stasis

[IMDB]

netflix tricked me into watching this crap by describing it as a story that involved time travel. except that the time travel did not really end up being that relevant. it was really more of an eye-rollingly bad spy movie. other things that were eye-rollingly bad included the acting, sets, writing, direction, and sound.

when i was a kid, my friends and i would make home movies that featured a budget of zero, starring us and the cows (cows work for free!), filmed on a previously-used vhs tape. the writing process generally consisted of us arguing about what the next scene would be before filming it. there were no second takes, and the editing process consisted of us watching the whole thing from the beginning after we were done. 

you kids with your digital recordings and multiple tracks and the luxury of multiple days (or weeks!) to complete filming. you should be able to do better than something on par with "rambill" or "indiana dan." you have actual camera people, fer chrissakes! in my day, we never had more than two actors on screen because somebody always had to work the camera. and if we did a switch in the middle of a scene, you would see the camera jiggling as the handover happened.

stasis gets one reused vhs tape. free tip: record static over the top of whatever was there before in order to avoid an awkward splice when your camera does not start recording at exactly the same spot it stopped at after the previous scene.

baby driver

[IMDB] [Amazon]

i dunno, i like a good vehicular stunt.  did i like these?  well...sort of?  it was all very stylized, which i think was part of the point, but it made it very difficult to just enjoy watching people push vehicles to the limits.  not that you get to see a lot of that these days, what with all the effects and such.  remember bullit?  man, *that* was a car chase.

the truth of it is that, just like any skilled person, a good driver makes it look easy.  but that does not generally make for exciting cinema, so instead we get baby driver, a film which lays the style on so thick that it becomes a substitute for the substance which is otherwise lacking.

i am sorry, i got all pretentious there.  what i mean is that baby driver is popcorn.  lots of fun, goes down easy, ultimately kills you.  so lay off the butter already, and eat your vegetables.

baby driver gets two pairs of fancy glasses that look so awkward you might as well have just worn a mask.

bushwick

[IMDB]

interesting premise ruined by directorial masturbation. note that i said interesting, not plausible.

here is the thing, if you are going to do some fancy camera work, eg, make it look like you shot the whole movie in a single take, then you better a) make it invisible, or b) have a good goddamn reason. bushwick did neither. this whole one-take thing in particular is really driving me batshit, by the way. once you see it, you cannot unsee it, and what it is is awkward.

on the plus side, Dave Bautista turned in another understated performance that served to further secure his place as my new favorite wrestler-turned-actor. i also really appreciated the sound work, especially around gunfire. and finally, if there was anything that held this film together, it was the relentless pace paired with an unflinching look at a brutal experience. the balance between acknowledging the gore without lingering on it was exactly where i like it to be, which is to say, far away from me.

bushwick gets three fingers shot off in a gunfight.

bright

[IMDB] [Netflix]

bright is a painfully wrought allegorical tale about race relations in whatever century we currently find ourselves in. plus in this world everybody hates cops, apparently. so i guess that maps cleanly, in the sense that some people say they hate cops, except then the cops save the day, which allows them to be simultaneously downtrodden and heroic and secretly loved by all. except for bad people, who still hate cops, but it is ok, they will get theirs one way or another.

while i am complaining, i will also mention that the storyline was obvious, dialogue trite, characters unidimensional, special effects over/poorly used, and where the fuck were the other six races? there was a girl with nictitating membranes, was she supposed to be something? an aardvark-person, perhaps?

also, i know that will smith never dies in his movies, but if he had turned out not to be a bright, then it would have made for an instance of actual heroism, sacrifice, and character development. just saying.

so i guess what i am saying is that if you were going to really fuck up a movie about race relations, then you would do something like this. please oh please no sequels.

bright gets one elf with a dragon tattoo.