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

Popcorn Kernels: Q4 Review Purge

In which, while I'm still gearing up to begin reviewing current films in earnest, I release mini-reviews of some 2017 releases that aren't quite recent enough to meet my cutoff for getting the full review treatment, but still deserve a nod.

Lady Bird

Year: 2017
Director: Greta Gerwig
Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Laurie Metcalf, Timothée Chalamet
Run Time: 1 hour 34 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

In her senior year of high school, Lady Bird navigates her prickly relationship with her mother and a series of friendships and relationships as she comes of age and gets ready for college.

Given the Oscar buzz surrounding Lady Bird and the fact that it was being described as the female iteration of Boyhood, I was worried that the film would leave me a bit cold. Well, I'm here to report that I needn't have worried. Lady Bird is a frickin' delightful warm breeze of a film. It's especially relatable to me, because there's a large portion of the film dedicated to putting on a musical theater performance, something I dedicated a good 85% of my high school life too, but this film is genetically engineered to be relatable to as many people as humanly possible.

The central relationship of the film is between Lady Bird and her mother (played by Saoirse Ronan and Laurie Metcalf respectively), an effortlessly sharp evocation of the sharp edges and mercurial bonds between mothers and daughters, but every aspect of a teenager's developing friendships and loves is explored with a fine-toothed comb. Obviously nothing can beat Metcalf and Ronan (Metcalf especially delivers up a healthy platter of emotionally-laced barbs that cut to the bone), but every relationship in the film is a well-observed, matter-of-fact marvel, preserving in amber the vast spectrum of feelings that make up one's youth.

Like Boyhood, Lady Bird presents its story as more of a series of vignettes than an actual structured plot, but unlike Boyhood, it's damn funny while it's at it. I bark-laughed more than once in the theater, and the warm joviality of the film's tone makes it so that the dark moments are even more powerful, cast in sharp relief against the genial humor.

I'd say Greta Gerwig the writer is much more on the ball here than Greta Gerwig the director, who is content to bathe her terrific ensemble in desaturated, flatly presented frames, but that writing is whip-smart, capturing the lived-in reality of its setting and characters as if they've always existed, just waiting to be brought to life by her hand. Presumably on a vintage typewriter, because this is still Greta Gerwig we're talking about.

Rating: 8/10

Ingrid Goes West

Year: 2017
Director: Matt Spicer
Cast: Aubrey Plaza, Elizabeth Olsen, O'Shea Jackson Jr.
Run Time: 1 hour 38 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Ingrid is an ex-mental patient who becomes obsessed with an Instagram lifestyle blogger, moving to Venice Beach to Single White Female her and ingratiate herself into her circle of friends.

If I didn't already have the CW show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend in my life, I'd think Ingrid Goes West was the work of a mad genius. And perhaps that's not fair to Ingrid, but that show handles how mental illness and obsession collide with the cold modern world in a way that wrings tears from me like a sopping wet rag. This movie doesn't quite reach that point, but what it does succeeds in its own, entirely unique way.

Taking the common inclination for Instagram stalking and ramping that up to its logical conclusion, Ingrid Goes West turns the psychologically dubious underbelly of social media into a twisted tale of terror. But as much as Ingrid's scheming is frightening and depressing, the fact that everything she does is instantly and completely relatable adds a startling layer of familiarity that is grotesquely juxtaposed with what could only be called a psychological thriller. It's a satirical indictment of the closed-off emotional world that social media creates, and it cuts deep.

Oh, and did I mention it's a comedy? It's not frequently laugh-out-loud hilarious, but Elizabeth Olsen is perfectly cast as the ne plus ultra of the perfectly primped Instagram hottie who lives her life out in a series of hashtags, misquoted authors, and superlatives. Then there's O'Shea Jackson Jr. (in only his second onscreen role), who breathes life into every scene he's in with an easygoing charm that allows you to forget that his character has literally one dimension and that dimension is that he loves Batman, which is maybe the most thoroughly boring character trait I could possibly imagine.

And Aubrey Plaza reaches emotional depths here that I never imagined her capable of, converting her usual deadpan personality from a sardonic sidekick role to a hollow shell for a totally empty personality. It's a shocking, sublime performance that interacts with the film's themes of identity formation and loneliness in a satisfying and visceral way. Sure, it's far from perfect, with a series of decisions in the third act that don't make a ton of sense or push the plot forward much - if at all - but as a showcase for these performers and the deeply felt central character arc, it's a tremendously satisfying bit of business.

Rating: 8/10

Coco

Year: 2017
Director: Lee Unkrich, Adrian Molina
Cast: Anthony Gonzalez, Gael García Bernal, Benjamin Bratt
Run Time: 1 hour 45 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG

On Día de Los Muertos, a young guitarist named Miguel rebels against his family, which has banned music for generations. He becomes trapped in the world of the dead, on a quest for a long-lost musician relative who can release him and approve of his love of music.

A lot of people have been saying Coco is a step down for Pixar, and they might not be totally wrong. The plot is entirely predictable from twenty minutes in, and it pulls much more from the Disney animated musical tradition than films like Up or Wall-E. But if you approach it as a Disney musical, then... Well, it's pretty superb.

Never forget for one minute that The Book of Life did more or less the same thing several years ago, a fact that I'm upset few people seem to have pointed out, but it's impossible to complain about getting multiple films based around the design and folklore of Día de los Muertos. And a mainstream American movie being so steeped in Mexican culture is almost unheard of. From the inclusion of a beautiful rendition of the folk song "La Llorona," to the appearances from many famous Mexican historical figures (including an extended cameo from Frida Kahlo, playing a hilariously exaggerated version of her personality that lovingly pokes fun at her favorite tropes and designs), Coco thoroughly pays homage to a non-American sphere, to the tune of becoming the highest grossing film in Mexican history.

But social issues aside, it's just a fun film to be around. It might not linger in the memory as long as Finding Nemo or even the short film Piper, but it's an emotional roller coaster with original songs that are much better than I would have expected from Pixar's decidedly un-musical crew (the most boring one, an inevitably Oscar-nominated musical theater standard called "Remember Me" that hits on the film's theme with the subtlety of  a jackhammer, was of course written by the Disney duo behind Frozen, and all the great ones that actually channel a distinct musical tradition were by co-director Adrian Molina and Germaine Franco - who also worked on The Book of Life, so she knows what she's doing).

Its depictions of the land of the dead are also pretty dang beautiful, an unnatural barrage of colors and lights and skeletal character designs that are enough to earn back the goodwill that the 22-minute short film Olaf's Frozen Adventure worked hard to obliterate. It's a tremendously satisfying film in its own right, even if its not totally unique or perfect. I'll be listening to the soundtrack for months to come, even if I don't feel the need to see the film again for a while.

Rating: 8/10

The Mountain Between Us

Year: 2017
Director: Hany Abu-Assad
Cast: Kate Winslet, Idris Elba, Beau Bridges
Run Time: 1 hour 52 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG-13

When their charter plane crashes in the mountains, two strangers must fight for survival and just maaaaybe fall in love while they're doing it.

There's maybe nothing better than a soapy romance movie if you just want to have a good time in the theater, and The Mountain Between Us has all the ingredients of being a perfect good-bad romantic thriller. Who wouldn't want to watch a movie you could describe as "Alive meets An Affair to Remember"?

Unfortunately, once again the vengeful gods of boilerplate cinema have struck. Mountain is hovering somewhere exactly between good-bad and mediocre, which is the most boring place to be. It just doesn't commit to being much of anything. Whenever the movie threatens to briefly become The Revenant, every problem from a slip down a mountainside to nearly drowning in a frozen lake is solved in less screen time than it takes for Kate Winslet to take a pee.

So what we're stuck with is a low-stakes survival thriller welded to a hideously contrived erotic romance. The script makes such an effort to paint Idris and Kate's clashing as a Brain vs. Heart conflict, it forgets to give them any character traits whatsoever, other than Winslet's fake American accent, the strained vowel sounds of which are the scariest thing in the movie.

But then the movie has the gall to very clearly end, then prattle on for a good fifteen more minutes, scraping up a thin gruel of drama from a pot that has long since been drained. There's nothing worse than a boring movie that overstays its welcome, and therefore I refuse to celebrate The Mountain Between Us as the second coming of B-movies, no matter how many mind-boggling unmotivated close-ups I get of Kate Winslet's watery eyes.

Rating: 4/10
Word Count: 1189