reviews

Jurassic World (2015)

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fourstar
After raking in a total of $524.4 million its opening weekend, Jurassic World broke box office records and took the world by storm. Everyone has seen it, wants to see it, and they just can’t stop talking about it. The hype is really similar to the release of Jurassic Park back in 1993. I was a wee one at the time, but I remember everyone going bananas over it because it was going to be the biggest dinosaur movie of all time. Prior to its release, most films about dinosaurs were just silly (Prehysteria!, The Land That Time Forgot, Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend, etc.). The excitement died down for the second film, The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), and the third film, Jurassic Park III wasn’t as big of a hit either. I seriously thought that the third film was going to be the end of the Jurassic Park franchise because trilogies are the way to go nowadays. After hearing about the fourth installment, I spent a good amount of time searching for updates, watching the film’s trailers, and perusing down the toy aisles admiring the movie’s many action figures. I was more than ready to have this film blow my mind.

Dr. John Hammond’s dream of creating a dinosaur theme park finally comes true in Jurassic World, and it’s absolutely phenomenal. The attractions include a Tyrannosaurus rex feeding, a Mosasaurus feeding & splashdown, and a futuristic sphere that allows park goers to roll alongside a variety of herbivores. Even though Jurassic World is the king of all theme parks, its attendance rate begins to decline. In order to bring more people into the park, a group of geneticists create genetically modified female dinosaur called the Indominus rex. This dino-hybrid was beyond rad. She was really smart, terrifying, and a total killing machine. The CGI effects for this dino as well as all the others were some of the best that I’ve ever seen. There’s a great scene where a large amount of Pterosaurs break out of their aviary and attack the visitors (this is when Jimmy Buffet has his cameo), and the effects are gorgeous. It’s easily one of my favorite parts of the movie.

Prior to this chaos, the Indominus escapes from her caged environment (surprise, surprise), and she just starts killing everything in her sight. The film’s female lead, Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard), is the park’s operations manager, and her two distanced nephews are visiting her. The two boys end up venturing out too far at the same time the Indominus escapes. She panics and gets the assistance of the park’s raptor trainer, Owen (Chris Pratt), to locate her nephews. Pratt was great as Owen, the motorcycle-riding raptor man. I really loved how Owen was the Alpha of the raptor crew and had spiritual connection with them so much so that I had way too many crying moments for a movie about a dinosaur theme park.

While the film was an amazing action-packed thrill ride, it did have its share of flaws. The worst part of the film was the portrayal of the female lead, Claire. She’s a stereotypical ball-busting, cold-hearted career woman that’s clueless when it comes to taking care of kids. Well, because women can’t be career driven and compassionate at the same time. That would be crazy! I can’t help but compare Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) from Jurassic Park to Claire because the two were leading female actors in Jurassic Park movies, but the difference between the two is night and day. Sattler was intelligent, considerate, and a complete equal to the film’s male lead, Dr. Grant; however, in Jurassic World, Claire runs around in heels depending on the protection and guidance of Owen. What’s so sad about this is that there is a 22 year difference between the two films. I think at this point, everyone is tired of seeing stereotypical, unrealistic female characters in film, and it’s a shame that such an impactful and monumental movie failed to be forward-thinking.

Jurassic World is definitely worth seeing in theaters, and it’s definitely worth the couple of extra bucks for the 3-D experience. The predictable plot and characters aren’t the main selling point for this movie. It’s all about the dinosaurs! They’re the ones that steal the show and make the film’s 2 hour length seem like a few minutes.

-Britnee Lombas

Inside Out (2015)

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fourstar

I’m not usually one to give in to the charms of computer animation, which usually makes me feel like an outsider on a lot of Pixar’s output. The almost-universally loved animation studio has been running strong since the release of the first Toy Story movie in 1995. That means that after 20 years of animated feature dominance, Pixar now has two generations of children & young adults that have only known a life where the studio is on top, churning out the most well-received children’s media on the market. As a devotee to traditional, hand-drawn animation I sometimes miss out on the studio’s milestones, harboring lukewarm-at-best feelings about beloved titles like The Incredibles & WALL-E, having no patience at all for more dire properties like Brave & Finding Nemo (sorry, y’all), and having to shamefully admit that I haven’t even yet bothered with a few titles that I might actually like once I give them a chance, such as Up & Ratatouille. When the studio is on point it establishes a really vital connection with an enormous, diverse audience, which is a super cool thing for an animation studio to be able to accomplish these days, but I often feel like I miss out on that connection due to personal (and honestly, superficial) tastes regarding the movies’ visual format.

I don’t mean to point out this personal preference to distance myself from the Pixar Is Always Incredible, No Exceptions crowd, but just to provide context for my experience with their fifteenth feature film to date, Inside Out. I approached Inside Out with extreme caution due to reservations I had regarding the film’s ads. The general look of the movie had very little appeal for me (still does) and there were enough eyeroll-worthy moments regarding the difference between the sexes (yawn) that I had very little interest in the film. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that despite those reservations, I still found Inside Out remarkably touching & well-considered. Very similar in intent & execution to the 2007 short Anna & The Moods, Inside Out is a sincerely heartwarming look at the way a child’s psyche is remapped as they transition into young adulthood. While it did lose me on some of the traditional adventure plot trappings Pixar films tend to fall into, its idiosyncratic world-building that depicts exactly how a brain works & develops is more or less unmatched in media of its caliber.

The story Inside Out tells is bifurcated between the internal & the external (or the inside & the outside if you want to stick to the terminology of the title). As the protagonist Riley, an eleven year old hockey enthusiast anxious about her recent move to San Francisco, struggles to communicate about her newfound anxiety with her parents, her inner emotions scramble to take charge of the unexpected changes in her life in a productive way. The five emotions depicted in Inside Out (Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger) are expertly personified by a perfect cast of voice actors (Amy Poehler, Phyllis Smith, Bill Hader, Mindy Kaling, and Lewis Black, respectively) who bring abstract concepts to life in a vivid, affecting way that everyone from young children to cynical adults can likely connect with. Making the abstract concrete & visible is exactly what Inside Out excels at as it methodically explains why sadness is a necessary emotion that should not be ignored in favor of unbridled joy. Until the still-developing Riley learns to accept sadness as an essential part of her emotional processing, she finds it extremely difficult to adjust to her new surroundings. It’s an incredibly important concept for young children to learn & Inside Out does a great job of framing the revelation in a traditional adventure story that is likely to be able to hold onto young attention spans for its entire 94min running time.

As stated, I didn’t completely buy everything Inside Out was selling. There’s no doubt in my mind that the film would’ve been more visually engaging if it were animated by hand, the adventure plot didn’t always metaphorically make sense, and there were uncomfortably gendered glimpses into minds outside of Riley’s (for instance her father’s psyche is controlled by anger while her mother’s is ruled by sadness), etc. However, these all feel like minor quibbles in view of what the film does right. The way Inside Out visualizes abstract thoughts like memories, angst, imagination, acceptance, and abstract thought itself is incredibly intricate & well considered. Its central message of the importance of sadness in well-rounded emotional growth is not only admirable, but downright necessary for kids to experience. Even if I downright hated the film’s visual aesthetic (I didn’t; it was just okay), I’d still have to concede that its intent & its world-building were top notch in the context of children’s media. As I’ve (hopefully) made abundantly clear, I’m far from a Pixar expert, but I’m confident it’s safe to say it’s the best film the studio has produced in the last five years, making it their best of the decade so far.

-Brandon Ledet

Dope (2015)

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threehalfstar

If you’ve seen the ads for Dope, it’d be forgivable if you mistakenly assumed the film was set in the early 90s. Very much conscious of its use of that visual palette, Dope is smart to declare itself set in 2015 from the get go, opening the film with the protagonist Malcolm explaining to his mother how Bitcoins work. For every 90s-soaked skateboard, flat top hairdo, and A Tribe Called Quest music cue, Dope also features references to memes, smart phones, and online black markets, presumably so you don’t lose track of exactly when the film is set. The reason for all the 90s cultural markers is fairly straight-forward: it’s been long enough that the era has been deemed vintage cool, at least by the three high school geek main characters. Of course, since they were but young pups during the 90s, their understanding of the era is flimsy at best, as hilariously skewered by A$AP Rocky (making his acting debut here) within the film in his role as Dom, a drug dealer who sets the plot’s wheels in motion, in one of the movie’s more amusing & self-aware exchanges.

Dope is the coming-of-age story of three high school geeks who are used to pursuing good grades unexpectedly getting suckered into selling drugs. Set in a neighborhood called “The Bottoms”, a particularly rough area of Inglewood, CA, the protagonists are basically just trying to survive. Of course, because they are teenagers, they’re also trying to look cool & get laid, which complicates the task at hand at nearly every turn. Dope has a lot to say about racial identity, social inequality, and teen sexuality, but at its heart it’s really just a sweet story about three awkward high school students finding themselves having to grow up very quickly (due to a misplaced hand gun & an enormous bag of drugs). The movie doesn’t get everything right in the details (the trio’s “punk band” plays songs hilariously over-produced by Pharrell), but it’s mostly on point in capturing a very specific cultural subset that’s never received the big screen treatment before.

Watching Dope, I was reminded of my experience with Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, except with the manga & video game references swapped out for 90s hip-hop. I enjoyed the film, but like with Scott Pilgrim. I’m certain that a very specific target audience of younger folks are going to latch onto it much, much more enthusiastically than I ever could. There’s no doubt in my mind that this is going to be someone out there’s favorite film, if nothing else because they’ve never seen themselves represented on the screen before. Where I see a fairly funny, vibrantly shot high school movie with wonderfully eccentric moments & a killer soundtrack (the Pharrell songs excluded), I expect someone else will see The Greatest Movie of All Times Forever.  Even if that’s all the movie accomplishes, that’s still pretty dope.

-Brandon Ledet

Spy (2015)

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fourstar

The absurdist genre-spoof comedy that hit its apex with cult classics like ZAZ’s Airplane & Top Secret has sadly become a dying art in recent years. Titles like Not Another Disaster Movie & Scary Movie 19 have tarnished the genre’s cultural cachet and more or less reduced its target audience to twelve year old boys who are emotionally stunted even for twelve year old boys. There have been a couple great exceptions in the past decade that give me hope for the genre’s future, though. The Judd Apatow comedy Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, while posed as a spoof of the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line, was a brilliant take-down of the entire biopic genre. Walk Hard somehow included every single biopic cliché & American genre of music into one silly, but intellectually extensive spoof. The Will Forte vehicle MacGruber did more or less the same thing with the violent action flick genre that saw its heyday in the 1980s. The difference is that instead of limiting itself to brilliant send-ups of films like Commando & Cobra, MacGruber went a step further and created one of the most vile, pathetic protagonists in all of cinema. Both Walk Hard & MacGruber breathed fresh air into the genre-spoof, but they’re just two titles in a sea of bad examples.

After a single viewing of Spy at the theater, I’m already confident enough to include it along with Walk Hard & MacGruber on the list of the best spoof movies of the past decade. Sure, the James Bond international spy genre has been spoofed before in movies like Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, Casino Royale (1967), and Our Man Flint, but Spy distinguishes itself from its predecessors by feeling distinctly modern. There’s a self-aware, crass irreverence to the film that feels distinctly 2015. Although it’s riffing on an entirely different genre, Spy is very much in the vein of MacGruber more than it is in the very 90s Austin Powers. Besides the general crassness of its script & general improv-enhanced vibe of its sense of humor, Spy also continues MacGruber’s undermining of alpha male action movie types that turns the typical hero (this time as a frivolous side character hilariously played by Jason Statham as opposed to MacGruber’s central protagonist) into vile worms of the lowest order. As Statham’s misogynist prick brags to the main character that he is immune to 179 varieties of poison & can water-ski blindfolded, it’s easy to see how an exact MacGruber successor would’ve been born if he was the central character, but Spy is smart to leave him sidelined while the more morally-palatable, but just as crass Melissa McCarthy serves as a much more relatable audience surrogate.

McCarthy hit her creative peak for me last year with the goofy road trip comedy Tammy, which felt like a wonderful culmination of everything she’s been building towards since Paul Feig’s breakout comedy Bridesmaids. Feig, who also worked with McCarthy on the similarly crass buddy cop comedy The Heat, finds an entirely new kind of role for her to play in Spy. In Tammy, McCarthy was a complete mess, more raccoon than human in her thoughtless pursuit of laze-about surface pleasures. While I found that character incredibly charming, she was a far cry from the in-over-her-head every-woman McCarthy plays so well in Spy. There are flashes of Tammy’s feral nature in Spy, but they’re dialed back enough to allow McCarthy to shine though as a relatable human being. With Spy, Feig has not only created a modern classic in genre spoofery, but also helped to open a door for an incredibly talented comedic actress who’s more or less hit a typecasting wall she hasn’t been able to sidestep since her wonderful turn on Gilmore Girls nearly a decade ago. Let’s hope he can keep the productive streak going when he works with her on their fourth film in a row together, the all-female cast Ghostbusters reboot.

-Brandon Ledet

The Secret of Kells (2010)

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threehalfstar

I personally have a very rough time getting accustomed to modern animation’s transition into computer-animated territory. Every time I see an ad for a CG animation, even for positively-received features like the recent Pixar flick Inside Out, I tend to let out a pained groan. There’s a depth of artistry to hand-drawn animation that I just don’t believe translates to its computer generated counterpart. It may be curmudgeony of me to complain about the way things are shifting to the digital spectrum, but I just don’t connect to movies animated that way. It’s more of a matter of personal taste than a choice of critical conviction, but it still remains true.

The Irish animated feature The Secret of Kells did a great job of helping transition CG animation skeptics like myself into the digital realm. While the computer-animated aspects of the film were somewhat flat & uninteresting to me, they were also luxuriously fleshed out by intricate chalk line drawings & geometric framing that made the CGI more visually engaging. Like with classic story book illustrations, a lot of The Secret of Kells’ visual artistry lurks in its borders where expressionistic symbols & shapes are given space to flourish. In this way, the movie finds a fantastic middle ground between tradition and innovation, making the ancient palatable for young tastes while not losing sight of hopeless luddites like myself.

The story told in The Secret of Kells also looks back through Irish tradition & mythology for its inspiration, but rarely manages to match the heights of its visual accomplishments. It’s a simple tale about an impending Viking attack on a settlement run by Irish monks who must choose between protecting their people and preserving their own book-making traditions. Like with the animation, the story is most interesting when it allows itself to flow freely, musing about ancient spirits of the woods, reflecting on the constant struggle of man’s destruction of Nature, and a particularly fantastic tangent in which a house cat named Pangur Bán is transformed into an out-of-body spirit.

There’s an admirable quality to the film’s message about the balance between academia and “real” life, best captured in the exchange “You can’t find out everything from books, you know.” “I think I read that once,” but it’s truly the balance between CG and “real” animation where The Secret of Kells shines brightest. I suspect it was the technical aspects of the animation, not the film’s story, that earned it a nomination for a Best Animated Feature Oscar. Alas, it was a tough crowd to beat that year, since the other features nominated were Pixar’s Up (which won), Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mister Fox, Disney’s The Princess and the Frog, and Laika’s Coraline. Although The Secret of Kells may not have been the best of its peers in a particularly great year for animation, it did accomplish a balance between the old guard & the new that deserves its own accolades. It’s a compromise of forms I’d like to see explored a lot more often.

-Brandon Ledet

My Mistress (2015)

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three star
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One of the most unexpected genre revivals I’ve noticed recently is the return of the 90s style erotic thriller. From major releases like 50 Shades of Grey to trashier fare like The Boy Next Door, there seems to be a veritable resurgence of erotic thriller media. This might be a little disheartening to defenders of good taste & decency, but for cinematic trash dwellers like myself, it’s a godsend. Bring on the expensive-looking echoes of crap that used to play at 2am on Showtime & Cinemax, I say. Bring it on, ya garbage peddlers.

It’s with that attitude that I welcome, without a safe word even, the arrival of My Mistress to Netflix’s Recently Added stockpile. An Australian film that grapples with questions about grief, maternal love, and the therapeutic powers of BDSM play, My Mistress doesn’t quite match the campy heights of fare like The Boy Next Door, but it also doesn’t try to. Although its story about a dominatrix who becomes involved with her teenage neighbor sounds adventurous, the film mostly plays it safe. It’s at heart a pleasant, but low key melodrama about two people who’ve been badly hurt & find solace in each other’s company. This kind of melancholy ambition doesn’t do much for the film’s erotic thriller appeal, admittedly. If it were to be a true addition to the genre one of the two love birds would have to flip out and start threatening to murder the other, but that’s just not the kind of story told here.

That’s not to say that there aren’t trashy elements at play. My Mistress may be hinged on the devastating grief suffered by two lonely souls, but it knows exactly how tawdry the erotic elements of its BDSM subject are. While the movie never gets overly kinky outside a couple whippings, there’s enough leather bullet bras & doggy costumes to give the whole thing a campy undertone. Watching a teen boy try to seduce a grown woman by smoking cigarettes and playing tough with lines like “I’m bad. Really bad. Evil sometimes,” is the kind of playfulness the movie tries to get away with while still dealing full-on with the more tragic plot developments. There’s also some uncomfortable, Oedipal vibes in the contrast between the two central mother-son relationships that the film is smart not to push too hard, but it still adds an extra layer of tawdriness to the affair.

My Mistress is not likely to be a movie that’s going to change anyone’s life. At best, it might help you fill up an afternoon. Its worst fault might be that it somewhat plays into the typical BDSM Folks Just Need to Meet Someone Sweet to Lower Their Defenses triteness you usually encounter in these kinds of films, but that only adds to its trashy charms in some ways. It’s a pleasant movie that finds a way to have it both ways, playing with titillating 90s Skinemax erotica and exploring the sad nuance of romance & grief. I liked the balance it struck, even if it didn’t push its worst impulses into deliciously over-the-top JLo territory.

-Brandon Ledet

Top Five (2014)

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three star
Sometimes a single, ill-advised scene can destroy an entire movie-going experience. There’s such a moment in the (excuse the pun) back end of Chris Rock’s magnum opus Top Five that involves hot sauce, a tampon, and a butthole. Without getting any further into the particulars, the scene begins with moderately cringe-worthy views on bisexuality & heterosexual prostate play that then veer into vile, regressive, homophobic territory almost immediately. In a dumb Farrelly Brothers comedy from over a decade ago the scene might be somewhat excusable or at least easy to ignore. In 2015, however, it just sours what was otherwise the most impressive work of Rock’s career so far.

What hurts so much about Top Five’s brief foray into casual homophobia (besides the hot sauce) is that the movie that surrounds it is so smart & so funny. Even once the sting of the horrendous gay gag wears off, there’s still an underlying sense of “they really should’ve known better” hanging in the air.  The rest of the film does a lot to cover up this ugly blemish, though. The movie’s single-day structure & use of flashbacks & interviews to piece together ideas about racial identity, sobriety, the nature of stand-up comedy, the highs & lows of fame, and the vulnerability of falling in love is a refreshing turn for a comedian whose talents have always been far too pronounced to be reduced to roles in dire films like Down to Earth & Grown Ups 2. Chris Rock wrote, directed, and headlined Top Five and you can really tell his heart was in this one. It’s the clearest his own voice has been outside of his stand-up specials & acclaimed sketch comedy show. That’s why it sucks so much that a single gag is its Achilles heel.

Of course, Rock has always been a button-pusher & there are bound to be people who can willfully overlook or even take pleasure in the regressive moment that soured the film for me. There’s certainly a lot to love. From the Hammy the Bear action-comedy spoofs to the beautiful image of Jerry Seinfeld making it rain inside of a NYC strip club, Top Five is packed to the gills with smart comedy writing and occasional gut-busting one-liners. The film itself even struggles with whether or not a movie’s surface pleasures can be overwhelmed by its political implications, supposing that “Sometimes a movie is just a movie,” a sentiment that is later countered with “It’s never just a movie.” Somehow, though, this level of self-awareness just makes its misstep hurt even worse.

I liked a lot of Top Five. The chemistry between Rock & co-star Rosario Dawson was lovely, the script was both intricate & refreshingly loose, the meta-text of Rock’s protagonist’s struggle with art & entertainment was on-point, the sequence where Rock’s protagonist bottoms out in Houston was gleefully dark, etc. It’s just a shame that a two minute sequence was enough to knock the whole thing down from Fantastic! to Pretty Okay for me. I guess I ended up siding with the “It’s never just a movie.” argument, a position I’m honestly not used to taking. It’s just difficult to ignore a fault so stupid in a film this smart. Also, after a long life of unhealthy Southern living, I’ve been accustomed to hot sauce being a trustworthy companion, a best friend, a culinary guiding light. It’s never been used to burn me so harshly before. That’s another offence worth getting chafed over, I assure you.

-Brandon Ledet

I Am Big Bird: The Caroll Spinney Story (2015)

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fourstar
Although he’s enjoyed a daily, masterful presence on television for over four decades now, Caroll Spinney is not a name or a face most people would recognize. With his quiet, reclusive demeanor & truly awful Prince Valiant haircut, Spinney hardly casts the image of a living legend, but his humbly dorky looks are entirely deceiving. As depicted in the profile documentary I Am Big Bird, it’s only when he transforms into the characters Big Bird & Oscar the Grouch on the children’s television program Sesame Street that Spinney’s true, wonderful self comes to light. There’s something magical hidden in those gigantic, yellow & tiny, green costumes that release Spinney’s inner child (& hopeless grump) and allow him to be himself in an extroverted way that he cannot even attempt out of costume. Part of what makes Jim Henson’s muppets so special in comparison to other puppet media is that they legitimately feel like real people. What’s special about Spinney’s relationship with the muppets he operates is that they also make him feel like a real person.

Instead of solely asking the I Was There, Man types in Spinney’s life to talk about how great he is, I Am Big Bird also digs into exactly why its subject is so hermetic. Since his dedication to puppetry dates back to his formative years and his first name happens to be Caroll, Spinney suffered abuse from his childhood peers in which he was subjected to homophobic slurs and asked questions like, “Oh Carroll, are you playing with your dolls?” The abuse persisted in his home life, where his doting mother could do little to compensate for the explosive, violent treatment he received from a father who also disapproved of his artistry. As an adult, Spinney continued to struggle to connect with others. On the Sesame Street set he felt like an outsider, struggling to connect with Jim Henson as a friend & a equal, because of his overwhelming sense of awe that tinged their relationship (can’t blame him there). When he had to deal with romantic, self-worth, and suicidal crises on the set, he had essentially no one close to turn to and would sometimes weep while wearing the Big Bird suit, a thought that will haunt me forever. Today, Spinney is a happily married man who’s proud of his life’s work and the legend he will leave behind, but it was not an easy journey for him. In countless ways, Big Bird & Oscar saved his life.

Although it’s Spinney’s emotional turmoil that anchors I Am Big Bird, the documentary also makes time to deliver a lot of behind-the-scenes information on Big Bird’s & Sesame Street’s history. There’s some insight into how Spinney operates the suit, who will take the reins once he retires, and anecdotes about the feature films & live tours of the show’s past. When Spinney was young he wanted to do something “important” with puppets and it’s a miracle that he found a home on Sesame Street, posed here as a researched educational experiment that has no doubt changed countless lives for the better since its premier in the idealist times of 1969. The story of Caroll Spinney’s career as Big Bird & Oscar the Grouch is extensive & populated with big personalities like Jim Henson’s & Frank Oz’s, but what I enjoyed most about I Am Big Bird is that it looks past the typical Wikipedia bullet points a lot of profile docs would stick to. It instead digs deeper to expose a very sensitive soul the world usually doesn’t get privy to under all of that green & yellow felt & feathers.

-Brandon Ledet

 

Hits (2015)

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twostar

Earlier this year, when I was complaining about the Academy Awards’ most recent Best Picture winner (Birdman), as people often do, I said “Pitch black misanthropy has worked for comedies like Happiness & Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in the past, but those movies are also, you know, funny. When a film hates all of humanity and only roughly 20% of its jokes land, it’s a remarkably dire experience. Just ask That’s My Boy or Nothing but Trouble. […] If you’re going to believe yourself to be above everyone & everything, you probably should at least succeed in the most basic requirements of your genre.” I still believe that to be true, but my resolve on the subject was somewhat tested by cult comedian David Cross’ directorial debut Hits. Hits was just as misanthropic as Birdman, lashing out at so many different kinds of people that there was seemingly no one left that it didn’t hate, but it was at least occasionally funny, something I didn’t find while watching Birdman. I’m not sure how to consolidate those two reactions & the resulting experience was more discomfort than anything.

“Based on a true story that hasn’t happened yet,” Hits employs a hugely talented cast (including Matt Walsh, David Koechner, Amy Sedaris, and Michael Cera) to attack basically everyone living in America. From right wing, small town yokels who drive big trucks & dream of being interviewed by Ellen Degeneris to mushy, liberal big city “citiots” who sell “feminist theory onesies” & artisanal cardboard, Hits hates everyone. It’s a scathing view of modern American culture where small town men are macho Tea Party dolts, big city liberals are effeminate hipsters, and women are obsessed with conceiving children or selling a sex tape as a means to become famous. Everything is scathing in Hits, but the film can be occasionally funny in its way. How can it not be? There’s too much comedic talent involved for all of the jokes to fall flat. It’s just hard to shake the feeling that the whole thing is hopelessly mean. For example, when a talentless white rapper is embarrassed by his peers (and then the world at large) on YouTube, the movie asks you to laugh. Instead, I felt bad for a teenager being bullied online. Maybe I’ve taken the anti-online bullying sentiment of The DUFF & Unfriended a little too close to heart. Or maybe I’m just not the bitter, hateful person Hits wants me to be.

I think the main problem with Hits’ hateful humor is that no one in the film ever seems even remotely like a real person. The idea of parodying modern Americans’ thirst for Internet fame could play well for black comedy, but when everything feels as fake and two dimensional as it does here, the idea just comes off as cheaply mean. What David Cross loses sight of in Hits is that every personality type depicted in the film, from bleeding heart liberals to secretly racist small town yokels, are actually real people. There’s no humanity in this hateful worldview . . . just hate. Sometimes its hate can be amusing, but without any sign that there’s anything worth being positive about in the world, and with the idea that everything is hopeless & cheap, Hits fails to mean much of anything. Instead, “like a wounded animal, it lashes out at every target within reach.” Even though it’s a lot less expensive & visually ambitious, Hits has what I’ll probably refer to as Birdman Syndrome from now on. The two films have very little in common structurally, but it’s easy to imagine them bitterly complaining to one another in a late night barroom about how the world has gone to shit. Hits just has the slight advantage of being the funnier of the vitriolic pair.

-Brandon Ledet

Apartment Troubles (2015)

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three star

Apartment Troubles is billed as a comedy, which makes sense in some ways. It certainly has a few cameos from comedians of note in it (specifically Jeffrey Tambor, Will Forte, and Megan Mullally). It’s got some typical indie comedy quirks, right down to the struggling artist profession of the protagonists & the CoCoRosie song on the soundtrack. It’s even got some great jokes from time to time, especially from Mullally, who is a hoot as a wealthy drunk who is really into gigantic wine glasses. On the other hand, it’s not an overwhelmingly funny movie, but more of a low-stakes drama that aims more for humorous melancholy than knee-slapping quips & gags. Apartment Troubles might be dressed up like a comedy, but it’s more quietly sad than anything.

The story begins with two NYC roommates confronted with eviction & the sudden death of a pet. As an aspiring actress & a visual artist with wealthy parents, the pair occupies a strange space between well-to-do & dead broke. These are people who can take a private jet to vacation in Los Angeles on a whim, but have to claim that they’re not eating because they’re “cleansing”, when the truth is they can’t afford food. While in LA, the two best friends start to bicker & rub each other the wrong way like an old married couple. At the beginning of the film they’re comfortable enough to ask for the shirt literally off each other’s backs (“Can I wear the shirt that you’re wearing?”), but by the end they’re sickened by each other’s mere presence (“If I feel your breath on my skin for one more minute, I’m going to vomit.”). It’s definitely easier to read this progression as a somber break-up story (between friends) than a riotous indie comedy.

In a void, Apartment Troubles is a pretty okay, low-key movie with some memorable performances in its fleeting Jeffrey Tambor, Will Forte, and Megan Mullally cameos. However it’s difficult not to draw comparisons to other emotionally-stunted NYC twentysomethings media that have been produced lately. If nothing else, I found myself wishing that I was watching Appropriate Behavior a second time instead. I realize this kind of direct comparison is completely unfair & it’s something I already said while reviewing the recent break-up drama X/Y, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Appropriate Behavior was something really special. Apartment Troubles is from the same funny-melancholy NYC break-up wheelhouse, but feels just okay at best. It’s the kind of film that’s pleasant, but destined for lazy afternoon Netflix viewing rather than the big accolades I’m hoping Appropriate Behavior garners.

-Brandon Ledet