It's Such a Beautiful Day (2012)

Director: Don Hertzfeldt
Writer(s): Don Hertzfeldt
Starring: Sara Cushman, Don Hertzfeldt

I stumbled upon this on Netflix, and was massively intrigued upon seeing just how well-received it was. Everyone seemed to be enamored by It’s Such a Beautiful Day, a mostly-animated movie by Don Hertzfeldt, a man whose works I had never seen before. As “training” for this, and to just get acquainted with his style, I checked out a couple of his more popular short films, and discovered that they utilized stick figures, absurdist humor and surrealism, three themes that were down my alley, though I also knew going in that this was also supposed to feature a heavy dose of drama.

If I understand correctly, this movie is an entire trilogy of short films that were combined to form one feature-length movie, and all of them center around Bill, a stick figure person who is losing his memory. His desolate life, and the life of those around him, are examined in sometimes poignant, sometimes comical, and sometimes flat-out repetitive detail, and all in Hertzfeldt’s trademark animation style.

The eye for animation that Hertzfeldt has isn’t very surprising, considering all of his major works are animated in this way. What did shock me is the way in which the material is presented: there’s plenty of his obligatory animation, but it’s also blended with some live-action footage, collages of different scenes, as well as some excellent sound design, that uses both noise and silence to solid effect. When you realize that Hertzfeldt was the single man responsible for all of this, it's a feat that becomes even more impressive.

There is no doubt that there are moments of genuine sadness in It’s a Beautiful Day; often, these scenes come out of nowhere, and it’s almost inexplicable that any of the emotional stuff works at all. One moment Bill’s having a dream that a fish is growing out of his head (there is still plenty of surrealism and absurdism here for all of the longtime Hertzfeldt fans), and then the next moment we flash back to a scene of Bill as a child that somehow packs almost as much of a punch as if we are looking at pictures of our own childhood. Only we’re looking at stick figures; it’s amazing the emotions that Hertzfeldt can reach using only stick figures and some well-blended photographs/footage.

But this movie doesn’t always hit. In fact, it misses more than most would lead you to believe. For someone with such a knack for presentation, I was pretty surprised that Hertzfeldt utilized such a heavy reliance on the narrator. There were several scenes that, at least in my opinion, would have been infinitely more powerful had the images been allowed to speak for themselves; very rarely is any scene given a reprieve from the overused narrator, who even quotes dialogue clearly written on the screen. There is no doubt that a narrator was needed, but I think his presence could have been scaled back quite a bit, without eliminating any of its emotional resonance.

I also thought there were some pacing issues: a couple scenes go on for way too long, without seeming to serve much of a point. For example, there is a sequence where Bill is waiting for a bus at the bus stop (where he spends a good amount of screentime), and we watch a man use a leaf blower for an absurd amount of time, and then…that’s it. Scene ends. It’s surrounded by the framework that life is essentially a series of droll events that merely give way to death, but these sequences, rather than strengthening the story, just felt like overkill.

Speaking of which, I can also take just as much doom and gloom as the next guy—in fact, I really welcome it—but the film’s constant, over-the-top obsession with death was a real mood-killer for me.  It starts off a fascinating study--after all, who isn't intrigued, and completely terrified, by the thought of what actually happens after we die--but there's always a limit to how many times someone can ponder something before it crosses into "annoyance", and good ol' Bill obliterates that.  To counterbalance the bleak material, It’s Such a Beautiful Day has moments of attempted humor, but most of them were redundant and fell a little flat. I personally thought that Hertzfeldt’s comedy style was at odds with the source material (though, to be fair, the vast majority of viewers seem to heartily disagree); imagine "Tim & Eric" trying to toss in a serious plotline in between their non-sequitur weirdness, and you’ll come pretty close to how I felt struggling through this movie.

I have to give the movie some credit for the sheer ambitiousness of its story—it sets its sights on the meaning of life and death, a gutsy, divisive topic no matter who you are—but it's one thing to set goals, and quite another to reach them.  It's Such a Beautiful Day falls well short of making the life-changing rumination on death that Hertzfeldt was no doubt aiming for.

RECAP: It’s Such a Beautiful Day has several effective moments of pure emotion, but it doesn’t take long for an awkwardly unfunny joke or unnecessarily overlong scene to come along and completely derail the momentum. The film’s over-the-top bleak tone, in which we are pummeled with ruminations on death, as well as the overall pointlessness of life, wears thin after a little while; considering such reflection is essentially the entire point of the movie, it lost me well before the halfway mark. This combination has worked for many—its wildly well reviewed from audiences and critics alike—but it left me wanting a whole lot more.

RATING: 5/10

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Trainwreck (2015)

Director: Judd Apatow
Writer(s): Amy  Schumer
Starring: Amy Schumer, Bill Hader, and Brie Larson, and Colin Quinn

As tempted as I am to take the easy way out, and say that this movie is aptly titled, I will refuse to go that route; it’s even worse. This is a movie that desperately wants to trick its audience into thinking it’s edgy and unique, but the only way it knows how to do that is by throwing in an “f” word, or a graphic description of sexuality. I actually enjoy this kind of humor when it’s properly used, but not when it comes off as desperate as the one-night stands that fill up half the movie.

It’s no surprise this was a critical darling: anything Judd Apatow touches is already instantaneous “gold”, while Amy Schumer is the current “it” girl of Hollywood comedies. It’s a combination that’s “too big to fail”, and I have no doubt some critics got some lean “bonuses” from the studio to ensure that positive reviews brainwashed the American public into believing this is something special. It’s not. It’s every bit as formulaic as all the other mainstream rom-coms, even down to the sudden shift in tone--from over-the-top comedy, to genuine drama—that sets up the third act. Why do movies like this always have to give us some kind of moral lesson? One moment we get a story about how a character has to dislodge a condom lodged inside her using only her finger, and the next, we’re supposed to be emotionally involved when that character—who is intentionally made to be as crass and unlikable as possible—suffers the loss of her father? Of course, stuff like this happens in all similar movies, from American Pie, who made junk like this marketable, on to its thousands of like-minded clones, and it’s every bit as pointless now as it was then; this was just used to highlight how by-the-numbers this is, no matter how many times “fuck” is said on screen.

Amy Schumer (who also wrote the screenplay) plays Amy, a woman who has commitment issues. She sleeps with a new man every night, kicks them out before morning, and is satisfied to never see them again. Her behavior, we are lead to believe, is a result of her father telling her and her sister at a very young age that monogamy is pointless and unrealistic. This is advice her sister never took this to heart, as she is now married and with a child on the way (though she already has a stepchild).

Anyway, queue all the clichés: She essentially vows to never get married, until her job requires her to interview a sports doctor (Bill Hader), who she slowly falls for despite sleeping with him on the first date, and then she ruins the doctor’s big day at an awards ceremony, so she thinks it’s over, and then starts drinking and going back to her promiscuous ways, and then he thinks it’s over, but is encouraged by his friends to try patching things up, and then they do, and then the movie ends.

The main issue is that Amy’s character is made up to be such a dick that none of this standardized formula really works. Take, for example, the obligatory scenes, briefly outlined above, where both of them “do wrong” and attempt to win each other back. The problem here, is that the sports doctor did nothing wrong—Amy consistently screws things up for him, refuses to even acknowledge her mistakes or apologize, and we’re supposed to cheer for them to be together in the end, solely out of familiarity of the subgenre and how it works. Like her character, Ms. Schumer refuses to put forth any effort to make us want to see them together; she just wills it, and relies on multi-million dollar marketing campaigns to make it so.

There are two saving graces that prevent this from being a complete disaster, and they go by the names of Lebron James, and Dave Attell. James gets the most screentime out of the two, by far, and is a surprisingly decent comedic actor. Sure, he generally relies on the cuteness and the “Hey, that’s Lebron James!” factor, at least at first, but it works, and he actually delivers a couple of humorous lines. Attell, who plays a homeless man who constantly stands outside of Amy’s apartment, is very sparingly used, but delivers Attell-style quips to passersby, to often funny results.

The rest is all miss. I have never seen Schumer’s television series, and have only witnessed short clips of her television show, so I didn’t really know what to expect going in here. On top of the constant vulgarities, the script also relies a lot on awkward silences, also a current fad in Hollywood, which tend to wear thin after being overused within the first few minutes. I think she’s a very attractive woman, and will not form a cemented opinion of her based on one project, but I honestly believe the buzz from this is a marketing attempt to push her farther up the comedy echelon, where more people stand to profit off of her. There’s just no way that anyone can honestly praise this as “different” from any other romantic comedy—like Amy’s character in the movie, it’s too afraid to commit to being anything other than standardized comedic fare, and the talents—or in Judd Apatow’s case, the overrated hype--of almost everyone involved is wasted.

If you’re a rom-com completist, you may find something to like here, though a word of caution: even my chick flick-loving wife demanded I turn it off at the 90-minute mark out of utter disgust. So we couldn’t even make it all the way through. Which brings me to the point that the only thing worse than a bad romantic comedy, is a bad romantic comedy that thinks it’s smart enough to ramble on for two hours and eight minutes.

RECAP: A piece of utter trash that’s neither as smart nor as funny as you were lead to believe. Trainwreck is so bad, it doesn’t even bare comparisons to its title—whereas trainwrecks are supposedly so horrible you can’t look away, my wife and I had the exact opposite problem, gladly turning it off just beyond the 90-minute mark. The film’s attempt to be “edgy” consists of throwing in random swear words and poorly-timed vulgarities, as it simply runs through one banal rom-com plot checkpoint after another. LeBron James, Dave Attell, and a couple humorous scenes save it from being a complete dog, but it’s even far worse than the similarly-overhyped dreck that was Knocked Up.

RATING: 1.5/10

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Entertainment (2015)

Director: Rick Alvarez
Writer(s): Alvarez, Tim Heidecker, and Gregg Turkington
Starring: Gregg Turkington, John C. Reilly, and Tye Sheridan

I like Neil Hamburger. Like, a lot. His “stand-up” performance is one of only a handful of live shows, music or otherwise, that I have ever been to. His comedy is an acquired taste, and one that most people probably don’t have any interest in acquiring: Neil’s entire set consists of telling question-and-answer jokes to the audience, gagging and coughing loudly to cover the silence in between the question and the answer, to prevent his fans from revealing the answer before he can (example joke: “Why does Arby’s lather their sandwiches in mayo? (long pause featuring constant hacking and coughing while crowd shouts out answers). So they’re easier to flush down the toilet!”). Not surprisingly, he is also awkward, presenting himself as a sad-sack loser who frequently sobs in between jokes that are of particularly poor taste, blaming the audience for making him tell it.  He occasionally berates audience members who are too loud, unleashing vulgar, brutal tirades that are probably more authentic to him than we realize. You would think it would be a thankless, dead-end job, but he has opened for acts such as Faith no More (another one of my faves), and Tenacious D, and has also been booed at quite a few festivals, comprised of audiences that aren’t quite in on the joke. It’s a shtick that shouldn’t be funny for more than a couple of minutes, but I find him absolutely hilarious.

What makes the whole setup even more “endearing” (for lack of a better term) is that Neil Hamburger is actually a character played by Gregg Turkington, a well-respected member of the music underground. He ran Armadillo Records for a few years in the early-to-late ‘90s. He was a tour manager for Link Wray, and one of my personal favorite bands, Mr. Bungle. He was a founding member of the musical duo Zip Code Rapists, collaborated with Trey Spruance (also a member of Mr. Bungle) in his band Secret Chiefs 3, has provided voices to mostly one-off characters in several animated shows, including “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” and “Adventure Time”, made small appearances in films like Ant-Man, as well as in television shows, like the series finale of "CSI", and ran the clever blog “Warm Voices Rearranged: Anagram Record Reviews” with fellow musician Brandon Kearney. This is one of those guys that manages to be both prolific, yet criminally underrated at the same time.

If you’re already lost on any part of the above two paragraphs, then I'll be frank: Entertainment is not for you. It wasn’t for my wife, who doesn't share near the affection for Mr. Turkington that I do, and it almost wasn’t for me. I really can’t see this movie appealing to anyone that isn’t a huge fan of Mr. Hamburger, because when he isn’t telling his trademark “jokes”, then he’s just walking around, as his “real-life” alter ego Gregg Turkington, in a variety of barren desert settings. It starts off intriguing, but once the formula repeats itself over and over again, it gradually threatens to become an endurance test; thankfully, it redeems itself a little bit toward the end, when his character goes off the deep end, and the events, and people, surrounding him get weirder and weirder.

There really isn’t a plot to speak of, at least in the traditional sense; I wasn’t joking when I said that this film more or less follows a rather repetitive formula: Gregg travels to a new location in the desert in his old white car, then there are a few shots of him looking quiet and depressed as he gets ready in the dressing room of some dingy bar, usually while the character credited as “Eddie the Opener” (an intentionally-terrible mime, played by Tye Sheridan) performs on stage; occasionally, the two come together to have an awkward conversation. After this, he goes to his hotel room, where he calls his daughter on the phone and leaves her a message about how his day went. It’s always a message; even she doesn’t seem to want to hear from her father anymore. Then, he usually stares off into the distance for a while longer before going to sleep.

When he wakes up, he usually takes some kind of a local tour (of an oil field, or automobile graveyard, or some similar “attraction”), where we get more quiet stares into space. If we’re lucky, we might actually get some human interaction, though even those instances get more and more bizarre as they slowly get more frequent. In the beginning, he meets up with his cousin, John (John C. Reilly, who you just knew had to show up here somewhere), whom he hasn’t seen in a decade. John thinks like a businessman, and is constantly thinking of ways that he can help Neil gain larger crowds for his shows (he also appears to be just as sincere praising his cousin’s work, as he is completely baffled by the material). But Neil doesn’t seem to have any interest in bigger or better things; as depressed as he always appears to be on the outside, he is apparently more content than we think. Either that, or he’s simply just unmotivated.

One night, he has a brutal encounter with a woman at a bar; after she causes a disruption in his set, he goes off on her the way he does anyone daring enough to interrupt him. However, she doesn’t take it well at all, and throws her drink at him. This only makes him more mad, as he verbally tears into her with a reckless abandon, going above and beyond the norms of decency; he crosses the line here from a “mock hatred” of his audience to genuine contempt, and watching the result is genuinely uncomfortable. She confronts him outside after the show, breaking his glasses and tearing his shirt. Oh, the life of an entertainer. (As an aside for the uninitiated, his performances in real life are way more fun and less cruel than they appear on here; unless he’s the opening act, or playing at a festival, the audience is always in on the joke and play along accordingly. If the audience isn’t familiar…well, things feel more dangerous for Neil than anyone in the audience.)

The film’s minimalistic style, the lack of a narrative, and Neil’s cringe-inducing jokes are going to be enough to turn off a vast majority of its audience. The constantly-droning score doesn’t really help much, as it always sounds like it's hinting at ominous events that never happen. Unsurprisingly, critics—who always have to feed off of each other and pretend to get things that they don’t actually get, much like a wine connoisseur pretends to have the capability of differentiating a 100-year-old bottle of Dom Perignon from a recent vintage of a grocery store brand, simply based on taste—have taken to it, while audiences seem to loathe it. That’s about what I would expect from a film that seems to try very hard to capture the desolation and loneliness of its main character. Occasionally, it works, but it relies on silence and empty stares far too many times to convey its message, as if having it take place completely in a seemingly endless parade of desert didn’t already establish that from the outset.

I hinted at it earlier, but things get really bizarre toward the end, with a nervous man named Tommy (played by Michael Cera) waiting for The Comedian (as he is credited in the movie; he is never referred to by name) and asking to stay with him in his car. But even scenes like this, ones that could have some kind of emotional resolution or resonance, are treated with a blatant indifference that borders on maddening; after the rather mysterious encounter, in which Tommy keeps insisting that The Comedian offer him some company until help arrives for his broken-down car, and The Comedian’s tolerance seems to be reaching an inescapable boiling point, it simply cuts to the next scene. There’s no resolution, and no mention of what either of them decided to do. I get that passiveness is simply part of its style, but the distance with which it treats its main character only serves to further alienate the viewer.

Despite the film's overall tediousness, I have to say that I actually kind of liked it, though again, it all has to do with my familiarity of the material (and its subject) moreso than actual execution. The ending, which I mentioned earlier, also helped to save it a bit for me; that’s when things start to go off the deep end, culminating in an emotional moment that works, even if it is simply because it’s one of the only concrete things that happens in the entire film. Unfortunately, it still manages to ramble on a bit longer, culminating in an abrupt ending that was more frustrating than anything else. When all is said and done, the final joke ends up on the viewer; then again, maybe that was the whole point all along.

RECAP: Much like this review, Rick Alverson's Entertainment is wandering, and overlong, and pretentious, and repetitive, and boring, and it feels like an “inside joke” more than a cohesive movie. But I have a certain fondness for the character of Neil Hamburger (a stand up “comic”, played by Gregg Turkington), so I tolerated the ensuing nothingness a lot more than most will be able to. In fact, many have dismissed this as complete garbage, something that, looking from the eyes of someone else, I can’t really argue. The soundtrack is actually really good, the few times that actual music is heard, while the droning, electronic score, which seems to suggest an ominous threat that isn’t there, is overused. If you’re a fan of Neil, then you might find something to like here; if you’ve never heard of him, hate him, or are indifferent to his existence, then you stand to gain nothing by watching this.

RATING: 5.5/10

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The 5th Wave (2016)

Director: J Blakeson
Writer(s): Susannah Grant, Akiva Goldsman, and Jeff Pinkner. Based on the novel by Rick Yancey.
Starring: Chloe Grace Moretz, Alex Roe, Zackary Arthur, and Liev Schreiber

Prior to seeing The 5th Wave in a (second-run) theater, I was immediately reminded why I stopped seeing mainstream movies at all in the first place: it’s a joyless walk through derivative landscapes, featuring carbon-copy characters stolen almost verbatim from a million movies before it. It’s a bad movie, but not because of its blandness or its write-by-numbers plot; rather, it’s a bad movie because it blatantly strives for nothing more than mediocrity.

I suppose part of that blame falls on the books, which rely on the ever-popular Twilight formula in which a human falls in love with a non-human, and then must defy the odds to make the relationship work. Only here, the “outsider” of the relationship is not a vampire, but an alien, which is part of a race that are imaginatively referred to as “The Others”. But whereas the books seem to be pushing the envelope of its target demographic (my wife, who has read the two that have been published up until now, says they are much more violent and have more language than the movie does), the film version is content with watering everything down to its lowest-common-denominator roots, in an obvious effort to cater to the teenage crowd.

Cassie Sullivan (played by Chloe Grace Moretz) is your typical high-schooler with a caring, loving, complete, and wholesome family consisting of a father (a completely unnecessary Luke Wilson), a mother (Maggie Siff), and a younger brother named Sam (Zackary Arthur). But things are not as perfect as they seem in this fairytale world: aliens are beginning the most-drawn out invasion in history. As we learn from the long tagline, which also serves as a curiously-concise plot synopsis that almost eliminates the need to even watch the movie in the first place, the first wave is darkness: the aliens, who hover above Earth in large UFOs, use an electromagnetic shield to disable everything, from engines, to cell phones, to electricity. In wave two, they cause massive flooding to all bodies of water on Earth, meaning those that live within a hundred miles of an ocean are all but screwed.

The third wave brings disease, as “The Others” infect birds with a deadly virus that naturally spreads to almost all living things. Some of the people are naturally immune to it, but those that aren’t slowly die an agonizing death: Cassie’s mother is one of them. The fourth wave is an all-out invasion, which we learn after the Army infiltrates a refugee camp in which Cassie, Sam, and their father are staying. Curiously, the children are bussed out to safety, while the parents are told that the one functioning bus will be back shortly to reunite parents with their children. Not surprisingly, this is a lie; through a debriefing to the parents by the required is-he-evil-or-is-he-good character Colonel Vosch (coolly played by Liev Schreiber), the Earth is under attack by aliens who can possess anyone without any trace. In other words, it’s impossible to differentiate the aliens, who look exactly like you or I, from normal humans. Also not surprisingly, Cassie does not make the bus, leaving her brother to make the mysterious trip all by himself, while also giving the story a convenient story arc.

Then there’s the fifth wave, in which the captured children are turned into soldiers to fight the onslaught of aliens, using technologically-advanced headsets that can detect who the aliens are. Would you believe that Cassie’s old high school crush, Ben Parrish,  and her brother Sam happen to be in the same squad? Or that Ben takes a liking to Sam (not knowing of his relation to Cassie) and does everything in his power to protect him from a world so violent and cruel?

But Cassie isn’t just twiddling her thumbs during all of this: after witnessing the death of her father at the hands of the military, she grabs a machine-gun and starts off in her quest to find Sam. Not long into her quest, she is shot in the leg while roaming through an abandoned freeway; so great is her blood loss that she lapses into unconsciousness. As we know will happen, she wakes up in a mysterious place, conveniently picked up by an attractive young man with dreamy eyes who attempts to nurse her back to health. He is Evan Walker, and we learn that all of his immediate relatives were wiped out during the previous waves, and he is deadset on helping her to compensate for his failure to save his own family. She is reluctant to accept his help at first, fearing that he may be one of “The Others”, but after he saves her life, she realizes that he might not be so bad to have around after all.

Then, one night, they are attacked while hiding out in a car, and the ease in which Evan dispatches three people, all armed, has Cassie questioning his genetic makeup yet again. Is he a human, as he assured her that he was, or something much, much worse? Forming an uneasy alliance (aren’t they always in these stories?), they set aside their differences in order to infiltrate the military base where Sam, and the other kids, are being forced to fight the alien intruders. But not everything is what it seems, as they will soon find out…

The whole project just feels emotionless and distant, like we are clearly watching actors and crew go through the motions simply to collect a paycheck: everyone does their jobs, but no one is interested in going above and beyond. Even though it’s been years (literally) since I have seen a big-budget “blockbuster”, I see the focus is still on computer effects, which are very much still obviously computer effects; the technology doesn’t seem to have progressed all that much in the many months I’ve been absent from the scene. I am probably in the minority—and probably sounding like a condescending, elitist jerk at the moment—but I just don’t get any satisfaction from hopelessly watching a videogame that I can’t control play out in front of my eyes. So to say that none of this inspired me to do anything but excitedly leave the theater when it was over, should go without saying.

The one saving grace for me was Liev Schreiber’s performance as Vosch, a man who is required to hover between “evil” and “genuine”, something that Shreiber does with complete conviction. He has such an intimidating presence that he gives his character a complexity missing from all the rest; an effortless balance that constantly leaves the viewer guessing what side he’s on, even as it becomes more and more apparent. Schreiber does something that is nearly impossible to do, and that is to almost singlehandedly give an uninspired character an extra dimension; I was absolutely drawn to his performance, and he easily became my favorite anything of the whole movie.

If you are a fan of the big-budget spectacle disguised as a movie, or if you have read the books in this series (as my wife has), then you will probably enjoy this a lot more than I did (and in the interest of full disclosure, my wife really liked it). It’s the kind of movie that allows you to just sit back, shut your mind off, eat some popcorn, and understand everything without having to make much effort to follow along. My biggest qualm is that those qualities have come to define almost every Hollywood blockbuster these days, to the point that audiences seem content with never having to turn their minds back on. But watching movies like The 5th Wave, ones that strictly adhere to time-worn formulas simply to make a buck, is akin to making a copy of a copy of a piece of paper, and then repeating this a million times: it doesn’t take long for the quality to drop until, eventually, all you are left with is a blank sheet of paper.

RECAP: As with the vast number of Hollywood blockbusters, The 5th Wave is long on obviously fake computer-generated effects, but short on anything of actual substance. It’s a cash grab, from the first frame to the last, one that follows a strictly formulaic story from which it never has the desire to stray. It feels emotionless and distant: sure, it has plenty of the obligatory scenes of emotional distress, but they are completely simulated by actors who either lack the talent, or the commitment, to give them any kind of lasting effect. My one plus is Liev Schreiber’s performance as Vosch; he oozes charisma, and strikes his character’s required balance of “evil” and “genuine” with surprising aptitude. Of course, if you like this kind of movie, or are familiar with the source material, then chances are pretty good that you will like this one, as my wife did. Personally, I just can’t get any satisfaction out of watching a movie that I feel like I have seen dozens of times before, completely verbatim.

RATING: 3.5/10

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The Lobster (2015)

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
Writer(s): Lanthimos and Efthymis Filippou
Starring: Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, Jessica Barden, and John C. Reilly

I have never minced words when it comes to the kinds of films I tend to like. For example, I avoid Hollywood “blockbusters” like the plague, because watching $200 million worth of computer effects, mixed with embarrassing tidbits of required “humor”, just does nothing for me. Likewise, I get bored very easily, so slogging through derivative drivel is the quickest way to ensure that I'll be dozing off at around the midway point. I guess what I'm trying to say, is that I'm somewhat of a cinema snob, and that's precisely why Yorgos Lanthimos's The Lobster appealed to me.

It's the kind of film where all you need to do is read a couple sentences of the plot synopsis to know that it is strange: It all takes place in a mysterious future society where single people are rounded up and taken to The Hotel; there they have 45 days to fall in love with a suitable match, or else they will live out the rest of their lives as an animal of their own choosing.

In this case, we follow David (Colin Farrell), an awkward (as everyone in this movie is), unconfident nerd of a man that chooses the titular character because, among other reasons, he “enjoys the sea”. He arrives at The Hotel with his dog, which also happens to be his brother (he failed to find a mate during his 45-day sentence) and is notified of the ground rules: no sex between single people is allowed, nor is masturbation, but oral sex from the hotel's maid is fine. Other than that, the Singles are free to walk around and mingle, but must arrive in time for dinner, where all inhabitants watch mandatory dinner skits extolling the virtues of partnership (in one, a woman walking alone is attacked by a man, which doesn't happen when she has a husband walking with her; in another, a lonely man chokes to death, whereas his wife performs the Heimlich and saves him).

The humor, which is rather dry and awkward, unquestionably won't be for everyone, but there are some moments that I found downright hilarious. A majority of them involve David's forced attempt to match with a lady known only as Heartless Woman, so-called for her stunning disregard for human suffering. In one instance, David joins Heartless Woman in a hot tub, where she proceeds to choke to death on an olive, with David making no effort to help her—as it turns out, she was merely attempting to test their compatibility together. Ironically, by not doing anything to save her, Heartless Woman agrees that they would make a good match.  On paper, this sequence might not sound funny, but thanks to the atmosphere of deadpan humor, Yanthimos pulls it off with straight-faced fervor.

Since it's a movie that will widely be classified as “bizarre”, that means John C. Reilly is required by law to appear in it; he fulfills his contractual obligation by playing a character known only as Lisping Man (none of the Singles in the mansion are referred to by name; instead they are called by identifying traits), who ends up receiving a harsh, primitive punishment for masturbating in his Hotel room (in a scene that somehow manages to be both unnerving and completely absurd).

Shortly after this, Heartless Woman discovers that David has only been pretending to be like her all along, when she beats his dog/brother to death. Upon hearing this, and seeing the evidence of blood all over her feet and legs, he runs into the bathroom to cry, and is caught; feeling their partnership was founded on a lie, she threatens to report him to the Hotel Manager, where he will be subject to punishment. David has other ideas, though: with the help of the maid, he tranquilizes Heartless Woman, and turns her into an unspecified animal. Realizing he will probably be caught if he sticks around, he escapes the Hotel and runs off into The Woods, joining a pack of nomads known only as Loners.

Even the Loners have their own set of rules, and chief among them is that romance between Loners is punishable by the “red kiss”: that's where the offending couple have their lips cut off and are then forced to press them together. Our narrator, who is known only as Short-Sighted Woman (Rachel Weisz), mentions that there is also “red intercourse” punishment, but she has never seen it done and doesn't even want to imagine what it could possibly entail. She gets closer and closer to possibly finding out, as she quickly falls for David, something that gradually starts to rub the leader of the Loners (Lea Seydoux) the wrong way. Will their love be enough to save them from the ire of their group, or will they have to face their stiff punishment?

There is a lot of social commentary in The Lobster, and perhaps the most effective bit is the way that partnership and marriage is forced on the inhabitants of The City; it's not a far cry at all from the way single people are generally referred to as “inferior” in today's society. From the moment we are old enough to listen, most people are taught that a life well-lived means falling in love with someone, getting married, and having children; the laws of The City consist of this idea taken to chilling extremes.

The performances are hard to critique, because all of the actors are intentionally wooden and awkward, which feed into the film's deadpan style; this was clearly designed to bring attention to the emotionless state of this future, where people quite literally go through the entire motion of life. It's a fascinating little touch--one that, like everything else in this movie, seems designed to divide viewers right down the middle—but an artistic decision that also makes sense within the context of the story. Even more telling is that it's impossible to imagine this film being played straight.

It doesn't always succeed in what it's trying to do; it does manage to taper off a bit as it winds down from its identity as awkward comedy, and starts focusing more on the love story aspect. I thought the first 90 minutes were actually pretty brisk, with everything moving along at a great pace, and then it kind of seemed to run out of ideas, ironically once the focus came on the budding romance between David and Short-Sighted Woman. That's not to say that I found it dull at any point, just that it's ideas taper off at just the moment I was expecting them to kick into overdrive.

There is also quite a bit of animal cruelty, so those with an affinity for the well-being of animals might have a difficult time making it through a couple of parts. Of course, these scenes are simulated, so no animals are actually harmed, but the scenes are realistic enough that it could easily upset people. This is neither a “pro”, nor “con” so much as it is just a warning...I was unprepared for it, and while the animal violence didn't upset me, it definitely did my wife, to the point that I don't think she would have agreed to watch it with me had she been made aware of it beforehand.

Lanthimos, you may recall, is also the director of Dogtooth, another film that's fairly well-known in some circles for its abounding strangeness. If you like that film, chances are you will like this one; at the very least, you will know what to expect. I liked Dogtooth, but wasn't blown away by it. The Lobster, though, feels like the perfect natural extension of his talents, taking a surrealistic set of ideas, and somehow combining them in such a way that it could appeal to more open-minded mainstream viewers; for this reason alone, it should be considered some kind of masterpiece.

RATING: 8/10

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