My first impression of the trailer of Jacques Audiard’s (Dheepan) The Sisters Brothers was that it too quickly and too easily reminded me of a Quentin Tarantino movie. The trailer teetered the line of whether it was a drama or a comedy, a comedy masquerading itself as a drama, a drama trying to go for so much dark humor, or a variety of other techniques made famous by one of our generation’s most recognized and revered directors. But, honestly, to compare Audiard’s film to one of Tarantino’s would be doing a disservice to Audiard because this movie is better than anything Tarantino has directed since Pulp Fiction, except for 2009’s Inglourious Basterds. This Tarantino was one that I liked, but one, like each of his movies, had more than a few scenes that were difficult to watch.
Category Archives: 2018
Arctic (2018)
Joe Penna’s directorial debut, Arctic, was a movie I highly anticipated, one that I didn’t love as much as I thought I would during its viewing, but one that stuck around with me well after it was over and one that’s worth a review. I wish this movie was a true story. It would have made the movie more meaningful. But, at the same time, Penna could have easily said that this was inspired by actual events because, of course, it was. There are survival stories like the one in Arctic across this beautiful planet every single day, whether it be in the frozen terrain in the middle of the Arctic nowhere, or on a mountain, in the middle of a forest, a desert, an ocean, or any other location where it would be deemed unsurvivable for the average person in the short-term and anyone in the long-term. So while the story of Overgård (Mads Mikkelsen – The Promised Land, The Hunt) is not his own, I don’t think the move is lessened because of what we know do know about stories where a person or a group of people are stranded in the middle of nowhere and either survive or don’t survive.
Wildlife (2018)
There is something very subdued from Paul Dano’s directorial debut, Wildlife that makes it a more meaningful movie than it probably is. I don’t know if there is a particular term for it other than it felt very Paul Dano-like. The man who never appears to age has delivered in a ton of movies you probably have never seen or left the theater scratching your head over (There Will Be Blood, Love & Mercy, Swiss Army Man, Little Miss Sunshine, Meek’s Cutoff, The Ballad of Jack and Rose). He plays some odd characters, so why wouldn’t his directing style be similar? Interestingly, the cast in his leads one of the most underrated and diverse actors of our generation in Jake Gyllenhaal (End of Watch, Prisoners), who is never afraid to take a risk in a role and is one of the most talented and underappreciated actresses of the same generation in Carey Mulligan (Shame, An Education) who prefers some of the safer roles.
Searching (2018)
While by no means a perfect movie, what an ambitious and stunning debut for first-time director Aneesh Chaganty. At the ripe age of just 27 years, he took a movie that many people (including the cast) thought was an impossible task while others thought would come across as a complete trainwreck and made this one of the absolute must-sees in 2018. Searching is so entuned with today’s technology, especially relating to social media, webcams, the dangers of communicating online with strangers, and the idea that an online persona can be so different than who a person is in real life. Chaganty considered that technology, including social media platforms, constantly evolves. He knew he only had a while to write, cast, film, edit, market, and release this movie that felt relevant and current.
Life Itself (2018)
Perhaps the most pleasant surprise of all 2018 movies was Dan Fogelman’s (Danny Collins) little-seen gutwrenching Life Itself. Not to be confused with the Roger Ebert documentary of the same name, this chapter-style movie is best viewed if you know as little about it as possible going in. I read this in the first paragraph of a review site I respect, and it was enough to get me to stop reading the review. I didn’t research anything more until I finished watching the movie and was completely shocked to see that it had just a 13% fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes (78% fresh with audiences based on 981 ratings at the time of this review). While the drama was thick and all of the tie-ins between the stories a little too coincidental and convenient to believe that all of the connections truly happened by chance, I was able to suspend that portion of the movie because A) I didn’t see everything coming ahead of time (naively perhaps) and B) because the raw emotions of this film felt so thick and real to me that I couldn’t help but be wrapped in the folds of each character.