BradWesley123's Movie Journal- December 2017

A sweat-soaked, frantic, drugged out odyssey through the seedier locales of New York, Good Time is a thrilling and, surprisingly, affecting story of brotherly love. The film is exceptionally made film, with first-rate direction, editing and music, but it's the type that can be made or broke by the lead performance and, lucky, Pattinson gives a truly wonderful performance. He sells the character's charm, deceitfulness, desperation, and the underlying love that he has for his brother. That love makes the film oddly emotional; you go in expecting another NY-set crime caper (which it, too, is), but you also get a surprisingly deep film as well.

Monthly Wesley AwardsBest Picture
Best Directors- Benny and Joshua Safdie
Best Actor- Robert Pattinson
Best Editing- Ronald Bronstein and Benny Safdie
Best Score- Oneohtrix Point Never

Unlocked is an auto-pilot movie; the script is pedestrian, the direction is uninvolving, and the slumming cast seems, for the most part, withdrawn. Sure, there are a couple of moments that work (an action scene here, a pulpy thrill there), but it just doesn't really do anything.

Monthly Wesley AwardWorst Picture

Person to Person is an exceptionally slight film, but there's a reasonable amount of fun to be had with it's minimalist pleasures. The stories diverge, pretty wildly, in quality; some take up too much time (George Sample III's storyline) for little reward, some too little (Philip Baker Hall's storyline) to matter, some, however, are mundanely charming (Bene Coopersmith's storyline, the best in the film). You're tolerance for meandering, (mostly) plotless films will inform you're feelings on the film; if you don't mind them, it's a fairly charming film.

A gentle, natural film, Columbus is a touchingly human film with great performances and craft. The plot is familiar, but writer-director Kogonada doesn't push the story artificially, letting it progress in a soft, gradual pace. He's also able to pull two affecting performances from John Cho, getting much more to do than usual, and Haley Lu Richardson, in what should be a breakthrough turn. It also helps that the film is lovely to look at (the think basically architecture porn), with brilliant cinematography by Elisha Christian that revels in stillness and calm. It's a slower film, so it won't be for everyone, but it's certainly a worthwhile one.

Monthly Wesley AwardBest Cinematography- Elisha Christian

It starts off pretty bland, but American Assassin eventually becomes passable when it embraces commonplace, rote spy-genre thrills. The acting is solid and the film is relatively well-made (though a few less quick-cuts would've been appreciated), but the story is pretty underwhelming, presenting a lackluster modern "real-world" spy story with underdeveloped characters and few genuine stakes. It gets better as it goes along, when it embraces well-trodden plot points that better films created (this is really just trying to be a younger Bourne film). Not the worst spy-film out there, but not particularly engaging either.

While it does lose itself a bit towards the end, and the end itself is a bit underwhelming, Marjorie Prime is an often thought-provoking film about the ways time effects memory, and the technology that we use to mimic both. The cast, direction and script are all top notch, selling the film's subdued pace (more than anything, this is a screenplay oriented movie) that allows the themes and characters to breathe. It can get a bit too ponderous at times, especially in the last act (where the story more or less just ends without much resolution), but it's insights into its themes is enough to make this film a worthwhile viewing.

Monthly Wesley AwardsBest Supporting Actress- Lois Smith
Best Adapted Screenplay- Michael Almereyda

A quasi-All About Eve/stalker flick for the digital age, Ingrid Goes West gets a bit too messy as it goes along, but largely works thanks to a smart script and an excellent performance from Aubrey Plaza. Plaza really is the film's main selling point; her work grounds the film in a frantic disparity that gives it it's soul. The film is able to cut between cringe-comedy and bitter loneliness quite well in the early going, but does start to lose its edge as it moves along (the ending is strong though). On the whole though, the film is a strong probing of the loneliness and melancholy that propels social media.

Monthly Wesley AwardsBest Actress- Aubrey Plaza
Best Original Screenplay- David Branson Smith & Matt Spicer

Maudie mostly sticks to the biopic script, but it's intimacy with its characters, and the lead performances propel this one to impressive heights. Hawkins and Hawke are exceptional here (monthly winners in a weaker month), rendering their characters complex with lived-in performances. It's also a well-made film, with nice control of pace and strong cinematography. The main issue, as with most biographical films, is; what to include, what to exclude, and how to use it. A bit more could have been cut, or condensed, and the transitions could be smoother. It's still a solid film though, with to great performances that always keeps it interesting.

Beach Rats is a rather familiar coming-of-age/LGBT drama that, nevertheless, excels thanks to smart filmmaking and a compelling lead performance. Eliza Hittman's directing style is a bit frantic, but lends to the film am authenticity that smooths over some storytelling flaws. Harris Dickinson's breakout performance is another plus for the film, crafting a naturalistic portrait of a young man's identity crisis. It's a story that's been done before, but rarely as human as this one.

It's so transcendentally saccharine that it may give you diabetes, but in the right setting (around Christmas, preferably) White Christmas can be a charming film. The story is slight and cloying as hell, but the "let's put on a show" mood that the film exudes is somewhat infectious. Sure, some of the numbers don't work ("Choreography" is odd, off-putting, and unnecessary) and it's entirely too long, but there's enough holiday cheer here to make up for the low points.

Monthly Wesley AwardBest Costume Design- Edith Head
Best Production Design- Roland Anderson & Hal Pereira and Sam Comer & Grace Gregory

Holiday Inn makes White Christmas look like It's a Wonderful Life. While a couple of the song and dance numbers are rather fun (one with Astair for the 4th of July is as wonderfully executed as it is bizarre and unintentionally hilarious), and the old-Hollywood spirit of just putting on a show for the audience can be charming, but this is just a overlong, bloated film that has just not aged that well. Several plot points can be skirted for the era from which they hail, but that doesn't necessarily make up for them. The story is just unnecessarily episodic, with nothing to really hold onto; the characters are just archetypes, with little-to-no depth. As mentioned, some of the numbers work, but just not enough.

Note: The blackface song-and-dance for Lincoln's Birthday is so stunningly horrific that I had to fast-forward through it. I really don't care what era that was from, it's so disgustingly misguided that my jaw was to the floor. Stepping away from it, it's hilarious to reference; experiencing it is another story.

The first hour or so of Song to Song features some of the best work that Terence Malick has done in years; it's not too frantically edited (it's still fractured, but relatively coherent), and there are actual character arcs. The second half let's this down though; it's not bad, but its incredibly repetitive (it would've been a hell of a short-film). The cast is all quite strong, actually get some character arcs, lending a sense of naturalism to Malick's beauty shots. Each, surprisingly (for a Malick movie), gets to do some of their best work, especially Fassbender and Gosling. Obviously, the movie looks pretty superb, again shot by Emmanuel Lubezski; even when the movie gets redundant, it's arresting to look at. Not for everybody (especially the impatient), but it's a beautifully compiled film that, at least for the first hour, has some genuine soul. Also, there's a pretty hilarious/absurd Val Kilmer cameo.

Monthly Wesley AwardBest Supporting Actor- Michael Fassbender

There's a lot of the energy that made the first two films such pleasantly enjoyable diversions, but Despicable Me 3's story represents a franchise running on fumes. The story is built on cliches, and the script uses them whenever possible. The visual energy, however, does make up for some of those problems, creating some fun sequences and gags that are passably enjoyable. It's a mixed-bag of a film, where the good and bad are split pretty evenly; i.e. it might not work for all adult viewers, but it's probably enough to distract younger viewers.

There's a great idea inside Bright but, boy, this thing is a big clusterfuck of a film. The idea of using a fantasy-tinged plot to explore racism and corruption could lead to an exceptionally original and piercing film; that is, if the film's world's logic made any real sense, as it collapses under even the slightest examination (like: why would the world be exactly the same as our own, despite the alternate history?). That non-logic would be forgivable if what we were given, in terms of story, was enough to occupy our minds; it isn't. It's a rote buddy-cop movie with a bungled script; one with an erratic tone and a, seemingly, genuine misunderstanding of the ways discrimination works. Above-board craft in tech departments doesn't make up for the poor storytelling.

Monthly Wesley AwardsBest Makeup
Best Visual Effects

I was honestly surprised by how much I enjoyed The Lego Ninjago Movie. It doesn't rank that close to the previous Lego films, but this one is also weirder; more irreverent, less beholden to plot, and more absurd. The last act doesn't live up to the first, and there's a fair amount of bloat to the story, but this a fun little film that doesn't take itself too seriously.

There are several moments where the mindfuckery of Buster's Mal Heart beguile, but their too few and far between. While director Sarah Adina Smith has a firm grasp on mood, the story gets away from her here; it's too fractured, too concerned with presentation than depth. It's exceptionally made, with an unsurprisingly committed performance from Rami Malek, but it never came together for. There's a lot of great individual scenes that just don't fully fit together.

While it does adhere a bit too much biopic, wronged-man tropes, Stronger cuts away the bloat to present a sobering look at recovering from trauma. Director David Gordon Green handles the material well, not overplaying the inspiring-victim card, but instead opts to focus on the recovering and aftermath, with a sharp focus on the characters. Most of them could be seen as stock characters (typical Boston-types), but the cast is exception, lead by another top-notch performance from Jake Gyllenhaal that sell's both the pre and post-explosion character nicely, melding those characteristics to create a full-blooded character. It's a familiar film, but it's one that does a great deal with familiar beats.

It might be too hard to watch at times, but Brawl in Cell Block 99 is a captivatingly brutal b-movie that hits the throttle and doesn't let up. It does start a bit slowly, though, to be fair, that's the point, and message is quite clear; it's hard to make a living in America, especially for an ex-con. Once the main plot does kick in, the movie is a brutal assault on the senses that revels in its own madness. While I wasn't entirely keen on the excess (again, the movie is of excess; more a personal preference), I found the film to be an engrossing nightmare with great direction, a surprisingly potent script (it's a smarter film that it appears to be), and a towering performance by Vince Vaughn, ably shedding his motor-mouth persona for stoic dryness.

Monthly Wesley AwardBest Sound