MOVIE: The Artist (2011)

Have you ever seen a movie so absolutely wonderful from start to finish that at the end you stood up and cheered?  Damn the people around you and their funny looks?

I have.

Highly, HIGHLY recommended.  I’ve never seen anything like this film (a silent movie about the end of the silent movie era) — I have never smiled so long and so hard during a film that my cheeks hurt (Dujardin’s grin is so infectious, you won’t be able to keep your own face still), I have never made such an enormous fool out of myself as the final credits rolled, and I have never left a theater dancing.  I did all those things with The Artist.  And I cannot WAIT to do them all again soon.

DO NOT MISS!  Now this is how you start a new year of movie-watching right.  Good goddamn, it’s a delight.  An utter delight.

[Prequeue at Netflix | View trailer]

Genre:  Comedy, Drama
Cast:  Jean Dujardin, Bérénice Bejo, John Goodman, James Cromwell, Penelope Ann Miller, Missi Pyle, Malcolm McDowell

MOVIE: Shame (2011)

Stunning.

Flawed.

And that’s about all I can really say about this film.  Anything else would be too much.  For me, I mean.  To say.  To think.  To feel.  To write.  To share.  It is hard and heart-breaking, and also in desperate need of tighter editing.  Fassbender is brilliant.  Mulligan is me at 19, possibly for similar (though not identical) reasons.  And I hope I never, ever see this movie again.

That’s all I’ve got.

Oh, except for this:  this film is rated NC-17 and we were carded THREE TIMES going in (ticket counter, ticket taker, bouncer at entrance to theater itself).  Why?  The sex is not explicit, and the full-frontal nudity is not gratuitous.  Grow up, MPAA.

[Prequeue at Netflix | View trailer]

Genre:  Agony
Cast:  Michael Fassbender, Carey Mulligan, James Badge Dale, Nicole Beharie, Hannah Ware

MOVIE: The Ides of March (2011)

The entire time I was watching this incredibly depressing film about a presidential candidate (played by George Clooney) and his campaign manager (Ryan Gosling) who sell their souls (metaphorically) when they realize there’s no way to succeed in American politics if you have a moral core, I kept thinking about this passage from William Faulkner’s novel, Intruder in the Dust:

Some things you must always be unable to bear.  Some things you must never stop refusing to bear.  Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame.  No matter how young you are or how old you are you have got.  Not for kudos and not for cash; your picture in the paper nor money in the bank either. Just refuse to bear them.

Dear America:  WE ARE DOOMED.

(As for the film, it’s great, though dishearteningly believable.  I still think Ryan Gosling can’t act (sorry), but any movie that pits Philip Seymour Hoffman against Paul Giamatti is WELL worth shelling out nine bucks for.  So: recommended!  You might want to smuggle a pint of scotch in with you, though.  You’re gonna need the stiff drink when the credits roll, believe you me.)

[Prequeue at Netflix | View trailer]

Genre:  Drama, Political
Cast:  George Clooney, Ryan Gosling, Marisa Tomei, Paul Giamatti, Evan Rachel Wood, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jeffrey Wright, Max Minghella, Jennifer Ehle, Michael Mantell

MOVIE: The Debt (2011)

This incredibly entertaining (though requiring a bit of a “suspend your disbelief” attitude) movie tells the story of a group of Mossad agents who, in 1966, were given the task of taking out the hiding-in-East-Berlin “Surgeon of Birkenau,” Dieter Vogol, and who, 30 years later, find themselves caught in a lie that could be their undoing.

First, the 1966:  Experienced agent Stefan (Marton Csokas) has teamed up with younger agent David (Sam Worthington, who: borrrrring!) after finally having tracked Vogol down.  When they discover he’s an OB/GYN in Berlin, they request the assistance of a female agent, and are sent Rachel (Jessica Chastain), who looks like you could knock her over with a good sneeze, but who instead is a martial arts master who would probably pop you in the chin while she yelled “GESUNDHEIT, ALREADY” in your face (she’s bad ass, is what I’m saying — I liked her immensely).

Their plan forms quickly:  Rachel and David will pose as a married couple having trouble conceiving a child, get inside the clinic, and then kidnap Vogol.  From there, with the help of the Israeli government, they’ll smuggle him onto a train and back into West Berlin, where he’ll be taken away and tried for war crimes.  Rachel goes to a few (extremely creepy) appointments first, to get the lay of the land, so to speak, and then successfully manages to inject Vogol with a sedative, claiming he had a heart attack during the exam, while David and Stefan pose as ambulance drivers to whisk him off to the “hospital.”

At first, the plan goes smoothly, until a screw-up at the train depot leaves them stuck with Vogol indefinitely.  If they can’t get him out of East Berlin, their only choice is to take him home and hide him until they can.   And so they do, managing to keep him alive for weeks on end, despite the fact they all desperately want to kill him every time he opens his disgusting anti-Semitic mouth.

But one night, everything goes wrong and Vogol gets loose, knocking Rachel down, slicing open her face, and running out into the street.  Rachel manages to crawl to her gun, takes aim at his back through the open window and. . .

Cut to present day, and the now-older Rachel (Helen Mirren) is attending a  book release party for her daughter, who has written a book about the group’s extraordinary capture of Dieter Vogol.  Stefan (Tom Wilkinson) shows up, but there’s no sign of David (Ciarán Hinds) and when Rachel learns he committed suicide earlier that same day, she demands to know what Stefan knows — because he clearly knows something.  And that’s when we, the audience, learn the truth about Vogol and what happened to him after he fled that apartment thirty years ago.  It’s a truth that could ruin Rachel and Stefan’s lives, the lives of their daughter and her family (oh yeah, I left the love triangle part out — blah blah Rachel loves David but has sex with Stefan, she gets preggers, blah blah etc., yawn) and devastate Israel in general.  And it’s a truth Stefan wants to keep hidden, at any cost, and that only Rachel is physical able to erase.

Though there were many elements of the story that seemed a little too unbelievable or coincidental, I was absolutely riveted by this movie from start to finish.  The scenes from 1966 are thrilling and pack a strong emotional wallop as well (try to imagine, if you will, getting a pelvic exam from a monster — not once, but thrice).  And while the present-day scenes were much less evocative for me, the acting prowess of the stars of that half of the film is undeniable.  I mean, come on:  Helen Mirren, Tom Wilkinson, and Ciarán Hinds?  If they were the only three actors in any movie ever again, I’d be perfectly content.

This is not a flawless film, but I was surprised by how deeply engrossed I was in  it.  Never a dull moment, and lots of truly good ones to boot.

Definitely recommended, though you’re safe waiting for DVD, I would say.  Ciarán Hinds on the big screen is a lovely, lovely thing, but, you know, then he gets hit by a bus.

(SPOILER, I guess, except I usually don’t count anything that happens in the first 15 minutes of a film terribly spoilery.)

Incidentally, how do you pronounce the name Ciarán?  I keep meaning to look that up and not getting around to it.  And have any of you seen the original Israeli film?  Worth checking out?

[Prequeue at Netflix | View trailer]

Genre: Thriller
Cast:  Helen Mirren, Sam Worthington, Jessica Chastain, Jesper Christensen, Marton Csokas, Ciarán Hinds, Tom Wilkinson, Romi Aboulafia, Melinda Korcsog

MOVIE: Meek’s Cutoff (2011)

Set in 1845, this visually stunning film is about three young couples who have hired a mountain man named Stephen Meek to guide them over the Cascades west into Oregon (Meek is played by a completely unrecognizable Bruce Greenwood, by the way — I didn’t even know it was him until the final credits rolled. THAT IS A BEARD, FOLKS, THAT RIGHT THERE. WOW, YES, SOME BEARD YOU HAVE THERE, SIR).

As the movie opens, the group has been on the move weeks longer than Meek had originally estimated, and are on the verge of running out of both food and water.  Tensions are high and only get higher when the group begins to suspect Meek’s “short-cut” off the trail has resulted in their becoming hopelessly lost in the dry plains.  When they spot a lone Native American on a horse, Meek and the unofficial (by way of being the calmest, it seems) leader of the group, Soloman Tetherow, take off after him, bringing him back to the group in the hopes he can lead them to water.

This goes about as well as you might suspect.  Half the group is terrified of him, the other half wants to hang Meek for getting them lost in the first place, and Meek himself wants to shoot the Indian before he signals his tribe and a massacre ensues.  (Or, more likely, before everybody realizes they are, in fact, better off with the Indian as their guide and go ahead and hang Meek after all.)

Only the Tetherows (Will Patton and the truly amazing Michelle Williams) seem able to keep their heads, even after a terrible accident destroys the rest of their water and most of their belongings to boot.

If that doesn’t sound like much of  story for a full-length film, that’s because the story here isn’t really the point.  It’s not a movie about “plot.”  This stark, gorgeous film instead aims to transport us into the world of wagon trains in the Old West.  What were they really like?  We’ve seen them here and there in other films, read about them in books, but never have I found myself so wholly engaged in the awful, long, plodding, hot, exhausting hardness of what they truly must have been like.  This film is so unflinchingly realistic there are entire scenes in which no one speaks at all (and why would they?  what is there to say?), and the insane brightness of the daytime sunshine contrasted with the pitch black of the night scenes conveyed like nothing else I’ve seen the sensation of really being out there in the middle of nowhere with nothing but what fit into your tiny wagon and the dream of something better somewhere over there in the distance.

Everyone looks just about worn through by the time we enter the story, tempers flare and fade, the youngest wife is losing her shit, and through it all, Meek is desperately trying to maintain an air of leadership and experience long since transferred by most of the rest of the group to the half-naked, completely alien (to them) Native American, despite the fact they can’t communicate and, for all they know, he’s leading them straight to their deaths.

The film ends as abruptly as it began — we drop into their journey and then we drop back out.  But in between, we get a powerful experience as viewers, transported right to the hot, dry west with them, their fears ours, and their dreams ours too.

Highly, HIGHLY recommended (and my god, is there ANYTHING Michelle Williams can’t do?).  Absolutely breathtaking visually — the colors of this film are so incredible I wish I’d seen it on the big screen or at least in HD — and extremely moving in its simplicity as well.  Brilliant.

[Netflix it | Buy it]

Genre: Drama
Cast: Michelle Williams, Bruce Greenwood, Paul Dano, Shirley Henderson, Neal Huff, Zoe Kazan, Tommy Nelson, Will Patton, Rod Rondeaux

MOVIE: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part II (2011)

Now that it’s finally over — all the books, all the movies, all the everythings — I just wanted to say one last time:

From the bottom of my deep story-loving heart, J.K. Rowling, I thank you.  Because that?  Was one HELL of a ride.

(For those of you who are afraid the last movie might be a disappointment, by the way:  it isn’t.  Good goddamn, it was grand. Fare thee well, Mr. Potter.  It was a pleasure getting to know you.)

[Prequeue at Netflix | View trailer]

Genre:  Drama, Fantasy
Cast: Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint, Ralph Fiennes, Alan Rickman, Helena Bonham Carter, Tom Felton, Michael Gambon, John Hurt, Robbie Coltrane

MOVIE: The Conspirator (2010)

I’m not sure exactly what I was expecting from this film, but I guess it was, at the very least, something a lot more “Hollywood” — take the trial of Mary Surratt, charged with aiding and abetting in the murder of President Abraham Lincoln, and turn it into, you know, a John Grisham flick.  Something mindless and fun.

And so, I was surprised to find myself incredibly bored about 30 minutes in.  Until I realized what was actually going on with this film.  Then things got a little more interesting, and a lot more thought-provoking.

My theory here, and director and ex-Boyfriend of the Week Robert Redford should feel free to debate this in the comments if he feels so moved (hi, Bob!), is that this movie was made — and made now — because the court case of Mary Surratt so plainly speaks to our post-9/11 political-legal world.

Mary Surratt, the mother of one of John Wilkes Booth’s co-conspirators, 21 year-old John Surratt, ran a boarding house where many of the conspirators both lived and held “secret meetings” in the months leading up to the president’s assassination.  Though there was no evidence to support she knew what those meetings were about, let alone that she was actively participating in them, she was scooped up and tried with seven others not long after Lincoln’s death.

Assigned to defend her was young Capt. Aiken (James McAvoy, who bored me as much in this film as he does in most of his films — sorry, fans), a survivor and hero of the Civil War, who returned to his legal practice as soon as the war was over, despite job offers from the U.S. War Department Secretary, Edward Stanton (Kevin Kline).  A strong patriot, though a battle-weary one, he is initially furious about his assignment to defend Mary, believing her to be guilty.  Nevertheless, as the trial proceeds, he becomes increasingly more convinced of her innocence, and equally-increasingly more horrified by the way the proceedings are being handled by the government.

Mary, played here with pale-faced, sunken-eyed resignation by Robin Wright, is certain she will be found guilty, and for good reason.  The retribution-hungry government has decided to try each of the co-conspirators in a military tribunal, despite the fact they are civilians.  The  tribunal denies her the right to a jury of her peers, the ability to testify on her own behalf, and even the right of her defense council to demand full discovery of the evidence the prosecution has gathered against her.  An outraged, grieving country instead tries her based on unreliable testimony from unreliable “witnesses,” all clearly more interested in seeking revenge against this “enemy of the state” than in seeking justice.

Hmm, sound familiar?

In any case, though the story itself is fairly familiar (young lawyer’s naïve belief system challenged by complicated case) and also a bit on the slow-moving side , it’s a relevant, thoughtful one.  If you’re at all interested in the history, I think you’ll get a lot out of this film.  It doesn’t have the entertainment value that the usual Hollywood courtroom drama has — it’s got more of an “educational film” feel to it at times.  But once I realized what it was up to and let go of my expectations for mindless fun, I was even more entertained than I would’ve been otherwise, I think.  Such a surprise to go into a film thinking it’ll be kind of a throw-away and find instead a much more intriguing examination of the ways in which times don’t really seem to change.

Recommended!

[Netflix it | Buy it]

Genre:  Drama
Cast: James McAvoy, Robin Wright, Evan Rachel Wood, Alexis Bledel, Justin Long, Danny Huston, Norman Reedus, Kevin Kline, Tom Wilkinson

MOVIE: Hereafter (2010)

I remember thinking this film looked unbearably cheesy when I first saw the trailer for it a year or so ago.  When Matt Damon‘s character said the line, “It’s not a gift . . . it’s a curse,” I confess I laughed out loud in the theater, which I’m sure was incredibly annoying to everyone else there with me (sorry, but COME ON).  I had absolutely no intention of ever seeing this movie — none ‘tall — until the other day when my sister recommended it to me.  Not only had she enjoyed it, she said, but it involved a set of twins that had made her think of us (we’re fraternal, but close enough).  We don’t tend to seek out the same kinds of movies, but when we do hit on the same ones, we usually either both like them or both dislike them.  So her recommendation had some weight to it, and I decided to suck it up and give Hereafter a shot.

First things first, it IS ridiculously cheesy at times, especially at the end, when it is also ridiculously hokey.  And, what’s worse, Damon’s character, a psychic who recently retired because talking to dead people was seriously bumming him out, says that “It’s a curse” line not once but TWICE.  TWICE!  TWICE with the world’s most trite and annoying movie line of all time!  Whoever the screenwriter was, I’d like to take him out back and pop him one in the chin.

That said, I was surprisingly entertained by this film, and it made me think some too — not a lot, but some, for sure.  It’s got some interesting ideas about responsibility, the afterlife, perseverance in the face of adversity, the way people latch on to beliefs that don’t make any sense in order to get through difficult ordeals (my two cents), etc.  And it’s well acted, despite the fact it’s not very well-written (not just the dialogue, but it also lacks a clear mission and the end is absolutely unforgivably dumb).

The story comprises three separate tales which converge ham-handedly (but whatever) at the end.  The first is about a guy named George (Damon) who had brain surgery as a child that somehow left him with the ability to talk to dead people.  By touching your hands briefly, he can connect with someone you’ve lost and convey messages back and forth.  But after a successful career doing just that, George burned out and quit.  The constant grief wore on him, and the fact people treated him like a freak didn’t help much either.

So, he threw in the towel and took a new job, this time in construction, and though his brother (Jay Mohr) constantly pressures him to get back into the psychic biz, saying it’s his responsibility as someone with such a unique ability to help people, George is happier living his new “normal” life and wants no part of his old gig.

As his tale unfolds, the film introduces a second story, this time focusing on a young French woman named Marie, a news reporter who nearly dies when a tsunami hits the small island she is vacationing on in the beginning of the movie.  Obsessed with the peaceful visions she had as she was drowning, she begins exploring research on the “hereafter,” ultimately publishing a book on the very controversial and oft-disdained subject.

Meanwhile, the third tale weaves on in, this one about a little boy named Marcus, maybe 7 or 8 years old, whose identical twin brother is hit by a truck and killed one afternoon.  The boy’s mother is sent to rehab and he’s placed into temporary foster care, where he slowly begins to fall apart, lost and untethered without his “big” brother there to guide him (I can see why my sister could relate to this, as she’s always been my tether and guide as well).  When he comes across some web sites about psychics and the afterlife, he immediately robs his foster parents of their rainy-day fund and begins paying a series of kooks to talk to his brother in Heaven for him.  Though he knows each one is a phony, rarely getting any information correctly, he persists, desperate to get both his brother and his previous life back.

The three characters end up meeting at the end of the film (when, where, and how I’ll leave for you to discover, but I hope you believe in tremendously unbelievable coincidences. . .).  We knew it was bound to happen, of course, this being the way movies with parallel story lines typically go.   But even though the plot is predictable, the dialogue is cheesy, and almost all of Matt Damon’s storyline was completely expendable, I really enjoyed the other two plots and their characters, and the actors in those roles (Cécile De France as Marie and Frankie and George McLaren as the twins) did a wonderful job with their complexly emotional parts.

Overall, I’d say this one is well worth a rental if you’re interested in this kind of stuff.  (And, while I’m at it, allow me to also recommend the terrific sci-fi novel Passages by Connie Willis, which is also about the science and theory of the afterlife and is both better written and a lot more engaging than this movie.)

Incidentally, it turns out I’ll never be able to look at Matt Damon again without thinking of this (NSFW):  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSfoF6MhgLA&feature=related.  Hee.  Hee hee.  Hee hee hee hee hee.  Oy.

[Netflix it | Buy it]

Genre:  Drama
Cast:   Matt Damon, Cécile De France, Frankie & George McLaren (the twins), Bryce Dallas Howard, Jay Mohr

SIFF MOVIE: On the Ice (2011)

Alaska Natives Qalli and Aivaaq have been best friends since they were little.  Now that their senior year of high school is over, though, things have started to grow a little strained for the boys, primarily because Aivaaq has picked up a drug habit and knocked up his girlfriend, while Qalli is planning to leave their tiny Barrow community in a few months to go to college and create a better life for himself.   Suddenly, two boys who had everything in common are coming to realize they’re about to take dramatically different paths in life, and the friction this causes between them is hard to ignore.

But ignore it they do.  Or at least, they try to.  And so, thinking mostly in the now instead of the down-the-line, the two boys are spending as much of their last summer together as possible, going to parties, talking about girls, and hanging out with their friends.   In keeping with Inupiat traditions, both are also avid hunters, and one afternoon they decide to spend the following day on a seal hunt out on the ice, along with their friend James.

The night before their hunt, though, all three are at a party together.  Qalli leaves early, needing to go visit his grandmother, but Aivaaq and James end up getting hammered — and high — and stay up all night.  Since they’re awake in the wee hours, they set out on the hunt early together, sharing James’s snowmobile.  When Qalli gets up and goes to Aivaaq’s, his mother tells him the other two boys already set out, and Qalli heads off to follow their tracks.

A short drive later, Qalli sees his two friends far ahead of him, but they’re no longer on the snowmobile, nor does it look like they’ve started the hunt.  Then suddenly, one of them throws a punch at the other, and Qalli hits the gas.  When he finally gets close enough to intervene, however, the fight has gotten way out of control.  Aivaaq is down, and James is holding a shovel, getting ready to whack him in the head.  Aivaaq pulls out a knife, Qalli races into the fray, and the next thing they know, James is lying on the ice, dead from a stab wound to the neck.

Panicked, Aivaaq wants to take James back to town right away and tell the truth about what’s happened.  It was an accident, after all.  Right??  But when Qalli looks down and sees a crack pipe, he realizes Aivaaq is high and that the cops would undoubtedly arrest him, maybe even trying him for murder.  With a baby on the way!  In an attempt to protect his friend, Qalli quickly decides the only option is to hide the body, which shouldn’t be too hard in the enormous expanse of ice outside of Barrow.  All they have to do is find a hole somewhere and drive James into the water below on his snowmobile.  Then it looks like an accident — people accidentally drive into holes and drown sometimes, after all, and their bodies are rarely recovered.  It seems like the perfect plan.

Which, of course, means it’s absolutely doomed from the start.

Complicating matters, Qalli’s father is the head of the local search and rescue squad, and also a savvy tracker.  The boys tell him what happened to James — the lie, anyway — and he immediately puts together a search party to try to find him.  But when Dad sees the patterns of tracks and footprints, and the hole in the snow where the boys had dug out all the bloody ice to hide the evidence of the fight, he begins to get suspicious, thinking Aivaaq had killed James and lied to Qalli about what had happened.  As the questions pile up, the already-fragile Aivaaq starts to crack under the pressure, and Qalli is forced to decide which is worse for his pal:  the truth or the lie.

Especially considering the fact the truth is not quite what Aivaaq thinks it is. . .

This is a wondeful film that takes us deep into the small, rural world of the beautiful, frozen town of Barrow, a place I’ve been fascinated by myself since I first learned of its existence while in college (I used to read the forecast for all the cities listed in the paper and it was always FREEZING there, even in the summer, so I looked it up to learn where it was and immediately fell in love with the photos and stories of the Inupiat culture I found).  The scenery is stunning — STUNNING, I say — and the ice itself is so pivotal to the story it practically becomes a character all its own.  The way it shifts — unpredictably, quickly, helpfully, disastrously — serves as the perfect metaphor for the friendship between Qally and Aivaaq, and the culture of the Inupiat natives living on that ice provides another complex layer to this otherwise somewhat predictable story.  (Nice, also, to finally see Barrow in a film that DOESN’T involve blood-sucking vampires, though I did love 30 Days of Night too, I confess.)

I was truly mesmerized by this film, and was especially moved by the ending, though I wasn’t terribly blown away by the acting, which was mostly amateurish (except for Frank Qutuq Irelan, who was incredible as Aivaaq;  Josiah Patkotak (Qalli), on the other hand, was either naturally terrible at expressing emotion, or trying to ACT naturally terrible at expressing emotion, and either way, his blunted affect made it hard to get a read on or take much of a liking to him).

I was pleased to see this film took a jury prize (for best new director) at the Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF) this year.  It’s not the film I would have selected for that prize myself, but I can certainly understand why it was chosen.  This is a unique, gorgeous, emotional movie about the harshest kind of coming-of-age — the kind that rips a childhood relationship wide open and exposes all the cracks and frailties of the kids who lie within.  Highly recommended, so keep an eye out for it on DVD over the next few months!

[Prequeue at Netflix | Featurette from Sundance]

Genre:  Drama
Cast:  Josiah Patkotak, Teddy Kyle Smith, Denae Brower, Tara Sweeney, Frank Qutuq Irelan

SIFF MOVIE: The Off Hours (2010)

Francine is a young woman living in a rural Washington town whose life pretty much revolves around her dead-end, night-shift job at a local truck stop diner and a string of sexual encounters with pretty much anyone who seems interested, mostly in dingy bar and restaurant bathrooms (and oh, honestly, is there anything more depressing than cheap sex in public restrooms?  Blargh.)

It’s not much of a life and she knows it.  But she feels stuck, trapped.  She’s been there so long (12 years) she seems to have forgotten she ever had options.  And the people she’s close to are similarly cycling and recycling through their own personal circles of hell:  there’s her boss, Stu, an alcoholic divorcé with a teenage daughter he rarely sees; Jelena, a middle-aged Serbian waitress who spends her off hours sleeping with truckers in her motel apartment; and Corey, Fran’s roommate and foster brother, who’s so furiously in love with her he can hardly stand talking to her anymore.

One night, Francine spots a new face at the diner.  She introduces herself, pours him some coffee, and the two begin to chat — his name’s Oliver, he’s a truck driver who’s just started a new route, he’s married with two kids, blah blah.  Over the next few weeks, they become friends — him looking for her through the diner windows as soon as he pulls into the parking lot, her face lighting up as soon as she spots him.  Turns out he’s sort of on the other side of “stuck;” he was a banker for ten years and when his branch closed, he decided he was tired of a 9-to-5 existence and took a leap into the life of trucking just to try something new.  Now he’s hardly at home, always on the move, his wife growing more and more frustrated by the week.  Unstuck in some ways, for sure.  But perhaps more stuck than ever in others.

When a series of things go wrong at roughly the same time, it seems to dawn on Francine at last that she’s in charge of her own destiny.  With a line of nudges all giving her a collective shove, she decides it’s time to unstick herself.  How she does it is the final scene of this mesmerizing, gorgeously-made film, and it takes what is otherwise a painful story of desolate, dark sadness and drops a light right into it.  A flare goes up.  And you leave the film knowing Francine’s gonna be just fine.

Goddamn, I loved that final scene.

In fact, there were so many things I loved about this haunting film I hardly know where to begin.  The acting is incredible, the writing is tight and authentic, the story is engaging and relateable, and the visuals — wow.  I’ve heard people raving about local cinematographer Ben Kasulke for years, and though I’ve seen a few of his other films, this is the first time I really understood what all the hoopla was about.  The colors, the crispness, the still shots, the long shots — this movie does everything visually great art is supposed to do.  It moves you; it picks you up and takes you right to it.  And it does it subtly, quietly, perfectly.  In between scenes, there were often quick stills of images from around the town — a beat-up truck here, a broken rocking chair there, an angled shot of the diner counter that made it look like it went on forever (oof, so great), a close-up of Francine’s face that showed every pore of loveliness and despair.  By the middle of the film, I found myself wishing I could get a print of every single one of those shots to frame and hang on a wall where I’d see them every day.  They were that good.

They were lovely, in fact.  In fact, lovely is the right word for every element of this film.

This film is lovely.

Highly, highly recommended.  And I can’t wait to see what director/writer Megan Griffiths does next.  Here’s hoping it doesn’t take her a decade to make her second film (as this one did), because the world shouldn’t have to wait so long to be so incredibly moved again.  A masterpiece.

[Prequeue at Netflix | View trailer]

Genre:  Drama, Indie
Cast:  Amy Seimetz, Ross Partridge, Tony Doupe, Scoot McNairy, Gergana Mellin, Lynn Shelton, Bret Roberts, Madeline Elizabeth