The Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials

One thing that can be said for the new teen dystopia sequel The Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials is that it doesn’t waste any time. As the movie opens, we get a 60 second flashback recap of the last film and then it’s on to more running. It makes sense for a film that has “runner” in the title to have a lot of running, I guess, but man, there is a lot of running in this movie. It should have just been called Maze Runner 2.0: Now With More Running.

The premise of the series overall is that, in the future, a giant solar flare lays waste to most of the earth and somehow triggers a massive outbreak of a virus that turns people into zombie-like monsters called cranks. A few young children appear to be immune to the virus and so they are taken and experimented on like rats in a you-know-what in hopes of finding a cure. In the first movie, they are placed at the center of a giant, monster-filled maze and they are studied as they attempt to find their way out. They do escape and the sequel begins mere moments after the last film ends.

Now the Maze Runner himself, a young man named Thomas, and his friends are out in the ruined part of the earth known as the Scorch. Supposedly, they were rescued from the organization that was experimenting on them, but the very end of the last film revealed that their so-called liberation is actually just another phase of cruel testing. So the world becomes their maze – the remains of a shopping mall buried under the shifting desert sands, the narrow stairways of slumped over skyscrapers, underground tunnels filled with cranks. Thomas and his friends try to track down a resistance movement that’s fighting against their captors and hopefully make it to a safe, non-scorched part of the world.

The film does get a bit repetitious. Four different times in the film, our little group of runners enters some new, vaguely threatening compound and gets introduced to the “man in charge” only to discover that they have to make a narrow escape yet again.

But the film looks great and director Wes Ball films some mean chase scenes, managing to imbue them with a real viscerality and menace. The dread and fear during the underground mall sequence in particular is surprisingly intense for a movie supposedly aimed at teenagers.

Thomas is played by Dylan O’Brien whose sharp-eyed good looks remind me of a young Paul Walker but with stronger acting skills. He makes a convincing leader, and the film overall is not bad, but it does suffer from a mild case of middle-film-it is. Last year’s Hunger Games sequel had the same problem. It’s that feeling that you’re not watching a film that could stand on its own but rather that you’re just seeing one exciting but ultimately incomplete part of a bigger picture.

The middle film of a trilogy doesn’t always have to be like that. I’d argue that The Empire Strikes Back and second Godfather film were both the strongest in each of those series. A middle film can have a strong beginning, middle, and end while still being part of a larger narrative. But I also realize that kind of success is more the exception than the rule.

The Scorch Trials is more about exciting action set-pieces than about character development or even overall plot. It never slows down long enough for most characters to become anything more than place holders or for the story to really coalesce. Still if you’re just interested in a fun, somewhat lightweight action movie, you should run right out and see it. 

Hell's Half Mile Film and Music Festival

This week I interview Mitchell Jarosz, the most dapper man in Delta's English division and also one of the founders of the Hell's Half Mile Film and Music Festival. The festival takes place September 24th through the 27th and here Mitchell recommends some films and events to watch for. HHMFM is a really cool event here in the Great Lakes Bay Region that everyone should attend. Good music, cool movies, and fun people.

One Crazy Summer

 Well, summer is over. Kids are back in school, Michigan’s weather is alternating between hot and swampy and rainy and swampy, and Wal-Mart is already stocking Christmas trees. Summer blockbusters are on their way out and the high prestige awards-season films are coming up. But that’s not what I’m here to talk about. Instead, I want to pay homage to the end of hot weather, time on the beach, and hanging out with your friends on endless Friday nights. 

Specifically, I want to talk about a movie you might have missed, the largely forgotten 80s schlock comedy, One Crazy Summer written and directed by Savage Steve Holland. Released in 1986, it stars a very young John Cusack and Demi Moore. Cusack plays Hoops McCann, a recent high school graduate who spends his summer on Nantucket Island with a group of weird outcast friends while waiting to get into art school. The movie features a biker gang, Godzilla destroying a model village, Demi Moore singing a terrible 80s synth ballad, and even cartoons interspersed throughout. It’s an 80s teen film, so naturally there are evil rich kids in Polo shirts who abuse the poor kids and act like they own everything. John Cusack is gangly and charming in his pre-Say Anything days, Demi Moore is the love interest, and the whole thing ends with a climactic boat race for prize money that will save grandpa’s house!

 

It’s clear that writer/director Savage Steve Holland wasn’t interested in making art that would last the ages. No, what he loved were sight gags and set-ups that sound like they were invented by your fourteen year old brother. For instance, what if your buddy was buried in the sand on the beach at Nantucket and then someone put a chair over his face for shade – but then someone else sat on the chair and started eating a can of chili? You get the idea. 

 Reality, character motivation, and sense all go out the window in the name of cheap, silly gags and one liners. The whole film seems like it was written by John Hughes’ little brother after he huffed glue. Like Hughes’ 80s teen classics, One Crazy Summer is at least superficially interested in social and economic class conflict, but instead of going for the gravity of the Breakfast Club or Some Kind of Wonderful, the film goes for the absurd by having the rich villain pathologically hateful of lobsters.

  

If it sounds like a hot mess, it is. Rather than story or sense, the film focuses on ridiculous performances by actors like Bobcat Goldthwaite and on silly side plots like the crazy uncle who spends the entire summer with his hand perched on his phone, waiting to call into the local radio station contest and win a million dollars.

 

If it’s so infantile and silly, why am I recommending it? It’s because all of One Crazy Summer’s zaniness and pointless joking seems like summer to me. It’s relaxing, it’s fun. Nothing is taken seriously and, like a long Sunday drive on a warm afternoon, it doesn’t really go anywhere but it’s a fun ride anyway. I love a heavy duty Oscar contender as much as the next movie fan, but I believe there’s also a place for movies that are so stupid, they’re funny.

So don’t watch One Crazy Summer in spite of its absurdity, but rather because of it. Because with school starting and the weather starting to turn, there will be plenty of opportunities to take things seriously coming up. For now, take one of the last warm nights of the year, pretend that summer’s not over just yet, invite some friends over, and watch something stupid like One Crazy Summer –just because you can. You’ll groan, but you’ll laugh too.

 This review originally appeared on Q90.1 Delta College Quality Public Radio. For more information, go to www.deltabroadcasting.org.

Mr. Holmes

There are certain roles and certain actors that come together and you think, "This is perfect. Why hasn’t this happened before now?" So it is with Sir Ian McKellen and Sherlock Holmes. I am surprised, in his long and varied career playing everything from Richard the Third to Gandalf, that no one has ever matched McKellen’s intelligence and winking, sly wit with the world’s greatest detective. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Sherlock Holmes is one of the most filmed fictional characters in history with over 250 different versions, but only just now are getting Bill Condon’s wonderful, compassionate Mr. Holmes. 

Perhaps the movie gods were just waiting for McKellen to be old enough. Mr. Holmes is the story of the great detective as an old man. 93 to be exact. He lives in the remote Sussex countryside in post-World War II England, having left London more than thirty years before. He tends his prize bees and frustrates his housekeeper, Mrs. Monroe, played by Laura Linney. He spends time with Mrs. Monroe’s son, Roger, who has a clear intelligence and powers of observation in line with Sherlock himself.

The main conflict of the film is Holmes trying to remember and write down the particulars of his final case in London. He says he never liked John Watson’s “fictionalized” versions of their adventures together and wants to write one the way it actually happened, particularly the last one because, even though he can’t remember it all, he knows something happened in it that made him leave London and his profession forever. The only problem is, at 93, Holmes’s memory is spotty and failing at best. For once, all the clues to the mystery are hidden in the great detective’s own mind. Sherlock struggles with his failing powers as Roger struggles with knowing that he’s already smarter and more educated than his housekeeper mother.

McKellen gives us a human, compassionate Sherlock Holmes, quite the opposite of the brusque super-brain of Benedict Cumberbatch’s popular contemporary tv version. He’s an old man who is full of regrets but doesn’t necessarily remember what he regrets. McKellen is only 76 in real life but he successfully plays Holmes in his 60s in London flashbacks and, thanks to makeup and a tremendous performance, as a decaying old man in his 90s.

Milo Parker, the young actor who plays Roger, does a terrific job conveying real intelligence mixed in with hero worship, naiveté, and resentment for his mother. His relationship with Holmes is fun to watch as the old man allows the boy to prod his memory and tell him more of the story of his last case. 

The film’s only weak link is Laura Linney as Mrs. Monroe. Of course, Linney is talented but her performances always strike me as brittle and self-conscious. Next to a performer as organic and joyful as McKellen, she seems calculating and a little flat. But it’s a minor distraction from an otherwise really lovely film.

Mr. Holmes is an elegy, a kind of cinematic poem of mourning. It’s about how we lose things – people we love, the innocence that existed before war, our certainty that we know how people are and how the world works, our memories, sometimes even just our ability to get out of bed on our own without falling over.  To watch the great Sherlock Holmes, a kind of proto-superhero whose power was the ability to remember everything, struggle to recall a name or an event, reminds me that everybody declines eventually. It’s part of being human.

While the film is melancholy to be sure, it is ultimately an affirmation that, even though people die and our abilities decay, we can honor who we have lost and take pleasure in the joys of the present moment. Mr. Holmes is a beautiful film and deserves to be seen. 

This review originally appeared on Q90.1 Delta College Quality Public Radio. For more information, go to www.deltabroadcasting.org.