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Split - A Lil’ Lookie at a Movie Subtitle: “The Line Between Genius and Madman is Closer than Ever”

The Welcome to the Cinema Guy says hi!

Through a series of unfortunate events, I found myself seated in a large, dark room, surrounded by a fellow audience of skeptics at a screening of the new M. Night Shayamalan film, Split. I accidentally missed his last big one, After Earth, on purpose. 11% on Rotten Tomatoes is no bueno, habaneros.

Split is a fully immersive schizophrenic experience.  It runs the gamut of near-genius level cinema that Early-Shahalaman was known for, right down to the nausea inducing depths of his later work such as Lady in the Water, or perhaps, Avatar the Last Airbender *hiccups loudly and a small trail of bile runs down chin*.  The audience is left to make sense of that grand disparity, the bizarre spectrum that is Split. My friend, whom I went to see it with, even suggested that Shyamalan might be trolling the audience by purposefully directing well and then not well, to somehow reflect the varied states of the identity disorder patient, portrayed willfully and with gleeful restraint by James Macavoy.  Nice try, but I think the truth is much simpler. And sadder.

There is good direction and bad direction, very good camera work and very bad camera work.  The cinematography is truly remarkable.  This is the idiosyncrasy of Night.  He is capable of directing the tough-to-direct scenes flawlessly, but he goes on and stumbles over the easiest thing of all – expository dialogue, due to his showmanship.  Lines inserted with the grace and care of a neurosurgeon with stage four Parkinsons.  See fig 1.  The psychiatrist character, in M. Night’s cameo scene, where he plays some sort of building security guard, asks of him, after gazing at the well shot security camera footage: “See the way he walked through the trash like that? (in reference to one of James Macavoy’s characters 24 personalities), no normal person would walk through the trash on the street like that.”

Really, psychiatrist lady? Would they not? I sure as hell would.  I love to romp around through trash between my day-to-day meetings and appointments. I dragged my ass through fourteen street corners littered with dry gum, empty pepto bismol bottles and pizza pizza boxes to make it to your mentally addled film, didn’t I? Where the hell is the logic in that line….HOW DID THAT MAKE THE CUT, M. NIGHT?

That is the essence of late-form M. Night Shylaman.  His directorial decisions don’t make any fucking sense.  How does one go from a compelling third act that delivers thrills, chills, beautiful shots and layers, that ties up the divergent plot points together nicely into a gritty, little bow, to a line about a security guard’s proclivity for fast food: “Why do you continue to purchase that microwaveable chicken drumstick – in an apparent act of prolonged suicidalness?” This line also comes from the psychiatrist.  She gets most of the bad ones.    

In what world did that dialogue not get cut? WHO GREENLIT THAT SHIT? To try and understand the mind of the mad genius of Mr. Night is to enter a paradoxical world of hyper-pretense, of brinksmanship where the two players are both Mr. Shahalamang and to win is only to regain the credibility once lost, like a poker player in a deep hole who has to somehow bluff his way into winning the hand.  One can only assume that these poor attempts at expository dialogue, these bad directorial decisions, are attributed to a mad grasp for the public’s respect after 15-20 years of critical and box office disaster. He overreaches, and then overreaches, and then overreaches, again and again, and again.  He twists and counter twists, engaged in a fencing duel with the ghost of his former 90’s glory.

But despite myself, I want him to succeed. I want him to stop sucking and doing horrible shit. I want it so damn bad. Because I am beginning to understand that M. Night’s struggle with his own ego, to have the need to constantly one up himself, is the same struggle that grips the entire Hollywood machine.  Substance supplanted by Style – budget and CGI in replacement of story. It occurs to me that directors work best under constraints and worst when given no limitations.  Look at Lord of the Rings against the Hobbit.  Look at Jaws against say, BFG.  Look at Split, which cost $9.5 million, against say, After Earth, which was made for $130 million. There is no comparison I need to make to establish the glaring facts – you do not need a huge budget to make a great movie, and in fact, financial constraint forces creativity, the way a deadline keeps work getting done. Obviously there are limits to this – you can’t make a compelling Titanic on $500 dollars and a maxed out VISA. But this is the rule.  Enforce constraint and be rewarded.  Are you writing this down, SONY?

Anyways, yeah. It was an alright movie overall.  There’s a bit of a twist at the end that leaves fans of early Shyalamin agape, including myself.  The third act is good fun, and watching Macavoy just devour his roles (for those of you who’ve seen the film, no pun is intended) is intensely rewarding.  But it’s the little moments, the idiotic quirks in the dialogue or the direction that leave you really breathless – with shock, and maybe anger.  He really needs to rein in that dialogue, man. Besides that, solid effort. Thank you, M, for returning to form. Please studios, stop giving him money though. Unless you liked Avatar the Last Airbender in which case give him $200 million dollars.  

-          February 6th, 2017

-          Signed, “Welcome to the Cinema” Guy

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Assassin’s Creed - A not Movie Review of the Movie, Assassin’s Creed, by Welcome to the Cinema

Assassin’s Creed takes everything that is boring and dumb and dull and hazy and bad graphicy about the game series Assassins Creed and everything about the Spanish Inquisition that is boring, grim, sad and dumb and combines them together into something that is dumb, sad, needlessly grim, hazy and bad graphicy.  I should call it a film. But it is not a film, and to call it thus does a disservice to the auteurs and craftsmen of this and the previous century. I could barely refer to it as an association of images and sounds. That it even got made is endemic of how lazy and cannibalistic the Hollywood machine has become.  

As such, I will not deign to review it in the traditional sense – I will talk about it, however.  

If you like this association of images and sounds called hereafter, Assassin’s Creed, or Ass Creed for the short hand, you have either suffered a stroke or are about to suffer a stroke. I don’t care much which it is. But there is a good chance that your genetic material is not worth duplicating, so consider that as I go on to talk about the movie itself.

We open in some dark, dusty catacombs.  There’s lots of haze and smoke. And weird people in hoods are speaking in Spanish – talking about free will and how they are assassins and shit, which is already pretty laughable.  I would suppose that somewhere in the script or screenplay they referred to this sequence as “the initiation” because the main character, Callum Lynch’s ancestor (both ancestor and Callum are played by a needlessly dour and morose Michael Fassbender), is becoming an assassin, a defender who fights in the night to secure the light. No shit.  And how does he do that, you might ask? By killing a lot of people. Like a lot. At times he kills one person, a bad guy with an evil agenda, or a bad guys lackey, who might just be at the wrong place at the wrong time. But that’s basically it. He fights and kills guys. I cannot stress to you how dumb this plot point is, because it is the fulcrum of the movie.  Rather than having some set and arbitrary goal to strive towards over the course, Ass Crack’s dramatic fulcrum is lynched (no pun intended) to the fact that our protagonist kills a lot of folks.  To call them “assassinations” in turn does a disservice to actual assassins. When I think of assassination, I think of a guy sneaking around to kill a very specific person for a very specific reason.  What we who view this turd of a movie are forced to witness is an assassin who kills people really quickly, which is not really assassination at all.  It is more like murderation, or mass murderation, if you will.  

Visually, Ass Creed is shot by a lunatic.  We go from birds eye view shots, to close ups, from indoor to outdoor, in quick succession, directly, one after the other, breaking then re-breaking the 180 degree rule to the point of sheer insanity. I am not certain that I did not suffer from multiple bleeding aneurysms over the course of it. From light to dark and light again…maybe they’d have something here if this was an actual movie, but frankly, there are more interesting ways to establish that theme visually than a camera that can’t keep track of basic filmic principles.  

There is not even the remnant of a nugget of a shard of a film in this mess.  How did this get made? Seriously. I’m asking for a friend.  

Despite that, there are ways to turn the story into something worthwhile.  The entire plot is predicated on one giant conceit that is never addressed – that the “apple of eden”, this ark of the covenant type device, has been around for over a thousand years, and somehow…it contains the genetic information to help end violence, or rather, enforce slave will over the masses of mankind.  Obviously the baddies, this esoteric, all powerful group of robe wearing thespians called the Templars, desire this object.  And obviously these assassins…called the Assassin’s Creed, are standing in their way, conveniently siding with those who want to retain free will. And yet this movie does not only fail to address the fact that genetic helixes were only discovered in 1953 and thus, ancient peoples would have had no idea about how to somehow RETAIN THE KEY TO ENFORCING ONES WILL OVER HUMANITY WITH GENES, but they fail to deal with any of the social implications about the subject matter this battle over free will gives rise too.  Seriously. They only go over it with the briefest of explanations.  An explanation that is so completely terrible that it is laughable. They say “There was an ancient civilization that was very advanced, and it’s what made the Apple of Eden”.  Like what? Are you talking about aliens? You know, the dudes who helped us build the pyramids? Why is this a throwaway line of exposition and not the CRUX OF THE FUCKING MOVIE? Like, what if the Templars are after the Apple of Eden because it leads to a catacombs where there’s all this super advanced technology leftover from the aforementioned civilization and they want to get their hands on it?  That could be interesting. But again, no.  This movie is an utter fucking failure and the writers involved should be banned from ever touching pen to paper again.

It’s not that the ground isn’t right for ploughing and reaping what is plowed. There is genuinely interesting source material in the form of some of the plot points and themes in the video games. But these are never gone into. Such as the animus – this machine built by the Templars to allow modern day humans, who’s ancestors were assassins, relive the past through “genetic memory”.  Ripe territory to bring up questions about the nature of reality – about knowing what’s real and what’s fabrication, about the subjective will and how it is connected to the wider world. But nope. Not even close.

And that’s endemic of the whole movie experience. One insane missed shot to the next. On and on for like a hundred minutes. Fuck. THIS. MOVIE. FUCK ASS CREED.

Please, Regency Pictures, get in touch with me and I will help write a sequel. Just kidding, do not get in touch with me. 

-          Signed, February 1st, 2017

-          The “Welcome to the Movies!” Guy

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