Not all of my writing makes it to the blog. If you've found my Letterboxd account, you'll also know that I often write quick, relatively informal paragraphs on other films which I have seen. January was a particularly busy month, given the impending deadline of my Top 10 List, so in that month I saw a sizeable number of well-liked movies of 2017. Starting this year, I am going to publish these shorter reviews on here in monthly bursts. Here is everything I didn't give a full review in January of 2018:
8/10
About as formulaic as Pixar's other recent films, but doesn't quite reach the sheer subtextual power of "Inside Out," and the narrative here is a little more contrived. Still, the visual imagination here every bit as astonishing as, say, "Moana," if not more so: the endless creative details of the Land of the Dead more than make up for the relatively typical plot, and there's a real emotional specificity to how these tropes are employed, balancing Miguel's naivete with the deeper, older emotional histories of the other characters. Even the "overbearing family tradition" cliche is given a little grounding, and while some characters are mostly treated as visual gags (albeit very funny ones), at least two of the characters who join Miguel on his journey have such detailed, melancholic pasts that their journey becomes even more moving than Miguel's own. Plus, there is a very, very good dog in this.
As a side note, this also has one of the most intelligently selected titles I've seen from a Hollywood flick in some time. Rather than just pick something from the basic plot synopsis, they went for something which connects subtly to the film's emotional core. Nice job with that.
The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) (Noah Baumbach, 2017)
8/10
Super funny, with well-sketched relationships between well-sketched characters spouting sharply hilarious dialogue. Ben Stiller is at his comedic best here, playing a character whose success in business has complicated every single one of his relationships, and Adam Sandler once again shows that he can act quite well when he's actually given the opportunity. It's the nuances in these relationships which really makes this tick, though, and the film wrings both humour and pathos from the specificity of their dysfunctions. All of these people have been chewed up by the world and spat out not quite whole, and after all these years they're still working through their baggage. Would have liked to see more from the female characters, however; Jean's distance is thematically necessary, but Maureen's distance felt to me like it's concealing something we never get to see. Otherwise, aside from being vaguely familiar, this is pretty terrific.
Mudbound (Dee Rees, 2017)
7/10
The first half of this plays primarily like table-setting, gloomily establishing the grim lives of these people in increasingly exhausting fashion. It's not entirely uninteresting, and a few of these characters have some poignant complexities, but until the World War II pilots come home, it grows increasingly exhausting, and not always productively. Too many events are just unfortunate accidents, and for all that works in the first half, the characters are pretty neatly bisected into monsters and martyrs. Their varied relationships with the farm are important, but they're overwhelmingly explored in narration, which ultimately has a distancing effect. This picks up in the second half, though, when the two families' soldier sons return home from the war, and are forced to cope with the usual PTSD and survivor's guilt in addition to enduring racial issues which didn't exist overseas, culminating in a familiar but nonetheless powerful climax. First half I distantly admired but never fully embraced; second half is much more solid, but never quite achieved the rhythm I think this was going for. Still, worthwhile.
Columbus (Kogonada, 2017)
7/10
For a while this really charmed me. Its characters are offbeat but not overtly quirky, and the naturalistic performances blend nicely with the astonishingly precise aesthetic. The soft hum of nature, the often soulful conversations, and the gorgeous scenery are all very appealing, and for much of its first half, this is also lightly funny. Halfway through, however, it takes a turn for the more sombre and dramatic, and while there's still some genuinely stunning sequences, and I continued to admire its efforts to project emotional resonance onto the lovely architecture of the city, I began to find the quietude and symmetry emotionally distancing rather than poetic. This leans so heavily on its aesthetic, however, that I wonder if a second viewing might unlock the key to this resonating; in that regard, file it alongside "The Fits."
Nocturama (Bertrand Bonello, 2017)
7/10
On the surface level, I got a lot of enjoyment out of 3/4 of this, but I struggled to discern a purpose. Maybe it's about how capital and the state will always work to keep you down, or maybe just how teenagers are hedonistic and attention-hungry and don't understand the consequences of their actions; I think it's somewhere in-between, but either way, the way this refuses to actually reveal these kids' motivation makes those themes overly abstract, and the ending is just unproductively dour, repetitive, and preachy. I got no sense that the hedonism was supposed to be ironic on some sort of ideological level, mainly because the film never. tells. us. their. ideology, but if that is what it's supposed to be about, then I have to say... who cares? I kinda liked seeing these disenfranchised kids finally seizing all the luxury which had been denied to them; if this really did glamorize terrorism, it might actually work better as pure fantasy. Nonetheless, the first hour is incredibly tense, providing a nonlinear, context-free, almost dialogue-free flurry of motion which abstracts a thriller template down to its visual essentials all while developing a few character relationships and potent shades of doubt. The second act, about up to the hour thirty mark, is one scene of formally-assured, joyous bliss after another, with a decent radical subplot involving a homeless couple and only the occasional scene of doubt. Ultimately though it all gets a little repetitive, and the opacity of the narrative really doesn't help matters even before the dreary climax comes about. Plus, the way terrorism is depicted in this strikes me as a little phony. This does not take place in the real world, but even as a fantasy it repeatedly tries to undercut itself. Still, formally astonishing, and there's a lot of surface pleasures to be found here.
Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2017)
7/10
It's very pretty and aesthetically entrancing, but otherwise I think I just didn't get it. There's something here that apparently everyone but me has picked up on, and I'm not quite sure what it is. From what I actually can figure, I'll comment that I struggled to get behind the central relationship, as these people's lifestyles seem just so diametrically opposed that I'm not clear on how they coexist, so while that ending really does change everything - as all great twists should - I couldn't really buy the implied universal theme. Which, again, might just come back to me "not getting it." Nonetheless, this touches lightly on a lot of interesting subject matter, and that aesthetic is just so precise and masterful that I was rarely bored. It's certainly interesting.
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