At the Cinema - January 2017

Hidden Figures – 10

Hidden Figures is everything a movie should be.  It takes history and illuminates it.  It takes emotion and deepens it.  It takes talent and expands it.  Most importantly, it takes our memories and refreshes them.  If you’re old enough, you remember John Glenn and the early space flight days with wonder, and this is a massive enhancement of the background.  No matter how old you are, if you love movies, this will take you back to those great movie experiences that you cherished as a child.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been in a more crowd pleasing movie than this one, ending in a theater full of applause.  History is full of hidden figures that we will never know about.  But thanks to this story we get to focus on the unlikeliest trio one could imagine in the early 1960’s – three black female mathematicians who go to work for NASA as America appears to be losing the race to the moon.

The three actresses, Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monae are all terrific.  They play the three in fully formed lives – with real problems and real families.  The action here is not the kind of crazy action we see in a stunt driven, special effects movie.  It’s real life action, like running for a bathroom across a parking lot, or trying to come up with a workable equation in a crucial situation.  Its references to the civil rights movement are heart-breaking.  This is a must-see movie that will be a classic, and it’s best experienced in a full theater.  Go now.

Hell or High Water – 9
I looked back and realized I never wrote about this wonderful movie.  It’s a modern day Robin Hood story set in Texas during the foreclosure crisis.  Ben Cross cements his position as a great actor, and Chris Pine and Jeff Bridges are equally terrific.  Wonderful Movie.

Captain Fantastic –  9

Viggo Mortenson, who always seems to be in great movies, plays survivalist Ben Cash in this thoroughly entertaining story.  He and his wife have chosen to raise their six children in the wilds of the gorgeous Pacific Northwest.  They are well educated and can survive in the wilderness.  But their mother has tragic demons and dealing with the aftermath forces Ben and his brood back into a confrontation with civilization that they are only partly ready for. 
They travel on Ben’s old bus and their trip alternates between tragedy and comedy.  They celebrate Norm Chomsky day instead of Christmas, and gifts of Bowie knives make their day.   Happy, Sad, terrific.

Moonlight – 6
This is the odds on favorite for a Best Picture Oscar and I’m mystified by the accolades.
Moonlight is the coming of age story of a young black child in Miami who is bullied because he is “soft.” The story is told in 3 parts, and Chiron is played wonderfully by three different actors at three different stages of his life.  The story is depressing and the camera work is distracting, and the message seems to be that there is only one way out of the ghetto economy – a premise I found offensive.  I was not entertained, nor enlightened.  The bright spot in the movie is singer Janelle Monae who comes out of nowhere to sparkle in two movies this month.

The Girl on the Train – 1
I was a little late in seeing this 2016 release, but it races right to the bottom of my list of movies.  It is a horrible mismatch of lies and deceptions, and worst of all its main objective is to deceive the viewer.  It starts with voyeurism and that’s the high point of its intentions.  If you want to torture yourself start with a blackboard and a piece of chalk, take a hammer to your toes, then watch this movie.  It’s a horrible use of money and talent.
I never thought I would see a worse movie than Independence Day:  Resurgence, but that was a harmless movie, not a hateful one.  Hate drips out of this movie.  Yuk

Last month I "ordered" my movies.

Now I’m ready to give my Ozzies for 2016:

Best Movie:  Arrival

Best Actress:  Amy Adams in Arrival

Best Actor:  Casey Affleck in Manchester by the Sea
Best Supporting Actress:  Viola Davis in Fences
Best Supporting Actor: Chris Pine in Hell or High Water

Best Director:  Damien Chazzelle for La La Land

Here are the TV Lizzies
Best Series:  Fargo
Best Actress:  Emmy Rossum in Shameless
Best Actor: Bryan Cranston in All the Way

Best Supporting Actress:  Maggie Siff in Billions

Best Supporting Actor:  Jesse Plemons in Fargo

So, here’s my revised top ten of 2016 Movies:

Arrival – 10

Hidden Figures - 10

La La Land – 10

Hell or High Water - 9

Manchester by the Sea - 9

Star Trek Beyond – 9

Deepwater Horizon - 9

Midnight Special – 9

Captain Fantastic - 9

Deadpool – 8

The Best of 2016

Here’s my ranking of the movies I saw that were released in 2016.  Unfortunately, there are many acclaimed movies that I haven’t seen yet, like Jackie, Silence, Everybody Wants Some, and 20th Century Women,    Should I see them, I’ll go back and inject them into my "subject to change" list, not that you’ll ever look at this list again.  One more thing, some of these movies I haven’t written about yet, but will soon, Arrival – 10 Hidden Figures - 10 La La Land – 10 Hacksaw Ridge - 10 Hell or High Water - 9 Manchester by the Sea - 9 Captain Fantastic - 9 Star Trek Beyond – 9 Deepwater Horizon - 9 Midnight Special – 9 Deadpool – 8 10 Cloverfield Lane – 8 Jack Reacher:  Never Go Back – 8 The Accountant - 8 Suicide Squad - 8 The Free State of Jones – 8 Southside with You - 8 Criminal – 8 Money Monster - 8 Fences – 7 Whiskey Tango Foxtrot - 7 Nocturnal Animals – 6 Moonlight - 6 Edge of Seventeen - 6 Sully - 5 Jason Bourne - 5 Hail, Caesar – 5 Independence Day:  Resurgence - 2} The Girl on the Train - 1 Documentaries: OJ – Made in America - 10 Weiner - 10 Gleason – 10 13th - 10 Nothing Left Unsaid – 10 Marathon:  The Patriots Day Bombing - 10 Becoming Mike Nichols – 8 Bright Lights – Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds – 8 TV Shows I wrote about Rectify – 10 All the Way - 10 The Good Wife – 10 Roadies - 10 Billions – 10 The Night of – 10 The People vs. OJ Simpson - 10 Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel - 10 Cyberwars - 9 Vinyl - 9 Confirmation - 8 My guilty pleasures on TV are Timeless and Lethat Weapon because they feature graduates of Rectify, which had such a fantastic cast. While this was an exceptional year for movies, particularly documentaries, no movie cracked my top ten of the 21st Century so far: 1 Serenity 2 Gone Baby Gone 3 Inception 4 The Dark Knight Rises 5 Pan's Labyrinth 6 The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo 7 The East 8 Zero Dark Thirty 9 The Wolf of Wall Street 10 Minority Report
See you at the movies!

At the Cinema - December 2016

La La Land – 10

There’s been a renaissance of on-screen song and dance and I think it goes something like this:  American Idol begat Glee which begat Pitch Perfect which begat The Voice, and all this was going on during about 100 seasons of Dancing with the Stars, and theater majors everywhere rejoiced.

Then along came a movie with a strong musical emphasis called Whiplash which was a surprise hit and it picked up an Oscar.  So someone with a lot of money that had seen all those “begats” threw it at Whiplash director Damien Chazelle and said go ahead, “put on a show.”

Put on a show he does in La La Land.  He takes the considerable charisma, talent, and chemistry of Emma Stone, (who did a turn on Broadway in Cabaret) and Ryan Gosling, (who grew up as a mouseketeer) and crafts a wonderful modern musical around their Cinemascope romance. 

The movie starts with an inspired song and dance number and ends with an amazing final act.  They are classic scenes.  In between the characters pursue their dreams and their romance and are confronted with some serious issues about what happens when artists have different degrees of success.  But mostly the movie is just simply fun and it made me want to pull out my Astaire and Rogers box set.  Yea, I really have all their movies on DVD.  May the renaissance continue.

 

Criminal – 8

Kevin Costner is one of our national treasures, and he can even bring life to a B movie plot like this one.  Ryan Reynolds is a CIA agent who gets caught, tortured, and killed over information he’s got.  The CIA hadn’t gotten the information yet either, so they call on Tommy Lee Jones to transplant the memories into the lifelong criminal Kevin Costner plays – who is beyond evil.  With Gary Oldham ranting and raving Costner begins to transform into a man worthy of the memories he carries while still being able to lay waste to some bad guys. It’s all pretty cool.  I often say you either buy a movie or you don’t.  Have no idea why I bought this, but I did.

Nocturnal Animals – 6

Which I can't say about this, one of those stylishly beautiful movies that is lovely to look at but very hard to hold.  Riveting at times, (especially an opening scene unlike anything you've ever seen, or wanted to see) but also baffling, I’m sure if I sat down and tried to figure out the plot and what the filmmaker was trying to tell us, I might eventually come up with it, but I’m just not sure it would be worth the effort.

Amy Adams is the loveliest to look out in this tale.  She married the wrong guy, then left him for the wrong guy, and now is going through some remorse as she reads the novel of the first guy while the second guy is off cavorting on a business trip.  The novel is acted out for us by the author – the first wrong guy.  Got all that?

Fences – 7

Denzel Washington directs himself reprising his Tony-winning Broadway role as a former Negro League baseball star who is now a garbage man in Pittsburgh.  It’s August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize winning play and there is never any doubt that it is a great play.  But a great play does not a great movie make, which we’ve learned many times. 

The language and the acting are compelling and I would expect that Denzel Washington and Viola Davis will be recognized during award season.  But the movie suffers from one problem. 

Broadway plays are usually in the 2 and a half to 3 hour range, in some ways to justify that ticket investment. Who would want to pay those prices for a 90 minute play?  So, every minute of that play appears to have made it to the big screen, and this movie, as interesting as it is, is just interminably long.  Most of it is an interesting portrait of the dynamics of a dysfunctional family.  But the truth is that it is Denzel Washington’s Troy Maxson who carries the dysfunctional torch and the problems revolve around him like the sun.  It’s interesting and provocative, but gruelingly long.

Rogue One:  A Star Wars Story – 7

The familiar Star wars theme music swells to cue you that something big is happening.  This new story is well done, but dare I say that Star Wars is running out of steam.   Even with characters we’ve never seen before, we kind of feel like we’ve seen it all before.  This is essentially a war movie, and the battle scenes that occupy the final third of the movie are certainly exciting, but maybe they are running out of ideas.

Scanning the Satellite

Rectify – one of my favorite all-time dramas, came to a satisfying conclusion with its final season on the Sundance Channel.  Incredible characterizations by an astounding group of actors - If you ever get the chance, it’s binge-worthy.

Bright Lights:  Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds – 8

HBO commissioned a documentary and then televised it early after the tragic deaths of the two subjects over the holidays.  If you don’t think people who entertain for a living are different, check this out. 

Marathon:  The Patriots Day Bombing – 10

HBO unveils another stunning documentary, a heart-tearing story of the Boston Marathon bombing.  If this doesn’t move you in a dozen different ways, from the footage of the actual event, to the story of the recovering victims, to the story of the investigation and pursuit – you better check your pulse.