21. The Search (1948, Fred Zinnemann)
14. The Truth About Charlie (2002, Jonathan Demme)
13. 48 Hours (1982, Walter Hill)
Sunday, December 31, 2017
25 Favorite New-to-Me Movies of 2017
Wednesday, December 20, 2017
Fire and Ice: I, TONYA
Yes, I, Tonya, Craig Gillespie's rollicking whiplash darkly comic
recreation of Tonya Harding's ice skating career, is a sports movie with an arc
of scandal and tragedy. It would have to be, following the inevitable unlikely
rise and tabloid-violence fall of an Olympic hopeful. But what the movie is
about underneath these grabby trappings is digging into the psychology of a
woman in an abusive relationship. She (Margot Robbie) is used to getting hit.
Her prickly, chain-smoking, boozy mother (a tough, biting Allison Janney) chips
away at her for years with mean-spirited jabs and frequent smacks. When she
escapes, as a late teen, into the arms of her first real boyfriend (Sebastian
Stan, with a shyly dangerous charisma unseen in his Marvel pictures), he hits
her too. "I told myself, my mom hits me and she loves me," Harding
tells us with a honey-drip affection in her voice. It's harrowing and sad, a
film intermingling the glowing romance she feels with the bruised eyes and raw
scrapes of a battered woman. All the while her skating career is taking off,
the thrill of her graceful athleticism sitting next to her hard-scrabble
poverty as she has to fight classism and snobbery at every step of the way. She
sews her own costumes, which are pretty but not quite the pageant-level shine
of the fussy rich girls who dominate the sport. It's not just about talent;
it's about image.
By the time Tonya’s handsome
dope of an abusive beau -- now her on-again-off-again husband -- gets it in his
head, with prompting from a buddy of enormous, stupidly delusional
self-confidence (Paul Walter Hauser, with a convincing bovine look), to
intimidate Harding's closest rival, the ensuing chaos threatens to snuff out
Tonya's life-long dream. By this point Gillespie -- providing a booming jukebox
score, overlapping voice over perspectives, and an active, swirling camera with
insistent, pushing editing (a very David O. Russell approach for this usually
more restrained journeyman) -- has made it clear the whole incident will be no
less than the final parting smack of this abusive husband. Steven Rogers’
screenplay skips around between characters’ competing, overlapping versions of
events, sometimes even stopping the action to have another character in the
scene turn to the camera and say “I never did this.” It creates a swirling
triple-axle of tone, allowing Tonya’s pain to be centered in every telling.
This neither excuses her complicity, nor lays all blame at her feet. The film
overemphatically pushes and prods at the real complexity under the tabloid
sensationalism while using it to raucous effect.
Saturday, December 16, 2017
A New Hope: STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI
I didn’t know they had it in them, but I’m grateful to be
proven wrong. Star Wars: Episode VIII –
The Last Jedi is the first great Star
Wars movie since creator George Lucas sold his company to Disney. Though
run by Lucas collaborators and acolytes – from an ILM and Skywalker Sound
stocked with Wars veterans to a story
group built out of the prequel days, to a longtime producing partner in Kathleen
Kennedy overseeing it all – the results thus far have been mostly successful
recreations of franchise sensations past. They were nostalgic, fleet, and fun
enough. JJ Abrams managed to introduce a handful of bright and promising new
characters along the way in Episode 7
– the searching Rey (Daisy Ridley), stewing dark-sider Kylo Ren (Adam Driver),
turncoat stormtrooper Finn (John Boyega), and hotshot pilot Poe (Oscar Isaac). Gareth
Edwards and company cobbled together a decent margin note in the franchise’s
canon with the heisting of the Death Star plans in Rogue One. But for all that potential, it took writer-director Rian
Johnson (whose Brick and Looper marked him as an original voice
to watch) to return the sense of surprise to the galaxy. He makes a movie
following Abrams’ new characters and some of Lucas’ classic ones into a roller
coaster of creative developments.
Where Johnson succeeds is in his molecularly precise
evocation of the Star Wars style, not
by simply copying faithfully what’s come before, but by returning to the
source. He realizes the series is a suis generis blending of Westerns and World
War II movies, gangster pictures and samurai films, high fantasy and low serialized
sci-fi. He returns to these inspirations for whip-smart visual language,
spirited tone, and adventurous spirit, shot through with zen portent and
seriousness of mythological import. So once more unto the Star War we go, the sinister First Order seeking
to crush the rebellious Resistance once and for all. General Leia (the late,
great Carrie Fisher), hoping for the return of her brother Luke (Mark Hamill,
soulful and unpredictable), leads the surviving rebels across space, pursued by
the evil Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis). The usual sturm und drang of space battles and aliens worlds follows, with a
healthy dose of Jedi mysticism on a far-flung planet where a Master hides from
his mistakes and an earnest would-be Padawan desperately seeks his help. He’s
their only hope. The Rebels assemble for dogfights and showdowns; the Dark Side
and the Light ready their laser swords with patient, spiritual connections in
The Force; nefarious characters plot backstabbings and pure-hearted beings become
the sparks that will light up the darkness. In the middle is Rey, an ever more
exciting new hero movingly unmoored from a sense of destiny, hoping to find her
place in all this while Kylo Ren, similarly lost, circles with roiling bad
vibes.
This is rich emotional territory mined with crisp, clear
storytelling in painterly precision and elegantly lensed filmic cinematography.
It’s big, broad, immediately satisfying storytelling in the tradition of the
series’ best moments. Every step of the way, Johnson finds visual invention for
his gripping sequences and compelling settings – a bombing run is so crisply,
efficiently unfolded, the fate of a character we’ve never before met and who
hardly speaks is intensely felt; a dazzling casino world drips in
military-industrial power and is larded with slimy monsters of all sorts (and a
jazzy alien band to boot); a colony of frog-like nuns caretake a crumbling
village surrounded by a sea of squawking bird-beings; a salt-covered planet is streaked
in billowing red dust as a battle rages; a red-walled throne room is draped in
ominous Dark Side intent; a hyperspace jump shatters plans – and minds. In these
thrilling images and places are a host of creatures and more new characters,
from a mysterious pink-haired admiral (Laura Dern) to a big-hearted rebel
recruit (Kelly Marie Tran) and a slippery thief (Benicio Del Toro). Johnson
imagines fun adventures, tense escapes teetering on massive stakes, and pleasing
grace notes – First Order office politics, a melding of prequel lore in sequel
minds, loving glamour shots of vehicles and tech – while never stepping wrong.
What a deeply felt outpouring of the finest Star Wars anyone not named George Lucas
has managed to get on the big screen! This isn’t a film entirely coasting on
old nostalgia (though the familiar sounds of lightsabers, TIE fighters, and the like are powerful generators of it). Nor is it content to simply doodle in the margins of the expected. Johnson uses the old as a
runway for new adventure to take off. In the end, I found it poignant to
consider how he’s skillfully built in an old franchise a space for new
imagination, while connecting to the childlike wonder at the sense of grandiose
unfolding mythology that makes it evergreen. Johnson has pulled off a perfect
balancing act – a reverent brand deposit that pushes all the right nostalgic
buttons while fearlessly unfurling satisfying surprises. It’s a sensation as
pure and as real as a kid, head swimming in the galaxy far, far away, picking
up a broom and, for a fleeting moment, imagining it a lightsaber.
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