Say hello to my little friend

Keanu

Crit

Now I remember: I always liked Key & Peele, but I never had any inclination to watch 3 or 4 episodes in a row. This is an excellent sketch expanded like gas to fill 101 minutes. And not gas like "what a gas!" An inert gas.

That is a damn cute kitten, though.

Trailers

• Swiss Army Man--Paul Dano and Daniel Radcliffe in a remake of Cast Away; Radcliffe plays Wilson.
• Boo! A Madea Halloween--Would I lie?
• Hands of Stone--No one ever says "no mas" to boxing flicks.

Because the night

Everybody Wants Some!!

Crit

From Richard Linklater, a goofy, good-hearted valentine to beer, jockaraderie, and painfully bad fashion and hairstyles, with just a hint of Boyhood's ambiguous, ambivalent conclusion. But really, just a hint: don't take any of this seriously.

Trailers

• Ben-Hur--Would I lie?
• Keanu--Aw, what a cute kitten.
• Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping--Why do I think the subtitle is gonna be the best thing about this?

Suspicious minds

Elvis and Nixon

Crit

A nice, harmless high-concept goof based on a famous photograph, with Michael Shannon and Kevin Spacey more convincing in the title roles than we could have had any reason to expect. At its worst on the occasions when it momentarily takes itself seriously.

Trailer

• Bridget Jones's Baby--Really? Was this necessary?

So what

Miles Ahead

Crit

If Samuel Johnson were alive to review Don Cheadle's admirably ambitious film, he might tell the director and coscreenwriter, "Sir, your film is both good and original; sadly, the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good." Cheadle is convincing as Miles Davis, but much of the film is another go at the old artistic-genius-is-impossible-to-live-with trope (cf. Born to Be Blue), and the razzle-dazzle of the rest relies on an inane (and entirely fictional) who's-got-the-tape chase-and-shoot story.

Trailers

• The Birth of a Nation--Wow, had I even heard of this? Nat Turner, urging everyone to just get along. And yet . . .
• Papa: Hemingway in Cuba--I'd love to believe this could be good. And yet . . .
• The Lobster--This looks like a delightful mindfuck; cowritten and directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, who cowrote and directed the delightful mindfuck Dogtooth. 
• Maggie's Plan--Great cast, written and directed by Rebecca Miller.

The violence inherent in the system

Shotgun Stories

(2007)

I saw the trailer for this at IFC during my M5 of March 22, 2008, and I was not much impressed; if I'd had a chance to see it in the theater, I doubt that I would have recognized what would come to make Jeff Nichols maybe my favorite writer-director of his generation who is not my child.

From a distance, though, I can see his deft hand at foreboding and understatement: in a film whose soul is violence, there are only a couple of violent acts onscreen, and the violence that looms is far more unsettling than any we see.

The setup evokes Shakespeare via Twain: a violent drunkard has 3 sons, Son (Michael Shannon, at the heart of every one of Nichols's films), Boy, and Kid, then leaves them and their damaged, hate-filled mother, finds Jesus, dries out, remarries, and has four more sons, all of whom get actual names. When he dies, Son comes to the funeral and calls bullshit on the eulogy, and the enmity that has simmered for decades flashes into the menace of a blood feud.

His father's eyes

Midnight Special

Crit

Tell you one thing: when this comes out on a 25th-anniversary CerebralCortexRay edition, they're not going to be able to plausibly digitize firearms into mobile phones per the film's thematic forebearer E.T.

Tell you another thing: I've seen this film's other Spielbergian progenitor, Close Encounters, 2 or 3 times without ever having it enchant me as I'd been led to believe it would. But this? No question. 

Tell you one more thing: anything Jeff Nichols ever wants to show me, I'm in, no questions asked: in my experience he's 3 for 3, all extra-base hits. In fact, among all the mysteries this film puts on the table, the biggest question mark is why I've never rented Shotgun Stories. But oh, hey, look: it's on Amazon Prime, so I may just rectify that next weekend.

City of Gold

Crit

Never before felt any particular need to visit Los Angeles, but now I do, and not just because Pulitzer Prize-winning food critic Jonathan Gold has made me hungry for about 20 cuisines (though god knows he's done that, and many of the 20, god help me, are inescapably carnivorous). No, it's more than that: as more than one talking head in the documentary points out, Gold writes about food the way Melville wrote about whaling, by writing about people and life and goodness and pain and love. And if you can spend 90 minutes with Jonathan Gold and not love at least a little the city he loves with his whole huge heart and capacious stomach, well, you're a more fastidious diner than I.

Born to Be Blue

Crit

This is not altogether the standard fuck-up-artist-saved-by-the-love-of-a-good-woman-until-that's-not-enough narrative, but it's too much that, saved from being pro forma by the intensely committed performances of Ethan Hawke (who also directed) as Chet Baker, for a time the best white junkie trumpeter in the world, and Carmen Ejogo as his almost third wife, and ostensibly the first one he loved even fractionally as much as his horn and his heroin.

Sidenote: Hawke obviously feels the same way I do about Baker's egregious misreading of a line in "My Funny Valentine": Ethan sings it as Ira wrote it, "Don't change a hair for me." I'm glad he recognizes the error, but does he have the right to edit his historical subject like that?

Trailers

• The Huntsman: Winter's War--Prequel to Maleficent, which I have on my DVR but have never been able to work up the will to watch. 
• A Bigger Splash--Tilda Swinton as a rock star loved by Ralph Fiennes and Matthias Schoenaerts? Why on earth not?

Love and anthropology

Trois Souvenirs de ma jeunesse (My golden days)

Crit

Sorry, I can't help using the P-word: it's French, it's about la mémoire, et Maman, et l'amour . . . it's Proustian, dammit!

More than that, Paul Dédalus--bearing a name with as heavy a mythic freight as has been encountered recently, and played as an adult by the national treasure Mathieu Amalric, as a teen and young adult by Quentin Dolmaire--is an overthinking, overfeeling Proustian protagonist in his own right, and Esther (a bit of nomenclatural freight there, too; played by Lou Roy-Lecollinet, who at times calls to mind a young Emmanuelle Devos) is the Proustian love interest, the deck stacked against her as much by the protagonist's inability to be satisfied in love as by her own inconstancy.

That story is the third memory of the title (and a nod is due the English-language distributors who gave us a translation title so bland and clichéd--and ironic, I guess, though I'm not sure we can credit the distributors with that much thought; thanks from protecting us from the hopelessly obscure poetry that, say, the literal Three Memories of My Youth, or even the truncated Three Memories would have imposed on us), the longest but not the most interesting. That would be the second memory, of the involvement of 16-year-old Paul and a friend in a mission to help refuseniks escape the Soviet Union for Israel. That adventure, and the "identity loss" that results for Paul, resonates a bit later, but when I remake the film, that will be at its center.

CDE, CYA

Eye in the Sky

Crit

OK, I'll admit: in my entire career, I've never killed anyone--or, for that matter, saved anyone's life--and I'd probably be as fanatical in my pursuit of ass coverage before making a fatal decision as anyone in this film, but good golly, what a weaselly bunch of pound-note passers. Because yes, the two politicians who have no trouble cutting the ethical Gordian knot of whether to kill the terrorists (who are clearly planning suicide bombings) at the cost of some innocent lives are cabinet-level Americans, while the politicians who waffle and bail on the question, passing it up the hierachy, are Brits (and are, to be fair, concerned much more about political blowback than about the morality or ethics of the decision). I'm not sure which stance we are meant to find more appalling, but at least we don't have to listen to the Americans for long; the interminable rhetorical circle jerk of the Brits make you wish someone would put a Hellfire through their roof.

The last we'll see of Alan Rickman, I guess. Sigh.

Trailer

• Suicide Squad--Hey, a comic book movie! Hasn't been one of those for a while!