The Motion Picture Academy recently announced this year’s Oscar nominations, and when it comes to best picture… well, let’s just say the Academy held true to form. This body is notorious for choosing poorly in its most important category — famously picking How Green Was My Valley over Citizen Kane in 1941 and Forrest Gump over Pulp Fiction in 1994, among other atrocities.
Even worse, the best films in any given year often don’t even make the list of nominees at all. Take 1988, for example, when the head-slappingly wretched Rainman won best picture, while Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Salaam Bombay!, A Fish Called Wanda, Wings of Desire and The Last Temptation of Christ all were shut out of the category entirely. Or 1989, when Driving Miss Daisy won, but Casualties of War, Batman, Do The Right Thing, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Drugstore Cowboy and Glory were not nominated.
Not convinced? How about this little nugget: From 1953-63, the great Alfred Hitchcock enjoyed a decade-long run of legendary productivity in which he directed Strangers on a Train, Dial M For Murder, Rear Window, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Wrong Man, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho and The Birds. Not a single one of these films was even NOMINATED for best picture.
These people wouldn’t know a good movie if they sat in a chair and watched one. I’ll get to my thoughts on the eight movies that actually were nominated for best picture this year in a future Popwell column, but for now I’d like to offer my choices for this year’s best picture snubs:
Da 5 Bloods
Spike Lee has been known to bitch about Oscar snubs in the past, but this time he’s got a point. For my money, Da 5 Bloods is easily one of Lee’s three best films, up there with Malcolm X and Do The Right Thing. We’ve had “important” Vietnam films before, but this is the first one to tell the story of the Black experience in that war. Blacks made up close to a quarter of all U.S. troops in Vietnam, despite comprising just 11% of the U.S. population. And those lucky enough to return in one piece came back to a country that treated them like shit. 5 Bloods tells that story, as four Black vets from the same unit travel to Ho Chi Minh City circa 2018 for two very important reasons. Officially, they’ve been given clearance by the Vietnamese government to recover the remains of their fallen comrade — the fifth “Blood.” Unofficially, they want to recover something else: millions of dollars in gold bars they buried in the jungle. The reunion of these four friends, now well into their senior years, and their fraught journey up the river branches off into many interesting avenues of microdrama, all without slowing the momentum of the hunt for gold and their buddy’s body. Lee gives us hints of Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Apocalypse Now, and Three Kings along the way, carried along by a powerful performance from Delroy Lindo as the most tormented member of the group. Lindo has a beef with the Academy, too: He was shut out of the best supporting actor category. But his rage and backstory provide much of the tension for this film’s hefty 156-minute run time. These men shared the most important experience of their lives, went a half-century without really seeing each other, and now are reuniting to find some closure and meaning in their shared sacrifice, while also faced with the war’s effect on contemporary Vietnamese and pulling off a daring caper under the nose of some very dangerous local gangsters. That’s a lot to handle, but the cast — which also includes Clarke Peters, Norm Lewis, Isiah Whitlock Jr. and Johnny Tri Nguyen — and the script are up to the challenge. Oh, and Jean Reno pops in for a brief but welcome turn as a villain, not letting the French off the hook for their essential role in that country’s long civil war. 5 Bloods bites off an awful lot, but for the most part things are resolved to pretty satisfying ends. Which is a lot more than one can say about the war itself.
Another Round
Another Round also concerns four male colleagues, but that’s where the similarities end. The guys in this film are Danish school teachers, and the 18-year-olds they see are more worried about not getting into a good college than having their heads blown off. An idle conversation about a Scandinavian philosopher who maintained that human beings are born with a blood-alcohol level that’s .05% too low prompts our heroes to embark on an experiment — for “academic” purposes, mind you — to test this theory. They decide to engage in daily consumption of alcohol, mostly at work, starting in the morning and ending at 8 p.m., with the goal of maintaining a .05% BAL. This immediately improves their overall mood and performance in the classroom, most noticeably for Martin, who’s been gripped by a severe midlife apathy that threatens his career and marriage. Martin’s students, who were so distraught by his phoned-in lectures that they were ready to have him fired, quickly become enchanted by this new dynamo, whose lessons now include tributes to history’s highest-achieving drunks (Grant, Churchill, Hemingway). The drinking also brings the men closer together, and what started as a scientific exercise during the day bleeds into a few nights of drunken carousing, and before you know it things are heading south for pretty much everyone. It’s an unsurprising arc to say the least, and probably as unavoidable in real life as it is in drama, but writer/director Thomas Vinterberg has some tricks up his sleeve to prevent this from turning into an adult after-school special. Another Round is an exceptionally honest film in that it shows the destructive power of alcohol while also refusing to deny its benefits. This is not a film where the hero must swear off drinking entirely in order to redeem himself, nor are we subjected to one of those contrived epiphanies that can turn an otherwise engaging film into a paint-by-numbers set. Vinterberg also makes you care about these characters — a lot. I can’t remember the last time I so thoroughly liked everyone in a movie. Mads Mikkelsen is fantastic as Martin, as are Thomas Bo Larsen, Magnus Millang and Lars Ranthe as the other friends. This is a real feel-good movie that serves as a paean to life, friendship, and knocking back a few when the mood strikes you. Watch it and you’ll even feel better the next morning.
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
Ma Rainey is based on August Wilson’s 1984 play and follows up on 2016’s Fences, another screen adaptation of a Wilson play. It’s great to see Wilson’s work get feature film treatment — he was a gifted writer whose best plays deserve a place among classic 20th century American dramatists like Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams. This one concerns a Chicago recording session in the 1920s featuring Gertrude `Ma’ Rainey, sometimes known as “the Mother of the Blues,” and the internal drama roiling her band. The film has been properly hailed as an actor’s showcase, with Chadwick Boseman a lock to win a posthumous Oscar for best actor and the great Viola Davis a strong contender in the best actress category. Wins for both would be well-deserved, but I found the entire cast and the film itself to be praiseworthy and thoroughly entertaining. Director George Wolfe and cinematographer Tobias Schliessler give the proceedings a gorgeous period look, and Wilson’s dialogue comes alive in tight quarters as the tension simmers and crackles in the manner of a good jazz combo. The music’s pretty dope, too. The soul singer Maxayn Lewis does Ma Rainey’s singing, but Davis makes you believe those sounds are coming out of her. She’s spectacular in this film, dominating the screen in a knockout performance that’s “big” in all the best ways. Modern-day divas like Mariah Carey have nothing on Ma Rainey. The film’s makeup and clothing staff had their work cut out for them meeting the high bar set by Davis, and they rise to the task. Davis looks every bit the flapper blues goddess: It’s impossible to take your eyes off her. Glynn Turman offers memorable support in a key role, too. Turman’s one of those guys who’s been around forever, toiling in a lot of mediocre movies and TV shows and the occasional quality fare like The Wire or In Treatment, and he proves once again here that when given something to work with he’s a considerable talent. As for Boseman, it’s both heartbreaking and inspiring to watch his work in Ma Rainey. He was dying as he filmed this part and his smaller role in Da 5 Bloods, yet his gaunt frame still lights up the screen, a gifted artist determined to go out on his shield. Actors and their various sycophants often like to blabber about “brave” performances, but this is one case where that word is quite apt.
Tenet
Christopher Nolan’s movies are different than other films. They’re sort of like amusement park rides, with their own carefully constructed worlds where expectations are upended and rules of time and gravity don’t necessarily apply. You enjoy them for their slightly off-kilter reality, their showy set pieces and dizzying sense of displacement. He’s kind of like Hitchcock that way. Such is the case with Tenet, the first major release after theaters shut down for the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. Tenet was part of a big industry push to get people to keep patronizing theaters in spite of the fact that doing so might kill them. Ironically, it turned out to be a film best viewed at home. Viewers need to make liberal use of the pause and rewind button if they have any prayer of following the action. John David Washington (who probably needs a few more solid roles before we stop referring to him as Denzel’s son) plays a spy in the near-future who gets involved with a plot from the far future that involves the reversal of time. You know, bullets flying back into guns, cars driving in reverse, people coming face-to-face with themselves a couple weeks from now, etc. That’s really only the tip of the iceberg in terms of plot density, as Nolan tries to outdo his previous masterpiece of this genre, 2010’s Inception. Robert Pattinson, Kenneth Branaugh, Elizabeth Debicki, and even Michael Caine are along for this ride, but their familiar faces won’t help you understand a thing. I didn’t like Inception until I saw it a second time and started to at least get a handle on its challenging conceit, but it’s clear very early on that the best way to enjoy Tenet is to try your best to follow the action, but give up entirely on making sense of the plot. That decision is validated about 2 hours into the 150-minute run time, when it becomes clear that Nolan has done the same. There is just no way this thing makes sense (I’ll never understand why Washington gets into a fight with himself, for example). That doesn’t make it any less fun, though. The film is exhilarating, handsome to look at, and swiftly paced despite its daunting length. I suppose you could call it a guilty pleasure, but who feels guilty enjoying Hitchcock? (You think North by Northwest makes a lot of sense? It does not.) Treat it like a spy movie and revel in the sleek clothes, cars, boats, and locations that dominate the first two-thirds of the action. Imagine if the James Bond films had been helmed by a great director instead of a bunch of hacks, and you have Tenet.
I’m Thinking of Ending Things
Writer/director Charlie Kaufman is known for stubbornly philosophical (read: noncommercial), brutally honest films that play with reality in ways far more esoteric than Nolan’s work. As a writer, Kaufman gave us the masterpieces Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but his record as a director is a bit more spotty. He debuted with 2008’s Synecdoche, New York, which was not exactly a crowd pleaser (I think it’s a great film, but it does give new dimension to the term downbeat), and followed that up with 2015’s forgettable animated film Anomalisa. His latest effort starts out as a rumination on a young couple’s unhappy relationship as they drive to a farmhouse in the snow so the woman, named Lucy, can meet the boyfriend’s parents. They’re both highly literate and seem to have similar interests, but we hear Lucy’s unspoken thoughts in the car as she contemplates breaking it off and expresses guilt for agreeing to the trip in the first place. They arrive and the parents turn out to be movie-creepy, played brilliantly by David Thewlis and Toni Collette. In fact, the whole house is creepy, and as the evening progresses Lucy begins to lose her sense of reality. Going any further would spoil the plot, but I will say that the film is not what it appears to be at first. It’s not a horror film either, though I’ve seen it described that way. It’s basically a Charlie Kaufman film (perhaps he should just get his own genre, like Nolan). This means LOTS of literary references (including Wordsworth, Pauline Kael, David Foster Wallace, and the musical Oklahoma), lots of characters engaging in self-analysis, a fair amount of general weirdness in the David Lynch vein, and perhaps most identifiably, a VERY unhappy ending. The whole film is sad, in fact, and not sad in the way one can easily dismiss as specific to a fictional character. The themes of death, loneliness, and disappointment plumbed here are universal, and the characters’ endless interior dialogues will eventually strike a chord with almost any viewer. So if it’s so depressing, you might ask, what’s this movie is doing on my list of Oscar snubs? Easy… it’s good. The writing is good, the acting is good, and the sadness stays with you, the way good art is supposed to. It’s not Kaufman’s best work — not as hefty as Synecdoche, as inventive as Malkovich, or as madly ambitious as Adaptation — but it’s a Charlie Kaufman movie, and in 2020, that’s like found gold.
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