The Prospect Of A Great Movie Year Slips With 'Amsterdam,' 'Tár' and 'Triangle of Sadness'
#197: "Amsterdam," "Tár," "Triangle of Sadness"
Edition 197:
Hey movie lovers!
As always, you can find a podcast version of this newsletter on Apple or Spotify. Thank you so much for listening and spreading the word!
In this week’s newsletter: Three more entries in the prestige movie season, and the chances of a great year are quickly slipping. In this week’s “Trailer Watch” more evidence to that point.
Amsterdam | Tár | Triangle of Sadness
For the people out there who call themselves cinephiles, movie lovers, or otherwise enjoy big screen experiences with a little more substance than, say, this weekend’s Lyle, Lyle, Crocidile, the calendar from post-Oscars in March until October is mostly seven months of throat-clearing and table setting for the hectic two-month sprint we here in this newsletter community have come to call “Movie SZN.”
The model itself is a concession, and also a self-fulfilling prophecy. Audiences aren’t showing up to watch these so-called “prestige movies” in theaters, so distributors drop them all at once in the most effective awards campaign window, which then leads to audiences feeling overwhelmed and confused and showing up even less.
The cycle has solidified in recent years, to the point that this type of movie is no longer considered first and foremost as a commercial product. It only exists because of the ego-measuring contest among Hollywood executives for little golden trophies, or to appease talent both in front of and behind the camera, or because somewhere deep deep down these people still want to try to make something great.
However, the bullseye for what “great” means has shifted with the changing motivations. We’ve seen similar fragmentation across all aspects of culture — if you can’t reach everyone, why try to please them all? Double down who you are. Awards movies have gotten more niche, more specific, and more weird. They are almost all the vision of a single auteur writer/director, often telling very personal stories. If people don’t get it, who cares!
Case and three points — this week’s releases.
After this week and last week, the prospect of a great movie year is slowly going out the window.
Amsterdam
Set in a post-WWI New York City, every character in this kinda sorta murder mystery is played by a famous person, beginning with doctor Christian Bale, lawyer John David Washington, and nurse Margot Robbie. Also featured: Robert De Niro, Rami Malek, Anya Taylor-Joy, Taylor Swift, Chris Rock, Mike Myers, Michael Shannon, Timothy Olymphant and Zoe Saldana. Wowzas.
Making a bad movie is one thing, and to be fair, filmmaker David O. Russell (The Fighter, Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle) has never been my favorite director even in his hits, but here he managed to make a movie that isn’t even interesting despite all that talent.
The runtime is long (2 hr. 15 min.), the pacing is slow, and the plot is convoluted the point of obscurity. The movie is far less interested in solving the crime than serving as a takedown of fascist politics, which I guess is some sort of artistic response to Trump-era politics but comes off as a tired recycling of uncomplicated villain tropes we’ve seen a million times.
One thing I wouldn’t call Nazi-ism is funny, and yet this movie is played in the tone of a screwball comedy. The ba-dum-ding humor didn’t get hardly any laughs in my mostly full and ready-to-enjoy-it screening.
A comedy that’s not funny puts a lot of pressure on the actors, and though Bale is excellent and Robbie is compelling even with a flat character, I felt like Washington really lagged behind the others. The three-legged stool of a movie doesn’t stand for long with one bum part. I was checking my watch at multiple points and just ready for it to be over.
Tár
For the intellectual, pretentious types who might read The New Yorker, listen to NPR in the car and have an opinion on the European gas crisis, this character study of the Great Man mythos in a woman’s body will give you plenty to gossip about with the other parents in the private school pickup line.
Cate Blanchett will almost definitely win her third Oscar for playing a musical genius who, over the course of 2 hr. 38 min., gets “cancelled.” She is fantastic and given the chance to use every tool in the actor’s toolbox here, turning on a bit of OCD, paranoia, delusions, narcissism, arrogance, and brutality.
But phrases like “character study” and “thought experiment” should start to raise alarm bells inside the brains of longtime newsletter readers, that perhaps this movie isn’t a thrillride of fun.
Not so coincidentally, the movie opens at The New Yorker Festival, and the first 15 or so minutes are something like a literal video podcast conversation between Blanchett’s titular Lydia Tár and a journalist. The movie goes to painstaking lengths to construct Tár’s glass castle that will eventually shatter, and for the longest time, you’re begging something, anything, to happen.
Then the dominos start falling, and you’re begging things to stop. Tár’s life falls apart systematically, and the movie doesn’t necessarily pass judgement on her, so her fall from grace feels nothing like righteous judgement. It’s just further discomfort. A thoughtful viewer is left asking whether genius requires one to be an a-hole, or the lengths to which obsession is helpful, or what are the correct systems for tracking and revealing misbehavior. All interesting to ponder, in an uncomfortable sort of way.
Triangle of Sadness
“Eat the rich” is a very popular theme in movies and TV these days, and is something like a thesis statement for Ruben Östlund’s career (The Square, Force Majeure). Never mind the fact that this movie and others like it cost tens of millions of dollars to produce! We’re all more than happy to point our fingers and laugh at billionaires, especially if they happen to be Russian.
That’s the basic premise of this movie. Everything goes wrong on a $250 million luxury yacht filled with uber-rich and terrible people, giving us all ample opportunity to laugh at their misfortune with all the tact of the food poisoning scene from Bridesmaids. Still, Woody Harrelson shows up to make fun of everyone for a while, and the movie finds a nice comedic rhythm.
The story is told from the point of view of a slightly less rich but no more likable couple of models, who love themselves far more than each other. The satire of their modern vanity might be the most effective thing about the movie (other than the poop and vomit), though the time spent in exploring their relationship pays off to exactly nothing when several guests and crew members get stranded on an island (not a spoiler, it’s in the trailer!).
Things go “Lord of the Flies” in a way that you can probably guess does not end well for the rich folks. The survival set-up is compelling and the social commentary pretty sharp, if obvious, but the problem comes when the ending decides to rob the viewer of any sort of narrative satisfaction or deeper insight, other than to say wow, don’t all these people suck?
The Next Two Weeks
Wanted to drop a programming note here to let you all know there will not be a newsletter from me these next two weeks.
I’ll be solo traveling in Italy, which I promise will be half as glamorous yet twice as awesome as it sounds. During the pandemic, while everyone else got really into sourdough baking, my obsession became the country and culture of Italy (thanks a lot, Stanley Tucci). I started dreaming and planning to travel there, and went so far as to start taking Italian language lessons for the past six months or so. Figured there’s no time like the present (and in the case of the US dollar's value recently skyrocketing against the Euro, that saying is quite literal), so I spent several months planning and saving and now I’m going for it.
Lest you all be left totally out of the loop in the movie world these next two weeks, I wanted to provide a quick rundown of the movies that will be coming out! Fortunately for both of us, there aren’t too many can’t-miss releases:
Halloween Ends: They’re trying to tell us this will be the last Halloween movie. Well, that is of course until the next Halloween movie. These things reliably make a boat load of money but the trailers for this one look pretty terrible, so I’d only engage if you’re a franchise completionist.
Till: The murder of Emmett Till is a story that needs no artificial stakes. It’s a big deal. But much like the recent biopic of Harriet Tubman, I do wonder if a relatively unknown cast and unproven filmmaker will be able to elevate this movie into either the cultural conversation or awards consideration. My gut feeling is no.
The Stranger: I’d be pretty excited about a two-hander starring Joel Edgerton and Sean Harris about a budding friendship between an undercover cop and a ruthless criminal, but the fact that this is a Netflix release from a second-time filmmaker has me cooling my jets.
Ticket to Paradise: George Clooney and Julia Roberts in one of those old school rom-coms, that’s enough said. The story has them aged up as parents trying to break up their daughter’s wedding (the excellent Kaitlyn Dever), which is a smart move because the target audience for this movie is something like age 40 and up. Regardless, 27-year-old me thinks it looks really fun and I can’t wait to check it out.
The Banshees of Inisherin: The film community loves In Bruges, which paired filmmaker Martin McDonagh with Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson as idiot assassin partners. But no one takes that movie seriously. So when the three reunited for this movie with a similarly bizarre and comedic trailer, people laughed it off. Then the movie premiered at the Venice Film Festival, and suddenly it’s a Best Picture contender. Take notice!
My Policeman: Apparently Harry Styles is supposed to be pretty decent in this movie, and I really hope so, because after Don’t Worry Darling he needs to change my mind about his acting talent.
The Good Nurse: Eddie Redmayne is a caregiver whose patients are all *mysteriously* dying, and Jessica Chastain is a nurse who’s on to him. Based on a true story. It’s a pretty cool concept, but the trailer made me think of something like a cheap TV movie. Then at the end, the logo: Netflix. Yep, makes sense.
Trailer Watch: Women Talking
It will be very interesting to see how this movie gets received. The amount of talent in this all-female cast — Frances McDormand, Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley — and critics’ eagerness to praise filmmaker Sarah Polley (a well-liked actress who hasn’t directed in 11 years) scream awards season powerhouse, but initial reports are that the movie is somewhat…confrontational. That’s not necessarily a death sentence. If the movie allows for some kind of mental satisfaction, and general consensus agrees with that point of view, it could clean up. Or it could anger people and get left out in the cold. Either way, from this trailer the movie does not exactly look like a bundle of laughs.