The Films of 2017

[swo17]

The world hasn't quite ended yet so people will presumably keep making movies. See here if you don't believe me. Some highlights:

- M. Night Shyamalan makes a thematic sequel to Unbreakable
- Lasse Hallström remembers how much people liked his last movie about dogs
- You're going to have to hear about 50 Shades of Grey again
- Two more Lego movies
- Zhang Yimou makes his obligatory Matt Damon-starring vehicle
- The Earth's once-every-21-years purging ritual of another Trainspotting movie
- Jeffrey Blitz directs a Duplass brothers script
- Disney quietly replaces another of its animated classics with a live action version
- A Power Rangers movie not directed by Joseph Kahn
- Zach Braff's artistic breakthrough
- Stephen Chbosky remakes The Elephant Man for teenagers
- James Gray remakes Aguirre: Wrath of God
- Ridley Scott remembers how much people liked his last Alien movie
- 762 comic book movies
- Ridley Scott doesn't remember how much people liked his last Blade Runner movie
- A Baywatch movie, because everyone used to watch that for the storylines
- Sofia Coppola remakes a Clint Eastwood movie
- Christopher Nolan, Joe Wright, and Doug Liman make war movies
- Edgar Wright remakes Drive
- Not just an emoji movie, but the emoji movie
- WB misses the clown craze by a year with another adaptation of Stephen King's It
- Tomas Alfredson remakes his first two movies into one
- Steven Soderbergh makes another movie because he is a liar
- The Wild Tales guy remakes The Six Million Dollar Man
- Another terrible Friday the 13th movie that domino will no doubt still feel obligated to watch
- Same Kind of Different as Me will still be released despite -100% interest generated by its trailer
- Taika Waititi is sucked into the superhero director machine
- Kenneth Branagh betrays Shakespeare to adapt Agatha Christie
- Disney takes us further from God's light with another Christmas Star Wars movie
- Another Jumanji
- Alexander Payne remakes Honey, I Shrunk the Kids
- "Untitled Warner Brothers Comedy"

[domino harvey]

Paramount already set to have the first bomb of the year with Monster Trucks, which is expected to lose $115 million dollars for the studio

[cdnchris]

My kids want to see that.

Fuck my life.

[colinr0380]

I found the Sight & Sound review amusing for describing Monster Trucks as an ostensible environmental friendly message film that is really about celebrating the power of the trucks (and just how cool doing sick jumps in them are) and the monsters apparently happily enslaved inside the chassis to provide the eco-friendly fuel to drive them!

[Brian C]

Paramount already set to have the first bomb of the year with Monster Trucks, which is expected to lose $115 million dollars for the studio

The first half of that sentence makes perfect sense, but the second half raises a lot of questions. Such as, holy hell, how much did they spend to make that fucking movie?

[domino harvey]

I don't think I even remember the existence of the first film, but this summer's sequel to the Nut Job is subtitled Nutty by Nature, which is so dumb that it's kinda great!

[mistakaninja]

I don't think I even remember the existence of the first film, but this summer's sequel to the Nut Job is subtitled Nutty by Nature, which is so dumb that it's kinda great!

The forthcoming limited blu ray is already OPP.

[D50]

TOWER Premieres on INDEPENDENT LENS Tuesday, February 14, 2017 on PBS. Starts at 10:00pm Pacific here.

I've been checking every Thursday and Friday for a theater showing. This will have to do.

[ianthemovie]

I assume you're trolling us with that uniformly depressing list of stinkers waiting to happen (The Beguiled hopefully being an exception)! :-&

Let's not forget that we will likely see new films this year from Michael Haneke, Todd Haynes, Paul Thomas Anderson, Andrew Haigh, Noah Baumbach, Frederick Wiseman, and Richard Linklater, in addition to official releases of such festival-circuit darlings as Personal Shopper, Staying Vertical, A Quiet Passion, Mudbound, Call Me By Your Name, and The Big Sick (among others). May the thought of these keep us warm as we head into the impending nuclear winter.

[domino harvey]

Brad Pitt's War Machine has been bought by Netflix, will premiere "exclusively" on Netflix in May. I imagine there will be a qualifying one week run in LA beforehand, as per usual

[flyonthewall2983]

Netflix made a deal with Pitt's production company last year, which is pretty much why The Big Short had it's cable/streaming premiere there as opposed to Epix/Amazon/Hulu.

[DarkImbecile]

Given its near-total box office failure and critical dismissal, Gore Verbinski's A Cure for Wellness looks from the outside like the classic unsalvageable studio disaster dumped in February and bound for permanent residence in the DVD discount bin at Best Buy. On closer inspection, it's a stylishly weird, mid-budget R-rated feature with no major stars and based on an original story: basically, the type of film that most of us regularly bemoan as an endangered if not extinct species in the 21st-century studio film landscape.

While resting solidly in the C+/B- range overall, it feels better and more refreshing than that while being consistently surprised by Verbinski's willingness to take the story and imagery on detours to the oddest corners of its potential (while still eventually giving in to some disappointingly conventional moments in the final scenes). I won't get into the plot as this is a rare instance where a viewer could come in fresh without already knowing or being able to predict every beat of the first two acts, but I will say that despite being 2-1/2 hours long the film never bored me, and even if I can't unequivocally endorse the total package, I can recommend devoting the time to a type of film we don't see very often these days. I'd suspect that mileage will vary wildly between viewers, and while it could still be forgotten in the aforementioned discount bin for eternity, it wouldn't surprise me at all if this developed a bit of a cult following over the next several years as an enjoyable oddity with some distinctly memorable moments and images.

[rohmerin]

For 2019 The painted Bird, one of the best books I've read. Czech, with Harvey Keitel.

http://cineuropa.org/nw.aspx?t=newsdeta ... did=325645

[aox]

Has anyone heard any buzz on Smarzowski's Hatred?

[MichaelB]

I saw it six months ago.

[aox]

I saw it six months ago.

Did you enjoy it?

[MichaelB]

I can't think of a less appropriate word than "enjoy"! But given the subject matter, that's to be expected.

[hearthesilence]

Hours after reading FrauBlucher's post to Paul Schrader's interview on "slow cinema," I watched a prime example that could have been a visual aid to his exact words, Albert Serra's The Death of Louis XIV. The title sums it up, and reminiscent of The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, we experience the slow and agonizing death of the title character. In this case, it's nowhere near real-time, compressing days into a few hours, but scenes are constructed primarily from long, static takes where every painful, excruciating second is felt. You're very aware of time passing, you hear every tick of the clock in background, every fly buzzing around as if circling an imminent carcass, and once again the doctors really f-ed things up, though not for lack of care, far from it. An excellent film for what it is, though I'm still debating whether the ideas are a bit too simple or shallow to leave a lasting impression.

[DarkImbecile]

I haven't seen everything Ben Wheatley's done, but I'd be very much surprised if anything else in his filmography is as purely fun as Free Fire, which throws about a dozen very good character actors rocking '70s clothing and hair into a warehouse and has them insult, beat, betray, and - of course - shoot each other for 90 minutes. There's nothing groundbreaking going on here, though the skillful editing and staging of the action in such a way that the audience has a decent sense of how characters are spatially related and who is being shot at by whom is an absolute necessity.

Perhaps counterintuitively for a movie in which "crawls" and "cries out in pain" compete for most repeated stage direction, the writing is what elevates the movie beyond its "feature-length single location shootout" elevator pitch. Wheatley's and his co-writing spouse Amy Jump's script distinguishes its characters well enough to keep viewers invested in their survival - or take sadistic pleasure in their ever-increasing array of injuries, in a few cases - and adds enough notes of irony and dark humor to break up the near-constant bloodshed. Throw in some extra-charm/smarm from Armie Hammer, Brie Larson, Cillian Murphy, Sharlto Copley (who can be hard to take in a more serious role but fits his character here perfectly), and Jack Reynor (who I don't remember seeing before but enjoyed enough here to keep an eye out for in the future), and Free Fire is more than worth a viewing.

[DarkImbecile]

Michael O'Shea's The Transfiguration is a dark, misshapen little horror gem about Milo, a black kid in the New York City projects whose struggles to get by are complicated by his being more than a little obsessed with the mechanics of vampirism. Feeling somewhat like a twisted alternate version of the teenage section of Moonlight - in which the poor kid with the troubled family life is learning how and whether he can live with not homosexuality but psychopathy - the film from its opening scene never tries to engender false sympathy or make excuses for Eric Ruffin's Milo, but presents all but the most extreme of his patterns of behavior with a matter-of-fact style that makes them all the more disturbing.

Both Ruffin and Chloe Levine (who has the air of a young actress who could definitely make a name for herself) as a young neighbor who takes an interest in him do quality work in making their unstable relationship convincing and compelling, and O'Shea's script and Ruffin's performance nail the awkward mannerisms of a certain kind of obsessive teenage boy in a way that feels, as Milo would say, "pretty realistic".

O'Shea has crafted a grim yet weirdly affecting blend of genres and styles, leveraging some powerful images, evocative NYC locations, and skillful editing to create a micro-budget thriller that I'd guess will gradually develop a solid reputation. It's not getting much of a release, but definitely worth seeking out for fans of the genre.

Trailer and release calendar

[DarkImbecile]

As someone who both really enjoyed David Michod's Animal Kingdom and The Rover and who has read Michael Hastings' work that inspired his most recent project, I found Michod's War Machine to be a huge disappointment. Weighed down by interminable amounts of narration and a thesis statement about the hubris of well-meaning technocratic leaders that somehow manages to be both underdeveloped and overly emphasized, the film also refuses to stray too far from its source material to dig deeper into its characters to be dramatically compelling or go broad enough with its comedy to be consistently entertaining. Despite fictionalizing its characters - Brad Pitt's Glen McMahon is former Afghan war commander Stanley McChrystal - Michod's script allows for almost none of the supporting cast to be even remotely memorable or distinguishable after being briefly sketched by the narrator in the first fifteen minutes. Almost none of the satire hits the right mark, and tonal inconsistency plagues the film's attempts at humor so thoroughly that I don't think I chuckled once.

The movie still looks handsome enough, and certain moments that seem taken from better movies are executed with a level of talent such that I hope we'll eventually be able to pin the failings here on incompatibility with the material and the genre and/or Pitt's production, and not the inability of Michod to be successful beyond the realm of grim Australian dramas.

[Murdoch]

I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore - I'm not sure how I feel about this one. It takes the nihilism of noir and injects it into a contemporary setting, the angry pessimism of the post 9/11 world casting a shadow over every scene. Nobody simply dies in this. Instead a random chain of occurrences cause characters to meet their demise - a ricocheting bullet, a blunt object to the head that causes the target to go stumbling into incoming traffic. The same randomness that kicks off the film - a home burglary - sets the trajectory of the film's remainder, as the two leads wander through town, no real direction other than to find the thieves. The problem is that the nihilism that sets the tone also sets the characterizations, with no one except Lynskey and Wood given enough screen time to let the audience see the people wandering in and out of the film as anything more than ciphers for the director's own malaise. When the film climaxes in a bloody display of coincidence, I was left wondering what the point was. Maybe that's the way I should feel toward a film as ambivalent about what it presents as this, but it doesn't make for much outside of a depressed teenager's worldview.

[jindianajonz]

The new Transformers movie changes aspect ratios regularly and seemingly for no reason

[JabbaTheSlut]

The IMAX frames (the taller image) pop in and out in the clip.

[PfR73]

That's not new. It happened like that in the 2nd Transformers film, which was the one where Bay first started using the IMAX cameras. I haven't seen any since, so I can't comment on those, but the 2nd one definitely changed aspect ratio constantly from shot to shot in many sequences. Even The Dark Knight had several scenes that would switch back & forth within a single sequence.