Mini-Reviews for August 28 - September 3, 2017

Reviews, etc. Read on.

Movies

Good Time (2017)

This is the first Great 2017 movie I've seen, and given Heaven Knows What, the directing Safdie brothers' previous feature, that shouldn't have been a surprise. What did surprise me, though, is how much fun Good Time is—"fun" being a word I would have never used within hearing distance of the excellent but misery-filled Heaven Knows What. There's not a lot of misery in Good Time, and that's part of its con; make no mistake, these characters are miserable. But we don't see it—at least, not at first. Connie, played memorably by a Robert Pattinson still apparently looking to salvage his street cred after Twilight, spends most of the movie's 99 energetic minutes manipulating everyone—including, most significantly, his mentally handicapped brother—in his ever-getting-out-of-hand scheme to rob a bank and staying just a step ahead of the collateral damage he causes, and the majority of the film consists of the lengthy and rigorously cause-and-effect-driven sequence of crime-thriller setpieces. It's all terrifically exciting and tense and frequently hilarious, too, right up until the abrupt ending that sees a terrible pile-up of that deferred collateral damage. In all the chases, mistaken identities, and off-handed scheming, it's easy to forget that the movie opens with a scene with Connie's brother reluctantly recounting a particularly painful family memory to a therapist, but the ending, which returns us to this brother's POV, slaps us back into this reality. Connie is a black hole of a human being, and Good Time is a compelling portrait of just how jointly exhilarating and destructive his particular brand of self-involvement is—nihilism disguised as survival. Grade: A

Time Lapse (2014)

There's a lot that's sloppy or kind of stupid about Time Lapse, both from a writing and a filmmaking perspective. The acting is mediocre, too. But more than any movie I've seen since Timecrimes, Time Lapse evokes the kind of unpretentious, clever, punchy sci-fi short fiction that I used to read by the bucketful in middle school. Among a film landscape of high-minded and/or high-budget sci-fi epics, it's a distinct pleasure to run across something as straightforwardly small and grimy as this. Grade: B

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007)

I'm sure some of my musical-loving friend will razz me for this, but the music isn't all that great in Sweeney Todd. Granted, I haven't seen the original stage show, so maybe the fault lies with Tim Burton's adaptation—and given Burton's lackluster (who are we kidding—bad) run of films in the past ten years, I'm willing to give him a good portion of the blame for this movie being just kinda okay instead of the made-in-heaven, peanut-butter-and-chocolate slam dunk it should have been having Tim Burton direct this particular story. Music aside, the movie just kind of plods along its straightforward plot, spending entirely too much time building up to the moment we all know the movie is really about—i.e. when Sweeney Todd and Nellie Lovett start slicing throats and putting them into meat pies. It's only sometimes that, in moseying through this plot, the movie arrives at something interesting or arresting, visually-speaking (the final shot is a major keeper, and pretty much any time Depp's titular barber is slicing throats, it's riveting), but the costuming and set design is consistently wonderful, though considerably dialed back from Burton's usual German-Expressionism-but-wryly-funny extremes, electing for a more muted, grimy twist on a early industrialized London. So the movie's not a total wash, and I enjoyed it more often than not. But it's not hard to feel like this is something of a missed opportunity. Grade: B-

Frailty (2001)

I'm not sure the copious voiceover is quite the necessary storytelling evil that this movie seems to think it is, and in general, the way the plot is given in expository chunks feels clumsy. But by the end, this movie has gone some places I truly didn't expect it to—a twisty piece of true crime that gradually transforms into something else entirely that I won't spoil. I've already compared one movie I've watched this week to short fiction, and this movie fits that distinction, too, which is great—because as we all hopefully know by now, it's the short story, not the novel, that is the closest literary antecedent to the feature film. Grade: B

You Can Count on Me (2000)

The relationship at the core of this movie, the prickly sibling sparring of Laura Linney's and Mark Ruffalo's characters, is gold—a sweet and very human look at two individuals orbiting each other's lives in their disparate attempts to find agency in their respective worlds. The movie surrounding that relationship, though, is shaggy to a fault. This is nothing out of the ordinary for writer/director Kenneth Lonergan, whose work in Manchester by the Sea and especially Margaret shows a proclivity for circuitous, rambly, inefficient narratives as a way of exploring the human condition. This movie, Lonergan's debut, is the least-high-minded of his three directorial features, and it's also the least convincing in proving its shagginess worthwhile. That's not to say the movie is a disaster or that the marvelous success of the Ruffalo/Linney relationship doesn't make the watch worthwhile. But it's a relatively humble debut from a creator who would go on to much, much more interesting work. Grade: B

Bob Roberts (1992)

Bob Roberts is technically a mockumentary, but outside of a few obviously silly bits (the titular Roberts being a conservative goof on Bob Dylan, right down to the album titles and covers [e.g. The Times Are Changin' Back]), it doesn't feel that far removed from the reality we see every day. This is, I'm sure, a commonplace and rather dull observation made already by millions of others also suffering from Trump angst. But that doesn't change the fact that Bob Roberts plays a lot more like a political drama than it does a jokey satire—whether this is because it was forward-thinking enough to anticipate shifts in American culture (a la Network, a movie that also increasingly feels like a drama than the bitter, exaggerated satire it was conceived as) or because writer/director/star Tim Robbins simply was interested in caustic commentary more reflective of reality than comedic sensibilities, I can't tell. What I can tell you is that the movie is a marvelous construction, definitely worth a watch; but lord, it's a bitter pill. Grade: B+

Doctor Zhivago (1965)

It's overwrought, overlong, and shaggy in the way that Old Hollywood epics tend to be, but golly is it beautiful to look at. This shouldn't be surprising, given that it's directed by David Lean, who brought us Lawrence of Arabia, nothing if not one of the most gorgeously crafted and meticulously formed epics of the era. Lawrence is a much better use of 200+ minutes, admittedly, especially given the lopsidedness Doctor Zhivago's story suffers from (there's so much buildup to what should be the narrative lynch pin of Russia's collapse into post-Bolshevik poverty), but Zhivago may in fact be the better-looking movie. The camera is inventive and observant, and the mis-en-scène is to die for—the clean geometry of Lawrence's desert is replaced by a lush evocation of both urban and natural Russia that feels almost fantastical in its construction; a scene featuring a house encased in ice is breathtaking, and the entire movie is full of moments nearly as grand. The story... well, the story is just kind of okay—well-acted, I supposed, but the romance is never really engaging enough to justify 3.5 hours of it, and it progresses in fits and starts that seem to skirt over important sequences and languish on less-dynamic moments of stasis, creating a plot that at once feels too long but not quite long enough. And for a movie that positions itself in the decades surrounding the rise of Lenin and the fall of the Romanovs, this movie has precious little to say about Communism or revolution or tsars or anything of political important. But all is forgiven once you see this movie in motion; its aesthetics are truly a wonder to behold. Grade: A-

Books

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (2017)

George Saunders's first novel is, I'm guessing, unlike most novels you've read. Set up almost like an oral history of sorts, the book renders the death and afterlife of Abraham Lincoln's son Willie through a series of dialogues among both fictional and nonfictional sources (including, in one instance, the recent-ish Team of Rivals), and the result is one of the most effective depictions I've seen of what the process of history making actually entails—the accumulation of stories and information from personal accounts. Through this device, Saunders is able to spin a surprisingly moving treatment of death and grief through the cross-cutting of the actual history of the Lincolns' mourning with the fictional history of Willie Lincoln's experiences in the "bardo," a limbo borrowed from Tibetan Buddhism and here mixed with Christian and other religious iconography. Early on, this is all sort of abstract and academic-feeling, but as the novel progresses, it becomes a much smoother ride and ends with a series of beautiful scenes in which the residents of this afterlife begin to realize that they are, in fact, dead. It's a strange, often funny, and ultimately profound journey, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. Grade: A-

Music

The Men - Tomorrow's Hits (2014)

2013's New Moon was a turning point for Brooklyn group The Men, shrugging away the punk sounds of their first few albums and leaning into the country and soft rock textures that the band hinted at in their 2012 breakthrough, Open Your Heart. With Tomorrow's Hits, the band seems to have smoothed out some of the kinks that made New Moon the slightly uneven album that it was, and in doing so, they've arrived at a sound that's almost like power pop, full of bright, loud guitars and hooky melodies. This is a far cry from the punk of their early days, but it's a good fit for the band here, foregrounding the group's strength as pure songwriters. Every song is raucous enough to be fun but disciplined enough to hold together as a close approximation of guitar pop, even the chaotic, Chuck-Berry-meets-honky-tonk-meets-noise-rock "Pearly Gates," the most rambunctious track of the bunch. It's a fantastic collection of songs and one of the band's best full-lengths. Grade: A-

100 Years...100 Movies 34-36: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Annie Hall, The Bridge on the River Kwai

Hello all! I'm working my way through AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies list, giving thoughts, analyses, and generally scattered musings on each one. For more details on the project, you can read the introductory post here.

A weird bit of list synchronicity: all three of this post's films were released in years that ended in the number 7. Yeah, I got nothing. Read on.

34. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937, David Hand)
I've never understood the "masterpiece" status of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Look, I get that this film is monolithic in terms of its historical and technical significance. Being not only the first feature-length animated film from what would become one of the juggernauts of animation (heck, of entertainment in general) but also one of the first feature-length animated films ever is no small accomplishment. And yeah, I also get that there's an appealing maturity to the animation that hasn't been present in Disney animation since like the forties. I'll give it this much: Snow White looks mighty pretty, and at parts it's legitimately unsettling and even Gothic, two adjectives that describe maybe three percent of the rest of the Disney canon. And yeah, I get that the dwarfs are charming and that "Heigh Ho" is a fun song. But one of the best movies of all time? The only Disney animation represented on this list? Better than Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Pinocchio, Sleeping Beauty, The Emperor's New Groove, and Fantasia [1]? Not in my book, buster. While I acknowledge all the feats mentioned above, I also reserve the right to claim that the film is, as a whole, remarkably slight when considered outside of its historical importance. As a person, Snow White is as dull as a toothbrush and has none of the psychological depth that characterizes even the most basic of dental tools. What's worse is that she's irritating, to boot. I swear, she coos and giggles and yelps more than she actually utters words in this movie. And when she does speak, she's spouting off irritating platitudes about washing hands before dinner or asking for apples from the creepiest, most hello-I-am-dangerous fruit peddler of all time. To put it another way, she's not going to be the valedictorian of the princess class anytime soon. Disney gets a lot of flack (some deserved, some not, I'd argue) for the social backwardness of its "princess" brand, but there's a possibility that the single worst bit of gender regression the company ever did was create this shell of a character. I mean, 1937 was a relatively good time to be a female character in a Hollywood movie; the screwball comedy was at its height, at least, and the first rumblings of film noire were being heard. Surely Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs could have come up a more lively princess, especially if she's the protagonist of the film! Even forgiving the awful sin of Snow White the person, there's still no escaping the fact that I find the songs (save "Heigh Ho," of course) cloying and insufferable, and the general tone muted and lethargic—not in a stately, mesmerizing way like Sleeping Beauty but in an oh-my-gosh-when-is-this-movie-over-show-me-the-wicked-queen-kicking-skeletons-again-already way. I could go on, but I've already had quite the rant. Better move on. Y'all, I do not like this movie.

35. Annie Hall (1977, Woody Allen)
Y'all, I do like this movie, though. I love it, in fact. So much so that it's hard to write about it. Annie Hall is one of those films that just haunts you, even years after you first see it. At least, it haunts me, and I'm a happily married Christian man living in the American South—pretty far out of this film's intended demographic, I'd say [2]. In my mind, it's unquestionably Woody Allen's best film, and I can't count the times that I have been thrown into serious introspection by the sudden memory of a stray line or scene from the film. Even after I'd seen it only once, I felt I had the whole thing committed to memory, since every last corner of the film is brimming with magnetic nuggets of humor and insight, often both contained in the same punchline. That's the real kicker about Annie Hall, too; the funniest bits are also the most bracingly honest. It's an immensely quotable movie, and part of that is the screenplay's remarkable ability to turn a punchline into a gut-punch that eviscerates we audience members along with protagonist Alvy Singer. And about Alvy: of all the Woody Allen movies I've seen (and I haven't seen all of them, unfortunately), Annie Hall is the only one that really nails the Woody Allen character [3]. Alvy Singer has enough of that Woody Allen charm and vulnerability that I sympathize with him and even project my own life experience onto him, and yet, the film also seems perfectly aware of the sleazier aspects of his personality and is often quite critical of his fussiness and arrogance. That character's balance between affable audience surrogate and object of criticism is crucial to the success of this movie, and a failure to pull off that balance has derailed plenty of Allen's other films (including, for me at least, his second most-popular '70s movie, Manhattan). Of course, all the great Alvy Singers in the world wouldn't amount to much if there wasn't someone for him to riff on, and Diane Keaton's Annie is perfect in that regard. Keaton and Allen have terrific chemistry together, which isn't surprising, given that they had been a couple at one time (although the relationship ended before the writing of this movie). One final note: this movie won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1977, beating out none other than Star Wars for the award. There are precious few films that I would be okay with taking the Best Picture from Star Wars, but Annie Hall is one of them. It's just that good.

36. *The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957, David Lean)
About 90 minutes in, I was ready to dismiss The Bridge on the River Kwai as not my cup of tea. I didn't think it was bad, exactly, just kind of dull and lumpy and disappointing after the awesomeness of the last David Lean flick on this list, Lawrence of Arabia. In fact, up to that point, I had just two things to say about the film. First, that hey, it stars Ben Kenobi (or, as people who weren't weaned on George Lucas call him, Alec Guinness) twenty years before A New Hope, and he looks nothing like Ewan McGregor. Strike three for the prequels. Second, that hey, it features that song that the teens whistle in The Breakfast Club, which a mid-film Google search revealed to me as being "Colonel Bogey March." Apparently, the song was written in 1914 and became a big deal for the British in WW II when its tune was used for the novelty song "Hitler Has Only Got One Ball" (move over, Weird Al). You learn something every day. But a funny thing happened around an hour from the film's end: this movie got good fast. Like, really good. The turning point, I think, is the sequence in which the Allied troops, on their way back to the river to blow up the bridge, are ambushed by a few Japanese soldiers and have to chase one through the jungle. The scene is completely devoid of music, dialogue, or anything other than environmental noises, and it plays out with pea-soup-thick tension and brutality (I won't spoil the scene's outcome because if you don't know how it ends, it's a gut-punch). It's here that seems to be the linchpin for the entire film, both ethically and aesthetically; not insignificantly, this scene has the most prominent use of the film's bird motif, and the events of this sequence add layers and layers of meaning to that image. From that scene on, the movie picks up and never lets up, building to a truly tremendous climax. It's not just the plot that makes the end of this movie so engaging; there's also a towering moral complexity to the proceedings that took me completely by surprise, where capricious chance picks at the systems of command and obedience that war fosters and draws them out to their destructive conclusions. It's something to behold, and if I'm speaking in overly vague terms here, it's only because I'm still processing what happened.

Until next time!

If you like, you can visit the previous post in this series, #s 31-33, here.
Update: The next post, #s 37-39, is up here.

1] No secrets about which Disney animated movies I consider to be the best, eh?

2] Although, I am an graduate student in English, so I suppose the Woody-Allenness of that occupation counteracts any other demographic concerns.

3] You know this character if you've seen him: that nervous, stammering man crippled by insecurity and neuroses while somehow still remaining a pompous dick, who delivers most of the funny lines in the movie. Usually played by Woody Allen himself, though in the past couple decades the role has occasionally shifted to people like Owen Wilson.

100 Years...100 Movies 7-9: Lawrence of Arabia, Schindler's List, Vertigo

Hello all! I'm working my way through AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies list, giving thoughts, analyses, and generally scattered musings on each one. For more details on the project, you can read the introductory post here.

Onward through the AFI 100! You know what all three of these movies have in common? They are all long, dangit. I'd already seen Vertigo and Schindler's List, though, so I only really had to watch one. And who am I kidding? It's a privilege to watch movies, not a chore; I need to stop complaining so much.

Interested about the details of this series? Check out my commencement post. Otherwise, read on.

7. *Lawrence of Arabia (1962, David Lean)
Of the three movies on this list so far that I've just now watched for the first time, Lawrence of Arabia is the first one that I've felt is legitimately great. For sure, it's a '60s Epic with a capital E, and thus has all the usual trappings: exotic locales, historical setting, "cast of thousands" battle scenes, excessive runtime. I probably should have mentioned this back in my Gone with the Wind response, but I'm generally not the biggest fan of the old Hollywood epic style; so many of those characteristics I've listed above (especially the exoticism and length) tend to feel excessively cumbersome to me. And yet... Lawrence of Arabia pulls it off magnificently. Seriously, the film almost—almost—earns its nearly four-hour length, which is really something coming from me. The biggest factor in the film's success has to be its cinematography, which is gorgeous—I mean, holy crap is it gorgeous. In a movie full of battles and tense political conversations, it's a testament to the utter beauty of the camerawork and direction on display here that the moments that thrilled me most in the whole picture were the silent ones when the camera lingers on a landscape or a stunningly composed detail. The desert—filmed, Wikipedia informs me, in Morocco, Jordan, and Spain—is practically a character unto itself, such is the vibrancy of the imagery; whenever the camera captures a low sun splaying its light over dunes cut by the long shadows of some desert riders: perfection. Another thing that sets Lawrence of Arabia apart from its epic brethren is the line delivery, which is probably equally indebted to the smart screenplay and sharp acting. Peter O'Toole is no Charlton Heston, and his more naturalist portrayal of the titular Lawrence within already more natural dialogue does a lot to help the film avoid the stagey and portentous aspects of a work like Ben Hur (which we'll get to a little while later in this project, actually). So yeah, great acting, neat script, beautiful cinematography: it's a winner in my book. Man, that cinematography.

8. Schindler's List (1993, Steven Spielberg)
There's a certain corner of film criticism out there that will dismiss Schindler's List as emotionally manipulative. And they're right. But you know what else is emotionally manipulative? Every single movie ever made. To paraphrase Picasso, filmmaking is a lie. Every cut, every note of score, every bit of acting is part of an overarching scheme to manipulate an audience into feeling a certain way; the trick is to justify that manipulation with beauty, philosophy, entertainment, sophistication, or some other content that makes the moviegoing experience worth something to the viewer, which is the hard part. So is Schindler's List manipulative? You betcha. Does it justify it? I'd argue that it does in bucketfuls, but that, of course, is a matter of taste. I've heard people argue that touches like the girl in the red coat or Schindler's "one more person" speech at the end are thudding examples of uncalled-for manipulation that compromise the impact of the film, but for me, moments like those are among the movie's most powerful. I think the film is a masterpiece, a powerful statement about the cruelty of humanity against itself and the small pockets of light that try to push back against that cruelty. Stanley Kubrick may be right in noting that Schindler's List is less about the Holocaust's six million deaths than the six hundred survivors in the titular list (though for a movie about the living, Schindler's List spends a whole lot of time showing people die), but I don't think that's a failing on the movie's part. Schindler's List wants to contrast what humanity should do against what it's done, and on that rubric, it's a moving success.

9. Vertigo (1958, Alfred Hitchcock)
You won't hear me saying that Vertigo isn't a great movie, 'cause it certainly is. It is an exceptionally clever, complex film that straddles an impressive number of genres, from the thriller/mystery of its opening beats to the romance of the middle passages to the arthouse touches of the film's more experimental moments, and it's definitely the most thematically dense of the Hitchcock movies I've seen (which are numerous). The mirroring of those themes in the film's cinematography is fantastic, too. I'll admit that this is one of those movies that I last watched a long time ago, so I can't recall many of the specifics, but I do remember that it's got probably the all-time greatest use of the dolly zoom ever. So there's that. But even considering all those wonderful things, Vertigo is still not my favorite Alfred Hitchcock movie, and I sometimes feel that its recent critical reappraisal as not only Hitchcock's best but one of cinema in general's best is maybe just the tiniest bit inflated. It's too long, for one, and shaggy in ways that Hitchcock movies usually aren't. Also, while I'm not one of those people who considers black and white film to be inherently superior to color, I do think that Hitchcock is a director whose work is much better suited to b&w, especially given the color film tech popular at the time. Something like North by Northwest is fine because it's a fun romp, but the darker tone of Vertigo suffers from the more pastel aspects of the film's coloring. It's a personal thing, I guess, but I much prefer the tighter genre pictures in Hitchcock's filmography, to Vertigo. Don't get me wrong: I really, really like Vertigo; it's just that if given the choice between it and something like, say, Psycho, I know which one I'd choose.

Well, that's it for the first nine. There's a long stretch of movies coming up on the list that I've already seen, so I should fly through those responses pretty quickly. Until next time!

If you want to look back, you can read #4-6 in the series here.
Update: You can read ahead to #10-12 in the series here.