Lion is a fine example of the fact that a great true story can get you everything that you need to be nominated for Best Picture Oscar, but not necessarily to make a great movie. It’s a fine movie that pays off better than it ever deserves to, but overall it’s just another powerful film, cherry picked by the Oscars to be the "international" film. Now, I think that this film being nominated is just as important as anything else being nominated, but you could do better. Seriously, though, while we’re on the subject of the international films from around the world where the heck is The Handmaiden? That’s miles better than Lion and it got nothing! So, if you could guess from my review Lion isn’t great. Lesser so from the review, it’s actually good but heavily marred by bad direction that never lets the harrowing images at its center sink in and a second act that muddles the central character motivations and dynamics into mush that does make for a quiet, moody, feel but just isn’t interesting. The best way to address Lion is to address that each of the three acts is split up between distinct tones and feels. The first, where our main character Saroo (played as a child by a kind of empty but enthusiastic Sunny Pawar) is left at a train station and then accidentally boards a train that takes him very far from home. He eventually ends up on the streets of Calcutta. This is the first part of the movie which has an intensely emotional premise to it but is delivered to the audience in such a bland way that it’s impossible to feel the emotion of the moment. Pawar can scream and reach out of the train car that he’s been accidentally left on all that he wants, but if the compositions don’t hold up their end of the bargain, the movie lacks the bite that it should have. This doesn’t in fact, have the versatile director of Trainspotting on its side, though there are some suggested disturbing themes that come specifically from just the performance and editing that seems to spice it up a bit. Other than that though, despite the subject matter, there’s no urgency to the story when there really should be. A bigger point could be being made in the fact that people simply ignore the stranded Saroo, but it’s not enough to keep the movie rolling. Saroo, after living on the street is then adopted by an Australian couple (Nicole Kidman and David Wenham) and taken to live in Australia. 20 years later, he wants to find where he came from. The film here transitions into a muddle of weepy character drama that seems ultimately neglectful of establishing full personas. That’s not to judge the way that actions were played in real life, just to mention here that the film lacks a bit of character. Nicole Kidman is just the “strong mother,” and doesn’t really transfer into anything special until a scene that herby cements her character as “Jesus.” Dev Patel is fine as grown up Saroo, but it’s hard not to get the sense that the movie’s working too much around his plight to the point that it’s just not fun to watch. It can be appreciated that the film tries to transpose the feelings of its characters onto the audience, but it’s still disorienting and doesn’t go anywhere. Most unfortunate of all is Rooney Mara, who is standing around stranded in a part as grown up Saroo’s girlfriend, Lucy. Their relationship is the main thrust of the passage of time and to say the least it doesn’t really get there. And then there’s the ending. Lion for all its imperfections is a film that with the power of it’s true story does eventually hit peak emotionality. It’s worth it too. This is based on a true story so we all know how it’s going to end, but nonetheless the ending is worth the ever so flawed trip. As Saroo finally makes it back home, as he can finally see his family after years of being lost, the effect is so crushing with happiness, melancholy, nostalgia, and joy that only the most cynical wouldn’t be moved. But an ending can’t save a flawed movie, and that’s what Lion is. It’s not outright bad, as all the flaws still offer up a movie that is coherent and emotional, but it lacks the sheer genius devoted to the direction that the other Best Picture nominees have been afforded. Lion is one of those movies that is nominated for an Oscar just because it is. I appreciate the great true story here, just not the way it was represented on screen. Lion gets a 6 out of 10.
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Best Picture
“Arrival: Dennie Villeneuve's Arrival may have been one of the smartest and well told science fiction films of recent memory. It's a safe pick for Best Picture, but it's a very good movie that deserves every award it is nominated for. This is a truly human film. MY REVIEW: http://filmanalyst.weebly.com/movie-reviews/arrival-directed-by-denis-villeneuve-starring-amy-adams “Fences:" Fences didn't end up anywhere near the top of my list for the year (which is coming I swear. I need to see a couple more things) but it's still an intense work of drama. Denzel Washington's direction is special as it actually increases the emotional intensity of the play. “Hell or High Water:" Hell or High Water was a special gem this year. A great Western that currently sits at #6 on my top ten list. This is an oddly compelling, funny and brutally honest film that allows you to sink into it's world. MY REVIEW: http://filmanalyst.weebly.com/movie-reviews/hell-or-high-water-directed-by-david-mackenzie-starring-chris-pine-and-ben-foster “Hacksaw Ridge:" Hacksaw Ridge was an interesting beast or corniness and absolute gore heaven. I'm surprised such a fever dream of weird dialogue and violent as hell set pieces is nominated here, but it's certainly cool to see that it is. MY REVIEW: http://filmanalyst.weebly.com/movie-reviews/hacksaw-ridge-directed-by-mel-gibson-starring-andrew-garfield “La La Land:" La La Land is sweeping the Oscars and the awards season, and deservedly so. It's not as intoxicating as some of these other films, but it's a masterpiece of a filmmaking tightrope walk with Damien Chazelle walking. There's Hitchcock, Allen, and everything but the kitchen sink in this movie. MY REVIEW: http://filmanalyst.weebly.com/movie-reviews/la-la-land-directed-by-damien-chazelle-starring-ryan-gosling-and-emma-stone “Manchester by the Sea:” I wasn't quite as warm to this spectacular and intimate drama as many others, but that's only because most consider it the best picture of the year. Kenneth Lonergan has crafted a full-tilt, slow-burn, masterfully written work here and gets performances out of his actors that those same words could describe. MY REVIEW: http://filmanalyst.weebly.com/movie-reviews/manchester-by-the-sea-written-and-directed-by-kenneth-lonergan-starring-casey-affleck “Moonlight:" I didn't give this a full review but this is an engrossing, delirious and beautiful film about love and loss. It's three great movies for the price of one. “Hidden Figures:" I haven't seen this. I will within the next week. “Lion:” I have not seen this as well. I will within the next week. It’s a hot summer day in Austin, Texas. The students of the town are milling around and the tower at the University of Austin forebodingly stands. For the next few hours, the persistent sound of thundering gunfire pierces the sky. The result will be 16 deaths, multiple injuries and a terrifying true tale playing out in one-hundred degree heat. Tower starts quietly, much like the day. The players, each beautifully recreated by rotoscope, don’t know what to make of the moment. Some are viciously forced into it, others come at their own accordance having heard something about an air-rifle. But it was all too real. Tower works best when it is showing these quiet moments of contemplation that the characters are placed under. When things really start going the ever beautiful technology at the center adds an almost dreamlike nature to the ferocity of the story. While to some that might seem insensitive, the animation only makes it more jarring when the through harrowing grainy black and white footage of the still motionless students. The horribleness of all of it is almost too much to fathom that it almost becomes detaching, but the sudden shifts between sobering look of the animation and the reality that slams us back to earth. The events proceed as you’d expect, but with each person bringing their own meaning to it. Some only remember it as a blisteringly scary day, others remember it with an idea that the man who did these things had problems. While overall the documentary seems to play pretty conventionally, besides stylistically, the moments when it’s not just giving an eye-opening history lesson make Tower the gem it is. The scary image of the large tower stretching into the sky. The musings of an old woman simply trying to forgive, and quietness of all the sadness that a few hours on a hot day in Austin, Texas left behind. Tower is a documentary that scares in it’s ever persistent cacophony of the repeating gunshot that rings out over its score but truly lives in the soulful eyes of the people that experienced those hours. This is a small film, but it is one to see. Reviewing it, viewing it even, feels a bit unjust. These are a stressful yet calming 82 minutes, one that only those present could accurately describe. For now, Tower does a consistently fear inducing job of giving us what it must have been to witness this tragedy and what it is to hold onto it. The film ends with images of more recent school shootings, reminding us that this doesn’t only happen once. One day, a new generation of wounded souls will have to take on the burden of their own tragedy. I always spoil the twist of a new Shyamalan movie for myself before I see it. I have a certain affinity to be fascinated by twists, that could lead me to judge a movie higher than I actually might have. The Sixth Sense (not that it was ever bad) was the film that showed me this, and I won’t make the mistake again. The Visit (Shyamalan’s last effort) barring its twist was a rancid, annoying film, and I caught that. I went into Split knowing full well what would happen, ready to feel the superiority of my mastery over the games the movie was playing….and walked out joyous at the fact that even without said twist, Split is kind of fascinating, earnest and beautifully intense. The reviews of The Visit called it too early, but now M. Night Shyamalan has returned to his previous success. Welcome back. Split focusses on Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy) who is kidnapped along with two other girls and is kept in captivity by Kevin (James Mcavoy). Kevin has Dissociative identity disorder, which means he has multiple personalities going on in his body, each of which can randomly take the spotlight. So what we have is a thriller where the captor can’t control whether or not he’s a nine-year-old child named Hedwig, or a pedophile named Dennis, or the twenty-three personalities that embody his body. Hands down that is a really interesting idea for a movie, good job on that Shyamalan. Ok, and now that you’ve read that I’d like to say that I’m about to spoil this movie. The reason? Split is a film that is a good movie on its own, but a great movie when you consider its implications and the genre that it actually resides in. See, Split might have been marketed as a horror movie, and it is a pretty solid thriller, but when you get down to it, but it’s actually a superhero film told from the perspective of victims who are often ignored by the stories themselves. Kevin, has in fact, supernatural powers which can manifest themselves as one of his identities. These powers allow him to climb up walls, be incredibly strong, fast and for his skin to be especially rough and unstoppable. Where does this all lead? Well, Split is a sort of sequel to M. Night Shyamalan’s best film (and a contender for one of my very favorite superhero films) Unbreakable. Split is an origin story for a villain in that universe. The film might seem overly earnest and hammly written which is a problem for Shyamalan...when he’s making movies that expressly exist in the real world. In the context of a superhero film and the accepted aesthetics, you can get away with a lot more of this stuff. Take Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 1 and 2 for instance. Those films of course, were silly, but they were allowed to be because the silliness allowed for these larger than life characters to blend ever more into the background of the modern day context that they existed in. This allowance of more silly concepts allows Shyamalan’s usually hard to take dialogue to become believable, almost as if has just been torn from the comic books that one used to read as a child. Shyamalan does the concept of the superhero connected universe one better and finally pulls off the “darkness,” that Zack Snyder and his cohorts have been trying to fake in the DC Extended Universe, and he’s making it look easy. The two villains that have populated the “Pittsburg Extended Universe” (let’s call it that) are both villains, but they aren’t maniacal psychopaths like Lex Luthor in Batman v Superman nor are they overly powerful leaders with many henchmen that simply want to destroy the world, as in every Marvel movie. Shyamalan’s villains are people full of pain and suffering, just like most of the real villains of the world. Not to empathize, just simply to dimensionalize. Of all the “Universes” I’d take Kevin (a villain named The Horde) and Mr. Glass (still a high point for Samuel L. Jackson) over the incarnations of more popular villains that are present in the alternate universes. James Mcavoy putting in way more work than he necessarily needed to into each personality as well as being just scary when The Horde finally emerges puts Split above that pack too. For as much of the dialogue is taken care of by the present genre, some of it probably wouldn’t have sold this well if it weren’t for Mcavoy putting everything he has into the performance. This was the same with Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson almost 17 years ago. The actresses on display here, Anya Taylor-Joy (so great in the best horror film of last year The Witch) and Haley Lu Richardson of The Edge of Seventeen make the best of some of their more oddly phrased lines. Taylor-Joy’s character has a flashback arch going on here that gets downright fascinating once the effect of it is truly shown, and she proves her versatility shown in The Witch was no fluke. She shines in this. Split might not come to be a favorite film of the year, but as the first great genre/superhero movie of the year, this is a show that can’t be denied that title. The writing is back to the quality it contained in Unbreakable, the direction is back to that point, and so seems Shyamalan. Here’s to Unbreakable 2? Please? I give Split a 9 out of 10. Review by Stephen Tronicek Martin Scorsese’s Silence might prompt an especially weird reaction. This is a film that while it plays isn’t resoundingly entertaining and even frustrating to the point of misfire, but when considering the true intention of the film, and what it means Silence is a film that seems to be lifted to the point of masterpiece probably only hindered by the fact that it was cut down from 195 minutes to 161 minutes. This is a flawed but effectively frustrating masterwork and if that sounds confusing than...go see the movie...I don’t know. That might have to do a little with expectation and reality. The trailers make the movie look like a ruggedly intense film about the persecution of Jesuit priests (Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver, and Liam Neeson) in Japan in the 1600’s. The movie, in reality, is a slow burning, emotionally frustrating, contradictory piece of work that goes up to the edge of its convictions, but never truly embraces them. It’s a deeply odd and troubling work that when considered as what it is and who it was made by can’t help but seem more important and intelligent than it possibly is. Silence is bewildering, to say the least. There’s a sense that the movie’s attempting to mess with its audience the whole way through. Cut’s look odd, plot is repeated, the characters never really gel to be satisfying people and the message of the film looks to be contradicted by the end. Yet, when one considers the pedigree involved, you can’t let go of the sense that no matter how jarring everything is intentional. This seems a film that despite its subject matter doesn’t actually take itself too seriously. It’s a film about faith as a construct and the way that sometimes the world simply can’t accept certain faiths. It undermines itself because it is about internal struggle. In that way Silence often plays into an illusive and disorienting tone, that is not entertaining, but represents a vigorous horror in the misuse of faith. In his last movie, The Wolf of Wall Street Scorsese explored the way that our boundless consumerism affected our lives, as well as showing ourselves an exaggerated version of ourselves. Maybe in this day and age, that’s the purpose of Silence as well, mirroring our religious aspirations back at us and allowing us to stare at ourselves from the outside. This is often explored throughout the runtime of Silence, but the best moment comes in one where the ruthless governor of the land tells Father Rodriguez (Andrew Garfield as our protagonist) a fable about a man with four fighting concubines. The concubines fought and caused terror and the man got rid of them and now there was no fighting and terror. That is how Christianity is viewed by this man. Simply, a destructive force that needs to be smitten. If all that can be heard is silence, why all the violence? With how the film continues, the contradictory nature of faith is very much explored with good and bad offered up. In the moment it might all seem disjointed but as a whole, it plays very well. Effectively, there seems to be genius in much of what Silence is telling us about religion now, but it’s hard to tell whether or not there’s intention in Scorsese's and longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker's odder and less fashioned cuts. Scorsese is especially disciplined in his use of film form and while previously mentioned that it must all be intentional, there are moments when the film seems undisciplined, rather than a fully coherent, intended work. This might have to do with length. The film was originally 195 minutes long but has been cut down to 161 minutes. This seems to have forced Scorsese to take some shortcuts involving narration that are just about as effective here as they were in the original cut of Blade Runner (which is to say not very). I wonder if a version of this film will come out in the future that doesn’t include this narration because the film is best when it is silent. There are only a few moments of brutal violence throughout the film, and each is played with a delicate, slow and silent disposition. The silence of the moments and other silences throughout the film give you time to ponder the what Scorsese is truly attempting to show us. If only Andrew Garfield would stop talking over it. Silence could very well be a great film, but I’m not sure yet. It could be intentionally created to disorient. To contradict, or it could simply be bad. I don’t know if we’re ever going to figure that out. Scorsese is presenting a hypothesis on the nature of faith that says, “It might all mean something, it might not,” and while it’s exhausting, I can’t wait to see it again. A Monster Calls has three types of descriptors: pitch perfect, visually arresting but not narratively and thematically involving, and visually uninvolving and narratively arresting. The film feels like the screenwriter and the director randomly picking one for each scene and just going with it, while also not being lucky enough to hit “pitch perfect” until the third act. A Monster Calls is a film focusing on Colin, a young boy having to deal with his dying mother. Suddenly, a monster appears and Colin must find out the meaning of the monster as well as his own feeling about the coming events. That is one heck of a premise, and really when the actual drama finally gets informed by some genuine feeling rather than just dragging the audience along some beautiful watercolor stories interspersed with the fascinating picture of making Sigourney Weaver boring the movie soars, but that’s not for a while A Monster Calls is a movie that without the Monster can’t survive. The material barring the beautiful watercolors is trite and honestly a little boring, and when the Monster does decide to show up, which is very few times, the Monster is a successfully underwritten smartass, who seems to enjoy bullying Colin and abstractly telling him the message of the movie. There’s a scene in a great film from this year called The Nice Guys where Russell Crowe’s character talks to Ryan Gosling's character about a man who dies and sees Nixon in order to teach Gosling that there are two ways of looking at something. Gosling asks him why he’s just told this long boring story just to tell him that it is about two different ways of looking at one thing? That’s kind of what A Monster Calls feels like. I do in fact understand that I am a horrible person, but also a good person and that people contradict themselves, why did you tell me the long boring story to get there? Then again it is more asking why did you tell me the THREE uninvolving stories? The Monster each time it shows up tells a story, each one having to do with the main simple revelation. Sure, they are told with a beautiful and stimulating array of watercolors, but I still don’t understand why the already under compelling drama of the actual story of the film is being interrupted by even simpler, contradicting fairy tales. I mean, yes contradiction is intended as a theme of the film, but if there’s not a guided narrative for the momentary plot at that specific moment, the morals just muddle themselves. It might all look good but thematically it’s just a hot mess. It does play well too, though. For all the inconsistency, the actors at the center of the film are all suitably up to their jobs, though technically Lewis MacDougall, playing Colin, has to carry the entire movie on his shoulders. This isn’t because the other actors aren’t fine at their jobs, Toby Kebbell, Sigourney Weaver, Liam Neeson, and Felicity Jones are all making smart choices, but script-wise they are all such nonentities that MacDougall is left stranded in the middle of the movie having to carry the entire thing. MacDougall is very impressive, but I’m not sure any actor of his age could carry a full movie like this. It gets almost sadder and sadder to watch as this kid is pushing hard to leave his mark on a movie that he never could. Not because of any fault of his, but because the film just can’t work on its own. This is until the third act. The film finally catches its footing and morphs into what it was always meant to. A breathtaking image of grief informed by the finally revealed themes about humanity that were better explained in just the performances of Jackie than this entire movie. This came from the director of The Orphanage and The Impossible, J.A. Bayona, and it might be the first film he’s made that could be considered anything close to a disappointment. The overall package isn’t particularly rotten just bland. That is the most unfortunate thing of all. I give A Monster Calls a 5.5 out of 10. |
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December 2017
CategoriesAuthorHello welcome to FilmAnalyst. My name is Stephen Tronicek, and I really like movies. This is a way to get my opinions out to people. Thank you for visiting. |