Pacific Rim Uprising

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It’s been 10 years since the conflict ended. Jake was born when the world was still fighting the Kaiju monsters, and his father, Stacker Pentecost, gave his life to help win the war. Jake is not his father. He lives in a coastal city that never recovered from its attack, in half a mansion that was destroyed by the creature whose skeleton still adorns the property. He steals to make a living, and nothing pays more than stole jaeger tech (jaegers being those massive, two-pilot robots used to win the war against the giant monsters).

When Jake (John Boyega) is inevitably caught, he’s sentenced to teaching kids to be 21-pacific-rim-uprising.w710.h473 jaeger pilots where he immediately meets and dislikes fellow pilot Nate (Scott Eastwood), who resents him for having the special privileges granted him by his last name. Of course, Jake and Nate must become co-pilots of a new flagship jaeger meant to reassure people that the world would forever more kept safe, but its designers should have perhaps heeded another movie’s admonition – if you build it, they will come.

And when the Kaiju do attack, it’ll be Jake & Nate & a bunch of kids standing between alien monsters and the earth’s destruction, which is a discomfiting thought. But the most important thing to know about Pacific Rim: Uprising is that it is not directed by Oscar-winner Guillermo del Toro, who gave us the first one, and this one lacks the conviction and subtlety that made the first so special. Guillermo’s movie about gigantic monsters and robots fighting each other still managed to have a greater message and a lot of heart. The sequel is its empty shell. It’s got all the parts, and plenty of punchy action but it’s missing the movie magic that connects with audiences and transcends the outward trappings. Uprising is intent on being bigger, louder, dumber, and never, not once, equal to, let alone better. It’s content with ticking boxes: one liners, big hunks of metal, migraine-level sound effects, frantic Japanese people. And most egregiously, it sets itself up for a third installment, and if it comes to that, I hope the Kaiju fucking win.

Tomb Raider

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Lara Croft is the tough and independent daughter of a wealthy adventurer who disappeared 7 years ago and is presumed dead. So when she learns his secret obsession with an ancient Japanese myth, she pursues him to the unknown island that seems to have swallowed him whole. It seems like a really bad decision to follow in the footsteps of a dead man, but Lara (Alicia Vikander) doesn’t just put her life on the line, she involves an innocent stranger too (Daniel Wu), just as her father did. So if you’re wondering who the Croft family is, they appear to be in it solely for themselves, and fuck every body else.

So Lara makes her way to this evil island where she meets up with a bad man named Mathias (Walter Goggins) and things go from merely murdery to a whole shit tonne MV5BMTBjZDBiNGEtYjhlMC00YmM1LThmZWEtOWE1ZjhhMDg5MDEzXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyODAyMDA1MDk@._V1_ of worse. And even though she’s been violently shipwrecked and then hunted, actually hunted on an island that seems intent on killing her, she somehow maintains a perfectly shaped brow and stubble-free armpits, which are constantly on display thanks to a skimpy outfit that seems particularly ill-advised when visiting malaria-infested countries. So while Lara may be about to out-box me, I’ll still take the victory because I packed the DEET. Though I suppose I should concede that the Vikander version of Lara is slightly more grounded and slightly less lustily rendered on the screen than was Angelina Jolie.

Tomb Raider is fine, I guess, except for some painful green screen moments that are ENTIRELY unconvincing. And the fact that it’s boring as shit to watch someone solve a puzzle when the puzzle is never shown or known to us. It’s just a lot of knob twisting. Vikander is tough as balls but the story is uninspired and makes no arguments for its own existence. This franchise didn’t need a reboot and it got a rather lacklustre one, despite Vikander’s charm.

Solo: A Star Wars Story

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They pulled it off! Despite the director change and the “creative differences” and the reshoots, Solo: A Star Wars Story is not only a coherent film, it’s a film that lives up to the legacy of the best Star Wars character, hands down: that loveable scoundrel, Han Solo.

Solo is a prequel done right. We get to see those legendary events referred to in the original trilogy, which is what you’d expect. But what you can’t count on, and what Solo delivers, it that those moments live up to the hype AND fit into a grand adventure that doesn’t feel like a dull connect-the-dots exercise the same way Episodes 1-3 did. Clearly, Lawrence Kasdan should have been writing all the Star Wars films. The script for Solo is a masterful work by Kasdan and his son Jon. The elder Kasdan has stated this was his last Star Wars script, which makes me sad mainly because that feels like the final nail in Han’s coffin.

At least we will always have Solo. While Alden Ehrenreich doesn’t exactly channel Harrison Ford, his take on Han is a credible version of the charming smuggler we know and love. Woody Harrelson is solid (as always) as Han’s mentor, and Emilia Clarke adds a lot as Han’s childhood sweetheart, but it’s Donald Glover who steals the show as a note-perfect Lando Calrissian (and kudos to both Glover and the Kasdans for maintaining Lando’s hard-A spin on Han’s name). Here’s hoping that rumoured Lando spinoff gets greenlit soon. Lando’s so much cooler than the bumbling Boba Fett, whose spinoff is already in production!

Don’t been dissuaded by the (relatively) poor box office results. Solo: A Star Wars Story is a worthy addition to the Star Wars canon and a great way to spend an afternoon at the movies, which is, after all, what the original Star Wars aspired to be.

Circles

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Eric is a Katrina survivor who has built a new life for himself and his son Tre in Oakland, California. From his own childhood, he knows all too well the importance of fathers and father figures, particularly in the lives of young African Americans. That’s not the only reason he’s a restorative justice warrior in a really rough high school, but it just might be the reason he’s so good at it. Restorative justice tries to understand the circumstances which contribute to crime. Its emphasis is on the rehabilitation of offenders through reconciliation. In terms of Eric’s work, his bottom line is to keep kids in school, to keep them from getting expelled, and maybe even graduate. He sees a lot of himself in his students, and even though the staff and school board often feel at odds with his work, he perseveres and fights hard for them.

But during the making of this documentary, Eric’s own son is arrested for a crime he didn’t commit. So you can imagine that Eric’s ethics and beliefs (not to mention patience) are tested, and his son is about to be his toughest case. That’s what so great about documentary film – sometimes the movie you set out to make ends up morphing into something else entirely. You couldn’t really have planned this if you tried, but over the course of two years, director Cassidy Friedman has incredible access to this collision between Eric’s personal and professional lives.

Eric’s work is in impoverished neighbourhoods. His students are largely people of colour, vulnerable, with unstable family situations. He’s fighting racial discrimination, the insidious, every day kind, even if that’s not explicitly stated. He connects to the kids because the tragedies of his own life are so similar, and he’s not shy to relate them. But when things disintegrate for his son, he starts to really question himself, his efficacy as a teacher and as a father.

What Circles becomes is a sad, honest, difficult portrait of a man who is desperate to be the father his own could never be.

Total Recall (2012)

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It’s been a while since I’ve watched the 1990 version of Total Recall, and yet it was still obvious to me that the 2012 version was the same in plot but different in setting. The setting change was particularly jarring. It is bizarre to me that Mars does not enter into the 2012 movie at all – Australia stands in, which is not really an even trade. No offense, Australia, but a destination (/colony) I can reach by airplane is not nearly as futuristic-feeling as a colony on another planet. Also, is the fa hero_EB20120801REVIEWS120739999AR ct they refer to Australia as “the Colony” in Total Recall a little too close to home?

As with all remakes, I waited for the 2012 Total Recall to justify its existence. And like a lot of remakes, it never did. The Total Recall remake is more serious and more down to earth than the original, and both of those are bad things. The original stands above, not just because it did everything first (including the three boobed prostitute) but because it did everything better (including giving a reason why there would be a three boobed prostitute).

The original is campy and dumb and fun. The remake is muted and sterile and dull. The difference between the two is exactly the difference between 80s Arnold (no last name needed) and Colin Farrell (no time period needed since to say he peaked would wrongly imply he was ever much good). No one with any sense would choose Farrell over 80s Arnold as an action hero, and likewise no one should watch 2012 Total Recall when 1990 Total Recall is either in your basement/garage or the basement/garage of a friend, gathering dust with hundreds of other DVDs.

Please Give

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Kate and Alex own a successful, upscale second-hand furniture store; they buy estate items from grieving families and turn a tidy profit. Kate (Catherine Keener) and Alex (Oliver Platt) also own the apartment next door to theirs, and are impatiently waiting for its former owner and current occupant to die before they can knock down some walls and start the renovations. The old lady is cantankerous enough that they don’t feel particularly guilty about this, though their repeated run-ins with her granddaughters (Rebecca Hall, Amanda Peet) are increasingly awkward.

That sounds kind of brutal, but what writer-director Nicole Holofcener has created in Kate is actually a very interesting, nuanced character who’s experiencing some of that white woman, liberal guilt that comes with middle age and introspection. Kate is living MV5BNTM0OTU5ODY5MF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNzgwNzUzMw@@._V1_SX1777_CR0,0,1777,997_AL_ in complex economic times that challenge her notions of propriety. She can’t pass a homeless person without contributing to their cup, which makes her privileged teenage daughter somehow feel deprived. There’s something really fascinating about Kate; she’s complex, and not afraid to have conflicting emotions. She has mastered the world in which she lives but while she isn’t comfortable holding the reins, she’s not a hypocrite, and she knows deep down she wouldn’t want it any other way. Meanwhile, the women next door, in less than ideal circumstances, provide a nice contrast to Kate’s guilty affluence.

Catherine Keener continues to be under-rated but she’s really terrific in Please Give – it’s inspired casting. Kate’s empathy and ambition give her a complexity that’s rarely seen and difficult to pull off, and I can imagine it being a lot less successful in almost any other hands. The movie feels a little slight at times, a little thin in plot, but everyone has a point of view and the film maker trusts us to sit with the themes and experience our own version of existential reckoning.

Super Troopers 2

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In the 17 years between the first Super Troopers and its sequel, you’d think one of the guys from Broken Lizard would have written one half-decent joke. Even plagiarized one accidentally. And you’d definitely think that if, between the 5 of them, they hadn’t written any new material WHATSOEVER in 17 frickin years, they would agree that they did NOT have enough to make a movie and thus would not have made a movie – ha. You give them too much credit.

It is incomprehensible that any of these buffoons would be gainfully employed in any capacity, but it is no surprise that after being inexplicably handed back the very jobs they were so very deservedly fired from in the first movie, they would spend the whole of the sequel abusing their power in childish, unoriginal, and unamusing MV5BN2Y1YzM2YTMtNGViMy00NzYzLWJkYWUtZmZmNDkyYWEyNmEzXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNDg2MjUxNjM@._V1_SX1777_CR0,0,1777,948_AL_ ways. I’m normally pretty hard on sequels that are content to ride on the laurels of their predecessors, but in this case, Super Troopers 2 only wishes it could attain the very attainable, very modest heights of the first movie, a movie that could only dream of laurels in the first place.

In this iteration, the boys are back in beige because the Vermont border is moving north, into territory that used to be Canadian. So this movie exists for the sole purpose of making fun of Canadian stereotypes made up by, and existing only in the minds of, stupid Americans. This movie feels so out of touch with 2018 that I almost felt sorry for it – in the way that you almost feel sorry for Roseanne, who was fired from the show that bears her name, for just being her on-brand, normal, ignorant, racist self, in a world that has evolved to no longer reward such puerile, unenlightened behaviour.

We saw this movie as the third in a triple feature at the drive-in two weeks ago and I’m still not over how offensively bad it was. Of course, I didn’t really like the first one either. Too juvenile for me, but I said that, Sean was quick to jump on me: “But you own it!” he said, sure he was catching me in some sort of lie. And he’s right in that it does reside in the DVD collection in my garage. Which is why, on the quiet 3am drive home from the triple feature at Port Elmsley, I had to have The Conversation with Sean. You know, the one in which I confess that he isn’t the first boy to force me to watch movies against my will. He is shook. Not that we needed another reason to vehemently dislike Super Troopers 2, but boy did we get one.

What Happened to Monday

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The world is overpopulated and we are consuming resources at an untenable rate – these are facts, not fiction. It’s kind of depressing that in a dystopian, sci-fi future, the architect of our demise is real, but our willingness to do something about it is the fiction.

In this particular 2078, a strict one-child policy has been made law and is brutally enforced. The GMOs in our food has led to unfathomable rates of multiple-births, so every human is braceleted and check-points are set up to monitor for siblings, who are then removed from the population in order to be cryogenically frozen for a time when the earth may sustain them. But as Willem Dafoe watches his beautiful and beloved daughter die while giving birth to septuplets, he vows to keep the seven sisters secret. Named for each day of the week, they are raised behind closed doors to be smart and self-sufficient. Each one may only venture outside on the day of the week for which they are named – outside their home, they live as “Karen Settman”, a character that all 7 must be equally devoted to keeping sacred.

Of course, when Monday goes missing, the remaining 6 are going to have a heck of a time tracking her down since between them they only have the one avatar allowed to exist in the world. So the script basically forces itself into an anything-goes amalgam where we’re never sure if we’re watching a gritty crime thriller, or a family drama, or a murder mystery, or jagged social commentary. There are a couple of really great set pieces that may get your heart pumping quickly enough to sustain you during the more aimless scenes in between. It’s an uneven movie, overstuffed for sure, but an interesting premise even if its denouement is somewhat predictable.

Noomi Rapace gets to play all seven juicy roles, and she gives each Settman sister a twist of her own. It’s fun to watch her interact with herself, and it’s a trick pulled off rather deftly. But for me, personally, the most interesting part of this movie is imaging myself and my sisters (there are “only” 4 of us, luckily – the world could not take a single one more) co-existing even nominally peacefully in an apartment for years, sharing one single identity. The four of us are nothing alike and I can’t even imagine what a compromise would begin to look like. One of us lives and breathes hockey, and one of us cannot physically stand upright on skates. How do you even do that halfway? One of us is covered in tattoos and one of us refers to them as “prison ink” with a judgmental eye roll. Growing up, we couldn’t agree on a single television show to watch. How would we agree on a single hairstyle, job, boyfriend, drink preference? And let’s face it: whoever pulls the Saturday shift will never have to go to work or school, while poor Monday will forever be stuck without a single drop of fun.

Sean watched this movie and had a very different takeaway. He saw only potential: since we are childfree by choice, he thought our right to a child could be sold to the highest bidder, and he envisioned us living comfortably off the proceeds. So in summation: Jay can’t even imagine a fictional world in which she is capable of compromise, Sean is mercenary, and What Happened to Monday is an entertaining but not quite brilliant addition to Netflix’s sci-fi catalogue.

Outlaw King – again

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I was in the audience when Outlaw King premiered at TIFF. I don’t feel bad admitting I didn’t care for it. Director David Mackenzie himself was unsatisfied; he likened the feeling of losing the audience’s interest at such a high-profile festival to the air being sucked out of a room. With Netflix’s blessing, Mackenzie made a beeline for the editing room. He shaved 23 minutes off the runtime, and tightened up the film’s pace. He feels much happier with the cut currently streaming on Netflix, the only cut the world will ever know, and because I like and respect Mackenzie so much, I decided I could find it within myself to give it another try.

If you read my first review from TIFF, then you know how big a sacrifice this was for me. I sound punch drunk in that one, and I was, dizzy with all the horse slaughter, for one. There were so many dead horses that I made a deal with Sean when we turned this on (he didn’t see it with me at TIFF): if he could accurately count all the murdered horses, I would murder him with a blow job. And that is not an empty promise. I once put the poor kid in a coma with an ordinary handie.

Anyway, is Outlaw Kind new & improved? It is. It is still an unapologetically brutal movie. Having seen 50 or so movies at TIFF and maybe twice that since, I didn’t expect to remember this 2.5 hour movie frame for frame, and indeed I did not, but I could point out several differences as we watched. Mackenzie launches us into the action much more quickly, almost directly after that impressive opening 8-minute shot that everyone’s talking about.

I still think it’s a little hokey that Robert the Bruce (Chris Pine) is repeatedly shown to be a kind and considerate lover. In a movie where historical accuracy seems to be prized, it’s odd that Robert is so insistently shown to be a gentle husband, and his wife Elizabeth (Florence Pugh) to be so headstrong and plucky. Not exactly the hallmarks of a woman who has been given as chattel from the conquering king as to the defeated one, in appeasement. Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s still pretty great though, crazed and demented. I remember feeling bad for him the first time; Chris Pine is evidently this movie’s heartthrob as he is always clean and probably period-inappropriately hygienic whereas poor Taylor-Johnson is constantly covered in mud (god I hope it’s mud, especially given the number of dead horses) and his teeth, oh lord, his teeth, smeared in god knows what. Horse shit isn’t out of the realm of possibilities. And speaking of Johnsons, you have no doubt heard that Pine’s is on full display in this movie. True. It is also a true and turgid fact that Taylor-Johnson’s is a hell of a lot more visible in A Million Little Pieces, if you’re into that kind of thing. More visible in terms of length – both movie and cock wise. Not that anyone’s counting.

What else can I tell you about this movie? I noticed that this time, I chuckled in a couple of places. There is no hint of that in my first review; I was overwhelmed by the brutality and the unrelenting muck. This time I had a little more breathing room despite the fact that they’ve literally removed a lot of the breathing room. I am proud of myself for making it through this one twice. My brother-in-law Chris liked this movie. Sean liked this movie. And in the end, he’d totaled 71.

Ibiza

16 Replies

Harper gets sent to Barcelona on business, and I believe that her boss intended for her to do some actual work but instead her give-a-fuck meter is pointing to zero, which should have been evident the minute she invited her two best friends on her very important, very serious business trip.

Things that Harper (Gillian Jacobs) and besties Leah (Phoebe Robinson) and Nikki (Vanessa Bayer) do in Spain instead of work: sun tan, sun burn, rate nipples (Bilbo Baggins, Little Bo Peeps, Honeydews, Rhi-Rhis, and Daniel Craigs – which are you sporting?).

And that’s before they skip town entirely, chasing after a hunky DJ because Harper felt a “connection.” Hence, Ibiza.

This movie is almost entirely drugs, beats, black lights, confetti cannons, and naked sushi. Have you ever risked your career and future to get high and get dick, not necessarily in MV5BNjE3MDk1NTQ3MV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwNTMzODI0NTM@._V1_SY1000_CR0,0,1491,1000_AL_ that order? Priorities, people! Now imagine, for a moment, being the HR lady back at Harper’s PR firm in New York. Imagine being Harper’s mother. Imagine being Harper’s urethra! Imagine being Harper: putting yourself in a series of really sketchy situations, and then having the privilege to call it “adventurous” and “risk-taking” because you had the good fortune not to get raped. Netflix wanted to dip its misshapen little toe into the raunchy comedy genre, and it did it EXACTLY as you’d expect it to.

To say this film is loosely structured is to loosely blaspheme structure. Twenty five minutes in, I still didn’t have the foggiest what this movie was going to be about. Ibiza puts a lot of faith in Gillian Jacobs’ ability to carry a film, to truly be its star, and as you can tell, I have absolutely no chill for this entitled character and her complete disregard for her colleagues, her clients, her dignity, her vaginal health, and worst of all, for me and my time and my vaginal health. Just kidding, about that last bit. My vagina is the only part about this with any genuine charisma or girl power, so go me, and also, don’t watch this movie.