Movies

An Obama Campaign Worker Watched the Documentary Mitt. Should You See it?

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Alex Marino

In our rarely-running kinda-series Should You See It? we talk about movies that just came out. You can figure out the rest of the premise from the title of the series. That’s right: we talk recipes. Should you see the new doc about Mitt Romney?

Given that all my other pieces here are about yelling at kids to get off my lawn, I could understand the belief that I spend my days sitting on a porch in a lawn chair being grumpy at the world.  But before all that I worked for the Obama campaign doing data work in North Carolina for all of 2012. It was exhausting and exciting and unhealthy and incredible all at the same time. Like so many of my colleagues, once everything was over and I actually had an ounce of free time I decided to occupy it with reading as much as I could about the election. I’ve read almost every book that’s been written about the campaign. Hell I was reading short e-books about the campaign during the campaign. It was always interesting to see what journalists got right (that we used data incredibly well) and what they were completely clueless about (how we used that data). I had read so much that by the time the highly-anticipated sequel to Game Change called Double Down came out there really wasn’t a whole lot of never-before-seen content. I finished it craving an account that actually understood what we did or at least brought a fresh perspective to the race. But I never thought that a documentary about the guy I worked to beat would be that account.

Mitt isn’t about the inside politics of a national campaign. It’s not about the internal struggles or the war room drama. You don’t see Paul Ryan until 70 minutes in. You don’t see the campaign manager until 80 minutes in. It’s the story of a man and his family on the campaign trail since 2007.

When you work on a political campaign it’s easy to lose perspective on how you view your opponent. For so long I held this belief that Romney was completely out of touch with working-class Americans. And while Mitt didn’t show any evidence that directly refutes that belief, there was a really touching scene where he talks about his father, former Governor of Michigan and candidate for president George Romney. He was showing the notes he took while on stage at the first debate. At the top of the first sheet was “DAD”.  He went on to explain:

“I always think about dad and about [how] I’m standing on his shoulders… There’s no way I’d be running for president if dad hadn’t done what dad did. He’s the real deal. The guy was born in Mexico. He didn’t have a college degree. He became the head of a car company and became a governor. It would have never entered my mind to be in politics.  How can you go from his beginnings to think ‘I could be head of a car company. I can run for governor. I can run for president.’ That gap. For me, I started where he ended up. I started off with money and education and Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School. For me, it’s moving that far. (moves his hands, palms facing each other, slightly apart) For him it was like that. (moves hands considerably apart)”

Even after the first debate I felt so confident that Obama was going to win that I couldn’t imagine the conversations going on at Romney HQ. I thought they had to be living in some strange bubble where only good news gets passed along. But after the first and second debates it was Romney who was even-handed. He knew he did well in the first debate and he knew he didn’t do as well in the second. This was in the face of his family being excessively supportive (as they should be). Even on election night as everyone else is trying to find ways to hold on to the belief that he can win, Mitt is well aware that it’s over and seems remarkably relaxed.

I remember feeling so strongly that Mitt was this out of touch rich guy.  His life consisted of car elevators and dressage horses! I never once thought that those things helped make his wife’s life a little easier as she dealt with multiple sclerosis. And while those things may seem excessive, if you were as rich as the Romneys wouldn’t you do everything in your power to make coping with a disease like MS easier?

But while Mitt did such a better job than the campaign in making the candidate seem human, there were many puzzling things the film revealed how informed Romney was about the state of the race. In the last few weeks of the race he saw huge crowds everywhere he went. I understand how he could feel like things were on an upswing. But a look at the numbers would have quickly brought him back down to Earth. During election night Ann mentioned that they were hoping to win Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Polling just before election day never showed any of those states as even being close. The fact that the candidate and his wife weren’t aware of their path to victory is baffling to me. They got most of their return information from external news sources rather than their internal analytics team. But was he actually not briefed on these things or did the documentary just not show any of that?

The scene that hit me the most took place the day after election day at Romney HQ in Boston. After he and his campaign manager each spoke, you saw the tears of sadness streaming down the faces of his staff. Most people don’t understand what’s in those tears.  For so many of us this race meant moving across the country, barely seeing friends and family, putting off school for a year, relationships collapsing under the stress of the campaign, 3:30 a.m. wake up times, 10:00 p.m. checkout calls, 11:00 p.m. dinners, and more takeout than you can imagine. It was our entire life and to not have it all end with a victory is nothing short of devastating. I was lucky to be on the winning side that was filled with tears of happiness on election night.  I can’t imagine how I would have felt had the results been different.

Should You See It? If you have Netflix make sure to watch Mitt. If you don’t have Netflix what the fuck is wrong with you; are you 90? Because while it’s easy to get caught up in the passions of a long political campaign and view your opponents as enemy robots seeking to destroy your entire existence, it’s healthy to remember they’re people too, from the field intern all the way up to the candidate.

Image source: ABC

Tough Questions: What Are You Most Excited for in 2014 That You’re Sure Will Disappoint You?

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Every Monday we ask everyone who hangs out around here to answer a tough question. This week?

What Are You Most Excited for in 2014 That You’re Sure Will Disappoint You?

Rules are simple: what do you have hope for that you know you’re wrong about? What are you fired up for early in the year that you will be miserable about once it happens? As a note here, Brent answered before the game. His pick of the Seahawks flopping in the Super Bowl looks hilarious for that reason.

Alex Marino

I speak for a lot of people when I say that I was hoping George R. R. Martin was going to release the next book in the A Song of Ice and Fire series called The Winds of Winter.  But it’s looking more and more like it’s not going to be released anytime soon. With his last release A Dance with Dragons, his original goal completion date was late 2006. Then his publisher said it would be released in the fall of 2008. Then in early 2009 he said he would get it finished by June of the same year. By July 2010 he had yet to have the book finished. It wasn’t until July 2011 that the book was finally published. And in 2011 with regards to The Winds of Winter Martin said that he could have it finished in three years at a good writing pace. But given how everything went down with A Dance with Dragons, who knows how accurate that is. It’s now to the point where people are getting worried the TV show is going to catch up to the novels before they’re all finished. I still believe that the remaining books are going to be excellent, but my biggest 2014 disappointment that I’m most excited for is Martin’s eventual statement that things are taking longer than he anticipated.

Alex Russell

Every year I set four basic goals for myself. They’re simple but important, and keeping them in mind all year allows me to keep my year on track. It’s easier to quit smoking when it’s one of four things to do in a year than it is to “quit smoking.” I quit last year and haven’t had a cigarette in just under a whole year. This year? The one I’m going to miss is losing 20 pounds. I was rail thin growing up and time caught up with me in my late twenties. Through portion control, salads for lunch, and just outright misery I’ve managed to get my diet under control, but there’s just no damn way I’ll make it to 20 pounds. It’s fun to live in a world where that’s still possible, and that’s where February finds me. Oh, and stand up. There’s no way anyone can follow 2013, which had some of the greatest album releases of the last decade. The only way to go is down.

Andrew Findlay

The University of Tennessee’s football season. God. Damn. It. Go Vols.

Brent Hopkins

This is strange (because by the time this is posted it will already have passed) but I think the thing that I am most excited for this year is the Super Bowl. The reason I am so into the Super Bowl this year is because I am a huge Seahawks fan and have been for years. I got to sadly watch the last Super Bowl they were in where Pittsburgh benefited from less than stellar refereeing (yes, I know the Seahawks had quite a few games go their way unfairly this year, also). The reason I think this year will disappoint me is two-fold. One is I have work. Like any sane company though, we aren’t allowed to just sit and watch TV so I’m probably not going to be able to watch it. I will be sitting at work, doing nothing, in Korea. Second is this sinking feeling that the Manning two-headed dragon needs four rings to satiate the football gods in their family. One for the father and one for the unknown brother as well. The stars seem to be aligning for them to place their fists together in this strange Planeteer formation made with four Super Bowl rings  and Mr. Football will come down from the skies  and erase rugby and soccer from history and the new sports chairgroup will be the Mannings… or maybe I am a smidge neurotic. WOOOO HAWKS (if they won).

Scott Phillips

I always get fired up for the Olympics, but I just know that I’m going to be disappointed by this year’s Winter Olympics in Sochi. I mean, can Russia do anything right? There are still Olympic structures that have yet to be completed. There’s the fiasco about stray dogs and whether Russia actually believes if non-heterosexuals are “people.”

And we haven’t even gotten to the actual playing of the games. In the summer of 2008, I had the time of my life playing drinking games to the Olympics nearly every night while I was living at my Mom’s house and hanging with my friends from high school. It was fantastic. But, ever since, I can’t find good drinking partners for these games and the Winter Olympics, in particular, are a difficult sell.

Drinking games during the Olympics are fantastic and I encourage people to join me at any point during the Sochi games, I just know I’m going to be disappointed while doing it.

Mike Hannemann

The event in 2014 I’m most looking forward to being disappointed by has boiled down to the third and final Hobbit movie.  I don’t mean that in the sense that I thought the prior two were particularly bad films. Quite the contrary, in fact. They were flawed and directionless at times, but they still were fun. And as a nerd who made that large transition into adulthood during the original Lord of the Rings trilogy, any chance I get to return to that world is already a win in my book. Hell, I’m going to fight kicking and screaming to hold onto that belief when an inevitable sequel to the original trilogy comes out in 15 years. The disappointment is instead going to come from longing to return not to a place, but a time. I’m going to see this movie with my best friend at midnight in the same theater we saw the original films in, and I’m going to hope beyond hope that it’ll feel like I’m 19 again, and there’s still a whole lot about the world I haven’t figured out yet. But in the end, I’ll probably just end up mildly entertain and thinking that maybe taking the next day off of work just to see a movie was a bad idea. Also that I probably shouldn’t have drank 64 ounces of Mountain Dew at one in the damned morning.

Louis C.K. Made a Movie in 1998. He Just Released it for $5. Should You See it?

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Alex Russell

In our rarely-running kinda-series Should You See It? we talk about movies that just came out. You can figure out the rest of the premise from the title of the series. That’s right: we talk recipes. Should you see Louis C.K.’s “lost” movie Tomorrow Night?

The entire world knows who Louis C.K. is, more or less. Sure, you have to restrict that to the “English-speaking world” and within that “people with TV or web access” and within that “people who aren’t the worst or have friends who aren’t the worst” but that’s basically everyone.

The unlikely hero of American alt-comedy (and really more than that, but let’s leave it there) shows up on Facebook whenever he weighs in on people whining about the Internet on planes or kids with cellphones. This is great, because it means that more people have access to someone that everyone should already love. Louis C.K. is one of the few comics (see also: Oswalt, Patton) that you absolutely have to like if you like comedy. He’s unassailable because he is unstoppable. He helped pioneer the idea of writing a new hour every year and retiring the old one completely. He still does it better than just about anyone and he’s as such raised the bar so high that comedy is in a better place in 2014 than almost ever in history.

If that sounds like high praise, good. You don’t need me to tell you Louis C.K. is one of the greatest comedic minds of our generation, but you might want me to give a quick history lesson. Louis C.K. comes from the old guard of comics that you expect your friends to know but don’t. He made it where many of them didn’t, and that’s into the world of people who don’t “know” stand up comedy. Louis C.K. is a name that someone who didn’t hear a single comedy album or watch a single comedy special last year will still likely know. He transcended comedy geekdom in a lot of ways, but the one that’s most interesting is with his show Louie.

Louie is a 30-minute exploration of the fictionalized life of Louis C.K. He shows the gritty, depressing, and sometimes-funny world of raising two daughters and not understanding the cards dealt to a person. It’s beyond me to describe it — it’s my favorite show on television, and the number two spot isn’t close — but all that need be said is that it is an Emmy-winning show that is essentially labeled perfect by the people that label TV for a living. Even if it isn’t your favorite show or you don’t even watch it, you have to be aware of the fanfare around Louie.

Louis C.K. made a show before Louie for HBO: Lucky Louie. There’s a different sensibility to Lucky Louie. The dark-at-times, surreal-all-the-time nature of Louie is replaced by brighter-but-not-happier themes and situations. Lucky Louie is about another fictionalized Louis married to Pamela Adlon (who you most likely know as the voice of Bobby from King of the Hill). They’re broke, they have a kid, and they live imperfect lives. It’s a show that Louis C.K. has likened to a modern-day The Honeymooners for good reason. Life is hard for the people in the world of Lucky Louie, but it’s a life worth living.

On Wednesday at noon, Louis C.K. released a feature-length film he made in 1998. You can go buy it and watch it for five bucks. I’m just not sure you’re going to like it. It depends on what you want out of Louis C.K.

It’s weird, but everything’s weird about Louis C.K. His “big break” in stand up style came when he started talking honestly about how hard it was to sometimes hate things he wasn’t supposed to hate. He talked honestly about the struggles of marriage and raising children and he didn’t couch his feelings in the typical hypotheticals. He brought a new voice that demanded to be heard because it didn’t sound like anything else.

Tomorrow Night is weird for a lot of reasons. He talked about the movie on his recent appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and detailed the story of borrowing money to make it. His description to Jon Stewart — that it’s a movie about a guy sexually excited by sitting in ice cream — is technically a true description, but it masks the tone of the movie completely.

The main character works in a photo store. He’s miserable because he can’t stand the untidiness of life. He decides that the way he can take back his little corner of the world is to call up every single person who has photos waiting to be picked up — the first of many reminders that it’s almost two decades ago in the world of this movie — and demand that they come in that day.

That drives the action. The guy meets a hypersexual woman who tries to seduce him and a mailman (played by J.B. Smoove, who is seemingly always just his character from Curb Your Enthusiasm) who wants him to get out of his shell. At night, he goes home and sits in bowls of ice cream.

It’s an absurd way to show that the character leads a double life. He’s obsessed with cleanliness, so he must defile himself in a graphic way to experience true freedom. He finds himself drawn to an elderly woman who keeps a tidy house and the wheels fall off in increasingly absurd ways. Someone is killed by wild dogs in the street. They go see a 1998 Conan O’Brien (who is a timeless man and possibly a wizard). They ride in carnival rides. There’s lots going on.

The movie isn’t “random” or exactly “surreal” because all of this really happens and it all happens for a reason. It’s just a little bit too much. One character, a dopey soldier stuck forever “at war,” sends letters hope to his mother only to have them all be thrown away by two cackling mail room guys played by Steve Carell and Robert Smigel. The results are hilarious here (and possibly worth viewing on their own) but they don’t fit well with the surrounding set pieces.

Tomorrow Night is more Louie than Lucky Louie, but it’s a little bit of both. It’s getting mixed reviews for good reason: parts of it are just bad. The husband of the elderly woman is played so cartoonishly evil that it’s impossible to even hate him. Lucky Louie-veteran Rick Shapiro plays a woman in mostly-unexplained drag that doesn’t really go anywhere. A lot of this movie is Louis C.K. saying “it would be funny if X happened” and going for it. He’s mostly right, but the results aren’t essential viewing.

Should You See It? It depends on your level of obsession with the creator. If you love the sensibility of Louie, there’s something here for you. If you don’t, or if you can’t get past that “sitting in ice cream naked” is supposed to represent something else less gross, then you can probably skip this. It’s a great piece of history to have, but it’s going to be too weird for people who just think he’s really damn funny.

Image source: ABC News

This Looks Terrible: Labor Day

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Alex Marino

In “This Looks Terrible” we look at previews for upcoming movies. We… probably look too closely.

Damn you, Jason Reitman. Up in the Air was so damn good and now you have to leave this heap of trash on my doorstep? This shitpile is called Labor Day and it’s somehow a romantic comedy about a mother and son that are forced to take in an escaped prisoner.

This trailer teaches us a few helpful things if you ever find yourself quasi-kidnapped by an escaped convict. First, after he ties you up if he feeds you like a baby then you know he won’t hurt you. He’ll become a fatherly figure through teaching your son baseball because that’s not been done in movies ever before.  And if you’ve suffered the loss of a loved one it can be cured by baking a peach pie.

“I can’t give you a family.”

“You already have.”

Ugh, fucking spare me. Let’s not forget that nobody gave him shit. He forced Kate Winslet to take him home because he threatened the life of her son. Did an 18-year-old write this script? Is this movie just The Notebook but for the 35+ crowd? This is the kind of shit that should only be allowed on Lifetime or The Hallmark Channel.

“I’d take 20 more years just to have another three days with you.”

Can we talk about this for a second? From everything I’ve heard prison isn’t a fucking vacation. And because he’s doing time for murder, he’s not going to be in minimum security either. Anyone dumb enough to do 20 years of hard time in exchange for 72 hours with someone they’ve known for a week deserves to be in stupid prison.

But it’s okay everyone, you don’t actually have to see this movie. They show us the fucking ending in the trailer! You’ve got Henry covering his ears while laying down in the back seat of a car as bullets pierce the seats. So James Van Der Beek is going to get into a shootout with Brolin, kill him, and then we’re going to have a dramatic death scene with Brolin whispering his last words as Kate Winslet holds him. My guess for that scene is Winslet pleading for Brolin to not leave her and him saying:

“I only knew you… a week… but you gave me… enough love… for a lifetime…”

Fuck this movie.

Image source: IMDB

This Looks Terrible – Life of a King

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Alex Marino

In “This Looks Terrible” we look at previews for upcoming movies. We… probably look too closely.

Just when you thought it had been too long since another awful teacher-student drama, Cuba Gooding, Jr. fills the void. This movie is called A Fuckton of Chess Puns and is going to follow the exact same formula so many of these films have already used and abused. If you’re an asshole and didn’t watch the trailer all you need to know is this is the chess version of Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester but this time the mentor has a mentor (GROUNDBREAKING) and the pun density is off the charts.

Let’s take a minute and just list the puns included in this trailer:

“Just keep your eye on the endgame.”

“…you must think before you move.”

“This is your life.  One mistake and it can be taken away.”

“I didn’t see the endgame, man, and it cost me.  It cost me big.”

“I learned.  I learned the board.”

“It’s about learning how to play the game”

Even in the on-screen text they write “To make a difference you have to make the right moves.”  This trailer can go straight to hell.

But don’t take my word for it. The Washington Post’s review for this movie is titled “In ‘Life of a King,’ chess becomes an allegory for life” proving that The Washington Post believes their readers have never seen a movie before.

You don’t have to be a chess player to know that the game is incredibly complex.  True genius in chess comes from a person being able to see 20 moves ahead of where the board is and that’s just not entertaining to put in a movie. So you’re forced into slow motion shots of someone knocking over their king or having someone dramatically make their final move and say “checkmate”.  But almost no one is going to see this movie for the intense chess scenes.  We’re all just looking to save more on our car insurance with Allstate.

Image source: IMDB

Worst Best Picture: Is Forrest Gump Better or Worse Than Crash?

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Alex Russell

In “Worst Best Picture” we search every single Best Picture Oscar winner of all time from 1927 to present to uncover the worst of them all. Conventional wisdom says that 2005’s winner Crash is the worst winner in history. We won’t stop until we’ve tested every last one. Read the the first, our review of Crash, here. All posts should be considered to have a blanket “spoiler alert” on them. Today’s installment is the 1994 winner Forrest Gump. Is it better than Crash?

If you put ten people in a room and told them they couldn’t come out until they’d named the ten most iconic American films of the last thirty years then you would probably go to prison for kidnapping. Before serving your time, though, you’d also have a list that almost assuredly included Forrest Gump.

Only The Lion King outdid it in the domestic box office in 1994. The Shawshank Redemption, Quiz Show, and Pulp Fiction failed to stop the feel good movie of the year (where someone loses their legs) from winning Best Picture. Forrest Gump made hundreds of millions of dollars, enjoyed almost universal acclaim, and launched an entire damn theme restaurant. People loved this movie.

It is strange to see it now, twenty years later. I’ve heard stories of sad nerd parents showing their kids the original Star Wars movies only to be frustrated that they cannot love them as they do. They know who Luke’s dad is. They aren’t impressed. That comparison isn’t perfect here, but even if you haven’t seen Forrest Gump you still kinda have.

Forrest Gump (Tom Hanks, as though I need to even say that) lives a full life. He meets world leaders, plays college football for a legendary program, gets honored in war, and invents the smiley face. The movie unfolds through Gump telling his weird story like a clip show. The clip show comparison does work here, because these scenes are so iconic in recent American film that it’s just about impossible to not know them. Shrimp. Lt. Dan. Jenny. You know because you can’t not know.

Saying there are “problems” with Forrest Gump is putting it mildly, but they are all intentional problems. The camp factor of Gump is off every chart, even the chart they invented to show things that are off of charts. Tom Hanks pulls his pants down to show LBJ a bullet wound on national television. It’s all in the service of making Forrest the character into a lovable oaf, but it’s thick. It was probably more endearing before lines of dialogue became relics of the early 90s, but there are moments when you can’t help but feel overwhelmed by it all now.

For as broad and as hamfisted as it is, it’s all intentional. They set this movie up to feel goofy in an earnest way. Crash stumbles around more serious subject matter in the same awkward fashion, but Crash does so with no self awareness. That’s why Gump just elicits eyerolling when it goes too broad and Crash feels like something a sixteen year old didn’t think through when it does.

There will always be a discussion of Forrest Gump versus Pulp Fiction among the kind of people that have that discussion, but Gump brings something to the table more than the aphorisms and goofball charm. It comes through as a bright movie with dark edges even years later. There are problems — Jenny’s character doesn’t get enough to do and she’s just another piece of Forrest’s puzzle — but the movie is still cohesive. The third act is decidedly strange and has gotten even stranger with time. There’s a case to be made that his “running for no reason” is a statement about Forrest’s place in the world or is his response to an uncaring world but it doesn’t advance the movie’s message and comes off as just blessedly strange.

I’m not going to sit here and say Forrest Gump is bad. On the contrary, it’s amazing how little it feels like the “Movie of the Week” ideal that it occupies in American pop culture.

The Best Part: Lt. Dan (Gary Sinise), who is the only person with real motivations in the movie outside of Forrest. Most of the cast just doesn’t get enough to do in this movie. There’s no way to interact with a character like Forrest Gump unless you play a foil to him, and the only person they let really do that is Gary Sinise.

The Worst Part: This, probably.

Is It Better or Worse than Crash? It’s better, absolutely. Forrest Gump is one of your family’s favorite movies for a reason. The flaws don’t ruin the experience, of course, and there’s no greater thrill to the movie than watching Tom Hanks just Tom Hanks around. Crash is starting to sour even worse than it originally came off to me, and I’m hoping one of the next few gives it a real challenge at the bottom of the barrel.

Worst Best Picture Archives: Crash | Terms of Endearment |

 Image credit: IMDB

Worst Best Picture: Is Terms of Endearment Better or Worse Than Crash?

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Alex Russell

In “Worst Best Picture” we search every single Best Picture Oscar winner of all time from 1927 to present to uncover the worst of them all. Conventional wisdom says that 2005’s winner Crash is the worst winner in history. We won’t stop until we’ve tested every last one. Read the the first, our review of Crash, here. All posts should be considered to have a blanket “spoiler alert” on them. Today’s installment is the 1983 winner Terms of Endearment. Is it better than Crash?

The Motion Picture Association of America debuted the PG-13 rating in the summer of 1984. In the decade before that, movies were all rated G, PG, R, or (very, very rarely) X. Whatever you think of the MPAA and the rating system, watching a movie prior to 1984 shows the need for PG-13. Terms of Endearment, a PG-rated movie, has two direct orgasm jokes in the first 15 minutes. It’s the first of what I can only call a lot of same. It’s a movie about personal interactions. Some interactions get blue.

Terms of Endearment won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1983. Of the four other nominees, history best remembers The Right Stuff and The Big Chill. After looking at everything that was nominated across the board, history’s list also needs to include WarGames, Flashdance, and Return of the Jedi. All-in-all it’s not a bad year for film, but it definitely feels absolutely and completely 1980s.

The tone is set early: Albert Brooks dies. The legendary comic plays (off screen) Emma’s (Debra Winger) father and Aurora’s (Shirley MacLaine) wife. His funeral scene is accompanied by the “opening theme” of absurd jaunty music. Tone is a big part of any movie and music is a big part of tone. It’s astounding how much this element doesn’t hold up. The movie was nominated for Best Original Score, but I can’t remember the last time music was this distracting — oh wait, it was Crash.

The music reinforces the “period piece” nature that every movie takes on after a few decades. The central narrative of Terms of Endearment is the story of Emma and Aurora. Aurora is the straight-laced mother who can’t let go of her daughter and Emma is the caged daughter who doesn’t really want to be free. She marries a man named Flap (Jeff Daniels, who looks young) right out of high school and carries out a marriage her mother Doesn’t Approve Of, moves to Iowa, and has three children.

There are a lot of places this plot could go from there. The average movie would force the mother to learn that she was too hard on the daughter and force the daughter to realize that running away from control only hurt her worse. Terms of Endearment, a movie from more than three decades ago, is ahead of even today as it subverts that hacky expectation.

Flap and Emma play house for a bit, but they can’t change the fact that they got married right out of high school. When people get married right out of high school it goes one way or the other: this one goes the other. This isn’t surprising, though the fact that no one ever questions that Jeff Daniels is playing a guy named Flap definitely is. Was Flap a name in 1983? We don’t have all the facts in, but we’re monitoring this story closely.

Shirley MacLaine beat out her fictional daughter Debra Winger for the Best Actress Oscar, but hot damn Debra Winger is perfect in this movie. Emma leaps into her mother’s arms after coming home for a weekend and she moves with a fluidity and liveliness that perfectly sells her character. When she’s playing a 20-something trying to act like a real adult, the movement tells it all. Emma is a kid, forever, and she’s always going to be Aurora’s kid.

The two stay on the phone through the whole movie, which is another 80s-shock device. In the time before cell phones, it is clearly supposed to be weird that Emma and Aurora are on the phone moments after sex or early in the morning. Aurora’s last words to Emma on her way to Iowa are about the phone bill. It helps sell the seriousness of the mother-daughter relationship. These little touches do more than any overwrought dialogue ever could.

The other side of mother-daughter is Aurora. She starts the film as someone who is visibly upset that people won’t let her say she’s 50 at her birthday party (she’s 52, her doctor reminds everyone). The hacky thing to do here is to transition her into a wild woman by the end of the movie. She begins an odd relationship with her ex-astronaut neighbor Garrett (Jack Nicholson at his absolute most Jack) that includes doing donuts in a convertible on the beach (reluctantly) and having sex for the first time in a decade (also reluctantly).

This is the very first non-Crash edition of this, so I’m still setting overall rules. All of these should be considered to have a spoiler warning on them. These are supposedly classics, all of them, and you should have either seen them or accepted that they may be spoiled for you when you read this.

The third act of Terms of Endearment is intense. Her doctor uncovers something troubling and suggests that Emma needs treatment immediately. She does well enough to go to New York City with her childhood friend at first, but then she rapidly goes down the proverbial tubes. Emma has cancer and Emma is dying.

This movie won Best Picture because it manages to be funny even though it’s the story of a woman whose mother never lets her go. It’s the story of a woman who dies after having an imperfect life that she never really has control over. She makes some final decisions (which has an odd feeling of “we should be so lucky in this world”) and then dies.

It’s a powerful movie before Emma ever gets cancer. It deals with individual loss of love. It deals with loneliness around others. It deals with the ways we all choose to just get the hell by when we end up somewhere (or someone) we just can’t get away from.

The cancer third act feels like another movie; it’s another episode of a show that you already like with people you already know. Acts one and two are funny and real in equal doses, but act three is a full-on reality haymaker that never gets maudlin. They deal with Emma’s dying and death with grace. It feels like a real person is dying, and the greatest trick of Terms of Endearment is that it stops being just a really great story at just the right moment.

The Best Part: While the obvious nod should go to Emma’s goodbyes to her friends and family in the hospital, I want to give this to a scene where she visits her mother during the depths of her despair about her marriage. She leaps into waiting arms and then discusses her extramarital activities with her mother in bed over coffee. The movie establishes the relationship between the characters so well that this scene feels sweet rather than weird, and that’s an accomplishment.

The Worst Part: The “theme” plays over and over in this movie and it is never appropriate. As Emma is just about to be hospitalized forever, some Super Nintendo-type funky jazz plays. It’s distracting at best.

Is It Better or Worse than Crash? Much, much, much better. This movie may as well have been the reason I started doing this. There’s no better thing to say about Terms of Endearment than that the distance between it and Crash is not measurable by the tools we have in today’s world. It is a theoretical distance, measurable only in the abstract.

Worst Best Picture Archives: Crash

 Image credit: IMDB

This Looks Terrible – Divergent

Alex Marino

This is the trailer for the movie Divergent based on a book of the same name. It’s the new Hunger Games with a similar awful love story that takes place in a dystopian society where teens are the center of attention.

I’ve never liked trailers that are meant for people that have read the source material. Any film company with half a brain should be trying to expand their viewing audience with a trailer that captures peoples’ attention. But if you haven’t read Divergent this trailer makes it seem like the movie is about Shailene Woodley taking a shot of Hpnotiq, failing at dreaming, and going to war over it. Along the way she falls in love with a cheaper, younger James Franco that has the same tattoo on his back as the girl from Waterworld. And he just gets her.

If this trailer’s goal is to get every 14 year old girl that has already read the entire trilogy excited about the film then they’ve succeeded, but I’m guessing that audience was going to see this opening weekend no matter what. I’m just hoping Summit Entertainment recognizes that this movie has the rare opportunity to take a middle-of-the-road young adult book with a lot of potential and turn it into something Veronica Roth (the author) couldn’t do: something good.

Image source: Yahoo

Worst Best Picture: Is Crash the Worst Oscar Winner of All Time?

crash-4-large

Alex Russell

On March 5th, 2006, America watched the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences award Crash the Academy Award for Best Picture. I didn’t personally watch the 78th Oscars, but I like a good movie as much as the next person. A few years later, I put Crash on my Netflix queue (back when people still had a Netflix queue for discs) and I waited.

Crash came. I watched Crash. I did not like Crash.

I still remember watching it on a tiny TV in a kitchen in Memphis. I remember wondering what I was missing and what everyone else had figured out. I watched the climax twice to try to pull out whatever beauty that other people saw in it. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me.

History has not remembered Crash fondly. It tops a number of lists of “worst” Oscar winners ever. Now that we’ve had plenty of time to crown other winners and compare them to Crash, we’ve got enough time before it and time after it to ask this question:

Is Crash the worst movie to ever win the Oscar for Best Picture?

With Argo last year, there are 84 other choices. We’re going to check them all.

In 2014, we’re going to watch every single movie that has ever been named best of the year. We’ll compare all of them to that most-hated-of-them-all Crash. Future editions of this feature will explore one of the other winners and then compare it to Crash, but we’ve gotta start somewhere.

We’ve gotta rewatch Crash itself.

I bought Crash with actual, real money. It turns out that it’s cheaper to buy the damn DVD than to get it any other way online. So now I have this shame capsule, forever. Some part of me wants to justify this purchase as “research materials” or “sources” or “self-inflicted punishment” The truth is that I had to know if it was as bad as I remembered it. I’ve actually only seen about 20 or 30 Best Picture winners, and for all of them I am going to revisit them completely. Crash can be no different.

The first thing you notice when you watch Crash is just how quickly it is… stupid. Calling a movie “stupid” is a simple criticism that should generally be reserved for much more base subject matter, but Crash starts off with an onslaught of some of the most asinine and insulting dialogue ever put to film. The first five minutes has dozens and dozens of slurs. You are struck, as a viewer, at how this not only isn’t the best movie of 2004, but how it barely feels like a movie at all. It feels more like a play written in a creative writing class full of teenagers. It is relentless with its message, and it assumes that you, as a viewer, will forget what it means to say if it ever stops saying it for one second.

For those of you who have not seen it, Crash is about racism. A handful of people in Los Angeles interact with the classic “other” stereotypes that they are most afraid of until they are all connected by a shoestring plot. Everything that happens in the movie serves to “challenge” the viewer. No one is “good” and no one is “bad,” everyone is just afraid of the “other.” Black people get pulled over and are mistreated by white people. A Chinese man gets run over by black people who essentially leave him to die. A white lady feels threatened by a Latino who is fixing her lock. There’s no reason to delve into the specifics of the plot. It is enough to know that Crash really, really wants you to think about what you think you know about racists. Surprise, everyone is racist at all times, to everyone.

It becomes a challenge to find any character with any redeeming qualities. People don’t act like people, they act like stand-ins for evil ideas. You know when you read an obvious allegory and someone’s name is like, Charity, or Hope or something and you roll your eyes because the author thought you were so stupid that you might not understand anything not spelled all the way out for you? Crash is worried you will miss the forest, the trees, and the ground. It’s shocking people aren’t wearing T-shirts that list the themes they represent on them.

In one of the opening scenes, Ludacris carjacks the Defense Attorney of Los Angeles. He does this after giving a long speech about how he felt discriminated against when he didn’t get enough coffee with his spaghetti at an Italian restaurant. You can accuse me of leaving out parts to make that sound absurd, but then you’d have to see Crash, wouldn’t you?

Is Crash all bad? No, not by a long shot. There are actually some decent scenes in the second act of the movie, but they are all shattered by these interjected lines. Every time some tension develops or a conflict goes somewhere, someone all but screams a slur at the camera. It robs the movie of any authenticity. This gets especially meta when one of the characters on a movie set hears from Tony Danza that a black character isn’t “authentic” enough. It’s clearly supposed to make the recipient of the message uncomfortable, but it is not something an authentic person would say. The movie is evil and calls this “normal.” If you want to make a movie about how no one is truly good or evil, you can’t make everyone evil all the time. There’s no baseline. It’s sci-fi without rules.

Some special attention needs to be given to the music. Nearly every “important” scene where two stories intersect has this weird Gladiator-style choral music over it. The effect is that even when a scene is in danger of getting to a good place, it takes you out of it. It happens every time the movie gets really, really proud of itself. It never happens deservedly.

If it was just some movie that came on TBS on a Saturday afternoon you would watch five minutes of it, snap back into yourself, and turn on some other horrible movie. The biggest sin of Crash is that the people who tell us what the good movies are say it was the best of them. It should just be a forgotten, weird piece of 2004. It’s not, though, and that’s why we embark on this journey.

The Best Part: There’s an OK scene with Terrence Howard. He does OK in one scene where he gets carjacked. That scene immediately becomes one of the worst of the movie when cops with shotguns stand down after they are asked real nice.

The Worst Part: At one point, a character shoots a kid. The kid doesn’t die (because the gun is filled with blanks) and then the family walks away and leaves the shooter standing in broad daylight. If you shoot at my kid, we’re at least going to have a conversation.

Honorable mention for worst goes to Sandra Bullock, who plays a completely useless character that does not drive any element of the plot. I’m not anti-Sandra Bullock, but whoa. To call her “misused” implies that they made an attempt. They did not.

Next time we’ll be back to compare Crash to another movie. We will not stop until we have done our due diligence. We’ll answer this, once and for all: what is the Worst Best Picture?

 Image credit: IMDB

This Looks Terrible – Ride Along

Ride Along (2014)

Alex Marino

In “This Looks Terrible” we look at previews for upcoming movies. We… probably look too closely.

This poster kills me. Why the hell are Kevin Hart and Ice Cube looking at each others’ foreheads? Is this actually some sort of weird forehead fetish movie that’s being billed as an awful semi-buddy cop film? Maybe they want to make this movie seem like a waste of time so only the hardcore forehead-fetish enthusiasts see it?

This trailer has everything I look for in a “haha this person shouldn’t be doing this job!!!!” movie. Startle the skittish main character? Haha look at him overreact and dramatically break everything not bolted to the ground! Oh man Kevin Hart is about to fire a shotgun when he obviously doesn’t know how! And hehe look at him get catapulted backwards because he underestimated the kickback! Original! Lol Kevin Hart shot a guy when he didn’t mean to! Accidental gun violence is hilarious! And don’t forget to make tons of jokes in the face of mortal peril!

But movies like Ride Along are supposed to be stupid. You’re not going for awards when you have Ice Cube and Kevin Hart as your leads. But they’re perfect for these roles and if you aren’t sick of Kevin Hart yet (what is wrong with you?) you’re probably going to enjoy it. If I had to spend 100 minutes with Ice Cube and Kevin Hart I’d just rather watch this video with Conan 10 times.

Image credit: IMDB