the m0vie blog

Non-Review Review: The Magnificent Seven

Posted on September 14, 2016 by Darren

The Magnificent Seven is a western, pure and simple.

It is not a deconstruction. It is not a reconstruction. It is not filtered through the lense of postmodernism or through the prism of postcolonialism. It does not interrogate the underlying assumptions of the western, nor does it explore the relationship between the myth of the frontier and the brutal reality. From beginning to end, through and through, The Magnificent Seven is very much a straightforward execution of the familiar western tropes delivered with a minimum of irony or reflection.

“Ain’t we magnificent?”

There is a certain charm to this. Director Antoine Fuqua takes great pleasure in running through the standard western tropes, particularly those epic tracking steadicam shots of riders galloping through acres of beautiful countryside as the theme music builds. There is a certain pleasure to be had in The Magnificent Seven as a film resistant to modernisation, a film content in the assumption that the language and iconography of the genre does not need to be tweaked or updated beyond the application of some computer-generated imagery and a modern cast.

There is also something deeply frustrating in all of this, something that reduces The Magnificent Seven to a rather lifeless collection of western imagery tied together in a fairly unimaginative way without anything particularly bold or exciting to say.

The sky’s the limit.

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: Antoine, denzel washington, film, fuqua, Movie, non-review review, the magnificent seven | 13 Comments »

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Apocalypse Rising (Review)

Posted on September 14, 2016 by Darren

Apocalypse Rising stands quite apart from the other Star Trek: Deep Space Nine season premieres.

Most obviously, it the only single-part season premiere across the entire seven seasons of Deep Space Nine. Emissary and Way of the Warrior were two-hour television movies. The Homecoming fed into the franchise’s first official three-part story. The Search, Part I and The Search, Part II were obviously a two-part episode, while Image in the Sand and Shadows and Symbols provided a two-part introduction to the seventh season. A Time to Stand segued directly into Rocks and Shoals while also setting up a six-episode arc.

The times, they are a-changeling…

This is not to suggest that Apocalypse Rising is a more typical Star Trek season premiere. It is not a continuation of Broken Link in the same way that The Best of Both Worlds, Part II is a direct continuation of The Best of Both Worlds, Part I or that Basics, Part II is a direct follow-on from Basics, Part I. While Apocalypse Rising does resolve a cliffhanger left dangling by Broken Link, that cliffhanger was only really set up in the final two minutes of the episode. Indeed, the cliffhanger dangling from Broken Link recalls the endings of The Jem’Hadar or The Adversary.

Apocalypse Rising is also notable for being the first season premiere that is not positioned as a jumping on point, that is not intended to either expand the scope of the show or recruit new viewers. One of the luxuries of avoiding the traditional cliffhanger structures to bridge seasons was the freedom to begin each season with a relatively clean slate and introduce new elements. The Search, Part I and The Search, Part II introduced the Defiant and retooled the show to focus on the Dominion. The Way of the Warrior brought Worf over and shifted emphasis to the Klingons.

Klingon to the status quo…

While Apocalypse Rising does represent a slight shift in the tone of the show, it is not a radical new departure. More than that, it leans rather heavily on the show’s established mythology and in some ways indicates a desire to get the show back on track following an extended detour into war with the Klingons during the fourth season. Apocalypse Rising confirms what was made clear during the fourth season of the show, that Deep Space Nine has eventually evolved into its final form. Apocalypse Rising is a show so comfortable with itself that there’s no need to reinvent.

Although a little cramped and rushed in places, Apocalypse Rising represents a strong start to a stellar season. It is an efficient and effective piece of television, one that demonstrates the clarity of focus driving the season that will follow.

Drinking games…

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Filed under: Deep Space Nine | Tagged: apocalypse rising, deep space nine, Dominion, gowron, Klingon Empire, Odo, politics, star trek, star trek: deep space nine, war | 8 Comments »

Star Trek – Season 3 (Review)

Posted on September 12, 2016 by Darren

This July and August, we’re celebrating the release of Star Trek Beyond by taking a look back at the third season of the original Star Trek. Check back every Monday, Wednesday and Friday for the latest update.

The third season of Star Trek was always doomed.

NBC had wanted to cancel the show after the second season, but a massive outpouring of fan support (and no small amount of press coverage) convinced them to renew the series for a third year. However, this was not a pardon. It was at best a temporary reprieve. The budget was slashed. Key creative personnel were lost. Outsiders with minimal experience in science-fiction television were drafted. The show was exiled to the graveyard shift of late Friday nights, when its target audience would either be in bed or out on the town.

With all of that in mind, it is no wonder that history has been cruel to the third season. The third season is generally regarded as a massive step down in quality from the first two years of the series, and that is certainly true. Without a strong producer like Gene L. Coon or a quality script editor like Dorothy Fontana, Star Trek would struggle to match the consistency of those first two years. Even before factoring in budget cuts and other constraints, the third season cannot compete with the prior two seasons on an episode-to-episode basis.

However, there is also a recurring sense that the third season of Star Trek is odd. It feels tangibly different from the two seasons that came before it. However, it also feels markedly different from the twenty-four live action seasons that followed. There is a strange tone to the season, one that feels distinct from that of the larger Star Trek franchise. The third season is populated by ghost stories and dying worlds, by mythology and folklore. Repeatedly, the logic that drives plots seems more magical than rational.

This lends the third season an almost mystical and irrational quality. While Star Trek has flirted with irrationality and dream logic before, most notably in the episodes credited to writer Robert Bloch and instalments like Shore Leave or The Immunity Syndrome, the third season grabs these concepts with both hands. There is a sense that all of the assumptions underpinning the Star Trek universe are up for grabs, that nothing can truly be known for certain, and that relaity itself is coming undone.

Coupled with a recurring motif of dying races and dead worlds, this irrationality serves to cast a shadow over the entirety of the third season. For all that the third season embraces the utopian ideals that would become a staple of the franchise, the third season is permeated by an apocalyptic dread. There is a sense that doomsday is approaching, that death is an inevitability, that all might be lost. In a very real way, this perfectly captures both the production realities of the third season and the general mood of the time around it.

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Filed under: The Original Series | Tagged: star trek, the original series | 7 Comments »

Non-Review Review: Blair Witch

Posted on September 9, 2016 by Darren

Blair Witch is more clever than scary, which is at once the best and worst thing about it.

Reteaming veteran collaborators director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett, the film is nominally a long-delayed sequel to the classic 1999 found footage horror. The Blair Witch Project was something of a game-changer when it arrived. At a point in time when movies like The Matrix and The Truman Show (not to mention eXistenz and The Thirteenth Floor) teased out the idea of characters trapped in unreal surroundings, The Blair Witch Project applied that aesthetic to a horror movie in the style of Cannibal Holocaust.

Any witch way but loose…

The Blair Witch Project kickstarted an entire genre of contemporary horror framed as documentary footage of horrible happenings; Cloverfield, [rec], Diary of the Dead, The Last Exorcism, Paranormal Activity. Such films appealed to studios because they were cheap to make, relying on no-name casts and minimal special effects as part of the premise. They also resonated with audiences, perhaps because they spoke to the postmodern anxieties at the cusp of the twenty-first century, perhaps because they mirrored the use of amateur footage in news and online.

Blair Witch marks a return to that premise, perhaps a fond farewell to a genre that has been in decline for the past few years. At their best, Wingard and Barrett push the premise of found footage horror to its limit. This is a film that wallows in its self-awareness and referential integrity, one that feels postmodern and cheeky, one that draws attention to its own status as a sequel by pointedly trapping its characters within a sequel. It is all very clever, and Blair Witch works best when it plays with these ideas. Unfortunately, its scares are nowhere near as clever.

Branching out.

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: blair witch, film, non-review review, review, the blair witch project | 2 Comments »

Star Trek – Turnabout Intruder (Review)

Posted on September 9, 2016 by Darren

This is the end.

And what an ignominious ending it is. Turnabout Intruder is the last episode of the original Star Trek run, bringing down the curtain on three years of boldly going and bidding farewell to this cast… at least for the moment. It is also an infamously terrible episode of television, in which Captain Kirk finds himself swapping bodies with the psychotic scientist Janice Lester. Lester is repeatedly categorised as insane, but her primary motivation seems to be rebellion against Starfleet’s institutional sexism.

It’s full of stars.

Seen as this is a Gene Roddenberry story, Turnabout Intruder sides entirely with Starfleet on the matter. This was the same writer and producer who would later balk at The Measure of a Man because he thought that Data should willingly surrender himself to Starfleet experimentation. So, instead of becoming an exploration of sexism and discrimination, Turnabout Intruder instead becomes a vigorous defense of institutionalised misogyny. Of course Starfleet doesn’t allow women captains, the episode suggests, they could never handle the strain!

It is an episode that really puts paid to the show’s claims of liberal progressivism, credited to a writer who would in later years cultivate a mythology of himself as the architect of that liberal progressivism. Turnabout Intruder is just about the most damning argument against the franchise’s utopian idealism imaginable, which makes it particularly insulting as a series finale.

William Shatner did not react well to news of cancelation.

William Shatner did not react well to news of cancellation.

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Filed under: The Original Series | Tagged: gene roddenberry, Misogyny, sexism, star trek, the original series, Turnabout Intruder, William Shatner | 22 Comments »

Star Trek – All Our Yesterdays (Review)

Posted on September 7, 2016 by Darren

It is almost as though the Star Trek franchise doesn’t want to end.

For a fifty-year-old franchise, Star Trek has a hilarious near-miss ratio when it comes to offering satisfying conclusions. There are exceptions, of course. The franchise seems quite good at closing smaller chapters while the rest of the property rattles on. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country was the best place to leave the cast of the original show. The final season of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine might have been rocky, but What You Leave Behind bid an emotional farewell to the cast and crew. Beyond that? The franchise struggles.

A cold reception.

It often seems like the ideal closing instalment is buried one or two stories shy of the actual ending. All Good Things… would have been a great place to leave the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation, particularly since Star Trek: Nemesis wound up being such a damp squib of a conclusion. Demons and Terra Prime provided a satisfying conclusion to the final two years of Star Trek: Enterprise, only for These Are the Voyages… to air as the final episode of the franchise for well over a decade.

This is something that the franchise inherited from the original show. Star Trek was remarkably terrible at choosing a high (or even an appropriate) note on which to end. Although some of this can be down to the fact that sixties television seasons did not build to a finale in the way that modern television does, the three seasons of Star Trek all end in disappointing fashions. The City on the Edge of Forever would have been a great close to a first season that built incredible momentum across its run. Instead, the year ended on Operation — Annihilate!

Snow escape.

This was a bigger issue during the second season, when it was entirely possible that Star Trek would be cancelled. Ending on a strong note was imperative. Instead, Gene Roddenberry chose to give over the last broadcast and production slot of the season to Assignment: Earth, a thinly-disguised (and ultimately underwhelming) pilot for a series that never got off the ground. Even in terms of production, the penultimate episode of the season was Roddenberry’s vile passion project, The Omega Glory. (The Ultimate Computer would have made a much better ending.)

So it is with the third season. The last episode of the third season is an infamous disaster, Turnabout Intruder ranking as one of the very worst episodes of Star Trek ever produced. Even the misguided and mean-spirited cynicism of These Are the Voyages… has nothing on the rank sexism of Turnabout Intruder. It was an ignominious episode upon which to draw down the curtain, to wrap up three years and seventy-nine episodes of storytelling. It is hard to tell whether the episode is more or less awful than The Omega Glory or Assignment: Earth, but it is in contention.

Dying free(ze)…

This is all the more frustrating because a perfectly good alternative rests right along side it. All Our Yesterdays is a flawed and imperfect episode in some key ways, like many of the third season episodes around it. It is a story that flows on dream logic rather than rational plotting, relying on a bizarre fairy tale version of time travel and falling back on some of Fred Freiberger’s best-loved tropes. It is also a tough sell as a “final” episode, given that the series had not been cancelled by the point that the episode entered production, and it does not offer too much in the way of closure.

And yet. All Our Yesterdays feels like the culmination of the morose themes that have been building through the third season, all the dead worlds and the ghost stories and the doomed romances. It is a story about escaping to the past when there seems to be no future. It is populated by barren wastelands and death sentences, about the literal end of the world and survival beyond that point. It is a quiet and withdrawn affair, morbid and reflective more than heightened or action driven. It is a story about death, which feels entirely appropriate at this interval.

How BiZara…

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Filed under: The Original Series | Tagged: all our yesterdays, spock, star trek, the city on the edge of forever, time travel | 20 Comments »

Non-Review Review: Ben Hur (2016)

Posted on September 7, 2016 by Darren

What does a biblical blockbuster look like in the twenty-first century?

Hollywood has wrestled with the question of how best to resurrect old genres. The past couple of years have seen a resurgence in revisionist westerns like The Hateful Eight or Bone Tomahawk or The Revenant. There have even been a smaller number of contemporary swords-and-sandals epics like The Eagle or Centurion or Pompeii. These genre were once a staple of Hollywood production, but they fell by the wayside in the intervening years. Barring an occasional breakout success, they are considered dead genres.

Chariots of fire!

Biblical epics are very much an example of such a genre, to the point that Hail, Caesar! focused on the production of such a film as a celebration of the Golden Age of Hollywood. More people can probably point to the iconic version of Ben-Hur starring Charleton Heston as the eponymous chariot rider than can name Lew Wallace as the author of the book upon which it was based. When Hollywood attempted a blockbuster adaptation of C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books, they did so by stripping out a lot of the more overt Christian themes.

Ben-Hur is part of a mini modern revival of these classic biblical epics for a new age, alongside films like Exodus: Gods and Kings or Noah or Risen. It is a film which struggles with the question of what a biblical epic needs to look like in this day and age, but is primarily useful as a counter-example. Whatever a successful modern biblical epic might look like, it is not this.

“Is Game of Thrones hiring, by any chance?”

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: ben-hur, film, Movie, non-review review, review | 6 Comments »

Non-Review Review: Hell or High Water

Posted on September 6, 2016 by Darren

Hell or High Water is a modern western, a tale of the land and the people shaped by it.

Hell or High Water revels in the old cowboy tropes. Repeatedly over the course of the film’s runtime, eye witnesses liken the outlaw pair at the centre of the story to “cowboys” or “cowpokes.” Set in West Texas, the film unfolds in a world of cowboy hats and rattlesnakes. This is a story about lonely men in the desert, land and self-determination. At one point, a half-Native American half-Mexican character pauses to reflect upon the idea that this is essentially the foundational myth of the frontier playing out again. The actors might change, but the roles remain the same.

No Country for Young Men.

Hell or High Water is bitter and cynical reflection on the concept of land and ownership, and the importance that it plays to the American identity. Towards the end of the film, bank robber Toby Howard justifies his actions by reference to generations of struggle; the generations that came before and the generations that will follow, and the land that has either condemned or sustained them. Toby is quite literally building his own future out there on the frontier, his bank robberies motivated by the urge to wrest back his family’s land so he might wrest a profit from it.

Like its lead characters, and like the land that drives them to this desperate course of action, Taylor Sheridan’s script is reserved and restrained. There is an economy to it, a sparseness and a leanness that suits this tale and the people inhabiting it. However, Sheridan’s script implicitly trusts director David Mackenzie, who manages to find a striking beauty and a stunning brutality in this rugged landscape inhabited by these rugged men.

At home on the Ranger…

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: chris pine, film, hell or high water, jeff bridges, Movie, non-review review, review | 6 Comments »

Non-Review: Don’t Breathe

Posted on September 6, 2016 by Darren

Don’t Breathe works reasonably well for about two thirds of its runtime.

The premise of Fede Alvarez’s Detroit-based horror is quite clever, a stew of familiar ideas thrown into a blender and delivered in a very stylish manner. Don’t Breathe is a film that begs to be summarised in pithy one-liners that bridge movie titles using the dreaded “… with …” In those terms, Don’t Breathe is Home Alone meets Halloween, Wait Until Dark meets The Bling Ring, Panic Room meets Saw. The combinations are infinite, as are the influences. And there is a charm to that.

Firing blind.

Horror is a visceral genre; doing something new is great, but so is doing something familiar in a novel way. For its first two thirds, Don’t Breathe is an exciting and tense horror movie with an ingenious high concept and with a number of reliable jump scares. Fede Alvarez does not necessarily innovate, but he understands how to pace a sequence for maximum tension and he has a great eye for cinematic influences. Contemporary culture can often feel like “remix” culture, mashing old ideas together to create something interesting. Don’t Breathe fits with that.

The problem comes during the movie’s third act, when the thrills and horror slow down just long enough to flesh out the “monster” at the centre of the film. As it pushes into its climax, Don’t Breathe becomes a lot less intriguing and effective. In those final twenty minutes, Don’t Breathe indulges the baser impulses of the horror genre in a manner that is crass and cheap. Don’t Breathe begins as a series of inventive homages to the best that horror genre has to offer. Unfortunately, it ends as a demonstration of the genre’s worst attributes.

Setting his (gun) sight on them.

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: don't breathe, exploitation, film, horror, Movie, non-review review, review, stephen lang | 1 Comment »

Non-Review Review: The Young Offenders

Posted on September 6, 2016 by Darren

The Young Offenders is mighty Cork, boi.

Perhaps the most enjoyable aspect of Peter Foott’s coming of age adventure comedy is its sense of place. There are any number of Irish films that depict modern rural life, most obviously the films of John McDonagh (Calvary or The Guard) or Garage or even Smalltown. However, for all that those stories deal with big themes and bold ideas, it is rare to get a perfect sense of place. As with just about any country, Ireland offers a rich and diverse cultural landscape, and The Young Offenders is interested in exploring that landscape even before the first use of a map insert.

theyoungoffenders1