Plato Shrimp » Another Award Season In Hell

Jinnistan · 1/23/2024 11:22 pm

crumbsroom wrote:
But just on the face of what the movie is or isn't...it isn't camp.

What I mentioned upthread about it:

I saw one review that addressed the issue of critics applying a "camp" tag to the film, questioning whether or not this was the critics' response of being unable to take the uncomfortable subject matter at face value. The IndieWire review exemplifies the confusion by calling it a "heartbreakingly sincere piece of high camp", which is nonsensical considering how "camp" is defined as being the opposite of sincere.

In other news, regarding Barbie as a barometer of feminism, as infuriating as it is to see someone like GulfportDoc's misogyny at the forefront (which isn't political), it's somehow even more infuriating when you see the AV Club playing the strawman to a tee, with their article claiming victimhood over the same box-checking reasons. "It’s hard not to wonder whether the energy of this past summer will be as fleeting as the notion of girlhood itself." Aww. Except, then at the end the article kind of points out exactly why it's actually a pretty good year for women this year, for a lot of reasons not based on a doll's impossible physical proportions. (Don't hate the messenger.) But, hey, everyone's got to have a reason to bitch, right?

"We’ve gotten to a place where a movie about Barbie can be taken (somewhat) seriously, which certainly isn’t nothing, but we still have a long way to go." Let me recommend the direction away from Barbie as your North Star of feminine self-worth.

Jinnistan · 1/25/2024 6:51 am

Jinnistan wrote:
But, hey, everyone's got to have a reason to bitch, right?

I take a lot of shots at the AV Club, so let me give them some credit when they try to correct some of thier ill-mentum. The article I posted yesterday has already fallen off of their front page it seems, and, although I haven't bothered to read any of the comments, it looks like maybe it fell afoul of even their regulars, and this new article seems like a direct response to it even without directly mentioning the former article.

This new article mentions something called the "false underdog phenomenon", which is an interesting phrase, "wherein someone or something that’s already undeniably on top is treated as though they’ve been marginalized". This phenomenon obviously cannot be contained to strictly perceived progressive race/gender issues, as probably the biggest proponent of such a grievance are the comic book 'jama-boys, endlessly frustrated with the competition of substantial art despite their commercial dominance in the entertainment field. (One could argue that we're seeing them among the Nolan cheerleaders, talking about his "turn" and "about time" and other stupid stuff.) So it would seem that something like Margot Robbie not getting an Actress nod would supercede her accomplishment, along with Emma Stone, as actresses receiving precedent-setting nominations as producers this year. And even if Greta Gerwig is a more arguable contender for director - in an agreeably very tight competition this year - using her as a female martyr happens to diminsh the significance of her peer, Juliet Triet, who did manage the nomination. The above more recent article accurately points out this back-handed dismissal of fellow female accomplishments this year by citing an even worse, but higher profile, article from the LA Times writer Mary McNamara, who claimed: "If only Barbie ... barely survived becoming the next victim in a mass murder plot. Or stood accused of shoving Ken out of the Dream House’s top window." The clear implication here is that, somehow, Lily Gladstone and Triet's Anatomy of a Fall had an easier and less deserved route to their respective nominations. Or that these presumably lesser nominations prove some kind of misogynistic bias against the presumably more deserving Barbie. It's worth asking at this point, "how much success would be enough to satisfy these fans?" And why is Barbie's projection of feminism - which even this article admits is a fairly recent interpretation of what is a plastic symbol of unrealistic beauty and wealth standards - automatically more deserving than these other depictions of women?

So credit where it's due. I'm happy to see some pushback on this egregious victim-mongering. Tay-tay, you gonna be OK.

Rock · 1/25/2024 9:27 am

Jinnistan wrote:
(One could argue that we're seeing them among the Nolan cheerleaders, talking about his "turn" and "about time" and other stupid stuff.)

From my experience Nolan fans tend to be more generic film bros / jocks than comic book stans. Marvel stans in particular tend to hate him from what I’ve seen.

Jinnistan · 1/26/2024 12:54 am

Rock wrote:
From my experience Nolan fans tend to be more generic film bros / jocks than comic book stans. Marvel stans in particular tend to hate him from what I’ve seen.

I just mean "stans" in general. You had them at RT and movieforums. Nolan stans were always "he's the absolute greatest" and flashing his box office, but then acting like persecuted refugees every time his films didn't win every last award or poll or whatever. It's like they get offended whenever they perceive dissent. It's in the same way, very typical now, how victimization has been retrofitted into being a tool of authoritarian enforcement. And you see it when comic book people claim victimhood, either from bad old bully Scorsese or the bad old Tomatometer with its anti-Snyder bias. And you see it when Chadwick Boseman fans tried to act like Anthony Hopkins was a racist for daring to win the acting award that year. And you see it with Taylor Swift fans for whatever insufferable indignity they're going through. And now this is what I see with these Barbie snubs. It's all "stan" logic.

Jinnistan · 2/04/2024 3:10 pm

Instead of picking on the AV Club again, it didn't take long to find another one of these diaper-spa dipshits on a slightly better movie site, this Nate Jones over at Vulture. This cunt calls themselves an "awards pundit", and seems to be leading up that site's awards-season coverage in an imaginatively titled sub-blog, "The Gold Rush". Basically (and I mean very basically), Nate Jones is a rancid incarnation of deformed critic, the kind of critic who prognosticates a film's success as if it were a political election and as if that election were a sporting event. Just a monster of all of the worst that our very-online commentary has provided. I think it's sufficient to point out that throughout the linked piece - the one I will take special issue with - that none of his award punditry is based on any actual personal consideration of any of the films being discussed. Instead, whatever passes as wisdom in his divined handicapping is based on what he feels is the online consensus. Much like any other pundit of the other fields who would rather discuss polls rather than policy, or stats rather than play strategy. And I'll rest my case on the sad fact that Nate Jones here is also heading up a new feature at Vulture, a "Movie Fantasy League", where one can, presumably, waste even more time wagering on everything about movies that have nothing to do with the quality of the movies themselves.

It's already a cliche how some people like to refer in collective and homogeneous terms to "the internet" as a singular autonomous voice, and Nate Jones here is no exception: "The internet could not pretend that Oppenheimer was being shoved down their necks, because they’d already claimed it as their own." I'll step right over an obvious joke about the confusion between singular and plural pronouns, and simply say that I find it difficult for anyone who has spent very much time online to honestly believe that "the internet" is capable of such universal agreement. But this represents a perceptual illusion that tends to only apply to one's localized social media bubble. People will say, "everyone online is talking about..." or "literally no one likes..." or some such idiocy. This doesn't even really have anything to do with any particular thoughts about the movies here either, but it's a formal irritation that I needed to get out of the way. And I will also go ahead and suggest that Jones' lack of depth is probably an age issue. I did notice him mention: "I came of age as a pundit during the Trump presidency..." Someday, this will be the preamble for a charity event with a Sarah McLachlan song. If your "coming of age" period has been within the past ten years, you're probably still coming of age. I'm curious which of our finer liberal arts colleges are churning out these Bachelor of Punditry degrees. At another point, Jones also happens to mention "Both of my siblings attended the same private high school as [Bradley] Cooper". Nate fails to mention which school he attended, but I have to assume that whichever school this was is likely the reason why he is writing tabloid copy about "vibe shifts" for Vulture right now. (Jones also tries to name-drop some "Cousin Gary" like anyone gives a shit.)

Anyway, as for why this is such a horrible piece of online content. Ostensibly, the article is supposed to try to explain why the film Maestro is receiving such an Oscar backlash right now. It is? I didn't know either, bare with me. The film is still sitting at about 80% with "generally favorable" reviews. I only mention this because Nate Jones believes otherwise: "Consensus is that the film is technically marvelous but cold, as if Cooper spent such time studying Bernstein’s tics that he lost sight of the man’s soul." I'm sure some critics feel exactly that way, but I don't see anything approaching "consensus" on these points. I'm not even sure if Nate Jones is aware of what a dictionary is. But this is common throughout, Jones always pushes these takes not as his own opinion but of some larger agreed-upon opinion among "my friends" or whatever. When Jones does mention a specific critic, what-do-you-know?, it's old Richard Brody. I already skewered Brody's (bad) take on the last page, but I need to call out this part: "Maestro sidelines Bernstein’s art and activism, the very things that made him important. In The New Yorker, Richard Brody said that the film 'leaves out the good stuff.'" In fact, Brody never mentioned a lack of Bernstein's "art" in the film (probably because there is no lack of it there).

There's so many examples of critical ineptitude here: "Maestro is about a straight woman and a gay man who fall for each other, and instead of using each other for clout the way they would today, decide to get married." So Nate Jones is admitting that he simply doesn't understand, or isn't willing to accept, the core premise of the relationship drama in the film, which is that "love" and "sexuality" are not really the same thing, and that it's possible for a gay man to love a straight woman deeply, and visa versa. I like how he sees the less sincere route of "using each other for clout" as the more reasonable and sophisticated option. But I have noticed, among the negative reviews of the film that I've read, that this has been a major hang-up for those other critics as well, with some even claiming that it amounts to some kind of cop-out or obscuration of the validity of Bernstein's homosexuality. ("Non-binary" indeed.) But, again, Jones is noncommittal, falling back on his "friends" opinion, because, I guess, they're probably better writers: "To me, that’s as valid a subject for a movie as any. Sounds swell, my friends say, but absolutely none of that has been communicated to the general public." I'm not sure in what way they mean. It's clearly communicated in the film itself, but then he pivots to "those who haven't seen it". Who gives a fuck what they think?!?!?! You can't criticize a film based on the misperceptions of those people who haven't even seen it. "The private life of Leonard Bernstein is, as Cousin Greg might say, not IP many of them are familiar with." Oh Jesus Fucking Christ with these cunts!!!!! "Few of those who have seen the film have rallied to its defense." I'm sorry, you mean "few" outside of the 315 positive reviews from professional critics? "As one redditor put it...." I swear, I'm about to start scratching and stabbing. This is the basis of his "consensus"?!?!

The second half of the article is probably a lot more honest, which is that none of this backlash, or the basis of these "vibes", really has anything to do with the film itself than it has to do with the popular celebrity perception of Bradley Cooper himself: "Cooper has accidentally violated one of the cardinal rules of campaigning: Show you want it, but don’t be desperate"; "Fans side-eyed his extremely public romance with Gigi Hadid"; "At the risk of psychoanalyzing a stranger, it’s worth digging into his teacher’s-pet intensity"; "I heard rumors about Cooper being a bit of a pill on the Star Is Born campaign". Note that all of the above appears to be sourced from reddit and other online gossip forums. (I'm just now learning what a "blind item" is.) Obviously none of these, um, "observations" have anything to do with the merits of the film or Cooper as a filmmaker/actor. Worse still, is that Nate Jones seems qualified to weigh in on Cooper's class background, citing, apropos of very little, the Philadelphia neighborhood Cooper was raised, the private school he attended, his collegiate extracurriculur activities, "he had high-culture ambitions, even studying at the famed Actors Studio", and finally passing the judgment "Mare of Easttown this was not". (And I have no fucking clue how that could possibly be relevant to Maestro.) But, as Nate mentions, he's apparently also from this same environ, and says "This is an environment where the dream of meritocracy still holds sway, where a smart kid from a well-off family could believe that if he studied hard enough his dreams were indeed within his grasp." That's actually not at all what "meritocracy" means, btw, but maybe Nate Jones is a light sleeper. Then Jones - "at the risk of psychoanalyzing a stranger" - proceeds to remark on Cooper's chip-on-the-shoulder and need to prove himself against his (implicitly more talented) peers. Or maybe that sounds more like projection, Mr. "couldn't get in to my siblings' private school"?

"Intellectual pretension is acceptable in our awards vehicles; emotional pretension far less so." I don't have a lot more to add to this, except I think it would be lovely if Nate Jones happened to get beaten with a soggy pair of tennis shoes by immigrants on his next subway ride through SoHo.

Jinnistan · 2/05/2024 2:23 pm

Having seen Anatomy of a Fall now, I think that any blather about snubs for Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie are rendered moot, as the direction and writing of Justine Triet and the performance of Sandra Huller is so unquestionably superior in the eyes of anyone other than someone working for a corporate-thirsty movie blog. The film acts as an eye-opener for what truly humanizing cinema looks like. And quite honestly, it's to the Academy's detriment that they failed to acknowledge the young 13-year-old Milo Machado Graner, who stomped circles around anything Ryan Gosling accomplished. Presciently, I think Anatomy deserves and will likely win the screenplay award. I can't think of a better crime-courtroom drama which displays the fundamentally dehumanizing effects of the entire "true crime" culture with which modern audiences are so vicariously infatuated.

I also think Anatomy of a Fall is ultimately superior to both Oppenheimer and Maestro, but the comparison with Flower Moon is more intriguing, as both films involve examinations into the complications of love and abuse in intimate relationships, and what constitutes justice and what constitutes guilt in this deeply emotional context. Anatomy of a Flower Moon is the amalgamation which should be the more substantive discussion for this year in film, and the contrast by which we should be judging the accomplishments of our finest filmmakers.

Jinnistan · 2/08/2024 11:11 pm

Two more down.

If Emma Stone pulls a coup and nabs the Actress award, I can't be too upset. But more than that, I think I'm actively hoping for a Poor Things Cinematography win, as well as Costume and Production Design And even if it doesn't win, it definitely desrves Best Score over that piano slather in Oppenheimer. Since neither of them were going to win, I would have preferred DaFoe to have gotten the Supporting Actor nom.

American Fiction is likely to go empty-handed. The best chance might have been for Adapted Screenplay, but, here, I also think Poor Things would be the more deserving winner. Again, Oppenheimer remains the dogmatic favorite, because, omg, "first person".

Jinnistan · 2/29/2024 2:15 am

I don't think I've seen any crumbs' review for Poor Things.

It's a film that's worth tying into the fabric of the zeitgeist this year. "Bella", an object by design, is an interesting doppleganger for Barbie, and I think both films feature similar tortured attempts at feminist revisionism, but I allow it more for Poor Things because it doesn't have the corporate/merchandising albatross attached to it. It's allowed to play with its concepts and contradictions more without the contortions of pop culture and political correctness trying to iron out its complications into easily consumable cookies.

On Letterboxd, Macrology says of Poor Things, "One could even argue that the film nearly offers a critique of a very narcissistic brand of feminism." That's an argument that could easily be made against the status-obsessed Barbie as well, but the reason why it's arguable at all with Poor Things is because it could also be argued, as Macrology suggests, that the film is rather endorsing this narcissism: "In interviews, Lanthimos and Stone have made much of Bella's lack of shame. But isn't shame akin to guilt? And isn't guilt, on some level, a function of human morality?" And for the primacy of Bella's moral evolution: "The bildungsroman phase is further undermined by the fact that it never takes its subject's moral progress all that seriously."

It's an interesting question which I didn't really consider, because I was more willing to accept the film as farcical and absurdist in nature, rather than reading into the film these types of current sociopolitical contexts. But if Lanthimos, as adaptor and director of the material, is intending such a read - that Bella's selfishness is being presented as specifically revolutionary or liberating in a feminist sense - then I would have to admit that I would find that to be pretty ludicrous. As I interpreted it in my own review, "I don't take it very seriously as anything other than a mangling of Victorian-era ideological pretensions", including those pretensions of sex, class, psychology and social control that I think are being mangled in the film. If Lanthimos was not in on that joke, that he was under the impression that there was some kind of clearer social thesis involved here, I guess I would have to laugh, but there's nothing about Lanthimos' previous films, demonstrating his dry sense of humor and absurdity, that would lead me to believe that he wasn't content to simply ridicule the fundamental Freudian/Marxist/Existentialist roots of 20th Century modernism, rather than attempting something more duplicitously progressive (again, ala Barbie).

Jinnistan · 3/10/2024 1:48 pm

I'll use this thread to live-mock this evening's Academy Awards ceremony.

I will try my hardest not to make any hippo jokes about Da'Vine Joy Randolph's breasts. I understand that it's a sensitive issue. I can only hope that Da'Vine chooses not to rub our faces in the matter.

Jinnistan · 3/10/2024 2:36 pm

It's a shame about the recent plagiarism allegations against The Holdovers, although, being that the votes are cast, this won't have any effect on tonight's outcome, and shouldn't effect the estimated qualities of the performances. And although I didn't get a chance to finally see Holdovers before tonight, I have little faith that it could possibly have deserved the Screenplay award over the tremendous Anatomy of a Fall anyway. (I don't think very many people were considering Holdovers' success in any of the other categories.)

Despite the fact that I have yet to see so many films from the past year, I'll go ahead and post my Top Ten to Letterboxd tonight as well. I doubt there will be any last minute tooling from this:

Asteroid City
Killers of the Flower Moon
Anatomy of a Fall
Skinamarink
Poor Things
Maestro
Blackberry
El Conde
May December
Oppenheimer

And a short list of my blind spots:

Past Lives
Zone of Interest
Holdovers
Boy and the Heron
Io Capitano
Society of the Snow
Priscilla
Beau is Afraid
Godzilla Minus One
Ferrari
Daaaaaaali!
About Dry Grasses
Fallen Leaves
Monster
Dream Scenario
Taste of Things
The Crime is Mine
Infinity Pool
Evil Does Not Exist
Full River Red
Iron Claw
...and I'm sure many others

Jinnistan · 3/10/2024 5:53 pm

Jinnistan wrote:
I will try my hardest not to make any hippo jokes about Da'Vine Joy Randolph's breasts. I understand that it's a sensitive issue. I can only hope that Da'Vine chooses not to rub our faces in the matter.

Rest assured. Da'Vine appears to be well secured.

Jinnistan · 3/10/2024 6:12 pm

Why isn't Ryan Gosling's wife, Eva Mendes, here tonight? Maybe she doesn't like his mascara...

Jinnistan · 3/10/2024 6:30 pm

On the other hand...it's just a fucking watch, right?

Jinnistan · 3/10/2024 6:38 pm

I know that Lennon cartoon is on Netflix, but it looks like it's going to be so corny. Oh, well, get the "Oh Yoko" out there.

Jinnistan · 3/10/2024 6:40 pm

Thank god. I was about to slap some spidey sense into these bastards. Classy absence, Hayao. Leave them wanting more.

Jinnistan · 3/10/2024 6:49 pm

Anatomy of a Fall is one of the best written films of several recent years.

Jinnistan · 3/10/2024 6:59 pm

This is probably my first disagreement of the night, but since the Scorsese/Roth script for Flower Moon wasn't nominated, I guess it's good enough. I probably would have leaned toward Poor Things but I'd like to read the book first to determine it. The original Erasure, on which American Fiction is based, would probably help too.

Jinnistan · 3/10/2024 7:12 pm

We need some female streakers. Me Too indeed.

Jinnistan · 3/10/2024 7:32 pm

I think we could use a mean Ryan Gosling comedy. We've seen these threads through Big Short and Nice Guys. I appreciate that he doesn't 'cute-crack' like a lot of these pretty boys.

crumbsroom · 3/10/2024 7:32 pm

I've got 7 out of 9 correct so far, which isn't too bad for someone who filled out my ballot in about thirty seconds, and haven't followed any of the previous awards.
I never would have picked that ghastly looking War is Over shit though.