Three and a Half Stars for Three Billboards

Movie Reviewed: Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri

Director: Martin McDonagh

Date: 21 July 2018

jamesintexas rating: ***1/2



A rough, profane trip through the heart of darkness in Missouri, Irish playwright and filmmaker Martin McDonagh crafts Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri with a fever-pitch, volcanic performances, and a surprisingly touching ending.  The film has stayed with me much longer than I thought it would, and I'm eager to see it a second time. 

Francis McDormand is the vengeful Mildred Hayes, a grieving mother whose daughter's heinous death inculcates a fierce desire to see justice meted out in their small town.  Mildred rents three billboards, posing explosively accusatory questions at Chief Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) for not solving the crime yet.  The seemingly incompetent, bumbling, near-caricature of stupidity and racism enshrined all in one character is Officer Dixon (Sam Rockwell), a would-be opponent of Mildred's, and a kind of institutional obstacle in his cluelessness, his insouciance, and his white male prerogative and privilege in a small town, codified by his power as the police.  Mildred's provocative act spurs his even more provocative acts of violence and abuse, events that pit much of the town against Mildred's myopic pursuit of justice, a pursuit that estranges her from her son Robbie (Lucas Hedges), her ex-husband (John Hawkes), various townspeople including her dentist, while attracting James (Peter Dinklage).  It is an assemblage so remarkably strange, but it works for the most part because of the profane poetry spewed by Mildred and others in a sort of backwoods Shakespearean vernacular of pain, viciousness, and shock.  And Mildred's histrionic media-grabbing billboards push the case forward into unforseen places. 

All the performances are stellar.  McDormand and Rockwell are the stars and the Oscar-winners, but Harrelson is dependably, solidly the core of the film with his much-maligned Chief Willoughby containing depths and surprises.  There's one particularly Mildred memorable monologue about culpability delivered with venom by McDormand to the local Catholic priest who has come to persuade Mildred to take down her billboards.  Her point is "You joined the gang. You're culpable" when dissecting priest sexual abuse scandals.  Another turn, late in the film, is surprising in its scope and its bringing us out from the microcosm to the macrocosm of war, American foreign policy, and those whom we ask to fight our wars.  It is breathtaking when it arrives and consumes the remainder of the film.

The ending of the film suggests hope for its travelers, hope (maybe) for America in 2018, as unlikely allies find ourselves full of fire and fury, dangerous but simultaneously aware that we need time to talk and think ourselves out of actions that may destroy our souls.  Maybe.  In a film swirling with police brutality, darkest violence, and Cormac McCarthy-level nihilism, that's the best that we can hope for, the best that we can get.

Del Toro's Majesty and Grandeur: The (Odd) Shape of Water

Movie Reviewed: The Shape of Water

Director: Guillermo Del Toro

Date: 21 July 2018

jamesintexas rating: ***



Guillermo Del Toro's The Shape of Water has an assured quality in its storytelling, a loving hand which offers homages to The Creature from the Black Lagoon and other touchstones of Del Toro's cinematic life, and its weird assortment of creatures, human and non, make it one of the most unusual films of the year.  It did not move me, and writing about it in July after it won Best Picture means that the film has taken on a life of its own.  It is a phenomena of creativity.

Mute janitor Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins) works alongside Zelda Fuller (Octavia Spencer) in a secret 1960's lab run by autocrat Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon), and one night after seeing a bloodied Strickland emerge sans fingers from the lab, Elisa begins to communicate with the creature that is kept chained up in a pool, the remover of those fingers, an amphibious gilled-creature (Doug Jones).  Elisa starts a burgeoning friendship with the creature, and she begins to fantasize about rescuing him from his torture at the hands of the government, including Dr. Robert Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg) who offers a more humane way to treat him opposed to Strickland's ferocity.  To do anything of this magnitude, Elisa would need help from her artistic neighbor Giles (Richard Jenkins), himself an outcast of sorts because of his hidden sexuality. Strickland's harassment of Elisa in addition to his authoritarian control over the creature and the lab lead to an inevitable showdown of sorts. The film is about being outcast because of ability, race, sexual orientation, and even politics, and Del Toro lovingly shoots it with attention to the blues and yellows of neon, the windows on the bus Elisa takes to work where she traces the raindrops.

The film works best with Hawkins and Jones marvelously playing off of each other, or Hawkins and Spencer, or Hawkins and Jenkins.  Sally Hawkins really shines, making Elisa a compelling and dramatic figure.  What troubled me was so much time spent by Del Toro on and with Strickland.  Michael Shannon is a fine actor giving a fine performance, yet the amount of screen time given to him in the second half of the film undercuts the power of Hawkins and Jones.  And, it does not lead to any greater understanding of him, any epiphany, or any denouement that seems worthy of the amount of time spent with him.  Del Toro is sure to include scenes of Strickland's viciousness and also his insecurity with his superiors, especially with him being a veteran.  I guess that I just don't think the shape of the script matches the grandeur of Del Toro's images.  But to see the creature watching a film in the old-fashioned style of theater with water dripping from Elisa's underwater apartment above is a special moment.  What an odd choice of film to be enshrined forever in the public consciousness as a Best Picture!  I think I would always prefer Pan's Labyrinth over this film, but Del Toro delivers his own unique vision in his own unique way.

Alienated: Alien Disappointment

Movie Reviewed: Alien: Covenant

Director: Ridley Scott

Date: 29 June 2017

jamesintexas rating: **



I think an Alien film will always get me in the theater door because of my unqualified love for the first two films and even my nostalgia for the darkness of the third film.  I was a Prometheus apologist, and now, I'm turning on the franchise.  Despite an interesting prologue conversation between David (Michael Fassbender) and Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce) about the nature of humanity, the film swerves into expected territory, with a damaged colony ship full of couples needing to make a quick decision about continuing their on their mission or stopping at this perfectly normal hospitable planet which is really close by.  What could go wrong, eh?  The exploration of the unfamiliar place leads to the sniffing of germs that lead to infection that lead to alien infestation, naturally, and then the film goes really off the rails.  Characters make very nonsensical decisions that lead to greater chaos and bloodshed, and despite a Fassbender tour-de-force moment that is one to savor, the film just seems to be comfortable in its complacency.  Katherine Waterston, Danny McBride, and Billy Crudup cannot save this film, which just does not seem to work very well.  I think Alien: Covenant misfires, ultimately.

Powerful Panther Power

Movie Reviewed: Black Panther

Director: Ryan Coogler

Date: 20 June 2018

jamesintexas rating: ***1/2



Ryan Coogler's Black Panther is a marvel, dramatically rendered in textures and special effects that enhance the storytelling.  He's out-Star Wars-ed Star Wars this year, and his film fits with his previous two films Creed and Fruitvale Station in their strong casts and well-developed character arcs.  Here, Coogler explores the hidden African country of Wakanda, led by T'Challa, aka Black Panther, (Chadwick Boseman) and the much more captivating and interesting warriors Nakia (Lupita Nyong'o) and Okoye (Danai Gurira), as well as sister Shuri (Letitia Wright).  The film's prologue in Oakland features a contrast of styles in how to confront injustice in the modern world with some devastating consequences of choices made by leaders that may not be fully felt for many years.

Coogler's steady hand leads us to London, where Erik Killmonger (Michel B. Jordan) espouses a philosophical reclamation of tribal artifacts and African history from the London Museum before leading an actual reclamation of a vibranium axe, the element being an integral part of the technology that makes Wakanda so strong.  Killmonger works with Ulysses Klaue (Andy Serkis, sans CGI) but has his own personal reasons for challenging T'Challa.  There's also the sleuthing of Nakia and T'Challa, as they try to figure out the next moves of Killmonger and Klaue. The teaming-up-with-the-CIA part of the film is probably its weakest aspect, even though Martin Freeman does as much as he can. There's much to like here from the elaborately conceived and majestically purple-colored dream sequences where T'Challa communicates with his elders, as well as the ritual combat set against thunderous waterfalls and edges.  Coogler handles the intensity of this world by giving us so many characters to care about, with Nakia, Okoye, and Shuri leading the way.

Chadwick Boseman's work is more subdued in contrast and less interesting.  Nyong'o, Gurira, and Wright are given much to do, humor, and significant screen time.  Alan Hook's art direction, Ruth Carter's costumes, and Jay Hart's set decoration should all be remembered come Oscar season.  The film really looks original and unique, and though I've fallen off the Marvel bandwagon and am many, many movies behind, Black Panther succeeds as a stand alone film because of Coogler's confident streamlining of the story and rooting it in characters that we care about.  For my eyes, the final fight sequence with T'Challa and Killmonger loses its power in CGI muddled imagery, with the final moves that end the fight being hard to follow. But in nearly every other respect, Black Panther is one of the best films of the year.  The film ends back in Oakland with a philosophical unpacking of isolationism vs. globalism, the idea of sharing, not hoarding what you have that makes you special, exploring elements of social consciousness in a film far more interested in ideas and characters than in the superficial.  Bravo!

Wanted: More LeCarre Films

Movie Reviewed: A Most Wanted Man

Director: Anton Corbjin

Date: 29 June 2017

jamesintexas rating: ***1/2



My memory of this film is that it is world-weary, heavy, thick with plot and character, and it is the kind of thing that is right up my alley.  James Bond-esque, but then decidedly not very James Bond-esque, A Most Wanted Man features one of Philip Seymour Hoffman's last performances, and he is just great here.  Based on a John le Carre novel, which means to me that it will feature the less glamorous but fully essential minutia of spycraft, Gunther (Hoffman), the head of German spying in Hamburg, finds himself close to locating and bringing in Chechan immigrant Issa Karpov (Grigoriy Dobrygin) who would be a key asset in the War on Terror.  The swirling politics and geopolitics surrounding capturing Karpov and what he represents gives glimpses into both refugee advocacy and activism and cutthroat, utilitarian politicians, represented by both Rachel McAdams and Robin Wright.  As a fan of this genre in film and in literature, A Most Wanted Man did not disappoint in its thoughtfulness, its calibration of storytelling, and its explosive ending with its vertiginous powerlessness.  Hoffman's work here is spectacular, and his choices reveal Gunther to be both haunted and idealistic, and damned either way because of forces greater than he can fathom.