"Lady Bird"

Greta Gerwig’s directorial debut brings a charming take on adolescence to the screen. Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson struggles to live with her stern mother and caring father while trying to fit into her school as well as trying to make a name for herself. When she finally has the dream to go to New York, she then reflects how little she really cared for her hometown, Sacramento, and how much she really valued it.

I watched the featurette about Gerwig bringing the story to life. She was concerned with casting newcomer Saoirse Ronan because she’s Irish. With this and SNL, do people have a problem with people changing their accents? For years I thought Hugh Jackman was British because he did so many British roles flawlessly. He’s Australian. For years I didn’t know Russell Crowe was Australian, nor Nicole Kidman. They, and many others, all managed to change their accents for the sake of the characters they played and fooled us all beautifully. If you have a problem with that, then you shouldn’t be in the film industry.

The featurette also talked about Laurie Metcalf’s deadpan humor while being serious. I didn’t pick up on that. Instead, I see a nagging mother trying to keep her wits about her. Don’t get me wrong, Metcalf played the part beautifully. I watched her for ten TV years as the wacky Jackie Harris on the controversial Roseanne, and it was a shock to see her in a part this dramatic.

The hidden element in the film is that the story is set six months after 9/11. Though no one they knew died that day, they and everyone else lived cautiously. The McPhersons lived like a regular on-the-poverty-line family struggling to make ends meet: Mom is working double shifts at the hospital, Dad is laid off, brother is the manager at a grocery store, and the main character dreams of a better life. She dreams it so hard that she convinced people that her ex-boyfriend’s grandmother’s house was hers. Until it blew up in her face.

We really don’t know where she got the name Lady Bird. I assume she got it from Lady Bird Johnson, President Lyndon’s wife, but there is no picture of her on Lady Bird’s wall. Lady Bird is a rebellious teen like we all were at one point, and it gets her into trouble constantly, one incident getting her suspended from the school.

Timothée Chalamet surprisingly starred as the biggest butthole since Jacob Black as the ruins probably one the biggest moments in anyone’s life for Lady Bird by taking away her virginity while giving her the impression that she took his too. And yes you did, dude. You did tell her that you’ve never done it. We have you on camera. You’re so lucky you have another film that makes you more redeemable.

I feel the movie left us on a cliffhanger. Lady Bird finally goes to New York, gets drunk one night, and gets sent to the hospital. When she is released she stands outside a Catholic church and calls her mother, telling her how much she really appreciates everything she did for her, and how much she underestimated Sacramento. Then it ends. It was a “That’s it?” moment. Will there be a sequel? A continuing story focused on her mother, a prequel, something that starts with “Things weren’t always this way?” I really felt empty afterward.

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Released On: December 1, 2017
Rating: R
Stars: Saoirse Ronan, Laurie Metcalf, Timothée Chalamet
Director: Greta Gerwig Rotten Tomatoes Score: 99% Certified Fresh
IMDb Score: 7.5/10

Awards
Academy Awards

• Best Picture - Nominated
• Best Director Greta Gerwig - Nominated
• Best Actress Saoirse Ronan - Nominated
• Best Supporting Actress Laurie Metcalf - Nominated
• Best Original Screenplay Greta Gerwig - Nominated

Golden Globe Awards

• Best Motion Picture Musical or Comedy - Winner
• Best Actress Motion Picture Musical or Comedy Saoirse Ronan - Winner
• Best Supporting Actress Motion Picture Laurie Metcalf - Nominated
• Best Screenplay Greta Gerwig - Nominated

(Click here to view more awards for "Lady Bird")

"The Shape of Water"

I was initially nervous to see this film after a previous encounter of the works of Guillermo del Toro, Pan’s Labyrinth, the scariest movie I ever saw.

I was actually blown away by the fact that there are no hand-eye monsters or anything like that involved. The whole cast and crew were a list of film veterans, Octavia Spencer, Michael Shannon, composer Alexandre Desplat, del Toro as writer, producer, and director.

Sally Hawkins plays Elisa, a mute girl who works the night shift cleaning the local government laboratory in 1962-era Baltimore. Right off the bat, we see her masturbating. Not dirty like, just as if it’s part of her “morning” routine. I’ve read other reviews about how others were repulsed by it. If they have never done it as frequently as she does once in their lives, then they are liars. This shows that, despite her inability to speak, she’s human just like the rest of us. Spencer plays her friend and coworker, Zelda. She does much of the talking for the two, and she’s always making sure Elisa’s on time for work.

Richard Jenkins stars as Elisa’s neighbor, Giles, a struggling commercial artist recovering from a career-ending past. He also struggles to live with his homosexuality in secret, known only by Elisa. One morning after Elisa’s shift, they go out for pie, and Giles shows interest in the pie shop owner, but more on that later.

One night, while Elisa was working, a top-secret tank arrives, guarded by the head of the project, Strickland (Shannon). Shannon shows an arrogant personality of Strickland, obviously very proud of his accomplishment. The creature inside the tank is an amphibious manlike creature standing over six feet tall, which Strickland recovered from the rivers of the Amazon. Strickland’s pride takes a beating as his fingers become severed from the creature. They are reattached but they deteriorate throughout the movie.

During cleaning, Elisa begins interacting with the amphibian man, feeding it eggs, playing music, and even dancing around the tank. But little did she know, she’s being watched by a mysterious scientist (Michael Stuhlbarg), who is secretly working for the Soviet government. He’s amazed by how the creature responds with Elisa. When it came the time that Strickland wanted to kill the “asset” to study it, the scientist conspires with Elisa, who is planning to break it out of the lab anyway, to help her. With the help of Zelda and Giles, Elisa succeeds in rescuing the creature.

During their time together in the lab, we watch a romance bloom between them, which does sound weird, but, nevertheless, heartwarming. In Elisa’s apartment, she takes it up a notch with the creature and engages in intercourse. Their romance is short lived as the creature has spent far too long outside the tank, the floodgates are filling with rain, and Strickland is hunting them down. In an epic showdown, the double agent scientist is killed by members of the Soviet government as an expendable but doesn’t die without blurting the truth of the asset’s whereabouts to Strickland, against his will. Strickland then kills Elisa and the amphibian creature, but the creature rises up again and kills Strickland. It then picks up Elisa’s body and jumps into the sea. Using the godlike powers that he possesses, he was able to revive Elisa, giving her gills, and they live happily ever after.

The character development is well done for many of the characters. We see Elisa go from a quiet, shy girl to a brave independent woman. Strickland, with his arrogance, gets taken down a peg with his injury making him bitter throughout the film and hungry for vengeance. Stuhlbarg’s character was just a scientist doing his job for the Soviet Union, but he grows to care for the creature. While Strickland wanted to study it, the Soviets just wanted it dead so that the Americans don’t gain knowledge from it. We sympathize with Giles throughout the film that the way he lives is what holding him back in life. When he tried to move forward to the pie shop owner, the owner feels threatened and bans him from the shop. He, too, grows to care for the creature. In fact, the moment he laid on it, he says, “He’s beautiful.”

My mother, who watched the film with me. Didn’t like how Strickland, while having sex with his wife, he puts his bleeding hand over mouth to shut her up. I agree and I find that gross as well, but I feel you would expect that from a guy like him.
I don’t care what you say about bestiality or what have you, I didn’t think that at all. I congratulate The Shape of Water on its four Academy Awards, Best Picture, Best Director Guillermo del Toro, Best Original Score Alexandre Desplat, and Best Production Design Jeffrey A. Melvin, Shane Vieu, and Paul D. Austerberry. I feel, however, that Sally Hawkins was snubbed for Best Actress as she did the entire movie in sign language.

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Released On: December 22, 2017
Rating: R
Stars: Sally Hawkins, Richard Jenkins, Octavia Spencer, Michael Shannon
Director: Guillermo del Toro
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 92% Certified Fresh
IMDb Score: 7.4/10

Awards
Academy Awards

• Best Picture - Winner
• Best Director Guillermo del Toro - Winner
• Best Actress Sally Hawkins - Nominated
• Best Supporting Actor - Richard Jenkins
• Best Supporting Actress - Octavia Spencer
• Best Original Screenplay Guillermo del Toro & Vanessa Taylor - Nominated
• Best Cinematography Dan Laustsen - Nominated
• Best Costume Design Luis Sequeira - Nominated
• Best Film Editing Sidney Wolinsky - Nominated
• Best Original Score Alexandre Desplat - Winner
• Best Production Design - Paul Denham Austerberry, Shane Vieau & Jeff Melvin - Nominated
• Best Sound Editing Nathan Robitaille & Nelson Ferreira - Nominated
• Best Sound Mixing Christian Cooke, Brad Zoern & Glen Gauthier - Nominated

Golden Globe Awards

• Best Motion Picture Drama - Nominated
• Best Actress Motion Picture Drama Sally Hawkins - Nominated
• Best Supporting Actor Motion Picture Richard Jenkins - Nominated
• Best Supporting Actress Motion Picture Octavia Spencer - Nominated
• Best Director Guillermo del Toro - Winner
• Best Screenplay Guillermo del Toro and Vanessa Taylor - Nominated
• Best Original Score Alexandre Desplat - Winner

(Click here to view more awards for "The Shape of Water")

"The Post"

The biggest director, writer, and producer on the planet, who brought us Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park, War of the Worlds, Munich, Saving Private Ryan, Schindler’s List, Lincoln, War Horse, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Super 8, A.I., Gremlins, Back to the Future, The Color Purple, The Goonies, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, The Land Before Time, Hook, Twister, Men in Black, Amistad, The Mask of Zorro, Minority Report, Catch Me If You Can, The Terminal, Bridge of Spies, The BFG, and Ready Player One, Steven Spielberg, brings us the most unfulfilling period drama ever. I was utterly disappointed by this film. It was one part girl power, though wasn't shown in the trailer I was excited for, one part pure comedy, and one part an accidental prequel to All the President’s Men.

This was not really about The Washington Post defying presidential orders of releasing the Pentagon Papers, it was about Katharine Graham proving to herself, her editor, her board, and the world that she can successfully run a newspaper. During the movie, we see her cast aside several times by her own board, as if she was temporary until they can find a new CEO. But when it came for the ultimate climax for Kay to tell her board what’s what, she says it in the tiniest voice possible and then simply says, “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to bed.” I felt like the movie was running and then it tripped at the finish line. It was close, and yet it was so far. Let me remind you that this is Meryl f*cking Streep, 21 time Academy Award nominee, 3 time Academy Award winner, last year’s recipient of the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award, and this is the best she can do. Apparently. In a time when we need girl power movies, we get an old geezer who stands up to older geezers and then she returns to being an old geezer admiring the printing papers.

The one part of pure comedy is the fact that they cast Bob Odenkirk in the film. And they couldn’t be too off brand of Better Call Saul as his character runs down to a phone booth to talk to his informant. That’s all he is.

This movie makes it more infuriating by trying to give the audience one last laugh as we watch the silhouette of President Nixon screaming into the phone to never let anyone from The Washington Post into the White House again only to see someone reporting the break-in at the Watergate Hotel, ultimately becoming a prequel to a far better movie, written by the guys who did it. This movie relied too hard on the audience to get it. If you actually lived through it, which that number is rapidly depleting, or you read about it, a smaller number, or seen the movie, an even smaller number, you may have a had a chuckle or two.

I believe this was only hailed as brilliant and was in the running for the Academy Awards because of how much star power it had both in front and behind the camera. But, boiled down, it was basically how a middle-aged man working a tasking job is caring for his ailing “mother” in a difficult time. When it was nominated for six Golden Globes, host Seth Meyers had a joke where one of the ladies brought out all the awards for the film during the monologue, but, in a shocking turn of events, The Post walked away empty-handed; the same at the Academy Awards.

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Released On: January 18, 2018
Rating: PG-13
Stars: Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep, Bob Odenkirk
Director: Steven Spielberg
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 87% Certified Fresh
IMDb Score: 7.2/10

Awards
Academy Awards

• Best Picture - Nominated
• Best Actress Meryl Streep - Nominated

Golden Globe Awards

• Best Actor Motion Picture Drama Tom Hanks - Nominated
• Best Actress Motion Picture Drama Meryl Streep - Nominated
• Best Director Steven Spielberg - Nominated
• Best Motion Picture Drama - Nominated
• Best Original Score John Williams - Nominated
• Best Screenplay Liz Hannah & Josh Singer - Nominated

(Click here to view more awards for "The Post")

"Blade Runner 2049"

I’ve already seen the Final Cut of Blade Runner so I won’t be covering that, sorry. However, I will be covering how the movie ties to this one.

Ridley Scott’s visually stunning one-of-the-most-talked-about film continues, this time set thirty years later. Fresh off the set of La La Land and Song to Song, Ryan Gosling stars as K, a Replicant blade runner assigned to retire Replicants that have gone rogue. While on assignment, he discovers a military crate buried thirty feet in the ground. The crate carried the skeletal remains of a body. Dun-Dun-DUN! Doing an autopsy, K and his commanding officer, President Claire Underwood, discover that not only was the body once pregnant, but she was also a Replicant. Replicants weren’t designed to give birth. Dun-Dun-DUN! And the body was Rachael’s. Dun-Dun-DUN! So, K sets off on an epic quest to find the child. All the while, he recalls a memory of when he was a child and had a wooden horse. The horse had an inscription, 6-10-21, the same as the inscription on the tree near the burial site. He began to believe that HE was the child. This causes all sorts of problems when Luv, the Replicant henchwoman of the Wallace Corporation, sets after him up to the point where K finally confronts Deckard. In an epic showdown by the sea, K kills the unkillable Luv, and delivers Deckard to his missing child, who works for the Wallace Corporation! Then K dies from his wounds in the epic showdown. Right there in the snow.

K had a companion throughout the movie. Joi was a hologram, created by the Wallace Corporation as whoever you want her to be. So K had her as a female companion and treated her like a girlfriend. She even began to have feelings for K. I kinda want to know how weird it was for Ryan to be making out with an invisible woman, especially in that scene that had the weirdest threesome ever put to film. The movie pulls a few heartstrings when Joi is tragically killed by Luv when she crushes K’s emanator, but not before Joi blurts out “I love you.” But it’s okay because he dies anyway.

Why was Harrison Ford billed as a costar when he shows up in the final hour of the film? This isn’t the first time a film has done this. I’ll get to that another time. It would make much more sense for him to be a surprise reveal, or don’t even mention him in the trailers. You build surprises and tension that way.

What is the baseline test? The featurette on the DVD, the way I understood it, said it was like a recalibrating system/psychological test to see how a job affects the blade runner. The questions seem similar to the Voight-Kampff test in the first movie, which I still have no idea what that was. I mean how do you answer that? Is a human supposed to get confused about how the contents of the questions correlate? “You’re reading a magazine and you come across a full-page nude photo of a girl. Suddenly there’s a wasp crawling on your arm”—Woah! Stop right there! Where in the hell did that come from? What do those two sentences have in common? Being basically a robot, Replicants should have been able to ignore the context of the sentences then, right? Same thing with the baseline test. “When you’re not on duty, do they keep you in a little box? Cells!” “Cells!” "Why don’t you say interlinked three times?” “Interlinked. Interlinked. Interlinked.” A human would have probably been flustered by that, right?

In a cutaway of K’s flying car, we see a hologram of the Atari logo projected on the side of a building. Why is Atari still relevant in 2049? I understand that Atari would have been relevant in 2019 since the first movie was released in 1982. Atari, Inc. went defunct in 1984 but then was bought by Jack Tramiel, who then started Atari Corporation. Then that went defunct in 1996, and was sold to JTS Corporation but went bankrupt in 1999. Parts were also sold to Hasbro Interactive, which started the Atari Interactive, and, as of today, it’s still going strong. Ok, I see.

Then there is the question of how was Rachael was able to give birth. When we were first introduced to Rachael, she was a new breed of Replicant, far beyond Nexus 6. I suspect she was designed to be the most human possible, which included her ability to reproduce. Or it could have been an error in the math, and she glitched. They kind of left that open to interpretation I think.

I never caught on whether or not Deckard was a Replicant too. Maybe it was the version I watched. I couldn’t see how it was possible that Deckard was a Replicant. He had one trippy dream about unicorns and that was that. And Edward James Olmos’ deep comment didn’t spark anything, even as it echoed in the end. But this movie played with that a lot more, especially when K talks to Edward James Olmos. He told K that Deckard was retired, and put an origami sheep on the table. But when we see Deckard at last, no, he’s not a Replicant. He would have been dead at least 26 years prior.

How stupid has an interstellar company, like Wallace, got to be that the person they’re looking for was right in their own offices? She is a dream maker for the company, building authentic memories for the Replicants. This sort of explains how her own memory got into K’s mind in the first place. But a troubled girl, with no past, has a million fake diseases, and needs to be kept in a CGI box didn’t raise a few eyebrows? This and the rebellion that showed up the last minute, are these to set up a third sequel? Should we be on the lookout for Blade Runner 2052? Will there be a new blade runner to lead the rebellion now that K is dead? Will Deckard become the new leader?

There is one other thing that didn’t sit well with me. While Deckard was captured, Jared Leto made him a new Rachael to persuade him to give up the hidden rebel base; they even brought back Sean Young, which is an amazing technological achievement considering that she looked exactly how we last saw her, with the exception of the plot twisting eye color. Then they kill her. Deckard turned away, but we saw the whole damn thing. I didn’t need to see that. The sound bite will do just fine.

I felt the story this time around was much more compelling than the first, despite the nearly three-hour run time. I thought the story arc overall was well done. I felt I could follow along okay and not get lost. Except when the movie can’t decide what time of the year it is. It was either raining or snowing. Sometimes it would rain then change to snow midscene. I really liked the subplot that had both us and K believe that K was the child. It sounds frustrating at first when we find out he’s not, but I feel it was a pretty good twist for us all.

I don’t really like sequels that take too long to develop. I believe after five years no one really cares. But I think the movie did a pretty good job recapturing the magic that captivated us 35 years ago. However, if there is going to be a third sequel, I would like it to happen soon.

One more thing, I didn't know what Galatian's Syndrome was, so I went searching. I really can't explain it because I'm trying to understand it myself. Here is a link to an article explaining the syndrome.

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I hope you liked this. Be sure to subscribe and leave a comment about what you thought or if you want to recommend a movie for me to review if you can. I'm still trying to navigate the blog site, so I hope everything is set up properly. Thank you for reading. I'll return next week with another movie. See you then.

Here are some links to some fun videos involving the Blade Runner franchise.
CinemaSins – Everything Wrong with Blade Runner in 17 Minutes or Less
CinemaSins - Everything Wrong with Blade Runner 2049
Screen Junkies - Honest Trailers - Blade Runner
How It Should Have Ended - Blade Runner Comedy Recap (HISHE Dubs)

Released On: October 6, 2017
Rating: R
Stars: Ryan Gosling, Harrison Ford, Jared Leto
Director: Denis Villeneuve
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 87% Certified Fresh
IMDb Score: 8.1/10

Awards
Academy Awards

• Best Cinematography Roger Deakins - Winner
• Best Production Design Dennis Gassner & Alessandra Querzola - Nominated
• Best Sound Editing Mark Mangini & Theo Green - Nominated
• Best Sound Mixing Ron Bartlett, Doug Hemphill & Mac Ruth - Nominated
• Best Visual Effects John Nelson, Gerd Nefzer, Paul Lambert & Richard R. Hoover - Winner

(Click here to view more awards for "Blade Runner 2049")