Chips (1/2)

To say a movie like Chips is "bad" is the equivalent of saying the Mona Lisa is "fine." The language undercuts what makes it so special and is lost as a mere triviality. There isn't a verb strong enough. With the Mona Lisa I might say "breathtaking" or "divine." With Chips I might say "horseshit" or "steaming garbage" or "necrotic." Perhaps there aren't adequate words out there that would describe my distain for this film...

Watching movies is a passion. I find joy in sitting in a theater or in my living room and watching something I've never seen before. Movies as a form of art are unique in the way they tell stories. It's sound, it's visuals, its dialogue. When they work in harmony it's a joy. When they are off it certainly becomes a chore to sit through. When they fail, it's a torturous experience. Might I borrow the words of Henry Higgins by saying that I'd be equally as willing for a dentist to be drilling than to ever see this movie a second time.

Dax Shephard (our blonde star who also "wrote" and "directed" this heap) based this movie on the TV show of the same name. The story follows two motorbike policemen (the California Highway Patrol) as they seek to write tickets and catch speeders. The second partner, Michael Pena, is actually an FBI agent undercover sent to solve a crime that involves a whole lot of stolen money and something about Ducati's and corrupt police officers. Can you guess what kind of movie this is?...

... A buddy cop movie. Obviously.

Let's not review the film based on what did and did not work. I would be hard-pressed to find any aspect of this film that is virtuous. As the cocky FBI agent, Pena plays a man who is both sex-driven and smart, where Shephard plays an ex-biker who is supposed to be the raging idiot of the pair. Not only do the two men have zero chemistry between them, but their characters are a baffling blend of illogic and idiocy. Usually in a story like this, we have the "straight man" and the "idiot." One is funny and one is not. I see that Pena is supposed to be the more relatable man in this group, but giving his character habits like frequent masturbation and a slapstick approach to riding a motorcycle (not to mention a fetish for lululemon), I realized only one thing: this film is garbage.

The two guys trudge through some of the most baffling and horrendous writing in a film that I can remember, moving from one scene to the next as a facade for a plot. This isn't a movie. It's an abomination. From the stupid penis jokes to the stupid sex jokes to the stupid gay jokes, it's one misfire after another in a movie that we watch with the literal fascination of watching a trainwreck. In fact a trainwreck would be arguably more fascinating to watch. The sheer fact that one man was able to make a movie this inept isn't the most surprising thing. It happens. I will give Dax Shephard credit as a director for having shots that are largely in focus and characters framed coherently. Hey, I'll be nice, that deserves at least half a star, right? The fact that Dax Shephard wrote, directed, and starred in this film only solidifies him as a candidate for being the "Orson Welles in Citizen Kane" of bad movies.

Chips is the movie equivalent of diarrhea. You know it's coming, you can't stop it, and you have to wait anxiously for it to run its course and end. The final product isn't something you would want to show to your friends, or to your loved ones. You wouldn't want to buy it at a store, nor would you want to think about it once it's all over. If someone talked about it over dinner you might lose your appetite. In fact before writing this review I had to Google the movie to make sure I even remembered the stupid title correctly. That was really the highpoint of this whole experience: that I could forgot about it even before I wanted to.

The Lego Batman Movie (****)

The Lego Batman Movie continues along the same vein of comedy that originated in it's predecessor: The Lego Movie. This time we are treated to a free-standing story surrounding Batman (as played by Will Arnett) as he fights crime and mayhem in Lego Gotham City. It's a notable movie that very rarely slips into a dull moment. It's also very much a retread of what worked in the first film. It's nothing we haven't seen before.

We remember Batman from the first Lego Movie. With his brooding voice and personality of an emo guitarist, he was a highlight in the film as a small but memorable cameo. His expansion to feature-length makes sense in terms of marketability. It's a remake just like the franchise has seen in years past. It pokes fun at the fact that the superhero genre is now over-saturated with content. This gives us everything and then the kitchen sink.

Batman is a lonely crime fighter who takes his job almost as seriously as his looks. Besides Alfred, the only thing we see Batman concerned for is his own well-being. Through a series of circumstances he becomes the guardian of a lovable loser, Dick Grayson (Michael Cera) who dreams of having a father and yet is oblivious to the fact that Bruce Wayne' basement is home to the caped crusader. Even when Dick meets Batman in the Bat Cave, he is told that Batman and Bruce are like Dick's "two dads." Makes sense to Dick! Dick essentially becomes the Robin character in the film, donning tight green shorts and a cape to match (much to the distain of Batman). The comedy comes from these polar opposites interacting, and since it's sttill technically a children's movie we know that Bruce will come to care for the boy by the end of the film.

The humor from the Lego Movie was it's complete absurdity. Batman very much continues this tradition. Of course this is a Batman movie, but it's also a Lego movie, so we get very funny scenes of characters from different worlds colliding (much as they might with children playing). The Joker (Zach Galifianakis) seeks to destroy Batman for good and travels to the Phantom Zone where he recruits the likes of Lord Voldemort, the Wicked Witch of the West, Cthulhu, and the Eye of Sauron to battle for control of Gotham. The animation style still carries the stop-motion effect although we would never believe a film this complex and detailed would ever be completed anywhere but in a computer.

As a small character in the first film, Batman was a hilarious sidekick. As the main character, it's a lot of the same old stuff we might expect. We have to learn about the death of his parents, and his potential love interest with Commissioner Gordon's daughter, and his rivalry with the Joker. At times scenes become a bit too repetitive, a bit too cliched, and we patiently wait for the movie to return to the mindless action at play (and the action scenes are surprisingly good considering it's all just Lego pieces).

The movie is absurd and far-fetched but I think that's what my main appeal with this franchise is. It has a very distinct style and creativity that simply is unmatched among other animated films coming out of Hollywood. Filmmakers don't seem bound by conventions here, and it's all the more enjoyable a filmgoing experience to guess what will happen next. For all it's shortcomings, there's no reason that this movie still shouldn't come highly recommended. It's an endless barrage of silly jokes and vivid images, and it's more than a lot of fun to watch.

Life (*)

LIFE is a dumb movie about dumb people making dumb choices. It might have been entertaining if the characters acted like smart people making smart choices, which would make sense given their circumstances. We might also enjoy a movie like this a bit more if it wasn't such a blatant carbon copy of Ridley Scott's Alien. It's a lazy attempt at a fast buck that does everything to sell its audience short. What a waste.

The International Space Station has collected samples of the surface of Mars and carefully studies them in the safety of space before returning to earth. The crew is made up of all the usual suspects: the scientist who is overly emotional, the guy who likes the isolation of space, the captain who feels responsible for everything, the foreigner with a skill for comuters, and the jokester who's there for laughs ala Ryan Reynolds (played by Ryan Reynolds, of course). They find a single cell frozen amongst the dirt, the first evidence of life on another planet. Slowly they raise the temperature and try to wake it up. I assume we all know that is finally comes to.

What ensues is an attempt at horror along the vein of Alien or maybe a thriller like Gravity. We've known since the 1970's that space can be an extraordinarily scary setting to be trapped with a monster, but for some reason this movie doesn't seem to realize why. The creature (named "Calvin" by school children on earth) slowly grows into a part-octopus part-easter lily and begins to kill crew members one by one. The only surprise I can say is that the person who dies first wasn't my first guess... Maybe third or fourth. In Alien, the scares came from darkness and our inability to see the alien for long stretches of the movie. When it is finally revealed to have grown 10 feet long, that is terrifying. In Life, the monster grows to maybe the size of a house cat and then stops. Yes, it will eat you alive, but where's the menace in being killed by something that more closely resembles a potted plant?

I do mention Gravity as another film that clearly influenced the look here, all the way down to the detailed destruction of the Space Station in a noiseless panic. Even the score is a pitiful copy of the shimmery sounds that made Gravity so special. Not often do I actively notice film music for being bad, but the one-note sound from the composer made it sound like some of the instruments lost their sheet music mid recording. The astronauts float in space here with wirework as convincing as a Peter Pan stage production. In the weightlessness of space we can all but see the actors stressing to keep balanced and it hasn't been since Apollo 13 that space travel actually felt real (in that film mind you they actually created zero-gravity sets). There's a moment when a character pulls their mangled hand out of a glove and it falls limp to the ground. Why does their hand fall to the ground in space? Probably because the actor forgot to pretend like it was weightless.

The ending of the film is grim and depressing in a way you would expect from a movie as shoddy. The action is so dark and the alien is so tiny that it's hard to keep track of what's going on. Fortunately by this point we are too numb to notice. For the few surviving crew members, we kind of wish the alien would just eat them and let the movie end a few minutes early. They're not making a sequel to this, so in the end who really cares?

Raw (**)

'Raw' operates under the flawed idea that gore is horrific. It bets all its chips on this idea and leaves little else to the imagination. If it's grisly, then it must be good, right? Wrong.

In recent years horror has been becoming more polarized between the psychological (The Babadook, The Witch, even Get Out) and the bloody (Saw, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Human Centipede). One works by toying with the mind, exploring the semantics of what is scary. The other takes a lazier approach.

'Raw' follows an unlikely story that is amplified beyond recognition. A girl named Justine is dropped off at veterinarian school by her two parents and told to be good. At this school is already Justine's older sister, Alexia. What you might expect of a medical school is far from the truth. The first years are submitted to deplorable hazing rituals that would make someone like Carrie feel a little bit better about herself. They are drenched in animal blood, made to crawl on hands and knees naked, and forced to drink themselves to fatigue at all-night ragers in the dormitory basement. What ever happened to adult supervision? As another test, these pledges are forced to eat rabbit kidneys. Justine's problem? Why she's a vegetarian of course.

The innocent act of eating this bit of flesh sets off a reaction in Justine that she can't understand. She soon develops an unquenchable taste for meat in whatever form she can take. She begins by sneaking a juicy hamburger out of the cafeteria in her lab coat. Then it's devouring raw chicken from her mini-fridge for breakfast. Next she is chewing on a severed finger the way a dog gnaws on a bone. Gross right?

The basic premise of the film doesn't come into focus until the last few minutes of the film when we discover that Justine is sort of genetically-programmed to enjoy raw meat. It's in her blood, from her sister to her mother and Lord knows how high up the chain it goes. It can be curbed as long as these girls aren't given meat in their diet. Even the smallest bite will set it off. They're like French vampires without the sex appeal and charm.

Did I enjoy the film? No. For first-time director Julia Ducournau the look of the film is the one true success, a visual story that works well in tracking a descent into Hell. The rest of the film is downright silly and with few redeeming qualities to it. With little more than the premise of "vegetarian finds comfort in red meat," the story panders along through gratuitous nudity and a barrage of shocking images that allegedly made filmgoers walk out by the dozens at the Toronto Film Festival. I like a movie with brains, and with a horror movie I don't just mean the craving of zombies. If you want strictly gore then at least make a scary movie to excite the viewers. If you want anything more, have the script to back it up. This movie succeeds at neither. A better title might have been "Stale."

Beauty and the Beast (****)

It's very easy to declare Beauty and the Beast as the greatest Disney cartoon. The crowning film in Disney's Renaissance, It was the first cartoon ever nominated for Best Picture. It's a high standard to match for a remake, especially one as anticipated at this. For such a beloved movie to return to the screen there needs to be a reason. I think the filmmakers found just that.

We know the story, the characters, the songs. It's engrained into the zeitgeist of our times. Belle (Emma Watson) lives in a 'poor provincial town' and dreams of finding a life outside of the stagnant misogyny of rural France in the 1800's. She is wooed by a braggadocios Gaston (the perfectly-cast Luke Evans) and raised by her loving father, Maurice (Kevin Kline, with an American accent no less). After Maurice is lost on the way to the market, he stumbles on the Enchanted Castle and is imprisoned by Beast (Dan Stevens). Belle finds him and trades his life for hers, and slowly she learns to care for and understand the Beast.

Right away this film seeks to answer many of the questions and potential loopholes established by the original cartoon, such as: how does no one remember this giant castle just a mile or two away from the village? Is every object in the castle originally a human, and if so, what happened to all their real plates? Where is Belle's mom? There is an expanded mythology that even clarifies the original spell and the the time Beast has to break the curse. It all works quite well. Even the personification of these characters work very well in fleshing out who they are. Beast, where in the cartoon is a loud, stubborn oaf, here takes on a softer side, with charm and higher education. With the understanding of Maurice's deceased wife, we can understand why losing his daughter is all the more tragic.

Simply looking through the list of Disney live action musicals, this is easily their best and most ambitious one since Mary Poppins. The film benefits from several additional songs (composed for the film, not lifted from the Broadway show or other sources) that are both beautiful and make the movie feel like you're watching an actual show, not just a movie. There's a great song sung by the Beast after Belle leaves to save her father. Not only does it make sense to the story, but it's also a great tune. Even familiar numbers like Gaston are expanded to accomodate this live action setting: there's a dance sequence and some very funny one-liners by LeFou (Josh Gad). From the layered costumes to the very whimsical sets, it's clear to see the ambition and care given (not to mention this is allegedly the most expensive movie musical ever made at $160 million).

Emma Watson is clearly a talented actress and has a history of playing characters living in magical castles, but her personification of Belle felt little more than average. In the original, Belle is headstrong, courageous, and evenly-matched against the Beast. Here, it's simply a bland performance that makes sense on paper but is utterly forgettable after the film is over. Dan Stevens definitely is a strong-point in bringing a unique take to the cursed Prince, but you have to admit that the CGI depiction of the monster seems to need a bit more rendering before becoming believable. The sidekicks in the castle (Lumiere, Cogsworth, Mrs Potts, etc) are all fantastic to look at, but they lack the charm we saw in the original film. It's easy to sympathize with a cartoon candelabra, but seeing a realistic one in person still looks very odd.

It's a relief to see Beauty and the Beast has been made with care and passion and not just a lust for money. The film is already breaking box office records and it's easy to see why: not because it's a Disney musical, but because it's a story audiences truly care about. This isn't a movie that was made solely as a fan-service, it's very much a strong film that brings more to the table that one might expect. I don't think it necessarily improves on the original, but it's certainly should be recommended.