REVIEWS IN BRIEF: AUGUST, 2015

I mentioned some while back that going forward, there were going to be a lot of shorter reviews popping up, and going forward, I hope to make these posts happen weekly - biweekly for sure. But it's been a bad month for watching things, so this first capsule review round-up is going to stand instead as the collection of all the things I watched in the month of August that I thought I wanted to talk about in some capacity. Bonus: this means, now and in the future, that I'm going to review classic movies that happen to cross my transom that would otherwise never make it to the blog.

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A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Contemplating Existence (Andersson, 2014)

Just like that other Anderson from the United States, there's not point in denying that Roy Andersson tends to make films that resemble each other, and A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, his Leone d'Oro winner from the 2014 Venice Film Festival, does pretty much exactly the same things as 2000's Songs from the Second Floor and 2006's You, the Living, and it it does them in pretty much exactly the same way. Long takes of barely-moving scenes, sudden eruptions of po-faced absurdism, and the whole thing would be suicidally depressing if it the comic timing weren't flawless. Third verse, same as the first.

Or is it? Whether I'm just starting to feel diminishing returns, or whether Andersson is slowly running out of inspiration, the one clear difference between Pigeon and its two forerunners in his trilogy of modern life is that it's not as good as they are. Which is a very different thing than saying it's not good, period, and I laughed heartily, many times, throughout the film, and was then cut off cold, many times, by the mordant shifts in perspective and tone. It's virtually impossible to imagine anyone who responded to the other films not liking this one at all, or even liking this one a whole lot. But comparatively, it lacks the passionate fire they possessed in such quantity; there are many handfuls individual shots and gags I could recite in loving detail from the first two movies, but the scene from Pigeon that lives strongest in my memory does not do so because I admire it the most (though a repeating motif involving 18th Century King Karl XII of Sweden, played by Viktor Gyllenberg, imposing upon the confused patrons of a rundown portside bar in the 2010s does give me enormous pleasure as I roll it around in my head).

Still, if we free it from the tyranny of having to live up to the standards of two of the most brilliant, idiosyncratic comedies of the 2000s, Pigeon is a fine piece of work on its own merits. The crawling pace of the static long shots - which are frequently exteriors or otherwise not beholden to the "this is a shadowbox in a room" staging of the earlier films, and that gives things a nice sense of sprawl - is absolutely perfect in establishing the film's erratic humor, and telling us how to appreciate it: first you're confused, then you're repulsed, and eventually the stiff stillness becomes hilarious. Or it doesn't. This is, beyond doubt, the kind of material that appeals to a very particular audience, and I think Songs from the Second Floor is absolutely more immediately winning, but there's no doubt that this is a thoroughly enjoyable experience for folks as what like morbid humor based in the pasty-faced frigidity of both people and their actions.

8/10

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A Star Is Born (Pierson, 1976)

Two terrific versions of the highly melodramatic story A Star Is Born - three if you count the original 1932 What Price Hollywood? (as you absolutely should), the same material in all but name - was perhaps already pushing it, but least the 1976 incarnation of the story tries to freshen the material by changing the setting from the movie industry to pop music. That doesn't entirely work out in practice, owing to the differences in image management between classical Hollywood and the '70s music industry, and it's only the least of the problems that brings the movie down to its knees.

One can have heard rumors and mutterings for years, as I had, that the '76 Star Is Born is nothing but a colossal ego trip for star-producer Barbra Streisand (who won the film's only Oscar, for the gooey love ballad "Evergreen", co-written by Paul Williams), but it's impossible to be prepared for how all-encompassingly dreadful a movie it is. It's not simply that the screenplay, assembled by too many cooks who clearly didn't work in the same kitchen, sacrifices its dramatic integrity in favor of giving Streisand one moment after another to show off. Though it's not possible to have enough favorable feelings for the star nor her vehicle to excuse the grotesqueness of extending the sodden 139-minute film's ending by a good quarter of an hour beyond its natural stopping point just to facilitate a showstopping solo number at the end.

But really, everything about the movie, save perhaps for its nifty grit-soaked concert-doc cinematography (by Robert Surtees, Oscar-nominated), is just embarrassing hackwork. Kris Kristofferson, cast as the third wheel in the love story between Streisand and herself, ambles in like a guy who figures that you'll buy him a beer if he has a relaxing enough smile, while the rest of the cast shuffle around in the background; the luckier ones get to furrow their brows and look sad at the thought of Kristofferson's drinking. Occasionally, a pair of African-American backup singers materialise to give the film a jolt of incongruous lazy racism. As a work of craft, the film begins and ends with Surtees; the '70s fashions are charmingly dated, but still more campy than anything, and the less said about the raw editing in some of the singing scenes, the better.

No, the film lives and dies on Streisand's talent, which is of course considerable, but sabotaging the drama to get us there is hardly worthy of anybody's time or energy, hers least of all. I would at this point name some of the films to better show off her iconic vocal powers, her loopy screen presence and comic timing, or her gift for turning woundedness into lashing anger, but it would take too long: all of Streisand's films are better showcases than this, even the most overt vanity projects. And yes, I have seen The Mirror Has Two Faces.

3/10

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Fantastic Voyage (Fleischer, 1966)

One of the last big sci-fi pictures before 2001: A Space Odyssey came along and fundamentally changed the possibilities of the genre, 1966's Fantastic Voyage is the platonic ideal of a movie that gets praised, sincerely, for its visual effects, by someone whose tone of voice and inability to maintain eye contact make it clear that they hope you don't ask about anything else. Because it feels bad to attack the movie: the visual effects are really good, even if they were supplanted and then lapped within a few years of its release. And how much nicer to have those kind of top-drawer visual effects in a movie about interesting concepts and adult characters, and not one that involves giant robots walloping the shit out of each other.

Still, you can't get too far into the film before you have to admit that for all its achievements, and the very real charm of mid-'60s sci-fi (notwithstanding the vast budget gap, the film more than slightly resembles TV's Star Trek, from the same year), Fantastic Voyage is a fucking slog. It shouldn't be: the hook is terrific. Both the U.S. and the USSR have developed miniaturisation technology, but only the Americans have a scientist who knows how to make the process last for more than an hour. And he's been almost fatally shot, and sent into a coma that can only be cured by shrinking down brain surgeon Dr. Duval (Arthur Kennedy), his assistant Cora Peterson (Raquel Welch), Dr. Michaels (Donald Pleasance), and sub captain Bill Owens (William Redfield), and injecting them and their microscopic submarine right into the scientist's body, with government agent Grant (Stephen Boyd), along for manly protagonist duties, trying to catch Duval in the act of being a Commie spy.

That certainly ought to be a fantastic voyage, and if you've encountered the story in Isaac Asimov's novelisation, you even know that it kind of can be (Asimov demanded permission to re-work the story to make it less idiotic). But Henry Kleiner's screenplay and Richard Fleischer's direction show off all the seams and plot holes while pushing the plot along as slowly as a nominal adventure movie could possibly support. The sub voyage takes place in something longer than real time, during which the plot plonks along through a repetitive cycle of theoretically tense moments flattened by lifeless direction. Every actor who isn't Pleasance stands around being vastly too serious, and sometimes we are given blessed relief in the form of the production designers' florid, psychedelia-tinged vision of the inside of the human body.

It looks great - there will be those who carp about how dated it is (and, sure, it is), but really is quite a special visual experience. Tragically, behind those visuals, it's bloated B-movie nonsense built around false characters, expanded and perpetrated by people who didn't know how to capture the proper spunk and speed of a good piece of junk sci-fi.

5/10

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The End of the Tour (Ponsoldt, 2015)

Far be it from me to tell the nearest and dearest friends and survivors of David Foster Wallace, a great many of whom have said some pretty withering things about the beatifying biopic-in-miniature The End of the Tour, that they're wrong. There's something squishy and off-putting about the film just in relationship to itself, and the way it treats its version of Wallace (Jason Segel) as a soul too gentle for this cynical, cold world - literally, the film is set in the Midwestern winter - while constantly foreshadowing his suicide 12 years later. There's a distinct, appalling thread of "come laugh at the homey wisdom of Your Literary Idol®, and then cry to remember that he's dead" that runs through the whole thing.

And yet I find myself not only not-hating the film, but even admiring bits and pieces of it, though probably not the bits that the filmmakers wanted. Frankly, I found Segel's Wallace to be all mimicry (good mimicry) with limited willingness to let us inside - and this is, to be fair, much more a function of Donald Margulies's script, which presents the author as an enigma and a concept in the first hour, than it's a sign of Segel's limits as an actor - with not nearly enough thought behind his eyes. The movie depicts Wallace, but it's terrified as hell at grappling with him.

Instead, the real protagonist and by far the deeper, more thoughtfully played character, is minor novelist David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg), assigned by Rolling Stone to interview Wallace near the end of the promotional tour for the author's 1996 novel Infinite Jest. Eisenberg performance isn't as "revelatory" as Segel's, I guess - the doubt-ridden, antagonistic urban Jewish figure he plays here is securely in his wheelhouse - but it's far more expansive and tricky, full of threads that aren't quite in the script, allowing his version of Lipsky (whose story was never finished and ultimately turned into the 2010 book, Although of Course You End Up Meeting Yourself, that this film is adapted from) to be sufficiently resentful under the starry-eyed nervousness and awe that the film's lurch towards an interpersonal conflict as it goes along feels like a natural outgrowth rather than an imposition. It ends being, Amadeus-style, better as the story of an average man admiring and fearing a genius, than as the story of that genius itself, and it's easily Eisenberg's best work since The Social Network.

Stylistically, it's wholly undistinguished American indie filmmaking of a sort that has been unchanged in all particulars since sometime in the 1990s; director James Ponsoldt is clearly more interested in presenting his characters than in doing anything to frame them cinematically. A literary approach certainly fits the material, but the lack of aesthetic challenge is exactly the problem: all the film wants to do is gawk at Wallace/Segel, not engage with him, and the result is often more trivial than penetrating.

6/10

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: THIS MISSION WILL SELF-DESTRUCT

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation continues the unexpected late flowering of a TV-derived spy franchise into its best self. And now, may I present its worst self.

There's nothing new in the observation that anybody with in any interest in the matter already made between 1993's Hard Target and 2003's Paycheck: for an unqualified genius of an action movie director, with two different candidates for Best Action Film Ever Made in his career in the form of The Killer and Hard Boiled, John Woo surely could not put a single foot right during his layover in Hollywood. Out of his six American features, the absolute best is surely 1997's Face/Off, and even that film is closer to "good enough" than "all-time genre classic". We can't just blame the language barrier: even the most culturally non-specific elements of action filmmaking are deeply compromised.

I bring this up in connection to Mission: Impossible II, from the summer of 2000, both because it is possibly my least favorite of Woo's American films (though that is a competitive race), and because it so beautifully typifies how badly he was fumbling the basic skills that he had so recently used better than just about anyone else living. M:i:II (I had forgotten how beastly the abbreviations of the titles for this and Mission: Impossible III looked) was a movie literally conceived around its action setpieces; this was not merely something the filmmakers weren't ashamed of, they broadcast it, like it was a proof of how focused they were on a great action experience. Now that it's standard operating procedure for the Mission: Impossibles to construct their narratives exactly this way, it's easy to lose track of how thoroughly dangerous a strategy this is, because there is a very strong possibility that you end up with a story exactly like the one M:i:II suffers from, but my present concern isn't the film's storytelling woes. The thing is, if you make a point of coming up with action sequences along which to strong a narrative, rather than the other way around, it stands to reason that the action will be pretty fucking terrific, right? And M:i:II can't even get that right.

It has one gunfight scene that is, so far as you can make it out through the choppy editing, solid middle-tier Woo, and the climax involves one very impressive knife fight stunt and some fantastical wire work that, is, so far as you can make it out through the outright incoherent editing, daunting and impressive and poetic. But that's pretty much it, unless you count the early rock climbing scene that's more of an amuse bouche than an action sequence proper. There's a ghastly car chase sort of sequence that doubles as the two main characters flirting, and it is utterly dumb and plagued with slow motion (the film as a whole is plagued with slow motion, like Woo decided it was his "thing" and never stopped to wonder if it belonged in this shot or that shot particularly), and there's a scene that tries much too hard to remind us of the exquisite "suspended in the computer room" scene from the 1996 Mission: Impossible, undone by familiarity and the worst visual effects of the whole movie. And when all is said and done, none of these things represent nearly a large enough percentage of the 123-minute running time - itself cut down savagely from Woo's mythological intended cut of some three and a half hours - which is largely devoted to inching through a bare bones plot. Even that's being polite: the first 33 minutes of the film aren't "inching". They're just fucking stopped there, staring earnestly as the characters repeat the exact same beat for 20 minutes.

The plot this time: Russian scientist Dr. Vladimir Nekhorvich (Rade Serbedzija) has a cutesy-named bioweapon "Chimera", and its even more cutesy cure, "Bellerophon", and he's taking them to the United States and the Impossible Missions Force, owing to his trust and friendship with IMF agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise). Unfortunately, ex-IMF agent Sean Ambrose (Dougray Scott), wearing an Ethan Mask and a little electronic patch that allows him to speak in Ethan's voice, confronts Nekhorvich on a plane and steals the chemicals, before forcing the plane to crash. Naturally enough, Ethan himself is assigned by IMF executive Swanbeck (Anthony Hopkins, somnambulant) to track down Ambrose, with one curious point of insistence: Ethan can pick whatever two IMF agents he wants, but he absolutely must also recruit the civilian con artist and thief Nyah Nordoff-Hall (Thandie Newton).

And here the film walks out of the room, right in the middle of a sentence, leaving us all baffled as to whether we should, like, follow it? Or just wait there for it to come back? Anyway, it is pure cinematic death as we watch in what feels like real time for the days that it takes Ethan to persuade Nyah - whose special skill, it turns out, is not thievery, but being Ambrose's ex-girlfriend, which easily makes this the most condescending of all the female roles in this enormously sausage-festy franchise - to join his team. At a certain point, that highly elaborate car flirtation happens, to augment the implausibly fast and thorough physical flirtation they've already launched into, and it is hard to completely hate it, because of how elaborately and well-executed it is, but it's also hard to love it, because it is the silliest goddamn thing.

Eventually, the movie starts to move again, though not with any particular urgency. What happens in the remaining three-quarters of the film is frankly a bit unfocused: we know all along that Ethan wants to stop Ambrose from using an apocalyptic bioweapon, but not always how this or that particular scene is going to aid him in that goal. On paper, this is all marvelous: Woo and screenwriter Robert Towne, working from a story originally by Ronald D. Moore & Brannon Braga, are more interested with lingering on moments and characters, and allowing production designer Tom Sanders and cinematographer Jeffrey L. Kimball to stage beautiful collages of color and light and kinetic movement. It's a massive tentpole action movie that wants to attend to small poetic moments in the background, and allow the characters to inhabit moments, and what's not interesting about that? In practice, everything. Part of it, surely, is that the film was cut down so dramatically, suggesting that what's left is connective tissue more than narrative movie. But part of it is just plain ol' rocky, confused filmmaking.

Certainly, the film's editing (by Steven Kemper and Christian Wagner) is as conspicuously lousy as it could possibly manage to be. From the moment during Ethan's re-introduction on Utah mountaintops that the scene cuts between four different angles of his hands slipping in less than a second, the movie throws its lot in with hectic, clarity-demolishing over-editing, sometimes so giddy that it's almost fun in a bad way (the explosive cut to the Utah scene, a dancer spinning across the screen to create the gaudiest wipe I have ever seen in a professional motion picture). Hans Zimmer's score, I suspect at Woo's urging, also trips near to "so bad it's good" territory, with its soaring use of a wordless female voice doing more than all the slow motion and all the doves in the world ever could to render Woo's aesthetic as a self-parody. The performances are all over the map: Cruise plays his cocky charming shtick with an unusual layer of uncertainty and inauthenticity, and Newton is astonishingly, uncharacteristically leaden, though with a role like that, how could she be otherwise? Scott is the most blank villain in a franchise that has had a fairly consistent villain problem, and the best thing about his presence here is that it prevented him from playing Wolverine in X-Men. And those are basically the only actors that the film cares about in the slightest.

As for what it does care about? I cannot say. Woo's best films are all about movement of people relative to the camera and the violence happening around him, but M:i:II is almost exactly the opposite of that: it is inert, subdivided into tiny little static moments cut together fast enough to synthesise kineticism. Visually, the film is soothing, not exciting: exactly the wrong thing for an action movie of any sort to be, or a sequel to a film noted for its intense thriller sequences, or a movie whose character beats are so generic that we just need to be distracted from them. Oh, it's pretty in it's gauzy way: the polish is there, but it's all in service to nonsense.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: HORROR IN THE LATE 1990S - CROCODILE SCHLOCK

The late 1990s were a deeply insincere moment in American pop culture. Emboldened primarily, I suppose by the enormous success of Jerry Seinfeld's famous stand-up and television comedy about nothing, every facet of music, movies, and television were infested by a great desire to indulge in something that was not, in fact, irony, but was described that way so pervasively that the word "ironic" now basically refers to that. To the glib, sophisticated style of mordant humor that permits the speaker to divorce themselves from any real engagement with what they're talking or thinking about.

I bring this up because Lake Placid, from 1999, is something of an irony bomb, explicitly mouthing these exact sentiments in the opening scene through the vessel of a character who is unmistakably looked at askance by the screenplay by David E. Kelley, himself one of the leading lights of the Age of Irony, thanks to his TV show Ally McBeal (a show for whose popularity we shall have to some day answer to our children). "Look at this joyless, square cop", the movie says in this opening scene, with mirthful detachment, "he's such a hick. Doesn't like sarcasm or city folks. Hey, let's throw a line in two-thirds of the way through the movie to suggest, a propos of nothing, that he's also a homophobe".

The film itself is part of the wide-ranging trend of mixing self-aware & self-effacing comedy into horror movies, distinctive mostly because of how heavily it skews that balance towards comedy. As will happen when a TV auteur noted for his quips takes the lead on a giant killer animal movie, and make no mistake, Lake Placid is a Kelley film in all the ways that matter, even if he didn't direct it. Even if, in fact, the director is somebody like Steve Miner, who you'd think should keep the movie more firmly tied down in horror territory: Miner having the distinction of being the only man to direct films in both the Friday the 13th and Halloween franchises (F13, Part 2 & F13, Part 3, and Halloween H20, specifically). But he also spent 1998 directing four episodes of the slick teen soap Dawson's Creek, including the pilot, and it's that skill set that gets a far more robust workout over the course of Lake Placid's gratifyingly swift 82 minutes.

The movie's plot is thoroughly formulaic in a way that would become even more familiar during the glut of direct-to-video and made-for-TV creature features in the 2000s, but was as old as the very first Jaws knock-offs. In the Maine countryside, on the picturesque Black Lake (we are told that they wanted to name it "Lake Placid", but that was taken already), Fish & Game officer Walt Lewis (David Lewis), a monosyllabic snarky bastard, and Sheriff Hank Keough (Brendan Gleeson, not even feinting towards an American accent) are on a boat. It doesn't matter why. What matters it that Walt gets attacked by some kind of a Thing, that absconds with his lower half. And this is something that Sheriff Hank has no clue how to deal with, so off we dissolve to New York City, and the film gets down to its real project: forcing us into the company of the worst goddamn people in the world. The first of these is Kelly Scott (Bridget Fonda), a paleontologist at the natural history museum, who finds out that her boss-boyfriend (Adam Arkin) and BFF (Mariska Hargitay) have been sleeping together, and in this circumstance, taking an assignment to the Maine backwoods seems totally reasonable. But upon arriving, Kelly starts to complain about everything. In this wide-ranging arrogant New Yorkers-hate-nature way that, to save my life, I can't tell if we're meant to laugh with or at.

Kelly, Sheriff Hank, and a new Fish & Game officer, Jack Wells (Bill Pullman) begin to investigate, and are quickly joined by Kelly's colleague, a mythology scholar and crocodile fetishist named Hector Cyr (Oliver Platt). Note that nobody at all has said one word about crocodiles so far. That's how good Hector is. For it is, in fact, a saltwater crocodile that's haunting Black Lake and devouring the local fauna, and the film give us just enough real knowledge to encourage us to really dig in and think about all the way that this makes no sense at all (a croc swimming across the Pacific is the kind of dubious science it's possible to swallow in the interests of kicking off the plot; traversing the Indian Ocean and rounding South Africa before crossing most of the Atlantic from north to south is daring us not to call bullshit). The film eases us into that: it's a good halfway through the total running time before we see the croc in more than just a flash for a second or two, at which point it is predominately played by a really neat Stan Winston Studios animatronic, and occasionally by shiny CGI that I'd say has aged poorly, except that I distinctly remember it already looked terribly insubstantial in 1999, like this massive 30-foot crocodilian weighed no more than a soap bubble, or a fairy's kisses.

But, I mean, hell! We're not at this giant crocodile movie for the giant crocodile, I hope! No indeed, we're hear to enjoy that one of a kind David E. Kelley banter, as Kelly, Hector, Jack, and Sheriff Hank have personality clashes between their four different outlooks: Jack's taciturn manliness, Sheriff Hank's bullish rural gruffness, Hector's animalistic mysticism, and Kelly's bottomless ability to hate goddamn everything in the world. There's also sassy Mrs. Bickerman (Betty White), the old lady who's the sole human being living on the lake, ever since the time her senile husband died under circumstances that are too enormously shady for words, and now busies herself feeding cattle to the crocodile. And Deputy Sharon Gare (Meredith Salenger), who's there largely to let Platt bounce lines off somebody who won't fight back.

So all these different personality types come into conflict, which in this case means hurling invective at each other. Florid insults, to be sure. Here's a nowhere near comprehensive list of the snappy things that are said over the course of the movie:

-"Maybe later you can chew the bark off my big fat log."
-"Officer Fuckmeat."
-"The longer you live, the more sex you get to have with your sister."
-"You fuckshit!"
-"If I had a dick, this is where I'd tell you to suck it."
-"It helps to hear it from a complete stranger: you're fat."
-"If you call me ma'am one more time, I'll sue you, and with today's laws it's possible."
-"They conceal information like that in books."
-"Maybe I should just wipe myself with some leafy little piece of poison oak. And then I can spend the whole day scratching my ass, blending in with the natives."

And that's not even counting the more routine "fuck yourself" and "asshole" and such that litter the script. It's truly fatiguing. In the hands of the greats, vulgar language can be the source of some of our finest poetry, but too much of it used too bluntly is beneath artlessness. It is the effluvia of filthy-minded adolescents, gleefully shouting "fuck!" because they know it's offensive, but unable to do anything beyond carpet-bomb insults.

This is, please understand, the only card Lake Placid has to play. You either find the nasty-minded writing amusing or you don't, and there's nothing left for the film to draw on if you don't. The acting is no help to the screenplay at all, which is kind of absurd: you'd think the one thing that dialogue this chewy and acidic ought be good for is providing a lot of fun for the actors spouting it. That was, after all, the entire basis of George Sanders and Sydney Greenstreet's careers. But the unifying characteristic of the cast is that they're terrible. Unsurprisingly, in the case of Fonda, who magnifies everything objectionable, shrill, and bitchy about her deeply unpleasant stereotype of a character. And unsurprisingly in Pullman's case as well, though mostly he's just a lump of meat for the vast bulk of the film, until he finally gets an outraged moralistic speech that he completely fluffs. It is very surprising that White is so weak in her role: the foul-mouthed old lady with a cheerful attitude should have been a gift to this actor among all actors, but there's not a single moment of White's performance where she appears to believe in the character, her motivations, or the words she say. Go back to that "if I had a dick" line - there are so many ways to make that line funny, or at least energetic, and White just sort of slurs it out and lets it die.

Platt's not terrible - the crude, erratic role is a liability that any actor would be hard-pressed to make work, and he at least has the right personality for it - but it mostly falls to Gleeson to be interesting in any way, with any plot beat, or any line reading. His deadpan response, "He seemed taller", when snarkily asked to identify a corpse from just the toe is the only line in the whole movie that I, for one, find even a little bit funny, and generally speaking his deliberate approach to the character - play the man, not the collection of quips - is enough to make him far and away the most tangible figure in the movie. (we know from other evidence, of course, that Gleeson is far and away the most reliably talented member of this ensemble, but I wouldn't want to use Lake Placid itself to mount that argument).

The flat acting and the deadening effect that has on the already shaky comedy is emblematic of the film's biggest overriding problem. It wants to occupy too many tonal registers at once, and can't make any of them succeed. The lurches from comedy of ill-manners to creepy monster movie to campy exercise in musty genre mechanics are ungainly at best, and they are rarely at their best. More often, the film heaves its way through the shift from comedy to horror like a drunk attempting to navigate a narrow doorway, doing through brutal force what cannot be done through mental clarity. Miner's directing is exactly wrong: he has no apparent sense of comic timing and his approach to making a thriller consists entirely in telegraphing jump scares, not all of which actually arrive. He does, at least, show off the crocodile well, lingering on half-seen animatronic shots and jumping briskly through whole-body CGI shots. And the film gets some decent mileage from the simple technique of showing nothing on the water in wide shots: a good way of suggesting both the size and the unknowability of the lake, and allowing us to sketch in our idea of the creature living inside of it.

Still, when everything is working perfectly Lake Placid is no more than the exact same creature feature that was all over the place in the years after Jurassic Park, and was often done better (it's easy to spot problems with Anaconda, but I'd never pass up a chance to watch that movie in favor of this one). And the catastrophic mixture of dumb comedy and wimpy horror that keeps apologising for itself means that things almost never work perfectly. There are many worse giant killer animal movies than Lake Placid, of course; it is a subgenre uniquely adept at producing tacky, formulaic garbage. A snotty sense of humor detaching the film from its own content and characters is certainly not a winning strategy to redeem that formula.

Body Count: A moose, a bear, two cows, and a crocodile, and then all of two human beings, in full disregard for how badly we want to watch every last one of these people die.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: HORROR IN THE LATE 1990s - FRIEND OF A FRIEND OF A FRIEND

At a certain point fairly early in Urban Legend, the character Damon Brooks turns on the radio, and a couple of bars of the 1997 Paula Cole single "I Don't Want to Wait" play, at which he becomes overly flustered and scrambles to turn it off. The younger of you among my readers, or those with the blissful fortune to have forgotten the shittiest of late-'90s pop culture, will perhaps need to have this moment unpacked. "I Don't Want to Wait" was the theme song for a TV show that premiered in January, 1998, Dawson's Creek, which was a teen soap opera that aired on The WB. Joshua Jackson played a character on that show. So it's a simple little in-joke, but it's also probably the single most typical moment I have ever encountered from an American horror movie made between 1996 (when Scream brought horror back to major prominence after years in abeyance) and 2004 (when Saw reminded horror what it mean to be intensely violent and nihilistic). It's a joke; the great sea change of post-Scream horror was that it absolutely refused to be anything but glib. It's a sequence that insistently reminds us that Jackson was a TV star on a show designed to package nonthreatening sexuality for pubescent girls; teen TV actors had become all but unavoidable in horror over the preceding year. The entire genre had, in effect, been resurrected for the solitary purpose of being made toothless as a direct result of being tailor-made for a market of teenagers who wanted... you know what, I have no fucking clue what the people who made films like Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer hits wanted from the horror films, or even if they got. But it damn certain wasn't what I want from horror films, as I am keenly reminded every time I decide that I've been making too many good life choices in a row, and thus revisit the teen soap horror boom of the late '90s into the '00s to course-correct back into masochism.

Urban Legend has few merits or points of interest. It's among the most structurally pure slasher films of the late '90s, which is a polite way of saying that it's damnably predictable in almost all its particulars. That's a horrible fate for a film so entirely driven by a gimmick that it even titles itself that way. This is supposed to be fun, or some such; instead, it's the kind of movie that one watches with a sort of a mental checklist:

-Opening sequence with a random character who dies in a manner that clearly establishes the killer's, that is to say the movie's, M.O.

-The cast is introduced in a group setting that allows us to see their group dynamic, which in turn raises the question of why the hell these people are friends. They are each given one personality trait apiece, and it is instantly obvious which one is going to stay alive longest; she is a woman.

-There's a male who is not part of the group, but who enters into their dynamic slantwise; nobody likes him, and therefore it's a ticking clock until he makes out with the already-designated Final Girl.

-Rumor of a secret institutional history of violence is mentioned.

-A character actor, legendary among the target audience but still quite cheap to acquire, is brought in to provide some omnidirectional menace.

I could go on, but it's as boring to write as it is to watch, and I suspect as it is to read. Let me fill in some of the details: the first victim is Michelle Mancini (Natasha Gregson Wagner), who is killed when a creepy gas station attendant (Brad Dourif) can't overcome his stutter long enough to warn her that somebody with an axe is hiding in her backseat. She had some mysterious connection, unknown to anybody, to Natalie Simon (Alicia Witt), the Final Girl among a group including Brenda Bates (Rebecca Gayheart), Parker Riley (Michael Rosenbaum), Damon Brooks (Joshua Jackson), and host of a radio sex advice show Sasha Thomas (Tara Reid), who is by leaps and bounds the most interesting of the side characters, almost solely because her job puts her at the center of the only creative scenes. The interloping boy is Paul Gardener (Jared Leto), brash ambulance-chasing reporter for the school paper - I didn't mention, these are all college students. And about half of them are even close enough to college age that it's not worth calling them out on it. Some of them are in the folklore class taught by William Wexler (Robert Englund, the genre legend character actor), currently on Urban Legend Week, and those of you familiar with that literary genre already recognised from Michelle's death that the flashy part of the movie is that all of the murders are stagings of famous urban legends, except for Sasha's, which is a pure slasher movie chase scene.

The concept is sound, but it's gruesomely marred in the execution by writer Silvio Horta, a 23-year-old first timer when the film was shot, and much too in love with empty-headed "cleverness" to focus on nuts-and-bolts storytelling; Urban Legend is addicted to twists that are obvious many, many scenes in advance, and its organising gimmick is applied sloppily and with increasingly limited imagination - there's little doubt that the first two deaths are by far the most inventive and thematically focused (for that matter, the gas station is even beautifully shot by James Cressanthis, the only point at which the film does much of anything visually that I can speak of positively). Director Jamie Blanks, more a composer than a director by trade, doesn't help at all; not that there was much of a tradition for making slasher movies in 1998, but the slackness with which the violent sequences are presented, the downright charming inability to mine tension from scenes in which characters are mere seconds from being murdered, is truly remarkable. Usually even the worst filmmaker stuck with a bunch of vapid TV soap stars - and they are so vapid this time around, Leto is the only under-40 actor who has even the glimmer of an inner life - and a mandate not to freak out the 13-year-old target audience too hard, R-rating or no, can still manage to get the audience to jump a little bit from a shock cut and a burst of noise on the soundtrack. Urban Legend telegraphs every last one of its thin little scares so thoroughly that one rather sits down politely to wait for them, than springs back in alarm from them. It's wan enough to make I Know What You Did Last Summer, its exact equivalent from the year prior, seem halfway decent. Shit, it's enough to make Blanks's follow-up, 2001's dreary Valentine, look like a clear and gratifying evolution in the direction of greater talent.

A few sparks of life do show up, mostly contained in the person of Loretta Devine, who plays the school's apparently only security guard, an aficionado of the '70s action films of Pam Grier; while the young people are too generic and soulless to do much in the way of acting, and the old guard, in the form of Englund and John Neville, don't even pretend to care about the mechanical crap they're obliged to shove forward, Devine at least approaches her character as somebody with thoughts in her head that aren't exactly cotangent with the words she's speaking at that exact moment. It's not inherently great, or even good acting, but at least she seems alive, and that's more than basically anybody else can lay claim to.

There are also a few decent moments of knowing humor in among all the lazy smirks and winks, an inheritance that all post-Scream slashers needed to reckon with, and which some simply weren't prepared for, wanting to be serious but forcing themselves into irony for market purposes. Urban Legend is one of those; the more it resembles Scream, the flatter it goes, with its meta-narrative flourishes easily the most ineffective parts of a movie that's only ever ineffective. But I was headed in the direction of a compliment: a few of the sardonic bits are even kind of amusing, like the deadpan creepy janitor (Julian Richings) that the movie can't put over as a red herring no matter how hard it tries.

It even manages to toss in a few smart nods to its urban legend gimmick, though never when it looks at them directly; the callers to Sasha's show have problems that map to urban legends, the last scene quietly evokes the story of the woman with a ribbon around her neck. These are nice, lovely grace notes, and the film desperately needs them; for without them it is sheer junk, a derivative slasher that is worth paying attention to only in that its absolute lack of creativity gives it some value as a survey of all the most generic elements of the '90s horror resurgence in its second year, right down to the irrevocable time-stamp of the prominent use of "Zoot Suit Riot" on the soundtrack

Body Count: That depends on how exactly you want to interpret the last scene: in keeping with the urban legend motif, the film allows the possibility that what "happened" is different based on the teller. But it's probably never going to be lower than 9. Also a dog that ended up in a microwave, also in keeping with the motif.

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SIDEKICKS: THE MOVIE

Bad movies are one thing. We know how to deal with them. But Minions isn't bad, exactly. It's perfectly neutral - the most impressively flavorless movie in many a long age. I've found preparing to review it has been something of an exciting race against the clock: would I be able to finish writing before every last memory I had of the experience of watching it had evaporated away? Given how hard it was to remember the beginning of the movie by the end of it, dear reader, I was not optimistic.

The film is a point-missing prequel to 2010's Despicable Me and 2013's Despicable Me 2 that contradicts the back-story heavily implied by the first of those movies, on top of the greater sin of fundamentally messing up the tonal balance that drove both of them. Basically, this is what happens when you put the comic sidekicks in the driver's seat. Instead of the little yellow capsule-shaped, gibberish-spouting minions serving as a enjoyably wacky, old-school cartoon way of leavening the slightly more sincere A-plot (as in DM1), or threatening to overwhelm the A-plot entirely and sort of making the whole thing a bit of a screechy annoyance (as in DM2), here they're the whole show. It's exactly like the difference between having a few cookies in between bites of a not-very-healthy mill, versus just straight-up unlocking your jaw an pouring a whole fucking bag of sugar down your throat, right down to the jitteriness and the headache at the end of it.

Minions opens at the dawn of life on Earth, with one of its very best sequences: the minions evolving from yellow unicellular organisisms clinging with enthusiasm to a bigger, meaner unicellular organism, and so on through the early history of evolution. It's in a style that looks like chalk drawings, skipping through time in a series of fluid "in-camera" edits, a great piece of mixed-media playfulness that of course descends into standard-issue CGI the second that the opening credits stop, and Geoffrey Rush pipes up on the soundtrack to narrate how minions evolved to pursue and serve the cruelest villain alive at any moment in history, eventually finding their true calling when mankind came into existence. And I will say this: to hell with narration (and the sequence would definitely play better if it were told entirely through images and editing), but there's absolutely no better choice than Rush for the slightly acidic warmth that gives the narration a sense of stately authority while also indulging the rampant silliness of the humor.

Anyway, the film posits that after accidentally killing Napoleon, the minions fled to the arctic to build their own society, and eventually found themselves on the verge of death by boredom, without any bad guys to serve. So in 1968, one of the wisest of them all, Kevin (voiced, like all the minions, by co-director Pierre Coffin), decides to go on a mission to find a boss, accompanied by the childlike moron Bob and the snotty Stuart - and before I completely get out of the habit of complimenting the film, kudos to writer Brian Lynch, to directors Coffin and Kyle Balda, and all the animators for creating three totally distinct personalities, instantly readable and flawlessly distinctive despite the fact that all three are identically-dressed yellow tubes with googly eyes.

The three minions arrive in New York, and travel thence to Orlando, amusingly sketched out as a pre-Disney hell of swampland and barely visible roads, and here they attend Villain Con. A spot of good luck puts them in touch with Scarlett Overkill (Sandra Bullock), the world's first female supervillain, who takes them on as her henchmen for a plot to steal the crown jewels of England. And somewhere in all of that, Minions burns off all the charm of its characters, and its brightly colored, highly angular design, and the way that design fits neatly into the stylistic ethos of the 1960s, and pretty much every other damn thing that gives it an ounce of personality. In essence, the film has no momentum of any sort: scenes happen, we hear one of the many incongruous celebrity voices studded into the movie (Steve Coogan, Allison Janney, a totally wasted Michael Keaton), some gags modeled on the slapstick MGM animation of the '40s or the absurdist Warner animation of the '50s. Then the cycle restarts. At no point does a sense of inevitability take over; there's barely even a sense of continuity about things, especially in the astonishingly arbitrary middle section when the minions wander around trying to find the crown and then- but even a barely-plotted collection of wacky shorts tied together more by proximity than anything else deserves better than to be spoiled, I guess.

The most annoying thing about Minions is that it has just enough individual pieces that are terrific in isolation that it's really not possible to discard the whole. The opening credits are on obvious place where the animation takes such a swerve that I can't help but love it, and the same is true of a mid-film bedtime story in faux-claymation with appealingly goofy character design and an acerbic, abrupt sense of humor. There are moments in which the even the bog-standard CG animation is suddenly and powerfully beautiful and detailed in texture and lighting.

And there are comic highlights throughout, one or two minutes of a stretch where the ludicrous illogic of the storytelling turns into something close enough to the classic cartoon shorts that are plainly never far from the filmmakers' minds that you can see them if you squint. The same lack of cohesion or building momentum that makes the overall movie a slog is, in fact, something of a strength at the micro level: the villain convention, for example, is such an odd and off-putting narrative element, but it's responsible for some of the most effective dashes of zany jokes in the whole movie.

But I'm hunting for nice things to say towards a movie about which it's hard to feel anything at all. Uncharitably, I'd say that Minions is a film that expects its viewer to have a stunted attention span. It jumps around so much in search of loud, simple gags that you never have to worry about paying attention. Were I being kind, I'd say that it simply knows its target audience: little kids who want to be dazzled for 90 minutes while laughing at straightforward jokes. Still and all, "it does a good job pandering to children" is hardly the stuff of praise and even if I aged out of the right mindset to really meet the film where it lives a solid quarter-century ago, I like to think that I still know profoundly mediocre filmmaking when I see it.

5/10

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: MALE STRIPPERS

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: Magic Mike XXL continues its predecessor's look at the lives of men who dance dirty for a living. Not the commonest subject in a male gaze-dominated medium, but nor is it the first time this milieu has been plumbed.

A Night in Heaven is a romantic drama about a community college professor stuck in a dying marriage who has an affair with one of her students after discovering he's a dancer at the local strip club. So obviously it starts off with golden hour shots of Kennedy Space Center. What possible other opening gambit could there be?

So it's a disastrous film, anyway. The splendidly inappropriate opening isn't the reason for that (though it absolutely doesn't help). What it is, though, is perfectly symptomatic of the film's deeply broken sense of self. It's easy to joke, "what kind of movie about strippers opens with several minutes of Cape Canaveral location footage?", but the fact that A Night in Heaven is the answer to that question is telling of how unclear its goals are, as well as its execution of those goals. It is a film divided between the impulse towards smut and towards socially-minded character drama; it is exactly what you get when the Oscar-winning director of Rocky, John G. Avildsen, and the writer of the core material of Nashville, Joan Tewkesbury, find themselves in the business of making a star vehicle for Christopher Atkins, primarily known then and now as the male half of the teen soft-core drama The Blue Lagoon. It's possible to tell, if you hold the film at the right angle, that Avildsen and Tewkesbury had in mind a steady-handed narrative of marital stresses, female desire, and the hard cost of making ethical choices instead of economic ones, and found themselves obliged to readjust everything in the wake of a lead actor whose primary skill was his ability to not wear a shirt. I will say on behalf of the film's novelty that it is maybe the only thing ever filmed that derives virtually all of its dramatic value from the level, complex presence of Lesley Ann Warren.

She plays Faye Hanlon, a skittish-looking teacher of public speaking at a Florida community college and the wife of a bored, boring NASA engineer, Whitney (Robert Logan). For his part, he's facing down an industry in decline, and the company he specifically works for is hunting down Defense Department contracts to make ends meet. This sits poorly with Whitney, who chooses to be laid off rather than work towards what he considers immoral ends, a fact he massages when relating it to his wife. There is surely a deep and interesting subplot involving Whitney to be explored, but A Night in Heaven is resolutely disinterested in it; at 83 minutes long, it could probably afford a little more meat on its bones, but the film is hellbent on getting to the steamy stuff as fast as possible and staying there as long as it dares, and Whitney's existence comes to feel more like an imposition levied on the the film than a possibility for dramatic expansion early in the proceedings.

Faye has a particular student, Rick Monroe (Atkins), who's one of those quintessential movie youths, a brilliant kid with all the potential in the world and no drive to exploit it. So she is compelled to flunk him, on the very day that her sister Patsy (Deborah Rush) is coming to town for a few days of girl bonding, including drinking and a night at Heaven, the local strip club that she found on her last trip. The most popular and lusted-after of all the dancers there is one Ricky the Rocket, and you get zero points for guessing ahead of time that he's the exact same student that Faye just bawled out. She's both mortified and transfixed by his tremendously overt sexual energy, his fearlessness in grinding against patrons and passionately kissing them, and his inappropriately perfect abs. He can tell she's transfixed, and comes along to give her his special treatment; this turns into an intense mutual infatuation that leads her to (gasp!) lie to her husband and (shock and horror!) go back to the strip club to continue ogling. And eventually, it leads to them making tender love. But this was the '80s, and social standards must be maintained, and that means a very abrupt series of plot developments that feel more like the notes for a third act than actual third act. The upshot being that Rick turns out to be a callous little shit.

There are no ways around it: the story is a dog, collecting musty clichés and not even pretending to freshen them up. Avildsen is not without an eye for capturing the sweaty fatigue of environments, and that trick serves him well at multiple points throughout this movie, but it's mostly just spackling a respectable gloss on a tawdry scenario in a tawdry milieu. Which is not, in and of itself, a problem, except that none of the filmmakers seem tremendously interested in making a tawdry movie and that's just not really an applicable strategy here. When the action switches to Heaven, and there's no choice but to make it a tasteless cartoon, it's palpable how weirdly the energy rotates: suddenly the lighting and framing become very self-conscious, like we'll hopefully be so aware of the abstract qualities of the shots that we'll ignore the gyrating men who are, by and large, given curiously unerotic dance moves - witness the Dance of the Kitchen Stools!), or the fever dream hectoring of the Heaven M.C. (Spatz Donovan). His dialogue is the one element of the film that's so incomprehensible that it turns out to be funny - "They'll steam the crease right out of your polyester, ladies!" he leers at one point. "Do you wanna see Ricky take his clooooooothes off?" he later asks, in the kind of hyper-literal statement that suggests children play-acting at strip club management. For unclear reasons, he has been costumed to look like a disco version of the Mad Hatter, but that's just part and parcel of the uncompromising hideousness of the wardrobes. Anna Hill Johnstone, the costume and production design, had an apparent vendetta against the cast, burying Warren especially in costumes so over-the-top in their '80s signifiers that it feels like an Expressionist nightmare about the decade. "You look like a hibiscus in bloom!" coos Patsy to Faye before their first night of debauchery, and that is a thoroughly accurate statement, which certainly would appear to be meant as a compliment.

The strip club sequence is at least appropriately erotic (less so the couple's sexual encounter, which is rushed through like Avildsen - editing as well as directing - just wanted to get it over with), and it's here that Warren really shines. In a lengthy scene that relies entirely on her reaction shots, the actor is able to evoke longing and an immediate wash of guilt at feeling that longing; a desire to stare but also conspicuously trying to make sure that nobody notices her staring; and, uncomplicated by any libidinous urge, a very real sense of confused horror that her professional life and her off-hours gallivanting with Patsy have been blended. It's remarkable acting, and it builds up an aura of goodwill towards the actress attempts to redeem the insufficiently probing remains of Tewkesbury's compromised script, which largely involves adding lots of complicated self-doubt and fear to the surface-level horniness. It's the most human, interesting material in the film, and it's largely wasted, but Warren deserves a lot of credit for the effort.

Nothing was going to actually humanise this material, not with Atkins sucking all the energy out of the room. He's pretty as hell, undoubtedly, but limited to one vapid expression of innocuous self-regard, and prone to making terrible decisions like rolling his eyes so hard during class that it resembles an epileptic fit more than an expression of annoyance, or wearing a nominally flirtatious grin that has virtually no sex in it, just the distant smile of somebody who just remembered the leftover pizza at home. Given his prominence in the story, and the prominence of his body in the film's visual scheme, his callowness, static expressions, and inability to build a solid character are limitations that A Night in Heaven was certainly never going to survive. Warren fights as hard as she can to buck this odds; Avildsen nervously tries to ignore it with needless shots of rockets and a blazingly fast pace; most everybody else just gives up and tries to slap some crap up there onscreen. It's not much of a tribute to the male body or the female libido, and it's an outright joke to pretend that we can cobble together the dog-ends of ignored subplots into a treatise on economic tension in the early years of the Reagan presidency. It's not sordid enough to be decent junk, but the filmmakers gave up on it before had stopped being any kind of junk at all, and other than offering the unusual sight of male objectification in a Hollywood studio picture, there's nothing about it that justifies so much as a sidelong glance.

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YOU STOOD ON THE SHOULDERS OF GENIUSES TO ACCOMPLISH SOMETHING AS FAST AS YOU COULD

Jurassic World is absolutely the best sequel yet to the 1993 Jurassic Park, which is one of the least-impressive compliments you can pay to a record-setting summer blockbuster. We should not feel obliged to mark it down as a strength when a movie can be confidently declared to be better than not just 1997's enervating The Lost World: Jurassic Park, but also 2001's brain-dead Jurassic Park III. Better than those should be obligatory. People who can't make a better summer thriller than those shouldn't be allowed out of Popcorn Movie School. But this is not the best of all possible worlds, and there's shit worse than that every year. So yes, it is the second-best Jurassic Park movie, and that is a good thing and worthy of note.

It is not, however, particularly good or interesting on its own merits, and it really doesn't even seem like it's trying to be. Even by the standards of nostalgia properties, Jurassic World goes all-in on nostalgia, and very rarely to its benefit, allowing fannish enthusiasm for recreating moments from the first movie to overwhelm the new movie's own ideas and characters and especially basic story logic. I would go so far as to call the script by director Colin Trevorrow & Derek Connolly, retrofitting an original by Rick Jaffe & Amanda Silver, a catastrophe, and not simply because of how readily it drifts into Jurassic Park fanfiction, though that happens all the time. It's criminally undernourished and erratic: filled with plot holes and unearned leaps of faith, to a degree that it's practically daring you not to nitpick every last thing to death.

Which I will not do, because that's a lazy form of criticism, but at least this much needs to be said: at no point in the movie did I get any sense of what Jurassic World, the dinosaur zoo/theme park at which the film takes place, is actually like. That is, I couldn't imagine what a tourist's trip to the park would be like on a day that all the dinosaurs didn't break out and try to kill everybody, nor how it's geographically laid out (a neat trick for a movie that keeps returning to its Big Electronic Map), nor even what attractions it contains besides the ones conspicuously designed to be death traps. Like the self-guided gyrocopic balls that allow you to zip around under dinosaurs' feet, and which don't automatically return to home base when the park managers flip the "rampaging killbeast on the loose" switch, but simply assume the teenagers joyriding around in will return in an orderly fashion because they've been asked to do so. That makes for some impressive popcorn movie imagery - very impressive, in fact - but fuck Jurassic World forever and always for pretending that it could possibly exist in anything like the form we see it.

That's one of the most glaring examples of many places where the film demonstrates a complete disinterest in building a coherent, sensible world, and it's ruinous. Any film whose plot depends on such utterly fantastic nonsense as cloning dinosaurs needs to have a stable, utterly plausible foundation - even the entirely flimsy Jurassic Park III knew how to do that - without which it's nothing but scenes of monster mayhem stitched together by mind-sapping bullshit. And surprise of surprises, that's exactly what Jurassic World turns out to be. The plot feels like a Mad Libs completed after a lazy day of watching creature features on SyFy: one day at Jurassic World, Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) finds herself obliged to take care of her nephews, Zach (Nick Robinson) and Gray Mitchell (Ty Simpkins), while their parents (Judy Greer and Andy Buckley) are busy getting divorced. It being a particularly busy day at the park, she hands them off to her assistant Zara (Katie McGrath), while she deals with an immensely important business meeting on top of all her normal duties. Meanwhile, the current park owner, multibillionaire Simon Masrani (Irrfan Khan), is concerned that their new showcase attraction, a genetic experiment built on a Tyrannosaurus rex base by head scientist/Frankensteinian supervillain Dr. Henry Wu (B.D. Wong, the sole character and cast member returning from an earlier film), will be unsafe, so he sends the park's tart-tongued animal trainer Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) to take a peek at its enclosure. He finds that the animal, Indominous rex, is a supervillain in its own right, able to form complex plots that, in record time, leave it rampaging through the park and triggering the usual monster movie action. And this allows the venal Vic Hoskins (Vincent D'Onofrio) to try out his pet theory that the park's velociraptors, the pride and joy of Owen's career, can be weaponised.

None of the above is particularly bad as such, though it's preposterously clichéd. None of the Jurassic Park movies have been models of narrative ingenuity, and it would be unfair to expect them to start after 22 years. Still, the lifeless way that this has all been stitched together is unlovely at best, and the uniformly flat characters and performances don't offer any distraction from how the film requires all of its humans to make the most obviously stupid decision possible at virtually every turn. Howard fights with the film's laziest character and manages to turn her into something that doesn't feel totally useless, and Jake Johnson is actively good as the nerdy comic relief character in the park's control room, and that's about it as far as memorable acting; even Pratt, who so nimbly played a sarcastic dick at the center of a summer tentpole in last year's Guardians of the Galaxy, offers no personality or charm to a totally generic action hero who emerges as the structureless film's protagonist largely through attrition.

Yeah, but the dinosaurs, or so the internet tells me. And I'll spot the film that: almost all of the dinosaur scenes are terrific, up until they're not. Several of them suffer from the same basic lapses in logic as the rest of the film (the film's best monster, far more impressive than the rather dopey looking Indominus rex, is a seafaring mosasaur that's comically oversized and presented in a context where it is impossible to believe that it doesn't murder a couple dozen park visitors every week), but in such places the film exploits the rule that if the genre parts of a genre film are good enough, it gets a pass on having a brain. I mean, it exploits that rule constantly, but this is the only time it works out. Everything about the action and suspense feels mercilessly pre-ordained and overfamiliar - its best sequences don't so much "steal" from Jurassic Park, Aliens, and Predator, as they use different colored crayons to fill them in - but the film's largely gorgeous CGI (I can only point to one shot where the effects fall apart, a child awkwardly "hugging" a baby brachiosaur) makes those borrowings enough of their own thing that it feels okay to forgive them.

Even as broad spectacle, the film can't quite put itself over: the Michael Giacchino score is shockingly insipid when it's not directly quoting from John Williams's awestruck motifs (and even that poorly: the first appearance of the main Jurassic Park theme accompanies a shot of Nick Robinson's feet), and the final climax gets more and more dumb as it adds more and more complications and self-conscious bigness. But the costliness and grandeur of the spectacle is enough to keep the film from being as totally sour of an experience as its disastrous scriptwould otherwise make it. It's not memorable, and it's rarely fun, but at least the film offers up a summer movie's worth of summer movie opulence.

6/10

Reviews in this series
Jurassic Park (Spielberg, 1993)
The Lost World: Jurassic Park (Spielberg, 1997)
Jurassic Park III (Johnston, 2001)
Jurassic World (Trevorrow, 2015)

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REVISTING THE OLD HAUNTS

At its best, the 2015 Poltergeist is a beat-for-beat (but only sometimes shot-for-shot) retread of the 1982 Poltergeist, with Jared Harris substituting for Zelda Rubinstein. And I love Jared Harris, and I'm never sad to see him in a movie, but Zelda Rubinstein was the best part of the original movie. So at its best, Poltergeist '15 is a conspicuously less-good version of a thing that exists in a perfectly fine iteration. At its worst, Poltergeist '15 is basically a disaster site.

I will say this in its defense: it manages to reverse the usual fatal sin of horror movies, particularly ones about ghosts and hauntings, particularly in the modern age. Virtually every such film is at its best when it's simmering along and freaking out the characters, and the minute it starts to explain things and bring in the experts to help exorcise the whatever it is that's causing mischief, everything goes right into the crapper. Poltergeist front-loads all of its worst material, and ends up being kind of interesting as it gets closer to the end, or right about the point that Harris and Jane Adams, in the role of a credulous parapsychology professor at the local university, take over protagonist duties.

That front-loading is dire, though. There's a rule so straightforward, longstanding, and obviously necessary that I'm always baffled when horror filmmakers forget to follow it: start by showing us what normal looks like, so we know what abnormal looks like. Phantasmagorical explosions of style and plotless terror on the European model can get away without laying that groundwork, but none of those words describe Poltergeist at all, which eagerly starts throwing demonic clowns and unseen people in the closet at its central family their very first night in their new haunted house, without even a single evening of vague unease to warm us up. It's not a good way to amp up the tension, it's a good way to blow out the tires on the movie before it's even out of the driveway, and the first half-hour of the film throws out so many creepy images with gothic shadows and a wailing score to tell us that it's time to be scared, it's numbing. It's like director Gil Kenan and screenwriter David Lindsay-Abaire threw the switch from "banal domesticity" to "gaping hellmouth" so hard that they broke it and couldn't switch it back.

Even setting that aside, the first act of the new Poltergeist is amazingly defective. The basic plot is about the same as last time, with the names changed and significantly more emphasis on economic misery: the recently laid-off Eric Bowen (Sam Rockwell) and his writer wife Amy (Rosemarie DeWitt) have settled on a kind of dumpy suburban home as the new place for their family to live and economise as they regroup (Deficiency #1: every character reacts to this house like it's a tumble-down shack that only the most hellishly impoverished would dare to live in, when it's quite a trim, clean 2-story in a nice neighborhood, and if the constant implication that we're in the southwestern Chicago suburbs is meant to be taken seriously, it's certainly setting the grindingly poor Bowens back not less than a couple hundred thousand dollars). And so comes the fateful day when they move in the kids, surly teenager Kendra (Saxon Sharbino) and unbearably adorable moppets Griffin (Kyle Catlett), around 11, and Madison (Kennedi Clements), around five. It's seriously repellent how precious they are; but they have the merit of looking inordinately plausible as DeWitt's biological children.

And so, without further ado, the Bowens are swamped by an army of horrors, most of them plaguing the absurdly high-strung Griffin; eventually, the Whatever It Is in the house seduces Madison into entering her closet, whence she is warped into a hell dimension that, as we'll find out, exactly overlaps the Bowens' house, but only occasionally interacts with it. After which, things settle out into that beat-for-beat retread, and Adams and Harris come along, and it's almost possible to forget just how wretched everything has been so far. Other than Catlett, who's pretty terrific as a preteen neurotic living in the worst imaginable place for a child of his nervous sensibilities. Rockwell and DeWitt are generally terrible in their roles, persuasive as a married couple happy to be with each other as a bulwark against poverty, and nothing else - certainly it's difficult to believe in either of them as a parent, the foundation upon which the entire notion of Poltergeist stands. But it's not sporting to blame the actors for being unable or disinclined to do much with the half-formed characters and situations in Lindsay-Abaire's screenplay, which frequently resembles a skeleton for a script to be built up later more than a coherent movie in its own right. Like the way it treats the Bowens' financial difficulties, which is the central point of some scenes and totally forgotten in others. Or its utter failure to figure out what makes Kendra interesting and necessary as a character in any way.

Kenan's directorial debut came in the form of the motion-capture haunted house adventure Monster House in 2006, and it's easy to see that as an argument in favor of his qualifications for making a family-friendly scary movie (though the new Poltergeist is considerably less interested in being for kids and parents than the original), but none of his facility with genre mechanics shows up here. The first act is one-note and blandly assembled, typified by its pile-up of jump scares of escalating ridiculousness - a scary clown? No, a whole fucking box of scary clowns! No, a freaked-out squirrel jumping at the characters! No, a squirrel with blood red zombie eyes! - and its artless reimagining of moments from the original with absolutely none of its creativity, most prominently a scene that re-creates the wonderful moment in the the first film where the camera pans away from a kitchen only to find that a few moments later every object within it has been stacked into a complicated tower (in the remake, it's a house made out of comic books). Not only is the tone different - in the original it was more mysterious and wonderful than scary, but since the remake is humping "scary" as hard as it possibly can from the second scene, there's no room for that here - it's accomplished in a shock cut instead of a single camera movement, or even a simulated single camera movement. The result is something barely shocking, since Kenan telegraphs it too openly, and certainly not creepy.

It sticks the landing, at least, though not without some stupid touches (a Boschian hellscape of writhing CGI corpses is just silly), with Catlett, Harris and Adams all coming to the fore in the last third in ways that tweak the original enough to feel like the new thing has a worthwhile personality of its own. It's never, ever as good as the first movie, which I don't even personally love all that much, but it maneuvers through the formulaic requirements of a haunted house movie crisply enough.

Don't stay for the mid-credits scene, though; it's jokey awful nonsense, and the worst part of the entire movie with its insipid winking. And it immediately undoes all the hard work of the film's last hour in washing out the foul taste of the first 30 minutes.

4/10

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THE LITTLE BIG ONE

San Andreas, a by-the-books disaster movie in which Dwayne Johnson fights an earthquake, is exactly the movie you suppose it to be, except in one, absolutely crucial regard: it's weirdly allergic to fun. By which I guess I mean that "by-the-books disaster movie" suggests one particular register of sobriety and anguished emotions, where as "Dwayne Johnson popcorn movie" suggests something infinitely goofier and more charming and dippy, and at all junctures, San Andreas elects to be the former thing and not so much the latter. I wasn't enough of a fool as to actually expect a movie where The Rock punches the San Andreas fault back together, but I was hoping for something that was ever silly in any way. Spectacularly bad science aside, San Andreas isn't that.

Let me re-emphasise, that this is a very by-the-books disaster movie. In a genre that's particularly beholden to formula and common elements, San Andreas still stands out for the purity of its commitment to that formula. We have the couple about to get a divorce thrown together by the terrible events unfolding around them, a daughter readying to go to college when her life is thrown into disarray, a puffy scientist trapped with a designated audience surrogate, a slimy capitalist whose fate is ironically tied to his profession. The opening scene is a mostly stand-alone setpiece designed to show off the hero's particular skill set; the final scene involves an enormous American flag slowly whipping in the wind. It's almost a holy thing, I really mean that. Not since, good Lord, maybe Volcano back in 1997 have I seen a disaster movie so painstakingly eager to be the most prototypical disaster movie it could possibly be. Or at the very least, The Day After Tomorrow in 2004.

This is not at all meant to be a slight against San Andreas, which knows exactly what it is, what it's doing, and why. Disaster movies, like romantic comedies and slasher films, derive much of their pleasure from being predictable, and finding most of their individuality in their execution. And this is the slight against San Andreas, which is many things that aren't terribly complimentary - unbelievable in the extreme for one, unusually indifferent to deaths of human beings beyond its core group of named characters for another - but is worst of all for being preposterously not-fun. Since the all but forgotten days of The Mummy Returns, Johnson's screen persona has fully coalesced into a big meaty goofball, too campy to be a serious action star and too imposing to be a standard-issue comic character actor; isolated counter-examples in the intervening decade and a half like 2013's Snitch only demonstrate his considerable onscreen charisma and movie-star qualities thrives in an atmosphere of jokey flippancy. The screenplay by Carlton Cuse, from a story credited to Andre Fabrizio & Jeremy Passmore (though "writing" the "story" in a film like this is mostly a matter of plucking down plot elements like overripe apples), is absolutely not jokey, nor flippant, even when it seems like that would be the obvious thing to do with it: Johnson gets a grand total of one dumb one-liner.

Instead, we get standard-issue family drama presented with an extraordinary lack of irony: Ray Gaines (Johnson) is a helicopter rescue pilot with the Los Angeles Fire Department, and a wife named Emma (Carla Gugino) who is leaving him, and about to move in with a handsome architect, Daniel Riddick (Ioan Gruffudd). Ray does his best not to be a jerk about this, even when it falls to Daniel and not himself to bring his daughter Blake (Alexandra Daddario) up to Seattle. For Ray, in the time-tested way of action heroes, spends more time attending to work emergencies than his loved ones. Meanwhile, a pair of Caltech professors, Dr. Lawrence Hayes (Paul Giamatti) and Dr. Kim Park (Will Yun Lee), have a perfect opportunity to test out their earthquake-predicting model during a freak event in Nevada. Kim dies rescuing a child from the collapsing Hoover Dam, but in the process, he and Lawrence prove their model works, and Lawrence is able to use the data to discover that the San Andreas fault is about to blow. Like, now. Too soon for there to be any chance of evacuating the tens of millions of people who will be immediately affected by the gigantic quake, but enough time that he can get on the air with CNN reporter Serena Johnson (Archie Panjabi) to explain to the audience what earthquakes are.

The movie doesn't genuinely care about Lawrence, but Giamatti is the second-biggest name in the cast, so it keeps cutting back to him without ever finding a remotely organic or elegant way of tying its two subplots together (the solitary link is that, prior to heading to Caltech, Serena went on a ride-along with Ray's crew in the opening scene, as he fearlessly rescued a young woman from a fissure that foreshadows the quakes to come). This leaves San Andreas moving along only in the lumpiest sort of way, on top of how clumsily it juggles the two plots it's actually committed to: Ray and Emma flying, driving, and otherwise scrambling northward through the devastation of southern California on the way to San Francisco, where Blake has teamed with a pair of English brothers, sexy Ben (Hugo Johnston-Burt) and tween Ollie (Art Parkinson), after Daniel reveals how totally craven and Evil Movie Capitalist he is. For as the most brazen of all its clichés, San Andreas goes all-in on "architecture is the path to enormous financial success" as its villain's backstory and personality. But anyway, as Lawrence tells everybody to beware the even bigger second quake on the TVs that no longer work, what with the California power grid being gone, the estranged couple reunites on the hard road north, while Blake proves to be her father's daughter and manages to use wits and survivalist know-how to keep herself and the brothers alive through fires and floods and collapsing buildings.

The least we can say about all of this is that the visual effects and especially the sound work are pretty good, though the film suffers from some particularly weightless CGI (almost the first thing that happens in the whole movie is an animated car flipping down a hill like a tin can, and a mere two weeks after the heaving metal of Mad Max: Fury Road, it's even more depressing to watch than it might have been otherwise). It suffers much worse from director Brad Peyton, whose entire list of features preceding this have been worse sequels to bad children's movies (his Journey 2: The Mysterious Island was one of those very same movies where Johnson got to be good and campy and fun), and who comes to this film totally without the skills required to make large-scale destruction looking visually spectacular and exhilarating. There are scattered scenes that work tremendously well: Emma scrambling through a disintegrating skyscraper to jump on Ray's copter in the midst of an explosion of dust could stand with any mid-level tentpole movie in recent memory, and there are some aerial shots that show off the enormity of the destruction with an appropriately epic popcorn movie sensibility. But they are much outweighed by sequences that feel limited in scope and ambition. It's never persuasive that anything bigger than what the heroes can see with their own eyes - nothing here like the last time San Francisco was devastated onscreen in 2014's Godzilla, and the terrible grandeur of the action seemed bigger than human understanding. San Andreas is cramped, without the compensating factor of being more intimate with its characters by virtue of backing away from a broad canvas. It's scared of ambition and too flimsily-written for anything else, and while it's sufficiently noisy and pretty to exist as a big ol' summer picture of no distinction, it's definitely not the kind of thing that anybody will remember a couple of years into the future.

5/10

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THE PITCH IS BACK

Being "disappointed" in Pitch Perfect 2 would require having meaningfully elevated expectations for it, and hopefully not too many people would make that mistake. Cinema history is littered with comedy sequels that fail in exactly the way this one does: re-create the same plot beats and thematic arc, only do everything bigger, more expensive, and less funny. There are few enough exceptions that the course of wisdom is to just assume that you're heading for a piece of absolute crap, or a mildly amusing but horrifically lazy retread at best, and when you are graced by the sudden arrival of an Addams Family Values or A Shot in the Dark, clutch it to your breast like an innocent child. What I am disappointed in, then, is not the movie itself.

But I am definitely willing to concede that I'm very disappointed in Elizabeth Banks's directorial debut, which Pitch Perfect 2 happens to be: after years of counting on Banks to be a reliable stabilising presence in wonderful comedies, mediocre comedies, and downright shitty comedies, I was more than a little eager to see her apply the knowledge she picked up over the years into working on the backside of the camera. And that didn't happen; there are lots of reasons that Pitch Perfect 2 isn't very great, but the directing is absolutely one of them, with the tone going far more sour far more often than in the first Pitch Perfect and the visuals flatlining in exactly the place you'd want them to thrive, the musical numbers. Which are inventively staged by choreographer Aakomon "A.J." Jones, but shot hectically and cut to ribbons by Banks and editor Craig Alpert, and that's just no fun at all.

In her defense, Banks didn't have all that much to work with. The script, written like the original by Kay Cannon, is a pristine example of sequelitis, going to extreme (and frankly, unnecessary) lengths to set the characters back to the start in a lot of ways, while raising the stakes enormously but unconvincingly, and ramping up everything that worked last time from modest and thus charming all the way to screaming and tedious. Three years after winning the national college a capella championships, the Barden Bellas are America's premiere a capella group, having completed a three-peat of their victory, and thus must be punished back down to freakish misfits. This is accomplished in the first of the film's weirdly regressive jokes, for a movie that is so fucking anxious to show off its liberal message bonafides: at a concert for no less than President Stockfootage Obama, the self-named Fat Amy (Rebel Wilson), sardonic Australian and beloved breakout character from the last movie, suffers a wardrobe mishap that leaves her genitalia on lingering display for all of America to gawk at with intense furor and ragehorror, because the vaginas of fat people are the holes to Lovecraftian hell dimensions.

The Bellas are kicked out of the a capella ssociation with only one chance to redeem themselves: if - if! - they can become the first American team to win the world championship of a capella. And they throw themselves into the task of doing so, though de facto leader Beca Mitchell (Anna Kendrick) is far more interested in her new internship under a great music producer (Keegan-Michael Key) than making new and radically challenging arrangements for the group to prove itself. It's no more and no less predictable in its assemble of stock items than Pitch Perfect was, and the difference comes down entirely to performance and tone. Pitch Perfect ignored its wanton overfamiliarity in favor of focusing on the warm, specific characters played by Kendrick, Wilson, and others like Brittany Snow (who comes back as a graduation-averse four-time senior), Anna Camp (who cameos), and Ester Dean (who returns in a role that isn't as mired in lazy stereotypes as before, though it feels like she's also in the movie less). Pitch Perfect 2 lets its characters be far too snappish, and the basic pleasure of watching characters be friends with each other is forced and inauthentic in most of its occurrences. There are just enough flashes of the congenial spirit of the first movie for the sequel to be, generally, speaking, satisfactory; for example, a long scene around a campfire where the movie digs in with a "wow, we're all going to graduate soon and this will all end" vibe that the movie keeps glancing at without committing to.

But these likable grace notes are only intermittent in a film that loses the originals two best weapons, with much-degraded performances from a palpably checked-out Kendrick and Wilson shading perpetually into mean brutality instead of fleet-footed sarcasm. And then there's the usual "do it again but bigger and stupider" problem, which finds the last movie's riff-off turned into a huge underground a capella death match overseen by a rich eccentric played by David Cross as a collection of mincing effeminate stereotypes that were stale by the end of the 1980s (this scene does have, by far, the film's best joke in the form of the most unexpected celebrity cameos in an age), and the dirty-minded humor cranked into outright foulness that's so wearying as to lose any ability to trigger even a slight giggle. The morally reprehensible color commentators played by John Michael Higgins and Banks herself (she proves, like many actors before her, incapable of directing herself; she keeps stumbling into a reprise of her Effie Trinket from The Hunger Games and its sequels) are even more of a film-stopping liability than before, jamming the breaks to grimly push through riffs with rather too much cruelty to be even ironically funny.

Even when the film plumbs new territory, it's of limited value. The movie's new villains, an archly Germanic a capella group led by the statuesque Kommissar (Birgitte Hjort Sørensen) and Pieter Krämer (Flula Borg), are amusingly severe at first (all of Kendrick's best work comes in her scenes with them), though it eventually becomes clear that the movie's sole idea for them is "boy, Germans are assholes!", the first volley in what will eventually become a whole litany of national parodies in the last act that makes Epcot Center look like a painfully realist docudrama (one previously unseen Bella, played by Chrissie Fit, is nothing but a delivery system for obnoxious and tired "boy, what about illegal immigrants? And those Central American death squads!" jokes). The new hero, Emily Junk, is a generic striver played by Hailee Steinfeld without any color or charm, and the film's open insistence in its writing and framing that she's set to be the franchise anchor going forward is nothing but a threat. Particularly if her character continues to write such joylessly anonymous pop songs as the one that turns into a major film-long plot point, and we're meant to find enthralling in some way or another.

It would be overstating to call Pitch Perfect 2 "bad". Mostly, it is profoundly lazy, slackly plotted - after three years of national prominence at a school where a capella culture is a Big Fucking Deal, there's only one Bella who isn't a senior, and the script calls repeated attention to this fact - and tonally off; not contrary to being funny so much as it doesn't have the flair and timing to be more than thinly amusing. There's never more than ten minutes that go by without a scene that works well on a character level, and Key proves to be an infectious scene-stealer, wandering in from a spikier, much smarter movie and bringing all its stinging wit and laser-focused pacing with him. The filmmakers didn't not care. But they didn''t care enough, and their movie is the most boring kind of retread, one with all the jokes muted and the performances robbed of vitality and the characters put through glaringly simplistic paces.

5/10

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