For those who may have missed some of this year's Muriels announcements, here are the winners.
Best Film - top 10:
1. Phantom Thread - dir. Paul Thomas Anderson
2. Lady Bird - dir. Greta Gerwig
3. Get Out - dir. Jordan Peele
4. Nocturama - dir. Bertrand Bonello
5. Personal Shopper - dir. Olivier Assayas
6. The Florida Project - dir. Sean Baker
7. A Ghost Story - dir. David Lowery
8. Call Me By Your Name - dir. Luca Guadagnino
9. Good Time - dir. Josh and Benny Safdie
10. Dunkirk - dir. Christopher Nolan
Best Lead Performance - top 5:
1. Daniel Day-Lewis - Phantom Thread
2. Saoirse Ronan - Lady Bird
3. Vicky Krieps - Phantom Thread
4. Daniel Kaluuya - Get Out
5. Cynthia Nixon - A Quiet Passion
Best Supporting Performance - top 5:
1. Laurie Metcalf - Lady Bird
2. Lesley Manville - Phantom Thread
3. Willem Dafoe - The Florida Project
4. Tiffany Haddish - Girls Trip
5. Michael Stuhlbarg - Call Me By Your Name
Best Direction: Paul Thomas Anderson - Phantom Thread
Best Cinematic Moment: Stairwell fight - Atomic Blonde
Best Documentary: Faces Places
Best Screenplay: Get Out
Best Ensemble Performance: Lady Bird
Best Cinematography: Blade Runner 2049 (Roger Deakins)
Best Music: Phantom Thread (Jonny Greenwood)
Best Editing: Dunkirk (Lee Smith)
Best Cinematic Breakthrough: Jordan Peele - Get Out
Best Body of Work: Michael Stuhlbarg (actor - Call Me By Your Name, The Shape of Water, The Post)
Best Youth Performance: Brooklynn Prince - The Florida Project
10th Anniversary Award: Zodiac - dir. David Fincher
25th Anniversary Award: Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me - dir. David Lynch
50th Anniversary Award: Play Time - dir. Jacques Tati
The Muriels web site has been updated to include this year's results. Thanks again to everyone who's been following this year's Muriels! See you this summer for Hall of Fame announcements!
Monday, February 26, 2018
Sunday, February 25, 2018
And the 2017 Golden Muriel Award for Best Film goes to...
"Before Phantom Thread was released, a friend of mine commented that, though she usually looked forward to Paul Thomas Anderson’s movies, she'd be skipping this one. She had no interest in, as she put it, another movie about a brilliant, tortured artist who is abusive to his loyal muse. I could see how she could get that impression from the film’s trailer, but the brilliance and pleasure of Anderson’s film is how he subverts that expectation at every turn. While designer Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) fits the 'tortured artist' mold in many ways, with his uncompromising manner and meticulous attention to detail, Anderson is less interested in celebrating him than in puncturing his obsessive routine with the arrival of Alma (Vicky Krieps), his new would-be muse. Though Alma is in awe of her lover’s work, her refusal to fulfill the role of a passive and ultimately disposable clotheshorse upends Reynolds’s hermetically sealed existence, ultimately rendering Phantom Thread as a portrait of the artist as a petulant, fragile boy. One of the movie’s driest running jokes is that it’s not even clear Woodcock’s dresses are any good, or if it matters.
"And this is a movie with many jokes – one thing that seems to have been partly lost in discussions of Phantom Thread is that it’s a comedy. Anderson is often compared to Kubrick, and Phantom Thread’s severe, rigorous visual style invites the comparison (not to mention its visual references to A Clockwork Orange), but Anderson also shares Kubrick’s adolescent sense of humor. Besides naming his main character 'Reynolds Woodcock' after Day-Lewis texted the name to him as a joke, Anderson has fashioned what is, on the surface, a highbrow British period piece around a bluntly scatological metaphor for relationships. Whether one considers the games Alma, Reynolds and his sister/manager/life partner Cyril (Lesley Manville) play in the film’s second half abuse, co-dependence, kink or an exaggeration of the routines all couples create for themselves (or all of these at once), this is a tasteful, visually sumptuous movie in which vomit and diarrhea are signifiers of emotional attachment. The bodily fluids are kept offscreen, as are Reynolds and Alma’s sex life; food is substituted for onscreen coupling, with a series of increasingly fraught meals charting their relationship through infatuation, lust, malaise, commitment, more malaise and, ultimately, bliss. In fashioning his own Rebecca, Anderson has taken the repressed tensions of gothic romance to their logical, sadomasochistic end. It’s a deeply perverse film, and yet I wouldn’t trust any couple who claims they can’t relate to it on some level." ~ Andrew Bemis
2017 Muriel Awards: Best Picture Countdown, 2nd Place
Lady Bird [268 points / 26 votes]
“Coming-of-age stories are a dime a dozen. So many are released on a yearly basis that it’s surprising that the words ‘coming-of-age story’ still manage to get people’s attention, no doubt because of the universality of the best of them. I’m one of those people. Many of my favorite films could at least be loosely described that way. Writer/director Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird is the best one I’ve seen in years, top of the heap just above the other best coming-of-age films of recent years (including The Spectacular Now, The Edge of Seventeen, and this year’s Call Me by Your Name).
“So what makes it so special? Admittedly, one of the main reasons I connect to it so strongly is where I live. A major theme in the film is that it’s set in Sacramento, CA, a not-quite-but-almost-big city I’ve called my home for nearly two decades. One character in the film describes the city as the ‘Midwest of California.’ That’s very true in a lot of ways - though let me tell you, there are areas of California that are way more rural and conservative than this. As a Sacramento native, Gerwig captures the feel of the city better than I could have even hoped, both its specialness and its ordinariness. Numerous locations in the film are familiar and beloved places to me, some within walking distance of where I sit now typing this. The Crest Theatre’s gorgeous marquee is briefly glimpsed, and that’s where I worked and co-managed for a decade and made dozens of friends who will last my lifetime. Not only that, but the Tower Theatre’s marquee is also shown, which is where I was actually watching the movie (that’s a surreal experience but only the second time that’s happened to me, the first being Colin Hanks’s excellent Tower Records documentary All Things Must Pass). The ‘Fabulous 40s,’ so named because it’s the neighborhood consisting of 42nd Street, 43rd Street, etc…, is a wealthy area of town where many cruise by on Christmas Eve because they go all-out with decorations. I got my Halloween costume the year before last at Thrift Town. Gunther’s Ice Cream is a must.
“While Sacramento has its shortcomings and it’s understandable why the teenage Christine ‘Lady Bird’ McPherson (Saoirse Ronan) is not crazy about it being her hometown (most teens are not pleased with their own respective hometowns), anyone who walks away from this film thinking that part of the film’s message is that Sacramento sucks are mistaken. This film radiates love for Sacramento in a way that only the work of a native - and a truly talented filmmaker - could.
“I don’t mean to talk your ear off about my (mostly) beloved hometown, for now and for the foreseeable future. Thankfully, Lady Bird has much more going for it. As compelling as Ronan is as the protagonist, so recognizably human and so very teenage, part of the film’s power comes from its wealth of interesting supporting characters. Laurie Metcalf is so brilliant as her mother, Marion, and the bond between mother and daughter here is so realistic it’s painful and beautiful all at once, but there’s also Tracy Letts as her wry and forlorn father, Lois Smith as a nun with a memorable sense of humor, Lucas Hedges and Timotheé Chalamet as two of her boyfriends that turn out to not be right for very different reasons, the wonderfully named Beanie Feldstein as her best friend, Jordan Rodrigues and Marielle Scott as her goth adopted brother and his girlfriend. Perhaps best of all, though, is the great character actor Stephen Henderson as a priest and drama teacher with a great sadness not far beneath his friendly surface, the source of which we never discover. Henderson packs such a depth of feeling into what couldn’t be more than a few minutes of screen time that it’s honestly breathtaking.
“There are so many things I love about Lady Bird (its setting, its characters, its writing and direction, its salute to both the joys and follies of youth, its recognition of both the best and worst traits in all of its many characters) that I’m not sure how to end this other than to say that I couldn’t be happier that it’s become a surprise hit, and not just in Sacramento - where I believe it will continue playing for quite a long time.” ~ Jason Alley
2017 Muriel Awards: Best Picture Countdown, 3rd Place
Get Out [245 points / 26 votes]
“What’s left to say about Get Out, at this point? That it’s terribly clever, and rewards repeat viewings? That it’s both funny and genuinely thrilling? That it manages to be an unapologetically black film while not forgetting about non-black audiences? That it’s the first movie that’s distinctly of the Trump age, despite having been made before the election?
“All these things, and more, have been said. Yet they’re still worth repeating, because it’s easy – as some have – to dismiss Get Out as ‘merely’ a competent genre flick with some social messaging. It’s easy to see why some people underestimate it: Jordan Peele makes everything look easy. But that doesn’t mean it was.
“Some stories have come out that show how the movie was finessed, even during filming. An earlier ending was a lot darker, with Chris arrested. The movie’s ultimate resolution is better. When the police car shows up, your first thought isn’t ‘at last!.’ It’s ‘oh shit!’ – even as a white viewer, because the movie skillfully manages to shift your perspective. The fact that Peele had the confidence to know that that ‘oh shit’ was enough, and that the movie would be best served by offering us a release instead of doubling down, shows how sound his instincts are.
“Another story came out recently, about a subtler point. As written, it seems, there was a discussion during which Chris wanted to leave, but Rose convinces him to stay. In the end, the roles were shifted: it’s Rose who is outraged on Chris’ behalf, seemingly just realizing just how racist and insensitive her family members are. She’s the one trying to get Chris to leave… which results in him being the one who argues for staying. After all, his unease is probably just paranoia. White people aren’t actually out to get black people… are they?
“The movie is full of these kinds of choices: Peele may be a first-time director, but his hand is assured. The final result is a deeply satisfying popcorn flick that lingers and reveals its intricacies only gradually. It builds on earlier movies – The Stepford Wives and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner most obviously – but it is, in the end, a fully original movie. A movie that, whether through accidental timing or unconscious prescience, could not have arrived at a better time.” ~ Hedwig van Driel
2017 Muriel Awards: Best Picture Countdown, 4th Place
Nocturama [139 points / 12 votes]
"The plan: detonate explosives around Paris, then spend the night in hiding. The conspirators’ refuge: a vast department store. The outcome: not in their favor. That’s the whole 130-minute arc of the shocking thriller Nocturama. Those first and last portions unfold with alacrity, their chronologies sliced and diced, footsteps and gunshots puncturing the air. The middle is a waiting game, as the young culprits kill time with clothes and makeup, food and drink, TV news and go-kart rides. They blast songs — 'My Way,' 'Call Me,' 'Whip My Hair' — which act as droll counterpoint to the action. Sinister camera movements follow them through this languorous interlude past the store’s array of mirrors and closed-circuit cameras.
"From start to finish, Bonello draws on the conventions of crime and horror movies. Consequently, his work’s not only experimental but perversely entertaining, too. The widescreen framing, applied to Parisian architecture both indoors and out, insinuates a terror in open, empty spaces. The precise pacing toys with viewer expectations while expanding the grammar of screen violence. These thrills and chills lack any moral or catharsis. They just linger in the stomach, like a razor it’s failed to digest." ~ Alice Stoehr
2017 Muriel Awards: Best Picture Countdown, 5th Place
Personal Shopper [137 points / 14 votes]
“Stanley Kubrick once famously said that he believed any film about ghosts was, regardless of other content, spiritually optimistic, since it suggested there was existence after death. These remarks were made in relation to his own film, The Shining, which, metaphysically-speaking, is about as far from optimistic as you can get while still hinting that death is not the end. On the other hand, Kubrick wasn’t talking about vampires or zombies, but specifically ghosts, and the ghost story is the one subcategory of horror than can exist completely apart from that genre. There can be funny ghost stories, sad ones, romantic ones, all without even nodding at anything frightening or dangerous. (A zombie story that tried to do something similar would at the very least need to deal with the fact that it deliberately wasn’t doing certain horrific things.)
“Yet rarely does a ghost story come along which attempts to be both of the horror genre and separate from it, but that’s, more or less, what Olivier Assayas is up to with Personal Shopper (which, for the record, I consider a horror film, just to make things confusing). In it, Kristen Stewart plays Maureen, a young woman in France with the titular job who works for a massive celebrity (Nora von Waldstätten), who is never around to buy her own outrageously expensive clothes. Maureen is also a medium who, when the film opens, has just suffered the loss of her twin brother Lewis, also a medium. Lewis’s belief in his own powers, and what they said about life and the universe, was a lot stronger than Maureen’s is in hers. However, she’s staying in France, rather than joining her boyfriend on another continent, because she expects Lewis to give her a sign that life, in some form, continues. Or she hopes he will. This was a promise he had made to her. And she does encounter a ghost, but one she doesn’t believe is Lewis, and one that may be malevolent.
“Assayas being who he is, Maureen’s investigation into spirits and spiritualism is done with and depicted through, and communicated to the audience via, various kinds of technology. Early in the film, Maureen is told that she would be interested in Hilma af Klint, the Swedish painter and spiritualist whose abstract paintings predated the official beginning of the abstract art movement. To learn about Klint, Maureen watches Youtube videos. This brand of exposition occurs more than once, and I’m not sure how Assayas is able to get away with it, but he does, and there is something inexplicably artful about how he goes about it. It probably doesn’t hurt that this is actually what people do. Anyway, Klint said her strange paintings were inspired by spiritualist photographs of the early 20th century. So the technological advancement of photography led to a new type of modernist art whose roots, at least as far as Klint was concerned, are found in the oldest, most primitive, yet complex, questions about human life. And if you’ve ever seen those old spiritualist photographs that Klint and Assayas are referring to, you’ll remember that they feature people clad in just-barely-post-Victorian garb with great, waxy gouts of ectoplasm pouring from their mouths and noses – if you’re looking for an abstract image to illustrate man’s quest for meaning, you could do worse. Assayas even recreates this when Maureen first sees the ghost.
“At first it resembles, intentionally or not, the ghost effect (itself a small slice of technological modernity, though we needn’t make too much of this) in Lewis Allen’s 1944 light horror film The Uninvited. Then as it seems to be about to attack Maureen, its features solidify into something human, and it vomits ectoplasm. Life in a nutshell. That it might excite Assayas to explore much of these ideas through Maureen’s smart phone should surprise no one. An already, and justly, famous texting sequence about midway through Personal Shopper is one of the most suspenseful and eerie in any film last year.
“But much of Personal Shopper is about grief and loss. There are two ghost stories running alongside each other: the dangerous one that could lead Maureen to her death, and the one about her brother, dead of a heart attack at 27, from whom she just wants one irrefutable sign that he’s still around, talking to her, in his way. The film tells the audience little about Maureen’s life prior to our first sight of her, apart from what we know about her relationship to Lewis, and even though this forms the emotional center of Personal Shopper, we’re not even told much about that. But it makes it possible to wonder about her, and how different she might have been before Lewis died. Now, though her job is ostensibly glamorous (but also ‘stupid’ as one character puts it, a judgment Maureen doesn’t refute), and she’s young, and has more resources than most, she pretty clearly would rather be alone, somewhere quiet. Or barring that, she’d rather be someone else, as she admits. Who, though? Someone who knows more about the universe than she does? Someone whose brother isn’t dead? At times, Maureen shows that she has the same shallow desires as the rest of us, that it’s not all agonized ‘what does it mean??’ brooding, and the crucial texting scene seems almost to be about those desires – this is when her admission that she’d rather be someone else comes out, which itself leads to her secretly trying on her boss’s clothes, something she’s been tempted to do before. This basic unadorned humanity, a kind of subplot here, eventually reaches an endpoint, in a scene that is the film’s most unapologetically of the horror genre.
“Which means what? The very job Maureen is paid to do, the job of personal shopper, is itself a kind of exhausting example of modernity, an abstraction of the act of buying clothes for oneself. Horror is an abstraction of the fact of death, and horror movie deaths, which we get in Personal Shopper, are abstractions of the process of dying. And Olivier Assayas, through layer upon layer upon layer of modernity, technology, and art shows us that after a while, everything, including, or especially, the most vital things, will one day have an abstraction of itself, a doppleganger, a twin with a flawed heart.” ~ Bill Ryan
2017 Muriel Awards: Best Picture Countdown, 6th Place
The Florida Project [134 points / 13 votes]
“So why didn’t The Florida Project get nominated for Best Picture or Best Director? Willem Dafoe was given a nod for Best Supporting actor for his reserved yet heartfelt performance as the manager of ‘The Magic Castle,’ a dystopian motel down the road from the manufactured utopia that is Disney’s ‘Magic Kingdom,’ but other than that the film was ignored. I would think the film’s indie budget of $2 million might have hindered its chances of an Academy award, pushing it towards the many Independent Spirit nominations the film did garner, but last year’s Best Picture winner Moonlight was reportedly made for less, $1.5 million. Even if budget isn’t the reason the film was overlooked, money still might be at the root of the snub, more specifically the story of money.
“Many critics have pointed out that the unromanticized look at American poverty, especially women in poverty, might be the culprit behind the film’s lack of Oscar nominations. Though Lady Bird deals class difference it hugs much closer to the middle-class; Lady Bird lives in a small house longing for a mansion, while the mother and daughter protagonists of The Florida Project scrape by in a motel, having to change rooms occasionally to appear as though they aren’t permanent residents. Baker recognized the disconnect between Hollywood and reality in his film early on; he knew that casting a starlet worth millions in a film telling the story of a very specific version of need wasn’t going to work sending him to cast in non-traditional ways- through Instagram, inside a Target, at an actual roadside motel called home for many children. Despite Baker’s best efforts, and the resulting darkly honest story, the only Oscar nomination went to the only Hollywood star.
“Moonee (young Brooklynn Prince) sits in the bathtub of her hotel room playing with her toys in an imagined world. Her mother (Bria Vinaite) turns up the music and closes the door trying to shield her daughter from the actions unfolding in the other room, actions she must take to pay her rent. When a strange man enters the bathroom one night, Moonee is faced with confusion, fear and reality. Childlike dreams slowly harden into the American one, a capitalistic narrative that the Academy is more than happy to support and one that the stark realness of The Florida Project turns away from. Baker’s preoccupation with those not so much living on the fringe but those living in vastly overlooked populations- both by Hollywood and beyond- continues to set him apart as a humanistic auteur; an echo of the Italian-Neorealists and a needed change in the overly curated/Photoshopped lives of current image based culture. Hopefully Sean Baker will continue to tell these vital tales and lead others to do so, and hopefully the Academy, as it seems to have done for decades, will lag behind, slowly recognizing that audiences exist outside of its gilded gates, outside of its own focused frame of pretend.” ~ Donna Kozloskie
2017 Muriel Awards: Best Picture Countdown, 7th Place
“Out of all the movies I saw in 2017, A Ghost Story was hands down the most original. The premise seems simple: a couple live in a small house that the husband is more attached to, but then he dies in a car accident. He comes back as a ghost who watches his wife continue to live her life. Where it goes from there is utterly unpredictable and leads to an ambitious, contemplative, existential film on life and time's impact but ultimate indifference to it.
“The most noticeable aspect of A Ghost Story is writer-director David Lowery's audacity to depict the ghost as someone in a sheet with two holes cut out for the eyes. It's a reference to a very different time - the 19th and early 20th century. Back then, in an allusion to burial shrouds, the bed sheet ghost made for an easy, inexpensive Halloween costume. Today, such a depiction brings an element of absurdity and comedy since the costume has been satirized in everything from Charlie Brown to Scooby Doo to E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. Regardless that a bed sheet ghost has never looked more elegant than here, Lowery playing it perfectly straight creates a Brechtian dissonance through the audience always being aware of the deliberate artifice. Brecht wanted to avoid too much emotional identification with his characters to allow for conscious critical evaluation for the viewer. Such identifying with the character is further debilitated by watching a ghost with no facial features here. That one can't help but feel for the ghost anyway is a testament to the power of Lowery's filmmaking.
“Lowery also chooses to shoot in a square 1:1 ratio with curved corners. That's a reference to an earlier, more quaint period of photography, further calling attention to a story set in the present seen through the lens of the past. And so is time a central theme of this story. The immense expanse of time covered might seem to lessen the meaning our ghost is seeking when it foregoes the chance to leave this plane of existence. What is one person's attachment to another or to a house in all of that forgotten memory? (Note that the main characters all go nameless.) Or perhaps the flood of time actually makes that struggle for meaning all the more powerful for what it's struggling against, the vastness of eternity. A Ghost Story is not a horror movie and it's never really scary, but its power is still haunting.” ~ George Wu
2017 Muriel Awards: Best Picture Countdown, 8th Place
Call Me By Your Name [112 points / 12 votes]
“Film is an audio-visual medium. In principle, it offers only sound and images, engaging our ears and our eyes.
“Apparently nobody told Luca Guadagnino this.
“More than any other director working today, he consistently engages all the senses. In Call Me By Your Name, you can feel the sun on your skin. You can taste that peach. You can smell the teenage hormones.
“If there’s one quibble I have with the film, it’s that it seems to agree a little too much with the wonderful speech given by Michael Stuhlbarg in the end. His wistful monologue frames the affair between Elio and Oliver as the ultimate romance, profound and rare. It’s true that most of us – alas – could only dream of such a perfect, bold, bittersweet affair when we were teens. It’s also true that the romance is about more than just teenage lust, and maybe even about more than infatuation.
“Still. It’s not not about teenage lust, and the silly things it makes us do. It’s not not about the fact that Oliver, faced with a perfect soft-boiled egg, confesses that once he indulges in something he finds it impossible not to over-indulge. And in Luca Guadagnino’s sensual cinema, affairs of the mind are incomprehensible: love is impossible to separate from the act of love. It includes tearfully staring into a fire, but it’s also messy bodily fluids and unbearable embarrassment and the smell of your crush’s underpants and the illicit thrill of wearing their shirt. It’s also the delicious, unbearably ache of their absence.
“Call Me By Your Name is undeniably sweeter than the first two films in Guadagnino thematic trilogy about desire, Io sono l’amore and A Bigger Splash. In those films love was more mature, uglier. More violent, too. But the strength of Call Me By Your Name is that it never becomes too saccharine. Oh, it will make you long for long lazy summers in Italy – the cinematography is lush, the landscapes and towns are gorgeous, and the food looks simply amazing. And it will make you look back nostalgically to the silly things you did as a teen. But I doubt many viewers will truly want to be teens again, because the film is clear eyed about the fact that this intensity of feeling has drawbacks too.
“Thus, we end the film with that shot of Elio, crying into the hearth. Summer’s over. But as the memory of his affair with Oliver will stay with Elio, the sensations of this film stay with us.” ~ Hedwig van Driel
2017 Muriel Awards: Best Picture Countdown, 9th Place
Good Time [112 points / 11 votes]
"So often the default metaphor for big budget Hollywood action/adventure cinema has been a rollercoaster. And if you’re speaking in terms of visceral sensation, that’s fair.
"But what metaphor does that leave for the Safdies’ Good Time, as jarring and kinetic an experience as one could have on a dozen emotional Tilt-A-Whirls? That live-wire menace is the foundation that the film is built on, but there’s no way of knowing where things are going to go. No matter how many times you watch it, Connie’s frazzled charm and increasingly more uncertain certainty leaves a viewer tangled up in knots.
"That the proceedings end up in an actual amusement park seems perfectly natural, whether through internal, speedy nightmare logic or just a case of game recognizing game. But even with that flourish, the knife turns and things escalate further as we witness what is simply one of the cruelest things ever done to a bystander character, as Barkhad Abdi’s night watchman character gets dosed with enough hallucinogens to know that he’s never going to be all right again.
"That isn’t meant as moralizing- merely an observation that there is no logical way for anyone to think of Connie as a positive influence on any situation. He’s loyal, but he’s got that destructive stealth macho bullshit in the driver’s seat for so long that he can’t help but be destructive to everyone around him. Two moments in the film help puncture his seal, and they provide the notes of transcendence that make the shifts and sinking turns bearable, even without the necessary antacid/benzo combo that the film’s emotional itinerary demands- the final shot, of course, and the moment in the bail bonds place where Connie has to backburner himself while Jennifer Jason Leigh tends to business.
"To scream 'I’m trying to be a helpful person' and mean it. That’s Good Time in a glorious, gripping nutshell." ~ Jason Shawhan
2017 Muriel Awards: Best Picture Countdown, 10th Place
“The latest film by Christopher Nolan is a new way in which the director expands visual and genre horizons that he has explored before, this time in the realms of war cinema. A difficult genre, it’s always dangerous to speak about it, especially when it comes to its moral and representation issues. What does the war genre want? What does a filmmaker want from it? François Truffaut opened fire saying that there’s no such thing as pacifist cinema, which was expanded upon by Spielberg many years later by saying that there’s no such thing as a war film that isn’t pro-war. So, let’s get away from those big names and those issues and let’s get this straight: I usually don’t like war films. Now, there are some films among them that I hold dear, and Dunkirk has turned into one of them. But why?
“Nolan’s film is ambitious, telling the story of the escape from the battle of Dunkirk, where more than 300,000 British soldiers were evacuated from the shore of the French city after a catastrophic defeat by the Germans. Nolan divides his approach into three different space/time segments, which are edited together and in parallel: the shore of Dunkirk (showing events that last a week), the English Channel (during one day) and the airspace above (an hour). For this reason, it’s one of the most experimental pieces of mass media in terms of editing and misé-en-scene in a long time. Even though Nolan takes his time to introduce every one of the three aspects of the film, the editing between them provokes the sensation that you are seeing every corner possible to the conflict. At the same time it’s not a totalizing film or one that aims for a complete experience of what that battle in particular was like, but it only tries to get across one idea: war is an uphill battle not between two forces, but internally, against the loss of humanity that war causes.
“Dunkirk happened at a time during the War in which any outcome seemed possible: Russia was still swamped by its non-aggression pact with Hitler and the Americans hadn’t yet entered the fray. The evacuation of France was the final stage of a lost battle. One might call it a ‘moral victory’, but the film constantly undermines that concept by showing that there’s nothing moral to be seen. As each of the British and French soldiers (not one German soldier shows up until the very end) do what’s possible to survive, they’re capable of anything: betrayal, clamoring in the dirt, trampling over others, and other acts that could be construed as cowardice. Nolan’s film is not the glorification of a triumph - there’s no triumph here - but it isn’t one that condemns the soldiers for their actions either, but it understands them for what they are: humans in the worst possible circumstances.
“It makes sense that in the weeks prior to the world premiere of the film Nolan would list films and directors that inspired him visually and thematically, he specifically praised the works of Robert Bresson. I don’t want to suggest that Nolan is the sole heir and successor of one of the greatest directors of all time, but each one of the segments that he puts together applies or gives an idea of Bresson’s cinema, as if Nolan had made this film as a sort of dissertation on how the legacy of that master is all but dead.
“For example, the segment in the shores of Dunkirk, where we see thousands of soldiers waiting, hiding when the bombs come, anonymous… here the used of mostly unknown actors as the soldiers suggests Bresson’s casting process, as the master mostly used people he found in the streets, generally similar to the role they were going to play. Now, clearly Nolan couldn’t cast actual WWII soldiers, but most of these performers are unknown (the exception being Harry Styles, though Nolan didn’t know who he was until he was already cast). These actors follow simple acting directions, mostly reacting to things happening around them - hiding when a plane buzzes over, rushing forward when a boat appears, protecting themselves when attacked - much like the ‘models’ of Bresson. This straightforward style makes them believable and relatable to the audience in their simple and sensible approach to what they should do, and you feel almost entrenched alongside them.
“Completely moving away from anonymity and possible distance, we go to another Bressonian aspect that is manifested in the scenes that take place on a boat on the ocean. A father sails in a small craft from London into Dunkirk with his son and a humble kid from town who volunteers to help. All of this is part of a general call from the the British military, which commandeers every ship possible to go in the search of stranded soldiers. Mark Rylance plays the father, delivering a performance that could be identified with an almost Christian piety, similar to the one that Bresson felt or wanted his characters to feel. This old sailor wants to save as many as he can not necessarily for a patriotic conviction (although there is some of that), but a more personal one: his firstborn died in the first weeks of war, and he desperately wants that no one else follows on that similar path. Much like other characters in Bresson films, from the animals to Mouchette, the character played by Rylance is confronted with signs that what he’s doing makes no sense, that evil and death is what surrounds him. Still, he stoically presses on, faithful to his convictions, never mind the risk, even if a shell-shocked man pleads him not to go to Dunkirk, because there’s nothing left to be done there.
“Finally, the sequence on air, in which three airplane fighters (led by Tom Hardy) do a routine maneuver of defense for an hour to assist those stationed in Dunkirk by protecting them from assaults by German bombers. Here Nolan’s debt to Bresson is seen in the construction of shots, editing and direction similar to those in his later films. Feet, heads and objects are the actions that give deep sense to the story. We’re mostly confined to the small cabin of Tom Hardy’s airplane, feeling how every second counts, how he writes with a piece of chalk the amount of fuel that’s left after every detour he makes on the way for his main objective. These scenes generate suspense through their immediacy, which carries over to the other storylines through the editing, even though these other scenes have more (non-diegetic) time to develop their events.
“Is this Nolan’s masterpiece? Hard to say. Like much of his work, Dunkirk has been divisive. But watching the film, one gets the feeling that Nolan is less interested in surpassing Bresson than in paying him homage. In addition to making one of the best war movies of recent years, he’s also made one of the best analytical exercises on cinematic language, not only spending hundreds of millions of dollars in studio money to do so, but also winning them back and then some. In an age when many blockbusters are timid, Nolan’s bravery is encouraging.” ~ Jaime Grijalba
2017 Muriel Awards: Best Picture Addendum (The Elephant in the Room)
“It’s not a movie. Congratulations! We concede the point. Twin Peaks (subtitled The Return by Showtime but not on its subsequent video release) aired in weekly installments over the summer of 2017 just like I’m Dying Up Here, which no one in their right mind is claiming for cinema. Having established that, however, a few things need to be noted for the record. The director of all 18 hours of Twin Peaks, David Lynch, referred to the project as ‘a feature film in parts’—and while it’s true that every ambitious and/or pretentious showrunner under the sun has claimed the same, well, none of those people are David fucking Lynch. Per co-writer Mark Frost, the script was a document the size of a Manhattan phone book and encompassing the entire story, undivided into episodes. The production was shot on a feature-film schedule, with Lynch adding more material on the fly as his muse dictated. So maybe we can put it this way without causing too much controversy: Twin Peaks is an extraordinary piece of filmmaking, delivered in the form of a television series.
“The strict guidelines of the Muriel Awards prohibit those of us who would otherwise be so inclined from voting for Twin Peaks in any of the existing categories, but to ignore it altogether would be a miscarriage of justice. Let’s start with the unlikelihood of its existence at all, and the degree of difficulty involved in successfully pulling off such a belated revival. In recent memory, only Mad Max: Fury Road has managed such a feat, and even that wasn’t a direct continuation. Twin Peaks not only picked up the threads of a story that had been left dangling for more than 25 years, it brought back dozens of original cast members, most of whom didn’t miss a beat when it came to reprising their long-dormant roles.
“But Lynch and Frost had no exercise in nostalgia planned; in fact, quite the opposite. The story sprawled far beyond the borders of the quirky Pacific Northwest town fondly remembered from the original TV series, to New York, Las Vegas, South Dakota, and various bizarre planes of reality. The cast ballooned to include Lynch stalwarts like Laura Dern and Naomi Watts as well as unlikely co-conspirators ranging from Michael Cera to Jim Belushi. Through it all, however, the two central figures of the Twin Peaks saga remained the axis around which all else revolved. Kyle MacLachlan gave the performance of his career as the many aspects of Special Agent Dale Cooper, from the physical comedy and pathos of Dougie Jones to the contained fury of Mr. C to the tantalizingly brief but remarkably assured reappearance of original recipe Agent Cooper. And while Sheryl Lee’s screen time was limited, Laura Palmer continued to haunt the narrative—her absence remained the gaping hole through which all pain and suffering (garmonbozia) poured forth.
“While David Lynch would never think in such terms, Twin Peaks plays a grand career summation, incorporating obsessions and imagery from throughout his entire body of work. Absurdist humor rubs shoulders with cosmic mystery and heartrending emotion, and it all feels, well, Lynchian in the best possible way. ‘Part 8,’ with its atomic origin-of-evil pyrotechnics, has understandably garnered the most attention as perhaps the most experimental hour of television ever aired. For me, Lynch/Frost’s achievement is best summed up by the opening minutes of ‘Part 15,’ in which the soaring emotion of the long-delayed romantic reunion of Norma and Big Ed at the Double R Diner is immediately followed by the uncanny mindfuck of Agent Cooper’s evil doppelganger meeting with a former FBI agent now in the form of a giant teapot. Both of these events were equally Twin Peaks, and whether you call it a TV show, a movie, or an 18-hour interpretive dance, 2017 was far richer for having it.” ~ Scott Von Doviak
2017 Muriel Awards: Recent and Definitely Better Than Decent
Just because a movie didn't crack our top 10 doesn't mean there wasn't any passion behind it. I invited a handful of voters to write about movies about which they felt some affection even though they might not have gotten all that much love from the group as a whole.
14th Place: A Quiet Passion
“It's not often that a literary biopic fully works as cinema—writers, almost by definition, lead visually uninteresting lives devoid of physical drama unless your idea of riveting kineticism is the image of someone staring sadly at a blank page—but when one does, it's a cause for celebration. A Quiet Passion is, as proclaimed, quiet, but it stirs with a love of art, and the inextricable connection in the heart of the artist between the life force and creative work.
“While it's a film with no weak links whatsoever, in the interests of brevity the two main players will suffice to highlight: writer-director Terence Davies' cinema is one that is equally theatre, painting, and poetry, yet wholly cinematic. It's a vision of cinema as art, and art as cinema, exquisitely rendered and so fully, warmly alive that invites its audience in, in a friendly embrace. All this would collapse without a centerpiece, which is Cynthia Nixon's performance as Emily Dickinson. It's a stage actor's work in a film that requires just that, creating in full a great American poet without breathing down the back of the audience's neck that they're to gaze upon A Great American Poet and genuflect. Nixon's Dickinson is the most wondrous subject of attention there is: a full human being.
“A Quiet Passion is a brilliant, erudite film about a great artist, and it's also a ruefully funny movie about a woman who could kind of take or leave most people. It's bursting with a love of language, and a love for those who shape it, like clay, into the stuff that lives on forever. It's a great film, and one that shouldn't slip through the cracks of history.” ~ Danny Bowes
26th Place: Mudbound
"The American dream: earn a little money, buy a bit of land, and build yourself a place to call 'Home.' Is the dream achievable? For some, maybe, but for others the enterprise is a Sisyphean chore, a never ending struggle against the land, its inhabitants, and its history.
"Mudbound, written by Rees and Virgil Williams, and directed by Rees, is a study in struggle. Two families, the McAllens and the Jacksons - one white, one black - share a plot of farm land in Northern Mississippi. Pride and prejudice, despair and hope, are all hallmarks of a story that is ultimately about how we set about establishing a place in the world we can call our own. How we fight to express an identity that is uniquely our own, and how the world fights back when it thinks that identity has crossed a predetermined line.
"On the surface it is a story all too common; a story of racial relations that have echoed through film and literature in many thousands of tales. But, thanks in large part to the subtle and sure-handed direction of Dee Rees, with a gorgeous visual assist from cinematographer Rachel Morrison, what could have been a heavy handed exercise became, instead, an almost poetic ode to the characters and characteristics that shape this country to this very day. It is an eternal struggle, it seems, one destined to trap us all in the mud, forever damning us to dream in brown." ~ Donald G. Carder
35th Place: On the Beach at Night Alone
“The Korean master Hong Sang-soo had a breakout year in 2017, premiering three great films – On the Beach at Night Alone, Claire’s Camera, and The Day After – and garnering both acclaim and US distribution for all three of them. The latter two will be released in 2018, but On the Beach at Night Alone feels both of a piece with and yet distinct from its coequals, and not only because it was released the year it premiered.
“Hong’s style – that of single-take conversations punctuated by conspicuous pans and zooms, mercurial relationships between men and women, and soju-sodden outbursts amid naturalistic dialogue – is so recognizable, but it always varies in fascinating ways from film to film. Informed to no small extent by his experiences as a member of the film industry, they always take on some veneer of self-referentiality (if not autobiography), something that On the Beach at Night Alone takes almost to the limit.
“The film, in its portrait of an actress (played by Hong’s muse Kim Min-hee) essentially in hiding after her brief dalliance with a director is exposed, obviously invites comparisons with Hong’s real-life affair with Kim. But it almost seems more productive to take the film in the context of an entire career rather than the past few years; if this – along with the films he has made since 2015’s Right Now, Wrong Then, almost all of which feature Kim – signals a new phase of his career, it is nevertheless deeply, vitally indebted to his other work.
“Like many of his films, it takes place in two parts, the first set in a self-imposed exile in Hamburg, and the second taking place an indeterminate amount of time later in a resort town in Korea. The chronology appears to be straightforward, unlike many of Hong’s other works, but the implication that the first may just be a dream or even a film within the film is never far from the viewer’s mind.
“What makes this, to my mind, one of the best films of a career defined by its uniformly excellent quality is the level of examination and emotion on display. It is at once among his most even-keeled, almost placid works and among his most self-lacerating, but the emotions never feel telegraphed or forced whatsoever. They emerge out of Kim’s extraordinary performance, characterized by such control and ambiguity that every moment feels charged with a simmering undercurrent.
“It is enlivening and gratifying to see one of my favorite directors continuing to flourish and develop, and the final image, that of a slow release and acceptance, seems emblematic of that. Infinite possibilities within a single framework is Hong’s MO, and so many grace notes, so many conversations only make the power of On the Beach at Night Alone more mysterious, yet more palpable.” ~ Ryan Swen
14th Place: A Quiet Passion
“It's not often that a literary biopic fully works as cinema—writers, almost by definition, lead visually uninteresting lives devoid of physical drama unless your idea of riveting kineticism is the image of someone staring sadly at a blank page—but when one does, it's a cause for celebration. A Quiet Passion is, as proclaimed, quiet, but it stirs with a love of art, and the inextricable connection in the heart of the artist between the life force and creative work.
“While it's a film with no weak links whatsoever, in the interests of brevity the two main players will suffice to highlight: writer-director Terence Davies' cinema is one that is equally theatre, painting, and poetry, yet wholly cinematic. It's a vision of cinema as art, and art as cinema, exquisitely rendered and so fully, warmly alive that invites its audience in, in a friendly embrace. All this would collapse without a centerpiece, which is Cynthia Nixon's performance as Emily Dickinson. It's a stage actor's work in a film that requires just that, creating in full a great American poet without breathing down the back of the audience's neck that they're to gaze upon A Great American Poet and genuflect. Nixon's Dickinson is the most wondrous subject of attention there is: a full human being.
“A Quiet Passion is a brilliant, erudite film about a great artist, and it's also a ruefully funny movie about a woman who could kind of take or leave most people. It's bursting with a love of language, and a love for those who shape it, like clay, into the stuff that lives on forever. It's a great film, and one that shouldn't slip through the cracks of history.” ~ Danny Bowes
26th Place: Mudbound
"The American dream: earn a little money, buy a bit of land, and build yourself a place to call 'Home.' Is the dream achievable? For some, maybe, but for others the enterprise is a Sisyphean chore, a never ending struggle against the land, its inhabitants, and its history.
"Mudbound, written by Rees and Virgil Williams, and directed by Rees, is a study in struggle. Two families, the McAllens and the Jacksons - one white, one black - share a plot of farm land in Northern Mississippi. Pride and prejudice, despair and hope, are all hallmarks of a story that is ultimately about how we set about establishing a place in the world we can call our own. How we fight to express an identity that is uniquely our own, and how the world fights back when it thinks that identity has crossed a predetermined line.
"On the surface it is a story all too common; a story of racial relations that have echoed through film and literature in many thousands of tales. But, thanks in large part to the subtle and sure-handed direction of Dee Rees, with a gorgeous visual assist from cinematographer Rachel Morrison, what could have been a heavy handed exercise became, instead, an almost poetic ode to the characters and characteristics that shape this country to this very day. It is an eternal struggle, it seems, one destined to trap us all in the mud, forever damning us to dream in brown." ~ Donald G. Carder
35th Place: On the Beach at Night Alone
“The Korean master Hong Sang-soo had a breakout year in 2017, premiering three great films – On the Beach at Night Alone, Claire’s Camera, and The Day After – and garnering both acclaim and US distribution for all three of them. The latter two will be released in 2018, but On the Beach at Night Alone feels both of a piece with and yet distinct from its coequals, and not only because it was released the year it premiered.
“Hong’s style – that of single-take conversations punctuated by conspicuous pans and zooms, mercurial relationships between men and women, and soju-sodden outbursts amid naturalistic dialogue – is so recognizable, but it always varies in fascinating ways from film to film. Informed to no small extent by his experiences as a member of the film industry, they always take on some veneer of self-referentiality (if not autobiography), something that On the Beach at Night Alone takes almost to the limit.
“The film, in its portrait of an actress (played by Hong’s muse Kim Min-hee) essentially in hiding after her brief dalliance with a director is exposed, obviously invites comparisons with Hong’s real-life affair with Kim. But it almost seems more productive to take the film in the context of an entire career rather than the past few years; if this – along with the films he has made since 2015’s Right Now, Wrong Then, almost all of which feature Kim – signals a new phase of his career, it is nevertheless deeply, vitally indebted to his other work.
“Like many of his films, it takes place in two parts, the first set in a self-imposed exile in Hamburg, and the second taking place an indeterminate amount of time later in a resort town in Korea. The chronology appears to be straightforward, unlike many of Hong’s other works, but the implication that the first may just be a dream or even a film within the film is never far from the viewer’s mind.
“What makes this, to my mind, one of the best films of a career defined by its uniformly excellent quality is the level of examination and emotion on display. It is at once among his most even-keeled, almost placid works and among his most self-lacerating, but the emotions never feel telegraphed or forced whatsoever. They emerge out of Kim’s extraordinary performance, characterized by such control and ambiguity that every moment feels charged with a simmering undercurrent.
“It is enlivening and gratifying to see one of my favorite directors continuing to flourish and develop, and the final image, that of a slow release and acceptance, seems emblematic of that. Infinite possibilities within a single framework is Hong’s MO, and so many grace notes, so many conversations only make the power of On the Beach at Night Alone more mysterious, yet more palpable.” ~ Ryan Swen
2017 Muriel Awards: The Big Day Has Arrived!
Well, today is the big day, with the countdown to the announcement of the Golden Muriel Award for Best Picture, which is coming at 7 PM Eastern tonight. But before we begin the countdown, I'd like to thank everyone who voted in this year's Muriel Awards.
Jason Alley
Josh Bell
Andrew Bemis
Christianne Benedict
Scott W. Black
Danny Bowes
Sean Burns
Donald G. Carder
Kevin Cecil
Paul Clark
Dennis Cozzalio
Andrew Dignan
Kevin Dufresne
Philip Dyess-Nugent
Jim Emerson
Steve Erickson
Molly Autumn Faust
James Frazier
Kenji Fujishima
Luke Gorham
Jaime Grijalba
Russell Hainline
Glenn Heath Jr.
Odie Henderson
Daniel Cook Johnson
Stacia Kissick Jones
Sam Juliano
Donna Kozloskie
Peter Labuza
Craig D. Lindsey
Matt Lynch
Sam C. Mac
Jeff McMahon
Patrick J. Miller
Matt Noller
Jason Overbeck
Bill Ryan
Jason Shawhan
Alice Stoehr
Ryan Swen
Scout Tafoya
Melissa Tamminga
Ian Scott Todd
Hedwig Van Driel
Vern
Scott Von Doviak
Clayton Walter
Bryan T. Whitefield
Bryce Wilson
George Wu
And a big thanks to everyone who's been following the Muriels this year!
Jason Alley
Josh Bell
Andrew Bemis
Christianne Benedict
Scott W. Black
Danny Bowes
Sean Burns
Donald G. Carder
Kevin Cecil
Paul Clark
Dennis Cozzalio
Andrew Dignan
Kevin Dufresne
Philip Dyess-Nugent
Jim Emerson
Steve Erickson
Molly Autumn Faust
James Frazier
Kenji Fujishima
Luke Gorham
Jaime Grijalba
Russell Hainline
Glenn Heath Jr.
Odie Henderson
Daniel Cook Johnson
Stacia Kissick Jones
Sam Juliano
Donna Kozloskie
Peter Labuza
Craig D. Lindsey
Matt Lynch
Sam C. Mac
Jeff McMahon
Patrick J. Miller
Matt Noller
Jason Overbeck
Bill Ryan
Jason Shawhan
Alice Stoehr
Ryan Swen
Scout Tafoya
Melissa Tamminga
Ian Scott Todd
Hedwig Van Driel
Vern
Scott Von Doviak
Clayton Walter
Bryan T. Whitefield
Bryce Wilson
George Wu
And a big thanks to everyone who's been following the Muriels this year!
Saturday, February 24, 2018
2017 Muriel Awards: Lead Performance Retrospective Poll
Here's the second part of this year's special ballot, in which we've polled the voters to see their preference of their male and female lead performance winners from years past. Who do we like best? Here are the results:
2006:
*Sacha Baron Cohen, Borat - 18 votes
Helen Mirren, The Queen - 14 votes
2007:
*Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood - 27 votes
Carice Van Houten, Black Book - 3 votes
"How could you make me choose????" - 1 vote
2008:
*Anne Hathaway, Rachel Getting Married - 15 votes
*Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler - 15 votes
2009:
Jeremy Renner, The Hurt Locker - 9 votes
*Tilda Swinton, Julia - 19 votes
2010:
*Jesse Eisenberg, The Social Network - 20 votes
Hailee Steinfeld, True Grit - 13 votes
2011:
*Juliette Binoche, Certified Copy - 20 votes
Michael Shannon, Take Shelter - 13 votes
2012:
*Denis Lavant, Holy Motors - 15 votes
*Rachel Weisz, The Deep Blue Sea - 15 votes
2013:
*Chiwetel Ejiofor, 12 Years a slave - 17 votes
Adèle Exarchopoulos, Blue Is the Warmest Color - 16 votes
2014:
*Ralph Fiennes, The Grand Budapest Hotel - 16 votes
Scarlett Johansson, Under the Skin - 15 votes
2015:
Michael B. Jordan, Creed - 13 votes
*Rooney Mara, Carol - 21 votes
2016:
Casey Affleck, Manchester By the Sea - 10 votes
*Isabelle Huppert, Elle - 20 votes
2006:
*Sacha Baron Cohen, Borat - 18 votes
Helen Mirren, The Queen - 14 votes
2007:
*Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood - 27 votes
Carice Van Houten, Black Book - 3 votes
"How could you make me choose????" - 1 vote
2008:
*Anne Hathaway, Rachel Getting Married - 15 votes
*Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler - 15 votes
2009:
Jeremy Renner, The Hurt Locker - 9 votes
*Tilda Swinton, Julia - 19 votes
2010:
*Jesse Eisenberg, The Social Network - 20 votes
Hailee Steinfeld, True Grit - 13 votes
2011:
*Juliette Binoche, Certified Copy - 20 votes
Michael Shannon, Take Shelter - 13 votes
2012:
*Denis Lavant, Holy Motors - 15 votes
*Rachel Weisz, The Deep Blue Sea - 15 votes
2013:
*Chiwetel Ejiofor, 12 Years a slave - 17 votes
Adèle Exarchopoulos, Blue Is the Warmest Color - 16 votes
2014:
*Ralph Fiennes, The Grand Budapest Hotel - 16 votes
Scarlett Johansson, Under the Skin - 15 votes
2015:
Michael B. Jordan, Creed - 13 votes
*Rooney Mara, Carol - 21 votes
2016:
Casey Affleck, Manchester By the Sea - 10 votes
*Isabelle Huppert, Elle - 20 votes
2017 Muriel Awards: Best Lead Performance, 1st Place
Daniel Day Lewis - Phantom Thread [318 points / 28 votes]
“Maybe he’s the most demanding man." – Alma (Vicky Krieps) speaking, of course, about sought-after dress designer Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) near the beginning (but really, near the end) of Phantom Thread
“Alma is speaking to someone, who will eventually be revealed as a doctor, about her exacting, exasperating, mysterious husband, but as the doctor remains off-screen for the moment she might just as easily be speaking to us, laying down in loving, unforgiving terms the groundwork for our eventual acceptance or rejection of Woodcock’s insular manner, his refusal to compromise, either in his celebrated sartorial vision or the minutiae of daily procedure that seems to be his tether to self-expression, to his minimalist articulation of emotion, to sanity itself. And Day-Lewis, always a generous receptacle into which his characters can be poured, molded, and realized with an acuity and commitment rare among modern movie actors, could perhaps himself be described in a similarly evocative, inquisitive, slightly awestruck fashion.
“Yet I’ve actually heard some people, perhaps those who hold in high regard Day-Lewis’s three Oscar-winning turns, as well as his Hawkeye in Michael Mann’s superb rendition of The Last of the Mohicans (1992), describe Day-Lewis in Phantom Thread, in what he has hinted will be his final movie performance, as, well, boring. Yes, in comparison to his relatively ostentatious appearances in in My Left Foot (1989), There Will Be Blood (2007) and Lincoln (2012), Day-Lewis’ Reynolds Woodcock is certainly subdued. But boring? Perhaps only if you’re disengaged from the entire movie. However, those who find themselves caught up in the hushed, meticulously structured routine and the underlying tension woven into the fabric of the film by writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, are magnetized by the confidence with which Day-Lewis draws his audience in. Every glance up from a sketch pad and over glasses, every hitched breath, prepares the table for the expected histrionics which, gratifyingly, never come in quite the timbre, the pattern, the timing in which we feel prepared to receive them.
“For me, the height of the movie’s emotional pitch arrives in a moment so off-rhythm and cloaked in reserve that it might be easy to miss. Reynolds, beginning the long, measured process of unveiling himself to Alma during a phase of what could be described as mannered infatuation, turns his reticent, reedy voice to the subject of his late, revered mother, a persistent ghost whose presence is ever felt, yet never quite so much comforting as unsettling. Her eerie silence is, for Woodcock, a terrible barrier, a measure of unattainable perfection for the designer who fears his work will never fill the void created by her absence. To Alma he hints at secrets which he routinely incorporates into the very fabric of his clothes, invocations and bits of physical memory sewn into the lining which make them unique to their owner. He then reveals that a lock of his mother’s hair has been hidden in the breast of his own jacket, and in doing so he hitches and swallows, interrupting but for an almost-imperceptible moment the flow of the confession. It’s a perfectly modulated moment from the actor, one that barely moves the ‘Acting!’ needle but somehow still registers an earthquake’s worth of character truth and mystery, and it’s as moving as anything on Day-Lewis’s Oscar résumé.
“If Phantom Thread does turn out to be Day-Lewis’s final film, then Anderson seems well intent on drawing Woodcock’s character in terms that also reflect on the intent and character of his lead actor. In addition to Alma’s framing observation near the film’s beginning, we also hear Alma say of Woodcock, ‘When you love your work, you can give like he does.’ Then later, when the pressures of reconciling his relentless work pace with the intangible, yet paralyzing yearning for romantic fulfillment which he can barely articulate begins to wear him down, she observes, ‘Sometimes it’s good for him to slow down his steps a little,’ knowing well the plans she herself has devised which will bring their relationship into full, twisted bloom. It’s difficult to hear these expressions and not think of Day-Lewis as well, a mercurially tempered, Method-precise actor who has decided that it’s time in his life to turn away from that which has brought him and his audiences so much reward and toward a life of carpentry and other pursuits involving the craft of his hands as well as his heart.
“Many of those fans of Day-Lewis’ film work, in admiring his achievements, have also expressed a somewhat imperious selfishness when contemplating his imminent retirement: How could he do this to us? And again, in Phantom Thread Reynolds Woodcock seems to address both the pressures of delivering couture to the exacting denizens of London society in the 1950s and the ambivalence interlacing the conviction of Day-Lewis to forever step away from the spotlight: ‘I think it’s the assumptions and expectations of others that cause heartache.’
“To what degree Anderson and Day-Lewis have consciously conceived of Phantom Thread as the actor’s last hurrah is unknowable, but Day-Lewis’s announcement of retirement, which came before filming began, and our awareness of it as an audience, certainly colors the experience of seeing the performance. And it’s profoundly satisfying to see the actor meld more with the director’s physical and spiritual vision for the film than stand apart from and somehow above it, in the manner which has brought him such a bounty of previous glory. But really, if this is the last we see of Day-Lewis as professional inhabitant of his characters’ fantasies, nightmares and obsessions, it’s hard to imagine a more resonant way to bring down the curtain.
“After all, Phantom Thread provides this meticulous craftsman, this artist among journeymen, an exeunt informed by an elegant, piercing rumination on meticulous craftsmanship, sending him off into a new life of an entirely different sort of scrupulous and painstaking accomplishment. It’s a pursuit which is honored by his embodiment of Reynolds Woodcock, the artist as mad scientist, demanding lover, uncompromising visionary, emotional cripple, and Anderson rewards him with the most passionately optimistic, yet peerlessly perverse conclusion of any in the director’s oeuvre. When Woodcock pleads to Alma, ‘Kiss me, my girl, before I get sick,’ it’s an anticipatory consummation of passion that signals moving from a plane of controlled, yet unsatisfying pleasures to a new realm where fulfillment will come with much more private, personal intensity, an adventure that may be understood entirely only by the one embarking upon it. On those terms, and among a symphony of deepening shadow and softening light radiating from Anderson’s palette, Daniel Day-Lewis creates in Phantom Thread a most exquisitely realized swansong.” ~ Dennis Cozzalio
2017 Muriel Awards: Best Lead Performance, 2nd Place
Saoirse Ronan - Lady Bird [268 points / 27 votes]
“Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird presents us with a teenage heroine who, simply put, has quite a lot of chutzpah. From applying to East Coast colleges in spite of her mediocre academic performance to ingratiating herself with a popular, rich classmate by pretending she lives in a beautiful, blue house in Sacramento’s Fabulous 40s neighborhood, Christine ‘Lady Bird’ McPherson goes after what she wants, often worrying about working out the pesky details later.
“In the titular role, Saoirse Ronan renders Lady Bird’s pluck and foolhardiness with great comic timing and a jaunty charm. We marvel at Lady Bird’s unabashed confidence, for instance, in an early scene where she introduces herself to would-be suitor Danny (Lucas Hedges), blindsiding him in a grocery store with a hilariously delivered ‘Come here often?’ as she extends her arm for a handshake. This effervescence that Ronan naturally projects in such scenes serves as a poignant contrast to the dramatic moments she shares with Laurie Metcalf. Both actresses instinctively portray the loving but contentious relationship between this somewhat blindly idealistic teenager and her overly practical mother with remarkable precision and depth. The interwoven tenderness and resentment felt by these two women emanate as much from their silences and body language as they do from their spoken dialogue, as we see in the scene where Lady Bird, from behind the door of a thrift shop fitting room, tells Marion, ‘I wish that you liked me.’
“In this briskly-paced, 94-minute film, it is a testament to Ronan’s charisma as a performer that she conveys the many complex, at times unflattering, facets of Lady Bird with both nuance and economy. It also helps that Gerwig has populated her film with well-drawn supporting characters, many of whom have their own unspoken backstories and sustained moments, whose experiences Ronan draws from in such a way that fulfills her character’s own story arc, allowing us to see Lady Bird evolve from a place of self-absorption to one of empathy and self-awareness.” ~ Kevin Dufresne
2017 Muriel Awards: Best Lead Performance, 3rd Place
Vicky Krieps - Phantom Thread [264 points / 23 votes]
"Where’d she come from? Literally, from Luxembourg. But the question is asking a bit more than that. Did Vicky Krieps emerge parthenogenically from the forehead of some deity, ready to intervene and teach the people of earth about transformative love and how to establish new and unforeseen kinks that span forests of portent, exquisite kitchens, and remote sickrooms? How did fate bring her to the attention of Paul Thomas Anderson? And how did she craft the internal life of this singular woman?
"Alma is kind, exacting, mysterious, and fearless- she’s in a multilevel battle with routine fussbudget Reynolds Woodcock to win his heart, put the corrosive aspects of his ego in abeyance, nurture his creative side, and put him in check when he’s being too much of an asshole to too many people. And she dies this with elegance and tact. As stunning as Day-Lewis is in the film, look around him in the scenes wherein Krieps’ Alma and Lesley Manville’s Cyril are interacting with one another. There’s an entire other film in those moments, and it’s just as captivating as the ultimate chapter in the 2017 Mystery Mushroom Trilogy that Phantom Thread completes.
"I look forward to the career that Vicky Krieps has in acting. I can’t wait to see what she does for decades to come. And I am in awe that she made an entrance into the artform with a performance as complex, moving, and exquisite as Alma. There’s not a word for it, really. Blindsided, but without the pejorative connotation. Something sudden and wonderful and transformative..." ~ Jason Shawhan
2017 Muriel Awards: Best Lead Performance, 4th Place
Daniel Kaluuya - Get Out [238 points / 25 votes]
"Get Out is a movie about a guy who quits smoking. OK, maybe there’s a little more to it than that. Some additional details: In Jordan Peele’s debut feature, Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya), an almost impossibly handsome young black man, is taken home by his white girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams) to meet her parents at their country estate outside Mobile, Alabama. Thing is, she hasn’t told them he’s black. Not like she’s trying to hide anything, it’s just so not a big deal. Her folks are extremely not-racist. Her dad (Bradley Whitford) is even a little embarrassing about it, always trumpeting that he’d have voted for Obama a third time if he could have. Over the weekend, Chris is persuaded (more or less against his will) to give up cigarettes. And, well, it isn’t pretty.
"Those are the bones of the plot, but the real story, and the real drama, moment by moment, is what’s going on in Chris’s nicotine-deprived head. We follow that narrative by tracking the contradictory ideas and emotions that flicker across Kaluuya’s face as he tries to suss out what the hell is going on here — sorting through scenarios and responses, trying out each one briefly, then rejecting it for another when circumstances shift.
"Something is not right out here — and it’s not just a racial or generational or political or socio-economic thing. Sure, the outer über-burbs prove to be a land of unquestioned entitlement, populated by excessively genial upper-crust liberals who breathe deep the woodsy air of white privilege while bending over backwards to flaunt how hospitable and woke they are. That’s to be expected. The house has this basement door that’s closed off to contain a 'black mold' problem. Perfectly plausible and sensible. But what to make of the black servants who are always lurking in the background, so solicitous and pleasant (or are they taunting and passive-aggressive?) that they seem almost lobotomized? And what about those bizarrely mismatched couples, old friends of the late family patriarch, who show up en masse as invited guests at an afternoon cocktail party in his (and Chris’s?) honor?
"Chris’s face is the movie — simultaneously both screen and projector. Watch as he resists Rose’s hypnotherapist mom’s insistent attempts to question him about the night his mother died, and his vulnerability as she probes his feelings of guilt and regret. Witness his attempts to figure out if the handyman is being awkwardly friendly, or provoking and challenging him. Study his anger, frustration, fear, acceptance as it dawns on him why Rose can’t find the car keys. They say there’s nothing more cinematic than the human face, and Kaluuya is living proof of it." ~ Jim Emerson
2017 Muriel Awards: Best Lead Performance, 5th Place
Cynthia Nixon - A Quiet Passion [204 points / 19 votes]
"The Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman has inspired various degrees of adoration among the most ardent cinephiles for his complex philosophical themes, stark visuals and spare use of classical music, but just as prevalent his ability to coax extraordinary performances from his acting company, especially the females. A fair argument in fact could be posed that no other film artist has featured in his films a comparable number of great turns from women over a career spanning nearly five decades. Britain's greatest living director Terence Davies has written and directed only a fraction of the iconic Scandinavian's films, yet his work with the fairer sex has already yielded some critically-acclaimed lead turns that attest to a special gift from the man in charge.
"The first two were by Gillian Anderson playing Lily Bart in The House of Mirth (based on a novel by Edith Wharton), and by Rachel Weisz as Hester Collyer in The Deep Blue Sea. The latter won the New York Film Critics prize for best Actress, while the former won second place from the same organization. Anderson also finished as the runner-up for the National Society of Film Critics Best Picture Award. In 2016 Davies has again rung the bell for thespian excellence, setting the stage for Sex in the City stalwart Cynthia Nixon to travel down the road once taken by Renee Falconetti in 1928's The Passion of Joan of Arc. While any discussion of Nixon's magnificent interpretation of the beloved poet Emily Dickinson in comparative terms with Falconetti's legendary work - regarded by many as the most electrifying in movie history - is taking things too far, the underlying point revolves around Nixon transcending a career which till this point had never demanded a comparable level of depth and intimacy, nor such a hybrid of intelligence and emotion.
"In a métier of film roles that included thrillers, comedies and less intricate drama, Nixon came arguably closest to the intensity of her work in A Quiet Passion only in her lead performance in the Broadway staging of Rabbit Hole, which won her a Tony Award. But in Davies' lyrical chamber drama, one where words have rarely taken such integral and provocative an implication, she is called on to humanize an embittered recluse who lashes out against social mores, and hides the brewing emotions inside of her with stoicism and the famed anti-social conventions that made her as almost as prickly as the famed artist J. M. W. Turner in Mike Leigh's 2014 biopic of the cantankerous British landscape artist.
"In the rapturous, painterly film, dominated by lyrical camera turns and sunlight, flower and sun umbrella resplendence, Nixon's voice over reading of some of her most renowned works are passionately rendered. She is masterful at juggling the demands of a role equally attuned at feminism and submissiveness, to rebelliousness and cognizance of the societal status quo at a time when her leaving the box was as shunned as as her own family's exasperation at her uncouth behavior. Nixon negotiates pensiveness, ire, fear, anxiety and madness, in a narrative that runs the gamut from caustic wit to an almost morbid severity. Her three hour midnight talk with Susan segues into a character metamorphosis leaving as a white-wearing mourner who never leaves the house and finally her bedroom. Her death scene is one of the most visually shattering ever filmed. The actress has confirmed she came to the role having read and studied Dickinson growing up, and understood the poet's desire to connect with society yet maintain her rigid privacy. Her intensity and immersion under Davies's nuanced direction has resulted in what this writer feels was the most distinguished lead performance by male or female in 2017." ~ Sam Juliano
Friday, February 23, 2018
2017 Muriel Awards: More Great Cinematic Moments
Some more of the year's best Cinematic Moments for you to enjoy!
Wonder Woman - No Man's Land
Baby Driver - "Bellbottoms"
Okja - "Annie's Song" escape
A Ghost Story - Rooney vs. pie
Blade Runner 2049 - K vs. Deckard
The Square - going ape
The Big Sick - "So... 9/11..."
The Florida Project - no harm no fowl
And finally, one for the missus. The Greatest Showman - "This Is Me"
Wonder Woman - No Man's Land
Baby Driver - "Bellbottoms"
Okja - "Annie's Song" escape
A Ghost Story - Rooney vs. pie
Blade Runner 2049 - K vs. Deckard
The Square - going ape
The Big Sick - "So... 9/11..."
The Florida Project - no harm no fowl
And finally, one for the missus. The Greatest Showman - "This Is Me"
2017 Muriel Awards: Best Cinematic Moment
Third place:
Get Out - first trip to the Sunken Place [78 points / 7 votes]
Second place:
Call Me By Your Name - Elio gazes into the fire [102 points / 9 votes]
And the winner is...
Atomic Blonde - stairwell fight [108 points / 11 votes]
“Maybe it’s not really a single take. Most likely there’s some trickery going on somewhere in the 10-minute unbroken shot that encompasses Atomic Blonde’s best action sequence (and one of the best action sequences of the past decade). But at least for the seven or so minutes that director David Leitch follows MI6 agent Lorraine Broughton (Charlize Theron) and the East German defector known as Spyglass (Eddie Marsan) inside an abandoned building in East Berlin, the action is seamless, an expertly choreographed series of brutal physical confrontations, presented with the kind of effortless cool that can only come from massive, painstaking effort.
“Lorraine is attempting to escort Spyglass across the border between East and West Berlin while being targeted by KGB agents (and, although she’s not entirely sure about it at the time, by her own colleague David Percival, played by James McAvoy). She manages to protect Spyglass from KGB snipers above them as they walk through a huge group of protesters (thanks to a flash mob-style covering of umbrellas), but she doesn’t account for Percival getting in a covert shot from across the street. Lorraine, spotting the KGB gunmen above, drags the injured Spyglass into the empty building where they’ve set up their operation, determined to take them all out.
“And boy does she. What follows is a breathtaking demonstration of Leitch’s skills as a director, bringing in his background as a stunt coordinator (aided by the film’s actual stunt coordinator, Sam Hargrave) to orchestrate an epic fight sequence that starts when Lorraine takes the elevator to just above where two KGB operatives are positioned in the stairwell, and ends with her calmly walking the bleeding but bandaged Spyglass out of the building. The beginning of the movie shows Lorraine, 10 days after the mission in Berlin, her body covered in bruises and cuts and welts, soaking herself in an ice bath, and the stairwell sequence provides the origin for most of those injuries.
“Lorraine is clearly an incredibly capable secret agent, adept at marksmanship and hand-to-hand combat, but fighting off six muscular, well-trained KGB operatives takes every ounce of energy she has, and Leitch, Hargrave and Theron make sure the audience feels the impact of every kick, punch and stab. In contrast to the nearly nonstop pop music in the rest of the film, this sequence features no music at all, just grunts and the sound of bodies hitting bodies (or walls, or floors). Lorraine barely speaks, uttering occasional single words (‘Fuck!’ ‘Go!’) until a brief moment of calm when she tells Spyglass to tend to his wounds, and then later when she defeats the final KGB henchman by jamming a corkscrew in his neck. ‘Am I your bitch now?’ she sneers at him, triumphant despite barely being able to stand up. She’s drained but exhilarated, and by the time Leitch finally makes a clear, recognizable cut (which isn’t until the car chase scene that follows), the audience is, too.” ~ Josh Bell
Get Out - first trip to the Sunken Place [78 points / 7 votes]
Second place:
Call Me By Your Name - Elio gazes into the fire [102 points / 9 votes]
And the winner is...
Atomic Blonde - stairwell fight [108 points / 11 votes]
“Maybe it’s not really a single take. Most likely there’s some trickery going on somewhere in the 10-minute unbroken shot that encompasses Atomic Blonde’s best action sequence (and one of the best action sequences of the past decade). But at least for the seven or so minutes that director David Leitch follows MI6 agent Lorraine Broughton (Charlize Theron) and the East German defector known as Spyglass (Eddie Marsan) inside an abandoned building in East Berlin, the action is seamless, an expertly choreographed series of brutal physical confrontations, presented with the kind of effortless cool that can only come from massive, painstaking effort.
“Lorraine is attempting to escort Spyglass across the border between East and West Berlin while being targeted by KGB agents (and, although she’s not entirely sure about it at the time, by her own colleague David Percival, played by James McAvoy). She manages to protect Spyglass from KGB snipers above them as they walk through a huge group of protesters (thanks to a flash mob-style covering of umbrellas), but she doesn’t account for Percival getting in a covert shot from across the street. Lorraine, spotting the KGB gunmen above, drags the injured Spyglass into the empty building where they’ve set up their operation, determined to take them all out.
“And boy does she. What follows is a breathtaking demonstration of Leitch’s skills as a director, bringing in his background as a stunt coordinator (aided by the film’s actual stunt coordinator, Sam Hargrave) to orchestrate an epic fight sequence that starts when Lorraine takes the elevator to just above where two KGB operatives are positioned in the stairwell, and ends with her calmly walking the bleeding but bandaged Spyglass out of the building. The beginning of the movie shows Lorraine, 10 days after the mission in Berlin, her body covered in bruises and cuts and welts, soaking herself in an ice bath, and the stairwell sequence provides the origin for most of those injuries.
2017 Muriel Awards: Best Screenplay
Third place:
Phantom Thread (written by Paul Thomas Anderson) [151 points / 22 votes]
Second place:
Lady Bird (written by Greta Gerwig) [163 points / 25 votes]
And the winner is...
Get Out (written by Jordan Peele) [174 points / 27 votes]
“Jordan Peele’s screenplay for Get Out has much in common with its villainous characters. It hides in plain sight while simultaneously misleading the viewer. As events unfold, we start to question our own interpretations the same way Daniel Kaluuya’s Chris does. The blatantly sinister act that opens the film telegraphs its horror movie intentions, but until its big reveal, Get Out plays more like a psychological thriller whose mystery is whether Chris is overreacting to seemingly normal situations. It’s smart enough to account for the differing viewpoints of the audience: Black viewers familiar with the daily microaggressions that Peele piles on Chris like a thousand paper cuts may still question if Chris’ paranoia is completely founded. White viewers may see the Armitages’ clumsy attempts at welcoming Chris as mere cringe-worthy overcompensations.
“The key to both of these inaccurate reads is Rose. She’s embarrassed by her family’s initial meeting with Chris and she’s furious about the cop’s treatment of Chris. Peele presents her as an ally on the surface, but he slyly tips his hand to less than noble intentions in her first scene. When Chris asks her pointedly, ‘do your parents know I’m Black,’ she responds ‘should they?’ Everything she does in the first half of the film is meant to engender either guilt or confusion. It’s only upon a second viewing that we notice just how openly these clues are laid out in the screenplay.
“Even the symbols in Get Out have multiple intentions. The deer that Rose hits is an innocent victim and the catalyst for a rant by her father that sounds eerily like what racists say about minorities. Jesse Owens’ prowess becomes the vengeful motivation for the Armitages’ medical procedure. A blind art dealer, whose own skill set is impressive because it overcomes his disability, becomes Chris’ biggest fan and his worst nightmare. And good china and silverware, things normally associated with gentility, are revealed to be terrifying weapons of destruction.
“There’s a richness to Get Out’s screenplay that’s unusual for a genre film. Peele’s ideas are so cleverly and tightly woven into its structure that subsequent viewings always unveil something new. The script is an equal opportunity gaslighter that preys upon the race-based experiences and ideas of its viewers. But it milks true horror by forcing everyone to identify with the day-to-day societal aggravations Black people endure. The extremes to which Peele takes this are the hallmarks of great satire.
“If nothing else, Get Out cements ‘the sunken place’ in lexicon and culture; whenever it’s invoked in conversation, people will not only know where it is but also the type of person who is trapped in it. Not many screenplays can lay claim to such an achievement.” ~ Odie Henderson
Phantom Thread (written by Paul Thomas Anderson) [151 points / 22 votes]
Second place:
Lady Bird (written by Greta Gerwig) [163 points / 25 votes]
And the winner is...
Get Out (written by Jordan Peele) [174 points / 27 votes]
“Jordan Peele’s screenplay for Get Out has much in common with its villainous characters. It hides in plain sight while simultaneously misleading the viewer. As events unfold, we start to question our own interpretations the same way Daniel Kaluuya’s Chris does. The blatantly sinister act that opens the film telegraphs its horror movie intentions, but until its big reveal, Get Out plays more like a psychological thriller whose mystery is whether Chris is overreacting to seemingly normal situations. It’s smart enough to account for the differing viewpoints of the audience: Black viewers familiar with the daily microaggressions that Peele piles on Chris like a thousand paper cuts may still question if Chris’ paranoia is completely founded. White viewers may see the Armitages’ clumsy attempts at welcoming Chris as mere cringe-worthy overcompensations.
“The key to both of these inaccurate reads is Rose. She’s embarrassed by her family’s initial meeting with Chris and she’s furious about the cop’s treatment of Chris. Peele presents her as an ally on the surface, but he slyly tips his hand to less than noble intentions in her first scene. When Chris asks her pointedly, ‘do your parents know I’m Black,’ she responds ‘should they?’ Everything she does in the first half of the film is meant to engender either guilt or confusion. It’s only upon a second viewing that we notice just how openly these clues are laid out in the screenplay.
“Even the symbols in Get Out have multiple intentions. The deer that Rose hits is an innocent victim and the catalyst for a rant by her father that sounds eerily like what racists say about minorities. Jesse Owens’ prowess becomes the vengeful motivation for the Armitages’ medical procedure. A blind art dealer, whose own skill set is impressive because it overcomes his disability, becomes Chris’ biggest fan and his worst nightmare. And good china and silverware, things normally associated with gentility, are revealed to be terrifying weapons of destruction.
“There’s a richness to Get Out’s screenplay that’s unusual for a genre film. Peele’s ideas are so cleverly and tightly woven into its structure that subsequent viewings always unveil something new. The script is an equal opportunity gaslighter that preys upon the race-based experiences and ideas of its viewers. But it milks true horror by forcing everyone to identify with the day-to-day societal aggravations Black people endure. The extremes to which Peele takes this are the hallmarks of great satire.
“If nothing else, Get Out cements ‘the sunken place’ in lexicon and culture; whenever it’s invoked in conversation, people will not only know where it is but also the type of person who is trapped in it. Not many screenplays can lay claim to such an achievement.” ~ Odie Henderson
Thursday, February 22, 2018
2017 Muriel Awards: 10th Anniversary Award for Best Film of 2007
Third place:
No Country For Old Men (dirs. Joel and Ethan Coen) [174 points / 27 votes]
Second place:
There Will Be Blood (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson) [193 points / 28 votes]
And the winner is...
Zodiac [193 points / 30 votes]
“Do you know more people die in the East Bay commute every three months than that idiot ever killed? He offed a few citizens, wrote a few letters, then faded into footnote.” – Robert Downey Jr. as Paul Avery
“Let’s take a brief moment to appreciate the resuscitation of David Fincher’s Zodiac. Dumped into theaters just before spring of 2007, after Fincher declined to trim the film into the streamlined prestige picture Paramount hoped it would be, the film opened quietly and then died at the box office (a domestic take of $33 million, making it the lowest grossing film of the director’s career). Overshadowed by the equally artful and brooding No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood at the end of the year, the film pulled a no-show at the Academy Awards and failed to win a single major critical prize. Like the titular killer who terrorized Northern California during the late 60’s and early 70’s, it appeared briefly on everyone’s radar and then just disappeared.
“Except it didn’t. Ten years on, the small but loud group of devotees dedicated to the film continues to feverishly evangelize for it. Pouring over the film’s fastidiously chronicled trail of breadcrumbs, re-litigating the notion of whether the film’s resolution is truly definitive or not and allowing themselves to swept up in Fincher’s sprawling, impeccably-designed, descent into the nightmare that consumed him as a child growing up in Marin County. Awash in sunshine and earthy tones, Zodiac instills in you a false sense of security, compounded by the way Fincher presents murder in an almost quotidian manner, allowing the threat of malevolence to slowly seep outward like an ink stain, eventually enveloping everything it comes into contact with. But the real violence of Zodiac is spiritual; the soul-sucking emptiness of never knowing the truth, when the dogged search for answers becomes the sum total of a life.
“The film places the viewer in the role of amateur gumshoe, cataloguing an endless stream of names, dates and details, pursuing dead-ends and conflicting information. But Fincher, a notoriously unsentimental perfectionist, demands that you understand the cost of obsession, devising a three-head monster of a narrative that allows the film to introduce, and then dispense with, its protagonists only after their respective leg of this relay race has left them a hollowed-out husk of a man (quite pointedly the film addresses the double-edged sword of being a man, unencumbered and willing to shed family, profession and even your health in pursuit of a ‘higher’ calling). At over two and a half hours the film dares to leave you exhausted, your head swimming with competing theories and suspects, giving you all the pieces to the puzzle and then asking you to accept the perfect imperfection of its conclusion.
“I am not Avery.” ~ Andrew Dignan
No Country For Old Men (dirs. Joel and Ethan Coen) [174 points / 27 votes]
Second place:
There Will Be Blood (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson) [193 points / 28 votes]
And the winner is...
Zodiac [193 points / 30 votes]
“Do you know more people die in the East Bay commute every three months than that idiot ever killed? He offed a few citizens, wrote a few letters, then faded into footnote.” – Robert Downey Jr. as Paul Avery
“Let’s take a brief moment to appreciate the resuscitation of David Fincher’s Zodiac. Dumped into theaters just before spring of 2007, after Fincher declined to trim the film into the streamlined prestige picture Paramount hoped it would be, the film opened quietly and then died at the box office (a domestic take of $33 million, making it the lowest grossing film of the director’s career). Overshadowed by the equally artful and brooding No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood at the end of the year, the film pulled a no-show at the Academy Awards and failed to win a single major critical prize. Like the titular killer who terrorized Northern California during the late 60’s and early 70’s, it appeared briefly on everyone’s radar and then just disappeared.
“Except it didn’t. Ten years on, the small but loud group of devotees dedicated to the film continues to feverishly evangelize for it. Pouring over the film’s fastidiously chronicled trail of breadcrumbs, re-litigating the notion of whether the film’s resolution is truly definitive or not and allowing themselves to swept up in Fincher’s sprawling, impeccably-designed, descent into the nightmare that consumed him as a child growing up in Marin County. Awash in sunshine and earthy tones, Zodiac instills in you a false sense of security, compounded by the way Fincher presents murder in an almost quotidian manner, allowing the threat of malevolence to slowly seep outward like an ink stain, eventually enveloping everything it comes into contact with. But the real violence of Zodiac is spiritual; the soul-sucking emptiness of never knowing the truth, when the dogged search for answers becomes the sum total of a life.
“The film places the viewer in the role of amateur gumshoe, cataloguing an endless stream of names, dates and details, pursuing dead-ends and conflicting information. But Fincher, a notoriously unsentimental perfectionist, demands that you understand the cost of obsession, devising a three-head monster of a narrative that allows the film to introduce, and then dispense with, its protagonists only after their respective leg of this relay race has left them a hollowed-out husk of a man (quite pointedly the film addresses the double-edged sword of being a man, unencumbered and willing to shed family, profession and even your health in pursuit of a ‘higher’ calling). At over two and a half hours the film dares to leave you exhausted, your head swimming with competing theories and suspects, giving you all the pieces to the puzzle and then asking you to accept the perfect imperfection of its conclusion.
“I am not Avery.” ~ Andrew Dignan
2017 Muriel Awards: Best Ensemble Performance
Third place:
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri [81 points / 12 votes]
Second place:
The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) [86 points / 15 votes]
And the winner is…
Lady Bird [136 points / 20 votes]
“One of the most vital aspects of any film intently focused upon the growth and development of a single person is the community that surrounds them. Whether for good or ill, no individual living in society is truly unaffected by the people living around them, and thus care must be taken to represent the person’s family, friends, and acquaintances in a manner both legible and complex.
“In making Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig and her casting team – Heidi Griffiths, Allison Jones, Toni Staniewicz, and Jordan Thaler – assembled one of the finest casts of the past few decades. Notably, many of the significant actors also appear in some of the other best films of the year: Timothée Chalamet in Call Me by Your Name, Tracy Letts in The Post, Lois Smith in Marjorie Prime. But casting is just one part of an ensemble, and what makes this particular assemblage of actors so extraordinary is their harmony. Anchored around Saoirse Ronan’s truly brilliant performance, the cast creates Sacramento circa 2003 with an innate sense of care.
“Certainly, some of the actors have rightly received more attention than others: Ronan, Laurie Metcalf as her mother, and Tracy Letts as her father. However, the acuteness with which the performances are executed is such that a student with a single line of dialogue can make a sizable impact, a football coach turned drama teacher that on paper could seem like a one-note caricature is performed with such vigor that he becomes dynamic. The viewer gets the feeling that almost every single actor with a speaking part has the ability to hold a shot or a scene by themselves with no problem, and indeed this occurs at multiple points in this film – notably, with Stephen McKinley Henderson and Beanie Fieldstein, among others – even as it keeps its focus upon a single woman coming of age.
“If Lady Bird is ultimately, as the film suggests, about its main character’s largely unspoken love for her mother and her hometown, the ensemble acts as a brilliant reinforcement of that sentiment. No character is ever played with condescension or lack of understanding, and all involved consciously strive for a lightness of being that only further grounds their characters in a lived-in, genuine experience.” ~ Ryan Swen
Second place:
The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) [86 points / 15 votes]
And the winner is…
Lady Bird [136 points / 20 votes]
“One of the most vital aspects of any film intently focused upon the growth and development of a single person is the community that surrounds them. Whether for good or ill, no individual living in society is truly unaffected by the people living around them, and thus care must be taken to represent the person’s family, friends, and acquaintances in a manner both legible and complex.
“In making Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig and her casting team – Heidi Griffiths, Allison Jones, Toni Staniewicz, and Jordan Thaler – assembled one of the finest casts of the past few decades. Notably, many of the significant actors also appear in some of the other best films of the year: Timothée Chalamet in Call Me by Your Name, Tracy Letts in The Post, Lois Smith in Marjorie Prime. But casting is just one part of an ensemble, and what makes this particular assemblage of actors so extraordinary is their harmony. Anchored around Saoirse Ronan’s truly brilliant performance, the cast creates Sacramento circa 2003 with an innate sense of care.
“Certainly, some of the actors have rightly received more attention than others: Ronan, Laurie Metcalf as her mother, and Tracy Letts as her father. However, the acuteness with which the performances are executed is such that a student with a single line of dialogue can make a sizable impact, a football coach turned drama teacher that on paper could seem like a one-note caricature is performed with such vigor that he becomes dynamic. The viewer gets the feeling that almost every single actor with a speaking part has the ability to hold a shot or a scene by themselves with no problem, and indeed this occurs at multiple points in this film – notably, with Stephen McKinley Henderson and Beanie Fieldstein, among others – even as it keeps its focus upon a single woman coming of age.
“If Lady Bird is ultimately, as the film suggests, about its main character’s largely unspoken love for her mother and her hometown, the ensemble acts as a brilliant reinforcement of that sentiment. No character is ever played with condescension or lack of understanding, and all involved consciously strive for a lightness of being that only further grounds their characters in a lived-in, genuine experience.” ~ Ryan Swen
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