Author: Arthur Martinez-Tebbel

Box Office Democracy: Kong: Skull Island

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It’s probably a good thing that I’m not in charge of which movies get made and which ones don’t.  While we would certainly get fewer third-rate horror movies and lazy animated movies (and like three more Crank movies, what happened to that franchise?) there’s just so many movies that must sound terrible at the log line phrase that end up being good movies.  For example, if I had been in charge when someone came and said, “Hey, we want to make a new King Kong movie but it’s going to be what if King Kong met Apocalypse Now!” I probably would have passed. But someone at Legendary Pictures said yes, and we got Kong: Skull Island—a delightful, odd, horrific monster movie.  It’s a better movie than I expected, a better movie than it probably should be, and a worthy opening salvo in the 2017 action movie wars.

The second act of Kong: Skull Island was the whole movie for me.  The first act is an endless parade of set-up that I did not need, made only barely tolerable by the frequent use of John Goodman.  I don’t particularly care how or why anyone ends up on Skull Island, just that it happens— and while I appreciate that different sets of characters need to be briefed on the nature and the history of the island, I don’t need to hear everything three times.  I just need them to get to the part of the movie where there’s a giant monkey.  Similarly, the end doesn’t feel like it’s the end result of the build of the movie, more like the movie needs to wrap up— and so a bigger, badder, version of the kind of fight we’ve already seen is whipped together and done in full view of all the remaining characters.  It didn’t work for me.  The middle of the movie is where I got my money’s worth.  The characters are all split up, and each scene is them uncovering some new horror or another as the color temperature shifts on a dime.  It’s stressful, terrifying, and relentless just like Mad Max: Fury Road. It puts you on the edge of your seat waiting for the next giant spider or terrible bird or whatever and Kong himself is a rare, seemingly random, participant in the action.  When he appear on screen he’s riveting (he’s King Kong— he’s been doing this since 1933) but he doesn’t drive the action per se.  It’s a wonderful segment, some of the best filmmaking I’ve seen in years… they just couldn’t keep it up.

I understand that everything needs to be a franchise these days and that shared universes are the new hotness, but we might be expending too much effort to lead up to a crossover movie with Kong and Godzilla.  We don’t need six years and four films to connect the rebooted Godzilla with the rebooted Kong.  Either audiences are smart enough to not need their hands held the whole way to get them interested in the monster showdown, or they’re so dumb you risk losing their attention entirely. I refuse to believe that people fall in to the narrow band of needing all this exposition to understand that they what to watch two giant creatures level a city.

You can never quite tell what’s going to work in a movie.  The B plot of Kong: Skull Island is essentially Moby Dick retold with Samuel L. Jackson playing Captain Ahab (and with Kong playing the whale, of course) and it’s ludicrous and a bit predictable and it steals shots from a dozen other movies and it’s delightful.  One of the reasons the third act didn’t work for me is that this plot has run its course and we’re given a less satisfying antagonist for the finale.  I might have just been in an uncommonly good mood, or maybe I was blinded by the spectacle of an IMAX screen but I found all the ridiculousness in Kong totally charming.  I also liked the 2005 Kong Kong more than my peer group at the time, so maybe I have a soft spot for giant apes.  Kong: Skull Island is, at its best, an oppressive, horrifying film and it’s a triumph.

Box Office Democracy: Logan

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It’s kind of funny that the inferiority complex that has plagued comic books for decades has migrated on to comic book movies.  Every time you read an article with the headline “Bam! Pow! Comics aren’t just for kids anymore” you get this kind of desperate need for some of the less secure in the industry to justify their life’s work when they really don’t need to.  Good work is good work regardless of who reads it, and most importantly regardless what people who don’t read it think of it.  Comic book movies are getting to the same place with this death spiral race to the bottom to make the movies more and more gritty to prove that they’re more and more adult.  It made me nervous when I heard the final Wolverine movie was going to be rated R; that we would get a joyless slog of a movie more focused with blood and body counts than with making a good movie.  Logan is a great movie, a violent movie to be sure but also a thoughtful one, it’s a movie that gives you time to think— and while it is bleak, it has joy and it has hope.

Logan has a thin story, but I mean that in the most flattering way.  The whole movie is essentially a road trip where Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) takes an aging Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and a young clone (Dafne Keen) , that the film only refers to as X-23 once but we all know is X-23, looking for a mutant sanctuary in the North Dakota wilderness.  The good guys are being chased by some awfully nebulous bad guys who never get much more motivation than wanting to mess with the heroes.  I’m also not 100% sure that the emotional center of the entire X-Men franchise has been the relationship between Wolverine and Professor X, but it doesn’t matter.  Jackman and Stewart have the chemistry and the sheer magnetism to drive the whole movie as long as you don’t stop and fixate on what happened in any of the previous films.  Keen is a star in the making, she has a quiet intensity and seems great at ripping bad guys to shreds.

I’m thrilled that Logan is a superhero movie that doesn’t feel compelled to tell me that the world is ending or a city is in peril.  The central conflict of the film is one with a very small footprint.  That’s not to suggest I’m somehow okay with the corporate exploitation and then extermination of children— but there’s no ticking time bomb, no cosmic threat.  I’m honestly not sure the wider world would have noticed if the good guys had failed in this one; everyone who seemed to know what was going on was either directly involved or dead by the end.  This is just a character arc for Wolverine (and to a lesser extent X-23) and everything in the movie is just in service to that.  It shouldn’t be every superhero movie (or even most; I bet this would get old very quickly) but it’s refreshing to see a movie that could be wall-to-wall action stop for a second and appreciate the quiet moments.

I know I literally just finished praising Logan for being willing to linger on quiet moments, but this movie is also just too damn long.  I want small character moments, but I don’t need quite so many of them to be just another way of reinforcing the notion that Logan drinks too much, I got that pretty quickly.  I also think a harsher editing eye could have been taken to some of the action sequences.  I know the rule is an action beat every ten pages, but so much of the middle of the movie is different variations on Wolverine with or without X-23 just crazy murdering a bunch of evil redshirts, and what does that really accomplish the fifth time that we didn’t get on the third?  There is nothing like seeing Wolverine go nuts on people, even more so now that we got an R-rated version of it, and the first few times seeing X-23 go at it is a delight— but at a point it’s just blood and falling bodies and isn’t revealing anything about character or pushing the story forward, it just seems to be there because that’s what a studio executive thinks good pacing is.

Logan is the end of an era— it’s supposedly the last time we’ll see Jackman play Wolverine or Stewart play Professor X.  Stewart was the best casting decision in the 2000 X-Men film, and while they’ve been transitioning to James McAvoy for a while now it’s sad to see the actual curtain call.  Jackman has been the bedrock for the entire X-Men franchise up until this point, and while it’s sad to see him go I’m sure he’ll appreciate being able to gain 15 pounds without it being a complete life-altering disaster.  I firmly believe at some point someone will wonder why they’re giving up all the money they could be making by having Wolverine in movies and the part will be recast… and I’m both scared and excited by that prospect.  Scared because Jackman leaves huge shoes to fill, but excited because I want to see more of these roles turn over as a matter of course.  Actors should be able to leave these roles without needing giant continuity resets that tire out the audience.  We should accept a new Wolverine or Iron Man the same way we accept a new James Bond or a new John Connor.  The actors are important but the roles need to be timeless.  There’s an exciting opportunity here, and I hope Fox does as good a job with it as they did in making a movie as brave as Logan.

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Box Office Democracy: “Get Out”

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I am going to spend a lot of time telling you how scary Get Out is, but I want to take a moment at the top of this review to tell you how fresh it is.  Jordan Peele is a first time director and he’s made a movie that isn’t like anything I’ve seen before.  He seems to understand his actors so well he gets performances that are frankly unbelievable.  I could spend an entire afternoon trying to describe the range of emotions in a 30 second sequence of this film and still feel inadequate, so I don’t know how you get someone to do it on camera.  Horror movies are about metaphor and tempo control, and both are handled here in ways I’ve never seen before— and while I’m not enough of a horror maven to guarantee it’s never been done before I sure see a lot of movies.  I generally do not care for horror movies, and I loved Get Out.

Get Out is a simple enough story: Chris, a black man, (Daniel Kaluuya) is nervous about his white girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams) taking him home to meet her parents when they don’t know he’s black.  He meets them and a slew of microaggressions from her father (Bradley Whitford), and some prodding about his smoking habit from her mother (Catherine Keener) make him uncomfortable.  All of the black people his sees in this town behave strangely, and it spirals out from there into a story I don’t want to spoil (but one of the trailers sure seems to have the whole thing) because if you can see it clean it’s really worth it.  It functions as a great parable about the dangers of more insidious forms of racism, or you could ignore all of that and simply appreciate it as one of the freshest horror movies we’ve seen in some time.  Hell, just by having the protagonist be an able-bodied young man it’s well outside the norm for a modern horror movie.

It’s hard to say exactly why Get Out is so scary, because it isn’t scary in typical movie fashion.  There are jump scares, but they’re used sparingly compared to what modern horror has prepared for us.  Neither is the horror some kind of monster or disgusting creature.  Get Out traffics in the horror of realizing you are in a very bad situation and that you perhaps should have left some time ago.  It’s a movie about growing unease and slowly inching yourself towards the edge of your chair.  We’re all probably familiar with Jordan Peele from his comedy work, and there are some good laughs here but I can’t help but suspect they’re helped along by the general unease and need for release it builds in the audience.  That said ,the backyard gathering scene is one of the funniest things we’ll see all year.  The character of Rod functions as kind of a Greek Chorus and also gets a lot of good material just sort of commenting on the absurdity of the whole situation.  Those are easier laughs but no less genuine.

I want to call Get Out the best horror movie I’ve seen in years, but I keep coming back to Crimson Peak and what a fantastic movie that was.  In a lot of ways they aren’t remotely the same thing.  Crimson Peak was made by a director who has been working for decades, cost $55 million dollars to make, and is anchored but these massive shots of haunting vistas and expensive looking sets.  Get Out is a first-time director spending $4.5 million for a movie that gets most of the terror out of small moments of unease.  The shot that will stay with me from Crimson Peak is Mia Wasikowska walking in to the door of that house for the first time to discover there are holes in the ceiling and a sinking floor; my most incredible moment in Get Out is when Chris tells Georgina that he gets scared when too many white people are around and we watch her go from terror to crying to laughing it off.  Both are haunting, both are incredible and both are sublime triumphs of slightly different kinds of craft.  This is a long way to say: who cares what the best horror movie is, as long as we get so many excellent ones.

I am, of course, not the best person to talk about the racial politics of this movie— my analysis is going to be facile compared to the myriad critics you could find who actually have to live with the prejudices this movie plays on.  I will say that this movie plays on some of the fears instilled in me as a child when my father warned me that as a Jewish man I should never go on a road trip through the American south.  That isn’t what this movie is about, but it certainly made me afraid of big expanses of nothing filled with a certain kind of polite white people in it.  That is nothing like being black in America and should not be read as trying to make this film about me, rather just trying to explain why it worked on me the way it did.  If you’ve read all the way this far please go find and read two reviews of this movie written by black critics.

Box Office Democracy: The Lego Batman Movie

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I wonder if there’s a pop culture franchise I wouldn’t be excited to see turned in to a Lego production at this point.  The Lego Batman Movie could have so easily been an uninspired cash-in to take advantage of how profitable Batman is as a character and the good will we all still feel from The Lego Movie but instead we have a movie chock full of funny jokes, intriguing themes, and most importantly a monumental amount of effort.  This is such a strong children’s movie that I saw it in a packed house on a Saturday night with basically no children, and it was the most boisterous crowd I’ve been a part of in recent memory.  Lego Batman is a triumph, a shining beacon, that every other DC movie should be trying to reach the same level of competence or at least figuring out how to fake it to the studio executives.  Perhaps Ben Affleck is not actually trying to get out if his obligation to play Batman not because of creative differences but because he’s worried about being overshadowed by Will Arnett.

There’s nothing to the plot of The Lego Batman Movie that you haven’t seen elsewhere— it’s just kind of unique to see these elements in a superhero story and, perhaps more importantly, in a movie about a hero so associated with hypermasculinity.  This is a story about Batman needing to connect with people, to construct a family out of the people in his life to replace the one he lost.  Interestingly, instead of making this a source of external conflict, it’s only a source of internal conflict; almost every important supporting character is falling over themselves to become an essential part of Batman’s life, from the obvious examples of Alfred and Robin to the quasi-adversarial Barbara Gordon who might not approve of Batman’s methods but wants to be close to him, and even the Joker wants to destroy all of Gotham City but more than that he wants Batman to acknowledge that he’s important in his life.  The actual plot elements are a little thin, many elements of the evil plot seem designed to shoehorn in as many other licensed characters as possible, and while those are some fun cameos it doesn’t make for a complex story.

One thing that kind of bugged me about The Lego Batman Movie is that it doesn’t play with the idea of being toys the way The Lego Movie did.  It’s clearly supposed to be the same world and all the weapons make “pew pew” sounds like a child is making them, but it never pulls back to the “real world” layer to see Will Farrell’s kid.  I’m not sure what it would have been— the obvious answer seems to be about the death of a parent and that may have been a little dark, perhaps giving this story a chance to reflect a slightly more real situation would have helped it land a little harder.  As it is we get a great movie, but one that fails to land with quite the same impact as The Lego Movie.  Not that “slightly worse than The Lego Movie” is a particularly stern critique; I just wanted a bit more depth.

Will Arnett is an absolute treasure as Batman.  I’m not entirely sure how strong any of the material he was given was in an objective sense because it feels like he could reenact the end of Old Yeller in that voice and it would get huge laughs.  I would watch a live action Batman movie starring Arnett and I would promise to ignore the fact that he would never be in the kind of shape you expect to see The Caped Crusader in.  Rosario Dawson is a pleasant surprise as Barbara Gordon making a deep character at what could have been a thankless role.  Michael Cera is great at awestruck and overly affectionate, I wonder if we couldn’t have seen a little more range from him as that bit can wear a little thin.  It’s so thrilling to hear Billy Dee Williams voice Two Face that you can easily overlook that the part has fewer than five lines.

It is so refreshing to get a DC Comics movie that isn’t taking itself so seriously.  The Lego Batman Movie is fun before it’s anything else.  It isn’t obsessed with continuity (although it does reference in some way almost every other on-screen depiction of Batman to date), or with having a dark tone, or with proving the comics are for grown-ups.  This is a movie that just wants to be fun— and that’s so refreshing after two Superman movies that seemed fixated on generating the biggest body counts.  I need some childlike wonder in my superhero movies; I can get gritty nihilism from the real world.

Box Office Democracy: Rings

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Most of the time when a studio looks to revive or remake an old property it’s a desperate grasp for more money, but I’m willing to give the people behind Rings a little more credit than that.  The Ring is about a shared video, and the ways in which we share and consume videos has changed so much in the 15 years since the original came out.  Rings exists to carry the franchise into the YouTube era, and it pays off on a lot of the promise offered by the new technology (although not actually YouTube which was strange).  Rings is a clever movie, but clever isn’t enough on its own— and unfortunately, clever is all Rings has.

I absolutely adored the use of new technology.  There’s a sequence where Samara emerges from a flat screen TV that has fallen face down on the floor that never would have happened 15 years ago and looks amazing.  I’m sure the actual technology to do that effect has been around for decades (at least since Thing in The Addams Family I reckon) but it looks like a million bucks and it feels new.  While not exactly showing off new technology, there’s a shot right before the credits where a character looks fearfully out a window while it’s raining, and when the lightning lights up the window it becomes the well shot from the cursed tape and that was my favorite shot of the whole film.  Again, there are good ideas here through the haze of mediocre filmmaking.

The story is convoluted, and while it contains interesting ideas it ends up right back where every other Ring movie has been.  We start out with this interesting idea about studying the tape as a scientific phenomenon with an infrastructure built in a college to keep passing the curse along so it can be studied.  This idea is tossed aside at the end of the first act and we get to more exploring the circumstances of Samara’s life in an attempt to break the curse just like we did in The Ring and The Ring Two.  There’s a mildly interesting twist, but it all ends up about where one would expect and that’s not even taking in to account that much of the end of the movie is contained in the trailer.

Through all this narrative malaise the entire enterprise is almost saved by two bigger name actors slumming it through Rings.  Johnny Galecki is playing a creepy version of his character from The Big Bang Theory and he simply outclasses the array of marginal TV actors and performers I’ve never seen before that he’s put with in this film.  It’s not a huge part but Galecki looks like a movie star, which might serve him well if he ever gets tired of sitting around on his giant pile of money after his TV show wraps up.  Vincent D’Onofrio is given the most leeway by the script and he turns in a powerful performance.  D’Onofrio is capable of switching from unassuming to terribly menacing in the blink of an eye.  It’s almost like he never stopped playing Wilson Fisk; he’s the best thing about the film even if his mere presence feels like a bit of a spoiler the first time you see him.

We have to be willing to accept that just about half of movies will be below average, and Rings is certainly in that half, but that that effort separates the mundane from the awful.  Rings isn’t a good movie, perhaps because the two lead actors are amazingly boring, but it’s trying.  It knows what it has to add to the mythos and it tries to weave those additions seamlessly in to the established formula.  The result is a bland retread, but one with moments and performances that will endure— hopefully as inspiration for a better movie down the road.

Box Office Democracy: Split

Split is over a week old and that’s usually enough to disqualify a movie from coverage here.  (This is the policy that keeps me from reviewing Blade 2 every six months in a vain attempt to force it in to the conversation for best superhero movie of all time.)  But Split had a secret, and that secret didn’t get out until the movie had released and I had already watched the movie for last week.  I’m going to talk about this secret right off the bat so if you have somehow avoided this piece of information I will tell you that Split is an excellent horror movie that might be a bit tame in the sheer terror aspects but is totally worth watching especially if you’ve liked M. Night Shyamalan’s works in the past.  From here on it’s spoilers on; stop reading if you want that undisturbed experience.

We’ll wait for you below.

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Box Office Democracy: xXx: Return of Xander Cage

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I was extremely excited when I walked out of the original xXx back in the summer of 2002.  Finally, a spy film for my generation.  Something that could mix international espionage and the X-Games aesthetic that seemed poised to take over the world.  I’ve rewatched xXx recently and it does not hold up at all.  Also, I never participated in any extreme sports or watched very much of any X-Games so I have no idea why embracing this culture appealed to me at all.  In retrospect, the original xXx was an okay action movie with some fantastic costuming and an awful lot of dated references.  15 years later xXx: Return of Xander Cage is still trying to traffic in counter-culture hipness, but it doesn’t feel like anyone involved in the production has talked to a cool person or a youth in decades.  Return of Xander Cage is jam-packed with the kind of disingenuous focus-grouped edginess the characters would claim to hate.  Too bad they’re fictional and not writing this or any other better movies.

In Return of Xander Cage everyone who is part of the establishment is bad.  I’m not against this general ethos, the establishment is generally a terrible thing— but the medium has to inform the message.  This is a film made by a major studio, so when the burly special forces soldier who doesn’t care for Xander Cage and his alternative ways taunts him saying that he must love Red Bull and Mountain Dew, I can’t help but wonder if those companies paid for that placement.  I see the two leads of these extreme spy teams being played by two actors with a combined age of 102 and I can’t help but think of that 30 Rock meme with Steve Buscemi pretending to be a high school student.

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Return of Xander Cage could be so much more cool if it wasn’t so intent on telling me that it was cool all the time.  (I don’t even want to get in to how 44 year-old Toni Collette is kind of made to look like an old crone next to her older male co-stars but it’s also bad, I just don’t want to be here all night.)

There’s also a sense that Return of Xander Cage is trying to capture some of the magic of Vin Diesel’s other, more successful franchise, The Fast and the Furious, but it’s not clear that anyone involved knows what made those work.  They copied the big multicultural cast, they copied the never-ending banter, they copied the ambitious action sequence, and they copied the requirement of having a few party scenes full of beautiful people dancing to music.  None of it works as well.  Most of the supporting characters feel like quick thumbnail sketches instead of people, and for a movie that literally circumnavigates the world it feels rather small.  There’s a secret sauce in the Fast and Furious movies and it might just be as simple as star power or sharper action choreography or even just familiarity with the universe, but those movies are just as far fetched and just as ridiculous and they work.

I’m usually not on a high horse about sequels or Hollywood running out of ideas, but this feels like a spot that should have gone to a new idea.  Return of Xander Cage feels weighed down with the baggage of the two previous movies and I can’t imagine that enough people where clamoring for more xXx to necessitate this (and the box office results seem to back me up on that).  There are a couple usable ideas here, and maybe on their own they could have blossomed in to something else but instead they’re just drowned out by the baggage of trying to live up to this X-Games early-2000s rebelliousness.  Return of Xander Cage is the cinematic equivalent of the guy in his early 20s hanging around the park with high school kids— it isn’t making him seem cool and everyone there just kind of wishes he was doing something else.

Box Office Democracy: “Live By Night”

I’m sure everyone thought Live By Night was going to be a big deal—  Ben Affleck directing his first film since Argo won Best Picture, and this time a crime story based on a novel by the same guy who wrote Mystic River.  It feels like a sure thing; America loves prestige mafia stories— just ask Scorsese, Coppola, or Chase.  Unfortunately, Live by Night isn’t quite like any of those, or rather, it’s too much like those and other movies that came before that. It never quite feels like an original story, and it collapses under the pressure to be something amazing so it never settles for being just good.  It could have been a great good movie.

There’s so much going on in Live By Night, it’s an endless cavalcade of story and plot points, but I’m not sure it ever gets around to figuring out what it’s about.  The strongest attempt it makes is that it’s about how entrenched power strives to keep down the less fortunate but it doesn’t try very hard to get that across— just a couple scenes and then in the climax it all seems to be a metaphor.  The events aren’t compelling enough or, frankly, unique enough to make an impact on their own.  Everything feels lifted from something else: a better gangster movie, a better gangster TV show, even an above average video game about being a criminal from 10 years ago.  It’s a tired shtick, and while it can be done well it needs to have some kind of hook, a new take, or a transcendent performance, or something… and Live By Night just doesn’t have anything to make it special.

It might help if there were more characters in the film that mattered.  Joe Coughlin (Affleck) matters, of course, the whole movie flows through him in his quest to, I don’t know, generally make Tampa Bay a worse place through criminal activity.  Irving Figgis (Chris Cooper) matters too, he’s the police chief that makes deals with criminals and thinks himself above everything.  We get to see both of those characters struggle and change, but everyone else in the film just sort of exists to move one or both of these characters through to their next thing.  Elle Fanning is a delight in this movie, she plays a complicated character with a tour de force personal arc played to perfection, but her character doesn’t matter, she’s no more important than the casino Coughlin is trying to build, just another obstacle to overcome.  It goes on like that— there are fine actors in this movie like Zoe Saldana and Chris Messina but they’re ultimately reduced to occasional maguffins doing accents.

Ben Affleck has acting, writing, directing and producing credits on Live By Night, so while film may be the ultimate collaborative medium it’s hard not to feel like this is on him.  Ben Affleck the actor does a fine job (although accents continue to mostly elude him) but he’s let down by Ben Affleck the writer.  The movie is based on a novel and I suppose it’s only sporting to give the benefit of the doubt that the source material was bad, but doesn’t that responsibility fall at least partially on Ben Affleck, producer?  Director Ben Affleck must be credited for the cast delivering some standout performances, but with the exception of an early car chase there are no particularly compelling visual sequences, and it lacks the tension of The Town or Argo.

Maybe we need some sort of commission to review any new attempts to make gangster films—to monitor them to ensure that they add something worthwhile to the genre which has been mined so aggressively over the years.  Live By Night had some nice moments, but if you put the DVD on my shelf next to The Godfather and Goodfellas it would never get picked up.  (I don’t happen to own Goodfellas but you’ll have to take me at my word on this one.)  Live By Night is an above average movie that demands to be compared to excellent movies, and it suffers for it.

ComicMix Six: Box Office Democracy’s Worst Movies of 2016

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Last time, I covered the best movies of 2016— and now it’s time for the flip side. Brace yourself.

#6: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice – In my top list I praised Captain America: Civil War for being a kind of triumphant pinnacle of fan service in comic book movies. Batman v Superman might well be the dark mirror of that idea: fan service run completely amok.  Characters are crammed in this movie every which way along with vague concepts, half-formed ideas, and every frame of iconic superhero artwork Zack Snyder has ever seen.  Batman v Superman is depressing both in tone and failed potential.  The Superman that Snyder puts on the screen is the worst interpretation of the character I’ve ever seen, impulsive and violent without a trace of warmth.  Only the moderately badass Wonder Woman sequences save this movie from higher placement on this list, and they desperately need to right this ship before they consider putting a Justice League movie on the screen.

#5: Allegiant – Allegiant is barely a movie at all.  It’s supposed to be setting up for some grand finale, but it has so few plot points to actually dole out that we end up just endlessly spinning.  There’s probably a way to do a movie like this in a better way, perhaps by diving deeply in to the characters or by some distracting world building, but even writing that I realize I’m talking about a filler episode of an hour-long TV show and not a feature film.  Allegiant was a shallow cash grab by a cynical studio and they seem to have torpedoed the entire franchise with their greed.  A more optimistic version of me hoped that this would be the end of splitting books in to multiple movies, but that doesn’t seem like it’s in the cards now that one Harry Potter reference book is poised to be turned in to five movies.

#4: Independence Day: Resurgence – I’m eagerly awaiting the other shoe on Independence Day: Resurgence to finally drop and to learn that the en tire movie was some sort of experiment in programming a computer to write a summer blockbuster.  I would much rather that be the solution rather than a human being (or several teams of human beings as credited) sat down and wrote a movie that so transparently tried to tick every box on some sort of magical checklist.  Sequel to a beloved film of the primary moviegoing populace’s childhood?  Check.  Jettisons the most expensive actor but brings up the character enough to try and get that secondhand rub?  Check.  Crucial character is Chinese to appeal to the essential audience there but don’t give her a big enough part to scare off the more xenophobic among the domestic audience?  Check.  Bigger badder explosions, damn the reduced emotional impact?  Check.  While it’s certainly possible a group of people made a movie this bad I would certainly prefer to find out it was a rogue AI trying to bring down humanity or something.

#3: The Angry Birds Movie – I was delighted by many animated movies.  Two made my top six list and if we did ten over here at ComicMix I likely might have had space for two more.  Children’s entertainment is at a fantastic place as most of the studios seem to have learned not to talk down to kids and to put effort in to their work in exchange for almost unheard of responses.  The Angry Birds Movie is a movie that shows that not all lessons are learned by all people.  Angry Birds is a barrage of ideas that presents no internal consistency or emotional stakes.  Everything is 10 seconds away from being a poop joke and in 2016 that simply isn’t good enough.  The fact that the movie ends with an endlessly long sequence reacting the mobile phone game everyone was sick of five years ago Is the final nail in the coffin.

#2: Sausage Party – Sausage Party would be a solidly above average sketch on Funny or Die if it ran for seven minutes.  They have an interesting premise, three mediocre jokes, and an hour and a half of garbage.  There are times when it’s offensive and that’s awful, but also there are interminable stretches when it’s just unbelievably boring.  I felt like Sausage Party was holding me hostage in the theater until they had a chance to spit out every terrible idea they had, culminating in the orgy sequence that felt more like a desperate attempt to seem edgy than to blow off any narrative or comedic steam.

#1: Norm of the North – I have never seen a movie in the theaters as bad as Norm of the North.  Honestly, that might be giving it too much credit as it certainly has to be in the conversation with cult classics of terrible cinema like The Room and Troll 2 when we discuss the worst movies ever made.  It’s an incomprehensible film that changes narrative focus randomly and without justification and seems to just be hoping we don’t notice.  There isn’t a single joke that hit with me.  The character design and animation are so bad that I have to believe that dozens of student films this year looked better.  I’m angry that someone paid for Norm of the North to get made while so many talented people must be struggling to get by in the animation industry.  It’s offensive that this exists in the same medium as Frozen or Zootopia or even Shrek.  Norm of the North is the worst of the animation industry, the film industry, and the worst piece of entertainment I’ve ever seen marketed to children.

ComicMix Six: Box Office Democracy’s Top Six Movies of 2016

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6. Captain America: Civil War – There are so many fantastic moments in Civil War.  The easy one is the fight at the airport where we finally get that big super hero battle we’ve seen in a thousand different comic books (and acted out with action figures at least that many times) put on the silver screen in all its glory.  The three-way fight at the end might be even better because it’s a crisp action beat full of emotion that is rare anywhere these days, and is honestly pretty uncommon even in print.  It’s not a perfect movie, but it might be the perfect application of fan service.  Every other Marvel movie has to either top this in terms of fan service (and they honestly probably shouldn’t try) or do something new and exciting.  The gauntlet has been thrown down (this is not an Infinity Gauntlet pun I swear).

5. Moana – This is the pick I am most concerned is recency bias messing with me.  I saw Moana recently, and while it completely delighted me, I’m concerned in a few years time I’ll look back at this pick and think it should have been The Accountant or Kubo and the Two Strings or really anything else.  I loved Moana, it’s a sweet movie with a good heart, a great set of characters, and a soundtrack that I can’t stop humming to myself.  When we spend the next two months marching towards the Oscars falling over ourselves to talk about what a historical accomplishment La La Land is, I hope people remember it wasn’t even the best musical released within two weeks of its release date.

4. Rogue One – This might seem a little high for a movie I reviewed two weeks ago and was kind of hard on but while it was easy to harp on the stuff that didn’t quite work I’m still quite fond of the stuff that did.  Rogue One brings a bunch of new stuff to the action vocabulary of the franchise and while it might not have wowed us as an independent sci-fi film, as a Star Wars film it feels like a revelation.  There’s an honest-to-goodness war happening in Rogue One for the first time in eight movies with “War” in the title.  Weak central characters may keep Rogue One from joining the top tier but in a soft year for movies overall a compelling B+ can make the top list.

3. Zootopia – Zootopia is a great movie.  It’s funny, touching, and with a decent bit of intricate noir-inspired plotting for a kids movie.  It is worthy of being a standard bearer in the Disney Revival era and standing next to Frozen and Wreck-it-Ralph.  That would probably be enough to get it on this list but what makes me actually proud is that Disney decided to use their giant influence on the youth of America and make a movie about institutionalized prejudice.  They’ve done “don’t judge a book by its cover” movies before but Zootopia is about how the whole system can be against people because of what they look like and that makes it a more special movie and one that I would be proud to show my own children.

2. The Nice Guys – I did not review The Nice Guys for ComicMix this year (I watched The Angry Birds Movie that week) and it’s rare I go see a new release movie on my own anymore— but for Shane Black I was willing to do it and it was worth it.  The Nice Guys is very funny, certainly the best comedy of the year, but more than that it was so inescapably fun.  That’s a strange thing to say about a movie that is sort of about a string of murders in the seedy world of the 1970s porn industry.  The chemistry between Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe is delightful— I would watch that pair do seven buddy movies like Bing Crosby and Bob Hope.  I think a premium cable network should commission a junior detective show staring the daughter character.  I want to live in the world of The Nice Guys as much as I can, and that’s such a fantastic thing to get from a movie.

1. Arrival – For the second year in a row my top movie of the year is a non-franchise science fiction film with a third act that’s a little out of left field.  I guess we all have a type.  Arrival is a movie that establishes a high degree of difficulty with its concept and then crafts a simply perfect film to go with it.  It’s tense and thought provoking and beautiful and cripplingly sad.  I went in to Arrival with no idea what I was getting or what to expect and then spent the next three weeks recommending it to literally every person I spoke to.  In 2017 I would consider myself beyond lucky if I saw another movie that completely delights me like Arrival did; I would settle for the new Blade Runner being a passable attempt.

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