→ May 7, 2021
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Minari.

Minari was the last film we caught before the Oscars, completing our run through the eight Best Picture nominees (and all of the Director and Acting nominees, except for Hillbilly Elegy). Nominated for six films, with Youn Yuh-jung winning Best Supporting Actress, it is a lovely, funny slice of nostalgia base don writer-director Lee Isaac Chung’s childhood, and gives a different take on the immigrant experience in America.

Steven Yeun stars as Jacob Yi, who moves with his wife Monica (Han Ye-Ri, formerly of Hello My Twenties!), daughter Anne, and son David (Alan Kim), the last of whom is Chung’s stand-in in the film. Jacob has brought his family to rural Arkansas, where he intends to build a farm and grow traditional Korean produce he can sell to restaurants and the growing immigrant communities of the American South. He and Monica will work as chicken sexers to earn enough money to get the farm started, but Monica isn’t on board with the whole farming plan, and the whole family has trouble assimilating until Monica’s mother Soon-ja (Youn) arrives to help Monica take care of the kids and provide substantial comic relief.

What happens from there is almost beside the point, although there is certainly drama to come, and the family will be forced to confront the cracks threatening to tear them apart, to choose how they’ll respond when everything is on the verge of falling apart. This is far more a study of its characters, of Jacob and David specifically, and of its time and place – Arkansas in the 1980s, in an overwhelmingly white community that by and large welcomes the Yi family, even if sometimes they don’t exactly go about things in the best ways. Chung’s script is full of heart, and empathy for its characters – there really are no antagonists here other than the vagaries of nature and fate.

Chung tells the story mostly through David’s eyes, although there are a few scenes with his parents by themselves, and the growth of the relationship between David and the grandmother he doesn’t know becomes one of the emotional touchstones in Minari. The movie takes its name from a resilient, edible dropwort, also known as Korean watercress or Chinese celery, that David’s grandmother plants on the banks of a stream near the family’s farm; in addition to the metaphor of the vegetable itself, water, or the lack thereof, is one of the recurring symbols of Minari, showing up right at the start when Jacob encounters a charlatan with a divining rod but refuses to pay him for his “service.” Soon-ja is unflappable, even as David rejects her at first, and her often coarse humor is one of the film’s best facets, and a surprising contrast to her dour, reticent daughter’s exterior affect.

Minari‘s magic is in how Chung manages to take something so small and make it feel so broad and universal; nearly everything in this movie is about the Yi family and what happens within their household, right up until the one big dramatic twist at the end – and even that event functions as another way to explore and demonstrate the way the family holds together. The story is sweet, sometimes bittersweet, but not saccharine, and full of heart. It’s frequently funny, between Soon-ja’s witticisms and the extremely eccentric farmhand Paul (Will Patton), and its tragedies feel real, not forced.

Youn’s win for Best Supporting Actress was well-deserved, and there seemed to be no real pushback before or after her victory. The film was also nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Actor (for Yeun, who deserved the same honor for Burning but was snubbed), and Best Original Score. I loved Minari, but wouldn’t have voted for it in any of the other categories, just because it was up against two movies – Nomadland and The Father – I liked a bit more. It did, however, make my top 5 among 2020-eligible movies; I’ve seen everything from that cycle I intended to see except for First Cow and a couple of international films. So here’s my almost-final rankings for 2020:

1. Nomadland

2. The Father

3. A Sun

4. Minari

5. Promising Young Woman

6. Wolfwalkers

7. Never Rarely Sometimes Always

8. Judas and the Black Messiah

9. A Personal History of David Copperfield

10. Borat Subsequent Moviefilm

11. Collective

12. The Nest

13. Boys State

14. Palm Springs

15. One Night in Miami

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→ April 22, 2021
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A Sun.

The gripping Taiwanese neo-noir film A Sun mostly escaped critical notice in 2020 after hitting Netflix last January, only coming to broader attention when Variety critic Peter Debruge named it the best film of 2020. Even now, it has just 15 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, only three from major U.S.-based outlets, despite making the short list for the Academy Award for Best International Feature. It should have advanced to the final five, because it’s one of the best films I’ve seen from 2020, wrapping a 21st century crime drama and a story of family tragedy ripped out of 19th century Brit Lit together in a strange and totally compelling picture.

A Sun starts out with a shocking scene, as we see two teenage boys heading through the kitchens of a large restaurant into the dining room, where one of them approaches another teenager at a table, takes a machete, and hacks off the victim’s hand, leaving him screaming and covered with blood on the floor. The reasons for this won’t become apparent for some time, but we learn that Chen Jian Ho, called A-Ho throughout the film, is one of the two attackers, along with his friend Radish, and claims at the trial that he thought they were only going to scare the victim, not maim him. This incident sets off ripples throughout A-Ho’s family – his seemingly perfect brother, studying in cram school so he can become a doctor, starts to crack from the added pressure on him as the good son; his father refuses to acknowledge A-Ho as his son, and is beset by the victim’s father, who demands the compensation the court awarded him; his mother, quietly devastated time and again in this film, takes in A-Ho’s young girlfriend, who is pregnant with his child and living with an aunt. We follow A-Ho through his time in prison and his release, but when Radish, who received a longer sentence, gets out as well, he tracks A-Ho down and proceeds to make more trouble for his ‘friend’ even as A-Ho is trying to live a quiet, law-abiding life.

There are so many layers to A Sun, which is titled “Sunlight Reveals All” in Taiwanese, but at its heart it’s a story about A-Ho and his father, who works as a driving instructor and clearly wants more for both of his kids than he’s gotten from life. Chen Yi-wen, who plays A-Ho’s father Wen, won the Taiwanese equivalent of the Oscar for Best Actor at the Golden Horse Awardst, but his performance here builds over the course of the movie; what starts out as a hackneyed “I have only one son” character develops into far more by the time the movie hits its climax and Wen has to make a choice to help A-Ho when Radish once again has him in trouble. Chen’s performance is anguished and understated, and the dynamic between him and A-Ho (played by Wu Chien-ho, who was also nominated for the Golden Horse for Best Actor) reveals itself slowly to be more complex and emotional than it first appears.

There’s some irony both the original and English titles of A Sun given how much of the movie takes place under cover of night or in pouring rain; even when the sun is out, it’s often shining a light on something we’d rather not see. Director and co-writer Chung Mong-hong gives the film its neo-noir feel by keeping so much of the film in the literal and figurative dark; we don’t learn anything about the reasons for the initial attack until well into the second half of the film, by which point it threatens to upend the audience’s established opinions on various characters, and resets the tone for the drive to the finish. Chung’s script avoids black and white answers, right up through the final scene, in depicting a family that has made mistakes but is also being pushed around by inexorable fate. The sun will rise tomorrow, but you might not like what it shows you.

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→ April 21, 2021
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The Father.

Nominated for six Academy Awards this year, including Best Picture, The Father gives a devastating portrait of dementia from the perspective of the sufferer, recasting the experience as a psychological mystery – but one without the promise of a neat ending. It brings together an incredibly clever screenplay and a BAFTA-winning performance from Anthony Hopkins, while making superb use of the limited space of a film set almost entirely in one flat. (It’s available to rent now as a premium/early access option for $19.99 through amazon and other VOD sites.)

Adapted from the stage version by the playwright Florian Zeller, The Father starts out simply enough: Anthony (Hopkins) is arguing with his daughter Anne (Olivia Colman, also nominated for an Oscar) because he has scared off his most recent carer. He says it’s because she stole his watch, and rants about his other daughter, Lucy, whose name seems to bring the film to a screeching halt whenever Anthony broaches the topic. In the following scene, Anthony finds a strange man (Mark Gatiss) in his living room, and the man says he’s Paul, Anne’s partner, whom Anthony doesn’t recognize – and when Anne returns, she’s played by a different actress (Olivia Williams) and Anthony doesn’t recognize her either. Is this just his memory failing, or is something more sinister at play?

The Father utilizes those tricks and more – details of the flat change as well, part of the nonlinear nature of time in this film – to express Anthony’s disorientation to the viewer beyond having him show his confusion. His flat and his daughter’s share a structure, but things like light fixtures, furniture, and wall colors differ slightly, just enough to throw Anthony and the viewer off as we try to figure out not just where we are, but when. Hopkins is truly incredible here, still showing a plus fastball here at age 81 (when it was filmed), delivering the sort of performance the film requires and that you’d expect to see in a stage production. His confusion is palpable, his attempts to mask it through word and action realistic, and his rapid mood shifts – one of the scariest aspects of dementia for family members – are just a series of hard line drives, impressive because they’re subtle and yet impossible to ignore. The script avoids the obvious, such as having Anthony become violent, or scream obscenities, or other possible behaviors of someone with his condition, and instead lets Hopkins deliver the smaller but no less devastating changes in a way that hammers them home to the viewer.

This film is as replete with symbolism as any I can remember watching, perhaps a reflection of its stage origins, although in this sense it felt just as much like a classic novel. The color blue is everywhere in this film – walls, backsplashes, furniture, clothes – which seems like an obvious nod to the sadness and depression suffered by both a patient developing dementia and their loved ones, while the color also appears in a new setting at the end of the film that makes the connection more explicit. Anthony’s obsession with his watch, which can be a common behavior in patients with memory loss, may also represent his slipping grasp of time; in one scene, the time jumps from early morning to evening without a cut, leaving Anthony, still in his pajamas, even more confused than usual. There could be more – the shattered tea cup, the painting above the fireplace, the trees – but I will assume the chicken is, in this case, just a chicken.

The one quibble I have with The Father is the ending, which may be completely realistic but does take away some of the mystery that Zeller built up in the preceding 100 or so minutes with a resolution that, again, is probably accurate to such stories, but took some air out of the dramatic balloon. We spent much of the movie trying to come up with possible explanations for everything that was happening – for example, are Gatiss and Williams some sort of confidence artists? – but the story is much simpler than that.

Hopkins is just incredible here, my favorite lead actor performance of the year, although I don’t think there’s any chance he wins the award over Chadwick Boseman for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (and I’m not sure I would want to see the reaction if he did). Colman is superb as well, my favorite of the three nominees I’ve seen, although it appears the favorite is one I haven’t seen, Youn Yuh-jung for Minari. It’s also nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay, which could be its best chance for a win on Sunday. As for the film itself, I would still lean towards Nomadland for Best Picture, but this sits at #2 on my ranking of movies from the 2020-early 2021 awards cycle, with just a couple of candidates left to see, and one more that made my top 5 still left to review.

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→ April 8, 2021
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Never Rarely Sometimes Always.

Never Rarely Sometimes Always is such a small, wonderful film that might have found its audience had it had a normal theatrical run last year, but Focus purchased it out of Sundance and sent it to streaming after three days in theaters right at the start of the pandemic, so it seems to have escaped a lot of notice. It’s a gem of a movie that takes an unsparing look at abortion and just how difficult the United States makes it for women to exercise this most basic form of autonomy over their own bodies. (You can watch it on HBO Max or via HBO on amazon.)

Autumn (Sidney Flanigan) is a 17-year-old living in a rural town in northern Pennsylvania who suspects she might be pregnant, so she goes to a ‘pregnancy crisis center,’ one of those fake clinics where they try to prevent pregnant women from making rational choices, often by lying to them. Autumn decides she wants to get an abortion, so her cousin Skylar (Talia Ryder) steals some money from the grocery store where they work – for a truly creepy manager – and they hop a bus to New York City, where parental consent isn’t required as it is in the backwater where they live. Once they arrive, however, they realize that the procedure won’t be as quick or simple as they’d been led to believe, and they have to make some unpleasant choices to stay in the city and let Autumn get a proper abortion.

Never Rarely Sometimes Always does so much right with this story, but foremost among them is how granular it gets throughout the process. There’s an attention to detail here that puts you deeply into the story in a way that tries to express the difficulty, stress, and sheer exasperation that Autumn faces, even though she’s sure about her decision. The scenes at the pregnancy crisis center, or her intake interview at Planned Parenthood in New York, or as she and Skylar end up trying to pass the night at the Port Authority and riding the subways all give more time to the minutiae of the moment, passing in something more like real time, giving it a documentary/cinema verité feel.

There are also some small but clearly conscious choices on the part of director/screenwriter Eliza Hittman that drive home Autumn’s anguish and isolation. The intake interview – the best scene in the film, and the scene that gives the movie its title – has the camera focused exclusively on Autumn, even when the kind woman interviewing her is doing most of the talking. Autumn and Skylar are together for long periods where they don’t speak as the camera follows them around Manhattan, or just shows us the two of them trying to sleep in the station, emphasizing that Autumn can simultaneously be alone and with her cousin. If Hittman used any artificial lighting, it wasn’t evident; the whole film has a tinge of grey to it, and the indoor scenes all look like they’re lit solely by the cold fluorescent lights ubiquitous in offices and other public spaces. The script is clearly on the side of a woman’s right to choose, and expresses that view through an intensely realistic look at the process from positive test to the abortion itself, undermining any argument that this is something women do cavalierly while showing just how many obstacles our supposedly free country throws in their way.

Flanigan made their film debut in NRSA, and earned a slew of honors for their performance here, winning Best Actress from Boston and New York critics circles. The film depends so much on Flanigan that you can’t understate the importance of her work, which is superb – she’s entirely believable and disappears into this role, owning that scene in the PP intake interview that, for me, defined this film. It can’t work without a knockout performance, but they deliver one, and you can add Flanigan to the list of actresses who I think deserved an Oscar nomination over Andra Day (who did her best with a badly written role) this year. I’d also put this movie in my top ten for 2020 right now, with maybe a half-dozen possible contenders for that still on my to-watch list, including Minari, The Father, and First Cow. It’s great, and manages to educate without becoming didactic, while telling an important, compelling story.

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→ April 7, 2021
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The United States vs. Billie Holiday.

Many, many people told me The United States vs. Billie Holiday (streaming on Hulu) was bad, but my God did they undersell it. This movie sucks.

And it’s not that it sucks from the get-go; the first half-hour is actually okay, so you think, oh, this might be a serviceable music biopic about a really pivotal figure not just in music history, but in American civil rights history. The second half hour is worse, and you start to see the lack of focus in the script. By the last half hour, though, this thing is so far off the rails that you might start to question whether this was even a movie in the first place. It’s so bad that I can’t even really begin to argue Andra Day’s awards case, because she’s stuck in this very terrible, badly written, badly directed movie.

There’s a good story here, even if this movie doesn’t tell it. Billie Holiday was hounded by the federal government for nearly two decades because of “Strange Fruit,” one of her signature songs, a song written by Abel Meeropol about lynchings. Because she refused to stop singing it in live performances, they harassed her, cut off her license to perform in NYC cabarets (which I can’t believe was a real thing until 1967, and arrested her on drug charges. Holiday was an addict, and her celebrity also made her a useful target for post-Prohibition hardliners looking for other ways to regulate the behavior of Americans. Holiday’s life naturally offers the peaks and valleys you’d want in a Hollywood biography.

Instead, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan Lori-Parks’ script for The United States vs. Billie Holiday adds one ridiculous fabrication after another, and suffers from ham-fisted directorial work from Lee Daniels (The Butler, Precious) that do Holiday and the viewers a series of injustices. Day is good, I think, and she certainly does an expert impression of Holiday’s speaking and singing voices. Trevante Rhodes (Moonlight) is in a similar boat, doing what I think is great work in a terrible role as Jimmy Fletcher, the real-life undercover agent who entraps Holiday in a drug sting, although in movie world they end up having an affair. He’s working for Harry Anslinger, who truly did hound Holiday to death; Anslinger is played here by Garrett Hedlund, and calling his performance “one-note” would imply one more note than it actually contains.

I can’t even express how much I loathed the last half of this movie, though. The lighting is weird the entire time, not in a way that evokes its era, but in a way that makes you want to adjust your television, or maybe go get a glaucoma test. Then Daniels decides to start shifting within scenes from full color to black and white and back again, adding nothing except confusion and delay. Holiday’s childhood trauma comes to Fletcher not from her telling him about it, or one of her confidants doing so, but because he shoots up with her retinue and then sees her memories during his high.

Day’s performance might be the film’s only redeeming quality, although this movie is way beyond redemption. The character is just so poorly written that it’s hard to say whether this is a great performance, or a game performance along with a great impersonation. Holiday gets off some great one-liners and a clever soliloquy or two, but there’s no depth to the character here, and especially no real exploration of just why she continued singing “Strange Fruit” even though doing so jeopardized her career and her liberty. There’s a completely made-up scene where she and Fletcher just happen upon the aftermath of a lynching, but it’s so late in the movie that it can’t explain anything, and its inclusion here is so inept that it seemed like it might have been intended as a dream sequence or memory – except that Fletcher wouldn’t be in a memory like that, so, no, this is supposed to be real.

Nobody saw The Nest, but I would have given Carrie Coon a nomination over Day, and if the Academy was going to nominate an actress from a bad movie, they could just as easily have gone with Sophia Loren for The Life Ahead (more of a mediocre, sentimental movie than an outright mess). I just can’t get over what a crime it was to take an American musical icon who took a principled stand on race and turn her into a two-dimensional figure at the heart of a disjointed, overdirected film like this one.

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→ March 30, 2021
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Shaun the Sheep: Farmageddon.

I wouldn’t normally write up a movie like Shaun the Sheep: Farmageddon, now on Netflix, one of the nominees for this year’s Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, because it’s ostensibly a kids’ movie – and I say that as someone who has long loved Shaun the Sheep and Aardman stuff in general. The first StS season came out when my daughter was maybe 3 or 4, and she and I would watch them together and laugh, and her giggle would just make me laugh some more. The episode in season 1 where the sheep are visited by a couple of mischievous aliens helped my daughter come to the conclusion that “aliens have one eye, monsters have two eyes.” (It’s still one of my favorites.)

The first Shaun the Sheep movie was also nominated for an Oscar, and it was funny, but frivolous. That was a great movie for kids, one that you could enjoy as an adult, but not something that had a second layer for the older parts of the audience like most Pixar movies do. Shaun the Sheep: Farmageddon, a stand-alone sequel, goes way beyond the first movie, though. It is absolutely packed with references and callbacks to classic science fiction, from H.G. Wells to Doctor Who to 2001 to The X-Files to E.T., over 50 Easter eggs that I saw myself (I watched it twice to try to spot more) and that I read about online after watching. And it’s still really funny, with great sight gags (there is no dialogue in any Shaun the Sheep films or episodes … they are sheep, after all) and a plot that winks at conventions of sci-fi in general and the hoary alien-visitation gag in particular.

Shaun is the ringleader of the sheep at Mossy Bottom Farm where, as with the titular animals in Chicken Run, the sheep are organized, and often try to outwit The Farmer (not that hard) and his dog/foreman Bitzer (a bit harder) to try to get more food, have more fun, or annoy the asshole pigs who live next door. (The pigs are, sadly, not in Farmageddon enough.) This time around, though, they have a visitor – an alien child named Lu-La who crashes their spaceship nearby and ends up in the Farmer’s barn, unbeknownst to the Farmer, who sees a news report about the old man who said he saw the spaceship and decides to capitalize by building a ramshackle attraction he calls Farmageddon. What that really means, of course, is that he makes Bitzer and the sheep build it, while Shaun and Lu-La try to hide from everyone around – including the very Scully-like Agent who is determined to find the spaceship and capture Lu-La.

Hijinks ensue, as they always do when Shaun is involved, but the great surprise of this movie is that it is absolutely packed with allusions, references, callbacks, in-jokes, and more. One Doctor Who bit my daughter and I caught just slayed us, and apparently there’s another one we missed around the Fourth Doctor that was somewhere in the background. There’s a symbol in a pizza box right when Shaun and Lu-La first meet that I didn’t catch the first time around, but it was one of at least two references to that particular movie – and I got the second one. There’s a mechanic’s shop called H.G. Wheels. The Agent’s code to access a locked room is a reference. There are just so many things to catch in this movie that there are still more I haven’t, and I don’t even think the few lists I’ve seen of Easter eggs and trivia are close to complete.

I recognize that in-jokes and allusions don’t make a movie great, but everything Shaun the Sheep is at least good enough, and this sequel has a more entertaining plot than the original. I know Soul is the favorite for the Oscar, but, man, I’d watch this for a third or fourth time before I watched that a second time.

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→ March 23, 2021
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Another Round.

Among the Big Six categories at the Oscars, the biggest surprise nomination was, I think, the Best Director nod for Thomas Vinterberg, director and writer of the Danish-language movie Another Round (Druk), which also scored one of the five nominations for Best International Feature Film. The latter is understandable, especially given how universal (if very man-centric) its themes are, but the former … well, I have a feeling it might not entirely be because of Vinterberg’s work on the film, which is streaming on Hulu and can be rented on amazon.

Another Round follows four male, middle-aged high school teachers who are bored with their lives and decide to try to maintain a constant level of intoxication, starting at a .05 BAC, throughout the workday, only stopping at 8 pm. The immediate results are positive – they’re happier, they lighten up, they connect more with their students, and in the case of Martin (Mads Mikkelsen), his marriage seems to improve – but the effects are temporary, and as they decide to push their luck and crank up the BAC, the wheels start to come off for all four of them, forcing them to reconsider their plans and their purpose in this experiment in the first place.

For a movie that touches on some deep material like getting to middle age, thinking your best years might be behind you, wondering if some of your major life choices (at work, in marriage) have been mistakes, Another Round is often delightfully silly. All four lead actors do a pretty good drunk impression, reminiscent of Parks & Recreation‘s Snake Juice episode, and watching these somewhat awkward 40- to 55-year-old men (Mikkelsen is 55, and I don’t think Martin is supposed to be any older than that) dance and stumble about, or even just smile the smile of a mildly inebriated man can be charming – especially since their bad behavior mostly comes at their own expense. The script offers some balance, as one of the men struggles to control his drinking once they start ramping up their BACs, but the general tone is one of seizing life and enjoying the moment – and if a little alcohol helps you get there, what’s the harm?

Martin’s reactions especially seem to reflect those of someone dealing with depression who finally gets some form of treatment, whether CBT or medication, and starts to wake up to the life around him. Danish binge-drinking culture (the film’s Danish title literally means “binge drinking”) is strong enough that the story here probably isn’t metaphorical, but if some viewers’ takeaway is to do something about their midlife malaises, Vinterberg would probably consider that a success. On the other hand, this is a very narrow look at life, very much that of men whose biggest problem in life is ennui. Women are tangential to the story, and the two men of the four who have children aren’t exactly carrying much of the child-rearing load here, while they seem to have job security, without any worries about money or health. That doesn’t detract from the film’s entertainment value, but there’s something very frivolous about the whole exercise that doesn’t compare well to the other leading films from 2020.

Another Round swept the four main awards for which it was nominated at the European Film Awards, winning for Best Picture, Director, Actor (Mikkelsen), and Screenwriter, after winning the same four honors at the Robert-Prisen, the Danish equivalent to the Oscars. That leads to the big surprise in the Academy Award nominations, and the truly tragic story behind Another Round. Vinterberg wrote this story in part with inspiration from his 19-year-old daughter’s stories of the drinking culture of Danish teenagers, but four days after filming began, she was killed in a car accident in Belgium, hit by a truck driver who was looking at his phone and didn’t see that her car had stopped. Filming did resume and Vinterberg dedicated it to her memory. Much of the English-language coverage of the movie has included her death and its effect on both Vinterberg and the film (he altered the script to make it more life-affirming), and I wonder if that drove support for him in this category. There isn’t a great argument on the merits for his nomination over Regina King for One Night in Miami or even Armando Iannucci for the overlooked The Personal History of David Copperfield. This just isn’t that kind of film – it’s good, entertaining, ridiculous in a good way, but I don’t think the direction or script really rise to the level of what I’d expect for a Best Director nominee.

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→ March 21, 2021
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Promising Young Woman.

I still can’t believe Camilla Parker-Bowles is now a two-time Oscar nominee, but she absolutely deserves it.

Emerald Fennell, previously best known for portraying Prince Charles’ affair partner on seasons 3 and 4 of The Crown, now has nominations to her credit for writing the screenplay for and directing Promising Young Woman, a brilliant, shocking, and powerful revenge story that feels incredibly well-timed. Featuring a tremendous lead performance from Carey Mulligan, the film earned five nominations – two for Fennell, one for Mulligan, one for Editing, and, perhaps the big surprise of the five, one for Best Picture. (It’s available to rent on amazon and other streaming services.)

Mulligan plays Cassie, who, as the film opens, is in a bar, alone, and so drunk she can barely sit up straight. A guy in the bar offers to help her get home, but then takes her to his place, where he tries to sexually assault her, at which point Mulligan looks right up at the camera to reveal that she’s stone sober – and she confronts the creep before leaving. This is a regular weekend act for her, and we learn that she dropped out of medical school when her classmate, Nina Fisher, was raped by a classmate at a party, and the school did nothing about it. She’s working in a hipster coffee shop when another classmate, Ryan (Bo Burnham), walks in, and the two start gradually start to have a meet-cute – just at the same time that Cassie gets wind that Nina’s rapist is about to get married, at which point she launches a more elaborate plan to take revenge on everyone involved in the rape and abortive investigation.

Fennell leaves all kinds of clues in the film to indicate that Cassie’s calm exterior demeanor hides the fact that she’s not quite right. Over the course of the story, we learn how Cassie’s life seems to have just stopped after the assault and immediate aftermath. She lives with her parents, who say she has no friends and hasn’t had a boyfriend in years. She’s still wearing a childlike pattern of pastel colors on her nails. Her wardrobe, which seems rather extensive, often veers towards clothing maybe ten years too young for her. She’s supposed to be 30, but alternates between looking 25 and 40 throughout the film. She’s our heroine, and there’s a distinct pleasure in watching her dish it out to various awful men across the film, but there’s also something amiss here, from how and why she left medical school on to just how deranged her plans for the rapist and his enablers are, and Fennell does a spectacular job of balancing those elements so that the conclusion can still work.

The ending is shocking and the subject of many thinkpieces already – this Variety piece has spoilers and does an excellent job breaking it down, and the video with Fennell and Mulligan is well worth the time – and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since we watched the movie. Listening to Fennell in that video, in addition to getting a window on to her brilliance as a writer, changed how I interpreted the ending, and that in turn changed some of my thoughts on what came before. Cassie’s life just stopped after Nina was assaulted and everyone – the school administrators, most of their classmates, even one of Nina and Cassie’s best friends – chose to look the other way, and as the film progresses it becomes clearer that the revenge fantasy is at least mixed with the story of Cassie’s unraveling, a satirical condemnation of a system stacked against victims but also a tragedy of a woman whose promise – who was, at least, on her way to living the life her parents wanted for her – is gone. The fact that Cassie would take the risks she ultimately takes without any regard for the effect her injury or death might have on her parents, for example, is a mostly unspoken indicator that Fennell didn’t write Cassie as a flawless heroine.

I’ve seen four of the five Best Actress nominees so far, and Mulligan would be my pick for the award, although the one I haven’t seen is Andra Day, who won the Golden Globe in this category, and the other three nominees are all outstanding – this might be the most loaded category of the season. I’ve also seen four of the five Best Original Screenplay nominees (I’m waiting on Minari), and would choose this over Sound of Metal, Judas and the Black Messiah, or the extra-Sorkiny The Trial of the Chicago 7. I wouldn’t put it over Nomadland for Best Picture, but it might be my #2, with Minari and The Father still on my list to see. I’ll be pulling for this to take home those two honors, though, as it’s tremendous even when there are minor plot points I wish had unfurled differently.

(My wife and I discuss every movie we watch at length, so her opinions always appear somewhere in these reviews, but here she deserves particular credit for shaping my interpretation of this film. As a man, there are issues here I’ve just never had to face in the world, and her perspective was invaluable.)

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→ March 18, 2021
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Mank.

Mank led all films with ten Oscar nominations this year, and after seeing the film (which is on Netflix), my reaction is best summed up by the GIF of Ryan Reynolds saying, “but why?” I think the answer is actually obvious – it’s a talky black-and-white movie about Hollywood, all things the voters find hard to resist – but it doesn’t make it any easier to accept this adequate if somewhat boring movie taking home spots that could have gone to many more deserving films.

Mank is Herman Mankiewicz, a cantankerous screenwriter who was often called in to ‘fix’ scripts by other writers from the 1920s through the 1940s, and who worked with Orson Welles on the script for Citizen Kane, which won them both the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. The film tells the story of the writing of that script, with flashbacks explaining how Mank managed to become persona non grata in much of Hollywood, and his relationship with actress Marion Davies and partnership with her nephew Charles Lederer.

I really enjoy some of Orson Welles’ work, and appreciate Citizen Kane for its artistic merit and historical importance, and I can certainly get into some making-of stories, but I can’t express how little I cared about what was happening on the screen in Mank. It’s the story of a self-destructive white man handed one gift after another only to throw them away via drink, gambling, or just general assholery. It’s also told through a poorly-structured series of flashbacks that bounce around in time so often it makes it too hard to follow when things are happening, especially since Gary Oldman is 20 years older than Mankiewicz was in 1940, when the latter wrote Citizen Kane, and thus nearly 30 years older than Mankiewicz is supposed to be in flashbacks, with no real concession made to the age gap.

Oldman is busy chewing scenery when he isn’t throwing it back up, and it’s especially frustrating because it seems like he took the message the Academy gave him when they named him Best Actor for a lengthy Winston Churchill impression in Darkest Hour as a sign to go even further in this direction, forgetting the actor he showed he could be in Léon, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, or even Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, where he used his scene-chewing ability to far better purpose. Amanda Seyfried earned her first Oscar nomination for her work here as Davies in a role that doesn’t have a lot of screen time and is probably most notable for her accent here; I’m not sure she does much more than Lily Collins does as Mank’s amanuensis Rita, and really none of the women here are that well-written in the first place. The most compelling supporting performance might be Tom Burke’s as Welles; Burke absolutely nails Welles’ voice in a way I found thoroughly distracting (in a good way), although he loses it a little in a critical scene late in the film where he and Mankiewicz feud and break over the final edits and what credit Mank might receive.

Mank is just so self-indulgent and so insular that I couldn’t help but think back to The Artist, which won Best Picture a decade ago for being a black-and-white movie that told everyone how great movies are, as well as for its central gimmick as a mostly-silent film. They’re movies that appeal not just to the presumed interests of Academy voters, but to their identities: Both give movies an importance beyond reality, and, unfortunately, both rely on the assumption that viewers will care far more about inside-baseball stories about how movies are made than they actually do. The best movies about making movies are great movies first that happen to have elements of moviemaking within their stories – Singin’ in the Rain, ostensibly a story about the first talkies, is far more a tale of fakery and integrity, along with a slapdash romance and some great dance numbers; Boogie Nights, a movie about the golden age of porn, is really about this group of misfits and outcasts who form (and break) familial bonds while working in an industry that embraces them for their weirdness. Mank is a movie about a white guy who got more chances than he deserved and drank them all away. It made me want to pour myself a tall one more than it made me want to go watch Citizen Kane or any of the classic films of that era.

As for those nominations, David Fincher getting a Best Director nod over Regina King for One Night in Miami is just … it’s exhausting. And that latter film missing out on Best Picture with two slots still unfilled and Mank getting one of the eight nominations is baffling. I’d have given Gary Oldman’s spot in Best Actor to Dev Patel for David Copperfield, and I think it’s telling that Mank‘s screenwriter, Fincher’s father Jack, didn’t get a nomination for Best Original Screenplay, especially with the intricate flashback sequences making this story harder to follow. Fincher’s done some great work, and this project had to be more personal to him than anything he’s done before, but if this film had received a theatrical release, I bet it would have tanked, and perhaps taken some of its Oscar helium with it.

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→ March 17, 2021
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Sound of Metal.

This week’s Oscar nominations included a bunch of surprises, including Sound of Metal, available now on Amazon Prime, earning a Best Picture nod among its six overall nominations. It’s an extraordinarily well-acted piece, with well-earned nominations for Riz Ahmed and Paul Raci, with a story that has its heart in the right place but that has some plot holes I found it impossible to overlook.

Ahmed plays Ruben, the drummer for a two-piece hard rock band called Blackgammon along with his girlfriend, singer-guitarist Lou (Olivia Cooke). During one of their shows, he notices his hearing has almost vanished, and a subsequent trip to a doctor reveals that he’s lost about ¾ of his hearing, and while Ruben doesn’t want to accept it at first, it’s permanent and will require him giving up his career. He’s also a recovering addict, clean for four years, but when he tells Lou about his hearing loss, she freaks out and calls his sponsor, who quickly arranges a place for him a house for deaf people recovering from addiction run by Joe (Raci). Ruben spends at least several weeks at the house, gradually adjusting to his deafness, learning American Sign Language and working with some deaf kids at a local camp, but still wants to get the implants he thinks will save his hearing and his career – but that doesn’t work out at all like he planned.

Ahmed and Raci are this film, no offense to Cooke, who is fine in a modest role (other than her eyebrows, which appear to have been bleached in an unfortunate industrial accident). Ahmed wears this haunted look through so much of Sound of Metal that defines Ruben’s inability or unwillingness to accept his deafness, and that cuts through even scenes where he’s supposed to be happy. You can feel his frustration at the hand he’s been dealt – or that he’s dealt himself through his music, although that question is never acknowledged in the film – in almost every scene, but when he can no longer deny that he’s never getting back to where he once was, Ahmed delivers a moment that drives home the devastation. Raci’s nomination has to be the feel-good story of awards season, as he’s 72, with a limited resume in film and TV; Wikipedia has him appearing in just seven films before this, all in minor roles. Raci is the son of deaf parents, so he knew ASL already and I presume is very familiar with deaf culture, but without the credibility and compassion he provides in his role as the leader of the rehab house and a mentor who takes a particular interest in Ruben’s case, the film wouldn’t work. Once he exits the story, you can feel a little of the air escape, because the interactions between Ruben and Joe are the center of the film, and also its most credible elements.

The script works too hard to get Ruben to the rehab house, and struggles to give him a realistic path once he leaves. Ruben sees one doctor for a hearing test, and the doctor tells him about cochlear implants, but there’s no extensive consultation and somehow Ruben thinks the implants will restore his previous hearing – continuing to believe this right up until he gets the implants and has them activated. You don’t get cochlear implants without a long consultation first, and no doctor is going to wait until after the surgery (as Ruben’s does) to explain that implants don’t let you hear through your ears again. When Ruben reveals his deafness to Lou, she immediately reacts as if he’s relapsed, before he’s shown any indications of a problem. After Ruben gets his cochlear implants and asks Joe if he can stay a few more weeks while he waits for the activation, Joe tells him to leave immediately – which itself seems unrealistic, and antithetical to this sort of self-help program – and somehow Ruben, who said he was broke, ends up on a plane to Paris, where he shows up at the house of Lou’s father, who has never met Ruben and didn’t seem to know he was coming. There are just too many of these little plot conveniences for the film’s good, especially since some of them could have been addressed with modest changes.

The film landed six nominations, including the two for Ahmed and Raci; Ahmed has no chance to win against the late Chadwick Boseman (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom) but would certainly be a worthy winner, while Raci seems like he’s going to lose to Daniel Kaluuya (Judas and the Black Messiah) yet would also be deserving of the award. I understand both of those nominations as well as the one for Best Sound, since so much here depends on the way the movie manipulates sound, often putting you into Ruben’s head to show how little he’s hearing. The nomination for Best Original Screenplay, however, seems to reward Sound of Metal for its greatest weakness – a script that takes shortcuts to get its main character where he needs to be – and why the movie ultimately fell short of Best Picture status for me.

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