Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese) - This is the kind of film American Fiction satirizes, bloated Oscar bait about the suffering of a disenfranchised group. Hell, even the title was pre-ridiculed by Daniel Clowes in Ghost World (Terry Zwigoff, 2001) - remember The Flower That Drank the Moon? But if it's gotta exist, let it be the work of a master. Scorsese's account of the slaughter of the Osage in 1920s Oklahoma is rich in novelistic detail and earns every moment of its 206-minute [sic] running time. And I'd say that this showcases a career-defining performance for Lily Gladstone if the exquisite Certain Women (Kelly Reichardt, 2016) hadn't already done so. A-minus.
Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan) - I'd probably knock it down to B+ today. But I had it at A-minus when I reviewed it after Barbenheimer weekend.
Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos) - I can't believe it either. Reviewed here. B+.
American Fiction (Cord Jefferson) - Tender, welcome evocations of Black middle-class quotidian existence vie with corny satirical jabs at white liberal well-meaningness, promising yet another two-steps-forward, six-steps-back prestige project. But then there's the ending which I initially loved because I thought Jefferson was offering us a pomo Choose Your Own Ending type of dénouement à la Clue. Watching it more closely a second time, I now realize it's more conventional than that. Still, it's looser and jazzier than most prestige projects ever get. I'm impressed. B+.
The Holdovers (Alexander Payne) Like American Fiction, a film to curl up with at various points of the year - December for this one, July for the former. Reviewed here. B+.
Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet) - Solid. But only the ambiguity of "did he fall or was he pushed?" and its was-it-really 152-minute running time save it from a certain Investigation Discovery feel. Saint Omer (Alice Diop, 2022) covers similar ambiguities with more complexity and a better ventilated conception. It expands where Anatomy of a Fall implodes into its overly localized concerns. And Saint Omer is half an hour shorter. B.
The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer) - One of the biggest disappointments of the year from a director capable of the very best (Birth, Under the Skin). Reviewed here. B-minus.
Past Lives (Celine Song) - Even more localized than Anatomy of a Fall, a considerable feat given that the film concerns a woman who leaves her native South Korea to become a writer in the USA. Bittersweet if you don't think too hard about it. I just want to know if all the talk about 80,000 layers of fate and past lives and future lives is an apologia for ghosting. A much better film about the importance of living this present life: Journey to the Shore (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2015). B-minus.
Maestro (Bradley Cooper) - Ugh. And it looked so enticing on the New York Film Festival lineup. Panned here. C-minus.
To paraphrase myself, the only thing worse than a bad album is an okay one. Of course, Peter Gabriel is a musical artist of more substance than, say, Sha Na Na or Burt Reynolds, to choose two recent horrors I've accessed via Apple Music. But where Sha Na Na enrage me and Reynolds's sole album makes me guffaw, Gabriel's discography hangs in the air moist with solid intentions, waiting for you to honor it. Plenty of music lovers have honored it such that it compels you to wrestle with the oeuvre. But for me, despite the occasional arresting moment or even entire song, the music remains suspended in mid-air, rarely traveling down my auditory canal and into my musical memory hole. Across a discography, such
inoffensive ambience soon becomes irritating and that's when okay shades into bad.
The bland masala of Gabriel's oeuvre derives in part from a neutralizing of source genres. No authenticity queen, I get itchy invoking a genre purity that doesn't exist. Nevertheless, on the first four self-titled albums, it sounds as if Gabriel aimed to prog out within tighter new wave and post-punk structures but failed to achieve the highs in any of the respective genres.* That's why I'm constantly longing for something with more foreground spritz, something punkier or funkier and just weirder, when listening. 1978's "D.I.Y." may have been his tribute to (parody of?) punk. To the extent that it's not, it's a perfectly nice number with a lazy piano that rolls more than it rocks (at least in the chorus). To the extent that it is, then lawd gawd why not listen to (gulps) the real thing? Or even the unreal thing, e.g., Blondie's "One Way or Another" from the same year. "San Jacinto" has a creepy coda...that starts 5:20 into a 6:34 track of trebly tinkle. "I Have the Touch" is a slinky dance track that unfortunately stays at "Safety Dance" levels of speed and the nifty section when Gabriel mirrors the rhythm with the "Pull my chin/Stroke my hair" verses again comes near the end of the song. I love "Shock the Monkey" unreservedly, "Solsbury Hill" is a roving classic, and "Games Without Frontiers" dazzles despite Kate Bush's hideous French pronunciation. But too much of his oeuvre through 1982 passes by respectfully in the background. It's no surprise that he soon became a soundtrack maestro.
I assumed 1986's So was where Gabriel took whatever miasma he'd been working up for the past near-decade and whipped into shape. But even at the time, I couldn't stand "Sledgehammer" and "Don't Give Up." Revisiting again after almost thirty years, I'm nevertheless stunned at how much I cannot stand his (American) pop breakthrough. The former trudges by at 96 BPM, a lynchable offense on most dancefloors, never mind the grody lyric that allowed the thing to wink-nudge its way to number one on the Billboard Hot 100. The latter raises the suspicion that Gabriel was trying for a pop-new age fusion, damn near inaudible in its wispy, detail-free atmospheric(s). It's a charge that could be leveled against baffling ILM fave "Mercy Street" and even John Cusack fave "In Your Eyes" as well. That's over half the album's running time right there. Thankfully, "Big Time" picks up the pace. But it's the only sign of life on this multiplatinum appliance.
He should've stuck with soundtracking after that point. Us, the belated follow-up, is damn near unlistenable, punishingly slow and with a pathetic attempt to match "Sledgehammer"'s chart position in "Steam." And just as I wisely never bothered listening to those Sha Na Na and Burt Reynolds albums in their entirety, I cherry picked Gabriel's post-Us oeuvre, taking in only the focus cuts of 2002's Up and appreciating his 2010 cover of the Magnetic Fields' "The Book of Love." Last year's I/O came out in various mixes and I quickly got sleepy trying to determine which I should listen to. What little I heard demonstrated that he was still atmopshering around too much for my ever-unsettled ass.
Peter Gabriel 1 - I'm in a Car: B
Peter Gabriel 2 - I'm Scratching: B-minus
Peter Gabriel 3 - I'm Melting: B
Peter Gabriel 4 - Security (Ok this is one of the coolest, creepiest album covers ever): B
So: C
Us: C-minus
* This is how I explain other okay 1980s artists who become annoying in their okayness. INXS fused dance and rock and blanded out at both. U2 melded arena rock with post-punk and then tried to meld that mélange with pop and wound up with edge-less bloat or blurry wallpaper.
I wanted to adore The Holdovers. This is the kind of warm, cozy film I can imagine someone keeping on in the background during that odd interzone between Christmas and New Year's Eve when those lucky enough to be off work have no clue what to do with themselves. Indeed, The Holdovers takes place across that very week when Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa, gangly and totes adorbs) gets held over for the holidays with several other unfortunate students at the New England boarding school they attend. Largely as a result of his curmudgeonly behavior, classics professor Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) is tasked with supervising the holdovers and much tension arises when he expects diligent study from the misfits under his care. Payne, along with screenwriter David Hemingson and cinematographer Eigil Bryld, deserve whatever Oscar nods may come their way for evoking moments when something could happen. With an empty campus as their canvas, the film's architects paint situations pregnant with possibility, to quote Margo Channing in a film underestimated for its warmth, including the possibility of sitting on your ass and doing nothing at all.
Would that the film progressed in such a lazy fashion. But alas, the lash of narrative progression must strike down upon us. It's ye olde vertically compelling, horizontally moribund problem of mainstream cinema once more. In a crusty deus ex machina, the group of holdovers gets broken up when one student's rich father arrives on campus via helicopter and airlifts all of the the boys save Angus to a ski trip. That leaves Angus alone with Paul as both Come To Terms With Things and Payne abandons the polyphonic density of, say, Paul Thomas Anderson's greatest film Licorice Pizza (2021) for story beats that march forward in lockstep. In a career-defining performance I hope/predict will earn her an Oscar, Da'Vine Joy Randolph airs out the proceedings a bit as Mary Lamb, a cook mourning the loss of her son in the Vietnam War. But the depth she provides is not enough to swerve away from the predictable spectacle of Paul finding a heart and Angus learning valuable lessons on the cusp of adulthood. Still, I expect to enjoy The Holdovers in fitful chunks around 2038 on whatever streamer is left standing long after they've all adopted ad-supported plans.
1. Jungle: "Candle Flame"(featuring Erick the Architect) (Caiowla/AWAL).
Single, video, and choreography of the year. As the oft acid jazzy duo Jungle, Brits Josh Lloyd-Watson and Tom McFarland seemed some of the least likely candidates to create music worth holding dear. But with "Candle Flame," they lay claim to haunted house, a specter of soul moaning above a post-disco beat. The apparently unsampled vocals sound like a dream of records past with all identifying marks fried out of distinction and twinkling doo-wop patterns hovering around the edges. It's such a raw, arresting sound that the duo felt it necessary to add Erick the Architect's raps as a placeholder more tethered to the earthly here and now. They needn't have bothered given how much presence and humanity the miraculous video, directed in one shot by Charlie Di Placido, returns to the song. Shay Latukolan's astonishing choreography uses the flow of gossip to activate his dancers. Individuals form canons as others pick up and spread the news. They attach to one another with copycat precision in a parody of bitchy clubgoers. But at the song's climax, the entire ensemble breaks free from the robotics and move together in looser-limbed ebullience. It's one of the most euphoric rejoinders to the idea that music organizes time. Here, music forges relationships and the dancers unhaunt the song, the emotional gibberish of the vocals finding a moment of articulation in their synchronized bliss-energy.
2.Vladimir Sorokin: The Queue (NYRB, 2008; originally published 1985).
Russia 1985–1999: TraumaZone: What It Felt Like to Live Through The Collapse of Communism and Democracy (Adam Curtis, 2022).
Tetris(Jon S. Baird, 2023).
Save for 21 blank pages intended to represent sleep, Sorokin's novel is comprised entirely of dialogue. 33 pages are devoted to a roll call. Several pages of oohs and aahs stand in for sexual activity. But mostly, people in the former Soviet Union chat with one another waiting in a series of lines for unnamed goods. With no other enunciative force in place, the novel forces the line to encounter itself as Sorokin makes clear in an incisive 2008 afterword: "The collapse of the line was much more painful for the collective Soviet body than the collapse of the Soviet Union...Gray and boring, but
inescapable, the line dissected the body into pieces, pacified and
disciplined it, gave people time to think about the advantages of
socialism and about the class struggle; and in the end they were
rewarded with food and goods" (261; 257).
Curtis gives viewers seven one-hour episodes to think about socialism for his latest Molotov documentary. As with The Queue, TraumaZone abjures similar enunciative functions such as voiceover and non-diegetic music, using only occasional explanatory titles over undeployed footage from the BBC's Moscow bureau. Less sanguine than Sorokin about the line, Curtis nevertheless mourns the loss of any ability to think collectively. How even Francis Fukuyama could view the subsequent slide into capitalist kleptocracy as utopian destiny defies belief.
For a more triumphant narrative, Tetris, an Apple TV+ production, recounts the struggle to wrest the licensing rights for the evergreen video game out of the Soviet union just before its collapse. Given Hollywood's inability to think collectively (or to collectively bargain), the story is told via car chases, last-minute reversals, and characters partitioned off into Good and Bad categories. When the principal players (to name them would go against the spirit of this entry) finally get the game in proper capitalist hands, the Pet Shop Boys' "Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money)" plays over their triumph/the closing credits with no apparent irony.
3. Assassins, Kweskin Theatre, Stamford, CT (June 17). And at the same time that Fukuyama was proclaiming the end of history, this is the democracy he was celebrating. In what is quite possibly Stephen Sondheim's greatest achievement, all the Americans who attempted and/or succeeded to assassinate a president come together to sing "Everybody's got the right to be happy/to their dreams" as each points a gun at the audience. Also, please allow this entry to serve as a reminder to support local theater since this production was a far more unforgettable experience than Sweeney Todd on Broadway.
4. Pierre Leguillon: The Barefoot Promise (Triangle) A coffee-table book of film stills of the human foot in various forms. And far less cheap than that might seem. It sometimes takes a good scan to see how the foot signifies in certain photos - a renegade toe from Ozu's The End of Summer or a recessed Cinderella. Which means this is a gift from a true scholar of cinema, one who knows that much of the art of mise-en-scène lies in pulling your eye away from the main action.
5. Rectify (Created by Ray McKinnon, 2013-2016)A rewatch of The Sopranos is in order. Until then, this is the greatest serial of the Peak TV era I've ever seen. After nineteen years on death row, Daniel Holden is exonerated with the help of DNA evidence. But his return to small-town Georgia is far from Edenic. In Daniel's subsequent quest to keep meaninglessness at bay, we're forced to confront the decisions we make on a daily, even hourly basis. No other series and few films have glimpsed so penetratingly into quotidian existence. And while I've been known to make condescending remarks about the art of acting, the performances here humble me. Aden Young as Daniel is damn near extraterrestrial in his portrayal of Daniel. But Abigail Spencer, J. Smith-Cameron, Adelaide Clemens, Clayne Crawford, Luke Kirby, Bruce McKinnon, Jake Austin Walker, and J. D. Evermore (I need to list their names) all dumbfound.
6. To Leslie (Michal Morris, 2022)
The Lost King (Stephen Frears, 2022)
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret (Kelly Fremon Craig, 2023) Three absolutely fantastic middlebrow films. Believe the hype re: To Leslie, a tale of redemption told with such simplicity, hell, such purity that I was crying buckets at the end when a clear line communication between the principals is finally opened up. Frears is the finest middlebrow director extant so the high quality of The Lost King is no surprise. A biopic on Philippa Langley's quest to exhume the remains of King Richard III, it has trenchant things to say about urban planning and the victors of history. It's a measure of the freshness of Judy Blume's 1970 book Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret that it took such a criminally long time to make it to the screen. Hopefully, this consistently inventive adaptation, along with the terrific 2023 documentary Judy Blume Forever, will inspire more Blume-authored projects.
7. Jason Farago, "Why Culture Has Come to a Standstill," The New York Times, October 10, 2023, p. 38 This bullshit again. It's a fool's errand to pick apart each nugget of wrongness in this venal thinkpiece on why "ours is the least innovative century for the arts in 500 years." For the real goal of articles like this is to assure the Times-reading landed gentry that the world is not changing.
8. Hugh Hodges: The Fascist Groove Thing: A History of Thatcher's Britain in 21 Mixtapes (PM) As a catalogue of popular/semipopular musicians' response to Thatcherism, essential; as a reading experience, numbing. "I knew I was never going to get everything and everyone I wanted into these pages" (155), Hodges rues. But boy does he ever try. Organized around 24 mixtapes (not 21 since 3 come in two parts), his pedantic, rockist prose cries out for pruning. And that's without mentioning the ten pages of recommendations for further reading and the 39-page annotated discography. In a footnote listing songs that addressed nuclear war, he admits/threatens, "I could go on" (137). Oh, we know, Hugh, we know.
9. Alex Pappademas and Joan LeMay: Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan (University of Texas Press) The rare book that deepens the mysteries of a discography. Pappademas respects the abyss at the center of Steely Dan's music. Seizing on the inexpressive codes of Brill Building pop, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker disappeared themselves behind lyrics knotted with proper nouns and a sound besotted with jazz heard from a suburban afar. "The music tells you nothing about the people who made it," (3) Pappademas tells us early on. So with the help of LeMay's wry illustrations, he provides exegeses of damn near every lifeform populating the Steely Dan songbook. Dr. Wu, Kid Charlemagne, Josie, the Gaucho, Third World Man all get a chapter. Fagen and Becker too - they're the most prominent aliens on board. It's the most trenchant analysis of the Dan extant. And still you close the book knowing that you will never get to the bottom of this parallax view of an oeuvre.
10. Olivia Rodrigo: Guts (Concrete/Motown/Quality Control, 2023) Album of the year. Some may welcome the insight Rodrigo's lyrics provide into the travails of dating while famous. Me, I'm in it for the music, man. Not since Lady Gaga has an artist evinced so much joy in the sheer craft of songwriting. She rocks, she pops, she Fleetwood Macs, she raps some. Even her parlor ballads exude variety and inventiveness. Two great albums already and she's not yet 21. So to all potential suitors, I have this to say: Dude (or gal, cf. "Lacy"), don't bother! You'll probably just bore her and, even worse, keep her from writing songs.
What
about this particular story or historical event dictated that it be
filmed in "one take"? The gimmick turns Saving
Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998) into a video game and, as such, I
found it insufferably goal-oriented. There's a vaguely psychedelic
moment in the middle where the hot-thank-gawd protagonist played by
George MacKay holes up in a village on fire.
It looked like a sound stage and I was fond of this brief bit of
artifice in a film praised for its realism. But if Mendes has any
insight into what makes WWI a unique disaster, then he's hidden it quite
well under his dexterous camera movements. A dreary slog.
This was not a pleasurable exercise. The only thing worse than a bad movie is an okay one. The lies Argo tells (along with the expert thriller mechanics with which it does so) enraged me more than a dutiful Wikipedia article like Spotlight. But that rage has stuck with me over the last decade whereas I would've flunked a quiz on Spotlight a month after I saw it. And so it goes with the vast majority of Best Picture Oscar winners.
I didn't get a chance to rewatch all of these. But those I did changed in estimation only a peg or two. So I'll never know if Braveheart, Gladiator, A Beautiful Mind, etc.are sitting in their appropriate buckets. Somewhere south of a B-minus is charitable enough (waves hand). I also didn't get a chance to review all the rewatches. But I've provided links to those I did. I'll probably get the most questions about No Country for Old Men. I've long since dispatched it as "Halloween for adults" so will leave it at that here (waves hand once more). As for that one film I refuse to watch, I saw the first Lord of the Rings installment and found it pitilessly dull. Sorry - I cannot stand world building. And even fans acknowledge that the win was less for that particular installment than the series as a whole so why bother? In effect, I saw the first three hours of a ten-hour epic and I'm more than fine with that.
Finally, while I've been watching all the Best Picture noms since 2016 (an "unnerving" project, as my friend Noah told me this week), I will not be watching the others. Skippy (huh?) and Nicholas and Alexandra (zzz) and District 9 (that was nominated?!?), I look forward to forsaking you with some desperately needed Paul Sharits.
One doesn't want to be ungrateful since The Banshees of Inisherin is quantum leaps better than Martin McDonagh's previous outing, the juvenile, execrable Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017). Still, it suffers the fate of so much Oscar bait before it - all its roads lead to a Message. It starts off as a promising Mikey and Nicky (Elaine May, 1976) variation. During the Irish Civil War in 1923 on the fictional isle of Inisherin, two long-time friends have a sudden falling out. Colm (Brendan Gleeson) wants nothing more to do with Pádraic (Colin Farrell). When Pádraic presses for a reason why, Colm tells him that he's boring. Furthermore, any attempts at rekindling the friendship will result in Colm cutting off one finger per attempt. Since Pádraic keeps pressing the matter, Colm starts to lose fingers, each bloody stump thrown against Pádraic's door to prove Colm means business. Unable to move on from Colm's toxic behavior, Pádraic devises his own violent retribution.
Gleeson and Farrell inhabit their characters with a depth worthy of an Oscar which I predict Farell will win. Not only do we feel Pádraic's pain at being ghosted but we grasp Colm's longing for a more meaningful existence than that available mindlessly chatting with Pádraic at the pub every night. Colm is older so he's feeling his last act approach which provides further justification for his coldness, devastating and just plain mean though it is.
As the war rages on in the background, though, it's clear McDonagh meant the absurdity of the central conflict as an allegory for the Irish Civil War. Instead of recognizing Pádraic as his brother, Colm cuts off his nose to spite his face (or fingers to spite his hand). But that's about as deep as McDonagh takes it. A colleague suggested that to pin the traditionally female designation of banshee on Colm and Pádraic upholds Siobhán (Kerry Condon), Pádraic's sister, as a voice of reason and marks the moment when she leaves in disgust as the point at which the film descends into irreversible tragedy. But all of this is implied in the phrase "Civil War." It remains unclear what exactly McDonagh is trying to say about the event. I knew nothing about the Irish Civil War going in and I know a teensy bit more now. And as always with these kind of eat-your-veggies projects (like, oh, Spotlight), I'd much rather read the Wiki about it, especially given dutiful, by-the-numbers direction which stymies any desire for further exploration.
Based on Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Hours has a pretty big problem at its core. Two stories spin out from an account of Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman in an Oscar-winning performance) writing Mrs. Dalloway and, like so many films about authors, neither screenwriter David Hare nor director Stephen Daldry provide much insight into Woolf's style or even the toil of writing. This fatal-for-some shortcoming is compounded by a further conceit dictating that each story plays out over a single day (despite a brief depiction of Woolf's suicide which frames the film). Would I could pump out even a blog post within 24 hours.
But if you can forgive these limitations (and again, I grant that it will be impossible for many viewers), The Hours is surprisingly moving, in more ways than one, for a project that threatens the most ponderous Oscar-mongering. The other two stories concern a housewife (Julianne Moore) consumed with soon-to-be-specified dread in 1950s Los Angeles and an editor (Meryl Streep) in contemporary Manhattan. Woolf's limning of the quotidian passions and disappointments of lesbian life filter through the latter tales for the kind of trenchantly observed film for grown-ups that seems to have retreated from theatres to the big streamers today. Best of all, Daldry keeps things brisk. Before one trajectory becomes too crusty, he switches to another for a productive middlebrow mental workout. That's no insult. The Hours allows us to think of lesbianism transhistorically and casts welcome doubt on contemporary life as always already more enlightened.
There are some crass moments such as when Moore's housewife bolts up from her attempted suicide and proclaims, "I can't!" The fact she did not, in fact, go through with it would have conveyed that information to us quite efficiently. But overall, the game time performances power over the few low points. And for all the accolades thrown at the three principals, the greatest performance here is owned by an unrecognizable-by-me Toni Collette as a fellow housewife trying to sublimate her desire for Moore. In just one scene, she motors through lust, containment, anger, propriety, resignation all while suggesting possibilities for different futures than her tract-home existence allows.
Fleet, yielding, with a drive unexpected in such prestige items, The Hours is the rare kind of film to give middlebrow a good name.
Near the beginning of his BFI monograph on On the Waterfront, Leo Braudy writes, "it is tempting to argue that naming names before the HUAC put Kazan into a moral and psychological quandary that paradoxically made him a better director." (8). That may be so. But film history would have survived, and then some, had Kazan kept his quandary to himself and, Abraham Polonsky, whose career was destroyed by the HUAC, been allowed to continue writing and directing masterpieces like Force of Evil (1948), a far superior film than anything Kazan ever achieved and featuring the greatest screenplay in Hollywood history.
So while Braudy offers a welcome refresher on the more immediate subject matter of corruption within the longshoremen's union, that does not negate the fact that On the Waterfront remains easy to read as an apologia for naming names. The structure of apology supersedes any contemporary muckraking into corrupt unions. Or as V.F. Perkins put it in Film as Film, "[t]he personal story overwhelms the political morality-play" (146).
Even at that, though, a director for whom casting is 90% of the art of cinema, as Kazan admitted, will always come off too messagey, actorly, and middlebrow for my tastes. For those who find Rear Window inferior to On the Waterfront, feel free to cluck along with Braudy's assertion that "[c]asting therefore was a crucial element in Kazan's preparation for a film, a procedure totally unlike, say, Hitchcock's, in which the director's total vision of the film dictated a more condescending attitude towards the actors as objects themselves" (45). Me, I'll take Hitch's vulgar Freudianism, breaking the fourth wall, and genius last shot any day.
Still, Brando's performance is for the ages, as if that were ever in doubt. When Terry confesses that "I don't like the country. The crickets make me nervous," he ain't heavy; he's my brother.
Grade: B+
Other Hollywood films which deserved the Best Picture Oscar much more than On the Waterfront: er, Rear Window, Track of the Cat, Bait, The Other Woman, The Barefoot Contessa, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, A Star is Born, Johnny Guitar, Silver Lode, and such ineligible avant-garde shorts as Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, Gyromorphosis, Evolution, Form Phases IV, etc. I assume Anatahan was ineligible too but if not, throw that on the list as well.
This is actually a strong year for the Best Picture Oscar category. Nothing even remotely approaching a great film but nothing too hideous either. Here are my rankings in roughly preferential order:
Minari - Comes perilously close to the cute line. But something about it continues to haunt me, probably its episodic structure, its unpredictable characters, its quizzical ending, etc. Grade: A-minus
Promising Young Woman - Consistently surprising (although I knew precisely who would turn out to be a pig) bleak comedy that reminded me of such 1940s melodramas as Leave Her to Heaven or Siren of Atlantis where women exact their revenge/wield the most power from beyond. Maybe a bit of Ruby Gentry in there too. Grade: A-minus
Nomadland - Loved the discontinuous editing that underscored the nomadic life; rued how much it left Amazon off the hook to portray the nomadic life as a personal quest. Grade: A-minus
Sound of Metal - Devastating. And the penultimate scene (usually the point where a film shits the bed) was handled with impressive ambiguity. Riz Ahmed = husband material. Best cameo: A Rudimentary Peni t-shirt. Grade: A-minus
The Father - A mainstream Celine & Julie Go Boating! Keeps you on your time-and-space-determining toes. But the narrative games get dreary since they're tied so conventionally to the father's deteriorating condition. Grade: B
Judas and the Black Messiah - In the Oscar tradition: yet another felt, well-meaning, terrifically acted (I think - I don't know from acting), style-neutral biopic. Grade: B
The Trial of the Chicago 7 - Purely as a zippy, vacuous entertainment, figure about an A-minus. As a grotesque Sorkinization of 1960s American leftism, especially in its appalling portrait of assistant federal prosecutor Richard Schultz as a conflicted sympathizer, a D+. So let's say....Grade: B-minus
Mank - I already ripped on it here. I'm not a betting man. But I predict it will win solely because it's my least favorite here.
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