OK, major housekeeping ahead.
"Lady Bird"
Unexceptional coming-of-age film built around mother-daughter tension; Saoirse Ronan is delightful.
Lady Bird is fantastic!
Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri is awesome too
The Disaster Artist also my top 5 movies in 2017
Also watched this week: I, Tonya, Stronger, and Battle of Sexes
I'm trying to cross off all movies in GG nomination before Academy Awards.
Saw Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri.
It is an intense movie full of hate-driven, stupid people doing hateful stupid things.
Not a bad movie, really, but difficult to watch. Not share it is worth the effort.
Like 2016's Manchester by the Sea (with all due respect to Lonergan's superior previous feature Margaret), both Lady Bird and Call Me by Your Name, the other coming-of-age favorite of 2017, are movies for the smartphone era, composed of bite-size pieces that we are supposed to respond to accordingly a la Pavlov's dogs but which do not add up to a cohesive whole. Of course that actually worked in their favor, given the truncated attention span of many consumers and apparently many professional reviewers today.
If I had to choose I'd say I prefer Lady Bird even though it's the less arty of the two, as the rapport between the titular character (in a fine performance by Golden Globe winner Ronan) and her mother (even more ably portrayed by Laurie Metcalf) is undeniable. Lots of people seem to feel the same about Timothée Chalamet's Elio and Armie Hammer's Oliver in CMBYN and I suppose I should take their word for it, but I can say this for myself: never once in the entire film did their relationship feel convincing to this particular viewer. Since I seem to be firmly in the minority in this matter I'm prepared to admit to a failing on my part, but some of the blame lies with the casting itself which asks us to (make-)believe that the devilishly handsome Oliver would be instantly taken with the lanky adolescent Elio. And for those who claim to be "devastated" by the movie's protracted closing shot of Elio brooding over the latest news (I'll refrain from spoiling it here, though you could see it coming a mile away), I urge them to check out Naruse's When a Man Ascends the Stairs and Yearning which both conclude with a most indelible image of the heroine (played in both films by Hideko Takamine) - with the only possible exception of City Lights', the two greatest close-ups in all of cinema - if only to see what real devastation is like, and in the most economical, concentrated expression imaginable.
Three Billboards just won the Globe for Best Drama because in the current battleground over identity politics sexism is a bigger culpa non grata than racism. The movie will ultimately fade from memory as its shallow and confused treatment of its subject matter is gradually exposed.
I did like The Disaster Artist though it doesn't transcend the trappings of a standard biopic. Given the outsize influence of The Room as a veritable cult classic James Franco's collaboration with his bro Dave (who BTW was just as effective in The Little Hours) and his BFF Seth Rogen could've been a lot more. I understand this may be an apples-to-oranges comparison as Robert Crumb is an infinitely more important artist than Tommy Wiseau, but Crumb the documentary shows how one can probe the grotesque and seemingly impenetrable for real insights.
I, Tonya boasts one of the strongest casts of 2017 but still turned out to be a disappointment. My previous encounter with Craig Gillespie was through his 2007 feature Lars and the Real Girl which if anything begins with an even more outrageous premise, but it does not traffic in the nonstop smart-aleck shtick of his latest feature which contrary to
his stated aim brings more empty bluster than genuine "empathy" to its subjects. I hope for Gillespie's sake that he has not succumbed to the fleeting vicious pleasures of Twitter, as he's clearly a promising talent who knows how to get the most out of his actors.
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I said upthread Battle of the Sexes is one of the better biopics, but apart from its touching depiction of BJK's affair with her hairdresser (in real life her former secretary Marilyn Barnett) it's thoroughly middlebrow fare.
Missed Stronger during its brief theatrical run.
Watched Death in Venice (1971) - Luchino Visconti. With Dirk Bogarde.
Some lovely shots of Venice - Kael compared them to works by Eugène Boudin, only even more "voluptuous" - but I can't say this is one of the better Visconti films. Which is quite strange, as both the director and Bogarde were gay and the latter was especially memorable a decade earlier as the closeted protagonist in Victim whose long-suppressed passions felt so raw and palpable. This putative Thomas Mann adaptation on the other hand has less to do with the book or its subject than with its setting and zeitgeist (for one thing Mann based Gustav von Aschenbach in his novel on Mahler, while Visconti turns him into a composer). It's almost as if Visconti adapted Venice itself and then transplanted the Mann characters, with Aschenbach's object of desire Tadzio standing in for all that is beauteous and luminous about the city and its culture.
And that brings me to why I must rate Visconti dead last among the great Italian directors (the others being Rossellini, Antonioni, De Sica and Fellini, in that order), though I'd probably rank The Leopard the greatest Italian film ever made (or at the very least my all-time fave). Apart from Senso I can't think of any other film by Visconti that could conceivably belong in such exalted company, while I can think of at least three by the other Italian masters. Of course Visconti unlike the other four was as active in theater and opera as in cinema, but you don't get extra credit for that.
I just learned Gary Oldman has been nominated for a Golden Globe as Best Actor for his role as Churchill in "Darkest Hour." He is one of my current era favorites and I hope he earns the Oscar too! The guy is an amazing talent. His Stansfield role in Leon: The Professional was pure outrageous terror!
"Darkest Hour"
Strongly character-driven drama of Winston Churchill's anguish. Gary Oldman can start writing his Oscar speech.
I know Ronan just beat out Robbie for the Best Actress Globe but my bet is still on Oldman and Robbie for the respective Oscar. I've never completely warmed to Oldman's over-the-top scream-acting, but if there were ever a figure (historical or not) for whom such theatrics are not only appropriate but welcome it's Churchill, and Oldman's performance makes an otherwise morally suspect film worth seeing. (According to Joe Wright's flag-waving version of WWII all common Londoners were eager to enter the war against the Nazis, and Churchill personally mined this insight on a single London Underground ride.)
But let me stress that these two are who I expect to win the Oscar, not who I think should win. The more I watch and write about movies the more I'm convinced that any awards for acting are meaningless unless the judges agree on a specific set of criteria. For example I loved Denzel's performance in Roman J. Israel, Esq. (which BTW is superior to Gilroy's previous effort Nightcrawler whose hip cynicism is designed to make you feel smug in your supposed moral superiority, but of course that's exactly why critics preferred the latter) and it is only the latest proof he's at worst one of the greatest actors alive today, but the film's lackluster box office has ensured that his work won't be as celebrated as that of his luckier colleagues. How is that a fair assessment of acting? Also is the portrayal of an eccentric, even when performed so flawlessly by a first-rate actor like Denzel, that much more laudable than the portrayal of a downtrodden but unremarkable member of society as by many actors in The Florida Project or even nonprofessional ones in the neorealist classics? The former task may be more "difficult" in the sense that it requires less a fine-tuning than a complete revamping of one's behavior, but is that necessarily "better"? Those are just some of the many questions that most arbiters of thespianism fail to answer.
