Nocturnal Animals

The second half of my double-feature was the strangely compelling psychological thriller Nocturnal Animals.  Amy Adams plays Susan Morrow, a successful, but profoundly unhappy, Los Angeles gallery owner.  She receives a copy of a novel written by her ex-husband, Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal) and slowly becomes obsessed with it.  This film has a story-within-a-story as the novel is acted out as Susan reads it.  In the novel, Tony Hastings (Jake Gyllenhaal), along with his wife Laura (Isla Fisher) and daughter India (Ellie Bamber), is hijacked by a gang of thugs, led by Ray Marcus (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), on a remote road in the West Texas desert.  His wife and daughter are forced into the gang's car and are eventually raped and murdered.  Tony works with Lt. Bobby Anders (Michael Shannon) to find the culprits but there is not enough evidence to convict them so they end up meting out their own kind of justice.  Because the novel is dedicated to her, Susan believes that Edward wrote it for revenge because she left him for another man and aborted their unborn child.  She is also strangely attracted to Edward again but, like the character of Tony, Edward ultimately gets his revenge.  This is film-noir at its best with lots of Hitchcockian moments which kept me on the edge of my seat.  To be sure, it is quite strange (the opening alone may be off-putting to many) but I couldn't take my eyes off the screen.  Adams, Gyllenhaal, Shannon, and Taylor-Johnson (who is nominated for a Golden Globe) give outstanding performances and Tom Ford's direction is visually stunning.  I highly recommend it (but it is weird).

Moonlight

Last Wednesday I spent the day at the Tower theater, a small art house theater in the ninth and ninth district of SLC, for another double-feature of films garnering Oscar buzz.  I began with Moonlight, an achingly beautiful coming of age film about a boy searching for his identity in modern-day Miami.  The film explores three pivotal moments in the life of Chiron, beginning when he is a shy and withdrawn child (Alex Hibbert) known as "Little."  His mother (the brilliant Naomie Harris) is a crack addict and he is bullied at school when he is befriended by Juan (Mahershala Ali) who tells him that he gets to decide what kind of life he will have.  Little spends more and more time with Juan, viewing him as a mentor, until he learns that Juan is a drug dealer who supplies his mother.  Next, we see the teenage Chiron (Ashton Sanders) who is the target of a particularly cruel bully at school and an increasingly abusive mother.  He becomes friends with Kevin (Jharrel Jerome) and they become intimate.  Kevin betrays Chiron when he is forced to beat him in a hazing incident.  Finally, the adult Chiron (Trevante Rhodes), now known as "Black," is a tough, hardened, and disillusioned drug-dealer.  In an incredibly poignant scene, he makes peace with his mother who is in rehab and reunites with Kevin (Andre Holland).  It is a difficult film to watch but it does end with hope for Chiron.  I was particularly struck by Hibbert's portrayal of Little Chiron, especially the scene where he boils water by himself to take a bath.  It was heartbreaking for me to watch Little Chiron because he reminded me so much of Sean when he was little.  I loved this beautiful film and I highly recommend it.  However, the subject matter might be difficult for some.

Lion

Another film that is getting a lot of Oscar buzz is Lion so I saw it after the screening of Jackie in a double-feature (I love spending the day at the Broadway).  This film tells the incredible true story of one boy's journey to find his home.  Five year old Saroo (Sunny Pawar) accompanies his older brother to look for work but falls asleep on a bench in a train station.  His brother leaves him there telling him that he will be back for him soon.  Saroo gets on a train hoping for a more comfortable place to sleep but the train begins moving with him trapped inside.  The train stops in Calcutta, thousands of miles from home, where Saroo wanders the streets for months before being adopted by an affluent Australian couple (David Wenham and Nicole Kidman).  Twenty years later Saroo (Dev Patel) embarks on a course in restaurant management and meets a group of Indian students who spark his meager childhood memories.  He becomes obsessed with finding his family by using Google Earth.  I love the scene where he finally finds his village and, as he uses the satellite to view the streets, there are flashbacks of him as a child running along those same streets.  I also love the very poignant scene between Patel and Kidman when Saroo tells his adopted mother that he has been searching for his birth mother (made even more affecting by the fact that Kidman is an adoptive mother herself).  I did find Rooney Mara's role as Saroo's girlfriend to be rather superfluous.  She breaks up with him when his search becomes obsessive and has a tearful moment with him when he finds his family but she doesn't do much else to advance the plot.  There is the predictable reunion scene between Saroo and his mother followed by actual footage of the real-life Saroo with both his mothers but I found these moments to be very well done and incredibly heart-warming.  I really enjoyed this film and I highly recommend it.

Note:  Throughout the entire film, I kept wondering why it was called Lion.  When the reason was explained in the epilogue, it brought spontaneous tears to my eyes.

Jackie

I love this time of year because this is the time when the Broadway screens all of the films generating Oscar buzz.  No one is getting more buzz than Natalie Portman for her performance in Jackie so this film was high on my list to see over winter break.  It follows Jackie Kennedy (Portman) in the days after her husband's assassination through flashbacks during an interview given to Theodore White (Billy Crudup) for Life magazine.  We see Jackie during the immediate aftermath of the shooting in Dallas, witnessing the oath of office administered to Lyndon Johnson (John Carroll Lynch) aboard Air Force One, telling the children about their father's death, making preparations for the funeral, and leaving the White House after her efforts to restore it.  Through it all, Jackie expresses her profound grief and demands that JFK's legacy be protected.  Portman gives the performance of her career and I literally could not take my eyes off her. She physically resembles Jackie Kennedy but it is the voice which sells the performance, particularly during the filming of the White House tour.  I was also struck by the scene between Jackie and a priest (John Hurt) where she discusses JFK's infidelities and the scene where she drunkenly relives her shining moments in the White House by going to each room in the clothing she wore for those occasions.  The score by Mica Levi is incredibly stirring but it is the use of the music from the Broadway musical Camelot that is especially dramatic.  I highly recommend this film for Portman's brilliant portrayal of the enigmatic former First Lady.

Passengers

I have had the best winter break ever, spending the majority of my time in darkened theaters.  In fact, in between Christmas and New Year's Day I saw ten movies (including La La Land for the third time and Rogue One for the third time).  I will write about them this week and I'll start with Passengers, which all of the girls in my family saw downtown at the Gateway the day after Christmas.  I found this movie to be incredibly entertaining and we all really enjoyed it.  Jim Preston (Chris Pratt) is in suspended animation aboard the starship Avalon on a journey to the colony Homestead II when a catastrophic event inadvertently awakens him 90 years too early.  The starship is equipped with every conceivable luxury (for the passengers to enjoy after they awaken three months prior to landing) and, at first, Jim enjoys himself.  He tries to figure out how to put himself back into suspended animation but soon realizes that there is no way.  He does, however, learn how to awaken others.   Distraught at the thought of living out his life alone, he becomes obsessed with passenger Aurora Lane (Jennifer Lawrence) and makes the agonizing decision to wake her up.  As they grow closer, the ship begins to slowly malfunction.  Will Aurora learn of Jim's duplicity in her awakening?  Will they be able to repair the malfunctioning ship?  This is a sleek and stylized sci-fi thriller with incredible special effects, especially the pool scene when the ship loses gravity, but the romance is also quite affecting due to the chemistry between Pratt and Lawrence. I also really enjoyed Michael Sheen's performance as Arthur, a droid bartender (the scenes where Jim talks to Arthur reminded me of similar scenes in The Shining).  My Mom, my sisters, Tashena and I had a great time watching this movie and I recommend it for what it is: escapist entertainment (If you want a more philosophical exploration of space travel, see Arrival).