Stan's Movie Dump: August/September 2016

Let's catch up with what I've caught up with.

Bee Movie

This was mentioned, for some reason, at Sween's cabin in late August. I want to say Keith brought it up. What's crazy to me is that this 2007 movie was released as close to the end of Seinfeld (1998) as it was to when I watched it. Wow. At any rate, this was a weird one. Weird is good! Especially when it means "not boring." But let's review, broadly and loosely, what happens in this 90-minute movie. It starts out with a young adult bee leaving the hive for the first time to discover a whole big world out there - fair enough. Then he befriends a human woman who is astonished to learn that bees can talk - hard left turn, but let's see where this goes. Then the bee learns that humans are using bees as slave labor to mass produce honey and steal it for themselves, so the bee sues people in court. The bee wins. All the other bees get all fat and happy off from all the honey that's been returned to them, and as a result, they stop pollinating flowers. Then all the flowers in the world die. Or maybe just the country? That would make more sense I guess. The movie ends with the bee and his human girlfriend landing a commercial airliner by defying all laws of physics and putting it down "the way a bee flies." I mean, what? What even was all of this? Interspersed throughout are a bunch of Seinfeld witticisms and bee-based puns. So yeah, it's a 90-minute kids' courtroom drama featuring a dude getting cucked by a bee.

Jupiter Ascending

"So bad it's good" is a real phenomenon, and everyone knows it. This almost gets there. Such a swollen, crowded movie, just teeming with imaginative aliens and technology, but all for no apparent reason. Rumor has it this thing started out as a 600 page script and I kind of believe it; that would have been a ten-hour movie! I don't know what the Wachowskis were thinking with this one. Channing Tatum plays a werewolf alien in rocket-powered rollerblades! It's all just batshit insanity for the sake of batshit insanity. There are a hundred things going on, as if the Wachowskis wanted to make their own Star Wars trilogy, condensed way the hell down into one two-hour film. On a scene-by-scene basis it's actually an entertaining watch. Sean Bean is here, trying his hardest. Eddie Redmayne clearly understands exactly what he's signed up for, and just chews on every horrible line his villain character needs to say, in this hammy strained whisper of some sort. Mila Kunis gives a pretty forgettable performance, but then, she also has to play the main character here, a stand-in for the audience, a regular ordinary earthling who's suddenly off on a sprawling aimless mess of an adventure. She spends the whole movie just asking other characters what's going on. I can't remember another movie that laid down so much exposition and yielded such an incomprehensible story. So yeah, Jupiter Ascending is a hilariously ill-conceived mess, but at least it's not a bore. No sir, not at all.

The Danish Girl

This, on the other hand - this was a bore. Eddie Redmayne is here too, of course, as the titular Danish Girl - or is Alicia Vikander the Danish Girl? Because this movie felt more about her cisgender character, and her dealing with her husband's transition, than it did about Redmayne's transgender character herself. It seems like the "transgender community" at large has deemed this film problematic and harmful, and while I can't fully agree with a number of those complaints - it takes place in the 1920s, of course these people aren't going to use the right pronouns or adjectives! - I also understand that I don't get to dismiss such concerns and complaints from my tower of cisgender privilege. This was a movie made, after all, by cisgender people, starring cisgender people, and mostly for cisgender people. Okay, this whole paragraph feels wildly disconnected now, so to recap, it's a slow and sluggish movie that might be harmful and problematic for cisgender views of transgender issues, and the whole thing just feels like an Oscar grab for everyone involved. Skip it! (But I didn't think it wasn't terrible.)

The Road

People raved about this one, right? The book too. And I read the book but didn't love it. Maybe you need to be a father to "get" it. Maybe I need some kids. Anyway, the movie was pretty good. Viggo Mortensen, y'all. Very Walking Dead and lots of Last of Us vibes, but without any actual zombies. What caused the apocalypse in this story anyway? Doesn't matter.

Wiener-Dog

Here's an odd one, a true black comedy with far more cringes than laughs. It's essentially four separate stories - told serially, not in parallel - whose only common link is the same titular dachshund. It's a movie full of death and reacting to death and anticipating death and it's only like 80 minutes long if you feel like checking it out on Amazon Prime. 

The Host

I'd been looking forward to this one for a while - widely considered one of the best horror films (and foreign films) of the 2000s, and directed by Bong Joon-ho, whose Snowpiercer was one of my favorite movies of the last, oh, five years or so. It's a monster movie set in South Korea where some kind of amphibious slithering giant lizard-fish with tentacles wreaks havoc on a city. The part I wasn't epxecting - and didn't really care for, to be honest - was this quirky undertone about how dysfunctional the family at the center of the movie was. Wanted to love this, but merely liked it. Eh - so it goes!

Hush

This is a horror movie about a deaf woman and a home invasion. I liked it! Netflix. As you may imagine, the deaf angle puts a new twist on what makes this particular victim vulnerable - but also what makes her resourceful and capable of fending off her assailant. There are plenty of "ugh, you dumb fucking idiot" gaps in logic made by both parties, but for a tense ninety-minute horror flick? Yeah, this was decent!

Youth

Oof, you know how long it took to find a SFW poster for this one? At any rate, this is a slow-paced movie in which old friends Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel take a spa vacation in the Swiss Alps to shoot the shit and talk about retirement, their prostates, their families, and life in general. I didn't love this one and I can't recommend it, but it felt like a decent movie I'm just not old enough to appreciate. One review I read said "this won't be appreciated for another forty years," and I kind of get where the reviewer was coming from. (That said, if Youth is being viewed by anyone at all in 20 years, let alone 40, I'll be considerably surprised.) Anyway, Michael Caine was great, as he always is. There were some surreal images and sequences I really enjoyed, too. But for something that appeared sporadically on lots of Best of 2015 lists, eh. Your mileage may vary.

The Witch
Dang, another poster with a naked woman's backside. Or is this her frontside? Tough to tell with silhouettes. The Witch is a horror movie that takes place in early puritanical New England. It's authentic as hell in its characters' language and accents - or at least it feels that way, I dunno, I wasn't around in 1630 - and in its depiction of the shitty, shitty lifestyle that was "early puritanical New England." Nothing but chores and prayers and trying not to freeze or starve - and God forbid you smile! Seriously, for a horror movie, I didn't find this one all that scary. Unsettling, sure, very. And a good movie to boot. But blood rituals and witchcraft seem less harrowing than spending a lifetime chopping wood and hunting rabbits and praying for death. Oh, and it had a great ending.

That's all for now. Look for more horror movies in October, I'm sure.