2018 Film Review: Darkest Hour (2017)

Directed by: Joe Wright

Written by: Anthony McCarten

Starring: Gary Oldman, Lily James, Kristin Scott Thomas

IMDb Link

It's a neat coincidence that in 2017 two films that went on the be Best Picture nominees were released that covered England's involvement in the Dunkirk evacuation, with one right in the thick of things yet impersonal and the other far removed from the conflict but focusing on a single man.

*

Darkest Hour covers some of the early days of World War II under Winston Churchill (Oldman). We see the state of the politics in England that led to Churchill's appointment, the mess of conflicts he has to deal with on a global scale, as well as his personal struggles with his ability to be what his nation needs him to be and his disconnect with the common people. 

The film works entirely because of how great Oldman is in his transformation in to Churchill. He mimics Churchill's image, character and mannerisms incredibly well, and portrays him in a way that is ultimately humanising. It's easy to see where an overemphasis of these attributes could have turned the performance in to a caricature, but Oldman is restrained in his use of them, never overdoing in, and finding the perfect middle ground in expressing Churchill's imperfections. 

The rest of the film ends up working (sometimes only somewhat) by way of building up Oldman's performance. The framing and movement in many scenes work to strengthen Churchill's performance by reacting to him or isolating him, creating this visage of the lone bright spot to hold back the night, beset on all sides and fighting the doubt within. It's a little trite, and lacks a lot of energy, and plays in to more of the image of Churchill than the man, but on a technical level it works exactly as the film intends, and is made worthwhile by Oldman's work.

Credit is due the make-up artists that help bring Oldman's performance to life. Their work makes the transformation literally seamless; there's even a scene in which the camera zooms in close on Churchill's profile, bringing the audience to within an inch of his face, and there's simply nothing to suggest that what's there is anything but real, it's truly some excellent work that helps reinforce Oldman's performance.  

The Short Version: Darkest Hour is good only by virtue of Oldman's outstanding performance, becoming Churchill in a way that captures a character without it being a complete caricature; an icon of a man, but a man nonetheless. The film plays to some of the performance's strengths by dramatising the mystique around the character of Churchill, depicting him front and centre and alone in a dark world that needs a wartime saviour. 

Rating: 7/10

Published January 31st, 2018

2018 Film Review: I, Tonya (2017)

Directed by: Craig Gillespie
Written by: Steven Rogers
Starring: Margot Robbie, Sebastian Stan, Allison Janney
IMDb Link

I, Tonya is a unique look at the life of Tonya Harding, based intentionally upon conflicting and subjective accounts.

*

The film carries over Tonya's (Robbie) entire skating career, all the way up until the incident that she remains known for. We also see her abusive relationships with her mother LaVona (Janney) and first husband Jeff (Stan), and how they shaped an unfortunate amount of her life.

All throughout the film, the acting is top-notch. Robbie shows incredible range, expressing real suffering as she struggles to handle the pressure of everything that hangs over her while driving herself to achieve greatness. Tonya goes through a lot in this movie, and Robbie rises to show every bit of the complex emotions involved. Janney is also fantastic, disturbingly at ease as a mother that is abusive but with conviction; you don't sympathise with her, in fact Janney makes it very easy to hate her, and more often than not she's there to entertain with shock, but Janney's performance also brings a sense of understanding to her actions that cannot be understated. Stan brings an excellent contrasting performance to the table; his character is much quieter and far less outwardly shocking, so his performance isn't as visibly outstanding, but it creates a strong dissonance with his abusive background behaviour, which ends up pulling off the role very well.

The writing and tone in the film are a strange but also effective mix. The story goes to great lengths to humanise Tonya, but also to stress that the story is being told by a several unreliable narrators. The film has everyone say their piece, but also clearly takes sides in painting Tonya entirely as a victim of LaVona and Jeff, so other accounts in the story become seemingly worthless in the actual telling of the story and only end up serving as punchlines. This becomes further conflicting as the film takes on discussions of subjectivity and frames the story in slightly bizarre ways. The film will often have Tonya narrating over a part of the story, only to have the Tonya in the story finish the narrating Tonya's sentence. She'll even in-story interject in to other people's stories. It's as if the film wants to bring up the idea of the subjectivity of truth to ease the presentation of a piece of history in an alternative way, but it then dashes that subjectivity in order to reinforce that the filmmakers believe their particular account. It works sometimes, and largely due to both the fact that the film never loses track of this theme and reminds the audience of how unreliable its narrators can be, but these points of execution are too on the nose and a little at odds with themselves.   

The Short Version: With stellar performances from Robbie and Janney, I, Tonya is an entertaining and humanising re-examination of the Tonya Harding story. The writing is on the nose and the film takes strange liberties with tone and framing as it attempts to get across the subjective nature of truth couched within its story, but the film is ambitious in doing that, it never stops the acting from shining through.

Rating: 7.5/10

Published January 29th, 2018

2018: A Week of Movies - January 22nd to January 28th

Another week, more movies.

22. Vampires (1998) - January 22nd

A movie directed by and with music by John Carpenter is always a recipe for great cheesecake, and James Woods is just the icing on top. Carpenter may have made his name as cult filmmaker with films that are actually great, blowing away expectations with Assault on Precinct 13 or re-shaping a genre with Halloween, but I'll always appreciate him most for the combination of horror and comedy with action, creating tension by making a joke out of overdone masculine bravado and then putting that in a context that tears it down. Give me They Live, Escape From New York, Big Trouble in Little China, or The Thing any day; now that I think of it, it's also why a movie like Predator is one of my all-time favourites; I absolutely love ridiculous action movies with ridiculous action heroes, and I love poking fun at them just as much.

I appreciate this to an extent in Vampires. The way the movie starts with a cheesy rock number as a bunch of guys suit up with all manner of silver-slinging weapons, acting all tough and ready to go, before the music stops completely and silence falls as they enter the house, the machismo now gone, it's a charming reminder of Carpenter's style. Likewise, the first vampire attack at the motel is really quite enthralling, with Valek establishing himself as a credible threat while Carpenter employs more hilariously over the top imagery. Unfortunately, these are the only scenes in the film where it gets remotely scary, a bit of a surprise from a director who made some of the scariest movies of all time. Equally as unfortunate is that as the movie slowly slips in to seriousness it gets considerably less interesting; the film gets slow as it becomes weighed down with developments expressed mostly through exposition, losing that tone of self-silliness that made it so fun in the first place.

That said, the best part of the movie remains the best throughout the entire movie: James Woods. His character is an excessive mix of the hard-boiled and the tightly-wound, dropping great and stupid action movie lines with intense manliness and a noticeable self-awareness. It's reminiscent of his character in The Hard Way, but with a lot more winking at the audience and far less redeeming qualities, and it's pure entertainment to watch him do his thing from start to finish. His character is so utterly unlikable, just a constant stream of dick-headed one-liners that make him sound tough, and Woods willfully, wonderfully makes every line his own. Even as I stopped caring for the plot, James Woods kept me invested in the experience with his performance. - 5/10

23. Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964) - January 23rd

Considering how much I love Godzilla and monster movies, there's still plenty I should've seen by now. This is particularly important in the case of Ghidorah, since it's the origin of Godzilla's greatest foe, and it contains their first titanic battle.

The fight is as great and terrible as you would expect from a movie released in 1964 using guys in rubber suits. For its time it's iconic, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that more monsters on screen creates more hype; a three-headed, golden dragon and a giant dinosaur is great, but it's better when you also throw in a giant pterosaur and humongous moth larva. It also helps that Rodan and Mothra were pre-existing monsters; it makes this film quite literally the Japanese equivalent to Marvel's Avengers team-up movies, almost fifty years before The Avengers. In retrospect, of course, it's hard not to laugh at the effects. Sure, it was what they were capable of in 1964, and I have the utmost respect for that, but it's inescapably cute rather than awe-inspiring when looking from this perspective. That said, it seems a fitting transition given how Ghidorah is presented.

As far as tone is concerned, Ghidorah is quintessential Showa-era camp, from the hilarious scenes of UFO crackpots scolding non-believers to the use of theremin for that spooky sci-fi feel, to the fact that the human subplot involves a princess being mind-controlled by aliens who's also the target of assassins, it's all as weird and lacking in seriousness as you would expect from a kaiju film in this era. It's not yet at the point where Godzilla is being targeted directly at kids, but it's a step in the direction of ramping up the silliness to make it more palatable for a younger audience while emphasising the space and sci-fi themes that were becoming all the rage at the time, the sort of aspects of the film that would continue through the series until the end of the era (I still need to see the likes of Godzilla vs. Megalon, but the fact that in that film Godzilla tag-teams with a super sentai designed by a child and named Jet Jaguar is enough for me to get the picture). I do appreciate that regardless of stylistic choice, the film maintains the series' goal of addressing and reflecting society with its themes, even if it doesn't really comment a whole lot on the nature of society's growing fascination with space at the time and its words about natural disasters are no more than what previous entries in the series have already talked about. This isn't as good as the likes of Shin Godzilla or Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack, which hold the standard for great Godzilla sequels that carry on the spirit and themes of the first with a new approach that's cleverly conscious of the current in their respective societies, but Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster is a monument to what monster movies would become, with a rampaging rumble that I can't wait to see replicated in the upcoming Godzilla: King of the Monsters. - 6/10    

24. The Greatest Showman (2017) - January 24th

I saw this at the cinema after a number of old friends recommended it to me. It was overall decent, with magical musical numbers offset by a mediocre story. My full review for it can be found here. - 6/10

25. Last Flag Flying (2017) - January 25th

Richard Linklater has always been a compelling oddity to me. With the exception of Bernie and A Scanner Darkly, all the films I've seen from him have this sort of romantic verisimilitude, this depiction of life that feels both genuine and too well-spoken and good-willed to be true. The Before Trilogy, Boyhood, Everybody Wants Some!, they've all been presented in a realistic, character-motivated fashion, with the conversations directing the film rather than some sort of plot kicking up and pushing the whole thing forward. Last Flag Flying is a sort of half-exception. It's directly motivated by plot rather than life or happenstance, but there's still ample time given to the conversations of the characters that the plot is happening around rather than to the plot itself. The concept is relatively simple, a man who has no-one implores some old friends to come with him and see his dead son's body before his son is buried. The film's only direct plot turn is when they decide to take him to be buried beside his mother instead of the original intended place. But the characters are given enough of the breath of life, by their writing and by the excellent contrasting performances of Cranston, Carell and Fishburne, to make it worthwhile, even as the film begins to feel like it drags on. The characters are Vietnam War veterans; that isn't the plot, but it has everything to do with the characters' actions and reactions. Cranston, belligerent, washing away his life in alcohol. Carell, reserved, never uttering more than a word of what he has to. Fishburne, pious, working to redeem himself every day for his actions. The conversations develop the three from these initial points with little subtlety, but they don't ring hollow, and maintain the air of "wishing there could be easy answers but knowing there isn't" that has resounded in Linklater's romantic realism for over two decades now. Unfortunately, the way the film is character orientation doesn't allow for a lot of depth in the text beyond the personal. The film makes some passionate parallels between the Vietnam War and the Iraq War, but doesn't follow through on examining them deeply. This is still a good film, but is a sort of half-execution of Linklater's usual filmmaking style. - 7/10

26. Carrie (1976) - January 26th

This was utterly insane. Carrie was of the last of the Great Horrors of the 70s and 80s that I had yet to see, and aside from the pig blood plot twist I was totally unprepared for this. I was floored by the performances of Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie, the dynamic they created between Carrie and her mother was so believably yet incredibly uncomfortable. Every scene they shared made my skin crawl and left me squirming in my seat, and carried with it (no pun intended) the weight of the rest of the film's context. The way it shades its horror with sharp wit to offset the slight ridiculousness of an otherwise disturbingly effective (and melodramatically exaggerated) situation just makes the experience that much better. Such moments as Carrie getting revenge on a teasing child by telekinetically knocking him off his bike, or the way thunder claps as Carrie's mother asks sternly "...Prom?", in response to Carrie saying she's been invited, just enhance the more horrifying moments with a humorous contrast. The same can be said for the cuter scenes, the calm before the storm. By the time they happen you know exactly what's going to happen, even if you didn't know beforehand as I did, and the whole thing has an excellent emotional juxtaposition of joy and dread. The way this is all fueled by Carrie's own self-hatred incited by her mother's draconian methods is just great groundwork to make the discomfort of the inevitability of these scenes just the icing on the cake. The actual moment and what follows is excessive in terms of technique, one of the few dissenting opinions from critics at the time that I agree with, but Carrie's rampage is otherwise the stuff of horror legend, pure chaos and destruction sold by Spacek's cold, unforgiving eyes. The fact that Stephen King stories with a supernatural twist seemingly can't end without divine intervention isn't enough to put a dampener on proceedings, at this point rote rather than retch-worthy. - 8/10   

27. Lights Out (2016)

This movie starts on a fairly strong note, a familiar but effective horror opener that makes clever use of lighting and positioning to be at least chilling and memorable. It keeps some of its momentum with the performances from its leads, and a premise that makes the monster more meaningful in a way similar to The Babadook. Unfortunately, it becomes repetitive with its scares, and a little ludicrous to make its gimmick work. The horror is couched in the need to keep the lights on and the threat of them being turned off. This works in situations where lights naturally do that on their own, such as in the opening scene or in a later scene involving a flashing neon sign, but it becomes artificial as the movie tries to use every source of light it can think of to keep the tension high, in the process almost doing the opposite. The metaphor for depression is kept fairly consistent and works for the most part, with the moment the mother silently cries out for help done particularly well, but when the movie's conclusion is to have the mother kill herself, the film outright destroys its message in the process. In this way, I'm tempted to look on the movie quite poorly, because intentional or not, the message of the film becomes 'if you kill yourself all of your loved ones' problems will go away'. At the same time, I'm not one for looking down on a film just because its message is not something I agree with; it's not what the film is, but how it is, that matters. The movie is good enough at what it does enough of the time, even if it's re-treading old ground instead of breaking new. - 6/10

28. Sabrina (1954)

Watching films like Sunset Boulevard, Some Like it Hot, The Apartment, and now this has taught me that Billy Wilder is a magnificent writer. His dialogue sounds natural yet clever; it's too fast to sound like a normal conversation, but it's smart about the information conveys, even when it's too direct. I think it has something to do with the way these movies have a sort of fairy-tale approach; classic Hollywood "and they all lived happily ever after" even in the face of considerably more complicated situations. The films take place in "movie land" where everyone knows just what to say and just how to say it without it sounding like exposition. You don't need David to explicitly say that Linus is a workaholic, you just need David to be lightly disappointed that Linus is going to work on a Sunday. You don't need Linus to tell you that David's a mess by something as direct as "you need to clean yourself up", you just have Linus correct David on the fact that it's Wednesday and not Sunday. Sabrina is somewhat of an exception to this; the opening narration feels out of place as a narrative tool, at least in how straightforward it is, but it fits the fairy tale theme and is at least a bit clever about how glib its direct statements about the characters are. The story arc is familiar, with couple of characters learning from one another by revolving around a third person, but the film goes to great lengths to tell it well. The direction is similarly effective; pulling out from a single sign to show several to convey just how big money the Larabees are, a fade to the moon from Sabrina after she states dreamily "the moon is reaching for me". It's a lot of big moves that are so obvious it would be silly to do anything else, but also a little bit silly for doing it at all because of how obvious it is. That said, I'm not knocking it, in fact quite the opposite; it's economic visual association, moving the story forward with visuals that match the scenes they're in or transitioning to. Within all this, it's supported by a fantastic cast. Hepburn is at once magical and hilarious; she knowingly conveys Sabrina's naivete without diminishing her value as a character. Bogart is intriguing, far less bitter without losing any sense of the sardonic attitude; it's not the most complex character, but at the meta level it's interesting to see how this contrasts with Bogart's usual hard-boiled detective type. The whole film is just delightful. - 8/10     

Re-watches

7. Some Like it Hot - January 22nd

This was easily one of the best movies I watched in 2017 and has quickly become one of my favourite movies of all time. The humour drawn from every single situation is just pure gold, it's just constant, fast and light, while still being layered enough by the sheer silliness of the situation that it lands hard every time. Curtis and Monroe give excellent performances, but anything would pail in comparison to Lemmon, who is just perfect here, one of the funniest comedy roles I've ever seen and such a great character arc in the context of the film. The way he goes from incorrigible tail-chaser to one of the girls by learning what it's like to be a girl in that time is sublime, fitting at every single turn of the story, with such work by Lemmon in the role to deliver it perfectly. He's seriously one of the greatest here.

The writing is such brilliant comedy, both in terms of situational comedy and dialogue. Everything moves quickly, but the way it leans in to its set up at every opportunity carries with it the weight of every joke that came before it, so from the moment the idea of these guys dressing up as girls to dodge the mob is planted, the film just ekes hilarity out of every chance it gets. It reminds me of Dr. Strangelove, ramping up the comedic tension and getting as many laughs as it possibly can out of one idea that progresses naturally and believably within its own context, toeing that line between reality and absurdity with expert maneuvering. The gender politics at play are also surprisingly progressive for 1959; like I said, the best part is Jack Lemmon learning how life is for women by way of becoming one of the girls, and while on second viewing the progression is less than I thought, it's still more than I'd expect for the time.

A small final thing, but I love jazz, so any movie that emphasises it in their soundtrack gets an extra point from me. This was a 9.5/10 the first time I watched it, but all of the jokes landing just as well the second time around, everything just fitting like a dream, how influential the film is, how brilliant Jack Lemmon is, and how much I love the film, I'm comfortable knocking it up to a - 10/10   

Published January 28th, 2018 

2018 Film Review: The Greatest Showman (2017)

Directed by: Michael Gracey
Written by: Jenny Bicks, Bill Condon
Starring: Hugh Jackman, Michelle Williams, Zac Efron
IMDb Link

I finally got around to seeing this after a barrage of recommendations from people over the weekend. Thankfully, it wasn't a waste of time.

*

The film follows P.T. Barnum (Jackman) as he essentially invents show business. He rises from nothing and clashes with taste and class and art to provide a show anyone and everyone can enjoy; the film literally justifies its own existence with a philosophical meta-narrative of entertainment over art.

As far as entertainment is concerned, the film is a resounding success. The numbers in the movie are excellent, if a little gaudy, brilliantly and elaborately choreographed with support from wonderful music and an inordinate amount of enthusiasm. They are escapism at some of its finest, with a personal favourite being the exchange between Zac Efron and Zendaya, which carries with it more chemistry and tension than they exhibited in any other part of the movie. Every moment the characters were singing rather than talking is like a spell the movie casts on you to dazzle you for a few minutes to hide the fact that it doesn't have much else to show.

This is because the movie glosses over most of its story for the sake of easy transitions, and most of what it does show is simple and shallow. Conflicts rise and fall in this movie in mere moments, and are sometimes resolved in ridiculously excessive fashion with no actual discussion; the film blasts through entire stories that others would take the care to make their central focus. Everything is so easily resolved when presented it's a wonder that they bothered to have dialogue at all, and didn't just present its non-musical portions as purely emotional tableau. It was a sincerely stark contrast, switching between a few minutes of music that had so much love and care poured in to it and a story that was so quick and superficial it hardly needed to be there. 

There's no denying Jackman's charm, however, or any of the other characters, particularly Keala Settle's Lettie Lutz, who exhibits an incredible amount of endearing emotion in the short amount of actual screen time she gets. The actors are offering something that feels more sincere than the rest of the movie, which is part of why the musical moments of the movie are so much more meaningful than the rest; when the movie just needs to rely on expression, the actors are the ones that sell it with gusto, even if the writing doesn't offer more than a couple of minutes to the characters.     

The Short Version: The Greatest Showman is a lot of really well made musical numbers in between a glossy story with easy but ultimately empty platitudes.

Rating: 6/10

Published January 24th, 2018

2018: A Week of Movies - January 15th to January 21st

Third week, third lot of movies.

15. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) - January 15th

The first movie of the week is a classic, and one that I found out while doing a bit of reading was not the most well-received upon release, getting several mixed reviews along with the positives. To be honest, I can sort of see why. It's strange for a Western, at some times lionising the anti-heroes and the way of life of the time, at others feeling like a serious meditation on the way things actually were at that time, and still at others almost devolving in to farce. At the same time, the duo of Paul Newman and Robert Redford is dynamic; the two play off each other so masterfully that even when the film drags out their time on the lamb it's not a problem because it's just more of an excuse to see them interact. I also do appreciate what the film was going for, a sort of mix of older Westerns of the John Wayne era with a hint of the Spaghetti era, a little like what Leone did himself with Once Upon a Time in the West, except here it's heavily influenced by Wayne Western ideals and only nods to the Spaghetti. The film seems a little conflicted, wanting to be Unforgiven before its time but influenced by the era's notion that Westerns should still carry the hope of the Old West. In retrospect, it's quite brilliant in this regard, at least at the prototypical stage. Still, this is the sort of film where its place in film canon is rote at this point, so it's in a strange place where I'm tempted to doubt my own observations, so once again a rating feels oddly pointless. That said - 8/10

16. Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) - January 16th

This film is a loving tribute to both cartoon and noir by way of satire and it pulls it off so well. Neither aspect of the frame is a gimmick; they fully employ both here, with a keen self-awareness and humour that go a long way, and incredible effects work that has aged extremely well. It's all highlighted in the opening scene, transitioning from cartoon to joke noir with a literal cut to reality, only to pass by a heavy-drinking Bob Hoskins as he says "Toons" with great ire. The can use the serious nature of Hoskin's Valiant's gritty backstory while still ending up with him doing a vaudeville number because the film knows how much humour there is just in the dissonance of mixing the two genres. A chilling scene of cronies tearing up an apartment looking for a guy is right at home in noir, but it's just funny when the cronies are cartoon weasels and the guy their looking for is a cartoon rabbit hiding in the dishwater. - 8/10 

17. The Post (2017) - January 17th

I was originally going to watch The King of Comedy today, but somehow I ended up at the cinema watching this, the review for which can be found here. It's about as well-made as you can expect from a film that's directed by Steven Spielberg and stars Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks. - 8/10

18, Chicago (2002) - January 18th

Chicago is another excellent movie in a string of excellent movies I've managed to finally watch lately. It's sexy and stylish, but also slimy; the burlesque angle of the musical numbers captures the idealised image of the era it's emulating, and I love how that gets juxtaposed against the reality of the situation. The way the numbers interlace the events depicted with an flashy version of themselves are inspired moments that both make sense in terms of narrative and musical structure and display admirable choreography and jazzy design. It's all very elaborate and exaggerated and enjoyable, in between clever (if, once again, aggrandised) story turns that satirise the ridiculous nature of giving media spectacle to criminals. As for my favourite number, as much as I loved "Cell Block Tango", the gaudy imagery of Flynn using Roxie as a dummy puppet completely sold me on "We Both Reached for the Gun". - 8.5/10

19. Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters (2017) - January 18th

The new Netflix anime Godzilla movie just came out and it's... pretty bad, to be honest. My full review of it can be found here. - 4/10

20. Ferdinand (2017) - January 19th

Ferdinand was decent, but it never really tries to be more than that. My full review for it can be found here. - 6/10

21. Jigsaw (2017)

Jigsaw is a dirty trick of a movie. It's hardly the low point of the series, shedding all of the bloat and excess of both story and gore built up by its predecessors in favour of a more streamlined narrative; but its twists are so painfully duplicitous it seems the filmmakers are more interested in messing with the audience than telling a story. This isn't particularly new for the franchise; they've stretched credulity from the very start, and have re-written the lore with every other entry in the series. However, with Jigsaw, the convoluted twist is made that much worse by the contrasting streamlining that preceded it. It starts out like a soft reboot; the traps are far simpler, the gore is turned way the heck down, and by Saw standards there's basically no blood. The plot is also simple: no mention of any of the films that came before, bar the fact that Jigsaw was a guy who died, and it's just a handful of people being put through torture for their sins. As the film goes on, it gets more and more gory and violent, and the plot becomes more and more unnecessarily convoluted. It's like a meta-commentary on the progression of the Saw series itself, even drawing inspiration from previous traps and twists, without directly ripping them off. Unfortunately, that's not really a good thing, and by the time the film has revealed its fake twist and then doubled over backwards trying to accommodate its real twist, the film finds itself where the series ended up: overloaded with pointless characters and subplots, collapsing under the weight of trying to explain how its so clever for not revealing anything to the audience until the very end, and entirely unsure of why it went on for so much longer than it had to. 4/10 

Re-watches

None this week

Published January 21st, 2018

2018 Film Review: Ferdinand (2017)

Directed by: Carlos Saldanha
Written by: Ron Burch, David Kidd, Don Rhymer, Robert L. Baird, Tim Federle, Brad Copeland
Starring: John Cena, Kate McKinnon, Bobby Cannavale
IMDb Link

The story is simple: we follow Ferdinand, a big bull who doesn't want to be a part of the bull-fighting life, who gets captured and taken to a bull house to be shown to a matador.

The film goes as you'd expect, with Ferdinand using his tenet of non-violence to change the hearts and minds of everyone he meets along the way, in the process helping to end the culture surrounding bull-fighting and the mistreatment of cattle. It's sweet, and heartwarming, and leaves lots of time for Ferdinand to just be a swell guy that slowly but surely turns things around. Unfortunately, the film's writing doesn't really let it try and be more than that.

That's essentially the only key issue with the film; the writing is overloaded with unnecessary fluff that doesn't add anything to the story or tells us what we already know. The film opens with Ferdinand as a child at the bull house, running away when his father doesn't come home, before finding a home at a farm with a lovely little girl and her father, only to be taken back to the bull house ten movie minutes later. The inclusion of the scenes with the father does very little for the story, and its specific placement in the story creates a hard emotional whiplash. The film cuts out a lot from its third act sequences, with the editing becoming noticeably terrible at points, because for some reason it needed to included an extended dance-off sequence between all of the bulls and a trio of fey German horses. Several characters that are included don't really do anything for the movie; the hedgehogs are cute, but the movie doesn't gain anything by having three of them. None of this is offensive or even particularly off-putting, they're just indicative of the fact that the film's writing was fighting to stretch itself out to nearly two hours while still keeping focus on its primary themes.

The rest of the film is just fine, decent even. Cena and McKinnon do good work in their voice roles, and the animation is fluid with its own distinct art style reminiscent of Blue Sky's other work like Ice Age. None of it stands out as particularly amazing, and the best of what the film does is all fairly familiar if you've seen an animated film before; it's all competent, but nothing amazing.

The Short Version: Ferdinand tugs at the heartstrings, but is so full of fluff and tired cliches, and struggles to mix the meaningful with the surreal in a meaningful way. It's inoffensive fun with a nice anti-violence message, but little more than that.

Rating: 6/10

January 19th, 2018

2018 Film Review: Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters (2017)

Directed by: Hiroyuki Seshita, Kobun Shizuno
Written by: Gen Urobuchi, Sadayuki Murai, Yusuke Kozaki
Starring (English Dub): Chris Niosi, Lucien Dodge, Edward Bosco
IMDb Link

Now available on Netflix

DISCLAIMER: Before we begin, this film is essentially useless to newcomers of Godzilla movies. Unlike Legendary's 2014 Godzilla reboot or Toho's recent Shin Godzilla, this film asks its audience to accept far more sci-fi jargon additional concepts that are a lot easier to swallow if you're aware of how they're essentially par for the course when standing next to some of the older films. Giant monsters is one thing, but multiple alien races with even more attached to both of them is only acceptable if you're used to that sort of thing from mid-Showa and some Heisei era work.

*

Humanity had to abandon Earth after several giant monsters, including Godzilla, rose from the earth and inflicted destruction upon civilisation. Aided by two space-faring alien races, who had each tried and failed to subdue either humanity or Godzilla in their own ways, humanity retreats in to space. Due to relative light-speed travel, while humanity slowly loses hope in space for the next twenty-two years, life continues to evolve for a further 10,000, the planet's ecosystem shaping itself entirely around the Godzilla species. If that sounds unnecessarily convoluted to you, it's because it is.

The movie is so heavily front-loaded with exposition involving stuff that won't matter until future films in this planned trilogy that all of the potential emotional attachment to the human characters gets lost. There's this early thread about the remains of the government dumping 'useless' members of the population on uninhabitable planets for the sake of the colony that starts as the driving force of the main character's motivation, but it gets re-directed to hatred towards Godzilla because he put them in space in the first place and is largely never spoken of again. Both species of aliens have their own commentaries and solutions on the board, and one species even has history with Godzilla-like creatures, but neither of them do anything for the sake of the actual plot and simply spout religion and allude to MechaGodzilla. There's an environmental message and a theme of change in the film, but both once again get lost in the unnecessary detail of it all, like a guy telling you a gripping tale in between reading you the Apple License Agreement.

The animation doesn't save the film, unfortunately. It's so stiff and it stutters; the actual designs of the humans are fine and the design of Godzilla is excellent, but none of it moves with any sense of fluidity or connectivity. Godzilla's atomic breath is a nice effect, but it comes across as separate from Godzilla himself, as he makes no motion to open his mouth and just spends the entire movie with a slightly agape jaw. I would've assumed that this was a stylistic choice, as they explicitly mention Godzilla's plant-like changes, but when the humans aren't much better, I have to assume it was some sort of limitation.

The film manages to somewhat recover in its final act, as is the case when all that matters to a lot of people is seeing the big guy destroy things, but it still carries with it all of the problems it had before. The film can't even revel in the Godzilla reveal without him looking stiff as a board or interspersing it with one of the alien species talking in vague religious language for attempted dramatic effect.   

The Short Version: Planet of the Monsters is consistently lacklustre, with stiff animation, boring characters and an unnecessarily convoluted plot. However, it contains an interesting, if mostly unexplored, concept at its core, and as is the case with kaiju movies, it manages to almost bring it home with an explosive, action-packed finale involving the biggest, baddest monster of them all.

Rating: 4/10

Published January 1st, 2018

2018 Film Review: The Post (2017)

Directed by: Steven Spielberg
Written by: Liz Hannah, Josh Singer
Starring: Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Bob Odenkirk
IMDb Link

At this point I would be more surprised if the combination of Spielberg, Streep and Hanks didn't turn out something excellent. The Post is world-weary, well whipped up cinema, offering relevant commentary with strong turns from its performers and flexible direction that ebbs and flows with the tensity of the movie.

*

We return to 1971, America still very much embroiled in the Vietnam War, with the sudden publication of the revelation of the government's lies to the people about the state of the war through the release of  excerpts from leaked top-secret papers. This nation-changing story is juxtaposed against the very personal one of Kay Graham (Streep), thrust in to the position of publisher of The Washington Post in the wake of her husband's suicide. She is embattled on all sides by investors and board members who don't believe in her, as well as her editor Ben's (Hanks) push to get involved with the publication of the top secret papers, and even the Nixon Administration as it tries to stifle the press' attempts to make more information public. The whole film is rich in detail and humanity, with even those historically placed in the negative positions at this time shown as flawed rather than evil (except Nixon, who's almost cartoonish in his villainy as the desk slamming shadow in the background). The political conflict is real, and even as the movie would have you side with the press and its policy of information above all else, there's definite pain the movie shares in admitting that the government did what it did. Likewise, the sheer intimacy of Kay's struggle is surprisingly touching despite there being generally little intensity; it only takes a few moments of her waking from an overworked slumber or fraught with indecision as she struggles with so much to sympathise with her, made all the easier by Streep's performance.

Streep really does give a great show here: she's vulnerable without being weak, stubborn but passionate and not unreasonable, and she's all of this sometimes with just the slightest of of touches. A force in her smile to hide a quivering lip, a tilt of her head to keep her mouth shut, its all a lot of subtlety to her craft. Sometimes the dialogue is a little cheesy and doesn't quite pull it off, but for the most part her performance pulls through despite that. Likewise, Hanks is a great counter to her, much more assertive in his passion for his work and a little sharper. The dialogue is fairly tame in this movie, but every time the words become cutting, Hanks is the one uttering them, and without missing a beat. Everyone else offers a strong performance too; it's a lot of good actors delivering quick pieces of efficient, smart dialogue, in a word, a talkie, so everyone just brings their A game to their smaller parts, clashing or bouncing off each other as the director would have them need to.

The direction in this film is quintessential Spielberg. You have moments of multiple characters talking over one another to simulate reality while also getting a lot of exposition out quickly; you have lithe long takes that move dynamically and deliberately while not trying to draw attention to themselves; you have plenty of scenes where the camera just stops and looks at the characters while they talk so that the audience can hear that what is being talked about is important and interesting enough on its own to justify just paying attention to. It's simply good film-making that allows the writing and actors to speak for themselves by highlighting, or de-emphasising as needed in subtle or methodical ways.
 
The Short Version: The Post is superbly made, relevant historical drama that gives its actors and writing the time they need to play well and remind the audience the importance of the freedom of the press. 

Rating: 8/10

Published January 17th, 2017

2018: A Week of Movies - January 8th to January 14th

Alright, the second week of the movies, let's go

8. A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985) - January 8th

This became my film of the day for a friend who had time for a movie, but not a long one, and wasn't particularly picky about what he saw. As far as Freddy movies go, it's a significant step down from the first, which remains in my top ten horrors of all time. That said, it's a mixed bag of awful and amazing, the kind of strange film that would ultimately receive a mediocre rating that doesn't reflect the spectrum of quality it spans. We have a terrific concept and great practical effects, as well as decent leading performances and that general camp theatricality, but we also have... everything else. The writing is paper thin and the acting of the side characters could not be more bizarrely forced, a significant number of scares don't land (and don't as often have the same flair from the first one that suggested the scares were just as readily used for comedy), and the whole thing ends up with very mixed execution. I can't say I'll quickly forget the transformation scene, which saw Freddy's hand spew forth from the main character's, before slicing him open to let Freddy out, with practical effects reminiscent of The Thing, but I also wish I could forget the delivery of specific lines.

On the point of subtext, I didn't know going in to the film that there was a lot of homosexual subtext attached to the film, but after reading about it, I can absolutely see it. You need look no further than the gym teacher, aggressively clad in leather at a bar, only to be later tied up and whipped with towels, to see how blatant the point felt getting across.

Anyway, now to give a rating to the film. Like I said, no one number could be truly reflective of a movie like this, but if have to put a number to it... - 5/10

9. District 13: Ultimatum (2009) - January 9th

A follow-up to the 2004 film District B13, this is a well-choreographed and relatively fast action movie with some good humour, some intrigue, and a considerable amount of cynicism by nature of its function. In order for the movie to exist as it does, the film has to and does recognise that the entire first film ultimately amounted to nothing. It's not a hard sell, politicians just re-neg on their promises from the end of the first film, and surprise surprise, we're still stuck in a dystopic concrete city that allows for maximum parkour. In this regard, the film is a success; the fighting and the parkour are both really well done, with a lot of light fun detail injected in to otherwise tense and pitched scenes, such as attempting to fight around a priceless Van Gogh, or tripping up chasing police officers with simple tricks with clothes lines and the like. The writing is less of a success: the structure is heavily front-loaded, getting out a lot of interesting but mostly superfluous information before it actually gets on with the plot, introducing our main characters from the first film in fun ways that don't actually further the plot or their characters, and would probably be fine if they weren't also drawn out. Damien's intro scene is funny and ends in a good fight scene, but it drags on for so much longer than it needs to between the intro and the fight. It shows Damien as competent, but we already knew that, so acceptance of light humour turns to boredom before actually getting in to the thick of action. This can be said for the actual set-up of the film's main conflict, which is also excessively long . This actually matters by the end of the film, so it's inclusion isn't unwarranted, just how much time spent on it is when it has nothing to do with the main characters. That's essentially the key issue I had with the film; between its fantastic action scenes, the film is trying to set up intrigue and political machinations, most of which feel removed from the characters themselves. It reminds me of The Raid 2, except in that movie the overarching conflict was much closer to the main characters, and was much easier to get invested in as a result. This feels far more nihilistic, especially with its ending, but also politically broader by way of its less personal touch. As a first reaction, I'm not sure what to make of the ending, but it's subversive, to say the least. - 6.5/10

10.  Sense and Sensibility (1995) - January 10th

Ang Lee is one of my favourite directors, mainly for his peerless work with Life of Pi, but also because of the sheer variety in his work. He's always experimenting with new formats or structures, new ways of filming things or telling stories; Life of Pi had its own set of unique choices in deliberate format changes and the like, and most recently he did Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, which I still haven't seen, but primarily because it would be near-impossible to see in its intended format, which seems precisely the point of the film in the first place. But, I digress. Though I initially sat down to watch Sense and Sensibility as an example of Ang Lee's earlier work, it became quickly apparent that this was very much Emma Thompson's work as well. I haven't read the book for reference, so how much of this is direct adaptation or rough translation is lost on me, but regardless the writing is excellent here, fitting the characters at least as they are portrayed in this film. I honestly don't have a whole lot to say about the themes of this movie that I haven't already read about; class and gender and the complications therein are presented with great comedic and situational irony and made compelling by the actors' performances. The one thing I disagree on is the idea that the film frames Elinor as someone who must learn a lesson of passion as opposed to Marianne learning a lesson of propriety: one thing I really enjoy about the film is the way the two women cross their idealistic paths, with Elinor eventually seeing more than propriety to love and Marianne seeing more than passion. This is strengthened by Lee's restrained but detailed visual presentation of each character, with Marianne being shown with carefree visual shorthand and Elinor being shown with control, but both achieving a sort of soft amalgam by the end of the film, not abandoning their initial ideals but learning to add to them, with both of them learning through loss, both of status and of their loves. As an aside, I really loved Hugh Laurie as Mr. Palmer - I always love Hugh Laurie, but he was just such a sardonic delight for the brief moments he was on-screen that he left an impression enough that it required talking about. - 8/10

11. The Handmaiden (2016) - January 11th

I'm honestly not sure what to say about this one, though it's par for the course from the guy who brought us Oldboy. The film is bold, disgusting, graphic and yet meditative rather than exploitative. The film depicts deception and subjectivity in ways that completely threw me; I love that I both expected a turn by the nature of the director's reputation and was still blindsided again and again. The film lulls you and lies to you and cheats on you, and it's both infuriating and applaud-worthy. The editing is what struck me the most, however, upon considering it further: the moment that first truly wowed me in the film was that of supreme skill, communicating character and simultaneously planting the seeds of deceit about that character while another character is already lying. It's using one of the key advantages of the medium of film to some of greatest potential, and I love how well the film pulls it off.  - 8.5/10

12. Them! (1954) - January 12th

Watching films like this is always a treat for me; it's both a film that should be respected as a hallmark of 50s sci-fi, the same as The Thing From Another World, and the sort of film I get a kick out of because I adore monster movies, especially those that draw from the same sort of origins as the likes of Godzilla. While Them! is obviously nowhere near as prolific as Godzilla, it draws from the same well of creativity; never content just to have monsters be monsters, movies like these serve as a stern warning against what caused the monsters, in this case atomic radiation. In the case of these two movies in particular, it's great to see key differences in the movies that contrast each nations' reaction to the effects of atomic warfare. Them! is a concerned potentiality, Godzilla a suffering reality: where one states "nobody can know what will happen next, this could be it", the other says "this is what happened." This extends to the way the movies are made as well. Them! is much more explicit in its references to atomic testing and the potential problems of it, formed by a nation learning how to deal with a new power; it even follows the same route as The Thing From Another World and has a pontificating moral at the end of the film to take away with you. Godzilla was formed by a nation not only dealing with the existence of the new power, but with its fallout, and a government that wanted to sweep everything to do with the war under the rug. Extreme censorship had only ended a couple years before, and even then there was pressure not to talk about it, so a lot of Godzilla, despite following a lot of the story beats common in these types of movies, it more restrained or maudlin with its approach; the fact that the movie ends with the movies' moral, its victory, being intentionally clouded by military propaganda for what we are told is the sake of the nation, is particularly telling. But I better stop here with the comparisons; I could turn anything in to a conversation about Godzilla and end up talking about him all day.

As for Them! itself, it's impossible not to appreciate the film as a piece of history and pop culture; it's campy and melodramatic, silly by today's standards, with effects that are a product of their time, but its story is tight, and structured the way these sorts of movies are, creating tension through the difference in audience understanding and character understanding. If you know the monsters that the characters will fight (which, at this point, you should), then there's enjoyment to be had in the little clues as the characters try to figure out something truly unbelievable. It's got the usual theme of military strength versus scientific understanding, with a mix of some scientists looking for options that are alternative to a show of force, and others looking for ways to apply that force most strategically. It's always cool to be reminded that this theme was with sci-fi monster movies since their inception. - 7.5/10

13. Call Me By Your Name (2017) - January 13th

I wrote a review for this one here. It was excellent, but also undoubtedly shadowed by some of the expectations set by the absolutely glowing reviews the film had. I'm curious as to whether I would have rated it higher or lower if I hadn't seen the reviews before I watched the film. I could see what it was going for, but it didn't work for me on the personal emotional level. That said, emotional resonance isn't everything I rate a movie on, it was still excellently performed and written, and the direction had a terrific eye for detail, the way the characters' and camera's movements interacted with one another was a particular bonus. - 8/10

14. The Shape of Water (2017) - January 14th

Well, I managed to get a second cinema viewing in by the end of the week. My review for this is here. It's one of the weirdest film's I've seen in quite some time, and I doubt the images of this one will leave my mind for some time either. - 8.5/10

Re-watches

5. Time Bandits (1981) - January 8th

This was one of my favourite films that I watched last year, and I got the chance to show it to a good friend. I absolutely adore this film, it's a pitched fever dream of high fantasy, capable of getting by just on the sheer insanity of its premise alone. Seriously, the film is about a history buff kid falling in with a group of time travelling little people who've stolen a map from God (well, we don't know him that well) and are seeking to become international criminals. That kind of premise is funny enough on its own, but the film is also hilarious, with Palin and Gilliam's writing creating a lot of comedic irony that's essentially Monty Python-but-kid-friendly, the sort of story with the sort of humour you'd expect from Pratchett (must be something to do with the name Terry). The characters are robbing Napoleon, then getting riches taken by Robin Hood, soon they're in Greece stealing from Agamemnon, then they meet an ogre with a bad back, whose boat gets unwittingly picked up by a giant, it's all just completely batty, and the film is ever so joyful because of it. It's also one of the few times where the denouement being a deus ex machina is actually great, since the movie had previously set up as God being a thing that exists in the movie. That's probably what I love most about the movie: the characterisation of God. The entire time He's this foreboding presence on the movie, the bandits are running from Him because they stole His map, and they're more scared of Him than they are of Evil. However, when it's time for Him to show up and save the day, literally because he feels like it's time for Him to show up and save the day, He's this all-powerful, slightly forgetful fellow. He pauses to think when trying to answer why there has to be such a thing as Evil, and His answer is hand-waved ("something about free will"), it's a funny way of thinking of God, whose concerned himself with the creation of everything but forgotten rather why He did so, it's just in the idea of us never really getting that answer because even God has forgotten. Other than that, I love the set-pieces of course, and the score, both reminding me heavily of the Python movies, but most importantly I love the childish whimsy of the whole affair. It's literally an escapist fantasy, running away from the day-to-day life of discussing which make of toaster is better to go on an adventure, but learning along the way basic tenets like "don't steal" and "rise to combat evil", as well as some slightly deeper ones like "believing in something hard enough doesn't make it true", not particularly earth-shattering revelations, but the sort of thing you'd hope a child would learn, all framed by the hilarity of the film's tone and script. - 8/10

6. Carol (2015) - January 10th

Somewhat fitting that I ended up re-watching this with a friend when my plans to see Call Me By Your Name were cancelled. This was just as fantastic the second time around, with powerful performances from both Mara and Blanchett, and excellent drama and tension set by morally grey actions informed by the context of the film. I appreciate the film's ability to have a clear indication of who to support in the film and yet understand the world it lives in: Therese and Carol are absolutely sympathetic, but characters like Harge are not cartoon villains. It allows the audience to be fully invested in the romantic aspect of the story, to be taken in by Carol as Therese is, and have it be contextualised in a way that doesn't seem particularly sordid, but by nature of their setting have it be so to just enough people in the story for it to be a problem. At the same time, Harge acts in the way that he does because he comes from a place that lacks understanding, as everyone does in this world, something that I thought was brilliantly highlighted by Therese's conversation about it with Richard. We see a world where this sort of thing is so strange, so 'other', and therefore scary, beset by a local  morality that calls it so wrong that it's treated as a mental health issue, so the reactions of the people around Therese and Carol are understandable. Harge is still definitely a key antagonist in the story, but he acts as a product of the world around him, and as easy as it is to get mad at him, Chandler sells the complexity of the character with the fear in his eyes as his world collapses around him; it's not taking it  from his perspective, but it's understanding that his perspective is not something to be merely dismissed, especially in the day and age in which the film is set. Of course, it should be obvious at this point that a film that puts this much care and thought in to its secondary characters that there's considerably more put in to its two main characters. It would be so easy to do this cheaply, to have the film's love affair be the only subject of the film, but Carol takes the harder route of applying so much to the character of its title. Carol is herself a wonderfully complex character, with an entire life leading up to the events of this movie, that affect her actions beyond who she is to Therese. The image of the perfect powerful woman who can melt you with a glance falls away as the realities of her life set in, but you love her as Therese does all the same as the movie reveals her as a more complete person than as a character. The details of her divorce are the best of this: the way she has to fight to maintain joint custody of her daughter, the struggles and lengths she has to go to just to show that she is a mother first and foremost. It's both a great way of reinforcing the context of the story and developing Carol in a much more universally sympathetic way. Blanchett's final soliloquy is a great climax to all this, essentially summarising the themes and conflicts of her character in a few meaningful sentences. Therese is a bit of an odd duck, at once an audience-insert for viewing Carol and at the same time carrying her own indecisiveness, insecurities, and development, she's more of a narrative tool than the other characters and doesn't carry quite as much humanity as the rest of them, but at the same time has more than most audience-insert characters and is carried by a sterling performance from Mara. She asks the questions the audience wants to know the answer to, and learns what the filmmakers want the audience to learn, but her individual attachment to Carol feels more meaningful than just something for the sake of the plot happening (again, most of this weight coming from the way its sold). In this regard, you could say Therese is far more human than most characters of her type, even though these types of characters can often feel less dynamic than those that they react according to. Overall, this film was a treat to re-watch: while I initially gave it an 8.5/10, I'm now tempted to bump it up to a 9/10. Definitely something I'll have to reconsider.
   

Published January 14th, 2018

2018 Film Review: The Shape of Water (2017)

Directed by: Guillermo del Toro
Written by: Guillermo del Toro, Vanessa Taylor
Starring: Sally Hawkins, Michael Shannon, Doug Jones
IMDb Link

The Shape of Water is a monstrous fairy tale; sweet and twisted, charming and horrifying, gorgeous and grotesque all at once.

*

We follow Elisa (Hawkins), a mute woman spending her life tending to her lonely neighbour Giles (Richard Jenkins), listening to her colleague Zelda (Octavia Spencer) chatter about anything and everything, and quietly cleaning at a top secret research facility somewhere in the US. Her life is changed forever and when new security Strickland (Shannon) brings in an unknown creature reminiscent of Creature From the Black Lagoon (Jones) for study. All of this takes place with a backdrop of Cold War paranoia and social aspects of that time.

Del Toro's imagination runs wild here. Merging fairy tales with adult themes is par for the course for him at this point (Pan's Labyrinth, Crimson Peak), but once again he proves he can do it brilliantly, executing a weird and wonderful story that takes more than its fair share of narrative risks to emphasise emotion and fantasy. This extends to his vision as well; the Creature is one of the most beautiful takes on the design, genuinely breathtaking in both beauty and horror. The use of rich and moody colours reinforces all this as well, building up the dark fantasy nature of the tale.

One of the more intriguing aspects of the film is how much time it spends with its secondary characters. There is a lot of work put in to strengthening and thematically joining the actions of the secondary characters to the primary plot, the way we follow Giles as he tries and fails to find connection in life, or time learning about Zelda's home life, or even reinforcing the motivations of Strickland. It's a significant amount of detail that goes in to making these characters more engaging as people, and it's an odd mix with this otherwise fantastical story, myth with reality happening around it.

The performances in this film were universally strong. Hawkins is delightful, lightly rebellious and passionate and frustrated, aching for connection in a lonely world as she fights for it in the unlikeliest of places. She doesn't say a word (technically), but her emotional communication is fantastic. Shannon is terrifying, never failing to be creepy with his cold dead stare and monstrous determination, or even his casual disregard for everyone he sees as below him. Jenkins is vulnerable, understanding, worn, weakening, and ever so sympathetic. It's hard not to appreciate just how much he does with how he feels in the role. Spencer is the grounding the movie needs, just a dash of audience voice to alleviate the bizarre, and serving beyond her purpose in her brilliant chemistry with an nonspeaking Hawkins. Finally, Jones is a sight to behold as the Creature, not something you feel comfortable looking at but nevertheless mesmerising, moving like, well, water.

The Short Version: The Shape of Water is beautiful and bizarre, a strange fantasy that takes fairy tale tropes and adult themes and mixes them all together through del Toro's unique creative lens. It's a del Toro film through and through, which means it's unusual, but undoubtedly encapsulating. 

Rating: 8.5/10

Published January 14th, 2018

2018 Film Review: Call Me By Your Name (2017)

Directed by: Luca Guadagnino
Written by: James Ivory
Starring: Timothee Chalamet, Armie Hammer, Michael Stuhlbarg
IMDb Link

Call Me By Your Name is a tale of discovery and understanding, a coming of age story that covers first love and loss through a lens of homosexuality in a less understanding time. While it is excellently executed in its detail and performances, I also found difficulty engaging with the film on an emotional level, due to its slow pace and restrained passion. However, everything came together in the film's final thesis, which poignantly summarised everything that had happened in the film and everything that can be taken away from it.

*

Elio (Chalamet) and Oliver (Hammer) bond over a hot Italian summer (another good title for this movie) in 1983; Oliver is visiting to be a research assistant for Elio's father, Elio is listlessly reading his way through the summer. The two interact coldly at first, ever-fettered by Elio's insecurities and Oliver's distance, but as they grow closer over conversations of their Jewish heritage and the difference between knowledge and wisdom, they learn how to approach each other honestly and without prior judgement. Romance soon blooms, before being snuffed out by fear, but the two stop fighting their urges and begin to properly fall for each other.

The actors sell the story completely. Chalamet in particular is sublime, wearing just the right amount of passionate agony across his face to convey so much with a glance and not a single word. Likewise, Hammer was fantastic throughout the whole film, able to communicate with just the slightest of body language. Stuhlbarg was a personal highlight, however, always quietly and understandingly observing in the background, and providing wisdom in the film's epilogue that ties the whole film together. This is all really subtle and naturalistic, not feeling like performances at all, just breaths of life from these actors in to their characters.

Likewise, the writing and the direction mesh really well to create a very realistic look and feel to the movie, with a lot of attention to the detail of the actor's expressions and movements, and time taken to make the experience more human. Bite-sized scenes are only snapshots of the summer, such as a political conversation between two opinionated Italians or a game of volleyball between friends, but they carry with them visual details that tell you what's going on beneath the surface of both Elio and Oliver. Once again, it's very precise and believable.

However, this contributed heavily to the film's pacing becoming almost painfully slow at points. I understood the director trying to convey a lot of internal struggles and passions with incredible attention to expression and movement, everything stops for a moment of pure intimacy. For me personally, the spell stopped working fairly quickly, and while Stuhlbarg brought it all back together, I was still taken aback by the iceberg-speed at which the film was moving. I see him trying to build the passion the two characters have for one another, and I can see why it would work for some or even most, but while it stuck the landing for me, the jump was more of a plod. I couldn't always find my way in to the experience with this one, but it was excellent regardless.

The Short Version: Call Me By Your Name is a lot of great acting, great writing, and agonisingly slow pacing. While Chalamet and Hammer's chemistry keep you invested and Stuhlbarg's final monologue sells the entire piece, the realistic, naturalistic approach to the film, combined with drama that was entirely internal, left me struggling to stay interested in several stretches of the film.

Rating: 8/10

Published January 13th, 2018

2018: A Week of Movies - January 1st to January 7th

I want to engage more consistently with the movies I watch. For movies I watch at the cinema, I'm both at the cinema and expecting myself to write a review, so I engage easily. However, for a lot of the movies I watch at home, they run right through me, so unless I'm watching at the request of a friend, I find myself picking easy movies that don't require a lot of engagement and by their nature require little thought when giving a rating. As such, I want to remedy that by finding at least a small space for me to expose my thoughts on the movies I watch at home as well as the movies I watch in the cinema. I don't think a full review is necessary, at least not always, especially since I'm going to watch 365 films plus re-watches, but I want to document more than just the film's number and rating. So here's the first week of movies that I watched in 2018

1. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017) - January 1st

I wrote my review for Three Billboards here. It's an absolutely fantastic movie with stellar acting and writing that'll likely get Oscar nominations for both. I highly recommend seeing it. - 9/10

2. Collateral (2004) - January 2nd

I haven't seen much of Michael Mann's work. I watched Public Enemies back when it was released, largely because Johnny Depp's name still carried some weight (although, funnily enough, my favourite scene from that movie doesn't contain him), and I watched Manhunter last year after a friend lent me Hannibal and I gained a brief interest in seeing the movies based on the Red Dragon story. Public Enemies is very good, and Manhunter is good (despite its badly shot and edited climax), but both films were stylistically muted. Collateral is much the same. It's got a great deal of adherence to reality for an action-thriller: when I hear people talk of this film, they always points to a scene in which Tom Cruise disarms a man in the correct fashion. Admittedly, stuff like that is cool to see, but the way scenes like this are shot very basically. I can see a beauty in this, shooting for realism to let the action speak for itself. At the same time, the experience is a little flat; any effort to apply music to a scene or take in shots of the city feel unmotivated. It's as if they thought the scenes of a cabby driving a hitman around needed to be puffed up to make them seem as exciting or meaningful as the action scenes, so they half-heartedly put a grunge soundtrack over shots of bad guys in cars thoughtfully looking out the window. It's a shame, too, because scenes like the club scenes do stand out despite their almost clinical lack of style, the actions do speak heavily for themselves without need for over-emphasis by camera movements or editing. The writing is solid; not much more than you'd expect from an action thriller, but some decent commentary on how carelessly we treat death when we're not personally attached to it, and some dialogue that's held up by charismatic performances, particularly from Jamie Foxx. The movie successfully ramps up the tension with a couple of twists and turns in its final act that managed to pull me right back in to the movie. Overall, it's a very good movie, but for a lot of it Michael Mann continues to not suit me personally. - 7/10

3. Pitch Perfect 3 (2017) - January 3rd

Another movie that I reviewed, which can be found here. It's an inoffensive piece that has allows its character to have a bit of fun, but rarely has any actually conflict and doesn't know if it wants to stay relatively grounded or turn itself up to eleven. - 5/10

4. Jeepers Creepers (2001) - January 4th

It's only January 4th and I'm already tempted to do a horror binge. Jeepers Creepers actually starts pretty well, with an aesthetic and setting similar to the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre (and probably the sequels, but I haven't seen those yet). The chemistry between the two leads is fine (and I can never hate Justin Long), but the writing sometimes feels as if it was written for 10-year-olds rather than adult siblings. The horror, however, is really effective. The image of our main characters being chased down by a normal truck with the apparent visage of a monster is really memorable, and for a while the movie is pretty capable at creating tension with its air of mystery and occasionally gruesome imagery; a couple dozen people sewed to a ceiling is, once again, pretty damn memorable. The effects are a little hokey, but not much worse than you'd expect from a low-budget movie made in the early 2000s. I also appreciate the slightly slow build of the horror, not always immediately jumping to the jump scare and sometimes letting a scare be momentarily diagetic. It's not much, but considering I only recently went through the entire Friday the 13th series, it's a heck of a lot better than the type of horror I've seen recently... at least until the movie changes tactics. After the first act does a good job of setting up the mystery, the second act plants the seed of a cheap exposition dump that'll essentially pull back the curtain on all the suspense and turn in to a weaksauce creature feature; the movie then forgets about it for a little while to go back to being decently suspenseful and pretty funny once again, but eventually follows through on its exposition dump, and it's at this point that the promise of the movie begins a steady decline. Obviously a monster has to have some detail beyond "scary thing that will kill you" revealed, but like all things there are several ways of doing this and an exposition dump from a psychic woman is not only incredibly contrived and has only the most meagre of set-ups, but also dissolves almost all of the intrigue in the movie when we learn that it's specifically attracted to fear. The only thing left is that it's specifically attracted to the main characters because they have "something" it wants, which could have been a satisfying mystery but because of its hamfisted inclusion and ultimately quick resolution, it's all wasted. There's not much else to say about the film, it's a decent Texas Chainsaw imitation that turns in to a pretty bad (insert vampire movie here) knock-off . It's got the early 2000s aesthetic that I still can't quite put my finger on, but that's an ongoing realisation about no movie in particular. - 5/10

5. The Guard (2011) - January 5th

John Michael McDonagh is a talented writer, and after watching one of his more recent films, Calvary, at the end of last year, as well as seeing his brother's Three Billboards earlier this week, this was a no-brainer. The story is fairly familiar, save for its location: a mismatched buddy cop comedy about investigating drug dealers, only it's set in a small Irish town. Brendan Gleeson is sublime as ever, playing to memorable strengths as a crusty and unorthodox police officer with a heart of gold, and Don Cheadle respectably holds his own as the kind but straight-laced FBI Agent brought in on investigation. The two, and indeed everyone in the movie, keep the tropes from getting cliche with McDonagh's fantastic dialogue, fast-spoken and smart, with a hint of self-awareness. A montage of Gleeson 'suiting up' except he's getting in to prim and proper police uniform is a great example of McDonagh's awareness of our expectations; as well as little things like Gleeson getting puffed out on his way to the final shootout. Just about every line has something sly or snarky, and toes that line of dark and humour that makes these sorts of movies great to watch. The film is very very good, a humorously cynical tone and lots of clever and slightly offensive dialogue that's easy on plot for the sake of more character. - 7.5/10

6. Keeping Up with the Joneses (2016) - January 6th

Quick pro-tip: don't watch a bad movie just because you like everyone in it. I know, it's obvious, and I've told myself dozens of times, and yet here I am watching a bad comedy because I watched the Jon Hamm Black Mirror episode yesterday. This was bad, but the kind of bad that's not too offensive and will be gone from my mind by tomorrow, a comedy that's not funny but doesn't try to be offensively unfunny to compensate, only gets painfully awkward a couple of times, and is otherwise easy to look at because the filmmakers were smart enough to include Jon Hamm and Gal Gadot. It's a shame, too, because the idea is outrageous enough to be funny, but every glimpse of humour in the film fails to get a laugh just by how stale it all it, even if it's ultimately wholesome. - 4/10

7. An American in Paris (1951) - January 7th

I wanted to finish the week off with a classic, and as I mentioned in my top 10 of last year's movies, Gene Kelly is perfect, so here we are. Plus, it's another Best Picture winner I can knock off the list.  As a piece of art, it reminded me of both the nature of time changing out perspective, and how easy it is for me to fall in to the trap of making surface-level criticism that, regardless of how shallow or deep my thoughts on a movie go, don't really say anything. Each of these is a factor that crops up when considering new and old film, the first comes up every time, the second came up because my initial thoughts on this film reminded me of my review of Pitch Perfect 3. This is hardly the place to get in to the first in detail, so I'll leave it for now. The second, however, is perplexing to myself. Watching this film, I initially saw the plot as flimsy and just an excuse to have some good music numbers. This is true, but also what I said when I summarised my thoughts on PP3. That said, PP3 is a movie I gave a 5/10, whereas with this film, an 8/10 was more appropriate. The reasons are there, of course: they may both be flimsy plots used as excuses to show musical numbers, but An American in Paris' musical numbers are better choreographed, capable of being more elaborate or doing just as much with something simple, and with 66 less years of film and dance to use as a reference. Its plot, too, while light, at least contains real tension, drama, and doesn't go off the rails in the final act. The dialogue is smooth, the colour contrast really pops, it's altogether excellent, if flawed, all things that PP3 really isn't. The point is, these films couldn't be more different in terms of quality in several areas, but my surface-level words about both films were all too similar. It's a mark on me, I need to edit my writing more, work on diversifying my vocabulary and sentence structure so that I don't fall in to making all my reviews sound samey, but at the same time balance it by not lose trace of my own voice in the writing. I won't ramble further, but it's something for me to think about. As for the movie itself, my thoughts on the film are there in rough terms, but here's some more detail: Gene Kelly is perfect, even when the characters he plays aren't. His dance numbers are beautifully choreographed to great music, and his acting is as wonderfully classic Hollywood as ever (that is to say, cheesy, but in the theatrical way). The opening is really forced and artificial in retrospect, and the plot is definitely a little off-colour to the point of it being uncomfortable from a contemporary perspective, but the writing itself has all it needs for a more dramatic story, and the dialogue is excellent where it counts. Sometimes it's just the clever light montage of describing a gal while her dance number and colour scheme changes with each adjective, others it's talking about the qualities of different music genres, then there's the smooth conversations and tidbits of meta dialogue; it's all very well done. - 8/10   

Re-watches.
I don't just watch new movies, I re-watch films, sometimes if they're easy and sometimes if they had significant impact, and sometimes if I feel that discussion I've read around the film has called in to question how I see a film. It's the holidays, so I have a lot more time on my hands as well. Anyway, here's the movies I decided to re-watch, for better or worse.

1. Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (2016) - January 2nd

I've always been a sort-of fan of the Resident Evil movie series. They're mediocre at their best and terrible at their worst, but a handful of factors always left a place in my heart for them, and for Paul W.S. Anderson films in general. Despite all of the ways I find his technical and writing skills to be lacking, he always seems to genuinely care about what he's making. The series hit its peak for me personally at the fourth entry in the series, Resident Evil: Afterlife, where the ridiculousness of the series became so intense that the pain I felt at all the bad things in the series turned to joy, mainly due to the hammiest of performances by Shawn Roberts as Albert Wesker, who chewed the scenery with a smug grin while dressed like he's in a matrix movie, before literally doing bullet time tricks. Along with the scene of Alice and Claire fighting the executioner, where the term 'restraint' had no meaning to the slow-motion effects guy on the movie, these scenes have essentially defined why I still love these bad movies. Their complete lack of pretence and, despite ineptitude, a discernible style, made them at least consistently entertaining so long as I didn't think about them. That became harder to do in Resident Evil: Retribution, because the series tried to be more and failed. Giving Alice a pseudo-daughter to make her even more Ripley-like didn't end up doing anything for her character or the story in any way, a fact that's even more obvious in The Final Chapter considering she died and yet is never mourned over or even spoken of. Retribution fell down lower than the rest of the series because it made a half-hearted attempt to make the series' main character two-dimensional and failed. It was easy to be complacent with the series when it only tried to be a zombie movie with a lot of style, but the cracks in the skin started to appear when the series' atrophied body tried to stretch out of its slump of a niche. This ends up being the key problem with The Final Chapter as well.

That said, there's a handful of other issues that should be addressed first, some of which occur due to the film's key issue of trying and failing wildly to be more. The first is the soft reboot of the series that comes with this movie. The series has often done this, but what makes The Final Chapter so egregious is the extent to which it re-writes the series. There were no  real retcons between Resident Evil and Apocalypse, they essentially just contextualised the final scene of the first movie within the second. Between Apocalypse and Extinction, they time-skipped enough so that they wouldn't have to explain the details of everything that happened between the two films. From Extinction to Afterlife, they ignored the fact that the T-virus also dried up rivers and lakes, and then kept the setting as far away from any water that wasn't the ocean as possible. Less a deletion of the previous film's lore and more a side-stepping of it. They also somewhat failed to payoff on the set-up of hundreds of super-powered Alice clones saving the world, but the movie would have been over in ten minutes if they had succeeded. Finally, from Afterlife to Retribution, they time-skipped again so as to not have to come up with all the details of how the end of the last movie connects to the start of this one. It's messy, and largely awful storytelling, building up expectation of payoff in order to keep people coming back from the next one but then never actually resolve the build-up on screen. I've seen replicated by a lot of long-running series, including Sherlock and Red vs Blue for seasons 11-13. It's bad because we aren't seeing what was promised. It gets worse in the move from Retribution to The Final Chapter because, not only do we not get what was promised, we are told that half of what happened in the previous movies didn't happen or don't matter, and that we shouldn't care because we were lied to. It's not just a failure to keep a promise, it's an admittance that the promise was a lie. It's easy to feel alright about the fact that I don't really care about any of the events in the series when it appears that the makers at least care about their work, but when the creators essentially come out and say that they don't care either, it becomes nigh impossible to enjoy the film for what the other films were. It's bad enough when the film opens by telling you that not only will it not show you the epic battle the previous movie set up but that the battle was also a trap, a lie set up by the bad guy who became a good guy but was secretly always a bad guy. It's that much worse when before getting to that point, the movie tries its damnedest to make you forget what little plot and lore the previous films had altogether. The film ignores the fact that the Red Queen was the last movie's villain in order to make a terrible attempt at symmetry, despite the fact that her good version, the White Queen, exists out in the world somewhere (the film also ignores the fact that the red queen died in the first movie, but Retribution did that too, so it's a mark against that movie, not The Final Chapter). The film ignores the fact that the creator of the T-virus appeared in Apocalypse, as did his daughter. The film handwaves all hope of badassery by telling you that most of what you heard in Retribution was a lie, and that Alice will not, in fact, be getting her powers back. The film ignores the dynamics of Extinction, making Isaac's Wesker's superior instead of the other way around. The film does all this so that it can hamfistedly insert its corpo-religious metaphor and awkward triple character symmetry in to the story (although that symmetry does produce the best line in the movie, "the Trinity of Bitches"). It may also be financially motivated; Iain Glen is probably a bigger box office draw now thanks to Game of Thrones. All of this is worsened by the fact that the film doesn't wipe the slate clean. It doesn't ignore all previous entries in the series to have this one last hurrah free of messy lore, it just picks and chooses the lore it likes and ignores the rest, despite the fact that some of these ideas come from the same movie, let alone the same series. It's not just bad storytelling, it's awful storytelling built upon a foundation of bad storytelling, and it's trying to play Jenga with its foundation, removing the pieces it doesn't want while trying to stay steady on the shaky remains.

The other most painful aspect of this film is its editing, especially in action sequences. The series' action sequences were never particularly amazing, but they always had a strong sense of style: you could always count on the series to use long takes that would take advantage of Anderson's propensity for slow motion and use of actual 3D cameras. Someone needed to tell him that not every single second of a slow-motion shot had to be slow-motion from time to time, but the entire lack of restraint was like watching a kid play with new toys for the first time: as if Anderson wanted to see what every single shot looked like in slow motion and liked them all so much that he didn't want to leave a single one out. I mentioned the fight with Wesker and the fight with the Executioner before for good reason. As silly and overproduced as they are, it's the closest the movies get to being good by virtue of being as over the top as possible, the sort of schlocky approach that makes movies like Crank such a joy to watch. Unfortunately, all of this is dropped in The Final Chapter, for much, much worse. The action scenes in The Final Chapter drop all previous sense of style: no more slow-motion, no more long shots made longer by said slow motion, no native 3D. Instead, we get a hell of a lot of cutting and no slow motion. There's flashes of this style working: a couple of shots in Alice's fight with a bunch of faceless soldiers looks less terrible than the rest of the movie. However, for the most part it's simply awful, physically painful to lay my eyes upon. One fight is particularly atrocious: Alice takes on some new monster in a lab, and at one point I lost count of how many cuts were taking place in a single second. She rapid fires a pair of pistols, and we get a cut for every single bullet fired and every single time a shot connects, it's the sort of scene that requires an epilepsy warning beforehand. I understand the conceit, that if you show a shot twice the audience will connect two shots together and make it one hit, but the audience needs time to register what they're seeing on screen in order for any of what happens on screen to make sense.

I'm not sure what motivated the complete stylistic turnaround, but a lot of the retcons seem entirely motivated by this movie's new agenda, a poor attempt, once again, to try and be more than a bad zombie series. Changing the details of who made the T-virus and who his daughter is in order to twist it so that Alice is a clone of Alicia in theory ties up the whole cloning schtick introduced in Extinction, clears up why the T-virus bonds with her, and gives her some meaningful connection to everything in the series, but it's all so awkwardly inserted in retrospect. Alice becomes destined to stop the T-virus rather than having that responsibility thrust upon her, but the end of this goal isn't apparent. It basically re-writes her backstory and a lot of the previous entries in the series just to make her closer to the film series' lore, but she was already so close because of the events of the series that it simply makes no sense outside of having a twist that would have been neat had they not had to ignore half the series to make it happen. Once again, it's telling the audience that not only does nothing matter, but they're not even going to pretend anymore that it does. The other key aspect of the film that tries and fails to be more than what the film series is, is the way the film re-orients everything that happened in the previous films to have a religious angle. Now, on its own the idea isn't bad, in fact it's actually one of the more interesting ideas in the story, but it essentially adds new and extremely overt dimensions to a pre-existing character that had no appearance or even an indication of an appearance in previous movies. The juxtaposition is really cool too, having religion work alongside a big corporations to turn everybody in to zombies is a pretty decent and cynical metaphor. Once again, however, it's not what is down, but how its done. The film barely gives any thought to this angle when its presented, essentially touching on ideas of penitence and parallels to the biblical flood but never doing anything with them. Isaac's religious tendencies were the impetus for all that's happened in the series, so the only takeaway from this angle seems to be that big corporations are bad, a mainstay theme of the series since the start, but also that religion is bad, and that together, the tenets of these things can exploit one another to be worse. The series essentially re-writes itself just to force in the message that corporations and religion are bad, or at least can be used for evil, half of which was already said by all of the previous entries in the series. It's such a forced message pushed by forced retcons and it goes essentially nowhere beyond "hey, wouldn't it be cool if we told our audiences that we've figured out that both corporations and religion exploit people?"

The movie is everything that was bad about the series compounded by the fact that it forgoes everything that made the series watchable in favour of weakly suggested claptrap in a failed attempt to actually be about something. - still 3/10

2. Escape from L.A. (1996) - January 2nd

Not much thought about this one, other that it's not as good as Escape From New York, but is still decent; the movie was my dad's choice. Carpenter is one of my favourite directors of all time, always just clever enough that his complete lack of subtlety is its own form of subtlety. His work always features undertones of comedic self-awareness, a recognition of how everything in his films are exaggerated for effect, a sort of sardonic laugh at dystopia as a given rather than a possibility. Stuff like Escape From New York, They Live, Assault on Precinct 13 and The Thing are my favourite examples of this. Escape From L.A. is strong when its emulating these films, or even satirising them for a nice double-layer, becoming a bit of a tableau of his earlier work, but outside of its world-weary opening and hilariously chilling ending we get a bunch of fast-moving action that is fine, but not spectacular, nor as brimming with social satire, rather just trying to be as silly as possible for a good laugh. Escape From New York was great because it was the first of its kind and good at what it did, L.A. is not the first of its kind doesn't do what it does as well. - still 6/10

3. Kung Fury (2015) - January 2nd

Alright, I know this isn't technically a feature film, but it's also the greatest piece of art I've ever laid eyes on. From the name of the studio that made it (Laser Unicorns) to the way everything looks like it's on an overused video tape, to the way the film opens with a thug flipping a police car by kicking a skateboard underneath it, to just... literally everything about it, Kung Fury is a perfect mish-mash of 80s greatness. The way the film depicts "MIAMI 1985" as a dystopian future when it was made in 2015, the fact that the film literally turns in to a G.I. Joe -esque Saturday morning cartoon at one point, the fact that a Tyrannosaurus Rex shows up to kill nazis and teach us helpful life lessons (this one's my favourite, seriously who wouldn't want a T-Rex giving them helpful advice in their daily life?), the fact that there are characters named "Triceracop" and "Barbarianna", the synthiest of synth wave soundtracks since Tron: Legacy, the very concept of a time travelling Hitler shooting someone through a phone line, and the fact that "Kung Fuhrer" might be one of the most stupidly funny puns I've ever heard. The film is utter utter cheese, condensed in to a tight thirty minutes of complete nonsense and neon. I cannot stress enough how much I love this movie. - 10/10

4. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) - January 3rd

I love getting to show friends great movies, and Dr. Strangelove is honestly the greatest movie of all time, a statement I don't make lightly and understand just how much competition there is. The film manages to be perfect satire: of Cold War paranoia, of that era's jingoism, of the foils of humanity that allow such an event to even be a possibility, even the power of corporations. The fact that all of it is presented through Kubrick's obsessive realism, trying compulsively to cover every possibility as thoroughly as possible, makes all of this chillingly believable, which in turn makes the satire that much funnier. The way people try to maintain a sense of calm in this utter madness and chaos is absolutely hilarious: the president of the United States talking to the leader of the USSR over the phone, bickering like he's talking to his mother, the sheer insanity of Lionel Mandrake trying to convince a soldier to allow him to make a simple telephone call with the world hanging in the balance, it's all so stressful, which brings such dark humour to every seen as the film gets crazier and crazier. While all of these are factors that make the movie great, what makes me call it the greatest is its bizarre applicability: the idea that, when I first watched the movie in 2016, 52 years after the movie first released, it was still disturbingly relatable. As a final note, a character representing American Cold War jingoism at its most extreme being called 'Buck' Turgidson, a literal dick-swinging name, is still one of the most inspired ideas I've ever seen put to film. - 10/10

Published January 7th, 2018