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.

Hombre Secreto

Film: The Secret Agent (O Agente Secreto)
Format: Streaming video from Hulu on Fire!

There were times when I was watching The Secret Agent (O Agente Secreto in the original Portuguese) when I felt like I had seen this movie before. The reason is that it feels like it covers a lot of the same territory as I’m Still Here from the previous year. Both films deal with the military dictatorship in Brazil in the 1970s and with the lives that were devastated or lost under that regime. I’m Still Here deals with a woman looking for what happened to her husband. The Secret Agent deals much more with the direct victim of the violence. The stories are different but similar, and feel united even though they take place years apart and concern different people.

Armando Solimões (Wagner Moura) is a dissident in a Brazil that has been under military rule for more a decade. He travels to Recife where his in-laws are taking care of his son Fernando (Enzo Nunes) ever since Armando’s wife Fátima died. He finds his way to a sort of commune of dissidents and takes the name Marcelo as an alias. He is placed by the group in a job at the city office that creates identity cards. This allows him the opportunity to look for information on his mother, who he knows very little about.

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.

Vroooooooooooom!

Film: F1 (F1: The Movie)
Format: Streaming video from Apple TV on rockin’ flatscreen.

There is a huge problem at the heart of F1 (sometimes called F1: The Movie). The problem is that because we know we are watching a movie, the endgame is played out for us once we know the premise of the film. Once you know what the plot is, the ending, while not guaranteed, is shuttled into a couple of possibilities with slight variation. It makes about 90 minutes or so of the film not meaningless, but having nothing really at stake. We know where we have to get.

We’re going to start not with F1 cars but racing at Daytona in the 24 hours at Daytona event. The person we are focusing on is Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt), a one-time F1 prodigy gone from that world for 30 years. Hayes now lives in his van, moving from driving gig to driving gig, essentially working for hire. His team wins the race, but he refuses to touch the trophy, or even really to celebrate. He collects his bonus check and drives off.

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.

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Picture 2024

The Contenders:

Anora (winner)
The Brutalist
A Complete Unknown
Conclave
Dune: Part Two
Emilia Pérez
I’m Still Here
Nickel Boys
The Substance
Wicked

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.

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.

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.

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.

Gone, but Not Forgotten

Film: I’m Still Here (Ainda Estou Aqui)
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on basement television.

Some movies are harder to watch than others, and for various reasons. Because of the state of the U.S. right now, I’m Still Here (Ainda Estou Aqui in the original Portuguese) is a film that feels both relevant and terrifying. This is a film about political murder and authoritarianism, as well as military rule, and a lot of it feels a lot more relevant than it should.

As with many a film about a very serious issue, I’m Still Here has a sort of high-concept plot that is easy to understand and terrifying to watch play out. In 1964, Brazil was taken over in a coup d’état. Congressman Reubens Paiva (Selton Mello) resigned his position and returned to his position as a civil engineer. Several years later, Paiva is living peacefully with his family, but is privately supporting political expatriates without the knowledge of his family.

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.

Half a Story (Is Better than None)

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

I knew a little bit about Wicked before I watched it in the sense that I knew the very basics of the story. I haven’t seen the musical (I don’t do a lot of theater), and I haven’t read the book on which it is based but just through osmosis and being alive in a society, you learn a few things. So I was prepared for a lot of what was to come even if I didn’t know the details.

What I knew going in was that this is the story of the Wizard of Oz from the perspective of the Wicked Witch of the West. I also knew that the witch, Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) was given that name specifically by the author of the original book because it would recall the name of the author of the Oz books, L. Frank Baum. I expected this to be a big, blustery, traditional Hollywood musical, which, of course, it is. I am honestly shocked that the controversies surrounding this were about Cynthia Erivo’s reaction to a fan poster and the fact that this ruined the marriages of Ariana Grande and Ethan Slater. I genuinely can’t believe that the reactionary bastards of the American right wing didn’t have an absolute conniption over how utterly “woke” this film is. I mean this in only the most positive way.

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 Picture 2023

The Contenders:

American Fiction
Anatomy of a Fall
Barbie
The Holdovers Killers of the Flower Moon
Maestro
Oppenheimer (winner)
Past Lives
Poor Things
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.