Disclosure Day (2026)

Disclosure Day is really good for a while. It’s mysterious and a little quirky, and Emily Blunt is stellar. Then the movie takes a really dumb turn toward religion, “empathy”, and saccharine Spielberg nonsense. This starts during Jane and Daniel’s discussion about whether people will stop believing in gods if they know there are aliens (pro tip: lots of people already don’t believe in gods), it continues with Jane’s unsubtle stigmata and her asinine call to her nun-friend, and it's truly brought home with an absurd monologue Colman Domingo is forced to deliver about how empathy is the solution to WWIII, an idea that Spielberg apparently actually believes. 

It’s a shame this went south, because I was having a good time for a while. In many ways, I think this is a more personal film for Spielberg than The Fabelmans. Disclosure Day actually explores the big questions that Spielberg has been asking in his films since the late 1970s. To wit: 

• How would knowing about alien life affect how we see one another? 
• Could it stop violence on earth or would it exacerbate it? 
• Would it take the place of a belief in a higher power? 
• Is believing in aliens the same thing as believing in a god? 
• How do we reconcile feelings of faith, certainty we know in our bodies, with the skepticism of those around us? 

These are deeply personal questions for Spielberg, and so I think he’s made quite a personal movie. I wish those questions were of more interest to me… If they were, I might have enjoyed where his movie went a bit more than I did. 

Side note: An actress named Courtney Grace plays a New York NBC anchor in the film’s final act who tells the world about what she’s seeing in the footage, and she gives an incredible performance. Cast her in everything, please.

New Color Purple Same as the Old Color Purple

When The Color Purple uses the songs from the musical it works very well. The best sequences are easily “Miss Celie’s Pants”, “Push da Button”, and “Hell No”. Which makes one wonder why they didn’t use more of this music. So much of Blitz Bazawule’s movie musical is not musical! Why? I just don’t get it. The whole thing just works so much better when the performers are singing. 

The real kicker for me, though, was that this film reused so much of Spielberg’s movie (the dumb food-burning humor when Shug arrives, the invented subplot about Shug having a minister father, the near complete erasure of Shug and Celie’s love affair) instead of the far-superior (and closer to the novel) libretto from the musical. Ugh. Well, I’ve written a whole book chapter on this in Love Is Love Is Love, and this version of The Color Purple is much more like Spielberg’s version than Walker’s version or the stage show. And that’s too bad.

Here's a little section from Love Is Love Is Love, so you know what I mean when I tell you how annoyed I was at this movie:

* * *

The concept of god [is] central to The Color Purple. Celie still begins her letters “Dear God,” and the Bible and Heaven make regular appearances. The shift for Celie begins in letter 73, more than halfway through the novel, after she has discovered that Nettie is still alive, that her father was lynched, and that the man she thought was her father is her stepfather. Celie and Shug talk about God, but they have very different ideas about it. Their conversation is far reaching and fascinating. Celie says that “the God I been praying and writing to is a man. And act just like all the other mens I know. Trifling, forgetful and lowdown,” but Shug argues that Celie’s god is not only a male god but specifically white and male:

If you wait to find God in church, Celie, she say, that’s who is bound to show up, cause that’s where he live. […] Cause that’s the one that’s in the white folks’ white bible.

Shug! I say. God wrote the bible, white folks had nothing to do with it.

How come he look just like them, then? she say. […] How come the bible just like everything else they make, all about them doing one thing and another, and all the colored folks doing is gitting cursed?

I never thought bout that. 

It is important to note here that Shug’s critique is one that marks this god as specifically racialized, gendered, and aged by the white people who created him in their image. 

Shug’s personal theory about god is the one that Celie finally adopts, although it takes her a long time to arrive at this position – she struggles with it through several letters. In letter 73, though, Shug tells Celie that “God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it. […] God ain’t a he or a she, but a It. […] I believe God is everything, say Shug. Everything that is or ever was or ever will be. And when you can feel that, and be happy to feel that, you’ve found it.”  It is in this same letter that Shug says the memorable phrase from which the book’s title is taken, that “it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.” 

Even more, Shug’s theory of god is one deeply inflected by an ethos of sexual freedom and an emphasis on sexual pleasure. Shug understands desire and sex to be invented by her god, and she says that “God love all them feelings. That’s some of the best stuff God did. And when you know God loves ’em you enjoys ’em a lot more. You can just relax, go with everything that’s going, and praise God by liking what you like.”  Shug’s sexual ethic here emphasizes a free sexual choice that, significantly, doesn’t emphasize a specific sexuality as much as it insists on sexual freedom and sexual pleasure – “go with everything that’s going,” Shug says, and “lik[e] what you like.”

At the same time as her long talk with Shug, Celie stops writing letters to her god, writing instead to her sister Nettie, from whom she has been separated for the many years of the novel. Nettie has gone to Africa as a Christian missionary to a fictional ethnic group called the Olinka, but after their time in Africa, she and her husband Samuel come to see God in the same way that Celie does, as a spirit not tied to a particular image. Celie writes to Nettie until the moving final letter of novel. By this time, Nettie and Celie’s children have returned to Georgia and they have all been reunited, and so instead of writing to her sister, Celie addresses her final letter in this way: “Dear God. Dear stars, dear trees, dear sky, dear peoples. Dear Everything. Dear God. / Thank you for bringing my sister Nettie and our children home.”  Celie has come to believe in a god that is everywhere and everything rather than a white patriarch who punishes sexual pleasure and demands obedience, and she is grateful.

* * *

This is as gay as this new movie gets.

All of this – and to my mind these are the central themes of the novel – is cut in Spielberg's film. I go on in the book to detail the changes made for the film and for the musical. Celie and Shug don't even have this conversation about god in the 1985 movie. What's so wonderful about the musical is that it restores this conversation and does so musically with Shug's gorgeous song "The Color Purple". The musical also restores the beautiful sexual relationship that the women have, another thing that was cut for Spielberg's movie.

Well the new Blitz Bazawule movie cuts the conversation yet again (cutting Shug's song, of course), and it cuts the sexual relationship too, for good measure. The musical version did so much work to get back to the themes of the novel from the botched 1985 movie adaptation. The new movie adaptation takes us right back to 1985.

The Seventh Curse (1986)

The Seventh Curse (原振侠与卫斯理) is gory and insane and makes not one lick of sense. It’s a kind of Hong Kong Indiana Jones fantasy with practical effects. It has a murderous monster baby and a crypt keeper that transforms into a Ridley Scott alien. It also stars a young Chow Yun Fat (that's him with the pipe) and a young Maggie Cheung (all the way to the left). Honestly everyone should see this. 

I should also mention that Lam Ngai Kai's movie about a blood curse... in 1986. It’s very obviously about coping with the terror of HIV/AIDS.

My unseen movie club watched this gem in a dubbed version – we couldn't get ahold of a Cantonese version – but it was still worth the watch. 

Oscar Nominations 2022: 2 of 9

This year's nominees:

The Fabelmans

7 Nominations

• Picture
• Director: Steven Spielberg (West Side Story, Lincoln, Munich, Saving Private Ryan, Schindler's List, E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Close Encounters of the Third Kind)
• Actress: Michelle Williams (Manchester by the Sea, My Week with Marilyn, Blue Valentine, Brokeback Mountain)
• Original Screenplay: Tony Kushner (Lincoln, Munich) & Steven Spielberg
• Supporting Actor: Judd Hirsch (Ordinary People)
• Production Design: Rick Carter (Lincoln, War Horse, Avatar, Forrest Gump) & Karen O'Hara (Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Alice in Wonderland, The Color of Money)
• Score: John Williams (Star Wars: Episode IX – the Rise of Skywalker, Star Wars: Episode VIII – the Last Jedi, Star Wars: Episode VII – the Force Awakens, The Book Thief, Lincoln, War Horse, The Adventures of Tintin, Munich, Memoirs of a Geisha, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Catch Me If You Can, Artificial Intelligence: A.I., Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, The Patriot, Angela's Ashes, Saving Private Ryan, Amistad, Sleepers, Nixon, Sabrina, Schindler's List, JFK, Home Alone, Born on the Fourth of July, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Accidental Tourist, Empire of the Sun, The Witches of Eastwick, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, The River, Return of the Jedi, E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Empire Strikes Back, Superman, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Jaws, The Towering Inferno, Tom Sawyer, Cinderella Liberty, Images, The Poseidon Adventure, Fiddler on the Roof, The Reivers, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Valley of the Dolls)

Director: Spielberg

Cast: Williams, Paul Dano, Gabriel LaBelle, Seth Rogen, Hirsch, Mateo Zoryan, Keeley Karsten, Julia Butters, Alina Brace, Birdie Borria, Robin Bartlett, Sam Rechner, Oakes Fegley, Chloe East

This is a very strange movie. Obviously Spielberg understands that some wonderful directors – Paolo Sorrentino, Alfonso Cuarón, Paul Thomas Anderson, James Grey – are mining their own childhoods for important stories right now, and so Spielberg tries his hand at this too. Except that he co-wrote the story of his own childhood with Tony Kushner. The thing is that Spielberg isn't really very good at mining anything for meaning or nuance. He's very good at a particular kind of movie shallowness. The Fabelmans is, accordingly, a very shallow exploration of something that might perhaps have deserved depth. What we come away from this film with is something like "the power of film" or "the magic of a boy and his camera" or somesuch business. Platitudes, in other words, rather than depth; clichés rather than insight. I was skeptical, as soon as I saw the trailer, of Michelle Williams' questionable accent, but the performance is actually so much worse. It's just an odd, odd, performance for which I don't really have words. I am not sure what she's doing or why anyone let it continue without talking to her about it. Mind you, now she has been nominated for best actress, so... I guess it was successful? I loved Paul Dano in this movie, though. I will say that. And Gabriel LaBelle and Judd Hirsch are good too. One more thing to say about Michelle Williams: props to her for not committing category fraud like Ke Huy Quan and so many other actors. They could easily have run her as a supporting actress, since she's a mother character, but she chose to run in the lead category, and she's top billed. So that's exactly what should have happened.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #33 out of 63

Tár

6 Nominations

• Picture
• Director: Todd Field
• Actress: Cate Blanchett (Carol, Blue Jasmine, Elizabeth: the Golden Age, I'm Not There., Notes on a Scandal, The Aviator, Elizabeth)
• Original Screenplay: Todd Field (Little Children, In the Bedroom)
• Film Editing: Monika Willi
• Cinematography: Florian Hoffmeister

Director: Field

Cast: Blanchett, Nina Hoss, Noémie Merlant, Sophie, Kauer, Sylvia Flote, Mark Strong, Zethphan Smith-Gneist, Nicolas Hopchet 

I loved this. I've written about it here, so I won't say too much more about how exquisitely crafted this film is, but it is worth repeating how finely made Tár is, how haunting and difficult and mysterious. It's a gripping modern Greek tragedy, and it works beautifully (at least until the very last sequence). I'm betting against Blanchett here. She already has two Oscars (this is her eighth nomination) and Michelle Yeoh doesn't have any. To me, that means that Michelle Yeoh deserves the Oscar no matter how good Blanchett is. Blanchett will be nominated many more times. She gives Oscar-worthy performances every year (last year she was the best thing about Nightmare Alley). My prediction means that I'm suggesting that Tár won't win any awards, though, and that doesn't seem right. So if you're filling out your own Oscar pool at work, you might still want to bet on Blanchett.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: Director, Actress, Original Screenplay, Cinematography
My Rating: #5 out of 63

Top Gun: Maverick

6 Nominations

• Picture
• Adapted Screenplay: Christopher McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects), Eric Warren Singer (American Hustle), Peter Craig, Ehren Kruger & Justin Marks
• Film Editing: Eddie Hamilton
• Sound
• Visual Effects
• Song: Lady Gaga (A Star Is Born, The Hunting Ground) & BloodPop

Director: Joseph Kosinski

Cast: Tom Cruise, Miles Teller, Jennifer Connelly, Val Kilmer, Bashir Salahuddin, Jon Hamm, Charles Parnell, Monica Barbaro, Glenn Powell, Ed Harris, Lyliana Ray, Jay Ellis, Lewis Pullman, Danny Ramirez, Jack Schumacher, Manny Jacinto, Greg Tarzan Davis, Kara Wang, Raymond Lee, Jake Picking

This movie saved theatrical distribution. Everyone says so. Steven Spielberg said it to Tom Cruise at the Academy nominees luncheon just this week. This is because it's true. So, you know what? Throw every Oscar at this thing. I mean it. It does not deserve its adapted screenplay nomination – that is absurd – and I wouldn't have nominated it for best director either, but it definitely deserves its best picture nod, and it probably deserved more than this: score and cinematography; I wouldn't even have been mad at best actor. Cruise is great in this. His scene with Val Kilmer is incredible. Jennifer Connelly is great. Miles Teller's star is undimmed. The whole thing is wonderfully made and it fucking delivers. The screenplay bugged me throughout, and it unnecessarily repeats one of its third-act moves, but other than that, this movie is completely good fun. I expect it to win many Oscars.
Will Win: Film Editing, Sound, Visual Effects, Song

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #20 out of 63

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

5 Nominations

• Supporting Actress: Angela Bassett (What's Love Got to Do With It)
• Costume Design: Ruth E. Carter (Black Panther, Amistad, Malcolm X)
• Visual Effects
• Make-up & Hairstyling
• Song: Ryan Coogler, Ludwing Goransson, Rihanna & Tems

Director: Coogler

Cast: Letitia Wright, Lupita Nyong'o, Danai Gurira, Winston Duke, Bassett, Tenoch Huerta Mejía, Dominique Thorne, Martin Freeman, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Michaela Coel, Michael B. Jordan

This is a pretty good action movie with a superb villain, wonderfully played by Tenoch Huerta Mejía. There is a trouble at the center of this Black Panther sequel, however. It's a bit more self-important than it needs to be; it lacks the fun and discovery of the first film. This is, of course, demanded by the loss of Black Panther's magnetic and brilliant star, Chadwick Boseman, and it's dealt with very smartly by Ryan Coogler. But the film positively dwells in its frustration and difficulties. This is, in fact, a plot point: who will be the next black panther is the film's central question. Unfortunately, the answer is a grim one. The next black panther is T'challa's sister, played by Letitia Wright, and Wright is not a movie star. She's outshined by everyone else in the movie, and she looks small next to all of the other actresses in the movie – Angela Bassett, Lupita Nyong'o, and Danai Gurira. Things get better in her scenes with Huerta Mejía, but she's just not up to carrying a movie this big on her shoulders. As for Oscars, Bassett is going to win, hands down, and I'm happy about it. She's a superb actress, and she's overdue for an Oscar. I expect Ruth Carter to win too, and she deserves it. But I do wish the Academy would start paying attention to Carter's design work in non-Marvel films. She should have been nominated for last year's Coming 2 America and the fact that she wasn't nominated for 2019's Dolemite Is My Name is a crime. We should all be banging the drum for Ruth Carter. Her work is incredible every time she makes a movie. 

Will Win: Supporting Actress, Costume Design

Could Win: Visual Effects, Make-up & Hairstyling, Song
My Rating: #32 out of 63

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

More posts coming soon:

3. Avatar: the Way of Water, Triangle of Sadness, The Whale, and Babylon
4. The Batman, Women Talking, Living, and Aftersun
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

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

Oscar Nominations 2021: 1 of 9

Oscar nominations are here!

Every year I post about each of the films nominated for Oscars (this year there are 34 + 10 short films). I see all of them except for the documentaries (I am just not that interested in documentary film; I'm not sure why). I will hope to be able to post about the short films, too, but I am not sure I'll be able to catch them. If I am, there will be 11 posts.

This year there is a lot for me to appreciate; most of my favorite films of the year got at least one nomination, and I actually think I approve of the Academy's choices a little more than I usually do..

I will go film by film discussing each movie individually rather than discussing categories, beginning with the movies most beloved by the Academy this year. If the nominee has been nominated for Oscars previously, they will be listed next to their name in parentheses).

This year's nominees:

The Power of the Dog

12 Nominations

• Picture
• Director: Jane Campion (The Piano)
• Actor: Benedict Cumberbatch (The Imitation Game)
• Adapted Screenplay: Jane Campion (The Piano)
• Supporting Actor: Kodi Smit-McPhee
• Supporting Actor: Jesse Plemons
• Supporting Actress: Kirsten Dunst
  
• Film Editing: Peter Sciberras
• Cinematography: Ari Wegner
• Production Design: Grant Major (The Lord of the Rings: the Fellowship of the Ring, The Lord of the Rings: the Two Towers, The Lord of the Rings: the Return of the King, King Kong) & Amber Richards
• Score: Jonny Greenwood (Phantom Thread)
  
• Sound

Director: Campion

Cast: Cumberbatch, Dunst, Plemons, Smit-McPhee, Kenneth Radley, Sean Keenan

This movie is the frontrunner, and I know folks are kind of hoping for an upset win for CODA or some other film, I don't think anyone can move The Power of the Dog out of its place at the top here. Funny thing is: everyone is bored by this movie when it starts, but by the end of its length, the movie tends to win audiences over. This movie really tricked me. It fully got me, and I didn't see the big twist coming. It's not a gay movie, per se, which I guess is too bad, but it's deeply intriguing and unsettling, and I really enjoyed it. I especially liked the acting. I was very taken with Jesse Plemons' performance and was so glad he snagged a surprise nomination. Almost no one on this team has been nominated for an Oscar before, and Campion hasn't won (or been nominated) since the early 1990s, so this is long overdue, and everyone here deserves the accolades they're getting.

Will Win: Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay

Could Win: Film Editing, Cinematography

My Rating: #13 out of 56

Dune: Part One

10 Nominations

• Picture
• Adapted Screenplay: Eric Roth (A Star Is Born, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Munich, The Insider, Forrest Gump), Jon Spaihts & Denis Villeneuve
• Film Editing: Joe Walker (Arrival, 12 Years a Slave)
• Cinematography: Grieg Fraser (Lion)
• Production Design: Patrice Vermette (Arrival, The Young Victoria) & Zsuzsanna Sipos
• Score: Hans Zimmer (Dunkirk, Interstellar, Inception, Sherlock Holmes, Gladiator, The Thin Red Line, The Prince of Egypt, As Good as It Gets, The Preacher's Wife, The Lion King, Rain Man)
• Costume Design: Jacqueline West (The Revenant, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Quills) & Robert Morgan
• Sound
• Visual Effects
• Makeup & Hairstyling

Director: Villeneuve

Cast: Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Zendaya, Jason Momoa, Stellan Skarsagård, Sharon Duncan-Brewster, Josh Brolin, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Chang Chen, Javier Bardem, Charlotte Rampling, Dave Bautista

I loved this movie. It's my favorite of the year. I haven't written anything about it yet, but I thought it was just so fucking cool. I am kind of stunned that it wasn't also nominated for Best Director, and I cannot wait until Part Two. Villeneuve's worldview is not always one I think is enjoyable, but I thought this movie was an absolute blast: rich, mysterious, and dynamic. There's so much I didn't understand, but it always felt as though Villeneuve was taking care of me, letting the information that I couldn't get right away come to me as mystery rather than as a failure in storytelling. I fell hard for this, and I think it's going to win a slew of below-the-line Oscars on March 27.

Will Win: Film Editing, Cinematography, Production Design, Original Score, Sound, Visual Effects, Makeup & Hairstyling

Could Win: Costume Design
My Rating: #1 out of 56

Belfast

7 Nominations

• Picture
• Director: Kenneth Branagh (Henry V)
• Original Screenplay: Kenneth Branagh (Hamlet)
  
• Supporting Actor: Ciarán Hinds
• Supporting Actor: Judi Dench (Philomena, Notes on a Scandal, Mrs Henderson Presents, Iris, Chocolat, Shakespeare in Love, Mrs. Brown)
• Sound
• Song: Jim Morrison

Director: Branagh

Cast: Caitríona Balfe, Jamie Dornan, Jude Hill, Lewis McAskie, Hinds, Dench

This was, for a long while, the frontrunner for Best Picture. Now, I honestly don't think it will win a single statue. I wrote about this in my review, but I actually would have nominated almost all of the actors in this. I think Balfe and Dornan were both amazing. They both campaigned in the supporting category, and so, as it turned out, they both missed getting nominated here. Balfe was expected to get a nomination, but then the Academy went for the actual supporting actress, Judi Dench. Ah well. I think it's good when category fraud doesn't pay off. But I think the acting in this movie is wonderful. And it's a fine movie; it just so happens that Belfast is an also-ran this year and won't win anything.
Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #25 out of 56

West Side Story

7 Nominations

• Picture
• Director: Steven Spielberg (Lincoln, Munich, Saving Private Ryan, Schindler's List, E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Close Encounters of the Third Kind)
  
• Supporting Actress: Ariana DeBose
• Cinematography: Janusz Kaminski (Lincoln, War Horse, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Saving Private Ryan, Amistad, Schindler's List)
• Production Design: Adam Stockhausen (Bridge of Spies, The Grand Budapest Hotel, 12 Years a Slave) & Rena DeAngelo (Bridge of Spies)
• Costume Design: Paul Tazewell
• Sound

Director: Spielberg

Cast: Ansel Elgort, Rachel Zegler, Mike Faist, Ariana DeBose, David Alvarez, Rita Moreno, Brian d'Arcy James, Corey Stoll, Josh Andrés Rivera, Iris Menas

Sure, sure. This deserves most of its nominations – except the one for Spielberg, and maybe it even deserves that. As I wrote in my review, this is a beautifully made remake that no one at all needed. I honestly do think it's weird that Mike Faist didn't get nominated. So much love for Ariana DeBose, but Riff is the star of this production of West Side Story. DeBose will win the Oscar for playing the same role that Rita Moreno won for in 1962. And that's fine too, I guess, although I find the whole business sort of underwhelming and tired. It's West Side Story. I'm over it. I will say that I am happy about Paul Tazewell's nomination. He's a stage designer, for the most part, and this is his first nomination. The costumes are gorgeous, and he did a fabulous job. So I am into that.

Will Win: Supporting Actress

Could Win: Cinematography, Production Design, Sound
My Rating: #35 out of 56

2. King Richard, Drive My Car, Don't Look Up, and Nightmare Alley
3. CODA, Licorice Pizza, Being the Ricardos, and The Lost Daughter
4. The Tragedy of Macbeth, Encanto, No Time to Die, and Flee
5. Tick, Tick... Boom!, Parallel Mothers, The Eyes of Tammy Faye, and The Worst Person in the World
6. Cruella, Spencer, The Hand of God, and Lunana: a Yak in the Classroom
7. Cyrano, The Mitchells vs the Machines, Luca, and Raya and the Last Dragon
8. Spider-man: No Way Home, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and Free Guy

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

West Side Story Redux

The cast is great, the music is orchestrated and conducted beautifully, the cinematography, production design, and costumes are gorgeous. Mike Faist (as Riff) is excellent. I loved Ariana DeBose (Anita) and Josh Andrés Rivera (Chino), and I have no complaints about any of the rest of the cast. They're all great. I liked it. I'm just not sure why this exists. Steven Spielberg's West Side Story is a very, very, very good production of something we didn't need a new production of.

Tony Kushner's new screenplay puts all of the events of West Side Story into context. The new film historicizes the plot of West Side Story. Good! But Spielberg, Kushner, and co. refuse to change it. We spend all our time with the Jets, and we're supposed to feel an immense amount of compassion and sadness for these racist, violent boys playing at being men. And I do feel compassion for these white supremacists. Of course I do. That's how the show is engineered. So West Side Story 2021 is what it was back in the day. This is a nicer, fancier, gorgeous version of something that is the same thing that we've seen before.

Chicago 1969 Double Feature

I have to say that I really didn't know much about this trial before watching The Trial of the Chicago 7. But it is stunning to watch a conspiracy of criminals sit in judgment and purport to represent law and order in the United States with impunity. It's stunning to watch because it's so obviously part of the very fabric of this country. Villainous, terrible people literally running the government and bringing the entirety of their considerable violence and might against unarmed people in order to silence them and get them to bend their knees to force. Justice? I don't see much of it. The government does what it wants, and then it tells everyone what it did was right. 

The film itself... is fine. It's a little bit too self satisfied for my taste. It has a kind of smugness that I found a bit distasteful. Its emotional tone, too, is a little bit too Steven Spielberg for me. I'm not sure why Sacha Baron Cohen is receiving the accolades he's receiving. He's fine but not great. I liked Jeremy Strong a lot. And Kelvin Harrison Jr.

Judas and the Black Messiah is a better movie than The Trial of the Chicago 7, but I'm glad I watched them together. They belong together. Judas and the Black Messiah is also a movie about terrorist, murdering, arsonist policemen and FBI agents who assassinated Fred Hampton and called it justice. Watching these kinds of stories is so difficult and even unsatisfying. It's unbelievable to me that people still trust the police to mete out justice in this nation. This film documents a violent racist campaign by our federal government to destroy a revolutionary hero who was attempting to make people's lives better. The acting in this film is great. Daniel Kaluuya, especially, is fantastic. It is completely and totally category fraud to try to sell Kaluuya in the supporting actor category, though, and this might backfire. There's no reason he couldn't be a solid contender in the Best Actor group. It's one of the best performances of the year.

I watched The Trial of the Chicago 7 on Netflix. Judas and the Black Messiah is on HBOmax.

1941 (1979)

Steven Spielberg's 1941 is a broad farce about (among other things) the Zoot Suit Riots – not a funny topic. This is singularly unfunny. I laughed one single time the entire 150 minutes of this. Lots and lots of things explode in 1941, but that doesn't make this any less boring or bad. To be fair, there is a great dance sequence in act two, but this is widely understood to be Spielberg's worst film, and who am I to disagree?

Oscar Nominations 2019: Part 10 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?, If Beale Street Could Talk, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.
Part 5: Never Look Away, Mary Queen of Scots, Isle of Dogs, The Wife.
Part 6: Detainment, Marguerite, Skin, Madre, Fauve.
Part 7: At Eternity's Gate, First Reformed, Shoplifters, Capernaum.
Part 8: Spider man: into the Spider-verse, Incredibles 2, Mirai, Ralph Breaks the Internet.
Part 9: Bao, Animal Behaviour, One Small Step, Late Afternoon, Weekends.
Part 10:

Avengers: Infinity War

1 Nomination

• Visual Effects

Director: Anthony Russo, Joe Russo

Cast: Josh Brolin, Chris Hemsworth, Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Zoe Saldana, Benedict Cumberbatch, Scarlett Johansson, Don Cheadle, Paul Bettany, Elizabeth Olsen, Chris Pratt, Tom Holland, Bradley Cooper, Karen Gillan, Anthony Mackie, Chadwick Boseman, Sebastian Stan, Tom Hiddleston, Peter Dinklage, Danai Gurira, Benedict Wong, Pom Klementieff, Dave Bautista, Vin Diesel, Letitia Wright, Gwyneth Paltrow, Benicio Del Toro, William Hurt, Winston Duke


There are a million people in this movie. Ok. So, honestly, I started watching this movie, got five minutes in, and realized I had no idea what was going on. In order to understand this film, one needs to have seen three movies that I had not seen – Captain America: Civil War, Thor: Ragnarok, and Avengers: Age of Ultron. I've seen tons of these Marvel movies, and had seen the most recent one – Black Panther – but apparently this was not enough. This was a behemoth of a thing. There were way too many plots, and most of the time I felt myself wondering why I was supposed to care about what the filmmakers were asking me to care about. One of the central problems with this universe is that the characters in these films all have magic powers, but it is not really clear how much power the, you know, beams of light that come out of their hands or whatever are actually worth. Is Hulk and his muscles more powerful than Captain America's shield? Why are the evil zombies who work for Thanos apparently stronger than Dr. Strange who literally has one of these infinity stones around his neck? This just doesn't work for me. Someone needs to explain to me why so many superheroes are so weak and can't defeat 2 or 3 bad guys, but that same number of people can put up a series fight against Thanos and his 4 magic stones. I don't get it. A bright spot in this movie, though, is Tom Holland. His Spider-man is really wonderful. He has tons of great lines and he delivers them brilliantly. His last scene in the film is the most heartfelt sincere moment in the entirety of this monstrosity.
Will Win: N/A
Could Win: Visual Effects
My Rating: #62 out of 70

Solo: a Star Wars Story

1 Nomination

• Visual Effects

Director: Ron Howard

Cast: Alden Ehrenreich, Woody Harrelson, Emilia Clarke, Paul Bettany, Joonas Suotamo, Donald Glover, Thandie Newton, Linda Hunt, Erin Kellyman

I honestly thought this was cute. I love Alden Ehrenreich, and he's great here. There is not too much to complain about with this. It's honestly identical to the rest of these Star Wars movies, and I don't think I have any objection to this. No one liked this movie, apparently? Or maybe that's just, like, crazy Star Wars fans (whom I do not understand). I think everyone's dislike for this film, though, is really just because Solo foolishly was released in summer instead of in December, which is when Star Wars films are usually released. Audiences just weren't ready for a summer Star Wars picture.
Will Win: N/A
Could Win: N/A
My Rating: #41 out of 70

Ready Player One

1 Nomination

• Visual Effects

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn, Lena Waithe, Mark Rylance, T.J, Miller, Simon Pegg, Philip Zhao, Win Morisaki, Hannah John-Kamen, Ralph Ineson, Susan Lynch

Oh jeez. Well, I want to say that I still love Tye Sheridan, but this movie is really, really bad. The script is just terrible. I think Lena Waithe is also pretty awful here. Her performance is strangely flat, and all of her scenes have a lot of trouble. But mostly it's just the writing. The visual effects look cool, but the world-building kind of sucks (I expect that's better in the book...?), and I was super bored.

Will Win: N/A
Could Win: N/A
My Rating: #65 out of 70

Christopher Robin

1 Nomination

• Visual Effects

Director: Marc Forster

Cast: Ewan McGregor, Hayley Atwell, Bronte Carmichael, Marg Gatiss, Oliver Ford Davies, Jim Cummings, Brad Garrett, Nick Mohammed, Peter Capaldi, Toby Jones, Sophie Okonedo, Sara Sheen

I mean, honestly. Why does this film exist? In case you're wondering, the moral of the story is that you shouldn't lose sight of the magical being that you are when you are a child. Adulthood isn't all its cracked up to be, and your relationship with your imaginary friend is actually much more important than your life as a grown up. Adulting is hard, this movie seems to say, and who can argue with such a statement? The ham-fisted clunker of a lesson here is that the "important things in life" are actually family, fun, and a childhood sense of wonder. And you shouldn't become a stodgy old person who only cares about "success" and "work". No one needs to learn this lesson, so I can't imagine why anyone thought this dumb film was a good idea. I will say that I really love the voice of Pooh. There's something about it that is comforting and sweet. Not sweet enough for me to enjoy this stupid film, but sweet nonetheless.
Will Win: N/A
Could Win: N/A
My Rating: #61 out of 70

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

Oscar Nominees 2016: Part 2 of 11

Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5. Part 6. Part 7. Part 8. Part 9. Part 10. Part 11.

Bridge of Spies

6 Nominations

• Picture
• Original Screenplay: Ethan Coen (True Grit, A Serious Man, No Country for Old Men, O Brother Where Art Thou?, Fargo), Joel Coen (True Grit, A Serious Man, No Country for Old Men, O Brother Where Art Thou?, Fargo) & Matt Charman
• Supporting Actor: Mark Rylance
• Original Score: Thomas Newman (Saving Mr. Banks, Skyfall, WALL·E, The Good German, Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, Finding Nemo, Road to Perdition, American Beauty, Unstrung Heroes, Little Women, The Shawshank Redemption)
• Production Design: Adam Stockhausen (The Grand Budapest Hotel, 12 Years a Slave), Rena DeAngelo & Bernard Henrich
• Sound Mixing

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Tom Hanks, Rylance, Amy Ryan, Sebastian Koch, Austin Sowell, Will Rogers, Scott Shepherd, Mikhail Gorevoy, Alan Alda

First of all, this was an original screenplay? Bridge of Spies is incoherently stuffed full of so much stuff that I would have bet $100 it was an adaptation of some absurd novel. Huh. Oh well. I thought this movie was pretty boring and unsuspenseful, and had a long conversation about it here. But I am a Spielberg hater and everyone knows it, so I guess this shouldn't deter you if you usually like him. Still, the Best Picture nomination is a kind of strange stand-out here. The Academy obviously liked the movie (a screenplay nomination is a big deal), but they ignored Bridge of Spies' director, its lead actor, and its photographer Janusz Kaminski, so it didn't like the movie that much. Thomas Newman deserves his nomination here (his twelfth). He has never won an Oscar and, once again, will not win this year. It's starting to be a very notable situation. I keep hoping he'll write the score for a movie that people can really get behind. I expect almost all of the Academy's love for this film to have evaporated by February 28th. No Oscars for this movie.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #56 out of 61

Carol

6 Nominations

• Actress: Cate Blanchett (Blue Jasmine, Elizabeth: the Golden Age, I'm Not There., Notes on a Scandal, The Aviator, Elizabeth)
• Adapted Screenplay: Phyllis Nagy
• Supporting Actress: Rooney Mara (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo)
• Cinematography: Ed Lachman (Far from Heaven)
• Original Score: Carter Burwell
• Costume Design: Sandy Powell (Cinderella, Hugo, The Tempest, The Young Victoria, Mrs Henderson Presents, The Aviator, Gangs of New York, Shakespeare in Love, Velvet Goldmine, The Wings of the Dove, Orlando)

Director: Todd Haynes

Cast: Blanchett, Mara, Sarah Paulson, Kyle Chandler, Jake Lacy, John Magaro, Cory Michael Smith

I didn't write my own review of this because everyone seemed to like it so much and I was sort of soft on it. Besides, Carol is gorgeous – beautifully designed, beautifully acted, exquisitely costumed – and the script is really tight and lovely. For me, though, something was off. I wanted something else from Carol, and the more I think about it the more I just felt sort of weirded out by the idea of "true love" or the idea of these two women being in love. I just didn't buy this relationship as fully as I wanted to buy it. As I puzzle this out, what I've come to believe is that the character of Carol is really much more like the main character in Purple Noon and The Talented Mr. Ripley than Todd Haynes (and Cate Blanchett) would like us to believe. If this is so, then Carol herself is not really to be trusted – her actions should be more mysterious. We should be spending much of our time puzzling her out from the perspective of the Therese character. Instead, the film doesn't see Carol as a problematic; Haynes presents her straightforwardly as a woman who knows herself well and is beaten down (but unbroken) by a constraining, difficult society. I wanted more complexity here.

Will Win: Costume Design

Could Win: N/A
My Rating: #31 out of 61

The Big Short

5 Nominations

• Picture
• Director: Adam McKay
• Adapted Screenplay: Charles Randolph
• Supporting Actor: Christian Bale (American Hustle, The Fighter)
• Film Editing: Hank Corwin

Director: McKay

Cast: Bale, Steve Carrell, Brad Pitt, Ryan Gosling, Finn Wittrock, Hamish Linklater, Marisa Tomei, Adepero Oduye, Rafe Spall, Jeremy Strong, John Magaro, Melissa Leo, Billy Magnussen, Max Greenfield

I started off thinking this movie was smug and more flash than substance. In a lot of ways the movie stayed smug, flashy, and insubstantial, but I came around to the way it was working as the movie progressed and really began to enjoy myself. The direction and screenplay are the most fascinating thing about this movie. They both really are excellent: the film takes a Brechtian tack toward its subject matter, addressing its audience directly, historicizing its narrative, teaching us about its difficult subject matter, and then asking us to get emotional not about characters so much as information. It's an extraordinary choice, and McKay commits to this fully. His commitment pays off and The Big Short works marvelously. It's funny and hard hitting and analytical. As I said, it maintains its rather smug tone for most of its running time (Brad Pitt's character is the lone voice of earnestness), but this doesn't seem to have bothered most audiences, and The Big Short surprised everyone by winning the big prize at the Producers Guild Awards on January 23rd. I expect it to win Adapted Screenplay for sure, but support for this movie may swell even more by the time we get to late February, and it may take home Picture and Director, too.
Will Win: Adapted Screenplay

Could Win: Director

My Rating: #13 out of 61

Star Wars: Episode VII - the Force Awakens

5 Nominations

• Film Editing: Maryann Brandon & Mary Jo Markey
• Original Score: John Williams (The Book Thief, Lincoln, War Horse, The Adventures of Tintin, Munich, Memoirs of a Geisha, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Catch Me If You Can, Artificial Intelligence: A.I., Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, The Patriot, Angela's Ashes, Saving Private Ryan, Amistad, Sleepers, Nixon, Sabrina, Schindler's List, JFK, Home Alone, Born on the Fourth of July, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Accidental Tourist, Empire of the Sun, The Witches of Eastwick, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, The River, Return of the Jedi, E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Empire Strikes Back, Superman, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Jaws, The Towering Inferno, Tom Sawyer, Cinderella Liberty, Images, The Poseidon Adventure, Fiddler on the Roof, The Reivers, Goodbye Mr. Chips, Valley of the Dolls)
• Visual Effects
• Sound Mixing
• Sound Editing

Director: J.J. Abrams

Cast: Harrison Ford, John Boyega, Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver, Oscar Isaac, Carrie Fisher, Domhnall Gleeson, Lupita Nyong'o, Peter Mayhew, Max von Sydow, Andy Serkis, Mark Hamill, Anthony Daniels

This was cool, if completely predictable. But the thing is is that The Force Awakens is predictable in all the right ways, in ways that work to tell us that the world makes a kind of sense, that things are getting better, that our memories matter, that dad is looking out for us, that each of us has a heroine hiding inside us waiting to come out and kick the ass of the evil corporation/religion that doesn't care about people's lives and is seeking to destroy everyone in the world. So if The Force Awakens delivers exactly what it is meant to deliver and nothing more, it is hard to fault anyone for that. Anything more ambitious wouldn't have worked to please crowds as much as this film has. And for the record, five nominations is a ton for a Star Wars movie these days and even a Star Trek movie. The prequels to the original trilogy only ever got five nominations total, but then, they sucked, so that makes sense. John Williams has received his umpteenth Oscar nomination for this score, and I have to admit that the score is serviceable and interesting, though it doesn't really manage to transcend the original Star Wars material in too many ways – and not nearly as much as Ludwig Göransson's Creed score does with the original Rocky material.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: Film Editing, Original Score, Visual Effects, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing

My Rating: #27 out of 61

Jeremy Irvine and Jack O'Connell Are Not the Same Person

Jeremy Irvine and Jack O'Connell are apparently not the same person.
 

This one is Jeremy Irvine

This one is Jack O'Connell

I kept thinking they were. And throughout the whole time I was watching Yann Demange's Northern Ireland military thriller '71. I thought I was watching Jeremy Irvine. But I was not. That was Jack O'Connell.

Jeremy Irvine was the guy from Steven Spielberg's (pretty awful) War Horse, and he was the main character in Roland Emmerich's much maligned film Stonewall from earlier this summer that no one saw. (This probably wasn't Jeremy Irvine's fault, per se, but he became a kind of symbol for "young white gay man" taking center stage and therefore pushing to the side the people who did the real work at Stonewall.) In any case, poor Jeremy Irvine really can't catch a break, even though as far as I can tell he is a pretty fine actor. In fact, it's a little hard to feel sorry for someone who is that good looking. I expect he'll make something soon that will redeem his career. Surely he can't make only stinkers.

Shirtless Irvine

Shirtless O'Connell

You can see why I might be confused.

Both men were, in fact, born less than two months apart in the summer of 1990, and both have played leads in big Hollywood films, but neither has really made a name for himself as an actor. And both are also English: O'Connell was born in Derbyshire and Irvine in Cambridgeshire.

But the guy in '71 is Jack O'Connell. He was also the guy in Angelina Jolie's Oscar-bait/Oscar-fail Unbroken. But don't let Unbroken fool you; Jack O'Connell is a very good actor. He got great reviews for a prison drama called Starred Up, and he is great in '71.

'71, in general, is pretty damn great. I was expecting something a bit more sentimental, a bit less hard hitting, but Yann Demange keeps his film so that it is always saying what he means it to say, and he outlines the army's lack of care for its footsoldiers. It's a tough little movie, despite what might seem to be a sentimental idea behind it. What's even better is that the film has enough reversals – it's full of them, in fact – that it kept me on my toes for most of its runtime. It's also unsparingly violent and politically smart.

I've had this movie on top of my DVD player for a month and a half, easily, and I've just now gotten round to watching it. I wasn't expecting much, but it constantly surprised me, and I was absolutely sold by the time we got to act three. Jack O'Connell, too, really ought to be an actor we're all watching. He is a really fascinating performer.

One gripe: Demange adds two extra endings onto the first ending of his film – not sure why he did this, unless he was trying to convince me that I actually was watching War Horse again – but I think we can expect his work only to get better and tougher.

Generic Title (Bridge of Spies)

A (sober) conversation with my friends Chris and Walter about Spielberg's new movie Bridge of Spies. This does contain spoilers, so be forewarned. Still, none of us recommends this movie, so you can probably just keep reading and then skip the film.

Walt: Ok fellas, I'm off to see Bridge of Spies. Wish me luck.
Chris: Stay strong.
Walt: Let me just say that I am the youngest one here.
Chris: Off to a good start.
Aaron: I just got out of the movie.
Chris: Initial thoughts?
Aaron: It was boring.
Chris: Agreed.

Aaron: What was this movie about? America and stuff, right? Principles? Doing the right thing? I don't mind a movie about all of those things, really, but I think what bugged me about this movie was something I kept puzzling over the whole time it was going on. What kind of movie is this? Is Bridge of Spies supposed to be a character study? It certainly isn't one; we know nothing of the main character except that he is a kind of symbol for "American values" and "giving a guy fair shake" and that sort of thing. We literally get only one little flash that there might be something else to his character in that little moment when he says that the Yale kid is the same age as someone else (no one follows up on this little red herring, but it is some indication of this character's humanity). But then if the movie isn't about this character, then it is a movie about plot, which means this is supposed to be a kind of suspense movie! If it is, then why is it so slow? There are all of these ponderous scenes where characters philosophize about the right thing to do, but where is the suspense??

Chris: So this is basically a heroic tale of human compassion, right? Mark Rylance has this line in the holding cell where asks for a pen and paper to sketch with. Hanks denies him and Rylance responds with something to the extent of "You would want your man to be treated just the same over there, right?" – cut to soft-focus close up of Hanks trying his best.

Walt: It was a parable or something. Or something.

Chris: The trailer wants us to think it's a thriller and at the very top (the opening sequence with Rylance being pursued) I was totally on board with that. But then this goes away and I wasn't sure what was left in its place. The plane sequence was pretty great; wish there was more of that. Something that my buddy Joey brought up was that we never get a chance to really care about the Hanks/Rylance relationship, because we spend so little time with them together. This caused the final bridge scene to fall flat since it was hard to care about them as much as the movie wanted us to. 

Hanks is feeling a little bloated

Walt: I think I just watched three different movies (or maybe I’m just responding to the three endings). At some point we’re in the one of the Berlins and I’m like “this is the same movie? But I thought Alan Alda…” Ugh, it was so bloated. I feel like Spielberg used to be so tight and now he’s become so much more ponderous. A year or two after The Color Purple, he called the it “the most grown up film I’ve made”. And if I think about it, all of his grown up films are bloated. So maybe it's not about where he is in his career so much as it is that he think grown up films should be bloated. Really, though, the movie kind of wanders. I remember watching an interview with him in the '90s talking about how he has this group that he screens his films with (I’m guessing Scorsese, Coppola, yadda yadda yadda). What the hell kind of notes are they giving him, anyway?

Aaron: And I wonder about the novel, actually, because there are really three plotlines – this had to have been cleaner in the novel, and it certainly could've been written more cleanly for the screenplay.

Walt: I didn't know that it was originally a novel. That makes sense. I don't think the adaptation is very strong. This thing should’ve been an hour on the history channel, not a Hollywood film. Seriously, why did anyone make this movie? What do we need it for right now? Spielberg reminds me of my dad in a way: he still thinks we should hate the Russians and that Castro is public enemy #1. This movie hated Russians. And Amy Ryan. They must hate her, to give such a great actress such an impossible and ultimately meaningless role. All she does is complain, right to end, when he doesn’t bring back that sweet sweet British marmalade. Imagine Odysseus returns home, saves Penelope from all the suitors and she just complains about how he didn’t bring back one of those amazing Trojan rugs! Also, what’s with Tom Hank’s son? Why is there even one scene with him? And what about the humor? All those jokes stood out like a sore thumb.

The camera loves Amy Ryan but this movie doesn't.

Aaron: I love your note that it is three different movies. But for me this is both a screenplay problem and a direction problem. There are so many little jokes. Spielberg can't help himself with these little bits of silliness. It baffles me. I'm thinking of that chief prosecutor in the GDR picking up the wrong telephone. Ha ha. And the little trick that Hanks plays on the assistant who is dating his daughter. What a prankster! And when that little joke comes back to bite him when the assistant spills the truth to Amy Ryan I actually laughed out loud. I thought this was quite a comical sequence. But this has nothing to do with the rest of the film in either its plot or its tone. It is very early in the film, and is, I presumed, designed to set the tone for what we're watching, but it's so comic that the tone it set confused the rest of the movie.

Chris: Oh yeah, that assistant... what happened to his plot line/why was he in the movie? For the joke?

Aaron: You are so right about the stuff with Hanks' son. Who cares. Maybe it is supposed to contrast with that final moment on the train? "American kids used to live in terror and sleep with their bathtubs full, but now they happily scamper over the fences of their neighbors so that they can more quickly get to the orange juice in Mrs. Thompson's icebox."

Walt: I don’t see a strong enough connection between the kid in the bathtub and the kids jumping the fence, but I had other things on my mind when that was happening. Yeah, his kid meant nothing.  When he’s deciding on whether to handle the negotiation and who does the pilot remind him of?  Some older kid that works for him that he’s not even related to!

* * *

Walt: But anyway, it’s about the power of the everyman or something. A guy realizes how awesome his life is or how awesome it could be, maybe. Like Joe vs. the Volcano, except the volcano is just a bunch of shitty people he has to wade through. Tom Hanks had a cold in that one, too, except he got better as the movie went on. Maybe that’s the difference between comedy and drama? The cold gets worse in drama. Oh my god. He had a cold. I kept wondering about that in the movie, but it just hit me. Cold. Cold War? Oh my god, I bet that’s it. Like they read a Syd Field screenplay book and got to the section where they suggest you give the character a physical marker à la Jack Nicholson in Chinatown (Jake is nosey so his nose gets cut) and thought “oooh, we should do that for Tom, too! I mean, it’s the Cold War, amiright, Stevie?”

Chris: Worst bit: That old woman on the train. She notices Hanks and scowls at him (you know, because he's defending a traitor). Then weeks later she happens to be on the same train car with him, but this time smiles because he did good job. Steven, we get it.

Walt: Oh my god, that woman on the train. She smiles for an awfully long while, doesn’t she? That’s bad train etiquette, even in an age where you didn’t have to lock your doors at night. Also, what about when Tom Hanks is looking out the subway window down onto the Brooklyn streets and is most likely thinking "god, I’m glad we’re not Russian"?

Aaron: Can we talk a little about Tom Hanks's acting in this? I kept looking at him in this picture and I just don't get it. What is he doing?

Tom Hanks is a little lost.

Walt: I don’t know what to say about Tom Hanks. I love him. I miss him, actually, but not enough that I want him back yet. He should hang out for a while. Thanks to TBS, he’ll never really go away, anyway. They basically just alternate screenings of Big and You’ve Got Mail. I mean, he was fine, he really was. But just because he’s our Jimmy Stewart doesn’t mean he has to take roles that they can’t offer Jimmy Stewart anymore. 

Chris: Hanks was not bad, but forgettable. I thought he was fantastic in that Captain Phillips movie and had high hopes for this. I will say he was a great casting choice, as was everyone. Rylance was fantastic but we didn't get enough!

Aaron: I thought Mark Rylance was great, and I also really liked Peter McRobbie (who plays some sort of higher-up dude in the CIA), and I also thought Sebastian Koch was perfectly cast and he was probably my favorite thing in the whole film. He was so good.

Walt: I enjoyed Mark Rylance. I’ve seen some clips of him doing Shakespeare and one of his funny Tony acceptance speeches, but that’s about it. I found him a bit too adorable, though. Wasn’t there something about him that was just kind cute? With that “would it help?” catchphrase? What a darling. I loved the KGB guy (Mikhail Gorevoy) and Sebastian Koch as well. In a movie that tried so hard to make everything look so dangerous, the danger he presented felt authentic to me.

* * *

Chris: Positive thoughts: Cinematically, it was everything we've come to expect from Spielberg. Just beautiful to watch with great attention to detail. Really lovely.

Walt: You’re right: it was beautifully shot. Spielberg is a master at conventional visual storytelling. That shot of Hanks on the bridge in the 1st ending was breathtaking. I thought the film should’ve ended there.

Aaron: Yeah, it surprises me that you guys thought it was well shot. The whole thing looked simultaneously washed out and milky to me. All of that bright, hazy sun pouring through the windows (this was especially annoying when we were in the chief prosecutor's office at the GDR). I don't understand Kaminski's style anymore. What is the point of bleaching all of the color out of every shot? 

The milky glow of sunlight beatifying our star

Walt: I agree with you that the lighting exposure in a lot of the film didn’t really work, but I’ll still defend the visual storytelling.  Little things, really, like the reveal of all the policeman in front of Tom Hanks' house. A lot of other directors would have shown all those police cars at the beginning of the scene to establish the tension, but Spielberg holds that off and waits until after he’s confronted by the single policeman to reveal what looks to be the entire precinct out there. Before that reveal Hanks and the policeman are on equal ground, but after, we see that Hanks’ character is all alone in this. I’ll also stand behind that beautiful shot of Hanks on the bridge in the first ending. However, I will not stand behind the several shots of using window panes as a literal framing device.

Chris: To be fair, the dismal/it's really cold look with the saturated color scheme was effective. Russia looked terrible and I wanted to put on another coat. Then we get a nice sepia tone for the pilot plot because we're going back in time. Haha.

Walt: Oh man, and what about how the Supreme Court glowed like Superman’s Fortress of Solitude? Spielberg really loves the America. And the 50s. I didn’t mean to write the “the” in “the America”, but it actually seems right somehow. 

Aaron: But I don't think it is fair to say that Spielberg loves the 1950s any more than any of the cohort that he came of age with - Lucas and Barry Levinson and Zemeckis and Coppola all love the 1950s. It was an important time for them. "When men were men" or maybe "when ethical questions meant something" or something like that. The movie does try to deal with those things. As much as Spielberg loves the U.S. – and that absurd shot at the end where Hanks is glad he's not a Soviet is evidence of that – the  movie can't help but notice that the Americans themselves are just as bad as the Soviets and the East Germans at several points. Note Hanks' crack about his East German prison cell being no better than his digs in West Germany. And then there was that crusty old judge and his total railroading of American justice, and the CIA's attempts to get Hanks to violate attorney-client privilege. The movie can't help but show us that Americans are no more a just group of people than the East Berliners or the Soviets. For all its highmindedness about the Constitution and liberty and all of that, the soldiers at the end are still dishonorable assholes to that kid who got shot down over Soviet territory and managed not to talk even though he was tortured. Bridge of Spies believes that the American people are, in truth, just as bad as Soviets and East Germans; we just have better laws over here.

Mark Rylance being adorable.

Walt: Oh man, I totally kept cracking to myself “when men were men” during this movie.  And you’re right too, that the movie includes Americans in the shitty people/volcano that Tom Hanks has to fight (I thought of Lionel Barrymore a lot when watching that cranky judge. Doesn’t that judge belong in a holiday movie about a guy who doesn’t believe reindeer can fly or something?). Perhaps Spielberg is wrestling with the idea that while he was having his American Graffiti moment there were all kinds of assholes pulling strings at the highest level. But do we need this movie for that? Or this story?

 * * *

Walt: Was anyone else struck by Tom Hank’s color palette at the end of the film?  He’s passed out on the bed wearing a charcoal gray suit with a dark red sweater poking out the sleeve.  Does he come back from East Berlin a lil’ bit Communist?  Does it signify Mark Rylance’s last impact on him?

Aaron: I didn't notice a change in his color palette when he returned. Perhaps that was further evidence of that never-ending cold??

Walt: Also, why go through the bit at the end where Rylance mentions that if the Russians don’t embrace him upon his release at the end it will signify his death only to tell us in the credits that nope, never mind, he didn’t die actually?

Aaron: That Mark-Rylance-doesn't-die bit was so Steven Spielberg - a habit he has that is just as marked as his multiple endings. Create tension and make something seem really scary, and then show us that we had nothing to be worried about after all. It happened when the CIA guy followed him in act one, as well. That guy seemed really dangerous, but turns out he was able to be defeated simply by a few snide remarks about American values and some nonchalant snacking on an almond or two. I kept hoping Rylance would get shot on the bridge itself by those snipers. I know that's terrible, but this movie needed some actual stakes, and then all of that tension would have actually had a payoff.

Walt: I fully expected him to get shot. Otherwise, oooooo snipers.  Better watch out, cause, y’know, they might… let you know if someone’s coming or something.

Chris: This was a true event right? So there's boundaries.  I assume Rylance's character didn't get shot on the bridge - then again maybe that whole scene didn't actually happen on a bridge. I don't know.

Hanks on the eponymous bridge

Walt: It had to happen on a bridge, otherwise no title. The bridge was so inconsequential to the film though. What’s the bridge of spies? Is it East Berlin? Tom Hanks? The actual bridge? It works on many levels, but so little is made of the actual bridge that there’s nothing concrete to tie it to. I’m just generally confused. About why the movie was made and what we’re supposed to get from it. I’m sure Spielberg’s great uncle loved it. It felt like a movie that a great uncle would tell his filmmaker nephew that he should make. “Now THAT would be real story.  None of this treasure-hunting crap. You wanna talk about danger?  When I was in Berlin…” 

Aaron: I am not actually sure how I stayed awake.

Chris: So why are people giving so much love to this movie? Is it palpable to today's attitudes towards war?  The paranoia factor? Are people just suckers for Spielberg? The shot that rings most true for me was the Germans getting shot down climbing the wall: that demonstrated the terror of the entire situation for me. That "oh shit" moment. Then Steven screwed it up by having American kids climbing over a fence at the end.

 * * *

Aaron: I am not really a Spielberg fan or a Hanks fan, so I don't have the same kind of affection or emotional attachment to these Hollywood icons that the two of you do, but to me this kind of "prestige picture"/Oscar-bait garbage that Spielberg makes is completely uninteresting. It reminds me of the sort of old-school Clifford Odets-style of writing: a kind of writing that makes itself look very important but actually doesn't say anything at all; it simply pretends to be serious. I think Spielberg should stick to genre pictures.

Walt:  I love Spielberg and I love Hanks, but I’m over their being paired together. I’ve heard that Spielberg thinks Hollywood is broken, though he and his “cohorts” as you called them, namely Lucas, were really behind the breaking. Now he’s trying to make up for it by being a grown-up, except it feels like a 14-year-old’s version of what being a grown-up is. Not that “being grown up” really means anything anyway, but Spielberg seems to think it does, and who better to cast in a grown up movie than Tom “American Dad” Hanks. I don’t know. I don’t know what to do about either of them as a fan of theirs.  I just want them both to go away. Like Star Wars. Just go away so that I can be glad to see them again. 

Chris: If I had to rate this movie with a facial expression, it would be the one that old lady made on the train. Mildly disapproving with a touch of confusion.