NOMADLAND (2020)

NOMADLAND (DIR: CHLOE ZHOU)  (SCR: ZHOU, BASED ON THE NONFICTION BOOK NOMADLAND: SURVIVING AMERICA IN THE TWENTY FIRST CENTURY)

To me, NOMADLAND was a surprising choice for a Best Picture winner; it's unassuming and soft spoken, its plot is loose, there are no big emotional scenes, it has many moments of stillness, and at times seems downright meditative.  Add to that a main character who is a woman over sixty and you have a film that doesn't seem like the usual Oscar glory material. It's possible that the recent movement to diversify the Oscar voters may have led to more openness to low key independent movies than splashy, big budgeted Hollywood affairs, like Aaron Sorkin's THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7 (which I thought was going to win). Or maybe the Academy just wanted to embrace a road movie during the pandemic lockdown.  Either way, I  personally don't think that NOMADLAND was the best film of the year, but I do enjoy its lovely images and independent heroine.

 It tells the story of  Fern (Frances McDormand), a sixtyish recent widow who used to work at a now closed factory in Nevada .  At the start of the movie she has decided to sell most of her belongings and live in her van, traveling from place to place to find work.  In her travels she meets other people living the same lifestyle, who teach her some of the ways of life on the road.  After her van breaks down, she doesn't have enough money for repairs, so she goes to visit her sister by bus.  Her sister offers to let her live with her family, but she refuses, borrowing money for her repairs instead.  On the road, she also meets Dave (David Strathairn) a fellow traveler who moves in with his children after becoming a grandfather.  He asks her to stay with him, but she says no and hits the road once again.  

Before it was a movie, it was a non-fiction book called  Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century written by Jessica Bruder and published in twenty seventeen.  The rights to the book were optioned by McDormand herself, and after seeing director Chloe Zhou's twenty seventeen film THE RIDER (another movie about an independent loner), asked her to write and direct it.  For the shooting of the film Zhou and McDormand lived in vans like the characters for four months, and often used real people playing themselves instead of actors.  Shot on a budget of around five million dollars, the film would eventually make six million in worldwide grosses (obviously the pandemic has affected its box office take).

Frances McDormand

To me the most striking thing about NOMADLAND is just how real it feels.  There is no attempt to sugarcoat Fern's life; she is poor and lives out of a small van, she has few possessions, and yes, she has to use a bucket as a toilet.  And yet there is a beauty to her way of life, (like how she proudly shows another traveler how she has found ways to utilize the limited space of her van), and there's a dignity in her willingness to do the  hard work that she needs to do to survive.  I love the way that Zhou's camera moves smoothly through the gorgeous natural landscapes that Fern travels through, and the quiet way it shows Fern appreciating those landscapes while lying naked in a river or hugging a huge tree.  The fact that Fern is alone in these scenes is telling; Zhou's script gives Fern no big speech about her desire to be independent because we can see it in the still moments like these.  Here is a woman who misses her husband but now treasures her independence and time alone.   But even more striking than the natural landscapes are the scenes towards the end of the film when Fern visits the now shuttered factory that she and her late husband used to work in.  There's a striking beauty in the ruins of a once busy, now desolate building. 

While Fern does make some friendships and connections, they are always at a distance.  When Dave tentatively makes romantic gestures towards her, she gently turns him down. McDormand and Strathairn have a real nice chemistry; I really like the way he calmly tells her that he likes her, and the quiet way that she rebuffs him. I also enjoy the way that Dave's attempt to be helpful finds him accidentally breaking some of Fern's plates, one of the few moments of humor in the film.   It's rare and refreshing to see people over sixty portrayed romantically (although they never even hold hands), but   it's also no surprise to the audience that Fern doesn't move in with Dave; her independence has already been established earlier in the film when we see her turn down the chance to adopt a sweet dog (as a dog owner myself, it does bother me that she just leaves the poor pooch leashed to a bench!).  The idea of a person who travels alone across the country, never wanting to settle down, is not new in movies, but such wanderers are usually male characters, and ending the film with a woman refusing to live with a man and taking to the road instead is a nice inversion of the usual cliche'.

McDormand, who is in every scene of the film, won her third Best Actress Oscar for this role, and again I find that a bit surprising given that the character is usually still and almost never raises her voice.  But, to me,  that's the beauty of her performance; when Fern talks about the loss of her husband, she isn't asking for pity, she's just laying out the truth of her life.  When she works at tough jobs across the country, she never complains, even though her face shows the strain of her work.  As I said, McDormand lived in a van for this role (and she also actually worked at some of the jobs shown on screen), and that gives her performance a sense of rightness, a feeling that this isn't just some Hollywood actress slumming.  Her van feels lived in.

If the film has a flaw, it's that to me it does sometimes drags.  Although I've already stated that I admire Zhou's decision to not have big emotions in the film, I do wish that there was more focus to the story.  No, I don't want chase scenes or explosions, but maybe a little more about how Fern and her fellow travelers get by would have been nice.  But my criticisms are mostly mild for what is a very successful film.

SO DID THE ACADEMY GET IT RIGHT?

While I think it's clear that I really enjoyed this film, I don't think that it was the best film of the year: I preferred Shaka King's JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH, Lee Isaac Chung's MINARI and, my personal favorite, Emerald Fennell's openly provocative PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN.  Still, NOMADLAND is certainly not a bad choice, and it's great to see Zhao breaking ground as the second woman (and first Asian one) to win Best Director.  

THE PANDEMIC OSCAR SHOW

 So, how was the first (and hopefully last) pandemic Oscar ceremony like?  Not bad, in my opinion.  Placing the show at Union Station in downtown Los Angeles and having the attending nominees sit at tables while a DJ (Quest Love, the drummer from the hip hop group The Roots) spun appropriate tracks gave the show a loose, party vibe that was fun.  And not having an official host took the pressure off one person to be constantly entertaining, which worked for me.  I enjoyed the long tracking shot that accompanied the first presenter, Regina King, as she made her way into the station.  And her joke about the recent Chauvin trial's outcome was well made without getting too preachy.

Most of the awards did not come as a surprise: Nomadland was favored to win Best Picture which it did, and its director  (Chloé Zhao)  and lead actress (Francis McDormand) were also favored and also won.  The big surprise was when Anthony Hopkins won Best Actor for The Father over the late Chadwick Boseman for Ma Rainey's Black Bottom.  Personally, I preferred Boseman's performance, but in The Father, Hopkins, one of the most esteemed actors in the world, showed a willingness to play a character who is sad and pathetic, breaking down in a raw and honest way at the end of the film.  (And maybe the fact that many of the Oscar voters are older themselves had something to do with it).  In any event, I am a big fan of Hopkins so I won't say his award was completely underserved.  (At the same time I still think that Delroy Lindo was robbed by not even being nominated in this category for his great performance in Da Five Bloods).

The lack of musical numbers (the songs nominated for Best Original Song were all performed in pre broadcast special) meant that the show could indulge longer speeches from the winners, which is really a lot of what people want to see the most anyway.  And there were a lot of nice moments:  Zhao becoming the first Asian woman (and only the second overall) to win Best Director (for Nomadland) and her thoughtful acceptance speech was great.  As was Yuh-Jung Youn, who won for Best Supporting Actress for Minari, and who joked her way through her speech in a charming manner.  And Tyler Perry, getting a lifetime award, gave a moving and sincere speech; even though his movies are not my cup of tea, his graciousness was appreciated.  

Oh sure, there were a few silly moments in the broadcast as well: an Oscar music trivia contest felt too much like a bar trivia night, and some speeches did go on a bit too long.  To me the worst decision was to announce the Best Picture winner before Best Actor and Actress.  Since the Best Picture award is the one that is remembered the most, and can add enormously to a film's box office success, building up to it seems to be the logical way to do the show.    In any event, ending the show with the Best Actor award really didn't work because when Hopkins won  he didn't appear and no speech was given, causing the show to peter out somewhat pathetically. Still, considering everything going on in the world, this broadcast was a fun break from the stresses of our time.  Obviously I didn't agree with some of the winners (more on that when I post about Nomadland), but that's all part of the show.

THE 2020 NOMINEES: FIRST IMPRESSIONS

 

Even with all the chaos that the coronavirus has wrecked on the world, Hollywood has decided that the (Oscars) show must go on.  Even with so few films playing in theaters and delays in production and whatnot, there were still enough good movies released (or streamed) to qualify.

Many of the choices were not surprising: because Hollywood loves movies about its own history, David Fincher's MANK, about the writer of CITIZEN KANE, got multiple nominations.  And because the Academy is made up of older people, FATHER, a film about an elderly man dealing with dementia, also is up for many awards.  It's also not surprising that Shaka King's critically acclaimed drama JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH and  Aaron Sorkin's THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7, were well represented, since both were well acted period pieces about the kind of political upheaval that progressive Academy members can support.  Personally, I think it's good to see nominations for low budget independent productions like NOMADLAND and MINARI, not to mention what is probably my favorite movie of the year, PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN.  It's also noteworthy that Emerald Fennell being nominated for Best Director for PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN and Chloe Zhao being nominated in the same category for NOMADLAND  marks the first time that two women have been nominated for Best Director in the same year.  And historical precedent aside, I think they both deserved it. I imagine that both will lose to David Fincher for MANK, given that he's never won before and that it's such a good looking film.

As for disappointments, although  George C. Wolfe's MA RAINEY'S BLACK BOTTOM got several acting nominations, I think it was good enough to be up for Best Picture, and I preferred it to MANK and THE SOUND OF METAL.  I also think Regina King's ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI  was also worthy of being up for the Best Picture award.  But to me the big surprise and disappointment was the complete shut out of Spike Lee's DA 5 BLOODS.  Maybe it was uneven and too long, but I much preferred it to most of the Best Picture nominees.  I'm really surprised that Delroy Lindo, who's dynamic performance steals the film, is not even nominated.  Perhaps because it came out to early in the year to be remembered?  In any event, it's a shame.  

The awards show this year will inevitably be a subdued affair, just like the Grammys and the Emmys were, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. (I'm not a big fan of all the glitzy trappings of the show itself).  While it's hard to say what the favorite is, I think that MANK will probably win Best Picture because of the sheer number of nominations it received (ten in all).  Despite the film's occasional historical inaccuracies, the strength of its performances, meticulous production design and stunning black and white cinematography will put it over the top.  But of course, I could be wrong.

CANCEL GONE WITH THE WIND?

Recently, in the wake of the civil rights protests going on around the nation, HBO decided to remove the 1939 film of Margaret Mitchell's novel,  GONE WITH THE WIND, from their downloading sight.  This was understandable, given, that the film unabashedly romanticizes the days of the antebellum South, complete with happy slaves who fight for the Southern cause.   A few days later, African-American film scholar Jacqueline Stewart announced that the film would return with an introduction by her that would help explain the inaccuracies of the film, and, I assume, will also explain the controversies around it.  This is also understandable.  GONE WITH THE WIND is, quite simply, a film that is too big, too popular (the most popular film ever when adjusted for inflation), and too influential to just pretend it was never made.
It should be mentioned that it was certainly not the first film to romanticize the South.  In fact, DW Griffith's THE BIRTH OF A NATION, which went even further, and which was also extremely popular, was released  way  back in  1915.   To his credit, David O Selznik, the producer of GONE WITH THE WIND consciously tried  to avoid making another BIRTH OF  A NATION, as he had all the source novel's references to the Klu Klux Klan removed.  Still, not making a film that sank to the level of one of the most racist movies ever made is still not all that impressive. And while both films are often defended as products of their time, it should be remembered that were also controversial and picketed at the time of their making.

Yes, Gone With the Wind could have been as bad as this

I first saw Gone With the Wind at a special screening for my junior high school class when I was just twelve years old.  My reaction to it then was actually very similar to how I still feel about it; I was dazzled by the first half of the film, with its gorgeous technicolor visuals, amazing sets and costumes and romantic, often poetic dialogue, with the fiery spectacle of the burning of Atlanta really making a deep impression on me.  And then I felt that the second half of the film lapsed into romantic melodrama, with too many big emotional moments piled together towards the end.  Still, I enjoyed it overall and understood why it was considered a classic.
As for the film's racism, I must admit that as a white upper middle class child, it didn't really register with me.  Yes, I of course knew about the evils of slavery and saw that all the black characters in the film were stereotypes, but it didn't occur how historically wrong the film was.  I just accepted that its depiction of the South was accurate, and it wasn't until I read thought provoking analysis of the film years later that I changed my mind.  And that is the real danger of the film.  To this day, the film's view of Southern plantation life has bled into our national collective image of that time, making us think that its depiction was real.  And so much of it is so alluring, with colorful fancy dress balls and beautiful, castle like mansions that it's easy to forget how those balls and mansions were paid for.
And much worse than those fancy balls and beautiful buildings are the scenes that show slaves happily working in the fields or cheerfully helping out the white characters.  And, perhaps worst of all, we see a contingent of slaves joining together to fight against the Union soldiers!  And yes it's true that Hattie Mc Daniel made history by winning an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, and her performance in the film is undeniably great, but just like the film itself it endorsed and influenced a stereotype that would last for decades.
I think HBO is making the right move here by bringing the film back with the commentary at the beginning.  This is an important and wonderfully made film that should still be viewed, but not without some context being placed on it.  Personally, I always like to hear about the context of the making of any work of art that I enjoy.  My interest in   Fred Zinnemann's 1952 film HIGH NOON, for example, is increased by the fact that the film's story was consciously fashioned to be a metaphor for the anti-Communist witch hunts that were going on in Hollywood at that time.  So people should still watch GONE WITH THE WIND, but they should also be aware about the controversy it has caused ever since it was made.

PARASITE (2019)

PARASITE (DIR: BONG JOON HO) (SCR: HO AND JIN WON HAN)

The ratings may have been low for this year's Academy Award telecast, but that didn't mean that there weren't any surprises.  I won't lie, when Bong Joon Ho's South Korean thriller PARASITE was announced as the Best Picture, I jumped to my feet in surprise.  Even though the film had already won three Oscars (for Best Original Screenplay, Best Director and Best International Film), I just couldn't believe that the Academy had, for the first time ever, awarded a foreign film the Best Picture award.  Now a cynic may point out that this could just be an example of Hollywood courting the foreign film market at a time when  international box office is getting more and more important to their bottom line, and it does raise the question of why the Academy has waited so long to award a foreign film when there have been so many great foreign films made over the years. Surely,  filmmakers like Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini have made movies that were the best of the year they were released.  Despite all of that, I think PARASITE won simply because it was indeed, the best film of last year.  It's an exciting, darkly funny and wildly violent movie with some raw social satire mixed in as well. 
Director Bong Joon Ho has actually been pretty well known in the American market since his entertaining monster movie THE HOST came out in 2006.  Since then he has also made another excellent thriller (2009's MOTHER) and two oddball science fiction films (2013's  SNOWPIERCER and 2017's OKJA).  Ho first came up with the idea for PARASITE while working on SNOWPIERCER when it was originally imagined as a play.  He based the story partly on his own experiences as a struggling young student tutoring for a rich family back in the '90's ("Every week I would go into their house, and I thought how fun it would be if I could get all my friends to infiltrate the house one by one." He told Atlantic magazine).  The script that Ho and his co screenwriter Jin Won Han completed was also influenced by Kim Ki-young's 1960 Korean film THE HOUSEMAID and the true story of Christine and Léa Papin—two live-in maids who murdered their employers in 1930s France.  Because the beautiful home that the poor family infiltrates is so crucial to the film, the entire building was created in striking looking sets in different locations.   The poor family's basement dwelling was also built on sets, with production designer Lee Ha-jun visiting towns and villages in South Korea that had been abandoned and were about to be torn down to get a feel for the set design.  Shot in a hundred and twenty four days mostly in the city of Seoul on a budget of around eleven million dollars, PARASITE has become a world wide hit.  Along with grossing around forty three millions in the US (a very high amount for a foreign language film), it has made over two hundred million world wide.

Kang-ho Song

It's plot concerns a family of four, father Ki-taek (Kang-ho Song), wife  Park Chung-sook(Jang Hye-jin), young adult daughter Kim Ki-jung(Park So-dam) and near college age teenage son Kim (called Kevin) Ki-woo(Choi Woo-shik) that are just barely surviving in modern day South Korea, squatting in a basement and doing odd jobs.  When a teenage friend of the son offers him a job tutoring the teen daughter of a rich family, he jumps at the chance and secures the job with documents forging a fake education.  Seeing that the family has an artistic young son, Da Song(Jung Hyeon-jun) he introduces his sister as his educated cousin and art therapist, and she too is soon hired.  Then the family manipulates the family's chauffeur (Park Keun-rok) and maid  (Lee Jung-eun), getting them fired and replacing them with the father and mother.  But one night when the wealthy family is gone and the whole family is relaxing and enjoying their new social status , the maid returns and reveals that her husband Oh Geun-sae (Park Myung-hoon) has been hiding in a secret bomb shelter in the basement of the house to avoid paying his debts.  She begs them to let him stay and give him food, but they refuse.  A physical confrontation ensues, which gets even more tense with the unexpected early return of the wealthy family.  The four of them manage to lock the maid and her husband in the cellar for the night and avoid being found by the family.  The next day there is a birthday party for  Da Song.  When Keven tries to let the maid and her husband loose, he finds her dead and the husband crazed.  After knocking  Keven unconscious, he wildly stabs Kim during the party.  In the ensuing chaos, Da Song appears to have a seizure, and his father begs Ki Taek to drive him to the hospital.  In a fit of rage, Kit Taek stabs his employer and hides in the basement.  Later, Kevin recovers from his injuries and discovers where his father is hiding.  He dreams of buying the house and releasing his father.

First of all, this is a great movie to rewatch: the first time I saw I responded mostly to the thriller elements, as I found myself wondering if the trickster family would get away with their scam.  And then, when everything seems to be going their way, the return of the family's maid set the movie going in a completely different direction.  In a world of predictable movie formulas, there's nothing I love more in a film than a story that moves in unexpected (but plausible) ways, so from the moment that the maid revealed her husband's hiding place I was hooked!  Ho has mentioned that Martin Scorsese is one of his directorial influences, but I found myself thinking of Alfred Hitchcock in the way that Ho builds suspense out of the simplest thing, like hiding under a table or walking down  a long, narrow staircase without knowing what lies below.   And the chaos of the climatic birthday scene is perfectly handled, with characters making sudden, shockingly violent choices that make sense upon reflection.  While the script sometimes can be heavy handed (the symbolism of the philosopher's stone, which brings the poor family both good and back luck, is a bit obvious, especially since Kevin refers to it as a metaphor!), and the fact that we don't know for sure if little Da Song dies at the end or not seems like a flaw (it could go either way), it's mostly perfect in both story and character.
On my subsequent viewings of the film, I was able to focus more on the more subtle elements of it:  I love the way that director Ho and cinematographer Kyung-pyo Hong keep the camera sleekly panning in the enormous house, often to reveal people hiding or spying.  Or the way that Kim's first visit to the wealthy household is shot likes he's entering paradise (for him, he is).  The house itself, with it's enormous window view and sleek modern look, is a triumph of production design.  Even the location of the basement door and the secret door beneath it is in the right place, becoming a constant reminder to the trickster family once they know what lies behind it.  I also love the clever wit in the way that Kim rehearses her fake story to herself before meeting the family, and then correctly guesses just what to say to impress the mother while "analyzing" her son's art. 
All of the performances are great: I especially enjoy Kang-ho Song (who's a big star in Korea, and has worked with director Ho several times now, stretching back to 2003's MEMORIES OF MURDER) as the father Ki-taek.  On my first viewing of the film, I found his act of violence at the end shocking, but upon repeat viewings I can see the anger and resentment simmering up under his usually taciturn demeanor.  And the moment where he almost seems mad enough to strike his wife, and then laughs it off is chilling, because we never know just how much he's joking.  As great as he is, my favorite performance in the movie is given by Jeong-eun Lee (who has also worked with director Ho before)  as the ill fated maid Moon-gwang.  At first, her character just seems like a prim and proper housekeeper, but then she becomes sad and  pathetic as she begs the family to let her husband stay.  Only moments later she becomes wrathful when she briefly  has the upper hand on them, almost transforming on screen .  She even gets some nice romantic flashback moments with her simple minded husband.  This is a wide range of complex emotions that Lee nails perfectly, and she's only a supporting character!

Jeong-eun Lee

So, excellent suspense, dark humor, great plot twists and wonderful performances throughout are part of this film's greatness.  But it also works on another level; biting class commentary.  From the opulent home of the wealthy family to the pathetic, crowded basement that the poor family is squatting in, the contrast between the rich in the poor in not only South Korea but also the rest of the world is always present in the film.  Importantly, we at first on the side of poor family as we see the terrible conditions they live in and menial work they have to do.  But as their plan progresses it's gets harder to defend the way they set up the innocent servants to get fired, although we can enjoy their ingenuity as they manipulate the family into hiring them(squirting chili sauce on a napkin at just the right moment is a brilliant detail!).  And we can't help but be on their side when they briefly enjoy their ill gotten gains by kicking their feet up and dreaming about actually owning a such a house  while the rich family are all on vacation. The real breaking point comes when Moon-gwang reveals her husband, and they refuse to feed him and let him stay, even though it wouldn't be hard for them.  So here we have an poor family that has moved up in the world refusing to help out someone who is in the same position they once were, a bleak look at how poor people moving into the middle class often ignore their roots.  Even more interesting is the fact that the rich family are not bad people, but then they have the luxury of being able to afford kindness ("They are rich but still nice."  Ki-taek tells his wife. "They are nice because they are rich." She replies).  Class is shown as such a defining factor with these people that even the literal stench of poverty that hangs over Ki-taek can't be washed off, and it leads to a defining moment when a reminder of his scent causes him to lash out at his employer, killing him.  Yes, wealth dispartiy is a tricky issue in this film, and even the title can be seen as having a double meaning, in which both the poor and the rich leech off of each other.

SO DID THE ACADEMY GET IT RIGHT?

Ok, it's pretty obvious that I love this movie and agree with the Academy's choice.  I personally didn't think that 2019 was a particularly great year for American movies, with only Noah Baumbach's well acted drama MARRIAGE STORY reaching greatness, in my opinion.  In fact, I think the only other movies that could compare with PARASITE are all from other countries, like Pedro Almodovar's excellent PAIN & GLORY, or Céline Sciamma's PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE.  And while both of those films are good, I don't think that they top PARASITE, which was not only a groundbreaking choice, but the right one.

THE 2019 NOMINATIONS, FIRST IMPRESSIONS

The nominations for the 2019 Academy Awards were announced this morning, and, as always, they were a mixed bag: the big surprise was that JOKER leads the pack with a whopping eleven nominations, despite the sometimes controversial nature of the film and its only somewhat positive reviews.  For me, the most positive development is that Bong Joon Ho's excellent PARASITE is up for Best Picture, a rarity for a foreign film.  It even garnered five more nominations, including Ho for best director.
I was also glad to see that Antonio Banderas's great performance in Pedro Almodovar's PAIN AND GLORY is up for Best Actor, although I wish that Almodovar's film had gotten more nominations.  (It's also up for Best International Film).  I found it interesting that Robert DeNiro was not nominated for Best Actor for THE IRISHMAN despite the film getting ten nominations.  Is it possible that this had something to do with the digital anti aging technology used on him in the film?  Does the Academy sees this as a bit of a cheat?  Perhaps, but then both Joe Pesci and Al Pacino are both up for Best Supporting Actor and that technology was used on them too.  So who knows.  I was also surprised and disappointed to see that Adam Sandler's gripping lead performance in UNCUT GEMS was unnominated (the film was completely shut out of nominations, which is  disappointing).  Perhaps Sandler has made one too many lazy, dumb comedies over the years to ever be taken seriously as an actor, and while I'm certainly no fan of those films myself, it's still a shame that his good work has been overlooked.  Also shut out was Lulu Wang's well received THE FAREWELL, despite Awkwafina's  good performance in the lead.
Other than the surprising admiration for JOKER, most of the Best Picture nominations were predictably films that garnered positive reviews and other awards.  I was a bit surprised to see  Taika Waititi's only pretty good JOJO RABBIT up, but then, it's usually a safe bet for anti Nazi films to get nominations.  Personally, I found Quentin Tarantino's ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD and Scorsese's THE IRISHMAN to be overlong and overrated, but given the popularity of those two directors with the Academy, there was almost no way they couldn't have been nominated.

As always, diversity is an issue in the nominations:  as the New York Times points out, "the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has mounted an effort to double female and minority membership, in large part by inviting in more film professionals from overseas. But even after four years of the initiative, the organization remains 68 percent male and 84 percent white. "  The big snub is that Greta Gerwig's charming LITTLE WOMEN is up for Best Picture (and got five other nominations) but Gerwig herself is not up for Best Director.   Two of the nominees in the acting categories  are people of color (Banderas and Cynthia Erivo for HARRIET), overlooking fine performances like the aforementioned Awkwafina, Luptiat  Nyong'o in US and the two lead performers in Melina Matsoukas's QUEEN & SLIM.
I've already mentioned my admiration for PARASITE, which I think should win Best Picture, but probably won't. ( It will almost certainly win the Best International Film award. ) And despite it's high number of nominations, I seriously doubt that a film as dark as JOKER could possibly win Best Picture.   Martin Scorsese's THE IRISHMAN probably has a good chance, with its critical acclaim and period piece details.  But I wouldn't rule out Noah Baumbach's excellent MARRIAGE STORY, with its two powerhouse lead performances.  In any event, I was glad to see that none of the Best Picture nominees were as bland and predictable as last year's winner, GREEN BOOK.  Whatever wins this year will be an improvement!

MAD MAX: DID I MISS SOMETHING?

Hmmm, even the poster likes Furiosa more than Max

Back in 2015 when the Oscar nominees were announced, I was surprised to see that George Miller's MAD MAX: FURY ROAD racked up 10 nominations (it would go on to win 6, all for technical things like editing).  When I posted about this on this blog, I dismissed the film  as "vastly overrated", and called Tom Hardy's lead role performance somnambulistic.  When SPOTLIGHT  went on to win Best Picture that year, I had no objection, thinking it a far superior and relevant film.
Recently, in the inevitable rush to summarize the last decade, various media outlets (like The AV Club online magazine) have been releasing  their lists of the best films of the decade.  And lo and behold, Fury Road has been topping or placing highly on many of them.  Now, I tend to agree with critical consensus over the ones made by the Academy over the years (I daresay that CITIZEN KANE has held up better than HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY!) , yet I really disagree with the critics regarding Fury Road.  While I generally liked the film, the notion that it's better than say, MOONLIGHT or SELMA seems crazy to me.  I could probably come up with one hundred films released in the last decade that I liked more than Fury Road.  Am I too out of  step?  Am I snob who dismisses it as "just" an action film? (Yes,  but that doesn't make me wrong!). Have the nation's film critics all been replaced by twelve year old fan boys, or did I miss something?  In the interest of being open minded, I have decided to watch the film again with as little bias as I can muster. I don't like to think that my opinions are written in stone, maybe there's more to the film than I thought.
First, some words about the Mad Max series in general: the first film was the debut feature of George Miller, an Australian born emergency room doctor who used actual motor related injuries he saw as inspiration for the film!  Starring a then unknown Mel Gibson, made for only around three hundred thousand dollars and shot mostly in semi legal fashion around the Australian outback, it became a worldwide cult hit.  Looked at years later, it holds up pretty well, especially in its opening scenes that sets up Miller's skill with a chase scene, not to mention his willingness to put his cast and  stunt people in some pretty precarious situations.  If the movie descends into standard issue action film cliches in it's later scenes (with post apocalyptic law man Max getting revenge on some evil  bikers after they kill his wife and child), it's still entertaining given its budget. Its success led to an inevitable sequel in 1982, MAD MAX 2: THE ROAD WARRIOR (released in America as just THE ROAD WARRIOR).  In my opinion, this film is the best in the series, as Miller, armed with a bigger budget, created even more impressive action scenes than the first, (the film's climax still stands as one of the best chase scenes ever)  while Gibson had grown to be far more comfortable on camera and used his natural onscreen charisma to good effect.  It would prove to be an even bigger hit than the first film, making an international star out of Gibson (which, looking back, may not have been  a good thing!).  Perhaps most interestingly for the series as a whole, THE ROAD WARRIOR was the first film to really lean into its post apocalyptic setting; in the first film, that setting was mostly a budget issue, and society overall still seemed to be functioning.  But in the second film, the world is a big ugly anarchic desert  with scarce resources full of road gangs willing to kill for those resources.  It was a bleak view of the future, one that Gibson's cynical mercenary character fit right into; he was not unlike the famous Man With No Name that Clint Eastwood played in Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns of the 1960's.  The third film in the series, MAD MAX: BEYOND THUNDERDOME, released in 1985, toned done that bleak view, and lightened up the main character, perhaps because of Gibson's increasing popularity, or to widen the audience appeal by getting a PG-13 rating.  The result was an almost maddeningly uneven film, with the first half having some of the best scenes in the series, and the second containing some of the worst.  The film opens with Max, alone again, stumbling into a society known as Bartertown, a ramshackle society run on methane and led by Auntie Em (played surprisingly well by Tina Turner).  The film's first half jettisons chase scenes and builds instead to a very exciting and well done man to man battle that finds Max and his towering opponent bouncing around on giant rubber bands in a huge dome.  Unfortunately, the film falls apart as Max encounters a group of annoying children in the desert, and the film ends with a chase scene that merely tries to rehash the climax of the second film with diminishing results.  It even ends with a ridiculous scene of Auntie Em letting Max go after wrecking half her army chasing him!
After the fourth film, director Miller would go on to make other films like 1987's THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK and 1998's BABE:PIG IN THE CITY  but he apparently never stopped thinking about returning to the Mad Max universe.  He tried to gear up production for one as early as 2001, but first the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and then the Iraq war affected the budget and locations, and he would instead make the animated film HAPPY FEET in 2006.  Finally, after years of storyboarding and delays, and the decision to recast the role of Max from the too old Gibson to Tom Hardy, Miller was finally able to start shooting in the African country of Nambia with a small army of crew and cast members, including olympic gymnasts and Cirque du Soleil members for the stunt scenes. After shooting for 120 days,  Miller's wife Margaret Sixel  took on the Herculean, months long task of editing the film's reported 480 hours of footage into a releasable film.  (She would win an Oscar for her troubles). 
Surprisingly, it only opened at #2 at the US box office (behind Pitch Perfect 2, if you can believe it!) and was only a moderate hit (around $150 million in America) considering its budget.  But critics and fan boys embraced it so strongly that it's reputation has swelled in social media, making it the opposite of the far more successful AVATAR, which has seen its reputation diminish over time despite being one of the biggest money making films ever.  Perhaps it plays better on TV and computer screens than the 3D effects heavy AVATAR.

Clearly there's some overlap

In many ways, Miller seemed to consciously make FURY ROAD as a  throwback to THE ROAD WARRIOR: the toned down violence of the third film is rejected to bring back the harder, R rated action of the second.  Story wise, we once  again, have a raspy voiced, hideously masked villain (the absurdly named Immortan Joe*) who leads a cult like group of bikers.  Again we have cynical wandering outsider Max encounter a society built in the chaos of the desert, focused around on rare resources (gas in the second film, water in the fourth).   And again, we see Max learn to respect and aid a group of renegades against that hideous cult leader.  And, or course, both films end with a smashing, crashing chase that features multiple vehicles and impressive stunts.  The big change in FURY ROAD is the addition of Charlize Theron as Imperator Furiosa, who betrays Joe because of her disgust of his use of women as essentially breeding machines in his twisted little society. .  Theron is definitely the best thing about the film; she's no Wonder Woman with super powers, instead her strength is driven by her sense of righteousness and steely determination.  That determination give her action scenes an extra edge, since we are always aware of what she's fighting for and against, even when she's fighting Max himself.
Theron and her character are so good in this film, that it actually leads to the film's biggest flaw: she's  a better character than Max.  Unlike him, she has to carry off a major betrayal knowing full well that it will put her own life in danger, when she could have just gone along with Joe's corrupt society.  Max, on the other hand, just kinda shows up.  Seriously, he gets taken captive in the first scene and spends much of the first part of the film bound up while the story unfolds around him.   Personally, I found my interest in the film flagging every time the film cut away from Furiosa to catch up with our so called hero.  And even when Max inevitably starts to get involved in the story, much of the time he still seems almost tangential to what's going on, spending more time reacting than being active.  So here's a bold assertion:  Max shouldn't be in this film all.  I think a much better film could have been made with Furiosa being the main character that's just set in the Mad Max universe.  I think this not only because of Max's lack of connection to the plot, but also because of Tom Hardy's performance.  I already called Hardy somnambulistic in this film, and I stand by that statement.  Now, I wouldn't exactly call Mel Gibson's acting in the first three films great, but he was compelling and strong enough to carry the action.  Hardy often seems barely involved with what's going on around him; he grunts, points and looks bored throughout most of the film.  (Honestly, given the huge amount of footage that Miller and his wife had to edit for this film, one has to wonder how  Hardy could have been worse in the outtakes!  Did he burp in every shot?)  The weakness of Hardy is really displayed in a scene that clearly calls back to the second film:  In THE ROAD WARRIOR, late in the film, a bruised and battered Max declares that he will drive the huge tanker truck in the final chase.  It's a big moment for him, in that up to that point he has only shown self interest. but here he finally does the right thing, and Gibson plays it well, finally showing some humanity in his soft spoken delivery.  Conversely in FURY ROAD there is a moment when Max suggests to Furiosa and her compatriots that they could fool Joe and his army by doubling back.  Again, it shows Max doing the right thing for the first time in the film, but Hardy's mumbling, ridiculous line delivery kills it.  He's not exactly Mr Charisma! 

"Stop, this action scene is too exciting!"

Losing Max would also eliminate one of the other big flaws in the film; the bratty girl character that pops up randomly throughout the film.  Yes, every once in  a while, Max has a vision of a little girl that cynically chides him verbally.  Is this character supposed to add depth to Max?  To make him more human? If her insults are supposed to be somehow pushing Max into doing the right thing and helping Furiosa, why do they feel so random?  Why does he imagine the girl  showing up even after he's moved towards helping Furiosa?  Even worse, her presence stops the film's action dead in its tracks; great action scenes are about pacing and building to a big climax, not having some kid freeze things to a halt.  And there's never any explanation as to who this kid is: in the first film Max had a son who was still a toddler and no other children.  Some have theorized that she is one of the kids from the third film, although that hardly explains why Max would start thinking about her while he's in the  middle of a life and death car chase!
Ok, there are a lot of things in this film that I do like: although it's a repeat of The Humongous character in the  second film, the messiah like hold that Joe holds over his followers is interesting and well thought out, especially since Furiosa's rebelling over his treatment of women gives the film an anti patriarchy feminist kick.  I also like the idea of one of his Joe's men (Nux, well played by Nicholas Hoult) being able to break away from Joe, effectively showing that even good people can get caught up in a cult under the right conditions.  And yes, as much as the kid stopping them annoys me, the action scenes are undeniably exciting and the relentless pace of the film, which is almost all chase scenes, is impressive.  I do love the fact that most of the effects in the film were achieved without the usual CGI trickery, adding a realistic sense of danger and  excitement every time we see people hanging off of poles while riding on speeding vehicles.  But I still don't think anything here tops the ending of the second film. 
I went into what was my third viewing of this film after writing the first half of it, wondering if my opinion of the film would change after seeing it again.  The answer is no, I still think that it's a well made, sometimes exciting film that's partly sunk by a lame lead performance.  I still don't see how this movie, above all others, could be thought of as one of the best films of the last decade. 

*This may be off topic, but I would like to mention just how annoying I find all the silly names in this film series.  I mean: Toecutter, The Humongous, Master Blaster, Furiosa.   Are these film characters or professional wrestlers?

THE PROBLEM WITH OSCAR BAIT

In the recent debate about Martin Scorsese's disparaging comments about Marvel movies, I tended to agree with his opinion that those movies aren't really cinema.  In his comments, he compared them to theme parks, which I think is reasonable.  But the seemingly endless stream of superhero movies aren't the only kind of movies in modern Hollywood that are problematic; there's also what are often referred to as Oscar bait films.  Now, while I think the Oscar season (which comes around the last three months of the year) is really the only time when you can see movies made for mature audiences in big multiplexes, the inevitable result can be movies a little too determined to win awards.

An Oscar bait film in one that seems so calculated to please middle brow audiences, with a serious subject matter and plenty of obvious, heavy handed, uplifting moments, that it becomes smug, self satisfied cinema.  Since winning an Oscar can translate to  millions of more dollars at the box office, Oscar bait films  seem to be actually marketing  themselves to the Academy while you're watching them.
The perfect example of such  a film was 2017's THE ZOOKEEPER'S WIFE.  From its historical setting (it's a holocaust drama) to it's too pretty cinematography, to its high minded speeches and brave, noble heroine (the titular character hides Jewish refugees from the Nazis), it's a movie that practically screams "love me!" at the audience, as it brazenly apes the far superior SHINDLER'S LIST.  While disliking such a film is like kicking a puppy, its cloying nature is overwhelming.  It also functions as an example of how Oscar bait can suffer from overreach; despite its obvious ambitions for award glory, the film was mostly critically panned and garnered zero awards.
I bring up the subject of an Oscar bait movie because I just saw the Kasi Lemmon film HARRIET, and it practically drips with such Award desiring fervor.  Unfortunately, it's just not that good of a film.  I say that as an admirer of Lemmon, who's past films like EVE'S BAYOU (1997) and the sadly underrated TALK TO ME (2007) are really good.  But with HARRIET she mostly stumbles. 

The film's biggest flaw is that the character of Harriet Tubman in Lemmon's direction, script (which she co wrote with  Gregory Allen Howard) and Cynthia Erivo's performance never feels like a real person.  Instead, she functions as a symbol of nobility and bravery to such a degree she never comes across as relatable.  There is one brief moment in the opening scene in which she cries a single tear; after that she all stoic determination.  She is constantly making big speeches about freedom, and refusing to listen to the men around her who tell her what she can and cannot do.   She never makes a wrong move and seems superhuman in her ability to lead slaves to freedom.  The result is that we  admire her without really feeling for her as anything more than an important historical figure.  It doesn't help that the real dizzy spells that Tubman suffered from are translated here to actual visions that she uses to avoid capture.  Like I said, super human.
It should be mentioned this is often a problem with biopics, with writers and directors so determined to show their subjects in a positive light that they become blathering depictions of perfect people: from Gary Cooper's god like Lou Gehrig in THE PRIDE OF THE YANKEES way back in 1942 to  Russell Crowe's noble James Braddock in 2005's CINDERELLA MAN, biopics too often just go too far in giving us someone to root for.  It would appear that Lemmon was intimidated by being the first director to ever bring to the screen such an important figure in African American history as Tubman, so she overcompensated on the character's bravery and lost her humanity.  I wish she had taken a page from the far superior 2014 film SELMA, in which director Ava DuVernay was able to show Martin Luther King Jr with complexity, displaying his flaws alongside his strengths.
It also doesn't help that Lemmon fills the movie with action cliches, as Tubman makes one narrow escape after another; while I'm sure the real Tubman's life was filled with danger, I can't quite believe that she came so close to losing her life so often.  Also, Lemmon clearly made this film with a young audience in mind, imagining American history teachers encouraging their students to see the film.  And while this may not seem to be a bad thing, it also means that the film's PG-13 rating limits its ability to accurately display the horrors of slavery.   2013's 12 YEARS A SLAVE, with its far more brutal and realistic depiction of slave life works much better than Harriet's almost sanitized view in my opinion.

So, will Oscar go for the bait of HARRIET?  I suppose it will, considering that it's important lead character is hard to pass over (Cynthia Erivo is a shoo in for a Best Actress nomination, partly because  it's always a bit of a stretch to find five movies that feature women in  lead roles to fill up that category).  And I will say that I while I'm listing all of its flaws, I don't consider it to be a lousy movie, or even a bad one.  I just wish that Lemmon weren't shooting for both Oscar glory and a mainstream audience, and instead had  kept to making a more real film with more realistic characters and story.  Tubman deserved better.

THAT'S NOT CINEMA

"That's not Cinema."


Recently, famed director Martin Scorsese, in an interview promoting his latest film, inflamed the internet by saying about Marvel Movies, “I don’t see them. I tried, you know? But that’s not cinema. Honestly, the closest I can think of them, as well made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks. It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.”  When another famed director, Francis Ford Coppola, echoed Scorsese's comments, he added “Martin was kind when he said it’s not cinema. He didn’t say it’s despicable, which I just say it is." ,more uproar and backlash ensued.
Now part of this is an inevitable cycle of any art form, with the older generation (both directors are over seventy) lashing out the new generation in predictable fashion.  And anyone thinking that Scorsese and Coppola are making over the top critical statements should read Frank Capra's 1971 autobiography, in which the creator of films like IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE  ranted that"practically all the Hollywood film-making of today is stooping to cheap salacious pornography in a crazy bastardization of a great art to compete for the 'patronage' of deviates and masturbators."(!).  In other words, the old have always romantized the art of their formative years and rejected the new.
When Scorsese and Coppola first began making their movies in the late 60's and 70's, most mainstream movies were definitely for adults; the end of the production code in 1968 allowed them and other filmmakers to deal with subject matter that would have been impossible just a few years earlier.  This new artistic freedom resulted in movies that were both grown up and successful (Coppola's THE GODFATHER was not only a critically acclaimed film for adults, it also was the biggest hit  film of 1972). 
But the death knell of the grown up film as big box office came long before the Marvel Movies: when George Lucas's STAR WARS was released in  1977, it showed that if you updated the kiddie serial stories of Buck Rodgers and Flash Gordon while adding top flight special effects, kids would not only flock to see them, they would see them again and again, and buy merchandise on top of that.  While hugely successful films had been around since the very start of the medium, no other movie had dominated the box office for so long, or had built such anticipation for its inevitable sequels.  And really, right then, the concept of a series of films as a franchise was born. 
Which brings us to today's Marvel Movies, which show just how much moviemaking has become about spectacle, with  bigger and bigger effect scenes with one over the top battle after another.  I agree with both Scorsese and Coppola  that these movies are repetitive and formulaic, with individual directors subsuming any personal style they may have into a sameness that matches all the other films in the series; lack of individuality is the point.  Now, film series are nothing new (between 1938 and 1950 a stunning 28 movies based on the comic strip Blondie were released!), but between the Marvel Movies and the DC movies, I can't think of a time when the main stream box office was so captured by one kind of film.  Scorsese compares these kinds of films to theme parks, but think of them more like fast food: mass produced variations on the same thing.  Spiderman is to Bat Man as the Big Mac is to the Whopper. 
Now, I'm not naive, I know that movie making is a business, and that these films make boat loads of money both in the US and overseas.     The logic behind them is obvious, with the modern viewing public having so many choices of watching movies in so many formats, giving audiences thrills on a big screen with good sound is one of the best ways to entice them into the theater.  This is also nothing new: back in the 1950's Hollywood responded to the rivalry of TV partly by making bigger and bigger epic movies in Cinemascope, providing images that no TV screen could equal. 
But the difference this time is that Marvel movies, and other blockbusters like them, are squeezing out smaller, more intimate films from screens, pushing them exclusively into art houses or home viewing, making it harder for them to catch an audience at all.  Disney, which owns the Marvel movies, has gobbled up so many theaters with these films and their other (mostly uninspired) big releases that it's hard for rival studios to get a foothold.
So how will this all play out?  Well, for people who care about movies for grown ups, the Oscars are probably more important than ever, with the prestige of nominations and awards bringing attention to movies that would have no chance of being seen by big audiences otherwise.  Really, without the Oscars, Disney could just buy all the multiplexes and only screen their films and few people could tell the difference.