BEFORE: Hard to believe, I know, but this is my third film in a week that seems to be based on a documentary, fourth film in the last week based on true events, a theme that carries over from "Vice", along with actor Steve Carell. "A Futile and Stupid Gesture" was based on the documentary "Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead" and "Battle of the Sexes" was based on a 2013 documentary of nearly the same name. Today's film was based on the 2010 doc "Marwencol", which I have not seen.
I'm posting late today because my wife and I took a quick 2-day trip to Atlantic City, we hadn't been there since last spring, and we know that if you book a Sunday-Tuesday hotel stay there, you get a much better rate than if you book a Friday-Sunday stay. The deals are out there for the taking, and then when you're spending less on the hotel, it's easier to come out ahead on the slots, or have some extra money to go to a couple of nice restaurants or a trip to the buffet. This time we stayed at the Borgata, and took a side trip to the (relatively) new Ocean Casino, which used to be called Revel, the site of some infamous celebrity parties and encounters (Ray Rice) before it had some financial problems and changed hands. (Huh, a casino that lost money and wasn't being managed by Donald Trump's company, what do you know...) The new place seems very fancy, but it's not just catering to high-rollers any more, plus they have a BBQ restaurant called "The Pit Boss" that I think we should check out next time. My wife wasn't feeling well on Monday, so we just had a brunch and then she went back to our room to relax.
But since I got lucky on the slots at Revel, I was happy to stop playing, because I always feel that if I keep playing, I'm going to eventually lose whatever I just won. So we just took a nap, then binge-watched the Food Network all afternoon, and I went out for a proper bowl of ramen and some Asian apps at about 10 pm.
I did watch this film before we left, I just didn't have any opportunity to post a review until now.
THE PLOT: A victim of a brutal attack finds a unique and beautiful therapeutic outlet to help him through his recovery process.
AFTER: Damn, I was really looking forward to this one, because I'd heard about it's innovative blend of live-action with stop-motion (?) animation, but then about a month ago, everyone in the media just sort of stopped talking about it, and I wondered why -
Now, I know why - the use of animation here is unique, making action figures that move and resemble the actors who provide their voices, but it needed to be used in a better story, because this one is severely flawed. Again, it's supposedly based on a true story, and they run a photo of the real Mark Hogancamp before the end credits (again, haven't seen the documentary yet...) and some might say that's the one saving grace here, but then, I suppose that's all in how you look at it.
(EDIT: I just found out that the animation process used here is motion-capture, not stop-motion. I suppose that changes things just a bit, because stop-motion animation is a long labor of love, and mo-cap is just putting people in tight-fitting suits with dots on them and letting the computers do most of the busy work. But then, technically it's also more work for the actors, since they have to physically DO stuff in front of a green-screen and not just lend their voices to the characters in a sound studio. This same directed made "The Polar Express" and the 2009 version of "A Christmas Carol" the same way, so I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised.)
Here's the thing, I don't know about the real Hogancamp, but I found Steve Carell's character, the fictionalized version of him, to be very creepy. I know, I'm supposed to have sympathy for him because he was brutally attacked and beaten in what seemed to be a hate crime - four guys in a bar beat him up just because he said he liked wearing high-heeled shoes. So people who are narrow-minded and fearful of anything that seems remotely queer took out all their anxieties and hatred on him.
But just because he was the victim of a crime, that doesn't excuse his weird and creepy behavior after the recovery from the incident. Now, he supposedly doesn't remember his personal life from before the attack. Which seems a little too convenient. Was he gay, straight, a transvestite or just a guy with a fetish for heels? Or maybe, was he a guy who just JOKED about wearing them? We'll never know, because the movie doesn't say. But, as my boss pointed out today, this constitutes a huge NITPICK POINT, because why doesn't he just ask somebody who knew him before the attack what his own deal was? I suppose it doesn't really matter, because it's a hate crime either way - I just mean to say that by leaving things ambiguous, someone here seems to be covering all the possible bases.
But I want to call attention to what comes after the incident - he built a miniature town, set in Belgium during World War II, so he could "heal" - and he says this in the trailer, which is a little too on point. Doesn't the writer think we, the audience, can figure out that he's doing this to heal? You don't need to have a character say it out loud if it's so flipping obvious. Here's the creepy part - there's a miniature version of him in the town, a G.I. named Cap'n Hogie, and there are dolls that look like Nazis, only they represent his attackers (and I think in one case, a man he meets later in the film, so that's really putting the cart before the horse...). There are also six female dolls, with impossible/unrealistic Barbie-like figures and they're all dressed in short skirts and other skimpy or very tight attire.
Over time, we learn that these six sexualized dolls represent women that he knows in the real world (or in one case, from a porno movie) - there's Wendy the bartender, who first found him after his beating; Carlala, the cook he works with in a restaurant kitchen; Roberta, the woman he buys his action figures from at the local hobby shop; G.I. Julie, a veteran he met during his rehab, and Anna, his Russian caregiver. Suzette, the one based on the porn actress, rounds out the group. So he's fetishized the women he knows into doll form, and acts out wartime scenarios where these dolls are wearing next-to-nothing, or occasionally topless, and they shoot guns and throw Molotov cocktails at the Nazis, and rescue him when he gets captured. It's like Tarantino turned "Inglourious Bastards" into a children's show, or something. Or some sick Twilight Zone episode where the dolls come to life and work out problems from the real world, combined with that issue of "Fantastic Four" where they first fought the Puppet Master, and he put the heroes' minds into little clay dolls for his own twisted pleasure.
Then a new neighbor, Nicol, moves in across the street, and she's a redhead. Mark falls for her on sight, and works her into his weird "healing" narrative right away, via a redheaded doll - sorry, action figure. Think about it, if you moved to a new town and meet your new neighbor, and then found out just DAYS later that he'd altered a doll to look like you, and took pictures of it interacting with his other dolls in his constructed tiny town, and he was pretending that the doll that looked like him was falling in love with the doll that looked like YOU? That would raise a few red flags, right? I think there's enough reason there to at least call the police, or perhaps call the movers back and get out of there right away.
Look, everyone might have, from time to time, random fantasies about people they meet, or see on the street, or people we see in movies. But it's not appropriate to TELL near-strangers, friends or co-workers that you maybe have thought of them in that way. You keep that to yourself. But Mark takes PHOTOS of the dolls interacting, dancing or kissing or battling Nazis together, and he shows the photos in a gallery, I'm guessing without the consent of the people that the dolls resemble. That's wildly inappropriate, even if it's being done to help him "heal". Even worse, Mark seems unable to pick up on social cues and goes right to "Let's have a relationship" with Nicol. He doesn't seem to understand that a real relationship takes time to develop, you can't just skip steps by acting out fantasies with dolls.
And even worse than THAT, he talks at length about his collection of women's shoes - 287 pairs, but who's counting? - and how when he wears the shoes of a woman, he feels like he's absorbing part of their "essence". Ugh, that's so creepy it's almost like Buffalo Bill from "The Silence of the Lambs" talking about wearing his skin-suit. Again, are we supposed to excuse all this creepiness just because this guy got beat up once in a bar?
Somehow, Mark doesn't drink any more because the attack beat the desire for alcohol out of him - even though that's not how drinking works - along with his memories. In a way, it's too bad they didn't beat the creepiness out of him, too.
NITPICK POINT #2: I didn't understand any of the stuff with Deja Thoris, which I thought was the name of a princess on Mars in those books by Edgar Rice Burroughs. But here she's some kind of demon/succubus character, who also looks like a sexualized Barbie doll, only with green hair, who terrorizes Mark but also asks him to build her a flying time machine, so she'll then stop sending the female characters light-years into the future, or something. This felt like a very disjointed part of the storyline that seemed to serve no purpose, either as part of the therapy or part of the fantasy, so why was it there?
Ah, there's something of an explanation on Wikipedia, it seems she's supposed to symbolize his medicine, and I was supposed to pick up on this from the green color of her hair. She (the meds) prevent any woman from getting too close to Mark, thus the symbolism of her sending the women far away. Only after he realizes that his meds are hurting his healing process and he stops taking them can he stop having the PTSD flashbacks and potentially have a real relationship. Only this is terrible advice for the viewers, to change a course of medicine without consulting with one's doctor.
And, I don't think it's the meds that are keeping potential girlfriends away, I think once he shows women his shoe collection and the dolls he alters to look like women he knows, I think he can accomplish keeping women away all by himself.
Also starring Leslie Mann (last seen in "The Comedian"), Diane Kruger (last seen in "Copying Beethoven"), Merritt Wever (last seen in "Into the Wild"), Janelle Monae (last seen in "Hidden Figures"), Eiza Gonzalez, Gwendolyne Christie (last seen in "Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi"), Leslie Zemeckis, Neil Jackson (last seen in "Nocturnal Animals"), Falk Hentschel (last seen in "Transcendence"), Matt O'Leary (last seen in "The Lone Ranger"), Nikolai Witschl (last seen in "Deadpool 2"), Patrick Roccas, Alexander Lowe, Eric Keenleyside (last seen in "The Edge of Seventeen"), Stefanie von Pfetten, Siobhan Williams (last seen in "Forsaken"), Conrad Coates, Veena Sood, Fraser Aitcheson, Trevor Jones, Brad Kelly, Jeff Sanca, Patrick Sabongui, Clay St. Thomas.
RATING: 3 out of 10 hand-formed meatballs
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