Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)

Nominated for Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Director, Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Original Song, Best Original Score, Best Production Design, and Best Film Editing    Content warning:  murder, dead dog, 

The Osage Nation had been pushed from their ancestral lands by the U.S. government and forcibly resettled on land in Oklahoma that was widely considered to be worthless.  But karma is a bitch and the Osage struck oil, turning them overnight into the richest people per capita on planet Earth.  Naturally, white people couldn't allow that to stand and began to systematically murder the Osage heirs.  Ernest Burkhardt (Leonardo DiCaprio) returns home from the Great War and is recruited by his uncle, King Hale (Robert De Niro) to woo Mollie (Lily Gladstone), one of the richest heiresses.  Mollie sees what is happening all around her but her ability to affect change is curtailed by her race and gender.  She can't even access her own money without a white husband.  And yet, she persists, hiring private investigators and petitioning the Bureau of Indian Affairs to do something about the blatant robbery and murder.

This movie took me three days to get through.  I would watch about 20 minutes, get overwhelmed by rage/disgust/sorrow, and turn it off to watch something happier and more life-affirming, like True Detective.  

Martin Scorsese is 80-years-old and is considered one of the greatest living filmmakers.  My personal theory is that he is completely tired of people missing the whole-ass point of Goodfellas for 40 years and has decided to just do away completely with subtlety.  Between this and The Irishman, the message is clear.  These are garbage people doing despicable things that they don't really even profit from.  Killers of the Flower Moon beats you over the head with it, just in case you don't really get it.  It tells you verbally about the atrocities, then shows you, just so you can't claim you didn't understand.  It's the 10th grade book report thesis statement of movies.

That being said, this is probably the best work De Niro has turned in in decades.  People keep saying DiCaprio got snubbed but I don't think he did.  He basically played the same character from The Revenant only with worse teeth and Vito Corleone jowls. Cinematography is great but editing is where this movie really shines.  Gladstone rightfully is up for Best Actress and is the odds-on favorite but I wouldn't call it a lock yet.  Production design, costumes, and score are fine.  Nothing we haven't seen before.  I would love it if "Wazhazhe" won Best Original Song, though.  It's currently streaming on Apple+.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)

Nominated for Best Original Score     This kind of feels like a pity nomination but John Williams has five Oscars already, so it's really not.

Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) is staring down the barrel of old age.  He's retiring from the university, his marriage to Marion (Karen Allen) is ending, and everything looks like the beginning of the end.  Then his goddaughter, Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) shows up, followed by government agents and an honest-to-God Nazi (Mads Mikkelsen).  Thanks, Operation Paperclip!  Dr. Voller has a brand new name and affiliation with the U.S. space program but has never forgotten that in the last days of the 3rd Reich, Dr. Jones and his compatriot Basil Shaw (Toby Jones), Helena's father, stole the legendary Antikythera mechanism from him.  Designed by Archimedes, the Antikythera was broken into two parts and hidden to keep it from the hands of Roman invaders.  Helena needs the piece, the Nazis want it, and Indy...needs to feel needed?

This felt much closer in tone to the early trilogy.  It is still trying to recapture a glory of days gone by but it's a better attempt than the last one.  The de-aging is incredible, even if it is morally and ethically a gray area, and Waller-Bridge is very game.  I wouldn't mind seeing her having a spin-off.  Although I suspect Disney will keep trotting out Ford as long as he can still say yes.  Or agree to have his likeness used in perpetuity superimposed over some young, underpaid body double.

It's streaming on Disney+ if you want a nostalgia hit!

Altered States (1981)

  This movie was hilarious but I don't think it was supposed to be.  Regardless, 5/5 stars.  Content warning:  dead animals (lizard, antelope), animal abuse (dog)

Dr. Paul Jessup (William Hurt) is interested in experimenting with human consciousness.  He uses a sensory deprivation tank and a near lethal amount of hallucinogenic mushrooms in order to focus entirely within, to seek the immutable Truth of humanity, tracing back through millions of years of evolution.  And then something reaches back.

I don't want to spoil it but the "big reveal" is a laugh riot.  Especially because the 50 minutes or so before that had been all philosophical musings and quasi-scientific explorations of man and nature with strong religious crisis overtones.  **SPOILER WARNING** And then it turns into Body Horror with the Muppets!  **END SPOILERS**  

There's some stuff that didn't age well, like Jessup's constant sleeping with his grad students and the "all a man needs is the love of a good woman to save him" throughline but not terrible overall.  Definitely a cautionary tale for people who wonder why Ethics Boards exist.

It's streaming on the Criterion Channel this month and I would definitely encourage you to give it a spin if you like psychedelic sci-fi horror.

2024 Oscar Nominations

Best Picture

American Fiction
Anatomy of a Fall
Barbie
The Holdovers
Killers of the Flower Moon
Maestro
Oppenheimer
Past Lives
Poor Things
The Zone of Interest

No real surprises here.  There's the obligatory Holocaust-But-Centered-on-Germans film, the Weird One, the Blockbuster/Here's-One-for-the-Plebs, a couple of biopics, a Black-led and an Asian film so they can pretend they're not racist.

Best Director

Justine Triet - Anatomy of a Fall

Martin Scorsese - Killers of the Flower Moon

Christopher Nolan - Oppenheimer

Yorgos Lanthimos - Poor Things

Jonathan Glazer - The Zone of Interest

Looks like Triet got the Woman in Directing slot so no room for Greta Gerwig.  Everyone else is white and male, so expected.

Best Actor

Bradley Cooper - Maestro

Colman Domingo - Rustin

Paul Giamatti - The Holdovers

Cillian Murphy - Oppenheimer

Jeffrey Wright - American Fiction

No big upsets here unless you're Leonardo DiCaprio.

Best Actress

Annette Benning - Nyad

Lily Gladstone - Killers of the Flower Moon

Sandra Hüller - Anatomy of a Fall

Carey Mulligan - Maestro

Emma Stone - Poor Things

No Margot Robbie.  No Julianne Moore.

Best Supporting Actor

Sterling K. Brown - American Fiction

Robert De Niro - Killers of the Flower Moon

Robert Downey, Jr. - Oppenheimer

Ryan Gosling - Barbie

Mark Ruffalo - Poor Things

Best Supporting Actress

Emily Blunt - Oppenheimer

Danielle Brooks - The Color Purple 

America Ferrara - Barbie

Jodie Foster - Nyad

Da'Vine Joy Randolph - The Holdovers

The Academy is going all-in for Nyad.  No Natalie Portman.

Best Adapted Screenplay

American Fiction

Barbie

Oppenheimer

Poor Things

The Zone of Interest

The Barbenheimer showdown for real.

Best Original Screenplay

Anatomy of a Fall

The Holdovers

Maestro

May December

Past Lives

Best Animated Feature

The Boy and the Heron

Elemental

Nimona

Robot Dreams

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Best Documentary Feature

Bobi Wine: The People's President

The Eternal Memory

Four Daughters

To Kill a Tiger

20 Days in Mariupol

Best International Feature

Io Capitano - Italy

Perfect Days - Japan

Society of the Snow - Spain

The Teacher's Lounge - Germany

The Zone of Interest - United Kingdom

Interesting that Past Lives didn't get nominated here.

Best Animated Short

Letter to a Pig

Ninety-Five Senses

Our Uniform

Pachyderme

War Is Over! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko

Best Live-Action Short

The After

Invincible

Knight of Fortune

Red, White and Blue

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar

Best Documentary Short

The ABCs of Book Banning

The Barber of Little Rock

Island in Between

The Last Repair Shop

Nai Nai & Wài Pó

Best Cinematography

El Conde

Killers of the Flower Moon

Maestro

Oppenheimer

Poor Things

Best Costume Design

Barbie

Killers of the Flower Moon

Napoleon

Oppenheimer

Poor Things

Best Hair and Makeup

Golda

Maestro

Oppenheimer

Poor Things

Society of the Snow

Best Original Song

"The Fire Inside" - Flamin' Hot

"I'm Just Ken" - Barbie

"It Never Went Away" - American Symphony

"Wahzhazhe (A Song for My People)" - Killers of the Flower Moon

"What Was I Made For?" - Barbie

What a world.  Ridley Scott just got as many nominations as the origin story of Flamin' Hot Cheetos.  Amazing.

Best Original Score

American Fiction

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

Killers of the Flower Moon

Oppenheimer

Poor Things

Best Production Design

Barbie

Killers of the Flower Moon

Napoleon

Oppenheimer

Poor Things

Best Film Editing

Anatomy of a Fall

The Holdovers

Killers of the Flower Moon

Oppenheimer

Poor Things

Best Sound

The Creator

Maestro

Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One

Oppenheimer

The Zone of Interest

Fun fact:  the sound editors had to create a whole ambient overlay to cover the sound of Tom Cruise's joints creaking.

Best Visual Effects

The Creator

Godzilla: Minus One

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One

Napoleon

Okay, so Scott ended up with three nominations.  That's respectable.  Probably still going to feel like a snub, though.

Oppenheimer is leading the board but I expected more for Barbie, if I'm honest.  Cutting Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig is a slight.  The May December camp is probably feeling the sting too.  Hilarious that two major films about women were overshadowed by their supporting male leads.  But it means we're getting a live performance from Gosling which makes all the misogyny worth it.

As always, the clock starts now on me watching as many of these things as I can until the ceremony on March 10.  Stay tuned.

The Holdovers (2023)

  This was supposed to go up yesterday but I had to go in to work unexpectedly and it threw my whole day off.  Also, it's just been nominated (full list coming shortly) for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Original Screenplay, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Film Editing.  Which is at least four nominations too many.

Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa) is shocked and appalled to be stuck at his elite boarding school over winter break 1970 after boasting about going to St. Kitts with his family.  Worse, he's stuck there with Mr. Hunham (Paul Giamatti), the notoriously strict History teacher and Mary Lamb (Da'vine Joy Randolph), the lunch lady who recently lost a son in Vietnam.  Can some tough love and compassion break through to the troubled teen?  Will the crusty mentor find a soft spot?  Will the only Black woman in the cast share world-weary wisdom?

I don't understand how this is so critically acclaimed unless everyone who reviewed it has a TBI that caused them to forget the literal hundreds of movies this is shamelessly copying.

Original screenplay?  Hardly.  We've been getting a variation on this story since roughly 400 BC.  I am so tired of Privileged Cis Hetero White Boy Learns Money Doesn't Buy Happiness.  

Best Actor?  Maybe as a consolation prize for not winning a more deserved role.

Best Supporting Actress?  Randolph is given almost nothing to do except smoke and give a single speech about how her son died as a contrast to the sons of privilege she's forced to serve.  I know it's set in 1970 but can we not avoid the Tired POC Servant role in modern films?

Best Film Editing?  There's nothing remarkable about this film's editing.  Baffling nomination.

This movie is two and a quarter hours long and every minute is a slog through the most mundane, milquetoast With Honors remake you could imagine.  It's currently streaming on Peacock.

T2 Trainspotting (2017)

  Here's a wholly unnecessary sequel.  

Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor) returns to Edinburgh, now 20 years clean from heroin, in order to look up his old friends.  Spud (Ewen Bremner) is still a junkie, subsisting on odd jobs, Sick Boy (Johnny Lee-Miller) is trying to start his own brothel with a Bulgarian prostitute (Anjela Nedyalkova), and Begbie (Robert Carlyle) is in jail.  Renton soon discovers that old habits are the hardest to break and betrayal is not so easily forgiven.

This just feels like an exercise in nostalgia.  Danny Boyle could have just tweeted a "Where Are They Now" and it would have served the same purpose.  The original Trainspotting is a classic and nothing was going to top it.  It does give you Justice For Spud, if that's a thing you're looking for, but otherwise retreads the same ground.  It's currently streaming on Starz.

Oppenheimer (2023)

  This is the clear frontrunner for the Oscar race.  It is obviously bait but is it good bait?

J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) is brilliant but not especially well-liked in theoretical physicist circles.  His left-leaning views keep him on the outskirts of government-funded projects but soon the desperation to beat the Nazis overwhelms and Oppie is read on to the Manhattan Project, working with some of the finest minds in the world.  He opens his dream station, a self-contained town in the New Mexico desert called Los Alamos focused on one goal:  a fission bomb.  But success comes with a price and post-war America suddenly remembers all its petty internal squabbles.

This movie is three hours long and I felt every minute of it drag past like sandpaper on skin.  Sure, it's beautiful and well-acted.  The dialogue is hokey and the female roles are cardboard but the most egregious sin is that it's a Mary Sue role for the director.  "Look at the tortured genius!  Women love him, men want to be him, but jealous hacks conspire to bring him down!"  It has the same energy as Lord Helmet playing with action figures.

Robert Downey, Jr. is definitely getting a nom for Supporting Actor, Murphy is definitely getting a nom for Best Actor, Emily Blunt may get one for Supporting Actress, long shot for Best Actress, and it's probably getting Best Picture, Cinematography, Visual Effects, and Director.  Maybe Adapted Screenplay, Editing, and Costumes.  It 100% was not my favorite and it wouldn't have made my top 10 of the year.  But other people sure did like it and maybe you will too.

Baby Driver (2017)

  Yesterday was a holiday so you get a freebie today.  

Baby (Ansel Elgort) is a getaway driver for a mob boss (Kevin Spacey).  He just needs One More Job to pay off his debt and be free.  Of course it's never that easy so he hatches a plan to -- actually, I'm not sure exactly what his plan was because it goes to shit immediately.  Cue the extended action sequence.

When this came out, people couldn't shut up about it but I haven't heard anyone say it's their favorite or even mention it since then.  It's a decent popcorn flick but hardly a cult classic in the making, unlike Edgar Wright's other films like the Cornetto trilogy or Scott Pilgrim.  This is probably due to casting choices.  Elgort and Spacey are trash people in real life and audiences know that.  Hard to see it having a popularity resurgence with that kind of cloud.   

Jon Hamm was the standout here.  The female characters were underwritten and came off more as archetypes than people, which is something Wright has struggled with previously, but for Dudes Driving Cars While Shooting Guns, it's not bad.  My copy comes courtesy of Christy, who gave me the digital file that came with her DVD.

40 Days and 40 Nights (2002)

Happy MLK Day!  Here's a completely unrelated movie featuring not a single Black cast member even in 2002.   This movie fucking sucks for a host of reasons, lack of diversity being just one.  Content warning:  rape, sexual harassment

Matt (Josh Hartnett) decides to give up all forms of sex for Lent in the hopes it will help him get over his break-up with Nicole (Vinessa Shaw).  Almost immediately, he meets Erica (Shannyn Sossamon) and horror of horrors, is forced to actually date her instead of immediately having sex with her.  Plus, his roommate (Paulo Costanzo) told his asshole co-workers about his vow of celibacy and now there's a bet going.

This just in:   Local Man Discovers Women are Human Beings, Not Just Holes.  "She has, like, thoughts and feelings and stuff."  More at 11!

If you are a hetero cis man, you should be fucking embarrassed there are movies like this representing your people.  It basically gives you no agency and claims you are utterly dependent on your dicks with zero capacity for willpower or higher thought.  Get it together, men.

Besides the pathetically outdated gender assumptions, this movie is painfully unfunny and a complete waste of your (and more importantly, my) time.  But if you must, it's streaming on Paramount+.

The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994)

  I am so mad nobody showed this to me as a child.  I mean, yes, I had To Wong Foo, but I would also have liked some Australian drag.  Content warning:  homophobia, gay bashing

Tick (Hugo Weaving) gets a call to perform a cabaret show in Alice Springs, New South Wales, and recruits his two best friends, a transwoman former showgirl who has been recently widowed, Bernadette (Terrence Stamp), and a young, hyper-energetic drag queen, Adam (Guy Pearce), to join him on a cross-country drive through the desert.  But mechanical problems see them stranded far from the cosmopolitan embrace of Sydney and Tick's secrets begin to come to light.

This is such a wholesome movie.  It was like a glittery, marabou feather, rhinestone-encrusted balm to my little dark soul.  If you've only ever seen Weaving, Stamp, and Pearce in their villain roles (Agent Smith/Red Skull, General Zod, that one guy from Count of Monte Cristo/that one guy from Iron Man 3, respectively), you owe it to yourself to see how vulnerable and open they could be here.  It's streaming on Kanopy but this is a must-buy for me.

Also, there is apparently a musical based on the film and once again, I am wondering why I had to find that out for myself and no one told me.  What else are you hiding?!?!

Raise the Red Lantern (1991)

  This week's Movie Club brings us Raise the Red Lantern, a film by Zhang Yimou, one of my favorite directors.

Songlian (Gong Li) is poor but beautiful and marries a rich man as his fourth wife.  Moving into his compound, she is forced into a delicate balance of spite and protocol among the other three, competing for attention and luxuries.

You can read this movie as anti-patriarchy and anti-Maoist.  The wives are kept isolated, powerless in every real sense, and so devolve into vicious in-fighting to gain favor from the Master.  He is fully aware and in some senses encourages this until it inconveniences him or makes him look bad.  They are also each from a different sector of society: 1st wife is nobility, 2nd wife is mercantile, 3rd wife is the arts, and 4th is scholars.  All of which were summarily crushed in the Cultural Revolution.  

It's a really neat perspective that the Master is never fully shown.  He is always filmed from the back, behind a curtain, or in a long shot, never a close-up.  Because he is completely unimportant to the story. He could have been replaced by a different actor in every scene and you probably wouldn't notice.  The wives, however, are richly dressed in vibrant colors that pop from the bland surroundings.  Their inner lives are just as prominent, hopes and fears on display in every interaction.  It's a surprising choice for 1991 but Yimou has demonstrated a sense of equality in all his films.  

Unfortunately, the only way to watch it is YouTube so the video quality isn't great, but it's the full movie with English subtitles.  It's a fascinating film and I recommend it.

Sunrise (1927)

  Hey, look, it's a good movie!  Only took 97 years.  

A man (George O'Brien) contemplates killing his wife (Janet Gaynor) in order to please his mistress (Margaret Livingston) but ends up remembering why he got married in the first place.

I'm pretty sure this is also a Tyler Perry movie but it's public domain so more power to him.  

Jokes aside, this felt timeless.  Murnau really couldn't be beat as one of the greatest filmmakers of the Golden Age and I'm a little sad he seems to have fallen out of favor when they do retrospectives.  Obviously he's best known for sci-fi and horror but this is a pretty decent rom-com.  It was up for four Oscars in the very first ceremony and won three of them, including Best Picture.  It's available for free on Tubi and I encourage you to check it out.

The Immigrant (2013)

  2024 is not starting off with a great selection of movies.  

Ewa (Marion Cotillard) and her sister Magda (Angela Sarafyan) travel to Ellis Island, fleeing their native Poland because of war violence.  At the entry point, they are separated because Magda has tuberculosis and must be quarantined.  Ewa is told she can't enter as a woman alone and is about to be deported when a kind stranger, Bruno (Joaquin Phoenix), steps in and pays some bribes to have her released.  Bruno, of course, is a pimp specifically preying on desperate women.  He coerces Ewa into prostitution but soon grows enamored of her himself.  So much so that he is insanely jealous when his cousin, Emil (Jeremy Renner), shows interest in Ewa.

It's a sad, tawdry love triangle with nothing terribly new or important to say.  The only interesting bit is that Cotillard only had two months to learn a convincing Polish accent and dialogue.  It's on the Criterion Channel as part of a collection of the director's, James Gray, work.  If you are interested, go for it.  This was not for me.

Paddington 2 (2018)

  I don't get the hype around this movie.  I watched the original with my godchildren and it was so boring I didn't even review it.  I wasn't going to watch the sequel but it was on so many top ten lists and had such rave reviews that I thought it must have made some major improvements.

Paddington (Ben Whishaw) loves living with the Brown family in London but is worried about finding a special gift for his Aunt Lucy (Imelda Staunton) for her 100th birthday.  He finds a pop-up book of London landmarks in an antique shop but as it is one of a kind, it is very expensive.  He takes a series of odd jobs to try and make enough money, only to have the book be stolen and Paddington arrested for the crime.  In prison, he tries to make the best of things while the Brown family search for the real culprit.

This is an absolutely bog-standard children's movie.  There's nothing especially clever or unique about it.  The performances are good but one look at the cast list will tell you that.  

I was irked by one particular aspect -- the conflation of "kind" with "stupid".  Paddington is portrayed as sweet-natured, always ready to give the benefit of the doubt, but also kind of dumb.  And the villain is clever but rude and sarcastic.  It just bugged me.  Like being nice and smart is somehow inherently manipulative, instead of a conscious choice.

It's currently streaming on Hulu if you're trying to find a movie for your toddler.

Shazam: Fury of the Gods (2023)

  Happy 2024!  I am cheating a little bit because I watched this a couple of days ago so I could have one more for my top ten.  Which it did not make because it is straight-up terrible.

Billy Batson (Angel Asher) is leaning into his life as the superhero Shazam (Zachery Levi) so he can avoid thinking of his problems as a foster kid about to age out of the system.  Which doesn't have anything to do with the Daughters of Atlas, goddesses who are searching for a seed of the tree of life so they can rejuvenate their blighted world.  Meanwhile, Freddy (Jack Dylan Grazer), is shocked and delighted to learn that the new girl in school, Anne (Rachel Zegler), is interested in him.  

Do those seem like three separate storylines that are somehow ham-handed into one?  Because that's what I got out of it.  Nothing in this film made sense.  The heroes' motivations were unknown, the villains were underbaked, the actions scenes didn't feel grounded, and the story was somehow both overstretched and cluttered.  Ensemble films are hard to pull off.  None of the Shazam-family seemed to have much of a personality in either of their forms except Billy and Freddy.  That worked okay in the first one, because it focused primarily on Billy/Shazam.  This one tried to broaden out but there wasn't enough there to build on.  

Shazam is supposed to be a kid dealing with adult problems, forced to grow up too soon, given an absurd amount of power but no instructions on how to use it.  A metaphor for adulthood.  There is a lot to be mined from that but this movie is completely uninterested.  It doesn't even seem interested in the parallels between the Daughters of Atlas, unmoored by their grief with no clear way forward, and Billy's fears of abandonment.  

It's a regression, filled with childish one-note jokes about unicorns and Billy's teenaged crush on Wonder Woman.  

Skip it and watch Black Adam instead.  Seriously.