“A Complete Unknown”: Deluxx Folk Explosion

February 18, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Movie poster with Timothee Chalamet onstage, playing acoustic guitar and harmonica holder around his neck.

As seen on Saturday Night Live!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Oscar Quest ’25 continues! Once again we see how many among the latest wave of Academy Award nominees I can catch before the big ABC ceremony, regardless of whether or not I’ve previously connected with the subject matter in the slightest, and whether or not I’ll sound like a philistine to said subject’s biggest fans who outnumber me 500 million to 1. It wouldn’t be my first time speaking as an ignoramus who’s willing to learn.

Over the years James Mangold has directed films of all sizes and accumulated enough goodwill among studios and audiences alike that he’s now alternating between them — not exactly the vaunted “one for them, one for me” model of project selection, considering the last time he spent under $20 million on a film was 1997’s Cop Land. A steady career of dramas (and one fantasy-lite rom-com, the underrated Kate & Leopold) segued into blockbuster franchising with The Wolverine and Logan (still in my superhero-film Top 3), returned to true-story territory with Ford v. Ferrari, then was handed the golden keys to the Indiana Jones series and…uh, lost a lot of Disney’s money, but at least he helped the old man live down the one with Mutt and the aliens in it.

Mangold manages to do more with a little less in A Complete Unknown, technically another biopic in the manner of his Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line, though it only covers a five-year period — the early years of Bob Dylan, which seem enough to convey his impact on the world of folk music and stopping short of…well, the last five decades of his career that fell within my lifetime. Hence why I procrastinated seeing this ever since its Christmas Day release until after it was a confirmed Oscar nominee rather than a presumptive one: folk music is generally not my thing.

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Yes, There’s a Scene After the “Captain America: Brave New World” End Credits

February 16, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , 22 Comments
IMAX lobby poster of Red Hulk towering menacingly over Anthony Mackie's Captain America.

Every heart bleeds true under Red, fight and BOOM.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: our family keeps up with the Marvel Cinematic Universe line of comic-book screen adaptation and transmutation products! Yes, we’ve even watched the ones that show up at the low end of every “Every MCU Movie and TV Show, Ranked” listicle whose criteria change whenever new interns update it. Someone needs to sort those with an “Every MCU Ranking Listicle, Ranked” listicle, but it won’t be me. Between the Marvel Zombies that give every release an A only because they have the “Marvel” cattle-brand stamped on them, and the four-hour YouTube anti-“woke” tantrum-throwers who think hate-watching is a wise use of their limited lifespans, I’d never get more than halfway through most of the contenders without developing listicular cancer.

I was perhaps a tad less cranky than the pro critics who groused about the MCU’s 35th film, Captain America: Brave New World, and the curious decision to devote Anthony Mackie’s first solo Marvel marquee to sewing up dangling threads from previous works. I can’t say it’d go in the top half of my own MCU rankings, but it got some things right, though part of the plan involved pleasing Disney’s superiors by forcing the MCU to diverge into a completely different political backdrop, quainter than our own reality.

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“Sing Sing”: The Divines’ Comedy

February 13, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Colman Domingo as a prison inmate sitting against an outdoor courtyard wall, laughing with eyes closed.

Colman Domingo, two-time nominee for Best Actor — for this and last year’s Rustin.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Oscar Quest ’25 continues! Once again we see how many among the latest wave of Academy Award nominees I can catch before the big ABC ceremony, no matter how much chase they give me as their showtimes are few and far between — disappearing from all local screens one week, only to pop up the next as a last-minute addition to fill up any remaining back-of-the-theater showings that weren’t already taken up by the cartoon about the weredog beat-cop.

Such was the elusive cat-and-mouse chase between me and Sing Sing, which seemed to hold down more screens here in Indy before its three Oscar nominations were announced. It finally slowed down and let me catch up so I could marvel at Colman Domingo’s bravura performance in a very different prison drama — no sex, drugs, gore, riots, or interfaith gang wars among tattooed factions. (There are tattoos, but no one declares war over wearing the wrong ones.) It’s based on the true story of a community of men encouraging each other to find new purpose in their broken lives behind bars.

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Yes, There’s a Q&A After the “September 5” End Credits

February 8, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Movie poster for "September 5" depicting the four main cast members, each visage divided across multiple TV screens.

We are all made of screens.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Oscar Quest ’25 continues! Once again we see how many among the latest wave of Academy Award nominees I can catch before the big ABC ceremony, even those named in just one category. In a possible historical first, one of our nominees is actually about ABC.

The last time Peter Sarsgaard starred in a true-life tale of journalism and ethics, Shattered Glass was riveting and remains The Greatest Hayden Christensen Film of All Time. Sarsgaard returns to the news beat in September 5, moving from newsprint to live TV in an unofficial yet historically sequential headline-news prequel to Steven Spielberg’s 2005 Best Picture nominee Munich. It’s a true-life drama that’s half found-footage suspense and half You Are There recreation of one of the most horrifying moments in sports history.

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“Nickel Boys”: Press Start to Begin Empathy

February 6, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Large standee for the film next to a white theater wall. The image is first-person viewpoint from a kid on a bicycle, riding behind another one, both heading down a straight country road surrounded by fields.

New | Continue | Load | Save | Options | Extras

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Oscar Quest ’25 continues! Once again we see how many among the latest wave of Academy Award nominees I can catch before the big ABC ceremony. Every year it’s a lively ballroom dance between new voices and For Your Oscar Consideration familiarity. Sometimes it’s two for the price of one.

Academy Award Winner RaMell Ross won that honorific with the live-action short film Hale County This Morning, This Evening back in 2019. This year the director scored another shot at the trophies with his first full-length feature, Nickel Boys — a period-piece drama about a subject familiar to longtime Oscar fans, not to mention historians and other decent folks still working and/or waiting for social sciences to discover the cure for American racism. To differentiate the film from past exemplars, Ross conducts an extended experiment with the narrative vantage approach that’s seemed revolutionary to scores of film critics whose only pastime is movies.

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My Reading Stacks 2025 #1: Walter White, Saul Goodman, and the Joy of Recaps

February 2, 2025 By in Comics/Lit, TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Each of the two books covered in this entry -- one with chemistry glassware all over it in a Jolly Roger shape, the other with a billboard silhouette and a tiny shyster standing at its base.

The one on the left is autographed!

Welcome once again to our recurring MCC feature in which I scribble capsule reviews of everything I’ve read lately that was published in a physical format over a certain page count with a squarebound spine on it — novels, original graphic novels, trade paperbacks, infrequent nonfiction dalliances, and so on. Due to the way I structure my media-consumption time blocks, the list will always feature more graphic novels than works of prose and pure text, though I do try to diversify my literary diet as time and acquisitions permit. This installment is all prose, though.

Granted, I haven’t even finished “My 2024 Reading Stacks” yet. Trust me, forgetting them is impossible — the literal stacks of books are still cluttering the living room, waiting for encapsulation here before they go to their next home in our library. I’ll get to those in the near future, but for calendar-related reasons I’m taking a quick timeout from Oscar Quest ’25 to praise a pair of recent reads that captured my attention at the intersection of reading and binge-watching.

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“The Brutalist”: Architectural Gothic

January 31, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
"The Brutalist" poster, with Adrien Brody lit by a furnace and surrounded by metalworking sparks below the logo and fine print.

A.I. art prompt: “Adrien Brody attacked by the internet, symbolized as flying glowworms”.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Oscar Quest ’25 continues! Once again we see how many among the latest wave of Academy Award nominees I can catch before the big ABC ceremony. The rules are simple and the points don’t matter to anyone but me.

Critics had already been raving about The Brutalist weeks before a big night at the Golden Globes gave it some light mainstream recognition. Based on the buzz, I saw it two days before its Oscar nominations were announced so I could cross it off my checklist in advance. AMPAS voters traditionally love sweeping epics at the intersection of personal ambition and world history, regardless of runtime or controversies. Director/co-writer Brady Corbet (Vox Lux) and co-writer Mona Fastvold (Apple’s The Crowded Room) figured the time was right for a resonant, fictional, occasionally ugly tale of underestimated immigrants, family rent asunder, talent discovery, teamwork, overreach, exploitation, and how the symbiosis between artist and patron can drift from reign to rot.

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“Wolf Man”: The Entropy of Lycanthropy

January 26, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Woman with pricey hairdo and flannel shirt in a dark room viewed through a werewolf's perspective so the colors are weirdly red and blue around the shadows.

Life viewed through the eyes of a werewolf — warped colors and very few survivors.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Leigh Whannell’s reinvention of The Invisible Man was my favorite of the four whole films I saw in theaters in 2020 and smartly updated James Whale’s original mad scientist into a millennial tech-bro stalker who just wanted to dominate a single fed-up ex rather than the whole unwieldy world. Though Universal Pictures claims they’ve given up on their plan to reboot their classic monsters in an all-new shared universe (with or without a vaudeville act to string them together again), it wasn’t exactly counterevidential when they let Whannell take another crack at the catalog.

The next title on his checklist is The Wolf Man, but he’s dropped the “the” (it’s cleaner!) and adapted it to another modern metaphor rather than perpetuate the whole “gypsy curse” origin that would invite the wrath of the Romani on social media. The metaphor suits a smaller, more intimate thriller, a phrase that might not appeal to the millions who love their Universal Monsters big ‘n’ broad, or to fans of Twilight or Underworld who were hoping to see an entire team of vulpine antiheroes fighting a horror-fantasy gang war.

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My Oscar Quest 2025 Quick-Start Scorecard

January 24, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks, TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Robot has baby bird in its palm. Hand emits red and orange light rays into the darkness around them, diffused through its fingers.

The Wild Robot, my favorite film of 2024, nominated for three Academy Awards!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: every winter is my annual Oscar Quest! The game is simple but time-consuming: after the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences announces their latest nominations for the Academy Awards, I make plans to catch the nominees in every category, 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. They have the Super Bowl; I have the Oscars.

I’ve seen every Oscar-nominated feature and short released between 2021 and 2023 — running the full gamut from the highest-priority Best Picture contenders down to the mediocre flicks with negative Tomatometer scores that show up only for Best Original Song. I’ve seen every Best Picture winner from Wings to Oppenheimer, and every Best Picture nominee from 1984 to the present, many of which were memorable and worth the hunt. I’ve enjoyed surprises and suffered regrets.

Sometimes I have to wait for smaller films to arrive at the art-house theaters here in Indianapolis. Sometimes I luck out and they’re available on our subscribed streaming services of choice. Sometimes my only option is a streaming rental for a few dollars more. For extreme cases and a bit of savings, I used to turn to Redbox kiosk rentals, but alas, as of last July they are no more. I go wherever the Quest takes me, while my wife Anne waits patiently at home or in another room, like Penelope looking forlornly at her calendar and wondering why that pigheaded Odysseus insists on stopping at every single time-wasting Mediterranean island in his way.

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I Did Not See “Anora”. You Are Not Reading This.

January 19, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment
A smiling young couple sit at a Vegas card table, she in his lap, arms around his neck.

TikTok was made for couples like them.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: I’m a prude who’ll never win a debate at Film Twitter’s water cooler and is not among the pro critics who spent the past few years writing thinkpieces about the lack of sex in today’s movies, up until Poor Things and Challengers apparently sated their appetites while they waited for the next Criterion 4K-remastered cult-favorite re-releases about sexual awakening or sexual liberation, which we all need now more than ever in case the internet runs out of porn. Ever the irrelevant blogger, I’m happy keeping my amateur-hobbyist consumption within certain boundaries.

That personal guideline sometimes conflicts with the rules of my favorite annual game: Oscar Quest! I’ve seen every Academy Award Nominee released from 2021 to the present and continue running myself into the ground while seeing how many nominees I can watch in every single category before the big ceremony — 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. Some years, I’ll try getting a head start and watch a few potential nominees in advance, based on buzz among the critics I follow on social media and, for my first time this year, begrudgingly peeking at the Golden Globes’ finalist list for possibilities. Sometimes the pre-homework pays off; sometimes I end up having watched a movie just for movie-watching’s sake.

Hence: Anora, a tiny indie released last fall that critics still won’t shut up about. I greatly enjoyed one of writer/director Sean Baker’s previous films, The Florida Project, whose characters and living situations reminded me of a few distant relatives and of old people I knew in my bygone restaurant-manager days. (Willem Dafoe picked up a deserved Oscar nod for it!) Anora‘s reviews positively glowed but kept calling it “SEXY!”, which for me is usually Strike One on my scorecard before deciding whether to see a given film. Nevertheless, I gave it a shot in hopes of reducing my fun workload after the Oscar nominations are announced this Thursday morning. As it turns out, I was pleasantly surprised once I could stop averting my eyes after the first twenty minutes.

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