2017 Films: #11. Dunkirk

July 29th in Chicago, IL. Legend has it that writer/director Christopher Nolan was inspired on a trip with his wife across the English Channel to Dunkirk some 25 years ago. He drafted a 67 page story and decided to shelve it until he became the best director of the early 21st century.

The film is based on the allied evacuation of Dunkirk that took place from 26 May - June 04 1940. Nolan's story is told in three parts: The Mole, The Sea and The Air. The main focus is on small groups within each story, so don't expect a lot of big shots or grandeur, a la Saving Private Ryan or The Longest Day. Nolan keeps it small. I never got the feel that there were over 300,000 soldiers on the beach just waiting for a miracle. Nolan does an excellent job of building tension. The troops on the beach are not constantly strafed by any means, they're just stuck there. Waiting. Rescue or death. It reminded of the scene in Jaws when Quint says he was most scared when it was his turn to be rescued.

The Mole portion deals with the complexities of getting ships in and out of the area in order to evacuate. Kenneth Branagh is the British Naval officer in charge of the pier. He knows he faces an impossible task and remains steadfastly British about it. Every time a ship gets ready to depart, it's strafed by the Luftwaffe. Another failure. The Mole portion also handles the activities on the beach and centers on a few soldiers who are trying anything to get off the beach. This group of soldiers always seem to be going from the frying pan into the fire. Just when they seem to be making it out, things change for the worse. Most of the beach scenes are silent. No dialogue between character just silence. The combination of the silence and Hans Zimmer's score really build the tension.

The Sea portion deals with the Royal Navy's requisitioning of civilian boats to perform the rescue. Mark Rylance plays a man who answers the call and takes his two sons, rather than Royal Navy personnel, on the trip across the Channel. They pick up a soldier stranded on a sunken ship who has no desire to go back to Dunkirk in any way, shape or form. Nolan uses a lot of wide shots to give the viewer the idea of how vast the English Channel is. This reminds everyone that the task will not be easy.

The Air portion deals with the air cover provided by the RAF. It's a tight focus on three pilots, one being Tom Hardy, and their mission. After engaging a group of enemy planes, Hardy quickly finds himself alone (his wing man has to ditch and is rescued by Rylance's character) and with a busted fuel gauge, which will obviously come into play later. Hardy bravely defends ships from air attacks and manages to down a dive bomber about to strafe the crowded pier while out of gas.

The film is a non-linear narrative and all three portions overlap, it took me a few minutes to realize this, so you see things from each group involved. Nolan utilizes the "hide the monster" trope. Aside from the Luftwaffe, the villain, is never shown. They have an ominous presence but they have no face. The acting is great, the cinematography is awesome, the aerial shots are nothing short of amazing and the score is brilliant, expecting nothing less from Hans Zimmer. There's a reason the picture received a 93% rating from Rotten Tomatoes, it's a helluva film. Nolan has cemented himself as a "must see" director and Dunkirk is a film that needs to be experienced in the theater. 

2017 Films: #10. Clinical

A Netflix viewing on July 22nd. As we all know, Netflix has been producing a lot of it's own content recently. There are some hits and there are some misses. The good stuff can be difficult to find, so sometimes you get lucky.

This picture is directed by Alistair Legrand, who also co-wrote the film with Luke Harvis. Legrand set out to make a part horror part thriller that's not exactly horror, though it does get a little gory at times, but not exactly a thriller. The film has a run time of 104 minutes but gets dull and the tension isn't really there. The story is a series of tropes thrown together. I can tell where the film wanted to go but it got off a few exits too early.

The plot centers around Dr. Jane Mathis (Vinessa Shaw), a psychiatrist who works with troubled patients. On a dark and rainy night she's attacked by a patient, Nora (played nicely India Eisley, sure she looks like the girl from the well from The Ring, which probably is not an accident, but she adequately creepy but not really that scary as she weighs about 96 pounds), who cuts up Dr. Mathis with a glass shard before unsuccessfully trying to kill herself by slicing her throat. This traumatic experience forces Dr. Mathis into a self imposed exile, though she still manages to get into a serious relationship with a cop of all people despite being a recluse, and into treatment with Dr. Drummond (Walter Peck(er)). Of course Dr. Mathis can't leave well enough alone and she takes on a new patient, Alex (Kevin Rahm), that's a special case and against the wishes of Dr. Drummond.

Dr. Mathis is also seeing visions of Nora in places because she's still haunted by the attack. Her sessions with Alex (who she treats in her home so you know that will come back to bite her) get more and more intense as do her visions of Nora. Long story short, Dr. Mathis has a vision of Nora attacking her in her home and she kills her in self defense. But she wakes up in the insane asylum only to find out she killed her boyfriend. Dr. Mathis manages to escape the asylum, very poor security there as Nora escaped as well, and falls into the hands of the person who set her up. I don't want to give it away but it's not that hard considering there are only a few major characters. This is what passes for a twist ending. Meh, at best.

The acting is ok and there's people you've seen before but may have look up. The plot is up and down and has an identity crisis, is it horror or is it a thriller? It's neither really. There's not enough tension to be a thriller and it's only link to horror is gruesome deaths and the fact that all of the bodies wind up displayed at Dr. Mathis' home at the end, Friday the 13th style. The film isn't that good but I didn't really mind that I'll never get those 104 minutes back. 

2017 Films: #9. Baby Driver

July 8th in Chicago, IL. Edgar Wright wrote and directed this action comedy that currently carries a 96% Rotten Tomatoes rating and has taken in $62 million through July 12th. Now, there's a lot to like about this film; great acting, awesome soundtrack, great action scenes, solid cast and it's heist film! However, a 96% rating is a bit high. I mean, that's a better rating than Heat for crying out loud! I guess I should blame millennials like everyone else.

Anyway, the film revolves around a twenty something named Baby and he's a driver. A really good getaway driver to be precise. Baby (Ansel Elgort), it's a code name, is currently residing in Atlanta and works part time for Doc, (Kevin Spacey) a guy who puts together teams to take down scores, where do these jobs exist? Is there a craigslist for the criminal underworld? He never uses the same combination twice but Baby is his driver of choice because Baby owes him a debt. Baby's parents were killed in a car crash and suffers from tinnitus as result. That's why he always wears headphones and listens to amazing tunes on his iPod (it's explained why he uses an iPod so relax).

The team for this 1st job consists of Buddy, Griff and Darling (Bernthal, Hamm and Eiza González respectively). With Baby behind the wheel and the fact that there's no traffic on I-75 in Atlanta at 0900 on weekday, the job goes off without a hitch. In between scores, Baby frequents a diner and falls for a waitress named Debora. Baby wastes little time and tells Debora she's beautiful and she's pretty much smitten with him.

Doc calls upon Baby for the "one more job" cliche. This team is a little more nervy than the last crew. This crew is led by Bats (Foxx), who is the kill them all and let god sort them out kind of guy; No-Nose (Flea) and JD. This job doesn't quite go off as planned but thanks to some sweet getaway driving by Baby, they getaway.

It turns out that despite paying off his debt to Doc, that wasn't Baby's last job. It's the old "one more job" cliche. So it's a given that things will go bad. Why will it go bad you ask? Because Bats is part of the team, he's unhinged remember, along with Buddy and Darling. Baby tries to get out and take Debora with him but that doesn't work and the job goes south. Deep south. In the melee after the job,  the gang splits up and it turns into the shootout scene from Heat. Imagine that. From that point there's a few more cliches and I won't giveaway the ending.

Sure you have to suspend your disbelief at times and there's even Motown lip sync scenes but this a good film that's really fun to watch. It's a good time at the theater. It gets a little corny at times but the action scenes more than make up for it. My wife and I had a real good time.

2017 Films: #8. XX

A Netflix viewing on July 3rd in Chicago, IL. This is an anthology horror film with four different stories all directed and written by females with a female perspective.

The first segment, "The Box" is directed by Jovanka Vuckovic. The story starts off with a mother and her two grade school age children, let's say 9 and 11 years old, on a train heading home. The young son pesters an old man with the old, "what's in the box" routine. The man assure the mother that it's cool and shows the boy. Based on the boy's reaction, he immediately regrets it. At dinner the boy doesn't have an appetite. This persists for several nights to the point where the parents take him to a doctor but the boy just isn't hungry. Eventually it spreads to the daughter and the father. This leads to the mother having a dream that she's the main course. Come Xmas, the father, daughter and son are emaciated but no one minds. Eventually everyone dies and the mother is left scouring the train for the man who showed her son the contents of the box.

The 2nd story "The Birthday Party," directed by St. Vincent, involves a family on the day of their young daughter's birthday. The mother i s bit of an OCD freak and she wants to things to go perfectly. Yet she has to deal with one problem after another. Weird nanny (?), daughter ruins her costume and her husband turns up dead. She does everything possible to keep her husband's death from their daughter but something always turns up. The mother will not allow her daughter's birthday be synonymous with her husband's death. It wasn't meant to be.

 The 3rd story, "Don't Fall" was directed by Roxanne Benjamin and finds four friends hiking and camping in the desert. One of the friends is afraid of heights. The group comes across an ancient cave painting that looks a little creepy. At their secluded campsite (again, nothing good happens in a film when people are secluded in the wilderness) Gretchen, the one who's afraid of heights, get's possessed by an entity that looks a lot like one of the cave paintings. Things don't go well for the other three friends.

The final story, "Her Only Living Son," is directed by Karyn Kusama and it deals with Cora and her son Andy's 18th birthday. You see, Andy has never met his father and Cora has moved them around trying to keep away from the father. Things are a little weird as they get close to Andy's birthday. The mailman is weird, Andy is really acting out and there's a violent incident at school between Andy and another student (Andy would have been suspended and possibly arrested in the real world, it was nothing short of aggravated assault). School officials tell Cora what special kid Andy is but they say it in a weird way. Like, Andy's father is Satan weird. Cora does everything she can to make sure that Andy does not go away with his father, she even says that he "was never there" for Andy and is only coming after Cora did all the hard work.

All the segments were good, the film received a 72% Rotten Tomatoes rating . "Don't Fall" was probably the weakest of the four but had the most horror of them. "The Birthday Party" was more a dark comedy than anything resembling horror. It showed the lengths a mother will take to make a child's birthday special. "The Box" is probably the segment that would make the best feature length film and the most creepy. "Her Only Living Son" could be a feature length film but when supernatural horror can go off the rails. It's hard to get it right. To me, they all seem to devolve into some sh*tty Exorcist knock-off.  I thought some of the best dialogue was delivered at the end of the segment.

All four directors are worth keeping an eye on to see what they come up with next. This is a film worth watching, it goes by quickly at 80 minutes and is something different. A nice change of pace.

2017 Films: #7. The Blackcoat's Daughter

July 1st in Chicago, IL. My wife and I were looking for something to watch on a Saturday night and after about an hour of surfing On Demand, Netflix and iTunes, we were settled on this title as an iTunes rental.

The film starts off at an upstate New York all girls Catholic boarding school preparing for a winter break. Sally Draper is a freshman who's forced to stay over the break until her parents are able to come pick her up. Also staying over is "cool chick" Rose (Lucy Boynton), who's been asked by the headmaster to "keep an eye" on the freshman. Suffice to say Kat is a little weird and Rose being a "cool chick" isn't thrilled with the task. After telling Kat a scary story about nuns and demons, Rose sneaks out for a date. Despite no one being at the school except for the girls and two female caretakers, Rose and her boyfriend are not exactly clandestine when they get back to the school. When Rose returns, she finds Kat in the boiler room. Weird (the boiler room plays an integral part in the plot so I won't spoil it).

Meanwhile Joan (Emma Roberts) is at a bus station having flashbacks and gets ride from Bill and Linda (James Remar and Lauren Holly) who are on there way upstate. Bill picked up Joan because he reminds her of his daughter. Back at the school things are getting weirder when Kat pukes at breakfast. Things goes bad for the women staying at the school soon after. After leaving a motel, Joan, Bill and Linda get back on the road to get ahead of the storm. Things go bad for them.

There's a bit of twist here that I don't want to reveal because this was a good film. Solid acting, good story and the tension builds up slowly. Suffice to say my wife figured out the plot twist (student became the master) and it was a nice little twist. I wasn't able to get any info on the film's budget but trust me, it wasn't very big. Writer/Director Oz Perkins, making his directorial debut, does some nice things with a small budget. Perkins does a nice job with melding slasher and supernatural aspects of the film. There's just enough of each to keep it interesting. The film received a 74% Rotten Tomates rating and deservedly so. The film slow down a little but not too much over the less than 90 minute run time. This is a nice little film that's worth watching.

2017 Films: #6. Wonder Woman

June 13th in Charleston, WV. It seems we've been  waiting for years for Wonder Woman to hit the big screen. During that time in the DCEU, Superman was rebooted twice. Batman had three films with Christian Bale then switched to Ben Affleck and a forgettable Green Lantern film was released. There was even a failed Wonder Woman TV pilot. What we did get was a taste of everyone's favorite Amazon on last year's lousy Batman v. Superman. She was one of the very few bright spots.

Rotten Tomatoes gave the film a staggering 92%. The film has made over $350 million domestically to date to with a $100 million opening weekend. Now I don't feel the movie warranted a 92% rating. The story borrows heavily Captain America: The First Avenger. But I guess they the writers wanted to stick with a proven formula and they did, heck, they even found a way for Chris Pine to ride a motorcycle. It took a long time to get Wonder Woman to the big screen and it's a huge success. Wonder Woman will be appearing next in the upcoming Justice League film set to be released later this year. Of the four DCEU films that have been released so far, this one is by far the best. That may not be saying much but it's a good start.

The picture is directed by Patty Jenkins and she did a nice job putting this blockbuster together. So much so that she's already attached to the sequel as a writer. The action scenes are put together well and the film is a lot of fun. The film has an all-star cast with stand out performances from  Connie Nielsen as Hippolyta, Diana's over protective mother and Robin Wright as Antiope, Diana's aunt who trains Diana as a warrior against her mother's wishes. To be honest, it's the females that have all of the good parts and do the best work. Chris Pine is essentially Jim Kirk; Danny Huston, as usual, plays a bad guy and David Thewlis plays a British guy. Elena Anaya is the evil Dr. Maru, who I thought could've used a bit more development. That brings us to Gal Gadot. Gadot took a lot of static when it was announced in 2013 that she would be playing the role. I felt she'd be fine and dammit! She was awesome. Shes does real well in the action scenes and she has a bit of innocence about her when she ventures into man's world (the old fish out of water cliche) for the first time. It seemed to me like the women in the cast, not to mention Jenkins, knew what was at stake (this being the first super hero film with a female lead meaning that box office failure would have turned it into the only female superhero film) and knocked it out of the park. Oh, by the way, most of the problems I have are with the story which was written by three men. Which is probably why Jenkins is attached to the sequel as a writer.

The story is derivative. We get an Amazon backstory but Diana's arc follows the "you're special/the power comes from within you" trope. Make no mistake, just because "she's special" doesn't mean that Diana doesn't work her tail off. Antiope trains her and "good enough" isn't part of her vocabulary. I can sit here and make fun of the story (as I mentioned earlier it borrows a lot from the MCU overall which is probably a good choice seeing how Marvel has had their sh*t together for sometime now) and poke holes in the plot all day long, personally I would wait until Cinema Sins releases their video as they are much better at it than myself. This film is a lot of fun and a must see on the big screen.

2017 Films: #3. Get Me Roger Stone

A Netflix documentary viewed on May 13th in Chicago, IL. My wife chose this one because of the person we currently have in the White House. I'm going to try to leave any opinions I have about President Trump to a minimum. The fact that no news outlet gave hi a chance to win the election is not "fake news." It's an incorrect prediction. Villanova was not supposed to defeat Georgetown in the 1985 NCAA Men's Basketball National Championship game. Yet the Wildcats, much like Trump, defied logic and won. Just like Trump.

Anyway, Mr. Stone is a right-wing talking head, strategist and lobbyist. Get a a job with President Richard Nixon at a very young age. Nixon was apparently impressed with the man's moxie. The film traces Stone's life and role in politics. He's been called a lot of different things and not all of them nice depending on who you talk to. I got the feeling that Stone revels in what's said about him. He loves it all, whether he's referred to as a "dirty trickster" or "provocateur," Stone loves it. He loves the spotlight and loves being talked about.

This is an interesting look into not just Stone's life and into the uglier side of politics. Stone is a bit of a dirty player but that's the way the game is played these days (it's being going on in politics for a long, long time) and it's why he's been so successful. Some of it can be hard to stomach depending on how you lean politically. Perhaps the DNC should watch, maybe they can formulate a winning strategy. 

2017 Films: #5. Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 2

June 14th in Charleston, WV. Everyone is back for the sequel. The film received an 81% Rotten Tomatoes rating, opened to the tune of $146 million and has grossed over $376 million domestically. It is a commercial success by any standard.

Everyone's favorite group of space pirates are at it again. The film opens up with the gang protecting valuable batteries from an inter-dimensional monster, it's desire for the batteries are never explained, for the Sovereign race, essentially elves of middle earth in space (gold skin, tall, great hair, good looking, smart, talented and a heavy air of superiority).

This is Ayesha, the queen if you will. She's come a long way since here early days as bathing suit clad eye candy...

It's nice to know that alien females still have all the goods in the right spot. 

After they finish the job, the Guardians draw the ire of the Sovereigns for stealing some of the batteries they were paid to protect. This sets off a series of events that gets the gang into one mess after another.

The main story arcs are Quill's daddy issues, Gamora and Nebula having sister issues and of course the fate of the universe hanging in the balance. Quill is torn between the abandonment issues with his birth father, Ego (nicely played by Kurt Russell), the living planet and the man that raised him, Yondu. Despite getting together in the last film, Quill and Gamora are in the "will they, won't they" portion of their relationship. Come to find out that Nebula and Gamora, daughters of the evil Thanos, have a "Jan v. Marcia" type relationship. We also get Groot, a cute as the dickens little plant is setting himself up for his teenage years in the next installment. Rocket's arc is the "I won't let anybody in because I'm afraid of being hurt" cliche. Drax is pretty much just comic relief. Quite a step down from the hell bent on revenge bad ass he was in the first film.

The effects were good, the acting was good (seriously, Kurt Russell was perfectly cast), lots of cool cameos, a few laugh out loud moments and a terrific soundtrack but everything was pretty predictable. We all know that there's a 3rd film in works so it's not climactic when the gang is facing "certain" death at the end. Hell! Even Nebula survives! I understand that Marvel has a grand plan. The Guardians will have a stand alone 3rd film that will somehow tie-in into a future Infinity Wars story line. Until then, they're going to give us a lot of style but not that much substance. If you've invested time in the films, like a lot of people, then you should see the film. Just be sure to stay for the all the post credit scenes. There's a few of them. But no Thanos.