Category: Oscar Extra Credit

Drive My Car

I think this is another case of “it’s good, but not Best-Picture Good”.

There’s a bit of an unusual technique here – the credits don’t start rolling until about a half hour in, turning everything before the credits into a sort of prologue, And it fits – that’s where we see the backstory for our main character, a Japanese actor and director named Yūsuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima). His wife Oto (Reika Kirishima) is a screenwriter who uses an unusual storywriting technique – her work is based on the stories she makes up and tells him after they have sex. But hey, it works – they’re both successful and well-respected in their fields. The only problems they have are the death of their four-year-old daughter several years prior….and Oto’s infidelity, which Kafuku has been dealing with by willfully ignoring it. But then one day, just before Kafuku leaves on an errand, Oto asks him if they can “talk” when he gets home, and he agrees, but uneasily postpones his return….and then when he does return, he finds Oto collapsed on the floor, killed by a sudden brain hemorrhage.

Then the credits roll and the main story kicks off. It’s two years later, and Kafuku is beginning a resident artist program at a theater in Hiroshima, where he will direct a production of Uncle Vanya. Kafuku has played the lead in Vanya in the past, so things should go smoothly. However, a couple of early problems crop up – firstly, one of the actors in the cast, Kōji Takatsuki (Masaki Okada), happens to have been Oto’s most recent lover at the time she died (and Kafuku knows because he walked in on them once, but they were in flagrante and hadn’t seen him). And secondly – due to some vague insurance issue, Kafuku is not allowed to drive himself to and from the rehearsals. Usually the theater would enlist a full-on chauffeur, but since Kafuku brought his own car, the theater has hired a driver for that car instead – a sullen young woman, Misaki Watari (Tōko Miura).

On paper the rest of the plot seems kind of predictable; Kafuku and Takatsuki gradually open up about their respective relationships to Oto, and Takatsuki and Watari gradually warm to each other as well. But happily the plot didn’t feel predictable as I was watching. Mostly this is because Nishijima and Miura give especially good performances; Nishijima plays Kafuku with a wonderful subtlety, giving him just enough gruffness so you know that he’s still a little wounded by his past but has just gotten good at hiding it. The script also isn’t afraid to have Kafuku be a bit of a jerk in rehearsals. And Miura plays Watari as a weirdo introvert, but in a way that gradually becomes endearing – and yet it never verges into the Manic Pixie Dream Girl territory. There’s a fantastic scene where the theater’s company manager and his wife invite Kafuku over for dinner, and since Watari is there they also invite her in – and for the bulk of the scene the manager and Kafuku are caught up in a discussion about theater and the current production, and only after several minutes does everyone – even the audience – seem to remember that Watari has been awkwardly and silently sitting at the end of the table as well, picking at her food and occasionally patting the manager’s dog.

So it’s good. But…ultimately, kind of forgettable. I saw it a week ago, and when I sat down to write this…I actually had to think a couple minutes trying to remember anything about it. I’d even forgotten the film’s name. And I’m not sure this bodes well for its Oscar night success.

West Side Story

As things began, I thought this was going to be unusually faithful to the 1961 film – the opening also begins with the sound of the Jets whistling to each other, set over shots of New York streets, and then things move into the Jets gradually gathering for a prowl through their streets, one character or another sometimes busting out a dance move. But then the characters finally start speaking….and I realized that “oh, they’ve added some things.”

Steven Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner dive into the racial tensions fueling the Sharks and the Jets, in ways which the 1961 film only hinted at. During the gangs’ first run-in with Officer Krupke, after he orders the Sharks to leave the scene, Bernardo stares him down a minute – then starts defiantly singing “La Borinqueña”, the Puerto Rican national anthem, with the rest of the Sharks (and a few onlookers) joining in as they turn to go, turning their dismissal into a rallying cry. The whole setting is also moved to the former San Juan Hill neighborhood of New York, right at the time when the city is tearing everything down as a “slum clearance” move so they can build the current Lincoln Center cultural complex.

The Puerto Rican characters also get some development. Maria (Rachel Zegler) is a bit feistier and we see more of the family dynamic between her and brother Bernardo (David Alvarez). Bernardo is also given a career here – he’s not just the leader of the Sharks, he is also an aspiring boxer. And Anita (Ariana DeBose) isn’t just a seamstress, she is saving up to start her own business; and, she’s also Bernardo’s live-in girlfriend. And Chino (Josh Andrés Rivera) isn’t a member of the Sharks – he is a college student.

An even bigger change is that a good deal of the scenes between Maria and Anita and Bernardo and any of the Spanish-speaking characters are all in Spanish – without subtitles. Spielberg has said he did so as a way to sort of de-emphasize the Anglo perspective – and I get it, but as a viewer it was occasionally frustrating. Most of the time I got the general gist of what characters were saying, but once or twice I could tell I was missing some nuances and really wished I weren’t.

Tony’s also been given a little more of a backstory – and that helps, because Ansel Elgort’s Tony otherwise felt a little…bland. He has a sort of reserved and overly-chill manner that works when he’s telling Maria about the year he spent upstate in prison….but doesn’t work when he’s singing “Maria”, and really doesn’t work during the balcony scene. His singing is technically good – and there are some really pretty shots and lighting effects there – but technically good is all it is. I didn’t sense any feeling in it – and for a song that Tony’s supposed be singing because he is head over heels in love, “technically good but no feeling” is just plain wrong. Fortunately his performance picks up a little towards the end when things are all dramatic and tragic, but this initial blandness bugged me.

There were some bits where it worked, though – and that was in his scenes with Rita Moreno. For Spielberg brought Moreno back, casting her as a new character, “Valentina”. In the original show and film, one of the Jets’ hangouts is a malt shop run by a longtime local named “Doc” – but here, the shop is run by Valentina, who is introduced to us as Doc’s widow who’s taken things over. The role is largely the same – the local shopkeeper who deep down believes that these gang members are just kids who are suffering from some hard knocks and deserve understanding, who urges them to straighten up, mourns when they turn bad and celebrates if they turn good. Turning things over to Valentina adds some extra nuance – Valentina alludes to the struggles she and Doc had themselves, and she’s able to warn Tony about that. She also mentions in one scene that the Jets seem to think of her as “a gringa”, but it’s only because of who she married – if she hadn’t married Doc they’d have seen her very differently. There’s even a moment of comedy – Tony has cornered Valentina and is asking her how to say various romantic declarations in Spanish, things like “I love you” and “you are beautiful” and “I want to stay with you forever”. Halfway through the lesson, Valentina quips, “have you thought of starting with something like ‘Do you want to go out for coffee’ instead?”

Is “historical drama about men with hubris” a genre? That seems to be the theme with these next two.

The Power Of The Dog

I usually don’t get into Direction here – I don’t understand the role well enough to always notice their impact as such. So it’s telling that my gut reaction right now is that Jane Campion needs to win for Best Direction for this tale. And not just because she made me like a Western – but because every performance is so subtle.

This isn’t so much a “Western” as it is a psychological drama. Benedict Cumberbatch and Jesse Plemons are rancher brothers in 1920’s Montana, with the older brutish Phil (Cumberbatch) opting for the rougher work and the meek George (Plemons) as the paper-pusher and the pleasant public face. During a cattle drive they stay at an inn run by widow Rose (Kirsten Dunst) and her son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee); Phil locks onto the bookish Peter, teasing him for being a “sissy”, but George is taken by Rose, starting a whirlwind courtship which ends with George marrying Rose and bringing her back to the ranch. Phil resents the change in routine and starts tormenting Rose – but Peter isn’t quite the wimp Phil thinks he is.

I really, really like it when films don’t telegraph everything about a character – I like to discover things on the way, with little hints dropped here and there. It’s really hard to pull off – if you make a hint too subtle people will miss it (the “Ending of [movie] Explained” craze on Youtube speaks to how many films get things wrong here), but if you make a hint too big people will feel pandered to. Campion gets the balance exactly right here. We learn a good deal about Phil during a long wordless scene where all he does is take a long and lingering bath in a stream. That scene is also subtly erotic as well (eros is another tricky thing to be subtle about).

Everyone talks about Benedict Cumberbatch’s performance – for good reason – but Kodi Smit-McPhee is who caught my eye. Phil dismisses Peter as effeminate, and it’d be easy for him to play Peter that way – but Peter is only effeminate by Phil’s yardstick, and Smit-McPhee gives him a more honest bookishness. Even more intriguing – at some point Peter finds a way to fight back against Phil, and only after the film did I start realizing ways Peter had been quietly playing a long game, subtly manipulating things so that Phil was set up for a fall. I asked Roommate Russ about when he’d figured out what Peter had been doing – we each figured things out at a different time, and even now I’m remembering earlier moments in the film that also suggested Peter knew what he was doing well before I did.

The Power Of The Dog is winning many critics’ “Oscar Predictions” forecasts, and I totally buy that.

Nightmare Alley

Well, subtle this isn’t. But subtlety in a film noir that starts off amongst carnival carnies would be all wrong anyway.

Bradley Cooper is “Stan Carlisle”, a man we meet at the moment he has literally run off to join the circus – taking a job as a carnie with a small side show in 1939. He falls in with “Madame Zeena” (Toni Collette) and her husband Pete (David Strathairn) who have a clairvoyant act. Pete teaches Stan the tricks of their trade (very detailed observation of the audience combined with a little bit of coded patter), and soon Stan is heading off to bigger and better things, bringing his sweetheart Molly (Rooney Mara) along. Within two years they have a successful psychic/clairvoyant night club act in Buffalo. Then one night, a woman in the audience interrupts them – Dr. Lillith Ritter (Cate Blanchett), a psychologist and skeptic. Stan manages to dodge her challenges on the fly and save the act, but is intrigued enough by Dr. Ritter to stop by her office the next day and come clean.

Ritter is also intrigued, and makes a proposition; she’s in the habit of recording all of her analysis sessions with the wealthy folk of Buffalo, the very same people taking in Stan’s act. He could start offering much more lucrative private “seances” for her clients, armed with the private detail she’s gathered during her sessions. Because this is a film noir, of course, there are double-crossings, things go wrong, and people meet their downfalls in particularly dark and dramatic ways.

I started by saying this film wasn’t subtle – but it actually is subtle for its director. Guilliermo del Toro has toned down the weird-and-fantastical angle he used in The Shape of Water or Pan’s Labyrinth, but only a bit – the side show is weird enough, and he lets that carry the weird, delving into the seedy underworld of strong men and little people and acrobats and bearded ladies all living out of tents and caravans, and reveals the horrific truth behind the spectacle. “Madame Zeena” isn’t actually clairvoyant, she’s just a long-suffering wife to a former magician now incapacitated by alcoholism. “Fee Fee the Bird Girl” isn’t a half-bird hybrid, she’s a woman with a disfigurement who couldn’t get any other work. The geek isn’t a feral missing link – he’s a drug addict who is rewarded each night with opiates if he “puts on a good show” and bites the heads off chickens.

Bradley Cooper’s performance ultimately caught my attention – but it took a little time to win me over. He doesn’t speak for a good ten minutes, and this bothered me somehow but I couldn’t tell you why. Things pick up the first time he steps in to help out Zeena and Pete, however. And at the end, when Stan is in a desperate spot and accepts a job, Cooper’s reaction to the offer is a moment that’s going to haunt me for a good while. Sadly I can’t say any more than that without spoiling things.

Happily, I’ve already seen a couple of the Best Picture nominees; before I dive into the rest, let’s get those hot takes out of the way.

Belfast

He may speak in all his interviews with a somewhat plummy English accent, but director Kenneth Branagh is actually from Belfast, and as a child saw the beginning of The Troubles that roiled that part of the world for decades. His father was already a freelance construction worker in England and brought the rest of the family to join him there. No doubt he’s watched the subsequent films about “Northern Ireland” that have come out over the years, ones that emphasize the violence and chaos – and it’d be understandable that he’d want to present a film showing his own memories, to prove that it wasn’t all like that.

And….well, he does succeed in proving that it wasn’t a warzone 24/7. However, I am afraid I didn’t get all that much of a sense of what it was like. To be fair, we’re looking at things from a child’s perspective, with young Jude Hill playing the 9-year-old Branagh stand-in (here named “Buddy”); he may occasionally notice moments of tension amongst his parents or grandparents, and there’s a weird barrier at the end of the street that’s been up since the day when this scary riot thing happened, but he’s still able to play basketball and he still gets to hang out with his cousins and he still has a crush on the pretty girl in his history class and he still loves when granny takes him to movies and…this is the stuff of the film, but it’s stuff that could have happened anywhere, so when Buddy and his family finally move to England at the film’s end, I’d almost forgotten why they moved until Branagh added a small title dedicating the film to “those who left, those who stayed, and those who were lost.”

This isn’t to say this was a bad film, though; the cast is all excellent, and it’s a damn crime that Catriona Balfe wasn’t nominated for her role as Buddy’s Ma. There’s also a chillingly effective moment from one of the few instances when The Troubles bleed in – earlier in the film, Buddy watches High Noon on television, so during a scene when Jamie Dornan as Buddy’s Pa has to stand off against a more militant neighbor, Branagh scores the scene with that film’s plaintive theme. Nevertheless, the bits of this film that lingered with me longest was its use of classic Van Morrison songs more so than the story itself.

Dune

Well….it’s way better than David Lynch’s adaptation from 1984, for starters. Lynch tried to fit Frank Herbert’s entire sprawling epic into a single film, and he was also working in the early 1980s when computers weren’t used for visual effects production – so all the special effects were either models or practical sets or animation, and things took an impossibly long time. So Lynch ended up with a super-confusing mess, where the only thing most people remember is a shot of a bare-chested Sting wearing a bikini with tailfins. (At least….that was the biggest takeaway I had when I saw it at age 13.)

Although, speaking of the visual effects – considering the times, Lynch didn’t do all that bad. I’ve recently discovered a series of Youtube videos in which visual effects artists react to and deconstruct various special effects scenes from films, discussing how they were made, discussing how they may have been done better or – more frequently – how the technology which could have made them better wasn’t around yet. Their video about Denis Villeneuve’s Dune compares each scene to the corresponding scene in Lynch’s Dune, and actually does much to redeem that film’s visual effects as being “as good as they could have done back then.”

However, it wasn’t just the visual effects that saved things here. Villeneuve and his fellow screenwriters John Spaints and Eric Roth had a much more judicious hand with the scissors, cutting out and simplifying the more baroque parts of Herbert’s book. They also took a huge gamble and focused only on the first half of the book, trusting that there would be enough demand for a sequel that they could deal with the second half then.

So this is a much more straightforward space opera, with Timothée Chalamet in the lead as “Paul Atredies”, the only son in a royal family. Paul’s mother (Rebecca Ferguson) is a priestess in a quasi-psychic mind-control religion who’s been training Paul in its secrets (even though she shouldn’t be), and his father (Oscar Isaac) is assigned to govern over a desert planet named Arrakis – the only source of a valuable resource called “Spice”, which is worm guano that has psychotropic qualities. But the previous family in charge attacks to take back control, and Paul is forced to escape to the desert and hide amongst the nomadic Fremen, the planet’s indigenous people.

….That is an extremely broad summary, and is only the first half of the book. There are entire major characters I’ve not yet mentioned – like “Duncan Idaho” (Jason Momoa) and “Gurney Halleck” (Josh Brolin), two members of the Atredies court, and “Chani” (Zendaya), a Fremen woman whom Paul eventually falls in love with. All three characters fare a lot better in this adaptation – as does everyone, honestly. Character’s motives are clearer, relationships are more solid – and the simplified script also means the actors have much more room to breathe, and aren’t saddled down by having to spout off complicated gobbledygook by way of exposition. The characters even get to have in-jokes in this adaptation.

Whether this is a Best Picture film, though, I’m not sure. Everyone does great with it – but it’s still kind of a space opera, and things are a bit unfinished. Paul in particular feels unfinished – but that’s because he is at this point. Villeneuve tries to hint at the heavier stuff in the second half by giving Paul a series of “visions”, but that’s not quite the same as Paul actually experiencing them. It will be very interesting to see what Chalamet does with Paul in the second part. But this first part – while fine, and definitely an improvement on the 1984 film – is not something I expect to take a statuette.

Hooray it’s Oscar season!

As with years past, I will be occasionally posting shorter reviews and reactions to the Best Picture Nominees for this years’ Academy Awards. And this year, that list is:

• Belfast
• Coda
• Don’t Look Up
• Drive My Car
• Dune
• King Richard
• Licorice Pizza
• Nightmare Alley
• The Power Of The Dog
• West Side Story

Conveniently, I will be watching the 1961 film adaptation of West Side Story very soon, so that could make for an interesting double-feature.

Roommate Russ and I discussed this list, and…honestly, we’re both a bit disappointed. We each had a favorite film we were hoping would get nods in at least a couple categories; Roommate Russ was particularly taken with Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, while I wanted to see The Green Knight get acknowledged for something. But both were well and truly snubbed. And, honestly, there are a couple films on this list that I wouldn’t have been seeing otherwise.

Fortunately, there are also a couple I was already planning on seeing – and a couple I’ve even already seen. I was also planning on streaming The Power Of The Dog for convenience’s sake, but Roommate Russ talked me out of that, pointing out that the setting would really show up well on the big screen. His only concern was that as of yesterday, there was only one theater screening it, and it was slated to leave on Thursday evening. I told him that the Oscar nomination would likely change that – and sure enough, by day’s end yesterday they had added 14 more screenings to their calendar; I’m reserving my ticket as we speak.