By: Henry J. Fromage –
This week was was all about the Oscars, baby, as everything that had been hiding out on me seemed to hit at once.
144. Pacifiction
This was not an Oscar nominee, but did top Cahiers du Cinema’s list of best films of the year (which, yes, does always lean a bit artsy-fartsy). You could probably levy such accusations at this nearly 3 hour portrait of the Haut-Commissaire of Tahiti as he schmoozes his way across various social scenes while trying to prevent the joint prospects of renewed French nuclear testing and protests against it. It’s a woozy, go with the flow type of film suffused with gorgeous imagery but not a lot of narrative momentum. Three Beers.
145. Cocaine Bear
This doesn’t have an Oscar nomination… yet (Best Picture 2023, mark it down). I jest, but I can report that Cocaine Bear is all of the fun you’ve heard, provided you’re down for a mix of goofy and usually effective comedy and the no holds barred gory demises of most of the fun characters creating it. Nobody would mistake this for a good movie, exactly, but it no doubt holds your attention for the duration. Three Beers.
146. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
This may be the favorite to take home the Best Documentary Oscar this year (with Navalny, which I prefer, at its heels). It tells two distinct but intertwined stories of Nan Goldin, a photographer renowned for her documenting of the art, drug, and sex scene of 70s and 80s New York, and then, after narrowly defeating her own opioid addiction, taking on the Sackler family and their company Purdue Pharma, manufacturers of Oxycontin and in a large part the hostage crisis as a whole. With her status and connections in the art world, she focused on getting the Sackler name removed from all of the galleries and museums they donated their blood money to over the years. A complex and inspiring story. Two Beers.
147. There’s Something Wrong With the Children
Call me twisted, but I’m a sucker for evil kids horror flicks (the little weirdos can be such great fodder for scares). This one isn’t A24 elevated horror or anything, but does hit its spots entertainingly, as two couples vacationing end up in peril when the two kids of the one go into a spooky cave and come out… different. Zach Gilford is great as one who finds out what’s up first and looks like a monster in his interactions with the little monsters. Three Beers.
148. TAR, Round 2
I gave this Best Picture contender another watch in a push to get my wife up to speed on the principle contenders she’d missed. It holds up every bit as well as when I first caught it in Toronto (but not at TIFF- just in a theater there). Cate Blanchett gives an absolutely fierce performance that may still pull an Anthony Hopkins and land the statue despite all of the popular support for Michelle Yeoh. A Toast.
149. The Fabelmans, Round 2
Despite suffering from one of the worst trailers in recent memory (that makes this look like the worst kind of schmaltz-fest), I was able to get my wife to watch this as well, finally, and reexamine my own feelings towards it to boot. Well, I’m happy to report it holds up fine in a second viewing, mostly because of how clearly personal it is to Spielberg, how drawn from his own real experiences, suffused with the cinematic magic that he’s had as much a hand as anyone in creating our shared language for. Two Beers.
150. The Phantom of the Open
This is one of those quintessentially British comedies about working class folks getting up to something that scandalizes stuffy upper crust folks. The thing is, this formula works more often than not, particularly when you have quality performers like Mark Rylance and Sally Hawkins on board. Rylance plays a factory worker who’s about to be laid off and decides his next occupation will be… professional golf. He registers for the British Open and is approved because nobody there could imagine someone who wasn’t actually a professional golfer registering. After he proceeds to shoot the worst round ever seen there, a very particular kind of legend is born. Three Beers.
151. Close
Belgium’s entry into the Best Foreign Language Film race is a beautifully shot and acted, devastating tale of two preteens who’ve grown up together and have a correspondingly close, innocent brotherly relationship with the kind of physical intimacy that draws negative attention from their classmates when they start a new school together. One friend (Eden Dambrine, truly superb) pushes the other away after this, leading to tragic consequences. Truly a masterfully modulated drama. A Toast.
152. Eo
This Jerzy Skolimowsky film is ostensibly not unlike the Bresson classic Au Hasard Balthazar, in which we experience the cruelties and beauties of life through the eyes of a small donkey, although perhaps a bit more of the former than the latter in this modern edition (the ending will be divisive, for sure). There’s a hypnotic quality to this cute guy’s journeys, as well as a dark undercurrent of criticism of the modern Europe he uneasily traverses. Three Beers.
153. The Quiet Girl
Like the titular young girl, this film is a sweet, subtle little thing. Cait is a 9-year-old girl who is dropped off by her father at a more well-off distant cousin’s farmstead, and the older couple are told they can keeper her as long as they wish (another baby is on the way to Cait’s already overstuffed household, after all). This is a film of subtle thawings and blossomings, shot with care and grace, and while I still think Decision To Leave should have had its slot in the Oscar race this year, it’s hard to find much fault in it, either. Two Beers.
154. Confidential Assignment 2
This sequel to the quite fun odd couple cop movie that teamed up Yoo Hae-jin and Hyun Bin as South and North Korean cops respectively who have to team up on a case sees an American third added in Daniel Henney’s suave FBI agent. The mark this time is a North Korean terrorist (an appropriately creepy Jin Seon-kyu), but it’s as much about the quips and the propulsive action than the plot, and this movie delivers on both fronts. Here’s hoping for a third. Two Beers.
155. Tell It Like a Woman
This anthology of films about impressive women by impressive women also got an Oscar nomination – yes, before it was even released and despite the fact that you still have never heard of it. That’s the power of Diane Warren, who knows how to land herself an Original Song nomination more often then not (this is now her 14th in the category, although she’s never won). Anyway, the song is fine, as are most of the shorts in the anthology, which varies in quality as they all do, although the finishing animated short was a real stinker worth a beer in itself. Some interesting names in front of and behind the camera may make it worth your while, though. Ah, and Warren’s credits song is awful. Man, she knows how to play the system. Four Beers.
156. Three Thousand Years of Longing
George Miller took a break from the world of Mad Max to shoot this curious romance between an academic expert on the evolution and history of storytelling and the literal genie in a bottle she finds in an Istanbul market (I’m assuming who can tell which is which in the picture above). The genie tells her the story of his past masters and loves (often the same) while she tries to ascertain what the catch is for her wishes (there’s always a catch). It’s lesser Miller for sure, but well acted with some striking and grotesque imagery to enjoy. Three Beers.
157. Me and Me
This is an odd but unquestionably ambitious film about a kindly schoolteacher and his wife who has a strange affliction- she becomes other people after dark. Well it’s about that until it very much isn’t, when a detective (the always great Cho Jin-woong) comes to investigate some tragic deaths in the same community, before waking up one morning to discover himself living an entirely different life than the one he thought he had. While the abrupt narrative shifts and ending may not totally cohere, at least for me, this is a film willing to take risks and deliver something different, with style. Three Beers.
158. Not Okay
This Hulu dark comedy stars Zoey Deutch as an aspiring internet writer if not influencer who denied for a writer’s workshop in Paris, but decides to staycation it and act like she’s actually there on her social media platforms. The catch- a horrendous terror attack on Paris at the same time she’s told everyone she’s there, which results in her telling an at first white-ish lie that becomes progressively darker as she allows herself to be drawn into an anti-gun movement populated by folks who really did experience these horrors firsthand. What is she to do when her social clout has never been better? Deutch plays an incredibly thin line still being sympathetic despite this undeniably sketchy choice, but this isn’t a movie meant to comfort people like her, as she learns devastatingly when it all inevitably unravels. Two Beers.
