Of course, if you're just here for the reviews, it won't hurt my feelings to just slide on past.
Best Picture: Moonlight
Actor: Casey Affleck
Actress: Ruth Negga
Supporting Actor: Mahershala Ali
Supporting Actress: Michelle Williams
Animated Feature: Kubo and the Two Strings
Cinematography: Arrival
Costume Design: La La Land
Directing: Moonlight
Documentary Feature: O.J.: Made in America
Editing: Arrival
Original Score: Moonlight
Original Song: "How Far I'll Go"
Production Design: Hail, Caesar!
Animated Short: "Piper"
Sound Editing: Hacksaw Ridge
Sound Mixing: Arrival
Visual Effects: Kubo and the Two Strings
Adapted Screenplay: Moonlight
Original Screenplay: Hell or High Water
Movies
Large portions of this movie consist of parades of tired war-movie cliches, particularly in its battle scenes, which very much read like director Mel Gibson really loved both the gruesome nightmare of Saving Private Ryan's Normandy beaches sequence and the cool stylization of his own action movie pedigree. But when this movie focuses most on its protagonist, the Medal-of-Honor-decorated Desmond Doss, it's much more successful, both in the early scenes of Doss's hometown of Lynchburg, Virginia, and the climactic scene were, unarmed, he pulls more than seventy wounded human beings (both Allied but also Japanese) from a battlefield over a single torturous night. It's during that latter sequence in particular, in which a broad but ultimately effective Andrew Garfield (0 for 2 for exaggerated accents in 2016, unfortunately) depicts one of the most unambiguously good deeds in American war history, where the film gains its power, and by golly, when it happens, it's worth being moved to tears. Grade: B
The combination of dialogue absurdity, light slapstick humor, out-of-nowhere third-act setting change, and languishing when-will-they-end-lengthy shots of gorgeous landscapes makes Jauja a conceptually interesting film, for sure, and a welcome, all-too-rare attempt to move the western out of its myth/realism spectrum. But it certainly isn't much fun to sit through, and I'll be darned if, interesting as it may be in theory, I can make heads or tails of what it's trying to accomplish beyond bewilderment. Grade: B-
Banking on its reputation, I skipped the theatrical release and went straight for the extended, 3-hour cut. My gut tells me that I've done the right choice; perhaps attempting to create a new subgenre—the indie epic—writer/director Kenneth Longergan has crafted a film in which seemingly superfluous detail and the recounting of every specific of its characters lives (both mundane and spectacular) become vitally important in weaving a complex, fascinating, and often frustrating tapestry of the film's reality, so every minute counts as much as every other minute feels like it should have been cut. Beginning with its most conventionally exciting setpiece, in which our protagonist, Lisa (Anna Paquin), plays a small role in causing a fatal bus accident, the rest of the film's meandering hours play out as a strange traipse through the various collage of trauma, guilt, self-righteousness, and growth Lisa experiences in the aftermath. What makes this an effectively sprawling movie instead of a tedious one has to fall both on Longergan's writing, which does great work making almost all of its scenes zing with both hilarity and high emotion, and Paquin's absolutely stunning performance as the 17-year-old Lisa. I really can't overstate just how good Paquin is here. Lisa is temperamental, selfish, delusional, sensitive, moralistic, convicted, and short-sighted—essentially, a high schooler—and Paquin plays her with an astounding lack of glamour, an infuriating yet sympathetic ball of human life. In fact, the film's no-nonsense approach to its adolescent character in general is brilliant; rarely have teenagers been so thoroughly teenaged in a movie. So the fact that the movie's by-design sprawl doesn't always coalesce into a worthwhile whole is more than made up for by the minute-to-minute pains and pleasures of this sort of sharply observed reality. Grade: A-
While it's never quite the audio/visual tour de force of last year's American Honey—writer/director Andrea Arnold is on her home UK turf in this feature, likely accounting for the straight-faced realism here in place of American Honey's mythic sublime—Fish Tank is nevertheless as tense as this kind of naturalistic indie tends to get. An abduction sequence near the end of the film verges on horror, in fact. Not knowing much about inner-city London, I can't say if the realism here has the compassion and verisimilitude of Arnold's later work, but its attention to detail and the not-so-quite desperation of its characters is both fascinating and humanistic, finding the spark of life within even bleak circumstances. Grade: B+
Music
Of the Stones' four undisputed masterpieces—the remarkable streak of consecutive releases that includes this one, Sticky Fingers, Let It Bleed, and Exile on Main St.—Beggar's Banquet is by-far the weakest. Mick Jagger's affectation of regional accents rarely works, and it definitely doesn't in goofy country songs like "Dear Doctor," and that's only the worst song with an unsuccessful affectation. But honestly, this is a nitpick and only a "weak" album by the rubric of the Rolling Stones' even better peak work, which is totally an unfair rubric to hold any artist, even the Stones. Besides, this one's got its share of classics, from "Jigsaw Puzzle" to "Street Fighting Man" to "Salt of the Earth" to the undeniable, unassailable, stone-cold ownage of freaking "Sympathy for the Devil," which, as far as I'm concerned, is on its own the definitive argument-ender for any debate of the Rolling Stones as all-time greats. Grade: A-
No comments:
Post a Comment