1. The Death of Stalin-This comic retelling of the aftermath of Stalin's death is at least five times better than anything else Armando Iannucci has ever done. To do crack-pace dialogue with Julia Louis Dreyfus in the present day sort of writes itself: Just take two parts Aaron Sorkin and add one part dysfunctional workplace comedy. To take your style of screenwriting and work it into one of the most historically villainous regimes in history while staying true to the real-life tics of historic characters and maintaining overall lightness required for a comedy is downright operatic.
2. Disobedience-Rachel Weisz stars as a Rabbi’s daughter returning to an Orthodox Jewish community that has shunned her because she has chosen not to adopt their austere lifestyle. The film has a brilliant pseudo-horror vibe with the voyeuristic looks that others gaze upon her with, as she sits with them at dinner or walks through the streets alongside them. The film is advertised as a film about a lesbian relationship, but it's really a film about free will because being in a pre-marital sexual relationship, dating a secular jew, even having secular Jews in your friend circle or getting an education all lead to the same end result of shunning anyways. Perhaps it’s my experience in this type of community, but the film is beautiful, spot-on, tense, sexy (spoiler: the two Rachels get it on) , and treats each of the three leads (Rachel McAdams and Allesandro Nivola) with the respect to round out their character arcs..
3. Tag-Nope, it’s not a drama on any level, but it’s ok to have popcorn comedies high on your lists. This is funny on every level. The timing of the jokes, the rounding out of character tics, the multiple layers of the jokes and the call backs all work. Like “It’s Always Sunny”, there’s a lot of humor where we get joy in watching adults act childish in front of baffled adults who just don’t know how to react to what they’re seeing. Only complaint in the humor department: The attempt to Sherlockize Jeremy Renner’s character wore out its welcome as a repeating joke. The film is also sentimental at just the right level and speaks to how growing old doesn’t mean you need to stop having fun. A good lesson to any critics who didn’t appreciate this film.
4. Ocean’s 8-To the people who think it’s too much of a feminist statement or not enough of a feminist statement: Shut up, both of you! It’s just a good movie with a legitimate sense of tension and flow, and a good cast that it utilizes well (also, there isn’t really a wrong way to utilize Rihanna or Helena Bohnam Carter for that matter). Sandra Bullock isn’t someone I would think of as a self-assured cat burglar type but I liked the sentimentality she bought to the role. When she toasted to her brother’s grave, it was a more meaningful moment than anything in the original Ocean’s series which was really just an overt self-congratulations of smug rich actors and Soderbergh’s “look at how good of a director I am” flashy stuff. James Corden is perfect as a bumbling foil. I had a couple minor problems with how things unraveled, even after suspending my disbelief and going with the absurdity of it all.
5. Leave No Trace-Best described as a less pretentious “Captain Fantastic”. Ben Foster, an underrated actor, plays a guy ill-at-ease with mainstream life so he lives off the grid with his daughter. The movie twists and turns in a few unexpected places and each of those defines the enigmatic protagonist better without revealing too much about him.
6. Ant Man and the Wasp-For someone who never cared about "The Avengers" or "Captain America", there was a distasteful amount of catch-up involved but nothing detrimental for me enjoying this film that largely knows it's about summer fun and not extended mythology. Paul Rudd is so solid at playing a "cool dad" type that I wouldn't be surprised if a whole generation of young viewers view him as the new archetype. The film works in humor at an extremely organic level and for that alone, I'd be extremely comfortable recommending this film to anyone who has been searching in vain for that comic action film that captures the feeling of the original "Indiana Jones" or "Star Wars" franchise. This is especially true for the micro-microscopic universe which had the feeling of a 1950's B-movie. Credit has to also go for TI, David Dastmalchian (ironically, TI is named David while Dastmalchian is named Kurt, how confusing), and Michael Pena which have graduated from background noise in this movie to a genuinely entertaining band of side kicks.
7. Tomb Raider-Alicia Vikander and Anjelina Jolie both have the same number of Oscars, but as far as I can tell, Anjelina Jolie was mostly sold to audiences in the 2000s like waitresses at Hooters are sold to potential diners. I’m a sucker for archeological jungle adventures and while the McGuffin was ridiculously weak, the Alicia Vikander character was progressive without being obnoxious, compelling, and was a unique style of action star (mainly crashing into objects with minimal impact). The races and set pieces were pretty solid.
8. Black Panther-The hype and much of the cheering from the left was pretty annoying considering it was a pretty nuanced film about the dangers of not being militaristic in your civil rights movement. In other words, the film was more nuanced than what people were taking from the films. There were good and bad white and black guys, after all. I thought the plot stretched a bit thin, but the narrative flowed smoothly from point to point so not a lot of wasted space while still doing a lot of world-building. The Afro-futurism angle is just a cool hook simply from the perspective of reimagining a world that’s so different but kind of plausible. Congo, for example, has natural resources found nowhere else in the world; the natural healing powers of African shaman medicine has been better than Western medicine in some points in history.
9. Set It Up-Up until the last 20 minutes, this much-praised romantic comedy is formulaic but watchable. In the last 20 minutes it finds a way to upend itself without being cheap or forced and that’s when it sticks with you much longer. Zooey Deutsch is a bit cutesy but she checks the boxes of a progressive feminist cheerleader so the critics are on board. Lucy Liu and Taye Diggs play strong villains and Pete Davidson (currently getting a lot of attention for being in the most high-profile relationship in SNL history) is surprisingly decent.
10. Ibiza-Every plot point here abides by the formula of “group of guys/women go wild and lose themselves for a night” and it’s getting slightly old. Despite a complete lack of anything original, it’s a good showcase for the three actresses.
11. Ready Player One-Like the “Transformers” franchise, it’s about shiny manly toys for the most part and doesn’t really sketch out this vision of the future as much as I would have liked but it’s a fairly compelling story. It’s definitely of a go-big-or-go-home style of Spielbergian artistry without being awful. I have a feeling I’ll look back on this a while and find it even less memorable.
12. Red Sparrow-A bit gruesome and repetitive but a largely coherent plot and less nihilistic than the female spy thriller I saw last year “Atomic Blonde.” Spy thrillers like these often have too many twists and turns and that can lose viewers at light speed, so that this is a coherent story is a major accomplishment. I also imagine a master’s level sociology thesis can be written about everything this movie has to say about sexuality and society.
13. Racer and the Jailbird-I thought this was a sexy action film. Instead it’s a dark film about a couple who both go through extended periods of chronic illness and incarceration. Just a sad, sad story. This might be unfair to judge the film based on the package of information available to the me before the film, but if I was prepared for a sad story, my assessment might be different. At the same time, I do believe the film was legitimately depressing without having more of profound approach.
14. Game Night-I hardly see a reason to justify this film’s existence. A couple (Rachel McAdams and Jason Bateman) like playing games? That’s the hook? The violent take on comedy has been done a million times and it just feels tacked on here. The “when is this real, when isn’t this real” tension is stripped of its meeting when we know the plot is “thing that they think isn’t real becomes real.”
15. A Whisper in Time-This children’s film doesn’t treat its mythology as something worth caring about yet asks us to endure excruciatingly boring technobabble about said non-interesting mythology. The film is too tonally bizarre and its character dynamics too uninteresting to care about anything at all that’s happening on screen. Maybe we should just admit that Ava DuVerney (despite being a woman of color, yay!) is just not that good of a film maker. Selma" was "important" but not particularly captivating.
Friday, July 20, 2018
Monday, July 16, 2018
Non-current Films I've Seen: Flash Reviews of Maps to the Stars, Gifted, Perks of Being a Wall Flower
Maps to the Stars (2014)-I watched this because I remember it coming out the year that Julianne Moore won her Oscar for the other film she was in (Still Alice). I also distinctly remember this being in the comedy/musical category of the Golden Globes, but wait, this film is directed by David Cronenberg?! Did he decide to mix things up and direct a light-hearted comedy? Nope, this is a macabre, twisted story and the Hollywood Foreign Press got it wrong as usual.
This film is extremely similar tonally to both Robert Altman's The Player and David Lynch's Mullholland Drive in deriving not just satire but genuine horror at the shallowness that pervades Hollywood life. Julianne Moore plays a has-been actress who isn't necessarily malicious but she's pretty soulless in her desperate quest for relevance. She's paralleled by a self-help guru, played by John Cusack, who's son (Evan Bird) is an extremely bratty child actor. There's also an opportunistic burn victim who represents the ingeneue looking to make her mark on Hollywood (think Ruby Keeler in 42nd Street if she chanted Wiccan prayers whenever she passed along the Hollywood Walk of Fame). The only halfway decent character might be the limo driver played by Robert Pattinson although he comes off as a little devoid. There's also a Hollywood director who will trade parts for sex, an entire clique of vapid child stars who enable Evan Bird's character, and a rival for a part that displays the kind of shallow flattery that lets us know in an instant just how fake this town is.
Like "The Player" which shifts gears midway from its broad ensemble satire to the perfect crime; or "Mullholland Drive" which segues to a Lesbian love story than a mobius strip; this film's satirical elements get overwhelmed midway for a more gruesome tragedy which makes the ending feel like something that's been tacked on to cover a superfluous detour from what was originally a better film.
Gifted (2017)-What a wonderful gem of a film. McKenna Grace (who was also in I Tonya AND How to be a Latin Lover in the same year, what a busybody of an 11 year old) plays a math prodigy who's mother committed suicide due to trying too hard to being a math genius. Her grandmother (Lindsay Duncan, the nasty critic in Birdman) was also a math genius and tries to get her granddaughter's custody so she can put her in "service to humanity" solving big math problems. On the other side of this custody hearing is McKenna's uncle who is an incredibly handsome and free-spirited Chris Evans. When he talks about how he went to go get laid the night that his sister committed suicide, it comes off as an odd humble brag.
No worries, Chris Evans isn't just a piece of meat. He's very solid here and his relationship to his niece carries a whollop of sentiment. This is also the first time I've really liked Jenny Slate, and the two are so cute together. I couldn't imagine Jenny Slate being a teacher somewhere and not having half the dads on parent-teacher night not massively crushing on her.
This is a film that is about the kinds of issues with genius, parenting, and growing up in an untraditional environment that you don't see often enough and the film has done its homework on these issues. It's also rare to see a film portrayed so richly from a child's point of view.
Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012)-If your favorite off-the-grid indie rock band that you like to gloat about at parties because only you know about them were anthropomorphized into a film about the teenage experience, you'd get this film about a teenage outcast who's magically rescued from having to sit alone in lunch (the horror!) by a manic pixie dream set of siblings (MPDG played by Emma Watson and MPD Gay Best Friend played by Ezra Miller) who don't seem to have any basis in reality. That they would bond with him so instantaneously and unconditionally is a bit off as is the fact that they are step-siblings who voluntarily spend that much time with each other. Were they best friends first who parent-trapped their respective mom and dad?
Logan Lerman, who one year prior played Renaissance France's greatest heartthrob, D'artagnan in the Three Musketeers remake, plays the ugly duckling but he's not particularly convincing. He's obviously good looking so he comes off as a broody James Dean type instead. Perhaps if his part were switched with Ezra Miller, then we'd be getting somewhere.
Lerman's character, Charlie, plays into every stereotype for an indie hero: Wanna be writer, self-realization through indie music, crushing hard on an unattainable girl, etc. While the film has enough verisimilitude to the teenage experience to make it engaging, that doesn't mean that Charlie is by any means original.
Attempting to parse out a dense novel into a two-hour film shouldn't be this hard considering the writer of the novel is the screenwriter and director, but there seem to be a lot of threads that are massively under-resolved. Charlie deals with schizophrenia and black-outs and a molestation story line that all gets so little screen time that since it comes off as an afterthought that was thrown into the script, it takes away from the gravity of any of these serious issues the film is trying to pull us through.
He also has a sister (Vampire Diaries' Nina Dobrev) who's interesting but she has so little screentime, she might as well have been cut to tighten the narrative, and there's a brother too but uh,, what? I don't even remember that character anymore.
In terms of tangent, the film is best served by realizing that Charlie isn't the most interesting character in the story. Patrick's (the manic pixie gay best friend) love affair with a closeted jock or the reveal that Emma Watson's character, Sam, is trying to overcome a past of sexual abuse and promiscuity, are both lines that do get a mention here or there.
This film is extremely similar tonally to both Robert Altman's The Player and David Lynch's Mullholland Drive in deriving not just satire but genuine horror at the shallowness that pervades Hollywood life. Julianne Moore plays a has-been actress who isn't necessarily malicious but she's pretty soulless in her desperate quest for relevance. She's paralleled by a self-help guru, played by John Cusack, who's son (Evan Bird) is an extremely bratty child actor. There's also an opportunistic burn victim who represents the ingeneue looking to make her mark on Hollywood (think Ruby Keeler in 42nd Street if she chanted Wiccan prayers whenever she passed along the Hollywood Walk of Fame). The only halfway decent character might be the limo driver played by Robert Pattinson although he comes off as a little devoid. There's also a Hollywood director who will trade parts for sex, an entire clique of vapid child stars who enable Evan Bird's character, and a rival for a part that displays the kind of shallow flattery that lets us know in an instant just how fake this town is.
Like "The Player" which shifts gears midway from its broad ensemble satire to the perfect crime; or "Mullholland Drive" which segues to a Lesbian love story than a mobius strip; this film's satirical elements get overwhelmed midway for a more gruesome tragedy which makes the ending feel like something that's been tacked on to cover a superfluous detour from what was originally a better film.
Gifted (2017)-What a wonderful gem of a film. McKenna Grace (who was also in I Tonya AND How to be a Latin Lover in the same year, what a busybody of an 11 year old) plays a math prodigy who's mother committed suicide due to trying too hard to being a math genius. Her grandmother (Lindsay Duncan, the nasty critic in Birdman) was also a math genius and tries to get her granddaughter's custody so she can put her in "service to humanity" solving big math problems. On the other side of this custody hearing is McKenna's uncle who is an incredibly handsome and free-spirited Chris Evans. When he talks about how he went to go get laid the night that his sister committed suicide, it comes off as an odd humble brag.
No worries, Chris Evans isn't just a piece of meat. He's very solid here and his relationship to his niece carries a whollop of sentiment. This is also the first time I've really liked Jenny Slate, and the two are so cute together. I couldn't imagine Jenny Slate being a teacher somewhere and not having half the dads on parent-teacher night not massively crushing on her.
This is a film that is about the kinds of issues with genius, parenting, and growing up in an untraditional environment that you don't see often enough and the film has done its homework on these issues. It's also rare to see a film portrayed so richly from a child's point of view.
Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012)-If your favorite off-the-grid indie rock band that you like to gloat about at parties because only you know about them were anthropomorphized into a film about the teenage experience, you'd get this film about a teenage outcast who's magically rescued from having to sit alone in lunch (the horror!) by a manic pixie dream set of siblings (MPDG played by Emma Watson and MPD Gay Best Friend played by Ezra Miller) who don't seem to have any basis in reality. That they would bond with him so instantaneously and unconditionally is a bit off as is the fact that they are step-siblings who voluntarily spend that much time with each other. Were they best friends first who parent-trapped their respective mom and dad?
Logan Lerman, who one year prior played Renaissance France's greatest heartthrob, D'artagnan in the Three Musketeers remake, plays the ugly duckling but he's not particularly convincing. He's obviously good looking so he comes off as a broody James Dean type instead. Perhaps if his part were switched with Ezra Miller, then we'd be getting somewhere.
Lerman's character, Charlie, plays into every stereotype for an indie hero: Wanna be writer, self-realization through indie music, crushing hard on an unattainable girl, etc. While the film has enough verisimilitude to the teenage experience to make it engaging, that doesn't mean that Charlie is by any means original.
Attempting to parse out a dense novel into a two-hour film shouldn't be this hard considering the writer of the novel is the screenwriter and director, but there seem to be a lot of threads that are massively under-resolved. Charlie deals with schizophrenia and black-outs and a molestation story line that all gets so little screen time that since it comes off as an afterthought that was thrown into the script, it takes away from the gravity of any of these serious issues the film is trying to pull us through.
He also has a sister (Vampire Diaries' Nina Dobrev) who's interesting but she has so little screentime, she might as well have been cut to tighten the narrative, and there's a brother too but uh,, what? I don't even remember that character anymore.
In terms of tangent, the film is best served by realizing that Charlie isn't the most interesting character in the story. Patrick's (the manic pixie gay best friend) love affair with a closeted jock or the reveal that Emma Watson's character, Sam, is trying to overcome a past of sexual abuse and promiscuity, are both lines that do get a mention here or there.
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