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.

You Saw Me Standin' Alone

Film: Blue Moon
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on Fire!

When people talk about very talented actors, people who are genuinely and consistently good at the craft, Ethan Hawke doesn’t get mentioned enough. Hawke feels (to me) like one of those actors who goes into every job like it’s the one that’s going to make his career. He commits, and he’s good to great in pretty much everything he’s been in, at least that I’ve seen (and I even forgive him for The Purge). I was happy to see that he was nominated for an Oscar, his third acting nomination and first for lead. Blue Moon hinges entirely on Ethan Hawke’s performance. This film is him, and he is the film, even with a good supporting cast.

Blue Moon is a memoir of sorts of Lorenz “Larry” Hart (Hawke), the lyricist half of Rodgers and Hart, who wrote a number of Broadway musicals over the course of a couple of decades. Hart’s decline came about not from rumors of his sexuality (he was what we would today probably call pansexual), but his copious drinking. Rodgers, needing a more consistent partner for his music, teamed up with Oscar Hammerstein to make the greatest musical composition team ever, starting with their first collaboration, Oklahoma!

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Original Screenplay 2024

The Contenders:

Anora (winner)
The Brutalist
A Real Pain
September 5
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.

Everything is Political

Film: September 5
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!

My kids get mad at me when I tell them that virtually everything they do has political ramifications. It’s true, though. Spend money at Chick-Fil-A, and you’re helping to finance a company that happily gives money to anti-LGBTQIA+ organizations. Buy something at Wal-Mart, and you’re enriching a company that has thousands of employees on food stamps and other forms of welfare. Make a movie about a group of Palestinians killing Israeli athletes, and you’re making a comment on the current situation in Gaza, even if that wasn’t your intent. That makes September 5 a movie that is a lot more politically charged now than it might have been a few years ago.

To be fair, the events of the Munich 1972 Olympics are a compelling story, and that is enough to warrant a movie. It does seem oddly timed, though, as Israel undertakes what certainly looks like genocide and the eradication of the Palestinian people in Israel. A story that clearly has Israelis as victims and Palestinians as terrorists certainly feels politically motivated, regardless of intent or the viability of the actual historical events.

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.

Family Ties

Film: A Real Pain
Format: Streaming video from Hulu Plus on Fire!

I’ve decided to be a little more proactive on watching Oscar films (and 2024 films in general) this year, so I figured diving head-first into A Real Pain would be a good place to start. I tend to like Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg. A running joke I have is that the easiest way to tell the difference between Jesse Eisenberg and Michael Cera is to remember that Eisenberg is the one with talent. A Real Pain is evidence of this, even if you haven’t liked his previous work; in addition to starring in it, he also wrote and directed it.

The film tells the story of David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Culkin), a pair of cousins born less than a month apart. David is a fairly normal, responsible person with a wife and child, and a job selling advertising banners online. He is very concerned with appearance, and with being on time for things, correct and not causing a scene. Benji is the complete opposite, someone with strong ideas and opinions, but who is otherwise aimless. They are wildly different, and have decided to take a trip together to Poland to visit their heritage, the house where their grandmother grew up, and the concentration camp that she survived.

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Original Screenplay 2023

The Contenders:

Anatomy of a Fall (winner)
The Holdovers
Maestro
May December
Past Lives

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.

Inyeon

Film: Past Lives
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on basement television.

My default genres are science fiction and horror more than anything else. This blog is testament to the fact that I don’t shy away from much and definitely don’t from any specific genre, but most of my comfort movies are in those genres. Because of that, I don’t spend a lot of time watching what amounts to a fairly melodramatic Korean drama like Past Lives. Still, this was nominated for two Oscars that I care about, so I knew I would be getting to it sooner or later. I found it at a local library and I’m right on the edge of some off-time, so I figured now was a good time to give it a watch.

This is not a complicated movie. That doesn’t mean that it’s not a good one, but it’s worth saying that it is a very simple story, one that is easy to follow and understand, and importantly, one that is very easy to relate to. Anyone who has any level of introspection in their life at all has lived through some level of plot, even if only mentally and emotionally.

Age Gap

Film: May December
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on various players.

I have never been shy about the fact that age gap relationships in film really bother me. I don’t understand why Hollywood still seems to believe that having women in their 20s and 30s actively pursuing relationships with men in their 50s and 60s. This comes with the knowledge that I know of several relationships like this in real life. My wife’s cousin is married to a woman who is several decades older than he is, and that is the kind of relationship that we’re going to be investigating in May December. The difference is that my wife’s cousin met his wife when he was in his 30s and she was in her 50s. In May December, we’re looking at a relationship that began when she was in her 30s and he was…13.

And that is the story of May December. Actress Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman) goes to Savannah, Georgia to research an upcoming role. That role is as Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore), a woman caught having an affair with a 13-year-old boy named Joe. Gracie was sent to prison for this clear abuse of a child, and while in prison gave birth to that boy’s child. And, then when she was released from prison, she married him, and 23 years later, is still married to Joe (Charles Melton).

The Music, Man

Film: Maestro
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on Fire!

Bradley Cooper appears desperate for validation. The man has 12 Oscar nominations, five for acting, but no joy yet. One has to imagine that there’s a part of him that is struggling mightily to live down his early years in front of the camera in some desperate attempt for legitimacy, but it’s not like other actors haven’t had to do this. Tom Hanks won consecutive Oscars, and the guy did Bachelor Party and The Money Pit. Maestro is Cooper’s latest attempt for Oscar glory, and while I’ve liked some of his work in the past, I’m unimpressed in general with this one.

The biggest reason for this is a variation of the reason I was so disappointed in The Theory of Everything. If someone is going to do a biopic of Stephen Hawking, you’d think that the focus would be on the man’s work—on the incredible things he was able to accomplish and the jumps forward he made in theory, but the film focused on his marriage. In much the same way, the biopic of Leonard Bernstein (Cooper) should focus on the man’s music—he redefined the American musical in significant ways—and it instead focuses on the fact that despite his marriage and three children, he evidently couldn’t get over his craving for “the d.”

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.

Christmas Breakdown

Film: The Holdovers
Format: Streaming video from Peacock on rockin’ flatscreen.

As my current quarter winds down, I’ve decided I need to start hitting the Oscar movies from the latest year rather than just thinking about it. There are a bunch I still can’t find (yet), but it’s worth knocking a few out. There are a few I’m looking forward to, but I figured I would start with The Holdovers, only because I got a late start tonight and I didn’t have time for anything much longer. This is one I’ve been wanting to watch since it showed up on Peacock, and tonight I finally got the chance.

The Holdovers takes place at the end of 1970 in the environs of Barton Academy, a New England boarding school for the scions of wealthy families. As the year winds to a close, the school takes a two-week break and most of the students go home to family. Five students are left behind—there were supposed to be only four, but the fifth, Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), gets a last minute call from his mother, who wants a proper honeymoon with her new husband. The teacher being left in charge is Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti). The only other person left at the school is Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), the school’s cook, who has just lost her son in Vietnam.

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Original Screenplay 2022

The Contenders:

The Banshees of Inisherin
Everything Everywhere All at Once (winner)
The Fabelmans
TÁR
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.

Eat the Rich

Film: Triangle of Sadness
Format: Streaming video from Hulu Plus on various players.

Every year, I have good intentions of watching as many of the Oscar movies that are relevant to me before the ceremony as possible. I usually fail pretty miserably and am still struggling to complete the short list at the end of the year (or even in January, as happened this year). So, I was excited to see Triangle of Sadness appear on Hulu the other day, because it was another one to cross off the list, putting me at more than half of the Best Picture nominees with a few weeks still to go. That’s pretty good for me.

I went into this completely cold. I knew nothing about it, and didn’t even know that this is a comedy. It is, but it’s going to take us some time to get there. It starts as a sort of ugly romance between two very superficial people. We’re going to be dealing with Carl (Harris Dickinson) and Yaya (Charlbi Dean), who are both professional models. Yaya is also an influencer, which is a big part of how the two of them live. What we learn early on is that the two of them are a couple, but it’s in large part for show. Yaya, despite making more money than Carl, expects him to pay for everything. We also learn that Yaya is with Carl in large part because it helps her get more followers on Instagram. Her eventual goal—her “way out of this life”—is to snag a very wealthy husband and live as a trophy wife, a fate that Carl decides he will save her from.