Now that my lengthy piece on Downhill and Force Majeure is completed, I can finally focus on shorter reviews for the sake of streaming recommendations. Unfortunately, most of what I’ve consumed lately is complete trash. Very soon, “polarizing” will sound like a compliment.
Remember when Netflix first started to produce “original content” by buying up crappy films that no studio wanted to distribute and advertising the hell out of them? While their offerings in the past several years have improved drastically, “Netflix will green-light anything” is still a running joke in the popular imagination.
While Amazon Prime has always played second-fiddle to Netflix and Hulu (at least in my opinion), it recently hit a new low – several new lows in fact. In one of my previous binge reports, I talked about a documentary called Big Enough, Small Enough, a low-budget offering that didn’t quite feel at home on a premium streaming service like Amazon. I’m fine with exposing the works of young filmmakers to the masses, but this looked as if it was submitted to Amazon, not sought out by them. I’m not completely familiar with how each streaming service curates their content, but it’s clear that Amazon is doing something different in order to pad their collection.
For whatever reason, Amazon has introduced me to not one, but TWO of the shittiest films I have ever seen. As is probably obvious by the movies I choose to cover, I actively seek out the worst of the worst. Until now, I’ve never really had a solid hierarchy of “least favorite films”, because I believe After Last Season to be the greatest example of cinematic failure on every level, and failure in cinema comes in such a wide variety of forms. I now have a bottom three, and two of those were courtesy of Amazon Prime. ALS is still the worst, but Domination of the Becoming and The Misty Green Sky now trail closely behind.
Domination of the Becoming
It took me a very long time to recall the name of this film without looking it up, to the point of absurdity. Domination of the Becoming is the most forgettable non-title I’ve encountered in years, but at least it’s uniquely campy. The rest of this travesty, however…
It fucking hurts.
I have walked out of two movies in my life (The Haunting in Connecticut and Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby), but by my recollection I have never rage-quit something I’m watching at home. I might fall asleep and forget to finish it, but when I sit down to watch a movie, I’m in it until the end. Domination of the Becoming’s first 30 minutes became so intolerable so quickly that my finger stayed on my remote’s home button for half the run-time.
This film has everything you could ever throw into a post-apocalyptic movie – vampires, zombies, vampire-zombies, demon-vampires, angels in human form, an abandoned backstory about the mark of the beast in which the world goes blind and must receive eye implants labeled “666” in order to regain their sight, prostitutes!, vague impressions of potentially being a Christian film until characters start gratuitously dropping F-bombs, every kind of continuity error imaginable, a first act that is SO TERRIBLY EDITED THAT I’M CONVINCED IT’S CAPABLE OF PHYSICAL HARM, and an opening title card that says, “7 years later.” 7 YEARS LATER FROM WHAT??? It also seems to subscribe to the kind of faux-Biblical end times theology I’m sure Tim LaHaye (of Left Behind fame) pleasures himself to on a nightly basis.
As I learned afterward, this is a sequel to The Becoming, an almost-Christian end times vampire film. I haven’t seen it, but that’s okay – I’m fairly certain Domination decided to recap it for me. It’s a bit like the case of Silent Night, Deadly Night 1 & 2, in which the second film replays an edited version of the first for an obscenely long time before the movie even begins.
I haven’t been able to track down a solid number for the budget, but I saw one estimate that truly alarmed me – $500,000.00. And yes, I’m writing out the whole number with every zero intact so that you can marvel at the insanity of that budget-to-quality ratio. That number may be wrong, but even if it is, spending any money on the creation of this film should be a sin.
I desperately want to recommend Domination of the Becoming for the spectacle of its sheer ineptitude. However, each time you stream it, the filmmakers gain a little revenue. So please – use your preferred shady method of obtaining this if at all possible. These people don’t deserve your money for birthing the gnarliest dumpster-baby imaginable, and the thought of a third film in this “franchise” is just nauseating.
1/10
Where to stream: Amazon Prime of course, unless you wish to venture into the darkest layers of hell where humanity’s worst are probably forced to watch this on repeat.
The Misty Green Sky
3D-rendered pornography has existed since the dawn of 3D animation. How else would one make a clip of Kanye West getting blown by Taylor Swift while he attempts to penetrate her with her own Grammy? It wouldn’t surprise me if that exists, but by simply posting this to the internet, I guarantee it’s in production right now. It’s really not too difficult to pull off either – there are plenty of software and texture packages specifically meant for rendering 3D porn. I know this because someone decided to use these tools to create a “serious” movie.
As I explain the overall plot of The Misty Green Sky to you, you may almost think it has potential. You’d be wrong, but the ideas behind the plot are definitely the only redeeming factor of the film – if you can even consider potential “redeeming.”
The main character of this story is Emma Dante, a naïve girl living on a planet with other young adults. Their economy is entirely based on an unknown substance they collect by zooming around on hover boards while doing aerial parkour. The closest thing this planet’s colony has to a “school” is a room where residents have one-on-one conversations with the subtly-named “God”, a holographic image that speaks only in non-answers. After replying to Emma’s seemingly basic questions with nothing but warnings, God tells Emma that she must stay away from the old town, which totally doesn’t contain the answers she’s looking for. Definitely not.
After denouncing God as a liar, Emma heads straight for the old town, only to discover that she lives on a planet that isn’t earth. Humans attempted to settle this planet, but a horrible disease wiped out the colony’s population. The children who were born there developed an immunity, and now earth’s government is lying to them so they’ll continue to harvest the valuable mystery resource.
Enraged, Emma tries to leave the colony by somehow making her way to a space station orbiting the planet while her home takes heavy fire. She explores the station and learns even more about her planet’s history, but she’s quickly noticed, and an engineer initiates a self-destruct sequence. Emma finds an escape ship and leaves, the only survivor. As she flies toward earth, she remembers that she’s still carrying a deadly illness, and her arrival will likely result in a global pandemic. She begs earth’s landing port to shoot her ship down, eventually speaking to a senator, but nobody seems concerned about her arrival in the slightest. The film ends with this senator meeting her in person and dismissing the disease as nonsense, while Emma deals with the guilt of potentially being the harbinger of an apocalypse.
That plot synopsis has problems, but it isn’t incomprehensibly terrible. Unfortunately, every other aspect of the film is balls-to-the-wall incompetent.
The primary issue is the animation. As I mentioned before, whoever rendered this was clearly using texture packages and models made for porn, and this leads to some incredibly awkward moments. Emma’s facial expressions are completely wrong, and even though the animator usually picks a preset expression that almost fits with what the character is supposed to be feeling, most of the time she’s making extremely inappropriate mouth gestures. For example, to express surprise, Emma’s mouth is shown agape…except she’s making a very specific shape with that mouth.
The distractingly pornographic animation doesn’t end with Emma’s mouth. Because the film has no sense of continuity whatsoever, she winds up wearing a pretty wide variety of clothing, which changes at completely random points, along with her hairstyle. It quickly becomes difficult to discern who our main character is, because she appears as several different models. Much of this clothing is provocative, and it often lingers several inches away from her body, gifting us with many nip slips in the first half of the film. She spends most of the run-time in panties or extremely short shorts.
At a certain point, the animator seems to have grown tired of trying desperately (yet lazily) to cover up the fact that these models are MADE FOR PORN. When Emma finds herself aboard the space station, she’s strapped to a machine that begins awkwardly spraying a white liquid all over her body, which dissolves all of her clothes aside from some strange underwear. She mostly spends the rest of the film topless or close to it, and her nipples are clearly hard as a rock. This is about when the animator realized he forgot to make these characters breath, so Emma’s chest begins to rise and fall…furiously. This animation is so awful that the final product looks as if her breasts and stomach have taken on a life of their own, moving independently of the rest of her model. It’s really, really jarring, because her breasts bounce up and down for at least twenty minutes, and it’s incredibly unnatural.
The Misty Green Sky has a number of other eccentricities and obvious flaws that boggle the mind. There’s a minutes-long sequence in which Emma is serenaded by a robot on a holographic piano that’s being held up by a gorilla, and it’s fucking magical. Every line of dialog sounds like shit, and they’re often recorded inconsistently. There is absolutely no sense of how conversations are supposed to flow, and tons of awkward pauses throughout. The pacing in general is impressively bad, and the movie manages to feel twice its run-time. It’s a tremendous train wreck.
The lingering question here: who the hell would create this and think, “This is okay. I should make two sequels.” Jack Foster, the director, had this thought, and the magnitude of that lack of self-awareness is almost scary. He’s actually proud of this project, and actively promotes it. Those sequels never happened, thankfully, but now that Prime will pick up anything, who the hell knows?
1/10
Where to Stream: Amazon Prime.
Hamilton
It’s time to make some enemies.
Even if you have very little pop culture awareness, you’ve probably heard of Hamilton. The bizarre recounting of Alexander Hamilton’s life through the lens of a traditional Broadway musical with some hip-hop touches and race-swapped casting has been nearly impossible to avoid since its surprise success. People are still taking out second mortgages just to pay for tickets, and like most of Broadway, it’s an exclusive affair.
The rights to distribute a filmed stage production of the musical were purchased by Disney, and since Hamilton fans are ABSOLUTELY FUCKING RABID, releasing it exclusively on their Disney+ streaming service may be the greatest ace up Mickey’s sleeve right now. Broadway’s habit of relishing in the barrier to entry for most musicals has been a serious problem in the industry for a long time now, and we should all be grateful that we’re getting a proper stage production – and not Cats.
I’m just going to say it: I hate Hamilton the musical. I’m sick of all the theater kids trying to sell me on the idea that listening to the soundtrack is almost as great as seeing the show. I’m sick of comments about how, “it’s such a weird concept, but Lin-Manuel Miranda makes it work!” However, above all, I am incredibly sick of Hamilton’s untouchable acclaim. How dare I speak out against its absolute infallibility!
In my opinion, Hamilton was dead (to me) on arrival. The very concept of a musical about Alexander Hamilton could never have worked without a serious dose of surrealism or sarcasm, and while there are traces of that, it takes itself incredibly seriously, to the point of just being rather dry. It’s like singing a history book to millennials in a desperate attempt to keep their attention, and it reminds me of every teacher who failed to make learning fun by taking up “make learning fun” initiatives. This is your dad turning Alexander Hamilton’s history into an elaborate bedtime story in hopes that you’ll have an edge on a few middle-school exams.
The casting in general is completely fine, except for the lead, Lin-Manuel Miranda, who is terrible at rapping. He may have written the musical, but he really should have outsourced the leading role, because he has no business being here. This is something evident from the start, and really leaves the impression that Miranda sees himself as quite the auteur. This is further supported by the faux-humility found in his interviews. His shrill arrogance and endless attempts to pass this off as socially relevant are a bit off-putting and, perhaps, pathetic.
Thankfully, Hamilton is much better than previous attempts at filming a musical, such as NBC’s live Sound of Music bullshit. It’s also a tremendous show of restraint that Disney chose to release this rather than a computer-animated version, which they’re just doing by default now for every moderately-successful Disney film that isn’t Song of the South. It’s sad that there are so many conspicuously removed swear words, but that’s Disney.
Ultimately, this was not made for me, and was a massive waste of two and a half hours. You already know what you think of Hamilton, and nothing I say will persuade you otherwise. I can admire the technical elements that went into this, but DAMN was it arduous to sit through. You’ll probably love it.
3/10
Where it’s Streaming: Disney Plus
Becky
If you’ve seen Becky’s trailer, you know the big draw – Kevin James is playing the first villain in his career, and not a fatty-boom-boom punchline. After over twenty years of playing the male version of Melissa McCarthy, James finally took on a role that didn’t require him to over-eat on-screen. America waited with baited breath to see if James’ career outside of comedy was doomed, or if this was the start of a whole new path.
It’s doomed.
Becky is a home invasion thriller about a remarkably unlikable girl that gets to play Home Alone while some white nationalists hold them hostage in order to find something James stashed away just before his arrest. The villains are almost completely one-dimensional, and their only defining characteristics are their steadfast white nationalist beliefs. Becky was obnoxious enough that I was almost rooting for the villains, and that clearly wasn’t the intention.
There are a couple fun moments, but they don’t make the film worth watching unless you’re extremely bored.
Side note: Becky plays a really simple song on what looks like a ukulele, and I haven’t seen the name of the song anywhere online. It’s The Other Side of Mount Heart Attack by Liars. Go check out the album Drum’s Not Dead, because it’s amazing. Unfortunately, its inclusion in this film is clearly for hipster cred alone.
4/10
Where to Stream: It can be rented on Amazon and a variety of other services.
Shirley
Josephine Decker is known for odd films that don’t quite hit the mark with most audiences and critics. Madeline’s Madeline is probably her most famous work, and I run across hate and praise for it in almost equal measure. Shirley is not a deviation from this trend, and I’m not honestly sure I can say that I’ve fully made my mind up about it yet.
Shirley Jackson, the Gothic horror author known for The Lottery, The Haunting of Hill House, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (adapted last year), is played by Elizabeth Moss. Her performance is, of course, incredible and nuanced, adding a maniacally sinister side to Jackson. Moss carries this film, but that’s to be expected. Almost equally as interesting is the playfully vindictive portrayal of Jackson’s husband, Stanley Hyman, and all of his extra-marital affairs that Shirley is more than aware of. Michael Stuhlbarg has churned out better performances, but this one is definitely memorable.
A majority of the film concerns a young couple that Jackson and Hyman take in, and throughout, it’s very unclear if Shirley is gas-lighting the poor kids, or suffering from severe depression coupled with a personality disorder or two.
There’s plenty to like here, but it’s going to take quite a bit of thought and re-watching to really form an opinion. For now:
6/10
Where to Watch: Hulu. You can rent it as well, and Amazon/Google Play/Youtube seem to be the absolute cheapest ways of accomplishing that.
Faults
I’ve seen so much trash in the recent past (thanks Amazon) that I had to include at least one good film on this list. Faults is an unfairly overlooked cult film from 2015, and it stars mid-career Mary Elizabeth Winstead alongside Leland Orser.
When I say “cult film,” I mean that in two different senses. It’s a film with a niche audience that absolutely adores it, and also a film about cults.
Orser is a down-on-his-luck cult deprogramming expert whose new book isn’t selling, leaving him broke. When he is approached by two parents who desperately need his help to rescue their daughter from a cult, he sets up several days in a hotel where he plans to undo the cult’s damage.
This one goes some very strange places, and at times it borders on comedy. Its plot is dominated by little twists throughout, so I really shouldn’t say much, but the performances are great. I can see some aspects being rather polarizing, but overall it’s an impressive single-location film that’s just subtle enough to run the risk of fading into obscurity.
7.5/10
Where to Stream: Amazon Prime (Also: The Roku Channel, VUDU Free, and Tubi, if you can stand ads.)