I liked it. Don’t go see it, though

Posted on February 14, 2015 by reelentropy

This visual, echoed in both the film’s opening and its abrupt, snazzy close, is exactly what I’m talking about. Sam Taylor-Johnson did a brilliant job with this movie despite clearly being shackled to the source material, no pun intended. Photos courtesy Universal Pictures.

The target audience for Fifty Shades of Grey is women who are somehow both older than 17 and still immature enough that nudity makes them giggle, but it does have much more to offer as a film.

The movie follows Ana Steele (Dakota Johnson), a virginal college student on the edge of graduation. She is sent to interview her commencement speaker Christian Grey (Jamie Dorman) in lieu of her journalist friend (Eloise Mumford), who really ought to have passed the task off on a coworker instead of her roommate. Steele and Grey are immediately attracted to each other and begin a romantic relationship, but tension arises between Grey’s fetishes and constant attempts to morph Steele into an obedient set of girl parts and Steele’s sexual inexperience and desire for a more normal relationship.

As previously discussed, despite the negativity surrounding the book, this movie still had a lot of potential. It’s got a good base story — it’s hyper-focused on two characters who just entered into a relationship and both very much want to be together, but are driven apart by their different stages of romantic and sexual development. Steele has never been in a relationship and wants to work her way slowly into a conventional one, but also wants to be with Grey in the ways he’s used to. Grey has a traumatic upbringing and sexual abuse in his past and doesn’t view himself as capable of having normal relationships, so he sabotages what relationships he does have by insisting on demeaning his partner sexually and controlling her in some very unhealthy ways. This has a fantastic set of internal conflicts within Steele and Grey and tension leading to conflict between them. The book’s execution was laughably poor, but with a film adaptation, a mostly new set of people gets a fresh crack at that aspect.

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What Fifty Shades of Grey will say about our culture

Posted on February 12, 2015 by reelentropy

Photos courtesy Universal Pictures

By most accounts, Fifty Shades of Grey isn’t a good book. It was born of a housewife in her mid-40s with a hardon for Edward Cullen typing a requiem for a sex life that was never this exciting, and that’s what it feels like you’re reading. It’s unlike anything people who know less of the world have read before, but the truth is this kind of writing — sexually explicit fan fiction — is everywhere and not worth the paper it’s printed on much of the time.

What sets Fifty Shades apart is that it takes the sex just a little further. Controversy became fame, and four years and 60 million copies later, it’s one of the most anticipated movies of 2015, be it with baited breath or dread.

Ironically, a major part of the criticism leveled at the book is that its interpretation of BDSM is sanitized for a broad audience, making it not as risque as advertised. That and piss-poor writing — mostly the piss-poor writing — make it an unsatisfying read for anyone drawn to it because they’d heard it pushed the boundaries on dominance/submission in mainstream writing. It almost certainly won’t push those boundaries in mainstream movie making, but it is still fascinating from a cinematic adaptation perspective because of what it says about female pleasure and rape culture. Unfortunately, most of these messages will be just as sanitized as the book’s version of BDSM.

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The Ballad of Spider-Man in Film

Posted on February 10, 2015 by reelentropy

In 2008, Marvel took a chance on Iron Man as a proof-of-concept to fund and start up a long string of superhero movies that didn’t focus just on Tony Stark, but would also include Captain America and Thor and a long list of others that has, in recent years, become “literally anyone we can fit into this thing.”

But this wasn’t their first kick at the can. In 2000 on a much less proven market, they released X-Men in the hopes of funding Spider-Man, Hulk, Fantastic Four and Daredevil franchises. It’s easy to see the DNA behind the Avengers movies in this set — in order to push multiple franchises consecutively and avoid fatigue, Marvel’s creative directors made sure they were significantly different movies. Daredevil was a crime drama, Hulk was a monster movie and Fantastic Four was a team movie focused on family dynamics. Spider-Man, on the other hand, was a straightforward superhero movie in line with the Superman and Batman series of preceding decades.

X-Men was a surprise hit, but the materials they hoped to fund with it mostly failed. The Ang Lee Hulk is universally reviled, as is Fantastic Four. Daredevil was met with very poor reviews, but the director’s cut — a completely different film — has become a minor cult classic.

Spider-Man, on the other hand, was met with critical acclaim and became the first movie ever to clear $100 million on opening weekend.

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Posted in White Noise | 8 Comments

Sponge actually in water, most of the time

Posted on February 6, 2015 by reelentropy

I’m really not sure how to feel about the bait and switch here. Many of the lines in the trailer aren’t in the movie at all and it outright lies about Burger Beard’s plot. Slash’s scenes were all cut from the final product. But at the same time, the movie follows through on all its basic promises. Photos courtesy Paramount Pictures.

Well, if you wanted a feature-length episode of SpongeBob SquarePants, here you go.

The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water’s advertising — and title, for that matter — hinged mostly on the scenes where SpongeBob SquarePants (Tom Kenny) and crew are on the beach in CGI, and that’s a little deceptive as they spend only a long denouement on dry land, about 25 minutes out of 93.

The real plot of the movie is divided into rough thirds. The pirate from the series’ opening theme is re-cast as Captain Burger Beard (Antonio Banderas), a greedy swashbuckler with an amphibious food truck and reality-warping powers which he uses to steal the secret recipe to Mr. Krabs’ (Clancy Brown) krabby patties, famously addictive in Bikini Bottom. Upon the recipe’s seemingly magical disappearance, the town is thrown into Mad Max-style dystopian chaos, with the acolytes pursuing the last two creatures to lay hands on the recipe — SquarePants and Plankton (Mr. Lawrence). The duo escape through time, and their time-traveling shenanigans make up the main body of the movie. After that segment is over, the whole town embarks on a long journey to confront Burger Beard.

It feels slimy to not call this movie out for reneging on so many of its specific promises, but Sponge Out of Water shows folks what they came to see. While most of the series isn’t coherent enough to draw a full movie from, this film’s journey is a good length, well-paced and always entertaining. The potty humor is still present — the toilet paper sticks to the extra-dimensional dolphin’s fin just a touch too long — but most of the movie is sideways enough that it avoids descending into predictability.

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Not what we had in mind

Posted on January 28, 2015 by reelentropy

They’ve been talking about Ghostbusters 3 for 20 years solid now and nothing’s come of it, and after the death of Harold Ramis last year, nothing ever will. Having already made Ghostbusters 2 due to studio pressure despite writers Ramis and Dan Akroyd and director Ivan Reitman all being uncomfortable with it — and after the movie itself ended up being one of the most disappointing ever — Bill Murray has been repeatedly stamping out the idea of a third movie for 10 of those years. Akroyd had a script ready to go in 1999, though according to IGN it was terrible. Despite two animated series and several video games, it looked like Ghostbusters, a smash hit in its run and still recognized as one of the funniest movies ever made, would only have one movie in its progeny.

And every human creature in the world that didn’t stand to make a ton of money off a third movie was so, so OK with that.

 

Photo courtesy Columbia Pictures.

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Posted in The Möbius strip, White Noise | 3 Comments