Oscars 2024
Unvarnished opinions on a selection of this year’s Academy Award nominees (narrative films). Not for the faint of heart.
March is when all of last year’s biopics come out of the woodwork to fulfill their intended purposes and follow their Oscar-calling. Hollywood’s biggest award show is a haven for stories of resilience, social virtue, grit for the sake of grit, and lately oversimplifications of feminism. Spoiler alert: Most of these are mid! I want something beyond technical mastery and aspirational moralism, unless it actually hits. Art is a difficult ask, though the voters sure tried this year with a Sandra Hüller double-header and I salute them for that.
For the anti-award show individuals, might I suggest taking the night off to revel in the low-key excellence of James Gray’s TWO LOVERS? I wrote about the film, which features what is imho Joaquin Phoenix’s best performance. He plays an offbeat loner who falls in love with Gwyneth Paltrow in what was her last real role before she got caught up with the MCU and the world of vaginal steaming. The movie shows how ambition gets restrained by the demands of family (a Gray specialty) as well as the challenges of romance and relationships for the clinically depressed/those with mental health conditions, something to which I can wholly relate. Life gets rough. At least I can vent through this cinematic opining..
On that note, I’m looking for someone to help edit this newsletter! DM me if you’d like to help spot my typos, reign in my unintentional alliteration, and maybe grab a bite to eat.
SHORT TAKES
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE — DEAD RECKONING, PART 1: The Tom Cruise renaissance spurred was ill-fated and ill-conceived. The man’s fillers are wearing off. Juvaderm lasts for months, but A.I. is forever.
THE CREATOR: Unlike M:I, this “man on a mission” film tells us A.I. is good. Its attempt to romanticize the beauty and potential of robots feels premature, and its structure overly schematic, almost as if it were penned by a chatbot. In reality it was cowritten by Chris Weitz, the man who gave us such comedies as American Pie and About a Boy. The humor is in short supply, and even if it were present, there’s no guarantee it wouldn’t be lost on stiff-lipped John David Washington. While covertly championing the benevolence of smart machines, the film paradoxically subverts today's technological ethos by freeing itself from the constraints of green screens. Opting for real locations instead of relying heavily on visual effects, it is unexpectedly quite beautiful to look at.
GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 3: At the opposite end of the aesthetic spectrum, there’s this, my first entry into the MCU. I watched approximately forty minutes on the plane as I was deterred by the gloomy, queasy aesthetics of Knowhere and its associated worlds—the visual look and feel of which I can only describe as excremental and epidermal.
INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY: I started this after I gave up on the superheroes and regret not having finished it, though I’m sure that’s for the best. Harrison Ford rides a horse in the subway and makes a dad joke. It was a great dad joke.
ELEMENTAL: I believe a better work of visual entertainment that rests on different tribes of water, earth, fire, air already exists.
FLAMIN’ HOT: The existence of this movie makes one wonder what transgressions Ben Affleck committed exactly to piss off the Academy. Following the Moneyball formula, AIR was the sly feel-good movie about capitalism of the year the people have been waiting for.
MAY DECEMBER: Todd Haynes wields artifice like a weapon and from the rubbles of tabloid story sensationalism erects this complex hall of mirrors from which you can make endless meaning. The Bergman references are smoothly integrated, never overbearing, the performances suggestively stilted, and Charles Melton fucking incredible. Shocking and moving.
NYAD: Channeling her inner Steve Zahn, Jodie Foster energizes the film with a collegial swagger that complements Benning’s aura of agitated delusion and frozen expression of gastrointestinal distress. The bond between these two besties as portrayed by veteran actors proves steadfast, while the creative direction of the two documentarians who made the movie remains questionable.
PERFECT DAYS: “ChatGPT, write me a Wim Wenders movie set in Japan.” While it has its moments, this touristic sketch of alienation that reaches the depths of credible yearning. What do you think Wenders loves more about Japan: that people sleep on a tatami mats or that government cares enough about public works to make starchitect-toilets by Tadao Ando and Kengo Kuma? I think he just likes making mixtapes.
RUSTIN: Colman Domingo and Bayard Rustin, the gay Black Quaker Socialist political activist, whom he plays, are utterly failed by this film’s visual stagnancy.
SOCIETY OF SNOW: It’s hard not to cry when the score sounds like the music from Lost. Oh, wait..
THE WONDERFUL LIFE OF HENRY SUGAR: Storytelling verbosity rendered literal with so many moving parts, which no matter how loving crafted and smoothly executed, runs the risk of pretentiousness for me. I’m sorry; I cannot.
And the nominess for best pictures are..
AMERICAN FICTION
Cord Jefferson’s adaptation of Percival Everett’s novel Erasure lacks teeth. And the film’s ending, while inspired, is a get out of jail free card that liberates the movie from having to deal with some of the book’s more pointed and nihilistic insights over race in publishing industry and more. It chooses easy amusements over thorny literary references and embraces self-reflexive diversions over explosive insights. What could've been more like Network is something like wanna-be Alexander Payne.
Here’s my capsule review for Literary Hub; yes I have read the book.
THE HOLDOVERS
Speaking of Alexander Payne... In all seriousness I wouldn’t mind if this won. An innocuous feel-good picture with little ramifications for better or worse.
More here: The Holdovers & Cherries jubilee
BARBIE
Insipid and moronically clever, sometimes too much for its own good. It’s incredibly hard to deny Barbie’s Mattel origins and divorce it from the fact that the film is still merely a stronghold of White feminism, even as it's undone by young latinx youth spouting faux shade or snarky lines to a very cool transperson. Barbie is a wan and winking apology of gratingly excessive jubilance. Any potential fun to be had I experienced in the same stilted lockjaw fashion that constitutes the dolls’ movements. The artifice ground me down (is this maybe what Werner Herzog meant when he claimed it sheer hell?) the surroundings are impressively crafted to appear garish and the images purposely flattened to mimic the limited vantage point of the dolls before superficially zooming out to the larger human world. (I do think the film is deserving of Best Set Design.)
But the logic of Barbie world does not hold. intelligence intrudes and overrides her and her fellow citizenne’s thoughts at the whim of the script and whenever it calls for clever gesticulations. “The thoughts of death and celluloid” that clutter the characters’ minds are an easily identified dichotomy born from its writers Gerwig and Baumbach, and the film is ultimately is much better at skewering masculinity than it is dismantling or doing anything with notions of womanhood and femininity. By the time America Ferrara delivers her speech, the pervasive odor of commercialism has tainted the atmosphere to such an extent that any meaningful impact might hold has diminished. Let’s hope at least her character got a promotion.
KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON
No notes, mostly, except maybe this. Lily Gladstone can, should, and will win.
MAESTRO
Bradley Cooper’s long gestating passion project bears little evidence of said passion, resulting in a desultory biopic that is cumbersome, staidly mannered, and as opaque as the facial prosthetics created by Kazu Hiro—a lock for Best Makeup and Hairstyling. Cooper’s portrayal is studied but empty, an impersonation abjectly devoid of the subject’s charisma and whatever sense or joy presumably ran through his work. A friend of mine who was in the pit orchestra of select scenes of the film told me that on the first day of filming, Cooper’s conducting was so atrocious that a professional had to lay on the ground at his feet so he could mimic their baton movements. By the end of rehearsals the musicians worries were put to rest as he’d finally gotten the hang of it. But, a competent imitation can only get you so far. It is evident pretty early on that Cooper focused his efforts on replicating Bernstein's gestures rather than imbuing the man with any authentic human traits. The play by play of his conducting Mahler at Ely Cathedral is better served in an episode of Documentary Now.
The film’s narrative focuses on Bernstein’s tumultuous marriage to Felicia Montaleagre (Carey Mulligan), and in doing so inadvertently and grossly undermines what could've been an exploration of Bernstein’s talent. What is lost in this drama of relationships is the breadth of Bernstein’s work, which is merely a sidenote, as well as the opportunity to bring him new fans and cement his legacy among old ones. I left the movie with little understanding of the man, why he was so great at what he did, aside from benefiting from fortuitous circumstances of being at the right place at the right time to conduct the New York Philharmonic when the guest conductor falls ill.
Cooper aims over his head with what we might call a feminist approach but in spotlighting Mrs. Bernstein manages to turn her into a nagging shrew, reducing her to the role of literally suffering wife. Mulligan aptly captures Felicia’s fury and pain, but there isn’t much in the role to begin with. The film also fails to provide an explanation for why this American, who was born in Costa Rica, possesses a flawless Transatlantic accent. But given the movie’s disjointedness, why the hell not.
ANATOMY OF A FALL
Marital dysfunction between creatives also figures into Justine Triet’s fourth feature, though in an intrepid and original gender role-reversal. Successful German writer Sandra (Sandra Hüller, never not good) is put on trial when her husband Samuel, a less successful French writer, is found dead at the foot of their Alpine chalet. Sandra stands accused of murder, seemingly as vengeful payback for Samuel blasting an impossibly loud steel drum cover of 50-Cent’s P.I.M.P. Without any real evidence to support the murder—the only witness the visually impaired son—Sandra is effectively being prosecuted for her distant demeanor as a spouse, and both the details of her marriage and fictional books are used as evidence to support this claim.
As in her previous film Sybil (2019), Triet draws on a panoply of languages (French, German, English), genres, and textures, (psychodrama, courtroom drama, and the marriage story)—all with a little less farce, wit, and trash. The film also employs an admixture of composed shots and sudden zooms meant to augment the fractured realities of its characters that annoyed me but everything falls into place when Sandra switches from French to English on the stand to defend herself and really hits its stride when the lawyers unveil an explosive and covertly recorded conversations, meant to inspire a future novel. Triet presents the evidence in flashback, as its own mini-movie that exposes a brutal exchange between the spouses over their marital and artistic struggles, which are naturally and fiercely entwined.
This is a good movie (highly contemporary and relatably modern) though not an earth-shattering one, neither as ambiguous as I expected, nor as consequential as it could be—and from an Oscar Best Picture, I want more. The recording-flashback is the film’s nutgraf, forcefully illustrated in the one scene but regrettably not expanded upon other than through courtroom dialogue. Some of the essence of Anatomy of a Fall is captured in Emily Gould’s now viral NyMag essay about “marriage’s intractable defects.” Gould observers, Keith’s work is still more stable and prestigious than mine, but we conspire to pretend that this isn’t the case, making sure to leave space for my potential and my leisure. If only Sandra and Samuel took note.
POOR THINGS
Yorgos Lanthimos’s most belabored amusement, or alt-Barbie with some admittedly enviable fashion choices, set in an oversaturated Windows screensaver world.
Here’s my capsule for LitHub, excerpted in full !
Buoyant and bawdy, Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest film—a steampunk Frankenstein update based on Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel—is his most easily digestible and least provocative film. Upholding what one would presume to be commonly held convictions, Poor Things is a sexual bildungsroman, a broadly feminist tale about a woman discovering her place in the libidinous desire and what she deems “furious jumping.”
The film’s unequivocal highlight is Emma Stone’s leading performance as Bella Baxter, who appears to be an adult but acts incontrovertibly like a toddler. She’s all infantile babble and incontinence, breaking plates with gleeful abandon to the chagrin of her father, the monstrously deformed, cutting edge surgeon Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). Suffice it to say that the rapid aging of Bella’s brain brings a most merciful end to the overblown juvenilia that comprises the film’s first act. Bella is soon betrothed to Godwin’s assistant Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) but elopes on the whim of sexual desires with a rakish lawyer (a hammy Mark Ruffalo) on a globe-trotting trip, where she becomes privy to the brokenness of the world and its unfair constraints on women.
As the film shifts from London to Lisbon, the black-and-white gives way to an oversaturation of color and further lavish sets, Wizard of Oz-style. Lanthimos, long recognized for employing a purposely affectless dialogue and puttered sentences that defy the primacy of language, broke that trademark with The Favourite (2018), a period piece fueled by eloquent and long-winded British-speak. As in that film, he gets his kicks in Poor Things by juxtaposing expletive-laden flourishes with refined propriety of Victorian language. Many incredulous WTFs (expertly executed by Youssef and Ruffalo) add a contemporary comedic element and anachronistic flair, much like Bella’s wardrobe and makeup, which spans ludicrously puffed shoulders, ruffled corsets, and go-go boots. The maximalist ride is mostly a confection, lacking the full political bearing of the novel.
OPPENHEIMER
Christopher Nolan’s ideas fall short of his technical dazzling in this movie that aptly captures the wonders of science—stars, celestial bodies, time space—but stops shy of explaining it proper, not that we ever could grasp physics like this genius… but the movie could make things a little more human, and in mortalizing this looming figure of history I’m not entirely sold. (According to brilliant friend with a PhD in physics, Oppenheimer apparently wasn’t even that good/known for quantum physics.) Something must be said that I felt worse for Strauss than for Oppie, whose burdens and conflicts are eaten up by a swirl of bad dialogue and substantive ensemble of supporting players. The women though are left completely out to dry.
Actor power rankings (least to most formidable):
15. Florence Pugh, participating in one of the worst sex scenes in the history of film
14. Emily Blunt, saddled with trite role of “alcoholic housewife”
13. Macon Blair
12. Alden Ehrenreich
11. Bennie Safdie
10. Rami Malek
9. Casey Affleck
8. Josh Peck, Olivia Thirlby, Alex Wolff
7. Gary Oldman
6. Cillian Murphy
5. Matt Damon
4. James Urbaniak
3. David Krumholz
2. Josh Hartnett
1 . Robert Downey
PAST LIVES
At least a little bit of an apologia for marrying a white man. The wonder and achievement of this film is its ability to relay its characters’ emotional connections—and forge a searing drama from it—without really giving them any real interior lives. Everything is a checkbox of characterization. Nora is a writer; Haesung is an engineer; Arthur is a white writer. The trio of actors, heartachingly good, conjure some marvelous magic and induce heavy tears. I cried, I did.
THE ZONE OF INTEREST
By turning his camera exclusively to the private lives of the commandant Rudolf Hoss and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) inside their aspirational living quarters at Auschwitz, Jonathan Glazer creates a voyeuristic experience that implicates the viewers who are watching, in essence, Nazi life-style porn. Images of idyllic picnics, a thriving garden, and a home well-maintained by servants, and all of this is shot with fastidious compositions and artfully calculated staging, where the plumes of incinerator smoke intrudes just so onto the stark blue sky.
Loosely based on the Martin Amis novel, The Zone of Interest adopts a purposefully narrow point of view, showcasing how ordinary individuals willfully shut themselves off from the world's atrocities, especially when it serves their own interests.
By employing various arthouse aesthetics, the film distorts the intended meaning of the film—or conceals its fundamental absence. Daring formal surprises, like sporadic inserts of thermal camera footage, extended takes of an entirely blackened frame, and glimpses of a modern-day Holocaust museum complicate the picture, at times it feels like the film is just a few edits away from an installation piece. Undeniably superb is the sound design by Mica Levy, which presents a captivating blend of monstrous echoes, mechanical burps, and perhaps human screams.
Glazer's shedding light on the slippery slope towards fascism is maybe not entirely groundbreaking, given what goes on right now, in countries all over the world. The film successfully courts our disgust and gives us no catharsis—is that brilliant or brainless? A copout or a condescension? I can’t decide. Maybe it’s all of these things, and I’ll continue to think about it.
Here are two opposing and more thorough takes, by Richard Brody in The New Yorker and J. Hoberman in The Nation.
An amazing round up, as always!
Brilliant to read this, thank you. “at times it feels like the film is just a few edits away from an installation piece.” — saw this week and had the same thought