What Are You Watching?

The difference between Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and 30 Rock can most clearly be seen in their treatment of their main characters, so that’s where we’re going to start. For instance, one of these shows has a main character who, despite many seemingly-insurmountable obstacles, fights her way through everything life throws at her and determinedly climbs to the top. The other one features a main character who desperately flails from one situation to another, barely getting a handle on one crisis before another situation she does not have the capacity to handle blows up.

Each one could theoretically describe either of our two leading ladies, right? But this is where the importance of contextualization comes in. You see, it’s true that you could see Liz Lemon as the former type of character, looking at her story as a whole. But the sad fact of the matter is that this is simply not how 30 Rock presents her to us. Liz is constantly eating the wrong things, dating the wrong men, and in general making the wrong decisions. Episodes are often structured around how she is dealt a bad situation, struggles to fix it, and then finally stumbles blindly into a solution that just barely works. Her comic ineptitude is very endearing, and it’s a big part of why the show works. But it also means that, despite being a successful TV writer living in a nice NYC apartment doing what she loves, her character is ultimately defined far more by her failures than her successes.

Now let’s compare this with Kimmy Schmidt. On the surface, she’s far more inept than Liz Lemon ever was. Kidnapped as a child and left with only an 8th grader’s understanding of the world, her attempts at reintegrating into society are often met with catastrophic failures, from losing all her money to nearly helping her kidnapper go free. And yet, once again, this is not how the show presents her to us. This time, the focus of the show is on its leading lady’s resolve, how she refuses to let the world beat her down. There are plenty of jokes at Kimmy’s expense, poking fun at her misunderstandings of society or her childish approach to life, but these are never allowed to define her. Instead, we are left her steely determination to meet life’s challenges. Even if her solutions are haphazard or imperfect, the important thing, the show tells us, is that she hasn’t given in. In other words, that Kimmy Schmidt is truly unbreakable.

This kind of shift in tone is evident all over Kimmy Schmidt, too. Take the two shows’s most direct link, Jane Krakoswki’s Jenna Maroney (30 Rock) and Jacqueline Voorhees (Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt). They are both vapid, wealthy, and self-centered socialites with little connection to reality. But the underlying causes and consequences of Jenna’s behavior are rarely touched upon, and even then usually just for a joke. Jacqueline, on the other hand, has an entire arc during the second half of the show in which she is forced to confront who she is and what she wants, as we explore the series of circumstances and decisions that have lead her to becoming the person she is today. And this is all done without ever letting up on the constant jokes at her expense or the humorous tone! It’s actually a very effective storyline that never compromises the comedic nature of the show, which may be Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’s greatest strength.

On the whole, 30 Rock and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt are very similar shows, and you can see the unmistakable mark of Tina Fey on either. But that’s what makes these changes in context so huge. By taking the pieces of 30 Rock and reassembling them, Fey has given us a product that is familiar and yet wholly different. Where 30 Rock could often be cynical, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is uplifting. Where 30 Rock gave us characters who were trapped in cycles they couldn’t break free from, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt gives us characters who take their bad experiences and use them to become better, stronger people. In the end, 30 Rock let its characters find their happiness, but Kimmy Schmidt shows us the beauty in their struggle. They’re both fantastic shows, but I feel that Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt has a little more to say, and I’m glad to hear it.

So I should preface this by explaining what I mean when I say I like bad movies, because there are many ways a movie can be bad. The best version is a movie that is sincerely trying to be good, but the budget or the acting or the script or any number of things just isn’t there. A lot of bad 80′s action movies are like this, and they are fantastic. There’s also the Sy-Fy channel style of bad movies. These are movies that know they’ll be bad, and try to accept it. The thing is, they don’t have the skill to pull off the wry acknowledgment of how bad the whole thing is, which just creates this whole beautiful trainwreck of being bad at being bad. Then there’s movies like Furious 7.

Furious 7 is part of the more recent trend of action movies that fully acknowledge how stupid they are and launch into it with gusto. In general, I'm a fan of this. After all, this is how we end up with movies like The Raid, a love letter to crazy action that revels in how ridiculous its premise is. But despite how it may seem, this type of movie requires a great deal of skill. You have to carefully walk the tightrope of not taking things too seriously while also not overindulging in self-awareness. It’s the latter problem that I feel Furious 7 constantly runs into.

On paper, the ridiculous things the characters do seem like they’d be incredible. Watching people drive a car out of a window into another building, by all rights, should be fantastic. But there’s something about the way Furious 7 presents itself that makes it hard to get into such scenes. There is too much acknowledgement of how silly things are. When Vin Diesel looks into the camera and gormlessly mumbles “This time, being fast isn’t enough,” I don’t feel like something awesome is going to happen. I feel like the movie is winking and nudging me, going “Hey, isn’t this so bad? You like that, don’t you?” It’s like the movie version of when companies use memes in advertising: they don’t understand what makes it good, just that people like it.

Part of what lets it down is, frankly, the acting. Most of the actors in this movie signed onto the series towards the beginning, before the era of self-aware action, and it shows. Vin Diesel can be great in the right role, but he was not made for self-awareness. Hearing him stumble through witty one-liners is painful, and his actions made me roll my eyes more than anything else. Paul Walker plays the world’s blandest man, Michelle Rodriguez desperately tries (and fails) to make her emotional scenes with Diesel land, and the rest of the cast has too little to do to make much impact, good or bad. There are some bright spots, of course. Kurt Russel’s enigmatic Mr. Nobody is entertaining, if somewhat out of place, and Jason Statham as the villain is suitably menacing, but it’s not enough.

Speaking of Statham’s role as the villain, Deckard Shaw, he is criminally underutilized. The movie hypes him up as this untouchable badass who hunts them across the globe to exact vengeance. Every time he pops into their latest heist to throw a wrench in the works, it actually feels cool. And then at the end, his role as the villain is hijacked by a faceless band of terrorists we don’t care about. 90% of the film’s climax centers on the crew’s attempt to “hack” a computer program back from these terrorists in the middle of a car chase, leaving only a flaccid wrench fight with Vin Diesel for Statham. He doesn’t even get a cool take-down. A missile leaves the parking garage they’re fighting on crumbling, Diesel gives an incomprehensible, eyeroll-worthy one-liner and stomps the ground, and then Statham kind of rolls down a slope that collapses, and that’s it. It’s a real let-down.

Besides the tonal and acting problems, there’s plenty of mechanical problems as well. The plot is inexcusably bad, even for a self-aware action movie. Not only do they inexplicably give the climax to a bunch of nobodies with no personality, the movie is riddled with baffling decisions. Why do they bring the vital computer program to the showdown, where it can be stolen? Why do the villains then make the same exact decision that screwed over the good guys? The treatment of hacking is the some of the worst since Die Hard 4, the motivations of the characters often make no sense, and the dialogue is rarely any good. Even the action is honestly not great. The camera jerks back and forth oddly, and it cuts between shots just fast enough to make it hard to tell what’s even happening. For a movie that should be all about the action, it’s pretty disappointing.

All of this negative comes with a huge caveat, though, and that caveat is named Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Every second this man is on screen is incredible. He’s pretty much the only actor with the charm and nuance to pull off the ridiculous nonsense these characters do and make it fun instead of played out. All the various car stunts bore me. When Vin Diesel throws away his shotgun and pulls out a wrench for the final fight, I yawn. But when Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson flexes his cast off, steals an ambulance and drives it into a predator drone, and then tears out its minigun and walks off with it, I cheer in triumph. I’m honestly baffled how they can get every scene with The Rock so perfect when every other scene misses the point so badly. All I know is The Rock needs to be in more movies.

I want to like Furious 7. I really do. I love a good self-aware action movie, and Fast & Furious is so popular that the boom in imitators it inevitably inspires would almost certainly yield some gems if it was great. But it’s not. Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m tired of this sort of movie now, or maybe I’m too cynical, or maybe I went in expecting not to like it (full disclosure, I didn’t care for Fast 5 either and didn’t go into this with high expectations). But for now, all I can say is Furious 7 is not a good movie, and even The Rock can’t change that.

Whiplash is a story about a jazz drumming student, played by Miles Teller, who tries to impress a tough teacher, played by J.K. Simmons. On the surface, it's a very simple story about wanting to be great, but underneath that surface is a teeming pool of subtext. What starts as your typical inspirational story about someone trying to succeed becomes more complicated as Teller's character becomes increasingly single-minded in pursuit of his goal, making ever more questionable and even dangerous decisions in his attempts to win over his teacher. It's a brilliant parable about what it takes to be great (and whether said greatness is worth what you have to sacrifice for it) that's quite unlike anything of its kind.

A strong script can make a good movie all on its own, but Whiplash is a great movie, and accordingly, every aspect of it works together to deliver a truly amazing product. The camerawork is excellent; tight shots of instruments crash from one to another each time the band plays, creating a swirling cacophony of visuals that perfectly accompanies the swinging jazz numbers. And when Simmons rages at his students, the cinematography takes what could easily be a rather dry stretch saved only by the performances of the actors and instead heightens it to create a perfect sense of tension. One scene in particular, where Simmons attempts to find out which member of the band is out of tune in the audience's introduction to his draconian methods, was seriously one of the tensest moments I've ever seen in a movie.

The crown jewel of the movie, however, is undoubtedly the performance of J.K. Simmons. The other actors put in a great performance as well (particularly Teller, who portrays the complexities of his character mixed with the awkwardness of your typical teenager with aplomb), but Simmons is by far the stand-out. At times a helpful, even thoughtful mentor, at other times a raging lunatic, he masterfully showcases a portrait of a deeply disturbed but equally compelling individual. A bad, or even an okay performance in that role could easily have knocked Whiplash down to the ranks of the merely good: without an antagonist we can see as utterly hateful, and yet multifaceted and human, and yet hateful once again, certain scenes would have fallen flat, and the stunning climax, which I don't have the heart to spoil for you, wouldn't have hit nearly as hard. Simmons delivers all that and more, and I hope he manages to win Best Supporting Actor this year. He certainly earned it.

If a movie is able to make me feel some measure of real emotion, even for just a moment, I'm usually willing to look on it quite favorably. With Whiplash, I was gripped from start to finish. Anxiety, frustration, shock, hope, I felt all of it in ebbs and tides throughout the movie. Simply put, Whiplash is one of the best movies I've seen, and certainly one of my favorites. I cannot recommend it enough.