Rerun... Unfriended VS Cyberbully

Movie stills? Or Red Wedding reaction videos?

Movies do often come in pairs. Dante's Peak and Volcano. Armageddon and Deep Impact. 12 Years a Slave and The Lone Ranger (identical in their depiction of ridiculous racial insensitivity) It's inevitably tempting to pick favourites (Dante's Peak, Armageddon, and obviously The Lone Ranger) but it is always interesting to bounce them off of one another to see how they compare. So this brings us to Cyberbully and Unfriended, two remarkably similar stories which deal with the subject matter in two very different ways.

Cyberbully shows us Casey (Maisie Williams of Game of Thrones fame), learning the hard way that her cyber-bullying of a classmate has, after snowballing into a storm of abuse from around the web, led to said classmate's suicide. The lesson is being taught by an anonymous hacker who takes control of Casey's computer and threatens her with uploading pictures from her "personal collection", shall we say, while they play a psychological game of Simon Says, suggesting that, since Casey's victim suffered suicide, fair recompense would be for Casey to do the same.

Unfriended starts identically, as we meet a group of high school kids (lead by Shelley Hennig) who we find out had, at the very least, a hand in the cyber-bullying of a classmate who had an embarrassing party video uploaded to the internet which, again, led to the girl committing suicide. The lesson-teacher in this instance, however, is the ghost of said girl who takes a more active role in the process by personally possessing and murdering each of the film's protagonists over the course of a protracted game of Never Have I Ever (look it up, parents).

So which film fares better?

Anyone else just start humming Eye of the Tiger? No? Just me then?

The look: Both films are filmed largely from "Webcam-view", and the look of both reflects the fairly shoddy quality of these cameras, though whether to save money or to build the atmosphere, I will leave up to your own level of cinema cynicism. Cyberbully does have a little more variation, allowing for some more stylised and professional looking shots, but Unfriended does really take the cake on this point. It was filmed on an actual computer using computer programs (some real, some created for the movie). While the action plays out over the 6-way Skype call, characters have bitchy asides with one another through instant-messaging, with the literal ghost-in-the-machine pulling up articles and videos behind everything. It is wonderfully immersive, especially if watched on a laptop or PC, and I'm willing to sacrifice a little production value for a successful experiment.

The acting: It's a thriller against a slasher. What do you think? Maisie Williams has shown in her previous endeavours that she has serious acting clout, but it was great to see her holding up in a one-man-show. Unfriended isn't ridiculously bad, but pretty standard fare for horror movies. Cyberbully takes this point hands down.

The theme: This is the most important thing by far. Both films deal with a difficult subject matter, but the degree of sensitivity is very different in each film. In Unfriended, we are given barely twenty minutes of learning to like the characters before we discover what they are supposed to have done. Once this is established, the film takes us through a self-rightous slaughter which we are allowed to enjoy because "Well...these guys are assholes". That being said, the acting is good enough that the repentance seems genuine and there's enough room to stop and think "Is this really the best way?", given that our protagonists are slightly too dead to learn any lesson. The problem for Unfriended is that, with a ghost story, the murderous ghost is always going to come off like the bad guy and, no matter how much you try and portray your main characters as "deserving it", I did become a little uncomfortable with the idea of the "literally bullied to death" character being the villain, especially when it is little more than a pretext for emotional (and visceral) catharsis for anyone who has ever been bullied online. Cyberbully is a little more careful with the subject at hand. The villain of the piece is simply seeking vigilante justice, not personal revenge, and the crime committed by the protagonist is relatively innocuous, meaning that it's less of a problem (though not completely) to cheer for her as she gradually figures out how to beat her adversary. The fact that Cyberbully actually takes the time to admonish cyber-bullying and also deal with how easy it is to become a bully without realising it makes it by far the more nuanced of the two. Game set and match, Cyberbully.

And it's nice to see Maisie Williams in a role that I can actually root for...

In the end, your decision of which film you prefer relies largely on what you're looking to get from them. Stacked up against the myriad of low-to-middle budget horror films out there, Unfriended holds up brilliantly and is a very enjoyable film. Indeed, on its own, you might even say that it is thoughtful. Stand it against Cyberbully, however, and you see the difference between a film that is trying to create a threatening atmosphere by using an important story, and a film that is trying to tell an important story by creating a threatening atmosphere. And in my book, you are always better off serving the story first.

Be sure to let me know if you disagree...

...but please be nice.

That's a wrap.

Rerun...Les Miserables (Quickie review)

Every Hugh Jackman film becomes more fun if you assume that he's still Wolverine, just at a different point in time

I very nearly didn't bother writing anything after watching Les Miserables because, as we've encountered before, if ever you were going to watch this film, you probably already have. However, I thought I would crack out a quickie review because the film did end up presenting an interesting challenge for movie criticism. Suitably intrigued? Then we'll begin.

To break down the critical aspects of a musical, I find you are most concerned with "How does it look?", "How does it sound?" and "How was it acted?". The look of Les Miserables is terrific, it does well what so many other book and stageplay adaptations fail to do, which is to give it a cinematic beauty, without resorting to big action setpieces that weren't in the originals for the sole reason that "Well, you couldn't have done that on stage!". A particular example is the barricade, which I have found in live performances often look either too well-built or not well-built enough, cheifly due to the danger of having your actors crawling over broken kitchen furniture. On the silver screen, however, that sense of debris-turned-fortress, is captured perfectly.

The music in the film has been discussed to death due to the interesting, if potentially ill-advised, decision on behalf of the director to have the actors voices recorded on stage, rather than in a studio. The music suffers as a result, there is no way around it, though there is a trade off - the emotion being acted comes through much more strongly, with the actors choking up while singing or screaming a line in rage rather than melody. All in all though, I'm left with the feeling that if I wanted to hear live voices, I'd see it live. I'm watching the movie because with a studio, you can mask problems with actors like Russell Crowe, clearly cast for his acting rather than his singing. Though it is interesting to note that I am a little suspicious of how diligently the "no studio singing" idea was upheld. The group scenes in particular must have been captured with a space-age boom mic to get the sound quality they did if it was not done in post. But I'm not a sound editor, so I could be wrong.

Pictured: Space-age boom mic? Maybe?

The acting is generally good, not great, with the exception of Anne Hathaway who was rightfully rewarded for an astonishing performance. Hugh Jackman holds his end up and outclasses Russell Crowe in almost every way. Eddie Redmayne is adorable, I mean, come on, did you see that Oscar acceptance speech?

So all in all, you'd expect me to be pleasantly surprised, perhaps? "Meh" with a side of "OK, I'll admit bits of it worked"? So why then was my reaction more like this:



But...you know...manlier...

This reaction led me to an interesting conclusion: It seems that the story and the music of Les Miserables is so good of its own account that even not-so-great productions can have a profound effect on the audience. Now, yes, I'm not exactly breaking down any critical walls by saying "Hey guys, Les Miserables is good!", but it did get me thinking about how far this phenomenon extends. Is it as popular as it is because the source material is so good that it's actually difficult to do badly? Is it the same for Phantom of the Opera? Cats? More to the point, how do you review it? Must stories like these be held to stricter standards, since even the bad versions will be good? Should we be encouraging or discouraging studios to take on these classic tales that, in many ways, are safe bets regardless of the effort that is put in? Or perhaps these stories can only be considered in relation to other productions of the same tale, i.e. "The movie is bad, because the stage musical was better."

It's difficult to quantify of course, but it does cause one to wonder: how many stories can claim to be so well-made that they literally transcend criticism?

An interesting thought, if not revolutionary.

Vive Rosebud est un Traineau!

That's a wrap.



New this week... Fantastic Four

In every fanfiction for the next six months, a Fox executive is just below frame

There is an interesting observation that can be made about "nerd" culture when it comes to comic-book movies. With a culture that has already torn apart, reassembled and torn apart again each film before it is even released, the idea of "popular opinion", that is, the opinion that is shared by most of the community, has distorted into "opinions that are popular to have", that is, the opinion which you feel you ought to have in order to fit into the culture. What's curious is that this is not a new phenomenon, natural product of the bar set by The Avengers and its kin, but has existed since the birth of the genre. Remember Daredevil? Until very recently, you would be shunned for aknowledging it without a sneering irony. Similarly, Joel Schumacher is still a dirty word amongst much of the community. And lest you think I'm getting on a high horse, I'm guilty of it myself: a friend once confided in me that he had actually enjoyed The Green Lantern, to which I immediately admonished, "But that movie was terrible!...wasn't it?", at which point I had to admit that I hadn't actually sat through the whole thing myself.

I have done since, by the way...and well...hate to say I told you so...

The reason I mention any of this is because Josh Trank's Fantastic Four is not great. It's not even good. But it is extremely popular to dislike. Indeed, if you have seen anything about it online before seeing it in the cinema (or merely glanced at it's dismal Rotten Tomatoes rating, currently 8%), even the most open-minded of individuals would have trouble setting their expectations any higher than say, Birdemic or, well, the last Fantastic Four movie. I was subject to the same bias, and was therefore confused when, forty-five minutes in to the film, I was finding it pretty enjoyable. Had I missed something?

The plot of the film hardly needs reiterating, as anyone who cares enough to read a review probably already knows it: Reed Richards (Miles Teller) is one of the greatest young minds of the era and has cracked interdimensional travel before an age that most of us learned what order the seasons come in. Later, in high school, he is offered a full scholarship to a prestigious institute to complete his work on a bigger scale. There he joins Johnny and Sue Storm (Michael B Jordan; Kate Mara) to build a teleporter, and eventually brings childhood friend, Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell), along for the ride. Finishing up the team is a fifth member, (whaaaat?) the totally-not-going-to-be-the-bad-guy-later Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbel). A drunken dare has most of the team enter another dimension where they are all irradiated with strange cosmic power and Von Doom is lost, presumably dead. Upon return, they find that they have all developed strange powers: respectively, extreme flexibility, flight and fire powers, invisibility and forcefields and finally, the inability to ever ride in a lift again. Cut to a year later, when the heroes have more or less gotten used to their new powers, but are being manipulated by the government to use them for warfare. They decide that they need to re-enter the other universe to try and cure themselves, but instead they find a horribly transformed Von Doom, who wants to destroy the world that left him behind. They face off with him. Credits.

Now, you may already be noticing some of the problems that the film suffers from. In fact, I could hardly blame you for asking me whether or not I fell asleep during the second act, because it certainly seems like there was one missing. The first act (also the first hour) plays out like a slow release sci-fi in line with The Sphere or even a massively dumbed down Primer. If it hadn't opened with the Marvel logo, you might think you've walked into the wrong film - a good film. Make no mistake, this portion of the movie is well made, atmospheric, the acting is pretty good (Jamie Bell is criminally used in this film, given almost nothing to do, but doing what he can with what he is given), the science is intriguing. Then they get their powers and everything falls apart.

You see, there is a reason that the first in a series of superhero films always follows the same pattern: you're a normal person; you gain powers; you discover how it changes you as a person; then you learn...well, come on, if you don't know by now...

He's basically Marvel Buddha now (and as I thought of that joke, I googled it and yes, there is in fact a version of Buddha in the Marvel universe...)

Fantastic Four completely skips the central aspect of the hero's journey. After gaining their powers, we don't even get to see a training montage, we literally just screenwipe to one year later when everyone has kind of gotten used to their new abilities. Not to mention it's particularly off the mark to miss this with the Fantastic Four, whose most interesting attribute is the fact that they have no secret identities - their powers inconvenience them in their daily lives and they have to alter themselves as people accordingly after gaining them. The stupidity of missing this in a superhero movie is so staggering that I feel like I need to make the point again,

Superpower movies are only interesting because the powers reflect changes in our own lives. If you don't show a transformation process, then the audience has nothing to connect to!

Agh...OK breathe...

In fairness to director Trank, there are a lot of rumours circling about trouble behind the scenes with this movie, but the most corroborated one states that Fox Studios meddled furiously with the production of this film. This is obvious from the blatant attempts to copycat more successful franchises, the startling lack of action setpieces (of which there is one, Fox apparently demanded that three be removed from the script, though did not object to one of the annexed scenes being used in promotional material for the film) and shamefully obvious reshoots.

Note to editors: if your actress looks like a different person halfway through the film, you've done your job wrong

But however much you try to redirect blame from Trank or the actors (and in interviews since they have all done their very best to do exactly that), it doesn't change the fact that Fantastic Four is a badly scripted, badly shot, badly lit, badly edited, not brilliantly acted, and pretty damn boring film for the latter half of its runtime. It's not offensive in its ineptitude, and I think many of the derisive comments hurled at this film are as a result of it being a "popular to hate" film, but you certainly won't find many people saying that they loved it either.

In the end, it will come as a surprise to no-one that Fox, like Sony, really ought to be leaving these films for Disney to take care of. Though, now that I think of it, they did answer one question that fans have been aching to know forever: Does The Thing have a thing?

Answer: sorry, Thing's thing...

That's a wrap...

PS. If you've stuck with me this far, I'd like you to hold on a little longer because there was one thing that I wanted to comment on about Fantastic Four that did get me pretty upset. It's nothing to do with the quality of the film per se, and more to do with a general state of things in Hollywood, so I thought I'd leave it out of the main body of the review. However, it's worth mentioning I think: in case you didn't notice, Susan Storm and Johnny Storm (brother and sister for those of you who don't know - Hi Mum!) are not of the same skin colour. In the comics, both are white, as is their father, but in this film Susan is the only white member of the family. It made me very angry, then, that whoever wrote the script (or perhaps, whoever altered it after an initial draft), felt the need to include a scene where Reed asks Susan whether she was adopted, to which she replies that she was. Leaving aside the fact that a black father could biologically birth a white daughter, Susan Storm's status as an adopted child is never referenced nor made relevant in any way elsewhere in the film. The scene serves no purpose other than to explicitly make clear how these two people can be siblings to an audience that (supposedly, I guess?) cannot possibly fathom this idea. We as movie goers can buy Luke and Leia Skywalker as family, even though they were damn near in each other's pants, but if you want Kate Mara to call Micheal B. Jordan "my brother" in the script, you apparently require a scene where another character all but asks "Do you mean 'brother"? Or 'brother'? Because you can see that he's black, right?"

The sooner we grow out of this kind of thing, the better we will be as people.

Rerun... The Maze Runner

Magic Mike XXS was a non-starter

In my opinion, the most frustrating films are those ones that come so close to being really good and then muck it up. I find it hard to blame the Scary Movie movies or the Sharknado clones because when your expectations are sub-basement, then you can't be disappointed. But when you watch a film that you begin to really enjoy and then it pulls the rug out from under you, either by doing something monumentally stupid or unbelievable or by simply running out of ideas, that really hurts.

And so it is with The Maze Runner.

The Maze Runner is one in a long line of young-adult dystopian future book-to-film adaptations, however while most films in this category are largely aimed and the teenage girl market, this one is very much aimed at the boys (read: there is swearing drinking and fighting). Our protagonist is Thomas (Dylan O'Brien) who wakes up in The Glade, a small square of green land surrounded by a huge stone maze. Its inhabitants are a tribe of kids self-named "The Gladers" (yes, this film, like most of its kind, has invented new words to stand in for perfectly acceptable ones to show how "futurey" it is. That being said, this being a PG-13/12A film, the combined swear word "shuck" is genius). The Gladers are all boys, one new arrival coming every month, and they explain to Thomas that his life now consists of basic living-off-the-land survival, and the exploration of the maze, every day, in search of a way out. But if you don't get back to The Glade before nightfall, you get trapped in the maze where no-one has ever survived a full night. However, there's more to Thomas than meets the eye, and from the day he arrives, the rules of the maze start changing.

When William Golding wrote Lord of the Flies, he painted a wonderfully vivid picture of what young boys are like devoid of rules and regulations, however, I could never help but feel that it was a slightly unfair portrayal - mainly I had a problem with the idea that everything would turn to ash quite so quickly. The Maze Runner obviously owes a lot to Golding's novel, even having many of the same stock characters.

Marked for death? Surely not...

Where this film separates itself from its predecessor is that it shows the boys as more than capable of keeping it together. Granted, these boys are 15-16 rather that 12-13, but it's refreshing to see an "abandoned kids" plot where they have been managing OK for years. And this is what really drew me in to the film: like Thomas, the audience is dropped into this story in medias res with a fully functional society at work with hierarchy and job systems. None of the boys remember anything pre-incarceration except for their names and no-one knows who has subjected them to this puzzle-death-game. We are asked to accept the world as it is without explanation, and that which is unknown is an intriguing mystery. This kind of trust in the audience has been rather absent in this kind of movies, with films like The Hunger Games opting instead for an introductory exposition dump to detail who is good, who is bad and why the world is the way it is. I was gripped for the first hour, as The Maze Runner parrots the mission statement of The Cube in saying "Don't worry about why they're here, worry about how they'll escape."

Then it all falls apart. The finale of the movie has the boys tripping over the entrance to building of the people in charge, wherein they are met with a video which does a concluding exposition dump about who the good guys are, who the bad guys are and why the world is the way it is. Normally, it would just be lazy - an indication that the writers couldn't think of a good way of ending the film and were probably running out of money, but that's not all that's at play here. As we wade through the torrent of information being spewed at us, we begin to realise that we aren't quite following everything. Information is being left out. But this is the end of the movie why would they...? And then it hits us. This is a young-adult dystopian future book-to-film adaptation. It is bloody obligated to be a franchise. And as the final line of the film rings out "It's time to begin Phase 2", I just got mad.

I'm coming for you, Hollywood!



Not mad because I'm against franchised movies. Not mad because it's still a lazy way to end a film. Not mad because somewhere there is a table of businessmen actively seeking to reduce art to a value sum. Mad because, in spite of the state of cinema today, The Maze Runner was almost really good. Up until that point you had a brilliantly built world. An intriguing premise. Great acting, for the most part - Thomas Brodie-Sangster, a young English actor who is popping up in all sorts of things now is quickly proving himself as the next Jamie Bell. I got mad because it just seems like every good idea now has to go through the wringer of business marketing until what little originality is left is eclipsed by the necessity to optimise merchandising. It spoils the fun.

And the fact that this happens so often, never ceases to a-maze.

Corporate Jim's tip # 64: End your presentation with a subtle joke and a handy visual aid!

That's a wrap.