If the determination of a good film was based completely on the length of time it feels like it takes to the length of time it actually takes, Loving would be a bad movie. This is a SLOW film, but since that was the real point, that’s actually ok. Loving is about making one feel like they are living the life of the Loving’s with all the anxiety and ever expanding long hours that simply come with that. The film’s pacing and feel seem to parallel the frustration that the Loving’s themselves went through. If you haven’t caught on yet, Loving is not a movie of fast pacing. It’s a straightforward, sparse piece of work that needs to be taken on those merits. That’s not much of a surprise. Even Jeff Nichol’s science fiction “action” movie from earlier this year, Midnight Special, (still a year's best contender if you’re wondering) let itself slowly marinate the audience in Nichol’s personal hang-ups and much like that film Loving is more dependent on the performances that he pulls from his actors than any actually exciting action that comes from the film. Nichols has never been about sensationalism, and in the face of overly dramatic dramas of a similar type Nichols simply tells it how it is. Life is frustrating and long, but it’s in full satisfying and that’s the best way to describe Loving. At the end of two hours that feels like five, one gets the notion that they have in fact lived this life and it’s an enlightening experience. It does help to have a little flair though in your movie, and that comes mainly in performance. For all the muting of that Nichols applies to his own film, it’s still not enough to bring down the almost transformative performances at the center of the film. Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga have had some great roles (Negga in Preacher and Edgerton in Nichol’s Midnight Special), but Loving far surpasses their earlier work. The naturalistic performances at the center of this film take one off guard, and since all the actors are on the same page it’s a top rate acting job. Negga and Edgerton are the Loving’s, that’s simply the one thing we can see. This is the type of movie that’s so slow that it’s really exciting to see some familiar actors hanging around the margins of the movie and I damn near jumped out of my seat whenever a Nichols collaborator showed up for a cameo. Loving should be seen, but only for those willing to take the journey. This feels like an almost infuriatingly wronged, slow, life playing out in front of us and while that’s fine in my book others might not be drawn in enough by the performances to really appreciate what is here. I give Loving a 9 out of 10.
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Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals is a vicious burlesque show on narrative and noir, taking two stories: one diegetic and the other not and burning down the wall in between them. This is a film almost fully dependent on the richly detailed compositions of Tom Ford, and he uses his attention to detail to force the stories together in a way that is incredibly subtle enough to sneak up on the audience. The film begins with a burlesque show appropriately presenting obese characters dancing stark naked with sparklers. This makes it pretty obvious as to what’s going on. That’s actually most of what can be said of the film. It’s a disconcerting affair, one that feels fragmented and broken as it plays but mends together after careful consideration of the frames. Tom Ford puts too much work into the compositions that he places up on screen for them not to mean anything, and here they are part of making sense of the film. The best example that I can think of has to do with SPOILERS so I’m going to put that up right now. See, Nocturnal Animals is about a modern artist played by Amy Adams whose ex-husband sends her a manuscript for his new book. In said book, a protagonist representing him is traveling through West Texas with his family when a Deliverance type attack (rape and murder) befalls the family. The book’s protagonist is the only one left alive. The shot showing the dead body of the book’s protagonists daughter is a shot of her naked body laying across the screen showing her back. Later in the film, Adams calls her daughter who is shot in the exact same way lying in a bed. It is later revealed that Adams had aborted her child. Ford’s use of duplicating the daughter frame allows us to connect the two events and stories. This spells out pretty well what Nocturnal Animals does, but also why it’s so difficult to piece it together. Through the same compositional detail and technique that director Tom Ford brought to his seriously great A Single Man he lets the biting guilt of Adam's character as she reads the manuscript be shown through subtle inconsistencies representing the way that this guilt is affecting the mind of Adam’s character. Thematically it never quite gels, but it’s so impressive and competent in what it’s trying to do that I predicted after multiple viewings Nocturnal Animals will only get better and better. After one, a few things are obvious. This is an ambitious, detailed and acted to perfection film. Jake Gyllenhaal,is as usual, the most excellent actor, Amy Adams is giving a performance that could rival hers in Arrival and Michael Shannon playing a sheriff in the book’s story deserves to win a best supporting actor award. Tom Ford has burst back onto the scene with an incredibly layered, confounding piece of work. I give Nocturnal Animals a 9 out of 10. There are many great moments in Robert Zemeckis’s Allied, but my favorite (barring any spoilers) might be near the beginning. Max Vatan (Brad Pitt), a spy who is just arriving in the beautiful city of Casablanca strolls into a bar full of Nazi sympathizers drunk and smoking. The immaculate bar looks like a sort of heavenly painting reflecting a gold hue into the audience. Then, suddenly a woman. One he’s never seen before but has been instructed to love with all his heart. She turns around to see him and smiles with the most beautiful smile one could imagine, and then springs up to hug and kiss him. Two strangers in the most beautiful town in the world falling into character in a second. It’s a beautiful thing to see. There’s an immaculate quality to that moment that Allied doesn’t always keep hold of but much of the time is suspenseful enough to compensate for. The trick to its suspense isn’t exactly what one would expect and might even throw some off of its true beauty, but to those who can fall into the film much like the beautiful characters do this will be an beautiful experience....no I won’t stop saying beauty. That’s hard when you’re talking about a film directed by Robert Zemeckis. The trailers to this movie offer an addicting hook: Max Vatan (Brad Pitt) has started a family with the woman spy who took part in the Casablanca mission with him, one Marianne Beauséjour (Marion Cotillard). One day, his bosses in the British intelligence V-Section pull him aside and tell him that his wife might be a German spy and it’s up to him to figure that out. If she is, than Vatan must kill her, if not the whole ordeal will be forgotten. Even if the trailer didn’t make this movie look as good as it actually is, that hook was enough to make me want to see it. Good thing that the actual film really is better than most are regarding it as, though it’s not a surprise that reception hasn’t been exactly glowing. The reason for this is found in the way that the piece juxtaposes the life of a spy and builds suspense. This is done very carefully through little things about the production that don’t seem quite correct. Brad Pitt is good, but he seems a little flat and out of place. The visuals are captivating and believable, but there’s an ever more obvious fact that most of them are digital The effects are good, but they also look old fashioned to a fault even. Marion Cotillard...well she’s just so amazing in everything that it’s not a surprise that she is in this. All of this seems to present and deliberate to have been unintentional, which seems counterintuitive, but it’s not really. The tone instead finds itself never landing on its feet making the film extremely riveting. It’s odd to watch as what should be a flaw allows a film to actually iron out most of its problems, but that’s just what happens here. Brad Pitt doesn’t really fit in, well now I can believe that there’s stakes in him being caught. Nothing feels safe, nothing feels sound and nothing feels right. That’s good, this is a spy movie. There are moments when the film ratchets into place. Gory, brutal moments of violence and moments of passion. Zemeckis takes a time to create a romantic movie out of Allied too, taking advantage of the Casablanca setting to stage romantic scenes strung together with blissful digital transitions. Cotillard and Pitt feel so bonded as a couple that their dedication to the craft is obvious. The moments of passion as just are effective as the moments of violence, even startling. For any misstep, that Allied takes the couple at its center feels perfect. This being a Zemeckis film, no matter what the ending has a touch of sentimentality that should never be underestimated. It feels almost like Forrest Gump or Zemeckis’s other 90’s efforts, which is actually refreshing in this downbeat era of filmmaking Allied is another well-made effort from Robert Zemeckis that seems oddly counterintuitive in the way it builds suspense but does so all the same. This isn’t the movie that will receive the awards, but it’s sure one of the nicest little surprises of this awards season. I give Allied an 8 out of 10. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: Directed by David Yates, Starring: Eddie Redmayne11/20/2016 Fantastic Beasts is a very different beast from Harry Potter in more ways than one. The story structure of setting up, character development, everything important happens at the ending, is still present, but this is a different feeling film. Harry Potter always had a sense of magic behind it. An uplifting lived in and well... magical feel. Fantastic Beasts fails to carry that. The special concoction of joy and mystery that found itself in each Potter film simply isn’t present here, but it can be said that Fantastic Beasts differentiating itself is a good thing. This different just isn’t better. Fantastic Beasts takes place in 1920’s Wizarding New York as Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) enters with a case full of magical creatures. The first two acts will be dedicated to him and these creatures, and in them there is a lot of amazing factors. The first thing is the world. J.K. Rowling world builds very efficiently, and that’s very much the same here. 1920’s New York feels like 1920’s New York, cars lumbering past, and skyscrapers new and shiny. However, this does pose a problem. One of the most incredible things about the Harry Potter films is the way that they contrasted the world human world with the Wizarding World, as the Wizarding world seemed to be stuck in an almost a halt in time, looking like the early 20th century, while the human world evolved more and more over time. It’s fun to see cars and then find yourself looking at a giant beast that takes people places. With the setting of the 1920’s though, both worlds look the same and it takes a lot of the differentiated feeling out of the world. We’ve seen parlors, and mob bosses in the 1920’s, what’s the difference if a tiny, poorly rendered (most of the CG is good, this one guy not so much) goblin is being a mob boss. We’ve seen government raids, we’ve seen parlor singers. This is a familiar world, and not the one of wonder that Potter gave us. It’s still a fine world that is well used but it lacks real magic. If there is an aspect of Fantastic Beasts world that works, it’s there’s a whole number of people who demonize wizards, that attune themselves to a New Salem group ready to burn witches. They come off like a religious cult and are genuinely scary at times. The contrast more comes in the fact that we’re comparing the idealization of the 1920’s that the film has to the shadiest aspects of things that existed in that time period and that’s terrifying. There are many moments that do contain magic, though, and those can be put on the actors and the characters. If Rowing has been always great at worldbuilding, she can do characters in her sleep, and each one here feels new. Eddie Redmayne as Newt Scamander is the best he’s ever been, mainly because the effect Newt has fits Redmayne very well. Newt’s a little dopey and antisocial, and that fits the physique of Redmayne excellently, much better than his other leading roles have. There’s a crowning moment of his career in which Newt attempts to get a large rhino creature back into his magical case of creatures, by attempting to mate with it, that has a wonderful bravado to it. Redmayne is also just funny and engaging in that moment. Katherine Waterston gets some fun moments too, but her character is kind of the weepy, distressed bumbler, so her shining moment is a heavily disturbing, almost execution. Moments like those and the rhino are what make Fantastic Beasts better than most blockbuster fare. It might be moving too fast for the audience to see the extent of the world, but it’s determined to show us emotional set pieces and that it does. The other few characters are less so established, with Dan Fogler being simply the bumbling idiot, Alison Sudol being a charismatic, ditzy, manipulator that gets some laughs, Colin Farrell as Graves, a government worker, and Ezra Miller as Credence, an abused boy who is part of the New Salem cult. While Newt and friends have a pretty cohesive story that wraps up right before the third act, the one involving Graves and Credence takes up the third as a somewhat convoluted, but intoxicating blunt metaphor takes over the film. That would constitute a spoiler, so I won’t say anything of it, but this story is the reason why Fantastic Beasts kind of fumbles its third act. It all makes sense but when wrapping so many threads up in mostly dialogue there’s a sense of whiplash and clunkiness to the entire thing. The final twist though involving a character is a brilliant moment of a studio all tricking the heck out of us, and an exciting note for the movie to go out on. Fantastic Beasts has plenty of brilliant moments, but it also has plenty of missteps. This is a sweeping, surprisingly scary, imperfect work that is better than most blockbusters bother to be. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them gets a 7.5 out of 10. The phrase “A New American Classic” is thrown around a whole lot in the effort to describe the almost unreachable state that the 70’s left for filmmaking. That’s the moment in time when the “American Classic” was born. The time after the Golden Age when the glamour of the studio system only butted heads with what could be put on screen. The time when Americans needed new, revolutionaries to come in and make them films that had to do with the actual world that they lived in, or allowed them to escape that world. Films like Taxi Driver, Star Wars, The French Connection all needed to happen, and that’s what might just constitute a classic. Is this film necessary? Does it give us something that is desperately needed even if that something is just exciting action? Jackie is a necessary work. Jackie is a work of unprecedented mastery. The reason has to do with grief and the way that it affects people. What can be done about it, and what can allow us to truly understand it? Jackie is about the following days after the death of JFK and an interview that went on between Jackie and reporter, Theodore H. White, following the lavish funeral that she held for a president that many didn’t think deserved such an affair. The first stage is a sense of shock, where the initial event hasn’t sunk in. Natalie Portman, playing Jackie Kennedy in a role that should win her a best actress Oscar (Rebecca Hall should too), runs around hazy and weeping attempting to make sense of the blood on her dress and face. It’s captivating and powerful stuff, done masterfully by director Pablo Larraín. Jackie is at first a film of close-ups, keeping tight and allowing the claustrophobic sense of the ever burdening pressure that comes to all dealing with the assassination of a president to inch into our minds. The Secret Service, Lyndon B. Johnson, everyone stands with the face of confusion, of guilt, of pain. At the center is Jackie Kennedy, who can’t begin to comprehend what just happened. Neither can we as an audience. As the film lays its base it’s incredibly frustrating, but intentionally so. It pushes the feeling of the characters into the audience through tight close-ups that force all actors on deck into somewhat of an endurance test of acting. The spell that the film casts is calculated, and Larraín never lets you out of his hands. Then the film backs out a bit, giving us almost a second stage, where the crushing sense of all of it comes crashing down. The moment when Jackie must tell the children what happened, and accept that her connection to the history of the White House seems almost meaningless The frame widens as more well recreated characters such as Peter Sarsgaard as Bobby Kennedy start to occupy the film, and the coldness of the big empty house becomes apparent. A great thing about Jackie’s second act is that it understands that at moments of great shock and great grief one can find herself thinking about the simplest of things. What that thing is you couldn’t ever get me to spoil, but it’s shockingly realistic. The facets of the performance in here are just marvelous as the grief slowly turns into guilt. The final so-called stage has to do with the acceptance of this, mainly through the efforts of cinematography. The camera finds itself occupying almost a duet of the first two acts distinct camerawork as cinematographer Stéphanie Fontaine channels Emmanuel Lubezki’s work for Terrence Malick. The close-ups are still claustrophobic and cutting and the wider shots still accentuate the coldness, but as the importance of the administration, the legacy, the things that comfort Jackie come to the surface the styles start to excitingly flow together. The film in all it’s glory solidifies and one finds themselves transported through the nonlinear, dreamy, and poetic imagery into the world of Jackie Kennedy as the film punctuates it’s ending with the glorious feeling of euphoria as hope and understanding once again punctuate the Former First Lady’s life. Now, none of this would work if the screenwriting (Noah Oppenheim of….Allegiant and The Maze Runner...What the hell?) and Larraín’s direction was not on point. The actors aren’t the only one on an endurance test. The way the story unfolds is almost the full reason why it’s so engaging and lusciously absorbing and Oppenheim and Larraín almost effortlessly push everything together. For the third time in this review I’m going to call Portman something of a astonishing presence. She’s surrounded by great actors like John Hurt, Peter Sarsgaard, Caspar Phillipson, John Carroll Lynch, Billy Crudup, and Greta Gerwig, all of them collectively bringing to life the exciting moroseness of the events. There’s not really describing the feeling that each actor and each shot allows the audience to feel. By the end, everything is playing together in a wonderful orchestra of filmmaking, of sound design, score, acting and screenwriting. Jackie isn’t just one of the best movies of the year. That’s an insult. This one of the best movies….ever. It’s extremely important on one hand, but it’s also just a damn great, poetically assembled, no punches pulled, GREAT on the level of any important movie of the 70’s piece of filmmaking. Jackie so far should win best picture and I can’t wait to see how it goes over in the awards race. I give Jackie a 10 out of 10. Denis Villeneuve makes dark, and scary movies about things like adultery, the personal ethics of torturing a person, the violent drug trade on the Mexican border and the existential and beautiful sentimentality of the ever expanding beauty of life and the incredible nicety of raising a chil…..wait what just happened there? As joking goes that’s not a very good one, but it just about gets across the surprise that is Denis Villeneuve's Arrival: 1.This isn’t the type of movie that he usually makes, 2. HIs calculated style should not work with an overly sentimental tone without feeling like he’s trying to copy Spielberg (see moments of Interstellar), and 3. This movie is hiding the sentimentality in the middle of it all wrapped up in a spoiler protected bow, which does make it pretty hard to actually talk about what the movie is about. The short answer is that translator, Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams), possibly fueled on by the recent death of her child at the hands of an unstoppable disease, is called upon by the US military to a remote base located at the base of a large alien spacecraft. Eleven other spacecrafts have landed around the world and other countries aren’t acting quite as well too them. Now, on it’s face that’s a pretty cool story, and this part of the movie works because it feels incredibly grounded and personal into Adams’s perspective. Want to make your movie a globetrotting effort that stays in relatively the same place throughout the entire movie? Ground your movie on an almost miniscule protagonist compared to the rest of the world and hope that that comparison and the existential trappings your movie is using, as well as the simple but spellbinding effects can smooth out the edges .Arrival, does so too. Louise is perfectly played protagonist, as Adams turns in wonderful work and eventually the scale of the movie finds itself feeling both out of our grasp but also intensely intimate. This at first feels slightly off, as those tones shouldn’t fit together, but throughout the first two acts the composure breaking alien imagery (seriously guys there’s a rugged and dark emptiness to the alien ship that is mystifying), actually intense real world reactions by some soldiers to the aliens, and almost over staged, charming dialogue in conversation does a nice job of smoothing out some of those rough edges. Turns out all of this is necessary once the twist of the story actually comes in i.e. I’M ABOUT TO SPOIL THIS AND YOU SHOULD NOT READ ANY FURTHER IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE MOVIE, IT”S GETTING A 9. GO SEE IT. See, after a voiceover section in the middle of the movie that shows Banks and the other scientist working (a very sympathetic Jeremy Renner) out how the alien language works, the aliens start to talk about giving Adams and other countries around the world a weapon. This spooks China and other Eastern governments who decide to mobilize, and as Louis attempts to keep the countries from using weapons, Villeneuve slowly starts to feed us the truth. One thing that’s always been strong in his films is he allows the audience to figure things out rather than just telling them. So, that tangent aside, the alien’s “weapon” happens to be their language, which allows them to look at time non-linearly. Suddenly, we get the sense that Adams, now learning it is also getting a view into time, and that the daughter stuff we thought was motivating her character is actually not even in existence yet. That’s one hell of a twist, but it’s also a genius inversion that allows the same plot point to have emotional bearing on both the beginning of the movie and the end. The stakes soon become focussed on how Louise can use this newfound ability to stop the world from falling apart but more importantly whether or not she will allow the sad reality that she knows is coming (her daughter living and then dying from a debilitating disease) to happen. This sounds like the type of ending that would probably piss off a lot of people, but the movie promises it in the earlier tone of epic yet intimate. Eventually, the melancholy longing that comes with allowing a life, with all it’s good and bad moments imposes take over the film in a strong finish. Arrival is a film one could imagine Spielberg making now as a rebuttal to his more cynical 70’s alien fare in that while Spielberg split families apart in an effort to create a broader realization of life and how one would deal with beings from another planet, Arrival brings them together. Both versions are not half bad I give Arrival a 9 out of 10. A lot has been said on the “Marvel origin formula” and how it, unfortunately, creates lacking films. That’s an overstatement. It just makes very similar, all good, films. The real determination is whether or not Marvel can make the character of interest different enough to be its own thing. That’s where Doctor Strange excels. The story is not that much of an alteration of the formula, but instead of being driven by character, the movie seems more driven by external universe forces as the one little guy seems to be running around trying to figure it out as it goes along. This is a good idea, as Doctor Strange as a character is basically Tony Stark and in much the same way needs to have de-jerk-ified (that’s a word right there). Strange is a cocky jerk who is smarter than most people that he is associated with and he knows it too. This is actually the biggest flaw with the film. At its start, Doctor Strange doesn’t really differentiate itself from some of the other Marvel films and therefore doesn’t feel special, other than Marvel casting Michael Stuhlbarg who deserves any work that he’s given. The script near the beginning feels like it was punched up in a day to simply spell out enough to get us to realize Strange is a jerk (a weird angle to see Benedict Cumberbatch play, I mean at least Sherlock is likable) and that he’ll go on a hero's journey to stop being a jerk and everything will be fine. That’s where this movie actually becomes special because Stephen Strange doesn’t actually become better. For all the heroism, and fighting and hubris of surviving a near fatal car crash he’s still stuck up and superior by the end of the movie, but he’s getting better. In fact, it’s this stuck up superiority that keeps the movie interesting and allows the film to be driven by the plot rather than the character. Strange doesn’t change very much, which allows the focus to be more on the world and how it’s affected by him. Doctor Strange is a setup movie and the exposition dumps are present but the focus on the overall, big picture events keeps this from being a big deal. That each new dump reveals some new awesome, mind-boggling special effect helps too. There’s just enough of Marvel’s trademark tongue in cheek dialogue to make all of the character’s personable, especially Wong, the librarian and Mordo (Oscar winner Chiwetel Ejiofor). Mordo’s character arch throughout the film is an example of how Marvel continues to succeed in setting up other storylines for its film universe to expand and by the end of the film not only does he seem to change the way that sorcerers stand in the Marvel universe, but also the idea that maybe the heroes aren’t always great or right. This all culminates in a completely against form anticlimax that stands as one of the smartest inversions of Marvel’s origin story formula and serves to be very funny, something that Doctor Strange consistently is. The best thing Doctor Strange has going for it though is the fact that it feels like a movie about discovery. That feeling a wonderment that comes from the pages of a comic book as a comic character discovers a wonderful power or a powerful wonder is the beating heart of the movie. With that, the best visual effects of the year, and enough changes to the narrative formula, Doctor Strange is certainly more fun than Civil War and is a magical time at the movies. Doctor Strange gets an 8.5 out of 10. Review by Stephen Tronicek If there’s one thing that made me question whether or not I liked Hacksaw Ridge (other than the more superficial problem of third act being pretty repetitive and weak compared to the first two) was the concept of religion in it, a big elephant in the room with any film (other than Braveheart and Apocalypto) in anything Mel Gibson. Hacksaw Ridge has a distinct sense of religion baked into it that the stigma of it is unavoidable. That said we all want religion to be something for the good of all people (at least I hope we do) and that’s more or less the stance that Hacksaw Ridge takes. That religion is more for the good of the hero and the people around him in the literal hell-scape that they occupy and that it brings people together and keeps them from violence. And despite that tangent, which is more like the first thing I wanted to say, Hacksaw Ridge is something that you should see, if only because it’s smartly written and pristinely directed to show the true horrors of the war that it portrays. The whole first act is really just setup but it serves the purpose of making the audience comfortable with the main character and the worldview that he occupies. Desmond Doss is a conscientious objector, meaning that he cannot touch a weapon or dole out violence in any way. This becomes problematic when you’re in an area where killing is your job. The most important thing about the opening act of Hacksaw Ridge is that it’s sugar-sweet and cheesy to the point of almost second-hand embarrassment, but this works mainly because the screenwriters are intelligent enough to address the audience and put them in the mind space for it too. There’s a conversation in which, in the attempt to pick up a girl, the main character says something extremely cheesy and when her response is commenting on that fact that it was, Doss responds in saying he’d worked on the line all night, smiling like an idiot. This is almost a reassurance to the audience telling them, “Yes, we understand that we’re corny, but we’re also completely earnest about it, so give us a break.” The delivery of the lines from Andrew Garfield, playing Doss, with an ungodly sense of optimism and levity and his costar Teresa Palmer’s mirror personality makes the whole scene enjoyable. This optimism doesn’t always work well with the complex mix of PTSD issues that Hugo Weaving brings as Desmond’s father, and the patriarchal view of all of this stews into feeling a bit sickening, but it’s all just likable enough. The following training sequences are the highlight of this beginning act though as the film allows us to laugh at the soldiers in a way many war movies don’t. The abject racism of Vince Vaughn as the drill Sergeant, a muscular Clark Gable type realizing too late that being naked when drills start does not mean you get to put your pants on and a young man with a knife in his foot having to explain it to his superior officer are all really funny situations, especially since they are all making fun of the subjects (a surprise on Gibson’s part). Then again, if you’re like me, you’re not really there for the drama or the laughs, even if they do really work, You’re there to see what type of adrenaline pumping, traumatizing thing Gibson has put on screen. Gibson’s violence has always been strong gory stuff but just detached enough to be exciting rather than upsetting always, though there are moments of Apocalypto where the thing truly goes scary as hell. Hacksaw Ridge delivers the same amount of Mel Gibson violence but he does what most filmmakers are a little too noble to do. He casts the entire thing as a straight horror show, complete with jump scares and unrelenting violence. I’d personally say that I have a desensitization to some violence, but when the first battle scene of Hacksaw was done, I was shaking in my seat and gritting my teeth. That first battle ranks up with the work that Gibson did in Braveheart and deserves to be seen if just for the numbing effect that it sends you into. The battle is especially easy to follow and because you laughed with these men it’s literally painful to watch them run through hell. The amount of violence that Gibson dishes out is warranted, but the numbing feeling does have side effects eventually, as Gibson’s own audacity to be so violent starts to wear thin over time. As Doss starts to save people, well that’s all the movie turns into and it often feels like it’s running out the clock too often. There’s a montage of him saving a lot of people….after he’s done so for the past 20 minutes. The film simply slows to a crawl and thankfully ends quickly after that. Hacksaw Ridge is an odd mixture of a film. Each section of the film is resoundingly strong for the most part and yet lacking in others. The question as to whether or not Mel Gibson is back? Ok, fine he’s ok...hopefully, there are no more rants. Hacksaw Ridge gets an 8 out of 10. Review by Stephen Tronicek Christine is about the quiet intensity of depression. Those moments when you’re sitting alone or in a crowd of people with one urge, and one urge only. The urge to cry and maybe, if you have the energy, scream. There are many moments where the masters of the film, who are directors Antonio Campos and Rebecca Hall, allow this feeling to bleed through the screen and into the audience. This is what makes Christine so horrifying and empathetic This feeling of disconnect and paranoia is extremely important to the film as a whole. It takes place in the wake of the Nixon impeachment, at a moment in time when there seemed no sense of security—when even the president could be caught lying. In this thick tone of the 70’s we are transported to the warmly colored, dirty, cramped offices of WXLT-TV Sarasota, where the reporters work hard, but it’s not enough. Where the cigarette smoke of Mike (a better than ever, Tracy Letts) seeps into the walls. Where the colors of a once new and high tech news station have faded, and the yellowing tar of tobacco and coffee has stained everything. There’s always a sense of disparity to the interpretation of the newsroom, but also an innocence in its bright colors and homey demeanor. This is simply not the place for someone to commit suicide. The people we’ve come to know here are desperate, but supportive, nobly trying to present the news and not end up in a place of more and more insecurity. And then there’s the odd woman out—that one poor soul, still living with her mother and desperately trying to overcome both the disparity of the workplace and the depression that permeates her worldview and lifestyle. This is where Rebecca Hall comes in. Hall, from whom I’ve seen good performances, has an incredible burden as she plays this part. Chubbuck is a selfish, self absorbed, antisocial character but her actions are more filtered through the monstrosity of her depression, rather than the actions of a functioning person. This forces Hall to play the role to such an extent as to blur the line of when the audience truly sees Chubbuck or Chubbuck filtered through the veneer of professionalism that she holds onto to function in the news station. Rebecca Hall’s work as Chubbuck is one of the best performances by an actress of the year, and I hope that she is given some consideration as the Academy Awards start to ramp up. The great thing about the performance and all these layers is that they never call too much attention to themselves. There’s a morose feeling hanging over the entire production for obvious reasons, but it’s understated, never bringing down the truly inspired moments of filmmaking or the levity that any of the co workers show each other. There’s a specific scene of all of the reporters at a party that reminded me of Boogie Nights, in the way incorporates a lovely longshot. That’s a lofty comparison and Christine’s scope is nowhere near that film’s, but what Christine lacks in scope it makes up in personality. The moroseness while understated serves to make everything in the movie, really, really, creepy. The studio might seem homey, but there’s just enough creepy to it hanging from the sidelines, dooming everyone who goes in. The perception of us being through the depressed eyes of Christine is terrifying, but most frighteningly, it’s realistic. It might be a gimmick to use aperture on a camera (blurring or clearing up the foreground and background of a picture) to show the haze of depression, but in Christine, director Campos almost allows it to sneak up on you mid-scene. The result is mystifying while also alarming. For as much credit as I’ve given Campos and Hall, the other players of the film are impressive as well. Michael C. Hall’s bravado as George Ryan is intoxicating, drawing the eye. There are plenty of twists that undermine that bravado in a perfect way, and C. Hall is equally. This is his best performance since he finished Dexter and he’s always had the creepy demeanor to fit right in with stories of gore and sadness. Speaking of gore, the moment, when it comes is as shocking as the filmmakers could make it. Literally, traumatizing in its effect, intentionally made to look slightly off to fit the hyper reality that the period piece requires. The sense of intensity and panic that comes with it as everyone realizes that it’s not just some sick joke is crushing. The film, through its silent intensity, through the empathy with a character, who just needs a hug, who just needs life to go alright, draws you in and gives you that intensity passes it to you . It’s not comfortable. It’s not pretty. It’s real. And in that reality Christine becomes on of the best films of the year. I give Christine a 10 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. |