Reel Entropy

James King (Will Ferrell) is being hugely racist here, and is put in mortal peril for his ignorance. Photos courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.

If you don’t know what people mean when they talk about casual racism, check out Get Hard.

After James King (Will Ferrell) is framed for embezzlement and insider trading and sentenced to 10 years in maximum security, he offers $30,000 to his building’s in-house car washer Darnell Lewis (Kevin Hart), who he assumes has been to prison because he’s black, to train him to protect himself during his 30 day grace period.

This movie puts casual racism and homophobia on display in two settings — both overtly with a supremely naive main character, but also subvertly with amorphous masses of stereotype-affirming black, Hispanic and gay people.

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Sorry Beyonce, but you’re not the only girl in the world. Photo courtesy 20th Century Fox.

Watching Home, a viewer may well find his or herself contemplating his own existence. What meaning can one’s life really have if one is watching this movie?

The movie follows Oh (Jim Parsons), a clumsy member of a peaceful but invasive alien species. The boov are on the run from the Gorgs, a world-destroying race that has been after them for centuries. The boov come to Earth, relocate everyone to Australia and move in, thinking they are finally safe, but Oh sends an interstellar email to apparently everyone in the universe inviting them to his housewarming party. Oh becomes a fugitive as the rest of his culture tries to hunt him down for his password so they can retract the message — this movie really has no concept of how email works — and in his flight, he bands together with Tip (Rihanna), a human who was missed in the evacuation and separated from her mother.

They say that when you die your life flashes before your eyes, and it’s natural to wonder what we’ll see. We accumulate good experiences, surely hoping they will dominate, and many that cannot will learn to appreciate bad experiences because they’re better than simply lounging about while our bodies slowly decay — bleeding just to know you’re alive, the song goes.

Home isn’t enough of an experience to be bad. That decaying sensation is much more prevalent. As the dull, predictable road movie drags on, viewers are sure to at least consider what they could have been doing with this time, if not fully realizing the emptiness of their lives. Continue reading →

Naomi Watts is 46 and does not look anywhere near old enough to be playing Theo James’ mother, to the point that it actually took me out of the movie because I thought they were going too far to make the cast sexy. Photos courtesy Summit Entertainment/Lionsgate

Insurgent picks up six months after then first film with the lead characters’ discovery that the machines are drilling into Zion. Wait a minute…

Insurgent picks up three days after Divergent with the lead characters on the run from the Erudite ruling class, which assumed power from the lead characters’ home class Abnegation in the first movie. They are quickly found and sent on the run again, and spend the majority of the film continuing on the run, organizing an insurrection as they go. Tris Prior (Shailene Woodley) suffers nightmares and acute guilt, as she holds herself responsible for much of the death in Divergent. Eventually, she is forced to give herself up to Erudite for experimentation on a weird box the bad guy, Jeanine Matthews (Kate Winslet), found.

All of this is shot in a way obviously inspired by The Matrix series and Inception, with repeated use of that Nightmare on Elm Street trick in which the dream sequences are revealed in surprising, organic ways.

Insurgent carries over Divergent’s poor, jarring pacing, which is its biggest problem. Situations change too fast for the audience to find any footing. Tense situations end before they peak, and eventually, they stop developing any tension at all since the audience is so ready to be whisked swiftly to the next scene.

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One of the turnoffs for Run All Night was the apparent plot twist of sending Conlon back to the mid-1800s with this bolt-action Winchester. It’s pretty clear someone really wanted this scene and built a movie around it, but instead built a completely different movie and shoehorned this scene in at the end. Photo courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.

Run All Night’s primary purpose is to fill a market niche opposite Cinderella, but it’s a  more than serviceable action movie in its own right.

It’s a story of parallels between Shawn Maguire (Ed Harris), a drug lord with his life together and a screw-up son (Boyd Holbrook), and Jimmy Conlon (Liam Neeson), his old friend and hitman who descended into alcoholism over the memories of his murders with an on-the-right-tracks son (Joel Kinnaman). Mike Conlon (Kinnaman) works as a limo driver, and the plot jumpstarts when he witnesses Danny Maguire (Holbrook) killing a client. Jimmy Conlon is forced to kill Danny Maguire, sending his father on a vendetta against the Conlons.

It’s a great story with a lot of potential, not all of it realized. The basic elements are there — a large-scale chase scene driving the plot, a character one could care about in Jimmy Conlon. He’s got a lot of regret and a son that hates him, and those are universally sympathetic traits.

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“Wouldn’t you like to know a little about him before you marry him?” Ella asks her step-sisters about the prince while a cannonball of pure irony soars over her head. Photos courtesy Walt Disney Motion Picture Studios.

The first version of Cinderella seems to be Rhodopis, a Greek courtesan who is married by the king of Egypt after he becomes enthralled with her tiny feet in first century B.C. We next see a much more familiar rendition from ninth century China that adds an abusive step family and a fairy godmother — or in this case, a magical fish. The story was expanded on several times in Renaissance Europe, with the popular 1950 cartoon based on Charles Perreault’s Cendrillon. This story has been around for a while now.

Everyone under the age of 65 grew up with the Disney classic, but with the rise of fan fiction it appears this type of vapid wish-fulfillment may be even more elemental than that. As a character, Cinderella reads like a lazy Mary Sue. While most forms of this character are given continuity-breaking power with which to dispatch villains like so many flies, Cinderella doesn’t do even this much, but gets the good-by-fundamental-nature, fairy-tale-romance treatment anyway just for being the special and unique snowflake that she is, even though she doesn’t really demonstrate that uniqueness or snowflakiness. Everything bad anyone ever said about Bella Swan or Ana Steele applies just as much to this character.

This story is something almost everyone aspired to at some point, and that’s kind of a problem. What is that aspiration, really? “One day when I grow up, someone rich and powerful will fall helplessly in love with me for no real reason, and we’ll live happily ever after?” This isn’t something healthy people aspire to for either their professional or romantic lives, but the story is dug deep into the public consciousness. Self-determination is the measure of a man, but Cinderella has none. When her step-family turns her into a slave through essentially peer pressure, she bends over and lets them. When faced with adversity, she cries a bit and makes up her mind to just put up with the problems she allows to fester.

This is a bad story. It is a story that rewards complacency and passiveness. It is a story in desperate need of subversion and deconstruction, to be remade for a world that wants to inspire children to do things for themselves instead of waiting patiently for their prince, a world that wants resilient, aggressive role models for its daughters.

So how in fuck does this movie exist?

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