Christopher Schroeder

Category: movie

  • Nothing Smashing

    Many credible critics liked The Smashing Machine, which I liked more than I expected yet couldn’t recommend.

    This sports biography focuses on several years (1997-2000) in the life of mixed martial arts fighter Mark Kerr as he confronts professional and personal challenges. These moments were also featured in a 2002 documentary, which seems to have been widely admired.

    I’m a fan of neither sports biographies nor Dwayne Johnson, who nonetheless attempts to go places in his Kerr performance that I’ve not seem him acknowledge in other roles. Johnson claims that this movie, which also changed his life, isn’t a “fight” film but a “life” movie perhaps in part because its subject is still alive, and even makes a cameo appearance in a grocery store at its end.

    Neither Johnson nor his co-start Emily Blunt, who plays Kerr’s girlfriend Dawn Staples, succeeds for similar and different reasons. For Blunt, the issue is less her ability — she makes the most of her role, and attempts to add dimensions but runs out of room in this script. Regardless, the effect limits the appeal of this movie.

    The bigger problem is the lack of a clear purpose. For example, I was curious why Kerr, whom I’d watched struggle with losing, could laugh after having done so in the shower while his friend, and manager / trainer Mark Coleman went on to win the “life-changing amount” of money. Both had mused about the possibility of fighting each other one day, which until this loss seemed inevitable in this tournament.

    The explanation suggested by this movie has something to do with Kerr’s newfound sobriety, including its effects upon his romantic relationship. His addiction had previously forced him to withdraw from a tournament, for which he had apologized, so his sobriety could be both why he can fight again and why he cannot maintain the ferocious professional reputation. Perhaps that also accounts for why he was showering while Coleman was fighting.

    Or maybe the purpose is more recognition for Kerr, who was a MMA pioneer but remained relatively unknown even after the 2002 documentary. The scrolling epilogue informs audiences that Kerr and Staples marry soon thereafter and later have a son — becoming parents is a conflict between them earlier in the movie — and that they were together for fifteen years, which seems life-changing enough.

    I’d guess if pressed that the writer and director Benny Safdie wanted to highlight a forgotten figure whom others could admire. Such a possibility, and parts of the plot, are easier to understand after reading about the previous documentary on which this version is based. Regardless, I think Safide gets bogged down in doing so as a box-office success, and cannot find the proper perspective to do both.

    Perhaps both are ultimately impossible, or at least seem so in this version of a biography of someone who might be admirable nonetheless. By its end, I had no greater interest in this sport, and didn’t learn anything about being human, even as I had been more entertained for a couple of hours than I expected, which at that point seemed enough.

  • Dead On Arrival

    I repeatedly considered walking out of Dead of Winter, which I think is worse than most credible critics think.

    This movie, which is written by Nicholas Jacobson-Larson and Dalton Leeb and directed by Brian Kirk, is a story about a widow named Barb (Emma Thompson) who is driving in snowstorm to scatter her late husband’s ashes on the lake where they had their first date when she decides to intervene in a kidnapping. The married kidnappers (Marc Menchaca and Judy Greer) hope to extract a kidney from their hostage (Laurel Marsden), who has previously attempted suicide, and are thwarted by Barb, who eventually drags the remaining kidnapper to her, and their, watery death.

    The casting suggests aspirations for something substantial. Thompson in an interview about this movie called for more female heroes presumably of a certain age on the big screen, and suggested that female heroism is existentially essential.

    Thompson isn’t wrong. She just has the wrong project. The scenery-chewing performances make some scenes in this movie difficult to watch, but these only make a flawed script seem worse.

    Barb’s accent might be distracting, but her strength is implausible. This senior citizen can bust through a locked basement door, tumble down a flight of stairs, and exhibit no effects. Elsewhere, she fashions a needle from a fishing hook with one good arm to stich a bullet hole in her other one and later can lift a water heater or some other large appliance high enough to slip her handcuff beneath its leg.

    Her motivation is no more clear than it is for the other characters. Why would Barb for example go to this lake in the middle of a snowstorm, and not wait until it had subsided if not until the ice had thawed? Even their first date — ice fishing when she was much younger — hadn’t occurred in a snow storm.

    Barb’s actions are bewildering. For instance, she has the foresight early in the movie to write backwards on a frosted window to communicate with the young woman who has been imprisoned in the basement, which obviously makes it easier for her to read, but doesn’t think to erase it, which later reveals her presence to the kidnappers.

    Barb decides to spare one of the kidnappers, who has hypothermia after falling into the hole in the lake she cut and hid, after he agrees to drive to the police before the hospital. In response, he donates additional ammo presumably in gratitude for her risky decision or an affirmation of his intentions or both. Barb, who has realized that she needs more bullets, nonetheless fires blindly beneath a vehicle at this kidnapper’s wife, and only strikes her in the leg, which slows but doesn’t stop her.

    Instead, this kidnapper forces Barb to help her take the victim to her makeshift surgical ward atop the icy lake, which happens to be near the fishing cabin Barb had earlier erected. This kidnapper, who has earlier killed her husband after finding him driving away, seems intent upon harvesting her victim’s liver by herself after she also shoots Barb with a rifle in the chest.

    Audience members who circumnavigate these script holes eventually arrive at the final confrontation, which concludes when Barb manages to drag the kidnapper into the same hole where the kidnapper’s husband previously had fallen. We never see the victim who nearly lost her liver try to save her savior, who nonetheless manages to open the tackle tin that had previously saved her life — the bullet is buried in her husband’s ashes — and release these ashes that have been hidden beneath the top layer of lures and line.

    We’ve never learned why this victim had wanted to kill herself or worse why late in the movie she announces a newfound desire to live. We do watch her as the sole survivor discover a photo of Barb and her late husband from her fateful first date years earlier, which mercifully releases us from this cringe-worthy movie.

    Dead might be a B-movie, but that doesn’t absolve it from any and all obligations to its audience.

  • Don’t Do It

    I thought that I could follow my friend’s recommendation to ignore other critics’ opinions, and would see Doin’ It, a new classroom comedy by Sara Zandieh, Neel Patel, and Lilly Singh as a result of its trailer. Maybe I was missing stuff by using aggregated critical opinion I mused that I’d otherwise be glad to have seen.

    This movie starts with Maya’s and her mother Veena’s return to the United States from India where they relocated when Maya was a precocious teen. Maya now thirty years old hopes to launch an app and her career but soon discovers her unfamiliarity with its demographic, which she can research according to her friend Jess by becoming a substitute teacher.

    Maya is hired to teach sex-ed, which is even more uncomfortable for her because she as a virgin is less experienced than many of her students. Jess offers to help her both complete her high school bucket list and develop her sexual experience, and their efforts are aided by the another new teacher Alex, a cafeteria worker named Barbara, and even her former infatuation, which also enables Maya to reconsider her app and even finding funding.

    The predicable plot includes a Dead Poet’s Society moment around sex-positivity, which both inspires Maya’s revised app and helps her regain her job. The stock characters include the tolerant and thoughtful lover, who is both the other minority (Filipino) new hire and teaches computer science, which offers them yet another connection and a potentially productive conflict.

    Maya had expected to teach computer science, so this rivalry could have added depth to their characters but does not. This missed opportunity is consistent with Maya’s larger lack of development. At no point does she reveal anything more than superficial satisfaction with her relationships, including her friendship with the mysterious cafeteria worker who befriends Maya, audits Maya’s class, reveals her hidden wealth, and ultimate funds Maya’s new app.

    Too many of the gags, which also appear in the trailer, aren’t that amusing, which doesn’t prevent them from reappearing. For example, the vibrator from Jess is misrepresented by Maya as a handheld blender, which her mother uses for their breakfast smoothie and later another for her love-interest neighbor. Its initial shortcoming only means that subsequent scenes are bigger failures.

    This movie I believe contains a larger story but never explores it. It could have been a narrative about sexual maturation in an Indian / Indian-American home or of an older or brown or older, brown woman. It could have considered emotional and physical intimacy in a continuum of relationships, especially as people migrate, age, or even relate to aging parents.

    Such a story could have offered insights about shifting notions sexuality that could be useful to anyone. None of that though and not much else appeared on the screen, which is why I slipped out of the theater as fast as I could once the credits started to roll.