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Wonder and Thunder

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Wonderstruck

by Hope Madden

If Wonderstruck—the latest from indie god Todd Haynes—feels a bit like Scorsese’s 2011 wonder Hugo, there’s a reason for that. Both films are based on juvenile fiction created by Brian Selznick.

Selznick, who adapts his own material here for the screen, is a one-of-a-kind author whose elaborate pencil drawings fill far more pages than actual text. The resulting novels offer near-magical journeys full of sumptuous detail supplied by visuals.

In both cases, the visual majesty of Selznick’s work jumps easily to the screen—in Hugo, to Oscar-winning results by cinematographer Robert Richardson. For Wonderstruck, Haynes works with longtime collaborator Edward Lachman.

But if Selznick’s unabashedly whimsical, sentimental material felt out of character for Scorsese, it’s no more characteristic for Haynes. His films tend to tackle ideas far more subversive, and by lighting those ideas with beauty and humanity, Haynes illustrates universal ideas, often of longing and the desire to belong.

His newest film also explores the human need to belong, although there’s very little to find subversive in Wonderstruck. It’s a family film that’s likely too slow moving for most youngsters and too lightweight for most Haynes fans.

The tale follows two deaf children, each on a similar journey 50 years apart. In 1927, a period lensed in black and white with a near-silent film feel about it, Rose (Millicent Simmonds) escapes her overbearing father to run away to a Broadway theater in search of her favorite starlet (Julianne Moore).

Ben (Oakes Fegley) follows a similar path in a far more garishly colorful 1977. Having recently lost both his mother and his hearing, the boy follows a clue about his father’s whereabouts to a bookstore in Queens.

Wonderstruck is a gorgeous movie. The Seventies period detail is as delightful and the Twenties elegance is lovely. All performances—particularly those of the two young leads—compel attention. Underlying themes of loneliness and the longing for acceptance resonate in the same way they echo through all of Haynes’s work.

Unfortunately, the narrative feels more full of contrivance and convenience than wonder. In the end you’re left thinking, wow, that was really pretty. Too bad it all collapsed on itself at the end.

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Tragic Kingdom

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The Florida Project

by Hope Madden

Full of the raucous rhythm of an unsupervised childhood, The Florida Project finds power in details and tells an unadorned but potent story.

Co-writer/director Sean Baker follows up his ambitious 2015 film Tangerine with another tale set gleefully along the fringes of society. Where Tangerine used weaves, stilettos and spangles to color the Christmas antics of Hollywood hustlers, here Baker fills the screen with bold colors and enormous, cartoonish images to create a grotesquely oversized playground.

The film begins with as perfect a movie opening as you will ever see.

Six-year-old Moonee (an astonishing Brooklynn Prince) wastes her summer days wandering the Orlando strip surrounding her home, a vivid purple bargain motel catering less to Disney World tourists than to tenants who can’t afford the security deposit world of traditional housing.

When she’s not out finding adventures with her besties Jancey (Valeria Cotto) and Scooty (Christopher Rivera), Moonee’s probably hustling wholesale perfumes to tourists with her mom Halley (Bria Vinaite).

The one true grown up in the mix, motel manager Bobby, is played with charm and tenderness by Willem Dafoe.

Baker’s many talents include an ear for authentic dialog, a knack for letting a story breathe and an eye for visual details that enrich a tale. But maybe what’s most striking is his ability to tell fresh but universal stories. We all remember elements of unbridled recklessness in our childhood, although very few of us grew up the way Moonee does.

Baker creates a bridge into Moonee’s life, revels in her freedom and bravado, but keeps us always aware of the dangerous edges when you’re blurring childhood and adulthood.

It’s the concept of childhood and adulthood that preoccupies Baker and his story, set in this absurd, low-rent amusement park of a world. As Mooney’s mother, Vinaite offers a fierce mixture of childishness all her own as well as street-savviness. Halley keeps the ugliness of the world away with her own whimsy, and Vinaite’s onscreen chemistry with Prince is authentic and full of tenderness.

As much as Tinsel Town was the perfect backdrop for the struggling glamour of Tangerine, the shadow of Disney World is almost too perfect a setting for the grinding poverty and perverted innocence of The Florida Project.

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Scar Tissue

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Blade of the Immortal

by Hope Madden

One hundred films in, you might expect director Takashi Miike to start repeating himself.

He does, in a way, with this big screen adaptation of the manga Blade of the Immortal, the tale of a samurai cursed with immortality.

Though Miike sticks mostly to genre work (horror, samurai, yakuza), his style veers wildly from one project to the next. Still, a thematic thread can be found in a lot of his films that questions the relevance of societal conventions. Though this theme was explored with a far more subversive touch in his 2001 gem Ichi the Killer, Blade of the Immortal shares a lot in common.

Manji (Takuya Kimura) is an insider on the outs. A samurai who’s killed his masters, he’s already doomed as the film’s prologue unwinds in gorgeous black and white. As Manji butchers his way through dozens of reprobates looking for the bounty on his head, Miike invites us into the hyperbolically brutal world of his imagination.

But it’s here, on the ground bleeding out surrounded by carnage of his own making, that Manji is gifted with immortality—a gift he takes to quite begrudgingly. Forever an outsider wanting to get farther out, he eventually takes up with an orphan bent on revenge.

Rin (Hana Sugisaki) lost her parents to outlaw bladesman Anotsu (Sota Fukushi) and his gang. Anotsu is an outsider who longs to be accepted. He’s skilled and serene where Manji is brutish and disheveled. They are opposite sides of the same coin, and for Rin’s sake, they become mortal enemies.

It’s not such an unusual plot, honestly. Though screenwriter Tetsuya Oishi complicates things with one side plot about Anotsu’s quest for acceptance and another about a rogue band of bounty hunters, the film basically boils down to one guy taking remarkable injury as he dispatches others due to sworn vengeance.

For two and a half hours.

Miike populates the corpse-strewn landscape with intriguing characters. Sure, they mainly exist to be dispatched by Manji, but each brings enough fresh personality and style to keep battle fatigue from setting in.

As is the case with his best efforts, Miike’s flair for fight staging, action choreography and bloodspatter—all of it in abundance—is on display. The result is a gorgeous, bloody mess that treads familiar ground but never wears out its welcome.

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WTF

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LBJ

by Hope Madden

This is Spinal Tap. Stand By Me. The Princess Bride. When Harry Met Sally. Misery. A Few Good Men.

What does that list say? That director Rob Reiner came out of the gates as a filmmaker who defined a generation. And also, that director Rob Reiner hasn’t made a good movie since the mid-Nineties.

LBJ does not turn that tide.

Reiner directs Woody Harrelson as our 36th president, a larger-than-life Southerner as crass as he was cunning, as charming as he was quarrelsome.

Maybe he just wanted to be loved.

I’m not kidding—that seems to be the thrust of Reiner’s film, written for the screen by Joey Hartstone. His script covers a window in Johnson’s career opening at his failed bid for the presidency and closing as he helps a mourning nation recover from the assassination of JFK.

Harrelson—as fine a character as you will find—relishes every second inside this conundrum of ego and insecurity. His scenes are riveting, particularly those he shares with another character actor of the highest order, Richard Jenkins. Jenkins portrays Georgia Senator Richard Russell, conservative and racist. The sparring between the two politicians, so ably brought to life by these talented actors, gives the film a sense of purpose as it sheds light on the true nature of Johnson’s character.

But the rest of it is bullshit.

Beautifully lit, clean-cut men looking earnest and overwhelmed, ask “How is he going to do all of it?” and receive the awe-struck answer, “The same way he always does.”

Aside from Harrelson and Jenkins, the ensemble is unable to rise far enough above Hardstone’s superficial writing and Reiner’s sentimental direction to leave a mark.

So Lyndon Baines Johnson, who pushed the Civil Rights Act through the Senate and mired us in the Vietnam War, is being remembered onscreen for pouting because the good looking rich kids who took over the White House wouldn’t let him in their clique?

It’s a shame Woody and LBJ couldn’t have taken their excellent collaboration to a better production.

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No One Is to Blame

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The Killing of a Sacred Deer

by Hope Madden

What if God exists and he’s an awkward adolescent boy?

That’s not exactly the point of Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, but it’s maybe as close a description as I can muster.

Lanthimos’s work (The Lobster, Dogtooth) does tend to balk at simple summarization, none more so than Sacred Deer. The film offers a look inside the life of a successful surgeon (Colin Farrell), whose opthamologist wife Anna (Nicole Kidman) and their two children (Raffey Cassidy and Sunny Suljic) are, well, perfect.

It’s the kind of perfect you might find in a Stanley Kubrick film—cold, clean, sterile. In fact, from the framing to the violently intrusive score to the thematic suspicion of intimacy, Sacred Deer leans heavily Kubrick.

But Lanthimos brings with him a particular type of absurdity all his own. He hints at it with the memorable opening shot and deepens it with the now-characteristic stilted, oddly detached dialog.

But the filmmaker’s unique tone finds its perfect vehicle in Barry Keoghan (also wonderful this year in Dunkirk). Unsettlingly serene as Martin, the teenage son of a patient killed on the surgeon’s table, he controls the film and its events.

With Martin, Lanthimos is able to mine ideas of God, of the God complex, of the potentially ludicrous notion of cosmic justice.

All the while he sends up social norms, dissecting the concept of the nuclear family and wondering at the lengths we will go to avoid accountability.

Sacred Deer, though certainly absurd, lacks the comedic flourish of 2015’s The Lobster. This film’s comedy is ink black and subversive in a way that’s equally likely to break your heart as draw a chuckle. This is particularly true as Anna and her children begin bargaining for their lives in scenes that are astonishing in their insight.

Nicole Kidman is chilly perfection in a surprisingly unlikeable role. The uneasy chemistry she shares with Farrell helps the film balance its weirdness with moments of authenticity. She and Farrell shared the screen earlier this year in the also engrossing The Beguiled, a fact you may almost forget as they trade in the steamy tension of the first relationship for the frosty, antiseptic nature of this one.

As was true with The Lobster, Farrell comfortably shoulders lead responsibilities in Lanthimos’s weird world. His scenes with Keoghan, at first treated as if some kind of illicit affair, give the film its unsettling power.

Their karmic battle strangely told will be hard to forget.

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What We Do on Asgard

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Thor: Ragnarok

by Hope Madden

What if the next Avengers movie was a laugh riot? A full-blown comedy—would you be OK with that?

The answer to that question has serious implications for your appreciation of Taika Waititi’s Thor: Ragnarok.

You’re familiar with Thor, his brother, his buddies, his hair. But how well do you know Waititi? Because he’s made a handful of really great movies you should see, chief among them What We Do in the Shadows and Hunt for the Wilderpeople.

Waititi’s films are charming and funny in that particularly New Zealand way, which is to say equal parts droll and silly. So a total goofus has made our latest superhero movie, is what I’m trying to tell you, and you’ll need to really embrace that to appreciate this film, because Thor: Ragnarok makes the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise seem dour and stiff.

There’s a real Thor movie in here somewhere. Thor (Chris Hemsworth and his abs) learns of his older sister Hela (Cate Blanchett—hela good casting!). Sure, Thor’s the God of Thunder, but Hela’s the Goddess of Death, so her return is not so welcome. But daaayumn, Cate Blanchett makes a kick-ass Goth chick.

Indeed, the film is lousy with female badasses. Tessa Thompson (Dear White People, Creed) proves her status by taking all comers, Thor and Hulk among them.

But can you get behind the idea of Hulk and dialog? Because he has dialog in this movie. Like whole conversations. Dude, I don’t know about that.

Loki (Tom Hiddleston) returns, as does Idris Elba, so this is one bona fide handsome movie. Mark Ruffalo makes an appearance in a vintage Duran Duran tee shirt. It’s like Waititi thought to himself, how many of Hope’s crushes can we squeeze into one film?

One more! Jeff Goldblum (don’t judge me) joins as a charming and hysterical world leader. His banter with his second in command (Rachel House—so hilarious in Wilderpeople) is priceless.

Also very funny, Karl Urban (who brings a nice slap of comic timing to every bloated franchise he joins), Waititi himself (playing a creature made of rocks), and one outstanding cameo I won’t spoil.

Thor: Ragnarock lifts self-parody to goofy heights, and maybe that’s OK. There’s no question the film entertains. Does it add much to the canon? Well, let’s be honest, the Thor stand-alones are not the strongest in the Marvel universe.

You will laugh. You’ll want to hug this movie, it’s so adorable.

Unless you’re totally pissed about the whole thing, which is entirely possible.

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100% Pure Adrenaline

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Take Every Wave: The Life of Laird Hamilton

by Christie Robb

Imagine the most fun you’ve ever had in your life. Then prepare to watch a dude who is having 100 times more fun Every. Single. Day. That’s Laird Hamilton, pro surfer and quite possibly the luckiest guy alive.

The documentary Take Every Wave: The Life of Laird Hamilton details the life of the 53-year-old adrenaline addict who, though disdainful of participating in any one-on-one competition with mere mortals, affords an ocean-front, surfing day everyday lifestyle by falling into modeling gigs with Vogue, landing roles in some bodacious surf movies, and nabbing sponsorships from choice beachwear companies.

Nice work if you can get it. (Especially if you refuse to lower yourself to auditions.)

As the movie starts, you are introduced to an aging Poseidon who trains aggressively to combat the injuries sustained in a lifetime of wipe-outs: arthritis in the hip, a fused arch in one foot, numerous shoulder injuries, and an ankle that has been crushed seven separate times. His goal is to ride a foilboard on the biggest waves of his life.

The foilboard is something Hamilton pioneered—a surfboard that hovers several feet above the water, suspended via a strut using hydrofoil technology developed by America’s Cup engineers.

But this isn’t the only novelty that Hamilton’s been into over the years. Over the course of the documentary you get to watch the glint in his eye as Laird recounts how he big-dogged his way through the line-up at some of Hawaii’s top big wave surf spots, figured out how to use industrial strength Velcro to strap himself to his surfboard (allowing for X Game-style tricks), adopted the sport of windsurfing in its infancy, and co-invented tow-in surfing. (You know, when a jet ski tows you improbably far out so you can surf a 40 to 50 foot wave that’s located directly in front of a cliff face.)

You also see the envious and sometimes irritated faces of Laird’s friends and family as they recount his sometimes douchey exploits and marvel at the fact that his body is still basically intact while some of his contemporaries sport gnarly scars and spin yarns about the times they were playing with him and almost died.

Via a mix of vintage footage, interviews, and camerawork worthy of the cover of National Geographic, Take Every Wave provides an epic escape into the radical world of an almost uncomfortably handsome and fortunate top athlete.

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Exit Stanton

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Lucky

by Matt Weiner

It’s a fitting tribute to the range of Harry Dean Stanton that his career could’ve ended with just about any role and you could decently argue, “Well, that makes sense.” But to give us Lucky at the end of a decades-long career is nothing short of one last cosmic joke at the non-religious character’s expense: God not only exists, but is a huge Harry Dean Stanton fan.

Lucky is the debut feature from John Carroll Lynch, who is, like Stanton, a gifted character actor probably used to being called “ohhh that guy!” And with Lucky (written by Logan Sparks and Drago Sumonja), the collaboration between Lynch and Stanton is pitch-perfect.

As Lucky, Stanton carries more weight than his brittle frame should bear. Lucky is a 90-year-old World War II veteran who has seemingly outlived everything save death. A minor fall and a visit with the town doctor (Ed Begley Jr.) prods the tequila-drinking, cigarette-smoking atheist Lucky to maybe, finally, reflect on his mortality, which he does begrudgingly through a series of interactions with local friends and strangers.

With little more than a light of his cigarette or a hoarse whisper of “bullshit,” Lucky makes it clear that he hasn’t the time or interest in what comfort God or religion has to offer in a world of horrors and loss. Yet the film is deeply—reverently—spiritual.

Lucky is the spiritual heir of Max von Sydow’s knight from The Seventh Seal, if he got to live out his days through the funhouse of America. The oppressive Lutheranism of Ingmar Bergman has been replaced by a more searching acceptance—and both films uncomfortably force us to make our own peace with the time we have.

If Lucky doesn’t waver in his beliefs, he can still realize a sort of spiritual enlightenment. You get the sense, with his age and relative good health, that Lucky is more afraid of being immune to destiny than of dying, and how can anyone find meaning in that?

Thankfully, the film gives Lucky perfectly cast sounding boards to figure it out by way of the supporting characters, especially a show-stealing turn from David Lynch as a man in mourning for his lost tortoise, President Roosevelt. (That this doesn’t crack the top five strangest moments in the history of David Lynch/Harry Dean Stanton collaborations is saying something.)

John Carroll Lynch chooses to leave us with something hovering between resolution and reservation, as if Lucky is one long Zen koan. But knowing how things end doesn’t mean there’s nothing left to discover. Watching Stanton in any performance is to see flashes of some elusive truth buried within his characters. Watching him as Lucky is an untouchable capstone.

 

 

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A Grateful Nation

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Thank You for Your Service

by Hope Madden

American Sniper screenwriter Jason Hall moves behind the camera for his thematically similar big screen adaptation, Thank You for Your Service.

Where the Clint Eastwood-helmed Sniper dealt in large part with its hero’s bumpy re-acclimation to civilian life, Thank You deals almost exclusively with veterans’ troubles on the homefront.

Miles Teller is Adam Schumann, returning permanently to his wife and two small children after his third tour in Iraq. He’s joined by buddies and platoon-mates Solo (Beulah Koale) and Will (Joe Cole).

Too earnest for its own good, Thank You for Your Service shadows these three servicemen as the responsibility for and repercussions from their actions overseas haunt their post-war lives.

This is a film about PTSD, but more than that, it’s about a country both ill-equipped to serve those who served, and often disinterested in trying.

Hall’s storytelling can’t rise above cliché, but he manages to tell his painfully heartfelt tale without cloying manipulation or judgment. Though Thank You buzzes with impotent rage—that of the filmmaker as well as that of the protagonists—it never feels preachy or even pessimistic. Hall articulates these veterans’ helplessness and frustration in a way that is genuinely rare in our current glut of flag-waving dramas, big screen and small.

Teller, always strong when playing a likable goof who’s just hanging on, is in his comfort zone as the soldier with the best chance to make it. He and Haley Bennett, playing Schumann’s wife Saskia, share believable, well-worn chemistry and there are moments between them when Hall’s gift for naturalistic writing shines.

At other times, the dialog forces too much explanation at the audience, as if Hall doesn’t trust us to understand the extent of the problems plaguing our veterans. A newcomer to directing, Hall’s unsteady craftsmanship can’t overcome that weakness in the same way that Eastwood was able to.

This is a tough film to criticize, though. Hall and crew do get an awful lot right, and the film surprises with periodic bits of gallows humor, selfishness and other glimpses at human frailty that make the film feel far more authentic than Sniper or most any other veteran-themed film.

The flaws can’t go unseen, though, and Hall either needed a better writer or a director who could take some of the obviousness of this screenplay and find a fresher way to approach it.

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Save Your Tears

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Tragedy Girls

by Hope Madden

Heathers meets Scream in the savvy horror comedy that mines social media culture to truly entertaining effect, Tragedy Girls.

Sadie (Brianna Hildebrand) and McKayla (Alexandra Shipp) are looking for more followers to improve their brand, and they have been doing a lot of research to make their content more compelling. The Tragedy Girls plumb their small Ohio town’s surprising death toll with more insight than the local police seem to have. Where do they get their knowledge?

Provocative.

Tyler MacIntyre directs a screenplay he co-wrote with Chris Lee Hill and Justin Olson. The trio wade into the horror of a social media generation with more success than anything we’ve seen to date. A great deal of their success has to do with casting.

Hildebrand and Shipp (both X-Men; Hildebrand was the moody Negasonic in Deadpool while Shipp plays young Storm in the franchise proper) nail their characters’ natural narcissism. Is it just the expectedly shallow, self-centeredness of the teenage years, or are they sociopaths?

Mrs. Kent (Nicky Whelan) would like to know. The spot-on teacher character offers the film’s most pointed piece of social (media) commentary when she points out the traits encouraged in a snapchat world, where shallowness and parasitic, even psychotic behavior is a plus.

The film is careful not to go overboard with its commentary, though, and the final product is the better for it. MacIntyre’s affectionate, perhaps even obsessive, horror movie nods receive at least as much of his time and attention.

The result is both mean and funny. Josh Hutcherson’s small, image-lampooning part is an absolute scream proving that MacIntyre and company have pop cultural insights to spare, and proper comedic timing to boot.

McIntrye loses his snidely meta tone briefly with a lengthy sidetrack focusing on Craig Robinson, which becomes more zany and broad than anything before it. The director can’t entirely find his footing again, as the resolution of the film gets mired a bit too much in the genre tropes.

Still, the details are priceless (she lends him a copy of Martyrs! Dig that ringtone!), the performances impress and the whole thing is a hoot.