Director Andrew Bowler and producer Gigi Causey, who lived in Brooklyn a while before decamping to Los Angeles last year, were nominated for an Oscar this year for their short film, Time Freak, a time-travel comedy. I spoke to both by email about Brooklyn, their film, and the sometimes surreal nomination experience.
Will you write a speech?
They have a lunch for the nominees very early in the process and while they have everyone together—and it is everyone—they encourage us (strongly) to prepare something and commit it to memory. Then they show you a video by Tom Hanks on how to give a good Oscar speech and he, too, asks you to please be prepared. So, since it's hard to say no to Tom Hanks, we have prepared something. You only have 45 seconds before they play you off so it will be brief for sure. If we are lucky enough to be up there, we plan on mentioning the countless people who have helped and supported us in the collective 30+ years that Gigi and I have been working at this.
Directed by: Giorgos Lanthimos
Written by: Giorgos Lanthimos & Efthymis Filippou Full credits at IMDB
If Yorgos Lanthimos's previous feature, Dogtooth, examined the tyranny of the motion-picture director, then his follow-up, Alps, explores the lives of actors. The focus is off of instruction-givers: here, those who issue orders usually have their heads chopped out of the frame, or are out of focus, or have their backs to the camera; this is a movie about interchangeability, replaceability, the loss of self. It centers on a group that gets paid to fill in for the recently deceased, playing the dead to help the loved ones they left behind ease through their grief.
So, literally, they're actors, and the film addresses specifically the profession's unique condition: the weird exploitation, the objectification, the sexualization, the coddling—and the potential addiction to assuming another's life. But it's also more broadly about identity...
Directed by: Paul Feig
Written by: Kristen Wiig & Annie Mumolo Full credits at IMDB
Let an actress pass diarrhea into a restroom sink and a thousand critics can write think pieces about gender and the Apatow formula. But for me Bridesmaids had a lot less to do with sisterhood than it did the economy. Goddamn, this movie is one long class-anxiety nightmare, a relentless shaming—sexually, professionally, every which way—of Kristen Wiig's Annie, who has to ride coach while others ride first class, who has to fret over price tags, who drives a shit car, who doesn't have the resources to shower her best friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph) with the kind of gifts and parties that a rival lady-friend can. I thought Annie's problem wasn't that she had to watch Lillian get married—the formula for so many friends-growing-apart narratives—but that she had to watch as her old pal moved past her economically. The saddest part is the way Annie's economic life becomes linked with her personal life: her bakery goes under, she loses her boyfriend; being broke makes her insecure and inspires a self-loathing that pushes her to sleep with awful men. If it weren't for all the jokes, Bridesmaids would have really bummed me out.
Keep reading my conversation with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine
Directed by: Stephen Daldry
Written by: Eric Roth Full credits at IMDb
[The main character] embodied the caricature of the new, post-Giuliani New Yorker, the self-centered resident who considers the city his personal plaything. The movie is a lot of fun as a contemporary travelogue (hey, it's our beloved Sunny's! And the intersection of Front and Pearl streets!), as the movie's junior detective story—imbued with phony gravitas via terrorism—takes Oskar from Queens to Brooklyn, exploring the city's diversity to discover that most New Yorkers are fundamentally sympathetic and kind (as long as they don't live in Rockaway). But the city also comes across as a baby-proofed wonderland, in which an unaccompanied minor's greatest concern when gabbing with a group of homeless people in Central Park, or walking over the Manhattan Bridge to Fort Greene, or climbing into a car with a strange adult, is whether he can muster the courage to overcome his social anxieties. I guess he has bigger things to worry about, like strangers flying planes into buildings?
Keep reading my conversation with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine
Directed by: Ben Wheatley Written by: Ben Wheatley & Amy Jump Full credits at IMDb
Ben Wheatley's cryptic, loose, gory, and discombobulating sophomore feature is part kitchen-sink drama, part hit-man buddy picture, and part pagan death-cult horror movie—as though the fellas from In Bruges wandered into a version of Wicker Man directed by Mike Leigh. It revolves around Jay (Neil Maskell), an out-of-work and rageoholic assassin-qua-family man, with a Danny Torrance-looking son and an embittered marriage. For half an hour, the trio's domestic dramas play out, but unsettling jump cuts and Jim Williams's unnerving Penderecki-esque score suggest something amiss beyond family strife. Then Jay gets a new job.
Not unlike Jacob's Ladder, the movie concerns former soldiers—in this case, UK Iraq War vets—inhabiting an increasingly surreal world of nocturnal visions and peculiar encounters.
Moneyball is a story about baseball, which means it's a story about America, right? It's a redemption story, but more to the point an American Dream story, a practically Capraesque affirmation of America, though perhaps a bit more complex; Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) has the financial disadvantage as the general manager of the Oakland A's—they're the runts of capitalism, with one-third of the payroll of the Yankees—but he chips away at their hegemony through his determination and intelligence; or, at least, the smarts to employ and listen to people smarter than him (Jonah Hill). Strangely, Beane struck me as a Mitt Romney figure; his solution to solving baseball's "medieval thinking" sounded awfully Bain Capital-esque, making systems more efficient by breaking hoary shibboleths about prizing people over statistics. Moneyball sort of celebrates a profits (i.e. wins)-over-people approach. Although Beane also succeeds only when he becomes less like Romney (in affect if not ideology)—when he drops the cold and distant thing and connects with his players.
Keep reading my conversation with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine
Directed by: David Fincher Written by: Steven Zaillian Full credits at IMDb
There's a pretty plain moral simplicity here: Lisbeth becomes this absurd repository for all that's awful and abusive about how men treat women, the barbarity of this misogyny highlighted by the red-herring connection of the case she's investigating to Scandinavian Nazis. And if there's one thing the Academy loves, it's movies about the WWII-era Jewish experience, yeah? I think what's most damaging to this movie's Oscar chances is that it's lowbrow and artless, a pulpy streamlining of Steig Larsson's knotty, already artless plotting—efficient perhaps, but Oscarbait's gotta be more than summer fare with a prestige-season gloss; it's gotta make at least pretenses toward significance! And probably feature fewer car chases, eh?
Keep reading my conversation with Benjamin at The L Magazine
Written & Directed by: Tate Taylor Full credits at IMDb
All black women are wonderful and all white women are terrible—except for those who went to college, that is! If I were a woman, I would have left the theater feeling so much better about myself, whether black or white. (Not as a man, though. The movie's tangential males are either horny, boorish, violent, casually misogynistic, casually racist, and/or uxorious lily-livers.) For any black women in the audience, they can identify, or at least sympathize, with the film's wise, quasi-magical black women: so put upon by society, but so strong, so courageous! For the whites, they can take comfort in the fact that the white people (like them!) aren't at all so, so, so racist and mean anymore. Good for you, white people! Well, except, aren't some women still treated similarly to the way those in The Help are? I mean, ok, state surgeon generals don't force Caribbean nannies to use separate bathrooms. But only a quarter of Park Slope nannies get paid overtime, for example, even though that's the very first right in New York state's recently adopted Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. What I mean is that I wish director Tate Taylor had acknowledged that there's still plenty of hired help all over America, and that though they're not treated monstrously, they can be treated less than ideally. Instead, he depicts it all as problems of the past since rectified. I also wish he hadn't portrayed black women as good because they're good mothers, and white women as bad because they're bad mothers. (Though he allows that unmarried women could go to college and become writers, so they can tell the stories of mothers.)
Keep reading my conversation with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine
Directed by: Xavier Gens Written by: Karl Mueller & Eron Sheean Full credits at IMDb
The heroes in Xavier Gens's The Divide don't simply stumble into some prefab horror-movie depravity. The French splattermeister doesn't take the conditions of a torture porn for granted: rather, his characters slowly fashion them—all it takes is nine normal New York neighbors locked in the superintendent's fallout shelter following a nuclear attack for a matter of weeks before shaved-hairless men are living beside the bound and battered corpse of their former sex slave, trying to rape the rest of the male and female survivors. The question is whether Gens's brutality and gore have a purpose. His breakthrough, 2007's Frontier(s), was so blatantly political that its politics were inconsequential, receding behind a pointless exercise in envelope-pushing degeneracy. But I don't think The Divide is so nihilistic, perhaps because the director is working from a script he didn't write.
