→ January 27, 2020
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Joker.

In what appears to be a remake of Falling Down with clown makeup, Joker has somehow ended up a critical darling, leading all films in 2019 with eleven nominations, including Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Adapted Screenplay, for this year’s Academy Awards. It’s a grim picture that manages to lionize a murderer, present an insulting image of mental illness, and retcon a major character’s backstory, driven entirely by the lead performance by Joaquin Phoenix as the Joker descends into madness. (Joker is now available to rent on amazon and iTunes.)

Joker is a new origin story – because the world hasn’t had enough of those – for the most iconic villain in the Batman stories, a character portrayed quite memorably by Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger, among others. Arthur Fleck, played here by Phoenix, is a clown for hire, a meek, lonely adult man who lives with his frail mother and has the very rare condition known as pathological laughter, a form of pseudobulbar affect that is usually the consequence of a brain injury. He can be weirdly childlike, but only at certain times, and he has some sort of serious mental illness that requires seven different medications, although the illness is never identified. Most of the first half of the film shows how little use or regard society has for Arthur, until a series of revelations finally causes him to go off the rails, becoming the psychotic killer we recognize as the Joker.

There’s a clear intent to get after some Big Themes here, two in particular. The first, around mental illness and how little regard our society has for people who suffer from it, is the film’s major flaw and one I’ll return to in a moment. The second is a simpler depiction of growing economic inequality, with Arthur and his mother on one side of the divide, and Thomas Wayne and his family (including the young Bruce) on the other. Arthur’s first crime makes him a sort of inadvertent Gavrilo Princip, spurring a grassroots movement of people in clown masks railing against the 1%, while Thomas Wayne, here depicted as a cold, ambitious billionaire running for Mayor of Gotham (which differs from previous backstories), is a derisive, entitled man who hides behind wrought-iron fences and attends fancy banquets while showing no regard for anyone beneath him.

Joker‘s big failing is that Arthur should not be a sympathetic character. He describes himself in the film as a “mentally ill loner,” and he is utterly beaten down (literally and figuratively) and discarded by the dystopian-but-accurate society of Gotham, which, in the script’s logic, turns him into a gleeful killer. Several of his victims appear to have had it coming in this twisted worldview – he kills several yuppie douchebags on a subway train early in the film, and then later, after receiving some news that seems to cause him to completely snap, enacts revenge on multiple people in his orbit who have harmed him, and in each case the script seems to justify it. There’s more than a kernel of truth behind the story – the United States is about the worst place in the developed world to have a serious mental illness, especially if you’re not well-off, and of course it’s ridiculously easy for people who shouldn’t have access to guns to get one. The script just paints way too much of a straight line from mental illness to violence, which way too often mirrors both media portrayals of real-world serial killers and mass shooters – nearly all of whom look a lot like Arthur – and the excuses we hear from gun-rights people whenever there’s another massacre.

Phoenix does give a good performance here, although the role itself is written to be extreme, so his performance is going to stand out more for its sharper peaks and valleys; it’s a bit like a great hitter going to Coors Field and putting up video game numbers, where he’s still a great hitter but the superficial stat line may overstate the case. (As an aside, I did wonder if choosing the music of an incarcerated pedophile for Phoenix’s now famous scene on the outdoor staircase was deliberate.) Two of the best ways to get an Oscar nomination for acting are to play someone famous and to play a crazy person; Phoenix certainly got the second one, and he plays it to the hilt. He’s appropriately disturbing when he needs to be, although his affect when he’s just regular Arthur tends to come and go a bit, including his use of an infantile voice in certain scenes but not others. There are other good actors in this film – Bryan Tyree Henry and Zazee Beats are both wasted in minuscule roles – but no character gets beyond two dimensions, not even Robert Deniro’s talk show host Murray Franklin, although Deniro at least appears to be having fun with the role.

We’ve seen examples of genre films tackling serious themes successfully in recent years, including Black Panther, so it can clearly be done. Joker is not as successful, especially when it comes to its treatment of mental illness, and in the process also turns an incel into some sort of folk hero when the history of the character is that he’s a sociopathic villain. I don’t dismiss it as a comic book movie, but I do think it aspires to a level of seriousness it fails to reach, and in the process mixes its messages in a way that’s actively unhelpful. Todd Phillips getting an Oscar nomination for his direction here over Greta Gurwig and Lulu Wang is an absolute joke. I’m sure Phoenix is going to win Best Actor for this performance, but any more honors for Joker will only serve to elevate a movie that doesn’t deserve it.

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→ January 23, 2020
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The Two Popes.

Netflix’s The Two Popes – or, as my friend Will Leitch likes to call it, Coupla Popes! – is a showcase for two great, aged actors, Jonathan Pryce and Anthony Hopkins, playing the current and previous popes in conversation as Pope Benedict is about to step down as Pontiff and Jorge Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, tries to dissuade him through a wide-ranging conversation that covers almost the entire film. As a movie, it’s perfectly fine, often funny, generally thoughtful, a bit verbose, but also problematic in its portrayal of history. As a platform for the two actors, it’s quite good, with Pryce stealing much of the show with his performance and dedication to his accent.

The film is based on a play called The Pope that presents a largely fictionalized conversation between the two men, and that is a bit problematic, as the events are quite recent (mostly 2013) and the two men depicted are still alive. The script definitely brushes aside the very serious matter of the Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandal and Pope Benedict’s role in covering it up; it’s broached, but the characters discuss it and dispense with it. There’s even a fictional confession given by Benedict to Bergoglio, which I find deeply troubling given the role of penance and the Seal of the Confessional in Catholic doctrine; sure, it’s fake, but it feels like an invasion into the character of the erstwhile Pope to assume what he might have said in such a confession.

We get a brief look at the conclave where Joseph Ratzinger is selected as Pope over Bergoglio, who we see was a distant runner-up in the voting, and thus becomes Pope Benedict XVI. He resigned as Pope in 2013, the first such abdication of a pontiff’s own volition in over seven centuries; Bergoglio was selected by the next conclave to replace him, becoming Pope Francis. The bulk of the movie covers Bergoglio’s visit to the Vatican to resign as Cardinal, during which Benedict reveals he plans to resign as Pope, a conversation that reveals their philosophical and theological differences. That meandering dialogue gives us frequent flashbacks to Bergoglio’s youth and to a period in the 1970s when his actions and inactions led to the detention and torture of two priests under his command. The flashbacks are powerful, as are the scenes where Cardinal Bergoglio recalls his actions, and shows remorse; in their entirety, they’re the best parts of the film.

Those scenes are also the best moments for Jonathan Pryce, who is really superb as Bergoglio, right down to a credible Argentine accent – in contrast to Hopkins, who makes scant effort at a German accent. Pryce is a solid likeness for Bergoglio, which helps his performance, but he also infuses the character with emotional depth and a lot of the charm that has made the real-life Pope Francis so popular. He’s the more interesting character of the two in reality, and Pryce brings that to life on the screen. I think it’s the best thing he’s done since those Infiniti commercials. It’s a contrast to Hopkins, who is playing a rather uncharismatic character, and does so accurately, almost as if he was more focused on getting Benedict’s mannerisms and old-man’s gait more than his persona.

As an overall film, however, The Two Popes is a more than adequate, just a bit hollow in the aftermath. The script moves along, thanks in large part to the flashbacks, although it’s so dialogue-driven that there are definitely long stretches where you want something to happen. There are too many odd closeups of the two actors – we get it, they’re old – but the re-creation of the Sistine Chapel is marvelous. There’s also quite a bit of humor in the movie, more than I would have expected and probably a lot more than there was in any real conversation between the two men. It was after watching it, however, that I realized how little the script bothered with the sex abuse scandal that has engulfed the Church for two decades, one that may have contributed to Benedict’s abdication and that exists because of the choices of men like him. Without that, it feels like there’s a giant elephant in the room and these two old men refuse to see it.

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→ January 15, 2020
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Hustlers.

Monday’s announcements of the nominations for this year’s Academy Awards were unsurprising and kind of disappointing; the Academy’s one brief moment of acknowledging art outside of the mainstream, when Moonlight won Best Picture in absurd fashion, wasn’t a harbinger of a change in the electorate’s inclinations, but a blip on the timeline. The Academy remains as conservative and insular as ever, nominating five men for Best Director in a year with many deserving women, and snubbing many performances from films outside of the mainstream in favor of giving nods to bigger stars from more commercial films.

One of those snubs was Jennifer Lopez, who plays a supporting role that is absolutely critical to the success of Hustlers (available to rent on amazon and iTunes), a movie I liked more than I expected and in large part enjoyed because Lopez is so damn good. As Ramona Vega, the ringleader of the larceny scam that involves the lead character Dorothy/Destiny (Constance Wu) and a few of their colleagues at the strip club Moves (a fictional version of the NYC club Scores), she dominates the movie from the moment her character arrives, and the movie flags any time she’s off screen.

The film is loosely based on a true story, detailed by Jessica Pressler in a 2015 article in New York magazine, where multiple strippers at Scores concocted a scheme to rob some of their rich clients by drugging them and maxing out their credit cards, taking home a sort of commission for bringing in the clients that was well beyond what they’d ordinarily make through performing and private dances. The script tidies things up quite a bit, including making the women more sympathetic and glossing over the prostitution aspect of the scheme, but follows the original article’s story of the case that exposed them – a victim who wasn’t rich, and who had gone through some horrible personal times, but whom the girls scammed anyway, only to have him fight back and get the cops interested in the case.

The focus here is on these women, who feel demeaned and discarded by a society that values women for their physical appearance, and that only temporarily, more than it values them as people, and fought back against men they figured wouldn’t really miss the money and who were among the biggest offenders at denigrating the women in the first place. Wu’s portrayal of the woman to whom Pressler spoke is actually much softer than the way in which that woman comes across in the original article, but her character isn’t all that deep or interesting – it’s the Vega character that gets the depth and complexity, a woman of great generosity in emotion and material goods with her friends but who has a callous, even frigid side when it comes to the men who misuse her.

The script also makes sure to let the audience know that these women become a surrogate family for each other – Destiny, Vega, two women who dance with them (played by Keke Palmer and Lili Reinhart), the club’s ‘den mother’ (Mercedes Ruehl) – filling the emotional void where their biological families, who have either discarded them or died or otherwise vanished, would have been. It’s obvious, and a little manipulative, but it also was largely effective because of Lopez’s performance, with boosts from Ruehl and a brief turn from Wai Ching Ho as Destiny’s grandmother at the over-the-top but still moving Christmas party. (Cardi B and Lizzo also appear as strippers at Moves, and both are incredibly entertaining in their limited time on screen but aren’t on enough.)

The movie frames the story as Destiny telling the story of the scam to a fictionalized version of Pressler (played in sterile fashion by Julia Stiles) after they’ve been caught and have served their sentences, which works a little to give Wu more chance to show some range but flops when screenwriter and director Lorene Scafaria seems unable to figure out how to wrap things up. The conflict between Ramona and Destiny often feels contrived, never more so at the end – perhaps because the New York article stops before the real-life Destiny (named Rosie) had her day in court, and because the real story is a lot messier. The idea Scafaria conceived is sweet enough to rot your teeth, and in the end Hustlers can’t get above the level of high entertainment because the script works overtime to make these women more sympathetic.

Lopez didn’t get her Oscar nod, but I couldn’t tell you if she deserved one over Kathy Bates (Richard Jewell), Scarlett Johanssen (Jojo Rabbit), or Margot Robbie (Bombshell), not yet at least. I wouldn’t put Lopez over the two nominees whose films I did see, Florence Pugh (Little Women) and Laura Dern (nominated for Marriage Story, but just as good in Little Women). I will say Lopez’s performance was worthy of a nomination; perhaps she was just crowded out in a strong year. I don’t think any of the other omissions, such as Scafaria for directing, were actually snubs; Hustlers is good but only Lopez really rises above the material.

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→ January 13, 2020
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Little Women.

Greta Gerwig’s debut as a writer and director, Lady Bird, was a largely autobiographical story of her own teenage years in Sacramento, with Saoirse Ronan in the lead role as Gerwig’s fictional stand-in. Ronan repeats the performance in a way as Jo March in Gerwig’s generally wonderful adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s beloved novel Little Women, helping with the framing device Gerwig uses to tell the story in a nonlinear way… although Ronan here is completely upstaged by one of her own (fictional) sisters.

Little Women was itself an autobiographical novel of Alcott’s own upbringing in Massachusetts, telling the story of the March sisters, Meg, Jo, Amy, and Beth, who live with their mother Marmie and housekeeper Hannah while their father is away serving as an army chaplain during the civil war. The book, published here in two parts (and, in something I just learned, still sometimes seen abroad as Little Women and Good Wives), covers a period of about four years that sees the girls through courtships and tragedy, finally ending with three of the girls marrying and – there’s no way you don’t know this – one of the four dying of complications from scarlet fever. It was an immediate commercial success, spawning two further sequels (which I’ve never read), and remains a favorite for young readers today, in part because it’s one of the only novels of its century that truly focuses on its women, both as unique, well-developed characters themselves, and as women in a highly restrictive, patriarchal society.

The framing device Gerwig uses wears out its welcome a little quickly, especially given some of the abrupt transitions between past and present. She splits the time period across the seven years between Beth’s illness and her death, using different lighting and, eventually, a different haircut for one character as ways to distinguish between the periods, but some of the scenes don’t have enough time to develop fully because the next cut yanks you out of that moment and into a different one entirely. The shot of Jo grieving at her sister’s grave ends way too quickly and transitions to a scene of relative mirth that I think robbed the former of some of its power. There’s probably a good way to tell this story in a nonlinear way, still using the motif of Jo writing her great novel about her family as the framing device, that doesn’t make some of the intervening scenes so terse.

Beyond that, however, this film is just great, anchored by so many wonderful performances that it’s hard to identify just who is carrying what. Ronan is very good as Jo, although of course she is far prettier than Jo is ever described on Alcott’s pages, and particularly excels in any scene where she gets to crank up her emotions in any direction – and in her scenes with Laurie, played rakishly by Timothée Chalamet, who might as well have been born to play this young bachelor on the road to roué. But Florence Pugh is the biggest star here as Amy, a character who gets more emotional growth in the movie than she does in the book, going much farther from snotty younger sister to a young woman aware of how little the world might value her, fighting for any agency she can find. Pugh isn’t the lead, but I think she’s more important to this movie than anyone else.

Laura Dern might win Best Supporting Actress for her turn in Marriage Story, but I liked her performance here as Marmie even more – she’s the original supermom, showing the patience of a saint, and delivering one of the best and most memorable lines in the movie when Jo asks why she’s never angry. Bob Odenkirk is only in the film briefly as Mr. March, but he’s wonderful and is fast becoming one of my favorite character actors, even when the role requires little or no humor at all. Chris Cooper is delightful as Laurie’s grandfather; Meryl Streep does quite a lot with Aunt March, even though the character has maybe one and a half notes to her. Even Tracy Letts has a minor role as Jo’s publisher, and he’s the perfect amount of grump for the job.

And then there are the other two sisters, Meg, played by Emma Watson, and Beth, played by Eliza Scanlen. Watson just seems miscast here, speaking with a sort of affected precision that doesn’t line up with Meg, who truly wants the life of domesticity for which she’s destined. Scanlen, though, is just plain weird as Beth, who is also written strangely – made more infantile on the screen than she is on the page, which becomes particularly offputting when Beth is 13 and 14 in the earlier time period and she’s portrayed by an actress who is 21. Meg’s character isn’t that critical to the film, but Beth’s is, and the portrayal here is a bit jarring.

The ending Gerwig cooks up is rather sublime, and a welcome departure from authenticity. Jo is even more Alcott here than she ever could be in the novel, and Gerwig slips in some details from Alcott’s life to spice things up a bit, making her a shrewd negotiator and getting us to the big finish with a metafictional flourish for the ages. It’s not faithful to the source material, but given how problematic Jo’s literary marriage – which Alcott apparently wrote under duress from her publishers – is for the novel and her character, this is a substantial improvement.

We’ll find out the Oscar nominations the same morning I post this, but I’m guessing we’ll get Best Picture, Best Actress (Ronan), Best Supporting Actress (Pugh), Best Costume Design, and Best Adapted Screenplay, with maybe even money on Gerwig getting a Best Director nod. We’ll see if the backlash against the Golden Globes’ all-male director slate helps Gerwig at all; (I’m assuming three slots are locks, for Scorsese, Tarantino, and Mendes, with Boon Jong Ho a good shot at the fourth.) It’s not Best Picture, but it’ll certainly end up in my top 10 once I’ve finished the various candidates from 2019; as long as Pugh gets a nomination, though, I’ll call that a win for the film.

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→ January 8, 2020
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The Farewell.

Awkwafina got her start as a Youtube comedic rapper, and didn’t even earn her first live acting credit in anything but a short film until 2016’s Neighbors 2, so her rise from that to a Golden Globe for Best Actress – which she won this weekend for her outstanding lead performance in The Farewell – is one of the more incredible and heartening stories out of the movie world in some time. (Was Cate Blanchett all teary with joy when Awkwafina won? I kind of think she was.) I haven’t seen all of the nominated actresses’ films in that category, but I can say Awkwafina gave a performance worthy of awards, and without her and the way her coarse, rational character contrasts with the rest of her slightly loopy family, The Farewell wouldn’t be half the film it is.

Awkwafina plays Billi, a 30ish, struggling Chinese-American writer who has just learned she didn’t get a fellowship she was hopeful she’d land, when she finds out that her grandmother in China, to whom she was once quite close, is dying of lung cancer. The catch is that the family, adhering to a cultural tradition, isn’t telling the grandmother that she’s dying, so she can continue to live her life as if everything was normal until it reaches a point where the truth becomes inevitable (if it ever does). Billi isn’t on board with the plan, since it involves lying to a beloved family member, so her parents tell her not to come with them to China for what is presumably the last visit they’ll have with Nana. Of course, she defies them and flies there on her own, and hilarity ensues in the face of a terminal diagnosis, from the internecine squabbles about telling her, Nana’s desire to find Billi a husband, culture clashes with other cousins who remained in China, and, oh by the way, the sham wedding of Billi’s first cousin to a woman h met in Japan (who speaks no Chinese of any dialect) that is the excuse for everyone coming to visit Nana at once.

Part of the beauty of the comedy of The Farewell is that the premise is rather simple: They’re not telling Nana she’s dying and they’re all there for a fake wedding. Everything else flows naturally from that setup; you just had to get the characters in one place for an obnoxiously passive-aggressive argument about whether the United States or China has the superior culture or is the better place to send your child for college to break out. Billi is often in the middle of the comedy, but not necessarily its prime mover; sometimes she’s Bob Newhart, the ‘normal’ one surrounded by crazy people, providing the voice of reason. 

The scenes with Billi and Nana are more tender, as if maybe Billi can forget for a moment that her grandmother is dying, than the family scenes, where she and her parents keep switching to English to talk about the propriety of the ongoing lie, which also gives the film some needed contrast. I expected more of a one-note story, yet The Farewell is anything but, especially avoiding the trap of simply making Billi the heroine whose position is right and thus for whom you’ll root in every argument. (You will sometimes, though.) Rather than burdening the script with major subplots, writer-director Lulu Wang, who based the story on her own experience with her family and her own grandmother, adds small flourishes to flesh out the main story. The best of these lets Nana’s sister tell her own story, explaining her role in the family, which gets exactly the screen time it needs without becoming a needless, ongoing plot point.

Awkwafina’s win might be the boost she needs to get an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress this year, which would be great news as I don’t think I’d put more than one performance over hers of what I’ve seen (Scarlett Johanssen in Marriage Story, although she has less to do overall). It seems like it would be an upset for The Farewell to get a Best Picture nod, but I’ll be pulling for it – and GoldDerby.com‘s Oscar odds page has this fifth in Best Screenplay and even has Zhao Shuzhen, who plays Nana, ranked 6th among candidates for the Best Supporting Actress award. (She’s very good.) It’s a good movie, maybe a little insubstantial to say it’s a great movie, but a movie I’ll root for next month, and one I’ll encourage a lot of people to see because almost anyone could watch this movie. It’s a very human story, simply told, without distractions or things to deter anyone from enjoying it.

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→ January 6, 2020
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The Irishman.

I had to get sick to watch The Irishman. 

At three and a half hours, it’s the longest movie I’ve ever watched in a single sitting at home or in a theater; I’ve watched longer films, including Lawrence of Arabia, but over multiple days, because my attention span’s normal limit is around two hours and it takes a lot to overcome that. This Friday, though, I was knocked out by a virus and had a fever high enough that I wasn’t leaving the couch, so we watched Martin Scorsese’s latest entry in his opus of films around organized crime, about a serial liar and trivial mob figure who, near the end of his life, ‘confessed’ to numerous murders, including that of Jimmy Hoffa.

Taken from a dubious non-fiction book called I Heard You Paint Houses (which appears on-screen in an alternate title card), The Irishman follows the career of Frank Sheeran as he goes from a truck driver who delivers meat between Philadelphia and DC to consigliere to a local don, Russell Bufalino, and later to Hoffa himself. It’s a sprawling story with an epic scope but a focus on minute interactions, giving Scorsese’s three leads a chance to do what we all presumably came to see them do – and to see them as younger doppelgängers of themselves, thanks to digital de-aging technology, so Scorsese can use the same actors across a thirty- to forty-year span.

(By the way, Slate breaks down how Sheeran likely confessed to a slew of murders and crimes he never committed. The story is mostly fiction, with lots of real people in it.)

Frank is played by Robert De Niro, who probably looks the least like himself when he’s de-aged but whose voice and accent are unmistakable. (Although the characters are supposed to be from Philadelphia and Detroit, the accents sound a lot more like Brooklyn Italian-American to me.) Hoffa is portrayed by Al Pacino, also given away by his voice even when he’s also been de-aged. Both deliver solid performances, De Niro’s a bit more workmanlike yet a character a bit independent of the movie around him, Pacino infusing the bombastic Hoffa with the kind of bombast Pacino is known for giving his characters.

But this movie is dominated by a scene-stealing performance from Joe Pesci as Russ; I can’t say I ever forgot it was Joe Pesci, because how could you ever forget that, but of the three actors he is by far the most convincing and the most fully in character. Known for playing hair-trigger characters with on-screen histrionics, Pesci here is understated by comparison, measured, sounding well-reasoned even he’s asking Frank to take someone out (and I don’t mean for drinks). He seems the least like someone playing an archetype in a film about mobsters, even though that – and My Cousin Vinny – is what he’s best known for doing. It helps that the de-aging was least noticeable on him out of the big three. For him to come out of retirement – he’d last appeared in a live-action role nine years ago – and deliver this performance is remarkable, and I assume assures him an Oscar nomination.

The film indulges in those archetypes, both in characters and in plot points, although by the end it’s clear that Scorsese, at least, is making a much larger point about the pointlessness of such violence, and how it threatens to dehumanize the perpetrators in the long run. The various executions are gory but ultimately mundane for their frequency, and the ease with which Frank can deliver either a beating or a bullet is never explained even in the extended introduction to his character (which does introduce one of the many wonderful minor performances in the film, this one from Ray Romano). At three-plus hours, the repetitive nature of this cycle becomes clearer, and while the violence is stylized, it’s not glamorized – it’s ugly, and futile, and by the film’s conclusion, everyone involved is either dead or left with nothing.

Frank himself has been shut out by one of his daughters, played almost wordlessly by Anna Paquin in over 25 years in the movie’s present tense, and pleads with another daughter for her to help reconnect them, which she refuses to do. One of the most memorable, awful scenes in the film is when Frank goes to a funeral parlor and shops for caskets (the salesman is rapper Action Bronson, who literally doesn’t seem to know how to stand while Frank is talking to him); when the salesman asks who the casket is for, Frank reveals it’s for himself. No one else cares enough to do this for him. He will die unloved, and likely unlamented.

Paquin’s nearly silent role has come in for a lot of criticism, but the reason is so clear, and writing the character that way, as opposed to making her angry and voluble and demonstrative, is powerful in its own right and because it plays against stereotypes of women in films. The general lack of women characters of any substance in the film is a bigger problem, and not one about or limited to Paquin’s character; Frank leaves his first wife for his second and it barely merits a mention, while his wife and Russ’s are there on a road trip the four take from Philly to Detroit but they’re there for nothing more than comic relief and smoke breaks. And it’s not as if the film lacks room for female voices – there’s a fair amount of fat in this film, at least twenty minutes’ worth of overlong montages or scenes of old white men talking to each other too slowly. The entire sequence leading up to the murder of “Crazy” Joe Gallo, which eyewitnesses say Sheeran did not commit, and the murder itself could have been left out without hurting the film at all, since the murder doesn’t matter in the subsequent timeline of the movie.

The Irishman is going to earn a slew of Oscar nominations, obviously. It’ll get a nod for Best Picture. Scorcese will get one for Best Director. I think all three of my fellow paesani will get acting nominations. A movie of this length hardly exists without extensive editing, and while I have some quibbles with a few specific cuts, I think the sheer size of the job gets the editor(s) a nomination there as well. I won’t be surprised if it wins Best Picture, but little else, however, as the film is more than the sum of its parts, and if you like this film, you love this film. I’ll just personally root for Pesci to take a statue home as well.

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→ December 30, 2019
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Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

Quentin Tarantino is one of the most frustrating filmmakers working today, a brilliant author of dialogue with a unique eye for scene and setting, prone to bombast, pretension, and general excess that nearly always ends up detracting from even his best movies. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (now on amazon & iTunes) is one of the best things he’s done, and it’s also way too long and frequently too clever by half, buoyed by a pair of tremendous lead performances and burdened by the lack of interesting women and a meandering plot.

Once is another alternate history, in a similar vein to Inglourious Basterds and even Django Unchained, although this time around Tarantino’s playing with facts is subtler until the film’s climax. He gives us two lead characters, TV actor Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stunt double/personal assistant Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), and follows them from the end of Dalton’s star turn on a TV western Bounty Law through a dry spell that eventually leads him to work against type as the ‘heavy’ and to star in some spaghetti westerns, all in the late 1960s. Their paths intersect multiple times with Dalton’s neighbors, Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) and Roman Polanski (Rafal Zawierucha, his first English-language film role), and with a group of hippies who just happen to be living on the Spahn Ranch under the spell of a charismatic cult leader named Charles Manson (Damon Herriman, reprising his role from Mindhunter and a damn good likeness). Cliff picks up a flirtatious hitchhiker (Margaret Qualley) who brings him back to the ranch, which helps set the plot on its alternate path away from actual events and gives us the most Tarantino-esque part of the film, the over-the-top violence in the big finish.

This movie is quite good, almost great, but it’s way too long. All three of Tarantino’s feature films since the death of his longtime editor Sally Menke have run 160+ minutes; Menke edited all of his films before she died, and none ran that long unless you want to consider Kill Bill as a single film. There is so much fat to trim from this film that you could easily have brought it home in close to two hours; the entire tangent showing Rick working in Italy is wasted time, and many scenes, including most of the driving scenes in L.A. and Rick’s tantrum in his trailer after he flubs his lines on set, could have been cut by half without losing anything of merit.

That criticism shouldn’t take away from how strongly Tarantino establishes this setting from the start of the film. It looks incredible in every aspect – clothes, hair, cars, background – and sounds just as good. If Tarantino was trying to capture a specific moment in time at a specific place, he nailed it, both in terms of this golden age of Hollywood and the post-Summer of Love counterculture movement that helped give rise to the Manson cult. Some exposition early in the movie – the scene at the playboy mansion, which gives us a great cameo from Damian Lewis as Steve McQueen – does help establish the setting, and to try to put the audience under the spell of the film, which might have held all the way to the climax had Tarantino not gone off on multiple needless digressions like Rick’s brief career in spaghetti westerns.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is also full of Tarantino signatures, which is mostly a positive thing. There’s tons of quick, snappy dialogue, especially in the many movie/TV show scenes within this movie, including DiCaprio’s Oscar-reel moment where he’s playing the villain in a western and gets to chew the scenery with the help of a precocious actress playing the little girl his character has kidnapped. There are cameos galore, including Lewis, Bruce Dern, and Lena Dunham (who … doesn’t really work here), as well as the stunt-casting of children of famous actors as many of the Manson followers (Qualley is Andie MacDowell’s daughter; we spotted the children of Ethan Hawke/Uma Thurman and Demi Moore/Bruce Willis, while director Kevin Smith’s daughter is here too). The movie is full of references and callbacks to other Tarantino films, a few of which I caught, including the dead-obvious riff on Inglourious Basterds. And it wouldn’t be a Tarantino film with lots of vaguely creepy closeups of women’s feet, especially the bizarre shot of Margot Robbie’s as Tate is watching herself in a movie theater and enjoying the positive reaction the audience has to her scenes, which is kind of ruined by the way her feet, propped on the seat in front of her, ruin the perspective of the shot and make her head (covered with comically large eyeglasses) seem so small in comparison.

Between the sheer ambition of the movie, Tarantino’s reputation, and the fact that it’s a movie about movies, this feels like a lock for a Best Picture nomination. I’m assuming Pitt will submit for Best Supporting Actor, and will absolutely get a nomination, while DiCaprio seems likely to get one for Best Actor. The most prominent actress in the film is Robbie, whose lack of dialogue has received much coverage already (with merit), and while I think she does the most she can to use body language to infuse Tate’s character with that of the promising ingenue, about to embark on a career of stardom, there just isn’t enough for her to do on screen. Qualley might have more dialogue, and if there was any doubt after The Leftovers that she could be a star, this ought to end it, but she’s also a side character and only in the movie for maybe 20 minutes. Beyond that, I could see Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and definitely Best Cinematography for the unusual shifts in perspective that Tarantino employs to change your sense of scale, including the wide shots of the Spahn Ranch and the party at the Playboy Mansion (where Dreama Walker plays Connie Stevens in a wig that perfectly mimics Stevens’ look in 1969), and one for Best Makeup and Hairstyling too. For what it’s worth, though, I wouldn’t vote for this over Parasite for the top honor.

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→ December 21, 2019
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Stick to baseball, 12/21/19.

I wrote two ESPN+ pieces this week, on the Madison Bumgarner contract and the Corey Kluber trade. I didn’t chat this week as I’m preparing for the holidays and had a lot of personal business that required my time.

On the board gaming front, I ranked the top ten games of 2019 for Paste and the best board games of 2019 by category for Vulture. I’ll have a piece up this weekend on Ars Technica ranking the best board game apps of the year. Also for Paste, I ran down the best games I saw at PAX Unplugged earlier this month.

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, comes out on April 21st from William Morrow (Harper Collins). You can pre-order it now through that link or wherever delicious books are sold.

And now, the links…

  • The Mormon Church has built up a $100 billion fund they claimed was for “charitable” purposes, but has hoarded much of the money and only made distributions to two for-profit businesses owned by the church, which if true is a massive case of tax fraud.
  • Professor Julie Sedivy writes about rediscovering her parents’ native tongue, Czech, after her father died, and how the process reconnected her with her roots.
  • I’ve been listening to the audiobook version of Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! and have been struck by just how much of a creep Richard Feynman appears to be in his own telling. It turns out I’m far from the only one who noticed, and, worse, his second wife accused him of physical and verbal abuse. To make it worse, the audio version has its own problems, such as the narrator trying to imitate non-American accents, with an especially cringey version of a Japanese accent that might make Krusty the Clown blush.
  • Over at the Atlantic, Amanda Mull says enough with the year-end rankings, and while I agree there are a lot of those posts, I think she misses a large part of the point: They become both conversation starters, which is one of the main reasons I post rankings here, and ways to find new music or books or movies you might not have heard about previously.
  • Clint Eastwood is clearly a chauvinist asshole, with his new film, Richard Jewell, fabricating a story about a real journalist offering sex in exchange for information – a story that never happened, about a journalist who has since passed away and can’t defend herself. Ankita Rao writes in the Guardian how harmful this pervasive stereotype is.
  • I guess one good thing about the ongoing measles epidemic in the U.S. is that it is waking up more media outlets to the existential threat anti-vaxxers pose. Men’s Health has a column from Jacqueline Detwiler on how scientific BS has brought measles back, and how we can fight for science against denialists.
  • A bill in the New Jersey legislature to end non-medical exemptions to mandatory schoolchild vaccinations – which is only rational, since there are no religious prohibitions on vaccinations, and if you have a “philosophical” objection to vaccination then you can just home-school your kid – stalled in the Senate after vocal protests from anti-vaxxers. The Newark Star-Ledger’s editorial board commented by saying that the anti-vaxxer movement has gone off the rails, comparing vaccinations to “hate crimes.” Do you live in New Jersey? Find your legislators and call them Monday to let them know you support this bill.
  • The Washington Post‘s Dave Sheinen profiles fringe relief prospect Gabe Klobosits to talk about how the proposed cuts to minor league baseball might impact players at the margins of organized baseball. It’s a good piece, but I think it’s an anecdotal argument that doesn’t consider how many other players like Klobosits never pan out (and he hasn’t yet) and what the overall cost is to employ and develop those players, and additional coaches and staffers, in the hopes you’ll find one or two hidden big leaguers.
  • A disabled artist designed a hotel room that is deliberately difficult to stay in, trying to mimic the experience disabled people have in rooms designed solely for the non-disabled, for the Art B&B in Blackpool, England.
  • I do like my elite status when I get it, so this New Yorker piece on the madness of airline elite status hit rather close to home.
  • The Department of Agriculture listed Wakanda as a trade partner, trading ducks, donkeys, and dairy cows with the U.S., even though Wakanda is a fictional country. We have handed the keys to our government to the dumbest possible people.
  • China responded too slowly to a pig virus called African swine fever, leading to an epidemic and fears it will spread beyond China’s borders.
  • I’d never heard of Bolze, a French-German hybrid language spoken in a small town in the canton of Fribourg, before finding this BBC Travel post about the language and its associated culture.
  • The Anti-Defamation League now lists the ‘ok’ hand gesture as a symbol of hate, depending on context, of course.
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→ December 17, 2019
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Booksmart.

I wanted to like Booksmart, now streaming on Hulu, and the first twenty minutes were so promising … but I don’t think it lives up to its opening, and while there are some clever running gags and a few good quips, in the end it’s another teen movie that’s just a shade smarter than some of the films it rips off. (You can also rent it on amazon or iTunes.)

Molly (Beanie Feldstein) and Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) are best friends and massive overachievers who’ve spent their high school years studying and doing all the things you’re supposed to do to get into a good college, but never doing anything fun, only to discover that a bunch of their classmates who have partied their way through high school have also gotten into elite schools. Molly’s the Class President and has a crush on her Vice-President, Nick, who appears to be a dimwit but, of course, isn’t. Amy has been out for two years, but has never kissed a girl, and has a crush on a classmate, Ryan, although she doesn’t know if Ryan is into girls. The night before graduation, they decide to go to a huge party at Nick’s aunt’s house, and spend about the half the movie trying to figure out where the party is and then trying to get there. Once they do arrive, they go after their respective crushes, only to have things not go as planned (obviously) and then something else works out for each of them instead.

There’s a lot of promise in this premise, and the two leads are both quite good. Feldstein is wonderfully annoying throughout the movie, and handles the transitions well from earnest to flailing to, at one point, shockingly rude to her closest friend in a way that makes the character feel entirely coherent and three-dimensional. Dever has somewhat less to do until they get to the party, and even then plays an unfortunate second fiddle to Feldstein until she has her unexpected tryst and can be the main character on the screen without her co-star. Billie Lourd is hilarious as Gigi, a prominent side character with the best running joke in the film, and some of the other kids are effective in narrow roles, although half of the actors are in their mid-20s already and look it. There are a couple of gay kids in their class played by Noah Galvin and Austin Crute who play both their characters as if they’re acting in a play within the movie, and most of their scenes are well-written and funny in an absurd way. (I’d watch a movie that starred just those two.) In fact, just about all of the actors playing the students are good at what they’re asked to do – in contrast to the adults in the movie, most of whom look out of place or uncomfortable, and all of whom are poorly written.

The story is nothing you haven’t seen before, unfortunately. A couple of kids want to have fun/drink too much/get laid before they go to college, and have a hard time doing any of these things correctly at first, only to get to the big party and have things go wrong before they go right. There’s some witty banter early in the film, but the script can’t keep up the pace, and things start getting progressively weirder as the film progresses. Their principal (Jason Sudeikis) moonlights as an Uber driver, and the situation gets kind of creepy. Another of their teachers has serious boundary problems, leading to a seriously cringey movement at the party. Amy’s big moment is sort of marred by a bad writing decision at the end of the scene that was unnecessary. One of the girls ends up in jail – seriously, the entire plot is ripped from Can’t Hardly Wait, which isn’t a good enough movie to rip off in the first place – and the way they get her out is a ridiculous plot contrivance. And how are they totally unable to figure out where Nick’s aunt lives in an era where most addresses are listed online and everyone has the internet on their phones? Oh, in the span of a few seconds one of the girls loses her phone and the other’s runs out of charge, because of course it does. These characters deserved a smarter story, right up to the resolution.

It was just too easy a movie to pick apart. Very little of it seemed realistic, and the script couldn’t maintain all the energy from the first few scenes – especially the one scene in a classroom, where the one-liners are flying back and forth and the kids all show their most interesting sides. This movie took in around $22 million at the box office, beating its budget comfortably but spurring a weird social media campaign, led by director Olivia Wilde, that made it seem like the movie was a flop. The better explanation is that the movie didn’t find a big audience because the script wasn’t good enough. Feldstein and Dever did their parts, but this is a forgettable entry in the sad tradition of mediocre teen comedies.

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→ December 10, 2019
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Marriage Story.

Noah Baumback’s Marriage Story, now streaming on Netflix, landed six nominations yesterday for the Golden Globe Awards for Male Filmmakers, including Best Motion Picture and Best Screenplay, although it didn’t get a nod for Best Director. It’s a bit puzzling given how weak the film is in most aspects, with thinly-drawn characters, a story that actually isn’t all that interesting, and a stunning lack of self-awareness about how one-percenty this story is.

This isn’t a marriage story, but a divorce story. Charlie (Adam Driver, nominated for Best Actor) and Nicole (Scarlett Johanssen, also nominated) are splitting up, although she’s the more adamant of the two and eventually is the one who takes the firm steps to move from separation to divorce. He’s a somewhat successful playwright in New York and she is his muse and lead actress, but when she gets a part on a pilot in LA, she leaves and takes their eight-year-old son with her, which Charlie seems to think is temporary but Nicole intends to be permanent. Their trouble communicating, highlighted in the first of many caricatures with their incompetent mediator (who is playing couples counselor, not like an actual mediator), eventually leads Nicole to hire a strong attorney (Laura Dern, nominated for Best Supporting Actress and deserving) and to surprise Adam with divorce papers, after which the process becomes more contentious and further details of their marriage start to spill out.

The entire story is smug from start to finish, full of knowing nods to life in New York and LA. (Really, the tea and biscotti sequence was so cringeworthy.) There’s a lot of arguing about how they don’t really have any assets to divide, even though these are two hilariously privileged people. Nicole refers to Charlie as a narcissist and she’s not entirely wrong; for most of the movie, really up until he realizes that he might lose custody entirely, he’s wrapped up in himself, and comes off that way in Nicole’s retelling of their marriage and courtship, then again near the end when he’s telling his actors about mundane details of divorced life. I could have done without Driver’s weird karaoke thing towards the finish as well. What might have been interesting about their dying relationship is how the two of them are unable to hear each other, especially Charlie’s inability or unwillingness to hear Nicole and see her as an equal with agency and goals beyond his, but the script barely explores that at all, and eventually careens into two big arguments, one on the phone that introduces an element to the divorce that makes you turn completely on Charlie (with reason), and then a blowout argument in his apartment that rather confirms that he’s an asshole and ends in utterly unbelievable fashion.

Most of the side characters are painfully one-dimensional, starting with Henry, who is supposed to be 8 years old but still sits in a car seat meant for much younger kids, who whines like a younger kid, who doesn’t want to eat any food that touched the “green thing.” Baumbach wrote him like a kindergartener, and he’s played like one, which makes him kind of insufferable – just like nearly every other side character. Nicole’s mother is an atrocious character played with a nails-on-the-chalkboard childlike voice by Julie Hagerty. The expert who comes to observe Henry at his parents’ houses is impossibly mousy and humorless. The lawyers are better developed than the family members across the board, and I suppose if this were Lawyer Story that would make sense. 

Why do critics seem to love this movie? Do they see something of their own lives in it? It is anchored by a great performance by Johanssen, a solid one by driver, and some strong supporting turns by Dern, Alan Alda (just wonderful in a small role as an avuncular attorney Charlie hires), and Ray Liotta (looking roided up as a bulldog attorney Charlie consults), but Baumbach forgot to finish drawing everything around them – the other characters, the depth their back story required, or some of the realism around their conflicts after she’s served him with papers. Even the one revelation about Charlie, which of course happens all the time in actual marriages, ends up derailing the story in a way because he goes from maybe-the-bad-guy to definitely-the-bad-guy, rather than advancing the actual marriage story – and it gives us another scene with a one-dimensional side character that tries to be funny but doesn’t work either. I don’t get any of this, even though you might think that I’d be right in this film’s demographic. It feels like the story of a marriage and divorce written by someone who’s never gone through either.

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