Movies
I, Tonya (2017)
I, Tonya gets its best laughs out of being a sort of flippant farce that recreates the whole Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan drama (Paul Walter Hauser is never not hilarious as mastermind/masterboob Shawn Eckhardt); but I, Tonya gets its best material out of the sardonic tragedy of Harding's life trajectory—I don't know a ton about the real Tonya Harding, but this movie version of her is a fantastic character, the story of someone so entangled in cycles of abuse that it's hard to tell whether she's punching back or just manifesting signs of trauma. It's a shame, then, that that the movie's relentless cutting between these two modes—farce and tragedy—comes off as overly clever and smothers the heart of the film under a blanket of smarmy Scorsese-isms and a cloying soundtrack that gives us the late-1980s/early-1990s by way of the 1970s by way of American Hustle. Grade: B-
Lucky (2017)
There's plenty that's trite and obvious and just kind of mediocre in Lucky—the movie is far too fond of punctuating scenes with lines of dialogue that are ostensibly part of the preceding conversation but are obviously only in the movie to hammer a theme (Pet store lady: "Would you like to give this dog a permanent home?" Lucky, squinting into the wind: "Nothing's permanent"). But there's at least as much in the movie that's flat-out amazing, including a mid-film dream sequence that comes out of nowhere but is absolutely stunning. Then of course there's Harry Dean Stanton, doing what will surely become one of the canonical final artistic statements alongside Bowie's Blackstar and Richard Farnsworth's The Straight Story performance—and with Lynch acting in a (great) supporting role, this may as well be a Straight Story revision with Stanton in the lead instead of the periphery. An imperfect Straight Story, to be sure, but capable of some of the same humbly profound heights. Grade: B
Brawl in Cell Block 99 (2017)
Anyone who saw writer/director/composer S. Craig Zahler's previous film, Bone Tomahawk, and its adaptation of the whole "unseam'd him from the nave to the chaps" Macbeth routine shouldn't be surprised at the level of violence in this movie, but I'm still a little shocked. Some of this is the sound design (which goes out of its way to make sure we hear every bone break), but there's no denying the stomach-churning visual immediacy of seeing a dude's face scraped on on a concrete floor until all that's left is a grinning skull. And it's all done in immaculately staged practical effects. Whether this all makes the movie better or worse depends on your sensibilities, I suppose, and me, I'm inclined to like it, though only barely, and as it is, I do wish this movie were about thirty minutes shorter. As is, it's paced like a B-movie trying to pass as an arthouse flick, and well, when we're dealing with face-flaying, I think it's best to throw off all pretension and cut right to the chase. There's a lotta buildup here. Grade: B
Sworn Virgin (Vergine giurata) (2015)
It's a movie about a Balkan sworn virgin (look it up—I had to), and it's absolutely obsessed with bodies. The camera lingers over the human form in a way that even more obviously objectifying films don't, and this movie, being from the POV of someone who has existed outside the gender continuum of her country's society, presents those bodies with the curiosity and strangeness of someone from the outside looking in. The obvious pitfall here is that this curiosity could have come across as either leering or clinical, but neither is the case. It's a warmly human movie, and even if all the interpersonal relationships don't feel quite as fleshed out as they should, plenty of emotional weight alone comes from the geometry of muscles and bones. Grade: B+
Gone Baby Gone (2007)
The score is boilerplate, and the cinematography is forgettably workmanlike. And thank goodness we've all been saved from the "you know it's a flashback because we've got all this color correction and grainy effects" overload of the mid-2000s. But presuming you're willing to put up with the conventions of mainstream American cinema from last decade (and Casey Affleck), Gone Baby Gone is an engaging enough crime drama. I'm not nearly familiar enough with Boston to know if this is an accurate portrayal of the city, but the movie has a tremendous sense of place—fantastical or not—that lends a specificity to the film's drama, and the plotting follows the trappings of traditional crime thrillers closely enough that it's surprising when it dances onto the razor's edge of moral doubt at the end. Grade: B
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