Mickey17 (3/5 Stars)

A “Straw Man Argument” is a logical fallacy where an opposite position is distorted into an extreme version and then argued against. Instead of addressing the actual argument, a straw man argument presents a simplified or false version of the opponent’s stance.

Science fiction polemics, by their very nature, are straw man arguments. Because they take place in the future, the proponent gets to lay the groundwork for several hundred (maybe thousands) of years of distortion by making the audience assume that across the vastness of time and space the opposite argument when enacted into policy will naturally result in an inevitable and disastrous slope towards dystopia.

Here, in writer/director Bong Joon-Ho’s newest movie, Mickey 17, we are introduced to a world where the world is beset by environmental destruction and rampant organized crime. The remainder of the human race desperately seeks to leave a doomed Earth for a distant planet. A buffoonish politician (Mark Ruffalo) and his Machiavellian wife (Toni Collette) lay on thick plans of cultish demagoguery for the new settlement, which an utterly naive populace consumes without a hint of critical thought. One especially pitiful creature, Mickey Barnes (played by Robert Pattison) signs up to be an expendable, which apparently is a category of human being that agrees to be cloned for the purpose of suicidal tasks that range from being exposed to radiation, to being a test subject for biological weapons, to being a guinea pig for the development of vaccines. We are introduced to Mickey 17, who provides an elongated voiceover explanation as to the gruesome fate of versions 1-16.

For various reasons that need even more elongated voiceover explanation, this particular spaceship can only have one expendable on it, so Mickey is tasked with every single suicidal task the mission requires. He’s a great help. Indeed by his multiple sacrifices he saves many lives and is hard to imagine the mission succeeding at all without him. You would think these people would be grateful. But they aren’t, because apparently the future is full of shitheads. (Except for the one black woman. Black women, as we all ought to know, are magic negroes imbued with a sense of heightened morality brought upon by the extreme intersectionality of their historic victimhood).  They treat him as if everyone was still in grade school and he came to class with the wrong kind of shoes. I don’t think Mickey Barnes is even being paid.

Would society in the future actually not care about the experience of cloned people? Would we treat them as second class citizens? I ask you, given the world as it is today, why that would be a probable outcome? There have been many science fiction books and movies about cloned people. Can you think of one example where the author isn’t sympathetic to their plight? Do you hear anyone today arguing that clones might be a decent source of cheap slave labor? Wouldn't it be odd if our culture in the 20th-21st Century started out uniformly sympathetic towards clones and then turned with uniformed antipathy against them sometime in the future? And yet, in every single one of these science fiction books and movies, the creator assumes that this will be the case. If there is basically no one with antipathy against clones today, who exactly is Bong Joon-Ho arguing with here?

The answer I don’t think is any one segment of society that actually has antipathy towards clones. I believe Bong Joon-Ho’s argument is against capitalism and he is setting his scene way far into the future to suggest an inevitable outcome of the march of capitalism towards some dystopia where the lives of human beings become valueless in the face of corporations or contracts. It is telling that he wouldn’t be able to make that argument today, since all that has occurred since the introduction of capitalism as a ruling orthodoxy in society (starting say in England circa the Industrial Revolution) is the steady democratization of political power, an exponential rise in the standard of living, and the universal acceptance of human rights, at least in societies that use capitalism. There are still plenty of places that do not have capitalism, and the people there remain slaves to power monopolies. I’m not sure why Bong Joon-Ho, if he is so concerned about the plight of humans, can’t direct a satiric gaze at North Korea, the totalitarian state across the border, where people are treated like animals as we speak, not far off in the distant future.

One of the more influential pieces of culture in the past few years to originate from South Korea was Squid Game, a contemporary story about a group of capitalistic elites (mainly composed of gay texans and at least one Chinese man) pit debt-laden and put-upon South Koreans against each other in fights-to-the-death. Have any of these people ever heard of North Korea? Squid Game could take place there, except of course, for the prize money element.

Mickey 17 draws parallels (and maybe inspiration) from a better movie about science fiction clones. That would be 2009's Moon by Duncan Jones starring Sam Rockwell. That is a much better critique of capitalism. The main difference is that the original Sam Rockwell astronaut sold his genetic material to a corporation and gave them the permission to use and dispose of his clones on a remote lunar base. In that movie, the original guy is sitting at home getting paid for the work his clones are performing. His clones, although expendable and not privy to the truth, are treated with a nominal amount of respect. No one goes out of their way to insult them and the robot on the base is programmed to be helpful. It is a much more interesting take on the subject since it is much closer to an actual moral quandary that someday could occur.

Moon came out in 2009. At the time, it was impressive to see Sam Rockwell interact with himself on screen. In 2025, although I enjoyed the performance of Robert Pattinson in Mickey 17, I am no longer impressed all that much by seeing two of the same actor interact with himself. It’s not all that much of a novelty any longer. It is always nice to see Steven Yeun show up in a movie. It would have been better if he was around longer and was more important to the plot. Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette ham it up as real idiots and that go about doing real stupid things. One wonders how they could ever be put in charge of anything, and then one remembers that this takes place in the dystopic future where everything is possible.

Has it really been six years since Bong Joon-Ho made his previous film, the great Parasite. Do you notice the integral difference between that movie and this one? Parasite takes place in the present day. So, to make it believable, there couldn't be the underhanded straw man cheating that is possible in science fiction movies. Joon-Ho was forced to present characters that would be believable in our time. That constraint made for a much better movie. He should do more of that and, please, more often.

Nightmare Alley (3/5 Stars)

“Nightmare Alley” was directed by Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth, The Shape of Water) and adapted from a novel that had earlier been made into a movie in the 1940s (I haven’t seen it). Ostensibly it is a horror film, but it felt more like the devolving efforts of Tim Burton, that is, much competent and loving attention is paid to the macabre look of the film, the creepiness of carnivals, the moodiness of 1930s-1940s noir style and fashion, but not so much to the underlying emotional landscape. In other words, Nightmare Alley looks like it might be scary, but it isn’t.

The movie looks very good on paper. It has a large talented cast including Bradley Cooper and Rooney Mara in romantic leads, Cate Blanchett as a psychiatrist/femme fatale, Willem Dafoe as an unscrupulous carnival operator. In supporting roles are Toni Collette, Richard Jenkins, Ron Perlman, and David Strathairn. It has great production design and costumes and in general, looks really good. The writing is at its most interesting when carnival techniques are explored. In particular, the David Strathairn character is a mentalist, that is a person who can read other people’s minds (and perhaps communicate with ghosts). Mentalists cannot actually read minds, but like magic in general, sometimes the technique and artistry of how they appear to do so is just as interesting or even more so than the act demanded to be believed. Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper) shows up to the carnival as a no-name drifter. He does odd jobs until he becomes involved with Pete (David Strathairn) and his wife Zeena the Seer (Toni Collette). Soon they begin to teach him the art of mentalism. These details, and later scenes in which Stanton Carlisle performs a mentalist show in front of a well-heeled audience in Chicago, are the best in the movie.

What seems to be the problem is that the movie has no hook. As such, the plot progresses without anticipation and/or suspense. We are presented with Stanton Carlisle, a man with no background, and must take him as he is. As he is a poor drifter, my first inclination is to want him to gain a living. Stanton Carlisle starts learning and performing mentalism, first in an emergency situation and then as real bona fide act. The movie appears to frown upon this, with a character or two making vague suggestions that he don’t get into the ghost part of the business. My first inclination is that I support him in his new venture. Stanton woos a fellow circus performer Molly Cahill (Rooney Mara) and proposes that they ditch the carnival and move their mentalism show to Chicago where they will make lots more money and live in a nice hotel. The movie appears to frown upon this. Bruno, the strongman in the carnival, (Ron Perlman), tells Stanton to stop being so friendly with the girl and that he is watching him. My first inclination is that Molly works for a carnival. She should take this opportunity to make more money with Bradley Cooper, who is nice enough, good-looking and ambitious.

It is hard to say, but I’m not sure the movie was aiming at my first inclinations. I think Guillermo del Toro wanted instead some sense of growing dread that the whole thing wouldn’t turn out so good. If this is the case, I think he miscast Bradley Cooper, who wasn’t giving off “bad guy” vibes at all. Moreover, when things do go wrong, they don’t quite seem to have the proper motivation. Like, I don’t understand what Dr. Lillith Rader’s (Cate Blanchett) motivations are, or why Stanton, if he is assuming she is untrustworthy, would trust her so blindly. I also didn’t get why Stanton starts drinking whiskey after swearing that he never touches the stuff, or after all the inevitable bad things happen, why Stanton doesn’t just start over. I mean, isn’t he at the end of the movie exactly where he was at the beginning. Why are there no options? Why doesn’t he just move his mentalist act to Canada? Perhaps there are explanations but I did not pick up on them.

The movie seems to want to say something about a certain set piece of a carnival show: the geek. This is a guy that goes in front of everyone and bites the heads off of chickens. The geek we see is unkempt, dirty, and wild. I thought for certain he may have a mental disability. Instead, it is explained that he is an alcoholic that Clem Hoatley (Willem Dafoe) surreptiously got hooked on heroine. (If this is the case though, why can’t the geek speak a language. Here his ability to communicate is limited to grunts and screams.) In this way, the movie appears to be saying that even Stanton Carlisle. who once successfully swore off drink, worked hard, wooed a beautiful girl, and performed as a perfectly fine mentalist, could subsequently become so degraded by life as to become a carnival geek. I’m sorry, I don’t buy that, which ultimately means, that I didn’t get the whole point of this movie. Oh well, they can’t all be winners.

I'm Thinking of Ending Things (3/5 Stars)

 

I saw “I’m Thinking About Ending Things”, the new movie written and directed by Charlie Kaufman (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Synecdoche New York), without reading any reviews about it. Strange things occurred all over the place. Still I believe I grasped the basic concept of what was happening. My guess was that an old janitor at the local high school was reminiscing (and revising) a memory he had a long time ago when he brought a girl he liked back home to meet his parents for the first time. I was close. After I saw the movie I read an review/interview with Mr. Kaufman in which it was revealed that everything but the janitor going about his day at the school was entirely imagined. There was no memory the janitor was revisiting. The whole thing was a daydream.

 

Is that a spoiler? I’m not sure. A spoiler generally refers to revealing a detail of a plot too early. In this movie, the basic concept is never revealed. You can only guess at it. Furthermore, I’m not sure knowing what the concept is will change how you view the movie a second time. There is much in this movie that is just strange and is hardly justified by the movie’s concept. There is a dog that appears and disappears randomly, a mysterious basement that isn’t so mysterious, a dinner meal that is never eaten. In the third act, the movie delves into ballet and animation. Even now, when I know what was happening, I could not tell you why most of the strange choices were necessary. They appear to be arbitrary to me.

 

This is the sort of argument I would level against a David Lynch film, but I have also like some of what David Lynch has done (the Twin Peaks tv show in particular). And I liked the movie The Lighthouse last year, so strange happenings by themselves are not a complete turn off to me. However, there is a problem with static scenes that simply go on too long to be anything but boring after a while. There are two scenes that take place entirely in a car. Each must be at least fifteen minutes long and contain nothing but dialogue. Kaufman changes the camera angle a bunch of times, but that is not enough. After a while one cannot stave off the feeling that nothing has happened for an exceptionally long period of time.

 

The concept when finally understood (I recommend reading articles that explain this movie either before or after seeing it) is very sad. Apparently, this old janitor never got far in his love life because he was always so terrified at bringing a woman home to his depressing farm to meet his weird parents. Even his imaginary girlfriend (here played by Jessie Buckley, his imaginary self is played by Jesse Plemons) does not seem to like him. Even though she is a creation of his mind and implanted with various bits of culture he has picked up over the years (landscape painting, Pauline Kael movie reviews, his favorite poem), she can’t help want to end the relationship, thus the title. I can’t help but think of Fight Club, which was about a man who so loathed himself that his imaginary friend wanted and proceeded to beat the shit out of him.

 

I’m not about to tell Charlie Kaufman to stop being so depressing. (Surely solitary high school janitors deserve movie as much as anyone else.) However, it may be a good idea for him to stop directing his own screenplays. His best movies employed such inventive directors as Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation) and Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). They brought a colorful energy to Kaufman’s writing that is sorely missing from the bland palette of Kaufman’s own directorial visions (Synecdoche New York and Anomalisa). Perhaps if Kaufman went back to only writing his movies, he could find more time to make more of them. I note that Kaufman has only made two movies in the past decade. That is not nearly enough with someone with so much raw talent.

Knives Out (5/5 Stars)

The Trope (aka Movie Cliché) abounds for a practical reason. They represent to the unimaginative a kind of shortcut in the creative process. Instead of going through the rigamorale of producing from scratch a totally original plot, they reuse tried and tested plot devices gleaned from genre and tradition. Like jokes told more than once, these tropes lose some of their effect each time they are employed, but this should not cover up their inherent truth: They are used so often because they work.

Perhaps the most used plot is the murder mystery. Agatha Christie at one point would churn these stories out annually making her the most best-selling author behind The Bible and William Shakespeare. Someone gets killed: Big Deal. The killer is still out there: Present Danger! Who is it? Suspense! The most used trope within the murder mystery plot is the locked room. That is, all the characters are in the same locked room with the dead body. We don’t know who the killer is but they must be someone in the room.

This story has been told many times over. As stated before, such retelling lowers the effectiveness of the trope. That is unless the writer reemploys creativity to the trope, subverting the audience’s already held expectations. In this way, the plot’s dull edged are resharpened and, once again employ their original effectiveness. Such is “Knives Out” an ingenious locked room murder mystery written and directed by Rian Johnson (Brick, Looper)

The setting is an old mansion isolated in the New England woods. Therein Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer), best-selling author of murder mysteries, is holding his 85^th birthday party. All his family is in attendance, a colorful privileged lot of bigoted conservatives and insufferable liberals. Harlan does many things that night to give a colorable argument for each of his family members to seek his death. And then Harlan commits suicide by slitting his own throat. The police are pretty sure it’s a suicide but then the great private detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) shows up, hired by an unknown someone who suspects foul play.

Benoit Blanc is himself a mystery. He is played by an Englishman (James Bond no less), has a decidedly French name, and employs a southern accent. This is not explained. Without giving too much away, and I can’t because what I am about to reveal happens in the first twenty minutes, the story is not necessarily a whodunit, but more of a how did a particular character didn’t do it?

We are shown in the first twenty minutes that Harlan’s in-house nurse Marta Cabrera (Ana de Armas) mixes up his medication, giving him an overdose of morphine. In order to spare her a criminal conviction, Harlan instructs her how to escape the house without attracting suspicion and then kills himself. But is that all to this story? And who hired Benoit Blanc to investigate? And why?

The family of Harlan Drysdale is a cabinet of unique caricatures and good casting. The more important ones are: Linda Drysdale, daughter of Harlan (Jamie Lee Curtis), her husband Richard Drysdale (Don Johnson), and their playboy son Ransom Drysdale (Chris Evans); Walt Thrombey, son of Harlan (Michael Shannon); Joni Thrombey (Toni Collete), daughter-in-law of Harlan. It is to the credit of Rian Johnson, that they are not all terrible people. They have their faults, and some are worse than others. Others, like Walt Thrombey, are not so bad, well, most of the time. In this way, the writer throws the audience leads and red herrings and makes us thinks very hard about how much we trust everyone.

There is one character that Rian Johnson wants us to trust completely and that is the in-house nurse Marta Cabrera. Marta has a medical disorder that causes her to vomit every time she tells a lie. But she is also the one who gave Harlan a fatal dose of morphine and last saw him before he died. How did she not do it? Well, watch the movie and see if you can figure it out before the cliché everyone-in-the same room as the great detective makes his speech scene. The reveal is highly effective.

The Way, Way Back (3/5 Stars)

I am going to say something rather mean a little bit later. So watch for that.

“The Way, Way Back” was inspired by an experience of Jim Rash, one half of the writing/directing team behind the movie (the other writer/director is Nat Faxon). When he was a youngster of 14 his family spent a summer at his stepfather’s beach house. On the way there his stepfather told him to rate himself between a 1 and a 10. Little Jim answered 6 thinking it was a safe number. His stepfather disagreed and said he was more like a 3 and that he should use the summer as an opportunity to get that number up. What a dick thing to say and apparently this entire movie is a sort of cinematic revenge against Jim Rash’s stepfather. The main character Duncan (Liam James) is a youngster of 14 who is insulted by his stepfather in exactly the same way in the first scene of the movie. Now I will say the mean thing. Based on the movie I saw, I think Duncan is about a 3 too.

There is an impressive cast in this movie. Steve Carell and Toni Collete play Duncan’s parents. Next-door is the hard-drinking town gossip, Allison Janney and her conveniently attractive teenage daughter played by AnnaSophia Robb. Rob Corddry and Amanda Peet hang around as friends of friends. And right down the road is a water park staffed by Sam Rockwell, Maya Rudolph, Jim Rash, and Nat Faxon. This is as good a cast that anyone can have for a comedy. But Steve Carell and Rob Corddry, seasoned comedians, are not really given a chance to tell jokes. Sam Rockwell, an actor who can’t be uninteresting, could be giving a seminar on why scenes of dialogue don’t work when only one person is trying. Maya Rudolph continues her lengthy movie streak of severely unwritten roles. And AnnaSophia Robb perhaps has the hardest job of all but I will get to that later. The main problem is that the character Duncan is in every scene. And Duncan is a truly sad and boring presence. He has no interests or hobbies. He has nothing to say. He is a truly pathetic dancer. His situation with his father and especially the first scene engenders him a great deal of sympathy, but as a movie character this can only go so far. At some point he has to prove himself on the merits of his character. Instead the movie situates the kid in the midst of cool people that have no particular reason to hang out with him and have him win certain battles that can come off as contrived. It’s like watching a youth soccer league give a trophy for “Most Improved” to the worst player on the last place team. It is an exercise in self-esteem generation with no concern of whether it is deserved.

I want to make a point of comparison here so it doesn’t seem like I’m just bashing pale emo kids. In 2008 a movie called “Role Models” came out. It starred Paul Rudd as a man that was sentenced to 100 hours of community service as a Big Brother. He gets a kid named Augie, played by Christopher Mintz-Plasse. Augie is a pale nerdy emo kid with a stepfather and a mother that think he is a loser. So it is basically the same sort of story. However in “Role Models” Augie is given a hobby. He enthusiastically participates in a real life medieval role-playing game named LAIRE. He has made his cape and costume. He is practicing his sword moves. He knows so much about it that it is successfully demonstrated that he is involved in something very fun and interesting. So by the end of the movie when Paul Rudd gets mad at Augie’s parents and says he would be “psyched” to have a kid like Augie, the scene really works. It is not an exercise in self-esteem inflation. Augie really is a great kid. “The Way, Way Back” merely has a series of characters, mainly his stepfather and a series of girls that are unnecessarily mean to Duncan. But merely having some characters being mean to another character does not make the latter likable. It makes the latter pitiable.

Which takes us back to the impossible job of AnnaSophia Robb, the hot girl next door, who is tasked with finding some reason any reason for being the romantic interest in this story. I pity her perhaps the most. I think it was a very good thing that the writers decided to make her sullen and boring too because if a vibrant enjoyable girl fell in love with Duncan I think I would actually be annoyed to the point of anger. Once, just once, I want to see a movie about a teenage loser that does not somehow get the most beautiful girl in town to fawn all over him. I know Jim Rash did not get any action when he was 14. Why did he decide to write such this girl of cliché into his story?

There is also a problem with much of the humor in the story, which is generally mean. This usually would not be a problem but it is in this case given Duncan’s main personality trait as a kid being unnecessarily picked on. Let’s take a scene that the creators apparently found so funny that they put it in every single movie trailer. At the largest water slide in the park an attendant played by middle aged Nat Faxon is in charge of spacing out the kids going the slide. He likes to play a joke in which he deliberately makes teenage girls wait to start for an inordinately long time so he can ogle them in their bikinis. Duncan gets a job at the water park and later on he pulls the exact same prank. If the whole thing about this movie is that it is uncool for people to be unnecessarily mean to Duncan, why is Duncan presented as cool when he is being unnecessarily mean to other people. In fact, there is a character (played by Jim Rash) in here whose sole purpose is to be mercilessly made fun of by the entire water park staff. This is admittedly consistently funny because Jim Rash is consistently funny but that doesn’t mean it isn’t hypocritical, a concept of which this movie seems to be completely unaware. Guess what? That is bad writing and I am going to double down on what I said about the writing team of Nat Faxon and Jim Rash in my review of “The Descendants.” They are not particularly good at what they do. I don’t care if they just won an Oscar for it.

Little Miss Sunshine 11/17/06

This is the sweetest fucking movie I have seen this year. It might be the sweetest fucking movie I will see in my entire life. It is just so fucking sweet. and I don't say 'sweet' with any slang connotation. This is truly sweet. It is cheerful, it is cute, it captures all the joy and laughter that somehow peeks through the dreariness of mediocre lives. When one day you wake up and you feel like complete crap and you don't want to get out of bed and go to work but you do because you hate yourself and your so miserable but then you spot a child or just someone you know who is exceedingly cheerful because that's who they are and although you've been trying so hard to have the worst fucking day in your life this little ray of sunshine pierces your heart and melts all the fucking indifference in your system. All your problems turn into solutions and everything that looked so ugly suddenly looks beautiful and you want to stand up and clap and sing and dance and hug oh-so-tightly those you love. That's what this movie feels like. It's the fucking sweetest fucking movie I have ever seen in my entire life. God I love that kid. Everyone else in this movie, although they may be the most depressed people in the world, do too. She's beautiful and I'm not just saying that because of her brains and personality.

I'm not a fortune teller, but if I know anything, it's that the Academy loves giving out the Best Original Screenplay Oscar to this type of movie. Its the director's, Jonathon Dayton and Valerie Faris, and screenwriter's, Michael Arndt, first movie. It's very low budget and it's skillfully made although not expertly made. It's got the amateurish feel to it in that certain scenes may have been staged better or edited differently. It doesn't feel like an art house movie. It's a tiny independent movie, one of those you're glad to have seen because it feels like it could have easily been overlooked. There's a hell of a lot of potential here that makes me eagerly await their next film. One that will hopefully have as much heart, but also the little details that can only come from a good amount of helpful experience. Like I said, this movie isn't technically good enough to get huge awards attention only because so many other films look and feel superior. But it definitely will get a Original Screenplay nomination, and I wouldn't be surprised if it won.