Category: Box Office Democracy

Box Office Democracy: The Boxtrolls

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The Boxtrolls is a movie that always felt like enjoyment was just beyond my grasp. It has so many things going on and I never felt like I got quite enough information or context to really appreciate them. This ended up making me feel very old because I probably wouldn’t have gotten caught up on that as a child. Back then, I would have just considered each thing, found it pleasing or displeasing and moved on but now while they’re giving me a cross-dressing villain or an oddball pseudo-murder montage and I’m still thinking about how weird it is that everything in this entire world is somehow cheese-based.

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Box Office Democracy: The Maze Runner

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Cover via Amazon

It’s easy to throw The Maze Runner in with the rest of the Young Adult fiction boom, and it’s probably mostly true, it is a YA book, it does seem to have made in a response to the money being trucked in by Twilight and The Hunger Games but there’s a world of difference here and much of it centers on having a male character be the center. The Maze Runner has a stronger focus on action and gives much less attention to establishing characters. Perhaps this is serving someone in some demographic but it feels too soft to be a real action movie and too hard to contend with the other YA franchises.

There are only three characters in The Maze Runner that I would need to use more than just “The <blank> Guy” to describe. This isn’t unheard of in movies but it’s a serious problem when the female lead falls in to that category (she’s The Girl Guy) along with almost every ally of Thomas, the hero. There are people who stand by him the whole way and seem to be some of his most trusted friends that I’m not even sure got named in the film. It’s hard to get invested in the climactic battles when the kids being thrust in to harms way feel like 80% red shirts. It’s also a bad sign for a franchise when two of the three characters that feel the most complete die in the first film. They’ve left a lot of heavy lifting for the sequels.

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Box Office Democracy: Summer Box Office Report

This past weekend was the worst total box office of any weekend in ten years.  If you consider how much more expensive a movie ticket is now than it was ten years ago you can get a picture of how catastrophic this weekend was for the film industry.  It was so sparse this weekend that rather than have me review the one meager offering this week (a Christian-themed unlicensed Elvis biopic) I’m here to give you a run down on Hollywood’s disaster summer and try looking ahead to determine if film is in an inescapable death spiral.

This summer was off 15% from last year’s take, and I assure you it was not because our nation’s exhibitors decided to slash ticket prices across the board.  Guardians of the Galaxy was the only big hit this summer and not for lack of trying on the part of every other movie.  We had big name sequels like Transformers: Age of Extinction, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes fail to connect with an audience.  All of those movies made $200 million dollars, which used to be a barometer of big success but you have to remember that’s now what The Avengers did in one weekend.  There isn’t a movie released in 2014 that has out-grossed the first 10 days of The Avengers.

The poor results this year may have more to do with the movies that didn’t come out than the ones that did.  Pixar moved The Good Dinosaur from this summer allegedly to fix “story problems” and while that doesn’t sound like the strongest movie in the world Pixar is usually good for some good money, this summer felt particularly starved for kids movies so the latent demand was probably there.  The unexpected death of Paul Walker pushed Fast & Furious 7 to next year and it’s not unreasonable to suspect that it would have been the highest grossing movie of the year had it released.  Those movies wouldn’t have just added dollars to the ecosystem, they also would have likely drawn some money from other films but there’s no question losing a big franchise and the most successful studio in animation was a serious blow.

Hollywood loves to think the movie business is coming to an end.  It happened when the television was introduced, when the VCR came out, when movies on VHS got cheaper, when DVDs were popularized, when high-definition TV became cheap, and now we’re in the doom saying cycle with streaming services.  None of the other things killed movies so I seriously doubt this one will either.  Nothing you do in your house is the same as the experience of going to the movies and it seems as if people from all walks of life around the world simply like going to the movies.  Give people movies they want to see and they will go to the theater no matter what is in their living room.

Luckily, next year Hollywood seems much more prepared to give people what they want.  We have The Avengers: Age Of Ultron, which will almost certainly break every box office record we have.  We have Finding Dory, the sequel to one of the most successful movies ever made and a likely box office titan.  We have the delayed Fast & Furious  sequel primed to do good business.  People say they hate sequels but they really don’t; they hate bad sequels and this year that’s all they got.  Next year will be the biggest year ever and such a substantial boost over this year that industry pundits will be writing long pieces about how movies have never been better and no one will remember how soft things were this year when they note that sales are up 25% or whatever they are.  It is only in this last paragraph that I realized that I am now also an entertainment industry pundit and if you’ll excuse me I need to take a long shower.

Box Office Democracy: “The November Man”

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There’s a moment in the first half of The November Man when Pierce Brosnan’s Peter Devereaux is having a tense conversation with his former protégée David Mason (Luke Bracey) and he says “You can either be a human or a killer of humans” and that’s a cool line and it caps off a tense scene but it has nothing at all to do with anything that happens in the film.  Instead The November Man is a movie that strings together a number of spy-action clichés to make a movie that isn’t unenjoyable by any means but doesn’t provide anything particularly original.  It’s as if Brosnan, an executive producer on this movie, has spent the years since he exited the Bond franchise watching all of the spy movies he could find with a notebook trying to find a way back in to the genre that left him behind.

There are some great sequences in this film.  Brosnan doesn’t, and maybe never did, have the physicality to be a believable action hero in this day and age but they structure things very well so he can be the smartest guy in the movie and he can do things by being in the right place and by getting the jump on people.  It’s a little bit like The Bourne Identity crossed with a Droopy cartoon but I mean that in the most flattering way possible.  Younger men run around and do little bits of parkour and whatnot and when they get to a corner Brosnan is there to hit them in the face with a pipe or a shovel or his elbow or whatever.  It’s a breath of fresh air after watching Sylvester Stallone and Harrison Ford pretend they could keep up with 20 year-olds two weeks ago.

The plot is nonsense.  There are dialogue scenes to keep the action scenes apart but there’s no rhyme or reason and a disregard for continuity even from scene to scene.  There is a sequence late in the film where a young girl is kidnapped and it’s enough to make the younger agent to question his loyalty to the CIA but he saves those reservations for way after he kidnaps the girl with no apparent reservation off screen.  Devereaux is alternatively all about not having attachment to anyone who can be used against him and having tons and tons of friends and assorted other allies.  He even picks up more along the way.  The movie also features an astounding amount of violence to seemingly innocent people without asking us to take anyone to task for it.  Brosnan cuts the femoral artery of a completely innocent woman and doesn’t even seem to feel bad about it.  She never comes back to the movie either, for all we know he murdered her.

This is part of a much larger disregard The November Man has for all its female characters.  With the exception of the femme fatale Russian assassin none of the female characters do anything competently; they are pawns to be acted upon by the stronger male characters.  They can’t fight, they can’t do their jobs, and they can’t even run or hide effectively.  The incompetent female CIA operative sort of gets a chance to get revenge on the man who treated her so badly but she does it by making a phone call so a man can do it for her.  Olga Kurylenko, the female lead, is constantly a victim and the further we get in to the film the more we dive in to the depths of her character’s victimhood.  She gets a brief moment of comeuppance against her assailants towards the end but the revenge on the man who ruined her life is reserved for a man.  It’s a shame that Brosnan has left the Bond franchise but he can’t help but keep making his girls pretty plot devices.

Box Office Democracy: “Sin City: A Dame to Kill For”

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I was remarking to a friend a few weeks back that I was afraid that I had grown out of Sin City, that the franchise I had loved so much as a teenager/young adult was just beneath me now.  I don’t think that’s it though, not entirely, popular culture itself seems to have absorbed the things it likes from Sin City and moved on.  All that’s left is a movie that feels just as old and tired as the original film felt new and fresh nine years ago.

Before I go any further I have to shower praise on Joseph Gordon-Levitt, a man who seems to have been born to play noir leads.  While this is no secret to anyone who saw his dynamite performance in Brick it’s a treat to watch him do this work and a crying shame that there aren’t more opportunities for him to do it.  His scenes are easily the best in the movie as they crackle with an ephemeral energy that can’t quite hold on when he’s not on screen.  He’s helped a bit by a story that clicks more thematically with classic film noir but there’s no denying that he’s pushing the entire movie higher with his performance.

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Box Office Democracy: “The Expendables 3”

ex3-posterThe first two Expendables films worked for me in the same way old-timers days work for me in baseball.  They take a career that scarcely has any use for people over the hill and gave them a place to look relevant in a limited space.  My biggest problem with The Expendables 3 is that it deviates too much from that idea by introducing a crop of young guns that expose the existing cast as being largely too old for this line of work while the presence of the established stars steals all the gravitas from the scenes shared with the newer actors.  There are great individual performances and a couple of surprising ones. Excellent choices, but ultimately the Expendables franchise seems to be on a downward trajectory and I don’t know how it will right itself.

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Box Office Democracy: “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles”

It’s worth noting that I loved all three of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles released in the early 90s even though there is no way those movies hold up.  I looked at clips on YouTube this week and could barely stomach a few minutes.  This reboot of the franchise is objectively better than those movies.  I don’t know that people will look back on it fondly in 24 years but there’s a level of commitment in production design and casting that goes above and beyond what we got with cash-in kids movies two decades ago.  While this new revival of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is probably the perfect thing for the audience of pre-teen and pre-pre-teen boys it wasn’t particularly enjoyable for me.

The design of the Ninja Turtles is a revelation this time around.  Rather than being the lazy palette swaps they were for decades all four turtles have unique looks this time around.  They’re different in size, they wear different gear, and they even have different mask designs.  This does so much to communicate character that was ignored for so long I didn’t even consider it as an option.  I feel strange lavishing praise on this movie for something any competent costume designer could have done in 1990 with no problem at all (people have been wearing clothes in movies for decades) but they just didn’t try before.

The increased emphasis on production design is wasted a little on a movie that generally looks unpleasant.  I’ve been telling people that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles looks like a movie I wouldn’t want to touch and that’s not just because there are reptile monsters as principle cast members.  Everything, even human-only scenes, looks so slick and shiny that it comes across as slimy.  It permeates the entire film and made me uncomfortable in the theater.  I might be an edge case but everyone I’ve shared this idea with has instantly understood what I was talking about.  I’m sure executive producer Michael Bay had very little direct hand in the visual look of this film but it sure felt like someone was trying, and failing, to imitate his signature style and it spilled in to something worse.

It feels terrible to say this but I’m not sure that I will ever really believe Megan Fox when she’s playing a smart character.  I don’t believe she’s smart in her day-to-day life and she isn’t a good enough actress to convince me her characters are.  Her April O’Neil is a more essential part of this story than past Turtles stories and this results in her having to carry an incredible narrative load and she doesn’t seem capable of enduring that kind of strain.  She never seems clever enough to deduce the things she does and the emotion she plays most often is a combination scared and confused that doesn’t serve the story.  Will Arnett is wasted as the vaguely pervy cameraman.  He’s the second most important human character almost by default and while he does great work with what he’s given it isn’t nearly enough and I found myself focusing on him when he was on screen waiting for moments that never came.  This is probably not a problem 12 year-olds will have.

Ultimately this movie is trying to appeal to two audiences: young people now who could become hooked on the franchise for life and people who were hooked on a previous incarnation of the franchise and are consuming the new product for nostalgia.  Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles does a great job of appealing to the former audience but offers little for the latter half to really enjoy once they’ve gotten over the idea that Megan Fox is nice to look at.  The hype was good enough to bring enough of that older crowd in for a big opening weekend but they’re going to have to really hook that younger demographic to make this a winning franchise long term.  While this movie is certainly competently produced enough to do it I wish it had been able to do a little more for the six year-old inside of me.

Photo by AndarsKI

Box Office Democracy: “Lucy”

lucy-9122048The nicest thing I can think to say about Lucy is that it is exactly how I would have remade 2001: A Space Odyssey if I had done it when I was 16 years old.  I would have replaced the male astronaut with an attractive woman, kept the trippy end sequence and replaced the first two-thirds of the movie with a mediocre tribute to Hard Boiled.  I also probably would have struggled to fill 90 minutes and would have added some really strange filler to get it to a marginally respectful run time like 89 minutes.  Thankfully no one was willing to give me $65 million to make a movie when I was 16 (unfortunately no one will do it now) but we’re stuck with what Luc Besson made here.  I was stuck at least; you might still be able to save yourself. (more…)

Box Office Democracy: “The Purge: Anarchy”

Last year I reviewed the original Purge movie on my own blog and my chief complaints were that the movie was intellectually lazy for not exploring more of the complexities of the setting and for being so short that there was no time for any kind of real narrative.  The Purge: Anarchy leaves practically no stone unturned in examining what kind of culture would emerge around the idea of annual purges and it clocks in at almost 20 minutes longer with a far more nuanced story to show for it.  I got every thing I said I wanted and I still don’t like this movie.  It’s either a shaking moment for my credibility as a critic as I might have no idea what I want or this franchise is just not going to be no matter what they do.  I hope it’s the latter.

 The Purge: Anarchy dives deeper in to the world by focusing on a more diverse ensemble.  Our cast consists of a poor mother-daughter pair that is dragged out of their homes on purge night as part of some nebulous conspiracy that I won’t spoil mostly because it didn’t make a ton of sense.  They are joined by a couple on the rocks who have their car sabotaged so they can’t escape the purge, that committing crimes before the purge to make purging easier would seem to be against the rules is never brought up.  The last member of the ensemble is a police officer out for revenge who can’t help himself and saves the rest of the four and then takes on the role of their protector and displays some honestly godlike powers along the way.  Maybe it isn’t the annual purges keeping crime down the rest of the year and more that they’ve trained all their officers to be Batman on steroids.

The bigger cast doesn’t really change the original film’s reluctance to have characters change over the course of the film.  The sum total of character growth in this movie is one character decides that murder is always wrong, even in the case of revenge, and another decides killing people for revenge is therapeutic.  I’m not even sure if the film wants us to judge the character who decides that murder is the answer, she’s treated very sympathetically all the way up to that moment and is never seen after that.  “Is murder wrong?” is not a question a movie like this can be ambiguous about, that’s not what telling this story is about.

The first Purge movie had some uncomfortable race moments, a lot of menace seemed to stem solely from the idea that a white family should be afraid of a black man, and the second one tries to bounce back while completely missing the point.  This time around virtually every black character is virtuous but most Hispanic people are terrible.  It seems they got the feedback but missed the point.  This seems to be an unstoppable franchise at this point so we can all hope that by The Purge 5: Constitutional Monarchy they’ve sorted all this out.

Box Office Democracy: “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes”

English: Andy Serkis at the Comic-Con 2011.

English: Andy Serkis at the Comic-Con 2011. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes could have easily fallen in to the trap that many genre movies fall into of simply being competent.  They scarcely have particularly original or surprising stories (and Dawn is no exception on this front) but they usually get by through skillful execution.  Dawn of the Planet of the Apes does a masterful job of being a good tense thriller but what elevates it to something special is Andy Serkis as Caesar.  He takes a mediocre script and turns it in to Shakespeare without having to actually be on the screen.

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