Reviews of Super Mario Brothers, Beau is Afraid, Tetris, Air

Super Mario Brothers-Chris Pratt, Charlie Day, Anya Taylor-Joy, Seth Rogen, Jack Black

This animated movie isn’t just a filmic homage to the Super Mario Brothers game you grew up with as a kid; it’s hodgepodge of every video game with the Super Mario label. Kind of like Ready Player One except there’s thematic consistency. And that nostalgia factor lights a bulb in your brain. And talk about that score! It’s almost worth the price of admission to see the most memorable tunes of the early 90s outside of the Billboard top 40, to be put to orchestration. As for the story, it’s pretty typical but not lazy enough (from an adult perspective) to have made a negative viewing experience for me.

Air-Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Viola Davis, Jason Bateman, Chris Tucker, Chris Messina, dir. Ben Affleck

In the mold of films like Syriana, Moneyball, and Ben Affleck’s own Argo, this latest edition of Ben Affleck is simply about a man (or group of men) and his goals. It’s in the tradition of 70s anti-hero films like French Connection, Marathon Man, China Syndrome, and especially All the President’s Men where character development is secondary to action. And Air is definitely worthy of all its predecessors: It’s paced very well and the stakes are high. Sonny Vaccaro is a fascinating rogue of a character who plays a hell of a game of speed chess against bigger companies to land the greatest player of all time. Ironically, for a film that lionizes athleticism vis-a-vis Michael Jordan -- Vaccaro’s big speech is about how no one really matters in that room but Michael Jordan, how much of that entitlement has produced college athletes who skip classes and add to rape culture?—Jordan himself wasn’t evolved. I couldn’t help but feel the film was too afraid to touch a societal golden cow.

Beau is Afraid-Joaquin Phoenix, Patti LuPonte, Amy Ryan, Nathan Lane, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Zoe Lister, Parker Posey-Jones, dir. Ari Aster

Not a fan but it wasn’t that far away from working. The film’s marketing describes the movie as about a lonely man’s odyssey home, and the director described it as a “nightmare comedy” on press tours. I would classify it as the kind of ride that amusement park’s convert into a haunt-fest for Halloween. Only it lasts three hours, and it was seemingly co-written by Carl Jung and Franz Kafka for maximum symbolism. Joaquin Phoenix plays a lonely man who’s ill-at-ease with the world. It’s kind of justified, however, because, he seems to live among the worst possible humans alive and Murphy’s Law appears to be in hyper-drive around him.  It isn’t all miserable; he’s saved from near-death on a couple occasions and finds the occasional moment of love from a stranger.   The best I can say about It, is that at three hours, it doesn’t feel that long. I was genuinely on the edge of my seat trying to work out where things would go. But at the end of a day, I’m usually not satisfied with the genre of reality-bending films. Perhaps, it was one twist too many.

Tetris-Taron Egerton, Anthony Boyle, Neketa Efremov, Oleg Stefan, Sofya Lebedeva, Tobey Jones –

Without overthinking it, I’d say this is the best film of the year so far. It’s hard to understate how impressive it is to take a subject that bores me to tears and make it a gripping thriller. Of course, it helps that the real-life story is equally mind-boggling: In order to acquire the rights for Tetris, Henk Williams mortgaged his house, risked trouble with the KGB, and was initially dependent on a company that was actively trying to screw him. When he finally broke free and secured the rights with the Nintendo company, he realized he didn’t have the rights because he was lied to. Although it’s easy to root for him in retrospect, movies like these often overlook that these bold risk takers simply can’t be classified as responsible adults. I’d love to see a deleted scene between Henk and his financial advisor. Throughout the film, Hank is in a bidding war with two other parties and the film makes great use of dramatic irony: The narration is omniscient enough to let us know what’s happening with all three parties, but the POV is tilted towards the hero and away from the villain (Anthony Boyle) as he generally knows the least of the three.  My only problem was why that I spent much of the film wondering why cast Taron Egerton when Shia LaBeouf is still alive? Egerton’s makeover here feels like he’s entering a Shia LaBeouf look-alike contest, and who needs him when this is the kind of part LaBeouf would kill?

Who Should Have Been Invited to the Academy's Acting Branch (a Year-by-Year Simulation)

One of the less publicized elements of the Academy Awards is who gets invited to join the Academy every year. Every year, a press release gets sent out and it usually gets pushed down to the proverbial page six of Hollywood trade magazines. It doesn’t really get much more than an obligatory post on corresponding entertainment websites.

From digging up press releases, it appears that about 20-25 are from the actors branch. This often includes people who have just been nominated for the first time (provided they didn’t get an at-large invite).

This is the 2014 list which includes 5 first-time nominees from the year before, a nominee from 2005 (David Straithairn) who’s paperwork must have gotten lost in the shuffle, a variety of people who were hot at the moment (Josh Hutcherson coming off the Hunger Games; Julia Louis-Dreyfuss having the hit movie Enough Said) with people who had been amassing notable roles for a while (Ben Foster, Beth Grant)

Barkhad Abdi – “Captain Phillips”, Clancy Brown – “The Hurricane,” “The Shawshank Redeption”
Paul Dano – “12 Years a Slave,” “Prisoners”, *Michael Fassbender – “12 Years a Slave,” “Shame”,
Ben Foster – “Lone Survivor,” “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints”, Beth Grant – “The Artist,” “No Country for Old Men”, Clark Gregg – “Much Ado about Nothing,” “Marvel’s The Avengers”, *Sally Hawkins – “Blue Jasmine,” “Happy-Go-Lucky”, Josh Hutcherson – “The Hunger Games,” “The Kids Are All Right”. Julia Louis-Dreyfus – “Enough Said,” “Planes”, Kelly Macdonald – “Brave,” “No Country for Old Men”, Mads Mikkelsen – “The Hunt,” “Casino Royale”, Joel McKinnon Miller – “Super 8,” “The Truman Show”, Cillian Murphy – “The Dark Knight Rises,” “Inception”, *Lupita Nyong'o – “Non-Stop,” “12 Years a Slave”, Rob Riggle – “21 Jump Street,” “The Hangover”, Chris Rock – “Grown Ups 2,” “Madagascar” *June Squibb – “Nebraska,” “About Schmidt”, Jason Statham – “Parker,” “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels”. David Strathairn – “Lincoln,” “Good Night, and Good Luck.

But what if we made parlor games out of who would get invited each year to the extent that we obsess around predicting the Oscars? Wouldn’t that be fun for us? Well, I can certainly say it was fun for me when I tried this exercise out for myself for the last 15 years.

I’m going to also operate under a few assumptions:

-An actor has to have at least appeared in a film in the past year before the Oscars.

-To squeeze the pressure on the process, 12 per year

-Breakout performances by people who were unknown before will have a harder time getting in because the Academy would want to award people who’ve been at it at least for a little while. At the same time, people who are hot right now, either commercially, or just earned Oscar buzz but didn’t make the cut, would also get strong consideration so there will be a balance between these forces.

-Comedy doesn’t get rewarded at the Oscars so this will be a way that the Academy would be to even the playing field.

-Actors who are successful in another medium like TV or Broadway will get in a bit more immediately once they make a good film

-As with the Oscar nominations, your chances of getting in will go up if you’re attached to a film that gets a lot of awards

-Child actors Hailie Steinfeld and Quevenzhane Wallis were not invited to join the Academy after being nominated. This is probably because they would need parental approval to even watch the other nominated movies and attend Academy-sanctioned events, so I’m assuming the Academy would have a preference for adults

-The Academy would have a need for international diversity to an extent. It would be hard enough for a critical mass to gather around an obscure film from, say, Bangladesh, but the kinds of international films that make dents at the Oscars would gain advantage. After #oscarssowhite, I’m assuming that there was a shift from international diversity to racial diversity

I’ll show you one example of my picks:

2008:

Aaron Eckhart-Eckhart broke out in the 1997 indie film In the Company of Men and had been more of a B-list leading man (someone who might carry an off-beat film) than someone at the top of the casting charts. This pick would be a response to Dark Knight being the biggest hit of the year and spillover from a number of leading roles in less successful films like Thank You for Smoking and No Reservations.

Ann Savage-An 87-year-old actress who dazzled in the 1945 film Detour before languishing in obscurity and being rediscovered at a screening of her film (literally: People didn’t know she was in attendance). She was cast in the indie My Winnipeg.

Brendan Gleeson-Today, Brendan Gleeson is a lot more visible considering his starring role in Mr. Mercedes, his guest role in his kids’ series Frank of Ireland, his lead in the dark morality tale Calvary, and his Oscar-nominated role in Banshees of Inisherin. He had a string of memorable supporting roles but it’s arguable if Cold Mountain or Gangs of New York would have caught the attention enough to meet the threshold.

Dev Patel and Frida Pinto-I’m assuming that the Academy’s love for Slumdog Millionaire also includes a wake-up call that they have few South Asians among their ranks.  

Hiam Abbass-Abbass got some Oscar buzz for the Oscar underdog  The Visitor which managed to land Richard Jenkins one of the unlikeliest lead actor nominations I’ve ever witnessed. She went on to play the mom in Ramy.

James Franco-It’s highly possible James Franco could have gotten earlier considering Spiderman was such a big sensation when it broke the $100 million mark in 2002 and he had a big presence in all three films. He also did headline his first film Annapolis in 2006, but 2008 is when he starred in Milk (garnering significant  Oscar buzz) which was a BP nominee and showed off his comic (pot-smoking) side in Pineapple Express.

Mathieu Alarmic-Rose to prominence the year before with The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (hello, indie cred) and then was a Bond villain (ironically, in one of the franchise’s more arty attempts with its en media res beginning and brooding pathos) so the commercial box is checked as well.  

Oliver Platt-Frost/Nixon was a BP nominee that featured four character actors who had not been nominated. Michael Sheen, Kevin Bacon, Oliver Platt, and Sam Rockwell. I’m assuming Bacon (who has been acting since the 80s) would have made the cut by now. Although a lot of people like to reverse engineer Sam Rockwell’s career since his Oscar win to suggest he was always hot shit, he was more of a cult figure who was consistently reliable but rarely on the top of the marquee. Sheen’s biggest roles required him to be overshadowed by a bigger personality (Queen, Frost/Nixon). Platt has been one of the Three Musketeers and headlined his own TV show but has he ever had his day in the sun?

Karen Allen-Without checking IMDB, can you name the highlights of Karen Allen’s career outside Indiana Jones? It’s actually not a bad list: Starman, In the Bedroom, Malcolm X, National Lampoon’s Animal House, The Perfect Storm and the Sandlot, although these roles are all pretty small. Still, being a solid working actress for the preceeding 25 years combined with one certifiable pop culture icon as Marion Ravenwood is enough to get her in.

Shia LaBeouf-The only disadvantage would have been youth in 2008. As the heir apparent to Indiana Jones and the leading man of Transformers, LaBeouf was killing it commercially and still made room for a number of smaller films like Eagle Eye, Disturbia, Bobby, and a Guide to Recognizing Your Saints over the past three years.

Thandiwe Newton-Playing Condolezza Rice in W. was a pretty high task even if it didn’t garner Oscar nomination (that director Oliver Stone peaked between 1986 and 1991 all but ensured that none of the actors from W. would never be considered). There wasn’t as much of a push for racial diversity, but there was still some and she was the female lead in Run Fatboy Run the year before and had appeared in the best picture winner Crash. She'd go on to win an Emmy for Westworld.

Runners-Up: Scott Glenn, Emile Hirsch, Christina Ricci, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Sam Rockwell, Michael Sheen, Omar Benson Miller

 

2009:
Danny McBride, Emily Blunt, James Gandolfini, James McAvoy, Joseph Gordon-Leavitt, Maya Rudolph, Melanie Laurent, Michael Stuhlbarg, Melanie Lynskey, Ryan Reynolds, Sam Rockwell, Zoe Saldana

Runners Up: Paula Patton, Rachel Harris, Daniel Bruehl, Dianne Kruger, Rachel McAdams, Bradley Cooper, Rosamund Pike

2010:

Andrew Garfield, Daniel Radcliffe, Dwayne the Rock Johnson, Emma Watson, Emily Mortimer, Jason Schwartzman, Jon Hamm, Mila Kunis, Paul Rudd, Rachel McAdams, Vincent Cassell, Zach Galifianakis

Runners-Up: Olivia Williams, Michael Cera, Patrick Wilson, Steve Carell

2011

Anthony Mackie, Armie Hammer, Beth Grant, Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone, Jay Zhao, Justin Timberlake, Ian McShane, Kristen Wiig, Michael Fassbender, Steve Carrell, Tom Hardy

Runners-Up: Olivia Wilde, Wendy McLoven-Coverly, Matt Lillard, Judy Greer, Ed Helms, Missi Pyle, Rose Byrne, Chris Dowd

2012:

Anne Dowd, Amanda Seyfreid, Aubrey Plaza, Ben Whishaw, Eddie Redmayne, Jason Schwartzman, John Ortiz, Kerry Washington, Martin Freeman, Matthew McConaughey, Rashida Jones, Suraja Sharma

Runners-Up: Billy Connolly, Andrew Sachs, Kyle Chandler, Carmen Ejogo

2013:

Benedict Cumberbatch, Channing Tatum, Daniel Bruehl, David Oyelowo, David Warhofsky, Dwight Henry, Jennifer Garner, Lake Bell, Margo Martindale, Michael B Jordan, Michael Kelly, Simon Pegg, Steve Coogan

Runners-Up: Idris Elba, Joel Edgerton, Isla Fisher, Sarah Paulson, Charlie Day, Burn Gorman, Jason Sudeikis, Will Forte, Kathryn Hahn, Greta Gerwig, Sharlito Copely

2014:

Chris Rock, Chris Pratt, Gugu Mbuthu-Raw, Kim Dickens, Lindsey Duncan, Neil Patrick Harris, Oscar Isaac, Peter Dinklage, Riz Ahmed, Rene Russo, Scoot McNairy, Timothy Spall

Runners-Up: Kristen Stewart, Charles Dance, Matthew Goode, Paddy Considine, Sienna Miller, Jeremy Strong, Merritt Weaver

2015-2022

I'm going to keep this part of the list under wraps for now because I want to either invite guests or submit this elsewhere

New YouTube Video: An Imperfect Guide to Every Best Supporting Actress Ever

A massive project of mine. I learned to edit on YouTube recently and have now taken my YouTube videos to the next level. Because I didn't initially think I would know how to edit, I just downloaded tons of still pictures from Google's Image Search (around 70 and all) and fed them to a friend who knew how to edit for $70. I recorded all the way to Jo Van Fleet's win for East of Eden in 1955 but I assumed people's viewing appetite was 20 minutes or so, and I was extremely careful about not going over.

If you're interested in classic film you might find it interesting but I hope that it awakens people to the fact that there are interesting films and interesting stuff about the films before they were born.

I could have undertaken a project to watch every film that won an Oscar in this category but I thought it was more entertaining to just go in the other direction and just riff on what I didn't know. After all, there are enough know-it-alls out there about film. My goal was to be educational but also entertaining and find my own sweet spot somewhere in there.

RIP to Mozart in the Jungle's Blair Tindall, an Interview Subject of Mine

In 2016, I was a struggling freelance journalist that wrote an article about the TV show Mozart in the Jungle that got Blair Tindall’s attention. She took the time to message me on Twitter and tell me my piece was great. When I expressed doubt that my editors liked me much and that I was doing ok in journalism, she encouraged me further in private messages to have a “screw the editors, you’re good” mindset,

Tindall lived an adventurous and financially rocky life like mine (the kind worth living) and she really meant a lot to me. Her book is an inspiration to all artists who find a balance between passion and stability. I eventually found her Her show was an exciting entrance into the world of classical music.

She also agreed to do a public interview with me a few years later, and her generosity won’t be forgotten. I’m really glad to have briefly known her, she was a generous and classy person, and I mourn her loss with the rest of the Mozart in the Jungle fan community.

I whole-heartedly recommend Mozart in the Jungle as both a read and as a TV show.

 

 

What I’m Watching March Edition: Not Dead Yet, Night Court, Poker Face, Hello Tomorrow, Animal Control, Night Court

Not Dead Yet (ABC):
Capitalizing on Ghosts, Gina Rodriguez plays obituary writer Nell. During the period of her obituary assignment, she can see dead people.

It’s one of many female-centered shows about a woman who doesn’t have her life together in the vein of Dollface, Maggie, Girls, Single Drunk Female, and can trace its lineage to Mary Tyler Moore.

However, Mary Tyler Moore never looked that far down on its protagonist. One problem of this subgenre is that it casts broad labels over women based on whether they’re in a relationship or have achieved a certain career goal.

There’s also one of the autistic leads from As We See It here as the autistic apartment owner and roommate for Nell, which is an interesting wrench to throw in the works of typical sitcom character conflict.

The show is watchable but hasn’t really hit its stride yet. No relationship is really the stuff that would make lists of TV’s “Most ruthless boss” or “Most heart-warming besties” and I get the feeling the show is going for those kinds of archetypes.

It is getting closest in building a must-see relationship in the friendship-triangle between the protagonist and her frenemy boss (Lauren Ash) and the coworker (Hannah Simone) who’s allegiances are caught in the middle.

Watching the Not Dead Yet half-handle its world-building is just a reminder of how remarkable Ghosts has been at ironing the concepts of how the interaction between dead and living works.

Still watchable.

Animal Control (Fox)- McHale’s roguish devil-may-care charm that carried Community for umpteenth seasons is ready made for single camera comedy. He borrows many of the same features as Jeff Winger: In particular, he’s a slacker with a capital S. It does help to differentiate tham a little that this guy doesn’t get laid as often as Winger does.

The problem is it’s hard not to simply see this as a Joel McHale vehicle. The cast isn’t completely flat but there are no stand outs. Gerry Dee comes closest as Templeton Scruggs who appears on the right side of a couple of the best plots. He’s a Michael-Scott-type blow hard but he’s a little more substantial.

There’s also a guy with an Andy Samberg haircut who won a snowboarding bronze medal which I personally love as a character trait because I’m a connoisseur of winter sports; still, this is pretty much an informed ability. What I’m saying is I want to see discount Andy Samberg hang a flying squirrel before I invest in this guy.

There’s also a woman who looks exactly like Chelsea Peretti but has an Australian accent which is kind of jarring.

But, I’m just riffing here. It’s not the most original set of comic characters, but the chemistry between the characters and the quality of the over-arching plots makes this a far better attempt at all-out silliness than, say, Brooklyn Nine-Nine. I dig it.

Mayfair Witches (AMC)-This witch drama really aims for sex appeal. If you want to see Alexandra Daddario (the otherworldly-looking brunette with smoldering good looks from The White Lotus) get involuntarily aroused on an airplane or see an early 20th century tryst between a white-eyed woman and a ghost, this show’s got it all.

Daddario’s character, Rowan Fielding, is the typical no-nonsense heroine that populates many a procedural: She’s got brains (she’s a neurosurgeon); her vulnerability on her sleeve is visible from miles away; she’s unapolagetically sex positive (hence, more sex scenes, yay!), she’s independent, and she’s properly defiant against any and all mansplainers. What’s more, Daddario elevates the material so that the character works even better in practice.

The series takes place in New Orleans and plays well off the city’s lore surrounding the occult. That it’s based on an Anne Rice novel also adds pedigree. The show isn’t a slow burn as Rowan and a couple of the side characters (the uber-prolific character actor Beth Grant plays Rowan’s great-aunt) are interesting enough to watch.

As for the larger mythology, it’s solid but how much that hooks you will likely depend on how into witches and warlocks you are.

Night Court (NBC)-This one is reviewed over at TV Fanatic. Basically, the dialogue and the jokes are often very lazy but, hey, I’m still watching it 11 episodes in, so something about it is working.

https://www.tvfanatic.com/2023/03/night-court-flawed-as-great-tv-effective-as-comfort-food/

Poker Face (Peacock)-The short review here is that the show has serial elements which don’t work and procedural elements which are generally a delight. Riann Johnson has proven himself one of his generation’s top film makers, and especially a master of mystery in the Knives Out series, so he adds a lot of pedigree here. Natasha Lyonne’s character is 95% Colunbo impression and 5% her own thing. This slightly disappointing, but hey who doesn’t like modern-day reimaginings of Columbo in the body of a fiery redhead. The guest star roster (especially Judith Light and S. Epatha Merkerson) is epic. Some of the episodes are unbelievably cinematic. A couple are duds but that’s part for the course. The overarching serialization (she’s on the run from a Vegas mobster) is thin

Hello Tomorrow! (Apple)-Mad Men meets 50s era sci-fi. I’m unclear exactly what year the show takes place, but it hardly matters as the show is decidedly ahistoric. This is a parallel version of the 50s where we didn’t just land on the moon but were able to quickly subdue it for human colonization to the point that we were selling real estate on it.

This show reflects a 1950s era sensibility in which men are bread winners, and there’s no better way to win that bread than don a suit and sell something.

But wait! Were real estate prices as suffocating in big cities in that era as they are today? Didn’t we not go to the moon until 1970 when society was more populated with hippies with long-hair? Again, best not to think too much about historic details.

The series anachronisms’ are tied together quite well anyway under the umbrella of 50s-era sci-fi where writers were coming from uncertainty about what the space age would bring.

It’s not until the show’s 5th episode that anything crucial really happens to the plot but what drives the series is that it has a strong sense of place and time and the heavy hitters — Billy Crudup, Alison Pill, Hank Azaria, and Susan Heyward (not the Oscar-winning actress from the 40s and 50s) — infuse the drama so well.

Poker Face (Peacock)-The short review here is that the show has serial elements which don’t work and procedural elements which are generally a delight. Riann Johnson has proven himself one of his generation’s top film makers, and especially a master of mystery in the Knives Out series, so he adds a lot of pedigree here. Natasha Lyonne’s character is 95% Colunbo impression and 5% her own thing. This slightly disappointing, but hey who doesn’t like modern-day reimaginings of Columbo in the body of a fiery redhead. The guest star roster (especially Judith Light and S. Epatha Merkerson) is epic. Some of the episodes are unbelievably cinematic. A couple are duds but that’s part for the course. The overarching serialization (she’s on the run from a Vegas mobster) is thin

Final Thoughts on 2022 in Film

-Stephen Spielberg thanked Tom Cruise for saving movies with Top Gun. You can call the film over-rated due to how big it blew up but, by that standard, a lot of things are overrated. Think of how little you expected when you walked into that theater and think of how you (most likely) were moved; how well done all of the film's elements were. Moreso, think of how this was not a Marvel film and managed to rule the Box Office for 3 weeks in the middle of Summer. It was the top grossing film of the year in an age where the only stuff thriving is superheroes and cartoons.

-Best director is likely going to two guys named Daniel. Although I don't love Oscars being used as lifetime achievement awards (like Don Ameche in Cocoon or Lee Grant in Shampoo who were indistinguishable from the rest of their casts when they won Academy Awards; I'll go to my grave saying Al Pacino did a great job in Scent of a Woman if people stop comparing it to the 70s), I tend to think it's a little embarrassing to have people who aren't particularly accomplished in that category. More than any other award, we can't tell what a director does from a single film since he relies on various craftsmen and actors to create his vision. The best director award comes close to reflecting a list of the best, but when you have the guy who directed Rocky (can't remember his name), Delbert Mann or Tom Hooper, you run a risk that the award is diluted. I'd prefer if the award went to someone with somewhat of a track record for doing big things.

-We need to just collectively admit this was not a particularly good year for American films:

*Baz Luhrmann is an erratic and polarizing guy. Whatever your opinion of him or this movie is, we should recognize this was not something that all viewers considered a success. I found it to not vary enough from the typical beats of the biopic to merit any special recognition.

*Tar is 2 hours and 37 minutes long. My friend Khari typically avoids films over two hours and while I disagree with that method of film going, this was a film that could have easily been told in an hour and 45 minutes. It's set in a highly specialized world of orchestral conducting and does little to explain why waving your arms in front of a group of classical musicians merits millions of dollars

*The Whale was gross (although that was probably the point) and a bit heavy-handed in its metaphors (the guy loves in a city with more thunder than any other). It's interesting.

*The Banshees of Inisherin is about two people who are mentally off and the film doesn't acknowledge that.  One person basically spends the whole movie whining that the other isn't his friend and the other responds in the worst way imaginable: Self-harm, not locking his door, etc. It's supposedly also about the Irish civil war and loneliness and coping, but all that stuff is muddled in the background. I could see someone reading it differently, but it didn't work for me.

-The result of the lack of decent films and the momentum behind films that were actually pretty good (at least in my opinion) like Empire of Light and Armageddon Time resulted in a bunch of foreign films like Everything Everywhere All At Once, RRR, Bardo, and Triangle of Sadness either getting nominated for BP or getting close. RRR and Triangle of Sadness I found to be terrific films but I also rarely add foreign films to my viewing diet so that was a positive effect on me.

-In spite of the Glass Onion's length, it worked as a critique of rich people. The Menu, Triangle of Sadness, and Death on the Nile also had this element which was a nice new direction. For films.

-Underrated films to me: Deep Water, The Bubble, Where the Crawdads Sing, Armageddon Time, Metal Lords, and Amsterdam

-Unfortunately, there is a sphere of entertainment-centered journalists who will always manufacture some controversy about how Hollywood doesn't properly honor people of color. They continue to attempt to drive headlines around this cause even when the facts don't support their case. This year, their double standard was highly evidence when Michelle Yeoh's broke existing campaign rules to knock down competitor Cate Blanchett.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/michelle-yeoh-deletes...

I don't think that Michelle Yeoh should be raked over the coals or even found guilty, but she violated a rule about campaigning by taking a potshot at a fellow nominee on social media.

There is no source that Andrea Riseborough directly marketed the film herself illegally (it was the director's wife who was under suspicion) and she investigated and found innocent, but her name will now be tainted because she's not really a name in the industry anyway.

That Michelle Yeoh gets all this support because of a strong double-standard here where if you're on the right side of what the identity politics crowd perceives to be social justice, you got cheered for getting on your soap box no matter what you say.

The more egregious thing here is that it's not even Andrea Riseborough's control that she was White when she had the greatest Cinderella story campaign in recent Oscars memory. The story doesn't matter: Just her skin color.

And I'm repeating myself here, but the absurdity of citing racism due to a (very probable, beforehand) snubbing of a four-time Oscar nominee dilutes the word beyond belief.

Empire of Light Review (2022)

It might be a bit overkill for the Academy to have awarded Olivia Colman three Oscar nominations in four years, but the multi-layered ball of repressed pride that Colman plays just might be the performance of the year.

The film is set in a theater in a small English town in 1981 and though it focuses on Olivia Colman's character of Hilary, there's a rich slice-of-life quality to it.

Sam Mendes has long had a knack of capturing the atmospheres of time and place: The suburban purgatory of American Beauty, the sepia-toned Depression-era Midwest of Road to Perdition, the hellish warscapes of Iraq in Jarhead and World War I in 1917.

At the same time, Mendes tries to equate a cinema in 1981 as the height of theater going, when he's at least 40 years removed from the era of movie palaces and event screenings. Although it could be argued that  Jaws and Star Wars might have jump-started a new weekened-centered craze of moviegoing, that's not what's really being portrayed (unless the original cut of Chariots of Fire had space lasers or sharks I am unaware of).  There's a curious vagueness here from a director who's generally so exacting with his settings. It's also hard to get a grip on exactly what kind of an English town this is: Vaguely somewhere that's not London is as much as I can gather.

The crust of Hilary's arc is that it throws her into two relationships: A numbing dalliance with her cheating boss (Colin Firth) and a May-December romance (Michael Ward as Stephen) that's as dreamy as the movies that Hilary and her crew never actually get around to watching (irony alert!). Colman plays the self-loathing with the former and the genuine affection with the latter beautifully.

There's also the obligatory referencing of the times (the Thatcher era) and the racism involved in Ward's character. It's a sure bet that any film that attempts to discuss race (particularly by a White director) will have loud critics whatever you do, so it's best to just ignore that: This isn't a film with any profound proscribed solutions to race, but the existence of a Black character in a more racist era than the present is dealt realistically and in a way that serves the story.

The film picks up significantly in the second act with two or three strong twists that are cleverly deployed. It's revealed halfway through the film that Hilary suffers from a certain mental illness but the foreshadowing is subtle enough to provide a true a-ha moment that pieces together the story retroactively. 

It's certainly not one of the best works of Sam Mendes but the film has a certain charm that keeps the film fresh.

Review: The VIPs (1963)

 I went into this for a project I was doing on best supporting actress winners (Margaret Rutherford), but I stayed because I love a good ensemble film.

The film follows four storylines: A dramatic love triangle involving a woman (Elizabeth Taylor) who is planning on leaving her husband (Richard Burton) for an idle playboy (Louis Jordan) but wants to dodge confrontation through a Dear John note; a Yugoslavian director (Orson Welles) needing to leave England to dodge tax laws; an Australian magnate (Rod Taylor) with assistant (a not-yet-famous Maggie Smith) who needs to head to the board of directors before his company is bought out; and a loopy Duchess (Margaret Rutherford) who is trying to raise money to save her castle.

Unlike most ensemble dramas where there are a lot of intersecting characters, there's an urgent need for everyone to go in the same direction which is out of London's Heathrow airport which means the tension gets ratcheted up to 11 in one foul sweep, when a case of fog (this is a thing?!) delays all flights.

The film is at its most compelling when focusing on the Burton/Taylor/Jordan plot which has enough heft to support its own dramatic mid-century melodrama like the Douglas Sirk or Elia Kazan film.

Burton and Taylor were a tabloid phenomenon on screen and the pair had just come out of a film shoot where they just discovered each other's bodies (TCM reported that this film was rushed into production to capitalize on the tabloid). It was over the shoot of this film that an internally tortured Burton decided to leave his wife and marry Taylor: An idealized glamour that six other men had fallen under the spell of over the course of Taylor's life. It's not hard to imagine how viewers in 1963 felt watching the two act out a heated marriage spat felt like a glimpse of the tumultuous affair between two of the most beautiful and idolized people on the planet.

But the scene-stealer here is Louis Jordan. Referred to as a "gigolo" by a jealous Richard Burton, he's the kind of idle gentleman who casually walks through life bedding women and never thinking about his next meal. He's a gambler as if there's any profession cooler than that. He's properly vulnerable with Liz Taylor and he shows an intriguing splitting of the difference between empathy and verbal one-upmanship to the man whose wife he's stealing.

The Australian magnate plot is a solid B-story with the contrasting sense of gravity by Maggie Smith (another scene stealer) and the "Oh well, my life's over, might as well have champagne" attitude of Rod Taylor. There are a couple sweet twists and the story feels emotionally robust.

The Orson Welles and Margaret Rutherford plots are mostly filler. Welles dons an Eastern European accent and some fine character affectations and Rutherford shows a penchant for physical comedy as she constantly looks lost and fiddles with her hat a lot.

The upsetting thing is with the richness of the performances of Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Louis Jordan, and Maggie Smith, Rutherford walked away with the 1963 Best Supporting Actress Oscar. Still, I'm glad this film won an Oscar of some sort so I had the chance to discover it.