Ladybird (2017)

The plot line of this movie is one that you have seen dozens of times before, but this is an altogether different presentation of a coming of age story.  And it is wonderful in the sort of way that continues to build for days after you have watched it.  There is just a glow about it that is well captured in the film's advertising poster.  I am so relieved because I love Great Gerwig's work, and this so far exceeds anything I could have hoped for.
Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson is a heroine reflective of a wealth of outsider identities.  She is at once In her bright, awkward, ambitious, insecurity-riddled and likable.  In its finely drawn portrayal of economic pressures and class divisions, the film cuts a wide swath through the “just getting by” sector of Americans that is rarely seen on screen.
It does all that with kindness, smart, often uproarious humour and a candid, feminine point of view that  makes it tacitly a film for the moment, a modest cinematic antidote to the horrible rearing up of the racist misogynistic culture of decades ago.
Setting it evocatively in George W Bush’s America of the early 2000s courts a kind of bittersweet nostalgia that’s hitting many right of the right notes.  It is soft but sober, it’s a film about how bad things were before we knew how bad they were going to get. It is sweet, bittersweet, a tangled mess of bad parenting and poor boundaries within families that can sometimes come out more or less okay in the end.

Sourdough by Robin Sloan

This slim novel was long listed for the Booker Prize, which is a list that I try to read most if not all of.  They tend to be well written and not too focused on place but more so on people and dynamics.  So that is where I started.
The tale is of a Lois who works at a technology company that is developing robotic arms.  Her life consists of work, sleep, and she doesn't exactly eat.  She takes in nutrients in the form of a chemically constructed nutritive gel that has nothing going for it except that it is straight forward and  without objection.  You could also call it tasteless and soulless.  The opposite of exhibiting terroir.
In step Beoreg and Chaiman, two foreigners from a land never heard of before who run the Clement Street Soup and Sourdough out of their apartment.  One cooks and the other delivers.  They make one kind of bread and one kind of soup, and Lois is hooked.  When they move on to their next abode in a far away city in a far away land they leave her with the sourdough starter, and so begins Lois' journey back to the land of her ancestors, where food needs to be nurtured and cared for rather than assembled in the lab.  She comes to life herself as she devotes herself to the starter that she has been entrusted with. 

Bladerunner 2049 (2017)

I highly recommend re-watching Bladerunner before you watch this, because even with that immediacy, there are some dots that remain hard to connect.  I hadn't seen the original since my second son was born, and let's just say that while I have offspring, none of them remain children.  It was some time ago and truthfully, some of it still seemed like I was seeing it for the first time.  The one amazing thing is that Harrison Ford has aged remarkably well.
So, thirty years on, the world has gotten no less dystopian.  Ryan Gosling is a cop with no more back up than Ford had in the first movie.  He has a robot girlfriend, much like his predecessor.  As one of my aforementioned kids said, does Ryan Gosling tend towards imaginary girlfriends? He is sent to find a missing child, one that is highly sought after because it would represent the only successful reproduction of a robot with a human, and so that child is in grave danger, and he comes to think that he might be that child.  There is a lot of gloom and doom and very unpleasant characters, with some action thrown in.  Well worth watching.

Heroin(e) (2017)

This is nominated in the Best Short Documentary category, and it is definitely topically timely.  The film takes a deep dive into one community dealing with an overwhelming heroin epidemic, which has spun largely out of a large chronic opioid pain medication addiction.  When the pills dried up, the heroin came in and it was plentiful and cheap, and nowhere was harder hit than West Virginia.  The mixture of poverty, hard labor, and lack of hope is a powerful mix that led to an inordinate use of pain medication.
The documentary follows three women — a fire chief, a judge, and a faith-based social worker — dedicated to doing anything they can to stave off West Virginia’s opioid epidemic. The resulting profiles shows three different sides of addiction all the while demonstrating just how devastating this crisis really is.
The documentary starts off with Deputy Chief for the Huntington Fire Department Jan Rader. Though most of film focuses on the small, daily ways heroin destroys these addicts’ lives, Rader’s job forces the audience to literally consider life or death. On multiple occasions, she’s shown trying to help a near comatose person.  She sees every save as a win, a chance for that person to consider quitting, and she is tireless in her pursuit of another chance.  It is well worth watching and is streaming on Netflix.

Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz

I read a lot of murder mysteries, but you would not know it from my blog.  I keep that part of my life secret, more or less.  Only my librarian knows for sure.  I occasionally highlight a particularly good writer, but not often.  For example, I think both Tara French and Louise Penny are some of the very best authors of the genre, but I do not review either of their books.  I think the Charles Todd series highlight the experience of WWI for Britain, and are consistently enjoyable, but I do not write about them either.  So why this one?  It is a bit of a unique set up, clever and well written, so I am openly acknowledging my enjoyment of it.
It is a book within a book, and I think it helps to know that up front.  The first to start and the last to finish is a straight ahead Agatha Christie inspired cozy mystery, where there is murder and mayhem at the manor house in a sleepy English village.  Horowitz reportedly likes to emulate British mystery writers, with his first book an ode to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and his second in the style of Ian Fleming.  The second is a murder related directly to the book, and they are different and both are enjoyable.  I won't say more because, you know, it is a murder mystery and picking out the killer is half the attraction, so no clues will be dropped here.

Darkest Hour (2017)

Gary Oldman doesn't look much like Churchill, but he does a spectacular job of capturing him.  Unlike the other Churchill movie that came out this year, which is set on the eve of D Day and The Crown, which has Churchill during the waning days of the British Empire, this is set during the crisis that began WWII.  It was undeniably the darkest hour for England but it was Churchill's finest hour.  The German's had devastated the French and Belgian armies, and had almost the entire British army pinned down on the beaches at Dunkirk.  They were trapped between the Germans and the sea, and there were insufficient Naval ships so that there wasn't hope of bringing even a fraction of them home.  In addition to the tragic loss of life, they would have been without an army.  Churchill, who had correctly assessed the danger of Hitler from the very beginning, wanted to fight, fight to the death, while others wanted to negotiate peace.  Churchill's response in the movie was "You cannot reason with a tiger when your head is in it's mouth.", meaning that England would not retain independence or it's colonies in a negotiated peace.  All the while he is fighting his counterparts he also mobilized civilian boats, almost 900 of them, to go to Dunkirk and bring the army home, which they did in a spectacularly successful operation. His "We shall fight on the beaches", which was characterized by his opponent, Viscount Halifax as "He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.", thereby saving Europe (with some help from Russia, and eventually the United States).

Churchill (2017)

Churchill somehow managed two movies this year, and this is the lesser known of the two (Gary Oldman just won the Golden Globe for his portrayal in the other).  It is set on the eve of the invasion of Normandy, known as D-Day going forward.  In this film, he is at heart against it, preferring a more nuanced and broad based attack, whereas Eisenhower and Montgomery were pusjing him aside, more than implying he didn't understand modern war fare.
True or not?  Here is what the history books and Churchill's own letters tell us.  Churchill and Roosevelt met together with Stalin at Teheran in December 1943, Churchill tried to avoid the massive, single-front invasion across the Channel. With Passchendaele, Dunkirk, and the disastrous raid on Dieppe in mind, he feared a bloodbath.  Stalin insisted that an invasion of northwestern France was the only acceptable military strategy. Churchill did not prevail. Churchill supported his version of a cross-Channel invasion consistently from start to finish, but just as consistently argued for a peripheral, “closing the ring” strategy—a series of smaller, widely separated attacks to wear down German strength and disperse German forces. While he accepted and then supported the OVERLORD Second Front, he never became its advocate, telling one adviser in April 1944 that “This battle has been forced upon us by the Russians and the United States military authorities.” Only a month before D-Day Churchill had told the dominion prime ministers that he was “in favor of rolling up Europe from the South-East, and joining hands with the Russians.” The Americans insisted, prompting Churchill to complain that “They had been determined at every stage upon the invasion in North-West Europe, and had constantly wanted us to break off the Mediterranean operations.” So he was on the record as ambivalent and bullied, which this film depicts.  With he not in good humor about it.

The Power by Naomi Alderman

Margaret Atwood is quoted on the cover of this book, so you know right away that there is going to be some serious feminism in the guise of fiction contained within. The difference here is that the women rule, and the bad news is that it really is just as bad as when the men do.  The story is told through several lenses and it is beautifully written and you can view it many different ways, and you won't forget it, whether you love the book or hate it, and I think for the most part it will be one or the other and not something in between.  Which is a real accomplishment in and of itself.
The story is that girls and women across the globe begin to have electrical power,  they are able to transmit this electricity to people and things and they use this power mostly to get back at the patriarch.  Men have oppressed women for generations and now they are ready, even eager to take over the reigns of power.  But not so much to use it for good.  Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and this is no exception.
In the end, I think what I have always thought, that power sharing is the key to peace.  We know that gender imbalance, in either the work place or government, leads to problems.  Women are just as capable of being villains as men are, if given half a chance.   The real issue is we need change, but let there be more peace on earth, let's just tuck the patriarchy in and put it put to bed, never to arise again.

Wonder Woman (2017)

I have not been the devotee to the Marvel series that my offspring have, been I really enjoyed this movie.  One thing that is appealing to me is the link with ancient myths, which my children tell me is true to the Marvel narrative.  They aren't teaching any history lessons, as Wonder Woman is the Roman god of the hunt, Diana, but her brother is Ares, the Greek god of war.  Maybe Artemis didn't seem like all that sexy a name.  In any case, Diana is hidden away on an island with the Amazons and demonstrates what excellent homeschooling and strong female role models can do to develop a vibrant, confident adult superhero.  All is well until a WW I pilot pierces their island's invisibility cloak and Diana gets a glimpse of what is going on in the outside world.  She is convinced that her brother is to blame for the horrors that Europe is suffering under, and she defies Hippolyta who like all mothers would like to keep her charge out of harms way, and heads into battle.  She is the least complicated of superheros, unencumbered by guilt and brave in her pursuit of what is right.  An altogether enjoyable action movie.

The Prophet (2014)

Watching this movie it became very clear very quickly that I remember nothing of the book from which it came.  So back to the drawing board to get that information.  The film is based on the book of the same name by Lebanese writer/philosopher Gibran. In it, the prophet Almustafa is about to board a ship that will take him home after 12 years away when he is stopped by a group of people and proceeds to discuss a number of topics related to the human condition in the form of 26 prose poems. Since its initial publication in 1923, the book has never gone out of print.  The thing about the animation in this movie is that it is positively lyrical, and while I find the poetry a little too flowery for my taste, the animation matches if to a tee and is fabulous.
I think the approach to telling the story is not entirely successful, but that the beauty of it overall carries it off well, and is worth watching for that reason alone.