There are so many movies being made available for our pajama-wearing asses this week, it’s as if the fates are begging us to be lazy. So let’s do it! We’ll help you decide what to view.
Click the title below for the full review.
by Hope Madden
It’s Blue Jacket season, which always makes me a little nostalgic for Brazil. Not that I’ve ever been there, but watching early Jackets’ history through the eyes of our Brazilian exchange student gave the whole experience more energy and excitement.
Edinardo – or Edodido, as my mother-in-law cheerily, loudly called him for no reason I can think of – moved in with us November of 2000, just in time for the Jackets’ inaugural season. He’d never seen a hockey game before, being more of a baseball guy, but he turned out to be a Yankee fan, so we decided to focus on hockey.
Edinardo came to us sort of by accident. My husband George had read his woeful tale in the Tri-Village News. He’d been mistakenly placed with a family planning a move to Peru.
That’s totally outside Grandview City School district.
The service had found another family to host Edinardo in Kentucky, but he’d made friends at Grandview Heights High and hoped to stay.
We’d never tackled the challenges of parenting a teen before. Since then, we’ve not only tackled those challenges, but we’ve actually tackled teens. Knocked them right to the ground.
But back in ’00, our son Riley was about to turn seven, we were still optimistic about the upcoming election, and the whole world seemed gentler.
Plus, we had two unused bedrooms, so we took him in.
We were interviewed, of course, to ensure we were fit to assume responsibility for the boy. The woman from the agency asked us what our policy was toward dating. I told her we weren’t allowed to (bada-bing!). It was all pretty silly, but they let us have him anyway.
There were ups and downs. He more or less refused to speak more than severely fragmented English, which was certainly the down part. He poured full bags of Lays Sour Cream and Onion potato chips on top of every meal I cooked. In his room at night, when he talked for hours on the phone with the friends he missed from back home, he sounded exactly like a roomful of 12-year-old girls.
I don’t know how he did it, but you’d swear we had a Brazilian middle school cheerleading squad stomping around and squealing up there.
He pronounced George with the most gorgeous accent, but called me Rope and referred to Riley as Big Baby, which came out sounding like Pig Baby – a nickname that stuck for a while, actually.
But once it got beyond the “let’s be on a first name or close to it basis” we didn’t really gel as a group until hockey.
Although our first game didn’t go as well as it might have.
We decided at the last minute one night to give hockey a try as a newly-extended family. George was going to meet us at Nationwide Arena, and I planned to scalp four tickets in the meantime. (It’s not illegal; it’s just frowned upon. And in 2000, it was harder than you realize.)
The guy wanted $35 apiece.
“Dude, there’s no way. We’re just looking for cheap seats,” I explained.
“I can give them to you for twenty each,” he countered.
I can see the scene from his point of view: a wholesome enough hockey mom, an apple cheeked 7-year-old attached to one hand, an exchange student eager for new cultural experiences behind. I countered back:
“That would be all the money I have. The boys are going to need a hot dog, at least, once we’re in there.”
“Fifteen bucks.”
“Sold.”
As I dug around for the sixty bucks, Edinardo decided he wanted to treat and pulled out a hundred dollar bill.
Well, it’s not like I wanted to strike up a long term friendship with the scalper.
Plus, it was a good opportunity to explain some of the nuances of American sports culture.
Edinardo loved the game so much that he began going on his own as often as he could. His best day in the US came during a Jackets’ home stand against the hated Red Wings.
The Jackets got behind. A Red Wings fan – a particularly belligerent one I like to imagine wearing a mullett – shouted to Edinardo as his team went ahead, “Hey, loser, why don’t you go home?”
I hate that part of the story. Edinardo, alone in a sea of drunken hockey fans, harassed and intimidated. But his tale improved.
The Blue Jackets went on to an amazing come-from-behind win. The screaming crowd was on its feet. It was the most excitement Edinardo had been part of since coming to our country. Full of team pride, he turned around to the Red Wings fan.
“Now maybe you go home.”
God bless America.
Busy week! Loads covered on this week’s podcast: 12 Strong, Den of Thieves, Phantom Thread, Call Me By Your Name, Mom and Dad, The Road Movie, The Final Year and Mary and the Witch’s Flower, plus a quick look at what’s new in home entertainment.
Listen in HERE.
by Hope Madden
Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) sews little treasures into the gowns he makes for the most upper of crusts in 1950s London: little notes, wishes, secrets. It is a connection between the creator and the creation, existing regardless of the audience.
In many ways, Woodcock could be a stand-in for writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson, a filmmaker whose work is genius (few would argue) even if there are things about each creation we may not entirely grasp.
Phantom Thread may be his most exquisite and least accessible film. Every frame, every elegant sweep of the camera, every jaunty note from Johnny Greenwood’s score says classic glamour. And at the center of this controlled, rhythmic beauty is Daniel Day-Lewis.
Hard to go wrong there.
Day-Lewis entirely inhabits this character, as you, of course, expect. His Woodcock oscillates between childlike charm and parental dismissiveness, and it’s a beguiling creation: narcissistic but tender, spoiled and selfish but dignified, the epicenter of his universe and yet frighteningly dependent.
The conflict here is subtle. While your eyes will not leave Woodcock and his glorious gowns, the remarkable Lesley Manville refuses to escape your notice. Manville plays Woodcock’s sister Cyril, the business brains to balance Reynolds’s creative genius, yin to his yang, Alpha to his Omega.
Manville is chilly perfection, her every gesture and expression a conundrum of thoughts and emotions. She keeps this man, this art, this world working. There is one scene in particular—Reynolds loses his temper when his breakfast solitude is broken and Cyril reminds him with clarity and authority exactly who is in charge here.
Which brings us, slowly and quietly, to the film’s actual conflict. Woodcock tires of the muse/model/girlfriend living with him, leaves Cyril to remove the problem and heads into the country for a rest. There he meets his next muse, the lovely German waitress Alma (Vicky Krieps).
What follows is an interesting, deeply human, beautifully acted and quite surprising battle for Alpha. And of course, it’s a great deal more than that. Namely, it is a meditation on creation and recreation, on the tricky nature of inspiration, on an artist’s obsession, on the surprising intimacy between creator and creation.
by George Wolf
They’re back, baby! The star and one of the five writers from London Has Fallen are reunited, and it feels…so much better than you are thinking right now.
This time, writer Christian Gudegast also takes the director’s chair for his debut feature, an ambitious mix of Heat and The Town and maybe a few other heist flicks I’ll bring up later.
Gerard Butler is Big Nick, an L.A. County sheriff who’s a very bad lieutenant. Some cops just got killed in an armored car job, and Nick is pretty sure it’s the work of Merriman (Pablo Schreiber).
He’s right, but the big score is still to come: a master plan to rob the L.A. branch of the Federal Reserve. Amid some surprisingly engaging dialog, Gudegast effectively contrasts the good bad guys and the bad bad guys, slowly laying the groundwork for a final confrontation while getaway driver Donnie (O’Shea Jackson, Jr.) openly works both sides.
At 140 minutes, it’s at least half an hour too long, bloated with some futile attempts at character development, and a bit tone deaf on police brutality and some other current events. But there is well-plotted tension, some inventive turns among gaps in logic and an Ocean’s/Logan Lucky inspired wrap-up that will bring a chuckle.
by George Wolf
12 Strong tells a tale of extreme courage and heroism carried out by extremely courageous and heroic men. Like many films on a similar path, it sometimes struggles to navigate the overly familiar tropes that come with this territory.
In the weeks immediately after 9/11, the special forces team now known as the “Horse Soldiers” were the first deployed into Afghanistan. A dozen men, led by Captain Mitch Nelson (Chris Hemsworth, charismatic as usual), joined the soldiers under Afghan warlord General Dostum (Navid Negahban) in an attempt to take back a Taliban stronghold.
Director Nicolai Fuglsig, helming just his second feature, teams with experienced screenwriters Ted Tally (Silence of the Lambs) and Peter Craig (The Town) to adapt Doug Stanton’s book with alternating layers of nuance and shallow cliche.
The men are tough, stoic, and bound by the brotherhood of battle. Their women and children back home must stiffen their lips and hold heads high while they long for their husbands and fathers to return. These traits are not weaknesses in the real world, far from it, but incorporating them into a big screen narrative without the essence of checking off obligatory character-building boxes has become a common obstacle that 12 Strong can’t overcome.
But almost every time you’re ready to give up on it, the film rebounds with a surprise. While there’s far too much exposition dialog, with the characters explaining things to the audience rather than talking realistically, there are also quiet moments that resonate. Dostum’s reminder to Nelson that he may already have a life “better than the afterlife” underscores the film’s success in showcasing the effective teamwork and diplomacy that emerged in the mission, despite the culture clash.
The ensemble supporting cast is loaded with strength (Michael Shannon, Michael Pena, William Fichtner, Moonlight‘s Trevante Rhodes), and Fuglsig finds his footing after a by-the-numbers start, rolling out some tense, gritty, and well-plotted battle scenes for a rousing finale.
The Horse Soldiers earned their statue at the 9/11 Memorial site, and 12 Strong is a well-deserved salute. It’s always watchable but also muddled, and too often chooses broad strokes over finer, more memorable points.
by Hope Madden
It’s a languid Italian summer circa 1983 and everything is just so ripe.
Call Me by Your Name, the coming-of-age drama from Luca Guadagnino (I Am Love, A Bigger Splash), swoons. Precocious seventeen-year-old Elio (an utterly astonishing Timothée Chalamet) is surrounded with luscious fruit from the trees, lovely girls from the village, books and music to fill the hours spent with his parents (Amira Casar, Michael Stuhlbarg) in the rural villa where they research Greco-Roman culture.
Then their seasonal research assistant Oliver (Armie Hammer) arrives.
Awash in sensuality, Guadagnino’s love story is unafraid to explore, circling Oliver and Elio as they irritate each other, then test each other, and finally submit to and fully embrace their feelings for one another. Theirs is a remarkable dance, intimately told and flawlessly performed.
Enough cannot be said for Chalamet’s work. He is astonishingly in control of this character, and were that not the case, the age difference between the two characters (Oliver is meant to be 24, though Hammer is 31 which makes the gap seem more disturbing) would have left things feeling too predatory.
Hammer has never been better. Though the young Chalamet’s performance is Oscar-caliber, Hammer matches him step for step, creating a character both vulnerable and authoritative.
A standout in a solid ensemble, Stuhlbarg, looking almost alarmingly like Robin Williams, brings a quiet tenderness to the proceedings, a tone he elevates in a late-film monologue that could not have been delivered with more compassion or love. It’s breathtaking, perfectly punctuating the themes of acceptance and self-acceptance that permeate the film.
But even before Hammer or Chalamet can seduce you, Sayombhu Mukdeeprom does, lensing a feast for the senses. Together he and Guadagnino immerse you in this heady love story, developing a dreamy cadence and alluring palette that invites you to taste.
by George Wolf
It may be an often misused phrase, but if you’d like an example of someone literally at a loss for words, you’ll find it in The Final Year.
Ben Rhodes, senior advisor to President Barack Obama, is trying to come to grips with the fact that Donald J. Trump had just become President-Elect of the United States. Rhodes tries several times to process a comment, and cannot.
It’s a striking sequence of an entire administration caught by horrific surprise, one of many indelible moments in director Greg Barker’s compelling look inside the final twelve months of the Obama presidency. Beyond the press conferences and photo ops, the film celebrates the daily grind of governing, and builds an ironic vibrancy from the slow and often frustrating march of persistence.
The goal is Obama’s vision of a “global common humanity,” and as the months wind down, we get close to the key players on his foreign policy team: Secretary of State John Kerry, UN Ambassador Samantha Power, National Security Advisor Susan Rice, and Rhodes.
It’s The West Wing with very real, incredibly high stakes, and from the Iranian nuclear treaty to the Syrian conflict, from the Paris climate accords to Boko Haram, we witness a commitment to progress that might be…steady…”harder to dismantle if we take a different turn.”
Which, of course, we did, a fact that lays bare the anchor in this film that’s as bittersweet as it is inescapable. Government needs people this committed, this intelligent, this qualified, this decent, and right now they seem in damn short supply.
Is Barker selective about what sides of his subjects we’re permitted to see? For sure, as that’s what a director does. But whether your political lean is left or right, the suspicion that Barker’s sitting on video of Obama bragging about sexual assault or calling some country a “shithole” would occur only to the most rabid of Hannitys.
It adds up to a fascinating, fly-on-the-wall account of 2016 that arrives already feeling like a freshly opened time capsule from some faraway yesteryear, a magical time when Presidents might have actually cared about other people.
by Hope Madden
I brought you into this world, I can take you out of it.
It’s a joke, of course, an idle threat. Right?
Maybe so, but deep down, it does speak to the unspeakable tumult of emotions and desires that come with parenting. Wisely, a humorous tumult is exactly the approach writer/director Brian Taylor brings to his horror comedy Mom and Dad.
Horror films have been coming up with excuses to exorcise our forbidden desire to kill our own children for decades, mostly with little-seen cult films like It’s Alive or The Children or Cooties. In those films, the children themselves become monsters and the adults have no choice, you see.
Taylor (co-director of the Crank series) has a different take. In what is basically a long and very bloody metaphor for a mid-life crisis, parents the world over simply give in to an unspecified but urgent need to kill their own offspring.
It’s an epidemic picture, a zombie film without the zombies. Which doesn’t sound that funny, I’ll grant you, but Taylor and a game cast indulge in many of the same family tensions that fuel most sitcoms. They just take it one or two or three demented steps further.
So why do you want to see it? Because of the unhinged Nicolas Cage. Not just any Nic Cage—the kind who can convincingly sing the Hokey Pokey while demolishing furniture with a sledge hammer.
This is one of those Nic Cage roles: Face/Off meets Wild at Heart meets Vampire’s Kiss. He’s weird, he’s explosive and he is clearly enjoying himself.
Selma Blair lands the unenviable role of sharing the screen with Cage, but she doesn’t try to match him as much as keep him focused: they do have a job to accomplish, you know. The result is a fascinating picture of marital teamwork, actually. Good for them.
Taylor’s frantic pace and hiccupping camera mirror Cage’s lunatic energy, and clever writing toys with our expectations while delivering a surprisingly transgressive film.
Others have done it better. (I’m looking at you, Babadook.) But this may be the most amusing way to spend 90 minutes watching people try to murder their own children.
A couple of middling horror movies are available this week in home entertainment. Well, one is middling—nothing amazing, but better than expected. The other is a colossal waste of talent in a jumbled mess of a nonsensical plot. Oof!
Click the film title for the full review.
