OK, Brennan

Year: 2017

Director: Luca Guadagnino

Cast: Armie Hammer, Timothée Chalamet, Michael Stuhlbarg 

Run Time: 2 hours 12 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

As a gay film reviewer, I felt personally and professionally obligated to watch Call Me By Your Name, the new film from Italian director Luca Guadagnino, which has been nominated for a pile of Golden Globes and will surely be one of the most buzzed-about Oscars titles in the coming months. (Plus, as a horror fan, I needed to do some reconnaissance on the man who is currently helming the Suspiria remake.) I'm happy another gay film is getting such a big awards push. The years were long between Brokeback Mountain and Moonlight, and it's time for LGBT stories to hit the big time. But until our stories become mainstream in a legitimately major way, we're still stuck in the Oscarbait realm, a genre that I don't really like all that much.

Pictured: Me attempting to interact with fancy-people movies.

Based on the novel by André Aciman, Call Me By Your Name tells the story of six long weeks in the dead of summer in 1983. At a palazzo in Northern Italy, 17-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet) finds his lazy days are beginning to heat up with the arrival of graduate student Oliver (Armie Hammer), who has come to intern with his anthropology professor father (Michael Stuhlbarg). Other than some initial resistance and the inevitable end to their time together, there is very little drama to be had here. Their love blossoms as they lay in the grass and lounge by the pool. And sometimes Oliver actually does some work, though you start to wonder if Michael Stuhlbarg doesn't just cart in students so his son can get it in.

At any rate, his Father of the Year award is in the mail.

It's difficult for one to review a film so purely dedicated to the depiction of aesthetic and sensual pleasures. Especially when one didn't really like it quite as much as the rest of the world. But let me say this: If the sole reason you're watching Call Me By Your Name is to get some gorgeous, sun-dappled shots of the Italian countryside (and you have every right to approach it this way), you will love this movie. But after a certain point it begins to feel like a screensaver and not an actual narrative.

It does capture that feeling of time ticking slowly in a summer daze, the seconds seeming almost too lazy to drift by the way they normally do. However, accurately representing the feeling of boredom isn't something I'm really looking for in a motion picture, and as much as the lush camerawork takes in the awe and splendor of the beauty of nature, it doesn't quite manage to let you feel the sheer heat of the summer. Characters are splashing around in pools and rivers, so it clearly ain't winter, but the film is too pretty to let them sweat. It all feels sealed off from any real-world experience, which isn't really helped by the fact that Elio is living out his teen angst in a gorgeous palace in one of the most breathtaking natural landscapes in the world, with parents who love and understand him and a strapping broad shoulder to cry on.

I just don't feel inclined to feel sorry for him, I can't put my finger on why...

To be fair, it's not like the purpose of every movie is to be relatable. And to be fairer, there is some excellent work here in two people in the first throes of falling in love can create a bubble around themselves, finding a space for their passion to grow in a beautiful vacuum apart from all the other factors in their life and environment. And while it's certainly not exciting, it's never truly boring. There's always some new vista or terrible dance sequence to keep you occupied.

But now that I've just barely nicked a toehold onto the concept of music, I must speak my piece about the score to this film. It's just plain aggressive. Its constant piano trills feel like it was played by someone with hammers instead of fingers, and the two or three times it dips into an original Sufjan Stevens acoustic noodle, the lurching leaves a pit in your stomach. And by George, are those Sufjan Stevens songs two of the most treacly, infuriatingly juvenile tracks ever provided for an Oscar contender, and I'm including that song from Trolls that got nominated last year. It feels like something I would have written when I was 14, and there's a reason I wasn't being asked to score major motion pictures in junior high.

OK, maybe I'm just complaining extra hard because the rest of the critical sphere is revering this film as a new modern classic and I just don't get it. But allow me one more: There's a scene with a peach here that - as I understand it - is a direct lift and even a sanitization of a scene from the book. But with it, the movie takes a swerve into territory that feels like a cross between John Waters and David Cronenberg, and it fits like a square peg into no hole at all.

Let me tell you, if I had witnessed the events of this film in real life, I would certainly not feel the urge to be kissing either of these people.

OK, because I'm going to give Call Me By Your Name a 7/10, I should probably start saying some nice things about it. Like I said, it's certainly a visual feast. And I would definitely like to commend one Mr. Hammer, who manages to turn a brash American idiot into a delicate, loving dreamboat in a way that actually feels organic and all contained within the multitudes of one single personality. Chalamet and Stuhlbarg have been getting all the attention lately, and they are good, but this is an ensemble piece through and through. Everyone commits to the feelings and tone of the film, and even if those things aren't ones I particularly respond to, that's something worth celebrating.

TL;DR: Call Me By Your Name is a lush, pretty romance that ends up feeling just a teensy bit empty when all is said and done.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1057

Creatures Of The Night

Year: 2016

Director: Tom Ford

Cast: Amy Adams, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Shannon

Run Time: 1 hour 56 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Fashion designer Tom Ford would not seem like the obvious candidate for a prestigious movie career, but his debut film A Single Man was just the right blend of overwrought ambigu-drama and stunning aestehtic that he caught the eye of the Hollywood elite. Now, 7 years later, we’re getting his sophomore feature, the thriller Nocturnal Animals. This is the most important movie of his career, the one that defines the direction of his narrative and aesthetic development to see if he can actually sustain a directorial career. Let’s see how that went.

So far so good.

The plot: Grotesquely rich visual artist Susan (Amy Adams) lives in Los Angeles with her husband Hutton (Armie Hammer) one of those moneyed types in suits who has a job so above the scope of day-to-day labor that you’re not actually sure what it is that he does. Also his named is f**king Hutton, so who needs more description than that.

Susan is reaching a personal crossroads, doubting every choice that she’s made in her life when her ex-husband Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal) sends her the manuscript of his new novel, which she reads over the course of one sleepless weekend while F**king Hutton is on a “business trip” with some slinky model.

In the novel, which contains some disturbing parallels to her own life, West Texas father Tony Hastings (also Jake Gyllenhaal) works with local policeman Bobby Andes (Michael Shannon) to track down the man (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) who murdered his wife (Isla Fisher) and daughter (Ellie Bamber) on the lonely highway one night. He attempts to overcome his own lack of strength to bring justice back into the world.

And take lots of showers.

Basically, Nocturnal Animals is a Western disguised as a prestige drama, which is actually pretty nifty. Did it need three layers of narrative to achieve this (her reading of the novel is also intercut with flashbacks of their life together)? Absolutely not. Does Amy Adams need to be involved? Well, definitely not as much as she is, but she’s a gorgeous canvas for Tom Ford’s most dazzling aesthetic, so we’ll let it slide. It’s a deliriously messy structure, but the story at its core is strong enough to survive the worst lashings of narrative incompetence.

First, let’s take a closer look at that core story, the Western thriller novel, also titled “Nocturnal Animals.” It’s definitely a narrative that would have made a decent film on its own, depicting the bond between two men who have nothing to lose and how their differing personalities chafe against a tense situation.

The roadside thriller sequence that opens this particular story is exquisitely terrifying, dominated by an unhinged Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who Deliverances it up without going too over-the-top. You can sense Tom Ford’s preference for grounded, character-driven drama in the way he nervously fumbles the film’s one true-blue action sequence: a car chase with no discernible geography that feels like two or three cars are just singular points barreling through the void with no particular relation to one another (seriously – I could have sworn three cars were involved, but only two come into play as the scene closes out) – but his work with the actors up-close and personal is phenomenal.

Jake Gyllenhaal is a marvel here, depicting his entire arc within a tremendously tactile performance that seamlessly differentiates his two characters through subtle physical cues.

And I don’t just mean shaving his beard, though that helps.

Gyllenhaal might be an offscreen character during the “present day,” but Nocturnal Animals is nevertheless all about him and he knows it. The only reason I’m not frustrated by the overused narrative-within-a-narrative conceit is that the film is explicitly taking a look at how we use fiction to cope with and redefine our reality. I really can’t overstate the subtlety of his performance in getting his message across.

But then you zoom out one tick more and land on Amy Adams. This section of the film is immensely frustrating, slashing up the flow of the novel with constant insert shots of her reading and looking sullen. Her performance is solid, but the script serves her extremely poorly. Her struggles add a frisson of social satire and four film-stealing, one-scene-only cameos from Laura Linney, Michael Sheen, Andrea Riseborough, and Jena Malone, but the tone is all over the place. These scenes are the mostly overtly comic, yet the atmosphere so clearly yearns to be dour and repressive.

This is also the area where Ford busts out his most self-consciously composed frames, using lush color blocking and glammed-up costume design for  carousel of poster moment that are stunning but don’t add up to much. When two-thirds of the film works so well, it feels wrong to complain about the rest – especially when it’s as well-composed as this- but this stuff just kind of fails to work. It sputters and stalls the film over and over and over again, in its desperation to be noticed (as evidenced by the opening credits, which rest on a truly shocking image that adds nothing to the film, existing just for its own sake).

Nocturnal Animals is far from a failure, but its just barely an improvement on A Single Man. Ford’ll have to work a little harder than this if he really wants to prove himself. But maybe he doesn’t, and that’s fine too. Nocturnal Animals is good enough to just be itself.

TL;DR: Nocturnal Animals is a gorgeous thriller that's a tentative step forward for director Tom Ford.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 941