→ April 27, 2023
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Living.

Living was the last English-language Oscar nominee on my list of movies to see, since I’m not interested in seeing Avatar and the only other nominees of note I haven’t seen are three of the International Feature picks. Scoring nominations this year for Best Actor (for Bill Nighy, his first) and Best Adapted Screenplay (for Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro), this adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s famed Ikiru is a quiet gem of a film, with a tour de force performance from its star and some lovely dialogue supporting him. It’s available to rent on amazon, iTunes, etc. (Full disclosure: I have never seen Ikiru.)

Nighy plays Mr. Williams, a widower and an aging bureaucrat in in the London County Council in the 1950s whose job seems to consist primarily of pushing paper around, especially when it can be pushed to another department on another floor. He never declines a request, merely passing the buck (or quid, I suppose) to someone else. His staff includes the young Miss Harris (Aimee Lee Wood), the lone woman in the group; the eager, brand-new employee Mr. Wakeling (Alex Sharp); and a few other replacement-level men who show no desire whatsoever to challenge the existing system.

This is all upended when Mr. Williams receives a terminal cancer diagnosis, with just months left to live, and finds himself terribly dissatisfied with his life. His son and daughter-in-law show little interest in him as a person, and he doesn’t seem to have any friends. He has no legacy to leave, no one who will truly miss him, so after vanishing from work for several days, he decides to take on one particular project that has been presented to his department and kicked around the building that he can see to fruition: turning a bombed-out building into a playground. His attempts to live a little also bring Miss Harris into the picture, as he takes her to lunch once or twice, and to a film, in an entirely chaste relationship that she can’t understand and that his daughter-in-law, with help from the neighborhood gossip, assumes is something more prurient. The film jumps ahead around the midpoint to show his funeral, after which we see flashbacks to the last few months of his life and the way his family and co-workers respond to his death. Their words and their behavior don’t exactly line up, although this might be the most authentic part of the entire script.

This is Bill Nighy’s film. I’ve always enjoyed his work, and argue just about every year that his story is the only remotely acceptable one in Love Actually, in large part because he treats the film with the reverence it deserves – none. He was outstanding in the British mini-series State of Play, and even charming in the ridiculous The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. This is the role of a lifetime, and he gives a performance to match it. His Mr. Williams is restrained, so constipated in speech that he’s hard to understand, but it makes the moments of actual emotion so much more powerful, even though he’s still actually kind of hard to understand. (Turn the volume up. Just a tip.) Nighy is often at his best in patrician roles, even though that’s not his upbringing, but here he gets a more consequential role in which to deploy that high-born air.

The script takes its time hitting its points, which appear to mirror those of the original film (based, I admit, on my reading of the latter’s Wikipedia entry), including a long, slow buildup to the doctor’s visit that defines the whole movie. That works because the dialogue is so precise – every word seems placed there for a specific purpose, especially those that come out of the mouth of Mr. Williams, yet these words never come across as forced, or out of character. Ishiguro is one of the greatest living prose writers, yet even across his novels, his voice changes to suit the style and genre of the work. Living is his work without sounding like his work, and the result is that Mr. Williams’ grief and revelations and enthusiasm for his one last project come through as genuine.

Nighy became an Oscar nominee at age 72, which Collider says puts him in the top ten for oldest such first-timers, forty-two years after his first credited film role. This is too un-showy of a role to win the honor – I’m surprised he even got the nomination, given how quiet and unpretentious he is as Mr. Williams – but he was certainly better than the fat-suit guy and the Elvis impersonator. Aimee Lee Wood, who is one of the stars of Sex Education, also gives a lovely turn in a smaller role as Miss Harris, serving as the unwitting confidante and comforter to Mr. Williams, while Alex Sharp, who bears more than a small resemblance to Matthew Murphy of the Wombats, is perfect as the wide-eyed innocent who hasn’t yet been ground down by the do-nothing mentality of the office. I’m not sorry to see Ishiguro lose out to Sarah Polley for her adapted screenplay of Women Talking, but both were quite deserving.

For those who are still curious about such things, I’ve got this in my revised top ten for 2022, at #9, just behind Tár and ahead of La Caja and Nope. I still have to see EO, Close, The Quiet Girl, and Return to Seoul, all of which are at least now out as rentals.

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→ April 13, 2023
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The Whale.

I don’t know what The Whale was like on stage, but Darren Aronovsky’s adaptation, which took two Oscars home last month, is excruciating on so many levels that even a strong performance from Brendan Fraser can’t salvage it. When the main character’s daughter screams at her father “Just fucking die already!” she could be speaking for all of us, because at that point there’s still nearly 40 minutes of misery porn to go. It’s manipulative, sermonizing claptrap, and I can’t believe no one saw this film before its release and saw how bad and offensive it was.

Fraser plays Charlie, a morbidly obese man who lives by teaching English and writing classes online while keeping his camera off. His eating disorder is his reaction to the trauma of the death of someone close to him, the details of which are revealed in bits over the course of the movie. The entire film takes place in or just outside of his apartment, where he’s visited by a young missionary named Thomas; Charlie’s nurse and friend Liz; Charlie’s estranged daughter Ellie, whom he hasn’t seen in nine years; and Charlie’s ex-wife Mary. As you might expect from a movie adapted from a play, the dialogue between all of these characters exposes their back stories and gives Charlie some modest depth. We discover why that particular death has sent Charlie into what is essentially suicide by binge-eating, why he and Ellie haven’t seen each other in so long, why his friendship with Liz is both profound and complicated, and some inspirational-poster advice about writing honestly.

What we don’t get, unfortunately, is any real insight into Charlie, or what it means to be capital-f Fat. Charlie’s obesity is handwaved away as the product of trauma, which is facile enough but could work in the service of a better story. Instead, the movie spends too much time pushing that angle while tying it to religion, homophobia, and a fairly naïve interpretation of both grief and eating disorders. This isn’t new, and it isn’t interesting, and if you don’t have either I’m not sure why you make this movie.

Charlie is the only remotely interesting character in the movie, which is important since he’s in almost every minute of it. (I think there are two conversations that do not involve him and take place in a different space.) Even so, there’s little exploration of who he is other than that he’s very sorry. The film isn’t laughing at Charlie, or inviting us to do so; it’s telling us to gawk at him, condescend to him, and maybe, if we’re feeling charitable, pity him. He’s pathetic, a mess, a slob, apologizing to everyone for merely existing. He’s not a bad person because he’s fat; he’s not a bad person, but he’s fat, and that is supposed to make us think less of him. Rather than spend more of the dialogue showing us who he is under all that excess weight, it embarrasses us by embarrassing him: Liz saying “beep beep” when he’s backing up, when he chokes doing routine things like eating or nearly dies laughing or masturbating (a scene the movie really, really did not need), it’s all just fat-shaming of a different sort. You can extrapolate from what we learn to see Charlie is probably an interesting person, an intellectual who loves words, whether in prose or poetry, and who has a lot more empathy for other people than they do for him. I wouldn’t mind getting to know him. The Whale won’t let us.

The ending is a huge tearjerker, ruining one of the very few real emotional moments in the entire movie with an excess of gimmickry and artifice. It got me, even though I know better, because it’s just so manipulative, especially given everything that came before. The Whale hasn’t earned the right to make the audience feel this way.

Fraser is the only saving grace in the film, and while he wouldn’t have been my pick (Colin Farrell and Paul Mescal were slightly ahead for me), he’s worthy of the various Best Actor accolades he received. If he hadn’t been good this might have been the worst movie of 2022. He manages to get somut e range of emotions into the character, and when he’s hurt, ashamed, embarrassed, and so very often sorry, you feel it, probably the only honest emotions that come out of this film. Hong Chau was also nominated for an Oscar, as Best Supporting Actress, but she’s very flat in this movie and often comes across as whiny; she was better in The Menu with a character who was only slightly more multi-dimensional. Sadie Sink gives the second-best performance as Ellie, but it’s an extremely one-note character who might as well be from Flatland. (Fun note: In a flashback scene, Sink’s sister Jacey plays a younger Ellie.) Adrien Morot, Judy Chin, and Annemarie Bradley won the Oscar for Best Makeup and Hairstyling, and I think they were the most deserving of the nominees, although I can see the argument that this was all about a single character rather than an entire cast. The transformation of Fraser into a 600-pound man is completely believable.

Lindy West (of Shrill) eviscerated this movie and its ridiculous view of fat people better than I ever could. I’ll just leave it that this movie was awful, and while I’m very happy for Fraser and love the stories of actors who go from acting in bad mainstream movies to turning in Oscar- or Emmy-worthy performances (Michael Keaton being the best example), he’s not reason enough to suffer through The Whale. I’m too much of a completist to skip it, but you should feel no compulsion to join me.

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→ April 10, 2023
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Holy Spider.

In 2000-01, a seemingly ordinary man in the Iranian holy city of Mashhad began killing sex workers, claiming he was doing his religious duty to “cleanse” the streets of “corrupt women,” with 16 victims before he was caught and executed. Holy Spider takes the story of Saeed Hanaei, a builder, Iran-Iraq war veteran, husband, and father of three who was also a serial killer, and retells it via a fictional journalist character, Arezoo Rahimi, who comes to Mashhad to write about the killings, only to find the authorities disinterested in solving it because they tacitly support what he’s doing. (It’s on Netflix, or you can rent it on Amazon, iTunes, etc..)

Holy Spider is entirely in Farsi, and was Denmark’s submission for this past year’s Academy Award for Best International Film, as the Iranian filmmaker, Ali Abbasi, lives in Copenhagen. Much of what happens with Hanaei is drawn from reality – he lured sex workers, many of whom were drug addicts as well, back to his apartment, gave them a little money, and then would strangle them with their own headscarves. The Iranian press at the time nicknamed him the “Spider Killer,” and some even questioned whether his murders were even a crime, given the victims; wasn’t Hanaei just cleaning up the streets?

Rahimi arrives in Mashhad and immediately finds that the men are being … well, men. The best among them, such as the local reporter whom Hanaei calls sometimes to tell him where he left his latest victim’s body, is benevolently sexist towards her, trying to deter her from investigating the killings at all and constantly telling her not to go to certain areas or run down certain leads because it’s all so dangerous for a lady person. Others interfere more directly, or lie to her, or threaten her, or in one case assault her. As Hanaei keeps killing and the police seem to do nothing, Rahimi begins to investigate more directly, putting herself in Hanaei’s sights, but also creating the best chance for the police to catch him.

Holy Spider tries to be both a thriller and an exploration of cultural misogyny, but isn’t quite deft enough to do both, so once the thriller part is largely resolved with Hanaei’s arrest, the film finally gets to be one thing, and does it well. There’s no real mystery to Holy Spider – even if you didn’t know the original story, the first thing we see is Hanaei committing one of the murders. The film gains some tension from the knowledge that the longer it takes for anyone to figure out what’s going on, the more women will die, and from the unspoken conflict between Rahimi and pretty much everyone she encounters as she tries to cover the story or find the killer herself. Once he’s arrested, after the film’s most intense scene, the focus can be entirely on the way Iranian society, from the police and the religious authorities down to the people they’ve indoctrinated, devalues women. Hanaei even becomes a sort of folk hero to some Iranians. One victim had a child; another was pregnant when killed. Rahimi and her reporter ally even interview one victim’s parents, only to find the mother say she’s glad her daughter is dead rather than still engaging in sex work and using opiates. A woman’s life is simply not worth as much as a man’s to this society. Or this one, for that matter.

The unevenness of Holy Spider crosses into some of the direction and editing as well. The film lingers too long on the murders, coming across as lurid rather than shocking – it does nothing to humanize the victims, each of whom gets a sliver of a character before their on-screen deaths. Focusing on his face during a killing ends up giving him more screen time than the character deserves, time that could have gone to exploring more about the women he was murdering. The ending, after Saeed’s execution, is also very on-the-nose and could have gotten its point, that Saeed’s internalized misogyny and religious zealotry are cultural phenomena rather than just his individual madness, across in less than half the time.

Holy Spider still works, with flaws. It’s buoyed by a great lead performance by the exiled Iranian actress Zahra Amir Ebrahimi (profiled here last fall), who lost her career to the entrenched misogyny of Iranian society; and a strong supporting performance by Mehdi Bajestani as Saeed. Ebrahimi’s performance successfully threads the needle between making Rahimi seem to weak and making her seem implausibly strong or confident; an early scene, where she’s checking into a hotel and they try to turn her away because she’s a woman traveling alone, establishes her toughness while also setting the scene for the various indignities to come. Had the film chosen just to focus on her character, even though she’s entirely fictional, it might have been even stronger in the end.

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→ March 21, 2023
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Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.

Black Panther was a tremendous action movie, a smart film with an incredible cast, an interesting concept and solid story, and brought some great action sequences that helped the film survive a story that didn’t quite hold together in its final third. The loss of its star and the actor who played the title character, Chadwick Boseman, meant that the long-awaited sequel Black Panther: Wakanda Forever was hemmed in by real-world events and would have to start its story with something acknowledging Boseman’s death.

That’s part of why Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is so long, running over two and a half hours, but for a script that was forced on some level to hit certain points, it’s smart, empathetic, and more interesting start to finish than its predecessor. It’s the action that lets this film down, not the story, as there’s something almost perfunctory about the battle sequences, both large and small. And the film doesn’t need a lot of that fighting anyway – it’s smarter and more thoughtful than a film that just resolves everything by having characters throw each other off buildings or boats.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever opens with T’Challa dying off screen as Shuri (Letitia Wright) moves frantically to try to find a cure, only to have their mother Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett) arrive to inform her daughter of T’Challa’s death. This leads to a brief but solemn sequence to open the film as we see the community mourn and get glimpses of the Wakandan funeral rites, which are interspersed with scenes from the outside world, where other nations are demanding access to vibranium, with one country going so far as to stage a raid on Wakanda to try to steal some. An incident aboard a mining ship that was searching for an underwater source of vibranium in the south Atlantic exposes the existence of a suboceanic culture, Talokan, that also has access to the powerful metal. A young scientist named Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne) – whom Marvel Comics fan know as Ironheart – designed the ship’s vibranium detector, putting her life in danger and setting up a conflict between Wakanda and Talokan over her fate and their relations with the rest of the world.

The reveal of Talokan and a sort of diplomatic mission to the underwater kingdom allows screenwriters Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole to engage in more of the world-building that was so mesmerizing in the first Black Panther film. There’s an extended flashback that explains the origins of Talokan and how their king Namor (Tenoch Huerta Mejía) has been in power for centuries, tying them back to a Mesoamerican tribe that was threatened by white slavers and the smallpox viruses they brought to the region. Namor is the only Talokanil character we get to know, unfortunately, although the stage is set for more such characters to appear in a future movie.

There’s also further development of the Wakandan culture on screen through the death of T’Challa and a further character death partway through the film, as well as more exploration of some of the core characters from the initial movie, notably Shuri and Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o). Nakia has left Wakanda and her post in California where she was about to work at the end of the first film, a decision that the film explains in pieces right through the end credits. There’s a little more exploration of Okoye (Danai Gurira) and M’Baku (Winston Duke), but I would have loved to see more with both of those characters, as well as the new Dora Milaje fighter Aneka (Emmy winner Michaela Coel of I May Destroy You). Instead of getting more time with them, we get a couple of pointless bits with Everett Ross (Martin Freeman) and his boss/ex-wife Val de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss), which are throwaway scenes that don’t advance the plot and are painfully unfunny.

Indeed, there’s a lot of humor in this film, and it often feels organic as different pairs of characters are thrown together – nearly always women, by the way, because this is very, very much a film about the women of Wakanda. Serious conversations turn light with a bit of unexpected banter, and the actresses deliver it seamlessly in ways that also make the relationships between them more credible.

Eventually, two things have to happen in this movie beyond the acknowledgement and grieving that open the story. One is that we need someone else to become the new Black Panther, and the other is that that character and Namor have to fight, probably within a larger battle between Wakanda and Talokan. The former worked for me – I thought it was one of the two obvious choices, and I thought the way the script handled it was smart and insightful, especially when that character takes the herb and travels to the ancestral plane. There’s a shorter story arc there that brings that character through to the film’s (first) conclusion that is effective if a little facile and sets us up well for at least one more movie in this series. The second part, the huge battle that mostly wraps up the film, had the problem I have with most Marvel movies I’ve seen – the fighting is mostly ridiculous, because one or more characters are all but invincible, people on the screen are doing all sorts of absurd things, and people are thrown great distances into hard objects without anything worse happening than getting the wind knocked out of them. It’s good that the ultimate solution in this movie isn’t just one character beating the hell out of another, but there’s a lot of that between A and B that didn’t help the plot and that just wasn’t as exciting as the action stuff from the first movie.

As for Angela Bassett and her Oscar nomination, I think she was clearly better than Jamie Lee Curtis, who won the award for Everything Everywhere All At Once, but I would have voted for Kerry Condon (The Banshees of Inisherin) or Stephanie Hsu instead of Bassett, who isn’t in the movie all that much and whose character is not that complex here. She is regal, but it’s a bit of the Judi Dench thing – is it enough to just be the queen, even if you’re not on screen and don’t have a lot of work to do to build out the character? (Yes, I know Dench won, but that will be a controversial win forever.) The most award-worthy performance in this film, for me, was Wright’s, as she has way more to do to develop and fill out her character, who went from a fun sidekick in the first movie to the closest thing this film has to a lead. This film leans on her almost as much as the first leaned on Boseman.

Is Black Panther: Wakanda Forever better than the original Black Panther? Yes … and no. It’s less fun and ebullient. It misses Boseman in many ways. The action sequences don’t work that well and there’s too much CGI in them. But there’s also a better story here, some really interesting and worthwhile character development, and more meaning in its story and conclusion. It almost demands a third movie in the franchise, beyond the Ironheart TV series that’s coming soon (with Thorne in the title role), that goes further with the women who now lead Wakanda in almost every way. It may not be what everyone involved intended for the franchise when it first starter, but Black Panther: Wakanda Forever has the series in a good place.

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→ March 17, 2023
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RRR.

RRR was a worldwide sensation last year, the biggest crossover in Tollywood history and now the third-highest grossing film to ever come from India. If you haven’t seen it, you probably know the Oscar-winning song “Naatu Naatu” from its viral dance sequence, which is certainly the highlight of the film. It’s a whole lot of movie, running three hours and bouncing across genres, including action, bromance, musical, and more, much of which doesn’t work, but at its heart it’s a revisionist revenge fantasy (like Django Unchained or Inglourious Basterds) that tries to have fun, and that’s when it works the best. (It’s streaming on Netflix.)

The core plot of RRR is pretty simple – an English colonial governor visits a Gondi village with his wife, and she takes a shine to a girl of about eight or nine, so she and her husband kidnap the kid, paying a few coins to the mother as compensation. Eventually, we meet Bheem (Tarak, also credited as NT Rama Rao Jr.), the tribe’s guardian, who swears to get the girl back, posing as a Muslim man in Delhi to try to infiltrate the governor’s house. Meanwhile, Raju (Ram Charan) is a soldier in the Raj’s employ who shows incredible courage and fighting skills, even against his own people, and is tasked with finding Bheem before he can pose a danger to the governor. Raju and Bheem meet without knowing the other’s identity and become best friends, but we know this can’t last and the two find themselves in conflict multiple times during the film before coming together near the conclusion. Everything else is ornamentation – this is a bromance driven by the kidnapping and rescue plot.

RRR is extremely entertaining, especially given its length (although it could have been a half hour shorter, if not more), but you have to accept it on its own terms. The action sequences are hilariously over the top, and these two men should be dead fifty times over by the time it ends – it’s like a Marvel movie in that way. Raju is impaled on a tree branch at one point, both men are stabbed more than once, both are bludgeoned, Bheem is severely flogged, and both go flying through the air high enough to break a few ribs at the last on impact. This is just how RRR rolls, and I laughed along with the absurdity of it. There’s even a bit of the horror-movie gambit where you are invited to enjoy a good kill here and there, usually when the victim is a colonial soldier or authority figure who’s been openly racist earlier in the film, and I have to admit a couple of those even worked for me. (When Edward finally gets what’s coming to him, it’s extremely well done – the reveal there is quite clever.)

That suspension of disbelief starts to crumble outside of the action sequences. I have no issue with the film’s depiction of almost every English person (save one) as a moronic asshole, given the Crown’s racist and repressive policies towards people who had existed without the white man’s help for millennia, but it does function as a plot convenience too often – it’s less fun to see your heroes outwit a group of simpering idiots than to see them defeat more worthy foes. There are smaller details that also seem unnecessary, such as when one of the heroes is held in solitary confinement and nearly starved, but somehow manages to exercise and become more muscular in the process. I understand the desire to turn these two into supermen, but this feels like an LCD Soundsystem album, where every song with a good hook goes on twice as long as it needs to.

There’s an extended flashback in the middle of the film that explains Raju’s character and arc at great length, a conceit that Amsterdam used and that tanked that film’s story. It’s more effective here, and far more necessary, but again goes on way too long, and the way the story jumps to the past, back to the present, and then a good while later returns to that flashback to finish the story is sloppy. That could have been much tighter while still providing the essential back story.

The two lead actors are pretty great, though – both can command the screen when they’re on it, both exude charisma, and the way they work together on screen whether their characters are friends are foes is the movie’s strongest asset. I’d watch a whole series of movies where these two solve crimes or take out petty English tyrants, especially with a well-choreographed dance number or two. Both men are already stars in India, and I can see why. There isn’t much room for anyone else, although it’s worth mentioning that the governor’s wife is played by Irish actress Alison Doody, who played the villainous Elsa Schneider in the third Indiana Jones film.

RRR won one Oscar this past week for “Naatu Naatu,” although the performance during the awards ceremony didn’t include any actual South Asian dancers, which seems like an unforced error for the Academy. India submitted another movie for the Best International Feature Film honor, The Last Film Show, a movie about how great the movies are, which meant RRR was ineligible for that award. I know many critics and fans felt that RRR deserved a Best Picture nomination, but I can’t get over that line. This is a fun movie, and an entertaining one, but I don’t think it passes that higher level of scrutiny – it’s sprawling and disorganized, often ridiculous, and engages in a lot of trickery to make the plot work. I still ranked it higher on my own list than than All Quiet on the Western Front, Elvis, or Triangle of Sadness, but I can name ten other films I would have put in the BP category over this.

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→ March 12, 2023
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Top ten movies of 2022.

I’ve tried to publish some sort of ranking of films in each of the past few years, either on its own or folded into another post, usually tying it to the Oscars or to seeing some specific film that I thought I had to see to make the list more or less complete. This year, I still have too many acclaimed 2022 films left to see to keep putting this off – Living, EO, The Quiet Girl, Saint Omer, and Return to Seoul among them – so I’m just calling it today, and if I see something later that belongs in this top ten, I’ll add a note here at that point.

10. Nope. Jordan Peele’s third feature as writer-director wasn’t quite as good as his debut, Get Out, but also shows that he’s deft at more than just horror, and that his thematic range is much broader than that first film (or the second, Us, based on what I’ve read) implied. Two siblings run a ranch where they train horses for use in films, but a mysterious presence in the sky is spooking their horses and raining down metal objects without warning. As in Get Out, we learn in stages along with Daniel Kaluuya’s main character, with several surprises, a clever dose of humor, and this time some incredible special effects as well.

9. La Caja. Venezuela’s entry for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film is, unfortunately, only available on MUBI, which is how I saw it, but which also seems like it might bury its chances of finding any sort of audience. It follows a young boy who goes to Mexico to claim his father’s remains, only to spot a man he believes to be his father walking around in the same town where he supposedly died. It’s small, but powerful, addressing themes of immigration, economic inequality, and the exploitation of workers.

8. Tár. I was completely on this film’s wavelength until the last twenty minutes or so, when the main character, Cate Blanchett’s Lydia Tár, experiences her fall from grace, and it’s no longer clear if everything we see is real. She’s a world-famous conductor of classical music, an impossible celebrity in our era, and extremely used to getting whatever she wants, without consequences for her actions. The majority of the film is such a perfectly slow burn that it’s frustrating when the pace gets faster for the final portion, but what comes before is a remarkable work of writing and direction from Todd Field, as well as yet another masterful performance from Blanchett.

7. The Menu. “Rich people are terrible” was a big theme in movies this year, but unlike some of the others, The Menu gets the tone right with its extremely dark comedy that also skewers modern food culture and features an excellent ensemble cast led by Ralph Fiennes and Anya Taylor-Joy. A group of mostly unlikeable people head to a restaurant on an island for a prix fixe dinner that costs $1250 a person, only to find the celebrity chef’s behavior increasingly disturbing until something big happens that makes it clear this is no ordinary meal. It’s funny, and strange, and gives the viewers more to chew on than the diners get.

6. Broker. Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 2018 film Shoplifters was one of my top 3 films of that year, and this movie, starring Parasite’s Song Kang-ho, has a lot in common with the earlier film, as both revolve around a group of people who form a makeshift family after they find the world has cast them aside. Broker focuses on two men who steal abandoned babies from a ‘baby box’ at their church to sell them on the black market to parents desperate to adopt, but this plan goes awry when one of the mothers comes back the next day, learning about their illicit business and demanding to come along with them as they try to find adoptive parents. It doesn’t quite pack the same punch as Shoplifters, but it’s still lovely in its own way, and the story gives it more of the edge of a thriller.

5. The Eternal Daughter. I wasn’t a huge fan of Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir, and didn’t see The Souvenir Part Two, but this sort-of sequel is a knockout, featuring Tilda Swinton … and Tilda Swinton, as she plays two characters, the main character from The Souvenir films (played by Honor Swinton-Byrne, Tilda’s daughter) and her mother (played by Swinton in the first two films). They travel to the mother’s childhood home, now a creepy bed and breakfast in north Wales, as the daughter tries to learn about her mother’s life to make a film about her and hold on to these memories before her mother is gone. I know Swinton can be a polarizing actress, but this is her at her absolute best.

4. Aftersun. Charlotte Wells’ feature debut about an 11-year-old girl taking a trip to Turkey with her father, who is divorced from her mother and not very present in his daughter’s life, packs a huge emotional punch by doing very little – the camera observes, as we are watching the daughter’s memories from some point later in her life, and we are left to decide what might really have happened. It’s a heartbreaking look at how hard it is for us to understand our parents, especially through the lens of childhood memories, and features two standout performances from Paul Mescal (nominated for Best Actor) and first-time actor Frankie Corio.

3. Decision to Leave. The most ridiculous snub of the year at this year’s Oscars was the omission of Decision to Leave from the Best International Feature Film category – it made the 15-film shortlist, and it was miles better than the two eventual nominees I’ve seen. Director Park Chan-wook’s first film since 2016’s The Handmaiden follows a depressed detective in Busan as he tries to determine whether the death of an immigration officer who fell from a mountain he climbed frequently was an accident or an almost-perfect murder at the hands of his wife. The detective becomes obsessed with the case and the young widow, which sets off a series of events that can only end badly for at least one of them. It’s a masterful plot that eschews easy answers, anchored by two strong lead performances by Park Hae-il as the detective and Tang Wei as the widow/murder suspect.

2. The Banshees of Inisherin. Colin Farrell’s Pádraic and Brendan Gleeson’s Colm are best friends and drinking buddies, but one day, Colm says he doesn’t want to drink with Pádraic any more … or even talk to him, which drives Pádraic, who doesn’t have much going on in his life and lives with his sister (Kerry Condon), to increasingly desperate measures to which Colm responds in turn. This latest film from Martin McDonagh reunites the stars of his In Bruges in a film that is by turns comic and tragic, standing as a parable for the Irish Civil War while also serving as a meditation on male friendship. All four of the film’s most prominent actors, including Barry Keoghan, deserved and earned Oscar nominations, and the dialogue in this film is spectacular.

1. Everything Everywhere All At Once. My favorite film of the year, which isn’t to say it’s the best film of the year except that I think it is. It’s a madcap trip through the many-worlds hypothesis that ends up a poignant and insightful story about parenthood, self-sacrifice, the hopes and dreams we have for our kids that we didn’t fulfill for ourselves, the immigrant experience, and more. It’s also funny, exciting, and laced with cultural references that were right in my wheelhouse. Ke Huy Quan deserves all of the praise and accolades he’s receiving, while Michelle Yeoh gets her best role at least since Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I want to watch it again and again, but I also know it’ll never quite hit the same way as the first viewing, where all of that madness turned out to be something magical.

If you’re curious, 11 through 15 on my list right now are Glass Onion, The Wonder, The Fabelmans, After Yang, and Women Talking. My favorite animated film of 2022 was The Sea Beast, on Netflix, and my favorite documentary was probably The Janes, which made the Oscars shortlist but not the final five.

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→ March 12, 2023
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Oscars preview, 2023 edition.

Here we go, my annual Oscars preview with links to every movie I’ve reviewed on this site. Throw your predictions, disagreements, snubs, and more in the comments.

Best Picture

All Quiet on the Western Front
Avatar: The Way of Water
The Banshees of Inisherin
Elvis
Everything Everywhere All At Once
The Fabelmans
Tár
Top Gun: Maverick
Triangle of Sadness
Women Talking

What will win: Everything Everywhere All At Once

What should win: Everything Everywhere All At Once

What was snubbed: Decision to Leave, Aftersun, The Eternal Daughter

I know there’s a wide chasm between folks who think EEAAO should win, like I do, and those who think it will be at best a below-median Best Picture winner, but I’m comfortable with my take. Not only do I think the film works extremely well, but it’s also tried to do the most – it’s an extremely ambitious movie on multiple levels, and succeeds at all of them. There should be a level of difficulty adjustment when considering movies for this honor. My second choice would be The Banshees of Inisherin, while Elvis would be the biggest travesty, although I haven’t seen Avatar.

Best Actor

Austin Butler, Elvis
Colin Farrell, The Banshees of Inisherin
Brendan Fraser, The Whale
Paul Mescal, Aftersun
Bill Nighy, Living

Who will win: Fraser

Who should win: (pass)

Who was snubbed: Park Hae-il, Decision to Leave; Song Kang-ho, Broker

I haven’t seen The Whale or Living, since even people who praise Fraser’s performance don’t say kind things about the movie, and I’m not paying $20 to stream a bad film at home, even to hate-watch it. Mescal and Farrell were both incredible in their roles and weren’t doing an extended impersonation, like Butler did, but it seems like neither has any chance to win.

Best Actress

Ana de Armas, Blonde
Cate Blanchett, Tár
Andrea Riseborough, To Leslie
Michelle Williams, The Fabelmans
Michelle Yeoh, Everything Everywhere All At Once

Who will win: Yeoh

Who should win: Blanchett

Who I really want to win: Yeoh

Who was snubbed: Tilda Swinton, The Eternal Daughter

Best Actress is the strongest category this year, although the nominations don’t adequately reflect how good a year it was for actresses in leading roles. De Armas was not good in a terrible role within an even worse movie, and Williams, while a very skilled actress, gave an affected performance that barely qualified as leading. I could name a half-dozen better performances than de Armas’s, and did in my Blonde review. Of the contenders, Riseborough had no shot even without the controversy, and I’d give Blanchett a slight edge over Yeoh, but Yeoh is the sentimental favorite for many reasons and Blanchett already has one of these things.

Best Supporting Actor

Brendan Gleeson, The Banshees of Inisherin
Brian Tyree Henry, Causeway
Judd Hirsch, The Fabelmans
Barry Keoghan, The Banshees of Inisherin
Ke Huy Quan, Everything Everywhere All At Once

Who will win: Quan

Who should win: Quan

Who was snubbed: Gabriel Labelle, The Fabelmans

I think this is the lock of the night, and I’m good with it, although Gleeson did give something close to a second lead performance in Banshees. Quan is another sentimental favorite, since EEAAO marks his return to acting after a twenty-year absence, but he’s absolutely essential to that movie and his character has the most range of any of the four main ones. Hirsch has the weakest case, since he’s on screen for less than ten minutes, and this seems like a way to honor an older actor at the end of his life rather than an argument that this was one of the five best performances by an actor in a supporting role in 2022. He’s very good in that small role, though.

Best Supporting Actress

Angela Bassett, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
Hong Chau, The Whale
Kerry Condon, The Banshees of Inisherin
Jamie Lee Curtis, Everything Everywhere All At Once
Stephanie Hsu, Everything Everywhere All At Once

Who will win: Bassett

Who should win: (pass)

Who was snubbed: Dolly de Leon, Triangle of Sadness

I’ve only seen Banshees and EEAAO, although I’ll get to Black Panther soon – I loved the first one, like most people, but that has made me disinclined to see the sequel, especially given its running time. (Seriously, enough with the three-hour movies. Hollywood needs a pitch clock.) I also haven’t seen The Whale, so I can’t say specifically that de Leon belonged over her, but de Leon was the only truly redeeming quality her film had. Chauwas great in the underrated The Menu, though.

Best Directing

Todd Field, Tár
Martin McDonagh, The Banshees of Inisherin
Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert, Everything Everywhere All At Once
Ruben Östlund, Triangle of Sadness
Steven Spielberg, The Fabelmans

Who will win: Spielberg

Who should win: No opinion

Who was snubbed: Park Chan-wook, Decision to Leave

This is my pick for the category where something wacky might happen. I could see any of these candidates winning, and while the betting lines have the Daniels as huge favorites, I’m not sure … is it not a serious enough movie? Is this the one place the voters honor Spielberg for making a movie about how great movies are? (They could do that with original screenplay, too.) Does that create a chance for one of the other three to sneak in? I don’t have a strong opinion on this award this year, despite seeing all five of the nominees; I would just say I don’t think Östlunddeserves it, because the movie itself isn’t very good, and the direction in the middle section is too weak.

Best Writing (Original Screenplay)

Todd Field, Tár
Martin McDonagh, The Banshees of Inisherin
Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert, Everything Everywhere All At Once
Ruben Östlund, Triangle of Sadness
Steven Spielberg, The Fabelmans

Who will win: The Daniels

Who should win: McDonagh

Who was snubbed: Jeong Seo-kyeong & Park Chan-wook, Decision to Leave; Charlotte Wells, Aftersun

I’ll point out that these are the same five nominees as the five for Directing, and none are women, again.

Best Writing (Adapted Screenplay)

Edward Berger, Lesley Paterson, and Ian Stokell, All Quiet on the Western Front
Kazuo Ishiguro, Living
Rian Johnson, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
Sarah Polley, Women Talking
A whole bunch of people, Top Gun: Maverick

Who will win: Ishiguro

Who should win: Polley*

I haven’t seen Living, so I qualify my opinion that Polley should win here with that caveat. Ishiguro is an actual Nobel Prize winner. I feel like that’s going to sway a lot of voters, even some who haven’t seen the movie. This would make him just the third person ever to win an Oscar and a Nobel Prize, along with Bob Dylan and George Bernard Shaw, both of whom won the same Nobel as Ishiguro (Literature). Maybe I’m way off base, but I try not to overestimate the Oscar electorate.

Best Animated Feature

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio
Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
Puss n Boots: The Last Wish
The Sea Beast
Turning Red

What will win: GDT’s Pinocchio

What should win: The Sea Beast

What was snubbed: My Father’s Dragon

I haven’t seen the latest Puss n Boots cash grab, and I doubt I will. Pinocchio looked amazing but the songs weren’t good and the story itself felt wooden (yes, pun intended). I watched The Sea Beast last night on a flight home and was pleasantly surprised by many aspects of the story, while the animation was excellent. My Father’s Dragon is the latest film from Cartoon Saloon (Wolfwalkers) and I can’t recommend it enough if you enjoy animation. I have Inu-Oh downloaded on my iPad right now to watch on a future flight, after it earned a Golden Globe nomination.

Other quick thoughts:

  • I’ve only seen three of the five Best Documentary Feature nominees, with Navalny my favorite, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed fascinating but also a little frustrating in its lack of focus, and Fire of Love a disappointment.
  • I’ve seen just two of the five Best International Feature Film nominees, de-prioritizing those once it became clear All Quiet on the Western Front was a complete lock, while my #3 film of the year, Decision to Leave, got the shaft. I also think All Quiet will win Best Cinematography and a bunch of other awards that are very important but that I don’t think I know enough to offer an opinion.
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→ March 11, 2023
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Women Talking.

Women Talking doesn’t lie – it is a film of women, almost exclusively, and they do a lot of talking, and since the vast majority of the film takes place in a single room, it has the feel of a stage play that’s been adapted for film. That’s not the case, as this is an adaptation of Miriam Toews’ 2018 novel of the same name, but it does mean it won’t be to everyone’s tastes. It is to mine, though, as I love a movie that’s packed with strong dialogue, although the film’s extreme realism starts to break down near the end once the talking is done and the time for action arrives. (It’s available to stream on Amazon Prime.)

The novel is based loosely on a true story: In the early 2000s, the women in a small, isolated, retrograde Mennonite community in Bolivia would wake up with bruises and blood that indicated they’d been sexually assaulted during the night. The community’s elders claimed that they were making it up, calling it a matter of “female imagination,” and then claimed it was the work of demons. Some of the victims eventually caught their rapists in the act; it turned out a group of men in the colony were using an animal anesthetic to sedate entire families so they could rape the women, with victims ranging in age from 3 to 65. Ten men were convicted of rape or associated crimes and served jail time, while one fled and, as far as I can tell, remains at large.

Women Talking starts with the premise of the attacks and has the women of the colony, many of whom are functionally illiterate and almost none of whom has knowledge of the world beyond the community, hold a vote on whether to do nothing, stay and fight, or leave. The vote results in a tie between the last two options, so a subgroup of the victims meets in one large room in a barn to decide for all of the women what to do. This discussion comes with time pressure, as the elders have told the women they have two days to forgive their rapists or face excommunication. The ensuing debate occupies the majority of the film’s running time.

The cast of Women Talking is an All-Star lineup. Two-time Emmy winner Claire Foy plays one of the women, Salome, who wants to stay and fight, advocating violence if necessary. Jessie Buckley, who has BAFTA and Oscar nominations to her credit, plays Mariche, whose anger comes out as sarcasm and derision directed at her fellow women, although as in most cases we learn that there’s a reason why she acts the way she does. Rooney Mara, herself an Oscar nominee, has probably the best performance I’ve seen from her as Ona, who has become pregnant by her rapist, and who is determined to carve an independent path for herself in a community that denies this to its women. Two-time Tony Award winner Judith Ivey plays one of the older victims in the room and delivers on of the most nuanced performances, as we first get the idea she might be a little daft, only to learn about her character’s depth and strength in layers. And Frances McDormand, the most decorated cast member of all, appears briefly in the film, although by the second time she appeared I’d forgotten her first scene completely.

Which all makes it a bit frustrating that the best individual performance in the movie comes from its lone male cast member, Ben Whishaw. He’s consistently great, but the way the script is written, his character, the milquetoast schoolteacher August, has the broadest range of emotions and actions, He’s hopelessly in love with Ona, who appears to return his affections to some degree but has refused to ever marry anyone. He’s in the room as the scribe, since he’s one of the few colony members who can read and write, but often finds himself asked for his opinions, which are then welcomed by some of the women and derided by others (Mariche in particular). It’s a numbers game – the women are all sharing the bulk of the great dialogue, while Whishaw is the sole male voice, and he’s half of the only real interaction between any two characters that doesn’t come from the stay/leave debate.

For most of its running time, Women Talking had me completely in its grasp, but the way the story resolves broke that spell. There’s a strong element of feminist fantasy here, almost from the start, but I could stay with it until the plot has to leave that one room. Either decision would have presented problems for the script, but this particular choice of resolution was improbable and also highly impractical, to the point where I couldn’t extend my suspension of disbelief enough to accept it. It takes a potentially great movie down to an above-average one, a 60/65 to a 55, although the power of much of the dialogue and some of the individual moments still stayed with me.

Women Talking took two Oscar nominations this year, one for Best Picture, which I think is fine given the other nominees; and one for Best Adapted Screenplay, which I know it probably won’t win but I think should get strong consideration because the script itself is so dense. This is all dialogue, and so much of the dialogue is great – although, again, this story puts vocabulary into the mouths of these characters that may not be realistic for women who’ve been denied education or worldly experience – that the film relies more on the quality of its script than most.

That’s nine of the ten Best Picture nominees for me; I can’t be bothered sitting in a theater for three and a half hours to watch the blue people, especially since I never saw the first Avatar. I haven’t changed my overall opinion that Everything Everywhere All At Once is the best movie of 2022, and the one I most want to see win the top honor. I’ll have more thoughts on the Oscars and my top movies of the year on Sunday.

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→ February 28, 2023
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Nope.

Nope is the third feature film from writer-director Jordan Peele, who won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for the outstanding Get Out, which was a biting satire wrapped in a smart horror film. For some reason, the studio behind Nope tried to pitch it more as another horror film, but that’s not just underselling it, but also probably misrepresented it. This is much more of a sci-fi mystery with a surprising moral to it, another smart film from Peele but in a completely different vein from his debut. (I haven’t seen Us, his second film.) You can stream Nope on Peacock or rent it on amazon, iTunes, etc.

Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer star as the siblings OJ and Em Haywood, who run a horse farm where they train the animals for roles in film and television. As Nope begins, their father, Otis Sr. (Keith David), is killed by metal debris that falls from the sky, with a nickel impaling him in the eye and a key embedded itself in the horse he was riding. They assume these fell from an airplane and eventually they try to pick up more business, but when they find it’s lagging, OJ sells some of his horses to the nearby western theme park Jupiter’s Claim, run by Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun), a former child star whose TV series ended in tragedy when the chimp who starred on the show became violent to several of the cast members – but not to Jupe. When the electricity starts going off on the Haywoods’ farm without explanation, and the horses start reacting badly to some unseen force, the siblings decide to invest in some high-tech cameras to try to figure out what’s going on.

Nope is a slow burn, similar to Get Out, but not quite the same – where Peele’s first film was sinister until the big reveal, this one unfurls its mystery by degrees, with more misdirection that allows you to experience the perspectives of multiple characters. It was also easier to figure out what was happening in Get Out, or at least get the sense, than what’s happening in Nope. The obvious answer would be that it’s a UFO, which, of course, most of the characters think is the answer, including the Fry’s Electronics employee Angel (Brandon Perea), who realizes from the start that something weird is happening out at the ranch and invites himself to be a part of the investigation. What they find is much more interesting on a literal level and a thematic one.

The cast is fantastic across the board. Kaluuya has never missed for me, right down to his pre-fame appearance on Doctor Who (where we get to hear his British accent for once). The steely reserve that made him so menacing in Widows here works in a different direction, as his character is so tightly wound that he feels like he’s about to combust. Yeun probably needed more to do, but he’s excellent, as always, as a huckster and entrepreneur trying to squeeze every dollar he can out of the limited assets he has. Perea is a scene-stealer in a comic relief character that’s actually well conceived and well written – he’s hilarious, but also plays important roles in the plot and helps illuminate the relationship between the siblings and also later provide some connection to a fourth character who helps them try to unravel the ultimate mystery. If there’d been any awards attention for this movie, he would have been worthy of a Best Supporting Actor nomination, as well as a potential Original Screenplay nod for Peele. Wrenn Schmidt is a little wasted as Jupe’s wife, while Barbie Ferreira is even more wasted in a cameo as Angel’s co-worker, but I did enjoy the cameo from ‘80s prime-time soap star Donna Mills.

There’s one overarching theme to the story here that I might spoil by discussing, so if you haven’t seen Nope and intend to, you may wish to stop reading. The throughline that connects Jupe and the Haywoods is the use of animals for entertainment, with the implication that how we treat these animals in turn affects how they will treat us, or even what sort of animals they will become over time. OJ shows respect for their horses, and when he’s trying to show one horse, Lucky, for a commercial, he bristles at any suggestion from the director that might distress the animal, even telling a crew member not to make eye contact with Lucky for fear it will upset him. While we don’t see Jupe’s chimpanzee colleague being openly mistreated, the flashbacks – the one bit of the film where there’s some actual violence on screen – strongly imply that the chimp was being exploited, and that his rampage was the result of this treatment. (If you want to go down a rabbit hole about this, several critics and writers have noted that this subplot mirrors the actual story of Travis the chimp, who was separated from his mother at three days old and sold to a couple who kept him as a pet, only to have him turn violent one day, mauling and disfiguring a family friend.) All of this comes together in the film’s resolution, which also features some spectacular visual effects, to make it clear that the story is at least trying to make us realize the extent to which we are exploiting other creatures – and perhaps, on some level, other people – for no purpose beyond our entertainment. The characters who don’t understand this end up dead; the others survive. I don’t think you could make the moral much clearer than that.

Right now, I have Nope in my top ten for the year, although it could end up pushed out as I see more foreign-language films, since several of the most acclaimed non-English language movies, including two Oscar nominees, still aren’t available digitally as of February 27th. (Here’s hoping I wake up to find The Quiet Girl is rentable.) Regardless of its exact ranking for me whenever I wrap this cycle, Nope is excellent, another cerebral, thoughtful undertaking from Peele, even if it’s not quite up to the high bar he set for himself with Get Out.

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→ February 27, 2023
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Blonde.

Blonde isn’t just the worst movie I’ve seen from 2022, by a long shot; it’s one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. It’s a patched-together collection of scenes that barely connect to each other, jumping through aspect ratios and shutter speeds and even from color to black and white with neither rhyme nor reason, like a teenaged filmmaker’s limited understanding of what it means to be experimental. It also fails at its most important task – giving the audience an interesting, three-dimensional portrait of its lead character, Marilyn Monroe.

The film tries to do a cradle-to-grave story, although the script, based on Joyce Carol Oates’ novel of the same name, isn’t going for any sort of accuracy – most of what’s in this film is made up, often leaning towards the lurid, which you could probably guess quickly by how much time Monroe (Ana de Armas) spends topless for no apparent reason. We see her abusive childhood with a mentally ill mother (Julianne Nicholson, giving maybe the only decent performance in the movie). When she’s removed from her mother’s care to an orphanage, the film jumps forward to her pin-up years, then to a meeting with a studio head who rapes her almost the minute she’s done reading, then through a meandering story that sideswipes the films she made while spending far more time on her tabloid romances, one of her miscarriages, and an abortion that apparently never happened. She meets and marries Joe DiMaggio (played by some actor doing a bad Bobby Cannavale impression), then meets and marries Arthur Miller (Adrien Brody), with no chemistry between her and either of these men, and in the case of Miller, no explanation at all of why they ended up together. An ongoing subplot where Monroe receives letters from a man purporting to be her father, whose identity she never knew, ends ridiculously, leading Monroe to take her own life with barbituates.

There is no defending this movie. It’s badly shot, looks bad, poorly acted, and incredibly poorly written, from character to dialogue to pacing. The opening story with Monroe and her mother, which recalls a better-done scene involving Mitzi in The Fabelmans, is disjointed, dark, and features her mother using stilted, bizarre vocabulary that wouldn’t make sense for an adult talking to another adult, let alone a parent talking to a preteen child. The flips between color and black-and-white photography happen without reason, and add nothing to the film. Monroe’s character jokingly asks if she’s just “a piece of meat,” but that is exactly how this movie treats her – she’s a bag of flesh and bones to be passed around or discussed or ogled, but she has no agency, no depth, no explanation beyond these idiotic Freudian notions that she has daddy issues or desperately needs to be a mother. Even the idea that she wanted to be taken more seriously as an actor is only brought up in passing, where the script just sort of waves to the notion as is drifts on by. Marilyn Monroe in Blonde is nothing but a victim of the world. I can’t think of a less generous interpretation of her life.

There are two rape scenes in Blonde, the second of which is unspeakably gross and degrading, even beyond what a complete fabrication that particular scene is. The camera focuses its male gaze on de Armas’s face while she is performing oral sex and trying not to gag, and stays there for something like two minutes. It has no artistic intent or merit; it exists to shock. I guess it worked, but it also underscored just how terrible this movie is from conception to execution. I doubt I would ever defend the existence of an on-camera rape scene in any film, but this film’s version is the worst of the worst.

De Armas does a dutiful impersonation of Monroe, although she can’t entirely lose her Cuban accent (and she’s a lot smaller than Monroe was, which seems a very odd choice given all the efforts to otherwise make people in this movie look like their real-life counterparts). It’s just a dead character, and she isn’t capable of infusing any life into it. Her brief role in No Time to Die highlighted how ebullient and energetic she can be on screen; Blonde shows that a bad script can leave her a walking doe-eyed corpse. You could argue this isn’t her fault, but giving this performance an Oscar nomination for Best Actress is more an acknowledgement of the fact that she had to suffer through this awful film – as did everyone who voted for her – than a measure of actual quality. Giving de Armas a nod over Tilda Swinton (The Eternal Daughter) is a giant farce, and should have garnered way more controversy than the Andrea Riseborough one did. I can think of at least five other lead performances by actresses that would have been more worthy, and I’ve only seen about 36 films from the 2022 Oscar cycle.

(In no order: Emma Thompson from Good Luck to You, Leo Grande; Jennifer Lawrence from Causeway; Ruth Wilson from True Things; Florence Pugh from The Wonder; and Frankie Corio from Aftersun.)

No one else fares much better, although there’s a mercy in how many characters we see in that none of them is on screen for very long. The two actors playing Cass Chaplin and Eddy Robinson are the most cringe-inducing, as they’re both doing some kind of impersonation of Skeet Ulrich’s character from Scream, right down to the hair (wrong decade, guys), in yet another complete fabrication that in this case informs the movie’s incredibly ill-conceived climax.

Blonde barely qualifies as a movie. It’s an absolute mess. I admit that having not read the book, I may have been unprepared for how far it diverges from history. If I set that aside, however, this movie is still garbage. Norma Jean deserved so much better.

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