January 2018 Capsules
Some thoughts on all of the movies I watched this month. Just so there’s no confusion: 🔁 means I’ve previously seen the movie, and my rating scale is a little harsher than most people’s (if you’re curious about how it breaks down, check out this article here.)
Grosse Pointe Blank (George Armitage, 1997) — 55
Absolutely no reason for this to be the light comedy it ended up being, especially considering it came out eleven years after the much better Something Wild. Though the two movies admittedly don’t have a ton in common, content-wise, both have a dark undercurrent running through them even (sometimes especially) during their most joyous moments. Demme wisely lets that aforementioned darkness take over the back half of his film, while Armitage’s team of writers seem content to merely flirt with it every now and then (vis the trip to the nursing home, (SPOILER!) Minnie’s initial reaction to the pen killing) but ultimately allow the lighthearted comedy to win over for the wretched ending (END). It’s a shame, too, because there’s plenty to love here: the aforementioned nursing home scene broke my heart out even when it was making me laugh (as is usually the case with dementia), and whoever decided to set Cusack disposing of a body to “99 Luftballons” deserves an award. Equally award-worthy is the superb dialogue; Dan Aykroyd cheering “workers of the world unite!” is an obvious winner, but I also found myself adoring the way Cusack switches back and forth between matter-of-factly stating his feelings for Driver and (SPOILER!) calmly directing her and her father out of the line of fire, though I suspect part of that is John Cusack’s wonderfully strung-out (ahem) performance and deadpan demeanor. Still, that all of this is building up to the cop-out finale reverberates backward, retroactively souring so many of the pleasures that the Grosse Pointe Blank had to offer (END). Still worth seeing for Cusack (both of them), Driver, and Arkin, though.
A Serious Man (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2009) 🔁 — 93
You’d be hard-pressed to find a single scene in this comedic masterwork that isn’t both a) a superb microcosm of its themes (uncertainty, the incomprehensibility of God/life) and b) wickedly funny. Not that you would realize a) on first viewing, though; A Serious Man has such a runaround, incidental plot that you spend most of the film how this all going to be properly resolved until you realize in homestretch that it can’t… and then it dawns on you what the Coen Brothers have been up to this entire time. The ending (which I’d argue is the most chilling since Sluizer’s The Vanishing) reverberates backward throughout the film but even had Joel and Ethan settled for a more conventional finale you’d still end up with what might be the funniest movie they ever made. Obviously, Stuhlbarg’s bewildered facial expressions make for great comedy their own, and all of the dream sequences are instant classics, but what kept getting to me was the wonderfully discordant conversation dynamics; with matter-of-fact one-on-one conversations slowly morphing into shouting matches between four or more people before abruptly ending, often without any resolution to the initial conversation (again, microcosm of its themes). If this isn’t the Coen Brothers’ best film (and it might be), it’s certainly the most representative of their worldview and filmmaking style. Just look at that parking lot.
Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954) 🔁 — 94
The movie that got me into movies. The way Hitchcock juggles about eight different substories (most of which serve little narrative function) while never losing track of the domestic drama that anchors this NOR ever leaving L.B. Jeffries’ apartment continues to amaze me over seven years later. What I somehow missed in my previous viewings, though, is how funny this is when it wants to be; be it the tart honesty of Thelma Ritter, the spiky conversations between Grace Kelly and Jimmy Stewart, or Wendell Corey’s gradual loss of patience with Stewart’s obsession over his neighbors’ affairs (his annoyance with which he barely tries to cover up by the end.) Really, my sole noteworthy issue lies in the resolution to the “Miss Lonelyhearts” storyline — too saccharine for my tastes. But that’s no more than ninety seconds of sub-par screentime — the rest is practically perfection.
Army of Darkness (Sam Raimi, 1992) 🔁 — 79
Were it that all parody movies were as well-made as this one. Having seen this five or six times already, I figured that there wasn’t much to rediscover about this old favorite. Yet, this time around I was stunned by how skillfully Raimi directs the climactic medieval battle, often so much so that you end up feeling sad he didn’t dabble in action filmmaking more. I guess out of some commitment to honesty I feel the need to mention that this movie perhaps a bit imbalanced, with the vast majority of the great jokes and slapstick insanity being relegated to the second half of the film (the first fifteen minutes in particular struggle, with a non-insignificant number of gags and lines falling flat)… and yet, I don’t really care. Sam Raimi’s hyper-energetic direction mixed with the best, most relentless insanity of his career (seriously, the skeletons play bagpipes) makes it hard to get mad about the weak first act or what have you. Still can’t understand why the inferior Evil Dead 2 ended up the canonical classic of the trilogy.
20th Century Women (Mike Mills, 2016) — 81
To quote mentor/fellow critic Josh Katz: “I wanna hug this movie!” Perhaps I’m just a sucker for hangout pictures, but I just found this to be nonstop bliss — where to even begin? There’s the wonderful late-seventies soundtrack, with the best use of the Talking Heads since Stop Making Sense? Or how about Greta Gerwig’s typically brilliant character work as a free-spirited feminist struggling with cervical cancer? Or perhaps Annette Bening’s show-stopping, borderline indescribable performance as a mother who can’t even begin to sort out her own emotions, let alone her son’s? All of these (and more) are wonderful, yet what’s stuck with me the most is Elle Fanning’s beautiful portrayal of a young woman in desperate need of a genuine human connection — never have I seen the difference between sexual and platonic desire articulated so eloquently. The only real complaint is with the epilogue, which is a bit too specific for my tastes — vagueness is usually a lot more compelling than explicitly spelling out a character’s future. Then again, that could very well change on viewing number, and if it does… we might have a modern masterpiece on our hands.
Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve, 2017) 🔁 — 67
Ambition can compensate for a lot. Much like its predecessor, Blade Runner 2049 drops the ball an awful lot, whether by taking over an hour to properly get going or allowing THREE actors (Leto, Hoeks, Wright) to give borderline unwatchable performances in a film that desperately needed them at their best. Also like the original, though, the proceedings are so damn beautiful that it’s hard to care. For all his faults, Villeneuve is great at getting the most out of his cinematographers, and the work he and Roger Deakins do here is nothing short of magnificent. Where the original film created a hazy, tech-noir landscape of overpopulation and squalor that ranked with Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans in terms of sheer formal brilliance, this time around Villeneuve borrows heavily from the works of Tarkovsky to create a stunning cinematic vision that’s refreshingly distinct from the original. Plus, once the story does get into its groove, we’re treated to some of the finest sci-fi I’ve seen in quite a while: there’s the heartbreaking romance between K and his holographic girlfriend; the dual-tone oceanic confrontation between K and [REDACTED]; and best of all, the film’s breathtaking denouement that at once honor and build upon the original’s finest moment. If we must have $150 million, two-and-a-half-hour blockbusters, more Blade Runners and less superhero shit, please?
Days of Being Wild (Wong Kar-Wai, 1990) — 60
The critical consensus around Wong’s films seems to be that this, Chungking Express, and In the Mood For Love are his major works. As usual, the critical consensus is wrong. Perhaps hindsight is playing too large a part in my lack of enthusiasm, but in 2017 this really can’t help but play like a rough draft for all of Wong’s forthcoming (and mostly much better) works — -the breakup blues of Chungking, the dysfunctional-relationship drama of Happy Together, the yearning romance of In the Mood For Love — hell, shades of Fallen Angels and even 2046 can be seen here. Still, it’s not entirely fair to hold a movie’s successors against it, and rough-draft Wong can still work wonders on me (the bits with Leslie Cheung and Andy Lau…ugh, my heart). What doesn’t quite work, on the other hand, is the final five minutes, which aims for heartbreaking and winds up feeling more accidentally cynical — without going into details, Wong sometimes struggles his endings from being as powerful as they should, and it’s never been truer than here. And that’s to say nothing of the final final scene, which if it feels like a non-sequitur it’s because it literally is one. Some talents take time to fully form, I guess.
Stop Making Sense (Jonathan Demme, 1984) — 82
Full disclosure: I really don’t care for concerts. Nothing wrong with liking them, obviously, but I personally find them kind of boring (especially when I’m not a diehard fan of the band that’s playing.) So it’s a testament to the inventiveness of Demme and the creative genius Byrne that I was not only entertained but often ecstatic throughout Stop Making Sense, the seminal concert film from the late master of the form. At times it plays like a feature-length version of the “Good Morning” number from Singin’ in the Rain, especially when numbers like “Burning Down the House” have members of the band bopping around with the type of earnest glee one usually associates with Donan and Kelley. Other times, the lights drop out and Demme allows Byrne and co’s faces to be lit in borderline expressionistic ways (at one point he even looks like the experimenter from La Jetée) and it really shouldn’t work…yet, it does. It really, really does. Probably a perfect movie, but like even the best concert I’m ready for it to be over a decent bit before it ends. Again, personal preference.
The Post (Steven Spielberg, 2017) — 58
If you want to show a bunch of film students how you can make a movie look great without over-stylized camera angles and/or making it look like a perfume commercial, Steven Spielberg’s The Post isn’t a bad place to start. Spielberg and DP Janusz Kamiński shoot this using mostly dull, grey colors (that’s not a mark against it, FYI; a muted color palette, when utilized correctly, can be hypnotic, as it is for 2001’s meeting scenes or the entirety of L’argent), and Spielberg’s skill at blocking a shot for maximum on-screen information hasn’t diminished one bit since 1975. He’s a first-class filmmaker, even today.
It also doesn’t hurt that the story at the center of this historical drama-turned-op-ed piece — the story of how the Washington Post leaked the Pentagon papers when it could mean the end of their business (and jail time for their top executives) is pretty absorbing, too. Sure, it’s a little odd to tell the story of the Pentagon Papers by way of the Washington Post (because, y’know, they weren’t the ones who initially got the story), but Spielberg and screenwriters Liz Hannah and Josh Singer make it work, mostly. In fact, had they stuck to covering that prelude to Watergate, we might have had one of the year’s best movies on our hands. Unfortunately, in addition to being an entertaining yarn about fighting corruption, The Post is also about a few other things as well. Also included in The Post is Katharine Graham’s struggle to run the Post in the face of widespread sexism — an important story to be sure, but Hannah and Singer struggle to properly weave it in, leaving a lot of the first act feeling somewhat dramatically inert. Still, Spielberg’s such a master filmmaker that even when the story is bogged down by board meetings and IPOs it’s still remarkably watchable, especially with Bob Odenkirk and Tom Hanks being typically excellent… until you realize that in addition to being a film about the Pentagon Papers and sexist discrimination, it’s also an anti-Trump screed.
Obviously, there’s nothing inherently wrong with railing against Trump, but in this case it means that the final third of The Post becomes almost insufferably didactic, with multiple speeches serving as thinly-veiled lectures about our current political landscape. Again, using the events of the past to comment on modern society isn’t inherently bad (Selma, for example, packs loads of prescient political insight) but subtext has the “sub” prefix for a reason. And that’s to say nothing of the ending, which contains (and I kid you not) what feels like an MCU-style sequel tag for All The President’s Men. In addition to being absolutely ludicrous and self-indulgent, this epilogue also reminds you how much more tightly focused (and just outright better) Pakula’s film was. Just watch that one instead.
2046 (Wong Kar-Wai, 2004) — 83
Say what you will about the idea of a Blade Runner sequel, at least that film was set in a dystopian future that could theoretically be worth further exploring. In the Mood for Love is a such a singular, self-contained story that the idea of continuing it seems ludicrous, like making a sequel to Citizen Kane or Apocalypse Now. That 2046 turned out to be every bit the original’s equal is nothing short of a miracle. Wong effortless weaves together four separate stories in his trademark improvisatory fashion, allowing him riff and build upon his previous works (including what can only be described as In the Mood for Love from an outsider’s perspective) while exploring new ground in science fiction. It’s a hypnotic, heartbreaking ride. Admittedly, there’s not a lot here that Wong hasn’t dealt with before (even the sci-fi elements of this story feel somewhat familiar), but Wong’s visual acuity and aching sense of longing basically render that issue irrelevant in my mind. Yet another triumph from one of the best directors working today.
Call Me by Your Name (Luca Guadagnino, 2017) — 74
I’m a little out of my depth writing about such a decidedly queer story, so if you’re looking for a more knowledgeable take on this subject, go read this review here instead. Even as a straight cis guy, though, I gotta admit that an awful lot of this pretty much floored me. First love stories are a dime a dozen, but what makes this one so special is the tender dynamic between Timothée Chalamet’s bratty adolescent and Armie Hammer’s laid-back young adult. Not only do the two share remarkable onscreen chemistry, but the way James Ivory’s screenplay finds Hammer slowly piercing Chalamet’s emotional barriers provides for as compelling drama as I’ve seen all year. Perhaps best of all is that unlike Moonlight or Blue is the Warmest Color, Call Me by Your Name doesn’t feel bogged down by the need to be an Important Film — it’s remarkably funny when it wants to be (there’s a scene involving a peach that made me laugh harder than practically anything else I saw in theaters this year), and Guadagnino and Ivory understand that the simple sight of two people enjoying each other’s company can be just as affecting as any tearful monologue or traumatic incident. Only real issue lies in how the final thirty minutes have a bit of a janky rhythm — there are about six different places where the movie could’ve ended (most of which are better than the actual ending, which itself is fine but a massive comedown from the show-stopping penultimate scene), and the start-stop rhythm tests your patience after a while. Still, this is a remarkable, perhaps even major work from a director I was at best ambivalent on.
The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966) — 61
“Patchy brilliance” is how I’d describe the first half. At its best, The Battle of Algiers plays like a surprisingly modern action film/police procedural hybrid; at its worst, it’s a fairly straightforward historical drama that’s very much of its time. I’d spend ten to fifteen minutes more or less ambivalent towards what was happening on screen, and then I’d snap back to attention with some virtuoso setpiece (the police assassinations, in particular, play like a rough draft of The Godfather’s famous baptism montage.) Around the hour mark, though, when Pontecorvo introduces the villain proper, is when things start to get interesting. Lt. Col. Matthew is amongst the most quietly disturbing villains ever put to screen; relaxed, professional, borderline sympathetic to the FLN’s cause…and also a complete monster, who brutally interrogates guerilla fighters with the same casual disinterest of a man filing taxes. In fact, by the final act’s one-two punch of a brutal torture sequence and the heart-stopping finale, I was basically on board with the whole thing…until the overlong epilogue. Botching a great ending can be enough to retroactively ruin a film, and the last five minutes are so remarkably tedious that it ended up souring me. I guess Z is more to my tastes.
The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2012) 🔁 —63
During my first viewing (back in March ’17) I spent about two-thirds of The Master thinking I was watching PTA’s best film. Anderson’s gorgeous 70mm compositions were enough to win me over on their own, but it was the dueling of Joaquin Phoenix’s animalistic frenzy and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s grandiosity that kept me intoxicated. Everyone cites the “test” scene as the movie’s highlight (and to be fair, it is one of Anderson’s finest moments) but I’d personally point to the prison scene as what best sums up the strange relationship between Phoenix and Hoffman: Phoenix flails around in agony, violently slamming his body into his surrounding while Hoffman sternly tells him to calm down… until Phoenix turns his rage towards Hoffman, where Hoffman authoritative bellowing devolves into the same primal screaming as Phoenix. It’s a striking piece of work and amongst Anderson’s highest achievement.
Thus begins the final third.
Even if you count yourself amongst the people who think There Will Be Blood’s ending ruined the film, it at least had a conclusion: a ferocious Daniel Day-Lewis monologue, and then an act of brutal violence; by contrast, The Master just fades away, bringing the entire story (and most importantly, Joaquin Phoenix) back to square one. It’s a bold move, to be sure… and it doesn’t really work? (SPOILER!) The decision to ditch the Movement to focus on Phoenix’s return to “normal” life is an interesting one, but Anderson never really justifies the choice logically or thematically, playing it instead like a postmodern curveball for its own sake (END). Equally frustrating is how episodic the final third becomes — though the film is fairly structureless throughout, the home stretch jumps from one event to another seemingly at random, like Anderson abruptly started cutting out scenes to make the picture more obtuse. Phoenix remains captivating throughout, though; he practically holds the picture together when it threatens to collapse in on itself and gives the final scene a level of poignancy that Anderson wouldn’t have capable of on his own. A very good film, but a frustrating one as well.
Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2017) — 51
Not since Tarkovsky’s Stalker have I had a first viewing as confounding as this one. For one, this perhaps even more elliptical than Anderson’s last feature, Inherent Vice, and that film was Thomas Pynchon adaptation. Secondly, this film’s meaning (SPOILER!) is more or less unlocked by one of the final scenes, which means that one viewing will absolutely not be sufficient (END). That being said, I have absolutely no idea why Inherent Vice, the near-masterpiece that it is, was dismissed as “too confusing” while this decidedly inferior film is getting raves across the board. Vice, even with its labyrinthine plot and classic Pynchon dialogue, felt like a coherent whole; this film plays (again, at least on first viewing) like the final third of The Master: incidental, episodic, and increasingly oblique. Which makes for plenty of interesting moments, to be sure (the nail-on-a-chalkboard sounds of Alma eating breakfast might be my favorite recurring joke of the year), but the whole ends up feeling like so much less than the sum of its parts. Anderson remains a first-class filmmaker, and Jonny Greenwood turns in a great (if more conventional) score, but for now, it looks like this might be my least favorite Anderson.
I, Tonya (Craig Gillespie, 2017) — 46
More proof we live in Hell: this sub-Scorsese hack job gets awards season buzz, while Doug Liman’s great American Made is almost completely forgotten by the year’s end. I suppose I, Tonya isn’t a bad movie — it’s got Margot Robbie being typically excellent, and some fantastic individual scenes (pretty much anything involving Paul Walter Hauser’s deluded bodyguard is golden), but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a director seem quite as intent on sabotaging their own film as Craig Gillespie. This is the type of movie where the director barrages you with fourth wall breaks, subjective narration and obvious needle drops (“Spirit in the Sky” shows up; I suppose “Fortunate Son” was too expensive?) all in the name of making another rise-and-fall Oscar-bait biopic “fun.” And in the hands of a talented director (usually named Martin), these things can be fun… only Gillespie has no idea how to effectively utilize these tools, often whipping them out at the worst, most offensive times possible. The Wolf of Wall Street, for all of its plane orgies and Quaalude freak-outs, knew that when the domestic abuse starts you don’t cue up Dire Straits’ “Romeo and Juliet” or have the characters turn towards the camera and remark on the situation. The only real instance where Gillespie really makes the case for himself as a director is during the ice skating sequences, which he captures with a surprising amount of fluidity. If I seem angry, it’s because this was so clearly almost a great movie, and you can see that potential shine through when Gillespie calms down and lets Robbie and Allison Janney do their thing. But in a war between shoddy direction and great acting, the latter’s always gonna lose.
Primer (Shane Carruth, 2004) — 41
I’m reminded of Ebert’s thoughts on The Usual Suspects: “To the degree that I do understand, I don’t care.” This isn’t entirely fair, though (I’m tentatively rating this a 41 for a reason) — Carruth has some visual chops, and I admit to being fairly interested in what would come of this clearly disastrous machine…until the fifty minute mark, where we realize that what we’ve been seeing is about ten percent of what’s actually been happening. It simply gets too dense for a 77-minute movie. I suppose I’d be more forgiving if the final half-hour was as compelling as what came before it, but Carruth inexplicably decides to focus less on the potential implications of a time-travel machine and more on some boilerplate drama about a crazy ex-boyfriend — seriously, who cares? Little pieces still work (there’s one deliberately unresolved thread involving a mysterious third party that suggests where a better version of this movie could’ve gone), but by this point, I was almost completely checked out. Add this to the growing list of movies where the fans seem to mistake “impressive” for “good.”
Thelma (Joachim Trier, 2017) — 56
Near-exact duplicate of my thoughts on It Comes At Night: incredibly unnerving, technically impeccable, and also feels like an incomplete draft of a much better movie. To be fair, there are a few key differences in my opinions: for one, where It Comes At Night night was just non-stop nervous tension (aided by Shults’ love of Tarkovsky-esque long takes), Thelma is more unsettling: lots of imagery of Hell and drowning (even both at one key moment), and Trier’s knack for capturing icy Scandinavian landscapes does a lot to add to the creeping sense of unease throughout. That being said: this is kind of…nonsensical? To quote Matt Lynch’s wonderful mini-review:
“There’s a lot about guilt and systems of repression but ultimately it’s seemingly ambivalent about just how destructive those things are when applied to something that’s actually dangerous, and that danger is explicitly aligned with other desires that can’t at all be described that way.”
That should give you a good idea of how little thought Trier has put into his screenplay. The movie seems to be about the evils of religious repression (especially w/r/t queerness), but the metaphor is so thoroughly bungled that I wouldn’t blame you for thinking this movie to be anti-gay. By contrast: Let the Right One In also deals with similar material (a dangerous person growing up and falling in love), but that film not only has a much more coherent worldview but is also a much more effective love story. To take this comparison even further, both films have (SPOILER!) remarkably similar endings (protagonist triumphs against oppressors while satisfying their worst urges), but while Let the Right One In carried with it an appropriate amount of ambiguity, Thelma plays this in an almost completely positive light — an odd choice, considering what terrible things she’s clearly capable of doing (END). Trier’s a talented director to be sure, and his work with DP Jakob Ihre keeps this watchable even at its very worst, but it’s pretty clear this is a case of director’s desire to play with Big Ideas outweighing his instinct to provide a satisfying narrative.
Columbus (Kogonada, 2017) — 54
Quite possible that this type of ultra-understated, low-key drama is fundamentally not to my tastes, but I found an awful lot of this fairly…dull? I suppose that’s kind of the point, as this is primarily about the mundanity of day-to-day life. Even so, I confess that the only point where my interest went anywhere beyond mild interest was during the quasi-flirtatious conversations between Jin and Gabriel as well as John Cho’s unexpected breakdown about his estranged father (which was surprisingly affecting — seriously, I almost broke down as well). Other than that: not much going on here, narratively. Formally, this is a much different story: this looks what I’d imagine Antonioni would make today, all intersecting visual planes and geometric landscapes — it certainly did a much better job at informing the mundane mood of this picture than the actual story did. It was enough to suggest that Kogonada could very well be a master in the making, though as with Antonioni I doubt I’ll ever be an acolyte.
25th Hour (Spike Lee, 2002) 🔁 — 91
The first masterpiece of the 21st century. Spike Lee’s hyper-kinetic style may not seem the right pick for such a decidedly melancholy piece about responsibility and maturity, but it works — form and content have never clashed so brilliantly (favorite moment: the music-video montage in the club quickly cutting between people dancing, before splicing in less than a second of Barry Pepper breaking down, before cutting back immediately to more dancing.) Those who’ve seen any of the last few seasons of Game of Thrones might be skeptical about writer David Benioff’s ability to appropriately convey Norton’s internal struggle, but the hyper-condensed timescale of the film plays to all of his best instincts as a writer, and the cast does brilliant work bringing his words to the screen. Oh, and speaking of which: Norton has never been better than he is here, I don’t think anyone’s surprised that Hoffman’s perfect as usual, and Barry Pepper is nothing short of a revelation. We first meet him as a cocky, brash Wall Street guy who at once describes himself as being in the “99th percentile” of New York bachelors and asks in earnest “why do women cry after great sex?” Yet when Norton corners him at the club his tough-guy facade slowly starts to wear down, eventually crescendoing to a third-act confrontation that ranks among the best acting moments for all three leads. And that’s to say nothing of the magnificent ending, which tore my heart out once again. Such a shame this film’s been somewhat neglected by the critical community — this is one of the finest films ever made.
The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson, 2001) 🔁 — 88
So many moments here that absolutely destroy me. Margot sauntering over to Richie to “These Days;” “the last six days have been the best six days of probably my whole life;” Margot and Richie’s quiet conversation in the tent; “I’ve had a rough year, Dad;” (SPOILER!) Royal’s resigned smile in the ambulance, (END), and perhaps most of all the big finale set to “Everyone.” The Royal Tenenbaums is admittedly not as technically refined as Wes’s later works, but I’ve always been drawn more towards his sense of melancholy and longing than his dollhouse aesthetic so that hardly matters for me. What struck me on viewing number three is how Gene Hackman, despite playing an abusive sociopath, almost single-handedly prevents the film from becoming overly melodramatic or suffocating through sheer charisma; the “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” sequence ranks amongst the most joyous moments in Wes’ filmography (and unlike Fantastic Mr. Fox, that joyousness actually feels earned), and the way he flippantly dismisses his children’s issues adds a welcome tinge of dark comedy to what could’ve been an overly melodramatic affair. Not that there’s anything wrong with melodrama, though: the aforementioned tent conversation is one of the most tender exchanges I’ve ever seen, culminating in a two-word line so utterly heartbreaking I wouldn’t be surprised if Gwyneth Paltrow’s subsequent tears were real. The only weak link in the film is Dudley and Raleigh St. Clair, who despite Bill Murray’s efforts ends up feeling like an obnoxious Wes-ism for its own sake. Wes and Wilson wisely keep him out of focus, though, so it hardly matters. Probably the best film Wes will ever make.
Love, Simon (Greg Berlanti, 2018) — 30
If I measured movies solely by how much “good stuff” the picture has, my rating for Love, Simon would probably be an awful lot higher. Nick Robinson makes for a pretty good lead, and a decent amount of jokes land. So why the low score? Simply put: this is one of the most agonizingly useless movies I’ve ever seen, without a single interesting idea or even a compelling reason to exist. Hardly a minute passed where I wasn’t actively resenting whatever factory churned this paint-by-numbers nonsense. I wasn’t as big a fan of Lady Bird as most people, but that movie at least felt like it took place in a universe even remotely resembling our own; this is two steps away from a Disney Channel original. Avoid with extreme prejudice.
