Paul Verhoeven is the master at making stuff that isn’t funny, amusing. He made fascism funny in Starship Troopers, he made secret agents and murder funny in Total Recall, and before you yell at me no I’m not about to say that he makes rape funny, nobody can do that. The sheer fact that anyone would try is completely inappropriate and not what Verhoeven has an interest in doing in Elle. He instead makes each of the characters reactions to such a horrible event, slightly humourous, showing us a dark mirror as to how self absorbed we all get in times of conflict for the people around us. Verhoeven’s work is always about finding the perfect balance of things. Fascism and murder aren’t funny, and neither should be the absurdist ways that people react to assault, but just like Verhoeven’s other work it’s all about that perfect balance. Elle is more of a drama than a comedy, but it is infused with just enough absurdity that it can’t help but feel a little bit funny. With as much high brow disturbing content is present, Verhoeven plays everything just as thin and minimalistic as he always did. People might remember the more overblown nature of his satires like Robocop and Total Recall but in drama Verhoeven was kind of a straightforward point and shoot dramatist, which oddly isn’t an actual insult to him, It in fact works to his benefit allowing the subtlety of the entire filmmaking style to contrast heavily with the disturbed and uncomfortable themes of rape, death, psychopathy, and religion. There are moments of great melodrama in Elle that are played incredibly straight just because Verhoeven doesn’t allow them to go off the cuff. The film not treating some developments as scary, even though they should be and still working brings up the absurdity of everything to the point that it’s hard not to make an exclamation of “Dear Lord” or a nasally short laugh. Verhoeven has a cast that is all game to go crazy on screen and just trust him to make sure that the movie doesn’t fly the heck off the rails, and when Isabelle Huppert is on screen blowing through a psychopathic character of hidden depths like she’s done it forever (which she’s actually been doing this kind of ball busting character forever) any restraint from the director is a good idea. This does become a little problem as this is Huppert’s movie and while the other characters play huge roles the subtlety of the direction creates a weird contrast in which Huppert basically sticks out of the screen and everybody else is just there. Each of these characters are eventually satisfied with arches that create the world of the film though so the short drags in the middle act can all be forgiven. If there is one other thing off here Elle meanders a bit. That’s not a big problem because it’s all engaging meandering, but it’s still a little lengthy at times. Elle is an effort that has a lot of problematic stuff in it but it’s all played off with ease. Verhoeven is thankfully back to his great exploitation/genre film well and Isabelle Huppert cements herself as one of the best and most committed actresses of all time. I give Elle a 9.5 out of 10.
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If Damien Chazelle showed us that he could blow us all away with Hitchcockian suspense in Whiplash and his screenplay for Grand Piano, than La La Land, his ambitious sophomore effort has Chazelle playing Hitchcock, Woody Allen, and Stanley Donen at the same time. That’s a lot of plates in the air and it’s thrilling to watch Chazelle work his directorial ass off keeping them up there. The fact that he doesn’t break one plate is what solidifies the trick and boy is La La Land one of the best of the year. The best way to deconstruct what Chazelle has achieved here is to break down the individual styles that he’s expertly borrowing from and building onto. Early Tarantino (ie subpar direction to some lengths) this is not. This is sprint of glory. La La La follows the story of two people Mia (Emma Stone) and Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) as their story of love plays out. Stone and Gosling are both sumptuous with Gosling turning in his second perfect performance of the year (The Nice Guys being the other one) and Stone bringing something I haven’t seen very much in her work, a Romantic use of her expression. Let me explain. Stone is a great facial actress with her expressions selling a lot of her personality, but many films that lack the hyper energy of La La Land don’t let her use this EXTREMELY vital artistic weapon that she has. Here in La La Land as the story and songs expand into such hyper energy, Stone is allowed to cut loose and the results make for some of the best performing of the year. Okay, now onto that aforementioned deconstruction. See, Chazelle makes La La Land by keeping it interesting. We as an audience can go watch a cute musical or couple movie anywhere else (this reminded me of 500 Days of Summer), so what makes us to effectively care specifically about this one is not about what Chazelle throws up on screen but just how he does it. That’s where the key to La La Land is. He’s very much playing Hitchcock as he allows scenes to play out with emotional time bombs to explode from under the table. The ending (which I will not spoil) is his crowning achievement of this as he allows the emotional bomb of the story to explode in ways that are both joyous, but also destructive. It’s a blast. His work compares to Allen’s in that Chazelle’s showbiz dialogue plays like any wonderful Woody film. La La Land actually plays much like Allen’s excellent Café Society in the way it efficiently jumps across years of love and heartbreak. The film also looks very much like one of Allen’s works using the one shots that match many classical comedian directors like Allen, Billy WIlder, and while not funny, Hitchcock too. This shooting style is often known as the Spielberg oner, but I don’t think that the intention of this is the same. Spielberg doesn’t want you to see these shots, but Chazelle wants you to get lifted by them. This brings us to Donen. The whole point of Donen’s style seemed to be the concept of the suspense of the dance, and that’s what’s going on here too. Chazelle allows his camera to do cathartic pushins and chilling pulls as the dances extend in a flurry of color that is almost unseen today. This, Jackie, and The Neon Demon might be the best looking movies of the year, as La La Land attempts to capture the beauty of old technicolor epic musicals. The music is intimate and energetic capturing the ever so Romantic views of the dreamers in Hollywood. Composer Justin Hurwitz and lyricists Benj Pacek, and Justin Paul all create unique musical compositions from energetic tap to melancholic piano that blend wonderfully into Chazelle’s creation. The fact that La La Land reward the dreamers of music and Hollywood and tells us that all our might come true makes it all the more entertaining and rewarding. In the end La La Land is about the little dreams that come true and the others that don’t presented in the most energetic and enthusiastic way they possibly could be. “Here’s to the ones that Dream, foolish as they may seem” (1), including that one now great director who may have dreamed of being Hitchcock, Allen, and Donen. La La Land gets a 10 out of 10.
Assassin’s Creed is such an incredible failure that any measure of good will that I would have given it due to the fact that it was made by the people who made last year’s Macbeth (my #8 of last year, and a reason for Shakespeare scholars to think I don’t have good taste). I’m one to give films a great sense of leeway if the actors and director bring an artistic clout to them because films do not exist in a vacuum. The presence of two of what may be the best actors of all time, and the director of Macbeth is enough to make me bow down and let plenty go over my head (even if I don’t objectively do so), but Assassin’s Creed is such a horrible, rotting tease of a misfocused film that any goodwill that it had with me was spent within the first hour. For a little context, the film is about a young man named Calum Lynch (Michael Fassbender), who is executed. He is soon revived in a facility where a scientist (Marion Cotillard) conscripts him to help her find the mythical “Apple of Eden” so she can CURE VIOLENCE. Yeah, you heard that right, the villain wants to cure violence. Doesn’t sound too bad, until you see that all of this is delivered in exposition that Fassbender and Cotillard can’t even save and that the dynamic it creates for the assassins is one of a toxic fake edginess that never appeared in the Romanticism of their actions in the games. Anyway, Calum is put into GLADOS from Portal and is transported back in time to the feelings of his ancestor, as he experiences events that lead to the finding of the Apple of Eden. I have played a lot of the Assassin’s Creed games and the misfocus of the screenplay in baffling. Assassin’s Creed, for better or worse, to me at least was never about building a layered, complex story. It was about the player's ability to explore a bygone and fascinating period of history, and that’s where this film drops the ball royally. Not that simply this focus could truly ruin a movie (I mean a focus on the more violent and simple plot points of Macbeth made for a great movie) but because the focus is on plot points that are so thuddingly stupid it can’t help but feel like it’s robbing you of a better movie. This becomes hugely clear when the movie actually cuts back into the Spanish Inquisition, where the Kurzel can actually cut loose. He’s not afforded the heavy carnage that he displayed in Macbeth but the action is consistently center framed and not as hard to see as in many other films. The setting though is what makes this part of the movie. There’s burnings at the stake and black knights and sultans and that’s all pretty cool, if only the movie had not kept cutting back to the modern day and not letting the audience get our excitement out to the Gladiator type stuff. Justin Kurzel, Michael Fassbender, and Marion Cotillard are all reliably doing their jobs, but they can’t even salvage how bad this movie gets. The first act is ok and the second is sorely out of focus but at least has the gall to call its own stupidity, but the third makes you think all three of these players have given up. Jeremy Irons can’t even be great in this. This is a movie that teases you with the sweep of its Inquisition setting but never lets the audience truly explore that more interesting aspect. This is a film of horrid miscalculation, stay home and play the stunning games. Assassin's Creed get a 3 out of 10. The Handmaiden is a pretty perfect film that gets there because it doesn’t censor itself. There’s an unabashed excess to the way it indulges in sex and violence, in a way that a work of more “esteemed” art houseness never would and it comes out on top. The Handmaiden is sexy, funny, terrifying, and best of all touching. It could not have been too. Take this schlocky premise in lieu of Dangerous Liaisons and rob it of the explicit and roughly visceral content that it’s director Park Chan-Wook is so famous for and you’ve got a nice old lesbian love story that in its schlocky ness lacks the bite of anything (ie what Cruel Intentions did to the aforementioned Liaisons), but that’s not what happens here. Wook (and his screenwriter, Seo-kyeong Jeong) is able to work with all the disturbing, yet passionate toolbox he’s always been known for and in that he elevates The Handmaiden. You need to give these passionate stories some arteries that take them from just soap operas to reality and a good dose of explicit and exciting material does just that. It’s also helpful that Wook might just be one of the best filmmakers in the world. Part of the reason why these types of stories are often just “schlocky” is because they’re too often they’re afforded the filmmaking prowess of a simpleton who knows how to do a flat shot, reverse shot and not the guy who did Oldboy. Great direction can take the wild, unkempt emotions of a piece like this and treat them properly. Sexual lust is a feeling that has been bastardized but only by human creations. It in fact when presented at face value is incredibly beautiful. Wook has the smarts to present it as such. That actually leads nicely into the main point of what makes The Handmaiden so well crafted and it’s content so necessary (other than the previously mentioned fact that it really gives the film some life). The story and characters actions revolve around the interpretation of this lust and what it means, and when two characters react to it by falling deeply in love it’s touching, and when another reacts to it by chopping a man’s fingers off in the pursuit of more, it’s funny. The Handmaiden is special because other than just bolstering its world with graphic content, it’s literally built on such content and the way that humanities lustful idiocies manifest themselves. The fact that the cast at the center of the film here, namely Min-hee Kim and Tae-ri Kim (no relation) are turning in some of the best work I’ve seen from this genre since Lust Caution certainly makes The Handmaiden a must see. This is truly the best foreign film I’ve seen all year (Elle comes to me next month). A film based on lustful emotion that isn’t scared to delve as deep as possible into them. Park Chan-Wook has made an excellent follow up to Stoker. The Handmaiden gets a 9.5 out of 10. I love Star Wars and I’ve never seen a bad one in theaters. I never had the experience of watching The Phantom Menace being bad or even worse Attack of the Clones in theaters. That’s an experience that I didn’t think was possible. Star Wars inspires me, The Empire Strikes Back takes me off my feet, and Return of the Jedi marvels me. What does Rogue One do? It bores me. For once on the big screen, Star Wars felt like a letdown. Not a betrayal. There’s not that much at stake here, especially with how decidedly shrug off able this entire production is, just a letdown. Star Wars is fine as gritty, but it doesn’t have to be boring. The problem here is in an almost depressingly uneventful tone. Original trilogy Star Wars might have had very little going on in it, but it was smart enough to find the balance needed to make everything feel involving and epic enough. Rouge One can’t manage to find that balance and instead feels too inconsequential to be effective. The first problem comes in the “character.” Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) is not a classic character. In fact, she only gets a few lines in her own movie. The same goes for the other characters. Diego Luna as Cassian Andor just kind of stands around and is a rebel, Alan Tudyk as the robot K-2SO, is the “comic relief” doing a less entertaining and more blunt version of the TARS schtick from Interstellar, Donnie Yen sure beats the heck out of people and says, “I am one with the Force,” a lot. These aren’t characters these are character sketches, and saying Star Wars lacks a character driven storyline is like saying Indiana Jones doesn’t fight a foreign power. The lack of it kind of allows the magic of the film to fall apart. No, that is not me saying that all the Star Wars films must be the same, or that a genuinely different tone isn’t a good thing for long established franchises. I’m saying that if you’re going to change up the tone and the structure that has worked so far, you have better actually make a sound movie, and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is not a sound piece of work. In fact, most of the movie is pretty perfunctory as the film finds itself covering just some Star Wars mythology and continuity for the first hour and a half. Nice for the fans, but doesn’t actually make for well-paced plotting. Rogue One is all over the place, at least for the first hour and a half, going from father daughter stuff, to dark empire killings, to espionage, all of which should work, but are just so boring. Forest Whitaker shows up as this familial friend of Jyn Erso's and is completely scattershot in character ruining the relationship. Many of the epic relationships that better writing could have salvaged feel weirdly stale. It is understood that since this is effectively a spy movie, everyone’s playing on the defensive, but if there’s no connection between the team, we can’t understand the individuals inside, and because the film is so darkly lit and hard to see (that said this might have been my projector. Seriously, I had some eye strain going on) there’s even trouble differentiating them from one another. This is super disheartening because if anything Star Wars was the colorful, but dirty universe not the grimy, I can’t see anything one. Speaking of things you can’t see, Gareth Edwards (not to be confused with The Raid’s Gareth Evans, a true master of the handheld cam) overuses his handheld camera to the point that the action at points doesn’t affect. I mean sure, you can see that Stormtroopers are shot and that ships are flying (If there’s one great thing here the final space battle is nuts), but there are very few just vista shots in the close quarters combat that the film is mostly built on. Another great thing that Star Wars has going for it is that wides of the characters fighting with sabers is just part of the scenery. Wides of blaster fire over precarious falls were as well, but in the effort to become “gritty” Rogue One abandons much of this for intimate combat that doesn’t feel that intimate. There’s also the matter of just how emotion drives action, and how Rogue One can’t really carry that as well as the other films. The action here is much less about the dueling ideologies between epic family members and more coincidence. Not that Star Wars isn’t coincidental, but there’s not really any other emotion than “Run” informing the depth of these characters and this combined with the shoddy action and whiplash pacing spoils Rogue One. This is all in service of saying though that Rogue One isn’t really bad, it’s just boring. There’s an active evolving badness about projects like Batman v Superman, Suicide Squad, and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and Rogue One thankfully doesn’t go into that. The actors, though not afforded characters are great (but hey Felicity Jones and Ben Mendelsohn are great in everything), the film has good effects, and overall the whole thing actually pays off, even if it doesn’t deserve to. As Rogue One closes it becomes viscerally exciting and violent as the Star Wars we know and love enters the film. Too bad that too much of the earlier minutes just leave to little to care about. Rouge One: A Star Wars Story gets a 6.5 out of 10. Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea is an exploration of the tensions in human connection and a contemplation on guilt that is so honest, yet comforting that it’s therapeutic. This is a film that makes one take all the things they’ve done in the past that still weigh hard on them and shows them hope. Shows them it’s possible to let go. That’s something we all might need. Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck) isn’t a nice person. He’s a man with an incredible weight that intentionally shuts people out and as the film starts he shuts us out too. Lonergan is smart enough to not let us connect to this man too early. We see him go to work, we see him fight, we see him, a broken man, a guilty man. And then life happens. Chandler must journey back to Manchester by the sea, the last place he wants to go, where his brother has just died and his nephew (Lucas Hedges in a breathtaking if less informed performance) needs a guardian. There’s a gripping sadness to every moment of the film as Affleck transcends his performance in Gone Baby Gone and takes himself to a whole other level of actor, even surpassing the excellent offerings of his brother, Ben. Lee and everyone else seem under the impression that they need to hide their pain and each of them is an emotional time bomb, just ready to explode. Manchester by the Sea is driven by this anticipation, and while simple as the dominoes begin to fall and the relationships of all these grieved people start to reveal themselves the results are both crushing and even a little funny. The writing Lonergan applies here is the reason for that and the way he directs dialogue scenes helps too. Characters are all consistently on the defensive, ready to yell at each other in a way that resembles just birds randomly and hysterically bickering over each other. Each fueled on by their own sad engines they yell “f” words at each other with the precision of an auction dealer and it’s amusing, yet melancholic stuff. This interrupted by moments of true droning sadness takes the funny sadness of life and the real sadness of life and contrasts them. The film's best moment comes when Lee must make a realization that he won’t get ultimately what he deserves for a wrong he did and Affleck’s pain is enough to make me flush cold. It’s all too easy as well. For all the focus and work that needs to go into the honesty of human interaction, Lonergan, and his actors seem to leave that at the door. There’s no difficulty to the ever expanding world and characters of Manchester by the Sea. Sure, there’s big emotional moments that really don’t feel like they should organically find themselves in the story, but there they do, and they beat you up as they come. Manchester by the Sea is a movie where character is king, and with such pained and wonderful beings at its center, this is certainly an important and well-versed film. Manchester by the Sea gets a 10 out of 10. Review by Stephen Tronicek You know what’s interesting about Disney’s past few movies? They can get away with taking an “original” property, warping the story structure to conform to the structure that all Disney projects must conform to, and then release this new less original, barely standing skeleton, and still pull off making an at least ok movie out of it. Moana is a example of this, just as Zootopia was earlier, but it’s also an example of why this doesn’t actually work if you don’t bring enough of your own stuff to the movie. Sure, Zootopia was effectively Chinatown for kids and about racism, but it had a living breathing world to fall back on. Moana doesn’t really have that, no matter how much perfection is to be found in the animation and the songs. If you’re wondering what movie Moana is taking its bones from, that would be Mad Max: Fury Road. There’s much worse films to steal from, but what made that movie work so well was it was saying something interesting, as well as just being a kickass action movie. Moana is actually kind of a kickass action movie at times (seriously, you wait until the Kakamora show up), since it is effectively Mad Max: Disney Road, but instead of a potent message about the fall of humanity at the hands of the patriarchy Moana has, trust in yourself and you’ll find power. One of those is fresh and other is contrived, and as far as I can understand that’s the reason why Moana doesn’t ever really get going no matter how hard it tries. And boy does it. For all the disheartening stuff that has just been said about Moana, this movie has some master animation. The character models are striking, with the titular character, and Dwayne Johnson’s Maui really sticking out as versatile characters. The songs are also really new this time, even if plot wise they are treading the normal ground. The infusion of more oceanic motifs to the music and some bolstering by Hamilton scribe Lin-Manuel Miranda, allow the score to take on the beautiful chants of the former and the pitch perfect rhythm of the latter. Voice actress Auli’i Cravalho has a very expressive voice as Moana and shines in "How Far I’ll Go", a song that holds familiar themes to other heroine songs, but is a highlight of the film. Hamilton’s Christopher Johnson also leads a catchy exposition song near the beginning that starts everything off with a bang. The vibrant colors of each character and the calming blues of the ocean are suitably distracting, but sadly it can’t get past the fact that what’s going on seems so overdone. The animation and music quality is enough to call this at least a good movie, but I’m still disappointed with this familiar film. What’s Disney going to follow up with next? Dead Ringers? I sure hope so. I give Moana a 6.5 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. |