Category Archives: Movies/Films/Flicks

The Oscars 2023 Season Finale

March 13, 2023 By in Movies/Films/Flicks, TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Posters for all this year's 10 Best Picture nominees.

Excerpted from host Jimmy Kimmel’s ABC ad for the event, which also featured Jon Hamm and a very special guest.

Oscar season is over at last! Tonight ABC aired the 95th Academy Awards, once again held at ye olde Dolby Theatre and hosted for a third time by ABC’s favorite trooper Jimmy Kimmel. Coming in at 158 minutes by my clock including end credits, it was nowhere near the longest ceremony ever, but that didn’t stop Kimmel and his writing staff from relying on runtime jokes for half their material. To be fair, runtime jokes are as much an Oscar Night tradition as the lengthy runtime itself. If watching these telecasts is your annual Super Bowl, then you’re used to both of those things.

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

March 12, 2023 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment
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

March 6, 2023 By in Movies/Films/Flicks, TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Tobey Maguire as a rich, Mob-connected ghoul in "Babylon"

Peter Parker 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.

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

March 2, 2023 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
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

February 26, 2023 By in Movies/Films/Flicks, TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
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”

February 23, 2023 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
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

February 21, 2023 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
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”

February 17, 2023 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
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”

February 13, 2023 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
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”

February 9, 2023 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
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

February 4, 2023 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
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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My Oscars Quest 2023 Quick-Start Scorecard

January 24, 2023 By in Movies/Films/Flicks, TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Michelle Yeoh looking peaceful, eyes closed, with an explosion behind her.

Michelle Yeoh descends from the heavens to accept her honors.

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. When new releases were going quickly or directly to home video while theaters were shuttered, the Expanded Challenge was easier for me. I saw all but two of last year’s nominees, and am still missing eight nominees from the year before that. Someday maybe I’ll complete those sets. In the meantime, I have concerns about this year’s logistics now that theaters are back in business. I’m probably looking at far more trips away from home to reach my pointless personal goal, mood and local cinema schedules permitting.

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2022 at the Movies at My House

January 22, 2023 By in Movies/Films/Flicks, TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Halle Berry and Patrick Wilson as astronauts just standing there looking pained.

Live footage of Halle Berry and Patrick Wilson exiled off-planet as punishment for costarring in Moonfall.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: in 2022 I made 18 trips to the theater to see films made that same year. Though I’ve tried to get back out there with my vaccines and my restlessness and whatnot, more often than not the motivation level still wasn’t quite where it used to be. As a sort of compromise, in the year’s back half I tried to overcompensate and catch up with 2022 through our various streaming subscriptions and a smattering of Redbox rentals. We don’t have HBO Max or Amazon Prime, but I nevertheless watched plenty by estimation, enough to present the third annual installment of the MCC tradition borne of the pandemic: a ranking of all the brand new films I saw on comfy, convenient home video in their year of release.

Whittling away any and every film with a pre-2022 release date, our living room hosted 28 films in 2022 that fit the specific parameters for this list. We’re not far away from the Oscars’ nominations announcement on January 24th, which for weeks I’ve been keeping in the back of my mind as the deadline for this listicle, so…on with the countdown!

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My 2022 at the Movies, Part 2 of 2: The Year’s Best

January 20, 2023 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
The Batmobile jumping through an explosion in "The Batman".

Brought to you by EXPLOSIONS! They’re good for what bores ya!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: in 2022 I made 18 trips to the theater to see films made that same year. In Part 1 we ranked the Bottom 8 backwards from “Blockbuster Video clearance bin” to “groundbreaking yet ordinary”, which I realize makes little sense to anyone who lives outside my own head, but is the sort of convoluted flaw you need to expect from a hobbyist who super-likes movies, occasionally enjoys writing about them, but refuses to rate them on an ordinate scale comprising numbers, letters, stars, adjectives, or cutesy emoji.

And now, the countdown concludes with the ten most relatively awesome films I saw at a theater in 2022 that were released for general audiences in same. Onward!

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My 2022 at the Movies, Part 1 of 2: The Year’s Worst

January 15, 2023 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Jared Leto as Michael Morbius holds a hand up to the camera.

Talk to the Morb.

It’s listing time again! In today’s entertainment consumption sphere, all experiences must be pitted against each other and assigned numeric values that are ultimately arbitrary to anyone except the writer themselves. It’s just this fun thing some of us love doing even though the rules are made up and the points don’t matter.

I saw 18 films in theaters in 2022 that were actually released in 2022, an 18.2% decrease over 2021 despite having taken more vaccines than ever, well short of my all-time high of 32 films in 2019. That number doesn’t include the seven Academy Award nominees that were officially 2021 releases, but which I saw later as part of my annual Oscar Quest. It definitely doesn’t include all the 2022 films I watched on streaming services, which will receive their own much longer two-part listicle.

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“The Menu”: Tonight’s Special is a 10-Course Massacre

December 26, 2022 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Anya Taylor-Joy and Ralph Fiennes face off as diner and chef in "The Menu".

“No, miss, I will not recite today’s specials in Voldemort’s voice.”

Speaking as someone who’s been in customer service for 34years and counting: when everything goes well, the symbiosis between a service team and their customer — whether a singular exchange or a recurring relationship — makes for a heartening occasion that both sides can appreciate. They pull off the quid pro quo between creator/provider and receiver/consumer, and everybody wins.

When things go wrong between the two parties, the results can be anywhere from mild disappointment to small-scale war. The customer gets full of themselves, or the employees show up in a foul mood, or there’s a miscommunication between the sides that could be resolved with some calm negotiation, yet isn’t. No one wins, everyone’s miserable, and it’s another round of cringing when they look back on That One Time years later.

The Menu falls in the latter column as an extreme worst-case scenario. An evening gone wrong becomes no mere comedy of errors, but an all-out class-war ambush where no one is innocent.

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“Avatar: The Way of Water”, the Weight of a Waterworld and the Wonder of Warrior Whales

December 23, 2022 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Na'vi characters greeting each other in "Avatar The Way of Water".

Jake Sully, a fish out of water, becomes a little fish in a bigger pond, fishes for compliments from his hosts, believes he has bigger fish to fry, and realizes there’re other fish in the sea.

It’s been 13 years since the original Avatar hit theaters in December 2009, made a zillion dollars, and was nominated for a couple of awards. It was two years before this site existed, four years before I signed up for our first streaming service, 4½ years before I bought my first smartphone, and seven months before I joined Twitter. My son was in middle school. Barack Obama had been President for less than a year. Breaking Bad was two seasons in and a handful of AMC viewers thought it was keen.

It’s in those primitive times that James Cameron unleashed Avatar‘s technological might. I saw it twice in theaters, both times in 3-D. The first time, I was enthralled and perhaps a little giddy. The second time, I nodded off during one of the space-pterodactyl taming sequences. Over a decade in the making, the first sequel Avatar: The Way of Water vows that any theater-goer who pays extra to see it in a deluxe format cannot possibly sleep through a single second of it unless the speakers give them a concussion.

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“Tár”: Classical Gaslighting

November 18, 2022 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Cate Blanchett as Lydia Tar expounding upon the classical music world to a lunch companion in the film "Tar".

“But enough about me, let’s talk a little more about ME…”

Full disclosure: I suck at fathoming and sorting the full breadth and scope of classical music in all its storied splendor. I can be taught, but my retention sucks through no conscious choice on my part. My wife Anne is far more skilled at recognizing symphonies and suites, catching nuances, spotting themes in film scores and remembering titles of lyricless songs. But she hasn’t seen Tár and prefers to let/watch/make me write my own blog, so here we are with a philistine on the keys, hopefully not too tone-deaf.

Not that I wasn’t looking forward to this! I still recall writer/director Todd Field’s debut, 2001’s In the Bedroom, a Best Picture nominee in which Tom Wilkinson and Sissy Spacek were equally moving as parents dealing with the death of their adult son, Terminator 3‘s John Connor. I never got around to his follow-up Little Children, but that’s my fault, not Field’s. This time I didn’t wait to be prompted by my annual Oscar quest to run out and catch his next work, a taut drama so impeccably dressed and so meticulously crafted within its very specific milieu that you’re halfway into the film before you realize you’re viewing the entire edifice through an unreliable vantage.

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Yes, There’s a Scene During the “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” End Credits

November 13, 2022 By in Comics/Lit, Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Danai Gurira and Letitia Wright as Okoye and Shuri, wearing expensive non-superhero fashions to "blend in" with mixed results, from Marvel's "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever".

Okoye and Shuri learned everything they know about “going undercover” from James Bond parodies.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: after going 2-for-2 on his first feature films Fruitvale Station and Creed, director Ryan Coogler raised the bar in the Marvel Cinematic Universe with Black Panther, and in turn gave Chadwick Boseman a long-overdue boost into super-stardom after years of his own fine works such as 42 and the still-underrated Persons Unknown. His death was among the many, many, many reasons we will never forgive the year 2020 for its endless curses.

Though we were blessed with chances to celebrate his life and talent posthumously in Da 5 Bloods, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and the grand surprisie of an alt-timeline Panther reprise in What If…? season one, the MCU proper never got a chance to say goodbye, to give King T’Challa of Wakanda the big sendoff he would’ve deserved if only Boseman could’ve had a couple more years to perform the honors. Coogler and co-writer Joe Robert Cole return for that very purpose — and so, so much more — with Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.

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“Decision to Leave”: The Mountain Between Us

November 10, 2022 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Movie poster for "Decision to Leave" with the two leads atop a mountain, standing next to a victim's chalk outline.

The detective. The widow. The mountaintop. The fall.

If you’ve seen director Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy, perhaps you get why his name might strike fear into my heart, because I can never unsee that film nor unfeel the Grand Guignol trauma I carried for days after. (I can’t think of a single reason to seek out Spike Lee’s remake, and pray no one ever makes an all-ages cartoon prequel called Oldbaby.) I’ve been afraid to watch any of Park’s other films until now. His latest, the crime-drama romance Decision to Leave, likewise follows broken souls careening off each other amidst secrets and death, but is far more interested in examining the emotional contents of two hearts than in spatchcocking them.

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