Battleship, But More Boring

It's the end of the world as we know it, and this movie feels...blah.

Quick Plot: The year is 2063, and it's not a great one. Most of our planet has drowned, leaving just two unnamed continents above water, and both, therefore, at eternal war. 

On one side, four fairly apathetic paid soldiers are stationed on a base in the middle of the ocean (well, or anywhere, considering most of the world now looks like this). Relief is three months late, and hotheaded Baines and restless Sullivan are eager to jump ship at any chance they get...which makes the appearance of an abandoned enemy ship pretty kismet. 

Cassidy (played with suitable stoicism by Kate Bosworth), finds herself in the middle. She has a casual/maybe deeper romance with Sullivan, but also seems to carry some loyalty to the cause and their superior officer, Sgt. Hendrichs, a man who is fully dedicated to protecting their station. Considering it houses some kind of mystery doomsday device that could completely destroy what's left of the world, that's probably a good thing. 

Last Sentinel is, to put it mildly, a very slow film. A nice way of saying this is to call it patient. A more straightforward adjective would be boring. 

Somewhere in between (but tipped a little to the right), I stand with sad bangs.

Not every apocalyptic drama needs to be exciting or action-packed. There are some great ones that zoom in on a single human element or intellectual challenge. You can tell an end of the world story without a single special effect. The genre doesn't require sparks.

But it should have some form of...life.

Written by Malachi Smyth and directed by Tanel Toom, Last Sentinel is a serviceable film. It's shot well, acted quite competently, and has a production design that seems to be making a lot with a little. There's (eventually) a clear sentiment towards the film's end about its message. 

But by golly, it's very slow.

At a full two hours, Last Sentinel is not what you would call an "urgent" film. It ultimately does have some things to say, but it's quite a slog to there. Still, completists of apocalyptian cinema will likely find some satisfaction.

High Points

To my surprise, the actual "four soldiers of varying levels of commitment" interpersonal relationships worked fine, and the dynamics of having one female second in command while in a sexual relationship with the lowest ranked felt absolutely natural. 

Low Points

That being said, there's a good rule in storytelling that I'll sum up in full butchered form: the more specifically your characters are drawn, the easier it is for your audience to connect with them. Last Sentinel goes in such an opposite direction of giving its decent actors zero details as to who their soldiers are, making them such blank slates that BOY is it hard to care

Lessons Learned

I'm not a soldier, but I have to believe it's a standing rule that when investigating potential enemy turf, you do what you can to stay in contact with your team

Engineering skills trump sanity any day

Nothing multiplied by ten still adds up to nothing

Rent/Bury/Buy

Apocalyptic completists (like me) should probably put Last Sentinel towards the low middle of their to-watch list. It's FINE, but also very, very dull. Find it on Amazon Prime.  Amazon Prime if that has any appeal. 

In the Company of Vampires

Allow me to make something very, very clear: I would never intentionally sit down to watch a movie written and directed by Neil LaBute. In fact, I had actually removed House of Darkness from my Hulu queue once I realized it was a product of one of my least favorite woman-hating trolls. 

But then weeks passed, it was early, and I quickly said, "this looks like a quick horror movie with a good poster," pressing play fully forgetting the entire reason it wasn't on my list.

So. Here we are. 

Quick Plot: Hap (scream king Justin Long) drives Mina (Kate Bosworth) home to her sprawling gothic castle to end their first date. He's a city boy who feels unsafe in the country, while she's an extremely confident heiress smoothly calling him out on his various bullshit. It's Justin Long: of course he's playing a smarmy bro.

They flirt, or rather, Hap thinks he's flirting by yammering away with the same effective ickiness Long used in Barbarian. Mina's sister Lucy (GET IT?) shows up to triple the date, giving Hap all sorts of typically gross ideas. He drinks whiskey, they drink...wine, and at the 80 minute mark, we get to hear a Neil LaBute male character call women cunts. Order has been restored. 

I try to approach every film with an open mind, but when an artist has spent his entire professional career dedicated to telling his audience that women are evil (and doing so with little skill), I don't know that I owe this one a break. 

I'll say this for House of Darkness: it's short. 

It has to be, since it feels like one of the least ambitious films I've ever seen. LaBute obviously comes from a stage background, so it's not terribly surprising that the script reads more play than movie, and the actual staging offers nothing of visual interest. But it's a dull play even at that. 

I had a lot of issues with Barbarian (primarily the third what-exactly-are-we-trying-to-say-here act) but Justin Long's performance was certainly not one of them. He's exceedingly good at playing exceedingly awful, which makes Hap feel like something he filmed on his Barbarian lunch break. Well, in truth, the entire movie feels like it was made over a long weekend.

There's just no real energy, no real sense of danger or even surprise. We have sisters named Mina and Lucy and guess WHAT? They're vampires. Eventually, they kill Hap. Credits roll. 

Now mind you, I have nothing against the concept of dialogue-driven horror. It's just that if that's your style, make it interesting. Make it refreshing. Make it say something, ANYTHING. 

This movie does not agree. 

High Points

Kate Bosworth doesn't get many notes to play here (remember: it's a Neil LaBute script) but she's effectively captivating with the one she gets

Low Points

...if only her character, or any of the four we meet, offered a single surprise

Lessons Learned

If you really feel the need to brag to your friend about the hot rich chick you're about to bang, consider sending a text rather than a regular volume phone call. Also, it's 2023: who makes PHONE CALLS?

Good stories need to begin with "once upon a time"

Trust me: sisters do not ever want to have a threesome with you

Rent/Bury/Buy

Considering where I stand on Neil LaBute's work, I guess I'll concede that House of Darkness isn't nearly as infuriating as I expected it to be. Instead, it's just ... there. And then it's over, and we all will likely never think about it again. 

Unlike some of his other work...

(Black) Rock Paper Scissors

First, a rant.

I'm a woman. Been so for 32 years and counting, leaving me a realistic 27 years to make, keep, and occasionally lose friends, many of whom are female. In these 27 years of BFF comings and goings, both of myself and within groups of friends who are friends, there is one thing that has never happened:

I have never, in 27 years of conscious awareness, personally witnessed a friendship end because one female was intimate with another female friend's partner.

Is this a thing that a lot of women DO? According to cinema, yes. The same women who keep their bras when lounging at home, exercise with their hair down and go to sleep with full makeup on are the norm, and the norm also sleeps with or has to watch their beloved sleep with a girlfriend. 

Movies don't lie, right?

Anyway, that's my preluding gripe with Black Rock, the otherwise fairly believable female-centric thriller.

Quick Plot: Sunny Sarah (Kate Bosworth) attempts to reunite two childhood besties with a surprise weekend getaway to a New England island they partied on as kids. As you might guess from my prolonged prologue, some tension is afire due to Lou (Lake Bell)'s previous romantic entanglements with Abby (director Kate Aselton)'s then-boyfriend. 

Now in their early 30s, the ladies attempt to make the best of an awkward situation by humoring Sarah's quest to find their old clubhouse, where a VHS of The Goonies surely awaits in watchable condition (remember: VHS tapes are the cockroach of media). Before pillow fights can ensue, the ladies bump into a trio of young hunters, one of whom Abby is quick to drunkenly flirt and share a can of Spaghettios with.

NOTE: Share a can of spaghettios is not a sexual term I'm aware of. But I also tie my hair back when working out, so I might just actually be a dude.

All is not so carefree once Abby goes a little too far with her new friends, quickly revealed to be recently dishonorably discharged soldiers. Before you can spit on anyone's grave, the ladies are running, swimming, and tree climbing for their lives. 
There is nothing particularly new about Black Rock in terms of plot or style, so let's just address the main reason this film has found some footing: it's a genre film directed by a woman.

As much as I wish this wasn't something that needed to point out in 2014, it really, really still does. In Black Rock's case, this is especially important because we're dealing with the type of film that has so often found itself stewing in debates of gender and misogyny. While not exactly a 'rape revenge' flick (despite critics like Rex Reed's assertions, suggesting that he apparently doesn't watch the films he gets paid to review), Black Rock does put pretty women on the run through the wilderness from very bad men. We know where this usually goes.

It's refreshing then to say that while not officially or aggressively a feminist film, Black Rock handles its gender issues quite well. The men are stronger because of their size and military training, yes, but put three healthy thirtysomething females against them and the fight becomes realistically even-handed due to their smarts and will. The film even manages to deal with, without OVERdealing with, Abby and Lou's complicated boyfriend past. When the going gets rough, the lingering feelings of betrayal are acknowledged, resolved, and ultimately made into a good and necessary laugh. If a trio of sociopath soldiers were hunting me down and the only help I had was a former friend who ruined my love life, I tend to think that's exactly how I'd deal with that too.

Even more vital to seeing what makes Black Rock a little more knowing than some of its peers is how it handles that always complicated cinematic issue, nudity. Hey guys, did you know that women take their clothes off every day? Actually, TWICE a day, and sometimes more. Again, a century of cinema has taught us that nudity is only useful for stimulating its presumed male audience. Observe the token camera leering breast shot that seems so central to even the most rushed rape scene, something so clearly focused on for all the wrong reasons in films like Silent Night Deadly Night and Blood Games (a film so female unfriendly that rumor has it, the studio tacked on a fake female name as its director).

Side Note: I still love Blood Games. It's a vengeance flick about a female baseball team. But just as I love Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and don't pretend Kevin Costner is even trying, I can also adore A League of Their Bloody Own without ignoring the fact that it's got quite a bit of misogyny in its running time.

My point, and maybe I do have one, is that seeing how Aselton handles nudity is vital to understanding why Black Rock is a worthy film, even if it seemingly offers nothing new in its storytelling. In many ways, this is indeed just another Deliverance-inspired thriller. But the fact that it's so deliberately FEMALE in its execution helps to point out some of the problems these types of films can so often run into. 

High Points

I've been awfully hard on Kate Bosworth following her Lois Lane in Superman Returns (if there was a more offensive case of miscasting in Hollywood, I've yet to see it) but watching her in Black Rock was a pleasant reminder that she has genuinely likable screen presence. No, she wasn't and probably never would be believable as a 25 year old Pulitzer Prize winning journalist with spunk, but as Sarah, Bosworth really does have a sense of ease in front of the camera that helps to sell not just her character, but her character's friends.

Low Points

For the most part, the protagonists of Black Rock behave the way you want them to in this kind of situation. But it behooves me to mention such key frustrating moments as 'survivor holds gun, then seems to drop it (I think offscreen) to better fight her enemy with a child-friendly pocketknife'

As the reigning queen of the I Don't Have An Indoor Voice Club, even I was shouting "Shhhhhhhhhhh" at key moments

Lessons Learned

Black rocks are the hardest rocks of all

Always bury a useful treasure. You just never know when you’ll need that junior pocket knife in the wilderness

Seriously ladies, SSSSSHHHHHHHHHH!

Rent/Bury/Buy

Black Rock is a slick and efficient little survivalist thriller not without its flaws (GRAB THE GUN!) but well-worth a visit. There are better tellings of this tale, but the utter female-ness of a film in this genre makes it a prime discussion piece for the topic.