Posts Tagged: movies
Catching up on the Oscars, Long AFTER the Oscars
Flashback time! Because we’re slow at this!
We’d done a decent job of getting ready for the Oscars, in that we’d seen more of the movies than usual. Some, we’d seen in the theater (Marty Supreme, Sinners). Most, we’d streamed. I watched Weapons alone because my husband isn’t a big horror fan. We’d wanted to see Frankenstein in a theater but even in Portland, this proved extremely difficult to find, so we streamed it in all its happily ended pastel gore.
We also streamed One Battle After Another. In shifts. We watched the first half, then paused it while I made dinner and we ate, and then we watched the rest. I do wonder why movies are so long these days, but then I saw Boyhood in a theater so what am I complaining about?
My Internally Awarded Oscars
Anyway, I had definite favorites. After we finished One Battle, I said, “If Sean Penn doesn’t win Best Supporting Actor, the Oscars have no meaning.” I was also rooting hard for Teyana Taylor and heartbroken when she didn’t win. I mean, COME ON.
I hadn’t seen Hamnet but assumed Jessie Buckley deserved to win because I’ve never seen her give less than an Oscar-worthy performance. I definitely cheered the roof off when Michael B Jordan won because he also deserved it (but for which role since he played two? I know, it’s for the movie, not a specific role).
I enjoyed Frankenstein for what it was, but it wasn’t the best picture of the year. I had no love for Marty Supreme, and much love for Sinners. Sinners had my vote. But I could live with One Battle as Best Picture. Because it was wildly suspenseful and entertaining and funny and, well, shockingly good, despite the length.
What We Didn’t See
There were a couple of other movies up for many awards that I hadn’t seen. My husband and I kept meaning to watch two contenders. First, there was Hamnet. I’d read the book (and I know this is ridiculous because everyone else loved it) but in a basic way, it failed to work for me. Our main character Agnes, Shakespeare’s wife, seemed too much of a fantasy novel stock-character: the herb-wise forest witch with tangled hair and a hawk on her arm. And here she was as Shakespeare’s wife, and I had a hard time with it. She never quite came to life for me.
The other big Oscar contender we hadn’t seen was Jay Kelly, with George Clooney. This was another one we meant to watch and kept putting off. It looked dumb. The premise sounded puny, restrained, and the trailers I watched seemed to point to a rom-com. Like, screen-idol Dad would follow his daughter to Europe and there he would meet an attractive age-appropriate woman who would finally show him what love meant. And…Scene.
I Was So Wrong!
Well, we watched it Saturday night and it was nothing like that. Jay Kelly is a true Hollywood film. It’s huge, sweeping, gorgeous. The opening is alchemical magic. Visually, each shot is a delight for the eyes. The score is expansive without overwhelming. Every performance is pitch perfect. Clooney is an aging screen icon facing how stardom has hollowed out his identity. He is flawed and irresistible. The entire movie is charming and bittersweet and funny and so very, very sad. I’m shocked that Adam Sandler wasn’t nominated for Best Supporting Actor. If he had been, it would have been a tight race in the all-important race for Oscars mentally awarded by one Karen G. Berry.
And then, the other one.
On Sunday. night, we settled in to watch Hamnet. My husband gently lay some Kleenex on the coffee table before me with the words, “I’ve heard it’s a weepy.” Knowing the story, I assumed he was right.
The good news is that almost immediately, Jessi Buckley’s Agnes filled out all the voids of the written character. Agnes ascended from trope to character right before my eyes. And Paul Mescal is a beautifully human Shakespeare. It’s such a tapestry of a movie. The costumes and set and that gorgeous forest, and every single actor, and the language, and how some of it is muttered but we didn’t turn on the closed captions because that muddling felt intimate and real to my ears.
I thought the movie was beautiful, through and through. But it is not perfect. They had to age up the twins for obvious reasons. In doing so, they lost the neat trick of their illness, the strange and magical and tragic consequence of their closeness. The film extended the related scenes of suffering and healing and limbo to what felt like melodramatic lengths. The tragedy of loss isn’t like that, not really. Losses are internally harrowing. But they are not externally operatic.
ALL THAT ASIDE. Every other part of the movie (okay, the score got a little bombastic at times) but almost every other moment worked for me. What I loved most was how the movie examines the role of writing, drama, and catharsis in its final scenes. When Agnes goes to the play, she literally does not understand what she is seeing. The actors are walking around onstage looking absurd, people with sticks, and she demands to know what they’re doing.
And then, the magic starts for her. Ghost, son, death. She understands. As a writer, her husband has done his processing through writing, and invited the audience to share his pain and help him carry the burden of it. In return they experience catharsis of their own sorrows. I was moved right down into my core.
And I used the Kleenex.
I’m not sure what else we missed, because we always miss a few. But next year I’m going to do better as far as watching the contenders. My biggest regret is, I wish I’d seen both of these movies in the theater instead of Marty Supreme. You can read what I thought of that here. Marty Supremely Disappoints
Some Thoughts on Marty Supreme
A whacking time of it.
I didn’t know much about this movie before going in, only that it starred Timothy Chalamet, it was about table tennis, and it was touted as an Oscar contender before it was even released. I wanted to see it. This is part of a larger intention on the part of me and my husband to see more movies and less series. Recently that’s been Eddington and One Battle After Another on streaming, with plans to use those fabulous Regal gift cards for Marty Supreme and Hamnet.
Okay. I have a soft spot for the kind of movie where nothing goes right for our hero, whether or not his disasters are of his own making. That starts way back at It’s a Wonderful Life and stretches through What’s Eating Gilbert Grape and Dan in Real Life and Inside Llewyn Davis and The Joker on up to, well, Eddington, One Battle After Another, and now Marty Supreme. There is something intensely compelling in watching human action in the face of one battle after another (see what I did there). It’s the basis of action movies, which I don’t usually watch, and these movies, where the catastrophes are small and personal.
And this isn’t about the so-called likeability of the character at all. Llewyn Davis was a self-centered prick who was somehow unable to make one good decision. Still, I was fiercely urging him on. My heart was bleeding for Phoenix’s Joker and he was a psychopath. In Eddington, another of Phoenix’s characters bumbled from one catastrophe to another, continuously making his situation less and less survivable. Everyone in that movie was either insane or corrupt except for one character, who in the final shot of the movie is radicalized and ready to wreak havoc for what has been done to him. Still, I didn’t regret watching it, and I understood the characters.
I’m not saying that any of these movies are a walk in the park, a feel-good afternoon with popcorn. I’m saying that if I can find the terrifying actions of Colonel Lockjaw compelling, understandable, and impossible not to watch, I have a high tolerance for monomaniacal assholes on the big screen.
I couldn’t stand to watch Marty Mauser.
He made no sense to me. He left behind a trail of mayhem in the name of WHAT. He actually destroyed cars, homes, reputations, businesses, and LIVES. He underwent utter humiliation and wreaked physical havoc on everyone he met in order to get where he believed he belonged. He was not a man whose triumph I could possibly celebrate.
The movie, as a piece of work, has a complex, twisting script that is word-for-word brilliant. Every single thing about the production is perfectly done. There are moments, especially those around the women in Marty’s life, that are so compelling. I mean, watching Fran Descher actually act, with not much more to work with besides the conflicted intensity of a mother’s gaze? The graceful faded swan that is Gwyneth Paltrow? The fecund beauty and spirited-if-misplaced loyalty of Odessa A’zion?
Those are the women, but every single actor is a marvel, in fact. Koto Kawaguchi invests his character with a focused grace that is the absolute opposite of Marty. This performance was the standout of the movie for me, the perfect counterpoint to all of Marty’s bombast and frenetic energy. I could go on about Tyler the Creator and Kevin O’Leary, but they are just at the top of a list of actors who invest every part with humanity, no matter how small. I mean, even the rubes at the bowling alley are magnificent. There’s also a dog that gives his all, a dog that arrives covered in shit and is last seen barking and snarling as if he will rip apart anyone near him.
And yet, folks.
And yet. Chalamet knifes his way through his role with pointed intensity, hitting every note, never stopping for an instant, fully committed to his destiny as the table tennis king. Was it actually his job to enlist me in this quest? If so, he failed. For me, he was like that dog, a loud, terrifying catastrophe waiting to sink his teeth into anyone to get out, out, out and on his way to wherever he thinks he needs to be. He did what he needed to do perfectly, but I didn’t want him anywhere near me.
That’s my review. I’d love to hear what you think of the movie.
Nosferatu lives. And we watched it.
We Finally Watch it.
As some of you know, my daughter and grandson have been living with us for, well, a while, now. And this has been fun and hectic and rewarding and so on, but it has also meant that we are not likely to tune in something terrifying when he’s here. As a result, we had not watched Nosferatu yet, despite knowing it was going to be a wild ride. But he is with his dad this weekend, and my daughter is off being young, so we decided to sit down and watch the extended cut (it’s four minutes longer, folks) of Nosferatu.
My experience with Eggers films is mixed. I really enjoyed The Witch (well is enjoy the right word for something terrifying?). I stopped watching The Lighthouse (life is too short). We saw The Northman in the theater and I was busting out laughing by the end of it, because it does feature two naked barbarians battling it out with broadswords on a live volcano. Eggers doesn’t hold back.
So we turned out the lights and tuned in.
The movie begins with Lily Rose Depp as Ellen Hutter, entreating the screen for some love and tenderness, only to be answered by the creepy voice of Nosferatu. Then, it goes on from there with a plot that is very familiar to readers and watchers of any Dracula story, because Nosferatu was a rewriting of Dracula for the purposes of making a movie without Bram Stoker’s permission. You have all the same characters with minor changes, and it takes place in Germany.
This creates two problems; one, none of the actors can do a credible German accent, and two, there is no sea passage between Germany and Transylvania. The accents, feh, who cares. The sea passage is much more crucial to the plot, so the Jonathon Harker character arrives to the castle after a journey on horseback, but then the count arrives to Germany via a ghost ship.
I’m not sure how many of you have read Dracula, but it’s a wildly uneven book with incredibly dull parts, like, unforgivably dull, and it is also an assembled text, composed of standard storytelling, all kinds of journal entries, news items, long monologs written in accented speech, and so forth. The best way to read it is with a free substack called Dracula Daily, and by the way that starts fresh in two weeks so sign up now! (no ad here, just, it’s such a cool way to read a difficult book).
Back to the movie.
If you’ve seen the play version of Wicked, you probably appreciated how the playwright combined elements of the original Baum book, the 1939 movie, the novel, and the entirely new musical. This version of Nosferatu does something similar. The parallels to Dracula are part of it, of course, since its stolen in the first place. But there are MANY parallels to the original Nosferatu movie, including long shots of Max Schrek-inspired finger shadows. And I saw copious nods to Coppola’s Dracula.
All of this is to say, this movie is a labor of love, an homage, a masterwork, and not nearly as good as I’d hoped it would be. Some of it is the lauded camera work. It seems that every shot is set up for maximum impact and maximum Wes-Anderson-but-filthy-symmetry. That sounds good, yes? But the constant center framing of all the action lets you know that Something. Important. Happens. You lose the sense of a story unfolding, of action or story, and start to see one masterfully framed painting of horror after another. Here it COMES. Dead CENTER. Right in the MIDDLE. And so on.
Sets and costumes are gorgeous and perfect. There is no sense of Fake London, like in the Coppola movie. Our German village is perfectly created.
So let’s talk about the acting.
The acting in this is about a hundred times better than in the Coppola Dracula. Lily Rose Depp is fascinating. You can’t take your eyes off her when she’s onscreen, whether she’s pining for her lost husband or having a sexually-tinged seizure or behaving indecently under the sway of Count Orlok. She’s convincing up to and including her last moment, which is both tender and profane.
Everyone else is good to excellent. Willem Defoe as the alchemist who is a ripoff of Van Helsing takes large bites of the scenery and chews them with great gusto. My husband remarked, “Defoe really commits, doesn’t he?” and we cracked up. But when Defoe is framed up in a crumbling architectural element and waving his hands madly, it’s all a little much. I’m sure he had fun. But were we supposed to be laughing?
The Renfield-type character can’t even touch Tom Waits’ Renfield. He tries, he runs around bloody and naked and insane, but he’s just the requisite crazy guy waiting for his master to arrive. I don’t know how Waits did what he did in the Coppola mess but that was one helluva performance and all other Renfields will be judge by his uber-Renfield.
And the Undead Himself.
Well, then, let’s get to the Skarsgaard Orlock. You know, it’s fine to bury a gorgeous man under a bunch of ugliness. Eggers managed to do that to this actor’s brother (I think they are brothers) in The Northman by making Hamlet (yes, The Northman is a retelling of Hamlet) savage and dirty and brutal and dumb. But he was still nice to look at.
In this movie, this other Skaarsgard’s Orlok is huge, menacing, and in advanced state of decay. I do wish Eggers would have taken a note from the Coppola Dracula and cleaned up his Orlok a bit, transformed him into a seductive dandy once he left the castle. But he stays just as grotesque and decayed. And the note that Eggers did import–the horrible, gargled, marbles-in-his-mouth Dracula diction–that is well and firmly in place, but with the addition of a strangled wheeze, as if Orlok were a three-pack-a-day smoker ending his life with galloping emphysema.
It is almost impossible to make out what he is saying, but that’s okay because it’s just a bunch of evil commanding crap. You will obey me! Silence, slave! And so on. The “extended cut” turns out to be mostly a couple of extra minutes of him speaking in the castle. Without subtitles I couldn’t make out most of it. I tried to console myself with the fact that at least we were not subjected to the heart-shaped hairdo that Gary Oldman wore in the Coppola Dracula. But really, between the voice and the rot, this Nosferatu asked a lot of the viewer.
At the heart of it, the sad, sick heart
So now I want to leave aside the aesthetics of this movie, and talk about the part of it I’m most interested in interrogating. And that is, the deep trauma at the heart of Ellen. She is the source of the evil, it is revealed, because of that tearful entreaty at the beginning of the movie that invites Orlok into her psyche and eventually, her life. The physicians blame her seizures on excess of blood, part of an overwhelming “base nature” that came on with her young womanhood. This was held at bay when she was married (it’s clear that sex with her husband delayed Orlok for a time).
Eggers also covered this territory in The Witch, when a young girl entering puberty sends her shunned Puritan family into psychic danger, or maybe they just ate blighted corn that made them crazy, but its all centered on her: a lonely girl entering young womanhood in isolation, though as I recall it’s her brother’s puberty that sets it all off.
Ellen is especially lonely for love and touch, as her mother is dead and she’s a privileged child, with all the isolation that seemingly brings. But there’s more to it than that. She starts to confess to her husband, to explain that her starvation for touch led to some kind of event with her father, who found her writhing and unclothed and…she stops there.
The implication is that something deeply traumatic happened that caused her father to reject her. He is not part of the story, even though he is alive. And whatever happened, it sent her to the entreaty at the beginning of the movie, a lonely girl sobbing into the night, craving love and touch. Like the brother and sister in The Witch, young Ellen’s emerging sexuality awakens evil.
When a young woman enters puberty and has desires, it does invite evil into her world in the form of unwanted attention and attempts at predation. But is she the source of that evil, or just the target of it? This is the troubling question at the center of both The Witch and Nosferatu, and both movies seem to say that the only cure for this evil is to surrender to it. That troubles me deeply. Perhaps I’m misinterpreting. I’d rather be wrong, here, but I think I’m right.
And that is my review of Nosferatu. Feel free to tell me what you thought of it in comments.