Movie Reviews - 2017 posts

WARNING: SPOILERS

I get that “Deep Throat” was taken as a title, but surely there’s a less cumbersome subtitle than “The Man Who Brought Down the White House.” Not to mention more accurate. The White House still stands, yo. It’s Nixon who was brought down.

Mark Felt was, of course, Deep Throat, Bob Woodward’s garage freak, the man on deep background in the Woodward/Bernstein investigation into Watergate, which, yes, brought down the Nixon White House, paving the way for the Ford one, then Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush II, Obama and, yeah, here we are with the Trump White House and its attempts to control and/or malign the FBI. Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to be fucking assholes.

So guess when Bob Woodward rears his pretty head in this movie? An hour in—two-thirds of the way through. He’s a blip. Hell, he’s not even Felt’s main press contact! That would be Sandy Smith of Time magazine (Bruce Greenwood), whom Felt meets in a diner like normal folk, and who, when Felt finally tells him to take out his notepad, warns him: “Mark, are you sure about this?” You know: like any true reporter on top of a world-breaking scoop would.

Smith is also one of the many characters who keep telling us who Felt is:

• Bill Sullivan (Tom Sizemore): “Mark Felt: Integrity, bravery, fidelity. Ladies and gentlemen, the G man’s G man!”
• Mrs. Felt (Diane Lane): “I give you the chief dragon slayer and guardian of the American dream!”

So why does Felt become more opaque the longer the movie goes on? And why does “Mark Felt,” which should bring greater clarity to Watergate—revealing the other side of “All the President’s Men”—bog us down in murkiness?

All we’ve got are pieces
It even begins wrong. On April 11, 1972, Felt goes the White House to meet with the three Johns of the Nixon administration: Dean (Michael C. Hall, a good match), Mitchell (Stephen Michael Ayers, not so good), and Ehrlichman (Wayne Pére, shitty). Referencing the antiwar protesters outside, we get this convo:

Ehrlichman: Goddamn Russian revolution out there. Why aren’t we arresting anybody?
Felt: Because that ... isn’t a crime.

So we’ve set up our dynamic in the most reductive way possible. Thanks, Hollywood.

The Johns are offering Felt a kind of quid pro quo: If J. Edgar Hoover is fired, would he be a friend to the administration? Maybe as director? But Felt is a company man, loyal to the Bureau and to Hoover. He’s so loyal to Hoover, in fact, that after being dismissed, he sticks around to give a long, exacting synopsis of FBI intelligence gathering regarding the peccadillos of Washington politicians—all of which Mr. Hoover keeps safely in his secret files. And if something should happen to Mr. Hoover? Who knows what will happen to them?

It’s a threat. From our hero. Our guy is someone who actually makes us feel sorry for Nixon's men. The fuck?

Most of “Mark Felt” is dimly lit, ominous, airless. We’re forever in closed rooms, forever getting close-ups of faces. Everyone is trying to figure things out. Everyone but Felt, who has them figured out and is trying to keep that knowledge from his face. He’s inscrutable. Do we even know when he decides to leak? Do we understand how he first meets Bob Woodward and why he goes to him? 

The basic conflict is straightforward—not to mention topical. The Nixon administration wants to control the FBI, particularly its investigation into the Watergate affair, and Felt wants to keep the Bureau independent. Halfway through, we get a good scene that exemplifies this conflict. By this point, Hoover has died, and Felt has already determined that Hoover’s replacement, L. Patrick Gray (Marton Csokas), is doing Nixon’s bidding rather than the FBI’s. So Felt has begun to leak information about Watergate. John Dean calls him up to investigate and plug the leaks.

Dean: We want you to do something about it, Mr. Felt. Now.
Felt: Fine. But I don’t understand.
Dean: Which part?
Felt: The part about you calling me. The White House has no authority over the FBI.
Dean: Uh, we can—
Felt: At all, Mr. Dean.
Dean: But we can suggest—
Felt: I’m afraid the White House has nothing to suggest to the FBI.

That’s great. It also sets up a great inner conflict: How does Felt investigate leaks that he himself is causing—and that others are beginning to suspect him of—while protecting his men? While not accusing the innocent? The movie doesn’t really have an answer. At one point, doesn’t he let a subordinate twist in the wind? Then doesn’t he clear him? Kinda sorta? It’s never as straightforward as you’d want. It's as if half the movie is on deep background. 

Here’s a clearer answer from the book the movie is based on:

On one report prepared by his team, Felt dramatically circled a paragraph stating that [assistant U.S. attorney Donald E.] Campbell had been approached by Woodward before a leak but denied giving any comment. Felt wrote boldly capital letters, “LAST PAGE OF ATTACHED MEMO—HERE IS ENTIRE ANSWER.” That was not the only time Felt tried to deflect attention from the FBI to other potential leakers.

That’s some nasty business. But so what, right? Campbell was probably one of those Nixon cronies. He probably got what he deserved. Except Campbell turned out to be one of the prosecutors who helped break James McCord (in January ’73), which helped break the Watergate case wide open.

We also get way too many dull subplots. Felt’s daughter has left home, (like in the Beatles song), and the Weather Underground is blowing things up (like in that other Beatles’ song). Are the two related? Does Felt think they are? Does he let the personal get in the way of the professional in pursuing the WU? The movie implies it. And what’s up with his wife? The movie opens with the two of them generically happy, but before long she’s blaming the FBI for ruining her life, and he’s blaming her for ruining their daughter.

Throughout, Felt never loses Neeson’s Irish accent, just as L. Patrick Gray, who is Irish, never loses Csonka’s Eastern European one. It’s like a battle over who is the least likely American.

What the puzzle is supposed to look like
What a mess. Writer-director Peter Landesman, a former New Yorker reporter, directed the underrated “Parkland,” about the JFK assassination, as well as the disappointing “Concussion,” about the collision of science and football starring Will Smith. This is his worst. By far.

This is what it should’ve been. Felt is a man who, in order to save the FBI (from the Nixon administration), betrays the FBI (by leaking its secrets). And he’s successful. He helps reporters connect the dots and bring down a president. Except in saving the FBI (by bringing down Nixon), Felt exposes the FBI (to the Church committee). Its secrets are revealed, too. Its image is tarnished. And he gets caught up in this. He’s indicted before a Grand Jury for violating the civil rights of Americans in pursuit of the Weather Underground. He loses by winning.

A movie that connected those dots would be worth seeing.

WARNING: SPOILERS

During the movie’s rollout, The New York Times kept saying that they broke the Pentagon Papers story, not the Washington Post, so the movie should be called “The Times” not “The Post.”

Huff.

Except the movie isn’t about that. It’s about this:

• The struggle to make the Post a national newspaper.
• The struggle for Post publisher Katharine Graham (Meryl Streep) to find her voice.

These things coincide, according to the movie, with the risks the Post took in publishing the Pentagon Papers.

The movie gives full credit to Neil Sheehan and the Times for breaking that story. Hell, the Times is not just present here but omnipresent. It’s the big brother whose shadow you can’t overcome. To Ben Bradlee, it’s as much an enemy as the Nixon White House. More so, in some sense.

That’s actually one thing that I loved about it. While lionizing liberal icons Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) and Katharine Graham (Meryl Streep), who are in the midst of a battle with a corrupt Republican administration, the movie lays bear the lie of “the liberal media.” True journalists like Bradlee don’t have political agendas; they have professional ones. Their goal is to beat the other guy to the story. 

This isn't a Hollywoodization, by the way. In Bradlee’s memoir, “A Good Life,” from 1995, he writes about the moment the Nixon Justice Dept. got an injunction to keep the Times from publishing more excerpts from the Pentagon Papers—restraining an American newspaper in this manner, he writes, “for the first time in the history of the republic.” Dark days. Was he frustrated? Angry? Nope. More like relieved and energized. “At least the New York Times had been silenced,” he writes, “never mind how.”

Never mind how?

That stunned me when I first read it. But Bradley’s agenda isn't political but professional—ruthlessly so. Same with today’s Post and Times and Wall Street Journal. As opposed to, say, Fox News, where the agenda is wholly political. And completely unprofessional.

Zero to 60
That said, I was a little disappointed with “The Post.” It should totally be in my wheelhouse—a historical procedural about historic journalism that’s smart, true, and cares about the details—but I never felt engaged. There was always distance. The movie started on the wrong track and never quite righted itself.

I wouldn’t have begun in 1966 in Vietnam. Or if I did, I would’ve worked in that Daniel Ellsberg (Matthew Rhys) wasn’t just an intellectual; he had been a first lieutenant in the Marines in the 1950s. I did like the dynamic on McNamara’s plane. Ellsberg is called back to give his assessment, says the war isn’t improving, and Bob McNamara (Bruce Greenwood), rather than discount him, agrees. Angrily agrees. Yet on the tarmac, before the press, he still gives LBJ’s and the Pentagon’s upbeat assessment. That helps sour Ellsberg, which helps explain his later decision to leak the Pentagon Papers.

Here’s something the movie doesn’t wonder over that both Bradlee and Graham, in their respective memoirs, do. From Graham’s “Personal History”:

It’s hard to understand why Nixon and his people were so upset by the publication of these Papers, which were essentially a history of decisions made before they were in power. Nothing in them was a reflection on Nixon. I believe the administration’s reaction was an example of its extreme paranoia about national security and secrecy in general.

Overall, the journalistic side of the story ain’t bad. I like Bradlee wondering what Neil Sheehan is up to—“Haven’t seen his byline in a while”—and the amateur spy games to try to suss it out. I like everyone reading the Times the day the story breaks. It’s assistant managing editor Ben Bagdikian (Bob Odenkirk) who tags Ellsberg as the leak, and who contacts him from the usual public pay phones, and who travels to Boston to get a copy. The sorting of the papers in Bradlee’s living room is good—with the daughter selling lemonade outside—but does it have the zip it should? I associate Bradlee with energy, with that ballsy, freewheelingness of WWII vets who moved through life as if stunned they were still alive and decided to make the most of it. The movie doesn’t have that verve. Bradlee and Graham were the upstarts, the unknowns, trying to prove something at ages 49 and 53 respectively, and director Steven Spielberg cast the grand dames of American cinema, Hanks and Streep, ages 61 and 68 respectively, and maybe that was a mistake. There needed to be a greater hunger there. 

The second half of the story is Graham’s, who is often the only woman in a room full of accountants and lawyers, and who, according to the film, is virtually mute at the start. She’s smart, a good study, but can’t perform. Then she finds her voice.

The pivotal moment occurs after the reporters do their work and the Post’s lawyers warn about publishing it. From Graham’s memoir:

I was extremely torn by Fritz’s saying that he wouldn’t publish. I knew him so well, and we had never differed on any important issue; and, after all, he was the lawyer, not I. But I also heard how he said it: he didn’t hammer at me, he didn’t stress the issues related to going public, and he didn’t say the obvious thing—that I would be risking the whole company on this decision. He simply said he guessed he wouldn’t. I felt that, despite his stated opinion, he had somehow left the door open for me to decide on a different course. Frightened and tense, I took a big gulp and said, “Go ahead, go ahead, go ahead. Let’s go. Let’s publish.” And I hung up.

The movie, to its credit, captures all of this—particularly the silent interaction between her and Fritz Beebe, a legend at the Post, played by playwright Tracy Letts (“August: Osage County”). It’s nearly the same role he plays in “Lady Bird,” isn’t it? The wise, patient man next to the leading lady. Just as Bradley Whitford (“Get Out”) gets to play another asshole.

Anyway, it’s a great moment, and Streep nails it. Graham’s arc is the arc of the film—from figurehead to actor—but it feels overdone. It’s too obvious what she’s lacking, and then, boom, all of a sudden she gets it. How nice. And this is even before Spielberg—forever underlining points—films Graham, after the SCOTUS decision, making her way through the crowd, which suddenly turns into only admiring women. I don't buy it—the trajectory. Pretending she only found it at the 11th hour does a disservice to her and to the movie.  

27 for 30
“The Post” is Steven Spielberg’s 30th feature film and I’ve seen 27 of them. He and I have spent a lot of time together in the dark. Here's a question: As he’s aged, as his future has receded and his past has grown, have his futuristic sci-fi movies become more dystopian (the idealism of “Close Encounters” and “E.T.” giving way to “War of the Worlds” and “Ready Player One”), while the historical movies have become more nostalgic?

The nostalgia is certainly thick in this one. I learned more about how newspapers were printed than ever before—and I'm the son of a newspaper man. And those newspapers were read—from beginning to end. People didn’t just see a headline, or a tweet or a meme, and share it. Those were the days.

I’m with him. I just find it ironic that Spielberg, the former wunderkind, has such love for what no longer is—for what’s been replaced by the very thing that used to make his eyes light up: the whiz-bang of it all.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Can anyone watch this movie and not be reminded of their first overwhelming love? For me it was in college with a girl named Kristin; and just as Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and Oliver (Armie Hammer) dance around each other for weeks here, repelling and attracting, repelling and attracting, so I did the same with Kristin—but for years. There was always an excuse—she with someone, I with someone—but mostly I felt unworthy. I couldn’t imagine it. Then I couldn’t imagine not letting her know, so I told her the spring of my senior year. And then suddenly, magically, we were seeing each other, in the few weeks before I graduated and she left for a summer job on the coast of Maine.

Another parallel: Near the end of the movie, and near the end of Oliver’s stay in Italy, the two are walking and kissing at night in the nearly deserted cobblestone streets of Bergamo, a northern Italian/Germanic town, and they come across some locals listening to music (“Love My Way” by the Psychedelic Furs); and Oliver, overcome by it all, and with his usual boundless enthusiasm, dances with the girl, while Elio, overcome by other things, stumbles to a nearby trashcan and throws up.

I doubt it was the drink; I think it was the love. I think that because that was me. When I realized my case with Kristin wasn’t hopeless, what did I do? Dance? Shout with joy? Sure. I also returned home and threw up. For a time, it made me think our anatomical symbol for love was all wrong. It shouldn’t be the heart, I decided, but the stomach. We should send each other cards with stomachs on them. Our love notes should read “I (stomach) you” and “You make me nauseous.”

Keeping the lovers apart
Can anyone imagine a more languorous film? That’s the word that kept coming to me: languid. It’s a movie that feels like a summer day with nothing much to do.

It’s a slow dance. It’s circular. There’s the doors that open and close—literally and metaphorically. In this impossibly beautiful Italian country home in Lombardy, Italy, Oliver is using Elio’s room, and Elio is forced into the smaller room on the other side of a shared bathroom, and the doors are like invitations or refusals. Generally when one is opening the other is closing. It’s red light, green light, keep away. There are little verbal attacks, snarky little bites that confuse the other, and probably the biter. The two men show off and compete with each other, and, for a time, each sublimates his desire with a pretty Italian girl. (As sublimation goes, that's not a bad way.) The point of the love story is to keep the lovers apart, and dramatists often bend over backwards to find ways, but “Call Me By Your Name” reminds us that we do a pretty fine job of it on our own.

You keep the lovers apart because once they get together it’s fairly dull business for the viewer. Here, too, a bit. We’re no longer building toward something, we’re just at something. I found my attention wavering.

But screenwriter James Ivory (of Merchant/Ivory) and director Luca Guadagnino (“A Bigger Splash”) still keep it interesting. Maybe because we know it’s ending shortly? Because they go there with the fruit? Because there’s always the specter of possible gay bashing—that it’ll end in violence and pain? Thank god, it doesn’t. It ends traditionally, at a train station. No violence, just pain.

I was confused by the title before I saw the film but not after: “Call me by your name,” one says, “and I’ll call you by mine.” The wish to subsume yourself in the other, to be the other. Is it stronger in homosexual relationships? Where it’s easier to be the other? Oliver and Elio trade names and clothes and secrets. Then again, Kristin and I traded shirts. Or maybe she just wore mine.

Yes, the privilege here is immense. The Perlman family has cooks and gardeners and (the greatest privilege of all) lives with meaning. The father (Michael Stuhlbarg) is an archeology professor, Oliver is his graduate student, they are living lives of the mind. They have the dining table outdoors, and the meals served without fuss, and volleyball on the grass. Friends drop by. I envied the place, and the privilege, but mostly I envied the intelligence. Most movies make me feel too smart; this made me feel the opposite. Like I hadn’t studied enough. Like, at 54, I really needed to hit the books again.

L’interloper
In that final phone conversation, in winter during Hanukah, when Oliver tells Elio he’s getting married, he also tells him how lucky he is that he has parents who are so understanding—so open—about his homosexuality. “My father would’ve carted me off to a correctional facility,” he says. And Elio is lucky. To be who he is and where he is with the people he’s with. He's particularly lucky to have a father who gives him “the talk," the real talk, that every sensitive son needs to hear. I certainly needed to hear it in the summer of 1987. I still need to hear it. I want the speech on an MP3 file. I'd listen to it weekly:

We rip out so much of ourselves, to be cured of things faster than we should, that we go bankrupt by the age of 30, and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. 

And this:

Our hearts and our bodies are given to us only once. And before you know it, your heart is worn out. And as for your body, there comes a point when no one looks at it, much less wants to come near it.

Right now, there’s sorrow, pain. Don’t kill it, and with it the joy you’ve felt.

Staying open is so tough. Most things in life push us in the opposite direction. Most movies, too. “Call Me By Your Name” opened me up in a way I have not felt in a long time. It’s the best movie of the year.

At the start of the movie, as Elio first watches Oliver arrive, he jokingly calls him an interloper. So he is. For life.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Despite the thrilling ending, that whole “Every word you just said was wrong” triptych ticked off by Luke Skywalker, which not only upends Kylo Ren’s worldview but our subtitle, since the last of the three is “And I will not be the last Jedi”—which, let’s face it, we all knew it going in, Rey being the ray of hope and the Jedi idea worth billions—despite all that, “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” disappointed me. Mostly for this reason:

They had 35 years to figure out what happened to Luke Skywalker, and this is what they came up with? I vant to be alone? Sulking for a long time, at the edge of a galaxy far, far away?

Luke was my guy. And look what they did to him. Look what they did to my boy.

Most likely to succeed
In the summer of 1977, when I was 14, I must have seen “Star Wars” half a dozen times. I had “May the Force Be With You” and “Darth Vader Lives” iron-on T-shirts. And if I knew anything I knew this: Luke was going to wind up with the girl. The other dude? Han? A jerk. A hot-rodder. Besides, it wasn’t his story. It was Luke’s. He had the true heart. I knew that. Everyone knew that.

But that was before a car accident disfigured Mark Hamill’s pretty face, and before George Lucas—who had already invented something that binds his universe together—decided to tie it all up in a way-too-neat bow by making the villain, Darth Vader, Luke’s father, and the girl, Princess Leia, Luke’s sister, which created all kinds of complications for the original—the least of which is the kiss. I mean, Darth tortures his own daughter? He tries to kill his own son? Without knowing it? What good is the Force if it can’t fathom that?

But at least we got Luke’s heroic journey: rise and savior in the first movie; training and setback in the second; rescue and ... OK, so he doesn’t exactly stop the Emperor in the third. Daddy does that. He surrenders, hoping he can bring Darth back from the Dark Side, and he does, in the most-telegraphed, worst-edited change-of-heart in movie history. So Luke kinda-sorta gets credit for stopping the Empire. And by the end he’s a Jedi master. Also secondary to Han/Harrison Ford, who became the bigger star by far, and whose bad-ass ways were apparently more appealing to both men and women. Talk about your upended worldviews! “Wait, women want the jerk? All women want the jerk? Damn, this is going to be a long life."

Really, what heroic thing did Luke do after blowing up the Death Star in the first movie? He gets clocked by a wampa, whines with Yoda, loses a hand to Darth, gets trapped by Jabba, and is zapped by the Emperor. Still he’s treated as a legend, rather than someone who never lived up to his promise, so he sets up a Jedi camp to train the next generation, including his nephew, Ben Solo, the son of Han and Leia. And he screws that up, too. And he screws it up in the exact same way Obi-wan did.

Obi-wan took a kid, Anakin, trained him in the Jedi ways, lost him to the Dark Side, then lied about it to his next pupil, Luke: “A young Jedi named Darth Vader...betrayed and murdered your father.”

Luke took a kid, Ben Solo, trained him in the Jedi ways, lost him to the Dark Side, then he too lies about it to his next pupil, Rey, leaving out the part about thinking of killing him. Which woke up Ben/Kylo and completely turned him.

And what about that anyway? How exactly does Kylo, the student, best Luke, the Master? All we see is Luke looking horrified, falling backward, “Noooo!,” then waking up to flaming ruins. Is it that Luke was off balance by his earlier murderous thoughts, while Kylo was enraged? But OK, since it happens, here’s another one: Why doesn’t Kylo take the opportunity to kill Luke here? He killed everyone else—why not Luke? He certainly hated him enough.

That’s not even the worst of it. Imagine you’re Luke amid the wreckage and the bodies. You’re a legend, a Jedi Master, and now your nephew is the disciple of Snoke, who is rebuilding the Empire as the First Order. What do you do?

You flee to the edge of the galaxy, live like a hermit, and cut yourself off from the Force. Of course.

Faux feminism
Admittedly there’s a kind of symmetry to it. Luke begins the saga desperate to leave the desert planet, Tatooine, and join the rebellion, and he ends it on the water planet, Ahch-To, refusing to join the rebellion. Except the latter part isn’t exactly heroic. And if he didn’t become heroic, what was that hero’s journey all about? What was my childhood all about?

Dude isn’t even wise or resigned in his hermitage. He’s bitter. He went from whining to bitterness. The wisdom we get comes from ghostly Yoda, appearing in cackling, crackling form, talking about failure. Luke can’t even burn the ancient Jedi texts; ghost Yoda has to do that for him.

Wait, isn’t this true: Yoda is to Young Luke in “Empire” as Old Luke is to Rey in “Last Jedi”? So why is Rey’s mission to recruit old Luke to battle while young Luke’s mission was to just get trained by Yoda? How come Obi-wan didn’t instruct him, “Luke, go to the Dagobah system and find Yoda and bring him back to lead the rebellion because that dude can seriously kick ass”? Why weren’t the Emperor and Darth worried about Yoda returning the way Snoke/Kylo Ren are worried about Luke? Because Yoda was super old? Because his powers were weak, old man? Maybe. But at the time, his powers were still greater than young Luke’s.

Are Star Wars’ powers getting weak, old man? We keep seeing the same movie. Once again we watch our young hero (Luke/Rey) tossed about by the wizened Sith Lord (The Emperor/Snoke), while the Dark Side disciple (Darth/Kylo) stands to one side deciding whose side he’s on. At least the editing was better this time around. At least victory was a matter of intellect—hiding your true intentions. And at least Kylo did what he did for dark reasons: power. Still, I’m curious: Didn’t Snoke know the story of the Emperor’s fall? And doesn’t this galaxy have its version of George Santayana? Those who don’t learn history are doomed to repeat it. Ditto those who have lousy screenwriters.

You know what really bugged me about that scene? The throne. Dude’s sitting on a fucking throne in the midst of a big red empty in the middle of a spaceship. Can we get past this throne trope already? How about a desk with some paperwork on it? How about a comfy couch with two corgis? Where’s the pleasure in a big red empty? And what is Snoke doing while waiting for his 1:1s? Does he have hobbies? Has he tried moisturizer? Visine? 

The movie does go off in some new directions—notably with Rey’s lineage, which isn’t related at all to the Skywalker/Kenobi clan. Thank god. She’s a nothing from nowhere. She’s the exceptional borne from the unexceptional. In this way, the Force is being democratized. Cf., the kid before the end credits who uses the Force to grab his broom.

“Last Jedi” also trots out the subversive—in the sense of subverting usual tropes—with its newfound feminism: Rose Tico schooling Finn; Leia and Holdo schooling Poe Dameron. But it feels like faux feminism to me.

Let me get this out of the way first: Leia slaps Poe Dameron for losing lives while destroying a dreadnought? I get the demotion, or worse, for not following orders; but a slap?

Besides, the whole “hot-dog flyboys wrong/calm women right” dynamic feels forced; it feels like the movie stacked the decks to make its “gotcha!” point. First they cast Laura Dern (never a good sign) as Vice Admiral Holdo; then they doll her up with purple hair and an odd turtlenecky dress so she looks like a cross between a “Hunger Games” socialite and an “Alice in Wonderland” sketch. Military rep aside, she seems like the unlikeliest admiral in the world. Which is why Poe leads others in a mutiny when they discover she’s abandoning ship. Actually that’s not why they mutiny. They mutiny because she doesn’t explain why they’re abandoning ship. To anyone. It would’ve been so easy, too. “Hey, let’s take these undetected transports to the rebel base on Crait so we can fight another day. Who’s with me?” But nah. And the movie doesn’t own up to this. The movie thinks Poe is a hothead, and wrong, and she’s a leader, and wise.

Doesn’t Poe also get the (dis)credit for the idiot Canto Bight subplot? But that’s a Rose Tico/Finn/Maz Kanata operation from the get-go. And how stupid is Finn in all this? The place is Vegas, full of rich, drunk, gambling fools, and he’s luxuriating in it. He needs RT to tell him look beneath the surface to find the exploitation. I wanted to smack my head—or his. That whole subplot is a longshot that never pays off. Worse, the partner in crime they pick up, DJ (Benicio del Toro, the best thing in the movie, btw), gives away Holdo’s plan and the transports get zapped like so much popcorn. Which leads to Holdo’s big sacrifice.

How come this hasn’t been tried before? Hyperspace the shit out of a giant Imperial/First Order ship? Kamikaze it. Cut it in two. Of course, for all the destruction, no main characters buy it. Fancy that. Finn and Rose are over there, as is, I believe, Rey. Not to mention Kylo Ren and Gen. Hux—the perpetual Abel to Kylo’s Cain. All survive. They don't even lose a hand. 

On Crait, Finn attempts his own sacrifice. He’s going to ram his speeder down the throat of the First Order, but at the last minute Rose’s speeder comes from the side to clip his and take him out of harm’s way. A few objections:

• Attempting to rescue someone by ramming your vehicle into theirs at full speed? In the real world, the odds are pretty high both of you will die.
• How is this logistically possible?

She veers off but he keeps racing in a straight line. But somehow, taking a circuitous route, she beats his straight line and gets ahead of him? That only works if: 1) her speeder is speedier; 2) she’s a better pilot. And if it’s 2) add that to the list of things Finn can’t do. One wonders, between this, and the Vegas infatuation, and constantly trying to run away, why we care about him at all.

But at least Luke gets to go out with a bang.

Old tech
I’m not the only one who had a problem with Luke’s outcome, by the way. Luke himself wasn’t thrilled. From a Vanity Fair piece on Mark Hamill:

“I at one point had to say to Rian [Johnson, director], ‘I pretty much fundamentally disagree with every choice you’ve made for this character. Now, having said that, I have gotten it off my chest, and my job now is to take what you’ve created and do my best to realize your vision.’”

That said, that final battle, with its twist, is pretty good. He gets to fight, or “fight,” but remain true to his last-act “plague on both your houses” persona. He gives the rebels the time to escape in the Millennium Falcon, which he called “a piece of junk” a long time ago, and which just keeps going. Chewie just keeps going. But he’s a bit player now, as is C3PO and R2D2. They come on, play their greatest hits—“Help me Obi-wan”; “The odds against our survival are...”—then are shown the door. They’re old tech and no longer supported by the machinery.

Anyone know why Luke buys it? Is it the strain of projecting his form across the galaxy? Or was it just time to die? For all my problem with his hermitage, they give him a good end. He gets to stare at the setting sun one last time—as a young Luke once stared at the setting suns of Tatooine, longing for adventure. He certainly found it. He’s seen things you people wouldn’t believe.

WARNING: SPOILERS

In “Youth,” Feng Xiaogang’s sweeping tale of a cultural troupe in the People’s Liberation Army in the 1970s, one of our main characters is He Xiaoping (Miao Miao), a young dancer from the provinces with a sad backstory. Her father was reeducated during the Cultural Revolution, and her mother remarried; Xiaoping has since taken her step-father’s name, but he ignores her, and village peers bully her. She’s hoping for better now that she’s in the PLA.

She doesn’t get it. Is it simply first impressions? Mean girls? When she arrives, her clothes smell (it costs to shower where she lived), and she sweats more than the other girls, and, despite her cheery demeanor, she can’t live this down. It doesn’t help that she borrows the military uniform of Dingding (Yang Caiyu) to take a picture to send back home—specifically to her father, to whom she’s loyal, and who isn’t long for this world—nor that she doesn’t own up to it when confronted. There’s also an incident with a padded bra, which is apparently scandalous. Bottom line: She’s “other” in this troupe. She’s mistreated, a punchline.

But boy can she dance. And when the group is readying to perform before cavalry officers in the mountains, the lead dancer, as in a classic Hollywood melodrama, injures herself. It’s Xiaoping, the understudy, who is called upon to save the day.

Except by this point she’s done with the troupe—less for the way they’ve treated her than the way they treated Liu Feng (Huang Xuan), a selfless, almost saintly figure, who is kicked out for indescretions. Specifically: He spent years doing good deeds for Dingding because he was hopelessly in love with her; and when he finally confesses this to her, and tries to embrace her, he’s caught (“caught”) and condemned.

So Xiaoping, done with it all, feigns illness to get out of dancing the lead role. Ah, but the political commissar realizes she’s faking, and, in his wisdom, decides to see where she’s going with it. He takes her on stage before the cavalry officers, tells them that she’s sick but has agreed to perform for them anyway. The troops chant her name: “Learn from Comrade Xiaoping!” they cry. The music wells up, and the camera closes in on her, saluting the troops, overcome with emotion.

And then she shows them what she can do. 

Except that doesn’t happen. Instead we cut away, and the next time we see Xiaoping she’s working as a nurse on the front lines of the Sino-Vietnamese War. We never get the big dance number the movie seems to be building toward.

It’s even weirder than that. Because the big dance number was actually filmed. It was in the movie when it screened at the Toronto International Film Festival last September. It’s even on YouTube. You can see it here. But it’s not in the movie I saw in downtown Seattle last weekend. And apparently it’s not in the film released in China on Dec. 15.

And what about that release? For a film from Feng Xiaogang, the Steven Spielberg of China, “Youth” had a really rocky time getting before the public. It was supposed to be released in late September, just prior to “National Day,” October 1, but was pulled by the Chinese government at the last minute. There’s an extremely informative article on the background to all of this by Richard Yu on the Cinema Escapist site, but even he doesn’t know why the film was pulled. He simply thinks the politics of the film, such as they are, had nothing to do with it.

So did something happen between when it was pulled and when it was released? Did Feng take some extra scissors to his project? Did someone else?

It’s the real thing
“Youth” is based upon a popular novel by Yan Geling, who was herself a dancer in a PLA troop in the 1970s, then became a journalist during the Sino-Vietnamese War. Essentially she’s Suizi (Elane Zhong), who narrates the film, and who’s part of the troup’s two unrequited love stories. Just as Liu Feng does everything for the shallow Dingding (for naught), so she does everything for the callow Chen Can (Wang TianChen) for naught. The Chinese do love their weepies. They love the scent of bitter almonds.

Me, I love this period in Chinese history. In 10 years, China went from the Cultural Revolution, when a whiff of westernism, let alone capitalism, was enough to be reeducated; to “to get rich is glorious,” when the machinery of capitalism was put into place and began to roar. The movie reflects that leap. The first thing we see is a giant mural of Mao Zedong; one of the last, a giant ad for Coca-Cola.

I admit that when the war started I went, “Wait, what? A Sino-Vietnamese war? In the ’70s?” Turns out it wasn’t much to brag about. The Chinese backed the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and when Vietnam desposed them, China took offense and attacked. (Most wars have suspect provenances, but starting one to keep Pol Pot in power has to be at the bottom.) The war lasted a month and cost China between 9,000 to 62,000 lives, depending on who you believe. Here, it costs the ever-helpful Xiaoping her sanity (temporarily) and the ever-selfless Liu Feng his arm (permanently). We do get a lovely scene where Xiaoping’s old troupe performs for the war’s wounded, and she, startled into recognition by the music, winds up outside, dancing on the grass under the stars.

Shortly after, amid tears, the troupe is disbanded. Economic reforms are on the way. Capitalism is on its way. 

To get rich may be glorious but it’s not portrayed so here. The people who get rich are the Chan Cans of the world—the opportunists. The Xiaopings and Lei Fengs get screwed again. The last time we see them, they’re huddled together on a train station bench in the mid-90s. Suizi’s voiceover lets us know they remain together, unmarried and without children, and show up at a reunion in 2016. But she says she won’t show us those scenes. She says it’s better to remember everyone as they were when they were young.

These days are ours
This is the second international film in the last three years to use “Youth” for its English language title—after Paolo Sorrentino’s 2015 film—and there's some interesting differences between the two. Most obviously, the western film focuses on the aged (Michael Caine, Harvey Keitel), while the Eastern film on the young (to the point of casting unfamous actors in the leads, and not showing us how they aged). It’s the opposite of how we perceive each culture: the west discards its aged, the east reveres its elders. I hope China doesn’t give up on that as it moves to the center of the world stage.

Overall, I enjoyed “Youth”—I was certainly swept up by it—but there’s a big disconnect that isn’t addressed. On some level, we’re all nostalgic for our youth, as is our narrator, Suizi, as is the film itself. Which means she/it yearns for this troupe, full of mean people, and this period, the Cultural Revolution, a time when society was upended, education reviled, priceless artifacts destroyed, and millions of lives ruined. Not exactly “Happy Days.” Not even “That ’70s Show.”

WARNING: SPOILERS

I’m not a fan of shitty movies. I have friends who are, who gather monthly to drink, laugh, and do the whole “MST3K” shtick with this or that piece of crap. Sometimes it sounds fun. It's just not for me.

I’ve never seen “The Room,” for example, a 2003 vanity project by a long-haired, pockmarked, deep-pocketed, thick-accented dude named Tommy Wiseau, who not only stars but writes, directs and produces. He’s good at none of these things. He’s notoriously bad at all of them. The movie is notoriously bad. It’s the “so bad it’s good” movie of the 21st century, and, over the years, has acquired a cult following, including various Hollywood stars: among them, Jonah Hill, Seth Rogen and James Franco.

“The Disaster Artist,” directed by and starring Franco as Tommy, chronicles its making. It’s the opposite of “The Room”: it's gotten raves: 92% on Rotten Tomatoes, top 10 lists, WGA nomination. It’s the acclaimed movie about the making of a bad one—a la “Ed Wood” or “Boogie Nights.”

Here’s my question: Does “The Disaster Artist” make “The Room” worse? Somehow less fun?

A cable kind of guy
I began to understand how huge all of this was last month, at Christmastime, when my nephew kept repeating the following line of dialogue to me. It's almost like his generation's “wild and crazy guy”:

I did not hit her, it’s not true. It’s bullshit. I did not hit her. I did naaaht. Oh hi, Mark.

It's from an infamously bad scene in “The Room.” You can see it here.

You can also see how it’s redone in “The Disaster Artist.” Franco's scene is good: the number of takes it took; how everyone on set knew the line except for the actor, Tommy Wiseau; how when he finally nailed it, in a manner so bad it became a joke, everyone broke into applause—because at least it had been done.

But ... Franco doesn’t quite nail it, does he? He doesn’t get the quick glance over to Mark before tossing the bottle on the ground. He doesn’t get the squinched eyes on “Naaaaht.” You look at the difference between the two scenes and wonder if Franco isn't a good-enough actor to act as badly as Tommy Wiseau. 

Plus ... isn't he’s kind of menacing?

That’s what surprised me when I watched some YouTube scenes from “The Room” after seeing “The Disaster Artist.” Tommy Wiseau may be weird and off, but he’s not as weird and off as James Franco playing Tommy. There’s an innocence in the original that isn’t in “The Disaster Artist.”

Indeed, if “The Disaster Artist” reminds me of any movie, it’s “The Cable Guy,” starring Jim Carrey and Matthew Broderick. Each is about a vaguely menacing loner who insinuates himself into the life of a well-meaning guy.

The well-meaning guy here is Greg Sestero (Dave Franco), a San Francisco actor who’s too uptight onstage. That’s why he admires Tommy, who puts it all out there. In their acting class, Tommy does an extended version of Brando doing Stella; at one point, he literally climbs the walls. Greg wants to be like that.

But the closer he gets to Tommy, the more he realizes how odd he is. The hair, the thousand-yard stare, the Eastern European accent. The insistence that—despite the accent—he’s an American from New Orleans.

Franco piles on oddities of his own. Tommy does Brando in acting class but he’s never seen a James Dean movie? But it allows us to watch the “tearing me apart” scene in “Rebel Without a Cause,” which Tommy incorporates into/steals for “The Room.” As with tossing a football around with Greg. Even though he can’t toss a football around.

Despite his near-comatose look, Tommy is a go-getter with a carpe diem attitude—at least when it comes to Greg. A move to LA seems impossible to Greg until Tommy says they can stay at his apartment down there. He has one. He’s loaded. But he seems fixated on Greg to an unhealthy degree. When the two are at a bar, and Greg starts chatting up a cute bartender, Amber (Alison Brie), Tommy demands they leave. And when Greg moves out to move in with Amber? It’s like a betrayal.

Is it because Tommy is lonely without Greg? Because Greg is his only friend? Or is it something deeper? The movie never answers these questions, merely insinuates. It never answers who Tommy is, or where he’s from, or how he got rich. It almost delights in not answering.

Later, when Greg laments the endless, fruitless auditions, and says the only way they can be in a movie is make one themselves, a light bulb goes on over Tommy’s head, and “The Room,” in which Tommy mistreats nearly everyone on set, and which is about how everyone betrays the upstanding hero, is made.

Thus the implication of “The Disaster Artist”: that Tommy makes “The Room” to keep Greg close, then makes it all about Greg’s betrayal of him.

That’s some fucked-up shit. And does it make “The Room” itself less fun as a result? I guess people who like shitty movies will have to answer that one.

For the birds
So Tommy spends millions of dollars to make a horrible movie while being a horrible person in the process. But this is Hollywood, so we need a happy ending. More: Franco and others like “The Room.” They know it's a horrible movie but they don't feel it's a horrible movie. It's given them too much joy. And that's their out. That's their happy ending. 

In “Ed Wood,” the best director in the world, Orson Welles, tells the worst director in the world, Ed Wood, to keep going: “Visions are worth fighting for,“ he says. ”Why spend your life making someone else's dreams?”

Here, it’s something similar. Though the movie is a disaster, though at the premiere every winds up laughing at it, Greg convinces Tommy that that’s a good thing. Did Hitchcock ever make people laugh like this? No. So in this way Tommy is better than Hitchcock. 

Yeah. He is naaaht. 

WARNING: SPOILERS

For a director as esteemed as Guillermo del Toro, it’s kind of shocking how few esteemed movies he’s made. It’s really just “Pan’s Labyrinth” and this. Everything else is lesser fare (“Crimson Peak”), B-comic movies (“Blade II,” “Hellboy”) and giant stupid shit (“Pacific Rim”). He’s got one Oscar nom (original screenplay, “Pan’s”), two BAFTA noms (both for “Pan’s”) and a shitload of sci-fi awards. 

I guess that’s who he really is: a sci-fi geek.

As for this fairy tale, fish-out-of-water love story? Patricia loved it from beginning to end. I liked it. But you know what I liked more? I liked Del Toro talking about it.

In December, he was on NPR’s “Fresh Air” and pointed out that “The Shape of Water” is really a revisionist take on “Creature from the Black Lagoon.” It’s the outsider’s take—the creature’s take. The woman, rather than being desired, is desirous. The creature is a creature, but benevolent and intelligent and curious. The true villains are the white men in charge: scientists and military officials and bureaucrats. I wonder if del Toro considered having Michael Shannon smoke a pipe throughout—like a ’50s era, B-movie scientist hero.

Then he goes deeper:

The screenplay makes a point of showing you that the characters that have the power of speech, that talk, have more of a trouble communicating with each other than the characters that just are.

That's nice. The movie is set in the early 1960s, one of the most frigid parts of the Cold War, but del Toro lets us know why the film is relevant today:

Every time we talk about emotions we do so very guardedly and with the fear of appearing disingenuous. And I wanted to make a completely honest, heart on the sleeve, non-ironic melodrama in which we talk about falling in love with, quote unquote, “the other”—as opposed to fearing the other, which is what we face every day in the news and politics.

Listen to the whole thing. His accent alone makes it worth it.

Follow through
As for the movie?

OK, so I’m a worst-case-scenario person. Sue me. I just couldn’t get past the stupidity of our heroes, Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins) and Zelda Fuller (Octavia Spencer), stealing an Amazonian river-god from the U.S. government in 1962, right under the nose of a borderline psychotic head of security, Richard Strickland (Shannon, essentially reprising his “Boardwalk Empire” character), and then ... not doing anything with him. For days. They just fill up the bathtub and let him flop around in there. Then Elisa has sex with him. She fills her entire bathroom with water and has sex with him. Mind you, she lives above a movie theater, and the building is old and made of wood. Fuck the shape of water, what about its weight? That’s risking a lot for one fairy-tale schtup. It’s not exactly staying on the down-low.

Even before then, in the government facility, isn’t Elisa quick to embrace the creature? To assume he’s not harmful? Here’s an egg, here’s another. You have claws and fangs but what the hell, I’ll just hang poolside with you. Within reach.

BTW: He is harmful. Ask the cat.

And what about the cat? Don’t they get over her pretty easily? If this things bites the head off Jellybean, I don’t think I’ll risk my ass helping him escape. Not that he’d get anywhere near Jellybean; she’d mess him up.

With most of this, del Toro is placing his needs as a filmmaker (to create the visually and emotionally dazzling) above the needs of his characters. He’s doing what he wants rather than what they need.

Not budging
That said, Hawkins is wonderful as Elisa, a mute janitor at a government lab, the lowest person on the totem pole, who, despite her mousy exterior, has an inner steel and her own, full, no-apologies sex life. Some of my favorite scenes are her confrontations with the bullying, supertall Strickland. How her eyes don’t budge. How her gaze undoes him because it doesn't bend to his will.

I also loved Michael Stuhlbarg as the most sensitive undercover Russian spy in the world. He brought true emotion, true feeling, to what might otherwise have been a by-the-way character. When he’s killed, shot by his own, it almost physically pained me.

I just wanted the movie to make more sense. Even Cold-War fairy tales should have their own internal logic. 

WARNING: SPOILERS

I wasn’t planning on seeing this, but then the New York Film Critics Circle tapped Tiffany Haddish for supporting actress over Laurie Metcalf in “Lady Bird” and Holly Hunter in “The Big Sick,” so I had to check it out.

No doubt, Haddish is the best thing in the movie, the only one who’s laugh-out-loud funny. But choosing her and this role over Metcalf and Hunter? The hell? Does NYFCC have a history of going with broad comedies? Did they, for example, choose Melissa McCarthy in “Bridesmaids,” a role which garnered a best supporting actress nomination at the 2011 Oscars? Nope. They went with Jessica Chastain for three films: “The Tree of Life,” “The Help” and “Take Shelter.” So why this one? Why now? 

Plus “Bridesmaids” was actually a good movie. Remember how it opens? With Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph having conversations that felt as intimate as any lifelong friendship? It felt personal and specific and funny.

“Girls Trip” is the opposite of that.

A mile away
We’re told that four friends graduated from college in 1995 and went their separate ways. And each became a plot point waiting to turn:

• Ryan Pierce (Regina Hall) is super-successful, “the next Oprah,” with a line of books, shows, products she pushes with her ex-football star husband, Stewart (Mike Colter of “Luke Cage”), encouraging women to “have it all.” Let me guess: He’s cheating on her.
• Sasha Franklin (Queen Latifah) is a struggling former journalist who runs a celebrity-gossip blog. Bills are piling up and backers are demanding more dirt and more clicks. Let me guess: She’ll realize the error of her dirt-digging ways.
• Lisa Cooper (Jada Pinkett Smith) is a single mom so anal she borders on obsessive-compulsive. Let me guess: She’ll let her freak flag fly.

Yes, yes, and yes.

The last of the four is Dina (Haddish), a take-no-prisoners party girl who refuses to be fired from her office job for physically attacking the coworker that stole her Go-Gurt. The four are reunited when Ryan, on the verge of her Oprahesque deal, flies them to New Orleans for the Essence Music Festival, where she is keynote speaker.

During the course of the weekend, things get crazy. Lisa accidentally pees over a crowd on Bourbon Street and hooks up with a studly man half her age; Dina pees over a crowd on Bourbon Street on purpose and gets the others effed up on absinthe; Sasha keeps pondering whether to go public with photos of Stewart in flagrante delicto with an Instagram queen (all bootie, boobs, and bitchiness), while Ryan has to decide whether to give Stewart, and possibly that Oprahesque business opportunity, the heave-ho.

It’s obvious what Ryan needs to do but it takes her the entire movie to do it. And then of course it turns out OK. The Oprahesque deal goes through anyway—Oprah didn’t need a Stewart, after all—while Sasha is rewarded with a partnership. It makes up for the time Ryan totally threw her over for Stewart—a key fact that’s revealed only two-thirds of the way through.

What’s not funny
The obvious plot turns might have been forgivable if any of this had been funny. It isn’t. Haddish is funny. Her demonstration of the grapefruit method had me laughing so hard I missed the next 15 seconds of dialogue. I think I had a few other laughing jags courtesy of Haddish, who, not coincidentally, is the only character who doesn't have an obvious plot-turn.

That’s the lesson. The obvious isn’t funny. Bullshit isn’t funny. The other characters are obvious and bullshit. Bravo to Haddish and thanks for the laughs, but unlike NYFCC I stop there.

WARNING: SPOILERS

It’s a helluva story.

The doc opens with Marc Tyler Nobleman, a writer of young adult nonfiction, talking to a class of elementary school kids. He shows them a slide of the bat signal, asks them if they’ve heard of Batman, and says of course they have. He’s been giving talks all over the world, from Chile to the UAE, and he hasn’t been in a classroom where someone doesn’t know Batman. Then he says this:

On every Batman story since the first, in 1939, there was only one name in the credit line: “Batman created by Bob Kane.” Here he is. And here’s the thing about that credit line: It. Is. Not. True.

We soon learn how Nobleman discovered that Bob Kane had a partner, Bill Finger, who created the bat suit, Batman’s origin, the bat cave, Robin, Gotham City, and who wrote several decades of Batman stories, but never got a line of credit. So Nobleman becomes determined to not only tell Finger’s story but to get his name properly credited in Batman comics, movies and TV shows. And after 10 years, and thousands of hours of research and detective work, he does just that. And justice is finally served.

Throughout, Nobleman is considered Bill Finger’s Batman. Several talking heads, including director Kevin Smith, say so, while the doc shows an animated Nobleman casting a long Batman shadow.

“I think there has to be one person who steps up and leads the charge,” Nobleman says. He’s that one person.

Here’s the thing about that line of credit: Is. It. True?

Mark of Kane
The doc lauds Nobleman in two ways:

1. He makes people aware of Bill Finger
2. He tracks down Finger’s granddaughter, who has the legal standing to challenge the Kane credit line 

There’s no doubt about the second achievement. We see all that happening. But the first? Just how well-known was Bill Finger when Nobleman began his project?

I was pretty deep into comic books in the 1970s but I admit I never heard of him. There’s also that montage of Nobleman asking comic-con visitors, some dressed as Batman, a series of Batman-related trivia, and all of them nailing the questions until the final one: Who’s Bill Finger? “Him, I don’t know.”

So Finger wasn’t generally known. But within the comic book industry? Oh yeah.

The doc tells us that when Batman producer Michael Uslan was a kid, he was introduced to Finger as “the creator of Batman” at the 1965 New York Comic-Con. Shortly thereafter, Jerry Bails wrote a fanzine article, “If the Truth Be Known or A Finger in Every Plot!,” lauding Finger’s contributions, but Kane denied it in an article for Batmania magazine, and that ended that. Finger remained mostly unknown and died in poverty in January 1974. He began as a ghost writer and became a ghost.

Here’s what’s left out. Finger was inducted into the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1994 (the same year as Bob Kane), and the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame in 1999 (three years after Kane). In 2005, about the time Nobleman began researching his book, Comic-Con International established the “Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing.”

Nobleman makes much of the fact that Finger died without an obit while upon Bob Kane’s death in 1998, The New York Times did a huge write-up on him. What he fails to mention? Kane’s Times obit credits Bill Finger in the second graph:

Batman and Robin, the characters that Mr. Kane created with his partner, Bill Finger, nearly 60 years ago, are some of the longest-lived comic-book heroes in the world.

What’s left out tends to elevate Nobleman; it makes it seem like only he knew.

But alarm bells really went off for me when the doc focused on the difficulty of getting a credit change for a longstanding comic-book character.

As example, we hear about the decades-long battle between DC Comics and Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster—including the 1947 case, in which Superman’s creators were awarded $94K but lost credit, and the 1960s case, in which the court sided with DC. Then Nobleman says this:

Long story short, Superman has been the subject of litigation almost from the beginning, and it’s been going on for decades at this point. ... And you know the Superman situation would not instill a lot of confidence that you can win.

Long story short? The doc fails to mention the 1970s case, in which Warner Bros., worried over negative publicity preceding “Superman: The Movie,” awarded Siegel and Shuster and their heirs $20,000 a year (later upgraded) as well as credit in all forthcoming Superman movies and comic books. Why was this left out? That’s huge. That’s precedent.

Is that the idea? They wanted Nobleman’s work with Finger to seem ... unprecedented?

Credit one
Even Nobleman tracking down Finger’s granddaughter leaves me with more questions than it should.

It’s thrilling detective work. When Nobleman started, all that was known about Bill Finger’s family was he had a son named Fred. It’s Nobleman who discovers Fred died of AIDS in 1991. He’s also the one who discovers that Fred had a child through a previous marriage, and he tracks down the girl, Athena, via an online Florida wedding announcement and MySpace page. He visits her. We see footage of that visit—apparently for a doc Nobleman planned at that time. We hear her complain about how hard it’s been for her—knowing what her grandfather did but not getting family cred. “I still don’t have closure,” she says, near tears. “I was excluded from everything.”

But ... what year was this visit? 2006? 2007? Later we see Athena going to the premiere of “The Dark Knight” in 2008 and having a great time. Then before the premiere of “The Dark Knight Rises” in 2012, DC/Warners wanted her to sign a document terminating rights to any kind of claim to the character.

“They wanted to keep me quiet,” she says.

It took her four years to realize this? What was she doing in the interim? The whole thing feels fuzzy. It feels like Nobleman wanted her to sue but she went to premieres instead. And it gets even fuzzier. Suddenly she’s with a guy named Dr. Travis Langley? Who’s that? Suddenly she’s getting pressure from comic book fans? I thought comic-conners didn’t know Bill Finger. Or is that before Marc’s book was published in 2012 and created a surge of interest?

But, yes, eventually she sues, and in Sept. 2015 they reach a settlement, and it’s announced that Finger will receive credit on the TV show “Gotham” and the movie “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice.” Wait, just those? No, it appears those are just examples. It appears he’s getting credit the way Siegel and Shuster got credit for Superman. Even though the doc never tells us Siegel and Shuster got credit for Superman.

(I’ll only briefly mention the irony that when Bill Finger finally, finally got credit for co-creating one of the world’s most famous characters, it was on “Batman v. Superman,” one of the worst superhero movies ever made.)

Listen, it’s a helluva story, and I’m grateful that Nobleman did all he did to get Bill Finger the credit he deserved. I even recommend you watch it. But “Batman & Bill,” directed by Don Argott and Sheena Joyce (“The Art of the Steal”), focuses too much on him, and makes murky too much of the history. A better Bill Finger doc awaits.

WARNING: SPOILERS

The trailer looked pretty good, but then Hollywood is rife with movies that work as trailers but not as movies. The director of this one, Jake Kasdan, son of Lawrence, is notorious for just that. His oeuvre:

• “The TV Set” (2006): chronicling the ways TV networks butcher good shows
• “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story” (2007): a satire on music biopics
• “Bad Teacher” (2011): Cameron Diaz as a foul-mouthed, pot-smoking, smokin’ hot teacher
• “Sex Tape” (2014): Husband and wife accidentally upload racy video to cloud

With “Jumanji: Welcome in the Jungle,” Kasdan finally has something more than a trailer.

Who should he/we thank for this? Screenwriters Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, who worked together on “Community” and “American Dad,” and who this year made the leap into film with “LEGO Batman,” “Spider-Man: Homecoming,” and “Jumanji”? Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, the world’s favorite action hero? Johnson and Kevin Hart, who continue to make a fantastic on-screen duo?

I’d say it’s whoever decided that board games were out, video games were in, and for god’s sake, make the kid the avatar.

And the nerds shall lead
Confession: I never watched the first “Jumanji.” Wait. Worse: I began it and stopped. Robin Williams did a kiddie version of his “Fisher King” role, every roll of the dice released chaos, and the backstories (1969, 1995) were convoluted and weepy.

This one begins where that one ends, with the Jumanji board game on the beach in 1996. It’s discovered, not by French girls, but by a jogging American dad (Tim Matheson), who brings it home to his teenage son, Alex Vreeke (Mason Guccione), who dismisses it out of hand. He’s into video games. When the game senses this, it simply transforms itself into one. Sure, why not? Alex chooses an avatar, begins to play, and gets sucked in.

Cut to: present day. Spencer (Alex Wolff) is a nerdy Jewish kid who is helping out his estranged childhood friend, now All-Star jock, Fridge (Ser-Darius Blain), by writing history papers for him. Bethany (Madison Iseman) is a social-media- and selfie-obsessed beauty queen who FaceTimes during class, while Martha (Morgan Turner) is ... uh ... what exactly? Shy? Dismissive? Basically she seems like a normal teen. All four get detention (the boys for cheating, the girls for sass) and are told to clean up the school’s cluttered basement. That’s where they find the Jumanji video game.

(Question: How did it get there? The Vreeke place is now shuttered, and the dad, who couldn’t handle the disappearance of his son, is the town nutjob. But someone, at some point, had to move the damn game. Did Dad give it to the school charity? And no one else ever tried to play it? Something for the DVD commentary, I guess.)

These kids, of course, do play it, and become their avatars:

• Spencer —> Dr. Smolder Bravestone (Dwayne Johnson), the Superman of the game, all strength and no weakness
• Fridge —> “Mouse” Finbar (Kevin Hart), a zoologist who’s short, slow, weak, and who carries weapons for Bravestone
• Martha —> Ruby Roundhouse (Karen Gillian), the super-fast, kick-ass Lara Croft type
• Bethany —> Prof. Shelly Oberon (Jack Black), a short, fat, middle-aged cartographer

Basically, the nerdy kids become powerful and are played by action heroes, while the popular kids become weak and are played by comedians. Each is still him or herself (Bravestone flinches at squirrels) but with the power of the avatar (Oberon is the only one who can read maps). And off they go, pursued by wild animals and biker dudes, to get a jewel, the Jaguar’s Eye, that the evil Van Pelt (Bobby Canavale) stole years earlier, and return it to the jaguar statue so the jungle can be restored. Or something. 

It’s both fun and funny. The Rock plays off his WWE persona (eyebrow raise, smolder, “Rock Bottom”), Kevin Hart plays off his little-man-with-big-mouth persona, and Jack Black channels his inner beauty queen. Eventually they hook up with Alex, whose avatar is Seaplane McDonough, and who thinks he’s been in the game for a few months—not 21 years.

Each avatar gets three lives, represented by three bars on their arms; when they lose one (eaten by a hippo, pushed off a cliff), they lose a bar. And when they lose all three? The assumption—theirs and the movie’s—is that they die. Not just the avatar. Them. But it’s just an assumption. Maybe they lose that third bar and—whoosh—they’re out of the game, and back as themselves. Who knows? Something else for the DVD commentary.

Popcorn machine
It’s a shame the movie didn't go a bit deeper. Our five are literally living Atticus Finch’s edict to walk in someone else’s skin, but the lessons they learn are basically: 1) appreciate one other; 2) work as a team; 3) take risks. I often found myself drumming my fingers during these scenes. And couldn’t we get better commentary on/satire of the gaming world? Van Pelt, for example, feels more movie villain than video-game villain.

That said, it’s a good popcorn movie with a bit of heart. I liked the moment, for example, when Alex/Bravestone is feeling cautious because he’s down to just one life, and Fridge/Finbar tells him, “That’s all we ever get.” Or at the very end, when grown-up Alex (Colin Hanks) introduces our four to his daughter, Bethany, and says, “We named her for the woman who saved my life.” I actually got a little verklempt there.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Halfway through the movie, which we watched at home, Patricia got up to get some ice cream. “Don’t pause,” she said. “I’m sure I won’t miss anything.”

Truer words. I don’t know if writer-director David Lowery (“Ain’t Them Bodies Saints”) has been studying at the Hou Hsiao-hsien School of Holding the Camera on Nothing for Five Minutes, but at times it sure felt like it.

There’s M (Rooney Mara) sitting on the kitchen floor shortly after the death of her husband, and eating a pie a friend brought by. Good, she could use some meat on them bones. And there’s her husband, C (Casey Affleck), now a ghost, wearing a sheet, a literal white sheet, with eyeholes that looks like slanted lemons, standing just in frame watching her. And watching her. And watching her. Until after four minutes, maybe five, she bolts for the bathroom to throw up. (So much for meat on them bones.)

And ... scene. Finally. 

“A Ghost Story” is an interesting experiment, and I enjoyed it more in the aftermath than in the watching. But top 10 for the year? I’ve seen a handful of critics who elevated it so; that’s why we watched it. Halfway through, as Patricia was going for ice cream, I wanted to strangle these guys.

C stays
It begins with a young couple living in a nondescript clapboard house. In bed, arm in arm, like young lovers do, she tells him a story:

When I was little we used to move all the time. I’d write these notes, and I would fold them up really small. And I would hide them in different places. So that if I ever wanted to go back, there’d be a piece of me there waiting.

Tuck that away.

The house makes odd noises. At one point, in the middle of the night, it sounds like something heavy fell on their piano, and he, followed by she, goes to investigate. They find nothing, despite the ominous music.

“Is it the ghost story already?” I asked Patricia. “I thought he was supposed to be the ghost.”

A second later, he becomes the ghost. Car accident on a road that doesn’t have much traffic. There’s a stillness to the movie, and to this scene, and to the scene in the hospital where his body is covered with a sheet and then rises. Right, I thought, I guess that’s why ghosts have sheets; because we cover dead bodies with them. But who cut out the eyeholes?

He walks down the hospital hallway, a window opens in a wall, holds, and then closes. His opportunity to step into the Whatever? But something is keeping him here and he returns to it: his home, his wife. A piece of him waiting. 

There’s a temporal dislocation to the movie, and, one imagines, to the ghost’s perspective. After the pie eating/throwing up, we see M heading out the door to work. And then again. And again. The same path, bedroom to front door, one right after the other. He remains. A man walks her to her door. He’s taller than C but less handsome. A consoling hug leads to a kiss, and then an awkward “Yeah, that was a bad idea” goodbye. Then rage from C, who knocks over a framed photo. She gathers it up, looks around. Is that why she leaves?

They were planning on moving anyway, and now she does, and the big question is if he’ll follow or remain behind. It’s the latter. A new family moves in: Hispanic mother with two kids. I like them running into the home, excited, on that first day. C is less enthused. Is it that he’s slow to comprehend? It takes a while for him to start dashing plates against the floor, but when he does they freak and move out. And des the boy see him? He seems to, but we’re not sure. We’re not sure of a lot.

Before M left, she wrote a little note, as when she was a girl, and put it into a small doorframe crack and painted over it; and in the aftermath of the family, and of kids partying there—with one dude, an annoying grad student or autodidact, expounding on the vastness of all, and the tininess of us—C tries to remove it. We don’t know how long it takes but he’s just about there when over his shoulder the blade of a bulldozer comes crashing through a wall. The place is leveled. C stays. A high-rise office building is put up. C stays. He wanders its hallways, then, from a top floor, leaps off and winds up in the same spot in the past. Now he’s with homesteaders. 18th century? 19th century? They’re killed by Indians. C’s like the Watcher in the old Marvel comics: a silent observer of the grim parade.

Before long he’s observing himself and M looking at the place for the first time. So, yes, he’s the ghost the heard that night; he’s the one who made the piano noise. Before long, there’s another ghost there—him—and I worried. Oh no, is this going to be like Sorcerer’s Apprentice? Like Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence? A room full of ghosts? And does his younger ghost-self see his older ghost-self? He doesn’t seem to, and he (and we) didn’t see anything the first go-round. Odd, because ghosts do see each other. Early on, C saw one across the way, and once the houses were leveled she declared, silently, via subtitles, “I guess they’re never coming back” and dropped out of existence. The sheet just crumpled, empty. That’s how ghosts go.

That's how C goes, too. In the second go-round, he finally pries her note from the doorframe crack, opens it, and drops out of existence.

C leaves
Why does he stay? Immediately I assumed for her, but then I wondered if it wasn’t the house—that stupid, ugly clapboard. Or the spot? The land? The ending brings us back to the original supposition. It's a kind of continuation of “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints,” in which Casey kept catching up to Rooney. Jail couldn’t keep him from her. Now it's death. We never find out what the note says, but what it says isn't really important. What's important is that it frees him to die.

The movie’s moody and atmospheric, still and almost silent. Lowery’s a talented director. But he tried my patience too long in the beginning with those Hou Hsiao-hsien shots, and I grumbled through the rest of it. It’s twice as long as it should be. Ideally it should be 45 minutes but there’s no place for that kind of thing in our world anymore. 

WARNING: SPOILERS

My mother suffered a stroke last year that left her weak on her right side, dependent on walkers and wheelchairs, and without the ability to speak. She could say a few coached words, or a string of enthusiastic nonsensical words, but that was about it. She couldn’t write, either, so all the history inside her was lost to us in an instant. I go back to Doctorow: “We should have talked; we should always have talked.”

But she could still sing. Apparently that function is in a different part of the brain. In the car, we’d sing old Sinatra and Ella songs, old show tunes (“Oklahoma!”), and Christmas carols. If you started out, and she knew the words, she’d pick up on it and sing along.

That’s probably why the scene that really got to me in Pixar’s “Coco” is near the end, when 12-year-old  Miguel (Anthony Gonzalez), back from the land of the dead, sings the song, “Remember Me” to his dying great grandmother, Coco (Ana Ofelia Murguia), and she, a mass of wrinkled flesh giving in to gravity and inevitability, slowly comes to life again. She smiles and sings and rises and remembers.

Of course, sap that I am, that scene probably would’ve gotten to me anyway.

No music!
That said, “Coco,” by Pixar standards, and despite its 97% Rotten Tomatoes rating, was a slight disappointment. It didn’t wow me like “Inside Out” or “Up” or the three “Toy Story”s.

Is it the familiarity of it all? Our hero goes out beyond his world, and has X amount of time to return or stay there forever?

Is it that Miguel doesn’t learn much on his journey beyond family history? In “Up,” Carl needed to learn that it’s the boring stuff that matters, and in “Inside Out,” Joy needed to learn to let others, such as Sadness, do their jobs. Miguel? Nothing like this. He's a smart kid, following his bliss, and he returns as ebullient as ever.

There’s no great sacrifice, either—the way Carl sacrificed his house for Russell and Bing Bong sacrificed his very existence (even the memory of his existence) for Riley. I think that's the key; you need sacrifice. 

The set-up isn’t bad, I suppose. Miguel has music in his soul but his family is not only longtime shoemakers but against music, since Miguel’s great, great grandfather left his family to make his name in music and never returned. Miguel, though, wants to perform, like his hero Ernesto de la Cruz (Benjamin Bratt), a long dead, lantern-jawed star of his great, great grandmother’s era. Then he discovers that Ernesto might be his great, great grandfather. That makes Miguel so determined to perform in the “Day of the Dead” music competition in the local plaza that, even after his grandmother, Elena (Renee Victor), destroys his guitar, he takes de la Cruz’s guitar from the mausoleum, strums it, and, oops, winds up among the dead—with a 24-hour window in which to return.

I like the border crossing. If your descendants put out your photo on the Day of the Dead, then you get to cross and spend the day as a spectral figure among them. I like the layers of death. You finally, completely die, or at least disappear from the Land of the Dead, when no one living remembers who you are. That’s about to happen to Miguel’s hapless companion, Héctor (Gael Garcia Bernal), nicknamed “Chorizo,” for supposedly having choked to death on one.

Miguel could actually return to the living quickly. He just needs to receive a blessing from a family member, via an Aztec marigold petal. But his family being his family, they demand he never plays music again. So off he goes in pursuit of another family member, de la Cruz, who is as big a celebrity in the Land of the Dead as he was in the living. He lives in a mansion surrounded by security, gives annual concerts, and receives incredible bounty from the living.

Turns out he’s also a thief and a murderer. Nice. He stole the music, and then the life, of his former singing partner, who turns out to be Héctor, who turns out to be ... wait for it ... Miguel’s great, great grandfather! Which is why he never returned to his family. He didn't choke on a chorizo; he was poisoned.

Eventually, of course, Miguel’s family unites against de la Cruz, who is revealed (to both the dead and the living) to be a scoundrel/murderer, and Miguel makes it back in time to sing the song to Hector’s daughter, Coco, so she can remember him, and allow him to remain in the Land of the Dead, and allow me to, you know, tear up. 

Although, at that point, wouldn’t Miguel count as someone alive who remembers Hector? And what did they do at the border crossing before photography—i.e., for 99 percent of human history? Was it portraits/paintings then? Meaning only the rich made it back?

So many questions, Pixar.

OK, music
But, for the movie, this is the big one: What did Miguel learn on his adventure? He learned...

• His hero was a jerk
• His great, great grandfather wasn’t

That’s about it. It’s really his family that needs to learn a lesson. Sadly, that lesson is obvious: Music is good. Or: Let your loved ones pursue their passions.

I liked “Coco.” It just didn't exactly take me to the moon.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Why is the fifth “Transformers” movie subtitled “The Last Knight“? Besides the obvious attempt to cash in on the Batman franchise?

Glad you asked! You see, back in 484 A.D., King Arthur and his knights were about to lose an epic “Game of Thrones”-inspired battle against the Saxons when the man whom Arthur trusted implicitly, the wizard Merlin (Stanley Tucci), a comic-relief drunk, stumbles upon a crashed spaceship with a transformer inside. Wait, 12 transformers? That’s what Wiki tells me but god help me if I remember more than one in this scene. Anyway, Merlin’s innate ... comedy? ... somehow convinces the transformers to back his side in the war (no Prime Directive for these fuckers), so they transform themselves into a giant three-head “Game of Thrones”-inspired dragon, give Merlin an alien staff, and warn him that “a great evil” will come for it one day; then off they go to battle and win the thing for Arthur and England.

CUT TO: Present-day, post-Transformers-III-or-IV Chicago, where, in the ruins, four “Stranger Things”-inspired nerd boys are saved by a fierce, Eleven-inspired girl, Izabella (Isabella Moner), and her transformer pals, who are, in turn, saved by our hero from the previous film: failed Texas inventor and all-around good-guy dad Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg). Cutting loose the nerds, they go off to some safe-ish haven/junkyard to wait out the next step in the inane journey.

Did you spot it? Yes, Yeager is our “last knight.” He’s the guy who will save the day. How? Well, this odd little transformer will attached itself to him, mostly to his arm but also move around his body sometimes, which gives him the opportunity to reveal his tight abs to the Oxbridge-educated but standoffish hottie Vivian Wembley (Laura Haddock), a direct descendant of Merlin. (Wahlberg here is like, say, Margot Robbie in the airport dressing/undressing in “Suicide Squad”: naively unaware of the effect his sexy body has on others.) Then, at a crucial moment, after Yeager and Wembley take a transformer-sub to the bottom of the ocean, and run from/fight the 12 guardian transformers there, not to mention Optimus Prime, who, like a WWE wrestler, has turned from face (hero) to heel (villain), because...

Fuck it. Enough to know that they resurface, there’s a battle, Megatron steals the staff, Optimus realizes the error of his ways because Bumblebee speaks, but he’s about to be executed anyway by the 12 guardian transformers when Cade shouts “NO!” and the odd little transform becomes ... EXCALIBUR! Yes! Arthur’s sword! And Cade stops the mighty blade of the guaridan transformer! And he saves Optimus! And now he’s ready for battle.

And so Cade takes Excalibur and ...

Actually, that’s pretty much it. That’s all he does with it. It doesn’t come into play ever again. 

Fuck me
Remember when you were like 9 or 10 and you’d play at “war,” or some kind of imaginary adventure game, and it was basically, “And then this happens, and then this happens,” and “No! Those guys are over there! No! That guy’s dead!” Remember that kind of thing? No logic, no sense of connecting the past with the now, just the hell-bent movement forward? That’s this. That's Michael Bay.

This movie is so bad I kept flashing to that “Curb Your Enthusiasm” season in which Larry David is cast in “The Producers” because Mel Brooks wants it to fail. He’s sick of his creation and wants to destroy it and move on. Is Bay doing the same? Is he sick of his creation and wants to end it? Or is he simply boundary-testing how stupid we are? “Can they take something this dumb? Cuz I’ve about reached my limit. I can't make it any dumber. I canna dumb it down any further, Captain.”

The plot is basically: Optimus and army men chase our heroes, who are on a hellbent journey to find a MacGuffin (alien staff) that could lead to the end of the world, and which only they can gather. Once they find the MacGuffin, and once the bad guys immediately steal it and try to use it to destroy the Earth, Optimus and the military guys join our heroes for the final battle, which takes place, with a nod toward the movie's King Arthur opening, over England’s moun-tains green. And the good guys win. 

Plus Anthony Hopkins as Sir Edmund Burton, the one who knows the backstory. 

Plus Tony Hale (“Arrested Development,” “VEEP”) as the government scientist apparently in charge of everything who orders generals to use nukes against the Decepticons because ”magic isn’t real."  

I kept wondering: In these movies, isn’t there always something that’s been left behind by centuries-ago transformers that today's transformers need to get a hold of to rule the world? Or save it? Shouldn’t someone do a study on this?

[Smaller voice] Oh no, I don’t have to do it, do I?

No, thank god. Or thank Rob Bricken at io9, a better man than I, who has already done it. Read his synopsis. He tears apart the movie, the series, and Michael Bay, with the necessary humor.

Final reminder: This is all about a toy robot that can turn into a car. Have we gone mad?

WARNING: SPOILERS

Based on reviews (37% on Rotten Tomatoes), box office ($45.8 million, a 60% drop from Amy Schumer’s previous film), and word-of-mouth (crickets), not to mention the awful double entendre of the title, I expected “Snatched” to suuuuuuuuck.

It doesn’t. Mind you, it’s not good, but it’s not bottom-of-the-barrel.

It’s good enough, in fact, to make me wonder why it didn’t do better. And I hate myself for the answer I’m about to give: I think it has a little something to do with Goldie Hawn’s face.

It’s not that she looks old; that would be fine. She just looks like she’s had too much plastic surgery.

Murray not Murray
Schumer plays a classic Schumer character, a spoiled, solipsistic American girl named Emily Middleton. We first see her talking endlessly to a retailing clothing clerk about an upcoming trip to Ecuador with her boyfriend—who’s in a rock band. Except the clerk turns out to be the customer, Emily is the clerk, and a second later she’s fired for being, you know, awful. Then her boyfriend (Randall Park, “VEEP”) dumps her for pretty much the same reason. Schumer opens the movie like a classic Bill Murray character—losing everything in the first five minutes—except she’s less funny, and less endearing, doing it. It was always a neat trick how Murray managed it.

Anyway, the plane tickets are nonrefundable, nobody likes her, and that’s why she winds up traveling with her mom, Linda (Hawn), who is in her 60s, lives alone with cats, and assumes all strangers are potential criminals.

I have to admit: This seems like great casting. One era’s kookie blonde giving birth to the next. I just wish Goldie had let herself age as ungracefully as the rest of us. Instead, she went the Hollywood route, and her face has that stretched, vaguely platypus look. They also have her playing against type: instead of dingbatty, wide-eyed and inviting, she’s suspicious and closed off. (Or maybe that’s what happens to the wide-eyed and inviting over time?) Either way, she’s the straight person here.

In Quito, Ecuador’s capital, Emily just wants to drink and meet a cute guy, while Linda assumes the worst. Both get what they want. The cute guy takes them on an excursion and they’re rammed by a white van and kidnapped by Colombians. For ransom? Doesn't anyone know they have no money? But at least it answers the question: Why Ecuador? Initially I thought it was because they’d wind up in the Galapagos.

Deepest cuts
A few things I liked: In their various attempts to escape the clutches of Hector Morgado (Óscar Jaenada, who played Catinflas in a 2014 Mexican biopic), they accidently kill his henchmen ... who turn out to be 1) his nephew, and 2) his only son. The neophytes who—oops—cause the deepest cuts always makes me laugh. I also like the interplay between Linda’s frenetic, spoiled, stay-at-home son, Jeffrey (Ike Barinholtz, “The Mindy Project”), and the laconic, career State Dept. official Morgan Russell (Bashir Salahuddin). Oh, and all the various saviors/rescuers that aren’t: Christopher Meloni’s jungle adventurer; the lesbian team-up of Wanda Sykes and Joan Cusack, who make the leap but leave Emily hanging. 

There are laughs in “Snatched.” I laughed. But not enough.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Afterwards, I asked Patricia if she could think of an actor who could play the lead besides Frances McDormand. Because I couldn’t. Allison Janney, maybe? Annette Bening? McDormand is perfect for the part. Chin up, working class, beyond world-weary but tough as nails, with an undercurrent of the maternal that might reveal itself at an odd moment—like when the cancer-ridden sheriff, in the midst of interrogating her, coughs blood into her face, and as she goes for help, she comforts him, calling him baby. It just slips out: that baby. That tenderness.

No surprise that writer-director Martin McDonagh (“In Bruges”) wrote Mildred for her. The punchline? She had to be convinced by husband Joel Coen:

“At the time he gave it to me I was 58 ... I was concerned that women from this socioeconomic strata did not wait until 38 to have their first child. So we went back and forth and we debated that for quite a while, and then finally my husband said, ‘Just shut up and do it.’”

One more thing to thank him for.

Mildred is less Marge Gunderson in “Fargo” than Elaine Miller in “Almost Famous”—berating Russell Hammond, then counseling him, then reminding him of his responsibilities. She’s Olive Kitteridge. She’s McDormand herself winning the Oscar for “Fargo”: that tough stride she took on her way across the stage.

I expected “Three Billboards” to be good but an eat-your-vegetables movie: the kind of dull indie that sacrifices plot for local Midwest detail. It’s not that kind of movie at all. 

Burn after reading
No time is wasted getting to the billboards. Opening credits, they’re there in the morning fog, run down and dilapidated, their original messages a checkerboard of illegibility. So: a movie about a small Midwest town struggling to survive in the digital age?

Nope. A freeway was put in, not many drive this two-lane highway anymore, but Mildred, who lives nearby, has an idea. She contracts the local company for all three billboards and puts up this message in the manner of the old Burma Shave ads:

RAPED WHILE DYING

AND STILL NO ARRESTS?

HOW COME, CHIEF WILLOUGHBY?

So: a movie about small-town police corruption and one woman’s battle to bring the truth to light?

That’s how it seems, particularly when we meet Deputy Dixon (Sam Rockwell), a dim, small-town bully known for racial profiling. But then Mildred has a tete-a-tete with Chief Willoughby (Woody Harrelson), he asks her advice, and after each of her suggestions he tells her of the civil rights violations involved. The further the scene progresses, the more you can feel your sympathies shifting away from her and toward him.

The movie keeps doing this; it keeps shifting on us. Willoughby is dying of cancer, Mildred knows and doesn’t care. Or she doesn’t let caring get in the way of her quest. Her teenage son, Robbie (Lucas Hedges, “Manchester By the Sea”), is embarrassed; she doesn’t care. And there’s Willoughby revisiting the scene of the crime, looking for clues. At the same time, the cops use what power they have. Mildred is hauled in, while her friend and coworker, Denise (Amanda Warren), is arrested to put pressure on her. Don’t forget how good Woody Harrelson is here. The scene after he coughs up blood, when he’s in the hospital room joshing with his wife (Abbie Cornish), and then alone, and the myriad of emotions that cross his face? The fear, mostly, and bone-deep sadness? Damn.

The crowning achievement in the battle with Mildred is his: He commits suicide. He has a perfect day with his wife and kids, and he wants them to hold onto that memory of him—not the one of him slowly wasting away—so out by the stable he puts a bag over his head and shoots himself. Watching, you know everyone will blame Mildred, and he knows it, too. He tells her so in a farewell letter. Plus the mysterious donor who paid for the billboards for another month? Him. So people will continue to blame her. The beauty of this is it’s not really malicious. His tone is amused, and she laughs, reading it. You can tell she already misses him. So do we.

Maybe too much. In the wake of his suicide, either the characters become unmoored or the movie does. The one-upmanship goes a bit over-the-top:

1. Dixon throws Red, the local billboard owner (Caleb Landry Jones, “Get Out”), out his second-story window. In full view of everyone.
2. Dixon is then fired by the new police chief  (Clarke Peters of “The Wire”).
3. The billboards are burned down—and Dixon is suspected.
4. In retaliation, Mildred throws Molotov cocktails into the police station, but unbeknownst to her Dixon is inside.

Dixon winds up with third-degree burns on his body and face, and in the same hospital room as Red—the man he put there. He doesn’t get away with his crime; Mildred does. As does the murderer/rapist who set everything in motion.

Blood simple
If the second act seems like excess, and it did a bit to me, the movie rights itself. The third act is basically redemption. Dixon’s is the Colin Farrell/“In Bruges” role: the dim man who’s done bad things but whose moral compass is, or becomes, true. 

Indeed, for a moment, you think he’s going to be the hero: the one to solve the crime through extreme sacrifice—getting beat up to get DNA. Thankfully, things aren’t so clean in McDonagh’s world. But the act unites Dixon and Mildred, who set out on their own quest. For justice? For further injustice? Who knows? They don’t even know. It’s a beautifully ambiguous ending. The world is rotten, but amidst all that there’s forgiveness. The movie feints toward giving us what we want (justice) only to give us what we need. What we truly, desperately need.