This was better than it looked from posters/trailers/hype. I am gonna need to watch again ASAP. The Back to the Future disappearing-hand trick is employed, I guessed early on that lead kid Miguel’s real great-grandpa is the desperate loser and not the famous crooner, and the big dramatic goal is to right a historical wrong and unite loved ones in the afterlife before one of them is forgotten by the living. Some beautiful stuff, giving me nice flashbacks to Kubo.
Tag: 2010s
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017, Martin McDonagh)
From the advertising this looked like an amoral violent comedy with the funniest dialogue of the year, but it turned out to be a deep story about forgiveness with the funniest dialogue of the year. According to the Internet, the movie is actually racist, anti-feminist, and not deep at all, so I am wrong, but I had a great time.
Frances McDormand wants to shame sheriff Woody Harrelson into continuing the search for her daughter’s killer, but Woody is dying of cancer and finally kills himself, causing the town to turn on Frances. Sam Rockwell, a horrible racist cop working for Woody, who badly beats Caleb Landry Jones (playing a nice guy for once), is fired by new chief Clarke Peters, then tries to do the right thing for once by helping Frances. Lucas Hedges, having a big year, is Frances’s son, John Hawkes her ex, Peter Dinklage her partner in crime, and Abbie Cornish Woody’s wife.
120 BPM (2017, Robin Campillo)
Ensemble drama about the actions and endless meetings of ACT UP in Paris, led by Adèle Haenel (Nocturama, The Unknown Girl) and Antoine Reinartz, which settles down in the second half to stick with one of the group’s most energetic members Sean (Nahuel Perez Biscayart of Could See a Puma) with his hunky boyfriend Nathan as Sean is dying of AIDS. It’s a bit long and talky, but moving.
Michael Sicinski on Letterboxd:
The relationship, and Sean’s death, may be “something we’ve seen before” in the movies. But I would argue that this relationship means something unique in context, coming as it does after the meticulous examination of the organization, function, and direct actions of ACT UP Paris. It is literally a love that has been won through struggle, something these men fought for to the very last.
Lady Bird (2017, Greta Gerwig)
Gerwig has assimilated the awkward realness of Noah Baumbach’s characters with the visual charm of Wes Anderson, and given Saoirse Ronan an even better showcase than Brooklyn. Saoirse Ronan dates nice guy Lucas Hedges (Manchester, Three Billboards) and hangs with best friend Julie, then gives them up for bad boy Kyle (Call Me By Your Name star Timothée Chalamet) and popular girl Jenna, realizing her mistake and rejoining her friend in time for the school prom before she leaves town for a college her parents can’t really afford. She feuds with her mom Laurie Metcalf (that bonkers episode of Horace and Pete), and they don’t quite make up in time, but quietly depressed dad Tracy Letts (schoolmaster of Indignation) sends his daughter a touching present of all the letters mom half-wrote her daughter and threw away. I have no problem believing that precocious Saoirse is a coming-of-age Gerwig stand-in. High school dramas aren’t usually my favorite things, but I can’t ignore something this smart and perfectly made, and Katys are raving that it’s an amazingly accurate portrayal of a mother/daughter relationship.
Wonderstruck (2017, Todd Haynes)
Better than Hugo from the same author, which was also a Christmas-release historical city-roaming kids’ adventure by a sometimes-favorite filmmaker. Ben, a 1970’s boy suffering recent hearing loss, runs away to New York, meeting a friend named Jamie and hiding out in museums. This is cut with scenes of 1920’s Rose (the magnificent Millicent Simmonds) in a similar situation, visiting some of the same spots. As soon as Ben meets up with grown Rose (Julianne Moore) the fun back-and-forth editing games end, and we’re caught up on the fifty intervening years through long exposition scenes, a shame. I also thought Personal Shopper did a better job dramatizing onscreen text (Ben and Grown Rose have to speak via notepad), but overall this was charming.
The Florida Project (2017, Sean Baker)
Young mom Halley, impulsive and disrespectful, is barely getting by, staying in a motel run by Willem Dafoe, living on food smuggled from her friend Ashley. But the film takes the perspective of her bright, energetic daughter Moonee, who is making new friends, tormenting Willem, accidentally burning down neighboring properties, and so on. The kids are barely aware of the adult world’s workings, and Moonee doesn’t realize how precarious her situation has been until child services arrives for her at the end.
Dafoe is getting award nominations, and deservedly so, if only for the scene in which he chases off a possible pedophile and the one where he tries to reason with some cranes blocking the driveway, but Moonee and her friends Jancey and Scooty with their completely naturalistic play and banter are the reasons this film will be loved forever.
The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017, Yorgos Lanthimos)
Colin Farrell and Nicole Kidman are happily married with two kids, Kim and Bob. Colin is a surgeon, whose dead patient’s son Barry Keoghan (also memorably great in Dunkirk this year) has been hanging around, and Colin has been talking with Barry and bringing him gifts out of guilt. Now Barry’s plan accelerates, and when Colin refuses to leave his own family and join Barry and his mom Alicia Silverstone, Barry curses the family, says they will all die unless Colin chooses one to kill. “Do you understand? It’s metaphorical.”
Everyone is going with the flat line-reads and bizarre, unnatural dialogue and behavior of previous Lanthimos movies (“I’d love to know how much painstaking trial-and-error was involved in crafting such magnificently stilted, awkward performances from these accomplished actors,” said Mike D’Angelo on Letterboxd). There’s some slow-motion and soft-focus, and a repeated Danny’s-tricycle-in-Shining tracking shot through corridors, sometimes at normal level, sometimes from Danny POV, and sometimes as if Danny is riding on the ceiling. Tied with the new Lynne Ramsay for screenplay at Cannes.
The Unknown Girl (2016, Those Dardennes)
Another empathy machine from those Dardennes. I preferred this to Two Days, was more involved in the story and more impressed by the performances. Although I wasn’t too surprised when the crime finally got solved… when you cast regular Dardenne star Jérémie Renier as the dad of a possible witness to the crime in a minor scene, you can assume he’ll be coming back in a major way in the second half of the film. Supposedly this has been re-edited since Cannes, but it’s hard to imagine what that means since the scenes are mainly long takes.
“A good doctor has to control his emotions.” Jenny (Adèle Haenel of 120 BPM, House of Tolerance) is a young doctor just getting her own place, doesn’t answer the door after hours, and is told the next day that the woman trying to get in was found dead. The police tell her all they can, then she investigates by asking employees and patients if they’d seen anything, eventually figuring out that one sick kid isn’t physically ill but has made himself sick worrying since he witnessed his dad killing the girl. The movie builds up so much goodwill in its first half and through Haenel’s sensitive performance that I didn’t even mind when it turned into a mystery-thriller towards the end.
Ingrid Goes West (2017, Matt Spicer)
Not nearly as good as one of my least-favorite Black Mirror episodes, Nosedive, but it’s got Aubrey Plaza at least, expanding her range from the April-as-a-nun movie. After apparently just having done a similar thing to someone else, Ingrid obsesses over social-media star Elizabeth Olsen to a dangerous degree. Wyatt Russell (Black Mirror: Playtest) is Olsen’s failed-artist husband, Billy Magnussen (Black Mirror: USS Callister) her shitty brother, and O’Shea Jackson Jr. (Ice Cube in Straight Outta Compton) Aubrey’s landlord and Batman-loving fake-boyfriend. Feature debut by Spicer, who previously made shorts with members of Stella and Human Giant.