#all I’ve got are my fucking made up characters and 600 responsibilities to attend to at all times and that’s pretty much it! (: it’s great!

[snmin10]

Sleep No More Shanghai: (Delayed) Highlights

*This was written over a year ago and I just rediscovered it in drafts, so some info (particularly castings) may be outdated*

It has been 2 years and 600 shows since Sleep No More opened in Shanghai. Of those 600 shows, I’ve attended around 14 of them - half in early 2017 and half in late 2018. Travelling half way around the world to watch a theatre performance is a bizarre concept to many people, but I’ve never left disappointed. Spending days full of real-world discovery and evenings full of Punchdrunk-world discovery makes for a very happy trip indeed.

Show-wise, this most recent visit was possibly even better than the first. Some of that may be familiarity, but it’s also down to small changes in the format, logistics and narrative. There’s a concern, especially when travelling so far, that expectations may not be met. But that wasn’t the case. 

SNM Shanghai has developed. Interestingly, according to conversations with some local fans, certain changes - especially those to the narrative - have had mixed responses. But for me as a visitor, every single show I saw had moments of genuine thoughtfulness and inspiration. It felt like care for the show often came from both sides; not just from impassioned audience members projecting their love of the format, but also cast and crew members striving to create a piece of art that is beautiful, and ever-changing.

Some highlights...

- Dull housekeeping highlight: the queuing system has been updated and is great. I’m sure I can’t be the only one who’s interested in queues (what can I say, I’m British) so here’s a quick breakdown. Upon arrival there are now two parallel, roped queues outside the front of building: one for on-the-hour ticket holders and one for the quarter past ticket holders (there are signs in Mandarin and English to show which is which). People are strictly let in according to the time on their tickets, so I imagine that these two queues become the half past and quarter to queues later on. On-the-hour ticket holders were let through to collect their tickets from a small hut about half an hour before the show started. We then entered the building, went through cloakroom (still free, hoorah) and receiving playing cards. It appears that playing cards are still shuffled about a bit, with a chance of either an Ace or a 2 if you’re one of the first in. 

- Quick shout out to the security guard who monitors the queue and lets people through. He does a stellar job, to the extent that every single show he made a point of picking us out in the queue to wave the 7pm sign at us. Despite having been there a few nights on the trot, he remained extremely skeptical that we ever truly understood the system. He was extremely friendly and we never went wrong under his watchful eye.

- Big bonus: on-the-hour ticket holders get a free pre-show drink in the Manderley! We had no idea, but a kind crew member ushered us over to the bar. You can choose from a number of drinks, including a couple of cocktails and mocktails. They were good. 

- Man and Woman in Bar made an appearance a few minutes before the first lift and usually performed a song before calling the Aces. Zhu Sujie’s Daphne was a highlight in this role - effortlessly charming and attentive. I always prefer an accessible Person in Bar, rather than someone intimidating. Daphne had the knack of making audience members feel comfortable and not ‘put on the spot’ when making conversation.  

- On the second show I exited the lift on the ground level, walked into the ballroom and stopped dead in my tracks: James Finnemore Banquo! A favourite Drowned Man performer, I had no idea he had travelled over to Sleep No More. He’s such a delicate, introspective performer and I’ve always enjoyed his dancing - his pre-hoedown, bar-top solo as Andy in TDM in particular. I thought he’d make an excellent Groom, and sure enough, I got to see it on the third show. 

- Speaking of castings, I’m sure there’s a good reason as to why Ed Warner isn’t playing Boy Witch, but I have no idea what that is. 

- Debby is one of the few performers who (as far as I know) has been in place since my first visit in early 2017. Her Bride is captivating and uncomfortable in all the right ways. That loop is such a rich addition to the show. In amongst all the subtleties and mysteries of a Punchdrunk show, hers is such a satisfyingly clear narrative that makes the downfall all the more affecting. I think she rivals Banquo for the best choreography in the show. 

- The surprise of seeing a familiar interaction from New York turn into something altogether greater for the chosen audience member. It ended, around 10 minutes later, on a completely different floor with different characters. The complexity of the interaction reminded me of The Drowned Man; how a certain audience member could feel like they’d, without realising, stepped into a funnel that led them to something, or somewhere, else entirely. Specifically, it reminded me of how sometimes after the Conrad’s Studio 8 1:1, you would get spit out into the basement and straight into an oncoming Stanford, who would grab you and tell you to keep what you’d just seen a secret. 

- In fact, that feeling of ‘riding the wave’ seems such more present in Shanghai than in New York. There are a number of interactions that are chosen by a different character to the one you end up with. That lack of control is marvellous. 

- Wang Mingchao’s Boy Witch was absolutely ace. Fickle, flirtatious and zero fucks given. I like a petite Boy Witch and his was full-on, spreading the Boy Witch love thinly across anyone and everyone in the vicinity. 

- Another powerhouse was Ching-I Chang’s Sexy Witch, who I followed first loop of my first show without even realising who she was. She’s a performer who commands attention and always seemed to have a devoted gaggle of followers whenever I saw her. Perhaps it was just her exceptional posture, but I think she’d be a brilliant Lady Macbeth. 

- Can I just say how much I like Simon Palmer and Laure Bachelot? I never spent much time with them during The Drowned Man (did Simon return as Harry on the final night or am I imagining things?) but they are both such generous and inclusive performers. Even when playing Speakeasy and Lady Macbeth respectively, they have a warmth to them that’s hard to resist. 

- Walking into a Shanghai-exclusive 2:1 on my final show that I never knew existed, and which I only received because the intended recipient backed away in horror at the hand being offered to him. I hope that audience member doesn’t regret denying the invitation, but I am very grateful to them whoever they are (and not too proud to be second choice!).

- New spaces: a connecting corridor on the 5th floor, a spooky nook in the 3rd floor graveyard. I found the latter while following Danvers. It’s interesting that no matter how many times you’ve seen a show, your heart does a total newbie-lurch and you get the jitters as soon as you’re in an unfamiliar space. Is that what it felt like the first time?? 

- New moments: a Boy Witch/Malcolm interaction by the ballroom. I couldn’t really see through the crowds - are they dancing?

- Having spent lots of time with Olly over the years - as Dwayne in TDM, as Macduff and Porter in New York, I spent little time with him here. But it always made me chuckle to see him pass by, 5 minutes into the show, having already accrued about 200 audience members. 

#sleep no more shanghai #sleepnomoreshanghai #sleep no more #punchdrunk

[davidfostercomedyblog]

The Things We Take for Granted

As a child I always wanted to be poor and black. As an adolescent I was criticized for this seemingly preposterous desire, but if anyone thought about it, it was quite logical. All of my heroes were poor and black: Rappers, many favorite actors (and the characters they portrayed), and most athletes (prior to signing their contracts) were poor and black. And what child doesn’t want to emulate their heroes?

Growing up my family was “comfortable” by white, American standards - filthy fucking rich by planetary standards. We didn’t attend private school, nor summer in the Hamptons, but my brother and I each had our own bedroom and Mom didn’t have to work. If you can claim the same and are under the impression that you’re not rich you’re probably a bad person.

 In 1994 the tides turned as Dad was let go by his company, who discovered a “loophole” in his contract that would transform his promised $100,000/year pension into a $0/year pension, and the house wasn’t close to paid for. Mom had to go to work, Dad had to go back, and if I ever wished to again be “comfortable” I’d have to earn it, which is hardly something to whine about, still a factor in my reality.

 I’ve lived in a million shit holes. In 1998 I was paying $440/month on West 15th St.

 Do you know what you get for $440 on W. 15th Street? A room, literally nine feet by six, that happened to offer a great view of the Empire State Building. It was an “SRO” – single room occupancy, which means no kitchen or living room, no nothing, but a miniature refrigerator if you’re lucky, and a dingy-AF bathroom in the hallway to be shared with whatever other college kids or miscreants caught in some life transition (or perpetual non-transition) happened to live on the floor. At the time I was the former, in love with alcohol and psychedelic drugs, and it was the best time of my life. One night my friend, Tre got locked out of his car and had to sleep over, which we executed brilliantly, each of us curled into fetal position at opposite ends of my futon single and I’m confident no spooning took place. Tre decided to take some magic mushrooms from my stash, leaving crumbs of them on the sheets as if they were late night cookies, but the next day he claimed they “didn’t really work.” Incidentally, I got a better night’s sleep than I probably would now by myself on a king-sized pillow top. Ah, youth.

 Eventually I upgraded to another SRO on 13th and 3rd Ave. for $600/month, which boasted over twice the square footage, and Tre ironically coined, “The Palace.” The Palace was (barely) able to fit a full-sized futon, parallel to a “coffee table” and perpendicular to a single bed, which made Tre’s sleepovers twice as comfortable and ten times as frequent. Infestation was worse than at the previous domicile, if for no other reason than the aforementioned law of probability as it pertains to literal space. What are the chances of mice and cockroaches as much finding their way into a box as specific as 54 square feet in a New York City building? We’d mostly hear the mice shuffling at night in the dark, but ironically saw roaches in the light, fearlessly perusing the sink or climbing the walls, and I don’t think I’ll ever again laugh as hard as I did when Tre pointed one out and muttered in a weed-smoked stupor: “Room service is here, nigga. You wanna place an order?”

 Summers in SRO’s were tough, as air conditioners were forbidden, because capitalism works and life is fair. I’ll never forget one morning the heat was so intense that it woke me up early, so I got up, grabbed my things and bought one ticket to an early morning showing of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. I’d already suffered through one showing of the cinematic vomit, but figured the air conditioned theater with an awfully uninteresting dialogue and plot as backdrop was the perfect setting to finish my night’s rest. I was right.

 No doubt the most interesting part about my time in The Palace was the ongoing mystery of who on my floor was responsible for the intermittent appearances of explosive diarrhea sprayed across the shared bathroom’s walls. One day they would be perfectly clean (relative to SRO’s), and the next day, Wham (literally)! It was everywhere, on the wall behind the toilet and beside it, on the floor as well as the trashcan, and at the still unshakeable age of 22 I was often as impressed by this poor soul’s range and diameter as I was grossed out by it being all over my home. The one thankful, but equally disturbing part of it was there was almost never any shit on the actual bowl. Who was this fascinating beast, first of all with some great gastrointestinal power, that insisted on ruthlessly shitting all over his own home and the home of others, but simultaneously considerate enough to never filthy the seat that his neighbors had to share? We had our suspects, but never got a conclusive verdict.

 I graduated from SRO’s to futons in friends’ living rooms, one of which was directly above the loudest and most volatile gay bar in Chelsea, The Rawhide. Instead of unbearable August humidity, it was techno music and the sounds of masculine rejoice that disrupted my sleep, sometimes from below, other times from my best friend’s room. He was more successful than I with drunk girls at parties, thus serving as an in-house reminder of my failures and frustrations in the middle of many nights. The majority of our time at The Rawhide was okay, though it ended poorly, with a break-up from my two best friends (Tre included), typical when cramming three besties into a two bedroom for four years.

 I’ve lived everywhere, dawg.

 For a few years I had my own studio apartment on one of Washington Heights’ most drug-infested blocks, which is kind of like saying the “most volatile gay bar in Chelsea.” One time a girl I was dating asked me to go outside and find her a bag of weed and I didn’t even make it to the bottom of the staircase before scoring. Location, location… I then moved cross country into a studio in the heart of Hollywood, Los Angeles, then to a dark and dirty converted two-bedroom with two Filipino women in Koreatown for two years, and to this day I have no idea whether or not they were a gay couple. It didn’t matter if they were; I just thought it curious that after all that time and interaction I remained curious. The worst part about that spot was just having to regularly concoct white lies about why I couldn’t join them at weekly Bible study, and each morning waking up to the sounds of urination through the thinly constructed bedroom wall.

 “Why don’t you just borrow money from your parents and get a better place?” a friend asked in one of the classic erroneous assumptions made by privileged people:

1.     Everyone may not have money, but their parents do at least. False.

2.     Hard work = financial success. I’ve never taken a vacation and I have nothing, which is half the reason why I’ve never taken a vacation.

3.     Intelligence = financial success. Donald Trump is President.

 I moved back to New York with the same complete void of resources that I’d gone to L.A. with, but got hooked up with a room in a real 2Br in Harlem for $678/month! No contract and right in my price range! What was the catch?  

 Never in my life had I seen such infestation.

 I’ll repeat that for the cheap seats and ears deafened by our over-stimulated society of idiots exploiting non-literal superlatives in order to garner attention: Never in my life had I seen such infestation. This includes homes I’ve lived in, as well as every one I’ve ever visited or even passed through just to get a quarter pound of weed in 1995. In my first week there I would come home at night, turn on the kitchen lights and see anywhere from 3-10 of the filthy insects fleeing for safety across the sink and countertop, in much greater numbers and more cowardly fashion than the apathy with which room service used to creep up The Palace walls. Roaches were so much tougher in the 90’s.

 Thankfully I barely ever saw them in the bedroom, but they absolutely owned the kitchen and bathroom. We were just renting, mere visitors in their home where they ruled, they roamed, and I didn’t bother to inquire as to whether the roommate would mind if I doused the place in bleach, taped and calked up all cracks in the floors and walls, and bought a new kitchen garbage… With. A. Cover.

 Within a month I was victorious in defending the wall, and the wildling little creatures were gone. I’ve been on HBO and Showtime, won comedy festival competitions and earned a Master’s degree in Chinese Medicine, and this was truly one of my greatest achievements in life. Unfortunately my new abode’s other obstacle would prove an impossible hurdle, and one I’d have to stand down to for the 15 months to come: El Bano.  

In order to successfully flush I had to hold the toilet handle down for anywhere from 5-12 seconds, making for the longest I’ve ever had to hold a toilet handle down for. Some toilets are stubborn, requiring a hold of 2-3 seconds, max. The next time you flush a toilet hold the handle down for 12 seconds. It’s an eternity.

 The seat was disgusting and I immediately decided that no square inch of my skin would ever come into contact with it. To be honest I didn’t even like the idea of my anus hanging above it. I thought about purchasing and attempting to install a new seat, though my brother brought up a good point.

 “Considering the apparent hygienic standards of your roommate, will you freely sit on the bare seat if you buy a new one?”

 “No.”

 “Okay then.”

 To cover up the impenetrable stains of funk and musk I instead resigned to spray paint the seat white, and continued to cover it with paper each time I sat down.

 Supposedly we couldn’t call the super for repairs, as part of the reason our rent was so cheap was because the apartment was rent controlled from a time before even my roommate lived there. Neither of our names were on the lease. The bathroom would remain as is, which could only be described as fucking disgusting.  

 I don’t know that I’d ever before smelled the smell, “putrid,” or even “rancid,” and if I had it was only in passing, only in that split second of sensual recognition before we clench our orifices in sheer panic and flee the scene for cleaner air, greener pastures. The smell emitted from my new, old bathroom’s pipes was putridly rancid, and if it wasn’t the worst thing I’d ever smelled it was at least the worst I’d ever smelled regularly. Many times while going to the bathroom I would try covering my nose with my shirt, but the thin layer of cotton was no match for this entity that surely required some kind of exorcism to defeat its demonic potency. Googled gimmicks such as baking soda and vinegar offered only brief reprieve, and for the first time in my life I was brushing my teeth everyday in the (newly exterminated) kitchen.

 Unfortunately, neither the odor nor the Zen toilet flusher was my biggest gripe with the room. I would have easily tolerated either of these were it not for the worst Goddamn shower I’ve ever taken in my life. I took 500 of them if I took one.

 The water dribbled out in pathetic pressure and took forever to get warm, and these were the unit’s only two familiar flaws from prior shit holes. Additionally delayed was its response to temperature adjustment, so if I came back after waiting the allotted 5-10 minutes and found the water to be scalding hot I couldn’t just adjust the knobs and expect it to adjust. There was a consistently inconsistent wait time between turning the cold water knob and when the water actually got cooler, or if it got cooler at all. Often times I’d get impatient and make it too cold before the defunct pipes were able to catch up and the water suddenly turned to the opposite extreme. Every shower was a non-stop guessing game, concurrent with a waiting game and usually a physical dance, as I’d err mostly hotter instead of colder, and had to dance in and out of the stream to rinse off suds but also avoid getting burned. The worst instances that brought me to exclaiming expletives while naked, wet and alone were surely at the end of long workdays in the winter. I’d bend over to wash my legs and feet and suddenly the erratic unit would turn from a tolerable temp to either ice cold or boiling, spraying my lower back, transforming what all my life had been a relaxing, therapeutic experience into a frustrating battle; a daily reminder of the impoverished outcome of all my hard work. Who’d ever think showering would become something I’d dread?  

 The good news is that next week I’m moving out, moving on up, not to the east side, thank God, but into my girlfriend’s apartment, who besides being lovely and beautiful, brilliant and hilarious, has a functional shower in an odorless bathroom with a toilet that flushes when you flush it. Amazing! I’ve never seen a cockroach in her place, and if she’s ever had explosive diarrhea it’s remained a secret, surely aimed and disposed of appropriately. I promise never to take such luxuries (nor my girlfriend) for granted again. For the first time in 21 years I’m comfortable. I may just miss being able to leave the toilet seat up.

#shitterwasfull #nationallampoons #manhattanapartments #bathroomlife

[justinmoviereviews]

The Class of 2017

This one is starting early, inspired by my least favorite movie of the year. I’ve got a bunch more on my list I’ll get to at some point.

Strong Island - Yance Ford

I don’t watch documentaries, but of the three I saw from last year this portrait of a family’s grief was my favorite. Because it was visceral and simple, catching a family as it processes the death of its oldest son, and then learns the circumstances surrounding why his murderer was never charged.

Columbus - Kogonada

It’s not just the architecture, which is fantastic throughout--every shot is set up to look as striking and pretty as it can, like a movie that was filmed entirely inside the Met.

Last Men in Aleppo - Feras Fayyad and Steen Johannessen

I’m not gonna say anything bad about this movie. I’m not a lunatic. It’s not an easy thing to see real footage of dead babies, but one of several interesting things in this documentary is how these guys go from digging bodies out of rubble to attending a wedding. Life goes on, it turns out, even in a place like Syria. These are people who fantasize about going to Turkey, but recognize that they’d be greeted with resentment and bigotry there, and anyway feel a responsibility to stay in their homeland. Their happiness comes from being with their friends, and occasionally planting trees, or buying some pet fish. Their day job is rescuing people from random air strikes perpetrated by their own government. They’re legitimate heroes, and Bashar al-Assad is a legitimate monster. One funny thing, the user score for this movie on Metacritic is a bizarrely low 3.3, with a handful of reviews that accuse it of being Al-Qaeda propaganda. The reviews are written by people with user names like MetacriticSuccs, so credit to the Russian cyber agency for their thoroughness.

Detroit - Kathryn Bigelow

Kathryn Bigelow has become the master of telling macro stories about chaos. The first half hour about how riots turned Detroit into a war zone are perfect--maybe her best contained piece of filmmaking yet. When this movie settles into its plot--about how a bunch of racist cops tortured a group of black people in a cheap hotel--it’s such a natural extension of what she’s good at that it doesn’t feel like it all takes place in a single location, even though it does. As the night wears on you start to realize that in black cities like Detroit police were and maybe still are barely disguised domestic terrorists. When a character asks someone “will we be safe?” she’s referring to the cops, but she might as well be referring to the villain in a horror movie. This one shoulda got a lot more attention.

Personal Shopper - Olivier Assayas

I’ll start with a criticism: Kristen Stewart is really bad here. I actually think she’s a great actress, but here she’s a collection of her worst impulses: tics and stuttering, like an SNL parody of her. It’s actually not much of a liability though, because this is a movie that’s entirely about events and mood. I’m like six viewings away from understanding what the hell is going on in it, so here are just some thoughts: the movie does away with any ambiguity about whether ghosts are real. They’re all over the place, haunting houses and generally causing mischief. But the clarity on an afterlife does nothing to explain the plot of this movie. The bulk of it takes the form of an extended conversation over text between the main character and a mystery presence. It’s never explained whether this presence is haunting her or helping her, if it’s a ghost or a person or a figment of her own imagination. I half-heartedly entertained a theory that it was the boyfriend of the woman she worked for her screwing with her, which would make enough sense to be plausible, but not enough to provide the movie with any sense of resolution. Basically I have no idea what Assayas is trying to say, or what any of this means. I don’t know if I’m supposed to. It doesn’t matter. This movie is creepy as hell, and incredibly, superlatively good. 

Lady MacBeth - William Oldroyd

This movie is called Lady MacBeth because it’s essentially a retelling of MacBeth, if his wife had been more willing to get her hands dirty. It looks and feels like a period drama about a marriage arranged between families for financial reasons and a resulting affair of passion, but it never actually is that. From minute one it’s pitched at such a tense, bizarre level, that when Mrs. MacBeth switches from a sympathetic if inscrutable kept woman to a full out psycho, it’s not all that unexpected or surprising. It’s still heavy though, because MacBeth is a heavy play. And this movie absolutely lives up to that ambition.

The Florida Project - Sean Baker

Sean Baker’s last movie was about two black transgendered prostitutes in LA--a demographic that to my knowledge has never been the focus of a movie before--and rather than ask his audience to pity them he just told a story about them. It worked so well for me because it never felt like he was trying to please the cultural moment. He just realized this was an underreported American vibrancy. Here he takes a slightly different approach. Everyone and their mother has taken a stab at American poverty, but Baker manages to tell a story about adults living in harrowing conditions from the point of view of children who don’t realize their situation is difficult and so don’t feel any difficulty. Actually, now that I think about it, they are pretty similar. Both movies are about how daily life can keep the sadness about one’s condition at bay. For the prostitutes in Southern California, it’s whatever workaday stuff they have to deal with at any given moment. For the left behind margin-dwellers in this movie, it’s either children or childhood.

The Beguiled - Sofia Coppola

90 minutes on female horniness and the color white. Who says no?

Beatriz at Dinner - Miguel Arteta

You’ll forgive me for thinking this was going to be the cringe comedy it was billed as, with a Trumpian bent as a casually racist rich old guy makes increasingly inappropriate comments to an unexpected Mexican houseguest. But in retrospect, doing that would have put the onus on the Mexican to be uncomfortable, and that’s not what this movie wants to do at all. Instead she spends the whole night making everyone else deeply, cringingly uncomfortable. Which makes this movie much more interesting than the one it was billed as. 

Gerald’s Game - Mike Flanagan

I’m going to reiterate an earlier point, which is that for a basic bang for your buck, it’s hard to do better than well made low budget horror flicks. Get Out may win the best picture Oscar, but at it’s heart it’s really just a best case scenario for what these movies can be--fast, fun, small, structured around really good ideas. They’re the best playgrounds for smart filmmakers. Gerald’s Game includes a scene near the end in which a woman rips the skin off her entire hand--a scene that stressed me out more than my first first date--but ignoring that I could easily watch it 600 more times. The most watchable movie since, well, Get Out.

Roman J. Israel, Esq. - Dan Gilroy

Here’s a not terribly controversial opinion: Denzel Washington is the greatest movie star of all time. Who’s better? Jack Nicholson maybe? Cary Grant? His total comfort in front of the camera, his powerhouse intensity, his towering presence, the way words roll out of his mouth like a waterfall from the fountain of youth. He’s been doing this shit now for four decades, and none of his movies are less than good. He is the king. I mostly loved this movie. Completely ignored by a general audience, I thought the trailer looked great and was disappointed it was removed from theaters before I could see it. For the first hour it’s rather near perfect. Denzel Washington talks and talks, citing legal statutes, expressing disdain for the obviously fucked up legal system, stuttering through social situations he never bothered to learn how to navigate. He’s confident but not comfortable. The second half goes off the rails. It’s the kind of mess you want to blame a studio for, or an angry producer who was annoyed there weren’t more car chases. But maybe Gilroy--who’s Nightcrawler was a more coherent movie--just lost the plot somewhere along the way. No real matter. More legal dramas should be this sharp and this fun. And one must hail the king.

Mudbound - Dee Rees

For the first 45 minutes this movie has an As I Lay Dying quality, where multiple narrators lay out the state of their moral and historical situations in portentous southern language that always sounds profound when done well, like it is here. It never gets quite that deep again, but it becomes a sober and accurate look at what this country, particularly the south, would have been for blacks, women, and even white men in the 1940s. Halfway through I started to wonder if any movie had ever shown how plain old fashioned American racism strips away the dignity of blacks and the humanity of whites as well as this one does. 12 Years a Slave, maybe, but even that one cheated a little bit by being a horror show. Also, Rob Morgan, who plays the paterfamilias of the black tenant farming family, especially finds the Faulkner in his character’s position. For my money he’s the breakout star here. 

Icarus - Bryan Fogel

A problem I have found with certain documentaries that rely on their primary sources to tell their story is that the narrative can get blurry. This is a movie that would benefit from a narrator just to keep an eye on the spine of this fascinating true life event. The premise seems to be that a filmmaker stumbled completely by accident onto something so interesting that it obviously needed to take over his movie. Maybe a better filmmaker would have stepped back and asked some of the bigger questions presented by this narrative, like, why did this scientist seem compelled to run Putin’s national doping program? Maybe a master filmmaker would have dug into the heart of a man like Vladimir Putin who felt compelled to orchestrate a national doping program, a true story of global deception and malevolent corruption that deserves dozens of movies. But you’d have to be a walrus to not be intrigued by this guy, or eternally grateful that someone with a camera managed to catch him as his crime was discovered by the IOC and his government threw him under the bus and forced him into witness protection.

The Discovery - Charlie McDowell

I’ll get this out of the way first: the twist is not good. A squander of a pretty great concept that they could have anything with. But the rest of the movie is. The concept really is neat, and the whole thing looks great. This is a small, self-contained movie that chugs along at a heady pace. It’s a perfect Netflix movie, a genre I suspect we will all learn to recognize pretty soon.

Wonderstruck - Todd Haynes

I’m Not There is a profoundly silly movie, but Carol was made by a consummate pro, so I’m inclined to like Todd Haynes, and trust him when he experiments by, say, making a silent movie that intersplices stories from two generations and shoots them to look contemporaneous to movies of their respective eras. Like The Shape of Water, there must be a wavelength that really gets this movie. Maybe one day I’ll give it another shot, but fuck it’s slow.

Good Time - Ben and Josh Safdie

Woah. Let’s see here: This is a grim, ugly, unpretty neon movie about a side of New York that most people don’t like thinking about and will generally choose to ignore. It’s not just the poverty--there’s a darkness here, an ugliness and a savageness that’s usually examined sociologically if it’s examined at all. But this movie lives in it like it grew up in it, which for all I know it did. It’s about a white guy--and his skin color is very relevant--careening through Queens, ruining lives along the way in a single-minded quest to raise enough money to make his autistic brother’s bail. Mostly it’s so exciting and unpredictable that it flies by, telling a story about a guy with the survival skills of a cockroach getting through a night we might describe as eventful. And I need to give special mention to Jennifer Jason Leigh. She’s only in one scene, but she takes it to a dark, viscerally disturbing place. I don’t know that much about her as an actor, I don’t know what kind of work she usually does, but in a movie populated by characters I sincerely wish could have better lives, she will stand out in my mind for awhile. 

Song to Song - Terrence Malick

Part of me wants to like this movie, or at least respect it. Every shot is interesting--in fact that might be most of the point: every scene takes place in a visually arresting location, the actors do odd things with their bodies, the camera shoots them from weird angles. And I admire that Malick has mastered an impressionism that is uniquely his. But I also suspect that maybe this is just a bunch of bullshit from a guy who’s talented enough to make decently interesting work without trying very hard. I mean, he used to take 20 years to make his movies, now he’s pumping out one after another like he’s Woody Allen. And I think a movie can only have so much emotional resonance when the average scene lasts about 5 seconds. I don’t know, I can sort of see why a person might like this sort of thing, if a person was so inclined, but man did I think it was boring. If he’s just gonna make ponderous nonsense now, then at least The Tree of Life had the decency to be about the meaning of the universe. 

Hostiles - Scott Cooper

This is first and foremost a really solid western. Stoic and sharp and very well made. Christian Bale is amazing at this and should do one of these every couple of years. My only complaint is that it could have been better. It could have been a masterpiece. But it points to ideas about the inhospitality of the American frontier that it never really manages to show. People knocked the Revenant, but that movie really slaps you on the ass with how tough it was to hang in the old west. Hostiles wanted to do the same thing, but it settles instead on the simpler thesis that we stole this land from it’s rightful inhabitants. Which, I mean, fair enough I guess.  

Molly’s Game - Aaron Sorkin

If Aaron Sorkin wants to write a novel and release it as an audiobook narrated by Jessica Chastain, guess what, I’ll listen, but he is not a director. This is a movie where the voice-over will voice over dialogue because good lord does he love to write, and a movie where the main character at her lowest point will narrate her depression over a shot of her in bed, because good lord does he not know how to show. So this movie loses something his screenplays don’t when they’re filmed by top shelf talents like David Fincher or Danny Boyle. But Sorkin is one of my favorite guys to write about because he’s so talented and also so flawed. He’s in love with academia, and with knowing things. I can’t imagine what he’s like to shoot the shit with, but I assume that the person he wants to be is the person he keeps writing--the hyper-literate Renaissance man (and now woman) with a top 99 percentile intellect and some kind of pathological drive. Lots of movies are about everymen, but neither you nor I will ever be a Sorkin protagonist. His doormen are wittier and better educated than we are. Anyway, his biggest flaw in my opinion, besides a tendency to get high on his own supply, which we might as well call a feature in this case, is his tipsy uncle sentimentality. But other than a scene at the end between Molly and her father, which is a cinematic crime against humanity, this movie mostly avoids that. It’s too busy being his most fun movie yet. Even more than Steve Jobs, which is where I learned to tear down my cynical walls and lean into his brand of goofy pop intellectualism. Here’s my take on this one: it will not stand up to repeat viewings. At all. Like, at all. But it made me want to get a job in finance just so I can start going to high stakes poker tournaments.

Kong: Skull Island - Jordan Vogt-Roberts

2017 was such a good year for movies that even bullshit like this was great. This movie pulls ideas whole cloth from the last Godzilla movie--here there’s also a benevolent monster god, a showdown between giant creatures over the soul of man, and almost contemptuously fantastic cinematography (because if something this corporate can look this good, than how much should we even value high priced photography?)--but it takes itself a fraction as seriously as that one did, and is by legions less stupid.

Call Me By Your Name - Luca Guadagnino

More movies should have stakes this low. There’s a lazy confidence here that I like a lot. This is how a movie about a 17 year old boy’s summer should feel. Nothing really matters, and every day is pretty good. Over the course of two hours he will swim, smoke, read, and fuck a boy, a girl, and a peach. He’ll grow up to become a gay man with a pretty normal and hopefully happy life. He’ll remember this summer very fondly.

Win It All - Joe Swanberg

If every movie were like this, movies would be a lot more boring. But I suppose there is a space out there for simple stories told simply. The best scenes are the ones with Keegan-Michael Key, who is so charismatic that he risks derailing the utter unexceptionalness that is this movie’s point.

A Ghost Story - David Lowery

Does it seem gimmicky to make a movie about a dead husband as a guy in a white sheet with two eye holes cut out out like a child’s Halloween costume? I don’t know, the effect in practice to me was to make this celestial being look lonely and sad. He hangs his head in a silent longing and watches time hurdle through space from a fixed point he either can’t or won’t leave. This is a quiet, still movie; the kind that doesn’t cost much and is probably over-represented at film festivals. But it is, and forgive the sincerity here, devastatingly beautiful.

Phantom Thread - Paul Thomas Anderson

I wanted to give this a few more days to sink in before I wrote about it, but I’m nothing if not a content provider, so here we go. As the greatest artist of a generation ought to do, PTA upended my expectations about his style with this one, creating something new and challenging and not beholden to his previous work. His last couple movies have been about tension and release. This one really isn’t. Instead it’s a love story, or actually I mean it’s a relationship story, about the hunt for connection that all relationships become after the initial euphoria wears off. It’s still a Paul Thomas Anderson movie, so it’s haunting and strange and made up of tense dialogue that obfuscates it’s artistic intentions, spoken by strange people with unclear motivation. But it’s also funny, and mostly straightforward. It’s centered around a relationship, but this movie is as impossible to reduce as the last one, or the one before that. There are limits to my partisanship--there’s a dandyism to this movie that I don’t like at all, but this guy is consistently setting his sights up past the rafters, and throwing walk off touchdowns every single time.

I Love You, Daddy - Louis CK

Louis CK’s disgrace is the only one I’ve had trouble reckoning with, because he’s the only person so far to go down who really had more to say. Unfortunately, if this ends up being his last project, it’ll have been a disappointing note to end on. Louis’ artistic problem is that he’s too hard on himself. Very often he will set up a disagreement between himself and another character and have the other character essentially school him, even if he’s not wrong. He has a tendency to shortchange his own point of view. But it’s never been detrimental to his work until now. This movie is essentially a professionally successful version of the pathetically passive guy Louis always plays getting chastised by a series of articulate women. The writing is very often great--he’ll probably never get his due now, but he’s the best writer of dialogue since Woody Allen--and it’s a little sunnier than his usual point of view allows for, but it’s less focused and less interesting than either of his two TV shows. 

The Post - Steven Spielberg

Like Bridge of Spies, this is a minor work from the master. The only bad thing I can say about this movie is that he’s not doing anything new, and the subject matter invites comparisons to more interesting movies, like Spotlight, and All the President’s Men, which would make a hell of a second billing here as a diptych about the rise of the Washington Post. Unlike Clint Eastwood, I believe Spielberg still has extra gears. He still has a few more home runs in him. But like Eastwood even his most workmanlike products are made with a level of casual mastery that makes them perennial top tenners. I don’t know that this movie was made for any reason other than to express a distaste for the current occupant of the White House. It still earned Meryl Streep another Oscar nomination. 

It Comes at Night - Trey Edward Shults

Why are all these low budget horror indies so good? 

The House - Andrew Jay Cohen

Will Ferrell movies have reached this weird place now where the concepts are funny but their executions aren’t. They’re coming up with good ideas but filming them straight because at this point they’re businessmen with schedules to keep. There’s none of the peripheral lawlessness that made up his earlier work, or makes up really any good comedy, especially in the Apatow era. This movie is only worth watching for two reasons: 1. it will pump you up if your on the way to the casino, and 2. evil Amy Poehler is so much better than civic do-gooder Amy Poehler.

Snatched - Jonathan Levine

Is Amy Schumer the first comedian since Jerry Seinfeld who’s funnier in their scripted work than they are in their stand up? Anyway, until she starts phoning it in like elder statesman Will Ferrell, or is supplanted by someone newer, she’s my comedy protagonist of choice. Why did people take on a pass on this? Cuz the plotting is lazy? When isn’t it in a comedy?

Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House - Peter Landesman

This movie is a huge mess but I refuse to not like it. It’s murky, paranoid, serious; in other words a great spy movie, about institutions of American government that dislike, distrust, and actively work to undermine one another. Nixon is barely even mentioned until the end, and the Washington Post is barely mentioned at all. But this should have been a miniseries or a novel. It’s a ten hour story condensed into two, and thus makes even less sense than a good spy movie ought to.

The Dark Tower - Nikolaj Arcel

As someone who has not read the books and wasn’t even aware there was a cult behind them, I can say this is a perfectly enjoyable plane watch.

Battle of the Sexes - Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris

I suppose this is the safe and logical choice for the recent Oscar winner, and it’s not a bad movie by any stretch. The actual battle scene at the end is quite excellent. But ignoring the current political environment, a movie where a tennis prodigy discovers her sexuality and takes on a boy’s club is much less interesting to me than a movie about a hustler who’s past his prime, gambling with his buddies and turning himself into a heel. Steve Carrell plays it as a good natured ode to a dopey strand of American hustle. He’s the best thing in this. But of course that’s not why this movie got made. I guess I’m ultimately just a member of the boy’s club. 

American Made - Doug Liman

Speaking of American Hustle, this Goodfellas in planes strikes me as more Hustle with drugs, inasmuch as the ostensible good guys, the feds, are really just a bunch of selfish ambitious cowboys playing with house money. Where Bradley Cooper’s FBI agent was too stupid to realize how bad he was at his job, American Made’s Domhnall Gleason, who I understand is now in every movie, is some kind of CIA stud with no accountability and no budgetary restraints, coming up with increasingly outlandish ideas for which there are no consequences at all. When Tom Cruise starts working with Colombian drug cartels, the implication seems to be that everybody knows and nobody really cares. I’m not sure this movie makes any sense at all, or if it’s supposed to. It’s buoyed by movie star Tom Cruise at his movie star best, bringing a slight, slight maturity to his Top Gun self.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi - Rian Johnson

In The Force Awakens Adam Driver was the only good part of a bad movie. Now he’s the best part of a great movie. 

The Lost City of Z - James Gray

The epic as a genre seems to me inherently flawed; who wants a movie that goes on too long and changes tone 7 times? This is an interesting one: it's first foray down the river comes with Apocalypse Now ambitions that it holds its own next to. The second trip is fun and captivating. The third trip, after extended scenes of World War One and, I don’t know, some family stuff, is too little too late. Basically, when this movie is in the jungle, it’s great. When it’s not, it’s not.

Lady Bird - Greta Gerwig

Let me stand apart from the glut of people my age who thought this movie was made specifically for them, and say that this movie was made specifically not for me. I can’t think of anything I want to see less than a coming of age tale called Lady Bird about a high school senior who decides to call herself “Lady Bird.” But the thing about good movies is that they transcend premise. Greta Gerwig isn’t dogmatically sticking to genre here--the dialogue is sharper than the average movie about an idiosyncratic high school senior, the parents and their financial situation occupy a more central role, and when the protagonist briefly tries to fit in with the cool kids, she kinda pulls it off--but really she’s just made a better coming of age movie than most people who try ever do. This is what we all would like to turn our childhood memories into. And for those concerned, like I was, by a trailer full of precious dialogue, the movie is so snappily edited that lines that would read as self-indulgent or treacly come out down and dirty in practice.

The Disaster Artist - James Franco

One of the impressive things about this movie is that it’s a comedy that doesn’t come at the expense of it’s subject: a man who in a slurred Slavic accent tells a room full of theater students “I’m not villain, you are villain!” A man who in other words could have an entire Office-style show built around him by a less charitable filmmaker. But James Franco is here to celebrate this bad movie, and honor the weirdo who made it. This isn’t the direction I would have gone in: I’d be too curious about the why and the who. But Franco does a really good job with his material. This is a really good and funny movie, with a murderer’s row of supporting actors who should all be doing stuff like this rather than whatever the fuck Seth Rogen is working on right now. Franco paints Tommy Wiseau as a pretty damaged guy with boundless ambition and absolutely no understanding of how human beings behave or how to interact with them--at one point he talks about wanting to run his own planet--but he keeps it light. Our man Tommy gets a standing ovation at the end, which I don’t believe really happened, but in this context I support.

I, Tonya - Craig Gillespie

One thing about Tonya Harding is that if she were coming up now, in the era of Lavar Ball and Jezebel, she’d be uncontroversially loved, and never would have had to club anyone in the kneecap. As far as I’m concerned she’s owed a revisit, which this movie gives her, and makes her look sympathetic and talented and fundamentally decent, if a little unwilling to take responsibility for anything at all. Anyway it’s a pretty damn good movie. Not quite as wild as it’s masterpiece of a trailer suggests, but pretty fun and breezy the whole way through.

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle - Jake Kasdan

Nowadays, most theaters will let you bring alcohol into the screening. So here’s a fun game: go see comedies you have no interest in, and drink steadily throughout them. Preferably with others. I’m not being a dick here, I found this experience highly enjoyable.

The Shape of Water - Guillermo del Toro

Pan’s Labyrinth has earned Guillermo a ton of goodwill. And I mean, I caught part of Hellboy 2 on HBO the other night and that is a flick. This may be his next one-for-me, but it’s not Pan’s Cold War. The genius of his earlier masterpiece was that the descent into nightmare of its real life surroundings was mirrored by the descent into nightmare of its fairy tale. This is a pretty simple love story between a mute woman and a fish man, set during the Cold War. It’s a ripe premise and a ripe backdrop that Guillermo weirdly squanders. Any movie that casts as its villain Michael Shannon, the strangest and most intense man alive, and then makes him just another square 1950s Keepin’ up with the Joneses asshole, isn’t going to stand up to Pan’s Labyrinth. This movie is a love story between a mute woman and a fish man. It should be a whole lot weirder, is my point.

Logan - James Mangold

What this movie gets so right is rather than make super hero movies that could conceivably take place in our world, directors should make super hero movies that would take place if they were the real world. Hence the cursing, the ultraviolence, and the theme of consequence which hangs over Logan like a lampshade. Watching Wolverine and Professor X say “fuck” and brutally murder government agents feels like removing the sanitizing goggles that the older movies were shot through and seeing them for the first time as they really are. These are two badly broken people keeping each other alive. It’s also by happy accident a movie for the era of Trump, where a shitty present has the bad guys in the driver’s seat and forces everyone in the margins back into hiding. Patrick Stewart brings warmth and realism to a new version of an old role. This is the best super hero movie ever made.

Darkest Hour - Joe Wright

So Gary Oldman’s definitely going to win the Oscar here, right? It’s fine, he deserves it. I could have used more about who Winston Churchill was, why he was such an eccentric alcoholic, but as a portrait of a great man working through his defining moment this is a great movie. Between this and Lincoln I hope every new biopic is about the defining moment of a great person’s life. So much more interesting than biopics about great people.

Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri - Martin McDonagh

At first I thought he was just making fun of American hillbillies. But if this isn’t his best movie, it’s definitely his deepest. Like a darker redneck Batman it’s main character lets a justified anger turn her into kind of a monster, and maybe gets redeemed at the end. It’s funny and entirely surprising. Sam Rockwell should get nominated.

The Big Sick - Michael Showalter

A movie about two saintly parents dealing with not only their comatose daughter, but an overgrown forty-year old child who’s rude to them yet refuses to leave them alone, and never has to face his own pathetic shortcomings because sometimes people are racist to him. Fuck this piece of shit movie.

Thor: Ragnarock - Taikki Waititi

Chris Hemsworth seems cool. 

Last Flag Flying - Richard Linklater

Eh. I’m much less of a Linklater partisan than most, but this movie actually wasn’t that well received. It’s not bad, it just kinda meanders, and I actually don’t think Bryan Cranston or Steve Carrell are particularly good actors. It’s anger is righteous though, and Lawrence Fishburn is a titan.

Blade Runner 2049 - Denis Villeneuve

This one slows down a little once the plot kicks in, but holy god does it look good. A worthy heir to the original.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer - Yorgos Lanthimos

I think I figured it out--this guy likes to set up insane premises, force his characters to speak so flatly that it seems absurd, and then lift the gate and see how the ball rolls down the hill. Every character in this movie acts calm and rational and mostly human in the face of something so bizarre and terrifying as to defy logic. I like The Lobster more because I suspect it had more to say, but this one keeps you on a knife’s edge and forces you to prepare yourself for anything.

Wind River - Taylor Sheridan

This is the third screenplay and first directorial effort from the guy who wrote Sicario and Hell or High Water, two of the best movies of the past few years. This is his worst movie. I suspect the culprit is novice direction. Despite this having a 501(c)4 title card at the end, for the first time I’m not sure what the point is or what he was trying to say. But I hold this guy to a high standard, it’s still pretty damn good. It looks great and the story’s good. 

The Foreigner - Martin Campbell

This is a movie about Jackie Chan--still kicking ass in his 60s--avenging his dead daughter by boobytrapping a woods outside of a mansion, and another movie about a radical Irish politician and his cronies agitating for Irish independence, possibly through terrorism. Both of these movies should be awesome, although only one of them is. I don’t want to spoil by giving away the answer, but you can probably guess.

Marshall - Reginald Hudlin

A pretty simple courthouse movie about the future Supreme Court Justice when he was just a lawyer who apparently never spent a day in his life being intimidated by racism or the second smartest guy in the room. Sure, why not?

The Babysitter - McG

The second best horror/comedy of the year. My man McG is still killin’ it.

The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) - Noah Baumbach

Noah Baumbach is a guy who likes a lot of stuff I don’t, but he’s enough of an adult here to write adults who don’t seem trapped in the imagination of a guy who hasn’t grown up yet. This is a really entertaining movie. Adam Sandler is very good.

It - Andres Muschietti

I’m a little surprised this didn’t take more flack for being the R-rated Stranger Things. This is also about a group of oddball friends dealing with something weird and scary in that sleepy town called 80′s Nostalgia. It even has one of the same damn actors. But maybe it didn’t take more heat for the simple reason that it’s really good. It might not hold up on repeated viewings the same way Stranger Things really doesn’t, but it’s the best horror/comedy of the year.

mother! - Darren Aronofsky

The more I think about it, the more I like it. I went back and watched some of his other movies, and concluded that Black Swan might be his masterpiece by default, but he’s never made something I really loved. He still hasn’t, but this might be his best movie yet. It’s about Adam and Eve, and it’s about mother earth, and it’s about a self-absorbed artist wrenching everything he can out of his muse. But it seems like Aronofsky is having fun screwing around with all these concepts rather than somehow trying to tie them all together or say something profound about any one of them. Which makes the movie a lot more fun than it’s reputation suggests. In any case, my immediate take walking out of the theater was that it more than anything was about some poor guy who gave up everything he had just to write a damn poem.

Logan Lucky - Steven Soderbergh

This one didn’t do nearly as well as I thought it would, which might have more to do with its distribution model than anything else. Ocean’s 11 for hillbillies couldn’t be more accurate, but it’s not criticism. At least not coming from me. First of all, Ocean’s 11 is like the perfect movie. Second of all, I mostly love redneck culture. Adam Driver has an amazing ability to land roles that shortchange him and make great work out of them anyway. And every real man knows Channing Tatum is a better star than George Clooney.

Dunkirk - Christopher Nolan

Chris Nolan isn’t any good at telling stories, and anyway doesn’t seem to like doing it, so it’s no mystery why his best movie bags the plot completely. Even with it’s time looping gimmick premise this movie takes place entirely in real time, in the present, which is, it turns out, by far the best way to shoot a war movie. It’s hard to imagine something better coming out this year.

Baby Driver - Edgar Wright

The best music video ever made. Pour one out for Kevin Spacey.

Wonder Woman - Patty Jenkins

I resist these pieces of shit like Roy Moore resists girls who can buy their own alcohol, but every year I end up seeing one or two. This is probably the best case scenario for a DC comic book movie in 2017. Gal Gadot is a very pretty lady. This coulda been a good WWI movie.

Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer - Joseph Cedar

Richard Gere plays a possibly homeless and mostly benevolent conman who befriends an Israeli bureaucrat and sees his fortune briefly change when said bureaucrat stumbles into the Prime Minister position. I walked into this one completely blind because it was March and I wanted to see a movie. I might be the only person outside of Israel who’s ever seen it. Which is unfortunate, because it’s better than a movie dumped out in March has any right to be. Kinda funny and kinda sad. Kinda satirical and very warm.

Get Out - Jordan Peele

Of course it’s a little overrated at this point. How could it not be? But the first hour of Jordan Peele’s cultural explosion is perfect--a breakdown of every awkward moment between black people and--let’s be honest--all white people. The second half is less deep and a little less fun: it’s when the social commentary flick turns into a genre film. But it’s a damn good genre film. Deservedly on everyone’s top ten list.

A Cure For Wellness - Gore Verbinski

I caught this one of the strength of it’s trailer and thought it was excellent, a creepy kind of horror movie that not enough people saw, about a health clinic that either prolongs or sucks the life out of rich retirees. Kind of a Shutter Island for a crowd less inclined to have its mind fucked.