Oscar Night! Whales and Other Stand-Ins
A good year at the movies! I’m getting old and sentimental but it was hard to summon any negative critical thoughts for anything I was lucky enough to watch.
Now for some micro-reviews! Whenever I think about skipping this write-up, I remember the quote:
“The easiest thing to do on earth is not write.”
I try to avoid spoilers and this year am beginning with my least favorite of the Best Picture Nominations:
Tár — A big miss. The only one on the Best Picture slate that summoned truly negative feelings centering around the director’s aim to show that the systems and institutions that we engage in lead to abuse, and attempting to tell this story using a hypothetical, but unrepresentative in reality, female lead.
Falls into the “can’t recommend to anyone” category as it spent too much time being impenetrable to casual movie viewers and you ultimately walk away with nothing to show for it.
Triangle of Sadness — It was done a disservice by being the third “eat the rich” movie of 2023 with Knives Out and The Menu being both tighter and more enjoyable. It had some funny set pieces, but the peak of the film was just a less funny Monty Python — Mr. Creosote.
On a side note, I am definitely getting Armageddon, Deep Impact vibes that the “Hollywood Elites” think pandering to our desire to eat them is profitable enough to green-light and crank out any script that crosses their desk. Even with that, it was long and uneven for what it was.
Top Gun Maverick — Don’t think, Don’t think, Don’t think, just do! No one puts baby in the corner, I mean no one grounds Maverick! Big jets go BWAHHHHHHR PEW PEW.
There is nothing wrong with giving people what they want (see Avatar) but I was sad that a genuinely nuanced story of forgiveness, trust, and changing roles from being in the spotlight to being a teacher of the next generation was scuttled to send “Airplane Jesus” on another… mission impossible…
Avatar — Lol. Maybe the dumbest first hour in movie history and a complete act of cinematic conceit bordering on hubris, but hell it was pretty and it got me to go to the theaters and plunk down cash for a 3d showing with no regerts. They go space whaling and it’s symbolism!
Everything Everywhere All at Once — Sigh. I like The Daniels, I love Michelle Yeoh and Sci-Fi and Kung-fu, but I am getting the same vibes from the returns on early millennial filmmaking as the recent urge to make movies about hosing the rich (see: Triangle of Sadness).
Spoiler alert: Every movie shouldn’t end with the parents apologizing and admitting they were wrong (Turning Red, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Encanto) and we are bordering on a new genre of filmmaking called the “millennial parental apology fantasy”. It was still good, just a recently belabored fantasy.
Women Talking — Getting to the good stuff. Major bonus points for checking in well under two hours, which was needed as it’s an emotionally exhaustive watch due to the topic matter and directing decisions.
What separates it, outside of A+ acting, is it is topically bleak (rape) but emotionally and thematically hopeful.
All Quiet on the Western Front — I am not a fan of war movies, but this is the only acceptable way to do a war movie. War is a “Children’s Crusade”, and should be sparingly depicted as no more than an exercise in the death and dehumanization of the children asked to die for other men’s aims.
Elvis — Cracking the top ranks for beating expectations, which were low. It turns out that when filming a music biopic, taking a kaleidoscope lens to a Wikipedia article’s worth of content is better than just “playing the hits” and making another derivative Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.
I admittedly expected little, but a whole-ass performance by the lead combined with enough gaudy Americana pushed it to the top.
The Banshees of Inisherin — Man, talk about a rebound from the drek of “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” for Director Martin McDonagh.
Polling friends, this movie was more polarizing than I expected. I liked it, but my appreciation was thinking of the film not as a character piece but as a study of individual duality. There is no perfectly kind, content yet dull Pádraic, and exacting yet exasperated Colm. Instead, all of us exist on a spectrum between the two where we juggle our contentedness with our situation with the striving and sometimes cruel trade-offs needed to advance.
If you can’t tell, I am attempting to write this while the girls’ want “daddy” and I am distracting them with Youtube videos, i.e. I am feeling a little Colm at the moment.
The other big takeaway I was left to chew on is, cruelty is a choice. To Colm, it was a choice that created consternation or felt justified due to his own fears and depression, but man is it a choice.
*Honorable Mention* The Whale (not nominated for Best Picture but shares the top spot in my mind) — In the amazing movie The Whale by the director Darren Aronofsky, the viewer witnesses the story of being trapped by physical condition and decisions. In the first part of the movie, the viewer, through a film camera, witnesses a small shabby apartment that is occupied by a man and his couch.
The viewer and the camera meet some visitors like a nurse and a missionary but later set out on a story about a teenager named Ellie, whose heart is broken, and very much wants to kill the main character who is named Charlie, who is her father and fat. In the course of her life, the teenager Ellie encounters many hardships. Now, her entire life is set around wanting a certain man, her father, to die. I think this is sad because her father doesn’t have any awareness, and doesn’t know how bad Ellie wants to kill him. He’s just a poor fat man. And I feel bad for Ellie as well, because she thinks that her life will be better if her father dies, but in reality, it won’t help her at all.
I was very saddened by this movie, and I felt many emotions for the characters. And I felt saddest of all when I saw the other visitors that were only stand-ins for religion, friendship, and romance, because I knew that the director was just trying to save us from Charlie’s own sad story of abandoning his daughter, just for a little while. This movie made me think about my own life, and then it made me feel glad for my —
;)
The Fabelmans — Talk about a lesson in grace. I am going to skip over all of the extra sentences about Steven Spielberg’s career and the Hollywood cliche of loving movies about Hollywood and just jump to the point.
I waxed earlier about my early exhaustion with the “millennial parental apology fantasy”, and The Fabelmans was the prescriptive opposite. Which is: using the “empathy machine” of filmmaking and all of its powers to write a eulogistic dénouement for your parents that I can only imagine is far more charitable than either deserves.
No one gets this treatment until after they have shuffled off this world, and only if they are lucky. We are all flawed humans and most of us were raised by other very flawed and equally human parents. Tip of the hat to Mr. Spielberg for a lesson on how to handle that fact.