Glass - Movie Review

Starring James McAvoy, Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson, Anya Taylor-Joy, Sarah Paulson, Spencer Treat Clark and Charlayne Woodard.
Written & Directed by M. Night Shyamalan.

★★½

I loved Unbreakable. I liked Split. After the hit of Split and the buzz afterwards, the studio would have happily financed Glass, but Shyamalan wanted to do it himself so he could have 100% control. This is a movie that really could have used a producer to reign him in and give script notes. The last time Shyamalan got too full of himself and refused to accept what the studio was telling him was when he ended his Disney deal and took his next film elsewhere under condition he could make it the way he wanted. That movie was Lady in the Water.

This movie isn't as bad as that one, but I really wanted to like this movie and it had too many issues to ignore. I am glad I saw the reviews were bad so I went in with low expectations.

I really liked this movie for a good while. Past the hour-mark, it was still a solid thumbs-up for me. We get reintroduced to the unbreakable David Dunn (Bruce Willis), still fighting bad guys in his poncho. We see what he and his grown son (Spencer Treat Clark) are up to. We also see that split-personalitied Kevin (James McAvoy) is free, and that the more malevolent ones in the Horde (what all the personalities who aren't Kevin are called) are running the show, as he's holding four teenage girls hostage in some abandoned brick factory. (I love abandoned brick factories as a movie setting. Almost as much as catwalk-and-steam factories for Act 3 action showdowns.)

David brushes up against Kevin and sees where the girls are. They have a showdown, but both wind up getting arrested and tranquilized and taken to a mental health facility. Enter Dr. Staple (Sarah Paulson), a psychiatrist who specializes in patients with delusions of being superheroes. It's a very narrow field of research. Oh, and also at this facility? Elijah Price, aka Mr. Glass (Samuel L. Jackson).

Now if you haven't seen Split, like my wife, this movie is very confusing and terrible. I have, so I understood everything about the lights switching personalities in Kevin, or why former kidnap victim Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy) has sympathy for a couple of the personalities inside there. But there are other ways the movie goes wrong.

First of all, Shyamalan is very fond of characters looking right in the camera to give their dialogue, giving the audience the POV of the character he/she is talking to. This is done quite a bit with Paulson, and we are unable to look away when her dialogue starts getting really clunky and repetitive. "Stop making Paulson look at us and explain everything!" The more she's forced to give over-expository dialogue, the worse it gets. Which is exactly how I felt when watching Lady in the Water. This makes the middle of the movie lose a lot of its pacing, but I was still okay with that.

Act 3 comes, and Shyamalan builds up to this twist that isn't really that great, or at least if he hadn't hung SUCH a lantern on it. But even as we get there, the climax is start-stop-start-stop, like a car that starts but dies as soon as you hit the gas. We also lose track of what everyone's doing during the final showdown. The last half-hour could have been done in fifteen minutes just as effectively, and it wouldn't have felt so clumsy. It also would have been nice if he'd had a couple more million in the budget to make the special effects look better.

Now I really enjoyed the three main guys in their roles. McAvoy bounces around all of the personalities with precision. One line and I have no doubt which of the dozen or so from the Horde is currently in charge. Willis looks more engaged here that he has in at least a decade, and Jackson really buries himself nicely into the role of Mr. Glass. It's one of my favorite characters of his.

Glass is a movie easy to pick apart. I could really rip on a lot more elements in this movie, but after I've slept on it, I'm still glad I saw it, as it mostly lived up to my low expectations. It's an entertainingly bad movie. But man, the potential it had... It could have been so much better.

12 Years A Slave - Movie Review

Starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, Benedict Cumberbatch, Paul Giamatti, Brad Pitt, Lupita Nyong'o, Sarah Paulson, Paul Dano, Alfre Woodard, Adepero Oduye, Garret Dillahunt, Michael K. Williams, Bryan Batt, Taran Killam, Scoot McNairy and Quvenzhane Wallis.
Directed by Steve McQueen.

★★★★

Chiwetel Ejiofor and Michael Fassbender

Probably the best movie on slavery since Roots. But very difficult to watch.

Chiwetel Ejiofor (Serenity, Salt) stars in the true story of Solomon Northup, a free man living in 1841 New York who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the Deep South.  Solomon is an educated man, well off from what we can tell as a violinist for hire.  He is our window to the experience, and it's a shrewd way to let us in.  Solomon is not a slave, nor is anyone in the audience, and so it makes easier to relate to the horrors thrust upon him, as opposed to someone who just grew up with it as their lot in life.

I've read some articles recently on trauma and PSTD, both what it does to children and to adults, but then there's the entire spectrum of damage done by slavery.  What does it do to generations beaten and imprisoned their entire life, family routinely removed from them, dehumanized daily.  What does it do to generations to raise them believing these humans over here aren't really humans so you can torture them and degrade them all you like.

Some of us descend from psychopaths who were okay with treating other people worse than animals.  Some of us descend from those other people who lived their entire lives at the mercy of those psychopaths.  How can a nation heal from such origins?

There's a scene where Solomon, on his way to the store, runs into some white men about to hang two black men.  And it's all treated so casually by everyone else in the scene.  The white men are just doing what's done, the black men know they can't do anything to resist, and Solomon has to walk away in despair as he hears the death throes of the slaves behind him.

Director Steve McQueen has an unflinching eye in the brutality.  There's another scene where Solomon is strung by his neck and his toes can barely touch the muddy ground.  We keep hoping the scene will cut away to something else, but it stays on him, and we hear him choking, and in the background, we see the other slaves ignore and go about their day. This is just the way life is.

Solomon spends most of his 12 years under a mentally unstable alcoholic named Epps (Michael Fassbender).  Epps has a mantra that "a man can do whatever he likes with his property." Epps' wife (Sarah Paulson), in ways, is as evil as he is, for when she gets upset, she wants to see some slaves beaten.  Slavery in all its brutality could only happen if there were women in on it.

I view it similar to Passion of the Christ, in that it's very violent, but it also leaves you with a lingering sense of the scope of suffering.  I was impressed with the pacing of it, and the way each event led to the next.  This is sure to get award nominations for Picture, Director, Screenplay, Actor, Supporting Actor (Fassbender) and Supporting Actress (Lupita Nyong'o, as slave-girl Patsey who unfortunately is liked by Epps).

One other note: there's a scene when a supervisor played by Paul Dano starts singing "Run N----r Run" to the slaves. It shows off his own deranged joy at keeping slaves in their place, but it also seems relevant to the headlines of today with Richie Incognito and others are still using the word. Let's just say I agree with Isiah Thomas's take on it.