The Films of 2020: After We Collided (dir by Roger Kumble)

Posted on December 1, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The worst film of 2019 gets a sequel and the end result is one of the worst films of 2020. If nothing else, you have to appreciate the consistency of it all.

At the end of After, Tessa (Josephine Langford) and Hardin (Hero Fiennes Tiffin) had broken up, despite obviously being meant to be together. They broke up because Tessa discovered that Hardin only went out with her to win a bet. When After We Collided picks up their story, a few weeks have passed. Hardin is now sleeping in his car and getting new tattoos. Tessa is starting an internship at Vance Publishing. It doesn’t take long for Tessa and Hardin to get together and once again become the most boring couple on the planet.

Everyone warns Tessa about Hardin and, of course, Hardin spends a lot of time drinking and brooding and getting tattoos. But Tessa is now more independent and …. eh, who cares? I mean, even if Tessa is now a stronger and more confident character and Hardin is now more honest about his emotions, they’re still just as boring as ever and, if possible, Langford and Tiffin have even less chemistry in the sequel than they did in the first film. Langford has mastered one facial expression (a sort of low-energy smirk) and Tiffin is constantly screwing up his features whenever Hardin is supposed to be feeling emotional but neither one of them actually seems to be a living, full-blooded human being. Instead, they feel like bots, created to mouth repetitious dialogue and to go through the motions of the same plot over and over again. Everything they do seems to be pre-programmed. There’s not a spontaneous thought or moment to be found.

When Tessa isn’t flirting with Hardin and reading her favorite books (like Madame Bovary, because Tessa is edgy, y’all), she’s working at Vance Publishing. Her co-worker, Trevor (Dylan Sprouse) is in love with her but he’s too shy to come right out and say it. He does warn her that Hardin is just going to hurt her. Because the film is so ineptly edited, it’s hard to keep track of how much time passes. However, it does appear that Tessa becomes a valued and important member of the office in what seems to be just a matter of hours. Of course, everyone in the film loves Tessa because this is basically fanfic and a Mary Sue by any other name is still a cringey trope.

Speaking of fanfic, the author of After and its sequels has a cameo in this film. Anna Todd appears in a nightclub scene. A woman asks her what books she’s written and Todd smirks before saying, “Oh, this and that.” This inspired me to yell, “Fuck you!” as I looked for something to throw at the screen. Seriously, it’s one thing to be responsible for something terrible. It’s another thing to brag about it. Add to that, the cameo was so poorly executed that I half expected Todd to look straight at the camera and wink after delivering her line. In fact, it probably would have saved the scene if she had. At the very least, it would have at least suggested that the film was inviting us to laugh with it as opposed to at it.

That said, I will say that After We Collided is a slight improvement on After. In After, Josephine Langford actually tried to give an emotionally honest and consistent performance and, as a result, she was kind of boring because Tessa is an incredibly dull character. In After We Collided, Josephine Langford is just as bad as everyone else and it leads to a few unintentionally amusing moments. Unlike the rather stolid After, the sequel at least has a few moments of accidental camp.

My favorite moment was when a frustrated Tessa told Hardin that she needed to go for a walk to straighten out her thoughts. When Tessa returns, Hardin has his earbuds in and is listening to music so he can’t hear her. That still doesn’t stop her from standing behind him and repeating his name a few dozen times. Is he deliberately ignoring her or is the music just that good? The film never tells us but Tessa and Hardin are such annoying characters that it’s fun to think about all of the passive aggressive ways that they can make each other miserable.

After We Collided is reportedly going to be followed by two more sequels so we’ll eventually get to see if Hardin and Tessa can somehow become even more boring than they’ve already been. It’s not going to be easy but I think they might just pull it off.

Lisa Marie’s 10 Worst Films of 2019

Posted on January 20, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Well, I guess it’s finally that time!

It’s time for me to finally post my picks for the best (and worst) of 2019. This is something that I do every year. Usually, I manage to do it before the third week of January but I’ve been running behind. I’ll be posting my film, television, book, and music picks throughout today and maybe into tomorrow, depending on how long it takes me to narrow down my choices.

Let’s start with my picks for the 10 worst films of 2019! Below are my picks for the worst. Some of you will agree and some will disagree. In the end, what truly matters is that I’m right.

(Also be sure to check out my picks for 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, and 2010!)

10. The Upside (dir by Neil Burger)
9. Glass (dir by M. Night Shyamalan)
8. X-Men: Dark Phoenix (dir by Simon Kingberg)
7. The Kitchen (dir by Andrea Berloff)
6. The King (dir by David Michod)
5. Miss Bala (dir by Catherine Hardwicke)
4. The Dirt (dir by Jeff Tremaine)
3. Backdraft 2 (dir by Gonzalo López-Gallego)
2. The Laundromat (dir by Stephen Soderbergh)
1. After (dir by Jenny Gage)

Film Review: After (dir by Jenny Gage)

Posted on August 15, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

After, which was released back in April, tells the story of the world’s most boring college romance.

Tessa (Josephine Langford) is a beautiful, intelligent, but shy good girl who has just started college and who is struggling to fit in with her fellow students. Her new roommate has tattoos and a nose ring and Tessa’s just not sure if she can keep up with a group of campus rebels who drink, vape, and play extremely anodyne games of truth or dare. Tessa’s roommate demands to know why Tessa has so many old books. It’s because Tessa loves to read but we soon discover that her literary tastes seem to be dominated by her old high school reading list. In her lit class, she says that Pride and Prejudice is a “revolutionary feminist novel,” in a tone of voice that indicates that she googled “revolutionary feminism” for the first time the previous night.

Hardin (Hero Fiennes-Tiffin) is a bad boy because he has tattoos and he tends to smirk before leaving a room. Hardin seems like he’s …. well, I guess he’s supposed to be dangerous. He’s cynical and he says there’s no such thing as love but actually, he just needs someone to help tend to his emotional wounds. We know that he’s not really a bad dude because he likes Jane Austen and he has a copy of Wuthering Heights in his room, one that’s full of book marks, indicating that he is an actual serious student of literature. He also says that The Great Gatsby was all a dream. (Seriously, you know he’s serious about literature when he owns copies of both Wuthering Heights and The Great Gatsby. I imagine if the movie had lasted a few minutes longer, he would have said, “Hemingway was the poor man’s Hemingway,” and everyone’s mind would have been totally blown.)

Anyway, from the minute that a towel-clad Tessa returns to her dorm room from taking a shower and discovers Hardin sitting in the corner (and reading, of course!), it’s pretty obvious that they’re destined to fall in love. (Of course, considering that Hardin refused to leave the room so Tessa could get dressed, it was perhaps just as likely that she would end up filing a harassment complaint.) Of course, the path to true love never runs smoothly. Tessa has a sweet boyfriend that she’ll need to dump. Hardin has all sorts of emotional baggage that he needs someone to unpack for him. Still, while Hardin and Tessa are swimming in the nearby lake, Hardin says, “We could never be just friends….”

If this all sounds like bad fanfic, that’s because it is. After is based on a novel by Anna Todd. The novel started out as fan fiction and Hardin was originally named Harry Styles. Anyway, the novel sold a lot of copies and developed a reputation for being an innocent version of Fifty Shades of Grey so I guess it’s inevitable that it would later be adapted into an amazingly bad movie. I mean, the sex was the only good thing about Fifty Shades so I’m not sure why someone would say, “Let’s make a chaste version of this book!”

The main problem with After is that both Tessa and Hardin are such inherently boring characters and all the soft-focus shots in the world can’t make them interesting. It doesn’t matter how much time they spend interlocking their fingers, they never seem like people who you’d want to get stuck in a conversation with. Tessa may claim to be into “revolutionary feminism” but she only exists to find a man. She’s defined by how she feels about Hardin and Hardin seems to be the only thing she’s interested in. Meanwhile, Hardin is the worst type of phony intellectual, the self-centered rich boy who has a convenient tragedy for every occasion. Josephine Langford and Hero Fiennes-Tiffin are both attractive in a “I just shot a pilot for the CW” sort of way but neither has much screen presence and, together, they generate so little chemistry that they might as well be two wax figures staring into each other’s glass eyes.

“I’m a mess,” Hardin says and Tessa agrees, “I think we’re both a mess,” and everyone who is a real mess replies, ‘Oh, fuck off, you two.”

Review: The Walking Dead S4E09 “After”

Posted on February 9, 2014 by Arleigh

“I know we’ll never get things back to the way they used to be.” — Rick Grimes

We finally see the return of AMC’s very popular horror series, The Walking Dead, after a couple months on hiatus. Last we saw the series seemed to have done a sort of reboot of season 3’s season finale. A season finale that people thought would include not just the Governor’s assault on the prison, but the scattering of Rick’s group to the four winds. Season 3 didn’t end as expected and to say it was anti-climactic would’ve been a major understatement.

So, out goes Glen Mazzara as showrunner of the show and in comes Scott M. Gimple as head honcho for season 4. The change has been a nice change for the series which can’t seem to get on a consistent narrative track. Sure, it’s had major moments when it’s best thing on TV at that given moment, but it’s a far and few.

Gimple has done a much better job this season of letting the characters grow and let them dictate how the season unfolds. The zombies continue to remain the main threat (this season has shown them to be even more dangerous than in season’s past) but now interpersonal conflict adds a new level of complexities to keeping everyone safe and alive for one day more.

The first half of the season saw many new characters introduced (some given to more time to develop while others just cannon fodder) and some leave and some die. The biggest exits happening to be that of Hershel and the Governor himself. Both end up getting their ticket punched in the very assault on the prison that fans of the comic book have been wanting to see since the end of season 3. With that reboot of last season’s finale out of the way and with Rick and his group surviving out in the wilds in their own separate ways we now come to the start of the second half of The Walking Dead season 4.

Tonight’s return starts off pretty much moments after episode 8 with the prison now in flames and zombies pretty much roaming everywhere. We get Michonne returning to find something or someone. In the end, she ends up finding two zombies she turns into armless and jawless pets to help her blend in with the rest of the herd. She also manages to find Hershel’s reanimated head which she destroys and leaves behind but not before pausing for a moment to remember al that she has lost once more.

The episode jumps back and forth between Michonne’s time spent after fleeing the prison and those of Rick and Carl. The father and son duo are having a much tougher time. Rick is too injured from his fight with the Governor and their supplies of ammo and provisions are next to nothing. It doesn’t help that Carl’s resentment towards Rick has come to the surface after the disastrous events at the prison.

This episode was really about Michonne and Carl dealing with the events from the previous episode. Michonne has seen the group she has begun to see as a family scattered everywhere and a place that was becoming home destroyed. Worst yet would be seeing Hershel, who she was beginning to connect with, killed before her eyes. This causes her to revert back to how we first saw her in season 3. Alone once again and dragging along two zombie pets to keep her safe. Maybe being alone and away from any sort of emotional attachment would be best for her, but her own subconscious makes it finally known to her that this is not so.

She could sleepwalk through the rest of whats left of her life in this post-apocalyptic world or try and retain some of the humanity and connection with others that she was having within Rick’s group. Or she could just give up and end up becoming like the very thing that has destroyed the world. We see this in a sort of flashback dream sequence where we finally get some backstory on Michonne and her life before the fall of civiization. We now know where she got her original pair of zombie pets and why she had such a strong reaction to holding baby Judith back in the prison. This flashback Michonne was not the badass, katana-wielding survivor we’ve come to know the past two seasons, but one who seemed well-to-do with a nice family and a young son.

Like everyone else in this new world order she has lost just as much as everyone else, yet she seems to have found a way to adapt and prevail while others fail and die or succumb to their basest instincts. In the end, she chooses to get back what she had lost fleeing the prison and the zombie salughter she initiates in doing so seemed not just cathartic for her character but for the audience as well.

As for Carl, we see him attempting to deal with his current situation on his own. His resentment toward his father’s inability to protect him, Judith and everyone at the prison has begun to gnaw at him. He sees Rick as a failure not just as a father, but as a leader. His needling of Rick by mentioning Shane’s name and everyone who has died under his watch sounds like harsh truth being exposed, but also makes Carl come across like a rebelling teen trying to prove to his father that he is better than him. As we see throughout Carl’s segment, he can take care of himself, but he also has so many close-calls that his bravado makes him out to be like a teenager playing at being an adult when everyone knows he still has further to go.

Yet, as much as Carl might not be ready to cut off the parental strings, Rick understands that continuing to treat Carl like a regular kid who must be protected from the dangers of the world doesn’t belong in this new world. The Carl that Rick was searching for in the first two episodes of season 1 is no more. His son has become not just a veteran and capable survivor like him, but one who has left his childhood behind in order to be more helpful.

The Walking Dead will always be about the zombies and how this new world has danger for it’s survivors lurking in every home, building and shadows both zombies and humans. Yet, the show, especially this season, has tried to explore what this world has done to these survivors and how it’s either brought out the best, worst and everything in-between. We’ve seen characters fail to live up to the very ideals that allows one to keep a hold on their humanity while others succeed. Tonight we saw two survivors who have made a sort of peace with their situation and now moving forward to try and live one day more.

As the tagline for the second half of season 4 points out: “Don’t Look Back”.

Here’s to hoping that the show’s writer take that motto to heed and continue to look forward instead of looking back trying to fix what needed fixing. The show is now halfway through it’s fourth season and, for good or ill, it needs to move ahead with what it has established and let the audience decide whether they should continue to watch week in and week out.

Notes

Tonight’s episode was written and directed by The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman and series producer Greg Nicotero.
The cold opening for tonight’s episode was almost scene for scene out of the comic book with the exception of Hershel taking the place of Tyrese.
It was nice to see Aldis Hodge in the role of Michonne’s lover and father to her son. He was great in Leverage and nice to see him back on the small screen.
Michonne’s dream flashback gave us some answers as to her past, but it still doesn’t answer the one important question: where she got the katana and how did she got so proficient with it.
Still no word on baby Judith.
Talking Dead Guests: series producer and KNB FX head honcho Greg Nicotero and Michonne herself, Danai Gurira.