6A — Monday, January 30, 2017
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

There’s nothing quite like crying 

during a movie. It’s cathartic, 
usually embarrassing and the best 
part is that after it’s over, you wipe 
your eyes in the sheltered darkness 
of the theater and promptly 
pretend it never happened. There 
are 
some 
signposts 
marking 

which movies will make you cry 
— if there’s a dog, if it’s about some 
sort of tragic event, if it’s nostalgic 
for your childhood, or if it’s a 
beautiful celebration of the power 
of humanity coming together. The 
last one might just be a personal 
preference (I dare you to name 
someone who didn’t cry at the end 
of “The Martian” though), but the 
fact is you never really know when 
it’ll happen, which is part of what 
makes movie-crying so special.

You don’t have 
to know 

anything about musical theatre 
or Stephen Sondheim to get 
something out of “The Best 
Worst Thing That Ever Could 
Have Happened,” a documentary 
chronicling 
the 
making 
and 

failure of the Sondheim musical 
“Merrily We Roll Along.” In fact, 
you can know next to nothing 
about musical theater and still 
find yourself stupidly wondering 
where all this water on your face 

is coming from.

“The Best Worst Thing” was 

made by Lonny Price, one of the 
original cast members in the 
musical, and combines footage 
from 
the 
original 
rehearsal 

process in the early 1980s and 
present-day 
interviews 
with 

the cast and creators, including 
Sondheim himself. The musical 
itself was about the relentless 
passage of time and 
the erosion of the 
idealistic dreams of 
people in their youth. 
Ironically (or maybe 
not ironically at all), 
“Merrily We Rolled 
Along” was not a 
successful 
show; 

it closed after only 
16 shows, making it a painfully 
fitting subject for this particular 
documentary.

Each of the original cast 

members remembers their time 
working on the show as some of the 
best days of their lives — getting to 
work with the legendary Stephen 
Sondheim on a Broadway stage. 
They all spent their childhoods 
wearing their record players thin 
with Sondheim’s official cast 
recordings, and now they had 
all received their big breaks as 
actors with their hero. To watch 
the documentary footage of the 
rehearsals in the 1980s is to see 
a bunch of kids (the cast’s ages 
ranged from 16 to 25 years old) 

experience the greatest joy they 
might ever know.

They 
staked 
all 
of 
their 

hopes and dreams on this show, 
believing it to be the culminating 
moment of their lives. In a video 
from 1981, a 23-year-old Lonny 
Price said, “If I get hit by a bus 
the day after opening night, I 
don’t think I’ll care, because at 
least I got to do this,” flashing the 

biggest, 
most 

earnest 
smile 

you’ve 
ever 

seen. 
Price 

was 
not 
the 

only one who 
felt this way. 
The 
contrast 

between 
such 

footage 
and 

present-day interviews of the 
same cast members, now much 
older, wiser and almost entirely 
sadder is jarring, to say the least.

The intended audience of this 

documentary is most certainly 
aspiring actors, theater students 
and of course Sondheim fans 
young and old. And yet, at its core, 
“The Best Worst Thing” is a story 
about a bunch of young people 
thinking they’ll never be any older 
and that their hearts will never 
break, and a bunch of adults who 
know better, but still think it’s 
worth hoping. There isn’t anyone 
in the world who isn’t one or the 
other. So, of course, there wasn’t a 
dry eye in the theater.

‘Best ’ honors Sondheim

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
ATLAS MEDIA CORP.

Sondheim in the new documentary “The Best Worst Thing.”

ASIF BECHER

Daily Arts Writer

“The Best 

Worst Thing”

Atlas Media Corp.

Michigan Theater

On April 23 of last year, I tweeted: 

“I wish you could get a yearly 
exorcism where all your like worst 
insecurities and petty jealousies got 
pulled out of you.” I was imagining 
some supernatural way to treat fear, 
some mystical way to conveniently 
get rid of all those self-destructive 
insecurities that keep you from 
being the best person you can be.

Then, over winter break, I 

started watching “The Leftovers,” 
and I found it.

In the eighth episode of the 

second 
season, 
Kevin 
Garvey 

takes a trip through the afterlife, 
represented in the series as a hotel. 
He is told that in this realm, he is an 
international assassin, tasked with 
killing a presidential candidate. 
The candidate is Patti Levin, the 
same woman whose ghost has 
haunted Kevin throughout the 
season, forcing him to confront 
his complicity in her death and in 
the dissolution of his own family. 
Perhaps if Kevin can track down 
and kill Patti in this purgatory, he 
will find some sense of closure, 
some acceptance of how his life has 
been derailed.

The question, then, is how much 

of this is real. Is this realm he 
inhabits really the afterlife? Does 
everybody experience purgatory 
as a hotel? Is the Patti we see — 
in all three forms, whether as a 
presidential candidate, an innocent 
little girl or the cult leader we know 
— really Patti, or has she solely 
been a hallucination representing 
Kevin’s deepest fears throughout 
the season?

One of the biggest strengths of 

“The Leftovers” (or one of its biggest 
weaknesses, depending on who you 
ask) is how much these answers 
are left ambiguous. The answer is 
sometimes both; yes, by drowning 
Patti in the afterlife, Kevin may be 
setting her actual spirit free, but it 
means just as much for his personal 
character development that he is 
willing to cross that line and kill her.

What if we all had these glimpses 

of the afterlife? What if you could 
poison yourself like Kevin did, 
take a journey through a hotel of 
your demons and come back alive 

rejuvenated and convicted? What 
if you could reduce each of your 
insecurities to a physical being, and 
by drowning them, exorcise them?

To be clear, “The Leftovers” 

doesn’t represent this option as a 
simple cure-all. The third and final 
season, which airs in April, will 
surely present many more obstacles 
standing in the way of Kevin’s 
happy ending. The specter of Patti 
was just one of many personal 
struggles he has experienced over 
the course of the series. But there’s 
still something about the idea that 

seems beautiful and simple.

Maybe it’s my relative stage 

in life that makes this fantasy so 
appealing. Maybe it’s the fact that 
I’m graduating soon, being thrown 
out into a world where friends 
aren’t a built-in guarantee, where 
my day lacks the structure that 
classes and a part-time library job 
provide. In this final semester, 
instead of finding myself liberated 
by the abundance of free time, I 
sometimes find myself weirdly 
constrained by it. I have the sense 
that I’m at a standstill, waiting 
for something exciting to happen. 
I should be enjoying the lack of 
obligations, but new stressors are 
quick to replace the old, providing 
an ample supply of residual teenage 
angst in the final months before I 
enter the “real world.” Sometimes, 
all I want is to enter a terrifying 
place, deal with everything that 
haunts me and then resume life.

Imagine it: You wake up in a hotel 

room you don’t recognize, with a 
vaguely familiar guy standing over 
you, smirking and saying things 
like, “Your writing will never be 
good enough” and “How do you 
expect to make it in the real world 

when you still have to Google 
simple household chores?” You 
push him out the window with a 
satisfying explosion of glass, watch 
him tumble to his death and feel 
yourself stop worrying about those 
things.

You hear a knock at the door and 

open it to find a parade of people 
marching in. After you wake up 
from this dream, you won’t be 
able to remember anything about 
their appearances except that 
they looked like amalgamations of 
everyone who ever hurt you, anyone 
who contributed to your deepest 
insecurities. There was the girl who 
looked like seemingly every girl 
you’d ever had romantic feelings for, 
telling you she didn’t feel the same 
way. There was the guy who looked 
like some ridiculous, stereotypical 
masculine ideal, all muscles and 
crooked smiles.

And all of these imaginary 

figures you vanquished, with the 
gallant swing of a sword or the 
flick of a lighter. You watched their 
imaginary visages crumble like 
rock or melt like paper. It didn’t feel 
violent or cruel, because they 
weren’t real. They were the 
worst parts of you, the parts 
you wanted to move past.

And then the world around 

you dissolved before your eyes, 
disappearing into blackness. 
Your eyes opened, expecting the 
cold white interior of the hotel 
room, but instead there was 
the warm glow of your bedside 
lamp and the Christmas lights 
strung across your ceiling. The 
heaped clothes on the chair, the 
leaning towers of books, the 
hum of the old mini-fridge — it 
was home.

You stood up, went upstairs, 

took a shower. As the warm 
water ran over your shoulders, 
you thought about what you 
would do that day. You stepped 
out of the shower, wiped the 
condensation from the mirror 
and looked at yourself, bony 
chest and bags under your eyes 
and hair too long or too short 
or too flat. And you didn’t see 
anything wrong this time.

Watching “Resident Evil: The 

Final Chapter” is like staring 
directly into the sun for two 
hours. For those who care about 
the wellbeing of their eyes, it’s 
unrecommendable. It may be one 
of the most inanely put together 
films in recent memory. Not a 
single action scene makes logical 
sense (nor a single one of the jump-
scares works). Its characters barely 
qualify as such; they’re cannon 

fodder meant to be killed off to 
give the illusion of “tension.” None 
of the “Resident Evil” films prior to 
this have been particularly good, 
but they’re bearable. “The Final 
Chapter” pivots that.

Fans of the franchise will pay no 

mind to any of this. They’ve stuck 
with it this long because of those 
B-movies tones. They’re fun, and 
it’s impossible to argue against 
that. It’s important for them to 
understand, however, that “The 
Final Chapter” pays very little 
mind to what they may want out 
of the finale of the franchise. The 
film picks up three weeks after 

the finale of the previous film 
in the series, meaning that the 
cliffhanger “Retribution” ended 
with goes unanswered. 
In many ways, that sets 
the stage for what’s to 
come. What better way 
for director Paul W.S. 
Anderson (“Pompeii”) 
to clue his fans in on 
the kind of movie 
they’re about to watch 
than by gaslighting them?

That’s not even the worst of 

it: The prologue to “The Final 
Chapter” features Alice (Milla 
Jovovich, “Survivor”) speaking 

directly to the audience, explaining 
everything that has happened 
in the series so far. The problem 
is that this glorified “Previously 
on…” segment literally rewrites the 
franchise. In this way, “The Final 
Chapter” is barely the finale to 

the “Resident Evil” 
franchise. It’s the 
capper to another 
series entirely, with 
different characters 
and 
a 
different 

mythology.

For most of the 

movie, it’s unclear 

why Anderson would rob his fans 
of the possibility of closure and 
a rewarding ending to a series 
that they love. By the third act, it 
has become shockingly obvious. 

History was rewritten to force 
one final twist, and in all fairness, 
it’s a twist that might have worked 
had it actually been planned from 
the beginning. Instead, it was 
shoehorned in at the last moment, 
one last betrayal from Anderson to 
the fans that he claims to love.

If “The Final Chapter” is an 

insult to fans of “Resident Evil,” it’s 
completely insufferable to those 
who have been on the fence so far. 
It sells itself as an action-horror 
film, but it fails utterly on both 
those accounts. With the action, 
everything is cut so fast and so 
awkwardly that even fights that 
might have been cool are rendered 
completely 
unintelligible. 
This 

reaches its peak later in the movie, 
where every frame for a full second 

is a different shot. It is painful to 
watch. Action has to be legible 
to be exciting, and “The Final 
Chapter” is anything but.

The horror doesn’t fare any 

better. Every two minutes, like 
clockwork, the sound falls out 
for a few moments before there’s 
an explosion of noise and rapid 
cuts. It would have been subtler if 
Anderson himself had shown up 
in the theater to scream directly 
into audience members’ ears, “You 
should be scared now!”

No 
matter 
its 
prospective 

audience, no matter its intentions, 
“Resident Evil: The Final Chapter” 
fails. The only thing anyone can 
hope it succeeds at is sticking with 
its titular promise: It better be “The 
Final Chapter” of this franchise.

JEREMIAH VANDERHELM

Daily Arts Writer

“Resident 

Evil: The Final 

Chapter”

Screen Gems

Rave, Quality 16

DAILY TV COLUMNIST

 To exorcise insecurities

BEN 

ROSENSTOCK

FILM REVIEW

FILM REVIEW

‘Evil’ fails on every level

