Testaments to the Boom Times to Come

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

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Roma

Roma is a deeply realist movie, that Cuarón made about his childhood maid and nanny, rendered with a near-surrealist visual language that makes it feel like a mythic saga, or a movement of music, or a dive into water. The movie follows Cleo, a young indigenous housekeeper, through a tumultuous year of her life that happens to coincide with a very troubled year in Mexico’s history, the two twining together during the most heart-clenching sequence in the movie, in which I just started crying, overwhelmed by the tidal swell and pull of it all.

Full review on Watch Log

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

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Paddingtons

This year’s Paddington 2 is so ridonkulously well-reviewed that I had to watch both it and the first installment of the Paddington franchise, also known as the British children’s movies where Ben Whishaw voices a 3 foot 6 digitally animated bear in a red hat. GUESS WHAT, THEY’RE CHARMING. Thought they couldn’t possibly be as charming as cooed, but the people are right, they are! These movies are really awfully sweet, and just this side of doable on the kids’ film silliness axis. Whenever they start to lose me with too many slow motion pratfalls of computer generated animals sailing paws-over-teakettle, one of the incredibly winning actors swoops in being so gosh darn delightful that you feel like sunshine is gonna start pouring out of your screen. Sally Hawkins alone could probably stave off your seasonal depression.

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SWEET AS MARMALADE. Review of Paddingtons 1 & 2 above, live-blogs for Patreon here!

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

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The Favourite

The Favourite is a sumptuous, mordant, slapstick lesbian love triangle meets Stuart royal court drama in which everyone is a morbid hilarious bitch. This is, mm probably my MOVIE OF THE YEAR. Maybe the movie of the year? I’ve a good few to go still, but this one is such a fucking diamond. It’s as if Yorgos Lanthimos, my adored weirdo Greek auteur of The Killing of a Sacred Deer and The Lobster, wondered what would happen if he stirred Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall into a pitcher of Armando Iannucci shows, strained out every pip of male POVs, then poured the whole lively cocktail over a block of dry ice carved in the shape of a duck named Horatio. God or maybe a rabbit. (The rabbits.)

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[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

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The Sisters Brothers

If I’m gonna describe this generally, and that’s what I’ve set out to do here, I’m pretty sure The Sisters Brothers is a meandering (but in an existentially on-theme way), surprisingly sensitive and also just surprising Western slash maybe darkly comic fable in which everyone’s delivery style is basically the opposite of Jeff Bridges in True Grit. Like, Joaquin Phoenix and John C. Reilly—the titular Sisters—are out here in eastern Oregon territory in 1851 clearly articulating all the letters in “Yes” in response to each other’s queries and brotherly arguing around the campfire about whether you should really use the word “victimized” to describe slights against some sort of shadowy Old West mob boss (theirs) only known as The Commodore, who inexplicably has this big emblem on the entrance to his large house composed of two noble mermen. Meanwhile the colors and camerawork are really very beautiful, and the score is by Alexandre Desplat and inspired by jazz combos, electric violin, and spare experimentalist John Cage of all things.

But if I’m going to try to explain the elements that to me make up the overwhelming portion of what this movie has to recommend itself, I’m gonna need to tell you about, *ahem*:

Jake Gyllenhaal and Riz Ahmed as the Slow West Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin

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[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

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Widows

Widows is pretty cold folks, and it rules.

This is basically the antithesis of Ocean’s 8, when it comes to 2018’s lady heist movies. There’s a moment where Viola Davis just spells out for the other women that they are not going to become friends, this is a job, and when it’s over they are on their own. The timeline for being on their own will be moved up are they to be caught while the job is still happening. This is a bleak movie about doing something rough and harsh because you’re being threatened, and the only way you can see out of the trap closing in is to be as hard as the steel of the bars, and move first.

More on Watch Log

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

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Wildlife

Well this was prettier than I expected! Definitely an acting showcase sort of movie, but behind-the-camera Paul Dano turns out to have a really beautiful artistic sense, in addition to getting wonderful performances out of his cast. In particular the color language, cinematography, and sound mixing were gorgeous, and tie to what I somehow did not know going in: that the 1950s nuclear family falling apart in Wildlife are doing so against the breathtaking backdrop of a Montana autumn, as a wildfire roars just beyond the mountain line, and the whole town waits for snow.

Full review on Watch Log

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

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Can You Ever Forgive Me?

A lovely movie about snarky miserable loners, real good for November coat weather. Alcoholic incorrigible middle aged gays become tentative friends and shabby book-world fraudsters in 1991 New York City, starring Melissa McCarthy and Richard Grant as the churlish wlw/mlm solidarity pair of the season, based on the memoir by writer Lee Israel herself about the true time she ran out of money and hope and started scamming collectors with fake letters from literary luminaries, and the English bar drifter she met along the way. This movie paints a really affecting portrait of down-trodden struggle and loneliness, but the bitter, tea-colored fog is mellowed with a dollop of grim sweetness from the story of two people discovering it’s better to be cranky together, and that sometimes you don’t realize you’ve made something good until you’re well past the middle of it, and on the run from the law.

Full review on Watch Log

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

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Shirkers

True crime was always a miss for me, but then Sandi Tan made a documentary about Shirkers, the indie film she shot as a teenager on the streets of Singapore in 1992, which was subsequently stolen from her and friends by their mysterious older mentor when he vanished with all their footage, and now I get it. This shit is riveting.

A bit on Shirkers, just released last month on Netflix and really good!

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

Just a behind-the-scenes moment here, but my Suspiria thoughts I just posted yesterday already have 20% more views than my A Star Is Born thoughts, which feels incredibly indicative of the community round these parts (i.e. you all are WEIRDOS) (I love you)

Anyway, reminder that I drop all my (spoiler-free!) (unless otherwise indicated up top!) “movie reviews” on the freshly ad-free and and url-upgraded watchlog.blog, ooh gettin’ fancy with the non Wordpress address ~

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

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Suspiria (Guadagnino, 2018)

Probably at the end of the year the movie that will hold the most drastically different places on my ranked lists of Favorites and Bests will be Suspiria (2018), during which I mostly wanted to die, but which I think is probably a good or at least very notable movie in terms of concept / vision / execution / sheer audacity. Hard to say for sure though as I was cowering behind my fingers for 25-30% of it!!!! I knew, I knew as soon as I read the shocked reactions to that clip they showed critics back in April that I was going to spend this swamped with nauseous adrenaline, but still had the idiocy to skip dinner to instead spend 150 minutes locked in horror and agony, then limp home to get maybe five hours of sick shivery sleep, which is the story of how Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria wrecked my health for like 24 hours. A powerful film experience! Thanks I hated it!

Horrible that the extent to which I would like to never have to remember things in this movie ever again is betrayed by how much I also had to say about it.