reviews

Focus (2015)

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three star

There’s a strangely impersonal quality to Will Smith’s big screen work that makes his characters difficult to empathize with. It’s the same way that actors like Tom Cruise & John Travolta never disappear on the screen, but rather remain themselves in a new costume. Sometimes, this effect works okay for “Big Willie Style” Smith, like in his 90s heyday of Men in Black & Independence Day, where being a Big Movie Star was perfectly fine for the task at hand, but it’s failed to translate to more human roles like in The Pursuit of Happyness & Hancock, where it’s difficult to buy him as a real-life, down on his luck dude (with superpowers or not). It’s somewhat telling that most of the emotionally resonant work the actor’s put on film was on the Fresh Prince of Bell Air sitcom.

The film Focus is smart to acknowledge Smith’s detached, “Slick Willie” façade & put his false exterior to good use. Casting Will Smith as a smooth-talking con man is such a brilliant, blatantly obvious move that I honestly can’t believe no one’s ever done it before. Splitting most of its time between  filming beautiful people robbing marks & rubes in New Orleans & then doing more of the same in Buenos Aires, Focus is hardly an example of exceptional filmmaking, but rather a collection of genuinely fun slight-of-hand tricks meant to fool the audience into a comfortably entertained sense of calm only to occasionally pull the rug from under them in a smooth, but violent motion. Detailing the budding romance between a con man and a pickpocket, Focus is centered on two characters the audience can never fully trust enough to be invested in, but its individual shell games & parlor tricks are really what the movie’s selling and it’s really fun to play mark for its trickery (especially during a Superbowl sequence that’s so intricately goofy & deceitful that it alone makes you want to watch this breezily entertaining film a second time).

I shouldn’t have been too surprised to learn after the fact that Focus was written & directed by the same folks behind the black comedy I Love You, Phillip Morris (which really does deserve so much more love than it gets), since both films rely so heavily on tricking a gullible audience rather than winning their hearts. Focus is much less devious than Phillip Morris, though, and instead of aiming for black humor at every beat, it mostly just looks nice and takes you on a fun ride. This is far from the worst goal a film can achieve, of course, especially since it also put The Fresh Prince to his best use in well over a decade.

-Brandon Ledet

Magic Mike XXL (2015)

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fourhalfstar

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I’ve long considered pro wrestling to be the hyper-masculine equivalent to the way femininity is vamped up in drag performances. Magic Mike XXL poses that male entertainment (read: male stripping) fills that role instead. As represented on the screen here, it’s a solidly convincing argument. Early in the film male strippers & drag queens meet eye to eye in a small dive bar where the male entertainment crew from the first Magic Mike film participate in a voguing contest hosted by a wonderful small-part drag queen MC named Ms Tori Snatch. This scene not only gives the world the wonderful gift of watching former pro wrestler/NWO member Kevin Nash attempt voguing (he at least gets the spirit down more than some of his buddies, even if he can’t move his lumbering body very well), but it also establishes a connection between drag & male entertainment as artforms. Although the strip routines at the big competition at the end of the movie feature a ludicrous amount of faux ejaculations & weightlifting human beings that you’re unlikely to see in a roadside drag show, that brand of cartoonishly gendered performance is not far from what Tori Snatch does for a living. It’s just at the opposite end of the spectrum.

This exploration of stripping as absurd gender performance is limited almost entirely to Magic Mike XXL‘s on-screen stripteases & the brief foray into voguing (although Channing Tatum’s titular protagonist does reveal that his drag queen name would be Clitoria Labia), though, so what of the rest of the film? Besides a couple refreshingly casual nods to a few characters’ bisexuality & some vague philosophising about male entertainment’s role as female worship & sexual healing, the film doesn’t have all too much on its pretty little mind. The first Magic Mike film was an existential, melancholy look at the personal lives of male entertainers that had a lot of devious fun clashing their gloomy off-the-clock behavior with the over-the-top escapism they delivered on stage. Magic Mike XXL, by contrast, is pure escapism. The sequel ditches its predecessor’s despondent character study in favor of an aging-boy-band-goes-on-a-road-trip slapstick comedy. The opening of the film revisits a little of Mike’s downtrodden attempts to escape The Life, but once he rejoins the fold & starts dancing again the film is essentially a long list of road trip gags that all land beautifully (when they aren’t interrupted by the film’s hot & heavy strip teases).

True to the film’s boy band dynamic, its narrative focus mostly distinguishing the individual personalities of Mike’s crew of stripper buddies. There’s the pretty boy mystic, the aging giant with an artist’s heart, the boytoy who’s looking to shed his casual sex life in favor of a longterm relationship, etc., all for you to fawn over while they remove clothing from their shaved & oiled bodies. Magic Mike XXL only loses its spark when it strays from detailing the quirks of its all-growed-up boy band heart throbs & tries to find women for them to love. A lot of the heart of the first film was wrapped up in finding a budding romance for Mike, but the idea of repeating that process for the sequel isn’t exactly an enticing one. The love interest angle of XXL is treated like a necessary evil that the movie attempts to downplay at every turn. Mike’s potential partner is an unlikeable Ke$ha type who fancies herself an important artist too wrapped up in herself to engage with the oustide world in an interesting way. She’s self-absorbed, too young & too naive for Mike, and “not going through a boy phase right now” anyway, so her role as the generic Love Interest #2 is significantly downplayed, but it still feels like a waste of the movie’s time. Brief turns as potential love interests from Jada Pinkett Smith & Andie MacDowell (whose Georgian accent is so bad here that she uses the phrase “you guys” instead of “y’all”) fare a little better than Ke$ha the Self-Important Photographer, but they don’t make much of an impression either. The best XXL has to offer story-wise is as a goofy roadtrip movie about a ludicrous group of male entertainment buddies each finding themselves & bringing their true natures into their acts instead of emptily filling the Village People type of stripper roles like fireman in a thong, policeman in a thong, etc.

Beyond the road-trip story, which survives on the strength of its individual gags, Magic Mike XXL‘s greatest asset is its intense imagery. It’s totally understandable that a franchise about male strippers often gets overlooked for the quality of its cinematography, but it’s still a shame. Certain images (like a BDSM-themed strip tease set to Nine Inch Nail’s “Closer” & a surreal tour through Jada Pinkett Smith’s dream-logic sex mansion) are just as striking as anything you’d find in a well-crafted art film, but still feel comfortably at home in this over-sexed road-trip buddy comedy. Magic Mike XXL is an impressive melding of the high & low brow, engaging both in its wealth of comedic & over-sexed surface pleasures & in its intense visual palette & light philosophising on the nature of gender performance & sexual healing in male entertainment. It’s difficult to say whether or not it’s a better film than the first, but it’s undeniably more fun.

-Brandon Ledet

Terminator Genisys (2015)

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threehalfstar

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In the recent flood of reboots, remakes, reimaginings and good, old-fashioned sequels that have effectively taken over Hollywood, there’s been an occasional uproar about what these films are doing to the credibility of the films they’re resurrecting. A few rehashes of long-dead properties have been lauded as critical darlings (such as the fever dream action monster Mad Max: Fury Road), but a lot of them have been met with aploplectic rage, such as Paul Feig’s not-even-released-yet take on Ghostbusters. Part of what Feig is getting flack for is tampering with the original formula, trying his damnedest to give his reboot its own reason to exist, and being met with a resounding opposition that claims he’s “ruining their childhood.” It’s sort of a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t endeavor, creatively speaking, since studios are pouring so much money into these retreads instead of fresh material, but it’d also be entirely pointless to just remake the original film faithfully, except with temporal markers like smart phones & drone-operated cameras to provide modern context (like in the utterly useless Poltergeist remake).

Terminator Genisys has a fun time not only acknowledging the fact that reboots & sequels have a tendency to tarnish the memory of the films that came before them (according to a hypersensitive few), but it revels in the idea. Using the time travel paradox theme from the first couple films in the series, Genisys tinkers with & dismantles its predecessors in a dismissive, disrespectful way that feels alarmingly bold for a film that eventually amounts to a long string of chase scenes. The first hour of the film features a jumble of timelines that interact not only with the 1984 & 1991 stories told in The Terminator & T-2: Judgement Day, but also fleshes out some of the 2024 revolution, makes a pitstop in 1972 that changes the whole game of the first film, and sets up an entirely new Skynet timeline that needs to be dismantled in 2017. It’s a doozy of an opening sequence that features cheap, literal imitations of exact scenes from the earlier movies & repurposes them for its own ends, the implications of how it unravels the first two films be damned. I respect its moxy in this respect, even if the execution was far from flawless.

There’s a televised news report in Terminator Genisys that features the hilariously self-aware headline “Has Genisys gone too far?” This plays like a direct nod to how the film is not only disrespectful to its audience as Terminator fans, but also calls them out as a bunch of technology-obsessed dolts who would allow a computer program to end human existence as long as it promised to make their lives easier. The idea of a killer app that links all of the world’s smartphone technology into one conveniently vulnerable control is far from unique. At the very least, I’ve already seen that concept play out twice this year in Furious 7 & Avengers: Age of Ultron. It’s still interesting to see it tie into an action movie’s larger overriding idea that its own audience is worth disdain. There are so many shots of people emptily gazing into their smart phones as a doomsday scenario swirls around them that even Arnold Schwarzenegger’s give-the-people-what-they-want one-liners like “I’ll be back” feel like a dig at the audience’s expectations. It’s so weird to see a film both fulfil movie-goer’s desire to see an old scenario play out yet again & subvert that desire by tearing apart the timelines of the original films by making them irrelevant, or as Schwarzenegger’s cyborg says of himself in this film, obsolete.

Speaking of Arnold, he’s the only enjoyable member of the film’s cast, performing with a weary, but endearing charm that says both “I’m too old for this shit” & “This is all I know how to do”. As a lifelong fan, I’m delighted by the idea of Arnold stretching himself to try new things, but if that means more snoozers like Maggie instead of the one-liner-fueled killing machine performances like in Genisys & the surprisingly enjoyable The Last Stand, I’m also more than happy to just see him filling this role for the rest of his life. No one else in the cast makes much of an impression at all, which (along with a who-cares 2017 climax sequence) tampers my enthusiasm for the film a bit, but that’s okay too.

Look, this is a franchise that’s already been dragged through the mud. Its first two entries are undeniable classics, but Terminator 3 & worse yet, Salvation weren’t exactly memorable cinema. Although I admire Terminator Genisys‘ mission to go back in time & effectively murder its predecessors, it’s an impossible mission. No matter what, those movies still exist & they’re still great. You can revisit your un-ruined childhood anytime you want through Netflix or blu-Rays or murderous smart phone apps or whatever you like, really. They’re still there. We just now also have a serviceable sequel that jumbles the timelines of those films into a barely-coherent mess just to watch its audience squirm under the pressure. I happen to find that tactic pretty hilarious, even if it did have trouble sticking the landing.

-Brandon Ledet

The Overnight (2015)

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fourstar

Usually, filmmakers have a tendency to keep their dark comedy & their sex romps separate. Full-blown sex comedies are usually mindless entertainment more concerned with raunchy gags than existential contemplation & while a black comedy might lighten the mood with an occassional sexual diversion (last year’s sadistic Cheap Thrills comes to mind), it’s rare that sex is its main focus. Even the recent raunch fest Wetlands, which I absolutely loved, kept its dark streak separate from its hedonism, a difficult task for a movie mostly remembered for its ungodly volume of on-screen semen. There might be a reluctance in blending the sexual with the menacing both because it’s awkward to take sex seriously & because sexual menace is difficult to play for a laugh for reasons that should be more than obvious without explanation.

In The Overnight, we have a surprisingly successful homogeneous blend of the black comedy & the sex romp, one where both elements are fused together completely instead of played off each other for a contrasting effect. The movie strikes a consistently terrifying tone through its depiction of underhanded sexual coercion, but somehow never loses grasp of the sillier raunch tangents you’d expect in a typical sex comedy. The effect of this powerful combination is that the sex gags are twice as funny as they’d normally play, thanks to the way they relieve overbearing tension of the the film’s sexual menace. In a lot of ways The Overnight follows the typical party out of bounds story structure of classic black comedies like The Exterminating Angel & Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? where in-over-their-heads guests feel compelled to remain at a social function even though the mood has soured, but the four characters at the center of this particular party out of bounds & their surprising tenderness for each other are unique to the genre. It’s a very well-written example of a very familiar story that I have a huge soft-spot for.

Besides the deft balance & gradual escalation of the razor sharp script, The Overnight‘s strongest asset is its cast. Adam Scott & Taylor Schilling are fantastic as the befuddled North Westerners struggling to decide if their Los Angeles party hosts are just having a California-style good time or if they’re swingers trying to take their newfound friends to bed. Jason Schwartzman & Judith Godrèche steal the show as the film’s sexual menace, making both sly & overt sexual advances through maneuevers as simple as a hand on a knee and as ludicrous as an art studio packed with abstract paintings of buttholes. It’s difficult to decide through most of The Overnight whether the L.A. couple is taking advantage of their more uptight out-of-towners guests or if they’re apparent sweetness is genuine. The tension between those two competing readings is a great dynamic and both tones could be read in some of the film’s best scenes, like in a stoned, strobe-lit dance party or in a literal dick-measuring contest by the poolside. It’s a testament to the film’s effectiveness that what lingers in your mind after the credits is not the film’s individual sex gags, but rather the implications of the relationships that form between the film’s two central couples. It’s both an equally fun & terrifying experience, as well as a must-see for fans of Jason Schwartzman at his most mischievous.

-Brandon Ledet

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (2015)

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onestar

It’s been interesting to see lately how teen movies are shifting away from the raunchy, American Pie type of sex comedies that have been prevalent since the late 90s towards a more serious, “grown-up” sensibility that hasn’t been very popular since the 80s era of films like Say Anything . . . & The Breakfast Club (or anything by John Hughes, really). Newer films like Dope, White Bird in a Blizzard, and an endless list of John Green adaptations have all reached for a more emotionally resonant, less detached brand of teen media, all with varying degrees of success. The recent Sundance-favorite Me & Earl & the Dying Girl is painfully aware of this trend and attempts to both play along with & subvert serious teen movie earnestness. It fails on both counts. By pretending to be above the emotional vulnerability of John Green adaptations while dabbling in the very same overreaching narcissism & sentimentality, Me & Earl & The Dying Girl creates an all new kind of inflammatory teen movie monster, one with both unique & clichéd reasons to be derided.

If Me & Earl & The Dying Girl is trying to interact with its earnest teen cinema pedigree in any deliberate way, it’s at the very least echoing elements of the John Green cancer-romance drama The Fault in Our Stars. As opposed to the John Green aesthetic where Everything Means Everything & teens struggle with the overwhelming significance of everyday existence, Me & Earl & The Dying Girl  shrugs off the emotional weight of a teen dying of leukemia and proposes that nothing means anything at all. It’s not endearing. The film’s protagonist, the titular Me, drifts through life without any concern for anything outside himself. An all-star navel gazer, Me (often referred to as “Greg” for some reason) finds zero significance in any of life’s little ups or downs and tries to keep it all very casual, unless of course the subject at hand is himself, in which case it’s of the upmost importance. This could be an interesting character trait if the movie surrounding him didn’t have the exact same fascination with Me, despite the wide range of infinitely more fascinating characters surrounding him.

The level of self-absorption in Me & Earl & The Dying Girl (alternately titled Me, Me, Me & Me) is so out of control that the central conflict is not whether or not The Dying Girl survives leukemia, but whether or not Me gets to go to college. The least interesting character in this film gets the first, middle, and last word, steamrolling any possible character development outside himself with his overbearingly bland omnipresence. There’s a scene late in the film where Me discovers that his Dying Girl friend has an artistic side she neglected to express to him directly. According to Me’s (& the movie’s) logic this is because Dying Girl was intentionally keeping her artistry private. The truth is, of course, that Me never shut up about himself for two consecutive minutes, so Dying Girl never had a chance to get a word in edgewise. Along with Me’s depressed stoner dad, Dying Girl’s white wine enthusiast mother, the titties & Criterion Collection obsessed Earl of the title, and a selfless former bad boy history teacher, Dying Girl is just one of many fascinating characters that are shamefully allowed to fade into the background while Me blathers on about Me, Me, Me & Me. The best scene in the film (& one of Dying Girl’s most prized memories) is a glorious, but all too brief stretch where Me finally shuts up because he is high & eating a popsicle.

This Is The Part Where I Explain That The Movie Is Not Only Narratively Bankrupt, But Also Stylistically Horrendous. Me, Me, Me & Me is broken up by annoying chapter titles similar to the first sentence of this paragraph and that’s far from the only instance of its stylistic overreaching. The film mostly borrows from familiar visual sources like Wes Anderson & Michel Gondry, often deviating into stop motion animation & Be Kind Rewind-style “Sweded” versions of Criterion Collection films. One of the worst mistakes Me, Me, Me, & Me makes is constantly reminding you of better media you could be filling your time with: The 400 Blows, The Red Shoes, Modest Mouse, etc. The movie does find its own visual language & metaphorical exploration in objects like scissors, pillows, and hand-drawn, Criterion-themed DVD covers, but their significance amounts to little more than inside jokes. Most of what the film accomplishes visually has been done before, better & many times over.

Like when I saw b I of course got the nagging feeling that no matter how much enjoyment I could pull from this movie, there was going to be a very specific target audience who connected to it even more. The difference is that Dope was at the very least entertaining to an outsider, while this film will only be entertaining to Me and all the Me’s in the audience, whoever they are. All I can say at this point is that I didn’t particularly care whether or not Me got into college, which seemed to be the main point of the film, so I guess it was a failure overall & I very much look forward to never spending any more time or energy on Me in the future. Hats off to the other characters & members of the audience who have more patience for Me’s incessant pondering on the nature of Me. I just didn’t have it in me.

-Brandon Ledet

Ballet 422 (2015)

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threehalfstar

Although I don’t remember seeing the first 421 Ballet movies, I found the 422nd entry in the franchise to be remarkably accessible. Now that I’ve gotten that horrendously unfunny joke out of the way I can at least echo a similar sentiment in the way the documentary Ballet 422 indoctrinates outsiders into its tightly controlled world of professional dance. As if the film were a triple digits sequel for a franchise that’s been running strong since 1948 (when the New York City Ballet company where it’s set was established), the world it depicts is already well-established & lived-in. Instead of explaining the art of ballet as a whole, however, the film is smart to remain pinpoint-specific. This is not a film about ballet, but about the production of a specific ballet and that specificity allows it to reveal more about the artistry as a whole than broader strokes ever could.

Ballet 422 documents a world in which all of the participants are already on the same wavelength, communicating abstract ideas to each other almost wordlessly as they work together to create a new ballet. It’s strikingly intimate. The central subject is Justin Peck, a 25 year old dancer from the New York City Ballet’s Corps de Ballet (layman’s term: background dancers). Although Peck has been a dancer with the Corps for seven years, he’s still a relative youngster as far as choreographer goes (maybe? I’m guessing there; sounds young to me) and the film follows him as he pieces together the company’s 422nd production in just a few months’ time. There’s a mostly dialogue-free fly on the wall approach to documenting these few months, which is entirely appropriate for an art form that is so physical, so visually based. It’s a rare treat to actually watch the ballet culminate slowly on film without its machinations being described by needless voiceover. After Peck’s production hits the stage, he immediately returns to his secondary role in the Corps de Ballet. It’s an oddly sad, abstractly affecting moment that the film allows to remain open to your own interpretation.

Ballet 422 sidesteps interacting with ballet’s historical or critical significance as an art form & instead reduces the dance into its most basic elements: music & movement. There’s a little insight into the physical tax, the backstage primping, and the politics in the interactions between the dancers & musicians involved in the production being documented, but those moments are mostly fleeting. The real meat & potatoes of the film is when the dancers are talking shop without talking at all. There’s a physical communication at the heart of Ballet 422 that reveals a great deal about the physical communication of ballet itself. It’s fascinating stuff without being flashy or pedantic. Like the ballet documented in the film, Ballet 422 is simple, straight-forward, and effortlessly elegant.

-Brandon Ledet

Leprechaun: Origins (2014)

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onehalfstar

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It was difficult not to go into Leprechaun: Origins without very specific expectations. Given its pedigree as a WWE Studios horror film starring little person pro wrestler Hornswoggle as the titular leprechaun, a role once played by a wisecracking Warwick Davis, it’d be fair to assume you know everything about the film before you even watch it. If you follow the WWE on a somewhat regular basis you might know Hornswoggle as a sort of a walking punchline. The performer is less recognizable for the quality of his wrestling performances (like, say, El Torito) and more for being involved in some of the promotion’s all-time worst storylines, such as ones where he was revealed to be Vince McMahon’s illegitimate son & the Anonymous Raw General Manager. Thanks to this kind of groan-inducing little person humor that Hornswoggle’s usually used for, it’s even already easy to picture him in the leprechaun costume (or to just Google image search it) and just sit back waiting for the Warwick Davis-style quips to be plugged into the script.

I’ll give credit to WWE Studios for this: they most definitely subverted my expectations here, a rare feat for the movie studio. Instead of dressing Hornswoggle up like Warwick Davis & providing him a bunch of Freddy Krueger/Chucky style one-liners about he gold, Leprechaun: Origins gave him a full-bodied prosthetic makeover. The pro wrestler/human punchline was reconstructed to look & sound like a shaved burn victim gorilla that did little more than bite, hiss, scratch, and growl. It seems that I may have spoken too soon when I said that remakes like Poltergeist weren’t doing enough to update their ancestor’s formulas in a means to justify their own existence.

Leprechaun: Origins is a far cry from its actually-fun predecessors like Leprechaun 2: Back 2 tha Hood & Leprechaun 4: In Space, so it does at least sidestep criticisms of being a shameless retread. The problem is that instead of retreading ground already covered by the Leprechaun franchise in particular, Origins instead removed everything that was unique about it & simplified the formula to the point where it felt like a retread of every monster movie ever. In a lot of ways this crime is far worse than the sins of Poltergeist’s by-the-numbers mediocrity.

Outside its Irish setting & a throwaway one-liner about Lucky Charms, there’s absolutely nothing of note in this film to distinguish it from any other cabin in the woods horror film I can name. Even the hideous get-up they use to conceal Honswoggle is oddly downplayed, so that most of the monster’s screen time is through a first-person POV cam à la Pitch Black. I can’t believe I’m saying this but I would almost rather they had just dressed Hornswoggle up in the cliché leprechaun costume and have him tell a bunch of lame ass jokes for 90 min. At least there would be the small chance of the film being fun (or at the very least memorable).

-Brandon Ledet

Poltergeist (2015)

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ghost

twohalfstar

So far this year alone in sequels, reboots, and remakes I’ve seen Mad Max: Fury Road, Furious 7, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Insidious: Chapter 3, and Jurassic World. Even if I didn’t enjoy most of those movies (I did) I’d still understand the fatigue folks are feeling with the oversaturation of rehashed cinematic properties. Of all the reboots, remakes & sequels I’ve seen recently, though, none have felt quite as pointless as the recent Poltergeist rehashing. When considered on its own, the new Poltergeist is passable as a decent genre exercise, I guess. It just doesn’t add enough to the original film’s formula to justify its own existence. If it were just any haunted house film Poltergeist (2015) would’ve been just okay, but it’s pedigree as a remake burdens its mediocre charms with way too much to live up to.

I’m not saying that the original Poltergeist film is a perfect work or art that shouldn’t be touched by lesser life forms. It’s just that updating its exact story with a few isolated cultural markers like flat-screen televisions, drone-operated cameras, and reality television isn’t really the kind of creative motivation that screams necessity. Both films share a goofy, childlike approach to horror & find their creep-outs in unlikely places like trees, suburban neighborhoods, precocious children, and television static. It’s just much less effective the second time around, more than three decades letter, with just a few faces & fashions swapped out as a means of making it fresh again.

I’m not usually this down on the idea of rehashing old movies, but I found very little special about the Poltergeist remake. Sam Rockwell’s always-welcome presence is the sole exciting element in play here, but he does very little to liven up the grim proceedings that surround him. I didn’t hate the new Poltergeist. I didn’t particularly like it much either. It was just kinda there, dying for a reason to exist, built on the cursed grave of a film that came long before it. You could do worse for lazy afternoon viewing if the film ever pops up on TV or streaming and you’re not sure how to kill a couple hours, but that’s hardly high praise.

-Brandon Ledet

Hot Girls Wanted (2015)

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twohalfstar

When I reviewed the movie Kink, a fluff piece documentary about the BDSM porn site Kink.com, I faulted the film for being stubbornly one-sided. Kink presented such a positive, non-critical view of its subject that it played a lot more like a long-form advertisement than a proper documentary. The Rashida Jones-produced amateur porn documentary Hot Girls Wanted unfortunately repeats Kink’s cinematic sins, except from the other side of the fence. The entire movie plays like an 80min version of the “Shame! Shame! Shame!” scene that recently aired on Game of Thrones, offering a wholly negative view of amateur pornography as an industry. Granted, it certainly found a lot of grotesque, incisive business practices to publicly shame here, but it also suggests that there are people who have had positive experiences in the industry without exploring those threads of thought. It’s a deliberately one-sided issue documentary meant to influence the viewer’s opinions on the subject at hand instead of objectively presenting the facts. Like with a lot of films in that vein, Hot Girls Wanted is surprisingly affecting, admirable even, but not exactly an example of exceptional film-making.

Hot Girls Wanted is at least smart about keeping its subject concise. Instead of tackling the porn industry as a whole, it follows a group of six female roommates in Miami, FL who have been recruited to shoot amateur pornography. The girls are all white, recent high school graduates who enter the industry as a way of getting away from their controlled home lives. They’re recruited into the lifestyle by a 23 year old scumbag who purposefully manipulates young women through Craigslist ads into becoming “adult models”. The reason the industry has such a strong foothold in Miami is because California recently passed a law requiring all pornography shoots to include condoms. Once in Miami, these girls are convinced to have unprotected sex on camera for sizeable (but far from long-lasting) sums of money until they’re replaced by the next crop of fresh faces (usually less than a year down the line). The films’s strongest moments is when it allows the girls to speak for themselves.

It’s when Hot Girls Wanted strays from telling these six girls’ stories to attempt to make larger points about the culture that supports their decisions to enter porn that it fumbles the ball. Blaming influences like celebrity sex tapes, the popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey, and music videos from the likes of Nicki Minaj & Miley Cyrus is kind of a cheap pot shot that has little to do with the task at hand. In just the first few minutes of the film, it’s slyly suggested that selfies are a gateway drug to making amateur pornography and if I had rolled my eyes any harder I would’ve gone permanently blind. The goal of Hot Girls Wanted is extremely admirable. The negative creeps the film exposes are hauntingly predatory and their unsuspecting teen prey are more or less children that don’t know exactly what they’re getting into until it’s too late. It’s only when the film wavers a little from telling specific stories to trying to make a larger point about modern culture as a whole that it loses me completely.

Hot Girls Wanted also has a tendency to present a wholly negative view of the amateur porn industry and pursues only the avenues that support its viewpoint. For example, late in the film it’s suggested that some of the subjects have had positive experiences creating & distributing pornography on their own through webcam technology. It seems to me that that’s the kind of thing you might want to follow up on if you want to tell a complete story, instead of taking time to mock the Kardashians or the art of the selfie.  It’s completely understandable why Hot Girls Wanted would want to stick to the supporting evidence, since its entire goal is to change minds about an industry it believes to be exclusively poisonous. It’s just that as a film, this one-sided approach is just about as exciting as when Kink went in the exact opposite direction: a little, but not very.

-Brandon Ledet

Insidious: Chapter 3 (2015)

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ghost

three star

When saw Insidious: Chapter 3 at the theater, it just happened to be playing at the exact right time. I had two hours to kill & Insidious 3 was conveniently positioned to kill it for me. Having not seen the first two films in the franchise I had absolutely no idea what to expect outside its pedigree as a horror sequel. Since then, I’ve caught up with the entire trilogy & I’m surprised to admit that the third “chapter” has held up both as an appropriate entry point & my favorite film of the series so far.

A prequel to the events that take place in the first two “chapters”, Insidious: Chapter 3 is a straightforward, no frills ghost story. A haunted teenage girl starts to get dragged into the afterlife (known here as “The Further”) by a super creepy specter with a terrible attitude. Character actress Lin Shaye (who was absolutely terrifying as the overbearing mother in Detroit Rock City) is expertly employed here as a medium who tries to drag her back to the physical world before it’s too late. Straightforward genre fare has been the Insidious series’ forte since the beginning, but this is the most successful entry so far both in terms of how fun it is and how successfully creepy-scary it can be.

Although Insidious: Chapter 3 doesn’t bring all too much new to the table that wasn’t in the first two films, it’s hard to shake the feeling that it’s the most successful of the three. Its ghost looked cooler, the tension was built better, it was much goofier on the camp scale (without the icky crossdressing phobia of the second entry), it spent more quality time in “The Further” realm, etc. The basic components of the first two films have merely been switched around & dusted off a little here, but it still managed to be my favorite entry to date, a rare feat for a horror sequel these days.

-Brandon Ledet