Stan's Movie Dump: Late October 2016

And as October hit its homestretch, with Halloween fast approaching, I switched gears and stopped watching horror movies entirely. I'm an enigma, you know that?

No Men Beyond This Point

A little-known speculative sci-fi mockumentary. In an alternative world, women acquire the power to reproduce asexually somewhere in the 1960s. Since all women are XX, this means they can only make daughters. Eventually heterosexual reproduction becomes impossible and men are literally doomed. (In the present day, the youngest man on earth is 37 years old.) Now, it's important for me to note that this really isn't a feminist or anti-feminist film. We've all seen those misogynistic "if women ran the world..." articles that just sort of mock how much they love shoes and don't understand cars. But we've all also seen episodes of science fiction shows from Star Trek to Rick and Morty that presume female-led societies are more enlightened, advanced, and peaceful than our own since the trope is that men are overly aggressive and focused on sex. This film sort of gently dabbles with both sides of that coin, but more than trying to make a point about why the world does or doesn't "need" men, it's more concerned with presenting a hypothetical world without many men and exploring all the different mindsets one might have in such a place. Suddenly "men's rights" actually is a thing worth worrying about in a broad sense, but you've likewise got all sorts of women dismissing their plight, with some even suggesting they're looking forward to the day there are no more men at all. (Kind of like the way your most racist aunt views Black Lives Matter, right?) I dunno - this wasn't a particularly good movie, but it was an interesting premise that seemed not to have an overt agenda attached to it, and at only eighty minutes or so, hey, it's on Netflix if you're interested.

Deadpool

I went into this cautiously. Every friend of mine who's seen it had nothing but good things to say; on the contrary, every professional film critic I follow had plenty of bad things to say. Having finally seen Deadpool, well... yeah, I'm with my friends! This was great. There's something so refreshing about a comic book movie with a "hard R" rating. Blog readers know how sick I am of seeing the same old formulaic movie (and show) year after year from Marvel. But this one's got so much gore - so much satisfying gore - which, really, any movie about superhuman creatures fighting and shooting one another ought to! The humor was a little sophomoric at times - hey, it's Ryan Reynolds after all - but so what? There's nothing wrong with a dumb movie that has as much fun as this one does. I have some complaints, sure, but give me five or six more of these before Thor 4 or Black Panther vs. The Wasp and I'd be a very happy audience member.

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For

This just felt like such a pale immitation of the original Sin City, almost like a movie struggling to understand what made the first one so enjoyable. If I didn't know better I'd be convinced this was directed by a completely different person (or people) than the first one, but no! Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez did this - it's on their hands! I mean, A Dame to Kill For wasn't terrible, but it felt limp and schlocky where Sin City felt exciting and authentic. Could just be a case of lightning not striking twice, I guess.

Room 237

Trev's post a while back gave me all kinds of interest, and after finishing The Shining (the book) I was finally ready to take a deep dive into the story behind the movie. Except, that's not what this was at all. This was a poorly assembled collection of crackpot theories about how Kubrick's movie was really about everything from the Holocaust to American Indian genocide to how Kubrick faked the moon landing. Half of the interview subjects don't even seem convinced by their own arguments - one of them even trails off halfway through all of his thoughts as if he's making them up on the fly while watching The Shining - and the ones who seem most convinced are clearly the craziest people. (One argument: "there's this poster of a skier, but it's not really a skier, it's a minotaur! And later Jack, in the maze, you know, a minotaur." Easy counterargument: But the thing on the poster was very clearly a skier. Another argument: "And the key, it says ROOM No. 237, and look at those capital letters, so clearly an anagram for 'moon,' it's right there you guys, Kubrick admitting that he faked the moon landing." Easy counterargument: "No, not even close, but an actual anagram for those five letters is 'moron,' you moron." The most generous thing I could say about this documentary was that it gives multiple firsthand accounts of passionate audience members forging their own deep reads, suggesting the power and imagination of film analysis. But really, Room 237 is just a tangled web of crap.

13th

Here's Ava Duvarnay's Netflix documentary on the mass incarceration epidemic in the United States and how we got here. After a brief overview of race relations in America from slavery through Jim Crow laws and the civil rights movement, the focus of the story begins in the 1970s with Nixon's Southern Strategy. Then we see Reagan's war on drugs, Bush's hard stance on crime, and Clinton's mandatory minimum sentence policies, and a running tally of the U.S. imprisoned population just keeps growing while a number of talking heads (including, for real, Newt Gingrich) talk about how all these policies have led to the situation we have today, in which one in three black men in America will be in jail at some point in their lives. This is moving and important stuff, and that's before the film even touches on the recent apparent surge in police violence and the Black Lives Matter movement - and it culminates in a truly depressing sequence where Donald Trump's violence-inciting comments are laid over footage from the civil rights movement of black people being abused by police enforcement and white mobs. But at the end of the day I'm left wondering, what did I really learn here? Don't get me wrong - a documentary's worth can't be based strictly on its ability to provide new information, and this was very tightly structured and well made. It should be shown in colleges and maybe even high schools for years to come, and it's arguably the most relevant movie of what's been just a ridiculous election year. But I can't help coming away from it thinking, "yes, but anyone who has been paying attention already knows all of this." I guess not enough people are paying attention, but then, will those people gravitate toward a film like this one? Whatever - this was very good all the same.

Raising Arizona

I wanted to love this - a straight up comedy from the early Coen brothers! But I didn't. I liked it - parts of it, at least - and it was entertaining on a basic level to see late '80s Nic Cage and John Goodman playing white trash criminals in a sort of proto-My Name Is Earl vein, but this is far from the best comedy I've seen and far from the best Coen movie.

I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House

Alright, fine - I didn't stop watching horror movies entirely. This, from Netflix, was all mood and suspense, very little else. There's power in using silence and negative space to build tension but it all needs to build to something. Still, this was well made and it might be worth a look for ghost story enthusiasts.

Cruel Intentions

I actually really enjoyed this. It stumbles in the middle after a confident first act, as so many movies do, and it ended on a bit of a melodramatic "really?" note that, hey, maybe didn't feel as cliche back in 1998 for all I know. But the premise here - rich, bored prep school kids make bets over who can take someone's virginity, make someone cheat on their partner, or otherwise ruin someone's reputation and life in general - is so delightfully 1990s. It's like Mean Girls with no lessons learned and a lot more sex. It's just so delightfully of its own era - Sarah Michelle Gellar, a young Reese Witherspoon, Selma Blair (remember her?), and Ryan Phillippe in glasses and a turtleneck as the proverbial coolest kid in school. There's nothing outrageously graphic about this one - it's a rather soft R, as most teen movies tend to be - but when Gellar and Blair share an exploratory French kiss about a third of the way in, you better believe the camera cuts to an extreme mouth-on-mouth close-up, the movie completely aware of what it is and what it's doing. It's so easy for me - I was ten when this came out - to perpetually look at "high school kids in the late '90s" as these totally mature adults, but holy shit, allow me to zoom out for a second, and I realize that this is a movie about high school seniors trying to seduce each other. The basis of the plot revolves around a guy wanting to fuck his stepsister. Sarah Michelle Gellar spends her opening scene walking around in semi-public in what could only be called lingerie by today's standards - or were low-cut loose shirts underneath pantsuit-style corsets just something we were all letting underage women wear in 1998? (If that link is broken, just look at the movie poster above for a decent idea of what I'm talking about.) Help me out - were the 1990s a deceptively crazy-sexy time to be a sex-crazed high school kid? I mean, the teen pregnancy rates sort of suggest, "yes." But Ryan Phillippe in glasses and a turtleneck bedding all the ladies in his class suggests, no, not in the least, are you crazy? Okay, that's plenty of time spent talking about the high school sex politics of the Monica Lewinsky scandal era.

Love

Okay, an appropriate follow-up to Cruel Intentions. That was a sexy movie and all, but what about a straight up sex movie? Do you like porn? It's cool, no judgment here - I'm the one who sat through this thing after all. Now, can you imagine sitting through a two-hour pornographic video? That's more or less what Love was, and artistic integrity be damned, there's no need for porn to last two hours. Alright, yes, I'm exaggerating a little bit; this was an actual movie, a story on film, with characters and a plot and everything, but seriously, a good thirty minutes of this movie was spent on intermittent unsimulated sex scenes. It just gets old! And it certainly doesn't pass for bold or new or daring in 2016. (This was made in 2015. Fine. Still.) This wasn't good. Do not watch this.

10 Cloverfield Lane

This was a good enough movie, but it's an even more interesting case study in modern day franchise building. Just about everyone involved in making this, from the cast to the crew, thought they were making some sort of modestly budgeted thriller for J.J. Abrams' production company about a woman trapped in a nuclear fallout shelter with the man who saved her life. (And that's still the premise of this movie.) But during production, a few people started to say, "this feels a lot like Cloverfield." And eventually Abrams himself said, well, here: "The spirit of it, the genre of it, the heart of it, the fear factor, the comedy factor, the weirdness factor, there were so many elements that felt like the DNA of this story were of the same place that Cloverfield was born out of." So Abrams decided, fuck it, I'll stick "Cloverfield" in the title, even though this isn't a sequel or a prequel to that big disaster monster movie, and it'll make a hundred million dollars. And he was right! Anyway, filming ended in December of 2014. And in late 2015 the film still had no release date and no marketing campaign of any kind, leading everyone involved on the ground level to fear the worst. Then one day Mary Elizabeth Winstead got a call from her agent, who said something like, "good news - you're going to be the star of a movie in a major franchise." And Winstead's like, "cool, which one?" And her agent says "Cloverfield." And Winstead's like, "oh, they're making a sequel to Cloverfield?" And her agent's like, "they already did, and you were already in it." And the first trailer for the film - the first announcement of any kind - arrived in mid-January of 2016, and the film was out in theaters eight weeks later. Imagine that! In an era where studios use viral videos and YouTube trailers and Comic Con press conferences to build hype for movies literally years away, J.J. Abrams and Bad Robot were just kind of like, "hey, here's another way to build hype: don't." That said, the film's title sort of - sort of - spoils what I'm sure would have been an awesome twist reveal in the third act. Oh well; would I have even seen this if it hadn't been called 10 Cloverfield Lane? Probably not.

The Nice Guys

This was great. Just earlier this year I saw Kiss Kiss Bang Bang for the first time and loved it. Shane Black's been on my radar ever since then - no, still haven't seen Iron Man 3 - and I knew it was only a matter of time before I got around to The Nice Guys from earlier this year. And again - just great. Ryan Gosling continues to be one of my favorite actors in the industry, showing off his underutilized comedy chops here as a sad sack alcoholic private investigator, and somehow Russell Crowe was even better. I'm still not quite sure how to make heads or tails of the plot - a fast-paced murder mystery of sorts revolving around the porn and automotive industries in 1970s Los Angeles - but first and foremost this was just a great buddy cop action comedy.

Good Lord, that was a lot of October movies. Time for a breather. Good night!