Review: Pet Sematary (2019)

The horror genre has been on a roll recently, and a lot of these great works, from The Babadook to Hereditary, reached their emotional heights by focusing on families struggling with the grieving process. Stephen King’s classic story seems a perfect fit, following a man who outright refuses to cope once he learns of a magical patch of nearby land that brings the dead back to life.

Yet there’s not as much consideration here as there is in these other works – the idea of a child returning to life but slightly off is obviously horrendous, but Pet Sematary does little with this concept. We spend too much time getting to that central element, and the payoff feels so slight in comparison.

This modern Pet Sematary suffers from an atmospheric clash. The finale is clearly from a pulpier work, becoming a tale of violent demonic possession. Honestly, the film feels like it’s missing an entire act – it’s as if the first act swallowed up the second. We really don’t linger much on the trauma of losing a loved one or even seeing that loved one return but slightly off – the possessed child is so immediately and obviously a demonic entity out for blood.

There’s nothing wrong with pulp – the problem is how painfully serious this movie is up until that point. Pet Sematary makes a sudden jump from modern arthouse horror to a more straightforward shock-fest of the past. It spends an hour building up a certain atmosphere and then tosses it aside.

The big problem here is expectation – even as someone who has never encountered this story previously, I knew pretty much every detail from the trailers. So much focus was put on the child coming back from the dead, but different – as this sequence doesn’t occur until the back half of the story, it really detracts from anything that happens before.

The seemingly missing second act should have occurred between this death and the revival. If the film truly wanted to explore the concept of grieving, it should have spent more time with Louis as he makes his decision. Ultimately, it doesn’t even feel like a decision – the seemingly unconsidered inevitability of his actions are too mechanical to carry real emotional weight.

Uneven pacing plagues this film. Looking briefly through major changes from the novel, it appears Jud originally spends more time attempting to dissuade Louis from his decision. Here, everything’s 0 to 100. If the filmmakers really wanted to skip ahead to the demonic child, they could have at least lingered a bit on her uncanny presence before switching into her murderous mode, but it instead stumbles into something violent and atmospherically inconsistent.

The visual presentation is similarly inconsistent. An early scene finds Louis failing to save a badly-mangled student. The details here are gruesome, brains poking out through his charred face. Yet the terrible accident at the heart of this film leave a rather undamaged corpse – this was likely due to the age of the victim, but in a post-Hereditary world, it’s jarringly clean. If you’re not going to show the gruesome aftermath of such a crash, then simply don’t show it at all. Considering the nature of the accident, the film could have both avoided grisly details and implied something worse by suggesting the body couldn’t immediately be found. They could have even just kept to the reactions of the traumatized parents – anything other than showing an almost perfectly preserved corpse.

Other visual elements are also lacking. The burial ground has this air of artifice that clashes with the standard realism of the setting. The whole presentation seems to be hiding the cheapness of the set. Even if the finale didn’t feel so tonally inconsistent, it would have still faltered due to some poor visual effects.

I think the most disappointing thing here is how well it manages its themes before the tonal shift. The mother’s inability to confront death, even one as small as a cat’s, sets off a chain reaction. It then becomes a piece about a man committing evil acts for both the sake of the people he loves and his own inability to cope. Yet that personal failure doesn’t seem to play much into the ending – which, again, is a change from the novel. His inability to move on seems to play into the very final moment of the book, yet that’s completely dropped here for something without much meaning at all.

Pet Sematary is completely indecisive about what it wants to be. It puts on the appearance of a modern domestic horror but then drops the elements from the source material that would have aided in that goal. A film with such themes shouldn’t have left me feeling so indifferent.

2.5 Stars Out of 5

Review: The Beach Bum (2019)

The Beach Bum is the latest film by Harmony Korine, perhaps the most detestable director working today. His works are largely exploitative and nihilistic, gratuitous in their depictions of women and following characters who seem to have no purpose in life.

This is my third encounter with Korine after Gummo and Spring Breakers – and, well, both of those grew on me after I initially had a strongly negative reaction. As sleazy as his works are, Korine has this odd ability to make them linger.

These three works all tackle nihilism but in different ways. In Gummo, he gives us a view into the world of the desperately poor, an observation of people who are given no sign that life can be anything more. Spring Breakers utilizes nihilism as a tool for violence, following a group of college girls who leave a wake of bodies while on vacation. If those two represent nihilism as a destructive force, The Beach Bum loops it back around to its most positive side – if life has no purpose, why not have fun with it?

The Beach Bum isn’t that naive – there’s an underlying sense of dread and giving up, people drifting without a focus. This film feels similarly unfocused, but in a way that suits the mood. This is a slice of life through the eyes of people who can get away with anything due to their undeserved riches.

What makes Korine such a compelling figure is how talented he is – he takes these detestable tales and gives them a truly impressive presentation. He’s like if John Waters had the visual mastery of Terrence Malick. His films carry this hypnagogic style, this feeling of drifting through the imagery.

So, where it’s easy to pass off Korine as merely exploitative, I think there’s more to what he’s doing. His film feels like a prime example of post-modernism – explicitly in its mixing of heightened visual language with low themes. Films about wanton debauchery don’t deserve to be shot so compellingly – yet Korine has proven time and time again that he can do so with ease.

The Beach Bum feels like the most accessible of his works, giving Matthew McConaughey a perfect role as he drifts between several figures – it’s like if Linklater’s Waking Life toured various forms of self-destruction in place of philosophy. Despite the context of what’s on screen, a lot of this film is strangely beautiful. Bright colors cover the screen, the thoughts of characters linger as the scene cuts to new shots. Some conversations occur over several cuts, the characters shifting places but their dialogue continuing as if no time has passed – it’s almost hypnotic, the way in which it plays with time.

The Beach Bum is excessively obtuse – your opinion of this film is going to be largely dependent on your tolerance for a narrative that goes nowhere, making statements that don’t add up to much. But if you’re less concerned with narrative cohesion and more drawn to the mixing of fine cinematography with vile excess, as I apparently must be, The Beach Bum is another good time. Where the overall picture might not add up to much, each individual sequence is strangely compelling – whether it be Zac Efron’s take as a completely misguided Christian youth while rocking panini-chops or Martin Lawrence as a woefully incompetent dolphin tour guide, there are several moments that are hard to forget.

God – when did I become such a big fan of Harmony Korine?

4 Stars Out of 5

Review: Dumbo (2019)

Dumbo is one of several Disney remakes releasing this year, and the one that appeared to hold the most promise – instead of being an apparent shot by shot remake, this film attempts to tell its own version of the story. So, what happens when you expand the tightly-focused, 64 minute original to nearly two hours by shifting focus to a bunch of human characters?

I really hate to open this review by attacking a child actor, but if you’re going to put a young person in a lead role, you really should make sure they can act. Nico Parker’s performance is distracting throughout – it feels as if they were attempting for this sort of stoic, wise-beyond-her-years child, and the result is this really boring version of Violet Baudelaire. This film is loaded with shots of her responding to big moments with completely dull surprise.

Her lacking gaze is far from the only dull element of this film – this entire work felt like a slog. Much of the film’s plot focuses on an attempt to reunite Dumbo with his mother, and the human characters all feel so secondary to this – yet Dumbo himself feels reduced to a non-character. While Dumbo didn’t speak in the original, having him surrounded by animals made him feel like an equal. That film was the story of a young animal struggling to find purpose in a cruel world.

This remake quickly leaps through the flying wonder stage – with Dumbo’s magnificence being established early, there’s really not much for him to do on a personal level. Instead, the film shifts into this awkward take on corporate takeovers, coming from a company guilty of doing so on a large scale. The corporate circus at the end seems to be a direct riff on Disneyland, but it’s such a hollow sentiment coming out of a film that exists due to a corporation exploiting one of the properties that got it established.

Disney has no apparent interest in reestablishing these classic takes for a modern audience. Everything about this production suggests it was rushed. Much like Mary Poppins Returns, it falls so quickly into a cycle of the most basic Hollywood-style framing and editing, the camera desperately chasing the action. The original Dumbo contains one of Disney’s most iconic and experimental sequences – that film deserves better homage than this shallow take.

This is yet another prime example of what Tim Burton lacks as a director. He has always been a top director when it comes to the plastics of his film – the set design, the costumes, they’re all fine here. But he is rarely able to capture his daring designs with worthy technique, and his narratives largely tend to be shallow. He understands the visual aspect of the image but not how to capture it, to add meaning to it.

Again, Disney has pushed out a film that feels less like an artistic work and more like a product. The original has always been the odd one out among Disney’s first five animated features, and it’s one that deserves a better legacy – but this remake shifts the focus to an unnecessary lens and adds a few side stories to draw the plot out longer. I can understand the compulsion to go beyond the original’s 64 minutes, as a film of that length is practically unheard of these days, but stretching it to two hours is a simply violent act against the audience.

Tim Burton’s Dumbo is an unfocused mess of a film, one that loses all traces of charm from the original to tell an entirely different story it really has no right to be telling. An adaptation of a visually inventive film from a director that used to be accused of similar creativity, this work is disarmingly bland.

So, I will instead implore you to revisit the original. It comes from an era when Disney could take risks, back when animated film was still being established as a form. Some of it might seem familiar now, but it still feels like a fresher tale than this newly minted adaptation.

2 Out of 5 Stars

Review: Us (2019)

Jordan Peele’s Us has the unenviable position of following an instant classic debut. Get Out was my favorite not-mini-series film of 2017, perfectly mixing horror tropes with a grand statement about race in America, a rare film that tackles real issues in a meaningful yet digestible way. Where Get Out was rather straightforward in its statements, Us is an entirely different beast.

The film starts simply enough – Adelaide, played by Lupita Nyong’o, briefly encounters a doppelganger as a child and spends her life in fear of its return. While on vacation with her family, they are attacked by their collective doppelgangers. This is a film that obviously plans to dive deep, but saying anything more exact than that would spoil the fun.

Luckily, Us offers so much more than narrative bullet points. The visual language of the film is phenomenal – lighting grants an ominous view of the doppelgangers as they first appear, and their body language is right in that inhuman, uncanny zone. The acting and technical elements work in perfect unison to highlight their differences, with close-up shots revealing haunting little touches that really drive the point home.

This sense of unlike doubles is really brought to life through the performances, especially lead Lupita Nyong’o. She captures this knowing, frightened mother role well, but where she really shines is as the copy. There’s this assured, sinister grace to her movements, the way she contorts her face as she speaks – she fully sells herself as one of the more ominous movie villains.

The film is loaded with imagery rife with potential symbolic meaning, though what it all adds up to is naturally a bit murky. This is a good thing, as this film creates horror through the unknown. A pair of scissors alone is a bit scary as a deadly weapon – having it as a common weapon shared by the doppelgangers suggests some deeper meaning at play.

At times, it feels like Peele wants us to be actively viewing this movie on both the figurative and literal level. Though Us is clearly a horror movie, I feel the style demands it be read quite a bit differently. Where my usual focus in this genre would be on who will survive and how, Us pushes past that. It’s ultimately a mystery film – it sets us up to believe there has to be a deeper meaning behind all these symbols, and then gives reason for the protagonist to hunt that meaning down. The struggle to survive is matched by a macabre curiosity.

Peele clears up some matters by the end, but a lot is left to linger. A week later, I’m still wrapping my head around some of the imagery. This is a film that hits hard, the type that will inevitable spawn a hundred different think pieces due to the depth of its imagery.

Which, I’ve been going on about its symbolism, but this is in no way a movie that requires a deep interest beyond the surface level. Like Get Out, Us makes these dense topics accessible. This is ultimately a comedic horror – which is not to say it uses this imagery as a backdrop for comedy. In fact, this is a rare horror comedy that manages to use comedy to heighten the horror at key moments. Punchlines in comedy tend to act like relief – here, Peele uses that relief to give a false sense of security before immediately reminding you of the brutal context.

The narrative structure is also on-point, evolving as new points of tension pop up. The story goes to wild places, but it always feels like a natural progression – I kept comparing it to Akira, which similarly starts small and uses that limited initial focus to tell a personal story on an increasingly larger scale. One thing that makes this feel so consistent despite its vibrant shift in focus is how it keeps cycling back to the same motifs – even if you don’t feel like diving into the symbolism, it gives a sense of purpose to every moment.

Us is a visceral, at times surreal horror experience. Though it doesn’t quite reach the level of Get Out, it is certainly a worthy follow-up. Jordan Peele is bold in his mixing of genres that are generally looked over as lighter fare with stark symbolism and dense social critique. This is a movie about us as both Americans in general and individuals. It will get under your skin, both in its immediate horrors and the strange way it gives just enough answers to keep you asking more questions. Great movies linger after they’ve finished, and Us certainly lingers.

4.5 Stars Out of 5

Review: The Dirt (2019)

What happens when you take a troubled dad rock band that was never properly passed on to any following generation and adapt an apparently disturbing tell-all book into an audience-friendly Netflix biopic? You get an experience about as pleasant as lapping up Ozzy Osbourne’s piss off the edge of a pool.

The Dirt appears to be targeted solely at older Generation X’ers who never quite grew up. The director’s previous credits all belong to the Jackass franchise, and his obsession with bodily fluids and self-destruction is just as shallow here. Motley Crue is not a band I even moderately respect, but I can at least admit there could have been something done with the source material – but this is not it.

With Jeff Tremaine’s immature focus, The Dirt is nothing more than a simple journey into hedonism. There’s no real atmospheric feel, just a bunch of awful men doing stupid things and not really being judged for it. The movie has slight references to the fact that there was likely something psychologically wrong with members of this band, but nothing is done to really analyze their behavior. Instead, the film largely joins in on the glee of their reckless abandon.

The Dirt has all the pieces required for a mid-2000s MTV film, a decade and a half too late. There’s no real sense of effort put into this movie – they took an easy source with a built-in fan base and narrowed it down to the most shocking moments in the name of bile fascination. If you’re not a fan of Motley Crue, you’re most likely going to walk away from this movie convinced they’re a group of awful, abusive people who you have no reason to look into any further. Which, really, is fine – there’s a reason we look back on the mainstream culture of the 1980s specifically and laugh.

The cast of the film doesn’t seem to be even halfway trying – you know there’s a problem when Machine Gun Kelly isn’t just a minor role but one of the leads (and he now unfortunately tops the list of my most watched actors of 2019). This film falls back on all the biopic cliches, and every close-up, fourth wall-breaking camera address just highlights how poor these performances are.

The film is a technical chore, the most generically shot film I’ve experienced this year. If Motley Crue is supposedly this transgressive band, why is everything in this movie so by the numbers? The acts performed on camera are certainly vile, but there’s little attempt to back it up through camera work or anything. When it does do something a bit unusual, it’s clearly because Tremaine has seen it done in other works and is simply copying, such as a first-person bender sequence. He even tries to use fades to black to punctuate each cut during a key end scene, which ultimately just highlights the shoddiness of everything.

The Dirt is simply a valueless film. There’s nothing to be gained from the experience; no reason to watch unless you’re a die-hard Motley Crue fan, and even then, you should ask for something more from a biopic about something you adore – though I guess that would require Motley Crue fans to be capable of asking for something better. They enjoy Motley Crue, after all.

1 Out of 5 Stars

Review: Apollo 11 (2019)

Apollo 11 is a rather straightforward documentary; it brings us on a chronological journey through the first successful moon landing and return purely through contemporary footage. There’s no historian to add context, no modern flourishes besides a soundtrack. This is a historical film that remains rooted in its own era, capturing the first hand experience as best as it can.

Apollo 11 is much more than a rudimentary recollection of a significant event – this is a masterclass in film editing. The film starts a bit before launch and carries through to the men landing back on earth, and it offers several vantage points. It begins by juxtaposing the nervous mission command with the excited public gathered outside to watch the launch. Director and editor Todd Douglas Miller gathers as much disparate footage as he can to tackle several perspectives. Where a film like They Shall Not Grow Old appears to gloss over the small details in service to the bigger picture, Apollo 11 feels more comprehensive by honing in on this specific moment. It might not address the various tests leading up to the launch, but this feels like full coverage of the public event, media frenzy and all.

Miller fits in as many details as he can while keeping the film to a tight hour and a half. He greatly utilizes split screen, whether it be to show conversations between ground level crew and the astronauts or sometimes to simply showcase the exact same moment from different angles. Some moments are montage while other key scenes allow an extended shot to run in full – Miller makes the wise decision of showing the full footage of the actual landing, this nondescript camera angle as a meter counts down the rapidly decreasing altitude.

By summarizing the events so directly, Miller manages to capture a bit of the frenzied zeitgeist this moment represented. By drawing these key moments out, he even adds in a bit of tension that would otherwise be missing since we all know how this story ends. Time is expertly used for atmospheric effect.

Despite the technical proficiency, there are a few moments that come across as a bit of a slog – surprisingly, not in the extended anticipation of the launch but in the slow trips between Earth and the Moon. I ran into the same issue with First Man; there’s no sense of the unknown to the actual journey. First Man was at its best when it was exploring the less publicized tests that led up to Apollo 11, just like Apollo 11 finds strength in the command center. The actual footage from the moon is at times frustrating – the length of the journey necessitated lower frame rates, and a lot of the angles reveal a painfully small amount of the landscape. However, I believe Apollo 11 is doing the best it can with the resources available.

There seems to be two classes of great documentaries – many of the best expose an otherwise overlooked concept, the type of work that can spark outrage in the right hands. Films like Apollo 11 serve more as a literal document – this is a succinct record of a major event that everyone is familiar with as a concept, but with footage neatly gathered in a single, logically-presented place. It’s unlikely to change anyone’s world view, but it certainly is a magnificent summary of one of the most important events we were lucky to catch on film.

4.5 Stars Out of 5

Review: Captive State (2019)

Captive State tries to take the sci-fi genre in a different direction, using an alien occupation as a backdrop for a film about a political revolution. The film was almost silently dropped into theaters, apparently having a review embargo up until its first public screenings.

The studio had fair reason to do this; Captive State is a jumbled mess of a movie, one that appears technically competent on the most basic levels but incapable of doing much with what it has. It’s clear the film wants to play upon some sort of political intrigue, never explaining what each character is truly doing; unfortunately, this coats the entire film in this vague layer of confusion. There’s a clear stylistic goal in its presentation, sometimes letting the camera quietly observe its characters and allowing actions to speak for themselves – but this is a problem when so many actions have no clear meaning.

Because it so consistently fails to establish anything, it’s similarly hard to invest in the narrative. Why should we care about any of these characters? A lot of people pop into this plot merely to die minutes later. The film even loses track of one of its two protagonists for what must have been half an hour – he gets trapped inside a subway booth, being chased down by a form of alien we haven’t seen before and won’t see at any other point in the movie, and simply stays there while a deluge of other characters push the plot forward. How did no one notice that they practically wrote a lead character out of a large chunk of the second act?

While carrying this vague energy throughout, it also telegraphs way too obviously in key moments. John Goodman’s William Mulligan has an early scene with the resistance leader who fronts as a prostitute. She talks of Greeks bearing gifts, and then the film cuts to a literal picture of a Trojan horse on her wall. Why make your eventual ‘plot twist’ so clear but none of the scenes we have to endure until that point?

Captive State simply lacks any form of the human element – despite being about humans rising up against an alien force, its characters are pure vessels for narrative advancement and nothing more.

It similarly lacks on the narrative front – the designs are subpar, and there is a variety to the aliens that is never properly established. The absolute worst of this is a shot of an alien spaceship travelling over the water; the effect is abysmal, this vague rock-like structure simply hovering, and I swear the exact same shot was used twice. Additionally, these mecha-like structures are lined up along the waterfront, but I don’t remember ever seeing them being used or otherwise referenced. So many pieces of the design act as simple signifiers, serving solely as a reminder that, yes, this is a science fiction film.

There’s a desperate need for more original films tackling genre fiction in new ways. Captive State likely started out with this goal, but every element works against it as a film. It’s bland, not by being generic, but by failing to establish any artistic purpose. Whatever this film was attempting to do got lost in murky editing choices and one dimensional characters.

1.5 Stars Out of 5

Review: Captain Marvel (2019)

Captain Marvel has been put in an unfortunate position – it is the penultimate piece to an arc that was put into motion several years ago. Despite this fact, it has an odd relationship with the franchise at large. It serves as a prequel by exploring Nick Fury’s early days, but being set in an earlier decade gives it this feeling of distance. Unfortunately, Captain Marvel feels like an afterthought, something that should have been established a bit earlier.

Let’s ignore these overarching hang-ups and focus on Captain Marvel as a single, standalone film. For certain reasons, Brie Larson has garnered a lot of attention for this role. She gave two of the best performances this decade in Short Term 12 and Room – but these are two very different films that required an entirely different type of performance. Larson has mastered this quiet grace, able to play coy which allows her to pull off a certain type of wry hero – yet something feels off.

This doesn’t fall on Larson as much as it does on the position Captain Marvel is in during the course of this movie. She is cast against too many concepts at once, a stylistic clash that doesn’t quite work.

The issue with Captain Marvel is largely structural. It wants to be a space film, a 90s nostalgia piece, while also spending a large portion on the American military. The Kree-Skrull War isn’t particularly compelling here, and we’re quickly stuck on Earth. There are a few 90s references, but most sequences are in generic enough locations that the decade doesn’t seem to matter besides the fact that they have to establish this film as taking place in the past. Most of what we get is music, though the choices are admittedly rather strong (if a bit too on-the-nose at certain moments).

This is the most basic kind of Marvel movie. It starts with a lot of promise, especially a sequence as Carol is forced through her forgotten memories in a rapid, surreal fashion. But any visual inventiveness falls to the side as we reach the second act. The presentation is all rather standard Hollywood fare, not putting much effort into standard shot composition. And, as always with a Marvel film and especially predictable with a spacefaring protagonist, the finale naturally calls for the inclusion of a sky battle.

Captain Marvel simply feels stale at this point. It got hype for being the first film in the franchise to have a woman in the lead role, but that’s all that really feels new about it. Other recent Marvel debuts do something to set themselves apart. In addition to being the first MCU film with a predominantly black cast, Black Panther had a stunning dedication to visual design. Even the third attempt at the Spider-Man franchise felt fresher due to the way it mixed in high school comedy tropes. Captain Marvel lacks stylistic focus in comparison.

The film feels like a lot of potentially great elements working against themselves. Marvel’s space storylines are always a bit harder to digest than their more traditional superhero tales – Guardians of the Galaxy succeeded by finding humor. Captain Marvel, comparatively, takes itself seriously. The Kree-Skrull War takes a few interesting turns over the course of the film, but it feels like a backdrop to Danvers discovering herself. Ultimately, I didn’t feel invested in this battle – which I feel is also due to this film being cushioned between a two-part film with higher stakes. The military base segment is straight-up bland, and Brie’s mumblecore-esque style feels out of place in this larger than life picture.

There are a few highlights – Samuel L. Jackson is strong as always, and it’s fun to see him play a central role after largely being a background figure. And there’s the cat – best animal in a 2019 movie for sure, even with several months remaining. Being a formulaic Marvel movie isn’t that bad of a position to be in – the formula works, just the better films in the franchise modify it in just the right ways. It’s pleasant in its mixing of humor and action but never exceptional.

Captain Marvel simply lacks the extra oomph found in more recent Marvel films – in many ways, it feels like one of their earlier works where they were still figuring out how to make each hero have their unique feel. Larson is new to this type of role, and hopefully this character will fall into her quieter style and drop the unnecessary attempts at bravado. It doesn’t quite land any of its stylistic goals, but the parts on their own are good enough that the film is worth a watch for those invested in the franchise.

3 Stars Out of 5

Review: Paddleton (2019)

Paddleton is a Netflix film about two men with a close friendship coping together as one discovers they have terminal cancer – the film coldly opens with that awkward discovery, as Ray Romano’s Andy Freeman questions the evasive doctor while Mark Duplass’s Michael Thompson quietly takes in his suddenly reduced lifespan.

Paddleton is one of many movies released every year that tries to coast entirely off an emotional premise backed by high quality but not especially noteworthy performances. While I value film for its ability to capture emotions, Paddleton is one that feels particularly lazy – a simple appeal without craftsmanship.

Much of Paddleton is shot in simple medium close-ups, repetitive shot composition to the point of being grating. So many scenes in this movie look like any other scene. None of the people involved seemed to take the time to consider how they could more effectively use the medium; for them, the camera seems to be an obstacle in the way of telling their story.

There’s some acclaim going around for the film’s improvisational acting; that Ray Romano and Mark Duplass lend an air of realism through their natural conversations. And, I will admit, these two actors do a fine job with the material – but that does not excuse the lack of planning in other regards. This is the blandest of bland movies, every technical element merely in service to the narrative instead of lending its own emotional potential.

I’m certain plenty of people will watch this movie and be moved – with such a theme, it’s something most people can find a connection to in some way. To me, it feels largely exploitative. This is the type of story you will encounter several times over in a freshman Creative Writing class, written by students unsure of their abilities but aware that certain elements inherently have resonance. It’s hard to criticize such works for being otherwise shallow without appearing to make light of a serious situation. But why settle for such base emotions when there are more masterful takes on the same subject? Cinema is an artform; the story is perhaps the backbone of most films, but that’s all it is – you can’t have a body with just a spine.

It has a few pleasant moments; male bonding is rarely handled with such delicacy, and the two leads do play off each other well. A years-long game of hangman, a shared obsession with an overlooked Kung Fu movie, there’s a lot of charm and specificity to the characters that make them feel real. But a lot of these elements are overshadowed by how quickly the film reaches its inevitable conclusion – Michael decides from the beginning that he is going to commit suicide before the cancer weakens him. The second act falters under this weight. Romano’s Andy pathetically attempts to fight back against this choice, but it’s clearly the course of the film.

For those who manage to get invested, the final act will get hard. But nothing within the establishing narrative moments of the technical and stylistic elements suggest anything worth that emotion. It’s an impactful shortcut taken by seemingly novice filmmakers who didn’t want to invest too much time into structure – the type of people who believe the camera is more of an obstacle than a boon. There are dozens of better movies with similar themes that also put in stylistic effort – or if not that, at least have consistently stronger writing and better performances. Why bother with Paddleton when films like 50/50 and The Big Sick exist?

2 Stars Out of 5

Review: Fighting With My Family (2019)

Family, identity, and dreams serve as the central theme of this WWE biopic. Paige and her brother Zak have been raised in a wrestling family, and the two gain a rare chance to try out for the WWE. Paige gets in – Zak does not. As Paige becomes overwhelmed with this new world, Zak appears to be falling down a similar path as his older brother, who ended up in prison after failing at this same goal.

There’s not much to this as a work of cinema – this is the standard modern Hollywood-style biopic. It finds a strong central story with a heartfelt message, competent but not pushing any technical boundaries. The camera is here simply to tell the story and nothing more.

A film with such basic features is going to be limited in its impact, having to be carried almost entirely on the back of its narrative. Luckily, I feel confident in saying that this does have a fairly effective story – despite having next to no interest in wrestling as entertainment, I found myself caught up in the emotions. It finds universal sticking points in its tale of underdogs and ‘failure.’

The other key element of the standard biopic is acting; the central actors here all fit well in their roles, though no one gives anything particularly award-worthy. This film runs on familial interactions, and they do well enough while playing against each other – it’s just hard to do much with such a familiar narrative.

I feel like I keep highlighting the cliches – but I don’t think they’re all that distracting. Despite its simplicity, I truly was engrossed by what was happening. A bitter ring fight between Zak and Paige as she briefly returns home really highlights the wedge driven between them by her success. There’s this constant return to coping – how do you manage dreams that you have been raised on when bluntly told you won’t be allowed in?

There’s a similar focus on who belongs where – we are in on Paige’s side from the beginning, but she is treated as an outcast. We are initially taught to look down on her fellow competitors due to their origins; models, cheerleaders, women who look pretty in the outfit but have never stepped in the ring before. After all, few women are actually raised wrestling. But this underdog story takes a deeper look – Paige is called out for her condescending attitude. She learns nothing of these women, but they all have their own story to tell. In fact, Paige truly appears to be the underdog in every sense, even falling behind on physical training. The film never takes the easy path, insisting on painting everyone in a sympathetic light – in the end, everyone feels like the underdog until they succeed.

Despite being as basic as films come, Fighting With My Family is an entirely competent work with an engaging narrative. While its central focus is on a violent sport, it comes off as an entirely well-meaning and optimistic work. Not everyone will be successful in achieving their dreams – but there is more to life than dreams.

3.5 Stars Out of 5