“There is no such thing as truth,” Tonya Harding (Margot Robbie) tells us at one of the many caustic, slippery moments in I, Tonya. “Everyone has their own truth.” This could serve as the self-congratulatory motto for Craig Gillespie‘s well-acted film, a distinctly, and appropriately, Trumpian sentiment for what might be the first of a genre: the Fake News Biopic. Let’s hope it’s not.
The half-remembered details of 1994’s second-most salacious celebrity story provide the occasion for the film, though not its crux — the irresistible tale of figure-skating infighting, the attack on eventual Olympic medalist Nancy Kerrigan (barely on screen here), the involvement of Harding’s ex-husband Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan) and doofus “bodyguard” (a Dorito-crumb-covered Paul Walter Hauser), the media frenzy are all starting points for a different project. What that project is, exactly, remains an open question.
If Gillespie and his team hope to generate empathy for Harding, or at least humanize her, I, Tonya has effective moments. The
classism on display, as a rarefied world of hoity-toity ice princesses and stodgy judges react with nothing short of contempt for a roughneck upstart who can land jumps no one else can, helps. So do the biographical details — a monstrous mother (Allison Janney) who nearly single-handedly corrupted her talented daughter in the name of personal profit, an avalanche of later physical abuse at the hands of her husband. It’s a misery to consider.
And it’s a misery played for laughs, introducing one of I, Tonya‘s distressing elements. Domestic violence is mined for jump scares, with their attendant anxious humor. Janney, a near-lock for supporting actress awards across the board, revels in comic grotesquerie, some sort of cross between chain-smoking, white trash sports-mom and Cruella De Vil.
It’s all of a piece with a larger aesthetic of collisions, some tonal, some physical, and some more epistemological, as that quote at the start implies. Intro text informs us that the I, Tonya is based on the “wildly contradictory” testimonies of the central players, and this seems true enough to Gillespie’s method, but it quite clearly means to take aim at us, too. It’s a spectacle dripping with reproach for its spectators.
This tendency reaches its nadir in a fantasy sequence of Harding beating Kerrigan personally, horror-movie-style, brutally quick-cut, Tonya’s gleeful, bloody face. Introduced by a bemused Gillooly, it’s a mock execution for all the morons in the world (read: the audience) who imagined this is how it went down. But it’s also a re-enactment that fulfills that viewing desire. We are meant to laugh at the idiocy of the vision while simultaneously celebrating the cleverness of having it presented to us, having our bluff called by a film that knows: this is what you came here to see, isn’t it? Again and again, I, Tonya wants it both ways: to disown and pillory toxic celebrity while catering to its worst aspects, to mock its redneck players in the name of anti-classism, to deploy every trick it can muster to engineer snappy fun out of brutality and then chide us for indulging in the fantasies it created. The effect is striking, and not in a good way.
This is far from the only time I, Tonya tries to pull these tricks. The horror/action grammar of that meta-pastiche has all kinds of corollaries (Tarantino, Rashomon, and, most of all, The Big Short), but Gillespie’s favorite is a sort of low-rent Scorsese imitation, amping up the energy through Goodfellas-esque needledrops and sudden (in this case, almost exclusively domestic) violence.
The terror of that domestic violence itself is undercut by all the meta-tomfoolery. In my theater, there were gasps at sudden
violence, but also some laughs … which the jump-scare has trained us to do. The film’s conceit seems to be that, by eliding tones and genres in these discordant ways, something important will be said about viewership as much about Tonya, or the 24 hour news cycle, or anything else. What’s more clear is how little I, Tonya actually cares about the violence it deploys in attempts to be cute.
What I, Tonya misses is that something like Goodfellas also wants us to identify with the glamour, with the aspirational, to place us in the position of these protagonists, all reflecting these different viewpoints and experiences, before pulling out the rug. In I, Tonya, its entire nesting-doll structure precludes this. The “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster” sequence has a grace and edgy desire that Gillespie can’t pull off because the story won’t allow it. Instead, the story I, Tonya insists on telling is the story of us watching I, Tonya and not feeling terrific about it.
A late-in-the-film background shot of O.J. Simpson being arraigned on TV draws a muddled parallel – the film seems to be saying, “we are at the birth of the 24-hour news cycle, the cults of celebrity are collapsing.” So is Harding a victim of that culture? Is the point that she is “no OJ”? Most people probably would say, regardless of whether the individuals implicated are guilty of those crimes, that the crimes themselves are pretty different, so okay. Or, more likely, is the point that we, as viewers and consumers of tabloid scandal and a kind of voyeuristic American bloodlust, are the real perpetrators? In which case, are Harding and O.J. kind of the same? Or … what?
I, Tonya would, I am certain, laugh at any expectation of a “moral,” but is it too much to ask for some kind of rigor to the filmmaking, a desire to contextualize things in ways that resolve into something more than “Everyone has their own truth,” spit out with disdain for the players, the audience, even for the film itself? Reflexive self-laceration and gotcha finger-wagging, what Gillespie seems to imagine are the film’s contributions, are nothing new, certainly not in a world where Haneke already exists.
But the notion that claims to truth should be hurled back with spite onto the guests you’ve invited over might be. I, Tonya is as cynical as modern American cinema comes, and it will be, and has already been, celebrated for that reason. Maybe it’s the movie of our time. So much the worse for our time.
That article was, frankly, a little nuts, and not at all representative of what art I’m usually interested in. I mean, there was never a chance I was going to like Logan or Brawl in Cell Block 99. Action movies about middle-aged men aging is my least favorite genre of media in the world. I’m sorry to my genre-movie loving friends—and hey, I like a genre movie as well as the next guy—but when those themes are put in the context of an action movie, what you end up with is usually not an exploration of aging, but a denial of it. You get a 2-hour trip into a fantasy world in which aging is overcome by a potent mixture of punching very hard and defending wives and daughters. (Brawl helpfully combines the 2 dependent woman roles into a pregnant wife.)
conversations were partially just because I’m a jerk who never met an adversarial position I wouldn’t take, but they were also about frustration at myself, frustration that I felt pressured to watch movies I knew from the pitch I wouldn’t like.
2017 was, among other things, a big year for the Fish-people who live among us, with 
A 3-hour Buñuel-like feast of false starts and farcical interruptions, filled with offhand discussions of Romanian post-Communism, faulty power outlets, religious tradition and modernity, and claustrophobic family dynamics?
The flat-out most enjoyable, satisfying release of 2017 (and 
So this is what it looks like when 
With its self-consciously lo-fi costuming, extended single-take depiction of a woman eating a pie, and the sudden appearance of Will Oldham waxing cosmic and philosophical at some indeterminate dinner table of the future, 
“Film,” 
There was no more visceral experience in movie theaters this year than 
It may spend its first half hour playing out the standard tropes of the Alien franchise, but once you arrive in Michael Fassbender’s bizarre alien Dracula castle, it becomes something else. Bonus points for being one of three movies to prominently use “Take Me Home, Country Roads” this year.
All of my friends put up with a lot of talking about the original and this sequel over the last 2 years or so. (How does the economy make any sense? Getting rid of a body costs as much as a drink?) But this one felt much, much cooler than the original to me, which relied on goofy-looking dudes in suits being inherently visually fascinating. Also, no Marilyn Manson this time.
I will stand by my fervent anti-Stephen King bias—I think he’s atrocious—but this movie helped me get the appeal. There is a sense of a genuine wider American horror mythology at play here, much wider and less place-dependent (and less explicitly dependent on racist fears) than Lovecraft. Everything about Beverly was exhausting and lazy, but I get why this was a phenomenon. 
I have a piece on this in the works, but frankly, I am always going to be excited about an adaptation of 14th century writer Boccaccio’s impossibly ribald Decameron. It’s the definition of slight, but 
Yes, it’s just Groundhog Day as a horror movie, but the free mixture of pop music empowerment and horrible murder makes this something really curious and charming. One particular montage set to Demi Levato’s “Confident” is simply the best use of music I saw this year. 
Vin Diesel’s throbbing cock became sentient and made a movie. Two stars.
What idiot called this car chase movie with intensely weird Oedipal themes “Baby Driver” and not “Oedipus Wrecks”? Thank you.
What would this movie be if it ended the frame before Harrison Ford showed up on screen? The idea that Rick Deckard—less a character than a narrative point in the original film, a fold in the world that helped reveal how the viewer’s assumption of the protagonist’s point of view can make them complicit in quiet fascism—is suddenly to be embraced as hero could be done, but it would require a hell of a lot more set-up than we get here. I do appreciate the implication, however, that Edward James Olmos has the magical ability to intuit what animal fills the fantasy life of each character. 
We recorded an episode of 
A historical biopic not even quite interesting enough to fall into the “released directly to 12th grade US history class” camp. 
This is only ranked so low because I was so hyped up for it. There’s one perfect moment: when Wolverine instinctively uses his body to protect the limo from gunfire. That brief moment perfectly encapsulates the world he’s living in and his place in it. Unfortunately, the rest of the movie is unbelievably boring (everyone always knew that getting stabbed with claws is violent and horrible—seeing the blood oozing out adds nothing). I’ve never felt more separated from other movie dorks than on this, honestly.
Axe body spray in an Yves Saint Laurent bottle. Points taken off for the absolute worst usage of “Take Me Home Country Roads” this year. (Logan Lucky apparently used it, too; I’ll let you know how it was in 2018 sometime.) 
“Challenge” definitely belongs in quotation marks here. While it’s absolutely true that our culture defaults to the masculine in basically all realms, and women directors are grossly underrepresented, it turns out that it’s really not that difficult to hit this mark — embarrassingly easy, in fact, with even minimal effort. The problem, of course, is that many of us just don’t make the effort. One thing I learned this time around: when presented with two viewing options of more or less equal interest, just watch the one that isn’t by the dude. It’s not revolutionary, but it’s also not exactly a back-breaking, Herculean effort, and you’ll often be rewarded with amazing films you might’ve missed thanks to cultural inertia (and patriarchy!).
first-time viewings. This is roughly 30% of everything I watched, give or take. (Film only; none of this includes serialized TV, a realm in which women directors have been faring better.) Women directors from 18 countries were represented; 10 from outside the U.S./Canada/England/Western Europe.
millenial cringe-comic examinations of Relationships In The Big City (Of New York). I’m glad I caught it now, because it’s actually an accomplished, frank affair. 
cultural and historical cross-roads is a wonder. There’s really nothing else like it: the poeticism comes through in the language and the images, with tradition echoing into the unsure present and the conflicted future of a people. It’s gorgeous in every way.
few cinephile lists.
throwback about family dysfunction and sisterhood. If Landline lacks the sure narrative footing (and irresistible logline) of the previous film, it makes up for it in shaggy charm and small moments of recognition. (The lovingly detailed, decade-specific touches don’t hurt either, at least for those of us who very much remember dial-up internet.)
undoubtedly perverse about a Civil War story in which the Civil War barely registers, much less slavery, and many viewers were critical of it for this reason. 
I watched 
It’s a small detail, even a passing one. Particularly in a documentary filled with startling on-the-ground footage of the brutality inflicted by the U.S. Government on tribal members and allied water protectors, and sobering aerial views of the land beloved by its inhabitants (and rightful “owners,” to whatever degree land can be owned) but treated as little more than a resource by corporatist bureaucrats. But its quiet poeticism lingers — it literally is an image, even in its sad stillness, of the conflict between water and jagged metal, between life and the tools of those who would bend it to their will regardless of the cost.
clearly not the case for those most impacted, and the doc takes us into their lives, histories, and demands. Make no mistake, this is an overtly ideological piece of work, intended to inform but primarily to outrage and spur to action. It’s entirely successful on the first count; one hopes the second will follow.
the confusion was not allayed. If anything, this only raised the stakes for Pottersville and for those who relish inscrutable bargain-bin absurdities.
And if what you want is a furry-themed Christmas movie about fake-Bigfoot and the town he saves through drunken participation in their curiously specific sexual proclivities, Pottersville has you covered.
They want us to look at those movies, depicting a world where everyone worships a stupid state that mixes brutal violence and inanity to ensure a sense of order. Then, they want us to look at the world, where exactly those states seem to fill the West. What else can we say? They clearly were predictive.
media to care about their world. And again, thank God for that: it’s a lazy observation when people do make it, and it’s far less accurate in describing the fragmented, complex ways we consume even mass art in 2017. 
But Verhoeven has always been more self-aware than I think he is given 
credit for, and partially aware of that on which he is open to critique. He’s aware that his movies visually celebrate the fascism they depict. 
Just as billions of Christians have assumed that John was predicting someone to come and shuddered as they waited for its arrival, political film fans have (in perhaps a more circumspect manner) looked at the modern corporation and assumed that the films of the 80s and 90s “predicted” them. 
part thanks to this film and their previous collaboration, 
But there are other spectres haunting our world. (The Assayas of 
Derrida’s 
