Spring 2018 Roundup, Part 1

Howdy everyone!  It's been quite a while.

So yes, The General has been taking it easy for a month or two, taking some time to decompress, unplug from the review machine a little bit, recharge my creative batteries for praising great movies or cursing terrible ones.  Three hundred films is quite a lot, and it was time for a little bit of a break, especially following the great year that was 2017.  I decided it was a good opportunity to just relax a bit and concentrate on other projects.

Also, I contracted SARS.

Yeah, The General's Post became The Quarantine Post for a good portion of the early parts of this year, with an onslaught of respiratory illness that took a good month to resolve itself.  The act of catching up with my life after that particular bout of unpleasantry was not something I'm in any hurry to repeat, and is one of the main reasons why none of you have heard from me for the last bit.

Nevertheless, I did manage to go and catch a number of films this spring, and I would not feel right if I didn't sit down here and share my opinions on all of them with you.  So for all of you patient little boys and girls who have been waiting for my sainted opinions on recent films, I present to you.

The General's Post Spring 2018 Roundup, Part 1

12 Strong

Alternate Title:  Charge of the God-Mode Brigade

One sentence synopsis:    A dozen special forces soldiers are inserted into Afghanistan during the first days after 9/11 to help local insurgents fight the Taliban.

The Verdict:  So let's start things with a movie none of you have ever heard of.

January releases are a messy lot, as most of the time people are either busy returning to work or watching Oscar films, and have no time to deal with any new releases not good enough to be deployed during Oscar season proper. As such you get a lot of films from genres that are famously not very good, banking on the fact that their audiences will not go see anything else. Christian message films, bad horror ripoffs, foreign imports of no general interest, and also the subject we have before us today: Military wank films not good enough to get a fall/winter release. So it is with 12 Strong, a movie about a very cool event in military history, but that was not regarded well enough either by critics or by its studio to merit anything beyond a January release.

So was that a mistake? Well no, not really. But there are virtues to the film.

12 Strong is about the US 5th Special Forces Group, Operational Detachment Alpha 595, a very boring name for a very tough group of hombres who did some very insane things in the first two months after 9/11 in Northern Afghanistan. Those of you old enough to remember it, might recall pictures of US special forces soldiers fighting on horseback in the Afghan mountains, and these are the men in question, the first American horse cavaliers since 1942, who battled the Taliban alongside an alliance of warlords and guerilla fighters, calling air strikes in from B-52s while galloping into battle with armored vehicles. This event, this concept, is goddamn amazing, and ripe for a badass movie to be made about it, and the filmmakers (primarily Danish documentarian Nicolai Fuglsig) assembled one of the better casts I've seen in a war film to make it. Chris Hemsworth, Michael Shannon, and Michael Peña are all actors I have tremendous love for, as any regular reader knows, and all three star in the film as the officers and NCOs in command of the 12-strong unit. There's not a great deal of material for any of them to sink their teeth into (especially Shannon), but these are the sorts of actors that elevate any role their in, be it through Hemsworth's charisma, Shannon's world-weariness, or Peña's general hilarity. Small touches, like the running joke of the soldiers' ever-more fantastical descriptions of how much they love the barren shitholes they are in, add a good deal of humanity to a movie that could easily be left without. Smaller roles go to the indispensable William Fichtner, the completely out of place, but somehow still decent Rob Riggle (what in god's name is Rob Riggle doing in a movie like this?), or to German-Iranian actor Navid Negahban, who probably gets the best role of the bunch, playing a veteran Northern Alliance commander which the movie takes some pains to humanize.

So what else does the film have? Well... not a whole lot to be honest. There are battle sequences of course, many of them, but they all sort of run together into one giant mess. Our heroes are invincible supermen, riding directly into machine gun and cannonfire and coming out unscathed while accurately gunning down their foes with perfectly-placed shots from a rearing horse. There are moments that liven things, like a confused sequence wherein hundreds of Taliban troops try to surrender simultaneously to four American soldiers, but these are few and far between. Discussions between Hemsworth's character (the commander of the unit), and the General played by Negahban never go beyond the whole "learning how to be an effective leader of men" stage of military speech-making. The film does dot itself with some moments of self-awareness, such as a riotous moment where Hemsworth, demanding to see proof that the troops he's about to carpet bomb belong to the Taliban, gets an answer in the form of the General calling up his opposite number on the radio, calling him the son of a flea-bitten dog, and telling him to confirm his identity to the Americans so that they can all go kill him.

There's nothing really wrong with 12 Strong beyond a certain lack of ambition, for the movie is competently enough made and the shots of whatever more commodious terrain passed for the mountains of Afghanistan are striking and beautiful in their rugged, barren way. As an excuse to watch good actors ride horses and shoot machine guns for a while, there are far worse films than 12 Strong out there. Just don't expect too much else from it.

Final Score:  6/10

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The Insult

Alternate Title:  Another Day in the Middle East

One sentence synopsis:   A Lebanese Christian and a Palestinian refugee's confrontation over a minor grievance turns into a massive political setpiece in modern Beirut.

The Verdict:  I try not to be a snob on this project, I do, but it's a basic fact that my enjoyment of the movies is almost directly proportional to the amount of weird shit I get to see. I can overdo it, certainly, like I did in the early part of 2015 (to the point where sitting in traffic for an hour and a half to go see Maggie seemed like a good idea), but in the spring, when movies suck, it's not a bad idea to look for what you can catch at the smaller theaters, and what did I catch this time but Lebanon's contribution to the Best Foreign Language Film category, a little film called The Insult.

The Insult is a movie that serves as both a primer on Middle Eastern politics (at least those of Lebanon), while also serving as a simultaneous send-up to Law and Order and to Crash, the 2004 Paul Haggis film about race relations in Los Angeles, and a short list candidate for the award of "worst film to ever win Best Picture at the Academy Awards" (fight me). It comes to us courtesy of Lebanese director Ziad Doueiri, a man who recently achieved the feat of being banned from Lebanon for being too pro-Israeli, while also being banned from Israel for being too anti-Israeli. Any man who pulls that off is deserving of respect and attention, and his film is one of the better things I've seen in this young year, a polemic of sorts (in a good way) about race and nationality and the wounds of civil strife in a poly-ethnic society like that of Lebanon.

Tony Hanna (Adel Karam) is a Lebanese Christian auto mechanic, and an asshole. He supports hyper-partisan politicians (most politicians in Lebanon fit this description), and regards immigrants to his country, particularly refugees from Palestine, as dogs. This is a problem, because the foreman of a construction project in his neighborhood, Yasser Abdallah Salameh (Kamel El Basha) is himself a Palestinian refugee, a man of considerable expertise and education, but who must work under the table and live in a refugee zone because he is a Palestinian, a group not well regarded in Lebanon since the violent events of Black September. A minor altercation between the two men over the code status of a leaking drainpipe results in one insulting the other, and kicks off a chain of gradual but believable escalations that lands both men in court to try and prove that they are the aggrieved party and the other an unreasonable menace to public safety. Heedless to the pleas of loved ones and friends to let things go, the men proceed with their dispute, until, almost inevitably, it blows up well beyond their control, breaking open the hastily papered-over fault lines in Lebanese society, a society which as little as thirty years ago was a full-fledged war zone, and which has not recovered therefrom by any stretch.

And yet rather than turn the movie in another parable about how bad sectarianism is, The Insult strangely goes the route of a courtroom drama, wherein lawyers stand up and give impassioned speeches regarding how terrible the life of their client was, and how many horrible things the other party has done or said in their lives, until both men are grudgingly left on the sidelines of their original conflict, their deepest wounds brought to the surface to be probed by the legal system. Hanna, it turns out, despises the Palestinian people because of the annihilation of his village during Black September at the hands of a screaming Palestinian mob, which executed his family and burned his home, while Salameh is forced to relive all the moments in his life when, pushed to the edge by indignity heaped upon indignity, he snapped and lashed back. Arguments are leveled about subjects that sound all too familiar to us Stateside, from affirmative action to free speech to incitements to hate crimes. And of course, being as this is the Middle East, even as the participants speak of high-minded ideals and racial tolerance, they layer every sentence of every accusation of wrongdoing with a thick coating of un-examined antisemitism.

The Insult isn't quite a great movie, the courtroom antics quickly begin to feel early-90s-era Law and Order, with lawyers basically allowed to recite dissertations at infinite length because the filmmaker said so, but it is, all in all, a very good one, buttressed by excellent acting by the two leads and most of the supporting cast. It's a small film with a big topic and one that handles things deftly, and if it's available on a streaming service or a showcase of foreign cinema, I would strongly suggest undertaking it. The alternatives from early this year are not encouraging.

Final Score:  7.5/10

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Black Panther


Alternate Title:  Anti-Marvel

One sentence synopsis:    Newly-crowned King T'Challa must defend his crown and country against the machinations of an international arms smuggler, and a warmongering figure intent on claiming his throne.



The Verdict: I am an unapologetic fan of Marvel's work. You all know this. I have lauded them time and time and time again for all of the myriad reasons that their films are heir to. You all know this. Eighteen movies into the Marvel Cinematic Universe (and with the most ambitious one yet being seen by yours truly the day after I write these words), there is no doubt in my mind that this universe of cinema they have created is, to-date, the crowning film achievement of the 21st century, a fountain of staggering creativity, enjoyment, fun, and splendor, even with the occasional stumble here and there. I love the MCU as I have loved few things in cinema, and there have been times in the past where it alone represented the only reason I continued to do this. Nor has the series been getting worse, not by any long shot. I loved Guardians of the Galaxy 2. I loved Spiderman. I adored Thor Ragnarok. And I was desperately excited for Black Panther, which looked supremely awesome, starred a half dozen actors I adore, and was being made by one of the better directors working. I wanted this film to be great. You all, if you know me at all, know this.

So when I criticize Black Panther, please understand that I do it from a place of love. Because no matter how I slice it, Black Panther is not great.

Now don't misunderstand me, Black Panther is not bad either, nor even close to it. It is always adecent, frequently good, and occasionally very good, but never does it rise to greatness, and in the company it keeps, within the lofty heights of the MCU, that does not suffice to obtain my unquestioning praise. There is a great deal to love about Black Panther, and yet something is missing from it, something fundamental and hard to elucidate. So let's give it a shot.

As always, I like to start with what does work, and the list is admittedly long. The film is gorgeous, vibrant and brilliant of color, with all the sweeping glories and rich palette that an African setting can offer. The styling of the film is even better, an Afro-Futurist riot of brilliant design-work, African-inspired of course, but with unexpected twists to the atmosphere that the film pieces together, turning it into a wonderland cornucopia of non-western design often without (to my western eye, at least) obvious source. Elements of the Wakandan world, such as the Dahomey-inspired Techno-Masai stylings of the "Dora Milaje", a kind of all-female royal guard regiment comprised of shaven-headed Amazonian Hoplites is goddamned brilliant, and serves more than adequately to ground the film in comic awesomeness while remaining true to its inspirations. Several of the new characters we are introduced to, particularly Shuri (Letitia Wright), the younger sister of T'Challa, a technophile genius who steals the best lines in the film, Okoye (Danai Gurira), the stoic (to a fault) head of the aforementioned royal guards, and Killmonger (Michael B. Freaking Jordan), the villain of the piece, who gets waaaaaaay more backstory and interesting material than any Marvel villain not named Loki has ever gotten. Indeed, Killmonger might be the best thing in the movie, a villain with a comprehensible, timely, and well-fleshed out backstory, one that encourages sympathy even as it paints him as a violent extremist prepared to wage worldwide race war to right the wrongs he and his people have suffered. That Michael B. Jordan can pull something like this off should be no surprise to anybody who's seen the rest of Ryan Coogler's work, and the screen is enlivened whenever he is on it.

But for all of these virtues, Black Panther is a deeply uneven film, and this is primarily due to a problem I don't think I've ever seen before: Accents.

You might be wondering how a bad accent can ruin a film. It can't (usually), but what I mean when I say this isn't that someone has a bad accent, it's that someone is unable to perform their role because of it, and that someone is Chadwick Boseman himself, an actor I have desperately tried to like in movies from 42 to Get on Up to Draft Day, for he is a likeable guy whom I assumed would use this movie as his coming out party. Instead, he falls completely flat, and the reason he does is because he cannot fathom that pan-African accent that they gave his character. I don't mean that his accent is unconvincing, though it is. I mean that it actively stops him from emoting, from project force and volume with his words, from acting, in short, restricting his entire performance to an awkward monotone that kills the movie's momentum whenever the main goddamn character has to speak for any length of time. This isn't a problem unique to Boseman. Other actors, good actors, from Angela Bassett to Lupita N'yongo, have tremendous difficulty reciting the dialogue they have been given, this despite the fact that Bassett is a phenomenal actress (go watch Strange Days if you don't believe me), and N'yongo (also a phenomenal actress) is actually Kenyan, but is not allowed to use her native accent for the role.

Obviously not everyone is unable to overcome this issue. Leticia Wright manages just fine, as does Daniel Kaluuya (whom I didn't even recognize). Forest Whitaker basically retreats into his Idi Amin impression, which is fine by me, and the portion of the cast that is actually African (N'yongo excepted) has no trouble. But while I don't care that the accent is fake, nor that some people can't manage it, I definitely care when major actors the film are so busy struggling with it that they can't actually act. Boseman is not terrible uniformly, but he is the weakest element of a movie that is the also the star of. This is a problem.

And it's not the only one. The movie is structured very strangely, with two distinct halves that effectively represent completely different stories, tied together with editorial duct tape and bungee cord. Killmonger's character is well established, but considerable chunks of that establishment are thrown out around the midway point of the movie so as to re-establish him with other, different establishment. This second establishment is indeed stronger than the first, but it leaves one wondering what the point of the initial material was. The plot, meanwhile, is overwrought to the point of melodrama (admittedly, so is about half of the MCU), and less-forgivably, is entirely predictable, beat for beat, being one of the most convenitionally-plotted films the MCU has yet to give us. The other films in Marvel's canon are hardly the stuff of Neo-Noir, but many of them, even relatively bad ones, include interesting twists and developments, either in the characters' fortunes or the machinations of the bad guys. Black Panther meanwhile, plays like a first draft, uninspired in its plotting and with very little in the way of character significance for anyone concerned. It's a fun outing, don't get me wrong, but it tells us relatively little about anybody except the villain of the piece, and leaves most of the characters exactly where they started. This might be fine for a proof of concept popcorn flick, but it is not the stuff of great cinema. And contrary to the opinions of those too stuck up to care, much of the MCU is great cinema.

I did not hate Black Panther, nor even dislike it, and there are moments and even entire scenes that are fascinating, if only for the richness of the setting and the novelty of the world. It is also worth noting, of course, that I am a white guy reviewing a movie that is probably not entirely made for me. But while I acknowledge this factor, and do not seek to denigrate the experience of others who have seen the movie, the flaws in Black Panther are much more fundamental than those that afflicted last year's Wonder Woman, and do not, I believe, represent some kind of special coding which I am unable to perceive, as some of Wonder Woman's did. A flawed film remains a flawed film no matter who is making it, and Marvel's movies, being the product of an international media conglomerate the likes of which find few parallels in history, are explicitly intended as universalist efforts, whether or not they attain such heights. Black Panther too attempts to appeal to everyone, and in many cases succeeds, but as MCU films go, it is unavoidably one of the weaker efforts, providing us with the rare example of a Marvel film whose hero is weakly drawn, and who is propped up by its villain, when almost every other Marvel film is the precise opposite.

And now you know where that Alt-Title comes from.

Final Score:  6/10

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A Wrinkle in Time


Alternate Title:  A Platitude in Script

One sentence synopsis:    The daughter of a missing astrophysicist must embark on an adventure with her younger brother and school friend to save him from the forces of darkness.

The Verdict: I receive criticism on occasion that I do not watch enough bad movies. This is generally criticism from those who enjoy my pain (which I assume to be true of all of you), and who want me to go and watch and then review some horrific piece of cinematic excrement that was obviously going to suck from the get-go. I reject these invitations, partially because I have a working brain, but also because there is no need. As I continuously remind people, I do not need to go looking for bad movies to see. By simple means of attempting to watch one film a week, and gauging their qualities purely on their trailers, the bad movies will find me eventually.

For example, we have A Wrinkle in Time.

Oh yes, A Wrinkle in Time is a bad movie, in fact it's an awful movie, a meaningless, smarmy, intensely boring piece of cinematic waste excreted by a director I had previously thought competent and must revise my opinions of accordingly. Brainless, stultifying and stupid, it is to children's films what Interstellar was to adult science fiction, a repudiation of whatever qualities its source material had and a strong incentive to seek for diabetes medication upon watching it. This is not a controversial opinion. I have seen this film compared negatively to Tomorrowland, and I'll remind you that I am the only person on Earth who liked Tomorrowland. Well even I couldn't stand A Wrinkle in Time. If it were not for the demands of my reviews, I would have left after five minutes.

I have nothing against children's films. Hell, I love good children's films, they can touch our souls the way that few things can, but a good children's film demands that someone have a sense of what the difference between whimsy and saccharine is, and Ava DuVernay, whatever her actual qualities are as a reasonable filmmaker, is not this person. The film is aggressively annoying, written in a disbelief-shatteringly on-the-nose fashion, a place where child and adult actors alike are forced to recite dialogue so wooden that I am currently re-enforcing my writing desk with one of the monologues. No character acts human in this movie, instead they stand around and use "As You Know" phrases over and over and over because the scriptwriter can't figure out how to shovel exposition into the audience's heads any other way. The children meanwhile do not act like kids anywhere, not even in the Disney sitcom land that this world takes inspiration from, but like pastiches of "bright-eyed eager youngsters", so squeaky-clean and inhuman that Leave it to Beaver would have rejected them as unrealistic. I understand that six-year-old Charles Wallace (the repeated name is never explained) is a super-genius. I should prefer that he also be a six-year-old boy than a robot programmed to spout "affirmations" every five seconds whilst others look on in rapt awe at how precious he is.

Indeed "precious" is a good word for this movie. Calvin, the boy next door to our main character Meg, looks and acts like he's auditioning for a younger version of One Direction, and spends the entire fucking film telling Meg over and over and over again that she's beautiful on the inside. I have nothing against the sentiment of wanting to teach such morals, but I have seen greater nuance in instilling them on episodes of Veggie Tales. Meg, meanwhile, must put up with the gamut of lazy scriptwriting cliche middle-school problems, from random, unexplained bullies, to stern, unfeeling principals, to teachers who gossip openly about the failings of their students in the hallways like a Greek Chorus. Once the adventure begins however, it's simply an unending barrage of positivity quotes taken from someone's page-a-day calendar on the subject, many of which come with attributions designed to be "quirky". If you removed from the movie all of the scenes in which Oprah (who I will remind you all, is a phenomenal actress) scolds Meg for not being sufficiently perky, happy, or positive (all without giving her any reasons to be perky, happy, or positive), then the film would be about thirteen minutes long. As it stands, generic "evil energy" must be combated by the power of... I don't even know. At least Interstellar had the balls to claim that love was the most powerful force in the universe. A Wrinkle in Time awards that distinction to generic contentedness.

A Wrinkle in Time is a truly wretched movie, one that was difficult, at least for me, to sit through, and inspired many a forlorn look at my smartphone as I desperately tried to determine how much of it was left. Whatever point I was through the film, the answer was always "too damn much", and the movie itself stands as a reminder that nobody, no matter how well praised or liked, is incapable of making a complete piece of crap.

Final Score:  3/10



Next Time: It's time to do this, ladies and gents.  It's time for the Infinity War.

The Worst Films of 2017

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, fellow moviegoers, but the worst films of 2017 were nowhere near as awful as the worst films of years before.  That is not a bad thing, not by a long stretch, in fact it was nice beyond description to finally go to the theater and discover good movies were waiting for me.  It does, however, cast all the more of a shadow over the films that did not live up to their counterparts.  And while the bad films that 2017 had to offer were by no means as bad as those of years previous, they were no more pleasant to sit through for that fact alone

As such, the moment you've all been waiting for is here.  The General's Post proudly presents:

The Worst Films of 2017!!!

The Best Films of 2017

And so another year ends, a year full of tumult and chaos, but also full of a whole host of great movies.  2017 was one of the finest years that cinema history records, with an absolute deluge of excellent films barraging moviegoers all year, from the hidden gems of Doldrums season, to the sparkling triumphs of Blockbuster season, to a searingly-good crop of award films in Oscar season.  All throughout, whatever the season or weather, we could count on staggeringly good films in a dozen different genres and styles.  And we're going to talk about them now.

So join us, once again, as General Havoc and Captain Corvidae gather to discuss the finest movies that the year 2017 had to offer us, and reminisce over the best times to be had in a movie theater in the year now past.  This is:

The Best Films of 2017!!!

Next Time:  2017 was, without question, the finest year for film I have ever seen.  But even the best year ever has its dark side...

I, Tonya

Alternate Title:  Abuse: A Comedy

                                                                                                                                                            

One sentence synopsis:  Tonya Harding deals with her abusive mother and husband, all while trying to win acceptance through figure skating before and after the attack on Nancy Kerrigan.

Things Havoc liked: Like everyone else who was alive and above the age of eight at the time, I remember the infamous Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan incident from the 1994 Lillehammer Olympics. It was, in many ways, the perfect scandal, filled with lurid details to titillate and thrill a news audience, women fighting one another for supremacy, America's sweetheart attacked by a violent thug, lurid plots among stupid people, overtones of classism, one of the first big media frenzies. I was there man, every one of us ate it up with a spoon. Following the Olympics, in which Kerrigan won a silver medal, and Harding won such infamy, Tonya Harding disappeared into the tabloids, popping up on news feeds periodically in celebrity boxing matches, in sex tapes, and in one trashy thing after another. I cannot say that I thought much about her in the intervening years, but all of a sudden, here we have a movie about the story of Tonya Harding from beginning to end, a film I ultimately decided to see purely because I felt I owed its main actress another shot.

You see, I didn't see I, Tonya, because I really desperately wanted to know more about Tonya Harding, I saw it because of Suicide Squad, a movie so bad I still suspect it to have been the result of some gruesome experiment in human psychology. Margot Robbie, who had the singular misfortune of starring in that film as Harley Quinn (a misfortune only slightly lesser than those of us who had to watch her) is an actress I have seen in nothing else to date (save a cameo in The Big Short), and while she was pretty goddamn awful in Suicide Squad, that much could easily be explained by the fact that everything touched by Suicide Squad turned to galvanized shit. After all, Viola Davis and Will Smith are both charismatic actors of considerable skill, and neither one of them could salvage any dignity. I therefore felt, given her increasing prominence, that I owed it to Margot Robbie to find out if she could act at all, an exercise I try to engage in when I encounter actors or actresses who have had the misfortune of making their major debut in a film so bad that nothing positive could be gleaned from it. The ur-example here is Twilight, a film that forced me to seek other examples of Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart's acting efforts, determining empirically that while Pattinson can act, Stewart cannot.

So with all that preamble aside, can Margot Robbie act? Ohhhhh yes. Yes she can, in fact Margot Robbie, playing a character that none of us ever got to know except in the pages of a tabloid, is phenomenal this time around, a treasure of a performance that fully justifies all of the faith that people placed in her following the atrocity that was Suicide Squad. Biopics are a dangerous game, as apt to win you condemnation as they are an Oscar, but Robbie, playing a character nobody really knows anything about, is exceptional, bringing all the classless rancor, the bitter devotion to her craft, the wounded patched-together pride of a victim of nigh-constant abuse, the serially-unreliable mentality of someone trying to make sense of her own life, bringing all of it together into a performance that merits the Oscar nomination that should be (and at time of writing, has been) forthcoming. It's a career-making performance, comic and tragic all at once, while still retaining the essence of what the public remembers of the character, and if that wasn't Robbie performing the fantastically-difficult skating maneuvers studded throughout, then the movie certainly fooled me.

I, Tonya, comes to us courtesy of Craig Gillespie, an Australian director who has yet to feature on this project, due to his propensity for mostly doing projects that don't look particularly interesting. The only movie of his prior to this one that I know anything about is 2007's exceedingly-odd Ryan Gosling vehicle Lars and the Real Girl, a movie that was effectively a weirder version of Her, and if you remember Her, that's quite a statement. This one is a bit more accessable than that one was, but is done in a fourth-wall-shattering style that emphasizes just how unreliable the various stories that the characters involved tell of the Kerrigan incident and everything that led up to it are. The result resembles The Big Short, or other movies that use unconventional directing techniques as a tool to emphasize the artificiality of the concepts they're attempting to get across, and in retrospect, it's probably the only way to do something like this without turning the entire thing into a Rashomon-style philosophical treatise, which would be highly unsuited for the material. It does, however, require a superb cast to be able to pull something like this off, and fortunately Gillespie has assembled one. Sebastian Stan, Bucky Barnes from the Marvel films, is utterly unrecognizable as Jeff Gillooly, an abusive loser who Tonya falls for due primarily to the fact that she has been conditioned by her upbringing to expect nothing but abusive losers to be interested in her. It's deceptively difficult to play a loser on screen, if only because most successful actors are charismatic, and the camera introduces such tremendous bias in their favor, but Stan pulls it off, giving us a character by turns entirely loathsome and yet completely believable, not a screaming monster but a person whose life is what it was always fated to be, and whose worst traits go utterly unexamined by himself or even his victims. But the best performance of all is Allison Janney's, because she gets to play a true monster. Tonya's mother LaVona, expertly portrayed by the one-time West Wing alum, is a vile, twisted, hyper-abusive harpy, an utterly loathsome creature whose every action and thought drips bitterness and resentment. And yet even here, Janney puts together a character that isn't just a caricature of an abusive single mother, but simply a person who is missing parts of their soul, who acts as she does because she thinks it the only way to properly act. We hate her all the more because we understand where she is coming from, and is that not the definition of an excellent villain?

If it sounds like the theme of abuse is coming up a lot in my description so far, that is because the movie is rife with it, not sensationalized, not dialed up to some unwatchable level, but inculcated into its very bones. The story of Tonya Harding, the movie claims, is a story of long-term abuse, not always cinematic and violent, and not always unreciprocated, but always there, poisoning everything it touches until actions that would seem unthinkable to any normal, rational person, are perfectly normal and indeed not deserving of comment to the characters that inhabit this world. Tonya is abused by her mother, by her husband, by the Media, by the US Figure Skating association which is made to look, probably with very good reason, like a bunch of classic snobs who never even considered giving Harding a real shot. Months and years of brutally-difficult work are rewarded time and again with "stylistic" point deductions and low-seeded rankings, despite Tonya being an exceptionally gifted technical skater, the only American woman to perform a Triple Axel jump. Without ever calling things out explicitly, the movie effortlessly places you in a mindset wherein anything, even attacking a rival with a retractable baton, seems reasonable, given that nobody else is playing fairly either. Moreover, despite everything I've just finished saying, the movie is also riotously funny at parts, mostly due to just how stupid so many of the participants in this little farce of a conspiracy were. Paul Walter Hauser, whom I've never seen or heard of before, plays Shaun Ekhart, Tonya's bodyguard, a loser among losers, who fancies himself some kind of CIA-trained espionage expert while living in his mother's house and plotting the dumbest caper in the history of dumb capers. Bobby Cannavale, whom I love dearly, gets the job of narrating most of this to us as a spray-tanned Hard Copy producer, describing in breathless glee how dumb the plan to assault Kerrigan actually was, with one conspirator staking out Kerrigan's training arena for three days, parking in an empty parking lot, and moving his car around it every fifteen minutes to avoid suspicion! Why only for three days? Because that's how long it took him to realize that Kerrigan was actually training in a different arena entirely in another state.

Things Havoc disliked: The film goes to some lengths to ensure that you know just how unreliable all participants in this absurd farce are. Everyone has their own version of what happened before and during the Kerrigan assault (the movie calls it "the incident"), and none of those versions stack up at all, particularly those of Harding and Gillooly themselves. This is fine, indeed it's only to be expected, nor is it surprising, given how much time it spends humanizing her, that the film ultimately winds up taking more of Harding's perspective than anyone else's. But the problem is that about two thirds of the way through the movie, without mentioning it or otherwise indicating, it basically hews entirely to the notion that Harding knew nothing about the impending attack, and if she did know something about it she didn't understand it, and if she did understand it she thought it was a joke, and if she didn't think it was a joke she thought the plan would involve threats, not violence, and if she did think the plan involved violence well it was only to be expected given her upbringing.

Um... right...

Look, nobody but Tonya Harding herself really knows how much she was or wasn't actually involved in the assault on Kerrigan, and given the nature of human memory and rationalization, probably not her either at this point. And it is certainly possible, though not much more, that Harding had nothing to do with the planning of the assault that put her back in the Olympics after her career was largely over. But for the movie to turn around so far into a story that is being told from multiple directions, and suddenly claim authoritatively that not only was the entire prosecution of Harding nothing but a political witch-hunt on the part of a classist Figure Skating world looking to finally be rid of her, but that it knows this for a fact is just ridiculous on its face. I don't demand that all movies represent nothing but the unvarnished truth, especially when that truth is open to interpretation, but when the movie's central thesis is that nobody knows the truth, it's a bit churlish to suddenly reframe everything that's happening as the truth because it casts your sympathetic protagonist in a more flattering light. And if you're going to do that, suddenly pivot from an unreliable to an authoritative viewpoint on the events in question, it's probably a good idea not to misrepresent the few actual facts that are known about the case. The movie's climax involves a tearful court hearing, where a barely-controlled Harding begs and pleads for her life after a stern, unsympathetic judge bans her from figure skating for life. Powerful stuff, if it had actually happened, but it did not. It doesn't take much research to know that criminal courts have no bearing on who can and can't participate in Figure Skating associations, and Harding was never so-sentenced. Instead, after she pled guilty to obstructing justice in the investigation of an assault on one of her competitors, the US Figure Skating association banned her for life, after their investigation concluded that she knew about the attack before it happened. Call the investigation a witch-hunt if you like, but please don't make up criminal penalties that never happened, framed to make your unreliable protagonist look sympathetic, and then wrap yourselves in the mantle of the one true arbiters of truth.

Final thoughts:   But I have to say, whatever the film's authorial bent or pretensions of truth and honesty, I, Tonya is an incredible film, a tightly-crafted, instantly-compelling, and brilliant-acted piece of 90s absurdity, taking a story we all knew and giving us even more salacious details about it, assuming we're willing to acknowledge that doing so makes us no better than the other people who tried to exploit Tonya Harding for our own purposes. It is a fantastic movie across the board, one that is entirely deserving of its buzz, and a fitting place to leave off the greatest single year I have ever experienced at the movies. With Awards season finally upon us, I, Tonya, along with many other fine films, is once more being re-released in theaters, and you all owe it to yourselves to give it a shot, whether you know the story or not.

Thank you to everyone who has followed these reviews over the course of the year now past. It has been quite a run, and I hope you are all ready to hear about it again, because it is finally time to evaluate the best this year offered us, and the worst...

Final Score:  8/10

Next Time:  Ladies and gentlemen, IT IS TIME!!!

Molly's Game

Alternate Title:  The Poker Room

                                                                                                                                                            

One sentence synopsis:  A former competitive skier builds an empire of underground poker games before being caught up in a massive federal case against the Russian Mafia.

Things Havoc liked:  Some stories are just too good not to film, really. Molly Bloom, a downhill skier whose career was derailed by injury, moved to Los Angeles in 2004 and was hired to staff a Poker game out of a backroom club called the Viper Room, catering to Hollywood celebrities. The game expanded, and Molly first took it over, then took it big, throwing lavish events and attracting moguls from industry, finance, entertainment, and every other corner of the high-roller world. By 2009, she had moved her operation to New York, running one of the most sought-after games in the country, before a 2013 raid and indictment caused her to lose everything in a massive RICO sting aimed at the many members of the Russian mob who were participants in her game. Along the way she dealt with addicts, egomaniacs, mobsters, drunks, Hollywood big shots, princes of various European and Middle Eastern royal families, and plenty of people who fit into more than one of the above categories. Her career came to an abrupt end in 2013 when she was caught up in a money laundering and racketeering sting by the FBI and Justice Departments, as part of their attempts to crush the Russian Mafia, most of whose most prominent members were players in her game. In the intervening years, she wrote a tell-all book (notable primarily for not even remotely telling all), and there were a number of attempts to turn her story into a movie, and after several abortive attempts, who has decided to take this on, but Television's master of self-important dialogue, Aaron Sorkin.

Molly's Game stars Jessica Chastain, an actress I have famously had little use for over the years (see my reviews for Zero Dark Thirty and Interstellar for more on that), as Molly Bloom, but for all my objections to Chastain's typical style of acting, if there's one thing 2016's The Huntsman: Winter's War taught me, it's that I had Chastain pegged incorrectly. The problem isn't that she can't act, the problem is that she can't act seriously. Her attempts to emote sincerity and seriousness have always fallen flat to me, making her sound alternately like a marionette struggling to understand these "hu-man" emotions, or like a petulant seven-year-old who has been denied a cookie. But give her a film or a situation in which she's supposed to be campy, or ridiculous, or over-the-top, and she suddenly becomes a completely different actor. And while Molly's Game is certainly intended to be a realistic portrayal of a young woman who simply got caught up in strange events, it's also written by Aaron Sorkin, of The Social Network and The West Wing (and several other things we will get to), who has one of the strongest and most distinctive authorial voices of any screenwriter in Hollywood (yes, moreso even than Joss Whedon). Sorkin's dialogue, no matter the setting or medium, has always felt like written dialogue, like something prepared in advance by a speechwriter, rather than something people might conceivably come up with and say in a real setting, and while that's not always a strength, it allows Chastain to do what she's good at, giving her the sort of snappy, witty, erudite one-liners that nobody would come up with in the spur of the moment. The long and the short of all this is that Chastain is excellent in this film, playing a driven young woman from a hyper-demanding background who is subjected to the sorts of raving, savagely egomaniacal, borderline sociopathic douchebags and pressures that are instantaneously believable as coming from the ranks of Hollywood or high finance.

And of course, Chastain is not alone. Idris Elba, my man-crush and yours, plays Bloom's lawyer, Charlie Jaffey, in the typical style of an Aaron Sorkin lawyer, meaning with wit, erudition, and snappy comebacks to every situation. As I know several people (Hi, Colleen!) who fantasize about Idris Elba yelling at them, this movie should provide plenty of fodder, and Elba is, as he always is, wonderful in the role, though his American accent this time is about as authentic as my British one. Kevin Costner, of all people, plays Molly's father, a professor of psychology and a helicopter parent, whose tough-love-style of borderline-verbally-abusive behavior is intentionally played in contrast with Costner's native salt-of-the-Earth persona. I've admitted before that for all the garbage that Costner has made over the years (and still continues to make, lest anyone forget Criminal), I've always liked him, at least in the rare occasions when the director and scriptwriters manage to get him something to say or do that is within his range. Sorkin does, and Costner, surprisingly, proves an excellent fit for Sorkin's stilted style, particularly in a late sequence where he sits down with his daughter and speaks what, to him at least, is brutal honesty. And then there's the various shitheads that Bloom encounters throughout her career, foremost among which is Michael Cera, of all people, as "Player X", a composite of various A-list Hollywood celebrities who frequented Molly's games, but apparently primarily based on Toby Maguire, or so the rumors have it. If those rumors are true, Maguire should take real care given the tenor of Hollywood today, as Cera plays this character as an actual raving sociopath, one who admits that despite all the poker he plays, he actually doesn't much like the game itself. What he likes, in his own words, is "ruining people's lives", something he does with Iago-like gusto to everyone he meets. My old pals Chris O'Dowd (of The Sapphires), and Jeremy Strong (of a whole bunch of crap), take smaller roles as, respectively, a drunken Irish associate of the Russian Mafia with a heart of gold, and a Hollywood wannabe/failed Los Angeles real estate agent with seemingly no heart whatsoever. This is the sort of thing one runs into when one turns in these circles, it seems. Both are superb, customarily so in O'Dowd's case, the opposite in Strong's, with O'Dowd managing to inject some real emotion into one of the oldest cinema character cliches in existence (the drunken Irishman), and Strong evidencing some of the douchiest behavior known to man outside of the White House.

Things Havoc disliked:You may have noticed by this point that I seem to be talking an awful lot about Aaron Sorkin, and that's kind of unavoidable, and not just because he both wrote, produced, and directed this film, his directorial debut, in fact. Honestly the direction is fine, Sorkin has a lengthy and well-established background in Television after all and has been working in film for over thirty years. But when it comes to the writing, we start to have an issue. You see, I mentioned before that Sorkin's authorial voice is one of the strongest in Hollywood, up there with the likes of David Mamet or Joss Whedon. This is not necessarily a good thing. You see for all of the success that Sorkin has had, with The West Wing, with Social Network, with Moneyball or Charlie Wilson's War, when Sorkin has nobody to restrain him the way David Fincher did, he generally produces works of such staggering, monumental authorial arrogance as to inspire mocking fake-twitter feeds that long-outlast the work in question. It was thus for Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, a failed behind-the-scenes-at-Saturday-Night-Live show that was so painfully preachy and unfunny as to make paint drying look like a Megadeth concert, and wherein Sorkin famously responded to the criticisms he was subjected to by calling all his critics basement-dwelling virginial bloggers with no taste. It was also thus for The Newsroom, one of the preachiest and most hamfisted television shows ever invented, wherein Sorkin re-wrote every story of the day as he would have reported on it with perfect hindsight, and then spent the rest of the runtime making his characters recite endless denunciations of strawman after strawman, particularly when it came to "the youths" and their "blogosphere". Now, let me be clear, Molly's Game doesn't have anything like those shows' levels of unfettered arrogance. What it does have, however, is the tendency for every character to sound the same.

You see, with a voice this strong, this recognizable, it's clear enough to me at this point that Sorkin doesn't know how to write anyone who isn't just like himself, an overeducated political and cultural snob (I say this with some endearment, as I am also an overeducated political and cultural snob). In shows like The West Wing, which was about a group of exceptionally intelligent and driven people at the heart of the political system, this mattered less, as Sorkin wrote his characters the way we'd like all of our elected officials to act and speak. With The Social Network, he was again dealing with masters of the universe, students at Harvard University with spectacular pedigrees and impeccable contempt for all the lesser creatures of the world. But in Molly's Game, despite all the high-rollers on offer, the movie is ultimately a character study of Molly, and to a lesser extent her lawyer, none of whom should sound the same as one another, and all of whom do, speaking in this inflappable, ultra-witty style of hyper-stylized dialogue that just does not exist when we are supposedly dealing with the real world. Everyone's speach consists of the same one-liners, peppered with references to high culture and in-jokes that it makes no sense for their characters to be making. And while I do like movies about smart people speaking in a smart fashion, Sorkin's voice is so overpowering that he risks losing the humanity of what's happening. It's hard for us as an audience to feel sorry or frightened alongside the main character when the film has spent the entire run-time establishing them as being beyond such mortal concerns as fright or sorrow. And none of this is helped by Sorkin, in the last third of the film, giving into his worst habits and spending a good portion of the movie waxing eloquently about the injustice of the FBI seizing Molly's assets and fining her hundreds of thousands of dollars, when in reality (as it turns out) neither actually occurred. I don't demand all biopics stick scrupulously to the truth of the matter, of course, but it's a bit rich to turn your film into an excoriation of the Federal Government for having done terrible things to poor Molly, when it did not actually do those things.

Final thoughts:  All that being said though, Molly's Game is certainly an enjoyable film, with a compelling story full of sleaze and greed and power games and, it must be admitted, luxuriously fun dialogue at times. Even if Sorkin makes everyone sound like himself, the fact is that his style of witty repartee is a lot of fun to listen to, especially when good (citation needed) actors are the ones reciting it. I don't know if it's worthy of the Oscars that it clearly is looking for, but as a film about the seedier side of high society and organized crime, I have seen far worse examples, and would recommend it unhesitatingly to anyone who likes the idea of the film, or just wants to watch Idris Elba yell for a while. And really, who doesn't?

Final Score:  7.5/10

Next Time:  Speaking of movies about women who formerly competed in Winter Olympic events...

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?