Mass circulation

American Honey

Crit

I'm not the first to notice, but this family road picture is a modern Oliver Twist, with Krystal (Riley Keough) as Fagin, Jake (Shia LaBeouf) her Artful Dodger, and Star (newcomer Sasha Lane) our Oliver. The game is selling magazine subscriptions door to door (or rig to rig at truck stops, or van to hand at oil fields), and the pastimes are weed, alcohol, music, and nonjudgmental sex. Which is somehow mostly less depressing than you expect.

Given its episodic nature, not sure it profits from piling up 163 minutes worth of episodes, and I'm pretty sure it doesn't profit from the head-hammeringly obvious symbolism of the final scene, but it's a surprisingly friendly film.

Trailers

• Moonlight--All the buzz on this has been excellent.
• 20th Century Women--Gonna say something silly here, based on one look at the trailer: this could be Annette Bening's best work ever.
• Elle--Isabelle Huppert out for revenge, and my money's on her.
• Manchester by the Sea--Kenneth Lonergan: yes.
• Miss Sloane--Jessica Chastain as a lobbyist who steps on some powerful toes.

Locomotive

En man som heter Ove (A man called Ove)

Crit

It's another mystery, this one concerning why the titular character is such a curmudgeon, with such a poorly disguised heart of gold. By the end he has ticked off good-guy boxes including xenophilia, homophilia, ecophilia, and--what's the word for love of the physically challenged? Oh, and he secretly loves children and animals too. You might think I've spoiled the whole movie for you now, but no, there's still that mystery.

Hard to dislike, difficult to respect much.

"Something? Anything?" "Nothing"

Chronic

Crit

In this mystery, we know from the first two scenes that David (Tim Roth) is broken, and we think we know why; our guess is accurate, but fathoms incomplete. That incompleteness begins to impress itself on us as we see how David's brokenness manifests itself: in loving, consuming care to one terminally ill person after another.

When I left the theater Friday, I wouldn't have thought I could feel kicked harder in the gut by another movie on the weekend, but I was mistaken. A hard-edged gem by writer-director Michael Franco, and a searing performance by Roth.

A new song

The Birth of a Nation

Crit

Wow, that sure puts losing the wild-card game in perspective.

This is a film more powerful than good, but it could be an awful lot better than it is and still fit that description. I could complain that only one white person (played by Penelope Ann Miller) displays even a modicum of decency, and that the dissolute plantation owner (Armie Hammer) is the next-best cracker only by the marginal virtue of being more morally weak than actively evil, but what do I expect: that the murderous rapist slave catcher (Jackie Earle Haley) is going to repent his sins at the moment of his comeuppance? Let's face it: white people suck, we always have, and the best anybody can hope for is that some day we'll stop, or at least get better.

There is a moment of moral revelation, but it's by preacher-for-hire-out-by-his-owner Nat Turner (Nate Parker, who also wrote, directed, produced, and presumably helped out with craft services as well), who comes to recognize that the word of the god in whom he has always believed and trusted can be warped to the most ungodly purposes. He enlists an ragtag army of barely armed slaves and leads them to Jerusalem, the conveniently named location of the county's arsenal. Three guesses how that turns out.

Fortunately, since then everything has gotten better.

Trailers

• Jackie--Natalie Portman in the title role.
• Get Out--Twenty-first-century middle-class white people even more dangerous than the ones I saw today.
• Live by Night--Ben Affleck (who also wrote and directed [read in jack-of-all-trades joke from above], as a Boston gangster.

Can't go surfin'

Danny Says

Crit

A documentary about a guy who basically discovered the entire third generation of rock & roll deserves a better blog post than this, but mistakes were made:

Cheeseblab (to Laura B, who saw the flick with me): Hey, wanna be my guest blogger?
LB: For Danny? Have you ever co-written one? What about interviewing each other? Danny deserves both our attention, he had given us so much.
CB: Yeah, for Danny. Yeah, mutual interviewbation sounds good. I'll start: had you ever heard of this guy before?
LB: Never. But man was he EVERYWHERE. I probably read the trashy dime tabloids he wrote, not to mention the hours of music I consumed. How about you? Were there any artists that he promoted that you thought just didn't deserve our attention?
CB: Quite the contrary: during the MC5 segment, I was thinking, "Really? Should I have paid attention to those guys?" Incidentally, I want to go on record (rim shot) as saying I had a Johnny Winter album.
LB: I had the opposite thought. MC5 seemed to be an early punk band and a precursor to metal. They had the potential to be a lot bigger, I thought. I was only marginally aware of them as somehow related to Iggy Pop but I had forgotten their ties.
CB: Right, that’s what I’m saying: was marginally aware, ignored them—maybe it’s MY FAULT they never got bigger!
LB: You can't blame yourself. They were ahead of their time. I'd be curious to know more bands and artists he promoted that weren't mentioned in the film. I got the feeling there could have been hours and hours of footage just as exciting as the stuff we saw.
CB: Or maybe just sex tapes we’re just as well off having missed. So hey, my YUP buddy and WNHH radio star Tom Breen informs me that the filmmaker is a New Haven guy, Brendan Toller, and that he was there for a postscreening Q&A at some of the screenings that we weren’t at. Usually I find those Q&As more annoying than informative—most Q-ers are more interested in self-promotion (all the other movies they’ve seen that shed light on the one we’re supposed to be talking about, and just generally all they know that makes them far more fabulous than anyone else asking a Q)—but I sorta wish we’d heard him. Oh well.
LB: Way freakin' cool!

After which the conversation just kinda fizzled out. But see the movie.