"Ready Player One"

 ☆☆☆ 

Ready Player One takes place in a future America that has become such a miserable place to live that people would much rather spend all their days in a virtual reality universe called The Oasis, where they can be whomever they want and live all sorts of wild adventures they couldn't possibly experience in the real world.

The hero of the movie is a boy named Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), who lives with his aunt in a near-future Columbus, Ohio, which according to his narration is the fastest-growing city on the planet and has a whole section of town where people live in motor homes that are piled on each other until they reach into the sky.

"The Stacks" are sort of a vertical, dystopian Mumbai people who live in "The Stacks," but its sort of no wonder its residents are poor since all they do all day is sit in their motor homes and immerse themselves in virtual reality.  If Ready Player One was intended in any way to make virtual reality look like a compelling or exciting technology, it fails -- in the film, VR seems a horrendous time-waster in which the only thing to do is play in a wall-to-wall video game.

Maybe the problem for me with Ready Player One -- which was also a problem I had with the novel -- is that I just have never found video games to be particularly interesting.  Sure, a couple of hours in an arcade is an entertaining diversion, but spending hours upon hours in a fantasy world filled with endless competition has never held an appeal; there is never any time to just relax and enjoy yourself in a video game, it's perpetual stimulation.

And so it is for Wade, whose visual avatar in The Oasis is named Parzival.  At the beginning of the movie, the inventor of this virtual universe, James Halliday (Mark Rylance) has died, and posthumously announced to the world that somewhere in the vast, endless digital expanse he has hidden an "Easter egg," a secret object that, when uncovered, will bestow a half-trillion dollars on the person who finds it.

After years and years of searching, it remains hidden, which is where Wade Watts/Parzival comes in. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory didn't follow Charlie Bucket around for nothing, and of course it will be the same for Wade/Parzival.

As he goes on his search, Wade/Parzival befriends fellow "Gunters" (that's a portmanteau for "egg hunters") like Aech, a giant hulk of a beast whose name is pronounced "H," and Artemis (actually, "Art3mis"), with whom Parzival falls in love.

The scenes set in the world of the Oasis are an elaborate animated film, and one of the great ironies of Ready Player One is that they aren't the most interesting scenes in the movie.  They're all too obviously CG creations, more excusable because they are supposed to look digital, but nonetheless exhausting because like all CG creations of late, they over-rely on the ability to do anything.  The dizzying, overstuffed scenery whizzes by, all looking like it was made in a computer -- again, that is sort of the point in a movie like Ready Player One, but that infinite possibility makes the film feel somehow smaller, a bit lacking in imagination.  Director Steven Spielberg isn't limited in what he can do in this setting, so he does everything, leaving us helpless to know where to look or what to feel.

The best sequence in the film, by far, is one that wasn't in the book and that takes the heroes into an unexpected cinematic setting whose surprise I won't ruin here but that turns out to be a delight.  The worst is the climactic battle, with tens of thousands of CG soldiers fighting an overwhelming army of CG villains.  Technically, it's impressive, but dramatically it lacks urgency.

Ready Player One is most comfortable, though, when it is telling its story with good, old-fashioned flesh-and-blood actors in real (or mostly real) settings.  I wanted more, not less, of Sheridan, Olivia Cooke and Mark Rylance -- even Ben Mendelsohn's rather bland villain is more interesting as a human than as an animated avatar.

There's little doubt of the outcome of the story, and because of that the plot loses some steam before it's finished -- there are multiple efforts by screenwriters Zak Penn and Ernest Cline (on whose novel this is based) to throw one more climax on top of one more climax.  Thirty-four years ago, critics complained that Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was too fast-paced and frenetic, and the director hasn't mellowed much since.

It is interesting, though, that in an industry whose strategy of blockbusters and "tentpole franchises" was essentially created by Spielberg, the director's style has started to seem endearingly backward.  Cinematically, Ready Player One is -- despite its all-CG sections -- about as traditional as they come, replete with a rousing orchestral score composed by Alan Silvestri, who seems to be doing his best to imitate John Williams.

Ready Player One is solidly made and will no doubt delight fans of the book and anyone who grew up on video games and pop culture.  The big surprise, though, is that it creates a digital world that seems so eminently less intriguing than the real world, which turns out to be both the lesson of the movie as well as its most substantial limitation.



Viewed March 28, 2018 -- DGA Theater

1900

"Game Night"

 ☆☆☆☆ 

There's more blood spilled and a higher body count in Game Night than in most horror films, yet somehow this is a movie so raucously, effortlessly funny and charming it makes you guffaw when you see a guy whose body is splattered into little tiny pieces.

That really does happen in Game Night, but even telling you that feels like a mild betrayal of the film's central conceit, which is that it presents itself as a mild, slightly bawdy comedy of the Judd Apatow variety before going into a wildly different direction and taking so many weird and wild detours that it all makes perfect sense even while making no sense at all.

Nothing about Game Night resembles reality, or maybe a better way to put it would be that the whole movie exists in a sort of surreal, hyper-reality, underscored by the film's occasional and effective use of tilt-shift photography to lend a sense that the whole movie takes place on a giant game board.

Indeed, there are times when the movie -- which is directed with carefree abandon by John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein -- seems to be making its next move based on drawing Chance cards; it's never entirely clear what's going to happen next in a script that I would have guessed had been written by several people but is in fact credited only to one guy, Mark Perez, who must be a very funny and unpredictable guy.

The story starts with two hyper-competitive game lovers, Max (Jason Bateman) and Annie (Rachel McAdams), who meet and get married based almost solely on their infatuation with games of any sort: video games, board games, parlor games, they love it all.  Once a week in their upscale suburban Atlanta home, they gather their friends Kevin (Lamorne Morris), Michelle (Kylie Bunbury), Ryan (Billy Magnussen) and Ryan's oddly consistent choice of girlfriend.

It's the appearance of Max's brother Brooks (Kyle Chandler) that sets things in motion as Brooks suggests a different kind of game night at his house. Shunning their odd next-door neighbor Gary (Jesse Plemons) and bringing along Ryan's older, Irish co-worker Sarah (Sharon Hogan), they've got no idea what's in store.

Brooks has set up an elaborate real-life mystery scenario that's a little like the one in David Fincher's The Game but a little more jocularity.  At least, that's the intent, but things go perilously wrong when actual hit-men descend on Brooks's house -- though none of the game night participants are aware that it's not all staged.

The result is an intricate, wild ride that's like a combination of Fincher's film with Martin Scorsese's After Hours, with echoes of Risky Business, Foul Play, Adventures in Babysitting and Ferris Bueller's Day Off thrown in for good measure.

Completely unaware that the game they're playing isn't the real-world role-playing scenario they think, each of the three couples -- Max and Anne, Kevin and Michelle, Ryan and Sarah -- begin trying to solve what they think is the mystery, finally coming together for a fast and funny chase scene that leads to a climax that's just ever-so-slightly overblown and that strains what little credulity the rest of the movie had.  Game Night moves from being a small observational comedy to a big-scale, action-oriented movie with ease, but as the scale and scope grow ever bigger, the laughs diminish just a tad.

Still, the energy never flags, and while Bateman and McAdams are sweet and engaging, what's best about the movie is its supporting cast: As a bickering couple with some serious marital trust issues, Morris and Bunbury have a running gag about a tryst she once had with a certain celebrity.  Hogan, meanwhile, is the straight woman to the surprisingly goofy and ingratiating turn by Magnussen as a hunky younger guy who might not be all there, intellectually speaking.  Whenever the energy of the central storyline threatens to wane even a bit, the movie reliably turns to one of these couples and gets things back on track.

Equally laugh-inducing is Plemons, who creates a fantastically memorable (and straight-faced) character in the ultra-serious, mildly disturbing next-door neighbor who feels left out of game night and holds a torch for his ex-wife -- a torch that burns with rather dangerous intensity.

It's no slight against Game Night to say that it so closely resembles other movies that have similarly combined slapstick comedy with dangerous undertones.  Clearly, the filmmakers have learned from those movies and used the essence of other films to create something that works tremendously well on its own.

It may be overblown at times, and every once in a while a hint of malevolence overwhelms the giddiness with a little too much violence -- but those quibbles aside, Game Night makes its hilarity look easy and feel fun, two things any game player will tell you takes a lot of effort and a lot of practice. The hard work pays off: Game Night is a winner.



Viewed March 24, 2018 -- AMC Burbank 16

2015

"Love, Simon"

 ☆☆☆½ 

The new film by John Hu-- er, sorry, Greg Berlanti is a sweet, innocent story of a student at an affluent suburban high school who has a secret crush and who constantly has to shoo away the school dork while hoping to fend off the humiliation of young love that goes unreturned.  Except at the very, very last minute, the hot hunk shows up and everyone is happy.

Yes, Love, Simon mostly is the plot of John Hughes' Sixteen Candles reworked for the woke generation and given a gay twist that is very, very careful not to be too gay, in the way that John Hughes movies were very, very careful not to be too real.  So, gone are the slapsticky grandparents, the offensively Asian foreign-exchange student, the horny dork, the observational comedy of Hughes that seems borderline shocking today.

Instead, we have beautiful parents who live in a home furnished by Pottery Barn, an adorable little sister who is perfectly well-behaved, a classically clean and pretty high school where the teachers are just slightly perturbed by the students (the seething animosity of, say, Hughes' assistant principal Vernon from Breakfast Club or Cameron Crowe's Mr. Hand from Fast Times at Ridgemont High is nowhere to be found here; the teachers are all no worse than mildly bemused).

Love, Simon is, in every way, scrubbed of any possibility of being offensive to anyone, gay or straight, black or white, rich or poor.  One of the students lives in an apartment building, but we have to glean that fact from conversation, not draw any inferences from the revelation.  All of the students write on and read a blog about the secrets of the high school, but no one seems particularly alarmed at what they read.

When, at one point, Simon (Nick Robinson) shows up drunk after a party, his female best friend (Katherine Langford) staggering upstairs with him, the reaction of his parents (the beatific Jennifer Garner and Josh Duhamel) is to giggle at his state and be proud that they raised a son who is always home by curfew.

In other words, there are no stakes in Love, Simon.  None at all, not even the comedic kind that drove Hughes movies in the 1980s.  So, when Simon reveals early on that he's got a "huge ass" secret, it's pretty much a given that when he finally tells his friends and family that he's gay, they're going to give him nothing but support and encouragement.

I hope this is how kids are finding the experience of coming out, but I have a sneaking suspicion that Love, Simon is something less than honest about what kids still go through when they're labeled as gay in high school (whether or not they are).  The most interesting character, by far, in Love, Simon is an androgynous, flamboyant gay boy named Ethan (Clark Moore), who shares his truth with Simon: His mother won't tell his grandparents that he's gay, and when he goes to visit them every weekend, she makes up stories about all the girls he's dating.

The look of humiliation that crosses Ethan's face during his scene -- one of a handful of genuinely honest scenes in the movie -- made me long to know Ethan's story, to have the film be about this interesting, wounded, defiant boy, not its actual main character.

Though no fault at all of Robinson, who is good-looking, engaging and quite a good actor, Simon is, let's face it, about as bland as they come.  His all-hoody wardrobe (an observation Ethan makes, by the way) is his way of hiding behind normalcy.  He wants to blend in, to be accepted not for being gay (ostensibly the point of the story) but for being cool and effortlessly charming.  For being the popular kid at school.

And that becomes the key differentiator between the classic Hughes movies of the 1980s and this one, which emulates the earlier films with a rather form-fitting precision.  Hughes movies were about the outcasts and the rejects, the kids who couldn't act normal to save their lives, who weren't rich or popular, or who had to learn how to exist with those who were.  (The sole exception to that is the pure fantasy of Ferris Bueller's Day Off, but even that movie gets a little, well, uncomfortable at times.)

Love, Simon is sanitized for your protection. Every one of its kids, even the dorky one, is wholesome and good-looking, breaking the rules maybe a little with a few beers, but not going any further -- there's no hint of drugs or pot or unsafe sex or the general messiness of modern life in Love, Simon.

It is, for all intents and purposes, an After School Special about the importance of coming out and accepting who you are.  And on that level, don't get me wrong, it's eminently enjoyable.  After the eye-rolling opening scenes of Simon's impossibly perfect home life, Love, Simon settles into a fun and engaging story: Simon has read an anonymous post on his school's blog from another gay student and begins a correspondence, lending the film an unexpected setting in two ways:

First, Simon's letters form a sort of epistolary structure, not exactly common these days, in which he creates a nom de plume for himself and his heartfelt letters about what he's going through are answered in turn.  That leads to the second fun twist: It becomes essentially a mystery -- not a murder-mystery, but a "love-mystery" with much the same structure.  As Simon tries to determine who is writing to him about being a gay student, he tries to figure out the identity of the person on the other end of the letters.

Getting in the way of that fun plot, though, is the film's continued insistence to come back to Simon's need to come out of the closet and the impact it will have on his life.  But we've already determined, just by watching, that the impact will be minimal -- and, indeed, that turns out to be the case.

No one cries.  No one screams.  No one says they were shocked, or worries about getting sick, or discrimination, or gay bashing, or the Federal government's increasingly intolerant stance on gay people. No one is concerned about what Grandma will think, or whether this will affect college admissions, or any of the things that usually do happen when kids come out.

Love, Simon is desperately sweet that way.  It imagines a world in which coming out is not difficult or particularly scary or laden with the fear that everyone, your family included, will reject you.

No, Love, Simon plays it as John Hughes Lite.  And it's totally fine. I can't fault the movie for being something it's not.  But it tries to play it both ways -- to be a "non-preachy" story about a boy hoping to fall in love, while making more than a few salient points about the importance of being who you are.

And it's just so darned cute and sweet and nice.  Which is ultimately the biggest problem I had with it.  The world isn't as easy as this.  Coming out isn't a piece of cake.  I have to believe Hughes or even Crowe would have upped the stakes quite a lot back in the '80s -- that someone's job might be on the line, that the parents might be getting divorced, that maybe there was a college admission that might be rejected, or at least that the rest of the school would shun Simon when he finally came out.

But that's not this film. This movie is only about happiness, about a hope and optimism.  In that sense, maybe it's the film that really will benefit some young people, and taken on those terms, it's terrific, maybe even kind of great.  The thing is, as a dramatic rom-com or a piece of genuinely compelling cinema, it's something less than fulfilling.  It's just too damn cute and perky and adorable.  Not bad things, any of them.  Just not completely satisfying, either.

When at the end of the film, five characters end up in a car together, and Simon announces he's taking them for "an adventure," you can't help but get the sense they're driving straight toward downtown Chicago, where Ferris is going to put them in a parade and teach them a thing or two about appreciating life.

Love, Simon is a cinematic confection: sweet, tremendously well-made, endlessly appealing, and almost wholly innocuous -- enough to give you a rush of sugar, but in no way close to providing a satisfying, emotionally nutritious meal.


Viewed March 19, 2018 -- ArcLight Sherman Oaks

1915

Oscars: A Most Uncertain Year

Here's a strange thing about the 90th Oscars -- it's either going to be one of the most predictable Academy Awards shows in history ... or the least.

The weirdness that went on last year with befuddled (but insanely confident) Faye Dunaway and bemused Warren Beatty and La La Land and Moonlight and those poor PricewaterhouseCoopers accountants who don't have jobs anymore (but went out with a bang)?

None of that's gonna happen this year.

Except ... don't rule anything out.

There's not even real consensus among prognosticators whether The Shape of Water will win Best Picture or Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri, and let's be honest, there's not a ton of passion for either film.  So, could the final envelope be opened and a shout of, say, Call Me By Your Name (be still, my heart!) actually happen?

Thanks to the preferential balloting system the Oscars uses, it's very possible.  As the Los Angeles Times points out, the Oscars voting system basically gives Best Picture to the film that the least number of Oscar voters actively dislikes.  Too many "anti-Three Billboards" or "anti-Shape of Water" votes could actually doom those films.  The complex system is explained coherently by the Times' Glenn Whipp:

Here's why that ordering is important: When Rosas and fellow PwC accountants Kimberly Bourdon and Mark Lobel sort the best picture ballots, they place them in stacks based on members' No. 1 votes.  They then eliminate the movie with the fewest first-place votes, giving those votes to each ballot's second-ranked film.  The process continues -- smallest stacks eliminated, votes redistributed to the next choice down -- until one movie has more than 50% of the vote.

So, let's be clear: a lot of people hate Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri for a rather confounding number of reasons, none of which I understood at the time or understand now.  The film got people talking all right, but in Hollywood a lot of them were talking about it for the wrong reasons.

The Shape of Water is a sweet and beautiful film, an ode to monster movies with a strong auteur director at the helm.  But a huge number of Oscar voters are turned off by "genre" filmmaking (that is, sci-fi, horror, etc.), and other older, less liberal members may very well have turned the damn thing off when the deaf woman and the sea creature got it on.

Since the majority of Oscar voters don't see movies in a movie theater, they watch them at home on inferior-quality DVDs with absolutely no consistency in the presentation.  It is infinitely easier to just say, "Oh, Helen, turn that stupid movie off" than it is to walk out of a screening.  A lot of people liked but didn't love The Shape of Water's far-fetched story and its telegraphed plot.

So, there are potentially a large number of votes against the two front-runners.  That leaves two movies about England's entry in to World War II  -- Dunkirk and Darkest Hour -- which could cancel each other out; both have their ardent fans, both have their vocal detractors.

Get Out is the film that has the fewest "enemies," perhaps, but it's also unfairly been branded a low-budget horror film that capitalized on the #OscarsSoWhite movement of the last few years, which has been all but forgotten in a #MeToo era.  What Get Out has going for it is that it's actually, genuinely one of the best movies of the year.

Phantom Thread and The Post are two "prestige" pictures that feel like holdovers from another era.  They received the nominations because they were supposed to, not because of passionate supporters.  (Let it be said, both are superb films.)

And then there are this year's two indies: Lady Bird and Call Me By Your Name.  Lady Bird has a passionate fan base, and the worst I've heard anyone say about it is that it felt more like a small TV film.  Call Me By Your Name, my vote for best movie of the 2010s, maybe the last two decades, is viewed by many as "boring," and a distressing number of people seized upon the age difference between its two main characters as somehow representative of our #MeToo age of anti-predatory behavior.  (To me, those people have as much of a point as do those who say Annie Hall is about a guy who has a problem with spiders.)

All of which leads me to wonder if the film whose title is announced might not actually end up being one of the longshots.  Doubtful, but -- as Faye and Warren reminded us last year -- oh so tantalizingly possible!

Oh, and they're opening the envelope again this year.

So, here's my attempt to predict the winners of the 90th Academy Awards.

  BEST PICTURE  

 WILL WIN : The Shape of Water 
 SHOULD WIN : Call Me By Your Name
 WHY?  There's no clear consensus in this race, but there is a good chance that Academy voters have been won over by the incessant, omnipresent, in-your-face campaigning for The Shape of Water.  Though the film has its supporters, I view it as this decade's version of Crash, a choice made out of sheer frustration with the nominees, and not because it's a great film.  Its story meanders, its characters are all over the map, it's got the symbolism of a 10th grader's short story, and it's got some laughably bad scenes (like the pie guy in the diner).  But it's extraordinarily self-important, and that turns the Academy on.  The insidiously effective "You-Realize-a-Main-Character-is-a-Racist!" social media campaign against Three Billboards has all but doomed that film's chances, and thanks to the weird balloting system, I think there's an incredibly good chance that Get Out or Lady Bird or (yes, seriously) Call Me By Your Name could be announced, if only because the backstabbing against the others has reached insufferable levels.

 BEST DIRECTOR 

 WILL WIN : Guillermo del Toro for The Shape of Water
 SHOULD WIN : Jordan Peele for Get Out
 WHY?  Del Toro wins because he is a master showman who doesn't just know how to play the system, he loves playing it.  Other than a child's birthday party, I can hardly think of any significant event lately in L.A. at which he has not appeared -- and he always spins a wonderfully compelling story about how he made the film to pay homage to the movies he loved as a child.  Oh, Hollywood loves that self-reflexivity.  Peele should be taking home this award, though, for his stylish, intricately designed, impeccably composed, beautifully shot and perfectly cast thriller that, by the way, also pays tribute to a lot of other Hollywood greats, but much more subtle ways.

 BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR  

 WILL WIN : Sam Rockwell for Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri
 SHOULD WIN : Willem Dafoe for The Florida Project
 WHY?  "But he's a racist! The Oscar will go to someone for playing a racist character!  It's disgusting!" No, it's acting. And writing, and directing. Three Billboards is about finding the grace and humanity underneath the outward appearance and behavior of truly despicable people, the kind of people who get mocked for wanting prayer and guns in schools, and for voting for Trump. Three Billboards takes some awful people, like Sam Rockwell's cop, and makes them real, makes us understand them. Rockwell never ever redeems his character, but he does try to make better choices.  Rockwell accomplishes one of acting's hardest feats: He keeps a character awful, but makes us like him anyway. Yet, there's Willem Dafoe doing the opposite in the shamefully overlooked The Florida Project, one of the very best movies of the year.  Dafoe creates a character unlike any we've ever seen him play: There's not a hint of Dafoe's trademark craziness, just genuine compassion, love, even pain as he wishes he could help provide a better life for the people who live in his rundown motel.  As the closest thing to an audience surrogate in The Florida Project, Dafoe allows us to see a world almost all of us have only overlooked.

 BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS  

 WILL WIN : Allison Janney for I, Tonya
 SHOULD WIN : Laurie Metcalf for Lady Bird
 WHY?  It's possible I'm the only person who saw Janney's work as caricature.  I never saw an actual person behind the de-glammed makeup, big glasses, oxygen cannula and chain-smoking.  I saw everything people have seen in Three Billboards: Disdain for this "kind" of person, for "white trash." In Janney's defense, she plays it with fierce and unrepenting anger.  But the character, like the movie, left me feeling depressed, not inspired.  While Janney is almost a foregone conclusion, she can't nail the moment Metcalfe delivers the year's finest supporting performance.  When her daughter Lady Bird (Saoirse Ronan) sighs, "What if this is the best version of me?" Metcalfe's weary response turns her into the most wonderfully relatable parent on screen this year.  She nails humanity, resilience, strength, weakness, desperation, pride, disappointment, hope, fear, optimism ... all of it in one almost throwaway moment, capturing perfectly how a parent can love a child even if she sometimes doesn't like the kid.

 BEST ACTOR  

 WILL WIN : Gary Oldman for Darkest Hour
 SHOULD WIN : Timothée Chalamet for Call Me By Your Name
 WHY?  There's certainly nothing wrong with Oldman winning the Oscar -- his performance is undeniable Oscar bait, endlessly entertaining, and a perfect blend of acting craft and makeup work.  Is it the best performance of the year by an actor?  You watch the last four minutes of Call Me By Your Name, then tell me.  The consensus is, "Chalamet has plenty of time." That's about the most ageist thing I've heard in a while.

 BEST ACTRESS 

 WILL WIN : Frances McDormand, Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri
 SHOULD WIN : Meryl Streep, The Post
 WHY?  McDormand would have had my vote for her fierce, genuine performance of a grieving woman who knows neither subtlety nor reason.  Then I saw The Post, and say what you will about a "token" Streep nominee, but she did so much more than deliver a caricature.  Her performance as Katharine Graham is a revelation: Streep plays her as something Streep is not used to playing lately, a woman who is unsure of herself, who has to find her own voice, her own courage to face down the establishment.  Wavering, tremulous, anxious yet confident and brave, Streep is at her best in The Post, which is a film that is destined to be rediscovered in years to come.

 BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY  

 WILL WIN : Call Me By Your Name
 SHOULD WIN : Call Me By Your Name
 WHY?  It's everything an adaptation should be. In a time of slavish "filmizations" of novels, James Ivory's screenplay dares to keep the same basic story and structure and turn it from an internal, first-person narrative into a film with two main characters (and two key supporting characters) so finely crafted that they have their own internal lives, and a logic and reason that are only theirs to understand.  Far from being a simple "coming-of-age story," Call Me By Your Name is a multi-layered film filled with nuance and discovery, all the hallmarks of the author who turned a tremulous, quivering moment between middle-aged Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson into a sighing, swoonable romantic milestone in his adaptation of The Remains of the Day. This is even more exquisite.

 BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY  

 WILL WIN :  The Shape of Water Get Out
 SHOULD WIN : Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri
 WHY?  A lovely fairy tale turned into a symbolic mishmash of repressed desires, there's little really genuinely memorable about The Shape of Water other than its sumptuous physicality, which is not what a screenplay is.  (Though I did like the bit about the gills.)  Even the knee-jerk, misses-the-point, it's-racist backlash against Three Billboards can't hide its wonderful way with words, its remarkable ability to change tones convincingly even within a scene ("It's a gag"), and a story that is getting under peoples' skin precisely because it dares to reflect one person's view of humanity.  It's a screenplay with a definite perspective to it, it's shocking, it's angry, it's sad, and it's terrific.  A lot of people hate Three Billboards ... and isn't that kind of the point of a movie like this?

 ADDITIONAL CATEGORIES  

Best Animated Film: Coco

Best Foreign Language Film: A Fantastic Woman

Best Documentary Feature: Faces Places Icarus

Best Documentary Short Subject:  Heroin(e) Heaven is a Traffic Jam on the 405

Best Costume Design: Phantom Thread

Best Film Editing: Dunkirk

Best Cinematography:  Blade Runner 2049

Best Makeup/Hair Styling:  Darkest Hour

Best Original Score: The Shape of Water

Best Original Song: "This Is Me" "Remember Me"

Best Sound Editing:  Dunkirk

Best Sound Mixing: Dunkirk

Best Visual Effects: War for the Planet of the Apes Blade Runner 2049

Best Production Design:  The Shape of Water

Best Animated Short Film:  Dear Basketball

Best Live Action Short Film: DeKalb Elementary The Silent Child

"Annihilation"

 ☆☆½ 

A weird and ultimately unsatisfying combination of Avatar, Alien, the TV series "Lost" and 2001: A Space Odyssey, Annihilation at least deserves credit for reaching for something that is way beyond its grasp, but all good intentions aside, a convincing purpose eludes director Alex Garland in this long and sometimes plodding hybrid of action-thriller and metaphysical rumination on life and love.

It may well be that Denis Villeneuve's Arrival convinced executives at Paramount to take a chance on Annihilation, though it could also be that last year's disastrous release of Darren Aronofsky's pretentiously symbolic mother! convinced them to dump this Natalie Portman sci-fi spectacle.  In any event, it's clear that the studio hasn't known what to do with Annihilation, but I've got to wonder if Garland himself knew quite what to make of adapting Jeff VanderMeer's novel, either.

That isn't to say that Annihilation falls into the same category as Aranofsky's piece of artistic masturbation -- Garland seems to want to say something here, and to do it using familiar tropes: From the tough and ready-to-fight former soldier who's leading the expedition (say hello, Ellen Ripley), to the colorful forest that sometimes glows with phosphorescent beauty (say hello, Avatar), to the love and loss that motivates the main character (say hello, Arrival), to the weird things that happen to a place on earth where magnets don't work, abandoned science facilities dot the landscape and mutant animals roam the land (say hello, "Lost").  It all ends with a glimpse into a fast-moving psychedelic vortex that might hold the answers to Life, the Universe and Everything. Every science-fiction idea of the last 50 years seems to be contained in Annihilation.

Like the strange life form that lands on Earth in the form of a meteorite as the movie begins, Annihilation absorbs those earlier stories and refracts them into something both the same and different, giving us a movie that frequently feels awfully familiar, then veers off into a totally new direction that should, in theory, lead to something utterly new ... but doesn't.

Where Annihilation goes is into a post-climax, pre-credit scene that should hold the answers to the questions the movie has proposed so well, but instead ends with Portman's character, a noted cell biologist named Lena, saying only that she doesn't know what happened.

Well, if she doesn't know what happened, and can't make sense of what she's experienced, neither can we.  There was a practical reason Kubrick ended 2001 with the unspeaking Star Child -- the babe couldn't explain what we had just seen, couldn't even try; his lifeless eyes meant we needed to figure it out for ourselves.  Annihilation also ends with a pair of eyes, but the person behind them should be able to give us more information about the film's ponderous, borderline silly final 15 minutes.

Yet, for hard-core science-fiction fans, Annihilation has a lot to offer, including its central idea that alien life could replicate here on Earth in ways we don't understand.  Annihilation is a more highbrow expression of a great line in 1982's Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, in which Kirk shows Spock and Bones McCoy a video description of the Genesis project, which would take a dead moon or rock and turn it into a living, breathing planet.  If the device detonated where life already existed, Spock logically reasons, "It would destroy such life in favor of its new matrix," a response that drives Bones batty.

But that's essentially what Lena discovers here when she walks into the strange area called "The Shimmer" that has started to consume parts of the Gulf States -- one of the towns that it took over early on is helpfully named Ville Perdu, or "Lost City," in case we missed that little snippet.  The town is a weigh station of sorts on the way to Ground Zero of the Shimmer, a coastal lighthouse where the meteorite first struck.

Lena is joined by four other women with various credentials: Tuva Novotny plays a geologist; Tessa Thompson is a physicist; Gina Rodriguez is a paramedic; and Jennifer Jason Leigh is a psychologist.  It's not too long before -- again, shades of TV's "Lost" -- one character observes how emotional distance from the lives they have "at home" binds them together even closer; they're all battling inner demons.

They're not generally traditionally trained soldiers, because the ones that have been sent into the ever-growing shimmer -- including Lena's husband Kane (Oscar Isaac), who never returned from his mission ... or, wait, did he?  Kinda sorta, and his maybe-there-maybe-not return from the presumed dead is what kicks off Annihilation, sending the five women into the field to see if they could do what men before them could not.

Their problems begin almost immediately, as time seems to both stretch and contract inside the Shimmer. Everything does, and everything changes: species are cross-breeding with other species in wild ways -- reptile with shark, flowers with each other, and most distressingly, a bear with ... a human?  Or at least a human's voice.  In Annihilation's one big scene of horror, which is genuinely disturbing, a mutated bear with the voice of a screaming, dying woman attacks the survivors. This is the stuff of nightmares, handled effectively by Garland.

Less effective, though, is the why of all this happening, and by the time one character begins turning into a plant, quite literally, it wouldn't be unusual to expect audiences flocking to the exits in droves, as I experienced during my screening.

For the faithful who stay, just know: There will be no answers.  Like "Lost," Annihilation teases early on that it will provide answers to its central mysteries, but it never does.  You won't learn what kind of alien life it is, where it comes from or what it wants, other than to take over.  And you certainly won't learn exactly what is going on in the film's big, crazy, effects-filled, explosive (literally) finale.

Something like this happens: Lena finds the lighthouse where it all started, which is covered in colorful, mysterious lichens and surrounded by a crystal forest.  (This happens long after Portman has rescued the half-alligator-half-shark.) She goes in. She finds Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh) the psychologist who, for unknown reasons, wanted to get there first.  They talk a little bit, Ventress tells her annihilation is coming.  Then she explodes into a hundred shafts of light, one of which pulls a little big of Lena's blood away and uses that one cell to divide and divide and divide until a new person is made -- formless, shapeless.

It's this person/thing Lena grapples with in the film's climactic scene, struggling against -- what? -- her inner demons?  Or outer ones?  And when she manages defeat, everything just ...

Well, I won't get that far, lest you see Annihilation.  I can't say I recommend it for almost anyone.  Despite its brilliant production design, fantastic visual effects, and clearly very well-intentioned story, it just fails to coalesce.  The final scene may try the patience of even the most ardent sci-fi-fan.

I wanted to be able to report back that I am clever, that I understood that final (or next-to-final) scene and the meaning of the very, very last shot, too.

But I'm not that clever.  Annihilation isn't a film I'd ever see again, but for all of its faults, it's got sophistication, great acting, wonderful design, an (intentionally) grating sound effects score, where it falls down is the one place movies can't fall down: Telling a completely satisfactory story.

In Annihilation, Garland seems to be so wrapped up in creating visual spectacle that from the beginning to the end, we're left with so many secrets that it's impossible to know exactly what is going on -- and it's a shame that the actors, judging by their frequently quizzical facial expressions, seem to have felt the same way, and that they can't quite overcome the material.

There are some great moments in Annihilation, and I guess a great idea, too.  It may take me a while to ponder what this film means in its entirety.  Or maybe I just won't bother.  I'm not sure Annihilation is good enough to warrant extra attention.



Viewed Feb. 24, 2018 -- ArcLight Sherman Oaks

2015

"Mudbound"

 ☆☆☆☆ 

It's almost impossible to write about Mudbound without mentioning the way it has been released, because almost everyone who sees it will do so on Netflix -- at home, on the relatively small screen of their normal TV set, which will be calibrated as they always have it (meaning, almost certainly, poorly), using whatever sound system they always use.

That's the way I saw it, having missed its very short theatrical run in L.A., when it played in a handful of theaters for a few days in order to qualify it for the Oscars. It was, as they say, "dumped" in movie theaters, on its way to Netflix, where it is marketed as a "Netflix Original Movie" despite having multiple production credits.

All of this is a real shame because Mudbound deserves to be seen in a movie theater, with a projector that has been professionally calibrated, with speakers that can handle the intricate sound design, with a big screen that helps immerse you in the story and -- most importantly -- without the distractions that inevitably crop up when watching a movie at home.  I've yet to find anyone, even the rarified few with a dedicated home theater, who can resist the temptation to do something other than keep focus on the movie while watching at home.

A movie theater limits your choices to maybe three: watch the movie, fall asleep, or leave.  You give yourself over to a movie, its plot and its creative ambition when you watch a movie in a theater.  Not so at home, no matter how dedicated or sincere a viewer you are.  (Don't believe me?  How many times have you "held it" in a movie theater versus pressing pause to take a bathroom break?  The pause button doesn't just freeze the picture, but interrupts the narrative flow that a movie is designed to have.)

This all matters to Mudbound because it's a marvelous, absorbing, well-told and emotionally wrenching film that you might easily -- based on the marketing -- mistake for a "good-for-you" movie about race relations, when in fact it's a tremendously complex tale that is sprawling and visually magnificent.  All of these things feel diminished in the living room.

Its story begins when the world is embroiled in World War II but the U.S. has remained safely distant.  Around the time the Japanese invade Pearl Harbor, Henry McAllan (Jason Clarke) reveals to his wife Laura (Carey Mulligan) that he has bought a farm on the Mississippi Delta, and the family is going to move there.  Laura and Henry have a complicated relationship, with the additional wrinkle of Henry's brother Jamie (Garrett Hedlund), who seems to have a soft spot for Laura, and she for him.

The family, including Henry's unrelievedly racist and always demoralizing Pappy (Jonathan Banks) moves. Jamie enlists. And Henry turns out to be a terrible businessman, whose savings have been swindled by a man who said he would rent them the big farmhouse but had no intention of doing so. The McAllans are forced to live in a ramshackle cabin, not far away from the Jackson family.

The Jacksons are sharecroppers who face the same plight as black Americans have for centuries: White people aren't going to do right by them.  They know it.  But still they try, and they all have dreams.  Father Hap (Rob Morgan), mother Florence (Mary J. Blige) and their children, including Ronsel (Jason Mitchell) don't know what to make of the McAllans, who are working the same patch of land they have been tending to for years.

Ronsel goes off to fight in World War II, as well, and while life on the farm continues in its unrelentingly harsh, bleak way for both the McAllans and the Jacksons, the matriarchs of each family show particular strength, and turn to each other begrudgingly for support, while Henry and Pappy seem to find ways to make it more and more difficult.

If Mudbound has a real flaw, it's in the lack of focus its middle section has -- it moves back and forth between stories about the Jacksons, the McAllans, Ronsel and Jamie, but never quite emotionally connects them rather than hoping we'll continue paying attention through to its third act.  It's a dramatic flaw that's heightened by being forced to watch it at home instead of in a movie theater.

When Ronsel and Jamie return, Mudbound becomes supremely confident, leading to a final third that is unnervingly good.  Director Dee Rees, who wrote the film with Virgil Williams, pulls together all of the elements that have seemed so scattered -- character traits, small plot points -- for a shocker of a climax that packs a wallop.

Though that ending is softly hinted at in Mudbound's very first scene, Rees wisely hides the meaning of a couple of key lines until near the very end.  Her dramatic sensibilities are enormously aided by beautiful cinematography by Rachel Morrison, which captures the scope without seeming overly prettified, and the thoughtful and careful editing of Mako Kamitsuna.  The technical side of the film is so good that it strengthens the film even when the energy flags.

The performances are likewise terrific throughout, and it is particularly worth noting how effortlessly Mudbound is driven by its two female leads -- Mulligan and Blige -- even while ultimately telling a story that mostly belongs to Ronsel.  In retrospect, it's easy to imagine Mudbound being even stronger by focusing in more intently on Ronsel, but it would have done so at the expense of its setting, which is so vividly and carefully conveyed.

Mudbound is a film that demands to be seen on a big screen, but won't.  It's both a very worthwhile movie, and a rather worrisome sign of the times: There's no way not to be grateful that a movie like Mudbound gets a bigger audience than it might have had otherwise, but its disconcerting to know how small this big and impressive experience will seem to so many.




Viewed January 20, 2018 -- Netflix

Second Thoughts: "Call Me By Your Name”

After weeks of cautious flirtation, of testing the emotional boundaries of each other and their own lives, there's a moment about midway through Call Me By Your Name in which Elio Perlman (Timothée Chalamet) and American research student Oliver (Armie Hammer) make a split-second decision to ride with each other into the town square of an unnamed Italian village.

It's the moment their relationship changes -- and the moment that the film moves from being a sweetly languorous comedy of observation to something that has become so frankly profound it's impacting the way people live and the choices they make in their lives.

How does a movie that is so outwardly lovely manage to exist on so many levels, to become almost a cinematic Rorschach test that leaves some audiences polarized?  I've heard from viewers who are stuck trying to process the age difference between the main characters (which is only seven years in the story and nine years in reality) and from those who criticize the film for being too pretty, too nice, too lacking in dramatic tension. On the other hand, it's become obvious that Call Me By Your Name has left many viewers with the live-altering fervor of someone who has just witnessed a religious event.

Call Me By Your Name has mysteries built on top of mysteries, not the least of which is the way it affects people.  In one of the key scenes in the novel, not replicated in the film, Elio and Oliver visit the ruins of a labyrinthine cathedral, and observe how it's built on remnants of its past, and how every time you think you've gone as deep as you can, there's something deeper.  Maybe that scene wasn't needed in the film because the whole film is that way: Examine one of its surface-level elements and you discover others you hadn't considered.

There is, for example, that spontaneous decision to ride into town.  It's not actually spontaneous.  Oliver has been looking for this opportunity for weeks.  Elio has been searching for it, too.  It comes.  Elio dismisses it with a joke.  And at this point, conventional wisdom says they'll be in love before the montage sequence is through.  But something oddly wonderful happens here, and to understand just how complex it is, you need to go back to the scene just before Elio and Oliver decided to get on their bikes:

Elio's mother (Amira Casar) has been reading him a story from The Heptameron, but the only version she can find is in German.  (This family is remarkably lingually fluid, perhaps itself presaging some other fluidity the film explores.)  The story is about a a knight who is madly in love with a princess, and she with him, and the predicament they face, which comes down to one choice: "reden oder sterben?" Or, loosely translated: "Is it better to speak or die?"

Elio and Oliver never answer that question for themselves, but the question itself matters, not because  it's thematically central to the film, but because for anyone who was alive in 1983 (when the movie is set), "speak or die" must at least unconsciously recall a similar phrase, one that captured the despair, anguish and desolation of gay men throughout the late 1980s and into the following decade, when AIDS ravaged bodies, families and communities: "Silence = death."

And indeed, just a moment later Oliver lifts up his shirt to show Elio an unsightly injury on his otherwise perfect body, a big, black mark that wasn't there just days before.  That's the odd and unexpected thing that happens when Oliver and Elio ride into town, and that moment, tossed away almost casually in the film, moves Call Me By Your Name forward in two remarkable, parallel ways.

In one, the love story is presented simply for what it is: Two souls discovering each other and the beauty, pain, obsession and joy of love. The film can be appreciated solely on that level. But there's no way to ignore the proximity of "speak or die" and the lesion on Oliver's torso.  There is a callous, imperfect, hostile world outside the villa in which Oliver and Elio spend their perfect summer, and it is peeking through.

The movie moves forward with those separate but parallel approaches in mind -- the straightforward love story and the more distressing subtext -- and they converge in final moments that are so filled with loss, memory, hope, love and pain that for many viewers (and I'll count myself among them) watching the last scenes of Call Me By Your Name is an experience that borders on traumatizing.

But the idea that there is an unseen, grander force at work that will work against these two men, even if they were able to make their relationship work, still lingers at the edges of Call Me By Your Name.

Not long after their first romantic gestures -- which ends with the suggestion of a trip to a pharmacist -- Elio gets a nosebleed.  Oliver seems unafraid of the blood or the physical malady, just as Elio was unfazed by Oliver's own injury.

Much later, Elio performs some buzzed-about auto-eroticism with a peach, and the movie begins with a scene that in the book was about the lengths to which Oliver would go to prove his attraction to Elio.  The film's exquisite screenplay by James Ivory changes the scene in a breathtaking way: When Oliver discovers what Elio has been doing and offers to eat the peach (which he does in the novel), Elio slaps the fruit away, but Oliver insists.  Finally, Elio breaks down and cries, "I'm sick." And Oliver cradles him and holds him and comforts him regardless.

This deeper, richer subtext to Call Me By Your Name is handled deftly: on the surface, it's barely noticeable.  But it persists, and also works its way into the first moment Elio and Oliver kiss: "We can still be good," Oliver says, physically dissuading Elio. "We haven't done anything wrong."

Any gay man between 40 and 70 knows those words and the feelings they convey, of denying real love, or at least a real chance, for fear of what lingered.  And AIDS, homophobia, the Cold War, Reaganomics, they're all lurking just outside the gates of the Perlman residence, even intruding: the movie is filled with depictions of bodily fluids and discussions of political changes, all the things that will define the years ahead for Elio and Oliver.

Oliver and Elio both see this; they are intensely smart.  They know what is happening in the world. But for now, for these six weeks ... it doesn't matter.

Some (including, it seems, studio executives) have faulted Call Me By Your Name for not having a clear antagonist.  It has an antagonist, indeed: The world itself.  Eventually, it's going to come after Oliver and Elio as it comes after everyone, and what they experienced together may just be a long-forgotten dream after a while.  One or both of them is likely to get sick.  One might become part of the anti-AIDS movement in the '90s.  Who knows?  But the idea that all that is lingering somewhere just beyond the little Italian village is hard to shake.

For now, though, there is no judgment.  There is no strife.  There is only one of the most palpably real depictions of summer in the country I've ever seen.

Truth be told, one of the four times I've seen Call Me By Your Name I watched primarily not to observe the characters but to look at and listen to the backgrounds.  Every image, every piece of sound design in the film puts you right there in the Perlman's home, or on a country road with Elio and Oliver.  The film creates an enveloping sense of being there, which Guadagnino enhances through very long, static shots, allowing the light and sound and feel of the places to work on us.

The physical beauty hides truths, and one of them is right in front of our eyes the whole time: Oliver. The first line spoken about him is, "He seems very confident," and the film is as much a coming-of-age story about young Elio as it is about the handsome American.

Hammer plays Oliver with such easy charm, such massive self-assurance, that there's never a question that a 6-foot-5, blue-eyed beauty will have everything together.  But then there's an unforgettable scene in which Elio tells Oliver what he thinks the American visitor has been doing every night, only to find out how wrong he is.

When, finally, the two lovers must depart, it leads to the most talked-about scene in the movie, between Elio and his father (Michael Stuhlbarg).  It is an extraordinary scene, one that deeply affects people, leading into the very last shot of the movie, which is less merely affecting than shattering, because those unspoken threats and difficult realities that the film has been holding at bay come crashing down, if only for the audience.

Call Me By Your Name lets everyone watching bring his or her own feelings into that last shot, which gives us time to process the metaphors, to reflect on our own knowledge of what is coming for Elio and Oliver (this is, after all, a memory piece of a film), and on our own lives and experience. We remember what it as to be 17 or 24, and to know how young that is.

Director Guadagnino has said he'd like to shoot a sequel, but please, no, don't.  The whole point of Call Me By Your Name is that it exists in an exquisite, perfect, joyous vacuum.  Its last quiet moments give us time to reflect on that possible future, but also to think about what we, individually and collectively, have lost.

And what we gained, because of course we're here now, older, better maybe, smarter sometimes, and we've gained in some way if not all of them.  But we think about what it took to gain.  What we wish we could go back to.

We think that maybe we will be lucky enough one summer to find an Italian villa where an old woman makes us food every night and we have nothing to do but read and dance and ride our bikes and talk to each other.  And to fall in love.

To be young.

And when you strip away all the allusions and metaphors, all the symbols and literary devices that make Call Me By Your Name such a rich and dense and wonderfully multifaceted experience -- when you take those away, that's what you're left with, why Call Me By Your Name is so impossible to forget.

It reminds us how young we were once, and how willing to love and be loved.  And how when we were, the world was good.  And how when the world was good, we were good.

The first time I saw it, Call Me By Your Name struck me with its brash eroticism, but I realize now that that's not the reason it persists in my heart and in the hearts of so many -- it's because we all long, no matter our age, for one more moment of youthful possibility when who or what we loved would love us back and all would be right in our little piece of the world.