Drama – Page 4 – Splatter: on FILM

LADY BIRD (2017) movie review

December 5, 2017December 4, 2017Leave a comment

Senior year at her Catholic school, a girl with abnormal charisma and confidence changes her name and takes on her toughest critic: her mother.Everyone wants to be loved. This film speaks to the soul of the everyday, normal, individual you that doesn’t feel approved of, noticed, or truly seen. Her issues resonate because in some ways they are universal.This film is a conversation being picked up, spun round, remembered and circled back to. Scenes and dialogue cut and jog but somehow maintain fluidity, grace, and humor.
The early 2000’s, Dave Matthews’ “Crash,” neutral and dark oversized shirts, Kool-aid dyed hair, thrift shopping for prom gowns, and high school musicals make every moment hilarious and true. It’s almost a little too close to home.From the opening scene listening to books on tape in the car with her mother to sneaking communion wafers with her best friend, this is all real. It’s about hope and finding satisfaction in yourself and in the family you were born into, and learning to love and pay attention to both for the broken wonderful things that they are. Because after all, in the end maybe loving and paying attention are the same thing.

MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS (2017) movie review

November 27, 2017November 25, 2017Leave a comment

When a novel becomes a film we all get front row seats on a trek into the familiar. As promised, it’s a lovely shady whodunit – every passenger a suspect, every side-glance a confession of guilt. Star-studded, humorous, curious, mysterious, we step onto the train platform with the famous detective Hercule Poirot in order to solve a crime and a murder. The old tale and BBC favorite has been masterfully reimagined by Kenneth Branagh, both director and main character.From point A to point B, this dangerous journey is thwarted with clues and interviews captured from every creative camera angle. Bright colors glint over the snowy landscape as crisply cast characters reveal nothing until the dastardly finale. It’s a brilliant film, beautifully created and worth seeing.

BLADE RUNNER 2049 (2017) movie review

October 15, 2017October 15, 20171 Comment

Executive produced by the original director Ridley Scott, directed by Denis Villeneuve of last year’s hit Arrival, and written by the same screenwriter as the original, the new Blade Runner 2049 lives in the exact universe of the first film, 30 years in that future.A simple premise for those who haven’t seen the first movie: Blade Runners are hired hitmen detectives working with the police to annihilate rogue AI. The culture and ethic of the Blade Running game is called into question when it becomes personal. The Blade Runner stories are based on the novel by Philip K. Dick called “Do androids dream of electric sheep?”

Ryan Gosling, Robin Wright, Jared Leto, and all of the other famous faces are perfectly cast in this follow-up film. I hesitate to call it a reboot, as it picks up the baton and runs at full pace as a stand-alone piece of work. Yet, if you missed the epic first, you will feel lost in the second. It’s all callback to the original, and a set of explanatory paragraphs on the first screen can never offer enough back story, enough power play between self-deifying creator and creation in these “replicant” stories, or enough of Harrison Ford’s character’s emotional connections to remind or prepare viewers fully for this visual bonanza.Both are art films. Futuristic, sci-fi, noir, almost neo-western, dramatic, art films. Unique. Slow pace builds in intensity to fierce action. The use of color and light, the silence then epic throwback music nodding to Vangelis’s original score, the heartbreaking potential future of relationships in a porn-addicted society that seeks fulfillment from devices before risking human contact. It could be seen as a sci-fi Her (2013).Blade Runner 2049 shows extremes. As the once emotionless regain their senses, the brutal continue to ravage without conscience. Blood and nudity, death and sensuality. The director is careful to hide much of what would be considered gore or blatant pornography just out of sight, but it’s ever-present in this dark future world. Both films were hard to watch in moments for the same reasons. Neither glamorize murder or sex. Rather they make both absolutely dark in this miserable, unlovely, lonely, future world.It’s hard to explain how these heavy films manage to show beauty, but somehow the emotions render as pure and honest, and the deserted radioactive wastelands of the films’ landscapes are simply breathtaking. The faces in the frame, often bloodstained, are flawless and offer so much insight with limited dialogue.Perfect storytelling from the start, we care about all that our main character cares about. We want answers, just as he does. We follow the same twists and turns in plot, living his existence with him, together hoping for meaning, purpose, truth, justice, and life.

WAR for THE PLANET of THE APES (2017) movie review

September 23, 2017September 23, 20171 Comment

Mercy, empathy, loyalty, grief. These themes transcend their opposites: hatred, misunderstanding, cruelty, apathy. In this film, two opposing sides fight for the same plot of land. Yes, it’s an Avatar and a Dances with Wolves all over again. But just as history is destined for repetition without intervention, so this film shows one side succumbing to evil claiming survival of the fittest while the other, the city of apes, merely wants to survive.Andy Serkis is Caesar, beloved and respected leader whose rescue mission skews when personal loss leads to vengeance. Steve Zahn’s character adds such necessary relief to the tension.Blood is spilled on both sides, but the new human enemy, played expertly by Woody Harrelson seems to feel nothing in the face of loss. He kills at will, wounds for sport, captures communities and watches them starve.

This is a war movie, as advertised, but it is shot-for-shot so beautiful, such a big screen wonder, that you may almost forget that the main characters are apes rather than men.Caesar’s literal journey takes sharp turns as he confronts his demons of bloodlust and unworthiness, meeting friends and foes on his own path to redemption. Don’t miss this enthralling finale’ to the trilogy.

GLASS CASTLE (2017) movie review

August 21, 2017August 15, 20172 Comments

My friend Matt is always challenging me to write the story that makes me bleed. It’s the one that comes most viscerally from your gut, from your experience, from your life, from your sorrow, from your joy, from the thing that makes you tick and move forward at the same time. This film bleeds author Jeannette Wall’s life story allowing tandem past memories to engage with present conflicts.

This director Destin Daniel Cretton, who gave us Short Term 12 (2013), has a gift for telling those stories that hurt to tell.Woody Harrelson and Naomi Watts give the performances of a lifetime as they attempt to parent on the run from one temporary living situation to the next, one binge drink to the next, one family fight and hungry belly and life lesson to the next.We ache with Brie Larson as she suffers and survives in her films like Short Term 12 (2013), Room (2015), and now in Glass Castle. Her character has changed her status in life and made it to New York as a writer, but her interactions with her homeless parents only force her to deal with the demons from her past.It’s a true story about a girl whose love for her father transcends his poor parenting, his cruelty, his ever-brimming promises to build life into a perfect glass castle for those he loves most. The ebb tide flows in with her belief in him and out with disappointment and carries moviegoers on the journey of forgiveness as they learn alongside her what it means to be like the tree that has lets suffering make it stronger.

THE BIG SICK (2017) movie review

August 7, 2017August 7, 2017Leave a comment

Kumail Nanjiani as “Kumail” in THE BIG SICK. Photo by Nicole Rivelli.

It’s not the classic boy meets girl. It’s not your everyday romcom. It’s a complex, unique story about two people trying to fit together then trying to fit into each other’s family dynamics. It’s messy and wonderful, just like real life.Moments made me supremely sad, but I also fell in love with every character individually. Each one in his or her own flawed and quirky ways became oddly likable. Ray Romano and Holly Hunter’s performances were raw and flawless. I’ve never loved them more. They play the parents of Zoe Kazan, the heroine of this little film that has won big audiences.

We follow Kumail Nanjiani’s true life story as he navigates Pakistani-American life, dreams of performing stand-up, and falls for the “wrong” girl. When she ends up in the hospital, he is left alone to make life-saving decisions and make good with her southern family, all while appeasing his own family bent on arranging his marriage.It’s a bit of a Big Fat Greek Wedding as cultural differences increase the tensions but add such humor and beauty.

Take the R rating seriously. The language is rough. The concept is tragic at times. The relationship, carnal. But get beyond that, and this film is honest, human, clumsy, comedic, and absolutely lovely.

DUNKIRK (2017) movie review

July 24, 2017July 24, 20172 Comments

On land: one week. At sea: one day. In the air: one hour.

This is battle. It’s the surging rush, the scavenging rescues, the silence of the skies broken by bullets and blasts. We wind down the empty streets of the town of Dunkirk onto the terror-laden beaches following one young man. He’s too young. He’s unassuming. He’s fearful but bold. Waiting on a beach with 400,000 men, waiting for unpromised relief and rescue. It’s too early in the war for Churchill to relieve them. They are sitting ducks.Wandering the beach means attempting to catch a floating vessel on rough seas when the tides are right. It means floating away only to be taken out by torpedoes or bombs from the air. It means restless lines of hopeful men surviving minute by minute until help can arrive.And it does. Help drives toward Dunkirk in small yachts and cruisers driven by men and women who answer the British Navy’s call to help evacuate the soldiers. In this story, one older man and his young son set off picking up any that they can, saving lives from dim waters and death.Christopher Nolan offers the world a masterpiece in this thrice-told tale. Capturing practical effects on film, utilizing thousands of extras, a large fleet of actual boats from the event, and the first ever hand-held IMAX camera, Nolan recreated one of the most moving true stories from World War II. Hans Zimmer’s score ignites tension as it sets a heartbeat and a ticking clock just above the deadly waves. I have not experienced this type of non-stop pace with so little dialogue since Mad Max: Fury Road, and the brilliant cinematography almost gives this film a Malick-esque feel, like Tree of Life offering visuals pieced out and reconnecting in a non-linear narrative.

Capturing three human stories, we fight from land, sea, and air. We wash in and out of the fateful, frothy tide with the boy. We maneuver through the waters of the English Channel with the older man whose own face is creased with a torturous understanding of battle, empathy, and loss. And we dash the horizon in the cockpit of a fighter plane attempting to gauge fuel and ammunition levels while chasing the nazi fighters picking off the boats and lines of waiting men.It was too early in the war to send help to these beaches. It was years before the battle would find its way to yet another French beach called Normandy. This story is tragic but redemptive, both exhausting and exhilarating.Too many men lost their lives in those short days, and if civilians hadn’t risked theirs and utilized what they now attribute as their “Dunkirk Spirit,” the war could have gone very differently.

Here is an interview with the director Christopher Nolan, and another article offering perspective from a veteran who experienced the evacuation at Dunkirk.

If you’d like to read more on the Battle of Dunkirk, or on the making of this film (linked here).

GET OUT (2017) movie review

July 13, 2017July 11, 2017Leave a comment

Don’t watch it alone. Or in the dark. It’s a horror film, but it’s also one of the sharpest and most poignant social commentaries to date.Just as SNL can tackle any political joust adeptly through comedy, so somehow this innocent seeming horror flick lays out an eerie Lottery-esque (a la Shirley Jackson) satire and allows a unique look at perceptions from the eyes of black Americans regarding common stereotypes around interracial coupling, police brutality, economic status levels, even physical make-up.
The entire film builds smoothly and thoughtfully to its absolutely terrifying finale. Know the genre and the rating going in, as it is rife with hard R language and frightening content – including a few jump scares.Throughout, the bread crumbs are there to be found. (Without spoilers), watch for a reference to picking cotton, parallels between the gorgeous photographs in the beginning and the layers of dialogue, and my favorite: the famous slogan (look up its origin) “a mind is a terrible thing to waste.”

LOST CITY OF Z (2017) movie review

July 10, 2017July 10, 2017Leave a comment

Remove the pristine profile shots of Charlie Hunnam’s jawline and the darkened jungle B roll and you’ve lost 80% of this film. If only that was it’s only flaw. Sadly, themes and scenes do not connect. Called to the jungle, the men move forward as mapmakers, explorers, and discoverers attempting to make their marks on history as they walk deadly terrain, meet with danger, and never quite find what they are looking for. Sadly, neither do audience members as the story muddles on. The main character’s initial drive to regain family status too quickly translates to the goal of personal glory. Robert Pattinson, a bad casting decision, plays the mumbling, no talent co-explorer who helps lead a team of forgettable allies who lack enough purpose and/or enough backstory to validate rants or bouts with jungle-born illnesses. Even the addition of racial tensions in the early 1900s and a dash of feminist debate fall flat, and both come to no more than fluffy exposition and pointless conjecture for a plot leading nowhere. In the same way, Hunnam’s wanderlust prevails over practicalities and sends him over and over back into the jungle on fruitless endeavors to find a City that stays lost.

LOGAN (2017) movie review

March 5, 2017March 4, 20171 Comment

I trust James Mangold with stories. I loved his remake of the western 3:10 to Yuma, and now he brings the X-Men franchise and specifically Wolverine’s story to a colossal finale allowing a curtain call for the Mercutio of the mutant clan. Wolverine, the classic loner with adamantium claws and a zeal for personal justice becomes Logan, a limo driver for hire in 2029 who also cares for the aging and unwell Professor X.

Charles Xavier is not finished finding and training young mutants, however, and the two must venture back out into the world to rescue a small girl with striking similarities to our hero, Logan.

Mangold wrote the screenplay then directed the film. Taking this film through Gladiator rounds, he begins lopping heads and slicing limbs to appease the masses of film-goers. It easily earns the R-rating with both language and violence in the first five minutes, setting the stage for a gritty and brutal film. Somehow, however, this film flows like a western, the sheriff admonishing the ruthless with cruel justice. Somehow Logan becomes a Christ-figure. And, somehow this film overwhelms with significance as it builds relational depth between characters and as it proclaims the truths that brutality is not without consequence and a life lived selfishly is lived without purpose.