Tag: James McAvoy

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It Chapter Two

Me: Well, I saw the rest of It.

You: The rest of what?

M: It.

Y: Right, what did you see the rest of?

M: It.

Y: What is it?

M: Chapter Two. You know, the sequel to the highest grossing horror movie of all time, It.

Y: Oh, yeah. I forgot about It. It seems like It came out a long time ago.

M: It was only 2017. That’s life in the Trump era.

Y: Huh. Well, how was it?

M: It was okay, I guess. I’ll have to admit, I thought the first one was overrated, even though I know most people don’t agree. It made $700 million domestically! There were some good performances, like Sophia Lillis as Beverly Marsh, the lone girl in the group of teenage friends who call themselves the Losers. They live in the small town of Derry, Maine, which, it turns out, has a kind of Hellmouth situation.

Y: You mean like Sunnydale in Buffy the Vampire Slayer?

M: Not exactly. It was built on the site where an ancient evil crashed to Earth from the sky, presumably from space. Now it’s haunted by Pennywise, a demon who looks like a clown who dances and sings little songs.

Y: A clown, huh? That doesn’t sound so scary.

M: The clown eats children.

Y: Huh.

M: Also, it sometimes takes the form of a semi-humanoid spider thingy. And it knows your worst fear and will taunt you with it before it eats you with its thousand-toothed maw.

Y: That’s messed up.

M: That’s Stephen King for you. It’s based on one of his most beloved novels.

Y: What’s it called?

M: It.

Y: Right. Shoulda seen that one coming. So how does it compare to the book?

M: I don’t know; I never read It.

Y: Not a Stephen King fan?

M: No, I like King just fine. ‘Salem’s Lot was my jam. Vampires crossed with Lovecraftian, New England, existential horror — someone should adapt that one. Shut up and take my money!

Y: Stephen King’s had a lot of movies made out of his books, hasn’t he?

M: He’s the most adapted author in history. The trailer for Doctor Sleep, the sequel to The Shining, ran before It Chapter Two. Looked pretty good.

Y: He wrote The Shining, too? That guy gets around!

M: He sure does. He’s got a cameo in It Chapter Two as the owner of a pawn shop, playing opposite James McAvoy as Bill, who grows up to become a horror writer. King was my favorite part of Creepshow, where he played the farmer who gets eaten by meteorite slime. He’s a much better actor than he is a director. You ever seen Maximum Overdrive?

Y: No!

M: Don’t bother, unless you want to see what the product of full-blown cocaine psychosis looks like.

Y: Maybe I do …

M: That’s on you. Anyway, when they’re kids, the Losers have a run-in with Pennywise the clown; afterwards, they make a blood oath to reassemble if he ever comes back. Now, it’s 27 years later, and kids are disappearing in Derry again. Mike (Isaiah Mustafa/Chosen Jacobs) stayed in town, living above the library, obsessed with figuring out how to defeat Pennywise once and for all. He calls the now-grown-up Losers back together. The first film was set in 1989, which means It is kind of like The Big Chill for Gen Xers, only with a demon clown who feeds on your fear. It’s kinda like the Trump era.

Y: That’s a little too real.

M: Yeah. Pennywise the clown is a metaphor for coming to terms with your anxiety and past trauma. That’s what It is about. Fortunately, Bill Hader is in it, as Old Richie, who used to be Finn Wolfhard from Stranger Things. Hader saves It from its own increasingly ponderous mythology by basically playing himself. (If you haven’t seen Barry on HBO, it’s a must. He’s brilliant in it.) Jessica Chastain plays Old Beverly, and she’s got that Molly Ringwald haircut, to keep it authentic.

Y: Bottom line: Should I go see It Chapter Two?

M: Sure, if you like It. It doesn’t really hold together as a movie, but if you’re invested in It, you’ll probably dig It Chapter Two, even though it’s really long and a bit of a slog in places.

Y: Is it the best horror movie of the year?

M: No, that would be Us.

Y: Who?

It Chapter Two

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Film Features Film/TV

Dark Phoenix

I’ll admit I got a little choked up at the beginning of Dark Phoenix when the 20th Century Fox fanfare sounded. Since 1935, it has signaled the beginning of so many great movies. Originally it was Charlie Chan mysteries that kept the lights on, then Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes was the studio’s big star. Henry Fonda starred in Young Mr. Lincoln and The Grapes of Wrath. John Ford got the studio’s first Best Picture with How Green Was My Valley. In the 1940s, Fox had both the courage to take on anti-Semitism with Best Picture winner Gentleman’s Agreement and the silliness to let Howard Hawks and Cary Grant make I Was a Male War Bride. In the ’50s, Fox churned out 30 pictures a year, including gems like All About Eve. The ’60s kicked off with Marylin Monroe in Let’s Make Love before the bloated historical epic Cleopatra almost sank the studio, despite being the highest-grossing movie of 1963. The decade ended with Planet of the Apes and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, then the 1970s began with M*A*S*H*. There was Young Frankenstein, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and, of course, Star Wars in 1977, a film which changed the entire calculous of Hollywood. The 1980s ranged from the serious Chariots of Fire to the unserious Cannonball Run. In 1984, Tom Hanks got his start thanks to Fox with Bachelor Party. A nine-month period in 1986-87 produced John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China, David Cronenberg’s The Fly, James Cameron’s Aliens, and the Coen brothers’ Raising Arizona. The 1990s began with Point Break and Miller’s Crossing, made a star out of Keanu Reeves with Speed, then ended with Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace.

The X-Men franchise turns to ash with Dark Phoenix, starring Game of Thrones alum Sophie Turner.

The new century began with X-Men, the moment when the superhero trend kicked into high gear. Bryan Singer, a Sundance winner whose commercial career began with The Usual Suspects, was the director who was finally able to make a non-Batman comic book movie respectable. It would set the studio’s course for the new century — and ultimately lead to its demise.

After the Star Wars prequels concluded in 2005, X-Men became the franchise that kept the lights on at Twentieth. The series had its high points, like Singer’s first two films and 2014’s Days of Future Past. But as Marvel and Disney grew into a spandex juggernaut, Fox’s creative team seemed adrift, unable to even make a decent Fantastic Four movie. X-Men: Apocalypse was an unmitigated disaster, due mostly to Singer, who, it turns out, is a serial sex predator who just stopped coming to work one day in the middle of production. The moody, low-key Logan should have been the end of the series, but here we are.

Jessica Chastain (left) and Sophie Turner try to rise from the ashes in Dark Phoenix.

Last year, Disney was flush with Avengers and Star Wars cash, and the Murdoch family decided they wanted out of the film business so they could devote themselves to destroying the world full-time. Disney officially took control of Fox in March, ending an era in Hollywood, cancelling dozens of productions, and laying off 4,000 people.

Dark Phoenix was in production during the negotiations, and odds are it will be the last film to feature the Fox fanfare. It’s an adaptation of one of the greatest and most beloved stories in comic book history — and one that Fox already mined for the awful X-Men: The Last Stand. This was to be a do-over, and give Simon Kinberg, the guy who cleaned up Singer’s mess, a chance for greatness. Kinberg is an experienced producer and studio apparatchik, but this is his first official project in the director’s chair, and it shows.

It gets off to a promising enough start. It’s 1992, and the space shuttle Endeavor is disabled in orbit. Professor X (James McAvoy) sends the X-Men to rescue the astronauts, but when things go pear-shaped, Jean Grey (Sophie Turner) ends up irradiated by the strange cosmic force that waylaid the shuttle. Instead of killing her, it makes her stronger, until she becomes a danger to everyone around her.

Unfortunately, no one seems to care. Turner, fresh from the triumph of Game of Thrones, looks lost in what should be her big leading-woman moment. Jennifer Lawrence as Raven mostly just stares blankly into the camera. McAvoy at least looks like he’s trying as Professor X. The edit is flaccid at best, there’s some shoddy camerawork that is simply inexcusable in a $200 million production, and the score by Hans Zimmer sounds like a series of electric farts.

The Marvel theme is “with great power comes great responsibility,” and the Dark Phoenix saga is meant to show what happens when that maxim fails. Instead, it shows what happens when no one cares about their job anymore. It’s an ignominious end to a once-great franchise and a once-proud studio.

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Glass

“How much of human life is lost in waiting?” is a line by Emerson quoted in one of the worst movies of all time, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I could not help but think of it while watching M. Night Shyamalan’s Glass, the capper to a trilogy that took 20 years to make. It started with 2000’s Unbreakable, a drama whose ending twist explained that it was really the prologue to the adventures of a superhero, David Dunn (Bruce Willis), and a mad genius, Mr. Glass (Samuel L. Jackson). 2017’s Split was about James McAvoy’s dissociative identity disorder-suffering villain, The Beast, with an ending twist that this took place in the same universe as the previous film, with the director resurrecting earlier characters. Glass is here to let these superbeings finally be unbound, which it tries to accomplish by stranding them in an insane asylum and locking them in cells for most of the film.

Shyamalan was hailed as a wunderkind after The Sixth Sense. He quickly fell into self-parody: His twists strayed to left field, his quirky dialogue turned odd. I prefer his films when they got weird. The Village has so much craft and prestige wrapping its silly, trashy plot. The Happening had none, and I love it the most: the cast speaking entirely in non sequiturs about a world taken over by angry plants, who in the end are defeated by love. Pure, glorious schlock.

Like Spielberg, Shyamalan is good at dramatizing neurotic childhood fears of loneliness and abandonment, but when the emotion becomes positive, it gets manipulative. Orchestral music tells you to feel happy, but you might feel alienated instead. Shyamalan is great at showy long takes. He loves to hold on a medium or close-up reaction shot well past the point most movies cut. It’s both economical and unnerving.

I watched all of his unclassifiable trilogy in one day, like a child forced to smoke a pack of cigarettes in order to hate them. Unbreakable is a dour retread of The Sixth Sense, enlivened by Jackson in a purple jacket and shock hair dramatizing the nightmare of brittle bone disease. Split is buoyed by McAvoy.

Unfortunately, Glass is horrible, but it’s as odd and idiosyncratic as his other films. Psychiatrist Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson) captures Dunn and The Beast and moves them into an asylum with Glass. She tries to convince them that their superheroic abilities are just delusions. When Dunn believes her, he does so because the story needs to sideline him, and the seams of threadbare writing start to show. Most of the budget may have gone to the salaries of the three headliners, and their schedules might not have connected, as they rarely share the same screen.

For half the runtime, Jackson is in a comatose state, staring emptily from a wheelchair, and when he wakes he says meta lines that might have been fresh 20 years ago, when Unbreakable opened with text explaining what comic books are.

Memphis filmmaker Chad Allen Barton has pointed out that Shyamalan is a religious storyteller. He often shows characters needing to believe in themselves, their family, and the afterlife. This is usually expressed in a spiritual way and affirmed with an inspirational twist. This faith serves an additional role of keeping expensive special effects to a minimum.

In what other superhero movie would the final fight between good and evil (in a parking lot) cut away at first punch to the viewpoint of nameless extras looking at a van? Or be preceded by Jackson pointing at a skyscraper where the fight would have occurred had the film had more money? Shyamalan is interested in not just twists, but delayed gratification.

In the theater on opening weekend, you could feel the excitement slowly go out of the audience. The final twist here is a conscious wrongheaded choice that is bugfuck in its disconnection from viewers’ enthusiasm, yet lovely for its wrongness. Marvel is sleek and sometimes great, but when it doesn’t fire on all cylinders, it smothers you like a committee-made sitcom. Glass is terrible but at least feels personal.

The finale doesn’t work as storytelling, but it might make sense as an accidental middle finger to the idea that superheroes are inherently inspirational, when the reason for their omnipresence is monetary, as with westerns and Roman movies before them. Remove the money, and you lose the faith.

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Split

The year is 2017, and there is much strangeness in the air: Donald Trump is in the Oval Office, it’s 78 degrees in February, and M. Night Shyamalan made a great movie.

I have never understood the cult of Shyamalan. (It’s been 17 years, so I’m going to just come out and say it: “Bruce Willis is also a ghost!” is a dumb excuse for a plot twist.) Personally, I’ve enjoyed exactly one of his 13 previous films, the stealth superhero story Unbreakable. Unfortunately, that was also the point when the late-story plot twist became cemented as Shyamalan’s gimmick, and his stories, stylishly told as they are, became progressively more pointless. I would peg the nadir of his career around 2008, when he made a movie about nothing happening called The Happening, but fans of the anime series Avatar: the Last Airbender would claim his 2010 evisceration of the franchise as the low point, while financiers who backed Will Smith’s vanity project After Earth would say the director hit rock bottom in 2013.

Maybe the problem all along was that Shyamalan was getting too much money. After Earth cost $130 million. (That it officially returned $244 million and is still considered a huge failure is an insight into everything that’s wrong with 21st century Hollywood.) Split, the current No. 1 movie at the box office, cost $9 million. Maybe Shyamalan just works better under constraints.

Anya Taylor-Joy as Casey, the least popular girl in school

It also seems to help that Split is not a puzzle movie, that nebulous subgenre inspired by The Sixth Sense and Christopher Nolan’s Memento, which rewards the viewer for piecing together the plot from a slow dribble of ambiguous information. Shyamalan has cut loose his signature gimmick in favor of jumping on all of the trends in contemporary horror at once, and throwing in a pinch of Hitch for good measure. When the film opens, Claire (Haley Lu Richardson) and Marcia (Jessica Sula) are waiting on Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy) to get picked up by her family from the restaurant where Claire just had her 16th birthday party. Casey, the least popular girl at school, was invited out of pity, and now Claire has to give her a ride home. But once they’ve piled into the minivan, a stranger gets in the car and renders the girls unconscious with an anesthetic spray. When they wake up, they’re in an underground holding cell. Their kidnapper is revealed to be Dennis (James McAvoy), whose fastened top button and fastidious neat freakery signify dangerous mental instability.

The opening sequence is classic Shyamalan. He uses the banal conformity of suburban America to set a mood of inhuman creepiness and then tosses in slight violations of normality to create tension. Shyamalan movies can sometimes feel like a Skinner box experiment, with a clinical psychologist probing for just the right stimulus to create a fear response. If Split feels more organic, it’s almost entirely because of the pair of killer lead performances from McAvoy and Taylor-Joy. Dennis’ real name is Kevin, a guy suffering from severe dissociative identity disorder, what used to be commonly called schizophrenia or, slightly more accurately, “split personalities.” Kevin’s psyche is divided into 23 personalities, all of whom happen to be over-actors, giving McAvoy an excuse to suck all the juice off the ham bone. It ain’t subtle, but it’s a dazzling display of technique by McAvoy. At one point, when Kevin is talking to his long-suffering shrink Dr. Fletcher (Betty Buckley), McAvoy plays one personality pretending to be another personality while Shyamalan keeps him in tight close-up to catch the fine shading. Taylor-Joy’s performance as the damaged, clever final girl, Casey, is much more conventional. She provides the much-needed straight woman to McAvoy’s antics, showing her character’s innate empathy with her big, expressive eyes.

Split‘s excellent widescreen camera work seems inspired by the ruthless beauty of It Follows, and the claustrophobic plot takes cues from Green Room and 10 Cloverfield Lane. Shyamalan’s greatest strength has always been building individual scenes; sprung from the puzzle movie trap, he is free to riff away. Even a half-hearted “big twist” head fake at the end can’t drag down Split‘s momentum.

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X-Men: Apocalypse

You can always tell a survivor of the Cola Wars by their sallow complexion, bulging waistline, and rotting teeth. Back in the 1980s, Coke and Pepsi, two competing manufacturers of carbonated sugar water, spent millions of advertising dollars to convince the world that their product was superior, when in fact, the two were virtually indistinguishable. In the summer of 2016, we find ourselves caught in the crossfire of a similar conflict, only this time with superhero movies.

In retrospect, the studios flying the Marvel and DC flags owe much of their success to Bryan Singer. The director proved he could handle an ensemble cast with his 1995 indie hit The Usual Suspects and then used those skills to bring Marvel’s flagship superhero property X-Men to the big screen in 2000, which mutated Aussie musical theater actor Hugh Jackman into an international movie star and paired Patrick Stewart’s Professor Xavier with his frenemy, Ian McKellen’s Magneto for the first time. This year alone, we’ve seen three films that borrowed heavily from Singer’s first two X-Men films: from the boring Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice to the more successful Captain America: Civil War to the genre-expanding lewdness of Deadpool (who, technically at least, is an X-Man himself).

Singer did two X-Men movies before leaving the franchise for the ill-fated Superman Returns, leaving Brett Ratner to butcher the resolution of the Dark Phoenix storyline in The Last Stand. Since then, Hugh Jackman got a pair of spinoff stand-alone Wolverine stories that proved imminently forgettable, and Singer returned to the series as a producer for a prequel trilogy, which got an unexpectedly spiffy start with 2011’s First Class. Singer directed 2014’s Days of Future Past, which featured Wolverine time traveling back to 1973 to prevent a mutant genocide, and now the prequel series concludes with X-Men: Apocalypse. Or probably concludes. Who knows with these things?

Oscar Isaac as Apocalypse ushers in a new age of endless permutations of superhero franchises.

The good news about Apocalypse is the same as the bad news: It’s a Bryan Singer X-Men movie, with all that implies. The cold open takes us back to 3,600 B.C.E., where the original mutant, Apocalypse (Oscar Isaac), is in the process of absorbing another mutant’s healing powers to gain immortality, when he is imprisoned underneath a collapsed pyramid by rebellious slaves. Singer’s brief foray into Pharaonic times is 10 times more rewarding than all of the misbegotten Gods of Egypt.

Flash forward to 1983, when CIA agent Moria Mactaggert (Rose Byrne) witnesses the resurrection of the fearsome mutant by his cult in Cairo. Apocalypse sets out to find and enhance four mutants, beginning with Storm (a mohawked Alexandra Shipp) Angel (Ben Hardy), Psylocke (Oliva Munn), and finally Magneto (Michael Fassbender).

Meanwhile, Magneto’s former protege Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) is running an underground railroad to get mutants out of communist Eastern Europe, where she meets Nightcrawler (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and inadvertently helps bring the teleporting Catholic into the fold of Professor Xavier (James McAvoy), who is training Scott Summers (Tye Sheridan), who will one day become Cyclops, the leader of the X-Men. Summers’ slowly blossoming affection for Jean Gray (Sophie Turner, aka Sansa Stark from Game of Thrones) as the showdown with Apocalypse looms is the film’s most deftly executed subplot.

Due to the current state of Marvel copyright case law, the X-Men franchise is in the hands of 20th Century Fox, and thus is not a part of the Disney conveyor belt. That works in Apocalypse‘s favor, highlighting Singer’s distinct look and feel. But Apocalypse still feels like a warmed-over version of what worked better 16 years ago. McAvoy and Fassbender work hard at animating Professor X and Magneto, but they still can’t fill the X-shoes of Stewart and McKellen. Lawrence brings humanity to Mystique, but I miss the chilly cunning of Rebecca Romijn. Only Nicholas Hoult as Hank McCoy improves on the previous incarnation of Beast. And Storm is as underutilized as always. Apocalypse arrives in a season when even single-hero movies such as Captain America have expanded into super team-ups. Whether you choose Coke or Pepsi, it’s still the same brown sludge.

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X-Men: Days of Future Past: Mutatis mutan(t)dis

I forgot how thrilling the X-Men movies were until the moment in Days of Future Past when a Sentinel robot shattered Iceman’s head. So I wasn’t surprised to discover that the fifth (or seventh) installment in the franchise is as casually creative and proudly pseudo-profound as its predecessors. With the exception of a few moments of lachrymose speechifying, its unrelenting, almost sadistic intensity makes it the summer’s most ruthlessly efficient blockbuster. You will be entertained. Resistance is futile.

Although I confess an irrational fondness for Brett Ratner’s X-Men: The Last Stand, bringing back two-time X-Men director Bryan Singer for Days of Future Past was a wise choice. His third entry (after the original X-Men and its first sequel) in the series satisfies serious fan expectations and respects the cinematic universe built by the previous four films. And if you don’t look too closely or think too hard, he also straightens out the previous tetralogy’s knotty timelines, gaps, and inconsistencies.

A movie this size is a big undertaking, and at times it creaks like some superhero version of It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. The army of recognizable faces in Days of Future Past is formidable: we see old and young Magneto (Ian McKellan and Michael Fassbender), old and young Professor X (Patrick Stewart and James McAvoy), new Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence), old Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page), old Storm (Halle Berry), and more fresh faces and peripheral favorites. At the center of this mutant whirlwind stands Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), an immortal tough guy for whom history is a nightmare from which he cannot awaken.

In Days of Future Past, Pryde sends Wolverine’s consciousness back to the 1970s in an effort to avoid the nightmarish future the surviving mutants now live in, where they are hunted down and obliterated by the sleek, chain-mailed Sentinels. But the fight scenes are only part of the show. Singer’s film is also a poppy, propellant gloss on Jean Renoir’s famous observation from The Rules of The Game: “The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons.”

Take Magneto, whose hostility is partially rooted in his belief that fearful humans will wipe out his mutant brothers. Or take scientist and industrialist Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage). Trask believes that mutants will do the same to humans because that’s the way evolution works. And don’t forget the eternal optimist Charles Xavier, who continues to believe in human decency and human hope even when he’s a drug-addled, powerless version of his former self. Each of them is, at some point in the film, doing the right thing.

Although its most fully realized set piece is a funny slow-motion musical interlude inspired by the 2006 animated film Over The Hedge, Days of Future Past is the most serious film in the X-Men cosmology. There’s not much time for verbal grace notes, but there are plenty of visual ones, from Wolverine’s gray-streaked temples to an army of Sentinels spreading out over a stormy sky like skydiver-shaped warheads. It traduces history because its whole premise is that history is changeable bunk, and for a global $300 million smash hit, it gets awfully dark before the dawn. Good stuff.