Catching up on Movie Stuff....
In a post I made a few days ago, I had alluded to the fact that I had seen none of the movies nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, and only one of the twenty nominated acting performances. In an effort to not be totally ignorant while watching the Academy Awards show on Sunday night, Linda and I watched two of the Best Picture nominees over the weekend. These are going to be Quicky Capsule Reviews.
The first was Marty Supreme. Timothee Chalamet, who apparently has become a lightning rod for "unlikeability" among his peers in the movie business, was nominated, deservedly so, for Best Actor for his performance as Marty Mauser, a champion ping pong table tennis player in the early 1950's. Supposedly loosely based on a real person (Marty Reisman), Marty Mauser was a hustler, a womanizer, perhaps a thief, and, while he was a champ at ping pong table tennis, he just was not a real nice guy, certainly not a character with whom you could sympathize. In fact, many of the people in this movie, were pretty much unlikeable. Chalamet plays the guy perfectly, and he shows his real acting chops in a scene at the very end of the movie when, maybe, he sees what a shit he has been and lets you think that maybe he will change how he is going to live his life. Maybe.
Three Stars from The Grandstander.
On the face of it, Sinners is not the kind of movie that appeals to me. I mean, there are vampires in it! However, the movie was nominated for sixteen Oscars, a record, everyone that we know who saw it simply raved about it, so we made it a point to see it, and after seeing it, all we could say was WOW. Simply a great movie, one that stays with you long after you see it. Michael B. Jordan plays a duel role as twin brothers, Smoke and Stack, who return to their home in the Mississippi delta - after being away for many years in Chicago, where they were involved in probably criminal activities - to open their own juke joint. In addition to booze and gambling, their joint is to feature authentic Mississippi Blues music. Some strangers, white Irish folks, show up and want to be a part of the scene. Smoke, or maybe it was Stack, resists, and these strangers then decide to make themselves a part of the scene anyway (this is where the vampires come in).
Yeah, yeah, vampires. Ridiculous, you say, and normally I would agree with you, but the way screenwriter and director Ryan Coogler tells the story, he won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, you buy into it completely. And the music! The blues music featured throughout the movie is simply terrific. It is as much a character in the movie as any of the actors.
Jordan took home the Oscar for Best Actor, and I believe that it was well deserved. I also liked the fact that after the ceremony, Jordan took his Oscar statue and celebrated at an In-and-Out Burger restaurant in Los Angeles. A Man of the People.
Four Stars from The Grandstander. Oh, and when you see it, either in a theater or on your TV set, watch until the very end of all of the credits.
Then there was the movie that was the big winner of the night, One Battle After Another.
I remember seeing a trailer for this way back last summer, and thinking, "hmm, not so sure about this one", but the critical acclaim and all those Oscars (Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay for Paul Thomas Anderson, and Best Supporting Actor for Sean Penn) has put this on our "We Have To See It" list. That will probably happen sometime this coming weekend.
I did read one post-Oscar comment that said, that while "One Battle..." is a good movie, it will not be the 2025 movie that everyone will still be talking about ten, fifteen, or twenty years from now. The one that we'll all remember will be Sinners.
That Oscar won by Penn is the third one of his career. He now joins the pantheon of these actors who have won three Oscars: Daniel Day-Lewis, Frances McDormand, Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep, Ingrid Bergman, and Walter Brennan (yes, Walter Brennan!) Pretty good company for someone who will probably be most remembered for playing high school stoner Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times At Ridgemont High way back in 1982.
By the way, all of this actors listed above are still one behind Kathrine Hepburn, who won four Oscars in her career.
As for the Academy Awards show itself, it was no better or worse than all of the ones that preceded it. It was too long, Conan O'Brien was pretty good as the host, the musical number from Sinners was tremendous, the In Memoriam tributes to Rob Reiner, Diane Keaton, and Robert Redford were great, it would have been better had we seen more of the nominated films and performances, and the award for the Most Ridiculous Dress of the Night went to Demi Moore.
Oh, and I promised you a book review, and I include it here because it its about the Movies.
As you can see from the subtitle of the book, it focuses on the rise of perhaps the three most prominent American film makers of the last fifty years, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg, oh, and throw in a healthy dash of both Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma, and you've got a book that movie lovers will thoroughly enjoy. Here is my take on the "stars" of the book. Spielberg comes across as the most normal and likeable, Lucas as odd, and Coppola as a total screwball in his we-have-to-do-this-my-way method of doing business. All are brilliant, but all of them are, shall we say, different than you and me.
The book is chockfull of stories about some of the greatest movies of our times: The Godfather, Jaws, Star Wars, American Graffiti, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Apocalypse Now, Taxi Driver, Raiders of The Lost Ark, and Raging BulI among others. I really enjoyed the book.
Three and One-Half Stars from The Grandstander.
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