Review Types: Food and Therapy

Reading reactions to Justice League made me realize there are two ways of reviewing movies, in terms of the logic they present.

The most popular, and often mocked, is movies as food. You know the type “Sometimes I want an expensive steak, but hey, sometimes I want a fast food cheeseburger, and this movie was a good cheeseburger.” There’s plenty of snark about that specific metaphor, but the logic behind it is less absurd and worth critiquing.

In this sense, what matters in the movie is the ingredients. We’re asking “is the movie good?” and the determinant of that is “Were quality ingredients put together using a known recipe?” If a movie isn’t good, it’s just because you can point to one ingredient and say it’s bad. The pacing was bad, the writing was saccharine, or the director is overrated. Such reviews are not a discussion of how different elements work together to produce something, but just operate on the assumption that if one of the ingredients is bad, that explains why the whole thing is worse. Or in the positive direction, a review will tell us the actors have good chemistry, that the CGI is seamless, the director is hip and capable of working with politically challenging themes - though not how any of these elements interact, beyond goodness multiplying with goodness.

This all points towards a very mass produced view of art. After all, that’s how we think of hamburgers, right? Once you’ve figured out how to make hamburgers, well then, just keep getting good ingredients, put them together the way you know how, and viola, you reliably have a finished product that will please as much as the first time.

If you liked Iron Man 1, well then Spiderman: Homecoming has the exact same quality ingredients, why wouldn’t you like it.

(The moral public image and political leanings of the stars of the film, are just one more ingredient these days that adds to its goodness or badness.)

Empirically, the philosophy doesn’t really work (or else churning out box office successes would be as simple as running McDonalds), but it’s still the basis for almost all professional reviews. It’s just easier to understand.

I'm lazy and examples of these are everywhere, so here's a random Justice League review from Rotten Tomatoes: http://www.screenit.com/ourtake/2017/justice_league.html

The good news is that those behind the scenes finally figured out that audiences of superhero movies prefer them not to be as morose, grim and humorless as most of DC Comics latest offerings, and like them having a little Marvel style humor thrown into the mix. I can't say if the late in production replacement of original director Zack Snyder with Joss Whedon (due to a family tragedy for the former) had anything to do with that change, but it's a welcome one that greatly benefits the offering. 

I'd wager there's more humor in this single film than all of its immediate predecessors combined, and much of that stems from Ezra Miller showing up to play the hyperactive, lightning bolt activated The Flash character. Much like Quicksilver in the "X-Men" movies, he zips along at high speed (thus making everyone else seem frozen in a freeze frame collage), resulting in some similarly fun scenes. But his naive eagerness and interaction with others are what makes him stand out. 

Jason Momoa gets some less hyper moments of humor playing the loner surfer dude type Aquaman character, but it's the presence of Gal Gadot reprising her Wonder Woman character that truly saves the day...and the film. The actress is so natural and comfortable in the part and the character is so powerful (above and beyond the physical) that you simply can't take your eyes off her, and the film really excels whenever she's present. Ray Fisher is okay as the part-human, part machine Cyborg character, but isn't explored enough to make him that interesting. Ben Affleck seems tired and ready to hang up the caped crusader character (which sort of parallels his Bruce Wayne alter-ego), and a character from past films makes a return (guess who) and livens up the proceedings in the third act. 

Which is a good thing as both the villain (Ciarán Hinds, heavily assisted by CGI) and his plot (assembling some powerful boxes to destroy the world) aren't anything worth writing home about. Many of these films really fail to create compelling antagonists and this is yet another prime example. As a result, you're not as invested in watching him get his comeuppance that you automatically know is going to involve lots of CGI heavy, multiple character fight sequences where too much is occurring and looks fake up on the screen. 

Thankfully, the return of that one significant character along with the presence of Gadot, Miller and Marvel-like humor makes most of the film easy and sometimes quite entertaining to watch. I would have preferred a more compelling story (rather than the usual end of the world material), better villain and less reliance on special effects. But enough of the pic works, even considering its various issues, to earn a recommendation. "Justice League" rates as a 5.5 out of 10.

***

At the other end of the spectrum we have looking at movies… like a therapy session.

You would not say about therapy: the client was very charismatic, and the story of their childhood had excellent pacing, but the lighting was flat and boring. B+.

Instead of grading it at all, we’d discuss how the elements (which might be awkward on their own) worked together to say something larger. “The way the client stuttered while talking about his mother,” says one thing, and “the fact that the client brings up academic success at any opportunity” says another. We find meaning both in the plain content of their utterances, and the details around the way they are delivered. The result isn’t good or bad, but it’s interpretable.

This is where the Group 3 type of film critique (and most academic work) ends up. The type of acting (flat, naturalist, manic, sensual) is seen as a filter on the words said and the plot elements. A director’s history is seen as context for themes they deal with in this work. How does the beginning of the session/movie compare to where things are at the end - are things the same, are there important changes, and what does that say about the nature of the problem the characters were struggling to solve?

Sure the movie is ugly (or the client is disruptive.) What does that tell us? In what ways is it ugly, and how can those be seen as deliberate choices?

Compare the above Rotten Tomatoes to people deciphering David Lynch's Twin Peaks, which emphasizes various unpleasant aspects to tell us how they comment on the broader work. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/david-lynchs-late-style/#!

Lynch holds on this scene for an uncomfortable amount of time, lavishing seven cuts and nearly a minute of footage on Mr. C’s tactile show of dominance, the effect of his gesture passing from intimidation to a strange kind of tenderness, registering the tragic feeling of the strong for the weak they nonetheless mean to exploit. We later find out that Jack gets murdered in this scene, but we never see the act take place. His death, we feel, is already written in the lines of this gruff but malleable face, the skin gone slack, vulnerable, now just an unresisting sculptural material for the dark forces that menace and shape it. In this gloriously inexpressive pause, Mr. C seems to be asking himself: what can this goony, docile face be made to sing? 

In many ways, this long squeeze is perfectly representative of the oblique, beguiling aesthetic of the new Twin Peaks. It is not only that the pace is so exquisitely slow or that the scene’s narrative purpose is unclear. We are also left to wonder about the spotlight of lyrical dread lavished upon a character so soon to disappear from the story, just as we may be disarmed by the proliferation of arresting minor characters, stray images, and tangential action throughout the series. 

Lynch has always had a way of elevating peripheral performances to derail our sense of narrative logic (think of the man in Wild at Heart who quacks like a duck, or the inexplicable presence of anthropomorphic rabbits in Inland Empire). But no work of Lynch’s has been so gloriously digressive as Twin Peaks: The Return, nor has any work of his been so elliptical or so unforgivingly distracted by the characters, images, and scenes that seem to exist to the side of its story line. In this, the series embraces a narrative style that is arguably even more inventive and jarring than the narrative itself, with its baroque mythology of lodges, personified evil, and interdimensional rabbit holes. 

The new season challenges us most in the way it seems to undo the story it is telling, moving out of sequence and perversely out of rhythm, indicating a wealth of paths it has no interest in going down, spending long stretches of time in scenes that do not immediately further the plot, and jumping without warning from characters and locales we know to those we don’t (and never come to know). The result is a feeling of erratic, transfixing chaos. A greasy drug-addled woman sits in the Roadhouse talking with her friend about zebras and penguins, scratching the “wicked rash” in her armpit. A woman frantically honking her horn screams at Deputy Briggs to let her car through traffic because, as she puts it with incredible and hideous fury, “We’re laaaaaate!” while a diseased young girl lurches from the passenger seat, vomiting a dark trickle of green slime. A young girl waiting for a friend at the Roadhouse is removed from her booth by two grown men, drops to her knees in the middle of a concert, and crawls through the crowd of dancers before screaming at the top of her lungs. In any other series — even the original series of Twin Peaks — these scenes would have consequences: they’d be explained or taken up again or at least referred to in passing later on, in order incorporate them into the larger plot. In Lynch’s hands, they are left only as refractory trace variations of the show’s central action.

This way, every movie becomes a complex inkblot, a source for endless analysis and conclusions that are both more and less than “good, bad, should I see it.” This view has its flaws as well (such as the reader bringing so much subjective baggage to their interpretation that they can’t really provide useful information for anyone else) but the point is how different it is, and why it’s valuable to keep this attitude in your toolkit.

(This is not the same thing as SECRET MESSAGES delivered through a film, like explaining how random names are actually references to some historical event, a la a Wizard of Oz being about the gold standard, or Room 237 about The Shining. These sort of fan conspiracy theories aren't really substantive, anymore than if you believed your therapy client could best be interpreted by taking the first word of every anecdote, and stringing them together to find out their message from their Russian spymasters.)

The therapy mode is much more engaging with the Real of the work, picking up on random details and incorporating them. As I mentioned with Justice League, few of the professional reviews that wanted to tell us whether it was “humorless” or “grim” or not, said anything about the fact that the first minute is nothing but a diagetic paean to Superman, let alone what the meaning of that choice of introduction was. When you read a therapy review, at least you see the elements the critic is talking about - when you read a food-type review, you might wonder “did she even watch the movie?”

Comics movie roundup: Guardians of the Galaxy 2, Punisher, Justice League.

Only halfway through the new Netflix/Marvel "Punisher" series, but admiring it so far. It's much more apolitical or even reactionary than the previous fare, staying loyal to the comics themes of "crime demands revenge", "violence is primally satisfying" and "men suffer from psychological trauma." All of these are examined critically, but they're very much front and center. There's nothing like the topical political messages of Jessica Jones or Luke Cage, which at this point is fairly surprising.

It feels kind of disjoint for a comic book series to deal so much with wartime PTSD. It provides these moving portraits of men who saw horror in war, even just on a banal level, and can never escape thinking about that. Next week Daredevil will kill, like, a hundred zombie ninjas and never mention it again. It causes the message to have a "very special episode" vibe, rather than a universal problem.

I might have more to say when I've finished it, but it's definitely worth watching, for a number of political perspectives.

***

Balioc wrote a thoughtful review of Guardians of the Galaxy 2, over at his wordpress. You should read it, and take in its valid points, before I disagree with it.

For one, it's not a very good movie. The first 15 minutes are not only forgettable, they are interminable. The best scene is a nearly silent dreamlike fight sequence between two sisters, that feels like its from an entirely different movie. The one good technique GOTG had going for it - running cool scenes to eighties tunes from Starlord's mixtape - is built up to the point of awkwardness, and no longer really carries any emotional punch. The climax is even more interminable, busy almost to the point of satire.

But mostly to address this:

This would allow him to make a real case to his son, providing a real dilemma worth grappling with — are you sure you want to fight for the status quo, like every other self-appointed hero?  Are you totally unwilling to embrace my vision of Something Better? 

…which would be a desirable thing in any story of this kind, but double-ultra-desirable in a story where our heroic protagonist is literally the son of God.  It is narratively unforgivable that Peter Quill is never presented as any kind of Christ figure, that he at no point grapples with the awesome responsibility of having been created to save a universe of lesser souls.

Ego does make a coherent case though, one with serious implications. Ego shares his love of an eighties song with Starlord, one that idolizes 80's/70's/60's caddish/beatnik lifestyle: we love our women so much, but the sea calls and its irresistible. It's nothing about you baby, I just gotta be free. He hammers this point with no subtlety whatsoever.

Now this may come off as a completely anachronistic boogeyman - modern media is more concerned with the overly attached male paramour, not the irresponsible one - but it acquires different meaning in a franchise about "we're a chosen family." It becomes a familiar plot: Starlord has questions about the burdens of his new family, he is shown all the glory of the option of leaving it all behind, but he chooses his friends instead.

GOTG2 just makes this a lot darker, acknowledging the awful/awesome responsibility of power. Ego's choice to leave Peter's mother is identical with him choosing to kill her. On one hand this is because of his terrible self-centeredness: he knew so long as she was there he'd be tempted away from his work, so he killed her. But on the other hand it's making explicit what was ignored: he could make her, or any of his lovers, immortal fairly easily. In choosing to leave them he is choosing their mortal fate, and he decided she was disposable.

This may sound fairly stretched, but what is friendship in the GOTG universe anyway? Every time someone "goes back" for a friend, it's to save their life. In a world of danger, when you choose to love adventurous rogues, leaving your friends will always mean leaving them to their death.

So Starlord must choose between always being stuck with this family, or letting them die. He is chained to obligations we would find intolerable, or repugnant consequences.

(This is still not the "terrible responsibility of Godhood" Balioc wants, not really. But what he's interested would be too dark for a Marvel movie, and besides, is the central philosophical argument of Man of Steel, between Superman and Jor-El against Zod.)

***

Speaking of:

Justice League is a fitting addition to the DCU movies. There will probably be more thorough analysis later, though for now I'm just bedeviled by critical reaction. It's definitely a little more light-hearted and witty than the previous DCU movies, something ascribed to the influence of last minute writer addition Joss Whedon, but not like, a ton. The character still believe in themselves and their mission, rather than undercutting everything they do or say with ironic detachment every thirty seconds. (Also the villain is a total letdown - a big ugly with few lines and an army of drones. We really are Marvel now.)

The box office disappointment of this movie is like some sort of ironic justice, where deviation from the artistic monstrosity of the first few DCU movies is punished. Give us more of Grandma's Sweet Tea, audiences demand!

But that conclusion is too far gone, and it's still hated by critics just as much as BvS or Suicide Squad was. That alone should be a good sign. I was particularly shocked by the review from fairly thoughtful film critic Walter Chaw:

The consensus seems to be that Justice League at least isn't as bad as Suicide Squad, which is like comparing something favourably to eczema. Granted. Yes, you got me: it's better than skin disease. I would offer that Suicide Squad and Batman v Superman and Man of Steel were at least fascinating in their atrociousness while Justice League is so desperate to be pleasant (when its core is so obviously bleak) that the best thing you can say for it is that it's puzzling.

I like how early DCU entries are now getting this sort of Prequels retrospective praise: at least they were trying to do something interesting, mainstream critics notice years later.

Consider that all that desperation shares time with two or three superhero origin stories crammed into whatever cranny's available, leaving the genesis of Cyborg (Ray Fisher) a garble right up until he bonds with Flash (Ezra Miller) over their being the team's "accidents," setting up a bro-bump that is never paid off because the script is a piecemeal slop-and-shuck. 

The multi-polar cast is actually quite efficient at telling their own nuanced stories (except Aquaman, which is not limited because of its lack of screen time, but because the "ronan prince" story is so uninteresting.) The origins and personality of these characters are all told deftly and quickly, and their small details pay off. You just have to actually be watching it, instead of expecting to be spood fed through exposition. In particular the bro-bump Chaw didn't notice happens in the final victory shot.

I definitely don't agree with everything said in Justice League, but the meat is there, and refusal to grapple with it is weird. In particular, analyzing director Zach Snyder is like a modern-day Clinton Derangment Syndrome, where anything he does is evidence of some inexplicable depravity.

Justice League is a hot mess, a film that was probably about something accidentally before it became about nothing on purpose. The thing to appreciate vis-à-vis Snyder's truncated run as the DC Cinematic Universe's showrunner is that he doesn't understand and maybe hates Superman. He captured the despair of our current state: the toxic masculinity, the triumph of mediocrity, the destruction of empathy and critical capacity.

Snyder hates Superman??? How do you even get that? Quick, here's the first sixty seconds of the movie.

(Apologies for the quality, but a bootleg filmed on a phone of an interview diagetically filmed on a phone, is more fitting anyway.)

How do you get more loving than this? The children are adorable. Superman is beatific without being arrogant or self-satisfied. The last question, answered only by Supes smiling and looking off into the distance, perfectly sets up "what question is this movie trying to answer" better than any Marvel movie has even thought about doing.

Hell, the worst you can say for Snyder is "he sure doesn't care about Batman, because he'll deface this fan favorite in any way if it can make Superman look better."

And yeah, he captured "our current state of despair" well. Here's the song that follows that initial flashback.

Thanks for using music and specifically chosen shots to capture the subjective feeling of a particular historical moment in time. Which is, you know, the whole point of being good at making movies.

Thor: Not Very Deep Thoughts

Before I really think about Thor Ragnarok, I just wanted to jot down what was really obvious throughout the movie. Most people reading this will have seen the same thing, but I guess it's helpful for those who haven't.

In current progressive politics, you have the Red Queen Race of always needing to be more woke than thou, just to stay in the same place. So what was comfortable as the ideologically dominant position five years ago - identity politics over Marxist analysis - has given way to a need to be radical if you still want to be socially secure.

The MCU movies were from the beginning firmly aligned with the culture of progressive politics. The leftist criticism of this, from Iron Man through Avengers 2, is that their vision is sorely incomplete.

In particular, Stark Industries and Asgard both stand in for the utopian ideal. We get all this awesome tech from them, renewable energy, female CEO, pleasantly multi-cultural, etc. We don't see the work or industry necessary to uphold these shining cities, they just are good.

I can provide evidence if you don't see it, but hopefully anyone reading this blog is familiar with this running theme. It reaches it's most blatant imagery when "Vision", the messiahnic robot who embodies good, is brought to life with Stark science and Thor's lightning. Thor, Stark, and Vision then simultaneously use their three "beams" to drive off Ultron, the champion of totalitarian revolution.



And yet, Ultron comes from Stark. Baddies just happen to pour out of these pure institutions. As SMG repeats over and over "Stark is Hydra."

So you can be a smug leftist (hi) and dismiss the stories of the MCU because they are about superficial attempts at fighting for progress, while ignoring the fundamental problems that make the main characters rich.

Red Queen's Race though... and Thor: Ragnarok submits to that criticism, and gives the left everything it wanted there. (So why do we still dislike the MCU?)

Ragnarok says that for all the peaceful harmony of Asgard, Asgard was built on a campaign of violent war by Odin. Odin tried to repress it, but Asgard could never be fully cleansed or redeemed. Hela effortlessly defeats any forces of Asgard because Hela is Asgard. She is the bloody truth of its origin, which can only be repressed but not defeated.

The answer, obviously from half an hour in, is to destroy Asgard and make a new world without that original sin. Which they do.

(There's an obvious Trump parable here. America was built on violence and white supremacy. That was a long time ago, and the liberal era tried to redeem America into a paradise for all its people. But once the unifying element that kept society pacified was gone, that original anger rose up again, and showed it can overwhelm any bindings you put on racism, slavery, and war. This isn't the best reading, but it's a fairly transparent one.)

So, why is this unsatisfying? Hell, in Captain America 2 they did roughly the same thing: Shield had to be destroyed in its entirety, not just weeded of a few bad apples.

It reads very much as hip culture's attempt to assimilate every buzzword without understanding the truth beneath it. "Destroy the foundations, check." But Shield is back in the next movie, looking so similar you didn't even need to see Winter Soldier to know why it changed. It's radicalism as a cargo cult.

Yeah, all of Stark Industries will probably be destroyed in Avengers: Infinity War: Part 2. Hell I expect one of the main problems will come from a weapon from the bad old days when they primarily sold weapons. (Agent Carter tie in maybe.) But why did it take fifteen movies to get to the same point Man of Steel did in its very first act?

***

Back and forth with redantsunderneath:

redantsunderneath

I had similar thoughts from a different angle.  The primary mode I saw working was a “shedding” of things (like Ishtar) in return for seeing the world more clearly - loss of the father, the comrades, the hammer, the eye, and the homeland.  The movie was about getting past false consciousness through loosing your crutches.  It is easy to see the crumbling dome revealing the real story beneath as a reflection of how Sakaar is what Asgaard is “really like.” I know you’ll do the “Alderaan/Death Sta(a)r” take on this, but the image of the Neo-liberal utopia covering up the violence and oppression with its gleaming facade being “replaced” as a setting by the less fortunate fighting to the death for the entertainment of the elite seems, like, right up front.

I think you are underestimating the mid-period-on Marvel movies’ engagement with liberal self critique (2nd phase on) - Ant Man was about alienation/emasculation in the neo-liberal economy, Age of Ultron was about societal engineers working for our own good creating an anti-life force (whoops), and Spider-Man Homecoming was explicitly about rejecting the call to join the global elite.  

bambamramfan

So on the more nuanced levels, you are probably right. I need to think about the movie more to relate the actual imagery and more complicated choices.

I only brought up this because it was the one they were hitting us over the head with. ASGARD HAS TO GO BECAUSE OF THE SINS OF THE PAST, and I wanted to set it up as the agreed upon context before delving into the more interesting questions.

I should have also included the garbage planet. Thor has to fall from the top of royalty to absolute garbage (beneath the Devil’s Anus) to begin his redemptive arc. And there we get both the face of true exploitation that Asgard relies upon, and some funny characterization of the two-facedness of a capitalist order that disavows its violence.

“The slaves have gotten into the mainframe” “I hate that word” “mainframe” “No… the s-one” “Oh. The prisoners with jobs have gotten into the mainframe”

And yeah, 2nd phase across the board has definitely moved into this liberal self-critique. I brought it up with CA2, but CA3, GOTG2, and your examples fall into this. Black Panther certainly will. Avengers 2 on the face of it is the apogee of “liberalism and new-age mysticism triumphs over proletariat totalitarianism”, but if you read it as at all satirical, Ultron raises some valid points.

The question is why all of these, especially with the on-the-nose examples in Ragnarok, just feel so empty and hollow, compared to even the ending of fucking Agent Carter Season 1.