Fantastic Four (2015)

Year 8, Day 117 - 4/26/16 - Movie #2,317

BEFORE: Miles Teller carries over from "Whiplash", which could now be thought of as the film where J. Jonah Jameson teaches music to the young Reed Richards - or is that just me?  

I'm going to try to avoid my usual rant about reboots, because I'm sure everyone's sick of it by now - hopefully I can find something else to talk about after viewing.

THE PLOT:  Four young outsiders teleport to an alternate and dangerous universe which alters their physical form in shocking ways. The four must learn to harness their new abilities and work together to save Earth from a former friend turned enemy.

AFTER: I can't avoid the elephant in the room - I was in the comic shop yesterday, getting my weekly fix, and the cashier said to me, "Hey, how's that new Robin book, I've been meaning to check it out".  He was referring to "Robin, Son of Batman", which features Damien Wayne, Batman's son (long story) as the fourth (or is it third?) Boy Wonder.  I responded much more cynically than perhaps I should have, saying, "Does it MATTER?  They're only going to reboot the whole universe in a few months, anyway, so what's the point?"  (Which is true, DC's "Rebirth" storyline is the next "soft" reboot, scheduled for after the books from the current timeline, "The New 52", tap out after just 52 issues)  But the cheery clerk persisted, saying, "Hey, maybe it won't be that bad, they're going to keep some of the good elements from the current reality."  Which to me is approximately equal to saying, "Hey, that guy only killed FIVE people, so he's not so bad, he could have killed TEN."  

So it's only been eight years since the LAST "Fantastic Four" movie, which was pretty bad because they started telling the story of the Silver Surfer and never really finished it, I mean, Galactus showed up but he was just like a cloud or something, and it really didn't make much sense in the end.  But at least the actors (Jessica Alba, Chris Evans) were well-cast and looked the part.  But nope, let's erase the chalkboard and start over, because why the f*ck not?  There's a whole new generation of teens that were too small to go out and see the last incarnation, and that's the demographic we really want to target.  

The Fantastic Four started with a simple concept, back in 1963 - a group of four adventurers that were eager to win the space race, so they snuck into a rocket ship and headed for the moon.  The scientist, his best friend, his girlfriend and her brother, only they got hit with some wacky cosmic rays and crash-landed with superpowers - the stretchy guy, the strong rocky guy, the invisible girl and the fiery guy.  They became a mainstay of Marvel Comics, even if the roster changed over the years a little bit, they had some of the best villains - Dr. Doom, the Puppet Master, Psycho-Man, Annihilus, Kang, the Frightful Four, Galactus and his heralds, etc.  For a long while, it was known as "The World's Greatest Comic Magazine", which during the 1980's, for me anyway, wasn't much of an exaggeration at all.

But to tell their story today, you need to do a little updating, because we've already BEEN to the moon, so I think in the last film series our heroes were attempting the first interstellar travel, and here they're attempting the first inter-dimensional trip.  Right, because that's a thing - shouldn't we go to another planet before we go to another dimension?  Just saying.  I can't help but notice this set-up's similarity to both "The Martian" (journey to another planet, one team member gets left behind) and the last season of "Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D", which also had a team member stranded after traveling through a wormhole.  Which is annoying, because it means that with a little more planning and coordination, this film's plot COULD have been easily worked into the grand scheme of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

BUT, since Fox owns the right to make "Fantastic Four" movies (as well as the X-Men ones), it means that they can't really play nicely together, they have to exist separately.  And as long as Fox makes a new crappy film every few years, it seems like they'll retain those rights, forcing Marvel to (allegedly) cancel the long-running "FF" comic book in order to devalue the property, eventually causing the rights to revert.  This could be true, because after the recent "Secret Wars" cross-over two members of the core Four joined other groups (Human Torch joined both the Inhumans and the Avengers, and the Thing joined the Guardians of the Galaxy) while Mr. Fantastic and Invisible Woman were tasked with repopulating the universe with new alternate realities, or something vaguely confusing like that. 

BUT, let's focus on THIS movie for a short while - I don't know if it's as bad as people all said it was, because it definitely qualifies as a Fantastic Four film, in that there are four heroes, and they have powers that make them resemble the characters from the comic books, and they do fight Doctor Doom, only he's not so much of an Eastern European dictator type, but rather an introverted computer expert from Latveria who likes to wear hoodies and keep other guys from dating Sue Storm.  And that's where the slippery slope of "hey, let's make this better" starts to affect the overall plan.  

Look, I don't care about the Human Torch being African-American now, if someone feels that will make the character more relevant, go ahead - but DON'T do it just because this is traditionally a comic-book full of white people, and you want to make the film more appealing to black viewers.  That's the wrong reason to do the right thing.  American movies want to do well in China, should we make the Invisible Woman Asian?  Once you start changing things to make the story more "relevant" (aka "profitable") where do you stop?  Reed Richards goes from his late thirties to his early twenties here, obviously to bring in more of a youth audience.  It's a seductive trap that eventually leads to compromising the quality of the story for the sake of the almighty dollar.  

Characters rise and fall in popularity, of course, and sometimes they come and go, and sometimes they change race, like there's a black Captain America right now in the comics (formerly the Falcon) and I'd like to think that was done for the right reason (diversity) rather than the wrong one (marketability) - but who knows?  Largely it seems that writers write what they want to write, and anyone writing a team book like "The Avengers" gets to put whatever characters he wants on that team, or whichever ones he needs to tell the best story, ideally.  

But as I saw in the documentary "The Death of Superman Lives", once you start making these little creative choices, each of which might be perfectly reasonable on their own ("Hey, what if Superman fought a giant spider?"  "Hey, what if polar bears guarded the Fortress of Solitude?") when you make too many changes from the original story, and you put them all together, you might realize that collectively, you've strayed much too far from the original intent of the story, and I think that's what happened with this version of "Fantastic Four".  

And too easily, all of those little changes can add up to a bunch of nonsense - for, like, a thousand reasons (OK, maybe 100) this is not the "Fantastic Four" I grew up with - Reed Richards is a young nebbish (hey, Ben Grimm's supposed to be the Jewish one), Ben Grimm is too short and non-Jewish, Sue Storm is from Kosovo for some reason, and seems to be more intelligent than Reed, and Human Torch?  Again, don't want to make it a racial thing, but he's not the Johnny Storm I grew up with.  Maybe this is the Fantastic Four that could have caught on with the millennials in the post-Gen X world.

But we'll never know, will we?  Because the director, Josh Trank sent out ONE tweet the week before this film opened, claiming to have a much better cut of the film that the studio would not let him release.  And honestly, it sounded like sour grapes, because he was a young director who had made just ONE feature before this, and suddenly he was filming a superhero movie and arguing with his studio.  I said it at the time, and I'll say it again - either you have final cut and you fight, fight for the edit that you want, or you don't have final cut, and you shut the hell up.  The right thing to do, if he didn't believe in the final product being released, was to say nothing - if the film was a hit, he'd reap the benefits and if it was a flop, he could blame the studio and push for the release of the Director's Cut DVD 2 years later, and prove his point that way.  But to sabotage his own film that way - jeez, now I don't know if he'll ever get the chance to make another one. 

OK, the IMDB "trivia" section on this film breaks down the way that Josh Trank's cut of the film would have been different.  I'm going to sign off now and go read that, out of pure curiosity.  

Also starring Jamie Bell (last heard in "The Adventures of Tintin"), Kate Mara (last seen in "The Martian"), Michael B. Jordan (last seen in "Red Tails"), Toby Kebbell (last seen in "The Counselor"), Reg E. Cathey (last seen in "St. Vincent"), Tim Blake Nelson (last seen in "The Big Year"), with cameos from Dan Castellaneta (last seen in "The Pursuit of Happyness"), Mary-Pat Green (last seen in "XXX"), Tim Heidecker (last seen in "The Five-Year Engagement"), Chet Hanks. 

RATING: (an appropriate) 4 out of 10 lab coats

Whiplash

Year 8, Day 116 - 4/25/16 - Movie #2,316

BEFORE: You probably figured this was where I was heading, with the last film being about music, and capping off the J.K. Simmons chain.  Hell, you can probably tell what I'm watching tomorrow, since this film doesn't have too many other stars in it.  No matter, it's all onward and upward.

THE PLOT: A promising young drummer enrolls at a cut-throat music conservatory where his dreams of greatness are mentored by an instructor who will stop at nothing to realize a student's potential.

AFTER:  This film brought up a lot of memories from high-school and junior high - back then I was heavily involved in the music program, playing clarinet in the orchestra and singing in the chorus (and in local stage-plays, but that's a whole other thing...)  I think music programs are very important, and if I hadn't been bitten by the filmmaking bug, who knows, I might have pursued singing or acting as a career, though I don't think I have the looks for either.  

My mother was a music teacher, at the grade-school level, fortunately for a neighboring town, and not the one we lived in.  (If you have your own parent as a teacher, there's all kinds of possible conflict...) At the grade school level, music programs are pretty chill, but still I'd hear her complain about the occasional "difficult" student, like ones who acted up or refused to participate.  So I can kind of view this film from both perspectives - that of the student, and that of the teacher.  

There were three times in junior high or high-school where I felt that I'd been sucker-punched by a teacher, one was the infamous "Pygmalion Incident", where my English teacher asked the class to write a sequel to the famous G.B. Shaw play, and I was told I could write "anything", even if it had UFO's and aliens in it.  But the teacher got sick and was out for a while, meaning that the papers were graded by another teacher, who tore my Shaw fan-fiction apart.  "But wait," I thought, "I was told I could write ANYTHING, so how can this be judged as bad?"  The replacement teacher saw things differently and gave a terrible grade to my Higgins/Doolittle fan fiction - it retrospect I think he was just down on any portrayal of hetero romance.  

But twice I felt betrayed by a music teacher, he'd been teaching junior high band forever, and when time came to march in the Memorial Day parade, he took me off the clarinet and put me on the bass drum, probably because I was the only kid big enough to carry it down the street.  And you'd think that when you move a kid from woodwinds to percussion, there'd be some kind of instruction to aid in the transition - nope, not one bit.  OK, I figured, this must be a cakewalk, or else he really believes in me, or barring that, maybe I'm just hear to do the grunt work.  Turned out the marching beat was pretty easy to pick up, the snare drummers knew what they were doing, so I just had to learn to hit the drum at a particular rhythm.  But then came the performance of "The Star-Spangled Banner", and I guess he just naturally assumed that I'd know what to do.  

Now of course, I'd heard our national anthem before, many times.  But I'd never listened to it to pick up the bass drum part, and now there I was, expected to play it.  No sheet music, no instruction, no nothing.  And admittedly, I'd forgotten to ask about all of the details this task entailed when I agreed to it - but it's also a case where the teacher forgot to, you know, teach.  So he started conducting the anthem and realized that the bass drum wasn't playing, then have me this enormous hand-signal, which could have been seen from space, telling me to start beating the drum.  OK, you asked for it, I got through it, but a little instruction over when to play (and, more importantly, when to stop) would have been nice.  

The second time was the spring concert, maybe a year later.  I was back on the clarinet, and the same teacher, who'd had my mother as a student years before (and she must have been some kind of prodigy, because he was expecting a clarinet virtuoso, and I just wasn't that), found himself with an abundance of clarinet players, and decided to take advantage by choosing a piece of music called "Clarinet Escapade".  There were a lot of fast notes, mostly in the upper register, and I don't know what this guy was thinking, but none of the three clarinet players were up to the task.  And he wouldn't listen to reason, I guess maybe he thought that we'd compete against each other to see who could play the solo the best, and a victor would emerge and blow everyone away at the spring concert.   Yeah, that's not what happened.  The three of us fumbled through it, but it was perhaps the longest 5 minutes of my life, being forced to just murder a piece of music in front of the whole town. 

I think back on it now, and I wonder if this teacher was senile, crazy, or just expected too much.  Did he think one of us would lock himself away in a room and play "Clarinet Escapade" for 12 hours a day, until we could nail it?  Dude, I'm like 12 years old, I've got real homework to do, they're making me learn French, and I've got a paper route.  Really, what recourse did I have?  I think I made myself pretty clear that playing this piece of music was beyond my ability.  Should I have walked out?  Set off the fire alarm?  I feel bad that we let the man down by playing poorly, but he just would not listen to reason.  If I'd been an adult in a kid's body, maybe I would have pointed out that since he was the teacher, and we couldn't play the music, maybe he was an incompetent teacher - I wonder how that would have gone down. 

When I got to high-school, I played clarinet in the orchestra for three years, but I did not join the marching band or the swing band, because that all seemed like too much pressure.  I tried to transition to the saxophone, but didn't really see the point.  Anyway, I'd had more luck auditioning for district chorus than district orchestra, and I had identified a lack of male bass singers in the school, so once my voice changed, there were more opportunities for advancement as a singer at the time.  The marching band seemed sort of cult-like, and I figured my mother would never let me do that anyway, since it meant traveling for competitions, and she'd probably have a fear of me tripping and accidentally putting a clarinet through my brain.  (Hey, I'm sure it's happened to someone.)  

But let's get to "Whiplash", for which J.K. Simmons won that Best Supporting Actor Oscar.  It's really the role he was born to play, since he studied music, had planned to become a composer, and had prefaced it by playing a sadistic Nazi skinhead prison inmate and a demanding, sadistic newspaper editor.  For some people, I think "sadistic music teacher" is a tautism, or some kind of redundant statement.  But there are many sides to this character, and maybe in the end it's not so clear-cut as to whether he's a strict disciplinarian, or someone who just demands the best from his students and is pushing them to achieve beyond the limits that they set for themselves.  Certainly I can see aspects of a drill instructor in his statements, poking fun at his students, getting under their skin, and berating them for the smallest mistakes, or perceived mistakes.  

The student here, Neimann, certainly aspires to greatness, and seems willing to do whatever it takes to achieve it, whether that's giving up his free time to practice, or not seeing the point in having a personal life that can only take him away from his art, or at best conflict with it.  The logic goes that if art demands sacrifice, then if you don't sacrifice, you can never be great - but I'm not sure that I agree.  But I do support the notion that no one is innately talented, and that the only path to success and fame (assuming that there IS one, which is not a given) leads through hard work and practice. 

However, we're shown extreme examples of sacrifice here, and also extreme examples of a teacher pushing his students.  Falling back on the story of Charlie "Bird" Parker, who didn't have his best performance until someone allegedly threw a cymbal at his head for making a mistake does not seem to justify, in and of itself, this level of physical and mental abuse.  And every small success that Neimann has seems to be followed by a new plateau of expectation - so where does it end?  Apparently not until that performer is capable of going so far beyond the sheet music and the charts that he somehow transcends the human limitations, and puts forth a drum solo that can not, will not be stopped or accept any boundaries.  

But that's hotdogging it, isn't it?  When a student starts to control a performance, and cue in his conductor, rather than the other way around?  To me that seems unacceptable, and egotistical to boot. Some of the actions of the star drummer here almost made me root for the teacher - but I wish I knew more about drumming, or at least had more appreciation for jazz, so I could better discern what exactly was going on during the final performance shown here.  Did the end justify the means?  Did Niemann get pushed to such an extreme explosion of drumming talent that it overshadowed everyone else in the band AND the conductor?  If so, not cool - unless that was the result that Fletcher was trying to achieve - and I think that's left open to some interpretation, no?

I think there are two schools of thought when it comes to teacher-student relationships - one is that you get more flies with honey than you do with vinegar, by which I mean that a little courtesy and encouragement can go a long way.  But the other school of thought is the one seen here, based on the concept that the teacher's not there to make friends, and that the worst thing you can say to a performer is "Good job!" because then they can develop an ego and stop striving to be better.  There's a part of me that believes the second line of reasoning, because when you make it to the big leagues (in whatever your chosen sport, craft or profession might be) it's time to wear your big boy pants, and you should KNOW when you've done a good job.  Your reward for doing a good job, beyond payment, should be that you get to come back tomorrow and do it again.  

The last time I heard "Good job!" from my boss was about 2 weeks ago, when I'd spent two days on travel sites trying to book three round-trip tickets to France, and kept getting return trips with a 13-hour layover in Paris (which was some huge B.S., by the way, I don't know why any airline would suggest such an itinerary, wasting over half a day of people's time.  You can't tell me there are no planes leaving Paris for New York within a 13-hour window...)  Finally, I was able to book the trip for three people, two different itineraries, on three different airlines, for under a thousand dollars per person.  And I KNEW I did a good job, I was frustrated, exhausted and exhilarated at the same time.  (Still, it was nice to hear some recognition.)  

But I don't subscribe to the belief that in order to do something, you have to be the BEST at it, or it's not worth your time.  If that were the case, then almost nothing would ever get done - imagine if everyone were a perfectionist, you wouldn't even be able to get a cup of coffee without your barista obsessively re-making your latte until it was just so.  Can't we just say that "any job worth doing is worth doing well" and leave it at that?

NITPICK POINT: When a college music group performs in a different city, don't they usually hire a bus to take them there?  Relying on all of the individual members to get themselves there by public transportation seems a little unreliable - it seems to me that if Fletcher was so obsessive about every part of the performance, why wouldn't he demand the same details when it came to travel?  Why leave any of that process to chance, because there are like a hundred things that could go wrong to prevent a band member from making it to the performance.  When I sang in the NYU Chorale, we did a holiday concert out in Kearney, NJ and everyone had to show up and get loaded on to a bus to go out there together.  

NITPICK POINT #2 (tangential to N.P. 1) - Neimann is first year of college, so he's what, 18?  19?  And he rents a car?  When I was that young, I couldn't rent a car in New York State until the age of 25.  (This was filmed in L.A., but takes place in NY.  The music school is fictional, but another character mentions attending Fordham, which is in the Bronx.)   I guess maybe things have changed in New York since I was that young - but even still, the insurance fees and security deposits for renting to someone that young would have been a deal-breaker.

Also starring Miles Teller (last seen in "Project X"), Paul Reiser (last seen in "The Story of Us"), Melissa Benoist, Nate Lang, Austin Stowell, Chris Mulkey (last seen in "Captain Phillips"), Suanne Spoke, Charlie Ian, Jayson Blair.

RATING: 7 out of 10 Band-Aids