The Prodigy (2019)

The Prodigy seems to posit that sometimes, parents are right to be afraid of their own children. But this is a pretty typical ‘bad seed’ type of movie like The Omen or Orphan or however many other ones. It’s so well-branded at this point it might as well be a corporate logo – Scary Kid, complete with creepy things said in a low voice, odd deadpan faces and spooky lighting! Get one at your local WalMart today!

Director: Nicholas McCarthy

Starring: Taylor Schilling, Jackson Robert Scott

IMDb

We start off with a serial killer dying when the police find one of his victims, a woman whose hand he cut off for some reason. Then at the exact same moment, Taylor Schilling’s character Sarah’s baby is born! Gee, I can’t imagine they’re showing us this for any hacky reason related to reincarnation or possession of any kind. Must just be a weird coincidence! I’m sure they filmed lots of other things that didn’t make it in, like just filming totally mundane random things for the hell of it! That’s how movies work.

The kid, Miles, grows up, and to my surprise the movie actually took its time here, establishing a family dynamic and only slowly introducing the creepier elements. I guess the story is that while the boy is gifted almost from birth, he also begins exhibiting some weird tendencies like when he begins speaking Hungarian in his sleep and it turns out to be some stuff like “you whore, I’ll cut out your eyes,” and you know, as far as an eight-year-old’s conversational skills, this isn’t that bad. Most eight-year-olds are way less interesting to talk to.

I think the craziest time to me is when he beats up a little kid with a wrench at school, and somehow is not kicked out after that – you never see the other kid again, but Miles is still there. But then again, what’s a little aggravated battery when you’re a kid? It’s just part of growing up.

So Sarah just goes to this weird doctor who tells her that reincarnation is real and her son is probably fighting off an evil spirit in his brain that could take him over completely! Imagine going to what you thought was a legit doctor and hearing that. He goes into insane detail about this. It’s like if you went to a totally normal doctor’s office with a bad cough and the guy turned to you and said unironically “you’re turning into a werewolf.”

But because this is some real brainless idiotic shit, the guy is totally right! He was on the money! He should probably try gambling because he’d be good at it most likely.

I think one of my favorite parts is when it’s revealed that the kid has rigged a baby monitor to spy on what his parents are saying, attaching it secretly to a picture downstairs. Are we sure this is a serious movie? Seems more like some kind of wacky sitcom. What will this boy genius do next? Maybe rig a school PA to play some hip trendy music so all the cool kids will like him?

Sarah's husband Edward flies off the handle randomly, losing his temper as if this were a fundamental aspect of his character and he were a fully three-dimensional character. But really it just seems random, and like a way to get him out of the movie for a while. He also gets into a car crash as well later – man, the script really tossed this guy aside like an old girlfriend it got tired of. The movie knew what to do with him about as much as a kid staying at his weird bachelor uncle’s house for a weekend.

Oh, and when she takes him to see that doctor dude, Miles blackmails the doctor into telling Sarah there’s no possession after all – he set up this whole plan to frame the doctor by taking his drugs, taking pubic hair off the toilet to put in his mouth (!!) to simulate the doctor putting his dick in his mouth, it’s fucking crazy. The doctor, though, he should probably quit – would you want anyone that easily outsmarted to be in charge of your mind? He’d probably get distracted and turn you into a vegetable.

I guess they figure out that to get the killer out of Miles, they have to complete the task he was there to do, which is murdering the killer’s final victim who escaped years ago. Sarah actually buys a gun and it looks like she’s gonna do it herself, which is completely batshit, like really just an out-there plot.

But if you’re afraid the movie might actually try something different and daring, nope! She wimps out and instead Miles, possessed by the killer, brutally murders the woman. Hooray for exactly the most predictable thing you could possibly do! But at least we got to see something completely, pointlessly cruel on top of that! That makes it all OK. Or maybe it makes it a total piece of shit. I can never tell.

Then Sarah chases Miles out into a field and tries to shoot him. Miles says he’s totally evil now and is only the killer, with Sarah’s actual son now completely gone. But of course, some random farmer guy shows up exactly at the right time, conveniently not hearing anything the kid said, and shoots Sarah before she can kill Miles. Of course! It’s not a lazy plot twist at all! Sometimes people just materialize out of nowhere right when the villain needs them to!

Then of course you get the lame-ass ending where Miles is at some new foster family’s place and he sees the killer in the mirror, signifying that HE IS ACTUALLY THE KILLER. Oh, wait, we already knew that. What a great ending, just reiterating what we already knew from the first act of the movie like it's a surprise!

Fuck The Prodigy, man. This is some seriously lame, dated, half-assed nonsense. Every decision made is cliché and the movie is afraid to take risks. The characters exist only as arbitrary hollow chess pieces to move around. The plot shies away from anything exciting and there’s no point to any of it. What was the message here? Serial killers are bad? Yeah, real Einstein-level shit, guys. At least Taylor Schilling is great – hope she gets a better movie next time.

Image copyright of its original owner, I don't own it.

Orange Is The New Black's Season Four & the Viewer's Prism - SPOILERS

The new Orange is the New Black season is probably the show's most audacious and challenging yet. I say that because there were parts of this that were awful and gut-wrenching to watch. This is challenging, forward thinking TV, and yeah, there are going to be some SPOILERS in this thing, so if you don't want that, go back on Netflix and finish the show.

I guess I'll just address the elephant in the room immediately, with Poussey Washington's death in Episode 12, “The Animals.” It's a horrible thing to watch, her being suffocated on the floor, and notably by Bayley, who was the most harmless looking, innocent seeming guy prior to this – that's really, really something, I think.

The thing for me was that I didn't know how to feel – Poussey's death was a tragedy, and Bayley was responsible yet is not some kind of evil psychotic monster like some of the other guards. That's important. Several characters on the show in the last episode – Caputo and Coates most notably – talk about how prison changes you, how Bayley is ruined after that. And obviously, that's the complete wrong reaction to have – like in the case of the Stanford rapist, talking about his life when another person has died (or in the Stanford case, been raped) because of him is unspeakably shitty. But Bayley isn't portrayed as some kind of evil monster either. His actions are awful and what happened is awful, because he's a moron who wasn't good at his job. He feels bad and he should fucking feel bad. But he isn't written as some kind of cartoon villain monster like he would be in other shows. It would be cheaper if he was written that way. He had to be a fully fleshed out character.

It's just a shitty situation. And the show does well at testing your moral compass and then smashing it up and throwing it into a blender.

The flashbacks in the episode are about Bayley basically going through life as this moron slacker kid. Getting thrown in jail for drinking on top of a water tower, getting fired from a job for giving free ice cream to girls. It's all inconsequential goofy petty bullshit that happens and none of it means a thing, because he's an upper-middle-class white kid and the world's his oyster. Even when asked why he's working at the prison, his answer is to shrug and say he's here “until the next thing.” Nothing has any meaning and he's just this aimless loser who gets by because he was born in a pretty privileged area and had a decent life up to now. He doesn't look like the kind of guy who'd kill someone, so when he does without meaning to, its his future and well being that are worried about – not that of Poussey or her friends, family, or the general injustice of it all. Infuriating shit. It's supposed to be – you're supposed to be mad at this.

The finale is even more gut wrenching – we see Caputo and the MCC PR people floundering desperately, Poussey's body left for hours on the kitchen floor while they try to spin it their way. Caputo, who has talked a big game all season about really helping these inmates and being there for them, can't do anything – he's paralyzed and his actions come off as cowardly. He's a fairweather friend of sorts, with good, charitable intentions during the good times, but then unable to do a thing during the bad solely from his own incompetence. And then again, how can we blame him? Any major insurrection against MCC would lose him his job and then nothing would ever change at all. He's doing what he can. But as in real life, doing what one can isn't always enough and it won't always matter a damn.

The show excels at creating these situations that are so morally complex that there is no right answer and people will view them through different lens. It's easy and valid to say that Caputo's a piece of shit and Bayley is trash and the flashbacks about him are unnecessary, because a person died, a black person, who are so often victimized by police in real life. It's also easy to say that they're all doing their best and things are fucked either way and nothing is simple. That's valid, too.

The show is a sort of reflective mirror-prism for how you look at any number of situations in life. Not everyone is supposed to find this season pleasant or easy to watch. I think that is what makes it great art, and what puts this show up there with Breaking Bad and The Wire for groundbreaking TV that portrays the human experience. I've read a handful of editorials from black viewers who absolutely hated this season:

http://jawnbaejaeger.tumblr.com/post/146175495753/every-white-person-talking-about-how-poussey

http://wearyourvoicemag.com/more/entertainment/orange-is-the-new-black-trauma-porn-written-white-people

http://verysmartbrothas.com/yeah-im-finished-with-the-black-suffering-trauma-porn-of-orange-is-the-new-black/

They are perfectly justified in doing so. Why wouldn't they? It more directly affects their community. It talks about a problem they deal with every day and which is so much more real to them. Expecting them to react to Poussey's fictional death in the same way as someone like me is farcicial. It's never going to happen. I don't know shit compared to them.

So, like I said – the mirror-prism thing. Your view of this sequence of events in OITNB is solely dependent on your view of the real life things going on. Some people won't like this stuff because it's uncomfortable or it comes off as exploitative, and that's fine, they are perfectly justified. I would never try and patronize them by acting like I know better. I don't. I have no idea what they go through and wouldn't dream of trying to push my worldview on theirs. I'm just a guy myself, seeing this show and I like it because I'm into real life news, and seeing art that portrays things in this manner interests me. But other people have different experiences and they may find this to be offputting. I don't think the show really wanted to please everyone anyway. What it wanted was to show this stuff – to open the window a bit. Let us gaze out.

But as sad as this all is, what you should be taking away is that young black people die at the hands of the law way too often in real life. This is a fiction, but what's happening mirrors things that the black community has faced for real. This is nothing compared to real life. Black lives do matter, and the show's portrayal of these current events is maybe not even necessary when there's so much real evidence of this kind of thing happening. That's the one flaw here. It's ugly, sad and horrific, and there are no punches pulled. Maybe it doesn't need to exist or be shown. I don't know - but it is here. And so I'm writing this.

The show pulls this trick, of testing your morals, over and over again. Sam Healy is an odious man, a racist and a misogynist who uses his position in power at the prison to work out his mommy issues. But he has other dimensions to him and we see the show's portrayals of him as sympathetic in his attempts to find real human connection, to feel good at his job, to help out. He doesn't often succeed, because of his own limitations as a person. Not everyone gets a happy ending. That's realistic. The point of portraying him this way is that even terrible people have dimensions and complexities. Lots of movies and shows don't have anywhere near this kind of insight. Should art only humanize and explore those that are widely considered good and respectful people? It's all fiction at the end of the day. We should use it to challenge ourselves a bit.

Likewise with the perhaps even worse Coates, who raped Pennsatucky last year. He was widely reviled last season. But this year, we see that he feels confused and starts to regret what he did after he learns what Pennsatucky thinks of him – you know, that she isn't just avoiding him to play coy. The fact that a show with such a feminist message and written by so many women is doing this is pretty key here. For one, it's the same thing as Healy, this humanization of a rapist, showing that he's still a person at the end of the day with his own complexities. You don't have to like him. In fact you're probably not supposed to. But his characterization, his humanization shows a different point – rapists are not the shadowy monster in the bushes, and they aren't somehow less human than us, and it isn't okay to feel vindicated or different if you've done something to someone without their consent just because you aren't that old stereotype. Rapists are guys who appear pretty normal from far away. That's what Coates shows.

The fact that the show gets these reactions is what makes it great to me though. I don't think art needs to be likable or palatable to everyone. Better if it's not, even. I want art to surprise and challenge me and make me consider things in ways I hadn't. OITNB does that big time here. That should be the whole purpose of art. People not liking something is fine. With a show like this, it'll be a given. You shouldn't want art to be easily palatable and accessible to everyone, because what's going on then? You're not taking a real stance, you aren't saying anything controversial or exciting or electrifying, and it's harder to come out with something really great if you're just taking the middle of the road and not trying to push any buttons. Does all art have to be likable first and foremost, over any other quality? I don't think it does.

Images copyright of their original owners. I don't own any of them.

What Makes a Likable Character?

In a lot of my reviews – and a lot of reviews in general – there's a certain emphasis placed on whether or not a character is likable. As relating to a character is often extremely important in how much a certain movie or TV show resonates with you, the concept isn't exactly one that can be brushed over lightly. But what makes a character likable? What draws us back time and time again to characters that, in all actuality, are just figments of someone else's imagination?

Well, I think it's simply the level to which said characters acts like a real human being. This is a product of both the writing and the actor's performance – a sort of double-team that comes together and creates a great character. A great writer can shade and detail a character all day and night and overcome a weak acting performance. And vice versa – a mediocre writer may not craft the best character, but a great actor can really bring out the best. And in both scenarios it may not work out because of one or the others' shortcomings.

The real treat is when you get a great actor AND a great written character. That's the golden prize at the bottom of the proverbial cereal box.

Hmm, nope, there was no prize in this one...

I think a lot of people define a realistic, likable character with one that fits their own morals and values – one that is an upstanding person morally, socially, etc. who doesn't do anything wrong and doesn't make mistakes. Call it a Superman complex – they want a character with as few flaws as possible. After all, what is there NOT to like about an upstanding, nice person?

That's fine. I don't have a problem with that definition – after all, everyone's got different standards and qualities that appeal to them. However, it does sort of bother me when I see certain characters lambasted for their flaws as if those doing the lambasting have never made mistakes. I'm of course talking about Piper Chapman from Orange is the New Black and Skyler White from Breaking Bad.

I've just seen endless bitching and moaning about how unlikable and awful these characters are. I dunno, that's your prerogative – I find them both to be wonderful to watch and great additions to their shows.

Piper is a rich, preppy white girl. That's basically the core of her character. She's melodramatic, kind of selfish and often given to pretentious speeches and moralizing. That's her character. Haven't you known people like that in real life? I have. She may not be someone you want to date or hang out with, but I just don't think that's a prerequisite to a likable character. It's certainly not a prerequisite to a well-written one, I can tell you that much. I guess some people really just hate watching characters they find annoying, but I think it'd be boring if every character was someone I found completely in-line with my own views and personality.

While she has flaws and shortcomings, the difference between this and some lesser shows and movies is simple – the show actually accentuates those shortcomings and uses them for character development. There's a lot of playing around in Orange is the New Black with this – several characters will talk to each other about how awful she is and then the viewer sort of thinks “hey, they have a point; she WAS wrong there.” But the brilliance of the show is when they swing you back around to her side later. Nobody is fully wrong and nobody is fully right in every situation. I've spoken about this in another blog post in more detail, but I think the show does a great job at showing their characters' flaws in equal proportions.

Plus, the brilliant performance by Taylor Schilling just works on so many levels. She's a really great actress and communicates a kind of frailty combined with naivete that manages to bounce off the hardness of prison life quite well. Great, great stuff.

Breaking Bad is even more of a controversial one, as Skyler White received so much hate throughout almost all of this show. Actress Anna Gunn – who is brilliant and was a great asset to the show – actually received threats of physical violence over it, which is so insane that I don't even have words to describe how insane it is.

Needless to say, if you wanted to see Skyler act differently than she did on Breaking Bad, you missed the point of the show.

I'll fill in the basics for those who never saw it – basically she's protagonist Walt's wife, who remains oblivious at first about his illicit drug making activities. She figures it out fairly quickly, though, and then proceeds to try and get him out of her life for good, then later help him for her own financial gain and family necessity, and so on – the relationship is quite complex and multi-faceted. Which is why it's a shame when people boil it down to 'she's a nag who just doesn't understand what Walt is doing.'

It's bullshit, really. This is a show full of drug dealers, criminals and all other sorts of miscreants and crooks, and somehow the one most hated character is the main character's wife who reacts as any sane person would upon finding out their spouse was making drugs. Yes, he said he was doing it for his family – no, that wasn't the whole truth and no, that doesn't excuse what he was doing. You might say 'oh, well if MY husband or wife was doing that, I'D understand'...well, it's easy to say such things from an armchair when it isn't happening to you.

I guess I just don't get what people want from this character. Do they want her to act like a completely submissive wallflower of a wife, never questioning Walt's motives and never challenging him? Would that have added more drama instead of taking away from the show? I've thought about this more than I should have, and really I just can't come up with any alternatives. You don't like the character; okay. How should she have acted instead? What would you have written into the show differently? I'd actually really like to hear different opinions here that do more than just bash the character.

Everything she does is realistic. The character is portrayed as a scared housewife trying to protect her family. I guess people just find her mannerisms annoying or the way she talks, or something like that – but is that really a reason to hate a character so thoroughly? I don't know. Anna Gunn is a stellar actress and portrays the character as well as any of the others are portrayed. I wouldn't even dream of trading her role for anything else in the show.

Both of these characters are flawed, sure – nobody's saying they're perfect, and it wouldn't be realistic if they were. However, as I said – the difference is that they're written so that the story works with their flaws, rather than ignoring them. Certainly this is different from movies like Hollow Man, in which the main character just unrepentantly acts like a dick to people and, surprise, is the main villain and dies at the end. Where's the drama? It's exactly what you'd expect to happen to that character, and what you want to see happen. There's zero complexity.

It just comes down to the level of writing you put in, at the end of the day. If your script has a character acting in shitty, awful ways and the movie doesn't try and address that at all – whether condoning or satirizing or punishing them for it – then your script comes off as hackneyed and will turn people off.

You can have characters selling drugs, killing people or lying to their loved ones, and if you write it correctly, then the audience will still want to see what happens to them and may even root for them in some cases - see Walter White from the aforementioned Breaking Bad for the most popular recent example.

But if you just make them do horrible things for no reason, for no consequence or dramatic purpose? Well, nobody really wants to see that.

Hell, even a generic Superman-style boy-scout character can be good. Just look at Rick Grimes from the Walking Dead!

He's a good old country-boy sheriff from a small town thrust in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. As is expected in this kind of story, he becomes the leader. And he's another example of an unfairly maligned character. People went on and on back in the early seasons of the show about how bland and boring the guy was, but I don't see it. I think people as good-natured and somewhat naive as him can be realistic, and in a zombie apocalypse, his sort of old-world views contrasted brilliantly with the hard reality around him.

His constantly trying to help individual people and doing what he considered right, even when it seemed foolhardy to everyone around him, was a big part of the appeal of the early seasons. Watching him grow into the brutal, world-weary leader he is in the new season is the definition of character development. It's really well done.

So really, there are lots of ways to make likable characters. You'll make your own definition and maybe disagree with me on some of these points. And that's good – it's good to have that kind of discourse. Go free my children and discuss! Unless you don't agree with me, in which case I will simply ignore you.

Images copyright of their original owners; I own none of them.