Weekly Movie Reviews: Apr 23-29, 2017

Favorite Movie of the Week

Moonlight (2016)

I knew we were going to have to watch Moonlight eventually, since it won the Oscar for Best Picture this year, but I wasn’t really looking forward to it because it sounded really depressing. The Academy knows what they’re talking about, though, because Moonlight is a fantastic movie.

We follow Chiron, a young black man through three decades of his life – as a kid, a teenager, and an adult – as he navigates his sexuality, his poverty, and life in general. Unusually for movie protagonists, Chiron is introverted and sensitive, and the movie doesn’t try to disguise it. There are long periods of silence where no one says anything, and the actors still manage to convey a world of emotion. There’s not much drama in this movie, and the most dramatic events happen off-camera anyway, allowing the audience to be entirely inside Chiron’s head.

If you’ve been putting off watching Moonlight like I was, don’t!

Other Movies Watched

Fargo (1996)

I’m not a big Coen Brothers fan – I know they’re great filmmakers, and I don’t dislike their movies exactly, but they always seem heartless somehow. Fargo is an exception, though – it’s both scathingly funny and adorable, depending on the characters you’re seeing. Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy, playing his usual sad-sack) attempts to get his wife kidnapped in order to extort ransom money from his wealthy father-in-law, but due to general ineptitude on the part of pretty much everyone, things go horribly wrong. Frances McDormand plays Marge Gunderson, the cop investigating one of the incidental crimes. The acting is terrific, the Minnesota/North Dakota winter setting adds a great deal of atmosphere, and the writing and emotional payoff is spot-on.

Loving (2016)

After watching the excellent Midnight Special, I was on board with pretty much anything else that Jeff Nichols wrote and directed, so I was excited to watch this movie about the Richard and Mildred Loving, the interracial couple that caused the Supreme Court to rule that state miscegenation laws were unconstitutional. Like Midnight Special, this movie drops you right into the life of the Lovings without too much explanation, and it chooses to focus on the people rather than the larger civil rights issue. The Lovings aren’t an exceptional family, and they’re not on a crusade to change anything – they just happen to be discovered by the ACLU. Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton do an excellent job making the Lovings feel like people you probably know, and that makes their story more poignant than if the movie had followed the traditional tropes of trying to make you care about them.

Nightcrawler (2014)

Lou Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a petty thief who has had no luck obtaining a more steady job. He observes a crew of stringers covering a car accident to obtain footage to sell to local television, and decides to enter the profession himself. He turns out to be extremely good at it, especially when he starts crossing ethical boundaries to obtain better footage. Jake Gyllenhaal is simultaneously creepy and compelling as Bloom, and the movie treats his story as both horrifying and like a success story – scenes where he’s done something amoral to get ahead are often scored triumphantly. The rest of the cast is really great, too, especially Rene Russo as a television producer who is desperate for more and more lurid footage to keep her job.

La La Land (2016)

This movie has gotten a lot of great press, and we loved Damien Chazelle’s earlier movie, Whiplash, so I fully expected to love La La Land as well. Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone play a jazz pianist and an actress trying to chase their respective dreams in Los Angeles. The movie is very well-made, and when I was watching it, the phrase “ode to moviemaking” kept popping into my head, and I think that describes it well. Much like Whiplash, the protagonists are obsessed with their work and everything else (including their relationship) comes a distant second, but unlike Whiplash, they seemed more like archetypes than sympathetic characters. The music is excellent, and the technical skill is amazing, especially in the sequence at the end (you’ll know it when you see it), but I just wasn’t invested in what was actually happening, so unfortunately I can’t say that I loved it.

Batman Returns (1992)

I’m a fan of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, but I’ve never actually seen the Tim Burton/Joel Schumacher movies, so we’re watching them in order. Batman Returns has Tim Burton returning as director and Michael Keaton starring as Batman, this time going up against Catwoman (Michelle Pfeiffer), the Penguin (Danny DeVito), and evil industrialist Max Shreck (Christopher Walken). It was much better than the first movie, I particularly liked the Batman/Catwoman relationship. It’s still fairly ridiculous and a little uncomfortable to watch, just like most Tim Burton films.

Gold (2016)

I was expecting great things from Gold, since it was written/directed by Stephen Gaghan, who did the terrific Syriana. It wasn’t a bad movie, but it was definitely underwhelming. It’s based on the Bre-X mining scandal, and stars Matthew McConaughey as a down-on-his-luck miner who teams up with a geologist who claims to know where to find a massive deposit of gold. McConaughey does a good job at playing an average hapless guy, but I don’t think it makes use of his talent. I can’t find anything else notable to say about this movie, it seemed like one of those movies which you’d never hear about but encounter on TV when channel-surfing (if people even do that anymore) and think was kind of interesting.

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