Sunset (1988)

Late Blake Edwards is just not good. Sunset boasts a winning, delightfully comic performance by Bruce Willis but not much else. I love James Garner and Mariel Hemingway, but they both feel wooden in this. But, honestly, the entire premise is faulty. It's title is the rather somber Sunset, and it looks on the outside like it should be a neo-noir picture – a kind of Farewell, My Lovely or L.A. Confidential – but it actually wants to be Hail, Caesar!. The Coen Brothers would do this kind of silliness tinged with real issues correctly, but Edwards' version can't make the broad comedy and the mystery–melodrama make sense together.

Oscar Nominations 2021: 4 of 9

1. The Power of the Dog, Dune, Belfast, and West Side Story

2. King Richard, Drive My Car, Don't Look Up, and Nightmare Alley

3. CODA, Licorice Pizza, Being the Ricardos, and The Lost Daughter

 

The Tragedy of Macbeth

3 Nominations

• Actor: Denzel Washington (Roman J. Israel, Esq., Fences, Flight, Training Day, The Hurricane, Malcolm X, Glory, Cry Freedom)
• Cinematography: Bruno Delbonnel (Darkest Hour, Inside Llewyn Davis, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, A Very Long Engagement, Amélie)
• Production Design: Nancy Haigh (Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood, Hail, Caesar!, True Grit, Dreamgirls, Road to Perdition, Forrest Gump, Bugsy, Barton Fink) & Stefan Dechant

Director: Joel Coen

Cast: Washington, Frances McDormand, Kathryn Hunter, Alex Hassell, Bertie Carvel, Corey Hawkins, Brendan Gleeson, Harry Melling, Moses Ingram, Miles Anderson, Matt Helm

I'm really glad this was recognized for its outstanding production design and gorgeous cinematography. This is Bruno Delbonnel's 6th nomination, and he won't win for this, so he is coming due. Hopefully he wins something soon! I recommend The Tragedy of Macbeth; I really liked it, and although it has a few problems, it's the best Shakespeare adaptation I've seen in a long time. Denzel Washington is so good that I think the production design and cinematography had to be that good just to compete with him for screentime. I don't think this movie will win anything, though.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #14 out of 57

Encanto

3 Nominations

• Score: Germaine Franco
• Animated Feature
• Song: Lin-Manuel Miranda (Moana)

Director: Jared Bush, Byron Howard

Cast: Stephanie Beatriz, Maria Cecilia Botero, John Leguizamo, Wilmer Valderrama, Jessica Darrow, Angie Cepeda, Diane Guerrero, Mauro Castillo, Carolina Gaitán, Maluma, Rhenzy Feliz

This is a beautiful movie with really fun songs and some lovely animation. I thought it was really funny and it also works a lot like a stage musical instead of a movie musical, and I think I liked that... at least for an animated movie like this. Now, everyone knows that the real hit of Encanto in terms of the songs is "We Don't Talk about Bruno", but the song "Dos Oruguitas", the eleven o'clock number that had me in tears, is the song that is nominated. I can see this, but of course this means that the Academy missed the boat on the song from the movie that actually matters a great deal to people at this moment. This was a mistake. Shout out, too, to Germaine Franco. This is her first nomination for original score, and the music branch doesn't frequently let composers into this club and still frequently women composers. So good for her! It isn't my favorite animated film of the year, but I don't think Encanto can lose Animated Feature. It's the one of the five with the most nominations, and it's been racking up wins in other places.

Will Win: Animated Feature

Could Win: Song
My Rating: #17 out of 57

No Time to Die

3 Nominations

• Sound
• Visual Effects
• Song: Billie Eilish & Finneas O'Connell

Director: Cary Joji Fukunaga

Cast: Daniel Craig, Lashana Lynch, Léa Seydoux, Christoph Waltz, Rami Malek, Ana de Armas, Ralph Fiennes, Jeffrey Wright, Naomie Harris, Ben Whishaw, Billy Magnussen, Rory Kinnear

Sure, sure, sure. You have to nominated the Bond movie for these things, and the movie is loud and its visual effects are cool, and the song is... a Bond song. So, ok. Bond 25 was not that great, though, and I think everybody knows it. I mean, it has Rami Malek as a villain, and he spends the whole movie trying to get the audience's sympathy instead of being a terrible villain who wants to destroy the world. This movie is looooong and it has way too many feelings that I didn't understand.
Will Win: N/A

Could Win: Song

My Rating: #50 out of 57

Flee (Flugt)

3 Nominations

• Documentary Feature
• International Feature: Denmark (Another Round, Under Sandet, A War, The Hunt, A Royal Affair, In a Better World, After the Wedding, Waltzing Regitze, Pelle the Conqueror, Babette's Feast, Harry and the Butler, Paw, Qivitoq: the Mountain Wanderer)
• Animated Feature

Director: Jonas Poher Rasmussen

Cast: Amin Nawabi, Daniel Karimyar, Fardin Mijdzadeh, Milad Eskandari, Belal Faiz, Elaha Faiz, Zahra Mehrwarz, Sadia Faiz 

This is one of the best movies of the year. I absolutely loved it, and I'd recommend it to anyone. It's an animated documentary film about a man talking about fleeing Afghanistan and trying to live as a refugee in Europe – first in Russia and then in Denmark. This movie documents illegal border crossings and their difficulties and terrors, but it also gets to something else. This is the story of a man who is now safe, who is now living as a refugee in Denmark and doesn't have too much to worry about, but he can't help but feel, always, like he needs to flee. It is ingrained in him to run away, to mistrust others. And Flee tries to tell the story of how this man must try, then, to develop the loving relationships we all need to flourish in this world. It's a great movie.

Will Win: Documentary Feature

Could Win: International Feature
My Rating: #3 out of 57

5. Tick, Tick... Boom!, Parallel Mothers, The Eyes of Tammy Faye, and The Worst Person in the World
6. Cruella, Spencer, The Hand of God, and Lunana: a Yak in the Classroom
7. Cyrano, The Mitchells vs the Machines, Luca, and Raya and the Last Dragon
8. Spider-man: No Way Home, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and Free Guy

9. House of Gucci, Coming 2 America, and Four Good Days

The Best Shakespeare Adaptation I've Seen in Years

Denzel Washington is incredible in this.

It's been literal years since I've seen a film of a Shakespeare play in which actors spoke the lines like human beings. If The Tragedy of Macbeth is notable for anything it's that Washington and the other actors behave and speak like real people and not like people speaking Shake-a-spear. 

The design, however, is a little baffling. The actors are human beings, but the production design is theatrical in the extreme. Joel Coen (working alone) shoots the film in black and white, and stages The Tragedy in a highly theatrical mode.

I didn't mind any of this. I was here for the whole thing. I thought Corey Hawkins and Kathryn Hunter were standouts in their supporting roles. (Alex Hassell, too.) And the cut of Shakespeare's text is very, very good, with (as is appropriate) a focus on Macbeth himself rather than a focus on the weird sisters or Lady M (as so many directors these days want to do).

And Denzel Washington. He's just extraordinary. It's an astounding performance.

I've heard rumors that Washington is going to give us more arthouse fare in the years to come. Anything he gives us like this is a blessing. This is an actor at the top of his game, and he loves to make big Hollywood nonsense, so if he started making arthouse fare? It's hard to imagine being so blessed.

Also: we're in a black-and-white moment, right? Passing and Belfast and C'mon, C'mon and The Tragedy of Macbeth? That seems like a lot of important movies in black and white for one year.

Blow the Man Down

Blow the Man Down (available now on Amazon Prime) is a Martin McDonagh film without the really brutal violence and without – and this is where it fails – the broad comedy. Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy's movie opts for a quirkier brand of comedy that I didn't really find funny. The inspirations here are McDonagh and the Coens, but the execution just doesn't work. It's fine, and Margo Martindale has a nice juicy part, and June Squibb has a good one too, but there is no more than that to recommend here and the two lead performers are boring.

A Hollywood Fairy Tale

Tarantino's new film Once upon a Time... in Hollywood was, I assumed, a fun reference to Sergio Leone's Once upon a Time in the West and Once upon a Time in America. (In fact, the television actor Rick Dalton, played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Tarantino's movie does go to Italy to make pictures). But Tarantino's title does more than nod in the direction of Sergio Leone and the spaghetti western; Tarantino is also marking his film as a fairy tale, a kind of magical story or fable in a far-away place, one with heroes and villains and magical objects and a princess who needs saving.

I am going to have to spoil the film's ending as I write this response to Tarantino's movie, so be warned. It's almost impossible to talk about Once upon a Time... in Hollywood without talking about its third act, because so much of what happens in the third act justifies what Tarantino does for the first two-thirds of the movie.

Hollywood is three stories in one. It is the story of Rick Dalton, one of those actors in Hollywood who made movies in the 1950s and then destroyed their film careers by accidentally but permanently moving to television, where they could get parts more easily and money more quickly. It is the story of Rick Dalton's stuntman Cliff Booth, whose career is in the dumps, who doesn't get along with other stuntmen and so has become Rick's driver, handyman, and general factotum. And it is the story of Sharon Tate, who, unlike Dalton and Booth, is a real human being who lived in Hollywood in 1968 and 1969. She was a rising star and a talented comedienne, and she was married to Roman Polanski, the Polish film director who had only just made Rosemary's Baby in 1968.

Sharon Tate is a puzzling figure in Hollywood – mostly because she simply doesn't seem to fit in the movie. The movie is so obviously focused on Cliff and Rick, and when the film leaves the two men and follows Sharon for an afternoon as she picks up a hitchhiker and watches a movie downtown or when she goes to a party with Steve McQueen at the Playboy Mansion, Tarantino's film feels confused, even meandering. Why are we watching Sharon Tate? DiCaprio's character is so much more interesting! I will admit that these thoughts crossed my mind while I was watching – so I can imagine that for the three young men next to me at the theatre (young weightlifting-type guys), who told me after the movie was over that they hated it, these Sharon sequences must've been painful. But this movie makes no sense if you don't know who Sharon Tate is and you don't know she was murdered by members of Charles Manson's "family" fifty years ago in August of 1969. Anyone watching the movie without knowing about the Sharon Tate murders – and I wager this is quite a few people – isn't going to be able to make sense of what Tarantino is doing here; his film depends fundamentally on knowing the context.

Pitt is as cool and effortless as ever

I'll come back to Tate in a bit, but first let me just say that all of Tarantino's films are bathed in nostalgia, especially nostalgia for the movies, and Hollywood is no exception. This film – and I'm not a huge Tarantino fan, to be honest – felt aimed directly at me. So many delightful movie references: from the marquees of 1968 releases, to the Los Angeles scenery, to the extended sequence with Bruce Lee, to the constant mentions of Edward O'Brien, to the absurd re-shot sequence from The Great Escape. I was in movie-lover heaven. Tarantino's movie taste and my own don't usually sync up, and so his film references don't usually land for me, but it all worked for me this time. Hollywood is also really funny, and both Pitt and DiCaprio are doing great work as comedians in this. Even when DiCaprio is being his most emotionally vulnerable in Hollywood, he is still allowing us to laugh at him. The extended afternoon we spend with him as he films that television pilot with Timothy Olyphaunt has some great acting in it.

Which isn't to say that Hollywood isn't overly long. Tarantino doesn't make tight movies. He makes fat, slightly messy, mostly shallow movies with slick surfaces and cool simulacra. That's the brand, and the movies are always too long. Tarantino thinks too much of himself to trim with any real zeal. But again – and I don't feel this way about Hateful Eight or Django Unchained – I was never bored during Hollywood. And everything felt justified by the film's insane third act. I guess it's time to talk about that now...

Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate

As we moved toward the night of the murders I started to get nervous. In the first place, this Kurt Russell narration took over again once we moved to Italy, and Russell's deadpan voice – especially as we got closer to the early morning of August 9th – reminded me that we were watching something that really happened. Tarantino gives us timestamps throughout. Sharon and her friends went to this Mexican restaurant; they came home and played the piano; they smoked marijuana; it was the hottest day of the year; one of Sharon's friends was watching television while the other went to bed. It's all so true and so it's a reminder that something terrible is about to happen. But the point is that he uses the generic conventions of documentary drama here to put us into a certain mode of watching.

And because of Tarantino's well-known infamy as a filmmaker who shoots violence savagely and coolly (there has been a great deal written about this), I started to get very worried. How would he film Sharon's murder, given how affectionate his film had been with her so far? But – and here's the surprise – Hollywood never switches fully into the genre. It never becomes one of those episodes of "The F.B.I." that Cliff and Rick watch. It stays... comedic. We are laughing, even as Rick yells at the Manson family's noisy car, as the driver speeds away after having "forgotten" her knife, even as they bust into the house and stand off with Cliff, who is on a mild acid trip. The fight with the Manson family is uproariously funny and is intended to be. The violence is brutal, absurdly, insanely brutal, and Tarantino takes pleasure in destroying and mutilating these horrible people, who (it is impossible to forget) actually murdered four people and Sharon's unborn baby, stabbing each person over a dozen times.

I have written before about the shift that I see in the violence in Tarantino's movies with Django Unchained, whereby I believe that QT has become much more ethical in his presentations of violence. As I have argued before, Tarantino is careful about which violence we can enjoy and which we cannot. He invites us to enjoy the violence in this sequence and in the sequence with the hippy out at the Spahn Ranch, but that doesn't mean that Once upon a Time... in Hollywood contains gratuitous violence. It doesn't. Tarantino could easily have shown us, just for example, Cliff (accidentally?) shooting his wife with the harpoon on the boat. He doesn't. He is being judicious about the violence we see. This isn't Pulp Fiction. In any case, watching these murderers get destroyed by Brad Pitt and his dog and then by Leonardo DiCaprio and his flame-thrower is endlessly delightful. I enjoyed it thoroughly.

Sharon Tate with Bruce Lee and Nancy Kwan

It's an ending that in many ways replays what QT did with Inglourious Basterds, a bold lie told in the face of history, a fantasy of what might have happened. It's... a fairy tale, if you will. Sharon Tate gets to live in this story. And as I thought about that while the movie ended, and even now as I write these words, I am deeply moved. It's a beautiful, generous, impossible fantasy, but one absolutely filled with hope and respect. Sharon's voice over that intercom at the end of the movie, and Jay Sebring's hopeful treble as he asks Rick questions honestly felt like gifts from Tarantino to me. He has imagined a world in which Sharon didn't die and this washed up actor's career is resuscitated because he saves Sharon's life and is neighbors with Roman Polanski (maybe in this universe Rick plays the lead in Chinatown or one of the men in Tess).

And this magical, fairy tale ending makes clear what Tarantino was doing with Sharon Tate in the first two acts of the movie. We simply spend time with her, get to glimpse her brightness and her pleasure, her sheer joy at being in the movies, her pride at having done a good job, her grace and kindness with everyone around her, her excitement about her baby. None of this is dramatic. It's simply a reminder of how lovely she was (especially compared with the hard-drinking asshole that Rick is). This respect for Tate is underlined by Tarantino's use of actual footage of Sharon Tate from the Dean Martin film The Wrecking Crew. As Sharon watches the movie, we don't watch Margot Robbie as Tate: we watch Tate herself. It's a strange choice for Tarantino to have made, until it becomes clear that QT is paying tribute to Tate and her talents. The more I think about it, the more I think it's an extraordinary thing to do.

....And all this at the end of a hilarious, Coen Brothers influenced, Hollywood western.

In case you hadn't guessed it, I really liked Once upon a Time... in Hollywood. I know this movie isn't going to be for everyone, but I laughed for most of the film and was very moved by the movie's end.

* * *

Final side note. You probably knew that Tarantino has a thing for women's feet: they appear with frequency in his movies, and I've written about all of the feet in Pulp Fiction before. Well, Once upon a Time... in Hollywood is no exception. In fact, I think this obsession is even more apparent in this movie than it's ever been.

Even DiCaprio's feet make an appearance in this one. Equal opportunity.

Oscar Nominations 2019: Part 4 of 11

Part 1: Roma, The Favourite, Vice, A Star Is Born.
Part 2: Black Panther, BlacKkKlansman, Green Book, Bohemian Rhapsody.
Part 3: Mary Poppins Returns, First Man, Cold War.
Part 4:

Can You Ever Forgive Me?

3 Nominations

• Actress: Melissa McCarthy (Bridesmaids)
• Adapted Screenplay: Nicole Holofcener & Jeff Whitty
• Supporting Actor: Richard E. Grant

Director: Marielle Heller

Cast: McCarthy, Grant, Dolly Wells, Jane Curtin, Stephen Spinella, Ben Falcone, Christian Navarro, Gregory Korostishevsky, Anna Deavere Smith, Erik LaRay Harvey, Pun Bandhu, Brandon Scott Jones, Marc Evan Jackson

This movie is so good! I thought from the trailer that this movie had no idea what it wanted to be – is it a comedy? A serious drama? A true story? What's kind of amazing is that it is all of these things and that it is still so balanced, so lovely. Marielle Heller has done superb work here, and she probably ought to have been nominated in the director category this year. It's rather a shame she wasn't. Can You Ever Forgive Me? is just such a good movie. I hope more people see this movie now that it has three Oscar nominations. I have to say, also, that I have long been skeptical of Melissa McCarthy. I thought she was hilarious in Funny People, but I think that's because Funny People is so unfunny, so she was a bright spot. But in this movie she is both hilarious and also really, really beautifully moving. She's excellent, and she was one of my top 5 performances of the year. This nomination is completely deserved. Shout out, too, to Nicole Holofcener, who, for some reason has never been nominated for best original screenplay but got her first writing nomination for a) a movie she didn't direct and b) an adapted screenplay! So strange. Oh! last note: this is a film about two queer people in New York in the 1980s. Queerness is not a problematic in the film, but the film's perspective is very queer. It's delightful.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #17 out of 67

If Beale Street Could Talk

3 Nominations

• Adapted Screenplay: Barry Jenkins (Moonlight)
  
• Supporting Actress: Regina King
• Score: Nicholas Britell (Moonlight)

Director: Jenkins

Cast: KiKi Layne, King, Stephan James, Colman Domingo, Michael Beach, Teyonah Parris, Finn Wittrock, Bryan Tyree Henry, Aunjanue Ellis, Ebony Obsidian, Dominique Thorne, Dave Franco, Diego Luna, Ed Skrein, Emily Rios, Pietro Pascal, Marcia Jean Kurtz

This is the best ensemble work of the year. Every actor is fabulous in it. Every single one. Stephan James is incredible in this movie, and Regina King will deserve her Oscar when she wins it. I loved this movie. It isn't quite the book (a book I love), but it's doing its own rather magical thing instead of trying to do the book. I felt near tears through most of it. Now... I have heard talk that some people think this movie got robbed when the nominations came out. I can't say I agree. It was released way too late, and the studio really didn't do the work it needed to do to get the nominations happening. Regina King's omission from the SAG awards is a good example of this. The SAGs skew heavily toward stuff that's been released in theatres – thus the popularity of movies like A Quiet Place and even Mary Queen of Scots. If a poetic movie like Beale Street is going to land with the Screen Actors Guild, it simply needs to be released earlier. In any case, three nominations is nothing to sneeze at. And this is pretty much exactly what happened with Call Me by Your Name last year. It was a movie popular with critics that everyone thought would get more nominations than it did, and it ended up with only three. Still, I think Beale Street could win two Oscars on Feb. 24th. It will definitely win supporting actress, but it may also win Jenkins his second writing Oscar, as well. (It is worth saying that Beale Street also is not perfect. Because Jenkins' style is so insistently poetic, the film's treatment of the appalling incarceration rates for black men in the U.S. don't quite work. Jenkins' film doesn't really take place in the real world, so if you're whole film is going to be a kind of poetic meditation, you can't also attempt to address real world consequences and issues, well maybe you can do this, but Jenkins' film doesn't quite manage it.)

Will Win: Adapted Screenplay, Supporting Actress
Could Win: Score
My Rating: #11 out of 67

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

3 Nominations

• Adapted Screenplay: Ethan Coen (Bridge of Spies, True Grit, A Serious Man, No Country for Old Men, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Fargo) & Joel Coen (Bridge of Spies, True Grit, A Serious Man, No Country for Old Men, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Fargo)
  
• Costume Design: Mary Zophres (La La Land, True Grit)
• Song - "When a Cowboy Trades His Spurs for Wings": David Rawlings & Gillian Welch

Director: Coen Brothers

Cast: Tim Blake Nelson, Liam Neeson, Tom Waits, Zoe Kazan, Bill Heck, Grainger Hines, Tyne Daly, Brendan Gleeson, James Franco, Harry Melling, Jonjo O'Neill, Saul Rubinek, Sam Dillon, Stephen Root, Chelcie Ross, Jefferson Mays, Paul Rae, Prudence Wright Holmes, David Krumholtz, Willie Watson,

This feels like a sort of minor Coen Brothers movie, but it's so funny, and it's such a pleasure to watch all of these little stories. Each one is excellent. Each works very well on its own terms, but as a group, these stories are pretty wonderful. And they're so well made that this film is completely enjoyable. Also it's on Netflix, so that just makes everything easier. For me, Bill Heck, who played the intended husband in the "girl who got rattled" segment, was truly the best in the film, His portrayal is so sensitive and vulnerable. I found him quite moving. I also loved Tyne Daly in the final segment. She's perfect. And the score. It's nice that the cute Gillian Welch song got nominated; that's really fun. But Carter Burwell's score is memorable and haunting, and I love it so much. I am very sad that it didn't get nominated.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A
My Rating: #29 out of 67

Oscar Noms 2017: 7 of 13

Part 1 - La La Land, Moonlight, Arrival
Part 2 - Manchester by the Sea, Hacksaw Ridge, Lion
Part 3 - Fences, Hell or High Water, Hidden Figures, Jackie
Part 4 - Florence Foster Jenkins, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Passengers, Rogue One
Part 5 - Deepwater Horizon, Kubo and the Two Strings, Moana, A Man Called Ove
Part 6 - Captain Fantastic, Elle, Loving, Nocturnal Animals

Part 7:

The Lobster

1 Nomination

• Original Screenplay: Efthimis Filippou & Yorgos Lanthimos

Director: Lanthimos

Cast: Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, Léa Seydoux, John C. Reilly, Olivia Colman, Ben Whishaw, Angeliki Papoulia, Garry Mountaine, Ariane Labed, Jessica Barden, Imelda Nagle Ryan

I am a big fan of The Lobster and I am so happy that it was nominated in this category. Lanthimos's work is so interesting, and his voice is truly unique. This is a complicated, funny, extremely weird movie that – the more you think about it – isn't really all that weird. It's one of the best movies of the year and not to be missed. Come to think of it: you know, the original screenplay category is often where the Academy really shines. It chooses some of the oddest scripts in this category, but really can shine a light on new voices in filmmaking. Just look back through some of the films that have been nominated in this category – Ex Machina, Straight outta Compton, Nightcrawler, Her, Margin Call, A Separation. It really is a category the Academy can be proud of, I think. And this year's choices (except for La La Land, really) are all very deserving.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #12 out of 92

20th Century Women

1 Nomination

• Original Screenplay: Mike Mills

Director: Mills

Cast: Annette Bening, Greta Gerwig, Elle Fanning, Lucas Jade Zumann, Billy Crudup, Allison Elliott, Thea Gill

This was my #2 film for the year. I absolutely loved this movie. I loved its central performance by Annette Bening (she was robbed of a nomination), but actually 20th Century is a true ensemble piece with five great performances at its center and lots of memorable smaller characters. I loved 20th Century's exploration of a different kind of motherhood than we're used to seeing. I loved that it was a coming-of-age film that wasn't through the kid's point of view, and then wasn't a coming-of-age film after all. It's a movie about parenting that doesn't pretend to be a movie about growing up! (I'm looking at you, Boyhood.) But it's also this amazingly feminist movie about the decisions our mothers make as they raise us and how someone might go about raising a boy so that he doesn't grow up to be a jackass. And it's about the connections we make with people in our lives that last only for a little while but can have an enormous impact on us. It's about getting old. But it's also about living in a world of uncertainty, trying to make sense of a world that doesn't really make sense anymore, trying to understand the way our kids see the world even though we don't see it that way at all. And at the same time, 20th Century is this portrait of a woman who doesn't always tell the truth, who has lots to hide because she is afraid of a lot of things, but who still wants to be open and generous with this kid she loves and wants to raise as best she can. It's so complex and beautiful and funny and quirky, and I absolutely loved it.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #2 out of 92

Silence

1 Nomination

• Cinematography: Rodrigo Prieto (Brokeback Mountain)

Director: Martin Scorsese

Cast: Andrew Garfield, Kubozuka Yōsuke, Issei Ogata, Tsukamoto Shin'ya, Adam Driver, Asano Tadanobu, Liam Neeson, Ciarán Hinds, Komatsu Nana, Yoshi Oïda

I didn't really dislike Silence, per se, but this film does not work. It's beautiful, of course, and this is due in large part to Rodrigo Prieto's nominated cinematography here. The production design of the film is also beautiful, and the acting is moving and intriguing (Garfield's performance here is surely one thing that pushed him over the edge for his nomination for Hacksaw). But Scorsese's film makes some very strange – even awkward – filmic choices. Much of the film involves speaking to a god who does not speak back (this is the eponymous silence, the god's silence after a prayer), but then, surprisingly, at a point late in the film the god does speak to Garfield's character. What? Something shifted in me when this happened and the film sort of lost me. It felt like a rule that had been set up for the audience over the long hours of the film had been suddenly and inexplicably broken for a reason I couldn't really understand. One of the reasons I found this choice so troubling is that the majority of Silence is about ethics: What are the choices I should make when faced with terrible violence? What are the choices I should make to save others, even though my decision might force me to do something I wouldn't normally do? What is my duty to my fellow man vs. my duty to my faith? But once the god does talk to a person, those questions are easily resolved. Can't the god just tell you what to do? And why has the god been silent for so long when it had the power of speech up its proverbial sleeve the whole time? This is, perhaps, the film's oddest choice, but there is yet another! The film's third act (which is structured like an epilogue), is actually quite a lengthy plot entirely its own that could be a film in its own right. We jump forward in time several times, and the film's central character, with whom we have spent so much time and whom we understood so well, makes a series of decisions that do not accord with what we know of him. For this third act, the film keeps its distance from the main character, never inviting us into his thoughts the way the first two acts did. This is so weird. We are not asked to dislike this character, we have followed him for too long for that,we are only asked to watch what he has done, but are no longer let into why. In fine, Silence is a complex, very long film that is interesting in its exploration of ethics, but awkward in its execution. Lots to recommend, lots to fault.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A
My Rating: #55 out of 92

Hail, Caesar!

1 Nomination

• Production Design: Jess Gonchor (True Grit) & Nancy Haigh (True Grit, Dreamgirls, Road to Perdition, Forrest Gump, Bugsy, Barton Fink)

Director: Joel Coen & Ethan Coen

Cast: Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Alden Ehrenreich, Ralph Fiennes, Channing Tatum, Scarlett Johansson, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand, Veronica Osorio, Jonah Hill, Allison Pill


This is so much fun. I can't recommend this enough. It is a silly little film, slight even, but it is so good at its own nonsense that it succeeds perfectly. This is a film set in old Hollywood that is really neither ironic nor nostalgic. It is a send-up of Hollywood, but not an ironic one. Instead, it's a fond send-up of Hollywood, one that genuinely loves Hollywood and can laugh at its silliness while taking pleasure in it at the same time. The stars, the glamor, the backstage gossip! The Coen Brothers' look into this is a kind of Chekhovian bit of brilliance that laughs at it all but can't help loving it. Best in show – amid a large number of great actors – turns out to be the relatively unknown Alden Ehrenreich, who is hilarious as an action star who can't act his way out of a paper bag. It's laugh-out-loud hilarious. This is also a really smart movie that involves a surprise cameo from a member of the Frankfurt school and an articulation of some of the goals of twentieth-century American Communism but with a Coen Brothers spin, off course. It's so much fun. Trust me.
Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #18 out of 92

Back to:
Part 1 - La La Land, Moonlight, Arrival
Part 2 - Manchester by the Sea, Hacksaw Ridge, Lion
Part 3 - Fences, Hell or High Water, Hidden Figures, Jackie
Part 4 - Florence Foster Jenkins, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Passengers, Rogue One 
Part 5 - Deepwater Horizon, Kubo and the Two Strings, Moana, A Man Called Ove
Part 6 - Captain Fantastic, Elle, Loving, Nocturnal Animals

Nostalgia for Old Glamor

Hollywood loves itself, and movies about old Hollywood seem to arrive on the scene every year. Last year we had the abysmal Trumbo, but not so long ago, we had The Artist, which was delightful and went on to win Best Picture. And, incidentally, I really liked Hail, Caesar!, this year's Coen Brothers spectacle. This year's winner will be about Hollywood, too, (I'm talking about La La Land, obviously), but it will be a different kind of nostalgia trip that three movies I'm reporting on today were.

First, a movie that is already on DVD, Woody Allen's Café Society. Is this movie about café society in New York? I guess it is. But more importantly this movie is just bad. Jesse Eisenberg plays a young Jewish kid and neurotic Woody Allen surrogate, who falls in love with a woman he can't have. Fine. That part of the film is actually sort of interesting.

The really bad part is Steve Carrell as his movie-mogul uncle. The film is filled with name-dropping absurdities. Carrell informs us that "I'm expecting a call from Ginger Rogers" or some other nondescript idiocy. There are no actors in Kate Hepburn or Hedda Hopper drag, and actually I can't believe that I am about to say this, but I think the film could've been improved by that camp gesture that usually so annoys me. I say this because without actors in drag as famous people, Café Society feels like a hermetically sealed Woody Allen universe that has no attachment to reality in any way. I never for one moment believed Steve Carrell was a movie executive, I never believed he had lunch with Errol Flynn, and I never, for that matter, even believed he lived in Los Angeles.

As I've said before about this period of Woody Allen's career, I feel like Allen can still write a movie – the premise and ending of Café Society are intriguing – but he no longer knows how to direct one (cf. Magic in the Moonlight, Blue Jasmine, To Rome with Love). Café Society feels phony in the extreme, filled with caricatures on movie sets doing things that real people never do and saying words that sound like bad readings of a Woody Allen screenplay. I still feel an attachment to Allen's universes, and that's why I saw this, but if you care about yourself, you will skip this film.

* * *

And then there is Rules Don't Apply, the first film by the great Warren Beatty since 1998's Bulworth. (Honestly, how is that possible???). This is actually a fairly charming little movie, although it does wear out its welcome after awhile.

Ms. Collins and Mr. Ehrenreich

Beatty has said that Rules Don't Apply is not a film about Howard Hughes, but is instead a movie about two young people who get caught up in Hughes's world. The two have been damaged by Christianity so much that they feel like they can't love one another even though they do. All of this is true. the film is about that, but Rules Don't Apply has Howard Hughes in it, and Hughes is too large a character for the film to be about anything else. Rules becomes about Howard's strange peccadilloes, even if it wants to be an old-fashioned love story about two kids overcoming silly Christian mores. 

The storytelling here is charming, though. Lily Collins, Alden Ehrenreich, Beatty himself, Annette Bening, Matthew Broderick, Candice Bergen, and the other (numerous) actors who appear in the film are all absolutely delightful. And the whole thing has a delightful whimsy that didn't wear thin for me, even though the Rules as a whole feels fairly shallow. 

Perhaps most disappointing about Rules is that it isn't going to get any Oscar nominations. Or... well, actually, I actually think the song "The Rules Don't Apply" actually deserves a nomination, and may garner the film its only one. It's just not a deep enough movie, glamorous and cute as it was.

* * *

Last but certainly not least is Jackie from Chilean director Pablo Larraín, who has had three movies released in the U.S. in 2016 (The Club was earlier in the year and Neruda is in theatres now). 

Jackie is an intense character study of Jacqueline Kennedy from just before the president is shot and killed to the end of his funeral procession. The form of the film is odd, though, and this is most clearly marked by Mica Levi's dissonant horror-film score, which either makes or breaks the film, depending on your perspective. But Jackie is not Jackie without this score. Levi's music is overwhelming, insistent, and always troubling. As Jackie interacts with Robert Kennedy, with Rose Kennedy, with Jack Valenti, with Lyndon Johnson, one has a constant sense of disturbance, disruption, even terror. It's a very jarring effect.

I thought Jackie was a weird movie. I rather appreciated what it was trying to do, but I can't say that I enjoyed it. I liked its version of character study – one that takes stock of a person in crisis and then makes judgments about her based on the decisions she made during this very difficult time. Jackie has a great deal of affection for its central figure, but is also deeply suspicious of her, sees her as fundamentally flawed, ambitious, vindictive, perhaps even shallow. This makes the whole thing complicated and interesting, certainly, but... well it just isn't all that pleasurable. I found myself growing impatient with Mrs. Kennedy, with her tics and her wealth and her pretensions ("I don't smoke", she tells a reporter, though she has been chainsmoking throughout the entire film).

Jackie is going to get a single Oscar nomination for Natalie Portman (and maybe could net one more for Costume Design), but I can't see this picture connecting with audiences in a big way.

In fairness to Larraín's movie, I will say that my central thought while watching the pageantry of Jack Kennedy's funeral was about how classy it all was. Say what you want about Jackie Kennedy, she had class. How far we have fallen! We are about to install the most vulgar, classless president in American history into the White House, and the new First Lady won't even be moving into the house where Jackie, Caroline, and John Jr. lived. It is very hard not to think about President-Elect Trump while watching Jackie, and it may be that, finally, that makes the movie difficult to watch.

More movies to come! I'm seeing lots of them.

Hail, Caesar!

Hilariously clever. All of the actors are great – and it is truly a great company of players – but for me Alden Ehrenreich really stole the show.


I loved everything about this: the weird homosexuality that was apparently everywhere; the spoofs of Esther Williams and Gene Kelly; the fact that the Communists really were plotting the downfall of Hollywood; the Soviet submarine; Channing Tatum (he's perfect); the Ben-Hur riff (Hail, Caesar: a Tale of the Christ hahahaha); and the fact that Marcuse is a character, lecturing Hollywood types about consumer capitalism. The whole thing is just too clever by half. I loved it.

Bone Tomahawk

I was really hoping that Bone Tomahawk was going to be great. It's a horror / western that stars the awesome Kurt Russell, as well as Patrick Wilson, Matthew Fox, Richard Jenkins, and Lili Simmons. I found the trailer for the film simultaneously bizarre and terrifying, and so I was looking forward to it.

But... although the script is mostly great, the movie itself is a fairly consistent letdown.This has nothing to do with Kurt Russell's taciturn performance as the film's main character, and nothing to do with the earnestness and nuance that Patrick Wilson mobilizes in order to play his role, but everything to do with the uneven way the film is directed by first-timer S. Craig Zahler.

The film's plot is delightfully gruesome. A trio of people is kidnapped in a small, 19th century Western town in the desert. The town's sheriff, two deputies, and a vengeful husband ride off to find the three. They have been kidnapped by cannibals – a bizarre tribe of Americans who paint their bodies white, implant whistles in their voice-boxes, speak no language, have no name, and rape and murder their own mothers. Grisly stuff.

Everything about the film, though, is uneven. The performances are occasionally great, but sometimes very very stilted. The score sometimes fills a scene beautifully; at other times, Zahler has opted for no music at all and the film feels lifeless and boring. A different (gorgeous) sort-of western from this year called Jauja spends most of its running time in longshot, observing its characters from afar and studying, instead, the landscape and the feeling of the world. Bone Tomahawk seems to want, occasionally, to do this same thing, to observe its characters from a distance, to set them out from a very general background of desert by putting them in relief. But the camera doesn't seem to cooperate. It jumps from closeups to wide shots without apparent rhyme or reason, and the film's meditative elements seem only half-hearted, as though what we're all really here for are the grisly sequences that we watch in act three.

Matthew Fox as John Brooder

These are decidedly grotesque. The centerpiece of this sequence is the scalping of actor Evan Jonigkeit.

He is then turned upside down and hacked down the center of his body lengthwise. It is extraordinary to watch and really, really gross. Definitely the nastiest thing I've seen all year. There are a bunch of other grotesque images here, as well, and they are worth watching, but I found myself wondering what exactly was happening. If the grotesqueries in act three are the point of the film, why waste all the time in acts one and two doing faux character study as we follow the men to the camp for three days and nights? Why not concentrate on the murders and the corpses that result?

Comedy is a problem in this film too. Nearly all of Richard Jenkins' lines are directed to be a kind of steadily running stream of feeble jokes. Some of them are funny – the audience I was with chuckled out loud at several – but this film is a horror/western, and the comedy always felt out of place to me, or as a kind of attempted but failed nod at the Coen Brothers.

And I suppose it is mean, but I thought Lili Simmons was terrible in this. Her performance holds a single register throughout, and she never looks or acts like a woman at the frontier. She's a beautiful woman, and a nice match for the very pretty Patrick Wilson, but she struck me as awfully miscast. Matthew Fox, on the other hand, is great. He is mean and effete and arrogant and just delightful, even if the camera tends to avoid him and the film's narrative disposes of him.

In any case, the film felt to me like something that had as its priority the telling of a story, instead of having as its priority the way to tell the story. Bone Tomahawk needed as its director someone who didn't write the screenplay.

Kumiko the Treasure Hunter

Kumiko the Treasure Hunter, the Zellner Brothers. movie, is based on a true story of a young Japanese woman who convinced herself that the Coen Brothers movie Fargo was a true story and that the treasure that Steve Buscemi buries next to a fence in a snow-covered field is a real treasure that she can go dig up.

The movie stars Rinko Kikuchi and is quirky and sad and more indebted to the Coen Brothers than I can even really begin to say. It has the same types of very funny salt-of-the-earth characters for which the Coens are known, and it shifts tone from incredibly bleak to totally absurd in the blink of an eye. It is, in fact, a kind of absurdist, existential film that works very, very well. The Coens, after all, are not bad masters to have, and if the movie owes much to them, the Zellners are certainly up front about their love for their predecessors and their debts to them. In any case, Kumiko is beautifully acted and thoroughly enjoyable, with a hopeful, whimsical strain to its tragic story.

Inspiration, Overcoming, and Oscar Bait

Somewhere near the end of act two of Angelina Jolie's Unbroken, the evil Japanese man who runs the P.O.W. camp where U.S. Olympian slash soldier Louie Zamperini is imprisoned forces the other Allied soldiers in the camp to punch Louie in the face. All of them. Louie takes their punches like a champ, screaming at his fellows who don't want to slug him Just hit me!

Jolie's film is a little bit like Louie at this moment in the movie.

It isn't that there aren't problems with the movie. There are plenty of them. But, like its hero, Unbroken seems to me a sort of resilient little guy. It tries and tries, and it wants to be something amazing. And as much as you might want to punch it in the face, it's just going to get up and stand there staring at you in defiance.

Unbroken, for the record, is based on a book by Laura Hillenbrand, and if you didn't know this before you started the movie, you will once you start watching. Anything that could happen to Louie Zamerpini happens to him. Hillebrand stuffs new events into Zamperni's life as though accretion will make him interesting, much like she did in the narrative she created that spawned Seabiscuit back in 2003. He is a first-generation immigrant; he takes control of his life as a small child by focusing on running; he runs in the Olympics; he is a bombardier in the Pacific theatre in the Second World War; his plane crashes not once but twice, and the second time the plane goes down in the Pacific and he survives. Then he survives in the middle of the ocean with only a tiger for company for like 45 days by literally catching sharks with his bare hands; he is finally rescued... by the Japanese; he is beaten; he is transferred to a POW camp in Tokyo where he is tormented by this crazy sadist named "the Bird", who has some kind of bizarre (erotic?) fascination with him; he appears on Japanese radio for some reason; he is then transferred to a new prison camp where he hauls coal; he lifts things above his head. (The poster, incidentally, really is iconic. I love it. Even if this movie never addresses anything approximating "redemption", whatever that is supposed to mean in this context.)

But all of that really happened to him, you might protest. Fine. But I am sure lots of other things happened to him, too. Like, I dunno, dancing with a girl for the first time, or learning to make gnocchi, or training to be a bombardier, or carrying his husband's blood around his neck in a vial. My point is that the film (of course it does) gets to choose what it shows us, and it chooses to show us all of the things that beggar belief. Even if they are all true, this compilation of events is not the same as a character study. Hillebrand and Jolie seem to believe that the fact that he made it through all of these events is a study of who the man is.

Garrett Hedlund: an unassuming bright spot in this movie

What it does to me, instead, is make him into a kind of superhuman figure, who represents resilience, unbrokenness (that old masculine preoccupation), triumph, even military victory, rather than being an actual human. We learn very little about Louie Zamperini himself, except that he is strong enough to take a punch.

There is plenty of sentiment here, too, and Unbroken is intended as a weeper: a deeply tearful story that makes us all hug our six children just a little tighter.

And now I imagine Louie getting back to his feet and looking at me with his clear, shallow eyes. See, in truth, this film is not really that much worse than the other big sentimental Oscar-bait movies of the year (The Theory of Everything, The Imitation Game, Rosewater). In fact, I think it's a bit better than them. It's beautifully shot, and much less boring than those movies, and it doesn't have nearly as many cliché phrases as those three films, and if Unbroken focuses, like Theory, Imitation, and Rosewater, on a young man who is assailed by things he simply doesn't deserve and a world in which he feels lost and misunderstood, Unbroken at least does not ask us to pity our protagonist from some position of audience superiority; the other films do that in spades.

Why did the Academy like Theory of Everything and Imitation Game so much more than it liked Rosewater and Unbroken? Honestly, I couldn't tell you. It all feels so arbitrary to me. But it might be this feeling of superiority that we are allowed as we look at Alan Turing and Stephen Hawking in this year's movies about their lives. Imitation Game and Theory of Everything are completely invested in the idea that their protagonists "really" want to be "just like us"; they're designed to make us feel better about ourselves. Unbroken wants us to try to be better, to work harder, to lift that motherfucking piece of wood over our heads. It's a ridiculous film, but in this way, at least, it asks so much more of its audience than its fellow Oscar-bait films this year. Somehow I bet that it will eventually make more money than those other two movies, too. Because when you punch Louie Zamperini, he just gets back up.

Oscar Nominees 2014: Part 5 of 14

Frozen

2 Nominations

• Animated Feature
• Original Song: Kristen Anderson-Lopez & Robert Lopez

Director: Chris Buck, Jennifer Lee

Cast: Kristen Bell, Idina Menzel, Jonathan Groff, Josh Gad, Santino Fontana, Maia Wilson, Alan Tudyk, Ciarán Hinds


This is cute and good for all sorts of reasons. I wasn't quite as crazy about the nominated song "Let It Go" as I was about some of the film's other songs – "Fixer Upper", for example, or my personal favorite "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?" – but the song is as wildly popular as the film, and the Academy, I am sure, will love to have Broadway star Idina Menzel belting the hell out of it at the Oscar ceremony on March 2nd. It's going to win, too. In fact, there would appear to be almost no competition for either of the awards for which Frozen is nominated. Although Brave taking this award last year was a big surprise to me, so maybe I just don't have my finger on the pulse of what other adults are looking for when they watch an animated film. In any case, if Frozen does win, it will mean two years of girl-power. And that's something we can all get excited about, particularly because Frozen's version of girl-power, is way, way cooler than Brave's.

Will Win: Animated Feature, Song

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #41 out of 77

The Grandmaster (一代宗師)

2 Nominations

• Cinematography: Philippe Le Sourd
• Costume Design: William Chang Suk Ping

Director: Wong Kar-wai

Cast: Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Zhang Ziyi, Zhang Jin, Chang Chen, Yuen Woo-Ping, Wang Qingxiang, Le Cung, Song, Hye-kyo, Zhao Benshan, Lau Ga-yung, Lau Shun, Xiaoshenyang

I really love Wong Kar-wai. At least, I used to. This movie made me, more than anything else, want to watch his earlier stuff: especially Days of Being Wild. (I've watched In the Mood for Love more times than I can actually count. It's incredible.) The Grandmaster – or in another translation The Grandmasters – moves in super slow-motion, but it isn't interested in the nuance of feeling or difficult emotional terrain of Wong's other movies. Actually, it might be interested in those things, but it is executed differently; the story is told in a strange sequential order and with an odd way of focusing on what it is doing. I was, quite frankly, a little bored. But I will tell you, this film is shot gorgeously. It most definitely deserved both of these nominations. It won't win either award, but I am glad that the Academy recognized this film for its exceptional artistry. Now, where's my copy of Chungking Express?
Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #55 out of 77

Inside Llewyn Davis

2 Nominations

• Cinematography: Bruno Delbonnel (Harry Potter and Half-blood Prince, Un Long Dimanche de Fiançailles [A Very Long Engagement], Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain [Amélie])
• Sound Mixing

Director: Joel & Ethan Coen

Cast: Oscar Isaac, Justin Timberlake, Carey Mulligan, Justin Timberlake, Max Casella, Adam Driver, Stark Sands, John Goodman, Garrett Hedlund, Ethan Phillips, Robin Bartlett, F. Murray Abraham, Jeanine Serralles

I reviewed this film at length here. A lot of people were surprised at how relatively poorly Llewyn did when the nominations came out. I can't say I was too shocked, but I did sort of expect it to get a Best Picture nod. I mean, A Serious Man was nominated for Best Picture! In any case, I think this film will be remembered as a very very good Coen Brothers picture, not the minor Coen Brothers picture it is being called right now. And while we're talking about them: how 'bout them Coens, man? I mean, every time they make a movie it's just really, really good. A Coen Brothers film is an important event. And just try to rank them in your mind. What goes at the top? Miller's Crossing? Blood Simple.? Fargo? Barton Fink? No Country for Old Men? The Hudsucker Proxy? These are superb movies. Anyway, let's all just close our eyes and try not to notice that Inside Llewyn Davis won't be winning any awards this Oscar night. Close your eyes and be grateful that Oscar Isaac will be getting a lot of work in the next three years.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: Sound Mixing

My Rating: #19 out of 77

Rewind Llewyn Davis

I've been listening to the Inside Llewyn Davis soundtrack since the producers started streaming it in its entirety via NPR music on November 3rd. I like folk music, though, and I am generally excited to see either Chris Thile or Justin Timberlake on any CD ever. Old songs like the ones that fill Llewyn Davis connect with me somehow, and I absolutely love the most important song in the film, "Dink's Song". In any case, I felt predisposed to liking Llewyn simply for its music – that is, in addition to loving it simply because it's a Coen Brothers movie and, well, they don't actually ever make bad movies, just films that are more or less difficult to love.

I'll wager that most people are probably going to find Llewyn Davis one of the more "difficult to love" Coen films. I know I did. I am finding the best way to describe it as a A Serious Man meets O Brother Where Art Thou? (When I said this to my friend Justin he instantly quipped: O Serious Man Where Art Thou?) But in truth, Inside Llewyn Davis is quite serious. Its main character is a difficult man who spends the entirety of the movie further messing up his own already precarious life.

The film's structure, too, is difficult. The film begins, moves along for a bit, and then it fades to white. Is what we see next a flashback? The film doesn't tell us until much later, but one gets the sense that this has all happened before, that Llewyn Davis is spinning his wheels, continually making the same mistakes and not learning from them. Llewyn stays on his friends' sofas. He imposes on them. He eats their food. He makes very little money. And although it is snowing outside, he has no winter coat, no boots, and no intention of moving south any time soon. Llewyn tries to make music – tries to earn a living making music – but he has principles, see. He doesn't want to make the kind of music other people want to make. He wants to sing folk music. He is, in fact, great at singing folk music, and the early 1960s saw a kind of renaissance of folk music.

I really liked Llewyn, even if it isn't all that likable. I know men and women like Llewyn: difficult people who simply can't ever get their lives to make a kind of sense, who never can get a foothold but keep working hard at it, doing their best but continuing to make terrible, selfish decisions. And I liked him for all that. He's sympathetic and difficult, and I wanted to take him in and clean him up. I felt a little like his friends the Gorfeins, I guess.

Mr. Isaac as Llewyn Davis ("It's Welsh.")

Back to structure for a second: the whole thing is a riff on Joyce's Ulysses. Llewyn is a kind of depressed pícaro, traveling from New York to Chicago and back again. He comes across all kinds of shady and colorful characters on his travels, and he is joined by a cat (several cats, actually). I have been frustrated with the film's bookends since I saw the picture. My sister and I wondered why the film needs to repeat itself. We both initially thought this was a kind of structural flaw in the story, an unnecessary bit of Guillermo Arriaga-style dramaturgy. But the more I think about it, the more I think it is doing important thematic and emotional work. Things really are repeating. Things really are cyclical. He really does go back to doing the same thing over and over again. He keeps fucking up. He keeps going back to his sister's house when he runs out of money. He keeps running into orange tabbies. And the songs, too, come back. These are old, old tunes, and they are given a new life in his music. If the movie repeats itself, these songs, this man's decisions, repeat themselves too.

The appearance of Bob Dylan at the film's end said one other thing to me. Renaissances like the rejuvenation of folk music as a genre in the 1960s are paved by unhappy, struggling people like Llewyn Davis. These people do the thankless work of making space for people like Bob Dylan. There is no Bob Dylan without guys like Llewyn who perform the labor of teaching audiences about what is good, giving music a kind of cultural value, rediscovering songs that other people will make famous, playing guitar on other people's famous hit records. Inside Llewyn Davis gets to the struggles of people who end up never finding fame or fortune in the industries in which they labor, but who contributed deeply, on a grassroots level, to the USAmerican music scene.

I should mention, too, that the performances in Llewyn are pretty awesome, particularly Oscar Isaac's work. I really liked Isaac in W./E. and I absolutely could not stop talking about his work in Drive, and so I am glad that this actor will be getting more work and I hope to see more excellent performances from him.

A Conversation about Nebraska

Because my friend Brian always posts pictures on Instagram and Twitter of all the movies he's seeing, I knew he had recently seen Nebraska. And because I love any excuse to talk to Brian about movies, I asked him to chat with me about Nebraska and hopefully be nicer/smarter about the movie than I am. Here we are:

Aaron: I thought the movie was pretty funny. Lots of comical stuff that I rather enjoyed. But, like most of Payne's movies, I thought it was sort of smug. It's funny watching this guy pathetically beg his girlfriend to move back in, and it's funny watching this woman harass this old man, and it's funny laughing at these brothers who have nothing to say to one another except to sit around and ask about cars that broke down in 1974. But, I get the feeling while I'm laughing at these situations that I'm laughing at how stupid these people are. Or rather at how much smarter I am than they are. Now, this may just be me – and maybe this says more about my own elevated sense of self-worth or something like that – but I felt like Nebraska just outright made fun of these people. The jokes are at their expense, as though Payne is just a bully poking fun at people who deserve just a little more kindness.

The other thing I want to say is that the movie is a good movie. I saw Nebraska in the same week as I saw Saving Mr. Banks and The Desolation of Smaug, and Nebraska is so much more skillfully made than the other two pictures. It is, in fact, expertly done. But it sort of left me hollow afterward. It hit all the notes it was supposed to hit, but I simply didn't connect with it very deeply. (This is, I think, how a lot of people felt about Haneke's The White Ribbon, to stick with black-and-white pictures.)

Brian: There's one tiny moment in the film that I keep thinking of – one which captures everything I liked about Nebraska.

We've been Woody's hometown for some time now, and we find ourselves again in the tv room at Ray and Martha's. The boys are in their spots, and Uncle Ray's in his. But it's the first time we see Aunt Martha joining them. Martha's sitting next to Ray but, rather than facing the tv, she's positioned to face the profiles of her two sons. See, the oversize sectional is way too big for the room, so they've horned the love seat section into the corner leaving just enough room for Aunt Martha's legs in the gap between. It'd clearly be a fuss for her to get up and out of her seat so, as is her way, Aunt Martha (as played with crystalline clarity by stage vet Mary Louise Wilson) just beams with delight to whoever wanders into the room as she hollers her enthusiastic chit-chattery over the blare of whatever rerun she and her men are watching.
 

Rance Howard and Mary Louise Wilson are just left of center in the frame.

The redolent layering of precise detail in this tiny moment captivates me and makes me somewhat inclined to defend Payne against claims of smugness. I like the vertiginous intimacy in Payne's work here. Payne forces us to stare long enough for the gaze to double back, in a way. I do remember laughing (fairly frequently) but not at many jokes at anybody's expense. What I mostly remember (aside from a few shocked guffaws) were abject giggles, mostly from my own embarrassment at my own reactions. In the end, I guess I liked how Payne's directorial hand forced me to notice not only the details of each tightly composed scene but also my own moment-to-moment discomfort in staring.

This queasiness might be why, when reflecting on the black and white cinematography, I found myself thinking not of Manhattan but of Night of the Living Dead.

Aaron: I love what you are saying about the specifics in the scene with Aunt Martha and everyone else watching The Golden Girls. This is when Nebraska is at its best: careful detail and intimate character study.

I think the reason I liked The Descendants so much was that I really felt that Payne cared for the characters in a way that didn't come through for me in Nebraska (or, indeed, in About Schmidt or Sideways). In Nebraska I felt distanced from the characters, even Will Forte, with whom I think the film sympathizes a lot. I saw the film as always just a little above that character, mocking him ever so slightly. I think the genuine warmth in The Descendants probably came from Nat Faxon and Jim Rash. This isn't to say that I didn't laugh a lot in Nebraska. I did. I just felt a little gross afterward. This is probably exactly what you're talking about.

But I love this Night of the Living Dead comparison. Tell me what you mean. Did you feel haunted by Hawthorne, NE?

Brian: Not so much the haunting. More the abject, looming threat of morbidity. (Death's coming for ya, kiddo, and – blecch – it's nasty even in black&white and, yeah, there's no escaping it! Even in static longshots.) Nebraska captures the weird creepiness of returning to your hometown and lacquers onto that discombobulation the horror of seeing the fact of your parents (and, by extension, yourself) becoming old. I think that's why I keep going back to the metaphors of vertigo and queasiness. They evoke Will Forte's (and by extension the film's) guiding disequilibrium. Forte's David loves his father; he loathes his father. David is mortified by this corpse of a small town; he is fascinated by the clues this town might hold for the mysteries of his own life. He wants to be closer to his father; he is repulsed and repelled by his father. He remains his father's child even as he becomes his father's caregiver. Not unlike Woody's lucidity, the film moves abruptly in and out, with a vertiginous swoop. For me, the black and white permitted Nebraska to amplify the uneasy moral ambivalences that I've found so intriguing in Payne's previous films by placing them in starker and more vulnerable relief.

Mr. Odenkirk, Mr. Dern, Mr. Forte, and Ms. Squibb – a polite family drive

Aaron: The acting is great. I loved Will Forte and Bob Odenkirk, especially. But I can't get Bruce Dern out of my head either, and the movie has sort of stuck with me.

Brian: I sorta think the acting (while excellent and masterful and all that) was a bit off. Especially Dern.

Aaron: What do you mean the acting was off? How is it excellent and masterful and also off? Does that mean your favorite performance in the film was Stacy Keach's? Haha.

Brian: Oh. Ack. Stacy Keach. No. I don't even want to talk about that. No, I think the performances I liked best were Rance Howard and Mary Louise Wilson as Uncle Ray and Aunt Martha. Both for their simplicity and precision, but especially for the way their performances bridged the stylistic gap that separated the principals from the bit players in this film world. The principal beef I've always had with Payne hasn't been his by-the-book screenplaying but his seeming disinterest in having his excellent actors find a shared style. Going all the way back to Citizen Ruth, Laura Dern, Swoosie Kurtz and Burt Reynolds are all great, but they're just not in the same movie stylistically. And I feel I could make that same claim for every Payne movie I've seen since. Payne clearly loves actors, which is great but, unlike other actor-loving directors (like, say, Woody Allen or Mike White or Almodóvar or the Coens), Payne seems a bit overdazzled by these actor creatures, which ends up stymying him in key ways.

I do think Bruce Dern delivers an excellent portrait of a difficult and complicated man experiencing a precipitous cognitive decline. But I'm not sure he was always playing Woody. I mean, I saw Dern  – vividly, palpably – but I don't know if I ever saw Woody. Likewise, I delighted in June Squibb's brusquely comedic depiction of this terrifyingly tiny tyrant. But I didn't buy it for a second that she was his wife or their mother. Or that she used to be a hairdresser. (Indeed, Squibb plays a version this mini-gorgon much more plausibly and to much greater effect in a recent arc on the HBO comedy series Getting On.) Even so, I still say Squibb and Dern each delivered masterful performances but it was the director's job to make sure their characterizations illuminated the story, and I'm not sure Payne held up his end of the bargain there.

Aaron: Ooo yeah. OK. I see all of that. I think the reason I love Odenkirk's and Forte's performances is that they felt like they were really doing things. Really watching each other, really seeing the things you're talking about vis-à-via mortality and son-hood. There's something about Squibb that I found sort of grandstanding, I guess. I mean, she is funny, but she somehow doesn't seem human. This is a part of what I mean by the director not really loving his characters. She is a henpecking old harridan, but I feel like it would've been nice to be able to love her a little bit. I just never felt like I could. Even when she is sort of badass and powerful – when she tells the one sister to go fuck herself and all of that. She doesn't ever feel like a real person to me, only a cartoon version of a person. She's not rudely sketched, but she's caricatured all the same.

The two sons are so much simpler. They had more opportunity for honesty, I guess. (I really did love Dern, though, even if I think you're right about the actors not being a part of the same movie.)

I love reading your thoughts about things like this. You make me smarter. You want to close us out?

Brian: Thanks for the invitation to gab. And, yeah, Call me JanEEce.