Movie Review I, Tonya

I, Tonya (2017) 

Directed by Craig Gillespie 

Written by Steven Rogers 

Starring Margot Robbie, Sebastian Stan, Julianne Nicholson, Allison Janney 

Release Date December 8th, 2017 

It’s hard to pin down director Craig Gillespie. On one hand, he directed the wonderfully warm and quirky Lars and the Real Girl in 2007 but also directed the awful, unfunny "comedy" Mr. Woodcock that same year. Gillespie has since directed the remarkably dull sports flick Million Dollar Arm, the forgettable and unnecessary horror remake Fright Night and the wildly underrated and too quickly forgotten The Finest Hours. So, is Gillespie a great director or a hack? Is he an auteur or a Hollywood carpenter, cobbling together studio products?

Gillespie’s latest effort, the sports-bio-pic, I, Tonya doesn’t necessarily answer these questions. On the one hand, the film is quite entertaining with a rock star lead performance by Margot Robbie and an Academy Award level supporting performance by Allison Janney. On the other hand, the editing is often muddled as to who is recalling what portion of the story via the faux-documentary structure of the film and the tone is rather dissonant, inviting laughs one moment while asking to be taken seriously in others, especially those related to domestic violence.

I, Tonya tells the story of the life of the infamous figure skater Tonya Harding (Robbie). Tonya grew up with an abusive mother, Lavona (Janney) and a mostly absent father who taught Tonya how to hunt deer with precision and then ran away so as not to be destroyed by Tonya’s mother. As awful and abusive as Lavona Harding was, she instilled a toughness in her daughter that would become her hallmark as she rose through the ranks of American Figure Skating.

Tonya was thrown into the remarkably competitive and cutthroat world of competitive figure skating at just three years old, according to this story anyway. By the time she was five years old, Tonya had won her first competition against girls much older than her and by her teen years she was in high level competitions with the goal of making it to the Olympics. All the while Tonya faced down her abusive mother and a stuffy, unwelcoming figure skating world that seemed to have no place for someone as outlandish as Tonya, preferring the demure, classical music style competitors over Tonya’s less cultured, rock n’roll, power, and strength style.

Find my full length review in the Geeks Community on Vocal 

Movie Review Logan Lucky

Logan Lucky (2017) 

Directed by Steven Soderbergh 

Written by Rebecca Blunt 

Starring Channing Tatum, Adam Driver, Katie Holmes, Riley Keough, Daniel Craig, Hilary Swank, Katherine Waterston, Sebastian Stan 

Release Date August 18th, 2017 

Published August 17th, 2017 

Being a fan of the American history podcast The Dollop allows me to watch a movie like Logan Lucky and never for a moment find the story implausible. Take a listen to them tell the remarkable true story titled Jet-Pack Madness and you will find within it a story every bit as brilliant as a Coen Brothers comedy. Everything in Logan Lucky feels completely plausible when you compare it to such historic silliness as what transpired with the Jet-Pack or the L.A Freeway Shootout or The Human Taco.

The Dollop has nothing to do with Logan Lucky but I could not help thinking of how Dave Anthony and Gareth Reynolds would tell this story if it were true. I imagine it would be just as good as the movie Steven Soderbergh has made, a crazy story of crime, family, pride, NASCAR, and the South. That Logan Lucky is also a heist movie is nearly incidental, as if these characters existing as they do might make for a good enough story but that they happen to pulling off a multi-million dollar NASCAR-themed heist certainly makes things even more colorful.

The Logan family is cursed or at least that is what little brother Clyde Logan (Adam Driver) believes and he would be happy to regale you with his tragic family background while he pours beer at a West Virginia bar called Duck-Tape. Older brother Jimmy (Channing Tatum) doesn’t buy into the curse, though Clyde’s point is understandable, he’s just back from losing an arm in Iraq while Jimmy lost a scholarship to play Quarterback at LSU when he blew out his knee and just as we meet him, Jimmy is fired from his job working construction underneath the famed Charlotte Motor Speedway.

Nevertheless, Jimmy doesn’t buy into Clyde’s curse talk, especially since he’s decided to pull off a multi-million-dollar vault heist and doesn't need the bad juju on his mind right now. Having been fired from his job where he operated an earth mover beneath the famed North Carolina race track, Jimmy has found out where all the money from the stadium concessions goes and how it gets there. The only thing standing in his way is the vault but Jimmy happens to know a guy who can help, if they can get him out of prison.\

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review Dumb Money

Dumb Money (2023) 

Directed by Craig Gillespie 

Written by Lauren Schuker Blum, Rebecca Angelo 

Starring Paul Dano, Shailene Woodley, Pete Davidson, Seth Rogen, Nick Offerman, Sebastian Stan

Release Date September 22nd, 2023 

Published September 22nd, 2023 

Dumb Money feels like an unearned victory lap for the proletariat. The story of a group of independent investors, led by a Redditor nicknamed Roaring Kitty, upending the Wall Street system by investing in, of all things, Game Stop, a video game retailer run so poorly that it's an absolute wonder how they lasted as long as they did. By finding a blindspot in the arrogance of a Wall Street hedge fund practice, Roaring Kitty, aka Keith Gill (Paul Dano), made millions and drove one billionaire hedge fund out of business, though realistically, only took Gabe Plotkin (Seth Rogen) from a being a billionaire to being a multi-multi-multi-millionaire. 

It's impossible for me not to be cynical about anything related to Wall Street. In my lifetime I have watched Wall Street grow in strength and wealth all while paying off regulators and lawmakers to prop them up to the point where billions of dollars have flowed from everyday Americans into the hands of Wall Street hustlers just to keep those billionaires from crashing the country into a depression so they can keep buying needless numbers of houses, cars and consumer items that add nothing to the everyday economy. 

Not since the age of Marie Antoinette have we seen rich fat pigs rolling in the filth of their own wealth in public the way we do today. We've literally watched billionaires build themselves rockets to take vacations in space while people struggle to have money for food. Jeff Bezos asks us to stand up and cheer for him when he returned from what amounted to a day trip to space. Meanwhile, a mother somewhere in America was scraping pennies together to buy baby food. So excuse me if I don't' view one minor victory over the greedy pigs of Wall Street as good enough. 

And, I'm sorry, that's all that the Game Stop thing was, a very brief victory of the proles over the privileged. All that the Game Stop thing did was provide other billionaires a cautionary tale. Now they know exactly what doors to close behind them to prevent this from ever happening again. I appreciate what Reddit did to game this system for a short time but there is only so much outsiders can do to fight this system. Game Stop provided the billionaires a road map to how to stay rich in the face of any kind of revolt within their own Wall Street system. 

Find my full length review at Swamp.Media 

Movie Review: Destroyer

Destroyer (2018) 

Directed by Karyn Kusama 

Written by Phil Hay, Matt Manfredi 

Starring Nicole Kidman, Sebastian Stan, Toby Kebbell, Tatiana Maslany, Bradley Whitford 

Release Date December 25th, 2018 

Published December 22nd, 2018

Destroyer stars Nicole Kidman as Erin Bell, a former undercover cop turned burned out homicide detective. We get two sides of Erin Bell, her life when she was promoted from a Sheriff’s Deputy to being an undercover operative embedded in a bank robbery gang, to today when Erin looks as if life has her thoroughly defeated. Oftentimes simply being de-glammed is enough to make us take notice of a performance but Kidman brings a genuine edge that goes beyond her looks and manner in Destroyer.  

We meet Detective Bell when she arrives in bad shape at a crime scene. At the scene, a body is laid out and Bell indicates she recognizes the corpse. Other detectives give us a strong sense of how Detective Bell is viewed by the rest of her department, they want her to leave the crime scene and let them handle it. That's likely because she looks as if she hasn’t slept in days and is in no shape to work. They have no idea how right they are. 

Destroyer was directed by the ingenious Karyn Kusama who is best known for her debut feature, Girlfight, about a female boxer. That film was notable in a similar way to Destroyer in that Michelle Rodriguez took a traditionally male character and invested it with a uniquely feminine toughness. Kusama is also known for the horror movie Jennifer’s Body which in recent months has been getting another look from critics who’ve taken note of the strong feminist themes that run throughout Kusama’s work.

This is notable in Destroyer in how Kidman is playing the kind of hard bitten, cynical character usually reserved for male protagonists. Detective Bell has faults that we’ve seen before in male characters but that get flipped around with it coming from a female perspective and it does freshen up the cliche a great deal. Kidman doesn’t play up any mannish qualities, it’s just that the specific traits of this character are usually assigned to men. 

It’s a fascinating performance and while I have focused too much on Kidman’s looks, I am doing so because her looks, the features, the worn, lived in, well-earned wrinkles and generally dishevelled look is an important part of this character. She's unvarnished for a reason, she’s given up on the basic comforts of life. Something so traumatic has happened that she’s turned most of her life over to either her job or to the hard drinking that helps to cope with the job and her memories, fears and shame. 

She’s also neglected her daughter, Shelby (Jade Pettyjohn) who appears to be headed down a wrong path, one all too similar to Erin’s. The relationship between Erin and her daughter has always been strained; Erin found out she was pregnant on the same day that Shelby’s father was killed in a gun battle. I won’t spoil the role that this played in Erin’s undercover work or the dark secret she’s hiding throughout the film but all of it coalesces into Erin’s dark story in devastating fashion. 

Toby Kebbell plays the main antagonist in Destroyer, a figure from Erin’s past whose return triggers a series of violent outbursts and leads to several bodies piling up. It’s a battle of wills with greed and revenge at the heart. Kebbell is a rather minimal presence physically in the film but his legend and his crimes hang over the entire story to the point where his appearances come to feel as if he is literally haunting Erin. 

It’s an exceptional and unique way to tell a revenge story. Destroyer is minimalist in story presentation with dialogue building Kebbell’s villain into a monster and Kidman delivering on making Bell desperate and feral like a cornered animal as she pursues him. The way the story plays out is a shocker and a real clever one. Pay close attention or you might miss a couple key details that play into the ending. I can tell you, it’s both satisfying and bleak. 

Destroyer is not a fun movie, it’s not an easy sit. The film is combative and pushy but Kidman’s performance makes it highly compelling. Kidman is Oscar-worthy not for her deglamorized look but for the grit that she brings to this character which combines vulnerability and street toughness into one of the most unique and yet familiar characters I’ve ever seen. It’s not just the novelty of a woman getting to portray characteristics typically assigned to male characters, Kidman makes Bell a uniquely fascinating figure, and for that, I recommend Destroyer.