Pop quiz, hotshots

ONLY THE BRAVE

2017

Directed by Joseph Kosinki

Written by Ken Nolan and Eric Warren Singer (based on the GQ article "No Exit" by Sean Flynn)

Spoilers: moderate

Holla day

TROLLS HOLIDAY

2017

Directed by Joel Crawford

Written by Josh Bycel and Jonathan Fener

Spoiler alert: moderate

King Week: Total eclipse of the heart

In which Halloween-related marathoning has resulted in reviews of several spooky movies from the mind of the world's favorite horror author, Stephen King.

GERALD'S GAME

2017

Directed by Mike Flanagan

Written by Jeff Howard and Mike Flanagan (based on the novel by Stephen King)

Spoiler alert: moderate

Go ninja go ninja go

THE LEGO NINJAGO MOVIE

When one calls it "the worst LEGO movie," one's not bound to follow that assertion up with "but it's still pretty great!", or anything like that.  In fact, it fails often and severely enough to be called an actual disappointment; but The LEGO Ninjago Movie isn't actually bad, either, and on the rarest occasion manages some of the coolest stuff the franchise has ever done.

2017
Directed by Paul Fisher, Charlie Bean, and Bob Logan

Written by at least nine whole human beings, wow

Spoiler alert: mild

2017: Movies on the Hell Planet

Though it's obviously unacceptably late in the publication—one's self- and society-imposed deadline for the thing being, at the latest, the day of the Oscars, which passed by, let's see, over two damn months ago—I nevertheless did still have a top ten for last year.  The irony is that I didn't really need the extra time I gave myself!  It hasn't changed since that day, even though I've caught up on over a dozen movies that should (allow me to emphasize the modal language there, should) have been contenders, but usually didn't even really come all that close.  2017 was not a tremendously lousy film year, but it was more solid than good, and it was also one of those years where practically everything great arrived early, leaving you with little but disappointment in the winter.  This is true of life, generally.  I suppose it's also true of many Oscar seasons, though 2017's was remarkably wide-open, rather few of our Best Picture nominees appearing to actually belong there even on the Academy's own narrow terms (indeed, the winner arguably belonged there least of all, so at least 2017's Academy-sanctioned best film was a weird one).  In any event, I can't complain too hard: this is a top ten list that doesn't have any eight-out-of-tens on it, even if the number of ten-out-of-tens seems light, and even if I have some cause to question at least three of my nine-out-of-tens (surprise, surprise, they're the Marvel movies, as well as the artsiest-fartiest movie on the list, which I respected more before I knew how thoroughly it was indebted to Don Hertzfeldt's Such a Beautiful Day, a gen-u-ine masterpiece).  I even question one of my ten-out-of-tens, a little, but I cannot deny the power of that third-placed ten's theatrical presentation; I hate theaters, a lot, and am ready for them to die; but damned if they're not still good for something, after all.

Well, anyway, here's ten movies that are certainly noteworthy, if only occasionally of gemstone-quality.  But first some honorable mentions: for Albert Serra's The Death of Louis XIV, which if I were more of a snob would definitely be on here, because I truly did love it despite it doing very little that movies "ought" to do; and for David Leitch's Atomic Blonde, which has one of the best-choregraphed action sequences in history, maybe the best ever in an American film, and isn't ever boring otherwise (though it is almost always befuddling); and for Darren Aronofsky's mother! and Terrence Malick's Song to Song, which, if the list had been even slightly less good (or if I were less of an easy lay for superheroics), might have shared the no. 10 spot as two very different (but each very pompous) allegorical takes on the same basic Bible story; and for Matt Reeves's War For the Planet of the Apes, the third best Planet of Apes film (which sounds backhanded, but absolutely isn't); and for Steven Spielberg's The Post, yet another Spielberg Chronicle, but this time, one that has no business whatsoever being as good in the telling as it is; and for Andy Muschietti's It, a picture with fundamental, insuperable flaws as a horror film, but which is remarkable nonetheless as such a great triumph of aesthetic and narrative nostalgia; and, finally, for Ken Branagh's Murder On the Orient Express, about which I have recently gushed long enough.

Oh well, no turning back now, even if this was the year I realized I'm probably overrating Marvel movies generally.  (It was the year, after all, of Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 2, a movie that goes tediously out of its way to set up its most memorable scene with one that franchise's endless diegetic soundtrack choices, then... plays a remix of Jay and the Americans' "Come a Little Bit Closer"?  I mean, I even like the remix more, but... Mr. Gunn.  James.  Jim.  Jimmy.  We figured out that audiences will accept background music that the characters can't hear, like, ninety years ago.  It would honestly be okay if you did that more often.  This message also applies to David Leitch.)

10. SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING (9/10)
"Best Peter Parker" equals "best Spider-Man movie," and since "Tom Holland" equals "best Peter Parker"... well, I'll let you do the math.  Everything else is just gilding the lily (Michael Keaton's Vulture; the great supporting cast; some of this particular franchise's best action sequences; superhero cinema's best super-chores montage since Superman, period), or more-or-less pleasant noise (Iron Dad).  I don't care if I am overrating them.  Good job, Jon Watts.  Good job, Marvel.

9. LOVING VINCENT (9/10)
By far the most idiosyncratic film on this list, or perhaps of all 2017, Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman's long-time-in-the-coming Loving Vincent tells a story that does not necessarily recommend itself to be told, but it tells it in a revolutionary way, with literal moving paintings, and I really doubt any film made last year was more immediately arresting in the strangeness of its beauty.  Plus I got to put a movie on my top ten that features, as one half of its directing team, a woman.  And that probably shouldn't have taken five years, but I blame Hollywood sexism, rather than myself.

8. THOR: RAGNAROK (9/10)
Possibly the funniest Marvel movie, its second-best-looking, and its first-best-sounding, this is another hit to add to Taika Waititi's list, one of the few directors who've been able to actually cross that line between their independent and obviously-more-passionate work (Hunt for the fuckin' Wilderpeople, guys) and their blockbuster aspirations and make it work without losing themselves in the process.  Still, for some reason, the movie Ragnarok reminds me the most of is Big Trouble In Little China, another shaggy story about a blonde braggart going on a magic quest and finding himself way out of his depth.  Except Ragnarok is way, way bigger, for better and for worse: there've been movies that have wasted Cate Blanchett more thoroughly than this one does, but I can't name even one that's been this blithe about it.

7. A GHOST STORY (9/10)
As noted, David Lowery's look at grief and life and all is basically an expanded (yet far more fettered) version of the last act of It's Such a Beautiful Day... but that doesn't mean it's not excellent on its own terms, and A Ghost Story sees Lowery taking on a far less whimsical and batshit tone, in service of his severe and slow and silent art film, than Hertzfeld does in his wacky one-man animation projects.  So it is melancholy, and punishing in its vision of the depths of time, and it is great.  You know what else was great?  Pete's Dragon, 2016's best E.T.  (Even better than Spielberg's 2016 E.T., The BFG, in fact.)  This Lowery guy turns out to be pretty flexible, even if I'm not sure he can do anything but remake other people's movies, though maybe I should actually see Ain't Them Bodies Saints before I call it Badlands 2: The Quickening.  But that's what I heard!

6. IN THIS CORNER OF THE WORLD (9/10)
A slice-of-life period drama that could only be better than it is if it were more; and, guess what?  That's exactly what Sunao Katabuchi's doing, adding new scenes for a new edition of his film.  Combining great, sometimes-even-frivolous artistry with high-test historical horror, Corner is almost as good as animation got last year.

5. JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 2 (9/10)
Chad Stahleski returns to the character he helped create with an even more intense exploration of the emptiness at the heart of grief than the first time, and John Wick: Chapter 2 is one of film's best takes on the trials of Orpheus.  That it is also 2017's best pure action film... well, that's why it's on this list, anyway.

4. KONG: SKULL ISLAND (9/10)
Jordan Vogt-Roberts' Kong: Skull Island (another example of an indy darling crossing over into the popcorn-littered arena) should not be on a top ten list, I hear you say.  But why?  It was the most efferevescently, stupidly pleasurable first watch I had all last year, full of great monster designs and even more full of crazed, playful nonsense.  It's like Joe Dante willed himself out of the director's graveyard and made Warner Bros. give him a mountain of money, just one more time, to see what would happen, and this time it really, really worked.

3. DUNKIRK (10/10)
A strikingly collectivist (almost to the point of inhuman) take on the war machine called Great Britain, Dunkirk is an experience more than a film as such, but it is a shattering, exhausting one... but not so shattering or exhausting that you cannot feel the pangs of awe at the grandeur of a Spitfire, or the heroism of the little captains of the thousand little boats that saved the Expeditionary Force at Dunkerque.  Truly breathtaking cinema, and Chris Nolan is to be commended, once again.

2. BLADE RUNNER 2049 (10/10)
This film is the 21st century as we know it, reflecting our own uselessness, replaceability, and reproducibility right back at us.  It knows we're fake, and it knows we prefer it this way.  It knows we can't do a damn thing to change the world, and barely do anything that so much as affects anyone else.  It is blockbuster filmmaking as cold, sad, and clammy, and it's explicitly about dying alone.  (Did you know "Joi" is an acronym for a genre of pornography?  It stands for "jerk off instructions," and its signal quality is a simulation of intimacy that acknowledges that you've little choice but to take matters into your own hands.)  It is endlessly gorgeous, even so, and it finally got Roger Deakins his Oscar.  That's important.  It's also important that Denis Villeneuve finally made a movie worthy of his innate talents.  I had lost hope on that, too.  So maybe there is a little hope, after all.  And you know, I just might like it more than the original.  Fuck you; I might.

1. YOUR NAME. (10/10)
It's two sci-fi movies smashed together, but what Makoto Shinkai's movie really is, is the best romance of 2017.  If you said it was the best ever, I'd believe you believed it, and you might even be right.  I don't need to take your word for it.  I could ask one of the theatergoers in Japan who watched this five, ten, twenty times, so many times Shinkai had to tell them to stop.  I get it, now: there is something addictive about it.  Maybe it's just that it's 2017's most outright beautiful animated film, and it's most beautiful film, generally.  Maybe it's that it captures love and loss and longing better than anything I can think of offhand.  Maybe it's that if you keep watching it, all the enormous plot holes get filled in with your affection for everything the movie gets so incredibly right about doomed young love and the glimmers of hope it engenders surviving even a world designed to destroy them.  Maybe it's because it makes me cry like flipping a switch.  And it's not even Shinkai's best film ever?  Get out of town.  Well, it's his best feature, anyway.  His only genuinely good feature, also, yes; but, hey, a masterpiece is a masterpiece, dude.

God and Hercule Poirot

MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS

2017's premier mustache ride.

2017

Directed by Kenneth Branagh

Written by Michael Green (based on the novel by Agatha Christie)

With Kenneth Branagh (Hercule Poirot), and a number of other actors, great and small, all of them smaller than Sir Ken

Spoiler alert: mild as I can make it

Reviews from gulag: But Batman and Robin will never die!

And now, the rest: The Big Sick, Lady Bird, Power Rangers, The Greatest Showman, The Book of Henry, and Good Time.

It is not correct to call it "Michael Showalter's The Big Sick," and if you've seen it, you know why, inasmuch as it was barely directed in the first place, and it really does show: practically the only thing I remember at all about the look of thing (beyond "extreme bland semi-competence," anyway) is a match-cut montage of its protagonist driving an Uber, which, you know, is fine, I guess, and the whole movie looks exactly like what a TV show on the same subject might have looked like at the dawn of HD.  We don't expect much from our comedies these days, and with that bigotry of low expectations firmly in place, Emily V. Gordon and Kumail Nanjiani's The Big Sick made a few waves back in the summer of 2017, when it was finally given its wide release, hot off the campaign of well-intentioned (and at least partly-deserved) hype that came out of its showings at Sundance in the January of that year.

There is, of course, plenty of bigotry to go around in The Big Sick, which tells the semi-fictionalized tale of how the sort-of interracial couple of Emily (Zoe Kazan) and would-be stand-up comedian Kumail (himself) hooked up after a bout of cute heckling and eventually got married, and also how, in between those two events, Emily keeled over and almost died after breaking up with Kumail due to his family's disapproval of either her whiteness, her heathenism, or possibly simply her non-Pakistaniness, but Nanjiani wound up dragooned into exercising a power of attorney over Emily anyway, at least for the limited purpose of inducing a medically-necessary coma when she got sick.  The big sick, as it were, and with her illness living up to that grandiose title, Emily Gordon winds up very much a tertiary character in her own romance, albeit one whose presence does continue to loom over the action even while she's doing absolutely nothing (though if you forgot, for example, what Emily's goals in life were before eating her coma sandwich, I think you could be forgiven).  Anyway: calling it a Kumail Nanjiani biopic that happens to co-star Gordon's parents (Holly Hunter and Ray Romano) is probably a little more accurate than "a romantic dramedy about Kumail and Emily."

It isn't true that I have nothing against The Big Sick, but I do like it, because there is, after all, plenty to like about it.  The most obvious points of recommendation, beyond a doubt, are the Gordons, demonstrating for the billionth time that Hunter is an excellent actress, even if the role demands very little of her beyond "be a gruff but still-loveable small woman," and demonstrating for possibly the first time that Romano can invest a role with genuine heart; but that's unfair to Nanjiani, who carries the romantic and dramatic weights of his role reasonably well, perhaps even shockingly well, given that that apparently really is the only voice he has, and it was not well-designed for roles beyond his niche of the weird mostly-a-straight-man on Silicon Valley.  And there are a great many little bits here and there that are fun; if not a romantic comedy as such, the movie is still a comedy-comedy, and easily carves out some small place in the genre.  The best stuff, though, is funny only as a second-order effect: it's how scathing Nanjiani and Gordon's screenplay can be when presenting Kumail's stand-up comedian community, basically by simply showing it as I presume it was—absolutely terrible.  The highlight of the movie as a comedy is arguably Kumail's one-man show about the history of Pakistan, which he thinks is funny; the highlight of the movie as a drama is when he breaks down on stage and just starts monologuing through tears at his situation.  But there are about as many actual laughs in both.  This isn't Don't Think Twice, and The Big Sick doesn't have a lot of illusions about the general quality of Nanjiani's profession.

On the other hand, the whole pursuit feels slightly off, doesn't it?  Though it registers only subliminally, the fact that Nanjiani is playing himself as he was over a decade in the past (while his and Gordon's screenplay unwisely updates their story to the present) never quite stops getting in the way of a series of events that makes the most sense to have happened to a guy who was in his mid-twenties, rather than in his late thirties.  Probably by accident, then, you find yourself having to agree with Kumail's dad (Anupam Kher), that maybe this life just ain't for him.

Not that you find yourself agreeing with him, or his wife (Adeel Akhtar), very often, and this is what I actually do have against The Big Sick, which is how incredibly easy it lets off the Nanjiani clan for their egregious fucking racism.  The Big Sick really, really wants to be a feel-good movie about overcoming your upbringing (as well as the broader racism of American society at large), and it certainly has those elements (though this is another reason why Nanjiani's actual age sticks in the craw, of course: a man of nearly 40 years having to rationalize his way around his parents' bigotry is exponentially more pathetic than a man in his twenties doing so, and it's still laughably pathetic even then).  But it has no coherent critique of the family who spends a third of the movie's screentime trying to ensure a literal purity of blood, whereas Emily just flips like a switch when the movie needs her to (that is, at the last possible second, in a fairly solid romantic scene that really, really emphasizes just how much this screenplay is about Kumail), and while we can impose the real world onto The Big Sick if we want—it seems clear that whatever problems Nanjiani had in 2006, they were resolved to Gordon's satisfaction—Kumail the Character in This Movie simply isn't that convincing when he pleads that his past behavior shall not be repeated, because when he repudiates his family, he does it in the most bizarrely subordinate way possible, it sticks for about five whole minutes, and I sure as hell didn't see them change in the meantime.

Score: 6/10

Reviews from gulag: And with strange aeons, even death may die

Following on from yesterday, these reviews: Mary and the Witch's Flower and Woodshock.

I have a confession to make, which doesn't make me proud, and kind of puts paid to any pretensions I ever had to being an animation nerd: I'm not really sure I love Hayao Miyazaki.  I know I'm supposed to love Miyazaki, which is why I own a half-dozen Miyazaki films, all of which I... like okay, I guess.  I obviously respect Miyazaki and his legacy and all that.  Yet it is a legacy that casts a long, long shadow over Japanese animation, and my ambivalence toward Miyazaki's style is compounded when his successors in the field have tried to copy it.  Hence The Children Who Chase Lost Voices, one of the two big feature-length missteps (alongside The Place Promised In Our Early Days) that Makoto Shinkai made on his way to making his pair of mature masterworks, The Garden of Words and Your Name.

Hence also, and far more directly, Mary and the Witch's Flower, directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi, formerly of The Secret World of Arietty and When Marnie Was There and therefore formerly of Studio Ghibli itself, back before it was put on standby due to Miyazaki's (now-abortive) retirement.  A little bit of background, then: Mary was the first release of Studio Ponoc, the result of a sort of semi-accidental Don Bluthing of Studio Ghibli during Miyazaki's retirement/sabbatical, and somewhat consciously designed to be Ghibli's rightful heir.  This explains the poaching of Yonebayashi, and it explains also the film Yonebayashi made for them, which is kind of like someone's idea of Studio Ghibli, turned up to eleven in some respects and to zero in others, and which is also at least somewhat terrible.

The story (based on The Little Broomstick by Mary Stewart) concerns young ginger Mary (huh) (Hana Sugisaki), an English girl sent off to spend a summer in the countryside with her great aunt Charlotte (Shinobu Otake); Mary is bored totally out of her gourd, of course, and we in the audience certainly sympathize, given that Mary spends an awful, awful lot of time stewing in its heroine's lazy, hazy forced-vacation.  On the other hand, Mary's shenanigans on the estate and in town, where she meets a colorful local jerk named Peter (Ryunosuke Kamiki) are cutesy-fun, and we know this is eventually going somewhere, thanks to the action-packed prologue that involved a broom-riding witch (another redhead) escaping an evil fortress and not looking back (so far as I recall) as it explodes.  The call to adventure comes when Mary follows a preternaturally-intelligent cat deep into the woods, where she finds a certain magical flower, identified later as a "fly-by-night," and also the broomstick left behind ages ago by the unnamed witch of the prologue.  (This actually takes two whole scenes, which is perhaps not ideal.)  At this point, she gets flower gunk on her new broom, and lo, it lifts her aloft to a world of magic, specifically the Endor College for Witches.

If this is a faithful adaptation of Stewart's 1971 novel, then I obviously cannot blame Stewart, but the reason Mary exists is, pretty clearly, because Harry Potter existed first; and, fittingly enough, you can even spot the little bespectacled warlock's doppelganger in a (somewhat forced and cloying) insert shot.  In any event, I doubt it's supposed to be Tim Hunter.  Mary takes a more circuitous route for its hero's journey,  because Mary is effectively a muggle on roids due to the fly-by-night, and while this is possibly more interesting on paper, it naturally ends up in the same basic place as Harry's more frivolous early dungeon-crawls; and the short of it is that Mary grifts her way into the school with her flower-buffed powers, which leads to something like the expected outcome, though in the process Mary also becomes aware that the school is a front for a sinister plot that only she can foil, led by two of Endor's distinguished faculty, headmistress Madame Mumblechook (Yuki Amami), and might-as-well-be-called-their-defense-against-the-dark-arts-instructor, Doctor Dee (Fumiyo Kohinata), an erudite reference I have chosen to be rather annoyed by.

So we have many of the characteristic Ghiblisms, starting from the very basic, that could probably refer to just about any fantastic fiction (a world of weird magic entered by a human child—it's more Ghibli if it's a girl, though), to the more specific (a caricatured old woman serving as the chief antagonist), to the stylization of the animated form itself, which is effectively indistinguishable from a turn-of-the-century Ghibli piece and which is probably the reason I find so many Miyazaki movies off-putting in the first place, though at least in Spirited Away, it was clearly on purpose.  Yonebayashi was a key animator on that, and it shows: Mary is awash in the squiggling, quivering, Kid's Kronenberg design ethos that gives the film's creatures and, er, magical fluids a strangely organic, even bizarrely sexual tinge, and I'll pretty much never enjoy that in a kid's entertainment, especially not one that's just way too pleased to revolve around the mechanic of a wee cartoon girl spilling blue lube out of a flower and having a hard shaft of wood get bigger in her hands before she shoves it between her legs.  I'd like to believe this is my hang-up, but I don't know any other way to read the images Yonebayashi's chosen—if there is a credible reason why a witch's broom must become tumescent, I'd like to hear it—but, sure, this sort of thing puts Mary quite squarely within the grand Ghibli tradition of Catbusses, horrifyingly-mutated forest gods, and whatever the fuck was going on in Yubaba's bathhouse.

The difference is that Mary, being a knockoff, does it without the quality of Miyazaki's imagination, or the sheer quantity of it. (Or of J.K. Rowling's imagination, for that matter.)  And it lacks, too, any of the deeper sense of mystical weirdness that Miyazaki's worlds always conjured, whatever other objections I might have had to their creation.  (Ironically, then, I kind of wish it were actually more of a Potter rip-off than it already is: by far—by far—the most enjoyable part of the film is the sequence where Mary bashes her way through her first day of "classes," simply because this is the only sequence that appears to be especially concerned with the Endor College as an institution, and hence packs the screen with practically all of Mary's cool visual and conceptual notions.  Plus, Harry Potter And the Secret of the 103 Minute Runtime would be, by default, my favorite Harry Potter movie of all.)

Instead of that, sadly, Mary gets a couple of lame villains with an evil plot barely worthy of a forgotten Saturday morning cartoon (not very Ghibli at all, that), and then takes its sweet time even getting to its several foregone conclusions—if you haven't figured out the mystery of the Prologue Witch about an hour before the film solves it for you, I don't know what to tell you, and when Mary finally twists, it chooses the least interesting way to actually go about doing it.  What you get in the end is a movie that's not really even interestingly abrasive in the way Ghibli fantasies often were, because it's too damn dull to be anything, really: nothing but a technically well-done rendition of character and creature designs that feel twenty or thirty years out-of-date, run through a plot dependent upon mostly-boring (and mostly-purloined) ideas, with no emotional hook that I noticed, and which stalls out almost the second it starts (which, again, is a good thirty minutes into the movie).  2017 was a pretty great year for anime, all told, but not because of this.

Score: 4/10

Reviews from gulag: That is not dead which can eternal lie

Admittedly, the past few months have been a little spotty: between work and personal obligations, and an unfortunately-mania-free depressive episode that feels like it's gone on for about four straight months, I've let Kinemalogue lapse into a weekly (bordering on biweekly) update schedule.  In the process, I missed the chance to talk about a bunch of stuff from last year back when it was still relevant.  Hence, it's mostly in the spirit of spring cleaning that I dump this first batch of short reviews for a bunch of movies that you probably only vaguely remember by now, and which I found so terribly interesting I didn't even bother writing about them at the time.  Am I selling it?  Anyway, today's reviews are for Marjorie Prime and Call Me By Your Name.

First up is by some significant margin the best of the items in the basket of unattended films I'll be dealing with over today and tomorrow, and the only reason I don't say "the best film from last year that I saw but didn't review, period," is because while I will eventually have to write about T2 Trainspotting (or, as it might have been titled by non-assholes, Trainspotting 2), I expect to do that in the context of a Danny Boyle retrospective, rather than in a lumpen review of various film-shaped objects.  Therefore, this one, which alone amongst this group actually did deserve something more thoughtful, is Michael Almereyda's adaptation of Jordan Harrison's play, Marjorie Prime.

The idea of a sci-fi play, by itself, already strikes me as somehow incongruous, even though there's clearly nothing but the silliest possible prejudice underlying this reaction—the genre of science fiction that deals with the offloading of human labor (physical or otherwise) onto artificially intelligent servants (fully-sapient or otherwise) began with a play, after all, namely Karel Capek's R.U.R., which—amongst other things—exported the very word "robot" into the English language.  Prime nobly extends that lineage one more time, finding a new task for our silicon friends to perform, and a stranger one: Prime posits the existence of an artificially-intelligent adaptive program, designed to keep the elderly company and help them retain their grip on their memories as they head, inexorably, toward the void.

Such a program, called a "Prime" (which seems ass-backwards, but I can accept this fictional branding of the software as an intentional irony) has been deployed to assist Marjorie (Lois Smith) as she fights her losing fight with Alzheimer's.  To this end, Marjorie and Marjorie's helpful, almost over-supportive son-in-law Jon (Tim Robbins) have set up the thing's holographic interface to resemble and sound exactly like Marjorie's dead husband Walter (Jon Hamm) as he was, around four decades earlier.  Marjorie's daughter and Jon's wife, Tess, is distressed by the whole situation, and (perhaps inevitably) can only look upon the automaton with the face of her late father with suspicion and a little bit of disgust; but she acquiesces anyway, because there is little else that even seems like it could help.  This "Walter Prime" tells Marjorie stories, all day, every day, intended to remind her of her past; but what's obvious from the very start is that Walter Prime can only know what he's been told by the living, and, indeed, the first conversation we find ourselves privy to between Marjorie and Walter is the key to unlocking what Marjorie Prime is actually interested in, when Walter spins the yarn about their very first date together, and Marjorie says it would be better if they'd gone to see a repertory showing of Casablanca.  (At this point, I forget exactly what it was they actually saw, so let's say it was, oh, Billy Madison.)

It is something of a miracle that Marjorie Prime manages to escape the heavy gravity of the basic Black Mirror premise which it resembles, and (more to the point) even the Black Mirror episodes which it specifically resembles.  (Take your pick, because it specifically resembles two of 'em, namely "White Christmas," which is also about Jon Hamm's ghost in a machine, or "Be Right Back," which is the one where Domnhall Gleeson plays a robot designed to replace a departed loved one, and who is therefore given license to act with even more awkwardly-miscalibrated emotion than he usually does.  Anyhow, they even use a pullquote on the poster that mentions Black Mirror, and ewww, that is some straight-up pandering, bandwagoning shit right there.  But damned if it isn't fair.)

But for starters, then, it's a miracle that Marjorie Prime itself never feels too much like a TV show—or like a filmed stageplay—despite an easy majority of the film taking place in a single location, and the vast majority of it taking place indoors (with the entirety of the action in any of its locations amounting to people talking to and often just at each other, or even effectively talking to themselves).  The very worst thing you can say about its aesthetic is that it sometimes trips over itself to be more dynamic, with tracking shots around the house that don't really justify themselves beyond proving the thesis, "this is an actual house and not a set."  But even these moments are relatively rare, and not especially distracting; the general impression is that of a very staid chamber drama, but an immaculately precise one.

As this is somewhat the case for many Black Mirror episodes, as well, the miracle that truly distinguishes Marjorie Prime (besides, I guess, the fact that it justifies its runtime, something only about half of Black Mirror's episodes actually do) occurs because Marjorie Prime is not pantswettingly terrified of the technology it imagines.  In fact, it doesn't even really care about the technology that much.  Instead, it finds it an interesting tool, and a starting-point for what it really wants to be, which is an examination of human families (which are rarely fully functional in the movies, and this is no exception) and, even more ambitiously, human memory itself.  It's a faculty that's awfully fallible in the first place—as the screenplay dutifully explains, what we remember is not any event itself, but the last time we remembered it, a copy of a copy at best—and one that's much more ephemeral than we'd like to admit.

In the process, it makes for a terribly upsetting depiction of a family dealing with Alzheimer's, essentially by default—you likely already noticed that the cast list is almost unfairly stacked in the movie's favor.  Smith (reprising her role from the stage, and, at 87, legitimately old as fuck) obviously steals the show.  But the show does not end with her, and Robbins and Davis each get at least one hunk of red meat of their own to chew on here.  Hamm, on the other hand, might not; but Hamm, in giving a semblance of life (though no more) to the first and most often-seen of the several not-all-that-intelligent artificial intelligences we meet, is also possibly giving Marjorie Prime its single most technically adept and interesting performance, managing the very subtle, philosopher-bait distinction between "computer you can talk to" and "person" with outright uncanny ease.  At this point, I'm on the edge of spoiling things; so let's just say that, in its final coda, it fully embraces its sci-fi conceit at last, in a way that is at once whimsical, darkly hilarious, and (I think) at least as insightful in regards to the humans that it's always been about as it is to the dumb ol' AIs it wasn't.

Score:  8/10

Stupid Lives Matter

THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI

Enormously strong central performances and occasional bouts of directorial excellence manage to weld together a bunch of mismatched parts into something that sometimes almost feels like a coherent whole; and, as easy as it is to talk shit about everything wrong about it (for there's a lot, and, boy, is it easy to talk about it), it's not possible to quite deny its finer qualities, either.

2017

Written and directed by Martin McDonagh

With Frances McDormand (Mildred Hayes), Caleb Landry Jones (Red Welby), Abbie Cornish (Anne Willoughby), Sam Rockwell (Officer Jason Dixon), and Woody Harrelson (Chief Bill Willoughby)

Spoiler alert: moderate

Steven Spielberg, part XXXVII: All the controlling shareholder's men

THE POST

Gasp!  Will the Washington Post publish the Pentagon Papers in the face of hostile governmental action?  I can't wait to find out!  (So, perhaps you can see that it's at least somewhat despite itself that The Post winds up being the best true story Spielberg's put to film in over a decade.)

2017

Directed by Steven Spielberg

Written by Liz Hannah and Josh Singer

With Tom Hanks (Ben Bradlee), Meryl Streep (Kay Graham), and others, many, many, many others, sheesh

Spoiler alert: they saved democracy?

You blew it up

GODZILLA: PLANET OF THE MONSTERS

You want to say, "nice try," but shouldn't you have something better to say about something you liked than that?

2017

Directed by Kobun Shizuno and Hiroyuki Seshita

Written by Gen Urobuchi

With Mamoru Miyano (Capt. Haruo Sakaki), Takahiro Sakurai (Metphies), Junichi Suwabe (Mulu Elu Galu Gu), Tomokazu Sugita (Martin Lazarri), Daisuke Ono (Maj. Elliot Leland), and Kana Hanazawa (Yuko Tani)

Spoiler alert: moderate

Reviews from gulag: I think I'd rather just watch a movie that was about (choose one) [ice skating/veterinary school/Austin Powers]

As we catch up with the last year, we turn our gaze to I, Tonya, Raw, and Kingsman: The Golden Circle.  One of these movies was worth a shit, I guess.

I, TONYA (Craig Gillespie, 2017)

I, Tonya is so much less than the sum of its parts that it's almost dysfunctional, its narrative and tone constantly pulling it in a half-dozen different directions.  And so, one minute, it really is a proper sports movie, pretending like the one thing it cared about all along was capturing Tonya Harding's (Margot Robbie's) unique combination of resentful blue-collar ambition, enormous athleticism, and idiosyncratic artistry, finding each of these things to be inextricable from her prodigious achievements as the bad girl of 90s' figure skating, especially when she becomes the very first American woman to pull off a daunting triple axel in competition (and, indeed, she remains one of only seven women, worldwide, to have ever done so).

Then in the very next minute, it becomes a nasty, awkward vaudeville show about the domestic abuse which Tonya famously suffered at the hands of her redneck then-husband, Jeff Gillooly, and, less-famously, her mother, LaVona (Allison Janney).  Then the minute after that, it gives up even the slightest pretense of trying to hide its cartoonish predelictions beneath its biographical drama, whereupon the story shifts to the hyper-Coen exploits of its supporting players, focusing particularly upon the high-test delusions of Shawn Eckhart (Paul Walter Hauser), as he and his team of "operatives" prepare to unleash a singularly poorly-planned hit on Harding's friend and rival Nancy Kerrigan (Caitlin Carver) during the run-up to the 1994 Winter Olympics.  And then (for a few seconds, anyway), it's on to its underdeveloped critique of figure skating as a prestige pastime for the wealthy.  And finally, it's right back to where it started, doing what I suppose it wants to do most of all, which is to be a satire of the media, and an examination of how sensationalist media narratives are created; and this, of course, is by far the most boring thing about it, since I don't reckon that anybody alive in 2018 needs to be reminded that the 24/7 news cycle is a force for evil.

If you get the impression that I, Tonya is mired in cruel ironic distance and winking self-awareness, which together tend to ruin it as anything but a pointy object which director Craig Gillespie and screenwriter Steven Rogers can use to poke at American culture in their desperate attempt to vitalize a biopic, I'm afraid you might be right.  The cleverest way it situates itself in its decade, therefore—even if it's not entirely intentional—isn't its costume design, or its soundtrack, or even its attempted-throwback cinematography (though I do like its grit).  Rather, it's simply I, Tonya's embrace of the quintessentially GenX idea that "being cool" is exactly the same thing as "being sarcastically detached."

The hardest thing to grapple with about the film is the odd structure that enforces this defining  cynicism, cobbled together, as it turns out, from 2010s-vintage interviews with the principals, which send Tonya, et al, on a fourth-wall-breaking trip down memory lane.  On the one hand, it does vitalize her story: scarcely a scene goes by without Robbie turning to the camera and layering whatever we've seen with Tonya's commentary, either to deny it ever happened, or say it happened differently, or to explain why something that did happen was significant to her.  On the other hand, this isn't fucking Rashomon, and the very, very minor differences between Tonya's story and Jeff's story and LaVona's story don't actually make for much of a case of compelling ambiguity.

Oh, I'm being unfair.  There is one thing that I, Tonya's capable of doing consistently, and that's treating its assembly of white trash like they were animals in a zoo: it allows Tonya to be human only begrudgingly, and mainly because her story can't not be about her life, and because Margot Robbie came to play regardless of the film's own wishes; it only fails to eradicate Jeff Gillooly's humanity completely because Sebastian Stan sneaks around the screenplay to give the man a semblance of credibility, though his character might still mainly be little more than your basic archetype of "the weak-willed wife-beater"; and nobody else is human at all, abandoned in the several one-note joke roles that the film is completely disinterested in interrogating beyond their capacity for ugly, off-center comedy.  (In between her long bouts of profanity, abuse, and parrot-wrangling, Gillespie is presumably of the opinion that Allison Janney does all the character work she needs to in his lingering close-ups of LaVona's face as she watches Tonya on TV.  He is extremely wrong about this, and for all the merits of Janney's commitment-to-the-bit, there's absolutely nothing about her the film wants you to actually take seriously, and you certainly don't.  Instead, I, Tonya banks mostly upon its spurious verisimilitude, distracting you with a humorous recreation of the real LaVona's admittedly-disastrous haircut.)  These people probably are precisely as ludicrous as they appear.  The problem is that I, Tonya doesn't even remotely care why.

It's unnecessarily shallow in virtually every single respect, then—from its nearly nonexistent probing of Tonya's love for her sport, to the penultimate moment that obnoxiously calls the audience out for being interested in her tale—and it's shallow to the extent that it does an active disservice to Robbie's performance, which is terribly great, and which does more to tell you about Tonya's drives and heartache than everything else in the movie combined—despite the fact that I, Tonya is at least as interested with making you titter (ironically, natch) at the fact that Robbie barely resembles Harding and, in fealty to 90s couture, has been savaged from head to chin by the makeup and hair department.  It's maybe even more interested in the fact that Robbie is visibly too much of an adult in command of her own being to play this 23 year-old womanchild naturalistically.  (Yet it does this, sadly enough, without actually committing to the essential slapstick of its single most-visual gag: sure, it's funny that Robbie plays Harding as a 15 year-old.  It follows that it would be even funnier if she'd played her as a 4 year-old, too—and it would've done that crucial little bit more to remind us of the immaturity of Tonya's character as a 23 year-old, and confirm to us the intention behind the silly artifice, and underscore the embittered-yet-unbowed retrospection that is, at the end of the day, the shriveled black heart pumping I, Tonya's cold, curdled blood.)

It does have other compensations beyond Robbie (and, to a lesser extent, Stan).  It is, despite my grousing, still funny.  And when it wants to be, it's a terrifically kinetic study of figure skating as a physical act.  If Gillespie leans upon this aspect of the film gingerly outside of the centerpiece triple axel sequence (and if he only figured out enough interesting ways to film figure skating for one sequence's worth of shots, or if the face replacement is not 100% on point)—well, hell, it's all still pretty great in the moment.  Meanwhile, when Gillespie does find the right register for his mocking tone, he offers up at least one extended bout of legitimately fantastic filmmaking, with the "hit" scene constructed with an air of parodic seriousness and urgency that is no less actually-thrilling for being, in its bare facts, both goofy and hilariously low-rent.  Now, it has other problems besides its structure, of course: for every well-crafted sequence, there's another that relies on the lazy recognition factor of a pop song, or that turns into an undisciplined tracking shot that seems to exist for the pure sake of it before getting away from Gillespie entirely.

Altogether, it's a movie that does a lot to make me not like it.  But I did like it—somebody, possibly just editor Tatiana Riegel, decided that the movie needed to end on a note of forceful emotion, rather than just a summary of its decades-later snark, and that the best way to do this would be to reward Robbie's powerful performance with a powerful conclusion to Tonya's anti-sports-movie anti-arc.  (If I, Tonya ever finds true greatness, it's in its very final image, a pool of blood on a white background that, of course, bears a striking resemblance to the ice upon which Tonya made her name.)  So it's good, I guess, that somebody approached the Tonya Harding story with this much ambition, even if what he wound up doing with it was taking a long, hard look at America that's messier, angrier, and more condescending than it is ever actually insightful.  It is good, also, that somebody's trying to do something different with the biographical form, and that's worth applauding no matter what; but maybe it's not so good that Fargo still feels like more like a true story than this one.

Score:  7/10

Here I reign

SONG TO SONG

Terry does it again.  (Whether that's a good thing or not remains, as always, a matter of taste.)

2017

Written and directed by Terrence Malick

With Rooney Mara (Faye), Ryan Gosling (B.V.), Natalie Portman (Rhonda), and Michael Fassbender (Cook)

Spoiler alert: mild

The challenge of the super friends

JUSTICE LEAGUE

We'll see you next time, Zack.  God bless.

2017

Directed by Zack Snyder and Joss Whedon

Written by Chris Terrio, Zack Snyder, and Joss Whedon

With Ben Affleck (Bruce Wayne), Gal Gadot (Diana Prince), Ezra Miller (Barry Allen), Ray Fisher (Victor Stone), Jason Momoa (Arthur Curry), Henry Cavill (Clark Kent), Jeremy Irons (Alfred Pennyworth), Amy Adams (Lois Lane), and Ciaran Hinds (Steppenwolf)

Spoiler alert: moderate

And here's to Nagasaki, always a bridesmaid, never a bride

IN THIS CORNER OF THE WORLD

A microscopic take on the defining tragedy of modern Japan, In This Corner of the World combines great beauty with great horror; but it turns out, in the end, that its chiefest concern all along was just telling a story about life.  Sounds lame, I know, but it was pretty great.

2016 Japan/2017 USA

Directed by Sunao Katabuchi

Written by Chie Uratani and Sunao Katabutchi (based on the comic by Fumiyo Kono)

With Rena Nounen (Suzu Urano), Yoshimasa Hasoya (Shusaku Hojo), Keiko Kuromura (Minori Omi), Harumi Kuromura (Natsuki Inaba), San Hojo (Mayumi Shintani), Entaro Hojo (Shigeru Ushiyama), and Tetsu Mizuhara (Daisuke Ono)

Spoiler alert: mild; spoilers are severe for a famous anime made in 1988, however

King of kong

WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES

2017 was a pretty great year for movies about primates other than people.

2017

Directed by Matt Reeves

Written by Mark Bomback and Matt Reeves

With Andy Serkis (Caesar), Karin Konoval (Maurice), Terry Notary (Rocket), Michael Adamthwaite (Luca), Amiah Miller (Nova), Steve Zahn (Bad Ape), Toby Kebbell (Koba), Ty Olsson (Red Donkey), and Woody Harrelson (The Colonel)

Spoiler alert: moderate

Darren Aronofsky, part VIII: Home invasion

MOTHER!

Overstuffed, overindulgent allegory sometimes gets better than this, true, but it doesn't usually get this grasping, and I choose to interpret that as a point in mother!'s favor.  You, of course, can choose however you want.

2017
Written and directed by Darren Aronofsky (based on The Bible by God)

With Jennifer Lawrence, Ed Harris, Michelle Pfeiffer, Domhnall Gleeson, Brian Gleeson, and Javier Bardem

Spoiler alert: moderate, though its relevance is a dubious proposition at best

Troy McClure's pre-ordered blu-ray

THE SHAPE OF WATER

A sweet and atypical melodrama, standing astride a very thrilling thriller, that still doesn't mix all its elements as well as it clearly must think it does.

2017

Directed by Guillermo del Toro

Written by Vanessa Taylor and Guillermo del Toro

With Sally Hawkins (Elisa Esposito), Octavia Spencer (Zelda Fuller), Richard Jenkins (Giles), Michael Stuhlbarg (Dr. Robert Hoffstetler), Doug Jones (the Amphibian Man), and Michael Shannon (Col. Richard Strickland)

Spoiler alert: moderate

Rey from nowhere

STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI

Even with this many self-imposed handicaps, it's still the best Star Wars movie the franchise's new cycle has so far produced.

2017
Written and directed by Rian Johnson

With Daisy Ridley (Rey), John Boyega (Finn), Oscar Isaac (Poe Dameron), Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker), Carrie Fisher (Gen. Leia Organa), Peter Mayhew (Chewbacca), Kelly Marie Tran (Rose Tico), Andy Serkis (Supreme Leader Snoke), Domnhall Gleeson (Gen. Nux), and Adam Driver (Kylo Ren)

Spoiler alert: severe