Boys on Bikes

In preparation for The Bikeriders, I wanted to watch a kind of legendary old British biker movie I had heard about called The Leather Boys from 1965 that has a homosexual twist (or a homophobic one, depending on how you're looking at things).

Well The Leather Boys is not nearly as gay as I wanted it to be. It’s actually a very typical angry young man/woman drama from the 1960s. Lots of married young people yelling at one another and living in tiny rooms when they shouldn’t have gotten married in the first place. From the perspective of The Leather Boys, hanging out with the boys while riding around on bikes looks a lot better than going home to tea and baked beans from a can. But I’m not sure the movie really says anything about queerness or queer bike riders or any of that. This seems like a sort of strange addition to the angry young man genre. But it's clear that some of the men in the biker gangs just really don't do well with society—with going to college and getting a job and, like, raising a family and stuff—and then some of the men in the biker gang are there to wear leather and get their rocks off with other leather boys. Seems reasonable enough to me.

Anyway, that is how I prepared for The Bikeriders. And, well, it was fine. 

The Bikeriders is shot in a cool way—it reproduces a series of documentary photos taken by the (completely undeveloped) Mike Faist character—but I don't really understand what Jeff Nichols has to say about this gang of bikers. The character development for all of the men is pretty much nonexistent. We don't really know Austin Butler or Tom Hardy at all. Who are these guys? Why do they hang out together? What are they doing? They actually almost never talk about bikes, so it's probably not really that. But, then, they don't really talk about anything. They’re violent and awful and drink too much and fight for no real reason, but I guess we’re supposed to find that charming. But, like, why?? 

What’s strange is that The Bikeriders just doesn’t have much of a point of view about them. I think I know why, too. The film almost completely avoids politics—there’s one part where a guy gets beaten up because he says he wants to become a cop and another where a guy says he hates “pinkos” who go to college—but the film doesn’t agree with any of this stuff. It’s just sort of presented for us. The same guy who hates pinkos tells us that he really really wanted to go to be in the Vietnam War, except that he didn't really because he got super drunk the night before and then slept through his alarm the day he was supposed to sign up. These biker guys are counterculture dudes, right? They hate cops and the government and having a job and the man. This is what I understand. They're violent, and they think cops and firemen are schmucks, which is why they flout the law and start fights and stuff. It’s the only real reason I can think of for their antiestablishment antics. And it must also be what ties the men together. But none of them ever talks about any of that. And the film doesn’t ask them to. 

Consider, for example, the gang going to Brucey's funeral. Why does the family send their flowers back? And why does the old woman spit in Johnny's face? There's literally no reason for these old folks to hate this group so much—as far as we know. Have they done something horrible that we don't understand? The screenplay, in other words, leaves a very large lacuna in the center of the film. The Bikeriders just seems sort of there, like a documentary that never presses its subjects on anything they say.

As for my homo-preparation for this movie, I was glad I prepped with The Leather Boys. There's this crazy erotic sequence in The Bikeriders when Tom Hardy asks Austin Butler to run the club after he quits (although he's not quitting, so the scene's purpose is actually just for Tom to tell Austin he's his favorite person). But the whole scene is firelit, and they are just so close together that it feels like they should be kissing. They didn't. And I'm not actually sure why they didn't.

Inside Out 2 (2024)

Miss Joy did not learn her lesson in the first film. So we need another movie to teach us all the same things. 

Inside Out 2 has three or four good jokes and a really funny reference to that famous 1984 Apple commercial, but this movie is really stupid. I was bored for most of it. 

Why must Pixar movies all be about forcing the child to explain herself, with making sense of the darkness within all children? In fact, Pixar now makes movies where they intensely project their feelings onto the kids in their films. I imagine these Pixar folks as really, really anxious parents, intensely worried about what’s going on inside their kids’ heads. They made a film about a teenager having anxiety, but of course teenagers didn’t make Inside Out 2. This is actually a film about parents’ anxiety about what their kids aren’t telling them. 

The clue to this is that we're supposed to identify with a rainbow of characters who are trying to take care of the teenager at the center of the film rather than the teenager herself, whose actions we consistently judge. And then the big lesson that Anxiety and Joy and the other emotions need to learn is that they have no control over who the teenager will grow up to be. At whom might such a lesson be directed? Right: parents.

The filmmakers show their hand at the end of the movie when we find that "This film is dedicated to our kids. We love you just the way you are."

If my impatience with all of this is exasperatingly obvious, it's because one of the arguments I make in my book Love Is Love Is Love is that animated films seem these days to be overwhelmingly about adults' frustrations with their children's inscrutability. I put it this way in my book:

Frozen and its sequels, in this sense, take part in a larger (adult) discourse within contemporary animated films – about children whose choices cannot be explained, who "act out," whose behavior is antisocial or mysterious or queer. Films such as Song of the Sea (2014), When Marnie Was There (2014), Inside Out (2015), My Life as a Courgette (2016), Your Name (2016), The Boss Baby (2017), Bao (2018), Over the Moon (2020), Soul (2020), Wolfwalkers (2020), Belle (2021), Poupelle of Chimney Town (2021), Luca (2021), Encanto (2021), and The Mitchells vs the Machines (2021) represent the child as frustratingly obtuse and distant, its desires inscrutable, its thought processes impossible (for the adult) to access. These are, in other words, all films about the queer child, the child who resists growing up according to the approved path laid out by adults or, as [Kathryn Bond] Stockton puts it, the child who grows sideways. Unlike many of these films, Frozen appears to celebrate the idea of Elsa leaning into this sideways growth, even if the film’s narrative still insists that she illuminate – "show herself" – so that her darkness no longer remains a mystery. 

And if this makes you think that I'm calling Riley, the teenager in Inside Out 2, a proto-lesbian that is because of course I am. But, unlike the parents who made this movie, I see no reason to be so anxious about it.

Furiosa (2024)

George Miller made the very intelligent decision to give Anya Taylor-Joy around 20 total lines of dialogue in this film. Instead, the script allows the brilliant Chris Hemsworth to do the screenplay’s heavy lifting. This means that the film’s emotional center is almost non-existent and that the most interesting character is Furiosa’s nihilistic villain. In other words, there are both drawbacks and benefits to this. Taylor-Joy can’t actually carry a movie, and Miller needed Hemsworth to do this, but it makes for a very jaded, emotionless film. 

Anyway Furiosa: a Mad Max Saga is visually relatively boring – there is nothing visually new about this film compared to Mad Max: Fury Road; it’s visually identical to its predecessor. And one wonders, after all, what the point of all this is? (I wondered this with MM:FR – a film I didn’t like – as well, honestly.null) Revenge, blood, bullets, gore, oil, depravity. OK. But why? Obviously this universe is terrible and bloodthirsty and hateful. And obviously Miller believes our own universe is headed in this direction, but, like, what does the movie have to do with that?

Evil Does Not Exist (2023)

I liked Evil Does Not Exist (悪は存在しない) so much better than Drive My Car and Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy! This is a mysterious, slow-building eco-thriller that had me thinking about it hours and hours after I watched it. The film is still bogged down by Hamaguchi’s penchant for long sequences of boring conversations in cars and other static locations, but weirdly those worked for me better in Evil Does Not Exist. And because the movie begins much more slowly and contemplatively, I forgave the long conversations in the car and at the community center. The ending is great!!

Alex Garland's Civil War

Civil War is a movie about journalism—it is not a movie about politics or humanity. And, in fact, it follows most of the tropes of those movies, just without any serious emotional depth. I hated this movie, and mostly I hated it because this movie loves war and plays to the audience’s enjoyment of violence. 

There is a case to be made that Garland’s film tries to make a movie about journalism in a war-torn country while also avoiding the usual Orientalist or paternalist gaze that those movies turn toward the places where the stories are set. I think that’s probably true. The movie does avoid that.

But the movie still gets off on showing the audience a war zone and asking us to enjoy the thrill of destruction, murder, death, and wholesale slaughter. 

I did like the scene with Jesse Plemons. It’s taut and interesting, and it’s also politically sound, by which I mean that that sequence makes a smart anti-war case. The rest of the movie thinks guns are fun.

Also, have you all heard of Joe Dante's film The Second Civil War? It's much better than this business.

Challengers (2024)

Challengers is the Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross show. 

Actually, look, everyone in this is a star. And they’re all sexy as hell. And this is shot gorgeously. And the editing is fucking brilliant. And the script is just a silly sports melodrama, but it doesn’t matter because it’s so perfectly made and exquisitely directed. 

The fucking shot when everyone is turning their heads back and forth to watch the ball and Zendaya just is staring straight ahead??! Perfection.

I know not everyone will love the ending of this movie, but what I love about the ending is the way that Challengers moves into the realm of the metaphorical more and more steadily as the match goes on until it just exists purely as metaphor and refuses to go back to the real. It's so great.

The Fall Guy

This is a great time from start to finish. The jokes are funny and they’re delivered very well by an excellent cast. The fights are so much fun. Really the whole thing is just a blast. The thing is, Emily Blunt and Ryan Gosling are fucking stars, and they just run the whole thing perfectly.

This is very much like David Leitch's last movie, Bullet Train, which I also thought was a very good time.

Mars Express

This movie is visually stunning with absolutely exquisite worldbuilding; this is a very smart movie about AI. It’s the kind of intelligent, generous, and humane exploration of AI that we need. But Mars Express is a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants action–crime thriller that kept me guessing and surprised me constantly. Great stuff.

Housekeeping for Beginners (2024)

Housekeeping for Beginners (Домаќинство за Почетници) is good. Goran Stolevski is an interesting filmmaker who really has a way with writing characters. I wish this film surprised me a bit more, but although it started off with some twists that were very interesting it moved into more familiar territory in act two. Still, I liked this despite its rather conventional ending.

Monkey Man (2024)

I love Dev Patel. I think he’s beautiful and I think he has good ideas. I’m glad he got funding to make this very very expensive movie, and I’m glad he made this movie. I’m glad lots of people went to see this movie. But I did not like this movie. 

Monkey Man is so slooooow, and then all the revenge killing is fun and brutal and just kinda disgusting but definitely fun. Then it goes back to being so slooooow. The revenge plot was unclear, and I found the monkey man kind of hard to root for. I did root for him, don’t get me wrong, and like sure, cops are awful, but I do find it difficult to root for a man who will just kill literally anyone. The information about motivation for the revenge was given to us so slowly I just couldn’t get behind the force of it. And anyway why now? This guy looks about 30. What’s he been doing with his time?

Also, there's a little army of hijras? Who are like really violent and happy to kill people while wearing sequence gowns? I'm lost.

Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977)

Holy shit! Looking for Mr. Goodbar is pretty incredible. It’s so intense and intriguing. It’s a fascinating character study and a pretty extraordinary portrait of female freedom amid a deeply misogynist world. It also has truly great performances from Diane Keaton, Richard Gere, Tuesday Weld, William Atherton, and Tom Berenger. 

 The ending is… shocking and kind of insane and I feel completely stunned. 

 Honestly this is good. I know a movie like this could basically not be made today, but that’s what makes it so interesting. I am not at all sure why Goodbar is out of print, but you can't find it streaming anywhere and it's never been released on DVD.

Femme

Femme is an ancient Athenian tragedy disguised as a psychological thriller. It did some things very well. I was constantly afraid of violence erupting at any moment so it was very tense watching. I like this film’s point of view and politics, too. I thought it was pretty smart. Some of the plot is not really believable, though, if I’m being honest (you’re telling me this violently closeted man went to a bathhouse?), and Femme takes a bit too long to get where it is inevitably going.

Godzilla x Kong: the New Empire

When I originally saw the trailer for Godzilla x Kong: the New Empire I thought Wait didn't we already see this movie? Everything in the trailer looked like something from Adam Wingard's 2021 offering Godzilla vs. Kong. As it turns out, this is a sequel to that movie, and it has new monsters if not new visuals.

 

I love monsters, so yes I went to see this movie, but I didn't like Godzilla vs. Kong, so I also went in knowing what I was going to get and expecting it to be nonsense. The monsters were cool. I was especially into the new pink Gojira and the Ice Princess Gojira. But y’all this movie is so dumb. The script, especially, is so. fucking. dumb. Honestly the most fun part of the movie was making jokes about it with my companion.

I don’t want to spoil anything, but Mothra shows up as a kind of hippy Grandmother Willow in act three, and Brian Tyree Henry’s explanations of the faux-Indigenous science and engineering in this movie are so stupid they make Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs seem like Oppenheimer by comparison. 

 One thing I did find cute: Godzilla curls up to sleep in the Coliseum. I guess we know how often he thinks of the Roman Empire.

Oscar Nominations 2023: 9 of 9 (with Final Predictions)

I just barely squeezed through! Neon finally released Perfect Days for VOD on Tuesday, and so I was able to watch it last night. None of these movies will win on Sunday, but they are our last three:

Perfect Days

1 nomination

• International Feature: Japan (Drive My Car, Shoplifters, Departures, The Twilight Samurai, Muddy River, Kagemusha: the Shadow Warrior, Sandakan No. 8, Dodes'ka-den, Portrait of Chieko, Woman in the Dunes, Kwaidon, Koto, Immortal Love, The Burmese Harp, Samurai 1: Musashi Miyamoto, Gate of Hell, Rashomon)

Director: Wim Wenders

Cast: Yakusho Kōji, Nakano Arisa, Yamada Aoi, Emoto Tokio, Asō Yumi, Ishikawa Sayuri, Miura Tomokazu, Tanaka Min

This is very good. It is a simple, quiet film (the main character, Hirayama, hardly speaks at all) about approaching each day with happiness. We do not know, really, what has happened to Hirayama before the film, and though we gradually learn a bit about his previous life, we mostly just spend time in the present. This, of course, is what the film is about, and Hirayama greets each day positively and richly. While I was watching this film, I felt like I got it, like the film's ideas made sense to me, but I think Perfect Days is better and better the more I think about it. It is sticking with me, and asking me to think more deeply about what it showed me. This is a very good movie.

Will win: N/A

Could win: N/A

My rating: #27 out of 82

Das Lehrerzimmer (The Teachers' Lounge)

1 nomination

• International Feature: Germany (All Quiet on the Western Front, Never Look Away, Toni Erdmann, The White Ribbon, The Baader Meinhof Complex, The Lives of Others, Sophie Scholl: the Final Days, Downfall, Nowhere in Africa, Beyond Silence, Schtonk, The Nasty Girl)

Director: İlker Çatak

Cast: Leonie Benesch, Eva Löbau, Michael Klammer, Rafael Stachowiak, Sarah Bauerett, Kathrin Wehlisch, Leonard Stettnisch, Anne-Kathrin Gummich, Katharina M. Schubert, Uygar Tamer, Özgür Karadeniz, Tim Porath, Kersten Reimann

İlker Çatak’s film is a modern nightmare of right and wrong set in a middle school. It’s truly terrifying. We watch a young, righteous teacher navigate between moral choices but seemingly misunderstand the human beings in her community. The Teachers' Lounge is a tense, ticking time bomb of a movie structured like one of Asghar Farhadi’s films, where a seemingly small injustice spins the characters out of control and into a terrifying world. The Farhadi structure is important here, because the way İlker Çatak and Johannes Duncker's script works is really modeled after movies like A Separation and The Salesman, but I don't think Çatak works his way toward finality of any kind, and the end of The Teachers' Lounge is unsatisfying. It is an exciting ride, though, with its taut, horror-film score and its building tension. Good stuff.

Will win: N/A

Could win: N/A

My rating: #47 out of 82

Io Capitano

1 nomination

• International Feature: Italy (The Hand of God, The Great Beauty, Don't Tell, Life Is Beautiful, The Starmaker, Mediterraneo, Open Doors, Nuovo Cinema Paradiso, La Famiglia, Three Brothers, Dimenticare Venezia, The New Monsters, A Special Day, Seven Beauties, Scent of a Woman, Amarcord, Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, La Ragazza con la Pistola, The Battle of Algiers, Marriage Italian Style, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, 8 1/2, The Four Days of Naples, La Grande Guerra, Kapò, Big Deal on Madonna Street, Nights of Cabiria, La Strada, The Bicycle Thief, The Walls of Malapaga, Shoeshine)

Director: Matteo Garrone

Cast: Seydou Sarr, Moustapha Fall, Issaka Sawadogo, Hichem Yacoubi, Doodou Sagna, Khady Sy, Venus Gueye, Cheick Oumar Diaw, Joe Lassana, Mamadou Sani, Bamar Kane, Beatrice Gnonko, Flaure B.B. Kabore

This definitely tugged at my heartstrings, but it felt like an Italian movie from the 1990s. Très romantique! It has a kind of triumphal, soaring, beat-the-odds quality that I associate with a kind 1990s filmmaking. This is a grueling portrait of young men attempting to leave their home in Senegal for what they believe will be a better life in Italy. The odyssey from Senegal to Mali to Niger to Libya is insane and almost unimaginably dangerous. And then there's the boat ride to Italy, which is also nearly impossible. This is an extraordinary portrait of young men (and the many, many other people who the film pictures only briefly), who are not given the freedom to move through the world, who are restricted by government violence and militamen, who are exploited by grifters because governments do not let people move freely. Still, the movie didn't quite work for me because it treats all of these things rather like small obstacles for our main characters that don't need their own interrogation. The world these young men have to navigate has been created by irresponsible governments in all of these countries (including Italy), but because we focus on the boys – their wonder, their difficulties, their tenacity – Garrone's portrait of this world takes on a romantic hue. Io Capitano is very well made, but this kind of thing is not what I want from Matteo Garrone and his usual portraits of crime.

Will win: N/A

Could win: N/A

My rating: 2024 release – unranked

My earlier Oscar posts for 2023:

1. Oppenheimer, Poor Things, Killers of the Flower Moon, Barbie, Maestro

2. Anatomy of a Fall, The Zone of Interest, The Holdovers, American Fiction

3. Napoleon, Past Lives, Nyad, Society of the Snow

4. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, The Creator, Rustin, May December

5. The Color Purple, El Conde, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

6. Animated Features

7. Godzilla Minus One, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Golda, American Symphony, Flamin' Hot

8. Animated Short Films

My Predictions for Sunday:

• Best Picture: Oppenheimer
• Best Director: Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer
• Best Actor: Cillian Murphy, Oppenheimer
• Best Actress: Lily Gladstone, Killers of the Flower Moon
• Best Adapted Screenplay: Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, Barbie
• Best Original Screenplay: David Hemingson, The Holdovers
• Best Supporting Actor: Robert Downey Jr., Oppenheimer
• Best Supporting Actress: Da'Vine Joy Randolph, The Holdovers
• Best International Feature: United Kingdom, The Zone of Interest
• Best Animated Feature: The Boy and the Heron
• Best Documentary Feature: 20 Days in Mariupol
• Best Film Editing: Jennifer Lame, Oppenheimer
• Best Cinematography: Hoyte van Hoytema, Oppenheimer
• Best Production Design: Sarah Greenwood and Katie Spencer, Barbie
• Best Original Score: Robbie Robertson, Killers of the Flower Moon
• Best Costume Design: Jacqueline Durran, Barbie
• Best Sound: Johnnie Burn and Tarn Willers, The Zone of Interest
• Best Visual Effects: Nojima Tatsuji, Shibuya Kiyoko, Takahashi Masaki, and Yamazaki Takashi, Godzilla Minus One
• Best Makeup & Hairstyling: Mark Coulier, Nadia Stacey, and Josh Weston, Poor Things
• Best Original Song: Billie Eilish and Finneas O'Connell, Barbie
• Best Animated Short Film: War Is Over!
• Best Documentary Short Film: The ABCs of Book Banning
• Best Live-action Short Film: The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar

Oscar Nominations 2023: 8 of 9 (Animated Shorts)

Here are the five animated short films. (I've decided to skip the documentary short films and the live-action short films – they're always so bad, and I've already suffered through Golda and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.)

War Is Over!

1 nomination

• Animated Short Film

Director: Dave Mullins

This is a sweet fantasy in the realm of Joyeux Noël, where the soldiers from both sides in World War I have a relationship with one another and don't really want to kill one another, but the warlords and the ruling class push a war. In this little film, the men play chess by writing their moves on paper and then sending a pigeon to the other side (this is not actually possible, but for the sake of this fantasy, I guess we accept it). Anyway, this is sweet but very much a fantasy, which is why I guess I expect it to win.

Will win: Animated Short Film

Could win: N/A

My rating: #4 out of 5

Ninety-five Senses

1 nomination

• Animated Short Film

Director: Jared Hess, Jerusha Hess

Cast: Tim Blake Nelson

Easily the best film of the group, this beautiful movie is an exploration of the five senses by an older gentleman who tells us things he knows about the five senses. More is revealed about the man as the film progresses, and we learn about him and the choices that he has made – and about the choices he hasn't made but have been made for him. The film is a powerful, extraordinary description of human being, of bravery in the face of death, and of the terrible power of the state. I absolutely wept, and I loved this so much. It deserves to win, and maybe it will.

Will win: N/A

Could win: Animated Short Film

My rating: #1 out of 5

Pachyderme (Pachyderm)

1 nomination

• Animated Short Film

Director: Stéphanie Clément

Cast: Christa Théret

This is a story of a young girl staying with her grandmother and grandfather in the country. It's mysterious and scary, and takes us to unexpected places. The animation style is beautiful but slightly surreal, almost in a kind of art nouveau kind of way. We experience things with the young protagonist and aren't sure what's real or not. The film clarifies at the end, though, and we understand what has been happening and why the surrealism is there, as well. The movie moves in dream logic, and that logic is smart and well crafted and beautiful.

Will win: N/A

Could win: Animated Short Film

My rating: #2 out of 5

Letter to a Pig

1 nomination

• Animated Short Film

Director: Tal Kantor

Cast: Alexander Peleg, Moriyah Meerson, Ayelet Margalit

I will have the most to say about this movie, perhaps. In Tal Kantor's movie, a survivor of the Shoah escaped from the Nazis and hid with pigs. The pigs protected him, and so he has written a letter to the pig, which he reads to a bunch of kids in a Jewish school. In the letter, however, he begins to spout racist hate, saying other people are no better than animals, and he seemingly forgets that he began by praising an animal. The children take this in with varying levels of boredom, but we move into a fantasy in which they find a pig and torture it. The film then shifts again and the pig gets younger and younger and younger until the protagonist – a young girl – pets the pig, snuggles with it, and then lets the pig go. In other words, the plot of Letter to a Pig is very interesting! But the film is not, actually, and I liked it the least of all of these. The reason for this is that the animation is startlingly ugly, and I'm not sure why. The people are partially drawn and drawn to be uglier than usual. There are parts of each body that move into a kind of beautiful realism, but those are frequently just a hand or a strand of hair. Mostly we're stuck with ugly drawings of people doing awful things. It's a film with a central idea that I really liked, but I just could not enjoy this. 

Will win: N/A

Could win: Animated Short

My rating: #5 out of 5

Our Uniform

1 nomination

• Animated Short Film

Director: Yegane Moghaddam

Cast: Moghaddam

This is perhaps the simplest and most unassuming of the films. Yegane Moghaddam's movie is animated on clothes, which you can see in the still above. She tells the story of growing up in Iran and being required to cover her hair. Even more, the film is about the ways that we separate girls from boys, and transform them into "females" instead of people who might have a future and be anything they wish. This is not an exciting or bold movie in any way, but it is simple and clear and charming, and I enjoyed it.

Will win: N/A

Could win: N/A

My rating: #3 out of 5

More posts coming soon:

1. Oppenheimer, Poor Things, Killers of the Flower Moon, Barbie, Maestro

2. Anatomy of a Fall, The Zone of Interest, The Holdovers, American Fiction

3. Napoleon, Past Lives, Nyad, Society of the Snow

4. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, The Creator, Rustin, May December

5. The Color Purple, El Conde, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

6. Animated Features

7. Godzilla Minus One, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Golda, American Symphony, Flamin' Hot

9. Perfect Days, The Teachers' Lounge, Io Capitano