Just the Ticket #101: Intro to....
Ticketmaster's Note: I originally intended to post this some time in January or February of 2016, but the rapid pileup of project ideas and the time and energy available to accomplish them weren't matching up. I am still very proud of my blog and its long history of bringing spoiler-laden critical input to its readership, and hope to continue the tradition far into the future.
Back to school, back to school. Gonna show the teacher that I'm not a fool....
Ummm...yeah. So, it's been a few months--again--since I posted anything in the Ticketverse. After succeeding enormously at keeping up with the Halloween countdown and failing miserably halfway through NaNoWriMo, I needed a winter break from writing. So I started reading and binge-watching TV instead. Since December, I have watched all seven seasons of Castle (a formulaic, usually predictable police procedural with an intriguing series-spanning whodunnit arc, likable characters, witty writing, and welcome nods to other high points in Nathan Fillion's career), the slow- and hard-boiled first season of Netflix/Marvel's Jessica Jones (which I plan on devoting an issue of Stay Tuned to in the near future), caught myself up on the cultural phenomenon that is the Star Wars film franchise, and finished reading Library of Souls: The Third--and possibly final--Book of Miss Perigrine's Peculiar Children. I will hold myself to future reviews of both in Just the Ticket and Cover Charge, but for now, it's time to get back to school and back to basics in this long overdue hundred-and-first issue of Just the Ticket, an intro to doing things right and wrong in the modern era of film, cinema, and other varying degrees of movie quality.
We start with "Intro to Making Good Films About Nothing," a case study of Entourage: The Movie, starring Jeremy Piven as the angry talent agent who flies into a rage whenever anyone questions his ability to avoid flying into a rage, the brother of the guy from Wayward Pines as a jock named Drama (in a comedy, isn't it ironic, Miss Morrissette?), Adrian Grenier (the perfect name for a French cage fighter, wasted on the poster boy for emo-hipster douchebagel actors everywhere) as the director of a movie-within-a-movie that's basically the cinematic equivalent of Geraldo Rivera opening the suitcase from Pulp Fiction and finding the same thing he found in Al Capone's vault (if you're too young to catch the references, we never get to see what's in the suitcase, and Capone's vault was empty, so draw from that what you will), Cast Me As A Gangster In Anything as a not-gangster named Turtle, and enough blatant product placement and "as themselves" celebrity cameos to make you OMG for various reasons. It's unnecesasrily long, excessively commercial, and vulgar to the very outer limits of good taste. But it's such a funny, well-written pile of Hollywood nothingness that we laugh often enough to forget that Entourage :The Movie is...well, a pile of Hollywood nothingness.
C+
Next on our class schedule is "Intro to Not Knowing When to End A Franchise," featuring Terminator: Genisys.
Hint: Stop after Judgement Day. It was the end of the world in the Bible, and it should have been the end of the Terminator series (except the Sarah Connor TV show, which would still be on the air today if anyone but me had a brain in their head).
The first problem with this movie is its title. It's Terminator, followed by the title of the first book in the Bible, but it's misspelled to look like the name of a rare venereal disease. It's meant to signify this as both an in-continuity reboot and a sequel, but all it says is "we're trying too hard to be cool! Please don't notice!"
The second problem is that the quantum mechanics behind the plot make very little sense, and any attempt to address these errors are met with further error messages, more specifically, with the Terminator himself saying "I can't explain how time travel works because I have digital Alzheimers." Of course, we could just let it all go on the excuse that Terminator: Genisys is not real, and therefore anything that happens is perfectly plausible within its context. Such a thought process has been known to work from time to time, given a cool enough heap of gibberish. But T:G is nowhere near cool enough and way too near nonsensical enough for that excuse to work. Disregarding the established mechanics of modern time travel theories for the sole purpose of disguising this sequel as a simul-pre-boot-quel is not a good idea. It's not even a real word, nor is any part of that non-word a word. Except for boot, and at least you know where that is supposed to go.
Then there's the cast. Terminator: Genisys has well-established, well-liked characters re-cast with actors who can't act and whom no one but the sarcastically-quoted actors themselves have ever heard of. Except J.K. Simmons (from The Closer and Spider-Man and the Farmers' Insurance commercials), who is way under-utilized, and Schwarzenegger (the exception to the unknown rule, but not so much to the can't act rule; at least he uses his poor acting skills to comic effect), who has to kill a younger, archive footage-and-CGI-based version of himself as a remake cameo. Is it sad to say that the most done-to-death cliche in remake history is also this film's best moment?\
Strap in, because here come the spoilers and the nonsensical crap.
Okay, so we all know that in the original movie, John Connor sent his father back in time to rescue his own mother from a naked killer cyborg who could have been played by OJ Simpson and later became a partial inspiration for Chucky the Killer Doll, all so Kyle and Sarah could have sex and he could be born, thus establishing an infallible time loop that includes another Terminator (re-programmed to be a protector), a T-1000, a TV show in which Sarah, her son, and a female Terminator tried to stop a chess-playing AI from becoming Skynet's brain, a second sequel in which no reference is made to that AI, but thanks to the technopathic abilities of a new T-X model, Skynet comes online and the inevitable nuclear holocaust of humanity ensues. Rise Of the Machines aged so poorly in my mind that I never bothered to see Salvation, but it apparently had a bunch of zombie movie archetypes and plot mechanics centering around the humanity of Terminators pretending to be human.
Now, we get to Genisys. Basically, it's the same "send Kyle Reese back in time to save Sarah" tale that we started off with, only something goes hinky with the time machine and Kyle gets sent back to...an alternate timeline? Parallel universe? The same timeline jam-packed with newer and cooler stuff? Who knows? Schwarzenegger's memory banks have Alzheimers, remember? There was more effort put into explaining why he's old than explaining how the movie actually works, thus establishing an infinite, rapidly collapsing loop of bullshit, wherein Sarah doesn't need saving because this version of her was raised by a Terminator, so she's Terminator Sarah with Judgement Day attitude and Judgement Day villains (the T-1000--originally played by Robert Patrick--is apparently a young, Asian dude now), leaving Kyle Reese uncharacteristically in over his head as the trio smash and shoot through recycled set pieces in another effort to stop Skynet (now an artificially intelligent syncing app that became obsolete while Genisys was in its pre-production stages) from reaching puberty and using its computerized hormones to nuke humanity.
Two more things: there is also a threadbare sub-plot wherein the time-travel malfunction causes Kyle to have flashbacks that ultimately force him to tell his younger self that Skynet is an obsolete syncing app, so that he has flashbacks about him telling himself this information, so they can stop Skynet, so he can tell himself this information, so.... Oh, and about that part where I said Salvation was full of zombie movie archetypes? Well, in Genisys, the Terminators have developed a virus that turns humans into Terminators. So they can pretend to be humans. So they can turn humans into Terminators. Who pretend to be human so they can turn more humans into Terminators....
Before you go, I want you to remember: Genisys is Skynet. Terminators are now robo-zombies. My brain can't take much more. Loop me out.
F+
As supplemental material for "Intro to Not Knowing When to End A Franchise," please see (or do not) Jurassic World.
Welcome back to a park full of gene-spliced dinosaurs, where nothing can possibly go wrong, even though it's gone horribly wrong three times already. Only this time, money trumps wonder at every turn and spectacle trumps science in the name of financial gain. There is a Starbucks on every corner, dinosaurs are sponsored by Verizon, and the park geneticists are forced to hybridize new species because, like us, they know everything else has been done before.
There's the squabbling couple (velociraptor handler Chris Pratt and park manager Bryce Dallas Howard), the children who go off on their own and get into trouble, the military profiteer (Vincent D'Onofrio) wanting to use dinosaurs for his own personal gain in the most ridiculous plot turn since Dr. Evil's shark tank, the prissy girl (Bryce Dallas Howard again) who manages to save her own ass by sheer luck, B.D. Wong doing whatever he damned well feels like to fill in the gene sequence gaps and make complete dinosaurs--again--and a bunch of innocent bystanders and incompetent park personnel getting their dumb asses slaughtered when the dinosaurs escape--again.
The result is a bunch of recycled plot elements and iconic moments from the first film getting updated and smashed together while the park's latest hybrid attraction (which you know is a T-Rex/Velociraptor mashup before you even see the damned thing) rampages about and employs such nonsensical abilities as turning off its body heat and making itself invisible. What's next? Aliens V Predator V Dinosaurs?
As in all Jurassic films before it, the final fight scene in World is pure, epic awesomeness, and it lets the movie stand alone while leaving room for a sequel. But just because a sequel can be made doesn't mean it should be made. Unless they can get Jeff Goldblum back. Hopefully, life will find a way.
But until then, I'll give Jurassic World a D+
Next up is "Intro to Tasteful R-Rated Comedies," featuring Trainwreck.
Judd Apatow directs. Amy Schumer writes and stars. John Cena is gay. Bill Hader is a celebrity sports doctor?
Throw in every celebrity cameo that wasn't already used in Entourage and add a bunch of well-known comedians from Apatow's boys' club and you have the perfect recipe for an R-Rated romantic comedy.
Schumer unapologetically plays an exaggerated version of herself: a boozy, non-committal ditz, who finds love in the unlikeliest of places when she meets Hader's doctor, who kind of stalks her in that uncomfortably sweet way that Apatow crafts so well for his male leads.
Schumer's writing is appropriately crude and ingeniously funny, turning every scene into a drunken yet surgically precise tightrope walk through the sweet spot between subtle, intellectual humor and modern over-the-top-ness. It shows and tells that obnoxious slapstick is both out of style and unnecessary. And that Apatow and Schumer allow the film's final--and only--moment of obnoxious slapstick to fall flat on purpose only drives that message home with art and style.
A+
Ticketmaster's Note: As it has currently been a year and a half since I saw or read any of the material I promised to review in future installments (Jessica Jones, Star Wars, and Library of Souls), I will take a cue from Terminator: Genisys and symbolically kill my plans so I can start fresh, but without the nonsense, poor quality, or colossally screwing up. I have recently begun writing a retrospective on Zenescope's Grimm Fairy Tales comics offsite that I will upload in bits and pieces as time goes on, and a summer purge led to me finding some of my old high school and college essays in hard copy that I plan to bang out and retool for Piece Offerings posts as well. Until later,
Stay Tuned and
Ticketmaster,
out.
Ummm...yeah. So, it's been a few months--again--since I posted anything in the Ticketverse. After succeeding enormously at keeping up with the Halloween countdown and failing miserably halfway through NaNoWriMo, I needed a winter break from writing. So I started reading and binge-watching TV instead. Since December, I have watched all seven seasons of Castle (a formulaic, usually predictable police procedural with an intriguing series-spanning whodunnit arc, likable characters, witty writing, and welcome nods to other high points in Nathan Fillion's career), the slow- and hard-boiled first season of Netflix/Marvel's Jessica Jones (which I plan on devoting an issue of Stay Tuned to in the near future), caught myself up on the cultural phenomenon that is the Star Wars film franchise, and finished reading Library of Souls: The Third--and possibly final--Book of Miss Perigrine's Peculiar Children. I will hold myself to future reviews of both in Just the Ticket and Cover Charge, but for now, it's time to get back to school and back to basics in this long overdue hundred-and-first issue of Just the Ticket, an intro to doing things right and wrong in the modern era of film, cinema, and other varying degrees of movie quality.
We start with "Intro to Making Good Films About Nothing," a case study of Entourage: The Movie, starring Jeremy Piven as the angry talent agent who flies into a rage whenever anyone questions his ability to avoid flying into a rage, the brother of the guy from Wayward Pines as a jock named Drama (in a comedy, isn't it ironic, Miss Morrissette?), Adrian Grenier (the perfect name for a French cage fighter, wasted on the poster boy for emo-hipster douchebagel actors everywhere) as the director of a movie-within-a-movie that's basically the cinematic equivalent of Geraldo Rivera opening the suitcase from Pulp Fiction and finding the same thing he found in Al Capone's vault (if you're too young to catch the references, we never get to see what's in the suitcase, and Capone's vault was empty, so draw from that what you will), Cast Me As A Gangster In Anything as a not-gangster named Turtle, and enough blatant product placement and "as themselves" celebrity cameos to make you OMG for various reasons. It's unnecesasrily long, excessively commercial, and vulgar to the very outer limits of good taste. But it's such a funny, well-written pile of Hollywood nothingness that we laugh often enough to forget that Entourage :The Movie is...well, a pile of Hollywood nothingness.C+
Next on our class schedule is "Intro to Not Knowing When to End A Franchise," featuring Terminator: Genisys.Hint: Stop after Judgement Day. It was the end of the world in the Bible, and it should have been the end of the Terminator series (except the Sarah Connor TV show, which would still be on the air today if anyone but me had a brain in their head).
The first problem with this movie is its title. It's Terminator, followed by the title of the first book in the Bible, but it's misspelled to look like the name of a rare venereal disease. It's meant to signify this as both an in-continuity reboot and a sequel, but all it says is "we're trying too hard to be cool! Please don't notice!"
The second problem is that the quantum mechanics behind the plot make very little sense, and any attempt to address these errors are met with further error messages, more specifically, with the Terminator himself saying "I can't explain how time travel works because I have digital Alzheimers." Of course, we could just let it all go on the excuse that Terminator: Genisys is not real, and therefore anything that happens is perfectly plausible within its context. Such a thought process has been known to work from time to time, given a cool enough heap of gibberish. But T:G is nowhere near cool enough and way too near nonsensical enough for that excuse to work. Disregarding the established mechanics of modern time travel theories for the sole purpose of disguising this sequel as a simul-pre-boot-quel is not a good idea. It's not even a real word, nor is any part of that non-word a word. Except for boot, and at least you know where that is supposed to go.
Then there's the cast. Terminator: Genisys has well-established, well-liked characters re-cast with actors who can't act and whom no one but the sarcastically-quoted actors themselves have ever heard of. Except J.K. Simmons (from The Closer and Spider-Man and the Farmers' Insurance commercials), who is way under-utilized, and Schwarzenegger (the exception to the unknown rule, but not so much to the can't act rule; at least he uses his poor acting skills to comic effect), who has to kill a younger, archive footage-and-CGI-based version of himself as a remake cameo. Is it sad to say that the most done-to-death cliche in remake history is also this film's best moment?\
Strap in, because here come the spoilers and the nonsensical crap.
Okay, so we all know that in the original movie, John Connor sent his father back in time to rescue his own mother from a naked killer cyborg who could have been played by OJ Simpson and later became a partial inspiration for Chucky the Killer Doll, all so Kyle and Sarah could have sex and he could be born, thus establishing an infallible time loop that includes another Terminator (re-programmed to be a protector), a T-1000, a TV show in which Sarah, her son, and a female Terminator tried to stop a chess-playing AI from becoming Skynet's brain, a second sequel in which no reference is made to that AI, but thanks to the technopathic abilities of a new T-X model, Skynet comes online and the inevitable nuclear holocaust of humanity ensues. Rise Of the Machines aged so poorly in my mind that I never bothered to see Salvation, but it apparently had a bunch of zombie movie archetypes and plot mechanics centering around the humanity of Terminators pretending to be human.
Now, we get to Genisys. Basically, it's the same "send Kyle Reese back in time to save Sarah" tale that we started off with, only something goes hinky with the time machine and Kyle gets sent back to...an alternate timeline? Parallel universe? The same timeline jam-packed with newer and cooler stuff? Who knows? Schwarzenegger's memory banks have Alzheimers, remember? There was more effort put into explaining why he's old than explaining how the movie actually works, thus establishing an infinite, rapidly collapsing loop of bullshit, wherein Sarah doesn't need saving because this version of her was raised by a Terminator, so she's Terminator Sarah with Judgement Day attitude and Judgement Day villains (the T-1000--originally played by Robert Patrick--is apparently a young, Asian dude now), leaving Kyle Reese uncharacteristically in over his head as the trio smash and shoot through recycled set pieces in another effort to stop Skynet (now an artificially intelligent syncing app that became obsolete while Genisys was in its pre-production stages) from reaching puberty and using its computerized hormones to nuke humanity.
Two more things: there is also a threadbare sub-plot wherein the time-travel malfunction causes Kyle to have flashbacks that ultimately force him to tell his younger self that Skynet is an obsolete syncing app, so that he has flashbacks about him telling himself this information, so they can stop Skynet, so he can tell himself this information, so.... Oh, and about that part where I said Salvation was full of zombie movie archetypes? Well, in Genisys, the Terminators have developed a virus that turns humans into Terminators. So they can pretend to be humans. So they can turn humans into Terminators. Who pretend to be human so they can turn more humans into Terminators....
Before you go, I want you to remember: Genisys is Skynet. Terminators are now robo-zombies. My brain can't take much more. Loop me out.
F+
As supplemental material for "Intro to Not Knowing When to End A Franchise," please see (or do not) Jurassic World.Welcome back to a park full of gene-spliced dinosaurs, where nothing can possibly go wrong, even though it's gone horribly wrong three times already. Only this time, money trumps wonder at every turn and spectacle trumps science in the name of financial gain. There is a Starbucks on every corner, dinosaurs are sponsored by Verizon, and the park geneticists are forced to hybridize new species because, like us, they know everything else has been done before.
There's the squabbling couple (velociraptor handler Chris Pratt and park manager Bryce Dallas Howard), the children who go off on their own and get into trouble, the military profiteer (Vincent D'Onofrio) wanting to use dinosaurs for his own personal gain in the most ridiculous plot turn since Dr. Evil's shark tank, the prissy girl (Bryce Dallas Howard again) who manages to save her own ass by sheer luck, B.D. Wong doing whatever he damned well feels like to fill in the gene sequence gaps and make complete dinosaurs--again--and a bunch of innocent bystanders and incompetent park personnel getting their dumb asses slaughtered when the dinosaurs escape--again.
The result is a bunch of recycled plot elements and iconic moments from the first film getting updated and smashed together while the park's latest hybrid attraction (which you know is a T-Rex/Velociraptor mashup before you even see the damned thing) rampages about and employs such nonsensical abilities as turning off its body heat and making itself invisible. What's next? Aliens V Predator V Dinosaurs?
As in all Jurassic films before it, the final fight scene in World is pure, epic awesomeness, and it lets the movie stand alone while leaving room for a sequel. But just because a sequel can be made doesn't mean it should be made. Unless they can get Jeff Goldblum back. Hopefully, life will find a way.
But until then, I'll give Jurassic World a D+
Next up is "Intro to Tasteful R-Rated Comedies," featuring Trainwreck.Judd Apatow directs. Amy Schumer writes and stars. John Cena is gay. Bill Hader is a celebrity sports doctor?
Throw in every celebrity cameo that wasn't already used in Entourage and add a bunch of well-known comedians from Apatow's boys' club and you have the perfect recipe for an R-Rated romantic comedy.
Schumer unapologetically plays an exaggerated version of herself: a boozy, non-committal ditz, who finds love in the unlikeliest of places when she meets Hader's doctor, who kind of stalks her in that uncomfortably sweet way that Apatow crafts so well for his male leads.
Schumer's writing is appropriately crude and ingeniously funny, turning every scene into a drunken yet surgically precise tightrope walk through the sweet spot between subtle, intellectual humor and modern over-the-top-ness. It shows and tells that obnoxious slapstick is both out of style and unnecessary. And that Apatow and Schumer allow the film's final--and only--moment of obnoxious slapstick to fall flat on purpose only drives that message home with art and style.
A+
Ticketmaster's Note: As it has currently been a year and a half since I saw or read any of the material I promised to review in future installments (Jessica Jones, Star Wars, and Library of Souls), I will take a cue from Terminator: Genisys and symbolically kill my plans so I can start fresh, but without the nonsense, poor quality, or colossally screwing up. I have recently begun writing a retrospective on Zenescope's Grimm Fairy Tales comics offsite that I will upload in bits and pieces as time goes on, and a summer purge led to me finding some of my old high school and college essays in hard copy that I plan to bang out and retool for Piece Offerings posts as well. Until later,
Stay Tuned and
Ticketmaster,
out.
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