Weekly Roundup: Doing my Best To Keep Writing About Movies
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This newsletter is coming a day later in the week than usual. You probably didn't notice, but I assure you that missing a self-imposed deadline is weighing heavily on me.
When I started this newsletter I asked a close friend with experience in comms and marketing for advice on what days and times to publish it. She warned me that Fridays were by far the worst. Well, here we are on Friday, so to the two people who actually saw this email and opened it: welcome!
Oscar nominations were released over a week ago now. With everything that's happened in the world since then it honestly feels stupid to share my thoughts on them, but I already wrote it so here they are:
Nominations I Love
- Sinners setting a record for most nominated film ever with nods in 16 categories is a huge vindication for Coogler and everyone who brought such a unique and fun film to the screen.
- I’m thrilled that Train Dreams was nominated for Best Picture, Cinematography, Screenplay, and Original Song (Nick Cave!) It’s a special, quiet film and I was worried it would be completely overlooked for major awards.
- The Secret Agent garnered well-deserved nominations for Wagner Moura as well as Best Picture and International Feature. It's a tough film to parse and very Brazilian, so it's a pleasant surprise to see it so lauded.
- Last April, my Letterboxd review for Sinners simply read: “Delroy fucking Lindo”. Well guess who got his first nomination in Supporting Actor!!
- In general, it's very cool how artistically and stylistically varied the nominees are this year.
Nominations I Don't Love
- I was not a fan of Frankenstein and am annoyed thinking about all the other films that could have been nominated in its place. Don't get me wrong, I love Del Toro, but Frankenstein felt like a copy-of-a-copy of his usual style.
- F1 in Best Picture is giving me mixed feelings. I'm a big fan of Kosinski’s adrenaline-fueled technical masterpieces and have zero problem with the Oscars honoring films that appeal to broader audiences. But outside of its technical aspects (for which it's justly nominated in a slew of categories) I thought this one was pretty lackluster.
Nominations I Miss
- No Other Choice not earning a single nomination is a huge snub. I've read speculation that it could be related to a dispute he had with the WGA over alleged violations during the writers' strike. Solidarity with the workers, but this does sound like an honest misunderstanding.
- 28 Years Later should have been nominated in Cinematography. Rewatching it this past weekend, I just can't get over how incredible and weird it looks. Kick Frankenstein out of its spot and give it to 28 Years Later!
Here's what I watched this week:
- It Was Just an Accident, a film about justice and retribution under an authoritarian regime, made at great personal risk by Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi.
- Mary Bronstein's If I had Legs I'd Kick You, a nerve wracking portrait of a mother at the end of her rope that's justly earned Rose Byrne a Best Actress nomination.
- Looking for a way to escape the stress of the world, I did the only logical thing and rewatched one of my comfort films: the deeply stressful Uncut Gems. It's a movie with deep stylistic and thematic connections to both Marty Supreme and If I Had Legs—Mary's husband Ronald Bronstein co-produced all three films—which makes it an interesting work to reexamine.
In 2010 the Iranian government sentenced director Jafar Panahi to six years in prison and banned him from filmmaking for 20 years. He has made six feature films since then, all filmed illegally on location in Iran.
It Was Just an Accident is a captivating exploration of the search for vengeance in the face of oppression by an artist who has clearly spent a great deal of time contemplating it. It follows Vahid, a mechanic and former political prisoner of the Iranian regime, who has a chance encounter with a man he believes to have been his tormentor. Vahid kidnaps the man with intent to exact his revenge, until his prisoner’s claims of mistaken identity instill enough doubt to give him pause.
As Vahid seeks second opinions from fellow dissidents, we see snippets of the everyday existence of the men and women who have been brutalized by the regime. We learn that these people don’t live at the margins. They’re bookshop owners and photographers, they get married and find ways to carry on while bearing the physical and mental scars of their abuse.
The subject matter may be heavy, but Panahi finds ways to inject bits of wry humor about modern Iranian society. My favorite moment is when a couple of policemen solicit a bribe, only to whip out a credit card reader when our protagonist protests that he doesn’t have any cash.
There’s something fascinating going on with Panahi’s use of long takes throughout the film. There are multiple complex, weighty scenes that play out for minutes on end without a single cut. It serves a dramatic effect: engross the viewer in the scene and establish a tension that grows with each passing second. But I also wonder if he filmed it that way to thumb his nose at the regime a bit. Getting good shots like this takes time and patience, something you wouldn’t imagine having when making a film illegally.
The protests that have erupted in Iran this past month and the thousands killed at the hands of the regime add a layer of real-world urgency and horror to the film. How do you suffer so much for so long at the hands of a system and still endure?
Political violence and the question of what you do with the anger that comes along with suffering injustice has been on my mind recently, for obvious reasons. It Was Just an Accident didn’t leave me with easy answers, but it did give me the nuance and perspective that can only come from someone who’s suffered so much from it.
I'll be honest: watching Die My Love and If I Had Legs I'd Kick You almost back to back was pretty rough.
The two films deal with broadly similar themes: women driven to the brink by the stresses of motherhood, caregiving, and being denied avenues of support. But while Lynne Ramsay’s film has a manic, sometimes even euphoric energy, Mary Bronstein immerses you in her protagonist's misery and drags you down with her.
To be clear, Rose Byrne does an incredible job conveying a woman at the end of her rope. The camera spends the majority of the runtime framed tight in on her face as she spends day after day trying to care for her sick (and honestly very annoying) child.
Bronstein and her husband are frequent collaborators of the Safdie brothers and you can see a lot of creative cross-pollination here. Safdie hallmarks like constantly rising stress, psychedelic CGI sequences, and unusual casting choices—Conan O’Brien, A$AP Rocky, and Christian Slater all make appearances—are present throughout. They’re all stylistic choices I love, but it makes for a rough watch when the protagonist is a woman I have genuine sympathy for instead of a compulsive gambler (see below) or an asshole who plays ping-pong.
Is it weird that Uncut Gems is one of my comfort films?
There’s something about this pressure cooker of a film, where Adam Sandler plays the most annoying, self-destructive New York Jew to ever exist on film, that helps me wash away the stress of the world. Maybe it’s some kind of exposure therapy, or the schadenfreude of watching someone with way more problems than me. Whatever it is, this is a film I’ve returned to time and again since first letting it wash over me in the depths of the 2020 COVID lockdown.
On this watch-through I focused on the thematic and stylistic echoes between it and Marty Supreme, Josh Safdie’s recent follow-up. They’re so similar that Marty functions as a kind of spiritual prequel. Both focus on the quixotic and self-destructive quests of New York Jews trying to improve their circumstances. Sports and sports betting, the interplay of skill and chance, are central mechanisms that drive both plots. Both are technically period pieces—even if Gems is only set in far off 2012—that capture a dreamy nostalgia using anamorphic lenses and 35mm film. The list goes on.
Where they diverge is in their protagonists’ level of hubris. Timothée Chalamet’s Marty is a man of legitimately meager circumstances propelled by the exuberance of youth and the post-war years to strive for an impossible goal. He’s self-destructive and his goals leave him vulnerable to men like Kevin O’Leary—who may actually be a vampire—but he’s earnestly striving for something he doesn’t already have.
Sandler’s Howard Ratner, however, seems to have had it all in the recent past—wealth, a loving family, prestige in his community—and is perpetually in the process of pissing it away. He’s a man who’s already won but continues to fight for more out of a sense that the world doesn't think he's good enough. It's an almost biblical cautionary tale about the dark side of searching for Jewish excellence.
On a separate note, I can’t believe that a film that’s mostly lit by florescent bulbs can look this incredible. Cinematographer Darius Khondji—frequent collaborator with the Safdies, Bong Joon-ho, and David Fincher—manages to pull beautiful purples and greens out of the tacky, over-lit interiors of New York’s Diamond District.
If you haven’t revisited it recently, you should.
Thanks for reading and please consider coming to an upcoming showtime!
Tyler Haas