2bastardsandabluray

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The Empty Man - Spoiler Review

"This looks like dogshit," I hear you already saying, "Another lazy cheap-assed slenderman type horror movie for middle schoolers. You really watched this? Fucking narc!"

Oh I sure did, asshole. And you should too because looks are deceiving. RLM's Jay Bauman, the immortal weird-indie-sex-pervert-film conniseur, commands it - and who am I if not his humble shill servant? The Empty Man has a lot going on, and this combined with its runtime (>2hrs!) lends toward the general impression that first time writer & director David Prior probably should've pitched it to Fox Studios as a TV series. So even though I do love to complain, I can hardly do so about this movie. Each of the 3 acts are more or less their own film, their plot threads carefully spun together, weaving a mostly successful third and final act.

I haven't actually said anything about the plot yet, because, well... I'm honestly not sure how to summarize it; Even the IMDB summary fails to properly advertise what happens. The plot of The Empty Man is functionally the plot of a full trilogy of movies, which Fox evidently was not willing to gamble on. If the studio wasn't one monolithic quivering pussy, David Prior's ideas would have had ample time across 4ish hours of screen time. In our day and age nobody is really willing to sit down and watch a movie for that long (have you ever tried to watch the original Ben-Hur? Jesus tittyfucking Christ it's like watching a 300 year old man-corpse play shuffleboard with his bare hands) and fairly so. Resulting from this unfortunate reality is a conceptually DENSE movie which makes use of some ideas I've never seen thrown around in a horror film before. I like 'em dense, babey.

The Empty Man opens with a trope-y and unceremonious vignette about a group of hiking buddies working their way up some unnamed mountain in Bhutan, c.1995. One of them, whom I can only refer to as Kmart Brand Aaron Paul, falls into a hole on the mountainside. Whoopsie! Within the hole/cave, Discount Paul discovers, uh, well, it's not entirely clear what he's looking at in this scene. I'd elaborate, but then I bet you wouldn't be as interested.

Hiker fella #2 hurriedly rappels down, fearing his buddy might've broken a bone, or something. Discount Paul appears unscathed, but he's acting really fucking weird. Completely unresponsive to people around him, just sitting cross-legged on the ground mumbling (praying?). The next 15 minutes are pretty bog standard, but it takes a strange twist at the end of this little intro when Discount Paul just fucking murders everyone and then throws himself off the mountain. "Huh," think we, the audience, collectively, "Fuck's this supposed to be about?" I'm writing a review right now and I'm here to tell you I have barely any goddamn idea.

Act two is where things get slightly more explicable. It's a procedural cop drama now, and our tragically generic (but quite nice as detective protags go!) lead is a grizzly, hard boiled ex-detective who left - or lost - his job for reasons we don't really know yet. Cool. His friend's kid (lesbian Finn Wolfhard) has gone missing though, oh no! Detective Whatever sets about hunting for clues and discovers quickly that a bunch of other annoying-ass teenagers have also gone missing here in Plotsville, seemingly in connection to some cheesy Bloody-Mary-esque ritual the school kids venerate as local tradition.

From this point, all the building blocks of a by-the-book garbage horror flick for children who've just recently been allowed into a PG-13 are in place. The Bye-Bye Man, The Smiling Man, Dark Shadows, Slender Man, that one that's set in Moscow I don't care what it's really called, ad nauseum. Act 2 approaches - but deftly avoids - relegation into an obscenely large rolladex of pissass garbage. As it makes this crafty maneuver away from irrelevance, the really interesting events and plot concepts start to throw themselves at you.

Detective Whatever has linked the kids' disappearances to an exceptionally wacky cult, so he pays them a hard-boiled visit and listens to a sermon delivered by Barry and Office Space alumnus Stephen Root's character, who comes across as far less wacky and more trustworthy than your average cult goon. Detective Whatever and the kooky minister sit down for a chat after the service, wherein our hero utterly fails to make any sense of what Root's character is trying to explain. Nice try though, Detective Philistine!

mumble grumble mumble my stapler

Root's dialogue in this scene gives us just a glimpse of what these supernatural yokels are up to. He tries, very very patiently, to introduce our hero to the concept of the noosphere, the imaginary realm from which originates - and through which flows - all conscious thought, human and otherwise. The homely minister goes on to paint a picture of a fascinating occult ideology which draws not only on various sects of Buddhist thought, but also on a real-world cult from the early 20th century called Theosophy.

The cult is fixated on notions of the noosphere, of thought manifestation, tulpas and the like. We don't know what exactly their goal is yet, but a circle of people chanting gibberish (not a foreign language, I mean actual vocal jibberish) in a giant unlit abandoned warehouse probably needs to be stopped by our dashing protagonist before something truly spooky happens.

heehee hoohoo we're gonna summon a demon or some shit idunno

Stop them he does not, however, and hooboy does it get fucking weird from here. Detective Whatever has moved a few links up along the chain of clues, and worn himself down to the bone in the process. The guy is falling apart at the seams trying to find the end goal behind all these high-minded ideas and violent cult bozos, while at the same time struggling to manage what appears to be PTSD due to a tragic loss.

Somewhere along the way, all that he's seen and been told about a higher plane of pure consciousness, about a world beyond the realm of our perception, about entities ancient and malicious, has more or less shredded his relationship with reality. As the plot threads begin to wrap themselves together, Detective WhoEvenAmI unravels at a rapidly increasing pace. Then, coinciding with his complete psychotic break, the detective happens upon the missing girl essentially by chance. She looks extraordinarily cult-y. The girl reinforces this initial judgement by saying some seriously bizarre shit. Detective Cuckoo's Nest is not, in fact, a real person, and nor was his tragically lost family. He is a manifestation of the cultists' combined thought and concentration, a sort of tulpa. "We made you!" she gleefully informs the harrowed and broken man, "We invented every aspect of your existence and conjured you into being".

Why? Fuck if I know, dude. That you're reading this on a Tumblr post instead of Roger Ebert's website or something similar is a decent enough indicator that The Empty Man falls a few hairs short of its ambition, losing some box office schmeat in the process. It's a shame, too, 'cause excepting the last 10 minutes the whole ride is unique in tone and deeply fascinating in content. Prior's debut movie is well-shot, well-edited (if a bit short), and the story is carefully crafted to have you scratching your head and ass the entire time. I love me a movie like that. And though the ending is neither explanatory nor wholly satisfactory, David Prior's blended vagueries of Buddhist philosophy and mass psychology are a very new and fresh take on a horror macguffin that can be spooky and/or scary. If you like spooky mysteries, and especially if you like cult horror, both I and the Great Immortal Jay In The Sky beseech you. Give budding director David Prior two hours of your time, you probably won't regret it. Besides, what were you gonna do with those two hours anyway? Scroll through Instagram? Fuckin' jackass.

[2bastardsandabluray]

Logan: A dying breed of storytelling

Major spoilers below.

Things change. This is an inevitable part of existence. For better or worse, nothing is truly static.

Movies change, too. They will continue to do so. It is not within my ability or the ability of anyone who gives a flying fuck about the art form to stop this change. What do I mean? Well, if you’ve ever seen Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2, you ought to recognize the change I’m talking about.

Some very nefarious and capitalistic things are being done by production studios, and also by Adam Sandler. (Side note: if you’re Adam Sandler, fuck you.) Although a lack of originality is one of these production changes, another is the dominance of the ‘popcorn flick’ - big budget, action packed summer movies whose detail and artistry are surface-deep, at best. On its own this is not a bad thing, but it depresses me to see the direction in which this trend is pulling Hollywood in general.

Logan is, as a result, among a dying breed of movies - a small story pulled out of a much larger world in which to tell stories. The Lord of the Rings trilogy, large and fantastical as it seems, is a subtle example of this to those familiar with more of J.R.R. Tolkien’s works. Almost 12 full hours of film fails to encompass even a small portion of the storytelling universe Tolkien created. 

This, in part, is what makes James Mangold’s Wolverine send-off so beautiful. The rest of the X-Men franchise is vast and deserving of its own essay some other time, but the power of Logan is in its lack of vastness. The only references we get to other X-Men movies are small, subtle, and often brushed aside by whatever else is going on (with the exception of the comic books).

As a result, we are left with a story about 3 people, on the run, worn out, and deeply lost. Logan is now well over 200 years old, and he is tired in every possible sense of the word. His last friend, Charles Xavier, whom he has known for over 50 years, is dying. Here enters Laura (X-23), Logan’s genetically manufactured daughter, who is being hunted down by her creators. The three of them argue, endure struggle, bond, and eventually both Logan and Charles die trying to deliver this girl to safety. After more than 200 years of wandering the Earth drunk and depressed, Logan dies having finally learned what it means to be happy, and to belong to a family.

This story arc, to me at least, seems very simple. There’s no maniacal villain, no doomsday machine, no massive implications or sequel possibility. Logan is a story about one man (with indestructible bones) finding a final happiness in his long, dark life. This is a dying form of storytelling - a small, simple story about people, doing their best in a world which makes it all too easy to do your worst.

-Andrew

[2bastardsandabluray]

Ghostbusters (2016) and the epidemic of lazy filmmaking

Before I can actually say anything, here’s this: This movie wasn’t poorly received because people hate women. That’s moronic and you know it, but that didn’t stop Sony from playing up the misogyny surrounding this film’s release as promotion. I’m not saying that there aren’t plenty of men (and some women) with a deep-set subconscious despise for women, but this is a movie blog, so look elsewhere for more on that. All I’m saying is that if you didn’t enjoy this film it almost definitely wasn’t because you’re a sexist.

Now then.

Ghostbusters is in an interesting position. It wasn’t a bad movie, but it was nowhere near a good movie either. Credit where it’s due, a film with an all-woman cast was likely very difficult to get produced. It was still bad, though, and there’s something about this film that feels very.... lazy. Let me explain.

Movies are an art form, and art tends to reach out and grab you in a way that other things in life don’t. Why does sad music bring people to tears? What is it about modern art that causes a white canvas with some streaks on it to be valued in the millions? Because it’s art, and even bad art can elicit a response from people.

 It’s the same in movies. Think of your favorite one - how much can you remember? Not the whole thing obviously, but you remember bits and pieces. Your favorite scenes. The tone in an actor’s voice when they deliver a certain line. An explosion, an action sequence, a character death, whatever. The point is that you remember moments in the film that were important in some way. Those individual moments are what make you remember the film. Zack Snyder is obsessed with this, which is why 300 became such an iconic movie instead of a straight-to-DVD action dumpster fire.

Ghostbusters lacks these moments; it lacks the artistic ability to grab your attention or get an emotion out of you. In all honesty I can’t distinctly remember one line or scene from this film clearly. It lacks a soul, like some sort of cloned animal. I remember thinking that Chris Hemsworth’s dopey character was funny, and Leslie Jones (who received a bizarre amount of hate for being in this movie) was the only main character with any, well, character. Beyond that, nothing. I had to go and re-watch bits and pieces of this movie to actually write a coherent review.

This movie isn’t the only recent one to lack that memorability. In the last few years we’ve had scores of half-assed reboots with this problem. Sure, some have been good. But the Hollywood money-earning algorithm has turned out plenty more that were anywhere from shitty to downright disgraceful to their respective originals. See the following evidence:

Screenshot from an unfortunately extant film which I won’t name.

A studio producer somewhere watched Idiocracy and decided that he wanted to make movies for those people instead of actual people who can think.

If a good movie is one that causes you to question things, then Independence Day: Give Us More Money is only good in the sense that it made me question what the hell I was doing seeing it.

It’s a wonder they even greenlit a third reboot movie after this 2-hour special of Bengalwick Cumpsterbats screaming and punching Chris Pine in the face.

Now I know you’re thinking, “Andrew, you naive asshole, studios only make movies because there’s money to be earned, they don’t do it because some rich loon wants to see 3 more Transformers movies made”. And you’re right! You got me. Money is a thing, and film studios want it.

But this Blart-esque model of low-effort reboots and bad movies can’t last. People are going to stop seeing movies as much because almost all of them are going to suck, and the industry will die gripping valuable franchises in its frigid, greedy hands. That’s why the ‘lazy movie’ trend has to stop. 

And I swear to god, if I ever hear rumblings about a Paul Blart 3 I’m moving to a cave. I’d rather watch some sort of horrifying cave-bear-creature claw me to death.

-Andrew

[2bastardsandabluray]

Suicide Squad is the Worst Film Ever Made

There’s a lot of things you could say about me. I’m tall. I have medium-sized feet. I might be one one hundred twenty-eighth Native American, maybe. These are unshakable character traits that have followed me throughout my life, and will likely continue to do so once I shuffle off this mortal coil and into a cylindrical cardboard urn. Another one of these traits? I despise Suicide Squad.

This film is ass. It reminds me of my ass. When I saw it in theaters, I remember finding it remarkable that someone was able to sneak a camera in my toilet and film my ass for 2 hours and 16 minutes. I had never even been on the toilet that long, unless you count that time in Cleveland wherein I found a bucket of raw goat meat in an alley and resolved to consume all of it in a momentary surrender to pure adrenaline. This resulted in a four-hour shit session in the bathroom of a Church’s Chicken. To reduce the session to a single adjective, I would likely choose “fire hose-esque.”  With this in mind, if Suicide Squad was, indeed, hidden camera footage of my ass on that fateful Christmas Eve, it would have at least had value as pure spectacle. I’m fairly certain I shat out an organ, for instance. The fact that this wasn’t included in the final cut is emblematic of the film’s piss-poor editing decisions. For shame, David Ayer. The studio should have opted for Gaspar Noe.

And indeed, while this omission is unforgivable AT BEST, perhaps even worse is every single other aspect of the film. Let’s start at the most obvious place - Ike Barinholtz’s character of Griggs.

Remember him? For whatever reason, the film saw fit to dedicate what seems like eighty-nine percent of its runtime to him. When we’re first introduced to Will Smith’s Deadshot, for instance, it’s in a scene where Griggs berates him through one of those little prison windows. We leave the scene knowing nothing about Deadshot as a person; only that Griggs is a guard, and he is mean. In the next scene, we’re introduced to Harley Quinn, the character who’s sexy and you wanna fuck with your penis. Griggs walks up to her and says, “Man, you’re hot,” or something. Then he says, “You wanna fuck?” Then Harley swings around on these weird blanket-rope things and goes up to Griggs and says, “Yeah, I love sex and fucking,” and then she licks the prison cell bar because it’s phallic and she’s hot. Then she says, “Oh, Daddy,” or something. Harley is one of the more complex characters in “The Squad,” so it was a good decision to make her really hot and sex-fucky and nothing else. Also great to see Griggs again. Powerhouse scene.

Further down the line, we get another Griggs scene where the Joker ties him to a chair and breathes on him for ten minutes. He goes, “Ooooh-AHHHHHH!” over and over again. Nothing happens in this scene, and it’s thirty-five minutes long. In the next scene, Griggs talks to Harley again and says, “Hey, what’s the Joker gonna do to me?” and she’s like, “Bad stuff! Ha!” and then we don’t see Griggs for the rest of the movie.

Why does this film - 136 minutes of Jared Leto sweating in a Hot Topic - feel the need to build up Griggs so much in its first act, only to forgo him entirely in its second and third? You could literally just have a scene with the Joker salivating in a helicopter somewhere, holding up Griggs’ severed head and smearing the blood on his pecs. That would have completed Griggs’ story arc. It would have had no point, but at least it would have been completed. This film could use at least one completed story arc, and it could have done so with just one severed head. All I want, in the end, is to see Ike Barinholtz’s severed head. Mail it to me, Tumblers. My P.O. Box is 1.

My point, though, is that this film is a disorganized pig orgy in Hell. From what I understand, it underwent countless edits and reshoots, because test audiences never seemed to actually enjoy it. I won’t go into specifics, because I’m a directionless college student writing this in between masturbation sessions, but still. The movie had a rushed, convoluted editing process, and fuck, you can tell. A good example of this is Killer Croc becoming a racist stereotype in the third act for no reason.

“Nah, shawty. I’m beautiful..” Fantastic.

Overall, it just feels like they had, like, three versions of this movie, none of which were good, and then one day, David DC told them they had to edit a new version in one day. Consequently, every single editing decision feels rushed. The intro to each of the characters, for instance, feels like it was written in three minutes, because while we learn the bare essentials of each character, we’re not told enough to give any amount of fuck about any of them. Enchantress, for instance, is an archaeologist who is now a ghost-thing, kind of, and she’s fucking a nondescript white guy who shoots things. I don’t care. 

And let’s talk about the music. There’s something about the use of music in this movie that engenders within me such a visceral hatred for all living things that, while watching this film, I would welcome a nuclear holocaust. It could be because the selection of songs seems to have been done by a DJ for a shitty classic rock station. Another reason, I think, is that I don’t care about anything happening in this movie. The worst use of music in film and TV is always when a song is supposed to accompany an emotion the audience is feeling, and yet the audience is not feeling that emotion. When Seven Nation Army starts playing once The Squad is finally coming together, the movie wants me to think, “Yeah! These badasses are gonna fuck some shit up! Jack White said so!” But I haven’t actually gotten attached to any of them yet, because none of them have had more than three minutes of screen time. As a result, the movie is just playing a hard rock song while people with skin conditions walk and then stand in a circle. That isn’t a combination that should exist.

I could go on and on about this piss cauldron of a film, but writing is largely an unpleasant process and I can only endure so much. My point, though, is that this is just a very bad movie. I think there may be an extra layer of hatred in my case (and likely in the case of many others), because I was really looking forward to this movie. For one, I genuinely think that the Joker is possibly the greatest villain ever portrayed in fiction, and I was interested to see what Jared Leto would do with the role. As a result, the fact that he was made into a malnourished Marilyn Manson with two minutes of screen time was a really huge shame. For another thing, I’m always interested in movies and TV shows with morally grey protagonists, and a mainstream film starring a literal group of these people definitely piqued my interest. I probably shouldn’t have been expecting much, but I would’ve liked more than what amounted to the bad acid trip of a man with ADHD at a Twenty One Pilots concert.

The one saving grace of this movie, however? Slipknot - the man who can climb anything. It’s honestly no wonder that he took America by storm like he did. 2016 will always be remembered as the year of Slipknot Mania, and rightfully so. Climb on, brother. Climb on.

- Max

[2bastardsandabluray]

Assassin’s Creed: Why don’t video game movies work?

People, especially internet commenters, like to take a big hefty dump on things other people like.

And sure, sometimes it’s deserved. Sometimes movies are bad. Sometimes movies are especially bad. But there’s a difference between a good film, one with subtleties and directorial character and symbolism etc., and a film that’s just plain fun to watch.

Green Room was a good movie. Well directed, well-shot, fantastic use of tension. I could and probably will go on forever about it. Dredd was a fun movie. Action packed, cool characters, good set-pieces and CGI eye-candy. Deadpool managed to be both, but more on that another time.

The thing is, there are a lot of movies that don’t fit in one of these two categories. It’s not absolute. So why am I bothering with it? Because nobody greenlighting these frankly bad movies is paying attention to it either.

Video games are meant to be fun, unless you like Dark Souls. DOOM, Hitman, Lara Croft, Warcraft, on and on and on. All fun, well made games. Absolute box office tanks. Why? What is it about these franchises that doesn’t translate between entertainment mediums?

Tone. The problem is tone. Let me give you an example.

DOOM is an incredibly fun game. I played through DOOM 2016 in one sitting, but you’d have to pay me to watch the movie again. Because the tone was wrong. It didn’t feel like DOOM, it felt like a canned horror movie set in the DOOM universe.

The Assassin’s Creed movie has a similar problem. I’ll freely admit I liked the movie, even though it wasn’t good. Michael Fassbender and Marian Cotillard both gave bland performances, the dialog was shitty, the editing (especially in fight sequences) was bad, and some of the story didn’t make sense. But where they really went wrong, I think, was the tone.

Assassin’s Creed is an entertaining game franchise with bizarre lore and no real reason for the action to happen. But it’s popular because the developers realized this and kept the confusing story to a minimum so you could jump off buildings and stab people.

This was what the producers failed to do with the film. The action sequences were short, few in number, and for some reason less prioritized than shots of Michael Fassbender looking confused and listening to someone mutter about an apple.

The point I’m making is this: If you want to make a high-earning video game movie, fret less about storytelling and more about action and the feel of the original game.

Thanks for taking the time to read! Comments and feedback are appreciated, man.

-Andrew