Call me by your name

I'm aware this has hit a lot of people's top ten lists. And it's not on mine. It's not by any means a hideous film. But for me, anyway, it's a case of something fundamental not working for me. In a romance, no matter what you have to buy that the characters are drawn to each other - that there's a passion dwelling underneath that neither can resist.

And I just don't buy it here. I'm told it, they go through the motions of moving towards each other and slowly exploring each other's touch, but ... it just isn't there for me. This is a very ... tasteful film (the script is by James Ivory, best known for being the director half of Merchant Ivory, and there are elements of some of his earlier films in the romantic escape to the Italian countryside for a set of otherwise somewhat uptight American Jews). The pacing is pretty languid, there's a lot of nice explorations of the Tuscan countryside (which, yes, is very pretty) and a little bit of antiquity referencing in among the story of a grad student whose visit to a professor sees him entangled with the 17 year old son of the household. Maybe it's that I'm not entirely convinced by Armie Hammer as anything but variations of the Winklevoss twins - he still feels a little bit too much the jock-ish guy who seems utterly in control of himself - maybe it's just that this feels all very... cultured, very restrained, with not enough of the red meat of passion that I'm really looking for.

Anyway. I'm sure this will do things for other people that it didn't do for me. But it didn't do much for me.

The Florida Project

In a Florida hotel just far enough away from the theme-park wonderland, a bunch of marginalised people just getting by live in a motel called The Magic Castle. During a summer, a six year old girl, Moonee, wanders around playing with friends, sometimes quite anti-socially (we're introduced to her as she and her friends are having a spitting contest onto a car in a neighbouring motel). But we soon discover that she can be as instantly accepting as she is destructive - striking up a friendship with a young girl who's living with her grandmother, the owner of that car she spat on. We explore this world through the viewpoint of an impulsive, playful six year old girl - as her emotionally disastrous mother slides into more desperate attempts to make money, as the motel manager balances his affection for his residents with his responsibilities as part of a business, as Moonee's friendships are endangered by some of the consequences of her reckless behaviour.

Willem Defoe as the hotel manager is one of the only name actors in this film (there are two other actors with a range of credits in minor roles) - it's a film that combines almost docu-drama reality with a stealthy sense of structure that explodes in the last ten-fifteen minutes as all the safety nets and all the other options drop away. This is another film that captures the kids-eye-view of what should be a horrendous topic (poverty in the US) in a way that stresses above all the character's humanity, in all the malformed and painful ways that emerges. Director Sean Baker's previous film, "Tangerine", was shot on an iphone and captured the messy lives of transgender prostitutes in LA in a way that refused to apologise for or condescend to its characters as purely victims or purely monsters. I talked to a friend afterwards and they described it as a film they'd find hard to rewatch (presumably becuase of the awful things that happen to the characters) - but I found it so very richly human that I'd love to get back in and spend time with this kid and these people again. It's one of my favourite films of the year.

The Greatest Showman

An attempt at a grand musical spectacular, "Greatest Showman" throws a lot at the screen - a splashy visual style out of "Moulin Rouge", a score of contemporary-sounding R&B numbers, a cast full of unusual figures, a lead character who rises through a whole lot of spin, and one of the few bankable leading men who has a genuine song-and-dance background. It's still a bit of a shemozzle, unfortunately - the songs have a tendency to be full of pseudo-inspirational lyrics that never really get anywhere beyond their opening declarations, and the script is much more comfortable depicting Barnum's rise than it is with finding anything interesting to do once he's got there. 

Hugh Jackman has a winning presence but he's largely trying very hard in aid of very little for an awful lot of the film. Michelle Williams has even less to do as his wife - she's probably never looked as radiant on screen as she has in this film, but her role just requires her to sit in the background and be the compliant wife right up until the point where she, very briefly, walks away (only to come right back with very little argument). Zac Efron as his eventual business partner has a bit more to do - and the Jackman/Efron duet is one of the highlights of the film as they both sing, dance and down multiple shots of whisky as Jackman tempts him into getting into the more disreputable sides of showbiz. Zendaya as a trapeze artist and love interest for Efron gets the other highlight number as they dance around each other while she swings across the arena, rising and falling in a gravity-defying pas de deux. Rebecca Ferguson has undoubtable presence but, again, her singer Jenny Lind feels required just to stand there and look pretty (and belt out another contempo-ballad). 

There's an over-reliance on dramatic acapella beginnings of songs in over-dramatic reprises, and a general sense of style over substance. It's by no means a cinematic atrocity, but it is an awful lot of sound and fury signifying not very much.

Downsizing

This is a disappointment. Alexander Payne's latest film attempts to do something on a wider scale than his earlier films like Election, Sideways and About Schmidt, looking at issues of consumerism and our responsibility for the environment through a sci-fi "what if" as an experiment in shrinking people to reduce consumption spreads across society.

The main problem is our protagonist. Matt Damon plays a reasonably average guy who decides to join in the trend. And the first hour or so of this film follows him as he drifts through life, drifting into the decision to shrink himself down, and the various people he encounters along the way. It's not until the second half when he encounters Ngoc Tran (played by Hong Chau), a Vietnamese activist who's been shrunk against her will and migrated to the US, and gets exposure to the new underclass of his society that anything really come of it. Damon's character is really remarkably aimless, and not in any kind of interesting way. He has a pleasant enough accepting demeanour, but that doesn't make for compelling or dramatic storytelling, and until Tran comes along there aren't any other characters who get to stick around for long enough to make an impact (and there's quite a reasonable bunch of supporting actors, from Kristen Wiig and Jason Sudekis to Margot Martindale, Neil Patrick Harris and Laura Dern, all of whom have roles that amount to very little).

There's no goddam reason for this to be focussed so strongly on the bland white-guy protagonist - Damon can be a fine actor when he's got something to pursue (whether it's to escape Mars, punch people in the face in pursuit of his identity, or pulling off a Vegas scam), but when he hasn't, there's not nearly enough surface charm to let us go along with this dull, dull character (and even when Tran comes along, she's still filtered through his boring, boring protagonist).

So give it a big miss.

Paddington 2

In this follow-up to the 2014 film, Paddington (voiced by a delightfully unasuming Ben Whitshaw) is a bear with a simple mission - to buy a pop-up book of London for his Aunt Lucy's hundredth birthday. But between the misadventures he encounters raising money to buy the book, and the even worse consequences when a sinister actor (Hugh Grant) steals the book as part of a diabolical plan to recover a mysterious fortune, events seldom run particularly smoothly.

This is a delightfully whimsical film, and very heftily British, with Grant's villain running the gamut of British monuments and the rest of the cast seemingly raided from a roladex of great British character actors. Director Paul King has a nicely stylized approach which means nothing ever becomes too cutesy for words - even while Paddington manages to get through his adventures either through being very polite to people, or, in the most extreme situations, offering a Marmalade sandwich, we consistently get to enjoy the simple pleasure of a children's story well told. Grant has a ball as the pompous ham of a villain, and all in all this is as delightful a children's film as you're likely to see.

The Last Jedi

"Star Wars" is, like it or not, our generation's mythology. It changed what blockbuster were supposed to be, for good and evil (noting that the film 20th Century Fox expected to be their box-office champ of 1977 was a Sydney Sheldon melodrama, perhaps it's for the better cinema didn't follow the Fox executives' predictions). And the extension of that mythology has had ... well, let's say, mixed results in the popular imagination. For some, the rot set in when the Ewoks showed up, for others it's the prequels, and for still another set, it's the new run of films that kicked off in 2015 with "The Force Awakens".

For me, it's still golden - I don't love the prequels but they have moments of awesome that make me happy (along with, yes, moments of bad dialogue or incompetent acting that make me glance elsewhere for a bit) - and the current crop keep the flame well and truly alive. "The Last Jedi" picks up the story pretty promptly after "The Force Awakens", with the Resistance well and truly on the run from the First Order, and Rey seeking enlightenment from Luke Skywalker. Neither go exactly as expected - the Resistance suffers blow after blow, while Luke is emphatically not at all interested in training a new generation. There's enough plot developments for what feels more like two sequels rather than one, and we end in a place where the possibilities seem endless as to what could happen next.

This is a beautiful action-adventure-sci-fi story that made my heart soar, pound, and even occasionally got my head to think. If the adventures of two characters occasionally look a little bit like busy-work to keep them occupied while other people are getting up to more important plot related things, they're never the less thematically important and serve to widen the world of the story. It's a film where the heroes choices get harder, where the dangers are more lethal, and where the difference between wrong and right isn't as clear as it has been. And it's beautifully shot too, with the action taking place in some gorgeous sets and environments.

I understand there's been some, ahem, mixed reactions out there to this. But I unashamedly loved it as a true expansion and a deeply thoughtful film rather than just another franchise retread. And I'm not ashamed to say so.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri

"Three Billboards" shows off writer-director Martin McDonagh's razor sharp black comedy instincts, well shown in plays like "The Beauty Queen of Lenane", "The Lieutenant of Innishmoor" and "Hangmen" and his previous film "In Bruges", in the story of a mother who protests police inaction over the rape and murder of her daughter by erecting three billboards asking pointed questions of the police chief. It's a very contemporary story of vengeance and public shaming, with Frances McDormand giving her best lead performance since "Fargo" and some fantastic support from Woody Harrelson as the not-entirely-unsympathetic police chief, Sam Rockwell as a somewhat more foolish cop plus Peter Dinklage as a local lawyer and friend to McDormand. It balances carefully the fine points of McDormand's righteous rage and the way that it burns both the just and the unjust alike, with escalations as her actions provoke a series of reactions and tit-for-tat revenges that take things several places you won't expect.

What works most about this is McDormand - sure, her character is bitter and angry, and somewhat justifiably so, but it's a very three-dimensional anger, one that you can see exists at least as much to cover for genuine pain as it does due to genuine rage. And it's not a film that finds easy answers at its core, just feeling its way towards finding a way through a cruel and unjust world. And I'll repeat, it's also astoundingly funny. Definitely recommended.

The Disaster Artist

I must admit I've never seen "The Room", Tommy Wiseau's entry into the "worst movie ever" sweepstakes, although I have seen enough youtube clips and read enough thinkpieces to agree that it's certainly got wretched writing and performances enough to make for a shambolic production. James Franco film tells the backstage story of how it got made - and provides a portrait of Wiseau, a genuinely odd fellow whose secretive nature is matched only by his transparent need for the affection and acceptance that his very guardedness cuts him off from.

This is a fairly gentle, sentimental representation of Wiseau - in some ways, it's just another story of an entitled wealthy guy creating a community around him who don't say no because they don't want him to cut off the tap of money, and about the fringe element of hollywood, where everybody's afraid they're just a second away from being cut off and never working again. But it never pushes this to being truly confronting about where these needs might come from. In many ways it's a modern day Ed Wood, except that Wood never had the strain of misogyny that reeks from Wiseau, and while Franco gives him puppy-dog eyes, he's just not someone the audience can really warm to particularly.

That's not to say this doesn't have amusing diversions - whether it be in recreations of the original or in the gobsmacked faces of the rest of the cast and crew as they realise just how weird their writer/director/producer really is. But ultimately it adds up to not a lot new, with the film reluctant to go too deep into Wiseau's screwed up philosophies on life and love.It's a light laugh but with not a lot behind it thematcally or dramatically.

Better Watch Out

Christmas is a great time to set practically any kind of story - particularly the traditional, Euro/American Christmases with snow and decoration. Forcing people who don't want to be together, often stuck in the same couple of rooms, means that tensions are quickly raised and can explode freely and frequently. In the case of this horror/thriller story, though, Christmas is largely, excuse the pun, ornamental - the basic nature of the situation is pretty non-season specific. A 13 year old and his 18 year old babysitter are at his house - he's got a mild crush on her, which she seems determined to ignore, when suddenly their house becomes besieged by unknown figures outside. And as tensions rise it becomes difficult to tell who's going to be around when or if mum and dad get home....

There's a basic casting inadequacy that brings this film undone. Olivia DeJonge as the babysitter is not that inadequacy - she's got the modern thriller-horror heroine down pat, resourceful and smart enough to be more than just ready-for-the-slaughter victim, while still not so world conquering as to be invulnerable. No, the problem is Levi Miller, who I moaned about earlier in the year with "Red Dog: True Blue". He's a very ... contrived actor, whose performances have never managed to pull the illusion that he's not acting. And given he's 50% of the leads, that's going to bring the film undone. There are a couple of clever plot twists and surprises, together with some genuine creepiness, but it doesn't hold together as well as it might with a better co-lead.

The Teacher

This Czech film is a period piece, set in 1983 as a- communist-aligned teacher stars teaching in a primary school. Her interest in her students seems largely to go to what their parents can do for her, from small favours like cakes and housework to smuggling food across borders. As the pressures build up on parents who resist her, the consequences to their children prove ever harsher. There's some interesting elements here, in particular the framing device at a school meeting where parents are gathered together to discuss complaints against the teacher, with the majority, aligned with her, paying little heed to the complaints of the parents who have been less fortunate. As the story develops, we see the consequences and fears that restrain people from speaking up against repression.

The analogy to the wider communist regime is obvious. Performances are pretty solid, although it's not exactly subtle as allegories go. The storytelling is reasonably tight. The reason I hold back from loving this is, perhaps, this doesn't really tell us too much we don't know, and it tends towards "goodies and baddies" storytelling, with not a lot of subtlety. But it's an interesting look at the time and place from a somewhat different angle.