The Anderson Tapes (1972)

Sidney Lumet's The Anderson Tapes is a satire of the surveillance state, perhaps more in conversation with Lumet’s own 1976 satire of television, Network, than with its more obvious companions, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) or Brian De Palma's Blowout (1981). 

Coppola’s version of the surveillance state, for example, is one of terror and darkness, a descent into madness brought on by the panopticon. Lumet’s version is much, much lighter. He sees all of this collecting of audio and video as so much wasted manpower, so much squandered money, and so much ill-spent time. Six people in a room talking about a video tape and trying to gain information about what's happening between a 90-year-old man and his son when nothing at all is happening! Lumet’s movie thinks the police state is absurd—like Kafka but comic. 

I think this comic quality is relatively hard to see from the perspective of 2025—and so Lumet's film feels weird from this vantage. We are used to thinking of surveillance as an evil, malicious, signifier of unstoppable state power. (The key 2025 example is, I suppose, Edgar Wright's The Running Man.) In The Anderson Tapes, though, all this recording is petty and stupid, and the agencies aren’t talking to one another, and no one knows anything about anything, even though everything is being recorded. The key to this is the truly insane sequence where the cops jump from roof to roof in act three, and the hilarious scene a bit later in which they try to talk to one another on walkie-talkies but can’t get a signal. The robbery is, of course, uncovered by a HAM radio—not any of the new surveillance devices from the 70s. In fact, even that discovery is nearly hampered by the bureaucracy at the telephone switchboard. (If you doubt my argument here look again at the film’s finale, in which all the agencies are obliged to erase their recordings.) 

All of this is to say that The Anderson Tapes works as a thriller (I watched it as part of a Criterion Channel series called 70s Thrillers), but it’s more of a scathing satire than it is anything else: a mockery of the 1970s surveillance state and the grotesque waste it involves.

Oscar Nominations 2018: Part 4 of 12

Back to Part 1, Part 2, or Part 3.

My Best of 2017.

Baby Driver

3 Nominations

• Film Editing: Jonathan Amos & Paul Machliss
• Sound Mixing
• Sound Editing

Director: Edgar Wright

Cast: Ansel Elgort, Lily James, Kevin Spacey, Jon Hamm, Jaime Foxx, Eiza González, CJ Jones, Jon Bernthal

This is the year's best musical – I think we can all agree on that – and it works very well and deserves all three of its nominations. Maybe it will even win one or two of them? The Academy has been much better about these categories lately, giving a very deserved film editing Oscar to Tom Cross for Whiplash just three years ago. The year after that the Oscar went to Mad Max: Fury Road, and last year it went, not to Moonlight or La La Land but to Hacksaw Ridge. So who knows. Maybe Baby Driver will win an Oscar. Somehow I don't think so, though. I don't think the movie will play well to most Academy voters (it's so young and hip and smug), and it also has the currently-anathema Kevin Spacey in a very large role.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: Film Editing, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing

My Rating: #30 out of 79

The Post

2 Nominations

• Picture
• Actress: Meryl Streep (Florence Foster Jenkins, Into the Woods, August: Osage County, The Iron Lady, Julie & Julia, Doubt, The Devil Wears Prada, Adaptation., Music of the Heart, One True Thing, The Bridges of Madison County, Postcards from the Edge, A Cry in the Dark, Ironweed, Out of Africa, Silkwood, Sophie's Choice, The French Lieutenant's Woman, Kramer vs. Kramer, The Deer Hunter)

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Streep, Tom Hanks, Bob Odenkirk, Bruce Greenwood, Tracy Letts, Bradley Whitford, Sarah Paulson, Matthew Rhys, Alison Brie, Carrie Coon, Jesse Plemons, Michael Stuhlbarg, David Cross

Sigh. Meryl Streep again. The Academy does this every year. This year, however, she deserves her nomination, even if she didn't deserve the last three. There is plenty to say about The Post, too. It's the Best Picture nominee with the least number of nominations, which means it was passed over in the Screenplay category, editing, other acting slots, and direction. I liked The Post a lot, but I think this is still the right decision. The film feels slightly unfinished, as though it was rushed into production and rushed (ahem) in post. It's a Spielberg picture, too, so it is mostly interested in feelings and not really invested in interrogating the material problems of the press's relationship with the U.S. government or the press's relationship to the public. Instead, Spielberg zooms in on his characters' emotional journeys, giving short shrift to intellectual exploration of any kind. And then he tacks on (as usual) an extra ending. The film can't just end once; it has to end a second time with an on-the-nose Watergate reference that anyone could see a mile away. Since this film has only two nominations, Best Picture and Best Actress, this is a good place to talk about something I noticed about this year's Best Picture nominees. Normally, commentators (correctly) note that Best Picture is generally linked very closely with Best Actor. But this year, the film's are split evenly: four films (Three Billboards, Lady Bird, Shape of Water, The Post) are nominated for both Best Picture and Best Actress, and four films (Phantom Thread, Get Out, Call Me by Your Name, Darkest Hour) are nominated for both Best Picture and Best Actor. No film shares a Best Actor and a Best Actress nominee this year. I am not sure this is a trend or anything, but I think it is worth noting.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A
My Rating: #20 out of 79

Beauty and the Beast

2 Nominations

• Production Design: Sarah Greenwood (Darkest Hour, Anna Karenina, Sherlock Holmes, Atonement, Pride & Prejudice) & Katie Spencer (Darkest Hour, Anna Karenina, Sherlock Holmes, Atonement, Pride & Prejudice)
  
• Costume Design: Jacqueline Durran (Darkest Hour, Mr. Turner, Anna Karenina, Atonement, Pride & Prejudice)

Director: Bill Condon

Cast: Emma Watson, Dan Stevens, Luke Evans, Kevin Kline, Josh Gad, Ewan MacGregor, Ian McKellen, Emma Thompson, Audra McDonald, Stanley Tucci, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Nathan Mack, Hattie Morahan

I hated at least six movies this year, and we could add to that another ten or eleven that I didn't like very much. But no movie this year was as useless as this Bill Condon mess, which is easily the year's worst musical while also being a complete waste of time. In the first place, this movie is simply a rehash of a film that is, if 25 years old, very very popular and widely remembered. In the second place, Condon brings absolutely nothing new to this remake. It is, to put it quite simply the same movie, with just a few things that are different – or rather they're out of place. I remember the original film so well, that anything that doesn't copy the original feels wrong, as though I am watching a nicely done but slightly off community theatre production of a play whose every word I've had memorized for twenty years. In the third place, they've treated Emma Watson's voice, which makes her singing sound strange and artificial. (What is the point of doing a live action movie if you're not going to let your actors sing?) In the fourth place, is this film even live action? Just like last year's Jungle Book, there's so much CGI in Beauty and the Beast that I can't imagine why anyone is bothering with this at all. (The number "Be Our Guest" is animated in its entirety, as far as I can tell.) The questions abound. Why is Audra McDonald using an Italian accent? Why is Lumiere's lover some kind of bird creature? Why is Emma Watson so bad in this? Why isn't Ewan McGregor Jerry Orbach? Why isn't Emma Thompson Angela Lansbury? (Thank goodness Céline Dion is still Céline Dion.) Poor Luke Evans, who I really really want to be in a good movie sometime soon, does a very good job trying to keep this movie afloat, but Beauty and the Beast sinks all the same. What a cynical, colossal waste of time!

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: Production Design

My Rating: #79 out of 79

Victoria and Abdul

2 Nominations

• Costume Design: Consolata Boyle (Florence Foster Jenkins, The Queen)
  
• Makeup & Hairstyling

Director: Stephen Frears

Cast: Judi Dench, Ali Fazal, Eddie Izzard, Tim Piggot-Smith, Michael Gambon, Adeel Akhtar, Paul Higgins, Olivia Williams, Fenella Woolgar, Julian Badham, Robin Soans, Simon Callow, Ruth McCabe

The only thing I want to say about these two nominations is to brag about having successfully pregamed this movie. I don't think it can win either of these two Oscars and I don't think it should. I didn't think much of Victoria and Abdul, and I can't really figure out who likes things like this. I found the whole thing to be a kind of bizarre love letter to the British colonialism of India. But good for Consolata Boyle. I am glad she has gotten her third nomination, in any case.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A
My Rating: #68 out of 79

The Beguiled and Baby Driver

I was into Sofia Coppola's The Beguiled. It's a mood piece, like all of Coppola's films, and, well, it is about the same mood as all of Coppola's films. Still, it's a fun, mostly sexy piece, and I was into it. I found it troubling and interesting. 

But I find that Coppola's movies make assumptions about audience identification or comprehension that aren't always quite there yet and so The Beguiled makes unjustified moves, assuming we are following, and we eventually end up playing catch up.

The other sort of odd thing about The Beguiled is that it isn't really sure whose side it's on. This is strange. Are we supposed to identify with this soldier against the women (the film seems to think so during a long sequence in the third act in which he is allowed to articulate his grievances), or are supposed to be on their side, to take pleasure in their actions? This just isn't clear, and if Coppola knows what side she wants us to be on, she hasn't made a film that helps us do that. Again, I think Coppola's filmmaking makes assumptions about audience identification that haven't actually been achieved.

This didn't bother me too much, though. I just love me some Nicole Kidman and Colin Farrell and Kirsten Dunst. And this film uses all of them very well. (I continue to be baffled by the popularity of Elle Fanning, I must say, but to each her own.)

The best thing about The Beguiled is the costumes. They're absolutely genius. I really hope that  Stacey Battat gets her first Oscar nomination for this.

* * *

Edgar Wright's Baby Driver is better than what I am about to say, but once it occurred to me that Baby Driver is La La Land for people who hated La La Land, I couldn't forget the association. To be sure, Baby Driver has guns and explosions and the best car chases I've ever seen in my life, but it is just a little more gimmicky than I could handle.

This is a fun twenty-first-century musical, and it is definitely Wright's most accomplished, finely directed film to date. But... well so much of it just seemed so overly phony. This is not helped by Kevin Spacey's absurdly over-the-top performance and the film's ridiculous romantic plot, which even has an entire La La Land fantasy sequence near its end.

Do not mistake me, though. This is a good movie. And I enjoyed it a lot. That the film does not have enough Jon Bernthal in it is, I think, indicative of why I didn't completely love this picture. Baby Driver is more interested in sentiment and fantasy than it is in crime, violence, or really scaring its audience. Instead, everything in the film takes place in a kind of Disneyland version of criminal activity, in which it is inevitable that love will save the day.

Five-O

Just a brief mention of some movie madness before I troll off to bed. (Grad school, as you might have guessed, has begun all over again and all of a sudden there is a lot of work to do...)

Saw Jules Dassin's Night and the City, which is really good except for a weirdly emotional second act that doesn't really ring true. The plot is about a loser small time con artist who has big plans to take over wrestling in London. It's totally a film noir thing, which is great. But there's all of this father drama and personal love drama that just felt strange to me. Richard Widmark is the star and he's great, but Gene Tierney is wasted as his love interest. I like her better as a bitch than in this movie, where she's really more of a Loretta Young wannabe. Still, the movie is worth seeing for noir fans. Jules Dassin is a great filmmaker, though this film is not up to the standards of, say, The Naked City.

Also caught Hot Fuzz which is easily the year's funniest movie. You probably know all about this movie already, but it's a satire of the buddy cop movie. And it also is a buddy cop movie, with about a dozen cool cameos (including Bill Nighy, Steve Coogan and Cate Blanchett) and a totally fantastic performance by Timothy Dalton. This movie is hilarious, raunchy, ludicrously violent, with some wonderfully executed action sequences. It's an action movie and a comedy and it's damn good at being both. Do not miss it.