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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FOUR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS

A version of this review was published at the Film Experience

The best and maybe the only compliment I can pay to Fantastic Four, the third unsuccessful attempt at bringing the oldest of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee's creations at Marvel Comics to the big screen, is that it's not obviously the worst of a sorry lot. Its big budget and generally solid (though not at all state-of-the-art) visual effects don't nearly compensate for the gung-ho charm of the unreleased 1994 film, famously made for $1 million to secure the production rights to the material, which improbably remains the best version of the story despite resembling a fan video made by some sugar-jacked kids in the basement. But its insipidities, and it is very insipid, aren't inherently worse than those of the ghastly 2005 big-budget version, just different. That film heralded the end of the "brightly colored larks that are wholly insubstantial but also not much fun" era of comic book movies; time alone will tell if its 2015 sibling will similarly ring down the curtains on the "ludicrously dark and serious-minded exercises in bitterness and misery" era, though I think we should be hopeful. Because Fantastic Four '15 is, if it is anything, alarmingly dark and serious-minded, to the point of parody.

How much of this is due to the awkwardly visible fencing match between director Josh Trank and the executives at 20th Century Fox is beyond our ability to say for certain. It does feel like a movie that wants to be anything than what it is: I am especially thinking of the rumors that Trank was hoping to make PG-13, summer-friendly body horror. There are vestigial traces of that conception: most notably, the giant rock-man Ben "The Thing" Grimm (Jamie Bell) darkly responding "I'm used to it" when asked if his body hurts. I guess it would have been better for the film to have gone all the way; at least then the incongruous bleakness of tone would have felt like it had some actual purpose. As it is, the movie doesn't have any clear intentions or personality, flattening everything into a single mood of aimless, sullen detachment, not caring about anything but just grinding through its leaden 100 minutes and getting it the hell over with. If it is possible for cinema to suffer from clinical depression, this is exactly what I'd expect it to look like.

The film laboriously reworks one of the most well-known origin stories in superhero comics, taking its cues from the Ultimate Marvel line rather than the more familiar story initially set out by Lee in 1961 (that is, the Fantastic Four are unlikable teenagers): in 2007, genius 5th grader Reed Richards (Owen Judge) set himself to the task of building a matter transporter, along the way picking up the support and friendship of classmate Ben Grimm (Evan Hannemann), a tough kid from a love-starved family, whose cruel older brother (Chet Hanks) would gleefully announce "it's clobberin' time!" before beating the 11-year-old into paste. Even if I had no goal but to write the bleakest possible grimdark parody of Silver Age comics, I don't think I could have come up with such a punishing origin for the Thing's corny-ass catchphrase. Anyway, Reed's early experiments are inconclusive, but by the time the two arrive in their senior year of college, with Reed now played by Miles Teller while Bell takes over Ben, he's almost got it down. And that brings him to the attention of Franklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey), the director of the Baxter Institute, a research facility that has been working on very similar technology to open a portal to another dimension. Reed finds himself working alongside Franklin's son Johnny (Michael B. Jordan) and adopted daughter Sue (Kate Mara), as well as the former prodigy and current joyless slacker Victor von Doom (Toby Kebbell), and they succeed in cracking the technology necessary to travel to Planet Zero, a physical space made out of pure energy, or something like that.

Sadly, an unauthorised drunken trip to that dimension goes wildly wrong, leaving Victor stranded on Planet Zero and the other three boys warped by the transportation back, while Sue also gets fucked up even though she wasn't part of the trip for some reason. This leaves them with the usual suite of powers: Reed can extend his limbs far beyond their normal range, Sue can phase out of the visible spectrum and create force fields, Johnny can set his entire body on fire, and Ben is an invulnerable rock monster. They are immediately taken by the U.S. government in the form of Dr. Allen (Tim Blake Nelson), who hopes to weaponise them; Reed escapes and tries to hunt for a cure while the other three sullenly learn to harness their new powers. A year later, the dimensional gate has been rebuilt, and a path re-opened to Planet Zero, which has now become Doom's hellish personal playground, from which he plans destroy all life on Earth.

Origin stories are all well and good, but this one is exceptionally methodical; it's not enough to show us how the Fantastic Four (not so named until the line immediately following the last line spoken in the film) came into being, we also need to understand in exact detail what their lives were like prior to the accident. That's literally all this film is, a distended first act that fleshes out backstory in three times the fulness it probably requires, minutely spelling out points that could be implied, and generally using expository dialogue on the principal that you can never be too specific and it's better to have characters say everything germane to the moment all at once than to make them sound like human beings. I do not think we should blame the writers - Trank, with Simon Kinberg & Jeremy Slater are credited - who were dealing with one of the most extensive reshoots of any major tentpole film in recent years, and could hardly be expected to make a shapely creation out of this gross hybrid.

Besides, there's probably something in this: a more psychologically-oriented, character-driven superhero movie is exactly what pop culture needs. It's a shame that Fantastic Four ends up with such compromised, indifferently-performed characters: to look at the highs and lows of their respective careers, one might not think that Teller, Jordan, Mara, and Bell would all end up underplaying their roles in more or less exactly the same way (for which we can almost certainly blame Trank), each of them walling themselves off from the other three and completely failing to make the connections that the "modern families can look weird but still be loving" conceit of the script absolutely demands: Mara and Jordan have a prickly dislike between them that's especially damaging given what a big deal the film makes about their polyglot family, while Teller responds to Mara with hostile chilliness in all the places that the script indicates that they should be flirting. And Bell (who is visibly far too old for the role) is completely checked-out, swallowed up by an American accent that sounds acutely painful.

Even setting aside its failure to execute the one thing that might have made it distinctive, Fantastic Four turns on itself the second that it puts its characters through their mutation. I can't recall if there's ever been a major big-budget superhero movie that breaks down so quickly and so completely as this one does after that "One Year Later" card. We know that whole sequences were ripped from the film, we know that much of it was re-conceived and re-shot, but it doesn't take following the gossip rags to sense that something went deeply wrong in putting the film together: Reed's escape ends up serving as nothing but a parenthetical, the return to Planet Zero is rushed and Doom's return and the battle to stop him abrupt and confusing, and the whole last 40 minutes generally ape the shape of a superhero movie without having any kind of meaningful content. It is as dysfunctional as anything in the genre has been since... I don't even know, Blade: Trinity? It's a damned ghastly wreck, anyway.

There is absolutely nothing in the aesthetics to prop this up: Matthew Jensen's cinematography uses the full palette of slate greys to be as unattractive as possible, and George L. Little's costume design fully commits to the trend of superhero garb looking functional in the bluntest way, all drab blacks and technologicalish lines. The score by Marco Beltrami and Philip Glass is a heartbreaking disappointment outside of its main collaborative motif, which mixes midcentury scientific optimism and contemporary soaring action music well, but otherwise sounds like a slightly less generic version of the banalities that show up in all the Marvel Studios films. The CGI is serviceable to very good, and is especially fin in the case of the Thing, captured in terrifically realistic shifts of rock against rock, aided by some great sound design. But the same veil of grimness that coats the rest of the visuals infringes on the CGI as well, and instead of being bowled over by how real and imaginative things are, it's easier to be depressed by how morbid Planet Zero looks, and how irritatingly off-putting they've made Doom's design.

It is, all told, a greatly joyless film, without any purpose to that joylessness; and it's dragged down further by its perfunctory, formless narrative. The homogeneity of recent superhero movies has very little to recommend it, but it means a certain level of basic competence: films this bad in that genre have been driven almost to the point of extinction. Hopefully, the failure of Fantastic Four on all fronts will be enough to finish the job.

3/10

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: THE FIRST FAMILY OF MARVEL

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: once again, it has proven impossible to make a remotely decent movie out of the seminal comic book Fantastic Four. Let us travel back in time to the movie that, against all odds, is still the best attempt that anybody has yet made.

This is a story wherein, if you're the sort who'd interested, you already know everything I'm about to say. But please bear with me anyway, because the backstory is the heart and soul of understanding how things could have ended the way they did. Once upon a time, the idea of making movies based on Marvel comic books was at best a pathetic joke, and because of this, German producer Bernd Eichinger was able to snag the rights to the oldest of all Marvel titles, Fantastic Four, for a mere pittance in 1986. This was after one studio, Universal, had already sat on the option long enough for it to run out, and Eichinger would do no such thing: he actively pursued big studios to partner with his Neue Constantin Film to make a Fantastic Four movie that all would be proud of, or at least profit from. But in those days, there had only ever been successful feature films made with Superman and Batman, and they were much too fussy and costly for anybody to roll the dice on such an uncertain project as a superhero movie.

As the deadline on Eichinger's option, 31 December, 1992, approached, he finally concluded that since no proper movie would be made, at least he could make an improper one, and thus retain his option for several more years. Wisely, he teamed up with Roger Corman, film history's greatest artist at stretching a budget to the breaking point and then beyond, to help produce his minimum opus, which went into production on 28 December. Their target was a release date in fall 1993, eventually bumped to January, 1994, but before that could happen, forward-thinking Marvel executive Avi Arad found out about the project, and rather than allow the release of such a tiny piece of shit dilute the brand name of one of his company's toniest titles, he bought out Eichinger and Corman, essentially paying them more than the production cost of their movie not to release it. The option remained, though, and some 22 years after all of this happened, any new Fantastic Four movie is still a co-production with Constantin Film.

And so that explains why the officially-unreleased The Fantastic Four, the story of a man who can turn into a fireball, a translucent woman, a man made out of a pile of rocks, and a man with long-stretching elastic limbs would have such an enormously insufficient budget as $1 million, and why it is now only possible to watch it in the form of bootlegs copied from a single full-frame VHS tape that leaked somehow. That does not explain why, for all of its flaws, those forced by its outrageous poverty and those which were simple the result of sloppy B-filmmaking, it's still the best Fantastic Four feature in existence. But it certainly is, and by my lights, it's no particularly close battle. It's insane to use the phrase "good faith" to describe any aspect of this particularly cynical production, but I truly do suppose that the filmmakers put in a good-faith effort to make the strongest and most respectful adaptation of the comic book that $1 million could buy in 1993. Whereas none of the big-budget films attempted since then have had much in the way of respect for the material, or even basic human decency.

The poor bastards tasked with turning this business proposition into a movie were writers Craig J. Nevius and Kevin Rock, and director Oley Sassone; between them, Sassone's work on the Don "The Dragon" Wilson picture Bloodfist III is the closest anybody comes to an earlier film credit that suggests that they even actually exist. What they turned out is about as thoroughly generic as an origin story gets; in college, Reed Richards (Alex Hyde-White) and Victor Von Doom (Joseph Culp) were best buddies, and they decided to perform an experiment tied to the closest approach of a comet-like energy object called Colossus, which goes badly awry, killing Victor. Or does it? Of course not, but Reed won't find that out for ten years. During that time, he and his other best buddy Ben Grimm (Michael Bailey Smith) work on perfecting that experiment so they can execute it again when Colossus returns, this time without killing anybody. This involves flying Reed's experimental spacecraft right up next to the object; for reasons that honestly seem to be solely sentimental, they're bringing with them the now-adult children of Reed's college landlady, siblings Sue (Rebecca Staab) and Johnny Storm (Jay Underwood), and for a totally unnecessary dose of creepiness, it's clear that A) Sue joins the mission because she's been harboring a desire to jump Reed's bones ever since she was a child and he was a college student, and B) he's happy to have her join because he's now harboring the same desire, though thankfully it seems unlikely that he's been doing so for the intervening decade.

Things go amiss, they all get blasted with cosmic radiation, and they crash back on Earth with a new array of superpowers: Reed can stretch, Johnny can flame, Sue can disappear, Ben is a big strong rock dude (and is now played by Carl Ciarfalio in a suit). This is iconic stuff, Comic Books 101, I don't need to belabor it. Bitter that his condition alone can't be turned on and off, Ben leaves, and encounters the weird subterranean Jeweler (Ian Trigger), who has stolen a large gemstone vital to harnessing the power of Colossus, as well as kidnapping Alicia Masters (Kat Green), a blind sculptor, to be his bride. And Victor, now styling himself Dr. Doom and wearing a metal face mask to hide his scars, has popped back up trying to build a weapon using Colossus, and the four heroes must learn to channel their abilities to stop both villains.

All of that is messier when you're actually watching it, with the subplot around the Jeweler in particular feeling like it could have benefited from another draft or two. And, frankly, it could have benefited even more from having a more clearly defined villain than this original creation (there's no readily apparent reason not to have used the Mole Man, the very first bad guy in the Fantastic Four comics, who would have required only a little tweaking to the script). But for the most part, this is boilerplate superhero origin story shenanigans, albeit from a time when there were just a few superhero origin stories that had been filmed. The details, though, are anything but boilerplate: the stupefyingly low budget and fast-paced production schedule gives The Fantastic Four a boldly amateur charm, like watching a middle school play with infinite ambition to go with its near-complete lack of resources. The one place, surprisingly, that the low-scale production doesn't betray itself is in the costume used to turn Ben Grimm into the Thing: it doesn't really resemble a man of rocks very much (he looks like a '70s linoleum pattern come to life), but the mechanics of the face are surprisingly functional in the mouth and eyebrows, and Ciarfalio's physical performance is the best in the movie, making the suit itself seem flexible and organic.

The rest of the effects are, unsurprisingly, quite dreadful, with the Human Torch realised primarily through judicious cutting and Mr. Fantastic's stretching arms a comically awful rubber prop (transforming Sue Storm into the Invisible Woman is pretty straightforward, using techniques pioneered in the 1900s, but it's also totally unimaginative). And the costumes, sets, and makeup (the garish white patches of hair designed to make Hyde-White look old are especially unpersuasive) are plainly not up to the demands of a broad-scale superhero movie, looking like a bunch of Midwestern ladies whipped them up over the weekend.

Where the cheapness shines, though, is in the unmodulated, one-take performances, ranging from the professor (George Gaynes) in the first scenes whose enunciation is delightfully stiff and formal (pronouncing "radioactive" as two discrete words is my favorite), to the '50s sitcom bigness of the doctor (Robert Beuth) who overreacts to the team's curious physical conditions, to the leads themselves. Hyde-White is generically unctuous, and Smith is actually good, insofar as the role gives him anything to be good with. But the other leads are all over the map, with Underwood screaming like a tweaked-out junkie and Culp hamming and camping it up like Dr. Evil from the Austin Powers films, only done deadly straight. The sheer ebullience of the performances is totally unacceptable, but so joyfully bad and low-rent that it gives the film a genuine personality as the kind of bad movie that everybody involved plunged right into rather than felt their way through cautiously. And that is the best kind of bad movie. It's hokey as all hell, the final act is made of pure idiocy (culminating with the Human Torch, in the form of ghastly CGI, outraces a laser beam) reliant on clichés every step of the way, and there's simply no way for the action to look like anything but people bumbling about in underlit sets, but through all of this, The Fantastic Four is surprisingly cheery and committed to the cheap world it barely builds. And this is better than can be said for any of the subsequent attempts at doing the same material on a halfway-decent scale.

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GAME OVER, MAN

A version of this review was published at the Film Experience

There's a good movie to be made out of Pixels, and it would be the easiest thing in the world to get there. First, keep all of the visual effects setpieces from the movie as it exists, for they are surprisingly beautiful and convincing considering how much lower the film's budget than the usual summer tentpole. Second, make exactly the opposite choices that the filmmakers actually did, because there's literally not one thing about the plot, characters, tone, morality, or basic comprehensibility about Pixels in this form that works.

The film began life in 2010 as a lovely little conceptual short by French filmmaker Patrick Jean (which you can watch here, and have a far more enjoyable 2.5 minutes than anything in the lugubrious 105 minutes of the feature), whence it was almost immediately nabbed by Adam Sandler, who wanted to transform it into a feature. And that's really sad, because of all the changes that would have clearly benefit Pixels at some stage in its development "don't make it an Adam Sandler vehicle" is unquestionably at the top of the list. Sandler tapped Tim Herlihy to write the first draft, which was supplanted by a rewrite by Timothy Dowling, making this the most Timmed-up Hollywood movie in recent memories, and makes me gravely unhappy at my name.

All those Tims whipped up a rather peculiar monstrosity, in which Sam Brenner (Sandler), a video game champion during his teen years in the early '80s, is called upon by his dumpy buddy Will Cooper (Kevin James), now President of the United States, to help save the world. It is first among the film's gaping flaws - not worst, not most inexplicable, just first - that the film makes the stock Kevin James character, the schlubby loser best friend, into the President without having any slight idea of how to make that funny. Or believable. I know that expecting rigorous realism from a Happy Madison joint is my problem, not the film's, but like anything else, comedy needs a baseline of logic to develop from. Given his background as a suburban nerd, given how viscerally everybody in the country hates him, and given that he clearly has no friends besides a sad sack tech nerd working at a Best Buy knockoff, it's impossible to imagine how Cooper got elected in the first place, and if we can't make that leap, there are huge swaths of the movie that never feel like anything other than the standard Happy Madison formula forcibly lacquered onto a framework that doesn't fit them. It's like a comedy sketch that everybody realises is going wrong, but has committed to in front of a live audience and can't back out of.

Earth's existential crisis, anyway, is an alien race that received our transmissions of video game footage in the early '80s and took it as a challenge to attack. So they use their highly advanced ability to form energy into cubes - voxels, technically, not pixels - and they form those cubes into three-dimensional versions of '80s arcade figures, who come to do battle with the ill-prepared human military. Lt. Col. Violet van Patten (Michelle Monaghan) quickly leads an R&D team to build an energy gun - a blaster, basically - that can disrupt the alien cubes, but it will take a genius arcade gamer to know how to use that technology to beat the aliens. And luckily, the president's buddy is just that genius. How this will work in tandem with the antagonistic sexual tension between Cooper and van Patten is anybody's guess, by which I mean that the second Monaghan appears onscreen and Sandler makes all sorts of leering, drooling faces at her, you're able to guess.

Now, that's one of the worst flaws: the insistence on welding the helpless Monaghan into the unenviable position of playing the woman who just can't help herself from being attracted to the life force that is Sandler at his most disengaged and inarticulate (you would never know he originated the project, based on how mopey he is onscreen). It is astonishing to me that in the year that the infamous The Cobbler was released, there'd be an even more off-putting, shambling Sandler performance than that film gave unto the world, but it's really not even all that close. The nominally comic actor pushes through the role with a single, unyielding sense of bitterness, as though trying to make any of the scripts theoretical jokes play as funny was a disgusting idea to him. But there he is, anyway, as Our Guy battling for the girl. It is all very dismal, at a level that goes beyond the usual "women in movies are objects to be won by vaguely unpleasant men" boilerplate. Brenner is viscerally repellent, both in his physical carriage and his defeated personality; trying to sell him as a romantic lead - even just the star of an enjoyable summer action-comedy, for that matter! - is a crime against decency.

Meanwhile, Brenner revives his 33-year-old rivalry against the loathsome video game superstar, Eddie Plant (Peter Dinklage, correctly concluding that he could only make the role interesting by playing it as a Lynchian satire and giving the film's sole effective performance as a result), an arrogant weirdo who dresses and acts like time stopped during the first term of Reagan's presidency. This is slapped onto the film crudely, but Dinklage is a life raft while you're watching the film, and I wanted to praise his name.

It's next to impossible to tell who is supposed to find any of this interesting. Chris Columbus directs with all the slam-bang gee-whiz gusto that a filmmaker of his punishingly anonymous style can muster, and in concert with the film's broad-as-a-barn dialogue, this makes it impossible to assume that this is meant for anybody but kids. At the same time, the film is anchored to Brenner's perspective, and so indulgent towards the video game culture of the early '80s (you are expected to know such games as Frogger and Galaga by sight and without explanation) that it seems unlike that the filmmakers genuinely cared about bringing in any audience member under the age of 35. And anybody who cares enough about the mere fact of watching '80s video games rendered as live action giants for nostalgia alone to carry them through the galling screenwriting and insipid directing is unlikely to make it past the film's misunderstanding of what playing those games consists of (a cheat code to make the ghosts warp around in Pac-Man? What the fuck does that even mean?).

But against all of that, I present the film's visual effects: loving and creative renderings of iconic characters who glow with diffuse internal light before collapsing into piles of shiny cubes. Not even during the asinine finale, a battle against Donkey Kong, had I grown so immune to the texture and color that made up the video game characters, that I ceased to enjoy staring at them as they danced across the screen. That's not a whole lot, but- no, I don't have a "but". It's not a whole lot, and you can see enough of it in the film's trailer to get the best of the experience. Fuck Pixels.

2/10

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IT'S ABOUT TIME

A third review requested by Andrew Johnson, with thanks for contributing yet again to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

Personal anecdotes aren't criticism, of course, but in this case the anecdote shall lead us to criticism, I promise. The thing is, when I was a wee cinephile, I was quite addicted to George Pal's 1960 adaptation of H.G. Wells's The Time Machine. It was almost certainly the most violent and gory movie I had encountered at that point: one of the green-skinned subterranean humanoid monsters, the Morlocks, gushed blood out of its mouth when it died! Another one was shown onscreen decaying over the course of years rushed through in time-lapse, in extremely vivid detail! Its eye popped out! Basically, The Time Machine completely fucked me up, in the way that seven-year-olds crave being fucked up. I hadn't watched the film in fully two decades before seeing it for this review, but I could accurately remember some scenes right down to the editing. What I did not remember is that the sequence that so powerfully affected me is a mere blip in the overall movie; it's more than an hour into its 103 minutes before we even hear about the Morlocks, let alone see them, and they're not an active threat for more than 15 minutes or so.

Now the memoir turns back into a review, for what my experience teaches us is that you can't beat a great monster. Pal, an animator turned producer turned producer/director, knew from making a big impression with some good state of the art spectacle, and this time he went right off the edge of the map. Forget the staggering impact the film had on my 7-year-old self; as a fully-functioning thirtysomething, I'm still pretty well blown away by the film's violence. This is basically a silly matinee picture and it looks like it: one doesn't expect to run into gore effects that are as explicit as Hollywood in 1960 would have dared to try to sneak past the censors. Especially on MGM's dime, of all studios. It's legitimately shocking, even a half of a century after the specific effects that The Time Machine shows off have long since been surpassed. And it certainly tends to skew one's impression of what the film is and where its strengths lie, because the other thing I really really didn't remember is that the Morlock sequences are easily the worst part of the movie, despite all of Pal's bravura.

The movie starts on 5 January, 1900, which is dumb as hell, because it immediately flashes back to New Year's Eve just six days earlier, on the cusp of a new century. Here we find the greatly dissatisfied H. George Wells (Rod Taylor), a London inventor who thinks that humanity is the absolute goddamn worst. To get away from the miserable state of civilisation, George has perfected a time machine, or so he proclaims to his friends Philip Hillyer (Sebastian Cabot), Anthony Bridewell (Tom Helmore), Walter Kemp (Whit Bissell), and David Filby (Alan Young), the last of whom is the only one to even pretend that George hasn't gone completely around the bend. George doesn't care much about his friends' mockery, though; he's already built his machine, which allows him to travel any direction chronologically while staying in one place relative to the Earth's surface, and he hopes to use it to leave the ugly, amoral England of the Boer War to find a time when humanity has finally evolved beyond violence. His attempts dash all the optimism right out of him: he first lands in 1917, where he meets Filby's adult son James (still Young), and learns that his friend has dies in the Great War. George's second jump is even less successful: he stumbles right into an air raid during the Blitz of 1940. His luck takes an even worse turn when his third try lands him in 1966, just minutes before a nuclear strike that triggers a volcanic explosion. George has just enough time to enter his time bubble before he and his machine are covered with lava, and he has no choice but to move forward until the natural process of erosion reveals the outside world again.

That takes him all the way to 12 October, 802,701. Here, he finds a race of humans calling themselves the Eloi, according to Weena (Yvette Mimieux), a young woman who speaks pretty terrific English and looks pretty conventionally attractive for somebody with hundreds of thousands of cultural and physical evolution under her belt. George is eager to learn more about this apparently utopian future, but his inquiries reveal the Eloi to be massively incurious and almost dysfunctionally idiotic. It's the Morlocks, George starts to determine, who are the actual brains of this future society: they and the Eloi are two disparate branches of post-homo sapiens evolution, and the hideous underground dwellers are keeping the moronic surface dwellers as food stock. At any rate, they're smart enough to have stolen the time machine, and that means that George has to fight them off, all by himself, since the cow-like Eloi aren't going to put up any kind of resistance.

David Duncan's script leaves the plot of Wells's novel mostly in place, while denuding it of much of its detail and depth, but to be honest, I can't say that it's noticed. The movie is too busy being splendid to look at, frequently in ways that offer the illusion that it's brainier that it is, which was pretty much Pal's entire career as a producer of feature films. The biggest part of it is the setting: by virtue of setting its roots in Victorian London, The Time Machine attains an instantaneous level of seriousness, classiness, and literary prestige, and something about it just feels more weighty than if George was starting his forward journey from 1959 (if nothing else, the sequence in 1966, probably the most nuanced part of the movie - the way it makes a mere 6 years in the future seem dangerously alien is the sharpest piece of commentary Duncan and Pal line up - requires a Victorian time traveler to make any sense at all). And the movie does an absolutely extraordinary job setting up the reality of Victorian London right from the earliest moments, where a beautiful street set and some exquisite matte paintings establish the physical nature of the place as something that feels real but mediated, like it's a moving, living version of an aged photograph.

Then again, the effects work throughout the film is truly special (the film won an especially well-earned Oscar for them), starting with that matte and moving on to its groundbreaking use of time-lapse photography to visually depict time travel. It's too straightforward and unfaked for it not to have aged well, which makes this one of the only effects-driven films I can name that looks every inch as good after the passage of decades as it must have done when it was new (though the fact that its signature technique has become a mainstay of advertising and music videos means that it has lost absolutely all of its novelty), but eye candy isn't what matters. It's the way that the effects, as well as the design - particularly the design of the time machine itself, something like a sled with a giant spinning dish on the back of it that looks exactly like something a middle-class Victorian bachelor would assemble in his back yard as a hobby - casually establish the film's plausible reality in a way that isn't particular dazzling or spectacular: for the most part, the effects are just kind of there, hanging around over Taylor's shoulder, in the background. The showy parts are at least a little clever, not just dazzling: the film's justly celebrated use of a storefront mannequin and the change in fashions that occur over 40 years is a bravura moment, but also one that serves very specific story moments.

Generally, the steadiness and sensibility of the opening of the film - everything up to the lava explosion, itself a pretty marvelous effects sequence - is so confident and so very unlike the normal stylistic gyrations of sci-fi in that period that it's honestly disappointing to me when it stops, and the A-plot starts. The fable of the Eloi and the Morlocks simply isn't as successful visually: imagining a post-apocalyptic future was apparently harder than recreating Victorian England, or maybe the budget ran out, but really, everything in 802,701 looks a bit threadbare. I am powerfully reminded of the most ambitious episodes of Star Trek, to be specific, and it doesn't help that the story feels so much like something that could have showed up there - nor, for that matter, that Mimieux's performance is so shallow and blandly flirtatious, though in her defense, that's exactly what the role asks for.

Parts of it work, beyond a shadow of a doubt: the Eloi boneyard is good and spooky, and there are moments in which the Morlocks, standing in the shadows, can be made out only as a pair of glowing eyes that have a great tension and dreadfulness about them (and not just because the slightly shabby make-up can't be seen). It's just a bit shlocky in the execution, and given that The Time Machine is at best an example of really savvy, gifted execution of impressive sci-fi visuals, this is the worst possible sort of weakness to infect it at any point. Still, even in its weakest moments, the film benefits from being graded on a curve: in its production design, its historical orientation, and the scale of its production, this runs rings around nearly any other sci-fi film in its generational cohort. Eight years down the line, and this would look utterly primitive, but on its own merits, it's damned impressive stuff, and there's just enough esoteric concepts dancing through the screenplay to make it feel more intellectual than the usual sci-fi action-adventure. Between the handsome production and the nerdy writing, this offers an unusually smart, sophisticated aura for what amounts to an expensive B-movie. There's better sci-fi, undoubtedly, but not in 1960, particularly not with the sort of glossy studio polish that makes this such a treat to watch.

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ANTS, THEN, WHEREVER YOU MAY BE

A version of this review was published at the Film Experience

Ant-Man is maybe the most typical film yet made in the now 12-picture Marvel Cinematic Universe. It is up to the individual viewer to decide if that's a compliment or a vicious & lacerating criticism. But it's really hard to think of it as anything other than a factory-pressed rebuild of the same basic story beats, character arc, gags, and conflicts that have become locked-in through Marvel's seven-year multifranchise experiment.

The film's distinguishing elements are all at the margins: in the hands of director Peyton Reed (who is much more in Yes Man-style "mercenary hack" mode than Down with Love-style "crafty stylist" mode), this is the most generously comic of all Marvel films to date, with the zippiest, silliest performances; the stakes are refreshingly low, and there's no aerial battle with the fate of nations and worlds at stakes in the final act. The cinematography by Russell Carpenter - an Oscar winner for Titanic - is distinctly more interesting than anything in any Marvel movie so far, with something resembling a thought-out purpose for the muted lighting. In concert with the production design by Shepherd Frankel and Marcus Rowland, it strips back some of the polish and gleaming surfaces in the Marvel movies of yore, to make a film that feels like it takes place in an actual world.

Behind the uncharacteristically soft visuals, though, lies a perfectly ordinary story, originally by Edgar Wright & Joe Cornish, then revised and "Marvelified" by Adam McKay & the film's star Paul Rudd when Wright dropped out of directing in 2014. I should say, "perfectly ordinary at best", since whatever would have been true of Wright's version - and there's really nothing even vestigial in the script that tells me that this wouldn't have been his worst movie - it's unquestionably true that the corporate insistence on tying the movie in with the greater Marvel Cinematic Universe, the most persistently-rumored explanation for Wright's departure, has had specific negative effects across the board. The film opens with a gaudy, stultifying scene whose awe-inspiring CGI avatar of a youthful Michael Douglas is its sole justification for existing, while its pointless introduction of minor characters from the franchise's established back history, is conspicuously unnecessary in every way; later on, the most spurious and least-interesting action setpiece, by far, is the one that exists solely to introduce a pre-existing character into the goings on. The dozen or so lines of obviously inserted dialogue self-consciously referencing the other movies in the franchise all clang uncomfortably against the rest of the movie - there is a scene in which Douglas, otherwise a cheery, charismatic presence, downshifts so hard to talk about Robert Downey Jr's unseen Tony Stark that one half-wonders if Douglas was trying to get the line snipped from the final cut of the movie through turning in a totally unacceptable take.

The less corporate Ant-Man gets, the more enjoyable it is, though there are problems that go down to the bone: the Marvel problem with boring villains, for one thing, has only ever been worse in Thor: The Dark World, with slimy corporate boss Darren Cross (Corey Stoll) steadfastly refusing to be interesting for any other reason than his arrestingly shiny bald head. But at least the plot tries to have something animating it. Newly-released con Scott Lang (Rudd), desperate for any way to reconnect with his daughter Cassie (Abby Ryder Fortson), over the objection of his ex-wife (Judy Greer, in a role marginally less thankless than her performance as the wallpaper in Jurassic World) and her boyfriend Paxton (Bobby Cannavale), almost turns back to crime. But he is saved by Dr. Hank Pym (Douglas), a disgraced genius ever since his refusal to weaponise his miraculous Pym Particles. These particles, in combination with a contained environment, allow him to change the size of any human being down to the size of, well, the title makes it pretty clear what size Scott ends up becoming for large portions of the movie. The mission: stop Cross from selling the rediscovered shrinking technology to God knows what kind of shady characters. The stakes: two different generations of shitty dads attempt to reconnect with their daughters. For Pym's resentful offspring Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly, making a generic "The Girl" role even shallower through her colorless performance) is his man on the inside, and she's disgusted by his literally patriarchal refusal to let her take on the Ant-Mantle, at least up until the sequel hook.

The littleness of Ant-Man is extraordinarily soothing after the increasing bloat and bombast of Marvel movies in the past few years: no more plot than breaking into a single facility, and the emotional hook of lousy parents wanting to redeem themselves but not knowing how is refreshingly intimate and humane. It's not always the case that the execution is up to the concept: Lilly is a tremendous detriment that the film has a hard time compensating for, and nothing that Rudd does can make the "criminal dad resents his burly rival for his child's affection" stock scenario feel minutely insightful, while Cannavale and Greer are just going through the motions.

But more of Ant-Man is likable than not, especially when it goes off the map completely to indulge most fully in comedy. The film's obvious secret weapon is Michael Peña, ostensibly just one of Scott's ex-con buddies and eventual helper, but beyond a shadow of a doubt the most captivating figure onscreen: what madness drove him to decide that the way to play the role was as a combination of a plucky reporter from a '30s screwball movie and the designated pothead from an '80s teen comedy is hard to imagine, but the results are truly impeccable. There's not a single line delivery that doesn't shock and delight me with its unexpected velocity; he's invaluable to selling the film's best conceit (which feels like Wright through and through, but it's been confirmed as a wholly new invention of Peyton Reed's tenure), in which he narrates nested flashbacks through a flurry of zoned out, slangy patter. I frankly don't want to ever watch another Marvel movie without Peña in it; his performance adds a lighting strike of weird, wonderful energy to Ant-Man and manages in the process to completely transform my expectations for what a superhero sidekick can be.

Even without Peña, there's enough bright comic momentum in the movie to make it fun to watch, when it's not going through the motions. The good news is, things never ends up in the latter rut long enough for it to detract from the film as a whole; the bad news is, there's enough of those longueurs that the whole movie, which is already overlong and far too slow to rev up, is rather sleepy and aimless, two unfortunate descriptors for a popcorn movie. Comic book pictures have been worse - comic book movies have already been worse in 2015, frankly - but they're not usually this indistinct.

6/10

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: THE SIZE OF A BUG

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: Marvel's Ant-Man shows us the fun side of being so small that you have to look up to an ant. Ah, but what of the scary side?

To begin with, it's thoroughly unreasonable to expect a '50s sci-fi thriller to star Orson Welles. But the teaser trailer for 1957's The Incredible Shrinking Man makes me faintly angry for promising such a miracle, knowing full well that it would never come to pass.

But enough about film advertising. In truth, even deprived of Welles, The Incredible Shrinking Man is a pretty terrific example of its genre, despite some rather obvious and avoidable flaws of story structure and a rather massive shortchanging of the sociological analysis of Richard Matheson's source novel, in favor of more straightforward survivalist adventure. In the hands of Jack Arnold, Universal's best genre film director at that time (he was responsible for Creature from the Black Lagoon, the studio's best monster movie since the 1930s, and he went uncredited for reshooting the best parts of This Island Earth), the film has a merciless pace and excellent scenes of tension, carried on the back of some of the very best special and visual effects of the decade. And beyond the film's admirable strengths as a taut spectacle, Matheson's screenplay ends on an especially strong note, surprisingly managing to achieve in one speech all the moral philosophising that the film needs to feel like it has real depth and nuance, and that despite tapping from the same brand of flowery religiosity that did in many a sci-fi film of the time.

Having gone ahead and given itself that title, the film wastes the minimal possible amount of time in getting going. The Careys, Scott (Grant Williams) and Louise (Randy Stuart) are enjoying a boat ride on the Pacific coast, and at the exact moment that Louise heads belowdecks, a mysterious fog rolls in, covering Scott with a reflective sheen that apparently soaks into his bare skin. Six months later, he discovers that all of his clothes are slightly too large: loose in the belly, too high at the neck, too long in the arms. A doctor's appointment confirms that he's inexplicably become 5'11" instead of his customary 6'1", and he's dropped from 190 to 180 lbs. The doctor (William Schallert) comes up with pleasant, rational explanations for why this is absolutely nothing to worry about, but evidence increasingly pile up that not only is Scott smaller than he used to be, he's continuing to shrink. We're still in the first reel.

God bless the film for its haste in getting us to this point, but it's symptomatic of the film's one overriding, unanswerable shortcoming. It's worth pointing out that the novel is non-linear: it intercuts the story of the very tiny Scott trapped in his own basement, facing down a spider, with the story of how he came to be in that predicament. In other words, it throws the good stuff at the reader first, and then luxuriates in the fine details of the story in the sure knowledge that our attention has been grabbed. By straightening out the narrative line, the movie suddenly makes itself vulnerable to the killer of all B-movies - and classic status notwithstanding, this is nothing if it's not a B-movie - which is that it permits the viewer to become bored. In order to make sure that this doesn't happen, Arnold absolutely flies through all of the material between Scott's discovery of his loose clothes and the moment that his pet cat finally decides that this tiny little biped would probably be an extremely fun thing to chase and dismember, thus precipitating his fall into the depths of the basement. That escalation starts some 33 minutes into the movie, which means that an entire feature's worth of psychological discombobulation, domestic strife, and medical suspense are condensed into just a half of an hour.

Pragmatically, it works: every last moment of the film from the shot of the cat looming through the window of the dollhouse Scott now calls home to the stately appearance of the words "THE END" is gripping, and the film gets to it fast enough that there's no chance of having burned off the goodwill the audience inherently brings to a movie titled The Incredible Shrinking Man (by which I mean, if you're going to hate a movie for showing a man the size of a bug being menaced by a spider, you know damn well enough not to start watching it). Subjectively, I'd say that the film almost doesn't survive it. The paradox is that, by racing through the material so quickly, Arnold and Matheson don't give it any chance to land and linger, which makes it difficult to feel very connected to the onscreen action. Which, in turn, means that it's more boring, because of the exact technique the film uses to keep us from being bored. The most significant example of what I'm talking about is a subplot about Scott's friendship with a little person from a carnival, Clarice (April Kent), who is at that point just about his size; it's undernourished, and the ramifications are left totally ignored (I mean, hell, you could get a whole act just out of what this means to his increasingly frustrated marriage), and while it adds some depth to Scott's arc, it's patently obvious how much more it could be providing to the film with a little TLC.

Please, though, let me be absolutely clear: at its very worst, The Incredible Shrinking Man merely repeats the sins of any given '50s sci-fi movie, and it repeats them at a higher level or sophistication. At its very worst. At its best, you can count on one hand the number of its direct peers that match or top it. Even before Scott ends up in the basement there are several individually terrific sequences that stress the helplessness and weariness of the Careys' situation, or the awkwardness and dysfunction of Scott's condition. In the latter case, there's a scene with Scott's brother (Paul Langton) talking to Louise in front of a chair, and it's only belatedly and thanks to a blunt cut that we realise Scott has been sitting in that chair the whole time. In the former, the best of the film's many exemplary forced-perspective shots (it's every inch as good as the famously ambitious forced perspective in The Fellowship of the Ring, 44 years later), Louise and Scott are having a difficult time talking, and she refuses to make eye contact, thus not only further selling the illusion but also turning a visual effect setpiece into one of the best character moments in the movie.

It's in the basement, though, where the film shines, in every way. The effects work is peerless, with close-up photography of a tarantula seamlessly married to footage of Williams, and the sets and props are impressively convincing simulations of the quotidian world at several times the magnification, an exciting change from the usual chintzy foam objects populating the era's sci-fi. And Arnold stages the action from acute angles that emphasise the size and peril of these routine objects: a scene where Scott tries to use a paint-stirring stick to cross a deadly crevasse of a foot deep or more is my personal favorite part of the movie, finding a way to make the laughably common (dude can't even throw away his spent paint supplies) into something alien and nightmarish. The translation of the banal domestic world of cats, junk in the basement, and crappy water heaters into an endless chain of danger is the purest kind of horror, and it's what gives The Incredible Shrinking Man so much of its brutal punch. It's a more immediate, visceral surrogate for the thoughtful introspection of the book, which crops up only in the last scene and, to lesser effect, in the film's annoying reliance on voice-over; but it's a worthy trade-off, since it means this is also one of the most immediate, visceral sci-fi thrillers of its generation, on top of being one of the most technically audacious.

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: SWAPPIN' CONSCIOUSNESS WITH TARSEM

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: director Tarsem Singh shows us the terrible things that can happen when two personalities are stuffed into one brain in Self/less. In this, he is merely returning to his roots.

When it was new, The Cell was at the center of controversy about its content: is there something wrong and wicked about how this movie used absolutely breathtaking images to depict horrible, violent acts, stripping them of their real-world gravity. How innocent a controversy it was! Back in 2000, when this movie came out, we hadn't even seen Saw yet (a film through which you can draw a surprisingly straight line from The Cell), and we didn't know just how pornographic violence could get. I don't know about you, but if I get to choose between a film that might be fetishising violence and is also gorgeous, and a film that definitely is fetishising violence and looks like it was shot on film stock made of dog turds, I'm not going to have to think very long.

But even that's begging the question. To be clear, no, I don't think that The Cell is a fetish object for anything, outside of perhaps the impossible fantasy costumes (Eiko Isihioka and April Napier share costuming duty; I'm going to assume without any real evidence that Napier is responsible for the clothing that looks like what human beings wear, while Isioka's contribution were all of the gilded parade floats with space for people's legs at the bottom). In fact, of all director Tarsem Singh's movies - this was his first - it strikes me as the one where style is most clearly used as a function of the needs of the story and the rather horrible psychological depths that story plumbs (his sophomore effort, The Fall, strikes me more as a story built more to facilitate style than the other way 'round; not that I feel for The Fall anything less than total love).

That said, style is still a very, very important thing; style muscles its way to our eyeballs right from the opening, while the story is still deliberately keeping itself hidden. In the beginning there is desert: shattering orange sand and glowing blue skies, the undiluted colors of the very concept of The Desert of legends and myth (this sequence was shot in Namibia, which would, 15 years later, provide the same uncompromising primary colors to Mad Max: Fury Road). In the desert is a woman all in beautiful, flowing, feathered white, looking like a dove come down from heaven - we don't know her yet, but she's Catherine Deane (Jennifer Lopez), a psychologist. And we don't know this yet, either, but this desert is all in the mind of Edward Baines (Colton James), a boy of about 10. Deane is a member of a team working on an extraordinary technology to treat extraordinary mental disorders: she can literally enter another person's headspace and interact with their consciousness directly. Edward is suffering from a coma triggered by psychological trauma, and his well-to-do parents have sponsored the development of this extraordinary technology under the hands of Drs. Kent (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) and Cooperman (Becker).

I'm in awe of this opening for reasons that have nothing to do with its literally awe-inspiring scenery and the exquisite costuming. By the ten-minute mark of The Cell, Tarsem and screenwriter Mark Protosevich have told us exactly what their movie is going to be and how to watch it: there will be beautiful tableaux, framed with a sense of painterly composition by music video veteran Tarsem and music video cinematographer Paul Laufer (who shot only one other movie in his career) that is far more attuned to the rules of graphical art than traditional narrative cinema, and is meant to be read accordingly. These images are the expression of moods, and the moods moreover of very specific individuals: tell a sullen 10-year-old to think of a "desert", and it is very much the desert that we get in the opening scene that he'll probably have in mind. So the first thing we learn is to read the images as essential concepts, and not as narrative spaces. The second thing we learn is that we're either on-board with a device that lets a psychologist mind-meld with comatose patients suffering from transparently made-up mental conditions, or we are not. And the film makes its technology as unreasonable as it can: the rig is some kind of fantastic open space where the participants are suspended in mid-air on many fine wires, while wearing suits that make it look rather like they've been skinned alive, which cannot possibly be an accident given the film's eventual fixation on torture and murder. Basically, I mean to say, the opening ten minutes find the movie putting everything on the table: if we aren't on its side, we never will be, and I greatly admire a film that certain of itself.

The plot pretty clearly situates The Cell at the end of the big wave of film's cribbing from The Silence of the Lambs: there's a serial killer, see, who drowns women in an implausible elaborate automated drowning cube (the glassy set for which vividly predicts Saw and its sequels and their theatrical murder boxes), and then bleaches and paints them to resemble porcelain dolls. Catching this repugnant creature has become the fixation of FBI agent Peter Novak (Vince Vaughn, in what is by an enormously exaggerated margin my favorite of his performances), who has finally scraped enough evidence together to catch the killer, Carl Stargher (Vincent D'Onofrio), right in his house. The problem is, Stargher's kill factory isn't in his house. And Stargher is currently suffering from another made-up psychological coma, meaning that Novak and his team only have about 40 hours to find, based on no leads at all, where the killer's present victim has been imprisoned, before she drowns. And there follows the one piece of contrived screenwriting that I can't bring myself to overlook, out of the whole lacework of contrivances that makes up the first third of The Cell: Novak is somehow aware of the experimental dream-sharing machine, and he wants Deane to go hunting in the hideous reaches of Stargher's subconscious to find any scrap of evidence for where he might leave his victims while they die.

The thing that The Cell transforms into at this point is damned near impossible to describe - certainly, even attempting a verbal sketch of the imagery is pointlessness itself. Tarsem, along with Ishioka and Napier, production designer Tom Foden, set decorator Tessa Posnansky, and art director Geoff Hubbard, create mental worlds in this film, both Stargher's and eventually Deane's, that are without specific precedent, nor can I offhand name anything that has copied them since. A few points along the way, though: the film is not quite as straightforward as "the inside of a serial killer's mind is like this" symbolism, though that's enough to get by. Beyond that, it's a synthesis of imagery from European and at least South Asian artistic traditions, as well as American pop culture, and what this suggests within the film itself is not just "let's make the most horrifying hellscapes possible by drawing on multiple sources". Instead, it suggests that Stargher is himself making the same synthesis that the filmmakers do, pulling together fragments of remembered images to construct a worldview. Setting aside its applications to the film's deep wells of horror, this is a tremendously effective way of cinematically visualising the process of how human personalities are built out of piece of memory, whether from personal experience or appropriations of fantasies, stories, and the background radiation of culture. And of course, since this is horror, the personality we need to be chiefly concerned with is one dominated by suffering, directed inward and directed outward and even freestanding representations of pain and death that simply exist, independent of who caused the pain or who receives it.

Importantly, this all applies not just to Stargher, but to Deane herself (at which point I think it deserves saying: Lopez is better in this role than she gets credit for, a placidly calm presence whose relatively simple and straightforward way of presenting the character's beatific sensibilities starts paying considerable dividends when that simplicity runs into the dense imagery), who defines her inner life with signifiers of goodness as soft and generically calming as Stargher's are specific and increasingly draining to watch. The design is no less striking, for being less cruel; Deane's get-up like a cherry blossom that became a nun is among the film's boldest costumes. This is not about reducing the film to a Manichean good/bad framework, though the implication is certainly that Deane thinks in those terms. What it's about is providing a counterpoint to the inside of Stargher's head, while making the same point: we mentally visualise the world in terms of broad signifiers which we then decorate with our own reference points, and that process is called "having a personality". A variation on it is called "consuming art, up to and including the movie titled The Cell", and that's maybe the most cunning thing about the film: it contains within its own structure the expectation that we will be effected by what we're watching. If we are healthy and know that's what we're doing, we can leave the movie having broken down its enormously memorable visual setpieces into our own personal library of reference points. If we are not healthy, well, the movie has some very imaginative ideas about what happens to people whose personality-construction goes awry. The point being, though, that the film is one of the boldest depictions of how external stimuli are transformed into internal narrative, for good or otherwise, that I know the movies to have attempted, and that's rewarding even beyond the shockingly bold images that almost exclusively make up the film's final hour and change.

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COME WYTH ME YF YOU WANT TO LYVE

A version of this review was published at the Film Experience

"The best Terminator movie since Terminator 2: Judgment Day" is a statement like "Jai Courtney's best-ever performance in a movie": they both have the functional shape of a compliment, but they're not actually saying very much that's complimentary. And they're both true of Terminator Genisys, the little movie that couldn't, currently on pace to be one of 2015's most visible and embarrassing box office flops.

That's not... entirely... fair. It is probably the case that Genisys gets more wrong than it gets right, starting right from that ghastly title (it's derived from an in-movie brand name designed for maximum marketing impact, but that hardly makes it less obnoxious). But it doesn't only get things wrong, and some of its successes are genuinely worth the time it will take to watch the first half of the movie on Netflix several months from now. Hell, even worth a trip to the dollar theater, if there are still dollar theaters where you live. Let's be generous.

The plot is a jam-packed muddle, but the basic strokes are that, in the war-torn California of 2029, human resistance leader John Connor (Jason Clarke) is about to stamp out the evil artificial intelligence system Skynet, but before he can, Skynet sends an assassin robot called a T-800 (Brett Azar's body with Arnold Schwarzenegger's younger face CGI'd on) back in time to 1984. Its mission is to kill Connor's mother Sarah (Emilia "Not related to Jason at all" Clarke), when she was just a helpless 20-year-old. Connor sends his right-hand man, Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) back to save history, only by the time Reese arrives, the events of the first three movies have so badly mangled the timeline that Sarah is now a bad-ass warrior with an aging T-800 named Pops (Schwarzenegger himself) as her protector and sidekick, and moved the end of the world from 1997 to 2017. The time machine she luckily has prepared for just such a situation provides their path to the future in the hope of stopping Judgment Day from happening, though Skynet fights them from two different time periods to preserve its existence and to destroy all humans.

That is literally the most concise version of Laeta Kalogridis & Patrick Lussier's screenplay that I could manage, which speaks to one of the bigger issues with Genisys: it wants badly to tell a vast, epic story, but it gets tangled up in the details. Ultimately, the only internal logic is a wearied "time travel works this way in this scene because we said it does", begging for our indulgence in promising not to think too hard about whatever the hell is going on. Around the time the story lands in 2017, the film has given up trying to tell a clear story, and has turned into a dispensary for action setpieces, which really aren't all that great; there's a lot of choppiness in the editing and the stakes are never clear on a scene-by-scene basis at any greater level than "try not to die".

Prior to 2017, though, there's actually enough that Genisys does well that it goes down pretty smoothly. The best thing that the writers and director Alan Taylor do is to present much of the first half-hour or so as a remix of plot points and specific visuals from 1984's The Terminator, letting the franchise faithful relax into the movie before it starts to rewrite the rules in front of us (those who aren't already invested in the franchise need to walk on by; this is a piece of unapologetic fan service). It's smarter than anything else in the film, more challenging to our baggage as an audience and more willing to use that baggage to its own end, exploiting the material of a remake as a way of digging into its own story rather than simply relying on nostalgia. When it starts to break the old Terminator mold, it is in crafty, pointed directions that don't treat us like morons who need to have things told at us repeatedly, but can pick up on shifts and understand what makes them important. Nothing else in the whole rest of the movie capitalises on any of this, which is one of the film's great sins. But at least it's playful, and when it was the only thing the film had going on, I was entirely prepared to sing the praises of this Genisys as a creative solution to a question that never had ought to be asked: so how can we do anything new in this sandbox, given that Terminator Salvation was plainly not the way to do it?

Besides, in the first half, the action sequences are a great deal of fun, however openly indebted to T2; the villain of the first third of the movie, for no reason other than "because it's cool", is a metallic shapeshifting T-1000 (Lee Byung-hun), and all of the tensest moments and most exciting action sequences pivot around that character - there is one sequence that brings us almost into Aliens territory (since once you've started copying James Cameron, you can't stop, like potato chips), in the form of a trap for the T-1000 that melts it into a scarred collection of jagged fingers of metal, and it is a lovely throwback to the traces of metallic body horror that were part of what made the first two Terminators so viscerally memorable, on top of being the only place where the 2015 CGI bringing the creature to life looks every bit as good as the 1991 CGI.

The other thing the film gets right is bringing Schwarzenegger back, and finding a way to do it that isn't transparently idiotic. Generally speaking, the human contingent of the movie is "fine" in the most sullen way: Emilia Clarke at times feels like a little girl playing at being a movie hero, and Courtney's strength in the role goes absolutely no farther than being perfectly serviceable and affable. But I had no problem watching either of them existing onscreen. But their co-star is a delight in his return to one of his great signature roles. An emotionless robot is hardly a showcase for an actor's sense of fun or comic timing, but even with that limitation, Schwarzenegger is obviously having a blast putting a deadpan spin on the corny gags the film tosses his way. The unblinking frivolousness of the performance and the role verge on parody of the classic-recipe Terminator, but with a film that goes off the rails when it takes itself seriously, a little bit of frivolous whimsy, even in the form of an angry machine, is exactly what Genisys needs to redeem itself into being at least watchable.

Because oh, how it goes off the rails. It's not, precisely, that it gets all that confusing, though it doesn't pay to think too hard about how time travel works in this franchise as a result of the revelations made in this franchise, since you would certainly put more thought into it than Kalogridis & Lussier did. What does happen is that it gets massively perfunctory, pulling out minimally surprising shocks - the big twist spoiled by the ad campaign might have been tricky to see coming, except that nothing the plot developments that force it into being make any sense without some kind of heel turn - and staging remarkably dull action. The climactic Terminator-on-Terminator fight is damn ugly, in its colors, its cheap CGI, and its broken-down editing. And it's still not as embarassing as the asinine "flipping bus" moment that made it clear from the ads that this would be an ultimately worthless experience.

Worthless is maybe strong. One good performance (two, actually: J.K. Simmons is an unadulterated delight as a conspiracy-minded ex-cop, but he barely affects the plot and simply vanishes out of the movie when his minor contribution is done) and some fun throwback action are all this movie has going for it, and while that's really not much, it's something. A very little something. As far as world-building and crafting a satisfying time-travel story go - as far as being a junk food action movie, frankly, except for a twenty-minute stretch in the first movie Genisys is a complete misfire, and being unexpectedly fun on the margins is nowhere near enough for this film to live up to the standards of its predecessors.

But fuck it, I liked it more than Jurassic World.

6/10

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ANDROIDS DO DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP

A second review requested by Michael R, with thanks for contributing twice to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

The credit for the production company glides into the movie so subtly you barely even notice:

A VIRGIN PICTURES PRODUCTION
hello
HELLO
is this a story?
YES
what type?
FAIRYTALE FOR COMPUTERS
name?
ELECTRIC DREAMS

It's a feisty, lighthearted start for a movie that continues to always and primarily be those two adjectives above all others, though there's at least one other that puts in a good case for itself: pacey. But we'll get there in a moment. The first thing that an honest person writing in the second decade of the 21st Century has to concede is that, for a movie from 1984, Electric Dreams has aged in a particularly miraculous way. By which I mean that you could spend weeks hunting without finding a movie that's so enormously dated in every way. But this is the very fact that redeems the movie. Put it another way: if I were writing this review in '84, I think I would find it preposterous junk elevated by Giorgio Moroder's score and Bud Cort's vocal performance as an A.I. But I am writing in 2015, and from this point in time, Electric Dreams is such a preposterously exciting time capsule from the dawn of the personal computer age that I can't stand it. We'll get there in a moment, too.

For now, just the plot. Miles Harding (Lenny Von Dohlen) is a brilliant architect but a disaster of a human, perpetually incapable of being where he needs to be on time or with all of his ideas collected. With his job hanging in the balance, he reluctantly decides to buy one of those brand new pocket computers that keeps track of dates and notes. Like a personal assistant, but one that's digital. The perky saleswoman (Wendy Miller) manages to upsell him a whole home computer set-up, along with all the widgets and doo-dads that will allow his computer to monitor all of his home appliances and basically run his whole physical life, if you can imagine something so implausible and silly.* Besides, what could an architect possible us a computer for? Modeling his highly experimental earthquake-resistant bricks in simulated three-dimensional space, or some fantasyland bullshit like that?

Exactly that, in fact, and it's the mind-blowing realisation of what a computer can do to his workflow that finally gets Miles onboard - or make that "Moles", since he is such a complete failure at life and computers are soooooo hard that he misspells his name during set-up, and can't go back to fix it later, ho-ho. So he decides to download everything he possibly can related to his work and design, and this so taxes the 1984 internet that his computer starts to overheat. In a feverish panic, Miles pours a glass of champagne all over the keyboard, and this somehow manages to slosh all the way into the machine's hard drive where it crystallises and grants the computer sentience. As will happen.

While this has been happening, Miles has been listening to his new neighbor Madeline Robistat (Virginia Madsen) practicing cello. So, it turns out, has his computer: its first act as a self-aware being is to improvise variations on the piece she's playing and play them through its voice synthesizer. And from this point on, the story goes to relatively predictable places: the A.I., calling itself Edgar (at which point it is voiced by Cort) and Miles both fall in love with Madeline, and she falls in love with Miles on account of the beautiful electronic music he's been playing for her through the walls. And, you know, that's charming and all, if necessarily limited. It's pretty obvious that the romantic triangle is the box for the filmmakers, led by early music video director Steve Barron and writer Rusty Lemorande, to pour all their ideas into, rather than the driving force of the movie itself. Indeed, it seems entirely possible that such a generic, played-out concept as a Cyrano de Bergerac-esque romantic triangle was picked specifically so that it wouldn't get in the way of the film's fascinated portrayal of the brave new worlds of computing and synthetic music.

The none-too-exciting result of this is that Electric Dreams has absolutely no narrative urgency, particularly in its first 40 minutes (the point where Edgar gains the rudimentary power of speech). It is, not to be inelegant about it, slow as balls. And when the entire narrative justification for a film is that it's genial without being actively funny and cute without being emotionally deep, there really isn't any upside to it also being pokey about moving through its plot. And this is where that special exemption kicks in: Electric Dreams benefits to an immense degree from being an in-depth look at a very specific moment in the development of the Information Age. Watching a movie from, say, 1930, the differences between then and now seem incidental and organic - sure, the attitudes, behavior, and technology are all essentially alien, but the process by which Point A turned into Point B is clear enough that it feels like a real part of history; one we no longer inhabit, but one we evolved from. In contrast, Electric Dreams is, in so many ways, exactly like our world, such that as recently as two years ago, the film Her could speak directly to our contemporary cultural moment while telling only a slight variation on the same plot elements. Hell, Electric Dreams even opens with a sequence ironically poking fun at people so captivated by the little blinking screens in their hands that they ignore the rest of humankind, a piece of visual commentary that could be plugged into a modern movie without having to change anything but the costumes.

Despite that, there is not a single moment in Electric Dreams that feels remotely compatible with the world as it exists today - the difference between "people were just starting to figure out computers" and "people use computers several hundred times every day" turns out to be much more severe than the difference between the latter and "people have never even heard of computers, because they are top-secret codebreaking machines used to hunt Nazis". Perhaps it's because the world resembles our own so much, that the fact that everything is just slightly wrong seems intensely magnified. Perhaps it's because computers are no longer mystical, and the things that the movie tries to sell as "what the hell, who knows how these damn things work, anyway?" do not seem plausible in any way. Perhaps it's seeing people doing what we do, only they have '80s clothes and '80s hair. Whatever the hell is doing it, it means that Electric Dreams is like reading a transcript of an opium dream - you can see real life underpinning it, but the effect is otherworldly and uncanny, and it's the most amazing damn thing.

Which is exactly why I feel like I'd have ignored if not hated this movie when it was new: all of the things that seem dazzlingly weird about it now were just the world outside in 1984. Or at least, the world as practiced by tech geeks, far away on the outskirts of polite society. All that leaves is the story, which really isn't all that interesting: Von Dohlen and Madsen make for pleasant but largely bland and shallow human leads, leaving no real focal point of personality until Cort finally comes to the rescue with his tartly mechanical line readings, as if HAL 9000 grew up listening to the Clash.

But even taken on its own terms, this isn't really about its story. Barron's music director instincts drive the film more than his narrative instincts. That means that most of the images where are interesting tend to exist in a vacuum: the example that leaps to mind is the profile shot of Miles in the computer story, his face appearing on a CCTV monitor that's blocking his upper body. Pretty much any shot of Edgar's abstract color-and-line interface is coming from the same place, more interesting graphically and perhaps because of what it says about computer culture, than because of what it says about this computer in this scenario.

Even more than that, though, Barron's intentions for the movie lead him to gift the entire thing to Moroder and company ("and company" meaning New Wave groups Culture Club and Heaven 17); this isn't a long-form music video to quite the same extreme that, say, TRON: Legacy is, but that's still probably the level on which it's most successful. And why not? Moroder was the guru of making music through electronics; it's right on a very nearly moral level that he'd be called in to provide the audio background for a story about what computers feel and how they express those feelings through song. It sounds perfect: nothing about the film makes Edgar so real as the music that essentially places us inside his head at the expense of Miles and Madeline, but since Edgar is more interesting than they are, it's no real loss. The film sounds every bit as quintessentially of the early-middle '80s as it looks and acts like it, and this completes its flawlessness as a time capsule; and the music, at least can be enjoyed unironically. Or as unironically as we enjoy any of Moroder's work, anyway. The end result of all this isn't great cinema, or even particularly good cinema; but it's sure as hell attention-grabbing.

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