action

Hardcore Henry (2016)

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fourstar

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Hardcore Henry is, in essence, a video game come to life. This is either a compliment or a complaint depending on the perspective of the individual members of the audience. Roger Ebert, who had a thing or two to say about video games as a lower tier art form, would likely balk (or perhaps even puke) at this premise. As someone who hasn’t owned a video game console since the Nintendo 64, I’m almost equally an outsider to the medium, but I still found the film to be a blast. Hardcore Henry‘s central gimmick of mirroring the look of 1st person shooters by mounting GoPros to its camera/stuntmen is a lot to handle for 90 minutes of action cinema & the video game-thin plot & villains that accompany it don’t help much either. Audiences have largely rejected the Russian-American co-production outright based on its marketing & the movie has made back only less than half of its budget on its opening weekend. Still, there’s certainly an audience for this pure-adrenaline macho-hedonism out there and I have no doubt Hardcore Henry will endure as something of a cult classic in the long run whether or not the immediate returns are looking optimistic (they’re not).

Besides being a live action, narrative video game of a movie, Hardcore Henry could also be understood as a sci-fi action thriller, even if it’s as a stubbornly vacuous one. Brought to life as a Robocop-esque “cybersoldier”, the titular hero/audience surrogate Henry is half man/half machine (or “half machine/half pussy” as one of his combatants puts it) who must save his scientist wife & the world at large from an evil sorcerer who looks like a bitter cocktail of Kurt Cobain, Andy Warhol, and Viserys Targaryen. Obviously, the sci-fi plot is mostly present as a delivery system for the film’s true bread & butter of action & gore. Much like in video games, Henry is mostly provided short-term goals & destinations by an in-the-know guide (Sharlto Copley of District 9) that he must achieve by obliterating all human (and inhuman) obstacles in the way with guns, grenades, wine bottles, screwdrivers, windshield wipers, etc. Every now & then the sci-fi element will lead to a hilarious line like “Put down the proto-baby!”, but for the most part this genre marker is pure background filler. Even my favorite aspect of the film, the telekinetic sorcerer video game villain with the terrible hair, is more fantasy than he is sci-fi, so it’s probably best not to think too extensively on why the plot unfolds the way it does. Just try to enjoy it for its own tasteless, disgustingly violent self.

I guess I should be clear about this: there’s far more to hate about Hardcore Henry than just its video game gimmick. Its rampant misogyny, gay panic humor, and constant, gleeful violence & gore are sure to turn off a lot of folks & rightfully so. However, I don’t personally see much of a difference between the misanthropy on display here and the macho-hedonism of any other generic shoot-em-up. Hardcore Henry is loud, obnoxious, one-note, nearly plotless, and entirely over the top in its meat-headed self-indulgence, but so are a lot of my favorite hallmarks of action cinema: Commando, Rambo IV, Invasion U.S.A., etc. I’ll contend that the film’s glaring, perhaps even deplorable faults are all outweighed by its consistently goofy tone (particularly in the scenery-chewing sorcerer villain) & 1st person POV visual experimentation). There are hordes of 13 year olds who’ll latch onto Hardcore Henry‘s naked girls, guns, and cocaine version of masculinity in an unsavory way, I’m sure, but I never really look to my dumb action movies for moral high ground and, truth be told, those kids will grow out of it eventually. Hopefully.

As much as I enjoyed Hardcore Henry as a violently campy good time, a large part of me is somewhat relieved that it’s floundering financially. If the film were a runaway success we might’ve been flooded with an untold number of 1st person shoot-em-up knockoffs for decades, just as The Blair Witch Project spawned a legion of subpar found footage horrors in its wake. Truthfully, I like Hardcore Henry‘s reputation positioned exactly where it is. It’ll be heralded by select fans as an overlooked classic, but never imitated to an extent where the gimmick becomes overbearingly redundant (I hope). I personally enjoyed the film with the same sick fascination a lot of folks have with GoPro videos of Russian teens hanging off of skyscrapers with just one hand & no safety gear (if you haven’t seen it, don’t Google it). I was appalled & more than a little concerned,but also undeniably made giddy by the sheer novelty & audacity on display.

-Brandon Ledet

Agents of S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X.: Captain America 2 – The Winter Soldier (2014)

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Superhero Watching: Alternating Marvel Perspectives, Fresh and Longterm, Ignoring X-Men, or S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X., is a feature in which Boomer (who reads superhero comics & is well versed in the MCU) & Brandon (who reads alternative comics & had, at the start of this project, seen less than 25% of the MCU’s output) revisit the films that make up the Marvel Cinematic Universe from the perspective of someone who knows what they’re talking about & someone who doesn’t have the slightest clue.

Boomer: Captain America: The Winter Soldier was very nearly a different kind of movie. Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely announced before the premier of the first Cap that they had already been hired to draft the sequel’s script, and there were three choices for direction: George Nolfi, F. Gary Gray, and sibling directorial team Anthony and Joseph Russo. Gray would certainly have been the most interesting choice, as he would have been the first person of color to helm an MCU film and have helped with Marvel’s ongoing diversity problem (as demonstrated just in the past week by the announcement that Danny Rand would be portrayed in the upcoming Netflix Iron Fist series by white Game of Thrones alum Finn Jones). To date, only two films based on Marvel properties have been directed by non-white directors, Hulk (Ang Lee) and Blade II (Guillermo del Toro), and only one has been directed by a woman, Lexi Alexander’s Punisher: War Zone. At present, Black Panther is set to break this white streak with director Ryan Coogler (Fruitvale Station, Creed), although the revolving door of directors (with Selma’s Ava Duvernay and Gray himself having been attached to production at different points) makes one wonder if there will be any more upsets between now and when production actually begins. Ultimately, Gray passed on the project in order to direct last year’s Straight Outta Compton, and the reins to the film were handed over to the Russo brothers, best known for their work on the early (good) years of NBC’s Community.

Those who are only familiar with the movies may be unaware, but S.H.I.E.L.D.’s contribution to the primary Marvel Comic universe took place largely outside of the context of superheroics. In fact, one could read comic books for several years without ever finding out that such an organization exists within that world; I certainly did. When interest in strong men and Amazons waned in the mid-Twentieth Century while the popularity of western, detective, and horror comics grew, S.H.I.E.L.D. took on prominence as a vehicle for telling stories about war and espionage, with books like Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos. The idea that S.H.I.E.L.D. should play a role in the founding of a superhero team is taken wholly from the Ultimate Marvel comics, a sub-imprint launched in the early 2000s to provide an entry into the comics world for new readers whose interest in the medium came as the result of the success of the Spider-Man and X-Men films. Forsaking the moniker “Avengers,” the equivalent team in the Ultimate books was known as “The Ultimates,” featuring a line-up of heroes that were brought together by Ultimate Nick Fury, who was consciously drawn to resemble Samuel L. Jackson in the hopes that he would be interested in the role should a film adaptation ever come to fruition. Many of the ideas that made their way into the MCU found their origins in the Ultimate imprint, with some scenes in the films even shot to be evocative of similar scenes in the comics (Thor’s visit from Loki, who lies that Odin has died in the first Thor film, is probably the most direct lift). The MCU has so far managed to mix stories from both the main books and the Ultimate line with new ideas to make sure that even comic book readers can never quite predict what twists the narrative will take. For instance, in the Ultimate Universe, Black Widow is revealed to be a double agent who turns on the rest of the team; non-readers who see Winter Soldier won’t have this knowledge and thus don’t know whether Natasha can be trusted, while readers who love the MCU Romanoff will constantly be anxious, wondering if she’ll follow in her ink counterpart’s footsteps, adding an edge to the movie.

Writing duo Markus & McFeely initially wanted to do an adaptation of Ed Brubaker’s Winter Soldier storyline (from the mainstream Marvel books) but were hesitant to commit to that idea, unsure if they would be able to make the story fit into the MCU while also doing it justice. Ultimately, with encouragement from MCU coordinator Kevin Feige, the two drafted the script as a political conspiracy thriller that incorporated elements of that plot but that also included S.H.I.E.L.D. in a larger role than in Brubaker’s story, given the greater prominence of the agency in the film franchise. Feige was quoted as saying that stories about Cap dealing with the fearmongering and political unrest of the seventies and eighties was “a hell of a journey” for the character. Although they couldn’t do stories set in that time period due to the fact that this version of Cap was frozen during that era, they “wanted to force him to confront that kind of moral conundrum, something with that ’70s flavor.” As such, the script was written with the intention of incorporating elements from political conspiracy thrillers of that era, like Three Days of the Condor and All the President’s Men.

To cement that connection, Robert Redford, who had appeared in both of those films, was cast to portray Alexander Pierce, the man to whom Nick Fury reports. Another new face in the cast was Anthony Mackie, who plays Sam Wilson, a character from the comics codenamed the Falcon. Cap and Falcon have had a long working relationship in the comics, with the Captain America comic even being retitled Captain America and the Falcon for 88 issues from 1971 to 1978, as the two duplicated the two-buddies-travel-the-world-and-have-different-social-perspectives narrative of the groundbreaking 1970-1972 Green Lantern/Green Arrow books. Emily van Camp was eventually cast as Agent 13, a longtime Cap love interest from the comics (originally introduced as Peggy Carter’s younger sister then later retconned as her niece given the nature of comic books’ static timelines) after beating out Alison Brie, Emilia Clarke, and Imogen Poots (among others) for the role. The film also introduced Crossbones in his civilian identity as a S.H.I.E.L.D. footsoldier revealed as a Hydra interloper; in the film, he is portrayed by Frank Grillo.

The nature of the time jump at the end of Captain America meant that most of Cap’s supporting cast would not be able to reappear in this film, although there is a heartbreaking cameo by Hayley Atwell as a very old Peggy Carter, and Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barnes plays a prominent role. Scarlett Johansson, Samuel L. Jackson, and Cobie Smulders reprise their roles from other MCU features as Black Widow, Nick Fury, and Maria Hill respectively. Maximiliano Hernández, who had previously appeared as S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Jasper Sitwell in Thor, The Avengers, and ABC’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., also appears in the film as a turncoat, as does Garry Shandling’s senator character from Iron Man 2 (it’s a good thing that Stark managed to keep the senator’s hands off the Iron Man suit, then). Toby Jones also reprised his role as Hydra scientist Arnim Zola, both in flashback and as an electronic ghost.

So, what did you think, Brandon? Captain America got high praise from you; how does this one fare?

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threehalfstar

Brandon: I was head over heels for the first Captain America film, which played like a retroactively-perfected version of The Rocketeer. Captain Steve Rogers’ bully-hating, Nazi-punching earnestness was a much welcome antidote to the sarcastic, megalomaniacs like Deadpool & Iron Man who often test my completist patience. I was, of course, stoked to catch up with the second installment in the Captain America series not only because I found the found The First Avenger so perfectly sincere, but also because ever since this project began The Winter Soldier has been sold to me as the height of what the MCU has to offer. I don’t want to say that I was exactly disappointed by the film that was delivered after all that hype, but I will say that the burden of expectation definitely colored my experience in a negative way. From the outside looking in, Captain America: The Winter Soldier is a fine action film, a perfectly entertaining superhero movie that does a great job of tying the Marvel mythology in with real-life political intrigue. However, I think the film stands as a dividing line between the franchise’s die hard fans who greedily eat up the ins & outs of the Marvel lore (particularly the narrative arc of S.H.I.E.L.D.) and the more casual observers such as myself who are mostly looking for an escapist spectacle with a cool hero in a kooky costume (which is more in line with what The First Avenger delivered). Fans who love the MCU enough to devotedly follow all of its short film bonus material & televised spin-offs are likely to love The WInter Soldier. The more detached devotees will enjoy the film’s action sequences & cool cat protagonists, but perhaps with less hyperbolic rapture.

Freshly unfrozen in the modern world, Captain Steve Rogers is simultaneously dealing with the post-Battle of NYC PTSD issues that Tony Stark wrestled with in Iron Man 3 & the same kind of fish out of water awkwardness as his Norse god buddy/fellow beefcake model Thor eternally suffers. Besides having to catch up with cultural markers like Marvin Gaye & Star Wars that he missed while taking an extensive nap on ice, Rogers also has to deal with the fact that his one true love (and ABC star) Peggy Carter lived a full life without him & is now spending her last days alone in a hospital bed. Friends & colleagues pressure Rogers to ask someone less geriatric for a date, but he refuses to move on. Of course, these small personal concerns are dwarfed by an evil world domination scheme Rogers has to put to a swift end. The Nazi offshoot Hydra from the first Captain America film is apparently alive & thriving, having successfully infiltrated S.H.I.E.L.D. & subtly influenced all of the world’s war & unrest from behind the scenes in the decades since the second World War. Can Rogers stop the Hydra from hijacking an advanced weapons system & using a sinister algorithm to destroy every one of its potential enemies in one fell swoop before it’s too late? Of course he can. He is The Greatest Soldier in History, after all (having now graduated from comic book hero status to living museum exhibit in his own lifetime).

What’s most interesting about The Winter Soldier is the way it complicates who & what is Captain America’s enemy. Rogers joined S.H.I.E.L.D. because it was partly founded by his one true love & he finds great value in reliving his wartime specialty: rescue missions. S.H.I.E.L.D. is too powerful to trust, however, especially since its participation in a worldwide (& maybe even intergalactic) arms race is what provides the weapon that Hydra intends to use the wipe out its enemies wholesale. By showing the faults of our modern day surveillance state by attaching a gun to each camera, The Winter Soldier approaches the most biting political commentary the MCU has offered yet, especially when Rogers criticizes his S.H.I.E.L.D. overlords for “holding a gun to everyone in the world & calling it protection” (a theme that will later be repeated in Age of Ultron). I don’t think the film’s political themes are ever explored any deeper or more thoroughly than they’d be in any other high budget, explosion-heavy action film, though. For MCU die hards who’ve been following every Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. episode & tangentially-related S.H.I.E.L.D. mythology-related media, the film’s big reveal that the organization has been hijacked by Hydra might’ve landed with massive impact, but the betrayal never feels too significant from an outsider perspective. It’s mostly a political thriller springboard for a cool action movie with a lovable hero & some of the best fight choreography in the MCU outside the Avengers films (including increasingly inventive uses of Captain’s shield in its hand-to0-hand brutality).

It feels almost like a betrayal to nerdom at large to say I really liked this movie but didn’t love it, but that kinda points to the way Marvel Studios have spread their properties so, so very thin. In the greater, 10,000+ hour span of MCU content, The Winter Soldier is a major turning point & a fulfilling payoff for irons that have been in the fire for years. As a standalone property surviving on its on isolated merits, its a very solid picture, but far from the pinnacle of any of its various genres: political thrillers, action flicks, superhero media, etc.

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Boomer: I love this movie. It’s the MCU picture that I’ve watched and rewatched the most and the one that I find the most enduring, thoughtful, and well-paced; for my money, it’s the best of them all. It’s a testament to Winter Soldier’s excellence that, despite the fact that I got dumped two hours after I walked out the theatre on that 2014 afternoon, it wasn’t ruined for me (like so, so many things were in the wake of that breakup). I can look back on that day and say, “Hey, that was one of the worst days of my life, but I also saw Winter Soldier.”

I’m not ever sure where to start with all the things that make this film work for me. I’m a sucker for a good conspiracy flick (and even some bad ones), and the tonal similarities between Winter Soldier and things like Enemy of the State, The Manchurian Candidate, and most obviously (and explicitly) Three Days of the Condor hit all the right buttons for me. It brings Black Widow into the foreground in a way that the previous films attempted with mixed success and introduces a great new hero character to the mythos in Falcon, and both Johannson and Mackie bring a lot of energy into the mix that harmonizes well with Evans’s leading man charisma. Redford is perfect in his role as the turncoat leader of the World Security Council, and the film puts a lot of work into including and subtly commenting on contemporary issues of security, privacy, and systemic violence. Evans was serviceable in his previous appearances as Cap, but he clearly understands the role better here than in the earlier outings: Cap is a man who fought a brutal war that history has painted as a righteous one, and as such is best suited to remind those around him when they are repeating the mistakes of the past.

The film draws a clear line between itself and other films of the same genre that came before, both within the text (most notably with Natasha quoting War Games) and metatextually, especially with the casting of Redford. Although his most notable contributions to political thrillers were his roles in All the President’s Men and Three Days of the Condor, I also have a fondness for Sneakers, which shares plot elements like computer algorithms and heisty shenanigans with Winter Soldier. Of course, the movie to which I feel this film is most tonally similar isn’t your standard contemporary political thriller like your Sneakers or even your classics like The Parallax View: it’s Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.

I’ll keep this as brief as I possibly can, given that I have a (deserved) reputation of making everything about Star Trek, despite any obstacles. The Star Trek franchise was always about creating the rhetorical space that science fiction inhabits when it’s at its best: commenting upon contemporary social mores through a lens that provides the viewer or reader with enough metaphorical distance that he or she can see the absurdity and beauty of the human experience. (Last year’s Hugo Awards were undermined by a small group of rabid people who fail to realize that this is and always has been the purpose of the genre.) As such, the classic 1960s series created by Gene Roddenberry featured groundbreaking elements like people of color and women being treated as colleagues and equals by their white and male crewmen while also exploring the relationship between different earth cultures by projecting them onto extraterrestrial confederations.

Most notably, this was demonstrated by the way in which the Klingon Empire was a clear stand-in for the Soviet Union, and this was made all the more textual in The Undiscovered Country, which opened with a Chernobyl-esque disaster that places the Federation (the society in which Kirk and Spock abide) in a position to finally hammer their swords into plowshares… or bring their enemies to their knees. In the midst of all this is Kirk, who has fought the Klingons all his life and even lost his son to them; still, the Federation believes that, just as only Nixon could go to China, only Kirk can present the Klingons with a metaphorical olive branch. Unfortunately, Kirk ends up being framed for the assassination of the Klingon Chancellor and is assigned to a Siberia-esque gulag, while Spock works out the mystery. Working from opposite ends toward the middle, the two find a peace-endangering conspiracy that has wound its way around the heart of the seemingly-utopian Federation, fueled by long-stewing grudges, cultural fascism, and speciesist (read: racist) attitudes.

The Undiscovered Country is a fantastic movie, and although it’s not the best entry in the film franchise (Wrath of Khan is the undisputed champion), it’s a viable contender for runner-up. The Winter Soldier plays out similarly with its revelation that Hydra was never destroyed, but that it was instead reborn by planting its monstrous seeds within S.H.I.E.L.D. from its conception. Like ST6, this film also features the great and historical hero who finds himself framed and caught up in political machinations, dealing with strategic espionage maneuvering which is far outside of his control but in which he has a vested personal stake. Both films take the tropes and traits of the conspiracy narrative and add them to their respective genres, elevating both films to increased notability outside of their franchises.

And Natasha! Romanoff is back, baby, taking on heavier narrative lifting here than ever before and not only rising to the challenge, but killing it. Natasha never comes off as a sidekick here, instead acting as the perfect foil to Rogers. He’s the perfect soldier, and she’s the perfect spy: the focus on the ways that their respective skills and worldviews inscribe, complement, and conflict contributes to the film’s constant momentum. Johannson nails the small moments of vulnerability and the fact that Widow is always a few steps ahead of everyone else, like she’s accustomed to always being the smartest person in the room. This is just as much a story about her as it is about Cap, despite how much of the plot is devoted to his feelings of having failed Bucky. The film also does a better job of displaying professional respect and friendship between the two than most films are able to with a male-female friendship, and their emotional arc is perfect, forsaking the easy road of creating a romantic relationship between the two.

If anything, the titular Winter Soldier is the weakest link for me here. Part of that may be that his true identity as a brainwashed Bucky is no secret to comic fans (and it kind of surprises me that it was a shock to film-goers, given how recognizable Stan’s face is even with a mask on). It provides a counterpart to Cap’s friendship with Natasha, but it’s not as emotionally satisfying to me. Cap and Bucky’s friendship was built up in the first film, but it never quite clicked for me; I’m not as invested in the two of them as the franchise wants me to be, mostly because we actually see the two of them interact with each other much less than we see Cap interact with Natasha or even Tommy Lee Jones’s General in the first film. His involvement raises the stakes for Cap personally, but not for me.

That doesn’t make me any less invested in loving this movie, however. It hits the sweet spot for many in virtually every way, and I can hardly thing of a disparaging thing to say about it. Every few months, we see a new thinkpiece being published that asks if this genre is on its way out. Although I haven’t really seen any signs of slowing or stopping at this point, I’d wager that Winter Soldier will long outlive its peers in the public consciousness even if the MCU draws to a close.

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Lagniappe

Brandon: One thing that has been super impressive over the last few MCU features is how they’ve turned around my frustration with one-line cameos & half-assed tie-ins. I think that The Avengers, while not the height of the franchise, was an entirely necessary step in bringing this whole mess of a universe into an increasingly sharp focus & The Winter Soldier in particular is a great collaborative effort that directly reflects that shift. It’s doubtful that Nick Fury or Black Widow will ever star in their own standalone vehicles, but they’re both given way more to do in The Winter Soldier than ever before. Black Widow has already had ample time to show off her badassery in previous pictures, but her extended presence is always a welcome asset. This is really Nick Fury’s big break as a major player, though, and it’s fantastic to see him elevated form a walk-through cameo in a stinger to a fully-realized character. It’s also incredible how characters like Falcon & Bucky are shoehorned in there (even if I spoiled their individual reveals for myself by watching MCU content out of order) without ever cluttering up the film’s proceedings. Again, The Winter Soldier is a well made political thriller-leaning action flick that covers a lot of ground in its massive 2 1/2 hour runtime. I’m not sure that each of its characters & themes are given enough room to properly breathe & resonate, but there’s an impressive juggling act in how many personalities & plotlines get involved in the first place and the film delivers a wealth of entertainment in its genre-based treats alone.

Boomer: The furthest-reaching repercussions of this film on the franchise is the revelation that S.H.I.E.L.D. has been infected by Hydra from its very inception. For me personally, S.H.I.E.L.D. has always been a non-essential element of the MCU; sure, most of the stories would be different without their involvement, but not by much and not necessarily detrimentally. This reveal did end up creating more plotlines for Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., with that series finally developing into something worth following in the wake of Winter Soldier, but it also annoys me. The rest of the MCU must now pay lip service to this development constantly, with references to Hydra showing up in shows and films that don’t really relate to S.H.I.E.L.D., if as nothing more than a bogeyman. Other than films where it wouldn’t make sense (such as Guardians of the Galaxy), all the villains relate back to Hydra now, if only tangentially. It makes me like past, unrelated villains like Jeff Bridges’s Obadiah Stane more in retrospect, since they weren’t required to tie in as heavily. It’s not that I feel the franchise is hamstrung by this revelation, but I find it weakens a plot when everything has to tie back into one evil mastermind or organization, limiting storytelling possibilities.

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Combined S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X. Rating for Captain America 2 – The Winter Soldier (2013)

fourhalfstar

-Agents of S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X.

Gods of Egypt (2016)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

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onehalfstar

campstamp

Director Alex Proyas has been going on some epic Facebook rants lately, decrying the violently dire critical & commercial response his latest film, Gods of Egypt, is being met with at the box office. He’s particularly frustrated that what he describes as “hate bloggers” have organized a boycott of the film due to its predominately whitewashed casting of its Egyptian characters. Much like the recent Ridley Scott epic Exodus: Gods and Kings, Gods of Egypt represents for a lot of people yet another example of a long line of Hollywood pictures in which POC actors have been locked out of the lead roles that, at the very least for historical accuracy, should not have been granted to white actors. Proyas claims that the reason critics have been harping on his film’s problematic casting is that they’re too overworked to form opinions on their own & instead parrot the shrill voices of “hate blogging” (whatever that is) out of convenience or laziness. Proyas genuinely believes that if his film were able to stand on its own merits outside of its political controversy, it’d be doing much better at the box office. He’s taken to the soapbox he claims to hate the most (online criticism) to cry foul, to complain that he hasn’t been given a fair shake as a filmmaker.

Now, I’m not sure if this makes me a lazy critic or a “hate blogger” (maybe both?), but I also hated Gods of Egypt. However, despite what Proyas might believe, I didn’t enter the film wanting to hate it. In fact, I set the bar for my enjoyment so pathetically low that it’s incredible that the film failed to clear it (despite its excess of golden wings). Equipped ahead of time with foreknowledge of the film’s controversial casting, dire reviews, and crackpot director (whose work ranges from total shit like The Crow to actually-enjoyable nonsense like Knowing), I felt like I was steeled to what the film had going against it. Still, there was a visual element in the trailer that made me hopeful that it might be mildly enjoyable as a campy trifle. What I was expecting was the visually striking, narratively undercooked mess of Snow White & The Huntsmen, which I enjoyed despite its negative critical consensus. What the film delivered instead was the bland CGI worldscape that put me to sleep (literally) both times I tried to watch 300 in the theater (and, curiously enough, both films star Gerard Butler). Gods of Egypt has problems that extend far beyond its racially tone deaf casting & temper tantrum-prone director. The film is also a hopeless bore, which might be the most damning fault of them all.

Similar to the way The Witch attempts to breathe life into the religious paranoia of Puritan beliefs, Gods of Egypt aims to illustrate the myths of gods living among men that once populated ancient, polytheistic Egyptian philosophy. The difference is that The Witch dealt in sincere historical recreation while Gods of Egypt attempted to mold its subject’s mythology into a goofy action epic framework & the most despicable genre of them all: the shameless franchise-starter. Through overbearing storybook narration, Indiana Jones-style action adventure, and flat-on-their-face quips, Gods of Egypt tells the story of a half-blind god & a mortal thief who team up to stop a deranged relative who plans on merging life & the afterlife in a quest to claim absolute power. I won’t bother you with many plot details, since very few are of interest & can be boiled down to dual damsel in distress rescues. True love prevails over death & destruction, the men save their ladyfriends, the universe maintains its balance, etc. The stakes rarely feel high in Gods of Egypt, because each challenge is conquered with ease by a pair of protagonists who have no option but to succeed. The Egyptian mythology setting mostly serves as a backdrop for a white knight story we’ve all seen play out countless times before.

The best chance you have of enjoying Gods of Egypt is either as mindless eye candy or as a so-bad-it’s-good camp fest. May the gods pity you in either case. The film’s costume & set design are bathed in sweet, delicious gold, but the effect was tiring after its initial introduction. The brevity of the film’s trailers did its visual style a huge favor, distracting the eye from its bland CGI mediocrity by making it seem downright lush through rapid editing. There’s a few interesting details here or there: a masked army in blood-red robes, a flying chariot pulled by scarabs, gods bleeding gold when wounded in battle, etc. For the most part, though, the film is about as visually interesting as a video game cutscene (something else I find unbearably boring). The creatures were particularly disappointing on that front. I kept waiting for them to prompt me to press “X”. As far as goofy camp goes, there isn’t much of interest to chew on there either. There’s exactly one line that made me laugh. When asked where his buddy is hiding, the mortal half of our heroic tag team responds “Up your butt,” which, you know, isn’t the height of wit or anything like that, but I’m honestly an easy audience. I also found a lot of humor in the way that they visually conveyed the gods’ imposing stature by making giant-sized versions of their props to dwarf their human counterparts. That’s the kind of tactic you’d expect in an old midnight movie like Attack of the Puppet People, not a modern $140 million action epic.

Acting wise, most of Gods of Egypt‘s (again, controversial) cast is on autopilot. Gerard Butler performs as if he’s in 300 Part Deux. Nikolaj Coster-Waldau phones it in as a barely-engaged Jamie Lannister, trading in his missing hand for a missing eye & swapping the moniker “King Slayer” for “Lion Slayer”. Brenton Thwaites & Chadwick Boseman (a legit POC actor! and he’s not even an extra!) overact in a way that’s far more annoying than it is entertaining. The female leads are given little more to do than to dress provocatively & await rescue. Only Geoffrey Rush’s out of nowhere turn as the sun god Ra stands out as wildly-entertaining scenery chewing. One gets the distinct feeling that the renowned actor is slumming it in this feature-length high resolution screensaver, but his delightfully bitchy take on the all-powerful Ra was one of the sole bright spots in a film that could’ve used a lot more of them. At least half a star in this review’s rating is due to his performance alone, which, as you can probably tell, was a much-needed boost.

Part of me kinda feels bad for Proyas. He’s such a typical 90s Guy that he probably had no idea that such a cultural backlash was going to plague Gods of Egypt from its initial announcement to its dismal box office opening. In his mind, he made a grand scale Hollywood epic with a handsome cast & a lot of browbeating about how “In this world you’re either rich or you’re nothing” & the radical idea that slavery is cruel. He expected to get by on good intentions, particularly perplexed that his own Egyptian heritage didn’t allow him to sidestep criticism for whitewashed casting in yet another mishandled Hollywood take on the region’s past. The truth is that just as many people would’ve been annoyed with Gods of Egypt’s casting pre-Internet, but would’ve had a much more difficult time publishing/publicizing their complaints. Casting isn’t the only way the film feels politically stale, though. Take, for instance, the protagonist god’s jealousy that his lover had sex with her wicked, power-hungry enslaver. It’s the romantic jealousy that’s played as a character fault, not the fact that he’s slutshaming his lover for being serially raped. That’s the exact kind of outdated sentiment that seems to be going over Proyas’s head, making him subject to intense scrutiny from “hate bloggers” & “lazy critics”. If released sometime in the 90s, Gods of Egypt might’ve been able to skate by as a mediocre prequel to a forgettable blockbuster like The Mummy. In 2016 its moral ickinees is too much of a sore thumb to overlook, especially for something that aims to be a franchise starter. You get the distinct feeling throughout the film that Proyas & company should’ve known better (or at least tried harder). After reading Proyas’s rants it’s all the more confusing that Gods of Egypt is such a dull slog. This is the film he’s going to bat for? This is what he’s confused about no one liking?

There’s a single scene in Gods of Egypt that perfectly sums up my whole experience watching the film. During a heavily green-screened chariot chase an arrow strikes & kills the mortal doofus hero’s beloved & she dies while he blankly looks on & continues to steer their escape. This scene is everything Gods of Egypt is in a nutshell: visually uninteresting, passionless, seemingly plucked from a time long gone (and I don’t mean ancient Egypt). Again, Proyas should’ve known better. Or he at least should’ve known to concede defeat when it failed to connect with audiences & critics, who, despite what the director seems to believe, are the very same people.

-Brandon Ledet

Point Break (2015) Wasn’t All That Bad . . . As Long As You’ve Never Seen Point Break (1991)

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Okay, it’s shameful confession time. I saw the Point Break remake, released just a few weeks before this past Christmas, before I saw Kathryn Bigelow’s 1991 original. It was always a given that I’d see the original Point Break eventually, but twas a task I had been putting off despite the enthusiastic recommendations of friends (& Nick Frost’s bumbling cop in Hot Fuzz) who rank it among their favorite films of all time. A free movie ticket & a convenient showtime, then, lead me to the curious position of having seen the little-loved remake of Point Break weeks before I saw the original (also on the big screen, thanks to Indywood). The shameful part is that I actually enjoyed the remake. As a dumb action movie packed with bad writing, overwrought performances, and over-the-top stunts, it’s  nothing particularly special, but it’s also nothing especially awful either. It’s pretty okay & might’ve even flown under the radar as a half decent genre pic . . . if it hadn’t purported itself to be a remake of Point Break (1991) in the first place. Point Break (1991) & Point Break (2015) are so far apart in terms of style, intent, content, plot, and central philosophy that there’s no reason the 2015 version should’ve bothered calling itself Point Break in the first place. With a couple minor tweaks & a title change it might’ve even been able to sidestep accusations of being a ripoff. The two films are worlds away from one another.

Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break is a laugh-a-minute action vehicle for Keanu Reeves & Patrick Swayze (not to mention wildcard Gary Busey in unhinged Under Siege mode). The script is overloaded with jokes & the mood is surprisingly light considering that its two most tense action set pieces – a police raid & a bank robbery – are some of the most brutally severe I’ve ever seen. The Point Break remake, on the other hand, is easily recognizable as the post-Dark Knight kind of re-imagining that believes a grim, self-serious mood is what the people want in their over-the-top action cinema. It’s a thoroughly dour affair, especially for a film about bank robbing surfers. Just about the only thing that transferred from the original to the remake were the surfing & the homoeroticism (between an undercover FBI agent & the lead criminal).

What the remake does instead of retracing Bigelow’s steps is focusing on & amplifying particular details of the original & turning those isolated aspects into a feature film. The criminals in the original Point Break are really into surfing, but occasionally dabble in a parachute jump or some beachside football. That’s not X-treme™ enough for the remake, which makes a point to include every Red Bull-fueled sport you can think of: snowboarding, base jumping, kayaking, whatever. The bigger difference is in the two film’s philosophy, however. The surfer bros in the original may occasionally muse about “the spiritual side of the sea” or how surfing is “a state of mind”, but at heart they’re just thrill seekers & thieves for whom bank robbing is both an adrenaline spike and a source of income. The remake, on the other hand, posits its “extreme poly-athletes” (ugh) as “eco warriors” (double ugh) who steal from “the system” in order to “give back” to a “dying” planet in some 21st Century version of Robin Hood justice. Their thrill seekers as well, but their main concern is achieving nirvana through cutthroat vigilantism . . . and X-treme sports.

Both Point Break films are, admittedly, quite silly. The difference is that you laugh with the original & laugh at the remake. Kathryn Bigelow’s film is loaded with enough snarky one-liners to give any Joss Whedon script a run for its money and, surprisingly enough, they all land. The 2015 version is funny in a different way. Lines like “A tree falls in the forest & no one puts it on YouTube. Did it ever really happen?” & “So, you live off the grid?” “No, we live on it. Just on our own terms,” are downright hilarious, just perhaps not intentionally so. The action sequences in the 1991 Point Break achieve a kind of shocking gravity bucks the film’s humor in an interesting way. The 2015 Point Break‘s action sequences often play directly into the film’s (unintentional) humor. For instance, my first laugh was when a dude bro fell of a cliff while dirt-biking in a bid to earn sponsorships & YouTube hits. I know that’s pretty harsh of me, bro, but the film never truly earns the right to be taken seriously, so I don’t feel too bad about it.

All things told, the 2015 Point Break is a lot more akin to an X-treme sports version of The Edukators than it is to Kathryn Bigelow’s film. If it hadn’t been pitched as a remake it might have never been greenlit or it might’ve been underfunded, but it also would’ve stood a better chance as a critical success. Watching a bunch of bank-robbing anarchists try to achieve nirvana by skateboarding off a yacht to shitty EDM is pretty damn amusing, but it’s nothing in comparison to what any ten minute stretch of the original achieves. If you have any chance of enjoying Point Break (2015) as is, it’d be in seeing it before you check out its far superior source material. Either that, or pretending it has a different title & functioned as a blatant ripoff. As a standalone product, it’s an occasionally fun trifle of mindless action cinema. As a point of comparison, the outlook is much less flattering.

-Brandon Ledet

 

The Revenant (2015)

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threehalfstar

Alejandro González Iñárritu’s latest is a difficult film to pin down in terms of quality. The Revenant is at times an intense spectacle of intricately detailed action choreography, but it’s also a meandering slowburner of a film that constantly reminds you that you’re watching Important Art. Its cinematography (provided by master of the form Emmanuel Lubezki) is gut-wrenchingly beautiful, but is often employed for such an empty purpose that it leaves you feeling cold. It aims for High Art severity in its narrative consequence, but the grotesque savagery of its rape & pillage masculinity feels like a well-constructed exploitation pic from a bygone era. I’m tempted to group it in with other arty, all-dressed-up-with-nowhere-to-go slowburners that were impressive but impossible to connect with (for me, anyway) like Only God Forgives & The Tree of Life, but I enjoyed too much of the film to dismiss it that easily. What is clear is that Iñárritu should at the very least be commended for not following up the critical success of Birdman (a film I was less than kind to) with a carbon copy of his most high profile film to date. I appreciate him sticking his neck out there, even if the results were the ultimate mixed bag of soaring successes & cringe-worthy missteps.

Part of what makes The Revenant so frustrating is its daunting 156 min runtime. The film’s opening battles between white men fur trappers & tribes of Native Americans and Leo DiCaprio’s protagonist & a pissed-off mama bear are breathtakingly savage, epically orchestrated orgies of visually striking violence. At the other end of the film, a  concluding knife fight between DiCaprio’s beaten-to-shit protagonist & Tom Hardy’s selfish brute who wronged him ranks up there with Friedkin’s The Hunted as one of the best hand-to-hand combat scenes ever committed to film. The long stretch between those heart-racing anchors, however, are painfully in need of some shrewd editing. It’s tempting to think of The Revenant as a revenge film floating somewhere between a Western & an exploitation, but a majority of the film is a travelogue. DiCaprio, Hardy, two opposing bands of American & French Fur trappers (one headed by Domnhall Gleeson, who’s been batting a thousand lately), and a revenge-hungry native tribe all slowly trudge toward an inevitable climactic bloodshed (while still recovering from the one that opened the film) in an unnecessarily-detailed step-by-step procession. At times the film itself feels like DiCaprio’s broken protagonist, crawling & gurgling blood for days on end under the weight of an over-achieving runtime.   Shave a good 40 minutes of The Revenant by tightening a few scenes & losing a shot here or there (as precious as Lubezki makes each image) & you might have a masterful man vs. nature (both human & otherwise) revenge pic. As is, there’s an overbearing sense of self-importance that sours the whole ordeal.

For the most part, though, the self-importance on display in The Revenant isn’t nearly as off-putting as it can be in Birdman. For instance, Lubezki’s camerawork is just as showy here as it was in Iñárritu’s Oscar Winner, but it ditches the single-extended-shot gimmick of that film in favor of a more tasteful line of highfalutin action cinematography. There are some gorgeous transitions from intense close-ups to long tracking shots in impossibly smooth single-swoops, but these shots are broken up in a way that Birdman‘s unrelenting gimmick of a structure allow for. Plot wise, The Revenant echoes the loud & obnoxious majority vs. the righteous intelligence of the few in the know that turned me off so sharply in Birdman (with Hardy anchoring the obnoxious brute end of that equation & DiCaprio serving as the righteous), but it’s not quite as much of a turn-off here. At worst, the preciousness & empty philosophy of lines like “As long as you can still breathe, you fight”, “Remember what mother used to say about the wind?”, and endless mutterings of “You are my son, you are my son,” (similar to the way Sean Penn whispers “Mother” into the void for hours in Tree of Life) are worth a hearty eyeroll or two. At best, they’re a nice break from watching DiCaprio gurgle & crawl his way through the snow. The dialogue in Birdman was much more off-putting.

Like I said, there’s too much of The Revenant that resonated with me to dismiss it outright. I’m more than willing to forgive an overwrought image or two (there’s a particularly egregious moment when a white bird emerges from a bullet wound, for instance) in exchange for the film’s more successful flashes of brilliance (like the bear & knife fights). For all of The Revenant‘s try-hard stabs at achieving High Art through hyper-masculine brutality, there’s a hell of a lot of praise-worthy ambition & striking imagery that’s well worth the patience required to make it through the perilous journey of its over-inflated runtime. Shorten some its travel time through montage & soften the cheese factor of its philosophical mumblings & I might even have heralded it as a masterpiece of brutish revenge cinema.

-Brandon Ledet

Brannigan (1975)

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fourstar

When you bring up John Wayne, it’s inevitable that his name will conjure images of old-fashioned Westerns. He’s synonymous with the genre, an in-the-flesh embodiment of cowboy cinema. That’s why I was surprised when I sat down at a Christmas party with my grandfather to watch one of his favorite John Wayne pictures to find that it wasn’t a Western at all. It’s not even set in America, let alone the Old West. Brannigan is a fish-out-of-water action comedy about a hard-boiled Chicago detective brandishing pistols in a stuffy, crime-ridden 1970s London. Of course, John Wayne plays the titular police detective with the same worlds-away-from-Chicago cowboy swagger he’s most closely associated with, but the setting is still jarring. In some ways, though, it makes you appreciate Wayne’s screen presence even  more to watching him operate outside of his element.

Besides casting a Western cinema legend in a non-Western role, Brannigan hosts several other glaring self-contradictions. Tonally, its mix of severed-finger, bullethole-ridden, sexual assault-threatening violence pairs ridiculously with its sarcastic, seen-it-all-before humor. This contrast can be best observed in an over-the-top pub brawl when Brannigan punches a goon so hard that he slides across the entire length of a bartop in a surprise tangent into Looney Tunes physics. Genre-wise, the film can’t decide if it wants to be a suspenseful heist film or an outright comedy. It can’t even decide which storyline is its main concern: the plot that has Brannigan chasing after a notorious crime boss being held for ransom or the plot that has Brannigan being chased himself by an assassin prone to using bomb & shotgun booby traps like an especially vicious Kevin McCallister. Or are both of these stories merely a backdrop for a blood-soaked comedy about Old World stuffiness vs. New World cavalier?

My favorite aspect of Brannigan‘s self-contradicting nature is where it sits on exploitation cinema’s temporal landscape. Although it’s a major studio film, it feels like it’s caught somewhere between the welcome-to-the-real-world harshness of New Hollywood, the righteously funky world of blaxploitaion (except with a white man as the lead, of course), and the as-yet-created humorously violent world of 80s action cinema. John Wayne establishes himself here as an early action star. His super-sarcastic, know-it-all one-liners play like a precursor to characters that would later be played by folks like Arnold Schwarzenegger & Sly Stallone. Brannigan doesn’t just burst into a room; he bursts into a room & dryly intones “Knock, knock” while brandishing a pistol. Then there’s the fact that every criminal in the world apparently knows legendary supercop Jim Brannigan by name, even though he works for Chicago’s municipal police department. That detail would be later repeated in every Commando, Cobra, and Hard to Kill to follow. He’s even provided a cute, tiny, foreign sidekick, another staple of the 80s action genre, although this time she’s never threatened to become a love interest despite all of Brannigan’s incessant leering. She does, however, spontaneously reward him with a kiss on the cheek over a dinner for two. Why? She explains, “You’re just so damn solid.” Indeed.

John Wayne badassery aside, Brannigan is a well put together action flick. Its lush shots of drive-bys, gun holsters, and sexy workers showing leg – all the leg – are all surprisingly intricate enough for a film that didn’t have to try too hard to succeed. John Wayne is entertaining enough on his own to carry the film, but a lot of effort still goes into detailing the organized crime end of London’s underbelly. Pubs, saunas, brothels, and late night stakeouts provide a nicely detailed background for Wayne to perform against and the car chases & counterfeit money production play like a precursor to Friedkin’s masterful To Live & Die in L.A.. Even without Wayne, Brannigan would still be a decent, humorous action flick with a great villain & hero, and a satisfying (albeit slow-moving) plot. Wayne’s hard-drinking, gun-toting supercop who calls everyone within earshot “Partner” is 1000% more cowboy than he is Chicago detective, but his performance is still what makes the movie special instead of merely decent. I’m far from a Western fanatic, so this oddly humorous & wildly violent action pic ended up being my favorite performance I’ve ever seen from Wayne. It’s easy to see why my grandfather holds it in such high regard despite it being far outside headlining star’s wheelhouse & being generally regarded as trash.

-Brandon Ledet

The Hateful Eight (2015)

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fourstar

One of the first things that will always come to mind with Quentin Tarantino’s latest film, The Hateful Eight, is the William Castle-esque pageantry of its release. Framed as an Old Hollywood-style Road Show, the film was released one week earlier than its digital-version wide release date as a 70mm film print (a strip twice as large as was standard when film prints were standard) complete with an overture, intermission, and a full-color playbill. The Hateful Eight Road Show was a three hour long experience. Purchasing tickets more than a week ahead of time I got the distinct feeling of when you’re anticipating a band you love coming to town instead of a film. To tell the truth, though, the Road Show wasn’t as flashy or as exciting as you would expect, not even as over-the-top as the Grindhouse gimmick attached to Tarantino’s Death Proof release. The overture & intermission were blank spaces accompanied by music. The “extra footage” was, presumably, a collection of extended exterior & detail shots that helped establish mood. Watching the movie unfold on projected film was a nice touch for an homage to old-fashioned Westerns, but it’s a detail that could be forgotten once you’re immersed in its story. The best part of the Road Show was not how it punched the film up & made it more exciting, but how it slowed the proceeding down & let it breathe.

At one point in The Hateful Eight, Samuel L. Jackson’s balding, ex-military bounty hunter says, “Not so fast. Let’s slow it down. Let’s slow it way down.” That seems to be the film’s M.O. in general. Tarantino is, of course, known to luxuriate in his own dialogue, but there is something particularly bare bones & talkative about The Hateful Eight. It’d say it’s his most patient & relaxed work yet, one that uses the Western format as a springboard for relying on limited locations & old-fashioned storytelling to propel the plot toward a blood-soaked finale. Depicting a (jokingly) self-described Bounty Hunter’s Picnic, the film follows the transport of a dangerous criminal (played by an especially feral Jennifer Jason Leigh) in the company of eight potentially dangerous men who are all snowed-in in in a small Wyoming cabin during a blizzard. Among them are Kurt Russell’s weathered bounty hunter, desperate to see her hang; Sam Jackson’s similarly-minded bounty hunter with his own payday to protect; Bruce Dern’s cantankerous Southern Rebel general who refuses to let go of the Civil War; Tim Roth’s “jolly good” rapscallion of a Brit; and the list goes on. As the plot unfolds it becomes apparent that one or more of the strange men are determined to set the prisoner free by leaving behind a trail of dead, which makes for a Western version of a mystery film like Clue or John Carpenter’s The Thing. Tarantino’s no stranger to genre mashups or liberal borrowing, but there’s a relaxed, unrushed pacing that started to emerge in his films sometime around Inglourious Basterds that’s getting its full due in The Hateful Eight.

Watching Tarantino’s films with the general public is always a little nerve-racking for me. The mashup of comedy & violence in his work builds a lot of nervous tension that leads to much-needed laughs, but I find a lot of audiences will laugh at disturbing moments designed to leave you more in abject horror instead of knee-slapping amusement. The Hateful Eight provides a wealth of opportunities for this discomfort. The audience around me laughed during shots of Jennifer Jason Leigh being beaten half to death by the men in charge of her transport. I found that more horrifying than amusing (despite her playing a cruel, heartless character herself), but Leigh’s immediate response to of spitting, shooting snot rockets, and licking up blood with a smirk were all very funny to me in a Jerri Blank kind of way and fell onto a silent room. Similarly, the copious amount of utterances of the word “nigger” in a post-Civil War America setting & an extended fireside tale of a rape & murder left me chilled to the rest of the room’s bizarre reactions. At least we could all agree on the excellent physical comedy gag of a door that wouldn’t stay latched? Tarantino knows exactly what he’s doing with this tension, something he plays up with decisions like ending the rape tale with a silent intermission or having characters puke blood in a grotesque practical effects display that alternates from funny to horrifying to funny to you get the picture.

So many details complicate the background & history of The Hateful Eight that it’s difficult to separate them from the film proper. The film’s screenplay was leaked online prior to production, so an infuriated Tarantino cancelled the film outright, then doubled back & staged a table reading before deciding to actually begin filming due to an overwhelmingly positive response. I mention this backstory because it bleeds into the film not only in its dialogue-heavy vibe, but also in the way Tarantino himself acts as a narrator, reading stage directions aloud during the film. The Thing vibes are inescapable in its snowed-in, no-one-can-be-trusted plot structure, but are also backed up & complicated by unused segments of Ennico Morricone’s score for John Carpenter’s The Thing. Then there’s the experience of the Road Show & the 70mm print, two features I cannot separate from the movie as a finished product. I also found myself thinking of its “Spend the holidays with someone you hate” tagline in the trailers, especially in Michael Madsen’s cowboy’s interrupted plans to spend Christmas with his mother & in a particularly uncomfortable rendition of “Silent Night”. It’s difficult to know when you’re enjoying The Hateful Eight or when you’re enjoying the experience & the lore of watching The Hateful Eight. It’s a confusingly engaging film in that way.

There are a few things that are remarkably clear about The Hateful Eight to me right now, though. It is an incredibly violent, misanthropic, lushly-photographed tale of a collection of vile ruffians murdering each other in such a flippant, nonchalant way that it leaves you with both nervous laughter and total disgust. In that way it’s classic Tarantino, so mileage may vary depending on how you already feel about his work. In this case, though, the pacing is slowed way down to allow the violence & the nervousness to soak in even deeper than before, leaving you with a particularly nasty, hateful feeling at the end credits.

-Brandon Ledet

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Parts I & II (2014, 2015)

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fourstar

I’ve enjoyed following the Hunger Games saga, both as a series of YA novels & and as a series of dystopian sci-fi film. It’s a pretty grim franchise for something a lot of people consider “kids’ stuff”, one that takes its forcing-to-children-to-fight-to-the-death-for-entertainment premise very seriously. Its haves-vs-have-nots dystopian world-building is nothing particularly new and can especially be seen telegraphed in properties like Battle Royale & The Running Man, but I think it’s a pretty great sci-fi intro for teens, especially refreshing for its strong female protagonist Katniss Everdeen (played by Jennifer Lawrence in the films, duh) & in the way its potentially-corrosive love triangle conflict is handled. One strange aspect for me has been how the film versions of the Hunger Games trilogy have resisted the law of diminishing returns. I felt that Suzanne Collins’ novels started at their strongest point, doing a great job of establishing an in-the-moment intensity in its abysmal future-world by dragging the audience along closely with Katniss’ experience navigating the Hunger Games. The quality dropped off a bit for me in the sequels, though, as the pacing seemed to get away from Collins and large swaths of summarizing overtook the focused intimacy of early scenes. The first movie was pretty great as well, doing a good job of capturing Katniss’ in-the-moment POV, but the film series subsequently seemed to improve from there, knowing exactly what to show & what to ignore in Collins’ sprawling narrative for maximum effect.

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Mockingjay – Part I might just be the pinnacle of the Hunger Games movies for me. General consensus has the franchise peaking with the second film, Catching Fire, but I’d say it’s at the very least a close call. the film’s themes of PTSD, regret, powerlessness, and the pressures of being the face of a revolution all hit me pretty hard. I’ve heard friends & family describe the film as boring, saying nothing happened, which is pretty surprising for a film with such a high bodycount & grandscale warfare, but I had a genuinely emotional reaction to its horrors, getting teary-eyed at the film’s hospital bombings, mass graves, and three-fingered solutes. Its murderers’ row of talented actors certainly didn’t hurt: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Julianne Moore, Jeffrey Wright, Natalie Dormer, and Donald Sutehrland are all at the top of their game here, which is really saying something. I also appreciated scenes of Jennifer Lawrence, who is an incredibly gifted actor, pretending to be an incredibly inept actor as Katniss fails miserably to produce convincing propaganda clips to rally support for a revolution. Mockingjay – Part I‘s riots, uprisings, strikes, and rescue missions were all a lot more satisfying to me than expected & Lawrence deserves a lot of credit for anchoring the film’s emotional resonance.

Mockingjay – Part II unfortunately didn’t hold up quite as well for me. I think the issue is that Collins’ summarizing had gotten out of control by the final book, so that the film version struggles to make individual scenes count for much as it chases an exponential momentum of a plot trying to wrap up a widespread political revolution, a small family’s struggle to remain a unit, and a strained, increasingly bitter love triangle in just two hours time. There were a few small moments to enjoy in the chaos — my favorite was when Katniss is called out for the “tacky romance drama” & cliché  “the one” specialness of her mythology at a wedding — but for the most part the films struggles to let its Big Moments properly breathe. Mocking Jay – Part II‘s killer C.H.U.D.s & third act Major Character Death both failed to land with full impact thanks to the runaway momentum of Collins’ plot & pacing. And because director Francis Lawrence did such a great job with Catching Fire & Mockingjay – Part I, I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt & suppose that the rushed nature of Mockingjay – Part II was far from his fault. Considering all of the ground that the novel covers (I’m struggling not to go long here just touching on it), Francis Lawrence  could’ve stretched Mockingjay into its own separate trilogy & given each underserved scene its own proper moment to shine.

I can’t imagine impatient fans, who groused about splitting the finale into two parts in the first place, would’ve been receptive to a Mockingjay – Part III,  though. If you consider that Francis Lawrence had no choice but to split the finale into two parts, I think he did a great job of adapting a difficult work of fiction for the screen. Mockingjay – Part I carries the emotional weight the film series as earned over the last few years & Mockingjay – Part II does the necessary work of bringing the whole thing to a close. The two halves function well together as a single, four-hour feature. One picks up exactly where the other leaves off & together they do a satisfactory job of carrying a work that’s spread pretty thin to a convincing conclusion. Although I’d contend that Part I is the far superior picture, they average out to something pretty great in the end, which fairly unusual for the third film in a sci-fi trilogy.

Bonus points: I’d like to take this opportunity to give kudos to the Hunger Games series for being the only action franchise I can think of where fashion as an artform plays a deeply integral part to the films’ central themes. I particularly liked a moment in Mockingjay where Katniss is told she’ll be “the best dressed rebel in history” & it’s a sentiment that actually means something significant. It’s a cool, distinguishing detail, if nothing else.

– Brandon Ledet

Creed (2015)

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fourstar

Creed is more of a sequel than a proper reboot, but writer-director Ryan Coogler is more than forgiven for not wanting to title his film Rocky VII: Creed. Following the lead of 2006’s succinctly titled Balboa, Creed keeps it simple in more than ways than just its name. It’s very much a by-the-numbers boxing movie, hitting every familiar beat you’d expect from the genre. After Southpaw‘s helpful example earlier this year of just how poorly that formula can be put to use, though, it’s downright miraculous just how effective Creed manages to be while never coloring outside the lines. As far as Stallone franchises go, I’m typically a much bigger Rambo fan (can’t help myself), but who doesn’t love a good underdog story? The pugilist protagonist (played by an all-grown-up The Wire vet Michael B. Jordan) of Creed‘s narrative may go through the motions of successes & failures the audience sees coming from miles away, but the movie is visceral enough in its brutal in-the-ring action & tender enough in its out-the-ring romance & familial strife that only the most jaded of audiences are likely to get through its runtime without once pumping a fist or shedding a tear before the end credits.

The illegitimate son of Apollo Creed, a father he never met & a boxing legend within the Rocky universe, Adonis Creed is more a child of the foster & juvenile correctional system than he is of the former Carl Weathers character. With that chip weighing heavily on his shoulder, Adonis attempts to walk the tightrope of earning a name for himself as a self-taught boxer while avoiding living his life in Apollo’s massive shadow. It’s hard to tell exactly how serious he is about ducking association with his father, though, since he adopts an elderly Rocky Balboa as his reluctant trainer & makeshift family. Balboa & Creed’s shared history is assimilated into the story expertly, made to feel real by adopting the format of high-end ESPN & HBO sports documentaries & talking heads forums. While Adonis is trying to balance his own career with his father’s legacy, he also struggles to stay connected with a mother figure who doesn’t want him to fight & falls hopelessly in love with a downstairs neighbor (played by an all-grown-up Veronica Mars vet Tessa Thompson) who records a less avant garde FKA twigs style of pop music in her bedroom in hopes of making a name for herself on her own terms.

There are Inspirational Training Montages galore in Creed, but only two proper bouts, a smart choice that not only allows the film’s familial & romantic bonds room to build, but also helps to establish Adonis as an in-over-his-head underdog. There are some fun, updating-the-franchise touches to the movie, such as a scene where a grandmotherly Sylvester Stallone perplexedly contemplates smart phones & “the cloud”, but the best thing Creed accomplishes is acknowledging the past while living firmly in the present. The two main bouts of the film are feats of pure cinematography & choreography, a brutally physical style of storytelling. There’s impressive imagery to be found elsewhere in the film’s smaller moments as well, such as a shot of Balboa & Adonis boxing duel punching bags in unison & a chilling scene where Adonis fights a projection of his dead father’s image. The sexual tension between Tessa Thompson & Michael B Jordon is also remarkably well played, both in the written dialogue & in the body language of the performances. The worst crime the film commits is occasionally functioning as a video form of Philadelphia tourism, an offense that’s more than excusable given that Balboa is now as much a part of the city’s DNA as cheesesteak & the Liberty Bell.

When Creed‘s production was first announced I’ll admit my initial reaction was a yawn & an eyeroll. Coogler’s film somehow completely turned me around on the idea of a non-Stallone-penned Rocky franchise living on in perpetuity, despite never truly deviating from the format. It’s a great example of how a strict genre film feel new & exciting when played with fully-committed earnestness. If Creed II ever makes it to a theater, I’m pretty much guaranteed to be there, which is  a sentiment I didn’t expect to leave the film with before the opening credits.

-Brandon Ledet

Movie of the Month: Class of 1999 (1989)

/ swampflix / 17 Comments

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Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before & we discuss it afterwards. This month Boomer made Britnee, Brandon and Erin watch Class of 1999 (1989).

Boomer: Class of 1999 is a strange little movie. For readers who haven’t had the pleasure, the film is set in the titular year, less than a full decade after its release date. In this “distant” future, inter-gang violence has become so overwhelming that the areas around high schools have become dystopian free fire zones, but these violent, Mad Maxian teenagers still submit to going to campus every day for some reason. The movie’s protagonist, Cody Culp (Bradley Gregg), is a former gangmember paroled and returned to school. Unbeknownst to the student body, the principal (Malcolm McDowell) has agreed to allow an obviously mad roboticist (Stacy Keach) to install three former military androids (Patrick Kilpatrick, John P. Ryan, and goddess on this earth Pam Grier), “reprogrammed” as educators, as new instructors. Culp tries to stay out of trouble, but his narrative arc is complicated by his romance with the principal’s daughter (Tracy Lind). The androids decide that the best way to create a stable educational environment is to rid the school of violence by creating a war between the two rival gangs, even drawing in Culp due to the false flag death of his brother (Joshua John Miller, who was also the annoying kid brother in Teen Witch). As you would expect, this culminates in the two gangs putting aside their differences to defeat the Terminator. I mean the teachers.

I love this movie. It’s a perfect encapsulation of worst case, slippery slope thinking with regards to teen violence, a misplaced jeremiad warning of dark days to come–won’t someone please, please think of the children? Bradley Gregg, star of many of my adolescent fantasies (and one of the dream warriors from Nightmare on Elm Street 3), parades around in an outfit that manages to be both utterly ridiculous and strangely sexy, featuring skin-tight leather pants emblazoned with the word “war” over and over again and a form-fitting tee under an oversized babydoll jacket. He has nothing on Keach, of course, who struts around in this film with a platinum ponytail and matching (painful looking) contact lenses, while still somehow managing to play this ludicrous role as straight as possible. Throw in the other stars in the cast, like Grier and McDowell, and it’s a surprise that this Terminator ripoff made barely half of its relatively low budget back in ticket sales.

The Keach/Culp dichotomy of seriousness and campiness is one of my favorite things about Class. On the one hand, the film features ridiculous gang warfare with oversized vehicles in one scene, followed by dark domestic trouble in the form of Angel and Cody’s mother’s truly frightening drug addiction in the next (before she completely disappears from the film). Somehow, this intermix works for me, although I can admit it probably shouldn’t. What do you think, Britnee? Is this tonal inconsistency a drawback, or a feature?

Britnee: I think the mix of the film’s outlandish features and serious moments made Class the unique and unforgettable film that it is. If anything, the serious moments of the film, such as the mother and son drug brawl, amplified the film’s campiness, and that’s always a good thing. When serious, dramatic situations are placed in such a ridiculous setting (post-apocalyptic 1999), they bring out this sick and twisted type of humor that makes us all think, “I really shouldn’t be laughing at this.” Being able to successfully pull off this type of humor and create such an uncomfortable mix of emotions is the greatest achievement that a film can accomplish. Unfortunately, Class did not have as many of those wonderful Lifetime movie-like moments as I hoped for, but I think that may be the only complaint I have about the film. It was that good.

Something that I just can’t stop thinking about from Class is the gang warfare between the Blackhearts and the Razorheads. The film’s street gangs are made out to seem like these awful groups of mixed-up teens who will never escape their miserable, violent lifestyle, but under their rough and tough exterior, they’re just a bunch of kids searching for a little bit of love and understanding. This really comes through when the Blackhearts and Razorheads stop killing each other and team up to fight the evil robotic teachers. The bad guys (Razorheads) join the not-as-bad guys (Blackhearts) and ultimately become the good guys. At this point, the gang lifestyle actually seems more acceptable and becomes a little appealing. I mean, if I was stuck in some crazy life-or-death situation where I was forced to join a gang, I would definitely let the Blackhearts jump me in. 80’s new wave couture, Nine Inch Nails dance parties with machine guns, and a gnarly black heart tattoo are enough to win me over.

Erin, what are your thoughts on the two opposing gangs joining forces to fight the evil robotic teachers? Was this one of the few heartwarming parts of the film? Or is it just another cheesy moment to add to the list?

Erin: I thoroughly enjoyed the Class of 1999 experience . . . but I’m not sure that I found the gangs joining forces to be terribly heartwarming.  I think that if they hadn’t been in an automatic-weapon fueled fire-fight, I might be with you.  Had they been engaged in an old fashioned fist-fight-style rumble, I think that I would be more sympathetic to their situation.  As it was, it seemed like the gang side of The Warriors and the terrorist robot side of The Terminator got together and forgot to bring a side helping of the humanity from The Outsiders (I’ll take 1980s movie title conventions for $500, Alex).

I think that Class of 1999 is trying to communicate a series of relationships to the viewers: the difference between the viewers and the post-apocalyptic kids,  the difference between the rival gangs, and the difference between all of the kids and the inhuman robots.  I think that the movie does a great job showing us the first relationship, but stumbles with the second two.  The gangland teens are pretty reprehensible, truly living up to the premise of the movie that youth gangs have turned American urban centers into warzones.  The movie makes a very clear break from reality with its set up and presentation of the its own world.

Cody is really the best glimmer of humanity out of the entire movie, in my opinion.  He’s the only example of a multi-dimensional character, with his dark side trying to survive in a gangland and his sweet side of falling in love with a certified Nice Girl.  We don’t get that multi-dimensionality from other members of the Blackhearts, much less from the punks in the Razorheads.  It’s really hard to root for any of them.  Perhaps Cody is supposed to stand out as the Last Sane Man?

In any case, it’s hard for me to see myself in the gang members as they make a stand against the Teachernators.  Yes, they’re scrappy kids coming together to take on psychotic military robots, but minutes earlier they were trying to kill each other with machine guns! On the other hand, the Roboteachers are out-of-their-minds inhuman, which is made evident early in the movie by their behaviors and later in the movie by their physical transformations into walking weapons.

What do you think, Brandon, does Class of 1999 struggle to humanize the human characters?  Is there a clear enough difference between the terrible actions taken by the gangs and the Teachbots?  Does the audience get an avatar to insert themselves into the movie, or are we just supposed to watch the carnage?

Brandon: Simply by the nature of what it’s trying to portray, I totally have to agree that all basic humanity has been stripped from this movie’s ultraviolent teens. Cartoonishly over-exaggerating adult fears about out of control young adult behavior, Class of 1999 poses a grim, larger than life portrait of teen rebellion that is far beyond anything you’d expect to see in any conceivable human being, young or not, even in a worst case scenario, ten years down the road cyberfuture. Yeah, teens can be perilously obsessive over getting their hands on drugs, beers, sex, and cool cars at times, but usually not in the way Class of 1999‘s teens mix those simple pleasures with guns, bombs, landmines, and missile launchers. The first half or so of the film plays like a particularly paranoid parent’s warped nightmare about what their teen is up to while they’re out with their bonehead friends. A great example of this is the warehouse concert scene. I’ve been to quite a few concerts in my time & while many may have involved industrial music dance parties, I can’t remember ever witnessing a gang beating in the moshpit, machine gun fire set off to the rhythm of the songs being played, or the venue being lit by carefully placed barrel fires. I’m sure that as my parents first let me out of the house to experience live music for the first time, however, their worst fears of what was going on weren’t too far off from that image.

The trick here is that Class of 1999 is smart to spoof both sides of the teen rebellion coin. Because teens are perceived as such violent, out of control animals, authority figures take an automatically adversarial position against them. Late in the film when Principal Malcom McDowell complains about his army of roboteachers, saying, “They’re waging war with my students!”, he’s met with the response, “Isn’t that what all teachers do?” If the film indeed has any specific sort of point it’s trying to make & we’re not supposed to just, as Erin suggests, sit back & “watch the carnage”, I think it’s to be found somewhere in that exchange. Even if real life teens are as bad as portrayed in this film (they’re not), they’re still far more sympathetic than the (robotic) adults that brutally murder them by snapping their necks or forcefeeding them glass vials of superdrugs. There’s an oppressive, prison-like atmosphere in the film’s educational system (complete with “RESPECT”, “OBEY”, “LEARN” commands that could’ve been directly lifted from John Carpenter’s They Live) that feels like a direct indictment of privatized, militarized schooling that treats kids like violent threats instead of young, eager minds. The cyberfuturism of Class of 1999‘s killer robot “tactical education units” may not be readily recognizable in today’s flesh-bound educational units (public school teachers), but they do feel like a blown-up, exaggerated version of the way we systematically tend to treat children as a threat & a nuisance.

Boomer, how much do you think Class of 1999 is a movie of its time? Do you think that there’s a bit of historical, late 80s gang violence context here that would drastically change if there were to be a Class of 2025 released in 2015? Or would the same basic adult fears of teen rebellion & a privatized, militaristic educational system be eligible for lampooning today (with CGI bloodsplatter unfortunately subbed for the practical effects gore, of course)?

Boomer: One of the great truths about western culture is that each generation that reaches the level of becoming “the establishment” seeks out and pontificates about the fatal flaws in the generation that follows. This is nothing new; adults of today are “concerned” about the isolating effects of handheld devices, just as my parents were “concerned” about the isolating effects of the Discman, or their forebears were concerned about the invention of this thing or that thing, going back to concerns that the invention of the phonograph would lead to fewer people being interested in learning to play instruments. There are a lot of sociological and anthropological reasons for this, but most of it boils down to the universal constant that we will only get older, coupled with the fear of obsolescence and fear-mongering about “the youth,” and treating them, as Brandon notes, as a threat or nuisance.

The other major factor in the genesis of 1999 is that the late eighties and early nineties saw a very visible rise in gang violence, something that couldn’t simply be dismissed, so the news media had to address it. However, the “establishment” couldn’t acknowledge that disenfranchised people turn to crime because of systemic problems related to class and privilege, especially not when people were basically walking down the street accidentally poking others with their raging pro-wealth Reaganomics hard-ons. As a result, the majority of Americans, ignorant of the real causes of gang violence and its apparent meteoric rise, had nothing to cling to but their filtered and incorrect understanding of social problems, reinforced by the cyclical nature of youth-blaming.

What’s so interesting to me is how 1999 manages to be both an indictment of that mindset and the apotheosis of it at the same time, and, although I may be giving it too much credit here, I think that this is intentional. The darkness that permeates Culp’s world represents all the things that the parents of 1989 feared about the future, a horribly violent place where those nasty (scary) teenagers with their loud music and their dirty fingernails rule over a scorched suburbia because no one took a stand against teenage skullduggery when there was a chance! But it also holds up a mirror to that absurd frame of mind, pointing out the flaws in that kind of fearful, conservative nightmare by showing how unrealistic and silly such a future would be. Also, there are killer robots, because who doesn’t love that? And, if your kids are running around doing drugs, they probably learned it from watching you, mom or dad!

So, the answer is “yes,” 1999 is a very much a product of its time and of the politico-cultural environment from which it sprung, and there would have to be significant updates to remake this movie, although I could see how it could be done in a couple of different ways, depending upon which of Joann and Cletus’s fears you wish to highlight and mock. Political correctness is often a good place for conservative muckrakers to stir up some passion: “In the future world of 2025, schools no longer teach facts, they teach feelings. They no longer teach science, they teach sensitivity. And they only teach the ‘corrected’ version of history.” And, like, instead of robot teachers, there’s an AI that seeks to “purge” students of their hopefulness or individuality or whatever by teaching them about all of American history, atrocity alongside progress, and by teaching them self-control and tolerance. Cody Culp would be a secret bigot who teaches his androgynous and sexless peers, long having been made soft of mind by those damn SJWs, to fight back against the machine of liberal indoctrination by being politically incorrect and proud, or whatever. To be honest, though, I don’t know that this would be recognized as a satirical interpretation of a conservative’s nightmare of the future; it would be more likely to be seen as a prescient vision of a world to come, ruled by the “libtard.” Or maybe I’m just on a tangent; who knows.

The real truth is this: the way education is enforced in the west is not the best method for schooling, and we all pretty much know that. The priorities are all skewed, and the eight-hour, rigidly-structured schoolday that has been the model for a long time isn’t based on the best pedagogical or psychoeducational practices but on the model of a workday; it forcibly instills in children a willingness to accept the drudgeries of pyramid capitalism, essentially, rather than encouraging critical thought, technical acumen, interest in knowledge for its own sake, or any kind of prioritization of variety in educational forms. You can see that small changes are taking place today, but for the worse; as an educator, I toured a new charter school just a year or two ago that was filled with classrooms that didn’t look like classrooms. They looked like call centers. So even if Class of 2025 were to be made in the way that I poorly pitched above, a Republican nightmare of social justice gone mad, it would still be nothing like the schools of the future, just as my school in 1999 was not a war zone of apocalyptic proportions.

Britnee: What do you think about a Class of 2025? Does your conception of what Class of 1999‘s thesis was differ from mine, and if so, how do you think your interpretation would be updated for a contemporary audience?

Britnee: When watching Class of 1999, I did realize that there was a connection to the large amount of youth gang violence occurring around the time the film was released, but I really didn’t think much of it. I saw the film as being loads of stupid fun without much depth, but your perspective really got me thinking about the whole “youth-blaming” and “conservative nightmare” aspects that the film definitely illustrates. Loud music, fast cars, leather jackets, heavy eyeliner, and funky haircuts were a conservative parent’s nightmare in the late 80s/early 90s, and the teens in 1999 are an explosion of this stereotypical degenerate youth. The whole film actually reminds me of a lost Billy Idol music video. It’s just so “Rebel Yell.” These types of teens were going to cause the world to become a post-apocalyptic cesspool of crime, violence, and pure filth. Unfortunately, the world did not become that exciting by 1999. There were many changes that occurred within those short 10 years, but at the same time, much remained the same.

Now, to think of what my interpretation of 1999 would be for a contemporary audience. 1999 did play on the fear of what the future would be like for the youth of that time, and now it seems as though one of the biggest fears for today’s youth is the lack of importance placed on quality education. A modern 1999, or as Boomer stated, 2025, would deal with the absence of general education and the emphasis on some sort of super strict social class-based structure. Children will be sorted into military, white-collar, or blue-collar positions at birth, like in the movie Antz when newborn ants are assigned to be workers and soldiers. Who knew that such a horrible movie would be so insightful? Each group would have their separate type of school, but they would be more like training academies. Only the elite would receive a quality education, and they would use it to coerce obedience and conformity on the youth. Those that do not have elite status would live in squalor and have all sorts of chemicals in the air and water that dope them up, making them ultra submissive to authority. I feel as though the teen rebellion wouldn’t be as violent as one would expect. They would rely more on outsmarting the authority and only shooting them up from time to time instead of a constant machine gun blowout like in 1999. At this point, weapons would probably have lasers instead of bullets, so the battle scenes would be a little more on the calm side.

Erin, speaking of weapons, did you think that it was strange that the weapons in 1999 weren’t very futuristic? Come to think of it, not much was futuriscitc about this film that was set in the future. Is the budget to blame for this or is it something bigger?

Erin :  Britnee, someone remarked during our viewing of Class of 1999 “Oh no!  They didn’t invent cell phones in the future!” as two characters were forced into a situation with no way of contacting each other.

In some ways, yes, I think that budget has something to do with why the weapons and other parts of the film weren’t very futuristic.  Clearly, the bulk of the effects budget went to the Teachbots and their final set-chewing rampage.  Honestly, I think the bulk of the general budget may have gone to that last scene.

In other ways, I think that a few things inhibited Class of 1999‘s presentation of the future.  First of all, it could make logical sense that the teen gangs in the movie only have access to older, out of date technology and weapons. Teens in 1999 might have had pagers, but in my community were only on the cusp of common cellphone ownership.   Admittedly, this theory falls apart a little in the way that the administrators are not seen using futuristic technology either.

Secondly,  one of the difficulties of setting a movie in the near future is hitting the right pitch for technological advancement.  I think that the rapid development of computer and internet culture, where even impoverished  families have internet access and at least one computer, and the ubiquity of personal electronics such PDAs and cellphones might have been impossible to see from late 1980s.  From where we stand, it seems obvious and inevitable that the future would look like it does (or did, in 1999).  For the writers and audiences at the time, that might have seemed as outlandish as Star Trek’s communicators and tricorders.

And thirdly (and most likely, I think), placing Class of 1999 in the near future is a nice way to hand wave away the complete ridiculousness of the world that the movie inhabits.  The future setting means that the filmmakers have to take much less responsibility for portraying any kind of real life anything, from the physical sets to the interactions of the characters.  Honestly, I think that’s a sloppy use of what can be an effective story-telling tool.  Science Fiction as a genre is also used as a means of giving us the distance needed from reality to discuss difficult issues.  By setting Class of 1999 in the future, the filmmakers were able to explore both the dual fear of out-of-control youth and out-of-control education institutions with removal from the actual educational landscape of 1989-90. (I’ll insert here that I think Class of 1999 is more a fantasy rather than a proper Science Fiction movie.)

The unreality of the movie not withstanding, there are some moments that resonated with me as “real”.  When Cody’s mother and brother fight over drugs, I was reminded that the late 80s had seen crack cocaine strike urban areas like an epidemic.  Many cities were still suffering from botched urban renewal plans and the hemorrhagic flow of residents to suburbs.

What do you think, Brandon, where do you see realism in this movie?  Is searching for reality even relevant?

Brandon: I feel like we’ve already run through a great deal of the film’s startling realism here: the cultural context of 80s gang violence (as portrayed in the media); the broken, unnecessarily adversarial education system; the shocking jolts of harrowing drug addiction & attempted sexual assault that break up the fun, etc. Something that does stand out to me, though, is the budding romantic relationship between our beloved teen protagonists Cody & Traci. Okay, it’s a little ridiculous that that the movie made time for a romantic subplot in the midst of battle droid educational units liberally murdering teenagers in the guise of discipline, but it’s also a somewhat believable ridiculousness. If you combine already heightened teenage libidos with the kind of tumultuous situations that naturally tend to bring people together (say, your gym teacher removing his arm to reveal a subdermal rocket launcher, for instance) it’s only logical that a romantic bond or two will arise. Thankfully, the one delivered here is accompanied with such great exchanges as Cody coolly responding to the question “You gonna call me or what?” with “Yeah. Both.” and hilariously teasing Traci to “Open up those suburban eyes” to the danger they’re facing. I’ll make no guesses as to how realistic that exact dialogue is, but the situation is at the very least more believable than an army of robotic teachers that get away with viciously spanking (not to mention disembowling & setting aflame) their students with out so much as a peep from the PTA.

Lagniappe

Erin: The least believable part of this whole movie is that these kids are still showing up for school.  With the exception of Cody’s probation requirement, there is absolutely no reason for anyone to show up. Why?  Why are they there?

Britnee: Of all the strange yet amazing moments in Class of 1999, the one that I just can’t forget is when Mr. Hardin (John P. Ryan) exposes his claw machine hand for the first time. As he sinks his creepy claw into the skull of an unfortunate teen, he says one of the greatest lines in the film: “I love to mold young minds.” Those obnoxious arcade toy machines will never be the same!

Brandon: One of the oddest details in a movie where they’re in no short supply are the ordinary objects of a banana & glass of milk. Character actor Stacy Keach does an excellent job of chewing scenery as the evil “Megatech robotics specialist” Dr. Robert Forrest, who provides the technology for the evil teacherbots. He gets obvious perverse pleasure from watching his creations discipline their students (which is especially alarming during one particular robospanking), deriving even greater joy when their “discipline” escalates to murder, and he just generally looks like an evil lab rat that killed so many other lab rats that he was honorarily dubbed a scientist because people were afraid to put him down. What I love most about Dr. Forrest, who is an all around great villain, is that on top of these unwholesome characteristics, he seems to enjoy incongruously wholesome snacks. Watching someone so evil & so fake-looking casually chew on a banana & gulp a glass of milk is a hilarious, unsettling sight gag that beautifully complicates his character in a way that’s almost too good to have been scripted. I like to imagine that Keach came up with his own onscreen snack regimen himself, insisting on enjoying his milk & his banana (surely obtained from craft services) on camera in order to give his character a whole other layer of perversity. No matter whose idea it was, though, it totally worked & after the movie I ended up thinking just as much about those snacks as I did about the film’s roboviolence, which is really saying something.

Boomer: The DVD for this movie is as light on special features as you would expect for a niche-but-not-quite-cult classic film such as this, but it amuses me that the DVD cover foregoes the Terminator-esque cover of the VHS in favor of an image that looks like Shaq in Steel. Almost every trailer on the disc, however, is for some film that echoes Terminator in some way, however, which is good enough. Also, nothing tells you more about the film-makers’ misconception of the teaching profession than Traci’s comment that women never buy just a sexy bra or pair of panties, that they treat themselves. Because teachers make soooo much money with which to treat themselves, am I right? That’s why I’m still a teacher–no, wait, I quit because even working a second job didn’t net enough to get by on. Sorry, Traci, not all of our academically employed fathers are getting grant money from crazed scientists.

Upcoming Movies of the Month
December: Brandon presents The Independent (2000)
January: The Best of 2015

-The Swampflix Crew