The Sisters Brothers (2018) - Jacques Audiard

In this off-beat Western, Joaquin Phoenix and John C. Reilly play a pair of squabbling brothers/bounty hunters.  Their latest assignment is to track down a prospector played by Riz Ahmed who has perfect a new method of mining.  Their on-again/off-again partner Morris, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, is either an ally or an enemy depending on the time of day.  The movie is off-beat and strange, but not as strange as the press it’s been getting would indicate.  Yes, it has a rather bizarre sense of humor at times and it’s paced at arthouse speed, by which I mean slow, but it’s a Western for sure, with plenty of gun battles to go around.  The film opens with a bravura slow zoom in on a gunfight taking place in pitch black and it’s a gorgeous shot.  The rest of the film is less overtly directed, but it ends with a surprising one-take shot that is mainly surprising because it actually is just one take, even though it seems like it would be edited together.  The performances are quite good.  Reilly’s production company optioned the novel the movie is based on and you can tell it’s something of a passion project for him; it’s his best dramatic performance to date, I think, or at least right up there.  Riz Ahmed once again proves his acting chops by turning in another “wait, that’s the same guy?” performance.  For a guy with a somewhat unique look, he’s incredibly chameleonic.  Phoenix is good as the wild-card of the brothers, though he isn’t asked to do any particular heavy lifting.  Neither is Gyllenhaal which might explain why feels a character named “John Morris” needs to have some sort of intrusive, incredibly inconsistent accent.  Actors, amirite?  Anyway, if you can tell what the hell he thinks he’s doing, you’re doing better than me.  Allison Tolman, who you might remember from Fargo’s first season, has a really wonderful cameo, essentially a one scene appearance; it starts hilariously funny and ends up surprisingly sad, but then that’s where this movie is a lot of the time.  Still, though the film does feel kind of like a trifle at times and could stand to have a solid twenty minutes or so shaved off its more than two-hour running time, it’s enjoyable, affable and surprisingly touching at times.  It’s no masterpiece, but it’s a solidly entertaining, creatively written shaggy dog of a movie and who could say no to that?  3 ½ stars.

tl;dr – off-beat Western has plenty of strangeness, but also hews to genre conventions; mostly good performances and a shaggy dog of a script add up to a fun time at the movies.  3 ½ stars.   

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30 Days of Night (2002) - Steve Niles, Ben Templesmith

In the isolated wilderness town of Barrow, Alaska, there are thirty days in the winter when the sun never rises.  Now, a charismatic vampire has heard of the place and the residents of Barrow are about to find themselves overrun by a horde of bloodsuckers.  This is a pretty great premise, honestly, but this is really kind of a premise in search of a plot.  The elevator pitch is basically “a group of vampires invade an Alaskan town experiencing its month long darkness.”  That’s, unfortunately, also a summary of the entire graphic novel.  There are a couple of things of interest here.  The main character, the sheriff of the small town, is an Inuit and I’m struggling to think of ANYTHING else that has an indigenous main character that isn’t explicitly about the indigenous experience.  Of course, in the film version, he was played by Josh Hartnett, so good job on that one, Hollywood.  But the real thing here is the art.  It’s very expressive and bold and artistic.  The color scheme is primarily black, white, grey and . . . well, dark blue.  So the way the book uses gore is particularly effective; the explosions of red and the way the color sprays across the panels is really striking and beautiful.  There’s a really gorgeous full-page panel at the climax of the story that is really breathtaking.  Still, even pausing to savor the art, there’s not much here.  If you read it, it should be for the art, not the minimal story and the bland characters.  But that’s not too much of an inconvenience.  I read the entire book in a single evening, taking my time over the illustrations even.  Just find it at a library, as I did, or borrow it from a friend as it’s certainly not worth the nearly thirty-dollar retail price.  3 stars. 

tl;dr – minimal horror story has a great premise but doesn’t do much with it; fantastic art though.  3 stars.

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