I'm still catching up on some movies released last year. The Academy Award nominations were released earlier today. The list confirms my belief that 2014 was a pretty shitty year for the types of films that get nominated for Academy Awards - but an otherwise solid year overall if you explore the places where the old white men of the Academy do not often play.
There are actually a couple of films on the Best Picture list that I have not seen yet, although I confess to not being particularly likely to see them. I may skip the maudlin-looking The Theory of Everything regardless of its nominations, and American Sniper looks like yet more military propaganda junk - hiding behind the "we're not political" bullshit that Hollywood loves to throw out when questions get raised. The era when I felt obligated to see all the major nominees has passed. There are just too many movies to see and not enough time to see all the Oscar-bait. But still there are a few 2014 movies that I need to see before I feel comfortable collating a list of my favorites from the year.
As to what I have seen recently, I have a good backlog of films that I want to briefly mention, so I might as well get started today.
The Interview manages to land a few chuckles but I found it mostly boring. Any light feints at genuine satire that the film tries to make are mostly lost in a sea of dumb jokes and overly self-aware mugging. At the end of the day the film is more worried about setting up a joke about Seth Rogen having to painfully shove something up his ass than about setting up any kind of political commentary. The response might be, as it is so often in Hollywood, that the film was not intended to be political. Fine, but then it was intended to be funny, right?
The Kim Jong-Un as sheltered, insecure guy looking for a friend bit is amusing for a minute, but then the film goes nowhere from there with the character. The gore as shocking humor thing and the "we're going to show you we're aware that we're following formula" thing are played out. Just as with 22 Jump Street, there are only so many times a film can wink and nod at you about how they know the whole thing is dumb before you wonder why, if they know it so well, they did not try to make something smarter.
From a stylistic standpoint the film is oddly composed and edited. Too many close ups and the dialogue scenes are choppily edited. There are a few too many musical transitions that feel like filmmakers just not knowing how else to get in or out of a scene. Goldberg and Rogen are not the only ones that demonstrate that problem these days, however. At the end of the day the film just feels a little too closed off and a little too perfunctory. I suspect it will be remembered for the whole hacking brouhaha much longer than it will be remembered for its actual content.
Speaking of Academy Awards, Ida might be a shoo-in for Best Foreign Language Film. It would not be a bad choice based on what I've seen as the film is really good. The film is a short burst - a simple plot efficiently set out by Pawel Pawlikowski - but it lingers in the memory. I found myself thinking about it for days and remembering those black-and-white images of the title character, a woman on the verge of taking her vows as a nun. She faces an eleventh hour spiritual crisis that dovetails with shocking discoveries about her past and her family history.
An interesting aspect of the film is how Ida is able to guilt the people around her into confronting their past sins merely by her presence. Yet the film is as much about Ida's need to explore her identity - ethnically, spiritually, sexually - before she can choose for herself which path to follow and life to lead. One message from the film seems to be that we cannot possibly know which direction to follow until we come to honest terms with ourselves about where we have been and what we have done. It would be a shame to limit that lesson of truth and reconciliation with the past to just the Holocaust. There are still crimes being committed, still governments leading us astray, still people standing by quietly as it is done, and still a lack of true justice for the perpetrators. It shouldn't take a novice nun's presence to make us think about that.
Predestination is an Ethan Hawke film receiving a very narrow release as it preps for its VOD run. In spite of an implausible and creepy premise the film still works pretty well as a modest time travel mystery. The film does not try to jazz things up with gratuitous action or a needless array of MacGuffins. That works well on the film's modest budget, as the film never spins out of control, something that can happen easily in a time travel movie that involves leaping forward and backward in time. I also appreciated that the film does not over-explain things, which filmmakers try to do sometimes in time travel movies in order to help things make sense, only to open up more plot and logic holes in the bargain. The film does not necessarily break new ground and does not have much to say, but it is nonetheless a decent little sci-fi film worth a watch.
More to come later. The Interview and Predestination were screened in the theater. Ida was streamed via Amazon.
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