Movies
The Shape of Water (2017)
God bless Guillermo del Toro and his weird, magical visions. This may not have been true a few decades ago when we had a more robust B-movie market, but right now, in our age of smarmily self-aware blockbuster posturing, del Toro's willingness to embrace even silly ideas with a clear-eyed sincerity that neither goes out of its way to make those ideas "respectable" nor pulls a muscle audience-winking over the silliness is peerless. Del Toro's yet to make a movie that wasn't flawed in some conspicuous way, and The Shape of Water isn't any different. There are character beats left hanging and lines of dialogue that feel just a tad too straightforwardly thematic, and it honestly feels like we're missing a scene or two near the beginning, given the pacing. But I don't care. The opening 10 minutes are a symphony of editing, image, and score, and even if it takes the movie until its late-breaking dream sequence in which Sally Hawkins dances, Astaire-and-Rogers-style, with her fish-man lover, for the movie to hit that level of classicist mojo again, the intervening 90 minutes are only a tad less wonderful in their fairy-tale rendering of the 1960s US military industrial complex as a backdrop for a genuinely heartfelt interspecies romance that involves both underwater sex and beheaded cats. If any of the previous sentence doesn't strike your fancy, I will have to ask you politely but firmly to leave, saddened by the fact that you're missing out on what is possibly del Toro's best English-language film, give or take Crimson Peak. Regardless of that, it's definitely one of the year's best, of any language. Grade: A
Atomic Blonde (2017)
There's a fight scene in front of a projection of an Andrei Tarkovsky movie, not one but two Bowie needle drops on the soundtrack, neon-lit fight scenes, Charlize Theron in a trench coat—I know when I'm being pandered to, and congratulations, Atomic Blonde, you win. I'm honestly not sure whether this or John Wick: Chapter 2 is the best action movie of 2017, but by golly, this one is certainly courting my affections more effectively. Grade: A-
Whose Streets? (2017)
Collected from what seems like hundreds of iPhones and cameras, Whose Streets? is a montage of footage of the 2014 Ferguson protests and aftermath. Most of these clips are presented without context, and whatever we're going to call "proper" documentary methodology, this movie probably breaks it. But in doing so, the movie also arrives at what I'd imagine Werner Herzog would call the "ecstatic truth" of the events in Ferguson. The events captured here are some of the most significant moments in recent American history, and the documentary evokes with a sort of startling effectiveness the subjective experience of the African-American participants in those events. I'm also pretty sure I teared up when Kendrick Lamar's "Alright" played over the credits. I suppose you could out-think this movie, but that's entirely beside the point. Grade: B+
Nocturama (2016)
In a lot of respects, this plays like a French remake of the Kelly Reichardt Night Moves, only with a banging soundtrack and a tremendously bleak ending—this in the sense that it's a patient and often very quiet depiction of violent radicalism (i.e. terrorism, in case you were wondering). I'd say this movie has a much greater sense of the visceral moral tension at the root of violent activism, but it's Night Moves that has the interesting character work, and in a movie as dependent on quiet character moments as Nocturama, that makes all the difference. There's a lot of cool posturing by these people, but precious little in the way of anything resembling interesting psychology. Grade: B-
Sleepwalk with Me (2012)
Every once in a while, I go back and watch one of those quirky little dramedies that dominated American independent film for the decade following the release of The Royal Tenenbaums. Why do I do this to myself? Maybe it's some irrepressible nostalgia in myself that keeps wanting to replicate the cinematic experiences I had in my late teens, even though I've apparently exhausted the well of good movies in this subgenre. Anyway, to absolutely nobody's surprise, Sleepwalk with Me (a film made on the tale-end of this era) isn't good; it's solipsistic and unfunny and has a casual disregard for its female characters and has a metric ton of ukuleles in the score. You know, the usual. It's also about an aspiring standup comic, so we've got a bit of a Ghosts of Christmas Past and Future thing going on here, as far as representing tiresome trends in American independent film goes. Grade: C-
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