RENFIELD

Directing: C
Acting: C-
Writing: C-
Cinematography: C+
Editing: C-

Renfield goes from zero to a hundred in about five minutes. That may not be much for a car, but for a a movie, it’s a bit much. It took me about another five minutes to lose my patience with it.

Nicolas Cage has basically made a career of phoning it in, which is ironic for an actor of his proven talents. The guys clearly likes to work, and he gets work plenty, having become one of the most prolific actors alive. I’m not convinced, however, that at this stage in his career he’s much interested in being challenged. In virtually every role, it’s like the director just points his camera at him and lets him do whatever he wants. I’m sure that’s plenty fun for him. For the rest of us, it’s a mixed bag at best.

Here he plays Dracula, in a comedy-horror that leans on the gore for its humor, much like last month’s Cocaine Bear did. The crucial differences are that Cocaine Bear had better dialogue—albeit not by a wide margin—and, perhaps more importantly, better pacing. That movie actually knew how to built tension, ridiculous though it may have been. Renfield just dives right into the wild action sequences, making it more manic than anything else. This movie feels more cocaine-fueled than Cocaine Bear did.

The protagonist, narrator, and title character is Dracula’s “familiar,” or his centuries-old slave, here played by Nicholas Hoult. Somehow he winds up becoming friends with a local New Orleans police officer played by Awkafina, as the only cop in the city who isn’t corrupt. I wonder how the City of New Orleans feels about this depiction.

In director Chris McKay’s version of this story, Renfield gains “a tiny fraction” of Dracula’s power by . . . eating bugs. At first I thought they had to be some kind of special bugs, but no, they can be any average bug. This would include the ants from a young boy’s ant farm. Renfield eats an insect, and suddenly he has superhuman powers.

The script for this movie feels like something no one bothered to proofread. To make matters worse, the editor and makeup artists were evidently entirely unconcerned with continuitiy. Renfield can fight off a whole crowd of attackers, literally make them explode in a fountain of blood and guts, and then emerge without any of it all over him, or even on him at all.

The most disappointing thing about Renfield is that is premise is actually compelling: Renfield is learning he is in a codependent relationship with Dracula, and must figure out how to break free of it—after a ridiculous amount of cartoonish violence, of course. This movie has a few amusing moments, but they almost feel like accidents. It’s not just that I want to write it off as dumb, because even a dumb movie can be well made in the right hands. This movie, on the other hand, is bereft of wit.

There’s a certain infectiousness to how much fun everyone is clearly having, I suppose. There’s even clear intent in how cartoonish it is. And yet: it’s just way too cartoonish, every plot point so wildly contrived it’s genuinely annoying, a complete waste of Shohreh Aghdashloo and Ben Schwartz as local mafia villains, who are so devoid of nuance they literally talk about how much they love violence and evil.

I’m sure some people will be entertained by Renfield. Those people have no standards and no taste. Okay, maybe that’s a little harsh. A more generous read on this movie would be that it’s an homage to mediocrity. The run time is merely 93 minutes and I was more than ready for it to be over after thirty. Why couldn’t they hire whoever cut the trailer to edit the movie? The trailer was far more entertaining, even upon repeat viewings. That is the trick with trailers, though: to dress up a bad movie as something you want to see. It worked on me. I guess you can take this as fair warning: don’t bother with this inept and rote attempt at subverting genre,

Nicolas Cage chews up the scenery, his costars, and any chance of wit.

Overall: C-

CATS

Directing: C-
Acting: C
Writing: C-
Cinematography: B-
Editing: C+
Special Effects: D-
Music: B-

The trick to enjoying Cats—or at least, to almost enjoying it—is to be drinking while you watch it. A lot. This was what my friends and I did going in, and it really made a difference. Particularly for me, by comparison: the other two people I saw this movie with had two cocktails each. I, on the other hand, had two margaritas, to which I added an extra contraband shot of tequila each, and I then had a snack of tequila chocolates afterward. Clearly I was the smartest person in the room. That would include everyone who had been involved in the production of this movie.

But there’s another trick! If you want to be pleasantly surprised, by even the tiniest sliver of a measure, seriously lower your expectations. The one true defense that can be made of this film is that condensing it down to a two-and-a-half-minute trailer made it look a lot more horrifying than it really is, on the whole. The flip side of that is, it also made it look a lot less dull. Because let’s face it, particularly if you have never seen the famously record-length-running Broadway show on which it’s based (which itself was largely derided as just for clueless tourists), Cats is largely just a 110-minute exercise in tedium.

And yet, because of the rolling mass of negative press, we all left the movie saying it wasn’t quite as horrible as we thought it would be. We dodn’t hate it. It was just . . . dull. The second half less so, but who wants to have to sit first through an hour of confusing editing, unsettling CGI, and a script that makes no sense? It’s originally based on a 1939 collection of T.S. Elliot poems called Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, written for his godchildren. In the play, the “Jellicle Cats” are all going to a “Jellicle Ball” where they will compete to be chosen to go to a place called the “Heaviside Layer” to be reincarnated. That’s basically the extent of any plotting, as most of the story just consists of songs that serve as introduction to many different Jellice Cat characters.

The music is entirely forgettable. “Memory” is the sole famous song from it, and while it is indeed the best performance in this film (by Jennifer Hudson), I found even that song forgettable. I could hardly make out the words, what with Hudson’s constant sniveling and the inexplicable choice to keep showing more snot on her lips than tears. Yuck. In a long tradition of adding an original song to a musical adaptation to qualify for Oscar contention, Taylor Swift shows up to co-write “Beautiful Ghosts” with original book writer Andrew Lloyd Weber. That turns out to be an apt song title, because the memory of it disappears as soon as the number is finished. (Swift, incidentally, shows up onscreen as one of the cats, not to sing that song—though she does sing a pop version of it over the end credits—but to sing “Macavity.”)

But of course, I must address the spectacularly misguided special effects. This, more than anything, makes you wonder how or why any of the people involved—which also includes the likes of Edris Elba, Judi Dench, and Ian McKellen, among others—thought a film adaptation of Cats was a good idea. At least, not with live action integrated with CGI in such a way, where fur and realistic-looking cat ears and tails were digitally grafted onto human bodies. Just filming a version of the stage play with people in the traditional cat leotard costumes and face paint would have made far more sense. That’s the only way you can imagine this impressing audiences, after all: to see incredibly fit bodies achieve the kind of dance moves you could never do on a stage. Not to see cat-leaps enhanced by digital effects, director Tom Hooper included apparently just because he could. Evidently he never stopped to think about whether he should.

And the thing is, it’s not even done well. This is the part that is the stuff of nightmares, the stuff that makes you imagine a bad trip after taking acid. Is that what the effects team did before they set about their work? The humanoid faces don’t even always match the herky-jerky movements of the bodies (apparently to evoke “cat movements,” not at all successfully) quite right, vaguely evoking a horribly evolved, digital version of the rudimentary animation from South Park. People complained as far back as the first trailer about the inconsistency of scale. I found myself thinking about that while watching the full movie, even thinking the scale was working a lot better than I expected. And then the number by and about “Skimbleshanks” The Railway Cat” first features all the cats atop railway tracks, on which they are way too small'; mid-sequence they suddenly appear inside a railway car, in which they are way too big. What kind of inter-dimensional horror show is this? The weirdest thing about Cats is that the effects could have been done so much better, but somehow they just got their visual priorities all mixed up.

There’s always also the inevitability of bias, and how that affects how you feel about something for which already have a particular expectation. With Cats, the bias works kind of backward: I liked it better than I expected to, only because I had such profoundly low expectations. What if I had gone into this movie cold, having no idea what I was walking to, having never seen the trailer or even heard about it? Realistically, I probably would have hated it. I was already literally thinking to myself, What the fuck? multiple times as it was, even going on four shots of tequila. This movie includes a dance sequence featuring tiny humanoid cockroaches, several of which get eaten by the cat played by Rebel Wilson, who gets several moments of “gags” that land with a thud. My favorite is when she makes a crack about whether one of the other cats had been neutered, even glancing at his crotch. And this is in a world where none of the “cats” have genitals at all, just finely furred humanoid and flat Ken Doll crotches.

A lot of the production design here is visually interesting, I guess, but that hardly makes up for much. The truth is, even factoring in a deliberately specific approach to make the experience more fun, Cats still qualifies as the worst movie I’ve seen all year.

Just for the record: that cat is not peeing. She’s just a ballerina.

Overall: C-

GODZILLA: KING OF THE MONSTERS

Directing: C-
Acting: C+
Writing: D+
Cinematography: C-
Editing: C
Special Effects: C

When I saw Godzilla back in 2014, I had high hopes for director Gareth Edwards, who had in 2010 made a name for himself with the indie alien mystery Monsters. That film revealed a director with real potential, which made Godzilla all the more disappointing. That movie spent its first half being static and lifeless before turning into an even worse disaster movie than 2012.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters, now, overcompensates for that previous lifelessness by jumping right into the action — although I use “action” loosely here, as it would be more accurate to call this film a “mess of chaos.”

Why did I even bother seeing this movie, you might wonder? I’m wondering the same thing. I literally went to it thinking to myself, These movies are never very good, I don’t know why I keep coming back. My only defense is that I held on to the idea that I knew full well it would be dumb, but the spectacle might me fun on its own terms. Some blockbuster special effects extravaganzas do work that way.

Well, not this one. This movie has not one redeeming quality. The closest it gets is that some parts of it are merely average — the acting, for instance — rather than terrible.

Otherwise, I hardly know where to begin. I found myself thinking, Why the hell would that happen? so many times, I can’t think of any specific examples. Maybe when Godzilla bites off one of the heads of the three-headed rival “alpha predator” that was reawakened in Antarctica, then that head literally grows right back in a matter of seconds, and this is explained away by somehow figuring out that it’s the one monster that is an alien, whereas all the others are actually native to Earth? That ridiculousness is just the tip of the iceberg here.

If I were Kyle Chandler, Vera Farmiga, Ken Watanabe, Ziyi Zhang, Bradley Whitford, Charles Dance, Bradley Whitford, Thomas Middleditch, Sally Hawkins, Aisha Hinds, O’Shea Jackson Jr., or David Strathairn, I would be embarrassed to be in this movie, but apparently none of them are. I guess they’re all happy to act proud of this mess since they got a nice paycheck? Presumably they got paid up front: King of the Monsters made half in its opening weekend what the previous Godzilla did. And trust me, no word of mouth is going to save this one: you might think that earning $80 million so far is nothing to shake a stick at, except it cost $170 million to make!

What a colossal waste of money. The special effects are subpar, the lighting is almost always too dark to get a visual handle on what the hell is going on, the editing makes it impossible to get any real sense of continuity, and this is in action set piece after action set piece that make up about 80% of the movie. Director and co-writer Michael Dougherty (Krampus) never takes things down a notch long enough to allow any time for the story to breathe. On the few occasions things do slow down, it’s apparently just to insult our intelligence.

At the beginning of our “story,” such as it is, it’s been five years ago since “the attacks” on San Francisco, and for reasons no one can explain, Godzilla has been in hiding all this time. We find Kyle Chandler’s Mark Russell off somewhere studying wolves — which evidently involves taking pictures of a pack feeding on a carcass, using a long lens from behind a nearby log otherwise exposed in a massive field. This is the “foundation” for which we learn about “apex predator” behaviors later applied to Godzilla, and the three-headed monster, and how all the other long-dormant monsters frozen in time suddenly wake up and answer their calls in one way or another.

Vera Formiga’s Dr. Emma Russell has devised an audio contraption that apes these so-called apex predator commands and somehow can render them docile — if used correctly and in the right hands. All sorts of wrong hands come into play, the one exception being Mark and Emma’s daughter Madison (Millie Bobby Brown), who of course has more brains and logic than any of the adults around her, which in this movie isn’t saying much.

We do get brief shots of other “massive unidentified terrestrial organisms” (MUTOs, they actually call them that), by the way, with three or four very quick shots and/or references to “Kong.” This is a transparent attempt at laying the foundation for the next film in this “cinematic universe,” Godzilla vs. Kong, also co-written by Dougherty and already in post-production. I’m exhausted already. At this rate, no one is going to care what Kong or Godzilla are doing by next year. I already don’t.

I’d be tempted to say that at least this time around you get to see Boston get destroyed, but . . . honestly, it hardly matters. You can barely see the city at any given time. And it’s just the same shit in a different movie, with no characters you feel any need to get emotionally invested in. This movie is supposed to be a thrill ride but I lost my patience with it within fifteen minutes and soon after became so numb to the onslaught of nonsensical carnage that it literally made me drowsy. Maybe that’s this movie’s best defense: Godzilla: King of the Monsters works if you have insomnia!

Hey, let’s have a sleepver! And watch this movie to go to sleep!

Overall: C-

THE WANDERING EARTH

Directing: C-
Acting: C
Writing: C-
Cinematography: B-
Editing: D+
Special Effects: C+

I don’t usually have much interest in Chinese films, and The Wandering Earth did nothing to remedy that. This is basically China’s answer to Geostorm, a special effects extravaganza offering occasionally compelling imagery, featuring an incomprehensible story. (More like The Wandering Script, amirite??)

Had bad the editing is in this film can’t really be overstated. Not one thing that happens — and far too many things are happening — is given any time whatsoever to breathe. This is basically a 125-minute music video, except instead of pop music, we’re subjected to an action-movie score pretty typical of western blockbuster disaster movies.

I guess I’ll give The Wandering Earth this much: it is better than Geostorm — barely. Its broad plot, involving an expanding sun necessitating the construction of worldwide propulsive engines to relocate the planet to a new solar system, might have been sort of compelling if it made any sense. Instead, the script is packed with incomprehensible techno-babble that’s rendered even more meaningless as it gets lost in the nonstop action.

The central conflict doesn’t even involve getting the Earth removed from orbit. Most of this story takes place well after that, after half the world has been annihilated by tsunamis caused by stopping the Earth’s rotation (how does one do that, exactly? — this movie fails to offer any real explanation) and the other half is forced to live in underground cities through the generations it will take before reaching this new location in another solar system more than four light years away. People go to the surface in “thermal suits” to work on maintaining this hundreds of giant engines that effectively turned the world into a planet-sized space ship.

The real problem is the gravitational pull of Jupiter as Earth passes by. Can humanity’s “United Earth Government” find a way to pull away and keep the planet on course? The suspense is killing me! I’m kidding about that suspense part; The Wandering Earth couldn’t manage suspense if its life depended on it. Which, really, it kind of does. Anyway I was thinking about how dreadfully bored I was before this movie was half over.

It’s all just so jaw-droppingly preposterous, there’s no reason to be emotionally invested in anything going on — not even the inter-generational conflicts of a middle-aged widower (Jing Wu) stationed on the Space Station serving as Earth’s navigation system and his family still on earth: his father (Man-tat Ng) and his young adult son (Chuxiao Qu) and teenage daughter (Jin Mai Jaho). And although these actors all appear competent generally speaking, this movie demands nothing more of them than to phone in their uniformly ridiculous lines. Many of the lines are distractingly obvious in their post-production over-dubbing. The line readings not syncing up with lip movements is obvious even to those of us who don’t speak Mandarin.

The special effects are all over the place. Many of the exterior shots in outer space, showing the Space Station or the planets, are actually pretty impressively rendered. But, those don’t require as much detail as exterior shots of the frozen surface of the planet, the sweeping camera movements making the images strangely jerky, as though someone did a half-assed job in their computer program. Very few of these surface shots are visually convincing in any way.

Not that it would matter much even if they were, the very concepts of this movie being as dumb as they are. And to make matters worse, our heroes make narrow escapes over and over again, constantly getting missed by, say, gigantic debris falling from cliffs in a huge earthquake as techtonic plates shift. It’s like watching the old G.I. Joe cartoons, except instead of villains with terminally terrible aim, it’s giant hunks of earth with terrible aim.

I do like the idea of giant cities like Beijing or Shanghai buried in ice, the tips of their skyscrapers poking out of the surface. That made for some kind of cool images. Such things get overshadowed by a complete disregard for basic physics, like when brother and sister are falling through the air and brother somehow catches up with her by falling faster. That is not how gravity works!

I mean, really, that’s not how anything works in this movie, which has the distinction of being easily the stupidest thing I have watched in at least two years.

Not even this picture makes any sense.

Overall: C-

MOTHER!

Directing: C
Acting: B+
Writing: D+
Cinematography: C-
Editing: C-

The pretension seeping through every surface of Mother! begins with its very title. What's with that exclamation point? To me, it punctuates the contempt I feel for this movie.

From the very first frame, the reaction is What the fuck? It ends with a bit of a What now? Everything in between makes absolutely zero things about it clear. Darren Aronofsky is a truly accomplished director, but I guess in his middle age he's more interested in offering a cinematic version of a stroke. He clearly wants his audience to understand Mother! is about something. What is it about, then? Someone explain it to me. No, I take that back. I wasted two hours of my life on this movie already.

I don't even know how I could offer any spoilers. Mother! is rotten as soon as it starts. But it's a sneaky kind of rotten, like when you chew a bite of food a few times, pleasantly oblivious until you realize there are maggots in your mouth. Too disgusting for you? Well . . . spoiler alert! There's a point in Mother! where a rabid crowd of zealots eat the main character's baby. Why that happens, I couldn't tell you. Darren Aronofsky should have a chat with Cormack McCarthy. Now there's a guy who knows how to make effective use of baby eating.

I couldn't provide a logical reason behind a single one of the choices Aronofsky makes in Mother! Well, except maybe for his decision to cast Michelle Pfeiffer, in one of the countless mystifying and/or pointless supporting roles. Pfeiffer is legitimately hilarious in this movie, which is weird because of how dark and disturbing it is. For a while, anyway. Then it's just oppressively chaotic. By then, Pfeiffer has disappeared. But when she's on screen, she plays the wife of a surprise house guest (a cigarette-hacking Ed Harris) as a deliciously cold bitch. We need to see more of Michelle Pfeiffer.

The point of view is from Jennifer Lawrence's nameless protagonist. Or is it? It would sure seem so, with Matthew Libatique's cinematography incessantly following her around this gigantic house she never leaves, right behind her head. She's consistently bewildered. It's her one emotion during this story that I could relate to.

It doesn't take long to realize time isn't quite linear. Things switch around too quickly. We learn that she helped restore this entire house, a massive house with countless rooms that evidently stands in the middle of a field with no roads to it, after it burned to the ground. "I lost everything," says her husband, played by Javier Bardem. These are two excellent actors who, in this instance, occasionally don't seem so excellent thanks to some clunky or subtly bizarre dialogue. By the end, there's an endless sequence in which reality gets so distorted that I couldn't tell if this was all an echo of a literal apocalypse (a word Jennifer Lawrence actually utters at one point), or maybe her character was nuts and having hallucinations so elaboriate that at one point the house literally turns into a war zone. I'm talking graphically shot soldiers, bullets through the face.

Weirdly -- I mean, this whole movie is weird -- Mother! startled me several times, like it was trying to be a horror movie, but each of them occurs within the first half. I even jumped when the heart that appears in the toilet squirts blood. Oh, and the toad in the basement.

I'm sure film snobs will insist this movie's "deeper meaning" is clear and anyone who can't figure out what the fuck it was about or what literally any of it means is a moron. There's a strong sense of allegory, just nothing even approaching clarity.

I found the massive marketing push over the past couple of weeks to be suspect, and I was right. Someone saw this movie and said, "Let's bombard the public with so much advertising that they give in before they knew what hit them!" I, on the other hand, put my trust in a proven director. But, even the greats typically make one or two steaming piles of shit movies.

Could this have been better if it were edited differently, maybe? Surely? Did all these great actors really read this script and say, "I have to be a part of this!" Did Darren Aronofsky roofie them all? Seriously, I don't understand. I can't remember the last movie I willingly sat through that had so few genuinely redeeming qualities. We're meant to ask, Is any of this real? By the last quarter of this movie I was just thinking, Get on with it! At least give us the detail that ties this mess together. And then the so-called twist comes in the closing scene and it's simultaneously dumb, disappointing, and more confusing the more you consider everything that preceded it. All that's left is the compulsion to warn the world not to waste their time and money on this movie.

Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem are like whaaat and so is everyone in the audience all day forever.

Overall: C-