Mur13l Awards 2018: Best Picture Countdown, #9

“It’s been quite a while since Spike Lee has made a truly relevant movie, but BlacKkKlansman, his true story adaptation of former police detective Ron Stallworth’s 2014 book about infiltrating the Klu Klux Klan in the ‘70s may be his most relevant movie ever.

“Stallworth, sharply portrayed by John David Washington (son of Denzel), was the first black police officer in the Colorado Springs Police Department, and we follow his rise in the ranks to the Intelligence Unit. Shortly afterward, Stallworth comes upon an ad for the KKK in the newspaper, and calls the number to find himself talking to a recruiter saying that he hates blacks, Jews, Mexicans, Irish, Italians, and Chinese, ‘but my mouth to God’s ears, I really hate those black rats, and anyone else really that doesn’t have pure white Aryan blood running through their veins.’

“This hate speech gets him invited to meet with members of the local charter, but, of course, he can’t go himself so he gets a fellow cop, Detective Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver) to go in his place and use his name (Stallworth used his real name when calling them because he didn’t know at the time that there would be an investigation). There are a number of likewise close scrapes where the detectives’ covers almost get blown with some scary redneck types including one riveting segment in which Washington’s Stallworth is assigned to be security for KKK Grand Wizard David Duke played with polished smarm by Topher Grace. While the love interest was fabricated – the character Laura Harrier plays is fictitious – what went down is reportedly accurate in this excellent film that’s part tense thriller, part powerful drama, and part history lesson.

“Lee arranged for this film to be released on the eve of the one-year anniversary of the tragic Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which a counter protester, Heather Heyer, was killed. The movie ends as a tribute to Heyer, and we’re left with the horrifying thought that this shit is still happening with the flames being fanned by the asshole in the highest office in the land.

BlacKkKlansman is a vital, piercing piece of work that is one of the best films of the year, and thankfully managed some awards season action, culminating in a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for Lee and his co-writers. But more importantly, the movie deserves to be in the national conversation. I know he doesn’t want to call it a comeback, but, dammit, I’m really glad that Lee has returned with the goods.” ~ Daniel Cook Johnson

Mur13l Awards 2018: Best Picture Countdown, #10

“Andrew Bujalski's Computer Chess took place at a programming convention; Results was a romcom about personal trainers; and here's another oddball comedy, this one set at a Hooters-inspired sports bar. As in those earlier films, Bujalski's jokes play with the codes and quirks of his chosen milieu. The waitresses have to tease their clientele, but can't get too overt. ‘There is an art to this,’ says Lisa, the harried manager, to a new hire. She's having a bad day at work, juggling duty and compassion; most of the film spans from her morning commute to the end of her shift. (Not all of it, though, as the jam-packed screenplay has some structural surprises in store.)

“Regina Hall, who plays Lisa, leads a crack ensemble. Haley Lu Richardson's there as the bar's resident ray of sunshine, and rapper Junglepussy makes her screen debut as a deadpan coworker with arms often akimbo. Both women deliver fine-tuned comic performances while clad in salmon pink crop tops. Along with the other girls of the double entendre title, they grin and bear the manifold indignities of working life. The rudeness of men is a major motif. They might not experience any epiphanies or liberation over the film's hour and a half run time, but they do have each other. In any stretch of strip mall, that counts for a lot.” ~ Alice Stoehr

Mur13l Awards 2018: Best Lead Performance (Male)

“Paul Schrader once had Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver narrate, ‘I’m God’s lonely man.’ Throughout his career as screenwriter and director, that description could apply to so many Schrader protagonists. Schrader then took this characterization a step further by making his lonely man a man of God going through a crisis in faith. Ethan Hawke as First Reformed’s Reverend Ernst Toller falls into a long line of Schrader male archetypes but Hawke’s performance brings something different. Toller is lost but his path towards righteousness is welcomed in ways that other Schrader characters never felt watching before.

“Toller starts from the bottom. Hawke’s boyish features and physical characteristics as a young Reverend marked with personal tragedy add to the sense of impotence and demureness of his character. His alienation when occupying the spaces of faith, be it the corporate mausoleum megachurch or the living, or rather embalmed, museum of the First Reformed Church, is palpably expressed by Hawke in his body language by feeling enclosed and dwarfed by the structures around him. Toller is a deeply wounded man who feels imposed by the troubled world and failed institutions, having to answer for a God when he too increasingly feels less in touch with. But there is a switch.

“Hawke’s Toller does become galvanized when injustice when a troubled man leads him to discover his church’s major donor is an area industrialist who happens to be one of the world’s biggest polluters. There is a spark in Toller’s steps and while he is still this frail man weakened by poor health, there is a different energy to him that Hawke presents in the way he journals and uses First Reformed Church for visitors. One such scene is is him being open with a smile and glee, immersed in showing young school children on a field trip that First Reformed Church was once a place of justice, presenting a hidden door in the church that helped escaped slaves hide during the Underground Railroad. Toller feels less alone in that moment and in turn, so alive. Hawke shows Toller as empowered by the past and traditions of his church and faith. Reverend Toller and First Reformed Church are both imperfect, weakened vessels through Schrader’s film, but Hawke enlivens both in his performance, by becoming a man with purpose. Ethan Hawke makes faith in First Reformed be more than words and action, but a force that reshapes all the senses and spaces that surround Reverend Ernst Toller.” ~ Caden Mark Gardner

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Mur13l Awards 2018: Best Lead Performance (Female)

“Everybody knows a Lisa. You may have never worked in a ‘breasturant’ like Double Whammies but you probably worked with a Lisa. Familiarity helps with such a character but what makes Regina Hall as Lisa the glue in Support The Girls, and how her acting differentiates from her previous role in Girls Trip where she was also the lead and the glue of that ensemble, is that she is being crushed under the weight of modern capitalism and caught in her middle management position. It’s a far cry from being a modern mogul at the Essence Music Festival in Girls Trip.

“Hall is a mother hen to her employees. She looks out for them even if some do the opposite of returning the favor to her or listen to her comments to them on the clock. Hall’s Lisa doesn’t necessarily expect gratitude in return. The big gestures from Haley Lu Richardson’s Maci literally catch Lisa by surprise. Hall keeps Lisa big hearted but humble. This is a woman has faced many disappointments at Double Whammies and elsewhere, Hall revealing that to the audiences in various moments through her dynamics with characters and being alone in the Double Whammies’ alley.

“Lisa’s upbeat optimism is sincerely there until the bitter end and then, finally, together with her now former employees Maci and Danyelle let out a release of catharsis. We all know a Lisa. Regina Hall’s Lisa made me wish I worked with one and share a scream with too.” ~ Caden Mark Gardner

Mur13l Awards 2018: Best Lead Performance Countdown, #3

"It would be a lot easier to tell if The Favourite is a comedy if Olivia Colman had made less interesting choices. She could have made her Queen Anne a buffoon, a figure of mockery, petty and ugly and stupid, allowing us to laugh at how easily she's manipulated by the two beautiful women vying for her favor. Or she could have portrayed Queen Anne as sad and pitiable, a victim taken advantage of by courtly vipers.

“Colman, however, makes sure we can't categorize her character, or the movie surrounding her, quite so easily. Her Queen Anne is easily manipulated, but not entirely unaware - and not above some manipulation herself. She's deeply, deeply sad, but can also be mean and vindictive, even sadistic at times. Towards the end of the film, she gorges herself on blue cake, takes a short break to puke, and then continues stuffing the cake in her mouth, sitting wide legged on the floor. It's a repulsive, darkly funny tableau. Yet even in that moment, Colman doesn't allow viewers to forget that it's a real, complex person sitting there. And that not knowing whether or not to laugh is kind of the point." ~ Hedwig van Driel

Mur13l Awards 2018: Best Lead Performance Countdown, #4

“There’s a scene early in Hereditary where Annie (Toni Collette), an artist and mother, attends a support group and, after some gentle prodding, reluctantly opens up her fraught relationship with her own recently deceased mother. It was during this scene that I realized, before anything overtly horrific had happened, I was fully absorbed, largely thanks to the choices Collette makes. The obvious and easy thing would’ve been to push Annie’s brittleness, to intimate darkness and fragility as Annie shares her various traumas. Collette is smarter than that, playing the moment as pragmatic and, though she’s reluctant to open up, clear-eyed about her own baggage. There are many horror stories about broken people who are preyed upon by monsters; what sets Collette’s Annie apart is that she’s a flawed but self-aware person who tries, even before all hell breaks loose, to take care of herself. And she’s no less doomed because of it.

“Collette’s approach to the character is also key to making Hereditary’s tricky narrative work. The movie’s last third reveals a greater context for the movie’s horrors that we, and the movie’s characters, have only glimpsed in fragments. Among the details that are brought into focus in retrospect are some of the details Annie shares in the support group and, later, when she has tea with Joan (Ann Dowd), a woman she met at the group. In the latter scene, Annie offhandedly mentions a sleepwalking incident that elicits a “Wait...what?” response from us; while we only fully understand its implications at the movie’s end, Collette pulls off a tricky balancing act, embedding the story’s sinister purposes in a matter-of-fact self-justification that is, in retrospect, deadpan hilarious. Of course she’d never do anything to hurt her children, and how ridiculous it is that her family would doubt her!

“It’s Collette’s performance that holds a Bergmanesque psychological horror punctuated by splatter movie shocks together, largely because she’s restrained when it would’ve been easy to go big. And she does go big, too, but the power of moments like her dinner table explosion of grief and rage, or everything she does in the movie’s last fifteen minutes, is in the juxtaposition with the Annie we see in those quieter moments, who is sincerely trying to be strong for herself and her family. The horror of Hereditary lies in the notion that we’re imprisoned by the choices our parents made for us before we even got here. For all the effective shocks in the film, it’s the psychic violence of its premise that lingers after, and while writer/director Ari Aster deserves the credit for making a truly disturbing movie, it’s Collette’s performance that gives it a tragic dimension.” ~ Andrew Bemis

Mur13l Awards 2018: Best Lead Performance Countdown, #5

“As Tom, the daughter of a PTSD-afflicted war veteran (Ben Foster) who has taken himself and the young girl off the grid, making for them a quiet, if illegal, existence living off the land in a forested park within Portland, Oregon city limits, 18-year-old New Zealand native Thomasin Harcourt Mackenzie is a relatively new presence to moviegoers. And in Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace there’s an openness and vulnerability to her performance, to her very appearance, that suggests someone an audience can chance upon from the ground up, a personality, a human being in the process of being shaped, defined, of learning the real value of curiosity, of expression. (Mackenzie’s highest profile appearance prior to this film was in a small role in Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies in 2014.) But there’s also a bristling, pointedly interior intelligence at work in Mackenzie which serves the struggle of her character to bring that curiosity and expression to the surface.

“Once they’ve been temporarily reined in by social service agents and given a taste of being reintegrated back into society, the father bristles, but Tom realizes that, though she wants nothing more than to be with her dad, a modest life among modest people carries its own allures. It’s this personal journey that is illuminated so eloquently by Mackenzie’s modest, naturalistic approach to the role. She marks the territory of her character’s development in hushed strokes, her wide eyes processing not only the details of the wooded environment which gives her and her father cover from the whole of the world, but also every element of the world she’s been largely separated from as she begins the incremental process of being integrated into it. What’s genuinely marvelous about Mackenzie’s work, in close collaboration with a director who most definitely shares her sensibility, is the way she makes clear the dawning difference between parent and child without signaling or overemphasizing the metaphoric significance. Mackenzie’s Tom eases into a world of new experiences with a child’s natural curiosity—sea horses she reads about in books, flag dancers at a local church, 4-H kids raising rabbits, learning about the temperament and tendencies of hive bees—while her dad remains at a measured distance, his mind never far away from the clarion call of an isolated existence to which he longs to return.

“Mackenzie’s considerable achievement here is to navigate viewers, with invisible technique and a depth of empathy that would be the hallmark of any far more seasoned actress, into an understanding of experience as this emerging young woman understands it, an understanding whose source can be traced directly to Mackenzie’s countenance and the way she occupies space, both in the frame and in her ever-new environment. By the time Tom declares to her father that ‘the same thing that’s wrong with you isn’t wrong with me,’ the movie has fulfilled its unhurried journey toward sublimity, with myriad opportunities for its audience to appreciate the nuanced, rarified air of a soul discovering itself, asserting independence, breathing in the world. The beauty of Mackenzie’s performance is how it matches that sublimity in unostentatious, yet vivid detail, there to be observed, certainly, but also camouflaged by a fresh, unassuming presence that serves both Tom and Thomasin supremely well.” ~ Dennis Cozzalio