Category: Movie Reviews

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A Man Called Otto is too Timid to Resonate

A Man Called Otto, directed by Mark Forster, is a feel-good flick adapted from a popular Swedish novel by Fredrick Backman. I haven’t read the book or seen the 2015 Swedish movie adaptation, but the new American film falls squarely under the storytelling umbrella of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol: a grump terrorizes his community, then rejoins it upon rediscovering the joys of love.

But the central casting of professional nice guy Tom Hanks telegraphs that this movie isn’t much interested in the “terrorizing” half of the equation. Indeed, Forster has stacked the deck for Otto by legitimizing his supposedly grumpy complaints in the first section of the movie. He has surrounded Otto with a carnival of newfangled weirdos in (of course) California: one neighbor, to get his daily steps in, marches up and down the block like Frosty the Snowman; another, so bad is his driving, nearly backs through his new rental house upon arriving. No one for miles, it seems, can perform basic property maintenance.

And even this neighborhood of ineffectual dopes pales in comparison to the dystopian mob that awaits outside of it: when a man falls on the train tracks at a local station, anonymous teenagers film the scene greedily for social media clout.

The problem with setting up the story like this is that it mitigates the intended emotional payoff. Whereas Ebenezer Scrooge goes from the town’s biggest miser to its biggest benefactor, Otto Anderson barely changes at all over the course of the story. He’s nice all along. Even the movie’s basic symbolism reiterates this: whereas the Grinch’s heart, for example, memorably grows three sizes, Otto’s is already secretly big. This crucial difference separates a moving, classic story from an average tearjerker.

The important dynamic is forgiveness. We love to forgive characters for their misdeeds, as we do with Scrooge, the Grinch, and many others. But if A Man Called Otto is any indication, contemporary studios doubt our capacity to do this. Otto can’t be made to commit any real misdeeds, because if he did, we wouldn’t forgive him when he tried to rectify them. He has to stand up to corporate developers, talk to his dead wife, have black friends, etc., from the beginning—because we’re apparently too sanctimonious to welcome him back into the fray if he truly stepped out of line.

This disheartening, cynical view of modern audiences is, in my opinion, inaccurate. After all, don’t we still cherish A Christmas Carol and its best spinoffs even after many years? While a vocal few might jump to cancel a protagonist after Act I, people in general are forgiving, and they can tolerate stories of misguided people who change for the better.

The unnecessary trepidation from the studio, though, has left us with something like a cross between Gran Torino (2008) and Sesame Street. With a movie about a mean old man whose meanness consists of…enforcing traffic regulations.

But maybe this is just what you’re looking for to start 2023. A Man Called Otto has positive messages, funny moments, and reflective scenes. It’s a light, enjoyable film. It just doesn’t have the courage to reach for the classic pathos of its predecessors.

 

–Jim Andersen

For more movie reviews, see my review of Top Gun: Maverick.

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Movie Reviews

Top Gun: Maverick is Tom Cruise’s Final Bow (analysis)

Tom Cruise since the mid 90’s has pioneered, or at least epitomized, a movie archetype that has helped define the most recent era of cinema: the hyper-focused, sexless action hero. Whereas action stars before him won audiences with natural charm or at least physical prowess, Cruise, who has neither, has instead built an empire around compelling viewers to watch him—through sheer dedication to giving viewers what no one else will give. Insane stunts. Mind-bending plots. Envelope-pushing pace.

Top Gun: Maverick may be his definitive work. MI5: Rogue Nation (2015) and MI6: Fallout (2018) are more inventive, but they’re also more absurd. Maverick feels like the “right” balance of implausible action and mindfulness of (if not fealty to) the laws of reality. For example, yes, the anonymous enemy neglects to guard a canyon that leads directly to their target. (They’re clearly third-world; they’ve never seen Star Wars.) But there’s enough talk about planes and tactics and losing consciousness that things still feel grounded enough.

It’s also Cruise’s most reflective film. Specifically, the plot functions as a meditation on the approaching end to his own movie stardom. Cruise’s character, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, is dressed down by his turnkey boss: “The future is coming. And you’re not in it.” This could surely double as admonishment to Cruise himself, who, at 60, strains credibility by merely appearing in a movie like this. And Mitchell’s notorious habits—pushing limits, bucking trends, endangering himself—are Cruise’s own as an actor.

Watching the movie with this meta interpretation in mind, I wasn’t as bothered by its obvious weaknesses. For instance, Cruise, never a standout in romantic scenes, even in Jerry Maguire (1996), can’t hold up his end of the film’s halfhearted love story. Grinning stupidly throughout, he plays the part as 16, not 60. Costar Jennifer Connelly, a skilled performer in serious erotic roles, has been hired to convince us that Cruise is still sexy, or even that he used to be. The effort is futile.

But flat notes like these only reinforce the elegiac feeling that Cruise is running out of gas, that this is his last hurrah. As his character emphasizes to his trainees with curious intensity: “Time is your greatest adversary.”

Further heralding the imminent end of the line, Cruise’s costar from the original film, Val Kilmer, appears in cameo as a cancer-ridden, speech-challenged shadow of his former self. This isn’t an act: Kilmer actually has lost the power of speech amidst a real life battle with throat cancer. His character dies mid-film. Cruise stands alone.

Tom Cruise has never been an Avenger. He has never been an avatar. He has never been a wizard or a jedi or a hobbit. In an cinematic era dominated by fantasy, Cruise has planted himself stubbornly in action-hero realism. So when he and a protege take charge of an ancient F-14 plane (the protege exclaims, “This thing is so old!”), we should catch the symbolism. The meaning: they’re about to do this old school. No magic, no superpowers, no cliffhangers. Just good old fashioned shooting, ducking, and yelling. And they do it. And it works.

But Cruise is only one person, and he knows that despite his contributions, the industry has moved in a different direction. Perhaps this is why for most of the film he plays a teacher to a new generation. His mantra: what matters isn’t the equipment or even the task at hand, but rather “the person in the cockpit.” If there was ever a more grandiose statement from an actor, I’m not aware of it. (Cruise’s experiences with scientology likely haven’t done much to dampen his ego.) Exiting his role as Hollywood’s biggest action star, he wants his successors to know that they can singlehandedly drive a film—and that, by extension, he singlehandedly drove his.

That may be outlandish self-aggrandizement, but given Cruise’s output over the past two decades, how can we argue? Until he slips up, we can only admire.

Top Gun: Maverick is an entertaining throwback that pleads for successors. Will anyone answer the call? Cruise has faith: all of his students are portrayed as skilled and worthy, even the arrogant pretty boy. (Maybe especially the arrogant pretty boy, who’s possibly a version of Cruise as a young man. Indeed, evidence abounds that Cruise likes him the most.)

I have less faith. But one thing is for sure: whatever Cruise puts out in his remaining years as an actor, this is his final bow. After seeming to insist on eternal youth in the last two Mission Impossibles, he has finally surveyed his place in moviemaking and acknowledged:

“Time is your greatest adversary.”

 

–Jim Andersen

For more reviews, see my review of Tár.

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Movie Reviews

Tár Lacks Punch or Purpose

I’m squinting to see what’s so great about the critically acclaimed Tár, and…I’m still not seeing it.

Chained to mediocrity by a pondering, lecture-y screenplay that nevertheless avoids any real stances on the issues it strains to raise, Tár, directed by Todd Field, fails to animate the character drama at the heart of its story. It wants to be a modern-day King Lear: a self-inflicted fall from grace of an egotistical but sympathetic protagonist. But even more, it wants to splash around in political controversy. The result is little more than a stale summation of the MeToo era, a boring both-sides tale of contemporary gender politics.

Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett), conductor of the Berlin orchestra, is a predatory abuser of young women. She’s arrogant and frigid, and she appears to have caused the suicide of a young woman with her diabolical behavior. On the other hand, she loves classical music and believes in the power of art.

You see the difficulty of rooting for this character. Enjoying old composers doesn’t automatically make you likable. (To acquire the notion that it does, I suspect that Field has misunderstood A Clockwork Orange (1973)). Nor does facing off against equally irredeemable foes, like the whiny social justice warriors that Field pits against Tar.

These brats are, indeed, horrible. But a sympathetic character still must have relatable traits, and Lydia Tár has none. It would be as if Lear, instead of withholding Cordelia’s share of the kingdom for her lack of sycophancy, had instead raped her for no reason at all. He would be awfully difficult to identify with after such an act.

As I indicated before, these basic failures of dramatic characterization are traceable to the film’s preference to spend its time hemming and hawing about MeToo and cancel culture. On one hand, Field portrays the movement’s proponents as a conceited, ignorant mob; on the other, he goes to great pains to portray Tár as the very type of individual that necessitates their crusade. This provides balance—but not nuance. A more skillful storyteller would have shown us the complex reality behind the media narratives. Field has only presented both extremes and declined to choose between the two. Some may see this as “objectivity;” I see it as aimlessness.

I admit that I’m biased toward any film—or any media at all—that proclaims the aesthetic value of art. After all, art needs its champions at a time when all manner of misers, idlers, and ideologues vocally question its legitimacy. But I know enough not to parade a film like Tár as the vehicle for my beloved cause. It’s too dramatically unrewarding to succeed as either a tribute to or criticism of classic aesthetic principles.

 

–Jim Andersen

For more movies reviews, see my review of Avatar: The Way of Water.

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Movie Reviews

Avatar: The Way of Water Isn’t Made For Humans

It’s been 13 years, and Avatar: The Way of Water is finally here. Was it worth the wait?

No.

There are many reasons why James Cameron’s follow up to 2009’s smash blockbuster isn’t a good movie, but most central is a surprising lack of imagination. Cameron has directed some of the best sequels of all time (Aliens, Terminator 2) by cleverly subverting or expanding upon the material of the original film. The Way of Water, however, merely retreads the first installment in both story and style. The result accordingly suffers from all of Avatar’s (2009) weaknesses while failing to provide the novelty that, in the first film, distracted from them.

Foremost among those weaknesses is unbearable seriousness. The Way of Water, like its predecessor, is no fun. To be sure, the characters occasionally have fun, for example adapting with joy to an aquatic lifestyle. But Cameron delivers even these moments in a crushingly reverent, pious tone, as if he wants us to believe (or he himself believes) that, for instance, a blue creature befriending a CGI whale is self-evidently a monumental, poignant event.

Because of this approach, the movie is dead on arrival. By demanding that we take things so seriously—via triumphant choral music, grand long shots, etc.—Cameron keeps us outside the experience. That we would enjoy the scene isn’t enough for him: he wants us to believe in it. But that’s too big an ask.

A useful comparison is The Lion King (1994), which is the heaviest influence on The Way of Water other than the first Avatar. (Cameron has a thing for Disney: he took from Pocahontas (1995) for the previous film.) Like The Lion King, this film leans on tribal spirituality, emphasizing harmony with nature’s cyclical rhythms. But Disney, unlike Cameron, knew to crack a smile every now and then—giving, for example, Timon and Pumba significant screen time. Without characters like these, we’re left only with stoic, smothering dogma.

It’s almost as if Cameron made this movie not for humans, but for the Na’vi. They would surely have rejoiced with much more enthusiasm than I did about, for instance, the seasonal return of the mighty tulkun. I didn’t see any Na’vi in the theater, though, so here we are.

Another weakness that has carried over from the first movie is reliance on cliché storytelling. It’s painful to watch a film with so much visual detail spend so little energy on character and story. A stock bully asks, “Why are you a freak?” Later, the recipient of the dig asks, “Why am I different?” And so forth.

And as in the first movie, characters repeatedly make implausible decisions. In one scene, a group of avatar baddies inexplicably explores Pandora wearing full camo gear, which, of course, does the opposite of camouflage them: it reveals them as obvious intruders. Their identities would have been otherwise impossible to discern, since they look exactly like natives. Again, with so much attention paid to visual detail, blunders like this are that much more difficult to understand.

I can’t write a review of this film without mentioning the quality that, for many, will most influence the viewing experience: its horrendous length. Cameron has never been one to curtail his runtimes, but we’d have to go back to The Abyss (1989) to find something this egregious. The final battle of The Way of Water takes—completely unnecessarily—something close to an hour and a half. The full movie is 3 hours 12 minutes. Plan bathroom breaks. I’m typically forgiving of movies that take their time, but The Way of Water truly seems, like its titular worldview, to have “no beginning and no end.”

Exactly one element of The Way of Water is improved from the original: the villain. It’s theoretically the same villain, but this version of Colonel Quaritch is newly cerebral and formidable, a far cry from the gung-ho fanatic of the first film. He also has a more interesting backstory. Unfortunately, the premise of his origin largely goes untapped for its existential possibilities. Nevertheless, the character inspires more fear and hatred than he did in the first movie.

My essay on the original Avatar criticized the film for deploying video game aesthetics in the cinema, where they don’t belong. This new film does so even more obviously. A character meets a beast with a torpedo in its fin, removes the torpedo, and gains the beast’s help. This kind of mechanical, cause-effect plot point is sufficient for video games, which have relatively few storytelling resources. But a long-awaited movie? That took 13 years of development?

Not good enough.

 

–Jim Andersen

For my thoughts on the first film, see my essay on its CGI visuals here.

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Movie Reviews

Movie Review: The French Dispatch

People are getting tired of Wes Anderson. In fact, they have been for some time. The knock on him, which has permeated in some way nearly every critical meditation on the recently released The French Dispatch, had already crystalized by at least 2005, when Anthony Lane of The New Yorker wrote:

“We have grown accustomed to the unassailable claims of deadpan, although Anderson’s detractors might argue that underreaction, having begun as a show of hipness, has now frozen into a mannerism. What chance remains, they would ask, for the venting of genuine feeling? What would it take to harry these controlled characters into grief, or the silliness of bliss, or unconsidered rage?

Lane believes that Anderson’s signature style, whatever its merits, suffers from a stifling drawback: it limits the emotion that can be depicted onscreen. He also implies, rather insidiously, that this limitation reflects a deficiency in Anderson himself: that the filmmaker’s style is a result of his valuing “hipness” over authenticity.

This view, as I said, has now become close to dogma for professional critics, most of whom profess to enjoy The French Dispatch—perhaps suspecting its artistic significance—while having mostly negative things to say about it. Richard Roeper of The Chicago-Sun Times exemplifies the general reception:

“It’s as if we’re in a museum of modern art and we’re silently applauding the latest exhibit, but our tear ducts remain desert-dry.”

Notwithstanding the melodrama of “desert-dry,” Roeper’s—and by easy extension, the critical establishment’s—evaluation of The French Dispatch is plainly off the mark. As the passing of time will surely solidify, this movie is very possibly the best film in the oeuvre of one of the very best filmmakers in all of American cinema.

One theater viewing is not nearly enough to synthesize and delineate the tremendous amount of imagery and wit saturating The French Dispatch. Perhaps once I have the pause button (always a godsend for an Anderson film) at my disposal, I’ll give that project a try. But it’s clear to me that first and foremost, the film is a tribute to being human: to our fallibilities, quirks, and desperations. It takes the form of a compendium of three magazine stories, but the events of the stories themselves, as well as the theme of journalism, are red herrings for anyone looking to make sense of the film.

That’s because we actually learn very little about modern art, culture, politics, cooking, or even magazines from the stories on display. What we do learn about are the characters who tell (write) these stories, all of whom I found funny and lovable, and some of whom I found painfully touching in their offbeat plights—in total contradiction to Anderson’s supposed indifference to human emotion.

This is where the Lanes and Roepers of the world have Anderson completely wrong. What Lane fairly describes as Anderson’s characters’ “underreaction” doesn’t equate to lack of feeling. It only requires that we supply more of what Anderson has deliberately left out to get the catharsis he’s luring us toward. In The French Dispatch, a lonely college professor (Frances McDormand) has an affair with one of her students (Timothee Chalamet), but later encourages him to get a room with his rival revolutionary. At the episode’s conclusion, she stoically types the story in an empty, blank room, her back to the camera. It’s filmed, like everything, in a quick-cutting, whimsical tone—but if your tear ducts are “desert-dry” here, you may not be thinking enough about what you’ve seen.

But what’s Anderson’s larger statement with this new film? You surely don’t need to plumb those depths to enjoy it, but I can’t help myself, so here I go.

The death of Arthur Howitzer (Bill Murray) at the movie’s beginning signifies a cultural change. The character’s most emphasized trait is the freedom he allows his writers, who, we soon begin to learn, have used this freedom liberally to spin wild yarns that indulge their own interests and weirdnesses at the expense of conveying reliable, factual information. Howitzer’s death, then, seems to hint at the demise of a certain kind of artistic liberty, or at least an imminent shift in priorities from style and character to realism and straight reporting. But with Howitzer dead, it seems, stylistic flourish may have lost its champion. Without him, journalism is likely to be shorter, drier, and more accurate. And indeed, the types of stories we see in this film are not exactly the norm in today’s magazines.

Howitzer’s death is placed in 1975, when Anderson was six years old. Surely the auteur is idealizing an older era when, he believes, a writer might have been rewarded for exploring human eccentricities rather than heckled for deviating from realism, as he himself has been upon nearly all of his major releases, including this one. After all, Howitzer’s credo is: “Make it seem like you wrote it that way on purpose,” which could surely double as Anderson’s own standard: surely no one would doubt The French Dispatch as an intentional, deliberate creation.

But perhaps Anderson views himself not as a casualty of changing values—as the magazine’s writers are sadly about to be—but rather the successor of his beloved Howitzer. The film ends with the line, “What next?” What, indeed? Well, the Dispatch might be defunct…but if only there was another, newer medium, where a burgeoning artist might pick up where Howitzer left off and produce work that seems to be made “on purpose”! If only!

 

–Jim Andersen

For more movie reviews, check out my review of Drive My Car.

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Movie Review: Jurassic World Dominion

Jurassic World Dominion consists primarily of two stories. In the first, trilogy protagonists Owen (Christ Pratt) and Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) lead an effort to find their quasi-adopted daughter Maisie (Isabella Sermon), who is kidnapped early in the film by an evil company that wants to study her cloned genome. In the second story, the heroes of the original movie, Drs. Allan Grant (Sam Neill), Ellie Satler (Laura Dern), and Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), attempt to infiltrate that company to investigate and reverse a plague of genetically modified, giant locusts that are devouring crops around the world, threatening a global food shortage.

You might notice that neither of these plots have anything to do with dinosaurs. And you might ask: isn’t this supposed to be “Jurassic World”?

Good question.

And not only do these two plots not involve the creatures that we’ve all paid to see, but they lend themselves to very little emotional investment. In the case of the Maisie storyline, it’s made clear before her kidnapping that she hates her current life as, basically, a prisoner in the woods. So her removal, during which she’s never hurt nor threatened to be hurt, doesn’t cause much alarm. In fact, if anything, she seems to be happier following her kidnapping than before it. The rescue effort, then, isn’t exactly gripping storytelling.

And in the case of the locust storyline, none of the characters in the film are affected by the supposed global catastrophe of the locusts, so the threat is only theoretical, talked about. All we see is one independent farmer whose crops are eaten up. Too bad for her, I guess, because she never reappears. Are people around the world really going hungry because of the locusts? This is never shown to us, so we never feel the danger.

These baffling mistakes in central story conception suggest a franchise with no ideas left. Jurassic World Dominion is sad and predictable. It goes through the motions of a blockbuster, but the aim of these gestures is merely to justify its own existence, not to provide enjoyment.

The movie is disturbingly similar in, in fact, to another failed trilogy conclusion: Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker (2019). Both films jump from setting to setting with disorienting, aimless action that doesn’t advance the story. Both films are satisfied with generic messages of empowerment, eschewing believable dilemmas or moral stands. Both films dredge up old characters from the franchise’s heyday to unite with the newer, duller cast, enabling eyeroll-worthy banter about old geezers being out of touch and kids being downright crazy these days.

On that last point, though, there’s an intriguing wrinkle here, because in Jurassic World Dominion, the kids actually are crazy.

In the original Jurassic Park films, most of the main characters understood that having man-eating dinosaurs around was a very bad idea. But in this film and the previous installment, the characters are possessed by the insane belief that having these creatures around is a good idea. And not only that; they believe that dinosaurs should be allowed to simply roam free—not on a remote island, mind you, but here in the wilderness, where they’re certain to eat people, drive other species to extinction, and mess up the entire ecosystem.

Who would defend such a position? Late in the film, Owen and Claire risk the lives of every character to save a baby velociraptor, which will surely devour a few campers some day, because Owen promised its mother that he would. Malcolm appropriately deadpans: “You made a promise…with a dinosaur.” But he and the entire audience are defied: the baby raptor must be saved.

Where is the military? Why hasn’t every dinosaur been exterminated? What is this madness? Apparently there is a black market for dinosaurs: why? Do people want illegal, disobedient pets that will kill them in their sleep?

Jurassic Park was a fine idea, because it was conceivable that one man could err drastically enough to enable the existence of such a park. But Jurassic World? Come on. We’re not that dumb.

Although, apparently, we’re dumb enough to believe the marketing hype and buy tickets to see this movie—just like the dinosaurs being herded into containment using brain microchip “signals.”

Hey, maybe they’ll fit in here in 2022 after all.

 

-Jim Andersen

More movie reviews: Spider-Man: No Way Home

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Movie Review: No Way Home

Spider-Man: No Way Home is, above all, a gag. Its purported subject is “the multiverse,” but this mysterious cosmic phenomenon, as it turns out, is really just shorthand for the absurdity of franchise moviemaking. Indeed, studio greed has resulted in several universes of Spider-Mans, causing the character’s traits and motivations to be scrambled nonsensically to the point where he is, truly, a joke. This latest film is the punch line.

Thanks to Dr. Strange and his magic, a cinematic reunion takes place between all three movie-era Spider-Mans, who together must face down old foes including the Green Goblin, Dr. Octopus, the Sandman, Electro, and the Lizard. Abra kadabra. This premise is mostly mined for comedic potential, and the targets of the jokes are the earlier films. Why, for instance, could one Spider-Man shoot actual, natural webs from his wrists? Why did another face off against a “rhinoceros guy”? And why was one of the villains named “Otto Octavius”?  These jokes comprise the film. The action scenes merely provide breaks amidst the endless comic riffing.

Of course, no knotty quantum physics are required to understand why three similar but not identical Spider-Mans have graced the screen over the past twenty years. The actual explanation is Sony’s bottom line: both previous Spider-Mans were aborted as soon as they starred in a panned film and thereby damaged the brand. A new cast wiped the slate clean. And why wait around for people to forget the old version, when there was money to be made right away?

Multiverse, indeed.

But this is all well known to the audience. Sony and Marvel aren’t fooling anyone by allegorizing their own money-grubbing as a mind-blowing new paradigm of time and space. If anything, fans know that they’ve played at least an equal part in the tap dance of maximizing studio revenue; after all, if they’ll reliably flock to see a new Spidey only a few years after the last one flopped, then why wouldn’t Sony oblige them?

The jokes about the old Spider-Man films, then, are jokes at the audience’s expense just as much as the studios’. And this, I think, is why people find them so much fun. There’s a kind of self-deriding glee in appreciating jokes that are so obviously dated and bad: the description of the Green Goblin as a “flying green elf” and the speculation that Tobey Maguire might ejaculate webbing, for example, elicit laughs primarily at one’s own self—for caring the slightest bit about the subject matter. Maguire’s Spider-Man, remember, was released in 2002. Why are we so invested?

You’re not supposed to care about the story of No Way Home, which transparently makes no sense, or the stupidity of Dr. Strange, who corrals supervillains in non-soundproof cells so they can chat with one another, or the lack of purpose for any of the villains, some of whom fight on the opposite side of their own stated goals. The film itself is beside the point. The point is that you’re watching it—and that you also watched the others.

This means that inside jokes can be made and understood as if you were hanging out with old friends. You belong: that’s the appeal of No Way Home. Of course, that type of belonging—Marvel’s specialty—has cost you a bit of money and time over the years, hasn’t it?

Self-parody is cheap and forgettable. It’s all the more disappointing in that there are bursts of excellence in this movie that suggest what No Way Home could have been. There’s one excellent scene in particular where MJ is knocked off a ledge, with camerawork recalling Gwen Stacey’s death from Andrew Garfield’s series of movies. Holland’s Spider-Man can’t get to her, so Garfield makes a leap and saves her. He’s overcome with emotion upon landing, apparently feeling redeemed for failing to save Gwen, an event he had cited earlier as a turning point that caused him to be “rageful” and unprincipled. This very moving scene, which takes all of ten seconds, shows that the filmmakers had the ability to capture real character drama if they wanted to.

But they don’t, and they don’t have to. Maybe Dr. Strange will one day take us all to a dimension where superhero films don’t exist, but until then Spider-Man is a rolling snowball with unstoppable momentum. What’s too bad is that we’ll never again see the type of films at the center of that snowball, the films that started the momentum: flawed releases that nevertheless tried to be serious and dramatic—films that aimed for the tone of their comic book source material. With so many layers of parody and self-parody concealing that center now, it’s all a joke, and the joke is on us. People seem to love No Way Home. But I find it a sad place to be.

 

– Jim Andersen

For more superhero commentary, see my essay on the MCU.

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2022 Best Picture Nominees Ranked

It’s that time again. Which movie has earned the Movies Up Close top prize of 2022? This year, I’ll put the rankings up front and follow with commentary.

10. Don’t Look Up (Full review)

9. CODA (Full review)

8. King Richard (Full review)

7. Dune (Full review)

6. West Side Story (Full review)

5. Belfast (Full review)

4. Licorice Pizza (Full review)

3. The Power of the Dog (Full review)

2. Nightmare Alley (Full review)

1. Drive My Car (Full review)

 

This was a good year for movies—better than last year, even though on reflection I gave good reviews to five of this year’s ten nominees, compared to five of eight last year. Maybe I’m just getting harsher with my evaluations. But I should also note that perhaps my favorite film of the year, Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, wasn’t nominated, an unjustifiable omission given the inclusion of the likes of Don’t Look Up.

The buzz right now is that CODA is going to win Best Picture. This would be highly undeserved but consistent with the Academy’s choices from the past few years, which have almost always run heavily counter to my own. The last rightful winner of the award was Moonlight in 2017, and I’m beginning to wonder whether a film of that level of artistry will ever again be recognized by the Academy.

This year’s Moonlight is Drive My Car, but it hasn’t generated any serious buzz for winning; its champions seem thrilled that it was even nominated. Previously, the favorite for the award had been the reasonably deserving The Power of the Dog, but some critics apparently soured on it when actor Sam Elliot called it “a piece of shit” and complained that it wasn’t a true Western, which is, of course, the point of the movie. That his tirade seems to have swayed critics only shows how ridiculous this process can be.

The top four movies on this list, along with The French Dispatch, constitute five strong recommendations that I would make to anyone who enjoys movies. It’s good to be back at the theater—happy viewing!

 

–Jim Andersen

For more movie rankings, check out last year’s list.

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Movie Reviews

Movie Review: Drive My Car

Originally published January 2022

Drive My Car, directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, is the first Japanese film to be nominated for Best Picture. Count me among those who would have it be the first winner of the award, as well.

The film is based on a short story by Haruki Murakami, a writer whose style I wouldn’t have described as especially translatable to cinema. But Hamaguchi relates the world of Murakami without compromise, boldly presenting us with the writer’s favorite elements: a confused, adrift man; an inscrutable, darkly erotic woman; the fight for authenticity in an impersonal world; and the grave shadow of Japan’s twentieth century military history. With this confidence in his non-mainstream source, Hamaguchi has given us something that feels rawer and fresher than anything I’ve seen on the screen this year.

Central to the tone of the film is incoherence: events don’t form a comforting narrative; life doesn’t make sense. Protagonist Yusuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) has lost his daughter and his wife (Reika Kirishima) to two separate tragedies and is trying to pick up the pieces—but the pieces just won’t fit. His wife surely loved him, but she cheated on him frequently. He in turn loved her but never confronted her about her infidelity, although he knew about it. Was she hoping that he would call her out on her affairs? Why didn’t he? How much of their relationship was real, and how much a lie?

A possible clue comes in the form of the revealed ending to her last screenplay idea, previously thought to be unfinished. The screenplay in totality suggests a feeling of overwhelming remorse, of having changed the world for the worse and being unable to rectify it. Does this signify that Yusuke’s wife regretted cheating and felt unable to return to the type of innocence she had with her husband before she ever did?

These questions must remain unanswered. This is not a mystery film; rather, it is a film about mysteries, the important kind of mysteries: the ones that are never solved.

Following his daughter’s death at four years old to pneumonia, Yusuke has shifted his career exclusively to theater, focusing in particular, it seems, on existentialist dramas like Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, which emphasize life’s bleakness and illogic. This is understandable given how, we can assume, Yusuke’s outlook on life changed after that event. But unlike his daughter’s death, his wife’s death (from cerebral hemorrhage) has too many loose ends for him to continue to find solace in renderings of life’s randomness, and he therefore embarks on a strange quest, casting one of his wife’s former lovers (Masaki Okada) in a role that everyone assumed he would play himself.

This seems to convey that Yusuke is and has been living vicariously through the younger actor, rather than grappling seriously with his wife’s infidelity. He’s keeping himself at too far a distance from his experiences to move past them, which may explain why he latches on to a younger man who, contrastingly, lacks control over his emotions.

But there is redemption in Drive My Car, and it comes in the form of Misaki Watari (Toko Miura), a young girl hired as Yusuke’s driver, who has a tragic past of her own. Their bond, like everything in this film, is too multifaceted for easy description, although certainly relevant is that she seems to be about the age that Yusuke’s daughter would have been. But for me the turning point in the movie comes when Misaki relates how her abusive mother would at times embody a childishly sweet persona at odds with her usual behavior. Misaki formed a bizarre connection with this persona—“She was my only friend”—but later took no action to save her mother from being crushed in a landslide. Like Yusuke regarding his wife, Misaki can’t explain her actions toward her mother, nor whether the shared moments of love were real or merely a strained farce.

After Misaki’s tale, Yusuke becomes emotional and pines to see his wife again, expressing regret for his detached behavior and attributing it to his fear of losing her. Later, he reclaims the titular role in his play, no longer so removed from his feelings. Something in Misaki’s story of her mother has struck a chord in him. Perhaps it’s Misaki’s gentle tolerance of duplicity and artifice, which she views as a kind of pained authenticity. One thing is clear: Yusuke’s character arc demands a level of focused analysis that requires more than one viewing.

This has become less a review than a meditation on Drive My Car’s themes, which typically happens when I write about my favorite nominee of the year: Roma in 2019, Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood in 2020, The Father in 2021. As with my write-ups for all of these great films, there’s so much to Drive My Car that I’ve left untouched. I admit that I found myself wishing that the middle section of this film was condensed, and viewers unused to ponderous three-hour movies will likely relate. But art doesn’t exist to grant our wishes, only to create an effect, and the effect of this film is to focus our attention, dreamlike, on the things we like to avoid: loss, secrets, randomness, and even rage against the ones we love.

Murakami, I’m sure, must be proud.

 

–Jim Andersen

For more movie reviews of great movies, check out my review of Nightmare Alley.

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Movie Reviews

Movie Review: Nightmare Alley

Nightmare Alley is a movie that stays with you. Maybe I’m a sucker for this sort of material, but I found it profoundly unsettling and meaningful, a frightening glimpse into a shadowy place in our collective national psyche. Directed by Guillermo Del Toro, this unusual work is as difficult to classify as it is to shake off, blending elements of film noir and Grimm’s fairy tale. The final product chronicles the misadventures of a kind of reverse Icarus: the man who dove too deep.

Something about this film is distinctly American, which is all the more impressive given that its director is Mexican and is best known for Spanish language films. Del Toro has grabbed and pulled a thread that weaves through American literary classics like Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathaniel West and cinematic masterpieces like Rear Window (1954). These works are about the hidden inner lives of our neighbors. And when those hidden lives are exposed, they don’t answer our questions but instead gesture toward an endless darkness just out of view.

We witness this darkness by way of a road show’s “mentalizing” act, a kitschy hand-waving routine that evokes audience members’ emotional memories. Protagonist Stanley Carlisle (Bradley Cooper), a natural showman, grows impatient with his fellow performers’ restraint in using the mentalizing techniques. While they worry that allowing the performance to escalate to a “spook show” will have damaging psychological consequences for everyone, Carlisle sees an opportunity to widen the scope (and revenue) of his act by ratcheting up the emotional stakes. He eventually leaves the road show to launch a successful career of his own in the city without the confines of his friends’ trepidation.

In other words, as in any good fairy tale, Pandora’s box is opened—and, as advertised, there’s evil inside. By the climax, when Carlisle finds himself acting on his own tormenting trauma, the situation has become so out of control that it could legitimately be characterized as (very) dark comedy. Nobody in this film wins: an adversary (Cate Blanchett, doing a passable Faye Dunaway) does get the best of Carlisle, but we can’t even take heart in her triumph, as all she can muster as a victory cry is: “I’ll live.” The spirit of film noir, alive and well!

Del Toro isn’t the master stylist that he was when he made Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), and this film could have been elevated higher by that kind of visual wizardry. He summons it only at lulls, such as with dusky faraway shots of the road show. But the relatively functional camerawork succeeds, intentionally or otherwise, in emphasizing the noir components compared to the fantasy ones, strengthening the depressing, deflating tone of the material.

Also helpful to Del Toro’s aims is the performance of Cooper, who, with his rough features and anxious glare, has always seemed a bit out of place on the A-list, always working a bit too hard—the mark of the social climber. Del Toro’s first choice was Leo Dicaprio, who would have brought a different angle entirely. It makes you think: what would The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) have been like with Cooper in the lead?

If only Stanley Carlisle were a salesman. Instead, he has the misfortune of being a “born” performer, and he learns the hard way that at the core of any performance is self-abasement: as Willem Dafoe’s character knowingly advises early on, an ego boost is the purest form of entertainment, and it’s made clear, as our anti-Icarus rises back to the surface for good, that the freak show will never go out of style.

What about us, then, watching these maniacs destroy one another?

 

–Jim Andersen

For more reviews, check out my review of King Richard.