Fishy: WHAT LIES BELOW and MY OCTOPUS TEACHER

What Lies Below is what happens when the Netflix front page becomes the assignment editor for entertainment sections all over the web. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. People open the app, say, “what’s that doing there?”, and click over for a look, thus keeping it on the list and driving more clicks. It’s the reason for the streamer’s top ten, to fuel that sense of wanting in on whatever everyone else is watching. As if we know how much of everyone that is. And then it trends on social media and it gets written up here and there. (Guess I’m guilty of it, too, now and again.) It is a peculiar thing, especially given Netflix’s strategy to inflate viewership numbers and hide any real deep dive objective data on the use of their service. When, say, a seven-year-old Mark Wahlberg movie bubbles up on the list, how many people are watching how much of it? Who’s to say? So here we are now with a cheap indie genre movie, the feature debut of writer/director Braden R. Duemmler. The streaming rights have been snapped up by Netflix to keep the content a churning. It’s no mystery why people click. It’s right there. It has an interesting hook — teenager meets her single mother’s new boyfriend at their cabin in the woods and it turns out he’s a mysterious hunk who might be a sea monster in disguise? — and a poster emphasizing the shirtless guy. You can see why a certain number of people glimpsing it among the squares while browsing would hover over and let it roll for a few.

The movie itself is sluggish, and full of the kind of cheap, flat, expository, subtext-free dialogue you might hear in a lesser Lifetime Original Movie. The plot plays like the faintest copy of Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank — dangerous guy might be a threat to his girlfriend’s daughter — transposed into a 90’s softcore mystery — without quite getting that steamy or mysterious — and crossed with one of those darkly missing-the-point post-Twilight paranormal relationships. It never quite digs deep into the potentially messy and uncomfortable interpersonal dynamics, instead skimming the surface for cheap dramatics. The mother (Mena Suvari) keeps thinking her daughter (Ema Horvath) is just trying to mess things up for the sake of keeping her mom all to herself. But we see the guy (Trey Tucker) sleepwalking into the lake and licking his lips and lurking in corners. And there’s that glowing light burbling in the middle of that lake at night. What’s up with that? Maybe it’s like evil Cocoon, I idly thought. The movie occasionally generates some modicum of squirmy tension as it sluggishly, somnambulantly trudges through its mostly predictable, partially convincing paces. Then it takes a swerve into outright horror for the final twenty minutes or so, with high-contrast red and blue lighting, and tense closeups, and violence, screams, and shocks. It gets pretty squirmy there in the final stretch, and ends on a note far more hopeless than I’d thought it’d get. In the end, it’s the sort of bad movie that makes you suspect its maker might have a good one in him one day.

Still, as lousy as that movie can be, I’m disappointed and a little embarrassed to admit I nonetheless liked it slightly more than another recent fishy Netflix movie, the Academy Award-nominated documentary My Octopus Teacher. It follows nature documentary cinematographer Craig Foster as he goes diving and meets an octopus. He feels a connection with this creature, who seems to recognize him and even forms something of a friendship. It’s clearly very powerful for Foster, who tells us in awestruck tones about what the animal taught him about its habits and habitat. That’s all well and good, but directors Philippa Ehrlich and James Reed are far more focused on the “my” than the “octopus,” and it never quite escapes the feeling it’s an intensely personal journey of one individual, the film of which can’t quite universalize in the ways to which it’s intended. It has copious nature photography, and it’s always a delight to see all the interesting critters under the sea. If you can’t go snorkeling or scuba diving, one of these nature documentaries is the next best thing. But I almost feel badly how little interest the movie kicked up in the personal experience of this guy. I wanted more of the creatures and less of the story of how meaningful Foster found it. He balances between anthropomorphic impressions of the octopus — “old lady in a dress” is one metaphor that sticks out — with oceanography understandings, and sentimental ruminations. I’m glad he had a good time, but I guess I didn’t need to see it. In the words of Keke Palmer, sorry to this man.

Lukewarm Leftover Pie: AMERICAN REUNION

Isn’t it funny how the march of time turns even a slight teen sex comedy into a little cultural time capsule? In 1999, Paul and Chris Weitz’s American Pie was just a small movie that became an R-rated box office success, a movie of raunchiness tempered with just enough sweetness to make its gross-out gags go down. But now it’s 2012, and that late-90s debauchery has begun to feel just the slightest bit quaint. It’s no less vulgar, but somehow the period-specificity of it all – it’s definitely a dated movie – gives it the hazy distancing effect of the recent past. That’s why the simple fact of American Reunion gathering the entire original cast gains poignancy from its strong hit of 90s nostalgia and the inescapable aging of all involved, the audience included.

The conceit of Reunion is that the class of ’99 has yet to throw a class reunion and decides to rectify the oversight with a big bash. So, it’s the 13th-year reunion and the whole gang is back in town. The years since the first film, since the first two theatrical sequels and a number of barely-connected direct-to-DVD sequels, have left the characters older, but in many cases no wiser. The seemingly endless opening moments of the film painstakingly reintroduce them all and, though it’s nice to see some of these guys again, they aren’t exactly the Muppets in The Muppets. There’s so much stage setting as they’re getting ready to party like it’s 1999, the movie seems to be spinning its wheels.

We see Jim (Jason Biggs) and Michelle (Alyson Hannigan) are having a bit of a dry spell in the intimacy department after the birth of their son. Oz (Chris Klein) is now a sportscaster who was recently voted off of a Dancing with the Stars knockoff. Kevin (Thomas Ian Nicholas) seems to be happily married, Finch (Eddie Kaye Thomas) has been globetrotting, and Stifler (Seann William Scott) is just as crude, stupid, and aimless as ever. That’s not all. Vicky (Tara Reid), Heather (Mena Suvari), and Jessica (Natasha Lyonne) are all back as well. And, wouldn’t you know it, Jim’s dad (Eugene Levy, the long-suffering consistent cast member for the series) is a widower looking to date again. And Stifler’s mom (Jennifer Coolidge) sits in her upstairs hideaway, just as ever the embodiment of the first movie’s signature contribution to early-2000’s slang.

Now, if those names mean nothing, or next to nothing, to you, I doubt there’s a chance the movie will work in any way shape or form. If, on the other hand, you have any kind of affection for the series (mine only extends to parts of the first, but the others’ have their proponents as well, I suppose), it’ll in all likelihood be a predictable, but not entirely unpleasant, nostalgia trip. It’s just a shame the movie couldn’t be any better. It ends up in a satisfying place. The reunion itself is just the right touch of vulgarity and syrupiness and the characters end their feature-length encore with a pleasant enough curtain call. But there’s so much left unexplored and the way there is so juvenile, that in many ways the whole thing just seems tired.

There are all kinds of humiliations and misunderstandings leading up to the reunion that would be less of a stretch in a teen comedy. Here, in a movie about adults, this rampant immaturity is less excusable. Actually, there’s no excuse a movie about grown people should be this squeamish about sex, using the very idea of adult relationships as a gag in many scenes. In American Pie, this made sense. The characters were inexperienced, virginal teens obsessing about something that, for the most part, they could only imagine. But now, these characters are married or otherwise attached. They’re not teenagers. They’re in their thirties. To have them sneak into upstairs bedrooms, pull scatological pranks, and react to perfectly reasonable adult desires and urges with something approaching unfathomable panic and squirminess mixed with unseemly leering, is simply pushing past the realm of believability and likability.

To make this sequel all the more uneven, American Reunion flirts with the idea of becoming interested in exploring aging in a more meaningful way. There could be a good movie to make out of these characters – this generation – struggling to find their way in the world as adults, while trying to reconcile who they were as younger party people. The movie’s written and directed by Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, who last wrote a much better raunchy R-rated comedy about this very subject matter, the surprising A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas, better than you’d think. But the Pie kids aren’t as lucky as Harold and Kumar. This movie nods towards a generation gap with the character of a hot 18-year-old girl-next-door (Ali Cobrin) only to literally turn her into a prop for a painfully belabored and largely unfunny sequence involving underage drinking and trespassing.

Hurwitz and Schlossberg shove in just-like-old-times embarrassment and raunch without aging the thematic concerns or even the gags to fit its older characters. This is a sloppily-executed franchise comedy with a few big laughs, a couple of fun cameos and a handful of nice callbacks to previous entries scattered amongst the dry patches of strained gags and sometimes-ugly undertones. I just wish it could have found an approach to its now-adult characters that respected the fact that they might now know just a little bit more about relationships (and anatomy) than when they were in high school. It’s a movie that trades off of its recognizability to a fault, weirdly unconcerned about making itself relevant or necessary.