Popcorn Kernels: Best Picture Contenders, Vol. 1

In which I once again attempt to sit through all the nominees for Best Picture, knowing full well that the presence of Darkest Hour shall surely prevent me from accomplishing this goal. Here are two of those efforts.

The Post

Year: 2017
Director: Steven Spielberg
Cast: Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Bob Odenkirk
Run Time: 1 hour 56 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG-13

When the Washington Post gets ahold of the Pentagon Papers, which expose a decade of government secrets, they must decide whether or not to publish them, which could potentially shut down the paper and send them to jail.

Look, I admitted that Spotlight was good, even though it's preposterous that it won Best Picture. And I dislike the state of the country as much as any reasonable American. But as timely as The Post is, it will never feel like anything other than Spotlight 2 (and in fact, it was co-written by one of the co-writers of Spotlight, if it wasn't already watered down enough for you). And as much as director Steven Spielberg has proven time and again he's a genius, we all have our bad days. The Post is such a huge waste of everyone's time and effort that it's not even funny.

Not that it was meant to be funny. The film finds Spielberg in intensely sober-minded Oscarbait mode, with only one scene (the best scene in the movie, involving a little girl selling lemonade) providing a moment of levity in this grandiose, self-important, completely arid awards season trifle.

The Post has a cruelly inflated sense of its own relevance, tying the problems of the past to current affairs in the most blunt, obvious way possible. Look, I'm all for arguments in favor of the free press, but they don't have to be couched in a series of artless, implacable zooms while characters monologue about how important the themes of the movie are. It hardly pretends to be dialogue, it's just one long essay mummifying an admittedly important historical event.

It's honestly rather clumsy, constantly framing Meryl Streep in drifts of men to pointedly remind you that she's not in a woman's space, all while the dialogue revolves around her being a woman in a man's space. It's very pointedly a message movie, and while shots like that can work - I'm thinking of Clarice Starling in the elevator at Quantico in Silence of the Lambs - it's forced down your throat so hard you start gagging before the fifteen minute mark.

It's just kind of a generally lousy movie, bookended by its worst scenes (a shoehorned-in Saving Private Ryan moment in Vietnam and a hilariously terrible Marvel-esque coda involving the world's worst Richard Nixon impersonator frantically waving his arms like a caffeinated mime and not even attempting to time his movements to the actual Nixon recording posing as dialogue) and endlessly unspooling trite, uninspired dialogue in between ("That picture makes me sad," exclaims Sarah Paulson, hopelessly drowning in a nothing role).

There's just no feeling involved here, it's all lecturing. And considering that The Post contains two of the world's most charismatic movie stars, it's astonishing how this could have even been accomplished. Meryl Streep is fine, as always, but she's snoozing through a role she could play with both hands and feet tied behind her back. And Tom Hanks is acting SO. HARD. But no matter how much he rakishly props his leg up on desks or undoes his sleeves, he's straining through an inexplicable old timey radio host accent that just drips with insincerity.

The Post was never going to be a great movie. It could only have ever been a acceptably Important prestige picture. But the way it fails its actors and the audience so substantially is frankly shocking. The music (John Williams, again visibly bored) seems to actively rebel against the tone of the film, the script is begging for attention yet barely there, and the coterie of strong performers (including, randomly, a handful of comic actors like Zach Woods and David Cross) is given nothing to do but be conduits for a firehose stream of flop sweat. One to miss.

Rating: 4/10

Dunkirk

Year: 2017

Director: Christopher Nolan

Cast: Fionn Whitehead, Tom Hardy, Mark Rylance

Run Time: 1 hour 46 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

We follow a fighter pilot, a civilian ship, and some ground troops through the effort to rescue the British military from the beach at Dunkirk during World War II.

Dunkirk is about as boldly experimental as a big budget blockbuster can get. But the thing is, experimentation leads to failure about half the time. Not that Dunkirk is a failure; what it gets right outweighs what it gets wrong, but its open risk-taking comes with some very odd choices that don't quite work.

For one thing, take the peculiar dilation of time that occurs over the course of the film. One story elapses over a week, one over a day, and one over an hour. The film cuts between these stories simultaneously, and they overlap at certain key moments. But the way they are presented doesn't really allow for any more insight or intrigue than if they had just been shown chronologically. And the landing of a fighter plane is dragged out over the course of what feels like half an hour of excruciatingly long screen time, milked for all it's worth in the film's biggest patch of jingoistic militarism.

Luckily, that doesn't seem to be the prevailing sentiment over the rest of the film. Dunkirk is a film that is above all else about the terror and constant, oppressive violence of war (despite the conspicuously pulled punches of its PG-13 rating), doled out by an omnipresent enemy that is literally never shown, except in the form of bomber planes that whistle by periodically. It eschews character arcs and even dialogue at times (especially in the sequences on the beach, it plays out more like a silent film, which fortunately prevents Harry Styles from screwing anything up) in favor of this all-important, nerve-rattling atmosphere.

And there is absolutely no denying that this is an utterly gorgeous motion picture. Between what are probably some of the best airplane action sequences ever filmed, Nolan provides us bleakly stunning, expansive vistas that blast your corneas with the sheer wideness of devastation and desolation on this beach. The single distracting thing about the visuals is that - at least on the home video release, I can't speak to the theatrical - it has been decided that the aspect ratios switch between the footage shot on 70mm and 65mm. The black bars constantly blotting out the huge screen-filling vistas are hugely distracting and an entirely odd choice.

Much more thoroughly satisfying is the soundscape, which is as harsh and alarming as you would expect any good war picture to be, slashed through with Hans Zimmer's droning, atonal, staccato score that ratchets up the tension to an unbearable degree.

It's a good thing that Dunkirk is so visually and aurally stunning and goes all in on those elements, because most of the dialogue sequences are the worst parts of the movie. Whether its generals dumping piles of exposition on the top of your head or Mark Rylance spouting nothing but affectless patriotic quotes for the better part of an hour, these scenes are generally worth much less of your time than the tense beach sequences - especially a scene where bullets begin to blast through the hull of a ship where stowaway soldiers are waiting for high tide.

I'm not usually a fan of war movies, and I wouldn't say I'd ever want to watch this again, but I'm glad I saw it in the first place. If you've already seen Lady Bird, Get Out, and The Shape of Water, this should certainly be next on your Oscars checklist.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1306

Hugh Glass And The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

Year: 2015

Director: Alejandro G. Iñárritu

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, Domhnall Gleeson

Run Time: 2 hours 36 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

It’s Oscar season, so it’s easy to get swept up in the prestige picture fever. But now, more than ever, should be the time to make bold statements. To defy the status quo. To admit that I really didn’t like The Revenant. Like, at all. To be fair, so far the collected works of Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu have pretty much confounded me, so it might be possible to pass it off as a genetic thing. This is a filmmaker with whom I have a deep, personal disconnection. So now is the time to remind you that all Popcorn Culture scores (and, let’s admit it, ALL critic scores) are entirely subjective. So feel free to disagree. I’m happy to be a voice for the minority.

Bear with me.

In The Revenant, Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a scout for a group of 1800’s frontiersmen collecting pelts in the Louisiana Purchase territory. The team is led by Captain Henry (Domhnall Gleeson, and don’t try to pronounce that if you don’t have the appropriate safety gear) and includes Glass’ Native American son Hawk (Forrest Goodluck) and the perilously Southern John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy). After Glass is quite rudely mauled by a bear, he is left for dead in the wilderness (after like an hour, because Iñárritu missed the lesson in film school that said each page of the script shouldn't last 20 minutes). He is then forced to battle his way across the frozen tundra, fighting for survival despite his injuries, the elements, and roaming bands of vicious savages, not to mention the Frenchmen.

If Leo doesn’t win the Oscar for this, he will literally eat a man.

Now, I may not have liked this movie, but I never said it wasn’t well-realized. The frozen landscapes of Canada and Southern Argentina are photographed with a sinister beauty, displaying an eye for capturing the starkest, most unearthly formations of barren trees and rocks that nature could possibly provide. Emmanuel Lubeski is on hand to knock out some of those famous long takes, most notably in an exquisitely choreographed battle between the natives and the frontiersmen. And speaking of that battle, the special effects in The Revenant are phenomenal, without a doubt the best thing in the film.

You see, The Revenant is a gory, visceral movie, sometimes unbearably brutal in is carnage. The makeup effects that achieve this are spectacularly conceived and – with the small exception of certain shots of the bear – completely seamless. When The Revenant combines these grotesquely realistic kills with its sweeping long takes, it operates at its fullest, most breathtaking capacity.

Also, Leonardo DiCaprio’s performance leaves nothing to complain about. I wouldn’t say I was bowled over, but I would hardly begrudge him the Oscar, especially considering that his only real competition in this year’s weak slate is returning crownee Eddie Redmayne. Leo is asked to carry this movie on his back, and in order to do so he must relinquish his star power and embrace his feral side, which he certainly commits to. It’s a stripped-down, raw performance that might just be the best in his wholly adequate career.

I mean, other than his role in Critters 3, obviously.

Yes, I’m aware I just listed a lot of good things about The Revenant. And that’s why it’s in the awards conversation. It’s not a bad film. But there’s a difference between being well-realized and actually telling a good story. The technical aspects, which are inarguably pristine, are only half the battle. And The Revenant can only be described as a battle, between austere art cinema and Iñárritu’s staggering auteurist pomposity.

For one thing, the film is too goddamn long. If it filled its time with original, essential scenes, it wouldn’t feel like such a slog, but Iñárritu insists on returning over and over again to a bluntly metaphorical dream sequence/flashback that would make even Terrence Malick blush. The film’s theme is constantly repeated via these flashbacks and eventually a broken record voiceover that begins to act like a psychic cheese grater, shaving away every layer of your patience one scrape at a time.

The surreal imagery these sequences insist upon don’t exactly help, especially considering that all but one shot feels just like student filmmaker masturbation. It’s sickeningly ostentatious and it carves a huge chunk out of the effectiveness of the rest of the film’s realism and austerity.

I want Leo fighting the elements, not Tree of Life 2: Full Throttle.

Another problem with the urgency with which impatiently metaphorical imagery seeps into the film is that there’s next to no consistency in how cold it is at any given time. There is a clear progression to Glass’s interaction with the weather, but the film loses track of its visual representation in the midst of plugging in as many shots of sweeping grandeur as possible.

However, all this pales in comparison to the film’s biggest flaw, which is unfortunately my beloved Tom Hardy. He gives his performance in such a ludicrously pronounced Southern accent that it’s nigh-on impossible to understand even fifty percent of what he’s saying. Between this and his Dark Night Rises performance as Bane, I’m not entirely convinced that he’s not doing this on purpose. It’s like watching a foreign film, where the language barrier is so dense that you can’t even tell if it’s a good performance or not. He’s kind of like the anthropomorphic representation of the film itself: a well-meaning effort towards prestige that completely obfuscates its original intentions beneath a thick layer of unintelligible nonsense.

No, I did not like The Revenant. It’s totally OK if you did. There’s a lot there. But from where I’m standing, this is Iñárritu’s second strained, mangled Oscarbait effort in as many years.

TL;DR: The Revenant is an arduous, pretentious watch that is well-realized but not enough to salvage a good story.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1002

Road Rage

Year: 2015

Director: George Miller

Cast: Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult

Run Time: 2 hours

MPAA Rating: R

Action movies aren't really my thing. I can muster up an appreciation for them, as with most films, but when a new action flick comes out in the theater, I usually just leave it to my friend Zach at Better Clear On Out the Back. 

And I'm no Mad Max fanboy, either. In fact, I haven't seen any of the original three films in the franchise (though that will be swiftly rectified this summer).

I'm telling you these things so you can properly understand the gravity of my statement when I tell you that Mad Max: Fury Road is the best damn movie of 2015 so far. Hell, I'm going to go ahead and call it right now as the best movie of the summer. 

Unless San Andreas pulls the rug out from under us all. 

Mad Max: Fury Road has a plot. In fact, it's quite involved, taking place in a lush world that's teeming with detail. But the tricky part is distilling it into a couple paragraphs, because so much of it takes place at the fringes of the main action, informing and instilling life into it, but not necessarily playing an active role in the goings on.

I want to make it clear that this is not a detraction. In fact, it's quite the opposite. The true narrative of Mad Max: Fury Road is buried within every detail of the production design, every line of dialogue, and every line in the sand. It is a film that not only assumes that you - the audience member - are intelligent and demands that you engage with it as an active viewer on every single level, but richly rewards you for doing so.

Anyway, the bare bones of the thing is this: Max (Tom Hardy) is a guilt-ridden wanderer through the post-apocalyptic, irradiated desert of what we can assume through franchise pedigree is Australia. Haunted by the ghosts of the people he couldn't save, his only instinct is to survive the barren terrain. The only ample source of water is the Citadel, which is ruled by the diseased despot Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) and his mutated brood.

So, basically it's California in three years.

When the town champion Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) diverts her war machine on what was supposed to be a routine supply run, Immortan Joe realizes that she has absconded with his wives, the enslaved healthy women which he uses for breeding. Max has been captured and used as a human blood bag for Nux (Nicholas Hoult), a member of the sickened, brainwashed slave race known as the Half-Lives. As the nobles of the Citadel pursue Furiosa along with their Half-Life army, Max escapes and reluctantly joins forces with her. She wants to take the girls to the Green Place, a safe zone across the continent, and he just wants to survive, but for the time being they find it mutually beneficial to work together.

I mean, she needs someone to help make sure her super awesome makeup isn't smudged. The ass-kicking she can handle herself.

The most definitive aspect of Fury Road is its outrageous sense of style. Its dominating aesthetic is downright lunacy, pushing so far over the top that it's visible from space. From the bulbous, fleshy creatures inhabiting the Citadel to the wraithlike Half-Lives who run staccato like they're in a Keystone Cops short, the film constantly prods and challenges the traditions and tenets of film costuming and design.

And they ain't afraid to be disgusting.

These delightfully insane characters populate a world of ramshackle glories: souped-up cars with porcupine spikes, massive green towers with waterfalls that flow over the unwashed masses, men dangling on pikes, and just about everything you can imagine. With a healthy sprinkling of things that you can't, which is what separates the geniuses from you or I. And this world is lit with bold, saturated colors that assault the frame with unnatural beauty.

Da ba dee, da ba die.

It's bloody gorgeous, is what it is, and this ludicrous, beautiful, terrible world is the perfect setting for the most unflagging, high octane action flick I've ever seen. Fury Road hits the ground sprinting and only picks up the pace from there, hardly even stopping to introduce its narrative universe, asking you to pick it up from the flecks of shrapnel that fly through the haze of battle.

As Max, Furiosa, and the Breeders storm their way through one massive action setpiece after another, the excitement never dwindles. Some all-action films can get dull and repetitive, but Fury Road knows the game and plays it with admirable skill. Packing handfuls of story, emotion, sacrifice, and distorted dystopian imagery in between every frame, there is more than enough to chew on aside from the truly astounding, ever-escalating practical effects work that dominates the landscape.

Honestly I'm surprised that director George Miller (of the three Mad Max films and most recently - and bafflingly - Happy Feet and its sequel) received the budget that he did to put this film together at such an unrelenting, raucus level, but the fact the Mad Max: Fury Road exists means that somebody is doing something right in Hollywood.

Also whoever designed the flamethrower guitar has an automatic pass to marry me.

As if we needed anything more to like about the film, the acting is across the board superb. Charlize Theron shows no cracks as a dauntless warrior, the villains are uniformly and unequivocally menacing, and Nicholas Hoult utterly inhabits a role as screamingly high octane as the film itself, but the unbeatable standout is Tom Hardy. 

With nothing but a few choice words and a series of animalistic grunts, he paints a detailed and nuanced portrait of a man broken beyond his own humanity. His impressively physical accomplishment completely transforms the actor, ripping him out of any sense of reality and throwing himself directly into the heart of the Mad Max universe. If any performance were to permanently break the barrier between summer blockbusters and Oscar nominations, it's Tom Hardy right here, right now.

The cherry on top of the towering ice cream sundae that is Mad Max: Fury Road is that it's a remarkably feminist and progressive action piece. The large amount of women in the film leave a safe, but enslaved life for the dangers of independence and claim their personhood. One of the Breeders says "We are not things,"and she is absolutely right. The women of Fury Road are an unstoppable force of good, fighting against a world that devalues them.

Also, ableism be damned.

It's a fascinating, energetic, wonderfully realized action film that never loses fuel, and it's spectacularly unlike anything you've ever seen before. Fans of more sit-down, low key dramas are best advised to sit this one out, but I think its unrelenting, explosive charm should appeal to just about anyone with a pulse that needs racing. 

TL;DR: Mad Max: Fury Road is outrageous, high octane, nonstop fun.
Rating: 10/10
Should I Spend Money On This? Yes, unless you really hate exciting movies.
Word Count: 1195
Reviews In This Series
Mad Max (Miller, 1979)
Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (Miller, 1981)
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (Miller & Ogilvie, 1985)
Mad Max: Fury Road (Miller, 2015)