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