Reel Entropy

Why?

Why has Misher Films remade Carrie? They can’t have thought it would make money — Sunday afternoon of opening weekend it still needs more than $10 million to break even, even though it’s October and Carrie is the only real horror movie out right now.

So… why?

The story follows Carrie White (Chloë Grace Moretz), a socially ostracized high school girl who is abused both by her classmates and her Bible-thumping psychopath of a mother (Julianne Moore). Over the course of the film, Carrie develops telekinetic powers, which she eventually uses to avenge herself after being doused in pig blood at her senior prom.

What? “Spoiler alert?” See, no, that isn’t a spoiler. For one thing, this story will be 40 years old in April, and for another, even if you didn’t know exactly how it ended, the commercials spell it out. For whatever reason, this film’s marketing made absolutely sure everyone will know how it ends.

So, everyone knows the ending, it’s not making much money despite being the only horror movie in October… why?

It wasn’t to make a good movie or express any kind of creativity. Misher Films is a small enough production company that it might have just wanted an art film, but this Carrie is a shot-for-shot remake of Brian De Palma’s 1976 classic. There are changes, but they all stand out in a bad way.

Even the faint glimmers of artistic merit that are present seem like accidents. The film opens with Carrie’s mother hemorrhaging vaginally and in immense pain, echoing the sequence in which Carrie has her first period and freaks out because she doesn’t know what it is. But this turns into a completely needless birth scene. The only purpose is to check off “ominous origin sequence” on the movie’s trope list.

Carrie seems to constantly have a menstrual cramp, which could be an interesting motif because of the same scene, but that’s probably just Moretz over-acting her character’s awkwardness.

There’s no artistic merit, everybody knows the story, it might make a few million dollars in the end but nothing significant… why?

Was it to put Carrie in a modern context? Because the mere presence of cell phones and a Tim Tebow reference doesn’t accomplish that. You could put cell phones in Shakespeare, but if it’s still in iambic pentameter you’re never going to surprise your audience.

Was it to make a higher quality movie? Because they did the exact opposite of that. The dialogue is atrocious, particularly between Carrie and her mother. Scenes that are supposed to be highly traumatic don’t have any teeth.

Director Kimberly Peirce has found a magical zone of remake badness. It’s a shot-for-shot reproduction, almost literally, of the 1976 version. But, somehow, the changes are all minor or cosmetic, but at the same time they make a huge difference for the worse.

The movie successfully adds in modern, annoying tropes, and that’s the only thing it does successfully. The intense awkwardness of the oddly-physically-mature high school kids is in full effect. Moretz and Ansel Elgort are the only main cast members under 24. It’s a little jarring when 25-year-olds who are probably just getting their start after years of modeling start building up to a threesome and then cut it off for a conversation about how much detention would suck.

There are better telekinesis effects, but in my own mind this actually works against the movie. Carrie is a story about the pain of being female and attempts to rebel against chastising peer groups, abusive parenting and an oppressive religious culture. All of those themes are understated in this version, but boy do those telekinesis effects look sharp!

Why? The only answer is to bring the horror classic into the modern era of filmmaking. That’s a bad thing, because this generation of horror movies is filled to the brim with laughably terrible films that have been manufactured to have the same aesthetic, the same basic story and the same absolute lack of artistic merit.  Someday, maybe soon, something will break the industry out of its mire. Carrie isn’t that something.

Joshua Knopp is a formerly professional film critic, licensed massage therapist, journalism and film student at the University of North Texas and a staff writer for the NT Daily. Why? FOR THE GLORY OF SATAN, OF COURSE! For questions, rebuttals and further guidance about cinema, you can reach him at reelentropy@gmail.com. At this point, I’d like to remind you that you shouldn’t actually go to movies and form your own opinions. That’s what I’m here for. Be sure to come back next week for a review of The Counselor.

In Machete Kills, Robert Rodriguez has created a perfect B-Movie.

Well, the first 45 minutes of one, at least.

The movie starts with Machete (Danny Trejo) losing a missile to unidentified assailants. President Rathcock (Carlos Estévez) then asks him to go to Mexico and track it down. Machete learns that the revolutionary who stole it, Mendez (Demián Bichir), has pointed the missile straight at Washington D.C. and wired the launch sequence to his heartbeat. Machete has 24 hours to get Mendez to America, where the bomb can be defused.

Machete Kills is wonderfully ridiculous. There is a ton of action, and all of it has gone through a few extra silly cycles. This is a movie in which helicopters can explode when their propellers are hit. This is a movie in which only a handful of people conduct electricity. This is a movie in which Charlie Sheen plays the president of the U.F.S. It’s filled with gleeful laughter and unrepentant, goofy violence.

Unfortunately, the shock of awesomeness wears off, and what was a romp of unbridled joy becomes a shamble through an overcomplicated plot that is suddenly important. Without their counterweight, the movie’s myriad flaws pop right to the surface.

There actually is a right and a wrong way to do a B-movie. Take Monty Python and the Holy Grail, probably the most recognizable B-movie. It’s actually a fundamentally sound film that was made to maximize abject absurdity. Watch it again and think. If someone cleaned up all the silly bits, the film would actually hold your attention.

Holy Grail is also constantly pushing the envelope. From the limbless Black Knight to the killer rabbit, the film never stops being stupid.

Machete Kills, on the other hand, gets lost in the weeds and starts to drag on. After the first few action sequences it starts to decelerate, and once Machete gets to America it comes to a screeching halt as a boring plot and poorly-developed recurring characters become more prominent.

After that, there’s nothing to compensate for the film’s blatant political agenda and extremely poor treatment of women. Machete fights against the Mexican Cartel and American corruption that allows them to exist, and the movie operates on the assumption that all violence in Mexico is directly tied back to that corruption. Anyone uncomfortable with these political implications will have difficulty enjoying this film.

Another difficulty that most decent human beings will have is with the movie’s female roles. Machete Kills is an exploitation film, and I get that. It’s supposed to be pulpy and exploitative and not to be taken seriously. And if there were one or two bubble-headed bleach blonds in there, it’d work. But there aren’t.

Basically, Rodriguez wrote a gender neutral script, then took every character that wasn’t Machete, made them female and subjugated them. Madame Desdemona (Sofía Vergara) and her prostitutes serve no purpose other than weaponized T and A. Miss San Antonio (Amber Heard) and Shé (Michelle Rodriguez) actually do have function, but they’re sexualized to the point that all other characteristics are trivial. There’s too much sexism here, even for Machete Kills’ outrageous context.

When Machete Kills sits down, shuts up and shows us the blood-spattered goods, there’s a lot to like about it. Machete, Mendez and El Chameleón (Walton Goggins, Cuba Gooding Jr., Lady Gaga, Antonio Banderas) are hilarious even in dialogue much of the time. It’s easy to enjoy the film for what’s right with it, but it could have been much better.

Joshua Knopp is a formerly professional film critic, licensed massage therapist, journalism and film student at the University of North Texas and a staff writer for the NT Daily. Oh dear God, the U.S. government is still shut down. For questions, rebuttals and further guidance about cinema, you can reach him at reelentropy@gmail.com. At this point, I’d like to remind you that you shouldn’t actually go to movies and form your own opinions. That’s what I’m here for. Be sure to come back next week for a review of Carrie.

Gravity’s opening crawl is enough to tighten every sphincter in the audience, and for the next 90 minutes, there will be no relief.

The movie follows mission specialist Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) through a disastrous spacewalk. While she’s servicing the Hubble Space Telescope, Russia shoots down one of its inactive satellites and hurls a shower of debris toward her at a few hundred miles per hour. After a scene of complete chaos when it hits, Stone is sent careening into space.

Gravity is equal parts breathtaking and terrifying. The movie does a great job of stressing both the horrible fate its characters face and their difficulty avoiding it. With no matter to push off of, every thrust Stone gets could be her last, sending her endlessly in that direction to asphyxiate thousands of kilometers away from the nearest living thing.

The film is beautiful to behold, though most of it is green screen. An $80 million budget isn’t enough to bring a camera into space, and for a large majority of the movie, Bullock’s face is the only real thing on the screen.

CGI-based films are normally a turnoff, but Gravity does two key things right. First, it has the goods. Visuals are both unbelievably gorgeous and completely believably accurate.

Second, it doesn’t use the CGI in vain. This is a story that would be impossible to tell with a real camera. So many movies waste time and money getting computer images when they could have had the real thing, but Gravity actually takes its audience thousands of miles above anywhere we will ever go.

For all its visual splendor, Gravity would be nothing more than smoke and mirrors without a powerful, human story at its heart. This film is the most emotionally intense cinema experience since the Breaking Bad finale. Writer/director/producer Alfonso Cuarón knocks the script out of the park as much as anything else.

The story is remarkably well-written and well-constructed. Structurally, it’s a horror movie — but in place of a slasher, Stone is stalked by the ever-present danger of where she is. Stone has all the marks of a Final Girl, and Gravity is a fantastic introduction to the concept.

Because it is character driven and because of the difficulties in acting against a green wall, Bullock and George Clooney are the real engines that drive Gravity. Universal went through Angelina Jolie, Marion Cotillard, Scarlet Johansson, Blake Lively and Natalie Portman before interviewing Bullock and Robert Downey, Jr. backed out before Clooney was hired. Gravity is very much a character driven film, but it only has two characters. Settling for second and sixth choices in those roles could have crippled the film, but the duo carries the action wonderfully.

There is every reason to see this movie in theaters. There’s even an argument to be made to see it in 3D. But there’s just as much reason to see it on a tiny analogue screen through a shop window. It’s a masterpiece.

Joshua Knopp is a formerly professional film critic, licensed massage therapist, journalism and film student at the University of North Texas and a staff writer for the NT Daily. The U.S. government is seriously still shut down. For questions, rebuttals and further guidance about cinema, you can reach him at reelentropy@gmail.com. At this point, I’d like to remind you that you shouldn’t actually go to movies and form your own opinions. That’s what I’m here for. Be sure to come back next week for a review of Machete Kills.

Rush is very, well, rushed.

Headlined by director Ron Howard, the movie tells the story of the 1976 Formula 1 racing season and the legendary rivalry between James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) and Niki Lauda (Daniel Brühl). Lauda, the defending world champion at the time, pulls out a large lead on Hunt while Hunt has car difficulties, which Hunt then makes up after Lauda has a near-fatal accident.

How this developed into an intense rivalry with one driver or the other incapacitated during the vast majority of the season is beyond me.

In its best form, Rush would be an intense scrutinization of the German Grand Prix that year. The heart of Hunt’s and Lauda’s rivalry was their contrasting natures. Hunt is courageous and reckless and Lauda is clever, cold and calculated. This was the race in which that conflict came to a head.

While the crew tried to focus on it, making the race a part of the prologue and the first half of the film a flashback, but that trick lost significance when it became fashionable.

Instead, Rush  is a giant — two very long hours — blow-by-blow breakdown of the principal characters’ lives. The producers wanted to get everything in there but didn’t want it to be too long, and it led to some sloppy writing.

Take the storyline with Hunt’s failed marriage. This kind of story constitutes the entirety of some very good movies (Blue Valentine springs to mind). But in Rush, they only have a couple of scenes — the first time Hunt meets Suzy Miller (Olivia Wilde) and then their last fight before divorcing.

The lack of screen time leads to weak, self-aware dialogue because that’s the only way to make sure the audience gets all the context. Real people don’t talk like Hunt and Miller do in these scenes. Real Formula 1 announcers don’t cater their play-by-play to people who don’t watch Formula 1, and it’s a safe bet the real Lauda never waxed poetic about how much fun having a rival is. It’s tough to tell whether Brühl is supposed to really hate Hunt’s guts and fails to express that through the say-exactly-what-you-want-the-film-audience-to-think dialogue or if his character is actually that self-aware.

Howard and writer Peter Morgan simply don’t communicate the soul of their story well here. A lot happens in Rush, but it just happens. There’s nothing to put the audience on the edge of it’s seat and make us want to keep watching.

Since it aspires to be a talkie, the weak dialogue gives most of this sense, but it’s everywhere. The race scenes are thrilling, but too short. Emotional scenes are also rushed.

I guess the movie was very well-titled, but that’s about all that can be said for it. Rush is just barely entertaining throughout, but not worth the two hour investment it demands.

Joshua Knopp is a formerly professional film critic, licensed massage therapist, journalism and film student at the University of North Texas and a staff writer for the NT Daily. He gets all the Major Arcana. For questions, rebuttals and further guidance about cinema, you can reach him at reelentropy@gmail.com. At this point, I’d like to remind you that you shouldn’t actually go to movies and form your own opinions. That’s what I’m here for. Be sure to come back later in the week for a review of Gravity.

I have to imagine the first meeting on the set of Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s new movie, Don Jon, went something like this- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u33dL7MVdoY

Gordon-Levitt writes, directs and stars as Jon Martello, a playboy who falls in love at first sight with Barbara Sugarland (Scarlett Johansson). Martello and Sugarland have a lot of sex because that’s the type of thing you get to do when you’re the director. But Sugarland must compete for Martello’s attention with his porn addiction.

The best microcosm of this film is a scene when Martello and Sugarland are first dating. Sugarman refuses to let him into her apartment for sex, but brings him to orgasm by dry humping him outside the door.

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