Movie Jibber-Jabber Vol. 6: San Diego Comic Con, 'Star Trek Beyond,' 'Ghostbusters,' Film Soceyology
Movie Jibber-Jabber is The Film Yap’s new digest column – your one-stop week-in-review of film news and commentary, as well as a preview of what we have to look forward to over the next few weeks.
News: San-Diego Comic Con is this Weekend
You'll be seeing a lot of big news this weekend about upcoming blockbusters because the annual San Diego Comic Con International is currently underway. We've already seen the new poster for DC's “Wonder Woman,” a cool trailer for next season of “The Walking Dead” and news that hit comic series “Deadly Class” is being adapted for TV by Joe and Anthony Russo of “Captain America” fame. Yet to come are big presentations from Warner Brothers and Marvel Studios.
On a deeply personal note, I had the insane privilege of attending San Diego Comic Con three times — 2010, 2012, and 2013. It is the most alive I have ever felt.
News: The FilmYap Invades Film Soceyology
Yappers Sam Watermeier, Joe Shearer and I joined friend of the Yap Matthew Socey on WFYI to discuss our first Fuck, Yeah! Film Festival experience. My first time on the radio! You can listen here!
https://www.wfyi.org/programs/film-soceyology
Review: "Star Trek Beyond."
I didn't grow up with "Star Trek" like many of my friends, but it did play a role. I saw all the movies; I watched many, many episodes of "Star Trek" and "The Next Generation." My brother talked endlessly about "Deep Space Nine." It was never my thing, though, coming up in an era where "Star Wars" and "Star Trek" felt oddly classical rather than contemporary. I liked gritty science fiction, superhero movies, stories with a sense of weight (if you define weight as bleakness), grim determination, and the journeys of young boys into men.
As I've gotten older, I've grown more and more to appreciate what makes "Star Trek" an important genre and cultural touchstone. Smartly told stories with social relevance, strong characters, diverse perspectives, humor, levity and hope. "Star Trek Beyond" is the best of the new "Star Trek" movies, and I think the best in the franchise since "Star Trek: First Contact" in 1996, and it embodies each of those fundamental qualities while utilizing contemporary blockbuster language.
I enjoyed "Star Trek (2009)," although it has always played as J.J. Abrams' "Star Wars" audition reel, something that became even more apparent when he actually got to make his own "Star Wars" movie. But it got the characters. Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Zoe Saldana, Karl Urban. Wow. What a cast. What great performances. The story? A little too Khan-rehash. Which was something that deeply hurt "Star Trek Into Darkness," one of the franchise low points — a completely unnecessary rehash that wasted the potential built by its predecessor.
Skip "Into Darkness." "Beyond" starts with our lovable crew halfway into its five-year voyage of discovery, docking for some shore leave with the massive space station Yorktown. The design of the Yorktown is straight off a 1960s sci-fi paperback, completely implausible and insanely gorgeous. They're sent on a rescue mission that ends up with them encountering an alien species; you know the rest. If anything else, "Beyond" plays the most like an episode of the television series. Every character is well-served and has moments to shine. The action, directed by Justin Lin of the "Fast & Furious" films, is vibrant, impulsive, interesting.
And a bit too extensive at times.
It's a common attribute of contemporary blockbusters to pack themselves from start to finish with action sequences; some ("Civil War") do it better than others ("Warcraft"). The ability to convey character through action is an incredible tightrope, and it doesn't always work. In a film like 'Star Trek Beyond," the characters are so much more interesting outside of their action exploits that it feels a little overdone at certain points.
Nonetheless, "Star Trek Beyond" is one of this summer's best movies. 2016 has been much more polarizing than the past few with regard to its big blockbusters; this one is definitely worth your money.
One more thing, and maybe the most important thing (but hey, it's a great segue): In "Star Trek Beyond," every single character of significance outside of the main cast is a woman. Every glimpse at the larger Enterprise crew has tons of diversity. For a franchise about a peaceful, united human race, "Star Trek" hasn't always lived up to the ideals on screen. "Beyond" makes it a point, and it absolutely shines.
Speaking of women shaking up old franchise tropes ...
Commentary: 'Ghostbusters'
Okay. Let's put it out there:
“Ghostbusters” and “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” are good and bad for the same reasons. You can read my review of “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” at the Yap, where I called it “the first merely good 'Star Wars' movie,” and praised the diversity of its character work, but docked the flaws in its storytelling. “Ghostbusters” has precisely the same mixture. They are, I think, films of equal quality because they take old stories we know and love and use them as springboards to reflect the diversity of our contemporary world in clever, meaningful ways.
Of the two? “Ghostbusters” is more interesting and more important, both for what the film contains and the culture surrounding it.
For those who don't know, Paul Feig (of “Bridesmaids,” “Spy” and “Freaks and Geeks” fame) and his stalwart collaborators Melissa McCarthy and Kristen Wiig were hired by Sony to make a "female-led" Ghostbusters reboot. They could have essentially rewritten the first film, inserting women instead of men, and called it a day. Structurally, they did. But instead of slotting their stars (also featuring Leslie Jones and Kate McKinnon) into familiar archetypes, they built new characters — fully fleshed-out, capable and flawed, clever and diverse. They are, without a doubt, the strongest women in a geek-franchise movie yet.
Sony has been working tirelessly, for decades, to bring the franchise back. This is the end result, and it is far more robust than it had to be. Of course, the Internet went apeshit, resulting in lots of bored, young men rating it poorly online and harassing Jones, the movie's lone black Ghostbuster. It's some fucked-up stuff.
What isn't fucked up, though, is how downright excellent “Ghostbusters” was at predicting this behavior and openly lampooning it within the context of the film. In doing so, it plays out as commentary on the demographic shifting of geek culture in the last 15 years. For a long, long time, women and other groups were marginalized within the sphere of mass-market geekdom. Largely as a result of the Internet, that has been changing. Big-budget filmmaking is a slow beast, and has taken longer than other mediums (like comics, novels or YouTube) to catch up, and with “Ghostbusters” it feels like we're finally arriving.
The villain, Rowan (Neil Casey), is s a needy, sexist, angry young man who feels neglected and turns to violence as an answer. The reason he feels so true-to-life to the people who have run weirdo campaigns to take down the movie is that they're an old type. Men reacting to women entering their spaces of expertise when it comes to fandom is old news. Openly combating that in the narrative of a big-budget movie? That takes some cleverness.
Does "Ghostbusters" flounder in the third-act? Yeah, the action's a bit dull. The main villain's plan is so-so. The finale feels like every other big-budget CGI smash fest. Whatever. So did “The Force Awakens.”
The reason I compare the two, and why I say “Ghostbusters” is just as good, is that “The Force Awakens” put considerable effort into the diversity of its cast as well. Incorporating Rey (Daisy Ridley), Finn (John Boyega) and Poe (Oscaar Isaac) as the main trio of this new trilogy eliminated the tired tendency of the movies to focus on solely on the white-male demographic. But it had the benefit of being “Star Wars,” a cultural (I'd argue religious) event for most of Western culture.
“Ghostbusters” had less of a safety net, and considerably more people sitting under it with spears upturned. Yet it's a consistently funny, progressively minded reboot with fantastic character work (shout-out to McKinnon as Holtzman, a career-defining role) and comedy. We'll be getting “Star Wars” movies until the end of time; after this, I wouldn't mind the same for “Ghostbusters.”
That's it for this week!