Simon Boccanegra
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On 3/11/2023 at 1:22 PM, xls said:
Also was there not one father brother or uncle of these girls who was angered/outraged by the systemic assault and wanted to protect his daughter?
I have read that that was the case in the real Mennonite colony on which Miriam Toews loosely based her novel. Some men were tranquilized as well to keep them from interfering.
I was mixed-leaning-positive on the film, and I agree with some of the criticisms voiced above, but I'm happy for Sarah Polley's Adapted Screenplay win anyway. Even if this isn't my favorite of the four feature films she has made (along with her screenplay for the miniseries Alias Grace), it was deserving. It had powerful and eloquent passages and ensemble acting of a high order—unfortunately, of the kind that sometimes keeps any one or two actors from being singled out at awards time.
Also, at some point in the last decade (around Carol/A Ghost Story time), Rooney Mara became one of my favorite actresses, and she just gets better and better. I liked the combination of warmth and a haunted quality she brought to Ona. She slayed that speech about how, with time and distance, she might be able to understand and forgive the crimes committed against her and the others, but forgiveness cannot be compulsory and on someone else's timetable.
What do we think of the fringe theory that August was the one responsible for Ona's assault (and pregnancy)? I tend toward "No," but there is an ambiguous reaction shot of him when she says that the child she's carrying is as innocent and blameless as his father once was.
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Tár (2022)
in Movies
In the Staten Island scene, in which school awards and diplomas are visible, we see that her birth name was "Linda Tarr." This sort of exoticization of name happens sometimes with artistic people, for example, the filmmaker Lars Trier giving himself a "von." At least she didn't go as far as the conductor Leopold Stokowski, who concealed his Englishness with a faux Middle European accent.
The Wikipedia page we see someone (presumably Francesca) editing tells us that Lydia's father was Zoltán Tarr, an Hungarian immigrant.
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Tár (2022)
in Movies
On 3/11/2023 at 11:57 AM, Wiendish Fitch said:On top of all that, Lydia Tar, certified control freak, has to conduct to a click track, the final dent to her dignity.
Yes. It contrasts with her lofty comments about time in the opening interview scene with Gopnik. "You cannot start without me. I start the clock."
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An actor, a producer, and a director anonymously reveal their 2023 Oscar choices. This is one of the nice ones, without snide comments about other nominees.
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It beat The Banshees of Ed Sheeran and Women Are Talking! (Mockery of Mark Wahlberg's crappy presenting should not be confined to any one thread.)
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A good close read from Thomas Flight, whose video essays I usually like. Even if you don't love this particular film as much as he does, I'd recommend subscribing to his YouTube channel.
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14 hours ago, Shannon L. said:
I'm planning on watching The Fabelmans before the Oscars, at which point I'll have seen all of them except Women Talking and All Quiet on the Western Front, both of which may be fantastic, but neither of which I'm really interested in seeing.
I've seen all but the Avatar sequel. I hope to get to it at some point before the ceremony, but I don't feel like going out of my way to do so, and I missed my chance to see it at a nearby theater. Like many people, it seems, I enjoyed the first Avatar well enough, never felt the urge to watch it again over the next 13 years, and remember very little about it.
Of the nine I have seen, my preferential ballot would be:
1. Everything Everywhere All At Once
2. TÁR
3. The Banshees of Inisherin
4. The Fabelmans
5. Top Gun: Maverick
6. Women Talking
7. All Quiet on the Western Front
8. Elvis
9. Triangle of Sadness
Deciding the order of 6 and 7 was the hardest part here. They're both good but flawed. I gave Women Talking the edge because it had more memorable characters and performances. More of it has stayed with me. When I try to think of any specific scenes in All Quiet on the Western Front, even though I saw it only two months ago, I may be thinking of 1917 (which I thought was better).
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@Brn2bwildMaybe that was family lore. It had the feel of something a somewhat eccentric relative would insist had really happened, and here it was just faithfully rendered from her point of view.
I was thinking that so many distinguished filmmakers have made quasi-autobiographical movies about the environment of their early lives, with a young actor playing an obvious avatar. It's nearly a rite of passage at this point. Off the top of my head: Federico Fellini (Amarcord), Louis Malle (Au Revoir, Les Enfants), Woody Allen (Radio Days), John Boorman (Hope and Glory), Barry Levinson (Avalon), Terence Davies (The Long Day Closes), Spike Lee (Crooklyn), Cameron Crowe (Almost Famous), Terrence Malick (The Tree of Life), Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird), Pedro Almodóvar (Pain and Glory...a half credit, because the boyhood flashbacks are only part of the movie), Alfonso Cuarón (Roma), Kenneth Branagh (Belfast)...I'm sure I am missing some.
I like all of these movies, and some of them are among the best for the filmmaker in question. It's interesting to compare them. Some are full of joy and others are more poignant, wistful, or even rueful, because people experience and remember childhood in different ways.
Spielberg's entry, which plays like something he wanted to make while he still could, but had not wanted to do too early in his career, is more focused than any of the others on the character learning to be a filmmaker. The Allen, Davies, Almodóvar, Cuarón, and Branagh films all make a point of showing the young character under the spell of the cinema, but it's not clear that he will pursue this as a calling.
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On 12/28/2022 at 5:14 PM, Browncoat said:
I will also agree that it probably could have been trimmed a little, but I'm not sure what I would cut.
I felt the movie lost a bit of steam in the Saratoga section. The scenes with the Christian love interest, especially, were overly broad. (They reminded me a bit of Frank's comic romance scenes in Catch Me If You Can, but not as funny.) However, I was loving the Jersey and Phoenix sections, and I really liked the Los Angeles wrap-up too. I'm glad David Lynch gave in on playing Ford, after Spielberg deputized his and Lynch's mutual friend Laura Dern to close the sale.
Overall, I had a lot of fondness and admiration for the movie. Unlike some above, I loved Williams's performance as Mitzi, and I think Spielberg and Kushner saw the character with a lot of love and understanding, warts and all. Williams is obviously very good at playing sadness (Brokeback Mountain, Blue Valentine, Manchester by the Sea), and this time she's playing a character who tries to conceal it with a lot of superficial liveliness and cheer. It's not quite like anything I've seen from her in the past, and it's a reminder of what a good director of actors Spielberg is, apart from everything else. I hope Gabriel LaBelle gets a big boost from this. He made a very winning protagonist, and he really managed to suggest the young Spielberg I have seen in photos.
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On 2/19/2023 at 10:46 AM, katha said:
Something that I also dislike about social media and the way its discourse operates: As an example, take that argument scene from "Marriage Story" and how it was widely mocked and meme'd as "bad acting/writing". [...] The characters ARE overacting, because their conflict has devolved into a performative and destructive game of one-upmanship. Which you'd know if you watched all of it. But I think social media discourse encourages "fast takes" and "hot takes" and a lot of extreme judgements.
That's an interesting observation. If social media had existed in the early '70s, people may have memed the most intense argument from all 280 minutes of Scenes from a Marriage (an obvious influence on the film you mention) and mocked the "overacting" of Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson.
On topic, congrats to Kerry Condon and Barry Keoghan for their BAFTA wins in the supporting categories. The film also won for Best British Film and for Best Original Screenplay.
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I think Raiders of the Lost Ark deserves its classic status; Temple of Doom is quite good (I appreciate the ways in which it tries to be different, even the terrified girly-girl love interest); Last Crusade is a lazy, safe retread, and Crystal Skull is better than its rep and a satisfying send-off for the main characters. I can't say I've been eagerly anticipating a fifth film in this series with an elderly Indy, and the handoff from Spielberg to James Mangold doesn't make me more excited, because I haven't liked his other films. But if I hear that it's good, sure, why not?
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A woman recalls a Turkish vacation 20 years earlier with her father (Academy Award nominee Paul Mescal), who struggles with financial pressures and mental-health issues from which he attempts to shield his perceptive daughter. The debut feature by Scottish writer/director Charlotte Wells explores memory, loss, and the struggle toward greater understanding. Also starring Frankie Corio.
I don't like to spoil too much about plot and destination in the first post of a thread (I figure if people keep reading further down, they have prepared themselves), but I really loved this one. I wish it had been nominated for more things besides Mescal's beautifully modulated performance as the father. I have never seen the television series Normal People, but I made note of Mescal last year as the young man Olivia Colman befriends in The Lost Daughter. That was another "vacation movie," come to think of it.
Aftersun is a subtle movie with some stretches that are superficially banal, and even what is overtly dramatic in it (friction between the father and daughter at a karaoke night) is underplayed, but it creeps up on you and ultimately is affecting in an unusual way. Much is done by implication. I feel so certain I know what happened after this vacation, almost as if I saw the scenes, but I have read other interpretations. There is a lot to consider just in the expressions on the face of the adult version of the daughter (Celia Rowlson-Hall), in the strobe-lit rave scenes that appear at intervals.
I am interested to see Charlotte Wells's future work. This seems the kind of very personal debut movie that could be hard to follow up, but I shouldn't get too far ahead. In the meantime, I would highly recommend it.
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Talking a little more broadly about divisiveness and polarization, maybe it was always true that there were acclaimed movies many people hated. People, especially young people, were fancying themselves iconoclasts for years by announcing that they finally watched Citizen Kane and it was boring and overrated. And there were always auteurs who left people cold with their whole body of work. But doesn't it seem there are more such movies now than ever before? A poster above mentioned Banshees and Everything Everywhere All At Once as the year's polarizing movies, but I've been seeing intense disagreements on my social-media feeds for months about TÁR too. Elvis is polarizing (as is everything Luhrmann does; you either eat up his maximalist spectacle approach with a spoon or you can't stand it, and I'm in...one of those categories).Triangle of Sadness, the Best Picture nominee from 2022 with the lowest Rotten Tomatoes score, is polarizing. Blonde for damn sure is polarizing, although it seems the "anti" contingent is louder in the United States. The Whale...some people really are deeply moved by it; others feel affronted by it.
I don't have an explanation, if this is a thing. Maybe cinema is so far along in its maturity now, and we've seen all the motion-picture genres brought off in so many ways, that really reaching people by doing distinctive work means alienating others? I'm just musing. I don't even know that it applies to all of the above. (The Whale, IMO, is the least "distinctive" movie on the above list.)
If anyone here has not seen the Actors on Actors chat between Jamie Lee Curtis and Colin Farrell, give it a look, especially if you really like one or both of EEAAO and Banshees. They have good chemistry and get good material out of each other. Curtis is pretty firmly Team Colm. She talked about advancing age and the specter of mortality, feeling she just has less of herself to give, and she said she's had to go through a similar process with people in her life. Minus the finger amputations.
17 hours ago, Milburn Stone said:If I read that in a folk tale, I would totally buy into its premise, and thoughts like "no man would actually do that" would be far far away from my mind. That's what The Banshees of Inisherin is. A folk tale. One invented by Martin McDonagh, but nevertheless a folk tale.
Same. I looked at it as a movie with one foot in the literal, one in myth and metaphor.
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On 1/28/2023 at 11:37 AM, StatisticalOutlier said:
Also, I noticed that I singled out the music in my original post, and saw that it got nominated for an Academy Award. Cool.
It's remarkable to me that this is only Carter Burwell's fourth nomination, given his longevity and how good he is. Besides all of Martin McDonagh's previous films, Burwell is so closely associated with the Coens, from Blood Simple all the way to Joel's solo Macbeth film last year. I think the only ones he has not scored are O Brother Where Art Thou and Inside Llewyn Davis.
A short featurette on Jenny the donkey:
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I don't think there is much danger of Riseborough winning. She gives a great performance and is the best thing about a movie that is only so-so (very lifelike in some details but underwritten and oddly focused). For her and for De Armas, the nomination was the win.
It will be Blanchett or Yeoh. Williams, who may be in the wrong category, is a more plausible longshot, just because she has been good in so many movies and has been an Oscar also-ran four times before. Not that that has done Glenn Close any good.
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On 1/24/2023 at 5:01 PM, thuganomics85 said:
Don't know what to think about who will win the big one and I won't speculate because I totally didn't predict CODA winning it last year, so I ain't going try and figure it out yet!
I guess The Fabelmans would be this year's CODA: warm, affectionate, family-oriented, with positive messages, likely not to be hated by anyone, thus likely to do well on a preferential ballot. Of course, it's also quite literally this year's Belfast, a famous filmmaker's loving recreation of his boyhood environment, and Belfast only went 1 for 7 last year.
I'm not sure what they'll do either. I can make a case for and against several movies on the list. EEAAO probably plays better to younger Academy members than to older ones; TÁR is an icy, deliberate film about a difficult character and the opportunists and phonies around her; Banshees is cryptic and strange, if fun to listen to and less brutal than most McDonagh; Elvis is polarizing with the Luhrmann of it all...
I have to say it's one of the most interesting years of recent memory, not only for this race but several others. And it was a good movie year.
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I am seeing this later this week. I've liked all of Sarah Polley's work behind the camera so far. I thought Stories We Tell was one of the best of the last decade. It's not something I saw coming when I was seeing her in movies such as The Sweet Hereafter and Go and thinking she was the most interesting young actress out there.
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Tár (2022)
in Movies
On 1/28/2023 at 5:14 PM, Spartan Girl said:Watched it on Peacock. I swear that the scream that Lydia hears in the park was the same one as the ending to The Blair Witch Project.
It was, indeed, repurposed Heather Donahue audio.
This movie doesn't let anyone off lightly, does it? All of these characters are "transactional" or otherwise morally compromised. Lydia, Francesca, Eliot, Olga, maybe even Sharon (the easiest character to like).
I'm not even sure Lydia's e-mails that we see to (real) famous conductors about Krista are wrong in and of themselves. They would be wrong if they were done vengefully, but they look like responses to inquiries. If Krista was prone to stalking, which is one reading of what we see (still following around an ex-lover and sending her unwelcome gifts, Lydia's comment about how she began to make demands), should Lydia have given her peers in the conducting world glowing recommendations, potentially making Krista the problem of some woman in another orchestra? Not that I think protecting others was Lydia's primary objective. She was trying to bury her own mistake.
Krista's "Where's Waldo?" appearances hiding around a corner in Lydia's Berlin studio and in the bedroom when Lydia hears the little girl screaming (the latter definitely coming after the suicide) are very creepy.
I would not have wanted to lose any run time from this, personally. It's obviously Kubrick-influenced (Field played Nick the pianist in Eyes Wide Shut), and it has some of the same breadth and its own insistent timetable.
Also, "Apartment for Sale" was robbed of a Best Original Song nomination. Ha.
On 11/27/2022 at 11:35 AM, Browncoat said:The one thing I didn't understand, but would like to, is the meaning of the notation the musician wrote on the score after Lydia was hauled out of the performance. I'm not exactly sure what he wrote or what it meant, other than the performance was stopped.
There are some real-life stories of tragic events in music, such as the baritone Leonard Warren dying on the Met stage during a performance of La forza del destino (he had just sung the Italian words for "To die! What a tremendous thing!"), and someone in the orchestra usually has the historical foresight to mark the spot in the score when this happens. Lydia did not literally die, but he was marking the spot when her career may have been over.
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I did not see Riseborough as all that much of a dark horse. I follow the Gold Derby odds (link below), and she was listed as eighth most likely in the Best Actress race. She was behind the four other women who were nominated plus Davis, Deadwyler, and Robbie. It's not as though the fifth slot went to someone really on the fringes, like Naomi Ackie for the Whitney Houston biopic (14th) or Florence Pugh for one of Don't Worry, Darling or The Wonder (18th and 21st, respectively).
Gold Derby called Best Actor perfectly: Fraser, Farrell, Butler, Nighy, Mescal. Mescal had pushed Cruise down to 6th in the last couple of weeks. That was also for an acclaimed, low-grossing small film, although Aftersun (one of my favorites of 2022) had more buzz and industry muscle behind it than To Leslie. It's an A24, after all.
There is an argument to be made that the biggest upset nomination in the major categories was Ruben Östlund for director. Gold Derby had had him at 14th. The likeliest #5 nominee was Edward Berger for All Quiet on the Western Front, and the other eight over whom Östlund managed to leap included James Cameron, Sarah Polley, Baz Luhrmann, Joseph Kosinski...I am interested to see Triangle of Sadness now, because it seems to have connected.
https://www.goldderby.com/odds/user-odds/oscars-nominations-2023-predictions/
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On 12/18/2022 at 6:17 PM, CherryMalotte said:
It did make me want to come back though, and during the second time with it I got way more out if it. Sometimes films like this you have to relax yourself into the story and action and let it's magic really work it's way over you. Now it's my fave film of the year.
I did love it the first time, and was surprised at what an emotional connection I made with it, because I had gone into it thinking it was just going to be wild and colorful and something to enjoy. But yeah, it's definitely a worthwhile second-viewing film. There are some things in the opening scenes that mean more when you see where it ultimately goes.
I think I see now what the Daniels were trying to achieve in 2016's Swiss Army Man, which had left me cold, although Paul Dano and Daniel Radcliffe were very good. This movie has a similar message, and a similar mix of silliness and heart, but it's as if this time they figured out the oven temperature.
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On 1/24/2023 at 1:42 PM, Spartan Girl said:
But even if her performance wasn’t good, I suppose it wouldn’t be the first time the Academy elevated a performance from an overall shitty and overhyped movie—hi, Joaquin Phoenix.
Or Jessica Chastain. Not that The Eyes of Tammy Faye was really "overhyped." Few people were saying it was more than a glorified TV-movie. I saw that one as a "We like her and she's due" win that just ticked the right boxes: biopic, wide age range, makeup/prosthetic transformation, singing, etc.
I'll be the closest thing to a Blonde fan here, I guess? I thought its nightmarish/surrealistic approach, although the material was transferred to the screen with extreme fidelity by Dominik (whose previous The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford was a favorite of mine), worked better in the Oates book with her fevered prose. But while I saw better movies from 2022, I also saw ones I liked much less. Some of them are even nominated for things.
Anyway, I don't have a problem with De Armas being recognized. She was intensely committed and sympathetic. Brody was a great Arthur Miller, too.
2 hours ago, Dancingjaneway said:Each year it seems like the Oscars picks a different minority to reward/shine a light on & this year it's all about the Asian acting community.
They did love Minari a couple years ago. Six nominations, two for acting (one win).
On 1/24/2023 at 7:25 PM, Shannon L. said:I can count on one hand the number of war films I've truly enjoyed--it's just not a genre that interests me-- so I won't be watching All Quiet on the Western Front.
I've seen it. It's "underwhelmingly excellent." I mean that on a technical level, it's superbly done, but it almost makes you despair that there's anything left for a movie to say on the topic. All of its points about the dehumanizing effect of war, the way battlefield conditions force young people to part with romantic and patriotic illusions, the callous disregard for death tolls from those higher up the ladder, have been dramatized in other classic films that had more in the way of character development than this one does. Of course, All Quiet on the Western Front's source novel (and earlier screen iteration) got there earlier, but it's 2022-23 now and there we are.
On the actress race: I won't be able to complain about Blanchett if she wins #3, because she's astounding in TÁR, but I'm Team Yeoh. EEAAO is my favorite.
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1 hour ago, monagatuna said:
I believe it took him 3 tries to pass the bar.
It did. When he got his results the third time, he was so nervous he couldn't even open the envelope himself; he took it to Kim. That was one of my favorite scenes of theirs (in "RICO," I believe). Kim is busy and starts to brush him off, and then she realizes it's that.
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On 8/19/2022 at 6:28 PM, jww said:
Just rewatched episode 1, season 1 and Jimmy is telling the skateboarders he used the money from his slip/fall scams to pay for bartending school. So it is reasonable to conclude Jimmy never went to college (other than online law school) and may at most have a GED. Jimmy/Saul likely is no more likely able to engage in conversation than Kim's current boyfriend.
In the flashback in which he tells Chuck that he's passed the bar, he says, "I got my last few credits for undergrad from a community college" before finding a law school that would accept him.
The "last few" part makes me think he went to college at the typical age, but just didn't finish.
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6 hours ago, jww said:
In episode 1 Jimmy is explaining to the skateboarders how he got the name Slippin Jimmy and how everyone knew him by that name. If that was the case how could he pull off the scam repeated times when it was well known what he was doing?
Maybe he just meant it was well known among his lowlife pals (typified by Marco, whom we meet later), not business owners and professional people. He says in that same monologue "When he strolled down the street, all the corner boys would give him the high five." Corner boys usually refers to the lower echelon of the underworld (as in The Wire).
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Tár (2022)
in Movies
· Edited by Simon Boccanegra
Here is another "score-marking" event in fairly recent music history. Early 21st century, at least. I looked for a non-paywalled link.
https://www.southcoasttoday.com/story/news/nation-world/2001/04/22/giuseppe-sinopoli-italian-conductor-dies/50359679007/