My Top 25 College Football Teams (Week 9)

Last week’s rank in parenthesis
1. Georgia 8-0 (3)
2. Alabama 8-0 (1)
3. Notre Dame 7-1 (4)
4. Penn State 7-1 (2)
5. Ohio State 7-1 (8)
6. Clemson 7-1 (5)
7. Wisconsin 8-0 (7)
8. UCF 7-0 (10)
9. Oklahoma 7-1 (14)
10. Miami, Fla. 7-0 (9)
11. TCU 7-1 (6)
12. Oklahoma State 7-1 (11)
13. Washington 7-1 (12)
14. Virginia Tech 7-1 (13)
15. USC 7-2 (18)
16. Mississippi State 6-2 (23)
17. Auburn 6-2 (20)
18. Iowa State 6-2 (25)
19. North Carolina State 6-2 (15)
20. Michigan 6-2 (21)
21. Michigan State 6-2 (16)
22. Stanford 6-2 (19)
23. Memphis 7-1 (NR)
24. Washington State 7-2 (17)
25. LSU 6-2 (24)
Dropped out: South Florida

2017 Oscar Nominations Predictions

* Designates predicted winner as of today

PICTURE

Call Me By Your Name
Darkest Hour
* Dunkirk
The Florida Project
Get Out
Lady Bird
Phantom Thread
The Post
The Shape of Water
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri


DIRECTOR
Guillermo Del Toro, The Shape of Water
Luca Guadagnino, Call Me By Your Name
* Christopher Nolan, Dunkirk
Steven Spielberg, The Post
Joe Wright, The Darkest Hour

ACTRESS
Jessica Chastain, Molly’s Game
Sally Hawkins, The Shape of Water
* Frances McDormand, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Saoirse Ronan, Lady Bird
Meryl Streep, The Post

ACTOR
Timothee Chalamet, Call Me By Your Name
Daniel Day-Lewis, Phantom Thread
Jake Gyllenhaal, Stronger
Tom Hanks, The Post
* Gary Oldman, Darkest Hour

SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Holly Hunter, The Big Sick
Allison Janney, I, Tonya
Melissa Leo, Novitate
* Laurie Metcalf, Lady Bird
Octavia Spencer, The Shape of Water

SUPPORTING ACTOR
* Willem Dafoe, The Florida Project
Armie Hammer, Call Me By Your Name
Richard Jenkins, The Shape of Water
Sam Rockwell, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Michael Stuhlbarg, Call Me By Your Name

ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
* Call Me By Your Name
The Disaster Artist
Last Flag
Molly’s Game
Mudbound

ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
* Get Out
Lady Bird
The Post
The Shape of Water
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

CINEMATOGRAPHY
* Blade Runner 2049
Call Me By Your Name
Darkest Hour
Dunkirk
The Shape of Water

COSTUME DESIGN
* Beauty and the Beast
Darkest Hour
The Greatest Showman
Phantom Thread
The Shape of Water
Possible: Victoria and Abdul
 
FILM EDITING
Blade Runner 2049
Darkest Hour
* Dunkirk
Get Out
The Shape of Water

MAKEUP AND HAIR STYLING
Beauty and the Beast
* Darkest Hour
The Greatest Showman
Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2
The Shape of Water

Available for home viewing: “Beatriz at Dinner” ★★★

Selma Hayek, Jay Duplass and Conne Britton in Beatriz at Dinner

Since the early ‘90s, Salma Hayek has carved quite a niche for herself as an actress with a serial array of singular spitfires. She’s been a gunslinger’s sultry squeeze in Desperado, a blood-sucking stripper in From Dusk to Dawn, a fierce one-of-a-kind painter in Frida and the voice of slinky Kitty Softpaws in Puss in Boots. Hayek on screen can be a formidable heat-radiating presence when given the right material (aka not an Adam Sandler comedy), and knows precisely when and how to turn it on.

But in Beatriz at Dinner, Hayek turns down the thermostat and assumes a cool, calm and, yes, beatific demeanor as an L.A.-based Mexican-born masseuse with magic fingers and holistic healing abilities whose connection to her ailing clients at a touchy-feely cancer clinic is almost empath-like. She is also at one with the universe, as signified by the dogs and bleating goat (the better to protect it from an angry neighbor) that crowd her bedroom at night or the image of the Virgin Mary and a toy Buddha that decorate her car. With a fringe of baby bangs, minimal makeup and a functional wardrobe, Beatriz obviously values the spiritual over the material. The serene sight of a de-glammed Hayek, beautiful and miraculously youthful at age 50, is a compelling one indeed.

Her Beatriz seems uniquely weaponized to pull off a one-woman rebellion against a walking, talking emblem of the toxic political climate that continues to pollute our world in what is essentially one of the first blatantly intentional culture-clash allegories for our Trump-ian times. As directed by Miguel Arteta and written by Mike White, whose previous envelope-pushing partnerships include Chuck & Buck, The Good Girl and TV’s Enlightened, the pair provides the circumstances for a dinner party from hell at a generically showy Newport Beach seaside mansion, the sort of a place where champagne popsicles on solemn holidays of remembrance would feel right at home.

The story fully kicks in when Beatriz, who makes house calls, ends up getting stuck in a wealthy client’s circular driveway when her clunky Volkswagen breaks down. Cathy (welcome-sight Connie Britton, resurrected from her country superstar’s demise on TV’s Nashville as the only other sympathetic character) considers Beatriz one of the family after she did wonders for her now-cured college-age daughter during chemotherapy. She naturally asks Beatriz, who has to wait for a mechanic friend to show up, to join the fancy gathering she is hosting that night.

Trouble is, it is a crucial business function for her brusque husband (David Warshofsky), one that includes his boss — real-estate tycoon Douglas Strutt (John Lithgow, who manages to ooze menace, condescension and charisma in equal measure as an obvious though more socially adept Trump surrogate) — and junior associate Alex (Jay Duplass, in full-on entitled jerk mode), along with their shallow couture-bedecked spouses (Amy Landecker as Strutt’s third wife and Chloe Sevigny).

You might be thinking you don’t want to witness a darkly humorous yet disturbing re-enactment of what we see and hear on cable news every hour. And it’s true that White’s script often creeps a little too close to being what it intends to satirize. But Lithgow’s smartly modulated performance as Strutt (got to love that name) is the key here, since the actor allows us to observe just how such a vile, egotistical-yet-ingratiating captain of industry could easily manipulate others to do his bidding while justifying the often-deadly sins against humanity and the planet in general.

Combustion between the smirk-prone privileged few and the selfless if somewhat naïve health-care worker is inevitable, but the filmmakers wisely allow it to simmer, with the assist of way too much alcohol. Eventually Beatriz — not used to drinking wine — finds she can no longer remain silent and begins to overshare her own history. That causes the rich folk to gradually expose the cesspool depths of their corrupt lifestyles while celebrating their financial gains at the expense of other living beings. When Strutt boastfully shares a photo of bloody rhino he shot on an African safari, matters reach a breaking point as Beatriz exclaims, "Are you for real? This is disgusting."

Arteta and White are aware enough to tap into the discomfort of those who are appalled by our country’s sudden turn of events and the self-satisfaction of others who find themselves with greater license to exploit their worst impulses than ever before. After the loud confrontation, an already tipsy Beatriz retreats into her room for the night with a bottle of wine and a joint she has found in a dresser while the others launch fire-powered paper lanterns into the sky as they make wishes. And the filmmakers then engage in a more violent form of wish-fulfillment before leaving us dangling with a more open-ended closing sequence — which seems about right when we don’t know which way the tweet wind will blow day after day.

Yes, this type of dinner party scenario could have benefited from a bit more nuance on the menu as the filmmakers are too on the nose as they ape the national debate, the shift in priorities and general unease that has consumed the citizenry since the presidential election. But Hayek turns Beatriz into her own breed of wonder woman, Lithgow’s Strutt is definitely a super villain of sorts and their head-to-head battle is clearly worth seeing even if, in real life, it has only begun.

Available for home viewing: Personal Shopper ★★★

Kristen Stewart tries on her client's dress in Personal Shopper

This review contains spoilers. Oblique spoilers, but spoilers nonetheless.

Although technically classified as "horror" or a "thriller", Personal Shopper works best when viewed as a mood piece. There’s something hypnotic about the way writer/director Olivier Assayas has filmed the movie, employing point-of-view shots and long takes to draw us into the world of the main character, Maureen Cartwright (played by Kristen Stewart, who appears in every scene except one critical omission). Not a lot happens; Maureen is stuck in limbo and the tone reflects this. Because of the nature of the story, however, Assayas infuses the proceedings with a gradually building sense of tension. It starts out small and reaches its crescendo 90 minutes later with an incredible sequence that generates more suspense from a series of text messages than I would have dreamed possible.

It takes viewers a while to figure out what’s going on. The movie doesn’t spoon feed us background. It drops us into the middle of the action and lets us gradually fill in the details by observation. Maureen, it turns out, is a medium who is spending time in Paris trying to connect with her recently deceased twin brother, Lewis. In the three months since his death, Maureen has been searching for signs of his presence while financing her stay in Europe by working as a "personal shopper" for high profile fashion model Kyra (Nora von Waldstatten). She’s neglecting her boyfriend, Gary (Ty Olwin), who she only occasionally contacts by Skype, and has become enmeshed in a bizarre "relationship" with an anonymous texter who asks her a series of personal questions. Dissatisfied with her job, Maureen begins to break the rules — starting small (wearing some of the shoes and clothing she purchases for Kyra) and getting bigger (masturbating in Kyra’s bed while wearing one of her expensive dresses) — but it’s unclear where all this is headed until things take a brutal and unexpected turn.

Kristen Stewart was easily the most beguiling thing about Assayas’s The Clouds of Sils Maria, so much so viewers really felt her absence when she was gone from the film’s narrative. For Personal Shopper, the filmmaker isn’t faced by the dilemma of coping with her disappearance because his lead actress is never far from the camera’s gaze. The word "unforced" applies here. Stewart never seems to be acting. Her distracted, aloof performance is perfect for a character who is more interested in the next life than this one. She drifts through her existence on Earth, aware that the same genetic condition that killed her brother might soon claim her, and never seems to connect with anyone. Stewart is unafraid to be shown in unglamorous shots (there are times when she is wearing little or no makeup and has stringy, messy hair) and allows Assayas to shoot her topless for a couple of non-sexual scenes.

Then there’s the ending. It would be easy, I suppose, to gloss over Maureen’s final words and accept everything at face value. I think the truth (and I’m getting into spoiler territory here) is deeper and less obvious. In piecing together what happens in the final 15 (or so) minutes, it’s necessary to consider the sequence I mentioned earlier — the one in which Stewart doesn’t appear. There are subtle cues in that scene that point to what’s really going on. That’s all I’m going to say. The ending works best for viewers who put in the effort to arrive at a resolution.

Despite containing some of the trappings normally associated with "horror" films, there’s nothing scary or disturbing in what Assayas brings to the screen. He’s not interested in jump scares or "boo!" moments — there’s not one of either to be found. There are, however, things that go bump in the night (some of them do this rather loudly). There are strong indications that the ghostly apparitions sensed by Maureen are more than figments of her imagination but Assayas provides enough ambiguity to make the viewer ponder. Although Personal Shopper occasionally evidences a slow, almost meandering pace, there are times when it turns the screws and ratchets up the tension.

Thus far, 2017 has been an atypical year for horror. In addition to Personal Shopper, we have also seen Raw, Get Out and It Comes at Night. None of these four movies follows the rules and provides the clichés one expects from a genre production. But, although Personal Shopper offers ghosts and seances, it is first and foremost an Assayas film and that means it will have a stronger appeal to art house viewers than those who frequent mainstream multiplexes. The production is in equal parts mesmerizing and perplexing, intriguing and frustrating. Focusing on Maureen grounds the narrative … until it doesn’t.

Available for home viewing: “It Comes at Night” ★★★½

Joel Edgerton and Christopher Abbott in It Comes at Night

Like a lot of horror movies, It Comes at Night opens with a death. An older gentleman, who is clearly very ill, says goodbye to his family and then gets shot in the head before his son-in-law and grandson burn his body. Did I mention they’re all wearing gas masks? From the beginning, confusion and loss reign in a film designed to keep you uncertain and emotionally raw.

Trey Edward Shults’s second film — after the remarkable breakthrough of Krisha last year — takes place in a world ravaged by a horrendous disease, the kind of thing that kills you in a day and has left survivors scrounging for food and trusting no one. It’s not pretty. Your body bruises, your eyes go black, you puke blood. But this is no riff on The Walking Dead or 28 Days Later. It’s important that Shults’s vision of the end of the world opens not with an attack but with the kind of event that forever twists the trajectory of a young man’s life: the death of a loved one. It is a movie in which the villains are loss, grief, pain, fear, and distrust — very human emotions — and it is has no traditional undead brain-eaters. There are no zombies in the streets, boogeymen in the basement or witches in the woods — and yet it is one of the most terrifying films in years.

Shults is very careful in the way he parses out bits of information about the world in which It Comes at Night takes place, even though almost the entirety of the action unfolds in a boarded-up house and the woods that surround it. Father Paul (Joel Edgerton) has very strict rules that are uniformly obeyed by son Travis (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) and mother Sarah (Carmen Ejogo). Every window in the house is boarded up and there’s only one way out, through two locked doors, one of which has been painted bright red. If they need to go outside for any reason, they go in pairs, and they never go out at night.

Shortly after the burning of grandpa’s body, the family awakens to a sound in the "airlock room" between the two never-to-be-opened doors. Someone, or something, is in the house. After a bit of a terrifying scuffle, they discover that their invader is named Will (Christopher Abbott), and he’s just looking for water for his family, wife Kim (Riley Keough) and son Andrew (Griffin Robert Faulkner), who are in another abandoned house 50 miles away. They have food they can trade. No, they’re not sick. And yet there’s something about their story that doesn’t quite add up.

Working at a peak of atmospheric horror rarely seen in only a second film, Shults and his ace cinematographer Drew Daniels (who also shot Krisha) create captivating visuals with in-scene light sources throughout It Comes at Night, from the dim illumination of a lantern to the harsh glare of a flashlight on the end of a gun. Working with a fantastic production design team, they ground It Comes at Night in a tactile world — you can smell the wood that makes up the house and feel the grime on their skins. Even when the action opens up to the woods outdoors, they find ways to capture the natural light coming through the trees in a way that never pretentiously calls attention to itself but adds to the tension. Everything adds to the tension in It Comes at Night, including the stellar sound design and the playful use of changing aspect ratios, as the perspective shrinks to clarify when Travis is having a bad dream … maybe.

The performances are uniformly stellar throughout It Comes at Night (particularly Abbott, doing his best work since James White), but the film surprisingly belongs to engaging newcomer Harrison, who becomes the eyes through which we see this story. We rarely know anything he doesn’t, and it’s his 17-year-old emotions that we come to equate with our own. In a sense, the adults are almost archetypal — the strict father, the supportive mother, the engaging male stranger and the sexy female one — further defining how much It Comes at Night works on emotional undercurrents as much as it does traditional horror tropes. It is about that day you think your father might be wrong; the day you realize your loved ones can die; the day you flirt with a pretty girl. It just also happens to be about what could be your last day.

Shults the screenwriter can sometimes push the refusal to answer questions about this universe to a point that will break for some viewers who need a few more rules and resolutions. I get that. My fear is that too many people will approach It Comes at Night expecting a traditional horror movie reveal in the final act or, worse, a Shyamalan twist. I would never spoil where a film goes but would only advise that you not try to get ahead of this one. Just take it scene by scene, beat by beat, and let the characters’ emotions work on you more than trying to solve the unanswered questions of this tale.

Most of all, It Comes at Night is a film in which the true elements of fear come from within, not from outside. Sure, it’s not exactly a new concept — George A. Romero, John Carpenter and Stanley Kubrick have created the cinematic templates for such a thing from which Shults openly cribs without ever feeling like he’s self-consciously paying homage — but it’s remarkable to consider how much horror mileage that Shults gets out of a film with no traditional villains. In a sense, it’s a reverse horror film, one that tells us, "Sure, the outside world is scary, but it’s distrust and paranoia that will truly be your undoing. The real enemy is already inside. Now try and get some sleep." Good luck with that last part.

My top 25 college football teams (week 8)

Last week’s rank in parenthesis
1. Alabama 8-0 (1)
2. Penn State 7-0 (2)
3. Georgia 7-0 (3)
4. Notre Dame 6-1 (9)
5. Clemson 6-1 (5)
6. TCU 7-0 (4)
7. Wisconsin 7-0 (8)
8. Ohio State 6-1 (6)
9. Miami, Fla. 6-0 (7)
10. UCF 6-0 (11)
11. Oklahoma State 6-1 (12)
12. Washington 6-1 (13)
13. Virginia Tech 6-1 (19)
14. Oklahoma 6-1 (15)
15. North Carolina State 6-1 (17)
16. Michigan State 6-1 (18)
17. Washington State 7-1 (20)
18. USC 6-2 (10)
19. Stanford 5-2 (16)
20. Auburn 6-2 (21)
21. Michigan 5-2 (14)
22. South Florida 7-0 (23)
23. Mississippi State 5-2 (NR)
24. LSU 6-2 (NR)
25. Iowa State 5-2 (NR)
Dropped out: Iowa, San Diego State, Texas A&M

Available for home viewing; “Maudie” ★★★

Ethan Hawke and Sally Hawkins in "Maudie"

Maudie is one of those movies that triumph over their worst instincts (and your well-honed doubts). There’s a lot to get past, including an opener that engages in some generic place-setting, and a pushy score that insistently tries to lighten the darker moods. But stick with the movie for its leads, Sally Hawkins and Ethan Hawke, a beautifully matched pair who open up two closed people, unleashing torrents of feeling.

Hawkins plays Maud Lewis, who, when the story starts, is in her early 30s and struggling to maintain a fragile independence. She’s living with her Aunt Ida (Gabrielle Rose), a dour scold whose opprobrium has seeped into every corner of her house and who enters, haggling with a man who proves to be Maud’s brother, Charles (Zachary Bennett). He has sold the family home, and is dumping Maud at Aunt Ida’s for the foreseeable future. Maud pleads and protests, and then moodily waits for her story to begin.

It gets going when Maud does, too. One day at the grocery store, she is nearly knocked over by a hard, loud wind that blows in and in time becomes her unlikely husband, Everett Lewis (Hawke). A reclusive fish peddler — much of the story takes place on the outskirts of a Nova Scotia town — he lives in a tiny white wooden house on a spit of land with only a couple of dogs and a flock of chickens for company. Having decided that he needs a housekeeper, he posts an ad in the store that Maud surreptitiously steals. She has figured a way out of Aunt Ida’s dominion and straight into a new life.

That life emerges with pinprick detail, framed by windswept landscapes and the bright flowers and birds that Maud begins painting, painful stroke by stroke, on the shack’s walls, steps, pots and windows, vivid manifestations of her will to create. Mostly, it is a life that emerges through the contrapuntal performances of Hawkins and Hawke, who, with bobbing heads, mutter and murmur, bringing you into the private world of two outsiders isolated by geography, poverty, disability, temperament and habit. It’s easy, especially, to admire Hawkins’s technical skill — the private smiles and halting, crooked walk — but the beauty of her performance is that soon you see only Maud.

Directed by Aisling Walsh, with a script by Sherry White, Maudie is based — or perhaps, more truly, inspired — by the life of Maud Lewis (1903-1970). A self-taught artist who lived in extreme poverty much of her adult life, Lewis struggled with what appears to have been juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, painting bold, colorful scenes of red trees and black cats with brushes tucked in a tiny, gnarled hand. If you didn’t know her name, you might not know that she was real. The story’s historical basis isn’t announced; there are none of the usual biopic introductions, no text to set the time and place, only some brief, closing documentary images that suggest that the movie has gently prettified the truth.

The film doesn’t cop to that, which doesn’t lessen its appeal. The distancing from the real Lewis registers as a commercial calculation, as does the emphasis on Maud and Everett’s relationship, which here evolves into an achingly moving love story. How much of it is true, including that love’s depths, remains unclear; certainly the movie deviates sharply in sweep and detail from some accounts, most notably Lance Woolaver’s biography Maud Lewis: The Heart on the Door. Woolaver has called Lewis’s life desperate and her husband terrible, and wrote a book that, as he told one interviewer, deflates the myth of her "as a happy little elf in a bright house doing nothing but paint."

Like many screen biographies, Maudie vacillates unsteadily between the brute realities of a difficult existence and its palatable imagery. The movie doesn’t erase the hard edges of Lewis’s life. Instead, it attenuates them — a brutal slap across the face, you suspect, stands in for more instances of physical abuse — and casts many of Maud and Everett’s difficulties as personal ordeals, playing down the institutional forces, like an orphanage, that discreetly hover in the background. There’s an argument to be made against such softening, though, as Lewis’s work suggests, there’s something necessary about the fantasies we make of our lives as we spin beauty and hope from despair.

Available for home viewing: “The Mummy” ½★

Annabelle Wallis and Tom Cruise in The Mummy

You’ve no doubt been told that if you can’t say something nice, you shouldn’t say anything at all. If I followed that rule, I wouldn’t be writing about films. But still. There’s no great joy in accentuating the negative. So I will say this in favor of The Mummy: It is 110 minutes long. That is about 20 minutes shorter than Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, about which I will also have some unkind things to say if and when I get around to it. Simple math will tell you how much better this movie is than that one. If you have no choice but to watch it — a circumstance I have trouble imagining — you can start in on your drinking that much sooner.

The Mummy begins with a supposed Egyptian proverb to the effect that "we" never really die; "we" assume new forms and keep right on living. I’m not an Egyptologist, but it seems just as likely that those words were lifted from a movie-studio strategy memo. Universal, lacking a mighty superhero franchise, has gone into its intellectual-property files, which are full of venerable monsters, and created a commercial agglomeration it calls the Dark Universe. The Mummy is the first of a slew — a swarm? a pestilence? — of features reviving those old creatures, including the one from the Black Lagoon. We can also look forward to new visits from Frankenstein’s monster and his bride, the Wolf Man and the Invisible Man, among others.

It sounds like fun. The Mummy reboot from 1999, directed by Stephen Sommers and starring Brendan Fraser, was kind of fun. Monster movies frequently are. This one, directed by Alex Kurtzman and starring Tom Cruise, is an unholy mess. Cruise plays Nick Morton, a jaunty military daredevil with a sideline in antiquities theft and a nutty sidekick (Jake Johnson). When a caper goes wrong, the two call in an airstrike on an Iraqi village — I guess that’s something people are doing for kicks nowadays — and a mysterious tomb is unearthed. Luckily, an archaeologist, Dr. Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis), is on hand to explain what it’s all about and also to affirm Nick’s heterosexuality.

Long story short: An ancient evil has been unleashed upon the world. Its agent is a long-buried pharaoh’s daughter, Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella), who is covered with mysterious tattoos and convinced that Nick is her secret lover, or the god of death, or both. She gets inside his head, which is awkward both because he’s kind of sweet on Jenny and because it’s such an empty place. Ahmanet also has a retinue of zombielike minions at her disposal, who rampage through England on their way to a meeting with Russell Crowe.

Crowe plays another fixture in the Dark Universe, a label that strikes me as a bit of an exaggeration. Dim Universe would be more accurate, with respect both to the murky, ugly images and to the intellectual capacities of the script, written and conceived by a bunch of people who are capable of better. The old black-and-white Universal horror movies were a mixed bag, but they had some imagination. They could be creepy or campy, weird or lyrical. The Mummy gestures — or flails — in a number of directions but settles into the dreary 21st-century action-blockbuster template. There’s chasing and fighting, punctuated by bouts of breathless explaining and a few one-liners that an archaeologist of the future might tentatively decode as jokes.

There is a vague notion that Nick is struggling with dueling impulses toward good and evil, acting out his version of the Jekyll-Hyde predicament. A more interesting movie might have involved a similar struggle within Ahmanet, but a more interesting movie was not on anybody’s mind.

It will be argued that this one was made not for the critics but for the fans. Which is no doubt true. Every con game is played with suckers in mind.

My Top 25 College Football Teams (Week 7)

Last week’s rank in parenthesis

1. Alabama 7-0 (2)
2. Penn State 6-0 (4)
3. Georgia 7-0 (3)
4. TCU 6-0 (9)
5. Clemson 6-1 (1)
6. Ohio State 6-1 (6)
7. Miami, Fla. 5-0 (8)
8. Wisconsin 6-0 (10)
9. Notre Dame 5-1 (11)
10. USC 6-1 (12)
11. UCF 5-0 (13)
12. Oklahoma State 5-1 (16)
13. Washington 6-1 (5)
14. Michigan 5-1 (15)
15. Oklahoma 5-1 (17)
16. Stanford 5-2 (22)
17. North Carolina State 6-1 (21)
18. Michigan State 5-1 (20)
19. Virginia Tech 5-1 (18)
20. Washington State 6-1 (7)
21. Auburn 5-2 (14)
22. Iowa 4-2 (23)
23. South Florida 6-0 (25)
24. San Diego State 6-1 (19)
25. Texas A&M 5-2 (NR)
Dropped out: Texas Tech

Available for home viewing: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 ★★½

Zoe Saldana, Karen Gillan, Chris Pratt, Dave Bautista and a critter
 voiced by Bradley Cooper meet Daddy in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 has all the digital bells and whistles as well as much of the likable, self-aware waggery of the first. In many respects, it’s not much different except it all feels a bit strained, as if everyone were trying too hard, especially its writer-director, James Gunn. Most of the ragtag futuristic fighters who powered through Vol 1. three years ago are back on board and led by Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), a cheerily roguish type who calls himself Star-Lord. The name still brings a light smile, even if the movie can’t help but feel as deadly serious as any other lucratively branded Marvel property.

It’s tough being a hitmaker who isn’t weighed down by corporate expectations, but for a while, Gunn does a pretty good job of keeping the whole thing reasonably fizzy, starting with an opener that winks at the audience with big bangs and slapstick. The movie begins in medias res, with Quill and the gang facing down a blobby adversary with fat, snapping tentacles and rows of nasty teeth — the better to eat them with or just tear them limb from limb. The Guardians take whacks at the blob, jumping and thrashing around a patently digital environment that’s vaguely far-out and indeterminate.


These introductions are fairly chaotic, which is the usual blockbuster way. The point is to telegraph the movie you’re about to watch — the threats, fights and winks followed by more threats, fights and winks — as well as to reintroduce the crew members, their skills, traits and foibles. Alternately bulgy and sleek, hairy and shticky, they make for often-amusing company, even if this time Zoe Saldana, as Gamora, the green-skinned Amazon with grave daddy issues, feels more sidelined than before. One problem, it seems, is that Gunn is still holding off on developing the romance between her and Peter that was teased in the first movie, probably because he’s saving it for the next installment.

The larger problem, as it becomes progressively evident, is that this series lacks a resonant origin story, a myth, on which a world, multiple stories and a fan base can rest. The Guardians’ personal stories are continuing to emerge, and the meme that’s in circulation is family, which at times makes it feel as if the movie is taking cues from the Fast and Furious franchise. This explains the testy, at times violent and generally dreary exchanges between Gamora and her sister, Nebula (Karen Gillan), a bald badass itching to deliver payback for their rotten childhood. The performers look fierce as they slam around, squaring jaws and giving good side-eye, but it just feels like narrative filler.

For the most part, Gunn puts much of his storytelling energy into filling in Quill’s origins, after having already dispatched Mom in the first movie. This doesn’t sound promising and isn’t, alas, despite the good will that Kurt Russell brings to the part of Quill’s father, Ego. At one point, Russell, or some version of him, assays the role with a weird, disrupting digital face-lift that’s meant to suggest the young Ego, but really only makes you contemplate whether this Benjamin Button-style age-reversing is going to become an increasingly standard (and creepy) industry practice. It’s a distraction that shows a filmmaker making a bad decision mostly, it seems, because he can afford to.

Still, before Russell is swallowed up by the story and digital effects, he holds you with the laid-back vibe of a Hollywood veteran whose tan and crinkly smile tell you that sunsets and Goldie Hawn are waiting for him back in Cali. He brings an unforced looseness to the movie that it very much needs, especially after Pratt slips into a more sober register in his daddy dearest scenes. Gunn likes to play a scene straight and then jokingly pull the rug out from under it, a trick that, among other things, helps soft-sell the violence. But the father-son stuff plays flatly less because it’s been told before (like, forever) than because he can’t figure out how to playfully kink it up.

At times, Gunn’s ambitions badly backfire. Like the first movie, this one is jammed with action-driven sequences, some wildly bloated and most of them cartoonish. For one fight, though, he cranks the music and lets the screen bleed as the ostensible good guys kill one villain after another, the casualties falling to the sound of a head-bobbing song. Tonally, the episode feels unpleasantly sour and wrong for this young series, which is best when it goes light; it’s a bummer watching another director attempt the kind of smiling sadism that not even Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino can always pull off.

In moments like this, Gunn loses sight of the insouciance and feeling that were crucial to making the first movie work. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 certainly has its attractions, but most of them are visual rather than narrative. Among the most appealing are the animated diorama-like tableaus that Ego uses to narrate his life, each a clue to his character. His private planet, meanwhile, is a kaleidoscopic fantasia that suggests modestly trippy science-fiction and heavy-metal cover art. This look — with its softly clashing colors and soaring stalagmites — seems designed to instigate, at least in some, flashbacks to stacks of yellowing paperbacks and lovingly played rock albums.

Like some of the canned music (Fleetwood Mac, the Electric Light Orchestra), the movie’s visual design gestures toward the past but mostly comes across as a generational yearning for such memories. Perhaps like some directors, Gunn fondly or regretfully looks back on a time when studio filmmakers could more or less do their own thing cinematically. Or maybe he just likes songs like Come a Little Bit Closer, a Top 40 hit about a fickle dance partner that works as a nice metaphor for every movie that wants to fall into the audience’s embrace. The difference is that while the first Guardians earned that love as if by accident, this one begs for it.

Available for home viewing: “A Ghost Story” ★★★★

I rarely see a movie so original that I want to tell people to just see it without reading any reviews beforehand, including my own. David Lowery’s A Ghost Story is one of those movies. So I’m urging you in the first paragraph of this review to just rent it or stream it and save this review for later. If you want more information, read on. There are no spoiler warnings after this because as far as I’m concerned, everything I could say about this film would constitute a spoiler.

This tale of a man who dies young and lingers around the property where he and his wife once lived is bound to be one of the most divisive films of the year. I didn’t know anything about it going in, except that its main character was a person who dies and spends the rest of the movie walking around mute, wearing a white sheet with eyeholes cut out of it. The film is a ghost story, in the sense that there’s a ghost in it, but it’s also many other things: a love story, a science fiction-inflected story about time travel and time loops, and a story about loneliness and denial, and the ephemeral nature of the flesh, and the anxiousness that comes from contemplating the end of consciousness (provided there’s no life after death — and what if there isn’t?).

The characters are so archetypal that they don’t have names, just initials. C (played by Casey Affleck) is a musician who lives with his wife M (Rooney Mara) in a small house surrounded by undeveloped property somewhere the vast flatness of Texas. C dies in a car crash early in the story but continues to linger on as a ghost, silent observing his wife’s grief and her eventual exit from the home they once shared. He stays in the house as new tenants move in, including a single mother (Liz Franke) and her two children (Carlos Bermudez and Yasmina Guiterrez) and some presumably young, single people who throw parties with lots of bohemian artist-types. Time keeps moving forward, and at a certain point the house gets leveled and replaced by a gigantic luxury condo-hotel type of development. C stays rooted to the spot where he died, as if he’s still stuck in the "denial" phase of the grieving process.

The movie’s two most fascinating formal traits are its decision to keep C under the sheet for much of the film’s running time, and the way it moves its story along with hard cuts instead of dissolves, fades to black or other signifiers that a lot of time has passed. The sheet denies the film’s leading man most of the tools he’d normally use to communicate emotion; he must instead approach the character as if he were onstage in a play where gestures were more important than words, and try to convey surprise, sadness or anger simply by holding his head and shoulders in a particular way, or turning quickly instead of slowly to look at something.

But this opens up a different kind of relationship between character and viewer: we’re projecting ourselves onto C as we might as children playing with dolls or stuffed animals. Simple, powerful emotions can be summoned that way, and it’s those sorts of emotions that are this movie’s specialty. There were many stretches where I was reminded of European art cinema classics like Stalker and The Passenger, which derive much of their power from asking you to commit to staring at the images the film has put in front of you, and think about what they might mean and how you feel about them. There are other times when the film is reminiscent of Groundhog Day, in its ability to weave guilt, karma, and fear of change into a story that might otherwise have played as a light diversion.

The hard cuts that move us through the story convey the idea that C perceives time differently than we do. In a scene that involves decay, which I won’t describe in too much detail here because it occurs in a context I didn’t expect to encounter, a body becomes a skeleton in a series of cuts that last about 30 seconds. The deeper we get into C’s story, the more Lowery teases our perceptions of time, until by the end he’s got us questioning the idea of singular, linear experience. (A Ghost Story would make a great double feature with Shane Carruth’s Primer or Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, two other Texas films about the perception and experience of time.)

A Ghost Story feels bracingly, at times alienatingly new. It’s a movie you can’t be quite sure how to take. There are moments where the movie seems to be handing you keys to interpretation, but I’d caution viewers against looking at such scenes for answers, because they have a rope-a-dope quality — as if they're designed to bait and trap those who would sneer at this kind of movie. In any event, this is a film that's more inclined to ask questions than answer them, much less give life advice. A long monologue by a party guest (Will Oldham) about humanity’s doomed attempts to leave traces that last, especially through art, would seem to suggest that a song C writes for M will outlast him, but we have no evidence of that. The film’s presentation of ghosthood as a purgatorial in-between state, inhabited by individuals who refuse to let go of the life they can no longer have, jibes with many Western religions’ ideas about the afterlife, but I don’t think the resolution of C’s story gives us any hope of Heaven; to me it seemed more like a warning to be at peace with the possibility that we may never know the answers to the big questions.

I should admit here that any take I can offer is provisional. I need to see the film a second time to sweep away preconceived notions that might’ve been lingering in my mind during my first viewing of A Ghost Story. The movie is so simple in its storytelling and its situations are observed so patiently that the result has a disarming purity, as if Lowery jammed a tap into his subconscious and recorded one of his dreams directly to film. It’s probably the closest that a lot of people are going to get to seeing a late-period silent movie on a big screen — a melodrama that deals in big ideas and obvious symbols, and that puts across fantastical concepts, such a ghost haunting the landscape over a period of decades, by putting a sheet over its leading man and having him walk around slowly and stare blankly at stuff. (Cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo shoots the movie in the old-fashioned, square-ish "Academy" ratio, letting us see the rounded edges of the frame; this has a constricting effect, so that we seem to be spying through a keyhole at someone else’s life.)

People either seem to love A Ghost Story or hate it, with no in-between. It got mostly very positive notices during festival screenings, but on the eve of its home-viewing release I’ve found myself arguing with colleagues who think it’s the Emperor’s New Clothes and find it too precious, too sentimental, too much of a one-joke movie, or not enough of one thing or another thing. I loved everything about it, including the scenes I wasn’t sure how to take. I recommend seeing it with others because it’s a movie that has as much to say about our perception of time and permanence as it does about love and death. Much of the impact that it has, positive or negative, comes from having to sit there and watch it without interruptions and think about what it’s showing you, and how.

My Top 25 College Football Teams (Week 6)

Last week’s rank in parenthesis
1. Clemson 6-0 (1)
2. Alabama 6-0 (2)
3. Georgia 6-0 (3)
4. Penn State 6-0 (4)
5. Washington 6-0 (8)
6. Ohio State 5-1 (9)
7. Washington State 6-0 (15)
8. Miami, Fla. 4-0 (11)
9. TCU 5-0 (7)
10. Wisconsin 5-0 (12)
11. Notre Dame 5-1 (13)
12. USC 5-1 (10)
13. UCF 4-0 (16)
14. Auburn 5-1 (17)
15. Michigan 4-1 (5)
16. Oklahoma State 4-1 (14)
17. Oklahoma 4-1 (6)
18. Virginia Tech 5-1 (18)
19. San Diego State 6-0 (19)
20. Michigan State 4-1 (NR)
21. North Carolina State 5-1 (25)
22. Stanford 4-2 (24)
23. Iowa 4-2 (NR)
24. Texas Tech 4-1 (NR)
25. South Florida 5-0 (23)
Dropped out: Florida, Louisville, Oregon

Available for home viewing: The Big Sick ★★★½

It sounds impossible — too melodramatic, too crazy — but it’s true. Actor and writer Kumail Nanjiani fell in love with his then-girlfriend, now-wife, Emily V. Gordon, when she was in a coma. It also sounds impossible that such a story would make for an audience-pleasing comedy, but that’s exactly what The Big Sick is, and so much more.

Director Michael Showalter’s film defies categorization. You could call it a romantic comedy and that would be accurate, because there are indeed elements of romance and comedy. It mines clashes across cultures and generations for laughs that are specific to Nanjiani’s experience but also resonate universally. The Big Sick also functions as an astutely insightful exploration of how we live now with the Pakistan-born comic, starring as himself, enduring racism that’s both casual and pointed.

But the pivotal plot point in The Big Sick is a potentially deadly illness — hence the title — which provides not only drama and catharsis but also dark humor, and it allows the film’s characters to evolve in ways that feel substantial and real.

That’s a lot of different kinds of movies at once, and Showalter — working from a screenplay by Nanjiani and his wife, Gordon — gets his arms around all of it with dazzling dexterity. On the heels of his sweetly heartbreaking 2015 dramedy Hello, My Name Is Doris, Showalter once again makes tough tonal shifts with great grace. Again and again, he finds that laughter-through-tears sweet spot, often in the unlikeliest of places.

But it all starts with the script. Nanjiani and Gordon have dared to make themselves vulnerable here, allowing us an intimate glimpse into a traumatic and frightening time in their lives. They imbue moments both large and small with such an abiding honesty, though, that The Big Sick never feels like shameless navel-gazing. The events that ultimately brought the two together are extreme, but the depiction of them always rings true.

And Nanjiani’s front-and-center presence is a crucial component in the film’s emotional connection. Even if you had no idea The Big Sick was based on his real-life courtship, Nanjiani exudes an authenticity and a directness that are hugely appealing. He’s part of the ensemble on HBO’s Silicon Valley and he’s had a number of supporting film roles in recent years, including a particularly, um, memorable appearance as a massage therapist in last year’s Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates. But this will make him a star, and it should.

At the start of The Big Sick, though, the on-screen Kumail is struggling to make ends meet, working as an Uber driver by day and a stand-up comic by night. He sleeps on an air mattress in a Chicago apartment that’s a slight notch above college squalor with his needy roommate, Chris (Kurt Braunohler). One night at the comedy club, he connects with the smart and beautiful Emily (Zoe Kazan), who’d inadvertently heckled him during his set. Kazan and Nanjiani have crackling chemistry from the start, a sweet and easy banter that only grows more enjoyable the more time they spend together.

With a deadpan playfulness, they repeatedly insist they’re not dating, even though it’s clear they’re falling for each other. Emily, a grad student with plans to become a therapist, is no giggly rom-com heroine seeking approval: "I love it when men test me on my taste," she zings when Kumail quizzes her on her favorite movies. It’s a testament to Kazan’s instincts and presence that while her character is lying in a hospital bed for much of the film’s midsection, you still feel her influence.

Before that happens, though, we also see what Kumail’s life is like with his family: devout Muslims who insist on arranging a marriage for him. His older brother, Naveed (Adeel Akhtar), already has a wife and seems content. His parents (Bollywood legend Anupam Kher and theater veteran Zenobia Shroff, both lovely) just want him to be happy — as long as he carries on their cultural traditions. Caught between Pakistani and American identities, between Islam and agnosticism, Kumail is unsure of who he is — but he knows he can’t tell his family about the white woman who’s become so important to him.

And then, Emily gets sick — a sudden and unexplainable illness that forces doctors to place her in a medically-induced coma. This allows us to meet her parents — the nerdy, down-to-Earth Terry (Ray Romano) and the feisty, no-nonsense Beth (Holly Hunter) — and it places Kumail in the uncomfortable position of getting to know them under dire circumstances. Again, this might not sound like comedy gold. But the way Nanjiani, Romano and Hunter navigate their characters’ daily highs and lows — and dance around each other — is simultaneously pitch perfect and consistently surprising. Romano is great in an unusual dramatic role, but Hunter is just a fierce force of nature, finding both the anger and the pathos in this frustrated, frightened mom.

The details in the hospital scenes make them feel particularly vivid: the colorful quilt from Emily’s childhood bedroom that her mother brings from North Carolina to cover her during her comatose state, or the yacht rock hits piping through tinny speakers in the bleak, cramped waiting room. The situation would feel like hell no matter where you are, but such touches make the characters’ anxiety seem endless.

Which brings us to the only slight drawback: the running time. The Big Sick is a Judd Apatow production, and like a number of movies he’s been involved with over the years (Funny People, This Is 40), it goes on a tad longer than it should. Some tightening, especially toward the end, might have made an excellent film into a truly great one.

But Apatow also has a knack for spotting up-and-coming talent and using his considerable influence to help foster it on the biggest stage and under the brightest lights. He’s done this with Lena Dunham (Girls) and Amy Schumer (Trainwreck), and he’s done it again with Nanjiani. We’re the ones, though, who truly benefit.

My Top 25 College Football Teams (Week 5)

Last week’s rankings in parenthesis
1. Clemson 5-0 (2)
2. Alabama 5-0 (1)
3. Georgia 5-0 (6)
4. Penn State 5-0 (8)
5. Michigan 4-0 (4)
6. Oklahoma 4-0 (3)
7. TCU 4-0 (10)
8. Washington 5-0 (7)
9. Ohio State 4-1 (9)
10. USC 4-1 (5)
11. Miami, Fla. 3-0 (16)
12. Wisconsin 4-0 (11)
13. Notre Dame 4-1 (13)
14. Oklahoma State 4-1 (14)
15. Washington State 5-0 (20)
16. UCF 5-0 (NR)
17. Auburn 4-1 (23)
18. Virginia Tech 4-1 (12)
19. San Diego State 5-0 (19)
20. Florida 3-1 (22)
21. Louisville 4-1 (18)
22. Oregon 4-1 (NR)
23. South Florida 5-0 (17)
24. Stanford 3-2 (NR)
25. North Carolina State 4-1 (NR)
Dropped out: Duke, Minnesota, Mississippi State, Wake Forest

Available for home viewing: Certain Women ★★★

Though not technically a western, Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women takes place in a region of broad skies, rocky landscapes and pent-up feelings. Human beings are sparse, and words are even scarcer. But Reichardt, a transplanted Easterner based in Portland, Ore., is a poet of silences and open spaces, and her plain-looking, taciturn films have their own kind of eloquence, the specific gravity of rare minerals.

Working from short stories by Maile Meloy, Reichardt has composed a splintered group portrait. The three women who, in turn, occupy the center of the screen are loosely connected to one another. They live in the same town, and one of them is having an affair with another’s husband. This adultery is peripheral to the main drama, which is more oblique, and turns on frustrations and failures of communication that are all the more painful for being almost impossible to describe.

Laura Wells (Laura Dern), a lawyer, contends with a difficult client (Jared Harris), a man whose profound unhappiness with the way things are threatens to erupt into violence. He’s pathetic but also frightening, and Laura tries to keep a safe, professional distance while holding onto her empathy for him, an effort that produces both a note of tension and a deep chord of melancholy.

Tension and unacknowledged sorrow also define Gina Lewis (Michelle Williams), who is building a house in the countryside with her husband (James Le Gros) and daughter (Sara Rodier), who she sometimes feels are allied in a silent conspiracy against her. Their family disharmony is underscored — but also, somehow, potentially resolved — when they purchase a pile of old stones from an ancient rancher. Those rocks are at once symbols of transience and of permanence. They lend themselves to solid structures that are nonetheless fated to fall down.

In all of Reichardt’s films — from River of Grass and Old Joy, through Wendy and Lucy, Meek’s Cutoff and Night Movies — the human presence feels fragile and contingent. And the stories of Laura and Gina, while interesting, deftly told and meticulously acted, also feel a little thin, more like anecdotes plucked from the stream of everyday life than like episodes of illumination. The third panel of this triptych is something else, though: a quiet, perfect vignette through which silent passion surges like an underground stream.

In it, Kristen Stewart plays Beth Travis, a young lawyer teaching a night class at a rural school. Ostensibly on the topic of education law, something Beth admits she doesn’t know much about, the course is mainly an after-hours opportunity for teachers to complain about their jobs. Also in the room, for unclear reasons, is a young ranch hand named Jamie (Lily Gladstone), who finds herself smitten with the instructor, and who pursues her infatuation with nervous dedication.

This love story — as full of longing as a great pop song, but without any overt statement of passion — is embedded in the hard routines of Western life: long drives, repetitive chores, endless cups of coffee. Stewart manages the remarkable feat of being at once convincingly mousy and unmistakably glamorous. With her stringy hair, stooped shoulders and anxious smile, Beth is a weary, self-effacing drone, except to Jamie, for whom she is a radiant queen. And Stewart, a tremendously disciplined actress, holds onto just enough of the magnetism that made her a movie star to allow us to see the character both ways, and to understand the ferocity of Jamie’s attraction to her.

That crush is the movie’s strongest source of heat, and it has the effect of rendering the other parts of Certain Women a little chillier and smaller than they might otherwise have seemed. The subtlety of the film is both an accomplishment and a limitation. It’s hard not to want more for these women, and to wish you could see more of them.

Post season baseball predictions

I’m not going chalk here, by any means. In fact, I’m predicting both visiting teams will win their respective wild card games although I must admit I’m not completely comfortable picking the Rockies over the Diamondbacks. I also lament the fact that the two best teams in baseball won’t meet in the World Series, but, instead, in the American League Championship Series.

With that out of the way, here are my picks:

AL Wild Card
Minnesota Twins over New York Yankees

NL Wild Card
Colorado Rockies over Arizona Diamondbacks

ALDS
Houston Astros over Boston Red Sox
Cleveland Indians over Minnesota Twins

NLDS
Washington Nationals over Chicago Cubs
Los Angeles Dodgers over Colorado Rockies

ALCS
Houston Astros over Cleveland Indians

NLCS
Washington Nationals over Los Angeles Dodgers

WORLD SERIES
Houston Astros over Washington Nationals