Posted on 03/21/2022 9:34:20 AM PDT by Red Badger
This year’s hosts: Regina Hall, Amy Schumer and Wanda Sykes
If people like liberal rear ends in their face then they can be my guest.
“Drive My Car” is the one I’d like to see. I have watched many more foreign films and TV shows than US made ones lately due to the ‘wokeness’ factor.
I recommend that you see it in the theater if you can.
I went to see it simply because of all the hype. I was prepared to respect it — a non-spandex, character driven story, not a splashy, CGI-heavy tentpole — but there was nothing about it that particularly rang my chimes. I just wondered why all the critics were going completely nuts and decided it was worth buying a ticket to find out.
If you do see it in the theater, visit the little boys’ room first and watch your fluid intake. It’s three hours with no intermission.
Then it’s talk, talk, talk, drive, drive, drive, talk and drive, drive and talk, and then talk some more, sometimes in the car, sometimes at home, in the office, on set, walking around, etc. And then more talk. In Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Korean sign language, and English. Pretty soon I entirely lost track of what language was being spoken; you learn to watch with one eye on the subtitles — and that alone is much easier to do on the big screen than at home. But I became unconscious of language.
It was riveting. A little way into the film, I stepped out of the trance enough to realize that I was wholly engrossed in it — and to wonder, given that it’s all talking and very little action, how the heck are they pulling this off?
The acting is wonderfully naturalistic. The characters are mostly very appealing. The two who misbehave — well, no spoilers, but their screentime is limited and they get their just comeuppance; the film is about the people around them dealing with the mess they leave behind. With those two exceptions, all the characters are highly relatable. You will root for all of them. You would like to have them as friends. You want to know what happens next and if they come out all right. And the film ends before you get tired of the conversation.
How do they pull this off? The film is a marvel of scripting and pacing. You will walk out of the theater feeling that you have spent an engaging evening with four new friends that you would like to see again. No, I’m not calling for a sequel; these are four nice people you would like to have dinner with, and sooner rather than later.
This was a film, probably more than any I can recall seeing, where I simply sat and admired the art of it.
This works well in the theater, where the big screen demands complete attention. I do wonder how it translates to home viewing. Again, it is a film that demands that you give it full attention, and that’s much harder from the couch potato position with 101 distractions beckoning. But yes, it’s a film worth watching. I doubt that it will win Best Picture, but if it did, I wouldn’t complain. If it does, I’m sure the usual naysayers will come out of the woodwork complaining that it’s a foreign film, a navel-gazing indie film, that nothing happens, that there are no flying spandex suits, no explosions, no sandworms, etc. And with 99.9 percent certainty, I will guarantee that those complaining will be people who haven’t seen the movie and don’t have a clue what they are talking about.
The other options are worse
Dune didn’t seem that special to me. It seemed like a lot of other SF movies. If Hollywood decides that it doesn’t want to punish Spielberg and doesn’t feel that they have to be ultrawoke, they’ll give it to West Side Story.
If Volodymyr Zelinsky doesn’t win Best Actor, the whole of media is a complete farce. Oh, wait... :)
We can tune in to FR next week to see how they did. Below 10 million is getting pretty low for a marquee event like the oscars.
Pretty good movie. Didn’t expect the ending.
West Side Story is a remake. “A Star is Born” was a remake of a remake of a remake. Has any remake ever gotten ‘Best Picture’? Yes, one time, 2006 ............
Thanks for your review.
5.56mm
I make no claim to be a sophisticated observer, but from noodling around over the last couple of years, I think the writing is the biggest chokepoint and problem area -- not that there aren't plenty of other problems as well, but the writing problem is acute and the DEI mania is making it worse. I'm a newbie, amateur and complete outsider, but I keep running across the scattered, always anonymous complaints that the writers rooms are the hardest places to diversify and that there are now too many writers who run to HR if they get edited or rewritten. The lunatics are running the asylum. The industry is hiring people who never would have made the cut a generation ago. Just like academia.
The bigger the company, the more entrenched these problems seem to be. Good writing? I'd look to foreign films and smaller, independent films. It's hard for a DEI committee to wreak havoc when the writer/director/editor team is one person. That's still not uncommon in movies. TV series are a different kind of beast.
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