A #MovieSZN Trio And Our First Ever Movie Fight
#296: "Emilia Pérez," "A Real Pain," "Woman Of The Hour," and our first Movie Fight: "Apocolypto"
Edition 296:
Hey movie lovers!
This week: Netflix unveils its big Best Picture play, a Sundance movie reaches for Oscar glory, and a Netflix genre movie reaches for nothing at all (and reaches it!). Then I unveil for the first time a new newsletter feature: Movie Fights. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” what if a movie leaned into being a musical and was proud of it??
Emilia Pérez
Netflix is desperate to win its first Best Picture, and this year’s race I think will be an excellent litmus test of what does or does not get the job done. As I’ve said many times, that prize is won by campaign rather than merit — think politics (actually after this week..I’m quite done thinking about politics for a while, thank you).
What wins elections? Money, and The Big Red Machine has a lot more of it than any of the traditional studios, especially in a year where Warner Bros., Paramount and even Universal are eyeing budget cuts and consolidation. The two Best Picture favorites right now, Anora and The Brutalist, are being distributed by super-indies Neon and A24. Emilia Pérez is, according to most straw polls, running third, and Netflix could try to bully its way onto the podium.
But will voters accept that?
On its face, the movie is kind of a hard sell. It’s 1) almost exclusively in Spanish and 2) a musical (sort of, I’ll return to that), 3) about a lawyer helping a drug cartel leader get a transgender surgery. I’m sorry for the minor spoiler there (it’s in the first half-hour of the movie, more like a premise), but there’s just no way to talk about the movie and not talk about that.
Awards campaigns have been popping off for Karla Sofía Gascón as the titular post-op gangster and for Selena Gomez as his ex-wife, but the movie 100% revolves around Zoe Saldana, whose performance is incredible and carries the movie on its back for most of the run time.
She sings and dances through musical numbers which honestly feel very out of place in the movie. Rather than communicate story, the big song-and-dance numbers freeze the scene (in several cases, literally) to spell out themes that are pretty obvious without all the emphasis. And they are far from swelling Broadway-style numbers or even toe-tapping diddies, more like inner monologues with intense choreography.
I’m not necessarily surprised by this movie’s success at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Jury Prize and Best Actress, because its boundary-pushing form and message closely fit the European cinema values (not to mention the movie’s director is himself French…despite this movie being set entirely in Mexico).
That’s not to say there’s not obvious quality on display here, and some seriously memorable moments. Were this movie to win the top prize in March, it wouldn’t be a travesty.
But it wasn’t really for me and I don’t think I’ll be clamoring to revisit it any time soon. If it surges in awards contention I’m going to first point to the dollars of The Big Red Machine.
A Real Pain
It’s actually been a handful of years since a Sundance movie competed in any of the major categories at the Oscars, but the early buzz has this in Best Picture and Kieran Culkin among the favorites for Best Supporting Actor. At first glance you might be thinking OSCAR BAIT — two Jewish cousins go on a Holocaust tour through Poland to honor their recently deceased grandmother and reckon with their past traumas — but make no mistake, this is best defined as a Sundance movie.
The festival has a very specific reputation for very earnest, very sentimental, very talky indies about the triumph of the human spirit. Tears optional, but encouraged. I often feel like Sundance fare seems more like an experiment than a real “movie,” a point I brought up when I saw Daddio (not a Sundance movie, but two people sitting in a taxi cab for 90 minutes is definitely an experiment).
I’d have the same criticism for Jesse Eisenberg’s first directorial effort (When You Finish Saving The World) and this, his second. There’s nothing inherently cinematic about it, which is saying something since it takes place in some beautiful European towns. They are lovely backdrops for conversations that could’ve happened anywhere, since the movie is really about the two cousins working through their emotional baggage.
Eisenberg plays…I know this is going to shock you…a neurotic, fast-talking beta male next to Culkin’s impulsive, charismatic, bipolar rollercoaster (what a stretch!). They make a great pair, and this movie is definitely captivating to watch. And of course, any movie that tours a viewer through a concentration camp is going to carry some weight. I’m certain that if I were Jewish, I wouldn’t walk away feeling like this movie was so insignificant. But to me it just felt like small potatoes for theaters and for the Academy Awards.
Woman of the Hour
Meanwhile, in comparison to the above, Netflix should be in the experiment business! This is the perfect place to give Anna Kendrick a chance to direct a 90-minute pure genre feature that feels insignificant.
And it turns out, she knows what she’s doing! This movie takes the indie sensibilities of directors Kendrick has worked with in the past (I’m thinking especially of Joe Swanburg, Drinking Buddies) and applies it to the true crime/thriller space, producing something that’s both exciting and heartfelt.
It’s only about half of a premise: what would happen if you went on a blind dating show and one of the contestants was a serial killer (a real thing that apparently actually happened on The Dating Game in 1970s LA), but Kendrick inter-splices the story with anecdotal scenes of the killer’s murders through the years. Those don’t end up skeleton-keying the primary plot (probably out of respect for the true story), and the movie ends up having the problem I sometimes have when I’m working on an article. There’s the story I have through my reporting and want to tell, and then there’s the actual story, and it’s hard to make the two separate threads come together.
Kendrick’s protagonist is kind of an infallible character, and the killer isn’t given any second or third dimensions either, so the story plays out like nothing more than a fun little cat and mouse. But again, it’s all about expectations. As 90 minutes of Netflix programming, with no awards or commercial aspirations, this was really kind of perfect and more than enough for her to get a shot at making something else.
NEW SEGMENT!!
Six-plus years and we’re still innovating here at No Content For Old Men. I have this idea for what could be a new semi-recurring segment, called…
Movie Fights
It doesn’t need much explaining. Someone really likes a movie that I don’t like, or visa versa, someone wants to rain on my parade. We both present our cases like lawyers in front of a jury and then you all can watch the movie and decide for yourselves who is right.
In that spirit, who better to bring on for our first guest fighter than my brother Drew, an actual real life lawyer.
He recently raved after seeing the Mel Gibson-directed 2006 drama Apocolypto, which I would describe to you now but I don’t want to bias you, so in the interest of fairness here’s the log line from IMDb: “As the Mayan kingdom faces its decline, a young man is taken on a perilous journey to a world ruled by fear and oppression.”
Presenting his case first, here’s Drew:
“The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”
Apocalypto was released in 2006, but its message has never been timelier. This film is an indictment of the excesses of American culture which lead to the toleration of evil. As suggested by the opening title card, this evil is what causes great civilizations to fall and thus is a warning to us all.
The premise of this film is essentially a two-hour long chase scene that is not dissimilar to other mid 2000s movies like The Bourne Identity. The audience follows a young father who must escape his brutal captors after they violently destroy his peaceful Mayan village. Our protagonist transforms from naive victim to fearless warrior as he attempts to rescue his family. However, this classic hero’s journey is just the vehicle for the film’s underlying message.
It becomes clear throughout this transformation that the protagonist’s inability to envision the evil outside his secluded village is what led to its vulnerability. This deadly passivism is reinforced when his captors take him to the grand Mayan city which is rotting from the tolerated darkness within. The audience views scenes of pestilence, slavery, exuberant greed, and human sacrifice.
The hero redeems himself by eventually recognizing the evil pursuing him and confronting it. The Mayan civilization fails to do so. That is the warning to us now.
And now my response:
I feel like when my brother argues, he thinks he sounds like Atticus Finch from To Kill A Mockingbird, while I think he sounds like Howard Beale from Network. “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”
One really has to dig deep to ascribe so much meaning from a movie that is, at least on the surface, really only interested in the minutiae of Mayan civilization. We’re introduced to an idyllic tribe that is immediately taken captive as slaves for a brutish warring tribe, in a first 45 minutes that are so brutal it could almost qualify as torture porn. Characters we came to love are brutally murdered one-by-one. The primary message I got from that was, “man, these guys lives suck.”
Our protagonist survives, and spends the next hour running (literally) from pursuing attackers, trying to get home to rescue his family and enact justice for his fallen comrades. If there’s a message there, it’s one Mel Gibson has made pretty darn clear in his filmography (Braveheart and The Patriot have almost identical storylines): the world is a jungle and it’s survival of the fittest out there. Make yourself the baddest cat in said jungle so you can enact righteous revenge on those who have wronged you.
The action is pretty cool and well-staged. The movie I’d compare it to most closely is The Revenant, honestly — one man’s journey through incredible hardship to settle his scores. But seeing modern politics in this is, to me, grasping at straws. And as pure entertainment it was for me too harsh to be any fun.
Trailer Watch: The End
The trend over the past year-plus has been to hide the fact that your movie is a musical in all marketing materials, at any cost. Audiences can’t know, the logic goes, or they won’t show up!
Or hey, maybe Joker: Folie A Deux was just a bad movie. Maybe Emilia Perez songs didn’t add any value. Wasn’t La La Land a giant smash hit? Here’s an alternate plan for marketing execs (a free-bee on me): market your movie as a GOOD musical. Like actually make it look like the songs and staging are worth seeing, and maybe (gasp) even something better than you can get from a non-musical?
That’s what this movie does. I’ve never heard of it before, but behind a really interesting cast of Tilda Swinton, George Mackay, Michael Shannon and Moses Ingram, a cool premise — a post-apocalyptic romance?! — and songs that actually seem really cinematic, I’m excited to check it out.