REVIEW: The Lost City

Your reasons for browsing a movie like "The Lost City" probably aren't so different from mine. Me? I just wanted to see Daniel Radcliffe back in the mainstream world. You may have wanted to relish Sandra Bullock or Channing Tatum making their rounds in the spotlight, or, just as likely, wanted to see them together. Maybe word of Brad Pitt's extended cameo did it for you. Whoever caught your attention, it was certainly one of the A-listers because a film like this doesn't have a lot to offer outside its movie star parade. And yet, I can't say I don't like the film.

Loretta Sage is a best-selling writer in the field of romance-adventure struggling to remind herself why she does what she does. Her latest writing block is a product of 1. her grieving the recent death of her husband and 2. her growing insecurity over the prestige of her career. Maybe eloquent prose is wasted on an audience that will read anything with Channing Tatum's exposed bosom on the front cover.

Loretta gets some firsthand experience in the type of romantic adventure she pens when she is kidnapped by a hungry millionaire who needs her to translate a map to an ancient treasure from her latest book (turns out that was a real treasure). Her dutiful cover model, the good-hearted but dim-witted Alan, makes it his mission to rescue her from the jungle, if nothing else to prove that he's more than just a handsome mannequin. He catches up to her quickly, and they decide they might as well find the treasure while they're in town anyway.

The movie actually starts from a place of cynicism. Cynicism toward romance-adventure as a genre, cynicism toward people who read romance-adventure, cynicism toward the media that promotes romance-adventure. This is a movie where characters regularly ask things like "Why are things exploding?" Early on, the movie risks trying to be too smart for its own good. Whether Alan and Loretta find the treasure--or love--is almost incidental. The real tension with this film was whether or not the film was going to feel comfortable being itself.

The movie leans a little bit too close to irony, but it touches base with sincerity at varying points. I'll give credit where it's due: it actually manages to turn what could have easily been a hackneyed takeaway into something with buds of profundity.

The movie doesn't put a lot of thought into the structural integrity of its own narrative (Fairfax is so bent on getting his macguffin that he'll kidnap a romance novelist to get what he wants!). Neither does it particularly surprise the audience with any clever storytelling turns. This puts almost all the weight of the film on the chemistry of the performers. Graciously, the star players all show up to bat.

Bullock's strength has always been her ability to straddle awkwardness with grace, and that talent shines as bright as ever. I'll even go as far as crediting her as the biggest single element that keeps the film's climax from dipping into cliche.

Channing Tatum's Alan sorts through not only his own baggage, but also all the insecurity that Loretta passes onto him as a sort of focal point of her disillusionment with her own literary work. Alan's own insecurity over him maybe not being the hero type might read more naturally if he weren't played by an A-lister like Channing Tatum. Just so, I won't deny that Tatum carries the film on his back, even when it's infested with leeches.

Daniel Radcliffe as a master villain never works as well as you want it to, in part because he never really gets to rise to the level of madness of the madcap adventure. Still, I think he's got it in him to give us Jack Lemmon's "Professor Fate" brand performance. I hope he gets that opportunity one of these days.

The film pads itself with narrative shorthand and doesn't let the audience think too deeply about its patchwork plotting, but I won't deny that its internal structure works. This is the story of a woman inundated with the flaccidity of her own commercialized existence wondering if there is real love and real adventure still to be had for her, and the film's execution is just filling enough that it doesn't have to be particularly novel. The Lost City remains a unicorn at the box office, and not just because it's the rare non-franchise film to not only play but find some success. Praising it gives it a little too much credit. Condemning it just isn't worth it.

Congratulations. You've beaten us.

--The Professor

Comments

REVIEW: You, Me & Tuscany

I've learned not to be ungrateful for movies like You, Me & Tuscany . It's the kind of picture that can be easily written off as predictable or derivative. And Kat Cairo's film definitely rides on some genre shorthand. Halle Bailey's Anna has very similar flaws to most rom-com heroines as this untethered 20-something trying to figure out how to stretch a check. And the story itself lands about where every one of these movies do. (Though, remind me, how does every Tom Cruise movie end?) After the screening concluded, one of the ladies sitting behind me even said something much like, "Yeah, that was a lot like While You Were Sleeping ." But she didn't sound smug in her assessment. Her pronouncement was more encoded with the excitement that comes with discovery--the realization that she had found something like a worthy successor. And as a fan of Sandra Bullock's second-best rom-com, I was inclined to agree with this la...

Reveling in the Mixed Messages of Miss Congeniality

In book ten of Metamorphoses, Greek poet Ovid tells the tale of Pygmalion, a talented sculptor living in the height of ancient Greek society. According to the story, Pygmalion’s sculpting prowess was so impeccable that one of his pieces, a marble woman he christened Galatea, was said to be the lovelier than any woman of flesh and blood. Pygmalion was so taken by his creation that he brought her exotic gifts, kissed her marble cheeks, even prepared a luxurious bed for her. Pygmalion so pined to be loved by Galatea that he prayed to the goddess Aphrodite to allow Galatea to reciprocate his love and affection. Aphrodite was apparently in a good mood that day, so she granted Pygmalion’s wish, giving life to Galatea, whom he then wed. The story of Pygmalion is in essence the story of a man who creates his own idealized woman out of whole cloth (or more appropriately, marble), endowing her with all the traits that he finds appealing or alluring. The story also provides a m...

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: Westerns Riding off into the Sunset

In both my Les Miserables and Moulin Rouge! pieces, I made some comment about the musical as the genre that receives the least love in the modern era. I stand by that, but I acknowledge there is one other genre for which you could potentially make a similar case. I am referring of course to the western film. See, musicals at least have Disney keeping them on life alert, and maybe one day we’ll get the Wicked movie Universal has been promising us for ten years [FUTURE EDIT: All good things, folks ]. But westerns don’t really have a place in the modern film world. Occasionally we’ll get films like No Country for Old Men, which use similar aesthetics and themes, but they are heavily modified from the gun-blazing-horseback-racing-wide-open-desert w esterns of old. Those died, oddly enough, around the same time musicals fell out of fashion. Professors Susan Kord and Elizabeth Krim...

The Belle Complex

As Disney fandom increasingly moves toward the mainstream, the discussions and questions that travel around the community become increasingly nuanced and diverse. Is the true color of Aurora's dress blue or pink? Is it more fun to sit in the back or the front on Big Thunder Mountain? Is the company's continued emphasis on producing content for Disney+ negatively impacting not only their output but the landscape for theatrical release as a whole? However, on two things, the fandom is eternally united. First, Gargoyles was a masterpiece in television storytelling and should have experienced a much longer run than it did. Second, Belle's prom dress in the 2017 remake was just abominable. While overwhelmingly successful at the box office, the 2017 adaptation is also a bruise for many in the Disney community. Even right out the gate, the film came under fire for a myriad of factors: the auto-tuned soundtrack, Ewan McGregor's flimsy accent, the distracting plot...

REVIEW: HOPPERS

In the 1950s under the threat of nuclear warfare, Hollywood premiered such exercises as The Day the Earth Stood Still or War of the Worlds where an alien power would pass judgment on humankind, holding its fate in its hands. Here in the 2020s under the shadow of such threats as climate change, Hollywood sends to be our judge ... beavers. Let me back up ... Daniel Chong's new film from Pixar Animation, Hoppers , sees Mabel (Piper Curda), a college student whose self-appointed mission is to preserve the glade where she used to find sanctuary with her now deceased grandmother. Her biggest opponent is hometown boy and beloved mayor, Jerry (Jon Hamm), who has designs to plow over the glade in order to open his new freeway--estimated to save travelers four whole minutes of commuting. Mabel gets her golden opportunity when she uncovers secret technology pioneered by her professor which allows a human to rem...

Silver Linings Playbook: What are Happy Endings For Anyway?

Legendary film critic Roger Ebert gave the following words in July of 2005 at the dedication of his plaque outside the Chicago Theatre: Nights of Cabiria (1957) “For me, movies are like a machine that generates empathy. If it’s a great movie, it lets you understand a little bit more about what it’s like to be a different gender, a different race, a different age, a different economic class, a different nationality, a different profession, different hopes, aspirations, dreams and fears. It helps us to identify with the people who are sharing this journey with us. And that, to me, is the most noble thing that good movies can do and it’s a reason to encourage them and to support them and to go to them.” Ebert had been reviewing films for coming on forty years when he gave that assessment. I haven’t been doing it for a tenth as long. I don’t know if I’ve really earned the right to pontificate in this same manner. But film ...

The Case for Pre-Ragnarök Thor

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has become such a fixture of pop culture that it’s difficult to imagine that the whole ordeal was actually a massive crapshoot. The biggest conceit of the MCU has been its ability to straddle a thousand different heroes—each with their own stories, casts, and universes—into one cohesive whole. It’s a balancing act like nothing that’s ever been attempted before in the hundred years of filmmaking. A lot of the brand’s success can be attributed to the way that each individual story adheres to the rules of its own specific universe. The Captain America movies serve a different purpose than the Spiderman movies, and all the movies in the Captain America trilogy have to feel like they belong together. There are, of course, questions posed by this model. In a network of films that all exist to set up other ...

REVIEW: The Running Man

A lot of people have wanted to discuss Edgar Wright's new The Running Man outing as "the remake" of the 1987 film (with Arnold Schwarzenegger playing a very different Ben Richards). As for me, I find it more natural to think of it as "another adaptation of ..." Even so, my mind was also on action blockbusters of the 1980s watching this movie today. But my thoughts didn't linger so much on the Paul Michael Glaser film specifically so much as the general action scene of the day. The era of Bruce Willis and Kurt Russell and the he-men they brought to life. These machine-gun wielding, foul-mouthed anarchists who wanted to tear down the establishment fed a real need for men with a lot of directionless anger. This was, as it would turn out, the same era in which Stephen King first published The Running Man , telling the story of a down-on-his luck man who tries to rescue his wife and daughter from poverty by winning a telev...

Notoriously Human: Alicia and the "Strongfemalecharacter"

The further I dive into classical Hollywood, the more taken I am by all its fascinating contradictions. This wasn't, I'll acknowledge, a period in American history which we think of as being kind toward women or recognizing their autonomy. The Mark of Zorro (1920) I think the collective point of reference most people have for women in old movies is the sort of hero's trophy who waits around for the guy to swoop in and carry her out of the mess she has made for herself, and that image has some basis in how Hollywood itself behaved. But film history covers a lot more than just that one type. The Hays Code prohibited illicit sexual material on film, among other things, and was in effect until the early 1960s. Because sexual content was greatly monitored and regulated, female characters weren’t really objectified--at lea...

An Earnest Defense of Passengers

I've heard a lot of back and forth over what the purpose of film is and what we should ask from it. Film as a social amenity kind of has a dual purpose. It's supposed to give the population common ground and find things that people of varying backgrounds and beliefs can unify around. On the other hand, film also creates this detached simulated reality through which we can explore complex and even testing ideas about the contradictions in human existence. In theory, a film can fulfill both functions, but movies exist in a turbulent landscape. It's very rare for a film to try to walk both lanes, and it's even rarer for a film to be embraced upon entry for attempting to do so. Let me explain by describing the premise of one of my favorite movies, Morten Tyldum's 2016 film, Passengers . A key piece of this film ’s plot revolves around the main character, Jim Preston, a passenger onboard a spaceship, who premat...

Films and Feelings

Search This Blog