“Sing Sing” is perfectly timed. Social media users are normalizing ignorance and incuriosity for clout, and characterizing anyone who is interested in art that they don’t already know they like as “pretentious” or “only pretending” to like it, essentially trying to shame others for wishing to expand their minds. The opposite mentality is represented in this movie based on a true story, about inmates in a maximum-security prison who treat the arts the way shipwreck survivors treat life preservers. The characters are men who feel direct sunlight only in daily walks in the yard, and regularly have to submit to strip-searches and hit the floor face-down whenever an alarm sounds. They recite Shakespeare, poetry, and their own material, and briefly feel liberated. It’s an engrossing and often funny movie with a big heart and a superb cast, many of whom are themselves ex-convicts who studied theater behind bars. (The star, Colman Domingo, taught prisoners theater in real life, and we see glimpses of that part of his life in archival video over the film’s ending credits.)
Director Greg Kwedar and his co-writer Clint Bentley adapted the script from John H. Richardson’s 2005 Esquire article “The Sing-Sing Follies” and added embellishments, many devised by the cast, drawing on their own experiences. It was shot at Sing Sing and in a variety of other locations standing in for Sing Sing, including a decommissioned penitentiary and a high school. The same filmmaking team also co-wrote and directed another slice-of-life character-driven drama, “Jockey,” Both films seem to have been made in the spirit of abandoning one’s ego: although “Sing Sing” is filled with thoughtfully blocked group scenes and compositions that compare freedom and incarceration (I didn’t realize that Sing Sing is the only working prison in the world that freight and passenger trains run beneath!) the movie is more likely to just park the camera on the face of an inmate as he performs a scene from a play or delivers a monologue drawn from his experience. There’s a rich tradition of filmmaking that draws equally on dramatic and documentary techniques. “Sing Sing” is a fine addition to it. Some of the group discussions are reminiscent of the moments in Hal Ashby’s classic VA hospital drama “Coming Home” where real-life Vietnam veterans talk extemporaneously about their war experiences in “rap sessions.”
Although the profanity, slang, and threats of violence in the yard are modern, and the program that introduces inmates at Sing Sing penitentiary in Ossining, New York to theater—Rehabilitation Through the Arts, lr RTA—was not implemented until 1996, it’s easy to imagine this movie having been made and released in the 1960s (the tall, broad-shouldered Domingo’s silhouette evokes Burt Lancaster’s in the great prison drama “Birdman of Alcatraz”) or even earlier. The backbone of the movie is the unlikely friendship between Domingo’s character, the sensitive and empathetic Divine G, who’s behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit, and Clarence "Divine Eye" Maclin, another graduate of the real-life program who was sent to Sing Sing for armed robbery and plays a version of himself. The distinctively direct, at times “hard,” way they speak from the heart to each other channels black-and-white films where one slum kid becomes a priest and the other a gangster. (When Maclin uses the N-word in an argument with Divine G, the latter informs him that the group has a rule against using that word and that he is henceforth required to replace it with “beloved.” And he does.)
The men in the story live in cells smaller than a lot of people’s bathrooms, but the ones who’ve decided to take advantage of the program immerse themselves in the history and traditions of theater with nearly monk-like dedication and discuss the practical aspects of performance (such as blocking, tone, and memorization) with the intensity of athletes trading tips on how to improve their games. Few things are as innately cinematic as people in desperate circumstances doing what they can to better themselves.
“Bob Trevino Likes It” is an example of what some people have called “Nicecore,” meaning a work of art that stresses kindness, generosity, empathy and other positive behaviors, and doesn’t undercut it with irony or cynicism. The main character, Lily Trevino (Barbie Ferreira), is a 25-year-old home care nurse whose father Bob (French Stewart) is a raging narcissist, the kind of guy who sits across from his daughter at lunch as she spills her heartbreak and barely looks up from the iPhone he’s using to determine which blonde from his senior community to date next. Lily’s mother, an addict, deserted the family when Lily was very young, and even though her dad stepped up, he openly resented Lily and treated her as more of a burden than a daughter.
Then the two have a fight and Bob decides to cut Lily out of his life, even blocking her on Facebook. When Lily, who thinks her dad simply unfriended her, tries to reconnect with him on the app, she types “Bob Trevino” into the search bar and comes up with several matches that aren’t her father and one that has no avatar. That’s the one that she sends a new friend request to. It turns out to be a different Bob Trevino, who is played by John Leguizamo and turns out to be the sort of person Lily always wanted to have as a dad: kind, responsive, a great listener, wise, honest, a fan of corny jokes, and the sort of parent who reflexively “likes” every social media post she puts up.
Their first in-person meeting is supposed to happen at a diner, but Lily’s client’s toilet overflows and she impulsively asks the new Bob to help her fix it. Not only does he show up quickly and solve the problem, he takes her to a hardware store to shop for necessities that her biological father never told her she needed.
You’re probably reading this thinking, “I wish life were like this.” I was thinking the exact same thing all through “Bob Trevino Likes It” because I didn’t read the press notes before the screening (I generally avoid doing that because I like to have as fresh a response as possible). As it turns out, the film’s writer and director, Tracie Laymon, is telling a strange but true story that happened to her but changing some of the key details because, as she explained at a SXSW screening, she didn’t want to get sued by her biological father.
What about Bob, though? We’ve been conditioned to expect that no nice person that we meet in fiction can possibly be just nice: they invariably turn out to have some dark secret or be secret hypocrites or con artists or worse. That’s not the case with the other Bob. He's exactly as advertised. It’s a career-capping performance for Leguizamo, a versatile performer who has often been cast as eccentrics, grotesques, and villains but has never been given the chance to rise to what some actors consider the ultimate challenge: playing a main character who’s a good person and keeping him interesting. He does it here, in a big way. This is Tom Hanks-caliber sunshine-and-lollipops acting.
There’s no point pretending this is a perfect work of cinematic art or that parts of it don’t seem contrived or not-fully-baked despite the fact that it’s rooted in reality. Bob’s wife Jeanie, played by Rachel Bay Jones, is an adoring lady who’s into scrapbooking, but lacks dimension beyond that, and she struck me as too immediately accepting of her husband running off to meet a 25-year-old woman that he met online. And there’s an element of Bob and Jeannie’s story as a couple that feels too on-the-nose whether it happened in real life or not. But any complaints I might have are minor in the greater scheme. Like “Paterson” and “Field of Dreams,” this is the kind of movie that will make certain viewers roll their eyes but inspire others to see it multiple times in a theater, just to have that great feeling one more time.
The thriller and the horror movie are adjacent modes of filmmaking. “Hood Witch” perches on the dividing line like a raven. Co-written and directed by Saïd Belktibia, it focuses on a single mother named Nour (Golshifteh Farahani of “Invasion”) who’s a witch, makes a living smuggling ritually necessary creatures into France, and is developing an app called Baraka that will connect witches, sorcerers, shamans and other practitioners of ancient rites (imagine an international Craigslist for the dark arts). The film is also, as it turns out, a domestic drama: Nour lives with her barely adolescent son Amine (Amine Zariouhi) in a forbidding apartment complex and is constantly being harassed by the boy’s father, her controlling and abusive ex-husband Dylan (Jérémy Ferrari), who wants full custody and will stop at nothing to get it.
When Nour is blamed for a tragedy she had nothing to do with, the apartment complex turns on her and begins a 21st century witch hunt, chasing after Nour in hopes of punishing or even killing her; at the same time, Dylan and his allies in the criminal underworld (who are themselves connected to Baraka) exploit the situation to try to nab Amine.
The middle hour of “Hood Witch” is as unrelentingly intense as anything I’ve seen, with mother and son pushing the limits of their ingenuity to stay alive through the madness and reunite. The movie’s final act is anticlimactic and feels rushed, or maybe I only feel that way because I identified with the main characters and despised the people who were making their lives miserable and wanted a more suitably prolonged punishment to be dished out.
Still, at its best—which is to say, during the long midsection where Nour and Amine are being hunted—the movie melds the physical, virtual, and metaphorical ideas of the phrase “Witch Hunt,” serving up the masochistic pleasures of a melodrama about persecuted innocents, then turning into a revenge flick. They messed with the wrong witch.
]]>BRIAN TALLERICO
"The Antisocial Network: Memes to Mayhem"
"Arcadian"
"Azrael"
"Babes"
"Clemente"
"Dickweed"
"Kryptic"
"Oddity"
"Roleplay"
"Stormy"
"This is a Movie About The Black Keys"
"Y2K"
MATT ZOLLER SEITZ
]]>I’ve had several conversations recently with people regarding how time has gotten weird since the pandemic. Maybe it’s because we were locked inside for so long, but some events of the last four years feel like they took place yesterday while others seem so far in the rearview mirror. I don’t think I’m alone in this, and I think this kind of weird fracturing of memory has not only led to more Mandela Effect conspiracy theories but it’s at the root of the recent spate of films in which time and space break. Reality just hasn’t felt real lately. There were several such films at SXSW this year, including a standout of the entire fest co-starring everyone’s favorite recent Emmy winner.
Bernardo Britto’s “Omni Loop” is a clever, moving riff on a “Groundhog Day”-esque piece of storytelling, one that comes at its concept from a deeply human and empathetic angle. So many of these films have been about people breaking out of a rut in order to learn how to live again, but “Omni Loop” is more about how we all should reconsider the repetitive nature of our lives and focus on what’s really important to us while we can. As someone who is approaching 50 and has watched his three children turn from babies into teenagers in the blink of an eye, Britto’s film really struck an emotional chord. It takes a bit too long to get going and ends a few too many times, but these are minor complaints for a really well-done piece of sci-fi storytelling, a movie that uses what seems like a familiar set-up in a new way.
Mary-Louise Parker gets her best part in years as Zoya Lowe, a woman who learns that she has a black hole growing inside her chest that will kill her—don't worry, just go with it and trust that it’s not as weird as it sounds. It’s mostly a stand-in for not just any terminal diagnosis but the parts inside our hearts and souls that we struggle so much to fill what really matters while we still can. It turns out that Zoya discovered a bottle of magic pills when she was young that can take her back briefly in time. She goes home from the hospital with her diagnosis, lives a week, her noses starts to bleed, and she takes a pill to do it all over again. Imagine not only having a week to live but a chance to re-do that week over and over again. What would you fix at the last minute?
“Omni Loop” is not as much of a drag as that sounds as it expands to something entirely different with the introduction of Paula (Ayo Edebiri of “The Bear” fame), a young woman who Zoya works with to discover how the pills work so maybe she can fight the inevitable or at least pass along the knowledge to someone else. Edebiri and Parker turn out to be an inspired duo, ably assisted by great supporting turns from Carlos Jacott, Harris Yulin, and especially Hannah Pearl Utt as Zoya’s daughter. There’s something so tender in the way it’s her “Hi, Mom” that sparks each new cycle of Zoya’s last week. They’re two simple words, but they have so much warmth in them that they say so much. And they’re emblematic of a film that contains so many big ideas without losing sight of it’s the small interactions and relationships that really define us. Sometimes just two words from the right person.
A very different kind of loop unfolds in Shannon Triplett’s very good “Desert Road,” a film that it truly feels that Rod Serling would have dug. “The Twilight Zone” regularly returned to travelers who break from reality, and that’s the basic template of Triplett’s film, a movie that consistently challenges perception of what’s really going on. Even at its conclusion, I’m not 100% it all adds up, but that’s fine for a film that’s more interested in how we move on than checking all the narrative boxes. Most of all, this is just a well-made mindf*ck of a movie, and a wonderful showcase for Kristine Froseth, who gives one of the best performances of SXSW 2024.
Froseth plays an unnamed woman traveling across one of those desolate patches of land in the Western part of this country where there’s little sign of civilization for miles. She stops at a gas station and has a somewhat unsettling encounter with a gas station attendant (Max Mattern) who may have skimmed her credit card. She drives off, calling home to Iowa and informing them that a long road trip is about to begin. It doesn’t. She blows a tire, getting stuck on a boulder. When she walks over the hill to the next gas station, she finds the one she left, with the same attendant. She calls a tow truck driver (Ryan Hurst), and then things start getting really weird. No matter where she goes, even off the road to another one that should be on the other side of a hill, she ends up back at the same gas station and the same broken-down car.
Getting stuck in time and space is an old idea in sci-fi, but it requires not just a sharp script but an engaging lead. Froseth keeps us in this complex story by anchoring us to her excellent performance, running with this woman down the desert road that she can never leave. There’s a bit of thematic inconsistency in Triplett’s script, especially when it shifts a bit in the final act to a story of closure more than survival, but it’s certainly never boring, the kind of film that could easily find a loyal audience with the right studio backing. A smart distributor should pick this one up while there's still time.
The final screwy film of SXSW for me this year was Michael Felker’s “Things Will be Different,” a movie with some neat ideas and sharp construction that nevertheless kept me at arm’s length more than the other two projects in this dispatch. There’s a very fine line between leaving your audiences with enough questions to answer on their own and making a movie that feels frustratingly opaque. As a directorial debut, Felker’s film is a promising one, but I can’t say it works for me on its own terms.
It's through no fault of stars Adam David Thompson and Riley Dandy, who are asked to navigate a lot of choppy waters here as performers, both narratively and emotionally. They play Jospeh and Sidney, a pair of siblings who have committed a crime and are basically hiding out in a safe house that defies reality, a sort of metaphysical space in which they can’t be reached, but also may have trouble leaving when they choose to do so. The thematic subtext of people stuck in their troubled existence is a solid foundation, but Felker can’t find the momentum in a story about people who have so little of it.
It may not be surprising to learn that Felker has been the editor for Jason Benson and Aaron Moorhead, two filmmakers who do this kind of time-bending experiment better than anyone really. And Felker’s editing on projects like “Synchronic” and “The Endless” were absolutely essential to their success. He knows how to put a project like this together, and that shows in “Things Will Be Different” too. It’s really a screenwriting issue above all else on a film that I think likely makes more sense to its creator than it will to viewers. That’s the tough part about films about people stuck in impossible situations—making viewers want to get stuck there too.
]]>Bio-docs have become a staple of the film festival circuit, an easy way to get butts in seats by attracting fans of the subjects on the screen. To be honest, this genre of non-fiction filmmaking has also become glutted with lazy artistry, putting cameras down in front of interview subjects and asking them to tell stories about themselves, or, worse, anecdotes about famous people they know. They’re usually shallow renderings of what made these people successful enough to have a movie about them in the first place, and all three of the bio-docs in this dispatch fall into this trap a few times, but the best of the trio elevates its subject by highlighting not just his game-changing abilities but his deep empathy for the human condition.
That film is David Altrogge’s “Clemente,” a loving ode to one of the most impressive and important athletes of all time. Robert Clemente was the first Latin-American to win an MVP, a World Series MVP, and be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. He shattered the color barrier in a way that still resonates across all sports to this day. It was kind of perfectly appropriate to watch this movie on the same day I was downloading the latest edition of Sony’s “The Show,” which has on its cover the great Vladimir Guerrero Jr., one of many Latin-American athletes following in Clemente’s giant footsteps, and continuing his legacy in the way they're changing the game.
“Clemente” spends enough time on the field and in the clubhouse for baseball nuts, focusing a great deal of time on the historic 1971 World Series, the one in which Clemente’s Pirates came back down two games against one of the most impressive teams of all time in the ’71 Baltimore Orioles. That he would be dead just over a year later, perished in a plane crash while trying to take emergency supplies to Nicaragua, was unimaginable to his millions of fans.
The baseball stuff is fun-but-familiar—it’s in the humanizing of Clemente that Altrogge’s film really succeeds. Not only does he get warm interviews from Clemente’s sons, he speaks to the fans that Roberto interacted with in ways they’ll forget. There’s an amazing story from a woman whose father drove Clemente after the team left him because he was taking too long signing autographs—their families became friends for life. Richard Linklater, who also produced the film, shares how he used to send photos to his favorite athletes in the hope of getting a signature. Clemente wrote back. He would just show up at children’s hospitals because he knew his presence could do some good. One might say “Clemente” is a piece of hagiography, but it feels like this is a guy who deserves it. As someone says in the film, “Everything about him was royalty.” Let him wear the crown placed on his head by the movie that bears his name.
There are no crowns being handed out in David Bushell’s “Cheech & Chong’s Last Movie,” a detailed history of the early lives and partnership of two of the most famous comedians of their generation: Tommy Chong and Cheech Marin. Both gentlemen come off splendidly, particularly in a series of conversational scenes as they drive through a desert talking about their friendship and sometimes-contentious partnership. There are times when some of these scenes feel a bit stagey, especially as the pair gets into fights about their eventual break-up, and I longed for a bit more context about Cheech & Chong’s impact on comedy—ethnicity is oddly avoided for most of the project, which is a mistake given how many doors these guys opened and how their unique, cultural voice is one of the reasons they became so popular. Having said that, this is certainly an easy watch, the kind of thing that I suspect will pop on a service like Hulu later this year.
To this viewer who knew little about the backgrounds of Cheech and Chong, the early biographical material is enlightening, especially in regard to the very different life that Tommy lived as a musician long before he met Marin. It turned out the pair were drawn together by a love for improvised comedy, admiring those who could develop charact3rs and bits on stage, and aware that they could do the same. I wished that “Last Movie” simply had more comedy material in it—the balance is sometimes off between how Cheech & Chong got famous when the film could have used a little more why.
It's also a bit unusual that “Cheech & Chong’s Last Movie” basically ends with their break-up. The details about how that happened—Marin accuses Chong of being a bit too power-hungry as a director while Chong seems honestly betrayed over being asked to do little more than a cameo in “Born in East L.A.”—is some of the most interesting material in the film, but, again, I wanted greater context. How did the guys get out of the shadow of what were actually characters they were playing—even though so many though these two guys were just version of the people playing them? And everyone knows how Chong has struggled with legal issues around something that’s now widely legal. They were ahead of their time in SO many ways, comedically and culturally, which makes the fact that “Last Movie” feels stuck in the ‘70s and ‘80s all the more disappointing.
There’s a similar lack of ambition in “This is a Film About The Black Keys,” a project that will likely play well for fans of the Grammy-winning rock duo but will struggle to bring anyone new into that fan club. Jeff Dupre’s film has a “Behind the Music” quality to it in how it hits all the major career checkpoints in the careers of Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney from their lives growing up in Akron to being one of the most popular bands in the world. The brutal truth here is that, while Auerbach and Carney are undeniably talented, there’s not much meat on the bones of their life story. It’s nice to see two dudes who are so good at what they do find fame, but that’s about it here, other than another case study in how two-man bands are going to inherently struggle when there’s no third party to break a tie in an argument.
Some of the historical details in “This is a Film About The Black Keys” are interesting, including the major role that Beck played in their ascendance when he heard their first CD and got them to open for him. The choice by the guys to reach out to Danger Mouse after hearing “Crazy” is also a neat bit of trivia, given how that song’s cinematic sound feels like a perfect fit with what The Black Keys do. At its best, Dupre’s film does convey the stress of a job in which your livelihood is truly based on production—if you’re not writing, recording, or performing, you’re just going to disappear. And it deftly captures the difficulty of two hard-headed people trapped in that kind of stressful dynamic forever, knowing that they need some sort of compromise to succeed.
Again, it feels like there’s a bit of broader context that might have helped. Most people think that rock is pretty dead right now, so how have The Black Keys defied that? And they’re old enough that you would think we would start to see their influence on the genre, although I’d be hard-pressed to think of too many bands now that sound like The Black Keys. Maybe they’re just so talented that they’re the anomaly in the music scene? While I generally like films that allow their subjects to tell their stories, this one could have benefitted from a bit more outsider perspective on what makes The Black Keys so special.
]]>The documentary sections at SXSW were very strong this year with standouts like “Roleplay,” “Grand Theft Hamlet,” and “Gasoline Rainbow,” which I expect will all find loyal fans when they leave the fest circuit. However, the documentary that could make the most waves is the most “Holy Shit” doc I’ve seen in years, the kind of thing that builds buzz on a streaming service simply because of the insane story that it unpacks that everyone needs to share. It helps, of course, that “Whatever It Takes” is also just a very well-made true crime documentary with a twist, a story of innocent people tormented by an absolute lunatic who, in my opinion, was operating under the orders of power players in the business community that should be in jail. This one has exactly what people love in this kind of true story: real people thrust into unreal situations crafted by the kind of sociopath who rarely considers the cost of his actions.
The tag for Jenny Carchman’s film is “The Most Shocking Scandal in Silicon Valley History” and it actually lives up to that high bar. Produced by Allyson Luchak (who worked on the game-changing “The Staircase”), “Whatever It Takes” is the story of Ina and David Steiner, an ordinary, likable couple who had a deep interest in online commerce and wrote about shifts in the industry at their blog EcommerceBytes, which had existed in some form since 1999. The site presents news, but that naturally leads to the rampant criticism that comes through comment sections, and life at eBay was a little tense in the 2010s. When someone aggressively tweeted at the Steiners about the damage they were doing to the company, it seemed relatively harmless at first. It became something much darker quickly.
The Steiners faced non-stop and terrifying harassment for the next few months, including an attempted delivery of a pig fetus, an actual delivery of a “Saw” mask, live bugs, and even a shipment that included a book about living without your spouse—a not-so-vague threat on at least one of their lives. It was insane, escalating to break-ins and someone literally following the Steiners in a van. Everyone involved is lucky that no one got physically hurt—a scene in which David has just been followed and then the harassers order a pizza to their house got me thinking how easily Steiner could have shot the man who pulled a black leather case from the back of his car in the middle of the night.
Without spoiling too much, it’s not hard to figure out who was behind the harassment, but the ridiculousness of this story only grows as it’s revealed. Inter-office affairs, training through clips from “Training Day” & “Full Metal Jacket,” general macho bullshit toxicity—“Whatever It Takes” is the kind of story that would seem unbelievable if it was a Hollywood script. In other words, it’s a documentary filmmaker’s dream come true.
A very different story unfolds in Alison Tavel’s deeply personal and moving “Resynator,” a story of a woman trying to learn something about the work of a father she never really knew and discovering so much more than she could have imagined. “Resynator” kind of runs out of chords to strike before it's over, repeating a lot of its best ideas and revelations, but Tavel is remarkably likable, and it’s easy to root for her journey to succeed, to find closure in a way that most of us who have lost loved ones could never imagine. “Resynator” is about a device that turns organic sound into something technical; the film with the same attempts the reverse journey, finding strength through human emotion like grief more than the specifics of how this technology works.
Alison grew up thinking that her dad Don Tavel invented the synthesizer. Not quite. She learns that he developed a technology called a Resynator, a unique synthesizer that was interesting enough in its early days to pique the interest of Peter Gabriel. Finding a prototype, Tavel sets out to get the machine physically working again, learning more about the father who died in a car crash when she was only 10 weeks old. Without spoiling anything, there are revelations about Don that are heartbreaking, and Tavel deserves a lot of credit for taking what is clearly a very personal trip in front of a camera. She is front and center through most of “Resynator,” and there’s a vulnerability to the filmmaking here that’s very admirable (even if some of the techniques employed, including animation, feel a bit unnecessary).
In an era when nothing feels like it’s the right length as Netflix stretches out stories to multiple episodes, “Resynator” suffers a bit from running out of story to tell at around the hour mark. At a time when it feels like it could be wrapping up, it shifts into something else, including a roster of famous musicians who rediscover or play with the Resynator for the first time. The idea is likely that Tavel’s work can still have an impact, but the truth is that his artistic passion has clearly been handed down to his daughter. Even if the device he invented never worked again, he would have a legacy. It’s all there on camera.
Finally, there’s the frustrating “The Hobby,” a film that feels like it should be a slam-dunk to a guy who grew up playing board games and tries to get his tech-loving kids to sit down and roll an actual physical die now and then. Simon Ennis’ film is about game-loving people who gather at something called the World Series of Board Games in Las Vegas, a sort of “Spellbound” for people who love the Catan and Ticket to Ride games. The personalities captured here are interesting, but “The Hobby” feels flat and repetitive, banking too much on quirky characters instead of having anything to say about why they love what they love or this unusual subculture.
Too much of “The Hobby” feels like a promo reel for The World Series of Board Games, an event that looks a lot more fun to attend than watch in a feature film. Frustratingly, every time that “The Hobby” gets into broader culture issues that are interesting, such as the Black couple who work to further POC representation in the fan base, it skips away to someone being quirky. I don’t blame any of the people profiled, but Ennis needed to place them in a more interesting context about the importance of board games and maybe more of their historical impact.
The film opens with a great scene in which a historian comments on how people have been playing games for literally thousands of years, and I wanted more of that broad history that led from Mesopotamian soldiers playing homemade games to what happens in Vegas. “The Hobby” certainly isn’t the worst doc at SXSW, but it feels like a missed opportunity, too focused on specific people instead of the larger picture. Although it did make me want to go buy another Ticket to Ride expansion. So, mission accomplished, I guess.
]]>Film festivals have long been a safe place for personal stories, usually independently produced passion projects for creators to explore their own interests and sometimes even their life journeys. Sometimes a film like this can almost feel too close to the creator, a case where someone not so close to the story might have offered a fresher perspective. Sometimes they resonate with more strength by being so true. These four films in this dispatch aren’t all true stories, per se, but they all feel like they reflect what truly matters to their creators, for better or worse.
For better comes in the case of Nicole Riegel’s excellent “Dandelion.” The writer/director of “Holler” introduced her newest work by commenting on the difficulties for women in creative spaces like independent film or the increasingly unprofitable world of original music. “Dandelion” is a deceptively smart character study, a movie that feels like an Alt-Folk “Once” for a while before pivoting to something else entirely. Through it all, star KiKi Layne gives her best performance since “If Beale Street Could Talk” as the title character, a Cincinnati-based troubadour who is exhausted from playing unrewarding gigs at a local bar and quarreling with her mother Jean (Melanie Nicholls-King).
As a sort of last chance to escape her life, Dandelion attends a music showcase in South Dakota, where she meets a very charismatic man named Casey (Thomas Doherty). The pair alternate a growing romance with impressive songwriting—Riegel never loses sight of the creative spirit of Dandelion. A lesser filmmaker would have discarded that aspect for pure sexual chemistry, but creativity is an essential part of not just this dynamic but Dandelion’s entire being. Of course, it helps a great deal that the excellent original music is written by Aaron and Bryce Dessner of The National (and “Cyrano”) fame.
Riegel’s approach is organic and grounded, focusing with cinematographer Lauren Guiteras on Dandelion and Casey’s hands, arms, and expressive faces as they create. Riegel loves close-ups, and I love the decision to keep us in so tight on this pair as they fall in love with music and each other. It’s a raw, sweaty, human film with a stronger visual language than nearly anything else I saw at SXSW. As with “Holler,” there’s a heartbeat in Riegel’s filmmaking that’s often lacking in independent cinema, which too commonly looks like it was made for a streaming service. “Dandelion” takes its time visually and narratively, respecting how creativity comes with ups and downs—lyrics change, tunes shift, relationships are redefined. It all plays out like a folk song, right down to the whopper of a final act.
Without spoiling anything, Dandelion has to find the creative courage within herself. Casey may have helped light the match for her fire to burn, but the brilliant screenwriting element of the back half of this movie is that Riegel never lets it become just another story of how a woman needs a man to inspire her. When Dandelion finally reaches a song that feels like it’s truly, finally, expressing her voice, it’s one of the most moving moments you’ll see in a film this year.
One doesn’t need press notes to sense that Roshan Sethi’s “A Nice Indian Boy” is personal for its creator too. A lot of films at SXSW this year felt like political statements, but Sethi’s film feels more like a call of kindness in this world. It is a remarkably sweet film, the kind of nice comedy that feels increasingly hard to make well in a landscape when so many films come with cynical agendas. It is sometimes disappointingly sitcom-ish in its structure and visuals, but the amount of love that Sethi and writer Eric Randall (working from a play by Madhuri Shkar) have for these characters is obvious and contagious. You’ll grow to love them too.
Naveen (a gentle and genuine Karan Soni) is a doctor who struggles to meet the right guy. He’s tired of going to Indian weddings while being nowhere near scheduling his own. His sister Arundhathi (Sunita Mani) is married, which has made his parents Megha (Zarna Garg) and Archit (Harish Patel) very happy. Naveen meets a photographer named Jay (Jonathan Groff), who seems almost like his opposite in terms of personality, but the extrovert and the introvert find love, and eventually Naveen gets the wedding of his dreams.
That’s about it. And that’s all it needs to be. There’s a simple sweetness to “A Nice Indian Boy” that’s charming, largely due to the fact that everyone involved seems to be on the same page. Groff is always a welcome presence in just about anything, and the typically supporting Soni proves he can carry a film. Even the parent roles that usually come off as two-dimensional feel different in Garg and Patel’s hands. The fact that Naveen’s parents put on Out TV in an effort to understand their son could fit on a network sitcom, but the team here somehow makes it work. It’s because this is a film that deeply loves its characters, and while I think there’s a version that takes a few more risks and has a bit more visual confidence, it’s impossible to deny that this film lives up to its title by simply being so very “nice.”
Writer/directors David Joseph Craig and Brian Crano introduced their dark comedy “I Don’t Understand You” by noting how it was inspired by and dedicated to their son. Making a film that conveys the difficulty of the adoption process—both in practical terms and emotional ones—is an admirable venture. Thousands of couples can relate to the apprehension that comes from considering yourself strong enough to raise another human life. And that foundation of emotional honesty sometimes salvages this tonal misfire but can’t quite pull together a movie that is constantly coming apart with bad screenwriting choices and direction that never figures out how to tell this quirky story.
Nick Kroll and Andrew Rannells are well-cast as Dom and Cole, respectively, a couple that is adopting a baby that is about to be birthed by a woman named Candice (Amanda Seyfried). After seemingly agreeing to terms with Candice, Dom and Cole decide to take a final trip, their own babymoon. They head to the Italian countryside, where “I Don’t Understand You” becomes a very different movie, a comedy of errors about communication that eventually leads to violence. Before you know it, Dom and Cole are hiding bodies, wondering how they’ll ever even meet the baby that was supposed to change their lives.
There are moments, usually between Kroll and Rannells, in which “I Don’t Understand You” threatens to become a better movie. Relatively early in the film, they tell a story about adoption fraud that’s the scariest thing in the entire movie—the idea that someone could do something as vile as to use a couple’s desire to be parents for profit is horrifying. But these moments that feel real are smothered by a script that gets increasingly ridiculous in ways that aren’t entertaining. Most problematically, we start to wonder if we’re supposed to be rooting for Dom and Cole at all as they make decisions that impact (and end) lives. Making a movie in which Americans basically carve a path of destruction in another country requires a truly deft tonal hand, and this one just doesn’t make sense.
A similar tonal problem betrays the intentions of “I Love You Forever,” written and directed by Elisa Kalani and Cazzie David. The buzz going around after the screening was that it was a thinly-veiled commentary on David’s relationship with Pete Davidson, which is actually more interesting than the film itself, a dark relationship dramedy that also misfires in terms of tone and lacks in filmmaking confidence. There are some funny beats in “I Love You Forever,” most of them courtesy of David herself actually in a supporting role, but this is a movie that wears out its welcome early, spinning around the same relationship ideas, and, worst of all, failing to give its lead enough character depth to justify spending so much time with her.
Sofia Black-D’Elia is genuinely fine here, but Kalani and David simply haven’t written her enough of a character. It’s baffling to me why a movie that’s in part about standing up to emotional abuse is content to present us with a protagonist that we know so little about. We actually get more personality traits from David’s Ally and Jon Rudnitsky’s Lucas, who are best friends to Black-D’Elia’s Mackenzie, a law student who semes to let guys like her regular hook-up Jake (Raymond Cham Jr.) take her for granted. When she meets a charming reporter named Finn (Ray Nicholson), she falls head over heels, only to pretty quickly discover that Finn is a needy jerk, the kind of guy who has a panic attack when she doesn’t text back immediately.
We haven’t often seen emotional abuse like this portrayed in film, and I think everyone will be able to see bits and pieces of past (and hopefully not current) relationships in the spiraling of Finn and Mackenzie. But there’s just not enough meat on the bones of this movie, which is also frustratingly shot and edited. Every time that the film shifted away from Mackenzie to her friends, I really just wanted to go with them instead of getting stuck in another one of Finn’s tantrums. I guess that’s part of the point in that the filmmakers want us to feel as weighed down by his nonsense as Mackenzie. But it doesn’t make this movie particularly lovable.
]]>The general feeling around SXSW this year was that the Midnights, often a strong program at the event in a city that boasts how it needs to be kept weird, were a little lackluster. Whether it was a lack of visual language or narrative cohesion, horror and its sister genres didn’t exactly fare as well as it did at Sundance, where films like “In a Violent Nature,” “I Saw the TV Glow,” “Love Lies Bleeding,” and “It’s What’s Inside” made for one of the strongest Midnights programs in years. I didn’t get to as much of the program as I do most years, but that was partially because buzz on the street kept advising me to make other plans. However, one of the most buzzed films of the fest, and one of my personal favorites of this year’s SXSW was a Midnighter. And it’s an unforgettable one.
That title belongs to the riveting “Oddity,” a movie that lives up to its title by blending Irish Folk Horror, elements of gothic horror—I was reminded of one of my favorites in that genre of all time in Jack Clayton’s “The Innocents”—and a bit of a Peter Strickland vibe. Damian McCarthy follows up “Caveat” with a more confident, powerful piece of work about betrayal, murder, ghosts, and a terrifying wooden mannequin. This one is gonna be a hit for genre fans and might even break out from that niche when IFC releases it later this year.
McCarthy opens with a phenomenal scene in which a woman named Dani (Carolyn Bracken) answers the door when she’s alone late at night in a home that she’s renovating for her and her husband Ted (Gwilym Lee). From the beginning, McCarthy is playing with noise and space as Dani walks the cold, empty halls of a home that may not be that empty. Ted works at a psychiatric hospital nearby, and a patient named Olin Boole (Tadhg Murphy) is the one knocking on the door. He’s jittery, and generally unsettling, but he insists that he’s not the danger. He saw someone else come through the door when she left it open. Dani needs protection. And there have been weird things happening. Let in the seemingly dangerous man outside to help against the unknown or risk it?
It’s no spoiler to say that Dani ends up murdered, and the cops pin it on Olin. A year later, Ted is already with a new girl named Yana (Caroline Menton) when Dani’s twin sister Darcy (also Bracken, excellent in the dual role) shows up at the door with a box that contains an enormous wood mannequin. Why? Darcy happens to be a psychic, and she has some plans to figure out exactly what happened that night her sister died. It’s gonna get weird.
“Oddity” is genuinely and consistently unsettling. Instead of relying on cheap jump scares, McCarthy goes for mood—a much harder thing to pull off, but he does exactly that. “Oddity” has a cold, unpredictable aesthetic that makes it equally riveting and tense. The economy of characters and storytelling allow McCarthy to deliver in terms of craft, turning viewers into residents in a remote Irish home in the middle of the night, a place where the skeletons in the closet might be literally deadly.
E.L. Katz made waves a decade ago at SXSW with the twisted “Cheap Thrills,” a film I genuinely liked (and one of my first RogerEbert.com reviews, for the record), so I was excited to see him team up with the underrated Samara Weaving on “Azrael,” a film that promised a bloody, post-apocalyptic thrill ride. Sadly, this one is a broad misfire for Katz and Weaving, a film that joins a weird little subgenre of dialogue-less films of late, a sort-of-horror-sister to John Woo’s “Silent Night.” The problem is that when a film eschews all dialogue, it needs to compensate with strong visual language and narrative momentum—this movie has neither.
Set years after the Rapture—yes, that one—speaking has been deemed a sin in this future world with no supplies and dwindling humanity. Azrael (Weaving) wanders the woods with a partner (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett), and, although we get no dialogue, they’re clearly living in fear and hiding. Before long, they’re caught by a group of roving marauders, and Azrael is strapped to a chair. A ceremony begins and what appear to be almost demons emerge from behind the trees, ready to chew on human flesh. Azrael escapes but fate keeps bringing her back to the marauder camp, which anyone who has ever seen a movie knows she will eventually topple.
A film like “Azrael” needs thematic density to break through the lack of dialogue, and writer Simon Barrett probably knows his project well enough to think that’s there, but it’s not well-conveyed to audiences. Instead, “Azrael” becomes a flat genre exercise, a series of poorly-staged combat sequences and some truly creepy creatures that look kind of look severely burned humanoids. Weaving is consistently giving “Azrael” her all—there’s just nothing giving back in return.
Director Kourtney Roy promised “rivers of mucus” before the premiere of her “Kryptic,” and that’s truly about all this experimental misfire has to offer. Again, the writer, Paul Bromley in this case, probably thinks there’s a lot going on here in this twisted tale of a cryptozoologist in search of a monster and herself, but nothing of substance comes through to the audience. I don’t mind a film that traffics in striking visuals instead of direct narratives, but “Kryptic” isn’t confident enough for either. It’s like a student film—full of ideas but none of them are how to tie a film together.
To be fair, Chloe Pirrie is impressive as Kay Hall, a woman who goes on a trek to find a mysterious Bigfoot-like creature who may have run off with a local scientist. After a weird encounter in the woods, Kay returns to a life she doesn’t quite understand. Is she actually the missing woman? She jumps into a new life with new characters before spiraling back to what could be her own with an overbearing husband named Morgan (Jeff Gladstone). More visually than narratively, Roy seems to be weaving in themes of suburban ennui, sexual violence, and even alternate realities. None of it adds up.
Again, I don’t think a film needs to be a math problem, but incoherent narratives need to be offset by captivating visuals. “Kryptic” simply doesn’t have that in its favor. Basic composition and editing choices baffled me here in a way that kept the film from casting a spell. Pirrie does a lot to hold it together when it threatens to become a total disaster, but even she gets carried away by this monster movie misfire.
]]>Some documentaries hinge on the wild nature of their story. Can you believe that happened? Can you believe those people did that? Can you believe that connection between two people who never knew each other? The best of these films use their twists to illuminate something about the human condition, whether it’s a need for community or the importance of parental support. These three films all falter slightly in different ways, but they also all contain stories that people tell at dinner parties, the kind of variations on the human condition that we love to see when we look at a big screen.
Jonathan Ignatius Green’s “Dickweed” feels like a product of the Podcast era, one of those too-crazy-to-be-true crime stories that have littered the podcast landscape for the last few years. The propulsive nature of the crime at its center does a lot of the work for Green’s film, which often feels a bit too much like something someone would see on ID or a very special “Dateline NBC” (which I believe has actually covered this story, if I’m not mistaken, given I was familiar with many of the details and watch that show somewhat religiously - don't judge me). While “Dickweed” doesn’t break out of its true crime form quite enough to be truly memorable, it also doesn’t do anything wrong. It feels to me like a perfect fit for Netflix, which has turned true crime into an industry. It would be #1 there for days.
The title of Green’s film refers to both the grotesque nature of the criminal in this case and the crime he committed. In 2012, a weed dispensary owner in Newport Beach named Michael was kidnapped in the middle of the night. He was taken to the middle of nowhere, and ordered to tell his trio of kidnappers where he buried a million dollars. The problem is that Michael had no idea what these monsters were talking about. They zip-tied him, forced him to eat dirt, and poured bleach on him. And they cut his dick off. Yep. “Dick” and “Weed.” You get it now.
The horror that happened to Michael baffled not just him but the police. Why torture this man for nothing? If he did bury a million bucks in the desert, did they think mutilating him would them find it? And then why didn’t they kill him? Anchored by extensive interviews with Michael and the investigators, “Dickweed” unwraps a fascinating hunt for a sociopathic fugitive. Other than the tone that often feels like it’s mocking its victim a bit too much (like in the title), the only real issue with “Dickweed” is that it feels overly familiar in terms of form, the kind of true crime thing you can watch on Netflix every day. It will fit in nicely.
There’s a similar “did you hear that crazy podcast” angle to Jeremy Workman’s “Secret Mall Apartment,” a documentary about a group of Rhode Island creatives who literally built an apartment in the Providence Place Mall in the early 2000s. After discovering space between two of the buildings in the massive structure, these artists decided to try and literally live there, bringing in cinder blocks to wall it off from prying eyes, furniture to sit on, and even a gaming system. They would hang out, go down to the food court to grab leftovers that were being thrown away, and spent a lot of time trying to upgrade their unique situation. Hidden in a massive structure that was seen as evidence of gentrification in Providence was basically an artistic co-op—creative passion living like a barnacle on the ship of capitalism.
While one of the leaders of the Secret Mall Apartment was caught and exposed, most of the other residents hadn’t come forward before Workman’s film. The timing of it feels perfect as these now-older artists revisit a formative chapter in their lives, speaking about its difficulties and rewards. Workman allows for a few diversions that deepen our relationship to these people, including a fascinating tape art project. The whole thing sometimes feels a bit underdeveloped thematically, but it definitely conveys that the existence of the Secret Mall Apartment led to the kind of environment where creatives inspire other creatives to be their best selves. Yes, they were essentially stealing real estate, but don’t corporations do that every day to a much lesser end than creative expression?
To be clear, I don’t think artists should go breaking into malls looking for places to live, and I think it’s something that would be a lot harder to pull off in today’s land of cameras and motion detectors. However, I also do stumble on TikToks all the time about people investigating run down malls, a relic of a time gone by. The truth is that artistic communities like this one still thrive across the country and will for generations to come. You can’t say the same thing about the mall.
Finally, there’s “She Looks Like Me,” a film with a truly remarkable true story that’s admirably respectful and even idolizing of its subjects even if it loses focus a bit too often over its long runtime. The two figures at the center of “She Looks Like Me” are models of strength, in character and physically. And there’s an interesting but slightly underdeveloped theme here about the importance of parental support for a young person, especially one with different needs. But “She Looks Like Me” ultimately would have worked at half its length, a version that homes in a little tighter on its messages instead of cutting back and forth between them.
Jen Bricker was born without legs, abandoned at the hospital and adopted by her parents, who are arguably the true heroes of this story, a pair who brought in another child into a home that already had three. Most importantly, they never held Jen back, encouraging her to do whatever she wanted. Jen speaks movingly of an ordinary childhood in which she never felt othered until she grew up. Her parents, other kids, teachers, her gymnastics trainers—Jen could do anything. And she did. She was incredibly successful and grew up idolizing a famous face who looked like her: Dominique Moceanu. Imagine learning your role model shared an incredible secret with you from your background? That’s the core of “She Looks Like Me.”
Writer/director Torquil Jones sometimes tries to do too much in one film, paralleling Moceanu’s story with Bricker’s in a way that necessitates the film get into some difficult places like the abuse rampant in gymnastics and the hideous human garbage that is Larry Nassar. In the back half, the film sometimes loses focuses as it tries to tell not just Bricker and Moceanu’s stories but all of gymnastics in the last few decades, but the two ladies at the center of this story really do hold it together over any of its criticisms. They’re both remarkable interview subjects, open and genuine in a way that’s empowering and moving. Were they born with that kind of courageous DNA? I’ve always believed strongly in nurture over nature—and, to be fair, at least Jen got a lot of the former—but “She Looks Like Me” could be considered evidence that there are certain innate qualities and passions with which we’re born.
]]>Clad in gowns and tuxes on the morning of Oscar Sunday, journalists from around the world board shuttles that transport them from the Cinerama Dome to a point near the complex that houses the Dolby Theatre—where the big event takes place. This year, however, the logistics had to account for the expected pro-Palestine protests in the vicinity.
As the shuttle I was on approached the drop-off area around noon, four hours before showtime, a small caravan of cars bearing “Free Palestine” on their rear windshields slowed down traffic on the corner of Highland and Sunset, where a sizeable group of protesters calling for a ceasefire in Gaza congregated. The demonstrations occurred just a couple blocks away from where some of the world’s most influential people gathered to celebrate the films of 2023, several of which dealt with past and ongoing conflicts.
Inside the Oscar interview room, where winners speak briefly to the press moments after their onstage speeches, no surprises were expected. Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” started the night with 13 nominations, seven of which turned into wins by the time Al Pacino unceremoniously revealed that, as predicted, it had received the Best Picture Oscar.
But whether on site, in the periphery, or watching from home, the fog of war was inescapable at yesterday’s ceremony. Not only because the frontrunner and eventual victor chronicles the creation of a weapon of mass destruction, or the fact that hundreds of individuals were right outside denouncing a genocide happening in real time. Throughout the night, multiple winners invoked a desire for peace amid a reality in turmoil.
Early in the evening “War Is Over” was named Best Animated Short. Produced by Peter Jackson’s Wētā FX, the film was inspired by John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s song “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" and written by their son Sean Ono Lennon (who spoke on stage). The win is a first for director Dave Mullins, a Pixar Animation Studios veteran with animation department credits in beloved titles including “The Incredibles,” “Coco,” and “Up.”
Backstage I asked Mullins and producer Brad Booker about their thoughts on how the anti-war message of their honored work resonates with the current state of the world.
“When we started the film, there were no conflicts—there's always conflicts but the major conflicts that we all track every day were not underway yet. We met with Sean in June of '21. And then Peter Jackson came aboard two weeks after the war in Ukraine broke out, and we finished our film in October of this last year, and that was right when the stuff in Gaza went completely sideways,” Booker explained.
“The takeaway from it is that there's a lot of fighting, there's a lot of war, there's other ways to solve it,” Mullins added. “And that's what I think John and Yoko were trying to say. Is like maybe talk a little more, kill a little less. That's the idea and that's what we tried to show in the film.”
”It sounds naïve, but if you want it, we can all make it happen,” Booker concluded.
On stage, the only person who mentioned Gaza by name was British director Jonathan Glazer, whose cerebral, German-language Holocaust drama “The Zone of Interest” became the first win for the United Kingdom in the Best International Feature Film category.
“Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people.
Whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist? Alexandria, the girl who glows in the film as she did in life, chose to. I dedicate this to her memory and her resistance,” he read.
Glazer didn’t visit the interview room. But Johnnie Burn and Tarn Willers, the surprising yet utterly deserving winners of Best Sound for “The Zone of Interest,” did make an appearance. I asked them how they thought their movie was relevant to the ongoing tragedies happening now, considering that Glazer mentioned Gaza in his own speech.
“This film doesn't say, ‘Look at those people. They were awful. How abhorrent that was.’ What the film says is, ‘They're so like me. This is so unusual, and this was humans doing this to other humans.’ So that's almost quite a normal thing,” said Burns. “For me it's incredibly relevant, and it's super important that this message of this film and this little thing here [raises the statuette] means that so many more people are going to watch the movie and that message about let's treat people with respect and do things like cease fire would be more important these days than ever.”
“The message of the film is about we choose to build walls, and then sometimes we choose not to look over them, and I think that's a crucial part of what we have in this film,” added Willers.
With a pained expression, Ukrainian war correspondent, photojournalist, and filmmaker Mstyslav Chernov walked into the interview room holding the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for his harrowing account of the early days of the 2022 Russian invasion “20 Days in Mariupol”—the first Oscar ever for a Ukrainian production.
I asked him about the jarring experience of being part of Hollywood’s awards season while his homeland continues to be under siege over two years after Mariupol was first occupied. Chernov noted that for him and his team it was never only about Mariupol, but rather about using the spotlight the film has granted them to bring attention to the other towns that have also been ravaged including Bakhmut, Mar'inka, Avdiivka, Soledar, and Popasna.
“It's been a privilege, but it's been a strange, painful experience at the same time. Because I'm standing here, [but] my heart is in Ukraine,” Chernov said. “My heart [is] with all the people who are now suffering and losing their lives and losing their homes and fighting for their land. Those who are in the jails. I don't know how I can fix it. I don't know whether I should try. But I hope that this win will just elevate this story to more people, and they will see us, and we will hear Ukrainians.”
The most invigorating thrill of the event came when, against most prognostications, Hayao Miyazaki’s “The Boy and the Heron” won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. I’m almost certain my audible cheer, one of true shock and disbelief, resonated through the room. An artist concerned with the horrors of armed conflicts, Miyazaki famously skipped the 75th Academy Awards, where “Spirited Away” received the same honor, to protest the Iraq War.
In his latest Oscar-winner (and perhaps his final feature), the protagonist, 12-year-old Mahito, loses his mother to firebombing during World War II within the movie’s first few minutes. That catastrophic loss haunts him for the rest of his journey through a fantastical realm where both the dead and the unborn reside. Yet, even when given the chance to forego our troubled world for that more whimsical kingdom, Mahito chooses to return home, to bet on the flawed humanity of those he loves rather than giving in to despair.
That sentiment seems to be shared by all these stories about war, “Oppenheimer” included: if we humans are capable of causing so much suffering, it’s also on us to course correct.
]]>It was finally time. The 96th Academy Awards ceremony was ready for its big moment: Best Picture. But when presenter Al Pacino appeared on the stage with the envelope, somehow skipped over reading the names of the 10 Best Picture nominees along with their producers (as the presenters of the top category are expected to do) and murmured “My eyes see….Oppenheimer,” the celebratory reaction felt delayed by a few seconds for those of us present at 3400-seat Dolby Theater. For such a Kenergy-filled night capping an awards season that gave us a Best Picture line-up for the ages, the ending seemed unfairly anticlimactic. (That’s how you invite “Oppenheimer” to claim its 7th Oscar?) At my section of the orchestra, people almost had to take a silent second to confirm that Nolan’s movie actually won. (Producer Emma Thomas saved the moment with a terrific acceptance speech.)
From my vantage point in the third mezzanine seat, the fizzled ending was the bookend to a clumsy-ish start, with host Jimmy Kimmel delivering a mix-bag opening monologue. While the reliable host won some laughs and celebrated the sometimes embarrassingly earnest, self-referential spirit of the Oscars, his early gags—like the uncomfortable mention of Robert Downey Jr.’s past struggle with substance abuse—drew a combination of disbelief and polite grins at best. “This is the highest point of Robert Downey Jr’s career. Well, one of the highest points,” Kimmel said. In that moment, I couldn’t help but think of Aidy Bryant’s brilliant Spirit Awards opening monologue from just a couple of weeks ago when the host poked fun at the tradition of “roasting celebrities” in awards ceremonies, continuing with a purposely unclever “Hi Natalie Portman, you stupid bitch!” Kimmel’s joke felt like the same type of approach that Bryant had targeted. But to give him credit, Kimmel scored big by dedicating a good chunk of his time to last year’s two Hollywood strikes and celebrating the workers and crew members that make the movies run on. The Dolby rose to its feet at the gesture.
What filled the bookends was glorious, for the most part. After I watched a small part of the show from my mezzanine seat through the first commercial break, I proceeded down to the orchestra level thanks to my wristband that gave me access to the entire Dolby and lingered by the lobby-area where the likes of “The Color Purple” nominee Danielle Brooks, “The Holdovers” winner Da’Vine Joy Randolph, famous Oscars chef Wolfgang Puck and presenter Jennifer Lawrence passed through and stopped by. That’s where I witnessed the Best Animated Feature win of Hayao Miyazaki’s “The Boy and the Heron” on a giant screen, a triumph that could be called surprising by most. (I stuck with my Miyazaki prediction, while many went with “Spider-Man: Across the Spirder-Verse.”) Master Miyazaki wasn’t present at the ceremony. But Studio Ghibli COO (and movie’s Executive Producer) Kiyofumi Nakajima jokingly told me on the red carpet that the master does pay attention to his film’s Oscars journey, but perhaps quietly.
“Since he is of a certain age now, he is trying to be very humble and he's pretending that he doesn't really care,” he said with a chuckle. Taking pride in Japan’s longstanding tradition of 2D hand-drawn animation, “It’s a treasure in Japan,” Nakajima continued. “It’s the one that we are most comfortable doing and we are very good at it. And I think 3D animation is America's major talent. So I think it's interesting that we are able to represent our 2D animation.” As the film’s distributor, GKIDS president David Jesteadt told me, “We feel there's a little something different about this year. Having Miyazaki's film is certainly a huge honor after starting—what was that—14 years ago with “The Secret Life of Cows.” That was our first nomination. It’s been gratifying to have these nominations reinforce the idea that the animation world is continuing to change and there is a big community that opened up around it. So it's been really fantastic. And [Miyazaki] is saying that they are watching the ceremony in Japan.”
For the rest of the show (with 2+ hours still to go), I luckily scored an empty orchestra-level seat next to the fresh Oscar winners of the animated short, “War Is Over! Inspired By The Music of John & Yoko” to my right. Sean Lennon told me, “We started the film production three years ago. The war in Ukraine had yet to break out, and so it actually happened during our pre-production. It felt chilling in a way because we'd already been planning to do a tribute to my mom and dad and their message of peace and love. And then suddenly it became very real, relevant and contemporaneous. So it's sort of a bittersweet feeling 'cause it's given gravitas to our film. And the film obviously resonates for the modern era now. But it's also very sad that the message of peace and love is still necessary and relevant. The idea of “War is over if you want it” is not just about a specific war, a specific time. It's also about overcoming violence in our minds.”
And, okay, I buried the lede. To my left was Ryan Gosling’s supportive and endearingly enthusiastic mother, Donna Gosling. “Oh he looks so good,” Ms. Gosling said when her son and Emily Blunt took the stage and launched into a playful Barbenheimer tête-à-tête. Naming “Lars and the Real Girl” as one of her favorite films of Gosling, “My son has always been about doing good work and working with good people. Look at the way he honored stunt workers now,” she remarked when I asked her whether she ever imagined Ryan as a bona-fide movie star during his successful indie beginnings. “I am not even sure if Ryan saw himself here. He was always step-by-step, about the work and not about destination. If you make decisions based on the destination, you miss the journey.”
Later, it felt like a true honor being the only person in the entire Dolby who experienced Gosling’s infectious “I’m Just Ken” performance live next to his mom. (Well, other than Gosling’s stepdad Valerio Attanasio seated on the other side of Ms. Gosling.) Like everyone else, we rose to our feet, sang along and danced to the show’s most exuberant moment—perhaps one of the finest live performances Oscars have ever produced. “That was terrific,” I told her at the end. “I am so proud of him,” she said.
In that same seat, I got served my tequila shot promised by Guillermo Rodriguez, and giggled at the nude John Cena bit and John Mulaney’s brilliant “Field of Dreams” description. From my vantage point, the somber “In Memoriam” segment felt beautiful and respectful, even though the dancers apparently made for a distracting sidebar in the telecast. Meanwhile “The Zone of Interest” deservingly winning sound over some of the bigger budget/high-tech entries like “Oppenheimer” and “Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One” collected the night’s biggest gasp. That win, which was met by a standing ovation (a rare feat for a Sound category), was bested only by Glazer himself, the only winner in the room to deliver a statement that acknowledged what’s happening in Gaza right now, sentiments also voiced by the Pro-Palestine protests I drove through on my way to the show. "Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst," Glazer, who is Jewish, said. "It shaped all of our past and present. Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many people. Whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack in Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?"
Later, Emma Stone’s win shook up the Dolby at a night when Lily Gladstone in “Killers of the Flower Moon” was largely expected to win. Charming as ever, a visibly shocked Stone gracefully accepted her award, and not without a mention of her former “La La Land” co-star Gosling. “Oh boy, my dress is broken. I think it happened during ‘I'm Just Ken,’ I'm pretty sure.”
Unlike last year, I didn’t have access to the Governors Ball this time. But I did notice of who was the very first in line to take the escalator up to the festivities: Steven Spielberg, responsibly masked, ready to party. His eagerness was in fact a good recap of a night marked not only by fresh faces and young winners, but the old-school Hollywood—names like Pacino, Nicolas Cage, Danny DeVito, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rita Moreno, Martin Scorsese, Sally Field and more—that showed up and made the Oscars what we want them to be: a night where cinema’s past and future march arm in arm. Perhaps that future looks a little bleak right now, but the enthusiastic response to Cord Jefferson when he called for a greater number of mid-budget fare in his “American Fiction” Best Adapted Screenplay acceptance speech signaled a little hope. Perhaps one day, studios will re-learn and remember that instead of one $200-million film, there could be ten successful $20-million films for a healthier industry with longevity.
My night ended at the NEON soiree where the “Anatomy of a Fall” Best Original Screenplay winner Justine Triet danced the night away with her actors Swann Arlaud and Milo Machado-Graner, and shared a hug with double-nominee Sandra Hüller, who made an appearance late. Dragging myself to my condo late at night, I felt like a winner for having the good sense to stuff a pair of foldable ballerina flats into my little evening purse. Let’s just say that I learned my lesson the hard way last year.
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