Lady Bird (5/5 Stars)

In one of several great moments in “Lady Bird”, the titular character, a catholic high school senior named Chistine McPherson who has given herself the “Lady Bird”, is speaking with one of her teachers, Sister Sarah Joan, about her writing sample about her hometown Sacramento. Sister Sarah Joan especially likes the writing sample because one can tell how much Lady Bird loves Sacramento. This comment surprises Lady Bird because she does not like Sacramento and has spent much of the movie stating exactly that and how she wishes to go to college somewhere on the east coast, like New York, where, as she says, “culture is”. But, Sister Sarah Joan remarks, Lady Bird’s writing is so specific and detailed. She shows so much attention to Sacramento and aren’t they the same thing, love and attention.

Sister Sarah Joan’s point is amply demonstrated by this movie, which on its surface is about a young woman who doesn’t like her neighborhood, doesn’t feel like she fits in, and wants to move. But the characters are so warmly drawn and the scenes are so wonderfully specific, it is impossible to believe that Lady Bird’s family, her catholic high-school, and Sacramento, all three of which she is trying desperately to rebel against, are not also very close to her heart. She also fights with her mother constantly, but it is the sort of fighting that comes from micro-management, not neglect, and this too the movie seemingly argues, is another type of love, maddening at times yes, but still love.

The greatness of “Lady Bird” lies in its specificity. It is a great counterargument to the prevailing wisdom about how to make and market movies about high school. Most high school movies seek to put characters into certain roles (mean girls, nerds, jocks, and the like), the idea being to appeal to the lowest common denominator. This movie could not be more different. Counterintuitively, in being very true to itself, it has apparently appealed to a large group of people anyway. It is has received an extraordinarily high RottenTomatoes rating and has made a lot of money. This was surprising to me because how many people could possibly relate to a catholic high school girl in Sacramento. Apparently everybody.

“Lady Bird” was written and directed by Greta Gerwig, better known as an actress. Greta went to a Catholic high school in Sacramento before moving to New York for college. So essentially this movie is about her. It certainly feels lived in. I felt like I could especially relate to it because I grew up in the suburbs, went to a Catholic high school, and wanted to leave for New York. I think she got that 100% correct. As important, she got correct how a rejection of one’s upbringing doesn’t necessarily mean a hatred of it. There is a particularly beautiful scene at the end of “Lady Bird” wherein Christine suffering from a hangover from night before, walks into a Catholic church for Sunday Mass and hears a choir singing. Christine isn’t religious anymore but she recognizes the feeling as that of her home and it moves her with feelings of nostaligia and gratitude. This movie, along with the musical “The Book of Mormon”, are exceedingly rare things, love letters from atheists to religious organizations. Greta Gerwig isn’t a believer, but she understands and respects it. It wasn’t for her, but she lovingly pays attention.

Lady Bird is played with perfection by Saiorise Ronan. Her mother is played by Laurie Metcalf. I expect they will both be nominated this year. Also, “Lady Bird” is a perfect candidate for Best Original Screenplay Oscar. I hope Greta Gerwig quits acting and starts writing/directing full-time. She is very good at this.

Coco (4/5 Stars)

I wouldn’t know the first thing as to what “Coco”, Pixar’s latest venture, gets right and wrong about the beliefs around Dia de los Muertos, the Mexican holiday that centers around veneration of ancestors. All I can say is that, portrayed by Coco, it makes for an ingenious engine for plot. The conceit of “Coco”, and for Dia de los Mueros perhaps, is that upon death, people enter into a new life in a parallel dead realm (there is probably a better word for it than that). In the dead realm, life goes on as usual, except instead of class divisions based on wealth or rank, there are class divisions based on how well one is remembered in the Earth realm. Remembrance in the Earth realm can be both physical as well as mental. A dead person can be remembered by having their photograph placed on a family shrine or can simply exist within the mind of a family member. But if the photograph is not placed on the shrine or the last family member who remembers the dead soul dies or forgets, than the dead soul dies a second death in the alternate realm.

Miguel, voiced by Anthony Gonzalez, is a young boy with an interesting family history. His great great grandfather, a musician, became estranged by the family. His great great grandmother swore off music and forbid any of her descendants to remember the great great grandfather. As Miguel’s family celebrates this year’s Dia de los Muertos, the only family member to still remember the great great grandfather is Abuelita, Miguel’s great grandmother, who is very close to dying herself. Thus there is a ticking time clock here, for Miguel to figure out what needs to figure out, to essentially save the second life of his great great grandfather. I have to admit, this is a plot I have not seen before.

The idea that the memory of ancestors keeps them literally alive, albeit in a different place, should be inviting to everyone. The fact that this movie is also very specific about a particular culture presents to the audience something Pixar does extremely well. It is an original story with emotional underpinning that is instantly identifiable. “Coco” is not as funny as other Pixar movies, but it makes up for it by being especially touching. Who, of course, who would not melt a little to see a long lost relative come back to life? And the way Pixar tugs this particular heartstring, through the use of musical elements and cues that weave themselves through the story, is very effective.

All that is lefts is to admit, once again, that Pixar has made a visually striking movie. The Pixar style may seems at times to be a bit foreign to this culture. When I think of movie dominated by bones, I am reminded more of the stop-motion animated style of Tim Burton, but it is not too distracting. I don’t know what details of Dia de los Muertos is got right or wrong, but even there had not been such a culture and this movie was made up whole-cloth, it would have succeeded in making it interesting, important, and vibrant.

Pixar has a tradition of dual directors per film. “Coco” was directed by the Pixar veteran Lee Unkrich (Toy Story 2, Monster’s Inc., Finding Nemo, and Toy Story 3) and a Pixar new-comer Adrian Molina, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Matthew Aldrich. I expect it is to Molina’s credit that this story has the level of detail it commands and to Unkrich, the usual Pixar flair and competence.

Thor: Ragnarok (4/5 Stars)

For those that felt Thor would be more entertaining if his tragic flaw was stupidity as opposed to pride (see my review of “Thor”) and did not bother seeing the second movie because it looked more stilted and oppressive than the first, the third movie in the “Thor” saga is exactly the course-correction the character and story sorely needed.

One half of the story is business-as-usual. There is a political crisis in Asgaard. Odin has finally died (or has he?) and his long-lost daughter, Hella, played by none other than Cate Blanchett, has come back from the throne. As she is Odin’s eldest issue and apparently was his right-hand person in establishing Odin’s empire, she has a pretty good argument for being Queen. Thor, played by Chris Hemsworth, and his brother Loki, Tom Hiddleston, aren’t going for it though and try to start a fight. She defeats them handily and even crushes Thor’s mighty hammer.

Thor lost his hammer in the first movie, but whereas in that movie the event inspired soul-searching and just a little bit of crying, in this movie Thor’s loss of his hammer merely serves to knock a few power notches off the characters ability points so the fights he undertakes afterwards are fairer and funnier. Thor finds himself on a garbage dump planet ruled by the Grandmaster, Jeff Goldblum, who specializes in providing gladiatorial contests. The whole scene feels like the color scheme and outgoing nature of “Guardians of the Galaxy” has been injected into the Thor universe (or that Thor has taken a vacation in the “Guardians of the Galaxy” universe for a spell.) This works much better than one would perhaps think. Thor has never been especially funny, but becomes quite useful for initiating and returning jokes in this movie. It helps that Chris Hemsworth is an underrated comic actor and is particularly good at being a dumb blonde hunk (see the recent “Ghostbusters” reboot).

Surrounding Thor in the trash world are other routinely funny characters. Jeff Goldblum, an inspired piece of casting if there ever was, is essentially playing a meme-version of himself. Given that he is technically the bad guy, his weirdly punctual way of stilted speaking deprives any sense of foreboding in the story. He enters Thor in a non-consensual gladiatorial contest. There Thor meets a rock giant named Korg whose accent and style of speaking is reminiscent of the “The Flight of the Conchords.” That is no mistake. He is voiced by a director of that series, Taika Watiti, who also is the director of this movie. Thor also meets the reigning champion, none other than the Incredible Hulk, who has eschewed his Dr. Jekkyl-Bruce Banner persona for a running two years because this garbage planet actually likes the other guy. Thor without his hammer is a bit like Superman consistently surrounded by Kryptonite. It brings him down to earth where Hemsworth comic abilities allow the rest of us to laugh at him. It also helps that they shaved off his pretentious long hair.

The battle scenes in Thor: Ragnarok are spectacular and not so cringe-inducing as most other blockbuster movies. I’ve complained ad infinitum about nameless and countless humans being destroyed in great movie spectacles of violence without anyone in the story particularly caring. This is less of a concern when the characters are gods and cannot actually die or get all that much hurt. The gladiatorial contest between Thor and The Hulk is especially pleasurable.

Given that one-half of the movie is consistently funny and fun to be around, the other half seems to lull in parts. This has got to be the first time that I have written that Cate Blanchett does not inhabit the most interesting part of a movie. Here it is true, but it is mainly because the Thor-Hulk story-line is so entertaining. I got a great kick out of it and look forward to the next Thor movie.

p.s. If Thor is the God of Thunder and he can summon thunderbolts, why would he not be immune to tasers that use electric shocks.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer (1/5 Stars)

Last year, I saw writer/director Yorgos Lanthimos’s film “The Lobster” and stated that it was one of the most original romantic comedies I had ever seen. It was the only film I had seen of Mr. Lanthimos, who at that point, had been making movies since the 1990s. After watching “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” I may never see another of his movies again.

The Lobster’s idiosyncrasies, it’s quirky characters, and its weird dialogue had the appearance of making sense because of the absurd fictional world that they inhabited. Having never seen a Lanthimos film, I suppose I just assumed that when he set stories in the real world, he would not expect to people to speak and act in the same unreal way. My assumption was wrong. “The Killing of Sacred Deer” has no place being set in the real world, but there it is. The unreality of what is happening on the screen and the unbelievable way the characters react to it makes it impossible for the viewer to empathize or care about what is occurring in the story. As a drama, it failed dramatically. As a comedy, the only laughs it garnered were the bad kind.

“The Killing of a Sacred Deer” takes its sweet time in getting to the main conceit of the story. As it meanders, you are left to wonder what might be happening. Several interesting story-lines seem possible, slowly the story is developed and you realize that the story-line that has indeed been chosen is one of the stupider ones. I will now give it away. A surgeon, played by Colin Farrell, once negligently caused the death of a man during a surgery. The son of that man, a shifty and sweaty Barry Keoghan, has put a hex on the surgeon’s family. Actually, to say it is a “hex” is doing more explaining than the movie cares to. What happens is that Colin’s family one-by-one slowly become paralyzed, stop eating, and start bleeding out the eyes. This happens to Colin’s son first before happening to his daughter. We do not know how Barry Keoghan is doing this or whether it a unique hex or has been attempted by anyone before. There is literally no attempt to explain it.

I guess that would not matter so much if other things were not missing. After all, many movies are based on otherwise impossible things happening. But the movie is so deadpan toward the situation, and its characters reactions are so absurdly understated, that it seems the movie is making a point of how pathetic  they are as they are confronted with otherworldly horror. Is the situation being played for laughs? People in the theater were indeed laughing when the story called for the kids crawling along the floor using just their elbows. But did Lanthimos want us to find children crawling on the floor because they can’t use their legs anymore funny? Really?

Characters in movies are fictional, yes I know this. But it also says something about a writer/director who seems to be purposefully positioning his characters in ways where it is impossible to empathize with them. What is left is ultimately is a waste of time. After all, if Lanthimos doesn’t care about whether or not the sacred deer is killed, why should we?

Battle of the Sexes (4/5 Stars)

Putting the Show back in Chauvinism

The show was so good it is hard to believe that it was actually true. “The Battle of the Sexes,” a tennis match played in 1973 between Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King plays like a professional wrestling match. In one corner is the heel, the ex-champion Bobby Riggs, a boastful, clownish, male chauvinist. In the other corner is Billie Jean King, young, serious, the greatest female tennis player in the country. Bobby believes that he can beat at his age, 55, any woman who has the guts to challenge him. His reasoning: men are better than women. The match became so hyped that it ultimately was played in a football stadium and 50 million people watched it on television. Like professional wrestling, it had a man one could love to hate and a woman everyone wanted to win.

Except that this wasn’t a professional wrestling match. The outcome that would delight the world, good guys win, bad guys lose, was not predetermined. The prize money was a million dollars and Bobby Riggs, a compulsive gambler, had bet $15,000 of his own money on himself. There would be no throwing of the fight and the fact that Bobby had previously soundly beat the next best female tennis player, Margaret Court, in what was termed the Mother’s Day massacre, had put a real suspense onto the outcome of the match. The match was exciting. And in this movie, the feeling is fully captured.

To Billie Jean King, the significance of the match was very serious. She had turned down Bobby several times before Margaret’s defeat, made it essential that she take the match in order to prove that women’s tennis wasn’t a joke. At the time, she was lobbying for equal pay in tournaments between men and women. Her reasoning: the men and women sell the same amount of tickets, why are they paid differently. To Bobby, the significance of the match seems less serious and more of a ploy to be paid more money. Bobby knows that by trolling the women’s lib movement he could generate interest in the match. Whether he actually hates women is an open question, but on a certain level it doesn’t matter. He does not take the women’s lib movement serious. As he comments in one scene: the women don’t deserve to be paid as much as the men because they can’t beat the men in a match-up. In fact, he says, “I’m being paid less to play on the men’s senior circuit than the women are making in their regular circuit. If I can beat the top women, its unfair to me to be paid less than them.”

It strikes me that I’m talking far more about the plot than usual. Well, that speaks to the power of the story. It is a fantastic battle between two very strong characters. Steve Carell is the perfect actor to portray the clownish Bobby Riggs and Emma Stone is perfect as Billie Jean King. In fact, I think this is the fullest character Emma Stone has ever played and is her best performance. Sarah Silverman and Bill Pullman pull their weight in supporting roles.

The movie thankfully pays a lot of time and attention to the match itself. It is well directed by Jonathon Dayton and Valerie Davis (directors of “Little Miss Sunshine”) and written by Simon Beaufoy (“Slumdog Millionaire”). This is a good movie. I really liked it.

Mother! (3/5 Stars)

The last two movies of writer/director Darren Aronofsky, “Noah” and now “Mother!” Present a point of view that is rarely posited. Believers of God generally think of the deity in an absolutely positive light, whether as fully good or at least fully just. Whereas non-believers don’t have an opinion about God (though they may hold a generally negative of organized religion) because they don’t believe that the deity exists to have an opinion about. Darren Aronofsky, at least in his last two films, believes in God, and finds the deity lacking. For example, in “Noah”, God decides to kill almost everybody on Earth. Some characters in that movie were quite articulate as to the unfairness of it all. If there was a such thing, that movie and this new one would be heretical works.

“Mother!” is an extending and ever-developing metaphor of all the crimes ever committed against Women/Nature. I myself did not quite grasp the overall metaphor until about two thirds of the way through and upon reflection noticed I missed many things early on. Then again, I went into this movie blind. Just reading that its a metaphor will likely help you catch on to the biblical parallels earlier. “Mother!” has received a Cinemascore of F which should give a hint as to what an unpleasant experience this movie can be. However, an unpleasant movie does not necessarily a bad movie. “Mother!” is technically proficient, well-acted, and has more things to say in ten minutes than most movies have in their running time. I cannot say I liked “Mother!”, but when I exited the theater I had a feeling that reminded me of the feeling I had when I exited the theater after watching Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche, New York.” It is an intense proceeding.

The movie takes place entirely in a fixer-upper mansion in a picturesque landscape. Here Jennifer Lawrence, doing her best impression of a Renaissance Madonna, works on renovations while her older husband, played by Javier Bardem, tries to get out of a writing block. Nobody actually has names as who they are and what they represent seem to more or less explicitly change over time.

The movie can be broken into three parts: the first is about the neuroses and concerns of a married couple trying to decide when and if to have a child, the second is about fame and what happens to a couple when one of them starts spreading their love in a not exclusive fashion, the third is quite explicitly about God and Mother Nature. In the background, making things complicated and then throwing the whole world into squalor and chaos are the humans. The movie takes a dim view of the humans, and through this dim of view of the humans, places the ultimate blame for the troubles on God, who made them in his image. The only innocent here is Women/Nature. At least that is what I believe this movie is about. Aronofsky does not feel the need to be explanatory. I think that wound in the floor is Original Sin, but there is no way to know for certain. Javier Bardem it should be noted is quite good as God. Not sure how that sort of thing is pulled off, but he does it.

I can’t recommend this movie to anyone who wants to see a movie with anyone else. You are going to have to see this one alone. It’s not a good time. However, it will make you think. It is quite literally a challenging movie. I for one never considered what Mary, mother of Jesus, may have felt about God giving up his only son through martyrdom for our sins. I mean it’s not like God asked Mary for permission or even her opinion on the matter.

Logan Lucky (4/5 Stars)

Those searching for a theme to categorize the career of Director Steven Soderbergh will be left searching. He is a man of seemingly unlimited interests. To take just enough examples to prove my point: his projects have ranged from an epic biopic of Che Gueverra, a remake of a Russian science fiction movie, an action movie built around the physicality of a female MMA wrestler, a no-budget movie set in a doll factory starring non-actors, a remake of a rat pack heist movie with the biggest movie stars in the world, a TV show about a hospital in NYC in the year 1900.

Logan Lucky is no exception to the rule that there are no rules. This movie takes place in present day West Virginia and concerns the Logan family’s heist of the Coca Cola NASCAR speedway. You could say it’s like Ocean’s Eleven because it technically is in the same heist genre, but really the movie are not the same at all. Or to put in another way, they are as different as Las Vegas is to Appalachia.

Logan Lucky is a lot of fun. In particular, you sense the deft hand of an experienced storyteller at work in what Soderbergh chooses to leave out of scenes. How the heist itself works is not really explained fully beforehand, so we experience how it works as the heist progresses. This was probably a good move because the heist, being somewhat realistic, is also not super complicated (as opposed to say Ocean’s Eleven). It does succeed in passing the Heist Test, a test I’m making up now (although it probably already exists somewhere).

The Heist Test consists merely of watching the movie and spotting some obvious clue that the authorities have been shown in the movie that should tip them off to the perpetrators. An example of a movie that fails the Heist Test is Spike Lee’s “Inside Man.” In that movie, the robbers make all their hostages shed their clothes, put on the same uniform as the robbers, and they all walk out the front door. The authorities could have easily just had all the hostages put their clothes back on. The people without any clothes to put back on are the robbers. Heist solved. The authorities in “Inside Man” don’t do this thus that movie fails the Heist test.

I think Logan Lucky passes the Heist Test. It does this in a nifty way by transforming the Heist of a Speedway more into an insurance scam. That is it takes away anyone’s motive for solving the heist. That sort of is a spoiler but isn’t really.

Logan Lucky stars Channing Tatum as Jimmy Logan, mastermind, Adam Driver as Clyde Logan, his sibling and sidekick in the scheme, and Daniel Craig as Joe Bang, an incarcerated bank vault specialist. They all sport Appalachian accents. Weirdly this seems the suit the Brit the best. Then there is Seth MacFarlane who plays a racecar sponsor named Max Chilblain. I couldn’t tell at all where his accent hailed from.

Logan Lucky exploits the regular fun from its Appalachian characters and setting while undercutting the stereotypes sometimes in the same line of a scene. For one particular good instance, Joe Bang makes what can best be described as a white trash bomb out of bleach and gummy bears, but then successfully explains it using chemistry equations. I had a good time watching Logan Lucky. It’s a good addition to the Pretty Good Soderbergh shelf.

Dunkirk (4/5 Stars)

 “Dunkirk” recreates of an early event in World War II when the German blitzkrieg flanked and encircled the entire British army at the beaches of Dunkirk while the German Luftwaffe bombed them from above and German U-Boats terrorized the British channel.

It is entirely possible that the large majority of the British army, around 400,000 men, may have died on that beach. The British navy was not sending the bulk of their destroyers to evacuate the men because of the superiority of the German air force and submarine fleet. The last and only hope was to draft all the “little ships” of the England, civilian boats, to cross the channel and pick up the boys. As a retreat it was so successful it became the stuff of legend. Only 40,000 men were expected to live. The British with the help of the civilian effort rescued ten times that amount and a good amount of the French army too.

Writer and Director Christopher Nolan treats the subject matter with solemnity and reverence. Individual stories are sacrificed to the events as a whole. (In fact, I can’t remember most of the names of the characters.) There is no back-story and no locations that are not on Dunkirk, therefore no characters that aren’t on-the-ground soldiers. This minimalism suits the sense of isolation and the impending doom felt by the men on the beach.

What is innovative is the structure of the story. Here, again, Director Nolan (Memento, The Prestige, Inception, Interstellar) engages his forte. The movie is divided into three parts and seamlessly switches between the three. The first is the Mole (french word for pier thing on the beach) and takes place over a week and covers the entire week that the evacuation took place in. The second is the Sea and takes place over a single day that the little ships were involved in the evacuation. The third is the Air and takes place over a single hour that the British Air Force provided a cover mission for the evacuation. The Air’s hour takes place during the Sea’s day which takes place during the Mole’s week. It is not necessarily intuitive that these stories could seamlessly move back and forth between each other, but Nolan once again proves that he knows how to clearly tell a seemingly convoluted story. I was not particularly confused as to what was happening when.

And it makes sense story-wise. If Nolan had told the story straight chronologically, the second and especially the third story-line would have been sandwiched unfairly near the end, thereby reducing the historical importance of the sea and air efforts. This way, they are all given equal time (even though the their times are unequal) and the movie has this interesting relativistic effect. The faster the characters move, the slower time seems to move for them, and an hour in a British Spitfire roaring across the channel equals the time spent by a man walking on the ground.

Most of the actors, though talented like Tom Hardy (airplane) and Cillian Murphy (ground), could have been replaced because of the deliberate motive of the movie to have the scenario overpower any one individual story. There is one exception and that is the civilian captain of one of the little ships, played by Mark Rylance (Bridge of Spies). The nobility of the man shines through and gives incarnate form to the humble and collective spirit of Dunkirk that became the stuff of legend. His interactions with a shell-shocked soldier (Cillian Murphy) provide the heart of the movie. “There’s no turning back from this, son,” he states and there is a power in the understated yet unwavering purpose behind his intonations. Keep Calm and Carry On indeed.