The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
Friday, January 13, 2017 — 5

‘A Monster Calls’ merits
mockery for mediocrity

J.A. Bayona’s latest feature tramples over premise by painting

in broad strokes and capitalizing in tired, indulgent clichés

“Stories are wild creatures,” 

a CGI tree monster tells 
a young British lad in an 
otherwise 
tranquil 
home 

somewhere 
in 

the meandering 
middle 
of 
“A 

Monster Calls,” 
the latest film 
from 
Spanish 

director 
J.A. 

Bayona 
(“The 

Impossible”). 
The 
monster, 

voiced 
by 

Liam 
Neeson 

(“Silence”), comes at night 
to 
tell 
stories 
to 
a 
boy, 

Conor 
(Lewis 
MacDougall, 

“Pan”), who is confronting 
his 
mother’s 
impending 

death from cancer. Conor’s 
father lives in America and 
his grandmother, his new 
guardian, is more strict than 

caring. At school, he’s bullied 
by his classmates and picked 
on by his teacher.

In other words, Conor’s not 

all right. And the monster, 
armed with a gnarly Northern 
Irish voice and formed from the 
old yew tree in the cemetery 
across the glen, coaches the 
kid to be brave through telling 
three fairy tales, two of which 
are stunningly rendered in 
watercolor 
animation. 
The 

message is clear: Stories are 

important because they teach 
us valuable lessons about life’s 
complexities. The shame in 
including this conceit in “A 
Monster Calls” is that while 
screenwriter and source book 
author Patrick Ness (“Class”) 
puts a premium on the power 

of 
stories, 
his 

story itself lacks 
the 
structure 

and 
potency 

to 
salvage 
the 

film 
from 
an 

onslaught 
of 

poor choices.

Even 
more 

frustrating 
is 

that 
what 
one 

garners to be the 

purpose of the stories — to 
teach that life is complex, that 
there are no easy answers — 
is directly repudiated by the 
simplicity of the characters 
on screen. While Conor, an 
avid and talented artist, draws 
effervescent images of his 
world, Bayona and Ness draw 
in rather wide, bland strokes.

Conor’s 
mother 
(Felicity 

Jones, “Rogue One: A Star 
Wars Story”) is a Dying Family 
Member With Cancer, rapidly 
diminishing, hopeless, soft-
spoken and flawless save for 
a malignant tumor. We’ve 
seen this before, too many 
times. Conor’s grandmother, 
an abnormally off Sigourney 
Weaver (“Avatar”), is just cruel 
and cold, concerned more with 
her house’s orderly appearance 
than her grandson’s sanity. 
Conor’s bully lashes out at 
our protagonist continually, 
for no reason other than that 
Conor is consumed by his art 
during classes. He’s beat up 
outside the school on multiple 
occasions, and his schooling 
life is reduced entirely to this 
two-handed relationship, as if 
they two are the only students 
at the school.

The film, overstuffed with 

both platitudes and extraneous 
thematic vehicles like Conor’s 
art and the stories and the 

monster 
itself, 
becomes 

something 
of 
a 
mockery 

of its central idea. Stories 
surely 
have 
transformative 

potential, 
but 
“A 
Monster 

Calls” is not one of those 
stories. Nor are the monster’s, 
but they at least get credit for 
being jaw-dropping in their 
realization. These fairy tales, 
dreamlike 
and 
captivating, 

provide all-too-brief respites 
from the utter blandness of 
the 
story 
that 
practically 

serves 
as 
their 
bookends. 

They’re pure cinematic candy 
but suffer from a dearth of 
groundbreaking lessons. Life 
doesn’t have easy answers, 
things are confusing and it’s 
all right to make mistakes. We 
get it.

I fear this film may matter 

or mean more for individuals 
older 
and 
younger 
than 

myself, but that should only 
serve to diminish its quality. 
The 
specific 
is 
universal 

insofar as that specific world 
is 
constructed 
to 
lifelike 

specifications. 
“A 
Monster 

Calls” 
is 
cinematic 
dog-

whistle politics, a tale about 
grief told in ways only those 
who have unfortunately and 
severely experienced it would 
truly understand.

FOCUS FEATURES

The Giving Tree SUCKS this year.

DANNY HENSEL

Daily Film Editor

The sneaker conundrum

FILM REVIEW

C-

“A Monster Calls”

Focus Features

Rave, Quality 16

WE HAVE PROBLEMS. WE ALL HAVE

 PROBLEMS. 

If, like us, existential dread keeps you up at night, please email npzak@umich.edu for a 

primer on why we’re your people.

STYLE NOTEBOOK

The ethics of the sneaker business is marred with ambiguity

Sneakers have been an inte-

gral part of fashion for longer 
than I have been alive. There 
are hyped-up sneakers being 
released every month and, if you 
are lucky enough to buy a pair, 
the resale price can be astro-
nomical. It’s not unheard of to 
make upwards of a 200 percent 
profit on a pair of sneakers. I 
remember when I was successful 
in purchasing a pair of the Pirate 
Black Yeezy Boost 350 sneakers 
for about $200. I was extremely 
excited to wear them, but I felt 
the need to satiate my curiosity 
and looked at the resale prices 
for my pair. When I saw that I 
could realize a 300 percent profit 
by selling them, I was no longer 
able to look at my sneakers as 
$200 shoes but rather $800 ones 
— I had to sell them.

Some people have even turned 

sneaker resale into a full-time 
job. Recently, a man named Allen 
Kuo entered the spotlight of the 
sneaker 
community, 
posting 

pictures with about 100 pairs 
of the Yeezy 750 Boost sneakers 
released in June of 2016. For ref-
erence, the retail price on these 
sneakers is about $350 and the 
resale price according to StockX, 
a reputable site for finding a fair 
price for resale sneakers, is about 
$950. Some quick math tells you 
that Allen is making at mini-
mum $60,000 on the release of 
a single pair of sneakers (he has 
the sneakers posted on his site 
for $2,000, so he may be seeing 

even more in profits from this 
venture). This isn’t the only pair 
of shoes that he has gotten en 
masse this year: Kuo has posted 
pictures on his Instagram with 
other coveted Yeezys and Jor-
dans whose resale values have 
surely shown him many more 
thousands in profits.

Kuo is not unique in this ven-

ture, though. For every Allen 
Kuo in the sneaker game there 
is also a twenty-something year-
old kid with a “plug” who posts 
on every Facebook buy/sell/trade 
group that you’re a part of that 
they have ten pairs of the new 
sneakers for sale at, maybe, a 250 
percent markup. Sneaker bots 
have also been around for many 
years. A bot essentially functions 
as an “add-to-cart” service for 
prospective sneaker purchasers. 
These script packages capital-
ize on the fact that humans can 
only type in their shipping infor-
mation so fast and, that by the 
time an ordinary customer has 
finished typing in their 16-digit 
credit card number and billing 
address, a customer with an ATC 
service has already successfully 
checked out, or “jacked” their 
cart. Retailers consistently claim 
to be working to stop the efficacy 
of bots, but release after sub-
sequent release show that even 
sites as large as Foot Locker sim-
ply cannot stay ahead of the ATC 
developers. It doesn’t stop with 
sneakers either, large brands like 
Supreme and Palace see the same 
thing happening. A Supreme 
box-logo hoodie (yes, a sweat-
shirt that simply has an embroi-

dery with the brand’s name) can 
retail for around $150 and will 
sell on sites like Grailed for four-
times that amount within a few 
hours of the posting.

A question that I have strug-

gled to answer for myself, even 
in the context of my single pair 
of Yeezys, is the whether or not 
it is fair to use these methods as 
a means of making money. The 
answer that I have been able to 
come up with is a resounding 
“maybe.” I’ve realized that the 
reason why everyone cannot get 
a pair of coveted sneakers or a 
hoodie is not due to the fact that 
full-time resellers are hoarding 
them, but rather because the sup-
ply does not meet the demand. 
Regardless of whether someone 
like Kuo buys all 1,000 pairs of a 
hyped release or if 1,000 distinct 
purchasers are able to buy them, 
the resale market will still exist 
and sellers will still actualize 
greater gains on a pair of sneak-
ers than even some of the riskiest 
stock options. Sure, some people 
may be able to purchase a pair of 
shoes that they intend on keep-
ing if bots are banned. But, I am 
sure that there are plenty of peo-
ple like me who can’t turn down 
a quick buck. I could go into the 
intricacies of a marginal-benefit 
/ marginal-cost analysis, but in 
the end all that will show is that 
even though there are some peo-
ple who are barred from the sec-
ondhand market because of their 
willingness-to-pay, markets will 
still clear and retailers really 
have minimal incentive to do 
anything about bots and plugs.

NARESH IYENGAR

For The Daily

This week Daily Music writers 

look back at — and reconsider — 
less modern pieces of music.

Folk music intersects with 

popular music in interesting ways. 
Classic artists like Woody Guth-
rie, Johnny Cash and most of all 
Bob Dylan have taken root in the 
hearts of fans for generations, and 
today the genre is being freshly 
interpreted 
by 
contemporary 

popular artists as disparate as Bon 
Iver, Fleet Foxes and the Avett 
Brothers. Folk has had its notable 
moments, both on the charts of 
popular music and in coverage 
by major publications. But as an 
umbrella with many subgenres, 
it has also seen more than its fair 
share of artists falling through the 
cracks into obscurity.

John Prine falls somewhere in 

the middle here: He is celebrated 
among folk fans and music critics 
alike, but isn’t widely known in the 
popular sphere. When I mention 
him in conversation to my friend 
who listens to folk music or ask 
for his music at a record store, his 
name is recognized instantly, but 
in most other conversations, it is 
met with blank stares. His catalog 
is almost as extensive as Dylan’s, 
and his songwriting abilities have 
been the source of consistent criti-
cal praise since his eponymous 
debut album in 1971, yet his name 
becomes less generally recogniz-
able with every passing year.

This may be because he has 

failed to produce any chart-top-
ping singles to launch him into 
public attention. Many songs, like 
John Denver’s “Take Me Home, 
Country Roads” and Old Crow 
Medicine Show’s “Wagon Wheel,” 
have left a significant enough 
impact on the general public to 
preserve their artists’ names in 
history indefinitely. Curiously, no 
single song has done this for John 
Prine, which may account for his 
relative deficit in popular recogni-
tion.

This deficit could also be attrib-

uted to Prine’s lyrics. Many of his 
songs are historically specific, 
such as 1971’s “Paradise,” which 
describes the takeover of a small 
Kentucky town by a coal company. 
These songs derive some mean-
ing from context, and Prine often 
approaches their subjects with 
angles of humor, political criti-
cism, or both. This narrow, spe-
cific style of execution, and the 
necessity of context here, may be a 
few of the reasons Prine is looked 
back on less frequently than some 
of his peers. It sometimes takes a 
certain mood to appreciate these 
qualities, which can reasonably 
set them in contrast against the 
often more widely relatable songs 
of Cash or Dylan. But these specif-
ic lyrics are used to tell stories that 
hold true emotionally even when 
removed from the context of his-
tory, and they are among the many 
traits that make him interesting as 
a songwriter.

Folk music has some history in 

political protest, and Prine car-

ries on this tradition in his music 
with a markedly humorous twist, 
often fixating on characters whose 
extreme stories reflect ridiculous 
aspects of our own lives. In his 
early song “Your Flag Decal Won’t 
Get You Into Heaven Anymore,” 
he calls commercial patriotism 
into question, narrating the story 
of a man who crashes his car due 
to the American flag stickers 
covering his windshield. With 
its cheerful tone and hyperbolic 
ending, it is easy to see how a nar-
rative like this would fit along-
side Dylan’s “Talkin’ John Birch 
Paranoid Blues,” or Phil Ochs’s 
“Love Me, I’m a Liberal.” Some-
times Prine’s music focuses exclu-
sively on humor — like in 1973’s 
“Dear Abby,” a satire of advice 
columns — and sometimes it lays 
the humor aside in favor of a more 
serious political tone, like in his 
2005 song “Some Humans Ain’t 
Human,” which criticizes Presi-
dent George W. Bush for invasion 
of Iraq.

Prine is a peculiar case in the 

timeline of American folk music. 
His personality is unassuming, 
and his songs have consistently 
occupied modest but dignified 
positions on popular music charts 
since the early seventies. But 
despite his lack of mainstream 
popularity, his songs offer elo-
quent, natural and at times 
humorous perspectives on the 
world, and given his lyrical abili-
ties and his lasting influence, 
he continues to occupy a crucial 
place in the world of folk music 
today.

ALL THINGS RECONSIDERED

OH BOY RECORDS

When you full but meemaw packs a doggy bag.
Prine’s overlooked legacy

LAURA DZUBAY

For The Daily

“Stories are wild 
creatures,” a CGI 

tree mondster 
tells a young 
British lad

His story 

itself lacks the 
structure and 

potency to salvage 
the film from an 
onslaught of poor 

choices

