I’m off to see all 3+ hours of Avatar this afternoon, which will mean I have seen all this year’s Best Picture nominees (my biggest goal for this round of viewing with one exception you’ll see below.) And then from there I will just be trying to hunt down a way to watch The Whale, and I’ll have seen all of the Academy’s acting nominees that I’m going to. (No offense to Ana de Armas, loved her so much in Knives Out, but I refuse to watch anything that disrespects Marilyn Monroe. She’s been through enough.)
Anyway, here’s what I’ve seen recently:
I went into this one mostly blind, knowing only that it got nominations for Bill Nighy and Kazuo Ishiguro – a comination I knew was calibrated to make me cry (which it did).
A remake of Akira Kurosawa‘s Ikiru, but transplanted into 1950s England, Living follows a proper English servant (Nighy) who has to decide what to do with his remaining time after a terminal diagnosis. Though it veers close to over-sentimentality at certain moments, Nighy’s quiet performance grounds it beautifully and I’m happy to see him getting recognized for it.
I had read the Miriam Toews novel that Sarah Polley adapted for this film, so I knew that I was signing up for an emotionally and philosophically heavy experience. (For those who don’t know the story imagines a fictional aftermath of a series of real, horrific sexual assaults that happened in a Mennonite community in Bolivia in the early 2000s.)
Polley’s take certainly does the novel and its women justice, and I cried throughout, form anger, but also in awe of their ability to hold space for each other and remain committed to their values in the face of unimaginable betrayal. But something about the film (maybe the odd blue tint to the lighting) felt like it was holding the audience at a distance.
The ideas and conversations presented here are so important, and I’m glad that a film with a cast this stacked will get people to see/hear them, but this may be a classic case of the book being the better medium for the story.
Baz Luhrmann‘s brand of all-in strangeness can be hit or miss for me. And music biopics in a post–Walk Hard world are hard to pull off. And this…was both hit and miss for me.
The structure is pretty paint-by-numbers, but Austin Butler did a really great job of channeling Elvis’s charisma, and his strangeness. Don’t come looking for historical accuracy, it’s what Anne Helen Petersen would call a star-study – an exploration of persona and image rather than a person. And Luhrmann, King of Spectacle, is a good match for that. But, it’s way too long, and Tom Hanks‘s Colonel Parker voice was so distracting that I would flinch when his face appeared on screen.
I admit that when this was blowing up over the summer I was kind of bemused and not super interested in seeing it. (I wasn’t really in a Blockbuster mood, it’s military propaganda, Tom Cruise is a Scientologist, etc., etc.). But, so many people whose opinion I respect loved it, and so did the Academy, so when it came back to theaters, I went to see it on the big screen…
And had such a fun time! All the things that stopped me over the summer are true, and still problematic, but as an excuse to turn off your brain for a bit and go for a ride – it’s a thrill.
I wish that it could have been as strange and queer-coded as the original (it’s not not queer coded in ways to be clear, but it’s been Disney-fied a bit, and Joseph Kosinski is no Tony Scott RIP), but it was way more charming than I expected it to be.
All Quiet on the Western Front
I had been dreading this, because its hard to motivate yourself to watcha film when you know the whole point is the whole cast dies in increasingly horrific ways. I had read the book this is based on in high school, and watched the original film for the Best Picture Baking Project ten years ago (!!), so I was also approaching this with a little apprehension about spending the whole time comparing the two.
I’m writing this a few days after watching it and am still having trouble nailing down how I feel about it. Well undeniably beautifully made, and exceptionally well cast, I kept wondering about how necessary it was. Not its themes, they are depressingly relevant, and I am not relevant, and I am not knee jerk against remakes (they can function like theatrical revivals and recontextualize texts in really thought provoking ways!) but something about this particular approach felt slightly off to me.
Looking back at my post about the 1929 version, I was struck by the moments of levity that movie allowed among the horror. There is none of that in the new version, even when the characters are momentarily happy the color palette and ominous score do not let us as the audience exhale along with them. Any brief moment of joy is quickly undercut by a fresh horror or a political swipe at the uselessness of powerful men. Warranted swipes! But they are spelled out here in a way left implied, to great effect, in the earlier version. Though I did appreciate Daniel Brühl‘s performance as the German politician who seemed to be the only one in the grand rooms with any understanding of the stakes.
Not that war should be sugar coated, with all due respect to Truffault, this certainly feels like an anti-war movie to me, but there was something about how bloody and muddy this felt that put me at a distance from the characters. At one point Paul (Felix Kammerer) is so caked in mud that he looks like a lizard monster rather than a person.
I don’t know, maybe I’m just losing my tolerance for war films, because we seem to get so many, and at a certain point the violence depicted has to escalate to still shock, and to what end? It all just feels so unrelenting.
At one point in this movie Adam Sandler gives and Inspirational Speech (TM) that made me exclaim “I love sports movies” out loud.
This isn’t breaking any new ground, but Sandler is really good (and can we all just stop acting surprised at this point when he is). I really enjoyed his quiet chemistry with Queen Latifah too.
Also, who produced this? Because they got so many actual NBA stars to do cameos!
A perfect Sunday afternoon on TNT movie.
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