Wind River (2017, Taylor Sheridan) - 5/10
A female FBI agent from Las Vages shows up in snowy Wyoming to assist local police with a murder investigation. There's three tiresome cliches in that premise, and Wind River chooses to run with all of them. First: A lady cop, oh no... there's no way she's up to the task. Or is she?!
Second: person from somewhere warm comes to somewhere cold and is unprepared.
Third: jurisdictional pissing contest. "It's federal!" "No, it's reservation land!".
The cast and the cinematography and the well executed action sequences all deserved so much better than to be built on this boring story. Wyoming in the winter is beautiful and large and this captures it. But the scene to scene drama was unoriginal or weirdly off key. The experience was just okay.
Lady Bird (2017, Greta Gerwig) - 4/10
Not my style. It exists in a weird middle ground where it's not quite funny and not quite emotional. I had the same reaction to it as Noah Baumbach's
Mistress America, Whit Stillman's
Metropolitan and Hal Hartly's
Trust. Lotta rambling. Lotta confident quirk.
You could push it left and it would be Napoleon Dynamite and I would laugh. You could push it right and it would be a Mike Leigh film and I would cry. Or you could do neither and put me to sleep. I get what the film is. I don't get what people enjoy about it.
The Shape of Water (2017, Guillermo del Toro) 4/10
Somehow watching a movie about a
mute woman who had underwater sex with an aqua-monster my reaction was
, "I wish it had been weirder".
I was initially pretty excited with the film and how it dove in the deep end and didn't come up for air. I thought "great, we're skipping all the boring parts where the protagonist takes 400 years to figure out what we already know". The film goes hard and fast and it had me completely at a loss for where things might be headed. And then it didn't. It hit the breaks and became just another love story.
It had me and lost me.
Meagan Leavey (2017, Gabriela Cowperthwaite) - 1/10
Even worse than I feared a Hollywoodized military movie about a soldier and her dog could be. Just unconvincing in every respect. It tries very hard to be raw... To be the unglamorous side of military life, and thereby make you feel like you're getting a real story. But it's shot like a conventional blockbuster (without a blockbuster's buget). What I think it really needed was an indie touch. Just forgo the action/gunfire scenes entirely since they were way to generic to be any good, and cut right to the ugly aftermath.
The dog stuff isn't well executed either. Everything comes too easy. Blah.