Film Review: The Little Things

 

The Little Things tries to be No Country For Old Men.  

And that is not a good thing.

Set in the 1990's, the movie is about Joe "Deke" Deacon (Denzel Washington), a former LAPD homicide detective who, for reasons that are revealed throughout the movie, is now a lowly Sheriff's deputy far away from the big city.  Circumstances force him back to town where he happens to run into his old coworkers and the new hotshot detective Jim Baxter (Rami Malek) who are running an investigation into a serial killer.  Despite his best intentions not to be involved, Deke finds himself drawn into the case and starts finding clues that the others are missing.  This eventually leads him to Albert Sparma (Jared Leto), a creepy repairman who may or may not have something to do with the murders.

It should be said that this movie has some great performances.  It is almost a given that Washington is going to be amazing he does not disappoint.  He put on the pounds to make himself look like the middle-aged man that his character is.  There is lethargy and weariness in his body, with his eyes slightly glazed with age.  He is constantly haunted by his own mistakes, but you can see the desire for just and to prove himself again keep pushing through.  Leto is perfectly creepy as Sparma.  He plays the character with just the right amount of detachment so that you really cannot tell if he is a psychotic killer or a con-man who like the attention.  It's like he is intentionally making himself look suspicious and you cannot help but feel like that is the point.  Malek is decent as Baxter, and he is able to keep up with Washington and Leto, but he never really breaks through.

Director John Lee Hancock does a great job of building tension and setting the mood.  The opening scene is fantastic and gripped me right away.  A young woman is driving down a dark desert highway singing along to the B-52s, when a pair of headlights rides up on her tail.  You see how quickly things go from fun and carefree to uncomfortable, to concerning, and then to terrifying.  Throughout the film, he gives the film the right noir feel for the script that he wrote.

Everything here is set for a truly enjoyable murder mystery.  But it drops the ball.

This is one of those films that I cannot accurately review without going into the ending, so be warned:

 SPOILERS BELOW FOR THE REST OF THE REVIEW.

The Little Things makes the mistake that I am noticing more and more in modern stories: it ignores the plot to focus on theme.

Don't get me wrong, theme is absolutely important as the transcendent element of the story.  But you need a good plot in order for the theme to take hold.  If the story does not grab you, the theme will not take root.

The plot of this movie is that it is a murder mystery.  You are following the detectives in order to follow the clues in order to catch the killer.  Along the way, we are introduced to the themes of justice, guilt, and redemption.  All of this is good and all of this works.

But then the movie decides to pull a No Country for Old Men.  That movie had a tight and tense plot until the third act when the Cohen brothers decided that they were no longer intersted in the plot and instead wanted to focus on the theme.  The main through-line we had been following is completely abandoned (although to be fair, I think this is also the case in the novel from which it is adapted).  

The Little Things does the same thing in the last 10-15 minutes of the movie.  Once a decision has been made by one of the main characters, the story no longer tries to answer the question of who the killer is.  Instead, the movie focuses completely on the moral implications of the character's choice and how it affects the themes of justice, guilt, and redemption.  

To be clear, the issue isn't that we never get a clear answer as to who the killer is.  Ambiguity itself is not the problem.  The problem is that the movie no longer cares who the killer is.  The main narrative engine comes to a complete stop and the movie expects us to jump the tracks and get on a new train for the last leg of the journey.  

I'm sorry, but that is completely unsatisfying.  When you write a story with a set up like this, you take on a certain amount of narrative debt that you must repay somehow to the audience by the end.  Hancock refuses to do so and as a result, you feel cheated.

I read a review that argued critics misunderstood Hancock's themes.  I disagree.  I get his themes.  I like his themes.  He just short-changed me on the plot.  

As a result, The Little Things is a mix of very talented people making an ultimately unsatisfying film.

Wednesday Comics: Nightwing #78

 

Tom Taylor is a writer that I have been paying more attention to over the last year or so.  His Suicide Squad was decent and engaging.  But his DCeased was incredible.  What could have been a gimicky DC version of Marvel Zombies was instead a riveting, devastating, funny, and moving story.  The core reason why Taylor's stories work is because he understands the characters.

Taylor put these classic characters into extreme situations in DCeased, but everything they did, even when they acted in ways different than in their normal series, had a resonance with all we knew about them before the zombie apocalypse.  Villains like Deathstroke believable could evolve into something like a hero without feeling false, because Taylor did not force an alien personality onto the character, but instead hit the character's pressure points so that their evolution was believable. 

My point is that in an age when many comic book writers simply impose whatever personality they desire onto the characters they write, it is refreshing to have a writer who takes the character on his own terms.

And that is what you get with Nightwing #78.

Dick Grayson, as a character, has been through the ringer.  Because of Tom King, he got shot through the head and became an cynical amnesiac named "Ric Grayson."  While creative team on Nightwing did a decent job with the premise they were given, they were not writing the hero we all know and love.  Because this character is near and dear to me, I have continued buying the book, despite its flaws.  But I have good news for Nightwing fans:

Tom Taylor has brought back the real Dick Grayson and it is wonderful.  

Dick is back in Bludhaven and is doing his best to clean up the streets.  His personality has always been a foil to Batman.  Whereas Bruce is sullen and imposing, Dick is light and quippy.  I even like the tongue-in-cheek mocking of the recent "Ric Grayson" story that Taylor inserts.  There is a humor that is intrinsic to the original Robin that makes him so charismatic and likable.  At the start of the story, we see Dick getting back to basics as his endless bank account has evaporated along with the Wayne fortune.  However, in the issues most touching moment, Dick receives an unexpected letter that changes his direction.  

Back too is Blockbuster, the hulking genius mobster intent on ruling Bludhaven.  I like the fact that Taylor is taking us back to the roots of Chuck Dixon's iconic run on the character.  Taylor delves even deeper into the Nightwing mythos, setting up some truly interesting conflicts down the way.

Artist Bruno Redondo (along with Adriano Lucas and Wes Abbott) do a wonderful job.  Unlike a typical Bat-book, most of the action here takes place in the daylight, which fits thematically with the new dawn of the character.  There is a fantastic two-page spread that I stared at for a good long while.  This creative team understands that comics are a visual medium and they can be transportive.  The double-splash page conveyed a sense of grandeur, joy, and freedom.  For a moment, you feel like Dick seemingly weightless, tumbling through the air.

If I had one quibble it would be that the adult Barbara Gordon is played just a little too cutesy in how she talks.  But this could be a simple humorous affectation as she becomes enamored of a rescue dog that Dick brings back to the apartment.

I don't know where the story is going, but Taylor has earned enough trust and good will from me that I will be eagerly anticipating each issue that comes out.

Film Review: Godzilla vs. Kong

 

Sexuality/Nudity No Objection
Violence Acceptable
Vulgarity Acceptable
Anti-Catholic Philosophy Acceptable

I usually do not look at reviews for movies about which I have not written a full review.  But I could not help but look at Red Letter Media's take on the movie.  And they said something that perfectly encapsulates this movie: "This is both a pro and a con: it felt like it was written by a child."

Godzilla vs. Kong is the fourth installment in the "Monsterverse" started by Godzilla (2014) and followed by Kong: Skull Island and Godzilla: King of the Monsters.  After his defeat of King Ghidorah in the last film, Godzilla became the apex monster that all of the monsters bowed to.  Fearing that Godzilla would sense Kong to be a challenge to his apex status, the monster agency Monarch has been hiding the giant ape in a VR dome like Jim Carrey in The Truman Show.

This is usually the part in the review where I give a detailed set up of the plot.  However, the plot is so inconsequential and idiotic that it makes any of the Michael Bay Transformers films look like Aaron Sorkin.  But I shall attempt to do my best:

For reasons unknown, Godzilla attacks an American city where the shady company Apex is doing research.  This makes people turn on Godzilla, who they looked at as their giant lizard protector since the last film.  The little girl from the last movie (Millie Bobby Brown) refuses to believe that Godzilla has turned evil and so gets her best friend who was the fat kid in Deadpool 2 (Julian Dennison) and a conspiracy theory podcaster (Brian Tyree Henry) to do their own investigating which somehow gets them all the way to Hong Kong.

Meanwhile, the clearly not evil any possible way owner of Apex (Demian Bichir) gets a lonely scientist (Alexander Skarsgard) to lead an expedition into the center of the Earth, which they believe is the source of the monsters.  The clearly not evil in any possible way owner of Apex claims that there is a power source that can be found there to help save mankind from the now-evil Godzilla.  Lonely scientist goes to talk to his Kong caretakers scientist friend (Rebecca Hall) because the lonely scientist thinks that Kong can lead them to the center of the Earth through a hole they dug in Antarctica.  So they take a bunch of ships and a little deaf girl who is the Kong Whisperer (Kaylee Hottle) across the ocean.  However, once Kong is out of his protective bubble, Godzilla can sense him.

I didn't bother writing any of the names of the human characters because they honestly don't matter.  Like most of these types of movies, they merely serve as the connective tissue to get the monsters to their different fight set-pieces.  In fact, the two main human stories don't really intersect.  It's almost like they filmed the main Kong storyline and then added the Milli Bobby Brown stuff as an afterthought.  I can't really say anything about the performances because they aren't particularly good or bad.  They are all just kind of... there.  

While not nearly as bad as the Godzilla from the 1990s, this movie makes me more appreciative of the recent Shin Godzilla.  While I had a lot of problems with that movie at least the script was about something.  There were strong thematic ideas about governments and disasters.  In addition, the movie was much more grounded in reality like the 2014 Godzilla.  Godzilla vs. Kong throws all of that out the window.  None of the science in this science fiction makes a lick of sense.  These range from small things like generally non-human apes can't swim to how the hell can Godzilla's atomic breath dig down 2,000-4,000 miles into the center of the Earth?  And when the clearly not evil in any way leader of Apex explains his evil plan, it's actually not really that evil.  In fact, it is absolutely reasonable in principle, but the script needs to turn him into a bad guy so that Godzilla is not seen as evil.

Michael Dougherty, the writer/director of Godzilla King of the Monsters,  only gets story credit for this movie.  With all of its flaws, Dougherty's movie had a clear love and (more importantly) respect for the Godzilla mythology.  Godzilla vs. Kong does not.  

And for a movie titled Godzilla vs. Kong, the headliner is reduced to the antagonist.  This is clearly Kong's movie.  He has the clearest character arc (and that includes the humans) and is the most sympathetic.  Godzilla comes off as a lumbering bully.  They give a reason to explain his attacks on the human cities, but it doesn't change the fact that hundreds would have died because of them.  At least the first two Godzilla movies in this series kept the human toll in sight.  Here, deaths are played for laughs.  There is no sense of peril or even wonder.  Director Adam Wingard does a find job of giving us spectacle, but there is nothing here resembling substance.  Gone is any sense of awe or mystery to these creatures. Godzilla (2014) made the mistake of being too serious and not showing us nearly enough Godzilla.  Godzilla vs. Kong makes the mistake of being to unserious and showing us almost too much of the monsters. Watching this movie is like playing the video game Rampage (which they also made into a movie).

Having said all of that, this review is not a complete pan.  In fact, I enjoyed this movie probably more than I should.  King Kong and Godzilla are two of the most famous movie monsters.  And while they did have their own movie before in the 1960's, this is a more fully realized match up that little kids might imagine.  When I was a kid I loved the idea of fantasy match ups.  My cousin had a copy of Superman vs. Spider-Man that filled up my imagination (probably because he wouldn't let me read it).  This movie is like that.  There is very little logic to the fights.  Godzilla's atomic breath should end almost every fight immediately.  But view through the lens of a child's fantasy fight, the movie is a great deal of fun.

If two famous giant monsters fighting doesn't fire those happiness synapses in your brain, then you will probably find this movie dull and tedious.   As I wrote in previous Godzilla reviews, Godzilla movies are a genre unto themselves and the fans of these movies have very specific tastes.  I shall be curious as to their take on this movie.

I plan to watch this movie several more times.

But I'll be sure to skip all of the human parts.  Give me more monkey punching lizard!

Alleluia! Christ is Risen! Easter 2021

 

There is darkness and gloom in this fallen world, but Christ has conquered the world.

As I've written before, it is the most audacious thing in the world to believe the Easter message.  And that message is this: death is temporary.  When we encounter death, it feels like a permanent separation, an ending of our relationships.  But because Jesus rose from the dead, He has conquered death.  Now, death is "falling asleep" and we are all waiting for the new day to dawn!

A few years ago, I lost my beloved mother.  This year, my wife lost her beloved father.  Easter reminds us that death is not the solid, impenetrable wall of separation that many believe.  There is a gate.  And now, because of Christ, the gate swings both ways.  We will be reunited with those we love.  We will hold their hands and embrace them in our arms.  

Jesus has given a permanent hope to the world that will shine brightly until the world's ending.  

All things will pass away in this world, even nations and empires.  But the hope of Easter will never fade from the memory of the world.  It is a permanent spike in the ground that pierces the temporary nature of this universe and gives us a glimpse into our eternal destiny.  

He is Risen.

Alleluia!

Film Flash: A Week Away

 

15 words or less film review (full review to follow soon)

Check the Venn Diagram below to see if you will like this movie.

Film Flash: Godzilla vs. Kong

 

15 words or less film review (full review to follow soon)

As usual, human storylines are worthless and dumb, but monster fights are fun to watch.

Divine Mercy Novena 2021

 

A reminder that the Divine Mercy Novena begins tomorrow (Good Friday) and continues through until Mercy Sunday.  You can find the novena here:

https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/devotions/novena-13366

This has been a powerful and profound devotion in my life and many graces have come to me through a devotion to Jesus' Divine Mercy.  This past year I have experienced this Mercy in ways like never before.  I am more and more convinced that the only reason I have anything good in my life is because of His Mercy.  And I am even more convicted of the fact that if He is merciful to me, I must merciful to the people in my life.

I look forward to joining all of you in spiritual communion through this novena.

In these days with all of the worries and struggles that we have, we have a greater need to throw ourselves at the Mercy of God!