Category: Movie Reviews

I won’t mince words: Winter’s Tale was a disaster upon release. With a 13% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a worldwide gross of only $30 million, there is no world in which Warner Bros didn’t regret releasing this film. The rumor is that it was a long-gestating passion project of Akiva Goldsman, who had worked on so many films with so many powerful players in Hollywood that he was able to call in favors and assemble an all-star cast and crew to bring his dream project to life. Every one of them likely wishes they had just said no.

That being said, it could have probably worked better than it did. Right from the start, Winter’s Tale establishes that Colin Ferrell’s Peter Lake has existed in multiple time periods, that he was shipped out in a tiny Moses-boat when he was still a baby, that everybody has a “miracle” for somebody else if the two can meet, and that there is a dog spirit (guardian?) that shows up to rescue Lake in the form of a horse, which is actually a Pegasus. When the Pegasus-dog-horse showed up, I checked my blu-ray timer to see how long the movie had taken to establish all this nonsense. It had been seven minutes and thirty seconds. Winter’s Tale wastes no time leaping into crazytown.

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The spy genre has been evolved significantly in the last couple of decades, primarily by moving away from the types of movies that made it popular. First, the Bourne films threw away the camp fantasy elements of the Bond franchise by setting themselves in an approximation of the real world. Chases and fight sequences still occurred, but they were gritty and violent, exaggerating on the types of conflicts that we could imagine happening off of official government records. Bourne’s success then influenced the James Bond series, which rebooted itself with Daniel Craig and an actual interest in the nature and character of Bond himself. Meanwhile, other attempts at the spy genre, such as the under-appreciated Kingsman, have paid homage to original spy movie tropes while simultaneously mocking and moving past them.

This is to say that it’s somewhat refreshing to see a movie like Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, the fifth in the franchise, embrace those very cliches so wholeheartedly. The grit and self-awareness that inform its contemporaries are nowhere to be found in the world depicted here, where ultra-powerful secret nations of former operatives (think classic Bond’s SPECTRE) can operate without knowledge of the outside world while openly murdering individuals and taunting current operatives with messages about their existence. There is no subtlety here, just good guys, bad guys, and lots of impossibly-complex pre-planning.

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Horror is often dismissed by “serious” filmgoers as a base genre, full of cliches and rarely engaging with the audience beyond making them jump. However, like with any film genre, a movie is only as low brow as its creators decide to make it. When a filmmaker wants to say more with their work, genre constraints are simply a small hurdle to overcome. In some cases, genre conventions can even be strengths, ways to further explore a particular topic. The latter is very much true in recent indie horror film It Follows, which uses an 80s horror framework to examine the subject of sexual promiscuity.

The look and feel of the movie places us right at home within this genre. Many scenes take place within a suburban neighborhood, not unlike slasher film classics like Halloween, while the synth-heavy score tells us exactly what to expect. The central premise too, regarding an entity that follows victims based on sexual activity, is taking the subtext of the slasher genre and making it text.

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Just last week I had a conversation with my friend Jason (of Jay and Ross Talk Shit) about the “chick flick” genre. My argument was that it was the only genre actually defined by being “bad.” If a film involves a female protagonist finding the man of her dreams, almost losing him, and winning him over at the end, but the characters are awful, it’s a “chick flick.” But if you make the same movie with interesting, funny, and relatable characters, then it’s a “romantic comedy,” but not a “chick flick.”

Case in point: Judd Apatow and Amy Schumer’s new film, Trainwreck. Despite Schumer’s reputation for progressive and ground-breaking comedy sketches, Trainwreck absolutely follows a standard romantic comedy arc. However, because Schumer’s script always takes care to treat its characters as actual human beings with understandable worldviews, and because it is frequently hilarious, nobody would dare slap it with the dreaded “chick flick” label.

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St. Vincent is a perfectly fine movie. It has some funny dialogue, a strong Bill Murray performance, and is centered on a particular character’s arc. The relationship between Murray’s Vincent and child protagonist Oliver (Jaeden Lieberher) is fun to watch, and it feels like a “complete” story. It doesn’t outright bungle any particular aspect of its narrative and if you’re looking for something to watch, you could certainly do worse.

But the problem with St. Vincent, like the paragraph above, is that it is unremarkable and by the books. It takes the shape of an emotional dramedy with a flawed protagonist and his young, innocent new friend, but it doesn’t seem to have a unique point of view or any flair to differentiate it from other movies. Despite the best efforts of the cast, St. Vincent lacks the soul to truly elevate it.

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