Selma (2014)

rating: ***

the story: Martin Luther King Jr. prepares his historic march for voting rights in Alabama.

what it's all about: I think in hindsight, Selma is where the culture truly started to fracture.  Selma is far more about the budding Black Lives Matter movement, the politicization of it, than MLK's march.  It's somewhat clear that that's the whole reason the movie was made at all, and why critics lined up to state how great and timely it was.  To state this is not to say BLM is meritless, but to say that as a matter of civil discourse, such a cultural response to a film, and the cultural divide it helped spark, is far more damaging than anything MLK confronted, and is in fact why BLM exists at all, why MLK's actions seem to have amounted to nothing but an annual holiday.  It doesn't even seem to matter that the march spurred exactly the results MLK wanted.  For committed activists, results don't matter.  For such people, it becomes about social revolt. 

Ironically, there's a moment in Selma where Malcolm X, shortly before his assassination, has finally stepped from out of the shadow of such reasoning, and MLK struggles to believe it. 

No, Selma is not worth the hype.  It's worth a look as a glimpse, of the times it reflects, even as a reflection of the times in which it was made.  But it is not good filmmaking.  MLK himself is not even the central figure.  The central figure of this movie is simmering rage, which again, reflects not the story itself but what director Ava DuVernay is really talking about, in intentionally incendiary ways.  It's a tone poem, of sorts, to further stoke the flames of social division.  And not much more.

The worst thing about it is the second-most lauded thing about it, the performance of David Oyelowo as MLK.  If this had been a movie about Frederick Douglass, there wouldn't be much of a problem with his performance.  Douglass has been lost to history as a person.  As a champion of black rights, he remains as well-known as he ever was, but all we have are photographs.  This was long before the advent of film, of recorded voices.  But the same is not true of MLK.  Everyone who knows MLK knows what he sounded like.  We certainly know what he looked like.  DuVernay chose an actor who looks nothing like MLK, and who chose to sound nothing like MLK.  He may turn in a competent performance, but Oyelowo seems to have chosen to dismiss the source material as much as DuVernay herself.  These are two fundamental strikes against the quality of the production. 

Tom Wilkinson, Tim Roth, they both turn in Tom Wilkinson and Tim Roth performances, as Lyndon Johnson and George Wallace, respectively.  What I mean is, they look and sound like Tom Wilkinson and Tim Roth.  It's a pattern.  DuVernay has no interest at all in anything but her metaphor.  Wilkinson is Wilkinson as Benjamin Franklin, too, in John Adams, but again, it doesn't matter as much in John Adams, because we definitely retain no cultural memory of Benjamin Franklin as a person.  LBJ, meanwhile, was certainly a Texan, and by most accounts a lot like Trump, with a lot more sympathetic coverage, an abrasive personality.  But yeah, with a Texas accent.  Which Wilkinson does not give LBJ. 

And yet, DuVernay, and Oyelowo, and Selma itself were almost uniformly called great.  How again?

There's very little art to it at all.  The movie begins with MLK already declared a cultural hero.  There's token reference to his personal failings, but mostly to represent his struggle with LBJ.  The only real complaints about the film are in fact about LBJ, how DuVernay depicts him almost exclusively as a villain.  Although really, his actions are little different than Lincoln's leading up to the Emancipation Proclamation, even as depicted.  It may be worth noting that Douglass eventually decided Lincoln was less the hero than history has since decided.  The first demagogue lost for perspective in this struggle, perhaps.

Oprah Winfrey appears as a token representative of the struggle MLK is working against, voting rights.  She's depicted saintly, of course, until the movie thinks it can get away with her lashing out.  About the one performance that's just about what it needs to be comes from Cuba Gooding Jr., once (and once) a critical darling.  He appears as a lawyer.  If Selma is so tepid about actually featuring MLK, it could easily have given Gooding an expanded role.

The biggest irony of all this is that none of this, in any other context, would merit such a harsh review.  If this had been made, say, in the early '90s, like Spike Lee's far superior Malcolm X, it might be different.  Although there was considerable civil unrest then, too, it hadn't yet been politicized, turned into a permanent wedge in society.  There was still a chance, even with the once militant figure in Lee's movie, to look for common ground, a positive rallying point.  Films had come a long way from Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, the tepid Sidney Poitier breakthrough icebreaker in which a black man merely asks to be accepted by a single family.  Now we get a satire like Get Out, in the current climate.  Coincidence? 

Of course, if it had been made then, it would've been for TV, and been little noted.

There are better movies to try and heal old wounds with.  But now we seem to get only ones that want to rub salt into them.  Selma, alas, the first movie to significantly feature MLK, is one of them.  Never really thought I'd see the day.  Much less with Martin Luther King Jr., of all people. 

As a reflection of the times in which it was made, Selma is a useful mirror.  As filmmaking, it's junk.

2018: The Year Ahead

With all dates subject to change, here's a look at what looks interesting, as currently announced, in 2018:

• The Hurricane Heist (2/9) Featuring Toby Kebbell, fast becoming one of my favorite recent actors, and Maggie Grace.
• Red Sparrow (3/2) Featuring Jennifer Lawrence and Joel Edgerton.
• Death Wish (3/2) Bruce Willis stars in this reboot from Eli Roth.
• Gringo (3/9) Another Joel Edgerton, along with Charlize Theron.
• Tomb Raider (3/16) Came a little late to the Alicia Vikander bandwagon, but glad I made it.
• Isle of Dogs (3/23) New from Wes Anderson, featuring Scarlett Johansson, Edward Norton, and Frances McDormand.
• Ready Player One (3/30) New from Spielberg.
• The New Mutants (4/13) The X-Men franchise expands before presumably contracting again thanks to the Disney deal.
• Super Troopers 2 (4/20) Excited for the Broken Lizards to return.
• Tully (4/20) Jason Reitman directs Charlize Theron, Ron Livingston.
• Avengers: Infinity War (5/4) Kind of a big deal in this franchise.
• A Star Is Born (5/18) Bradley Cooper directs and stars in this latest version of a classic Hollywood story.
• Solo: A Star Wars Story (5/25) Honestly pretty excited for this.
• Ocean's 8 (6/8) The all-girls team.
• Sicario 2: Soldado (6/29) Del Toro and Brolin made a terrific combo in the first one.
• Ant-Man and the Wasp (7/6) Should be an improvement over the first one.
• Alita: Battle Angel (7/20) The latest from Robert Rodriguez.
• M:I 6 - Mission Impossible (7/27) Durable series always worth a look.
• Christopher Robin (8/3) Latest from Marc Forster, featuring Ewan McGregor.
• Scarface (8/10) Remake featuring Diego Luna.
• The Happytime Murders (8/17) Brian Henson is doing a version of the Muppets.
• Captive State (8/17) Sounds like a fascinating new sci-fi tale.
• Smallfoot (9/14) Animated flick featuring Bigfoot.
• Robin Hood (9/21) Always game for this guy.
• The House with a Clock in its Walls (9/21) Another from Eli Roth, featuring Cate Blanchett.
• Boy Erased (9/28) More from Joel Edgerton, featuring Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman.
• Venom (10/5) Tom Hardy in another franchise.
• The Girl in the Spider's Web (10/19) Wish they hadn't rebooted the series.
• The Jungle Book (10/19) Not Andy Serkis's biggest fan, but he's got Cate Blanchett, Christian Bale, and Benedict Cumberbatch in it.
• X-Men: Dark Phoenix (11/2) Probably the swan song of the franchise before a Disney reboot.
• Holmes and Watson (11/9) Another pairing of Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly.
• Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (11/16) Always game for further trips into this realm.
• Widows (11/9) New from Steve McQueen, featuring Colin Farrell, Liam Neeson, Jon Bernthal.
• Aquaman (12/21) Was a definite highlight of Justice League.
• Mary Poppins Returns (12/28) Emily Blunt claims the role.

2017 (or at least what I've seen so far, and what I expect to see in the near future)

I've seen significantly fewer movies in the past few years than I have in a decade.  Ten years ago I was at what has so far been my peak, catching more than sixty movies in a year.  I made it to a theater eight times in 2017, and so far caught two additional films on home video.

Here's what that looks like, roughly speaking:

1. Logan
2. Dunkirk
3. The Beguiled
4. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
5. Justice League
6. Star Wars - Episode VIII: The Last Jedi
7. Wonder Woman
8. Spider-Man: Homecoming
9. Thor: Ragnarok
10. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales

There's a bunch of movies I am already primed to catch up on, and more I fully intend to in the near future:

• A Ghost Story
• Atomic Blonde
• Blade Runner 2049
• The Dark Tower
• Good Time
• Hostiles
• The Killing of a Sacred Deer
• The Only Living Boy in New York
• Roman J. Israel, Esq.
• Split
• Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
• Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
• The Wall

So that's an additional thirteen movies.  Can't say what I might add to that number, out of the more than seven hundred movies released this year, but I'm sure there'll be some, at some point.  I can't even say for sure I'll catch those thirteen soon, but I'll do my best.

The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby (2014)

rating: ****

the story: A marriage is interrupted by the death of their child.

what it's all about: I will admit, the thing that originally brought me to The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby was the fact that there were three versions of the movie: Him, Her, and Them.  Technically, Him is the original incarnation of the movie.  Director Ned Benson conceived of Her when his one-time girlfriend Jessica Chastain asked for her character's backstory to be fleshed out.  Then Them was created by combining the two other versions.  I would submit that Them is the best version of the story, the most artful, but it's certainly worth watching all three, and for different reasons.

The wife, the eponymous character, is played by Chastain, while the husband is James McAvoy.  The three versions of the story are best described this way: Him is by far the most open, viewer-friendly one, while Her is much more of an indy film; Them, by combining both, turns it into an art film.  Him has Bill Hader as its best selling point, broadening the story with his casual irreverence, and making it a fun experience.  Her has Viola Davis and William Hurt (Davis doesn't really appear in Him; clearly she's heard in her classroom mostly thanks to her prominence in Her; Hurt doesn't appear in Him at all), who ground Chastain in challenging conversations, the only way we get a sense of how she views the world.  McAvoy also has Ciaran Hines, in much the same role as Hurt, and in that way we get a sense that what originally brought McAvoy and Chastain together was running away from their lives, so that it's the same problem, in reverse, that they're dealing with throughout the story.  And why that ending is so appropriate.  (Katherine Waterston, later featured in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, has a small role in Her.)

It's a poetic, elegiac experience, concerning how we struggle with life, how it sometimes impossible to truly understand someone else, how flippant and rude behavior is sometimes not what it seems, more of a defense mechanism, something we know intrinsically but can rarely admit.  It's a long series of awkward conversations, either happening or being avoided, and the struggle to comprehend either how we grow or that we're still doing it.

So it's fascinating to me on many levels.  Most often, when there are multiple versions of a movie, it's because of studio interference.  Benson chose this risky, deliberate path for his first and to date only film.  No doubt it was asking a lot for audiences to try and choose between them.  Even critics would've had to demonstrate unusual levels of concentration to have understood the scope of his achievement.  I think everyone came out looking good having decided to make this movie, in all its incarnations.

Wonder Woman (2017)

rating: ****

the story: Diana enters Man's World during WWI and battles Ares in the hopes of determining its outcome.

what it's all about: I tend to be unsettled, these days, at a consensus of quality.  It's a peculiar predicament, for an amateur film fan, whose formative development was absorbing material with a consensus of quality.  The more experience, maybe, the greater the skepticism.  Or maybe it's just the times.  These days, films seem to be loved, even by critics, for reasons other than their actual worth.  Critics, for instance, love their superheroes if they're brainless.  Critics, in general, seem to love genre material if it doesn't take itself too seriously.  Of course the stuff they love always takes itself too seriously, otherwise.

Well, anyway, in case you've been living under a rock, Wonder Woman has been a massive success, both in making money and making fans, even among critics.  The movie makes some dramatic departures from its DC predecessors, Man of Steel and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.  I happened to like both of those quite a lot, so it was difficult to reconcile changing direction with the fear the end result was a sellout.  My first viewing of Wonder Woman was geared in that direction.  I saw things that I wanted to see, and thought the movie wasn't really worth the hype.  And I also wondered where Wonder Woman fit in with where the character was during Batman v Superman.

But I've turned the corner.  Diana, by the end of Wonder Woman, makes a defiant stand against the cynicism of Ares.  In Batman v Superman she's been operating in the shadows, keeping to herself.  Seemingly, not really be a hero anymore.  But Wonder Woman does explain this.  The death of Steve Trevor rattles her ability to work with others, which Batman assuages.  He gives her a cause again.  In Wonder Woman she opts against trying to actively shape the world in her image, which is the way of tyrants and villains like Ares.  But she is still a hero, and perhaps more a hero than just about any hero out there. 

It's true that Wonder Woman is a lot more lighthearted than Man of Steel or Batman v Superman.  It's also a different story, as Wonder Woman herself represents a different narrative.  Unlike Batman or Superman, Diana isn't a tragic orphan with a path toward the lives that make them heroes.  She's someone who actively yearns to be a hero, in a society full of heroes, whose mother seeks to shelter her from her destiny.  She's as traditional a hero as there's ever been.  Except, she then is thrust into a different world.  That's not a traditional DC narrative (unless you're Green Lantern).  It's a lot more like Marvel's, but Marvel is also more interested in monsters or self-made men, rather than someone merely making a transition. 

So she needs a guide, and Steve Trevor has always been that guide, the stranger totally unknown in her original society, where there are only women, and of course he's a man.  So there's a different element to play with right there, a natural romance, a classic romance archetype (boy meets girl), and humor complements that kind of material nicely. 

Gal Gadot, as Diana, is equally natural.  She's the classic Hollywood outsider, a foreigner with an accent.  Normally this will kind of be used against the actor, but Gadot's been lucky to find two big franchises where she can slide in easily, the Fast and the Furious series, which has always combined cultures, and Diana, who's a superhero.  Traditionally, Wonder Woman hasn't really been depicted as ethnic, even if she comes from a Greek context.  She's looked as American as Superman, and been treated as such.  So Gadot's casting was itself intriguing, and the fact that she hasn't been asked to hide her accent.  In fact, all the Amazons around her, including ones portrayed by Robin Wright and Connie Nielsen, adopt accents to match her (I've seen it before, with the Macedonians around Colin Farrell in Alexander syncing up with his Irish tendencies).  It adds authenticity to the role, really, and is one of the reasons why Wonder Woman proves so distinctive. 

As counterpoint, Chris Pine is All-American as Steve Trevor, and it's an ideal match-up.  His charm and her appeal don't compete, and they're able to draw out of each other all the nuances the movie needs to work.  If Pine can seem smug at times (Steve is "above average" for a man), it's all in selling the concept of the wider world being more complicated than superheroes tend to view it, how Diana needs to view it if she's to stand out among them.  And clearly she does.

It doesn't hurt to have an even more smug Danny Huston playing misdirection for David Thewlis, who ends up being the villain of the piece while playing most of it as a stereotypical British fop.  Director Patty Jenkins deserves a tremendous amount of credit for juggling everything in the movie.  She makes the cool action scenes and the goofy romantic scenes and the melodramatic villain scenes part of the same message, which is of course that Diana herself combines all of them.  The funny throwaway bit about how she discovers ice cream is from a 2011 Justice League comic, by the way, which is what these League movies are based on.

The end result is as unique a cinematic debut lead feature for a superhero as there's ever been.  The character debuted in another movie.  But everything's explained here quite nicely.  No wonder she's now being depended on to change the face of the franchise around her.  Diana has once again proven herself uniquely qualified for the job. 

The Beguiled (2017)

rating: ****

the story: A Union soldier ends up resting in a house full of Southern belles.

what it's all about: The story began as a book (1966's A Painted Devil by Thomas Cullinan) and then a Clint Eastwood film in 1971.  Sofia Coppola turned it into her sixth feature film in 2017.  It seems befitting for the director of The Virgin Suicides.  And also the star of Miss Julie, Colin Farrell.

Critics seem to have dismissed it as a mostly unnecessary duplication of Eastwood's film.  This is odd, as Eastwood's film really has no lasting cultural legacy.  You can tell when critics can't come up with a better way to dismiss a movie when they start referencing stuff they probably had to research in order to talk about, or otherwise material the general public has never heard of. 

At any rate, I think, as a movie layman, that The Beguiled works quite well, especially in relation to Coppola and Farrell's back catalog.  Coppola's first movie, The Virgin Suicides, was about a brood of sisters who, ah, beguile the neighborhood boys who can't understand what happens to them.  Farrell and Jessica Chastain matched wits in Liv Ullmann's Miss Julie, a 2014 adaptation of the August Strindberg play; it's Chastain who dominates Farrell in that one, although there ends up being a fair amount of blame to go around in how it ends.

Likewise, Farrell is both criminal and victim in The Beguiled.  His Union soldier can't help but exude charm amongst the women he becomes surrounded by, and he leads basically all of them on.  But this ends up backfiring on him when he chooses one of them and by default betrays the rest of them, which leads to...ah, well, nothing good. 

The women are led by a few heavy hitters: Nicole Kidman, Elle Fanning, and Coppola veteran (she appeared in Virgin Suicides and Marie Antoinette) Kirsten Dunst.  Between Kidman's and Dunst's characters, Farrell has the most trouble.  He arrives at their doorstep with an injured leg, and reinjures it when Dunst sends him tumbling down a stairway.  Kidman makes the decision to amputate it, believing she has no other choice.  Farrell interprets it as a spiteful gesture. 

In Miss Julie, it's Chastain who becomes totally unhinged; in Beguiled it's Farrell (I kind of wish it had been Chastain, rather than Kidman, who played the matriarch, for that reason alone).  It occasions his best scenes in the movie, anyway.  Kidman channels her Cold Mountain performance; Dunst is again her classic shrinking violet, a role that thrust her to prominence early in the millennium (the Sam Raimi Spider-Man trilogy, where she portrayed Mary Jane Watson), and as in her previous Coppola collaborations, she again finds new ways to present it.

The story itself must be considered fascinating.  Even if you fault Farrell for his fate, you can't say it's justified.  In some ways it seems a rebuke from Coppola for the exaggerated emotions running rampant today.  And it can't be a mistake that it's a Civil War drama, in an age where the United States seems to be teetering on schism once again. 

It's a contemplative drama well worth relishing, and a sobering reflection on the battles of the sexes.

2016

Viewed/Ranked

1. Arrival
2. Silence
3. The Lobster
4. A Monster Calls
5. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice
6. Hell or High Water
7. Free State of Jones
8. Star Trek Beyond
9. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
10. Midnight Special
11. Snowden
12. Suicide Squad
13. Ben-Hur
14. Jane Got a Gun
15. X-Men: Apocalypse
16. Captain America: Civil War
17. Jack Reacher: Never Go Back
18. Risen
19. Warcraft
20. The Magnificent Seven
21. Independence Day: Resurgence
22. Ghostbusters
23. Deadpool
24. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

Other Notable Releases

• 10 Cloverfield Lane
• The Accountant
• Billy Flynn's Long Halftime Walk
• The Birth of a Nation
• Café Society
• Central Intelligence
• Collateral Beauty
• Criminal
• Doctor Strange
• Fences
• Finding Dory
• The Girl on the Train
• Hacksaw Ridge
• Hail, Caesar!
• Hidden Figures
• The Huntsman: Winter's War
• Inferno
• Jason Bourne
• Knight of Cups
• Kubo and the Two Strings
• La La Land
• Lion
• London Has Fallen
• Loving
• Manchester by the Sea
• Moana
• Moonlight
• The Nice Guys
• Now You See Me 2
• Passengers
• Patriots Day
• Rules Don't Apply
• The Shallows
• Sully
• Swiss Army Man
• The Purge: Election Year
• War Dogs
• Zoolander 2
• Zootopia