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NEW BLOG - IMPORTANT!

NEW BLOG - IMPORTANT!

Januari 10, 2017
So. The time has at last home to finalize the moving of this blog to the new site, MOVIEBOB CENTRAL. The complete backlog of posts from this original site and all subsequent new posts can now be accessed by clicking "BLOG" from the table of contents at the top of the main page, which will take you to the new version right here.

I will continue to update both blogs for the time being, but all fans and followers should be bookmarking the new site and the new blog ASAP.

Thank you for your continued patronage ;)
NEW OFFICIAL SITE ANNOUNCEMENT

NEW OFFICIAL SITE ANNOUNCEMENT

Januari 04, 2017
Hey all!

I promised I was going to do this a year ago, and now it's officially underway: I've got a new, official, self-owned website; MOVIEBOB CENTRAL. It's a bit sparse right now, but ultimately it's going to become a hub for all of my work, news, series and merchandise (which currently means the books but should hopefully soon involve more than that.

This blog will continue to be updated as well for the time being, but the plan is for it to ultimately migrate to the blog section of the new site once I figure out how to do that. So bookmark the new place and get ready for a (hopefully) growth-filled 2017.

Bob's 2016 BOFCA Ballot

Desember 10, 2016
As I imagine most are aware, I'm a member and currently the Chairman of the Boston Online Film Critics Association, which late Friday night undertook voting for its year-end film awards. The results of said awards can be viewed HERE, and I invite you to share them as widely as you are able - every little bit helps.


Individual member ballots will be posted to the main BOFCA site at an upcoming date, but until then members are free to share their ballots as they see fit. After the jump, you can see mine:

NOTE: The BOFCA voting system using a weighted and ranked ballot, similar to an "instant runoff" system in electoral politics. What this means is that a choices are listed in order of preference, and winner's are determined not only by which choices occurred only the most ballots but also "narrowed down" based on how they were ranked.

BOB CHIPMAN'S 2016 BALLOT:

BEST PICTURE
1. THE HANDMAIDEN
2. NEON DEMON
3. MOONLIGHT
4. THE NICE GUYS
5. THE DRESSMAKER
6. GREEN ROOM
7. FENCES
8. EVERYBODY WANTS SOME!!
9. CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR
10. KUBO AND THE TWO STRINGS

BEST DIRECTOR
1. Park Chan-Wook (THE HANDMAIDEN)
2. Nicholas Winding Refn (NEON DEMON)
3. Ilya Naishuller (HARDCORE HENRY)

BEST ACTOR
1. Denzel Washington (FENCES)
2. Ryan Gosling (THE NICE GUYS)
3. Anton Yelchin (GREEN ROOM)

BEST ACTRESS
1. Isabelle Huppert (ELLE)
2. Kim Tae-ri (THE HANDMAIDEN)
3. Kim Min-hee (THE HANDMAIDEN)

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
1. Mahershala Ali (MOONLIGHT)
2. Ashton Sanders (MOONLIGHT)
3. John Goodman (10 CLOVERFIELD LANE)

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
1. Viola Davis (FENCES)
2. Naomie Harris (MOONLIGHT)
3. Taraji P. Henson (HIDDEN FIGURES)

BEST SCREENPLAY
1. HAIL CAESAR! (Coen Brothers)
2. THE NICE GUYS (Shane Black)
3. ZOOTOPIA (Jared Bush & Phil Johnston)

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM
1. THE HANDMAIDEN (South Korea)
2. ELLE (France)
3. THE LOVERS & THE DESPOT (South Korea)

BEST DOCUMENTARY
1. DEPALMA
2. LO AND BEHOLD: REVERIES OF THE CONNECTED WORLD
3. THE 13TH

BEST ANIMATED FILM
1. KUBO AND THE TWO STRINGS
2. THE RED TURTLE
3. ZOOTOPIA

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
1. HARDCORE HENRY
2. NEON DEMON
3. THE HANDMAIDEN

BEST EDITING
1. THE HANDMAIDEN
2. HARDCORE HENRY
3. CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE
1. NEON DEMON
2. JACKIE
3. DOCTOR STRANGE

BEST ENSEMBLE
1. FENCES
2. HAIL CAESAR!
3. CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR

Review: JACKIE (2016)

November 30, 2016
This review made possible in part through contributions to The MovieBob Patreon.



Spoiler warning for 2017: You're about to go through about a year and a half's worth of politically-themed film and television releases that are going to feel wistfully out of step because they were designed to be "current" with what everyone assumed was going to be the beginning of the Hillary Clinton administration. See: DESIGNATED SURVIVOR (aka "Aw, Remember White Guy Presidents: The Series") Lynda Carter's aggressively pro-immigration lady President on SUPERGIRL and (most imminently) MISS SLOANE, with Jessica Chastain embodying the ultimate ball-busting-Washington-corporatist-as-liberal-superheroine archetype as a near-sociopathic lobbyist who decides to crush The Gun Lobby under her stilletos as a personal challenge. (If only...)

Meanwhile, on the (accidentally) more prescient side, we have JACKIE; in which an iconic First Lady mourns the crib-death of a revolutionary Presidency that almost was as the nation prepares to slide into darkness in the background. Some art is topical, some art has topicality thrust upon it.

Let's get this part out of the way: Unplanned present-day resonance or not, it's hard to see JACKIE outside the context of being as naked an Awards Season Vessel as has ever been conceived. Whatever its other qualities, you'll never quite be able to shake the feeling that what you're seeing was willed into being through some variation on "Portman can do the voice and looks right in the wig. Write a Jackie Kennedy movie so she can get another Oscar nomination." (She's playing Ruth Bader-Ginsberg next, as Hollywood continues working through its apologies for making the instantly-promising actress waste her early 20s in the STAR WARS prequels.)

Structurally, the film is built around providing a gamut of scenarios for Portman to show off how completely she's embodied the character: Here she is as "Demure On-Camera Jackie." Here's "Really Loves Jack Jackie." Hard-Bitten Post-White House Jackie. Sobbing Wreck Jackie. Saintly Mom Jackie. Don't-Talk-Down-To-Me Badass Jackie. In the hands of a lesser actress, it'd feel like little more than a historical-impression decathlon with only the faintest suggestion of connective tissue; but the thing about Natalie Portman has always been that she really is as good her hype - this might not be the equal of her turn in BLACK SWAN (what is?) but it's an electric performance that blazes its way through some of Boomer Nostalgia Cinema's most familiar thematic and tonal material and elevates what might otherwise have felt like a modestly-unconventional biopic (it feels like my late Grandma pitched a Sundance movie) into something close to special.

Helpfully, the need to provide Portman's Jackie with dozens of different facets to show off ends up giving the proceedings a rewarding narrative conceit. Set mainly in the immediate aftermath of JFK's assassination as recalled to a reporter, the plot mainly follows the First Lady as she struggles to keep her composure while jointly planning her husband's funeral and her family's exit from the White House itself. During these preparations, the story flashes back to her famous televised tour of the extensive White House renovations she famously oversaw during her brief two years as First Lady; which gives Portman's turn a chance to be a performance about giving a performance but also allows JACKIE to present the title character in the terms the audience will always best understand her: An avatar of America's own sense of loss in watching "Camelot" recede.

That "Jackie O" might have been as enraptured by the minutiae of her own Kennedy Mythos as the First Couple's biggest fans is perhaps the film's most eyebrow-raising fantasy; but it turns out to be a canny way to cut straight to a genuinely affecting place (it's also what got me thinking about my Grammy, who like all Northeast Catholics was forever in love with the Kennedy mystique - I think she'd have liked the movie.) Portman's Mrs. Kennedy is mourning her husband and marriage, sure, but in terms of onscreen narrative she's sharing America's collective grief (and, eventually, rage) at being robbed of the Kennedy Administration that was supposed to be - and when juxtaposed with those increasingly ironic flashbacks to how much work and care went into creating the life she now didn't get to live... yeah, it got to me, shamelessly manipulative or not.

Granted, this is all helped along by the fact that director Pablo Larrain (THE CLUB, NERUDA) and the score by Mica Levi (UNDER THE SKIN) conspire to keep the atmosphere just offbeat and edgy enough to almost make you forget you're watching a Hollywood biopic. The sound design is unnerving and discomfiting, and Larrain resists the temptation to apply a retro sheen to remind us it's the early 1960s: The cinematography feels deliberately ultra-contemporary, with a by now ubiquitous digital sheen color-graded to a desaturation point you'd mistake for today if not for the clothes and the cars - oh, and the "soft focus" version probably wouldn't offer so explicit a rendering of JFK's blown-open skull, nor had so many lingering shots of Jackie covered in her husband's blood and brain-matter. Stylistically, it's a solid series of choices; resisting the visual-coding for "sentiment" where the acting and screenplay will carry the weight.

Amusingly, though, two of the most emotionally-charged moments play out "on paper" like something ripped straight from the Hallmark Channel: Yes, there's really a scene where Jackie and Bobby (Peter Sarsgaard - Jesus, how have they only made him play a Kennedy once?) literally sit and exchange a somber litany of progressive wish-dreams they won't get to fulfill themselves ("The space program..." "Civil Rights..."); and a penultimate sequence where Portman wanders an empty, soon-to-be-vacated White House knocking back wine, beaming at the decor and giving her best outfits a last show-off for nobody in particular while blasting the Reprise from CAMELOT ("For one brief shining moment...") is sincerely gutting in a way no scene thusly described should reasonably be.

JACKIE isn't one of the year's best films. It's an Oscar-moment showcase for Portman and an "Oh! That's familiar!" historical-tearjerker for grown-ups looking for Holiday movie. But it's miles better than either such thing needs to be, and if America must continue to mythologize how much it misses The Kennedy's for a few years longer (at least until it feels appropriate to begin making "I miss the Obama Years" movies) let them all at least be as satisfying as this.


This review made possible in part through contributions to The MovieBob Patreon. If you'd like to see more like it, please consider becoming a Patron.

Bob Chipman also publishes reviews at Geek.com

Really That Good: TITANIC

November 26, 2016
Better late than never, right?

YouTube version currently blocked in some countries because of a fair use claim, currently under appeal. If you cannot access that version, here is the Vimeo link. Both versions embedded below (Vimeo on top, 'Tube after the jump.) 

As ever, if you enjoy, please consider supporting The MovieBob Patreon.

Really That Good: TITANIC from Bob Chipman on Vimeo.

Review: ELLE (2016)

November 23, 2016
NOTE I: An alternately-worded review for this film may run later, elsewhere. Keep up with me on Twitter for details.

NOTE II: This review made possible through support from The MovieBob Patreon.


It's hard to imagine a movie being more divisive than ELLE, which opens in the midst of the brutal home-invasion and rape of Isabella Huppert as the titular character, follows her as she matter-of-factly demands that her friends, family and coworkers not feel bad for her and goes on to present an unraveling story of amoral complexity that sometimes seems to be demanding the same from the audience. It's an icy movie that doesn't feel like it wants to be liked about an icier person who actively works to be disliked, even (or, perhaps, especially) once she finds herself enduring a violation that can't help but earn sympathy.

Some Spoilers Follow:

Thematically, it's covering much of the same ground as director Paul Verhoeven's other movies, which tend to have the same overriding theme: "The world is complicated because most humans are pretty terrible people." Usually he's working in the format of genre film, so that level of bemused nihilism comes off either as parody or commentary: ROBOCOP mocks the corporatism of 80s action cinema, BASIC INSTINCT strips Hitchockian thrillers of their subtle niceties and (literally) rubs the audiences face in the implicit sexuality, FLESH + BLOOD is a medieval "romance" slathered in the blood and muck of medieval reality, STARSHIP TROOPERS tricks audiences into cheering for fresh-faced fascism and laughs at them from the sidelines. But there's no genre being subverted in ELLE - this is Verhoeven without a filter, and what's being held up for mockery is, seemingly, 21st Century humanity itself: Rapists, enablers, corporate cutthroats, smug suburbanites, adulterers and idiots - there doesn't seem to be a decent person in the cast, and maybe that's the point.

The other, more clear point is violently resisting any attempt to frame its characters as stand-ins for anything other than themselves. Elle (or, rather, Michelle) is someone who seems to spend every waking moment working to avoid any sort of broader human connection - whether to her family, friends, coworkers, her gender or even other rape survivors. It's tempting to imagine her as an exaggerated-for-subversion avatar for the corporate "post-feminist" ideal; a woman so committed to absorbing the violence of patriarchy and redirecting it into power of her own (it's no coincidence that she reigns with an iron fist over a video game studio staffed mainly by aggressive young bro'grammers in mid-development on a violent, sexed-up GOD OF WAR clone) that she'll even try to forcibly twist her own rape into something that can somehow be made to "work for her."

When her employees show off a sequence where the gremlin-like "hero" sexually-assaults a female character, her criticism (mere days removed from her own attack) is that the sequence isn't brutal or erotically charged enough. When she suspects one employee of potentially being the (masked) rapist who attacked (and continues to stalk and harass) her, she sexually humiliates him but makes a point not to fire him. Rather than go to the police (even when her stalker is breaking into her home and leaving DNA everywhere), she refuses to report, stocks up on weapons and starts playing mind games with another potential suspect. When we find out she's carrying on a no-strings affair with her best friend's husband, it's easily the most "ordinary" thing about her. By the time the "full story" comes into focus (she's the daughter of a famous mass-murderer*, and much of France still suspects that she, as a child, was in some way an accomplice to his crimes) it's almost beside the point: Sure, fine, what else would create this psyche?

It's a nasty way to tell a nasty story, and though the usual flourishes of black humor or stylistic indulgence that often work (along with genre subversion) to help Verhoeven's bitter medicine go down easier are largely absent (on the surface, it looks like a conventional upscale French character piece) the matter-of-fact professionalism can't mask the director's penchant for needling his audience's sensibilities. Events seem to escalate in the "wrong" order: We're horrified by what happens to Michelle and want to sympathize with her as a survivor, then we're flabbergasted at how non-invested she is in her own violation but want to sympathize with her refusal to survive in a way that's acceptable to others (you can feel her friends' vague sense of resentment at being "denied" the ability to feel good about themselves by comforting her). Then, at last, the layers of her personal history and broader life peel back even further and we're forced to confront the possibility that we've been projecting human expectations onto a character who may well be a literal sociopath.

This, along with what comes next (without spoiling any further, suffice it to say ELLE goes about as far and as dark as it could possibly go, at least thematically) turns the film into the kind of intellectual spectacle that would probably be called a "tour de force" if Verhoeven wasn't being so uncharacteristically restrained on the visual side. This is a high-wire act: One step out of place, and the "big idea" of exploring how a uniquely disturbed person responds to their own assault could tumble over into feeling exploitative or even offensively vindictive: "Ha! Gotcha! You felt bad, but she's just as sick as the rapist!" And while that wasn't my takeaway from it, Verhoeven is so similarly matter-of-fact visceral about the assault itself and Michelle's escalating attempts to confront it that it won't surprise me at all to see planty come away thinking of ELLE as exactly that, a psycho-thriller freakshow co-opting rape-survival narratives for sensationalism - and the film (like Michelle herself) is so disinclined to justify itself that reading feels pretty tough to argue against.

For me, what it comes down to is that Huppert is simply too good in the film, and the character she and Verhoeven work in tandem to create is simply too richly detailed and magnificently rendered for a film that rises and falls on her shoulders to be dismissed as mere sensationalism. ELLE is no message movie, it doesn't seem to want to "mean" or "say" anything about it's title character beyond presenting her and her actions for examination; but Huppert (who has seldom been better than she is here) finds the real humanity in a character that a lesser actress might have only been able to render as a collection of lurid contradictions. By the time the film wraps up we may be no closer to understanding the totality of what drives Michelle or the decisions she makes, but her actions feel organic and authentic through the sheer force of will by which her actress keeps all her various facets contained within a singular performance. It's likely that the film is too dark and the character not conventionally "likable" enough to register come Awards season, but few actors have so risen to such difficult material in 2016.

This is a tough movie, and it's qualities (it feels vulgar to say "charms" or "positives" in this scenario) are largely so inscrutable it's tough to "recommend" in any conventional sense. It's trafficking in dark material, and seeing one of our best working actresses deliver what might be an all-time performance will not be enough to make enduring that darkness worthwhile for plenty of potential viewers (and not just ordinary multiplex audiences, either.) But for my part, I found ELLE profoundly disturbing but also fascinating and impossible to stop thinking about. Make of that what you will.

This review made possible through support from The MovieBob Patreon.


*P.S. I'm aware of the increasingly popular theory that we're meant to infer from Michelle's glib recounting of her father's murder spree (specifically, that she mentions details the press "never talks about" which it doesn't seem like she would know either) that she was the actual murderer and her father tried to cover it up and then took the blame. It's a fascinating take and makes a lot of sense, but until I hear either the writer, director or star confirm it I'm not sure I fully buy it. I think we're absolutely supposed to infer that she was complicit enough to either have been an accomplice or not have needed to be "forced" to try covering it up, but it's not 100% clear that her "unremarked details" (that pets were murdered along with whole families) are unreported versus not-as-often-mentioned. Interesting angle, none the less.
Here's What I Don't Get

Here's What I Don't Get

November 10, 2016
So. Here it is. My contribution to the "Donald Trump is President, what do we do now?" genre. Please share if you like it, I hope you're constructive if you do not, and let's all work to make things better either way. Thank you.


So Donald Trump gets to be President of the United States, which feels like something out of a bad parody but is in fact terrifyingly true. Set aside the awfulness of what he claims this week are his beliefs, and you're still left with the fact that the man is utterly unqualified - a largely failed, multiple-times bankrupt real estate swindler whose main claim to fame is being a sort-of rich guy who played a richer guy on a reality TV game show.

For me, that's the rubicon-crossing element right up front in this: That it's the exact sort of story we used to tell to make fun of how venal and trashy our public discourse had gotten, that a hackneyed B-list celebrity could run for high office and win. Now that it's happened, even if Trump is some kind of cultural anomaly who happened to be the guy occupying this role at the lucky point where there was an opening for his angle to work out... what's to stop the continuation of it? There's no longer a lack of precedent for fringe celebrities, pop-demagogues, other reality TV people etc to swoop into the political scene and do well enough to muck things up even further - and at this point they're pretty mucked up.

The whole spectacle has been making me physically sick since election night, but the fact is I'm more bothered by what inevitably comes next. Of all the problems with Trump, the most serious long-term is that his election-year persona is so cartoonishly awful that it has the effect of obscuring how base-level awful the "normal" state of the Republican Party is. The most ridiculous things Trump promised his supporters (a walled-off Mexican border, a ban on Muslim immigrants, mass-deportations, etc) are going to be difficult to enact legally even with Congress nominally on his side, and that's if you assume that he sincerely believes in such things and did not simply adopt whatever outlook tested best with his voters - the man is, after all, a charlatan.

The fact is, the most immediately damaging things that will come of a Trump presidency are the things that would have come had any Republican been elected: The Supreme Court will (at minimum) return to its largely deadlocked state or flip to nominally-conservative, which will imperil the Affordable Care Act and leave many without access health insurance - I'm not in that boat, but only because I live in a state with its own ACA-esque system, so now if I ever want to move I have to limit my options to places where I can actually afford to live with a chronic illness. It will also mean that Red State lawsuits aimed at taking power away from the EPA, "Affirmative Action" and other vital systems that effect both small and long-term systemic change. States that want to pass discriminatory laws against gay marriage, transgender bathroom access, etc will likely find themselves much less challenged to do so.

Even if, in a best-case scenario, Trump were to commit some impeachable offense (or simply get bored with pretending to be a politician - both of which are not implausible) his waiting replacement is Mike Pence, a religious zealot who actually subscribes life-long to most of the vile positions Trump seemingly acquired as a matter of political expediency. ANY Conservative becoming President at this crucial historical moment was going to be destructive on about the same level, Trump merely brings the added "bonus" of being embarrassing and incompetent at the same time.

Oh, and also that the few areas where he doesn't fit the mold of a traditional Republican, its uniformly for the worse: He wants to engage peacefully with brutal thug dictators like Putin, and he favors (or claims to favor) an "anti-globalism" isolationist trade policy of "America first" restrictions on jobs and outsourcing (lets see how long that lasts, though) and import/export tariffs that can only conceivably drive up consumer goods prices (at the minimum) and make foreign-made goods harder to acquire here even if they are superior to the domestic alternative.

And yet, so we're told, it's that last part that won the day and is supposed to make Trump voters more worth taking seriously. As the dust settles and the corporate media looks for a way to A.) not admit their ow wrongdoing in treating Trump "fairly" by breathless coverage of Hillary's myriad non-scandals and equivocation about his very real ones and B.) report on the next few years in a way that's not ratings-killing depressing, the narrative already taking shape is that the outright racists, misogynists, xenophobes etc that enthusiastically backed Trumpism were just a loud minority, and that the "real" reason he succeeded is because he tapped into the angrier, more proactive version of the "anti-establishment" groundswell that propelled Bernie Sanders in the Democrat primary. That the hangers-on of the blighted rust-belt, the apparently disenfranchise white working class - abandoned by Reaganomics in the 80s and ignored by "urban coastal elitist" liberals in the age of globalism - saw someone whose election could blow up "the system" and decided to do just that.

And on that point... Egh, I just don't know, folks.

The thing of it is, my immediate instinct is to be introspective and wonder if there's truth in that. The fact is, as someone who is urban, coastal, liberal and frankly proud of the various ways in which I've been described as "elitist," it's not hard to see how maybe that COULD be the case: I'll be the first to admit that I don't generally given much thought to the supposed "victims" of the changes that the globalist, post-national economy have brought about in the world. I live on a safe blue coast as part pf a major city, so for me "globalism" is an almost entirely positive force: My tech/entertainment-adjacent job isn't going to be shipped overseas. My local infrastructure isn't crumbling because young people are fleeing to blue cities where the jobs are, it's being built up because it IS the blue city young people are fleeing to. Immigration has never meant more competition for scarce jobs for me, it's meant vibrant and diverse communities where a lot of my closest friends come from and the overall presence of which gives me a sense of connection to the ideal of a borderless, unified world. That diversity could be a threat to my identity would never even occur to me, because comfortably existing as a global person IS, in large part, my identity. And regardless of how arrogant this sounds, I believe that this outlook is really the only proper one for a person who hopes to exist happily in the 21st Century.

But, on the other hand, it's understandable that the opposite isn't true for everyone - particularly if you were born into the regional homesteads of what Trumpism calls "America's forgotten people" and aren't able (or interested in) uprooting yourself to the cities or remaking yourself as a 21st Century person. And in my angrier, more callous moments, I've been as guilty as anyone like me of looking askance at the economically blighted Red States and their complaining populace with abject contempt: "I'm a proud citizen of the society of the future, those places are the past, why are we wasting time and resources propping any of that up when everyone knows the action is here?" And no, the fact that I'm "right" in the macro-economic/societal-evolution sense doesn't make the dismissiveness less mean-spirited or callous in practice.

I struggle with a base impulse, born out of being mistreated and bullied by my peers for much of my upbringing, to dismiss whole swaths of humanity out of hand because, well... there's A LOT of bad in the world, and a lot of bad people; and when a subset of humanity seems to be giving me a good reason for that dismissal (say, by embracing backward politics, or hatred, or simply by being culturally vacant i.e. "nothing worthwhile comes from there") I tend to take it. Have in the past, probably will in the future. It's a personal failing - and so (probably) is the fact that most of the time deep down I still think I'm "right" and just need to be "nicer" about it.

Especially since, when I DO look past my own self-interest, what I see first are the morally-righteous net-positives of globalism: An increased secular social-liberalism that's made life immeasurably better for my gay, queer, transgender, etc, friends. A decreased power-base for white supremacy (in the form of white-as-default societal view) and increased opportunities for women to attain political, social and market power. A more diverse, interesting, enriching community to live in. If it's already easy for a "liberal coastal elitist" like me to casually dismiss the anti-globalist concerns of "Flyover Country," it gets even EASIER when you can point to people who've historically had to endure much, much worse than a downtick in local blue-collar factory jobs who're benefiting and say "No, you're demonstrably wrong, the way things are going is good because look at how much it's helping all of these worthy, awesome people." And in terms of broad cultural narrative, well... angry white guys versus marginalized women, LGBTQ folks, people of color, disabled persons, etc? Guess who's going to come off like the villain there even if they don't personally think themselves to be. Yeah, exactly.

So... yes, in the abstract, I "get" the concept of being someone who (correctly or not) feels like the transforming landscape of 21st Century America has left them behind and having a chip on your shoulder about it - even if my suspicion is still that there is a lot less actual "I did everything right and got screwed!" at play than there is "I'm mad because I'm not talented or clever enough to make it in a world that's no longer arranged for someone like me to just coast on perceived labor-force necessity and resent having to adjust." And I get (again, in the abstract) wanting to flip a symbolic bird or lob a symbolic brick at some vague idea of "the establishment" that you think was either actively out to get you or just didn't care about you. I get anger. I get lashing out. Even if I think the place it's coming from is utterly wrongheaded and grounded in unexamined-entitlement and ignorance... I get where that comes from.

That.

Having.

Been.

Said.

Here's what I don't get:

I don't get how, when confronted with an unprecedented mass of evidence and testimony that tells you, essentially: "Hey, if you throw that brick, it's a chain reaction that hurts good people who never did anything to you." Explain that to me.

I don't get how the unlikely possibility that backing out of NAFTA (not actually going to happen, by the way) might eventually lead to some kind of factory job maybe popping back up in your general area is still "worth it" when a gay person tells you "Hey, the guy you're electing President because you think he'll make that happen is going to create a Supreme Court that takes my marriage rights away and ruins my life." Explain that to me.

I don't get how the momentary satisfaction of seeing Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Samantha Bee, John Oliver or whoever your "smug liberal who told mean jokes about my precious rural working class culture" target of choice is have to swallow the idea of four years under Trump is "worth it" when a Muslim person tells you "Hey, the guy you made President for the lulz wants to prevent the rest of my family from coming to live with me here because we're the wrong religion." Explain that to me.

I don't get how the prospect of maybe (maybe!) seeing it become slightly easier to pick up this or that job because the migrant labor force growth has been stalled is still "worth it" when someone tells you "Hey, the policies you THINK are going to cause that are ACTUALLY going to be used as pretext to turn away war refugees fleeing a situation a thousand times worse than the suffering you think you're enduring." Explain that to me.

I don't get how seeing this or that company (maybe!) put out one more "now hiring" sign is "worth it" when it happens because EPA regulations have been eased back and that company can now profit from poisoning the air and water that both you AND the "coastal elites" have to drink and breathe. Explain that to me.

I don't get how the prospect of your regional H.R. manager maybe (maybe!) offering a few more overtime hours because corporate is "worth it" when it comes from no longer being required to spend money offering health insurance coverage to employees suffering from chronic illness - meaning those people will get sick and possibly DIE. Explain that to me.

I don't get how showing resistance to the spread of an art/entertainment culture that isn't precisely your "thing" is somehow "worth it" when you are told, again and again, that it means mental and physical harm coming to the people and communities behind that culture. Explain that to me.

I don't get how casting a vote on behalf of buzzwords like "manufacturing jobs" (manufacturing what? For whom? At what cost? For how long?) is "worth it" next to the undeniable fact that gay and transgender youth who - I promise you - are living lives as harsh or harsher than yours despite the impression you may have formed from only seeing such people as idealized pop-culture fixtures on daytime chat shows are going to have psychological and physical violence inflicted on them by bullies and bigots who feel emboldened by the victory of a political movement you claim to support strictly out of "economic anxiety." Explain that to me.

I don't get how whatever you think Trump could conceivably bring to you, personally, is still "worth it" when you know (unless you are utterly oblivious) that his court appointments could mean that women nationwide will lose reproductive freedom and possibly their lives as a result of it. Explain that to me - unless your explanation involves some asinine superstition about the "personhood" of fetuses, in which case you and I had nothing to discuss way before Trump showed up.

Good, decent, wonderful people - people who matter, people who have value, people who bring good into the world, their communities and this country, people who have things just as rough and in most cases substantially rougher than you - told you "What you are voting to happen will cause harm to come to me"... and you did it anyway. How do you live with that? How do you face yourself? Explain that to me.

And just so we're clear: I'm not asking for an explanation because I don't know the answer. We all know the answer to every single item: "I am selfish and looking out for number one." I know it. You know. I just think that all the "Not racist, just ______!" Trump supporters should have to own up to it, if nothing else.

The thing that I don't get and REALLY don't know the answer to is where we go from here. While demographic math and the inexorable march toward post-national globalism (which, just so we're clear, is not actually going to stop - it's just going to have a bunch of red tape to manage at most) will still likely create an eventual political map where the people/regions who supported Trumpism this time will not be able to wield any significant political power... we aren't there yet. The hope was that it would get most of the way there, barely, with a Clinton win this time and then the joint policy-changing movements of a Democrat president and Democrat-dominated SCOTUS would hasten it into full bloom - but that's not going to happen now, and it's going to take longer and require more granular, gradual work.

So until then, yes, it's grudgingly true that liberals in the blue city strongholds and the blue coasts will have to at least TRY to take "Flyover Country" at its word that the open racists and misogynists aren't truly representative and, if "reached out to" in some way, some of the supposedly disenfranchised working class "economic anxiety" voters can be peeled off to support liberal candidates who offer actual solutions to their problems...

But how does that work out, now?

Here's the thing: Regardless of whether Trump follows through on anything he's proposed, he proposed it and "Flyover Country" voted for him. They voted for taking marriage rights away from gays. They voted for mass-deportation of immigrants. They voted for a Muslim ban. They voted for the wall. They voted for "gay conversion therapy" (that one's on Pence - who is, explicitly or implicitly, your actual President in terms of the work. Just watch.) They voted for abortion restrictions. They voted for breaking bread with Putin. They voted for white nationalism. They voted for isolationism. They voted for America to back out of NATO. They voted to tank the economy by trying to force an unviable manufacturing-sector revival that can't be accomplished and an "America first" trade policy that corporations will weasel out of easily while passing any actual costs onto consumers.

Even if that wasn't why they voted for him (or why they THOUGHT they voted for him) ...they knew it about it and voted anyway. Which can only means two things: They wanted to inflict deliberate harm on their fellow countrymen, or they wanted something else and figured that getting it was worth inflicting that same deliberate harm. No matter what's to be gained... how can ANYONE from the "harmed" part of that equation be reasonably asked to build bridges and heal rifts? How do you get there?

Oh, I can imagine the Democrat PARTY getting there: Gearing up a gaggle of their best "relatable white guy" stable ("On Bernie! On Biden! On Kaine and O'Malley!") and "Blue Dog" Senate candidates and dispatching them to the rusted-out hinterlands on the pretext of "Okay, when the Union lunchpail vote was a thing, it was OUR thing - let's get it back!" Sure. That's probably Strategy #1 for the 2018 midterms. What I can't imagine is the ACTUAL power-base coalition of 21st Century liberalism - Blue State/Blue State-aspirant Millennials, LGBTQ people, people of color, immigrants, religious and cultural minorities, women, people with disabilities, etc - going along with it. Why should they? How can that be reasonably expected of them?

This isn't that fucking Black Jeopardy sketch. This isn't a matter of differences of opinion about regional economic priorities and mutual pop-culture acumen. Asking current loyal, active liberals to shake hands and find common ground with theoretically-persuadable Trump voters is not asking Hank Hill and Cleveland Brown to agree on a movie night pick. It's asking them to "make nice" with people who just proved that they AT BEST were willing to see them suffer and possibly die in exchange for the vague possibility that someone MIGHT turn "The Plant" or The Old Steel Mill back on at some point in the near future. And it won't be The Democrats trying to mediate common ground between the two: It will be The Democrats shoving marginalized, imperiled people with actual problems in front newly-emboldened white people with largely imagined/exaggerated problems and asking the marginalized people to swallow not just their pride but their basic sense of self worth and convincingly ask: "What can I do to make my life worth protecting to you?"

Forget not knowing how anyone summons the will to do that - I don't even know how you ASK someone to so much as TRY to do that.

Someone, please.

Explain that to me.


This piece is possible in part because of donations to The MovieBob Patreon. If you like what you saw here and want to see more like it, please consider becoming a Patron.

Statement

Oktober 14, 2016
I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this today, because I said my piece where it needed to be said and am otherwise trying my level best to stay out of something that (as far as I'm concerned) has nothing to do with me, But since the usual suspects are looking to make that impossible, I need to nip this part in the bud right now.

So. A few days ago a fellow film critic I'd been casually associated with on social media was accused of sexual assault and stepped down from his post. Subsequently, I posted a chained string of entries to Twitter (you can read them here) in which I stated that, one year ago, I was told disturbing things second-hand about this person from someone I love whom I should have believed... and did not. I went on to apologize for this, and referred to my actions as having made me "complicit in a status-quo of abuse and silence." To be additionally clear about this (which I did not initially want to do because it feels vaguely like minimizing and centering myself): The information that I had been told about was not the sexual assault accusation.

I subsequently was informed that OneAngryGamer.net - a website affiliated with the so-called "GamerGate" movement (which has been celebrating the critic in question's fall from grace because he had been a vocal critic of said movement, as have I) - had posted a "news" item about what I'd said which refers what I said in part as "MovieBob Chipman Admits Complicit Cover-Up..." The full article can be viewed HERE. Below is a screengrab, wherein the highlighted portion is shown to be a mischaracterization of the actual quotes they post below:



Now, as should be obvious to anyone who can actually read, "complicit in a status-quo of abuse and silence" (i.e. not believing makes me part of the bigger problem that people don't listen in these cases - both this one specifically and more broadly) is in no way that same thing as "admitting" to complicity in a "cover-up;" as that implies not only direct knowledge (which I didn't have) and direct action (which I did not take.)

So, suffice it to say, the piece is a grotesque mischaracterization of what I said that (at least from my perspective) could indeed be seen as rising to the level of libel. While I don't expect that anyone whose opinion I'd care about will put any stock in a random GG-affiliated site, for posterity I've asked that it be taken down and I wanted to have this post up clarifying everything.

Now, can we please place the focus of this very serious matter back where it should be (on abuse-survivors and the need to treat them and their claims properly), rather than co-opting it to score cheap points against tangentially-related people and entities? Because that'd be great.

The New Classics

September 29, 2016
So. As of earlier this morning, the playlists on the main YouTube channel for IN BOB WE TRUST and GAME OVERTHINKER have been updated to include remastered versions of the content produced for ScrewAttack back in 2015. You can view the full playlists via the links here, but the full roster of individual episodes will be posted below the jump.


It's possible, depending on when you started following me and/or my work, that you've already seen all of these episodes; but it's equally possible that you missed or forgot one here or there. Either way, along with the convenience of having this all in one place now, every view that these versions now get will go directly to the main MovieBob Channel traffic-count - so if you're a fan and you've got a few minutes to spare here and there, giving some of your favorite episodes from this period a re-watch and/or sharing them with friends would be doing me and my operation here a big help.

As always, thanks for watching :)

IN BOB WE TRUST (CLASSIC) EPISODES:
Widow's Peak
Blurry Road
Dissed-Topia
Who is Marvel's Worst Hero?
Captain N: Totally Underrated
Does Batman Need a New Origin?
Fantastic Four Sucks - Now What?
Nazi Stuff in Dragon Ball Z?
Will Superhero Movies Die?
Schlocktober: When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth
Schlocktober: Infra-Man
Schlocktober: Ninja Gaiden - The Anime
Schlocktober: The Manitou
Will Warcraft Be Any Good?
Who's The Best Marvel Movie Villain?
Batman V Superman V ???
Top Ten Movies of 2015 - Part I
Top Ten Movies of 2015 - Part II

GAME OVERTHINKER (REMASTERED) EPISODES:
Nintendo WTF?
IgaMania
Gamers Are Not Dead
Violence Is (Still) Golden
In Defense of Video Games
Jackie Chan Should Be In Smash Bros
Lost Girls
Is Piracy Ever Justified?
Can The Nintendo NX Save The World?
Make More Makers!
An Angry Birds Movie!?
When Did Gamers Become Wimps?
The Big Lie
Dumber Alive
The Smashing Seven
Amiibo: Most Wanted
Never Forget


These remastered re-uploads are possible in part thanks to generous contributions to The MovieBob Patreon.

Announcement: SCHLOCKTOBER RETURNS FOR HALLOWEEN 2016

September 25, 2016
Short, sweet and to the point: The annual SCHLOCKTOBER tradition (formerly of The Big Picture, now of In Bob We Trust) will return for all five Mondays of October, which will mean five brand new episodes focusing on five mystery movies. This always works out to be a pretty fun run of shows, so I hope everyone enjoys it again this time - I've got some strange stuff lined up :)


Meanwhile, the "remastered" uploads of the 2015 "ScrewAttack Era" episodes of both shows to the main MovieBob channel has continued, and I recommend everyone check out both playlists (i.e. In Bob We Trust and Game OverThinker) because there's a lot of new stuff in there now. I'll be posting a full roster of links once the whole batch has been fully updated, but for now here's the four SCHLOCKTOBER episodes from 2015 to get you back in the mood - enjoy!









These productions are made possible in part by continuing contributions to The MovieBob Patreon. If you enjoy this content and want to see more, please consider becoming a Patron.

Patreon Update 9/20/2016

September 20, 2016
The MovieBob Patreon has been updated with a new video-introduction clarifying current status and laying out new goals and potential upcoming projects. If you are not already a Patron, please considering becoming one if you want to support more new MovieBob productions.



ALSO: Episodes of In Bob We Trust and Game OverThinker that were originally produced for the ScrewAttack incarnation of each series are now being uploaded to the MovieBob YouTube Channel in "remastered" form in order to create a comprehensive playlist of each.

Episodes are going up a few at a time, so check back for updates, but for now the roster includes newly-updated versions of the following:

GAME OVERTHINKER
Nintendo WTF?
IgaMania

IN BOB WE TRUST
Widow's Peak
Blurry Road
Dissed-Topia

Empathy

Juni 13, 2016
Hello friends.

The following was to be the script to this week's IN BOB WE TRUST, which would've been posted a few hours from now once it had been edited together. The subject was to be adding some context to some social media flaming I've been enduring for suggesting that, in the wake of Sunday's ghastly events in Orlando re: the worst mass-shooting in U.S. history; it might be prudent for people presenting at the also-unfolding E3 conference to look at any of their trailers/showcases involving gunplay and ask "Is there anything in here that will make me look like an asshole today, in light of this?"

Since it was hard to think about anything else, I decided to turn elaborating on my feelings about the blowback my Tweet received and what it says about geek/gamer culture's issue with empathy into an episode... only to discover when it came time to actually record the audio and put it together that there was just no way to make the seriousness of the subject-matter "gel" with my standard video presentation (i.e. jokey graphics, fast-delivery, etc) - and that in actually following through, I'd be (potentially, at least) engaging in the kind of good-intentions/poor-taste business I was questioning in the first place. So I decided not to.

There will be an episode of IN BOB WE TRUST this week, but it will arrive on Wednesday or late Tuesday night. My call, no one else's, felt it was what was best. But for posterity's sake (and because I feel it reads better in text format anyway, I'm presenting my thoughts as originally-scripted here. I hope you find something worthwhile in them, and apologize for the delay in episode production.

Thank you.

ORIGINAL "IN BOB WE TRUST" SCRIPT (w/ minor alterations for blog post form)


Okay! So, this episode is going to be about two things I generally DON’T want to regularly fixate on for this series: Current events and video games. I don’t wanna do too much game coverage because there’s another show for that – oh snap I guess I spoiled that’s coming back at some point, too, huh? – and current events because this really isn’t the forum but, hey, y’know, sometimes you gotta get something off your chest.

So, the United States just had itself another godawful mass-shooting, this time targeting a gay nightclub in Florida. It’s completely horrible, there is no upside, it’s a shitty thing made even more shitty by the fact that these things could be mitigated if not prevented outright by fairly simple measures that most other civilized countries have already put in place but we refuse to because enough of our population still somehow believes that the word “Ammendment” means “Sacred Unchanging Writ Seared Into The Immortal Rock By Fucking ZEUS.”

But that’s a different show. Bottom line: Horrible tragedy, an outrage, maybe keep these things in mind when you VOTE in a few months and while thoughts and prayers are lovely what they REALLY need down there is donations in the form of blood or money.

ANYWAY! All of this happened to be occurring right at the same moment that the video gaming press was hunkering down to start watching this year’s info-dump of pre-rendered overpromising cutscene trailers from the E3 show. And since MY MIND always goes to the worst-case scenario, a thought occurred to me: Since a plurality of games likely to be shown off at this show involve looking down the barrel of an automatic weapon to some extent because video games have gone from being a fertile and endlessly creative space to… NOT that… wouldn’t it be just one more layer of horribleness if one of these presentations was to come off inadvertently in “poor taste?”

Nothing “intentional” of course – mainstream triple-A gaming may be STUPID (proudly so, in fact) but it’s generally not suicidal or intentionally cruel. The first thing I honestly thought of was “Boy, I sure hope Rockstar wasn’t planning to pop in and say ‘Hey guys! Big news! GTA6 is going back to VICE CITY!” Which, y’know, could still happen – the show’s not over yet. I mean, obviously wouldn’t be INTENTIONAL, the announcement and accompanying footage would’ve been prepped weeks if not months ago, but still… we can all agree that shit would’ve been awkward as hell, right? Big presentation about how fun it is to pretend to the shoot-up Florida within hours or days of some asshole ACTUALLY shooting-up Florida?

Or if the next CALL OF DUTY trailer revealed one of those "No Russian" type civilian mass-shooting sequences to showcase how bad the bad guys were? That'd would've gone over like a lead balloon, and along with just being a tone-deaf way to conduct business it would've turned "LOOK HOW GROSS AND INSENSITIVE THE VIDEO GAME WORLD IS!" into a headline news story in the mainstream media - and it'd be really hard to argue with the optics without coming off like the worst possible stereotype of a gamer - as demonstrated when I said THIS...


...and was immediately set upon by people eager to prove themselves as embodying the worst possible stereotype of a gamer: Death threats, accusations of attempting to "censor" the medium, fat jokes, racial slurs, all the tactics you'd expect.

Now look, I'm no stranger to being harassed by idiots - check out the comments under this episode if you don't believe me. But it really struck me that SO MANY people got SO OUTRAGED about such a minor sentiment. I hadn't asked for any games to be "banned," I hadn't scolded any developer for which games they'd showed (I couldn't have if I'd wanted to, since it hadn't happened yet) I hadn't Saif any games should be "banned" or "censores" because that would be wrong and stupid. I didn't even say "don't show any gun games!" because A.) I don't think that'd be a good idea and B.) even if I did, this is gaming in 2016 - what the fuck else are they gonna show, Ubisofts skiing thing?

The SUM TOTAL of what I said was "Hey, people about to make a public presentation about stuff involving guns? Maybe take one more pass on your preparations and see if anything in there that was fine YESTERDAY might make you look like an asshole. You know, what P.R. people are *supposed to do.* Or what no less than GEORGE CARLIN did when he revised his standup set for a special recorded in the immediate aftermath of 911 out if sensitivity to the victims because he was a fellow New Yorker and also just a DECENT GODDAMN HUMAN BEING.

Not that I'm confused about WHY there was blowback. What we call "gaming culture" NOW evolved from gamers first coming together in the 90s and early-2000s to oppose the very REAL censorship threats from the likes of right-wing political agitators like Jack Thompson, and the idea of never giving an inch or admitting that ANYTHING involving games might be in bad taste for fear of awakening The Demon is deeply ingrained in gaming's psychological DNA - even though the last "game censorship" controversy anyone who matters gave a shit about was a Japanese dev pretending to be afraid of censors as an excuse not to hire a localization team.

So yeah, not a surprise. Like I said, until spaces like Twitter, Facebook etc get some proper regulations in place; dealing with idiots is the price of doing business online. But the disproportionate response this time really shocked me. And I come to realize that what's so depressing isn't the anger... it's the lack of EMPATHY. All I or anyone else suggested was that people about to have a HUGE platform think about the feelings of others, and THAT somehow triggered an ignorance-fueled backlash about "censorship."

The thing is, we don't talk about this enough, but geek culture in general has a real problem with the concept of empathy. You can see it in the micro where forum cultures like reddit and 4chan or social-media harassment movements like You-Know-Who attack the very idea of earnest feeling or sincere emotional investment in ANYTHING other than snark-for-snarks sake "lulz" as a sign of intellectual weakness; but you can also see it as an almost pathological inability to even consider that anything beyond our own fandoms, our own fixations our own immediate enjoyments can "matter."

After all, why else is the go-too bogeyman always "censorship?" It's certainly not out of concern for artists rights - internet culture stopped pretending to care about artists rights the minute NAPSTER was invented. No, it's because "censorship" is the most obvious thing that could impact OUR enjoyment. A valid concern, absolutely - but should it really be the beginning and the end? I'm not exempting myself here, either: Best of intentions or not, it maybe speaks to MY subconscious priorities that "Hoo-boy, I wouldn't want to have to show off a shooter at E3 right now" is (one of) the first places my mind went, right?

Nerd-cultures problem with empathy also extends to how unwilling we often are to even hear out concerns about representation from those outside the "traditional" audience base for the things we enjoy, or why so maNY of us tense up and start blubbering out memorized nonsense about "narrative" and "agenda" at the mere menation of comics, games, movies etc engaging with social or political issues - all in the name of preserving supposed "escapism."

And escapism IS a great thing, and the idea of geek culture BEING a place to escape to is a key component of it. But it can go too far, and too often an attitide of "don't ask me to think about things in THIS game conic or whatever" turns into "don't make me think about things in ANY games comics etc" and then into "don't make me think about things during this whole fandom convention" and then into "don't make me think period ever." Where's the line?

Folks... its one thing to "escape" into a place, it's another to STAY there, build a fort around it and try to shut the world out permanently - that's not escaping anymore, that's HIDING. And it's also denying that same escape to people who might need it as much or more than you did. Playing a game, watching a movie… whatever, yes, that can an “escape” from the often trying experience of sharing the world with other people. But a culture around them really can’t be – not in the same way. Because a culture (even the so-called “geek culture”) is MADE of people – so it’s part of the grand human experience. 

And if we can’t at least THINK about having empathy for our fellow human beings… what’s even the point? I’d like to believe we’re better than that.


This piece made possible through donations to The MovieBob Patreon

Review: WARCRAFT (2016) - Updated with Video

Juni 08, 2016
This review made possible in part through contributors to The MovieBob Patreon.



Good news! After nearly 3 decades of video game movis being terrible because they didn't respect the actual games at all, we finally have one that's just as if not substantially more terrible because it reveres the games entirely too much! And now that Goldielocks has had her nibble at the Mama Bear and Papa Bear side of the equation, we should be just about ready for some enterprising go-getter to swoop in all Baby Bear and get things just fucking right – hopefully? After all, the next couple of these on deck are based on Ubisoft franchises; and they've never been known to vanish eagerly up the industrial-strength vaccum-like asshole of their own self-important mythological pretense!

Sigh. Yes, WARCRAFT is a colossal, monumental, staggering disaster. 15 or so years from when Sam Raimi, Peter Jackson and JK Rowling jointly planted their flags and kicked it all off, the Geek Age of Cinema finally has its answer to HEAVEN'S GATE (or, if we're being generous, ONE FROM THE HEART): A film willed into being by a genuine visionary of a filmmaker whose unwavering confidence and utter, unapologetic, deeply-drawn love of the material has resulted in something that avoids being called a simple failure by being so visibly cherished by its makers. Too compelling in its misbegotten grandeur to be dismissed, too grim and determined of its own importance to be called a farce; the only fair description of WARCRAFT is a tragedy.

It can be exhilirating to watch a bad film fail - watching the apotheosis of every shitty, pandering, grim-n-gritty creative decision made in comics over the last 3 goddamn decades crash and burn in BATMAN V SUPERMAN has been, overall, a fucking perverse delight - but there's no joy or even vindication to be found in WARCRAFT. It's not just that so many people tried so hard and believed so much in this project that makes its collapse so sad, it's that all that effort and belief is the main reason why it collapsed.

The fact of the matter is, WARCRAFT is the kind of bad movie that can only be made by fans – because you have to love something – really fucking love it - to the point of all-encompassing blindness to unwittingly yet so effectively smother it to death like this. This is video-game adaptation by way of the dad from THE LEGO MOVIE – a whole game’s worth of stuff that’s supposed to be fun all cragled into place so rigidly that it’s impossible to have fun with it: The characters are so arch the actors can’t move around inside them, the world has been so lovingly recreated you can practically see the museum display-ropes keeping everything from being handled and the dialogue practically chisels itself into the stonework for fear of a single line landing out of place. It’s clear that director Duncan Jones really wanted this to work – to make his mark, do something really different and set a new standard for blockbuster fantasy filmmaking… and geez, do you have to feel bad for this fucking guy, because what he’s managed to do instead is set a new standard for having missed the forest for the trees.

The flaws are baked in right from the get-go: WARCRAFT is, technically, a video-game adaptation… except somebody decided that instead of adapting a story from the games or even setting a new story in the world of the games, the place to start was retelling in pedantic BEAUTIFUL MIND-level detail - the setup of the original game – yes, this essentially an entire fucking movie’s worth of the kind of shit LORD OF THE RINGS blew through in bullet-points in the first two minutes of the first movie, or that STAR WARS wisely consigns to the opening title crawl. Previous video game movies may have failed because they were like watching someone else play the game, but WARCRAFT is like watching someone read the game’s instruction manual.

And that’s some heartbreaking shit, because it’s the kind of bad decision that only a truly lovestuck fan can make, assuming that the mechanics and mythology details are SO damn important that we need to learn every single piece of it rather than skipping ahead to the fucking interesting stuff. Make no mistake: This kind of attention to detail and narrowly-focused worship of the material is the reason that the armor and the weapons and the spells and the Orcs – holy shit are the Orcs amazing looking in this – all look so damn good… but it’s the exact wronginstinct for telling an interesting story.

Especially when the story already needs all the help it can get to be worth telling in the first place. Setting aside that for all its novelty the “World of Warcraft” is basically the same high-fantasy hodgepodge that every other kitchen-sink fantasy realm has aspired to post-Gygax; it’s still pretty astonishing to realize that once the movie is done introducing every location, race, faction, region, sect etc that someone seriously thought we needed two full hours to understand a plot that boils down to: “The Green Stuff Is Bad.”

Fine, it’s mythology… but mythology needs characters we can invest in, and apart from one early scene of an Orc couple just chilling and talking about life (which is probably the first and last moment where the film approaches “good”) there isn’t a single exchange between characters or line of spoken dialogue that doesn’t involve a character introducing themselves, explaining what’s going on, telling us what something is, how it works or where they have to go next. The screenplay is nothing but exposition, and the only thing that’s never explained is why the fuck we’re supposed to care beyond the supposedly edifying novelty of both the humans and the invading Orc army both being basically decent people trying to do right by their families and communities as opposed to the usual black and white morality associated with the genre.

Sadly, since none of these people ever register as actual fucking characters, all of that supposed moral gray area mainly boils down to the Orcs and the humans both being equally stupid; with the entirety of the would-be story tension resting on nobody noticing that the creepy Orc wizard building a giant magic-machine that runs on dead people and the creepy human wizard who fucked-off for a bunch of years and showed up again acting like a goddamn weirdo right when all the bad shit started might be the bad guys!

The closest we get to an actual character is Toby Kebbel as Durotan the Orc, in as much as he has the closest thing to a relatable storyline and because all the actually good stuff in the movie revolves around the Orcs – period. But for the most part we’re stuck with Travis Fimmel as a boring knight, Dominic Cooper as a boring king, Ben Schentzer as a mage and poor, poor Paula Patton struggling not to look stupid with inverted vampire fangs as a half-human/half-Orc lady Garona… who kind of feels like she should be the main character but then… isn’t.

None of these people manage to be interesting because they never get to talk about anything that isn’t tedious worldbuilding or exposition. At one point two characters suddenly seem to be involved romantically, and you could feel the audience come to life for the first time all night as everyone collectively looked at the person next to them and asked “Wait, when the fuck did that happen!?” Worse still, it all builds up to a chaotic climax full of death, betrayal, emotion, tragedy, huge stakes and grand self-sacrificing decisions that feel like they’d be the stuff of legends… if it was even remotely possible to give a shit who the fuck any of these assholes are or what the hell is going to happen to them. Even simply reacting to the ending feels like homework: “Okay, class – is this a sad ending? A happy ending? A cliffhanger? Or did they just run out of time?”

And despite all that, I still find myself wishing I could root for this fucking disaster just because Duncan Jones is so clearly talented and deserving of serious blockbuster clout, but… the most tragic thing about the film is how massively beyond his grasp it turns out to be. Sure, it’s possible taking this specific tone and route may have defeated any filmmaker, but whereas at the least the mostly-CGI scenes involving the Orcs or the (far too few) big scale battles at least look interesting… everything involving the humans or filmed on a practical set is staged and blocked in the most uninteresting ways possible. Everything plays flat, basic and dull, and it’s legitimately depressing seeing such dreary work come from the same filmmaker who brought such masterful command of cinematic language and scene geography to MOON and SOURCE CODE.

WARCRAFT wants to be big. It wants to be different. It wants to the be smarter, deeper, more meaningful breed of Summer blockbuster that explores ideas and asks questions. Unfortunately, the only questions that anyone will be leaving with “What the HELL did I just watch… and how the FUCK did it happen!?”


This review made possible in part through contributors to The MovieBob Patreon.

Review: TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES: OUT OF THE SHADOWS (2016)

Juni 03, 2016
It won't surprise me if the overall consensus on TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES: OUT OF THE SHADOWS (just TMNT 2 from here out, okay?) is that it's an improvement on the first film. It is - but only in the sense that the bar is already set so painfully low. The first film was a full-blown piece of shit - badly directed, badly scripted, poorly acted, edited into a clusterfuck to fix story problems that never should've made it that far to begin with and ugly to look at from top to bottom - this is seriously one of the worst production-designed series ever.



The sequel carries over all the pre-existing problems, but this time things are marginally better directed (however much of it was actually directed, since so much of it is so obviously comprised of bog-standard pre-viz) and they've imported a bunch of fanservice aimed squarely at the first-wave Millennial entertainment bloggers most likely to get assigned to review it by their Russian and/or Chinese owned traffic farm - er.. I mean, Perfectly Legitimate News Outlet so... yeah, the reviews will be better.

It's still pretty fucking bad.

Yes, they clearly had more time to work on this one so it's not quite as clunky and thrown-together as the original felt throughout, but an overriding sense of laziness and half-effort is still the name of the game. The plot (such as it is - see below) is an afterthought, the characterizations are basic to the point of parody (almost everyone introduces themselves with a description of their own personality and expected "arc") and none of it ever manages to have any weight or feel like it's supposed to matter - which I understand is a weird complaint to have about what's ostensibly a kids movie, but like I said last time: Kids deserve better than this.

I mean, he first time they made this shit into a movie I was the kid and it was every bit as much of a cynical grab for my or rather my mother's money for more licensed plastic Turtle crap; but at least they had enough respect for my hypothetical intelligence to slow the fuck down in Act 2 and have that quiet stretch at the farmhouse to develop the characters into something resembling depth. OR they figured that establishing emotional connection to the characters would generate even more devotion to the product line, but... look, the point is, "it's just for kids" is not an excuse not to do your goddamn jobs - that kind of thinking is how you end up with tainted baby food.

Case in point: You might've been under the impression that there's a new Shredder is this one... but it's just a new actor supposedly playing the same part. Wasn't Shredder a really old guy in the last one? Who fucking cares, right? And the Foot Clan are Ninjas again even though they were clearly black-ops mercenary guys in the last one because... okay, even I don't care about that one at this point.

Anyway, the plot this time is that the Foot Clan wants to break Shredder out of prison by using an alien teleporter rebuilt by Tyler Perry's mad scientist Baxter Stockman. But instead of sending Shredder where it's supposed to, it drops him into another dimension where the cyborg dictator Krang tells him that the teleporter is actually part of a bigger teleporter whose pieces are scattered on Earth and if reunited will let him beam in and conquer the place, which Shredder agrees to do in exchange for help with his Turtle problem. Believe it or not, I'm pretty sure that ENTIRE goddamn setup plays out in less time onscreen than it just took me to describe it - and yet somehow the rest of the movie is still almost 2 hours long.

What passes for a "theme" intrudes on the proceedings when Shredder uses a serum from Krang to turn henchmen Bebop and Rocksteady into their cartoon selves, which apparently occurs by "regressing human DNA to its animal ancestry" which is not how that works but... whatever. The point is that for some reason this means the same serum could turn the Turtles into full-blown humans, the prospect of which divides the team ideologically because hey, if you're going to steal a storyline from the fucking X-MEN movies, you might as well steal from the worst one... I guess?

It all feels phoned in and lifeless, save for the bizarre obsession the film has with reminding us that Bebop & Rocksteady really are BFF's for life - in a movie that's already much too long, it's just bizarre that so much screentime is given over to two lumpy, farting CGI monstrousities engaging in endless Judd Apatow "bromance" improv. The rest of it is just mechanical as shit, a Mother Goose simple plot interrupted for scheduled interludes that feel dreamed up by a seven year-old who knows that a narrative needs character conflict to give it structure but doesn't understand what any of that entails beyond cliches he's seen in other movies.

The action scenes, once again, are a big fat letdown considering how much money got spent on the FX. I can't for the life of me figure out why they decided to use motion-capture to create the Turtles or any of the shitty new villains since every big setpiece is the same bullshit mishmash of the characters flinging themselves through the air in weightless theme-park choreography designed to show off the 3D and not much else. The keep hammering the point home that these characters are ninja-master, but there's almost zero martial-arts in either of these films so far - the fucking KUNG-FU PANDA movies have better hand-to-hand combat sequences, and their both basically cartoons.

Speaking of which, the garish aesthetic mismatch between the design and the narrative isn't doing it any goddamn favors either: The story and characters are all pitched at the level of an audience that's still shitting it's Huggies, but the cinematography and editing make everything look so much like a faux-gritty cop show you expect the Dick Wolf logo to come up at any minute and the Turtles are all still overdesigned hulking brutes I can't imagine NOT terrifying a small child in person, forget being embraced as a children's merchandising icon - the resulting dissonance feeling like somebody dubbed a vocal track from BANANAS IN PAJAMAS over a particularly Ramsay-heavy episode of GAME OF THRONES.

Giving the dialogue some snap might've mitigated some of this, but the writing is uniformly bland and explanatory in a way that suggests everyone involved knows that the main function of this tossed-off kleenex full of turtle jizz (and every other third-tier tentpole franchise like it) is to suck up dollars from undiscerning overseas 4D "ride theater" audiences and figured they might as well make life easy for the poor souls who have to dub it all into Mandarin.

Oh yeah, Meagan Fox is also in this. I... once upon a time had some fucking douchey, not at all nice things to say about Meagan Fox early on in my criticism career that I'd pretty much take all the way back if I could. She's not GOOD in this, don't get me wrong, but it sometimes feels like she's trying just a little bit harder than everyone else is. She almost certainly deserves a lot better than this... but, then, so don't we all.


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