Sunday, February 26, 2017

My favorite movies this year

The best movies this year:
10. Lion
9. The Secret Life of Pets
8. Silence
7. Weiner
6. Hidden Figures
5. Ghostbusters
4. Captain America: Civil War
3. Fences
2. Deadpool
1. Game of Thrones

A word on continuing:
The time may have long since passed to give up on my movie blog. Longform narrative blogging is passe. But mostly, I have grown bored with most films and would rather spend my time doing something other than watching them. The best work being done in entertainment writing is now on TV. The best work in cinematography is being done in video games. The movies are dominated by comic books, horror, and children's movies, and I'm no longer the target demographic. I may be moved to get to work next February but I make no promises. 

Saturday, February 25, 2017

Oscars Preview: Awards

Best Director:
  • Damien Chazelle – La La Land
  • Mel Gibson – Hacksaw Ridge
  • Barry Jenkins – Moonlight
  • Kenneth Lonergan – Manchester by the Sea
  • Denis Villeneuve – Arrival


WILL WIN: Damien Chazelle
SHOULD WIN: Denzel Washington – Fences
BIGGEST SNUB: Denzel Washington – Fences – Mr. Washington paints his work with a number of unanticipated artistic brushstrokes that I’m still noodling over.
WORST NOMINATION: Reluctantly, Mr. Chazelle. So much of La La Land is elegantly constructed and shot with picturesque precision; no one could fault him for winning but an inveterate contrarian by nature. So I’ll state my case. One: he allowed himself to be talked into casting stars in roles that should have gone to the best broadway stars you’ve never heard of. Two: he has no idea how to stage and choreograph dance. The best thing I saw this year was a live performance of Kiss Me Kate put on by DC’s Shakespeare Theater Company. Musically, and in dance, it was everything that La La Land isn’t – bursting with raw talent and joy. It was so good that at another play 4 months later, everyone in the audience was still talking about it. Why is an off-Broadway theater troop blowing the prohibitive Oscar favorite out of the water?

Best Supporting Actress:
  • Viola Davis – Fences
  • Naomie Harris – Moonlight
  • Nicole Kidman – Lion
  • Octavia Spencer – Hidden Figures
  • Michelle Williams – Manchester by the Sea


WILL WIN: Viola Davis
SHOULD WIN: Viola Davis – best ugly cry in the business
BIGGEST SNUB: Kate McKinnon – Ghostbusters. She walked into THE female comedienne movie to top all others and made her more famous colleagues look like the straight women. Once upon a Jack Palance time, the Oscars could at least countenance comedy in the Supporting actor awards. This was one of those performances. 
WORST NOMINATION: Octavia Spencer. I appreciate the strong bounceback from last year’s Oscars too white scandal, but this feels like a throwaway on a middling performance.

PSH Award for Best Supporting Actor:
  • Mahershala Ali – Moonlight
  • Dev Patel – Lion
  • Jeff Bridges – Hell or High Water
  • Michael Shannon – Nocturnal Animals
  • Lucas Hedges – Manchester by the Sea


WILL WIN: Mahershala Ali
SHOULD WIN: Issey Ogata – Silence – easily my most memorable performance of the year
BIGGEST SNUB/WORST NOMINATION: This is usually the strongest category but this time you could replace almost all of the nominations comfortably and have a better list. Most notably: Woody Harrelson – Edge of Seventeen, Kevin Hart – The Secret Life of Pets, Issey Ogata – Silence, Glenn Powell – Everybody Wants Some, and Sunny Pawar – Lion. How could you put Dev Patel in over the cutest kid ever?

Cate Blanchett Award for Best Actress:
  • Isabelle Huppert – Elle – I can only guess that this is a conspiracy of the wardrobe voters
  • Ruth Negga – Loving – If ever there was a call for a stage name, it was here. Ms. N. stands out for soldiering on despite a dismal script, where the rest of the cast clearly gave up 30 minutes in.
  • Natalie Portman – Jackie – Godmother Streep must have spiked the distribution on this film, which disappeared almost immediately from theaters and mysteriously will not be available for rental viewing prior to the awards. I can only assume she was too good for comfort.
  • Emma Stone – She has a lot of subtlety within her relatively narrow range. 
  • Meryl Streep – An obligatory vote, this performance was wholly undeserving. Not deliberately bad enough to be funny, not touching enough to be moving. She seems to have hired a lot of bad actors to surround her only to prop up her underwhelming work here.  


WILL WIN: Emma Stone
SHOULD WIN: Lena Headey – Game of Thrones. With the convergence of TV and film, and another embarrassing crop of niche-film-only female leads, I choose violence.
SNUB: Taraji Henson – While Ms. Spencer’s performance was forgettable, Ms. Henson’s was a welcome surprise. She deserves a chance to see what she can do with more big roles.
WORST NOMINATION: Meryl Streep.

DDL Award for Best Actor:
  • Casey Affleck – Manchester by the Sea – Not so much acting as selecting roles that allow him to do the same thing over and over again.
  • Andrew Garfield – Hacksaw Ridge – Kind of a year-long achievement award for both this and Silence. Who would have guessed that everyone’s Spiderman, Tobey Maguire, would be done, and Mr. Garfield would have a well-earned career in front of him?
  • Ryan Gosling – La La Land – Ignore the singing and dancing issues and it’s amongst his best work
  • Viggo Mortensen – Captain Fantastic – I watched this so you don’t have to. DO NOT WATCH THIS. 
  • Denzel Washington – Fences – He’s bombed on enough roles now that I can’t put him in Daniel Day Lewis territory as the best actor of his generation…


WILL WIN: Denzel…but this felt like a career capstone fully meriting another trophy in all the ways that Training Day did not.
SHOULD WIN: Denzel
BIGGEST SNUB: Nate Parker, Birth of a Nation.
WORST NOMINATION: Viggo Mortensen

Best Picture:
  • Arrival – My mom once worked as a telemarketer. She told me at one point that she had an idea for a movie, in which a telemarketer saved the world. Apparently a linguist had the same idea about themselves. Perhaps the most interesting question we could ask ourselves after Arrival is, how many of us don’t have a story in mind about our infinite willingness to use our trade to save the world in theory. Who are the people who don't dream of soaring heroism. Are they happier?
  • Fences – The only literary work in this list.
  • Hacksaw Ridge – A nice war movie which tracks very closely to the personal life of its troubled director, in which his alcoholic Opus Dei father dragged his family to Australia to avoid having them fight in Vietnam. In keeping with Arrival’s theme, in Mr. Gibson’s mind, then, perhaps what the lead character does in this film is the heroism he imagines he would have engaged in. That is, before coming home and getting arrested for an alcohol-induced anti-Semitic rant in which he referred to the arresting officer as “angel tits.” 
  • Hell or High Water – The sort of airplane movie that you discover to your surprise a) exists and b) isn’t half bad. It has absolutely no business being nominated for anything.
  • Hidden Figures – Belligerently manipulative and cloying in all the ways that Fences deliberately avoids. I ate it up along with the rest of America. 
  • La La Land – Almost classic. Evocative of the Los Angeles I remember and fell in love with, but would never be a part of. Wonderful performances, and an aggressively un-Tinseltown but very Hollywood ending. The much-remarked upon problem is that neither Mr. Gosling nor Ms. Stone can sing or dance much better than half of the audience. Less remarked upon is that the company dance routines are little better. In fact, the most evocative musical performance throughout is the jazz. Which appears to be the director’s real interest, given that it’s the topic of both of his movies to date. Perhaps he has backed his way into a more insightful point on accident: the death of an art form, jazz, evoked by his failure to put together top-tier musical numbers, another dying art form.
  • Lion – A powerful advertisement for Google Earth.
  • Manchester by the Sea – I could not bring myself to see Casey Affleck return yet again to the greater Boston region to brood.
  • Moonlight – Another film I did not get to, because NPR was too busy reporting this same story every time I called it up on the car stereo.


WILL WIN: La La Land. Hollywood loves nothing more than itself, in musical format. 
SHOULD WIN: Fences. My favorite idea in Fences is the conceit that segregation is a never-present character, that it turns everything in more standard fare like Hidden Figures on this topic its head, that it provides no cheap tears moments like Costner-knocks-the-racism-down-with-a-crowbar. Ultimately, it is a film more interested in ideas, in characters, than in politics. And hence it never stood a chance.
WORST NOMINATION: Hell or High Water
BIGGEST SNUB: Silence. The only other truly literary film I saw this year, Scorcese’s bleak missionary drama was too religious and too remote for voters to connect with.


Biggest Snub ALL OTHER CATEGORIES: Hardcore Henry

Pitched as a relentless POV video game single-shot, you are not likely to love this movie, but it is jaw-dropping that they pulled it off. Easily the most "how did they do that" moments of the year. 

Thursday, February 23, 2017

Oscars Preview Part 2: Dubious Achievements

Movie I Didn’t Like As Much As Everyone Else: Star Wars: Rogue One

Going Rogue in the Star Wars universe means killing everyone within one “episode,” vice slowly, over three. The problem is that there are far too many new characters introduced at once to grow to care about any of them. The dialogue remains drab and there is no intellectual horsepower behind anything. At least Vader got his groove back. In fact, a 2 hour, fully-suited Vader lightsaber tantrum where he curb stomps the galaxy might be just what Rogue Two needs to be. I'm sick of the good guys winning every movie and yet still somehow coming out behind. Let's go full Star Wars: Suicide Squad. 

Movies I Liked More Than I Should:
  • Ben Hur – So much to dislike. The dialogue is tell-me-don’t-show-me. Morgan Freeman keeps waiting for Charleton Heston to show up…or any other actor that anyone has ever heard of. The actor playing Messala is so wooden that Charleton Heston out-acts him in absentia. The costumes and sensibility appear to have been pulled off the discount rack at H&M. Jesus is played by the Love Actually boytoy who mysteriously gave up on Laura Linney after she had a family emergency, leaving the audience to ponder why Jesus left her hanging. There’s a ludicrous happy ending replete with unlistenable cheesy pop end song. I don’t care. The chariot scene is outstanding, and, in its humble way, I was moved by the Jesus stuff in a way that Mel Gibson’s blood-soaked The Passion never accomplished.  
  • The Accountant – An autistic male power fantasy


MOVIE I WANTED TO LIKE MORE THAN I DID: Nice Guys. Nice movies finish last.

2016’s most bizarre cinematic moments:
  • 10 Cloverfield Lane. John Goodman: “Problem-solving puts me in a musical mood.” Commence shaking that ass.
  •  Matthew McConaughey lives out every well-meaning white actor’s dream of saving the South from slavery and Jim Crow by cobbling together a ragtag band of women, children, and runaway slaves in Free State of Jones.
  • The Jungle Book. A semi-serious movie with real suffering…and 70's-acid trip variety show musical numbers performed by CGI guest stars. 
  • The Lobster, an over-reviewed absurdist Scandinavian thought experiment. Scandinavians commit suicide a lot, on account of the long darkness. When they don’t, they play Trivial Pursuit and make absurdist thought experiments.
Biggest Disappointments:
  •  Superman vs. Batman succeeded at being a children’s movie about crashing toys together. Unfortunately, the fans are now adults.
  •  Star Trek Beyond – Tepidly wanders where every action sci-fi movie has gone before.
Overused Plot Device I’m Most Sick Of: The Acceptance Hour

You’ll note “The Acceptance Hour” most frequently high concept comedy. The notion is this – you have 10 minutes of movie based on your pitch. You have 20 minutes of shabby sex farce to add. That leaves an hour of exposition filler to hang the jokes on. Lacking any real ideas, you reflexively pull the Acceptance Hour off the shelf. The Acceptance Hour is the stock framework about how we are all worthwhile, and if we accept each other and embrace tolerance and diversity, we can all work together for the common good. It is the modern equivalent of Campbell’s stages of myth, and hence its greatest sin against art is not in being wrong, but in being dull.

The problem with the acceptance orthodoxy isn’t the behaviors it seeks to regulate so much as the thought it seeks to suppress. For the ideology of acceptance, tolerance, diversity is the idea to end all ideas. We are all fine and good, no one may be judged but those who judge, and anyone with an idea of the good best not advance it too forcefully, for fear of offending. It seeks to suffocate the romantic soul in the wetblanket of, “And your perspective is valid too.” This is the death of the mind.

To wit, you’ll find this chorus back benching any number of films. Core examples: Mrs. Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, Dirty Grandpa, Sausage Party. This is where we have arrived at: Freaks & Geeks in a WW2 Timeloop, Robert DeNiro doing lines and hookers in trying to break up his grandson’s wedding, and an animated sex romp about hot dogs – these are the modern leviathan's weapons. 

Biggest Missed Opportunity: The Birth of a Nation
Its achievement, beyond its compelling lead performance, is to turn the namesake original on its head by pointing the proper historical fingers at who was raping who. Pity all the attention was paid on the director and lead's alleged past sexual misdeeds, as it undermined an important, if brutal history lesson. But this film fails otherwise to cleverly play off of the crudely effective propaganda of the original by eschewing any references to it but the title in favor of a relatively faithful rendering of Nat Turner's abortive revolt. 

Biggest Cinematic Hate Crime: Tarzan 
Navigates troubled source material identity politics by steering directly for the Heart of Darkness .Continental in outlook, it has a Teutonic wit, Wagnerian dialogue, and Victorian creativity. 

Most Difficult Watch: Knight of Cups.
Terrence Malick pulls his usual trick of carefully constructing an overwrought literary framework for something interesting and then sparsely decorating it with beautiful imagery and procedurally-generated poetry voice over. In essence, an exceptionally well-cast screen saver.

Most Groan-Worthy Remake:
  • Sing Street – There’s a beautiful moment in The Commitments when the band is falling apart and their spiritual mentor turns to their defeated manager and says, “This way it’s poetry.” Sing Street removes the poetry for a happy ending. And you can't make a movie about the soul of music if the music sucks. 

Most Absurd Effort to Make the Government Out to be the Bad Guy: Sully

In an era of bitterly contested identity politics, the most acceptable villain is the government. It’s the only one that won’t complain, and never we mind if it breeds several generations of conspiracy mongers who instinctively assume that the government is out to get them. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

Don’t believe me?: let’s start listing movies set in contemporary times and their villains. Ghostbusters? Check. Central Intelligence? Check. 13 Hours? Check. The Brothers Grimsby? Check. Jason Bourne Again? Need we even watch to know? Even Paw Patrol falls victim to this trap. 

The most absurd extremity of this phenomenon this year goes to Sully, in which a 30 minute docudrama in need of  a villain more dastardly than a flock of birds invents a sinister conspiracy against heroism at the National Transportation Safety Board. Long overlooked thanks to years of the CIA framing its best agent and then trying to kill him, the NTSB finally gets the spotlight shined on its cruel campaign to frame a hero pilot for a crime he necessarily commited. Thankfully, justice prevails and the NTSB returns to the bitter reaches of the bureaucratic swamp, plotting against truth, air bags, and the American way.

Most Obvious Casting of US Government As Bad Guy: Suicide Squad

Fine, the bad guys are the good guys. In that case, make the villain the most unimpeachable good guy imaginable, not a 3rd rate bureaucratic hack and her generic supervillain witch accomplice. Heaven forbid we have any fun at the movies.

Most Egregious Positive Potrayal of the Chinese Government: Arrival 
Unlike the US government, the Chinese government by Hollywood’s lights is at worst a quirky state-run milk producer with a few non-commercial functions, and more often, the unlikely authoritarian hero. This is all a sordid effort to shoehorn every plot into something that makes jealously protective Chinese plutocrats willing to provide access to their massive, rigorously-censored market. Perhaps the cruelest silver-screen dagger in the back of the famous Tianenmen protestor was Arrival, if only because it sets you up to believe it was a film ready to take a stand. For much of the movie, the Chinese government drives the conflict, antagonizing our alien visitors and accelerating the world towards war. My Red Dawn hackles started to rise. “What's that in my gonads? The rising chant of Wolverines?” I wondered. No. No. None of that. The benevolent Chinese general has a change of heart because he loves his dying wife. World united, Utopian future secured. 

Most Egregious British Royalist Nonsense: The BFG.
Queen Elizabeth defeats supernatural bullying with a few cups of tea and a battalion of Tommies.

Actual Worst Portrayal of Government: Eye in the Sky


In which the War on Terror is reduced to a series of inane conversations portraying government officials universally as buck-passing cowards. If only they would just send in their best agent to get the job done, and then try to kill him! Which they still kind of do in this movie anyway...but only after very long, very earnest, very British deliberation.

Adam Sandler Award for Shockingly Unfunny Comedy: The Boss, starring Melissa McCarthy
The annual animated film everyone loves that I don’t: Kubo and the Two Strings
Bizarrest Re-Casting of the Same Actor, Same Role, Different Show: The Infiltrator – Bryan Cranston plays Walter White again.

Wednesday, February 22, 2017

Oscars Preview Part 1: 2016 in Movie Titles

BONE COLLECTOR AWARD FOR BEST INADVERTENT PORN TITLE:
5. Sully
4. The Magnificent Seven
3. Pete’s Dragon
2. Alice Through the Looking Glass
1. Me Before You
SPECIAL ACHIEVEMENT IN WORST INADVERTENT PORN TITLE: The Disappointments Room
SPECIAL ACHIEVEMENT IN SACRILEGE: Risen
SPECIAL ACHIEVEMENT IN ADVERTENT INADVERTENT PORN TITLE: Weiner

ZOMBIE STRIPPERS AWARD FOR B-MOVIE TITLE BEST LEFT TO THE IMAGINATION:
  • For the Love of Spock
  • The Greasy Strangler
  • Kill Me, Deadly
  • No Pay, Nudity
  • We Are Twisted Fucking Sister


WINNER: No Pay, Nudity: I believe this was the original name for the internet.
SPECIAL ACHIEVEMENT IN TRYING TOO HARD: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
ED NOTE: It’s sadly become time to retire this award. The proliferation of digital dissemination platforms has all but ended theatrical release of b-movie shlock. It’s just after “jobs with dignity” on the list of things weighing on retiring boomers’ minds. All that’s left to drive this category is the aggressively absurd documentary title. For which we already have…

MOST POMPOUS TITLE:
  • Generation Found –  We have a new name for millennials: Generation Found. It perfectly captures the nature of millennial angst – an unmet desire to be discovered, heard, employed, celebrated. A generation obsessed with self-discovery. A generation not lost, but badly foundering.
  • How to Let Go of the World and Love All Things Climate Can’t Change – The longest title of the year is almost always a contender…
  • Michael Moore in Trumpland – Mr. Moore’s Barnum-esque genius for relentless self-promotion has gone from putting his face on every poster, to adding his name to the marquee, and now summited by joining the ranks of similarly skilled sleuths like the Pink Panther and Ernest, yes “Hey Verne” Ernest, in making himself a running titular character in his own cinematic reality show
  • Requiem for the American Dream – We’ve been singing this dirge since the 60’s. Go meet a few immigrants. Rumors of the dream’s demise are greatly exaggerated.
  • Revelation: Dawn of Global Government – I’m particularly fond of the “Revelation” at the outset of the title, which manages the tabloid bifecta of polishing the movie’s contents with a preposterous “look here”, while also alluding to biblical millenarianism in forecasting the evils of internationalist humanism.

WINNER: How to Let Go of the World and Love All Things Climate Can’t Change -…on top of which are equal parts environmental Cassandronomy, faux Buddhist rejectionism and misanthropy, and free-aimed love.

SPECIAL AWARD FOR TITLE POMPOSITY IN WIDE RELEASE: Collateral Beauty 
SPECIAL AWARD FOR TITULAR SELF-MOCKERY: The Finest Hours – Allow me to assure you, they most definitely were not.

SPECIAL AWARD FOR MOST FOOLISH SEQUEL TITLE: Now You See Me 2. Now You Don’t. There was even a fan campaign to fix the title.