Matthew Fox and Jeffrey Donovan have earned a lot of goodwill lately. Fox with his efficiently ruthless Indian killer in Bone Tomahawk and Donovan with his treacherous elder son in the second season of Fargo. They’re not given nearly as much to work with in Extinction, but that’s hardly a fair comparison; Bone Tomahawk and the second season of Fargo are two of the most amazing things I’ve seen this year. Extinction, on the other hand, is just an occasionally clumsy zombie apocalypse yarn. So while they’re eminently watchable here, I can’t blame them for coming across a little flat in comparison to what else they’ve been doing lately. They’re each standing in tall shadows they partly cast themselves.
But Extinction is a unique entry in a genre that’s rarely unique. The first distinguishing feature is an unconventional love triangle. It’s Heather has two daddies…who went through an acrimonious divorce and are now the last survivors in a town called Harmony (subtle irony isn’t Extinction’s strong point). Simple and powerful relationships provide the structure, with Fox, Donovan, and the adorably Barrymore-esque Quinn McColgan as the fulcrum between them. Zombies provide the threat, but instead of shambling hordes, they’re lurking memories. They are a second distinguishing feature for how this isn’t your usual undead rot or rage virus. The final distinguishing feature is a crisp winter aesthetic, icy and colorless. The door to an abandoned house cracks open with that same gratifying ice sheet shatter as a car door opened after an overnight freeze. That cold glaze covers Extinction. This is where it lives. It is the opposite of fertility. Mother Nature has turned as harshly indifferent as a drunkenly numb parent.
Spanish director Miguel Angel Vivas’ previous movie, Kidnapped, was hollow home invasion trash with nothing to recommend it but its real-time split-screen gimmickry. Here Vivas shows that he doesn’t need a gimmick. He shows he can be heartfelt, exciting, and unpredictable, if a bit too earnest. Brace yourself for occasional clunkers like “you are so hellbent on surviving that you’ve forgotten how to live”. I can even sympathize with the zombies in that I sure do wish the music would let up. I’m trying to watch a movie here and the soundtrack keeps butting in to explain everything.
Extinction is available for VOD. Support Qt3 and watch it on Amazon.com.
Body stars two very good actresses and Alexandra Turshen. The best part of the movie is when Turshen lets loose with a full throated scream into someone else’s face and the movie just cuts to black. The intensity of her scream and the abruptness of the cut are chilling. They belong in a better movie.
Unfortunately, the talented, winsome, and frail Helen Rogers will duplicate the moment and it won’t work. Partly because Body doesn’t cut away. Mostly because Rogers isn’t up to the full-throated intensity of Turshen’s scream. Rogers’ strength is her expressiveness and, ironically, her vulnerability, both used to powerful effect in “The Sick Thing That Happened To Emily When She Was Younger”, one of the best shorts in the 2012 horror anthology V/H/S.
The problem with Body, one of those thrillers about otherwise reasonable people making bad decisions, is that the bad decisions make no sense. Body hopes you’ll believe that these bad decisions result from the force of Turshen’s personality as the alpha female. But being blandly pretty and merely loud don’t qualify you for alpha status. So the script makes its absurd leaps, while Rogers and Lauren Molina, the other very good actress, gamely do their best to bring you along. It isn’t enough. Some leaps are simply too far to make. Body disappears into a chasm of implausibility.
Body is currently in limited release and will be available for VOD on December 29.
A lot of the Fallout 4 conversation is about how it compares to The Witcher 3. What an odd comparison. The Witcher 3 is high fantasy with a predetermined protagonist in a very specific story that focuses on character development and good writing. Fallout 4 is pretty much the opposite of all that.
The more appropriate comparison is to Xenoblade Chronicles X. They have a lot in common, including a blank slot where you plug in your own hero. They both have an open world, mechs, sidekicks, character customization, an unruly world for you to settle, carefully calculated landscapes, quest list gameplay, stranger-in-a-strange-land storylines that you can pursue at your leisure, crafting, stylized combat.
After the jump, which one is for you? Continue reading →
Join us for an exploration of Christmas horror/comedy. Then, if you have time, stick around for our 3X3 of watches and clocks. It starts at the 1:02 mark.
Next week: In the Heart of the Sea
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Leaving Earth is one of the reasons I have no desire to make games. Sometimes a game design comes along that’s smart, unique, and exciting. Sometimes a game design comes along that convinces me to leave it to the professionals to do the hard work of thinking up this stuff. Sometimes a game design comes along that makes me think, “Oh man, I never would have thought to do it that way!” Joe Fatula’s Leaving Earth, a boardgame about the race into space in the 60s and 70s, is one such game.
After the jump, we choose to leave Earth not because it is easy. Continue reading →
Is this minor Pixar or is it a refreshing change of pace? Does it look good or does it look awful? Is it paced well or is it too slow? Is the first part better or is the last part better? All these opinions are represented on this week’s podcast! But at the 1:08 mark, we come together as if one for a 3×3 of our favorite twins.
Next week: Krampus
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There are three reasons to watch The Final Girls, not to be confused with The Final Girl also featuring Alexander Ludwig who’s probably having a heck of a time convincing people he’s in two separate movies this year. The Final Girl, singular, basically has no reasons to watch it. But then there are all the reasons not to watch The Final Girls, plural. Most of them have to do with writing that can’t sustain it beyond a clever premise as a send-up of slasher flicks. This has been a cottage industry since, oh, about 1981, starting with Student Bodies and going all the way up to the brilliant Cabin in the Woods. But as any of those other movies know, one of the worst ways to lampoon a slasher film is by having to play it safe. But Final Girls is conspicuously PG-13 with the way it assiduously avoids gore, nudity, and more than one occurrence of the F-word. The F-word is near the end and it’s pretty awful. “You fucked with the wrong virgin,” our final Final Girl growls weakly.
The reasons to watch The Final Girls are Thomas Middleditch, Adam DeVine, and Angela Trimbur, all of whom are relegated to minor roles playing facile stereotypes, and all of whom knock it out of the park with comedic timing, admirable commitment, and more energy than this script deserves. Angela Trimbur’s fantastic striptease-on-Adderall dance routine is worth the price of admission. Just fast forward to that part. Or wait until it’s on YouTube. Better yet, watch the comedienne’s joyous Youtube videos. Start with this one. Three millions views can’t be wrong. At least on YouTube her dancing isn’t interrupted by a forgettable movie in which less capable actors like Taissa Farmiga and Malin Ackerman carry what I think is supposed to be emotional gravitas. I can’t really tell since they’re both so, well, mild. The heartfelt moments drag ponderously. Their eyes well up with tears. They look at each other. They smile sadly. The moment drags on. I think there’s dialogue here, but it’s hard not to lose interest. Oh, hey, would you believe the movie ends with Taissa Farmiga doing wirework? And can someone please do something with her hair? She’s a dead ringer for her beautiful sister Vera, but plopping a dishwater blonde mop on her head doesn’t do her any favors.
The Final Girls is available for VOD. Support Qt3 and watch it on Amazon.com. Personally, I’d recommend just watching Cabin in the Woods again.
We at Quarter to Three wish you and your loved ones a happy Thanksgiving! Eat well, be merry, and don’t stress out if you’re going shopping this weekend. In fact, as one of your entertainment sites of choice, we recommend staying home to play a videogame about discovering New Worlds, get a favorite boardgame to the table, or watch an entirely frivolous movie. You can shop next week after all the fuss has died down.
We’re a year and some change from the 20 year anniversary of Lucasarts’ Outlaws. It’s been over five years since Red Dead Redemption. Call of Juarez: Gunslinger was two years ago. Are videogame Westerns a thing of the past? Or are there any Western games we’ll look back at fondly in the years to come?
After the jump, saddle up! Continue reading →
Experimenter is at first about the Milgram experiments, in which subjects were tested for their willingness to electrically shock another person at the behest of an authority figure. The finding was basically that people will totally be dicks if they’re absolved of responsibility for their actions. Psychologist Stanley Milgram implied a connection to the Holocaust. The movie exaggerates Milgram’s findings, implying that almost everyone (“the vast majority,” the character says at one point) was willing to escalate the shocks to a life-threatening voltage. In reality, a third of the subjects refused to continue, and Experimenter eventually admits as much. Furthermore, to ratchet up dramatic tension, the movie implies the authority figure was unrelenting as the test subjects protested. But in reaction to protests during the actual tests, the authority figure escalated through four scripted responses. If the subject protested a fifth time, the experiment was halted.
As you might guess from the title, Experimenter is more concerned with Stanley Milgram himself, coolly portrayed by Peter Sarsgaard (Sarsgaard is so often the king of cool, which is why it’s so much fun seeing him lose his cool in Black Mass). Director Michael Almereyda can’t resist gimmicks like breaking the fourth wall, shooting scenes against obvious backdrops, montages detailing Milgram’s other experiments, and one of the most ridiculous beards ever captured on film. There is even a literal elephant in the room when Milgram draws parallels to fascism. “Perhaps our awareness is the first step in liberation,” Almereyda’s movie concludes ponderously.
Experimenter also considers the ethical implications of the stress inflicted on the test subjects. They weren’t actually shocking anyone. It was a ruse to test their willingness. The “victim” was unseen in another room, faking cries of pain. The subjects felt guilt, remorse, duress, and anguish to varying degrees before they were told it was all a ruse. Psych! Psych, indeed. Should a research psychologist concern himself with the well-being of his test subjects? Or do the findings justify the means? If you want to test whether someone will totally be a dick, do you have to be a dick yourself? Fair questions, all of which the audience will probably wonder without Experimenter’s explicit dialogue to that effect. The most compelling parts of the movie are the scenes of the experiment itself, watching the subjects grow increasingly uneasy. Thanks to Anthony Edwards, John Leguizamo, Anton Yelchin, and Jim Gaffigan for the effectiveness of these scenes. They’re far better than the biopic in which they’re wrapped.
All of these things are expressed more viscerally and less intellectually in The Stanford Prison Experiment, so this is a review of that movie instead. It’s a more effective story about the same topics. As you might guess from the title, it’s about the experiment itself, another study of the willingness of people to be dicks. It similarly called into question the ethics of inflicting stress on test subjects. With confident direction from rookie director Kyle Patrick Alvarez and a pared down script by a former South Park writer named Tim Talbott, Stanford Prison Experiment takes a “just the facts, ma’am” approach. It presents what happened, how it happened, and even why it happened (Billy Cruddup plays research psychologist Philip Zimbardo as a hapless victim of his own hubris). It doesn’t need to preach. It doesn’t need to embellish. It doesn’t need to conjure up lurid thriller tropes like the 2010 movie based on the same experiments, called The Experiment, in which Adrian Brody and Forest Whitaker bring a knife to a psychology fight. This Stanford Prison Experiment is true to its roots, basking in the hardware, the costumes, and the hairstyles of its 1971 setting. It trusts the experiment itself to sustain the movie. It trusts the actors’ light-hearted laughs to convey the absurdity of the early set-up and their performances to see it through to its conclusion.
The cast is an it-list of young male actors. Tye Sheridan, Keir Gilchrist, Ki Hong Lee, Johnny Simmons, Thomas Mann, and Michael Angarano all demonstrate they’re not just pretty young faces. Put these kids in an ensemble, give them good material, and enjoy a tantalizing look at their careers to come. The real standout is Ezra Miller, previously seen as the eponymous Kevin who needs to be talked about in the wretched We Need To Talk About Kevin.
For two movies that use actual studies to make the same point — What did we learn from this and was it worth it? — The Stanford Prison Experiment is a far better movie than Experimenter. The only thing Experimenter has in its favor is the inspired casting of Kellan Lutz as William Shatner. Will someone please spin that into a full blown biopic?
Support Qt3 and watch The Stanford Prison Experiment on Amazon.com. You can also watch Experimenter if you feel like it.
It’s time for some arthouse post-apocalypse. Or, as Kellywand says, “This movie is sooo Tom.” At the 1:18, we launch into a discussion of missiles in movies.
Next week: The Good Dinosaur
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It can be awfully unbecoming to watch a couple of adults play at being nervous teenagers. But that’s how Lake Bell and Simon Pegg spend the first third of Man Up. It’s not entirely unsuccessful. You can’t deny Pegg’s deft charm as a nattering dork. Those distinguished crinkles fan out around his eyes when he grins and you know he’s better than this. Lake Bell tempers her comedic confidence with a generous dollop of vulnerability. And who can resist the mega-wattage of that Julia Roberts smile?
The contrived conflict kicks in awfully early. Watch the forced sparks sputter! Then the convenient split before they finally realize The Thing That’s Really Important Is Each Other. To a sappy piano rendition of The Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind?”, no less. Finally the wacky and frenzied dash to reconnect and the climactic emotional confessions of love in front of a crowd of enthusiastic onlookers. “I think you might be the blue bits,” Pegg declares at last! It’s a callback to a metaphor about life being like a jigsaw puzzle. Man Up is nothing if not a clunky formulaic script.
Also notable is Rory Kinnear, who really puts himself out there as the comedic relief. To think this was the actor whose Bolingbroke was such a powerful presence in the BBC’s televised Richard II. I’m sorry, that’s an awfully snooty thing to say in a romcom review, isn’t it? Can you tell this isn’t my preferred genre? But even I know the key to a formulaic romcom is a couple of appealing leads willing to commit even if the script is awful. Man Up has that in spades.
Support Qt3 and watch it on Amazon.com.
Tom Chick, Nick Diamon, and Jason McMaster discuss what went right and what went wrong with Bethesda’s post-apocalyptic saga.
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Fallout 4 is a Fallout about restoring civilization. It is not just a Fallout about a wayward family member, a water purifier, a GECK, a dam, or your favorite faction. Sure, those things might be in here (Fallout 4 directly repeats some of Fallout 3’s plot points). But this Fallout is unique among Fallouts for how it’s about restoring civilization to the wasteland. About worldbuilding. World rebuilding, to be more precise.
You might think you’ve restored civilizations in previous Fallouts. And, yes, depending on choices you made at the end of the game, maybe you did. But it wasn’t gameplay. Restoring civilization was a coda. A postscript. An oh-by-the-way, like those “where are they now?” title cards at the end of movies based on true stories. The new civilization was a slideshow and a block of text immediately preceding the credits.
But Fallout 4 is a game where you’re going to rebuild society as you play. In fact, you don’t have a choice. You’re going to be a hero who make the ruined world a better place, like it or not. This isn’t the kind of choice-and-consequence Fallout that will let you play the villain. You won’t blow up Megaton. Your choices will be a) pet the puppy or b) cuddle the puppy. The worst you can do is pet the puppy sarcastically. Besides, everyone plays a good guy on their first playthrough, right? You’ll find a couple of evil choices at the end. If you want to groove on the rubble, as per reformed hippie Jerry Rubin’s description of what would happen in an aftermath, you’re not going to do it directly. It will be a coda, a postscript, an oh-by-the-way. Up until then, when it really matters, you will work for a better world. Fallout 4 is a game about gameplay about rebuilding.
After the jump, the four things that keep Fallout 4 from being the game it’s trying to be. Continue reading →
Deep Dark takes a while to get underway. You might not be able to bear its glib low budget take on the angst of its struggling artist. He strings up trash like a mobile and calls it art and hopes to get a gallery showing. We’re in Portland where that kind of thing might happen. Hence this movie. Portland, the Austin of the Pacific Northwest, has it’s own film scene.
But if you give Deep Dark a half hour or so, you’ll find a story about talent, inspiration, and madness that plays out like a low rent Barton Fink, with clumsy gags instead of the Coen Brothers snap and bite. If you give it another half hour or so — if you wait until it really, uh, sinks in — it assumes an identity of its own. It certainly has a unique monster.
Writer/director Michael Medaglia shows admirable restraint and flashes of dark style. He might take too long to get underway, but he knows how to end. Lead actor Sean McGrath gives it his scruffy hangdog all. It’s probably no coincidence McGrath bears a slight resemblance to a young Anthony Hopkins. Say, an Anthony Hopkins about the age he was when he made a movie called Magic, also about talent, inspiration, and madness. Voice actress Denise Poirier brings the monster to life perfectly. And speaking of perfect, Keith Schreiner’s score has the mournful but mischievous quality of Carter Burwell’s best music.
Deep Dark is available for VOD. Support Qt3 and watch it on Amazon.com.
