Month of Movies: April 2018

Total Movies Watched: 7. Stop Making Sense, La La Land, Wild Wild Country, Atomic Blonde, The Iron Giant, Morvern Callar, Bound.

Top Two Movies: The Iron Giant and Morvern Callar. The number of movies was more limited this month but the quality made up for that. This was a tough selection to make but I'm happy that The Iron Giant shook out as the top overall film. It's an incredibly charming movie about friendship, peace, and the constant threat of nuclear annihilation. The titular Giant is a brilliant piece of animation, with a lot of emotional and literal weight coming through with his design. The movie is short but uses the running time very efficiently to establish the emotional connections and stakes. If anything, the movie could be a little longer and breath in a few more moments.

Number two was an even tougher decision to make. I ended up going with Morvern Callar just because it was such a pleasant surprise. Based on the little bit I had heard about the movie before watching it, I was expecting a small character piece along the lines of Wendy and Lucy. Instead I got something a lot darker and stranger. It was still a character study, but Morvern is much closer to Tom Ripley or a cable anti-heroine than a Reichardt character. Ramsay uses sound design and staging for striking moments (the first party scene, or Morvern taking over the novel) and for moral ambiguity, which is a fascinating combination.

Movie Death Match: Flashy crime films with bisexual leads- Atomic Blonde or Bound? I liked much of the flashiness of Atomic Blonde. I'm a sucker for the heavy-handed 80's music, the Cold War espionage plot, the brutal and well-made fight scenes. It's definitely the kind of movie I could go back to and re-watch scenes from.

But I would absolutely give the edge here to Bound. There are more elements in the flashy directing that don't work in Atomic Blonde and plenty of music cues that are badly deployed. The scene with the skateboarders being interrogated is a good example- it adds nothing to the plot and the Russian villain turns on "99 Luftballoons" just to ominously break the radio 30 seconds later. It even ruins the more effective use of that song later on by prematurely dropping that obvious musical cue. The ending is also completely disastrous in the way it completely throws out any reasonable reading of the plot in favor of one ambitious but failed twist.

Bound is a much more solid debut. It's strange that the Wachowskis never really went back to crime films or grounded realities because they do a really impressive job here. A lesbian neo-noir could have been exploitative or derivative in less skilled hands but the movie handles all those elements well. They essentially split the movie in half, with the opening centered on Corky and Violet's budding relationship and the second half building all the tension around their criminal plot and its aftermath. I'm still not totally sold on Jennifer Tilly but the rest of the acting is excellent. And as flashy as their direction gets, there's not an element that annoys me in the same way that some of the Atomic Blonde moments do. The smash zooms come the closest to over-reaching, but overall the movie works excellently as is.