I know, I know, it's forever and there's only like one other post on this blog, but goddamn, I just had such a deluge of great great films I have to get my thoughts down somewhere.
Me, Earl, and the Dying Girl:
What a soul-crusher! The Sundance winner was beautifully shot in Pittsburgh, PA, including literally directly behind my old house (although for a native Yinzer, perplexingly all over the city).
It's a beautiful story of the moment in your life that you finally stop thinking only about yourself and the small bubble around you. Unfortunately this moment of outward empathy typically is accompanied by a great loss and god, what a loss. And what sharpens that loss so much more is the comedy that this tragedy is wrapped in. We laugh at the sly jokes and references that fly between the three titular characters and learn to love them all, even with some character problems that I'll get into in a bit. Olivia Cooke steals the show as Rachel, aka The Dying Girl, playing this teen facing death with a perfect combination of frustration, anger, and a zen-like peacefulness. We also get Nick Offerman and Molly Shannon playing fun caricatures of zany parents (ok, I found them a little cliched, but really, they were fun!) alongside my girl Connie Britton (American Horror Story, represent!) playing Greg's mother with such beautifully grounded emotionality that she pulls some of the other characters back into a realistic realm.
Now, not everything in this movie was good. I could honestly go a few solid years without having self-made parody films as a plot device (except for Be Kind Rewind, because come on, those are great). I get it, it's super meta and is a commentary on how we take in other people's stories and make them our own, but let's try something new. I will say, however, that it does lead to a pretty satisfying film moment where we focus on two characters' reactions rather than the film being shown. It also lends a lot of great musical moments to the film. Director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon (also responsible for a lot of good AHS moments), uses musical themes from classic films pretty wonderfully, specifically the theme from Midnight Cowboy. Ok, I just talked myself out of that criticism. I also had a bit of a problem with the character of Earl, played by upcoming Power Ranger (lol), RJ Cyler, who does a magnificent job overcoming the scripts short comings. The lines given to Earl, and his pitbull wielding brother, smack of "White Person Trying to Write Hood Syndrome." The script lets Earl mature a little, but it still left me feeling a little uneasy. For a little background: Pittsburgh is an extremely racially segregated town, and a prime example of it is the division between the Hill District and the neighboring Polish Hill, where the film was mostly shot. I know the movie is not called "Me, Earl, and the Dying Girl and Social Justice," but to completely ignore any of the issues of race besides saying Earl lives in the "tough part of town" feels a little weird.
I know I haven't mentioned lead actor Thomas Mann, as Greg yet in this review, and that's because I honestly felt he was a little unremarkable. Maybe it's being paired with fantastic nuanced performances from Cooke, Britton and Cyler, but Mann's alternately brooding and quippy teen feels like an empty shell that takes the role of the audience's POV. He's by no means a passive character, he's just not very interesting.
Criticisms aside, this was a wonderfully made little indie film that makes me feel like there's bigger things ahead from Alfonso Gomez-Rejon (although IMDB says he's working on a biopic of Edison and Westinghouse's conflicts, so there's that). Me, Earl, and the Dying Girl has just as many moments that leave you smiling with butterflies in your stomach as those that leave you with tears in your eyes.
This movie definitely doesn't suck.
The Revenant:
Insanely shot, with fantastic CGI work on the animals. The plot was admittedly thin, but who needs that much plot when you have the sublime horror of nature and Tom Hardy doing everything they can to deny Leo his revenge. As others have pointed out, the narrative does feel a little too broken up. Whenever we left Glass to check in with rich-boy General with a heart of gold struggling with his decisions, it felt like we were just doing that to release some of the ever growing tension in the film (kind of the anti-Sicario). Tom Hardy brings in an amazing performance, where his villain isn't pure evil, just merely ignorant and looking out for himself above all others. He has as many moments of shaken fear as steely resolve. He also adds another ridiculous accent to his library, bringing out a wide, slippery, vaguely Pittsburgh/Baltimore tongue. You can see how difficult the shoot was on Leo and it really translates into his tortured performance on screen, literally crawling through mud, beard filled with frost and snot and blood and grime. Was his Best Actor Oscar a make-up Oscar? Maybe. Did he put in an Oscar-worthy performance? Absolutely. The real stars of the film were certainly the technical ones though. The camera feels like a mediation on nature, sometimes running around handheld like a scared animal, sometimes cooly taking in the Fitzcaraldo-like sublime of nature. The sound design was some of the best I've ever experienced, completely immersing you in Glass's struggle against an inhospitable world.
I'm not going to get into the Native American stuff, and whether they were too much towards the mystic Indian of "Dances with Wolves," because that's honestly too much for me to unpack.
The Revenant is a film best enjoyed in the theaters, so the sights and sounds fully envelope you in a chilly layer of gray.
So yeah, this movie REALLY didn't suck.
10 Cloverfield Lane:
JJ Abrams tricks audiences into eating their vegetables with this re-titled and slightly tweaked art-house thriller. Two things really made me smile. First, by calling this anything with Cloverfield in the title, he brings in so many mainstream film viewers who were fans of monster-romp Cloverfield (which is excellent), who typically wouldn't go out for this slow burn of a film. Some viewers are bound to feel betrayed that this has next to nothing to do with it's predecessor, but they'll get over it. The other is a funny little quirk that might be more thanks to the Marvel films. Everyone in the audience stayed for the whole credits, anticipating a juicy bumper at the end. There was none, but for the first time in a while, audiences are reading the credits. Pretty awesome.
Amazing performances from all involved, especially the king of the universe John Goodman, who is just a tornado in a bottle of emotions. We never know which Goodman we'll get, brooding, caring, delusional, menancing, and neither do the characters stuck down in the bunker with him. Definitely forgot to breath for pretty long stretches in this film.
Now, would the movie have been a whole lot better if we didn't have the action-y ending tacked on and instead had a little more restrained of a reveal? Sure. Did this make the rest of this insanely anxiety-inducing set piece suck? Absolutely not.
Sicario:
Holy shit. Traffic meets True Detective. Every actor in this film was at the top of their game, the script is super tight despite its potentially confusing nature, and the cinematography is next-level. It's a bloody, brutal, enraging ride that anybody's well off taking. Unlike The Revenant, Denis Villeneuve never takes his foot off the gas, giving audiences a series of tense dialogue scenes that more often than not erupt into butthole clenching thrilling set-pieces. Definitely need a little time to digest this one, but it's certainly going to have me looking over my shoulder next time I'm in a traffic jam.
This movie probably doesn't suck more than any of the other films I saw recently.
The Martian:
Passable, funny, but hated whenever we went back down to Earth. Have no idea why Jeff Daniels was nominated for just being like "How long does it take? DO IT IN HALF THE TIME." Love Ridley Scott, but compared to how awesome all these other films were, it feels like an also-ran, as it most certainly did during awards season. Big props to Matt Damon, carrying the majority of the movie by himself (although goddamn I wish he and the always great Michael Peña had more scenes together), breathing in a great sense of humor to what could have been an overly weighty film.
Overall, it didn't suck, but it didn't blow my mind.
The VVitch:
First, what's up with that title? I know the film is painstakingly based on old texts of witch trials, but do we really need the double v?
HOWEVER this movie kicks so much ass. It's kind of a beautiful combination of a few of the above reviews. It was a nightmare shoot like The Revenant, using only natural light. It's overwhelmed by slowly building tension and malice like 10 Cloverfield. I also didn't breath for about the last 15 minutes, just like how I nearly died watching Sicario.
The Witch is a slow burn with only early glimpses of the horrors to come, but man, when they come, they really come. Not for the squeamish or those afraid of nightmares, but refreshingly free of jump scares and all the cheap little tricks of modern horror films. Everyone I've talked to about this movie has spoken about how it stays with you, instills a horror that's so much deeper than shock or just tension, but full on dread.
The VVitch vvas avvesome and also really didn't suck.
