Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds (2016)

Fortuitously timed documentary about the relationship between mother/daughter stars Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher. I suspect this was originally planed to air closer to Mothers Day but was moved up after the films subjects died within about a day of each other last month. Reynolds and Fisher's relationship had been strained in the past, and Fisher had written a thinly disguised book about that called Post Cards from the Edge, which later became a (pretty good) movie with Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine. By the time this documentary begin production Fisher and Reynolds relationship had largely healed and the two were very close, living for around 2 decades or so in neighboring homes on a small "compound" outside Los Angeles. It's a very charming relationship they had with each other, and I found myself wishing they had been relations of mine and I had been able to visit them periodically, it would have been great fun just to sit in a room and watch them interact. The film gives you a good sense of how frustrated Reynolds was by her declining heath, she seemed to want to do nothing more then perform. Fisher seems like a delightfully wry character who had achieved a impressive peace with herself given a prolonged rough patch. This film is a wonderful portrait of a beguiling relationship. ***1/2

X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009), The Wolverine (2013)

The previews for the upcoming third Wolverine standalone film Logan, looked pretty good, and surprisingly "indie" for a superhero movie. So in preparation for seeing that I decided to watch the other two Wolverine films. I did the same thing with the first two X-Men prequels in prep for watching Apocalypse this summer, and I was impressed by both those movies, Apocalypse less so. The Wolverine movies were a mixed bag.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine was the first of what I think was supposed to be a series of 'X-Men Origins' films, an idea that later got absorbed into the prequel trilogy. This movie was mostly rehash of preexisting lore, I did like that they fixed Wolverine's age somewhat, we find out that he was born (presumably in Canada) in the 1830's, and the montage at the beginning of Wolverine fighting in various historic wars was cool. On the whole though the movie was nothing special, there is a kind of long con perpetrated on Wolverine that I didn't really care for, also the chronology is really messy and hard to pin down, as is true of all of the Fox X-Men movies. This film also seemed more of a 'spiritual', if that's the right word, continuation of the original trilogy whereas The Wolverine feels more a part of the prequels, which is ironic because it is set in 'the present day' while the first movie is the prequel. 

The Wolverine I actually quite liked, because it didn't feel all that much like an X-Men movie, more like some other movie that they dropped Wolverine into, at least until towards the end but even that mostly worked for me. This was really an innovative and unexpected way to do a Wolverine film and I hope to see more superhero movies take a similar approach. The movie is largely about intrigue surrounding the pending death of a elderly patriarch to a large Japanese business empire, a man who had become obsessed with Wolverine and mutants more generally after Logan saved his life from the atomic bomb blast on Nagasaki (portrayed in a very well done sequence at the beginning of the film). I know that Hugh Jackman has announced his retirement from the role, but I would have been up for seeing a similarly handled series of Wolverine films from him, let's hope that Logan lives up to or even surpasses this entry.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) **
The Wolverine (2013) ***

La La Land (2016)

La La Land really cleaned up at the Golden Globes last night, setting a record by sweeping all seven categories in which it was nominated. Now it's a real good movie, but I think one of the reasons it was able to do so remarkably well is 2016 was kind of a weak year for movies, and also Hollywood is a town where even the foreign press like to participate in its navel gazing. La La Land, more effectively then any film I've ever seen, manages to recapture the essence of a Gene Kelley movie musical of the 1950's. Both Singing in the Rain and An American in Pairs are well represented in the films motifs, and yet even more remarkably the nostalgia here is not overpowering. While it harkens back to an earlier age it consistently feels organic rather then forced, these characters are contemporary even as they evoke an earlier time, and the film doesn't try to shoe horn too much in, or make Ryan Gosling sing all the time. The opening number is joyous, the stylized one at closing is of a type we haven't seen in around 60 years, and Gosling and Emma Stone doing a little lite footwork on the street while looking for her car, well that just feels right. Still while I greatly appreciated the film I never quite felt the sense of enrapture I think it was aiming for. A fine score by Justin Hurwtiz. ***1/2

The Humbling (2014)

The Humbling is Director Barry Levinson's rendering of the 2009 Philip Roth novella of the same name, which if my memory serves was the first book of fiction I ever read in a digital format. Levinson takes his liberties with the book, including changing the ending, and if anything he improved the final product. I recall being disappointed in The Humbling when I read it, in part because I had recently finished Roth's The Human Stain, which is by far the superior novel (the general critical response to The Humbling was that it was one of Roth's weaker efforts). But time and change of format breathed some new life into this for me, with the story benefiting from edits and of course the presence of Al Pacino in the lead. Pacino plays the acclaimed actor Simon Axler, who at 67 finds his talent abandoning him, seemingly all at once one night on stage, and forcing him to retreat into an unwanted retirement. It is in his exile, after a brief stay at a mental institution, that Simon connects with the daughter of old theater friends from decades before, Pegeen Mike Stapleford (Greta Gerwig, a growing favorite of mine) a drama professor at a university near Axler's home, and who despite being a self professed lesbian, soon begins a sexual relationship with Simon. There is of course much fall out from this, and in general everything in Simon's life continues to progress downhill.

While the book did the better job of conveying the relentlessness of Axler's decent, the movie is more enjoyable, in part for that very reason. The supporting roles here make great little characters parts for the likes of Diane Wiest, Charles Grodin and Dylan Baker. Buck Henry's (The Graduate) contribution to the screenplay is well marked, he is the perfect scribe for making cynicism more palatable, and I'm kind of surprised he was still writing. The Humbling is not a great movie, but it makes the most of what it is and elevates presentation over content, which is novel for a 'smart' movie. ***

Fitzcarraldo (1982)

Best known as the movie where they drag a boat over a South American hill, Fitzcarraldo is another of obsessive director Warner Herzog's films about obsession. Klaus Kinski plays "Fitzcarraldo" Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, loosely based on real Peruvian rubber baron Carlos Fitzcarrald. The Fitzcarraldo of the movie is a man obsessed with opera, and who has the very impractical dream of building an opera house in the Peruvian jungle and bringing world renown tenor Enrico Caruso there to play at its opening. A business man who has already had more then his fare share of failures, Fitzcarldo leverages money from his wife's (Claudia Cardinale) business, which seems to be a bordello operating under the guise of a school for domestic staff, to purchase a used boat and stake a claim to some remote land covered in rubber trees. With a misfit crew he heads off up the river, however its the wrong branch of the river, but this dose not concern Fitzcarlado, who seems pretty confident they should be able to drag the boat over a hill when they get to the proper isthmus. Needless to say, this proves a pretty complicated challenge.

This was surprisingly a much lighter film then I had expected it to be. Kinski's character is manic, but ingratiatingly sow, a charming, slightly unhinged dreamer, I particularly liked how oddly strong his and Cardinale's marriage is portrayed to be. This film appropriately conveys the outsized dreams of the Peruvian rubber boom of the late 19th and early 20th century, and the kinds of eccentricity sudden immense wealth can engender. This film was actually shot in English but I didn't know that when I started the film so I watched it with the German audio track and English subtitles on, no need for you to make the same mistake. This is pretty great, pretty odd movie. ****

Edge of Seventeen (2016)

Unusually smart "coming of age" comedy/drama from writer and first time director Kelly Fremon Craig (Post Grad) . The film stars Hailee Steinfield as Nadain Frank, a socially nominal high school junior, who feels her world go into crises when her best and only friend Kristia (Haley Lu Richardson) starts dating her popular older brother Darin (Blake Jenner). Nadain's beloved father Tom (Eric Keenleyside, seen in flashback) had passed away from a heart attack nearly four years prior, and having never really connected with her neurotic mother Mona (Kyra Sedgwick), she seeks solace from her grumpy history teacher Mr. Brunner (Woody Harrelson), pines for distant bad boy Nick Mossman (Alexander Calvert), and gradually befriends nice guy classmate Erwin (Hayden Szeto, charming). Nadain's situation is awkward and unenviable, but like many teenagers, owing to her state of social development, she compounds her problems by taking things out of proportion, something which the film itself does an excellent job of not doing. This is one of the best written and emotionally realistic movies about high school I have ever seen. The performances are uniformly strong with Steinfield's the standout, and I don't think an Oscar nomination would be out of place here, she is deceptively good and true in this. Perhaps the only thing lacking from Edge of Seventeen is Stevie Nicks in the soundtrack, how did that happen? ***1/2 

There are still 2016 releases that I really want to see, but here are the 16 best films of 2016 that I actually saw during the year 2016.

16.Rules Don't Apply
15.Miss Peregrines Home for Peculiar Children
14.Sully
13.Deepwater Horizon
12.Passengers
11.Whisky Tango Foxtrot
10.Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice
9.Finding Dory
8.10 Cloverfield Lane
7.Indignation
6.Snowden
5.Jackie
4.The Light Between Oceans
3.Zootopia
2.Weiner
1.Sing Street