Popcorn Kernels: Best Picture Contenders, Vol. 1

In which I once again attempt to sit through all the nominees for Best Picture, knowing full well that the presence of Darkest Hour shall surely prevent me from accomplishing this goal. Here are two of those efforts.

The Post

Year: 2017
Director: Steven Spielberg
Cast: Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Bob Odenkirk
Run Time: 1 hour 56 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG-13

When the Washington Post gets ahold of the Pentagon Papers, which expose a decade of government secrets, they must decide whether or not to publish them, which could potentially shut down the paper and send them to jail.

Look, I admitted that Spotlight was good, even though it's preposterous that it won Best Picture. And I dislike the state of the country as much as any reasonable American. But as timely as The Post is, it will never feel like anything other than Spotlight 2 (and in fact, it was co-written by one of the co-writers of Spotlight, if it wasn't already watered down enough for you). And as much as director Steven Spielberg has proven time and again he's a genius, we all have our bad days. The Post is such a huge waste of everyone's time and effort that it's not even funny.

Not that it was meant to be funny. The film finds Spielberg in intensely sober-minded Oscarbait mode, with only one scene (the best scene in the movie, involving a little girl selling lemonade) providing a moment of levity in this grandiose, self-important, completely arid awards season trifle.

The Post has a cruelly inflated sense of its own relevance, tying the problems of the past to current affairs in the most blunt, obvious way possible. Look, I'm all for arguments in favor of the free press, but they don't have to be couched in a series of artless, implacable zooms while characters monologue about how important the themes of the movie are. It hardly pretends to be dialogue, it's just one long essay mummifying an admittedly important historical event.

It's honestly rather clumsy, constantly framing Meryl Streep in drifts of men to pointedly remind you that she's not in a woman's space, all while the dialogue revolves around her being a woman in a man's space. It's very pointedly a message movie, and while shots like that can work - I'm thinking of Clarice Starling in the elevator at Quantico in Silence of the Lambs - it's forced down your throat so hard you start gagging before the fifteen minute mark.

It's just kind of a generally lousy movie, bookended by its worst scenes (a shoehorned-in Saving Private Ryan moment in Vietnam and a hilariously terrible Marvel-esque coda involving the world's worst Richard Nixon impersonator frantically waving his arms like a caffeinated mime and not even attempting to time his movements to the actual Nixon recording posing as dialogue) and endlessly unspooling trite, uninspired dialogue in between ("That picture makes me sad," exclaims Sarah Paulson, hopelessly drowning in a nothing role).

There's just no feeling involved here, it's all lecturing. And considering that The Post contains two of the world's most charismatic movie stars, it's astonishing how this could have even been accomplished. Meryl Streep is fine, as always, but she's snoozing through a role she could play with both hands and feet tied behind her back. And Tom Hanks is acting SO. HARD. But no matter how much he rakishly props his leg up on desks or undoes his sleeves, he's straining through an inexplicable old timey radio host accent that just drips with insincerity.

The Post was never going to be a great movie. It could only have ever been a acceptably Important prestige picture. But the way it fails its actors and the audience so substantially is frankly shocking. The music (John Williams, again visibly bored) seems to actively rebel against the tone of the film, the script is begging for attention yet barely there, and the coterie of strong performers (including, randomly, a handful of comic actors like Zach Woods and David Cross) is given nothing to do but be conduits for a firehose stream of flop sweat. One to miss.

Rating: 4/10

Dunkirk

Year: 2017

Director: Christopher Nolan

Cast: Fionn Whitehead, Tom Hardy, Mark Rylance

Run Time: 1 hour 46 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

We follow a fighter pilot, a civilian ship, and some ground troops through the effort to rescue the British military from the beach at Dunkirk during World War II.

Dunkirk is about as boldly experimental as a big budget blockbuster can get. But the thing is, experimentation leads to failure about half the time. Not that Dunkirk is a failure; what it gets right outweighs what it gets wrong, but its open risk-taking comes with some very odd choices that don't quite work.

For one thing, take the peculiar dilation of time that occurs over the course of the film. One story elapses over a week, one over a day, and one over an hour. The film cuts between these stories simultaneously, and they overlap at certain key moments. But the way they are presented doesn't really allow for any more insight or intrigue than if they had just been shown chronologically. And the landing of a fighter plane is dragged out over the course of what feels like half an hour of excruciatingly long screen time, milked for all it's worth in the film's biggest patch of jingoistic militarism.

Luckily, that doesn't seem to be the prevailing sentiment over the rest of the film. Dunkirk is a film that is above all else about the terror and constant, oppressive violence of war (despite the conspicuously pulled punches of its PG-13 rating), doled out by an omnipresent enemy that is literally never shown, except in the form of bomber planes that whistle by periodically. It eschews character arcs and even dialogue at times (especially in the sequences on the beach, it plays out more like a silent film, which fortunately prevents Harry Styles from screwing anything up) in favor of this all-important, nerve-rattling atmosphere.

And there is absolutely no denying that this is an utterly gorgeous motion picture. Between what are probably some of the best airplane action sequences ever filmed, Nolan provides us bleakly stunning, expansive vistas that blast your corneas with the sheer wideness of devastation and desolation on this beach. The single distracting thing about the visuals is that - at least on the home video release, I can't speak to the theatrical - it has been decided that the aspect ratios switch between the footage shot on 70mm and 65mm. The black bars constantly blotting out the huge screen-filling vistas are hugely distracting and an entirely odd choice.

Much more thoroughly satisfying is the soundscape, which is as harsh and alarming as you would expect any good war picture to be, slashed through with Hans Zimmer's droning, atonal, staccato score that ratchets up the tension to an unbearable degree.

It's a good thing that Dunkirk is so visually and aurally stunning and goes all in on those elements, because most of the dialogue sequences are the worst parts of the movie. Whether its generals dumping piles of exposition on the top of your head or Mark Rylance spouting nothing but affectless patriotic quotes for the better part of an hour, these scenes are generally worth much less of your time than the tense beach sequences - especially a scene where bullets begin to blast through the hull of a ship where stowaway soldiers are waiting for high tide.

I'm not usually a fan of war movies, and I wouldn't say I'd ever want to watch this again, but I'm glad I saw it in the first place. If you've already seen Lady Bird, Get Out, and The Shape of Water, this should certainly be next on your Oscars checklist.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1306

Girls Gone Gone

Year: 2014

Director: David Fincher

Cast: Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike, Neil Patrick Harris

Run Time: 2 hours 29 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

It is both a blessing and a curse to not have read the source novel for a new film, especially as a reviewer. On the one hand, I have no context for Gone Girl's successes or failures relative to its original narrative, as well as the perspective which most fans will have that I lack. But on the other, I can take the movie completely on its own terms, devoid of any pre-existing judgements.

At any rate, I saw Gone Girl and it was pretty good. I have absolutely no desire to read the book at this moment in time, so perhaps it failed as an advertisement, but it took the number one spot this weekend, so who am I to talk? I'm not even number one on this blog.

This picture of Ben Affleck is number one. Actually, while we're on the topic, let me boost my Google search numbers real quick: Sexy. Shirtless. Underwear. Go-go boots. Penis.

The story, as adapted by Gillian Flynn from a novel by Gillian Flynn, goes like this. Nick (Ben Affleck) and Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike), by all appearances, are a happily married couple. But after an economic downturn, they both lose their jobs and it begins raining on cloud nine. Boo hoo, why don't you dry your tears with the opulent Missouri mansion that you somehow still get to live in.

White people, I swear.

Anyway, one day Amy disappears and Nick must find her, dead or alive, to prove that he isn't guilty of murder most foul. As a media circus paints Amy as an angel and Nick as a violent wreck, we soon learn that neither of them are as they seem. They both land in the bitter, cynical, manipulative, and unhappy-in-marriage end of the spectrum. Basically they're perfect for each other.

And I'm gonna cut off here because I've been told that mysteries don't work as well if you give too much of the plot away. Though, for those interested in being in the know, there's a 600-page tome full of spoilers available for eight bucks on Amazon.

OK, OK. I know that joke was garbage, don't rub it in. Oh Ben Affleck, you and your Pecs. Abs. Girlfriend. Beard. Gay. Batman.

As with most films adapted from novels that aren't Psycho, there are numerous potholes simply from crossing over - namely the bloated plottiness of the second and third acts and the arch, overly written dialogue of the first. The latter, sprinkled among copious flashbacks, leaves Affleck and Pike stymied. While he strains to spit out lines so wooden they could kill a vampire, she adopts a mildly bemused expression and clings to it like a security blanket.

Luckily, Gone Girl and its performances quickly begin to loosen up, and at least the utter non-chemistry the two actors have during the first act works in the favor of the film's underlying themes. And once Affleck eases into the script like a non-heated pool - first with one tentative toe, then all at once, he brings an easy humor to his character that lights up the film like a firecracker.

This is the most literal interpretation of one of my statements that I have ever found in screengrab form.

And once the film gets on track it stays there, bolstered by strong performances on the sidelines by Carrie Coon as Nick's twin sister and Neil Patrick Harris as Amy's pining ex-boyfriend. But what makes or breaks the film is the slick direction by David Fincher, which adamantly does both. With a strong sense of personality, much of Gone Girl stands out among its decidedly underwhelming 2014 peers.

Fincher is known for being stylish and precise in his set design, dialogue, cinematography, and composition, as most recently seen in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Social Network, but while his aesthetic complements the wintry inhumanity of an icy thriller and the slick modernity of technological progress, here it feels almost antiseptic. The visual schema makes every character, movement, and event feel like it's part of a well-oiled machine, in diametric opposition to the mechanics of the story, which details the consequences that intelligent people face when a carefully planned-out life has a wrench thrown into it by messy reality.

The chilly aesthetic doesn't necessarily ruin the film, but rather keeps it at arm's length. And a particular reluctance to indict a husband quite as much as his wife (among other elements that I can't spoil in good conscience) lends the film an unrelenting air of quiet misogyny. It's not present enough to make the movie a truly vile experience, nor is it necessarily a bad way to tell the story.

In a perfect world, a movie that vilifies a woman would blend into the background because it's just one way to portray a character in a wide array of potential roles. But in today's political climate, especially regarding sexism in Hollywood, Gone Girl contributes to a poisonous attitude. It is just another tile in a mosaic of hate - not necessarily actively hateful, but not something we need at this moment in time.

What we do need is a nice, relaxing bubble bath.

All that said (and I do have to say my piece before supporting a movie with such a toxic depiction of a female character), Gone Girl is quite good at what it does. It is a wild mystery thriller married to a psychological portrait of a marriage gone wrong and a man daring to challenge his public image. It is stylish and cool, and the set design, especially a scene in an abandoned mall, is impeccable.

I don't know if I would call Gone Girl a "fun" watch, but its extensive run time speeds by in the blink of an eye (unless your bladder is exploding - my advice: don't drink an entire Icee during the previews) and it provides consistent entertainment from start to finish. While I may have my issues with some of the bumps it hits along the way, it is still a remarkable film and one of the better efforts in a year in which there's nothing much impressive going around.

TL;DR: Gone Girl is a perfectly serviceable mystery thriller, but not a transcendent masterpiece.

Rating: 7/10

Should I Spend Money On This? It's certainly less likely to make you teeth-gnashingly angry than Annabelle. If you bladder can withstand the punishing running time, why not give it a shot?

Word Count: 1098