Tag Archives: dystopian adventures

ARQ

ARQ had its world premiere at TIFF and was sufficiently popular that Sean and I tried but failed to get tickets. It’s a damn good thing we didn’t get them because if I had paid money to see this piece of shit, I’d be in a REAL rage right now, the likes of yet we’ve yet to see on Assholes Watching Movies.

It sounds promising on paper: a dystopian thriller meets sci-fi Groundhog Day. The protagonists, Renton and Hannah, keep waking up in bed when a bunch of bad guys burst in on them. Things don’t go well. But every time Renton gets shot in the face, they wake up in bed again, to do it all over, though not necessarily with better results.

The gimmick wore off cinematically long before it evaporated on screen. Even screwball Bill Murray cottoned on to the trick quicker than this guy. The bad guys are ostensibly there to steal scripts, but it’s soon evident that Renton’s invention, the ARQ, is much more valuable…and it’s inconveniently causing a time loop.

I mentioned before that we failed to get tickets. How then did we see it? It’s on Netflix. That’s right. Just a few days after making it’s $25-a-head, world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, it’s airing on Netflix for free. Even at that low price, though, it arq_03 isn’t worth it. The dialogue put me off immediately. It has the look and feel of the kind of television show I would never watch. Even worse, it ends like it’s the pilot of a TV show that hopes to continue this mystery in vague and infuriating terms for the next 6 years. It isn’t, though. It genuinely believes itself to be a whole movie. Don’t believe it, not for a second: ARQ is to be avoided at all costs. Keep swiping left.

Looking for something more satisfying on Netflix? Try

The Wave

The Fundamentals of Caring

Tribeca: High-Rise

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High-Rise is the cinematic equivalent of a raisin muffin: it’s okay as long as you weren’t expecting chocolate chip. But why not have chocolate chip to begin with?

High-Rise-1-Glamour-16Mar16-pr_b The film’s biggest problem is that it took 40 years to convert J.G. Ballard’s novel of the same name into a movie. In the meantime, Snowpiercer happened and was a way more awesome movie than High-Rise, or really anything else ever.

It’s not just that Snowpiercer had better acting, writing or directing than High-Rise (though it did). High-Rise looks good but has a structural problem. Call me an optimist but I couldn’t accept High-Rise’s premise of an isolated lawless world developing inside a skyscraper, not when the outside world remained completely accessible to the building’s inhabitants. There’s no apocalypse event in High-Rise. The building’s main doors aren’t ever blocked. Mid-movie, a cop even pokes his head in to check whether things in the building are okay. But for reasons that aren’t at all clear, instead of calling 911 to report any of the murders, suicides or sanitation issues inside the building, the residents all choose to stay inside, ignore the dead bodies 2016_11_high_rise and garbage bags that line the halls, and scavenge for dog meat rather than drive to the nearest supermarket for hot dogs. That’s something that was impossible for me to swallow.

It’s too bad that conceptual problem is baked into High-Rise. I wanted to like the movie but I just couldn’t. Am I naive in thinking that people would take a bit of time between drunken orgies to leave the building and restock their snacks? I hope not, though the numerous food references in this review tell me I’m very hungry, yet instead of going upstairs to our kitchen I’m still here typing…

High-Rise is not a bad movie, but if you’ve seen Snowpiercer then High-Rise feels like a pale imitation. And if you haven’t seen Snowpiercer, what are you waiting for?

Tribeca: Equals

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In this version of the future, your feelings are genetically “turned off” in the womb. People are no longer subject to their moods, their intuitions, their base Collider_Equals-150729-b emotions. Everything is pleasantly flat. Nothing bothers them. But some are subject to a disorder in which those feelings are somehow switched back on. This disease is fatal – if you aren’t driven to suicide, you’ll be euthanatized, because being the only sensitive person in a void of flat affect is simply too much to bear.

Silas (Nicholas Hoult) contracts the disease. He’s given medication to try to suppress his feelings and is told to hope for a cure, but he knows that by stage 4, he’ll be given a painless death and that’s it. This world without emotion equals-movie feels rather cold and lonely to us, the viewers, but the people living it don’t seem to notice until they come down with the disease, which sets them even further apart from their peers. But the one good thing is that Silas can see that his work mate Nia (Kristen Stewart) must also be infected. She hides her disease from others but cannot escape his awakened intuition. The two inevitably fall in love, though “coupling” is distinctly prohibited. The only way they can be together is to leave society and head for the outside world, where primitive humans still exist.

The film is well-realized and quite stylish. The best part is the acting. I hate to admit it, but this is Kristen Stewart’s least lip-biting role yet. She and Hoult have tangible chemistry, and for a couple of kids who are experiencing sexual urges for the first time, the film is surprisingly sexy. Guy Pearce and Jacki Weaver lend a lot of credibility in their supporting roles, their performances add urgency and intensity to the proceedings.

equals-movie-kristen-stewart-nicolas-hoult-ksbr-2 The problem, however, is with the story. The truth is, it just feels recycled. It feels like you’ve seen this before. It’s like every second Margaret Atwood novel and does little to distinguish itself from other movies in the genre. What it doesn’t borrow from Atwood it steals from Shakespeare and it never really does its own thing. Equals is a highly-polished piece from a second-hand store. It’s not trash but it could never compete with the real thing. If you’re the kind of person who’s comfortable buying a couch off Kijiji, then maybe this one’s for you.

Z For Zachariah

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In a way, this is exactly the kind of end-of-the-world movie I’ve been keening for. No disaster porn here, it’s quiet, contemplative; a meditation on faith and hope. Margot Robbie plays a farmer’s daughter who’s beginning to think she might just be the last woman on earth when she comes across an exhausted scientist (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who can’t believe he’s just found the last lungful of fresh air. The two start building a life together when a third person (Chris Pine) arrives, disrupting their equilibrium.

The movie tells very little and shows even less of whatever it was that brought upon the world’s end. All we know are these few survivors and the shadows behind their eyes. You already know that Ejiofor is a fine actor, but both Robbie and Pine bring their A game as well, and this becomes a character study in the garden of Eden.

If you need action in your apocalypse, this one’s not for you. But if you like a movie that raises more questions than it answers, then you’ve probably met your match. What becomes of people when their past is wiped out and their future uncertain? And what happens to morality when no one is looking? There’s just a touch of creepiness to all that quietness, all that wide-open space that you can’t quite trust. A concept like safety gets redefined when humanity has just been all but wiped out.

If you’re open to it, there’s a lot of religious symbolism hidden like Easter eggs in the narrative of this movie. I wrote narrative rather than plot because to be honest, not a lot happens in this movie. And as much as I loved the absence of mutated monsters, and actually appreciated the stillness, and the lush cinematography that made it feel almost impossible that any ugliness could find their little corner of land, there was also a…dullness, something lackluster about it all, despite the finely tuned performances. I think it was a lack of commitment, as if the movie really didn’t want to make any choices at all, wasn’t confident enough to actually choose a position. I’m not usually unconformable with ambiguity, but this one tested me a bit, and it was only because the movie was quite good that I wanted for it to be great, and this weakness held it back.

City of Ember \ Stardust

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Once upon a time it was movies based on Young Adult Fiction week, and I watched some stuff that I would normally never watch. Some of it was bad, some of it was not bad, and some of it was so bad it was almost good. In the end I was so glad to put it behind me I never got around to talking about the stuff that didn’t fit in either category – not good enough to endorse, but not bad enough to make fun of. So here it is, the middle of the road:

I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen or heard of City of Ember because I didn’t know there was a Billy Murray movie I hadn’t already smothered in love. He plays the mayor of a town built deep underground by a team of scientists just as the world was ending. They buried instructions on how to return to the surface after 200 years too, but stupidly entrusted them to politicians, who predictably bungled the thing and lost the instructions and now their city is crumbling, the power supply is failing and food is running out. Things are dire: teenagers to the rescue! Two “young adults” (Saoirse Ronan & Harry Treadaway) take it upon themselves to do the thing countless older, smarter, more intrepid people (including their parents) failed to do.

The visuals are stunning. I loved the sets of this underground world, everything just a little off-kilter, labyrinthine without being claustrophobic. But the story never quite lives up to what our eyes suggest. The plot is modest, maybe even thin. Writers of this young adult genre seem to follow a pretty strict guide when it comes to their dystopian adventures: the founders, vague as they are, have decreed that people be assigned specific jobs and these jobs are ceremoniously given out and then life is spent labouring away at whatever “very important” job you’ve been given. There is little in the way of joy, but if you keep toiling away then your life is well-spent. BUT then there’s always some young upstart who questions the system. Sound familiar? City of Ember is basically Subterranean Divergent, although really I should say it the other way around since City of Ember came first.

The adventuring is pretty tame, the action mild, and the denouement predictable. This is post-apocalyptic-lite. Martin Landau gives a small performance worth seeing, and Tim Robbins isn’t half bad either. Bill Murray is, of course, always fun to watch, but otherwise this film is blander than you might think possible, though of course that was also Matt’s verdict on Insurgent.

Stardust came out in 2007, just a year before City of Ember, and it also passed me by. I haven’t been a “young adult” in at least a decade and haven’t been a typical consumer of this genre ever, so I guess it’s not so surprising.

I’m not remotely sure that I or alone else can really distill this story, but here’s my attempt:

Tristan is the young adult in question, a lad living in a quiet English village, madly in love with the town’s most beautiful girl who doesn’t give him the time of day because of course she’s way out of his league. Throwing him a bone, she agrees to consider him if only he will catch her a star, and so of course he follows a fallen star over the breach in the wall surrounding his village and into a fantasy kingdom called Stormhold where the star turns out to be Claire Danes. Everyone following? Fallen stars that look remarkably like Claire Danes are quite popular – she’s also being pursued by a witch (Michelle Pfieffer) who wants to eat her heart to make her young, and a bunch of princes (let by Rupert Everett) who believe a ruby she carries will inherit them the throne. So now poor Tristan’s saddled with this star who’s pretty high maintenance, and the only help he gets is from his mother, who’s unfortunately bound by a spell, and a transvestite pirate (played with MUCH enthusiasm by Robert DeNiro- and no, I’m not kidding).

The story didn’t speak to me whatsoever (sorry Neil Gaiman, I’m still you’re girl!), but hello, with a great pop-up role by De Niro and another by Ricky Gervais, it’s pretty much worth watching on that basis alone, and those moments felt more like the trademark oddball Gaiman humour I’m used to. The special effects are pretty awesome (Michelle Pfieffer uses a sword designed for but never used by Magneto in Matthew Vaughn’s 2006 X-Men movie) but the action-adventure really gets bogged down by a sluggish pace. This movie drags on. It’s a string of fun moments but didn’t quite work for me as a cohesive whole.

Sweet Escape with The Divergent Series: Insurgent

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I rented Divergent when studying Movies Based on Young Adult Novels just a few weeks ago. There were enough dicks, assholes, and maniacal Kate Winslets that the movie managed to hold my attention from beginning to end just because I couldn’t wait to see them get what was coming to them but I can’t say it left me wanting more. I decided to check out the second part in the series not out of a need to find out what happens next but a yearning to return that magical place with alcohol and comfortable chairs.

Knowing about my quest to find the perfect drink for each movie, Jay suggested a virgin daiquiri to get me in the spirit of young adult fiction. Point well taken but we’re here to drink so as a compromise I settled on something called Sweet Escape, which combined vodka, pineapple and strawberry liqueur, and strawberry puree. I regretted getting two when I saw the waiter bringing them on a tray all to themselves. So tall. So orange. So embarrassing. I’ll admit that they were delicious but the sweet fruitiness got to me after awhile and, partway through my second one, I realized a little Sweet Escape goes a long way.

So it is with young adult fiction, especially when you’re no longer a young adult and say things like “twittering”. I got through Divergent without much trouble. The premise that in the future we will all be forced into five factions based on such uninspired personality types sounded like that of an eighth-grade English assignment but there were enough talented actors involved ( pretty much phoning it in in most cases but still) to make it more interesting than it really should have been. Quickly into the second installment though, I realized that a little Divergent goes a long way.

Insurgent gets off to a pretty good start. The sequel picks up shortly after Divergent left off so, knowing the drill already, we’re spared the usual voice-over exposition and get right into it right away. Tris, Four, Caleb, and Peter have been hiding out in the peace and love commune among the Amity faction, led by a well-cast but not well-utilized Octavia Spencer. The Amity commune is a fun setting and Tirs and Four’s harrowing escape when the evil Eric inevitably show up was well-exectued.

Soon, we’re thrown much deeper into Divergent mythology. Too deep for someone like me who rolled his eyes at the basic premise from the beginning. The film starts to shift its focus to the Factionless and Candor- factions we were only peripherally aware of in the first- and to a hidden message from the Founders that could change everything. All of this is unavoidable. What would be the point of creating this world if we’re not going to explore it? But soon after my sweet drink started to overwhelm me, shortly after the escape from Amity, I began to lose interest in this world.

The Giver

Snow Piercer

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An experiment to save the world actually destroys it, sending the world into a deep freeze. The few survivors board a train that constantly whizzes around the globe, smashing through ice and snow, in perpetual motion. The train is strictly divided according to class, with the very rich poshly appointed in the front and the poor kept in dismal conditions in the back until cryptic messages filter through to them, inciting them to rebellion.

Curtis (bushy bearded Chris Evans) is the reluctant leader of the great unwashed in a brutal, gruesome battle toward the front, and the train’s inventor\conductor, Wilford. Wilford sends his minions to do his dirty work, including a nightmarish Tilda Swinton.

I heard about this movie from several sources in late spring of 2014 and looked forward to finding it in theatres, though I never did. Why did such a fascinating movie disappear? It’s because of a little dick named Harvey Weinstein. The Weinstein Company owned the rights but didn’t believe that North American audiences were smart enough to “get” the movie, insisting on a 20-minute slaughter of the film, as well as the addition of opening and closing monologues. To punish director Bong Joon-ho for sticking up for his movie, Weinstein buried the movie. But guess what? We found it, lots of us did, and you can too.

This movie works on many levels – as an allegory, as social commentary, as an action flick, as an intense, thrilling drama. I love how the progress of the underclass from the back of the train to the front is literally transformative, from the darkest quarters, to bright, lush, and sumptuous toward the front, with devastating frosty beauty outside the windows. This film is visionary, but it declares a certain urgency in setting year 0 at 2014. The editing is tight, it keeps the motion pressing forward, keeps the pace brisk and exhilarating (and sometimes terrifying). This is a real trick of cinematography, to use the train’s inherent claustrophobia as an asset, and to use the momentum as a character and not byproduct of the plot. The scenes are literally compartmentalized but they fit together to make a really nice, fluid picture that you’ll enjoy watching, enjoy rewatching, and really enjoy discussing.