Hacking Cinema #1: Summer Movie Roundup

Christine worked on one movie and watched a handful of others

That’s right hackers, the blog is back.

Due to compressed animation production schedules, my summers are mostly characterized by more work than the rest of the year. Fun? Relaxation? That’s for normies. But summer also means summer movies, and since going to the movies is the only activity that truly matters anyway, it all evens out.

My post-pandemic freedom resulted in a mild case of theatergoing mania. What movie? Don’t care, let’s go. The joy of being in Nicole’s house a theater was too intoxicating to say no.

This was good for two reasons. 1. Seeing bad movies is educational. 2. I was surprised by a handful of films that I didn’t expect anything from.

Yes, I understand that it is now late October and this post would have been more relevant a month ago. But maybe the extra time for rumination will make my takes extra good. That is what I’m going with.

Let’s start back in June….

Jurassic World: Dominion

I knew this movie would be bad, but I still went to it, which contributed to its one billion dollars in box office earnings. To my recollection I did have fun watching it. In retrospect I understand why.

I enjoyed Jurassic World: Dominion in the same way that I enjoy watching ten youtube videos of dogs being groomed in a row.

Am I interested in the process of dog grooming? No. I just want to see some dogs, because I like dogs.

Similarly, this movie served the function of “see some dinosaurs”. If there’s one thing people like, it’s dinosaurs, and this movie sure has them. There was a plot about human cloning and locusts, but it is only a scaffolding for the main point which is, again, seeing some dinosaurs. And for me, also seeing Laura Dern.

I re-watched half of Dominion as due diligence to see if my initial impression was accurate. It was. However I did notice a describable problem which perhaps explains my impression a little better.

The problem is that Trevorrow & co confuse dinosaur-centric action scenes with regular action scenes that have dinosaurs in them. For example, the Malta set piece featuring “Atrociraptors” felt the same as any scene in the latest Fast & Furious or Bond film, with the dinosaurs subbed in for cars or guys with guns, respectively. But there were also cars and guys with guns. This pattern repeats several times throughout the movie to varying degrees.

Dinosaurs do not feel particularly special when they are treated as generic action devices, and dinosaurs being special was largely the point of the original Jurassic Park.

This actionsetpieceification (new word coined by me) is inevitable when studios strive to make sequels “bigger” than their predecessors. Of course it fails to capture the spirit of the original movie. If it captured the spirit of the original movie… it would just be the same as the original movie.

To paraphrase The Social Network:

You don’t need a forensics team to get to the bottom of this. If you guys were the inventors of [Jurassic Park], you’d have invented [Jurassic Park]!

I don’t really know what to make of this movie’s massive success, but then again, the dog grooming videos are pulling down a couple million views apiece, too.

Minions: Rise of Gru

The haters will insist that the Minions and their antics have overstayed their welcome, culturally speaking. Many even consider the little yellow guys to be symptomatic of impending societal collapse.

I would like to assert that the haters are not engaging with the Minions films in good faith.

I found Minions: Rise of Gru to be not only NOT annoying, but actively funny and charming. The overall story of Gru and his quest to become the world’s greatest super-villain is admittedly uncompelling, but it provides enough plot framework to support the Minions’ side missions, which is where the bulk of the entertainment lies. These include Otto’s odyssey to retrieve a medallion that he initially traded for a rock with googly eyes, and Kevin, Stuart and Bob’s attempts at mastering kung-fu. Put simply, the Minions do funny stuff in a funny way.

Here’s the other thing: not only are the Minions funny, it is funny to watch the Minions. Going to see a feature length film that is fundamentally about a bunch of yellow pill shaped guys is really, really funny.

The teens deeply understand this, and made it even funnier by dignifying the event with formal attire. This is a perfect joke. Sorry, nothing about it isn’t funny.

Not to get all inside baseball on you, but I don’t think people realize how difficult it is to make a CG animated film goofy. With the investment of millions of man-hours of slow and intricate work, the desire to make the best film possible can push out lighter ideas in favor of more heavily (and often heavy-handedly) emotional ones. But silliness is an important value in animation, and what Illumination has done with the Minions films is a genuinely great example of the medium’s strengths.

Nope

Anticipating a movie for a long time can be a dangerous game. Inevitably, I begin to imagine what the film could be, and what a film could be is always more than what it is. All film strives for the imagined and falls short.

Nope is nothing like what I imagined it to be, so in some ways it disappointed me. But Peele’s imagination remains undefeated - the actuality of Nope is unlike anything I’ve ever seen, even in my own head.

On a descriptive level, Nope is an alien monster movie whose closest references are probably Jaws and Close Encounters, but its approach and style are so vastly different from those films, or any films of those genres, that the comparison feels insufficient to explain what it is.

All three of Peele’s movies operate primarily on a symbolic level, and consequently their plots can’t withstand a lot of logical probing. But the filmmaking is so wholly engaging and rich that it feels silly to worry about whether the details make sense. Have you ever thought about what a ridiculous rigamarole Get Out contrives just to get someone kidnapped? Probably not, because the rigamarole itself is what carries the movie’s affect and meaning.

Nope is truly cinematic in the sense that the scenes are not going to tell you what they’re about in any verbal way. Every scene is a mystery in itself, a microcosm of how the film operates overall. You’re going to be doing some mental work to understand what’s going on and how the scenes connect, but the imaginative visuals and entertaining characters make this work fun, not frustrating.

Where Nope deviates most sharply from Get Out and Us is that it isn’t focused on one idea. There’s a whole lot going on. It’s about animals and our relationship to them. It’s about what we pay attention to. It’s about how we exploit each other’s darkest impulses and curiosities. It’s about family legacies and how far we’ll go to preserve them.

I can completely understand criticizing this thematic grab bag as confused or unfocused, but I think I experienced it more as a deep well than an un-parsable tangle. This adds to Nope’s rewatchability factor — you can pick out something new each time you see it.

One thing Nope is inarguably about is movies, both literally and symbolically. Emerald (Keke Palmer) and OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) occupy the fringes of Hollywood, struggling to find work and stay in the business that they have deep family roots in. When something weird happens to them, their instinct is to film it. To chase the “Oprah shot”, as Emerald terms it. To do this they seek technical help (as all filmmakers must) in the form of Angel (Brandon Perea), a worker at Fry’s Electronics whose conspiratorial tendencies align seamlessly with their vision. The production goes legit when they get famous cinematographer Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott) on board, a man who will risk it all to get that perfect shot.

Making the movie almost kills everyone, just like making real movies.

Nope perfectly expresses the experience of working in the film industry — one that rides the line between between being deeply meaningful and rewarding on one hand and delusional and self destructive on the other. This push and pull isn’t reserved for creatives, either. Everyone feels it, from the assistant directors to the drivers to computer programmers (raises hand) to the person stocking snacks at craft services to horse trainers. Talk to anyone who’s ever worked on or adjacent to a production and you’ll get stories of high highs and usually even lower lows.

Why do we keep coming back for more? I could do a lot of theorizing, but I’ll just leave it with a clip from one of my other favorite movies about movies by my favorite movie guys:

Bodies Bodies Bodies

The way Twitter works is if you make as few as three clicks, you will land on someone willfully misunderstanding a statement to the point of condemning a person they probably mostly agree with as a monster unfit for society. It is the worst medium for serious exchange of thought ever invented, but otherwise intelligent people put their perfectly good ideas in the form of twitter threads as if there were no other options for communicating them.

If White Lotus was r/AmITheAsshole: the TV Show, Bodies Bodies Bodies is Twitter: The Movie. But much, much more fun than that sounds. I went into Bodies Bodies Bodies only knowing the that it was a “Gen Z slasher” involving Pete Davidson. I was surprised to find the most impressive alignment of filmmaking with plot and theme that I’ve seen all year.

Bodies Bodies Bodies begins with a very graphic depiction of my Ultimate Nightmare Scenario: going to a house party where everyone else knows each other but you don’t. I was relieved when people finally started getting killed, because for at least for myself that’s a more comfortable situation to be in, socially speaking.

In addition to paralyzing me with dread, the opening sequence plays a crucial role in making the mystery engaging: it sets up a rich web of character motives and relationships so that we have something to go on when we attempt to figure out who the killer is at various points throughout the rest of the movie.

The characters are uncomfortably real, deeply (fatally) flawed and insufferable, but still have enough layers of likability that you want to stick with them for the duration. They speak the way young people actually speak, without sliding into parody or anachronism. Most importantly, they’re funny — Rachel Sennott in particular kills as Alice, a woman brave enough to acknowledge that podcasting is hard. Pete Davidson, admittedly, is also funny.

Bodies looks as good as it talks. Much of the film takes place in darkness, with the characters using their cell phone flashlights to see. This works much better than one would think — I could hardly pick out a favorite shot.

(not even one of the better shots — just the most representative I could find online)

The lighting is not only visually and technically astounding, it’s a direct tie-in to the theme. Everyone’s unable to view the world around them or each other without their phones, which have been rendered unusable for normal purposes by the blackout. There’s even additional character-specific lighting, like Alice’s neon glow-stick rings, Jordan’s (Myha’la Herrold) headlamp, and Greg’s (Lee Pace) weirdo light-therapy mask.

I can understand arguing that the ending of Bodies is a bit on the gimmicky side, or maybe at worst a cheap cop-out. But because it’s so grounded in character and aligned with the themes, it’s actually more rewarding than a more conventionally “satisfying” way to end the story.

Barbarian

I saw the Barbarian trailer probably six times in theaters, eventually referring to it as “Justin Long Jump Scare Movie”, because of the random shot of Justin Long in a dark hallway. This one:

It looked like the type of horror movie I avoid, i.e. one centered around a vaguely topical gimmick. In this case: “what if your AIRBNB experience went REALLY BAD? Bet you’ll never wanna stay in an AIRBNB again, HAHAHA!!!”

I went because I was having a weird day already and figured it would be a good time to re-calibrate my tolerance for contemporary horror.

If Jordan Peele’s movies are in the A-tier of horror, I would put Barbarian in the B+ tier — it retains a lot of the genre’s lazier elements that wouldn’t really work in a regular movie (on the nose dialogue, thin characters), but makes up for it by being simply effective — effectively scary, effectively funny, effectively what-the-hell-am-I-seeing-right-now wild. The filmmaking is able to pull its weight just enough to keep us in it for the duration.

I won’t say much more about Barbarian other than to strongly recommend it, and to be happy that it’s doing well and excited for what director Zach Cregger will cook up next.

Horror is a great vehicle for film ideas, and film experiences, that are simply too out of left field to exist plausibly in any other genre. Barbarian turns sheer narrative chaos, usually a weakness, into its biggest strength. The whiplash is what makes the ride fun. You don’t get on a roller coaster to NOT be jerked around.

Some Honorable Mentions:

Marcel The Shell With Shoes On

I can’t believe Jenny Slate and director Dean Fleischer-Camp were able to get a feature’s worth of drama out of these somewhat overly cutsey YouTube videos from circa 2012, but they did. Affecting, funny, and far from the cloying slog that I was expecting.

Elvis

The King’s life is the perfect playground for Baz’s breakneck visual chaos. I’m not sure Tom Hanks even needed to be in it. A genuinely important view into Elvis as a person — for all his cultural dominance, we probably never got to hear his truest art.

Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris

This low-stakes story about a woman who really, really wants a dress was a surprisingly great time. I’m really glad something this un-flashy and un-franchisey can still get made, even if the whole thing is a not-so-thinly veiled advertisement for Dior.

RRR

Hyper-filmic, super-heroic, maximalistic fun. It’s able to be over-the-top wild and goofy while sincerely engaging with its characters’ very big emotions. Marvel should take notes.