Love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea. —Henry Fielding

22 January 2023

Best Supporting Actor 2022

Here is my top five in alphabetical order. These are the five I would nominate if I were an academy of one.

ANDRÉ HOLLAND, Bones and All

BARRY KEOGHAN, The Banshees of Inisherin

ANTON von LUCKE, 
Große Freiheit (Great Freedom)

ALBRECHT SCHUCH, 
Im Westen Nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front)

JEREMY STRONG, Armageddon Time


Also loved:
Judd Hirsch, The Fabelmans
Joshua Odjick, Wildhood
Oh Kwang-rok, Retour à Séoul (Return to Seoul)

Related:
My Best Supporting Actor picks from past years (2004-2020)
My Best Actress picks from 2022
My Best Actor picks from 2022
My Best Supporting Actress picks from 2022

21 January 2023

Cry of the City (1948)

I caught Robert Siodmak's Cry of the City this morning, and it's an excellent crime film. It's not shot quite as a noir, really, but it has plenty of wonderful shadows and play with light and dark throughout. It also boasts some excellent performances – Hope Emerson appears in a great small role and there is also a long sequence with a fabulous Shelley Winters. The film's best performance might be by young Tommy Cook who had previously had roles in such inauspicious movies as Adventures of Red Ryder and Jungle Girl.

There are many intriguing things to say about Cry of the City. It is, for one, a great example of a film made under the production code, where we can talk about bullets and fire guns, but we can't actually see anyone get shot. A woman, for example, apparently gets shot through a door, though the door's window doesn't break. A man is also stabbed to death with a switchblade through an office chair. There are two more shootings that happen in the film, neither of which looks even remotely realistic. This tends to leave 1940s writers completely off the hook – we never see where any bullets go in, so does the victim get shot fatally? Well, it's up to the writers! They just choose where they want the story to go.

Even more interesting is the film's own deeply conflicted attitude toward law enforcement and the criminal justice system. It feels very simple, watching the movie from the perspective of 2023, to see that it is actually the police who cause most of the trouble in this movie. As Victor Mature (the cop) lists all of the harm that Richard Conte (the alleged perp) has caused in act three, it's quite clear that in fact that harm has all been caused by the police themselves. All of it! What's even more intriguing is that Conte's character solves a separate crime for the police that they weren't able to solve on their own - one in which a rich old lady was allegedly tortured and killed for her jewel collection. Worse of all, perhaps, is that the lead policeman, at the end of the film, shoots an unarmed man in the back. This Cry of the City seems to present to the audience as justice. It's deeply unsettling, although I'm not sure I understand if Siodmak is as conflicted as I am.

Perhaps the key to all of this is that, according to IMDb, Conte was originally slated to play the cop and Mature the criminal, but Mature had played too many bad guys lately and 20th Century Fox swapped the roles. The criminals and those nominally assigned to catch them produce one another in Cry of the City, and it is this, finally, which makes the film as rich as it is.

20 January 2023

Best Supporting Actress 2022

Here is my top five in alphabetical order. These are the five I would nominate if I were an academy of one.

KERRY CONDON, The Banshees of Inisherin

NINA HOSS, Tár

TANYA MOODIE, Empire of Light
 
LAURA PAREDES, Argentina, 1985
 
SAVONNA SPRACKLIN, Wildhood

Also loved:
IU, Broker (브로커)
Forouzan Jamshidnejad, Holy Spider (عنکبوت مقدس)
Aimee Lou Wood, Living

18 January 2023

Best Actor 2022

Here is my top five in alphabetical order. These are the five I would nominate if I were an academy of one.

COLIN FARRELL, The Banshees of Inisherin

PAUL MESCAL, Aftersun

KE HUY QUAN, Everything Everywhere All at Once (
天馬行空)

FRANZ ROGOWSKI, Große Freiheit (Great Freedom)

SONG KANG-HO, Broker (브로커)

Also loved:
Daniel Giménez Cacho, Bardo: Falsa Crónica de Unas Cuantas Verdades (Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths)
Diego Calva, Babylon
Tom Cruise, Top Gun: Maverick
Paul Dano, The Fabelmans
Bill Nighy, Living
Brad Pitt, Babylon

Apologies to:
Vincent Lindon (Another World), Caleb Landry-Jones (Nitram), Luis Felipe Lozano (Los Conductos), Jeremy Pope (The Inspection), Trevante Rhodes (Bruiser), and Benjamin Voisin (Lost Illusions), whose films I have not yet seen.

Related:

17 January 2023

Best Actress 2022

Here is my top five in alphabetical order. These are the five I would nominate if I were an academy of one.

CATE BLANCHETT, Tár

OLIVIA COLMAN, Empire of Light


GUSLAGIE MALANDA, Saint Omer

TANG WEI, Decision to Leave (
헤어질 결심)

MICHELLE YEOH, Everything Everywhere All at Once 
(天馬行空)

Also loved:
Frankie Corio, Aftersun
Vicky Krieps, Corsage
Lesley Manville, Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris
Park Ji-min, Retour à Séoul (Return to Seoul)
Taylor Russell, Bones and All

Apologies to:
Penélope Cruz (Official Competition), Dale Dickey (A Love Song), Noomi Rapace (You Won't Be Alone), and Léa Seydoux (One Fine Morning), whose films I have not yet seen.

Related:
My Best Actress picks from past years (2004-2021)
My Best Actor picks from 2022 
My Best Supporting Actress picks from 2022 
My Best Supporting Actor picks from 2022

15 January 2023

Holy Spider

It's really too bad about Ali Abbasi's Holy Spider (عنکبوت مقدس). The premise is very interesting, and the underlying idea of the religious serial killer doing the god's work because the god wants people to behave a certain way and if you don't behave that way you deserve to die is certainly worth exploring. But this film doesn't quite know what it's doing, keeps changing focus, and finally wears out any welcome it had.

In the first place, Holy Spider begins by following one of the killer's victims. After he brutally murders her (something we see in gruesome detail), then he begins to alternate between the killer trying to hide the fact that he's a murderer from his family and a journalist attempting to stop him. This is not a bad premise, though it has its pitfalls – chief among which is the way the audience will naturally begin to root for the killer to escape simply because of how suspense works.

But after about an hour, the whole thing loses steam completely. It is unclear to Abbasi why he's showing these murders in such scopophilic detail. It's unclear why he's trying to understand the psychopath at the story's center. And it's unclear why the movie continues even after the killer is caught. The whole thing is a muddled mess made no less muddled by the fact that Abbasi clearly has a "message" for us all to take home with us. This was quite disappointing, especially because I was crazy about his film Border.

08 January 2023

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande


Listen, this is quite sweet. It's also... kinda boring. I think the central issue here is that nothing – and I mean nothing at all – in Good Luck to You, Leo Grande will surprise a viewer who has seen a movie or a play before. This is, in fact, very much like a little two-hander play. It has some good jokes, and I had a good chuckle a couple of times, but the showcase here is designed to be Emma Thompson, and that works well enough. She is fine in this, although, again, none of this will surprise.

What maybe is a tad surprising is that Good Luck to You is mostly sex-positive. This is a good thing all around. And Thompson does get naked for the part, which I found exciting and very body-positive as well as sex-positive. 

Still... I was kinda bored. Sex-positivity is great and everything, but must it all be so predictable?

04 January 2023

The Whale

I don't understand The Whale. I didn't understand it as a play, and I didn't understand it any better as a Darren Aronofsky film. This is, by the way, a very Darren Aronofsky film. It hates people and hates the god just as much as Mother! and Noah. The Whale is, in many ways, a perfect companion to these two very religious films, because this film is also about religion and horrible, horrible human beings.

The part that makes no sense to me, though, is the point of all of these portraits of horrible people. And I don't understand the purpose of the portrait of the delusional person at the film's center. (Aronofsky films are always about delusion.) This person is delusional about how wonderful people are. He somehow simultaneously believes that people are "amazing" (he uses this word more times than I could count) and wonderful while also willfully deciding to commit suicide. What does it mean to want to die but also to believe that the world is filled with people who are incapable of being unkind?

And of course one could say "I am large, I contain multitudes", as a poet the film cites once said, and one would be right. The film's protagonist can want to die while also believing in the inherent goodness of even the worst people in the world. But surely this is stretching things a bit.

For me, this film felt phony from start to finish. It doesn't strike a single true note. The situation that poses as a plot feels totally manufactured, and the backstories of the characters as they are revealed to us feel like theoretical feelings that people might have had rather than actual ideas thought by any real people.

As with the other two recent Aronofsky films, The Whale, although it's actually not a film about Jonah, is very, very angry at the god. But it also believes that the god is real. These two ideas can go together, and I understand their coexistence. Neither one, however, is at all interesting to me.

03 January 2023

Wildhood

Bretten Hannam's movie is about a Mi'kmaw teenager looking for his mother, and it slowly becomes what was for me the gay romantic movie of the year. Wildhood boasts a great appearance by Michael Greyeyes as well as excellent supporting performances by Joshua Odjick and Savonna Spracklin. This is a kind of teenage quest movie, a runaway odyssey. But it becomes so much more than that.

02 January 2023

The Fallen Sparrow (1943)

I persist in my fascination regarding WWII films made during WWII. The Fallen Sparrow, edited by Robert Wise (!) and directed by Richard Wallace, ​is well plotted and moves quickly. So much had happened by the end of the first 10 minutes, I was astounded by the amount of information we’d already gotten and had to look at my watch.

The best thing about this minor piece of anti-Nazi propaganda, though, is John Garfield. Despite the fact that The Fallen Sparrow was made as a vehicle for Maureen O’Hara, he’s just so good!  The camera loves him, and he’s a completely dynamic performer, immediately lovable despite his tough exterior. This film gives him some beautiful material to work through, including an intense monologue about torture in act one (of all places)! The monologue needs to be in act one because it needs to set up the psychological tension of the plot's twists and turns as well as the traumatic residue for the character.

Anyway, this is great. It's on the Criterion Channel until January 31st as part of a series celebrating Garfield's mostly underappreciated work as a performer.