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

Enough Said and Moments of Realism

I really loved Enough Said.

My friend George and I have been talking recently about reality (or maybe realism?) in films. There is, often, very little of it. My friend and I were speaking about The Way Way Back and The Spectacular Now, mostly unsure about how to talk about how we thought the films got to something that seemed real in some kind of way. These things are difficult to pinpoint. Films tend to be glossy and heavily scripted, and they almost always star an actor or actress that I know at least from reputation. I buy into the movies, usually, and I don't worry too much about whether or not the movie is real. Whether or not it is real doesn't matter to me, actually, because it's a movie and I am watching it for reasons other than realism. Art, incidentally, (and this should be rather obvious) doesn't need to be real to address something powerful or meaningful.

Enough Said's plot reads to me as obviously constructed. It's a romantic comedy, and it works exactly like a standard romantic comedy ought to work. Girl meets boy, girl and boy get along for a while, girl and boy have a break-up, and then either girl and boy get back together at the end or girl finds someone new. Enough Said doesn't mess with this mold at all, but that doesn't stop it from having some amazingly real moments.

This is a romantic comedy about people in their forties. The romance is difficult because dating at that age comes with a lot of baggage. The jokes are funny because they understand something about the banality of getting old, the frustration of dealing with high-school-age kids, the panic of trying to find "the one" again. All of these things approach a kind of realness of situation, or the way life really works.

But the most real thing in this movie is the relationship at its center. Julia Louis-Dreyfus and James Gandolfini have the most amazing chemistry. They are both so funny and perfect together, and their first kiss is so amazingly real and honest that my laughter moved from laughing at the situation to the kind of shocked laughter that comes when you can't believe that something is happening. These performances are some of the best of the year. For me, this is great acting: no histrionics; no big fight scenes; no rivers of tears; just simple behavior, the realness of everyday.

When Nicole Holofcener's Friends with Money (which I liked very much) came out, Kenneth Turan called her the Jane Austen of Los Angeles, a title I love and one that fits perfectly (except that I like Holofcener a lot more than I ever liked Jane Austen). But Enough Said works instead like a kind of feminist Angeleno, Woody Allen comedy. In fact, this movie combines the Austenian qualities – the keen observation of the daily lives of middle-class white folks, the difficulties of relationships – with Woody Allen at his best – good jokes, great relationships, broad farce – but focuses on a middle-aged woman from Los Angeles trying to find love again while her daughter leaves for college. This is lovable stuff and very funny.

Three Reviews

I say this to spare you. If you're heterosexual, don't see Another Gay Movie. You will be horrified. Ryan and I watched this movie on Thursday night and both of us were in hysterics and totally mortified as well. It's hilarious and irreverent and ridiculous. A lot of noise has been made about this movie. Most people saying "why do gay people need a movie like this," and I suppose it's dreadfully lowbrow of me to say that I enjoyed the film. My gay friend and I needed a little time together to bond and this movie was so ludicrous, so plotlessly asinine, so deliriously campy, that we laughed our heads off. A good time was had by all: certainly the filmmakers enjoyed themselves making it. This movie has no fear; it goes where you think no movie would be willing to go to find humor and it's definitely worth it.

And I loved Friends with Money. A reviewer in Los Angeles when it came out called Nicole Holofcener the Jane Austen of Los Angeles and I totally understand why. It's a lovely, thoughtful and funny film about Angelenos and their foibles, loves, insecurities, etc. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was sad and romantic and very funny with some running gags that are priceless. There is also a final touching moment at the end that I won't spoil, but was, for me, the icing on the cake of the film. It's a movie about friendships, marriages, loneliness and wealth. Loved it.

And today I finally saw Zhang Yimou's Curse of the Golden Flower, Zhang finally has reunited with his muse from the 1990's, Gong Li (they made Raise the Red Lantern, To Live, Ju Dou, and Shanghai Triad together) and the film is quite good. As you may know, I am not a fan of Zhang's recent work. I haven't yet seen Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles, but I was mostly bored with both the ridiulously over-praised Hero and the Takeshi Kaneshiro-starring House of Flying Daggers. Golden Flower is not a martial arts movie. Instead, it is a royal melodrama of the Lion in Winter variety. Sons and heirs and incestuous relationships and betrayal. This is a film with tricks and surprises up its sleeve. It's also breathtakingly gorgeous to look at. But (and here's the surprise) it's also a film that actually cares about the thousands of people it slaughters, and takes time to deconstruct the pageantry and beauty of all of those monochromatic court ceremonies. It's high tragedy and high diva stuff. Gong Li is totally fucking fabulous and soars in her role and Jay Chou is fantastic as her loyal son. It's a surprisingly excellent film.

Let's also just take a moment to appreciate how gorgeous Gong Li is:

That's all.