Stan & Ollie (2018)

Score: 4.5 / 5

It's pure movie magic. Stan & Ollie dramatizes the relationship between two founding fathers of American comedy, Laurel and Hardy, in their waning years. Battling personal demons and memories of former glory, the two embark on a tour of British music halls with some success and more than some squabbles. The simple story frames what is essentially a meditation on aging, aging in the entertainment industry, capitalism's effects on American artists, and of course friendships forged in the spotlight.

We begin in the heyday of their careers, as the duo make Way Out West and look to continue their successes. Studio execs wine and dine the pair -- sometimes together, sometimes apart -- and we see the seeds of strife sown between the men. Will they be as successful apart? That is the question everyone wants to know, but the two men can't seem to articulate their own hopes, concerns, or fears. So they remain together after what might be described as certain infidelities. Their act, after all, has made them; it seems likely that we'll see how it unmakes them, too.

And to an extent it does. Steve Coogan plays Stan Laurel to John C. Reilly's Ollie Hardy, and the two have never been better. Their comedic timing takes backseat to their acting chops, and both transform utterly into their characters. Never have their affected characters been so fully realized nor so uncannily like their real-life counterparts. Every look Reilly gives, every heaving sigh under layers of prosthetics and makeup, every twinkle in his eye oozes Hardy. Coogan's simpleminded Laurel onstage is revealed to be a veritable creative genius, and while his sense of urgency often butts against his partner's sense of style, he carries most of the heart of the film. Together, they carry the movie and immediately make you forget you're not actually watching the original duo in some forgotten biography.

And while the film has a lot to say about the state of the art, the cultures of theatre and comedy, and of the men who started it all, it's also a damn classy comedy in its own right. It weaves a mesmerizing tapestry of humor and melancholy that turn in unexpected places, making you laugh out loud -- at good clean fun, too, the timeless kind -- before choking back a gasp. It's so funny and so sad that you, shockingly enough, believe these to be real people dealing with real issues. How often does that really happen in movies these days?

The Sisters Brothers (2018)

Score: 2.5 / 5

Re-watch-ability is one of those things I usually scoff at others for valuing. Who cares if you don't want to watch it again? What matters is your experience of the art in the moment. Sure, we might love things more that we watch often (correlation or causation?), but surely that's just a measure of our personal taste. The more people I talk with, the more I find that their ideas of "good" movies heavily include their opinion of a film's re-watch-ability. I usually disagree.

Then I saw The Sisters Brothers and I had to concede.

The story follows the eponymous siblings as they roam the frontier in the employ of "the Commodore," a wealthy asshole who hires the brothers as hitmen. Their bounty: Hermann Warm (Riz Ahmed), a chemist whose new formula will help him easily find gold in California riverbeds. The Commodore had previously dispatched an assassin (Jake Gyllenhaal), but rather than murdering Warm, they had teamed up to strike it rich together. They make a handsome couple -- far more handsome and intelligent than the brothers teamed up to hunt them down.

The Sisters are almost immediately unlikable. Violent, brusque, and laughably grotesque, they stick out like cactus thorns. Joaquin Phoenix and John C. Reilly are in turns funny and pathetic, with the occasional spice of hostility, but they're also irritating, mean, indulgent, and simple. They harbor dark secrets that do not endear them to us. They're fascinating, to be sure, like the film around them, but only enough to keep us interested for one go-round.

Bleak, dry comedy characterizes this picture, and while it's somewhat fresh and intriguing in the genre, it's also not enough to save the flick from its other trappings. Some moments feel inspired; I think immediately of the nightmarish scene in which a beastly tarantula enters a sleeping John C. Reilly's mouth and they each bite each other. Horrific, to be sure, but also weirdly inconsequential.

Later, in the bizarre town of Mayfield -- in which everything is named Mayfield -- the brothers run afoul of the town's namesake, who they think is conspiring against them. There is no proof of this, and her denial of knowledge of their bounty is only painted as dubious because of our perspective (though she then hires hitmen to eliminate the drunken, dangerous brothers). Surviving, the brothers torture and interrogate Mayfield before murdering and robbing her. It's an awkward series of disjointed, sharply edited images, culminating in the brutal death of a woman in power; it doesn't help that the actress (Rebecca Root) is a trans icon.

Then again, the film has its occasional charms. When Carol Kane shows up in the final scene as the mother Sister, my heart leapt for short-lived joy. And that's nearly the same sensation I felt with the picture in general. It's entertaining and diverting for its run time, but little in it feels important or memorable, and it leaves a somewhat confused aftertaste. And it's not one I ever need to see again.

IMDb: The Sisters Brothers

Kong: Skull Island (2017)

Score: 3.5 / 5

While not quite measuring up to the likes of Peter Jackson's 2005 remake of the classic monster movie, Kong: Skull Island certainly carves out its own place in the pantheon of monster flicks. Featuring an unusually large incarnation of the titular primate, the film crashes along like an equally monstrous beast, shamelessly enjoying its own spectacular style and mindless action. Even occasionally poking fun at itself, the film is essentially the first summer blockbuster of 2017, coming at least two months too early. A sort of breathless adventure that easily scoots you along its two-hour running time, it reminds us that Oscar season too comes to an end, and that the age of extended franchises and multiverses remains alive and well.

If you've ever seen a Kong movie, you know the plot. If you haven't, shame on you. I won't bore you with the mundane details of the premise except to say that this picture is indeed a part of a larger franchise: the Warner Bros. / Legendary Entertainment MonsterVerse, begun by the brilliant Godzilla in 2014. The post-credits scene indicates the direction of the new franchise by revealing the studio's acquisition of other monsters, apparently including Mothra, Rodan, and Ghidorah. Whereas Godzilla felt like an art-house flick that happened to have an enormous budget, Kong feels every bit the costly major studio bash it is, replete with screwball soundtrack and tons of thick CGI. Avoiding the epic scope of Jackson's film, this one instead seems content with being a messy little fever dream of violence. Silly little jump scares and up-close monster battles edited at a frenetic pace keep us bewildered and excited. Layer in the tongue-in-cheek dark humor and pseudo-dramatic close-ups and you've got a beast of a picture that's not quite as horrifying as giant lizards and spiders but more exhilarating than an island of giants. So to speak.

Characters are thinly written, as if the writers are reminding us that we should only be watching for the spectacle. Dry, dark, and occasionally hilarious (though only meaning to be so half the time), the characters fill out an ensemble a little too big for its own good; even as each team member is introduced we ignore their names and roles because we know they will end up dead eventually. The ones who do matter capture our attention through sheer beauty (because the script gives them almost no help): Tom Hiddleston and Brie Larson are the two that matter here, make no mistake. While likable performers surround them, these two stars allow their characters to be fleshed out even in silence, existing fully in their world through the sensation of touch. They strike up a familiar rapport in the film and always seem to have each other's back, a nice dynamic shift of camaraderie in a film of violent mercenaries.

With its vivid, feverishly colored energy and '70s-style vibes, we might wish that it had given into its wild side a bit more. There's so much potential for craziness in a tale like this, and when married to pulsing lights and vibrant hues I can't help but feel the writers missed some golden opportunities. Instead they stick to formula, ignoring the potential fun in the native human presence, other giants on the island, and even the invading characters themselves. Casting the likes of John Goodman and Samuel L. Jackson was smart, but could have been better if their characters had contracted the same sort of apish madness that, for example, John C. Reilly's has caught. On an island where they clearly don't belong, they probably should have demonstrated some Heart of Darkness-level of crazy.

Then again, I was totally fine ignoring the lack of story and characterizations. I was busy filling my eyeballs with Tom Hiddleston being the perfect gentleman-mercenary in that tight blue t-shirt. Holy bananas.

IMDb: Kong: Skull Island

The Lobster (2016)

Score: 4.5 / 5

This is what filmmaking is all about. Aggressively weird and disturbingly tender, The Lobster defies effective description because it is so many things packed into one. A pitch-black romantic comedy that is too clinical and distant to be romantic and too deadpan and creepy to be LOL-ed at, the film seems to exist in a vacuum. In it, single people are observed Big-Brother-style in a hotel, where they are tasked with finding a romantic partner within 45 days despite bizarre and punishing house rules. Failure to mate within the allotted time results in the subject being transformed into an animal.

Enter our not-quite hero, played by a distinctly un-self-aware Colin Farrell. Channeling his brilliant comic timing from Martin McDonagh's films, Farrell plays a man adrift in this dystopian world, who goes with the flow so much he often blends into the strangely familiar sets and landscapes. As he begins to assert himself into the world and make autonomous decisions, however, he learns the cost of nonconformity and takes drastic steps to find his happy ending. Matching his lost soul and dry wit is Rachel Weisz, a member of the lone singles hiding from society in the woods, and as the two embark on a romantic journey they learn that love is not without its consequences.

A star-studded cast populates this picture, but the focus is strictly on Farrell. That's not quite fair, as the script steals the whole film right away. Beautifully crafted, bewilderingly complex, and lyrically absorbing, the dialogue and pacing control the film in wondrous style. Especially noteworthy is Weisz's narration, which adds distance to our perception of the film and lends formidably bleak satire to the proceedings.

It's not a feel-good film, and I'd even be wary of calling it a comedy. This flavor of vicious black humor and absurdism is an acquired taste, and its scathing satirization of superficial courtship (think of our increasingly virtual interactions with potential lovers) and our cultural ideal of the nuclear couple is so dense and allegorized that it will leave you thinking long and hard for days after viewing. The best part? I'm still not sure the film has a message; it just lambastes our norms and mores, leaving them pulpy and quivering on the screen for us to digest at our leisure. Daring cinematic surrealism at its finest, right here.

IMDb: The Lobster

Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)

Score: 4 / 5

I usually react badly when people try to argue that films are "simply" escapist ventures. Firstly, there's nothing really wrong with escapism, though I think a tendency for it leads to bad art. Secondly, there's nothing simple about filmmaking. Or film viewing, for that matter. And a desire to escape from reality into a world that becomes real to many viewers is a very complicated process. But as I watched smiling audience members walk out after Marvel's newest blockbuster Guardians of the Galaxy, the first word that crossed my mind was "escapism". And I was smiling too.

Due, no doubt, to any number of circumstances, superhero movies seem to have been getting darker and heavier over the last few years. Blame Christopher Nolan, postmodern nihilism, or the degradation of American youth, but it's no coincidence that superhero films seem to be growing more tragic in nature. Besides the subject matter that always includes the extinction of humans or the dissolution of Earth, just look at the color palette for Thor and compare it to its sequel. Or Captain America. And consider the titles of these sequels: The Dark World, The Winter Soldier. They grow bleak, because for some reason each installment must be a bigger, "better" challenge to overcome, and one that invariably makes a lot of rubble.

So Guardians proved quite the surprise for me. I usually prefer the darker-toned films of the last few years to comedies, but frankly I've been getting tired of them. The sheer optimism and glee in this film had me smiling through the whole damn thing. And lots of that comes from the director, James Gunn, who handles the (no less threatening than in other Marvel films) presence of multiple scheming, destructive villains with grace and style. While he eventually gives in to weak battle sequences typical of superhero finales, he also has an eye for lovely visuals. And I'm not talking about colossal buildings falling down, nauseating battles in aircraft, or legions of alien armies hammering it out; these elements are in the film but are hardly the photographic focus. The camera views the proceedings with a particularly human eye (with a few spectacle-oriented moments of exception, of course), carefully focusing attention on the cast of characters. Granted, there are so many characters that it is a bit tricky to keep them all straight, but eventually I got the hang of it.

For an ensemble superhero film with almost too many special effects, the real joy here is the acting. While I have never read these comics and so didn't know any of these characters previously, the screenwriters and actors obviously worked together to create strong, sympathetic characters that are both touching and funny. Chris Pratt proves quite capable of heavyweight protagonist flair, and with a sizzling heroic body to boot (which he has sported before, people, in Zero Dark Thirty. Stop acting like this is a new thing). Zoe Saldana peers through her greenface with her usual zest, and even Bradley Cooper and Vin Diesel shine in their moments, though their faces never show at all. My favorite moments, however, belong to Benicio Del Toro, who briefly shows his fabulous side in a turn as the Collector. While I worship Glenn Close, who plays Nova Prime, I don't entirely know why she was in the film; her role is so brief and unnecessary to the plot that she feels a little wasted, and for that matter, so does John C. Reilly. But I'll stop complaining because Close needs to be on screen more, period.

Amidst the sparkling energy and great comedic timing, we have a lot of empty visuals and tons of action without much accompanying drama. That seems to be the direction a lot of recent action films are headed, and that's why I usually prefer the darker stuff: the action has accompanying emotional weight and purpose, if sometimes a bit too much. But Guardians provides a truly giddy release from that, and it is Welcome, not least because its characters are assembled in a refreshingly queer narrative of appreciating and valuing individual difference. There isn't really the level of proud indulgence or selfish sacrifice that we find in too many other action-film heroes. Hopefully future Marvel installments can retain this sincere optimism while also providing just a little more emotional connection.


IMDb: Guardians of the Galaxy