Yes, There’s “The Quiet Girl” After the Oscar Quest ’23 End Credits

A quiet Irish girl stares ahead with her deep blue eyes, expression hidden, her inner monologue unknowable.

If you’re not watching out for the quiet ones, you can bet they’re always watching you.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: I basically finished my annual Oscar Quest and watched as many of the Academy Award-nominated works as I could access between the nominations announcement and the ABC ceremony. As of eight days ago I’d seen 50 of this year’s 54 total nominees. As it happens, one small holdout from across the ocean finally reached our local theaters the same weekend as said ceremony, just barely in time for inclusion.

Writer/director Colm Bairéad’s The Quiet Girl slipped unassumingly and mostly unseen onto the Oscar scorecard for Best International Feature in the shadow of Netflix’s much-ballyhooed All Quiet on the Western Front, sidling next to other small-scale fare like Close, EO, and Argentina, 1985. It’s one of three deeply Irish films synchronously joining the festivities, along with homeland fellows The Banshees of Inisherin and the live-action short An Irish Goodbye. Apropos of its main character, the film has its group memberships yet seems to prefer hanging out on its own.

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The Oscar Quest ’23 Grand Finale: All the Other Nominees I Could Catch

Tobey Maguire as a rich, Mob-connected ghoul in "Babylon"

Peter Parker #2 declares, “THIS IS CINEMA!”

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! Longtime MCC readers know this time of year is my annual Oscar Quest, during which I venture out to see all Academy Award nominees for Best Picture, regardless of whether I think I’ll like them or not, whether their politics and beliefs agree with mine or not, whether they’re good or bad for me, and whether or not my friends and family have ever heard of them. I’ve seen every Best Picture winner from Wings to CODA, and every Best Picture nominee from 1987 to the present, many of which were worth the hunt. You take the good, you take the bad, and so on.

In addition, this will be my third annual Oscars Quest Expanded Challenge, which was inspired by that darn pandemic — to see not just all the Best Picture nominees, but as many nominees as possible in all the other categories as well…

That was January 24th. Fast-forward to today, and I’ve watched all I can watch, for better or worse. A grand total of 53 different works are up for Oscars this year. As of this writing I’ve watched 50. Of the four irritating omissions:

  • Ireland’s The Quiet Girl is coming to Indianapolis theaters March 10th, at the eleventh hour before the ceremony when we have an extremely busy week planned. [UPDATED 3/12/2023, 1:40 p.m.: I did fit it in and wrote about it in the nick of time.]
  • The documentary All That Breathes is exclusive to HBO, which we don’t normally have. (Our cable company had another “Watchathon” weekend recently; this film’s HBO debut was the following Tuesday. Grrrrrrrr.)
  • The international feature Argentina, 1985 is exclusive to Amazon Prime, which we’ve never had.
  • The documentary short How Do You Measure a Year? has no streaming plan announced yet.

A perfect record would’ve been nice, but I’ll cope. I can mentally file it as “a Delaware Problem” and my heart will go on.

As for the other 50, they break down into five categories:

1. NOMINEES I SAW IN THEATERS IN 2022 which therefore received their own dedicated MCC entries:

2. NOMINEES I SAW AT HOME IN 2022, which were encapsulated and ranked in a single entry mixed in with numerous non-nominees:bl

  • Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
  • Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio
  • RRR
  • Top Gun: Maverick
  • Turning Red

3. NOMINEES I SAW IN THEATERS IN 2023 after the nominations were announced and got their own entries, per MCC rules:

…including the ten Short Film nominees we caught as part of the annual Shorts.tv theatrical run:

  • The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse
  • The Flying Sailor
  • Ice Merchants
  • My Year of Dicks
  • An Ostrich Told Me the World is Fake and I Think I Believe It
  • An Irish Goodbye
  • Ivalu
  • Night Ride
  • The Pupils
  • The Red Suitcase

4. NOMINEES I SAW AT HOME IN 2023 and already reviewed in previous entries…

…which includes the four documentary shorts whose capsules I lumped in with the ten theatrically viewed shorts while I was at it:

  • The Elephant Whisperers
  • Haulout
  • The Martha Mitchell Effect
  • Stranger at the Gate

5. NOMINEES I SAW AT HOME IN 2023 and haven’t reviewed yet:

And now, previously unwritten thoughts on those other 17 films — alphabetically rather than by quality ranking because I’ve rcomplicated all this too much already. A few were hidden gems I’m glad I was talked into trying, but several validated my original decisions to skip them till I “had to” watch them. More so than the last two years, I was madder at myself than at anyone else for this self-dare that often felt more punishing than rewarding. Anyway, onward:

Babylon (Paramount+): Damien Chazelle’s three-hour hyperactive drug-fueled aren’t-we-so-naughty? psycho-jamboree bellows in the faces of rose-colored glasses-wearers that Hollywood has never, ever in its entire existence been an upright, sober virtue pulpit. The first half-hour’s boundary-bouncing excess is like an obnoxious gatekeeper warding off sensitive and sensible viewers, but if you skip all that and press “Play” near the 31-minute mark when Brad Pitt hires Diego Calva to be his errand guy (who cares why), it’s maybe 40% more watchable. If a friend of yours can rig a supercut version, ask them to center Margot Robbie, repurposing her Harley Quinn accent to play yet another smirking steamroller, except this one won’t be saved from self-destruction by comics-merch licensees. But the Mad, Mad, Mad World cast can’t save it all from an ending that has way more chutzpah than it has any right to, on multiple levels (cue the Scorsese “This is cinema!” meme). The actual scenes of old-timey filmmaking are fun, especially after talkies upend their hermetically debauched world; but you have to wade through a lot of sludge to get to it, only to be reminded (intentionally so!) that Singin’ in the Rain handled that last part more gracefully and sans the recklesly overbudgeted juvenile abandon.

Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths (Netflix): Like many a filmmaker or artist, Alejandro González Iñárritu spent his pandemic months conceiving his next piece as a deeply personal work (see also: Licorice Pizza, Belfast, The Hand of God, etc.) that might resonate more deeply for himself than for audiences that live outside his head. Not until an hour in did its seemingly rules-free gonzo whimsies click for me and I bought into its central conceit, that our aging journalist protagonist (Daniel Giménez Cacho, from del Toro’s Cronos) looks back on his life’s most stressful and/or heartbreaking moments through warped lenses that divest them from reality and rewrite them into dreams, wishes, extended what-ifs, meta-films-within-a-film, and flat-out denial. Admittedly Iñárritu’s worst idea might’ve been tossing us into the psyche’s deep end by opening the film with a miscarriage reimagined as a morbid SNL sketch, but later scenes break away from the Truly Tasteless Jokes vibe and reroute toward something remotely meaningful. For me, breaking the 159-minute self-epic up into three parts, watched hours apart, helped mitigate its excess effluvia buildup. I’d love to hear a panel of Mexican historians (with or without Film Studies minors) contrast their impressions and annotate the ground covered here at length, if they can stand to sit through it.

Blonde (Netflix): Months ago I promised to coworkers if this sadistic biopic-shaped onslaught upon a bad-parts-only paper-doll version of Marilyn Monroe were nominated for anything, I’d watch it entirely on my phone, and only for the sake of sticking to my stupid annual Oscar Quest. I kept that promise and trash-compacted its defiant ugliness to playing-card size rather than let it be writ undeservedly large on our TV. Divvying it up into a four-part miniseries viewed over the course of three weeks helped slightly, but I wouldn’t say that made it all worthwhile. Feel her powerlessness! Shake your head at her naivete! Cringe at everyone who treats her like a prop, including her own mom! Furrow your brow at otherwise good actors falling morosely in love with her only to oppress her! Feel entire glaciers float by during the meaningless silences! Rage against the physical abuse, miscarriage, abortions, rapes, and daddy issues that form her Rogues Gallery in so many disconnected nightmare fragments! Then click Netflix’s “Not for Me” thumbs-down and go find something funny to salvage your day!

Causeway (Apple TV+): Imagine an alt-timeline in which Atlanta‘s Brian Tyree Henry is the main character here — a New Orleans auto mechanic who’s willing to help strangers in need, partly out of altruism and partly to distract himself from the ghosts of his past. One day a stubborn white lady in denial about her postwar PTSD crosses his path. He helps her out of the goodness of his heart. They strike up an imbalanced friendship, in which she offers little except awkwardly smiling camaraderie and access to trespass in rich strangers’ pools. Then she doubles down on her selfishness and jams figurative bamboo under his fingernails by pressuring him to dredge up the worst mistakes of his life, and not in any sensitive or therapeutic way. At the end she has the unmitigated nerve to approach Our Hero with more beer and ask, without even apologizing first, if they can still hang out anyway. In that timeline’s version, the ending would be a lot less ambiguous than this version’s ending is. Paper Boi would never suffer that nonsense, but it’s Katniss Everdeen, so we’re asked to pretend there’s a chance for forgiveness.

Dace Montgomery as director Steve Binder in Elvis, instructing his stage manager by desk microphone to "send in the whorehouse dancers."

The Elvis ’68 Comeback Special: Behind the Music.

Elvis (Redbox): Tom Hanks stars in the unseemly true story of a waddling Rankin-Bass evil walking potato who is in every way the dire opposite of Colin Farrell’s amazing Penguin. For its first half Moulin Rouge maestro Baz Luhrmann is on an audacious roll as the faux-southern-fried Colonel Tom Parker hitches his get-rich-quick snake-oil wagon to Austin Butler’s sincerely believable Elvis Presley, and it’s nearly enough to make me regret my general indifference to the entire Elvis catalog except that one techno-tastic remix from a while back. Energy levels flag in the home stretch as Elvis’ life runs out of milestone events worthy of Luhrmann’s showmanship, so he kinda stops trying except for the deliriously wild episode concerning the 1968 Comeback Special, anchored by Stranger Things‘ Dacre Montgomery as its director Steve Binder, a proto-Luhrmann ahead of his time who would go on to direct The Star Wars Holiday Special. You can feel Luhrmann relishing Binder’s every scene, because game recognize game. Colonel Fat Forrest Gump can go shuffle off to Alabamee with his unreliably narrated cornpone.

Empire of Light (streaming rental): Imagine an alt-timeline in which Michael Ward (who had a small yet important part in The Old Guard) is the main character here — a young Black graduate in 1980-1981 Britain, neither a great time nor place to be nonwhite and surrounded by skinheads on the dole in punk’s prime, who’s struggling to get into uni and in the meantime gets a job at the local movie theater, which in turn funds his after-hours immersion in the fabulously danceable and racially harmonious world of two-tone bands (the father of our American ska). One day a stubborn white lady in denial about her bipolar issues crosses his path, becoming his trainer and coworker. They strike up an imbalanced relationship, in which she offers little except awkwardly smiling camaraderie and access to the theater’s abandoned upper floors where pigeons now roost. Then she throws caution to the wind in a roundabout form of self-harm, makes a comeback perhaps still a bit on edge, and watches helplessly as he suffers the most painful incident of his life. At the end he gets the heck outta Dodge, and she’s treated to a free screening of Being There. In that timeline’s version, who do you think Peter Sellers reminds Olivia Colman of: Our Hero or herself? And would she still be smiling at The Magic of Movies, which extended its saving grace to her but not so much to Our Hero?

EO (Criterion Channel): Life’s hard for a Polish circus donkey who doesn’t talk or make cute human facial expressions, has no idea he’s allegedly suffering animal rights abuses, misses the kindly circus lady who chooses her boyfriend over him, and jerks us around Europe in a series of disconnected incidents. Sometimes EO is Our Hero; sometimes he’s just an Alfred Hitchcock cameo in someone else’s short story. Sometimes he poses with cool natural panoramas; sometimes he’s a defenseless victim of wanton human cruelty. One thing remains constant: he’s just a donkey. The film is so stingy with sentimentality that it won’t even let him perform any awesome circus-donkey tricks to save the day. If you love fuzzy animals in general and donkeys in particular, instantly on sight without any prompting, EO will be your new best friend for as long as the Fates grant him mercy. For some of us, he’s Li’l Sebastian and we’re Ben Wyatt hoping no one overhears us muttering, “I don’t get it.”

Fire of Love (Disney+): Anne and I decided years ago if God let choose our deaths, we’d go out together as an elderly couple in an airplane cockpit, trying valiantly to save it from causing mass destruction but, y’know, failing because we’re not pilots, no matter how many times I’ve watched Airplane! But at least we’d fail together and neither would have to live on without the other. I thought about that a lot throughout this documentary about married volcanologists who worked together, shot thousands of hours of spectacularly intimidating lava footage together, stood way too closely to live volcanoes together, and ultimately perished together in a 1991 eruption from Japan’s Mount Unzen, which everyone had drastically underestimated. This tribute, solemnly narrated by Miranda July in a tone implying she dreads getting to the end, is culled from their own voluminous work/home movies as well as their frequent appearances on old talk shows, which treated them like rock stars in their very specific world, only to arguably die like them. They knew the job was dangerous when they took it, but they took it together.

A young teen boy sitting outside, smoking a cigarette while an offscreen adult tells him, "Remember, your future belongs only to you."

On the bright side, at least he isn’t a raging alcoholic yet.

A House Made of Splinters (streaming rental): Heart-tugging documentary about a Ukrainian children’s home — not an orphanage, but a temporary group home that lets kids stay while their parents sort their personal problems — additions, abuse, mental health, war consequences, what have you (though we don’t witness a single frame of wartime, unlike several Syrian docs nominated in past years). The parents are given nine months to straighten up and come pick up their kids; if no improvement (or in the saddest cases, no response at all), their kid goes into the foster system or one of the actual orphanages. The filmmakers air no direct interviews or overtly coach them to perform for the cameras (they may regret some of their now-immortalized hi-jinks as adults); instead they just follow typical days and watch them be themselves — all the little pleasures, rare happy endings, and disappointed heartaches entailed. The most wrenching part is that, by and large, the kids know why they’re there, know their parents have failed them, and are pretty sure they’re better off without them, no matter how dearly they miss them…or more accurately, miss who they used to be.

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (streaming rental): I’ve never seen the original shorts this expands upon, but one of the first things they do us write out the non-shelled original cast, leaving only the tiny stop-motion beach souvenirs. Jenny Slate (SNL, Zootopia) is the voice of Marcel, one of several sentient shells who’ve been living for years in the same human house, which has now been turned into an Airbnb. The latest guest (Dean Fleischer Camp, who also directed) is an amateur documentarian who decides his wee polished roommate would make a cool subject. Marcel even has a mystery to solve: nearly his entire family has gone missing! (Except her elderly Nana Connie, voiced by Isabella Rossellini, light-years away from Blue Velvet.) Marcel soon becomes an internet sensation but fame doesn’t inspire her starstruck followers to search for clues. (Marcel laments their unhelpfulness: “That’s an audience, not a community!“) And so it goes, everyday living-shell life with its little epiphanies full of gentle sweetness and amusing bits (more so whenever Slate improvs) leading to a resolution that would trigger severe facepalm if it weren’t so doggone logical and warmly fuzzy. A much-needed antidote to some of the other “grown-up” Oscar-bait drivel.

Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris (Peacock): Within us race two trains of thought: “high society needs its comeuppances” and “sometimes it’s okay to want nice thing”. Leaning more toward one than the other, Lesley Manville (The Crown, Phantom Thread) is a put-upon British war widow who doesn’t judge others in her cleaning-lady day-job, just living kindly when a confluence of lucky blessings dumps a slight fortune in her lap, no strings attached. The first and only dream on her list: take a trip to Paris and buy a genuine Christian Dior dress. Her modest attire and polite humility draw predictable condescension from haughty haute-couture gatekeepers, but slowly her earnestness and fat stack of cash win over hearts and minds. Her misadventures invite guests like Isabelle Huppert, Alba Batista a.k.a. Warrior Nun, Lucas Bravo from Emily in Paris, the Merovingian from The Matrix series, and an army of seamstresses she eventually ends up leading toward unionizing and she hopes, saving this world-famous artisanal small business from bankruptcy. Mrs. Harris saunters along a rather long and winding road indeed, one that leads Dior to an identical epiphany seen in last year’s House of Gucci — to wit: “What if…we also sold to poors?” In Gucci that was a second-act source of homicidal conflict; here it’s a quaint tea-time denouement that earns its old-fashioned feel-good charms.

Navalny (HBO, courtesy of our cable company’s most recent free “Watchathon” weekend): If you thought Marcel the Shell had an internet fandom, wait’ll you meet Alexei Navalny, the young-ish Russian opposition leader who was a big, big deal on social media for years while The Powers That Be sprang traps on him like Wile E. Coyote — including a headline-news assassination attempt via poisoning — until one finally worked and he’s been in prison on bogus charges ever since. Daniel Roher’s documentary follows the journey from smiles to tears, and is absolutely worth seeking out for its astounding tragicomic centerpiece: after Navalny allies use cell-tower records and other resources to narrow down the government-issue suspects in his poisoning, he and two associates begin cold-calling them one by one to see if he can get them to talk while they record. After the first couple guys realize who it is and hang up on him, he switches gears and tries prank-calling one instead. The resulting chat, captured for posterity here and in his channels, is the sort of staggering, delightfully horrifying “gotcha” that every true-crime filmmaker would sell their soul to get. Like, sell it even harder, I mean. Like, second-mortgaging their soul if they could.

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (Redbox rental): Shrek 3 was so superfluous that I never bothered with the fourth one or with Antonio Banderas’ first Zorro-Cat spinoff. Oscar Quest self-obligated me to wade into the series’ sixth episode nearly cold and, wow, going Mike Myers-less makes such a tremendous difference. The killer kitty returns for a fantastic fantasy involving a wish-granting MacGuffin, a spookity forest whose dangers metamorphose depending on who’s foraying into it, and multiple antagonists vying for the same prize: Funniest Character in the Movie. And everyone wins! John Mullaney! Florence Pugh! Olivia Colman! British tough-guy Ray Winstone! Samson Kayo from Our Flag Means Death! My personal favorite, Harvey Guillen from What We Do in the Shadows, as a tiny, underwitted, bighearted mutt who feigns cathood to survive but dreams of becoming a therapy dog! For diehard Shrekverse fans, the always-welcome Salma Hayek Pinault returns as a rival of Banderas, whose feline avatar in turn is struggling with the aging process and desperate not to let it show (I can relate). The animation was beyond top-notch, even the gratuitous shifts from standard DreamWorks sheen into Spider-Verse Mode for the biggest action sequences. Also, side note to self: after his performance here as a vulpine Death Himself wielding a nasty pair of scythes, add Wagner Moura to the ever-lengthening list of Actors I Need to Watch Closely When I Finally Get Around to Narcos.

Jared Harris as an old-timey ship's captain, benignly judging a li'l Black girl stowaway.

All these years we’ve wasted time on pirate movies when they could’ve been making sea-monster-hunter movies instead.

The Sea Beast (Netflix): Someday there’ll be a sad animation era when nine out of every ten kiddie flicks will shift into Spider-Verse Mode because they feel they have to, and they’ll suck at it and ruin Spider-Verse Mode for everyone. For now let’s treasure films like The Sea Beast that feels no such bandwagon compulsion and pushes the boundaries of the norm into the super-norm from frame one. Quality control shouldn’t be a surprise given the resume of director Chris Williams (Bolt, Big Hero 6, Moana), but somehow I keep underestimating Netflix’s animation acquisitions and in fact hadn’t even heard of this till a week before its Oscar-nom announcement. It’s a glorious epic in which olde-tyme monster hunters sail the high seas where Here There Be Monsters till they slay them and statues are made in tribute. Even before pressing Play you know inevitably the main monster will be just misunderstood, but many, many more surprises lie in store, including but not limited to its vocal MVPs — Karl Urban as Our Hero, Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Broadchurch, Secrets and Lies), Downton Abbey‘s Jim Carter, his former castmate Dan Stevens, and — I cannot extol his virtues enough — Jared Harris having the time of his life as a salty, grumpy captain who’s spent his lifetime becoming the greatest waterborne hands-on kaiju-fighter of all time.

Tell It Like a Woman (streaming rental): This charity-driven anthology of seven tales in which Women Overcome Things was so off the world’s radar that its nomination for Best Original Song (“Applause”, written by career Top-40 hit-maker and 14-time nominee Diane Warren) apparently came to its distributor’s surprise, who then hurriedly released it online so it would exist outside of the cast and crew’s complimentary DVD copies. The first two tales are its strongest — one co-written by Twilight‘s Catherine Hardwicke and directed by Taraji P. Henson, in which Jennifer Hudson plays a troubled inmate who might have a shot at rehab and redemption if she can ignore inner hectoring from her full-size devil-side self; the other, directed by Hardwicke, has Marcia Gay Harden playing a real-life doctor and helper of L.A.’s homeless, doing her best to administer care to a grungy Cara Delevingne who has a lot of layers to unravel, literally and otherwise. Those two could’ve competed in the Best Live-Action Shorts category; their five companion pieces range from instantly forgettable to darkly warm-‘n’-fuzzy (the musical finale, “Sharing a Ride”). Fun trivia: as of tonight no one’s even added this project to either Hardwicke’s or Henson’s Wikipedia entries yet.

To Leslie (streaming rental): One of the year’s most controversial nominees lets Andrea Riseborough, unfairly overlooked in countless other films before now (Oblivion! Birdman! the Mandy in Mandy!), go through the familiar motions of playing a bedraggled addict who might qualify for redemption if she can give up her lower-class Babylon-level self-destruction and reclaim her life and her dignity in that order. Hillbilly Elegy was just two years ago and wasn’t a trailblazer of the old-school weepy Just Say No melodrama genre, and To Leslie learned little from the knocks it took. The actor-clique who waged a Weinsteinian media-flooding campaign to get her nominated (and where were they when this needed to sell theater tickets last year?) don’t impress me as much as the other actors who actually showed up for her in the movie itself. Stephen Root doesn’t get time to do much (he already just played an addict’s unhelpful acquaintance last year in Four Good Days), but if this film had made more than $27,000 at the U.S. box office, the talk of the town would be Allison Janney as a former family friend who’s seen every side of Leslie for decades, catalogued all her worst sins, revels in making her suffer…and comes to realize she can’t go on like that. Her riveting, steely monologue at the end is one of The Year’s Best. Too bad Team Riseborough didn’t show up for her.

Triangle of Sadness (streaming rental): Wanna see vapid rich folks act vapidly for repetitive stretches, then watch them suffer? That’s an enormous cottage industry in entertainment nowadays, kind of like that time in the ’80s when 99 out of every 100 movie villains was Middle Eastern for a while. Sometimes, sure, my poor childhood sets me up as an easy mark for “LOL rich people suck”, but I’ve developed a standard or two as I’ve aged. The film’s central conceit — that if you’re on a yacht and you aren’t an employee, you’re scum on principle (I’ve never been on one, so yippee, I’m in the clear) — assumes that’s all the prompt we need to cheer and hoot like an Arsenio Hall Show audience once the cruise goes topsy-turvy and the deaths and vomit start piling up. Had its first chapter been cut entirely, and the second chapter hadn’t been so witless or wasn’t more self-indulgent than its targets, then the third and final chapter might’ve earned some props. The Menu did all this better on every level.

…and that’s the end of my Oscar Quest 2023. Enjoy what you’re willing to, and we’ll see you back here after the Sunday night ceremony in all its low-rated pomp and joy and unintentional hilarity!

“Close”: Can Two BFFs Hug a Lot and Still Be Just Friends?

A boy smiles and holds up his sketch of his BFF, who didn't realize it would be intentionally crappy.

“Please don’t laugh. We spent our entire effects budget on just the one drawing.”

Dunno about you, but for me 13 was the worst. Everything was confusing and awkward and lonely and humiliating and uninhibited and oppressive all at once, and the noisy sweatbox that was junior high school cranked every negative emotion up to 13. Our mandatory classroom viewings of the “changing bodies” video were two years earlier — laughable and boring, outdated and technically informative compared to The Talk that some of us never heard at home. With all the peer pressure and social panic, the misery and self-loathing, the cliques ruling the open spaces and the nerds staking claim on the deserted corners…honestly, it’s a wonder we as a species ever make it to 14.

Not much has changed. Teens gonna teen. Society hasn’t found the cure for puberty. Big Pharma might have tools to procrastinate it, and various addictions might drown out its screams, but sooner or later it comes for us. Anyone with their defenses down when it hits is doomed, which was pretty much all of us. From Belgium’s version of the life phase I miss least, director/co-writer Lukas Dhont brings us together with Close, one of this year’s Academy Award nominees for Best International Feature, which just reached Indianapolis theaters last weekend and broke every heart that ventured out for the occasion.

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The MCC 2023 Oscar-Nominated Short Film Revue

Two stop-motion puppets: a puzzled office worker looks weirdly at his calm, seated coworker who may not be real.

Just another day at the office…OR IS IT?

Each year since 2009 (except for 2021’s pandemic lockdown marathon) I’ve paid visits to Keystone Art Cinema, the oldest surviving art-film theater in Indianapolis, to view the big-screen releases of the Academy Award nominees for Best Live-Action Short Film and Best Animated Short Film. Results vary each time and aren’t always for all audiences, but I appreciate the opportunities to sample such works and see what the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences deemed worthy of celebrating, whether I agree with their collective opinions or not. This year my wife and adult son also accompanied me on the journey even though my annual Oscar Quest is not their problem.

Since 2019 I’ve also assigned myself the extra-credit activity of catching as many nominees for Best Documentary Short Film as possible, depending on their availability online. But first up: my rankings of this year’s five Best Animated Short Film nominees, once again a mixed bag. For the second year in a row, the five nominees ran so long that no “Highly Commended” runners-up were packaged with the program. Links are provided where available in non-bootlegged form.

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The Power and Powerlessness of Memory Curation: “The Fabelmans” vs. “Aftersun”

Movie poster for "The Fabelmans", one of several in an outdoor grid.

Another one from the Department of the Power of Movies. If you’ve seen it, you’ll note the horizon is on the bottom.

Much bandwidth has been devoted to the movies-about-moviemaking subgenre that feels as if it’s relatively exploded here in the later pandemic years. Filmmakers are looking back on their lives with emphases on their relationship to movies and on their upbringing, often in that order. Given the perpetually precarious state of the world, everyone with at least a rudimentary level of self-awareness is in a reflective mood nowadays. Some of their stories are like a live feed staged in their mind palace, replete with witty host repartee and snacks. Others are more like candid self-therapy sessions, surveying the damage of years past and the few clues they still have on hand to decipher What It All Meant. The results among these motion-memoirs rely on whatever footage they’ve collected that hasn’t decayed like so much neglected celluloid, and on their level of control over the final cut.

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Yes, There Are Scenes During and After the “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” End Credits

Two Paul Rudds facing each other in shock in Ant-Man costumes.

Wacky Scott Lang vs. Serious Scott Lang: who wins?

Phase 5 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe begins! Paul Rudd returns for his fifth MCU outing and the third film in the Ant-Man trilogy! Unless they make more and it isn’t a trilogy! Which is just as well, because we’ve never had a literal, cohesive, hermetically self-contained MCU trilogy anyway. None of the first three Thor films resembles the other, the arcs of Iron Man and Captain America are incomplete without the four Avengers films, and Ant-Man’s life likewise had pivotal moments in Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Endgame. I’d love to pretend Guardians of the Galaxy will be the exception come May, but the story of Star-Lord and Gamora in Volume 3 won’t make sense without the traumatic events of Avengers: Infinity War as well as Endgame. As their multiverse presently stands, there’s been no such credible thing as a “Marvel trilogy” since Blade.

After a three-month moment of silence for us all to meditate on the fallout from Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, the MCU’s back with its 31st big-screen chapter, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, ostensibly directed by returning Ant-maestro Peyton Reed (he of Bring It On and the unjustly forgotten Down with Love), whose sensibilities are definitely felt in the film’s first ten minutes and its last twenty, but not nearly so much during the long, dour, draggy, perfunctory infodump and overextended Star Wars Cantina interlude between them, like an endless row of empty, pastel-graffitied boxcars separating engine and caboose.

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Twelve Angry “Women Talking”

The "Women Talking" movie poster hanging outside a theater at night next to two other posters for female-led films.

Not a lot of helpless damsels in distress out there at the theaters lately.

Sarah Polley’s Women Talking was the last of this year’s ten Best Picture nominees to see a theatrical release outside NYC, L.A., or film festivals, which don’t count as a release into the real world. Now that I’ve seen all ten, I realize it isn’t the flashiest, and it was probably the least expensive to make, but the titular discussion group is now in my Top 3 of that list, in good company with Evelyn Quan and Lydia Tár. Not that they need males vouching for them. On a related note, I imagine a film called Men Vouching would be the worst — just two hours of dudes indiscriminately giving everything two thumbs up, even movies that don’t contain Marvel or DC products. It’d still be better than 90% of all YouTube movie review channels, but not by much.

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Local Doughy Guy Confesses to Loving “The Whale”

Brendan Fraser smiling at us as Charlie from "The Whale".

Why is this man smiling?

“Brendan Fraser is back, and this time…he’s fat!

That was my first impression upon seeing the poster for Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale. Despite the reports of fanatical applause at film festivals that went on for weeks and caused repetitive stress injuries in some critics’ clapping muscles, I wasn’t immediately sold. Our clues to its content were an unhappy gaze into a short distance, a packed bookshelf behind his head, and the name of the director whose last three films were Black Swan, Noah, and Mother. I’d disliked one and skipped the other two. Also, yes, to a lesser extent there was the fat concern.

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Death and the High Cost of “Living”

movie poster for "Living" showing Bill Nighy standing before a very British building in dapper suit and bowler, holding a cane and checking his watch.

John Steed like you’ve never seen him before!

Remember that time Bill Nighy was in the Pirates of the Caribbean series as the Dread Pirate Cthulhu? If you were a celebrated actor given six months to live, it wasn’t the sort of role that’d rise to the top of your bucket list unless you were desperate to provide for your loved ones, was it? Living, on the other hand, would make a more sensible parting gift to those left behind. Not that Nighy’s dying anytime soon! God forbid. I’m just saying I prefer his natural talents not be hidden behind CG seafood.

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“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed”: The War on Sacklers

Nan Goldin lying down in front of a museum as a protest against the Sacklers. Fake dollar bills are stuck to her which read "OXY" instead of "ONE".

Worthless OxyContin-Bucks festoon a possum-playing Nan Goldin at an anti-Sackler protest.

One of my favorite parts of every Academy Awards season is the AMPAS-approved list of documentary recommendations (i.e., the Best Documentary Feature nominations), which for casual dabblers like me helps triage the 12,000 nonfiction productions released through streamers over the past year, at least 11,900 of which were slapped together with all the ethics and dignity of Tiger King. Sometimes I’m familiar with the subject at hand but appreciate a fresh take. Sometimes they’re an educational experience for me as relative ignoramus. And sometimes, as with the case of Laura Poitras’ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, I walk unprepared into a world wildly distant from my own, and yet I come out cheering.

(Well, “walk” might be an understatement in this case: my son and I sprinted to catch the penultimate showing of this film at one of our local indie cinemas before it vanished from Indianapolis altogether. Expect it on home video in the near future, but in many locales it may be challenging to fill in its blank on your Oscar scorecard before the ceremony.)

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