A new take on the Lone-Samurai (ronin) character familiar from Yojimbo and Sanjuro. The bustling 18th-century setting is fun, but Kurosawa and Mifune are missing, and missed. The role of go was a bit hard to swallow, but worse was a lack of subtlety, more expected in a film from 1970 than 2024.
Four characters and their permutational relationships is the essence, indeed almost the totality, of this film. After all the bluff and bluster of American cinema, it’s refreshing to return to a European film, this directed by the German auteur Christian Petzold, with no special effects, hardly any scenery, no dramatic soundtrack, just real people coping. Paula Beer and Barbara Auer are quietly magnificent and inscrutable as the psychodrama gradually releases its information, leading to a surprising, but comforting, ending.
Took advantage of my wife’s absence to catch up on two critically lauded (Washington Post maybe?) films from the last two years and was glad she was away. Both were unwatchable, if for different reasons. In Peter Hujar’s Day nothing happens, which is intentional, but in the day he describes nothing happens, too. And for some inexplicable reason, it takes a full day, in the movie, for him to recount his yesterday. Ben Whishaw is charming as Peter Hujar, but I learned nothing about the character from the 75-minute conversation. (Then again, I didn’t like My Dinner with Andre either.) Eephus purports to film a rec league baseball game, but unless it is a metaphor for something or a dig at New Hampshire I have no idea what it is about. If you aren’t a baseball fan the movie would be incomprehensible. If you are a fan, like me, the representation of baseball is offensive. Bill “Spaceman” Lee makes a walk-on to pitch an inning, further muddying the opaque waters. What were they thinking–and how did this get a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes (or Hujar a 91?)
Who needs good acting when you know where the Colleen Hoover formula plot is going. Maika Monroe is easy on the eyes, but the premise she embodies is wobbly: who sends a young woman with no record to jail for seven years when the car she’s driving hits a rock, rolls over and her fiance in the shotgun seat is killed? And why is her five-year-old daughter portrayed as a three-year-old?
Marks for message, but as cinema it was overlong, lacking drama and repetitive–too many shots of an empty school corridor. Although it won the Oscar, I can think of four or five better documentaries at the recent SB Film Festival.
Director Baz Luhrman atones for his dismal 2022 biopic Elvis with a joyful homage based on concert and rehearsal footage from the early 1970s, when Elvis was the greatest showman of our lifetime. The documentary plays his songs complete and gives full play to his twinkling smile and kidding personality. There are just enough interjections of the offstage world to keep it real: the Army, marriage to Priscilla, the movies, Col. Tom Parker. But we’re spared the bloated, drugged-out late Elvis, while also getting only hints of the early avatar of rock’n’roll. What Luhrman gives us is the singer, the outfits, the hair, the mesmerizing, transporting effect on his female audience of a performer in full.
“Weird” is too mild a descriptor for this Yorgas Lanthimos-Emma Stone-Jesse Plemons excursion into George Saunders-like surreality. Nothing makes sense in a very consistent way, and there is a sobering moral in a final scene that must have doubled the production budget (unless it was AI-generated, which would also be appropriate). While the film was not “enjoyable,” Stone and Plemons were admirable.
Sometimes you just long for an old-fashioned movie with a linear plot, dialogue you can understand, a satisfying story arc and a character or two you can like or even connect with emotionally. Instead, Kristen Stewart’s first directorial effort seemed designed to establish her bona fides as an artsy auteur with the portrait of an abused, sex-crazed, irresponsible poet of no discernible talent who somehow survived to write the memoir on which the film was loosely based. Imogen Poots remarkably kept the film, and her head, above water.
Having seen all the contenders except Bugonia (the sour taste of Poor Things still lingers), I’m ready to anoint my Oscar choices for 2025, limiting myself to the official nominees:
Best Actor
Ethan Hawke. An easy decision. He held the screen the entire movie, captivated us although he wasn’t attractive by any measure, and so inhabited the character that I had no idea who the actor was for much of the film.
Best Actress
Jessie Buckley. Also easy, although not for want of competition. Any other time I would be happy with a win for Rose Byrne, Renata Reinsve or even Kate Hudson, but Buckley was radiant, acted with range and carried what otherwise could have been a limp, albeit beautiful, film.
Supporting Actor
The supporting cast of One Battle After Another was uniformly superb, but Sean Penn, as he often is, was in a class by himself. Although you knew it was Sean Penn, you believed in him as a character every time he took the stage.
Supporting Actress
I thought I discovered Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas among her more heralded co-stars, only to see the Academy acknowledge her as well; but if the Academy wants to recognize Amy Madigan for her bizarro role, I will too.
Best Picture
Only two of the ten Oscar nominees made my personal Top Ten, and neither was near the top of the list. I will go with Sinners for its artistic achievement, a movie about music, the South, race relations and, yes, zombies.
Director
Ryan Coogler gets my nod over Paul Thomas Anderson. Both took ambitious, daringly big swings–Anderson’s a little too much so.
International Film
Sirat was the most convincingly original film of the year, in its setting, its cast, its score and its emotional shock.
Documentary Short
The Devil Is Busy, about a women’s health clinic in Atlanta, is well-made, inspiring and should be seen by everyone in America.
Live Action Short
Jane Austen’s Period Drama is dead-on hilarious. Honorable mention to The Singers.
The Technical Awards
I don’t hold myself out as competent to judge these awards, and I wonder if many Academy members do either, as year after year the nominees are drawn from the Best Picture slate. In other words, I suspect many people just vote for their favorite films, without considering some mediocre film that had really great costumes, say, or sound editing. How, for example, could someone say Marty Supreme, with a number of bumbling amateurs, was one of the five best Casting films?
With that caveat, I thought Frankenstein the most sumptuous film of the year, so I’ll give it the Oscar for either Costume or Production Design. F1 had great race scenes that didn’t overwhelm the rest of the movie, so I’ll throw a bone there, although I won’t complain when One Battle After Another wins the award. Cinematography could go to anything other than Marty Supreme; many people loved Train Dreams, and we felt we missed a lot by watching it on the TV screen. The director of Sirat made a strong case for the Best Sound nod; it was certainly the loudest, most percussive, and most instrumental to its story. Sinners had the best music, and Ludwig Goransson usually wins the Original Score, so no problem there. I don’t know any of the Original Songs, but our granddaughters love the Kpop Demon Hunters. Original Screenplay–Blue Moon. Adapted Screenplay–One Battle After Another. That’s all I know.
If a comedy, not funny. If a drama, not dramatic. If social commentary, no comment. After an hour we looked at each other, mouthed the word “stupid,” and departed. The culture gap between us and this Korean Oscar submission must have been too wide.
© Copyright 2019 Robert Marshall | All Rights Reserved.