My Own Little World

Sicario has grown on me since I first saw it a couple years ago. It is even more timely now than it was then, casting moral ambiguity onto the War on Drugs and its fallout around the U.S.-Mexico border. With its beautiful yet bleak composition from director Denis Villeneuve and cinematographer/legend Roger Deakins and excellent performances from Emily Blunt, Benicio del Toro, and Josh Brolin, that film asks a lot of questions about grey areas and, due to its construction, lets each individual audience member answer them. That’s the biggest difference between that film and its sequel, Sicario: Day of the Soldado : while in some respects it does keep pace with its predecessor, its treatment of its events’ moral standing leaves a lot to be desired. We view the actions of Alejandro Gillick (del Toro) and Matt Graver (Brolin) through the lens of Blunt’s Kate Macer, an outsider who is seeing all these grisly, gruesome acts for the first time. She bears the emotional weight of the fi...

Blade Runner 2049 is a really, really, really beautiful film. I don’t think I have been more visually or sonically treated in the past few years of watching movies. Between Roger Deakins’s Oscar-winning cinematography that is transportive and elegant, Hans Zimmer’s electronically graceful score, the sound direction, production design, and perfect (and I do mean perfect) visual effects, there is so much to take in from each shot that I almost could not comprehend everything that was happening. And that is Blade Runner 2049 ’s undoing. As perfect as Denis Villeneuve’s technical direction of the film is, its structure and narrative are kind of a mess. I loved Ridley Scott’s original film that discussed big-picture questions of humanity and reality while also forcing me to use my brain to connect the pieces of his visual storytelling amid the lack of plain and simple exposition – something that I was annoyed with at first but came to enjoy the more I reflected upon it. Wha...

In closing the door on 2016, I realize that there are a lot of films that I have seen that unfortunately I was unable to review for one reason or another. That doesn't mean, however, that I don't want you guys to know what I think of most of these films, so just like the last couple of years I will be doing a few posts over the next month or so wrapping up all of the films I got a chance to see from this past year. This time, I've got one of this year's most prominent sci-fi releases and a non-Transformers Michael Bay film... Arrival  - Buy it.  Arrival is one of the most thought-provoking sci-fi films I've ever seen. The direction from Denis Villeneuve is ridiculously visually rich and very artistic with its long takes and steady shots. Amy Adams turns in the best performance of her career, and the way the film reveals her character's true nature in the third act is stellar. The design of the aliens and their language is beautiful, and I love the film...