For the week of December 18th, Warner Home Entertainment is giving a bunch of Christopher Nolan films the 4K treatment. Of those, this year's WWII epic Dunkirk deserves especial attention. For those of you who do not care for Nolan, I'd recommend that you stay far away. Dunkirk plays like some kind of grand apex, the purest distillation of every cinematic obsession Nolan has been chasing since 1997's micro-noir Following. Ostensibly an ensemble drama set in and around the Allied occupation of Dunkirk, the film upends any expectations we might have of the blockbuster war epic. It's like the anti-Longest Day. The film has a massive cast, but outside of a few familiar faces (Harry Styles, Kenneth Branagh, Mark Rylance, and Tom Hardy, who Nolan places behind a pilot's mask for most of the movie - once again, Nolan has perversely reduced Hardy to just piercing eyes and a distorted voice), everyone is a virtual unknown. The action scenes are densely immersive (DP Hoyte Van Hoytema's IMAX lensings represent some kind of benchmark for the format), yet Nolan downplays our sense of geographical/spatial awareness, framing the action as impressionistic flashes: jets of flame shooting across a night sky, sand shrapnel crusting in open scabs, ocean water inexorably overtaking panicked human faces. He even eschews his love for dense exposition - I'd be amazed if there were more than a hundred lines of dialogue in the whole movie. Nolan is bypassing narrative and veering straight into memory, specifically how we remember trauma. Memento's Leonard Shelby and The Dark Knight's title character used their very bodies; here, Nolan and editor Lee Smith intercut between three very different timelines as a way of making the act of remembering visceral for us. No matter how each individual sequence takes (a desperate escape from the beach lasts a week; a British tugboat rescue, a day; an aerial dogfight, an hour), the editing rhythms allow for this simultaneous compression and expansion, like we're hitting that terrifying adrenaline rush that distends some horrors while mercilessly eliding anything we might mistake for downtime. As such, Nolan has crafted an often-stunning formal experiment, and I respect the hell out of his choice to pare the narrative down to a ruthless 107 minutes. However, the film might also be his chillest endeavor yet, and I don't yet know if that's a good thing. Minus Hardy's brave flyer or Rylance's noble sailor, I don't feel anything for anyone here. I suspect that's the point - again, Nolan wants to privilege our experience over any one person's. But it doesn't make for the most emotionally involving fare, particularly if you see Dunkirk on anything smaller than an IMAX-sized movie screen. On a regular-sized TV (or, God help me, a computer screen), the film plays like nothing more than a reference test for your 4K setup. An incredibly artful reference test, but a reference test just the same.
Also from Warner is The LEGO Ninjago Movie, and with it, I think it's time for Warner to consider putting this whole LEGO franchise to bed. Chris Miller and Phil Lord's The LEGO Movie is terrific, a canny action-comedy that deconstructs every pop-culture-consumerism trope even as it's celebrating them. But that's because Miller and Lord are brilliant, and you feel the lack of Miller and Lord in the decidedly less inspired The LEGO Batman Movie and now this Ninjago spinoff. You can chart these films' decline through the ratio of jokes-to-chaos. That first LEGO Movie plays like a lost Frank Tashlin farce, so thick is its layering of sly references, dazzling sight gags, absurdist non sequiturs, and witty one-liners. LEGO Batman benefits from the Will Arnett-Michael Cera pairing (as, respectively, egotistical Batman and his nebbish Robin) and a deep-cut knowledge of all things Batman (the Joker's nonplussed recitation of all the most ridiculous Batman villains made me laugh harder than anything in 2017), but director Chris McKay starts skewing our attention from the funny to the action: the nonstop action setpieces start to overwhelm us. And Ninjago, by comparison, is practically a Michael Bay movie. It's all sound and fury as the film's Ninjago warriors (voiced by Dave Franco, Michael Peña, Kumail Nanjiani, Abbi Jacobson, Zach Woods, and Fred Armisen, all of whom are much less funny here than their previous work would suggest) level cities to try and defeat the evil Lord Garmadon (Justin Theroux). What humor exists does so mostly on the fringes of the mayhem, and I mean that literally - we have to strain to hear the clearly ADR'ed jokes over the explosions and bombast. This LEGO outing expects us to take the proceedings semi-seriously - Franco's frustrated Green Ninja doesn't know if he wants to defeat or reconcile with Garmadon, who's also his estranged father - and by the time we're slogging through a rote, third-act "Dark Night of the Soul" low point, we realize we couldn't be further from the glib charm of what Lord and Miller created. Occasionally, LEGO Ninjago will calm down enough to land a better-than-average comic beat. Everything Theroux does is hysterical (between this and his Your Highness baddie, Theroux has established himself as a nefarious idiot without peer), particularly the way Bruce Springsteen's "Secret Garden" keeps cutting in as he bungles apologizing to his son, and I adored the fourth-wall-busting "Big Bad" that proves especially devastating to both our heroes and Garmadon. On the whole, though, these fleeting moments of inspiration play second fiddle to easy pop-culture gags (Robin Roberts and Michael Strahan play unfunny LEGO versions of themselves) and rampant destruction. Young children will enjoy Ninjago, so that's something, but kids also dig random screaming and eating profoundly inedible objects. We adults need more than just immaculately constructed toy commercials, I'm afraid.
Paramount's mother!, on the other hand, is a horse of an entirely different color. I know director Darren Aronofsky subjected himself and his crew to rigorous production and technical challenges, but I just don't care. In its finished form, mother! is buck-wild garbage. Even though Aronofsky's previous film Noah netted Paramount a healthy profit, somebody should have stopped Aronofsky at some point in the mother! process; Ideally, it would have been when he was writing the film. I was not surprised to learn Aronofsky wrote mother! in five days. I was surprised that, apparently, no one demanded any rewrites. The film feels like a first draft, like Aronofsky full-on committed to every idea that crossed his mind. To that end, the film is never predictable. The marketing materials might have presented mother! as a Rosemary's Baby-riff about a young wife (Jennifer Lawrence) confronting ominous forces that may or may not be conspiring with her tortured-artist husband (Javier Bardem), but I sense that promotional strategy was a desperation move. For all its perversions, Rosemary's Baby is a conventional thriller, whereas mother! is anything but - before jumping off a tall building in desperation, some Paramount executive probably demanded that the marketing department do whatever it could to make mother! seem normal. What we've got is about six different allegories fighting for dominance, and none of them are all that interesting. At times, mother! is Aronofsky's screed about how we're raping the environment; at times, it's his feminist manifesto; sometimes it dips into incredibly ham-fisted religious symbolism (including an embarrassing cameo appearance from Brian and Domhnall Gleeson as, I kid you not, Cain and Abel); sometimes it's Aronofsky's meta-textual criticism of his own artistic process. Everything unfolds through frenzied "And then..." plotting; nothing makes much sense. About the only thing that does is the fact that Aronofsky and Lawrence broke up a couple of weeks ago - if this movie is any indication, we're lucky Lawrence didn't kill him first. Since Aronofsky encourages us to see Bardem as his on-screen proxy, we must assume that, in part, he's commenting on his own relationship with Lawrence, and if so...ouch. Lawrence remains predictably fearless (you get anxiety watching her hyperventilate), but I'll bet she was undergoing some Friedkin-level exploitation behind-the-scenes. The film delights in her dehumanization, which runs the gamut from constant emotional abuse to graphic physical brutality, and I've got better ways to spend my time than watching Aronofsky work out his feelings towards women in a $30-million therapy session. If it were 1978, we'd be calling this his cocaine movie, so indulgent are its excesses, but at least pictures like New York, New York and 1941 (to name two other unhinged epics from master filmmakers) are…what's the word? Oh yeah: fun. mother! is just a violent, enervating mess.
Still, mother! is so aggressively toxic that it holds a dread fascination; the same can't be said of Lucky McKee's terrible microbudget thriller Blood Money. Back in 2002, McKee rocked the indie horror scene with May, a bizarre, little chiller that played like a more perverse Tim Burton. One wonders what the hell that Lucky McKee would have made of the dispiriting Blood Money. Even at less than ninety minutes, the film feels overlong - it's the worst kind of exploitation fare, the kind that labors mightily in order to pad twenty minutes of actual incident. I want to be charitable to McKee, so I think I get what he's after here: he's experimenting to see what would happen if you took a Richard Linklater-esque drama about three college students (Willa Fitzgerald, Jacob Artist, and Linklater's Boyhood muse Ellar Coltrane) reconnecting on a camping trip and then made a hard left turn into A Simple Plan territory as the kids find a whole lot of money AND the psychopath (John Cusack) looking to reclaim his ill-gotten gains. I enjoy a good genre swap as much as the next person, but you need to invest us in the characters and the plot mechanics for such a shift to work, and Blood Money categorically bungles both components. The (awful) Jared Butler and Lars Norberg script tests our patience long before the criminal behavior starts. From the jump, Fitzgerald, Artist, and Coltrane seem actively contemptuous of one another, and while their antipathy needs to motivate the tedious string of double-crosses in the back end, we never buy why these miserable losers would be in the same state together, let alone agree to a close-quarters camping trip. Once they find the money, we're just waiting out the clock for the cast to get smaller - other than one chilling moment of violence (it involves Cusack's old Ice Harvest co-star Ned Bellamy), McKee substitutes repetitive, artless stumbling through the woods for anything resembling actual tension - and we resent all the delays. I doubt, though, that anyone resents this movie more than Cusack, who just looks miserable. Forget the fact that Cusack conveys menace through a peevish irritation that's never threatening (his biggest outburst occurs when he realizes Coltrane's been hoarding cigarettes from him - we're a long way from Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men, folks), or that it looks like McKee shot all his scenes in three days with minimal interaction alongside the other actors. No, Cusack physically looks bad, his hangdog visage all the more sullen as he buries it under dyed-black hair and a red bandana designed to hide his receding hairline. What we've got is a clear case of leading-man withdrawal, and there's a cautionary tale here, I believe. Actors have shelf lives, and knowing when to transition to that next phase is a crucial component. If Cusack were more willing to humble himself on television or in a meaty supporting parts, he'd preserve a little dignity, but this low-energy Nicolas Cage plan of headlining DTV fluff is just not working. That gross bandana is a visual metaphor for his whole career. How far the mighty do fall.
Jeffrey Kauffman had a more positive take, writing that "one of the best scenes in the film is the penultimate one, a showdown between Lynn and Miller which bristles with a sort of manic intensity that the rest of the film is never quite able to match. Fitzgerald is especially impressive in this sequence, almost delighting in subverting audience expectations of what a 'damsel in distress' might be experiencing (Lynn is already on the ground in this scene, and so can't trip). There are a couple of curious staging problems in this scene that director Lucky McKee might have handled better (I'm still unsure of how a gun fires unexpectedly, despite rewinding and watching this little snippet several times), but the impact (both literal and figurative) of Lynn's devolution into a near feral state is one of Blood Money's best deconstructions of traditional thriller tropes."
I wish I liked Stronger more. Points for approach, I suppose: this docudrama might focus on Jeff Bauman (Jake Gyllenhaal, once again laboring mightily to win an Oscar...er, to capture a challenging character) and his life-threatening injury during the 2013 Boston bombing, but do not mistake Stronger for something like Peter Berg's crime procedural Patriots Day. Director David Gordon Green is only interested in the Boston Bombing insofar as it lets him study how it drove Jeff Bauman to depression and PTSD after he lost both his legs. For long stretches of the movie, we're watching Bauman bungle his rehabilitation through a combination of apathy and fear, and we're reminded how often these human-interest narratives coast on easy platitudes and facile resolutions. To Green and Gyllenhaal's credit, they cast Bauman as a diffident, hard-drinking wreck who was already mistreating the best people in his life (Tatiana Maslany's patient, long-suffering girlfriend) while excusing the worst ones (personified by Miranda Richardson's monstrous alcoholic of a mother) before the bombing, and the movie makes it clear that his physical injuries only compounded these personal failings. As such, Green lets his typically idiosyncratic style surprise us. I love how he and DP Sean Bobbitt frame Gyllenhaal and Maslany's characters as he's having his bandages changed - the two characters occupy the extreme ends of the widescreen frame as Gyllenhaal's distant, out-of-focus stumps swallow the whole middle. Or how Green's evocation of Bauman's lower-class Boston milieu feels authentic in ways that David O. Russell's more entertaining-but-cartoonish The Fighter does not. Furthermore, Green gets a very good performance from Gyllenhaal and a phenomenal one from Maslany. I've yet to watch Orphan Black, but based on the strength of this one turn, I suspect she might be able to do anything (pity the day Marvel swallows her up and relegates her to Tough Lady Support work). Yet I felt underwhelmed at the end. Part of that is Stronger's hard swerve into third-act sentimentality. After spending almost two hours wallowing in Bauman's miseries, we end on rote "Boston Strong" platitudes (complete with the obligatory trip to the Fen) as Bauman's struggles Help Inspire Others. And I'm sure they did, and that's all well and good, but where's the subversive integrity of the early-goings? In trying to split the difference between making us understand Bauman and breaking our hearts, Stronger misses the mark on both.
With one jarring exception, Universal's Victoria & Abdul has nothing subversive on its mind. It's a cuddly, marshmallow-soft docudrama designed to coast off star Judi Dench's ample charm. She's playing the idealized version of Queen Victoria - flinty, warm, quietly progressive - who delights in her relationship with Ali Fazal's charming Indian clerk. Easily ninety five of this movie's 111 minutes follow the same format: Victoria and Abdul bond over some shared human observation, her closest advisors (most notably the stuffy quartet of Tim Pigott-Smith, Eddie Izzard, Olivia Williams, and Michael Gambon) get the vapors because they consider Abdul a servant, but then Victoria puts them in their place. Rinse, repeat, often while cutting to a reaction shot of Abdul flashing a sly grin or knowing wink. What we end up with, then, is less a movie than a series of pleasant vignettes aimed squarely at the Downton Abbey crowd. In fairness, if you count yourself among that lot, Victoria & Abdul works. Dench and Fazal do have nice chemistry together, and director Stephen Frears is such old hat at this kind of story that he keeps the mechanics well oiled and gliding along. Yet if you're after literally anything more substantial, seek help elsewhere. Every time the movie threatens to go somewhere darker or more subversive, Frears and screenwriter Lee Hall steer it right back into calm waters, and that's a shame, given the intrigue of these side glimmers: Victoria's clear physical attraction to Abdul, for example, or her melancholy over the loss of longtime companion John Brown (sidebar: Victoria & Abdul is a kinda sorta sequel, letting Dench return to the same part she played in 1997's Mrs Brown). Furthermore, I know Frears is capable of delivering something a little more substantive. As light dramedies go, his My Beautiful Laundrette and High Fidelity are as winning as they get, yet they make time for trenchant observations surrounding, respectively, bigotry and toxic masculinity. You get the sense that maybe Frears, too, was chafing at Victoria & Abdul's weightlessness; how else to explain the hard turn into miserablism the film takes in its last fifteen minutes, when Victoria dies (spoilers, I guess, for something that happened 120 years ago?) and leaves Abdul exposed to previously sublimated anti-Indian prejudices? I applaud the instinct, but it doesn't fit tonally at all. Either Victoria & Abdul should have been more attuned to these realities throughout, or it should have maintained course through Pleasantville.
Martin Liebman wrote that "the film does strive towards, and achieves, quality integral production design. Boasting both richly presented practical sets and locations with some largely seamless digital support in places, the film certainly looks the part, very agreeably and bountifully beautiful where it matters. Costumes are well formed and precise, with an impressive selection of wardrobe choices with diverse presentation and construction that brings out the lavish extravagance of the place and time. Frears captures the action with a sense of splendor on one hand and intimacy on the other, the former in the more cheerful and, for Abdul, exploratory period of intimacy as the characters' bond grows through the middle. The film does have a cold and dark side, interspersed throughout and heavy towards the end; Frears is always visually complimentary of the film's narrative positioning. Acting is unsurprisingly excellent. Dench's makeup looks burdensome and overdone, but the actress overcomes with a complex performance that sometimes hints at senility but also explores her tender side and even darker side as she relentlessly fights her naysayers. Ali Fazal is strong, too, in the role opposite, finding a steadfastness and agreeable front in his humbling position and growth in friendship with one of the world's most powerful people."