For this week’s review, I chose a completely random stab in the dark movie I had never heard (and honestly wish I never had after having watched it for the blog…), Lions for Lambs (2007). This entire movie felt like it was trying so hard to be something big and provocative, a real “Oscar Nominee” attempt based on the stacked cast, the content, even down to its production. And at every turn, it fell short in many ways.

There is a purposeful scene in which Senator Jasper Irving (Tom Cruise) and the reporter interviewing him, Janine Roth (Meryl Streep) are talking, and Tom Cruise stands up, walks over to a chair, takes his jacket off, hangs it on the back of a chair, and then leans on the nearby window sill. It feels entirely forced and unnatural, almost as if every step of the process was precisely coordinated by the director. It’s supposed to add to the (self) perceived preciseness and motives of Tom Cruise’s character, but it falls extremely short. 

The concept of this movie is slightly interesting, it takes place in real time. Its 90ish minute run time revolves around the stories of 6 different characters that unfolds in real time. There is the journalist meeting with the senator, a professor meeting with one of his students, and two army rangers on a mission in Afghanistan. The mission that the two army rangers are on is what Senator Irving is describing to Janine Roth, as the new plan for the war on terror in the middle east. It’s an interesting concept to see the pencil pushers behind the desks planning the missions for those on the front line, but the execution of everything in this movie falls short, and ultimately feels boring. It’s definitely a movie that is less than the sum of its parts. 

The most interesting characters in this story are Professor Stephen Malley (Robert Redford, who also directs Lions for Lambs) and Todd Hayes (Andrew Garfield). Todd is a student in Professor Malley’s class, and they are having a meeting in the Professor’s office. The dialogue is deep, introspective, and very well written here. We’ve all been in Todd’s shoes, a young kid, with the world at his fingertips, but feeling lost and jaded by the potential of life as you get older and see the curtain pulled back. Professor Malley is older, and is trying to impart his wisdom on young Todd. These scenes were the only good parts of the movie. 

Arian (Derek Luke) and Ernest (Michael Peña) are the two army rangers, who are on the mission to “take the high ground” and set up smaller bases around the Afghan mountains, to give the U.S. Army the high ground, and set up strategic observation posts from which they can attack the smaller outlier groups of the Taliban. The “twist”, if you can call it that, is that Arian and Ernest were former students of Professor Malley. He was proud of them, and their efforts in his class, and the potential they each possessed. Professor Malley is a Vietnam Vet. The last thing he wanted was for Arian and Ernest to join the army and follow in his footsteps. Yet, that’s how they felt they could give back to the world. 

The major saving grace for this rather boring movie is that it only has a runtime of 92 minutes. If it were any longer, I would have had to spend more time bashing my head into my solid wood coffee table, wondering when it would end. The characterization was fine, Tom Cruise plays a sleazy and slimy politician, out to do what he wants and thinking he can get away with it all, and win his way to the presidency eventually. Tom Cruise actually plays this character well, and I think it may have to do with how sleazy and awful of a person he is in real life… 

Arian and Ernest, while on their mission, end up falling out of the helicopter they’re in, and are left alone in enemy territory. Unbeknownst to the army, the mountainside they are wanting to land in is already occupied by the Taliban. This is probably the weakest part of the entire movie. Two lone injured army rangers in enemy territory, surrounded by “the enemy”, and the entire sequence is so drawn out and has a terrible ending. Spoiler alert, but after laying in the snow, using up all of their ammo, and not knowing if help was on the way or not, they look at each other and say “Not laying down.” to one another. They then stand up, and with empty magazines in their guns, they aim them at the enemy, get shot full on, and die. I get they didn’t want to be taken alive as POWs, but this just feels beyond moronic and a dumb, pointless way to go out.

As I said earlier, this entire movie from the start feels like it’s trying too hard to be something it’s not quite good enough to be. It’s full of highbrow dialogue, and attempts to have the characters appear to be more important than they actually are. In the end, everything falls short, and leaves the viewer asking “that was it?” The final scene is Todd going back to his fraternity, sitting down, and watching the news with one of his frat-mates. We see the news ticker on the bottom of the screen scrolling by, showing news of the war in Afghanistan. Todd looks at the television with an expression of “huh, okay.” and then it cuts to credits.

As you’ve probably seen in my other reviews, I am not a fan of bad cuts to credits end scenes in movies, and this one is horrendous. The storyline with Janine is left unresolved, and we don’t have 

a clue as to what Todd is thinking at the end of the movie for what his future may hold. It’s not deep or meaningful in any way, if anything, it’s extremely lacking in everything that it’s attempting to be. 

I do not recommend this movie to anyone, it is a boring snooze fest of a film that fails to be anything close to what it set out to be. It has a 6.2 on IMDB, which is too gracious of a rating, a 28% critic score, and a 47% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, again with the audience score being too gracious. I do not think this is a movie that is worth anyone’s time. Everything feels incomplete. It’s pseudo intellectualism at its worst. 

1 mallard/5

-Seann

We Are Still Here (2015) is a film that was listed as number 7 on Rolling Stone’s list of top ten horror films of the year for the year of 2015. What this means to me is that there must have been only 7 horror films released that year, because it’s hard for me to imagine a worse horror movie than this one. While I’m going to talk about the film a little bit in this review, it’s mostly going to be me railing against the horror genre and genre films in general. This is the second horror film I’ve watched for the blog, the first one being The Awakening (2011), which I gave a score of 3, so I have in fact shown the potential to appreciate a horror film, despite my following opinions of the genre, or at the very least the current state of the genre. This should shield me from “horror movies just aren’t your thing, man” accusations. 

At what point do consumers, as a whole, decide that we’ve explored everything there is to explore about a given topic or in a given domain? At what point do creators shrug their shoulders and say ‘there’s nothing new that we can do?’ I think the genre of horror film has reached this point, though apparently I’m in the minority. This film was one of the most tropey, uninteresting, predictable, forgettable, and milquetoast movies I’ve watched this year. Despite this, many reviewers found that to be a good thing. Many claimed that the creators revealed a “love of the genre” and an appreciation for the medium of the horror film. It’s curious to me that genre films, specifically horror, action, and thriller, are praised for just being collections and mish-mashes of prior films that have been haphazardly thrown together. I feel that they should be admonished for not bringing anything new or interesting to the table. There are ways to show your knowledge and appreciation for a set of conventions and those who inspired you while also taking things in a new direction or a new approach.

The most creative thing about this movie is the poster, which is admittedly pretty dang cool looking. I was a bit excited to watch this film, because of how little information there was about it (it did not receive a theatrical release) and how interesting the poster looks. The first six minutes were very promising – a collage of establishing shots that show us a stately house in a rural and snowy New England. The visuals are very pastoral, almost peaceful, and seemed quite inviting and quiet. There was minimal dialogue for these first few minutes, and we’re treated to some pretty interesting and carefully chosen coloring of the characters’ clothing and surroundings. Then everything falls apart shortly after that. 

While I was watching this, I checked multiple times to see if this was listed anywhere as a satire or a parody. It honestly is not that far away from a Scary Movie-esque work. One character says that the first owner off the house “sold the bodies to the orientals in Boston who made them into chop suey.” Later on, as some of the characters leave the house and leave two other behind, one of those left behind says “what do you think we’re going to do, start a seance the second you leave?” I mean, who wrote this? Is this really what a ‘good’ horror movie is like? Perhaps I’m intellectualizing it too much or something, but does each movie in this genre have to be so regimentally structured and hokey? I understand the cult status of things like Troll 2 (1990) because they’re poorly made, had extremely low budgets, and are laughably incompetent. I would argue this movie is different from something like Troll 2 only in that the creators were operating with prior experience. There’s nothing remotely unique about this movie.

The ideal horror film, for me, is one in which a story is told that happens to have supernatural or enigmatic elements. Most horror films approach this the opposite way – they create a ghoul/monster/spectre/whatever and then shoehorn it into a ‘story’ as a way just to get that thing on screen. This movie is no exception. After having watched it, I have no clue what exactly was actually going on. There was a ton of blood and a lot of people died and there were like four or five jump scares that didn’t scare me. Things fell off the wall without being touched. There were things lurking in the shadows. Someone was shown from the waist-up, the camera followed them as they bent down to pick something up off the ground, and when they stood back up something was behind them. My response to these moments is always the same: okay, and? 

If I could compare this to the film I watched last week, The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015), I actually found Diary to be much more frightening and unsettling. I’m never going to encounter a house that harbors chain-smoking molten rock lava people, but I’m almost certainly going to make a small mistake at some point that snowballs into a life-changing experience. In fact, I’ve already done that multiple times. Diary was also able to accomplish this while having characters that were well-written, articulate, had real personalities, and behaved in a believable way. Nobody even had to get possessed for me to be made uneasy about what happened in Diary! I don’t even think anybody died in the entire movie, furthermore. Crazy. Yet, there are no review claiming that Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015) showed an ‘appreciation for the genre’ or a ‘love of the past’.

We Are Still Here (2015) has an IMDB rating of 5.7 out of 10, a shocking Rotten Tomatoes tomatometer score of 96%, and a Letterboxd score of 2.9 out of 5. Who is enjoying this movie? I hated it. Baffling.

1 mallard/5

-Maxwell