By Alex Gehrlein ‘19

The Mule is neither the best, nor the worst film in Clint Eastwood’s directorial arsenal, but it is certainly one of the weakest. Coming from the heights of Gran Torino and Million Dollar Baby to a string of middling to mediocre films is rather disappointing, especially considering what we know Eastwood is capable of. It seems that for every good movie he makes he makes one that you might just as well skip. Personally, I prefer Eastwood as an actor, but that might just come down to the caliber of movies he was given to star in compared to the scripts he’s been working with recently. Films like The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly will live on forever as some of the great pieces of cinema, while something like The Mule will fade from memory about a month after you’ve seen it.

What exactly is the problem here? It’s kind of hard to put your finger on. The movie is pretty entertaining, it does a pretty good job of keeping your attention, the performances are all pretty good, the script is pretty well written, and the cinematography is alright. That I think is the problem: everything is just okay. Nothing stands out. You don’t have amazing characters like Walt Kowalski. The story isn’t captivating like Million Dollar Baby. The cinematography isn’t as expressive as Unforgiven. The Mule does everything just adequately enough to be entertaining, but if you poke any holes in it you’ll find it’s completely hollow inside.

The story follows Earl Stone, an aging horticulturist, who after having his house foreclosed on, finds himself in need of money and takes the leap into drug trafficking. This transition is done quite laughably, with a character making a sloppy proposition to Eastwood’s character almost as if he were asking him how the weather was. Once the drug trafficking plot gets going the film picks up, but stops along the way for some poorly outlined cartel cutaways that add little to nothing to the film. The best scenes are when Eastwood is out on the road. It’s a joy to watch him behind the wheel or toying with his handlers. These scenes would work all the better if there was a better structure around them to support the rest of the film.

It’s a shame the film is this middling though, since Eastwood is working with some of his best collaborators. Bradley Cooper returns from American Sniper, and what excited me the most was the return of screenwriter Nick Schenk, who wrote Gran Torino back in 2008. Eastwood’s directing career has seen ups and downs, this film falls somewhere in between.

6/10

By: Alex Gehrlein ‘19

What can I say about this film? How should I say it? That is all I can think right now. Does this even count as a film? If a video game is a piece of entertainment where the player makes choices that affect the world in which it takes place, is this really a video game? Is it somewhere between a video game and a film? If so, what does that mean as far as classification goes? None of these questions can really be answered properly. There is no classification yet for just whatever it is that Black Mirror: Bandersnatch “is,” but I can tell you full heartedly that I enjoyed it quite a bit.

If you know anything about Black Mirror, it probably has to do with science fiction and nihilism. The show is the bleak brainchild of Charlie Brooker, a man it would be insulting to call anything but a genius at this point, and focuses on the darker side of technology and how it could possibly change our lives for the worse in the near future. This film is the crowning jewel of a fantastic seven year series, which has not ended yet; I just can’t see how they could possibly top this. I’m being vague; let me tell you what Bandersnatch is.

Bandersnatch follows Stefan Parker, a young video game designer in 1984, as he attempts to adapt a choose your own adventure book into a video game. Players are given the choice between two options at different points in the story, and the intersecting outcomes lead to multiple ways of viewing the journey your character takes. For example, you could choose to take one path or another, engage with an enemy or run away. The possibilities are endless. The same is true with this film. The mechanics are introduced subtly. You start by picking between different food or music options, but soon find that the choices you make have an actual impact on where the story is headed. Events loop in on themselves; scenes repeat with deeper meaning; it’s all fascinating from a film theory standpoint.

What worries me about this format is that I don’t see much room for it to move further. Spend a few hours within the film and you will find that this story is perfect for the medium in which it’s being told; in fact, it couldn’t work properly if it wasn’t being told this way. It is difficult to wrap your head around what Brooker has to have gone through to make all the pieces fit together in terms of structure, but no matter where this story takes you, or where you take this story, things will always end with a feeling of existential dread.

The performances and direction are all fantastic, even a step up from the series’ normal aesthetic. Returning director David Slade makes all the pieces fit together from a cinematic standpoint while incorporating some really fun visual choices that only enhance the immersion you can find in the story. I’ve already gone on about the structure of the writing, but the dialogue is just as good. Will Poulter’s character has some particularly fantastic chunks of dialogue that I hope you get to see depending on the path you take.

I spent a little over two and a half hours playing around with this world. I’ve seen four of the five possible endings, but I will never be able to see all the possible ways of getting there. Netflix claims that there are at least a trillion outcomes for how the viewer can take part in this story. I don’t know how they calculated that number, but I’m obliged to believe them. Netflix says that you need ninety minutes to get a satisfying experience with this story; I can’t say if there will ever be enough for me to be fully satisfied with it. I plan to watch it again, watch it with friends, and read as much as I can find about the behind the scenes. This is an unexplored area of cinema that Charlie Brooker’s team has just taken the first big leap into. Odds are we will never see the same version of this film, but I can say with conviction that we will both leave in awe.

9.5 / 10

By: Alex Gehrlein ‘19

Every couple of years we get a new Sherlock Holmes. Robert Downey Junior, Benedict Cumberbatch, Ian McKellen and a talking gnome have all taken up the hat and pipe within the past decade to varying success. I haven’t seen, nor do I ever intend on seeing, Sherlock Gnomes, but I am shocked to say that it seems like critics have looked more favorably on animated garden decorations than they have Holmes & Watson.

I love Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly, and would sincerely defend any of their past collaborations as being great works of comedic filmmaking. They may be silly, they may be dumb, but they came out at a time where I was just the right age for those things to reach me effectively. Step Brothers and Talladega Nights are endlessly quotable and completely unforgettable. I hope I can forget this film.

Nobody seems to be trying. The director, the writers, the cinematographer, the stars. Nobody. This is a movie intended to grab cash, and bank off of the audience’s attachments to the two stars. I can’t deny that Ferrell and Reilly have chemistry, even in this. I laughed out of excitement just from seeing the two of them back together on the screen. One would think that such an easily recognizable and perfectly parodiable property as Sherlock Holmes would give two upper class comedians enough material to make a dozen movies before getting to something that is of such low quality. I just can’t understand it.

It’s not really worth going in to the technical aspects of this film; they’re all pretty bad. There are two good jokes in the movie and they’re about heroin and the Titanic. Everything else just comes off as lazy improv, but there’s nothing on the same level as even the outtakes to a film like Talladega Nights (“I like to picture Jesus in a tuxedo T shirt…”).

This was a good idea for a film executed with no thought behind it. The people working on this film have managed to make even crazier stuff work before, but can’t pull through on a simple Sherlock parody. Avoid this movie. If you’re unfamiliar with any of the previously mentioned films, you’ll hate this movie. If you know and love them, you’ll be depressed.

2/10