Month of Movies: October 2018

Total Films Watched: 14. A Little Princess, Venom, Tabloid, Y tu Mama Tambien, A Wrinkle in Time, A Star is Born, Apostle, Blow Out, Private Life, Murder Party, Warren Miller's Face of Winter, Shirkers, Halloween (2018), Blue Velv

Top Two Movies this Month: Private Life and Blue Velvet. While I didn't have any all-time favorites this month, the competition for the top two spots was tight. Private Life and A Star is Born were the new movies that I loved and I finally to fill directorial blind spots with Blue Velvet and Y tu Mama Tambien. But since Private Life was the more unexpected surprise of the new titles and I will talk about Cuaron more later, I settled on these for the top two slots.

Let's start with why Private Life was such a surprise to me. I had heard that Tamara Jenkins' new drama about middle-aged infertility was supposed to be great but I had little interest in seeing it. It has a sense of humor that reminds me of Noah Baumbach, whose Meyerowitz Stories was another Netflix movie about wealthy New Yorkers with familial drama. But I just enjoyed that movie well enough, whereas this is in my top five of the year so far. Why? I guess that part of it is the more focused way the story is told. Everything circles around Paul Giamatti and Kathryn Hahn, both of whom are terrific at capturing both the sadness of the situation and the steady affection of their relationship. It also has more of an emotional crux; even though I know nothing about infertility, it still feels much more relatable than the legacy of a sculptor. And it has an ending so effective that not even the Netflix auto-finish screen can ruin it.

A lot is made of David Lynch's obsession with the seedy underbelly of the suburbs and the Americana that is usually shown on film. Blue Velvet has plenty of that, starting with the opening montage of white picket fences and a mysterious and horrific heart attack. But I really connected with the running themes around the sex in the movie. Lynch starts with the voyeurism that goes along with many thrillers like this and then just escalates from there into velvet fetishes, masochism, and musical cues. There's also plenty of material for a queer/ gay reading of the movie. After all, Maclachlan literally hides in a closet and there is plenty of semi-romantic tension between Frank Booth and the cartoonishly flamboyant singer in the film's most surreal scene. The movie even has different Roy Orbison cues for the two sides of Frank's obsession, and a different musical cue for the Machlachlan-Dern love story. Of course, that reading would have to conclude with that side of Kyle being ultimately squashed in favor of returning to the traditional romantic ending.

Movie Death Match: Adaptations of children's books about girls and missing fathers: A Little Princess or A Wrinkle in Time?

This will not be a comparison of how well these films work as an adaptation. I didn't know A Little Princess was a book until I saw the movie and it's been years since I read A Wrinkle in Time. Even with the similar core emotion, these are two drastically different stories. Princess is a pretty realistic film about a boarding school in 1910's New York, with colonialism and war both running through as major themes. At points it becomes a family-friendly precursor to Pan's Labyrinth and The Breadwinner, two other stories where fantasy stories break up the more straightforward story of a young girl's life. Emmanual Lubezki got an Oscar nomination for this family film, I assume due to the stunning glimpse of trench warfare and the way he handles the rain-soaked climax. Overall the movie is solid- far from my favorite Cuaron but more nuanced than it could have been. A few bad child performances around the edges, a thudding script, and a truly horrible portrayal of a magical Indian keep it from truly working.

I'm reluctant to say that A Wrinkle in Time is worse than A Little Princess, although I think that's the right call. Ave DuVernay made such a more ambitious swing with her movie, tackling a book based on extra-dimensional tesseracts and incredibly strange beings. "Interstellar for the Disney Channel" is not an easy challenge. I think the artificiality of some of the effects is a feature, not a bug (or a sentient flower swarm). She gets it right when it comes to the most interesting scenes and many key moments, so why can't the other dimensions look like cartoonish spectacle? I have more issues with the pacing of the film, which jumps between set-piece scenes with little for what gets thirty seconds of time versus six minutes. The final twist feels more like a response to having a limited child actor instead of a narrative device. There's nothing as egregious as the Indian character in A Little Princess, but that movie is ultimately an easier watch and has more of the director's stamp. And as a near-completist for both Cuaron and DuVernay, I feel confident in making that claim.

Longer Thoughts About: Venom. Writing about a bad movie by just throwing out a list of questions that it made you ask is not the most original review. But when did I ever call myself the most original reviewer? That doesn't count as one of the questions I had about Venom, probably the worst new release I've seen so far in 2018.

Eddie Brock, journalist. How did Tom Hardy's Eddie Brock get run out of New York and end up as a personality-driven investigative reporter? Is there anybody in real life who gets this freedom from a local TV station? Why is the only other person we see at the network two minutes of Ron Cephas Jones? Why does one question about medical trials ruin his career this quickly? Nobody besides Michelle Williams knew he surreptitiously got the idea from her case, so how did he instantly get fired? How can Eddie live for six months in San Francisco without getting a job? I know first-hand that reporters aren't making enough long-term savings to easily live in that city.

Symbiotes. How did all these alien symbiotes end up names like second-tier metal bands? Especially because they initially crash-landed in Malaysia? Riot infected a Malaysian woman for six months before he could find a flight to California, but still settled on calling himself 'Riot'? Why does Venom look like a sexy woman when it infects Williams? Why doesn't this change happen when Venom infects a dog? Why is that the only interesting visual aspect they do with Venom from the MRI scene until the ending of the film? And why, if you're making the visual joke and trying to give Williams a reason to continue staying in the movie, does that only last for twenty seconds? In general, what are any of the rules for how Venom's stretching and morphing works? How can he and Riot throw pieces of themselves at each other during the final fight? And is that actually what happened because it's literally impossible to see what is happening?

That all being said, there are elements that are entertaining to watch. Tom Hardy is at the top of the list. A lot of reviews compared his performance to Jim Carrey in The Mask, another famous bit of split-personality acting. But Hardy sweating and talking to himself is inherently more grounded that Carrey's mugging because he's a very different kind of 'big' actor. His biggest physical scene just involves stealing food and sitting in a tank of water. Instead, it's his face and sweaty charisma that carries the movie along. Him carrying both sides of the banter between Venom and Brock is almost as impressive as him being literally the only on-screen actor in Locke. I also appreciate that the movie actually tackles the issues of new companies and homelessness in San Francisco, which was scripted and shot before the topic became a bigger news story this year. As shallow as it is, it's the best tackling of a modern issue by a superhero film in years (depending on how you consider Black Panther, I suppose).