2016: The Year in FIlm: "Arrival" Review

Denis Villenueve is, full stop, one of my 3 or 4 favorite directors working today. His career is all of 5 years old at this point but his films have all, to this point, been distinctive, dark, and compelling enough to mark him as a director to watch. Prisoners and Sicario are two of the most memorable films for me of the last few years and his style - naturalistic yet stylized, artfully shot but relying on natural sounds at the expense of score and soundtrack, make his films intense and intimate feeling. (Oh, and for what it's worth, he's directing the Blade Runner sequel so mark that one down)

So when it was announced that his next project would be a sci-fi film about first contact with extraterrestrial life - I was a little surprised, but immediately on board. Enter, Arrival.

We are placed in an unspecified near-present where mysterious objects obviously of extraterrestrial origin suddenly appear in various spots around the planet. As the world panics, experts are tasked with figuring out just who the visitors are and what they want before the entire situation escalates into a potential war.  Louise (Amy Adams) is a linguistics professor and Ian (Jeremy Renner) is an astrophysicist and the two are brought in to hopefully find a way to communicate with the aliens in the spacecraft currently hovering above Montana.

The Good: like all of Villenueve's films to date this one looks immaculate. He has such a unique and valuable sense of space, of atmosphere, of setting. He uses very little score and soundtrack, relying instead on sounds from the environment and events happening on screen, giving this film a surreal sense of naturalism despite its otherworldly focus. The cast is tremendous. Especially Adams, but Renner and the always great Forrest Whitacker are great too, but Adams truly delivers a tour de force in this role. Her Louise is hyper-competent yet morose, intuitive yet brash, and so much of the film happens within her head that a lesser actor could have made the entire enterprise fall flat from the jump. Paced like a thriller yet at its heart a Contact-style meditation on the nature of communication, language, humanity and the possibilities of extraterrestrial life, the film is equal parts Terrance Malick and Spielberg, and I mean that with the highest possible praise. Villenueve's Blade Runner 2049 simply can't come fast enough.



The Bad: there isn't much here, but if I do have criticisms it's that the entire operation on the ground is run by a colonel - and given that we are dealing with extraterrestrial contact, it seems unlikely that the joint chiefs or POTUS wouldn't be directly involved. Additionally, the film wraps up so quickly that you'll undoubtedly be left with questions - as I was.

Ultimately, in an era of action packed spectacle, an intimate, ultimately optimistic and uplifting meditation on the very nature of communication and understanding itself may be just what the doctor ordered in our dark times. Arrival is intimate, moving, unexpected, shot beautifully, tremendously acted and truly a gorgeous film. My favorite of the year so far.

9/10

2013: The Year in Film: "American Hustle" Review

Yep. This review is the latest thing ever. This movie isn't even new on DVD... I'm pretty sure I've owned it since March. Let's just pretend, shall we?

David O'Russell is on an insane roll lately, you guys. After an early career that included the insanely underrated Three Kings, since 2010 he's released The Fighter (so good, you guys) and Silver Linings Playbook, which is one of the best romantic comedies of the last 20 years and a pretty darn good sports movie to boot. So his latest film features an absolutely stacked cast, reuniting with Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence, who starred in Silver Linings, and Amy Adams and Christian Bale, who were great and perfect in The Fighter and adding Jeremy Renner in a fictionalized account of the FBI's ABSCAM operation of the 1970's.

The Good: the performances are, in a word, great. Christian Bale is understated and unrecognizable as a paunchy small-time con artist who finds himself forced to work with law enforcement. Amy Adams turns in a solid performance as his mistress and partner and Bradley Cooper once again proves that he's more than just a pretty face. Jennifer Lawrence, despite the fact that she's easily 10 years too young to convincingly play mom and housewife to Christian Bale, is incredibly likable, charming and often hilarious and almost succeeds in making you forget that she's 23 years old and playing a character who's probably supposed to be 35.  The film is often charming and funny, if a bit scattered, but the performances hold everything together. The settings, costume design, music and atmosphere are very convincing, and if the reaction of my parents was any indication, this film nails the 70's.

The Bad: this film wants SO badly to be "important".  It wants to be an instant classic in the vein of the golden age of American film. Unfortunately... it's not. That's not to say that it's bad, far from it, it's just nowhere near as significant and timely as it thinks it is. And that's fine. A film isn't required to be a classic in order to have value... but when a film is explicitly setting out to be "a classic" from the jump... that becomes problematic. Ultimately, this film is trying to say SOMETHING so damn hard that it almost ends up saying nothing at all. Were this a film by a lesser filmmaker featuring lesser talent that would hardly be a complaint, but unfortunately this film falls victim to the weight of its expectations, as unfair as that may be.



Ultimately, if you're a fan of David O'Russell and/or great acting across the board, you could do much worse than American Hustle and you'll probably quite enjoy it. Unfortunately, given the talent involved, you can't help but be a LITTLE disappointed by the whole thing.  It's good, it's just not amazing, and as unfair a standard that is to hold  film to, it's applicable here. The whole thing ends up feeling a bit picturesque, as if we're dropped in to get a portrait of the life and times of these people, who ultimately we don't care that much about. Great, great performances and an ultimately fun film, but in the end it has less poignancy about greed and American corruption than does another holiday awards favorite: The Wolf of Wall Street.

7.5/10.