Seeking a Friend For the End of the World

Doing my Index for the site, I've stumbled across all sorts of reviews for films I have fondly remembered, but never pulled over here. This is is one of them—a film in a very similar vein to Don't Look Up, but with less of the focus on obstinate deniability.

I Got Stoned and I Missed It
or
"As Well as All Your Favorite Classic Hits..."

Right off the bat, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, starts with a great joke. Dodge (Steve Carell) and his wife Linda (Nancy Carell-heh—how "inside") are sitting in the car, listening to the news on the radio. It's not good. The space shuttle Deliverance has not been able to destroy or even divert the asteroid "Matilda" that is headed for Earth and will bring all life to an end. "Stay tuned for all the latest developments on this ongoing story, as well as all your favorite classic hits."

There's silence in the car. Then, husband and wife look at each other. Wife opens the car door. And runs as fast as she can...away, into the night, leaving hubby gaping. "What just happened?"

That's the tenor of the humor of SAFFEOW—a kind of horrific slapstick that feels frightening, as well as inevitable, like a Blake Edwards comedy. You know a radio station would end a horrific story...even of Armaggeddon...with a reassuring tag-line. And the wife's reaction? Without a word of explanation, escaping her settled life? Eh, that one feels real, too.

Dodge is the calm of the storm for all this chaos. Where his friends are freaking out along with the rest of society, he is quietly considering his fate and deciding what he can do with his time, rather than quickly self-destructing. The first part of the film is full of dark humor as Dodge goes to work as an insurance broker ("No, sir, it isn't covered in your policy"), botches a suicide attempt that only garners more responsibility, and everything and everybody systematically shuts down. The skein of traffic comes unraveled, TV reporters freak out ("We're f@&%ed, Bob...") and the lack of consequence—or a future—bring out the worst in people.

Dodge reflects, and as circumstances happen, he decides to seek out "the girl who got away," along with "the girl along for the ride" (Keira Knightley) who has a similar quest—finding a plane to get her back to her parents in England. She's got a car. He says he knows somebody with a plane, so the two contract to maneuver through the chaos to achieve their very short-term goals.

It turns into a road-trip movie, without "the light at the end of the tunnel" and the two may be the last two sane people on Earth. Just when you think someone along the way is normal...or at last coping...there's a surprise. It all plays out in the way that you think it might—circumstances soften the resolve and their zeal for their goals and their attitudes towards each other. Even if the world has an expiration date, there's still enough room to change your mind (in much the same way that Dodge's wife does at the beginning).

Knightley's fine in this, still determined to not let her looks get in the way of an idiosyncratic performance. She is one odd goose, as long as she's not standing still on a runway. Carell's just the opposite here—an internalized performance that maintains a simmering calm. The face changes expression constantly, but the brow is always furrowed, like it's reflecting the first shock-wave that hits Earth. He wouldn't betray any unnecessary emotion, even if the world IS coming to an end, and there are nice turns by William Petersen and Martin Sheen, and bombastic ones by Rob Corddry and Patton Oswalt (and though it might not be fair) acting the way I think they'd act if they knew the world was coming to an end.

It's a neat trick Lorene Scafaria (she made Nick and Nora's infinite Playlist) pulls off here: the idea couldn't be more "high-concept" and in the hands of, say, Mike Bay, or Mimi Leder, or Roland Emmerich it would be more parts spectacle and surviving than anything having to do with as universal a thing as "coping." The only "high ground" to be found in those films is the one everybody's running to, while the pixel-people to the rear are never seen or heard from again (and never really mattered enough to be portrayed by actors, anyway). Scafaria provides no high ground of safety, but only the artistic high ground of keeping the scale human, the emotions raw, and running the risk of turning sentimental or, worse, encouraging the audience's wrath (being hit with an asteroid would be more humane). She doesn't cheat, keeps it edgy, and allows things to play out...tidily.

And her musical taste? Spending the last night of your life before the power goes out listening to The Walker Brothers? Brilliant.

Unstoppable (2010)

Written at the time of the film's release...

"The Braking of Pelham 4-5-6"
or
"So...Now What the Hell Do We Do?"

Tony Scott's last film was the very "meh" update of The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3 with Denzel Washington as a harried subway supervisor on the day that crazy terrorist John Travolta decides to take a train (and its passengers) hostage. The movie was hysterical in the "hair-on-fire" way (and not in the "ha-ha" way) where the earlier Joseph Sargent-directed version was cleverly funny, the film-makers leaching colors out of the picture and backing it with a hip-hop beat. It was a dull and lifeless movie with all sorts of editing tricks and false drama trying to make the thing seem more like an action movie than the material had the capacity to fulfill. So, what you got was a movie that felt like it was suffering from inappropriate  'roid-rage.

Perhaps they should have skipped Pelham and gone straight to Unstoppable (called that because, presumably, Andrey Konchalovskiy already made Runaway Train in 1985!). Based on the "Crazy 8's" incident in 2001, where an engineer-less train—train 777, making it, apparently, that much closer to "the Choo-Choo of the Beast"—carrying dangerous chemicals (the "molten phenol" used in the film), moved unimpeded and under power at speeds up to 48 mph, it has, like Pelham, been ginned up with drama and death and derring-do, and the inevitable "countdown to disaster" that could end Scranton, Pennsylvania as we know it.

"Hello, do you read?"

Everything that can go wrong can and does. The train is under power due to an operator error—he was under pressure from co-workers to move a heavily laden train quickly, and left the cab to try and move a track-switcher—with its brakes disconnected, on a collision course with another filled with school-kids on a "train-safety" field-trip (Oooooh, the irony!), but there seem to be enough Pennsylvanians on the track that you suspect it was "Go Stand on a Railroad Track Day" in the state (at least, the film-makers kept it free of nuns, widows, orphans and puppies—although one shot of a raccoon crossing the track with the train hurtling at us in the background provoked an inappropriate fit of the giggles). It's carrying the afore-mentioned molten phynol "used in the manufacture of glue"—and in case we don't get it (a problem with this movie) it is reiterated that it is "very toxic, highly volatile" and the place the train will most likely derail is in the middle of Scranton on a curve that overlooks (conveniently) a large collection of fuel oil storage tanks. Now, ladies and gentlemen, that is bad city planning.

"Yeah, I read. I CAN read. Are you talking about genre?"

On top of that, the corporate heads irresponsibly want to stop it in the least expensive way possible, meaning that it probably won't work, and the two engineers also on a collision course with "a missile the size of the Chrysler Building" consist of a bitter company vet and a kid on his first day on the job with a court appearance that he has to make.

This is one over-loaded train. Scott pulls out all the stops—he doesn't have any brakes, either—skip-and ramp-editing the train footage to move it faster, swooping around the trains to give everything more momentum, constantly changing perspective to keep one ill at ease (until the two Mutt and Jeff engineers—Denzel Washington and Chris Pine—share a laugh—and a frame—half-way through the film, their conversations consist of separate shots of each speaking their lines from opposite perspectives of the engine compartment), it is a busy, busy movie. Credit to Scott, he keeps you informed what's going on so you never get lost in the spinning images. If anything, there is too much information—needlessly identifying various locations at the beginning when they're all 200 miles of each other, and not trusting any piece of information to not be re-iterated (after a terse conversation with the corporate HQ, do we need to have the gal in charge (Rosario Dawson) call her callous supervisor "an asshole?"). The entire plot is summed up a couple times during the movie ("So, what you're telling me is....") to the point where you're feeling slightly talked down to. Still, it is a bit of a fun ride for all the lapses in passenger-service.

"What is this, a book-club? Stop the damn train!"

One funny aspect of the film is its constant thrusting of Fox News coverage of the event (the film is a 20th Century Fox release and both entities are holdings of News Corp.). But it may be a bit of a miscalculation: the circling news helicopters buzzing the train seem to not only distract, but also interfere with the rescue efforts, to the point where they're actually one of the things hampering the struggles of the people to resolve the situation. Fox runs the risk of making one of their own divisions look poor in their attempt to cross-promote, derailing their own efforts throughout the film.

Ready Player One

Full Tilt Boogie (Midnight at the Oasis)
or
Virtual Encounters of the Shallow Kind

During the break that was required for the extensive special effects in Ready Player One, Steven Spielberg prepped, cast, shot, edited and released The Post, a very fine film that did get some attention for its historical material that, given the world at large, seemed all the more relevant today.* Ironically, the gee-wizardry of his new film does not feel relevant—unless someone has lived under a rock or in Mom's basement since the 1980's—as RP1 is a monument to nostalgia of the most puerile and shallow kind, piling on pop-culture references on top of each other as they flash, then die, on the 3-D IMAX screen, only to be replaced by others upon others along the way. This movie could conceivably fund its own edition of Trivial Pursuit next Christmas—and it is sure to be the most "paused" movie of the last (and next) quarter-century.

Look, I'm not a gamer. I choose to waste my time watching movies and writing about them on this worthless blog (so, who am I to judge?), so to see Spielberg do his "take" on the immersive experience with the same peripatetic verve that he gave to The Adventures of Tintin is not my idea of the director progressing as an artist, no matter how much of a roller-coaster thrill ride this film might be. It hearkens back to the Spielberg, who grew up frightening his sisters with his horror stories. It's the same Spielberg of the intimate, brilliant detail—like cutting away (in Jurassic Park) while a jeep is trying to out-pace a Tyrannosaurus Rex to a shot of a side-mirror, with the etched warning that "Objects May Be Closer Than They Appear." That Spielberg is here in abundance, unafraid to toss in asides and joking references, which he'd never dared with his more serious films like Lincoln, Bridge of Spies, or The Post. This is Spielberg on top of Play-Mountain.

Oklahoma, City in the Year 2045, not so soon after "The Corn-Syrup Shortage" and "The Band-width Wars," and the cultural hub of the world, while looking like a dystopian nightmare that would depress Calcutta and Jo-burg. The populace lives in "The Stacks," literally motor-homes and trailers stacked on top of each other, under a drab pollution-filled sky. One imagines we're in Oklahoma City because the coasts have since flooded and drowned, and that things are in such a sorry state because through every window of those trailers, people are escaping their realities by entering "the Oasis."

"The Oasis" is its own alternate reality, with its own rules, its own culture, and its own economic system, built on lives and bonuses accrued during play. It is the product of a company called Gregarious Games, a somewhat ironically named corporation as its messianic co-founder, James Halliday (Mark Rylance in a performance that resembles a morose version of Rick Moranis' accountant in the original Ghostbusters) is hardly the gregarious type. He and his former partner, Ogden Morrow (Simon Pegg) established the gaming platform, which has virtually and literally supplanted the drudgery of real life, in which the participants can compete against each other using avatars of their choice accumulating personal fortunes that can be used to improve their game and their alternate lives.

The Game 1 Grand Prix containing such vehicles as the Back to the Future Delorean, the 1960's TV Batmobile, Steven King's "Christine," the V8 interceptor from Mad Max, the van from "The A-Team", K.I.T.T. from "Knight-Rider", and the Mach 5 from "Speed Racer".

The story revolves around Halliday's be-quest announced after his death of his challenge for control of the Oasis and Halliday's personal fortune of over a trillion dollars, which can be one by winning three particular games, each rewarding a key that will unlock the ultimate challenge to win the Oasis' easter egg that will give control to the virtual kingdom. Obviously, this is a really big deal to the world at play, setting up ultimate challenges between "gunters" (the term for "egg-hunters") and a corporate conglomerate (only one?) named Innovative Online Industries—an Oasis outfitter, run by a former Gregarious intern Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), who wants to corporatize the Oasis for his own ends—he has already run studies that he can commercialize 80% of the Oasis' playing surface before his flashing graphics induce seizures in players.

The High Five's—Sho, Aech, Parzival, Art3mis and Daito—
talk to the Curator of the Oasis archives.

That's the hissable villain. Who are the heroes? They are the "High Five," competing gamers who form their own coalition to study notes, compare strategies and research Halliday's life—in the Oasis' virtual archives—to gain an advantage in the competition, dubbed Anorak's Quest. They are Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), a somewhat doughy 18 year old who plays as the avatar Parzival, his mechanic friend "Aech" (revealed to be Lena Waithe), the brothers "Daito" and "Sho" (Win Morasaki and Philip Zhao) and the mysterious "Art3mis," (she's ultimately Olivia Cooke), Wade's chief rival and finally partner in the quest for the keys. While they're all putting their minds together virtually, Sorrento is trying to learn their secrets in the real world to gain an advantage in the game.

Aech blows away Freddy Krueger and sets his sights on Duke Nukem.

Spielberg sets up the duel-matches as full-tilt battles royale whether in the neon -graced corridors of The Oasis or the begrimed back-alleys of Oklahoma City—it's just that the Oasis side has so much merch and copyrighted imagery that it's tough for the real world to compete (it's not too distant from another Spielberg production—Robert Zemeckis' Who Framed Roger Rabbit?—where the real world suffers mightily in comparison to the wonders of "Toontown"). And the three game-set-pieces are so splendidly realized (especially, for me, the second one which I won't reveal other than the clue that inspires it—"The creator hates his creation") that one's interest is drawn to the world within a world, which is probably the point, even while Spielberg is showing the exploitable madness of it all, frame by meticulous frame. I mean, didn't you rather live in Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory—the thread and thrust of which this film has in its digital marrow.

So, yeah, everybody wants to be in the Oasis—it's bigger, flashier, and something of a shit-storm for the hyper-active and hyperbolic. So, why is the movie so melancholy, especially when, after the solving of every puzzle, the film goes into a post-traumatic depression when contemplating the inner life of Halliday, The Man Who Built Everything? It's because the whole thing is an Oz-ian "there's no place like reality" info-mercial designed to teach the sad lessons of Halliday's life...by example. By the end of it, the most deserving will win the prize, but only by appreciating the clues along the way and learning the lessons to the keys of life that are merely trinketed as competition goals. The ultimate victory in the competition is in appreciating life beyond the Oasis. He who desires it least wins the most.

There's something almost biblical there. And, as with the Bible (or Willy Wonka and Chocolate Factory), in Spielberg's fable, the winner is the one who can look beyond the competition, and look deeper to the lessons inherently learned, and—in that gaming environment—put away childish things, including hero-worship, to become one's own hero, avatar's be damned.

Ready Player One is a smart little reflection of one of the simplest goals of a game—to get a life. And walk away from the table.

* He did, basically, the same thing back in 1990, where, while prepping the special effects for Jurassic Park, he oversaw the production of Schindler's List—which he was only allowed to make if he did the more popcorn-oriented film.

Deadpool

*Blam* Bad Deadpool! *Blam* (Uh!) GOOD Deadpool!
or
Taking the Hero Out of Super-Hero and Putting the Meta Into Meta-Human

From the generic credited Main Title, crafted like one of those Avengers-ending still-life's littered with in-jokes, Deadpool hits the ground kicking the tropes and biting the superhero genre that feeds it.

And thank God. The whole super-hero "thing" has started becoming stale and musty of late and Deadpool clears the cob-webs away...with a machine-pistol.

Maybe you don't remember Deadpool. In the comics, he was created by Marvel artist Rob ("I can't draw feet") Liefield to be as lethal as Wolverine and as chatty as Spider-Man. The one thing that made Deadpool unique (qualifier, DC had an earlier character named "Ambush Bug" that does this, too) in the Marvel Universe is that Deadpool is aware that he is a fictional super-hero in a comic book. He was a mutant, a mercenary and he was a bit insane. He has appeared in movies before—as played by Ryan Reynolds in the weak Wolverine: Origins, where he looked like this: 

That's right, they sewed his mouth shut. Now, since Deadpool is known in the comics as "The Merc with the Mouth" why didn't he have one in W:O? Probably because the character is supposed to be insane and funny and that would have stolen the movie away from the star-character and ripped the franchise right out from under Hugh Jackman's feet. We could not have that, so DP got zippered. Bad Deadpool.

But, Ryan Reynolds wasn't happy. He was unhappy enough that he was determined to make a fully-throated Deadpool feature, and since Wolverine: Origins was no one's idea of a good movie, nothing really stood in his way.

Except, of course, for time and money. Reynolds worked with script-writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick (of Zombieland) to come up with a rollicking script, more in keeping with what he had in mind, truer to the fourth-wall-exploding, incorrigible Deadpool of the comics, all of which seemed beyond the imaginations of the studio execs at Fox, whose super-hero experience had more to do with the stolid X-men movies and the egregious Fantastic 4 film (and their man-handling of that project revealed that their view was so narrow-minded and cookie-cutter as to be self-destructive). Bad Fox.

The final impediment to the project—demand—was taken care of when leaked test footage of what the producing team had in mind was released to the internet, and the fan-boy whoops could be heard and taken seriously enough to invest in a feature. The result was your standard super-hero movie, with its insistence on a "By Hrothgar's Hammer, I shall be revenged!" plot and a loosening of the moral hand-cuffs (which most of these movies have experimented with, anyway) to make Deadpool a complete anti-hero. The difference is the tone, which feels more like an action movie starring Jim Carrey in full antic (which would be The Mask, actually, but sped up about 150%).

Wade Wilson (Reynolds) is a slightly unhinged mercenary-for-hire with mad skills and no filters. He meets his potential damsel-in-distress, Vanessa (Morena Baccarin—who I've always suspected would have been Joss Whedon's Wonder Woman if that project had come to fruition) and they have an idyllic, if randy, year before Wade finds out he has terminal cancer ("Cancer's only in my liver, lungs, prostate, and brain. All things I can live without"). Vanessa wants to fight it, but Wade is just as determined that she doesn't have to suffer through it with him, so he skips out.

He probably should have stayed. In a desperate attempt to stay alive and go back to Vanessa, he is offered a devil's deal: given his mercenary instincts, he is approached by a clandestine organization that offers him a cure, but also, a bit of an improvement—turning him into a mutant. But, getting there amounts to inhuman torture and Wade emerges from the forced treatment with a pulped face and an undying rage—the "improvement" being the ability to heal from any wound, no matter how severe, —and the intent to kill anyone associated with his procedure, focusing on the mutant in charge of the operation, a sadistic brute named Frances (Ed Skrein).

Frances?  Frances!?

The term "berserker" is the best term for Deadpool. The movie's opening sequence has him in the middle of a curiously abandoned freeway (following a multi-vehicle smash-up that he initiated) attacking a gaggle of Frances' goons with only 12 bullets in his arsenal. He makes every bullet count, as he counts, mouthing sporadic one-liner non-sequitirs to taunt and distract the bad-guys, while amusing the audience (and himself). It is only the intervention of X-Men Colossus (CGI'd and voiced by Stefan Kapicic) and Negasonic Teenage Warhead (no, really, that's a real superhero name and she's played by Brianna Hildebrand) that stops him from decimating every single bad guy within several miles of empty city highway. They want to "reform" Deadpool by taking him back to Mutant Academy to meet with Professor "X" ("McAvoy or Stewart?" is Deadpool's reply).

From there, the movie pretty much runs the well-entrenched path of super-hero movies—revenge and redemption, which it does not take seriously at all. Nor should it. Something entrenched is in a rut. Comics (or should I say "graphic literature") are selling less than ever, at the same time that it seems to also want to be taken seriously and profoundly. This is reflected in movies made from comics sources, which started out wonderfully wicked in their debuts and then turn inert and careful by the sequel. You can take chances on the first one—and if it's successful, well, profits have to be taken seriously. Risks are fewer when it involves money.

And movies are duller. Deadpool is not dull, not for any stretch (well, except for the drawn-out mutation process scenes because the villains aren't entertaining...at all), and although the overall arc is much the same as any superhero movie, it's unrelenting goofiness at it's (and everything else's) expense feels like a tonic. In much the same way as Guardians of the Galaxy knew it was treading a lighter path and did a bit more stirring of ingredients in order to get the mix of grim n' gritty and comedy right, Deadpool throws in more nuts. And chops them. A lot.

As for "g n' g", Deadpool is very, very violent and is rated "R" for its splattering heads and severed limbs and constant "F"-bombing—it's certainly more violent that The Hateful 8. "So, Mr. Inconsistency, why hate on "our boy" QT and like this movie?" Because this has a sense of humor and The Hateful 8 doesn't. TH8 only thinks it has a sense of humor, but it's only actually a sense of outrageousness. They're not the same thing. Outrageousness can be funny if its satiric, but there's no satire in TH8. It doesn't want to make a point, it just wants to be outrageous, ("man"). Deadpool takes nothing seriously, but The Hateful 8 makes the mistake of thinking itself profound, like so much post modern pop culture does these days. Deadpool is clever. The Hateful 8 only thinks it is.

The fan-boys out there are ecstatic because they "finally" have an "R"-rated movie based on a comic book (quite forgetting American Splendor (which they never read), Watchmen, 300, Road to Perdition, Blade, and the Sin City movies). Deadpool will also appeal to those with ADHD and generally short attention spans.*

I plead guilty, as well. I laughed. I laughed a lot. GOOD Deadpool.

 

* There's even a line about that: "Right now your date is saying 'My boy-friend told me this was a superhero movie, but this asshole just turned this bad guy into a kebab.' Surprise, this is a different kind of superhero movie."