Still Alice (2014)

  This movie was so depressing I had to watch two episodes of Repair Shop followed by two episodes of Blown Away just to feel happy again.  If you don't know, Repair Shop is where highly skilled artisans repair broken heirlooms in the English countryside and it is soothing as fuck.  Blown Away is a competition between professional glassblowers and both shows are pure competency porn.  They are fabulous.  

Anyway, back to the depression.  Alice (Julianne Moore) is a linguistics professor at Columbia University, highly regarded in her field with a loving, if detached, husband (Alec Baldwin), and three grown children.  Just after her 50th birthday, she begins noticing memory lapses, some as simple as forgetting a word and others as concerning as not recognizing the jogging route she's been running for years.  Her neurologist (Stephen Kunken) confirms early-onset familial Alzheimer's disease, an extremely rare variant.  Alice struggles to hold on to what makes her herself as the disease takes more and more of her memories.

Julianne Moore got heaps and heaps of praise for her portrayal here and this is definitely her show.   She is in almost every scene of this movie and it looks to be a massive undertaking to embody the emotional work of that character for that long.  The other two standouts are Kate Bosworth and Kristin Stewart as Alice's two daughters.  Their parts are smaller but still full of resonance.  Baldwin is mostly phoning it in but he's not really required to do much else.  

This is also not a fun watch but nothing about Alzheimer's disease was ever going to be.  It's currently streaming on Tubi if you want something to cry over and give you a reason to call your older relatives.

Solaris (1972)

  Here I go again with the Tarkovsky.  This is marginally more accessible than The Mirror but there is still a lot of crying.

Psychologist Kris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis) is sent to a space station orbiting the oceanic planet Solaris after the crew fails to respond to routine communications.  He finds that the skeleton crew has been experiencing hallucinations and one crew member has killed himself.  The other two seem resigned to their descent to madness.  Kris isn't there for two hours before his dead wife, Hari (Natalya Bondarchuk), appears before him.  And he immediately launches her into space, which is the most relatable fucking thing anyone has ever done in a sci-fi movie.  But obviously she comes back and the other scientist, Snaut (Jüri Järvet), tells Kris that the hallucinations started after they probed the planet with x-rays.  Snaut thinks the planet itself is sending them to better understand its orbiters without realizing that it's driving them insane.

The plot makes it sound like space horror, which it kind of is, and not the meditative questioning of what it means to be human, which it definitely is.  Your mileage will vary on that last part, depending on how much you enjoy two hours and 45 minutes of Russian musings interspersed with montages of paintings and books being destroyed.  It's a slow burn, you could say.

This was one of the first sci-fi films to deal with the emotional side, not the "we're in space" side, and it's an important film for that.  It is not a fun film.  It's currently streaming on the Criterion Channel and HBO Max.

The Patriot (2000)

  I haven't seen this movie since I was in high school.  This was part of the Christy Collection from when we lived together and combined all our movies to take up an entire wall of our apartment and then some.  When she moved, I made a list of all the ones she had that I hadn't seen/reviewed and added them to my spreadsheet.  It's my own little way of keeping her close since we live so far apart now, as well as an opportunity to rag mercilessly on her taste.

Benjamin Martin (Mel Gibson) was a hero of the French and Indian War and is justifiably reluctant to be involved in the American colonies' fight for independence from the British.  His oldest son, Gabriel (Heath Ledger), is idealistic, hot-headed, and determined to fight for his principles.  These two men remain at ideological odds until a cruel and ambitious Redcoat Captain (Jason Isaacs) makes the war extremely personal.

This is the kind of sweeping, maudlin epic that gets critically panned these days for being too sappy, too simplistic, too long, and too impressed with its own jingoistic message.  And that's before we get to the problematic star.  

But this was made in the rosy, far-off past of 2000, before the never-ending war on terror and other convenient excuses to erode civil liberties in the name of "security".  Hell, this was six years before the infamous anti-Semitic rant that tanked his career (for around eight years and only in front of the camera).  Mel Gibson was box office gold at the turn of the millennium.  Heath Ledger was just starting to bloom into his heartthrob roles, and future Percy Jackson Logan Lerman was just a skinny, gap-toothed fifth Martin child.  In that sense, this film is kind of a time capsule.  Its watchability is going to depend on how much you, the viewer, are into this kind of thing.  For my money, if you're going to watch damn near three hours of Mel Gibson, watch Braveheart.  Or the Mad Max trilogy.  

The Patriot is currently streaming on Netflix. 

Daughter (2019)

  Kanopy is out here killing it with access to last year's shorts.  

A woman thinks about the distance between herself and her father as he lies in the hospital bed.

This short has no dialogue and it doesn't need any.  Everything is perfectly characterized and understood.  Daria Kascheeva wrote, directed, filmed, edited, did sound design, held a foley, and painted/designed the papier-mâché puppets.  

I spend a lot of time watching movies (duh) and not feeling very much about them.  I don't relate to a lot of stuff, especially not coming-of-age stories, because none of them seem very representative of my life experiences.  Like, I have enough empathy to get where they're going with it, I just don't feel like it relates to me.  This 14-minute short made me cry for like at least six of those minutes.  No words.  No special effects.  Just feels.  Now maybe it won't for you.  Maybe you'll be bored as hell watching this.  But I have spent the majority of my life on this planet feeling like a cuckoo's egg.  My family loves me but they have never understood anything about me.  It's isolating, and it's hard.  This short captures all of that in the silence of things unspoken.

Sister (2018)

  Not to be confused with the other Oscar short from the same ceremony called A Sister, this is a stop-motion animated short.  Content warning:  abortion

A man (Binglang Liu) reminisces about growing up with an annoying younger sister, except that he didn't because he grew up under China's One Child policy.

I'm not going to make light of what was clearly a humanitarian crisis.  I think history will record it as being one of the most draconian policies ever enacted.  This short isn't really the form for addressing it, either, and it knows.  It's intended to be a personal musing on a family tragedy and your mileage will vary depending on how you feel about that.

It is only streaming on Kanopy, which is a free service you can get with a library card.  I had it through the University of Maryland while I was attending and it was great.  I finally broke down and signed up for a local library card just so I could have it again.  Which now brings me up to nine streaming services, free or otherwise, that I use routinely.  And there's still shit that's unavailable!  Amazing.

Among Friends (2012)

  Well, this has been a very Galentine's friendly weekend.  We've had movies by women, for women, and about women and this is no exception.  It is a slasher film written and directed by women.  Too bad it's just not very good.

A group of friends gather for a party.  They think they are playing an 80s themed murder mystery game but their hostess (Alyssa Lobit) has a different idea.  Drugged and tied up, the guests are forced to confront and be punished for their transgressions against one another which range from ludicrously commonplace if shitty (consensual sex but cheating) to kinda justified (actual rape) to uhhhh-whose-side-are-you-on (leaving the girl who got an abortion after her rape to bleed out in a bathtub).  

It's supposed to be vengeful-comeuppance fantasy but it doesn't go far enough to make the characters worth rooting against.  Like, they are objectively shitty people, but not (with one glaring exception) worth a murder plot this elaborate.  You don't have to have an extreme budget to do horror well, but you do have to be better than this.  Save yourself an hour and a half and don't watch this movie.  It's currently streaming on Tubi.

Persona (1966)

  I was watching this movie and thinking that the pandemic had made me dumber, because I was really struggling to find the point of this entire goddamn film, but then I went online and it turns out it's supposed to be enigmatic and atmospheric.  So now I feel better (but still possibly dumber).

Alma (Bibi Andersson) is a young nurse assigned to the care of actress Elisabet Vogler (Liv Ullman).  Elisabet is physically healthy but refuses to speak.  Over a therapeutic holiday, Alma confides in the mute but sympathetic actress until she can no longer tell where one of them begins and the other ends.

Like, I know I should be going full film school and talk about Ingmar Bergman and art house and the aesthetic, but I cannot move beyond how creeped out I was by some of the implied ages in Alma's stories.  So, she starts by confessing to Elisabet that her first love was an older married dude that she had an affair with for five years before meeting her current fiancé.  She is 25.  Best case scenario is that her current relationship was whirlwind and they got engaged after a year or less.  More likely, she was fucking some predatory older dude while in her teens.  Not great.  So then she tells a further story about how she was on vacation with her current dude, met some other chick on the beach, and the two of them got peeped on by a pair of boys she describes as "young, terribly young."  She is 24-25 in this story.  How young is "terribly young"?  Because she then fucks one.  

The theme of the movie is identity and how much of ourselves we come to see in others, not "is this statutory rape?" but I had a real hard time moving on.  It's currently streaming on the Criterion Channel and HBO Max.  

A Sister (2019)/Saria (2019)

 I couldn't find posters for either film.  Short films are hard.  You can watch both as part of the 2020 Oscar Oscar Nominated Short Films collection on Amazon, as well as the other three from the Live Action category.

An emergency operator (Veerle Baetans) must help a woman (Selma Alaoui) trapped in a car with a man (Guillaume Duhesme).  The woman cannot speak freely for fear of violence and pretends the operator is her sister.  She can only give cryptic clues about her location and answer yes or no questions as the operator puts resources out to locate the car in a race against time.

Content warning:  sexual assault

As a woman, there is so much tension and dread in this short.  It really made me want to go scrub my skin off with steel wool.  But!  I did recognize the operator as the main character from The Broken Circle Breakdown, so that was nice.

Saria (Estefanía Tellez) and her sister Ximena (Gabriela Ramírez) are stuck in a Guatemalan orphanage.    They are beaten, raped, and forced to work as slave labor, but Saria has a plan to escape.  When the time is right, they will leap off the roof onto a tree, make a run for it into the forest, and from there across 2500 km to America.  Ximena recruits her boyfriend Appo (Jorge Ávila) to rally the boys' side, and after the distraction of a riot, all the orphans make a break for freedom.  

Content warning:  sexual assault, child death

Okay, so I'm going to stop the synopsis there because it's waaaaaaaaay more cheerful to imagine they get away than tell you what actually happens after that.  This short was a total downer and I really wish it had been first, so I could have watched A Sister after.  Just... Jesus, man.  I gotta go hug a kitten now.

Penguins of Madagascar (2014)

  I was very skeptical of this movie.  I enjoyed the penguins as side characters in the Madagascar films but there were a lot of ways a spin-off could go horribly wrong (ahem, Minions).  Fortunately, this went Frasier and not Joey.

The penguins, Skipper (Tom McGrath), Kowalski (Chris Miller), Rico (Conrad Vernon), and Private (Christopher Knights), are a tight-knit band of operatives, but recently, Private has felt that he's not as valued as his more specialized teammates.  Things are made worse when Private, along with hundreds of zoo penguins around the world, are kidnapped by evil octopus Dave (John Malkovich).  Dave plans to mutate the penguins and turn them loose on the world in the ultimate act of character assassination.  Skipper, Kowalski, and Rico must join forces with the North Wind, another elite band of animals, to get their secretary/mascot/valued member of the team back.

I cannot stress how funny this is.  I really had low expectations but this was outstanding.  Nobody outstays their welcome, the jokes don't scrape the bottom of the barrel, and they got John Fucking Malkovich to be an evil octopus.  That's just great, man.

It's currently streaming on Netflix.

Madre (2017)

  Shorts are the hardest things to find, I swear.  

Marta (Marta Nieto) receives a frantic phone call from her six-year-old son, Ivan (Álvaro Balas).  Ivan is supposed to be on holiday with his father, but cannot find him.  A country away, with zero landmarks, no recourse, and a dying phone battery, Marta tries to calm her frightened child.

This is a 17 minute long horror movie for parents.  For everyone else, it feels a little lacking.  Not that it's bad, it just doesn't tell a complete story.  

You can currently find this and the other four nominees from the 2019 Live Action category on Amazon in one little bundle.  ShortsTV releases them every year.  Some are free and some you have to rent, so try and catch it while it's still the former.  As far as I'm aware, this particular short isn't streaming anywhere else.

Soul (2020)

  Yay, a new Pixar!  (I know it came out on Christmas and I'm a month and a half late.  This isn't news.  I'm late for everything.)

Joe (Jamie Foxx) has been a struggling gig musician for years.  He finally gets a once-in-a-lifetime shot at playing jazz with the Dorothea Williams (Angela Bassett) Quartet but falls into an open manhole and dies.  Obviously, Joe isn't about to take death lying down.  He breaks from the Great Beyond into the Great Before, a kind of holding area where new souls are imprinted with personalities, and passes himself off as a mentor to Soul 22 (Tina Fey), who has determined that she never wants to be born.  She's more than happy to give Joe her pass to Earth but first they must do what no mentor has been able to do for her, find her Spark.  A handy loophole sees both Joe and 22 hurtling to Earth, but accidentally in the wrong bodies: 22 in Joe's and Joe in the unfortunately proximate Mr. Mittens, a therapy cat.  Joe has to convince 22 that life is worth the experience and also find a way to get back into his body before his chance to play passes him by.

This is so much better than Onward, it's a little sad.  And I like Dungeons & Dragons way more than I like jazz!  It just wasn't the type of deep, meditative animated film about the human condition we've come to expect from Pixar.  And maybe that's a problem but that's a discussion for another day.

My only concern about this is that Mr. Mittens is a calico cat and calicos are always female.  That's it.  That's my one complaint.  Soul is currently streaming on Disney+ and you should watch it.

78th Annual Golden Globes Nominations

Uh, did you guys know the Golden Globes nominations came out yesterday?  Normally, I set a calendar alert so I don't miss it but this year... well, it's been a rough decade this year.  At any rate, here are the nominees.  I've seen practically none of them so this is going to be great.  

Best Motion Picture - Drama

The Father

Mank

Nomadland

Promising Young Woman

The Trial of the Chicago 7

Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm

Hamilton

Music

Palm Springs

The Prom

Best Actor - Drama

Riz Ahmed - Sound of Metal

Chadwick Boseman - Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

Anthony Hopkins - The Father

Gary Oldman - Mank

Tahar Rahim - The Mauritanian

Best Actress - Drama

Viola Davis - Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

Andra Day - The United States vs. Billie Holiday

Vanessa Kirby - Pieces of a Woman

Frances McDormand - Nomadland

Carey Mulligan - Promising Young Woman

Best Actor - Musical or Comedy

Sacha Baron Cohen - Borat Subsequent Moviefilm

James Corden - The Prom

Lin-Manuel Miranda - Hamilton

Dev Patel - The Personal History of David Copperfield

Andy Samberg - Palm Springs

Best Actress - Musical or Comedy

Maria Bakalova - Borat Subsequent Moviefilm

Kate Hudson - Music

Michelle Pfeiffer - French Exit

Rosamund Pike - I Care a Lot

Anya Taylor-Joy - Emma.

Best Supporting Actor - Motion Picture

Sacha Baron Cohen - The Trial of the Chicago 7

Daniel Kaluuya - Judas and the Black Messiah

Jared Leto - The Little Things

Bill Murray - On the Rocks

Leslie Odam, Jr. - One Night in Miami

Best Supporting Actress - Motion Picture

Glenn Close - Hillbilly Elegy

Olivia Colman - The Father

Jodie Foster - The Mauritanian

Amanda Seyfried - Mank

Helena Zengel - News of the World

Best Animated Film

The Croods:  A New Age

Onward

Over the Moon

Soul

Wolfwalkers

Best Foreign Language Film

Another Round

La Llorona

The Life Ahead

Minari

Two of Us

Best Director

Emerald Fennell - Promising Young Woman

David Fincher - Mank

Regina King - One Night in Miami

Aaron Sorkin - The Trial of the Chicago 7

Chloe Zhao - Nomadland

Best Screenplay

Promising Young Woman - Emerald Fennell

Mank - Jack Fincher

The Trial of the Chicago 7 - Aaron Sorkin

The Father - Florian Zeller, Christopher Hampton

Nomadland - Chloe Zhao

Best Original Score

The Midnight Sky

Tenet

News of the World

Mank

Soul

Best Original Song

"Fight for You" - Judas and the Black Messiah

"Hear My Voice" - The Trial of the Chicago 7

"Io Si" - The Life Ahead

"Speak Now" - One Night in Miami

"Tigress & Tweed" - The United States vs. Billie Holiday

The dearth of hyperlinks there should indicate my predicament.  I had just gotten my TBW list under 1300 things and now it's back to 1350.  Some/all of these better get nominated for an Oscar or I'm not going to see them for a decade.

Best TV Series - Drama

The Crown

Lovecraft Country

The Mandalorian

Ozark

Ratched

Best TV Series - Musical or Comedy

Emily in Paris

The Flight Attendant

The Great

Schitt's Creek

Ted Lasso

Best Actor in a TV Series - Drama

Jason Bateman - Ozark

Josh O'Connor - The Crown

Bob Odenkirk - Better Call Saul

Al Pacino - Hunters

Matthew Rhys - Perry Mason

Best Actress in a TV Series - Drama

Olivia Colman - The Crown

Jodie Comer - Killing Eve

Emma Corrin - The Crown

Laura Linney - Ozark

Sarah Paulson - Ratched

Best Actor in a TV Series - Musical or Comedy

Don Cheadle - Black Monday

Nicholas Hoult - The Great

Eugene Levy - Schitt's Creek

Jason Sudeikis - Ted Lasso

Ramy Youssef - Ramy

Best Actress in a TV Series - Musical or Comedy

Lily Collins - Emily in Paris

Kaley Cuoco - The Flight Attendant

Elle Fanning - The Great

Jane Levy - Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist

Catherine O'Hara - Schitt's Creek

We just started watching The Great and it's pretty... well, great.  Elle Fanning is marvelous but I love her bitchy servant Marial.  The Mandalorian is the only full current season I've seen.  

Best Limited Series, Anthology, or Made for TV Movie

Normal People

The Queen's Gambit

Small Axe

The Undoing

Unorthodox

Best Actor in a Limited Series, Anthology, or Made for TV Movie

Bryan Cranston - Your Honor

Jeff Daniels - The Comey Rule

Hugh Grant - The Undoing

Ethan Hawke - The Good Lord Bird

Mark Ruffalo - I Know This Much is True

Best Actress in a Limited Series, Anthology, or Made for TV Movie

Cate Blanchett - Mrs. America

Daisy Edgar-Jones - Normal People

Shira Haas - Unorthodox

Nicole Kidman - The Undoing

Anya Taylor-Joy - The Queen's Gambit

Best Actor in a Television Supporting Role

John Boyega - Small Axe

Brendan Gleeson - The Comey Rule

Daniel Levy - Schitt's Creek

Jim Parsons - Hollywood

Donald Sutherland - The Undoing

Best Actress in a Television Supporting Role

Gillian Anderson - The Crown

Helena Bonham Carter - The Crown

Julia Garner - Ozark

Annie Murphy - Schitt's Creek

Cynthia Nixon - Ratched

The only one of these I saw was Queen's Gambit.  It was very good even for someone who doesn't give a shit about chess.  

It's been a weird year and these are some pretty weird choices for nominees.  We'll see how history judges them in a century or so.

God Bless America (2011)

  Ten years ago, this might have been funny.  Time and recent events have not been kind and have reduced this to a painfully tone-deaf polemic that educates no one, enlightens no one, and does more harm than good.

Frank (Joel Murray) is a sad-sack middle-aged divorced dad in a dead-end job, plagued by inconsiderate neighbors and chronic migraines.  He is trying to woo the receptionist (Brendalyn Richard) at work but his misplaced attention causes him to be fired for sexual harassment, then his doctor (Dan Spencer) tells Frank his headaches are caused by an inoperable brain tumor.  Pissed off, alone, and despondent, Frank decides to do the world a favor by murdering a spoiled reality show teen queen named Chloe (Maddie Hasson) before killing himself, only to have his suicide interrupted by Chloe's bloodthirsty little classmate Roxy (Tara Lynne Barr).  Roxy convinces Frank that there are many selfish, rude, inconsiderate people that deserve to die and the unlikely duo start a cross-country murderous road trip.

This very clearly wanted to be the successor to Natural Born Killers but after Charlottesville, Heather Hayer, the Las Vegas concert shooting, and oh yeah, an armed insurrection attempt in the halls of the Capitol, seeing a pair of entitled white people gun down anyone they feel is inferior to them just feels in poor taste.

And make no mistake, Frank is the definition of entitled.  He whines about how we as a country have lost our civility, and pander to our worst excesses while also refusing to see himself as part of the problem.  Sending someone you like some flowers to cheer them up is nice, but finding their address in the HR records is crossing a line and should have consequences.  Any valid points he might bring up are instantly negated by his attitude of "the world should change to fit my view with no effort on my part."

Roxy is just as bad, a fake woke "progressive" who thinks all NASCAR fans should be summarily executed for being trashy and can't see the irony in her hatred of right-wing conservatives.  But at least she's just a teenager.  Shitty extreme opinions not based in fact are practically a requirement.  

I feel bad for Bobcat Goldthwait.  I like him as a comedian and he's generally a very good writer.  This is going to be one for the ash-heap of history, I'm afraid.  It's currently streaming on Tubi.