Mubi Monday: Results (2015)

It is easy to view gym life as quite a cult. Those who work there tend to be positive and full of motivational mantras, and those who end up responding well to the lifestyle end up acting like someone who has been recently converted to some kind of new religion. I don’t say this with malice. I speak from experience, and that experience is ongoing as I try to remain committed to my own gym and fitness schedule. Results is a movie that has fun with this idea, especially in the way it presents two fitness instructors with two very different ways of viewing life.

Kevin Corrigan plays Danny, a man who wants to get into shape. He wanders into a gym and chats to Trevor (Guy Pearce), who ends up pairing him up with a trainer named Kat (Cobie Smulders). It turns out that Danny is quite rich. It also turns out that he finds Kat attractive. Furthermore, Trevor also has a thing for Kat. What follows is a constant clash of differing attitudes as every one of these three main protagonists is somehow helped by the others to correct their path through life.

Both Pearce and Smulders are great fun here, butting heads in a way that you know is just distracting them from a chance to see their relationship potential. Pearce has to be almost constantly optimistic and positive throughout, while Smulders enjoys being a bit more confrontational and carefree. Corrigan is an actor I have loved seeing in supporting roles for years, and his excellent turn here makes me wish he had many more people willing to give him this amount of screentime. Giovanni Ribisi is good fun in a small role, a partying lawyer, and Anthony Michael Hall feels as if he is channeling Dolph Lundgren whenever he appears onscreen as a kettlebell guru named Grigory.

Written and directed by Andrew Bujalski, who has helmed at least three gems in the last decade or so, Results is a well-constructed comedy drama that stays enjoyable throughout, even in the scenes that hint at darker or more cringe-inducing options. This is as much to do with the performances as it is to do with the script, but Bujalski clearly has a talent for dialogue and characterization that attracts some great actors to his projects. It is also worth noting that this isn’t a film making fun of those who enjoy fitness or gym life. It is saying that there is no one easy “fix” for any of us, whether in the gym or just in life, but nobody is mocked here for trying to better themselves, even while they struggle. As anyone who has been trying to get fit for a decent amount of time can tell you, you can learn just as much from failures as you can learn from success.

There might be some people who would have preferred this to be a sharper film, a meaner one, but I think Bujalski has judged it perfectly. It’s a typical look at some characters trying to sort out their problems and create a decent future for themselves. They just all happen to be connected by their ongoing attempts to develop healthy bodies and healthy minds.

8/10

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Halloween Kills (2021)

Here's a bit of a shocker. I wasn't a big fan of Halloween (2018). Despite my problems with it, however, it was impossible for me to deny that it was an attempt to set right a franchise that had so often gone off into choppy waters, to put it mildly. Halloween Kills is worse than the film that preceded it. The big surprise is that I think it is arguably worse than every film that preceded it. 

Following on immediately from the end of the previous film, Halloween Kills is the tale of Michael Myers getting out of a burning house and killing a whole load of people on his way to wherever he may want to be heading. Is that wherever Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) is? Is it his childhood home? Is it somewhere he can face off against an angry mob who rally around the chant that "evil dies tonight"? Wherever it is, events are interrupted by numerous flashbacks to scenes that show the aftermath of that fateful night all those years ago. The night he came home.

David Gordon Green is back in the director's chair again, and he co-wrote the script with Danny McBride and Scott Teems (the former also returning to the same role he had on the last film). So let me start by saying what this film gets right. Entertaining scenes of mayhem and death. This feels like the Halloween movie with the biggest bodycount yet, and the kills have a decent mix of variety and brutality. Michael Myers is as unstoppable as ever when he's all revved up for a major killing spree. 

The other thing the film gets right is the score, making plenty use of classic music cues in the right places.

That's it. That's all this movie gets right, and that's why it manages to do what I thought was impossible, become a new low point for the series.

Now let's go through the many things that the film gets wrong. 

The cast. They're either not that good (Andi Matichak still fails to make much of an impression as young Allyson, granddaughter of the legend that is Laurie Strode), unceremoniously sidelined because they need to be held back for the next - final - instalment (Jamie Lee Curtis), or forced to make one bad decision after another on the way to an ending that treats them as badly as any minor supporting character. This applies to Judy Greer, Robert Longstreet, and Anthony Michael Hall, among others. The fact that Hall is playing Tommy Doyle, joined here by Lindsey Wallace (Kyle Richards reprising her role), makes the misuse of his character arguably more egregious than the misuse of any other characters.

The many nods to other movies that everyone wants to pretend doesn't exist in this timeline. This has been a pet peeve of mine before, but it's even worse this time when so many details seem to have been included for fans to point out as nods to previous visits to Haddonfield.

Leading on from the previous point, there is almost no scene in Halloween Kills that doesn't highlight either some dialogue, character, or scene from the 1978 movie. It makes up what feels like the majority of the runtime, and it's bloody infuriating. This is a film that shows a flashback of Michael Myers clambering over a car just to allow the film-makers to feel smug when they show a near-identical shot of Michael Myers clambering over a car. There is a big difference between dropping in references to please fans and making your film little more than a collage of those references.

The many scenes that are supposed to show the events of Haddonfield in the 1970s generally look well, but they are a) totally unnecessary, and b) full of choices made by people who wanted to recreate certain moments and characters without considering whether or not they should. This leads to intrusive camerawork and some terrible audio that can take viewers out of the movie.

Any commentary on trauma and mob mentality is undermined by the weak script. Why bring so many characters back if you’re only going to use them to make the same mistakes that everyone makes in these movies? They even mistake someone else for Michael Myers, which I think it the third or fourth time that idea has been used in these movies. There are individual moments that have characters showing how affected they have been by the night that terrified the entire town, but they are disappointingly brief. And none of the mob mentality stuff works, with no real feeling of “angry villagers with torches” ever coming close to actually causing a problem for the monster they want to drive away.

Halloween Kills has worked for a hell of a lot of people, and it seems to have been a big hit at the box office already, so you may end up at the opposite end of the spectrum from me. Some people have heard the film criticised and wondered what viewers were expecting. I’ll tell you. All this had to do was be true to the characters, true to the idea of making it a worthwhile story branching directly from the events of the original movie, and full of good kills. At least the kills are good. 

Sadly, any other film in the series manages to do what it sets out to do better than this, which even keeps our favourite scream queen so far away from most main scenes that it’s akin to watching a cut of Aliens re-edited to keep Ripley in stasis for most of the runtime.

Worst. Halloween. Ever. (so far)

4/10

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Sixteen Candles (1984)

Ahhhhh, Sixteen Candles. It's a film I have very fond memories of. I have owned it on VHS, I have owned it on DVD, and now I own it on a shiny blu-ray. And others feel the same way. It's also one of the most problematic '80s teen movies that isn't focused on sex (those films are on a whole other level, and I'm not wanting to get into an argument about them at this time). I'll get into all that soon enough.

Let me start by saying that I can accept what Sixteen Candles is, just as much today as I did back when I first saw it in the 1980s. It is a teen film that speaks to a certain demographic of teens, and features a cast impressively made up of many actors who actually were at the same age as their characters. Molly Ringwald is decent in the lead role, Samantha, and the plot revolves around the devastating (when you're that age anyway) fact that her family have forgotten that it is her 16th birthday. They're all busy prepping for her big sister's wedding. Samantha also pines for older hunk, Jake Ryan (Michael Schoeffling), and has to fend off the attention of a young geek credited as Geek (Anthony Michael Hall). Although she doesn't know it yet, Jake has taken an interest in Samantha, although he's currently going out with the gorgeous and popular Caroline (Haviland Morris).

With a great soundtrack, decent performances from the main cast members (Hall has always been my favourite though, and I also love the silly performances we get from Gedde Watanabe, Joan Cusack, John Cusack, and even a number of the adult characters), and the standard moments of wish-fulfilment, this is a template-setting directorial debut for Hughes, who was largely responsible for the stardom of Molly Ringwald in this decade, as well as the chart success of a number of musicians featured on the soundtracks of his movies.

Sixteen Candles still makes me laugh, although I laugh less than I used to. It bounces along from one almost-surreal moment to the next with so much energy that it's almost hard to think too critically about it as it plays out. Much like any big party you attended while at high school, things take on a different hue when you are recovering after the main event.

So let's discuss the problems with Sixteen Candles, problems that seem way more obvious now, but should also have been pretty obvious when it was first released.

A lot of people mention the fact that Jake is willing to give away his drunken girlfriend as if she's a) just a piece of his property he no longer has any use for, and b) deserving of whatever happens because of her drunken state and sexual confidence. They also mention the cringe-inducing inclusion of an Asian character named Long Duk Dong (name often accompanied by a gong sound, yes . . . a gong sound). The horribly inappropriate grandparents, the horny geek who won't take no for an answer, you've probably heard about these problems already. There are other problems though, some that we are perhaps only more attuned to nowadays. Like the following exchange -

Randy: And a big Trans Am in the driveway with a ribbon around it. And some incredible gorgeous guy that you meet like in France. And you do it on a cloud without getting pregnant or herpes.
Samantha: I don't need a cloud.
Randy: Just a pink dress and the guy, right?
Samantha: A black one.
Randy: A black guy?
Samantha: A black Trans Am, a pink guy.

That may look light and amusing enough,  but watch the film and the shock of Randy when she thinks her friend is on about "a black guy" and it just feels like an unnecessary reminder that writer-director John Hughes delivered films that were almost uniformly sliced up chunks of whiter-than-white Americana, no matter what bitter pill may have been slipped into some scenes. And that's not even mentioning the moment that has Jake Ryan gaslighting his girlfriend as he dances with her while thinking about Samantha.

It was always clear, I think, that Hughes was writing for a specific target audience. The lack of diversity in his cast (beyond class and clique archetypes) now sticks out like a sore thumb, although I am not sure I would ever want to hear him try to lend his voice to a central African American character. He wrote for those he felt he could identify with, or at least give a voice to.

Which is why, despite the problems, Hughes movies will always hold a special place in the hearts of those who discovered them at just the right age. As silly as it may seem, he wrote teen characters in the way we wanted them to be. They were very rarely realistic, or able to see beyond their own selfish problems that seemed huge, but there was a truth to the core of many of them. Because we always wanted to be better than our reality anyway, whether that means being the coolest rebel, the prettiest girl, the edgiest outcast, the nerdiest of the nerds, or any other pigeonhole we could fully inhabit and call our own. And when it comes to not being able to see beyond selfish problems that seem huge, that is most of our teenage years. Sadly, thanks to my arrested development, I think that lasted right up until my late twenties. I am glad that nobody was around to record the many conversations I used to have with friends when we thought we knew about love, life, sex, and heartbreak.

I've waffled on a bit more than I intended to, mainly because I didn't initially want to give as much time to addressing the aspects of the film that more enlightened modern viewers may take issue with. But I think it is important to remember that, taken as a whole, Hughes was trying to do something good, in giving teens their modern cinematic dream scenarios, and also giving young females a number of role models, even if they often ended up just wanting to end their school term with a perfect date/Prince Charming. We've moved on a lot since then, in many ways, but teenagers still spend an awful lot of time thinking about these things. We just forget how many hours in the day were spent dwelling on such issues, because we grew up and realised that our lives would more likely be directed by Mike Leigh than John Hughes.

7/10

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Bodied (2017)

Rap battles, eh. They're a lot of fun. But they're also often full of racism, homophobia, misogyny, and general advice along the lines of violence being the possible answer to everything. You can say the same of rap itself, of course, but rap battles have an extra edge. They ARE battles, with the words and rhyming lines being built into an impressive combo until the knockout blow is delivered.

Bodied, directed by Joseph Kahn (who also co-wrote the movie with Alex Larsen),  starts with our main character, Adam, observing an evening of rap battles for his university thesis. He's interested in the use of language, particularly "the n word", and the idea of what is and isn't offensive when it's in the form of lines delivered by people who have created necessary personas for themselves while performing. After being asked to rap battle an interloper who tries to ruin the evening, Adam finds himself getting further and further into the world of rap battles, gaining more insight than he could have ever dreamed of, and even becoming friends with a very talented rapper named Behn Grymm.

Sometimes tense, sometimes hilarious, often offensive in ways that force viewers to think harder about what offends them, and why, Bodied is a two hour movie that flies by, thanks to the script and performances helping it to be consistently entertaining and interesting. It also helps that the central idea, although based in the field of rap, equates to an idea I very much ascribe to: you can joke about anything as long as that joke is actually funny or clever enough to warrant it.

Calum Worthy is excellent in the lead role, easily believable as a young men who feels out of place in the world he is observing before he finds that he has a talent for rapping, a talent that may get him just as many enemies as friends. Jackie Long is also very good in the role of Grymm, a man who best illustrates the clear divide that can exist between an individual and their stage persona. Rory Uphold is Adam's girlfriend, Maya, looking on in horror as she witnesses a barrage of what she views as incredibly offensive, Jonathan Park, Walter Perez, and Shoniqua Shandai all do well, and Dizaster is an intimidating "big boss", named Megaton, that you just know is going to feature in the finale. Elsewhere, you get solid supporting turns from Anthony Michael Hall, Simon Rex, and Debra Wilson.

What works so well here is the way in which viewers can be provided with a viewpoint that isn't necessarily a right one, or maybe it is. The choice is ultimately up to each individual, whether to go along with it or not, and the case is made in a way that would be welcomed by any top debate team. It just so happens that the debate here is taking place in the form of rap.

I've liked a lot of work I've seen from Kahn (who has a filmography that includes many music videos, the ridiculous Torque, and Detention), but this is easily his best work so far. It works equally as simple entertainment and a thought-provoking conversation-starter, and I recommend it to everyone. Well, I recommend it to everyone who can watch something about offensive material without getting offended by it.

9/10

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Foxcatcher (2014)

A bleak drama that often forces viewers to watch moments unfold in uncomfortable silence, Foxcatcher is a riveting piece of work, benefiting from three fantastic central performances - from Channing Tatum, Mark Ruffalo and Steve Carell.

Based on a horrible true story, that I'll try not to entirely reveal here (for those unaware of it), this is a look at John du Pont (Carell), a rich man who created the Foxcatcher training facility to help the wrestlers of America, namely one Mark Schultz (Tatum). Mark always seemed to be stuck in his brother's shadow, and Foxcatcher looks like the chance to make a name for himself. But his new boss also wants his brother (David, played by Ruffalo), and his new boss tends to get what he wants. Things start to get very tense, depite David trying to play peacemaker between du Pont and his brother, and the glorious future that they all began to dream about starts to look less and less likely.

Director Bennett Miller sets out his stall early on, allowing viewers to decide whether they're willing to jump in for the long haul or whether they won't be up to the task. The film is so still and, for the most part, quiet that it helps to maintain a constant feeling of unease. You know that any sudden movement or noise is going to be a bit of a shock. The script, written by E. Max Frye and Dan Futterman, is light on dialogue for most of the 130 minute (approx) runtime, but that doesn't mean that it's light on information and characterisation. This is a film in which the things that are unsaid are just as, if not more, important as those that are said. And each character has specific body language that speaks volumes.

Tatum and Ruffalo are both on top form, the former showing his lack of self-confidence, and purpose, while the latter knows where he wants his life to go, and already has a wife and children to consider in his plans. Carell, working under some fantastic make-up, gives the kind of performance that should allow him the choice of more dramatic roles further down the line. John du Pont is a man who often acts like a child. He can throw money around to get whatever he wants, be it a specific item, person or even friendship. Everything has a price, apart from the thing that he craves the most, which is approval from his mother (Vanessa Redgrave). Anthony Michael Hall does well in a small role, playing the right hand man to du Pont, and Sienna Miller has a handful of scenes as Nancy Schultz, wife of David.

The main problem with Foxcatcher is the feeling that the whole story could have been told in a much shorter amount of time. I understand that the steady, measured approach helps the material immensely, but it also feels as if things are being dragged out for far too long. Those who know the outcome of this tale may well have less patience than someone who knew nothing about it, like myself.

Well worth your time, it's just a shame that Miller seems so concerned about treating the story with the proper respect and tone that it deserves that he forgets to make some choices that might benefit the cinematic treatment of the material.

8/10

http://www.amazon.com/Foxcatcher-Blu-ray-Mark-Ruffalo/dp/B00QK4ANEI/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1420058857&sr=8-2&keywords=foxcatcher

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