Post by The Narrator Returns on Aug 21, 2017 21:58:02 GMT -6
Moonlight
It's fitting that I saw Moonlight and Certain Women so close together. They're both trios of stories about people struggling to make it in the world, they both end with simple stories of heartbreaking missed connections, and they both sit in my top five for the year. But while Certain Women thrived on its quiet gentleness, Moonlight is maybe the boldest film I've seen this year, a fact it announces before the studio logos come up (the first time I believe the A24 logo has been messed with, which I assume they allowed because this is their first in-house production), with the sounds of "Every N****r is a Star" and then a 360-degree shot that manages to keep the background surreally out-of-focus at all times, like it's a green-screen, as it focuses first on Mahershala Ali and then on a group of schoolchildren. And that's not even getting into the goddamn colors, especially the astonishing blue of Ali's car, which pop more than the colors of any film I've seen this year not named The Neon Demon. Given the film being about a black kid coming to terms with being gay and suffering a great deal for it, one would expect director Barry Jenkins and cinematographer James Laxton to go for unflattering intimacy throughout, just to get across this is Serious Business. But this movie is gorgeous and heightened at all times, even the handheld cribbing more from the freewheeling poetry of Malick than the ground-level realism of the Dardennes. In turn, Jenkins makes the film soar even beyond what it could accomplish with just the bare bones, making the scattered pleasures almost pornographic (this movie has the best-lit, most delicious-looking meals since Cypher's steak in The Matrix), the torment something beyond "a teenager gets beaten up", and the ultimate settling-down of the camera something totally beautiful. The use of blue (as one would expect from a film based on a play called In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue) is particularly breathtaking in how much it conveys the main character's passion, to the point that Andre Holland changing into a blue shirt is a jaw-dropping moment. I have not seen Jenkins' debut, Medicine for Melancholy, but if it's anywhere near as assured as this, it's probably a must-see.
But, of course, Jenkins and the behind-the-scenes crew (including production designer Hannah Beachler, who's worked on Creed, Lemonade, and the upcoming Black Panther) are not the only ones who make this film work as well as it does. The actors are what really send this thing into the stratosphere. Hearing before seeing the movie that none of the actors playing the main character, Chiron, as he goes from child to teen to young man, met each other at all during production didn't make it any easier understanding that fact, because this is pretty much one unified performance, the sullen and quiet young Chirons being direct continuations of each other and the older Chiron hiding that side (badly) with a competent cover-band version of Mahershala Ali. It's also nearly impossible to comprehend that Naomie Harris shot her scenes during a three-day break in the Spectre press tour, essentially tossing off a better, subtler performance than almost anybody would've given if told to play a crack addict. And Andre Holland and the two younger versions of his character are all terrific as well (I'm so glad Holland appears to be breaking out as an actor, he deserves it so much). But the conversation around the film so often centers around Mahershala Ali, and that's for a good reason. He really is that good in this movie, playing improbable kindness and compassion so well and getting one final silent reaction that should engrave his name in an Oscar all by itself (and Janelle Monae does similarly strong, warm work as Ali's girlfriend and replacement guardian to Chiron).
I loved this movie watching it and walking out of it, and honestly, as I've gotten farther from it, I've only loved it even more. I may see it again before it's out of theaters, and if you haven't seen it by now, make doing so your very top priority.
Grade: A
Stray Observations:
- Since there is the potential for this rising to the very top of my list for this year, that would mean that A24 would've released my favorite film this year and my least favorite film this year (that would be Sea of Trees), plus several in the top fifteen.
- Trailer I Saw Before the Show:
Loving: I'm going to be loving this movie, amirite?
Arrival
I thought I had Denis Villeneuve semi-narrowed down. His two American films prior to this, Prisoners and Sicario, saw him balance a deeply cynical worldview with several tense setpieces (the latter more successfully than the former), all the while building towards a climactic revelation. Arrival has two of those elements, and some aesthetic similarities (a scene of Amy Adams going to her house is told in two unnerving push-ins), but this sees Villeneuve completely strip himself of cynicism in favor of a heart-on-the-sleeve sci-fi drama, anchored by a truly fantastic Amy Adams performance, even by normal Amy Adams standards (not that I don't like Emily Blunt in Sicario, but that movie sells her out, necessarily, while Arrival puts everything on Adams' shoulders at all times; in at least one shot, Villeneuve waits on racking focus away from her and onto other characters as long as possible). Compared to the locked-down style of those two films, this gets big emotional dividends out of the way the camera the moved here, at one point the same movement getting greatly differing responses at two points in the film. If those two movies produced sweat, this one came very close to producing tears.
Of course, if Villeneuve and Adams were the only one pulling their weight here, the movie wouldn't hit me like it did. I have not read the Ted Chiang story on which this is based, but the script by Eric Heisserer (whose other credits are almost entirely garbage horror sequels and remakes) is a pretty beautifully-constructed beast (as with Sicario, my only real quibble is a few lines I could do without; here, Jeremy Renner gets a few too many cutesy one-liners, although his out-of-nowhere Sheena Easton joke got me), keeping things moving and doling out just enough information at a time. The cast other than Adams generally doesn't get much to do but they do it well, Renner especially. Villeneuve's go-to composer Johann Johannson crafts another gorgeously dissonant score, which combined with the sound design makes this an absolutely incredible aural experience. The effects on the aliens and their ships look great, even with/because of the layers of obstruction Villeneuve puts between the viewer and them. And of course, the cinematography. Whether Roger Deakins was merely busy or Villeneuve wanted to choose someone else for this, he made the absolute right choice with who he did pick, which is up-and-coming DoP Bradford Young (of Selma and A Most Violent Year fame, not to the mention the upcoming Han Solo movie), because I can honestly not imagine the movie looking better under Deakins' lens. Deakins' main strength as a DoP is color, whereas Young's strength is darkness (I've called him the heir to Gordon Willis' throne before), and this movie has the latter in spades and virtually none of the former (the most astonishing shot in the film isn't even of the aliens or their ship, but of the bright orange of a radiation suit standing out against grey nothingness). Young shoots the Montana location where the film spends almost all of its running time as the same kind of bland, dull hellscape that Villeneuve portrayed Toronto as in Enemy, where the sun's existence is barely even hinted at. And interiors are often lit extraordinarily dimly for what you'd expect from a studio movie (I'm pretty sure Michael Stuhlbarg spends half of his screentime barely visible), creating a pallor over the film that disappears in the presence of the milky whiteness of where Adams goes to observe the aliens, selling their benevolence and also laying seeds to be planted later.
Before seeing this and having it jump into my top five, I maybe thought I knew how Blade Runner 2049 would go. I know even less after seeing this, and I'm even more excited. Bring it on, Villeneuve. I may not even freak out if you don't immediately go back to Deakins after it.
Grade: A
Stray Observations:
- I knew this movie was going to be amazing by the time there was a full-scale reenactment of the penultimate shot of Enemy.
- Not so amazing, however, was my theater experience during this. The theater was unexpectedly packed for something this cerebral, and there was a lot of crowd noise, with popcorn bag crunching and the like. But what really got me was the person right behind me, who brought their four year old (or somewhere in that ballpark) daughter to this. And this girl was so chatty that if I didn't see her behind me, I might've assumed Johannson had brilliantly layered the sounds of parenthood into his score. I do not think she understood the film.
- Trailers I Saw Before the Show:
Gold: That Robert Elswit magic, tho!
Passengers: That Rodrigo Prieto magic, tho! (Wish the magic had been used for the Silence trailer, though.)
Split: That M. Night Shyamalan magic, tho!
Collateral Beauty: That Maryse Alberti magic, tho! (This movie looks like shit, though, and, as I realized on the way out of the theater, like the version of this movie for stupid people.)
Office Christmas Party: I don't know who shot or directed this.
Allied: Finally, Robert Zemeckis has once again made a movie where it's unlikely he'll be able to use head-slappingly obvious music cues.
Loving
Jeff Nichols' first film released this year, Midnight Special, was generally reasonably well-liked, but there were some common complaints about it targeting its quietness and stripped-down nature. These people felt that this muted the deep emotions at the film's core. I, for one, found that Special's reserve is what made the emotional content hit all the harder for me, the movie getting more power out of quiet looks and a few words than many movies get out of long-winded speeches. So, it is my honor to inform you that Nichols' second film this year, Loving, is an exceedingly worthy companion piece to Special, a quietly moving drama about two people deeply in love with each other. The fact that those people are a white bricklayer and a black woman is not incidental to this, as it means the two must jump through hoop after hoop to have their love be fully recognized, but more than the long-reaching implications of their fight, one walks away from the movie in awe of two people so inseparable as a couple. Tellingly, in the end "here's what happened after this" cards, the Supreme Court decision they inspired gets one card, and their futures get several.
Much like Special, Loving accomplishes a lot with a little. Richard Loving, as played by Joel Edgerton (returning from Special), is an exceedingly silent man, a guy who doesn't need to move beyond one-word responses to get across his feelings. His wife, Mildred (Ruth Negga), is a little more talkative (she becomes the spokesperson for her and Richard for TV cameras), but she too is prone to leave profound things about her marriage unsaid, in favor of unshowy, beautiful gestures. Edgerton and Negga are utterly perfect in their roles, never overselling a moment and always making their mutual adoration convincing. Edgerton's unwavering friend in Special was one of that movie's most touching elements, and here again Nichols brings out some quiet tenderness in him, softness hidden beyond a beefy frame. Negga (new to working with Nichols and, honestly, new to me as well) is just as good, radiating every moment she spends with Richard and their three kids and finding deep reservoirs of courage and strength when she needs to. Nichols' script respects both of their abilities to express everything while doing almost nothing, giving them poignant sentences when there could've been bloated paragraphs.
The movie only really missteps by bringing in Nick Kroll as the ACLU lawyer who takes on their case, who serves as comic relief of sorts that's a bit too pronounced for the film's muted world. He's not bad (and he gets better as he goes along), and one could make the case that his incongruity with much of the film is a symptom of him being an outsider to the hostile world the Lovings are stuck in, but his performance is pitched like it's the highlight in the Weinstein Company version of this movie. In comparison, Nichols good-luck charm Michael Shannon also plays an outsider who enters the orbit of the Lovings, in this case a Life Magazine photographer who takes pictures of them, and in his one scene, he adds some humor that's pitched quietly enough not to jar with the film's tone. Kroll just feels a bit out-of-place, but even he's not enough to take too much away from an incredibly touching little movie. I don't know if its stubborn refusal to play typical Oscar-bait cards will mean it doesn't get Oscars, but Nichols can rest easy even without awards support, because he made the right call for this story.
Grade: A-
Stray Observations:
- As a counterbalance to the film's loveliness, I had the single most obnoxious experience with a movie theater audience ever here. As goes with the territory when you (or maybe just I) see a movie with a mostly elderly audience, there were a lot of weird half-laughs at things that are objectively not funny. But even worse than that was someone in the audience making utterly bizarre, grotesque, very loud snoring noises no less than three times during the movie, apparently without being asleep. And at least one person in the audience actually laughed at this!
- Bill Camp and David "Elmo Oxygen" Jensen also reappear from Special here, their roles amusingly switched, Camp playing the wavering ally and Jensen playing the unrepentant obstacle.
- Nichols' regular collaborators, DoP Adam Stone and composer David Wingo, also did terrific work here, Stone creating wide-open compositions that give the Lovings as much room as possible and Wingo creating cues that, like the film, convey beauty without raising their voices.
- There's one scene in the film that involves a tense bit of nighttime driving (the core of Special), and my hand to god, the music cue Wingo accompanies it with sounds almost exactly like an orchestral version of Special's main theme.
- Trailers I Saw Before the Show:
Fences: Hey, we're off to a good start.
20th Century Women: I am going to see the shit out of this.
A Dog's Purpose: It's like the company from RoboCop decided to get together and make the most potent tearjerker possible.
The Zookeeper's Wife: Eh.
A Monster Calls: Meh.
Hidden Figures: Maybe?
Collateral Beauty: Nope.
Jackie
Much has been made about how Jackie flies in the face of normal biopic conventions, but plenty of films can be described as doing that in a far more accessible manner than this movie manages. This movie takes a buzzsaw to the respectable story of An American Tragedy like only a movie made almost entirely by non-Americans could. Pablo Larrain (whose string of three films released this year exhausts me just hearing about it)'s direction has gotten the most attention, and it's superb in crafting a woozy, assaultive atmosphere. The camera gets too close to Jackie's face for too long, her tear-soaked head filling the narrower 1.66:1 frame. The 16mm cinematography (handled by Stephane Fontaine, who also had three films released this year), which one would expect to be used to make the film softer and more "real-looking" (its ostensible purpose here is to convincingly blend new footage with archival footage), only adds to the bizarre atmosphere (the movie might as well have been shot on the moon, for how foreign the locations look under Larrain's lens), the chunky grain hovering over Jackie like a swarm of bees ready to attack. And the editing never quite lets the viewer sit easily in their seat. People move more distance than they should between cuts (Billy Crudup, as a reporter interviewing Jackie, is edited like a slasher movie villain in this movie), conversations occur over multiple locations, like a more disorienting variation on that sequence in The Limey, and a cut from Jackie from behind to Jackie staring down the lens reveals the full horror of her situation more than any prestige monologue could (this is the first time we fully see her blood-soaked pink Chanel suit). And then there's Mica.
Mica Levi burst onto the scene with her score for Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin, creating uniquely unnerving, inhuman sounds. If you think about it, Jackie and Skin are actually westerns share more in common than one would expect, both following extraordinary women who are violently yanked from their element by cruel men. And if the instruments (like strings and military drums) used here sound more "real" than the distorted otherworldy sounds of Skin (there's an appearance by that movie's buzzing synth-strings during the scene showing the assassination), the effect is much the same. Levi balances occasional notes of compassion with a general focus on the oppressiveness of Jackie's situation. It's just as bracing a listen as Skin's score, and maybe the best score of the year too (Moonlight is its only current competition for me, although I have La La Land waiting for me tomorrow).
But, of course, Jackie without an adequate Jackie would probably not be a movie I'd start reviewing with two paragraphs of raves. Yes, Natalie Portman is absolutely terrific in this movie. The trailers (as brilliant as they were) had me a bit worried that her performance would be more focused on getting the accent right than digging into Jackie's skin, and I'm happy to report that that is not what Portman did for this film. Sure, she does get the accent right, but any feelings that her proficiency will outweigh her excellence very quickly disappear. Portman is saddled with a very tricky mixture of obvious manipulation (particularly in the scenes between her and Crudup) and raw grief here, playing a Strong Woman with the potential to drown in sorrow at any moment, and she pulls off both modes with a minimum of "look at me" actorly tics. This film is structured like a memory play, and she makes it very easy to believe that something this fractured and frequently jarring is coming straight from her subconscious.
Grade: A
Stray Observations:
- The supporting performances are quite good as well. I'm not quite sure about Peter Sarsgaard's wavering Boston accent as Bobby Kennedy, but otherwise he's really good and moving as the Kennedy forced to take Jack's place at Jackie's side. Greta Gerwig is typically lovely as Jackie's assistant, and John Hurt gets a few good scenes as a priest who tries to break through to Jackie.
- I saw this with my mother and sister, and luckily, unlike the last prestige drama we went to together (Carol), I was not the only one to like it. My mom liked it and Natalie Portman's performance in it, although my sister didn't really care for it, even falling asleep at the beginning (though she claims that was more because she woke up early and was sitting in a recliner chair). She said that the story didn't really interest her like it did in other period films, like (and it should be noted that these are both films she saw in a high school film class recently) The King's Speech and The Imitation Game.
- La La Land tomorrow! I can't wait to be complicit in Trump's America or whatever bullshit the thinkpieces want me to think about this movie.
- Trailers I Saw Before the Show:
Beauty and the Beast: My my, someone fetch a priest.
Silence: 👌👀👌👀👌👀👌👀👌👀 good shit go౦ԁ sHit👌 thats ✔ some good👌👌shit right👌👌th 👌 ere👌👌👌 right✔there ✔✔if i do ƽaү so my selｆ 💯 i say so 💯 thats what im talking about right there right there (chorus: ʳᶦᵍʰᵗ ᵗʰᵉʳᵉ) mMMMMᎷМ💯 👌👌 👌НO0ОଠＯOOＯOОଠଠOoooᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒ👌 👌👌 👌 💯 👌 👀 👀 👀 👌👌Good shit
Fifty Shades Darker: There should be a crime against following the Silence trailer with a Fifty Shades trailer.
Live by Night: This was the second trailer, which was a lot better than the first one and apparently a lot better than the movie it's promoting.
Passengers: When will I be from this movie, goddamnit?
Gifted: Is this trailer trying to win an award for most music cues within two minutes? Also, my sister believes this to be a rip-off of Matilda.
A United Kingdom: Note: if your main idea for your period movie is "let's shoot everything in soft focus", stop making that movie and try again.
La La Land
At the beginning of 2015, I saw Damien Chazelle's Whiplash. I thought it was a powerhouse, headed by a new director with an almost Fincherian control over images and editing (the Fincher comparison helped by his work writing the bare-bones single-location thriller Grand Piano). I have now seen Chazelle's latest, and I cannot say Fincher was the first comparison to come to mind.
La La Land is a flashy, splashy musical extravaganza, directed by Chazelle like he may never get another chance and designed on every level to be as eye-popping as possible. It helps that Chazelle has assembled an absolutely top-notch crew. The production design is from David Wasco, who's worked with Wes Anderson and Quentin Tarantino, and the costumes are from legend Mary Zophres. But best of all, the cinematographer is Linus Sandgren, who previously came to my attention working on movies with fairly limited color palettes (like his two movies for David O. Russell) and restrained camera movements (like Promised Land), so it's a complete shock to see him let loose here (the camera certainly didn't follow partygoers straight into a pool in the Matt Damon fracking movie). Sandgren and Chazelle bathe scenes in gorgeous monochrome colors, from the expected blue and red to green over two melancholy-to-actively-sad scenes. And oh boy, if the shots in Whiplash were air-tight, the camera here literally goes off into the clouds at times, whip-panning and gliding and even at one point spinning until the images are an abstract blur. And the gold lighting and rigorously-edited aesthetic of the concert scenes in Whiplash even reappears here for a performance scene! It's probably the best-looking movie of the year.
Of course, a musical romantic comedy without adequate music, romance, or comedy would be a sorry thing. Many directors have tried this kind of gamble before, including all-time great ones like Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, and many of them just didn't stick the landing (I mean, I kind of love One From the Heart, but god knows it requires a very specific wavelength to find yourself on). And here this young punk succeeds beautifully after three movies. The music here is terrific and memorable, from the score (from Whiplash composer Justin Hurwitz) to the songs (by SMASH! songwriters Pasek & Paul), and the sequences around them are alternately incredibly fun (like the one-upping of the "Everybody Hurts" video at the very beginning, set to "Another Day of Sun") and incredibly moving (like an audition song shot in a single close-up of Emma Stone's face). But even without the music, this would be at the very least a very good movie (in fact, it was already made this year without the music, as Cafe Society). It may honestly be one of the funniest movies I've seen this year, with my favorite line of the year ("No, Jamal, you be trippin'"). I certainly laughed at Whiplash, but that kind of nervous laughter didn't prepare me for Chazelle to have serious comedic talents as a writer. And, most important of all, the romance really clicks. This is due in no small part to Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone being absurdly charismatic, beautiful people who make falling in love almost pornographic, but more than them, while their story is simple (and that's turned some people off of the less music-heavy middle portion of the movie), it's effective and affecting. One almost doesn't realize the depth of one's feelings for these two characters until the epilogue, which contains the aforementioned nod to 25th Hour (although I've also heard comparisons made to Up), which features a mixture of pasted-on-smiles razzle-dazzle and bone-deep melancholy that would be tough to sell as either if it was built around a weaker connection. But Chazelle, Gosling, and Stone thread the needle and make this more than a spectacle absent a heart. It's my favorite film of the year thus far, and as lovely a birthday gift as one could ask for.
Grade: A
Stray Observations:
- J.K. Simmons in this movie is totally Fletcher, having relocated and taken a quiet job elsewhere, right?
- I saw this with my mom and sister again, and they both loved it (my sister, being a musical fanatic, was over the moon about it).
- However, this lovely experience was spoiled by maybe the worst audience experience I've ever had. Remember when I complained about the person occasionally snoring loudly during Loving? Well, some homeless Santa-looking motherfucker was in my row and snoring throughout a lot of the movie (maybe it was Richard Brody in an attempt to sabotage other's enjoyment of this, I dunno). And then there's the motherfuckers who came in the theater late and practically screamed at the top of their lungs something like "THIS ISN'T THE RIGHT THEATER! THERE'S NOBODY IN HERE!!!!!!!".
- So, this movie apparently gets jazz wrong. I can't speak for most of its treatment of jazz (which I could honestly not care less about), but the complaints that John Legend's character in it is painted as some devil sent to ruin jazz are hilariously misguided, given that he has a big monologue on jazz where a). his points are entirely reasonable, b). Gosling, the big jazz snob (who's been painted as more than a little silly in his love for the form), raises no objections to his points, c). the points are delivered by John Legend, maybe the nicest, most reasonable man in show business, and d). the song they perform later is actually kind of a kickass song. Also, jazz schmazz.
- Trailers I Saw Before the Show:
20th Century Women: Aw hell yeah.
Fences: Hell yeah.
Sing: God fucking damnit, I saw this movie and can't even be spared from ads from it?!?! Illumination, you sick fucks.
Gifted: Who cares?
The Shack: Fuck no.
Patriots Day: Less nauseating than I was expecting.
Going in Style: In which Zach Braff directs a sell-out movie about wacky old people robbing a bank that still could very well be the best movie he's ever made.
Manchester by the Sea
I have not seen Kenneth Lonergan's last film, the hastily-dumped and quickly-reclaimed Margaret, so I can only compare it to his directorial debut, You Can Count On Me (and also I guess his screenplays for Analyze This and The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, but I have a feeling those comparisons wouldn't lead to a particularly enlightening review). Manchester by the Sea is in much the same register as You Can Count On Me. They both feel like dispatches from a life more than a whole story (although Manchester takes that further), they're both utterly devastating, and they're both surprisingly, wickedly funny (I could watch a whole comedy focused on the continued mistakes of Otto the drummer). But Count On Me, as great as it is, almost feels like a dry run in comparison to the smoothness with which Manchester chronicles its main character and his inability to open up. Casey Affleck is, even by his standards, beautifully understated here, refusing to overplay both the glimpses of his character's more outgoing self as revealed in flashbacks and the repression and sadness he deals with through the meat of the film (his big breakdown at the film's climax, in one of the most devastating scenes in any film this year, is maybe a 3 out of 10). He's backed by a supporting cast that similarly whispers when others might be prone to shout, especially the main trio of Lucas Hedges (as the nephew Affleck is forced to serve as guardian to when Affleck's brother dies), Kyle Chandler (as the dead brother), and Michelle Williams (as Affleck's ex-wife who's his scene partner in the aforementioned breakdown scene) but also everyone else in the film, including C.J. Wilson (as a family friend), Gretchen Mol (as Hedges' fuck-up mother), and Lonergan's best buddy Matthew Broderick (perfectly cast as the generically nice, store-brand Christian currently married to Mol).
And yet, despite the wealth of good performers Lonergan got here, he is the one that ends up being the star of the show (and not just because of his literal walk-on part in the film). He's written a terrific script here, and his direction of it is quietly superb (I imagine this will receive similar complaints to the "this isn't showy enough" ones that Spotlight got last year, because what this movie needs is a bravura tracking shot). The film is filled to the brim with incidents, some silly, some serious, some both, and many not "resolved" by the film's end (Hedges' character has two separate girlfriends in the film, and if you want a scene where he has to break this news to them both and choose one, hoo boy, I have some bad news for you), and Lonergan treats them all as pieces of a grand tapestry, where a great tragedy and the late-night beer run preceding it are of equal importance. Flashbacks are layered throughout the film, and while some carry information we need to process the present-day scenes, others are more for color (of course, these only set up the viewer for the absolute sucker-punch of the big flashback). These flashbacks arrive with no warning, part of an editing scheme where every cut is a surprise (literally, as in the case of one flashback where almost every cut reveals a new character in the same space as Affleck and Williams), cutting scenes short when you expect them to go on and leaving bits in that probably wouldn't appear in a more standard-issue version of this story (the editor, Jennifer Lame, practiced a more outwardly comedic version of her editing here in her work on Noah Baumbach's recent run of films). Despite running nearly 140 minutes and being deeply depressing, the film flies by, feeling more like a beautifully-constructed short story than an epic-length movie (SBT brought up Raymond Carver as a comparison, and I agree, adding that parts of it even reminded me a specific Carver story, the unpublished "Dreams"). Remember when I said La La Land was my favorite movie of the year? Well, it's second-place now, and Manchester has taken its spot.
Grade: A
Stray Observations:
- I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about Jody Lee Lipes (Martha Marcy May Marlene, Trainwreck)'s cinematography here. It's definitely unshowy, but the framing is brilliant throughout, using the 1.85:1 frame to fill each shot with negative space, which is either ominous (the surroundings showing their dominance over the weak characters) or hopeful (there's plenty of room for these characters to improve, even just a little), depending on the scene. Seeing these nearly empty frames projected so tall greatly added to the film's power for me.
- This was the third film in a row I saw with my mother (my sister chose to sit this one out, and if she was bored by Jackie, I can't imagine she'd get too much out of this), and she seemed to like it just as much as me.
- The bad takes about this and its gall in being about white people only seem more borderline sociopathic now that I know what these writers are proudly saying they feel no empathy about.
- Trailers I Saw Before the Show:
Fences: Looks good.
Split: Looks hella good.
Paterson: Looks goddamn amazing.
Gifted: Oh god, is this going to be the new Lincoln trailer? Also, I'm now wondering why the little girl knows the phrase "and change" but not "ad nauseum".
Lady Macbeth: Had not heard about this before, but it looks good.
Live by Night: Friendship ended with BEN, now CASEY is my best friend.
It's fitting that I saw Moonlight and Certain Women so close together. They're both trios of stories about people struggling to make it in the world, they both end with simple stories of heartbreaking missed connections, and they both sit in my top five for the year. But while Certain Women thrived on its quiet gentleness, Moonlight is maybe the boldest film I've seen this year, a fact it announces before the studio logos come up (the first time I believe the A24 logo has been messed with, which I assume they allowed because this is their first in-house production), with the sounds of "Every N****r is a Star" and then a 360-degree shot that manages to keep the background surreally out-of-focus at all times, like it's a green-screen, as it focuses first on Mahershala Ali and then on a group of schoolchildren. And that's not even getting into the goddamn colors, especially the astonishing blue of Ali's car, which pop more than the colors of any film I've seen this year not named The Neon Demon. Given the film being about a black kid coming to terms with being gay and suffering a great deal for it, one would expect director Barry Jenkins and cinematographer James Laxton to go for unflattering intimacy throughout, just to get across this is Serious Business. But this movie is gorgeous and heightened at all times, even the handheld cribbing more from the freewheeling poetry of Malick than the ground-level realism of the Dardennes. In turn, Jenkins makes the film soar even beyond what it could accomplish with just the bare bones, making the scattered pleasures almost pornographic (this movie has the best-lit, most delicious-looking meals since Cypher's steak in The Matrix), the torment something beyond "a teenager gets beaten up", and the ultimate settling-down of the camera something totally beautiful. The use of blue (as one would expect from a film based on a play called In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue) is particularly breathtaking in how much it conveys the main character's passion, to the point that Andre Holland changing into a blue shirt is a jaw-dropping moment. I have not seen Jenkins' debut, Medicine for Melancholy, but if it's anywhere near as assured as this, it's probably a must-see.
But, of course, Jenkins and the behind-the-scenes crew (including production designer Hannah Beachler, who's worked on Creed, Lemonade, and the upcoming Black Panther) are not the only ones who make this film work as well as it does. The actors are what really send this thing into the stratosphere. Hearing before seeing the movie that none of the actors playing the main character, Chiron, as he goes from child to teen to young man, met each other at all during production didn't make it any easier understanding that fact, because this is pretty much one unified performance, the sullen and quiet young Chirons being direct continuations of each other and the older Chiron hiding that side (badly) with a competent cover-band version of Mahershala Ali. It's also nearly impossible to comprehend that Naomie Harris shot her scenes during a three-day break in the Spectre press tour, essentially tossing off a better, subtler performance than almost anybody would've given if told to play a crack addict. And Andre Holland and the two younger versions of his character are all terrific as well (I'm so glad Holland appears to be breaking out as an actor, he deserves it so much). But the conversation around the film so often centers around Mahershala Ali, and that's for a good reason. He really is that good in this movie, playing improbable kindness and compassion so well and getting one final silent reaction that should engrave his name in an Oscar all by itself (and Janelle Monae does similarly strong, warm work as Ali's girlfriend and replacement guardian to Chiron).
I loved this movie watching it and walking out of it, and honestly, as I've gotten farther from it, I've only loved it even more. I may see it again before it's out of theaters, and if you haven't seen it by now, make doing so your very top priority.
Grade: A
Stray Observations:
- Since there is the potential for this rising to the very top of my list for this year, that would mean that A24 would've released my favorite film this year and my least favorite film this year (that would be Sea of Trees), plus several in the top fifteen.
- Trailer I Saw Before the Show:
Loving: I'm going to be loving this movie, amirite?
Arrival
I thought I had Denis Villeneuve semi-narrowed down. His two American films prior to this, Prisoners and Sicario, saw him balance a deeply cynical worldview with several tense setpieces (the latter more successfully than the former), all the while building towards a climactic revelation. Arrival has two of those elements, and some aesthetic similarities (a scene of Amy Adams going to her house is told in two unnerving push-ins), but this sees Villeneuve completely strip himself of cynicism in favor of a heart-on-the-sleeve sci-fi drama, anchored by a truly fantastic Amy Adams performance, even by normal Amy Adams standards (not that I don't like Emily Blunt in Sicario, but that movie sells her out, necessarily, while Arrival puts everything on Adams' shoulders at all times; in at least one shot, Villeneuve waits on racking focus away from her and onto other characters as long as possible). Compared to the locked-down style of those two films, this gets big emotional dividends out of the way the camera the moved here, at one point the same movement getting greatly differing responses at two points in the film. If those two movies produced sweat, this one came very close to producing tears.
Of course, if Villeneuve and Adams were the only one pulling their weight here, the movie wouldn't hit me like it did. I have not read the Ted Chiang story on which this is based, but the script by Eric Heisserer (whose other credits are almost entirely garbage horror sequels and remakes) is a pretty beautifully-constructed beast (as with Sicario, my only real quibble is a few lines I could do without; here, Jeremy Renner gets a few too many cutesy one-liners, although his out-of-nowhere Sheena Easton joke got me), keeping things moving and doling out just enough information at a time. The cast other than Adams generally doesn't get much to do but they do it well, Renner especially. Villeneuve's go-to composer Johann Johannson crafts another gorgeously dissonant score, which combined with the sound design makes this an absolutely incredible aural experience. The effects on the aliens and their ships look great, even with/because of the layers of obstruction Villeneuve puts between the viewer and them. And of course, the cinematography. Whether Roger Deakins was merely busy or Villeneuve wanted to choose someone else for this, he made the absolute right choice with who he did pick, which is up-and-coming DoP Bradford Young (of Selma and A Most Violent Year fame, not to the mention the upcoming Han Solo movie), because I can honestly not imagine the movie looking better under Deakins' lens. Deakins' main strength as a DoP is color, whereas Young's strength is darkness (I've called him the heir to Gordon Willis' throne before), and this movie has the latter in spades and virtually none of the former (the most astonishing shot in the film isn't even of the aliens or their ship, but of the bright orange of a radiation suit standing out against grey nothingness). Young shoots the Montana location where the film spends almost all of its running time as the same kind of bland, dull hellscape that Villeneuve portrayed Toronto as in Enemy, where the sun's existence is barely even hinted at. And interiors are often lit extraordinarily dimly for what you'd expect from a studio movie (I'm pretty sure Michael Stuhlbarg spends half of his screentime barely visible), creating a pallor over the film that disappears in the presence of the milky whiteness of where Adams goes to observe the aliens, selling their benevolence and also laying seeds to be planted later.
Before seeing this and having it jump into my top five, I maybe thought I knew how Blade Runner 2049 would go. I know even less after seeing this, and I'm even more excited. Bring it on, Villeneuve. I may not even freak out if you don't immediately go back to Deakins after it.
Grade: A
Stray Observations:
- I knew this movie was going to be amazing by the time there was a full-scale reenactment of the penultimate shot of Enemy.
- Not so amazing, however, was my theater experience during this. The theater was unexpectedly packed for something this cerebral, and there was a lot of crowd noise, with popcorn bag crunching and the like. But what really got me was the person right behind me, who brought their four year old (or somewhere in that ballpark) daughter to this. And this girl was so chatty that if I didn't see her behind me, I might've assumed Johannson had brilliantly layered the sounds of parenthood into his score. I do not think she understood the film.
- Trailers I Saw Before the Show:
Gold: That Robert Elswit magic, tho!
Passengers: That Rodrigo Prieto magic, tho! (Wish the magic had been used for the Silence trailer, though.)
Split: That M. Night Shyamalan magic, tho!
Collateral Beauty: That Maryse Alberti magic, tho! (This movie looks like shit, though, and, as I realized on the way out of the theater, like the version of this movie for stupid people.)
Office Christmas Party: I don't know who shot or directed this.
Allied: Finally, Robert Zemeckis has once again made a movie where it's unlikely he'll be able to use head-slappingly obvious music cues.
Loving
Jeff Nichols' first film released this year, Midnight Special, was generally reasonably well-liked, but there were some common complaints about it targeting its quietness and stripped-down nature. These people felt that this muted the deep emotions at the film's core. I, for one, found that Special's reserve is what made the emotional content hit all the harder for me, the movie getting more power out of quiet looks and a few words than many movies get out of long-winded speeches. So, it is my honor to inform you that Nichols' second film this year, Loving, is an exceedingly worthy companion piece to Special, a quietly moving drama about two people deeply in love with each other. The fact that those people are a white bricklayer and a black woman is not incidental to this, as it means the two must jump through hoop after hoop to have their love be fully recognized, but more than the long-reaching implications of their fight, one walks away from the movie in awe of two people so inseparable as a couple. Tellingly, in the end "here's what happened after this" cards, the Supreme Court decision they inspired gets one card, and their futures get several.
Much like Special, Loving accomplishes a lot with a little. Richard Loving, as played by Joel Edgerton (returning from Special), is an exceedingly silent man, a guy who doesn't need to move beyond one-word responses to get across his feelings. His wife, Mildred (Ruth Negga), is a little more talkative (she becomes the spokesperson for her and Richard for TV cameras), but she too is prone to leave profound things about her marriage unsaid, in favor of unshowy, beautiful gestures. Edgerton and Negga are utterly perfect in their roles, never overselling a moment and always making their mutual adoration convincing. Edgerton's unwavering friend in Special was one of that movie's most touching elements, and here again Nichols brings out some quiet tenderness in him, softness hidden beyond a beefy frame. Negga (new to working with Nichols and, honestly, new to me as well) is just as good, radiating every moment she spends with Richard and their three kids and finding deep reservoirs of courage and strength when she needs to. Nichols' script respects both of their abilities to express everything while doing almost nothing, giving them poignant sentences when there could've been bloated paragraphs.
The movie only really missteps by bringing in Nick Kroll as the ACLU lawyer who takes on their case, who serves as comic relief of sorts that's a bit too pronounced for the film's muted world. He's not bad (and he gets better as he goes along), and one could make the case that his incongruity with much of the film is a symptom of him being an outsider to the hostile world the Lovings are stuck in, but his performance is pitched like it's the highlight in the Weinstein Company version of this movie. In comparison, Nichols good-luck charm Michael Shannon also plays an outsider who enters the orbit of the Lovings, in this case a Life Magazine photographer who takes pictures of them, and in his one scene, he adds some humor that's pitched quietly enough not to jar with the film's tone. Kroll just feels a bit out-of-place, but even he's not enough to take too much away from an incredibly touching little movie. I don't know if its stubborn refusal to play typical Oscar-bait cards will mean it doesn't get Oscars, but Nichols can rest easy even without awards support, because he made the right call for this story.
Grade: A-
Stray Observations:
- As a counterbalance to the film's loveliness, I had the single most obnoxious experience with a movie theater audience ever here. As goes with the territory when you (or maybe just I) see a movie with a mostly elderly audience, there were a lot of weird half-laughs at things that are objectively not funny. But even worse than that was someone in the audience making utterly bizarre, grotesque, very loud snoring noises no less than three times during the movie, apparently without being asleep. And at least one person in the audience actually laughed at this!
- Bill Camp and David "Elmo Oxygen" Jensen also reappear from Special here, their roles amusingly switched, Camp playing the wavering ally and Jensen playing the unrepentant obstacle.
- Nichols' regular collaborators, DoP Adam Stone and composer David Wingo, also did terrific work here, Stone creating wide-open compositions that give the Lovings as much room as possible and Wingo creating cues that, like the film, convey beauty without raising their voices.
- There's one scene in the film that involves a tense bit of nighttime driving (the core of Special), and my hand to god, the music cue Wingo accompanies it with sounds almost exactly like an orchestral version of Special's main theme.
- Trailers I Saw Before the Show:
Fences: Hey, we're off to a good start.
20th Century Women: I am going to see the shit out of this.
A Dog's Purpose: It's like the company from RoboCop decided to get together and make the most potent tearjerker possible.
The Zookeeper's Wife: Eh.
A Monster Calls: Meh.
Hidden Figures: Maybe?
Collateral Beauty: Nope.
Jackie
Much has been made about how Jackie flies in the face of normal biopic conventions, but plenty of films can be described as doing that in a far more accessible manner than this movie manages. This movie takes a buzzsaw to the respectable story of An American Tragedy like only a movie made almost entirely by non-Americans could. Pablo Larrain (whose string of three films released this year exhausts me just hearing about it)'s direction has gotten the most attention, and it's superb in crafting a woozy, assaultive atmosphere. The camera gets too close to Jackie's face for too long, her tear-soaked head filling the narrower 1.66:1 frame. The 16mm cinematography (handled by Stephane Fontaine, who also had three films released this year), which one would expect to be used to make the film softer and more "real-looking" (its ostensible purpose here is to convincingly blend new footage with archival footage), only adds to the bizarre atmosphere (the movie might as well have been shot on the moon, for how foreign the locations look under Larrain's lens), the chunky grain hovering over Jackie like a swarm of bees ready to attack. And the editing never quite lets the viewer sit easily in their seat. People move more distance than they should between cuts (Billy Crudup, as a reporter interviewing Jackie, is edited like a slasher movie villain in this movie), conversations occur over multiple locations, like a more disorienting variation on that sequence in The Limey, and a cut from Jackie from behind to Jackie staring down the lens reveals the full horror of her situation more than any prestige monologue could (this is the first time we fully see her blood-soaked pink Chanel suit). And then there's Mica.
Mica Levi burst onto the scene with her score for Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin, creating uniquely unnerving, inhuman sounds. If you think about it, Jackie and Skin are actually westerns share more in common than one would expect, both following extraordinary women who are violently yanked from their element by cruel men. And if the instruments (like strings and military drums) used here sound more "real" than the distorted otherworldy sounds of Skin (there's an appearance by that movie's buzzing synth-strings during the scene showing the assassination), the effect is much the same. Levi balances occasional notes of compassion with a general focus on the oppressiveness of Jackie's situation. It's just as bracing a listen as Skin's score, and maybe the best score of the year too (Moonlight is its only current competition for me, although I have La La Land waiting for me tomorrow).
But, of course, Jackie without an adequate Jackie would probably not be a movie I'd start reviewing with two paragraphs of raves. Yes, Natalie Portman is absolutely terrific in this movie. The trailers (as brilliant as they were) had me a bit worried that her performance would be more focused on getting the accent right than digging into Jackie's skin, and I'm happy to report that that is not what Portman did for this film. Sure, she does get the accent right, but any feelings that her proficiency will outweigh her excellence very quickly disappear. Portman is saddled with a very tricky mixture of obvious manipulation (particularly in the scenes between her and Crudup) and raw grief here, playing a Strong Woman with the potential to drown in sorrow at any moment, and she pulls off both modes with a minimum of "look at me" actorly tics. This film is structured like a memory play, and she makes it very easy to believe that something this fractured and frequently jarring is coming straight from her subconscious.
Grade: A
Stray Observations:
- The supporting performances are quite good as well. I'm not quite sure about Peter Sarsgaard's wavering Boston accent as Bobby Kennedy, but otherwise he's really good and moving as the Kennedy forced to take Jack's place at Jackie's side. Greta Gerwig is typically lovely as Jackie's assistant, and John Hurt gets a few good scenes as a priest who tries to break through to Jackie.
- I saw this with my mother and sister, and luckily, unlike the last prestige drama we went to together (Carol), I was not the only one to like it. My mom liked it and Natalie Portman's performance in it, although my sister didn't really care for it, even falling asleep at the beginning (though she claims that was more because she woke up early and was sitting in a recliner chair). She said that the story didn't really interest her like it did in other period films, like (and it should be noted that these are both films she saw in a high school film class recently) The King's Speech and The Imitation Game.
- La La Land tomorrow! I can't wait to be complicit in Trump's America or whatever bullshit the thinkpieces want me to think about this movie.
- Trailers I Saw Before the Show:
Beauty and the Beast: My my, someone fetch a priest.
Silence: 👌👀👌👀👌👀👌👀👌👀 good shit go౦ԁ sHit👌 thats ✔ some good👌👌shit right👌👌th 👌 ere👌👌👌 right✔there ✔✔if i do ƽaү so my selｆ 💯 i say so 💯 thats what im talking about right there right there (chorus: ʳᶦᵍʰᵗ ᵗʰᵉʳᵉ) mMMMMᎷМ💯 👌👌 👌НO0ОଠＯOOＯOОଠଠOoooᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒ👌 👌👌 👌 💯 👌 👀 👀 👀 👌👌Good shit
Fifty Shades Darker: There should be a crime against following the Silence trailer with a Fifty Shades trailer.
Live by Night: This was the second trailer, which was a lot better than the first one and apparently a lot better than the movie it's promoting.
Passengers: When will I be from this movie, goddamnit?
Gifted: Is this trailer trying to win an award for most music cues within two minutes? Also, my sister believes this to be a rip-off of Matilda.
A United Kingdom: Note: if your main idea for your period movie is "let's shoot everything in soft focus", stop making that movie and try again.
La La Land
At the beginning of 2015, I saw Damien Chazelle's Whiplash. I thought it was a powerhouse, headed by a new director with an almost Fincherian control over images and editing (the Fincher comparison helped by his work writing the bare-bones single-location thriller Grand Piano). I have now seen Chazelle's latest, and I cannot say Fincher was the first comparison to come to mind.
La La Land is a flashy, splashy musical extravaganza, directed by Chazelle like he may never get another chance and designed on every level to be as eye-popping as possible. It helps that Chazelle has assembled an absolutely top-notch crew. The production design is from David Wasco, who's worked with Wes Anderson and Quentin Tarantino, and the costumes are from legend Mary Zophres. But best of all, the cinematographer is Linus Sandgren, who previously came to my attention working on movies with fairly limited color palettes (like his two movies for David O. Russell) and restrained camera movements (like Promised Land), so it's a complete shock to see him let loose here (the camera certainly didn't follow partygoers straight into a pool in the Matt Damon fracking movie). Sandgren and Chazelle bathe scenes in gorgeous monochrome colors, from the expected blue and red to green over two melancholy-to-actively-sad scenes. And oh boy, if the shots in Whiplash were air-tight, the camera here literally goes off into the clouds at times, whip-panning and gliding and even at one point spinning until the images are an abstract blur. And the gold lighting and rigorously-edited aesthetic of the concert scenes in Whiplash even reappears here for a performance scene! It's probably the best-looking movie of the year.
Of course, a musical romantic comedy without adequate music, romance, or comedy would be a sorry thing. Many directors have tried this kind of gamble before, including all-time great ones like Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, and many of them just didn't stick the landing (I mean, I kind of love One From the Heart, but god knows it requires a very specific wavelength to find yourself on). And here this young punk succeeds beautifully after three movies. The music here is terrific and memorable, from the score (from Whiplash composer Justin Hurwitz) to the songs (by SMASH! songwriters Pasek & Paul), and the sequences around them are alternately incredibly fun (like the one-upping of the "Everybody Hurts" video at the very beginning, set to "Another Day of Sun") and incredibly moving (like an audition song shot in a single close-up of Emma Stone's face). But even without the music, this would be at the very least a very good movie (in fact, it was already made this year without the music, as Cafe Society). It may honestly be one of the funniest movies I've seen this year, with my favorite line of the year ("No, Jamal, you be trippin'"). I certainly laughed at Whiplash, but that kind of nervous laughter didn't prepare me for Chazelle to have serious comedic talents as a writer. And, most important of all, the romance really clicks. This is due in no small part to Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone being absurdly charismatic, beautiful people who make falling in love almost pornographic, but more than them, while their story is simple (and that's turned some people off of the less music-heavy middle portion of the movie), it's effective and affecting. One almost doesn't realize the depth of one's feelings for these two characters until the epilogue, which contains the aforementioned nod to 25th Hour (although I've also heard comparisons made to Up), which features a mixture of pasted-on-smiles razzle-dazzle and bone-deep melancholy that would be tough to sell as either if it was built around a weaker connection. But Chazelle, Gosling, and Stone thread the needle and make this more than a spectacle absent a heart. It's my favorite film of the year thus far, and as lovely a birthday gift as one could ask for.
Grade: A
Stray Observations:
- J.K. Simmons in this movie is totally Fletcher, having relocated and taken a quiet job elsewhere, right?
- I saw this with my mom and sister again, and they both loved it (my sister, being a musical fanatic, was over the moon about it).
- However, this lovely experience was spoiled by maybe the worst audience experience I've ever had. Remember when I complained about the person occasionally snoring loudly during Loving? Well, some homeless Santa-looking motherfucker was in my row and snoring throughout a lot of the movie (maybe it was Richard Brody in an attempt to sabotage other's enjoyment of this, I dunno). And then there's the motherfuckers who came in the theater late and practically screamed at the top of their lungs something like "THIS ISN'T THE RIGHT THEATER! THERE'S NOBODY IN HERE!!!!!!!".
- So, this movie apparently gets jazz wrong. I can't speak for most of its treatment of jazz (which I could honestly not care less about), but the complaints that John Legend's character in it is painted as some devil sent to ruin jazz are hilariously misguided, given that he has a big monologue on jazz where a). his points are entirely reasonable, b). Gosling, the big jazz snob (who's been painted as more than a little silly in his love for the form), raises no objections to his points, c). the points are delivered by John Legend, maybe the nicest, most reasonable man in show business, and d). the song they perform later is actually kind of a kickass song. Also, jazz schmazz.
- Trailers I Saw Before the Show:
20th Century Women: Aw hell yeah.
Fences: Hell yeah.
Sing: God fucking damnit, I saw this movie and can't even be spared from ads from it?!?! Illumination, you sick fucks.
Gifted: Who cares?
The Shack: Fuck no.
Patriots Day: Less nauseating than I was expecting.
Going in Style: In which Zach Braff directs a sell-out movie about wacky old people robbing a bank that still could very well be the best movie he's ever made.
Manchester by the Sea
I have not seen Kenneth Lonergan's last film, the hastily-dumped and quickly-reclaimed Margaret, so I can only compare it to his directorial debut, You Can Count On Me (and also I guess his screenplays for Analyze This and The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, but I have a feeling those comparisons wouldn't lead to a particularly enlightening review). Manchester by the Sea is in much the same register as You Can Count On Me. They both feel like dispatches from a life more than a whole story (although Manchester takes that further), they're both utterly devastating, and they're both surprisingly, wickedly funny (I could watch a whole comedy focused on the continued mistakes of Otto the drummer). But Count On Me, as great as it is, almost feels like a dry run in comparison to the smoothness with which Manchester chronicles its main character and his inability to open up. Casey Affleck is, even by his standards, beautifully understated here, refusing to overplay both the glimpses of his character's more outgoing self as revealed in flashbacks and the repression and sadness he deals with through the meat of the film (his big breakdown at the film's climax, in one of the most devastating scenes in any film this year, is maybe a 3 out of 10). He's backed by a supporting cast that similarly whispers when others might be prone to shout, especially the main trio of Lucas Hedges (as the nephew Affleck is forced to serve as guardian to when Affleck's brother dies), Kyle Chandler (as the dead brother), and Michelle Williams (as Affleck's ex-wife who's his scene partner in the aforementioned breakdown scene) but also everyone else in the film, including C.J. Wilson (as a family friend), Gretchen Mol (as Hedges' fuck-up mother), and Lonergan's best buddy Matthew Broderick (perfectly cast as the generically nice, store-brand Christian currently married to Mol).
And yet, despite the wealth of good performers Lonergan got here, he is the one that ends up being the star of the show (and not just because of his literal walk-on part in the film). He's written a terrific script here, and his direction of it is quietly superb (I imagine this will receive similar complaints to the "this isn't showy enough" ones that Spotlight got last year, because what this movie needs is a bravura tracking shot). The film is filled to the brim with incidents, some silly, some serious, some both, and many not "resolved" by the film's end (Hedges' character has two separate girlfriends in the film, and if you want a scene where he has to break this news to them both and choose one, hoo boy, I have some bad news for you), and Lonergan treats them all as pieces of a grand tapestry, where a great tragedy and the late-night beer run preceding it are of equal importance. Flashbacks are layered throughout the film, and while some carry information we need to process the present-day scenes, others are more for color (of course, these only set up the viewer for the absolute sucker-punch of the big flashback). These flashbacks arrive with no warning, part of an editing scheme where every cut is a surprise (literally, as in the case of one flashback where almost every cut reveals a new character in the same space as Affleck and Williams), cutting scenes short when you expect them to go on and leaving bits in that probably wouldn't appear in a more standard-issue version of this story (the editor, Jennifer Lame, practiced a more outwardly comedic version of her editing here in her work on Noah Baumbach's recent run of films). Despite running nearly 140 minutes and being deeply depressing, the film flies by, feeling more like a beautifully-constructed short story than an epic-length movie (SBT brought up Raymond Carver as a comparison, and I agree, adding that parts of it even reminded me a specific Carver story, the unpublished "Dreams"). Remember when I said La La Land was my favorite movie of the year? Well, it's second-place now, and Manchester has taken its spot.
Grade: A
Stray Observations:
- I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about Jody Lee Lipes (Martha Marcy May Marlene, Trainwreck)'s cinematography here. It's definitely unshowy, but the framing is brilliant throughout, using the 1.85:1 frame to fill each shot with negative space, which is either ominous (the surroundings showing their dominance over the weak characters) or hopeful (there's plenty of room for these characters to improve, even just a little), depending on the scene. Seeing these nearly empty frames projected so tall greatly added to the film's power for me.
- This was the third film in a row I saw with my mother (my sister chose to sit this one out, and if she was bored by Jackie, I can't imagine she'd get too much out of this), and she seemed to like it just as much as me.
- The bad takes about this and its gall in being about white people only seem more borderline sociopathic now that I know what these writers are proudly saying they feel no empathy about.
- Trailers I Saw Before the Show:
Fences: Looks good.
Split: Looks hella good.
Paterson: Looks goddamn amazing.
Gifted: Oh god, is this going to be the new Lincoln trailer? Also, I'm now wondering why the little girl knows the phrase "and change" but not "ad nauseum".
Lady Macbeth: Had not heard about this before, but it looks good.
Live by Night: Friendship ended with BEN, now CASEY is my best friend.