Save the Green Planet (Trade it with Friends)

Film: Bugonia
Format: Streaming video from Peacock on Fire!

Of all the Best Picture nominees, Bugonia is the one that I’ve been putting off. Before you correct me and say that there’s at least one available streaming that I haven’t seen, I acknowledge that, but Bugonia has been available for a long time. The truth is that I don’t like Yorgos Lanthimos films as a rule. In fact, of the four I have seen prior to this one, The Favourite is the only one I can say I’ve actually enjoyed. Honestly, I think that’s a fair justification for why I’ve waited this long.

I also knew that this is a remake of a Korean film called Save the Green Planet! There was a part of me that thought I should watch the original before I watched the remake. But, at some point, you just need to get the work done, and what that means here is getting through Oscar films. Surprisingly (for me), this gives me 7 out of 10 for Best Picture before the ceremony starts, and it completes me on Best Adapted Screenplay. That’s got to be a record for me.

Green Acres, Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction

Film: One Battle After Another
Format: Streaming video from HBOMax on Fire!

We need a regular reminder that the Oscars are political and rarely correct. I say this because Paul Thomas Anderson is almost certainly going to win Best Director on Sunday and One Battle After Another seems likely to take Best Picture. The reason this is upsetting is that this is clearly not the best movie of this year and not the best directorial performance. However, Paul Thomas Anderson is a top director and much like the year that Christopher Nolan won for Oppenheimer, people have decided that it’s Anderson’s year.

That’s frustrating. Paul Thomas Anderson, to be fair, does have 14 nominations and no wins, so I understand the sentiment that he is due for a win. The problem is that One Battle After Another, while a fine movie, is not anything close to Anderson’s best work. This feels like Pacino winning an Oscar for Scent of a Woman or Paul Newman finally winning for The Color of Money. But, that’s where we are, and in a couple of days, it’s likely that that’s where we’ll remain.

Too Too Solid Flesh

Film: Hamnet
Format: Streaming video from Peacock on Fire!

My undergrad degree is in English literature. What this means is that there are times when I know at least some of what is going to happen in a movie. You can’t be much of an English student without knowing something of the life of William Shakespeare. Because of this, while I didn’t know exactly where we were going with Hamnet, I at least knew one or two of the major plot points. In this case, that doesn’t affect my enjoyment of the film, but it does mean that there will be people who are shocked at a particular moment that I spent a large part of the film expecting.

With Hamnet, named after Shakespeare’s son (both the movie and the play), we’re not getting a new filmed version of Hamlet, but sort of the story of its creation. This is much more the story of Shakespeare’s (Paul Mescal) tumultuous family life and his tormented relationship with his wife Agnes (Jessie Buckley). This was something that surprised me—traditionally, Shakespeare’s wife is recorded as Anne, but no matter.

Take a Ride on the Reading

Film: Train Dreams
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on gigantic television.

At this point, I think the Best Picture race is pretty much limited to One Battle After Another and Sinners with an outside chance of Marty Supreme. Honestly, even Sinners feels like an outsider at this point, with oddsmakers giving OBAA a better-than 60% chance. Train Dreams has virtually no chance of winning, and that has essentially been the case from the moment the nominations dropped. It doesn’t have much of a chance, but I am pleased that it was nominated. Oscar should go out of its way to nominate films like Train Dreams more often, if only to call out more attention to them.

Train Dreams is not the kind of movie that is normally going to get a great deal of attention from the average movie watcher. It is slow to a fault. Not a great deal happens in it. Even the massive forest fire, something that could easily become something like an action sequence is slow. I don’t have a problem with this, but I imagine that some people will.

Deadbeat Dad

Film: Frankenstein (2025)
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on various players.

I am not shy about my love of the work of Guillermo del Toro on this blog. I don’t often go to the theater, but Frankenstein is the first live-action del Toro film in a bit that I haven’t seen on its release. GdT has a reputation of loving his monsters. He’s also someone who, if you go through his films carefully, always makes humans worse than the monsters he shows us (or makes the standard vampires worse than the mutant vampires in Blade II). This is a running theme for him, so Frankenstein was an inevitability.

The running wisdom of the original Mary Shelley novel is that smart people realize that Frankenstein is the doctor, not the monster; wise people realize that Dr. Frankenstein is the monster. Del Toro is going to stay true to this. Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) is absolutely the villain of this story, while the creature (Jacob Elordi), while monstrous in appearance and sometimes in action, is clearly being depicted as an innocent.

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Adapted Screenplay 2024

The Contenders:

A Complete Unknown
Conclave (winner)
Emilia Perez
Nickel Boys
Sing Sing

Penny for Your Thoughts, Nickel for Your Sentence

Film: Nickel Boys
Format: Streaming video from Hulu Plus on Fire!

As we approach the end of the year, I realize that if I’m going to finish my Oscar chores, I need to get on the last couple of movies I haven’t seen. I started to watch Nickel Boys a few months ago, and then dropped off. This has nothing to do with the quality of the film. It has everything to do with the fact that it feels like this country is regressing, and movies that deal with oppression, racism, and similar topics are more overwhelming than normal right now. And make no mistake—this is very much a movie about racism and civil rights.

What’s frustrating here is that in a fair and just world, it wouldn’t be that story. We’re going to spend most of our time with Elwood Curtis (Ethan Herisse), who is a promising student who appears poised for academic success. He is accepted into a study program at an HBCU, and while hitchhiking to campus, is picked up by a man driving a stolen car. When they are pulled over, Elwood, who is a minor, is accused and convicted of being the man’s accomplice. As a minor, he can’t be sent to prison, so he is instead sent to a reform school called Nickel Academy.

How Many Roads?

Film: A Complete Unknown
Format: Streaming video from Hulu Plus on Fire!

I used to be a music nerd. Before I was a movie nerd, I was very much the sort of person who would name a bunch of obscure bands. And, honestly, then I grew up and I stopped caring about knowing more about stuff than other people. I’m old enough that there’s a lot of music that I like that’s gone past the category of “oldies.” I’m a huge Beatles fan, I love Steely Dan, and most of my musical roots are in ‘70s prog rock and early ‘80s punk. I’m also a fan of Bob Dylan for his lyrics and because of, not despite, his voice. There’s a part of me that seems to love singers who can’t really sing. Anyway, A Complete Unknown just started streaming on Hulu, so I figured I’d give it a watch.

Like any biopic, or at least like most of them, this is going to cover a period of the person in question. For Dylan (Timothée Chalamet), this means from his beginnings in 1961, his rise to folk music prominence, and his controversial move to electric instruments at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. I mean, I get why folk fans were angry about the move to an electric guitar, but a ton of Dylan’s best songs were played on electric guitars.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Acts

Film: Sing Sing
Format: Streaming video from HBO Max on Fire!

Who is the best actor working today? There are a lot of good answers for this, some who have been working for years and some up and comers who are making names for themselves. Colman Domingo might be the easiest to overlook in some ways despite two Oscar nominations in as many years. With Rustin, he was the best thing in the film by far. With Sing Sing, he is an outstanding part of an outstanding whole.

Sing Sing is a prison movie in the sense that it takes place in prison, but it’s not the sort of prison movie that you are thinking of. This is no made-on-the-cheap “sexy women behind bars” film, nor is it the story of gang vengeance or learning to live on the inside. It’s not a film about an escape attempt. Sing Sing takes place in prison, but it is about the transformative power of art. It’s cliché to say that a movie about prison is actually about freedom, but it is—and about why art matters and should matter.

Cartel Queenpin

Film: Emilia Pérez
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on Fire!

When you learn that the main actress in Emilia Pérez is transgender, you know immediately that this is a movie where you can’t really rely on the viewer reviews to get a good idea of what it’s going to be like. I guarantee that a bunch of the ½- and 1-star reviews of this film were written by people who haven’t actually seen the movie and are slagging it specifically because they don’t really know what pronouns are. Because of that, it becomes even more important to actually watch the movie carefully.

It’s also a movie where one has to be very careful in the criticism. I go into every movie hoping to like it and wanting to like it. I don’t want to spend my time watching things that I don’t like. So it’s frustrating when I don’t actually like a movie. When it’s something like Emilia Pérez, the worry is that the assumption will be that I didn’t like it because it’s largely about transgenderism, and that’s not the case. Emilia Pérez has problems that have nothing to do with the characters or the plot.

The Banality of Evil

Film: The Zone of Interest
Format: Streaming video from Max on Fire!

For Christmas this year my kids got me a year of HBO Max, which is honestly the only thing I asked for. I’m hoping to be more current on film in the coming year, and having a Max subscription is a part of this. It also gives me access to a number of shows I want to watch. This is also where The Zone of Interest is streaming, and it’s the last film I needed to complete everything for the last Oscars on my list of categories. Naturally, once I got the subscription up and running, it was the first thing I queued up.

There have been hundreds of movies made about the Holocaust, of course, and there will be hundreds more. An evil this huge and terrible needs to be confronted, both to keep it in the public consciousness (especially since Holocaust denial is a constant issue) and to purge it. In a sense, these films are a sort of therapy, a way of lancing the boil and draining the poison. What The Zone of Interest does is look at this terrible piece of history in a completely new way, something that I thought might well be impossible at this point.

Il Papa è morto

Film: Conclave
Format: Streaming video from Peacock on Fire!

I tend to think Ralph Fiennes rarely gets the credit that he deserves. Fiennes makes a really good villain (see the Harry Potter franchise, In Bruges, and Schindler’s List. He’s good in straight dramas—see his run in the James Bond franchise. He can also do comedy, as in In Bruges (again) and The Grand Budapest Hotel. He’s an actor who I will watch when I come across one of his movies almost automatically, so when I saw Conclave streaming on Peacock, I knew I’d get to it sooner rather than later.

My own religious opinions are fairly well known on this blog. I’m not merely someone who is irreligious but someone who is generally anti-theistic, believing that religion does more harm than good. It’s a constant part of my movie watching, though, because so many horror movies rely on religious themes. Conclave isn’t a horror movie, but it very much is a religious one, taking place essentially entirely in the Vatican.

My Pafology

Film: American Fiction
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on rockin’ flatscreen.

There are times with a directorial debut comes as a surprise. I was shocked that Get Out was Jordan Peele’s first movie, and still have trouble wrapping my mind around the fact that the Coen Brothers’ first movie was Blood Simple. There are other times when you can see the clear talent in the director but it’s equally evident that they are coming in unseasoned and undisciplined. Boots Riley lost track of the narrative in the third act of Sorry to Bother You, for instance. This is exactly the feeling I got with Cord Jefferson and American Fiction. Jefferson has talent, but right now doesn’t seem to have full control over the storytelling aspect of the film.

I haven’t read the book on which the film is based, so I don’t know how much of this comes from the actual story being told and how much of this is the lack of experience of Jefferson. American Fiction wants to do something very different with the story that it is telling, but the ending dives hard into levels and levels of meta that it can’t quite sustain as well as it wants to. Because of this, the last 15 minutes or so feel flat and a bit of a letdown after the bulk of the movie.

Destroyer of Worlds

Film: Oppenheimer
Format: DVD from Cortland Public Library on basement television.

I don’t think anyone was surprised when Oppenheimer cleaned up at the most recent Oscars ceremony. I hadn’t seen the film until today and I would have picked it to win more than the seven it did. Christopher Nolan was due to win an Oscar, as the best working director without one in the minds of many people (although I’d pick either David Fincher or Greta Gerwig). But it was Nolan’s year and nothing was going to knock this movie and Nolan off of that pedestal. It’s been one that I’ve been looking to watch for some time, but the last few months have been disturbingly busy, and this film is a good three hours long. As it is, it took me a couple of days to watch it.

This, of course, is the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), the man most credited with the creation of the first atomic bomb and the Manhattan Project. As befits a movie that is a good three hours long, Oppenheimer turns out to be a lot more complicated than we might think. The film has the good taste not to be hagiographic, although I wouldn’t call this a “warts and all” biography, either. Oppenheimer is painted as at least a sympathizer of communist sympathizers (his brother, his wife), as well as a womanizer. So, we’re going to be led to seeing him as brilliant, but flawed, which is probably the best we can expect.

The Cure for Quiet Desperation

Film: Living
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on various players.

Of all of the Oscar nominations, aside from the Avatar sequel, none worried me as much as Living. The original Kurosawa film, Ikiru, is a masterpiece, and I’m always leery about watching a remake of a film that is genuinely one of the best films of its decade, of its genre, and of its national cinema. Ikiru is a beautiful story, tragic and sad but hopeful and uplifting at the same time. It’s a remarkable piece of work, and don’t know that it can be improved upon. And yet, here we are.

What I’ve discovered here is that Living, while very clearly based on the same story as Kurosawa’s film, is also a very different take on that story. The skeleton of the story is exactly the same, as are many of the details. It is, ultimately, a very good remake of the base story. I remember some of Ikiru quite differently than this, especially toward the end, but no matter.

Return to the Danger Zone

Film: Top Gun: Maverick
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on rockin’ flatscreen

I’m not going to lie; Top Gun: Maverick had a real uphill climb for me. I’m not a fan of the original film at all. I don’t care that the original Top Gun is the gayest thing I’ve ever seen, and that includes Brokeback Mountain and Cruising. My problem with Top Gun is that you could not ask for a better advertisement for the military-industrial complex. Want a collection of young kids you can send off to war? Show ‘em Top Gun and get ‘em ramped up on patriotism and the desire to go fast, and you’ve got your lambs for the slaughter.

Top Gun: Maverick picks up multiple decades after the first movie—as the original took place when it was filmed, so too does this sequel. Our boy Peter “Maverick” Mitchell (Tom Cruise) is still flying for the Navy, and still at the rank of captain since his frequent insubordination keeps him from getting further promoted. His old friendly rival Tom “Iceman” Kazansky (Val Kilmer) now commands the entire Pacific fleet, and is the only thing that keeps Maverick still flying.

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Adapted Screenplay 2021

The Contenders:

CODA (winner)
Drive My Car
Dune
The Lost Daughter
The Power of the Dog

Self-Referential Title is Self-Referential

Film: Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
Format: Streaming video from NetFlex on rockin’ flatscreen.

On the day after Christmas, 2022, noted failed screenwriter and right-wing wastepaper basket Ben Shapiro went on a 17-tweet long rant about how much he hated Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (which I will call simply Glass Onion from this point forward). Part of his rant was about the politics of the movie (and we’ll get there), but it started with his evident inability to understand the basics of whodunnit mysteries. Shapiro complained that the first half of the movie was a bait-and-switch…and then in the middle of his rant switched focus, much like he just complained about.

It would be fair to complain a bit about Glass Onion because it doesn’t reach the same joyful narrative heights of the first Benoit Blanc mystery. This is much more a candy confection than the first film, an elaborate puzzle box like the ones received by the man characters at the start of the film. Because of this, its less rewatchable than the first film. Don’t take this as a serious negative criticism—sometimes this is exactly what you want. It is a difference, though, and there’s no getting around that.

Brokeback Ranch

Film: The Power of the Dog
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on Fire!

I tried to watch The Power of the Dog a couple of months ago, and for whatever reason, I found myself wandering. I walked away from it for a bit until I felt I was more mentally prepared for it. And then I more or less forgot about until I realized that I had to finish up the Oscar movies from last year so that I could complete the Oscar Got It Wrong! posts over the next month. I want to be clear here in saying that my first failed attempt to watch this was on me and wasn’t the fault of the movie. I was just really tired.

There is going to be a natural inclination to make some comparisons between The Power of the Dog and Brokeback Mountain; I’m not immune to that myself, as suggested by the title of this review. First, this is a more modern Western both in the sense that it is a modern film and in the sense that this doesn’t take place in the Old West. For as much as this is at least in part a cowboy movie, this take place in 1925. Second, there is definitely a theme of homosexuality and homoeroticism that runs through this.

Our Mother of Perpetual Sorrow

Film: The Lost Daughter
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on Fire!

I haven’t been putting up a lot of reviews lately, and I always have intention to change that. Life, work, all the rest get in the way. Here it is October and I still have nearly half a dozen Oscar films to finish up, which means getting through at least one more this month if I want to get done by the end of the year. So I picked The Lost Daughter for no reason other than it was one of the longer movies I had left, and I knew I was going to watch it eventually anyway. I went into this cold, knowing only that it earned Olivia Colman another Oscar nom. I like Colman, but it’s hard not to see her right now as one of the Oscar flavors-of-the-month.

The Lost Daughter is a slow movie, one that is contemplative, but not in a direction that is comfortable or easy. Leda Caruso (Colman) is on vacation in Greece. She is a noted translator and successful university professor. She has a run-in with a vacationing family, but then ends up redeeming herself when their young daughter goes missing at the beach. Leda finds the girl, but also steals the girl’s beloved doll for reasons that are initially unknown.