ROCKETING up to take second place (for now) in my favorite movies I’ve watched so far this year, is the first place winner for best title of the year: BAD TIMES AT THE EL ROYALE.

Remember when you watched Slow West and were just like, fucking superb you funky little genre deconstruction? So, that, only this time it’s 1969 and a small group of mysterious strangers with dubiously legal motives are all checking into a once high rollin’, celebrity hidey-hole kind of hotel that is now straddling the line between kitschy and seedy, just as it physically straddles the line between the states of California and Nevada, and also probably Heaven and Hell, distinguishable mostly by a slightly different color scheme. Salvation is in the eye of the beholder, and Purgatory is an empty check-in desk. It’s Drew Goddard’s first feature The Cabin In the Woods meets Dante’s Divine Comedy, in an at turns popcorn-spillingly surprising and popcorn-munchingly meditative 2 hour 20 minute stage play in which this is the incredibly well deployed soundtrack I still wanna belt out at every minute.

It’s funny that last week I got into a philosophical conflict with a coworker buddy over what constitutes a spoiler, in general but specifically in relation to this movie, as even more than usual I absolutely will not tell you any of the specific things I loved about this, because the surprise of them is that good!! But I stand by my position that “I’ve heard it’s sorta like purgatory” is not a spoiler, it’s just relaying a critical interpretation. That’s the kind of thing I’ve seen in headlines of reviews, where you do not put spoilers, but where you would put something like, I don’t know, Venom is sorta like a buddy/romantic comedy, which I’ve also been seeing recently. Providing info on the overarching genre or lens is the pitch, not a mid-plot reveal (usually), the same way cast billing isn’t a spoiler (…usually).

But on that, such a high calibre ensemble here, including Tony-winning Cynthia Erivo (she’s the lead! the marketing has not made this clear!), Jeff Bridges, Dakota Johnson, John Hamm, and of course: Shirtless Chris Hemsworth. Plus one bit part that I will tell you about even though it feels like one of the joys I’m closely guarding, because it’s the very opening scene and the very opening scene just cannot be a spoiler, it cannot: also featuring Nick Offerman, who spends the majority of his screen time in a hotel room shot like a diorama industriously prying up floorboards to bury a bag of money. Good Shit at the El Royale.

I’ve been going to movies by myself a lot here in Portland, and that is one of my sincerest pleasures so I don’t mind a bit. But now my bud Jonathan—actor, nerd, delight—has moved to town, and we are going to All The Films together, and when a shot reveals shirtless workers beautifully planing a floor in turn-of-the-century France we’re both minutely waving our hands and sotto warbling “Gustave Caillebotte’s The Floor Scrapers!”, which should give you a good indication of what we’re like at movies, and also what this movie is like! Colette! Fanciful gay Art History 101 biopic! The cinematic equivalent of curling up in a comfy chair in a silk bathrobe reading Tipping the Velvet! Jonathan, walking out of the theater: “Oh my god, I just had a wonderful time?” Me: “There is nothing wrong with a frothy, saucy picaresque.”

Colette is just so easy to watch, it brings everything right to you. Colette is graciously laying out a tray of powdering pastries in front of you going “Here I brought these for you!” and you’re like “Thank you I asked for these!” Om nom nomnomnom, delicious. This is a funny queer Belle Époque romp stuffed with salons and pantomime and overworked, unhinged authors, and that is what it is going to BE. At one point Dominic West performs some sort of spoken word rap on top of a table and is joined by a line of can-can dancers while Kiera Knightly makes eyes at a lady wearing trousers, who gets away with it because she’s nobility descended from Empress Joséphine. Just, fantastic, pile it on I love this.

Watching this reminded me of how I felt watching Ocean’s 8, because they’re both movies dyed in the wool with a type of simplified, ‘yeah babe!’ feminism. Sure there’s nothing exactly groundbreaking or sophisticated or interesting in its own rights about the politics this movie presents*, but you know what it’s a hellscape out there right now, and it can be real nice to escape into the kind of theater experience where lovely bold Colette smarting at her boisterous blowhard husband about how he’s hiding her artistic light under a misogynist bushel is presented like an old melodrama warmly inviting you to boo and hiss at the villain. I will, thank u for this opportunity. I have no problem with movies that just do loops on basic pot-boiler gender decency; they have their own stabilizing place in the march of progress, and are a relaxing reprieve from how I still have to watch so many new releases slightly on guard for blows from the pervasive, unthinking sexism that has dominated cinema for ages.

(*Except for something behind-the-scenes that I’ve been telling everyone about because you wouldn’t know and that’s what’s so novel and great about it: Colette, directed by a gay man from a script he co-wrote with his late husband, cast a trans actor in just a regular ol’ male-presenting role. Colette!)

Maybe taste is comparison. Watch that then this, use the accumulated experiences to plot a hit from palpable to miss. I liked The Lobster a hell of a lot. “Yes,” was what I had to say about that. Then I watched The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and I’m Eleanor Shellstrop standing in a field realizing “Oh! This is the yes!”

I’m trying to figure out how to come at this and yeah maybe just stick with comparing, why not. Colin Farrell is better in The Lobster. We knew Collin Farrell’s got it, we all saw In Bruges, and he’s just phenomenal in The Lobster, nearly reaches Rachel Weisz’s level and that is SCOPE. But The Killing of a Sacred Deer doesn’t need that Collin Farrell, because it has Barry Keoghan. Not to relitigate 2017 (always to relitigate 2017), but Barry Keoghan not being nominated or frankly winning Best Supporting Actor is an affront. Barry Keoghan in this movie is the most alarming person I have ever seen. I do not know how to describe what fuckening obscurely panic-inducing thing he’s doing because it’s not on the level of any of the usual tics people use to convey creepy weirdo menace, no Barry’s out here making choices that seemingly no human being has ever made before, because every second he’s on screen it’s like my whole brain is trying to somersault out of this situation because it just can’t deal. I will think about watching him eat spaghetti for the rest of my goddamn life.

You know something of that kind of disorientation if you’ve seen The Lobster, because it had it too in its ways — that thing where no part of the tone is where you expect it to be, so nothing makes sense on some intrinsic level. My reaction to it is to laugh or shriek, sometimes both. The Lobster was laugh and The Killing of a Sacred Deer shriek, but wait for it because get this: I found The Lobster much much harder to watch, and just basically scarier and more gruesome. Yes, even with everything that happens in this one! I wonder if it has to do with the story’s reference point, which steps ever more forward as the movie goes on, and was a very satisfying & thrilling revelation for me that I am not about to take away from you.

But yeah, I think having this eventually overt story declaration allows The Killing of a Sacred Deer to be primarily a (distinctly unhinged) version of something, and worry less about its Ideas. The Lobster definitely has more to say, probably has more meaning or what have you, but The Killing of a Sacred Deer does not have its drifting structural problems and is overall more proficiently scripted dark ass fun. Yes I dared say fun!

Oh and everyone still delivers all their lines in that stilted deadpan and it’s JUST as glorious. I think this is my ASMR.

Sorry that this is turning into the year I keep talking about pAcing in movies, but after working in post production for a couple years it seems the first department I address to fix fumbles is in the edit. So, listen, I started with an apology because I loved a lot of this, completely LOSING IT for much of the runtime, and I just feel like I could have lost it top to bottom had a post hoc script doc been sitting in the edit bay with a 90 minute mind and a wild eye. This needs to drop about half an hour, almost but no not entirely in the latter third. Keep all the components, but pile them on quicker and I bet this movie would feel more like one sequentially developing thought than a meander through them.

That said—holy shit. Holy shit, The Lobster. I do not know when I’ve last seen a more excitingly nouveau partnership between director vision and actor skill. Just a leapingly talented group here, a bunch of weird gazelles bounding around half in this world half somewhere else. I am [holds up defining hand] obsessed with the outlandish way people deliver their lines in this. This straight ahead, staccato clear, like-monotone-but-not-monotone affect that they express around and through, somehow? Delicious, I could eat this all day. I love black comic absurdity with beautiful coloring, I love it. The staging, the gorgeous compositions, the choices, the brutality…god this gang is fearless, a deadpan pendulum swinging between attractive and repulsive. It took me two tries to actually watch the last minute of this! I had to work up to it!

Anyway. Yes. Yes to the (sur)realism of watching characters who seem like a bunch of lost alien children scrambling around in the woods dressed up in suits and dresses they found in a dumpster behind a Macy’s because that sure feels like the Adult Experience. Yes to wry studies on societal obsession with partnering, and also how we try to match our brokenness, and what is compatibility, and what is arbitrary, and what does it matter. Yes to riotous gruesome whimsical movies by art ho-teurs, with structural problems.

Well this is as FUCKING UNUSUAL as promised. Like no piece of cinema I’ve ever seen before, begins in a dream built of bewildering woozy close-ups sliding over people’s mouths and off behind their shoulder through a guttural Lynchian sound design, and then never leaves it, just pulls you through its 90 minutes in a writhe of emotions and bodies and masks in a warped mirror of the cultish, ethical labyrinth that is so often a physical theatre troupe’s ~artistic process~. Madeline’s Madeline is a horror movie for the theatre set, two members of which I brought with me (I had a hunch), and we stumbled out partly delirious and sharing traumatized tales of Evangelines we’d known.

What I liked best was the final 20 minutes or so, a vividly still and then wheeling kaleidoscope that felt like the film was collapsing into a kind of humorous realism all while reaching its most surreal heights, in a finale one of my friends winningly described as “Sleep No More done by the cast of Cats.” Something was ready to break in me at this point, and one particular visual joke by the stage manager character (Sunita Mani, wackily endearing as she is on GLOW) cracked me so soundly that I doubled over into a full belly laugh.

I’m sure that this is not going to be one of my favorite movies of the year or anything, but I value it a lot. Again, it looks and sounds like nothing else playing, and that’s just a neat thing to experience. And I feel like this is going to lodge itself in the river of the medium, and maybe divert a path or two, and somewhere downstream I’ll recognize the impact of this movie on one that will be a favorite. If nothing else, we have a star in young lead Helena Howard. “A whole damn star, like a planet that is impossible to comprehend with what we know of the universe right now,” as Barry Jenkins enthusiastically described her.

Well this was a cute, dumb, emotional time. Rom-coms aren’t really one of my loves, which can’t be because of cheesiness given how much I go for things like the cosmically silly Star Trek series, so my current theory is that it’s probably for the same reason that I’ve never really gone in for Jane Austen. Which is absolutely what this movie is at its base. Austen meets Cinderella, but then make it Asian. A big cast of high-strung weirdos, rags to riches, but Asian. Crazy. Rich. ASIANS. That addition is a GOOD ONE. It’s probably not supposed to be the whole reason why I liked this movie, but it is. I’m supposed to tell you that in addition to being a representation revelation, ‘it’s also a really fun rom-com!’ But honestly, all the fun I had was absolutely with who was having it. And that really was a cinematic treat.

Also, like most rom-coms, it is undeniably its greatest when it embraces the fact that the most meaningful relationship is not between the man and woman at the ostensible center at all. Here, it’s Constance Wu’s plucky Asian-American heroine and her boyfriend’s silk & steel Chinese mother, Michelle Yeoh. The climactic scene in this movie is a pivotal mahjong game, incredible, with just the two of them and a couple half-deaf grandmothers. And that is why you buy your ticket.

That, and because the affably zany Awkwafina gets approximately four times the opportunity to show how funny she is than she got in Ocean’s 8. And because of the food montage in the night market scene.

And because there’s that particular moment of catharsis that yeah, only a romantic comedy can give you; that thing were you just *burst* into a joyous flood of tears as someone to your left flings both arms up in the air in celebration and someone behind your right shoulder cheers aloud and then everyone’s just laughing and clapping and wiping at their cheeks.

Oh my god I’m tearing up right now just thinking about it again! Shit, maybe I am a rom-com person….

Watched this spare & unsparing psychological costume drama in entirely the wrong season but with the entirely right person: my dear friend Emily, of exactly the artistic temperament to holler along with me from minute one to minute 90.

Here is your requisite explainer that Lady Macbeth is not about the Shakespearean antiheroine, but another woman in her troubling thematic line. Hers and maybe Highsmith’s, as the movie plays out like a chilly, murdery Ripley story set in a remote north English manor in the mid-1800s, with this particular enigmatically brutal protagonist a young woman just sold off into marriage to a wealthy, sallow man who hates her. She hates him too. There are approximately five and a half other characters in the play and four of them are people of color, because why just make a rare minimalist Victorian when you could also be making an incredible indictment of white feminism? I guess if you don’t want to be unusual and interesting!

Other things Emily and I yelled about:

– Florence Pugh, who is going to be so famous. Watching her performance in this is like being treated to something.
– How you can hear the sound of everything. The creaking of floorboards, the creaking of her dresses. This movie sounded like it was made in the ‘70s, in a cool way.
– That inside the house the camera never moved in a shot, like they’d just set it up to frame a picture and the actors would enter and leave it as they chose.
– But whenever she went OUTside, the camera broke free to track with her in a loose handheld. The wildness of the heath and whatever, good shit.
– This one very visually unusual cat we decided represented the undomesticated aspects of Katherine’s character, particularly when it jumped up on a table after she [redacted redacted mushrooms redacted]
– [mushrooms redacted]
– The part where a character literally goes redacted [!!]
– Power structures

Lady Macbeth is a striking, dialogue-light, tone poem sort of movie in which nothing is wasted, particularly your time. Come Holler With Us.

Of that classic genre: lush sweeping Merchant-Ivory period film about how if only the men had stayed out of it and let the women manage things we could have saved a lot of trouble. Interesting that this seems to be what became of the Shakespearean comedy three hundred years later. That was a joke but now that I think about it, these Edwardian novels do hinge a lot of the plot and entertainment on mistaken identities and mix-ups and secrets and marriages. Only it is certainly a drama now. It’s funny, but it’s a drama.

And romantic. There are a lot of passions, and even more Reasons and Rules why these passions should be restrained, which is of course the most romantic thing the Western canon knows of. Personally the most romantic thing I’ve ever seen is in this movie, which is HELENA BONHAM CARTER’S HAIR. It is IMMENSE, just cascading down her back in thick wild rumples. She tries but that hair will NOT be restrained, it must grow free, and there of course is the metaphor.

What is not a metaphor, because it’s spelled out very directly, is how E.M. Forster feels about English class hierarchy, capitalism, and gendered behavior policing, which is: this malarky will be the death of us, it will lit-erally kill you, fuck it all. E.M. Forster is great. He was writing a whole century after Jane Austen but my mind puts them in the same British Lit category, and also has a clear preference. I like that Forster writes romances where a lot of stuff doesn’t work out. Austen, and she is the pinnacle of this and we love her for it, gives us that game of watching the characters figure it out bit by bit until they come together in the end, and it’s very satisfying. But what Forster does, which I find more exciting, is stuff like how he opens Howards End: with a couple getting together bang out the gate, only to promptly break it off and then the real story gets going.

Emma Thompson won an Oscar for this movie. As did the art direction, and another statue for Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Merchant & Ivory’s screenwriter and the only person to have won both an Academy Award and the Man Booker Prize. Helena Bonham Carter’s hair did not win an award, but we still get to enjoy it forever.

By chance circumstance pulled a Jessica Chastain Double Feature, so let’s do two in one!

Take Shelter

What a beautiful movie. Do you know what movies can be really wonderful at, and this one is? Sensitively drawn character/relationship studies, and storms.

I like the way open space is used here. The camera gently tumbles you out into surprisingly vast stretches under clear or troubled skies — almost equally overwhelming, each. It’s astonishing that things can still come up on you so suddenly in a landscape that open, but that’s kinda the trick of those places. There is something uncanny about storms, the roll of them, the rain sweeping like sheets across the sky, mythic in scale.

Take Shelter deals in lightning and so it needed to be grounded, and it is. It’s one of the most well-realized portrayals of mental health struggles I’ve ever seen. This movie cares deeply about its characters, and allows them space (there’s that space again!) to breathe and try and live.

I found Take Shelter in the Suspense section of my local video rental store, and yes I did watch most of one scene through my fingers because I was very nervous. But this isn’t a thriller, with the eager thriller pace. It’s a meditation about anxieties, and true to the “meditation” part, no one’s trying to build up your own anxiety with staccato violins or anything like that. It’s about trying to manage brewing fear, and how, and where, we can find shelter.

And the ending lifted goosebumps all up and down my arms like I was facing a coming wind, the first raindrops hitting my skin.

Interstellar

And then a much less good movie, which I also deeply enjoyed in a very different way!

After this one came out a few years ago, what I remember taking up the bulk of the chatter was people arguing about whether or not the science was sound. What I do not remember is people arguing about what they should have been arguing about, which is how our most self-serious blockbuster filmmaker managed to turn out another truly spectacular comedy. The most mind-bending thing about Interstellar has nothing to do with relativity or worm holes, but that it was apparently not intended to be hilarious, and is in fact: VERY HILARIOUS.

Listen there’s not enough time to go over all the details in this that made me break into peals of happy laughter, because this movie tells a story about time and used up almost all of it in the process (it is so long!! eventually I was laughing simply at how long it is!!), but just know that if you also find Inception to be a true hoot, this too is more exposition than action and peopled entirely with caricatures of human beings running around being heroic and crying amazingly.

Oh Chris Nolan, no one makes ridiculous, dumb cerebral shit half as entertaining to me as yours.

I mean obviously go see Sorry To Bother You. There has never been anything quite like Sorry To Bother You. You know how it feels utterly lacking when people call David Lynch weird? That’s how I feel about Boots Riley’s first feature film, but on an entirely different plane. Here’s some other words I will say to try to build up a picture here, hopelessly aware that I won’t be able to capture just the ineffable quality of the thing: a bitingly conscious laid-back off-the-wall racial-social-political-economic satire in which you wonder at first if maybe critics have mistaken magical realism for “sci-fi/fantasy” but they have not, at all.

Sorry To Bother You has the feel of an internet video that crashed your local cinema like a party, and I mean that as a big compliment, and also a specific critique that we’ll get to. It’s huge on creativity and fearless, radical vision. It has ideas and point of view and young idiosyncratic humor. You drag all your friends around to watch it. It feels punk, renegade, special, something made outside the movie machine, for The People. And…the construction’s a little green and clunky. You know that “George Washington” animation on YouTube? How it’s insane and maybe brilliant, and only two and a half minutes long but somehow feels like it drags a bit? Sorry To Bother reminds me of that. For a movie that clocks in at a clean hour forty-five, it shouldn’t feel as long as it does. But there are internet videos that don’t fall into that trap, and what I think they highlight is how much an almost dangerously economical editing speed makes these hyper-creative, no-fucks projects sing. I want Boots Riley’s radical fire with the rapid-fire pace of those aughts BriTANick sketches — and anyone who has seen this and also that oeuvre knows exactly why I first drew this connection, and is already laughing. But beyond THAT, you know what I mean, right? I think this movie would love a little Vine vibe, a little Daveed-Diggs-in-Hamilton spitfire punch.

That said, holy balls was I enamored with so many details in this movie. There’s recurring gags, send ups of “creative workspaces”, a character who wears an eyepatch whose name is always bleeped out. Speaking of, the imminently likable puppy-eyed stringbean Lakeith Stanfield leads this anti-capitalist parable playing a character literally named Cassius “Cash” Green. His girlfriend is a rising-from-the-rundown artist literally named Detroit are you kidding, played by charismatic godsend/shooting star Tessa Thompson. Terry Crews is in this movie. Steven Yeun is in this movie. Armie Hammer, who could coast forever as a leading man, gleefully signed up for the character actor role of an unhinged villionaire he plays as if he has a man bun just, in his soul. Worn out, bewildered Cash at once point finds him in his den ensconced in front of a print of The Nightmare, and readers I lost it. Meanwhile, Cash’s photograph of his dad updates in each scene to reflect a new mood and commentary, like Cash has wandered over to just-a-bit-more dystopic Oakland from Bryan Fuller’s Wonderfalls. And Detroit’s looks!! Just, the art direction alone in this! 

Is Sorry To Bother You a well-made movie? It’s getting there! Is it a good movie? Hell yeah hell yeah. Show up at the ticket counter for this one. Vote. Boots Riley has some points to make and I want to hear what he has to say.