Hostiles

Alternate Title:  A Million Ways to Die in the West

                                                                                                                                                            

One sentence synopsis:  A veteran of the Indian Wars is assigned to escort a dying Indian chief back to his tribal homelands in Montana.

Things Havoc liked:  I love Westerns. I love the iconography, the setting, the themes, the action, everything about Westerns. Not to say that there aren't incomprehensibly awful movies made with that setting, but in January, when there's nothing to see but a bunch of dump-off films that no studio has faith in, and a screaming horde of oscar-bait movies that all came out on New Year's Eve, one kind of has to take movies by genre and concept more than by anything else, and a Western suited me just fine. The entire genre still lives in the shadow of the titans of the early 90s, especially Unforgiven and Tombstone, both masterpieces of the genre (the former won the Best Picture award that year), which stamped their form indelibly upon the genre and all films within it thereafter. At the time, many critics thought that Unforgiven in particular had closed the books on all there was to be said for the Western, but Hollywood doesn't work that way, and we've had a number of Westerns since then, some good (True Grit), some bad (Cowboys and Aliens), some modern (Hell or High Water) or otherwise setting-crossing (Serenity), but all ineffably Westerns, and most, on the whole, a credit to their forebears. The genre may not have the prominence that it once had back in the 50s or 60s, when the Western was regarded as one of the surest moneymaking prospects in Hollywood, but Westerns still get made, and the good ones, at least still try to say something about the world when they are. So it was that, still in recovery from the flu and looking for something with which to start the calendar year of 2018 (even if 2017's film calendar still has a film or two to run), I spotted a Christian Bale, Wes Studi, Rosamund Pike vehicle promising six-shooters and mustaches and long tracking shots across desolate plains, and settled in on a Friday night to watch something good.

Things Havoc disliked:That is not what happened.

2017 has been a banner year for film, without question, and one of the many consequences of its stellar slate of films has been that we haven't seen a lot of films like this one in a while, but they are still out there, waiting to strike as soon as your guard is down. Hostiles is just such a hidden trap, a movie that looks very good from the trailers, cast, and concept level, but completely implodes once it gets around to actually trying to tell its story. It is not a good film in general, nor a good western in specific. In fact, it downright sucks, in a way that we have not seen in quite some time. So let's analyze for a moment who could possibly be the one responsible for this dreadful state of -

... what's that? It's directed by Scott Cooper? Oh... well there we have it then.

Yes, Scott Cooper, a man who never met a screenplay he did not feel needed to be more on-the-nose, more anvilicious, more filled with trepidatious pauses and forlorn looks at the camera, a director whose entire filmography is full of sound and fury and signifies very very little. I know that many people liked Crazy Heart, the 2009 Jeff Bridges vehicle, and I even know some who liked Out of the Furnace, but I remember him from 2015's Black Mass, a movie in which Johnny Depp played a vampire and called himself Whitey Bulger, and Cooper did everything he could to disguise whatever else the film might have been about, beyond a handful of disconnected events that may or may not have had anything to do with Whitey Bulger. I didn't hate Black Mass, but it was not a good movie, and Hostiles, for all the differences in tone and theme and genre, is honestly even more of the same, a plodding, placid film directly from the Terrence Mallick school of filmmaking. But where Mallick is at least an interesting visual filmmaker, Cooper has simply learned that some directors place long, empty spaces between every line that every actor intones, but has not learned why. The result is a movie that is stuck in the tonal sensibilities of the worst parts of recent years, but the genre sensibilities of the early 1990s. Not a good combination.

The year is 1898, and life is hard in the West. Commanches raid farmsteads in New Mexico, while reservation jumpers are hunted down by the US Army with extreme prejudice. Captain Blocker (Christian Bale), a veteran US Army Captain, is assigned a mission by his commanding officer (Stephen Lang, in a rare moment of life within the otherwise dead film) to escort a dying Indian chief and his family (Wes Studi) back to their homelands in Montana, so that he can die in peace. Why is this mission so vital that the President of the United States issues a personal and direct order that it be accomplished? I have no idea, for the film is not interested in that question. It is interested instead in the fact that Captain Blocker, who seemingly fought in every single war between the US Army and an Indian tribe in the thirty years prior to this film, is a very bad man, a murderer of men, women, and children, and consumed by all-powerful hate for the Natives he has spent a lifetime battling. Thus far, we are on good thematic ground, with the hero revealed as a broken-down killer, much like in this film's most obvious ancestor, Unforgiven itself, which this movie is so endebted to that it steals quite a few major lines from the aforementioned Clint Eastwood piece, wholesale. Still, this would all serve well enough were the rest of the film, say, a character study of this broken and hate-ravaged soldier, or perhaps a slow exploration of the means by which he discovers a route to becoming something else. Unfortunately, the movie is neither of these things, preferring instead to be about nothing at all besides its own portentous, over-weighty dialogue, and its cynical marginalization of the very people it purports to be exposing the cruelties towards.

What do I mean? Well consider the setup above. A man who hates Natives is now forced to escort a Native chief halfway across the country through territories filled with hostile bandits and Commanche raiders. And yet of all the many and varied paths that the film could potentially take from here, the film chooses none of them, preferring instead to simply have Bale sit stone-facedly in the grass or in his saddle and stare off across the plains as though reviewing internally the emptiness of his life. I don't mean the life of the character, I mean the emptiness of Bale's life having been forced to make this movie. Bale spends the entire film in an unplaceable monotone that sounds like a Ron Swanson impression, staring into space blankly as the various other characters he meets recite ridiculously overwrought lines at him about how dark his soul is or how dark their own souls are or how dark everyone's soul has become or how much they wish they understood the meaning of the darkness that lies within their souls or how they wish their souls were not so dark but unfortunately they are, or or or or or. I get the desire to tell a revisionist Western (though the notion is not as revolutionary as Cooper thinks it is), but you actually do have to tell the Western, not just gesture at the self-evident notion that everyone who dared set foot in The West was a soul-destroyed PTSD-riddled hollow wreck of a person, whispering dialogue concerning the darkness that was their souls at ten second intervals before riding over the next ridge to do it all over again. The entire film is comprised of nothing but dead-eyed stares and monotone line delivery, until we as the audience start to wonder if the problem isn't something more medical than "the sickness of man". At least when The Homesman acted like this, it had the excuse of portraying characters that had literally gone insane.

But heavy-handed as this sort of thing is, I might have forgiven it (might) if the movie had had the balls to actually follow through with the premise that the story of the West is truly the story of the Natives, and that the disconnection the other characters feel has to do with the horrors they have perpetrated on such people. Unfortunately, for all its pretensions at telling a revisionist story of modern understandings of The West, the movie's interest in its Native characters, which as mentioned before include Wes Studi, the greatest Native American actor of all time (go watch Geronimo or Last of the Mohicans if you disagree with that), is practically non-existent. In addition to Studi's Chief Yellow Hawk, there is his son, Black Hawk, his daughter, his daughter-in-law, and grandson, and not a single one of these characters get a goddamn thing to do throughout the entire movie but sit in a circle and look enigmatically upon everyone else, without saying a word, and occasionally demurely giving gifts to the white characters and radiating angelicness. Yellow Hawk himself doesn't get much more to do. He and Blocker are established as being old enemies, both bad men who did bad things during the Indian Wars to one another's people, who have hated one another for years without halt. Yet Studi doesn't get more than a handful of lines across the entire movie, all of which are calm, dispassionate requests for Captain Blocker to listen to his wisdom in terms of how to deal with other Indian tribes, how to deal with his guilt, or (get this) thanks to the good Captain for having the common decency to treat him... better? It's not quite as obsequious as it sounds, but it's not far off, and this is the only Native character in the film with what amounts to a real part! Yellow Hawk and Blocker share barely a handful of scenes together, and then suddenly transform into best friends, with Blocker telling Yellow Hawk in his own language that he carries a piece of him in his heart. There is a way that this sort of admission between two old enemies could work, hell there is a way where it could be profoundly moving. But it would have to be in a movie that was about the relationship between these men, while this film is not interested in being about anyone, least of all the Natives, who are treated here like the Indian equivelant of Spike Lee's famous Magical Negro archetype, props for the movie to trigger the spiritual renewal of a sinful white character who is now redeemed. At least the majority of the Magical Negro movies out there (Legend of Bagger Vance for instance) actually involve the black character getting to do something, be it give wizened speeches or demonstrate his superior ways. This movie seems to posit that the mere presence of Native Americans will render you more spiritual and absolve you of your sins, like the symbols of some holy faith, bereft of the need to actually do anything.

Final thoughts:   I said before that I love Westerns, even though this sort of failing is not unheard of in the majority of them. Hell, I like Dances with Wolves, which a number of people have castigated for being nothing but another White Savior film. Maybe that's fair and maybe it isn't, but goddammit, in Dances with Wolves the Natives got to be real characters, with speaking parts and character arcs and everything, not mute props dragged along so that the "real" characters could react to their presence and be cleansed of their guilt. And when you combine all this with the fact that none of the characters actually do anything to cleanse said guilt beyond staring into space and occasionally getting in gunfights with the most thinly-characterized "bad people" imaginable, well let's just say that a film which starts to give me Under the Skin flashbacks is not precisely putting its best foot forward.

Westerns have come a long way in the last three decades, not always to great effect, but frequently so. Go watch Unforgiven or Tombstone, or Geronimo, or for that matter Wind River from earlier this year, as all of those movies are good movies first and foremost, with characters who take action and who deal with one another as people might do. Not all of them involve Native Americans, but the ones that do actually involve them, they don't play-act at involving them and then pretend that they somehow have something to say that the aforementioned movies did not say. Above all though, go watch movies that are actually about something, because Hostiles is about nothing besides its director's ego, and the highly out-of-date sensibility that the only thing you have to do to increase representation of Native Americans in movies is to physically include them within the frame occasionally.

Final Score:  3.5/10

Next Time:  We continue our trek through the Oscar Bait of 2017.  What gems shall we find therein?

Winter 2017 Roundup, Part 3

And now for things which are in some ways other than anticipated previously.

I promised myself that this year, 2018, I was going to finally break with the tradition of 2017 and actually catch up with my reviews, and despite a sudden bout of death-flu, that is what I am going to do.  So let's have a look at the last movies we saw in the calendar year of 2017, and look ahead to the year to come.

The General's Post Winter Roundup, Part 3

The Shape of Water

Alternate Title:  Fishfucking

One sentence synopsis:    A mute custodian at a top secret research clinic gets to know a strange, magical fish-creature brought there from the Amazon at the height of the Cold War.


The Verdict:  No, I don't think the alt-title is at all inappropriate, given what this move is about. You go see an R-Rated Guillermo del Toro movie, and you're gonna see some strange shit, man.

I'm a movie critic, and therefore I'm more or less contractually obligated to sing the praises of Mexican fantasist Guillermo del Toro, and to discourse windily whenever his name comes up about how much of a visionary he is relative to the studio hacks that populate Hollywood, etc etc etc... Unfortunately, I've always been hamstrung by the fact that I've disliked more of his movies than I've liked. Yes, Pan's Labyrinth was a masterpiece. Yes, the Hellboy series is awesome. But absent those two, we're left with crap like Mimic, Crimson Peak, Blade II, and Pacific Rim (yes, Pacific Rim was crap. Fight me!). He's a fantastic visual director, one of the few imagesmiths in Hollywood who really understands the soul behind B-movie genres like splatter-horror and Kaiju, but he also brings a real lack of narrative and structural polish to the proceedings, which ultimately result in most of his films turning out to be average creature features with excellent art design. I was consequently nervous about this new features of his, a send-up to Creature from the Black Lagoon, but was somewhat re-assured by the strength of the cast.

So who's in it? Well Michael Shannon, for one, an absolutely stellar character actor who has been in bad movies but never been bad in them, and who here is playing to type as a tightly-wound G-man in charge of a project to capture a fish-man thing from the Amazon jungle and bring it to the United States for testing. Shannon is in his element here, menacing and fragile and awkward and creepy all at the same time, a pastiche of 50s stoicism asked to loom about as only he can. His nemesis, this time around, is English indie actress Sally Hawkins. I've yet to have an opportunity to speak of Hawkins in these reviews, as she's always been firmly lodged in the independent film circuit (she's been in several recent Woody Allen films, and won a slew of awards for a 2008 Mike Leigh comedy). Nevertheless, I now have cause to regret the lack for she is fantastic in this movie, pulling off one of the hardest tricks in the world by creating a comprehensive, three-dimensional character, complete with goals, desires, aspirations, and libido (it's astounding how often the scriptwriters forget that part), all without speaking a word. Her character, Elisa, is a mute, communicating only by sign language and expression, a useful characteristic when dealing with fish-men who do not possess vocal chords. The movie does not infantalize her, which is a rarety for characters with disabilities, and her performance is the best thing here.

The rest of the cast is equally stellar, from Boardwalk Empire's Michael Stuhlbarg as a concerned scientist (movies like this require one), to Olivia Spencer, who is basically playing the sassy black friend, but is really damn good at it, so who am I to complain, to Richard Jenkins as a closeted gay artist who lives next to Eliza, and who, due to his co-star being mute, gets to steal all the best lines in the film. The creature itself, meanwhile (played, of course, by long-time del Toro collaborator Doug Jones), while it isn't the phantasmagorical nightmare-beast of some of del Toro's other creations (the fucking Pale Man has everyone beat there), is toned down into something more humanizable and evocative, which is a good thing, given that the movie requires it not to be terrifying to be pitied, studied, and, eventually, screwed. Yes, screwed. The movie is explicit about this, so if you ever wanted to see a scene where the mother from Paddington Bear has sex with a fish-man, boy, have I got a film for you. I'm not sure if this aspect adds to the movie or not, to be honest, the sequences are fine but it brings up certain unavoidably uncomfortable questions (of consent, for one thing). Then again, this is a fairy tale, and del Toro a modern fantabulist who does not shy away from the adult materials therein, so I suppose I should not complain. The film makes the most of its early-cold-war setting, with everything taking place inside massive ferrocrete bunkers, gargantuan brutalist laboratories, enormous industrial plants, or spiraling, Victorian buildings. Always, the aesthetic seems to be elegant corners carved out of enormous facilities, like the upstairs lofts that Eliza and her neighbor inhabit above a richly-appointed movie palace. None of this is all that uncommon for del Toro, consider where Hellboy took place, but it works with the paranoid structure of Shannon's character, and as a space for Eliza and her friends to scoot about in unseen.

Ultimately, The Shape of Water isn't a great movie, it's a bit too pedestrian a retelling of Creature from the Black Lagoon for that, despite the fish-sex, but it is a good one, in parts a very good one. Del Toro's command of space and aesthetic is entirely intact, and despite the absurdities on-offer, the movie does not embarrass itself at any point. It does seem to think that there's more hay to be made from its central conceit of "look how uptight the 50s were" than there is, given that every film since 1966 has had the same, but that doesn't hurt it overmuch. As such, if creature features are your thing, this film will be an excellent choice. And if not, then give it a shot anyway. Where else are you likely to encounter a sign language explanation of the proper functioning of fish-man sexual organs?

... you know what, I don't actually want to know the answer to that.

Final Score:  7/10

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Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle

Alternate Title:  Jumanji: GOTY Edition

One sentence synopsis:   Four high school students discover a video game that transports them into a fantastic adventure world.

The Verdict:  The original Jumanji, a 1995 movie by pulp-master-general Joe Johnston (The Rocketeer, Captain America), was not a great movie, but it was a good one, a Robin Williams vehicle that was funny and adventurous when it needed to be, didn't take itself tremendously seriously, and did everything it needed to do in order to be remembered fondly as a landmark of 90s nostalgia. As we presently live in the era when 90s nostalgia is regarded as a lode to be mined by every film studio on the planet, of course we wound up with a sequel, and I probably would have given it not a second thought, save that the trailers... intrigued me. They promised a movie that was fun and funny, starring multiple comedians of note, and placing, front and center, one of my favorite actors working, and the highest-paid man in Hollywood at the moment, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. Dwayne Johnson is a man hewed directly out of calcified charisma, who has been in bad movies but always manages to elevate them at least somewhat, and so I went to see this movie, expecting that The Rock would headline a cavalcade of adventure-comedy and bring a smile to my face.

What I did not expect was for the film to remind me how much I have missed Kevin Hart, and Jack Black.

Kevin Hart is a comedian who rides a very thin line between funny and annoying, and who has fallen off of it before. He generally appears in awful-looking films that I have no interest in seeing, and so I have not had much to do with him in the last several years. And now I regret this lack, because Hart is riotously funny in this movie, easily the best thing in it. With the premise being that four high schoolers are transported into video game archetypes in the world of Jumanji, Hart plays a football star who finds himself now in the diminutive body of... well... Kevin Hart, and is not happy about it in the slightest. The sequences where he tries to exert his will physically against The Rock are exactly as hilarious as you would expect, as both men are skilled physical comedians, and are in their element here. Almost as good is Jack Black, who often plays a caricature of himself, but this time does a brilliant job as an Instagram-obsessed popular girl/airhead shunted into the body of an overweight, middle-aged man. In lesser hands, or with a lesser script, this could all have been played as nothing but a Gay Panic joke, but Black plays the material sermon-straight, which is manifestly the right choice. Perhaps the best sequence in the movie is one where he, as the popular girl, must teach Karen Gillian, a bookish nerd-girl transported into the body of Lara-Croft-style sex bomb, how to be sexy and flirtatious. As to Gillian herself, I've not known her from much beyond certain seasons of Doctor Who, but she's excellent here, playing a semi-genre-savvy high school revolutionary who abruptly finds herself stuck in a crop top and short shorts, and given the ability to dance-fight with armed men. Ironically, the only main character who doesn't pop off the screen the way the rest of them do is The Rock himself, not from any lack of charisma (God no), but because his character arc (the nerdy hero who gets transported into Superman's body, and must discover his inner bravery) doesn't allow for much. There's moments, of course, any movie with The Rock is likely to have those, but overall, the movie puts The Rock in a back-seat position when it comes to the best lines and sequences. It's a weird decision, narratively.

Unfortunately, it's also the only at-all weird decision that the filmmakers made. The new Jumanji is the brainchild of Jake Kasdan, son of the renowned Laurence Kasdan, one of the very greatest genre scriptwriters to ever work in Hollywood (his resume includes Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and four separate Oscar nominations. This may be unfair, but his son has a lot of catching up to do. There's nothing tremendously wrong with the structure of Jumanji or with its direction, but that's only because the movie is as formula as you can get, a structure-obsessed piece of Hollywood fluff, with action setpieces parceled out at precise intervals, between which lie beats of character "drama" so obvious that one knows which way the film is going with them before they even begin. I certainly wasn't looking to a Jumanji sequel to revolutionize my understanding of narrative storytelling, certainly, but it's disappointing that nothing was done to spice the material up beyond hiring comic actors with charisma and giving them license to improvise. And even that doesn't extend to everyone. Bobby Cannavale, a fine character actor whom I know best from various television dramas, has basically nothing to do, playing a one-note video game boss (literally) whose biggest character attribute is the ability to spit centipedes from his mouth. More importantly, a fifth member of the troupe, un-announced by the trailers, turns out to be portrayed by one of the Jonas Brothers of all people (Nick, for those who can tell them apart). The best thing that can be said about Nick Jonas in this film is that he does not embarrass himself. The worst thing that can be said is that the previous sentence was the best thing.

So... Jumanji is not some kind of epochal story, destined to be remembered for all time, nor even a side-splitting classic of modern comedy, but for all that, it is not without its charms. I mean what I say when I praise all four of the leads, even The Rock, who may not have much to do, but mugs for the camera regardless in the best Rockian fashion. I won't pretend that I loved the film, but it's a decent enough little diversion, enjoyable on its own terms, and one that doesn't take itself seriously enough to ruin the proceedings. I can't pretend it will be remembered as a classic, nor that it will be featuring strong in my memory, but for what it is, it's an entertaining film, and one should never become too cynical to appreciate that.

Final Score:  6/10

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Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi


Alternate Title:  Metastory

One sentence synopsis:    As the First Order attempts to eradicate the last remnants of the resistance, Rey seeks to unravel her destiny as a wielder of the Force with the help of Luke Skywalker.


The Verdict: So, here we are.

It's a new year now, and every movie critic alive, from myself to the professionals, is presently engaged in looking back over the year just ended to see what sense can be pulled from it. Personally, I've been trying to catch up for the first time all year so that I can start 2018 with no review backlog (be still, my beating heart!), but as a result, I feel like I've come a bit late to the discussion of Star Wars, by which I mean that everyone has already commenced calling one another Nazis over their opinion of the film, and I feel sad to have missed my chance to be so-labelled. All joking aside, The Last Jedi has been one of the most polarizing movies that even recent history records. Though it has, thus far, made a billion dollars worldwide, there are those who still see those numbers as somewhat disappointing, given the scale of the all-out global media offensive that has accompanied it (has anyone seen a car ad that didn't feature Star Wars in the last couple months?). More importantly, the responses to the movie from critics and audience-goers alike has been decidedly mixed, with the obvious result that everyone has begun calling one another cucks, libtards, Nazis, racists and citing Donald Trump. Boy do I love the internet.

It's unlikely, given everything, that this review is going to be the deciding factor as to whether any of you reading it go see the movie, indeed its unlikely, given everything, that any of you haven't seen it already. As such, my purpose here must be a bit different than the standard review tenet of "tell the people whether they should see the film", but rather a retrospective of what I, an experienced filmgoer and fan of Star Wars, thought of the proceedings. And the answer? Well... it's complicated.

Let's get some basic elements out of the way. The Last Jedi is, above everything else, heartrendingly beautiful, shot and framed like a work of fine art, with a richness and eye for visual detail that stands alongside any of the great genre works of yesteryear. Certain sequences reference visually the classic shots of the old trilogy, while others showcase the universe of Star Wars in a way that we've never before seen. The soundtrack is spectacular, because of course it is, rousing and classical, and though it lacks any of the singular touchstone leitmotifs like the Imperial March or Duel of the Fates, it still buttresses the action tremendously well. The acting is superb across the board, something not always the case with Star Wars movies, with the standouts being Daisy Ridley (Rey), and Adam Driver (Kylo Ren), both of whom get the best and juiciest material as they both struggle with their place in the universe, with responsibility and duty, with their respective pasts, and with what place they wish to have in the new universe being created. Both of these actors took a while to grow on me in the first movie, but both of them are stand-out amazing here, and feature in several of the best sequences in the film, including a lightsaber combat (I shall speak no more of who is fighting what) that is the hands-down highlight of the entire affair. They are not, however, alone in this, as the returning characters from the original trilogy are just as good, with Carrie Fisher turning in her best performance in the entire series (as is fitting) as the world-weary, but still struggling on, figurehead of the entire resistance, a figure of almost mythical reverence to her crew and officers, and who gets several of the funniest lines in the movie. Mark Hamill, meanwhile, is absolutely on fire this time, playing Luke Skywalker not as simply Yoda to Rey's Luke, but as a bitter, defeated hermit, who has lived now long enough to see the cycles that perpetuate across the galaxy with the choices he and others have made, and wants to be done with it all. The story is consequently less Rey learning the ways of the Force from a wise old master, than it is Luke facing down what demons and flaws he had within him all along, trying to make a younger force sensitive see the larger picture to the mythic events of the day, and trying to provide not only guidance for Rey, but closure for himself. Finally, I'm just gonna come out and say it: The Porgs are cute and awesome. Come at me.

But let's be honest here, all of you already knew all of this before opening this review. Of course the visuals were amazing, they cost over half a billion dollars to produce. Of course the score is excellent, John Williams is a God. Of course the lead actors are great, we found that out from the previous movie. So what do I have to tell you about this film, as a Star Wars film, and its qualities or lack thereof? Well, simply put, this is probably the most daring Star Wars film I've ever seen, one of the most daring major franchise films of all time, purely because of the decisions that it makes concerning what the movie is actually about, both in terms of theme and tone, and in terms of simple plot mechanics. This is commendable, hell in some ways it's downright revolutionary. But it's also the source of a lot of problems, as some of the decisions the film makes, ballsy as they are, just aren't good.

What do I mean? Well, it's mostly a matter of structure and narrative. The concern prior to the film being released was that as Force Awakens was basically a clone of A New Hope, that Last Jedi would basically be a retread of Empire Strikes Back. It is very, very much not that, which is a positive overall, but it also makes the choice of sending my favorite character from the new series, former-stormtrooper Finn (John Boyega) down a plot cul-de-sac for the first hour of the movie for no real purpose beyond tendentious gestures at the wider universe that never really pay off to anything. It's not that Finn gets no screentime, for he does, nor that he is unenjoyable to watch during this time, for he is, but the whole sequence is awkwardly-placed, features the worst writing of the entire film, and sticks Finn next to an additional character, new to the series, named Rose. Again, there's nothing wrong with the concept here, Rose is the sort of below-decks, non-fantastical character that we don't get to see a lot of in Star Wars, nor does her actress (newcomer Kelly Marie Tran) do a poor job of portraying her. But the character feels shoehorned into the proceedings, given an immediate importance well beyond the scope of what her position in the narrative would appear to warrant, to the point where I seriously considered the possibility that this was a character introduced in some ancillary related media (a book, comic, or TV episode) with which I was simply expected to be familiar. A similar fate befalls Laura Dern's newly-introduced Admiral Holdo, brought into the narrative with the cinematic equivalent of trumpets to announce her advent, only for her entire plot arc to be a massive contrivance bordering on an idiot plot, wherein many large-scale problems could easily have been resolved with a single word to the right person, and were not solely so that Poe Dameron (still ably played by Oscar Isaac) has something to do for the first half of the film. Yes, Laura Dern is excellent overall. Yes her character arc is resolved in the most excellent manner possible (and with one of the coolest visuals I've ever seen), but all that Admiral Holdo does throughout the film is highlight the enormous pacing problems bedeviling most of the film as characters get shot off in different directions in pursuit of objectives that make little sense within the plot and less sense outside of it. On top of all that, is a massive tonal fault line running through the entire movie, as the earnest, pulpy line delivery clashes spectacularly with more snark-laden comedic lines designed to "take the piss" as it were out of the self-seriousness of Star Wars. It's not that I have anything against Star Wars playing things a little less Buck Rogers once in a while, but you can't match up dialogue from an Edgar Wright film directly next to something out of the Joseph Campbell stable and expect everything to come up shining, as the "let's not take this too seriously" material prevents people from taking seriously the material that comes directly after, begging the audience to take it seriously.

These are all serious problems with the film as a whole, not merely the sour grapes of various retrograde scum whom we imagine to comprise all forms of opposition to our opinions. And yet, I do not see them as "flaws" so much as "unavoidable complications" that arise when you take great risks as a storyteller, and director Rian Johnson, whom I have previously seen very little of, has swallowed enormous risk this time around, to the point where I have to stand in awe, for The Last Jedi is a movie that knows what it is to be a Star Wars movie, a film that plays with every aspect of audience expectation as to theme and narrative and meta-narrative and character, in the service of trying to create something that is truly "about" Star Wars as much as it is of Star Wars. Not all of these attempts work. Some blow up violently in the film's face. But when the movie threads that narrow passage, it produces sequences and character moments that we simply haven't seen before in any context within Star Wars, and precious few in any massive, multi-billion-dollar entertainment franchise. The character arcs for Rey and Kylo Ren, though they are the focal points of the film, work nothing like what I or anyone else would have anticipated, answering questions posed by the previous film(s) in ways that comment on our expectations as much as the characters involved themselves, and diverts the entire narrative theme of Star Wars into directions that it previously has not seen. Things as simple as what Kylo Ren's motivation actually is, what he desires and why he desires it, are fascinating, not so much because of the implications they line up for later films, but because we have simply never explored Star Wars before from these perspectives, and are now getting to do so. The entire plot arc of Rey and Luke on the hermetic island is less a retread of the Dagobah sequence from Empire Strikes Back than it is a metaphysical analysis of what Star Wars is on a narrative level, what sorts of stories it has told us in the past and what stories it might be able to tell us in the future. As much as this matters to Rey, and moreso to Luke, the person actually being addressed through most of it is us, the fans of Star Wars, we who find the series compelling and worthwhile, even if we don't necessarily know (or care) why. There are explosions in this movie. Dogfights and battles reminiscent of the greatest periodicals of WWII (including a bombing-run sequence that has few analogues in sci-fi in any context, mostly because the physics are stupid even by Star Wars standards). There are lightsabers and the use of the Force, and old mentors confronting fallen students on several sides of several coins. There is even comic relief, some of it good and some less so. But The Last Jedi is less a Star Wars movie than it is a movie about Star Wars movies, about legends and stories and what they mean to all of us, here and elsewhere. If A New Hope was a retelling of Joseph Campbell's Hero-with-a-Thousand-Faces theory, then The Last Jedi is a movie that asks us, sincerely, and without necessarily knowing the answer, what it is about that archetypical story that appeals to us so much, and what role such a tale plays in our lives, as imagined above the circumstances that we live in.

So, yes, I would have changed things in The Last Jedi. I would have reduced the presence of characters like Admiral Holdo and Rose and other characters we are told to care about for no reason other than the movie says so, and increased in turn the presence of previously-established, and interesting characters like Captain Fasma and Maz Kanata. I would have junked about a fifth of the dialogue overall, in an attempt to smooth out the cracks between the "Star Wars" writing and the "modern" writing. I would have restructured the plot in a number of major and minor ways. But given the film as it stands, warts and all, I am deeply impressed by it. It's a movie that does not play things safe, as the previous film did, seeking to prove that modern Star Wars films are possible, but instead seeks to show what is possible within Star Wars' framework, not necessarily by telling strange new stories, but by broadening the horizons of what Star Wars means as a franchise and a concept. It's a metanarrative gambit that could only have been spectacularly difficult to pull off, but that the director manages, somehow to execute upon, even if it leaves the film itself lacking polish that one might normally, and with reason, expect from a multimedia extravaganza like this one.

I enjoyed The Last Jedi very much, despite my reservations, and I respect the achievement of creating it even more. What it augurs for future Star Wars movies, I cannot say, as the film's purpose is not really to augur specific things, but to instead instill within us the sense that anything is possible. Perhaps Episode XI will be nothing but a return to the beats and themes of Return of the Jedi. Perhaps the new Han Solo movie will suck. Or perhaps none of these things will be the case, because this is Star Wars, and ultimately, there is a reason we gravitated towards it in the first place. This film doesn't always know what that reason is. But it does know that the reason is there, buried within ourselves and the stories we tell, waiting for the slightest spark of imagination to spring triumphantly to life.

Final Score:  7.5/10



Next Time: The Film Calendar doesn't end with the New Year, I'm afraid.  Next time we get to turn our heads to the Oscar-contenders that came out at the very end of the year, particularly for a primer on how to deal with Nazis.

Fall/Winter 2017 Roundup, Part 2

And now for additional things which are in some ways different

Still going here, ladies and gentlemen.  With a new year comes a new attempt to start afresh by catching up with everything we saw at the tail end of this remarkable year.

The General's Post Fall/Winter Roundup, Part 2

Murder on the Orient Express

Alternate Title:  Mustaches on the Orient Express

One sentence synopsis:    Internationally-famed detective Hercule Poirot must spring into action when a man with many enemies is murdered aboard a luxury train in Eastern Europe.

The Verdict:  Those whose tastes run to detective fiction must know of Agatha Christie's most enduring creation, the fastidious Belgian investigator Hercule Poirot, a 20th century rendition of the Sherlocke Holmes archetype, the eccentric sleuth whose perceptions and deductive skill penetrates all efforts at obfuscation. The character has been portrayed dozens of times, by great actors across stage, screen, and television, including David Suchet, Peter Ustinov, Charles Laughton, Ian Holm, and even Orson Welles (in a 1939 radio-play). It's not entirely astonishing to find someone like Kenneth Branaugh, a man who has never seen a piece of scenery he could not eat, nor a classic character he did not wish to cast himself as, deciding to undertake a rendition of his own.

Unfortunately, nothing else is particularly astonishing either.

Murder on the Orient Express, despite the services of an impeccable cast, a luxurious old-world location, and several decent-to-good ideas on the part of the cinematographer (Cypriot veteran Haris Zambarloukos, of Locke, and Branaugh's Thor), is pretty much a dud, and for this we really have nobody except Branaugh himself to blame, given that he directed the film, starred in it, and helped produce it in conjunction with Scott Free films (Ridley Scott's production company). It is a rote film, blessed with neither novel ideas as to how to perform the material nor any sense of proper excitement as it runs through its labyrinthine and yet rather absurd plot. None of this is the fault of the cast, a fascinating collection of excellent actors, including Judy Dench, Willem Defoe, Penélope Cruz, Derek Jacobi, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Daisy Ridley, all of whom do serviceable work as the various European and American archetypes they are assigned, particularly Dench's turn as a Russian Heiress and Defoe's as a bigoted Austrian doctor who is more than he seems. But none of the characters are given any real personalities beyond the vaguest sketches, it's as though Branaugh instructed all of them to do nothing more than look vaguely worried and recite their lines with a minimum of emotional effort. And given the sheer size of the cast, and the mechanical requirements of the plot (a murder has occurred, and Poirot must interrogate the various persons present to determine who the guilty party is), what this means is that the entire movie is simply a series of discussions wherein Poirot asks the same stone-faced upper-middle-class professional a series of questions which will slightly discomfit them, causing them to glance about their railway car in a guilty fashion before he moves on to the next one. Repeat for two hours and roll credits.

The plot's insane, of course. A wealthy American (Johnny Depp, an actor that studios seem to think we continue to want to see in the late 2010s) with a shady past is murdered while on a train from Istanbul to Vienna, and Poirot must deduce which of the other passengers has murdered him, after first digging into their backgrounds and associations with the murder victim, associations which every single one of them is plentifully supplied. I don't really blame the movie for this, as the book it's based on is equally labyrinthine, but the duty of the filmmakers is not only to give us something to elevate the complex material, but also to differentiate the film from the 1974 version, a rendition that (though I have little use for it) was regarded in its day as being one of the finest mystery thrillers ever made, directed by the great Sydney Lumet and starring a veritable cornucopia of towering screen actors, including Sean Connery (back when he still gave a shit), Lauren Bacall, (Sir) John Gielgud, Vanessa Redgrave, Anthony Perkins (Norman Bates), and even Ingrid Bergman (who won her third Oscar for the role). It's not that Branaugh has no ideas as to how to freshen the material, for he does, including a few bits of interesting cinematography (such as an extended long-take from overhead to show the reveal of the murder, with all of the characters hidden from view by their period hats), as well as re-casting one of the principal suspects (Doctor Arbuthnot) as a black veteran of WWI, so as to entwine the racial dynamics of the 1920s into the plot. But minor changes to an established formula are not enough to salvage anything really interesting from the whole affair. As to Branaugh himself, the best that can really be said is that he fails to embaress himself unduly, despite the ridiculous French accent and a mustache that someone really should have talked him out of (though admittedly, a sight gag of the mustache protector he wears at night is pretty good).

The 2017 version of Murder on the Orient Express is hardly an abomination, but in a year that has been packed full of great films, it is a decidedly amateurish, and fairly boring effort, one that does little beyond rehash the warmed over material without adding any spice to the mixture. It is a filler film that comes and goes without much actual impact, despite the services of the many talented and skilled individuals who were committed to its creation. It's honestly not worth spending as much time on as I have already, let alone any more, so my suggestion, given the transcendent year we've been having, and the plethora of excellent movies on offer, that you give this one a pass and go watch something worthwhile.

Final Score:  4.5/10

o-o-o-o-o

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Alternate Title:  South Fargo

One sentence synopsis:   A woman purchases space on three billboards outside a small town, demanding to know why the police have not solved the rape and murder of her daughter.


The Verdict:  ... for instance, you could consider this.

Martin McDonagh is a man with a strange pedigree when it comes to film in specific and art in general. An English/Irish expat who is probably better known as a playwright than a filmmaker, he has directed only a couple of films, but these included the wonderfully quirky, and difficult to describe In Bruges, as well as 2012's incredibly strange (too much so for its own good, frankly), Seven Psychopaths. This isn't enough of a filmography to really establish a career trajectory, but insofar as one can describe McDonagh's work, he seems to be a fan of extremely black comedy. This isn't exactly an uncommon affectation for the indie-minded directorial set, and there is an established cabal of actors who make the circuit of such films, floating in and out of the Coen Brothers' orbits. Among these actors are Francis McDormand and Sam Rockwell, and it is to them that McDonagh has turned to create one of the blackest comedies I've ever seen.

And holy hell, it's so good.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (the length of the title is going to necessitate some adjustment) is a wonderful film, brilliantly written, acted, shot, and produced on every level, a tour-de-force and one of the best movies of an incredible year. It is packed full of bleak humor and deep sincerity, with characters that are blunt and violent and awful and cruel and deeply human on every level. It introduces us to characters that have few if any parallels across mainstream cinema, and forces us to watch their lives and the way that they interact, mocking their foibles and showcasing their flaws all while forcing us to look past the mockery and the condemnation at the humanity beneath. No, I have not just segued into a particularly bad bout of Leonard Malkin worship, that is simply what the movie is about, and if you need further proof as to its qualities, consider that the film is more than two hours long, and part of the reason I didn't give it an even higher score is that I felt like it ended way too early.

McDormand plays Mildred Hayes, the divorced mother of a dead daughter and a living son, the former having been raped and murdered by an unknown assailant some seven months before. Seething with anger and resentment at the lack of progress in the case, she takes it upon herself to rent out three billboards outside of town, castigating the town police chief by name for not prioritizing her case, and lashing out angrily at anyone who tries to talk her into taking them down, whether they attempt to do so by careful persuasion or blunt intimidation. This leaves Police Chief Willoughby (Woody Harrelson, who has finally found a good role to play) in a bit of a bind, as he has no leads with which to solve the murder, and is presently busy dying of pancreatic cancer regardless. Willoughby's attempts to coax Mildred into taking down her billboards quietly are rebuffed, which infuriates Willoughby's chief deputy, Officer Dixon (Rockwell), a violent, racist thug and incompetent who nonetheless dreams of becoming a detective one day, and who takes care of his widowed mother as best he can. All of these characters, and the ones that surround them are fully realized people, horrible at times, violent, blunt and emotional, and watching them bounce off of one another is a true treasure. McDormand is on fire here, brimming over with relentless moral absolutism as she devastatingly rejects any and all excuses for why her daughter's murder has not been solved. Yet the film doesn't let her off the hook either, as her crusade for justice leads her to make demands that every male in town (or the country) have their DNA requisitioned to determine their guilt, and to ignore and even belittle the consequences that her crusade has for her still-living son (Manchester-by-the-Sea's Lucas Hedges). Harrelson, an actor I've never had a lot of use for, is almost as good this time, a cynical, weary sheriff who is simply trying to do right by everyone he knows with what little time he has left, the only person in town who manages to disarm Mildred, if

only for a moment. But the star of the show is Rockwell, who takes a character that in any other movie would be a (entirely genuine) caricature of small-town ignorance, and manages to humanize even him, using his gift for acidic comic timing and incomparable character work to render Officer Dixon into something more than just a repulsive slug, all without losing the inherent awfulness of who he is and what he does. McDonagh wisely simply lets the characters work, filling in the gaps with superb secondary work by actors like John Hawkes, playing Mildred's violent, probably-abusive ex-husband (again without losing the humanity of the character), or Peter Dinklage (who worked with McDonagh on In Bruges), playing a local car salesman with a deeply un-reciprocated crush on Mildred, who among other things gets one of the best lines in the film.

Mouthful though the name is, and limited though its release was, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is an exceptional film, a staggering triumph of character design, writing, and acting, showcasing excellent actors at the peak of their craft. Not only does it contrive to present characters more rich, more nuanced, and more textured than most films would dare attempt, but it does all of this while still managing to come out a comedy, albeit a very dark one indeed. Moments like Dixon's inability to find his badge during a moment where it is particularly important that he do so, or Mildred getting one over on a dentist who decides to take it upon himself to enforce his own moral policing on her behavior are simply ludicrously funny, despite or perhaps because of the underlying issues smouldering beneath the town surface. The entire production is a consequent gem, a movie that demands to be seen by anyone who enjoys pure cinema, or anything related to the Coen Brothers' orbit.

But... if this sort of thing isn't really up your alley, don't worry...

Final Score:  8.5/10

o-o-o-o-o

Coco

Alternate Title:  El Mariachi

One sentence synopsis:    A boy who dreams of becoming a musician finds his way into the Land of the Dead, and must discover the truth about his ancestors.

The Verdict: ... we've got you covered.

Pixar was the defining animation studio of the 2000s, of that there's really no debating. The 2010s... not so much. An increasing addition to sequels to movies that were not all that good in the first place (the Cars series for instance) was coupled with new features that simply did not meet the high standards of their glory days. Brave, Inside Out, and The Good Dinosaur were decent movies, certainly, but not the equal of masterpieces like Up and Wall-E, and even these were intercut with things like Monsters University, Cars 2/3, and Finding Dory, which varied from the good to the... less good. Admittedly, most of the above films would have been perfectly acceptable offerings from any studio other than Pixar, but setting high expectations comes with the price of not being able to slum it insofar as the critics are concerned. And with parent company Disney's own in-house animation studio producing signature masterpieces like Frozen, Big Hero 6, and Zootopia, I, at least, began to wonder if Disney hadn't poached all of Pixar's best people or ideas, and if the studio would ever return to the prominence it once enjoyed.

I still wonder that, to be frank, but the question has become somewhat more nuanced in recent weeks, because it turns out that Coco is a goddamn masterpiece.

Yes, that's right, from out of nowhere whatsoever, Pixar has pulled a gem out of their bag of tricks and given us a movie as great as their classics of yesteryear, a film that deserves to sit in the same pantheon as the finest Pixar films to be found. Though not an emotional gut-ripper like Up or Toy Story 3 (movies I have watched reduce whole theaters to puddles of slobbery tears), nor perhaps quite the equal of the singular animated achievement that was Wall-E (one of the finest animated films ever made), Coco is nonetheless a staggeringly great film, thanks to a compelling story, wonderful music, gorgeous animation, and a whimsical sense of fantastical fun drawn from another of the diverse collection of world mythologies that Pixar (and Disney) have decided to dive into in recent times, in this case the Mexican folklore surrounding Dia de los Muertos, known better north of the border as the Day of the Dead.

Miguel Rivera, the young scion of a large Mexican family of shoemakers, dreams of becoming a musician, like his great-great-grandfather before him, a world-famous balladeer who died in an untimely accident many years before. Unfortunately, his family is stridently against music and musicians, due to turmoils stemming back to the family's past, and forbids such pursuits. With the Day of the Dead approaching, and the boundaries between spirit and real worlds wearing customarily thin, Miguel's efforts to circumvent his family-imposed restrictions lands him as an accidental trespasser in the Land of the Dead, where his large, extended family of dead relatives further complicates matters. The mythology here is rich and detailed, but not spelled out beyond the absolute basics required to follow the plot, relying instead on a deep, rich, beautifully-textured and omnicolored art design that draws from everything from Aztec reliefs to Diego Rivera and everything in between. From Alebrijes (chimerical particolored creatures of Mexican folklore), to posthumous cameos by Frida Kahlo and El Santo (just... look them up), the movie is absolutely dripping in clever cultural in-jokes and references, all rendered in Pixar style, with a color palate that explodes off the screen, and a depth of field that, even in 2D, seems to stretch on for miles. What feats of technical wizardry were required to produce this gorgeous film, I can't possibly say, but the effort was worth it, as rarely, even in animation, does one encounter a visual feast such as the one Coco has to offer.

Equally good is the voice-cast, neither stunt-cast from name-brand celebrities nor tossed out as the least important element of the film (you may laugh, but I've watched major studios do both of those things with multi-hundred-million-dollar animated films in the last couple of years alone). Gael Garcia Bernal, of The Motorcycle Diaries, Babel, No, and Desierto, voices Hector, a con-artist and poor dead man with nobody left in the living world to remember him, with whom Miguel falls in in his attempt to find his illustrious ancestor. The ancestor in question is voiced by the increasingly ubiquitous Benjamin Bratt, an actor I have had little use for in the past (he was not exactly riveting in The Infiltrator), but who is unrecognizably excellent in this. Indeed both Bernal and Bratt, as well as youngster Anthony Gonzalez (playing Miguel) are spot on perfect in voice work that rivals anything being done in any animated context in recent years. Miguel is a clever, driven boy, desperate to follow his dreams despite the violent opposition of his entire extended family, living and dead alike, Hector is a trickster and a scoundrel, apparently on first-name terms with half of the dead of Mexico (most of whom would seemingly kill him if he wasn't already dead), while Miguel's Great Grandfather, Ernesto De la Cruz, is the sort of character that would be appearing in particularly un-self-aware telenovellas from the 1940s, all large hats and sweeping gestures. All three, along with a veritable army of secondary and tertiary characters are drawn so brilliantly well, but figuratively and literally, that the movie just (if you'll forgive the term, pops to life before you. And then there's the music, assembled by veteran film composer Michael Giacchino, whose credits include everything from Zootopia to Rogue One to half of Marvel's Phase 3 offerings. Infused deeply with everything from Bolero to Flamenco to Salsa to classic Mariachi fare, it's a fantastic accompaniment for a film that is, ultimately, about diving headfirst into a fantasy realm and luxuriating in its richness.

Coco is certainly not a perfect movie. The film's plot, when boiled down to bare bones, is nothing that special, and it carries a very strange message that could easily be interpreted as "stick with your family, even when they are abusive dicks", but balanced against the fundamental qualities of the film as a film, such complaints are very small beer. Coco is the first Pixar film in nearly a decade that has earned the title of "a Pixar film", and this fact alone should banish all doubt. It is a bouncy, adventurous film, with a vibrant atmosphere and a genuine warmth absent from all but the absolute finest animated movies on offer. Practically everything about this movie is fantastic, and if, like me, you assumed that Pixar's best years were behind them... well you were still probably right, but at least they can still muster up the old magic when it really matters.

Final Score:  8.5/10

o-o-o-o-o

The Disaster Artist

Alternate Title:  Oh hi, Oscarbait!

One sentence synopsis:    A would-be actor meets one of the strangest men on Earth, who finances, writes, and directs a feature film that will go on to become one of the worst movies ever made.


The Verdict: There's a concept in film criticism of a movie being "so bad, it's good", movies that are so baffling in their utter wretchedness that they become paradoxically fascinating and even highly enjoyable to watch. As someone who has spent more than their fair share of time watching bad films, I can assure you all, my gentle readers, that such concepts are 99% crap. Bad movies are generally just bad movies, unless of course they are really bad, at which point they become truly awful movies, and you all get to chortle at my misfortune as I expend rivers of virtual ink excoriating them for your amusement. And yet, even I have to admit that there are a very, very small handful of movies who actually do manage to attain some kind of idiot-nirvana, either by being so alien to common sense and decency as to defy belief, or by evidencing an almost touching lack of awareness of their own purulence. Plan 9 from Outer Space, the infamous Ed Wood magnum opus, is one such film, a movie that today plays like a brilliant parody of Z-grade 50s sci-fi, and features a chiropractor with his face covered serving as a stand-in for Bela Legosi, who died midway through production. Zardoz, the 1974 John Boorman film that can only be explained by vast quantities of hallucinogens or a series of massive brain aneurysms, is another (it features Sean Connery in a red diaper chasing a flying Easter Island statue which vomits assault rifles and intones, with stark gravitas, "The gun is good. The penis is evil"). In all the many years and hundreds and thousands of movies I have seen, only a handful of films have ever reached the lofty heights of being truly so bad that they were good. And one of those is The Room.

The Room, for those who haven't seen it, is a film that defies description in terms of its direction, script, and acting, all three provided by a certain Tommy Wiseau, who is one of the strangest people I have encountered in all my years of filmwatching. A mysterious pan-European film producer of unknown origin, whose accent is unsourceably weird and whose mannerisms resemble those of space aliens unacquainted with the proper functioning of human social structures, Wiseau was the brainchild of The Room, and for this has my eternal thanks. To attempt to describe what is wrong with The Room in a short-form review like this one is simply impossible. Like the Matrix before it, you must see it for yourself, hear Wiseau's unfathomable accent, see the brain-twistingly insane decisions made as to continuity, shot selection, and simple concept, in order to appreciate just what a colossal misfire that it is. And yet I love it, earnestly and honestly, for reasons that I do not properly comprehend, and which likely do not speak well of my general nature as a person. There is something endearing about The Room's cosmic lack of shame and filter, something utterly fearless about its baffling failure to rise to any rudimentary standard of filmcraft and narrative structure. It is platonic in its awfulness, and the ineffable qualities that have led me to love it are apparently not restricted to me, as the film has become a cult hit, playing to midnight screens of rabid "fans", and now, giving birth to a major Hollywood movie depicting its creation, and the minds, tangential to sense as they are, that could have dreamed up such a thing. And so we come to the Franco brothers.

James Franco has been a hit or miss quality for me for years, though on balance I don't mind him, and it is his task in this film to portray Tommy Wiseau, a Herculean one to be sure, as Wiseau has simultaneously one of the most imitable mannerisms and accents of any living human, and a quality to him that utterly defies replication. James does his method-acting best, hamming up the crazy Eastern-European-by-way-of-New-Orleans accent, donning the tragic black hair and curious mannerisms, acting weird at every opportunity, claiming to all and sundry that he is both a native-born American and an experienced filmmaker, all while evidencing absolutely no understanding of either filmmaking or American culture. It's honestly more of an impression than a performance, if I'm being honest, a little too deliberate to actually match the gonzo insanity that is Tommy Wiseau, especially when trying to mirror some of the more infamous sequences from The Room itself. Maybe James Franco is just too good an actor? Hard to say. His brother, however, Dave Franco, whom we ran into earlier this year back in The Little Hours, is better, or perhaps just better cast, playing Greg Sistero, Tommy's best (and probably only) friend, co-star of the Room, and the man who wrote the book on which The Disaster Artist is based. I've not seen enough of Dave Franco to properly gauge how good he is, but his forte seems to be playing earnest young guys getting dragged into strange circumstances they don't quite know how to deal with. Honestly though, however accurate Dave Franco is to the "real" Greg SIstero, he's intensely compelling here, playing the eager young actor who is made to bear witness to the absurd oddity of Tommy Wiseau, as well as the one tasked with showcasing to the audience just what he saw in Tommy in the first place. It's a careful balancing act that's not easy to pull off given the gonzo insanity of the subject matter.

The rest of the film is entirely peopled with a who's who of Hollywood actors, all of whom, I assume, thought it would be fun to appear in a bad movie on purpose for once. The film doesn't draw attention to any of them, to the point where I didn't know that bit characters were being played by Sharon Stone or Melanie Griffith until just a few moments ago, to say nothing of the dozens of little cameos, most of which flew right over my head. Long-time Franco collaborator Seth Rogan plays the embattled Script Supervisor/Assistant Director, and is used just sparingly enough to provide a voice of reason as the shoot for The Room goes completely off the rails, and the production falls apart. The other actors portraying the characters in The Room (the film-within-a-film thing is necessitating an awful lot of over-clarification in this review) range from Jackie Weaver (whom I've always loved) to Josh Hutcherson (whom I've generally not), but all of them are excellent (though Weaver, alone among the cast, cannot seem to get her counterpart's stilted performance right), and are buttressed by an armada of cameos from largely anyone who could convince the director (also James Franco, because a movie like this could only be directed by its lead actor) that they should be involved in it. Quite a few celebrities star as themselves, including super-producer Judd Apatow, who gets to steal one of the better scenes in the film when he berates Tommy for being a creepy bastard and interrupting his dinner out with his wife, insisting to him that he has no future in the movies.

Indeed, the whole film is more about Tommy the weird and occasionally creepy bastard, than it is about the fun-loving keystone-kop hilarity that was The Room's production. The movie pulls few punches when it comes to Tommy, recognizing his passion for film-making, his deep and abiding loneliness, as well as his staggeringly petty behavior as soon as anything comes between him and his one friend or goal. Without trying to diagnose a man over the internet, Tommy in this movie comes across as a truly weird individual, not in a conventional "zany artist" manner, nor a bumbling incompetent, but a sometimes-vindictive, sometimes-incomprehensible, sometimes-tragic, and sometimes-absurd figure who simply has latched onto the idea of making a movie with himself as the hero, and will not be talked out of it, no matter how batshit insane the ideas he has surrounding this notion are. This does not make Tommy Wiseau look particularly good, but paradoxically it humanizes him far more than all the gut-wrenching laughs to be had from The Room showings ever could.

I won't pretend that The Disaster Artist is some masterpiece, particularly as large stretches of it seem to have been included simply to pander to rabid fans of The Room (something I recognize, even as I appreciate it. And as mentioned before, for a film whose entire existence hinges on Franco's impression of the highly-impressionable Tommy Wiseau, Franco's impression is not exactly world-class. But it's an enjoyable and very human film nonetheless, a look into the side of Hollywood far removed from glitter and Oscar statuettes, and the story of how one of the weirdest films I have ever seen (and boy is that saying something) came into being. It may not win many awards, but I am deeply glad that I saw it, and that Tommy Wiseau lifelong dream to have his work appreciated on the big screen has come to fruition.

Though I have to say, if this movie somehow wins an Oscar, and the winner in question brings Tommy Wiseau up onto the stage to help accept it, then my lifelong dream will also be complete.

Final Score:  7/10



Next Time: The last roundup of the year covers the films we saw this December, and what a collection of oddities they are...