Movies can make you feel things

A lot of critics liked Patriots Day — The Boston Globe‘s Ty Burr being a notable exception. I didn’t much care for it. Peter Berg’s dramatization of the Boston Marathon bombing and ensuing manhunt started to lose its hold on me almost from the first, with its farcical interrogation of a poorhouse dope who confuses supercop Mark Wahlberg by calling the iron used as an assault weapon a “smoothie.” Ha ha! Because it makes things smooth! Wotta maroon!

It’s a bullshit moment engineered for audience response, much like the (much) later scene when a woman refuses a SWAT commander’s order to retreat from a firing position and he politely acquiesces because nobody messes with Boston Strong. Much like Wahlberg’s bum knee, which exists simply to put his wife in jeopardy when she heads down to the marathon’s finish line to bring him a different brace.

Nearly the whole movie felt designed to elicit responses. I don’t know if that makes it exploitative, but it definitely makes it manipulative. Now and then, the manipulation was so effective that it overrode my critical faculties — say, when an officer stands guard over the covered body of a bombing victim in the hours before the crime scene can be cleared. But more often, it left me annoyed at Berg & Co. for their hammy treatment of a genuine catastrophe. And while the appearances by the real-life people involved in the story at the end of the film are compelling, they don’t really fit with what’s come before, which makes their inclusion feel like one more attempt to wring emotion from an audience that has already had its denouement.

All that may be part of why I was so pleased by Julieta, which did much more to earn its interior twinges. (Though I can’t really argue with Reader critic Duncan Shepherd’s assessment of director Pedro Almodóvar in his review for Volver: “He shows nary a trace of the erstwhile ‘bad boy,’ nothing now but a good, good boy, devoted to mothers in particular, reverential of females in general, the Spanish George Cukor.”) And why I was able to be generous with One Piece Film: Gold, which was positively gleeful about its emotional extremes.

But nothing, alas, could make me be kind to Ben Affleck’s gangster pic Live By Night. A real misfire, that one. It’s a pity, because while the story elements were hoary, at least it wasn’t a reboot or a sequel or a nostalgia grab or schlock horror or just plain awful. You know, like so much January fare. (See video below. Language alert!)

On a possibly related note, we were unable to review Monster Trucks, Sleepless, or The Bye Bye Man.

Scott, meanwhile, had some luck with this week’s entries at the Digital Gym: both the young mommy-soldier story Alias Maria and the ex-con drama Hunter Gatherer proved worth his while. Maybe cinema isn’t gone, Misters Scorsese and Scott. Maybe it’s just smaller and more scattered.