SPOILER ALERT! The plots will be discussed.
Marty Supreme:
This film has a dynamic performance by Timothee
Chalomet. He has already received the Critics’ Choice Award and the Golden
Globes Award for Best Actor, and he is the favorite for the Oscar. He plays an
unlikable person who wants the recognition of being the best table tennis
player in the world. The story shows how the single-minded obsession to achieve
notoriety can create havoc and collateral damage in that pursuit. In the end,
he finally can show his talent without actually being the world champion, and he
begins to care for others. The movie is too long and a bit of a mess in the
middle (especially the part with the gangster, his cash, and the dog) as Marty
moves from one ridiculous situation to another.
After the Hunt:
The title may deal with the results following a
trauma. This movie will be seen by some as a betrayal of the MeToo movement and
views about discrimination. However, it should not be dismissed on that basis.
It challenges entrenched views and can be admired for its courage to take on so
many issues without becoming muddled. The story portrays the scholastic
community, represented by Alma (Julia Roberts), a philosophy professor at Yale,
and Hank (Andrew Garfield), a colleague, vying for tenure. They along with
others come off as pompous elites. The film presents the advantages of white
privilege. It also shows the devastation of sexual abuse in the person of Maggie
(Ayo Edebiri), a PhD student, who says that Hank assaulted her. However, she is
not your typical Black oppressed person, since her parents are rich, she plagiarized
material in her dissertation, and she violates Alma’s privacy. Alma lied about
a sexual assault on herself, and gives advice to Alma that entails surrendering
to male oppression in the workplace. Her ulcers symbolize her guilt, and she
fakes a prescription to obtain pain killers. The supporting performances by
Garfield and Michael Stuhlbarg as Alma’s neglected husband are particularly
good.
Here’s another odd and inventive film from director
Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster, The Favourite, Poor Things). This one involves
fringe characters kidnapping a female business executive, Michelle, played by
Emma Stone, who they believe is a member of an alien race eliminating the
world’s honeybees and manipulating people into passive victims. The story shows
her at first to be a victim of a deranged man, Teddy (Jesse Plemons), who puts
her in restraints and shaves her head, Samson-like, because he believes it is
the source of a power to communicate with her fellow aliens aboard a
mothership. He tortures her by inflicting electric shock treatments to prove
his theory that the aliens can withstand high voltage. She eventually plays
along with him, it seems, but as it turns out she really is the top
extraterrestrial. Her race has found that their experiment of creating humans
has failed since earthlings are too destructive to exist, and they terminate
the species. The other creatures are allowed to live, and the bees again
flourish. (The title refers to bees springing forth from the carcasses of
animals, which fits here). The problem with the film is that it may inadvertently
encourage conspiracy theorists to go down misguided rabbit holes. That is not
what the film is saying. Instead, it points to people looking for hidden
reasons outside of themselves for answers when it is they who are the problem.
A Good performance by Emma Stone, who is again nominated for an Oscar. But the superior
performance here is by Plemons, who was snubbed by the Academy.
Chloe Zhao (Oscar winner for Best Director for Nomadland)
directed this movie that uses the loss of William Shakespeare’s young son to
place the writing of the great play Hamlet in the context of how to deal
with the grief of such a tragedy. Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) is withdrawn,
dealing with his emotions, it seems, internally, and not capable of comforting
the grieving mother, Agnes, played by Jessie Buckley (Buckley is the favorite
to win the Oscar for Best Actress). However, her husband is channeling his
emotions into the play. Agnes witnesses the premier of Hamlet, in which
Shakespeare plays the ghost of the main character’s father. Mescal, shrouded in
white bandages and makeup, is like an apparition of himself after Hamnet’s
death. Earlier, the playwright taught Hamnet sword fighting. Now the actor
playing Hamlet repeats those moves, and the character becomes Shakespeare’s
attempt to say goodbye to his son and grant immortality through the main character
in his play. At the end of the performance, Agnes, at the front of the stage, reaches
for the actor playing Hamlet, and he holds her hands in his. The rest of the
audience extends their hands out also, showing how art and reality join
together to raise tragedy beyond grief. It is a transcendent moment.
This may be director/writer Paul Thomas Anderson’s
year. The film may win Oscars for Best Picture, Screenplay, and Directing. Like
After the Hunt, this movie, derived from the novel Vineland by
acclaimed and reclusive author Thomas Pynchon, critiques the many sides of the
social and political landscape. Left-wing radicals are exposed for their
violent tendencies, and the right-wing fanatics are satirized for their
bigoted, sadistic ways. Sometimes some become attached to a cause just so they
can be with the ones they love. That is the case with Pat (aka Bob) (Leonardo
DiCaprio, Oscar-nominated for Best Actor). He is romantically involved with
Perfidia Beverly Hills (Tevana Taylor, rightly Oscar-nominated nominated for
her role), a Black woman who is a leader of the revolutionaries. The name Perfidia
implies being deceptive with hidden motives, and the Beverly Hills name
suggests Hollywood liberalism. She is not admirable because she later leaves her
child with Pat (now Bob after they acquire new identities) and betrays her
comrades to gain safety in witness protection. Her name fits as she has a sexual
attraction for Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn, in a Supporting Actor
Oscar nomination for his scary, over-the-top portrayal), who presides over a
detention camp she liberates. (Anderson is not subtle with his character
names). Lockjaw admits later to Pat that he “loves” Black women. Thematically,
the relationship between the two works as the they are hypocrites to their causes.
But, in reality, it is easier to accept a white man’s exploitation of a Black
woman as opposed to that woman being attracted to a fascistic white oppressor. The
scenes with DiCaprio becoming exasperated by trying to remember the paranoid
leftish code word security are hysterical. That Lockjaw becomes a victim of his
own people shows how the right-wing white supremacists eat their young if they
discover anything that deviates from their agenda. Benicio Del Toro plays a
laid-back neighborhood protector who aids Bob. (Del Toro’s performance, in my
opinion, is not as good as either Stuhlbarg’s or Garfield’s in After the
Hunt). Perfidia’s grown-up daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti), goes off at
the end of the movie to join protesters, showing how there is, indeed, one
battle after another.
The title of this movie may be exploring who really
are sinners given the context of the story. Writer/director Ryan Coogler does
not use horror until later in this movie. He first deftly reveals the main
characters and their plight. Michael B. Jordan, nominated for a Best Actor
Oscar, portrays twin brothers, Smoke and Stack Moore. The last name suggests
that these two men can accomplish a great deal more than one might think. Their
nicknames suggest fire, implying they are two fellows not to be trifled with.
They have been living in Chicago, and their sojourn in the North has given them
a news perspective on life. They bring a feeling of empowerment back to their
hometown in Mississippi. With the money they earned working for the gangsters
up north they buy an old sawmill and turn it into a music club, hiring local
talent.
When the vampires do show up, they are symbolic of how
the scary local Klan and “crackers” have been scaring the Black folk here for
generations. They whites drained the life out of the African American
population and now are there to do the same to the formidable Moore brothers. An
epic battle occurs with many losses, but there is survival until dawn and the
vampires are vanquished.
There is a remarkable scene at the club before the fight.
The brothers recruited their cousin Sammy (Miles Canton) to play guitar at
their joint. His magical music channels the indomitable African American spirit
that can be found in this form of artistic expression. This surrealistic sequence
transcends time as we see primitive performers and others that represent modern
hip-hop artists.
This is a rich film, and I hope to do an in-depth post
on it in the future.
Frankenstein:
Writer/director Guillermo del Toro (disappointing that
he was not nominated for this film), as he did in his Oscar-winning The
Shape of Water, subverts our preconceived notions of who are the true
monsters. The film is structured to show the story from two viewpoints. It
begins near the North Pole where an injured Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) is
brought aboard a ship. He tells his story. His father, Leopold (Charles Dance),
an aristocrat, was a tyrant. He controlled every aspect of his son’s life to
make him into a surgeon. He beat him in the face with a cane to enforce his
agenda. Victor lost his mother in childbirth which suggests that is why he
wants to use science to defeat death (the subtitle of Shelley’s 19th
century work is The Modern Prometheus which reminds us of the
mythological being representing hubris and human advancement because Prometheus
stole fire from the gods).
Victor is able to fashion the Creature (Jacob Elordi,
nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar), because arms merchant Henrich
Harlander (Christoph Waltz) offers Victor all the funding he needs. Harlander
is dying and wants his brain transferred to the Creature so he can live
forever. The film here suggests the power of the ultra-wealthy. The Creature’s
body heals any wound and is extremely strong. Victor repeats his father’s cruelty
when he tries to teach his creation how to speak. Victor also is attracted to
his brother’s fiancée and lies when he says the Creature killed Harlander, who
died trying to subvert the experiment for his own purposes. The thrust here is
that humans are selfish and sadistic toward the outsider, the other, who is an
innocent. Victor tries to burn his lab and the Creature, but he does have a change
of heart. However, he is unable to stop a catastrophic explosion.
The Creature, after fighting the sailors in
self-defense at the North Pole, then tells his story to Captain Anderson (Lars
Mikkelsen). He says that he escaped the explosion and was attacked by hunters
who killed him, but he revived. He eventually helps a family of farmers, which
shows his natural benevolence. He then encounters a blind man (David Bradley)
who teaches him to excel in reading and writing. His blindness appears to
signify that he can relate to the Creature without any prejudice, just like the
statue of Blind Justice. His teacher dies when wolves attack the man, so the
Creature is on his own again.
The Creature says he returned to get Victor to make
him a companion since he knows he is immortal and suffers from extreme
loneliness. Victor refused, and the Creature attacked him. Elizabeth (Mia
Goth), the fiancée of Victor’s brother, sympathizes with the Creature. Victor is
jealous of the Creature. He accidently shoots and kills her when he attacks his
creation, afraid that the Creature might have offspring. It’s as if the
proliferation of purity must be stopped by selfish humans. Victor pursued his
creation to the Arctic, where the Creature failed to destroy himself out of
despair with an explosive that harmed Victor. “Father,” Victor, and “son,” the
Creature, reconcile in the end as Oscar succumbs to his wounds. At the end of
the film, the Creature follows Victor’s early advice of reaching for the
sunlight, a suggestion that we must try to illuminate our souls with acceptance
of others.
