The Other Movies I’ve Watched: Part 4
Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. I’ll have one more next week and then I’ll finally be caught up.
Snow White and the Huntsman
The worst movie I watched over quarantine. For most of the runtime I was thinking “who wants this?” It’s crazy to me this made nearly $400 million worldwide and spawned a sequel. This is why Hollywood will never make original stories again. Thanks everyone for spending $12 on this garbage!
This movie is such a product of 2012. We have Christopher Nolan and The Dark Knight to thank for a generation* of dark, gritty reboots that nobody asked for. This movie is that, but the tale of Snow White. Kristen Stewart (playing Snow White) would soon be released from the shackles of IP and go on to interesting movies, but in this she’s as bland as all her Twilight movies. Chris Hemsworth (playing a sad huntsman charged with killing Snow White) hasn’t evolved from hunk to hunk with comedic timing yet. Charlize Theron (playing the wicked witch that eats souls) REALLY goes for it. Not in a good way, but at least she’s trying something.
*Here’s some post Dark Knight examples of little loved dark, gritty reboots: Man of Steel (which I kind of like but still), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Fantastic Four, Alice in Wonderland, The Mummy, Star Trek: Into Darkness. There are surely legion more movies and TV that tried to copy Nolan’s success and failed.
It’s a problem that I internally sighed when Stewart and Hemsworth were on-screen since they’re the two main characters. Theron eating child souls to preserve her youth was the only not-boring thing to happen. Just make the whole movie out of Charlize Theron eating souls.
The Lion King
The 2019 reboot, not the 1994 one that, ahem, Scar’ed everyone’s childhood. As long as we’re talking about bad reboot ideas, why is this a thing? Well, I KNOW why ::money emoji:: But why are people continually suckered into “live-action” Disney reboots? Why would you pay money to see a nearly shot-for-shot remake of a movie, but with worse songs? You can watch the original at home for free! Disney Reboots are the most cynical movies that are made now. Disney knows that they’ll make buckets of money preying on nostalgia with recycled stories. The Lion King is the most obvious example. It looks gorgeous, and at times it feels like watching a Nat Geo nature show. But if that’s what you wanted, just watch a Nat Geo nature show, ya know? Those aren’t ruined by the uncanny valley, er, savannah.
It’s a stretch to call it live-action because the whole movie is CGI. The runtime is padded by a bad Beyonce song. It’s unclear if artists that worked on the original were credited or received residuals even though their work was the foundation for what’s onscreen. In a vacuum it’s not bad, but that’s because the original is good. In context though, this movie sucks. The redeeming qualities are that “Circle of Life” still slaps and my dog liked looking at the big kitties.
By the way, since the lions look realistic, it’s distracting that the male lions don’t have balls.
Ace in the Hole
I put this on my To-Watch list after Kirk Douglas died in February (103 years old!). I’ve seen very little of Douglas’ work, possibly just the great Paths of Glory and the ubiquitous Spartacus. Douglas plays Chuck Tatum, a former big-city journalist now stuck in Albuquerque after displaying questionable ethics at each of his previous papers. While on a road trip to another lackluster story assignment he happens upon a gas station owner that is trapped in a mine in Nowhere, New Mexico and decides to prolong the rescue mission in order to milk the story for personal notoriety. Douglas is brilliant playing a slimeball and this movie made me realize I need to seek out even more of his movies.
The film quickly becomes a critique of the media and the public’s consumption of media — a bored country becomes obsessed with this trapped man and a literal carnival breaks out outside the mine. We see a family take what they say will be a quick detour from their initial vacation plans to see the mine and they end up staying for a week. That hit home. I recently wrote about Twitter being garbage and yet I still can’t stop refreshing, looking for the latest hit of Trump screw-ups. No matter how advanced as a society we think we are, nothing can quench our lizard-brained appetite for disasters.
I haven’t seen a Billy Wilder movie I didn’t like. Ace in the Hole probably doesn’t make his Mt. Rushmore of iconic movies but it might be my favorite after The Apartment.
Candyman
In the Before Times, I got interested in watching this because I liked the trailer for the reboot (written by Jordan Peele) that was supposed to come out this summer. For a slasher movie it was a little too high-concept for me, which is a generous way of saying I was too dumb to understand what was going on. With your usual slasher villains, your Michael Myers and Jasons, their motivations are clear: murder the horny teenagers. But with this I was confused as to what the Candyman’s powers or motivations were. This movie has a good reputation and it was interesting integrating a sociological bend with a slasher flick, so I’ll chalk it up to personal user error for not loving it.
Detour
This is a 75 year old film noir that you haven’t heard of and will never see. I went too long on Snow White so let’s just move on.
Killing Them Softly (rewatch)
Andrew Dominik’s follow-up to his 2007 masterpiece, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. I’ve always been a defender even though the reviews were mixed. Audiences hated it and gave it an “F” Cinemascore, which was a clue that I would probably like it.
Their hate was understandable to an extent. With a loaded cast, Brad Pitt playing a hit man, and this poster, you’d expect Pitt to tear shit up for most of the film. That doesn’t happen. Instead it’s a sad meditation on America during the recession. A small time crook steals dogs to try to make a buck. James Gandolfini plays a depressed hit man that sits in his hotel and drinks rather than do the job he was hired for. Pitt’s Jackie is the only character that acts professionally because he’s the most cynical about life in America. Jackie’s philosophy is the America we hear about on the news from politicians is a fantasy, and that philosophy is reflected in the crumbling infrastructure of Boston(though the movie was shot in New Orleans). Not exactly what one might expect when they think they’re seeing a gangster movie.
Dominik uses a device throughout the film that plays a little corny now. We see news broadcasts on televisions in various locations and hear several politicians espousing their ideologies. It doesn’t work as well as I remembered. Dominik is underlining the themes of his movie in red ink for the audience and it violates every “show, not tell” lesson you had in high school English. I also don’t really buy that a dive bar TV would be tuned to Barack Obama instead of some crummy midweek baseball game.
I still like the movie but I’m less favorable on it than before this rewatch, when I thought it was perhaps one of the better movies of the decade.
End of Watch
This is a complicated movie to watch now. It’s shot documentary style and follows Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Pena as cops in a rough LA neighborhood. Gyllenhaal and Pena have great chemistry as partners and my favorite moments of the movie are when we get to spend time with them cruising the streets and bullshitting with each other.
This came out 2012 and eight years later it’s a bit awkward watching police officers mow down criminals, even though the shootings in the movie are justified. In light of the Black Lives Matter movement and Colin Kaepernick’s national anthem protest, I’m not sure this is a movie that would get made now.* The film doesn’t necessarily glorify cops. If anything, it humanizes them in an important way. They’re people too. They have families and they get scared and it’s their job every day to live on the knife’s edge. Before I watched this movie I didn’t appreciate how stressful that job is.
* 2018’s Dragged Across Concrete might be the exception, though I haven’t seen it.
Given all that, it’s still uncomfortable to watch them blow people away. The final shootout felt like a scene from a war movie and it’s the one time director David Ayer glamorizes the violence. It has aged very poorly. We’re supposed to cheer when the evil brown people get what they deserve. That surely played better in 2012 than it does today.
Star Wars: The Clone Wars
This is technically a Star Wars theatrical release, so by all measures it’s the biggest flop of all the Star Wars movies. It made only $35 million at the domestic box office and has a 35 out of 100 on Metacritic. Clearly there was little appetite for more prequel-related Star Wars adventures in 2008.
As a standalone movie, yeah, it’s a little clunky. We’re dropped into the middle of some battle with awkward narration and ugly animation. But as part of the larger Clone Wars saga I enjoyed it for what it really is: a long episode of the TV series. My wife and I succumbed to the hype and finally started The Clone Wars TV series on Disney+, but the movie came out first so we decided to watch it before. (Confusingly, the movie isn’t first chronologically in the story.) Viewed through the prism as part of the larger Clone Wars narrative, it’s totally fine. It’s fun to watch Anakin kick ass — something I always thought was lacking from the prequels — and see the clones imbued with distinct personalities. I also like the choice to make the battle droids total dipshits.
Dave Filoni is the man in charge of The Clone Wars movie and series. After Disney’s botching of The Rise of Skywalker, it’s refreshing to see someone that has a deep love for Star Wars craft his own story and take chances with canonical material. Even Jar-Jar gets to be a hero sometimes! I look forward to seeing where this story goes.
