Sunday, February 26, 2017

Reviews from gulag: Late-winter cleaning

Just to get them all out of the way at last, here's a bunch of mini-reviews of the features I screened in 2016, but never got around to properly reviewing.  To wit: The Jungle Book, Nocturnal Animals, Denial, Sing Street, The Wailing, The Handmaiden, God's Not Dead 2, and The Nice Guys.  (I guess I should be a gentleman and warn you, I get somewhat spoilery for The Wailing and Nocturnal Animals.)

First up, we have Jon Favreau's The Jungle Book, presumptively the best Disney live-action remake of a classic animated film to date.  I say "presumptively" because I didn't see Pete's Dragon, but, of course, neither did you, so you're not likely to care about any misattributed superlative on its account.  Either way, more than anything else, The Jungle Book is a fantabulous technical exercise—albeit one that takes ages and ages to get used to, simply because there's just no preparing yourself for the incongruous and deeply upsetting sight of all these nearly-photorealistic CGI animals who flap their lips in a simulacrum of speaking English.  (And even after you've finally gotten your head around that, then you have to deal with those two musical numbers, imported from the animated original, neither one of which feels precisely on-target, and the latter of which does its absolute damnedest, in conjunction with the film's abysmal reimagination of King Louie as a Kongian kaiju, to ruin your fucking life.)

On the other hand, you have Idris Elba's Shere Khan, monumentally terrifying, though this has somewhat more to do with the sterling CGI performance, and Favreau's willingness to stage some genuine high-test brutality in his kid's talking animal adventure, than it does with Elba's vocal performance—although it is a rather good one.  On that same hand, however, you have Scarlett Johannson's giant-sized Kaa, who is, objectively speaking, probably just as ridiculous a creation as King Louie—but who still comes off as a bolt of creepy horror-movie perfection, right in The Jungle Book's heart.  Best talking snake ever?  Maybe.  But the best use of the focal plane in a 2016 movie, hiding Kaa's body against the limbs of the tree Mowgli's found himself in, until the electric moment she begins to move?  Oh, almost without a doubt.  (And yet Kaa's success is just as much thanks to Johannson's vocals.  In combination with Her, it leads me to believe that the woman is a significantly better voice actor than she is an actor-actor.  Plus, if they'd kept her musical number—which is relegated instead to the closing credits, even though it's by far the best of all three—it might have helped the other two feel even the slightest bit organic to the proceedings.)

Meanwhile, Bill Murray's pretty well-cast himself, as the lazy Baloo; and Ben Kingsley is likewise doing just fine with one more check-chasing late-career role, as the stolid Bagheera.  As for that kid playing Mowgli, Neel Sethi, he is frankly doing much better than he's gotten credit for: can you imagine playing make-pretend on a set like this one, let alone at his age?  He's fantastic.

And yet, if you throw in an ending that seems to be at cross-purposes not only with the original text (whether "original" means the Kipling tale or the '67 cartoon), but at cross-purposes with its own themes and story, what you're ultimately left with is not that much more than one amazing-looking mess.  (And one that probably needed an R-rating to really reach its full potential, at that.  I live and I dream, guys.)  But it is amazing-looking, and that still counts, even in 2016.  And so even all the things that you're bound to hate about it just don't matter nearly as much as they really probably should.

Score:  7/10

Then there's Tom Ford's Nocturnal Animals, which is a mediocre revenge thriller trapped inside a bad art film—which is, itself, trapped inside an even worse revenge thriller.  (This outermost layer would be a revenge thriller that climaxes with a man standing up a woman at their dinner date.  Gotcha, bitch.)  This one's about a woman who divorces a man in her early twenties, mainly because he's one of those quintessential fools-who-dream, and years and years and years later, this loser has finally finished his dumb fucking novel, which I imagine must be a masterpiece of prose, because it's no masterpiece of plot—it boils down, basically, to a slow-motion reiteration of Deliverance (or any other hicksploitation-based revenge thriller you could name) except the victims of hillbilly-rape and murder here are the hero's wife and daughter, natch, for that added "why can't you be a real man for once, instead of an effete East Coast elite?" resonance.

So the author sends this weighty tome to his ex, who's become a rich man's bloodless trophy wife in the intervening years.  She spends most of her free time hanging out in bathtubs and showers (I swear she must spend at least twenty minutes of this film bathing, probably because she's—wait for it—so dirty), whilst she devotes her own meager creative energies to the curation of devastatingly pointless art installations (and yet, for whatever it's worth, the art installations Ford presents are just about the only things in the whole movie with the power to actually provoke a reaction).  Meanwhile, you can tell she's empty inside because of her stupid hipster friends (Jena Malone, Michael Sheen, et al), and the hilarious amounts of makeup tattooed onto her eye sockets, that kind of make her look like she's about to rob a bank, or, at the very least, about to knock over your trash can in order to get to the delicious half-eaten chicken wings inside.  Anyway, the novel awakens this woman's conscience, for whether she's imagining it or not, she sees herself in these pages—and she literally sees her ex-husband, as both the hero and the author are played by Jake Gyllenhaal—and, finally, it becomes increasingly clear that she sees the awful awful awful thing she did to him.  (Were this a full review, its title would inevitably be "Amy Adams doesn't want to me to impregnate her either, but I never wrote a book about it.")

Seen in the most charitable light possible, Nocturnal Animals is a movie about how you can read your own meaning into a text, based on your own lived experience; and even the world itself is just one more text to be read.  Unfortunately, Nocturnal Animals does very little that makes you want to treat it charitably, starting with the unsupportable cognitive leap this woman makes in order to get to the point where she thinks Aaron Taylor-Johnson's gross fictional redneck could possibly be a stand-in for her sins.  (To his credit, however, Taylor-Johnson at least manages to become alive again in a role, for what seems like the first time in a couple years.)  Still, if you were of such a generous disposition, I suppose the very best thing about it is that the ending of the novel-within-the-movie, in combination with our absent dinner-partner, does perhaps imply a suicide, something that makes the top level of this (apparently highly-conceptual) revenge thriller (kind-of sort-of) work.  But altogether, it's rather lousy, isn't it?  I mean, can you believe Michael Shannon got nominated for an Oscar for this shit?  He's fine, yeah.  Everybody's fine!  They're all good actors.  They're simply not going to not be fine.

But taken with Arrival, it represents two Amy Adams roles in a row where femininity is put on trial, and, if you've seen both films, you know that in one femininity is exonerated, while in the other, it is not.  If you have seen both, then, you're no doubt waiting presently for Adams' inevitable hat trick—indeed, for her next leading role, perhaps she can play an actual abortion clinic bomber, because anything that keeps her from continuing to wallow in the cold and airless subtext of her last two films would be fine by me.  And, speaking of this particular cold and airless director, it's certainly a big step down from his debut.  For all its many flaws, A Single Man had 1)a story and 2)at least a trace of relatable humanity.  But I will give the fashion-designer-turned-film-director this, and this alone: Nocturnal Animals is, even moreso than A Single Man before it, a very handsome movie, and therefore relatively easy to watch—and yet, even then, it's surely rather more like failed Refn than it is successful Kubrick, a comparison that I'd hope he'd take as the insult it's obviously meant to be.  That said, the score's also quite nice, a pleasant feature-length Pino Donaggio riff—though, obviously, all that ever really made me want to do is watch old Brian De Palma movies for the twentieth time, rather than soldier on, watching this.

The biggest takeaway from Nocturnal Animals, I think, is that it finally crystallized in my mind a rule of thumb for motion pictures generally.  It goes like this: if Jena Malone has agreed to be in your movie, it means that your movie is not nearly as smart as it thinks it is.  This is true of every movie where Malone stars, or even cameos.  It's certainly true of the bad ones, but it's also true of the good ones—hell, it's even true of the great ones.  (The Neon Demon, for its charms, is not especially insightful; while even wonderful old Donnie Darko is still pretty patent nonsense.  Perhaps the only major exception I can name is Saved!—which is only exactly as smart as it thinks it is.)  I mean, please don't get me wrong.  I like Jena Malone a lot.  She's talented, beautiful, and energetic, and why she never actually became a for-real movie star is one of the great mysteries of cinema in the 21st century (although perhaps one that the vicious cycle of her career somewhat solves for itself).  But if she read my script and thought it was brilliant, that's when I'd know for sure that it was time for another draft, because every single time she shows up in something, something about it is dumb—and pretentiously dumb, to boot.  Whereas if my script were called Nocturnal Animals, and my name were Tom Ford, well, I think I'd know it was time for me to simply throw it right in the trash—and start again.

Score:  4/10

Next on our list, there's Mick Jackson's Denial, which seems 1000% more relevant now than when I watched it, some weeks before a certain Tuesday in November.  That doesn't make it any more impressive, I'm afraid; and, yes, Denial is nothing more than a by-the-numbers true story retold, although it does represent one of the most flamboyant misapplications of the CinemaScope frame that you're ever likely to see.  (There is, literally, one shot in the whole movie that takes advantage of it, beyond its ability to put three or more people into a medium close-up.  It's a nice little shot of a man walking the fences at the Auschwitz Museum, smashed into the side of the frame while the fence itself dominates the image.  Altogether, I have to say that it's a pitiful waste of Denial's cinematographer, Harris Zambarloukos, a man who's amazed us in the past, and in the very same aspect ratio, on pictures as visually diverse as the broadly-epic Thor and the hyper-claustrophobic Locke.)

But wait, should I have already mentioned that this is the one about the Holocaust denier who took advantage of a spectacularly-stupid procedural loophole in British defamation law to advance a lawsuit against a real historian, a woman who called him an idiot and a liar?  Well, it is, and it's as precisely as exciting as you'd expect it to be.  Even so, there's nothing really wrong with it, and (I'd say that this must be to the film's enormous credit), it's somehow not even actively boring.  It benefits, quite immensely, from its two pretty swell leading performances—Rachel Weisz, on one hand, as that persecuted and permanently-incredulous academic, and Timothy Spall, on the other, as the grotesque Nazi sympathizer who thinks himself a pleasant British gentleman.  But, spoiler, guys: it turns out that calling someone a liar and a fraud for denying the Holocaust is not a slander.  Not even in the U.K.  (Guess we'll just have to wait and see how things shake out in the U.S., now, though.  Sad!)

Score:  6/10

Then there's John Carney's Sing Street, which a lot of people like for reasons I can't even begin to get a handle on.  This one's about an Irish junior high school kid in the 80s, who gets his first boner, and therefore decides to form a rock band to impress the girl who gave it to him.  It's passably cute, and that's great, but it's practically nothing but passably cute.  And it is altogether impossible to say how the Sing Street band goes from hilariously inept to almost-mediocre over the course of their picture, without even so much as a proper montage that actually  depicts their successive failures leading to a kind of qualified success.  Then again, it'd also be nice if they didn't keep getting blander and less interesting with every new number, going from legitimate (if crappy) New Wave to a lame, nearly genre-free brand of pop rock.  The film never really makes a point of their artistic evolution, possibly because "art" has nothing to do with it, which is maybe the boldest thing Sing Street has to say, though it doesn't also know how to do anything particularly interesting with that insight.

All along, Sing Street suffers even more from the outlandishly bad miscasting of its leads, with the object of our hero's affections so obviously in her mid-20s that it's frankly a testament to everyone's solid acting that you only occasionally have to wonder aloud if anyone's going to report the sexual predator hanging around outside the boy's school.  And then Sing Street has the gall to end, not on an expensively-purchased life lesson, but on what amounts to an outright fucking generational tragedy.  The thing is, it's never the least bit clear if anyone involved actually noticed that that's what their ending was.  Maybe they did, and maybe they meant it sarcastically.  But that's still not all that much fun now, is it?

Score:  5/10

That brings us to Na Hong-Jin's The Wailing, which is a two-and-a-half-hour exorcism movie with one great scene, this being the dueling exorcism that doesn't take, and you know won't take, because there's still so much damn movie left.  The Wailing isn't a failure or anything, but it is molasses-paced, rather indifferently-shot, and, above all, not scary.  It works slightly better as a character piece focusing upon its inept family man cop protagonist's descent into darkness, as he investigates the local Japanese man who may or may not be an evil warlock.  But even this doesn't work that well, thanks to a plot that amounts, essentially, to porn for Korean xenophobes.

The Wailing is what the word "proficiency" looks like in motion picture form, and I do not understand the passionate reception it's received at all.

Score:  6/10

Another one of the major Korean imports this past year was Park Chan-Wook's The Handmaiden.  And I suppose it really is his best movie since Oldboy—though all this really means is "why has Park Chan-Wook never made another movie nearly as good as Oldboy?"  It is, of course, an unfair thing to ask of any filmmaker—Oldboy, after all, truly is that good.  But you're still left with a chronic disappointment, when a director who once made a decade-defining masterpiece has also consistently failed to go on to make movies that were remotely great, or even sometimes to make movies that are so much as particularly good.  Indeed, if I'm being really honest, I'm not even completely sure The Handmaiden actually does beat, for example, Thirst or Lady Vengeance.

Anyway, this is the one about the male and female con artists in Japanese-occupied Korea, who weasel their way into a rich Japanese man's home, as a nobleman guest and a personal maid, respectively, in order to woo the rich man's niece and grab her inheritance.  (For reasons unspecified, or poorly specified—at this juncture, I forget, and there's a lot of plot in The Handmaiden—the uncle, who likewise intends to marry his much-younger niece, has not yet coerced the lady into matrimony.)  The story is told in three parts, and more-or-less told three times.  First it's told from the perspective  of Sook-hee, the titular handmaiden, albeit only theoretically; then it's told from the perspective of Hideko, the long-suffering niece, which doesn't amount to much more subjectivity than the first time around; and, finally, it's told from the perspective of nobody in particular at all, although the film sort-of half-ass commits to the perspective of "Count Fujiwara," the confidence man who'd presented himself as an expert art forger, and hence a fine prospective ally for the wealthy uncle who, it turns out, has founded much of his fortune upon the brokerage of rare pornography.  It's an erotic feminist revenge tale, in case you didn't guess.  And it's a better-than-decent one.  But that structure just feels naggingly wrong, existing primarily—perhaps even solely—to hide secrets from the audience, as opposed to the characters themselves.

And so what advertises itself as a riff on Rashoman turns out to be absolutely nothing more than a puzzle box that Chris Nolan might've put together on an off day.  The way Park offers and withholds information borders on the outright insulting—and when there's no abiding POV conceit to actually justify this, what you get is a bog-standard mechanical thriller that does little more than exactly what it needs to do, with an overlay of lesbian lust and East Asian race issues that distracts you, a little, from the fact that when it comes to this movie, there's so much less than meets the eye.  Furthermore, this movie promises a satisfying climax of ironic octopus rape, and I regret to tell you that no such thing occurs.  In fact, the way that the final act of vengeance winds up subcontracted out in this revenge movie is, frankly, a little bit Goddamned lame.

Still, I liked it for what it was, and Park's kinetic camerawork and judicious cutting can still make a thriller sing, no matter its weaknesses as a story.  Maybe you'll like it too.  Just, please—don't buy the hype.  Because Lord, this one's drowning in it, isn't it?  (Between this and The Wailing, you'd think that 2016 was some kind of banner fucking year for Korean cinema, given the way people have been carrying on about both—but unless The Age of Shadows is some genre-defining masterpiece that I just haven't seen yet, it was simply no such thing.)

Score:  7/10

Now comes Harold Cronk's God's Not Dead 2, and it manages to actually be much, much worse than the original God's Not Dead, itself a rather bad movie—but at least one which had the basic decency to frame its own dumbassed Christian persecution fantasy within a properly mythic scenario.

You'll recall (or, if you're reading this, you most likely won't) that the first Not Dead focused upon the contest of wills between a Christian college freshman and his evil all-caps ATHEIST philosophy professor (nicely embodied by a smarmy-as-fuck Kevin Sorbo); the lad, upon refusing to agree that "God [was] dead," was compelled to prove to his professor that God was surely alive.  It was just as impossibly moronic as it sounds, and, obviously, it bore not the slightest resemblance to any freshman philosophy class ever taught outside of, possibly, the actual Soviet Bloc.  (Indeed, if our good Christian was going to a school that receives federal funding, which presumably he did, the premise is straight-up illegal, and one hell of a slam dunk discrimination lawsuit.)  But it did work on the level of allegory, even if it's a stupid allegory I disagree with; honestly, it's so preposterous and high-concept that I can easily imagine people liking it unironically as allegory, in the same way that I don't need to be completely convinced that Oceania makes sense for me to enjoy 1984.  Regardless, the movie was certainly overwrought in all the right ways for it to be an extraordinarily good time. 

God's Not Dead 2, on the other hand, concerns itself with a weak-kneed Melissa Joan Hart, and the mess she gets herself into one day while teaching her history class.  The lesson involves the history of the philosophy of non-violence.  MLK and Gandhi get namechecked, and, obviously, the conversation turns to our old pal Yeshua, and Hart makes a confession of her Christianity when asked a point-blank question about it.  And all throughout this inciting incident, nothing ever happens that would justify so much as narrowed eyes, let alone a fucking lawsuit, but, because right-wing Christians are convinced that everything in the world they already own is nevertheless against them (go watch Silence and see what real persecution is like, dirtbags), this leads to the trial of our heroine's faith.  (By which I mean, she's put on trial for her faith, not that her faith itself is actually tried: this is a Christian production, and they just don't do "inner conflict," which is one reason why they come off as so remarkably inhuman.)

Either way, it's just as ridiculous, but nowhere near as fun, nor as engagingly direct, as the first film; meanwhile, Not Dead 2 doubles down on the things that were actively inept about the first film, namely the impenetrably-fake legal wrangling, and (especially) an ungainly ensemble cast that flits around on the edges of the main story.  The latter, of course, is more like an admission that nobody involved with either film could actually write enough compelling drama to fill up a feature's length with just their core cast of characters.

Even on its own terms, it's nowhere near as powerful (or "powerful") a Christians-versus-Romans movie as its predecessor; on my terms, it's nowhere near as enjoyably loopy.  (Though it's worth watching the end credits on both, where they point to the "real-life" precedents for their screenplays, which almost entirely involve the right of for-profit organizations to discriminate against gays or fail to give women health insurance, rather than the right of anybody to believe in Christ's divinity.  These people, you know?)  Anyway, it's basically just one more dull piece of Christian media.  I can't imagine we'll be seeing a God's Not Dead 3: No, He's Surely Alive This Time, For Real.  But then, I never thought this would be a franchise in the first place.

Score:  2/10

We've saved the best for last, of course.  As for The Nice Guys, it's probably pithy enough to simply call it the successful version of Inherent Vice.  Unfortunately, that would be unfairly dismissive of writer-director Shane Black, who is probably more talented than Paul Thomas Anderson, even though he'll never get the same credit as Anderson, because Black's movies are fun and approachable, as opposed to Anderson's movies, which are soul-crushing and pretentious, even when they are comedies.

And The Nice Guys is one of last year's most successful comedies.  Partly, this is because it's just so funny; the other part is that all its many gestures at comedy, or at weirdness (not always the exact same thing), grow miraculously naturally out of the basic elements of its inspired genre exercise.  This is the one about a pair of semi-pleasant men, Holland March and Jackson Healy, who, alongside March's young daughter Holly, attempt to solve a murder in Los Angeles in the late 1970s.

And so, we have our mismatched pair of antagonistic detectives, and our wise-beyond-her-years wunderkind; we have the way the hungover ambience of the post-Watergate years informs every frame of the film; we have Black's recourse to at least two over-the-top, even slapsticky shootouts; we have March and Holly's surprisingly melodramatic tragedy; we have Healy, groping around and looking for a redemption that he probably never needed, because what he really needed all along was a family; we have the sleazy maguffin, in the form of a lost porno film; and, of course, we have one very far-reaching capitalist conspiracy on our hands—and this time it looks set to swallow our heroes' American dreams up, bones and all.  These are our elements, and they've all been done before, individually.  Certainly, most of them have been done by Black before.  Often enough, they've been done better, at least one at a time.  Needless to say, they've all been done worse, though that certainly doesn't mean much of anything when it comes to "mismatched detectives"—nor anything else on that list, for that matter.

Still, I'm not sure that I can name any instance where they've all been done at once.  And all of them seem a whole lot fresher and more original than they have in years when they're sitting next to each other, within Black's deceptively-precise script—and within the three deceptively-precise performances that give the thing its unique life, animated by a trio of actors who take the dangers Black's arrayed around them seriously enough that calling it just a "comedy" frankly sells it a little bit short.

In fact, while from scene to scene, what you're likeliest to focus on is the shaggy bickering between the leads, The Nice Guys presents a compellingly-twisty mystery that—although perhaps eventually revealing itself as a little bit too big for this admirably self-contained film's britches—lends the film an exquisite sense of plot-driven momentum, which no amount of character-driven shenanigans can obliterate, even when those (many) character-driven shenanigans are the point.  It's a balancing act that rarely falters—much in the same way that Black's recreation of the 1970s makes itself felt, without too much of the outrageous pandering and signposting that characterizes virtually every other attempt to do the same damn thing.

But, then, in those characters, and those performances, we have the three people who make The Nice Guys so special and, well, so unavoidably likeable: Russell Crowe, bulldoggish, and providing a real sense of wounded humanity to what amounts to a brutish thug; Ryan Gosling, mustachioed, and remembering that he can, in fact, do more for a movie than simply stare sadly into the middle distance (indeed, he reminds us that his inexpressive, goofily-handsome face was fashioned at least as much for pure physical comedy as it ever was for clinically-depressed glowering); and, finally, Angourie Rice, precocious, and demonstrating in the most surprising turn of all that the implausibly-mature movie-movie tweenager, who no doubt realized she was smarter than her dad years ago, does not actually have to be obnoxious.  Instead, she can be entirely adoreable, even (or especially!) when her intelligence collides with her naievete, whereupon she makes the grown-ups realize that they've compromised themselves, and truly do need to be better men.  (It's certainly the best Inspector Gadget adaptation to come along yet, even if they did have to make it a little bit grim and gritty.)

Oh, they're a flawed bunch, our nice guys.  They wear their flaws on their polyester sleeves.  But what really gives us permission to love them is that they have a tendency to double down on their essential lameness, when another movie might've tried to force them into pure, unselfish heroism.  The result?  An effervescent, entertaining, and determinedly un-profound examination of just how inconvenient and annoying (and, yes, futile) doing the right thing can be, especially if what you'd rather be doing is retreating into dissolution, while ripping off grieving old ladies to make rent money.  It's a movie that—albeit in its very idiosyncratic, sub rosa way—actually does question whether morality can be a profitable thing.  (It's also, as you might have recognized, a movie that's so good and so enjoyable that you want to arrogate some kind of high-falutin' importance to it, beyond simply being its awesome self.)

You can find a thousand movies that grapple with that exact same question, albeit typically without being quite so inviting.  But if The Nice Guys asks that question at all, it does have an answer for you—which it offers up as early as its mystery-sparking prologue.  There, an act of kindness and dignity is treated purely as an end within itself.  And yet it is also a movie where the "happy" ending comes with the line, "At least you're drinking again."  It has it all: the spiritual corrosion of a good noir; the laughs and action of the best buddy cop movies; and, most shockingly of all, the heart of a Spielbergian adventure.  So, yeah; I know.  I'm catching up to where all the cool kids were back in May; and I sure wish I'd caught it in the theaters myself, instead of helping consign it to 2016's "also-ran" pile.

Score:  9/10


  1. While I was far more swept up in Sing Street's spirit than you, I do agree that the people hailing it as a masterpiece are vastly overreaching. I think it has a lot to do with the bad kind of nostalgia, where literally anything representative of the time you grew up is hailed as a glorious, life-changing thing.

    Oh boy, Nocturnal Animals. If it was JUST that Western revenge story, it would be... OK. Still not great. But all the extra noodling just feels like you're drowning in artless pretention.

    And I'm glad you finally caught up with The Nice Guys, which was my second favorite Gosling movie of the year! I too am extremely glad he's returning to comedy, because he finds little moments of physical comedy that are just dazzling. Like the scene in Nice Guys where he's trying to keep the bathroom door open while holding his newspaper and cigarette. That's way more challenging and satisfying than anything he does in a Refn film.

    1. Hey, it was my first favorite!

      (Still, Drive is a masterpiece, man. I know everyone says that, but they say it because it's true.)

      Nocturnal Animals is just so oddly committed to its abortion thing. It could've been anything, you know? But it's that. Is it weird that I thought the best part of the movie was the opening credits sequence? You know, the overtly offensive part? I mean, it was certainly interesting, and really well-shot.

      Sing Street just kind of collapses, even as a low-key charmer. I wish I liked it more. Maybe if it took place in the early 90s...