Riske Business: In Case You Missed Them (January 2017 Edition)

by Adam Riske

My take on some recent releases in theaters, ranked from least favorite to favorite.

The Bye Bye Man – I went into this movie expecting it to be pretty bad with the hope it would be enjoyably so. It absolutely is. This is a very unusual and fascinating bad movie. The Bye Bye Man certainly recalls those garbage teen horror movies from earlier in the 2000s (e.g. Darkness Falls), but this one has just enough WTF moments for me to recommend you watch it drunk sometime in the future. Most of the acting is atrocious, there’s a CGI dog that looks like something from Spawn and it features the greatest/most illogical librarian character in the history of movies. The Bye Bye Man is so oddly put together that it is even kind of creepy and sad (not, like, ironic sad but actual sad) at times. It’s a fascinating movie. It is also exactly what I needed in the midst of night after night of going to bed traumatized from watching current events on MSNBC for hours on end. As described by Nicolas Cage in Bringing Out the Dead, I’ve felt like a grief mop recently and something so silly and inconsequential as The Bye Bye Man provided a brief respite.

Patriots Day – Boy do I have complicated feelings about this one. It’s very well-made and suspenseful with mostly strong acting across the board, BUT should it have been made at all? I find myself of the opinion that I simply don’t know. I feel queasy watching a movie like Patriots Day because it’s supposed to be honoring the heroes of the Boston Marathon bombing (and the city overall), but isn’t it also exploiting those same people for entertainment purposes? Does it help the victims to have a recreation of these events on-screen as a reminder? Here’s where we get into some gray areas. By this rational, should there be a Schindler’s List? Or Roots? Of course there should be if for no other reason than as a reminder that those events should never have happened or happen again. But is that Patriots Day's aim? All I know for certain is that I think the movie is good and moving but also an experience I squirmed all the way through for multiple reasons, only some of which I’m sure the filmmakers intended.

Paterson – Here’s a movie that is alternately beautiful (e.g. the scene where Adam Driver’s titular character listens to a teenager’s poem from her secret notebook) to maybe a little too staid for its own good. What I like most about Paterson besides Driver’s performance -- he’s always good -- is that it helped me better appreciate poetry by seeing the genesis of several poems and how they were inspired. I think the movie touches on some interesting elements but abandons them (e.g. Paterson seems to be a deep/existential artist but his wife seems to be more of a populist one) and that prevented me from loving the film. I’m not sure what the movie is trying to say to be honest. Is Paterson just a simple man of simple pleasures and is satisfied with his lot in life? Is he dying on the inside? Could I just be projecting onto his character since he’s sort of a blank? What I take away most from Paterson, though, is that it’s a celebration of art and the artist – no matter what scale it is (i.e. even if for an audience of just you).

The Founder – Here’s a movie that’s very good and seems to have been lost in the pile of adult dramas at year’s end. Michael Keaton is perfectly cast and gives a tremendous performance as Ray Kroc, “founder” of the McDonald’s corporation. The story itself is fascinating as a chronicle on the rise of this global giant and it’s told in a refreshingly straightforward and non-flashy way through the great Robert Siegel’s (Big Fan, The Wrestler) script. The direction from John Lee Hancock (The Blind Side, The Rookie) is modest, almost wholesome, and I think the juxtaposition of Siegel and Hancock really works to the movie’s benefit since the McDonald’s brothers (the true originators of the company) are genial and naïve while Kroc is a cutthroat scumbag on the prowl. There’s an added element that factored into my enjoyment of The Founder as well, which is the representation of so many suburban Chicago locations very rarely (if ever) seen on screen, from Arlington Heights to Schaumburg. It’s cool to see neighboring cities and your own hometown pop-up (by name) on a movie screen. It’s even better when it happens and you’re watching it in your hometown (though the movie I’ve heard was shot in Georgia). That would explain Keaton’s garbage Arlington Heights accent. Just kidding, but yeah, it really doesn’t sound anything like us.

Have you caught any new releases worth recommending? I’ve been meaning to catch up with Lion, Sleepless and Toni Erdmann. Has anyone seen those?

Take Two: The Happening

by Patrick Bromley

It's just as bad as I remember. Maybe worse.

With M. Night Shyamalan back to being a major part of the pop culture conversation thanks to the success of Split (my feelings towards which aren't far off from Rob and Adam's), I've been thinking a lot about the director's work and what it means to me. As someone who would call himself a fan of Shyamalan's first few movies -- yes, even Signs and parts of The Village -- I'd argue that his career can be broken up into three movements: the skillful confidence of his early efforts, the flop sweat years of box office failure and constantly reacting to the previous bad movie by trying out a new kind of bad movie, and now the low-budget Blumhouse period, which has been met with a great deal of success both financially and with audience popularity. People really like M. Night Shyamalan again. It's been almost 15 years since we could say that.

Shyamalan made a number of bad movies during the flop sweat years, but none of them were really bad in the same way. After Earth is generic and impersonal big-budget filmmaking, while his adaptation of The Last Airbender is disastrously stiff, borderline incompetent big-budget filmmaking that suggests he'd never made a movie before. Of all his bad movies, I'm probably most partial to Lady in the Water and not because there's any single thing about it I actually like. He's really trying to do something different in that film, challenging both himself and his audience. I think he fails in every way, but I'd rather watch Shyamalan swing big and miss than what he does in, say, The Happening, a safe -- if still spectacularly terrible -- movie that's only distinction is that it's his first (and only) "rated R" effort. Outside of a little bit of extra self-inflicted violence, the film just finds Shyamalan doing his usual thing...and doing it very, very poorly.

I know that we have readers who love The Happening. It is not my intention to take that away from anyone. As entertainingly bad movies go, there is fun to be had here. It is a movie so poorly conceived on almost every imaginable level, so insanely misguided in its approach and, more often than not, so inept in its execution that I can very easily understand finding comfort in its awfulness. But there is no part of me that believes the theory that Shyamalan knew what he was doing -- that this is his tribute to bad B-movies and that he has pitched it thusly. I can buy the part about this being his B movie (in the way that the Shyamalan-produced Devil is), but like so much of his work he strangles it with pretense. I hate the term "elevated genre," by with The Happening Shyamalan is trying to do "elevated genre" and manages to fuck both the elevation and the genre up.

I still remember going to see the movie the weekend it opened in 2008 with Erika, JB and Jan. We were in a sparsely attended theater and more than willing to give The Happening a chance -- we were not there to make fun of it -- but pretty quickly it became clear what kind of movie it was and we found ourselves laughing at every terrible new line. No one else in the theater was laughing. I started to feel bad that we might be ruining the experience of everyone else, who appeared to be enjoying it on an unironic level. Truth be told, I hate inappropriate laughter at the movies, as it usually comes from an audience who have decided they are above what is on screen. It is not a practice in which I willfully partake. That said, The Happening wore me down. I didn't know how else to respond but to laugh, and the fact that we were among friends and all having the same reaction only made matters worse. I wasn't there to mess up anyone's good time, but how else am I supposed to respond when Shyamalan follows up a scene of graphic suicide with a character talking about how hot dogs are the perfect food?

There's a decent idea for a modern-day eco-horror movie at the center of The Happening: the trees and plants, tired of being trampled on by our stupid Uggs, fight back by releasing a toxin designed to wipe us out. Nature fights back! I'm on board. Unfortunately, Shyamalan either doesn't seem to know or care how the mechanics of horror movies work, so he establishes a premise but doesn't tell a story. There is no escalation to the situation he introduces. Things don't really get worse for our heroes. Something happens, and then it happens again and then it happens again. This is why the movie is called The Happening. It also doesn't understand how to dole out new information. There is a window of time in the first third of the movie in which we don't understand what is causing people to kill themselves. Then someone suggests it's the plants. Then the characters speculate that, yes, maybe it is the plants for a while. Then the big reveal is that it is HOLY FUCKING SHIT the plants. What a twist!

I am not suggesting that the movie need a twist. Part of what did M. Night Shyamalan in the first time around was his self-imposed need to end everything with a twist. But The Happening hardly understands dramatic structure. The movie works if we in the audience are misdirected to believe it's one thing, only to then be told "no, it's literally nature trying to kill us." The horror is in that realization. Instead, Shyamalan telegraphs everything early on and then makes a movie in which nature is the slasher, resulting in a sequence in which characters RUN FROM THE WIND. This is not how movies work. This is not how wind works. Don't worry; they succeed and outrun air. They don't want to kill themselves. Would that I could say the same.

A word about the whole "plants make us want to kill ourselves" premise. I'm not sure it works. It's just too passive. For it to be really scary, the people exposed to the toxin should immediately begin killing each other. I know this would be effective because I have seen The Crazies. The original and the remake! One setpiece, in which Shyamalan tracks the progress of a handgun as it is passed off from person to person shooting him/herself in the street, is the kind of thing I know he fell in love with from the writing stage through the final edit. It's photographed well because Shyamalan still knows how to put a sequence together, but the construction of it is self-conscious and the game of suicidal telephone becomes silly when it's meant to be, like, totally fucked up, you know dude? There is exactly one scene in the first few minutes of the movie in which the whole mass suicide thing is genuinely horrifying, and it's when the construction workers are all jumping off the top of a building en masse. Yes, it's ludicrous. Yes, it would be an unintentionally hilarious visual if it weren't for the reactions of the guys on the ground, who first think their friend has fallen and then can't understand what the fuck is happening when a few more people hit the ground. It's an honest moment, and the only time in the film in which a character's lack of understanding as to what is happening actually gives way to horror. Don't worry; because it's The Happening, it's ruined seconds later when the same actor gets a teary close up and cries "God in heaven..." and it all becomes funny because it is the worst. So much for bringing us to the brink of being scared.

Speaking of terrible acting, goddamnit does The Happening put most Hollywood movies to shame in this department. There are almost no words for how badly miscast Mark Wahlberg is in the lead. I'm not one of these assholes who suggests that it's impossible to buy him as a science teacher (especially if it was a science teacher that, I don't know, actively fought against teaching evolution under the direction of Peter Berg), but it is impossible to buy him as this science teacher. I'm not sure if it's just Shyamalan writing a garbage part for any actor or if he had so little faith in Wahlberg's ability to convincingly play the role, but the character's every line says something about "science." IT IS SO HORRIBLE AND FUNNY. I would quote them here, but it wouldn't do justice to Wahlberg's high-pitched, sing-song delivery that makes everything sound like he's not exactly sure he's pronouncing the words correctly. Zooey Deschanel, equally miscast as his wife, looks totally stranded. Her enormous eyes, once used to level Joseph Gordon Levitt and Buddy the Elf, here look into the camera like she wants to scream for help but can't because her sister Dr. Bones is being held captive right off screen and she doesn't want to get caught signaling us. Dummy up, New Girl.

Not helping matters is the fact that Shyamalan has asked cinematographer Tak Fujimoto to shoot much of the movie in closeups on actors' faces, a trick he borrows from Jonathan Demme (for whom Fujimoto has shot a number of movies). This results in a series of shots in which Mark Wahlberg looks confused even before people begin unexplainably killing themselves. He comes off really, really bad, but he's not alone. John Leguizamo is more convincing as a fat demon clown than he is here, forced to spout nonsense like "Don't take my daughter's hand unless you mean it!" and reference the fact that he's a math teacher as often as possible, because Shyamalan can only conceive of writing these characters in relation to what they do for a job. I know he thinks he's being all deep and shit by having these two men who guide their lives by the principles of logic and reason (math and science!) being confronted by something which defies everything they know to be true, but none of that comes off. Instead it feels like the first script written by a high schooler who doesn't know how to give characters personality traits, only expository details. Betty Buckley, a talented actress, is a disaster as a kooky old lady named You Eyein' My Lemon Drink. She poses one of the only external conflicts in the movie -- you know, the thing The Happening needs more of in order to be at all interesting or suspenseful -- and then succumbs to the same dumb suicide as everyone else. Thank you, threat, for neutralizing yourself without the heroes having to do a single goddamn thing. THE HORROR!

I know exactly how you feel, boys

I recognize that there can be a certain joy in watching a bad movie. But the pleasures of "bad" classics like Plan 9 from Outer Space or Troll 2 or Miami Connection is that everyone is working really hard to make a good movie but it's just not within their means. The fun is in watching them try. In the case of The Happening, though, we know that everyone is capable of doing good work, which means that the enjoyment comes not from watching them try but in watching them fail. It's cinematic schadenfreude of the highest order and it's hard to feel good by the time the end credits come up. (See? Told you! It's the wind! BUT IN FRANCE) It's hard not to giggle at the screenplay, one of the worst ever written by a former Oscar nominee, or at every second that Mark Wahlberg is on screen, but seeing a group of people this talented eat it this hard isn't rewarding; it's disheartening.

Now if you need me I'll be at the zoo feeding myself to the lions. Save me some lemon drink.