So this is what it feels like to actually be a film reporter. Multiple screenings every week, eating poorly, losing out on sleep, barely wanting to do any writing beyond what’s required of me.
Or maybe that’s just November in Hollywood. It is awards season after all.
Still, putting this out is better late than never, and it’s a great time to catch up on both good stuff and bad. And for the record, while I’ll have some December reviews as well, I’m targeting the week of December 17 for my annual Best Movies of the Year list. And I should have my Best Albums of the Year list in the coming days. So stay tuned.
“The Grinch” – 2 ½ stars
Do they even need writers for kids movies anymore? Patton Oswalt had a routine about being asked to join a writers’ room to spruce up a nearly completed animated film with quick one-liners and silly words designed keep the attention of kids. The comedians often recommended rewrites, but animators had been working every frame for years. At that point, everything of substance is set in stone, and anything the comedians would add was just gravy.
That brings us to “The Grinch,” which is as inoffensive and forgettable as studio kids movies come these days. Though if you ever wanted to hear a Tyler, the Creator version of “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch,” congratulations, you’re the only one.
It wouldn’t even be accurate to call the movie a “comedy” with actual jokes, set-ups, punch lines, etc. Minute to minute there’s a new Rube Goldberg machine of gadgets worthy of a “Despicable Me” movie or a literal slalom chase across snowy rooftops in Whoville, and occasionally there’s a goat that shrieks bloody murder or a reindeer that snorts whipped cream. This is supposed to be amusing, and to children, sure, why not?
But while there’s nothing insultingly obnoxious about “The Grinch,” it can’t even bother to be about much of anything of value. Dr. Seuss’s character has been transformed from a cynical sourpuss to an insecure agoraphobe with a sob backstory inside an orphanage. And it ends with the safest of toasts, “To kindness and love, the things we need most.” Forgive me if my heart is two sizes too small for such a morsel of a lesson.
“Green Book” – 2 1/2 stars
You can put “Green Book” on the same list of mid-budget, crowd-pleasing racial dramedies that includes “The Help,” “The Blind Side,” “Hidden Figures” and “42.” I wouldn’t say Peter Farrelly’s film does anything those films don’t already do to jerk a tear or earn an eye-rolling giggle. Of course these two completely different guys will somehow learn to get along. They’ll better each other along their road trip and learn a thing or two about racism along the way.
If anything, it leans into these tropes and executes them well enough that you can admire it for its formula. The writing is smart, the directing never beats you over the head with life lessons or applause break moments, and the chemistry between both Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen is delightful. Maybe I just liked it because Viggo is not a whiff Italian and is a more believable one than his co-star Sebastian Maniscalco.
But while this movie is a bizarre fable with a strange charm, even a cursory reading shows how problematic and frustrating “Green Book” is, taking an intrinsically black story and framing it entirely from the white guy’s point of view. This is a movie that feels like a dangerous fantasy in the Trump era, the idea that we can keep “both sides-ing” the narrative on racism or presume there are “good” racists who will change if only they meet the right black people, i.e. the highly intelligent, musical prodigy kind. In 2018, that sort of narrative is naïve, and continually showering this kind of story with Oscars only perpetuates that fantasy.
Listen to my most recent podcast of The News Reel for more, and stay tuned to a longer discussion with guest Candice Frederick in a few weeks.
“Creed II” – 2 ½ stars
The new “Creed” is a shell of its predecessor, a movie that fails to realize that the success of the first “Creed” was about more than just delving into Adonis Creed’s personal life or finding a spinoff thread from “Rocky IV.” It follows Adonis Creed, now a heavyweight champion, as he takes on the son of Ivan Drago, the man who killed his father Apollo Creed. In the interim, the film’s idea of drama is remarkably rote. He proposes to his girlfriend, he has a feud with Rocky, he realizes he’s going to be a father. He even literally watches scenes from “Rocky IV” on an iPad at one point to prepare for his own fight.
What’s new is the depth and daddy issues given to Victor Drago. The film opens with Ivan and Victor in unincorporated Ukraine, still castaways after bringing shame onto the Soviet Union. Ivan blames his wife’s abandonment on his son’s failures in the ring, and he puts the weight of his country’s rejection on his shoulders if he loses. This is despite the new Drago speaking all of about six lines of dialogue.
Michael B. Jordan plays Adonis as emotionally immature and volatile, despite all the growth we saw from him the first time around. Sylvester Stallone is his mumbling self. The real standout is Dolph Lundgren, who has a scene face to face with Sly that looks like something out of “The Sopranos.” The music video style of slow motion, pummeling training sequences and fight scenes are still impressive, if pointless. And “Creed II” suffers from bad movie sportscaster syndrome (or Commentator Mouth, as I like to call it) worse than any sports film in recent memory. Max Kellerman, I kid you not, says out loud about Rocky, “He knows better than anyone how this story played out 30 years ago!”
“Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald” – 2 stars
Thankfully, a Harry Potter movie can’t get any worse than “Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald.” That’s because even with a movie as frustratingly convoluted and meandering as this film, there’s a certain level of charm and creativity that goes into anything within the magical universe. David Yates and J.K. Rowling together have perfectly nailed down a plausible world of witches and wizards, with duels of wisps of light and exotic creatures that you simply can’t get anywhere else.
And I quite like Eddie Redmayne’s shifty, fumbling and stuttering performance as Newt Scamander, the way he’s always ducking his eyes beneath his quaff of red hair or seemingly looking through people instead of at them. The world is pretty divided on whether Redmayne’s Capital A Acting and nervous ticks are endearing or make him THE WORST. But not unlike the childlike whimsy of the first “Fantastic Beasts,” I’d watch a whole movie of Newt Scamander wrestling with giant seaweed dragons or using a combination of magic and Holmesian deduction to track and capture a massive cat-like monster.
But instead we’re stuck trying to make “Fantastic Beasts” into “Star Wars,” with Rowling concocting a lineage of prophecies, backstories and family trees (yes, there is a character who pulls out a literal magical family tree chart to explain all this shit) out of thin air. Not only does it not make a lick of sense, much of it doesn’t even end up amounting to a hill of beans before the characters are killed off or brushed to the side. Rowling might even be deliberately contradicting the established Harry Potter lore, which would be interesting on its face, but the twists have to be good for us to care.
Meanwhile, any larger significance that might speak to the more Trumpian aspects of the story have been scrubbed clean. Rowling’s books continue to surprise in how much social commentary about income inequality or the racial divide made it into the subtext of the stories, but “The Crimes of Grindelwald,” crippling from the weight of all the world-building shoved into the foreground, feels like a sanitized version of whatever topical parable this started as.
“Widows” – 3 stars
Steve McQueen’s movies all hit with a certain blunt force. They’re sweeping and showy, but rarely stylized to an excess. And when paired with the enormity of a prison hunger strike, a crippling sex addiction or American slavery, his movies are immensely powerful. But place that dead-eyed gravity onto what should be a sleek heist movie, and I found McQueen’s “Widows” cold and hollow if still complex and impressively made.
“Widows” involves four women whose husbands were killed in a robbery gone wrong. And with no one to pay back their stolen debts to the mob kingpin, also an aspiring politician in an underrepresented neighborhood in Chicago with growing power, the wives are forced to pick up where their husbands left off. Each woman has their reason for risking their lives, playing with ideas of grief, desperation and income inequality in miniature vignettes of bleakness. And the film even grapples with the grim realities and paradoxes of Chicago politics. Colin Farrell plays a white, wealthy politician earning his position out of sheer nepotism and in-grown corruption, while Brian Tyree Henry is a violent mob lord who is nonetheless deeply embedded in his community.
There’s much more, and it’s all very layered and at the same time…so what? The women feel trapped between a rock and a hard place for no other reason than to make it feel dreary. A few twists and flashbacks are powerful but may be ancillary and only underscore the melodrama. And the heist sequences themselves are precise and heavy if not strictly tense or suspenseful. It’s intellectually pointed and brilliant but emotionally shallow.
“Ralph Breaks the Internet” – 3 ½ stars
On a recent episode of The News Reel, we talked about the rise of brand mash-up movies like “Ready Player One” and “The Emoji Movie.” “Ralph Breaks the Internet” is like the dream utopia version of that kind of movie, a film designed to well up emotions at the sight of logos as the rest of us all call it world building.
Though I find it hard to be cynical about a movie this beautifully animated, funny and perceptive. The first film grappled with ideas of your place in the world, but the sequel grapples with existential crises in a way that the “Toy Story” sequels have done so well. And the first one had some good video game themed wallpaper, but “Ralph Breaks the Internet” truly gets being online, from pop up ads anthropomorphized as little green peddling salesmen voiced by Bill Hader, or an infinite auction house as the home of eBay. And the pay-for-play game “Slaughter Race” as depicted in the film not only continues to make Gal Gadot the coolest person on Earth, it also sets up a delightfully sardonic song parodying Disney princess anthems in a way that its voice actress, Sarah Silverman, might’ve dreamed up.
But the best part of this film has all to do with brand deposits, a scene that brings together all the past Disney princesses for a moment of feminist, revisionist fan fiction that’s as funny as it is creative, right down to the meme-inspired t-shirts sported by Ariel and even “Brave’s” Princess Merida (“she’s from the other studio”).
“Woman at War” – 4 stars
The Icelandic director Benedikt Erlingsson introduced his film “Woman at War” as an action movie, yet it had “no misery, no violence, no death, not even a gun, and no sex.” And yet he managed to stage one of the more inventively tense films of the year, if not the decade. It melds cat-and-mouse suspense with environmental parallels, human drama and offbeat humor in a way I’ve rarely seen.
“Woman at War” is about Halla, a middle-aged woman operating as a lone eco-terrorist battling companies contributing to pollution and the like. And because this is an Icelandic film, she of course has a small band following her around providing the film’s score. It’s a gag and a mood setting device that never gets old, and at one point, even provides some of the tension when she spots the drummer in an open field and senses that something’s about to go wrong.
But it takes a surprising turn away from the activist bent when Halla is introduced with an opportunity to adopt a child after being on a waiting list for four years. She’s faced with the dilemma of giving up this life to become a mom just as she’s starting to get the attention of the public. And “Woman at War” grapples with Halla’s personal grief and her twin sister, blissfully unaware of Halla’s double life, challenging the notion of whether her eco-terrorism is a good thing for the world.
The opening shots are an indelible image of her firing a bow and arrow over a power line to short circuit the tower. Erlingsson has a remarkable sense of space within nature and how she manages to avoid detection amid these massive Icelandic fields and mountains, including a brilliant early shot of her hiding beneath a protruding rock with a low-hovering helicopter looming just above her. It’s the kind of hands-on, guerilla filmmaking that made this year’s “Mission: Impossible – Fallout” so engrossing. But then you see the film’s final shot in a water logged Ukraine, the effects of global warming in full view, and you get why this film is so wholly unique.
“Free Solo” – 4 stars
Roger Ebert once said that if he’s watching an Everest documentary, he would rather learn about the guy who managed to lug an IMAX camera up the mountain rather than the guy who actually climbed it.
“Free Solo” is amazing because it actually does both. It’s about free-solo mountain climber Alex Honnold but also the crew around him that plans to document his attempt to scale Yosemite’s El Capitan without the aid of any ropes or harnesses. And their cinematography here is masterful. It turns out the team, led by directors Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, are nearly as experienced climbers as Alex. They illustrate with heart-stopping closeness that Alex is literally entrusting his life to a barely visible crack in a wall as a foothold or how the cliff face seems to close in on Alex as he shimmies his way up it.
But they also grapple with the ethics of being accomplice or witness to his latest stunt, one that could very easily kill him if the worst were to happen. Could the placement of one of their cameras be the factor that disrupts a key handhold or breaks his focus, and could they live with themselves if that happened? And when Alex finally does take the plunge, we’re right there with the cameramen as they can barely bring themselves to watch. The drama and suspense rests in their faces, not his.
That said, Alex Honnold is a fascinating character and well worth the time “Free Solo” spends with him. Here’s a guy who has accomplished the impossible and yet is so chill he lives out of a van and will eat his meals out of a skittle with a spatula. His blunt and awkward demeanor with people has driven him to this most isolated form of activity. He’s so weird he gets an MRI to see if science can explain why he’d risk his life so frequently. And we get to see him try to hold down a relationship with an ordinary woman who is so obviously none of those things. It’s a fuller, more engaging and complete character study than you’ll see in most fictional films this year.
“Bohemian Rhapsody” – 2 stars
I’m pretty much done with music biopics. If your movie is a name-dropping, history-bending complete life story, the re-enacted rise and fall from stardom to hardship of a rock band, complete with live performances, musical montages and scenes of how their hit song or album was recorded, consider me checked out. The best biopics, musical or otherwise, drill down on a single moment of a life story and use that to speak to the whole. Some biopics can get away with the full life story, but the band portrait is so played out it’s even been parodied to death.
That brings us to “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which is not bad so much as it is bleh. It’s boring, rote and perfectly mediocre. What it does have is a stunning recreation of Live Aid, a performance that watching it for real or re-enacted will give you chills and a reminder of why this band is so compelling to so many people. So there’s that. It also has Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury. He’s certainly dedicated to capturing the charisma of Mercury and does so quite well on stage and off. He bounds and slinks through the frame, he milks every word where everyone else is just talking, and he looks deep in the camera like he’s trying to seduce you at every turn. I might be willing to call it a great performance with another director, but with Bryan Singer focused on mimicry and bland precision, it feels like a showy and impressive imitation.
Everything else about “Bohemian Rhapsody” though is the kind of eye-rolling predictability that’s baked into these biopics. Will Queen become a band? Will they make it as a band? Will they get to fulfill their vision as a band? Will they stay a band once they’ve gotten too big? Thankfully, “Bohemian Rhapsody” doesn’t do the insufferable name-dropping and minor cameos of other rock stars. But that’s because it’s too busy patting Queen itself on the back for being the greatest rock band ever. We’re going to make a conceptual album! A rock opera – and we’ll call it, “A Night at the Opera.” What innovators.
Next month: “Capernaum,” “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,” “Mary Queen of Scots,” and more
re WIDOWS: one terrific extended single take from the slumgullion west side of chicago (maybe jane addams CHA housing … that limo’s making a lot of turns) to a line of gentrified victorian-style houses (also west side, along jackson boulevard i’m guessing) that’s like a fantasyland transition, all in the space of an actual mile or two * very observant—and i can’t remember colin farrell ever being so animated before, didn’t think he had it in him … * otherwise: pretty much in agreement with what you said about this: hard to figure what mcqueen thinks he’s accomplishing with it, aside from the gelid control aspects … though i haven’t really cared much for his other films either
in any case, taking a powder on everything else you’ve listed—your SURE this is what award season’s supposed to be about? * and take your finger off that two-and-a-half star button—gotta be a limit on this sort of thing!
Loved that shot too. Brilliant stuff. A lot of cool things he’s doing, but it left me cold. And hahaha I’ll keep that in mind with the ratings. Green Book in particular seems to have slipped significantly even more so since I first saw it and rated it.