Gorilla Snail

‘Vice’ is so vehemently angry, it feels like it was written by someone who just watched it.

And that’s probably why a lot of people did not like it: it feels preachy and overly emotional. It’s meant to make you angry at a specific person, by recounting what feels like an endless list of global tragedies. It doesn’t seem to reveal anything profoundly new about what happened - it just tries to drive home that Dick Chaney was responsible for all of it.
It’s also an extremely self-indulgent film, and critics are typically not kind to freshly decorated Hollywood filmmakers having that kind of attitude (see Nolan’s Interstellar).

I personally really liked 'Vice’. I think Adam McKay very much polished the frantic, YouTube-y style he used in “The Big Short”, managing to seamlessly and creatively integrate elements from internet video essays and vlogs into something that actually feels like a movie - rather than making a straight-up two-hour YouTube video like last time. As a result, the emotional payoff was far more profound for me and many of the character moments landed perfectly.

That being said, the movie doesn’t really bother much with the characters’ journeys. Even though it’s shot and edited like a much more “classic” cinematic experience, Vice does not pretend to try and tell a story. Much more than Big Short, Vice is an angry opinion piece, one that does not concern itself too much with the protagonists’ arcs or motives, or even the sequence of events themselves, like its predecessor. Other than some scattered character moments, 'Vice’ is mostly a list of interesting, non-linear facts, dressed up in (admittedly brilliant) emotional movie magic.

And that’s mostly why I feel insecure about reviewing it. I really enjoyed it - for me it was impactful, moving, and it pretty much hit every spot it was trying to: it made me mad, depressed, excited and unwaveringly interested. But I really have no experience in this kind of film at all! I never watch opinion-piece political movies, I haven’t seen the Michael Moore pics, I barely even watch documentaries. Big Short was an attempt at storytelling with an essay-like style - I could review that. But Vice is just an essay, period.

If nothing else, I can say I am really excited about Adam McKay successfully integrating YouTube elements in his films and that he’s still working on it, still tweaking the formula. It’s definitely not perfect yet, but it’s much smoother, much more mature, and really exciting to watch. This is a film that tries to do something that a lot of people might rightly find cheap. But there’s no real argument that it does it with mastery and style, using fresh new ways to achieve the results of old tricks. The director and editor of this movie deftly constructed an endless parade of expertly-made shots and sequences - and the end product was, for me at least, extremely gripping.

Oh also, I didn’t really love Christian Bale’s turn as Dick Chaney. He felt like he was doing an impression of him, rather than embodying him. His radical body transformation really feels more like a gimmick than anything else, which is tragic considering how much of a negative impact on his health it must have had. On the other hand, I thought Amy Adams and Steve Carrell did a much better job at bringing their characters to life.

There’s nothing better than watching a movie you were sure you’re gonna hate, then ending up loving it. It recently happened to me with “Spider-Verse”, so that’s partially why, against my better judgment, I chose to watch Aquaman on the big screen.

I’m sad to say, Aquaman is exactly what it looks like: an uninspired, empty, disconnected superhero soup. Not much better than proverbially bad superhero flicks of yesteryear (like, say, Green Lantern), Aquaman is boring, derivative and ugly in every aspect, from the plot, to the aesthetic, to the poorly made CGI combat. The story is trash, the characters are trash and there’s a painfully lost opportunity in every turn. Jason Momoa’s faux hard-rock character has some sparks of charisma but his limited screen time is mostly spent skulking in the background, flirting cringeily, or shouting out-of-place “bro” one-liners. Made in a production line, Aquaman is unbearably shallow, choosing to cowardly splash around in the most basic of superhero waters, and refusing to decidedly dive into one of the numerous kinds of delicious absurdity this premise could have offered.

It’s movies like Aquaman that give a bad rep to the superhero genre. God dammit. When did superhero flicks become so plastic again? I thought we were past this phase. These last few years had actually been great - even films I didn’t like, always had an interesting approach. But of this year, only Infinity War (which I disliked) and Spider-Verse had something new to offer.

Pff.