Oscar Nominations 2022: 4 of 9

This year's nominees:

The Batman

3 Nominations

• Sound
• Visual Effects
• Make-up & Hairstyling

Director: Matt Reeves

Cast: Robert Pattinson, Zoë Kravitz, Colin Farrell, Jeffrey Wright, John Turturro, Paul Dano, Andy Serkis, Peter Sarsgaard, Jayme Lawson, Barry Keoghan 

This movie was visually very cool, and I love me some Robert Pattinson. I must confess that this film was too long, but it looked interesting the whole time: cool lighting, intriguing sound design, great score. I was interested, too, in the sort of anti-Joker turn it took, where the villain became a terrifying army of people who idolize people like the Joker. For me the Catwoman character really didn't work as a plotline with any interest – or maybe I find Zoë Kravitz boring, who's to say? As for the Colin Farrell of it all? It's sort of mindblowing that he played Oswald Cobblepot in this. He's completely unrecognizable. Anyway, this is a slick bit of business. It's been a very long time since I've seen it, but it's good. I don't think it'll take home any trophies, but maybe the Academy will like the (far superior) make-up of this film over The Whale's prosthetics.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: Make-up & Hairstyling

My Rating: #28 out of 65

Women Talking

2 Nominations

• Picture
• Adapted Screenplay: Sarah Polley (Away from Her)

Director: Polley

Cast: Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, Judith Ivey, Sheila McCarthy, Ben Whishaw, Michelle McLeod, Frances McDormand, Kate Hallett, Liv McNeil, August Winter

I came to this place for magic, and instead I got Women Talking. Y'all, this movie. The women talk, but they only say things you've already heard. They debate, but the terms of the debate are without any intrigue. They weigh various consequences for their actions, but none of that feels remotely real. The plot of Women Talking is apparently based on real events that happened in a Christian religious community slash cult in South America. The events have been fictionalized by novelist Miriam Toews, with the events transplanted to the United States. This transposition makes things seem very odd. It's clear that we are in 2010 – a man in a truck blares the date over a loudspeaker to make sure we catch it – but it sure doesn't look like a place in the U.S. in 2010. Well, that's because it isn't. It's a fiction invented in order to debate a question that is not a question at all. This wouldn't have bothered me really if it was designed to get me to think differently about something. But it isn't. It is designed, instead, to confirm a bunch of things I already know: the gender binary and assumptions deriving from the gender binary are harmful and deeply inequitable; violence against women and sexual violence can be profoundly traumatic; bonds between women can often be very, very strong when fighting the oppression of men; women often develop separate cultures in order to preserve their own safety, enjoy themselves, create space for themselves, and for other reasons; it is difficult to love someone who is a member of a class who oppresses you as a member of another class, and yet this is the conundrum of heterosexuality. Women Talking has all of these ideas embedded in it, but it actually doesn't interrogate any of them. It's quite a bad film, actually, and I find myself rather stunned that it snagged a best picture nomination.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A
My Rating: #57 out of 65

Living

2 Nominations

• Actor: Bill Nighy
• Adapted Screenplay: Kazuo Ishiguro

Director: Oliver Hermanus

Cast: Nighy, Aimee Lou Wood, Alex Sharp, Tom Burke, Barney Fishwick, Adrian Rawlins, Oliver Chris, Hubert Burton, Patsy Ferran, Lia Williams, Zoe Boyle, Jessica Flood

This is gorgeous. Bill Nighy is completely incredible – his performance is not just the kind of stuffy British thing you might be imagining; instead it's wonderfully vulnerable, simple, and beautifully nuanced. This entire film is filled with nuance, and it boasts a truly excellent performance from Aimee Lou Wood, as well. Ishiguro's screenplay is also a beautiful standout here. The film brims with the deep feeling and impossibility of speaking at which Ishiguro excels so wonderfully. He understands this period of British life with utter perfection, and I found this movie unpredictable and moving, despite the fact that it's based on Kurosawa's Ikiru. I don't think this movie will win the two Oscars for which it is nominated, but if you haven't seen this movie, I think you should. And if you love Bill Nighy in this, you should also check him out his great performance in Their Finest.
Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #19 out of 65

Aftersun

1 Nomination

• Actor: Paul Mescal

Director: Charlotte Wells

Cast: Mescal, Frankie Corio, Celia Rowlson-Hall, Brooklyn Toulson, Spike Fearn, Harry Perdios, Ruby Thompson

Honestly I haven't stopped thinking about this film. It's such a beautiful piece, and it explores form in a pretty wonderful way. This is a film about memory – of a woman's attempt to understand her father by remembering a vacation they took when she was a child. The entire film is filtered through her memories but not as memories, instead we see the memories through the media that help her remember and, indeed, limit what she can remember. What complicates this is that she hasn't really known her father all that well, although she has loved him intensely and still does. Her father – perfectly, beautifully played by Paul Mescal – possesses a deep, powerful sadness for which he has developed some coping mechanisms but which seems always to threaten to overwhelm him. I loved this film. Paul Mescal's nomination was a bit of a surprise: he and Andrea Riseborough and Brian Tyree Henry (more on them in the next post) and Stephanie Hsu all got surprise Oscar nominations this February, but Mescal's is perhaps the strangest of these. It's not a showy part, and he doesn't have any really big Oscar-winning moments. Instead, Mescal just lives truthfully in this character in a way that feels heartbreaking and profound. I'm so glad he got nominated.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A
My Rating: #6 out of 65

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

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

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

More posts coming soon:

5. Blonde, To Leslie, Glass Onion, and Causeway
6. Argentina, 1985, Close, Eo, and The Quiet Girl
7. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, Pinocchio, Puss in Boots: the Last Wish, Turning Red, and The Sea Beast
8. Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, Empire of Light, Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris, RRR, and Tell It like a Woman

Hey!

Check out my new book Love Is Love Is Love – out March 24!

Oscar Nominations 2018: Part 10 of 12

Back to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, or Part 9.

My Best of 2017.

War for the Planet of the Apes

1 Nomination

• Visual Effects
  

Director: Matt Reeves

Cast: Andy Serkis, Woody Harrelson, Steve Zahn, Karin Konoval, Amiah Miller, Terry Notary, Ty Olsson, Michael Adamthwaite, Toby Kebbell, Gabriel Chavarria, Judy Greer

Such squandered potential. This movie looks very cool and the first two movies in the series were very cool, but this one overdoes every scene, overplays every hand, and is all around just extra. I think I would be ok with this if it weren't a melodrama, So what ends up happening is that most of what it overdoes is feelings. We have evil villains, we're shown that the alt-right is evil and racist, and every ounce of feeling is milked out of us while a tiny white girl-child looks at us with tears in her eyes. For me this fell flat. There are five options for the visual effects Oscar. The Star Wars movie seems to me the most likely winner – Shape of Water didn't get one, despite its 13 nominations – but I suppose if that one doesn't win, this one will, and last year's winner (The Jungle Book) was a lot like this one: computer-animated animals.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: Visual Effects

My Rating: #62 out of 82

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

1 Nomination

• Visual Effects
  

Director: James Gunn

Cast: Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Bradley Cooper, Dave Bautista, Michael Rooker, Kurt Russell, Karen Gillan, Pom Klementieff, Vin Diesel, Sean Gunn, Sylvester Stallone, Elizabeth Debicki, Chris Sullivan

I hate to criticize this film for the same thing as I criticized War for the Planet of the Apes, but I was also mostly bored with Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. This is a shame. The first one was so good, that I suppose such a thing is easy to replicate. But this one felt like a great confused mess to me, and instead of Chris Pratt fucking up and getting into trouble, this is about him, like, finding himself and learning his origins or somesuch business. There are so many feelings in this movie. This is just unnecessary! Tell us some jokes, blow some things up, have baby Groot dance. Why take things so seriously? Normally I am really into father–son narratives, but I found this one silly. Vol 2. does have some cool setpieces, and whenever we were in full fight mode I was usually enjoying myself, but I think this movie mostly just returns us to the usual Marvel, it's-almost-the-end-of-the-world-if-only-we-could-save-it formula. This is better than Apes, certainly, but not by much.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #55 out of 82

Kong: Skull Island

1 Nomination

• Visual Effects
  

Director: Jordan Vogt-Roberts

Cast: Tom Hiddleston, Brie Larson, Samuel L. Jackson, John C. Reilly, John Goodman, Toby Kebbell, Corey Hawkins, John Ortiz, Tian Jing, Jason Mitchell, Shea Whigham, Thomas Mann

This is the one that deserves to win. It is so much better than the other nominees (including Star Wars and Blade Runner). I really really liked this movie, and I know, I know, it's a King Kong movie, but this one is excellent. Obviously, I love monster movies, and this one gives us monster after monster after monster, but it also does this really well, and it is has some interesting themes to boot. I can't recommend this enough, and although I know it won't win on March 4th, I'll be rooting for it.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #19 out of 82

Once More with Too Many Feelings

For the record, I loved the first of these movies, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and I really really liked the second one, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. (I wrote an entire post about how the film thinks about justifying violence; the movie is very interesting.) This means, of course, that I am the target audience of Matt Reeves' third movie, War for the Planet of the Apes, since I already love the characters, already care about the fate of the apes, and am hoping the humans can leave them alone to live in peace. (Rupert Wyatt directed Rise; Reeves directed Dawn and War.)

Reviews of this third movie were good, so I was excited. But War falls mostly flat. It is a slow, ponderous type of thing that follows the conventions of 19th century melodrama to a tee. This means that all of the emotions in it are overdone, everything is milked for the absolute last drop of feeling that can be squeezed out of it. This is supposed to be an action movie, and it does have some good action sequences in it, but Reeves is not focused on action as much as he is focused on the feelings of everyone involved in the action. So even when we are in an action sequence, we get shots of sad chimps, looking wistfully at the camera and dreaming of better days or a world without action. All of this kind of thing slows us down, and it takes Reeves forever to do what he's trying to do.

The small, tearful, white child up on Caesar's horse stands in for all of this movie's many many feelings.

The other problem with War is that it is too intent on meaning. It takes itself extremely seriously (à la nineteenth-century melodrama). The other movies were serious too, don't get me wrong, but now that we are in a third movie, Reeves has decided that what the films are about is racism and not animals. To be sure, both topics are about the ways that we exclude people from the category of the human, but the first two movies told us a story and let us make sense of what the movies had to say. Not War. War makes explicit allegories about nationalism and Steve Bannon and the alt-right. Worse than that, the film simply tells us all what we already know about racist white supremacist without using the allegory of apes to see if there's anything new we might learn about the logic of neo-Nazism.

Still, the allegories aren't really the problem. What the allegories do is contribute even further to the slowing down of the entire pace of War. The real problem is the slow pacing of Reeves' staging and his sentimental treatment of every moment of feeling so that what could be a simple moment turns into a four-minute sequence. What could have been a good, tight, 117-minute movie became instead a 140-minute Spielberg melodrama with chimps.

Oscar Nominees 2015: Part 7 of 12

Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5. Part 6.
Part 7 of 12:

Captain America: the Winter Soldier

1 Nomination

• Visual Effects

Director: Anthony Russo, Joe Russo

Cast: Chris Evans, Samuel L. Jackson, Scarlett Johansson, Anthony Mackie, Robert Redford, Sebastian Stan, Frank Grillo, Cobie Smulders, Maximiliano Hernández

This was really fun. It is so much better than the first Captain America movie, mostly because this movie has a lot of action. In the visual effects department there is just so much. Gigantic set pieces and flying buildings, and Anthony Mackie is something called Falcon and he flies around Washington DC like a badass. It's all very cool. I am sort of surprised this movie wasn't nominated for more things, but I take it that the Academy is not really into the whole Marvel-as-studio thing. This is perhaps not surprising, since they are sort of snobby, but Marvel is making tons and tons of money and giving a lot of people work. The Academy should get hip, especially if the movies are as good as this one was.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #43 out of 80

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

1 Nomination

• Visual Effects

Director: Matt Reeves

Cast: Andy Serkis, Toby Kebbell, Jason Clarke, Gary Oldman, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Keri Russell, Nick Thurston, Kirk Acevedo, Judy Greer, Terry Notary, Doc Shaw

Yeah, this is very good. This is a good series with lots of big ideas. And this movie, like the last one, also dealt with real and interesting issues about humanity, racism, and animal rights. I wrote a little mini-essay on it when I first saw this movie back in July. I liked Dawn of the Planet of the Apes a good deal more than I liked more "important" movies this year – it's higher on my list than six of the Best Picture nominees, for example. This movie is excellent, and everyone should see it. It's exciting and powerful and imaginative and will ask you to use your brain. As for visual effects, this movie really works because of the humans who are digitally captured performing as apes. The effects people on these movies are doing insanely good work. This is great stuff.
Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #30 out of 80

X-men: Days of Future Past

1 Nomination

• Visual Effects

Director: Bryan Singer

Cast: Hugh Jackman, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, James McAvoy, Patrick Stewart, Peter Dinklag, Ian McKellen, Nicholas Hoult, Halle Berry, Evan Peters.

This was awful. I don't want to complain about it anymore, though. My review is here. And the visual effects, particularly in the Quicksilver sequence that is pictured above, are really great. So this nomination is deserved. I want these movies to be better. I think that's the real issue with everything X-men. I love the X-men; have since I was a kid. And I just want these movies to sort of rock instead of being sentimental and schmaltzy. Use your powers and be a badass and stop moping around.
Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #69 out of 80

The Hobbit: the Battle of the Five Armies

1 Nomination

• Sound Effects Editing

Director: Peter Jackson

Cast: Martin Freeman, Ian McKellen, Lee Pace, Richard Armitage, Luke Evans, Orlando Bloom, Aidan Turner, Dean O'Gorman, Evangeline Lilly, Cate Blanchett, Ian Holm, Hugo Weaving, Christopher Lee, Sylvester McCoy, Stephen Fry

How the mighty have fallen! Like this dragon in the image above, who dies within the film's first twenty minutes, this final episode of The Hobbit series simply peters out, rather than being anything interesting. It's sad because The Lord of the Rings series is so delightful, but The Hobbit series is painful. They look like they are the same but they are manifestly not the same. I have gone over my feelings about this movie in detail here, so I won't go through any of that again, but the absurdity of this film is almost incomprehensible. Who knew that an excellent little piece of literature like Tolkien's original novel could be this dumbed down?
Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #76 out of 80

Planet of the Apes. Now with Even More Apes!

I will confess that I am having trouble keeping the titles of these Planet of the Apes movies clear in my head. The new one is called Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and the last one was called Rise of the Planet of the Apes, but look: not much of this matters, because this series is actually well done. What you need to know is that this is Apes 2 and it is good.

Andy? Are you in there?

Perhaps most remarkable of all, this new Apes does without an A-list star. Andy Serkis, the actor whose face one never sees in anything, gets top billing in Dawn and he deserves it. The other actors are Gary Oldman (the only remotely famous performer), Jason Clarke (who was in Zero Dark Thirty and Gatsby), Keri Russell (Dawn's director was also a director on Felicity back in those days), Kirk Acevedo (who was so good on Oz back in those same days), and little Kodi Smit-McPhee (the kid from The Road is now 18).

But Apes has great characters. I find myself absolutely loving the main chimp, Caesar, and I am totally invested in all of his struggles and abilities. It is to the film's credit that scenes with Caesar and his mate or Caesar and his son are taken completely seriously and are also seriously compelling. I am always interested in what Caesar will decide to do, how he will handle his son's rebellion, how he will deal with the other apes in his clan, etc. These things are fascinating – and not just because he is a talking chimpanzee, but because this "animal" is a person, a character struggling with ethical dilemmas and important decisions about the lives of the other persons around him. And he is just so cool.

The other thing that is awesome about this is how stunning visually it is. Dawn is filled with surprising images: the chimpanzees riding horses on the poster are the least of it. Because we are dealing with apes, this is an action movie that is able to move off of the ground in ways that many action movies (even ones with flying robot suits) cannot even manage. It is a movie where the perspective of the fights, attack sequences, and camera angles has literally been rethought from the ground up. This is almost always intriguing.

There are missteps, too, of course: Jason Clarke is not very compelling as the main human character – he's simply neither dynamic nor striking as an actor. (The folks I was with got a little miffed at me when I called him the poor man's Josh Lucas, but it's true.) And really almost all of the interactions between the humans are uninteresting. When the film veered off into their plotline all I could think was let's get back to the apes. (It wasn't as bad as the human storylines in Godzilla, but you know what I mean.) I also sort of found the apes' English grammar inconsistent and therefore annoying. (I don't want to belabor the point because it is not very interesting, but there is literally no reason for any of the apes ever to use the first or second person, yet they do about 40% of the time, and when they did I was annoyed.) The film's third act is also way too long and too slow, even though it packs in quite a bit.

More importantly, this is also a thinking-man's action movie. It is a film that really deals with ethical questions – xenophobia, violence, nationalism, and civilization in particular. And I want to spend a little time thinking about the film's perspective on these right now. See, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is about nationalism and the value of identity. The film asks the questions: Is it more important to be true to the group with whom you have a genetic identity or to be open to the possibilities of coalition across genetic and other differences? Ought there to be an ultimate prohibition on murder? Or perhaps simply a prohibition on murder within one's chosen identity group? When does war become acceptable? What makes a being in the world worthy of personhood? Who grants or ought to grant this personhood?

Don't read any further if you don't want some of the plot spoiled for you.

What is fascinating about Dawn to me is the stance it takes on this question of the prohibition on murder. Throughout the film, the apes live by the rule Ape not kill ape. Koba, of course, does attempt to murder Caesar, and Koba also kills Rocket's son, Ash. So perhaps all bets are off, but Caesar does still hold to the prohibition on murder for his own ethics. (There is no prohibition against killing humans or other creatures who are not apes, bears, elk, etc.) So when, at the end of the movie, when we have all collectively decided that it is too dangerous a risk for Koba to continue to live, Koba reminds Caesar that ape not kill ape. Yet Caesar will kill Koba, and his justification is (and this is what troubles me) that Koba is no longer an ape. What I find so difficult about this is that this is the kind of racist justification for murder that everyone else uses, as well. It has been much easier, historically, for us to kill those who are not part of our perceived identity group, and many, many violence theorists have noted the ease with which we remove those outside of our own identity group from the very category of the human.

So, what Caesar does when he kills Koba is performatively remove Koba from the category of "ape" so that he can kill him. Koba is no longer an ape because Caesar wishes to kill him, and Koba can be killed because he is no longer an ape. But he is only able to be killed because Caesar is willing to kill him. If Caesar wished for him to live, Koba would still be an ape. Would it be possible for Koba to cease being an ape but still be allowed to live? I daresay such a thing is possible, but the two things go together in Caesar's new society – Koba is juridically removed from the category of ape and this coincides with his murder.

For the most part, the humans, we should note, are no better. Gary Oldman's character would kill the apes simply because they are not humans and he would rather humans live than apes live. What I think is so fascinating here is the way Dawn of the Planet of the Apes makes so colorable the ways that violence is justified through the simple exclusion of a person from the identity category in which he or she was initially included. Ape not kill ape. But who is allowed to be an ape? And who does the allowing? For that matter: Who is allowed to be included in the category of human? And who decides this?

If Koba is able to be removed from the category of ape it is because he has, in fact, been tortured by humans. He has lost his ape-ness (simianity? oh, let's just say his humanity) because of the behavior of the humans who enacted repeated violence on both his body and his psyche. It is not Koba's fault if he is no longer an ape. Koba's tragedy is that he never even had a chance to be an ape.

The film hasn't thought these things through completely, but I think this is perhaps ok. Dawn asks more questions than it can answer, and this is not a problem at all. Meditations on xenophobia and jingoism, even when coupled with an action-movie plot and computer-generated chimpanzees, are still valuable when done thoughtfully and intelligently. In short, this is a big-budget Hollywood picture worth seeing. And Caesar is as compelling an action-movie hero as you will find at the cineplex this summer.