→ March 30, 2018
→ By

Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

I’m a bit late to the Star Wars party, but I finally watched The Last Jedi (now available to rent/buy on amazon or iTunes) on Thursday evening, which I believe makes me the last person in the United States to see this movie. I have seen The Force Awakens and would agree with what I think is the consensus that this movie is better than that one was; if TFA was the greatest hits album, TLJ is the album after that where the band tries to recapture the sound of its best output, and intermittently succeeds.

I imagine most of you have seen this already, so here’s a briefer than usual plot summary. The movie picks up right at the end of TFA; Kylo Ren is still Mad in Space, Rey is still with Luke Skywalker on the island planet, Finn is still boring, Leia still kicks ass, and the Rebels are still lucky to exist given the firepower and numbers the First Order brings to the fight. After a Pyrhhic victory to open the film, the Rebels find themselves chased even through lightspeed travel, which we’re told is impossible (the tracking through lightspeed, not the lightspeed part, which is actually impossible), and must thus find a way to disable the First Order’s tracking capability so they can escape to a safe hiding spot to regroup. Meanwhile, Rey wants to grow up to be a Jedi and find out who her parents were, and Poe Dameron still has problems with authority and is a poor judge of what constitutes acceptable losses in battle.

The women absolutely carry this film, and I don’t think that’s entirely by design. Daisy Ridley stole the first film in this trilogy as Rey, apparently to the surprise of the studio, and she remains a riveting, central figure in this film. Kelly Marie Tran debuts as Rose, another character like Rey – it’s hard to imagine these films without them – and just underscores the point that casting more women even in roles that studios would historically have handed to men adds something, rather than just avoiding negative PR. Creating female characters who are tough and resourceful, who can fight but who also think well on their feet, isn’t any harder than creating male characters who are or do these things, and it’s no less credible. If anything, The Last Jedi gives Rose short shrift by dropping her into the film without much character development, but it’s possible she’ll play a larger role in the next installment, too. Carrie Fisher’s final turn as Leia may come across as even more powerful because we lost her before the movie was even released, but the increased role the writers of these last two films gave her character has also helped put them above The Phantom Menace trilogy. Laura Dern also appears as Admiral Hodor … er, Holdo, another Resistance leader who takes over when Leia ends up in a coma, and while Holdo’s plan is kind of terrible, Dern, a generally tremendous actress in any role, does a superb job of threading the needle between stern by-the-book authority to contrast with Poe and presenting herself as a thoughtful, strong leader willing to do whatever it takes to keep the Rebels alive.

This was also the funniest Star Wars movie by a wide margin, with some dopey physical comedy (that still made me laugh because inside I am just a 12-year-old boy who laughs when people in movies fall down), a good bit more sarcasm than I’m used to from these films, and an utterly brilliant nod to the now ancient Star Wars parody short “Hardware Wars.” Johnson is absolutely playing with viewers’ expectations throughout the film, and where TFA gave viewers the answers they wanted, The Last Jedi goes in the other direction, setting up an obvious answer and then responding to it with sarcasm or a twist. Given the reverence afforded to this saga, a little nose-tweaking here is warranted and does help avoid the self-seriousness that permeated both TFA and especially The Phantom Menace.

The Force Awakens was a perfectly cromulent film – entertaining, but nothing new beyond the special effects. We got our cantina scene, our flying through narrow passages battle scene, our light saber fights, Jedi mind tricks, a Kessel Run joke, and too many other allusions to the original trilogy. It worked, but it felt too much like a nostalgia play, and perhaps a plea to forget the intervening trilogy of films. The Last Jedi is less derivative of the series, but now we’re devolving into this pattern of “let’s put the heroes in extreme jeopardy, kill off a bunch of redshirts, and save the characters with names” over and over in the films, and that becomes a bit tiresome. It invokes adrenaline fatigue and tends to come at the expense of story and/or character development. There’s a real lost opportunity here when Rey is with Luke Skywalker and, in theory, learning about the Jedi religion and traditions; the biggest revelation she gets about her character comes not from Luke, but from Kylo “my parents didn’t love me enough” Ren.

And that’s the other aspect of both of these new films I haven’t really bought. I’m all for changing up the archetype of a villain in space epics, but “goth kid” isn’t all that compelling, and Driver’s mopey delivery comes across as depressed, not depraved. This script does a better job than its predecessor in explaining Ren’s backstory, and how the son of Han and Leia could become the most dangerous person in the known universe, so I’m holding out hope we’ll get more of his character development in the third film. This film was replete with plots and subplots and probably more named characters than it could really handle in 150 or so minutes, but there were still arcs that could have used more exploration.

They also could have cut Finn’s story substantially to make room for further depth in the narratives around Rey or Kylo. I know Finn is a popular character and John Boyega is likable, but I don’t think he has any charisma at all in this role – certainly not next to Oscar Isaak’s Poe, who is drawn with some very sharp lines but that at least let Isaak tear up the proverbial fucking dance floor. I’m still unclear on what Finn’s role in the greater story arc of these two new movies is, and the side plot where he and Rose go off to the gambling planet to find a master codebreaker (master … breaker?), played in fine scene-chewing fashion by Benicio del Toro, is the weakest part of the film by 12 parsecs.

This movie looks incredible, as you’d expect given the studios behind it and the money invested in it, but Rian Johnson has also clearly given consideration to how he can use things like color or establishing shots to contribute to the feel of the story. There’s a lot of red in the film, including Supreme Leader Snoke’s henchpersons and the tracks left in the salt on the rebels’ disused hiding planet. (I know we’re supposed to think ‘blood,’ but it kept making me think of Australia’s Simpson Desert, where iron oxide in the sand turns the entire landscape a deep red.) There’s also a lot of moving water in the film, including some stunning waterfall shots, designed to give you the sense of descent and to feel several characters fighting the current, especially Rey as she resists the dark aspects of the Force within her and the pull of Kylo’s own darkness. Such small, subtle additions to a script that often feels bombastic and certainly doesn’t shy away from huge battle sequences or grand gestures by its characters may be lost on viewers caught up in the extensive plot, but they do help set the tone and, I think, establish a more complex worldview than any of the preceding films offered.

At 153 minutes, The Last Jedi is probably both too long and too short; Johnson had enough thematic material to go three-plus hours, but the repetitive nature of some of the plot details wore on me by the end, and there really isn’t much doubt who’s going to live to see the end of the film and who’s not, so the question becomes “how will Johnson write them out of trouble this time,” rather than the more intense question of “who’s going to survive?” Unfortunately, Johnson isn’t involved in the as-yet untitled Episode IX, which will be written and directed by JJ Abrams and Chris Terrio, which I don’t interpret as a positive sign given some of their recent projects (The Cloverfield Paradox, Batman vs. Superman) and the wealth of material bequeathed upon them by The Last Jedi. With principal photography set to begin in just four months, it’s probably vain to hope that they’ll get another voice in the room to help give these arcs the resolution they might deserve.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ March 19, 2018
→ By

I, Tonya.

The very dark comedy I, Tonya, based somewhat loosely on the memoir by Tonya Harding with many winks and nods to the audience, garnered acting nominations for lead actress Margot Robbie and supporting actress Allison Janney (who won) as well as a nomination for film editing, with some critics anticipating a Best Picture nod as well. It is a perfectly solid film, a B+ or a grade 55, funny in several parts, disturbing in a few others, and benefits from a tremendous performance not by Janney (who’s fine, but one-note) but by Robbie, as well as a story that is itself just really damn good. You can rent or buy it now on iTunes or amazon.

For those of you too young to remember this fiasco, here’s the quick recap: Tonya Harding was one of the best ladies figure skaters in the world in 1991, and only the second woman ever to land the jump known as a triple axel. She went to the 1992 Olympics in Albertville, finishing fourth, and might not have skated again for the U.S. were it not for the IOC’s decision in 1988 to move up the next Winter Games to 1994, awarding them to Lillehammer, Norway. (The film screws with this timeline to make it appear that the IOC decided to move the next Winter Games up after Albertville.) In the lead to those games, someone in Harding’s circle hatched the cockamamie idea to kneecap her primary competition for a spot on the Olympic team, Nancy Kerrigan. That knocked Kerrigan out of the Nationals; Harding won the event and a spot, while the USOC awarded the second spot to Kerrigan. Meanwhile, because the men behind the kneecapping scheme were some of the dumbest hoods imaginable, they were all caught rather quickly, and Harding ended up taking some of the blame even though at the time she claimed she had no knowledge at all of any plan to injure Kerrigan. She had a disastrous performance in Lillehammer; Kerrigan earned a silver medal, as Ukraine’s Oksana Baiul won the gold.

The movie version focuses as much on what came before the 1994 Olympics as it does on what every character in the film resignedly calls “the Incident.” Harding’s mother (played by Janney) gets the Mommie Dearest treatment; she’s depicted as verbally and physically abusive, chain-smoking, day-drinking, and just generally an unlikeable battle-axe who, for all her flaws, will push for her daughter to get the training and opportunities to succeed as a figure skater. Harding, it turns out, was born with great strength and athletic ability, but never had the ‘grace’ that characterized so many figure skaters of the time – and the scoring system prior to the 2002 Salt Lake City Games’ vote-trading scandal was a corrupt, impenetrable joke, so judges could and did play favorites with various skaters. The film makes it clear that judges penalized Harding for being (in the script’s words) white trash, because she wasn’t dressed in expensive costumes and didn’t skate all pretty-like as Kerrigan did. (I always found Kerrigan to be technically skilled but boring to watch; Surya Bonali, who was a contemporary of those two, was by far more entertaining, and would often perform illegal backflips on the ice, which I interpreted as a sort of fuck-you to the judges who seemed to just plain dislike her for being big, or strong, or black.)

Robbie is incredible here as Harding; I’ve said this a few times, but 2017 was an absolute banner year for performances by actresses, with Robbie joining the list of at least five I’d say were worthy of Best Actress in a typical year. The hair and makeup are amusing enough, but Robbie nails a certain tenor to her voice and movements that reflects Harding’s background – or at least the version of Harding’s life that she wants us to hear. Janney was considered a shoo-in for Best Supporting Actress from early on in the process, but I thought the character was monotonous, and I don’t think she faced the challenge that Laurie Metcalf did in playing a more complex character in Lady Bird. (I’d probably also put Janney behind Lesley Manville for Phantom Thread.)

Sebastian Stan plays Jeff Gillooly, Harding’s abusive husband, looking like Rivers Cuomo with a taped-on mustache, and provides a dueling and somewhat differing narrative alongside what Harding tells the camera. Stan is superb, and both he and Robbie make the film’s core gimmick, of having characters break the fourth wall mid-scene, often with a moving camera shot, to explain that what we’re seeing didn’t happen or provide other details, work far better than I would have expected. That fourth-wall bit could go very wrong, but here it makes the film funnier and gives the script some more rope for scenes that seem a little beyond the pale. The movie also benefits from a hilariously spot-on performance by Paul Walter Hauser as Shawn Eckhardt, the fat, nerdy friend of Gillooly’s who hired the doofus hit men, and later gave an interview to Diane Sawyer where he claimed to be an international counterterrorism expert and otherwise showed that he was out of his mind. (He died about ten years ago; Gillooly later changed his name to Jeff Stone and disappeared, although Amy Nelson, writing for Deadspin, tracked him down in 2013.)

Harding’s story may not be true; other participants in it have denied her versions of events, and she even implied in an interview this January that she knew “something” was up, even if she didn’t actually order the hit. What seems beyond dispute, however, is that she was a victim of abuse, likely from both her mother and then Gillooly (which fits, as childhood victims are more likely to end up in abusive relationships as adults). In the script, Harding keeps telling us how various things aren’t her fault, and her mother tells us and tells Harding that she keeps blaming setbacks on everyone but herself. If, however, Harding is a trauma victim, then … well, yeah, that’s something trauma victims do to cope. And sometimes they lie, because dealing with the truth means revisiting aspects of past trauma. And of course they make bad decisions. I, Tonya may not have explicitly set out to make viewers feel sorry for its subject, but I certainly did. Whether she deserved the de facto death penalty she received from U.S. Skating – which I notice hasn’t commented on the film, unsurprising as its judges are made out to be snobbish, elitist asshats – is a bit beside the point, as she wasn’t going to the ‘98 Olympics anyway. The question is how history should view Harding; she says she turned into a punch line, while I think other accounts view her as a villain. If you accept nothing more in this film but the general gist of her life prior to Lillehammer, however, you have to see her as a victim first before she’s anything else.

I was a little uncomfortable with how I, Tonya used that violence for occasional laughs, or would shift its tone mid-scene from abuse to sight gag or fourth-wall-breaking, even when the switch was there to allow viewers to empathize more with Harding. There are many parts of this story that are genuinely funny – anything involving Eckhardt and the two nitwits he ‘hired’ to do the job – but the parts with Harding and her mother are truly horrifying, as is much of Harding’s time with Gillooly. The script also assumes too much on the part of the viewer around Harding’s marriage and why she stayed in that relationship, which risks putting too much blame on Harding (“why didn’t she just leave?”) when the answer isn’t that simple. The secondary theme, about how the U.S. Skating oligarchy wanted no part of a woman skater who came from outside their infrastructure and wasn’t a dainty waif dressed in frills, is also underplayed in the script; it’s less salacious than a dimwitted conspiracy to break Nancy Kerrigan’s knee, but it’s more insidious and wasn’t addressed at all until a global scandal blew up the biased scoring system. Harding’s life plays out for plenty of laughs in I, Tonya, but in the final reckoning it’s just not that funny.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ March 15, 2018
→ By

Ethel and Ernest.

Ethel and Ernest is a delicate, loving portrait of the animator-author Raymond Briggs’ parents, from their first courtship until their deaths after 40-odd years of marriage, a relationship which Briggs concedes in the opening was rather unremarkable. There really isn’t much ‘action’ in this movie, and as such it’s probably not going to appeal to viewers who need something to happen. It is so tender and so realistic a depiction of two lives that you should watch it anyway. It was eligible for the 2017 Academy Award for Best Animated Feature but was not nominated even though it is #BetterThanBossBaby. You can currently rent or buy it on amazon or iTunes.

The film opens with a quick look at Briggs in his studio, where he explains the film in an almost dismissive way, after which the remainder is animated, starting with the happenstance meeting between Ernest (voiced by Jim Broadbent, aka Horace Slughorn), riding his bike, and Ethel (Brenda Blethyn, Secrets & Lies), a lady’s maid whom he sees as she leans out a second-floor window to air out some linens. The story follows their courtship to marriage to years of hoping for a child, only to have the doctor tell Ernest after Ethel gives birth with great difficulty that they should not have any more children. They survive the Blitz, with Raymond sent to the country twice in the Evacuation, and then worry over their son becoming an artist and a hippie. Then they grow old and pass away within a few months of each other.

If that sounds thin for a 90-minute movie, it is, yet the film works because of the beautiful flow of the script from minute scenes of domestic life through even crises like the bombing of London. (It also leads to a number of jokes about historical events, including the ever-optimistic Ethel, when told that new German Chancellor Adolf Hitler will be selling his book in the UK, saying, “That’s nice of him.”) The couple’s love for each other is contrasted with tiny cracks in the relationship, like Ernest’s blue-collar roots and concerns over anything that’s too “posh,” while Ethel aspires to higher standards of class and wishes to see Raymond do the same through schooling. Ernest’s consciousness of his modest upbringing drives him to buy a television, a phone, a car, all of which seems to dismay Ethel, who doesn’t see why they need any of these trappings of modern life and often delivers some unintentionally humorous responses.

Broadbent and Blethyn are delightful and both are so thoroughly in character that it was easy to forget the famous names behind the voices. The animation mirrors that of the graphic novel on which the film is based, with a quaint, hand-drawn look to the characters – all of whom have impossibly rosy cheeks – and an idyllic backdrop of interwar London before the Blitz sets in. Briggs may not have set out in any way to make a great movie, but by telling the story of his parents’ lives with such love and affection, he’s done just that. Perhaps that is the key: He didn’t try to do too much, so the result is just right.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
→ March 9, 2018
→ By

In This Corner of the World.

In This Corner of the World is a Japanese anime film based on a manga of the same name, and I present it here as part of our ongoing #BetterThanBossBaby series, looking at films eligible for the 2017 Academy Award for Best Animated Feature that were passed over in favor of that unfunny, unimaginative, big-budget film. This one, as with The Girl Without Hands, is critically acclaimed in its own right, and features some gorgeous animation that draws on both conventional anime styles and alludes to many painters of the western canon, while also telling an epic drama that has much in common the works of great Japanese authors like Junichiro Tanizaki and Yasunari Kawabata.

In This Corner is narrated by Suzu, a young girl who loves to draw and who grew up in Japan between the wars, turning 18 in 1944 when a young man, Shusaku, arrives at the house and asks her parents for her hand in marriage. The bulk of the film takes places between that point and the end of the war, and follows Suzu through what first looks like it will be a traditional story of a young woman struggling to adapt to life with her new family, but what then becomes a broader tragedy when the town where they live, Kure, is raided with increasing frequency by Allied forces. Suzu endures several calamities that would break the spirit of many people, but she is fortunate in one sense, as her home town, where her parents still lived, was Hiroshima. It’s available to rent now on iTunes or amazon.

Suzu’s drawings form a critical through line in this film even as its tone and her circumstances change dramatically, and even when she can no longer draw as she once did, recollections of those drawings and the memories associated with them continue to drive the narrative forward. This thread is critical because there is no traditional story arc in this movie; the war and time push us towards the conclusion, but the movie lacks a second, entirely fiction plot that might have been grafted on top of this. The marriage between Suzu and Shusaku is not depicted as some great romance; there’s even a one-that-got-away subplot that appears a few times in the film that underlines how Suzu was not the master of her own destiny. She’s put through the ringer – the film doesn’t stint on the horrors of war, and serves as an inadvertent but potent reminder of how awful our actions in Yemen have been – but continues to grow and evolve as an adult because life forces her to do so.

The backdrop and Suzu’s artwork are really stunning, and easily form the film’s best attribute, given the somewhat aimless plot – although I think this is all aimless by design. I caught allusions to Van Gogh and Monet, at the very least, and I’ve mentioned before what a philistine I am when it comes to art. The renderings of the landscapes, buildings, and even warships are gorgeous and meticulous, giving the film a lush, textured feel like you’d expect from CG (think of the verdant backdrops in Tangled) but with the hand-drawn look of anime.

That aimlessness in the plot, however, seems rather deliberate. We think we have control over our lives, but that’s only the case until some greater force comes in and reminds us that we are merely fighting for control against a tide we can’t stop. The war isn’t there, and then it’s a tangent, and then it subsumes their lives, becoming a daily threat and leading to food shortages and rationing. Keiko, Suzu’s widowed sister-in-law, arrives not long after Suzu moves in with her in-laws, and serves as a figurative harbinger of what’s to come, pushing Suzu out of her new role as the dutiful daughter-in-law and taking out her own grief on the younger girl, who is powerless to defend herself given her age and the gender roles of the time. She’s pushed along by forces well beyond her, often that she doesn’t understand, and becomes the hero because it’s that or perish.

I know one of you commented recently that this was the best animated film of last year, and I wouldn’t necessarily argue against that, but I did have a few quibbles with the production, especially the abrupt ending to many scenes. Some of those scenes only last a few seconds, as in a few showing the family eating their meager dinners, which interrupts the moderate ebb and flow of the story in a way I found annoying – you can’t maintain a mood or atmosphere like that. The young men are also drawn too similarly, and there were a few points in the script where I was fairly sure I missed some detail because they jumped too quickly to the next speaker or scene. If you’re thinking of this for family viewing, there are a few scenes of violence that are quite graphic, and the content as a whole is not appropriate for kids. The bombing of Hiroshima is seen from a distance, but the effects are described in a few ways that would also likely disturb younger viewers.

While the story was imperfectly told in In This Corner of the World, it also has the broad scope you might expect to see in a highly regarded live-action film; if you made this into a ‘regular’ movie with famous actors (the English voice work is all done by folks who are not household names here), it would be discussed as a Best Picture hopeful. That makes it so much more ambitious than many animated films, even many live-action ones, and that along with the remarkable, beautiful animation have it rivaling Coco and The Girl Without Hands for the top spot among animated films last year. And I think you know what’s in last.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ March 4, 2018
→ By

Oscars preview and picks, 2018 edition.

If you haven’t heard it yet, Chris Crawford and I recorded a podcast previewing tonight’s Academy Awards, but I also wanted to be able to put my predictions here for everyone to see, as well as links to all of the nominees I’ve reviewed so far. As always, bear in mind I am not a professional film critic in any way, and I have no inside knowledge at all of who or what is likely to win any of these awards. I just have opinions.

I’ll do a full ranking of all of the 2017 films I’ve seen once I get Loveless.

Best Picture

Who should win: Of the nine nominees, I would probably vote for The Shape of Water over Dunkirk but would be fine with either winning.

Who will win: I think The Shape of Water is going to edge out Three Billboards given the blowback against the latter’s mishandling of a police brutality subplot that’s treated as a joke. I still think there’s maybe a 5% chance Get Out shocks the world, though.

I haven’t seen: Got ‘em all this year.

Who was snubbed: The Florida Project was my #1 movie of 2017, with only a few films left for me to see to put a bow on last year. I don’t assign letter grades to movies a la Grierson & Leitch, but that would be my only A, I think.

Best Director

  • Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan
  • Get Out, Jordan Peele
  • Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig
  • Phantom Thread, Paul Thomas Anderson
  • The Shape of Water, Guillermo del Toro

Who should win: Nolan.

Who will win: I said in the podcast with Chris that I could see Gerwig (first woman) winning, but I think I’d probably still bet on del Toro.

Who was snubbed: Sean Baker for The Florida Project, making a masterpiece with a cast of largely non-professional actors.

Best Actor

  • Timothée Chalamet, Call Me By Your Name
  • Daniel Day-Lewis, Phantom Thread
  • Daniel Kaluuya, Get Out
  • Gary Oldman, Darkest Hour
  • Denzel Washington, Roman J. Israel, Esq.

Who should win: Day-Lewis gave the best performance. I think I’d prefer to see Kaluuya win, and it was a real breakout role for him, but DDL is just a master.

Who will win: Oldman, who should win for Best Impersonation, but that’s not really the same thing, is it?

I haven’t seen: Roman J. Israel, Esq..

Who was snubbed: John Cho for Columbus, a wonderful movie almost nobody has seen.

Best Actress

  • Sally Hawkins, The Shape of Water
  • Frances McDormand, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
  • Margot Robbie, I, Tonya
  • Saoirse Ronan, Lady Bird
  • Meryl Streep, The Post

Who should win: Of the three I’ve seen, I’d give it to Hawkins.

Who will win: Everyone seems to think McDormand has this locked up. She’s good, but I think her role was much less demanding than Hawkins’ or one of the actresses I think was snubbed.

I haven’t seen: I, Tonya.

Who was snubbed: Daniela Vega for A Fantastic Woman, and perhaps Alexandra Barbely for On Body and Soul or Vicky Krieps for Phantom Thread. This was the strongest category of all this year.

Best Supporting Actor

  • Willem Dafoe, The Florida Project
  • Woody Harrelson, Three Billboards
  • Richard Jenkins, The Shape of Water
  • Christopher Plummer, All the Money in the World
  • Sam Rockwell, Three Billboards

Who should win: Dafoe.

Who will win: Rockwell.

I haven’t seen: All the Money in the World. This seems like an acknowledgement of the effort rather than the performance.

Who was snubbed: Michael Stuhlbarg (who appeared in three Best Picture nominees this year) for Call Me By Your Name.

Best Supporting Actress

  • Mary J. Blige, Mudbound
  • Allison Janney, I, Tonya
  • Lesley Manville, Phantom Thread
  • Laurie Metcalf, Lady Bird
  • Octavia Spencer, The Shape of Water

Who should win: Of the three I’ve seen, Metcalf.

Who will win: Janney.

I haven’t seen: I, Tonya or Mudbound.

Who was snubbed: Holly Hunter for The Big Sick.

Best Original Screenplay

  • The Big Sick
  • Get Out
  • Lady Bird
  • The Shape of Water
  • Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

      • Who should win: I’m torn on this one, but I think I’d vote Get Out here.

      Who will win: I have no idea. I’ll guess Lady Bird.

      I haven’t seen: None.

      Who was snubbed: The Florida Project and Columbus.

      Best Adapted Screenplay

      • Call Me By Your Name
      • The Disaster Artist
      • Logan
      • Molly’s Game
      • Mudbound

      Who will win: Call Me By Your Name.

      I haven’t seen: Call Me is the only one I’ve seen.

      Who was snubbed: The Sense of an Ending, another very good, quiet film that almost nobody saw last year. It’s adapted from the Booker Prize-winning novel by Julian Barnes.

      Best Animated Feature

      Who should win: Coco.

      Who will win: Coco.

      I haven’t seen: Ferdinand.

      Who was snubbed: This category has become a disaster thanks to the change in voting rules I mentioned yesterday, favoring big studio releases over indie films. But there were a ton of eligible films that were #BetterThanBossBaby, including The LEGO Batman Movie and The Girl Without Hands.

      Best Short Film – Animated

      • ”Dear Basketball”
      • ”Garden Party”
      • ”Lou”
      • ”Negative Space”
      • ”Revolting Rhymes

      Who should win: Three of these are great; I’d probably vote “Revolting Rhymes,” which is on Netflix. I reviewed them all in one post.

      Who will win: I assume “Lou” because it’s Pixar. It’s also great, as is “Negative Space.” I am really hoping “Dear Basketball,” easily the worst of the five, doesn’t win on the basis of Kobe Bryant’s involvement.

      I haven’t seen: None.

      Best Documentary Feature

      Who should win: This really depends on what you want from your documentaries – should the film really expose or explain something, or can it just show you a slice of life? I liked four of the five nominees and would probably vote Faces Places by a nose over Icarus.

      Who will win: I think Faces Places so they can put Agnes Varda – or a cardboard cutout of her – on the stage.

      I haven’t seen: None.

      Who was snubbed: I did not see Jane, but given the wide critical acclaim of that film (about Jane Goodall), I was shocked it didn’t get a nod. I also thought City of Ghosts would get a nomination over Last Men in Aleppo.

      Best Short Film – Documentary

      • ”Ethel & Eddie”
      • ”Heaven is a Traffic Jam on the 405”
      • ”Heroin(e)”
      • ”Knife Skills”
      • ”Traffic Stop”

      Who should win: Of the three I’ve seen, “Knife Skills” is a wonderful watch but “Traffic Stop” (on HBO) and “Heroin(e)” (on Netflix) are both so incredibly important.

      Who will win: I really don’t have a guess on this one.

      I haven’t seen: “Ethel & Eddie” and “Heaven is a Traffic Jam on the 405”. The latter is on YouTube but I couldn’t get through a few minutes of it because it was so upsetting right at the outset.

      Best Foreign Language Film

      Who should win: Of the three I’ve seen, A Fantastic Woman, which also would have been worthy of a Best Picture nomination.

      Who will win: I think A Fantastic Woman gets this.

      I haven’t seen: I’m going to see Loveless this week, weather permitting, and it has earned critical plaudits on par with the best movies of the year. I also missed The Insult.

      Who was snubbed: I haven’t seen either of these, but thought In the Fade (which won the Golden Globe in this category) or Foxtrot (that trailer looks amazing) would sneak in here.

      Best Short Film – Live Action

      • ”DeKalb Elementary”
      • ”The Eleven O’Clock”
      • ”My Nephew Emmett”
      • ”The Silent Child”
      • ”Watu Wote/All Of Us”

      I’ve only seen “DeKalb Elementary,” which is superb, well-acted, and unfortunately very, very timely. I haven’t been able to find any of the other four online in any format.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ March 3, 2018
→ By

Coco and this year’s animated shorts.

The 2017 slate of big studio animated movies was rather dismal, which I think is going to lead to an easy win for Coco, the best of the batch by any measure, especially since some of the best indie animated films didn’t even score nominations. Coco (available to rent/buy on amazon or iTunes) is genuinely very good, if not really at Peak Pixar levels; it’s better than the sequels Pixar has churned out recently, like Finding Dory and Monsters U., just not at the standard set by films like Up or WALL-E or the Toy Story trilogy.

(I suppose this disclaimer is barely necessary at this point, but just in case: I work for ESPN, which is owned by Disney, which owns Pixar, which made Coco.)

The protagonist of Coco is not actually Coco, but Miguel, a young Mexican boy who wants nothing more in life than to be a musician, but whose great-great-grandfather left his wife and very young daughter, Coco, to pursue his dreams in music. That has made the family extremely bitter towards music, to the point where Miguel has to hide his records and his homemade guitar from his parents and relatives, especially his grandmother, who is basically Nurse Ratchet in abuelita form.

Of course, he gets caught, runs away, and ends up crossing over the bridge to the netherworld where the mostly-dead spirits of the recently deceased reside in relative luxury … as long as someone alive still remembers them. On the Day of the Dead, the spirits can come back to visit their relatives as long as someone has put up their pictures on their ofrendas. Miguel can get back to the land of the living, but wants to do it in a way that doesn’t require him to surrender his dreams of becoming a musician, which leads him to chase down the man he thinks is his deceased great-great-grandfather, the underworld-famous musician Ernesto de la Cruz. (Spoiler alert: It’s not him, and God help you if you didn’t see that one coming.) So Miguel has to learn some important lessons about family, sing a song or two, and eventually get back to the living while also restoring a lost link to his family’s past.

Coco looks great, as all Pixar movies do, although I think since Brave they’ve kind of run up against a barrier of animation quality – Pixar films have blown me away visually so many times in the past that there isn’t much left for them to impress me with. This film is colorful and bright and very appealing, especially the spirit animals of the netherworld, but it’s also what we’ve come to expect from this studio. The story itself is just so-so, although there are plenty of sight gags and a bunch of references that will sail over younger readers’ heads but entertain the parents. (Bonus points for getting my daughter to ask me who Frida Kahlo was.) The setup never really worked for me – the loving parents who are so hellbent on denying Miguel any kind of music, not just saying he can’t pursue it as a career, but proscribing it as even a hobby. His grandmother destroys his handmade guitar, which just does not gibe at all with the rest of her character; no matter how mad you get, you don’t obliterate something your child made.

The best Pixar movies all have intricate plots that drop threads early in the film only to tie them all back together near the end. There are no throwaways in movies like The Incredibles or Toy Story – every detail ends up mattering in a big way. Not only is it satisfying in the moment to see a script recall something from an hour earlier, but it adds to the feeling that these are deep, three-dimensional films to be considered on par with live-action movies. If anything, most live action films would be lucky to bring scripts of the density and sophistication of great Pixar films. Coco isn’t one of these; there’s a single plot strand, established early and handled linearly, without much more. Even the complex structure of the netherworld where the skeleton-souls reside felt too familiar, with shots of the great hall and the stadium both recalling similar settings from Harry Potter films.

In a better year, with a better slate of nominees, I don’t think Coco would be deserving of the Best Animated Feature Oscar it’s going to win. It’s the best of the five nominees, and it’s hard for any other studio to match the sheer quality of the CG animation that comes from Pixar. If you go against them on animation, it has to be to choose something novel like the hand-painted cels of Loving Vincent or the visual style of The Breadwinner. (Let’s not even talk about The Boss Baby.) Tim Grierson and Will Leitch put this at #14 on their ranking of all 19 Pixar feature films, which amounts to dropping it behind all the good ones and ahead of all the mediocre-or-less ones. I can’t disagree.

* I’ve seen all five Best Animated Short Film nominees just in the last 72 hours, as they were all available somewhere for free: “Garden Party,” “Lou,” and “Negative Space” were all on YouTube, although at the moment two are gone; “Dear Basketball” is on Go90; and “Revolting Rhymes” is on Netflix. Of those, ”Revolting Rhymes” would be my pick, as it’s inventive, looks fantastic, and manages to develop some characters … but it’s also two episodes of about 28 minutes each, which exceeds the category’s length threshold, so I don’t know if voters have to consider just one of the two parts. It’s based on a Roald Dahl book of rhymes where he reworks some classic fairy tales to add some macabre twists and change the endings, all told here by a Big Bad Wolf (voiced by Dominic West). My daughter and I enjoyed it quite a bit, although I think she’d vote for “Lou” instead. That Pixar short brings the items in a school playground lost & found to life to teach the class bully a lesson. It’s cute and sweet and probably gets the nod on animation quality.

“Negative Space” is a stop-motion piece from Germany about a young man who is remembering how his father taught him his rather scientific method of packing a suitcase to maximize use of the space therein. It’s just five minutes, and there’s a twist that I think you’ll probably see coming. “Garden Party” also has a twist, and the animation of various tropical frogs taking over an apparently abandoned mansion is cool … but there isn’t really a story here.

And then there’s “Dear Basketball,” which I’m worried will win because it involves Kobe Bryant, even though it is clearly the worst of the five. Bryant penned a letter essentially thanking basketball for the huge, positive influence it has had on his life, which is fine, but not munch of a story. The animation looks like charcoal drawings, which is appealing, but ultimately there is just no there here. If it’s not pointless, the point isn’t very sharp. And that’s without considering the fact that Bryant was accused of rape and chose to pay his accuser to make the charges go away – not someone the Academy should want on its stage anyway, not this year of all years. If this were a truly great short film, maybe there’d be an argument for honoring it anyway, but it’s just not.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ March 2, 2018
→ By

Faces Places.

Faces Places (original title Visages, Villages) is the last of the five nominees for Best Documentary Feature I had to see – I’ve also caught two of the Documentary Short nominees – and I could see an argument that it’s the best. It’s certainly unique among the nominees in that it’s not really about anything at all; the other four all tell stories, often with an eye on exposing or explaining something, but Faces Places is a slice of life in the truest sense of the phrase. It seems like the sort of thing you could never sell until you’d made it and could show a distributor what the finished product is, because the magic here is in the way the two leads interact on screen throughout the movie. You can buy it on Amazon or iTunes.

Agnes Varda is an 89-year-old grande dame of French cinema, a major figure in the New Wave of the 1950s, a friend of Godard, married to Jacques Demy for over 30 years. She and a photographer-artist named JR are the stars of the film, driving around villages in France, visiting friends or acquaintances, taking photos and blowing them up to paste on the sides of buildings, water towers, and train cars. Their interactions with each other – it’s such an unlikely friendship, but the affection is so obviously genuine that it’s truly moving – and with the various locals are the heart of the film. Some of the best moments are the reactions of the people whose photographs JR and Varda take and blow up, how they respond to seeing themselves portrayed in these giant posters. One becomes a mini-celebrity and finds she doesn’t like how people recognize her now as the woman on the side of the building. The wives of three workers at a port end up with their portraits on giant stacks of shipping containers (Frank Sobotka declined comment) and then sit inside their own images in the film’s most memorable shot. One describes feeling large and powerful; another hates feeling enclosed and so far off the ground. It’s peculiar to see how making someone two-dimensional brings out something different in their humanity, but that seems to be the trick of Varda & JR’s technique.

Varda is really the star of the film, though, and that was evident to me even though I was totally unfamiliar with her work or reputation before seeing this. Part of the connection probably came from how she reminded me of my maternal grandmother, who, like Varda, was short (I doubt my grandmother ever saw five feet, and was probably closer to 4’8” when she died at 100), had a raspy voice (she smoked for 75+ years), and kept her hair very short. Seeing Varda lean into JR – who seems pretty tall, although standing next to her makes him look like a giant – reminded me so much of how my grandmother would do the same with me once I was an adult, especially comforting her during moments of melancholy near the end of her life, that I felt an immediate empathy with the director from the movie’s start. When she does have a real moment of deep sadness near the end, the one thing that really happens in the movie, it got to me even though her grief in that scene was intensely personal to her.

Varda became the oldest person to receive an Oscar nomination in any non-honorary category with this year’s nod, and between that and her importance in the industry, Faces Places might be the sentimental favorite, if not the overall favorite, to win for Best Documentary Feature. (The nomination also led to an amusing scene when Varda declined to fly from France to Los Angeles for the nominees’ luncheon, so JR brought a few cardboard cutouts of Varda in her stead, and 2D Varda was a big hit.) Last Men in Aleppo is probably the best of the five for the importance of its subject matter, although I was surprised at how distant I felt from the tragedies on screen in that film. Icarus was the most gripping to watch, because it’s so incredibly bizarre how that filmmaker stumbled on the biggest doping scandal in sports history while trying to make a documentary about something else. If I had a ballot, which I don’t because the Academy just won’t return my calls, I’d probably vote for Icarus, but inside I’d hope Faces Places won anyway … even if cardboard Agnes is the one accepting the award.

* Four of the five nominees for Best Documentary Short are available to stream right now, and I’ve seen two, with a third downloaded to watch today or tomorrow. Knife Skills tells the story of Edwin’s, a Cleveland restaurant that hires people who’ve just been released from prison, training them over a period of several months, while serving classical French cuisine and earning rave reviews. The documentary follows the restaurant’s inaugural class of 120, which ends up whittled by more than half before the restaurant has been open three months, focusing on a few individual student-employees, mostly imprisoned for drug-related offenses, who will surprise you with how quickly they seem to take to and enjoy this grueling work. It’s also on iTunes and amazon.

Traffic Stop is on HBO’s streaming apps, and holy shit, is this a bad look for the Austin Police Department. A white cop pulls a black woman out of her car for speeding, throws her to the ground, beats her, threatens to tase her, and then tells the next officer to arrive that she resisted arrest … but it was all caught on his dash cam. Not only was he not fired for the incident, his superiors didn’t hear about it for over a year, by which point it was too late for them to suspend or fire him; he was just terminated a month ago for standing on a suspect’s head during another arrest. The documentary intersperses all of the dash cam footage with shots of the victim, Breaion King, talking about what it did to her life, and just about herself – she’s a math teacher who has worked in the community and has no criminal history whatsoever, but was targeted because she was black. The big reveal, though, is when a different cop, one who seems to be sympathetic to her, says that the problem is that black people have “violent tendencies” that lead white cops to assume the worst. I see no evidence anywhere that that officer has been disciplined in any way, and can only assume that he’s still out there, representing Austin’s finest.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ February 25, 2018
→ By

The Girl Without Hands.

When the Oscar nominations were announced a few weeks ago, I tweeted an image showing all of the eligible films for the 2017 Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, and showed that Boss Baby, which scored one of the nominations, wasn’t close to a top five film in the group in the estimation of critics. At that point, though, I hadn’t seen any of the films ranked above it (using Rotten Tomatoes scores, a crude measure but useful for our purposes here). I can now say I have seen one film that was eligible for the award, and was #BetterThanBossBaby: The Girl Without Hands (La jeune fille sans mains), a stunningly animated version of the Grimm Brothers folk tale about a girl … um, with no hands. It’s available to rent on iTunes and amazon.

The girl, never named, suffers for her father’s avarice; when the film starts, the impoverished miller strikes a deal with the devil to give him “what’s behind his mill” in exchange for wealth, not realizing that his daughter was in the apple tree behind the mill at that moment. Eventually, the man’s refusal to give up the river of gold that is now running his mill costs him everything, including his daughter, whose hands he lops off at the devil’s insistence. She flees, eventually finding a prince who marries her, only to have the devil reappear and try once again to claim her for his part of the original bargain.

This adaptation, first released in France in 2016, was entirely written, directed, and animated by Sébastien Laudenbach, marking his first feature film. The animation style is like nothing I’ve seen before in an animated feature – the outlines of characters and objects are rough, and the colored portions inside those lines don’t always move in sync with the outlines, which is obviously by design and gives the entire film a ghostly atmosphere. The colors are bold and vibrant, with less shading than we expect now from animated films that try to look three-dimensional. The film is mostly faithful to the original tale, which has many supernatural elements, and Laudenbach’s non-realistic approach fits it perfectly.

The Grimms’ story is a rather blunt, grotesque fable about the corrupting power of greed, with just one character of any import, the girl, voiced beautifully by French actress Anaïs Demoustier. Her faith in her father is not rewarded, and her strength in the face of the tragedy is part of the story’s moral (which sort of pounds you over the head). Laudenbach and Demoustier at least manage to humanize her, even though his fidelity to the story limits how much depth the character can get on screen, and he altered the ending slightly to tie the restoration of her hands to something more specific than the Grimms offered. She’s an obvious object for pity; Laudenbach and Demoustier make her more than just pathetic.

It’s the imagery that makes this movie, though; Laudenbach gives the film a tactile look, like we’re watching images flicker on canvas or paper. He plays little visual games with his characters as well, having them move as if they’re aware that their outlines and their flesh aren’t quite together, such as having a character hide in what looks like its own shadow at one moment. It’s just such a feast for the eyes, in a way that’s completely novel in the era of hyper realistic CG animation, and it’s thoroughly refreshing.

As for why this was overlooked by the Academy … I have no idea. It ran at Cannes in the ACID program, a simultaneous screening during that city’s film festival, in 2016. It won the grand prize in the Tokyo Anime Awards last year. It’s at 100% fresh with 19 reviews, all of which were written in 2017. I can’t believe voters saw this and still went with Boss Baby; hell, The Red Turtle got a nomination last year and was just as obscure. Watch The Girl Without Hands and I think you’ll agree its omission is a mistake.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ February 23, 2018
→ By

Strong Island.

Strong Island, available on Netflix, is another of the five nominees for Best Documentary Feature at this year’s Oscars and is one of the two that I think was somewhat widely known before the nominations came out, along with Last Men in Aleppo. Ostensibly the story of a murder that took place on Long Island in 1992 for which no one was ever charged, it’s much more the story of that murder’s effect on the victim’s family over the 23 years between when it happened and when the filmmaker, the victim’s brother*, began the project.

William Ford, Jr., was 24 in April of 1992, trying to pass the physical requirements for a job as a corrections officer, the oldest of three children of Barbara and William Sr. His girlfriend’s car had been hit by 19-year-old Mark Reilly, a white man working at a nearby garage (rumored to be a chop shop), who offered to fix the car for free if they didn’t call the cops to report the incident. Ford and his girlfriend, both African-American, agreed, but when Reilly took too long to repair the car and then swears at Ford’s mother, he returned to the garage to confront him, only to have Reilly shoot him with a .22, killing him. The grand jury returned a no true bill against Reilly, choosing to believe it was self-defense even though Ford was unarmed. Ford’s mother claims in the film that the grand jury was all white, and many members weren’t paying attention during witness testimony.

Yance (pronounced “YAN-see”), the middle child in the family, directed this documentary and appears in it frequently along with his* younger sister, his brother’s best friend (who was there when the murder occurred), his mother, and a good college friend of William Jr.’s. Not appearing, however, are anyone connected with the investigation; the ADA at the time declines to comment at all, even on the phone, while the investigating officer does comment in a recorded interview but does not appear. Neither Reilly nor the other white man at the garage that night appear, and Ford himself has been very clear that he does not want to give Reilly any “space” in the film. The murder is described, but it is an inflection point in the broader story, not a mystery to be solved. The reveal, such as it is, is minor to the viewers but major to Yance.

* Yance Ford identifies as queer in the film, but is referred to everywhere within the film as a daughter, a sister, etc. Apparently since filming ended, he has come out as trans, and most subsequent media coverage uses male pronouns (without, from what I can see, acknowledging the disparity). I’m just following their lead, but I may be wrong.

It is, therefore, a somewhat frustrating documentary, because the topic is so insular. A happy nuclear family was blown up by the murder of their son and oldest child, after which grief starts to tear apart the fabric holding them together. The father dies not long after the murder, long enough ago that he’s only in the film on video once, in archival footage. But their grief is quiet and private, and I didn’t get an emotional connection to the tragedy the way I think Yance might have intended. Their loss is huge, but William, Jr., is a figurative ghost in the film. And the racial aspects, while undeniable – if you don’t think a black man would have been indicted for the same crime with a white victim, I don’t know what to tell you – are also somewhat academic here. There’s nothing here to prove racial bias in the investigation or grand jury proceedings. Instead, Strong Island feels a bit like reading someone else’s diary – like I’m intruding on the grief of a family I don’t even know, and the cascading tragedies of the story are too distant to get the emotional response the writer would have had himself.

That said, it wouldn’t shock me in the least if this won the Oscar, given the racial politics of the film and high profile right now of Black Lives Matter and similar movements. It’s not the best documentary this year, but its subject matter might resonate more with voters than topics like Syria, doping, or the financial crisis.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ February 22, 2018
→ By

Abacus: Small Enough to Jail.

Abacus: Small Enough to Jail, a documentary by Steve James (Hoop Dreams) that originally aired on PBS’s Frontline, earned one of the five nominations for Best Documentary Feature at this year’s Oscars. The film follows Abacus, the only bank to face criminal prosecution in the wake of the 2008 mortgage crisis, through the subsequent trial, largely from the perspective of the Sung family, who founded and still run the small neighborhood bank, based in Manhattan’s Chinatown. The resulting picture is one of politically-motivated prosecution of a non-white institution, of whom the overly ambitious Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance, Jr., could make an example, while getting himself in front of the cameras. You can stream the film for free on PBS’s site, or via Amazon Prime.

Abacus Federal Savings Bank discovered in 2010-11 that one of its loan officers had submitted several loan applications with false information – such as forged employment info or inflated income claims – and had skimmed money from some clients, so they reported the violations to the Office of Thrift Supervision themselves, fired the offending loan officer, and began examining other loans he’d made. Despite the self-reporting, the Manhattan DA’s office chose in 2012 to indict the bank and its officers on over 200 counts related to mortgage fraud, including grand larceny, threatening the group with jail time, fines, and the potential closure of the bank. The Sung family, who founded the bank in 1984, chose to fight all charges; one of their daughters quit her job in the DA’s office and went to work on her family’s defense. Their defense included evidence that the offending loan officers had taken steps to hide their misdeeds from executives, that the loans in question still performed, and that their decision to report themselves showed they were not engaged in any systematic attempt to defraud Fannie Mae, which purchased many of the loans in question.

The Sungs are the stars of Abacus, of course, and their dismay and indignation power the film. It’s clear from the start that the family members involved in the bank saw no choice but to fight the charges, recognizing that even a generous plea agreement might ruin the company, and in the film they repeatedly emphasize what the bank means to the Chinese community in which it operates. Tom Sung, a co-founder of the bank and the family patriarch, recounts the difficulty Chinese entrepreneurs would have in obtaining loans from white-owned banks that were perfectly happy to take those same customers’ deposits. Along with community activist Don Lee (who has a politician’s coiffure) and several reporters who covered the case, the Sungs describe the different norms of the Chinese business world, and how American rules that might target mortgage fraud also made it harder for immigrants to obtain such loans, even if their income was legitimate and their default rates were extremely low. (Abacus claims a 0.5% default rate on mortgages it originates; the national rate for serious delinquency reached 4.9% in 2010 and dropped to a ten-year low of 1.1% last year.)

Vance and Polly Greenberg, who served as chief of the DA’s Major Economic Crimes division from 2012 to 2015, both appear in the film to their own detriment, as they come off in the final product as vindictive and unapologetic despite evidence that they put extremely unreliable witnesses on the stand, possibly suborning perjury in the process. (The film was made before revelations that Vance declined to prosecute Harvey Weinstein for sexual assault around the time that Weinstein contributed to Vance’s campaign.) Their star witness, in particular, lied repeatedly under oath and eventually had his plea deal revoked as a result of his false testimony. It’s entirely possible that James isn’t showing enough of the prosecution’s side of the case, although given his reputation and the ultimate outcome of the trial, I am inclined to give him and the film the benefit of the doubt. At the absolute least, Vance and Greenberg failed in their duty to do sufficient due diligence on their key witnesses, and that opens them up to charges of malicious, racially-motivated prosecution. Vance Jr. was unopposed in the November election, which is too bad, as Abacus would make a fine campaign film for anyone running against him.

I’ve seen three of the five nominees for this category now, with Netflix’s Strong Island downloaded for my next flight, and Faces Places due out on DVD at least on March 6th (after the awards … this is so stupid; if you’re nominated and can’t get into theaters, put it out to stream right away, I am trying to give you my money). Abacus is the best made of the three documentaries I’ve seen, but lacks the emotional punch of Last Men in Aleppo or the holy-crap aspects of the more timely Icarus. FiveThirtyEight’s Walt Hickey has pointed out that this year’s slate of nominees is extremely weird anyway.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,