2018 OSCAR NOMINATIONS
I can’t blame
the Oscars for what was a very forgettable year in American cinema. While
reporters were falling over themselves congratulating the Academy voters for
nominating an unprecedented number of foreign films in a variety of categories,
the reason might have been that the domestic options were so limited.
Even with the
small numbers of quality films, good ones were still ignored, but that’s hardly
breaking news. I wasn’t surprised that my picks for the year’s best two films, “A
Private War” and “First Reformed” were left out of the nominees, though you
would have though the Academy voters would have noticed the career-best
performances by Rosamund Pike and Ethan Hawke (both previous nominees) in those
films. At least “First Reformed” writer-director Paul Schrader scored a writing
nomination for the film, a first for one of the preeminent screenwriters of the
past 45 years.
I was very
pleased that Willem Dafoe’s heartbreaking portrayal of Vincent van Gogh in “At
Eternity’s Gate” was recognized along with Glenn Close’s scorching performance
in “The Wife.” But where is Charlize Theron’s astonishing work in “Tully,” as a
mother struggling with postpartum depression? If it had been released in
December, her nomination would have been a sure thing.
The truth is
that even when movies (like “A Private War” and “Tully”) focus on women, the
new and improved Academy membership still ignores them unless they are high-profile
releases.
And while I can’t imagine anyone thinking that
“Black Panther” is among the year’s best eight films, it seems obvious that the
supporting work of Michael B. Jordan and Letitia Wright from that film deserved
recognition. Excellent work by Claire Foy as Janet Armstrong in “First Man” and
Millicent Simmonds as the pissed-off daughter in “A Quiet Place” were also left
off for the overrated performances of Emma Stone and Rachel Weitz in “The
Favourite.” In fact, the two women playing royals in “Mary Queen of Scots,”
Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie, were more deserving of nominations.
Of course, if the
voters followed my recommendations, no one would watch the Oscar telecast. But
if “Roma” is the night’s big winner, as most predict, it will be yet again
another best picture that few moviegoers have seen. Some articles have
indicated that the expanded Academy membership includes many more non-America
voters, explaining the increased representation of foreign films. If that is
the case, the “diversification” of the voters may not turn out as expected: instead
of more spots for American minority actors and directors, foreign artists will
receive more Oscar love. The best laid plans….
I can see a day
when half the best picture nominees are Marvel, DC or some variety of superhero
films and the rest are movies available only on streaming services. If the
Academy wants to remain relevant, it may have no choice. Who really wants to
see a movie on the big screen in an actual theater, anyway?
My list of the
year’s best, still a work in progress, was difficult to assemble as I simply
didn’t care much for what I saw in 2018. Maybe it’s just me getting older, but
I’m starting to believe that this may have been the worst year for American
films since the early 1930s, when the industry was still trying to figure out
how to use sound.
The final
version, along with my acting choices, will show up on the blog site later this
month.
1. A Private War (Matthew Heineman)
2. First Reformed (Paul Schrader)
3. A Star Is Born (Bradley Cooper)
4. Vice (Adam McKay)
5.
First Man (Damien Chazelle)
6. The Rider (Chloé Zhao)
7. At Eternity’s Gate (Julian Schnabel)
8. The Wife (Björn Runge)
9. Tully (Jason Reitman)
10. Mary Queen of Scots (Josie Rourke)
I usually list
another handful of films that I liked but, believe me, finding 10 was hard
enough. When I gather my second 10, it will mostly consist of films I didn’t
completely hate—it was that kind of year.
A PRIVATE WAR (2018)
Too often, even when filmmakers craft an anti-war picture, the focus remains on the soldier-heroes who live or die in the service of decision makers in some far away capital. Inevitably, if only because of the star's performance, the philosophical idea of warfare comes off as a heroic endeavor.
But this movie, a war film through
and through, directed by acclaimed documentarian Matthew Heineman (“Cartel
Land,” “City of Ghosts”), keeps the camera trained on the victims; the women
and children and men not on the front lines whose lives and homes and cities
have been destroyed in the name of political or religious disputes.
The
central character of the film is real-life newspaper reporter Marie Colvin,
through whose eyes and experiences we see these wars----Iran, Sri Lanka, Libya,
Syrian. She ventures where few foreign correspondences will tread, with an
obsessive need to show the world, through her stories, the victims of the
hundreds of bombs being dropped indiscriminately on towns and villages, often
by their own governments.
The
American-born and Yale-educated Colvin worked for more than 20 years for the
Sunday Times of London, going from one hot-spot to another, ignoring the
warnings of loved ones and editors. While she’s tough as they come, she’s not
immune to the effects of the horrors she regularly experiences; at one point,
she enters a sanitorium to recovery from both PTSD and alcoholism.
Bringing this amazing woman to life is
Rosamund Pike, best known for “Gone Girl.”
Pike is almost unrecognizable as she makes this legendary,
eye-patch-wearing reporter (she lost sight in one eye while on assignment in Sri
Lanka) come alive on the screen. Nothing seems to be held back—the drinking,
the recklessness, the indiscretions, her boundless empathy, the journalistic
passion—none of it can be separated from the others. The excellent script was
written by Arash Amel, based on Marie Brennan’s Vanity Fair article.
The
episodical film shows her in war zones through the Middle East, occasionally
back in the newsroom in London, enjoying time with friends or getting involved
with a well-to-do businessman (Stanley Tucci). There isn’t a moment in this
film that seems artificial or worshipping. Her interactions with Sunday Times
foreign editor (the fine British character actor Tom Hollander), one of the few
constants in her life, captures the classic love-hate relationship between
reporter and editor.
During a stop in the Green Zone in Iraq
before heading to Fallujah, she enlists the services of a freelance
photographer Paul Conroy (Jamie Dornan, the star of “Fifty Shade of Grey”), who
becomes her sidekick as she goes from one humanity crisis to the next.
While Pike’s performance is
unforgettable, the scenes of the dying and suffering is what is most memorable
about this film, especially when she arrives in bombed-out Homs, Syria, for
what would be her final assignment. Countries, leaders and politics are rarely
touched on (though there is a contentious, but amusing interview with Muammar Gaddafi
right before his death), as director Heineman, like Colvin, clearly sees his
mission as spotlighting those left to die amid the rubble.
THE RIDER (2018)
Is a film in
which the cast is essentially playing themselves, reenacting events in their
lives, a fiction feature or a documentary? That’s the line that “The Rider,” a
beautifully made film about a young rodeo rider, straddles. The movie plays out
like a typical feature, only lacking the polished acting of professionals, with
a script and editing and atmospheric cinematography.
It’s only when
you see the credits and read about the making of the film that you discover
that Brady Jandreau is playing a version of himself as Brady Blackburn, along
with his real-life father Wayne, his autistic sister Lilly and even his buddy
and severely injured rider Lane Scott. The result is a moving portrayal of a
struggling Lakota family and Brady’s attempts to recover from a rodeo head
injury that required a plate be inserted in his head (all real).
Chinese-American
director Chloé Zhao and cinematographer Joshua James Richards bring a rural
romanticism to the film—almost every scene seems to play out at sunset, against
the poetic vision of the South Dakota horizon. This could come off as
pretentious, but the characters and their plight are so powerfully told that
the heavy symbolism feels earned.
Brady, who is
warned not to get on a horse, works at the local grocery story for a bit and
then finds his calling in training wild horses. The way he deals with the
animals is something to be seen.
Jandreau gives a
believable performance (it’s easier said than done to play yourself—remember
Howard Stern in “Private Parts”?) as the
young “rider,” who, lacking much education, must face the world after his rodeo
days are over. He has the making of a real actor, coming off as the only
polished performer while interacting with the supporting “players”—non-actors
reading lines.
But the real
star of “The Rider,” is Zhao, whose only previous feature was “Songs My
Brothers Taught Me” (2016), another story set among Native Americans, where she
met Brady. This 36-year-old, who studied filmmaking at NYU, displays a keen understanding
of the connection between cinematic visuals and storytelling along with getting
more out of nonprofessional actors than many directors achieve with
professionals.
BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY (2018)
The big
controversy about this flimsy bio of the popular British rock band “Queen” is
that director Bryan Singer was fired during the production and has been accused
by multiple men of sexual impropriety.
Yet the film
scored five Oscar nominations, including best picture and best actor for Rami
Malek, who portrays Freddie Mercury, the band’s colorful lead singer.
What also should
be controversial are the script’s invented dramatics and reliance on the oldest
cliché in the rock ‘n’ roll story: a tempestuous singer’s estrangement from his
bandmates.
Despite a script
credited to Oscar nominees Anthony McCarten (“The Theory of Everything,” “The
Darkest Hour”) and Peter Morgan (“Frost/Nixon,” “The Queen”), the story never
explores Mercury beyond the usual pop music tropes. Born Farrokh Bulsara in
Tanzania and raised mostly in India, Freddie joins the band Smile as a teenager
after showing off his impressive vocal range.
The film skips
over the hard work and struggle of the band, jumping right to a record contract
and, before you really grasp if they’ve made it, a U.S. tour. And then, the
script invents a band breakup and estrangement between Mercury and band founder
Brian May (Gwilym Lee).
While Queen was
known as one of the top live acts of the 1970s and ‘80s, the film doesn’t do a
very good job of re-enacting that, apart from the band’s famous 1985 Live Aid
performance.
The second half
of the film focuses almost exclusively on Mercury’s sexuality and lifestyle as
he ends his romantic relationship with Mary Austin (Lucy Boynton) after a
series of homosexual pick-ups. But the script again relies on clichés as it
presents the singer as sad and lonely when he’s in a permanent relationship
with his overly protective manager (Allen Leach of “Downton Abbey” fame).
Malek, best
known as the star of the USA series “Mr. Robot,” certainly captures the
outrageous bravado of Mercury, but I was always aware that he was doing an
imitation; the actor never became the singer.
I’m not sure
how fans of Queen, of which I never was, are reacting to the flaws of “Bohemian
Rhapsody,” but it clearly has impressed Academy voters (and the Golden Globe
critics who chose it as best picture). Though I think most of its
end-of-the-year success—it was panned by most critics when it was released in November—reflects
admiration for Malek’s over-the-top portrayal of this legendary singer, who
died of complications related to AIDS in 1991.
WIDOWS (2018)
Maybe I’m being
sexist, but I have no doubt that this film about four strangers pulling a heist
would have been dismissed as a poorly executed and ridiculously potted mess if
it had starred men. Critics can’t resist the idea of a crime film featuring
women who are working through personal problems.
The overly
positive reviews can also be explained by the critical acclaim of limited-run
TV shows that have become the rage on cable TV. “Widows” plays out like a television
series in which many stories are going on simultaneously, eventually culminating—though
not always adding up—in a climatic action sequence. (Turns out, the story was originally
a miniseries back in 1983, featuring a cast of unknowns.)
Maybe, expanded
by a few more hours, “Widows” could have worked on HBO or Netflix, but as a feature
film it falls flat.
Viola Davis
plays Veronica Rawlings, the widow of a professional thief (Liam Neeson), who apparently
dies along with his crew, after their latest job. But the money goes missing
and the Chicago crime bosses want their cut, one way or another. So she brings
together the women left behind to take over the plan her husband was working on,
to rob the prominent Mulligan political family (scene chewing Robert Duvall and
Colin Farrell).
The film spends
so much time on the political rivalries, including a black candidate for city
council, that I started to wonder what the film was about. It has the usual
surprises, which might have worked at the end of each episode, but only ensure
the pointlessness of the much discussed but rather boring heist.
Along with Rawlings,
the heist team includes widows Alice (Elizabeth Debicki) and Linda (Michelle
Rodriguez) and another woman, Belle (Cynthia Erivo), whose story seems
extraneous to the film.
In fact, almost
every sequence plays out like its own mini-movie, without adequate transitions
or attempts to tie them together. Director Steve McQueen, whose “12 Years a
Slave” won the 2013 best picture Oscar, needed to excise some of these auxiliary
plots if he had any hope of creating a coherent picture. What ends up on the
screen is baffling and a waste of time.
THE CATCHER WAS A SPY
(2018)
Mo Berg, a
backup catcher in the 1920s and ‘30s for teams in Chicago, Washington and Boston, had
one of the most interesting lives in baseball history.
While
little known to the general public, his
story has been well chronicled in baseball books for years, including the 1994
biography by Nicholas Dawidoff that the film is based on. Paul Rudd, who should
never be allowed anywhere near a drama, plays the Yale-educated, multi-lingual
athlete who became a military spy during World War II at the end, and right
after, his major league baseball career.
Beyond Rudd’s
facile performance, the structure of the script by Dawidoff and Robert Rodat
and Ben Lewin’s direction of it fails on every level.
An underlying
theme of the film, for reasons I never grasped, is whether Berg is gay. It is
almost as if his sexuality somehow taints his bravery during the war—as it
would have in the 1940s—but, looking back, it shouldn’t be a major issue.
The plot focuses
on one mission Berg is given—in fact, it implies that this was his only
mission—to assassinate a German nuclear scientist who the U.S. fears is near to
creating “the bomb” for the Nazis. Despite the obvious intense nature of the
mission, Rudd and director Lewin manage to drain any intrigue out of the
action; at best, it plays like a made-for-TV thriller.
The film does
boast an impressive supporting cast, including Paul Giamatti as an American
scientist, Jeff Daniels as OSS (the forerunner of the CIA) chief Bill Donovan,
Guy Pierce as Berg’s handler and Sienna Miller as the girlfriend, who is
confused as the audience by Berg’s feelings.
TOO LATE FOR TEARS (1949)
I continue to
religiously watch “Noir Alley” every Saturday night on TCM (repeated early
Sunday morning) and I’ve learned that not all the film noirs that Eddie Mueller
rapturously extols live up to his praise.
A recent
screening of an odd, very B 1952 picture “Talk About a Stranger,” starring
Billy Gray (later the son on TV’s “Father Knows Best”) as a youngster who
blames a stranger in town for the death of his dog. His parents are played by
future California political stalwarts George Murphy and Nancy Davis Reagan.
Despite Mueller’s talk, the film plays like a very forgettable episode of
“Lassie.”
But another
Mueller favorite, which I had never heard of, more than lived up to his hype:
“Too Late for Tears.”
Lizabeth Scott,
who, if Hollywood was fair, would have had many more high-profile roles, plays
Jane Palmer, a money-hungry femme fatale and a master at using her sexuality to
get what she wants.
A case of
mistaken identify results in her and her husband (Arthur Kennedy, in the midst
of his run as Biff in the original Broadway production of “Death of a
Salesman”) gaining possession of a bundle of stolen money. She persuades her
less criminally inclined husband to keep the money, temporarily she says, but
it soon attracts the shady Danny Fuller, perfectly played by Dan Duryea, who is
the “rightful” owner.
The tough guy
can’t help but fall for Jane, who uses him like she did her husband to get a
slice of the money any way she can. The story becomes even more interesting
when a man (Don DeFore) shows up claiming to be an Army buddy of her husband,
who has conveniently gone missing.
The interplay
between Scott and Duryea is priceless, enhanced by the taunt, claustrophobic
direction of Byron Haskin (an acclaimed special effects guy who later helmed
“The War of the Worlds”). The hard-boiled, witty script comes from Roy Huggins,
based on his magazine story. Huggins went on to a celebrated career in
television, creating such landmark shows as “The Fugitive,” “The Bold Ones: The
Lawyers” and “The Rockford Files.”
Scott had quite
a run of noirish films in the 1940s, starting with “The Strange Love of Martha
Ives,” followed by “Dead Reckoning” with Humphrey Bogart, “I Walk Alone” with
Burt Lancaster and “Pitfall,” starring Dick Powell. She was also memorable in
“The Racket” (1951) with Robert Mitchum and Robert Ryan and in the underrated
“Silver Lode” (1954) as the bride-to-be of John Payne.
She should have
scored an Oscar nomination for this film (along with Duryea), but this kind of
genre picture was decades away from earning the respected it deserved.
IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK
(2018)
Like he did in
the Oscar-winning script for his breakthrough film “Moonlight,” Barry Jenkins
takes the screenwriting mantra of less is more to extremes in his follow-up to that
surprise best picture.
In adapting
James Baldwin’s 1974 novel, the writer-director offers his actors huge leeway
in shaping their characters as his sparse script leaves out more than it
includes, creating a movie filled with awkward silences and under-developed ideas.
Call me old fashioned, but I expect screen dialogue that goes beyond the
pedestrian exchanges of real life and expresses insights that usual exist after
many, many rewrites.
As Baldwin was
one of the most thoughtful writers of the 20th Century, whose
elegant prose regularly plunged the depth of the human psyche, I assume that
the “Beale Street” script reflects the sensibilities and style of Jenkins. But
if you responded positively to the tone and pacing of “Moonlight,” you’ll like
his new film.
The classically
simple story of a young couple falling in love is interrupted when a racist,
neighborhood cop pins a rape on Fonny (Stephan James), leaving Tish (KiKi Layne)
with a young child to care for and a husband in jail. The only effective scene
in the picture is when Tish tells Fonny’s parents and sisters that she’s
pregnant, turning the gathering from a celebration to family fight.
The scene brings
some needed energy to this static picture and, best of all, puts the spotlight
on Regina King, playing Tish’s mother, who is the only reason to see the film.
Unlike the rather dull young couple and cliché-loaded supporting roles, King’s Sharon
captures the protective, unconditional love of a mother.
In a strange
plot turn, the young woman who was raped leaves the country after identifying Fonny.
Obviously, in the real world, unless she testified in court he would not be
convicted, but those details—along with the scene of him being arrested—are
never depicted. Instead, Sharon makes a trip to Puerto Rico to convince the
woman to return to the U.S.; the oddly scripted scenes give King more screen
time but make little sense and add nothing to the central story.
At points in
“Beale Street,” Jenkins, utilizing a music score that overpowers the actors,
seems to be illustrating Baldwin’s novel rather than adapting it. To my eyes
and ears, it was a missed opportunity.
