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Critically Acclaimed
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Copyright © 2017 by J. Ryan Stradal and Adam Cushman
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Set in Minion
epub isbn: 9781947856394
Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data
Names: Stradal, J. Ryan, editor. | Cushman, Adam, editor.
Title: Critically acclaimed / edited by J. Ryan Stradal and Adam Cushman.
Description: First Trade Paperback Original Edition | A Vireo Book | New York, NY;
Los Angeles, CA: Rare Bird Books, 2017.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781945572548
Subjects: LCSH Film criticism—Fiction. | Motion picture industry—Fiction. | Hollywood (Los Angeles, Calif.)—Fiction. | Satire. | Humorous fiction. | BISAC FICTION / Satire | FICTION / Humorous / General
Classification: LCC PS3603.R5795 S77 2017 | DDC 813.6—dc23
Kevin Wilson
The Essential Failure of the Universe
Lucy Corin
Baby Alive
Stephen Graham Jones
The Boy Who Cried About Wolves
Brian Evenson
The Trigger
Stefan Kiesbye
Burned
Julia Ingalls
Werner Herzog on Michael Jackson:
He’s Bad?
Roy Kesey
Abbott Awaits
Antoine Wilson
Mine
Maile Chapman
Dr. Disgrace
J. Ryan Stradal
A Bird in the Hand
Sarah Tomlinson
Family Ties
Michael Martone
Kodak: The Film
Adam Cushman
Outlaw Country
Ana Ottman
Planet of the Women
Jimmy Chen
Rosemary’s Baby
Sara Finnerty
Two Thousand and Fourteen
Mike Sacks
Lost Classics! The Rarest of the Rare!
Paul Durica
Home Alone: Repossessed
Phil Kim
The Karate Kid Prequel
Josh Dubose
Charly
Jim Shepard
Three Films
Len Shneyder
The Beat Generation
Shirin Najafi
The Boob Switch
Ryan Wilson
Wheel of Truth
Summer Block
The Middle Man
Sofiya Alexandra
Bosom Bros 8: Bros 4 Life
Joshua Kornreich
Walt Disney’s 101 One-Percenters
Nathan Gratz
Stuck Under the Cleetz
Leo Marks
Consumed
Seth Blake
Death of a Clown
Eric Layer
Quixote Jones
David W. Harrington
Noah Means Yes
Adam Kaplan
Back to the Future V
Neal Pollack
Dr. Strange
Scott Dominic Carpenter
Saving Electra
Sarah LaBrie
Six Cats Who Look Like Jesus
Tom Dibblee
Baby on Fire
Directed by Naylon Beauregard. Starring: Angelina Jolie, Toni Collette, Jude Law, Jada Pinkett-Smith, Tom Cruise, Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne, Zhang Ziyi, Robert Duvall, and Jason Robards as the president of the United States.
There are few things that end up being worth the wait, the gradual buildup of expectation until it outpaces whatever the final product could ever become. And, yet, Essential Target was poised to top even our own outsized hopes. The pedigree suggested as much. Writer and director Naylon Beauregard’s previous movie, Acceleration Homeward, netted just shy of $900 million in foreign and domestic box office totals. That film, an epic story of an entire civilization’s lifespan aboard a spaceship the size of a planet, revitalized the sci-fi genre and made stars of Jude Law and Toni Collette. It changed the way special effects can enter the storytelling process, reminded us how a singular vision can speak to so many people, and, most importantly, altered our perceptions of our place in this universe. It was, to say the least, as life-changing as film can be. Essential Target, I must confess, does not succeed as a film in any traditional (or even nontraditional) sense of the form. It is so ponderous and overwhelmingly large in its focus that our current screens simply cannot accommodate it. I sense that, even if a screen were made that encapsulated the entire dome of the sky, it would not do justice to the aims of this film. What the film does accomplish, through means that may or may not revolve around the act of filmmaking, is to once again cause us to question our necessity in the universe, our need to exist, our possible movement toward a deserved extinction.
It’s impossible to critique Essential Target without first addressing the issue surrounding its creation: the budget. What began as a $100-million movie turned into a $200-million movie and, by the time a quarter of a billion dollars had been spent on a single motion picture still not even half-finished, there seemed no option but to continue pouring money into what seemed to be the literal assembling of an entirely new reality. The final budget has not been released, but rumors put it at $2.5 billion. A large portion of this money, we of course have now learned, was put toward the scientific enterprise of discovering a new planet in the solar system and then—no other way to describe it—blowing it up. It seems pointless, in a film review, to discuss the ethical questions of this endeavor, only to relate how that experience, captured on film in astonishingly beautiful and disturbing detail, affects the experience of viewing the finished film.
The story concerns a committee of world leaders, disturbed by the rapidly increasing instances of extraterrestrial contact— some good, some bad—which enlists several scientific geniuses to create a plan to rid the universe of other life forms. The committee, spurred by the fear-mongering of the president of the United States of America (Jason Robards), places its faith in the hands of a brilliant, young, beautiful (of course) scientist (Angelina Jolie) who devises a plan to send manned super-nuclear warheads into outer space, to then be piloted toward each known planet in the solar system. This comprises roughly ten minutes of the film. The resulting three hours and twenty-five minutes are devoted to the actual suicide missions of the eight missiles, which are piloted by Toni Collette, Jude Law, Jada Pinkett-Smith, Tom Cruise, Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne, Zhang Ziyi, and Robert Duvall. The star power at play is staggering, perhaps intentionally designed so as to allow the characters to withstand the awe-inspiring, divine setting of the film—some of it actually filmed in space. It should not ruin the movie to state that almost all of the participants in this mission are unsuccessful and it should not ruin the movie to say that the movie spends most of its time focusing on Collette, who is tasked with eliminating Pluto from the galaxy. Plot and character are, truthfully, not the interest of Beauregard; he cares, instead, about themes and visuals. The problem is that the plot and characters ar
e presented in such a strange way that the film seems to actively work against the tenets of storytelling.
The greatest example has to be the way in which these world-famous actors are presented. For nearly the entirety of the film, these astronauts/suicide bombers don’t wear helmets, which would obscure their faces, but, strangely enough, are encased in an oxygen-manufacturing cloud that protects their bodies from the stress of long-term space travel. This cloud is digitally created and works in the same way that offensive images are blurred on television, though in a more detailed, more ghost-like way. The actors seem not to be present, to instead already be perished and brought back to the film in ghost form. While the voices of these characters—and particularly unique voices like Duvall and Collette fare better than Cruise or Damon—are present, their bodies, their faces, are obscured for the duration of the film. Why, I ask, spend millions upon millions of dollars on actors who will not be seen? And some actors, such as Ziyi in particular, are primarily interesting actors because of their looks, their movements, not their voices.
However, to pinpoint one aspect of this film as overspending seems ludicrous. And, if the voices of these actors are to be prized, it is again strange that so much of the movie, I would say 75 percent, is silent. These are characters on single-manned space flights and they behave as such, sitting in their cockpits, occasionally floating through the cramped quarters that are not given over to the immense payload that is the primary purpose of the trip. It is, I have to say, much like watching a movie where everyone has died, including the director, and the film was reassembled in heaven and beamed back to Earth. It is, yes, unsettling and difficult.
The visuals are stunning. It is impossible, most of the time, to understand what we are witnessing, what is real and what is effect and what is actually a hallucination of our own creation. If it is possible, Beauregard shows us not the light of dying stars but the reincarnation of the stars into something brighter, more startling, more real. It is not enough to say that the visuals, objects moving through a vast expanse of space that cannot simply be understood by the human eye, make you believe in the existence of a god. It causes you to believe that Naylon Beauregard is a god, and this causes you to wonder why a god would create such a strange and unsettling film. There is a scene that many will reference, if they make it this far, where Collette’s rocket speeds toward Pluto and Beauregard presents the exterior of the rocket, the size of a fingernail, in a dense and empty expanse of outer space. The scene continues, without sound, for twenty-seven minutes. It is possible, for three or four minutes at a time, to lose sight of the ship entirely, to forget what it is you are even staring at, that you are even watching a movie. You keep reminding yourself that this is a studio-backed summer blockbuster sci-fi adventure, but you are weeping and you cannot understand why we exist when we hold the capacity to hurt everything we’ve ever loved.
Though it is rarely done, it is necessary to discuss the ending. You are free to stop reading, but it won’t matter. It won’t prevent the necessary readjustment of your mind and body. Knowing in advance cannot prepare you for the sheer spectacle of watching an entire planet explode and vaporize. Other articles will discuss the audacity of a film crew searching for, discovering, and then blowing up an actual, honest-to-god planet (though even that designation is, apparently, still being debated, though without the actual planet to help aid in the discourse). The aim of this review is to simply state that the ending, the successful delivery of Collette’s rocket into a planet, which then shifts to the actual footage that Beauregard painstakingly captured (using equipment and techniques he literally invented), is impossible to accurately describe. Even in the strangeness of the scene, having never witnessed an event like this before, it is perfectly understandable upon viewing it. You immediately understand that an object that took millions and millions of years to come into being has been destroyed. And you realize that it is not entirely dissimilar from the object that you currently inhabit.
The problem with reviewing Essential Target is that it is impossible to accurately classify it as a film. It is something else entirely, and that is perhaps why this review asserts the failure of the endeavor. It is not a movie. It is a universal experience, accidentally captured by a camera. It is our collective belief that we are both everything and nothing. I wish I never, ever, saw it.
Directed by Jake Kasdan. Starring: Sissy Spacek and John Stamos.
Detective Wendy Buckem (Sissy Spacek) finds herself on the trail of a killer targeting young mothers-to-be. Part thriller, part reality TV, the cast features MTV Teen Mom and 16 and Pregnant reality stars (Catelynn, Farrah, Amber, Maci, Leah, Emily, Ebony, and Whitney). The young women struggle with their relationships, dreams, and new responsibilities while attempting to evade a mysterious stalker. As time runs out and bodies pile up, Detective Buckem finds herself confronting her own past. Also starring John Stamos.
Reviews:
Baby Alive sucks you in and never lets you go. If you want action with raw emotion and the added bonus of REAL people that lends an air of ambiguity, this movie will intrigue and inspire.
I saw this movie in pre-release and found disjointed the attempt to merge so-called “reality” with actual celebrity within the same medium. Still, the plot itself is both familiar and functional, structured as a series of vignettes (or “episodes”) in which we meet each teen mother before, during, or after her pregnancy, such that, prior to each demise, earlier mothers are making the decision to have unprotected sex with their boyfriends (or sometimes acquaintances or assailants), and later scenes show the young ladies increasingly pregnant, and so on. Thereby, an interesting effect occurs with respect to time, which I could get into further though not in this format. Some of the most affecting portrayals are actually the minor characters—the teen’s family members, friends, and so on—who subtly look askance at the proceedings, and are in various ways positioned by force or happenstance to observe, as well, the killings, but then disappear from the film—not to get too deep, but perhaps like in life itself? In any case, the actors who play these minor characters are sometimes diamonds in the rough. Overall, the film merits a 3.5 but, as that option is not available, I give it 4 with the benefit of doubt.
The movie, enjoyable as it was, left me with many lingering questions. It doesn’t say what he wants with the babies, even though there are only a few near the end. I know that some of the fathers we’re supposed to think are good father figures, so maybe the babies left over go with him, but maybe there’s a sequel about the real dads? I found that aspect confusing. Otherwise, this movie is good and I was engaged about our society at large as well as the internal lives of the people. I know people curse a lot in real life, but I also feel that you didn’t need to have that many curse words to make your point.
Go Catelynn! I knew her in high school and she was never all that, but you gotta respect that she made more of her life than I did, ha!
How did they get Sissy Spacek to do this movie? Sissy Spacek of Coal Miner’s Daughter and Carrie and Badlands? She is a class act; she must be having money problems? I saw her last year at a farmer’s market in Virginia buying a bottle of olive oil for like twenty bucks so I don’t get it at all. I liked the movie, though it wasn’t worth the price of a ticket.
I am very selective when it comes to giving a five-star rating, but this movie was awesome and it would have got five stars if it wasn’t for the repetition in the methods the killer used. I know serial killers have to do it in the same way because they are compelled, but I also feel like swords are a little overdone and the director could have mixed it up a bit more. Other than that, it was fantastic viewing. John Stamos as the son/villain lends an air of brooding sophistication to the young cast.
Besides being genuinely suspenseful, this film has many themes and issues that it portrays. I enjoyed the symbol of the pacifier, or “nubbin,” as it pertained to the serial killing/cutting body parts off aspects of the film. In terms of society at large, many of us have felt this way, and it lends a sense of reality to the relatable nature of the main character. There are some good comebacks in it and surprise twists. When I go to the movies, I don’t need it to be Academy Award worthy; however, you should at least know how to act, so I have to admit some of the teen moms did seem scared. I was also appreciative of the production value, which is one thing that always kept me from enjoying the television version and reality TV in general.
Perhaps this movie was meant to be a satire, but someone in marketing didn’t think that would sell? I heard that the original trailer featured the classic song “Baby Got Back” which is hysterical, but someone nixed it or got offended which is why they switched to serious.
I had that doll as a kid and was expecting a movie inspired by it, but if that’s the case for you, you will be surely disappointed in this travesty of a movie. What we really want is to be entertained, instead you get something totally unexpected. You may remember Baby Alive as big compared to the usual dolls and pretty realistic. It came with a baby food assemblage and poop. You know Transformers is from toys right? I bet half of you don’t even know you just want to bang Megan Fox—who doesn’t? It’s one thing for an artist to be inspired but it’s another thing to rip something off and not even know it. I know it’s geeky but I got a lot of education about life from that doll.
This film seems like it’s all about the gore of the killer, but in the end it does have an uplifting message about the value of each and every child. I’m not saying it’s the greatest movie ever, but my date and I both enjoyed it.
Kitchens of the Great Midwest
Critically Acclaimed