Movie Review: The Mummy (2017)

Director: Alex Kurtzman

Writers: David Koepp, Christopher McQuarrie, Dylan Kussman, Jon Spaihts, Jenny Lumet, Alex Kurtzman, Robert Louis Stevenson, John L. Balderston, Richard Schayer, Nina Wilcox Putnam

Stars: Tom Cruise, Russell Crowe, Sofia Boutella

Verdict: Trash garbage, mid one star. 

Is this what other cultures feel like when they’re appropriated..?

I think what I was telling my self going into The Mummy was that it would probably be “apocalyptically bad”, but go in with an open mind, and I did, but it was. 

I can’t remember what the plot was (it’s that boring), after about a week so here’s the official synopsis, “Nick Morton is a soldier of fortune who plunders ancient sites for timeless artifacts and sells them to the highest bidder. When Nick and his partner come under attack in the Middle East, the ensuing battle accidentally unearths Ahmanet, a betrayed Egyptian princess who was entombed under the desert for thousands of years.” and before I’d seen the film that might actually seem vaguely entertaining in a kind of post-but-also-knock-off Raiders of the Lost Ark way, but after I’ve seen the film, just reading the synopsis is sending me into a fucking coma. It, in theory, stars Tom Cruise, (Top Gun, Magnolia, Mission: Impossible), and Russel Crowe, (Gladiator, A Beautiful Mind)

It’s not just that The Mummy is boring, it’s badly put together, badly characterised, intellectually offensive, sexist, racist, militaristic, derivative and has effects that’s slightly better than the animation in Foodfight!. Or in the old The Road Runner Show cartoons when you’d always know what rock was going to explode because it was added on from a different palate and looked funny. It is just intergalactically stupid and I’m ashamed to have paid money to see it. 

Let me elaborate for a second. There are two female characters with speaking roles. Two only. One is the Mummy herself, played by Sofia Boutella, (Kingsman: The Secret Service, Star Trek Beyond), which the less said about that the better but fuck it. She initially is designed like, both in the art direction and her own physical performance, to be how I imagine director Alex Kurtzman, (People Like Us, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, The Amazing Spider-Man 2), pictures, in both he wet dreams and fever dreams his fantasy dominatrix. They then proceed to put her up in extreme bondage gear. The degrees of sexual repression contortionistics that it must take to pull this off is frankly mind-boggling. There is one other female character who – despite having a first scene that is frankly how a two year old would try to demonstrate that this character is quoteunquote ‘strong’ – only serves to be a piece of theoretically intelligent eye candy that Tom Cruise gets to drag around places. 

Then we get into racism. This one takes some explaining. There are different ways you can present the ‘Other’. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial chooses to make it cute and friendly and full of wonder, Alien chooses to make it fucking terrifying. Now, an Egyptian character really shouldn’t be ‘Other’ anyway, but she is presented just about as ‘Other’ as Cthulu. Considering it was written by a group of white men, the way that they present the ‘Other’ in the form of an Egyptian woman, seems to be; to fetishize it, then to box it, and beat it up. This by itself would probably be reading into it too much but then there’s how it approaches anyone who isn’t American, and considering it takes place in Iran and London, that’s just about everyone who’s not Tom Cruise or… a ghost… thing..? The film takes The Mummy from Egypt to the Middle East, it says, because she’s just that evil that they had to move her out of her country. The actual answer it seems is so that you can blow up terrorists and make a joke of it with no remorse, in a way that is depicted as jingoistic, militaristic, and superior. Exacerbated by the fact that Tom Cruise, tomb raider extraordinaire, is a soldier and calls in air bombings so he can uncover artifacts. America can just come in and steal your history and your culture by force of firearms and bombs and that’s fine and it’s the actual fucking military doing it. Then they move the action to London, where I live, and oh boy. Aside from the fact that the way they incorporate British history just makes absolutely no sense, any British person who is meant to appear at any point nice and is also important to the story sounds like they grew up in a private boarding school that a royal child also happened to be sent off to, and anyone else speaks like Dick van Dyke in Mary Poppins. Fuck me.

Then there’s the case of Mr. Hyde.

Hm.  

When he shows up he is depicted as, essentially, Bob Hoskins, (Who Framed Roger Rabbit, The Long Good Friday), with the black death. It’s actually hilarious and maybe played for laughs..?

Now, Alex Kurtzman seems like a decent guy, he likes the same movies as me, he is a particular fan of early Cronenberg works like Scanners and Videodrome both of which I love, and he clearly understands why they’re interesting and tried to take inspiration from them for this film. He clearly, demonstrably, understands the point of the original Universal Monster Movies like Frankenstein and The Mummy when he’s off camera. the film itself clearly tries to cite works like The Evil Dead and An American Werewolf in London, both of those films I adore or respect hugely. So where did he go wrong? I think the key can be seen in his other work. With stuff like Mission: Impossible III, he demonstrated himself as a fine writer, and he’s run some good television, the problem I think is that he’s a hack who’ll write anything for a buck but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have something great in him if he ever just wrote something that took these inspirations in a more independent context. The Mummy, however, is quite clearly, painfully, and disappointingly, not that.  

Russel Crowe though, is absolutely fucking hilarious and the whole movie and franchise is worth it for more of him. He just knows he’s in a franchise’s worth of shit films and is trying to see what he can get away with and it is, fucking, glorious!

 

Movie Review: Blade Runner

Director: Ridley Scott

Writers: Philip K. Dick, Hampton Fancher, David Webb Peoples

Stars: Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young

Verdict: Nearly a masterpiece
What to say about Blade Runner that hasn’t already been said? Who cares I’m gonna say it anyway. Blade Runner is an absolutely beautiful, work of art. It’s also got some really exciting set pieces, and a poignant tear jerking ending that still ends on an exciting note. 

Blade Runner is a sci-fi noir in the vein of something like Dark City, which takes place in the year 2019, (I know but this was the 80s forgive their naive souls), in which we have created a race of workers almost exactly like humans except they have a four year life span. The film brings up questions of if we create beings capable of developing emotions do we have the right to take their life away before it’s fully developed, would our gods and fathers have that right of us? 

There’s so much to love about Blade Runner, (if you’re watching the final cut); the gorgeous cinematography by Jordan Cronenweth, (Altered States); the hypnotic, unmistakable 80s score by Vangelis that somehow does not at all what you’d expect but works perfectly, the score alone represents the wonderful meeting between the two genres of sci-fi and film noir Balde Runner demonstrates; the wonderful production design that sometimes the camera will just get distracted to look at, there are aspects of this world lesser directors wouldn’t show us and director Ridley Scott takes every opportunity to show us this world he has meticulously created, there is no film quite like Blade Runner, many have tried, (Pluto Nash for one *shudders*), but none quite cut it; the fantastic screenplay by Hampton Fancher and David Webb Peoples, (Twelve Monkeys), that takes on a lot of burden and succeeds. 

The film is not in the least helped by a hefty hosts of supporting performances, which honestly balances out the at-his-best-ever but-still-wooden Harrison Ford, (Raiders of the Lost Ark, Star Wars, Apocalypse Now), who, I really don’t understand why he’s famous because he really can’t fucking act. Ridley Scott has a way of choosing a great supporting cast, in The Martian he demonstrated it by filling every role with talented actors, here, like Sergio Leone, (Once Upon a Time in the West, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly), does so frequently, he fills every roll with talented faces that just happen to be on good actors. With people like Edward James Olmos, (Battlestar Galactica, Stand and Deliver), M. Emmet Walsh, (Wild Wild West, Blood Simple.), and William Sanderson, (Last Man Standing, True Blood), their faces are so interesting it does half the job for them. This isn’t to downgrade their performances, they all do fine jobs. By far though, the standout is co-star Rutger Houer, (Batman Begins, Sin City, The Hitcher), as the charismatic but emotionally infantile Roy Batty, a combat replicant. He is enigmatic, empathetic and deeply sorrowful in his role, and he carries it off with aplomb, his little double couplet at the end gets me on the verge of tears every time. 

Blade Runner was recently listed on WatchMojo’s list of masterpieces that are actually kind of boring, and I disagree. It’s slow, but never boring, there’s always something interesting happening and the final show down set piece is thrilling. One problem is the sex scene which verges on rape, I think the film gets away with it but only just and it is problematic at best. However, the film would be a masterpiece if it wasn’t for that scene, and to quote the film, Ridley Scott, “has done a man’s work”, with Blade Runner. 

TV review: Stranger Things

 

Creators: Matt Duffer, Ross Duffer

Stars: Winona Ryder, David Harbour, Finn Wolfhard, Millie Bobby Brown, Matthew Modine

Verdict: Came out of nowhere type of fab

Where to start with Netflix’s latest attempt to put standard format television to shame; Stranger Things? This is an 80s set period peice; a supernatural, horror, drama, that is in turns spellbinding, terrifying, mystical, magical and heartbreaking. It’s well acted, well made, and deserves a place on your Netflix ‘To Watch’ list, except, like, bumped up to the top. And this is why-

Netflix’s Stranger Things has been almost universally marketed on the strength of 80s nostalgia even though that’s demonstrably the least interesting or important or even exciting thing about it. Now there is an element of the same sort of post-modern frisson that one would get in Tarantino movies like The Hateful Eight, or Inglourious Basterds. Now this element does have its own charm but there’s a sheer craftsmanship, quality of story telling and actual originality that gives the show it’s charm and following. 

There has been a trend in horror cinema recently of referencing John Carpenter uber-slasher Halloween, in films like It Follows , or The Guest. It’s drawn a lot of success and John Carpenter is clearly an influence on this show, but I’d suppose that a better reference would be something like The Thing, or one of his flawed but massively ambitious later era films like Prince of Darkness. In fact, just to nail on the head the references of the show, I pitch it to my friends, and I’m quite proud of this, as if Nic Winding Refn, (Drive, The Neon Demon), directed a Steven Spielberg, (E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial , The BFG , Raiders of the Lost Ark ), written adaptation of a Stephen King horror novel like It.  

But I digress from what I really want to adulate about, which is thus;

Point 1 – The characters are fantastic. The Sheriff Hopper character starts off looking like a stock cliche and becomes so much more. His character is layered, proactive, deeply melancholic and really well written in terms of dialogue and back story. You WILL grow to love him over the course of the mini-series. Eleven has become a firm fan favourite and you can see why with her shaved head and total badassery; she is enigmatic, enticing, and endearing, and that’s just the beginning. Every character has their own little arc and development, even the arsehole boyfriend finds some redemption and complexity. The only issue being that this does mean that when certain comeuppances occur it does feel a tad disingenuous. 

Point 2 – the characters are realised by some extraordinary actors. If neither David Harbour nor Winona Ryder get Emmy nods come awards season I will scream, and not in the way the show would like. Matthew Modine’s villain is somehow incredibly threatening and sinister, but also sympathetic. The child actors are also universally great, I mean they do have their child actor moments, but they are child actors I think it’s forgivable given how fabulous they are most of the time. The role of Eleven especially must be really hard for such an inexperienced actress as Millie Bobby Brown to pull off but she does it with aplomb. Even Will, the missing boy, is really well acted and he’s hardly in it

Point 3 – the story is completely unpredictable and goes in directions that you’d never predict, they find a way to end every episode on a cliff hanger and still have a consistent narrative. I’m trying to tell you as little as possible because you shouldn’t know these things, to enjoy it fully. It is that type of show. 

Point 4 – The craftsmanship is extraordinary. I checked the time the show won me over, and it was exactly 5 minutes in. Whilst the likeability of the child characters are the real cause of this you can put the extraordinary cinematography and score there too. Style is written off a lot as frivolous and a luxury, but the point of them is to aid the story telling and that they do perfectly in Stranger Things. The design of the supernatural elements is also really fleshy, and actually gross and it’s really hard to make something gross and disturbing without falling into exploitation. The monster does reference the really adult imagery of Alien, and possibly to the show’s detriment visits it upon a child without fully understanding the implications of that, but the ubertexts for me are a mix of The Thing, and the Pale Man from Pan’s Labyrinth. 

My only nonmentioned real flaw, is that there was good episode and a half where I found myself skipping scenes with one of the characters, but that ended. Despite all the mention of references not only in this review but others it would be easy to miss just how much of an original, almost auterial stamp the Duffer Brothers have put on Stranger Things. It can join the ranks of House of Cards, Preacher, and Mr. Robot in the ranks of streaming TV shows that are completely unlike anything on standard television except for maybe Hannibal, except that’s been cancelled. And you wonder why television is loosing viewers like America’s loosing sense. Who am I kidding America never made sense.