2017: The Best and the Rest

Movies: Best of

In 2017 we witnessed the toppling of the Old Guard in Hollywood. In addition to #MeToo and #TimesUp challenging the status quo of powerful men abusing women (and other men) for their own pleasure, I think we saw a distinct shift in who gets to tell stories. Consider that this year a woman (Greta Gerwig) and a black man (Jordan Peele) are both nominated in the intensely white and male category of Best Director for the Academy Awards. That feels HUGE to me.

This isn't to suggest that Hollywood hasn't had moments in the past where diversity blossomed--it absolutely has. The late 80s/1990s were an amazing time for independent film and creative storytellers like Spike Lee and Quentin Tarantino gave us some of their greatest work. But to paraphrase Colin Jost: Life is a roller-coaster. Sometimes you're screaming in joy, other times you're throwing up in your own face. Life, politics, and art are all similar in that their trajectory isn't linear and always progressing toward something "better".

However, 2017 feels special. We finally got our Wonder Woman. We got to watch four black women throw down and stand up for each other during a girls trip to New Orleans. We got a peek into living hand-to-mouth in Florida. We got to watch Timothee Chalamet ejaculate prematurely in not one, but two movies this year. It's been a wild ride, to say the least.

I think you'll be pleasantly surprised by my list (as well as the honorable and dishonorable mentions below it). Because I haven't seen a lot of the "traditional" Oscar bait this year (skipped The Post, Darkest Hour, All the Money in the World, and--yep--The Last Jedi) there's room on my list for a couple surprises. I hope you enjoy, and see you in 2018.

***

11) Phantom Thread

PT Anderson's latest film is a scary movie without the scares. It has all the elements of a spookfest, including multiple creepy houses and a vaguely sinister protagonist in an overly close relationship with his sister. But instead of an update on the Hitchcock film Rebecca (which is where I thought the movie would go), we get a twisted little love story. They say that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach, and that axiom is taken to a surprising conclusion in this bizarre and beautiful movie.

10) The Shape of Water

This genre-blending fantasy from Guillermo del Toro, a mastermind of creature features, is shrouded in shades of green--the color of envy and the color of rebirth. A strong cast lead by Sally Hawkins playing a mute woman bring an unlikely story to life: an aquatic creature is captured and tortured by Michael Shannon's zealous military officer in a government facility during the Cold War, but the creature finds a soulmate and a savior in Hawkins' Elisa. The Shape of Water is a fairytale for adults about how none of us--whether we have scales or skin--truly "fit in". We are all outsiders looking for someone, man or monster, who truly understands.

9) The Disaster Artist

The Disaster Artist is one, long inside joke for fans of Tommy Wiseau's magnetically awful 2003 film The Room. James Franco portrays Wiseau, a man who defies all labels except "bat-shit banana-pants". Dave Franco plays Greg Sestero, the young actor Wiseau teams up with to make their Hollywood dreams come true. If no one will hire these two (admittedly awful) actors, then by God they'll write, direct, and star in their own piece of crap movie! Not many people can boast that they achieved the American dream, but against all odds, Tommy Wiseau did just that: through sheer force of will and a mysteriously bottomless bank account, Wiseau created one of the worst movies of all time, and here we are not 15 years later watching a movie about the making of that shitty movie. It's inspiring. Go for your dreams, kids.


8) Logan (second review down)

Wolverine--redeemed? After a number of mildly crappy X-Men movies, including what I've heard (haven't seen) is the truly awful X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Hugh Jackman's immortal--and eternally tortured--superhero gets a film worthy of its gritty, violent namesake. I watched Logan at a friend's house, not really expecting to be impressed because I'm not a "superhero movie person". But between the gratuitous violence (I love me some gratuitous violence), Dafne Keen playing the adorable mini-Wolverine, and Patrick Stewart in a heartbreaking role as an ancient and infirm Professor X, I was mesmerized. There's a scene at the very end of the movie where Jackman says something like "Oh, this is what it feels like", and you don't know if he means "this is what it feels like to die" or "this is what it feels like to love." Sniff. Godspeed, Wolverine. Godspeed.

7) Life 

Oh hey, bet you don't remember this random sci-fi horror movie from the spring! But I do, because it was one of the scariest movies I saw all year (in a year filled with freaky-ass movies. See #6 and #3). A space station filled with sexy people, including my bae Jake Gyllenhaal and Ryan Reynolds (not my bae) is terrorized by an alien life form. What starts out as tiny, cute lil creature named "Calvin" quickly grows in size and strength, breaking loose from its container and feeding on any warm bodies available, be they a lab rat or a human. Life was surprisingly gory and intensely claustrophobic. It may not win any awards this year, but for a genre film, it was excellent.

6) mother! 

OH HEY GUYS remember that movie that was advertised as a Jennifer Lawrence horror movie but actually turned out to be a highly metaphorical film about 1) the environment, 2) the Bible, and 3) how hard it is to date an artist? And also a baby gets eaten in one scene? Well, I fucking remember it and it damn well deserves a place on this list for sheer balls-out audacity. Darren Aronofsky's truly bugfuck movie mother! is actually, in my opinion, pretty entertaining. It starts out as a film about a couple (Lawrence and the much older Javier Bardem) living in peaceful splendor until an annoying couple (Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer) shows up and things slowly go to shit, culminating in the house party from hell. Read my review if you're too scared to see the movie and want to know exactly what happens. All I can say is that it was one of the most memorable movies of the year, hands down.

5) Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

AKA "fuck da police", aka "RAPED WHILE DYING", Three Billboards was one of the more controversial movies to come out this year. The tone is kind of all over the place. It's a movie where a teenage girl was raped while...well, you know...and then burned to a crisp and yet it's also...a comedy?!? Blame director Martin McDonaugh, whose last film, In Bruges, was similarly depressing and hilarious. Also: Peter Dinklage is in it mainly to be mocked as a little person, a cop who beats up black people gets a redemption arc (that ends with possible murder), and the word "cunt" is thrown around like gangbusters. This all makes for a very unpleasant film. And yet. I respected it for what it was, which was a movie that so clearly portrays the unique and horrid grief of a parent losing a child. Not to mention the acting, which is wall-to-wall fantastic. Perhaps Three Billboards, with its grief and its violence, and its naked hope is not the movie The United States of America wants in 2017, but the movie it deserves.

4) The Florida Project

This little indie gem snuck up on me out of nowhere. Directed by Sean Baker, The Florida Project is about families living in crappy motels (illegally, sort of) and their children, whose innocence and sense of fun collide with the brutal realities and indignities of living hand-to-mouth. The cast is filled with unknowns, with the exception of Willem Dafoe, in a beautiful and humanistic role as Bobby, the motel manager and in loco parentis to the kids, whose moms are often, well, less than nurturing. The Florida Project is a test in empathy: it shows what living below the poverty line can look like, both the good and the (mostly) bad. This is not a movie about pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps. Basically, if you're a shitty person, you'll look down on the adult characters as entitled freeloaders. If you're a good person like me you'll see the humanity underneath the trashy clothes and empty 40oz bottles of malt liquor. And, boy, the ending of this film will break your heart.

3) Get Out

I don't think any movie had a greater impact on pop culture this year than Jordan Peele's directorial debut. And I'm including The Last Jedi, which had a lot of talk surrounding it that amounted to a hill of beans at the end of the day. Get Out was a horror movie released in mainstream theaters about middle-class racism. It suggests that all those good intentions of "woke" white people only serve to hide the savagery underneath. How we white people would kill, rape, and sell black people in a minute if just given the chance. The film slapped white people in the collective face and, boy, do we ever deserve it. Released mere weeks after the inauguration of a blatantly racist president (in a long line a racist presidents) who won perhaps due to Russian interference but was definitely helped by the insidious, repulsive racial impulses of white America, Get Out stripped us naked to expose the ugly truth: that the election of a black president means fuck all in this garbage country that masquerades as "Christian". Do I sound bitter? I am bitter. And thank you, Jordan Peele, for giving us a film that allows both black and white viewers to explore and channel that bitterness and fear. We really needed it. Oh, and the movie was really good, too!

2) Lady Bird 

Christine "Lady Bird" McPherson is 17 going on 18 in 2002, the year this coming-of-age film is set. I myself was 16 going on 17 that same year. And while I didn't lose my virginity or join the high school theatre department in 2002, I *did* love Dave Matthews Band's "Crash Into Me", fell for a guy who wasn't interested back, and fought with my mom a lot that year. Greta Gerwig's 80% hilarious, 20% heart-string pulling film about a teenage girl (played by the luminous, even under acne makeup, Saoirse Ronan) figuring out who she is and who she wants to be is so honest and sensitive without being schmaltzy or fake. Lady Bird does something rare: it honors teenager-hood rather than mocking it or putting it on a pedestal. While excellent teen movies do exist, so many depictions of teens feel off. The actors playing the teens look too old and too sexy (teens aren't sexy. They may be sexual, but sexy they ain't. I know. I was one). Their conversation is either overly simplistic or overly mature. Their world is filled with mortifying pranks and hideous back-biting. But in Lady Bird, teens--especially teen girls--are allowed to be teens: they're falsely confident, often thoughtless, incredibly horny, and 100% real. Gerwig manages to inspire one of the best onscreen portrays of the mother-daughter bond I've seen (Lady Bird's mom is played by a revelatory Laurie Metcalfe). The deep love, the sniping, the passive-aggressiveness, the protectiveness. It's all there, and it's beautiful and will make you cry and want to call your mom. Which you totally should, by the way.

1) Call Me By Your Name 

I'm not sure where to start with Luca Guadagnino's exquisite Call Me By Your Name. I think I need a bulleted list to explain what is so gott-damn amazing about this movie:

• The gorgeous scenery. The film is set "somewhere in Northern Italy" in 1983 and the cinematography is infused with sunlight and shadow. You feel like you're there. This movie is a fucking spa for you eyeballs, designed to relax and mesmerize you.
• Also mesmerizing: the Sufjan Stevens and classical music-heavy soundtrack which elevates the film without overwhelming it.
• The performances are, to a one, excellent. But Timothee Chalamet playing 17-year-old Elio is truly outstanding. Basically, this dude perfectly captures what it's like to be a deliriously horny and very emotional teenager (the movie covers a lot of the same emotional ground as Lady Bird--which Chalamet is also in!). It makes sense that his performance is so spot on, given that Chalamet was only just out of his teens when he filmed this movie. There are some things he has to do for the role that are pretty brave and would come off as campy and ridiculous in the hands of a less gifted actor. But Chalamet makes even the most embarrassing aspects of being a teen look honest, raw, and beautiful.
• As I was watching CMBYN, I didn't want it to end. Even with good movies, I often find my mind wandering to other thoughts like "what restaurant should I have dinner at after the movie". It's rare for a movie to feel like flow to me, and when it was over, I ran home to download the book that it was based on as well as the soundtrack. Leaving the audience wanting more is a sure sign of a great film.

I could say more, but you can just read my review for a fuller picture of CMBYN. I was blow away by the film, and not just because (ok, maybe a little because) hot dudes make out in it.

***

Honorable Mentions:

I, Tonya

The Big Sick

***

Best Movies I Watched Streaming/That Weren't Released This Calendar Year (But You Should Totally Watch Them Because They're Great):

The Love Witch

Force Majeure

The Blackcoat's Daughter 

***

Worst Movie of the Year:

The Killing of a Sacred Deer

Oh how the mighty have fallen. Director Yorgos Lanthimos directed my choice for Best Movie of the Year 2016 and now here he is at the bottom of the ladder in 2017. Sometimes you just fly too close to the sun.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer is a creepy, pretentious piece of garbage--and I *love* creepy and pretentious movies! But I didn't buy what Deer was selling. The cast is utterly deadpan for no reason other than I guess it seems artistic? Seriously, there's a scene where Colin Farrell tells his son that he once jerked off his sleeping father. Yeah, you read that right. Jerked. Off. His. Sleeping. Father.  JESUS. DON'T TELL YOUR KID YOU JERKED OFF YOUR OWN FATHER. It's just bad parenting. Deer is emotional torture porn and it's not even GOOD emotional torture porn like Sophie's Choice or Requiem for a Dream. Sitting through an emotionally devastating movie is an act of trust on the part of the audience--we endure it for a satisfying payoff of some sort. And at the end of The Killing of a Sacred Deer it feels like you were the butt of some weird joke...only you're not, because the real joke is this ridiculous film.

Try harder, Yorgos. You're better than this trash.

Ice Queen

Movies: I, Tonya

I was 8 years old when Nancy Kerrigan was attacked just weeks before the 1994 Winter Olympics, setting off a 24 hour news cycle (years before that became the status quo) detailing the attack and the role Kerrigan's competitor, Tonya Harding, may have played in it.

The fact is, I remember absolutely nothing about Harding, Kerrigan, and the Olympics that year. While other people my age remember watching the Olympics and even remember the outfits Kerrigan and Harding wore, the only thing I remember is hearing the names "Tonya Harding" and "Nancy Kerrigan" floating around in my little world of Nickelodeon tv and Babysitters Club books.

So, I went into I, Tonya the way someone born a decade after me would have: knowing next to nothing. And perhaps that was for the best, since I had literally zero preconceived notions about Harding. What I saw was not so much a film that rehashed a sordid story from over 20 years ago, but a film about how an incredibly talented individual was ruthlessly abused by nearly everyone in her life. Even if she did play a role in Kerrigan's attack...could you really blame her?

I, Tonya spends plenty of time covering "the incident" and the aftermath, but it is less about the facts of the case and more about the two main relationships in Tonya Harding's life: her upbringing with her incredibly foul-mouthed, hateful stage mother, LaVona Golden (Allison Janney, spewing deadpan profanity with a bird on her shoulder, just as the real LaVona did in interviews) and her youthful marriage to pathetic dickweed Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan, who apparently played a superhero in a movie I never saw). As I said to some friends after the movie, "This was a movie about an abusive marriage that happened to have some ice skating in it".

Directed by Craig Gillespie, I, Tonya is unapologetically sympathetic toward Harding. Kerrigan is barely in the movie and we don't hear her side of the story at all. It is taken for granted that Harding really didn't have much to do with Kerrigan's attack and was the victim of the foolhardy men in her life who took what was meant to be a psychological mindfuck on Kerrigan (the original plan was to send her threatening letters) to an extreme level.

Instead of trying to prove Harding innocent, I, Tonya just assumes that she is and spends more time showing how she overcame her impoverished childhood and the intense prejudice against her in the figure skating world through sheer talent and determination. Harding was seen as crude white trash by snobbish figure skating judges and wouldn't have been given the time of day if it weren't for her undeniable talent. The fact that she was the first American female figure skater to attempt and complete a triple axel jump, which essentially involves defying gravity, forced judges to take her seriously, despite her gaudy homemade skating outfits and brazen attitude.

What made this film interesting to me is that it shows what utter bullshit the "American dream" is. It could be argued that Tonya Harding was the best female figure skater during the years she competed; however, she was shut out and kept down because she didn't portray the "image" judges wanted to sell of class and femininity. If America truly is a meritocracy and all you need to succeed is to work hard and develop your talent, Harding should have propelled to the top of the ice skating world easily. But of course, we all know by now that you can be a disgusting racist in the early stages of dementia and still be "president" of the US. This country never was and never will be a meritocracy. People like Harding will always be chastised to simply pull themselves up by their figure skating laces even after those same laces are broken.

Margot Robbie, though 5 years older than Harding was at the time of the 1994 Olympics and 5 inches taller to boot, really captures Harding's personality and quirks, based on the interviews I've seen of the real Harding. I think my favorite moments in I, Tonya are the close-ups of Robbie's overjoyed face after she completes a triple axel or other difficult move, mimicking perfectly how Harding's face looked. I would have thought, based on LaVona's intense stage-mothering, that Harding was pushed into figure skating and basically forced to keep at it. But her expressions during her competitions reveal she truly loved the sport, which make her pleas to the judge at the end of the movie, where she begs to be sent to prison instead of being barred from professional figure skating, all the more heartbreaking.

Was Tonya Harding guilty or innocent? Who cares. I, Tonya suggests that even if she did play a role in Kerrigan's attack, Harding was a victim her whole life: a victim of poverty, a victim of her mother, a victim of prejudice, a victim of her husband, and--finally--a victim of the media and everyone who enjoyed ripping into her. In the end, I, Tonya is about something bigger than the Tonya Harding story: it's about American narratives and the lies we spin to ourselves about working hard and dreaming big. For people like Harding, the punishment for dreaming big is to be destroyed in the court of public opinion.

Grade: B+

On Pincushions and Needles

Movies: Phantom Thread

Well, this movie certainly was....something. Paul Thomas Anderson's latest and Daniel Day-Lewis's (supposedly) last-est film is beautiful to the eyes and ears, but (as per usual with PTA) an uncomfortable and cold ride to a truly surprising end.

Set in  1950s London, Phantom Thread follows one Reynolds Woodcock (Day-Lewis), a highly regarded designer of women's dresses who is called upon by stars and royalty to fashion them beautiful (and often extremely constraining) dresses for balls, weddings, Christenings, etc.

Woodcock lives and works in a posh, multistory town home in London with his sister and secretary/business partner Cyril (Lesley Manville). Both Cyril and Reynolds are middle-aged and unmarried, focusing solely on Reynold's work as the anchor point for both of their lives. However, Reynolds has the occasional girlfriend he uses and then discards when he gets bored or annoyed by her. He feels cursed to never marry, although that curse is more of a self-fulfilling prophecy given his extreme arrogance, fussiness, and nearly sociopathic emotional distance.

The Woodock siblings also have a home in the countryside which they visit often, and on one of his trips out there, Reynolds finds himself captivated by a young, fresh-faced waitress, Alma (Vicky Krieps). He immediately asks her to have dinner with him and on their first date he takes her home...to take her measurements. It seems that Reynolds has not only found a new girlfriend, but a muse, model, and employee all in one. The way he dispassionately measures Alma's body, remarking "you have no breasts" in an even tone, shows that his interest in her is more aesthetic than sexual. She, like everything else, exists only to inspire and further his work.


But once Alma moves into the Woodcock home, she and Reynolds begin a bizarre courtship dance. Her habits (such as buttering her toast too loudly at breakfast) annoy him and he makes that clear to her...but instead of backing down, she ignores his annoyance and just does her thing. She pokes through his fussy ice princess personality, making him laugh and rage in equal measure. She takes note of the times after he has completed a huge project and becomes emotionally drained for a few days, remarking to a friend that he is "tender and open"--even willing to snuggle (!!??!!) with her--during these periods.

I read a review of this film that called it "kinky". Considering that I planned to see it with my parents, I was a little nervous. Would there be spanking? Choking? Bondage? Nope. The Phantom Thread has so little sex, an adjective to describe it could be "asexual". But it is, in fact, "kinky" nonetheless. The psychological warfare between Alma and Reynolds is the essence of a Dom/sub relationship...and while in most cases he is the clear Dominant, Alma finds a sneaky way to get him to fully submit and surrender to her--no fur-lined handcuffs needed.

The three leads excellent. Daniel Day-Lewis. This fucking guy. Has he ever done a poor acting job? He's willing to go into the dark depths of the soul for absolutely despicable characters (see his previous collaboration with Paul Thomas Anderson in the brutal There Will Be Blood). While Reynolds is hardly a monster, he is an absolute pain in the ass--he's pedantic, he hates fun, he's a workaholic--and Day-Lewis goes "vanity free" as they say in bringing this asshole to life.

Vicky Krieps is a prolific European actress and virtual unknown in the United States. She plays Alma as an observant, quiet, yet very strong-willed woman. I had trouble understanding what she saw in Reynolds, but perhaps she liked the idea of poking through the defenses of such an emotionally removed man. Alma knows that she has power over Reynolds that no other woman--including Cyril--has. And that intrigues her and gives her life meaning. And that's kind of sexist, but, you know...it's the 1950s. What ya gonna do?

And Lesley Manville is wonderful as Cyril, the steady rock to Reynold's tempest-like personality. They are bound together in an overly close brother-sister bond and when Alma starts messing with that dynamic, Cyril is not happy. 

The cinematography is not just beautiful, it's fetishistic in its focus on fabric, needles, haute coture, and female faces and bodies. And the musical score (by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood, a frequent collaborator of Anderson's) is sweeping and epic, but also creepy and intimate.

Phantom Thread is a gorgeous, meticulously crafted film. It's also very slow with, to be honest, not much reward. I mentioning the surprising ending, but it's not exactly a shocking twist. It's more of a realization that makes you guy "Huh. Ok then."

Phantom Thread is an objet d'art that feels as cool, clean, and composed as a museum. It's a very good movie and one I probably won't watch again.

Grade: B+

Let's Hear It For the Boys

Movies, TV: Call Me By Your Name; Looking

I watched HBO's excellent (and gone too soon) series Looking last fall but I've been holding back on reviewing it because I wanted to pair it with a specific film: Luca Guadagnino's transcendent Call Me By Your Name.

Both the series and the film are about gay men. Although in Call Me By Your Name, homosexuality is more about a moment, a summer, a person and less about identity in the way it is in Looking.

I have a special place in my heart for gay men, which might be a weird and even offensive thing to say. But I was friends with a lot of gay guys in high school and gay male love and sexuality was a simultaneously safe and excitingly forbidden lens through which to explore, think about, and consider my own sexuality at a time when I wasn't ready to explore that part of me with actual real live dudes.

There's also something inherently political about queer love and sex that gives it something extra. Being openly queer, even today (especially today), is a risk. Being openly queer and openly in love is an act of courage and faith. And I don't mean to fetishize or pedestalize queer relationships because I think you could argue that to fall in love no matter what your identity is to be courageous. The essence of love is vulnerability, after all. But with queer people, the stakes are undoubtedly higher.

Consider what AV Club's Brandon Nowalk writes in his review of "Looking for the Future": "Whatever your experience with gay pop culture, there is activism in this story of two guys falling for each other, and it works by simply selling the reality."

And both Looking and Call Me By Your Name so perfectly capture reality. And it will break your heart.

Call Me By Your Name is, above all, gorgeous. Set in northern Italy in 1983, the film is about Elio, the 17-year-old son of a professor of archaeology (Michael Stuhlbarg, playing a truly warm and loving father) who invites a graduate student to live with the family every summer and help with academic work. This summer, the lucky student is Oliver, a 24-year-old American with movie star looks and confidence and charm for days. 

Elio is played by Timothee Chamalet, an up-and-coming young actor (who was also in Lady Bird this year) who is just SO GOOD in this role I want to explode. He plays 17 SO WELL (probably because he's only a few years past that tumultuous age). He captures what it's like to be a teen who is too smart for his own good--he's all limbs, constantly moving, pretending to be cool when really he's a mess of emotions. Give this kid an Oscar.

As for Armie Hammer...well, at first I thought he was miscast. Hammer is 31 years old and playing 24. He *looks* 31, and this is a bit of a problem considering that the age difference between the two leads borders on not okay (for what it's worth, the age of consent in Italy is 14...which is kind of fucked up, but that's another story). There's been a fuckton of ink spilled on whether or not CMBYN is a story of predation, but from what I saw, it wasn't. Consent is fully established between the characters, though given Chamalet's teenage looks and behaviors compared to Hammer's adult looks and behaviors, I did wonder if they could have cast a younger-looking actor to play Oliver. But maybe choosing a mature-looking and acting man to play Oliver was a deliberate choice?

As the film entered it's second half, I have to say that I came to appreciate Hammer's presence as an impossibly tall, impossibly handsome man who falls for the teenage Elio. The first half of the movie focuses a lot of Elio and his awkwardness around Oliver, but the second half takes the time to zero in on Oliver's mixed feelings about their sexual tension and eventual affair. Oliver, like Elio, has the capacity for heartbreak. 

CMBYN draws out the "will they or won't they" tension for a long time and in a manner that feels realistic. Not only is Oliver older than Elio, he also kinda sorta works for Elio's dad. After the two share a kiss, Oliver holds back on going further, saying "We've been good. We haven't done anything to be ashamed of. I want to be good".

But, oh, does Oliver really want to be bad.

There's a lot of sex in CMBYN. It's not explicit--mostly kissing and tussling, as well as a memorable scene involving a peach--but if you're uncomfortable with men kissing men, you will not enjoy this movie. I was kind of glad no one was sitting next to me in the theatre, since watching this film felt like an incredibly intimate experience. But what I truly appreciated was how honest the portrayal of desire was, especially Elio's late-teenage horniness and longing. Nothing about it felt cliche or phony. And Michael Stuhlbarg gets a gut-wrenching monologue in the film where he encourages Elio (and the viewer) to accept and even embrace heartbreak as part of life--and consider yourself lucky for having felt it.

I left Call Me By Your Name with the feeling that there was something very special about it. In addition to the beautiful scenery, the on-point acting, and (not gonna lie) the blush-worthy sex...it just felt honest, and forgiving, and open-hearted more than anything else. It's a film about first love and I think we all understand that someone's first love is a treasure. We love with our entire hearts when we're young because we haven't yet learned to hold back and protect ourselves. I hope you'll see Call Me By Your Name because it's rare movie that is both brimming in heart and soul (and, ahem, body).

Grade: A+

***

Looking is most definitely NOT set in northern Italy in 1983. It's set in San Francisco in the 20-teens. It's the gay men's answer to Girls (only its wayyyyy fucking better than Girls). It's also not about first love. It's about men in their 30s and 40s who are opening their own businesses and moving in with partners, and--oh yeah, maybe also fucking their bosses? (spoiler alert?). These guys are way past the innocence of first love and loss of virginity. And yet, that same sense of open-heartedness and willingness to screw up and be vulnerable infuses the characters' personalities in a way you don't often see in television shows....especially when they're about ironic millennials who live life with a smirk. 

Looking follows three friends: wide-eyed, optimistic video game designer Patrick (Jonathan Groff), temperamental artist Agustin (Frankie J. Alvarez), and 40-something (but still super hot) waiter-slash-trying to open his own restaurant Dom (Murray Bartlett). There's also Doris (Lauren Weedman), Dom's best friend and signature "faghag" of the group, although she elevates the demeaning stock character of "faghag" to something much more human and relatable (and she gets her own love story too).

Looking had two short seasons before it was brutally cut to make room for other bullshit on HBO (*coughGirlscough*) and then given a movie to wrap things up. I'm amazed at how much was accomplished in those seasons and final film but I'm also sad to think of how much more the characters could have been fleshed out if given more time.

Although all the characters get plenty of screen time, the main focus is on Patrick, which was a bit of a problem considering Patrick is a cisgender white male in a series that otherwise does a pretty good job of highlighting queer men of color. But I have to admit, I liked Patrick a lot--he was just such a good-hearted goofball in a way you don't see a lot on TV, especially in HBO shows. Cynicism is in style, and I appreciated Patrick's complete and utter lack of cynicism. It was a breath of fresh air.

Much of the series follows Patrick's two big romances: the first with Richie (Raul Castillo), a down-to-earth (and stupidly hot) barber. The second is with Kevin (Russell Tovey), Patrick's new boss who is British, has huge ears, and is in a relationship....but open to a little strange on the side. To me, the person whom Patrick should end up with is clear, but of course the show needs to put him through the ringer before he realizes which man was truly there for him all along. 

A criticism lobbed at Looking was that it was boring. Which is weird because I binged all of it in like 3 days and cried for more. I liked that it wasn't as pretentious as Girls (I'm giving Girls, a show I was an apologist for, quite a bit of shit here, aren't I?) or as fast moving and dramatic as many shows are in our binge-watching culture. I enjoyed that fact that Looking focused on the minutiae of daily life: birthday parties, Halloween parties, drugs-and-sex-in-the-woods parties (gay men in San Francisco like parties, apparently). The plot arcs the characters follow--Patrick's love triangle, Agustin's relationship with an HIV positive man (Eddie, the best fucking character on the show), and Dom's new restaurant--are significant but also "mundane" in the sense that they are issues that everyone faces. Love problems, health problems, money problems. But seen through the specific lens of time, place, and identity. And, of course, friendship is at the heart of it all.

In a year where I watched so many wonderful TV shows (hi there, Twin Peaks: The Return, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and The Handmaid's Tale), there was no show that offered me such a sense of delight as Looking did. While many of the shows I watched this year had themes that ranged from important to heavy to downright brutal, Looking was an escape hatch that wasn't too light. It's anchored in reality, but looking (heh) upwards and into the future with a sense of hope and purpose. It really was gone too soon. I guess some shows are too good for this world.

Grade: A+

Lover From the Black Lagoon

Movies: The Shape of Water

Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water is clearly inspired by 1954's Creature from the Black Lagoon. del Toro, a director known for making films that walk the line between the real and the fantastic, also appears to borrow from the work of Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Jeunet's films--in particular The City of Lost Children and Delicatessen--are both whimsical and a little scary and bizarre. They're like the original Grimm's fairytales, filled with evil men and strange creatures, violence and playfulness.

Despite pulling from the work of other directors, classic horror and science-fiction, and millennia of fables and fairytales, The Shape of Water is anything but derivative. del Toro has done something remarkable with this film: he's taken half a dozen different genres--suspense, romance, drama, fantasy, history, and horror (with a sprinkling of comedy)--and stitched them together in such a way where no one genre dominates another. And at the heart of this tale is a desire common to all humans (and, apparently, non-humans as well): the longing for connection and the desire to be seen and accepted as we are.

del Toro also accomplishes a difficult feat: he makes us believe that a woman might actually want to fuck an amphibious half-man, half-creature. And fuck they do. Hoo boy.

Taking place in 1960, The Shape of Water follows Elisa Esposito (in a career-best performance by Sally Hawkins), a mute cleaning woman who works the graveyard shift at a government research facility in Baltimore. Elisa's only friends are her closeted gay neighbor, Giles (Richard Jenkins), and fellow cleaning lady Zelda (Octavia Spencer). Elisa seems to lead a quiet, orderly, and lonely life.

Then one day, the research facility becomes home to an "asset"--a sea creature that was captured and brought to Baltimore by Colonel Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon, malevolent and somewhat sexy as he always is). Strickland and his superior, General Hoyt, see this creature as a potential weapon in the Cold War and want to vivisect it to see how it works. Scientist Bob Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlberg) sees the creature as "beautiful" and wants to treat it with gentleness and certainly not kill it. Meanwhile, Elisa sneaks into the lab where the creature is kept chained up and feeds it hardboiled eggs and teaches it sign language. She discovers that the creature can communicate and feel emotions. When she overhears the plans to vivisect her new friend, she decides to bust the creature out of the facility and set it free.

There's also a Russian double-agent subplot as well as a subplot involving Giles in his attempts to express his desire for other men. del Toro manages to make these plot lines vital to the story and its themes of what it means to be an outsider and to be misunderstood. In fact, every character in The Shape of Water is misunderstood in some way, and forced into submission by other people, by society, or by circumstances. Of course, Elisa is misunderstood in a literal sense by being mute. Giles is a gay man in the 1960s, Zelda is a black woman, and the creature is, well, not human. But even Richard Strickland--the "bad guy" of the film--is misunderstood and bullied by his superiors. He reacts by acting aggressively towards those weaker than himself, but his pain is understandable even if his actions are deplorable. Like most great films, The Shape of Water has no one-dimensional characters and no simple answers.

Director of Photography Dan Lauston films The Shape of Water with a wonderful palette of shades of green, from the bright green candy that Strickland compulsively consumes to the grayish-blue green of the water where the creature lives. Green is a symbol of renewal and nature. Likewise, eggs show up in the movie a lot: Elisa hard boils them everyday before she heads to work, and her first connection with the creature is when she offers it an egg to eat. Like the color green, eggs are also symbols of rebirth and fertility, and The Shape of Water--especially the ending--is the story of Elisa's rebirth in the face of finding a connection and love where she leasts expects it.

If you think that a movie about a human woman falling in love with a non-human creature is silly or stupid, of course I only have to point to King Kong, or Beauty and the Beast, or every vampire and werewolf story ever told. Stories like these are about being loved for who we are, no matter our outside packaging. Stories about monsters are also about being hated or feared by society and a demand for conformity.

The Shape of Water takes place during a precarious time in United States history. The early 1960s was a time of manners and hierarchies, but it was also right before the world blew wide open with JFK's assassination, the Civil Rights Act, and Woodstock. The Shape of Water reveals that during this time in the United States, beautiful strangeness--or maybe a more accurate term would be "queerness"--existed right there under everyone's nose. That queerness, like the creature in the movie, lurked below the surface, just waiting for its moment to emerge from the depths and demand to be seen in all its glory.

Grade: B+

A Portrait of Grief 14 Feet High

Movies: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

It's difficult to pin down exactly how I feel about Martin McDonaugh's Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. Like his 2008 film In Bruges, it's a mix of intense drama and pitch-black comedy sprinkled with a light dusting of absurdity. The concoction, not unlike when I first had a salted caramel flavored beer, is both strange and addictive: I'm not sure what I feel about this, but I....I kinda like it!

Three Billboards is the story of a mother's grief. Frances McDormand, who is excellent in every movie she's been in, including this one, plays Mildred Hayes, a middle-aged woman whose daughter was raped, killed, and burned into unrecognizable ash just outside the town limits of Ebbing. After 7 months, it seems like the local police force is too busy sitting on their thumbs to make any arrests. So Mildred rents out three dilapidated billboards along the road where her daughter was murdered to send a message to the police and specifically the chief. The messages read:

RAPED WHILE DYING

AND STILL NO ARRESTS?

HOW COME, CHIEF WILLOUGHBY? 


(To give you a sense of the kind of humor this movie trades in, when Mildred and her 17 year old son, Robbie [played by the wonderful Lucas Hedges], drive down this road, Robbie remarks "Oh, great, the 'Raped while dying' route")

Chief Willoughby is played--also wonderfully (every single actor in this film brings their A-game)--by Woody Harrelson. Willoughby is a good man and beloved by the people of Ebbing, so Mildred gets tons of shit by putting up these billboards. Even the town priest pays her a visit to implore her to take them down. But Mildred rightly points out that she's gotten more phone calls, house calls, and attention in the days following the erection of the billboards than in the 7 months following her daughter's brutal murder.

Willoughby treats Mildred with respect compared to other members of the community, including her ex-husband Charlie (played--you guessed it--wonderfully by John Hawkes) and the hotheaded, slow-witted police officer Dixon, played MORE THAN WONDERFULLY by Sam Rockwell in one of the best performances of his career--which has been filled with amazing performances.

Officer Dixon is probably the most complicated character in the film. He's angry and abusive, but he longs for approval. He's the epitome of a blatantly racist small-town cop. He's everything wrong with police today distilled into one character: not that smart, thinks he's all that, lazy as hell--except when beating the shit out of innocent people. He's irredeemable. Or so you think....Three Billboards is full of surprises, both good and bad.

I won't get into the details of the plot since that would spoil the movie, but I'll distill my overall impressions into a couple sentences and you can decide if this is a movie you want to see:

1) As I said, the acting in Three Billboards is, to a performance, excellent, A+, perfecto. You will not be disappointed by a single performance in this film. Somehow, McDonagh gathered Hollywood's best and brightest and wrung out every drop of acting they had to give.

2) If you like movies where justice is served and peace and order restored in a way we rarely see in real life, then this is not the movie for you. The plot arc is really more of a rollercoaster and there's no neat little bow tying things up and the end.

3) There is, however, redemption. Three Billboards might be the most "Christian" movie that's not explicitly about religion I've seen this year. In particular, the character arcs that Mildred and Dixon travel throughout the film are like something out of the Bible (or a Greek tragedy, as my mother, who saw the movie with me, said). Three Billboards is about a lot of things, but it's surprisingly not about justice. It's about something deeper than justice--it's about forgiveness, redemption, hope, and love. And if all that sounds cheesy, I can assure you that the path this film takes towards these fuzzy feelings is the opposite of cheesy. It's goddamn brutal. It's a trial by fire, literally. To steal the title of a Rebecca Solnit book, it's about "Hope in the dark".

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri will enrage you. It will make you laugh. It will make you cry. You might hate it or you might love it. But I can promise you one thing: It won't bore you.

Grade: A-

Oh Hai Movie

Movies: The Disaster Artist

"Visions are worth fighting for. Why spend your life making someone else's dreams?"

The above is a quote from the wonderful Tim Burton film Ed Wood in which famed terrible director Ed Wood (Johnny Depp, before he was the caricature he is today) meets with Orson Welles (played by Vincent D'Onofrio). Wood is about to give up his directing dreams when Welles tells him to believe in himself. The joke is, of course, that Wood is essentially the polar opposite of Welles in terms of talent. But the quote has always stuck with me as a pure-hearted bon mot in a cynical world. Even if you're a no-talent hack, you still have a right to your dreams.

In order to appreciate James Franco's film The Disaster Artist, you first need to know what The Room is. Here is the Wikipedia entry for it and here are some options for where to watch The Room, or at least clips of it.

But to give you the elevator pitch, The Room is a 2003 film written, directed, produced, and starring a man name Tommy Wiseau. The Room has achieved cult status for how absolutely awful it is on every count: the actors are wooden, the script is terrible, and the plot is thin. But the cult behind the room would be nothing without the mystery of Wiseau--a man with a seemingly bottomless bank account, a bizarre accent, and dreams that stretch far beyond his talent.

Unlike Ed Wood, who was an all-American man (who, incidentally, enjoyed wearing women's clothing) with optimism and goofy charm, Wiseau is pretty much an asshole by all accounts. He bullied nearly everyone on the set of The Room, refusing to buy water for the cast and crew even at the peak of summer and calling the moles on his lead actress's body "disgusting". These revelations came to light in a memoir co-written by Greg Sestero, Wiseau's friend and second lead actor in The Room. That memoir is titled The Disaster Artist and it is the basis for this film, directed and starring James Franco. A rather strange actor/director/writer/producer in his own right, Franco is pretty much the perfect auteur to take on this project.

Franco plays Wiseau to near perfection, nailing the vaguely Eastern European accent and strange mannerisms impeccably. Franco's younger brother, Dave, plays Greg Sestero, which is arguably a more difficult role since it's far more subtle than mimicking Wiseau.

The Disaster Artist opens in 1998 San Francisco where Wiseau and Sestero meet in an acting class. Where Sestero is conventionally good-looking but timid onstage, Wiseau looks, acts, and dresses bizarrely but is absolutely fearless in the class. Well, that or crazy. But we all know that there is a thin line between madness and genius.

Sestero and Wiseau become friends and eventually Wiseau convinces Sestero to move with him to Los Angeles and make a real effort to pursue acting. Sestero agrees and they move to an apartment Wiseau already owns. The fact that this man owns apartments in both San Francisco and LA is mind-boggling to Sestero--how does he have all this money? To make matters more mysterious, Wiseau claims to be from Louisiana although he clearly has an Eastern European accent. And he refuses to tell Sestero how old he is. When pushed, he claims to be Sestero's age: early 20s. The man is OBVIOUSLY at least two decades older, but won't cop to it. What's up with this guy?

After multiple rejections, Wiseau decides to make his own movie and give himself the starring role and Sestero the second lead. The movie, titled The Room, is about Johnny, an "all-American hero" in Wiseau's words, who is betrayed by his girlfriend who sleeps with his best friend, Mark (played by Sestero). Through sheer force of will and with a little help from the apparently millions of dollars Wiseau inexplicably has in his bank account, he gets the film made and released.

Franco cast dozens of actors and comedians for The Disaster Artist. No role is too small. Ari Graynor plays Juliette Danielle, who plays "Lisa" in The Room, the unfortunate young woman who had to endure a sex scene with Tommy Wiseau. Seth Rogen plays Sandy Schklair, the script supervisor. Additionally, for you Room-heads:

Josh Hutcherson plays Philip Haldiman, aka "Denny"
Nathan Fielder plays Kyle Vogt, aka "Peter"
Jackie Weaver plays Carolyn Minnott, aka "Claudette" (the one who "definitely has breast cancer")
Zac Efron plays Dan Janjigian, aka "Chris-R"

Oh, and all three hosts of the podcast How Did This Get Made?--Paul Scheer, June Diane Raphael, and Jason Mantzoukas are in the movie.

Oh, and why not throw Sharon Stone, Melanie Griffith, Hannibal Buress, Allison Brie, Bryan Cranston, Megan Mullally, Charlene Yi, and fuckin' Bob Odenkirk in there as well? Seriously, all of Hollywood got a paycheck from this movie. Hell, I visited LA for a couple days this year, so I expect my royalties check to come in the mail any day now.

Seeing huge stars in tiny roles playing terrible actors working with a terrible script is part of the fun of The Disaster Artist. The film is less of a compelling and accurate tribute to Wiseau (they definitely downplayed his weirdness and on-set abuse, most likely to have his permission to the rights to his story) and more of a meta-comedy about fame and movie-making. Some folks have suggested that The Disaster Artist is "Oscar worthy" and I personally do not agree. It's a funny, good movie that speaks almost exclusively to fans of The Room (I can't imagine what people who have not seen The Room and walk into this movie blind will make of it) but it's not a masterpiece. In my opinion.

Even though it falls back on buddy-comedy tropes (Sestero and Wiseau have a massive falling out, but make up in the end), The Disaster Artist is great fun and pretty darn hilarious. I definitely recommend it to fans of The Room. For people who haven't seen The Room, I actually *do not* recommend seeing The Disaster Artist...yet.

First: Watch The Room "dry" just to familiarize yourself with the movie and how uniquely awful it is.

Then: See The Room during a midnight screening that includes audience participation. This is The Room in its truest and ideal habitat.

Bonus:  Read The Disaster Artist by Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell to understand the full story and insider's perspective behind the making of The Room

And then you're allowed to watch The Disaster Artist. If you see The Disaster Artist without fully appreciating the story behind it, you might find yourself saying

Grade: B+