Saturday, March 01, 2025

3:47 PM | Ranking the Best Picture Oscars Nominees

It's the Oscars on March 2. Here is my ranking of the Best Picture nominees, and not a ranking of what I think will win. To be honest, 2-8 all fall into the same slot for me. But I do love Dune Part 2, and I do hate Emilia Perez and Nickel Boys.

Labels: film, oscar

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Friday, February 28, 2025

1:40 PM | From French Kissers to Small People Adrift

Part 3 of the 2024 Oscar Shorts Considered

It is quite telling that of the fifteen animated short films that were shortlisted for the Oscars last December, the five that eventually made the cut and the nomination—Beautiful Men, In the Shadow of the Cypress, Magic Candies, Wander to Wonder, and Yuck!—only one was in my Top 5. Not that I didn’t like the rest of them. In fact, they are all quite good, and the nominations are totally deserved. I just liked other shortlisted titles better. That is how amazing the animation field—including both the shorts and the features—has been in the past year. As I’ve noted earlier, walang patapon.

I can see why Nicolas Keppens’ Beautiful Men made the cut. It is a beautiful dour, sarcastically funny story about three balding brothers who travel to Istanbul to get a hair transplant, and stuck with each other in a hotel far from home, their insecurities grow faster than their hair. There is always something of this kind of atmosphere in an animated short that makes it a must on the finalist round—as if the animation branch of the Academy feels the need to check themselves and say, “Hey, cartoons are not just for kids.”

But given that, what to make Jean-Sébastien Hamel and Alexandra Myotte’s A Crab in the Pool, which didn’t make the cut? It is a zany and psychedelic French look at puberty and the crushing insecurities and hormonal urges of adolescence, with an equally crushing subterfuge of death and loss, and I fell in love with this short film as soon as I finished it and realized its import: how—in its story of young siblings (an older sister and a younger brother)—we often turn to imagination to make sense of the tiny earthquakes in our lives. And what to make of Torill Kove’s Maybe Elephants, which also didn’t make the cut? It is the story of a globe-trotting family—courtesy of the mother who gets the occasional urge to leave and uproot their lives—and who finally find themselves in Nairobi where their three teenage daughters finally rebel to seek some antidote to restlessness, even as they themselves, as adolescents, find their inner lives turned upside down. It is a mature story about restlessness and roots—with an ending that approximates a kind of peace everyone is looking for.

I can see why Hossein Molayemi and Shirin Sohani’s In the Shadow of the Cypress got the nod. This Iranian short film is about a former captain who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, and has chosen to live, with his young daughter, in a humble house by the sea. They live an isolated life together, daily confronting the harsh challenges that come their way—but a gulf remains between them, until an unforeseen event (a whale beaching ashore) somehow changes the course of their lives. The animation of this film is dreamy in its simplicity, and the environmental and psychological story tugs at you because it is rendered so well emotionally.

But what of Tod Polson’s The 21, which didn’t get nominated? Like the war-tinged tale of Cypress, this one is the true story of the twenty-one Coptic men who were martyred by ISIS in Libya in 2015. The animation—produce in the style of Coptic iconography—is beautiful, in perfect contrast to its subject matter, which is horrifying. In the beginning, this short reminded me of the [odious] Chick Tracts I used to read and devour as an evangelical child, which often used the stories of the suffering of Christians in foreign cultures as missionary propaganda—but I also needed to check myself: This story is nevertheless true, and the victims were Coptic Christians under the tyranny of terrorists. In the end I needed to disregard religion and just focus on the basic inhumanity of this story: killing people just because they have a different faith than you is the ultimate inhumanity so far from any divine promise. That goes to adherents of all faiths. And what to make of Iain Gardner’s A Bear Named Wojtek, which also didn’t get nominated? It is another true story about another war—World War II to be exact—about a displaced and orphaned bear who finds itself in the company of a troop of Polish soldiers, forms an inseparable bond with them, and finds itself an unlikely war hero. Unlike 21, this one ends happily—but both remind us about the horrors of war, and the inhumanity it can breed.

I can see why Loïc Espuche’s Yuck! made it to the finals. Adult subject matters may intrude once in a while in the animated short film category, but a cartoon that’s clearly for kids [and the adults who delight in their kiddie charms] will still be a shoo-in for a nomination. This one is a humorous take on kids finding kissing on the mouth—done by gross adults—totally gross. [Kissing in the film is highlighted by the kissers’ lips turning bright and incandescent purple.] It centers on Léo, who laughs at these kissers together with his gross-out friends at a summer camp—but he has a secret he won’t tell his friends: his own mouth has actually begun glistening, and he wants to kiss a friend, who also wants to kiss him back. The humor in this child-centered tale is the magic formula for nomination. 

Labels: animation, film, life, oscar, short films

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Saturday, January 25, 2025

10:26 PM | From Courage to Cicatrice

Part 1 of the 2024 Oscar Shorts Considered

Every time Oscar season comes—this usually starts around November and ends around the time the annual Oscar Awards telecast gets held, which is around early March—I would embark on a months-long movie marathon popularly called the Oscars Death Race.

It’s so-called because all participants—usually cinephiles like me who want some structure around our fervent movie-watching—have to catch all the films anticipated to get some Oscar nominations before that particular announcement rolls around mid-January. [A lot of what we watch don’t even receive any nominations, which leads to a round of griping online—“What do you mean Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers did not receive any nomination, but Jacques Audiard’s execrable Emilia Perez got thirteen?” “What? Nicole Kidman did not get nominated for her best role to date in Babygirl?” “I knew Angelina Jolie was a longshot for a nomination for Maria, but I’m still surprised.” “All We Imagine as Light was robbed!”]

When the nominations finally hit, we embark on catching all the remaining films nominated before the telecast itself, in a fervent race to watch them all, and it’s not always easy, especially if you don’t live in the United States. Every year, there are white whales—which are films that are almost impossible to watch, because their release dates are atrocious, or the filmmakers for some reason just choose to hold on to them without viable distribution. For the 2024-2025 season, that has got to be the full-length documentary Porcelain War, and the documentary short Death by Numbers, which, as far as ordinary cinephiles are concerned, do not really exist. [I have since bought a ticket for an online February screening of Porcelain War, which apparently does exist. And when it was still on the short list, Eno was also something I planned to watch online—because I was intrigued by the idea that it utilized a computer program which selects footage and edits the film so that a different version is shown each time it is screened. But its online distributors did not make it easy to buy a ticket. So when it failed to get a nomination last January 23, I just willingly let it go, even if I am a huge fan of the documentaries of Gary Hustwitt.] Then there are The Brutalist, September 5, Nickel Boys, and I’m Still Here, which are out-of-reach for non-U.S. death racers simply because their distributors are, for a lack of a better term, stupid. So sometimes we make do with so-called “cam” copies of these films, pirated via a camcorder in a movie theater, because once you are on a death race track, you have to do everything you can to get to the finish line. Even watch bad copies of them online.

The release of the Oscars shortlists in early December is our Thanksgiving—and helps narrow the list down, because it trims the number of international films, documentary films, and all the shorts [live action, animated, and documentary] to a manageable fifteen each. The Oscar nomination announcement is our Christmas Day, and the Oscar telecast is our New Year—because that day marks the beginning of another film year for most of us. There’s even a website that tracks all the films you have watched, complete with a leaderboard. [As of this writing, I am at #11 worldwide, with 96% of all nominated films already screened by me.]

Why do I do this? Because I’m a masochist. And because I truly love film. And because without this structure, I would not watch titles that are definitely out of my comfort zone.

Having said all that, I have a particular interest in following all the short films in contention. I like short films. The best ones manage to convey with gravity their themes in ten, or twenty, or thirty minutes—sometimes better than feature-length films which are four or five times longer in terms of running time. For film year 2024, out of the shortlists released last December, I managed to see almost all the titles in the live action and documentary shorts categories, and everything in the animated short category.

The five nominated live action short films are Anuja [d. Adam J. Graves], I’m Not a Robot [d. Victoria Warmerdam], The Last Ranger [d. Cindy Lee], A Lien [d. Sam Cutler-Kreutz and David Cutler-Kreutz], and The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent [d. Nebojša Slijepčević]—a great list for the simple reason that it did not include Dovecote, which was the worst film in the short list, a one-shot mess that starred Zoe Saldana as an inmate in a Venice prison for women that seemed to mistake its cinematographic dexterity with depth. It was awful. [Saldana, alas, stars in two of 2024’s most maligned, but strangely Oscar-considered, movies: this one, and Emilia Perez.]

The other unnominated films run the gamut of excellence deprived of recognition to truly awful exercises of the form. I was very surprised that Àlex Lora Cercos’s The Masterpiece did not get a nomination, given that it has a lot of Parasite vibes to it—including the house the story is set in, and the story revolving around a small clash between the privileged and the poor. I like its conceit that it is a clash over a painting, but whether or not which party gets the painting in the end, this does not matter at all, because the painting is a MacGuffin. The subtext of the film is the story: the contrast in material culture between a rich couple and a couple of scraps men; the posture each camp instinctively take towards the other in terms of “safety”; the lackadaisical way the rich have with their excess and “trash,” which the poor, all intentional, feast on as a source for living; and the power dynamics on display when fighting over what “seems” valuable. What intrigued me about the short film is the way the camera lingers on the younger scraps man as he looks with some befuddlement at the older one, who just made the choice that ended the short film. Was the look in anger? Or relief? I think that’s the invitation the film gifts us to consider its thesis. As for me, I think the right choice was made. [It would be difficult to sell that painting, anyway, without a certificate of its provenance.]

I also liked Dani Feixas’ Paris 70, a tender antidote to most grim Alzheimer’s drama out there—and the short film truly earns it with its pace, its characterization, its story—about a son who finds a way to humor his ailing mother by succumbing to her dreams of traveling to other places. I also liked Portia A. Buckley’s Clodagh, about a nun who discovers a talented young dancer in her congregation, and how it limns the borders of integrity, however small. Where do we draw the line at a lie, especially if it benefits us? Are there small lies and big lies?

The other unnominated films in the live action short list felt mid—if mildly involving in some places, but generally falling flat. The surprising thing about TJ O’Grady-Peyton’s Room Taken, about a homeless man who starts living in the house of a blind woman, is that it is not a horror film at all, but bends over backwards to make its disturbing tale a fable of humanism. Mohammed Almughanni’s An Orange from Jaffa, about an Israeli taxi driver who takes in as fare a Palestinian man who has difficulty crossing a checkpoint, does not really do much with its embedded tension. Jean de Meuron’s Edge of Space—which is a period film set at the height of the US-Soviet space race in the 1960s, and follows an ambitious USAF test pilot who is recruited by NASA for a suborbital mission in an X-15 hypersonic rocket-powered aircraft—is strangely cold and uninvolving for a space race story, and the only thing that carries it is the painstaking attention to detail, and to image. The worst of the lot, aside from Marco Perego Saldana’s Dovecote, is Pavel Sýkora and Viktor Horák’s The Compatriot, an ill-conceived drama about a widower at the height of the Nazi occupation of the former Czechoslovakia, who gets an unannounced visit by an SS officer—with the only thing the two having in common being their Sudeten origins. It felt very much like a typical Oscar bait story—except that this time around, the Academy did not bite. There’s also Jens Kevin Georg’s Crust, a very loose adaptation of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” which follows a boy trying to prove his mettle by getting his first scar—something that everyone in his strange family seems to value above all else. Its telling is so offbeat though that I was more repulsed than entertained, and it was actually a relief when it was over. I have not seen Robert Moniot’s The Ice Cream Man, but the reviews online have not been kind—which might be why its filmmakers have chosen not to release the film in a suitable manner.

Of the nominated live action shorts, I did not expect Lee’s The Last Ranger to get the nod—although its depiction of a true story involving the fight against animal poachers in Africa might have swayed liberal-leaning Academy members with its important environmental message. [Sometimes, it’s really about the synopsis.] The story follows a young girl who is introduced to the responsibilities [and even wonder] of a game reserve by the last remaining ranger in their community—but soon the two are ambushed by poachers intent on harming the rhinos in the ranger’s keeping for their horns. During the fateful encounter, the young girl also discovers a terrible secret—a twist I knew was coming from the moment the film began. It’s not a bad film—it just feels like an important story told in a mediocre way.

I appreciated Graves’ Anuja because it felt like a part and parcel of 2024’s cinematic trend of following the travails of Indian women [a list that would include Santosh, All We Imagine as Light, and Laapataa Ladies—all of them unique and involving highlights of Indian cinema last year], but compared to these films, this short one felt like a breath of fresh air, simply because of its optimism. The story centers on two plucky sisters working in a garment factory and living on their own, but both soon face a decision they have to make at film’s end, which would alter their very lives. I make it sound ominous, but it isn’t. It is a film cloaked in hope—and springing from a story that has groundings in truth—and this quality makes it an endearing watch. It doesn’t have much of a punch, truth to tell, and it might even be forgettable, but its heart is in the right place.

Warmerdam’s I’m Not a Robot, on the other hand, is a serio-comic story about a woman who, while listening to music on her computer, discovers the program rebooting. This forces her to accomplish a series of CAPTCHA tests—which, to her chagrin, she fails again and again and again, leading her to entertain the disturbing notion that she might actually be a robot. The short film starts off as a commentary on our increasingly AI-infected lives, but it takes a sharp turn and becomes a rumination on relationships and the things we do to find compatibility in others—a turn that’s not exactly well-handled, but it’s entertaining enough, and the film is a hoot from beginning to end.

Cutler-Kreutz’s A Lien is the film from among the lot that feels like very much like it has been grabbed from the most contemporary headlines. It follows a bi-racial couple and their child as they arrive on the day of their green card interview, but they are soon confronted with a dangerous immigration process that’s actually quite common among agents working for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement [or ICE]—the taking into immediate custody, and then deportation, of “illegal aliens” who are, in fact, in the very process of legalizing their stay under the very blessings of immigration authorities. It is slice-of-life story whose tension comes from the unfairness of the situation we behold, and the film’s effectivity comes from the deft handling of that tension.

But the one live action short film that moved and disturbed me the most was Slijepčević’s The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent, because its story is one that needed to be told, and because its narrative conceit indicts its viewers about the possibilities of courageous action when confronted with evil. We are told that the story is inspired by the actions of an actual hero from the Bosnian Wars in the early 1990s—that of Tomo Buzov, a passenger on a Belgrade-Bar train, which was stopped in the village of Štrpci in 1993 by the Serbian White Eagles paramilitary group. The paramilitary unit, under the command of Milan Lukić, subsequently pulled away 18 Bosniak Muslims and one Croat from among the passengers, who were then eventually massacred. Buzov was the sole non-Bosniak passenger on the train who tried to stand up against the attackers—and was also taken away to be massacred with the rest. I cannot explain the conceit of the film without taking away its power, but it is very much an experiment in point-of-view, which also asks us a question: you might think you will take a courageous stand in the face of evil—but will you really? As one Letterbxd member puts it, the film is about “the fragile balance of who we want to be and who we [really] are.”



Here is my ranking of all the live action short films, including the unnominated titles:

[1] The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent
[2] A Lien
[3] I’m Not a Robot
[4] The Masterpiece
[5] Paris 70
[6] Clodagh
[7] Anuja
[8] Room Taken
[9] The Last Ranger
[10] An Orange from Jaffa
[11] Edge of Space
[12] Crust
[13] The Compatriot
[14] Dovecote
[15] The Ice Cream Man

Labels: film, life, oscar, short films

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Sunday, March 12, 2023

3:37 PM | If I had a Best Picture vote at the Oscars...

I'd vote accordingly:

1. Everything Everywhere All at Once
2. Tar
3. The Fabelmans
4. The Banshees of Inisherin
5. Triangle of Sadness
6. Top Gun: Maverick
7. Women Talking
8. Avatar: The Way of Water
9. Elvis
10. All Quiet on the Western Front

Note: This list does not exactly correspond to what I think were the best films of 2022. For that, go to this article.

Labels: film, oscar

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Tuesday, March 16, 2021

12:00 PM | Two Great Men on Making a Mark

Steven Yeun: “From my perspective, I’m just doing me. I’m very fortunate that I’ve been able to do work that feels pulled from my place. I carry with me so many things — including being Korean and Asian American. I’m glad and happy that I might be contributing to a larger, deeper understanding of who we are to each other. But I’m really just trying to play my part as well as I can. I’m still processing what this is. That’s literally where I’m at: What is this? Especially with the backdrop of this last year. I’m still figuring out what’s happened to us and where we’re at. [The year] has torn a veil off for all of us — removed a layer. In some ways, I’m thankful for that. But I recognize how scary that is. A lot of institutions got seen for what they were — the brokenness for what they were. I’m glad for it, because I think we can rebuild. But I recognize a lot of people are scared, because the safety we thought was there is also revealed to not be what we thought it was. It’s a super f—ed up year. So these are cool things — this nomination — I’m thrilled and I’m so blessed that I get to experience this. But I’m trying to hold both things at once, and it’s difficult.”



Riz Ahmed: “To be honest, I just feel like however people can find themselves in this moment, however they can find a connection to this moment, is beautiful to me. Some people may connect to the fact that it’s the first Muslim, some people might say British-Pakistani, some people might say first person from Wembley in London. What matters to me is that these moments of celebration, these moments of collective recognition, are actually moments where as many people as possible can recognize themselves in it. And so that’s all that really matters to me. And I’m really pleased if this is an opportunity for more people than ever before to connect to a moment like this.”

Labels: film, oscar, people, quotes

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Monday, July 20, 2020

10:00 AM | The Film Meme No. 86

[86th of 100]. This is how I know I love this film: whenever pontificating articles [or YouTube videos] come out listing down undeserving Oscar Best Picture winners and this 1998 romantic comedy by John Madden hovers near the top, I bristle with anger. I feel bewildered over the hate because if you watch the film now, it has more than withstood the test of time: it remains a delight, a fresh take, a funny speculative historical approach to the writerly life and troubles of young William Shakespeare before he became celebrated, and set during a fraught period which finds him falling in love, and getting inspiration enough to write, with fervor ... "Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter." [Laughter!] Its screenplay by Marc Norman and the celebrated playwright Tom Stoppard is still sharp -- and if you're a theatre or showbiz aficionado, the in-jokes are still golden -- and its uses of well-known Shakespearean lore and lines to suit its unfolding drama feel almost majestic in the breadth of their recycling. The performances, too, are still indelible -- perhaps the best turns yet of its leads, and in particular Gwyneth Paltrow who acquits herself beautifully as Juliet ... and as Romeo. [She deserves the Oscar win for Best Actress.] I was settling to being back home in Dumaguete after a year in Tokyo, and finding this was a godsend to my soul. This was readily my favorite film of its year, having delighted me to no end -- and when it won Best Picture, it felt like a just coronation. So what gives with the current hate? It centers, of course, on its win over the perceived would-be [or "should-be"?] champion, which was Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan. The debate would have us believe that what won was frothy confection over an important wartime drama. [And then there is the usual related chatter about the disgraced Harvey Weinstein's hand in the debacle -- that he wormed his way, in the heyday of his Hollywood powers, to Oscar gold with this film.] I can only do a comparative analysis of the two films, and this is my hard take as someone whose favorite director is Spielberg: his film is fantastic filmmaking, its crowning glory being its first 23 minutes which painstakingly captures in gripping, gritty details the horrors of the Allied landing in Normandy in France, which turned the tides of World War II. The starkness and the power of that sequence cannot be denied. It demands awe and attention. But the rest of the movie -- the "saving" part of an army private named James Francis Ryan [who has to be evacuated for PR reasons because he is the last man in his family still standing, all his brothers, also conscripted into the war, having met their end -- to the abject horror of their mother, the recipient of all those condoling telegrams] -- is kinda middling in places. Still absorbing, of course, but the film borrows too much from the power of its beginning to sustain the rest of itself. But for its technical and logistical achievements, the film merits Spielberg's deserved second Best Director win. John Madden's Shakespearean dramedy, on the other hand, has a strong arc of a well-told story, consistent from beginning to end, all its other cinematic aspects well-wrought to serve its beguiling tale. But is it "important"? I find it the height of macho bullshit to consider stories of war "more important" than stories of artistic or domestic troubles. [And of course leading the charge of this unfair criticism are male critics.] But in the final analysis, there really should be no competition between these two great films; they're much too different to be put at odds with each other. I still prefer Madden's "confection," though; after having my soul rattled by the gore of Spielberg's film, watching Shakespeare pursue love and writing is a grand exhale. What's the film?

For the introduction to this meme, read here.

Labels: film, oscar

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Saturday, February 08, 2020

3:00 PM | Short Takes on the Oscar-Nominated Documentary Short Subject, 2019

With Bong Jon-hoo's Parasite and Seung-jun Yi's In the Absence, we truly see a Korean ascendance in world cinema -- and both have so much alike, to be honest, including their unsparing critique of contemporary Korean society. In this documentary short, we navigate through that via the ineptness that attended the botched rescue of the ferry MV Sewol, which sank off the coast of South Korea in 2014, killing hundreds of passengers, mostly high school students in a field trip. It's a gripping and unsettling fly-on-the-wall documentary, and we are made to witness the hours tick by as the ship sinks slowly, while its passengers patiently await rescue, to their deaths.



I don't want to say much about Kristine Samuelson and John Haptas' Life Overtakes Me, except that in this documentary, about refugee kids in Sweden falling into a form of sleeping sickness bordering on coma triggered by PTSD over their plight, something feels and smells fishy.



Perhaps the most feeling-precious of this year's bunch of documentary short subject nominees is Laura Nix's Walk Run Cha-Cha, a love story about Vietnamese refugees re-bonding over ballroom dancing in New York in their senior years. You see, they used to be lovers in Vietnam, but were soon separated by the vagaries of war. Meeting once more in America, they try to rekindle their romance by dancing. Awwww. It's cute, but it's shallow -- and not even the sentimental production number at the end can truly save this film.



Carol Dysinger's Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (If You’re a Girl) is your standard "people in perilous places" documentary, and while its narrative arc and subject matter -- about a school that pains to teach Afghan girls basic school subjects, plus skateboarding -- no longer surprise us, it doesn't disappoint in putting heart to the heroism it depicts.



In Sami Khan and Smriti Mundhra's St. Louis Superman, we see a strange hybrid of black lives, politics, and rapping. It mostly works, and I like it, but this film was not made for me.



VERDICT: In order of preference, Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (If You're a Girl) > In the Absence > St. Louis Superman > Walk Run Cha-Cha > Life Overtakes Me

Labels: documentaries, oscar, review, short films

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Friday, February 07, 2020

3:00 PM | Short Takes on the Oscar-Nominated Live-Action Short Films, 2019

Truth to tell, Marshall Curry's The Neighbors’ Window feels so much like a nincompoop's idea of a good short film, I cannot actually believe it survived the culling of the Oscar long list at the expense of other contenders like Rémi Allier's gripping Little Hands. It's a morality tale about a couple who regularly spies on their neighbors across the courtyard they share in their adjacent apartment buildings -- and have come to believe these people lived better lives than they do. Of course it becomes a "the grass is greener..." story, which as an insight feels a little too on-the-nose and obvious. [Didn't Blake Edwards cover this already in 10 in 1979, and better?]



Meryam Joobeu's Brotherhood is deftly told, socially conscious, and remains gripping from beginning to end, easily making this the best of the lot. It's about a Tunisian farming family who has to contend with the sudden appearance of a prodigal son, newly-returned from fighting for ISIS in Syria, and a new wife in tow clad in a burqa. The father does not trust the son's intentions, and is fearful for the possible influence he might have on his younger brothers -- which is the key to the ultimate tragedy in the film.



I do not get the humor, and the praise it has been getting in, of Yves Pia's Nefta Football Club. I can accept it as dark comedy, but it overreaches with its quirkiness and resolution that nothing remains believable at all about this story. It has cross-borders drug smuggling, Adele's "Someone Like You," mules, and soccer all intertwined in its conceit, and never quite pulls off everything. I eye-rolled all throughout this film



We are made to feel that what Bryan Buckley tries to do in Saria is "important." And it is: the film largely dramatizes a real-life Guatemalan tragedy -- about orphaned girls trapped in an institution that is supposed to take care of them, only to be regularly abused, and eventually losing their lives in a fire. All good, and the young actors are committed enough to make this film works. I couldn't help but feel though: is this Bryan Buckley's story to tell?



The set-up of Delphine Girard's Une Sœur (A Sister) is simple: we have a young woman in a car, driven by a man we assume she knows, and then she makes an ordirnary call, ostensibly to her sister -- and then the film flips on us: she is not calling her sister, she is in fact secretly calling the French version of 911, and asking for help. The tension occurs when the operator slowly realizes the call is coded, and she must do all she can to send help to the woman and rescue her. We don't know exactly the nature of passenger's relations with the man, and what has happened to them that led to this -- but we are on her side all the way, until the end when the film flips us one more time and unsettles us once more.



VERDICT: In order of preference, Brotherhood > Une Sœur [A Sister] > Saria > Nefta Football Club > The Neighbors' Window

Labels: oscar, review, short films

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Thursday, February 06, 2020

3:00 PM | Short Takes on the Oscar-Nominated Animated Short Films, 2019

In Daria Kashcheeva's contemplative Dcera [Daughter], the titular character watches over her father who has been taken ill, and slowly her mind wanders through scattered memories of life with him which are not always bright and sunny, painting her father as someone who was not always there for her. But the short film's more than this; it's poetic and complex, and does not give easy answers -- which makes this the best of the lot among the nominees.



We meet a painter and his wife in Bruno Collet's wonderfully affecting Mémorable. He is slowly suffering through the effects of dementia, and she struggles to keep up with the challenges that come with her husband's condition. That we see his struggle rendered in painterly, impressionistic mode makes this tale transcend its grounding sadness.



Song Siqi's Sister is told in stark greyscale that reminds you immediately it is in the territory of retrieved memory, and it is: it is a man's recollection of growing up in a Korean home, with a younger sister who was born to exasperate him. Except that the sister takes on a surreal existence, and the film backtracks with its revelation in Joker-mode, which is frankly disappointing.



In Rosana Sullivan's Kitbull, a cantankerous kitten finds a home in a junky backyard, only to realize she is sharing it with a downtrodden bulldog. Enemies soon turn friends, giving us a film that finds comfort in its utter mediocrity.



In Matthew A. Cherry and Everett Downing Jr.'s Hair Love, a very young African-American girl tries to deal with the everyday challenge of her natural hair, and enlists her clueless father in the task. Hijinks ensues -- but it's so blandly told, it's quite forgettable. And then there's that twist of an ending that's so on the nose with its sentimentality, it's pretty much eye-rolling.



VERDICT: In order of preference, Dcera (Daughter) > Memorable > Sister > Kitbull > Hair Love

Labels: cartoons, oscar, review, short films

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Friday, February 22, 2019

10:57 PM | Short Takes on the Oscar-Nominated Live Action Short Films

Let's do the Live Action Shorts nominees for the Oscars, shall we? It is mostly a bunch of child-in-danger stories of varying effectivity, but the similarities in the themes will have you thinking, "What is up with Oscars and this deadly regard for children this year?"



I loved Gustav Möller's The Guilty from last year, a fine presentation of how you can create fantastic, tense-filled drama within the confines of a single room, with the gravest action taking place off-camera, registering to us only through the voices of people over the phone. Rodrigo Sorogoyen's Oscar-nominated live action short film Madre (2017) carries the same premise. This time we follow a divorced mother arguing with her own mother about the vagaries of life, only to be interrupted by a fraught call from overseas. The caller is her young boy, ostensibly on vacation with her ex-husband somewhere in France. And then the panic comes: the boy is lost somewhere on an unknown beach, abandoned by the father. Where can he go? Can he trust anyone? It's a child-in-peril conceit that never really registers, because the set-up feels rushed, and the dangers feels abstract, for some reason. It's a question of execution, and this film fails in that regard.



The most tense of all the live action shorts up for the Oscars this year has got to be Jeremy Comte's Fauve (2018), a harrowing story of two Quebec boys in one of the most toxic of all masculine shenanigans -- a pissing contest, which soon goes awry as they go about a small country town finding ways to dare each other in the worst ways possible. They soon meet their reckoning in a surface mine, and the less said about what happens there, the better. It is effective, sad, anxiety-ridden.



Guy Nattiv's Oscar-nominated live action short Skin (2018) is both repellent and riveting at once: its twists and turns are totally unexpected and makes for an exciting story, but in its choice of focus on a racist family -- which humanisizes them to some extent -- it can be both a bit too much to swallow. A skinhead father dotes on his young son, but an encounter with a black man in a grocery store turns deadly, with the boy as witness to the brutality. What happens next is a turn so unexpected that it borders on the sweetest revenge fantasy. What happens in the end is even more shocking -- but thoroughly earned. I liked its storytelling, but it does leave me very disturbed.



Vincent Lambe's Oscar-nominated live action short Detainment (2018) is a dramatisation of the horrific murder of three-year-old James Bulger in Ireland, based on taped interrogations of the two young killers behind it. By its subject alone it is controversial, and while I admired the filmmaker's insistence on exploring this tragedy as a learning lesson for all -- helped for the most part by wrenching portrayals by the young actors -- it is the humanisation of evil that keeps me at bay. It is a film meant to be seen once, but I doubt it is immediately forgettable.



Marianne Farley's Marguerite (2017) stands out because it is the only one in this batch of Oscar-nominated live action shorts that strays far away from depicting children in peril. Instead, it sets its intimate focus on an elderly woman in Quebec who feels a bond with the young female therapist who takes care of her. When she finds out her caregiver has a girlfriend, it triggers a memory of an old forbidden love with all its requisite longing and regret. To be touched by the love of a woman is the only thing in what remains of her life that she has yet to fully realise. In that quiet longing, the film shines -- the only ray of light in this bunch of dark, dark themes.




VERDICT: In order of preference, Fauve > Marguerite > Skin > Madre > Detainment

Labels: oscar, review, short films

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Wednesday, January 30, 2019

12:59 PM | Short Takes on the Oscar-Nominated Animated Shorts

Bobby Pontillas and Andrew Chesworth's One Small Step (2018) is basically the prologue of Up + the prologue of Contact + the epilogue of Cinema Paradiso repurposed to become a tale of a girl who dreams of becoming an astronaut.



Psychotherapy becomes animal business in Alison Snowden and David Fine's Animal Behaviour (2018), a good enough effort that metaphorizes through animal stereotypes our quirks and neuroses. Doesn't offer anything else, but funny in places.



How do you animate dementia in old age? Louise Bagnall's Late Afternoon (2017) tries, and comes up with a stream-of-consciousness style of animation that feels just right. And yet it is also strangely detached even if it strives to make us cry.



In Domee Shi's Bao (2018), we get a strange mix of culinary and empty-nest drama. It's cute in many places, but also sometimes creepy in its narrative choices. [She eats her "son"!] Props for occasional Pixar weirdness.



Trevor Jimenez's Weekends (2018) is so painterly it sometimes distracts from its story of a boy shuffling in-between the houses of divorcing parents. Gorgeous and sad, at the same time.



VERDICT: In order of preference, Weekends > One Small Step > Bao > Animal Behaviour > Late Afternoon.

Labels: cartoons, film, oscar, review, short films

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Wednesday, February 01, 2017

1:57 PM | Oscars Best Foreign Language Film Roundup, Done

[✓] “I’m just a boy. I want to go home. I nee—.” BOOM.
[✓] “Idiots.”
[✓] “I’m a Vanuatu Romeo, and you’re my Juliet.”
[✓] “Dad, I’m on the phone. Stop wearing that false teeth.”
[✓] “What do you mean you don’t want to go to the police?”

Done.

Labels: film, oscar

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Sunday, January 29, 2017

12:33 AM | Oscars Best Picture Roundup, Done

[✓] “Aliens know I can see the future, baby.”
[✓] “You’re full of shit, Troy, but I love you.”
[✓] “I can’t do guns, because God.”
[✓] “Let’s pay our mortgage with money we stole from banks, because macho irony. This is Texas, man.”
[✓] “You want me to do math? Give me a toilet.”
[✓] “Here’s to dreamers and the mess that we make. Plus backlash, because musicals are not serious films. You know?”
[✓] “Google Earth will find your way home.”
[✓] “I’m just a janitor full of angst. What do I know about raising kids?”
[✓] “Who are you? I repeat, who are you? I repeat, who are you?”

Labels: film, oscar

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Wednesday, October 22, 2014

12:02 AM | The Color of Living

I had no plans whatsoever in watching Jorge Gutierrez's The Book of Life (2014), the new animated film produced by Guillermo del Toro. The trailers made it look like the film equivalent of a sugar rush -- all that colour, all that schmaltz, all that zaniness. The trailers gave me one big headache, and so when the film parked itself in the local cinema, I merely shrugged. But someone I knew wanted to watch it with me, and I'm not one to decline a movie invitation. I like going to the movies, and I was sure the film wouldn't be that bad. When the screening was over, I found it wasn't bad at all. It was actually good. It was very, very good. True, the screen vomited with an avalanche of colours, and yes there was an abundance of zaniness. But it was all hyperkinetic colourful madness that somehow felt well-designed, intentional, organic. I think that turn-around for me is due mostly to the superb direction. Mr. Gutierrez knows how to tell a story, and in fact draws you in by dramatising that ability. The film opens with a bunch of rowdy students being bussed in to experience a day at the museum. But some intrepid lady tour guide takes them to a different adventure instead, showing them a closed-off exhibit about Mexico's Day of the Dead, and then regaling them with a story told from a book she called "The Book of Life." And in one tale, she unfurls the story of La Muerte, the Queen of the Land of the Remembered, and Xibalba, the King of the Land of the Forgotten -- both guardians of the souls of all our dearly departed who also happen to be sparring wife and husband. Xibalba is bored with the tedium of his kingdom and wants to take over the fiesta-land ruled by his wife. And so he proposes a wager: they randomly select three kids -- two boys and a girl, and all of them great friends and playmates -- and they try to see how destiny will lead them in the name of love. Will the boy who is a sensitive singer now being trained to become the greatest matador in the world win the girl's heart? Or will the boy who has the courage and the fighting spirit of a thousand armies emerge victorious? Manolo, the singing matador, is La Muerte's champion, and Joaquin, the soldier, is Xibalba's. They fall for the girl Maria. "Let the best man win," Joaquin tells his best friend Manolo. It is of course sad to see good friends become rivals. But the bet is on, and the story rolls out into a delightful amalgam of a believable love story, a movie musical (featuring contemporary songs! that rendition of Radiohead's "Creep" will haunt me forever), a showcase of dozens of delightful minor characters who all steal the spotlight, and insights about carving out a path for oneself (among others) that do not feel like moral lessons. Spinning all of these is an animation style that looks fresh and new: the characters look like wooden puppets at play in candy land, but animated with the vibrance of the "life" in its title. I love this film. I wish more people would watch it. There were only ten people in the theatre I watched it in, and it felt like a disservice to this gem of a film. It's better than what Pixar is churning out these days.




#RoadToOscar

Labels: film, oscar

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Saturday, October 18, 2014

11:45 PM | Bad Weekend

The race for the 87th Academy Awards has essentially started with all the online punditry abuzz with each new screening -- and as usual, I want to do my annual unflagging attempt to seeing all possible films in contention, even before the official nominations come on January. This blog series aims to chronicle this effort.






I have never before watched any film directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, fearful that I might not be able to hack any of their grim social realism. But here I was, finally watching the Dardenne brothers' Deux Jours, Une Nuit (2014), Belgium's current submission to the Oscars, and finally I feel grateful for having overcome my own cinematic hesitance. The film very much feels like seeing a stripped down version of one of my favourite feel-good movies, Audrey Wells' Under the Tuscan Sun. In that 2003 film, Diane Lane plays an American writer who falls into the deepest of despairs, only to find herself having an accidental splendid new life in the beautiful Italian countryside. Hollywood fodder, of course, but I have always responded to that film's golden promises, if only because I want to see the grimness of everyday life processed through rose-colored glasses. The Dardennes don't offer any rose-colored glasses at all. Their filmmaking is stark and spare, with a pace and mechanism to it that feels almost voyeuristic, bordering on the documentary. And all that felt exhilarating to me. We follow Marion Cotillard's blue collar worker Sandra who has been battling a crippling case of depression, necessitating medical leave from her work. (Doing what exactly, we have no idea.) On the eve of her return to her job, a Friday, she gets a call informing her that she has been made redundant at work. She also learns that her fellow workers were made to vote between keeping her, or keeping a 1,000 euro bonus. (Of course, they chose their bonus.) But her employer has given her reprieve. She has the chance of getting a new round of voting on Monday. Now, all she has to do is to convince the majority to give up their bonuses to keep her job. And the film follows her as she does her excruciating round of visiting each co-worker, begging them to reconsider. Some are understanding, some are angry, some don't want to see her at all, and some are downright violent and hostile. Her journey becomes like a microcosm of human behaviour. All the while, the film keeps a firm gimlet eye on Cotillard's character as she juggles through the most tumultuous of emotions, battling her darkness within, pleading for reconsideration, and understanding quite well when she doesn't get it -- and hating herself for begging, and knowing that if she doesn't fight, all is lost. What was disconcerting about the film was how the Dardennes -- and Cotillard -- telegraphed all these so easily and meaningfully that Sandra's dilemma becomes our dilemma: we could easily see ourselves in her shoes -- and the worst part is, we could easily see ourselves in her co-workers' shoes, too. What makes us human? What is pity? What is need, and what is selfishness? Will we give up something we desperately need in order to consider the plight of another human being? The film does not offer any easy choices. But I like how it ended. I like the hard-earned epiphany Sandra gets in the end, and in a sense, no matter how dour the story is, it is still a moving experience.

Best Foreign Language Oscar Chances: Very good.

#RoadToOscar

Labels: film, oscar

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Thursday, October 16, 2014

1:52 AM | 1993 Best Foreign Language Film Reloaded: How to Listen and Fall in Love

Part 6 of a Series







And finally we come to the last film nominated for Oscar's Best Foreign Language Film in 1993.

There is no overt story being told in Trần Anh Hùng's sensuous The Scent of Green Papaya, Vietnam's nominated entry (its first, and so far its last). Although once you let the film's rhythm embrace you, by and by, you do get a certain thread of a storyline -- and yet you quickly get that this is a film that is, above all, about atmosphere. The story follows a girl named Mui, newly arrived from the countryside, who comes to a neighbourhood somewhere in the outskirts of a city, and we get the impression that this is Vietnam before the fall of Saigon. Mui is taken in as a servant by a family -- the mother is a patient smalltime businesswoman, her husband seems to be a lout, their three young sons are consumed by the boredom and itches of adolescence, and their old cook stands in the margins, observing all. The film follows Mui's days and nights in this household, observing the minutiae of her life, until a shift happens midway where we finally see her as a young woman falling in love with the young master of the house she is currently serving.

I remember this film most as if it was something being told by way of a dream, or at least that brief moment we get upon waking where we are still floating in the boundaries of a dream before the claws of reality finally take hold of our senses. I think this is the impression I got of the film 21 years ago when I first saw it because it is largely a very quite movie, with snatches of dialogue here and there, but one that is also aware of the power of music and ambient sound. That carefully orchestrated mix of sound and music -- in particular Debussy's "Clair de Lune" -- are the cues with which we see things through Mui's senses. The feel and smell of green papaya seeds. The warbling of crickets. The crackle of sautéed vegetables in a wok. The sound of glass cracking. The sight of ants in a warpath. And sometimes above this beautiful mix of meditative silence and domestic sound, the drone of invisible warplanes in the distance.

You come away from Trần Anh Hùng's film knowing you have been made privy to an experience like no other. And this is what distinguishes Scent of Green Papaya high and above the other films in the nominee list. It is the most cinematic of them all, and pushes the art form towards aesthetics that are not easily handled, but here we see it displayed in virtuosic grandness -- but a grandness that springs from little things and small observations. This film should have won the 1993 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. That the least of them all -- Fernando Trueba's Belle Epoque -- won is testament once again of Oscar's overwhelming Euro-centricity, where France, Italy, Germany, and Spain dominate regardless of how the rest of world cinema fares. Three Asian films triumphed in 1993, and a poorly made Spanish sex comedy gets the prize.







But to get back to my main point. Sure, the Asian film often gets short shrift in the Oscars. But what of the Filipino film? Will we finally get Oscar recognition with Lav Diaz's Norte, Hangganan ng Kasaysayan? That's my next post.

Labels: film, oscar

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12:54 AM | 1993 Best Foreign Language Film Reloaded: How to Hide in the Closet

Part 5 of a Series









What a wonderful romp this film was. This was the first film of the Oscar-honored bunch that I saw, 21 years ago, and it has retained its charms after all these years. Coming a year before Eat Drink Man Woman and a year after Pushing Hands, The Wedding Banquet would complete a kind of trilogy depicting the small upheavals in Taiwanese family lives. These films are as observant as the best of Yasujiro Ozu's but with none of the distant formality: Ang Lee's early films are drenched in food, cosmopolitan quirkiness, and dramatic gestures, and all these to excavate the often unsubtle negotiations between the traditional and the modern in the Taiwanese family.

Temperamentally different by miles and miles from any of the other films in the nominee list so far, Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet was a surprise Oscar contender. That Taiwan submitted it given the unapologetic -- and positive (gasp!) -- way the film tackled the gay relationship central to the story was already a surprise. That the Oscars would also bite was another surprise, although 1993 was also the year Jonathan Demme's Philadelphia came out as a major mainstream offering. Philadelphia's serious subject matter -- homosexuality and AIDS -- proved to be something Oscar could not ignore, and soon dutifully handed over an acting statuette to Tom Hanks for what was considered a "brave" performance as an AIDS victim seeking redress. The Wedding Banquet is the lighter side of the gay spotlight that year: no victims here, no troubling darkness -- only the hijinks of a domestic drama involving a closeted gay Taiwanese businessman, his intrepid American lover, his doting parents who keep expressing a wish for him to get married, and finally his desperate Chinese tenant, a female painter who becomes the willing partner in a plot hatched by the two gay men to get the parents off their backs. There will be a fake marriage for a green card. A surprise wedding ceremony soon complicates things -- and the twisting and turning of these complications are what keeps the suspense for the movie.

I love the lightness of Ang Lee's touch in his early films, the way he manages to navigate through his culture to find insights to universal dilemmas. The rest of the 1990s would see him try to do the same for cultures outside of his own -- Sense and Sensibility in 1995, The Ice Storm in 1997, and Ride with the Devil in 1999, before returning to his Chinese roots and finally making a definite mark in 2000 with Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon -- but those early 1990s films are where he has poured his heart out.

It shares with Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine the menage a trois theme (two men in a relationship and the woman invading it!) at the center of their complications, but The Wedding Banquet is actually the better film. It's more complex in its mapping of its human stories, which is easily overlooked because of its contemporary setting and its comedy. The historical seriousness and the elaborately costumed drama of Concubine, however, are blinding flashes of fireworks that hide the fact there's not much there.


Next: Trần Anh Hùng's The Scent of Green Papaya...

Labels: film, oscar, queer

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Tuesday, October 14, 2014

9:08 PM | 1993 Best Foreign Language Film Reloaded: How to Survive Chinese History

Part 4 of a Series











I approached Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine with some trepidation when I watched it again last night, knowing full well how much I disliked it when I first saw it some 21 years ago. I suppose my earlier reaction was one borne out of the inevitable disappointment that came from much-too-high expectations.

But I remember sorely wanting to like this film. Gong Li then was my recently discovered film siren -- someone I latched on to in my younger "Fuck-Hollywood-The-Rest-of-the-World-Has-Much-to-Offer" years. I was also just discovering the vastness of Asian cinema, and I was devouring the works of Jafar Panahi, Ang Lee, Wong Kar-Wai, Zhang Yimou, Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu, and so many others. That the film had won the Palme d'Or from Cannes also sent my expectations to the stratosphere; its gay subtext also proved quite inviting.

And then I saw it, and I felt let down: Farewell My Concubine seemed like a mess. Its promise of a story set to epic scale seemed dwarfish in execution. The characters and their stories did not draw me in. And, worst of all, it had none of the visual poetry of Zhang Yimou's films. I had just seen Raise the Red Lantern, and I was overwhelmed by its lyricism, its sense of history unfurling in uncanny domestic melodrama. Yimou was my idea of a perfect Chinese film from the Fifth Generation of filmmakers. Kaige's effort seemed like the product of a crasser cousin: pompous, overlong, rough, uninvolving.

So I surprised myself for liking the film this time around. What had changed in the interim? Perhaps my middle-agedhood? (I'm quite old now, or at least, old enough.) Perhaps I have seen so much more of life (that cliche...), and have felt so much more the frail tango of desire and recrimination we do with the people we love? Perhaps I have known so much more the cruel subtleties of loving and the many languages of betrayal?

Because it is the convoluted relationships between the film's three main protagonists that I have responded to so much more now. I still though Kaige's execution to be rough, but this time, it felt more in keeping with the theme of its story. It follows the trajectory of the lives of two Beijing Opera performers -- one who plays the king and the other the consort in the popular play "Farewell My Concubine" -- from their harsh training in childhood to the harsher reception they get in the real world as history unfolds in modern China. The central motif, of course, is the dramatic details of the play they have been performing for all their lives. We see how the motif plays out in their lives outside of the stage as they confront the changes in society, from the fall of the monarchy, to the rise and fall of the Koumintang, to the invasion by the Japanese, to the rise of Communism, and the complete ravaging of the Cultural Revolution. Their lives is made even more complicated by the entry of a woman -- a prostitute played ably by Gong Li -- who has married the "king" (played by Zhang Fengyi) and has set the "concubine" (played immaculately, like a secret dragon, by Leslie Cheung) into an extended jealous fit. How subtle the ways they manipulate each one in their complicated triangle! And how equally subversive how they demonstrate their love and hate as well! I adored the complexity of their untidy melodrama.

Compared to the similar shenanigan's in Trueba's melodrama, Kaige's film easily trumps the Spanish one, and the latter suddenly seems like a horny teenager's depiction of sexual politics. Farewell My Concubine is smart, and is easily the better-made film. Belle Epoque's Oscar feels like frivolous win.

Next: Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet...

Labels: film, oscar

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