2019 Capsule Reviews

The Man Who Killed Don Quixote

rating: *****

review: Terry Gilliam's much-delayed masterpiece probably works better than it would have originally infused with Adam Driver.  I don't suppose critics were disposed to adoring the results anyway, so forget their lukewarm reception.  Gilliam is always just this side of genius, and sometimes is firmly on it, and this is his best film.  Absolutely worth all the hassle to get it done, worth the wait, and all the needless later loopholes to actually see it.

Yesterday

rating: *****

review: Critics were equally dismissive of this one, since they couldn't wrap their heads around the Beatles being popular today, and maybe it's because I'm unabashedly a fan, but I put well aside my usual apathy for romantic movies for this, and eagerly so.  Between the Beatles themselves, Across the Universe, and now this, I've witnessed the same songs executed to perfection in widely different ways.

Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood

rating: *****

review: Quentin Tarantino returns to the laconic form of Jackie Brown to rewrite history in a story about two lives that really had nothing at all to do with the Manson murders, but comment on the nature of living the film life better than anything I've ever seen.

Joker

rating: *****

review: Opinions range from brilliant to apathy, depending on how invested the viewer is in the legacy of the character.  The stairway sequence alone makes the results iconic, and Joaquin Phoenix a worthy successor to Heath Ledger.

Knives Out

rating: *****

review: Daniel Craig powers an ensemble that redeems Rian Johnson's reputation after The Last Jedi.

Star Wars - Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker

rating: ****

review: At this point you were either onboard with the sequels or had already dismissed them.  I found the conclusion of Rey's journey, her relationship with Kylo Ren, to be perfect, a response and the antithesis to how things played out in the original trilogy (and even the prequels), daring to believe in hope in a most cynical age.

Zombieland: Double Tap

rating: ****

review: An underrated gem of a series in the modern era, and a worthy follow-up to the original, both of which I've grown to appreciate more over time.

John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum

rating: ****

review: The bombastic third entry in this series turned it into a legitimate blockbuster, and knew exactly what it was doing, turning John's survival into a true epic experience.

Jojo Rabbit

rating: ****

review: Burned by my experience with Thor: Ragnarok, I was hesitant to follow Taika Waititi down this, heh, rabbit hole, but once I did, I fell in love with its unlikely magic.

Hotel Mumbai

rating: ****

review: The age of terrorism finds perhaps its perfect cinematic depiction in this unheralded ensemble drama.

Serenity

rating: ****

review: My appreciation for this one is possibly only beginning; where others were baffled by its twist, I thought it added to the movie's power, and all the same, became another great example of why Matthew McConaughey should never, ever be underestimated.

Where'd You Go, Bernadette

rating: ****

review: Actresses often find it hard to star in truly worthy vehicles for their talent, and Cate Blanchett has been no exception, but this is one of them.

1917

rating: ****

review: Presented as one long cut, a truly harrowing depiction of WWI trench warfare.

The Standoff at Sparrow Creek

rating: ****

review: James Badge Dale saw a resurgence of interest from filmmakers at this time, and this was the best result, a riveting look at the preppers phenomenon.

Terminator: Dark Fate

rating: ****

review: Ever since the second one, this franchise has been hellbent at sabotaging itself. Dark Fate was the rare instance of everyone sort of agreeing to trust the results. I've generally enjoyed every film, but this one was a cut above.

The Lighthouse

rating: ****

review: Robert Pattinson has been keen to find oddball projects, and this was perhaps his most successful at getting the mainstream to notice.  Personally I need to watch it a few more times, since I find his performance to be unusually showy, but I guess others didn't.

Detective Pikachu

rating: ****

review: A genius depiction of the Pokemon franchise, starring Ryan Reynolds in another perfect role.

The Hustle

rating: ****

review: Trashed or outright dismissed otherwise, I found the comedic pairing of Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson to be irresistible (between this and Serenity, as far as I'm concerned this was a career year for Hathaway).

Dumbo

rating: ****

review: I'm not overly attached to much of Disney's animated canon, so this particular live action edition landed well with me, which was certainly helped along by costarring Colin Farrell.

Glass

rating: ****

review: Putting the focus squarely on the franchise's best character helped achieve a solid hit for me from Shyamalan.

High Life

rating: ****

review: I actually like this Pattinson (performance) better, but the films in this de facto ranking are still probably accurate in terms of overall worth.

Ad Astra

rating: ****

review: Falling in the same basic range is the similar Brad Pitt experience, made before Hollywood realized Tarantino was revitalizing his career.

The Upside

rating: ****

review: The film that made me a fan of Kevin Hart.  I guess I could care less for him as a strictly comedic performer, but he plays dramatic roles surprisingly well.

The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot

rating: ****

review: The movie with the most ridiculous title ever is absolutely worth experiencing, especially the tense first half, which leads to getting to just spend time with Sam Elliott, since the actual climax isn't worth as much.

Ford v Ferrari

rating: ****

review: Christian Bale as a loose cannon racecar driver trying to prove Ford can make something good is worth Matt Damon not particularly clicking with the material, mistaking smugness for confidence.

Donnybrook

rating: ****

review: Another career seeing a bit of sunlight during this time was Frank Grillo, who unlike Dale carried the momentum further along.  Here he's stuck in a rut of being a thug, but it's still a far cry from not even knowing he was an actor in Warrior.

Under the Silver Lake

rating: ****

review: Basically the Andrew Garfield version of Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood.

Motherless Brooklyn

rating****:

review: Edward Norton made this one happen, otherwise he'd still be looking for another starring role. Also Bruce Willis' last shot at legitimate cinema.

Richard Jewell

rating: ****

review: I figure Clint Eastwood was being allegorical with this one.

Toy Story 4

rating: ****

review: For me the third one was needless rehash, but I figure there was actual new ground in this one, chiefly in the existential crisis of the toy that was made by a kid.  Although if there's another one they might validate the idea a little better.

Captain Marvel

rating: ***

review: Nothing wrong with it, except there's no way it can validate the hero's claim to icon status, which is the one thing it really needed to do.

Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbes & Shaw

rating: ***

review: If Johnson & Statham had to be relegated to their own vehicle (heh), it could've been worse.  

Frozen II

rating: ***

review: I still don't know what my niece thinks of this one.  So I don't really know, either.

Fighting with My Family

rating: ***

review: Being familiar with the source material, these results are okay, but at least they depict in cinematic terms The Rock's persona.

The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part

rating: ***

review: Can't really compete with the poignant twist at the end of the first one.

Men in Black: International

rating: ***

review: There's nothing wrong with this, except it doesn't have Will Smith.  Or Tommy Lee Jones.

Dark Phoenix 

rating: ***

review: Kind of ironic that the end of the Fox franchise proper circles back to the point everyone thought killed it in the first place.

Avengers: Endgame

rating: ***

review: I was thoroughly underwhelmed by the whole Thanos experience.  They just didn't know what to do with him, so fittingly, he's barely in this one.  This is the definition of the MCU's villain problem.

Alita: Battle Angel

rating: ***

review: Nothing wrong with this one except it feels like small potatoes compared to most of the other things from the year.

Shazam!

rating: ***

review: As it turns out, if people keep saying your movies are too grim, it's not the appropriate response to make a movie that features a kid in the body of an adult.  The results aren't bad, but keeping them disconnected from everything else is definitely the wrong move.

Gemini Man

rating: ***

review: I have a full review with a much different rating (I'm pretty sure), but this one's more accurate to relative results.  I guess I really would rather watch Men in Black without Will Smith than two Will Smiths.  This is '00s Smith rewarmed.  He'd already moved past this kind of material.

Spider-Man: Far From Home

rating: ***

review: I just wasn't a fan of the MCU Spider-Man, until he was joined by the other Spider-Men in No Way Home (which like Far needlessly belabored the title of the first one).

The Secret Life of Pets 2

rating: ***

review: I'll clue you in on a little secret: usually when I don't have strong memories of a movie I don't include it in these things.  This one was close, and I only saw it at all because of my niece, and isn't exactly something I'd go out of my way to watch again (unless I was still living with her and she insisted, which could just as easily turned its reputation around).  But I remember enough.  It was basically a decent experience.  Gruff Harrison Ford.  That's what I remember most.

Hellboy

rating: **

review: I was never the biggest fan of the original films.  This one is a marked step down from them.

Midsommer 

rating: **

review: Florence Pugh is the golden child of critics these days (she also starred in Fighting with My family, which is probably the only reason it was taken seriously by them).  And mostly, I just don't get it.  This was one of her breakout movies.  I found it needlessly impressionistic.  Because it's really just one of those weird movies that desparately wants to be profound but isn't.  The exact opposite of the movie at the top of this.

The Irishman (2019) Review

rating: ****

the story: An aging Frank Sheeran reflects on his life highlighted, among other things, by a close association with Jimmy Hoffa.

review: Martin Scorsese ignited a firestorm of controversy when he lamented the current state of filmmaking while releasing The Irishman, which was done on the streaming platform Netflix rather than exclusively in theaters.  Scorsese is a filmmaking master, so the fact that he had to use Netflix at all is either high praise for Netflix or faint praise, and an indictment of current pop culture's appreciation for talent on the level of Scorsese.  Much of the initial reception of The Irishman centered either on this or the de-aging CGI work stars Robert De Niro and Al Pacino experience to tell the stories of Sheeran and Hoffa.

To get that other point out of the way, the de-aging only matters if you really think it has to.  Because it shouldn't.  It should have no relevance to your appreciation of the results.

The results of the film itself have often been described as an elegiac response to Scorsese's career, often exploring the life of mob figures, in pop culture most famously in Goodfellas, which for me has long been the least interesting of his films, the most obvious, least nuanced, which should otherwise not be words associated with a filmmaker of his caliber.

It's a long film, but it doesn't really feel like it is.  I had previously read the book upon which it's based, which is sometimes itself considered somewhat a work of fiction, as it ultimately turns on whether or not you believe Sheeran's confessions, about being responsible for Hoffa's disappearance (by being his assassin) or even the suggestion that he played a role in JFK's assassination (by helping ship the weapons responsible).  The latter is heavily downplayed in the movie, but the Hoffa angle is clearly the focus, other than Sheeran's relationship with Russell Bufalino, a mob figure who ages along with him, whose aging is itself the most visible element of the film's true message, a meditation on aging, on the rare instance of Hollywood allowing the elderly to be the point of a drama without necessary fixating on the inevitable death, but rather the decline itself.

Bufalino is played by Joe Pesci, a familiar figure from the Scorsese catalog, playing well against type as a restrained figure, possibly because he's the one most reflecting that element, a figure being chauffeured on his final rounds in a road trip that helps begin the film's journey.  Some critics have focused on the significant lingering shots that begin and end the film, but I think it's inside the car with Pesci, Robert De Niro, and the actresses playing their wives, as Pesci asserts his no-smoking policy that's just as promptly ignored, and Pesci doesn't pitch his usual fit...

De Niro is the star, and oddly, when we see him at his oldest he looks his least convincing.  I don't even understand how that's possible.  He's the obvious target for criticizing the de-aging effects, but the scene where his younger self stomps someone, which some say looks least convincing, is most important as the moment Sheeran's daughter realizes she wants nothing to do with him.  

Pacino doesn't sell Jimmy Hoffa so much as deliver another Al Pacino performance, and since it's been so long since we've gotten one of those, who's to really argue about this?  The idea of Hoffa, now, means the mystery of the disappearance, which is what the film features, because his image as the ultimate union boss is no longer relevant.  

Arguably, the real draw here is of course getting to see De Niro and Pacino act together.  After decades of being described as the best actors of their generation, they shared the screen in Heat, which ended up being better known for the wide ensemble around them, and then Righteous Kill, which no one counts.  Here it's almost all De Niro and Pacino, delivering their signature performances.

Which is not to say there isn't plenty of talent around them.  Besides Pesci there's Ray Romano, Bobby Cannavale, Anna Paquin, Harvey Keitel (another Scorsese veteran, his De Niro before De Niro), Jesse Plemons, and Jack Huston, playing and sounding like Bobby Kennedy but otherwise recognizable.  Someday he'll be considered a major selling point all his own, given the opportunities.  

So much of the past fifty years has been chasing The Godfather, and arguably Scorsese has been doing exactly that for much of his career, and The Irishman is probably the closest he'll ever come, with a story that follows real events and therefore carrying more than just great acting and mob intrigue, and on that score weighing nicely against the iconic Marlon Brando performance, the breakthrough Pacino.  

It's too early to say for certain.  But it's another great film from Scorsese.  Not his best.  For me those are Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Departed, Silence.  But darn close.  In the conversation.  The one that matters.

Iron Sky: The Coming Race (2019) Review

rating: ****

the story: Survivors of an apocalypse living on the moon discover their best hope for the future is inside the hollow Earth…and all they need to do is defeat Space Hitler to obtain it!

review: Obviously I don’t review a ton of movies as described above (nor watch them!). I am not a fan of schlock cinema. I don’t make a point even to watch it if it’s the subject of sarcastic commentary. On the surface Iron Sky: The Coming Race is pretty much exactly schlock cinema. You can watch it with the expectation that the results are going to be ridiculous, and be happy with it.

I haven’t even seen the first one yet. I did see Finnish director Timo Vuorensola’s first feature film, Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning, a madcap Star Trek parody, and have remained interested in what he does next. When the chance to see Coming Race came up, I figured it was worth a look.

It was!

For those keeping score, it’s very possible to see in the results direct nods to another sci-fi franchise. There’s a spaceship culled from Star Wars’ Millennium Falcon, the kind of nod that has surprisingly taken a lot longer to happen (outside Spaceballs’ Winnebago, of course!), more than forty years in the making. In fact, the career of Vuorensola suggests that we’re getting that much closer to actual responses to George Lucas, rather than mere attempts to cash in (which was easy enough to attempt…immediately).

The movie, with its political and even social satire (the riff on Steve Jobs and smartphone culture, employing a surprisingly effective performance from Tom Green of all people, is more successful than evoking Sarah Palin, the part critics who just wanted to dismiss the results fixated on), knows when to take things seriously and when to just unleash expectations (Space Hitler’s abruptly hilarious fate!)

Surprisingly or not, comic books, and comic book movies, often seem like they want to be exactly like this, and too seldom manage to pull it off, despite considerable, sometimes painfully desperate, efforts. 

Anyway, it’s the kind of movie that seems unlikely on basically every level, including the ability to be legitimately entertaining. It pulls it off!

Gemini Man (2019)

rating: ****

the story: A hitman ends up fighting a younger version of himself.

review: Here's one of those movies whose reception has just baffled me, for any number of reasons.  I get that Will Smith hasn't been popular in about a decade, but for me, he's still an undeniable talent, and I love that he's getting back into the spotlight.  I also get that Ang Lee somehow lost his critical credibility (I still have no idea how), but to continue treating him as if he's just another filmmaker is beyond idiotic.  And for Smith and Lee to make a movie together and everyone still just sees no worth in their efforts...

Listen, I get it.  You see a movie like this and assume it's just a gimmick: Will Smith battles himself.  It's just another of those movies capitalizing on special effects.  But there's beyond simplifying it.  There's a lot to love, even if you're not as enamored of Smith (and Lee) as I am.

Take Mary Elizabeth Winstead, for instance.  When I watched the movie in theaters, I was initially baffled.  Is that Cobie Smulders? Wait, it isn't?  Oh, it's Winstead!  The last time I caught her was in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, which I took as the geek version of (500) Days of Summer (which was a welcome interpretation).  I expected that she'd go on to have a notable, visible career.  So there I was, a decade later, not recognizing her, thinking she was someone else, and suddenly remembering how much I liked her.  Her character in Gemini Man is pretty much exactly Smulders' MCU character, but given actual space to breathe (which in a half dozen appearances Smulders never got, which was why she had to take the act on the road in Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, and then just got to be awesome in Stumptown).

Then there's Clive Owen.  Actually, this whole movie features people inexplicably unappreciated by today's audiences.  Owen achieved immortality at least once, with Children of Men, but then he drifted into obscurity, and has begun resurfacing in recent years, although you'd hardly know it, because no one cares anymore.  This older Clive Owen is no longer the good guy leading man, suave and self-confident, but the bad guy, and yet he's still magnetic.  Of course. 

Smith is great, as he always is, and watching his current self opposite a version of his younger self (basically just before his career exploded) is a distinct treat.  The motorcycle stunts are a selling point all their own. 

But the best thing about Gemini Man is the unexpected point of the story: Lee is actually arguing that suffering is a good thing.  He believes that soldiers should feel pain.  This is different from not giving them treatment.  Smith ends up far better when he allows himself to embrace a personal life.  (In the mix is Benedict Wong in another standout supporting role, after his MCU appearances.)  The younger Smith is supposed to be one of those perfect killing machines who don't question anything.  In other forms this means robots.  But as we've repeatedly been told (even in Will Smith movies), robots are going to be people, too.  Eventually they'll want exactly what we want.

Even when we don't realize we need it.  We need our pain.  Sucks to have it, but it's an essential part of living.  Pain, regret, loss, all of it.  It helps remind us that there's so much more to life, things that will make us feel those things. 

Movies, especially blockbuster action movies, aren't supposed to help us worry about such things, yet Smith's movies have consistently, as his career has progressed, linger on them.  Lee's movies have sought the transcendent, universal messages that went far beyond his origins, the kinds of movies critics find easy to enjoy, and continually reward, but so often fall far of the mark that more ambitious movies attempt.  Such as, yes, Gemini Man.

2019

Viewed/Ranked

1. The Man Who Killed Don Quixote
2. Yesterday
3. Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood
4. Joker
5. Knives Out
6. Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker
7. John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum
8. Hotel Mumbai
9. Serenity
10. The Standoff at Sparrow Creek
11. The Lighthouse
12. Detective Pikachu
13. The Hustle
14. Dumbo
15. Glass
16. High Life
17. The Upside
18. The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot
19. Ford v Ferrari
20. Donnybrook
21. Under the Silver Lake
22. Captain Marvel
23. Fighting with My Family
24. The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part
25. Men in Black: International
26. Dark Phoenix
27. Avengers: Endgame
28. Alita: Battle Angel
29. Shazam!
30. Gemini Man
31. Into the Ashes
32. Spider-Man: Far From Home
33. The Secret Life of Pets 2
34. Hellboy
35. Captive State

Other Notable Releases

• 1917
• A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
• A Dog's Way Home
• Ad Astra
• All Is True
• Angel Has Fallen
• Brightburn
• Charlie's Angels
• Doctor Sleep
• Downton Abbey
• The Farewell
• Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw
• Fast Color
• Frozen II
• Good Boys
• Harriet
• Hustlers
• Jojo Rabbit
• Judy
• The Kid Who Would Be King
• Little Women
• Midsommar
• Missing Link
• Motherless Brooklyn
• Pain and Glory
• Parasite
• Pet Sematary
• Rambo: Last Blood
• Richard Jewell
• Stuber
• Terminator: Dark Fate
• Toy Story 4
• Uncut Gems
• Us
• The Wandering Earth
• Where'd You Go, Bernadette
• Zombieland: Double Tap

Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker (2019)

rating: ****

the story: The saga concludes.

review: This will be another film from 2019 I hesitate to call an out-and-out classic.  (True story: when I was picking up the recent home video release of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, I heard it referred to as the movie where Bruce Lee gets his ass kicked.)  Because I really like Rise of Skywalker, but I'm not immediately prepared to go all in.  Sometimes a movie will leave you with that kind of impression, right from the start.  Sometimes it takes a while.  Some of my all-time favorites are like that.  My appreciation for Tarsem's The Fall has grown even from a hugely favorable initial impression. 

But what you want to read about is Rise of Skywalker.  The Star Wars saga has quite an interesting backstory to it at this point.  I'm not talking about the films but how they've been accepted by fans over the years.  Empire Strikes Back sort of instantly, for most observers, became the franchise favorite, but it didn't make as much money at the box office as A New Hope.  Fans instantly derided Return of the Jedi as a shameless conclusion to the original trilogy, festooned with nonsense teddy bears and sudden revelations like Luke and Leia actually being siblings all along.  But fans forgot these facts by the time the prequels came around.  Over the years, the prequels became pariahs.  But the saga continued.  J.J. Abrams launched the sequel trilogy with The Force Awakens, but it wasn't until Rian Johnson's The Last Jedi that fans, who were already thinking Force Awakens echoed A New Hope too directly, started to grumble loudly.  We live in a #notmy[fillintheblank] era, so of course a fan community already discontent over the prequels had begun suggesting Star Wars was over.

Then of course Rise of Skywalker comes around and is announced as the finale of the Skywalker saga.  Not necessarily Star Wars itself, but the saga as it revolves around the Skywalkers.  (Do you want a spoiler?  By the end of Rise of Skywalker, the concept of revolving around the Skywalkers sort of gets a new definition.  But I think it still technically completes the saga as we know it.)

Now, we also now live in a world where Baby Yoda exists.  Maybe this is enough to bring back some of those skeptics.  I think one way or another Star Wars goes out with a bang, not just in the movie but as a cultural experience.  I don't really care what the public perception is.  I love Solo.  (And still am ambivalent at best about Rogue One.)  But it's nice to think Star Wars can still compete with the MCU.

I think Rise of Skywalker is infinitely better than Avengers: Endgame.  I think it absolutely schools the Thanos finale.  Where Endgame plays at trying to have resonance for a whole franchise, Rise of Skywalker speaks to unanswered questions for eight previous films spanning more than forty years, and does so brilliantly.  It doesn't attempt to resolve everything.  In the finest Star Wars tradition, it introduces new mysteries, that need never be resolved.  I mean, we'll never really know who shot first, after all.  (Thanks, George!) 

If Last Jedi was unconventional, Rise of Skywalker dips immediately and enthusiastically back into A New Hope, and revisits Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi.  Fans who only want to interpret things negatively will consider the results as nothing more than the original trilogy in a blender, a shameless rip-off.

But it's so much more than that.  J.J. Abrams is not George Lucas.  He's not Kershner.  He's not Marquand.  His sensibilities are as much informed by Star Wars as they are Peter Jackson and Harry Potter.  He's very much a modern blockbuster filmmaker, and crafts his movie around moments and ideas that didn't exist in the saga previously.  His Jedi have the ability to heal, just as George Lucas eventually built up the Sith to have the ability to create life itself (the disputed origin of Vader).  Rey has powers we've never seen before.  I've seen this sort of thing done with existing mythos before.  Green Lantern comics, for instance, which in the '90s I was thoroughly convinced had all the grandeur of Star Wars, before they ever went full epic in the new millennium.  Again, some fans will have problems with this sort of thing.  I think it rings true.  The Force now resides, effectively, in a handful of individuals at best.  And by the end of the movie, by the end of the saga, has shrunk even further. 

I think the mythology is given its due.  I think the characters introduced in Force Awakens are given fitting roles to play, and have fitting arcs.  Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Adam Driver, and even Domhnall Gleason turn in trilogy-best performances.  Original trilogy actors abound!  And deliver.  Everything delivers.

Even though I didn't like the movie itself, Return of the King had a killer, memorable climax when Sam tells Frodo that even if he can't carry the ring, he can carry Frodo.  I don't know if Rise of Skywalker has a moment like that.  I don't know if it needs to.  Last Jedi had a rousing moment, when Rey and Kylo Ren strike down Snoke unexpectedly, and that's a tough moment to beat in this trilogy, and so it's not really worth trying to compete against.  Instead, Rise of Skywalker is filled with reflecting back on everything we've learned, everything we've experienced over the course of three trilogies.  There isn't a Vader who seems far from redemption, or two Jedi being torn away from a treasured brotherhood at stake.  Rey and Kylo spend the entire movie going over their Last Jedi experiences.  Kylo's best moment is a direct riff on a scene in Force Awakens, a quieter and perhaps as a result, more affecting echo.  And that's sort of the whole movie. 

It knows, as with the best stories, that the ending reflects back on the beginning.  We last see Rey in the most perfect place possible.  I think if the results aren't perfect, they're as perfect as they could possibly have been, especially since George Lucas isn't at the helm, and because Abrams sort of swooped back in at the last minute.  That's some kind of magic.  And that's always been Star Wars in a nutshell.  You don't have to worry about what the fans think.

Under the Silver Lake (2019)

rating: ****

the story: A struggling LA resident finds himself deep in the midst of a wild conspiracy.

review: Essentially Once Upon a Time in Hollywood without Tarantino, a sort of love letter to Hollywood culture.  Under the Silver Lake is a one man spotlight for Andrew Garfield, letting him drift through the film and its kaleidoscope of craziness, in the process giving director David Robert Mitchell his highest profile movie yet.

Garfield has been a highlight in the movies for about a decade at this point, but two Spider-Man movies that weren't especially well received meant his profile began to suffer.  Silver Lake is a reminder of his appeal.  The movie, and the music around him, is a vision of Hollywood that only Hollywood itself could conjure, full of beautiful women and logic that makes little or no sense, except that it somehow does, and explains everything from pop music to the fates of the obscenely rich.

What's most impressive about the movie is that it's sort of classic noir, too.  Not noir in the way you usually think, whether because you still think of noir for its black and white roots (such as recent examples like The Man Who Wasn't There and The Good German, wrongly dismissed as a Casablanca knockoff because...it features Nazis, and a romance), or general style (as in Brick, which I've never been able to entirely enjoy despite appreciating its overall achievement), but approach, which again, is why we follow Garfield around, and listen to the particular noir-style musical score accompanying him.

The result is a mood piece.  Garfield is not a detective, but sort of stumbles into becoming one, as he attempts to solve a bizarre conspiracy theory.  One of the running plot points is that he's going to be evicted because he's failed to make rent, but he never seems especially concerned about it.  He exists in a wonderland where the only real concerns are ephemeral, and he doesn't mind the eventual solution to his real problem, even if he seems to have had many better ones available. 

All of it really means that whatever Mitchell does next, I'll be paying attention.

Joker (2019)

rating: ****

the story: Arthur Fleck begins to suspect his life is a comedy.

review: Toss Andy Kaufman, Heath Ledger's Joker, Taxi Driver, and You Were Never Really Here into a blender, and you would get Joker.  The result is greater than the sum of its parts, and completely justifies making a movie about Batman's most famous nemesis, something Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight, virtually was, based on Ledger's show-stopping Joker.

You Were Never Really Here also stars Joaquin Phoenix, by the way, in a role that almost combines the concept of Batman and the Joker (at least as represented in Joker), a man living with his mother and meting out terrible vengeance.  Phoenix doesn't make any effort to duplicate Ledger's performance; visually the similarities begin and end with the stringy hair we see Arthur Fleck, late in the movie, dye green.  The makeup is halfway between Ledger's and your average circus clown (and we see him apply that, too; no chemical baths in this story, thank you).

Director Todd Phillips (previously best known for the Hangover trilogy before branching out with War Dogs) was vocal about evoking Scorsese; that's your Taxi Driver connection (the social commentary is there, too, demonstrated best by Peter Boyle in perhaps his best role), other than Robert De Niro himself, sounding like Lawrence Welk as a Gotham late night TV host.  Brett Cullen, who appeared in a different role for Nolan's Dark Knight Rises, puts a sinister spin on Thomas Wayne (you know, Batman's dad), an elite who thinks he knows what's best for the poor but won't associate with them if he can help it, including viciously cutting off Arthur's mom when her problems prove too complicated.  Zazie Beetz (for the second time, following Deadpool 2) puts in another small but knockout supporting role as a would-be love interest for the erstwhile Joker.

And, Andy Kaufman?  Today he's best remembered for the Jim Carrey movie Man on the Moon, but his whole career was defined by defying logic, rebelling against expectations.  Arthur may not be intentionally following in his footsteps, but that's the best way to explain his reality, including a misguided sidestep into standup comedy that most feels like Kaufman. 

This is another 2019 movie (after Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) that feels like a classic in the making that I'm not ready to dub quite yet.  It's got better viewing appeal than You Were Never Really Here (a relentless tone that alienates the viewer), and mesmerizes in its descent into madness, as it spirals to the inevitable.  This may not become the definitive Joker, but it will be the definitive Joker story; it will be impossible to beat.  The movie is set in the '80s, but feels as if it's ripped from the playbook of the modern era, in which riots are well-intentioned but...still riots.  Heroes are hard to find, and even those who stumble into the role seem more like villains.  Arthur Fleck is the hero we deserve but don't need.  Wasn't that said about somebody else?  Something like that?

Anyway, Joker will be a definitive film for this era, regardless of its ultimate worth. 

Into the Ashes (2019)

rating: ***

the story: Vicious thugs end up getting their comeuppance.

review: If it weren't for the performance of Robert Taylor as the sheriff whose son-in-law goes on a revenge rampage, I wouldn't be talking about Into the Ashes.  I watched the movie at all because it was another of James Badge Dale's string of minor 2019 releases, the best being Standoff at Sparrow Creek and Donnybrook, which like the latter also costars Frank Grillo.   Grillo has been a fascinating career to follow recently, too, and he gives a different kind of performance, in the same basic role, than he does in Donnybrook.  (A far cry from my first distinct memory of him, in Warrior, where I assumed he was a real-life MMA fighter cast to give authenticity to training sequences.) 

Dale, meanwhile, has such a minor role in this one that he doesn't spend too much time creating a distinct character, which is the opposite of what he did for Donnybrook.

But as I said, I'm talking about Into the Ashes at all because of Robert Taylor.  I know, who?  There's an earlier Robert Taylor, but this one is the guy who starred in the latter-day western TV series Longmire.  Late in the movie he settles into a low drawl that totally transforms the performance, and becomes the best reason to watch, and talk about, the movie.

Because suddenly you're watching the western Harrison Ford never quite made.  Ford did make a kind of western, Cowboys & Aliens, but even as it was being billed as "Indiana Jones Meets James Bond," the movie was much more centered on Daniel Craig than Ford's grizzled rancher.  The Harrison Ford being channeled in Into the Ashes actually comes circa Blade Runner 2049, one of the many times in recent years Ford has revisited an iconic role.  As in Cowboys & Aliens, Ford's work in Blade Runner 2049 is a relatively minor one, all considered, but in it he seems at last totally comfortable as an older person.  If he'd made a western (I suppose he still could), it would be Into the Ashes, exactly as Taylor does it.

And Taylor looks like Ford (except, maybe, the hair, but why quibble?), and I can't help but wonder if that was all completely deliberate.  Before I got swept up in the idea, I even thought the filmmakers were deliberately looking for a bargain basement Ford, but Taylor is a relatively known commodity.  I have no idea if he did the same sort of channeling in Longmire, never seen it and probably never will.  But by the time we're following Taylor's sheriff basically more than anything else (sort of making the movie in the same spirit as No Country for Old Men or Hell or High Water, with Tommy Lee Jones and Jeff Bridges, respectively, in similar roles, but here perhaps at its best, even if the other elements aren't), it no longer really matters.  Taylor is fulfilling what Ford had done, but would probably never do this way.

And maybe doesn't have to, really, now that Taylor has. 

Mary Magdalene (2019)

rating: ****

the story: Mary decides to follow Jesus Christ, but finds Peter about as accepting as her brother had been.

review: With Rooney Mara and Joaquin Phoenix leading the cast, it's safe to say Mary Magdalene isn't necessarily the kind of movie that will appeal only to Christian audiences (plenty of uninspired filmmaking does exactly that, though).  Mara is the eponymous Mara, Phoenix is Jesus.  The fact that it isn't entirely beholden to the religious viewer doesn't mean Mary Magdalene is akin to The Last Temptation or Jesus Christ Superstar.  It's a serious approach that wishes to explain the material at face value, not wildly reinterpret it.

Mary as the central subject is a way to explore not only how the ministry of Jesus would've looked, but the world around it, and even Jesus himself.  I don't think any of it radically departs from the Gospels, but there's also room for an interesting idea or two.

The most interesting one, perhaps, is exploring the character of Judas Iscariot (a brilliant Tahar Rahim), the apostle who would later betray Jesus.  Here he's depicted as a true believer, but motivated, it seems, in the hope that Jesus will resurrect his dead family.  Conversely, Peter (Chiwetel Ejiofor in his best role since 12 Years a Slave) is presented perhaps for the first time as the grumpy figure he always was, without the focus on his ultimate redemption, just how he would've come across before it. 

Mara has been a fascinating chameleon at least since her breakthrough role as Lisbeth Salander in the Hollywood version of Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (the performance, and the movie itself, still criminally underrated).  She tends to inhabit low-key individuals in trying situations, and is always compelling to watch.  Her Mary has an older brother who's scandalized that their father has been indulging her, letting her remain unmarried and living at home well past the traditional norms.  If there's something of the modern feminist in the conception of Mary in the film, it becomes less about that and more the liberating idea of finding freedom in budding Christianity, an idea that seems completely outrageous today.

Jesus in the movie becomes drained of energy in vast crowds, especially when dispensing miracles.  I don't know if the idea is unique to this movie, but it's perhaps the most humanizing thing it does with someone who has sometimes seemed difficult to conceptualize on a human scale (although many have argued that he was just human, even those who believed in him).  His disgust at the tenders of sacrificial lambs at the temple is one of the most electrifying sequences in a movie about Jesus ever filmed, finding new context in one of the familiar scenes of his life.  In this version, the disgust is more about the awareness of his impending sacrifice (the whole entrance to Jerusalem is fraught with destiny) than profaning God's home with mere financial matters.

Anyway, we also get a scene or two in a synagogue, which surprisingly is something that's never really been emphasized in a story about Jesus.  When you remember that Jesus was Jewish, and that he was known to preach in synagogues, it seems all the more surprising, but then so few attempts have been made to stray, in good faith, from the traditional narratives.  It's actually Mary attending services, by the way. 

I don't know if watching a film like this will affect someone's perspective on matters of faith, but it feels like something that has genuine insight, and on that level alone can be recommended.  But it's also good filmmaking and worthwhile viewing for fans of Mara, Phoenix, and Ejiofor.

Men in Black: International (2019)

rating: ****

the story: A new MiB recruit quickly discovers another giant intergalactic crisis.

review: So, here's the thing: Men in Black (1997) is probably a classic on par with Ghostbusters (1984), but it's somewhat hard to view it as such because Will Smith was just getting started on a decade-long run as one of the most reliable box office attractions of that period, making it difficult to distinguish whether Men in Black was its own entity or, ultimately, just another Will Smith smash hit.  Regardless of whether or not you enjoy Smith two subsequent appearances in the series, this fourth entry then becomes: Does the concept work without him?

I think it does.  Then, I generally like the whole series.  The storytelling has changed over time, notably the attempt to pivot almost entirely to Smith in the third one, at a time when his appeal was actually waning, and his performances were shifting away from the kind he was giving in the first one, which actually served to put more focus on the MiB universe itself, its vision of aliens run amok in all manner of guises.  MiB: International, at the very least, adds to the memorable menagerie with the sidekick Pawny and the Beard Alien.  The Beard Alien is just awesome.

Notably, the stars of the movie, Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson, are actually reprising an act from Thor: Ragnarok.  Thompson is the lead character here, inhabiting the Will Smith initiate role from the first movie, which a more developed backstory and a more deliberate arc.  Any concerns that the hard focus on her being a woman playing too much into current trends might be redirected to how Smith was presented, including the memorable gag of the decoy white driver.  Which is to say, even that is entirely in-character for the series.

Hemsworth, meanwhile, gets to do what Smith never did, which is to make being an agent seem like a casual thing.  Clearly Smith's J was always supposed to turn out to be a rogue figure, but he was mostly presented as such in relation to Tommy Lee Jones' K.  I like that Hemsworth and Thompson actually reveal their real names to each other, further distinguishing the two versions of the series, where even though we learn J and K's names, those initials will always be how they're remembered.  If this is the only time we experience Hemsworth and Thompson in the series (though it would be interesting to Fast & Furious the series), then at least they leave a mark.

The mole trope seems fairly obvious from the moment Liam Neeson appears.  He plays his part  obviously from the start, but he's here for a supporting role.  Emma Thompson provides one of several pieces of linking material within the series (in hindsight it was a good thing Rip Torn was killed off last movie, since by this one he was, sadly, dead in real life).  Rebecca Ferguson appears as the somewhat requisite femme fatale.

Bottom line: International proves the series isn't entirely about Will Smith.  That's a good thing.

Donnybrook (2019)

rating: ****

the story: A U.S. army vet goes to extreme lengths to improve life for his family.

review: There's now a lineage of movies from the past decade that needs pointing out: Warrior (2011) to Hell or High Water (2016) to Donnybrook (2019), which will be perhaps the best and easiest way to explain what Donnybrook accomplishes.

Warrior was an MMA movie that was anything but an MMA movie.  It wasn't the MMA version of the traditional Hollywood boxing drama, but rather a movie that featured mixed martial arts but wasn't about mixed martial arts.  It was about the contrasting fortunes of a pair of brothers destined to collide all over again (in or out of the octagon).  It was above all else great filmmaking.  Hell or High Water was a latter-day western, a Great Recession story about a pair of outlaws who were also brothers.  They were both concerned with matters of the modern world we often don't focus on, how easy it is to fall behind when everyone's so focused on the glories of getting ahead.  But the reality is, there's a large percentage of the population that routinely struggles. 

Donnybrook is a powerful, poetic experience.  It maintains a razor focus on its characters.  It features acts of grizzly violence.  Interestingly, the only time director Tim Sutton actually shows the violence is perhaps the worst but also the most routine: when a scene of domestic violence plays out inside of a car.  It's fair to say that most of this is metaphor, that unlike Warrior, which ends up spotlighting the MMA tournament it builds toward, the eponymous backwoods version of that event in Donnybrook is really only glimpsed at the very end.  Where Warrior and Hell or High Water trace a sequence of events, Donnybrook follows its lead characters as they meet their various fates.

It's a movie where the villain has no redeeming qualities.  This is an era that has often put villains in a sort of sympathetic spotlight, but not Donnybrook.  There's never any hope of redemption for Frank Grillo, who had his breakthrough role in Warrior, which led to Captain America: Winter Soldier, where he first inhabited this kind of character.  Grillo's sister is played by Margaret Qualley, who nearly stole Once Upon a Time in Hollywood from much bigger actors.  Between the two performances, she has easily become a personal favorite.  Grillo's counterpoint is Jamie Bell, once an adorable young actor and now turned into grizzled veteran, and perhaps this is his perfect role, the army vet with nowhere to turn but sheer desperation.  James Badge Dale, who seems to have been cast out from Hollywood proper, turns in a typically compelling performance as the only cop who might've been able to intervene in these desperate lives, having firsthand experience as he does.

The whole experience is handled expertly, from how it opens to how the story circles back to that point, and the rich music score that punctuates every moment, knowing exactly when to pivot, as the story itself does.  Apparently what little exposure it has had fixates on the violence, but doesn't seem to understand how little there really is, or what any of it means.  A pity.  But one that shouldn't end up being the final word.

Once Upon A Time In Hollywood (2019)

rating: ****

the story: A former TV star's bid for career resurrection intertwines with the life of Sharon Tate.

review: A week after seeing it I'm still processing Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.  Sometimes I'm instantly in love with a Quentin Tarantino film (Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained), other times I'm not sure how devoted I'll be (Jackie Brown, Hateful Eight, even Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs).  The two-volume Kill Bill is sort of in-between, although the second one is closer to instant love.

But of all his movies, Once Upon...is probably closest to Jackie Brown, which was Tarantino's first taste of languid, of just letting his filmmaking speak for itself rather than splashy violence (Reservoir Dogs) or splashy stars (Pulp Fiction) do the talking (along with the characters, naturally).  Once Upon takes its tone from Margot Robbie's Sharon Tate, who today is best known for being horribly murdered at the behest of Charles Manson.  Tarantino has stated that he wanted Tate to exist apart from that narrative.  In fact, Once Upon... becomes his second film, after Inglourious Basterds, to deliberately rewrite history, in allowing Tate to avoid her fate, and it's in that regard that the film reaches its highest note and possibly the note on which the entire movie will ultimately be judged.

But Robbie's Tate isn't really the star of the movie.  That honor falls to Leonardo DiCaprio, who's featured as the former TV star, a fictional character, who has been struggling to find meaningful roles.  His TV show was a western, and by the time we catch up with him he's being cast in his latest guest spot in another one, and as Tarantino presents it the material becomes a movie-within-a-movie, something I wish he'd done with Django Unchained (as a flashback-of-sorts for the Brunhilda myth), which for some viewers might be a needless tangent, but it helps put the character in context, how he views himself, and thus how everything would turn out for all the characters if we followed their narratives equally.  Metaphorically, you understand.

Just below DiCaprio is Brad Pitt playing his former stunt double, now personal assistant.  After, oh, about a decade of sliding toward irrelevance and being best known for his relationship with Angelina Jolie, Pitt's performance in Once Upon... is almost akin to Travolta in Pulp Fiction, a giant reminder of his considerable talents, the full impact of his charismatic screen presence.  He's got the best scene, too, a fight with Bruce Lee that becomes better as it builds, which is interesting for Tarantino, who usually accomplishes the bulk of his work with words.  It's another subtle evolution of his filmmaking mastery.

Among the supporting players are Al Pacino (allowing himself a rare character role), Bruce Dern, and Kurt Russell, who's probably in the best sweet spot of his career (previewed, in some ways, by Death Proof, with a great spotlight in Hateful Eight).

But the ending is the real selling point.  As I said, Tarantino allows Sharon Tate to cheat fate.  In doing so, he probably allows Tate's husband, at the time of her death, Roman Polanski a reboot as well.  Polanski at one time was known simply as a brilliant director.  He was just coming off his breakthrough film, Rosemary's Baby, at the time, and would later direct Chinatown and The Pianist, but his career was forever tarnished by a rape charge he chose exile from America to avoid prosecution over.  Is it reasonable to assume Tate's death played a role in the sequence of events that led to this fate?  Is Tarantino saving two lives here?  That's how I choose to view it, anyway.

Giving Tate the focus, rather than Charles Manson, is itself a noteworthy choice on Tarantino's part.  It takes the power away from Manson, who entered virtual cultural immortality as the result of ordering Tate's murder, and Tate herself became just a name.  In effect, Tarantino is addressing two major sins, and offering a chance at correction, that've haunted Hollywood for fifty years, which is noteworthy in and of itself at a time when Hollywood has been playing a moral authority.  Is it a direct criticism?  Will Hollywood even care, come the Oscars next year, or merely be flattered, as it tends to be, when presented as subject matter?  If it gives Tarantino his long-deserved Academy recognition, all the better.

Perhaps, in time, I'll better understand how much I appreciate this one.  For now I'll be a little cautious.  But like all Tarantino's movies, it won't be easy to forget.  Not by a long shot.  Yeah....

Yesterday (2019)

rating: *****

the story: A struggling musician suddenly finds himself in a world that doesn't remember the Beatles, and so begins claiming their songs as his own work.

review: The critics are idiots.  There's been a vocal effort to dismiss Yesterday on the basis that the specific conditions that created the success of the Beatles has to be taken into account in any attempt to sell their songs on their own merit.

Yeah.  The film does that.  But that's not even the point, is it?  The Beatles attained success, initially, as the quintessential boy band.  They wrote songs that drove the girls wild. And then they just kept evolving, and their work became wildly praised.  And then they ended, after about a decade's work.

Today, we still have boy bands.  BTS, the current model.  One Direction, started out in a reality show singing competition as individual competitors.  None of them was good enough to win on their own.  Then they were strung together, and the rest is history.  And these are just recent examples. 

Jack Malik finds initial success "stealing" the Beatles with their ballads.  Love songs are universal.  That's kind of the point.  And the Beatles wrote some damn good ones.  And not just "some."  The success of the Beatles, again, was in their ability to keep producing at a high level, and at an increasingly high level.  That was kind of the whole point. 

But he doesn't find immediate success.  His own parents treat "Let It Be" as just another cute example of their son's hopeless delusion, won't even let him get past the very beginning of the song.  And his first gig playing Beatles songs is no more successful than his previous existence clinging to material like "Summer Song" that only his good friends care anything at all about. 

But then someone hears him.  Asks him to record in a tiny private studio.  And then Ed Sheeran hears him.  And then suddenly he becomes a full-blown phenomenon.

The fact is, Yesterday is a hugely honest (until, maybe, the part where Jack decides to just walk away, regardless of circumstances, but this is gooey romance, after all, at its heart) depiction of what it takes to succeed.  It takes being noticed.  And that's not easy.  And then not just being noticed but becoming something that's easy to sell. Such as the fact that he "writes" so many instantly fantastic songs, which is what wows Sheeran (whose career the film takes for granted but may not be familiar to everyone), and what the major studio that signs Jack uses as his key selling point.  Every major act has a key selling point.  That's what sets them apart.  It might even be argued that it's not the songs themselves that suddenly makes a success of Jack, but that he knows what to do with them. 

But yes, it's also a gooey love story, which is writer Richard Curtis's trademark (I don't watch a lot of this kind of movie, but About Time is pretty magical, too), so it's really about Jack and his longtime not-quite-girlfriend Ellie.  Where Jack is played by relative unknown Himesh Patel, Ellie is portrayed by Lily James, the biggest name actor in the movie, with the possible exception of Kate McKinnon, who has been a standout in Saturday Night Live for years and has been appearing in various movies, too (probably best thing about the 2016 Ghostbusters).  Oh, and in an uncredited, brilliant cameo role as John Lennon, there's also Robert Carlyle.

The director is Danny Boyle, with a long and storied career behind him.  For me, Yesterday is a particular triumph in relation to Boyle.  I still don't know the best way to describe Slumdog Millionaire that doesn't draw uncomfortable memories of British interests in India.  But Yesterday doesn't have that problem.  Jack's ethnicity is never really dwelt on; he's just another Brit who grew up a big fan of the Beatles, and happened to be in the right place at the right time to capitalize on that.  This is "colorblind" casting at its best.  Patel didn't get the gig, presumably, to diversify the story, but because he was the best option to play Jack.  And he can sing the hell out of the Beatles, yeah.

Where 2018's A Star Is Born felt artificial, Yesterday feels organic, not because I already knew the songs, but because the artistic journey doesn't feel forced.  It doesn't hurt that the results celebrate the enduring legacy of the Beatles, and in fact that aspect of the film was largely responsible for me wanting to see the movie at all.  The movie itself rewards the premise, and moves beyond it.  What more can you ask?  This is a great film.

2019 Favorites So Far

1. The Man Who Killed Don Quixote - The long, long awaited Terry Gilliam film.  To my mind, well worth it.
2. Detective Pikachu - Brilliant repurposing of an existing franchise (even if technically it was based on one of the many games).  Continues Ryan Reynolds' penchant for playing with identity.
3. Serenity - It's not really a twist ending when most of the movie explains that it's part of the narrative.
4. The Standoff At Sparrow Creek - I've waited a long time for a James Badge Dale spotlight.  It delivered.
5. The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot - Mesmerizing portrait on aging.
6. Glass - A fitting finale for the Shyamalan trilogy.
7. Dumbo - Playfully subversive family film from Tim Burton.
8. The Upside - Sort of instantly, for me, the best material featuring Kevin Hart and Bryan Cranston.
9. Hotel Mumbai - Chilling portrait of modern terrorism.
10. Captain Marvel - One of the best MCU movies.
11. John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum - It's like the Fast & Furious movies all over again.  The longer the series continues, the more awesome it becomes.
12. Fighting With My Family - Very much a movie version, but still fun to have an actual wrestler's journey (WWE's Paige) documented, with Dwayne Johnson getting to immortalize The Rock in film.
13. Dark Phoenix - The X-Men saga comes to a moody conclusion.
14. Avengers: Endgame - It's like watching Lord of the Rings: Return of the King  all over again.  For a lot of folks that's a good thing.  For me, not as much.
15. Secret Life of Pets 2 - Saw this thanks to my niece. 

The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2019)

rating: *****

the story: A young director finds himself thrust into the world of Don Quixote.

review: By some fortuitous twist of fate, I ended up reading Don Quixote by Cervantes, for the first time, not long before finally getting to see Terry Gilliam's torturously-gestated The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.  I don't think it's necessary to have read the book recently, but to have read it at all surely helps explain many if not most of Gilliam's subsequent creative choices for the film.  You might even say that Gilliam's film is a modern updating of the book.

I think the reaction of most critics to the film owes to their ignorance of the book.  I think the reaction of most critics owes to the fact that they really only know the story from the musical Man of La Mancha, whose fifty year existence is something of a drop in the bucket of the four hundred years the book has been in existence (Cervantes was a contemporary of Shakespeare).  Those critics may not know how much the musical departs from the book.  They might not even care.  They might really be convinced that Don Quixote is the story of an irrepressible dreamer.

It is, in fact, Sancho Panza's story.  Sancho is Don Quixote's squire, a peasant from the same neighborhood as the lord whose fortunes have been declining.  Most of the misfortunes that befall Don Quixote, in their subsequent adventures together, fall on Sancho more harshly.  Sancho spends the book doubting Don Quixote's sanity and going along with his flight of fancy mostly because he believes he'll end up with a higher station in life.  At one point he gets to play governor of an "island," something Don Quixote has been promising him as the most likely outcome of their time together.

But what is Sancho's story?  Well, it's much like Toby's.  (Meanwhile, the name of this character in Gilliam's movie is most likely derived from a namesake character in Tristram Shandy, a book inspired by Don Quixote and much later adapted into Tristram Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story, which takes a much more literal metafictional approach to adapting the source material.  Toby is also a supporting player in that story, and at least in the book, steals attention as shamelessly as Sancho.)

Toby is the young director played by Adam Driver.  Toby's career sort of peaked early when he made a student film, called The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.  He discovers a DVD copy of it by chance, in the present, and he decides to return to the village where he filmed it.  There he comes across the cobbler (Jonathan Pryce) he'd convinced to play Don Quixote.  Only now, the cobbler believes he is Don Quixote.  It's a comparable development to how Cervantes first set Don Quixote on his path of knight-errantry.

But Toby is driven, like Sancho, mostly by ego.  Going on the road with Don Quixote has nothing to do with believing in his quest.  As with Sancho, Toby doesn't believe for a minute that the cobbler is really Don Quixote, and the audience is given a concrete reason to sympathize with him.  As in the book, the character of Don Quixote becomes the very colorful window dressing the story uses to follow Toby's doubt, and how by the end he begins to believe.

So in short, the musical is about belief, while the book and this new movie are about doubt.

Toby's life is complicated by the fact that the main producer (Stellan Skarsgard) of the commercial he had set out to make when he becomes plunged into the world of Don Quixote, is something of a tyrant.  (A character no doubt inspired by Gilliam's ridiculously complicated production history.)  And the producer's wife (Olga Kurylenko) keeps trying to have an affair with him.  And the girl Toby cast as Don Quixote's beloved Dulcinea has reentered his life as well, and keeps instigating him to look beyond his cynical outlook.  She disagrees that his student production ruined her life.  But their further relationship clarifies around the cobbler's adventures, and the story ends up coming full circle.

As I've said, most of the story beats in Gilliam's film come directly from Cervantes' book.  Most of Gilliam's films throw their main characters into bewildering journeys, and sometimes the bewilderment becomes the viewer's as well.  I think Toby provides a clear center, his perspective easy to understand, whether or not you see all the parallels with the book, the departures and many elements missing from the musical. 

It actually becomes ironic, that we're once again living in an age like Cervantes'.  A real argument could be made that what Don Quixote was really about was Cervantes complaining that his contemporaries no longer valued or understood the literature that he himself still cherished, which in his case as with his main character was chivalric fiction.  Critics today, by their bewilderment of this film, admit that they have no real knowledge of the book itself.  (Makes you really wonder when you read any review that claims, "the book was better.")  Gilliam's instincts are well-established.  His last movie, The Zero Theorem, was pretty straight-forward but a lot weirder by design.  He never sets out to make The Man Who Killed Don Quixote weird for the sake of being weird (probably Tideland is the benchmark in Gilliam's work for that).  It's probably his most straight-forward movie ever!  Even The Fisher King makes you wait to find out what happened to Robin Williams.  Here you know everything you need to almost right from the start, and the story becomes, as with most stories, waiting to see how things turn out.

Driver is perfect as Toby.  I know there were many actors cast to play the character, and Don Quixote for that matter, over the years, but in the film as it ended up, it's difficult to imagine anyone else being able to lose himself in the role.  Johnny Depp, at the time he was cast, had yet to break out as a true character actor, and so still retained his dreamy persona, when not sporting scissors for hands.  Don Juan De Marco is an excellent example of Depp in his prime at that point in his career, and is similar to Don Quixote (a man who believes he is in fact the celebrated lover).  Driver is able to sell the ego-driven Toby, the would-be lover, and the man who becomes completely overwhelmed by his later experiences, and finally someone capable of taking on, yes, the impossible dream, without ever making any of it feel like a caricature.  It's a performance that needed to be grounded.  By all rights, it's a career-defining performance, in Gilliam's, at long last, career-defining film.

My favorite Gilliam movie, before this, was The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.  I'm still working on fully appreciating Brazil.  Arguably The Fisher King will remain his most accessible movie, and Twelve Monkeys will be the one the cool kids like.  But The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, a movie he tried making for a quarter century, is quite literally a movie only he could make, in a career of movies only he could make.  We live in an age where the idea of the remake is anathema, even as we never quite scoff at mere adaptations.  But storytelling is always about retelling stories.  The best stories are those that continue to resonate, even if a few details have to be updated every now and then, because they are continuously relevant.  Gilliam includes Muslims and even Russians in his version. Muslims were in fact integral to Cervantes' version as well, and that's just one of the many ways Gilliam helps resurrect it.  I think Toby's arc, from being lost in his own life to allowing himself to be lost in someone else's, is the whole point.  In the movie, as in the book, there are characters who think they'll make things better by attempting to do so cynically, mostly so they can mock Don Quixote.  But what Toby discovers is that the better version of himself, the one he can live with, has finally cut himself free from doubt.  He no longer views Don Quixote as crazy.  This isn't an impossible dream.  It's about finally refusing to make compromises, and just doing something.  Somewhere along the way, the spontaneous Toby who made the student film stopped existing.  The course he set the cobbler on was the opposite one Toby took.  This is a story of how they meet up again.

Anyway, it's also a damn good film, beyond anything else.  You don't need to try and take life lessons from it.  Things work out for Toby.  The end.

2019: The Year Ahead

(All releases dates subject to change.) 

The Upside (1/11)
Starring Kevin Hart, Bryan Cranston & Nicole Kidman, one of those life-affirming movies that looks like it's also a lot of fun.

Glass (1/18)
M. Night Shyamalan completes a trilogy begun with Unbreakable and Split.

The Kid Who Would Be King (1/25)
The trailer instantly intrigued me.

What Men Want (2/8)
Apparently if someone were to star in the reverse of the Mel Gibson flick, it's Taraji P. Henson, who's beginning to look like she can do anything.

Alita: Battle Angel (2/15)
And hopefully this Robert Rodriguez flick is released this year!

Fighting with My Family (2/15)
Dwayne Johnson has a small role in which he gets to reprise his wrestling persona on film. 

Captain Marvel (3/8)
The future of the MCU might hinge on this.

Dumbo (3/29)
This latest Disney live action remake costars Colin Farrell, which makes it an automatic watch for me.

Shazam! (4/5)
Believe it or not, but the title superhero of this one was also known as Captain Marvel until recently.

Pet Sematary (4/5)
Still haven't seen It, but Stephen King has been one of Hollywood's favorite writers for years, with sometimes brilliant results.  This looks like one of those.

Breakthrough (4/12)
Directed by Roxann Dawson, whose own breakthrough was in Star Trek: Voyager, as an actor, but she's been working steadily for years behind the camera.  This appears to be her biggest project to date.

Under the Silver Lake (4/19)
Featuring Andrew Garfield.

High Life (4/19)
The latest from Robert Pattinson.

Avengers: Endgame (4/26)
Technically the fourth Avengers flick, but really the culmination of every MCU movie to date.

Pokémon: Detective Pikachu (5/10)
Ryan Reynolds seems to have found another perfect showcase.

John Wick: Chapter 3 (5/17)
The more of these that're made, the more I think I ought to be watching them.

Aladdin (5/24)
Another live action Disney remake I'm interested in mainly for one actor, in this case Will Smith.

Ad Astra (5/24)
It's been far too long since Brad Pitt had something interesting to do.

Brightburn (5/24)
A horror version of Man of Steel.

Dark Phoenix (6/7)
The latest and probably last X-Men flick from Fox Studios.

Men in Black: International (6/14)
Reinvention of one of my favorite franchises, which seems to have done it right.

Shaft (6/14)
Samuel L. Jackson gets so few spotlights, it's always worth celebrating.

Toy Story 4 (6/21)
I'm the only person on the planet who didn't like Toy Story 3.  I hope this one's better.

Ford v. Ferrari (6/28)
Pitting Christian Bale against Matt Damon?  Yes please!

Spider-Man: Far From Home (7/5)
I greatly preferred the Andrew Garfield interpretation to Tom Holland's first crack.  Hopefully this one's better.

Stuber (7/12)
Dave Bautista in his biggest starring role to date.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (7/26)
Tarantino is a perennial threat for directing my favorite movie of the year.

Hobbs & Shaw (8/2)
The Fast & Furious spinoff featuring Dwayne Johnson & Jason Statham.

The New Mutants (8/2)
A Fox X-Men spinoff.

Dora the Explorer (8/2)
Featuring Temuera Morrison, Benicio Del Toro & Michael Pena.

Artemis Fowl (8/9)
One of the many characters who sought to cash in on Harry Potter's success, coming to film much later than the others.  We're about to see whether or not that was a good thing.

Boss Level (8/16)
New from Joe Carnahan!  Featuring Mel Gibson!

Angel Has Fallen (8/23)
Another third in a series I have yet to see.

Joker (10/4)
Joaquin Phoenix in his highest profile role since Gladiator.  An absolute must-see.

Gemini Man (10/4)
New from Ang Lee.

The Woman in the Window (10/4)
New from Joe Wright.

Zombieland 2 (10/11)
Never really expected to see this happen.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (10/18)
Seems like a perfect role for Tom Hanks, right?

Sonic the Hedgehog (11/8)
The latest voiceover performance from Jim Carrey.

Margie Claus (11/15)
Melissa McCarthy ought to get an evergreen out of this one.

Frozen 2 (11/22)
Huge expectations song-wise for this one.

Knives Out (11/29)
New from Rian Johnson, featuring Daniel Craig and Chris Evans.

Star Wars: Episode IX (12/20)
The conclusion to the sequel trilogy.

And as always, I don't know when or if I'll get to see all these, and what I might add along the way.  You never know!