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.

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.

Against the Crowd Blogathon 2020

Film: The Killing of a Sacred Deer; Soldier
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library (Sacred) and personal collection (Soldier) on the basement television.

Every year, Dell over at Dell on Movies hosts several blogathons. Because this blog is fairly regimented in what it does, I don’t tend to participate in them despite enjoying them a great deal when I read through the various posts. I decided this year, as I come close to completing my Oscar lists, that I’d play as well. The problem was finding movies I knew would fit the bill for this blogathon. The idea is to find two movies. The first should be one I dislike that most people like while the second should be one I like that most people don’t. My issue was finding movies that fit this bill that I hadn’t already reviewed. I can make this blog as flexible as I like, but I won’t review the same movie twice. Still, there had to be movies that qualified, right?

For whatever reason, the world seems to love the films of Yorgos Lanthimos. I didn’t hate The Favourite, but much of this is because it’s the first of his movies where the entire cast doesn’t recite likes like they have a gun to their head. There’s a reason, I think, that Lanthimos loves Colin Farrell, who seems more than willing to say his lines as if he is reading out the contents of cells in an Excel document. Nowhere is this more evident than in the somehow-beloved The Killing of a Sacred Deer.

All About Abigail

Film: The Favourite
Format: DVD from NetFlix on The New Portable.

Based only on my prior knowledge, I was surprised at the nomination of Olivia Colman for The Favourite. This is nothing against Colman, who I have loved in television roles for several years. I know her primarily from her work on sketch comedy shows with David Mitchell and Robert Webb, as well as from Hot Fuzz. And thus my surprise; Oscar seems to not so much dislike comedy as not really care that it exists. While I love Colman’s work, she seems like a terrible fit for Oscar’s typical Best Actress category. It was even more surprising to me that she won, and for the same reason.

Well, I’ve seen The Favourite now, and I have to say that there’s a part of me that is still surprised that she won. Again, this is nothing against Olivia Colman. It has everything to do with what feels like category fraud. The Favourite notched three acting nominations—Colman for Best Actress and both Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz for Best Supporting Actress. The problem is that Stone is clearly the main character of the film and gets the most screen time. While it’s true that Colman’s Queen Anne is the emotional and narrative center of the film, she’s not the main character nor does she have the main character arc.

Drawn Butter

Film: The Lobster
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on rockin’ flatscreen.

Author James Morrow wrote a book called “City of Truth” in which the characters are unable to lie. Every conversation is brutally frank and honest because even the smallest lie has been conditioned out of people. The main character of the book must learn to lie in order to save his seriously ill son. I thought that The Invention of Lying was the closest approximation to that story in the world of film, and it probably is. However, I would not be surprised if the writers of The Lobster were familiar with that book, since the conversations that happen in this film are about as close to Morrow’s book as I’ve ever seen.

The Lobster, much like Being John Malkovich or Jasper Fforde’s “Grey” series, trades on its inherent weirdness. This is a film that is really all about premise more than it is about anything else. If you can buy into the obviously allegorical premise, the movie is an interesting one, but there will be a percentage of the population that simply can’t get past the incredibly strange premise that we’re given.