Sundown (1941)

This is British colonial war propaganda made during WWII. It has a cool vibe for a while, honestly, and it's a sort of exciting spy-adventure-mystery film with an intriguing tension and mood – not Five Graves to Cairo level, but approaching it. Sundown also stars Gene Tierney, looking lovely in orientalist clothes by Walter Plunkett.

Where Sundown fails is when it becomes explicitly propagandistic at the film's end. For some reason, the film thinks it can accomplish this using a character whom we've hated for the entire running time. He dies at the end, and he pityingly says out of nowhere that war is just like church. He then gives this whole speech about church and religion and fighting the Axis Powers. It makes no actual sense and has nothing, really, to do with the film, which is about fighting Nazis in British-colonized Kenya, but is absolutely not about religion. Worse yet, in many ways, this character (played in usual withering style by George Sanders) is hateful. He makes numerous bad decisions as soon as he arrives – and they're shown to be bad decisions immediately – and he is a racist jerk to Gene Tierney's character for being mixed race, yet another trait that is shown to be terrible and awful immediately. After George Sanders gives his church speech, we fast forward to England and are suddenly in a bombed-out church in London, where Sanders' bishop father gives yet another speech to his entire congregation about how fighting in the war and sending your sons off to war (these men never want to go themselves) is a pure and wonderful sacrifice. We also find out – in another insane plot leap – that the bishop has officiated a wedding between Gene Tierney and Bruce Cabot, who sit in the congregation and repeat the bishop's words before (presumably) heading back to the British East Africa Protectorate to fight the Nazis.

Ok, but it is good and mysterious and intriguing for a while, even if it is colonial propaganda.

Man of Conquest (1939)

I'm annoyed with myself because I've seen two classic Hollywood stinkers in a row. Last night was Man of Conquest, which is a hagiographic faux-western about Sam Houston and Andrew Jackson. As you might imagine, it is insane and full of ridiculous inaccuracies. Now, Sam Houston's life was also insane and absurd, so perhaps that all makes sense, but trying to make this guy into some kind of amazing, freedom-loving war hero is just nuts, although he did negotiate on behalf of the Cherokee nation. Sam Houston's life would make an interesting biopic, of course, but this one was invested mostly in convincing us all that "Andy" Jackson was one of the best presidents and best Americans ever to have lived (!) and that rebellion in Texas against México was somehow justified because the settler colonial state allowed individuals to own guns and México did not. Actually, this does make sense. These filmmakers probably believe that the South's secession was also justified and laudable. This is as much a bit of pro-gun propaganda and a redefinition of the second amendment as it is a pro-genocide Andrew Jackson film. No thanks.

Kentucky (1938)

There's a lot I don't understand about this ridiculous movie. In the first place, it's called Kentucky as if it's an old-school western film like In Old Arizona or something. But this isn't an old western - despite it opening with a shot of a weird map of the North American continent that doesn't have the United States carved out – only the state of Kentucky.

Then this movie begins in 1861 – Kentucky secedes from the Union, but a really terrible Union soldier steals a bunch of horses from a racing stable and kills a man. It's war, but it's awfully stupid. They're racehorses, so it's not like they can really help in the Civil War. Either way, the entire point of this sequence is to set up a family feud, but it's done so by making the Confederacy the good guys and the Union the evil, horse-thieving murderers.

Then all of a sudden it's 1938? Weirdly we jump ahead three-quarters of a century and now this movie is about the same two feuding families except of course the young man from one family and the young woman from the other are going to fall in love. This is now a horseracing melodrama set in 1938. And if you didn't believe Rebecca Schneider when she told us in Performing Remains that the Civil War is still happening, this movie is here to tell you that Rebecca Schneider was correct.

This is a bunch of Old South nonsense dressed up as melodrama. Two more gripes: first, there is only one horserace in this entire film – it takes place in the movie's final 15 minutes. Even the apparently very exciting race that takes place before the final Kentucky Derby race is narrated by an announcer as our main characters don't even watch the race. They're in the saloon, betting on their horse, and they listen to the race instead of enjoying it. We listen too. My second gripe is that Walter Brennan just yells through this whole movie. And he won an acting Oscar for all of this yelling. It's absurd. He's terrible in this movie. Kentucky is a melodrama, sure, and he's an old crotchety grandad in it (despite being in his early forties when they filmed it), but he just yells the whole time. It's so obnoxious. (Apparently, Brennan won because extras were allowed to vote back in the 1930s, and he was very popular with that contingent, since he worked as an extra for so many year.) 

Either way, this movie is dumb.

Identification Marks: None (1965)

Jerzy Skolimowski's Rysopis (Identification Marks: None) is an astounding 1960s film about malaise in contemporary Poland. This movie was released in Poland in 1964/1965 and the U.S. in 1968. I think what's so fascinating is that I just saw Ivan Ostrochovský's 2020 film Servants – a film that's also about 1960s Poland (and includes a scene in front of a military board that cites Skolimowski's film specifically) – but Identification Marks: None is so, so, so much better, despite being obviously made on a shoestring budget and without a cameraman half the time. This is a really stunning film. I have known nothing about Skolimowski until 2022's Io, but now (thankfully) every streaming service I get is showing Skolimowski movies, so I can watch a few.

Identification Marks: None is showing exclusively on MUBI.

Servants (2020)

Ivan Ostrochovský's Služobníci (Servants) is a gorgeously shot film about Catholic schoolboys resisting totalitarianism in 1980s Czechoslovakia. I don't know if it's because I (incorrectly) thought this was going to be a gay story, or because I really do not care about religious convictions, but I was bored. Sure, Ostrochovský's film is clearly inspired by the gorgeous spareness of Paweł Pawlikowski's Ida, and of course I adored that movie, but this film is all beautiful pictures without anything really to say. Central to this muddle is Servants' focus on the Communist operative who is killing the young men who are in the right, here. Why should the film focus on this character so much, examining his inner life? (He is played by Romanian film star Vlad Ivanov, and I'm glad they got such a great actor for this role, but... he's playing a terrible person, and the film isn't actually about him. This whole business is a confused mess. 

Servants was released in the U.S. in February of 2022, and it's currently playing on MUBI.

Blithe Spirit (1945)

You know, I never really liked Blithe Spirit on the page, maybe because I thought the ending really wasn't that funny, even if the first act of the play is hilarious. Well, I quite honestly laughed my ass off watching Rex Harrison, Margaret Rutherford, and the rest of the cast of the 1945 David Lean–Ronald Neame–Noel Coward film of this play. It's delightful!

I've been watching films from the 1947 awards season, and I'd been postponing this one, but the Queer Cinema Archive posted about this recently as a bit of queer coding – the implication is that Margaret Rutherford's Madame Arcati character is coded as a lesbian – so I figured I'd catch Blithe Spirit tonight. Well, I've watched the film now, and I can't say I saw any such coding. However, a the end of the film there is some explicit queerness:

Elvira, the main character’s late wife, has been pestering him about her flirtations with a Captain Bracegirdle while she was alive. She had, apparently, been unfaithful to her husband with old Captain Bracegirdle, whom she tells us was very attractive. Well, at the very end of the movie, Rex Harrison has a monologue about how he’s always been picked on by women who have bossed him around. Harridans, he calls them. Then he says, “You were very silly, Elvira, if you think I didn’t know all about you and Captain Bracegirdle. I did. And what you didn’t realize is that I was extremely attached to Paul Westlake at the time!”

Incidentally, the poster, which is very sexy, doesn't have a thing to do with the movie, which isn't remotely sexy. Kay Hammond, the eponymous blithe spirit, doesn't wear anything approximating the sexy outfit of the woman on the poster, and her haircut looks nothing like this either. Honestly, I don't know who this is even supposed to be. In any case, although it is not at all sexy, Blithe Spirit is a very funny film, and I enjoyed it a great deal.

55 Days at Peking (1963)

55 Days at Peking begins as a kind of epic colonial war–melodrama in yellowface starring Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, and David Niven (none of these three actors is in yellowface, but Flora Robson, Leo Genn, and Robert Helpmann are). It's exciting enough for a time in its orientalist way, and John Ireland is excellent. By this film's end, though, 55 Days at Peking has become laughably absurd. The rescue sequence that comes at the film's 11 o'clock hour is nearly hilarious it's so stupid. And I fail to understand why we are supposed to be rooting for these eleven imperialist countries who are in China for their own profit.

There's Always Tomorrow (1956)

There's Always Tomorrow is a beautifully shot (in sparkling black and white) Douglas Sirk film that explores a man's mid-life crisis. Fred MacMurray is married to Joan Bennett, and he has three obnoxious children who take all of her attention – so much so that even when he is trying to communicate his deep existential crisis to her she cannot be bothered to give him any time or even acknowledge that he is in crisis. Into this void steps Barbara Stanwyck, a gorgeous fashion designer from New York who was an old flame and who still loves him. 

You know how this ends. It's 1956. I loved this melodrama because it's Douglas Sirk and it's gorgeously made, but it does a very bad job of selling us all on the idea that MacMurray makes the right choice by going back to the ungrateful group of assholes he calls a family. At the film's end, although MacMurray seems satisfied that he's done the right thing, even for his own happiness, I felt trapped, and I felt that he was trapped in this unhappy situation.

Stanwyck is incredible in this. She gives a cracking good performance that steals every scene she's in. It's a brilliant role and she's amazing.

Charly (1968)

Charly is a 1968 film based on the story Flowers for Algernon, and it's a very 1960s film. It does these split-screen double shots seemingly for no reason at all other than because it can, and when it should use them near the end for emotional payoff, it chooses not to. It's also sometimes filmed rather like a horror film – or perhaps I should say rather like a Frank Perry film. This definitely has the vibe of a film made by the Perrys – constantly telling a story that isn't scary as if it's terrifying. Charly's ethics, too, are suspect, and it approaches its central character with a gaze I found frequently hostile. Charly won Best Actor in 1969 for Cliff Robertson, and this was the very last of the 1968 Oscar nominees I needed to see. Well, I've seen it now. Meh.

Man Hunt (1941)

I love a WWII movie made during WWII. Man Hunt was made before the U.S. entered the war, and it's a sharp noir film directed by Fritz Lang. In it, a sharpshooter slash big-game hunter has Hitler in his sights, is tortured by the Nazis, and then is chased through London by a Nazi George Sanders. There is lots to love here, including a very young Roddy McDowell, who is excellent. Joan Bennett is very strangely miscast as a working-class Londoner, but overall this is an exciting and fun picture with lost of surprises up its sleeve.

Finian's Rainbow (1968)

Very strangely, Finian's Rainbow is one of two films I need to see before I'm done with all of the movies nominated for Oscars in 1968 (I've seen most films from most years, and I'm close on a lot of them.) But Finian's Rainbow is a musical, and so I should have seen it a long time ago. I think there's a reason I haven't. This is... a weird thing. It's a kind of Brigadoon meets... well, I don't know what it meets. The music feels simultaneously 1960s and 1940s. It's sort of nominally about fighting racist prejudice, but its main song – one that keeps recurring – is about some fantasy version of Ireland. And although this is quite a stagey musical, with a very weird episode of non-musical, non-minstrel blackface involving turning a racist white man Black, this is directed by Francis Ford Coppola, who would, of course, make The Godfather just four years later. Honestly, this felt like it had a lot of cool elements, and the songs were also good, but they felt mashed up oddly in this movie.

Oscar Nominations 2022: 9 of 9 (with Final Predictions)

My predictions are at the bottom of this post, but this year, frontrunners have not emerged, so this may be an enormous year for surprises. This is very exciting, I think, but also means that my predictions probably suck. This year's final five nominees:

Bardo: Falsa Crónica de Unas Cuantas Verdades

(Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths)

1 Nomination

• Cinematography: Darius Khondji (Evita)

Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu

Cast: Daniel Giménez Cacho, Griselda Siciliani, Ximena Lamadrid, Íker Sánchez Solano, Andrés Almeida, Francisco Rubio

I loved this movie, and although it only got this one Oscar nomination, it probably deserved many more. It's a surrealist, epic, ambitious sort of thing that explores Mexican history, colonialism, grief, parenting, art, money, and almost everything under the sun. For some audiences, these things didn't all work together very well, for me this worked very very well and I was enraptured by this movie from start to finish. It's on Netflix, by the way, but it deserved to be seen on a large screen. The production design is absolutely incredible, and Darius Khondji absolutely deserves his cinematography nomination. As I say, the movie's not for everyone, but I really loved it.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #11 out of 68

Empire of Light

1 Nomination

• Cinematography: Roger Deakins (1917, Blade Runner 2049, Sicario, Unbroken, Prisoners, Skyfall, True Grit, The Reader, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, No Country for Old Men, The Man Who Wasn't There, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Kundun, Fargo, The Shawshank Redemption)

Director: Sam Mendes

Cast: Olivia Colman, Micheal Ward, Tom Brooke, Toby Jones, Colin Firth, Tanya Moodie, Hannah Onslow, Crystal Clarke, Monica Dolan

I loved this movie too, and maybe we should all sense a pattern: movies that are gorgeously shot are usually going to be rated well on my end. I love it when a movie does beautiful things with light and camera work. This one was, of course, shot by Roger Deakins, so we all know to expect breathtaking visuals. This movie was better than that, though. It also boasts a brilliant performance (another in a line of brilliant performances) by Olivia Colman, and I thought it also had an excellent screenplay. I found this heartfelt and moving, and it was mostly unsentimental in its approach to British nationalism (by which I mean white supremacy), aging, mental illness, and grief. Tanya Moodie is also excellent in Empire of Light, and I enjoyed this movie a lot.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #7 out of 68

Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris

1 Nomination

• Costume Design: Jenny Beavan (Cruella, Mad Max: Fury Road, The King's Speech, Gosford Park, Anna and the King, Sense and Sensibility, The Remains of the Day, Howards End, Maurice, A Room with a View, The Bostonians)

Director: Anthony Fabian

Cast: Lesley Manville, Ellen Thomas, Isabelle Huppert, Jason Isaacs, Lambert Wilson, Alba Baptista, Lucas Bravo, Rose Williams, Anna Chancellor

I confess to having watched the Angela Lansbury–Omar Sharif–Diana Rigg version of this, titled Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris, many many times as a young person, so I was pleasantly surprised to find they were remaking it, and even more pleased to find that they remade it so well. This film is a charming little bit of fluff, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. The costumes are, of course, gorgeous. I love Jenny Beavan and feel devoted to her because she worked with Merchant–Ivory for so long in all of those wonderful 80s and 90s films. Everyone is great in this, and the whole thing is enjoyable. This is also modified from the Angela Lansbury version – they shifted the end, and it makes the entire thing cuter. As I say, it is a bit of fluff, but I had a good time.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A
My Rating: #41 out of 68

RRR (Rise Roar Revolt)

1 Nomination

• Song: Chandrabose & M.M. Keeravaani

Director: S.S. Rajamouli

Cast: NTR, Ram Charan Teja, Ajay Devgn, Alia Bhatt, Olivia Morris, Shriya Saran, Ray Stevenson, Alison Doody 

This was impossible not to like. I am not sure why I phrase it like this, except that this movie is absurd and insane and a completely and totally predictable melodrama musical. I liked most of it, although it has an underlying Hindu nationalism that it is selling, it seems to me. In any case, its stars are attractive and clever, the songs are catchy and fun, the dancing is great, and the whole thing is fun. The outrageousness of all of the giant setpieces in this movie make for wonderful viewing. It's really nuts and that's great. Maybe this will win original song? For a while, certain Oscar watchers had been predicting that RRR would be in the spot that All Quiet on the Western Front is currently in – that it would grab a whole bunch of nominations and would finally be the crossover Bollywood hit that the Academy would embrace. Those hopes/predictions did not materialize, but this song, "Naatu Naatu", definitely deserves its nomination, and perhaps Bollywood's recognition by the Academy will come at some point. 
Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #33 out of 68

Tell It like a Woman

1 Nomination

• Song: Dianne Warren (Four Good Days, The Life Ahead, Breakthrough, RBG, Marshall, The Hunting Ground, Beyond the Lights, Pearl Harbor, Music of the Heart, Armageddon, Con Air, Up Close & Personal, Mannequin)

Director: Silvia Carobbio, Catherine Hardwicke, Taraji P. Henson, Mipo Oh, Lucía Puenzo, Maria Sole Tognazzi, Leena Yadav

Cast: Eva Longoria, Jennifer Hudson, Marcia Gay Harden, Cara Delevigne, Margharita Buy, Anne Watanabe, Leonor Varela, Jacqueline Fernandez, Brandon Win, Nate' Jones, Alex Bentley

This is the worst movie I saw this year. The Academy's music branch has been doing this bizarre thing where they nominated a Diane Warren song in a movie no one has heard of or seen every single year. They've literally done this 8 times in the last 10 years. It's madness! The movies are uniformly awful, and then, of course, Dianne Warren doesn't win the Oscar anyway. What is this about? Meanwhile, the Academy is wringing its hands over Andrea Riseborough scoring a nomination. Let's take a look at the music branch's shady behavior, y'all. Anyway, Tell It like a Woman is a complete waste of time, and honestly I have no idea what the title means. "Tell it"? Is this an injunction for us all to do something? This is an anthology movie, and there is one good short in it and two fine shorts, but mostly this is just painful. And the Dianne Warren song? It's nonsense! Give yourself some applause, you deserve it. Girl, what? The song is basically "Treat yourself".

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A
My Rating: #68 out of 68

1. Everything Everywhere All at Once, The Banshees of Inisherin, All Quiet on the Western Front, and Elvis

2. The Fabelmans, Tár, Top Gun: Maverick, and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

3. Avatar: the Way of Water, Triangle of Sadness, The Whale, and Babylon

4. The Batman, Women Talking, Living, and Aftersun

5. To Leslie, Blonde, Glass Onion, and Causeway

6. Argentina, 1985, Eo, The Quiet Girl, and Close

7. Animated Features

8. Animated Shorts

Final Predictions:

Picture: Everything Everywhere All at Once (天馬行空)

Director: Everything Everywhere All at Once (天馬行空)

Actor: The Whale

Actress: Everything Everywhere All at Once (天馬行空)

Adapted Screenplay:

Original Screenplay: Everything Everywhere All at Once (天馬行空)

Supporting Actor: Everything Everywhere All at Once (天馬行空)

Supporting Actress: Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

Film Editing: Top Gun: Maverick

International Picture: Im Westen Nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front)

Cinematography: Im Westen Nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front)

Production Design: Elvis

Score: Babylon

Costume Design: Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

Sound: Top Gun: Maverick

Visual Effects: Top Gun: Maverick

Animated Feature: Pinocchio

Animated Short: My Year of Dicks

Make-up & Hairstyling: The Whale

Song: Top Gun: Maverick

I'd love it if you checked out my new book Love Is Love Is Love – out March 24!

Oscar Nominations 2022: 8 of 9 (Animated Shorts)

I am skipping the live-action short films this year. They're just always so torture-porn heavy, and then the winner is always one of the stupidest ones. But you should definitely watch the animated shorts. There are always some gems, and this year is no exception. Plus, for the first time, you can stream them all at home without having to deal with Shorts.tv and their weird distribution model. This year's nominees:

The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse

1 Nomination

• Animated Short Film

Director: Peter Baynton, Charlie Mackesy

Cast: Jude Coward Nicoll, Tom Hollander, Idris Elba, Gabriel Byrne

This is gorgeously drawn. I was totally in love with the animation, and I also loved the mole and fox characters especially. They both behaved in intriguing, rather wonderful ways. But this film did not work for me. It's about an orphan boy who meets and befriends a mole while they look for the boy's home. Much of the film's dialogue consists of little bumper-sticker phrases like "you are loved" and "what do you want to be when you grow up? / Kind." And actually, this is all the film is interested in doing: churning out little phrases worthy of wall art at an AirBnB. There is really nothing else to its screenplay. This is sweet, as far as it goes, but it left me very empty. See... the film takes place in a complete social vacuum. The boy, the mole, the fox, and the horse don't live in a world at all. There are only small indications of any outside forces: the snare that someone laid for the fox, the "other horses" who made this horse feel bad, the people who presumably live in the beautifully lit Thomas Kincaid houses across the little creek. So all of this "wisdom" that the horse and fox and mole and boy share with one another is hermetically sealed. They don't actually need to use any of it except with one another, and among one another they subsist only on love and without conflict. So for me, this movie was a series of cute poetic phrases with no relation at all to any real world that they're supposed to be helping the boy navigate. I still kinda think this will win the Oscar. It's beautiful, and at over 30 minutes it feels fully realized. It also boasts some very famous voices. You can watch this short on AppleTV+.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: Animated Short Film

My Rating: Unranked

My Year of Dicks

1 Nomination

• Animated Short Film

Director: Sara Gunnarsdóttir

Cast: Brie Tilton, Jackson Kelly, Klarissa Hernandez, Chris Kelman, Laura House, Chris Elsenbroek, Sterling Temple Howard, Mical Trejo, Sean Stack, Dylan Darwish, Pamela Ribon

This was endlessly charming and completely sweet. I fell in love with the characters and was completely taken with the style, the story, and the idea. This is the tale of a young woman attempting to lose her "virginity" in five chapters. She keeps trying to hook up with various guys, and it's a cute, sweet, little odyssey with a whole range of animated styles that look like a girl's diary. It's been animated so that it's sketchy and surreal and corresponds to the narrator's experience. It's funny and lovely, and I kinda think it will win. I am going to predict it, even though it's not the favorite. I know that this film's title received laughs on nomination morning, and the title is funny, but the film is so much more than a dick joke, and I think anyone who watches it will be taken with it. I recommend it wholeheartedly. And you can watch it at Sara Gunnarsdottír's website here: https://www.saragunnarsdottir.com/coming-in-2022

Will Win: Animated Short Film

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: Unranked

Ice Merchants

1 Nomination

• Animated Short Film

Director: João Gonzalez

This is my favorite of the animated shorts. It's beautifully drawn in a pencil-sketch style, and it's a very sweet story about loss and grieving that follows a father and a son who have lost their mother and partner but are loving one another and coping. These ice merchants freeze water overnight high on a mountain cliff, and then they dive into the city to sell their ice in the morning. It's a surreal, magical kind of story. But unlike the hermetically sealed film The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, Ice Merchants takes place in a world all-too real. These characters are dealing with actual loss, and there's a larger loss for which the woman's death is a kind of mise-en-abyme, that of our planet's changing climate and the loss and devastation this will wreak on the world. I loved this. I don't think it can win, but it's my favorite of the five. You can watch it on YouTube thanks to the New Yorker here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhj74ZjfaQ8.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A
My Rating: Unranked

An Ostrich Told Me the World Is Fake and I Think I Believe It

1 Nomination

• Animated Short Film

Director: Lachlan Pendragon

Cast: Pendragon, John Cavanagh, Michael Richard, Jamie Trotter

This short film is really really cool. Its message is perhaps a little trite, but its style is so cool that I didn’t mind one bit. In this film, an animated character comes to understand that he's animated. From the beginning, however, the film is showing us the equipment and technology used to animate him, so it's always clear – or almost always clear – that the character is correct. This is amusing and insanely clever, even if I'm not sure it really takes us anywhere. I totally recommend this, though. It's so much fun, and I loved the ostrich. You can watch An Ostrich Told Me the World Is Fake and I Think I Believe It on Vimeo here: https://vimeo.com/796231519
Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: Unranked

The Flying Sailor

1 Nomination

• Animated Short Film

Director: Amanda Forbis, Wendy Tilby

This is the least interesting of the nominees. A sailor's life flashes before his eyes during an explosion. Meh. However, if you're feeling like a completist, you can watch The Flying Sailor on YouTube via the New Yorker here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Rj3FG8vFtk.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A
My Rating: Unranked

1. Everything Everywhere All at Once, The Banshees of Inisherin, All Quiet on the Western Front, and Elvis

2. The Fabelmans, Tár, Top Gun: Maverick, and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

3. Avatar: the Way of Water, Triangle of Sadness, The Whale, and Babylon

4. The Batman, Women Talking, Living, and Aftersun

5. To Leslie, Blonde, Glass Onion, and Causeway

6. Argentina, 1985, Eo, The Quiet Girl, and Close

7. Animated Features

More posts coming soon:

9. Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, Empire of Light, Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris, RRR, and Tell It like a Woman

I'd love it if you checked out my new book Love Is Love Is Love – out March 24!

Oscar Nominations 2022: 7 of 9 (Animated Features)

 This year's nominees:

Pinocchio

1 Nomination

• Animated Feature

Director: Guillermo Del Toro, Mark Gustafson

Cast: Ewan McGregor, Gregory Mann, David Bradley, Tilda Swinton, Christoph Waltz, Finn Wolfhard, Ron Perlman, Burn Gorman, Cate Blanchett, Tim Blake Nelson, John Turturro

I loved this movie, and I think it's the best animated film of the year, but it is a Guillermo Del Toro movie, not a Disney Pinocchio tale. Del Toro's film is a very interesting and constantly surprising meditation on death, grief, loss, and the violence of war. Especially intriguing is the Blue Fairy's opposite, a terrifying and wise sphinx figure whom Pinocchio meets in the afterlife. This is also a film with songs, and I have to say that I think I would have liked it better without the musical elements, but it didn't damage my affection for Del Toro's engaging take on this old story. I am predicting this movie to win best animated feature, but I have to say I'm skeptical of my own prediction. Everyone was expecting Pinocchio to do much better on nomination morning than it did. Nominations were predicted for sound, adapted screenplay, and other categories, but it only managed this one. Even music-branch-golden-boy Alexandre Desplat missed a nomination for his Pinocchio score. All of the nominees for best animated feature this year are only nominated in this one category. This is unusual. I think, in the case of Pinocchio, it indicates that the Academy likes it a lot less than critics did. This might mean that Marcel can pull off a win.

Will Win: Animated Feature

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #13 out of 67

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On

1 Nomination

• Animated Feature

Director: Dean Fleischer Camp

Cast: Jenny Slate, Fleischer Camp, Isabella Rossellini, Lesley Stahl, Thomas Mann, Rosa Salazar

I really liked this. I liked Marcel when he was a YouTube sensation – I don't know how many times I watched that video – and I liked him again now. This is a very intriguing pandemic movie. It feels like a pandemic movie, like something made to cope with loss and grief. This is what the animated feature category is about this year – coping with mortality and trying to come to terms with grief and loss. Marcel has a very cute way of doing this, and this film is super charming. I was sort of surprised to hear how emotional people got over Marcel, though. It just didn't do that for me. In terms of the academy and its short film and animated feature branch, this movie is quite an anomaly, and it signals a new approach in considering animation. I think five years ago, this movie would not have been legible as an animated feature. This nomination, though, really opens things up for how the branch is understanding and honoring work in animation, and I think this is very positive.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #27 out of 67

Puss in Boots: the Last Wish

1 Nomination

• Animated Feature

Director: Joel Crawford

Cast: Antonio Banderas, Salma Hayek, Harvey Guillén, Wagner Moura, Florence Pugh, Olivia Colman, Ray Winstone, Samson Kayo, John Mulaney, Da'Vine Joy Randolph 

This is really fun! It's also gorgeously animated, with a witty and cleverly changing set of styles, used in various ways and for different effects. In case you haven't understood the theme, this too is a mediation on death. Puss is, for the first time, terrified for his life, and the film deals with death humorously for a time (perhaps the way most of us do) before moving into quite serious territory. The Last Wish, unfortunately, moves inexorably toward easy clichés and toward melodramatic solutions to its very intriguing problems, but for most of its runtime this is a fun, handsomely animated film, and Salma Hayek and Antonio Banderas are great.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A
My Rating: #38 out of 67

Turning Red

1 Nomination

• Animated Feature

Director: Domee Shi

Cast: Rosalie Chiang, Sandra Oh, Orion Lee, Wai Ching Ho, Ava Morse, Hyein Park, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, Tristan Allerick Chen, Mia Tagano, Lori Tan Chinn, Lillian Lim, James Hong, Sherry Cola

I've already written about Turning Red. If you follow my Instagram, you probably know that I'm obsessed with red pandas, and so I was very ready to be in love with this. It is, indeed, very good, and I had a pretty great time with it. For me, Turning Red is, like many children's movies these days, about the child who is weird, whose desires and impulses don't accord with those of her parents', and who finds herself strange even to herself. [I explore this concept of the queer child as central to recent animated features in chapter five of my new book – link below.] I definitely liked how this movie was about turning against tradition, about deciding to follow a different path. It does have some weird choices in it, though. I am not sure why it's set in the past, and especially not sure why they didn't draw the red panda to look more like the way a real red panda looks – they have beautiful black bellies and black boots, but the animated character is all red. Mostly, this movie makes a very strange homophobic choice that just didn't sit well with me. The movie's still good, but that moment stuck with me and I had trouble letting it go.
Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #46 out of 67

The Sea Beast

1 Nomination

• Animated Feature

Director: Chris Williams

Cast: Karl Urban, Zaris-Angel Hator, Jared Harris, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Kathy Burke

This nomination was a total surprise, and I really don't know how it came to be, because this movie is a complete retread of How to Train Your Dragon. I've already seen How to Train Your Dragon, and this is the same damn plot as the first one except that they're sea dragons instead of flying dragons. Now, I'm sure that lots of kids like this movie. It's cute enough, and it's harmless. But I was annoyed with it, despite my affection for Karl Urban's handsomeness and my love for Marianne Jean-Baptiste.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A
My Rating: #50 out of 67

1. Everything Everywhere All at Once, The Banshees of Inisherin, All Quiet on the Western Front, and Elvis

2. The Fabelmans, Tár, Top Gun: Maverick, and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

3. Avatar: the Way of Water, Triangle of Sadness, The Whale, and Babylon

4. The Batman, Women Talking, Living, and Aftersun

5. To Leslie, Blonde, Glass Onion, and Causeway

6. Argentina, 1985, Eo, The Quiet Girl, and Close

More posts coming soon:

8. Animated Shorts

9. Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, Empire of Light, Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris, RRR, and Tell It like a Woman

I'd love it if you checked out my new book Love Is Love Is Love – out March 24!

Oscar Nominations 2022: 6 of 9

This year's nominees:

Argentina, 1985

1 Nomination

• International Film: Argentina (Wild Tales, The Secret in Their Eyes, The Son of the Bride, Tango, The Official Story, Camila, Truce)

Director: Santiago Mitre

Cast: Ricardo Darín, Peter Lanzani, Santiago Armas Estevarena, Alejandra Flechner, Gina Mastronicola, Jorge Varas, Laura Paredes

I was into this. I know it's mostly a procedural courtroom type thing, but I didn't mind. I liked it a lot. It felt exciting to me to learn this much about fascism and the guerra sucia in Argentina. I knew a lot about it already, but this was satisfying in lots of ways, and I thought it was very well acted. Unlike many of the international nominees, this film is on Amazon Prime, and so it is easily accessible. I will say I am a bit surprised that this got nominated over the many other possibilities that were submitted by various countries – especially Mexico's Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, Venezuela's The Box, and France's Saint Omer. It's good, but all of those are better. Still, it's a fair choice, and the Academy loves Ricardo Darín.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #24 out of 67

Io (Eo)

1 Nomination

• International Film: Poland (Corpus Christi, Cold War, Ida, In Darkness, Katyń, Man of Iron, The Young Girls of Wilko, Nights and Days, The Deluge, Promised Land, Pharaoh, Knife in the Water)

Director: Jerzy Skolimowski

Cast: Sandra Drzymalska, Mateusz Kosciukiewicz, Lorenzo Zurzulo, Isabelle Huppert, Andrzej Szeremeta

This was my favorite movie of the year. I've written about it already here, so I won't say too much more about it, but it really blew me away. I think my favorite part of how this film works is the way that it asks us to think about things from the perspective of the non-human... and that the film tries to do this cinematically and not just narratively. This isn't Homeward Bound or something like that. This is a film that treats the world as a violent, awesome place but that also asks what the role of animals is in this world that we have made. It's an awesome film, and I love it. It's now streaming exclusively on the Criterion Channel.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A
My Rating: #1 out of 67

An Cailín Ciúin (The Quiet Girl)

1 Nomination

• International Film: Ireland

Director: Colm Bairéad

Cast: Catherine Clinch, Carrie Crowley, Andrew Bennett, Michael Patric, Kate Nic Chonaonaigh, Joan Sheehy, Tara Faughnan, Neans Nic Dhonncha, Carolyn Bracken

This movie is not playing anywhere near me, and I have no way to see it. I am very annoyed about this. Somehow I have managed to see eleven of the ninety-three films submitted in the International Feature category, and yet this film that made the shortlist and then got lucky enough to be nominated is only playing in a few select cities. This is especially dumb because right now is the time when interest has to be the highest for this film. It should be in way more cities. Once Oscar night rolls around on March 12, no one is going to care about this movie. (This happened last year, for example to Lunana: a Yak in the Classroom). All that to say, I have no idea if this movie is good or not. It is the only one of the nominees that I won't be able to see before Oscar Sunday. I'm salty, obviously.
Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: Unranked

Close

1 Nomination

• International Film: Belgium (The Broken Circle Breakdown, Bullhead, Everybody's Famous, Farinelli: il Castrato, Daens, The Music Teacher, Paix sur les Champs)

Director: Lukas Dhont

Cast: Eden Dambrine, Gustav De Waele, Émilie Dequenne, Léa Drucker, Kevin Janssens, Igor van Dessel, Marc Weiss, Léon Bataille

I had a feeling from the trailer that this was going to be one of my favorite films of the year, and I waited and waited and waited for it to be in a theatre near me. When it finally got here I made sure to go to the movie by myself because I knew I was going to be a sobbing mess. All of my predictions were right, although I didn't actually know what this movie was going to be about, and how it works is actually rather surprising. Close is about two boys who are like brothers, physically close and intimate with one another in the most beautiful, extraordinarily loving way. They're both beautifully acted, too, and so you fall in love with them as an audience... and you fall in love with their relationship. We see them first in the sort of edenic throes of their affection, and then the two go off to school. What they meet there is homophobia, suspicion, and hostility: the school is a place of hostile masculinity and demands that they account for their relationship. They are bullied as sissies and weaklings, and the movie studies the boys and their responses to this very closely. I will say no more about this movie, but it absolutely broke my heart, and, like Lukas Dhont's last movie, this one is a finely crafted portrait of young people dealing with emotions for which they have few words and even fewer coping mechanisms. Close carefully sets up its scenario, and it's deeply felt and wonderfully humane.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A
My Rating: #12 out of 67

1. Everything Everywhere All at Once, The Banshees of Inisherin, All Quiet on the Western Front, and Elvis

2. The Fabelmans, Tár, Top Gun: Maverick, and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

3. Avatar: the Way of Water, Triangle of Sadness, The Whale, and Babylon

4. The Batman, Women Talking, Living, and Aftersun

5. To Leslie, Blonde, Glass Onion, and Causeway

More posts coming soon:

7. Animated Features

8. Animated Shorts

9. Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, Empire of Light, Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris, RRR, and Tell It like a Woman

I'd love it if you checked out my new book Love Is Love Is Love – out March 24!