→ May 26, 2023
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The Show.

The Show was doomed before it ever hit streaming. Scheduled for release in the fall of 2020, when theaters were closed, it has one of the least search-friendly titles you’ll find. The sort-of sequel to a little-seen collection of short films called Show Pieces, this full-length film was written by Alan Moore (Watchmen, V for Vendetta) and stars Tom Burke as a mysterious man on a mysterious quest that turns out to be far, far more mysterious than he or any of us expected. It’s weird and unbalanced and doesn’t tie everything up in a neat little bow, but it is a blast. You can rent it on Amazon, iTunes, etc.

Burke plays Fletcher Dennis, a man who travels under many pseudonyms and arrives in Northampton in search of a man named James Mitchum who, it turns out, died the night before Dennis’s arrival. Dennis is far more interested in an item that Mitchum was wearing than in the dead man himself, but his search for answers leads him to chat up a woman, Faith, who nearly died in the same hospital where Mitchum kicked it; hire a pair of preteen private investigators; talk to an amiably stupid bouncer from the nightclub where Mitchum was last seen; and eventually learn about a pair of long-dead comics who were one of the most popular acts in the UK for decades. While all this is happening, something is going on in his dreams and Faith’s, where both of them appear to be going to the same nightclub, and Dennis learns more about the item he’s searching for and the duplicitous man who’s hired him to do it.

The Show is wonderfully weird, trippy and madcap and clearly the work of a man unafraid to abide by normal plot conventions. It’s a movie better experienced than pondered, especially since several things don’t quite add up in the end – literally the end of the movie, for one – and others might make more sense if you’ve seen some of the related shorts in Show Pieces, which I have not. The film bounces gleefully across genres; when Dennis is talking to the two child detectives, the film goes black and white, and one of them narrates the action, out loud, to Dennis, as if he’s not there and it’s a noir film with a voice-over. (The two kids have the film’s best sight gag as well.) Fletcher himself is a nod to the British comic strip character Dennis the Menace, wearing the latter’s trademark jumper even though it’s an anachronism, with Burke playing the character with a perfect combination of guile and bemusement.

It’s also consistently funny, from great one-liners (“I see dead people.” Pause. “You work in a hospital.”) to running gags to visual humors and more. The dimwitted bouncer, Elton Carnaby, is the film’s best running joke; he can never seem to make up his mind – if his first answer to a question is “yes,” you can be fairly sure the actual answer is “no,” and he’ll get there eventually. Becky Cornelius (played by Ellie Bamber, who I think is going to be a huge star) lets a room to Dennis, and is about the most hilariously inept flirt you’ll ever come across. The gags don’t all land – the musician known as Herbert Sherbert, who dresses as a young Hitler, feels too obvious – but the sheer quantity of them and their placement all over the film, even in graphics and background shots (like the nod to Monty Python) make up for it. I’m pretty sure I’d catch even more of them if I watched the film a second time and paused to examine some of the flyers and newspaper headlines I didn’t see the first time through.

It’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, and I could see a criticism that The Show isn’t really about anything – but that’s the nature of noir, or neo-noir, or perhaps we should just call this “hysterical noir” and stop with the labels? It’s just a fun story from a fertile, peripatetic mind. And I didn’t even mention Alan Moore’s own absolutely wonderful appearance in the second half of the film, with an utterly memorable hairstyle and a whole song and dance (okay, mostly song) number. I was hooked early on when it just seemed like a neo-noir film, but the sheer imagination of it all kept me on board till the ambiguous ending. Here’s hoping Moore gets to create the follow-up series he wants to make.

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→ June 30, 2022
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House of Gucci.

Whoa boy, House of Gucci is a mess of a film – it shouldn’t have surprised anyone that it was nearly shut out at the Academy Awards, taking just a single nomination for Hair & Makeup (well earned), because just about nothing in this movie works at all. Other than wasting a solid performance from Lady Gaga, there is nothing remarkable about this movie at all. It’s long, and sort of nice to look at, but the story is boring, the humor often doesn’t land, and it moves like someone fired the director halfway through the shoot.

Based loosely on the actual story of the fall of the Gucci family empire, House of Gucci follows Patrizia Reggiani (Lady Gaga), an office manager in her father’s trucking firm who courts the hapless Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver), heir of the majority shareholder of the Gucci fashion house. After they marry, she asserts herself and pushes Maurizio to be more aggressive at the company, leading him into conflict with his uncle Aldo (Al Pacino) and cousin Paolo (Jared Leto, looking as handsome as ever). When Maurizio does take the reins, however, his marriage to Patrizia sours, leading her to hire a couple of hitmen to kill him.

The story itself is more than juicy enough for a great movie – and perhaps the book on which this is based is better than the film – but the script is a dud. There’s very little tension in the story, much of which hinges on arcane financial maneuvers, and there’s no real reason to believe that Maurizio and Patrizia would get together. It doesn’t help that there’s zero chemistry between Driver and Lady Gaga. But the script mostly wastes some good material here: These are terrible people, most of whom aren’t very bright, and the film does nothing with all of this. It’s so rarely funny that it’s hard to understand why anyone made a movie about these people without at least trying to mine some humor from the situation – or playing it straight as a financial drama, like Margin Call.

Other than Lady Gaga, nobody is very good in this movie, and they’re just about all worse for the decision to make everyone use Italian accents – even though they’re actually speaking English. Driver’s accent is bad, and he’s really charmless throughout the movie. Pacino gets a WOO-AH! or two in, and his accent is passable. Jeremy Irons appears near the beginning of the movie as Maurizio’s emphysemic father, with an especially bad accent and makeup that makes him look dead several scenes before he’s actually dead.

And whoa boy is Jared Leto bad in this – not least for his ridiculous, that’s-a-spicy-meat-a-ball! accent, which I assume he ordered off the specials menu at Olive Garden. Is he supposed to be Mario or Luigi? I half-expected him to tell Maurizio he need-a the sheets for the table. Chef Boyardee is more authentically Italian than this pagliaccio. It’s the Little Caesar’s of accents. It’s Parmesan cheese, from Wisconsin. It’s commedia della farte. But he’s also just flat-out overacting, too, infusing the character with nothing useful at all. He turns Paolo into a two-dimensional joke, and not a funny one. He’s a moron, yes, but morons can be funny, or kind, or can elicit our empathy. Leto’s Paolo does none of these. He just sucks the air out of the scene every time he appears.

The best part? It’s over two and a half hours! One of the key plot points, where Patrizia decides to have her husband killed, is relegated to maybe ten or fifteen minutes at the very end of the film, and the aftermath just gets one small scene of Patrizia in the courtroom. It’s as if the screenwriters didn’t understand any of what made this story interesting. Lady Gaga probably deserved an Oscar nomination for her work in this mess – certainly over the impersonations that took up three of the five spots for Best Actress – but there’s no other reason to watch this. (If you still want to, though, you can rent it on amazon or iTunes.)

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→ April 15, 2022
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Playground.

I have what appears to be a false memory of an American movie critic  Playground, Belgium’s submission for this past year’s Academy Award for Best International Film, was the best movie of 2021. It made the Oscars’ shortlist, but didn’t get to the final five, and after a very limited theatrical release here this winter it hit streaming (amazon • iTunes • Google) this Tuesday. It is a marvel of small cinema – it tells a simple story, with few characters and no gimmicks, in under 80 minutes, and it’s just devastating.

Playground follows two kids, Nora (Maya Vanderbeque), aged 7, and her brother Abel, about 10, and takes place entirely at their school – mostly in the schoolyard, which is a brutal place, and Abel even tells Nora that he’s going to beat up some of the new kids with the school bully, Antoine. Nora has a very hard time leaving her father on the first day of school, and ends up clinging to her brother, which causes Antoine and the other bullies to turn on Abel. When Nora sees this, she wants to tell her father, but Abel orders her not to, for fear it will make things worse – and, it turns out, it does.

First time writer/director Laura Wandel shot nearly all of Playground at the kids’ height, and in soft focus, so Nora in particular is always centered in the shot and the story. Nora’s anguish is the beating heart of the story; the adults who ostensibly run the school let her down at nearly every turn, and even when she believes she’s doing the right thing by protecting her brother, he turns on her as well, blaming her for his switch from bully to victim and for his growing isolation from the other kids. Wandel declines to shift the focus to the adults – when we see them in full, it’s because they have bent down to talk to the children on their level – because the failure of the teachers and administrators is not the point of the story. It’s simply assumed. The adults are often kept out of frame entirely, and sometimes their words are muffled, to further evoke the overwhelming disorientation of being a young child in a new environment where the rules are unclear and adults don’t always fulfill their obligations to you.

Vanderbeque gives the best performance by a child actor I’ve seen since Brooklynn Prince’s in 2017’s The Florida Project. Her wide-eyed look conveys fear and determination in turns, and her facial expressions reveal the inner torment Nora faces as she realizes that none of her actions have unequivocally positive consequences. When Nora’s choices lead not to Abel’s liberation from bullying, but to his ostracism and her own isolation, Vanderbeque’s features tighten up as the character holds back tears, and if you’re a parent, just watching her doing that might rip you apart. Nora is forced to make decisions she’s not equipped to make, which only deepens her torment, and after several turns of the screw we see her start to feel the effects of this pressure. She’s still just seven and a young-looking seven at that, so despite her role as the protagonist, eventually her youth and immaturity take over and she begins lashing out at classmates and her brother – more so after her own few friends start taunting her over her brother’s unpopularity.

At a taut 72 minutes, Playground can move through its story without ever letting its foot off the gas – it’s as tense as a thriller and never telegraphs its direction, which also underscores that feeling of dread that most children experience in such apparently hostile settings. The playground of the school constitutes so much of the kids’ experience that the film’s original title, Un monde, means “a world.” It’s a nasty, brutish place, and perhaps Wandel’s way of showing us a microcosm of what awaits Nora and Abel when they grow up. You’re just hoping they make it okay until the bell rings at the end of the last class.

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→ March 27, 2022
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Oscar picks, 2022 edition.

The Oscars are happening tonight, so once again, I’ve assembled a post with some loose predictions, my own picks for each award, and, most importantly, links to every one of these films I’ve reviewed. I’ve seen all of the Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Cinematography nominees, and all of the films in the four acting categories. I still have one or two films left in the Animated Feature, Documentary Feature, and International Feature categories, and didn’t see any of the short films this year, although I’ll seek out the winners afterwards.

To be completely clear, I have zero inside information to inform these predictions. I read the same stuff you do, and don’t claim to know anything more than the average moviegoer. This is all just for fun – but I do have certain films I’d like to see honored, because I think when good films win important awards, it encourages studios to finance more good films.

Best Picture

Belfast
CODA
Don’t Look Up
Drive My Car
Dune
King Richard
Licorice Pizza
Nightmare Alley
The Power of the Dog
West Side Story

What will win: Drive My Car

What should win: Drive My Car

What was snubbed: The Lost Daughter, Passing

So my real prediction is that The Power of the Dog doesn’t win – in essence, I’d bet the field instead. I know CODA is now the popular favorite, and it might win. It’s not that great a film, and the idea of a film about deaf people that centers the experience of a hearing person winning BP is not that great, Bob, but in a year without a clear front-runner, a fractured vote could give us a surprising result. I have argued with friends who care about this stuff for a few weeks that Drive My Car is at least undervalued by oddsmakers; the more international Academy electorate gives it a real chance, even though it’s probably no more than third most likely to win and maybe fourth. But I could also see it being first on a minority of ballots, and in a year where no single film runs away with it, it might sneak in there. I might be wishcasting, but I’d rather argue for a scenario that is unlikely but not improbable than just tell you something you already know.

I’d also like to point out that the two films I thought most deserved BP nods but didn’t get them were Netflix movies, and seriously, fuck you to whatever Netflix exec decided to put time and money into promoting Don’t Look Up for this award when they had two far superior and more deserving films right there. Passing didn’t get a single Oscar nod, and I put that squarely on Netflix’s shoulders.

Apropos of nothing, there is a small chance that CODA wins this and nothing else – it was only nominated for two other honors. No film has won Best Picture and no other Oscars since Mutiny on the Bounty in 1936.

Best Director

Paul Thomas Anderson, Licorice Pizza
Kenneth Branagh, Belfast
Jane Campion, The Power of the Dog
Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Drive My Car
Stephen Spielberg, West Side Story

Who will win: Campion

Who should win: Hamaguchi

Who was snubbed: Denis Villeneuve, Dune

Villeneve shouldn’t just have been nominated over Branagh; he should be taking home this Oscar. I don’t think it would be remotely close, and I say that as someone who thought Drive My Car was the best movie of 2021. I didn’t think West Side Story was anything special, but Spielberg’s direction was not among its flaws.

Best Actress

Jessica Chastain, The Eyes of Tammy Faye
Olivia Colman, The Lost Daughter
Penelope Cruz, Parallel Mothers
Nicole Kidman, Being the Ricardos
Kristen Stewart, Spencer

Who will win: Chastain

Who should win: Colman

Who was snubbed: Renate Reinsve, The Worst Person in the World

If nothing else, I am glad that awards discourse has coalesced around the idea that nominating actors for doing impersonations is at least not in the true spirit of these awards. Three of these nominees are portraying real people; four of the nominees for Best Actor are too, if you count King Macbeth, although in that case, they didn’t try to make Denzel Washington look like his real-life counterpart. In this category, Chastain and Kidman just aren’t very good – they’re imitating, but hardly acting, although in both cases the scripts are the main problem. I’d be fine with any of the other three winning. Reinsve’s performance absolutely sustained that movie, though, and she would have been my pick. Ben Zauzmer noted that this is the first time in the ten-nominee era that no film has gotten a Best Picture nomination and had its lead actress get a Best Actress nomination, and the tenth time in Oscar history. By the way, Cruz’s odds have been soaring in the last few days, and I’d be thrilled if she won, too.

Best Actor

Javier Bardem, Being the Ricardos
Benedict Cumberbatch, The Power of the Dog
Andrew Garfield, tick, tick…BOOM!
Will Smith, King Richard
Denzel Washington, The Tragedy of Macbeth

Who will win: Smith

Who should win: Smith

Who was snubbed: Simon Rex, Red Rocket

My hypothesis on Red Rocket is that because director/co-writer Sean Baker non-professional actors for the vast majority of roles in his movies, the professional actors who vote on the nominees for acting categories might be disinclined to vote for his movies or anyone associated with them. The Florida Project was my #1 movie of 2018 but only got one supporting nod for Willem Dafoe, who was already a highly acclaimed actor and played a small role in the film. Rex had acting experience before Red Rocket but was never in anything good, and nearly everyone else in the film is a non-professional.

Anyway, Smith is almost certainly going to win, but Cumberbatch was great, too, and wasn’t doing an impersonation, which Smith definitely was (especially in imitating Richard Williams’ manner of speech).

Best Supporting Actress

Jessie Buckley, The Lost Daughter
Ariana DeBose, West Side Story
Judi Dench, Belfast
Kirsten Dunst, The Power of the Dog
Aunjanue Ellis, King Richard

Who will win: DeBose

Who shold win: DeBose

Who was snubbed: Caitrona Balfe, Belfast; Ruth Negga, Passing

I’ve ranted about Balfe/Dench already, in the Belfast review. This category is considered by pretty much everyone to be the strongest lock of the night. I won’t even pretend to know any better.

Best Supporting Actor

Ciarán Hinds, Belfast
Troy Kotsur, CODA
Jesse Plemons, The Power of the Dog
J.K. Simmons, Being the Ricardos
Kodi Smit-McPhee, The Power of the Dog

Who will win: Kotsur

Who should win: Smit-McPhee*

Who was snubbed: Daniel Durant, CODA

I put an asterisk next to Smit-McPhee’s name because I think he gave the best performance of the year … but I am rooting for Kotsur here. He was great, and fun, and improvised a fair bit of his dialogue. I think having him win that award, and give his speech in American Sign Language for hundreds of thousands of people to see, will be powerful and important. He is the third actor with a physical disability to be nominated for an Oscar; the previous two were his CODA co-star Marlee Matlin, for Children of a Lesser God, and Harold Russell, for The Best Years of Our Lives.

Best Cinematography

Dune
Nightmare Alley
The Power of the Dog
The Tragedy of Macbeth
West Side Story

What will win: Dune

What should win: Dune

What was snubbed: Drive My Car

I could see a case for West Side Story here, but not one to beat Dune, which was just breathtaking in almost every way.

Best International Feature Film

Drive My Car (Japan)
Flee (Denmark)
The Hand of God (Italy)
Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom (Bhutan)
The Worst Person in the World (Norway)

I still haven’t seen Lunana, but I assume Drive My Car is winning this and have no objection. I’ve seen a few films from the shortlist that didn’t make the final cut, including Hive and A Hero, but wouldn’t argue for either’s inclusion.

Best Original Screenplay

Belfast
Don’t Look Up
King Richard
Licorice Pizza
The Worst Person in the World

What will win: Belfast

What should win: Licorice Pizza

What was snubbed: Parallel Mothers

My prediction is this is where the voters give one to Branagh, now that it seems to be an also-ran in every other category where it’s nominated – although a shutout is on the table. I know there’s some popular sentiment for The Worst Person in the World, but I can’t get past the way it reduces Julie’s story to whether or not she wants kids.

Best Adapted Screenplay

CODA
Drive My Car
Dune
The Lost Daughter
The Power of the Dog

What will win: The Lost Daughter

What should win: Drive My Car

What was snubbed: The Dig

A hunch here that the Academy will honor Maggie Gyllenhaal here after snubbing her for Director and snubbing the film for Best Picture. If it doesn’t win, then this one probably goes to CODA regardless of the Best Picture voting. I never wrote up The Dig, a lovely, small movie starring Carrie Mulligan and Ralph Fiennes, available on Netflix. We liked it quite a bit, but Netflix didn’t do anything to promote it, and the plot – a young English widow hires a local archeologist to excavate the ancient burial mounds on her property – isn’t exactly white-knuckles stuff, although it is based on a true story.

Best Documentary Feature

Ascension
Attica
Flee
Summer of Soul
Writing with Fire

What will win: Summer of Soul

What should win: Summer of Soul

I still haven’t seen Ascension or Writing with Fire, but I loved Summer of Soul and it seems to be a lock to win. Flee made history by getting nominations in this category, Best International Feature Film, and Best Animated Feature Film (which Encanto seems like a dead lock to win), but will almost certainly go 0 for 3. I don’t have a real snub here, but if you have Amazon Prime, My Name Is Pauli Murray is a very straightforward documentary about an extremely important civil rights lawyer who also struggled with her gender identity and sexual orientation in a time when the topics were completely taboo.

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→ March 22, 2022
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Don’t Look Up.

If you enjoyed Vice for its sledgehammer-to-the-forehead approach to its subject matter, Don’t Look Up, the latest film from director Adam McKay and his co-writer David Sirota, might be right up your alley. It is as unsubtle and unfunny as any soi-disant satire can get, lacking both the humor and the power of the genre in its rush just to tell you how smart it is, and in the process, it wastes an epic cast that includes five Academy Award winners.

The premise of Don’t Look Up isn’t actually that bad: Two astronomers (Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence) discover that a comet 6 kilometers wide is on course to make a direct impact with earth, just off the coast of Chile, an extinction-level event that will wipe out all of humanity. They go to the feds, and end up talking to the President (Meryl Streep), who doesn’t take them seriously until she needs to distract everyone from a scandal. But when the CEO of an Apple-like tech company called BASH (Mark Rylance) who is also a major donor to the President points out that the comet holds over $100 trillion in rare metals critical to the technology industry, the plan to destroy the comet shifts to a plan to try to break it apart and mine it, much to the chagrin of the science community that believes destroying the comet is the planet’s only hope. (Cate Blanchett is the fifth Oscar winner in the movie, playing a vapid morning show host as a sort of Megyn Kelly clone.)

There is one funny joke in all of Don’t Look Up, and it has to do with snacks. Nothing in the actual plot, which is so thinly veiled a metaphor for climate change that it might as well be covered with Saran wrap, is handled in a humorous way. This isn’t actual satire. You don’t just move the chairs around and claim you refurnished the house. The writers here just changed a few details and then made everyone a genius or a moron, with nothing in between. The closest thing this film has to a real character is DiCaprio’s Dr. Mindy, who gets to evolve after his appearance on Blanchett’s morning show results in him becoming a heartthrob, both to viewers and to Blanchett’s character, with whom he cheats on his wife (Melanie Lynskey), another thinly-veiled commentary, this one on the corrupting power of fame and the conflict between telling people the truth and telling them what they want to hear. Even that seems to give this script more credit than it deserves, and it takes well over two hours to get to its eventual, obvious ending.

What’s most appalling is how McKay manages to get such awful work from otherwise capable, acclaimed actors. Rylance appears to have botoxed his upper cheeks into oblivion and affects a fey, high-pitched voice, while his character also has the social skills of a sea cucumber. Jonah Hill, playing Donald Trump Jr. by another name (the President’s son and also her chief of staff), is in full douchebro mode, and serves no purpose whatsoever except as a way to mock his real-life counterpart as an insipid misogynist. Blanchett’s co-host, played by Tyler Perry, is every bland TV personality who laughs too much and makes tasteless jokes about ex-wives.

And perhaps worst of all is Meryl Streep, who mailed this one in and had it returned for insufficient postage. She’s supposed to be as corrupt as Trump, but manages to make the character less interesting, somehow. She’s venal in the most boring way, and while, yes, there’s a comeuppance coming that you will see an hour away, it’s not even that satisfying because the character is such a cipher, and Streep, who has certainly had fun playing offbeat or even unlikeable characters before, seems disinterested.

As for the film’s so-called point, whether it’s just about climate change or a broader argument about humans’ inherent tendency to avoid short-term pain even for long-term gain, this isn’t going to convince anyone of anything. It’s preaching to – or just yelling at – the choir, while talking down to anyone else who might be willing to hear an argument on the matter. The writers would rather tell you how smart they are and take your compliments than do anything that might make a difference. When the protagonist also turns into a rhinoceros, you’ve taken the farce too far.

—

This is easily the worst film nominated for Best Picture this year, of which I have now seen all ten. My personal top ten for 2021, which could still change a little depending on some movies I haven’t seen and a few that aren’t available yet, looks like this:

1. Drive My Car
2. Dune
3. The Lost Daughter
4. Licorice Pizza
5. Parallel Mothers
6. Summer of Soul
7. The Power of the Dog
8. Passing
9. Red Rocket
10. C’mon C’mon

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→ March 21, 2022
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CODA.

CODA has become the top underdog to win Best Picture after taking the top honors at the Screen Actors Guild and Producers Guild of America awards in the last few weeks, buoyed by Jane Campion tone-deaf comments at the Critics Choice Awards when The Power of the Dog won the top prize there. It’s definitely the feel-good movie of the year, and well-executed for its type, but it’s formulaic and predictable enough that it doesn’t belong in the Best Picture conversation despite its positives. (It’s available to stream free on Apple TV+.)

Ruby Rossi (Emilia Jones) is the CODA of the title – a Child of Deaf Adults, born hearing to deaf parents (Troy Kotsur, nominated for Best Supporting Actor, and Marlee Matlin) and with a deaf older brother (Daniel Durant). The family lives in Gloucester, on the north shore of Massachusetts, and runs a fishing boat, for which they depend on Ruby as the one hearing member of the family, thus keeping them in compliance with Coast Guard rules. Ruby loves to sing, and if you can’t see where this going, you might not have seen a movie before. Of course, the music teacher at Ruby’s school (Eugenio Derbez) hears Ruby and suggests she apply to Berklee, offering to help her prepare for her audition, forcing her to choose between her family and a career.

As a coming-of-age story, CODA checks the right boxes, not least of which is the humor essential to this sort of narrative. Ruby’s parents are impossible, probably too much so to be credible, but because the film largely works from her point of view, it works because just about every teenager thinks their parents are impossible. Kotsur is fantastic, including a few scenes where he improvised some dialogue, not just in his scenes with Ruby but also in the subplot about the decline of commercial fishing in general and the way that the single buyer for fish at their port seems to take advantage of the family when Ruby isn’t there. (More on that in a moment.) Ruby is also bullied at school, in part because when she first started attending she spoke ‘funny,’ but also because her family fishes for a living, even though they are hardly the only family in town to do so – and, by the way, where exactly are the Gloucester accents? – which gets in the way of her crush on Miles (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo of Sing Street), who the music teacher assigns to do a duet with Ruby, because of course he does.

CODA follows a pretty clear formula from start to finish, and you’ll see everything coming a mile away, right down to the big finish. It at least improves on the French original by casting deaf actors in the roles of the deaf characters, but this is still a paint-by-numbers script, and it centers the experiences of Ruby over those of her family members, as if to say that the burden of being a hearing person in a deaf family is greater or more important than the burden of being a deaf person in a hearing world. That includes some nonsensical scenes at a doctor’s office and in a court where Ruby translates for her father, even though the Americans with Disabilities Act requires the provision of an interpreter in both settings. This isn’t just a plot contrivance – it violates a federal law, and a half an hour or so north of Boston, this just isn’t going to happen. The doctor’s office scene is mined for Ruby’s embarrassment, but the courtroom scene is there just to underline how helpless her family will be without her there, and that’s both wrong and embarrassing for the screenwriters – who are hearing, by the way, and appear to miss the boat (pun intended) several times on deaf experience and culture. (Here’s a take from a deaf writer who found the film frustrating for that reason.) You know she’s going to nail the audition and get the guy and figure something out with her parents, because that’s just how these movies work.

The film does do many things right, starting with representation of deaf people in the first place, although I’d like to know where the family’s deaf friends, who are mentioned but never seen, are hiding for the entire film. This world is built by people without disabilities for people without disabilities, and if you have a disability of some sort, whether it’s mobility, sight, hearing, or something else, you will find the world has built extra obstacles for you because the easiest and cheapest path was to pretend that you don’t exist. Ruby’s family ends up playing an important role among the fishing community as they push back against an exploitative middleman and what they perceive as overregulation (for which they must pay directly), and that wouldn’t happen if Ruby weren’t there to interpret in both directions at one critical public meeting. It’s a sign of what’s lost to everyone when we marginalize any set of people, and shows the isolation of her family while also providing several humorous moments.

Kotsur’s performance rivals that of Kodi Smit-McPhee’s for the best by an actor in a supporting role, and I’d be good with either winning the Oscar in that category on Sunday. Jones’s work might be flying under the radar too much, but she’s also excellent, with great comedic timing and a lovely singing voice that at least makes it plausible that her teacher would react to her singing the way he does. Derbez’s character is ridiculous, but he plays the hell out of it, and I challenge you not to like him as he leans into the artiste stereotype, flipping his hair and rolling the r in his name, Bernardo, for about ten seconds each time he says it. By the time she gets to the audition at Berklee, which you know the whole time she’s going to end up attending, the script just piles one absurd element on top of another to get to the desired outcome. It’s charming, but you’re just going to have to accept the unreality of it, and that’s a shame given the movie’s clear intent to put deaf people and deaf culture in the center of the story. It’s an entertaining film, but not a great one, better honored for its performances than for the script or the film as a whole.

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→ March 18, 2022
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Drive My Car.

Drive My Car has become the critical favorite of awards season, winning the best film prize from the LA Film Critics Association, New York Film Critics Circle, and the National Society of Film Critics, a trifecta that has happened six times previously, with the last four films to do so going on to win Best Picture. It spurred one of the best pieces I’ve read on movies in this, a  cycle, Justin Chang’s piece from late January arguing for the Oscars to nominate the film – his favorite of 2021 – for Best Picture. He was right, and the film did get the Best Picture nod it deserved, as well as nominations for Best Director and Best International Film. After Jane Campion’s tone-deaf, ill-timed comments at the Critics Choice Awards, which came just four days before voting opened, it might even have a chance to win the big prize.

Based on a brief short story by Haruki Murakami, Drive My Car is a three-hour meditation on grief and recovering from loss, beautifully shot and acted, with a script that pulls great emotion from small moments and quiet interactions among its characters. Yusuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) is a stage director and actor whose wife Oto (Reika Kirishima) narrates stories she creates for him during and after they have sex. Shortly after Yusuke discovers that she’s cheating on him, he returns home to find her dead on the floor of a cerebral hemorrhage. Two years later, he’s invited to stage his version of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, a multilingual production, in Hiroshima, where his contract requires him to stay an hour away and use a driver, Misaki (T?ko Miura), to get him back and forth. These drives, and the conversations that take place in the car, explore the two characters’ traumas and share difficulty coping with their grief and guilt over what they might have done differently to prevent the tragedies in their pasts.

Drive My Car immerses you in its world, the one facet it shares with Murakami’s writing – it’s akin to living inside of someone else’s dream for three hours, thanks to the gorgeous shots of Hiroshima and the unhurried plot, which reveals its secrets naturally, as the relationship between Yusuke and Misaki develops and the two begin to confide in each other. Yusuke and Oto lost a child earlier in their marriage, which we learn in oblique fashion near the start of the film but without any explanation, which only adds to Yusuke’s guilt and grief over losing his wife – especially since he never had a chance to confront her about her infidelity. He ends up hiring the actor with whom she cheated to play the title character in Uncle Vanya, with what seems like ill intent, but after an intense conversation between the two in the back of the car where the actor tells Yusuke the end of a story that Oto had never finished, his view softens and he realizes there were things about his wife he never knew.

There are some strange plot contrivances that never quite pay off. Yusuke develops glaucoma in one eye, which he discovers after the condition causes him to get into a car accident, which you’d think would be reason enough for him to end up with a driver. Instead, the glaucoma never comes up again in the film, and the screenwriters concoct this bizarre contract with the theater to force him to use a driver – which he’s reluctant to do because of the importance of his routine while driving, right down to the car itself, which we learn is closely associated in his mind with his wife. Getting Yusuke a driver is central to the unfolding of the story, but the glaucoma could have been the reason for it – or it didn’t need to be in the film at all.

I have never seen or heard any performance of Uncle Vanya, so I read the Wikipedia summary of the play to try to understand what was happening on the stage within the film, as well as its connection to the overall plot. (There’s a brief scene near the start of the film where Yusuke appears in a production of Waiting for Godot, a story about two people waiting for a third, unseen person who never comes, talking endlessly about it, which seems like a more obvious parallel to the story of Yusuke and Misaki.) The actors in the play speak different languages and often can’t understand each other without Yusuke or his local assistant translating, with actors who speak Mandarin, English, Korean, and Korean Sign Language in the production, but despite diffident direction from Yusuke, several of the actors experience breakthroughs while working with the material, forming bonds with each other and connecting more with the characters, an allegory for Yusuke’s own resistance to exploring his own grief or just his own emotions. Two of the main characters in Chekhov’s play are stuck, pining for the same woman, the wife of Vanya’s brother-in-law, whose first wife (Vanya’s sister) has died. Vanya has dedicated most of his life to managing his brother-in-law’s estate, but realizes that he’s wasted his time on a man of limited ability and even less sense of the value of other people, all while waiting for a woman who is unavailable to him.

Much commentary about Drive My Car has focused on how well it translates the dreamlike nature of Murakami’s writing to the screen. The comments get it half right. This film does replicate the all-consuming aspect of Murakami’s work, but that’s found in his novels, not in his short stories; the stores in Men Without Women, the collection where “Drive My Car” appears, are scant, like shadows of ideas, and lack the texture or altered realities of most of his novels. The comments also constitute Burning erasure, as that film, the best of 2018, followed the same formula, extrapolating a wispy Murakami short story into a film well over two hours long that developed its characters (its men, at least) and created layers of back story and scene. Drive My Car does so as well, with strong performances by both of its leads, and offers a thematic and visual complexity absent from the story on which it is loosely based. It’s the best movie I’ve seen from 2021 so far, with just two Best Picture nominees (CODA and Don’t Look Up) and at least two significant international films (Playground and Petite Maman), and while the odds are still against it winning Best Picture or Best Director, it absolutely deserves both honors.

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→ March 15, 2022
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The Worst Person in the World.

Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World earned two Oscar nominations this year, for Best International Feature Film and Best Original Screenplay, and should have gotten a third for Renate Reinsve as Best Actress. It’s a blast to watch, particularly because Reinsve is so charming and so convincing as the main character, but there’s a superficiality to the story that made the movie less satisfying than it could have been in a different writer’s hands.

Reinsve plays Julie, a woman about to turn 30 who is trying to figure out her life, dropping out of med school as the film begins to become a photographer, where she meets Aksel, an author of underground comic books who is about 14 years her senior. They begin a relationship despite his warning to her that she still needs to find herself, that he’s too old for her, and that they’ll want different things – which, of course, eventually turns out to be true, as they meet his friends, discuss having children, and, of course, meet other people. The movie unfolds in twelve ‘chapters,’ as well as a prologue and epilogue, each showing a small anecdote or slice of Julie’s life, ranging from funny to tragic, as she navigates her love life, her family, and more.

This film succeeds because of Reinsve, who looks younger than Julie’s age despite being about 32 when the movie was filmed. She’s so compelling from the moment we first see her, with a smile that fills the screen, yet over the course of the twelve episodes that constitute the film, she not only gives the character depth but makes it clear why she is the center of this particular universe. Julie is flawed but full of life, so that we can see her make mistakes, or at least what might be mistakes, and still be completely invested in her story. She’s the prototypical character who you just believe will come out all right in the end, without becoming hackneyed or unlikeable.

The script, however, is another matter. The plot is a bit beside the point, but it depends on two very fortunate twists that seem awfully convenient for the purposes of Julie’s story, getting her to the right people and places at those moments in the film. It serves to underscore how shallow the story is: this is a woman’s late 20s as seen through the eyes of a man. Julie doesn’t seem to have any friends of her own, and never has a conversation with another woman in the film without a man there – even then, those conversations are nearly always about a man, often Julie’s father, who lives with her stepmom and their daughter and takes no interest in Julie’s life at all. The movie views the life of a woman turning 30 primarily through the question of whether she wants children, and how that affects her relationships with men. Her career is an afterthought – we barely see her pick up a camera for about 10 chapters, and when she’s working at all, it’s in a chain bookstore, with no mention of photography or another career. Even the essay she writes that goes viral is about her relationship to men. Julie does have agency, and shows it in romantic relationships, so it’s puzzling to see her portrayed as lacking initiative or authority in other aspects of her life.

The Worst Person in the World has some gorgeous shots in and around Oslo, including a running scene – every great film this year had to have a running scene, it’s in the rules – that might be the most memorable sequence of 2021 for me. There are many fantastic shots, and Kasper Tuxen’s cinematography makes this a film in which you want to just exist. It’s also funny and bittersweet and often heartwarming, but in the end, I found it all a bit exasperating, not least because Trier ends the film with an improbable epilogue drowned out by the pretentious “Waters of March” by Art Garfunkel. Reinsve is so incredible that I’d still recommend the film – and can’t get over the nominations of three women doing impersonations for Best Actress over her – but wish that the two men who wrote it had considered getting a woman’s perspective on it.

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→ March 14, 2022
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West Side Story.

StevenSpielberg had wanted to film a new version of the 1957 musical West Side Story, which was first adapted in 1961 in a film that won Best Picture, for several years before filming began in July of 2019. This new version, with a script by Tony Kushner that hews more closely to the original stage play at several points, was delayed by a year due to the pandemic, but came out in time to be eligible for this year’s Oscars, earning seven nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actress for Ariana DuBose. It’s better than the 1961 film in some ways, worse in others, making it a perfectly fine film that nobody actually needed.

The framework of the story is the same as that of the first film: Two gangs of street toughs are engaged in a turf war on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the largely Puerto Rican Sharks and the white Jets, led by Bernardo (David Alvarez) and Riff (Mike Faist), respectively. Tony used to be in the Jets before he went to jail, and is trying to go straight now that he’s home, but at a community dance where both gangs arrive with their girls, he meets Bernardo’s sister, Maria (Rachel Zegler), and the two fall immediately in love. Tony works at Doc’s, which is managed by Doc’s Puerto Rican widow (Rita Moreno), who advises him against pursuing Maria while helping him learn some Spanish phrases. Bernardo isn’t happy to see his sister with a white guy, and wants her to marry his friend Chino (Josh Andrés Rivera), while Bernardo himself is with Maria’s friend Anita (DuBose). The two gangs decide to hold a “rumble,” a fight that ends up leaving two dead and has disastrous consequences for the star-crossed lovers.

I’ll save the biggest problem for last, but one major flaw in this version of West Side Story is that Ansel Elgort sucks. He wasn’t good in Baby Driver, where he barely had to do anything, but he’s awful here in every way – he’s stiff, uncharismatic, and dull, and his singing is the worst of any major character. Casting him was a poor choice, underscored by how much better Faist is as Riff – he’s a rascal, but has all the charm that Elgort lacks, and he owns every scene the two have together. Zegler is far better as a singer and actor than Elgort is, and unlike most of the cast, looks close to the age of her character. In general, the women in the film outshine the men, and the Jets’ big number, “Officer Krupke,” is one of the songs that’s clearly inferior to that of the original film.

There are some small differences from the 1961 film that do improve the end result, not least of which is employing Latinx actors as the Sharks and their girlfriends. The original had Natalie Wood, the daughter of Russian immigrants, in the lead role as Maria, and George Chakiris, the son of Greek immigrants, as her brother Bernardo. Both used comically bad accents that sounded more like mockery than imitation. Zegler and Elgort do their own singing, which neither of their counterparts did in the 1961 film. The character of Anybodys, a tomboyish Jets wannabe played by Susan Oakes in the original, is now much more fleshed out here, depicted as a trans man and played by iris menas, a nonbinary and trans actor. It’s a win for representation, but also adds substantially to the story, with Anybodys the character who gains the most in depth and screen time between the original and the remake. The audio quality is improved, of course, although sometimes that works against the singers, such as the men in “America,” whose vocals sound tinny, especially in comparison to the women on that song.

West Side Story can’t escape its fundamental, ontological problem: There is no good reason for this film to exist. The story is the same. The songs are all the same. The choreography is the same – perhaps captured more effectively by better camerawork and modern technology, but it’s still the same old song and dance. Elgort is a dud, a poor actor and mediocre singer whose hold on Maria is hard to believe. It’s a nostalgia play for Spielberg, and I’m sure 20th Century/Disney thought it would be a huge moneymaker, although that was foiled by the pandemic. For this film to get seven Oscar nominations while the superior In the Heights got zero – not even one for a song! – is a travesty.

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→ March 9, 2022
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Belfast.

Belfast nabbed seven Oscar nominations this year, including nods for Best Picture, Best Director, and both Supporting acting categories, which seems like a decided lack of ambition for the voters. It is a perfectly fine film, pleasant and funny with enough of a serious underpinning to make it more than just a slice-of-life story, but there just isn’t that much to it, and if anything, the Academy whiffed on the one category where it deserved a nomination – Best Actress.

Belfast follows nine-year-old Buddy, a Protestant boy in 1969 in the titular city, the capital of Northern Ireland and the main site of the sectarian violence known as the Troubles that had begun just a few years previously. Buddy’s father (Jamie Dornan) works in England, only returning home every few weeks, so Buddy spends most of his time at home with his mother (Caitrona Balfe) and grandparents (Ciaran Hinds and Judi Dench, both of whom got Oscar nominations). He goes to school, where he has a crush on the smartest girl in the class, Catherine (Olive Tennant – yes, David’s daughter), and gets into trouble with his degenerate cousin, Moira, whose only role in the story is to shoplift. Buddy’s father also has to deal with the Protestant thug Billy (Colin Morgan), who insists that he must come to fight on the Protestant side or be considered a traitor and a target. When the August 1969 riots come to their quiet street, the situation becomes untenable, and forces the family to decide whether to stay in the neighborhood where they’ve always lived or take a job offer in England.

Branagh can be a heavy-handed director, but he works with a lighter touch here that reminded me of his work on Much Ado About Nothing, where he hammed it up as Benedick but largely let his actors (and the outstanding dialogue) do the work. Other than the decision to make this film black and white, a showy choice given the year in which the film’s events take place, Branagh stays out of the way, and the script has just one scene that doesn’t work (the club, although it was surprising to hear Dornan can sing), while the rest of the film provides the contrast between the mundanity of quotidian life and the stress of knowing that the place you were made is now less safe for you and your kids. It’s a slight film, but strong for its size, and gets in and out in about 90 minutes, just right for this sort of story. I just keep coming back to the film’s total lack of ambition – I’d say it’s like a novella, rather than a novel, but it’s not a matter of its running time (or page count). Belfast isn’t trying to do anything. It has very modest goals and it executes them well.

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