2017 Movies

[darthrush]

Glad to see you enjoyed Call Me By Your Name! And yes, those two posters are strikingly similar.

I find myself revisiting the two Steven's pieces from the film on spotify constantly. They are really beautiful songs that accompany a very beautiful film. I honestly would have no qualm if it won Best Picture.

 

[TM2YC]

I honestly would have no qualm if it won Best Picture.

I can't decide yet if that or Two Billboards is the best. They are both deserving but so different. On that subject, I've now watched the last couple of BP nominations:

Lady Bird (2017)
Semi-autobiographical. At first I thought the quirky-o-meter was reading a bit high on this one but it turned out to have some real emotional heft. Saoirse Ronan as the title character is as wonderful as you'd expect and Laurie Metcalf is so damn good. Full of human frailty, love and miscommunication. Shot really beautifully capturing the love Director Greta Gerwig has for her Sacramento home town. Personally, I'm not sure if I'd have nominated it for Best Picture but I'm fine with it being there.

The Shape of Water (2017)
It's reassuring to know that a sumptuously romantic film about a mute cleaning lady falling in love with fish-man can still get a theatrical release and be a box office smash! For what is billed as a whimsical fantasy film, I wasn't expecting this much explicit sex and gory violence. That Guillermo del Toro can shoot a period sci-fi film looking this magical and luxuriously expensive on the kind of budget that some blockbuster Director's would spend on their catering (19.5 million) shows his total command of the craft. Up there with Del Toro's best.

Alexandre Desplat did a beautiful job on the score. It's got a  Parisian 'Edward Scissorhands' vibe:

Also,

The Handmaiden (2017)
I managed to get this in a dirt-cheap boxset with two cuts of the film.   I haven't watched the Director's Cut yet but the Theatrical version was good enough that I'm intrigued to watch that when I revisit 'The Handmaiden'. I had high expectations after Park Chan-Wook's last film 'Stoker'. This doesn't quite hit those highs for me but it's still a very fine film. Meticulously designed sets and costumes mixing Japanese, Korean and Victorian styles are a feast for the eye. A sexual quadrangle of eroticism, fetishism and deception plays out in a complicated flash-back/flash-forward way.

 

[darthrush]

I must admit that I found Shape of Water a little underwhelming. Not enough time developed to the relationship between her and the creature and everything felt a little overwritten. 

As long as Billboards or CMBYN wins I'll be satisfied. Get Out would be awesome too. 

But Shape of Water, Dunkirk, and especially Darkest Hour all feel so overrated to me.

 

[TM2YC]

Still catching up with 2017 movies that I wanted to watch but somehow didn't...

Victoria and Abdul (2017)
The trailer made this look very fanciful, light-weight and white-washed in comparison to 'Mrs Brown' but it turned out to be a good tonal companion piece. The first-half is lightly comedic (mostly down to watching the indignant facial expressions of old-grey stuffy gentlemen) but it gets much more serious toward the end. Abdul is portrayed with his flaws intact and judging by a documentary I watched, the film hues reasonably close to the known facts. They oddly omitted the fact of Victoria enjoying a good curry, which I thought was one of the more interesting anachronistic (seeming) details of this story.

Denial (2017)
An interesting film, of an interesting story that raises interesting questions but due to a tight 90-minute run-time employs too many narrative contrivances in order to get the facts across succinctly. About the libel trial brought by the fascist historian David Irving against the writer Deborah Lipstadt. Although set just before the internet age, a film about proving a Holocaust denier is a liar, while not lowering oneself to their level, proves especially relevant for today's anti-social-media age. As they say "Don't feed the trolls".

Lady Macbeth (2017)
A young girl is sold to an older Mill owner in 19th Century Northern England. It's a  stifling loveless marriage but this seemingly innocent girl soon proves herself more wicked than anybody else, as the tile suggests. There are no characters to sympathise with because they are all horrible in their own way but the film is still very compelling.

The Lost City of Z (2017)
If you liked other jungle=madness movies like 'Apocalypse Now', 'Aguirre' and 'Fitzcarraldo' then 'The Lost City of Z' will satisfy. Loosely based on the real-life exploits of the early 20th Century Amazonian explorer Percy Fawcett and his belief in a vast hidden city. Charlie Hunnam and Robert Pattinson are excellent and the film really captures the spirit of adventure.

 

[TM2YC]

Goodbye Christopher Robin (2017)
Having watched the schmaltzy trailer and knowing something of the real Winnie the Pooh story, this could have gone two ways. 1. The film was schmaltzy and white-washed. 2. The trailer was lying and the film was actually miserable like the real story. Luckily it's the latter but it's still not all that good. Domhnall Gleeson is sadly not up to task of portraying such an emotionally complex character.

The lying trailer in question...

...is kinda impressive in the way it's edited (almost fanedit like) to make the film seem like a jolly and heartwarming story when it's far from it. e.g. the first shot of Domhnall dancing is from a scene about him being depressed and angry but they used the brief moment when he forgets himself and smiles . Every moment of levity from the film is in the trailer. The cracks only show in the edit when they can't cut around the kid looking traumatised at 01.51. It's like one of those 'Brokeback to the Future' trailers that turn dramas into comedy for YouTube giggles.

Beauty and the Beast (2017)
Disney, for their latest in a continuing series of lazy live-action versions of their old animated classics have gone for basically a scene for scene remake (almost shot for shot sometimes), except they've had to change some things, just so they could claim it wasn't. When the original film was absolute perfection, that can only lead to changing things for the worse. So Belle's father is changed from a loopy inventor to a perfectly lucid music-box maker, making the villagers not believing "crazy old Maurice" nonsensical. Instead of Belle making a solemn pact to remain with the beast, he now initially locks her in a cell, leading to time being wasted demonstrating why she can't escape, despite many attempts.

Luke Evans is nowhere near handsome, charming and chisel jawed enough to be Gaston. I kept imagining Henry Cavill instead. He could have done that muscle-bound specimen of outwards male perfection but had the chops to do the inner ugliness too. The CGI characters are charmless and expressionless, in contrast to the lovely originals. Director Bill Condon keeps the camera distant from the character's faces which makes it hard to read the already bland expressions.It manages to tell the same story less well and takes 45 minutes longer to do it. Why oh why did they remake this? Oh yeah, it made a billion profit, that's why .

 

[thecuddlyninja]

^ I agree with everything you said about Beauty and the Beast, except for me Gaston was one of the few things that worked. Evans and Gad knew how to own a musical theater performance, while the two leads had to think so much about their performances that every number and much of the film played so stiff and lifeless, in my opinion. 

For me, the music was also a huge disappointment. I understand that they were going to do some new songs in addition to the original, to justify the film's existence. But the problem is that the Beauty and the Beast Broadway musical exists, and it already did additional songs wonderfully. They used the original film score to build new numbers so it really integrated. The film ignores these great new songs and writes some thoroughly mediocre ones instead. Then they get mediocre singers to perform them and boom, a billion dollars profit for a film I'd turn down watching ten times out of ten in favor of listening to the musical. Sigh.

 

[Sinbad]

Detroit

A film to endure more than enjoy, Bigelow's unfussy almost documentary approach is admirable but left me a little cold. There was a key scene which I found really hard to swallow that it went down as its portrayed in the film but I'm inclined to look into the events portayed in the film now at least.  Will Poulter is pretty good in it but its hard to get past his very youthful appearance which makes him seen miscast. The standout in this for me was Boyega, flashes of a young Denzel Washington in his performance suggested to me he could be round for quite a while... Well worth a look overall...

 

[TM2YC]

Detroit

Will Poulter is pretty good in it but its hard to get past his very youthful appearance which makes him seen miscast.

Oh really, I'd be scared to be in the same room as Will Poulter after seeing him in 'Detroit' .

6 Days (2017)
The bulk of this film follows the SAS team as they plan to storm the Iranian Embassy in 1980, that part is tense viewing. The official SAS motto is famously "Who Dares Wins" but I remember Andy McNab saying the soldiers really had the motto "Who Prepares Wins". Seeing every detail and eventuality planned out was fascinating, memorising faces, studying little miniatures and training on quickly mocked up full scale replicas of the Embassy interior. The film is let down by Australian actress Abbie Cornish who is doing an accent that isn't Australian, isn't British but might be from Mars? Nothing about her convinces as BBC reporter Kate Adie, from the clothes, to the wig, to the ridiculous voice. A short edit could be done removing her and perhaps replacing it with more genuine news footage (if a decent source exists).

You can see how jarring Cornish's performance is in the middle of this otherwise intense clip:

 

[Sinbad]

Only The Brave

A pretty powerful retelling of the Granite Mountain Hotshots events of 2013, I wasn't aware of this true story so won't give the full details of what happened. Good performances all round and a good balance of family drama and the events themselves, the fire scenes while obviously heavily cgi'd didn't appear so and were done tastefully and not to wow.  This was a surprise as Kosinski's work upto now has been very heavy on visual FX.  I couldn't help feeling it was hollywoodizing  what happened (which of course it is) but it definitely felt less manipulative than the recent Wahlberg/Peter Berg movies that follow the same formula.  A fairly worthy tribute to real life heroes

 

[Gaith]

Get Out (2017)

A devilishly entertaining and skillfully made flick. But, a Great Film/rightful Best Picture winner? I'm not quite in that camp.

Reveal message

Specifically, I wasn't much convinced by the community's whole scheme of snatching specifically black bodies. Why make it far harder to transfer assets to one's new selves, and generally travel around and/or return to society, by remaking one's self as a member of a persecuted/disadvantaged group? Are the grandparents just going to stay on the estate forever? Rather than an unexplained preference/fetish for blackness, it might have made more sense had someone said that it's simply easier to remove and replace a black individual from society than a white one, but such a blunt and grim message might have thrown off the movie's carefully maintained popcorn-worthy fun. Anyhow, I don't mean to start a touchy debate on a forum that avoids such things; it just felt as though the reveal was reverse-engineered to justify the story, rather than building organically from a developed theme.

I'm also a bit puzzled as to why so many commentators seem to take the characters' insistence they're liberals who would gladly have voted for Obama again at face value. Maybe they are, but since everything they do and say is part of an act, we can hardly trust them in those regards, can we?

Grade: A-

 

[Neglify]

Wait though. You wouldn't call this a "Great Film" but you give it an A-?

 

[Gaith]

^ As a popcorn entertainment, yeah. An A- on the "flick" scale. If I were measuring it on a "film" scale, it'd be a B+, possibly a B. But when Roger Ebert gave Iron Man 4/4 stars, the same rating as Schindler's List, he wasn't calling them equally great, ya know.

 

[Neglify]

I see. I thought it was a great fillum and a kick-ass flick and thought-provoking entertainment and a creepy piece of cinema. Bottom line, it was cool. Glad you enjoyed it.

Oh hey, slightly on-topic, there's a laundromat type place here in SF (and I'm sure Gaith knows exactly which one I'm talking about) called "Get The Funk Out". Always gives me a giggle when I ride past it on the #5 bus.

 

[Gaith]

Gerald's Game (2017)
Based on a Stephen King book. Wife ends up trapped handcuffed to a bed after her husband suffers a heart-attack while they are on a "romantic" weekend away in a secluded house. Quite a few details about the premise and it's resolution don't really add up but that's nitpicking plotholes. At first I thought the halluinations and flashbacks were filler for the limited setup but they turn out to be the meat of the movie. It goes to some really unpleasant places physiologically, which prove far more disturbing than the violent parts, which are pretty damn nasty themselves. An interesting horror film but they should have lost the silly Stephen King "Moonlight Man" subplot that it suddenly goes off into at end (Definitely a fanedit idea there to improve things).

Just watched this one... or, most of it, actually. I handled the gory parts fine, but the subsequent creepy climax was too much for poor ol' moi, and I skipped ahead. Agreed that that coda was a big ol' "huh?!" The rest of the Moonlight Man bits could stay in (or most of them, at least - not sure the final act could quite work without him), but the resolution, and the hacky use of a character with a genetic deformity, wasn't worth it.

Also: wouldn't that house have a land line?! Yes, it would.

 

[Gaith]

CHiPs (2017)

I can't find it at the moment, but I swear The AV Club used to have a term called "sexy garbage" for entertainment one knows is no good for one's health, but is nonetheless irresistibly enticing somehow. As a fan of Michael Peña, D'Onofrio (who isn't?), and junky but fun popcorn flicks such as SWAT, the notion of a juvenile action comedy about motorcycle cops under beautiful LA skies was oddly appealing, and when the Blu-ray was repeatedly listed at $5, I eventually gave in. As the saying goes: sexy garbage.

This movie got absolutely ravaged by the critics, as well as our own Bionic Bob, but I for one agree with the San Francisco Chronicle's Mick LaSalle: CHiPs is perfectly fine. It's not a great parody reboot like MacGruber  or the Jump Street films, nor is it a profound meditation on modern crime like Sicario, but the cast is likable, sh*t blows up pretty good, and an R rating allows for a pleasant amount of crudity and a few moments of mild gore. The jokes are nothing special, but they're nothing as anti-funny or offensive as the critics have claimed. I had fun, and sometimes that's enough, damn it. A $5 tolerably well spent on a sun-filled, great-looking flick that could definitely enliven a dull or rainy day, and I for one would happily watch a sequel that will, alas, not be made. (Did I mention Rosa Salazar's in this? Come on, that's worth an extra three points right there.)

Grade: B