Oscar Nominations 2025: Post 4 of 10

1. Sinners, One Battle after Another, Sentimental Value

2. Marty Supreme, Frankenstein, Hamnet
3. Bugonia, The Secret Agent, Train Dreams

This year's nominees are:

F1

4 nominations

• Picture
• Film Editing: Stephen Mirrione (The Revenant, Babel, Traffic)
• Sound
• Visual Effects

Director: John Kosinski

Cast: Brad Pitt, Damson Idris, Javier Bardem, Kerry Condon, Tobias Menzies, Kim Bodnia, Sarah Niles, Will Merrick, Joseph Balderrama, Abdul Salis, Callie Cooke, Samson Kayo, Simon Kunz, Liz Kingsman

This is great. It hits every beat it needs to. The sound is amazing. The script is perfect Hollywood nonsense, but it cleverly avoids most of the worst traps. And this movie has Brad Pitt and Javier Bardem and Kerry Condon. So the acting is just fuckin stellar. All three are absolutely pitch perfect. Damson Idris is great in the Miles Teller part. Sarah Niles is wonderful. The whole thing just sings. And, sure, it’s a retread of Maverick. I mean, yeah fine: it’s mostly about the same thing and it’s mostly a similar script, and the director’s the same, and it’s giving older-guy-bucks-the-system-and-blesses-the-young-people-with-his-wisdom. But I didn’t care one bit. I saw this on a gigantic screen and it felt like I was on a ride the whole time, and this rocked. Great score, great soundtrack, great editing. I was into it. Now, I have heard a great many complaints about the fact that this got a Best Picture nomination. I am baffled by these complaints. In the first place, F1 is very good. In the second place, F1 is appreciably better than Frankenstein. I defy anyone to tell me that Guillermo del Toro's movie is better than Kosinski's, and yet no one is complaining that Frankenstein made it into one of the Best Picture slots because it's a drama and not a genre picture like this one is. (In fact, to my mind F1 is better than Bugonia and Hamnet, too.) In the third place, the reason we have ten Best Picture nominees is exactly for movies like this. The ten slots were designed so that the Academy would make room for genre movies like this one. The Dark Knight was the reason for the change back in 2009 when it missed out on a nomination; then they switched to ten and action movies have consistently benefited and been included. To give just a few examples: District 9 (2009), Inception (2010), Hell or High Water (2016), and most significantly Black Panther (2018). In any case, I'm kind of baffled by anyone saying this movie doesn't deserve its slot. It absolutely does. It's one of the most fun movies of the year. To my mind, Kosinki scored again.

Will win: Film Editing, Sound

Could win: N/A

My rating: #18 out of 91

Blue Moon

2 nominations

• Actor: Ethan Hawke (Boyhood, Training Day)
• Original Screenplay: Robert Kaplow (1st time nominee)

Director: Richard Linklater

Cast: Hawke, Margaret Qualley, Bobby Cannavale, Andrew Scott, Jonah Lees, Simon Delaney, Patrick Kennedy, Giles Surridge, John Doran

I am going to tell you right now that when I saw the trailer I said "Oh no. Absolutely not. This looks horrible." But then my friend Greg told me I needed to watch it, so I went to the theatre and... this is utterly surprising. It’s very, very theatrical and it’s mostly just lots and lots of talk, but it works its way under your skin and it winds up being quite moving. This movie will be especially poignant for theatre people, of course—since it’s about the opening night of Oklahoma! from the perspective of Lorenz Hart, the lyricist and former writing partner of Richard Rodgers who didn’t work on the show. But there is honestly a great deal to enjoy here, and Ethan Hawke is pretty wonderful. I want also to note that some gay men I know have complained about the way the film, in their view, transforms the gay Lorenz Hart into someone who spends the entirety of this movie trying to get close to Margaret Qualley's character. I guess this might have bothered me if I believed in such a thing as sexuality, but, well, I don't. Blue Moon is based on real correspondence between Hart and that character, and in any case the film is quite clear that Hart is gay. I say go see this movie. It's a mannered, overly talkie theatre thing, and it's great.

Will win: N/A

Could win: Actor

My rating: #27 out of 91

Un Simple Accident (یک تصادف ساده) 

It Was Just an Accident

2 nominations

• Original Screenplay: Mehdi Mahmoudian & Jafar Panahi & Shadmer Rastin & Nader Saïvar (all 1st time nominees)
• International Feature: France (Emilia Pérez, Les Misérables, Mustang, A Prophet, The Class, Joyeux Noël, Les Choristes, Amélie, The Taste of Others, East-West, Ridicule, Indochine, Cyrano de Bergerac, Camille Claudel, Au Revoir Les Enfants, Betty Blue, Three Men and a Cradle, Entre Nous, Clean Slate, The Last Metro, Une Histoire Simple, Get Out Your Handkerchiefs, Madame Rosa, Cousin Cousine, Lacombe Lucien, Day for Night, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Hoa-Binh, My Night at Maud's, Stolen Kisses, Live for Life, A Man and a Woman, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Sundays and Cybele, The Truth, Black Orpheus, Mon Oncle, Gates of Paris, Gervaise, Forbidden Games, The Walls of Malapaga, Monsieur Vincent)

Director: Panahi

Cast: Vahid Mobasseri, Mariam Afshari, Ebrahim Azizi, Hadis Pakbaten, Majid Panahi, Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr, George Hashemzadeh, Delmaz Najafi, Afsaneh Najm Abadi

This is my favorite film of the year. It's absurdly funny and deadly serious at the same time. The ending is incredible. Mostly, though, I think I was struck by the film’s portrait of people living with difficult memories, of surviving violence and learning to do the next day’s activities—falling in love with someone, buying pastries, listening to your mom complain about you, helping a neighbor. Panahi's beautiful film manages this without sentiment and always with an eye on what these people have gone through at the hands of an unrepentant state. Un Simple Accident, of course, won the Palme d'Or, so I guess it doesn't need a Best Picture Oscar, Directing Oscar, or even an International Feature Oscar or a Screenplay Oscar. But it sure would have been well deserved. This movie is so good. In fact, while we're here we should say that the International Feature nominees this year are all stellar, with four of the five getting more than one Oscar nomination. It's really a banner year for the Academy's attention to international movies.

Will win: N/A

Could win: N/A

My rating: #1 out of 91

All 2025 Oscar posts:

1. Sinners, One Battle after Another, Sentimental Value

2. Marty Supreme, Frankenstein, Hamnet
3. Bugonia, The Secret Agent, Train Dreams

4. F1, Blue Moon, It Was Just an Accident

5. Sirāt, Avatar: Fire and Ash, K-Pop Demon Hunters

6. If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, Song Sung Blue, Weapons, The Voice of Hind Rajab

7. Arco, Elio, Zootopia 2, Little Amélie or the Character of Rain

8. Animated Short Films

9. Live-action Short Films

10. Jurassic World: Rebirth, The Lost Bus, Kokuho, The Smashing Machine

11. The Ugly Stepsister, Diane Warren: Relentless, Viva Verdi!

A Better Title than The Florida Project

I find the title of The Florida Project totally nonsensical. (It is a reference to Walt Disney World, which is what Disney called the park while it was being built.) But Sean Baker apparently is not interested in titles. He titled his previous film – about two sex workers and a cab driver in Los Angeles –Tangerine, a color/fruit that has no apparent connection to the film itself. He has also said in interviews that he doesn't see why filmmakers feel the need to title their works. Ok.

I wasn't super excited for The Florida Project, but the first time I tried to see it here in Florida there was a line outside the door. Screenings of this film have been selling out in my local Orlando theatre, where it has been playing on only one screen for two weeks. In any case, the excitement was contagious, and when I finally got myself a ticket, I was really looking forward to it.

The first forty minutes or so of The Florida Project build the world in which we're going to be living. We follow around six-year old Mooney and her miniature friends as they cause trouble, spit on parked cars, curse at adults, beg strangers for change, share a soft-serve cone between them, and turn off the power of the motel in which she lives with her mother. It's quality world-building that I didn't find that interesting until about the 40-minute mark, at which point I really became enamored with the film's characters and their world.

For the subsequent 50 minutes or so, things start to happen and the film really finds its stride. We begin to see the consequences of the absurd parenting job Mooney's mother is doing, and I began to feel afraid for the little girl at this film's center. Her mother is really not taking care of her, and this gave the film a real tension that truly began to work.

But then just as the film works its way toward its end, Baker changes the entire tone of the movie. The Florida Project ends with a laughably bad fantasy sequence that is completely incongruent with the rest of the film. All of a sudden, the beautiful care with which the previous parts of the film have been captured is discarded. The final sequence appears to have been shot on a smartphone. And all of a sudden an upbeat film score appears out of nowhere. We're clearly supposed to be in an impossible, fantasy-style sequence that is only being imagined by a character.

But who is doing this imagining? And why would a film that has been documenting the life of an impoverished six-year-old and her mother end with a sequence unrelated to the previous 90 minutes of documentation? The audience with which I saw The Florida Project left the theatre completely baffled. What was that? people were asking. Why did that happen? 

My companion and I decided that what happened was that Sean Baker doesn't really know what he's doing, and the more I think about that the more right I feel. The Florida Project is filled with interesting images and beautiful characterization, but none of this actually adds up to anything. The film ends the way it does because the end doesn't matter to the filmmaker. Baker strings sequences together, but they don't need to go in any particular order, and none of them actually says anything – about the characters or poverty in America or Florida or Kissimmee or Disney World or food or sex work or anything. They're all actually just surfaces.

A good example of what I mean is three sequences in the movie where Mooney's mom Halley (pronounced like Hayley) sells brand-name-knock-off perfume to residents at a Disney hotel. Each of these sequences is filmed in a longshot. We're asked simply to observe her, to watch her sell this perfume. And the sequences are also played for madcap humor, even one in which she is assaulted by a Disney security guard. Because the camera never moves in, the film never asks us to identify with Halley's experience while she does this. We never get a feeling of the stakes of the situation in which she has found herself. Rather than sympathizing with her, the camera sits in judgment of her, or to put it more accurately: the camera is simply there. It has nothing at all to say about what we're watching.

Baker clearly likes Richard Linklater – his influence is all over The Florida Project. I generally find Linklater a bit boring; to my mind he makes films that are more interesting in concept than in reality. But Baker really takes this all even further. It is as though he's making pseudo-documentary cinema. His camera captures the real, the gritty, the unattractive, the mundane. Fine, but what he is shooting is, of course, fictional – a set of fabricated characters and contrived situations that are not captured by his camera but created precisely for his camera – by him. He's devoted to avoiding meaning only so that his films seem more "real".

All I get from this is emptiness. The Florida Project is a film that could have plenty to say but doesn't say anything at all. And one begins to suspect that Baker doesn't have anything to say.

The Lost City of Zed

The Lost City of Z was an astoundingly ambitious film. I am not sure it actually works, but I was really taken aback by it, and I respected it very much. I don't think I've seen a movie like this since, like, the 1950s.

Nobody really makes big epic melodramas like this movie, and I think that is what I found so shocking about it. It felt like an old school Mark Robson picture or something: a giant epic like The Inn of the Sixth Happiness. James Gray takes his movies very seriously, and there is no hint of irony in this kind of moviemaking. I didn't think this worked at all with his last movie The Immigrant – I thought the acting was just terrible – but The Lost City of Z is much more successful, and Sienna Miller, Robert Pattinson, and Tom Holland do great work. Charlie Hunnam is less successful; the main part is a role made for someone like Brad Pitt, really, and Hunnam doesn't have the dynamism of a Colin Farrell or, say, Russell Crowe. He does his best, but the part just never quite jells.

To be honest, though, The Lost City of Z had other problems as well. The end is unsatisfying and not well designed: if you're going to make an old-fashioned melodrama, you need to have an old-fashioned happy ending. And the movie drags in its center, as the players search for their lost city and are bogged down by an absurd character played by Angus Macfadyen with Alfred Molina levels of absurdity.

In short, I can't really recommend this movie. I was excited to see it, and I found the whole thing rather stunning, if I'm honest. But in the vein of something like Richard Linklater's Boyhood, it turns out that the ambition and the idea behind the thing are more interesting than the picture; all that work and the movie just isn't that great.

Some 2014 Gay Movies Now on DVD

Let's start with a movie that isn't gay at all: Daniel Patrick Carbone's Hide Your Smiling Faces. This movie is a kind of old-school David Gordon Green picture – semi-rural life with kids trying to figure out who they are. The two brothers in the movie are coming to grips with the death of a young friend of theirs, and this movie is gorgeous. It tells its story in abstract, poetic ways, and it doesn't bother with the classic Hollywood narratives that might find the boys figuring out how to heal or finding solace in a new friend. Instead, it explores the frustration and terror of being a boy, of trying to fit in with other boys, of the impossibility at this age of understanding anything that one's parents have to say.

I want to say, too, that one of the reasons I love films like Hide Your Smiling Faces – and DGG's George Washington and Jordan Vogt-Roberts' Kings of Summer from last year and Benh Zeitlin's Beasts of the Southern Wild – is that they really are about childhood (pace Richard Linklater). These films are not movies about the experience of parenthood masquerading as films about childhood. They attempt to capture the lost, bizarre, truly difficult feelings that children experience, and they sort of refuse to make a kind of sense of those feelings.

* * *

I really liked Pride, as well, and I was surprised about this. Matthew Warchus's film is a rather straightforward account of a group of gay activists in 1980s London who begin to fight to raise money to support the National Union of Mineworkers' strike. I thought this was going to be a feel-good drama that repeated well-worn platitudes about the LGBT community and capitulated to the kind of capitalist-supporting identity politics practiced in the U.S. to which I object so much. But it isn't this at all! Pride is unabashed in its fight against fascism in the UK, and its message is not "acceptance" or "self-love" or even the "pride" in its title, but rather one that embraces radicalism, and understands that struggles to fight fascism can actually be won through unity. What's so fascinating about this is that the movie is not interested in identity between the miners and the queers; it is interested, rather, in coalition. One doesn't have to recognize one's self in other oppressed groups: one simply needs to fight.

Pride is, in this way, also a beautiful and moving tribute to the work of gay activists who attempted to enact real change in the world. Ben Schnetzer, the movie's lead actor, is great, and the film's supporting cast (Karina Fernandez, Dominic West, Bill Nighy, Paddy Considine, Jessica Gunning and Imelda Staunton) are mostly familiar faces who are all excellent.

* * *

Love Is Strange is just as cinematically conventional as Pride in many ways, except that this is a quirky comedy-drama about a gay male couple who gets married once marriage is legalized in New York. The man supporting the family financially through his job at a Catholic school where he teaches music, however, loses his job once he gets married. The Catholic school fires him for being gay.

The men (instead of leaving the city) move into other people's apartments – separate other people. Love Is Strange becomes a film about people's foibles, about the limits of love for our relatives, neighbors, and friends. Of course, the reason that the men are in this situation is fundamentally homophobia, but this is a movie about family dynamics, and the struggles of living with people we love very very much but don't actually want to live with.

Love Is Strange is presumably a riff on Leo McCarey's 1937 film Make Way for Tomorrow, so its conventionality has its roots, but I didn't find this movie very interesting, to be honest. The performances in it are lovely, but it is a little too dependent on narrative for my taste, and it often felt directionless. But then... the movie's ending is something else altogether. Ira Sachs' movie all of a sudden becomes an art film, representing loss and grief through images of sunlight and the trees and a skateboarding teenager. The end of Love Is Strange really does justify its title, and if it doesn't quite redeem the film in its entirety, it helped me to realize that hidden within this conventional film was an art film, secreted away and hiding. I expect Ira Sachs' next picture to be much more intriguing.

* * *

Finally, I must tell you about Arvin Chen's Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? (明天記得愛上我), a beautiful, whimsical, and very smart Chinese film about a man in his late 30s with a wife and a young son who has a kind of gay re-awakening. The film stars Richie Jen and (the excellent) Mavis Fan, and this is, more than anything else, a romantic comedy with themes similar to something like This Is 40 – about reaching a place in one's life that one no longer understands, seeing one's self in a new light as one reaches a scary age.

Mavis Fan is amazing as the jilted wife, and Stephen Wong Ka Lok is the most beautiful love interest.

But it's the way that the film works that is so good. Early in the picture, Richie Jen's manager floats away with an umbrella, and this signals a kind of child's world or fantasy realm, even though we are definitely dealing with real-world problems. Late in the film, when a drunken karaoke version of The Shirelles' "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?" becomes a beautifully produced musical number, Arvin Chen's movie has earned the right to play with reality in this way. This is a lovely, lovely film.

Oscar Nominees 2015: Part 1 of 12

Every year in the weeks leading up the Academy Awards ceremony, I post my thoughts on all of the nominees, although I exempt myself from the documentaries because I don't really like documentaries all that much. For me that means 50 films this year (2 more than last year). 2015 somehow seems even stranger than last year. Selma's director, actor, costume designer, and screenwriter were snubbed; Best Picture is newly up in the air; and two very deserving pictures (Grand Budapest Hotel and Whiplash managed to surprise with a ton of nominations). Because my favorite thing about all of this movie hubbub is the surprises, I am, as usual, loving Oscar season even though a great many of the big movies this year totally suck.

I say this every year, but most of the films in my top ten for the year were passed over (Under the Skin, Like Father Like Son, Fury, Force Majeure), but some scored a nomination or two (Ida, Two Days One Night) and three were nominated for Best Picture (Selma, Grand Budapest, Whiplash – that's one more than last year). In any case, I am excited for what is going to happen.

Oh, and if you're thinking why does he even care about this? I don't blame you. But I have an elaborate set of reasons for still loving the Oscars that I've explained here.

If the nominee has been nominated for Oscars previously, he or she will be listed next to his/her name in parentheses).

This year's nominees:

Birdman or (the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

9 Nominations

• Picture
• Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu (Babel)
• Actor: Michael Keaton
• Original Screenplay: Iñárritu & Armando Bo & Alexander Dinelares Jr. & Nicolás Giacobone
• Supporting Actor: Edward Norton (American History X, Primal Fear)
• Supporting Actress: Emma Stone
• Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki (Gravity, Children of Men, The New World, Sleepy Hollow, A Little Princess)
• Sound Mixing
• Sound Editing

Director: Iñárritu

Cast: Keaton, Zach Galifianakis, Norton, Naomi Watts, Andrea Riseborough, Stone, Amy Ryan, Lindsay Duncan

I liked Birdman, but I wasn't as in love with it as most of the people I know. The movie's central gimmick works really well, and it's a kind of stunning, virtuosic picture with some great performances (Andrea Riseborough's being the standout in my mind). Edward Norton gets lots of points for being willing to lampoon his own over-earnest image. Keaton is not great in the movie, as far as I am concerned, but he is right for the picture. It seems written for him and perfect for him. Much hullabaloo has been made about the score by Antonio Sánchez being disqualified by the Academy's music branch – it was determined that the movie relies too heavily on music from other sources (notably Mahler, Tchaikovsky, and Adams). In any case, you might think it's a little odd that the Academy loved this weird movie as much as it did, but this is a movie about actors and acting, and the Academy loves movies about that.

Will Win: Actor, Cinematography

Could Win: Original Screenplay, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing

My Rating: #29 out of 73

The Grand Budapest Hotel

9 Nominations

• Picture
• Director: Wes Anderson
• Original Screenplay: Wes Anderson (Moonrise Kingdom, The Royal Tenenbaums)
• Cinematography: Robert Yeoman
• Film Editing: Barney Pilling
• Original Score: Alexandre Desplat (The Imitation Game, Philomena, Argo, The King's Speech, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Queen)
• Production Design: Anna Pinnock (Into the Woods, Life of Pi, The Golden Compass, Gosford Park) & Adam Stockhausen (12 Years a Slave)
• Costume Design: Milena Canonero (Marie Antoinette, The Affair of the Necklace, Titus, Dick Tracy, Tucker: the Man and His Dream, Out of Africa, Chariots of Fire, Barry Lyndon)

Director: Anderson

Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Tony Revolori, Jude Law, F. Murray Abraham, Saoirse Ronan, Adrien Brody, Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, Willem Dafoe, Harvey Keitel, Jeff Goldblum, Edward Norton

This is my favorite of the Best Picture nominees and, as with Birdman, I am surprised the Academy liked this movie as much as it did. First of all, it's funny, which usually means that a movie isn't going to be taken seriously. I saw this movie with a whole group of friends (including my friend Walter – he and I cemented our friendship while drinking viognier and talking about Wes Anderson five years ago). Also, and this is a huge deal, the exquisite production designs for Anderson's films have never before been acknowledged by the Academy. This is an enormous first and a very exciting one. I don't expect this movie to win the big statue, but I do expect it to do very well, including Anderson's first Oscar for writing.

Will Win: Original Screenplay, Production Design, Costume Design

Could Win: Cinematography, Film Editing, Makeup
My Rating: #5 out of 73

The Imitation Game

8 Nominations

• Picture
• Director: Morten Tyldum
• Actor: Benedict Cumberbatch
• Adapted Screenplay: Graham Moore
• Supporting Actress: Keira Knightley (Pride & Prejudice)
• Film Editing: William Goldenberg (Zero Dark Thirty, Argo, Seabiscuit, The Insider)
• Original Score: Alexandre Desplat (The Grand Budapest Hotel, Philomena, Argo, The King's Speech, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Queen)
• Production Design: Maria Djurkovic & Tatiana Macdonald

Director: Tyldum

Cast: Cumberbatch, Knightley, Rory Kinnear, Matthew Goode, Mark Strong, Charles Dance, Matthew Beard, Allen Leach, John Northcote

Snoozefest. When you see this, I hope you're able to stay awake. This is not the film among the nominees that caused me the most ire, but it is way up there. In all honesty, too, I see why people loved it so much. It makes one feel very superior to people from the past. Oh, we're so much more evolved now and isn't it sad what they did to that poor genius over there in Britain, and didn't he just overcome? I can hardly bear it. This film's host of nominations are particularly upsetting because Tyldum's slot in the Director lineup really could've gone instead to AvaDuvernay for her work on Selma or, barring that, to someone else who made a superb film this year – Paweł Pawlikowski, say, or the Dardenne Brothers, or (more within the realm of possibility) Damien Chazelle. I have a feeling, though, that nomination morning was the high point for The Imitation Game, and the wind is now out of its sails completely; we saw this phenomenon last year with American Hustle.
Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #58 out of 73

Boyhood

6 Nominations

• Picture
• Director: Richard Linklater
• Original Screenplay: Richard Linklater (Before Midnight, Before Sunset)
• Supporting Actor: Ethan Hawke (Training Day)
• Supporting Actress: Patricia Arquette
• Film Editing: Sandra Adair

Director: Linklater

Cast: Ellar Coltrane, Arquette, Lorelei Linklater, Hawke, Marco Perella, Brad Hawkins, Tom McTigue

I was soft on this picture for several reasons. It is not without its charms, for sure, and it has been quite popular with critics, but I found the whole thing rather boring. This was an awesome idea – really an awesome idea – but its execution simply wasn't all that spectacular. Still, who doesn't feel good about Richard Linklater finally getting his due as both a screenwriter and a director. He has been making great, quirky, interesting films for two decades now, and this is as good a time as any to honor his contributions to all of our lives. Don't let its comparatively paltry six nominations fool you: this is going to win the big one as well as two other Oscars.

Will Win: Picture, Director, Supporting Actress

Could Win: Original Screenplay, Film Editing

My Rating: #43 out of 73

Morality Tales - Japanese and USAmerican

Takahata Isao's The Tale of the Princess Kaguya is, in many ways, a ghost story: the transliteration of the Japanese title, かぐや姫の物語, is Kaguya-hime no Monogatari. In many old Japanese movies that made it to U.S. release, this word monogatari (物語) is featured. It means tale or story or legend, and it comprises the tale/story part of the titles of Mizoguchi's Tales of Ugetsu, Ozu's Tokyo Story, and Misumi's The Tale of Zatoichi. These tales are not necessarily ghost stories, but they are always moral tales, and I had not really remembered that when I went in to see Princess Kaguya. (Frankly, I was just excited to see that it was playing anywhere within an hour of where I live; I drove 60 minutes.)

The moral tale that Princess Kaguya is telling is a tale for adults. This is, in many ways, a film for parents – admonishing them (us) to take care that we do not pressure our children to be something that they do not wish to be. Attempting to transform them into what we think they ought to be only causes heartache and misery, and our children may miss out on happiness altogether.

In Princess Kaguya, a poor, childless bamboo cutter discovers a tiny princess in the forest. He takes her home, where she transforms into a baby. The woodcutter and his wife raise the child as their own. (All children are a gift, the moral says, both the ones that are given to us and the ones that we think we created ourselves.)

The child is happy, learns quickly, grows quickly, but is a little off. The woodcutter decides that she is really a princess and that she ought to be taken to the capital, where she can learn how to be a proper princess. He executes this plan, but of course the girl hates it in the city, away from the bamboo and the wild pigs and the water and wind.

I don't want to say much more about the movie vis-à-vis its plot, but I will say that the movie underlines several other moral lessons. In Kaguya, what is of value are the things we have in our lives – the things we can share with one another or give to those we love – not fantasies about imaginary jewels or magic amulets. Dreams and fantasies are not worth much in this movie, but pheasant stew and mushrooms and fun with friends are worth a great deal.

And the film asks parents to spend time with their children and learn what they want from the world – learn what happiness looks like to them – instead of deciding what happiness ought to look like. (Kaguya literalizes this moral several times.) Life is very short, Kaguya says, and at any time our children, our friends, our money can be taken away from us. We must treasure what we have while we have it.

My gloss of the film makes it seem much more heavy handed than it is. The Tale of the Princess Kaguya isn't quite as on the nose as my description makes it out to be. Its moral lessons are subtle, its animation is beautiful, and I quite liked the film.  

~ ~ ~

But I had the same problem with The Princess Kaguya that I had with Richard Linklater's Boyhood. These are films about parenting: about watching a child grow up and understanding life in new ways by watching a child become someone we didn't originally envision, a person wholly his or her own. But, as Richard Linklater does with Boyhood, Takahata decides to tell his film from the perspective of the child rather than the perspective of the adults. For me, the journey of the child is not that interesting. In fact, it's predictable, even generic. The kids in both films almost always do what is expected of them. They watch their parents in predictable ways, they approach their friends in exactly the ways I expect them to.

Now, these are both films by adults, so while they purport to be giving us the perspective of a child, a way of looking at the world that is new and exciting and fresh and whatever, this isn't true. Both Takahata and Linklater see the world of the child in generic ways, in ways that idealize the experience of a child: the child wishes his parents would stay together and is terrified when they fight, the child wishes to live in the forest with her friends, the child idolizes his father, the child doesn't want to be a lady, she wants to be a tomboy, the child wants to learn to express himself, the child falls in love with the first boy that she meets, the child finds himself inexplicably and unanalytically jealous of his mother's boyfriend.

But although these films tell their stories from the perspective of the child, these are actually just more parental perspectives, covert parental perspectives disguised as children's perspectives. Both Boyhood and Kaguya reenact the failings the adults in their films commit – they are finally more interested in themselves and their own experience of watching the child, of living vicariously through the child, than they are in understanding the child him- or herself.

My big problem with Boyhood is that it is a movie about parenting that continually pretends it is a movie about growing up. It isn't just that I am way more interested in exploring the world of parenting than I am in attempting to relive the experience of growing up (although this is true), it is that so is Richard Linklater. For my money, if both Linklater and Takahata admitted from the start that their movies were about the experience of the parent watching the child grow up, I would have been much more interested in their movies. As it is, both movies are fine, but both simply recreate a nostalgic experience of childhood felt by someone who can't remember any more what being a child was actually like.

The Congress

Here's one you probably haven't heard of!

Ari Folman's The Congress is a quasi-science-fiction movie that is really an animated movie more than it is anything else. Hm. Maybe this is not the best way to start. Things get confused easily when I think about this movie, so I'll start with the plot.

In 2013, we follow the actress Robin Wright (played by Robin Wright). She is 44 and the studios want her to sign one last contract. She will be scanned by the studio so that they can put her into any movie they want without having to deal with the real actor's objections to things – no human problems. They will make her permanently 34 years old and she will be a movie star again, but it won't actually be her. It will all be computers. She will be animated. Wright signs the deal for various reasons, and they go about scanning her, but she stops the scanning in the middle unsure if she wants to continue – the whole thing is just too weird for her. This is the first 40 minutes of the film.

I originally thought this was going to be a movie about dehumanization, about the difficulties of being a person who is also a commodity, produced by studios and consumed by moviegoers everywhere. And it is that, but The Congress is about the future more than it is about anything else. And so it is about consciousness and drugs as well as consumption and commodification.

After the first 40 minutes, The Congress flashes a title card: Twenty years later. It's a shocking thing to do, and I feel bad for spoiling this moment here, but there's no other way even to begin to explain what comes next in the movie, and I still haven't even explained the title. Twenty years later, Robin is in her early sixties, and she drives to a "restricted animated zone" where she drinks an Alice-in-Wonderland-style vial and becomes animated. (At this point maybe you'll remember that the director, Ari Folman, first hit it big with the animated documentary Waltz with Bashir (ואלס עם באשיר).) I won't tell you what happens next, but Robin is attending an event in an animated world called "the futurological congress" where everything is in one's head (or at least it would appear so).

The rest has been described by others as psychedelic, and that is a very good technical description, I think, but The Congress is a representation of what living through chemistry might be like, of an imaginary world made to seem very real through ongoing drug use. As a film, The Congress is less of a nightmare than it is a kind of Rousselian pageant of wonders: things are amazing in this animated world, and much is possible that is impossible in the real world. It is mind-boggling and scary as well as beautiful, and the future that The Congress shows us doesn't seem that far away, to my mind. This is also an entirely different take on The Society of the Spectacle, by a filmmaker that uses animation to its fullest. If The Congress is like anything, it is like the animated universes of Oshii Mamoru's Ghost in the Shell (攻殻機動隊), Kon Satoshi's Paprika (パプリカ), and Richard Linklater's Waking Life (although it is nowhere near as soporific as Linklater's movie). This is smart, challenging stuff that imagines a possible future for us in critical, non-ironic ways.

Some other stuff: Robin Wright is superb. She has been doing the most challenging, interesting work of her career these last couple of years (did you see last year's Adore?) and she is a joy to watch. Harvey Keitel also gives an excellent performance in The Congress: his best in many years. And Max Richter's score is gorgeous and contemplative. This is great filmmaking, and Ari Folman is proving himself a real philosopher of media and human interaction with media. The Congress is one of my favorites of the year.

Oscar Nominees 2014: Part 7 of 14

The Lone Ranger

2 Nominations

• Visual Effects
• Makeup

Director: Gore Verbinski

Cast: Johnny Depp, Armie Hammer, Tom Wilkinson, William Fichtner, Ruth Wilson, Bryant Prince, James Badge Dale, Helena Bonham Carter, Barry Pepper, Saginaw Grant, James Frain

I was too drunk actually to remember what happened in this hot mess of racism, makeup, and visual effects. Just know that I thought it was basically Rango with humans. And I hated Rango. Apparently, however, the Academy kind of loves Gore Verbinski, and they still love Johnny Depp even though he only makes terrible movies these days. Still, The Lone Ranger, is a new low, and the nominations for this film were a bit of a surprise to me. If you're going to nominate a good effects-driven film, why not Elysium or Pacific Rim? I mean, those movies are actually good. The parts I liked about this movie were probably the costume design, which was fun, and the score, which used Giacchino Rossini's music too much to be eligible for Academy consideration. Ah well. In any case, The Lone Ranger won't be winning any Oscars. Trust that.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #74 out of 80

Before Midnight

1 Nomination

• Adapted Screenplay: Julie Delpy (Before Sunset) & Ethan Hawke (Before Sunset) & Richard Linklater (Before Sunset)

Director: Linklater

Cast: Delpy, Hawke, Walter Lassally, Athina Rachel Tsangari, Panos Koronis, Yannis Papadopoulos, Ariane Labed, Xenia Kalogeropoulou

This film is brilliant. One of my favorites of the year. I still do not understand why this goes in the Adapted Screenplay category. The script is not at all adapted from anything. It makes no sense. But this film deserves every accolade it gets. It is a film about talking, about talking through the difficult periods in the life of a couple. And this couple fights and says unforgivable things, and then they forgive. It is an extraordinary portrait of love and disappointment and loss and (I can't believe I'm about to say this) heterosexuality. But it is a kind of interrogated heterosexuality. One that actively wonders about gender dynamics and feminism and expectations. It is an extraordinary picture. Beautifully filmed, beautifully acted, and shot in Greece, so, well, there's that. Could this win its big award? Looks unlikely, but it would be awesome if it did.
Will Win: N/A

Could Win: Adapted Screenplay

My Rating: #8 out of 80

Prisoners

1 Nomination

• Cinematography: Roger Deakins (Skyfall, True Grit, The Reader, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, No Country for Old Men, The Man Who Wasn't There, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Kundun, Fargo, The Shawshank Redemption)

Director: Denis Villeneuve

Cast: Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal, Maria Bello, Terrence Howard, Viola Davis, Paul Dano, Melissa Leo, Dylan Minnette, Wayne Duval, Len Cariou, David Dastmalchian

Roger Deakins is so good! And, actually, so is this movie. I didn't really care for Villeneuve's last movie, the Foreign-Language-Picture-nominated Incendies, but this one is a tight, dangerous crime thriller in the vein of David Fincher's Zodiac. Villeneuve kept me guessing the entire time. Jake Gyllenhaal is also really, really great in Prisoners. He is just playing a detective, so it looks like rather an easy role, but Gyllenhaal fleshes his character out in all kinds of interesting ways – the acting is not this good across the board: Viola Davis is excellent, but Howard and Jackman are just playing "good father" to the hilt. Still, even with Jackman's overacting, Prisoners is really, really scary. I spent most of the film wondering who the kidnappers were, who was going to betray whom, and squirming in my seat as I worried about characters getting caught or maimed or killed or whatever. This is a really excellent watch. My roommate and I both double-checked the locks on our doors after this one. Good stuff.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #22 out of 80

Before Midnight

I am so glad that Linklater/Delpy/Hawke keep making these Before movies.

When I saw Before Sunset in 2005 (I actually have the review I wrote back then), I was blown away by how much I thought the movie was about me, how much the two characters seemed to be articulating so many of my own struggles – and even more: that they seemed able really to get at how I felt about the things with which I was struggling.

Jesse and Céline are older than I am now, and Before Midnight is a much different film than either of the previous movies. For starters, there are a lot more people in this movie. The film begins with Jesse and his son walking around the airport and talking. As invested as I am in the father-son relationship, you can be sure my eyes had already filled with tears five minutes into the film. We get to spend some more time with Jesse and Céline after this, and they talk about almost everything other than their relationship with one another: work problems, issues with the kids, scheduling, dinner. It's mundane, but doesn't feel stifling or heavy in any way. These are the things we do. These are the ways we fill our lives.

And it is hard to be alone with one another when you're in your forties and have three children. And friends. And work. And a life. A conversation by yourselves walking through a Greek village? Who has time for that? This is precious alone-time – time couples with kids don't actually have.

The centerpiece of Before Midnight is an afternoon dinner conversation with a group of couples. They talk about gender, they talk about love, about penises and the value of coupling. Marriage as such doesn't really come up. In other words, this is about being together. Even when we're talking about gender we're talking about how we manage to stay with someone, what it means to give up enough of oneself to make a relationship work.

Jesse and Céline have given up a lot to be together. And this opened up space for primal doubts. What do these people still want from life? What do they still want from each other? And what does it mean to be in love? What is that? And what of sacrifice? What is its value when weighed beside the other things that one gets from one's lover?

Before Midnight deals with these questions exquisitely. If it is a talky film – and all three of these films are – it also has more than a few gorgeous moments of cinematic poetry, where the film seems to pause. We sit and watch the sunset for a moment, breathe together and wait, and it seems to me that in little pauses like that, sometimes something has a chance to open.

This is, in many ways, a deeply unsettling film, attempting to deal with some very difficult problems of love and relationships. I absolutely loved it, but I also felt a little off-kilter the rest of the evening, as though I'd been asked to solve some really difficult puzzles and hadn't quite succeeded.

Oh, and one more thing: Look for Academy-Award-winning cinematographer Walter Lassally as an old mentor in the film. Lassally has never been credited for acting in a movie before now, but he shot Michael Cacoyannis's Zorba the Greek and Tony Richardson's Tom Jones in the '60s, as well as being one of Merchant-Ivory's regular cinematographers for twenty years – from Savages in 1972 through to The Ballad of the Sad Café in 1991.

Nicholas Sparks & Zac Efron

I have, until last night, been able completely to avoid films based on Nicholas Sparks novels. This has become a miniature point of pride for me. Girls I know look at me aghast. You haven't seen The Notebook??? they yell, indignant. How is it possible that you haven't seen The Notebook? Well, I haven't. I have also skipped Message in a Bottle, Nights in Rodanthe, A Walk to Remember, The Last Song, and Dear John. I say No Thanks to Mr. Sparks' particular brand of heteronormative schmaltz and his refusal to call the books he writes "romance novels". Mr. Sparks writes what he calls "fiction", and we are allegedly fools for placing his work within so debased a genre as the romance novel, even though his books are just as formulaic as Jackie Collins'. In a much-quoted and ludicrous interview in USA Today he compared himself to Shakespeare, Austen, and Hemingway, and then called Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian "the most pulpy, overwrought, melodramatic cowboy vs. Indians story ever written".

Okay.

On the other hand...

I like Zac Efron. There. I said it. And I try to see all of his movies. Now, I mostly think these movies are awful, but I always like Zac in them. There is something unapologetically earnest about his work, the way he truly works at his acting without ever phoning it in (like, say, Orlando Bloom or Ashton Kutcher sometimes do). Aside from all this, I honestly think Zac is pretty good. He gets at something – a kind of bro-truth, perhaps – for which I think our society often aims. So far I've been charmed by Zac in High School Musical (1, 2 and 3), found him adorable in Hairspray, thought he acquitted himself well in Me and Orson Welles, and watched both of his Burr Steers movies (17 Again was cute and clever; Charlie St. Cloud was absurd and overly sentimental). I admit that I probably shouldn't have seen Charlie St. Cloud in the theatre, but, well, Zac is just so pretty. I know that's not really an excuse but it's all I've got. The boy is not my type at all, but he's beautiful.

Which leads me to the point where I rent The Lucky One, the new film by Scott Hicks (who you might remember made the Oscar-nominated Shine in 1996), which stars Zac Efron and is based on a novel by Nicholas Sparks.

And it is every single thing you think it is going to be. The Lucky One is exhaustingly formulaic, unabashedly heteronormative, filled with inane dialogue, excruciatingly white, and cloyingly sentimental.

And I sort of liked it. Zac is very good, as usual. The beautiful female lead, Taylor Schilling, is actually delightful and gives a fine performance. There's also Blythe Danner, who wears a knowing, clever smirk throughout the whole film. The actors are honestly doing good work.

That's all I can say for The Lucky One, though. The movie wants you to have feeling after feeling, and for some reason, it treats its audience as though we haven't seen this movie before. The Lucky One is a rehash of every romantic drama you've ever seen that behaves as though it's telling this story for the very first time.

True love. Meant to be. Fate. Blah blah blah. And mostly I just sat there, drank my gin and tonic, and bought it.

A Brief Dialogue on Adaptation

Julie: I don't know why I am just realizing this now, but: what the heck is Toy Story 3 adapted from? Just the original story idea? That seems lame. What are the rules for adapted screenplays?

Aaron: They are very wishy-washy. For example, a couple of years ago Before Sunset was nominated in the Adapted category but it was totally original. It was just a sequel. And yet, The Barbarian Invasions was nominated in the Original category: also a sequel. I think they are doing it stupidly.

Julie: Ew. The Academy needs to get its shit together, because this is silly.

Aaron: Right?? I mean Toy Story 3 is not based on anything; it has characters we recognize. So did fucking Nixon!!

Julie: Ahahahahahaha. Truth.

Zac Efron and Orson Welles

I wasn't really bored by Me and Orson Welles so much as I am not quite sure what the whole thing was about.

As far as I can tell, Me and Orson Welles was one long theatre joke. The film is about a young aspiring performer who gets serendipitously cast as a minstrel in Welles' legendary 1937 modern-dress production of Julius Caesar. Christian McKay plays Welles, and actors play Joseph Cotton and John Houseman and all kinds of other famous people. In addition, about a billion names are dropped in the film. So many, in fact, that you'd have to be a theatre historian to get all of the references in Me and Orson Welles. I might be exaggerating a bit, but my point is that the film trades on theatre and movie in-jokes and does so with a wink.

(To be fair, one of my favorite moments in the movie is a reference to The Third Man where Joseph Cotton steps out of the shadows to give Zac Efron some advice.)

So, Zac Efron. I love him. The thing is, he is kinda... well... bad in this movie. I mean, he is cute, he steals focus, you always look at him when he is onscreen, even when he isn't in the center of the frame. But, he doesn't always know how to read his lines. And he doesn't quite know how to get a laugh. Oh, well. He is pretty, anyway.

Me and Orson Welles is a weird Richard Linklater film. It is a whimsical little thing with very little substance. Watching Orson Welles chew scenery is fun, and theatre jokes are cute, but the whole thing had worn rather thin for me by the end.

I should mention, however, that James Tupper, who plays Joseph Cotton, gives a really great performance. He was my favorite thing in the movie.

Home Improvement

I painted this weekend: pretty much all weekend. Friday after work I went to Lowe's, bought my paint and came home and watched The Broadway Melody.

On Saturday, I started painting at around 1:00p and finished the dining room around 5:00p. I was gonna watch another movie, but I ended up just bumming around until I met my friends at Applebee's (I fucking hate this place, but my friends don't care) in Diamond Bar (I live in Pasadena, but my friends don't care.) Actually, the drive wasn't bad at all and all I did at the restaurant was drink, so what does it matter how white-trash the joint is?

On Sunday, I was supposed to go coffee-table-shopping with Deborah to buy my parents a new one so that they could give me theirs (it matches the end tables in my living room). I didn't really want to go table-shopping, but it had to be done, or I wasn't getting my parents'.
Not so. Mom called and said she doesn't want a new coffee table and the one she has is in the way anyway, and can Debs just bring it by my house. Um... yeah. You're going to give it to me and deliver it and I don't have to do anything?? Sweet.

The doorway needed two coats because of the nature of the paint, so after the first one, I took a break and watched Before Sunset, which is SO GOOD. If you saw/liked Before Sunrise, you will love this sequel. You probably already know that it's a Decline of the American Empire/Barbarian Invasions thing, with a sequel happening with the same actors after many years (15 in the Denys Arcand case and 9 in this case.) And like Barbarian Invasions, Before Sunset is a very different film from it's predecessor, and wonderfully so. Before Sunrise was a hopeful, energetic, magical, coupling that wasn't the least bit based in reality and cashed in on a seat-of-the-pants mentality and earnestness that twentysomethings often have. I liked the movie when I watched it a couple days ago, and instinctively knew that if I had seen it in high school, I would have connected with it a lot better. The characters are idealistic and wonderful, but they seem to be in denial (they're not really, they're just young.) But Before Sunset is able to bring these two characters back together and they can discuss politics and love and their dreams with new attitudes and eyes: they are the discussions of people who are older and wiser and more tuned-in to reality on a lot of levels. I absolutely loved it. I feel like Before Sunrise was about a certain period in my life that I remember only semi-fondly, but Before Sunset is about my life as it is now, and it is no easy feat to make a movie like that. I promptly moved Before Sunset onto my top twenty-five list for 2004.

Still haven't seen Head On. I keep meaning to see it; this is it's second weekend in release. I just can't get my ass in gear to go to the cinema.

The dining room looks stellar. The paint is eggshell and it looks wonderful, and the color is just perfect. I hung the ($40) painting I bought at HomoGoods HomeGoods last week and it looks great on the new wall. I'm still kind of undecided on the doorway area. The paint is a satin finish (they couldn't give me the flat in the dark red color I wanted) and I'm not sure I like it; I know I don't like it as much as the eggshell. The color looks great, but I didn't paint the doors at all and so they kind of pop. Hmmm.