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Patreon Letter: 15th July 2019
🕑 Added 2019-07-15 21:07:30 +0000 UTCHey folks, it's Jackson here with another Patreon Letter! I watched two movies on Sunday, and now I am here to talk about one, or both of them. Have not decided how that will fall yet, we'll just have to see how long it takes me to hit 800 words. It is good to have options, as the wise man said. Here we go!
Vice (2018)
Adam McKay wants more than anything to have made Wolf of Wall Street. You can feel it in every frame of Vice, in the fourth-wall breaking narration, the archive footage inset into the frame, even the tryhard bit in the middle where Dick Cheney and his wife start doing Shakespeare. He, uh, he isn't Scorsese. Vice lacks both Wolf's razor-sharp satirical intuition and far more importantly, Wolf's competency at shot-reverse-shot. It's a very run before you can walk style film.
On the latter issues first. We'll get to Vice's thematic and political worldview in a minute don't you worry. But in a sheer sense of craft it just doesn't have any sense of propulsive energy. It's shot overwhelmingly in handheld, shaky scenes where every joke goes on a couple beats too long - which makes sense given McKay's Apatow lineage - yet ends up giving the film a sense of boys putting on their dad's clothes. The structure and pacing of an extended SNL bit, but it's a serious oscar movie now so the jokes are less funny and it's all forced film grain and muted tones.
These issues seem to stem from the fact that the film's premise is flimsy, condescending and most importantly cinematically inert. Is it a film trying to get inside the mind of Dick Cheney, figure out what makes this evil ass dude tick? Occasionally, it can do that. But Not wholly. Is it a film about what Dick Chney represents, what his success says about our systems of politics and society? Absolutely. Perhaps if you asked McKay, he would tell you this. But it's not really. Because this film begins with the deeply condescending title card that despite his malicious influence and immense power, "barely anyone knows his name"
Which is just not fucking true mate. Everyone knows who Dick Cheney is. And everyone already hates him.
So the movie is neither an interrogation of Cheney's interiority, nor a thorough societal reflection on the Bush presidency and Iraq War. It is a Dick Cheney explainer video. And through this lens a lot of it's absolutely bizzarre choice start to make a lot more sense. Like, here's one: in a very early scene, Lynne Cheney is giving Dick shit for being a fuck up, telling him he needs to get his act together and fix his life, because she can't, as a woman. So a fairly stock modern Hollywood scene between a man and a woman here, supporting woman tells the male lead to man up, but with an overture towards gender inequality. That's fine and good and all. Does not play that well when it's a conversation between Lynne and Dick Cheney!!!
Later in the film, Lynne is campaigning on Dick's behalf while he's recovering in hospital, and she gives a big pointed speech against bra burning feminists. These two things are not played against each other with any sense of irony or hypocrisy, they are both deeply earnest moments that come at separate points in the movie that both want to get across different things. The first scene is about the many second chances that Dick, as a fuck up rich guy, can get. The second scene is about how awful Lynne is. There is no sense that Lynne has betrayed her values, nor any interrogation of how she may hold these two opposing values. It's incoherent and illustrative of how the film feels like less a story than a series of Things That Happened.
Which would be fine. Like, McKay can't make a film as good as Wolf of Wall Street, but neither can most directors and at least here we have a man who fucking hates Dick Cheney, thinks that every single person even remotely complicit in the Iraq War should be in the Hague, and wants to spread these ideas in pop cinema. This is a thing I should be able to get behind, but unfortunately the film completely torpedoes this in the final seconds, as the condescension of the title card just opens its third eye completely and consumes the entire movie with one post credits scene. Honestly it's almost beautiful how much it just destroys the movie.
If you've not seen it, do me a favour and google Vice Post Credit Scene. You'll see.
Despite being so concerned with the evil of Dick Cheney, with the systems of power that enable the evils of American Empire, for most of its running time, when it comes to make a final thesis statement, Vice decides the problem is teenage girls with their selfies. A nation of passive, uninformed idiots who care more about Fast Five than Dick Cheney!! It's so fucking condescending and it's tinged with such a sense of superiority, Adam McKay is screaming to the heavens "why has nobody else heard of this Dick Cheney guy!!!"
We have dude. We have. Please learn to make better movies. The Other Guys was mostly alright.
Okay that's it it turns out I was grumpy enough about Vice to hit 800 words so you don't get to find out what I thought of AI: Artificial Intelligence in depth, at least right now. I will probably talk about it on a podcast. But the short version is it's legitimately fantastic, one of Spielberg's best movies, and the less you know the better. Cannot reccomend it hard enough.
See you next week with almost certainly another movie!
