Slate’s 2016 Movie Club

Posted on January 6, 2017 at 8:00 am

I look forward to Slate’s annual movie club roundup of critics discussing the best and worst of the year.

Slate’s own Dana Stevens points out that there was only one title on all four participants’ top ten lists for the year, Barry Jenkins’ “Moonlight.” She says, “‘Moonlight’s’ commercial and critical success—the near-universal recognition of its hard-to-define specialness—was one of the cracks in the wall that allowed light (that liquid Miami moonlight) to shine into this sometimes pitch-dark year.” Mark Harris calls it “a beautifully accomplished work that takes seminar-room issues of race, class, sexuality, and identity and transforms them into something artistic, sexy, tragic, wrenching, human, and fully American.”

I am more interested in the discussions and debates about particular movies than in the effort to look for themes in the movies that were released or popular in any individual year or consider them as a reflection on our times. But I did like Brooks Barnes’ essay in the New York Times about how in the tumultuous year all of the top box office films were fantasies.

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A Scholarly (Yes!) Look at Ferris Bueller

Posted on January 4, 2017 at 8:00 am

I’m a fan of Steve Almond’s writing, and really enjoyed his take on “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” especially his discussion of the relationship between Ferris (Matthew Broderick) and Cameron (Alan Ruck).

Hughes could have simply cast as a straight man for Ferris. But he does something far more compelling: he renders the pair as a psychological dyad. Ferris is fearless, larger-than-life. He has internalized the unconditional love of his parents and skips through his days in a self-assured reverie. He is what every teenage guy dreams of being: a raging, narcissistic id who gets away with it. Cameron is an actual teenager: alienated from his parents, painfully insecure, angry, depressed.

It is the tension between these two that drives the action.

He puts the story into context as more than a lighthearted wish fulfillment.

Hughes performed an astounding ontological feat. He lured viewers into embracing his film as an escapist farce, then hit them with a pitch-perfect exploration of teen angst. He snuck genuine art past the multiplex censors.

He writes about the scene where Cameron argues with himself about whether he will do as his friend Ferris asks and leave home for a “day off.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdcFYNe9U7A

The sequence lasts barely a minute. It is an astonishing piece of physical humor, an emotional ballet worthy of Chaplin. Hell, it’s one of the best pieces of acting I’ve ever seen, period. Because it’s not just funny, it’s heartbreaking. We are watching a kid utterly crippled by his own conflicted impulses, torn between outrage and obedience.

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The Worst Films of 2016

Posted on December 30, 2016 at 6:00 am

These films are not just bad; they are awful. Avoid at all costs.

Mother’s Day
The Wild Life
Norm of the North
The Boss
Alice Through the Looking Glass
Gods of Egypt
Huntsman: Winter’s War
Tarzan
London Has Fallen
Why Him?

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SPOILER ALERT: Rogue One Secrets

Posted on December 17, 2016 at 7:47 pm

For hard-core “Star Wars” fans only! SPOILER ALERT!

From Slashfilm: What the differences between the trailer and the finished film show us about the reshoots. Particularly interesting is the decision to soften Jyn’s character.

Most of this dialogue compiled from various trailers is very different. Jyn’s troublemaker backstory is mostly removed from the finished film. Her responses are more antagonistic and somewhat snarky. We had heard that the reshoots reworked the Jyn character to make her less arrogant and abrasive and more empathetic, and it appears this is true.

And, as you might imagine, there are a couple of very detailed lists of the Easter eggs and references to other “Star Wars” stories, including The Verge, Den of Geek, and Screen Rant.

And CinemaBlend has an intriguing theory on how “Rogue One” relates to the flashback sequence in “Force Awakens.”

These are the fan sites you are looking for.

Understanding “Arrival”

Posted on November 26, 2016 at 8:00 am

Still trying to figure out “Arrival?” These might help:

In the Washington Post, Michael O’Sullivan explains more about what a linguist does, with some comments from the woman who helped to inspire the character played by Amy Adams, Jessica Coon.

Linguists, Coons explains, aren’t so much glorified translators as they are theoreticians, more interested in the why of humankind’s natural affinity for language acquisition, when other species aren’t hard-wired for it.

In Entertainment Weekly, Darren Franich is one of the few people writing about the film to dismiss its aspirations of profundity.

There’s a phony core to Arrival, though, which emerges gradually and then suddenly. The film opens with the birth, life, and death of Banks’ daughter. The devastation of her loss haunts the film; mother-daughter scenes play through the movie. It seems like a character note, a clever bit of arc-setting: Banks, grieving the loss of her child, must now midwife our communication with an entirely new species. Perhaps you would say: Having cut herself off from humanity, she must now connect humanity to the stars. Or maybe not everything is plot-essential; maybe this is a movie daring enough to suggest that the characters have a life outside of the constraints of the movie.

But Arrival, turns out, is entirely a Plot Movie. Every character trait and hanging line of dialogue is hermetically sealed into the architecture of what amounts to a Big Twist. As Banks learns the aliens’ language, her consciousness comes unstuck in time. The daughter we’ve been seeing hasn’t even been born yet.

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