Kunstler’s Capsule Movie Reviews
It has been the main art form of our time, though its boundaries are eroding and it’s running into similar distribution problems as music and literature… so it’s hard to say how much longer the movies will be with us in the format we recognize. — JHK
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri (Dir: Martin McDonagh, with Frances McDormand, Woody Harrelson, Sam Rockwell). They were hyping the heck out of this movie around Thanksgiving, and I had high hopes, but it turned out to be a pretty ghastly affair. McDormand plays the mother of a teen rape / murder victim, who goes kind of sociopathic when the lazy-ass local police fail to find the perp and then give up on the case. All the characters are complex to a fault, doing things that un-suspend your disbelief. Woody has done this tragic-noble turn a half-dozen times already. Sam Rockwell is very interesting without being plausible. McDormand seems intended to represent 100,000 years of pent-up female Homo sapiens rage — a popular Prog fashion-statement these days that does a disservice to the reality of male-female relations. Director-writer McDonagh has the characters saying “fuck” every other word, which he apparently thinks provides dramatic velocity, but really just gets tiresome as it quickly loses effect. I left wanting to take a shower.
Blade Runner 2049 (Dir: Denis Villeneuve, with Ryan Gosling, Harrison Ford, Ana de Armas). Yet another exercise in techno-narcissistic sci fi. The most obvious annoyance is the depiction a future society in which everybody goes about in flying cars. America can’t help projecting its car-craziness eternally into the future. Where does the energy come from to run all the snazzy high tech in the background of the acid-rain-drenched slum that LA has become? And what do all those insect-like denizens and street people do to support their ramen habit? The movie has no internal logic and the pace is sludgy. It’s not redeemed by Gosling’s hang-dog charisma. I walked out at the two hour mark.
Wind River (Dir: Taylor Sheriden. with Jeremy Renner, Elizabeth Olsen, Graham Greene). Thoughtful and gritty look at Indian reservation life in Wyoming these days, but with dramatic logic problems toward the end — too many guns and too many bodies. Jeremy Renner is a very reassuring presence as a wildlife warden with family problems who manages his manners and behavior admirably. Olsen’s role has moments of unreality in some of the action sequences. Not her fault, but the tiresome need for Hollywood to demonstrate that women can do everything men can do. The mood is impressively grim throughout.
Manchester by the Sea (Dir:Kenneth Lonergan, with Casey Affleck, Michelle Williams, Kyle Chandler, and Lucas Hedges). A deeply moving portrait of New England working class family disintegration on the brink of Trumptopia. Casey Affleck won the Oscar for his leading role as the explosive hangdog Lee Chandler, whose life fell apart in the aftermath of a tragic house fire that killed his children. Some years later now, his brother has suddenly died and Lee is obliged to look after his teenage nephew Patrick, played very capably by Lucas Hedges, a good, smart kid with the usual teenage interests in sex and rock music. Affleck’s Lee Chandler is a walking emotional time bomb, but he’s smart too, and self-aware, and his journey through his family troubles is a great story for our time.
Elle (Dir: Paul Verhoeven, with Isabel Hubbert. English subtitles). Is it the astonishing beauty of everyday life in France that drives people batshit crazy? This movie fascinated me for reasons beyond its taut and compelling high-velocity story-telling, namely the grace on view in that country, the handsome social presentation of people, and the formality of their manners, the elegant streets — such a contrast to the tawdry slobbery of America in all those particulars. So, the movie is a little bit like a visit to another planet. Isabel Hubbert plays one Michele LeBlanc, a stylish and beautiful woman of a certain age who runs a company that produces the most extraordinary violent and vulgar video games (the scenes depicted of these monsters will remind you of everyday life in the USA). Michele also has a dark past: her papa was a mass murderer in a Paris suburb back in 1976. The story begins with a horrifying home invasion rape and from there we meet the well-drawn tribe of friends and relations in Michele’s world on our way to discovering the identity of said rapist. In the end, you are reminded of Sartre’s bon mot: “Hell is other people….” Highly recommended.
American Honey (Dir: Andrea Arnold, with Shia LeBeouf, Sasha Lane, Riley Keough). A fascinating and raw trip into the dark underbelly of post-prosperity America. Sasha Lane plays a questing teen from the parking lot wastelands of Muskogee, Oklahoma, who hooks up with a band of young grifters led by a 25-ish alcoholic reprobate woman (Keough) who transports the kids from town-to-town around the Midwest and houses them in cheap motels to run a door-to-door magazine-selling scam. Shia LeBeouf is her sometime lover and enforcer, and the kids in the van are uniformly lost and psychologically deformed by the awful tensions in a socially broke-down land. The story comports with the sad reality of what can easily be observed in Flyover America. Excellent performances.
Silence (Dir: Martin Scorcese, with Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver, Liam Neeson)
Quite a stately slog through the hardships of the Portuguese Jesuit missionaries in 16th Century Japan. For me, the society of that time and place holds deep fascination with its richly aestheticized culture — even in its methods of torture and execution. That said, the brutality of the story is taxing, and it’s a little hard for a non-religious person (yours truly) to wrap his head around the strange exigencies of Roman Catholic practice. Beautifully photographed (or cinematogged), with sturdy performance by all concerned, especially the chap who plays the frisky old Japanese grand inquisitor.
La La Land (Dir: Damien Chazelle, with Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, John Legend.)
A genuinely charming and smart contemporary love story with a really good score by young Justin Hurwitz. Critics have compared it to Singing in the Rain, which it resembles only slightly. I actually had a look on disk at Francis Coppola’s 1982 musical One From the Heart (music by Tom Waits), which La La Land resembles more. Both are pastel-colored pastiches of movie musical conventions, set in the palm-treed urban west (LA and Las Vegas). But the earlier movie was a spectacular flop and brought down Coppola’s fledgling Zoetrope Studios. The difference is largely better casting. In La La Land, Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone both radiate intelligence, tipping off the audience that, whatever else happens, they will not end up as losers. Chazelle says it took six years to get it made. Surprising to me that it got made at all, actually.
Jackie (Dir: Pablo Larrain, with Peter Sarsgaard, Greta Gerwig, and Billy Crudup.)
Surprisingly deft and moving portrait of Jacqueline Kennedy in the four days following the assassination of her husband, President John F. Kennedy, focusing on the events around the funeral arrangements. The movie is remarkably devoid of sentimentality and projects the viewer forcefully back into the very different world of the 1960s. Portman is outstanding in the title role.
Nocturnal Animals (Dir: Tom Ford, with Amy Adams, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Shannon, Aaron Taylor-Johnson.)
An interesting, complex, well-paced thriller for grown-ups. A story-within-a-story about lost soul LA art gallery owner (Amy Adams) reconnecting with the college love she spurned (Jake Gyllenhaal). Ford knows all the practical details about life in the .01 percent demographic and the pathetic status-signaling it entails. Will make you kind of glad you don’t live that way. Former fashion-designer Ford understands human emotion and orchestrates the drama confidently.