The Oscars and the Independent Spirit Awards are this weekend (whoops, I did not finish this post before the Spirit Awards), so a quick rundown of my thoughts on the nominated movies I've seen:
Haven't seen: Bridge of Spies, Hateful Eight, Trumbo, Steve Jobs, 45 Years, Straight Outta Compton, The End of the Tour, James White, Mediterranea, Mississippi Grind
The Big Short
Better than I expected. 40% polemic, 40% tutorial, about the housing bubble and subsequent financial crisis and its exploitation. If docu-drama is a thing, is docu-comedy? Adam McKay breaks the fourth wall in damn near every way imaginable in order to keep things moving.
One of the best movies of the year, though? I don't know. I am sick to fucking death of the "movie (sometimes a biopic but not always) about very recent history that you pretty much remember" genre -- Cate Blanchett and Robert Redford in that blatant Oscar-bait Dan Rather movie is a good recent example. They're rarely great movies (or even good stories), they're rarely movies we will revisit fondly ten, twenty, thirty years later.
Do you ever rewatch Primary Colors, for heaven's sake? Or W?
That said, while this is not necessarily a good story in the usual cinematic sense, it's a very interesting use of cinema, and in this case this particular story from recent history is one that's ten years old now and still never really got the attention it deserved. We live in the constant shadow of 9/11 but no one even bothered to properly scapegoat the financial crisis. There is a much more reasonable justification for making this movie than there is the Balloon Boy movie, or the Anthony Wiener movie, or whatever.
Brooklyn
This is wholly Saoirse Ronan's movie -- a well-deserved Best Actress nomination. I hesitate to call it a love story as such, but it's a great and beautiful movie of a sort that is otherwise underrepresented in the Best Picture category this year.
Mad Max: Fury Road
As I think I've written about here before, I was skeptical about a Mad Max movie even once people started praising it, because someone I hadn't heard that it was directed by the original director. Turns out the movie is awesome. I've found that with every year I have less and less patience for action movies. I don't think it's my age (so shut up), I think it's the movies -- I think CGI and the other ways that the filming of action has changed have made them less interesting, and even when I watch Mission Impossible movies or whatever, I have trouble paying attention. They just don't hold my interest.
But this, this worked. This was great.
The Martian
They dropped my favorite joke and I think it's silly to cast pretty boy Matt Damon as a dorky space botanist, but this was both a good adaptation and a good space movie. (It may technically be a "science fiction movie," but classifying it as one seems silly -- you may as well call most Tom Clancy books or James Bond movies science fiction.) However, in a year when people are wondering why the Oscars are so glaringly white, this stands out as needing to justify its place in the room -- sure, it makes sense for the technical awards, but Best Picture? Best Actor? Was this really one of the best stories told this year, one of the best performances on the screen?
Given that even Revenant is based on a true story, is Matt Damon the only Best Actor nominee playing a fictional character? That's just weird.
The Revenant
Birdman was A+ direction, A+ lead performance, B- story for me. And in film, that's okay sometimes. I mean, it's the difference between a great movie and an amazing movie sometimes, but everyone's different, people respond to different things. Some people barely notice the visuals, or mostly notice big explosions and car chases. Me, I have trouble with some Godard movies (though Band of Outsiders is a hall of fame favorite), because I can read about them afterward and understand what was groundbreaking about what he was doing visually, but in the moment of watching, I can't get past how much I dislike his protagonists.
Anyway, what kept striking me about The Revenant was that while the story was engaging enough -- it's a straightforward revenge story, but there's nothing wrong with that -- the visuals were just gorgeous. No shock finding out Inarritu was working with the same DP who worked with Malick on The New World.
Room
Maybe my favorite movie of 2015. Certainly way up there. I read the book after seeing the trailer for the movie, and there are parts they skim over, but I don't think it really matters. It's a movie bound by incredibly strong performances on the part of Brie Larson as a captive woman and Jacob Tremblay as the son she's given birth to in captivity -- performances strong enough that including Joan Allen and Bill Macy in the cast, as great as they are, is just icing on the cake.
Spotlight
Surprisingly good! See my Big Short comments re: what I generally think about "recent history." In this case we're talking about 14-15 years ago, so perhaps right on the cusp between history and recent events -- the same as doing a movie in the 80s about the Vietnam War or the protests about such. There's definitely been enough breathing room, anyway, enough space: since the Boston Globe publicized the scope of the cover-up of sex abuse by priests in the Boston area, similar scandals have been exposed in scores of cities around the world.
Furthermore, in the meantime, so many newspapers have gone through such downsizing that it's difficult to imagine investigative journalism like this taking place -- a staff being given this kind of leeway for this length of time, without the pressure to produce a story right away.
More comments about the movie itself, though. Tom McCarthy has been one of my favorite directors, but his last movie before this, The Cobbler, was startlingly bad. It can't solely be blamed on Adam Sandler -- it wasn't a good movie with a bad star, it was just tonally off and weird. While this movie is a huge improvement, it's hardly a return to form -- there is none of McCarthy's characteristic stamp here, none of his quirky loners or loneliness, apart maybe from the nervous energy of Mark Ruffalo's workaholic reporter. That's not a criticism, just an observation. I'm curious what kind of movie he does next.
Too many white people in the Oscar noms watch: again, like with The Martian, the acting nominations here are questionable.
Carol
Todd Haynes is one of my favorite directors. I think everything he does is just amazing and magical and worth umpteen rewatches. Far From Heaven, Velvet Goldmine, and Mildred Pierce are absolute masterpieces. So I was pretty fucking excited about this movie, even though the leads are actresses I'm always iffy about -- Cate Blanchett because her career seems to be evenly divided between great performances and high-profile stuff that makes me roll my eyes, Rooney Mara because just as my brain was rewriting its Rooney Mara associations to link up with the wonderful Ain't Them Bodies Saints and Side Effects instead of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, they cast her as Tiger Fucking Lily in that Peter Pan movie.
Anyway. There was nothing to be iffy about here. It's one of the masterpieces. Too soon to say if it will be as rewatchable as Far From Heaven et al, but I see no reason to assume it won't be. It's a great love story, a beautiful movie, and the fact that it's not up for Best Director or at least the more expansive Best Picture category is nuts. It's hard not to assume that, unlike Brokeback Mountain or a movie about AIDS or discrimination, it's because in this case, the movie isn't about the tragedies of homosexuality; and unlike The Kids Are All Right et al, there's no friendly straight male character as an audience surrogate. I mean, it would still be an exclusively white movie amid a too-white slate, but the exclusion we're seeing in these nominations isn't only race-based.
Joy
Maybe there are diminishing returns with David O. Russell / Jennifer Lawrence collaborations. This was a good movie, a fun movie, but less memorable than American Hustle (okay, so she only had a supporting role in that), much less Silver Linings Playbook. J Law is still great in it, the story itself just seems surprisingly straightforward for a DOR film.
The Danish Girl
Powerful and sad. Nice to see Alicia Vikander in an acting role after just seeing her in The Man from U.N.C.L.E., which asked so little of her.
Ex Machina
So creepy. What a year for Oscar Isaac and Domhnall Gleeson, who both went on to co-star in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, while Gleeson has supporting roles in both Brooklyn and The Revenant.
Star Wars: The Force Awakens
Only up for a few awards, none of them in the major categories, but let's face it, this is one of my favorite movies of the year. My earliest memories are of Star Wars, and The Empire Strikes Back has especially powerful resonance for me. Furthermore, I'm the kind of speculative fiction writer I am -- with little interest in hard science fiction -- because Star Wars was the first science fiction I was exposed to, I think, and because its popularity led to the rather soft science fiction that was on television when I was growing up (Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers) and drove a lot of my interests in comic books, the subject of a future post. Anyway, Rey and Poe and Finn are all spectacular.
It Follows
It's a toss-up between this and The Babadook for my favorite horror movie since Ju-On. Smart, tense, evocative. Like The Babadook and now The Witch, it got a lot of criticism from horror movie fans -- but there has traditionally been a deep divide between horror movie fans and horror literature fans, and movies like this feel, maybe they're closer to what the latter likes.
Bone Tomahawk
On the one hand, this was a fun, inventive, well-acted and exceptionally well-paced horror-western -- the sort where you don't really know it's even a horror-western until towards the end. On the other, I am still bothered by the choice to make the bad guys Native American cannibals straight out of 19th century dime novels or 20th century pulps, and briefly including a civilized "good Indian" who condemns them just seems like the token action you take to protect yourself from accusations of racism while indulging in the desire to play with what are still racist story tropes.
Love and Mercy
I've already mentioned I usually have no use for biopics -- as much as I like Bryan Cranston, I have no plans to watch Trumbo, and I have less than zero interest in the Steve Jobs movie. I was vaguely aware this movie -- about Beach Boy Brian Wilson at two different times (played by Paul Dano and John Cusack) -- existed, but it wasn't really on my radar until its Independent Spirit Award nominations. It's really quite good, not only because of those two performances but Elizabeth Banks, as the Cadillac saleswoman who goes out on a date with older Brian Wilson and discovers the weirdly controlling entourage (led by psychotherapist Paul Giamatti) that surrounds him.
Inside Out
I thought the hype for this was really overblown. Not as much as some recent animated movies -- I think the out of proportion response to Toy Story 3, The Lego Movie, and Frozen, all of which were just okay, means I know too many parents who are just grateful that a movie they took their kids too wasn't as fucking awful as the Ice Age shit, or more broadly that there are way too many terrible animated features out there. But if you were to list the Pixar movies top to bottom, it'd be smack in the middle.
Anomalisa
Another contender for my favorite movie of the year. Like Haynes and McCarthy, Charlie Kaufman is consistently one of my favorite filmmakers. This isn't Eternal Sunshine Charlie Kaufman, this is closer to Synecdoche New York Charlie Kaufman -- which makes sense, since that's the only other movie he's both written and directed. Like Synecdoche, some people are going to hate it and others will find it impenetrable or dull. It's a stop-motion animated film with three actors: David Thewlis as Michael, Tom Noonan as nearly the entire world, and Jennifer Jason Leigh as Lisa, a seemingly mysterious woman Michael suddenly hears in a hotel and is fascinated by because, well, unlike everyone else in the world, she isn't voiced by Tom Noonan.
Spoilers of sorts in the next paragraph.
I've seen reviews that say this movie doesn't have a twist, and I understand how they mean that -- he isn't "dead the whole time," it isn't Dark City or the Matrix -- but this is a story about loneliness, about a man who is a successful author of customer service books ("treat everyone as an individual") but who is surrounded by a world in which everyone including his wife and son seem identical to him. The twist, such as it is, is that the loneliness turns out to be the product of his own unpleasantness and dickheadedness, his own inability to appreciate other people, not a hell someone or something else has consigned him to. In this story that's still a substantial twist -- but compared to splashier movies it's definitely a minor key story.
Shorts
You know the Oscar-nominated shorts are available On Demand and on iTunes, as well as in a limited number of theaters, right? The specifics have varied every year. In the past, the live-action, animated, and documentary shorts were three separate packages. This year, the live-action and SOME of the animated shorts (no "Sanjay's Super Team," no "We Can't Live Without Cosmos") were all in one package, and the documentaries weren't available. Not sure if that differed in theaters.
As a huge Don Hertzfeldt fan, I have to go with "World of Tomorrow" for the best animated short, although I'm thrilled that the legendary Richard Williams -- director of the unfinished masterpiece The Thief and the Cobbler, animation director on Who Framed Roger Rabbit, animator of the title sequences for What's New Pussycat and A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum -- has a nominated short, the six-minute "Prologue" to his loose adaptation of Lysistrata. He's been working on it for twelve years and intends a ninety minute film; Williams is 82.
Among the live-action shorts it's hard to pick, though "Shok" and "Stutterer" will probably stay with me the most.
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