Realized I managed to NOT post last week’s IN BOB WE TRUST, which featured the revival of SCHLOCKTOBER. My bad. Here it is below, along with the new one from this week:

The Coen Bros back in 1940s Hollywood mode?

George Clooney as a hack leading-man blithering through a costume epic?

Scarlett Johansson as an Esther Williams analog?

To paraphrase Mr. Oswalt: What god did I please???

First things first: “Purpose in The Machine” introduces Agent May’s father. As he turns out to be (played by) the legendary James Hong – one of our all-time greatest character actors – it is now automatically the most important episode of AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D that has ever aired or likely will ever air.

Anyway…

By now I’ve come to terms with the fact that a lot of the reasons I’ve come to genuinely enjoy AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D are probably the same things that both the series’ creators and other audiences find the most frustrating – in particular its tendency to change-up tone, direction, story-arcs, character roles and general narrative flow on a whim. Yes, I’m aware it’s more a function of Marvel TV and Marvel Film not really being on the same page a lot of the time, but what works works. Case in point: “Purpose” opting to (seemingly) resolve what easily could’ve been a season-long plot thread (Agent Simmons, believed dead by everyone but Fitz, is stranded on an alien planet) in the season’s second episode. Did not expect that.

The “let’s get Jemma!” storyline takes up the bulk of the episode and (happily) serves as opportunity to reintroduce Peter MacNicol’s Professor Randolph, the standout one-off character from the early-half of Season 1. A blue-collar Asgardian commoner who’s been anonymously chilling on Earth for a few thousand years (random stone-worker in his own world but a super-strong near-immortal here,) Randolph was for a long time AGENTS best example of its then-unrealized potential to do interesting things with the Marvel arcana; and it’s both fun to see him back (MacNicol has been relieved of his supporting role on CSI: CYBER, so here’s hoping he picks up a regular spot here) and intriguing to see hints of deeper intrigue to him: He clearly knows more than he’s telling about The Monolith, is strangely insistent that “any” portals be destroyed and has an… “odd” reaction to learning that The Inhumans still exist or that Daisy (formerly Skye) is one of them.

That last part is especially interesting from a future-storyline perspective: We’ve already seen both Kree and Asgardian visitors react with fear to the presence of Inhumans and/or Inhuman-adjacent technology on Earth, which could make things very complicated with the series already plunging into the expected Inhumans-as-X-Men-replacements stuff re: government/military crackdowns. Historically, the middle is not the safe place to be in Marvel narratives. In any case, by the time things wrapped up The Monolith was atomized and Fitz/Simmons were reunited, though with her suffering some clearly heavy PTSD from… whatever she went through on the other side; with the only new information gleaned being that The Monolith was at one point in the possession of a pseudo-Masonic group of 19th Century Brits – wonder if that’s going anywhere?

Elsewhere, the secondary-business re-introduced Agent Ward, continuing in his quest to rebuild a leaner, meaner new HYRDRA in his own image. I’m still not really feeling this storyline (unless we’re going to get something more like the COBRA-esque HYDRA of the comics, HYDRA has been done at this point) but I enjoyed the misdirection of this step, as we’re led to think Ward is kidnapping a rich young brat to torture for his money but instead learn the “kid” is Baron Von Strucker’s heir and Ward was looking to test his resolve and recruit him. I’m still not “invested” enough to care about the eventual setup that comes from this (Strucker Junior enrolls in the College psych course of May’s ex, who’s also S.H.I.E.L.D’s on-call therapist) but it’s something.

I also found myself feeling a little impatient with how slow the build to Daisy/Coulson’s “Secret Warriors” team is turning out, though it’s at least more interesting than Nu-HYDRA or (at least so far) Hunter and May teaming up to go kill Ward (though that one did lead to some highly-agreeable quiet-drama scenes with Ming-Na Wen and the aforementioned Mr. Hong.) I’m more and more getting the sense that the anti-aliens/Inhumans/etc sentiment stuff is part of the build to either the mid-season break (for another AGENT CARTER miniseries – hooray!) or for the innevitable CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR tie-in, but I hope it doesn’t continue to sit there inert until then, with Dr. Buzzkill showing up every few episodes to say “Nope, not yet.”

Bullet Points:

• Where was Simmons? Still no idea, but given her reaction after leaving (waking up clutching a shiv in defense) it’s pretty clear she wasn’t alone there. Also, we know other people have been there before –  wonder what’s become of them?
• Randolph refers to the activities of the 1830s Monolith-dabblers as “half-baked Satanism.” Something to note: The Inhumans are showing up instead of Mutants here for purposes of MCU-worldbuilding because Mutants can’t be used outside of Fox movies, but the same rules don’t actually (entirely) apply to television; which (unless I’ve got it twisted) means that, if Marvel wants these guys to be an incarnation of The Hellfire Club, they could be.
• Also: Randolph describes attending a very EYES WIDE SHUT-ish party at the castle where the Monolith-machine was hidden, guided by “a man dressed as an owl.” Wouldn’t it be funny if he was any relation to a certain Daredevil nemesis?
• Coulson threatening to turn Randolph over to the alien-hunters was a nice nudge toward getting him back to the morally-ambiguous space he occupied before we found out his motivation was being a Captain America fanboy. The Secret Warriors are going to be the off-brand X-Men, fine, but that doesn’t mean Coulson needs to be Professor X.
• Unanswered question from Season 2: Where is General Talbot in all of this? (I’m crossing my fingers he turns up alongside the returning “Thunderbolt” Ross in CIVIL WAR.
• It just occured to me that Randolph could easily turn up on AGENT CARTER. That would be pretty great to see.
• We still never found out what made the Monolith liquefy apart from when Daisy and/or The Machine were making it happen, but it seems like it only ever did so in the presence of Inhumans, Randolph (and Asgardian) …and Simmons. I still don’t think she’s Inhuman, but maybe an alien of some kind?

NEXT WEEK:
“A Wanted (Inhu)Man” promises to pull Lincoln back into the storyline. I have no particularly strong feelings for this character, but apparently a lot of fans hate him. I bring this up because I now learn that his derisive nickname is “Pikachu” in some circles, so now even though I know they’re eventually going to call him Spark Plug I really want that to come up somewhere.

Note: Video review is in-production alongside several other projects, but I know people have gotten tired of waiting so for now here is a text version – as ever, content like this is possible in part through The MovieBob Patreon.

THE MARTIAN (2015)

HOLY FUCKING SHIT does it feel good to love a Ridley Scott movie again!

Alright, alright, look. I know people have been asking me about dialing back the profanity on these things, but, I’m sorry – it’s been a long time since one of our undisputed greatest filmmakers actually MADE a great film, and I’m excited about it! This hasn’t happened since the Director’s Cut of KINGDOM OF HEAVEN, and that was in 2005… and since he’s already announced that he’s going to follow this one up with another FUCKING “Prometheus” movie, it probably isn’t gonna happen again for awhile. So how about you get off my ass and enjoy a rare unabashedly positive review, huh?

THE MARTIAN is the best movie I’ve seen so far this year – and since it’s now October, pronouncements like that start to actually mean something. After a solid decade producing movies that looked great but often broke down on the narrative level, Sir Ridley has once again landed on solid base-material and turned in the kind of filmmaking that’s so good you want to call it a miracle… except that’d actually be doing it a disservice: There’s nothing mystical or ephemeral about why THE MARTIAN is great, the answers are all right up there onscreen. The cast is great, the acting is great, the script is tight as hell, the direction is nigh-flawless, the FX work is gorgeous – hell, even the song choices are good.

Everyone is on the same damn page and everyone is doing their damn job. THAT’S why it’s good… which is amusing, considering that that’s also a fairly concise breakdown of the film’s plot, theme and overarching ideals – but I’m getting ahead of myself.

The basic premise here is that in the near future NASA has finally managed to launch a manned mission to Mars. But there’s a storm on the planet’s surface bad enough that the crew has to abort the mission and take off early, and amid the chaos one of them – specifically Matt Damon as team botanist Mark Watney – gets swept up in the storm and thrown to certain death. BUT! By sheer random chance, Watney is NOT actually dead: He’s just stranded, alone, on the Red Planet.

Fortunately for him, Watney happens to not only be a brilliant and capable enough scientist to literally life-hack his way into creating a sustainable longer-term existence on Mars; he’s also one of those Movie Scientists whose ALSO kind of a “bro” and loves to quip sardonically about everything he’s doing for the audience. We’ve had a TON of these “It’s okay for me to be this smug all the time because my confidence comes from my admirable intelligence” heroes lately, and to be honest Watney would probably be insufferable if we had to spend the whole fucking movie with him – but we don’t.

And that’s where THE MARTIAN goes from being merely a solid film to a genuinely excellent one, transcending it’s starting point as a rock-solid genre exercise to become something like a masterwork.

See, while it’d be all well and good to just stick around on the red planet following Watney – especially since this is absolutely the finest “Movie Star” turn of Damon’s entire career to this point – the film instead cuts back down to Earth where NASA soon discovers what’s happening and mobilizes what soon becomes a global effort to bring him home; an effort through which THE MARTIAN slyly reveals it’s true colors: this isn’t some hackneyed cautionary tale about the dangers of exploring the unknown – it’s a high-stakes procedural about the AWESOME power of knowledge, which has placed Mark Watney in one of the most impossible situations imaginable MAINLY so that it can thrill us with detailed depictions of smart, dedicated people figuring out how to get him out of it.

This is, in effect, a love-letter to science, space-exploration and NASA in particular – both in terms of it’s history and also it’s ideals: There’s no “villain” in THE MARTIAN other than shitty luck and Mars itself – none of the human characters turns out to be an asshole or cartoonishly unreasonable in order to generate false drama, there’s no bullshit love-triangles or personal pettiness employed to make us like or dislike certain characters, none of the sappy tacked-on “personal growth” narrative that kept pulling me out of GRAVITY and (thank GAWD!) none of the pseudo-spiritual bullshit that ruined INTERSTELLAR.

Hell, the movie doesn’t even try to impose a “character arc” on Mark – and he’s the MAIN character! He doesn’t “change” or “grow” or “learn” anything through his ordeal, he and everyone else just face down the problems they’re presented with and solve them one after the other. That’s easier said than done – the whole reason cheap drama and forced-arcs exist in drama is because procedural storytelling isn’t always the most riveting thing in the world – that’s why you fill your cast up with people like Jessica Chastain, Michael Pena, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Kate Mara, Kristen Wiig, Jeff Daniels, Sean Bean, Donald Glover… AND why you hire a director like Ridley Scott. And that’s why, if everyone shows up and does their job, you’ll get a great film out of it.

Now folks… I’ll admit I’m the easiest lay in the world for stuff like this. I’m “that guy” who never stopped being in love with outer space. I’m “that guy” who thinks we oughta be dumping as much funding as we POSSIBLY can into NASA come hell or high water because I do NOT want to die without at least seeing humanity be on it’s way to something like Starfleet in my lifetime – and I’m that guy who if you hear this and come at me with some short-sighted “but people are still… and we need money for… but it’s not as important as…” my response is always going to be SPACESHIP. FUCK YOU. That’s why it’s been hard for me to write this review, because I wanted to be sure I loved this movie MAINLY as a movie, and not just because it’s a fellow “let’s get our asses back to space!” booster – but yeah, this one is REALLY that fucking good!

I cannot think of a single thing I dislike about this movie. I love Scott’s direction, I love the cast, I love watching Matt Damon remind us how GOOD he can be when he’s not making an idiot of himself of that fucking reality show, I love how tight Drew Goddard’s screenplay is, I love how well-executed the denser scientific stuff is handled so that it’s still 100% compelling even though I understood MAYBE 20% of what they were actually talking about, I love seeing Sir Ridley bust out a couple of those music-montage sequences he ALWAYS kills at but doesn’t do enough of, I love the way it celebrates and lionizes the idea of science and mathematics skills as essential tools of survival WITHOUT any shitty STEMLord “Nyah! We run the world now!” pandering “Revenge of The Nerds” bullshit, I love the way it celebrates a GLOBAL future of cooperation via a key subplot involving the CHINESE Space Agency without feeling like it’s unnecessarily getting into OR avoiding politics.

There just isn’t a SINGLE place where THE MARTIAN goes wrong – it is, quite simply, an absolutely perfect realization of exactly what it wants to be. And I haven’t enjoyed a single movie more this year. Don’t miss it.

Colin Hanks, following in his dad’s footsteps as a friendly chronicler of history/pop-Americana:

NOTE: This piece and others like it are possible in part thanks to contributions to The MovieBob Patreon.

And we’re back.

One thing is for certain: Whenever AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D (and yes, I’m going to be the one pedant who insists on still typing out the periods on that) eventually wraps up, it’s going to be fascinating to unpack. Popular culture in general will likely be chewing over the particulars of the Marvel Cinematic Universe for decades in terms of its substantial place in the evolution of mass-entertainment – specifically, the rise of continuity-drive cross-media storytelling – but AGENTS feels like it’s always going to remain its own strange animal: Tasked with expanding and setting-up the concurrent movies but denied access to the most notable “toys” while also telling its own story, it’s effectively been three different shows across three seasons with characters and relationships turning on that same absurd axis.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

Case in point: It now completely impossible to talk about Season 3 without “giving away” the laundry-list of reveals and twists that made up the first two seasons longest and most well-played gambit: Chloe Bennett’s mysterious orphan super-hacker turned quick-study neophyte Agent Skye has actually (unknowingly) been the Marvel Comics superheroine Daisy “Quake” Johnson this whole time, and “her people,” The Inhumans, have been lurking in the Cinematic Universe’s shadows for even longer. Which means that AGENTS’ mission statement now includes laying the groundwork for a Marvel movie that isn’t due to come out for another four years.

Short version: The Inhumans are basically Mutants (though they came first) but with a more complicated lineage as seemingly “normal” humans who ancestors were experimented on by The Kree (“The Blue Ones” from GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY) in pre-history who manifest super-powers and/or monstrous new forms when exposed to the alien element Terrigen. Most of them walk the Earth not knowing their own true identity, with a few isolated communities of “full” Inhumans living in secret, but at the climax of AGENTS Season 2 a quantity of Terrigen was released into the ocean and has now dispersed into the ecosystem to such a degree that “new” Inhumans are popping up everywhere. (This, you may have guessed, is an expansion of the original comics’ conception of The Inhumans, undertaken with an eye on letting the MCU tell X-MEN stories without needing the “real” X-MEN.)

As Season 3 opens, S.H.I.E.L.D (still not “officially existing”) has rededicated itself to managing the outbreak, both by trying to help the new Inhumans and contain those that turn out to be dangerous; with one eye on drafting those willing to be part of Director Coulson’s “Secret Warriors” program. Oh, and Skye isn’t “Skye” anymore: She’s going by Daisy, and arrives in the first scene of “Laws of Nature” having fully-emerged as S.H.I.E.L.D’s resident in-house superhero. Her focus for this episode is bringing-in (and expositing-to, of course) newly-changed Inhuman Joey Gutierrez, who has metal-melting powers and a touch of irony to his origin: He’s gay, and not particularly enthused about effectively having to “come out” all over again.

Elsewhere, the rest of the team are dealing with their own personal fallouts from Season 2: Hunter and Bobbi/Mockingbird are back on non-speaking terms, with her doing time in the lab waiting for a leg to heal and him brooding over revenge plans against the turncoat Agent Ward. Coulson is the only person who can’t get used to Skye’s new name, is worried that Agent May isn’t coming back from “vacation” and can’t find a mechanical arm (it got cut off) that feels right. Agent Mack is feeling glibly-innadequate now that Daisy is “the muscle” and Agent Fitz is scouring the globe in an obsessive quest to rescue Agent Simmons, whom they know was “eaten” by The Monolith but not why, how or if it can be reversed (as it turns out, she’s been zapped away to an unnamed alien planet.)

Otherwise, the plot of “Laws” was mainly concerned with some clever misdirection involving the reveal of what looks like our new “bad guy team” for Season 3, ACTU (Advanced Threat Contaiment Unit) a government-backed paramilitary unit tasked with neutralizing all the people-with-powers stuff that keeps happening over in the movies. I’m hoping there’s actually further misdirection going on here, since another “Bad S.H.I.E.L.D” feels kind of lazy (HYDRA is down to just Ward and some biker bros as of Season 2), but the introductory gag is pretty cool: Coulson and ACTU’s mysterious leader Rosalind Price had both assumed that eachother’s teams were responsible for the murders of various Inhumans, but as it turns out there’s a third party: Lash, an evil Inhuman who (in the comics, at least) feels that Terrigenesis transformations are being handed out too willy-nilly and goes about hunting/killing those he deems unworthy of the Inhuman mantle.

Bullet Points:

• The big setpiece, a powers-vs-powers brawl in a hospital between Daisy, lightning-tossing Inhuman Lincoln and Lash is suitably impressive stuff; but if AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D is committing to going the full-on superhero route (via the Secret Warriors business) it’s going to need to raise it’s game to compete with ARROW, THE FLASH and (potentially) SUPERGIRL.
• Since Gutierrez can melt metal, it feels like a safe bet that they’ll ask him to try and do… “something” to The Monolith, yes?
• It’s tempting to start wondering whether ACTU will be a precursor of the “let’s regulate superheroes” stuff coming in CIVIL WAR, but I wouldn’t bet on it – yet. Ike Perlmutter, the much-maligned Marvel bigwig recently ousted (forcibly) from having say over the movies, still technically controls the TV division and the two halves already didn’t get along great (logistically or otherwise.)
• Speaking of which: I’ll stop harping on this eventually, but I’m still annoyed that the TV Agents weren’t on the rescue-helicarrier in AGE OF ULTRON. Obviously Coulson couldn’t have been there, but if Fitz/Simmons or one of the Koenigs were just matter-of-factly onhand it would’ve been appropriate and a really cool moment.
• Speaking of The Koenigs, how long do we have o wait for Patton Oswalt to show up again?
• Nice Continuity seeing President Ellis from IRON MAN 3 onscreen again.
• Apparently the Hunter/Mockingbird spin-off series that was confirmed but then canceled while the Season was in production is back on the “yes” list, so I wonder how that’s going to work. Is the idea that they’ll go off and continue the conventional S.H.I.E.L.D vs HYDRA stuff with Ward while the “main” series focuses on being not-X-MEN?
• Who is Rosalind Price? Is she’s another “secretly someone from the comics” reveal, thus far it’s too well hidden to even guess.
• Where is Simmons? No idea, but the best guess is probably the Kree Homeworld or somewhere else Kree-related. Yes, it’d be fun if she ran into someone from GUARDIANS out there. No, that probably will not happen.
• Why did The Monolith (supposedly deadly to Inhumans) take Simmons but nobody else? Obvious answer would be “she’s an Inhuman,” but I wonder if it’ll be that simple…

So far, I’m digging it. It’s not as much of a “Holy SHIT this got better suddenly!” blowout as Season 2’s premiere was, but I’m liking where things are going thus far. One imagines that there’s some CIVIL WAR buildup to come that’s going to get everyone’s hopes up (the Inhuman-outbreak thing would fit well into that story, but so far they’re not even mentioned in the plot-descriptions for that movie) but for now I’m looking forward to seeing how things play out. Will we get some indication of the more “familiar” Inhumans (Black Blot, Medusa, etc)? Will some Cosmic Marvel stuff crop up in Simmons’ story? I’m looking forward to it.

NEXT WEEK: “Purpose in The Machine” isn’t teasing much plot, but I’m intrigued to see the team standing in what looks like an old-fashioned Universal Monsters mad-science lab and I’m really happy to see the return of Peter MacNicol’s expat-Asgardian, who was a highlight of Season 1. I hope they wind up asking him to be a regular (MacNicol’s CSI: CYBER character is being replaced by a series-hopping Ted Danson, so he’s got the space open…)

This piece is made possible in part by contributions to The MovieBob Patreon. Want to see more? Please considering becoming a patron. Do you operate a site or outlet and are interested in publishing work like this? Please contact Bob at BobChipman82@gmail.com

And here’s one of those not-great misfires of a movie that will probably wind up with a (slightly) better reputation than it deserves (later) largely because the initial response will be seen (by some) as much more negative (perhaps even “unfairly” so) than was warranted. So much of modern film-discourse is built around pre-reactions, space-filling hypothetical “analysis” (read: guessing) and hot-takes that this becomes a recurring issue – the transformation of “bad” movies into “better than expected” by hyped-up early condemnation.

Fair or not, the knives seemed to have been out for Roland Emmerich’s STONEWALL pretty-much since it was announced; first based on the idea that a blockbuster/action-specialist shouldn’t be tackling a historical drama about gay activism (that the ID4 and DAY AFTER TOMORROW director is himself a gay activist was evidently not as widely known as I’d thought), later based on the version of the story he had chosen to tell: Namely an “eyewitness to history” historical-fiction approach wherein the events of the infamous riots popularly-cited as the “birth” of the modern gay-rights movement are presented to the audience from the perspective of a fictional character rather than any of the real figures who participated in the real thing; the final straw being that said audience-avatar was to be a strapping, classically-handsome Midwestern teen-heartthrob type (Jeremy Irvine) whose journey to accepting his own gay self-identity occurs in-tandem with the events leading up to the riots.

SPOILERS after the jump:

Whereas the Stonewall Riots in “popular history” were, for years mainly framed as a moment of unity; in recent decades they’ve gained renewed life as a point of symbolic schism within LGBTQ activism. Today, Stonewall is discussed less often in terms of it’s meaning to the early gay pride movement than it is in regards to how the fact that the first wave of rioting/protesting was spearheaded by trans women and people of color whose contributions were subsequently minimized by the co-opting of the events as a rallying-point for “mainstream” (read: white, male) gay culture.

In this respect, then, the indictment of Emmerich’s approach is less that he’s opted to “print the legend” and more that he’s not printing the right legend. And while one can’t possibly not be sympathetic to the aggrieved parties here (the various erasures in question here are a serious problem in the reality of the matter and a major component of why the movie doesn’t work), I also can’t help but wonder if any version of STONEWALL that, regardless of quality, wasn’t explicitly all/only about condemning said erasure (which would be a wholly legit film to make in it’s own right, just so we’re clear) would’ve been welcomed at this point – regardless of who directed and how they chose to tell the story.

Not that it matters beyond theory at this point, since the film indeed is an unfortunate misfire and its tone-deafness to its own use of historic-symbolism is a big reason why; but I still can’t shake the sense that more than a few critical minds were made up before a frame of film had been projected. Still, since whatever was being attempted hasn’t worked, the point is largely moot.

Again, I take no issue with anyone so personally affronted by the manner in which the story is being told that they refuse to even bother engaging it on any other level (not that I, the exact opposite of “marginalized” in every conceivable way, would have a “right” to in the first place.) But, frankly, the ways in which STONEWALL goes wrong (and also right, here and there) run deeper than which details have been fudged and which figures have been ommitted. It’s ultimately a failure, but a sincerely-mounted and fascinating one.

The key problem, on a technical level, is that the film can’t find any sense of cohesion. Emmerich and writer Jon Robin Baitz are going for big, sprawling, multi-character, high-emotion historical melodrama here (think TITANIC), and if there’s one thing that consistently torpedoes works in that genre it’s an inability to make all the moving parts work together. There are a lot of threads criss-crossing the narrative here: The personal journey of Irvine’s Danny Winters, the exploits of a group of young homeless hustlers led by Johnny Beauchamp’s Ray/Ramona (a scene-stealing performance that come close to rescuing the movie), political/gangland conspiracies surrounding the mob-owned Stonewall bar itself, Ron Perlman as a brutal kidnapping-prone pimp, power-struggles within the corrupt police precinct charged with managing “business” on Christopher Street, Johnathan Rhys Meyers’s would-be Mattachine Society order-keeper, Ray’s unrequitted pining for Danny, the fleeting presence of Marsha P. Johnson, Danny’s secondary struggle to secure attendance at Columbia, the death of Judy Garland, etc… and very little of it ever comes together; with each plot-transition feeling more like slices of six or seven different movies (some more compelling than others) being shuffled around in an attempt to make “more” translate into “epic.”

But, if we’re being charitable, it can be said that the final film is a case of two disparate main storylines – Danny’s journey and the drama surrounding Stonewall itself – that fail to come together. They never form a genuinely-meaningful parallel, always leaving one feeling like a distraction from the other, and thus The Moment where they’re supposed to converge and drive the emotional climax doesn’t gel. You can see, mechanically, how everything is supposed to build to a crescendo wherein Danny embraces himself not only as gay but as a gay-revolutionary; but when it arrives it feels false. And while a big part of why is because it’s impossible to ignore that actual heroes are being nudged aside for a made-up one… the fact is it still wouldn’t work dramatically even if that somehow wasn’t an issue.

Here’s the thing: While too symbolically-problematic to likely ever be “acceptable” for this specific story, the “Danny-as-POV” aspect makes a certain amount of technical sense. It’s clear from the opening frames that Emmerich is aiming for message-movie territory here: unconcerned with accuracy to the point of self-parody, the goal here isn’t even so much to commemorate Stonewall itself but rather to send audiences home in an afterglow of righteous, fist-pumping “get off your ass and do something!” fervor; and framing the story around a near-blank protagonist’s transformation from self-preserving survivor to community-minded activist is a surefire way to do that.

In fact, in that regard even the “whitewashing” makes a certain amount of mechanical sense – the level of naivete about the way of the world required for Danny’s role as the reciever of lessons effectively demands that he be a clueless rural white kid in this scenario: If he were any further marginalized, it would be unbelievable for him to arrive on Christopher Street so lacking in worldliness so as to spur the other characters to explain their world and ways to him/us. That doesn’t make it “okay,” but you can see the reasons for it to have occured beyond simplistic presumptions of malice.

Yes, as many had worried, the film posits Danny as throwing the “first brick” in the riot, but he doesn’t pick it up himself: It’s thrust into his hand by another character as a “put up or shut up” moment wherein Danny, here more than anywhere else positioned as walking Golden Boy metaphor for the entirety of “apolitical” America and American gays of the era specifically, is forced to choose between Mattachine slow-build politicking and radical upheaval as the right path for himself and His People – and yes, because I wasn’t exaggerating about the melodrama here being TITANIC-level hyper-earnest cheese, this actually plays out with Rhys Meyers and Beauchamp shouting “DO IT!” and “DON’T!” at him from opposite sides of the street like those movies where two kids fight over ownership of a puppy.

(For what it’s worth, I cringed on-reflex when Danny threw the brick – an action that many accounts and popular-narrative typically attribute to Johnson – but in narrative/character context the moment makes sense. But having him then turn around, immediately-transformed, and become the first character in the film to raise a fist and shout “GAY POWER!” is a tone deaf, deflating decision. It would’ve been more appropriate and powerful if he’d thrown, stayed in-character with some “Oh crap, what’d I just do?” yokel-beffudlement and then find strength as Ray and the others rallied around him and started the chant.)

This sort of stuff is, believe it or not, the best and worst parts of the project. Turning complex events/ideas into stark clashes between goodies and baddies to drive The Point home is Emmerich’s narrative stock in trade – lest we forget his recent (under-appreciated) WHITE HOUSE DOWN, wherein a grab-bag of progressive policy-messages are wedded to a scenario wherein a fictional version of President Obama battles a terrorist strike-team comprising the entire scope of American right-wing ideology from pro-war Senators to white-supremascists to Snowden-esque techno-libertarians. Unfortunately, the unfocused screenplay makes all these mechanics for naught – a lot of the “worldbuilding” winds up as dead-ends, and even then there are too many scenes setting up other threads where our “hero” isn’t even involved.

Meanwhile, trying to give Danny an inner-life and backstory beyond metaphor/stand-in turns out to be a resource hog on the more interesting parts of the movie. It’s clear that Emmerich and Baitz have keyed in on the character at a very personal, visceral level (like most well-intentioned misfires, STONEWALL seems a case of decisive-clarity being impeded by filmmakers operating in full-blown, heart-on-sleeve, bleeding onto the text earnestness), but trying to make him a three-dimensional character weakens his ability to function as a symbolic vessel in the “other half” of the movie.

It doesn’t help that “Danny’s story” is where the film decides to drop any last remaining pretense to subtlety in establishing its moral axis: The poor kid isn’t simply bounced from his home after being outed at school (complete with finding an already-packed suitcase waiting on his bed); he’s “caught” in a tryst with the hero quarterback of the football team that just happens to be coached by Danny’s own father (really!) who, when confronting his son, accuses Danny of seducing “his quarterback” as a way to hurt him. Yeesh!

What’s frustrating is, even as the parts never really click into place there are individual moments where you can see the better movie STONEWALL wants to be. The lack of fusion between Danny the Character and Danny the Metaphor fails him, but Irvine is a strong presence in both versions. Beauchamp is legitimately great, carrying huge sections of the film on his shoulders and infusing the world-building business with real energy and elevating every other performer he shares a scene with to the point where you have to wonder why Ray isn’t the main character – especially since he also starts out even more politically-averse than Danny. Relative newcomer Vladimir Alexis impresses as Queen Cong, another of Ray’s posse. The production design and cinematography are pretty terrific, centering the aesthetic appropriately between gauzy Norman Rockwell mythic-history and sanguine oversaturation.

The riot itself, particularly when it sticks to history (“Why don’t you guys do something!?” occurs as it does in most accounts, and makes for a big moment), is unquestionably compelling – even though we only get to see the first night. And yes, even though it’s also one of the goofiest things to happen in the entire movie, Ray and Danny’s crew facing down an advancing phalanx of armed riot-control cops by forming a chorus-girl kickline (I honestly have no idea if this is drawn from anything real) and belting out a playfully-filthy power-anthem is pretty-much exactly what I wanted out of the Roland Emmerich version of this story, for better or for worse.

From where I sit, this is all much more “silly” than maliciously-offensive (though somehow also not silly enough, given that Emmerich’s other historical-fiction entries are legitimate gonzo camp classics)

In the end, while not forgiving the film it’s many shortcomings, it largely left me feeling bad for Emmerich, who clearly wanted to make this work and had described STONEWALL in the past as a 20-year dream project. I’ve referenced TITANIC a few times in describing the film’s tone, but in terms of net-results it has more in common with Scorsese’s GANGS OF NEW YORK or Levinson’s TOYS – other films that sat as long-desired “passion projects” from great filmmakers but emerged as overbaked, unfocused, overwrought and (perhaps) too long-overthought mistakes. Sometimes, you can sit the egg so long that what hatches just doesn’t smell right.

I absolutely believe Emmerich has wanted to make this movie for almost two decades… I also believe it’s clear he didn’t update his thinking or approach to it in all that time. 20 years ago, STONEWALL would’ve been a revolutionary culture-bomb (“G-g-gay stuff!? Gay p-p-power!? As a mainstream-aspiring crowd-pleaser!?”) that would today be analyzed as “of it’s time, but problematic.” Arriving today, it’s too little, too late, too focused on the wrong stories.

Too bad.

If you follow my social media (which I assume most reading this blog must, as it’s updated exponentially more often) you may have noticed me pulling back or posting cryptically over the last two days. There are a few reasons for that, but the main one is that I’d been waiting to hear back on some test-results from my doctor (newly-acquired, along with my new health insurance). The tests came back today, and… well, it wasn’t great news.