Delayed Reaction: Blood Diamond

The Pitch: Leonardo DiCaprio ends the corruption of the diamond trade in Africa.

I think I've finally figured out what Edward Zwick does as a director. He takes prestige movies and turns them into Hollywood movies. Think about it...

• Love & Other Drugs is a story about a troubled romance between a women with Parkinson's and a drug rep for Pfizer. It's easy to see how Anne Hathaway could think she'd get another Oscar nomination for her role in it. The film ends up being a fairly traditional RomCom with some edge to it, not that different from Silver Linings Playbook.
• Defiance sounds a little like "Schindler's List in the woods". The film ends up having some of the Oscar bait-y material, but also ends up being an accessible action movie.
• The Last Samurai is Dances with Wolves in Japan, then adds a few big battle sequences to keep it Hollywood friendly.

Legends of the Fall, Courage Under Fire, and even The Siege all sound like prestige movies at first then end up being much more populist in execution. I don't mean this as a bad thing either. I love The Last Samurai because of this. Zwick is one of Hollywood's great compromisers (Again. Not an insult). He is a director who keeps getting to make movie with good budgets and big names. While a Best Picture nomination has remained elusive, his films have picked up other Oscar nominations along the way and even some wins*.

*In recent years, he's dropped this trend some. Pawn Sacrifice was small to the point that I wonder if it was just a passion project of his, and Jack Reacher: Never Go Back aspires to nothing more than Zwick wanting to work with Tom Cruise again.

Blood Diamond fits perfectly into Zwick's filmography. It's a serious enough film to net a few Oscar nominations. Most notably, it's the film Leo earned a nomination for instead of The Departed, which won Best Picture. He probably should've been a double-nominee that year. The Oscar attention made up for the fact that it was a moderate box office loser*. The movie is essentially Hotel Rwanda as an adventure flick.

*Zwick has an impressive run of films that match production cost and box office returns closely.

I liked the movie well enough. DiCaprio and Djimon Hounsou are really good in it. Jennifer Connelly is a little underused. The movie drags a little in the middle and juggles more narratives than it can handle by the end. The ending is almost too neat. I feel like that can be said of most of Zwick's films though. Besides, I'll take neat and satisfying over messy and unsatisfying any day of the week.

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend

Movie Reaction: Ingrid Goes West

Formula: Single White Female + Instagram

There are many reasons to dislike a movie. Some are easier to explain than others. The most common reason is because the movie is just bad: the characters or plot make no sense or the visual language is ugly or incongruent with the story. Immediately, something like Need for Speed or Transformers: The Last Knight comes to mind. These movies are just incompetent. You don't have to work very hard to explain why you don't like them. Another reason to dislike a movie is when something in the tone or messaging bothers you. These are harder to shake. A lot of this could be categorized as "you know better than the movie does". It might be a lawyer hating a legal drama because they know how the law really works. It could also be a film that you just don't like what it's saying. For example, I hated Money Monster because it thought it was a much smarter movie than I found it to be. This kind of movie does even have to be bad. I don't like Network because I think it's making a dumb point, but I accept that it's well acted and produced. It's a personal intellectual response. Then there the movies that make you too physically uncomfortable to enjoy. That can cover a wide spectrum. It can be obvious, like the Saw movies. The writing in those movies could be Shakespeare and it wouldn't matter. I'm not sitting through that if I had a choice. This type of dislike isn't intellectual. It's a gut reaction. Sitting through it makes you physically uncomfortable. Ingrid Goes West is this kind of movie.

Before I get into why, I should first explain what the movie is. It's about Ingrid (Aubrey Plaza). She's an Instagram-obsessed woman who isn't taking the death of her mother very well. Or maybe she wasn't all that well before her mother's death. We don't know. Either way, she has issues now. The film starts with Ingrid doing a stint in a psychiatric hospital following an incident she has with a girl she follows on Instagram. After getting out of the hospital, she returns to her Instagram obsession almost immediately and stumbles onto an Instragram celebrity, Taylor Sloane (Elizabeth Olsen), who appears to have the perfect life. Ingrid becomes determined to meet Taylor and share that perfect life. Ingrid moves to California and tracks Taylor down via Instragram check-ins. She even lies and tricks her way into befriending Taylor by basically becoming Taylor. The rest of the film is about Ingrid staying ahead of all the lies she's told to ingratiate herself with Taylor. You can guess how well this goes.

The film works on a few more levels than I expected. After all, I saw it for Plaza and Olsen, not the story. I wasn't expecting much from the "Instagram stalker" pitch which is anything but subtle commentary on millennial culture. Since she's the POV character, the film doesn't hide anything about Ingrid. She's not well. She's lying about who she is. She not all that nice either. She isn't a mystery. The fun of the movie is in seeing how the other characters are exposed over time. Taylor presents a perfect life on Instagram, and it is a pretty great life. If it's not a perfect life, it certainly is a privileged one in which she never really has to work and can afford just about anything. She's also vapid and more concerned with selling the ideal of herself than being a real person. She's just a different kind of phony than Ingrid. Even Taylor's husband (Wyatt Russell) and Ingrid's landlord/boyfriend (O'Shea Jackson Jr.) are lying about or to themselves in a number of ways. In fact, the only authentic character is the most overtly unlikable one: Taylor's uber-frat bro brother (Billy Magnussen). I quite liked a lot of the character dynamics. O'Shea Jackson Jr. also gets a nice running gag about being obsessed with Batman. It doesn't mean anything to the film, but they manage to milk more laughs out of it than I expected.

As I mentioned though, I had a strongly negative reaction to the film. It's not that I thought the movie was bad. It's actually just meh. There's two aspects about the movie that made it almost unwatchable for me. The first and foremost is that the movie is built on escalating lies. I hate that structure so much. It makes me physically uncomfortable the whole time. I could get into more critical assessments about why I don't like it - I hate that it requires a lot of characters to be really dumb to work or it forces the movie to be plot-driven, not story-driven - but it's really the gut reaction that bothers me the most. I don't like the inevitability of a fall. It's the same reason I don't like most roller coasters. I hate the build, not the drop*. The other thing I found physically repellent is that I really didn't like Taylor. I love Elizabeth Olsen and think she plays Taylor excellently. That's just not a character I enjoy being around at all, not even in a fictional world. Most of my issue is with the first point though. The film veers nearly into farce. I hate farce.

*Ok, with roller coasters, I hate the drop too. I'm not a fan of being up high or falls.

Ingrid Goes West has wonderful pathos and a very fitting ending. A lot of actors do very good work playing with or against familiar types. Ingrid is tailor-made for Aubrey Plaza, who is the reigning queen of sardonic and sarcastic humor. Wyatt Russell gets to show that a little more is brewing underneath the easy-going persona he's cultivated in films like 22 JumpStreet and Everybody Wants Some!!. Jackson's only other screen appearance so far was playing his dad in Straight Outta Compton. This is a much softer role and he's charming in it. Olsen disappears into roles well. So, she work just as well playing a cool Los Angeles girl in this as she did when I saw her last week playing a rookie CIA agent in Wind River. I just didn't like watching this movie.

Oh, and the short film that played before this was just weird.

Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Amy

The Pitch: Let's make everyone feel bad for making Amy Winehouse jokes from 2007-2011.

I didn't care much for Amy. I don't think it was bad and it wasn't poorly made. I just didn't like it very much. First of all, I've never cared for Winehouse's music. Liking the music isn't vital to a music documentary, but it sure helps. When Amy Winehouse's story builds to Back to Black as a big, career-making moment, and I don't care much for the music, sorry, but that impacts the effect some. That leaves the story of her life to carry my interest. Her death is tragic, but it's not like it was a great surprise either. She clearly had alcohol and drug problems. There aren't abrupt turns in the story. If it was a roller coaster, it would have some abrupt rises and drops but it would always stay on the track. I think the part that really connects with people* is how the documentary looks into her celebrity. She was a joke in the media at the same time that she was desperately in need of help. That's rough. Whenever the film drags out another clip of an offhand joke made about her on some late night show or awards ceremony, I feel bad. And it's always crazy to see clips of celebrities trying to walk to their car and getting surrounded by photographers. These things are unsettling but hardly shocking. I think the film relies on the viewer having more empathy than I do.

*After all, it won all the awards it could that year and holds a strong RottenTomatoes rating.

To recap. I didn't care for the music of the central character. The story is told in a traditional, linear way. The editing is technically sound (I normally prefer that to editing that calls attention to itself). There isn't anything about Amy Winehouse's life and death that I found cinematic. I didn't find her story substantially different enough from all the other cautionary tales that came before her to single this out as something special. In other words, it's not bad, but I didn't care for it.

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: The One I Love

The Pitch: <Redacted>

This is a tough movie to talk about. Do I talk about it freely or do I spoil some of the surprise? For well known films, I don't mind talking freely about what happens. You probably know who Keyser Soze is by now or that Bruce Willis was dead the whole time. I don't think many people have seen The One I Love and I'd like to convince people to see it. Let's give it a try while being vague.

A married couple (Elisabeth Moss and Mark Duplass) are sent by their marriage therapist to a secluded estate for a weekend getaway. Once there, they find out that there's something special about that estate that makes them face their marital problems. And, that's about all I care to say. It's a clever concept and gives Moss and Duplass ample opportunity to give dynamic performances. There's a high concept premise to it that gets expanded on quite nicely for a while. It does reach a point of over-explaining things, which sucks some of the life out of the third act. The ending can only go one of two ways, and both have been done dozens of time before. The first hour or so does enough good things that I can accept some contrivance at the end. And Duplass and especially Moss are really good in it.

Verdict (?): Strongly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Margaret

The Pitch: Follow the life of a teenage girl as she works through some shit after a traumatic experience.

This is the movie I thought I was going to get when I saw Manchester by the Sea. I hadn't seen a Kenneth Lonnergan film before Manchester, but based on what I did know about the plot of Manchester, I expected a film with a lot of big emotional moments and a character who is transparently working through his grief. That's not Manchester though. Casey Affleck internalized most of his performance. Anna Paquin in Margatet did not. She's constantly babbling and being awful, primarily to her mother.

I mostly knew of this film as the one that Kenneth Lonnergan couldn't stop tinkering with. It was released 6 years after it was filmed due to numerous legal battles and an extended editing process. That shows. At 150 minutes, the run time is already fairly bloated. Apparently, there's a 186 minute cut out there as well. It's a tricky problem for Lonnergan. The film has a number of narrative dead ends like the stuff with Kieran Culkin or Paquin's teachers. Those add to the experience though. There's no way to fake time spent with a characters. For something like Paquin's emotional breakdown at the end in the lawyer's office during the conference call or with her mom at the opera to have the desired effect, you need to commit some time with the character. As a 90 minute film, I don't see how that could work.

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Mistress America

The Pitch: Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach deconstruct the Manic Pixie Dream Girl for 90 minutes.

There isn't a lot of middle-ground with Noah Baumbach's films. People either love them or hate them. And that can change film to film. I was underwhelmed and irritated by The Squid and the Whale yet I found Greenberg and Frances Ha very charming. Maybe it's just Greta Gerwig, because I enjoyed Mistress America the most of all his films that I've seen. Her character in this, Brooke, is a great one. She's completely full of shit but is so with such conviction that you want her to be right about some of it. Of course Lola Kirke's Tracy would be instantly drawn to her. On the surface, she is the Manic Pixie Dream Girl: a free spirit who lives for the moment and is always looking for a good time. Here's the thing. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is kind of a drag in real life. "Free spirited" becomes "irresponsible". "Lost in her own head" becomes "inconsiderate". Tracy realizes this over the course of the movie.

I love the extended sequence in Mamie-Claire and Dylan's house. It goes on way too long. It's filled with shaggy dog storylines that go nowhere, like the pregnant neighbor waiting for a ride or the stuff with the jealous girlfriend of the boy Tracy thinks she likes. It's not all building to one big "come to god" moment either. The events escalate and de-escalated several times. The conflicts evolve and change in real time. Heather Lind does terrific work as Mamie-Claire, who has been through this with Brooke before. She's annoyed and fed up with Brooke immediately, but gets broken down by her charms over time. You know that this has happened many, many times before with all of Brooke's oldest friends.

The movie isn't perfect. Some of the shagginess is probably could be trimmed down. The ending tries to tie things in too neat a bow. It relies of plot convenience if not outright contrivance a little too often. Overall though, I was pleased by this. It has reinvigorated me to track down Baumbach's other films or maybe just to find more films with Greta Gerwig. Yeah, more the latter than the former.

Verdict (?): Strongly Recommend

Movie Reaction: Wind River

Formula: Insomnia / Hell or High Water

Last year, when I first saw the trailer for Hell or High Water, I didn't give it a second thought. It looked pretty generic. It was a crime movie in Texas, and that's about it. Good cast, but no one who doesn't have a few stinkers in their filmography. There was a little commentary on the economy that didn't sound all that enlightening. I was ready to call it a late summer burn off and forget about it like The Book of Henry or Eddiethe Eagle. Then, it didn't go away. The word of mouth was abnormally strong. It was getting awards talk because the season's art house success story. So, I found it shortly before it left theaters are was really blown away by it. There was nothing special to the plot itself, but the film had such a great command of tone and characters that I really fell for it. Movies don't have to be doing something new to be great. They can just be great because they are executing familiar things at a high level, which was the case for Hell or High Water.

That is all a long winded way of saying that when the Wind River trailer looked pretty bland, I knew not to worry. Wind River was written and directed by Taylor Sheridan who also wrote (but didn't direct) Hell or High Water* and pulls off the same kind of trick. There isn't anything in the movie that I hadn't seen before in any number of movies about tracking down a killer, but it's all done so well.

*He wrote Sicario too, which was his first screenplay credit. As far as debut screenplays go, Sicario, Hell or High Water, and Wind River make for a hell of a strong and distinctive start.

Wind River is a pretty simple movie. Corey Lambet (Jeremy Renner) is a US Fish and Wildlife Service agent who finds the frozen body of a girl in the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming. Jane Banner (Elizabeth Olsen) is a young FBI agent called in to investigate if this was a murder*. Since the girl was found in the middle of nowhere, Jane employs Corey to help her track where the girl came from and, hopefully, solve the murder. The crime, the amount we do learn about it, isn't all that complex. The story isn't concerned with red herrings. It's more about putting the audience in this world.

*I'm not actually sure why the FBI was called in for this, but I'm guessing it has to do with jurisdiction, since it's an Indian Reservation.

That's probably the defining characteristic about Sheridan's screenplays so far: they introduce real places that feel like different worlds. In Sicario, it was the US/Mexican border. In Hell or High Water, it was West Texas. In Wind River, it's the frozen wilderness of Wyoming. It's an isolated region. Cold and unforgiving. If the elements don't kill you, the people might. Because Indian Reservations aren't entirely part of the U.S. or entirely independent, the region feels forgotten. As the film points out, they have a six man police force to watch over a region the size of Rhode Island. This sense of isolation and unease is underlined by a terrific score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. I loved the music throughout. It was always right on the verge of going too big for the moment and kept me on edge throughout. I often say that I have no vocabulary for music and typically don't even think about the music in a film during a first viewing. If I do notice the music the first time, that's either a very good sign (Jackie) or a very bad one (Suicide Squad).

If I'm being honest, I'm undecided about the casting. I like Jeremy Renner and he's in his element as a gruff outdoorsy type. At the same time, you kind of feel like a Native American actor would've been a better fit. Let me be clear though, he is not trying to pass as a Native American in this. He's a white guy. I just think, all else the same, someone Native American would've made more sense. Elizabeth Olsen doesn't fit at all, which is the point. She supposed to be an outsider. They also don't overplay that either. She and Renner work very well together. The rest of the cast is filled with capable character actors who don't try to upstage the scenery.

I'm also not in love with the climax of the movie. Like in Hell or High Water, it has a sequence that's big in a way that feels more required than a natural fit. It's entertaining and makes some sense in the context of the world. It just puts a neat little bow on everything in a way that didn't seem needed. It's a very well done sequence though. In fact, I have no complaints about Sheridan's direction throughout. Sicario and Hell or High Water had accomplished directors bringing the scripts to life. Sheridan hasn't directed much before this film. I was afraid there'd be a drop off in quality and there wasn't.

I was very pleased with this movie. I'd rate it above Sicario and below Hell or High Water, which isn't a bad place to be. It's a good crime drama. It isn't reinventing the form, nor is it trying to. The acting, directing, cinematography, and music are all great, which more than makes up for the story feeling a little slight and the themes being delivered rather bluntly. Basically, I'm talking about the difference between really liking and loving a movie. I really liked this.

Verdict (?): Strongly Recommend