OSCARS 2024

 

In 2024 it was the 1970s again. During that decade, arguably the best ever for American movies, the movie gods aligned in a way that has not been seen before or since. Popular movies, that is movies seen by the most people in any given year, were also the most critically acclaimed movies, that is movies that won the most awards. This is rarer than you would imagine, and for the past two decades was almost a non-existent alignment. Virtually no one saw Moonlight or CODA for example. But Oppenheimer not only won Best Picture, but it also was one of the highest grossing movies of 2023 (also, see Barbie). Just like those 1970s Oscar darlings The Godfather, Star Wars, Jaws, The Exorcist, The Sting, Rocky, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Deer Hunter, The Godfather Part II, and Annie Hall, all of whom were in the top 50 highest grossing movies of the decade. And for the second year in a row and the third time in five years, my pick for Best Picture is the Best Picture. This is after I batted zero from 2005 to 2018. Yes, I picked Oppenheimer.

2024 was also notable in that I saw a majority of the movies that I reviewed at home and not in a theater. This has much to do with the birth of my first son, Hiro J Travis. Opportunities for date night, or just seeing movies by myself in theaters diminished. Hopefully, as he grows, and we find reliable babysitters, I will be able to see as many movies in theaters as I did before (what we need is a good movie theater in Ridgewood. Anyone? anyone?). But till, then, what I choose to review will actually be less about what I see in a theater and more about what I just watched and how interesting I thought it was. I'm aiming for at least 18-20 reviews a year. Watch out for that.

Best Original Screenplay

Justine Triet and Arthur Harari - Anatomy of a Fall

Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach - Barbie

Bradley Cooper and Josh Singer - Maestro

Rebecca Miller - She Came to Me

Nicole Holofcener - You Hurt My Feelings

Best Adapted Screenplay

Ted Kupper and Jonas Karlsson - Corner Office

Christopher Nolan, Kai Bird, and Martin Sherwin - Oppenheimer

Eric Roth, Martin Scorsese, David Grann - Killers of the Flower Moon

Tony Macnamara, Alastdair Gray - Poor Things

Priscilla Presley, Sandra Harmon, Sofia Coppola - Priscilla

Best Documentary

20 Days in Mariupol

The Pigeon Tunnel

Best Costumes

Barbie

John Wick: Chapter 4

Napoleon

Poor Things

Priscilla

Best Hairstyling/Makeup

Barbie

Maestro

Oppenheimer

Poor Things

Priscilla

Best Production Design

Barbie

Killers of the Flower Moon

Napoleon

Oppenheimer

Poor Things

Best Use of Cultural Appropriation

Anatomy of a Fall - Sandra Huller's Trilingual Performance

Barbie - Mattel's Barbie

History of the World Part II - George Wallace as George Wallace

Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse - DaVinci Vulture

The Super Mario Bros Movie - Nintendo's Mario and Luigi

Best Original Score

Asteriod City

Corner Office

Oppenheimer

Killers of the Flower Moon

The Pigeon Tunnel

Best Sound Design

Beau is Afraid

Maestro

Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning

Oppenheimer

The Zone of Interest

Best Use of a Song

Anatomy of a Fall - Bacao Rythym and Steel's Cover of 50 Cent's PIMP

Barbie - "I'm Just Ken"

Maestro - Mahler: Symphony No. 2

The Iron Claw - Rush "Tom Sawyer"

They Cloned Tyrone - "They Cloned Tyrone"

Best Supporting Actress

Rina Sawayama - John Wick Chapter 4

Emily Blunt - Oppenheimer

Da'Vine Joy Randolph - The Holdovers

Margo Martindale - Cocaine Bear

Marisa Tomei - She Came to Me

Best Supporting Actor

Donnie Yen - John Wick: Chapter 4

Robert Downey Jr. - Oppenheimer

Jamie Foxx - They Cloned Tyrone

Ryan Gosling - Barbie

Mark Ruffalo - Poor Things

Best Stunt Direction

John Wick: Chapter 4

Barbie

Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning - Part 1

The Killer

The Iron Claw

Best Visual Effects

Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part I

Napoleon

Oppenheimer

John Wick: Chapter 4

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

Best Cinematography

Killers of the Flower Moon

Oppenheimer

Maestro

Priscilla

Poor Things

Best Film Editing

Anatomy of a Fall

Priscilla

Maestro

Killers of the Flower Moon

Oppenheimer

Best Actor

Joaquin Phoenix - Beau is Afraid

Zac Efron - The Iron Claw

Bradley Cooper - Maestro

Cillian Murphy - Oppenheimer

Peter Dinklage - She Came to Me

Best Actress

Sandra Huller - Anatomy of a Fall

Lily Gladstone - Killers of the Flower Moon

Emma Stone - Poor Things

Sydney Sweeney - Reality

Awkwafina - Quiz Lady

Best Director

Ari Aster - Beau is Afraid

Christopher Nolan - Oppenheimer

Martin Scorsese - Killers of the Flower Moon

Bradley Cooper - Maestro

Sofia Coppola - Priscilla

Best Picture

Anatomy of a Fall

Barbie

The Iron Claw

Killers of the Flower Moon

Maestro

Oppenheimer

Poor Things

Priscilla

John Wick: Chapter 4

You Hurt My Feelings

Poor Things (4/5 Stars)

 

It would be understandable if you thought of Director Yorgos Lanthimos as a satirist. His movies (“The Lobster”, “The Killing of a Sacred Deer”, “The Favourite”) feel like satires. But to be a true satire, the movie has to comment, through comparison or metaphor, on reality or something akin. That is for something to be a satire, there must first be a real-life subject. WIthout that subject, the art can’t be satire. 

“The Lobster” and “The Kiling of a Sacred Deer” dealt with situations that never existed and people that never will exist. “The Favourite” took its inspiration from the real-life monarchy of Queen Anne of England, an accident of history that thrust the guardianship of a nation-state upon a woman who had lost 17 children in the space of 11 years to miscarraige and infant mortality. It could have worked as a comment on the absurdity of a political system based on hereditary rights, but Mr. Lanthimos seemed to take no interest in the story’s historical significance. Instead, it was a great movie about “mean girl” backstabbing.

Which brings us to “Poor Things” , his latest endeavor, a movie that seems like it is commenting on our world, but has its satiric power undercut from the fact that it appears to take place in an alternate universe. Like his other movies, it is probably best to not think too much about what it might mean. Yorgos is doing something weird and is doing so in a very competent and fascinating way. Just take it as it is.

Where and when does this movie take place? That is a paramount question you may be asking yourself. There are certain identifiable landmarks. The places are given European names: London, Lisbon, Paris. The characters dress in prudish aristocratic suits and dresses sort of like it might be the turn of the 20th century (circa 1900ish). Certain set pieces, like the medical auditorium where surgeons can watch whatever new operation may be the next big thing, are associated with that time and place. 

But this is not the turn of 20th century Europe. There are strange scientific inventions that were not there back then and indeed would be new today. It’s sort of like Steampunk, but not even that. The color scheme is more vibrant and varied than Steampunk as it pertains to the landscape, makeup and the costumes. (All three categories just won Oscars and you will understand why). In one scene, a band in what would pass for a normal upper class ballroom plays music with discordant make-believe instruments. 

Perhaps the best example of the weirdness of the time/place conundrum is how the characters speak. Again, they wear the tuxedos and dresses of upper class British socialites and speak with upper class British accents. But they also curse like sailors, like all of them. In fact, it is interesting how they go back and forth between the two. They will start off a conversation as if they are in a Merchant and Ivory film, get frustrated and drop a bunch of “F” bombs. Noone in the history of the world speaks like this. It is weird. And boy, you should see them dance. You won’t forget it.

The conceit of the movie is that this mad scientist, Godwin Baxter (played by Willem Defoe) comes upon a pregnant woman who has just attempted to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge. The woman died but her unborn girl was still living. For reasons I couldn’t really understand, he performed the following experiment: he transplanted the brain of the daughter into the skull of the woman, and then, via an experiment that directly alludes to Frankenstein, he brought her to life and named her Bella Baxter. So, this person is both her daughter and her mother. Now Frankenstein was a metaphor for man’s relationship with God and the rights and obligations between the two. I have no idea what this mother/daughter relationship could be a metaphor for. I expect it may just be weird.

What you have then is a situation in which Bella Baxter (played by Emma Stone) is essentially an infant mentally in the body of a full grown woman. This provides the opportunity for some throw-down acting by Emma Stone who spends the first part of the movie doing a great impression of my infant son Hiro. Then, in that great tradition of “fish-out–of-water” movies, Bella goes into the world and confounds society with her childlike questioning of how things are. The movie does some shallow exploring of wealth inequality and scientific ambition, but settles down on its primary topic: Sex and men’s obsessive desire to possess women. Her first paramour Duncan Wedderburn is driven to madness by her free spirit. He is played by Mark Ruffalo who is increasingly funny in the movie as he more and more loses his mind.

This movie is notable due to the sheer amount of vulgarity present in it. Not only is there much cursing as noted above, but there is also quite a lot of nudity and sex. There have been more vulgar movies for a very long time, but I don’t think there has been one as vulgar as this one that has garnered so many Oscar nominations. It has been noted that taboo subjects in general society have changed. What we once considered “grown-up” categories: sex, violence and curse words are now commonplace. Instead, we shy away from the “n-word” and other racial epithets for fear of society’s retribution. This occurred in my life-time. Remember “There’s Something About Mary” in 1999. That was a shocking movie. “Poor Things” has ten times the vulgarity of that movie. And Emma Stone won the Oscar. As a result, there will be legions of young women interested in acting who will watch this movie and consider her performance to be a normal thing.

It is inherently unfair to satirize the past and not just because they are all dead and can’t defend themselves. To be more fair, try thinking of human beings that lived in past times not as older, but as younger. Take the general course of human history and consider that someone in 1000 A.D. would only have their own personal experience plus whatever amount of the past had been written down and taught to them as part of their education. Whereas, a person today, has not only their experience but Wikipedia in their smartphone, which is the entirety of human experience within a Google Search. If we equate age with experience, everyone today is much much older than anyone in the past.

Yorgos Lanthimos perhaps is sending up past times as an absurd place in terms of how it viewed sex. Back then, there were taboos on homosexuality, pre-marital sex, sex between races and sex between classes. You can look at it through our eyes today and consider it all backward and outdated, particularly for the reasons given for the taboos (i.e. religious, nationalistic, racial). But we now know things that they didn’t know back then. For instance, we have ways of telling whether a child is actually genetically related to its father and we know that certain diseases are caused by germs and some germs and not others can only be transmitted through sex. And with that knowledge, we have developed ways to make sex much safer than it was then in the past. If you forget all that, then the world in the past may seem like an absurd place. If you understand that there was an obvious, albeit misunderstood, connection between promiscuity and certain plagues breaking out in society, you would be less judgmental on the value placed in the past on a woman’s virginity or the taboo upon male homosexuality. You wouldn’t want your son to visit a whore or your daughter to sleep with a sailor. You wouldn't know exactly how it might happen, but you knew they could die or go insane (this is what syphilis does). If you were religious, and you probably were, you may conclude by experience that God didn’t like these actions because the people who did them were visited upon by strange and awful maladies.

And hey, if you didn’t consider the above, then “Poor Things” might be a satire. 

Barbie (4/5 Stars)

“There is only one thing worse in life than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”

- Oscar Wilde

Barbie is a movie that is full of ideas. Don’t be distracted by all the pink, Ryan Gosling’s biceps, or Margot Robbie’s plastic smile. A definite feature of the movie is an exploration of what the doll means, to society, to consumerism, to the little girls that play with the dolls. Barbie’s baggage is as extensive as her wardrobe. And the creators, writer/director Greta Gerwig and co-writer Noah Baumbach are dealing with it head-on and with great comedic effect.

There is money to be made in taking an existing trademark and making a movie out of it. The Transformers movies are the most profitable example I guess. But, the gold standard, for me at least, is The Lego Movie, which was action packed and funny but also had a clear sense of what made playing with the toy a worthwhile experience. This was beautifully articulated in a perfect ending scene by the boy’s father (played by Will Ferrell) who had lost the original point of the toy by supergluing his perfect creations so that they could never again be taken apart. 

Barbie doesn’t have such a clear vision of what makes the toy work, but then again, Barbie is means many things to many people. The movie, with cleverness and humor, presents both sides: that Barbie is an icon of feminism, out there in the workforce doing very smart and prestigious jobs like President and Scientist. And then the other side: that Barbie is an icon of tyranny, that she has an unattainable physical beauty that depresses the young girls who play with her and make them feel terrible about themselves. Many think pieces have been penned about this. I remember seeing a Simpsons episode about it when I was very young.

What is missing from all these philosophical musings is what is closer to the actual truth. That Barbie doesn’t have much of an effect either way and for that reason it shouldn’t be controversial. However, this is the last argument the Mattel corporation would ever use in its defense. Like Hollywood’s weird obsequiousness to critics of diversity representation, they would rather be a bad guy than admit that they are unimportant. And the same goes for the big speech about society’s expectations for women in this movie. The only thing worse about society having unrealistic expectations is the awful truth: that no one really cares. The thing that makes Barbie such a hot topic is its interaction with women’s vanity. Women can complain all they want about having to do so much to keep up appearances, but so much of why they are so high in the first place is because women are competing with each other. In other words, it is women that are setting such high expectations. All one has to do from letting Barbie get one down is to be less shallow. 

I’m skipping much of the plot which for the most part doesn’t make much sense. Actually, this movie is quite good at doing just enough to keep the plot going and not worrying too much about whether it is doing enough. Sometimes, the lack of a coherent explanation forms the basis of a knowing joke. I mean, how much does it matter how one gets from Barbieland to the Santa Monica boardwalk? This movie would prove that it doesn’t matter all that much at all and makes a pretty good joke out of how illogical it is. In any event, the plot is this: Everything is perfect in Barbieland until the girl playing with Barbie in the real world starts making her doll go about doing depressing things. This provokes an existential crisis to Barbie, who then takes a trip to the real world and delves into philosophical musings about her purpose and yada yada yada. At the same time, Ken also takes a trip to the real world and, in doing so, he discovers patriarchy (power and horses) and a purpose other than beach. He brings it back to Barbieland and transforms Barbie's Dreamhouse into the Mojo Dojo Casa House (coming soon to a fraternity near you).

For most of this I was wishing Greta Gerwig had expended her considerable talents on a more personal type of movie like her first exceptional ones, Lady Bird and Little Women. I was at least comforted by the fact that she was getting paid and perhaps, like Christopher Nolan and other directors, would have more of an opportunity to make personal movies because she was a good sport that did some big budget movies as well. (In this scenario, Barbie is Greta’s Batman). That is, until I witnessed the Great Ken Beach Battle and Musical Number. That sequence won me over and is one of the best things I’ve seen in the movies in 2023. Ryan Gosling has been nominated for an Oscar for his performance in this movie. That is no mistake. The man is committed.

Overall, Barbie is a lot of fun, which is the right attitude to have towards the doll in general. I mean, come on, it’s a toy. Noone is actually asking women to look like her. Certainly not Ruth Handler, the creator of Barbie, who is portrayed here by Rhea Perlman, a very not-barbie like woman. Sometimes it’s just nice to have an excuse to wear bright pink. 

Napoleon (3/5 Stars)

 

If Ridley Scott were to live long enough (He is presently 86 years of age), we were bound to get a Napoleon movie. He has three loves. Dystopic Science Fiction, Strong Female Leads, and Historical Drama. The historical dramas (Gladiator, Kingdom of Heaven, The Last Duel) are what we are going to miss the most about him. Not that these are his best films but because no-one else in the movie business makes them. Or at least no-one who has the goodwill and box office clout to make them with the type of big budget production that they require.

Napoleon Bonaparte is a towering historical figure. I read Will Durant’s Story of Civilization, which told the story of the West in eleven volumes and took the author and his wife their entire lives to write. The Quarter Century of the French Revolution and Napoleon took up the entirety of the last volume. As Durant would say, it was a time of compressed history. More happened in that 25 years than usually happens in 100. Ridley Scott brings to this task his usual diligence and competence. The directing is sure, the camera frame doesn’t spare the details, and the production value spares no expense. Cast as Napoleon is Joaquin Phoenix, who seems to have ripened into the go-to actor for complicated characters (He has played both Jesus and The Joker in the past five years). Not that his performance here is all that complicated. Because of the dichotomy between glorious victories in battle and dismal performance in the bedroom, Phoenix’s performance is part entitlement and part impotence, which more remembers than dispels all the satirizations of Napoleon as a very short and very temperamental man. A memorable line herein is, “Destiny has brought me this lamb chop.”

The problem with this mediocre movie is the same one that plagues almost all biopics. It’s a problem of scope. For Napoleon, this is a larger problem than most historical figures. There is a tendency to want to include everything notable that the title character has been involved in. However, when the title character has been in so much, what you get is an abridged version of a life, and the more that is cut out, the less what remains can hold together the plot. 

Here are the items that this movie concerns itself with: Napoleon’s famous battles including Toulonne, Egypt, Austerlitz, the Russian Campaign. (Try as the movie might to be comprehensive, we don’t get Napoleon crossing the alps in the Italian campaign.) The other half (half!) of the plot is about Napoleon's romantic relationship with Josephine. What doesn’t make the cut is the revolutions in political science, the revolutions in science (the meter system anyone?), the liberation of the European Jew, the French breakup and reconciliation with the Catholic Church, the global naval wars and the list goes on and on. In a way, this movie is a really good example of how Hollywood bastardizes history. There was only so much run time in this movie and what was prioritized in Napoleon’s life was the sex and violence. 

To witness how this common problem can be avoided, one can watch Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln which decided to not tell the story of Lincoln’s life but to focus on a six month period where Lincoln set out and succeeded in passing the 13th Amendment through the U.S. Congress. Because that movie constrained the time period, it didn’t have some obvious problems in character development that this one has. For one thing, characters that are introduced in the first half hour of the Lincoln movie still exist in the plot at the end of it. In Napoleon, all the characters besides Napoleon and Josephine that have roles in the first half, don’t make it to the second half. One of the biggest characters, Napoleon’s competing general at Waterloo, Lord Wellington, literally shows up in the last hour. If you didn’t already know the general arc of history of this movie, it might be a bewildering journey through random names and places. And if you do know the general background, you will notice details that are brought up but not really developed. Robespierre really did try to shoot himself but failed. It was dramatic when it happened I’m sure, but it is hardly dramatic when the movie shows it. How could it be, when Robespierre is hardly introduced before he exits stage left. Can you really pick up from watching this movie why it was such a disastrous move by Napoleon to invade Russian and then to hang around in Moscow for so long. The sequence must be about 10-15 minutes at most in this movie. 

But really, the worst part of telling this story fast-forward and only focusing on the battles and the love relationship between Napoleon and Josephine is that it inevitably draws connections that almost certainly are not there. Napoleon didn’t abandon his army early in Egypt because he missed Josephine and was worried that she was cheating on him (she was). He didn’t decide to reclaim his throne after his first exile in Elba because he read about Josephine dancing the waltz with the Russian emperor in the newspaper. That’s crazy. It makes sense to try to draw that connection dramatically in this story because otherwise the two halves of the plot would have absolutely nothing to do with each other. But come one, just do less and you’ll make a better movie. I wonder what this story would feel like if Sofia Coppola told the story entirely from the point of Josephine. Now that is not too much plot for a movie. Imagine a story about Napoleon without battles. Wouldn’t that be interesting.

Maestro (4/5 Stars)

Producer Rick Rubin famously has one piece of advice for artists: make the art for yourself. The audience should come last. And as he explains, this is not because the artist should not care about the audience, but it acknowledges the counterintuitive notion that what the audience ultimately wants is not art about a particular subject matter expressed in a certain way, but the best art. And the best art always is that which is personal to the artist, that means something to the artist. There is plenty of art out there that is made for the audience, and it will be inevitably mediocre, because by its nature it is designed that way. The bigger the audience a piece of art is made for, the less special it will be. 

I bring this up in the context of Maestro because it would appear to me that Bradley Cooper, an actor, who became a director and co-writer with A Star is Born five years ago is taking Rick Rubin’s advice. I’m not sure anyone was demanding a biopic about Leonard Bernstein or necessarily believed that Bradley Cooper (The Hangover, Silver Linings Playbook, American Sniper) would have been the man to do it. This movie seems to exist because Bradley Cooper thought it was interesting and wanted to do it. I generally agree with Rick Rubin that art developed in this matter is usually the best art. I didn’t know all that much about Leonard Bernstein’s oeuvre, conducting or composing (although I have seen Tar and Amadeus) or his personal history. Essentially, all I really knew of him was that he was famous and composed the score to West Side Story. That didn’t matter. I got what I needed to know from Bradley Cooper. One of the best things about following the work of good directors (and at this point, I am going to include Bradley Cooper in that list), is that it generally does not matter what the movie is about. If a movie is made by someone who is highly competent and cares about the work, it will almost always be worth the time to watch it. And the guidance of good artists is the best way to be exposed to new things.

Leonard Bernstein (played by Bradley Cooper) is a man of many talents in the musical world: he conducts orchestras, he composes symphonies, operas, and musical theater, he plays musical instruments. He is also Jewish and a homosexual. He was born in 1918 and entered into the music business in the late 1930s. That would make him right on time to push the cultural envelope by keeping his surname (as opposed to changing it to Burns) but too early to be openly gay. Leonard marries a woman named Felicia Monteleagre (played by Carey Mulligan) who is content, at least at first, to be his beard, his muse, and the mother of his children. Their relationship in all its complications is really what this movie is about. Both Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan affect arresting performances. (Although this isn't completely relevant to whether Carey's performance was good, I was affected by how much she aged in the story-line. After all, Ms. Mulligan is my age and I've always thought of her as being young or generally young.)

Bradley Cooper is a good director. He shows a general competence with the camera in certain flourishes and the choice of different film stock. (The movie switches from black and white to color based on the time period). But more impressive is his choice to set the camera at a distance and to employ long takes for scenes that are especially intimate. One is reminded that we are witnessing the domestic strife of real people and that these scenes are intensely private in nature. They are so well done and the characterization of the people involved so well developed, one wonders how the details got related to the writers. I am told that in addition to the many public interviews both Leonard and Felicia took together or separately, the creators also spent a lot of time interviewing the children. I suppose it would be impossible to really know what two people who knew each other very well said to each other in any particular room on any particular day (there is one especially intense scene that is incredibly specific as to it time/place, it literally takes place during the Macy’’s Thanksgiving Day Parade), but some scenes are likely to have happened in the manner we see it. For instance, the conversation between Leonard and his daughter as to the rumors going around (that Leonard is cheating on his spouse with men) is not something I think a child would forget or misremember.

I think the best comparison to make for Bradley Cooper is Warren Beatty, another actor turned director that starred in the movies he made. Warren Beatty described such dual roles as exceedingly difficult to pull off. He said being a director required a lot of control, whereas being an actor is about letting yourself get carried away. And because the process was such an ordeal, Beatty only made a few movies this way. How many movies will Bradley Cooper direct and star in? We will see, but I am for him not taking as many starring roles in order for him to make more of his own movies. 

The Killer (3/5 Stars)

I wonder who the narrator is speaking to in Director David Fincher’s latest movie The Killer. Usually a voiceover is directed towards the audience, but here the character involved, an assassin played by Michael Fassbender, is not the type of person who would choose to have an audience. Perhaps what we are witnessing is an internal monologue. Perhaps The Killer is talking to himself. 

Perhaps David Fincher is talking to himself here. The Killer is a competent and slick thriller, directed with competence and acted with proficiency, but it is not a crowd pleaser and doesn’t try to be. It follows an assassin whose philosophy does not inspire sympathy and whose outlook does not change in any distinct way. There is no character development in this movie. 

The plot is simple. The assassin botches an assignment. Then, because of his mistake, his agent attacks his hideout in order to “avoid blowback”. Presumably the agent, a lawyer played by Charles Parnell, wanted to kill the assassin, but the second set of killers never have a chance because they don’t attack the hideout while the assassin is home. Instead of waiting, they go ahead and ransack his place and beat up his girl. And then they leave for some reason. Maybe they all thought that the assassin would just go into hiding for the rest of his life.

The assassin doesn’t go into hiding. Instead, he methodically kills everyone involved one-by-one. Is this really necessary? It doesn’t appear that it is. It doesn’t even appear to be revenge. It is presumed in the movie that the attack on his hideout is to be expected since he screwed up the hit. Or if it is revenge, it is totally disproportionate. (What did the taxi driver ever do?) Then, after killing a lot of people, the assassin does not kill a particular character. That basically confirms this movie’s complete lack of any normal sense of justice. The happy ending was not satisfying to me.

 The Killer is well made as all David Fincher movies tend to be. There are colorful locations and at least one intense physical fight. But really, the movie is a lark. It exists but does not need to. I’m not sure it adds all that much to the crowded genre about professional assassins.

Killers of the Flower Moon (5/5 Stars)

In the early 2000s, HBO produced a remarkable TV Series called The Wire, which I could argue is not only the best TV series ever made, but perhaps the best anything ever made in the medium of film. The first scene of the first episode of the first season is a stand-alone vignette: the Ballad of Snot Boogie.

Snot Boogie is a young black man who has just been murdered. A police detective questions a witness as to how it happened. Well, a group of men played a regular dice game, of which Snot Boogie regularly took part in. Snot Boogie was not good at dice and at some point in most dice games, after he lost most or all of his money, he would scoop up the money in the pot and run off with it. Usually he was caught and given a beat down, until one game he was shot in the back and killed. The detective questions the witness: if Snot Boogie always stole the pot, why did you let him play. The reply: “This is America, man. You gotta let ‘em play.”

Per the audio commentary of David Simon, the point was that American society was so rigged and unfair, that it became absurd that its citizens would take part in the hypocrisy of the American Dream, this notion that anyone could make it. That is, if Snot Boogie was highly likely to never win, wouldn’t it be more honest to stop pretending that he could, to simply not allow him to play anymore? That was The Wire’s America. It is also the America of “Killers of the Flower Moon”, except in this case, Snot Boogie gets super lucky and wins the pot several times over. Then, perhaps, to extend the metaphor, Snot Boogie gets shot anyway and his winnings are stolen.

“Killers of the Flower Moon” is a bizarre story that could not take place anywhere but the USA. The Osage, a Native American tribe, were conquered by the USA in the 1800s and were forcibly relocated to a reservation in Oklahoma. It was desolate and unwanted land. That much is a normal occurrence in the annals of human history in all societies. What happened next is extraordinary. Decades later it was discovered that the land had oil under it and the Osage struck it rich. The movie informs us that their nation had the highest per capita wealth in the world in the 1920s. Substantial prejudice exists in the society, the Osage need white guardians to sign off on the disbursal and expenditure of their money and the white tradesman in town charge the Osage exorbitant prices, but even so, they are driving the latest cars, wearing 1920s high fashion, and intermarrying with the white populace (money trumping prejudice). When was the last time a conquered people were allowed to get that far? (To name some modern examples, I doubt we are going to see the Uighers or the Rohingya strike it rich any time soon.) Then, in a case study made famous by J. Edgar Hoover’s upstart F.B.I., many of the Osage start dying, some mysteriously and others not so mysteriously, to an extent that indicates the entire outside society is either involved in the murders or willfully blind to them.

Killers of the Flower Moon was directed by Martin Scorsese and stars, for the first time together in a Scorsese movie, his two main acting avatars Robert De Niro and Leonardo Dicaprio. They play historical figures, Robert De Niro as a man called King Hale an established businessman and philanthropist in the Osage Hills and Leonardo Dicaprio as Earnest Burkhardt, nephew of King Hale, a young man looking for work after his service in the Great War. The third main character is Mollie Burkhardt, played by Lily Gladstone, the Osage woman who marries Ernest Burkhardt and whose family members start and continue to die unnatural deaths. Martin Scorsese has a long and established history of making movies about people not exactly saying what they mean (think of all the Italian gangsters and their way with words) and this comes into play here as well. The characters are inscrutable in a way that perhaps only real people can be. 

We can start with Earnest Burkhardt, whose main attribute is his low level of intelligence. If we can say that the natural Leonardo Dicaprio role is one of ambition and charm (say Catch Me if You Can, The Wolf of Wall Street), this character is decidedly against type. Interestingly, Dicaprio doesn’t usually play uninspiring not-that-bright people, but when he does, they are some of his best roles (Revolutionary Road, Shutter Island). The movie takes a seemingly contradictory stand on Earnest Burkhardt both portraying him as the type of man who would rob at gunpoint, graverob, and coordinate murders of Osage but also one who loves his Osage wife. I assume the source materials bear this out because if it didn’t actually happen, you wouldn’t believe it. I am reminded of reading The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker which dealt with the enormous decline of violence in the modern era. In trying to explain the same, Mr. Pinker posited that part of it had to do with a sort of moral retardation in past societies. In parallel to a rise in IQs over time from better education, so there was also a rise in moral intelligence. That is, without the direct influence of a type of education that teaches abstract concepts such as empathy or equality between people, you would by default have someone who operates like Earnest Burkhardt. (Empathy is the ability to understand how something may be seen from another person’s point of view. Mr. Pinker suggests that this is an exercise in abstract thinking that a human needs to be taught in order to perform. This is in contrast to literal thinking which is like: I am white. You are red. We are literally different and so different behavioral rules apply.) The best thing that can be said about Earnest is that his disposition makes him predisposed to manipulation and so, given his nature, he may not be entirely culpable as he seems. In one scene, he is so easily manipulated that he fails to grasp that his uncle might be plotting to kill him too. But that is the best thing you can say about him.

Even more inscrutable than Earnest is his wife Mollie Burkhardt. I expect the creators of this movie found far less in the record about what made Mollie tick then the white people who were at some point interrogated by the authorities and cross-examined in court as to their actions. In various parts of the movie, Lily Gladstone’s facial expressions reminded me of the Mona Lisa. Why does she and her sisters marry white men? Is it a status thing? Is she in love with Earnest? Once all her relatives start dying, why isn’t she more suspicious? At some point, it would seem that she would rather be killed by her husband than consider the possibility that her husband would try to kill her. It feels like Scorsese did a decent job of portraying the Osage and the movie’s marketing materials heavily lean on assuring us of that point. Indeed, some of the best parts of the movie are all Osage. The field of the Flower Moon is poetry. The death owls are spooky. The best scene in the movie takes place in a powwow and concerns a moving speech by the chief of the tribe (played by Yancey Red Corn) about the present events and how they will respond to them.

Sitting in on that powwow is the most inscrutable character of all: King Hale. Here is a guy that has lived in the Osage Hills all his life, understands and speaks the Osage language, has made friends with enough Osage to be allowed in the powwow in the first place and is ultimately the mastermind behind a lot of the killings. If Ernest Burkhardt is morally retarded, King Hale is morally deranged. One is reminded of the villain in Chinatown who,when asked why he is orchestrating a particularly nasty scheme, replies without hesitation “The future Mr. Gittes, the future.” King Hale makes a similar argument about the Osage, which boils down to the following: Since they are all going to die someday, there is nothing wrong with murdering them. Then once he is cornered and the truth let out, he somehow believes that society will forgive him. I am reminded of Sam Bankman-Fried, a pioneer of his self-coined “effective altruism,” who seemed to think it was okay to steal from his clients, and that the world would be okay with it, because he felt he was so much better at spending the money. 

Killers of the Flower Moon is 3.5 hours long. But don’t let that stop you from watching it. Indeed, there is a great place in the movie to take a break either for an intermission or even for the day. That would be around the two hour mark when the agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation show up. (One thing about being stinking rich is that you can tell your problems directly to the President. It doesn’t appear at first that Mollie’s brief interaction with Calvin Coolidge would have precipitated direct federal action, but then again, Mr. Coolidge was historically circumspect with his words.) The agent in charge is played by Jesse Plemons, an actor who can somehow pull off normcore white guy and dangerous at the same time. The F.B.I does its work in a professional and competent way. Actually, it didn’t seem all that hard to crack the case, only a group of people with authority that cared enough to solve it.

Reality (3/5 Stars)

 

I am a long-time fan of the San Francisco 49ers and as I write this review, our quarterback Brock Purdy is being considered a candidate for the NFL Most Valuable Player award. Now, this award, not unlike the Oscars or any other awards given out for movies, have an inherent absurdity to them. After all, football is a team sport in the same way that movies are a team production. A good football team and a good movie comes about from the successful collaboration of a team. With that in mind, one may think it does the team a disservice by elevating one member of it and declaring that they are the most valuable person there. It may make sense if the team was atrocious except for this one guy who clearly was the only one trying, but these awards aren’t generally given out to individuals that took part in losing teams or bad movies. Indeed, the team winning and the movie being good are generally prerequisites to the individuals gaining recognition. So by definition seemingly, the individuals who win these awards that provide nothing but individual recognition do so with lots of help. 

Having said that, there is an obvious way that Brock Purdy is the MVP of the NFL, one which is never discussed, but probably should be. Brock Purdy’s salary this year is $870,000. The other contenders for MVP Dak Prescott and Lamar Jackson are making $40,000,000 and $32,000,000 respectively. Now, it is arguable that Dak Prescott and Lamar Jackson are better quarterbacks than Brock Purdy. But are they $30,000,000 a year better than Brock? Surely not. Dollar for Dollar, Brock is the Most Valuable Player in the NFL by an irrefutable margin. I bring this up in the context of a movie review about “Reality”, an HBO movie that came out earlier this year, because by that logic, “Reality” could be the best movie of the year. It is a good movie that is well produced. It does not feel or look like it was made on a shoe-string budget, but considering what is in it, you may well be correct in assuming that it is one of the cheapest movies HBO has ever made.

“Reality” is a great experiment in fidelity to source material. On June 3, 2017, a Farsi translator working for the federal government named Reality Winner was met at her home by FBI agents. One of the agents shows Reality a tape recorder and makes it clear that the subsequent conversation is being recorded. The resulting transcript, thereafter made public with redactions of sensitive material, became the source material of a play. That play then became the source material for this movie. The interesting thing from both the play and the movie is that they follow the transcript verbatim (except for that one scene near the end in pink). The entire movie takes place at Reality’s house, first outside in the yard and then in a nondescript back room. The dialogue couldn’t be more natural. Indeed, it is literally natural since it is a verbatim adaptation of a recording. It even has all those quirky lines and asides that you would never find in a real movie, unless it is a “Fargo”-type movie that throws in random stuff to seem more real. For example, Reality keeps an AR-15 in her house. It is pink. 

The verbatim transcript is inherently dramatic. The F.B.I agents inform Reality that they have a warrant to search her house and would like to ask her questions, but they don’t immediately tell Reality why. They want to see if Reality will tell them the truth or lie to them. Reality for her part goes along with what is happening without much objection seemingly because she is holding out hope that the FBI aren't here for that reason. If you know nothing about the real life case, then like myself, you may find yourself wondering what this is about, in a good suspenseful way.

Both sides are playing games and it comes out in the words and the performances. Reality Winner is played by Sydney Sweeney. At first, one wonders why an actress as beautiful as Ms. Sweeney is being cast in this particular role. But apparently the real Reality is young, blonde, and does cross-fit, so it is a plausible choice of casting. Given that there has been no money spent on production value, writing, or special effects, Ms. Sweeney, by herself, probably comprises the largest part of the budget. The lack of everything else puts the focus directly on her, most of the time in close-up. Ms. Sweeney rises to the challenge in a way that is generally not asked of her (or most actors) in other projects. It is a very good performance.

The agents, played by Josh Hamilton (Terribly Polite White Guy with Glasses) and Marchant Davis (Muscular Black Man) inspire confidence in the F.B.I. They have an agenda but don’t use intimidation tactics to get what they want. Indeed, they succeed in their goals through their sheer professionalism. They are upfront with Reality that the conversation is being taped (if Reality didn’t know that she was being taped, then the evidence acquired in the transcript would probably not be able to be introduced as evidence in a prospective trial) and are exceedingly polite (they treat her animals/pets with care). 

This professionalism allows them to better take part in certain manipulations, all entirely legal. They present Reality with a series of false choices. The agents tell Reality that they have a warrant to search her house and that they are willing to show it to her. They don’t actually show Reality the warrant though. They merely tell her that she can choose to see it. Reality doesn’t choose to see it because, presumably, she doesn't want to let on that this search may be about that reason. The agents tell Reality that they need to talk to her and that they can have that conversation at the house or at the nearby F.B.I field office.That seems straightforward enough unless you understand that Reality has a third choice that isn’t presented: she could not talk at all and seek the advice of legal counsel. Reality “chooses” to have this conversation at the house. The best manipulation is the agent’s statement to Reality that they already know what she has done it and how she did it, so the “what” and “how” do not need to be discussed. Instead, the agents explain, they want to know “why” she did it.

Do the agents already “know” the “what” and “how” of the thing they suspect Reality did? That we will never know. But once a perp starts answering the question of “”why”, no further questioning as to "what" becomes necessary. Implicit in a “why” answer is the admission that the act was done in the first place. For all those interested, “why” doesn’t matter and the agents probably only care about that question to the extent that it answers the question of whether Reality was working alone or in concert with other possible whistleblowers and/or foreign agents. What the agents wanted was an admission from Reality that she did the act in the way they supposed she did it. By the end of the interrogation, they have that admission. These agents are very good at their jobs. All of this, if written by a screenwriter, would be very well written. I can only wonder what the producer of this movie felt like when he first read the transcript. I suspect it would be like finding a puddle of oil seeping up from the ground in a field. There is a clear dramatic arc to the story and it wrote itself. You don’t have to pay the F.B.I or Reality anything for the writing or the rights. It is publicly available information.

The transcript is redacted to remove all indication of what classified information it was that Reality leaked to the press. But we now know what it was: Reality leaked a classified report detailing Russia’s attempt to influence the 2016 election and she appears to have done it right after Donald Trump fired F.B.I. director James Comey for not publicly stating that this interference did not occur. It is a credit to the F.B.I. that the substance of the leak did not affect their determination to enforce the law of the land. It was apolitical for the F.B.I. to prosecute Reality even though what she leaked vindicated the former F.B.I director. It is a discredit to HBO that it does not follow the F.B.I. 's apolitical lead. A subscript to the movie written by HBO infers a belief that Reality was unfairly prosecuted. Given that Reality committed the crime, the only reason I can see why HBO could take this stance is political. Since the leak confirmed HBO’s politics, HBO decided her behavior is forgivable. 

Write it on the blackboard a thousand times: An open society, that thing that makes the “free world” “free” is not about policy but process. It doesn’t matter so much what the result is, but how one gets there. It matters that the law is applied to everyone equally regardless of the sympathy we may or may not have for their cause. Reality leaked a state secret. Sure, it was not an immature data dump the likes of Chelsea Manning to Wikileaks. She leaked only one article on a narrow topic, but still her behavior is not to be tolerated. One may contrast the way she went about it with that of Edward Snowden who leaked far more information, but took ownership of the leak immediately and described how it was done. This would go far in letting the government know that he was acting alone and that there wasn’t a whole network of moles to worry about. Then Snowden left the country. He knew he had committed a serious crime and had forfeited his government job and indeed his citizenship by doing so. Reality, here, thought she could leak a state secret and keep her career. I hope her actions and what happened to her can serve as a lesson to us all. Just don’t do it.