Mediocre is the new bad

I saw one of the most mediocre movies of the year last night.

Kevin Connolly's Gotti was, indeed, extremely mediocre.

But I watched it because it was supposed to be bad. Like, everyone and their mother said it was terrible. But it was really more mediocre than bad.

Then I realized, mediocre is the new bad.

Rarely do you get movies that are just screamingly awful anymore. I've got a couple on my list this year, but not many. I'm not sure if the people who provide the checks and balances at the studios and the distributors are getting better at their jobs, but the worst a movie can be these days seems to be one of the following: random, boring, poorly timed, tone deaf. I don't see many movies anymore where all the decisions are bad ones.

Case in point: Eli Roth's Death Wish. This tends to be thought of as one of the most reviled movies of the year. I enjoyed watching it. And that's because Roth does a lot of things right in it. The thing he does wrong is, well, make a movie about a vigilante that kind of celebrates gun ownership in the year 2018. That makes it poorly timed and tone deaf. But not screamingly awful, as its reviews suggest it is.

Then you've got Holmes & Watson. According to most of you, this movie is an abomination, an offense against nature. This movie used to be called "a dumb comedy" and it got a pass as uninspired but harmless. The worst that happened to it was that it was quickly forgotten, rather than being held up as a shining example of one of the year's true turds.

Gotti has a bit of the sense of being a film out of time, as it's just not all that fashionable in 2018 to make a movie about a mob boss. You can't watch Gotti without watching it through a 2018 lens, in which it feels like an anachronistic example of the problems of a white male, the ultimate symbol of the patriarchy. We don't want those movies right now, and Connolly should have realized that.

Its only real female character is played by star John Travolta's wife, Kelly Preston, and she has about the typical level of agency for a mafia wife, which is to say not much. She also plays a number of her scenes pretty big, though she's the only one that ever stands out in a negative way for her acting (I'm sorry to say).

You also can't watch Gotti without thinking of a dozen other movies it obviously wants to be, most notably Goodfellas. Kevin Connolly, erstwhile Entourage star, is obviously not up to that. His attempt is limp, but it's not a travesty. It's bland more than anything else.

And you've also got some life imitating art here. In Entourage, the characters were always making movies that were kind of epic disasters. (And this is not the only way Entourage is rearing its head in 2018 cinema, as a real-world Aquaman movie has finally come out -- and is a massive hit.) In the end, all those characters ended up seeming like douchebags as well, and you felt that the actors themselves were probably douchebags for continuing to play their characters in such douchebaggy ways. Connolly played one of the least douchy characters, but he's not immune to it. Gotti is a bit like the movie Medellin that Billy Walsh made in Entourage, as it's a poorly received epic about a larger-than-life criminal character from history, made by a possible douchebag with an inflated sense of his own abilities. Perhaps cementing the comparison is that the actor who played Billy Walsh, Rhys Coiro, also appears in Gotti. That and the fact that Travolta and Preston both appear give this a feeling of a film made by a small circle of intimate acquaintances doing favors for each other, which is never a good look for a film and which marks many of cinema's greatest flops.

Toward that end, I think in 2018 we would expect Gotti to get some kind of smaller, quieter release, rather than opening on however many hundreds or thousands of screens it did. It's the kind of film that would just be another anonymous nothing if it showed up quietly on a couple off-brand platforms, or even went straight to video, as a lot of Travolta movies do these days. (I'm not sure what distinction I'm making between straight to streaming and straight to video, but you can probably follow where I'm coming from.) By presenting itself theatrically, it's being faulted for having the cojones to think of itself as worthier of our time than it really.

Even with all these factors to consider, this is still a film that is mediocre. Maybe a bit south of mediocre, but not a lot south.

And yet I myself gave it only 1.5 stars, perhaps because I'm feeling the urge to grade on a curve at this point in the year. Out of 140 movies I'm ranking in 2018 as of this writing, only ten have received a star rating under two from me. Only ten.

How could that be? Am I going soft? Have I been more selective this year? Am I throwing a bone to a lot of lame movies? Am I failing to properly assess my own level of enjoyment of a movie?

Or has the critical community shifted to make better use of the whole range of star ratings?

I think this latter must be the case. I feel like there was a time when truly wretched movies more regularly escaped the vetting process at the studio. Like, movies with obvious gaffes somehow crossed the finish line without anyone noticing. I think I'm looking for those gaffes when I'm handing out star ratings of 1.5, one and half-star.

Since we're mostly not finding those gaffes these days, other critics have adjusted their definition of what makes a terrible movie, while I have not. And maybe it's that this is always worth being graded on a curve. The problem is, you can't truly sense the contours of that curve until you have already looked at a sufficiently large body of movies in a particular year, if you even want to use the calendar year as your segment of study. By then you have already given out all your star ratings, which in most cases are issued at the time of viewing and not retroactively.

I suspect I should make this adjustment. Gotti probably really is a one-star movie, but I didn't find any individual technical aspect of it to be laughable. I was especially appreciative of the makeup used to age John Travolta and add deep grooves and wrinkles to his face, for example. It's a reasonably competent movie, it's just a bit random, boring, tone deaf and poorly timed.

You know, mediocre.

New Year's Eve with John C. Reilly and Kelly Macdonald

It's possible the programmers at the Dromana Drive-In realized they were scheduling a John C. Reilly double feature for one quarter of their New Year's Eve audience. However, they probably didn't notice they were also curating a Kelly Macdonald double feature.

However, I'm getting ahead of myself.

First of all: Happy 2019! It won't actually be the new year yet for most of you when I post this, but here in Australia, we're already nine-and-a-half hours into the last year of the decade.

Secondly, my family and I are spending five nights down on the Mornington Peninsula between the 29th and the 3rd. It's a long stretch of beach towns about an hour's drive from Melbourne, making it an ideal spot to feel like you're truly away from the city without having to drive for ages.

We had more or less this same holiday last year, and at that time, I had a desperate urge to scratch my vacation movie itch by going to the nearby Dromana Drive-In, about 15 minutes from where we were staying. Coco, my eventual #5 movie of the year, was one of the movies playing, and it seemed like the perfect beach holiday activity.

For whatever reason, we didn't do it. My wife must have seen my puppy dog eyes, but she didn't yield. Something about keeping the kids up too late, maybe. She did throw me a bone -- to extend the dog metaphor -- by taking our kids to the theater in nearby Sorrento for a viewing of Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle on our last day. We all really enjoyed it and that worked as a compromise.

When my wife scheduled another beach holiday for the same area this year, I think she knew she couldn't avoid the drive-in for the second year in a row, and indeed, she didn't want to. So she leaned into it. Not only would we go to the drive-in, we'd spend our New Year's Eve there, with fireworks at midnight and live music leading up to the 9 p.m. start time, once it was finally dark enough to start showing a movie. Because of the extra benefits, the tickets were $50 a head for adults and $30 for kids. Yep, that's one quick way to spend $160 on New Year's Eve.

But we both sensed it would be fun to do something festive and celebratory to ring in the new year -- which was also ringing in the fifth birthday of my younger son, a January 1st baby. What's another $160 here and there?

At one point she'd made the case to me that we should hold our Grinch viewing, which occurred on December 23rd, for this very eventuality. As it turns out, we could have. One of the options on four separate screens was The Grinch and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which would have been half of a great double feature. But I took my older son to a Spider-Man critics screening in order to review it, and though he would have been happy to see it again, we had initially determined it might be a little too intense for the younger one when debating whether to take him along to that screening. (Even becoming a big boy at age five.) As we ended up finding out, this was the one pairing in the deckchair cinema venue, which did not involve the essential drive-in experience of sitting in our cars. Better to have our kids' first drive-in experience -- or the first they can remember anyway (we took my older son twice when he was an infant) -- be of the traditional variety.

Two of the other three options would have been Aquaman and Bohemian Rhapsody or Bumblebee and Mortal Engines. I've already seen Rhapsody and Engines, but that wouldn't have been the most relevant factor in rejecting those pairings. We aren't even taking the older one to movies like Aquaman just yet, although he turns nine this year and that will probably be a good time to start. All three of Aquaman, Bumblebee and Mortal Engines seem to be about that level of maturity. Plus, we're seeing Aquaman at a different outdoor venue at the end of January, as discussed in this post. And Bohemian Rhapsody? I have no idea what the kids would do with that one except be bored.

But Ralph Breaks the Internet and Holmes & Watson seemed to be a perfect fit for us. Ralph was the one I'd targeted way back when I learned its release date, and knew we might be on the peninsula at that time. And sure, Holmes & Watson might be a bit ribald, but we figured that at least the younger one would be asleep by its 11 o'clock start time (which ended up closer to 11:30). The older one is just getting into comedy and they both loved Elf, which also stars Will Ferrell, so no further debate was necessary.

We spent a lazy afternoon recovering from a hot day at the beach, so we weren't there when doors opened at 5:30 or 6. When we did arrive just before 7, we'd already yielded some of the prime viewing angles to our more proactive neighbors, who were expanding outward from their cars with all sorts of camping chairs and a cornucopia of picnic-related paraphernalia. But we did find a decent spot on the left side, which we quickly switched for a more centered option that was a row further back. At the time we selected the spot, it had nice breathing room and few obstructions.

By the time we returned to our car, after dinner in the 1950s diner on site and throwing around a football for a bit by the playground, the situation had become a lot more dire. We could no longer properly open the doors on one side, and large pickup trucks with people sitting in the bed, not to mention SUVs with their hatchbacks open, were now proving significant obstacles. The kids had wanted to sit in the front seat, but my wife and I quickly determined we had no vantage point on the screen at all when we were sunken into the back. Desperation was on the verge of setting in.

Even though we saw our $160 flashing before our eyes, we didn't panic. The key decisions? Moving our car back about six feet, to improve its angle of incline, and removing the headrests from the front seats. With the headrests gone, the kids could see the screen from the back seat, and my wife and I didn't need them for our own viewing comfort. We were kind of like bugs in a rug, and I made an effort never to shimmy out of the passenger side unless absolutely necessary, since I had to suck in my gut to do so. But we cracked our beers and chocolate milks and were ready for the movies to start.

It occurred to me fairly early on that John C. Reilly was in both of these movies. If it's not clear to you, he provides the voice of Ralph, as well as the voice, face and all the actions of John Watson. In the U.S. he wouldn't have had two movies released on the same day, since Ralph Breaks the Internet came out at Thanksgiving, but here it seemed as though Boxing Day was Reilly's day to strut.

But it wasn't until deep into the second movie that I noted Kelly Macdonald's role in both films, which was oddly similar in its comedic function. It took Holmes (or was it Watson?) saying to her character that he didn't understand anything she was saying to remind me of the fact that Macdonald is also in Ralph Breaks the Internet -- in a role where nobody understands what she's saying. Macdonald is Scottish, as you will remember from her breakout in Trainspotting, and she leans into her accent as Merida in the Pixar movie Brave. Merida makes an appearance in the famous (notorious?) Disney princesses scene in Ralph, and spews forth an indecipherable combination of Scottish brogue and vocabulary. One of the other princesses says they can't understand her because she's "from the other studio." As Holmes and Watson's housekeeper, her dialogue is easier to understand, until it becomes more working class near the end and Holmes (or was it Watson?) comments on it.

I expected to enjoy Ralph, and thought Holmes looked dreadful from the trailers -- plus it had a rare 0 Rotten Tomatoes score at one point, though that's now up to a hearty 8. In the end, though, I derived more enjoyment from the second movie than the first.

Holmes & Watson is clearly the least fruitful of the collaborations between Ferrell and Reilly, which is probably to be expected when Step Brothers is one of my favorite comedies of all time and Talladega Nights has some really funny moments. But I'd be lying if I didn't admit that their line deliveries caused me to burst out laughing on a dozen occasions, if not more. It's perfect silly drive-in fodder (though by 1 a.m. I was desperate for it to be over, through no fault of its own). And though there are probably some things I wish my kids didn't hear -- neither of them fell asleep as we'd planned -- it was better than exposing them to action that was too intense. My older son and I laughed at the same stupid fart and vomit jokes, so that was nice.

Ralph Breaks the Internet produced very few laughs, and very few things that I thought were genuinely inspired, including its core emotional conflict. This is going to sound like sacrilege, but I'd take last year's similar The Emoji Movie over this any day. I think some people are conflating their affection for Wreck-It Ralph with this, but it's just not that good. And the extent to which Disney travels up its own ass in this movie -- with its use of the princesses, stormtroopers and other intellectual properties over which it now claims dominion -- really annoyed me.

Although I've rambled on at far too great of a length for you to read on either the last day of the old year or the first day of the new, I can't finish without telling you about the fireworks. With about two minutes to go before midnight they shut off the movies and replaced them with a clock counting down to zero. That was a relief, as part of me had thought they might just play the movies through the fireworks show, which would be counterintuitive but wouldn't really surprise me.

So we all piled out of the car, me in my socks, the kids in their pajamas, and counted down to both New Year's Day and my son's birthday. It was the first time my kids have been up at midnight on New Year's Eve, so that would have been fun enough itself.

But the fireworks ... oh the fireworks. They were shot off from a field just beyond the playground, so we were no more than a hundred yards away from them. I guess I expected a modest regional drive-in to give us a minute's worth of low-end pyrotechnics, and that would be good enough. These fireworks went on for six or seven minutes and included all variety of colorful explosions, some of which I'd never seen before. I thought I knew everything that fireworks technology had to offer, but had several welcome surprises in the offerings here. While my younger son covered his ears (NOT a great birthday present for him) and the older one looked on with a mixture of trepidation and awe, my wife and I ooh'd and ahh'd and both called it the best fireworks show we'd ever seen live or from this close. Right then and there our entry fee was justified.

We were all in bed by 2, and now I'm awake writing this.

And off we go for another year.