With this week’s (truly baffling) BAFTA nominations, there are now only the Oscar nominations (this Tuesday!) to complete this year’s too long list of things I have assigned myself to see! But as a good reminder of why I choose to so torture myself, I saw some fun stuff the last few weeks!
Here we go:
I have long been in talent-love with George Michael, so I know completely that I am biased when In tell you all that this is a great music documentary and you should all watch it immediately. But I also have been telling people that since I saw it in July and I don’t think anyone has taken my advice, because I think people remember Wham! as silly 80s Day-Glo popstars, which they were, but they were also really talented and George in particular was a genius. (Based on his words in this movie, I don’t think Andrew Ridgeley would mind me signaling Michael out.) It’s a rags to riches to story and a tale of the warping effects of fame that never gets too melodramatic. Plus, you get to listen to George Michael songs the whole time, what could be better. It’s on Netflix, please watch it.
There is a moment in this movie where Joaquin Phoenix‘s Napoleon (in keeping with Ridley Scott‘s stated recent stance that he doesn’t care about period or region specific dialects) speaking in his American accent, says to a British diplomat “You guys think you’re so great because you’ve got boats.” And while I appreciate the fact that Scott and his team clearly have no interest in the Great Man as Hero of History model of storytelling, I unfortunately couldn’t figure out which model they had chosen instead.
If the whole thing had been as absurd as that scene I think I would have had fun, but the battles were shot seriously (and graphically – don’t see this if you care about horses). While I always love to see Vanessa Kirby (Josephine) the marriage plot here reminded me far too much of a horrible romance novel I read once about her.
I appreciate the nonchalance of Scott’s energy when it comes to a press tour or awards season, but I wish he’d bring a little more care to his actual films than is evidenced here.
Emerald, Emerald, Emerald…I want to both hug and slap you. There is so much campy goodness in this movie. The lighting! The Livestrong bracelets and casually popped collars! The Bloc Party and MGMT needle drops calibrated to make people exactly my age feel wistful for a time of Jaeger Bombs and ill-advised dorm make outs. Your casting was perfect: Rosamund Pike has maybe never been funnier, Barry Keoghan sulks so wonderfully, and Alison Oliver‘s bland fragility is well executed. (Jacob Elordi is also great, may someday have to write an essay about his movie star career being launched by the adoring lenses of two female auteurs.)
But – the plot – you lost it, seemed to have found it, and then stayed so close to the map that every attempt to shock became more boring, but somehow still as baffling than the one before it. I could ramble on for awhile, but in the end I think this amounts to a lot of very fun style hiding that there isn’t much substance.
Someone texted me while I was watching this Indie Spirit nominee and I summed it up parenthetically as “good, sad, very quiet” and I feel like that kind of says it all.
The story of a trans woman (Trace Lysette) who returns home to the small town she grew up in when her mom (Patricia Clarkson) is dying there’s not a lot of plot, but there is a lot of staring with emotional intent. The two central performances are great, and the story is well told, but co-writer/director Andrea Pallaoro seemed to have gone to the Koganana-making-Columbus school of shot framing: oblique, face obscuring, distance-emphasizing. All of which I found distracting. The power of this movie is in Lysette’s face, stop shooting everything from behind!
(Also, this is silly, but my actual favorite performance last year from Lysette was in her TikTok ridiculing Dave Chapelle for his transphobic “comedy.”)
Well, it’s the first move of the awards cycle that I wish I had seen before the New Year so I could include it on my Top Ten list (come on film distributors, people in midsize cites like good movies too!). This trailer started showing at my local theater what feels like 6 months ago, and I’ve been waiting!
The preview is hilarious, but thankfully does not include all the good jokes – genuinely I can’t remember the last time I laughed out loud in the theater. (My husband, who also loved it, remarked on the walk home, “how come no one makes comedies anymore, that was so great?”). And the movie works great as a satire of the high brow, mostly white, culture world that could stand to deflate a bit, without becoming knee-jerkily anti-intellectual.
But, what the marketing didn’t prepare me for was the genuinely moving famiyl drama that is truly at the heart of this. Jeffrey Wright is a great anchor, and many of the supporting turns are wonderful. (Sterling K. Brown is from STL, why did we have to wait until January to see this?!?) I particularly loved Wright’s sibling dynamic with Tracee Ellis Ross and missed her when she wasn’t onscreen.
Highly recommend.
Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project
Tim, who listened to this more than watched it with me, asked as it ended, “was the organizing principle of this just ‘isn’t Nikki Giovanni fun?'” And I think essentially, yes, if you include brilliance and talent in your definition of “fun,” which I do.
The whole time watching it, I kept thinking of the Elaine Stritch documentary from like ten years ago, which I wasn’t expecting, they aren’t artists I have ever thought of in the same breath before, but the structure of the docs – follow a legend around while they cope with aging, interspersed with older archival footage of them at their most famous – is very similar, and similarly affecting.
Both of these women live (or lived in the case of Ms. Stritch) truly unapologetically, which is obviously for Giovanni a source of pride, but also pain – relationships seem to be a struggle for her. But it’s truly inspiring to see portraits of women who have actually stopped giving a damn about the comfort of others as it pertains to their choices for their own lives.
The archival material is handled very beautifully here, and I really want to track down and watch the full interview of Giovanni and James Baldwin that is excerpted at many points in this, because it was suffused with so much love even when they were disagreeing with each other.
I Get a Bit Obsessive 