AsPhilandAngela have said already today Into the Woods is the strongest touchstone of our youth. No matter how old we got or far apart we grew, if someone popped in that worn and warped old VHS of the Original Broadway Cast recording (usually once or twice a month) we would all eventually drift in and sit, laughing and singing, until we were all enthralled by the end of the performance. It’s probably the clearest example of something that we universally agree on and love. Into the Woods is also a fitting allegory for our little experiment this past year. We all set out with our own ideas and our own goals. We started on different paths in the same wood but as the year went on we drew closer and closer winding in and out of each other’s stories and by the end we were a stronger family then when we started.
How appropriate then that the silver screen adaptation of our unifying cinematic experience gets released in the last week of our year long journey. All in all, the new movie was a thoroughly satisfying experience. I hope that it will serve as a gateway to the brilliant stage performance and the full musical the PBS recording/stage production provides. At the very least it’s a totally acceptable way to introduce those who would never see the show to the power and awesomeness of one of the world’s best musicals.
If it isn’t apparent from the songs themselves, Sondheim is a total genius. He’s so smart in fact that he has weaved a musical puzzle throughout the score of Into the Woods just to keep himself entertained. What am I talking about? Well! As anyone who’s seen the musical knows the Witch and her beans are critical components of the story. The Witch has a dissonant chord of five notes that follows her throughout the story. Now those are the same five notes that make up the main theme and most iconic melody for Into the Woods, only played all at one time. Each one of these notes represents one of the beans the baker sells to Jack and as each bean is used and resolved, those notes drop from the Witch’s chord. As if that wasn’t enough the spiritual finale of the show ‘No one is alone’ serves as the end of the story of the beans. Fittingly, Sondheim inverts the lead melody representing the beans and the which, playing it backwards to form the melody on the line ‘People make mistakes’. It’s ingenious, tricky, beautiful, and done ON TOP of everything else he lovingly created JUST BECAUSE HE CAN. Amazing.
As good as the original is, we’re all very happy with Anna Kendrick’s Cinderella, Emily Blunt as the Baker’s Wife, and most delightfully Chris Pine and Billy Magnussen as the agonized princes. The film is certainly a Disney-fied version of what is a distinctly non-disney (anti-disney?) musical but ultimately it works. Meryl Streep even manages her version of the witch well but no one, NO ONE will ever match Bernadette Peters when it comes to this song:
Ultimately the Into the Woods movie was an utterly satisfying experience even to those of us who hold the musical near and dear to our hearts.
This year we’ve gone farther than we thought we could and we did it together. Not just the three of us though: we ALL did it together. Without you all, our readers, we might have given up a long time ago. Just as in the show, though this particular journey is at an end, our happily ever after isn’t over. This coming year will be our third act and we’re counting on all of you to help make it happen. Like in the story this site went from a little to a lot and now we’re hoping for something in between. Please stay tuned for a lot more we’ve been chomping at the bit to talk to you about and thank you so much for sharing our labor of love and walking with us through the woods.
As for me, I’m so thankful for this stupid little idea we had. I don’t know if I’ve found myself or if that really was the point but I can honestly say I’ve found something better: I’ve found my family again. To say Phil, Angela, and I didn’t always get along is quite the understatement but this past year I’ve talked more, laughed more, learned more, and drawn closer to my loving, funny, beautiful family than I ever have before. So thank you all for working so hard. Thank you for all the insight and laughs. Thank you for being my friends when I really needed friends. I love you all and I can’t wait to get started on our ever after.
Days away from the end of our yearlong journey I sit in a dark theater and watch a lone women staring down the barrel of a solo, thousand mile trek through the wilderness. At the very first sign post, loaded up with the weight of too much ambition and a monstrous pack, she pulls a journal from a small box by the road and writes a simple message I wish I had heard before the start of our odyssey: “If your nerve deny you, go above your nerve.” – Emily Dickinson. It’s a perfect way to start on her path as much as Wild is the perfect way to end mine.
In Wild, Reese Witherspoon gives us her defining performance as Cheryl Strayed, a divorcee and former drug addict who’s life has spun out of control after an abusive childhood and a family loss. The film follows her journey of self-discovery through adversity at the hands of the 1,100 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail: a wilderness trek stretching from Mexico to Canada. At first the Cheryl we meet is spunky and strong albeit clearly working through some relationship issues. She unpacks and repacks her insane amount of hiking gear in the cheap motel she rented from a suspicious inn keep. She hitchhikes to the trailhead, the music on the radio causing flashbacks to dancing as a child with her mother. She’s dropped off, loaded up, and then she is alone staring at the first segment of her epic journey: The Mojave Desert. No more than 100 feet into the trail a thin, echoed voice from inside Cheryl’s head asks, “What the fuck am I doing?”
It’s access to that internal monologue that sets Wild apart from other extreme isolation movies like Cast Away and All is Lost. And it’s those splintery flashes of memory that keep us firmly rooted in the journey while still giving us insight into her past. In fact it’s these devices, more so than the powerful story or even Witherspoon’s honest, understated performance that truly set the film apart from similar journey epics like 2010’s The Way. The flashback sequences, such as they are, are often momentary and overlaid with the audio from present scene. Even the more lengthy ones sprout organically from memory triggers and blend back into the present with audiovisual overhangs. Along with access to Cheryl’s internal voice, all the while singing bits of songs caught in her head or asking herself questions, it is the most realistic portrayal of how a person actually thinks and how memory actually works that I’ve ever seen on screen.
The deeper into the journey she goes the more we see of the life that led her here. The failed marriage, the infidelity, the drugs, the abortion, and great personal losses all bubble up and burst on screen only to disappear as quick as they came for us to watch Cheryl’s face as she relives them. To it’s credit though, even with all the deplorable acts and horrible memories we watch Cheryl live through, it never feels like the unbearable punitive tragedy porn we get from films like The Road or even this year’s Unbroken. Every memory has a reason and adds a layer of understanding and empathy, or shock and enmity to this character we thought we knew. What we end up with is a real, relatable picture of a broken woman trying to walk herself back to the woman her mother raised her to be.
The story itself is not trivial either. The challenges she faces along the trail and the people she meets are all deeply interesting. Her backstory is fleshed out piece by piece in digestible, carefully distributed chunks. The film lends credence to the lack of safety a woman alone can face without bending the actual facts of the story. There are genuine moments of hardship, triumph, and joy. It never tries too hard or shouts too loud. It is simply the delicate, ugly, awesome truth of a life.
Over the last year we’ve loved, hated, griped, cheated, and risen to the occasion all in equal measure. What seems simple, as an idea (such as ‘lets review a movie every day’ or ‘I’m going to hike the Pacific Crest Trail’) becomes an unwieldy beast you have to battle every day. There are pitfalls and victories, roadblocks and easy days. As hard as it is if you take the time once in a while to stop and look around, to see how far you’ve come, dream about what you can do with the time you have left, and put yourself in the way of beauty, what went from simple thought to impossible task reveals itself for what it always was: a great adventure.
While writing today’s review I found myself stealing so heavily from Mike D'Angelo’s review from the A.V. Club that I figured I’ll let you take a look at it and then we’ll talk a bit more about it? Okay? Okay.
The problem with sketch comics making feature-length movies is pretty basic: They’ve been trained to think in five-minute bursts. Establish the premise, escalate it quickly, find a punchline, move along. The State alumni Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon would seem to be exceptions, since they’ve written multiple traditional comedies (Night At The Museum, The Pacifier), as well as a book about screenwriting. And yet Hell Baby, their joint directorial debut (Garant previously directed Balls Of Fury solo), functions exactly like a sketch movie, using its meager, essentially irrelevant plot as a clothesline upon which to string a series of self-contained bits. At least half of the bits are pretty damn funny, though, and that’s arguably all that matters.
Given all the tired Paranormal Activity parodies out there, Hell Baby gets bonus points for not riffing on any specific horror movie, though a Rosemary’s Baby vibe comes with the premise. While Leslie Bibb is the hugely pregnant mother, it’s expectant dad Rob Corddry who does most of the fretting after the couple move into a scarily dilapidated house (dubbed “House Of Blood,” among other cheery epithets, by the locals) and weird shit begins happening, starting with mood swings by Bibb that clearly go well beyond any hormonal imbalance. Eventually, a couple of priests (Garant and Lennon) drop by to perform an exorcism, though not before the house has been spiritually cleansed by Bibb’s New Age sister (Riki Lindhome) and repeatedly invaded by a creepy homeless dude (Keegan Michael Key) with zero sense of social propriety.
Garant and Lennon have an affinity for lowbrow, gross-out humor, and a tendency to beat jokes into the ground, both of which are embodied here in gags involving naked women—one a misshapen granny (Alex Berg—yes, a man) who wanders into Corddry’s bed to blow him; the other, Lindhome’s kooky sister, who doesn’t cover up after Corddry accidentally barges in on her in the shower. Lindhome deserves credit for making this scene blithely hilarious, but the entire gag exhausts itself long before it’s over. And that pretty much sums up Hell Baby, which is evenly divided, joke-wise, between complete non-starters and uproarious setpieces that overstay their welcome. There are blissful exceptions: A montage of characters scarfing down po’ boys improves with repetition, and Key, as the omnipresent “neighbor,” somehow transforms a single sublime note of amiable obliviousness into a silly symphony. His character is so tangentially related to the story that he’d arguably fit in just about any movie—or any sketch, for that matter—but so long as viewers are laughing, who cares?
You can’t really expect much from a movie titled “Hell Baby”. Now throw in some sketch comedy heavyweights like Rob Cordry and Keegan-Michael Key and things start looking up. Now consider the fact it’s written and directed by the juggernaut duo behind Reno 911, Night at the Museum, and Writing Movies for Fun and Profit, Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon you might start thinking that there’s something to this little spoof. Well that would be your first mistake. Going into this movie with any kind of expectations of its quality or comedy will certainly ruin it for you. But if, for a couple of hours, you can clear your mind, accept what’s happening, take the good, and leave the bad then Hell Baby might just be worth a little of your time.
So many parts of this crappy little movie are pee you pants hilarious while just as many are things I wish I could unsee. Keegan-Michael Key is as genuinely funny as I’ve ever seen him and Rob Corddry is inspired as the straight man (for once) to the rest of the ensemble’s insanity. The gross out low brow stuff Garant and Lennon are so fond of are perhaps the least rewarding parts of the movie. It’s unfortunate because there are so many good parts that it feels like with a little extra effort it could have been a legitimately good spoof.
But I have a sneaking suspicion about Hell Baby: It wasn’t made for us. There is so much improvisation, so much chemistry, and so much that looks like a total blast to shoot. With the wide range of comedy muscle, sheer size of the ensemble, and minuscule budget you can be certain no one did this for the money. And well… come on, anyone who watches the movie knew it wasn’t going to be a commercial success. But who cares? Because this is the kind of movie that my friends and I would totally make just for the fun of making it. If a few of those friends happen to have wildly successful TV shows, and the writer/directors other films have grossed half a billion dollars in theaters, then so be it. We’re just going to have that much more wiggle room to have that much more fun. Ultimately I can’t recommend that anyone should actually see this movie, despite how much I loved it and how often I almost threw up from laughing. But I can tell you that if anyone else wants to make a Hell Baby 2, I’ll be first in line to help.
Holidays have long been an important part of horror. In fact, it’s difficult to make a slasher movie without tying it to some holiday, which is what Eli Roth was doing in his parody trailer of Thanksgiving (a trailer so accurate, I swear to God I’ve seen that movie). And since Christmas is the only holiday that’s actively growing across the calendar devouring weaker holidays like some terrifying jingle belled shoggoth, a lot of horror movies have latched onto Jesus’s birthday party. In most of these, Santa is an escaped lunatic coming into your house to cut you up, usually with an axe. Black Christmas is the first of these, though the Robert Zemeckis directed Tales From the Crypt episode “And All Through the House” is probably the best. Rare Exports is one such Evil Santa movie, although it breaks rather dramatically from the formula by positing Santa not as a psycho killer, but rather as one of Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones.
Korvatunturi Fell is a small range of mountains on the Finnish/Russian border, and is the traditional home of Santa Claus in Finland. It’s the kind of place where cold isn’t just a temperature, it’s a way of life. A company headed up by a rich guy the film keeps assuring me is American, despite the fact that his accent sounds like Borat after a stroke, is drilling into the mountain. Twenty-four days until Christmas they make a startling discovery: a sixty-five foot layer of sawdust. While this would immediately make me think there was a giant Ron Swanson down there somewhere making a huge dining room set, the “American” explains that people used to store ice by encasing it in sawdust. The mountain is a giant icebox, and iceboxes by definition are for storing something. He seems to have an idea of what that might be, and breaks out the new safety instructions which include stuff like “No Drinking” which, considering these guys are using massive drills for chewing through rock, I hope were already not doing. But there are others, like “No Cursing” which the boss takes extremely seriously. “It’s Christmas. Act like it.” He reminds the miner that it took the Sami people of Lapland centuries to build the mound, and the miners have twenty-four days to open it. And since the Sami are so bad ass they, no shit, castrate reindeer with their teeth, this is a tall order.
Two boys, Pietari and Juuso, watch the excavation, having sneaked into the mining camp through a hole they clipped in the fence. Pietari, the younger of the two boys, still has a stuffed animal he carries everywhere. Juuso can’t be more than ten, but he’s packing a rifle and drives a snowmobile. Pietari still believes in Santa, and is convinced he’s buried beneath the mountain, an idea Juuso scoffs at. Pietari heads home to do some montage research on Santa, and what he finds is less than encouraging. Though it begins with some innocuous pictures of the jolly old elf, they get steadily darker until Santa is a horned monster cooking a boy in a cauldron. All of this made me wonder, what the hell kind of books is Pietari’s dad buying him?
Who knows, because Pietari’s dad is some kind of crazy northman. He sets punji traps for local wolves, butchers hogs in his very own backyard abattoir, hunts reindeer and generally behaves like someone who is unaware that Game of Thrones is a work of fiction. Pietari, meanwhile, is pretty sure Santa is coming for him, something bolstered by bare footprints in the snow on the roof and in a field of slaughtered reindeer. When dad finds a naked old man clutching a potato sack caught in the wolf traps, things get a little weird. At first, they’re concerned the old guy is from the mining operation and thus “American,” but he doesn’t act like an American even by this film’s shaky understanding of what that might be. He never speaks, even accepting a beating from local potato farmer, Juuso’s dad, and terrifying enforcer Aimo. The only time the old guy perks up is when Pietari comes in, getting what can only be described as an Albert Fish look on his face.
While all of this is occurring, the local village is in the grips of a bizarre crime spree. Ovens, hair dryers, and radiators are all missing. Pietari finds that all the local kids are gone, something that doesn’t disturb any of the parents. I found this baffling, since wolves are mentioned as a persistent local hazard, so maybe these folks just aren’t the most attentive parents. Or maybe if the kid can’t survive a couple days in the hard winter dickpunching the local wildlife he really isn’t worth keeping around in the first place.
While the local farmers try to use the situation to pay off their crippling debt, Pietari sees the big picture. Santa is going to get out of his icy prison and eat all the naughty children, which is pretty much everyone at this point. Pietari has to make the highly symbolic choice between the stuffed animal he carries everywhere and a rifle. And yes, this means his dad gave a child who still carries around a stuffed animal a goddamn loaded gun. I wouldn’t be surprised if every local kid were just fired out of a barbed wire cannon into a pit of bears. Anyway, Pietari has to grow up. Ironically, this requires him to first believe in Santa Claus and then to kick the old monster’s ass. And find a novel solution to that debt.
Rare Exports is the story of one brave boy’s attempt to kill Santa. He doesn’t do this to ruin Christmas, but rather because the legends have softened with age, or as he puts it, “the Coca-Cola Santa is a hoax.” It’s a well-earned hostility toward American corporatism, presented as subtext. More importantly, it’s a damn fine flick about the importance of murdering beloved symbols of the season.
Nearly two million people in the US cancelled their cable television subscriptions last year. With the maturation of services like Hulu, Netflix, WatchESPN, and your parents’ HBOgo password it’s never been easier to walk away from the insane expense of an all-you-can-eat-but-nothing-you-really-want-to cable subscription. It’s still a gamble though. While services like Netflix allow us to watch what we want, when we want it we’re still largely at the mercy of television networks, movie studios, and marketing departments to create content that we want to watch and then HOPE TO GOD that those creations eventually show up on one of our fancy streaming platforms. Netflix and Amazon are starting to hack away at that situation by producing quality, original content but even those shows tend towards high budget, high production value, once a year events. So Netflix and Amazon release a few 13-episode seasons of shows a few times a year; what do I do with the other 1500 hours a year? My answer and, increasingly, the world’s answer is simple: YouTube.
YouTube is no longer the exclusive realm of cat videos and America’s funniest home videos rejects. A vast network of YouTube personalities, content creators, show hosts, gaming commentators, make up tipsters, professional and personal vloggers upload an ASTONISHING amount of content to YouTube every single minute. Dan Dobi’s documentary ‘Please Subscribe’ takes a look at some of the most influential YouTubers of the time and goes through many of the misconceptions and commonly asked questions from those less familiar with the burgeoning entertainment space.
One of the first and most important points Please Subscribe makes is that yes, you CAN make a living on YouTube. When most people hear ‘I make YouTube videos’ they think of it as a hobby. “They mostly think I do it on the side and the rest of the time I’m a mechanic” says Craig Benzine of the legendary and influential channel Wheezy Waiter. What they don’t often understand though is that for hundreds of content creators around the world making videos is a full time job. And in the case of the high profile, high subscriber producers featured in the film it can be a quite lucrative one. Independent daily or weekly video creators with around a million followers can often expect to pull down $65k a year or more.
Please Subscribe talks with a variety of creators from different genres. There are comedy creators like Craig Benzine and Zach Anner. Personal vloggers like Mitchell Davis and (the totally amazing and soon to be legitimate star of stage and screen) Grace Helbig. There are music video producers, video game commentators, large scale, YT based production companies, even a full-fledged, twice daily YouTube news network. It really is an astonishing look into the adolescence of the YouTube partnership network.
Now, I say that this is the adolescent phase of the YT partnership program for a very specific reason: This film came out in early 2012. Three years may not seem long to most of us but it is a GALACTIC epoch in terms of Internet culture. Several of the creators featured in the film are not nearly as popular or influential as they once were. Some, however, are much MUCH more so. For example, Hannah Hart of My Drunk Kitchen fame is listed as having just over 250k subscribers in the film. As of today she has nearly SEPTUPLED that number to just less than 1.75 million and is one of the most popular creators in YouTube today. The same goes for Grace Helbig of DailyYou, with well over 2 million followers and 250 million views.
The film also pretty much only focuses on individual vloggers, only tangentially mentioning production studios like Maker. This paradigm has DRASTICALLY shifted over the last several years with the launch of massively successful, largely (if not fully) YouTube based production houses like Rooster Teeth, Geek and Sundry, and the Vlogbrothers veritable cornucopia of channels and shows. As successful and important as those core creators and their personal shows are to the story of YouTube, and thus to the film, this too is becoming less and less representative of what YouTube is and looks like today. And you know what? That’s a good thing.
Just like the vlogging community and personal shows developed by the creators in the film are better than the mire of cat videos and viral outbreaks that littered the infant YouTube, the long-form, professional quality content now coming in to its own is better than what came before it. Whether it’s semi-seasonal, original fictional content like The Guild, Red Vs. Blue, and the Lizzy Bennet Diaries, or non-fiction juggernauts like Crash Course, Mental Floss, or… well… anything from Hank and John Green; it’s just better. This is hours of television quality content, direct to you, everyday, for free. And now with innovations like Chromecast (seriously: I consider Chromecast proof that there is a God and that He loves me very much) I don’t even lose the TV EXPERIENCE. I can build playlists on the fly and even flick through the virtual channels to see what my favorite creators have for me today. Its. Just. Better.
I even become involved in these people’s lives. I watch Rooster Teeth’s Achievement Hunter videos every single day. Now setting aside that Achievement Hunter even PUTS OUT a new video every single day and that its usually a half hour or more and is ALWAYS entertaining, I’ve gotten to know the people in Achievement Hunter as if they were my friends. I’ve watched Ryan Haywood have TWO children. I saw Mike and Lindsay Jones fall in love and get married. I’ve listened as Gavin Free went from a twatty manchild to… well… a successful twatty manchild and I LOVE THEM. I love them like they’re my real friends and THIS is what YouTube gives us that network television and Hollywood movies never can: Community.
Creators are involved with their audience. They talk and listen. They read comments and answer emails and participate in their forums, forever adjusting their style and output on the fly to give us more awesome and less suck. These are the kinds of shows we should be seeing, the kinds of personalities that should be representing our generation. In an age where major studios are so out of touch with their target demographic, I’m actually not worried. They can keep their big bangs and their matriarchal origin stories; I’ll be fine. I’ve got millions of friends to catch up with.
Please Subscribe is available on Netflix and YouTube is available everywhere that life is beautiful and just.
Traditional sword and shield movies have seemingly gone the way of the dinosaur. While battle scenes are, on the whole, more epic than ever; it’s a feat accomplished largely by green screen and computers. Hand to hand clashes are heavily altered and supplemented with wire harnesses and CGI projectiles all while being too closely shot and too heavily cut to see what even really going on. Largely gone are the days of pulled back camera and steady shots showing actual choreographed sword and shield battles performed by brave actors and talented stuntmen. Few movies dare to step outside the computerized projection to put vital, fluid action back into the hands of theses craftsmen of the stage and screen. The most recent, and likely the last, of these comes to us as 2011’s The Eagle.
The Eagle tells the story of a Roman legion commander assigned to an outpost at ‘the end of the world’. In this case the end of the world means northern Britain at the far reaches of Roman power. The outpost stands as a part of Hadrian’s wall, an 80 mile long fortification dividing the barbarian British clans in the North from the civilized Roman society in the south. If that sounds familiar to some of you that’s because, yes, Hadrian’s wall IS the inspiration for The Wall in Game of Thrones. Commander Marcus Flavius Aquila is sent to the wall as his first command, following in the footsteps of his father. Well, sort of.
A decade earlier Marcus’ father, under orders, led a legion of 5000 Roman soldiers north of the wall carrying the standard of Rome; A large, golden eagle. However they never returned from their mission to conquer, instead disappearing without a trace into the rough highlands. Marcus now comes to the wall to return glory to this failing legion and honor to his disgraced family by doing the only thing he can: finding the eagle.
This movie has often been panned for its leading star’s wooden performance, but really, what did you expect? Channing Tatum, while one of the most talented comedic actors IVE EVER SEEN, just does not have the chops to be a dramatic lead. The guy is a dancer and by all accounts a total goofball. Just because someone is hunky and white doesn’t mean he has to be a dramatic movie star. Anyways, those critics are not wrong. Tatum’s able to carry himself well as a military officer but nearly all emotion expressed is laughable in its ineffectuality. However that is no reason to write the film off as a whole. If lead casting endangers the film then certainly its ensemble cast saves it.The rest of the film is carried by some theatrical heavyweights such as Mark Strong, Donald Sutherland, and of course Channing’s co-star Jamie Bell. Everyone lays down meaty, substantive performances that lend credence to the films premise and period.
Surprisingly the film takes it’s setting very seriously. All of the locations are genuine with the actors actually trudging through the landscape the story takes place in. The highlands are very much a character in the story as well. Virtually untouched for thousands of years they, along with an unexpectedly true to life representation of British tribes at the time, do a wondrously effective job of transporting the viewer right into the world they are exploring.
But lets be honest, movies like this don’t get made for their historical accuracy or award potential. This is an action movie and boy does it deliver. More so, in fact, than probably any film since Rob Roy or Braveheart. The action is brutal, vital, and real. The camera is pulled back and uncut to allow you to understand just how the Roman war machine so effectively ruled the known world. Stunt coordinator Domonkos Pardanyi has worked on every movie with a battle scene worth watching since the late 1990s. Pulling together the best parts of his previous films like Troy, Kindom of Heaven, Hellboy II, and Prince of Persia, Domonkos created a series of muddy, messy, devastating sequences demonstrating the power of not only each Roman warrior, but the Legion itself.
The drama is a bit heavy handed for something of this ilk but what else do you expect from Kevin Macdonald, acclaimed director of State of Play and the Last King of Scotland? Channing Tatum is a bankable star but perhaps not the right choice of they expected this to be taken as seriously as, for example, Gladiator. However overall it’s a surprisingly entertaining, accurate, and beautiful film. Utilizing some of the best acting talents, locations, and cinematography available (Anthony Dod Mantle of 127 Days and Slumdog Millionaire) the team has assembled a totally watchable and even enjoyable way to spend a few hours on a weekend afternoon. As a farewell to the era of hand to hand, sword and shield cinema I think it does just fine.
