Author Archives: Jay

The Showdown

After world domination by Furious 7 and The Avengers, a couple of palette-cleansers are hitting theatres this week: Mad Max: Fury Road, and Pitch Perfect 2. Still, sadly, not an original thought between them, but I have it on good authority that The Rock appears in neither, and that’s gotta count for something.

Pitch Perfect 2

I was a little late to the party seeing the first one. I kind of hate Anna Kendrick and her horse teeth and avoid her as much as I can (which is fine, we rarely attend the same parties – I like artisinal cocktails, and she prefers hay). However, my sisters sold this to me. At least two of them, and maybe even 3, saw it together, and I vividly remember them reenacting Rebel Wilson’s “mermaid dance” on Mom’s kitchen floor. There were a lot of giggles. There may have also been a lot of daiquiris, because there usually are if no one is pregnant, but for the last 4 years that’s been a big if.

For the second one I expect that Kendrick is back to her neighing, along with a stable full of girls for harmony, but Rebel Wilson is usually the lube that makes the whole thing bearable, and it just so happens that the babiest of my baby sisters is visiting me this weekend all the way from Charlottetown and I’m keen to keep the mermaid love alive.

Mad Max: Fury Road

I don’t think they purposefully set out to find the complete opposite to Pitch Perfect to compete with it this weekend, but I do think that’s exactly what happened. I can’t quite remember the first time I saw the trailer to this movie on the big screen but I think it nearly eclipsed whatever movie I was seeing at the time. I couldn’t even tell you if the movie looked good or bad, it just looked BANANAS. And plot? Bah! This looks as plotless as a nightmare and just as sinister.

So which one are you going to see?

The Cobbler

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Not a super duper movie, but for once it’s not Adam Sandler’s fault! He reins in his inner moron to give a modest but adequate performance. In Hebrew his name, Sandler, means cobbler so it’s fitting that he plays the Brooklyn shoe maker resentfully hanging on to a business his father owned and abandoned when he abruptly left his family.

One night Sandler stumbles on a secret hidden in the basement: if you mend shoes using an antique machine, you can become the shoes’ owners simply by wearing them. This is just the escape he was needing – to slip into someone else’s skin, live a more glamourous life, see the city or even just the neighbourhood from someone else’s eyes. This is where The Cobbler becomes Freaky Friday. The body swap schtick means that Method Man gets to do his meanest Adam Sandler impression, and mostly fails. Dan Stevens does passably better, but his time in the film is short.

At any rate, this is a pretty neat party trick that fails to develop into anything exciting or worthwhile. In fact, the results lack any imagination whatsoever. You kind of feel like the director dangled the carrot, and then put the carrot in his pocket and walked away. Critics on Rotten Tomato have it sitting at a limp 9% although he’s got his mother beat, and his lover too (Reese Witherspoon played his angelic mother in Little Nicky; her film Hot Pursuit’s currently at 7%. Kevin James, who played his pretend boyfriend in Chuck and Larry, is sitting at 6% for Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2). Audiences, however, are much more generous with middle of the road reviews, calling it “watchable,” “potentially charming” and “a slight step up from Adam Sandler’s recent comedies.” Hear that? That’s the sound of ringing endorsements!

A Veteran’s Christmas

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When Captain Grace Garland returns home from two tours of duty with the Marines, there’s no one at the airport to greet her, no poster board with her name on it, no half-wilted but well-intentioned bouquet of flowers, no weeping mother or horny husband or gleeful children, or even a welcome home lick from the dog who’s been missing her. And everyone who’s been away should be missed.

Driving herself home, she gets into a minor accident, and a sweet, sweet puppy named Justice finds and leads her to a nearby farm. Turns out, Grace is a dog lover, having worked with them in the canine unit of explosive detection and search and rescue in Afghanistan. So she knocks on the puppy’s door, and her owner is the handsome owner of some antibiotic cream. Grace is happy to spend a little extra time giving Justice belly rubs because she’s had to leave behind her dog, the verygoodboy named Christmas. The holidays are making her sad as they just remind her of her best four-legged friend.

Meanwhile, Grace’s owner Joe is the town’s judge, the kind of judge who commutes a teenager’s speeding ticket in exchange for a promise that he’ll go to college. It is all kinds of trite and eye-rolly. And Joe may be a judge, but he’s got some pretty crappy judgment, particularly as he tries to prevent Grace from leaving the very town he himself plans to leave. If he likes Grace, and we all know that’s pretty much baked into the premise, he’s got a weird way of showing it.

This holiday is nothing special, not even very noticeable. Perhaps if you’re wanting to pair Christmas romance with some good old fashioned law and order, you’re in luck? Does that sound desirable in any way? It’s a bit of a tough sell, but at least there’s cute doggies!

Hot Pursuit

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I’m having a hard time writing anything about this movie because it really didn’t make an impression. If you don’t have what it takes to be good, then at least have the decency to be bad, and mean it. This one just kind of meanders along the line of blandly okay when it’s not veering too close to annoying (or god forbid, racial caricature), but I did, in all honesty, stumble upon some genuine giggles along the way, so not without merit, but mostly meritless.

Actually, if you mention the title to almost anyone, the reply more than half the time is “Which one is that?” And that’s about all the review you need. It’s forgettable. It follows the formula HARD and colours within the lines even harder. Sean and I went for drinks before this movie, and when the waitress asked what we were seeing, she responded “Oh, the Cameron Diaz one with that Latino woman?”. Yup, that’s the one.

I wanted to like this movie; you want to like this movie; we all want to get on board. How often does a movie starring women get produced and directed by them as well? This one does, but instead of celebrating it we’re all just kind of looking at our shoelaces.

It’s awkward when a likeable star fails. Reese showed real comedic chops when she did Elle in Legally Blonde, or even better: Tracy Flick in Election. She has an Oscar and her own production company so what the heck is she doing saying yes to a barely mediocre script (a script trying to ride on the coat tails of barely mediocre The Heat) in a vaguely offensive movie?

Reese is charming, and even appears to be having fun, but Sofia Vergara isn’t quite up to the task. Poor woman only has one speed, and without the wit of Modern Family, it starts to feel like Latina parody rather than an actual character. I never got the appeal of Vergara. She looks like a drag queen to me, with everything dialed constantly up to 11. Opposite Reese it’s even more vulgar, and the one-notedness more glaring and irritating.

Hot Pursuit is entirely missable. Full steam ahead to Mad Max: Fury Road and please baby Cheesus let it be good.

Under the Skin (is Under Mine)

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Under the Skin is described as a science-fiction-horror-art film. I hardly know how to talk about Scarlett Johansson as this alien seductress but what I can’t help talking about is the thing that’s still haunting me three days later: the score.

It was composed by the brilliant Mica Levi (and produced by Peter Raeburn, who recommended her to director Jonathan Glazer). Mica primarily used the viola to write and record the music, deliberately seeking out the most “identifiably human” sounds the instrument could make. She

Insert creepy music here

then altered the pitch and sometimes the tempo of these sounds to “make it feel uncomfortable” which she accomplished with crazy amounts of success, I tell you what. It made me monumentally, UNCOUNTABLY uncomfortable.

Glazer had her writing music to express Johansson’s feelings as her character experiences things for the first time, with the music following and reflecting her in real time, so to speak – “What does it sound like to be on fire?” he asked of her, and oddly, she had an answer. Another scene where the alien Scarlett attempts to eat cake is a stand-out for me, but is actually accompanied solely be the normal clatter of a popular family diner. The stark absence of scoring is as jarring as the creepy, otherworldly music can be.

The greasy, sinister sound of the viola is accompanied by percussion whenever a new man (victim?) follows Scarlett into the abyss. This music is unrelenting and aggressive, and it repeats with each new conquest. In an article for The Guardian, Levi wrote: “Some parts are intended to

be quite difficult. If your life force is being distilled by an alien, it’s not necessarily going to sound very nice. It’s supposed to be physical, alarming, hot.” Well, I’ll give her alarming. And unnerving. The sound is experimental, but at times she can get a whole orchestra in on it and it gives you the shivers.

Pitchfork wrote that “the strings sometimes resemble nails going down a universe-sized chalkboard, screaming with a Legeti-like sense of horror.” There’s nothing hummable or toe-tappable in this soundtrack, but it’s filled with innovative sounds that your body reacts to on a visceral, immediate level, leaving your mind racing to catch up.

I still can’t get those strings out of my head. They contribute to an audio-visual experience that’s unequal parts tension, perversion, anticipation, anxiety, and a big ole dose of the willies. The willies! Oh man, tonally and aesthetically this movie is disturbing. I’m disturbed, guys. There’s no going back.

Reel Quick Movie Reviews

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Seventh Son – Saw this one unintentionally at the drive-in. A rare misstep for Julianne Moore, and Jeff Bridges seems to have just wandered in accidentally. Moore is artfully costumed but as Sean put it “the movie wasn’t very interesting and there weren’t any cool parts.” Three days were not enough between seeing Alicia Vikander in the well-executed Ex-Machina and this poop machine.

Diplomatie – A historical drama that depicts the relationship between Dietrich von Choltitz (Niels Arestrup), the German military governor of occupied Paris, and Swedish consul-general Raoul Nordling (Andre Dussollier). The acting is superb but it’s 84 long minutes of two men talking in an office (please don’t blow up Paris – but I must – well we’d rather you didn’t – but really I must) and I wasn’t that into it.

Jupiter Ascending – They weren’t joking when they said this one was bad. It’s bad. It feels more like a Saturday morning cartoon, Eddie Redmayne makes an ass out of himself giving a weird, whispered delivery, and though at times strikingly beautiful, the CGI overload mostly falls flat. But good news for Matt: apparently if you’ve never been stung by a bee, it’s because they recognize royalty.

Escobar: Paradise Lost – A young Canadian (Josh Hutcherson) goes to Columbia to follow his dreams of surf and sun and ends up meeting the love of his life, Maria – and then meets her uncle Pablo (Benicio Del Toro). You can imagine that things don’t go particularly well for him because it turns out drug lords with political ambitions aren’t overly loyal. Makes you wish Del Toro was in a true Pablo biopic, and not some movie filtered through the eyes of a white boy.

Ex-Machina: How to Expertly Avoid Reviewing a Movie

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So last week, the Assholes enjoyed a late lunch on a sunny patio, some margaritas as we planned a future trip to California, and a movie that we all admitted to thoroughly enjoying.

Ex-Machina is a damn fine piece of cinema that we all came away from chittering about like we’d been starved of good film-making for centuries (and it being Avenger week, I guess it did kind of feel that way). And then we all promptly avoided writing about it.

Now why is that? Probably because I’m not interested in rehashing plot. I am, however, frothing to talk about what happens, really happens. So I’m writing two posts. This one, spoiler-free, for those of you who haven’t seen it yet: Go see it. It’s about a beautiful robot who’s (artificially?) intelligent and has a sporting vagina. How can you resist that? Answer: you can’t. See it immediately, and then come back to discuss.

And for those of you who have seen it, please follow this link to the real meat and potatoes, where we can finally get all those glorious WHAT THE FUCKS off our chests. Sound good? See you there.

Jay

Ex-Machina: The Spoiler-Filled Discussion

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You’ve been warned, ladies and gentlemen: this post is not a review but a place where we can finally talk about all those little light-bulb moments that Ex-Machina inspires, and sometimes orchestrates. Brilliant film, by the way. If you haven’t seen it, do. And then come back. For those of you sticking around, please view the following as talking points – take one or take all, and head to the comments to let us know how you feel. If you have your own questions to add, please do.

Okay, so first off: can you even believe that we haven’t learned our lesson yet? I mean, literally, every movie, every book, every comic has always warned of the exact same thing: robots will always get smarter than us. They will always realize that we a hazard. And they will always neutralize that hazard. Robots always win! End of story. Isaac Asimov microphone drop.

Director Alex Garland has described the future presented in the film as ‘ten minutes from now’. Meaning that ‘if somebody like Google or Apple announced tomorrow that they had made Ava, we would all be surprised, but we wouldn’t be that surprised’. Isn’t it a little scary that a machine that is potentially an extinction-level event for us could be being built in someone’s basement right now? Actually, we’re creeping closer and closer to this inevitability all the time – I recently warned our dear Carrie that she was wasting her time keeping in shape because one of these nights her fitbit would kill her anyway. As far as I know she’s alive and well, but I am concerned about how much of our lives we’re devoting to things like the Apple Watch, which can control your TV, pay for groceries, or give you directions. But it also has the ability to spy on you – just ask Edward Snowden! Did this movie feel like a real and imminent threat to you?

The title derives from the Latin phrase ‘Deus Ex-Machina’, meaning ‘a god From the Machine.’ It’s basically referring to a plot device where a god, or some powerful unknown, resolves character issues in one fell swoop. Nathan (Oscar Isaac) tells us that only gods can create new life – he’s cocky and proud of his invention and he loves when Caleb implies that he is a god. But Ava has other ideas. Whether or not she ever needed him, she’s certainly outgrown him (remember when Caleb sadly tells her it’s not up to him, and she asks “Why is it up to anybody?) – gave me CHILLS!), outgrown god even, by this point, and she knows it. So the ‘Deus’ is conspicuously absent from the title; god isn’t necessary. The machine is all that matters. Is it inevitable that we will create the thing that undoes us?

The movie is divided into “sessions”, each day that Caleb spends administering his best attempt at the Turing test. In the end, ‘Ava Session 7’ appears on-screen even though Caleb isn’t administering the Turing test anymore, and Nathan is pretty dead. Do you think this means Ava was doing the testing all along? It definitely feels like she was always in control. The boys felt the ultimate test would be to see if she could fall in love, but she knew that the ticket to her escape would be to manipulate Caleb into falling for her. Now that I’m thinking about it, Ava lives in this glass box, but when Caleb is questioning her, he steps into a box within her box, which sort of hints toward him being the one in the hot seat, doesn’t it?

A Turing test, you may remember, is a conversation of sorts between a person and an unknown entity. If a computer can pass itself off as a human during this test, it has passed, and the computer can be considered ‘intelligent’. In the film, Caleb can clearly see that he is interrogating an android – Nathan feels that if Ava can still relate to him as a human despite it being very obvious that she isn’t, then the test will truly be meaningful. What I think is meaningful is that the android is played by a human. So funny in this age of Ultron, but I loved that this movie was driven by ideas rather than effects. There are so many cerebral easter eggs, references to Frankenstein, and the Bible, and Greek mythology. I need to see it 8 more times just to soak it all in. But Ava is played by Alicia Vikander, who realized that to move and act like a perfect woman would end up seeming robotic, so for a robot to act like a real woman, she must be flawed. Did that make your head hurt? A robot like Ava knows and sees all. She processes everything at a much higher rate than a human ever could, but to win over Caleb, she must express a vulnerability that would appeal to him. In seeming weak, or scared, or dreamy, she gives him the opportunity to feel he has something to offer her. She plays him expertly. This is the greatest chess game a robot has ever played, but as we know, robots always win.

On the Other Hand, it’s Drive-In Season!

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Matt’s been belly-aching about his favourite movie rental place biting the dust while the rest of us saw it coming for – what? – the past 15 years or so? Only teasing, Matt. Elgin Street Video was THE place; it managed to be a neighbourhood fixture and also a city-wide go-to for its eclectic catalogue that was worth getting your knees dusty for. The original owner was a bit of Luddite, like Matt, unwilling to believe that new technologies could topple his empire, having famously quoted to the Ottawa Citizen in 1994 “We certainly know the value of this so-called information highway has been grossly exaggerated in the media” but alas the internet finally caught up with his legacy (he died in 2008, his video store outliving him an impressive 7 years thanks to friends and family who vowed to keep it going). The store will shutter for good at the end of the month, and in the meantime, the store’s contents are on sale and everything must go. Everything? Even the wacky memorabilia? Even John Candy’s pants? Well, that remains to be seen.

So while Matt’s throwing a funeral for the crumbs of his nostalgia, I’m still indulging in mine.

The drive in. Oddly enough, the drive-in was almost done in by videotape. It nearly vanished when people could simply rent a tape at Blockbuster and take it home to their living rooms instead. They’ve been going extinct for 40 years now, but here’s the thing: they’re not dead yet. And unlike DVD (or VHS!) rentals, there seems to be a throwback factor that’s keeping their faint hearts beating.

Why do I love the drive-in? What’s not to love about seeing a movie under the stars? About the sense of community involved in pointing our cars in the same direction, tuning in to the same radio station, honking our horns in unison to tell the projectionist we’re ready, flashing smiles along the way as we make the dark stumble towards the bathrooms, greet each other over popcorn, walk our dogs during intermission.

By the late 1950s, one-third of theaters in the US were drive-ins. It was an affordable way to see a movie (and often two or three), the drive-ins relying more heavily on concessions and the ticket prices staying quite low, often a set price for a whole carful of movie goers. Turns out that wasn’t a super sustainable business model and today there are fewer than 350 operating drive-ins in the US (there are about 40 000 indoor screens, by contrast). But there are some things that deserve a resurgence, and like vinyl records currently enjoying a comeback, so are drive-in theatres.

This weekend, our local (the only local) drive-in theatre showed its first double bill of the season (drive-in season in snowy Canada is tragically short). It never matters what they’re showing; Sean and I go every other weekend, which is as often as they bring in new movies. The movies are almost always movies we’ve already seen paired with a movie we had no intention of seeing, but we go. We bring blankets and pillows and mosquito netting and a picnic, and a bottle of champagne. We watch the movies with varying degrees of interest, sometimes with rapt attention from the edge of our captain’s chairs, other times stretched out in the backseat, half an eye on the screen and someone’s hand up someone else’s shirt. Being at the drive-in reminds us old married fuddy-duddies of the art of making out. It inspires us to learn new ways of doing old tricks so that the Volkswagen doesn’t get to a-rocking. It gives us a new appreciation of the suburbs – the night sky, the fresh air, the full moon, the fireflies. I can’t say exactly why we love to go, but we do.

Maybe it is a form of reminiscing. As kids, Mom would have us all put on our jammies before piling into the van. We’d negotiate amongst ourselves for who would sit in the middle seats, and who would go way back. There’d be cheesies and juice boxes during the first film, the family one, and during the second we were expected to sleep. I remember sneaking surreptitious peaks at the screen during Crocodile Dundee 2, a movie only tantalizing to someone who’d been told it was off-limits, “too grown-up” (it was rated PG).

Now we have the luxury of leaving if we don’t like the second feature, but we rarely do. The movie is secondary at the Templeton Cineparc. Foremost is the holding of hands, the nuzzling, the ability to talk through the movie without being shushed, smuggling in a whole pizza if the mood strikes, and having privacy but still enjoying the communal aspect of watching a movie with your neighbours. We’ve only just been and I’m already itching to go back.

Do you have childhood memories of the drive-in? Do you still go? Do you have one near by?

Wish For Christmas

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I heckle a lot of Christmas movies, especially the Hallmark ones, for being unforgivably cheesy and predictable. Those are the staple ingredients of their white bread movies, and you need to add a LOT of your own salt in order to make it palatable. But Wish For Christmas is bad in an entirely new way.

Anna (Anna Fricks) is a typical high school student, gearing up for the winter ball. Her parents, Luke (Joey Lawrence, with eyebrows so perfectly sculpted they’re suspicious) and Elizabeth (Leigh-Allyn Baker), are super religious. They “bring light to the law” in their law practice, which is not-for-profit, actually turns away paying customers, and focuses only on helping poor people whose homes are being foreclosed. And somehow they stay afloat. Don’t question it. Their family puts god first, which means never missing church, and praying before you eat pizza, and forbidding your teenage daughter from dressing like a teenage daughter. Although they’ve still managed to raise a real bitch. But then disaster strikes: the winter ball gets moved to Christmas Eve, which means Anna can’t go, as she is obligated to attend services at her uncle’s church. So she did the only thing that makes sense. She uses her nightly prayer to wish that her parents do not believe in god anymore. And it works!

So now her parents are non-Christian, which means her dad says things like “Hey, man” and her mom lets her buy a dress that doesn’t suck, and they toast their business with actual wine that they actually drink. And they get very worked up when a very expensive vase gets broken. Oh and they don’t pick up their phone on the first ring. But the rest of the town still thinks of them as religious, so they still show up for Bible study and such. Oh boy is it awkward. Consider them added to the town’s prayer list.

This movie gives Christians a bad name, and makes them look like fools. And when the screenwriter imagines the nefarious things nonChristians get up to, it’s even more ludicrous. Like, the secretary now has to say Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas. It’s impossible to take this shit seriously and important that you don’t. Jesus needs to fire his publicist. Wish For Christmas is every kind of bad except the kind that’s so bad it’s kind of good. This is so bad it stays bad, and makes you feel dirty, leaves a grimy film on the holiday season, and on movies generally. It’s going to take a real miracle to adequately cleanse myself of this movie’s awfulness.