#(context: i tricked myself into rewatching a film i really enjoy by making it a necessity for my schoolwork and now i am THINKING)

[starbuck]

the telltale sign that you've been watching good films is when you get legitimately confused by two-person relationships in media. Like. where's the third person? we need them.

[greenorangevioletgrass]

Ok I’ve settled and gathered my thoughts. Let’s talk Cherry.

For starters I normally keep a straight face when going into these kinds of movies, I mean I’ll cry and laugh when appropriate but I don’t always have physical reactions. Also I’ve heard many bts stories of Tom filming Cherry from extras and I read the book and the screenplay and obviously not everything made the final cut, stuff was cut out at one point or another. Yet this movie took me away.

The critics are doing their job of being analyzing everything and ran Cherry right over but I respectfully disagree. The Russo’s and Tom tried something far from their status quo of marvel and took many creative liberties with acting, music choices, camera shots, you name it. Notably for me in part 1 there’s a magical chime playing when Emily’s on screen to represent that feeling of love that later evolves in the future parts and the voice over being constant really matches this quiet kid who’s mainly a follower finally finding a purpose in Emily and leading himself towards her. And the brief scene with Madison was a forced focused like they said in one article; I forgot where Tom was in the brief moment she was dancing around like a stripper, basking in lustful attention from surrounding men and it was a suffocating shot. It was perfect.

Then comes the later use of opera music that reminded me of well opera. They go for hours and the music just plays and you wonder when will this tragic tale end which is what you wonder as this guy’s life just gets worsened with every step he takes apparently. Also since Tom mentioned this is a future Cherry looking back on his life, the people who are frozen in brief moments work well as though you’re recalling a memory and you find the main focus of that memory and everything else didn’t matter as much.

Next there’s the camera shots that I at first didn’t like when watching the clips. For me that was in the doctors office where it briefly cuts to the doctors face almost awkwardly but in the movie Cherry’s noticeably suffering and jittery at every sudden sound so that shot flowed better in a fuller context. And I loved Ciara, people are saying it’s a movie directed by men in the end so she was sexualized but she does have a baby face and was dressed so innocently. I think it worked in her favor, to see innocence be ripped away of this sweet looking character partially by her own self destructive behavior and being treated like a helpless thing that hid under her white ribbon and pretty pink outfits.

And lastly Tom. I love Tom, that’s what brought me to this movie. I know that goes against everything we’ve warned to others when choosing to watch but I was ready and then I wasn’t. When he cried, I cried because I can’t stand to see him like that. I didn’t fully separate himself from the character and that’s the Oscar winning trick there. Cherry isn’t named at all really, so yeah it’s one guys poor experience that might make you see yourself in him, or your friends or your family member(s) or for me, I saw Tom. I saw what could’ve happened if he wasn’t fortunate like he is today. I wept for him but I think that’s another point of view you could have seen if you didn’t see Tom, see a man who had potential but never knew how much greatness he could’ve achieved and where he will go now in his epilogue and hopefully find that he still has potential in his life. See a man that could represent your shadow side if you will.

There’s my piece and I’m so proud of Tom that once COVID is over I swear I want to tell him myself in person and weep all over again. How good was it for a possible five star rating?

🍒🍒🍒🍒🍒

Woah, that's a wonderful take nonnie!

I did rewatch the movie again, and I was more ready to watch it just to enjoy it this time. I definitely did watch it to scrutinize the first time.

The movie is so fucking long tho, I partly think this might work better as a limited series??? like a 30-40min episode a chapter, maybe?

[theantisocialcritic]

This AntiSocial Life: Peter Berg vs The World

Before we get started on this rather long-winded article, I’m going to propose a thought experiment to you to consider before we start. I’m going to say a sentence and I want you to judge what your initial reaction is to that sentence. It will be important later on in this article. Ready?

“A Muslim man kills three people.”

Remember your emotional response to this sentence.

1. The Yearly Patriotic Event Movie

It seems to be a regular occurrence now as January has become the semi-official month in which it seems the most controversial movie of the year drops and causes a widespread nationwide debate about it’s quality and importance. While in the past this wasn’t unheard of with films like Black Hawk Down and Act of Valor the regularity of this phenomena has been notable with films like Lone Survivor, American Sniper, 13 Hours and now Patriot’s Day. The films generally have a central through line in the sense that they are usually military and terroism focused action films with an emphasis on a singular character placed up against Islamic Terrorists.

Speaking for myself I’ve grown to rather enjoy this bizarre sub-genre mostly for the schadenfreude of getting to be a contrarian jerk to literally everyone at once. 

Are most of these films overrated action movies that portray the complex nature of the War on Terror is rather uncomplicated black and white moral standards?

Yah, pretty much!

Are the large majority of mostly coastal elite film critics taking too much effort piddling on these movies are war propaganda at the behest of a population that is sincerely affectionate towards it’s armed forces and wants the chance to honor and celebrate them?

Yah, pretty much!

Long term readers of the AntiSocial Critic blog (if there are any) will remember that two years ago I personally stoke a claim in the culture war and came to the defense of American Sniper as it’s cavalcade of critics berated Clint Eastwood’s film as war propaganda and proceeded to piddle on the people whom took up seeing the film as a political statement. While I’m proud of the article as one of my earliest attempts at long form writing on cinema I would like to publically say that I no longer share the opinion of said article. While I still stand by my defense of the film as something worth defending, I think my argumentation was off and I wouldn’t make the arguments I made then now. A good film is a good film and critics had sincere criticisms about the film’s quality that are worth addressing.

Having just recently rewatched it I can confirm that it’s still a film that has some amazing high points in a cloud of mediocrity. Yes we’ve all made fun of the American Sniper baby but that really isn’t the issue at hand. In recent decades Eastwood has become a director who is very slavish to the material presented before him. This means that while he is capable of making excellent films like Gran Torino and Million Dollar Baby he also gets dragged down by poor scripts and ends up making movies like Jersey Boys.  The film is obviously trying insanely hard to follow the material of Chris Kyle’s original novelization of American Sniper and since Kyle was a Navy Seal and not a screenwriter the final film adaption ends up playing out like a series of things that happen to one guy as opposed to a focused script specifically trying to take on a specific aspect of his life. The end result is a movie that’s split evenly between a patriotic war movie about a good guy trying to do his duty and a guy suffering from horrible PTSD, all being followed up with him dying off screen when another soldier tragically shoots him at a shooting range in an unrelated but horribly sad murder.

This is not good screenwriting!

2. How Screenwriting Works

Writing films is one of the hardest jobs there is. Writing great films is likely one of the most rare talents on the face of the planet. Like any other form of storytelling, film is one that is defined by it’s limitations and it’s advantages and most of the time the average writer isn’t capable of taking advantage of the format in any useful way to make a compelling story. 

At a glance it’s easy to imagine this not being a problem given how many movies are made and released every year. The problem is more easily recognized with the realization that of all the films you may have seen in the past few years, how many of them can you remember in detail if you haven’t watched them repeated since you saw them?

As an example remember back to February of 2014. There were several films that came out that month but the two I most easily recall are The Lego Movie and The Wind Rises. Both are excellent animated films I’ve watched repeated in the intermitted three years up to now. You know what else came out in February of 2014? You may recall that the long awaited reboot of RoboCop came out the week after The Lego Movie.  It wasn’t a terrible movie but it was mediocre. Be honest, you probably forgot that there was even a remake of RoboCop. This is the power of good storytelling. Great films say in your mind and make you want to rewatch them years later while mediocre ones fall off the face of the earth into bargain bins at the local 7-11.

What makes that valuable difference though between great and mediocre though?

Like anything else it all starts with a solid, focused script. All of the best stories you love and watch repeatedly over the years (Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, The Dark Knight, etc) have this trait in common. These films are well structured, well conceived and focused stories with a basic understanding of dramatic storytelling. You start out with a character that is empathic and desires something. Circumstances arise that make that thing the character wants scarce and he must go out in search of that thing. The drama arises out of the fact that you are invested in this character and his success or failure pushes our personal investment in the story.

Of course there are quite a number of caveats here. Some of the best filmmakers know how to bend and reshape the rules of storytelling in clever ways to tell new stories or express new ideas. There are also tons of outside factors at play here involving context for what kind of story is being told and what the story is saying that can affect the overall quality of the product. Poor execution can also harm a film if the director or creative team doesn’t know how to execute a particular kind of story. For now though the basics are what is most important. When you are telling a story you need an empathetic central character to center with personal investment in the story to get the audience invested in the plot of the film.

3. Peter Berg: Good Filmmaker, Bad Storyteller

Finally we actually get to the meat of this think piece. The enigmatic director of Friday Night Lights, The Kingdom, Hancock and Battleship has been coming up a lot recently since his career-changing re-emergence with 2013’s Lone Survivor. In many ways that film would predict everything that the bizarre January Patriotic Event film would ultimately become.

The film was released in January 2014 to sold out theaters nationwide and became a huge phenomenon as it seemed to represent a populace’s desire to see the military portrayed in a positive, sympathetic light after a recent string of Hollywood films that had presented harsh criticisms of the military and the United State’s response to the War on Terror such as Redacted, Rendition, Green Zone, In the Valley of Elah and Lions for Lambs. The film intelligentsia widely disregarded the film at best bad and at worst a disturbing kind of war propaganda that bizarrely portrayed the actions of the Navy Seals portrayed with a style best described as “torture porn”.

Regardless of the realities of the actual wars and the audience and critic’s thoughts the film was an interesting case study at the least. The film is a brutal and difficult film to sit through given how brutally all of the Navy Seals in the film get messed up. The film is drawing upon real life events and the film’s ending interestingly presents a diametrically opposed theme of cooperation and cross-cultural outreach that works against the obvious “propaganda” angle. One could argue that the central plot of the film being about the Seals releasing a captive child only for that child to rat them out and get the Seals killed by terrorists is dramatically suggesting that their actions were in some way wrong (IE: killing foreigner children good) but the ending differentiates the bad guys from the good populace well enough that I think it gets away with it well enough. There’s probably an ethics discussion to be had about the moral difference between soldiers who let innocents go versus terrorists who murder people who didn’t kill anyone but that’s not terribly relevant to this discussion. My main problem with the film is the problem that is what is going to become a regular problem with Peter’s Berg’s recent output in that the script doesn’t work.

As was stated before with American Sniper the film is so slavish to being accurate to the real life events that it forgoes traditional storytelling to its detriment. Mark Walberg’s character is presented essentially as the main character as his character (SPOILERS) is the only one who survives the events of the story. He nor the others really work all the well as traditional characters. The film’s story structure operates as a basic set and up pay off. The characters are introduced and then they get thrown under the bus to try and survive the rest of the movie. Keep in mind this isn’t a story that works around unchanging characters like Nightcrawler or Captain America that are specifically about characters who never change interacting with the world. The movie is pulling the old cheap trick of storytelling in which you introduce something the audience likes to them and then put it in danger. It’s cheap and it doesn’t work as the focus of the story. It’s the cinematic equivalent of holding a puppy over the side of a cliff and threatening to drop it. Contrast this with recent successful action movies like Mad Max: Fury Road, which took the opposite approach and fully dramatized the growth of the characters throughout the film. That film is as much of a non-stop action movie as Lone Survivor is and it still manages to weave arcs into the film for all the major characters. 

This isn’t to say that Lone Survivor is fully bad or irredeemable. I actually do like the film for what it’s worth. As a critic though I think the criticisms are totally valid and impair the film enough that it’s easy to see how elite critics could so easily piddle all over it. I still think that Peter Berg is an interesting filmmaker. His recent films have a lot of interesting stuff in them and I like and recommend much of it for what it’s going for. Berg is very well versed in the visual language of filmmaking and knows exactly how to execute movies just like this to create a visual language that emphasizes that these stories are “based on true stories”. His hand held cam gives the films a very down to earth feeling to them that creates the sense that you are in the room and the intimate eye-level cinematography of his recent films emphasizes putting you in the room with these characters. Berg directs the actors to act and behave very subtly to ground the films in reality. This is all a wonderful blanket to coat the films with however it suffers from a major issue in that it’s all just surface stuff in filmmaking. The foundation of the film’s story for Lone Survivor and his two subsequent films has been a mess.

4. And Nobody Learned a Thing…

The second film in his recent trilogy of event movies is last year’s Deepwater Horizon. Based on the true events of the horrible 2010 BP Oil Spill, the film this time follows the events of the people working on the Oil Rig in the hours leading up to the disaster where an experiment with starting up the drill unintentionally results in the rig exploding and spilling thousands of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

Functionally the film is very similar to Lone Survivor in all but skin. While that film was a poorly conceived setup-pay off with a war film and good cinematography grafted on to it, Deepwater Horizon is a disaster film with good stuff grafted on it. Much like it’s spiritual predecessor the problem lies with its bad script problem. All the lovely visual effects, camera work and muted, down to Earth acting don’t fix the problem that the film repeats the same structure from his prior work. 

A. Introduce Characters 

B. Put them in Danger 

Mark Wahlberg returns and once again his central performance follows a character who learns nothing during the course of the film and doesn’t grow. The only real difference between this and Lone Survivor is this film’s introduction of a message about how evil corporations are evil as embodied by John Malkovich’s mustache twirling boss who tries to activate the rig before it’s functional and blows it up. This might be an emotionally compelling idea to work with but the majority of Hollywood films have “evil corporations are evil” as their message so it just makes the film come off as trite more than profound. It doesn’t matter that this actually happened because the waters are already diluted with that overused theme thus desensitizing it’s audience to any real emotional heft that could be had at the expense of real corporations, conceptually speaking.

Stupid overused theme aside the film just returns us to the familiar territory of nice stuff grafted onto a dysfunctional core. Again, like Lone Survivor I enjoyed watching the film just because it’s a halfway compelling disaster film but my enjoyment had nothing to do with the film’s ability to function.

5. Patriot’s Day: A Film Standing for Nothing

Finally we arrive at our destination. Patriot’s Day represented Peter Berg’s third film in this bizarre little trilogy and once again manages to repeat all the mistakes of it’s predecessors. The main difference between this and Lone Survivor or Deepwater Horizon is that this film really isn’t a film that seems to represent anything unlike it’s predecessor. This time Berg uses his style to look at the events following the horrible 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. Once again Berg grafts good visuals and Mark Wahlberg on to a retelling of the actual event and tries to sell it as a film. While the first two films borrowed the style/template of war films and disaster films respectively to use as the frame for this film Berg chooses the more contemporary cop drama/action movie as the proverbial aesthetic blank. Again though the film makes the mistake of the setup-payoff problem of the last two films, giving us a much larger cast of characters this time and creating new problems.

Again I’ll state up front that I actively enjoyed the experience of watching the movie much like the first two. Berg really understands visceral filmmaking and I found myself really getting worked up by the events. Much of that though really had to do with the shock of realizing how much of this really happened in real life as the investigation and eventual manhunt for the two terrorists continues to escalate and become more absurd to the point where the two terrorists get into a full firefight in a residential neighborhood. Once again Mark Wahlberg continues to wander around the plot aimlessly as the theoretical “main character” even though his role in the film is mainly to be the one Boston Cop capable of answering all-important questions and being wherever the story needs him to be.

 What makes the film weirder than it’s contemporaries is it’s bizarre lack of a central consistent idea to work with. Moreso than even his prior two films which at the least seemed to prioritize a basic moral to contemplate (Seals yay! Corporations boo…), Patriot’s Day doesn’t seem to put any ideas forward. It smooths out the complexity and horrors of the real life situation into a vaguely optimistic “we will march forward” narrative about overcoming tragedy while the actual story is focused on the cops hunting the terrorists.

I mean… what?

This is the old Fight Club problem where the meaning of the story and the actual dramatic thrust of the story are 100% at odds with one another so the bad guys get made to look cool by virtual of how the film portrays them in a positive light for the duration of the screen time. If this is supposed to be a film about dealing with tragedy and moving forward in spite of it than the dramatic thrust of the film should’ve reflected that. Go back and look at Lenny Abrahamson’s masterpiece Room. That movie is functionally about emotional healing in the aftermath of a horrifying personal tragedy so the screenplay intelligently pushes the rapist/kidnapper subplot to the background of the film for it’s duration after the main events go down to focus specifically on the characters dealing with the aftermath of the horrors.

This more than anything else is really the underlying problem with Peter Berg’s filmography. As a director he doesn’t really think of the full implications of the events that are going on in his films and lets them be played straight in the style of cliché Hollywood archetypes. There always has to be a bad guy. There always has to be an epic struggle with explosions and tragic loss of life. Placing basic Hollywood schmaltz over horrible events in this way without the nuance and focus that they deserve turns them into confused, ugly little movies that critics can jump on effortlessly as symbols of everything they stand to rail against.

I asked at the beginning of this article how you would effect if you heard the sentence “A Muslim man kills three people” and it’s for this reason why. Patriot’s Day presents a situation where two young Muslim men committed a horrible terrorist attack. The movie portrays them as 100% totally the villains and portrays everything about them in a negative light and only vaguely hints at their motivations.

For the sake of clarity, OBVIOUSLY these guys are terrorists and deserved everything they ultimately got in the end. What they committed was unforgivable and the movie doesn’t shy away from showing just how horrible everything that went down was to those involved and how many people were devastated by it. Unfortunately though by boiling down this situation that took place in the real world where real people died and had motivations for what they did it failed to actually say anything about the events.

For a lot of people the sentence “A Muslim man kills three people” is a sentence that many people feel could spark tension and bigotry towards underserving Muslims who merely share the same religion of the two horrible people who committed the atrocity. Because the film doesn’t have anything to say and just frames the narrative as a black and white dichotomy it’s not hard to walk away from the film just mad at those two guys or their life philosophy for the horrors of what happened.

There’s an incredibly nuanced story about post-terrorist attack police proceedings or the backstories that led to this event and what fuels modern terrorism that could have been made. Alternatively they could have actually focused on the more interesting aspect of how a city learns to deal with grief and horror in it’s aftermath and focused on the growth of the characters and their eventual refusal to let this stop future Boston Marathons. That’s not the movie we got. Patriot’s Day is an action movie about Mark Wahlberg catching terrorists. It’s a movie drowning in catharsis and righteously due rage that then turns around and pretends it’s about moving on from such a horrible event.

Even with all that said I can’t deny actually enjoying the experience of watching the film. 

Much like the proverbial American Sniper the experience of being able to watch a film that boils down the frustrating complexity of real life into a two hour action movie can’t help but be cathartic. As i’ve said, Peter Berg is an incredibly talented filmmaker with an eye for gritty realism and a sense of humanity of the tragedy of the situations put before him. Heck, I can’t think of a scene more shocking and unsettling i’ve seen in quite a while than watching a firefight play out on a suburban street in Boston involving such extreme destruction and loss of life so close to home. 

There is a real sense that he is a person humbled by his presence in portraying these events that is kneecapped by an ineptitude with letting things play out to their logical conclusions. Patriot’s Day may not be a good or fully thoughtful movie but at the end of the day moment it’s enough for this one moment in time for a movie to offer this brief moment of respite just so long as the catharsis isn’t carried back into real life. 

6. Conclusion

I’d like to reiterate that I don’t believe that Peter Berg is a bad person or is intentionally fueling any of the problems of his movies. I suspect that Berg is an excellent person just trying like everyone else in the entertainment industry to dig himself into a place where he can earn a living doing what he loves.  Most problems like this in modern films aren’t born of intent or even necessary underlying prejudice from the filmmakers.

I don’t believe that Berg has ever been the kind of person who wants to make cathartic anti-Islam movies or just shovel cheap Hollywood clichés. His recent films all stink of a desperate desire to show persistence in the face of human tragedy and merely fail in execution.  Small details in the films all suggest that the filmmaker is aware of potential criticisms of the material and adds things to ward off criticism such as the ending of Lone Survivor and the Muslim government agent in Patriot’s Day. The main takeaway here from all these films it’s easy to allow ourselves to be swept up. The world is complicated and easy to make much much worse so understanding ourselves and others helps to make it a little better. Nowadays there is so much tension and hatred floating around that we all need a little catharsis. Just recognize what it is.  

For Mr. Berg, I’ll offer a slow clap for genuine talent and humanity with a pause for missing the target thoroughly.

Thank you all for reading! if you would like to see more essays like this lemme know by tweeting me at @AntiSocialCriti or commenting below. Also be sure to check out my new review show The Fox Valley Film Critics!

Live long and prosper!