That’s kind of an odd phrasing, isn’t it? Best use of visual effects? The Academy Awards give out “Best Visual Effects,” full stop. What’s the difference?
Too often, visual effects nominations go to films that simply spent the most money on visual effects. They don’t necessarily go to the most creative film or the film where visual effects become a story element rather than a showpiece.
Let’s get started:
Honorable Mentions
“Ant-Man” used visual effects to wonderful comedic effect, but otherwise stuck to Marvel’s tried-and-true approach of flashy CGI fight choreography.
We liked “The Martian” overall, but none of us felt that its visual effects added anything very crucial to the story. The heart of the film was carried by its actors, not by its design. That’s hardly a bad thing, but it fails to make it stand out in this category.
“Jurassic World” did a wonderful job of creating a creature horror movie, but it missed many opportunities to add personality to its creatures. This made them feel glossed over at times, and a little less fearsome than we would’ve liked.
“Star Wars: The Force Awakens” and “Mad Max: Fury Road” just missed out on the cut. Each use visual effects in brilliant ways to make their worlds stand out and feel unique, but they balance on that line between contributing to the story and acting as showpieces. Each film uses its showpieces to say more, but often these themes are left to be carried by more traditional film elements. Essentially, they’re our fourth and fifth choices, respectively.
3. Chappie
If it were just up to the fidelity of visual effects, there’s no way “Chappie” makes this list. In terms of how the visual effects are used to create a singular character, however, “Chappie” is in the rarest of company. Unlike a film like “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes,” the visual effects in “Chappie” weren’t true motion capture. Instead, the effects artists were entrusted to paint actor Sharlto Copley out of every frame of the film and replace him with their vision of Chappie. It’s a rough, risky way of tossing most of the rules for motion capture out the window and rewriting them from scratch. Yet the rough-hewn, art-over-realism feel of Chappie as a character is exactly what makes him feel so human. As a character, he’s more of a collaborative artistic creation, and less a series of motion capture measurements.
2. Ex Machina
Welcome to that rarest of company. “Ex Machina” has been the subject of a lot of controversy in our discussions of film of the year. You either love it or you loathe it. We all agreed that Alicia Vikander’s Eva is the definition of why this award exists. Even if her character is more costume design than you’d expect at first glance, the parts that are visual effect are blended seamlessly. If we have to believe as an audience that Ava should be treated as real as any human, and begin to question the nature of her captivity because of it, our impulse to feel for her starts at the meeting of actor, costume, and visual effect. It’s the visual effects that may do the most to make her seem vulnerable, since we can effectively see her internal organs and brain. The artistic decisions made surrounding the visual effects are some of the most evocative in the film.
1. Jupiter Ascending
If you remember, we’re part of the cabal that basically thinks “Jupiter Ascending” is simultaneously a kind of bad and essentially brilliant film. At first glance its visual effects might seem of the set piece variety. Many of them are (gravity boots, anyone?), yet the visual effects fill a wide range of roles – they deliver much of the film’s comedy and do a lot of the work in terms of world-building. They have personality and that personality gives you incredible amounts of information about the universe you’re watching. In creating a universe that nods to “Flash Gordon,” “Brazil,” “The Fifth Element,” “Dune,” and comic book artist Moebius, “Jupiter Ascending” is essentially telling you to kick your feet up and relax as if you were watching a cartoon (the main character’s name is Jupiter Jones, for godssakes). Not enough critics did that, unfortunately.
Yet few films required their visual effects to do so much over the course of the entire movie. They are colorful, sumptuous, threatening, weird, and busy, but in the curious universe that “Jupiter Ascending” creates, they all feel home to someone and they all seem to have practical use, even if that practical use is downright bonkers. For doing more of the lifting than visual effects are usually required to do, “Jupiter Ascending” stands out.
The seven voters are S.L. Fevre, Eden O’Nuallain, Cleopatra Parnell, Amanda Smith, Rachel Ann Taylor, Vanessa Tottle, and Gabriel Valdez
How do you describe a thankless role? Movies are filled with actors who do great work in B-projects, or who are unfairly blamed for a film’s larger failings. Sometimes, a film is superb, but it’s dismissed because its genre isn’t taken seriously.
Last year, one actor considered was Megan Fox for “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.” The movie itself was terrible. Fox herself wasn’t even great in it, but that’s not always what we ask from leading actors in action films. She held together what was otherwise un-watchable. Like appreciating the ringleader of an out-of-control circus staking down the tents as the performers themselves lurch into the audience, she alone helped the film avoid complete disaster.
Yet, she was still targeted as the reason the film didn’t work. It wasn’t the ripoff of a plot, or the shoddy CG, or the nonsensical attempts at humor. Those were all excused. Even Will Arnett was given a pass for a far worse performance. Fox was held uniquely accountable when, in fact, she was dragging the rest of the film along by her teeth. That’s what a thankless role is.
(Last year’s award went to Perdita Weeks for “As Above, So Below,” but Megan Fox is a more well-known example of what we’re talking about.)
So who inhabited those thankless roles last year? Our seven voting writers decided these five actors did the most work for the least thanks in 2015. Then we chose a winner.
Reg E. Cathey, “Fantastic Four”
Contrary to the critical pile-on, “Fantastic Four” wasn’t a terrible film, let alone the worst of the year or decade. It was merely bad. Its young, unproven cast failed to lend the film any gravitas. No, the only one who felt he actually lived in and cared about the world of the film was Reg E. Cathey, doling out moral lessons, character background, and expository dialogue in equal measure as team mentor Dr. Franklin Storm. His is the definition of a brilliant performance in a lackluster film.
Keira Knightley, “Everest”
Being the emotional heart of a film when you’re literally phoning your role in is a lot to ask. Yet as the pregnant wife left home while her husband and business partner encounter disaster on Mt. Everest, Knightley held a film together via a series of heart-wrenching, one-woman scenes. In a film that boasts some intense storm scenes, capable procedural storytelling, and way too many questionable accents, Knightley is the one who lends the film its emotional relevance. It’s rare that a film’s heart exists in a series of on-the-phone scenes, but that’s what Knightley brings to the table.
Mila Kunis, “Jupiter Ascending”
Kunis is criticized in “Jupiter Ascending” for not delivering any character arc as Jupiter. Essentially, after witnessing intergalactic thunder palaces and Soylent Fountains of Youth and corporate space vampires, Jupiter remains pretty much herself. This is not the kind of thing we expect from science-fiction, the critics roared. No, and that’s the point. After the temptation of love and riches and vast empires at her bidding, Jupiter chooses to remain herself. She’d sooner give up her family and her life than betray what she knows is right. We almost never see a film where a leading woman is already who she needs to be, and it’s the universe around her that’s criticized.
Julianne Nicholson, “Black Mass”
There’s a scene in “Black Mass” where Julianne Nicholson’s Marianne begs out of dinner by pretending to be sick. Her husband, corrupt FBI agent John Connolly, has lost face. Gangster Whitey Bulger goes up to check on her. Connolly has no power to stop him, and we’re given to understand Bulger could do anything he pleases and suffer no repercussions. He talks to Marianne about taking care of herself, her duties to John, and then puts a hand to her neck and face. Anything could happen, and Bulger communicates this to her without ever needing to say it. She has no power, and her realization in this moment is terrifying. It’s a shame her role in the film wasn’t larger than her handful of scenes. In what is there, she may give the finest performance in a film full of them.
Angela Winkler, “Clouds of Sils Maria”
(not pictured)
Although only appearing in a few brief scenes, Winkler communicates two entire lives to the audience: her own and that of her late husband. It’s the type of role that goes by unnoticed, but actors in these more limited parts often need to be the best in your cast at communicating complex characters quickly. Not everyone can communicate loss and the quiet struggle for acceptance inside a few minutes of screen time. It’s a different kind of thankless role, but one that struck us as worthy of mention.
THE MOST THANKLESS ROLE OF 2015:
Mila Kunis, “Jupiter Ascending”
Screw character arc, Jupiter’s already who she wants to be. She just hasn’t been challenged to know it until, you know, she goes through some space dinosaur fights. When men say screw the world and refuse to change and embrace their violence by becoming Batman, or John McClane, we celebrate that violence. When women embrace the world and refuse to change and reject violence, we criticize their failure to embrace the violence men demand of their heroes.
Yes, it’s worthwhile and necessary for women to be able to embrace that violence and kick ass in our screen mythologies, a la “Mad Max: Fury Road.” Yet if the violence itself is patriarchal by nature, it’s also necessary to have representations – for women and men – of what rejecting that violence looks like. Jupiter is a hero to us for remaining exactly who she is even as her entire perception of the universe around her changes. She may need help at points saving her own life, but she saves Earth all on her own, before the hero even gets there.
Kunis isn’t the best actor on this list by a long shot, though she has a good sense for reacting to dialogue and generating comedic timing. However, she is the one whose role is the most important to take out of the theater with ourselves. The commentaries “Jupiter Ascending” makes – on feminism, on capitalism, on gender fluidity – all are deeply valuable. The movie has some issues, but Kunis’s role of Jupiter is one of the most important, one of the most discussion-worthy, and one of the most overlooked characters of the year.
Those voting are: S.L. Fevre, Eden O’Nuallain, Cleopatra Parnell, Amanda Smith, Rachel Ann Taylor, Vanessa Tottle, and Gabriel Valdez.
Where did we get our awesome images? Reg E. Cathey is from If You Want the Gravy, Keira Knightley is from The Sun, Mila Kunis is from Starlog, and Julianne Nicholson is from Coming Soon.
Look, the review section is going to address the middling craft and storytelling behind this film. Then the Bechdel section is going to rip the utter bejesus out of everything that’s left. Just be warned:
Kingsman: The Secret Service is a movie that has no idea what it wants to be. It follows Eggsy (Taron Egerton), a young Englander who grows up without a father. His dad sacrificed himself for his team on the kind of mission that James Bond makes his bread and butter, and Eggsy wears a medal around his neck he can never show to anyone else. Eggsy’s life consists of getting into trouble and watching out for his mom, who doesn’t have the best choice in boyfriends.
Eggsy is whisked off to a spy school in much the same way Harry Potter is taken to Hogwarts. The first half of Kingsman is as solid as you could ask for, alternating between Eggsy’s training and a mission to save the world being carried out by his sponsor Harry (Colin Firth).
Inevitably, Eggsy is drawn into the mission itself, which pits his team against a villain named Valentine who’s so upset global warming will destroy humankind that he decides to, um, destroy humankind. Just take that kind of logic on faith – the villain’s played by Samuel L. Jackson, who seems to be the only one aware of what a cheeseball movie he’s actually in.
These sorts of plots are also where the film starts to come apart. When a writer (Jane Goldman) and director (Matthew Vaughn) are so obsessed with pushing a political agenda that it shoves everything else in the movie to the side, it becomes uncomfortable.
Any kind of message – liberal or conservative – that guts a film so completely of its story is a problem. The message in Kingsman is conservative. The last movie that did this so egregiously was the liberal-minded remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still. I don’t care what your politics are – if they’re such a priority that a popcorn movie feels more like chastisement than entertainment, the movie’s failed. A movie can have politics in it, yes, but it still has to prioritize being a movie and telling a story.
It’s a shame – Kingsman boasts a well crafted first half and offers some exceptionally choreographed, albeit horrendously violent, action. It just finds as many ways to shoot itself in the foot by the end as I’ve ever witnessed. It has too many politics and grudges to ring out, too many names to drop and meta commentaries to make. If you can’t tell Kingsman is a riff on the spy genre an hour in, don’t worry – characters will stop everything to remind you many, many times.
That’s not even bringing up the McDonald’s product placement, which tries to involve the ad as a meta joke the same way Wayne’s World and Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby have in the past. As it does with many elements, Kingsman feels too unsure of itself to fully commit to the joke – instead of characters nodding and winking at the camera, you end up with Colin Firth and Samuel L. Jackson awkwardly grinding their way through a minute-long in-film ad.
That’s too often the feeling in Kingsman. It criticizes spy movies for being too political, then it obsesses over being political. It insists action movies are too serious and have forgotten how to be light-hearted, and minutes later it’s engaging in an extended sequence where civilians tear each other apart in bloody chunks. If anywhere, this is where the film should nod and wink, a la Shaun of the Dead, but this is where Kingsman doubles down and wants to show you how good it can really be at all the things it just insisted shouldn’t matter.
I love bloody action and rude humor in my films, and even I felt like I had to take a shower after Kingsman. It’s not any worse than a brutal horror movie or the average episode of South Park, but it spends two hours selling you on the idea that these things shouldn’t be part of action movies before turning around and relenting to each of them anyway. It leaves you feeling confused, disappointed, and a little betrayed. Maybe it’s just trying to troll its entire audience. If so, mission accomplished.
In many ways, Kingsman ends up being the polar opposite of last week’s action movie, Jupiter Ascending. Kingsman is a movie that’s not enough of anything to feel very satisfying. Jupiter Ascending is a movie that’s too much of everything. Given the choice, I’d rather be overwhelmed than underwhelmed. If you only have time for one action movie, stick with Jupiter Ascending.
Does it Pass the Bechdel Test?
This section helps us discuss one aspect of movies that we’d like to see improved – the representation of women. Read why we’re including this section here.
1. Does Kingsman: The Secret Service have more than one woman in it?
Yes. Samantha Womack plays Eggsy’s mother. Sofia Boutella plays a baddie named Gazelle. Sophie Cookson plays spy school companion Roxy. Fiona Hampton plays spy school companion Amelia. Hanna Alstrom plays an imprisoned princess.
2. Do they talk to each other?
No. For one very brief moment, both Roxy and Amelia talk to Eggsy, about Eggsy.
3. About something other than a man?
Well, they didn’t pass #2 so this is moot, but women do occasionally talk to men about the sinister plot at the film’s center, when they’re not talking about Eggsy or Valentine.
Look, this movie is, for lack of a better way of putting it, patriarchal as fuck. Eggsy’s mother exists so that he can save her. Gazelle (an amputee who fights with sword-like blade legs) exists so we can fetishize her. It’s also strongly hinted that she’s the sexual reward of the villain, being played by an actor more than twice her age.
Even when the film gives a woman a victory, as happens late in the spy school sequence, the victory is because she’s proven herself to be heartless and have no loyalty. In other words, the single victory given to a woman in the film is due to her not being as good as Eggsy. In storytelling terms, it’s really Eggsy’s victory we admire.
The single reward given to a woman in the movie is to cheer on the men at the end.
And the movie ends with a male hero being rewarded with anal sex from a princess he rescues.
This is all before considering that every hero is a white male and the two villains are an African-American man with a lisp (Samuel L. Jackson) and a differently abled Arab woman (Sofia Boutella).
It’s also worth noting, as Vanessa Tottle has pointed out, that all the soldiers who face our hero are male. This isn’t to save violence against women either – there are sequences where civilians brutally murder each other and women are murdered in the dozens here. If you’re going to do that, then include some female soldiers, too. Otherwise, you’re not being bold, you’re just being exploitative.
The film makes noises toward being anti-aristocratic, but it’s a bit of a false flag – in the end, the movie trumpets all the values of aristocracy and being member to the ruling class.
As damaging as anything else – and this is leaving the Bechdel realm for the moment – we live in a world where dangerous elements in the U.S. believe that President Barack Obama is a villain who is working to destroy our country at the behest of real-world villains. These real-world villains always belong to non-white ethnicities. The dangerous radicals in the U.S. who believe these things talk openly about assassination.
Very minor spoiler ahead: in Kingsman, the villain Valentine has the ear of Obama and convinces him to help destroy the human race. Two African-American men form a conspiracy to destroy the world. In the end, Obama is killed because of this conspiracy. His head is exploded, albeit in pretty colors, and I can’t help but think back to the last president who died that way. Kingsman wants to play this act off as some kind of joke, but coupled with everything else the movie says and does, it’s dangerous and mind-numbingly irresponsible filmmaking.
Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn have every right to place this kind of thing in their movie. Britain and the U.S. are free countries, after all. But, as the line goes, freedom of speech does not mean freedom from criticism, and the movie they’ve constructed not only fails to work as a movie, it encourages some of the worst and most dangerous misogynistic and political perspectives I’ve ever seen put to film.
I try to find the good and the worthy in everything I see. Even if I don’t like a movie, I endeavor to communicate who will like the movie. Sometimes I come across something that – I understand exactly who will like the movie, and that worries me. It worries me that a movie can encourage perspectives of hatred and ownership by making those perspectives seem heroic. It takes characters who seem weak, attributes them with all the worst better-than-thou attitudes our society has to offer, and rewards them for embracing and exemplifying these attitudes. Kingsman is one of the ugliest, most uncomfortable movies I have seen in my life. It is bitterly disappointing.
Action movies are often criticized as being “color by numbers” and following the same, basic plot we’ve seen dozens of times before. What happens if you take all the color by numbers pages you have, crumple them together, and glue like a madman? Some parts might be recognizable, but the seams where the pages meet won’t make any sense.
It’ll be a surreal mess, but it might still be fun to look at. This is the approach Jupiter Ascending takes. It follows Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis), a young girl with a tragic past who works as a house cleaner, but is really the reincarnation of one of the universe’s most powerful CEOs. Before we get the chance to know her, she’s targeted by bounty hunters and saved by a hunky space wolf played by Channing Tatum. We take it on faith he’s a space wolf despite the only evidence being pointy ears and the occasional growl, but everyone in the movie keeps telling us he is, so why not? Oh, and he has anti-gravity boots that let him speed skate through the air at jet speed.
Have you seen Underworld, Stargate, Dune, The Fifth Element, or Star Wars? Read any Douglas Adams? Seen any Disney princess animation ever? Good, because they’re all smashed in here. Do you want a movie that makes a lot of sense? This isn’t the place. Do you want one that crazily shoves every sci-fi cliché into a blender and holds on for dear life? Welcome to Jupiter Ascending.
You can’t take the movie’s surface seriously. It’s thoroughly B-grade. There’s a sequence where Tatum fights aliens on earth, hops onto their frigate, rides a wormhole through space, and then raids an intergalactic thunder palace – all without putting on a shirt. The number of costume changes Kunis undergoes, from hospital gown to space jumpsuit to ever more extravagant and revealing evening gowns, becomes a running joke.
Jupiter Ascending is trolling science-fiction and our expectations of it, trying to get a rise by being like everything and nothing all at once. It’s more along the lines of directors The Wachowskis’ Speed Racer than The Matrix. Does that make it as good as either? That’s complicated. It’s constantly skirting the line between clever and disastrous. It’s a worse movie. It’s better art.
Kunis anchors the film by playing straight man to the film’s zany antics, and she’s better than expected. Tatum is too glum for the kind of chances the film is taking and Sean Bean nods and winks his way through a paper-thin mentor role. The biggest shortcoming is Eddie Redmayne, currently up for an Oscar for The Theory of Everything. It’s difficult to overact without being campy, but he finds a way, mumbling half his lines away.
The movie’s biggest problem is a lack of signifiers in the action scenes. We need to know where everyone is so we can marvel at the amazing visual effects and feats of heroism taking place. When our heroes hijack an alien fighter over Chicago, for instance, we’re treated to a few minutes of high-speed chase. The only problem is that all the fighters look exactly the same and have extra moving parts that distract the eye. This is Grade-A Transformers disease: which fighter are we rooting for in the mess of fantastic visual effects? Who knows? We’re rooting for the effects, I guess.
The solution is as simple as painting a red streak on the side of our heroes’ fighter, or lighting the cockpit a different color. Audiences thrive on context, and lacking it is a mistake Jupiter Ascending makes repeatedly. The movie gets a pass on being zany; it doesn’t get a pass on bad fundamentals.
Characters, realizations, and scenes don’t emerge; they crash into the rest of the plot. The film’s latter half revolves around the intergalactic espionage surrounding who owns Earth: it’s Jupiter and her space wolf versus the infighting dynasty of space vampires. Think the shenanigans of Twilight meeting the corporate metaphors of Dune, if you can do so without your brain breaking. The movie starts becoming more solid as it becomes clearer just how big of a riff it all is.
Jupiter Ascending is a one star movie with a four star ability to keep your attention. I want to like it more than I actually do. In this case, that makes the difference. Maybe it’s Kunis’s charm, or the Wachowskis’ kitchen sink approach. It could be the costume drama antics or the blue collar message it trumpets throughout. The movie’s multi-layered anti-oligarchy conceit is brilliant, it’s just not as brilliantly fused together into a cogent whole. Right now, it’s a lot of really good ideas sprinkled around.
It’s just insane enough to make me applaud its ambition. It stands out not because it achieves what it sets out to accomplish, but because it wants to accomplish so much. Falling on its face makes me admire the movie a lot more than if it didn’t try at all. Is it a good film? Absolutely not, but it is relentlessly interesting. You have to know what happens next. It’s a fine line to walk, as if the Wachowskis took the “There is no spoon” line from The Matrix and applied it to a movie instead of silverware.
Does it Pass the Bechdel Test?
This section helps us discuss one aspect of movies that we’d like to see improved – the representation of women. Read why we’re including this section here.
1. Does Jupiter Ascending have more than one woman in it?
Yes. Mila Kunis plays Jupiter. Tuppence Middleton plays space vampire extraordinaire Kalique Abrasax. Nikki Amuka-Bird plays Diomika Tsing, a capable captain in what amounts to the space police. Doona Bae plays bounty hunter Razo. Gugu Mbatha-Raw plays Famulus, Lieutenant to one of the space vampire sons. Jupiter’s own immigrant family may be patriarchal, but is dominated by women – her mother and aunt, especially.
2. Do they talk to each other?
Yep.
3. About something other than a man?
They rarely talk about men. The film’s biggest accomplishment is that Jupiter is the same person whether she’s cleaning toilets and getting yelled at by her family, or deciding the fate of Earth. This is a strong female character who always seeks to sacrifice for the greater good, even at the expense of herself or her family. It doesn’t matter if she’s discussing financial woes or intergalactic economics.
On the whole, I oppose character development the way we use it now. We’ve taken an element of storytelling that is a tool and, in Western narratives, we’ve turned it into all but a requirement. It’s like asking we build our houses out of hammers and screwdrivers instead of wood and brick. Character development is a great tool when used in the correct circumstance. It is not the essence of narrative.
The few times when we are gifted with characters who don’t develop, it’s because they’re thrown into a world where their personal strengths are turned from uselessness into dominance: Mel Gibson’s Max in Mad Max, Christian Bale’s Batman in The Dark Knight trilogy, and the progenitor of all these steadfast characters in American film – Clint Eastwood in any Western or Dirty Harry movie.
These are stories where unhealthy traits are suddenly turned into heroic qualities because the nature of their world demands it. It’s no mistake that the unhealthy traits that are presented as heroic almost always belong to male characters.
Rarely, do we see a normal person on film whose world is turned upside down, yet who is healthy enough to end up the same on the other side regardless. Almost never is this character a woman.
When this happens in Jupiter Ascending, it’s not stressing the need for dominance or vengeance or violence as strengths. It’s stressing empathy and confidence, the courage to understand something wholly separate from your own experience and meet it on its own terms rather than trying to conquer it on yours.
The ideas inside of Jupiter Ascending, especially as they pertain to gender dynamics, are some of the most exquisite and complex you’ll find on film. Does the film live up to those ideas? Enough to communicate them successfully if you’re willing to watch with an open mind, yes.
Our hunky space wolf does rescue Jupiter on more than one occasion. Sometimes it’s needed, but at least once he bursts in and impressively kills dozens for a rescue that’s completely useless. Jupiter’s perfectly fine. Whoops.
Later, he’ll burst in and rescue Jupiter when she’s already won the day. This isn’t to say she can claim what we think of as a classical movie victory – she’s made the decision to sacrifice herself and others in order to save billions of lives. She makes the right decision in a no-win scenario, and more to the point, she’s made the kind of decision people who clean toilets for a living already make every day, and not the one her aristocratic corporate space vampire opponents can even grasp as a viable option. So yeah, she does win, and in case you don’t get it, she’s given the opportunity to go toe-to-toe with the villain later on anyway.
So the hunky Channing Tatum space wolf (who she’s hitting on from first meeting rather than the other way around) does get to rescue her in classical movie form, often as she’s falling out of buildings, but it’s usually after she’s claimed the kind of victories we rarely get to see in movies, the kind that are far more impressive than all the speed skating anti-gravity boots in the galaxy.
Chris Braak writes more on this in an article that considers the feminism in Jupiter Ascending and how the film’s messages may reflect on co-director Lana Wachowski’s gender transition.
IN CONCLUSION
This is one of those films that the more I write about it, the more I think about it, the more I find in it. I can tell I’m not done writing about it by a long shot. Roger Ebert once said that you have to rate a film based on its own terms. Not is it good or is it bad. Does it succeed at what it’s trying to be?
It’s very difficult to tell what Jupiter Ascending wants to be. Earlier, I said it’s a one star movie with a four star ability to keep your attention. It’s five star performance art. It’s a six star discussion topic. It’s seven star feminism. It’s an eight star science-fiction conceit. It’s just very hard to get at those other things because it is a one star movie on the surface.
Where does that leave it?
As a box office flop (at least in the U.S.) that mainstream criticism will reject. And you can’t really blame them because their jobs are to rate movies as movies, not as discussion topics or meta commentary or performance art. That’s the critical industry dragging its heels on responding to the way movies are changing, and I’m not about to blame individual critics for rating movies as movies first.
As an inevitable cult classic a few critics will be championing for years, to either be remembered for how ambitious it was in reaching so far beyond the theater, or to be forgotten for how it failed to sell itself well enough inside the theater.
Where does that leave me?
See it. Be prepared to dislike it. Be prepared to love it. Go in with no expectations. Be prepared to not understand how a friend can feel the exact opposite of you after you watch it. Either way, you’ll be discussing it long afterwards. Be prepared to dislike it and love it in the same breath. Be prepared to see it and think I’m an idiot. Be prepared to see it and want to write 2,000 words on it. Be prepared to think it’s genius. Be prepared to think it’s trash.
In the end, do not try and rate the movie. That’s impossible. Instead… only try to realize the truth.
What truth?
There is no movie.
There is no movie?
Then you’ll see, that it is not the movie that’s awesome, it is only yourself.
First off, there were so many good trailers from Australia and New Zealand this past week that there will be a special edition of Trailers of the Week tomorrow, focusing exclusively on movies made Down Under.
Now, for the most obvious Trailer of the Week in our brief history:
INHERENT VICE Debut Trailer
Where to even start on Paul Thomas Anderson’s 70s crime comedy? Joaquin Phoenix is unrecognizable, and we haven’t exactly ever seen him as a pratfalling comedian before this.
Last year’s American Hustle played up the East Coast glitz and glam of the 70s. Inherent Vice looks like it’s playing up the seedier, Hollywood habits of the decade. What astounds me about Anderson are those little touches that cheap 70s movies have – when Phoenix clambers to his feet in a stairwell, the sound is horrible. His shoes clap the floor with every step. And it’s not that Anderson lets this detail pass – it’s that this is a detail he consciously seeks out in the first place.
I can picture him in the editing bay, insisting, “No, Joaquin’s shoes need to be louder, louder even than the dialogue, louder even than the gunshot!” I assume that’s how PT Anderson talks. It’s the attention to detail Anderson’s taken to both drama and horror; I’m excited to see him tackle a period comedy from a period Hollywood has chosen to forget.
BLACKHAT
Debut Trailer
Michael Mann was unstoppable a decade ago. He’d added The Insider, Ali, Collateral, and the movie adaptation of Miami Vice to a resume that already boasted Manhunter, The Last of the Mohicans, and Heat.
And then he disappeared. Well, not really. He’s still been producing. But as a director, the only movie he’s helmed since 2006 is Public Enemies, the middling Johnny Depp-as-John Dillinger film you probably forgot about.
So it’s big news when Mann returns to directing, confident again in his grainy-yet-sumptuous digital video style that feels like a brand of hard-boiled, 80s crime television that never actually existed. The cast? Chris Hemsworth, who has yet to prove himself outside of Thor; Viola Davis, who has proven herself in so many roles I wouldn’t blink twice if she was recast as Thor; and Wei Tang, an Ang Lee alum who showed her dramatic chops in Lust, Caution.
THE TALE OF PRINCESS KAGUYA U.S. Trailer #1
The style of this film still enchants me, and that soundtrack is so evocative it can send chills up your spine inside a few seconds flat, let alone two minutes.
If we hadn’t declared an earlier clip Trailer of the Week a month ago, this would probably be up top, but I like to vary it up.
JUPITER ASCENDING U.S. Trailer #3
This was intended to come out last year, but the Wachowskis delayed it so they could perfect the effects work (or the studio got cold feet, depending on which reporter you believe).
Either way, it looks like those extra months payed off. When Jupiter Ascending trailered last summer, it had awe-inspiring vistas and moments of spectacle, but the person-to-person action (especially Channing Tatum’s anti-grav boots) just didn’t look right. That appears to have been fixed in this most recent-trailer.
There’s not enough good sci-fi out today, especially featuring women. Mila Kunis wouldn’t normally be my first choice to anchor an effects-heavy sci-fi epic, but that was once true of Keanu Reeves as well. The truth is, the Wachowskis need lead actors with comic ability and easygoing charm to make their occasionally too self-serious mix of anime and opera influences more palatable.
I just hope she’s not always the damsel in distress and, like Keanu, gets to kick a little ass by the end of the movie as well. Maybe she takes the place of Sean Bean when he inevitably buys it.
LAGGIES U.K. Trailer #1
I’m just going to harp about the cast here: Keira Knightley, Chloe Grace Moretz, and Sam Rockwell. They could all read the phonebook together, and I’d pay to go see that. I’m actually not a huge fan of the premise, but you can’t buy the kind of comedic timing Knightley and Rockwell possess.
We sometimes lament the days when Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn would command the silver screen, or when Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks teamed together for a romantic comedy. We still have those kinds of talents, and this is a pair that can pull it off. My favorite comedic duo of the year already contains Rockwell (that’s Rockwell and Olivia Wilde in the one-less-cameo away from being perfect Better Living Through Chemistry), and if you’re looking for the reason Pirates worked so well, I hope you’re not thinking it’s Orlando Bloom’s timing with Johnny Depp that did it. It was Knightley’s, and any time you have two comedic powerhouses like these two joining together, it’s a must-watch.
I’ve now said that in approximately six different ways. I’m excited for Laggies.
THE GOOD LIE Debut Trailer
This is the kind of heartwarming I’m wary of, but I also have a weird kind of faith in Reese Witherspoon. I don’t know why, since I’ve never actually liked her in any of her roles, but at the same time I trust her reputation as a cutthroat exec who only does projects she feels are worth her time.
So I have faith in her, but don’t get me wrong – if the two of us were trapped in the Andes after a plane crash, I wouldn’t willingly fall asleep for fear I’d never wake up again. I mean, I had to sit through Sweet Home, Alabama one whole time. How do you trust after that?
Anyway, this movie could be something honest and heartfelt, helping to educate and expand viewpoints, or it could be “watch the white person save the foreign people” feelgood schlock. There’s no way to tell at this point.
Worst Trailer of the Week:
THE SCAREHOUSE Debut Trailer
“Slutcam games!” Girls in lingerie! Torturing naked women! Good job, Gavin Michael Booth, you’ve made Hostel for Dummies, and Hostel already was Hostel for Dummies.
This column has a rule – we’ll never rag on indie or amateur films for looking cheap or lacking the budget for effects or award-winning actors. Some of my favorite films are amateur, made for a nickel, and contain whatever friends and family the director could scrounge up.
That’s why Worst Trailer of the Week is never an indie film. But this week, in the words of Denzel, “I’ll make an exception.”
Look, I get exploitation, I like a lot of self-aware exploitation films that understand their genre – warts and all. I even like some exploitation films that don’t understand their genre at all, much for the same reason people slow down to look at car wrecks.
But The Scarehouse? This is one more bolt in the framework of posing women as victims and sluts and getting off on watching them helpless and tortured. We get enough of that in the damn real world; I hardly think we need this tripe to reinforce it.
January is the time of year when studios dump films for which they have no other place and try to get audiences to the Oscar nominees instead. Pretty soon we’ll see the ramp up for this year’s best films. With apologies to Guardians of the Galaxy, because I really can’t get that excited to see a tree and a raccoon save the universe when Marvel still doesn’t think a woman’s capable of doing it, these are the thirty movies I’m most excited to see this year:
30. A Fantastic Fear of Everything
February 7 — Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, The World’s End), mostly in his underwear, stars as a children’s author who is afraid of, well, everything, especially his laundromat. He is tormented by a stuffed hedgehog from his own books. If that doesn’t get you interested in finding out what happens next, I don’t know what would. Watch the trailer here.
29. The Voices
No date set — I remember my first Ryan Reynolds experience, the very questionable Blade: Trinity, in which he out-Parker Posey-ed Parker Posey herself. Since then, he’s made some bad career moves, so I’m excited he’s getting back to the indie circuit. Here, Reynolds plays a far too happy-go-lucky factory worker, as well as voicing the cat who keeps insisting he give into his urge to murder people, and the dog who insists that’s not such a good idea. Also starring Gemma Arterton and Anna Kendrick. Directed by Marjane Satrapi, director of the artful, animated memoir Persepolis…naturally.
28. Unbroken
December 25 — Angelina Jolie directs a screenplay by the Coen brothers about Olympian Louis Zamperini, who fought in World War 2 and was taken captive by Japanese forces. Jolie is relatively untested as a director, but she’s smartly and decisively managed her own career and has proven a desire to tell challenging stories.
27. The Lunchbox
February 28 — An Indian comedy about an older man and a young housewife who become accidental penpals through Mumbai’s lunchbox delivery system. It stars Irrfan Khan, whose central role in Life of Pi introduced Western audiences to an actor with the rare ability to communicate through the unspoken, quiet spaces between the dialogue. Watch the trailer here.
26. 300: Rise of an Empire
March 7 — The sequel nobody asked for looks much better than it has any right to be. Early trailers make it look like the naval battle of Salamis carries much of the synaesthetic sumptuousness of the first 300. While I expect about as much historical accuracy as my foot, Noam Murro is an incredibly intriguing choice at director, and those trailers also pose the battle as a clash led by queens. Lena Headey returns, and Eva Green looks to be chewing every piece of scenery she can lay her hands on. After the brawny manliness of the first 300, it will be nice to see women just as capable at leading their troops into battle. Watch the trailer here.
25. X-Men: Days of Future Past
May 23 — Bryan Singer fuses his modern and Matthew Vaughn’s First Class X-Men franchises together through the magic of time travel. Starring everybody who’s ever been in an X-Men movie, including Ian McKellen and Michael Fassbender as the same character, Jennifer Lawrence and Ellen Page as much bigger deals than in their previous entries in the franchise, and throwing Game of Throne’s Peter Dinklage into the mix because…why wouldn’t you? Watch the trailer here.
24. Under the Skin
April 4 — The director responsible for the uneven Sexy Beast and Birth delivers a movie starring Scarlett Johansson as an alien seductress picking up hitchhikers in Scotland. Wait, what? The trailer looks downright Lynchian, and my favorite David Lynch movies are always the ones he has nothing to do with. Watch the trailer here.
23. Blue Ruin
April 25 — A prisoner is released from jail. The homeless man whose life he ruined sets out for revenge. Things quickly devolve into a contest to see which man can hurt the other more. Watch the trailer here.
22. Jupiter Ascending
July 18 — In the latest Wachowski beat-em-up, the Queen of the Universe targets a lowly Earth girl named Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis) for assassination. Why? So we can have an action movie. Well, it’s because Mila Kunis has perfect DNA. So, at least it’s scientifically accurate sci-fi. Her DNA threatens the Queen, so the Queen sends her best assassin (Channing Tatum) for Jupiter’s head and he switches sides. So it’s Snow White and the Huntsman, but in space, and by the Wachowskis, so inevitably better. I’m always in the mood for a swashbuckling planetary romance. Certain parts of the trailer feel clunky and cliché and Tatum and Kunis haven’t proven they can carry this big a film, but the Wachowskis have rarely faltered. Success or failure, it will definitely be event cinema. Watch the trailer here.
21. The Grand Budapest Hotel
March 7 — Wes Anderson continues his campaign to film quirky, period characters exclusively at 90-degree angles, this time in a murder mystery set across the precious, snowy climes of Eastern Europe. I loved making dioramas as a kid, so I’m all in. Watch the trailer here.
Gabriel Diego Valdez 