Phantom Thread (4/5 Stars)

Paul Thomas Anderson has my vote for the world’s most enigmatic writer-director. If I were to define his career into a type, most likely his next movie would prove me wrong. This is his filmography: “Hard Eight”, “Boogie Nights”, “Magnolia”, “Punch-Drunk Love”, “There Will Be Blood”, “The Master”, “Inherent Vice”, and now “Phantom Thread”. One used to be able to define him by locale. His first eight films all took place or were at least tangential to Southern California. “Phantom Thread” is about a dress-maker who lives in London, England. Its off the grid and comes back to back with “Inherent Vice” a movie that could not be more opposite in style and tone. As loose and wild as “Inherent Vice” was, “Phantom Thread” is uptight and repressed. The main character is Reynolds Woodcock, an aging dress-maker played by Daniel Day-Lewis at his most fastidious. At this rate, P.T. Anderson’s next movie might take place on the moon.

“Phantom Thread” presents an intense character study and utterly strange love story. Reynolds Woodcock is a great artist who uses the high demand and idol worship of his craft to tightly control the people in his life. In an early scene, brilliant in the efficiency of its setup, he breaks up with a significant other. She brings up during breakfast the fact that he does not pay enough attention to her. He responds that he has to deliver a dress that day and that he cannot start the day with a confrontation. She leaves and he does not seem to be bothered one bit. The line of people who want his attention are around the block outside.

Enter into his life, Alma, played by Vicky Krieps. He picks her out at a restaurant where she is a waitress because she is his favorite body type to make dresses for. Alma is a nobody next to Woodcock. Vicky Krieps could be said to be just an unknown (at least to me) opposite to Daniel Day-Lewis, one of the greatest actors in movies. At first glance, she would not seem to stand a chance in this relationship given the extraordinary level of competition for Woodcock’s affections and his intense focus on his work.

The movie is rather simple plot-wise so I will say less about it other than that Alma proves to be an especially worth adversary in the battle for Mr. Woodcock’s affections in ways that illustrate the notion that all things are fair in love and war.

The power struggle between Alma and Mr. Woodcock is surrounded by impeccable costume design. I have not the slightest notion of high fashion, but the women looked good in the dresses, that much I can say. Daniel Day-Lewis once again has the preternatural ability to convince the audience that he is and always has been this particular character. His retirement announcement is laughable given that he has only acted in six movies from 1998-2018 (Oscar nominated four times in that span, batting 0.750). I figured he was already retired and that he does acting gigs as a respite from not working. I expect we will see him once more in the 2020s just as soon as he feels like returning calls from A-List directors beggin to offer him another role of a lifetime. 

Call Me By Your Name (4/5 Stars)

 Elio lives a charmed life. He is the teenage son of a graduate professor named Mr. Perlman and a mother who apparently inherited a Tuscan estate. Every summer the family vacations for three summer’s in an Italian paradise. They eat outside underneath olive trees, food served by the ancient stewards of the estate. There is wine and fish caught fresh from the nearby lake. There are teenage girls in the town that have the care-free summer off as well. Mr. Perlman seems like he is the friends of the most interesting people in the countryside. They come over for dinner and have conversations about highly intellectual topics. Mr. Perlman himself is an expert in ancient languages. Elio’s hobbies are swimming, flirting, and transcribing musical compositions. Really, the hardest thing about this movie is trying to shun the crushing sense of envy one feels while watching it. This looks and feels like the world’s best summer vacation.

The only thing that could possible count as some sort of conflict in this story is a forbidden love situation that also turns out as well as things possibly could have. Mr. Perlman, played by Michael Stuhlbarg, invites one of his graduate students to spend the summer with him as a research aide. This summer it is Oliver, played by Armie Hammer, a tall strapping late twenty-something. Elio, played by Timothee Chalamet, little by little falls in love with him. It is 1983, so homosexuality is still a concern to these particular characters. A 2017 audience will be more concerned about the fact that Elio is underage. This thorny issue the movie deftly handles with something akin to grace.

Most importantly, almost the entire story is told from the point of Elio, which provides the character with a high degree of agency. Timothee Chalamet here provides a sublime performance that has deservedly garnered him an Oscar nomination. It is a tricky feat to pull off, because the character cannot be any more articulate than a teenager and must necessarily convey a certain non-understanding of his homosexual feelings that apparently he was unaware of before this particular summer. He wants Oliver but at the same time understands the awkward position he is putting the older man in. He is also obviously nervous about revealing his feelings when there are so many good reasons why he would be rejected. To count the prospective ones off: Oliver believes it would damage his relationship with Mr. Perlman, Oliver does not have reciprocal feelings for Elio, Oliver has reciprocal feelings but does not believe he should act on them because of either a stance against homosexuality or Elio’s age, or Oliver likes Elio but not in a sexual way because he is not a homosexual himself.

How Elio comes out to Oliver is a tour de force scene of movie directing. Director Luca Guadagnino blocks the scene in front of a World War I memorial in the old Italian town’s square. It is the middle of the day, the square is deserted. The camera watches the action far away in a long shot. Oliver and Elio start the scene talking about the memorial. Elio stays on one side while Oliver walks around it on the other side. Although we hear Elio, we never see his face. The conversation switches from the memorial to an almost existential conversation about knowing things and wanting other people to know about the things you know. Almost nothing is actually said. There are no close-ups. But the amount of information conveyed to the audience is enormous. It is one of the best directed scenes of the year.

The movie’s theme is actually summarized in a scene near the end by Mr. Perlman. In most other movies, such an obvious exposition of “meaning” would not kindly looked upon. But this movie by that time had earned such a speech by living it out in real time for two hours. And Mr. Perlman, an educated and sensitive man, is actually a character well qualified to give it. This is the experience of “Call Me By Your Name” in a nutshell: A lot of scenes handled with grace and sensitivity that would probably crash and burn in offense and awkwardness in less qualified movies.

Not that all romances could be shown in this light. I do not believe a heterosexual romance of this kind would work even with the deftness of the makers of “Call Me By Your Name”. The closest movie that I believe has come to it was “Diary of a Teenage Girl” from 2015. I say that movie was the most similar because it too provided the very rare level of agency afforded to Elio here. However, it still concluded that the older man was not a good person. Is it possible that a movie someday could look on a heterosexual romance like the one seen in “Call Me By Your Name” and conclude that the older man is not guilty of something? Maybe, but not yet.

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (5/5 Stars)

One has to step back and shake oneself into believing that “Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle” is one of the year’s best films. After all, the movie itself does not make this kind of demand on its audience. It is marketed and feels like a good time family comedy that aims only to please, not enlighten. But when a movie accomplishes what it sets out to do so well, it is important sometimes to try to deconstruct how it does what it does. There are many levels to “Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle” and they interact with each other seamlessly to an extent that puts this movie on par with such other great comedies like “Hott Fuzz” and “Tropic Thunder”.

“Jumanji” was written by Erik Sommers and Chris McKenna, both alumni of the TV show “Community”. In particular, it was Chris McKenna who was credited for writing the Emmy nominated episode “Remedial Chaos Theory”. That brilliant episode, and “Community” in general, works in much the same way as “Jumanji”. Here, like in “Community”, the characters are deliberately stock characters. We have four high-schoolers, a nerd named Spencer, a jock known as Fridge, a mean girl named Bethany, and a sarcastic girl named Martha. They find themselves for various reasons in detention, a plot set-up that seems to deliberately recall “The Breakfast Club”. Detention involves cleaning out the school’s basement, wherein the four find a video game named “Jumanji”. Using the plot conceit of a previous “Jumanji” movie from 1995, itself based on an early 1980s board game, the game comes to life as the kids are playing it. In the 1995 version, the game came into the real world. In the 2017 version, the four are sucked into the game.

While in the game the four stock high-schoolers are transformed into archetypical video game avatars that they unwittingly chose before playing the game. The nerd is transformed into Dr. Smolder Bravestone, played by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and strong, courageous, and intelligent archeaologist (think “Indiana Jones” type). The jock is transformed into Franklin “Mouse” Finbar, played by Kevin Hart, a side-kick and zoologist. The mean girl accidentally chooses the Avatar “Shelly” Oberon, curvy genius, thinking it to be beautiful woman and not a fat middle-aged man, played by Jack Black, who excels in cartography and other sciences. And finally the sarcastic girl is transformed into Ruby Roundhouse, played by Karen Gillan (the blue robot in “Guardians of the Galaxy”), a scantily-clad femme fatale (think “Lara Croft”) who excels at Karate, Tai Chi, and Dance Fighting.

The video game they inhabit also has its rules. They have to work together with their character’s strengths and weaknesses to find their way through various levels, solve mysteries, and beat bosses in order to win the game and leave. Anyone who has ever played an old Nintendo game will immediately recognize the set-up. One of the cleverer ways this is played out is through a character named Nigel Billingsley, played by Rhys Darby, who serves as an explanatory character that, because of his programming, can only say certain things in response to certain things. This is annoying to the characters and funny to us.

Like “Community”, “Jumanji” uses cliches as a launchpad, not a crutch. By using tropes, it constructs a base of familiarity which it then exploits by developing the story through realistic character choices. We can predict how a stereotypical jock will react in a situation and we can predict how a stereotypical sidekick will react in a situation, but we are less familiar with how a stereotypical jock trapped in the body of a stereotypical sidekick will react. “Jumanji” presents eight familiar characters within four characters and stays true to all of them. Brevity is the soul of wit, and the rate of information thrown at the audience is amusingly efficient.

And how it does this is not just an achievement in writing, but in casting and acting. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is so good at playing a sensitive teenager that the shear believably of it is in and of itself amusing. Kevin Hart, a diminutive comedian who excels at large in-your-face comedy, seemingly didn’t have to change his personality at all in order to believably play the jock in the side-kick role, which in turn itself is a humorous take on his style of comedy comedy. But the best example of the possibilities of combining teenagers with video game avatar is Jack Black’s impersonation of a self-absorbed teenage girl. Not only is it pitch-perfect going one way, Jack Black sounding exactly like a teenage girl, it is pitch-perfect going the other way, a self-absorbed teenage girl inexplicably possessing larger-than-life intelligence. Remember that the teenagers now inhabit the special powers of their avatars. The Jack Black avatar Sheldon "Shelly" Oberon is a curvy genius. This does not make Bethany less self-absorbed, but it does make her especially articulate about her behavior in a way that is almost never seen with this particular stock character trope. This is a great example of how using otherworldly premises with their own special rules of reality can help develop the character of a real person in a way that regular drama cannot. Upon finding herself sucked inside a video game, Bethany complains about not having her phone anymore. The sarcastic girl chides her for being so self-absorbed. Jack Black’s response is so exceedingly reasonable and well thought out you wonder why nobody else is complaining about their phones being missing. Jack Black’s acting in this movie is worthy of an Oscar nomination. There is absolutely no chance of that happening because it is unthinkable that this type of role would result in such a thing. However, I would put this performance alongside Steve Martin’s in “All of Me” as a performance so unexpectedly good, one has to take a moment to realize just how underrated it is.

Finally the movie has great teamwork. There is not a character here that does not have a good role and the movie, directed by Jake Kasdan, seamlessly gives everyone something to do. Even the sarcastic girl who was transformed into the usually thankless role of the femme fatale, has her own touching developments. There is this one particular scene where Martha and Spencer within the bodies of smoking hot Karen Gillan and Dwayne Johnson act in the age-old awkward teenager “I like you” exchange. It is just something special. It is so recognizable, but as it is coming out of middle-aged movie stars, it is also very funny. This movie is something special and can be shown to anyone anywhere.