Serenity Now, Insanity Later

Before you ask: no, unfortunately I’m not here to talk about how great Jerry Stiller is and how Frank Costanza’s game-changing philosophy is what we need more than ever right now.  The good news, though, is that I’m actually reviewing a movie this week, albeit not a current one – in fact, Serenity was released in theaters during the post-holiday doldrums of the cinematic trade, garnering poor reviews and failing entirely to recoup its modest $25 million budget.  Be it due to the siren song of Matthew McConaughey, who is relatively high on my list of current actors who I enjoy/are also capable of great things, or be it due to the pretty enticing trailer, I was definitely interested in spite of the poor reviews, so way back in February I actually went to the AMC to see it.  However, there was a projector issue (what we were told was that one of the motherboards wound up completely fried), so I got a pass for a free movie and never wound up seeing Serenity – that is, until this past weekend.  What I know now is that the February incident was the cosmos’ way of telling me to never, ever, see this slipshod mistake of a movie, and gosh should I have listened.

Anne Hathaway trying to give Matthew McConaughey bedroom eyes when he isn’t even looking at her sums up this movie pretty well.

I’m willing to spoil Serenity’s twist here with little fanfare or warning, simply in hopes that if the twist is ruined for you, the reader, you may avoid the same error I made by seeing it and wasting almost two hours.  The long and short of it is that Matthew McConaughey is actually dead (not altogether unsurprising, as twists go) and this version of himself is living within a video game of his son’s design, and living with a different name, knowledge of his past, but no real knowledge of how he got to the island the game takes place on (altogether surprising, as twists go).  As a narrative element, it has juice for sure, but it’s telegraphed hard from the word go (and not in an effective way like in The Truman Show, where all is laid bare almost immediately and there’s no real “twist” to be had), and the twist itself is, well, twisted at what feels like a really inopportune time (right about at the middle of Act II, which is a baffling choice).  It’s also a twist that begs some unfortunate questions, such as “why is a teenaged kid creating a video game in which his late father – a man who he purportedly admires/looks up to – repeatedly has meaningless sex with a woman who isn’t his mother?”

Diane Lane‘s character giving Matt’s character money for I think finding her cat? Or the sex they just had? It’s kind of unclear.

What Serenity seems to be going for is film noir meets The Truman Show (one of my favorite films), which honestly sounds like a fabulous concept for a movie, making its failure to deliver on that initial promise all the more frustrating.  The noir parts are halfway convincing, with McConaughey showing flashes of troubled Bogart-ism when he’s not going all-out insane, but the film is also drenched in symbolism that in quite a few ways remain unexplained (what’s the deal with Walter, that old guy at the bar? He seems important in some way, at least to the writers), and also contains a lot of after-school-special elements about domestic violence that I’m more than willing to hear out but also come off as preachy and foamcore when they’re driven by such a black-and-white cartoon-bad-guy abuser as Jason Clarke‘s character (seriously, I’m sure there are some, but most abusers aren’t such clear-cut assholes).  The result is a movie that could have been so much better than it was, if only by committing to one of its prosperous narrative avenues instead of trying to shoot the moon and combine them – instead we get an end product that’s as good as none of them, and certainly not as good as the hard-to-achieve symbiosis of them.  The phrase “jack of all trades, master of none” comes to mind more than anything, but I’m also not sure that Serenity is the proverbial jack of anything.

Jason Clarke’s shooting script was one page long and just said “be a huge dick while holding and/or paying people a lot of money.”

But Serenity isn’t completely unentertaining, especially if you’re the kind of person who enjoys watching so-bad-they’re-good movies – this film definitely lies in that territory based largely on an over-the-top but no doubt beyond compelling performance from McConaughey that I daresay has shades of Cage at times.  The writing does him no favors whatsoever – nor any of the rest of the cast – and for the most part is laughably bad, but it also gives us an opportunity to watch a man collapse in on himself when in fact he starts the film by madly brandishing a knife at two largely-innocent men who just want to have the good time on a fishing boat that they paid for.  It’s for this reason, along with the fact that Serenity seems to be mostly focused on the life and characters within its bottled-up island community (some characters who simply aren’t explored enough), that I think the concept may have played at least slightly better as a television show; seeing Baker Dill’s precipitous fall from an initially non-existent grace probably would have been at least a little more enticing if it hadn’t been crammed unceremoniously into less than two hours worth of film.

Probably Serenity’s most compelling character, and therefore the one with the least amount of screentime.  Makes sense.

Serenity is a movie that certainly shouldn’t ever be paid for, and luckily I didn’t really pay for it either time I tried to watch it (it can be streamed on Amazon Prime, which is how I watched last weekend, and when I attempted to see it at the theater I was an A-list member).  This is the true joy of A-list: the ability to see movies of questionable quality with markedly less financial guilt.  It’s with this in mind, and with a heavy heart, that I report that I’ll be ending my tenure with A-list, at least for the next six months (that’s their minimum refractory period after cancelling, supposedly to curtail any on-again-off-again subscription patterns, which likely lose them money).  They’re about to raise their prices, and as I’ve mentioned in previous posts, my typically theater day (Sunday) is now being enveloped by sports.  Thus, as we look into the ever-hazy future of Tuesdays with Cory, I’d say you should expect more reviews like this: namely reviews of streaming content ranging from buzzy to Serenity, with the occasional current film thrown in as the ol’ wallet allows.

Pet Sematary Review

Friends and readers (and everyone in between), rejoice!  I’m back this week with an actual movie review, albeit one that came out a whole three and a half weeks ago (again I have to ask that you all cut me some slack – these are the lean times, and they’re almost over with the summer movie season kicking off later this week).  Pet Sematary is a horror film that draws its scares from Stephen King‘s 1983 novel of the same name, and it’s also a remake of a 1989 film of the same name, which by all accounts got reviews as middling as the 2019 rendition wound up settling into.  Indeed, I’ve been perplexed by the path to critical consensus that this year’s Pet Sematary followed, initially earning rave reviews at SXSW that hailed it as one of the best King adaptations ever, prompting its Rotten Tomatoes one-liner to simply read “Sometimes, remade is better” in a clear nod to one of the lines delivered by John Lithgow in the film and the film’s trailer.  Where it ultimately landed in both the general critical sphere and in my own mind, though, is a far different place than that, and I want to delve into the reasons for that for a few paragraphs.  Disclaimer: I have neither seen the 1989 rendition of Pet Sematary nor read the source novel, though I am a fan of King’s (I’m currently reading Mr. Mercedes, in fact, which is a different, sort of hard-boiled cop genre for him, but I’m quite enjoying it).

The OG on-screen spooky cat.  How they got the eyes to look like that I know not.

My one-line summary of what makes Pet Sematary such a middling experience is that it’s for the most part maddeningly inconsistent.  It’s possessing of sky-high highs, which is what I’m sure managed to captivate the SXSW crowds, but it also has a roughly equal measure of cellar-dwelling lows, and this is perhaps nowhere more prominent than in the cast.  While John Lithgow is magnetic in his supporting turn as the pivotal and wizened Juddson Crandall, and while Amy Seimetz is pretty convincing, and frankly a revelation given her relative unknown standing amongst the cast, leading man Jason Clarke is actively and surprisingly bad, and for the most part really just never shows up.  Equally uneven is the pacing of the film, as it feels at times (mostly in the front half) like there are a number of filler scenes that are breathlessly trying to get to things that the filmmakers deem more interesting – and they might be right that those scenes, which are mostly at the beginning, aren’t as interesting as the undead stuff towards the end – but having a palpable sense of rushing through exposition that would have been clunky even without the frantic pacing has never helped a movie ever, and it doesn’t here.  The occasionally choppy editing – which at times features jump cuts to entirely different scenes when a character has only barely finished a line – doesn’t do Pet Sematary any favors either.

Jason Clarke knee-deep in one of many moments showcasing some poor acting.

But Pet Sematary has one consistent strength in that its premise and its core story are good – having been created by arguably this generation’s master of horror storytelling – and the film is therefore well-positioned to pose interesting questions about life, death, and what lies beyond, or even in between.  The trouble is in the fact that in spite of making some great dramatic choices – giving a resurrection to a character that can actually speak about it rather than giving it to an infant, for one – Pet Sematary‘s script is frustratingly reductive with its morals and the deeper ideas at hand, often opting instead for violence and disturbing imagery that while at times effective is largely a mixed bag, and at other times feels gratuitous and/or self-serving.  Also frustratingly reductive is the film’s approach to its numerous promising subplots, which at worst are brushed off with less than a second’s screentime and not given a further thought.  In spite of all of this reduction, though, Pet Sematary impressively also has no real subtext to speak of, instead filling itself with shoddily written what-you-hear-is-what-you-get dialogue.  In terms of macro-plotting, I was on board with the majority of its decisions, but (no spoilers) I’m a bit back and forth on its ending as of now (which was reportedly chosen from a number of endings based on test screenings).

This is eerily similar to the way me and my girlfriend’s cat typically regard each other.

It’s certainly not all bad, though.  As I said before, there are some high highs in the form of solidly-crafted jump scares, great use of sound, and decent tension-building.  Some viewers may lament its ultra-predictable trajectory, but I actually thought this was a plus in some scenes.  The introduction of a graveyard that brings back dead animals naturally begs the question of what would happen if a human was buried there – this is in some sense the beauty of King’s story, and I can only imagine how great the book is given King’s ability to get inside of his character’s heads (which you’ll find is where a lot of Pet Sematary seems to take place, and while the numerous dream sequences are alright, they fail to tell the same transfixing story as a reader’s imagination, I’ll bet).  In any case, at the point of the introduction of the resurrecting powers of the forest, we know a major character will die, and we’re essentially just waiting for it to happen – that’s a decent tension-building mechanic, even if the identity of the character, the nature of her demise, and the chaos that ensues upon her return is completely spoiled by the bafflingly long and revealing final trailer for the film.  Not having the marketing material spoil essentially the entire film probably would have helped Pet Sematary out some – after all, an audience not knowing everything a priori (especially if the film deviates from the source material significantly, as Pet Sematary does) can only help to crank up the interest factor.

One thing I could have gone for much more of was usage of the spooky masks/masked children.

For me, Pet Sematary largely built to a single conclusion, and the thought that was evoked within me pretty much throughout, and it’s a thought that does a disservice to anything the film tries to accomplish.  That thought is: “Wow, the book must be great,” and one thing that I can assuredly report after watching the film is that the novel has shot up towards the top of my summer reading list, if only so I can further investigate the places that the film deviated from it.  As King adaptations go, though, it’s probably just as middle-of-the-road as the reviews suggest: I’ve seen far better (The Shawshank Redemption would be the obvious choice) and far worse (I watched this movie called Thinner once, which is an adaptation of another King novel of the same name, and all I have to say is wow).  Unless you have a theater subscription service at hand, it’s probably not worth the $11, but it’s decent enough fun and contains a high enough scare quotient to be solid Redbox fodder.

John Lithgow probably said it best – when it comes to remakes, sometimes, dead is better.

And now, for a brief moment of hype-building: next week will most likely (I don’t have my viewing plans fully fleshed out yet) bring the Tuesdays with Cory of Endgame – spoiler content TBD.  Check back in then!