No One Hurts You Like Family

Film: Sentimental Value (Affeksjonsverdi)
Format: Streaming video from Hulu Plus on Fire!

As I slowly make my way through the latest crop of Oscar movies, I’ve found myself struggling at times to want to pull the trigger on them. All of the ones I haven’t seen are currently streaming at this point; I could finish this in less than a week if I had a mind to, but right now, what I want to watch is going in different directions. So, while Sentimental Value (or Affeksjonsverdi in the Norwegian) has gotten mountains of acclaim, I’ve found it difficult to want to watch it. But sometimes you just have to force yourself into doing those things that you know you need to do. I’d like to knock out one of the remaining Oscar films ever week—I’d be done late June/early July, and that would absolutely be a record for me.

Anyway, Sentimental Value on its surface is one of those movies that is about making a movie, but it’s really about the relationships of the people involved. Hollywood always likes movies about movies, but this is not a movie that at all feels like it’s glamorizing the business. In fact, it does the opposite, and it takes some very obvious digs at NetFlix to the point where it will clearly never be shown on that streaming platform.

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.

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Director 2024

The Contenders:

Sean Baker: Anora (winner)
Brady Corbet: The Brutalist
James Mangold: A Complete Unknown
Jaques Audiard: Emilia Perez
Coralie Fargeat: The Substance

I Think the Stripper Likes Me

Film: Anora
Format: Streaming video from Hulu Plus on Fire!

My goal was to get through my set of Oscar films by the end of the year and to save the Best Picture winner, Anora, for last. I did save it for last, but circumstances prevented me from getting it watched until tonight. There was a part of me that didn’t really want to watch it (although I was far less enthused about The Apprentice). There are only a couple of ways for this story to go, and really only one interesting one, and on the surface, the characters didn’t appeal to me at all.

To give the elevator pitch, Anora is a far more realistic version of Pretty Woman. Exotic dancer/escort Anora “Ani” Mikheeva (Mikey Madison) dances at a club and for a fee frequently has sex with her clients. One night, a customer named Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn) wants someone who will speak Russian with him, and Anora gets tapped. Vanya is in New York City from Russia alleged for school, but he spends most of his time playing video games and partying. How can he afford this? His father is a Russian oligarch and a billionaire.

What's Brutal is the Length

Film: The Brutalist
Format: Streaming video from HBO Max on various players.

If you are me and you start watching The Brutalist, you take a step back when you hear the name of the main character, Lázsló Tóth (Adrien Brody). For most people, that name doesn’t mean a lot, but for me, there’s an immediate connection. Comedian Don Novello, best known for his character Father Guido Sarducci, wrote a couple of books where he played a character named Lazlo Toth. This version of Lazlo Toth wrote earnest (and ridiculous) letters to companies and famous people. Seeing someone with essentially the same name in a serious movie was a bit jarring.

It took me several days to get through The Brutalist. The version on HBO is truncated only in the sense that instead of a 15-minute intermission, there’s a 1-minute intermission. It’s still more than 200 minutes with the shorter intermission, and that’s a lot to ask from an audience for any film in one sitting. I do wonder about the necessity of the length. Film critic Mark Kermode tends to reference 2001 in a case like this—in that film, Kubrick takes use from the birth of humanity to the birth of a new species in about 2 ½ hours. In The Brutalist, we take nearly 3 ½ hours to look at the story of a fictional architect.

A Little Dab'll Do Ya

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

I’m not going to virtue signal here, because something I’m about to say is kind of belied by a lot of the films I really love: women and marginalized groups make better horror movies. I say this full in the knowledge that some of my all-time favorite horror movies (28 Days Later, The Thing) are made by white dudes, and Wes Craven is far and away my favorite horror director. That said, for the last decade or so, the really interesting things being done in the genre are being done by women and marginalized people. That brings us to The Substance, a brutal body horror film that was so damned good it got a bunch of Oscar nominations, including a win for makeup and hairstyling.

Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) is an aging actress who, Jane Fonda-like, has made a significant portion of her later career working in fitness videos. On her 50th birthday, her producer Harvey (Dennis Quaid) fires her essentially for being too old. On her way home from being fired, she sees one of her billboards being ripped down, and loses control of her car. At the hospital post-crash, a young nurse slips a flash drive into her pocket offering her “The Substance,” which promises to create a better, more perfect version of herself.

Blood is Thicker than Water

Film: Sinners
Format: AMC Market Square Theater (Theater 8)

I have to think that it’s not easy to try to rework a classic monster into something new. Tell people that you’re making (another) werewolf movie or (another) zombie movie and you’re likely to often get a yawn in response. That’s nowhere more the case than with vampires. Seriously, how many different versions of vampires are there? How many times have I reviewed yet another version of the basic Dracula story on this blog? (Answer—at least six that are based directly on the Bram Stoker novel). So if you can do something really new, you’ve got a chance to get an audience really interested. That’s where we are starting with Sinners.

This is a vampire story, not a Dracula-specific story, though. We’re going to get vampires here that are going to have a lot of similarities to traditional vampires (weakness to garlic, killed by sunlight or a stake to the heart), but these are more of a hive mind of vampires, and while they are certainly sexual in a lot of ways, these are not romantic in the least. These vampires are more feral, and that works to the story’s benefit.

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.

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.

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Director 2023

The Contenders:

Justine Triet: Anatomy of a Fall
Martin Scorsese: Killers of the Flower Moon
Christopher Nolan: Oppenheimer (winner)
Yorgos Lanthimos: Poor Things
Jonathan Glazer: The Zone of Interest

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.

Frankenstein's Baby

Film: Poor Things
Format: Streaming video from Hulu Plus on various players.

I think it’s likely that everyone who is a film nerd has those few actors or directors that they don’t like that everyone else seems to. I’ve long maintained that Quentin Tarantino would be better if he stopped trying to be awesome and instead tried to just be good. I find myself in the same position with Yorgos Lanthimos. Everyone seems to love his work, and I don’t see it. I’ve delayed watching Poor Things for months because of this but simply can’t delay any longer. It’s the last of the 2023 Oscar movies I need to watch that I won’t have to pay for.

The positive news for me, though, is that with Poor Things I’ve figured out exactly what it is that I don’t like about Lanthimos. Seeing this, it seems so obvious that I don’t know why it took me this long to figure it out. Yorgos Lanthimos is the dark, alternate universe Wes Anderson, and now that I’ve typed it, I hate that fact even more.

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.

Dropping In

Film: Anatomy of a Fall (Anatomie d’une Chute)
Format: Streaming video from Hulu on rockin’ flatscreen.

Sandra Hüller had a really good 2023. She was one of the stars of The Zone of Interest, dwhich was nominated for Best Picture and won Best Foreign Language Feature. She also starred in Anatomy of a Fall, which was also nominated for Best Picture. In 2017, Michael Stuhlbarg was in three of the nine Best Picture nominees—a damn solid year. I think Hüller might have had the better year. While she was in 20% of the Best Picture nominees rather than 33%, she also managed a Best Actress nomination.

The inciting incident here is the fall of the title. Novelist Sandra Voyter (Hüller) has to postpone an interview with a student because her husband Samuel (Samuel Theis) starts playing music extremely loud. Their vision-impaired son Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner) takes his dog Snoop out for a walk. When he returns, he finds his father’s body on the ground, evidently having fallen from the third story of their chalet.

Osage, Can You See

Film: Killers of the Flower Moon
Format: Streaming video from Apple TV on basement television.

My latest quarter in school ended Friday and my grades are due tomorrow, but I finished them this morning. It seemed like a good time to knock out the longest movie on my list, Martin Scorsese’s latest magnum opus Killers of the Flower Moon. I went into this expecting something like a mystery. Turns out that that’s not the case; Killers of the Flower Moon is a gangster movie. It’s just a gangster movie that takes place in 1920s Oklahoma, involves the Osage people, and is about oil. Still, it’s very much a gangster movie.

After World War I, Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) shows up in Oklahoma at the behest of his uncle, William King Hale (Robert De Niro). King Hale runs a ranch, aided by Ernest’s brother Byron (Scott Shepherd). The ranch is in Osage country, and in previous years, oil was discovered on Osage land, making the people fabulously wealthy. And this is the problem—the Osage have the oil rights, but because they are native, they don’t have any real power. And so they start dying, and their deaths are not investigated.

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Picture 2022

The Contenders:

All Quiet on the Western Front
Avatar: The Way of Water
The Banshees of Inisherin
Elvis
Everything Everywhere All at Once (winner)
The Fabelmans
TÁR
Top Gun: Maverick
Triangle of Sadness
Women Talking

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Director 2022

The Contenders:

Martin McDonagh: The Banshees of Inisherin
Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert: Everything Everywhere All at Once (winners)
Steven Spielberg: The Fabelmans
Todd Field: TÁR
Ruben Ostlund: Triangle of Sadness

Downbeat

Film: TÁR
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!

As seems to be happening lately, my life has spiraled out of control over the last two weeks. Primarily, these are health-related concerns of family members that have been taking up a lot of my time, combined with the holidays and increased duties at work. I’ve watched, and this is completely serious, a single movie in the last two weeks, and that movie was TÁR, one of the last two Oscar movies from last year left on my list. A few months ago, I was in great shape on Oscar movies, and suddenly it’s the end of the year and I’m not finished. Well, at least I got the long one out of the way.

TÁR is the story of Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett), the principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. World renowned on the classical music scene and wildly influential. As the film begins, she is being interviewed about an upcoming performance of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. Conducting this will give her all nine of Mahler’s symphonies with the Berlin Philharmonic, a true feat in the classical music world. As with any great tragic tale, we start with our hero at the pinnacle of her world and talent, poised for the fall that will take us to the end of the story.

Lights, Camera,...

Film: The Fabelmans
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on basement television.

A number of years ago, a random passer-by on this blog was upset that I wasn’t completely blown away by the film The Color of Pomegranates. In that rant, in addition to spelling the name of the director wrong, that commenter also told me I should spend my time with easier, less challenging films, like the works of Steven Spielberg. I always thought that was a weird insult—say what you will about Spielberg, the man makes a good movie. Seriously, go with Michael Bay or Tony Scott if you’re shooting for lowbrow. Anyway, I was reminded of this when I sat down with The Fabelmans.

For lack of a better way to put it, this is Steven Spielberg making his own fictionalized biopic of his early life and birth as a filmmaker. If you like, it’s akin in some ways to 8 ½, or perhaps more closely Woody Allen’s Radio Days. We’re going to see the young Spielberg stand-in Sam Fabelman (Mateo Zoryan initially, then Gabriel LaBelle for the bulk of the film) introduced to the idea of movies by his parents, Mitzi (Michelle Williams) and Burt (Paul Dano) in the form of The Greatest Show on Earth. Sammy seems upset by the train crash sequence, but also fascinated by it to the point that he asks for a train set for Hannukah that year.