Going to the Movies as a Political Act

Originally published 16 Jan 2019

Oscar Nomination Update
I’d like to tell you that I was pleasantly surprised by the Oscar nomination this morning, but no.

Willem DaFoe from At Eternity’s Gate was an unusual pick. I just didn’t think it had enough exposure, but you never know how the studios are promoting things to voters. Other picks that pleased me included both Richard (always with an “E”) Grant and Melissa McCarthy. Grant was so much fun, ranging from flamboyant scenery chewing to a diminished shell, and McCarthy managed to be a miserable misanthrope you actually cared about; neat trick. Also, it’s not often that a foreign language performance gets nominated (we’re going to ignore Roberto Benigni for now). It’s more unusual that a person gets nominated for their first role, but Roma was all about Yalitza Aparicio’s character, so she was impossible to pass over. How nice it would have been for Brady Jandreau to join her.

One film I did not discuss below was First Reformed. It was one of the most critically acclaimed films of the year, and while it didn’t qualify for my Emperor’s List, it might have gone on a “Not All That” list, if I had one (it would be a long list). I though it was Paul Schrader showing us alternate ending for Taxi Driver. I also thought the ending was actually a dream, and the audience was supposed to guess at Rev. Roller’s actual fate, since it was so absurd. But I’m alone in that interpretation.

Cold War shows up more than I would have expected. I sometimes wonder if black and white films get extra consideration for their novelty, but this was an excellent film. The love story isn’t complicated. Boy meets girl (recruits her, really). Boy and girl fall in love, boy leaves girl unwillingly and forgets how to shave, girl follows boy. Girl then leaves boy, boy follows, and then boy and girl “leave” together. What complicates the story are the borders they cross to accomplish all this. They could have been a conventionally turbulent couple, likely torn asunder by their chosen professions as musicians. Also, Joanna Kulig has the saddest eyes I’ve ever seen.

Also, nominating a film for Directing that is not in the Best Picture category pisses people off. Part of me is glad they didn’t leave Spike Lee out, because that’s all we would be hearing about today. (The other part of me wished he and his film weren’t nominated at all).

Documentaries broke through to mainstream audiences this year, and I had a feeling that either RBG or Won’t You Be My Neighbor would be nominees, but not both.

Overall, how could films like The Rider, Leave No Trace, Blindspotting, Sorry to Bother You and First Man be ignored? I’ll have a few things to root for, but I probably won’t watch the Oscar broadcast this year. It’s a three hour window that I’d prefer to fill with a good movie.

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Note: I am publishing this in advance of the Oscar nominations, on January 22, mostly because I’m expecting very little to come of that. It looks like Green Book vs A Star is Born vs Bohemian Rhapsody. An astonishing array of fascinating, challenging and entertaining movies were released in 2018, and they will mostly be ignored. I’d be delighted if Roma, If Beale Street Could Talk, , Annihilation, Leave No Trace, Sorry to Bother You, Blindspotting and many others made a huge showing, but I think we’re going to have a month of talking about Lady Gaga and Remy Malek instead. When the nominees are announced, I’ll do my usual thing. But this could be the most disgraceful year since Forrest Gump beat beat Pulp Fiction.

In 2018, The New York Times published 952 new film reviews, which is absurd. As of this writing, I saw 73 films that were released in 2018, and watched 111 films overall last year. There are still 132 films on my want-to-see list released in 2018. I tried to keep up with the best reviewed films, but I also caught up with some old classics as well. Has anyone ever said to you “I can’t believe you never saw that!” I hate that question. If you’d like a list of what I did see in 2018, I’ll put a link at the bottom of this essay. My favorite classic films last year were The Ipcress File, and Un Chien Andalou, and yes I finally saw Gone With The Wind, because you’ll watch anything to endure a 14 hour flight.

Political Theater

If you just attend movies, and don’t want to think about them too much, don’t read this. Because if you’ve managed to avoid all the controversy about several of the most prominent films of 2018, including some which were just rewarded with Golden Globes, then you probably lead a happy life.

It’s been decades since so many mainstream films were so overtly political. The central theme this year was race relations, and the timing could not be merely coincidental with the second year of the 45th president’s reign. Absolutely brilliant films with highly charged messages were released in 2018. But it’s more rare to find one that found favor with both audiences and their most vocal partisan critics.

Let’s start with the obvious, the two Golden Globe winners that some people love to hate. Did you like Green Book? Many say you shouldn’t. Not the movie critics though — they gave this film an 81% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Political critics complained about both a “white savior” and a “magical negro” problem, if that’s possible to combine. I’m not reaching far to find these criticisms — your friends may have all loved this film, but the internet is seething with contempt. Pile on Don Shirley’s family attacking the film, and this could turn out to be the most hated Best Picture winner since Crash or Driving Miss Daisy. Again, if you didn’t realize that these are also politically despised films, then please continue to enjoy your life.

I could write something similar about Bohemian Rhapsody; how did they turn Freddie Mercury’s gay (and Parsi) identity into something he was burdened with? And why bother making a Queen biopic rated PG-13? I recently asked Amy if her enjoyment of this film was impaired if I told her that the scene at Live Aid where Freddie Mercury tells the band that he had “it” (AIDS) never happened; he was diagnosed 2 years later. She considered the question, then happily went to see it again.

That brings up the “JFK problem.” JFK was Oliver Stone’s fantasy film about the first Kennedy assassination. It was hugely entertaining, regardless of it having no fealty to reality. Movies in 2018 based on real events included The Young Karl Marx, BlacKkKlansman, The Old Man & The Gun, Colette, Tag, A Private War, First Man and Roma. With one exception (see the Emperor’s List below), I enjoyed all of these, and was not compelled to read articles that compared the movie to reality (I had already read the New Yorker article about Forrest Tucker before Robert Redford depicted him). But for BlacKkKlansman, it was impossible (for me) to avoid these discussions, because it’s another film that has run afoul of activist criticism. Far too positive about the Colorado Springs police and Ron Stallworth, who spent three years infiltrating a Black radical organization, as part of COINTELPRO. The feel-good stuff about the other cops busting one of their own was a myth, many other changes were made to the story to make it palatable, and Spike Lee is a total sell-out, according to fellow filmmaker Boots Riley, who wrote and directed Sorry to Bother You, one of my favorite films of 2018. When confronted with facts and opinions like these, everyone decides for themselves how much they care, or if it ruins the film for them. I’m not terribly consistent about it.

“Incidental” politics in two very different films was more on my mind in 2018. First Man and Roma were unrelated to each other, aside from their excellence, and in their depiction of historical events swirling around the central story. In First Man, Janet Armstrong is shown turning off the television just as news broadcasts transitioned to Vietnam and protests. My read is that this was intended to show how all-absorbing the space program was for the astronauts and their families, in a slightly facetious manner. Roma was a more difficult film for me to understand, as it depicted the politics of 1971 Mexico. The Corpus Christi massacre was much more than just incidental to the events in the film, as Cleo’s boyfriend was revealed to be a member of the CIA front group Los Halcones, in the midst of the infamous Mexican “Dirty War.” But in the end, these events have almost no lasting impact on the family, despite their violent intrusiveness. Roma is described as Alfonso Cuaron’s memories of childhood, and it’s conceivable that these events amounted to nothing for him as a child. But they are so integral to Cleo’s pregnancy that the viewer is left wondering what all the fuss amounted to. Or at least I was.

Oaklandish Films

What a showing for The Town in 2018! In addition to the aforementioned Sorry to Bother You, we also had the superb Blindspotting and parts of Black Panther. I just missed seeing Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal at the Grand Lake Theater for Blindspotting’s opening weekend. Kudos to Ryan Coogler and everyone else for their hometown love.

Best of the Bunch

My five star films were If Beale Street Could Talk, The Rider, First Man, Blindspotting, Leave No Trace, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, and Can You Ever Forgive Me? I’ve never listed 7 films before. My “Un Certain Regard” list with 4.5 star movies is pretty long too. I was often delighted, moved and thoroughly entertained in theaters this year.

The Emperor List

These are the highly regarded films that left me cold. First of all, I am so over Wes Anderson. Isle of Dogs featured another extraordinary cast who were apparently instructed to run over their acting with a steamroller. I don’t want a flat Bill Murray or Jeff Goldblum, are you kidding?! I also don’t want to see another Wes Anderson film unless he changes his approach. He goes on a list with increasingly insufferable Terrence Malick, who didn’t release anything in 2018, thankfully.

From my review of Thoroughbreds, which I enjoyed writing way more than watching the movie: “[W]hy is this movie praised particularly for its writing? It has no wit or style. It’s not ‘Heathers meets American Psycho’ as the poster says. Those movies were a gas. This movie is just constipated.”

The worst for last, A Private War, the only film I walked out of in 2018. Phrases from my review include “hollow and content-free shotgun scenes of Marie Colvin around the world being brave and adventurous, with not a whit of substance” “Is Marie Colvin so absurdly over the top in real life, or is Rosamund Pike just a lousy actress? …plenty of empty shots of her staring into the middle distance, emoting. Such emoting!” “When she described journalism as the rough draft of history, my cliché-meter detonated.” That was fun to write. I ended with “Go see ‘The Year of Living Dangerously’ instead. Yes, I know it stars Mel fucking Gibson. See it anyway.”

Other disappointments included Mandy and Ready Player One. I should have known not to watch a video game movie wallowing in 80s nostalgia.

Inverse Ratio of Budgets and Memorability

All I remember are general feelings about each of these: Solo was meh, Grindelwald was bad, Avengers Infinity War was reasonably cool, but I all remember is Spider-man dissolving.

Youth Movement Films

One common thread this year were excellent films about young people, sometimes derived from Young Adult novels. The Hate U Give was one of those, and again, if you want to wallow in the fever swamps of controversy, you can find debates on whether it’s important that Amandla Stenberg is more fair-skinned than the girl on the book cover. Actually, don’t bother, just see the film. And watch the most powerful and damning scene from any movie in 2018, Starr Carter questioning her uncle, a cop played by Common, about pulling over someone driving a Mercedes. Then watch a very similar scene in Monsters and Men, featuring John David Washington playing another cop with similar internal conflicts, with far more vibrancy than he had in BlacKkKlansman.

Sophie and I enjoyed Eighth Grade and Won’t You Be My Neighbor together. Eighth Grade was only awkward if you attended school, or have a kid who attended school, so no issues there, right? The ending payoff makes it all worthwhile — saved by the nerds. We also saw The Miseducation of Cameron Post together, which we recommend to anyone, young or old, interested in ending the practice of conversion therapy, but with a caveat warning about a serious self-harm incident. I want to see the magnificently sinister Jennifer Ehle get an Oscar nomination.

Leave No Trace is a very rare film that manages to be dramatic without much conflict. There’s no antagonist, just a man and his daughter eager to live together, but who can’t agree on the best way to make that happen. “The same thing that’s wrong with you isn’t wrong with me” is heartbreaking line delivered with no animus, just honesty and love. I’m getting choked up just writing that, and thinking about the lines “Where’s your home?” “With my dad.”

Others include the uplifting and whimsical Saturday Church, the deeply weird and disturbing Madeline’s Madeline, the inventive and thought provoking Every Day, the best John Hughes film of 2018 Love, Simon, and yes, even the hilarious Blockers. Another John Cena comedy triumph!

Best Robert Altman film of 2018

Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind. There’s probably enough leftover footage from that 6 year project to create another movie entirely. It is two movies — a parody of European art films, and a cinema verite treatment of the wrap party. Be sure to watch the companion film They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead, and try to imagine Rich Little as the star of an Orson Welles film.

Never, Nope, Not Gonna Happen

Free Solo is the best reviewed documentary this year, but I’d die from dehydration if I tried to watch it, hands sweating, soaking my seat.

I hate skateboarders. It’s flat-out bigotry, but I make no apologies. I hate skateboarding culture, and I hate movies about skateboarders. So I missed Minding the Gap, one of the best reviewed films of the year. I also missed Jonah Hill’s Mid90s, which wasn’t. No regrets. If you’ve seen either of these and want to convince me otherwise, I’m willing to listen.

Sources

Once again, I want to thank Metacritic’s compilation of films that appear in every critic’s Top Ten list. of films that appear in every critic’s Top Ten list. Minding the Gap and Paddington 2 are the only films in the 30 most cited film list that I haven’t seen. And I probably have a date with Paddington very soon.

Now go forth, and read other, lesser film commentary.

Movies I’ve seen (filter for 2018)
Movies I haven’t seen yet, but want to (filter for 2018)