Dress for success

Molly's Game

I, Tonya

Crit

It's the same dame! OK, it's not really, but:

• she's a girl driven to and well past the point of parental abuse to succeed in her winter sport;
• succeed she does,
• until she doesn't;
• she grows up thinking J.C. Penney is as haute as couture gets (one improves her wardrobe);
• she gets the ever-loving crap beaten out of her (chronology and frequency differ here);
• she makes unwise alliances;
• law enforcement ultimately gets involved.

Another way my tough-'cause-they-have-to-be women's weekend meshes is that I've been watching season 4 of The West Wing, created and mostly written by Aaron Sorkin, screenwriter of Molly, and graced by Allison Janney, who, as Tonya's mother, looks about as little like Claudia Jean Cregg as cinematic art allows.

OK, so which would I recommend more enthusiastically? I suppose Molly is the better film, but Tonya is the one I enjoyed more. And based on performance to date, Jessica Chastain is without a doubt the more accomplished actor, but Margot Robbie accomplished an undreamed of miracle: she made me think that seeing her as Harley Quinn (a character that bleeds into Tonya a bit, at moments of particularly ugly makeup and facial expression) might be worth watching the 26%-on-Rotten Tomatoes Suicide Squad.

Monster in the mirror

I blame Trump.
I blame Weinstein.
I blame this nagging cold.
I blame advancing age.

Why the hell have I been so lax about blogging this year? Even this year-end, best-of post, though I'm backdating it to late New Year's Eve, is actually being composed on the first morning of the new year.

But at least it's being composed, which is more than I can say about posts for Darkest Hour, Downsizing, and All the Money in the World, all of which I saw over the holiday break, and about each of which I'll have something to say if you ask me at the Elvis's Birthday party next week. Which is to say I'm not seeing fewer movies, I'm not thinking about them less, I'm not enjoying them any less. It's just to say that the sitting down at the computer part, always something a chore (made more so by my compulsion to link to performers' IMDb pages and to mention all the first-looks at trailers) has this year (well, last year) tilted the sloth scale with guilt-producing frequency.

Not that I have any illusions about letting down a vast "you." This, like everything else in the universe, has always been almost exclusively about me: I see so many films that I completely forget some of them, even down to the essential "Did I like Your Name.? And remind me: why the period in the title?" (Yes, very much; it's complicated.) So I'd like to keep on keeping on, but how to overcome the ennui?

The obvious Jan. 1 response would be a new year's resolution, but somehow forcing myself to do something I find tedious doesn't sound like the way to renew genuine enthusiasm. Limiting links to those that people (i.e., I) might actually find useful: that's a plan, I think. And forgoing the impulse to waste time blurbing the trailer for every new crap film that I'd never intentionally waste time on in any other fashion? Yeah: maybe Trailers becomes Noteworthy Trailers.

No promises; a year from now we may be sitting here in the ruins, the smell of cordite and burned cheese thick in the air. We'll see.

And now on to the reason we're (ahem) up so late on New Year's Eve, to reprise the movies that got my attention in 2017, some of them even enough to make me blog them . . .

• January--As always, catch-up month, with 20th Century Women making a bid for me to rework the 2016 top ten list.
• February--Forushande (The salesman), a searing tale of love, faith, and violation, won the Best Foreign Film Oscar but wasn't released in the U.S. until this year, so I'm claiming it as top 10 eligible; the poetic Paterson, though, is undeniably a 2016 leftover, though a tasty one. Damn, I had forgotten that I Am Not Your Negro, the James Baldwin documentary, was also a December 2016 release, else it would have been on the list without a doubt. Fortunately, another very different stunner about being someone else's Negro came to town right after, and that one will be on the list, near or at the top.
• March--In a bit of a blah month (Personal Shopper disappointed me, e.g.), my favorite film was probably Kedi: cats (including one named Psikopat) in Istanbul.
• April--Frantz, a postwar melodrama, makes us think we know where it's going, then pulls the rug out from under us. Similarly, the anime Kimi no na wa. (Your name.) flirts with every cliché of time travel and soulmates yet delivers something fresh and moving. Then days later, the manifestly goofy--tragically goofy--Colossal works the time-space-big freakin' monsters continuum some more.
• May--Bacalaureat, a Romanian father-daughter story of moral compromise and guilt, painfully complex. Let's make room for one of those liked-it-way-more-than-I-expected-tos: Richard Gere in Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer. Wait, and another: Tracy Letts and Debra Winger in the gratifyingly grown-up The Lovers. And from Israel, a silly comic premise turned profound and beautiful: Laavor et hakir (The wedding plan).
• June--This seems to be when I started getting blog-sloppy. For example I never posted for Wonder Woman, even though it was one of my favorites of the summer, a brilliant treatment (brilliantly and often wordlessly performed by Gal Gadot) of the stranger in a strange land, until the obligatory final act dumb battle to save the world. Fortunately, though, I did post for a film I'd since forgotten just how much I liked: It Comes at Night, not to be confused with It or It Follows (though a triple feature of the 3 could deprive you of sleep for a month and of sex for, like, ever).
• July--The Big Sick is right in my sweet spot: smart (largely autobiographical) writing, makes bigotry as funny as it is dangerous, makes me laugh, makes me cry, has two generations of my favorite actors in Holly Hunter and Zoe Kazan.
• August--A Ghost Story is just that, but unlike any other you've seen. Detroit has gotten a lot of blowback, but it left me nearly paralyzed in my theater seat, and that has to count for something. Brigsby Bear is Dogtooth in English, with a Napoleon Dynamite vibe, only lots better. Ingrid Goes West is unremittingly ugly, and stunning.
• September--Failed to blog it (It), but good golly, I couldn't forget It even if I wanted to, and not just because clowns are creepy, though duh. Followed by another I'm glad I did blog, to remind me how much I liked it, or at least was wowed by: the horror omnibus mother! And then the non-occult horror of meth and Modernism in the Midwest: Columbus.
• October--Visages Villages (Faces places) is a buddy picture like none you've seen, by and with Agnès Varda. Ex Libris, Frederick Wiseman's loving 3½-hour stalk of the New York Public Library is another I didn't blog, but I remember saying, as I left the theater, "Best movie ever." Whoa, really: I also didn't blog (October is clearly when the blog went completely to hell) The Florida Project, so I guess I should point out here that, my daughter's wrongheaded demurral notwithstanding, Brooklynn Prince gives the best juvenile performance in a film since . . . I dunno, Abigail Breslin in Little Miss Sunshine, maybe?
• November--Speaking of remarkable performances by young actors, Millicent Simmonds in Wonderstruck, which is itself mostly wonderful. Lots of people were disappointed by Yorgos Lanthimos's latest weird film, The Killing of a Sacred Deer; not me, but it was a damn tough watch. And then there was Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig's near-perfect directorial debut.
• December--The rare Holocaust film that pokes nerves not already numb from decades of prodding: 1945. And the film that should have waited another week before coming to town so that it could have been my Christmas Day movie: Guillermo del Toro's haunting interspecies romance The Shape of Water.

So I end up with an unusually American list, the foreign films starting the year in the middle of the pack and getting pushed progressively lower: apologies to Visages Villages, to Bacalaureat, and to Frantz, among several others foreign and domestic. It was a very good year, and on my list perhaps even more competition than usual between "best" and "favorite." But here's what the list feels like:

• 10. 1945
• 9. The Big Sick
• 8. Lady Bird
• 7. The Florida Project
• 6. Columbus
• 5. A Ghost Story
• 4. Ex Libris
• 3. Get Out
• 2. The Shape of Water
• 1. It Comes at Night

Some other way to prove

The Shape of Water

Crit

It's official: as I suspected I would, I regret that this didn't come to town a week later so that it could have been my Christmas Day movie, for which it would have been practically perfect. (If you're asking "Why didn't you just wait a week to go?" I wonder how you even happened onto this blog, since you obviously don't know me.)

Anyway, I want to get that "practically perfect" out of the way first, because the issue that irked me is a pretty big deal, but I don't want it to be the thing I leave you with. Zelda (Octavia Spencer) jokes with Elisa (the transcendent Sally Hawkins at her very most transcendent) throughout the film about her shiftless husband, which is a tired trope regardless of race, though not necessarily toxic, given the distancing of a potentially unreliable reporter, but when we finally meet Lou (Deney Forrest), in a brief but critical sequence, he proves to be not only stereotypically shiftless but also cowardly, both physically and morally--about the worst advertisement for African-American masculinity you could make of the only African-American male with more than a single line in the film. And I can't really see why it's necessary.

An ugly scar on the neck of a film that otherwise works on every level: as a retro monster pic, as a Cold War adventure, as a plea (notwithstanding the treatment of Lou) for tolerance and commonality (but with a sly shot at Stuckey's-style commercially manufactured homogeneity), and especially as a romance. Hawkins has a history of playing characters who fall for the wrong man; maybe the problem all along was that she was falling for the wrong species. Loving the blessedly unnamed "amphibian man" from the South American rain forest (Doug Jones, whom Guillermo del Toro has been hiding in prosthetics for his whole career, but who finally gets to dance this time!) brings a joy into her face unlike any I've seen, and it's joy that's a joy to see.

And finally: Richard Jenkins. Do I need to say any more?

Trailers

• The Post--Do you need to ask? Only if you're that guy who wandered into the blog without knowing me.
• A Quiet Place--This, though, looks like a pretty rote horror film, though the cast is great, including Millicent Simmonds, the most wondrous wonder of Wonderstruck.

Porg: the other white meat

Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Crit

Yeah, OK, that was a pretty good Star Wars flick, worth a big chunk out of my day. Key intertwined takeaways are (relax, no spoilers, unless you start overthinking it right now and continue into the theater) the parentage of Rey (Daisy Ridley, still kicking ass but now being studious too) and a revelation (or articulation: I mean, we've always pretty much known this, right?) about the Force.

Trailers

• Ready Player One--Spielberg directed, so it must be smarter than the dystopic video game gimmick seems, right?
• Pacific Rim: Uprising--Let's see, I pretty much hated the first one, even though one of my favorite directors was in charge. I'm'a say probably not.

Do not forsake me

My Friend Dahmer

Crit

This portrait of the cannibalistic serial killer as a young boy is based on the memoir of a high school classmate, but it seems more like a literal-minded guess by an outsider of what must have made Dahmer Dahmer: the worst parents and the worst teachers ever, plus repression of his sexuality, plus a cadre of friends-in-the-sense-that-only-self-involved-adolescents-can-conceive-of-friendship, who, by exploiting the entertainment value of Jeff's inherent weirdness, may or may not have exacerbated it.

Not a bad film, but a surprisingly bland one.

1945

Crit

Small town, wedding day, and angst aroused by the arrival of a train--anybody else put in the mind of High Noon? It doesn't stop there, either, as the townspeople, some morally bankrupt, some just morally weak, try to repel or finesse the potential loss of the source of the town's economic comfort.

I don't want to go into too much detail because this is actually a bit of a mystery, but I will say that it's the first Holocaust (technically post-Holocaust) film I've seen in ages that has discomfited me in a completely new way. This is a film I'll be considering when I assemble my top ten list in 22 days (actually 19 days; this is a postdated post).

Given name

Lady Bird

Crit

Where to begin? Here, I guess: I hope writer-director Greta Gerwig decides that all the kudos she's getting for this means she should quit acting. As for the kudos itself, well, I don't think this will probably be #1 on my top ten list at the end of the year--in other words, pace A. O. Scott, it's not a perfect film; I found that it runs out of gas before the finish line. If it ended with her on the phone with her father, after reading what she has read on crumpled pages from a yellow legal pad--well, that would have been a nearly perfect film. Moreover, what follows could be the beginning of a sequel that everyone who saw this would buy tickets for right now.

But I quibble. It made me laugh, it made me cry. That's all I ask.

Trailers

• Father Figures--Twins (Owen Wilson and Ed Helms; yeah, I know) discover that their father might be Terry Bradshaw, among various other candidates--probably awful, but could be a hoot if not.
• I, Tonya--Yes, Winter Olympics, 1994, that Tonya. Trailer suggests an appealing narrative playfulness but gives little hint to what we really want to know: can Margot Robbie act? 

Major medical

The Killing of a Sacred Deer

Crit

OK, Suburbicon director George Clooney take note: this is how to make a study of people so despicable that to watch them makes us literally queasy. I am a huge admirer of writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos, and I'll go so far as to say I admire this film about banal crime and creepy, supernatural punishment, but I won't go so far as to say I'd ever be tempted to subject myself to it again.

Trailers

• Phantom Thread--Daniel Day-Lewis in what may or may not be his screen farewell, in Paul Thomas Anderson's worst-titled film without a doubt.

Passage to power

LBJ

Crit

What an odd movie. From a production standpoint, it's basically a big Halloween party: lots of people with clothes and makeup and prosthetics and accents trying to impersonate famous politicians and members of their families and circles. Thus it's cheesier than all the cows and ewes in Texas could account for, if Texas went in for sissy shit like cheesemaking.

But if Robert Caro's biography (astonishingly not given even a thank-you in the credits that I noticed) is to be believed, this is historically accurate far beyond the Hollywood biopic standard and could serve as an excellent primer to anyone hoping to understand how a son of the Confederacy could be the best civil-rights president we've had since Lincoln, and how he managed to bend his fellow southerners in the Senate to his will.

It also helps that Woody Harrelson, though the Dumbo ears and all the crap they put on his face make him look ridiculous (and sometimes disconcertingly less like Johnson than like his successor in office), brings his usual level of conviction to the role, and that goes a long way. And Jennifer Jason Leigh, as Lady Bird, is the one element of the film that never seems false in any way.

Trailers

• 12 Strong--Bruckheimer patriotism.
• Just Getting Started--Looks like a waste of Morgan Freeman and Tommy Lee Jones.
• The Leisure Seeker--This, on the other hand, looks as if it could be a good fit for Donald Sutherland and Helen Mirren.

Night at the museum

Wonderstruck

Crit

What a wonderful cinematic era, when one can, as I have, on consecutive postwork Fridays see My Future Wife Julianne Moore fill four roles in two films.

This is much the better film, though Julie has relatively little to do with its excellence. Millicent Simmonds, playing one of two runaway-to-New York deaf children a half-century apart (and deaf herself), owns this wondrous film, her wonder so evident in her eyes that you see familiar sights through her eyes and feel that wonder too.

Mind you, Oakes Fegley is fine as Ben, the 1977 Odysseus, but when the quick cuts between their stories cede the story to the later time, it's a letdown, and only a spectacular and completely illogical climax (but oh, what a thrilling climax, almost enough so to make you ignore its silliness) can level the playing field. We want to see lots more of Simmonds. And we might want to read screenwriter Brain Selznick's YA novel whence the film comes.

Trailers

• Isle of the Dogs--Full disclosure: I impatiently watched the trailer a few weeks ago online. Wes Anderson, animated, yes, please.
• I Can Only Imagine--Personally, I cannot. Imagine, i.e., that this "inspirational" true story can be remotely palatable.

Portrait of the jurist as a young man

Marshall

Crit

For a film about racism and false rape accusation in the tony corner of 1941 Connecticut, this veers awfully close to comedy at times, and it's certainly a buddy picture from the get-go. The buddies are a young NAACP attorney named Thurgood Marshall (Chadwick Boseman, completing a hat trick after previous cinematic portrayals of Jackie Robinson and James Brown) and Sam Friedman (Josh Gad), a Jewish Bridgeport lawyer whose specialty is finding technicalities to absolve insurance companies of their fiduciary responsibilities, who is enlisted to get Marshall, a member of the New York bar, certified to sit at (but not speak from) the defense table. They meet cute, they resist each other, and their mutual surrender is as inevitable as a black man someday sitting on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Not a great film, but both an entertaining and a moving one, which makes it more rewarding than some stodgily great ones.

Trailers

• Wonder Wheel--The latest from Woody.
• Roman J. Israel, Esq.--Denzel as a pain-in-the-ass (uppity, say?) lawyer; if nothing else, a good trailer to precede the feature.

You oughta be in pictures

Visages Villages (Faces places)

Crit

A buddy movie and a road picture, filmmaker Agnès Varda aiding, abetting, and documenting the artist JR's ongoing project of taking photographic portraits, printing them huge, and affixing them to walls. There are subtexts political, architectural, and geographical, and even a sort of cameo by that prick Jean-Luc Godard, but mostly this is about two charming and brilliant people charming us and illuminating the world.

Under the boardwalk

Beach Rats

Crit

Frankie (Harris Dickinson) doesn't "consider [him]self gay," but he surfs a gay Brooklyn chat site looking for men to hook up with, while his beautiful ostensible girlfriend, Simone (Madeline Weinstein), somehow can't inspire much ardor in him. What's wrong with this picture? And how is Frankie's deepening commitment to the oxy prescribed his dying father connected to his sexual self-deception? A sad bastard film about a very confused sad bastard.

Meth and Modernism

Columbus

Crit

My favorite moment: Jin (John Cho, making us think: hey, he's a grown-up [just checked: he's FORTY-FIVE]) finds his dying father's floppy hat in a closet and just holds it, staring at it as if it's Yorick's skull. My favorite repeated visual motif: hallways, alleyways, byways, bridgeways; standing still is going somewhere, but somewhere predetermined and enclosed.

This is everything we used to love about independent film, back when that phrase meant something: quiet, unhurried, painfully human, rewardingly inconclusive. And educational: I won't ask whether you knew Columbus, Indiana, is an architectural mecca; did you even know there is a Columbus, Indiana?

Feature debut by writer/director Kogonada, known (if at all) for his quirky shorts. More, please.

Piece of my heart

mother!

Crit

OK, you start with an open marriage between Rosemary's Baby and Night of the Living Dead, encourage liberal liaisons with The Shining, Alien, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Life of Brian, Saving Private Ryan, Do the Right Thing, Carrie, the Manson murders, and the riots outside the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, filtered through the sensibilities of David Lynch and Alejandro Jodorowsky, and against all odds you end up with something so bizarrely original that it takes my breath, as well as the majority of my cortical function, away. I'm pretty sure I liked it, dead certain that I admire writer/director Darren Aronofsky's chutzpah and Jennifer Lawrence's fearlessness, and pleasantly surprised to discover that I know the musician covering Skeeter Davis's "The End of the World" over the end credits (having, oddly, recently heard the original serving the same function in the JFK-assassination episode of Mad Men).

Trailers

• Downsizing--Woot! Trailers from two of my can't miss directors; first, an absurdist turn on life in the 21st century from Alexander Payne, and then . . .
• The Shape of Water--an apparent E.T. riff starring Sally Hawkins from Guillermo del Toro.

Justice deferred

Crown Heights

Crit

Another angrymaking documentary-ish account of an innocent black man ground up for decades in the wheels of what in often called with a straight face the American justice system. Or, looked at another way, another paean to persistence and enduring friendship and love. But if this is what it takes to elicit those qualities, . . .

Very bad wizard

Patti Cake$

Crit

A narrative trajectory older than rap, older than showbiz, even, older than the original Jersey, say nothing about the New one--as old, in fact, as aspiration--but made irresistible by J, Jheri (Siddharth Dhananjay); B, Basterd (Mamoudou Athie); and especially P, Patti (Danielle Macdonald). And by their beats--before I wrote this, I bought the soundtrack.

Trailer

• Stronger--The second film to come from the Patriots Day bombings stars Tatiana Maslany in what appears to be a single role and Jake Gyllenhaal as her boyfriend, who lost his legs and blames her. Directed by David Gordon Green.

About the rabbits

Good Time

Crit

Wow, twice in one weekend a character so far skewed from reasonable and self-preserving behavior that to watch is to cringe. This one, Connie (Robert Pattinson, leaving vampire romance behind forever), plots the perfect crime, enlisting the assistance of his mentally challenged brother Nick (Benny Safdie, who codirected with brother Josh). What could possibly go wrong? Right: that, and then some. An excellent adventure in Sad Bastard Land.

Trailer

• The Killing of a Sacred Deer--Yorgos Lanthimos, director of the wonderfully weird The Lobster and Dogtooth, is back. Hell yeah.

Lost in La Mancha

The Trip to Spain

Crit

For a third time, we follow Steve Coogan and Rob Bryson on a gustatory Odyssey featuring gorgeous scenery, gorgeous food, and gouging jousts of celebrity impersonation, with just enough real-life-seeming problems to suggest that someone thought, mistakenly, that a semblance of plot was necessary. I'm in for wherever's next--France seems a fair bet.

Single White Album

Ingrid Goes West

Crit

OK, I've seen more disturbing films about genocide, and about war. Famine, yeah. Ecocide, maybe. But you get past the heavy hitters in the woozy-making genre, you get down to one fucked-up person making you cringe, making you desperate to shake some sense into her, making you somehow have sympathy for her no matter how awful she is, and there aren't many to compare. There's Young Adult, which comes to mind in part because neither that film nor this one ever flinches from its misanthropic principles, and I'd call Aubrey Plaza here as courageous as Charlize Theron there except that Plaza has already built a body of unpleasant work, whereas Theron had more to lose.

Still: wow.

Trailers

• Gemini--Crime & mystery. Skeptical.
• Beach Rats--Just released in NYC to strong reviews.
• Last Flag Flying--Steve Carell, Laurence Fishburne, and Bryan Cranston in a buddy road movie. A possibility.

Dope as shit

Brigsby Bear

Crit

Dogtooth meets Napoleon Dynamite, except it's not in Greek, like the former story of overprotective parenting, and while it shares a gangly adolescent sensibility with the latter, that sensibility engaged me a lot more here. Add to that a spot-on depiction of the lovefest that grows up around the making of an independent film, and we have maybe my favorite weird pic of the year, and one of my favorite pix.

Trailers

• Novitiate--Oh, this looks scary good, with Melissa Leo as an anti-Vatican 2 mother superior in 1964.
• Call Me by Your Name--Another homoerotic teacher-student teaser.
• The Florida Project--If it can avoid oversweetness (trailer suggests it can), this might be in Little Miss Sunshine territory.