Review: THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI

Mildred taunts local police by renting some billboards that challenge them to solve the case of her daughter who was raped and burned alive. The cops push back with community support. The rent is expensive and the pressure to take the billboards down is mounting. Something's got to pop. Or does it?

A hefty talent lineup is hauled up to make this work. Frances McDormand leads with a bludgeoning tongue and the kind of lead-eyed stare when on the attack as sharks do. Without this fierce energy at the centre this film it would collapse. The part was written for her (that's not hyperbole, it really was). Supported by the likes of Woody Harrelson and his down home gravitas, and Sam Rockwell's violent and flailing hick cop Dixon might provide all we need but the good parts and performances are poured out like diner coffee.

And there is a real underlying sadness of the setting and the good-old-boy atrocity with its unavenged silence in the community. When Dixon says to his mother that the south "isn't like that" anymore it's a resignation that he can no longer freely strut and punch that way that old cops could. The lush surrounding landscape and picturesque town begin to feel like camouflage netting.

But this is a Martin McDonagh film and if you've seen others or at least the trailer to this one you should be expecting a lot of humour. Well, just as in the trailers for the others there's a lot of fun but it's never all laughs. In Bruges is one of my favourite films of the last ten years for its blend of tailspin humour and grimness and magnetic performances. That film felt overlong, however, and to my mind it was due to leaving its central gravity as a reveal rather than allow it to work beside the levity so that when the odd fourth act begins it feels like a job we had put off. This time there's no mistaking the atrocity nor its seriousness. Its constant presence in Billboards lets the humour (and there is a lot of it) weave with the crime and sense of stasis so that if there is to be resolution it must be made of all those threads. It does, it's still longer than it should be, but it works.

It works because McDonagh can write up a storm of hilariously point-missing characters, sharp wit that would seem so if spoken off screen, and constant engagement with characters. And a kind of soft-edged twist: at one point I noted some fatigue with the violence that was mounting and felt like I was rewarded for my concern when the violence that did ensue had a hitherto unaired motivation. It felt like relief.

Another scene features a deer that other filmmakers might allow in as a kind of reincarnation moment. Mildred dispels all such notions with another slashing tirade that turns poignant on a dime as character and audience alike recall the single scene that features daughter Angela. It isn't maudlin in the least. In this story of painful grief and inert justice the scene sobers rather than inflames or saddens. Like the conclusion and the Townes Van Zandt song that plays it out we recall the lack of control that grief and the most energetic fury cannot reverse. McDonagh's best yet.

2017: THE HIGH

HONG SANG-SOO TRIO
Hang is a contemporary master of comedies of manners. Yourself and Yours, Claire's Camera and On a Beach at Night Alone all proved sheer delights with their gently deceptive surface tension and depth. The only problem for me is that none of these MIFF films (I've only seen his films at MIFF) ever break out into the cinema. He could have a real following here but no....

At least I can give his latest three to make it here my top spot. These movies have depth, subtle performances and always delight. I can think of no one working now in film as consistent. Try and track any of them down.

A GENTLE CREATURE
A absurdist premise is given just enough energy to sustain it throughout. For once, Kafkaesque is not a warning to audiences.






mOTHER!
Strong and constantly entertaining allegory. I skipped the same director's Noah but maybe should backtrack and pick it up.






A GHOST STORY
The sheer pluck of this one would give it a place here but the courage of the performances and imagination that take it from a simple relationship to a cosmic level and a continuously inventive aesthetic let it barge in here.







THE KILLING OF A SACRED DEER

Yorgos Lanthimos again gives us something from his elastic imagination made of both hard reality and unsettlingly protean absurdism, one of the very few who can handle the difference and offer it as a seamless whole. Terrifying and wonderful.

THE FLORIDA PROJECT
Hard naturalism strengthened with a clear identification of the magic of children's imagination with a gut punching happy/sad ending that takes it even further. Proof that the suits in LA haven't crushed all free spirit from American cinema.




THE GO BETWEENS: RIGHT HERE
In which a series of interviews, some tasteful reconstructions and a lot of archival treats blends as cinema. It could have been about a band I didn't like and I'd still sing its praises.








MOONLIGHT

Goes at its own pace and tells it the way it wants, finding smooth transitions where other filmmakers might waste skill displaying ironic clashes. The story of a boy growing up tough through hatred and his own resignation to finally seek some sense and beauty.






RAW
Tale of corrupted perfection wins every race it runs and then some.











HOUNDS OF LOVE
Tense and suitably ugly tale of a crime perpetrated by a disturbing folie a deux couple. Tightly plotted with note perfect performances and not a moment of attempted comedy. A nasty film about a bad thing but all the better for it. Good to have a local entry in the high category.






INGRID GOES WEST
Brilliant and cutting satire of fan stalking and the loneliness that generates it. Plaza and Olsen perfect in their parts and the dark and light blended with a careful hand. A definite rewatchable.









IT COMES AT NIGHT

Sombre realisation of the issues that become crucial in the wake of mass disaster. Borrowed from horror without giving into genre.








GET OUT
When a mix of Stepford Wives, Rosemary's Baby and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner are in the shaker things could get a little hard to swallow but this blend that keeps closest to satire gets through  by a commitment to a plain-faced telling.






At home ...

As a new thing, I'm going to include tv this year.

TWIN PEAKS THE RETURN
In which David Lynch brought us what might well be his parting gift, a solid epic meditation on time, ageing, yearning regret, heroism, cosmic motivation, and mortality in a package that sat contentedly at odds with the golden age of television and delivered a message both simple and profound: you can't go home again. The fans of the original series were sharply divided as a Cooper split into a monster and a damaged naif variously infuriated or delighted them. Those expecting the same again gave up on this outing which was what we should all have hoped for, not a rerun but version 2.0. The first series ended in darkness and violence and this one had to take us out of it but showed that there must always be a cost to even the best intentions. Cooper's heroism ends in a shattering scream. It's terrifying and saddening at once like the best Lynch has ever given us.

MINDHUNTER
David Fincher in subdued mode presented a fictionalised account of the development of FBI profiling as new concepts in crime fighting have difficult births. Understated acting, the Fincher muted pallet and some strong low voiced scoring served writing that took its time but still managed to be compelling.





THE HANDMAID'S TALE
The chief criticism for this was that the society depicted was so severe it came off as propaganda. Well, dystopia is seldom literal. Nineteen Eighty-Four was a warning about nineteen forty-eight. Animal Farm was a satire on the Soviet system and even self avowedly called itself a fairy tale. Gulliver's Travels, Brave New World, The War of the Worlds etc. all presented scenarios pushed to the extreme so the issues remaining might be magnified. That's all this is. And when it's done as warmly and strongly as here it really does just work. Elizabeth Moss heads a good cast in a well written and updated retelling of this classic feminist dystopia.

SEARCH PARTY

Seasons 1 and 2 continued to show a strength of purpose that bubbled constantly under the surface of these pampered millennials who are forced against darkness. Poignantly funny and often just poignant. From Seinfeld through Sex and the City to Girls, this is my favourite New Yorkers as Universe Centres so far (though Master of None comes very close).

2017: THE MIDDLE

THE ENDLESS

From the team that made Spring and Resolution which showed again that passion and resourcefulness can fill gaps that budgeting can't. A further foray into a kind of DIY Lovecraft this is even more accomplished than the priors. We're still lacking a little tightness in the plotting but I'll be in the queue for the next one.



LOVING

Well executed historical tale of civil rights hit its notes without issue but still left a little too routine.






DUNKIRK

Highly immersive and on point with a clever management of time expansion. I left the IMAX screening in silence but as days went by (this was mid MIFF) the impact faded and I wondered if it would feel the same in a standard cinema. While it is a return to form for a director whose blockbuster films have become increasingly bloated and overrated, this lean and intense piece at best exposes how wayward Nolan has become. That's a good thing but probably will count for nothing with the next release.

TWENTIETH CENTURY WOMEN

The kind of social issue rivernovel that can get skewed by incidental quirkiness here is given a good strong helming. Perhaps an even stronger direction might have given it the adventurous lift it needed to make it great.







COLLOSAL

Extraordinary idea form a filmmaker who is good at them (Timecrimes and Open Windows) but not so great with pacing character development. The middle act sags before a big finish that feels like its addressing the problems of that rather than flowing toward a conclusion. Nevertheless, good performances and some real wow moments keep it afloat.




BEATRIZ AT DINNER

Some very effective oppositions between characters unaware of their own privilege and one who cannot escape awareness of her lack of same. Very solid performances throughout but perhaps that ending is too joltingly out of pace.






BEFORE I FALL

A darkened version of The Moonlit Road story (or a bleak Groundhog Day) in which an uber-popular girl must work out why she has come to a tragic end. Some strongly realised moments of teenage life but lacking real teeth towards the very end.






HAPPY DEATH DAY

Groundhog Day meets Scream plays its routine redemption story with style and energy, getting the strong lead it needs. Feels featherlight beside Before I Fall which begins with a near identical premise.







T2: TRAINSPOTTING

In a year when the phrase "the sequel no one asked for" kept appearing in  reviews this one hit the cinemas with a shrug. It's perfectly competent but carries a problem: it reminds anyone who remembers or sees the original around the same time that the source was only really OK. Boyle's Trainspotting felt whizbang and stylistically cheeky the same way Tarrantino's movies of the time did and those don't play that well anymore, either. Not a bad film but not a great one, either.

TRAGEDY GIRLS

A fun exercise in Wes Craven style culture twisting ends up feeling like a satire on Trump's America. It just needed a little push further into darkness. That said I'd watch it again and readily recommend it.





From TV

THE OA

Speaking of DIY the queen of choose your own writing/acting adventure, Brit Marling brought her most ambitious offering yet with this long form tale of atrocity, survival and the forces beyond (whatever they might be). Right up to the characteristic it-all-makes-sense-now climax it intrigued without fail but the climax itself overreached what viewers might have tolerated after living through so much beforehand.



CHANNEL ZERO

Both seasons of this long form horror series began impressively with slowburn plotting and truckloads of atmosphere and both felt too stretched to be fully effective at six episodes a piece where four would have packed more of a punch. Nevertheless, there is another season and I will give it a go as the overall quality improved between the first and second. What is really on show here is sharp genre thinking that harks back to the sci-horror of early UK tv and the kind of ethereal dark folklore of the internet. That alone is worth the try to see if it can also learn from its own shortcomings.

13 REASONS WHY

Mostly effective YA adaptation suffered from a dragging uniformity of the parts, possibly following the source novel. This left the central act without plausible motive and, when shown, wildly disproportionate violence (however highly effectively done).




AMERICAN VANDAL

Very funny parody on true crime serials this high school whodunnit was so engaging and deftly orchestrated that the tension of suspicion overtook the satire. The denouement suffered because of this as it had a point to make despite the drama. It was meant to be banal in context but just felt ...  banal.

2017: THE LOW

ALIEN: COVENANT

Ridley Scott's bizarre use of science fiction to validate his bronze age notion of divine creation could only accentuate how predictable and dull his story was. Expensive rubbish.







JUPITER'S MOON

A wonderfully begun allegory of the alien (a refugee) having super powers ends in sludgy theistic messaging.









BLADERUNNER 2049

Denis Villeneuve not only failed to save this unbidden sequel with a lot of visual splendour and the occasional strong scene, he made me care less and less about it as each minute of its two and three quarter hours. Nice looking but unconvincing and unengaging. I'd add "pity" but I feel none.


SUBURBICON

George Clooney's cover version of the Coens, written, worryingly, with the Coens themselves, promises too much and struggles to deliver more than the basics. Tries to be satire but only ends up being trying.





THE BUTTERFLY TREE

Poignant story of a woman dealing with great difficulty ruined by a bizarre love triangle involving a father and son. Grief can be funny but this isn't.






THE DISASTER ARTIST

Avowing a kind of reverence for a film whose cult celebrates its crappiness writer/director James Franco fails to convince he's doing anything better than squeezing another cheap laugh out of it.

Review: THE FLORIDA PROJECT

Two kids against a purple wall. A scream off. They respond. This keeps up until the third gets there and tells them to follow him. They do, running past huge cartoon heads, balloons, fruit and great splats of colour, all shops, to a landing of the purple place they live in, the project of the title, where they spit on the car below. The owner comes out and yells at them and they return fire with adult turns of phrase that aren't so much cute as worrying. They disperse. The girl runs back to her motel room where her mother Halley, almost entirely tattooed and green haired, is on the bed gazing at the tv. When the manager knocks because of the spitting a few minutes later, Halley shouts at her daughter to get the door. She has reasons for not answering it herself.

Halley manages the day to day hanging by a thread as she scams, does tricks or just begs her way through the days. The rent is always due and it's always too much. Meanwhile her daughter Moonee runs amok, leading any other kid she can find to cause mischief. But this film makes it clear that children with their nuclear level energy are pushing their own knowledge with each new experience more potent a lesson than anything in the classrooms they will soon be entering. They hangout at the swamps or the abandoned housing projects, all with names of dashed hopes like Magic Castle or Future World. It's Orlando, Florida, home of Disney World. But Disney World is over the road which is lethally busy, the cars speed thickly, their roofs like the fins of sharks. From a pad nearby a helicopter seems constantly taking off, carrying those who can afford it into the sky like a rapture for the one percent. Halley and Moonee give it the finger at one point. The July 4th fireworks from Disney World are spectacular, even seen from the damp grass of the swamp.

This day to day plotlessness is made compulsive movie going through the sheer boldness of its presentation. We don't have to work too hard to know the irony of all the candy coloured poverty but neither are we beaten about the head by it, that's simply what life looks like here. The persistent aural reminders are the same with kiddy pop and cartoon soundtracks on televisions that stay on when everyone's asleep. And the tension between the ugly acts of grown-ups and the gormless disasters of the children's play commands us: it's a system but it's always on the edge of snapping.

And it's the performers. Bria Vinaite as Halley goes from sweetness to cozening to outright horrifying as she swings between survival and an unrestrained sense of injustice that hasn't developed past her childhood. Brooklyn Prince as Moonee is only anything but natural when she's trying to be a grown up and then she seems heart-rendingly aware of its futility. Her dialogue and that of the other kids, especially when together never drops from natural, never sounds scripted. The film's thread of the elastic boundary between life and its violations is dependent on the direct identification we are forced to make between the wildness of the children and the only partially guarded chaos of their parents. Each moment feels precarious, each happy laugh a second away from a scream.

Presiding over this or what little he can control is Bobby the manager. Willem Dafoe whose intensity has taken him from roles as Jesus, to the chaotically violent Bobby Peru, to a recreation of Max Schreck as Nosferatu and beyond, seems to bring all that experience and the rest of the hemisphere on his shoulders as he keeps as much of the chaos on his watch from exploding beyond its bounds. Is he a little too good? Maybe, but if so it's the character rather than the performance which fills the gaps of any under-drafting with what feels like a very muscular concern for those around him. His scene with a freezingly banal paedophile demonstrates this: he knows he can't stop the man from invading anywhere else but uses a telltale detail found on the predator's driver's licence to buy a little time because that's really all that can be believably done about anything on that side of the road.

Taking in the sustained power of this film I was reminded as I might have been of John Cassavetes' often brutal naturalistic style, adopted from Italian neo-realism and the French New Wave. The unflinching and knowing eye coupled with the confident direction of the actors to keep themselves grounded in documentary realism is there for anyone to compare. But I was also taken by the direction of the children and the realisation of their secret world and how it reminded me of a favourite from years ago, Beasts of the Southern Wild. While never attempting the magical realism of that piece, The Florida Project's joy in examining the seriousness of children's play is as rich as it is in Beasts which is a tribute I'll happily part with.

And then, as the worst of the threads wind tight and the inevitable teeters to its crash in these lives we find a moment of magnanimity and even love that lifts us like children to its warmth. It's the sole moment with scored music and feels as manipulative as you might imagine but it is so perfect for what you need after the rest of the film that you simply don't care about that. Strong candidate for best of the year.

Review: THE DISASTER ARTIST

Tommy and Greg meet at a theatrical audition in San Fransisco. Greg fenceposts his way through a scene from Beckett. Tommy storms through the iconic "Stella!" moment from Streetcar. They pair up as potential acting buddies. Moving to L.A. they fail steadily until the inspiration strikes and Tommy decides that the only way out of the vicious circle is for them to make their own movie. Using Tommy's apparently bottomless pit of money they buy equipment, hire crew and cast actors and off they go to make a film that has become the world's current champion of cinematic rubbish. Through this we get Tommy's erratic mood swings and exhausting delusional behaviour and a premier that would crush the thickest-boned film director in history. This is a true story. Or is it?

Writer/director/star James Franco doesn't seem to mind. He fashions a polished account of the psychological maelstrom that created a film as a vanity project, beginning with a series of recognisable Hollywood figures attesting to the phenomenon of the film, The Room, before plunging into an imagined origins issue. Sometimes going for the laugh, sometimes starkly mocking, sometimes appreciative of the effort, Franco never gets close enough to his subject to find any single anchor point from which to float any comedy, drama or any substantial development. What we get is very little more than the late night screening audience's responses of the original film.

This is the problem. My reservations about the film were from a worry that the young and confident Franco, a contemporary Hollywood winner, would spend his screen time punching down. But who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel? Well, he does. Beyond the merest smudge of recognition that Wiseau might have serious problems Franco goes for the jugular in the hope that it's close enough to the funny bone to grab some collateral laughs so this can be both a pisstake and an earnest tribute to force of personality.

Comparison's with Tim Burton's Ed Wood are impossible to ignore. Burton took pains to tell us how, for all his risible missteps and gormless optimism, Ed Wood at least wanted to make good films and had ideas about how to do that. Cast above reality as a kind of bright lesser god we had no problem seeing the admiration at the heart of the laughter. If you watch Plan 9 or Glen or Glenda without expecting a laugh fest you will see real movies in there, ineptly executed but made for real. Burton also gives as perspective with a fictitious meeting between Wood and the genuine film god Orson Welles who, drinking in defeat, lets Ed know that the problems in cinema Olympus can be as niggling and infuriating as they are down there on Skid Row. James Franco gives as a Saturday Night Live sketch stretched wincingly over an hour and three quarters, ignoring the opportunities already in the screenplay (e.g. that Tommy would make a better villain than romantic lead) that might have led him to create something more powerful and profound with the forces of avowed fiction.

I went to a screening of The Room with a friend who had been to several. It began at midnight and we took our seats after arming ourselves with a bag of plastic spoons handed to us by the ushers. Lights down and the session started, the titters starting with the name of Tommy Wiseau on almost every credit. And then from the first scene on the heckles stormed from the audience. Every time a set of decorative spoons appeared on screen there was a rain of plastic spoons aimed at it. At first resistant I joined in, really finding it funny, throwing spoons, the lot. I laughed till it hurt.

But what did I find funny? The Room is a poorly made movie with a serious error in judgement every few minutes. Poor acting, bizarre action blocking, a narrative that lifts and falls like an autumn leaf in winter and an overall dreariness that saps the lifeforce of any of its audience members. In the crowd I succumbed willingly, joining the tidal response the way that Winston Smith is caught up in the shouting during a Hate Week screening in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Everyone would. If you didn't you would suffer the worst spite alienation since that time at primary school. If you watched it alone you wouldn't laugh; you would turn it off after a few scenes from annoyance or boredom something similarly oppressive. The midnight screenings of The Room are neither film appreciation nor interactive like Rocky Horror sessions, they are the Bear Pit and the Orwell Hate Week of today. To be in that crowd is to join the purgative good taste that Picasso correctly warned us was the chief enemy of creativity, a philistinism that shouts as deafeningly and laughs as woodenly as only norm-seeking cutlural explosions can: it brings us back the great middling void and from there we get to guffaw openly at this lame little misstep. When I checked Youtube for phonecam clips of midnight screenings I heard every single taunt I'd heard at the screening, each last one learned by rote and uttered as though fresh, night after night.

James Franco does not convince me that he's doing anything more than repackaging the mediocrity of these screenings, getting a chance to double the fun by playing the delusional narcissist at the phenomenon's centre with an accent as perfect as the wig. He can find none of the meaning Tim Burton found in Ed Wood and is left with another syllable correct heckle refined from a Youtube moment. And, really, when the warmest and most satisfying moment of your feature length film happens after the credit sequence it's time to reassess the expense of your time and effort.

Review: THE KILLING OF A SACRED DEER

Stephen is a middle aged surgeon who meets teenaged Martin in secret. Their relationship feels parent and child and extends to Stephen giving Martin an expensive watch as a present. Their conversation is stilted, as though they've only recently met, but also hints at a deeper intimacy. Martin begins to encroach on Stephen's work and then home life, drawing invitations from Stephen that have the ring of extortion.

Home life feels bourgeois, the couple, both doctors keep their tobacco habits from each other while the teenage daughter and tween boy appear to behave as we might expect, with both age appropriate sensitivity and difference clearly on show. Not an idyll by any means but vulnerable. This is where Martin enters as plot driver as he reveals the plan we have been waiting for from the first scene.

I won't spoil this but will say that this is the point where the film shifts from a kind of stylised realism to a gritty kind of magical realism. Whatever we are to make of Martin's power we can clearly see the effects and are compelled to follow the desperation of the characters to its ghastly end.

Lanthimos builds his world carefully, allowing us only enough empathy with the central characters to keep up but releasing enough when it matters to have us on the edge of our seats. The sense of threat and potentially explosive violence is constant. But the sinews of seduction within this horrifying tale serve to inject a vein of nauseous upset. The perfectly cast Barry Keoghan has a Max Cady's expertise with a smooth turn from gormless simpleton to unsettling manipulator. His steel blue calculation forces the conversations his own way. Sometimes that's the conquest of the daughter of the house and sometimes that's a perfectly turned threat to the parents.

Colin Farrell has a difficult task under a massive bush of beard and his deadpan Dublin lilt. His personal fortress is only that deeply walled and his surprise at Martin's success results in a palpable struggle with his own ethical sense. Nicole Kidman plays an older version of her role in Eyes Wide Shut, an American royal with a keen eye on the preservation of her realm. Sunny Suljic plays the kind of boy on the verge of bursting adolescence that we saw in Todd Solondz's best early efforts and Raffey Cassidy brings a hear rending vulnerability to her teenage girl longing for life beyond the home beautiful. However, the one I'll mention in dispatches here is the one I took a few ticks to identify. Martin's mother, in an excruciating scene of arranged seduction, pushes herself toward Stephen with the wiles of a mature woman but the compulsion of a teenager. I couldn't work out hwo it was until she grinned. It was a nervous grin but it flashed like a photo ID. Alicia Silverstone, still golden and energetic has reached from Clueless to this grinding horror with a commitment that leaves her pathetic as a character but brave and prepared as an actor.

This film is oddly more difficult than it's more fanciful predecessors as it keeps the alien force at its heart pumping solidly, making the already strained realism of the first act unnerving. That is why I will keep buying a ticket with his byline and it was the same in the eighties and nineties with David Lynch: I just had no control over what I might see and it scared me and I would much rather be scared by a risk taker than watch a logically perfect genre piece. I like popcorn movies but I love ones that make me think about what I'm buying a ticket to. The weird and the wonderful, the terrifying and the bleak, at their best lure me with the same kind of heart we see naked and pulsing in the opening shot of this film.