My Own Little World

I grew up watching Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood more mornings than not. My mom probably remembers it better than I do, but from what I can recall I loved the show in my early childhood. In retrospect, Fred Rogers’s demeanor was probably a big part of that; the man was warm, compassionate, and more sophisticated than many of the other main characters of the other shows I watched alongside his. One of the questions that has sat in my mind about Rogers, though, is whether he was like the man on the show. To have that kind of demeanor in everyday life would completely shock me in the cynical, jaded world in which we live. The documentary on Rogers’s life Won’t You Be My Neighbor? answers this question of many with a resounding “yes.” This film is overwhelmingly optimistic yet not without a sense of grounded realism that Rogers himself possessed. It feels exactly like Fred Rogers the character which, it asserts quite confidently, was Fred Rogers the man. Instead of focusing ...

Horror films have two main ways of scaring their audiences. The more conventional option is to hold the audience in suspense by what they do not see coming, scaring the audience by the surprise factor of the scare itself. This is an easy, no-risk way of building tension that many good mainstream horror films put to frequent but satisfying use. The less-utilized method, and my favorite, is by telegraphing what is going to happen and let the audience fear come from the knowledge of the inevitable or from the danger most likely to come. This requires far more skill to execute properly, but when done so – a la Stanley Kubrick’s immortal classic The Shining – there is an ambiguity to the audience’s fear that makes the whole film creepy and unsettling because there is no indication to whether something should be feared. Hereditary falls firmly into the latter category, and that is why it is the most disturbing horror film I have seen in quite some time. It uses almost no cheap ...

Manchester by the Sea makes me grieve. This is a powerful tale of emotion, a tale of life being so relentlessly brutal in the blows it deals – and in how often a single man can be reminded of those blows. It is a real film – real in the way it portrays the process of grief, the desensitization it causes to the outside world, real in the motivations and reactions its characters have. It all starts with Kenneth Lonergan. The writer-director shows here his uncanny intuition for sculpting characters in respectful, complex, and subtle ways. Manchester does not have one scene out of place: every moment has purpose and builds something into the story. Sometimes films like this one can become bloated due to their complicated character building and the many necessary subplots for doing so, but that is not the case here. In fact, as the film went on and introduced more elements I longed for all of them to be explored more – which does happen – just because these characters became s...

If A Quiet Place has taught me anything, it is the importance of good sound design. This is a highly effective horror film for a lot of reasons, but the way it uses sound to its advantage creates such a tense atmosphere that I won’t be forgetting soon. It is almost entirely silent with few portions of spoken dialogue. The production team tried to make very little noise so that every on-camera sound could be amplified in post-production, and it paid off. Because the suddenly loud noises are so loud and because we know that the creatures in the film are only attracted by these kinds of sudden noises, every time those sounds occur the tension instantly goes up. It is a perfect setup for a lot of good jump scares, but it also lends itself to the character development. One of the children of the family focused on is deaf, and when the film is from her perspective all the on-set sound goes away, giving us some very suspenseful and even emotional moments. In fact, A Quiet Place ...

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...

I loved literally everything about Get Out . There hasn’t been a horror film that reminds me of the more classic form of the genre in the past few years that has been as inventive and impactful as this one. I love being scared in the way this film scared me with its brilliant pacing and tension. Nearly all of this is due to Jordan Peele’s writing and direction. This guy amazed me in how he was able to move into a completely opposite genre from his prior comedy work and make his first movie and not miss a single beat. There is so much tension and eeriness surrounding the first and second acts that play beautifully into the third act that I swear Hitchcock or Kubrick must have been responsible. Peele has a way of using somewhat unconventional shots in cool ways – in particular when Chris (the film’s protagonist) arrives at his girlfriend Rose’s house, using a wide shot the whole time instead of cutting close to see Chris meet her parents for the very first time. Because it doesn’...

Biopics typically err in one big way: they don’t feel true to the characters they portray and have that typical “Oscar-bait” tone. Films like The Imitation Game , The Theory of Everything , and even Hacksaw Ridge have all fallen into this mold; it’s not that they’re bad films, but they just don’t try to do anything but tell a positive story about their main character’s life. They are bland, plain and simple. Thankfully, I, Tonya doesn’t fit this mold at all. It follows more in the vein of The Wolf of Wall Street and The Big Short in how it treats its subjects: there’s a lot of witty dark humor, and the tone is very much snarky sometimes but then gets a lot more serious as the story does. My problems with those two films I mention is that they can’t find the balance between the comedy and the drama, Wolf of Wall Street erring towards comedy and Big Short towards drama. I, Tonya has a smoother transition between those two tones, but it still does feel a bit abrupt, and ...

Weird, quirky movies are my jam sometimes. There’s something about them that just get to me. Maybe it’s because I find them to have a little extra creativity required, or maybe it’s because I identify with their outlying nature compared to the mainstream – whatever it is, I like them. Guillermo del Toro’s latest, The Shape of Water , definitely falls into that category. It’s got a fish man, a mute woman, and a romance between the two. As if that weren’t enough, the film also takes place during the Cold War, a setting that amplifies its themes quite a bit. Basically, it is the definition of strange, and it’s also an incredibly rich theatrical experience. I’m not terribly familiar with del Toro’s previous work (I’ve watched maybe a third of Crimson Peak ), but I feel like that doesn’t disqualify me for being absolutely enthralled with his direction of this film. Every visual aspect of this fits together marvelously, especially the set and creature design and the color palette....

As soon as I saw who was involved in The Post , I was hooked – you give me Steven Spielberg directing people like Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep, and it’s kind of like the most surefire Oscar contender you can get. And I got exactly the film I expected with The Post : a high-quality, entertaining, and even slightly informative movie with some great performances and few if any flaws behind the camera. It’s probably irrational for me to assume that The Post could be any greater than the sum of its parts, but that sum – as good as it was – is something I have seen before. Spielberg has gotten into a groove of these kinds of movies, these politically-charged dramas that tend to show a correlation between the world of the past and the world of today. The Post does everything that films like Lincoln and Munich have already done and done well; as lazy as that may sound for someone with Spielberg’s profile, this film does make some very pointed connections between the Nixon and Trump ad...

I have loved Aaron Sorkin for a long time. I first encountered his writing with The Social Network and fell in love with it watching The West Wing , The Newsroom , and Moneyball . He has a very unique style with fast, witty dialogue that says a lot in very little time; when combined with the walk-and-talk technique of The West Wing , it becomes an incredibly effective tool. I have never disliked his writing, even though it does get a little soapboxy from time to time. When I heard Sorkin was going to sit in the director’s chair for the first time, I got incredibly excited. I didn’t know what kind of visual style to expect from him, but I did know that the same writing that I fell in love with would be back in full effect. With Molly’s Game , Sorkin proves himself to be a competent but not (yet) adventurous director. There are parts of this film that definitely prove there is a lot of potential, but it’s not fulfilled here. Most of this I see through the film’s length: at two ...

This is a rare occasion for me. I don’t think The Greatest Showman is a good movie, but I did enjoy watching it most of the time. It’s not a guilty pleasure; it’s more like a sugary, rich dessert that doesn’t strike me as inventive or unique but also doesn’t make me sick of its richness. What does this, no doubt, are the musical numbers. They took me out of The Greatest Showman in the best way possible. Let’s be real: this movie doesn’t know what character development is. It doesn’t know how to craft a compelling story. What it does know how to do is tell a story through music, and for that reason it’s actually quite tolerable to a fan of musicals like myself. It’s not just that the music itself is good; the numbers are filmed well in their own right. They are choreographed and shot quite competently, and the vocal performances are excellent as well. My personal favorites were “Rewrite the Stars,” “The Other Side,” and the likely Oscar contender “This Is Me.” There’s o...

I have to admit that I am not as familiar with Ridley Scott’s filmography as much as I should. I have seen only a handful of his movies, but there has always been an element of risk involved with them. Blade Runner and Alien changed science fiction films forever, while some of his more recent works have seen the revitalization of dead genres like what Gladiator did for Rome-era epics. In his most recent film, the now 80-year-old Scott took a risk of a different kind. All the Money in the World originally starred Kevin Spacey as J. Paul Getty, but after his sexual assault allegations Scott opted to reshoot all of Spacey’s scenes with only a month left until release with his supposed original first choice for the role, Christopher Plummer. They re-edited as they reshot, getting all of Plummer’s scenes filmed in a little over a week. Why am I telling you all of this? It’s for one reason, and only one: there’s little to no evidence of the film’s hectic reshoots in the final ...

Film has the potential to be one of the most impactful forms of media because it excites the most senses: we can see, hear, and emotionally feel for everything that is happening on screen. We don’t always need big spectacles to do this for us either; sometimes, the smaller and more intimate a film is, the more impact it can have on the viewer. I recently saw Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri , a well-written character-driven mystery that has at its core a really unique portrayal of forgiveness and reconciliation. I think for a time like we are in now, this is a film that everybody must see. It doesn’t become overly political, and it doesn’t try to force these hefty themes: it simply tells a human story. The most central element to Three Billboards is the writing, both of the story and the screenplay. Martin McDonagh, the film’s director and writer, is actually best known for his plays, and that style of writing shows up constantly in this film. The dialogue is meaty...

One of the hardest things for any film to do is to be human. True humanity is extremely hard to capture in the pre-planned conversations of a script or in the often-visionary lens of a director’s camera. Even going to such lengths as filming the same cast over twelve years (looking at you, Boyhood ) does not guarantee that a movie can be a true slice of life. Somehow, some way, Greta Gerwig, in her first film in the director’s chair no less, has made one of the most genuinely human films I have ever seen. Lady Bird is an organic piece of cinematic art that doesn’t try to be terribly artistically original or innovative; it simply tells a human coming-of-age story, and it does it better than nearly any other film I have seen. As much as I’d love to claim that there is no one aspect of the film that helps this, ultimately the film rests on the shoulders of its cast. Without the amazing performances from Saoirse Ronan, Laurie Metcalf, Lucas Hedges, and everyone else involved, t...

Let's wind the clock back just a few weeks to the 89th Academy Awards ceremony. My girlfriend and I were watching them, having seen the front runner for Best Picture,   La La Land , and desperately wanting it to win. For two minutes and thirty-eight seconds, it did. Then, chaos ensued. In an unprecedented gaff, the wrong card was handed to Warren Beatty and he announced the wrong film as the winner. In its place was Moonlight , a low-budget indie film based on an unpublished play that chronicles the life of a gay black man in the projects of Miami. Nobody saw this coming, including us. I'm not going to lie: I was a little devastated that one of my favorite films of all time, let alone last year, did not win Best Picture. That being said, the fact that Moonlight  won Best Picture made me want to see it more than I already did, so I made a point of seeing it over spring break. And it was brutal. I usually don't struggle with giving films scores and ranking them, but Moonl...

There are times when I sit down to watch a movie, expecting the world, and I get something that underwhelms me. I really don't like that feeling of being disappointed by films I really look forward to. On the other hand, there are times where I'll sit down with no specific expectations besides a film being good and get absolutely blown away. La La Land  is definitely one of the latter. I didn't have any idea what to expect from this movie. I loved director Damien Chazelle's last film Whiplash  because of its editing and incredibly tight pace, and I have really enjoyed what I have seen from Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone recently; however, I still had no idea what I was getting into with this film, aside from the fact that it would be good. From the opening frames, my jaw dropped. La La Land  is a film from a bygone era and harkens back to the musicals from the 1950s such as Singin' in the Rain . This is seen so easily through the direction of the musical number...