Focus keeps viewers guessing

Posted on February 28, 2015 by reelentropy

In a few years someone’s going to write a small novel on the narrative significance of this gambling scene. It’s major audience manipulation and works on more levels that I can really understand on just one viewing. Photos courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.

Focus is a truly unpredictable movie, one that lies to the audience as much as its con man main character lies to his marks.

It’s tough to say what the film is about as a whole. It’s really broken down into five acts, two of which each have their own individual three act divisions. First, Nicky Spurgeon (Will Smith) heads a large group of purse snatchers through New Orleans in the lead up to Super Bowl XLVIII. Then, after an extended, gripping but somehow irrelevant gambling sequence, they’re in Buenos Aires ripping off F1 racers.

It’s very much a romantic comedy about star-crossed pickpockets Spurgeon and Jess Barrett (Margot Robbie), but the romance is downplayed and most of the jokes are washboard flat. The appeal of the movie is in how well it manipulates the viewer.

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Spock dies at 83

Posted on February 27, 2015 by reelentropy

Leonard Nimoy, best known for playing Spock in Star Trek and related movies, died in his home today due to complications from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Nimoy disappeared into the character of Spock for more than 50 years, saying he began to take on Spock’s characteristics while shooting the series and never shaking the public persona, remaining a science-fiction convention headliner and highly sought after guest star right up until his death. Nimoy even said he had an identity crisis with the character, and released two volumes of autobiography, I am not Spock in 1975 followed by I am Spock in 1995, which included conversations he had with the character.

Nimoy led a decent film career, garnering several nominations for playing Spock but also David Kibner in Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Morris Meyerson in A Woman Called Golda. Nimoy also tried his hand in writing and directing, directing Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, directing his own screenplay in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and writing Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Nimoy directed four films outside of the franchise, but the venture was largely unsuccessful. His first was the comedy Three Men and a Baby, a smash hit that held the top domestic gross of 1987 ahead of classics like Fatal Attraction, Good Morning Vietnam and Lethal Weapon, but his other three efforts all bombed.

Nimoy, for better or worse, will always be remembered as Spock, and in that memory, he will always be adored as a cultural touchstone. He leaves behind two children and a wife of 26 years.

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Kingsman wild, crass, not much fun

Posted on February 19, 2015 by reelentropy

EVERYBODY IN THE MOSH PIT. Photos courtesy 20th Century Fox.

If Kick-Ass was Kill Bill meets Superbad, Kingsman: The Secret Service is Deathproof meets Trading Places meets Octopussy. 

A wobbly adaptation of the six-issue Mark Millar limited series The Secret Service, the movie is a combination of willfully recycled rags-to-riches and super spy tropes. The main character, high school and military dropout Eggsy Unwin (Taron Egerton), lives with his mother (Samantha Womack), who is in a harshly abusive relationship with a local gang boss, when he is plucked from the slums by Galahad (Colin Firth), a member of an international spy agency conspicuously composed exclusively of British aristocrats who name themselves after knights of Arthurian legend. Unwin begins training to become the next Lancelot, while Internet magnate Richard Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson) lurks in the background.

This movie’s got jokes, but it can’t escape an overall sloppy nature and artistic purpose. There’s a lot of meta commentary, particularly in a scene between Galahad and Valentine in which they reminisce on older, sillier spy movies. Professor James Arnold was named Mark Hamill in the comic, so his character is renamed and they brought in Mark Hamill the actor to play him. It’s playful, and there are a lot of little bits of fun in there, but they’re not pervasive enough to save a movie that set out to combine archetypes and does a poor job of it.

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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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