Rated R for sexuality and, more importantly, an incredibly graphic rape scene. The foundation of who Donald Trump is in this movie is built on a complete lack of empathy. Because of this, people are cruel to each other all through the film. The movie also has that Wolf of Wall Street attention to vice, despite the fact that Trump himself often doesn't partake in drugs or alcohol. Still, this movie more than embraces its R-rating.
DIRECTOR: Ali Abbasi Come on. This is a layup for me, right? I mean, this is me, straight up embracing my cultural biases. The Apprentice wasn't made for anyone but for people who reflect the same political values. But I kept hearing that the movie might not have been any good. Listen, I'm not the guy who can tell you this. I loved it. Absolutely loved it. The biggest problem, for me, is the fact that I can't use it as a teaching document because biopics aren't documentaries. But do you know how much I would want to cite parts of this movie to tell people how much they should be afraid of a man like Donald Trump. In terms of a movie, The Apprentice is brilliant. Again, not a big fan of biopics. I tend to find them follow the same layout, copy and paste. But Ali Abbasi has an eye on him. Part of it is the idea that any kind of takedown of Donald Trump can't be a standard presentation of how much of a turd he is. Instead, we have this Mean Streets Martin Scorsese approach to this film. Now, I'm going to show my hypocrisy off here. I hated Joker when it gave a movie a vintage Scorsese pastiche, but I love when The Apprentice does it? Yeah, I'm a huge turd. The reality is that I like the pastiche in Joker. I just disliked the movie. Trust me, if you want me on your team, you are going to make the film look a little vintage. But back to the lambasting of Donald Trump! Donald Trump mentally lives in the late '70s. Every part of him seems influenced over what happens in The Apprentice. The film takes the argument that Donald Trump went from a wishy-washy dork to a dumb shark because of the tutelage of Roy Cohn. So to set the movie in the grimiest version of New York with an aesthetic to match that dirty '70s vibe that movies like The French Connection were so good at achieving is smart as heck. I look at this era in history fondly because I never lived through it. Instead, there's something Bukowskiesque (I hate me too) about this era in history. Part of it is that Donald Trump only succeeded because he became the King of Turd Mountain. (I want this blog to be really crass, despite having thousands of entries where I avoided any vulgar language whatsoever.) Just to avoid constant caveats, please be aware that I'm talking about the character of Donald Trump as presented in The Apprentice, even though I think that they might be one-in-the-same. Donald Trump was born at just the right time to become what he has become. He lived in an era where the world was falling apart under its own stupidity. It was on the verge of the '80s, where things got bigger and bigger and --to a certain extent --prideful in its own stupidity. Trust me, as someone who is living in 2025, I can't deny that stupidity spreads. Maybe it wasn't stupidity. Donald Trump is simultaneously a con man and the most earnest man in the world. The Apprentice's Trump is a guy who believes his own press and that's mostly due to Roy Cohn. I didn't know much about Roy Cohn before watching this movie. By that logic, I still don't. What I don't understand is Cohn's decision to make Trump a pet project. The one thing that is made very clear to me is that Cohn is the one person who was never taken in by Trump's hubris. He saw this guy who tooted his own horn, Willy Loman but with success, and took him under his wing. I don't quite get it. Part of my read of Cohn at the beginning of the movie is that Trump becomes his apprentice mainly because Cohn has nothing to do. Cohn molds Trump into this mover and shaker because he sees the perfect vehicle for corruption. But there's a big difference between Cohn and Trump, at least from a morality perspective. Cohn knows he's evil. I don't know how smart Roy Cohn was. I get the vibe that Cohn was a monster, using his talents for his own sense of success. It's why everything around Cohn is about excess. Trump never really thought about morality. It's odd, because we don't really have a moral grounding in the movie shy of the few scenes with Trump's mom. I often ask my students if they ever made a mistake on a grand scale if they'd like to be considered evil or incompetent. With Cohn and Trump, they are evil and incompetent respectively. Regardless of Trump's stupidity, it doesn't change the fact that the man completely lacks empathy. That's something that I can glean from the real world. He never feels anything for anyone. It's such a depressing concept that someone that powerful can't even entertain the notion that other people exist around him. He rapes Ivana because he's bored with her. He's angry not that he might not sexually satisfy her, but the notion that she is a burden by her mere existence. It's incredibly depressing. My favorite thing about this movie, though, is the exact characterization of Cohn and Trump. I can't deny The Wolf of Wall Street vibe that the movie teases. But it's not The Wolf of Wall Street by itself. It's The Wolf of Wall Street by means of Napoleon Dynamite. Roy Cohn lives in a drug fueled, sex-addled fantasy world where he rules with an iron fist. Donald Trump is a man boy playing dress up. They both think that they are amazing, but both of them are insufferable from moment one. It's two guys who think that they're incredibly cool. But every scene together is in that awkward place where people would talk about how uncomfortable these two made them. There are scenes of outrageous wealth being displayed. If it was anyone else, it would be a Pennies from Heaven sequence. But adding Roy Cohn and Donald Trump into these scenes, you'd be counting the seconds until you got to get yourself out of that. I love it. As evil as these turds are, they're more insufferable and losery than anything else. I mean, points for having Donald Trump trip in a snowsuit. I honestly wondered how Ivana could stand being married to this man. I don't know how anyone could be in a room with him at all. I do have a confession to make. I used to pride myself on the notion that I didn't hate anyone. I was taught that the very notion of hate was a toxic concept and sinful in itself. I still really do think this. But I earnestly hate Donald Trump. He is the worst person on this planet (when it comes to making broad strokes) and I genuinely hate him. I'm not proud of that. I'm taught that I should love my enemies. But Donald Trump disgusts me on such a visceral level that I can't even pretend to hide it. There have been so many things lambasting Donald Trump and his cronies. But The Apprentice somehow seems like the most artistic and authentic take on the current president. Just beat-for-beat, I found the take on Trump fascinating. Yeah, it's a bit much and it's a bit shameless. But it is also a movie that resonated so strongly with me that I couldn't help but applaud. This movie was incredible. Rated R for being quite appropriately graphic about the abuses of the Catholic Church. These abuses range from physical abuse, to sexual abuse, to straight up mass murder. While we never see any of the abuse, the descriptions of these actions are harrowing. The results of these actions lead to alcoholism and we meet some of these alcoholics throughout the film. It's a brutal movie. R.
DIRECTORS: Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat Again, very hard to write about documentaries. How do we write about subject matter while divorcing it from the context in which it is presented? Part of the argument that goes into determining Best Documentary Feature is how much it moves you. As part of that, there's the idea that one's personal politics plays a part in the investment that comes with a documentary. Perhaps if you asked me years ago about a movie like Sugarcane, I would have been skeptical. I'm far introspective nowadays. I didn't go into this with a defensive stance. Instead, I let the misery wash over me. It sounds like a sadistic attitude to take, but the only way that real change will ever happen is if people start looking at themselves before putting up walls. For those not in the know about Sugarcane, this is a documentary looking at the Catholic Church's abuse of indigenous people in Canadian missionary schools. While it draws attention to its American sister schools, Sugarcane points the camera at one particular school as a representative of an institution that preyed on indigenous people for decades. When I was in high school, all of the attention towards the Catholic Church focused on sexual abuses by the clergy. I was also at the height of my charismatic love for the Church during this time, so a large part of me wanted to bury my head in the sand. After all, I was hearing things from adults that it was overblown. I think I heard a report from a pretty biased source that said that the amount of sexual abuse among the clergy was typical if not less than other professions. Do you know how I held onto that fact as a life raft for a lot of my formative years? It made the world make sense. But as time passes and more information gets out there about pastoral abuse, especially when it comes to minors, there has to be a willful ignorance to ignore it. We're re-entering some pretty dark times. The last two weeks in America have been incredibly troubling. There is a culture war going on between a bunch of different factions. The mental culture war I'm fighting is between Christian Nationalists (who seem to be gaining more and more traction within the Church) and progressive Catholics (a term that I would have been mortified to be associated with at one point but now find to be a beautiful concept.) (I'd also like to note that I wrote a lot of this blog, but then lost it pretty quickly when Windows opened a new website...somehow. I'm pretty angry that I have to rewrite this. Also, I was supposed to go on a date with my wife tonight to celebrate our anniversary, but my oldest daughter didn't do her homework again. These sentences are my way of venting my frustration.) Anyway, back to the notion of accepting truths. When I was far more conservative, there was this need to defend the Church against accusations. If I repeat something, I apologize, but I'm trying to recreate my initial argument. Back then, someone told me some pretty dubious information. I remember desperately grasping on to this pretty unverified fact that said that while sexual abuse in the Catholic Church existed, it was on par or less than other professions. Do you know how much I held onto that like it was gold? That gave me hope for the world. But stuff like Sugarcane keeps coming out. It is incredibly hard to be a Catholic in light of stuff like that. I can't imagine what it is like to be Rick Gilbert in this movie. Rick Gilbert has the unfortunate role as the most paradoxical indigenous person in this movie. While it seems that anyone else tied to these missionary schools distanced themselves from the Church (probably rightly), Rick Gilbert married Annie and seems to have become a pastor. How do you go from a world that praised the name of Christ and then did these horrible things to devoting one's life to Christ? I mean, I'm having a hard time holding onto my faith and that's just me interacting with people who lack empathy. But Sugarcane is a spotlight on some truly awful communities who institutionalized abuse on a scale that I have a hard time even comprehending. Like, there was a point in time when I was thinking about becoming a priest. Right now, I'm sitting here thinking that I dodged a bullet because I struggle real hard in my early 40s. But at the height of my faith, with the zeal I was holding in my heart, imagine if I went into the seminary to discover that there were all these monsters who did awful things. Like, the events described in Sugarcane are on par with almost concentration camp level evil. Children were raped. Babies were thrown into an incinerator. Live babies, thrown into fire. I don't know how to stress how evil this movie got without straight up telling you what happened. I know I'm stating some real obvious stuff here, but how could people who espouse the teachings of Christ? What is it about people that proclaim the Good News the loudest also seem to have the darkest sins attached to them? There has to be some kind of psychological correlation. It's really messed up. I'm not saying that holy people are without sin. But the darkness that came out of these missionary schools is so bleak that it makes me question everything. I know that there are good people who have religious convictions. I refuse to believe that every single religious person has this darkness inside of them. Like, it shouldn't be to a point where I hear that someone is filled with the spirit and that raises a yellow flag for me. I don't know what to think anymore. There's also this secondary narrative in the story that I feel like the directors want me to pick up on and it is the weightlessness of an apology. There are a few threads in the documentary, just because the different individuals have different ways of looking at events. Not that they don't all view it as less than horrible. It's just that they are different people and they process trauma differently. Going back to the Gilberts, he goes to the Vatican to receive an apology from Pope Francis. I tend to love Pope Francis. But I can't say that I haven't heard some stuff that might make Francis complicit in stuff. I don't know what to believe. We live in an era where there is a glut of information and all of it seems contradictory. Anyway, Gilbert goes to the Vatican to receive his apology and it seemed so tone deaf. Again, I love Francis, but there seemed to be an exhaustion to the apology. It's almost that a ceremonial figurehead is so used to apologizing for the atrocities of an entire faith community that the words seem to lose any kind of merit. I want these apologies to be heartfelt. I want to be able to go into a time in my Church where actual change seems to happen. It's not that Francis did anything wrong with the apology. It's just that he didn't do the right thing with it either. And these horrors that came out of the school? They cause all of these ripples in people's lives. These events don't live in a void. Everyone in the community seems to be carrying their pain differently. The prevalence of alcoholism seems to be a common theme. But then there's the story of the director and his father. Julian and Ed NoiseCat have an estranged relationship that may be one of the more sympathetic abandonment stories that I ever heard. A less sympathetic watcher might say that emotional vulnerability made Ed NoiseCat a bad father. But this is a man who carries around so much mental scarring from the things that happened to him in the missionary school that he had no idea what it meant to be an adult, let alone a parent. It's heartbreaking to watch. I would sooner watch a documentary about this than an adaptation about this. Spotlight covered similar material and everyone lost their minds. I'm sooner moved by the real stories by the actual people. What Sugarcane accomplishes is the fact that we are experiencing these events from the perspective of the fallout without actually dumbing down the events that happened there. The problem I have with movies like Spotlight is that it makes it all about the intellectual investigation and we have to imagine what the trauma was like. Sugarcane hits hard. A good documentary makes you look at everything a little bit differently. That's what Sugarcane did. Not rated, but there is a lot that kids cannot see in the movie. There is nudity, both in a sexual context and in a non-sexual context. Like apparently all foreign films, this is a movie about having an affair and the fallout of having an affair. (I am writing this, admittedly, in the midst of my journey through the works of Ingmar Bergman.) Also, there's a suicide in the film that gets pretty rough. It has a lot that is fairly objectionable.
DIRECTOR: Agnes Varda Oh man, the font is huge on my new computer and the spacing is all off. I have no idea how big this blog will be in the long run. Yeah, I eyeball it. So what? All I know is that this blog is on a To-Do list full of low-priority things objectively, but high priority to me. I'm a mess of stress and I need to get a blog about an Agnes Varda movie done. Le Bonheur took me all over the place. Maybe it is a good thing that I don't necessarily instantly adore every work by an auteur. I mean, I'm probably wrong in a lot of those cases. So when I start up an Agnes Varda movie, I'm not sure if I've signed up for a genius film or something that is going to drive me insane. In the case of Le Bonheur, I kept on jumping between the two. I didn't know what I was watching. I think my takeaway is that this film is absolutely genius while being kind of dumb at the same time. Okay, that's not even it. I don't know. The long and short is that I'm frustrated at this movie and I have to write about it to process it. I'm a vulnerable human being with lots of flaws and writing helps me understand art sometimes. For a long time, I thought that this was a movie about the joys of polygamy. I am completely influenced by my deep dive into Ingmar Bergman and the fact that he treats infidelity as something that everyone does. The Criterion Collection isn't a dummy. They know that they put Le Bonheur on a disc labeled "Married Life." I don't know much about Varda's marriage. I even watched the documentary that started this whole thing. But that was ages ago and I don't necessarily retain everything that I watch. But for a minute, this was the loveliest take on infidelity ever. I mean, sure, I hated Francois and I kept thinking that this isn't how the real world works. I knew that the real world gets messy. I'm also in the mindset that some people make polygamy work, but it wasn't like how this movie was showing it. After all, the movie has an incredibly chipper tone for the majority of the film. Considering that Le Bonheur translates out to Happiness, it keeps with that idea for the majority of the movie. Francois is an odd protagonist. Now that the movie is over and I'm writing about it, I knew that I was right for hating this guy. There are so many movies about the unfaithful. But usually, the adulterer tends to be somewhat sympathetic. There's something in their story that makes them tragically attracted to some kind of out. Either that, or the movie paints the character as some kind of monster. Varda doesn't quite do that. One thing, as much as Varda paints with optimistic hues for this character, is that he is without motivation for his affair. It does make him selfish. But the way that Francois speaks, he is unique as a philanderer. He doesn't really mince words with Emilie. There's never a story where Francois wants to leave his wife. If anything, he's the paragon of polyamory. He keeps stressing that he loves everyone equally. I mean, there was a reason why I kept stressing that I thought that this was going to be a treatise on polyamory. It paints it like it is something that can absolutely be achieved. Then the movie goes the other way with it and becomes an After School Special for a very specific crowd. The movie just has Francois's wife, Therese, kill herself after the two made love. See, Varda knew what I had floating in my head. Again, I understand that there are people out there who are fine with having open relationships. I can't wrap my head around such things nor would I want to, but I also don't want to throw stones at something that I don't understand. What I do know is that it's not really an open relationship if someone doesn't have a choice in the matter. Francois simply pursues Emelie without ever consulting Therese. When he eventually reveals that he has been having an affair for months and that is why he is happier than he was before, it puts Therese in a situation that seems unwinnable. I'm not in the mindset to victim blame here, but Therese absolutely should have destroyed him in this moment instead of --let me check --sleeping with him and then committing suicide. But that's all on Francois. It totally is. It may be a bit much for a movie like this, but I respect that curveball of an ending. (Note: I would go as far as to say that this ending is needed to redeem the movie that was frustrating me at this point.) Now, here's where the real unpacking happens. What do I think of the end of the movie? The end of the movie somehow makes the film a straight up horror movie. Yeah, it might not be a gore ridden murderfest. But Francois has a spare wife! That's something that we need to think about. Varda's most genius moment has in her bookending of the film. The movie starts off with a blurry image of a family of four holding hands and walking towards the camera. In that original shot, the mother is Therese. But the movie ends with a family of four walking away from us and Emilie is the mother. That's some messed up nonsense. I've clearly lost some of you. He goes right to Emilie immediately after the death of his wife. And this is where the unpacking is happening. The movie's name is Happiness. That's Francois's entire motivation. When he is unhappy, he does what he wants to restore that happiness. I often roll my eyes when people need to look beyond happiness in life and value the important things. But with the case of Francois, he's almost deleting an entire person so he can experience happiness. Therese's death becomes almost an inconvenience. That dinner table scene where people are volunteering to divvy up the kids shows the nightmare that Therese's parents are going through. It's really quite bleak. The movie ends in a world where Therese basically didn't exist. Francois, in his pursuit of happiness, goes beyond hedonism. He's almost a sociopath. Yeah, he admits that he misses his wife. But he says so with the same apathy that I just wrote that sentence. He's more upset about being put out as a parent. The more crazy part is that the supplanting of Therese with Emilie has so many weird beats that it is hard to wrap my head around these beats. First of all, the kids are oddly cool with having a new mother. But the bigger issue is the assumption that Emilie would want to be a mother of two on a dime. Emilie feels incredibly immature for the entire film. She's there because she finds Francois attractive. I get it. They're both gorgeous. But Emilie is in a different place in her life. She's not Therese. Yet, she's all in on just upending her life for someone with whom she's only had an exclusively sexual relationship. I don't know if that's the story that she told herself about how relationships are supposed to go. In a very specific way, it seems against her character. Do I believe that she believes that she loves Francois? Sure. She seems pretty head-over-heels for Francois. But she also claimed that she had a hard time taking the next step with a lot of men. She always found reasons for distancing herself from them. This entire upheaval of her life seems insanely out of character. The only thing that really makes it makes sense is her immaturity. After finally finding a place where she starts off her life as an individual adult, she's absorbed into finishing up someone else's life. I'm not saying stepparenthood isn't for anyone. I'm saying that Emilie isn't the most wired to make that choice. It's a fascinating ending because it is such a bleak decision to end the movie on. Overall, I'm going to say that I dug it. It's a weird take on the narrative of infidelity. It is harsh and oddly bleak of an ending. Still, it is absolutely worth a watch. Rated PG because the Norbot gnomes get a little bit scary when they turn evil. My kids, who aren't always the most brave, were able to handle this. It's kind of silly when cottagecore OGs have to fight some kind of penguin supervillain. All of it is in a very lighthearted tone, so there's not much to be concerned about. But there still is an intimidating threat at times when everything comes at Wallace at once. Nothing to worry about when it comes to parenting though.
DIRECTORS: Merlin Crossingham and Nick Park The odds on me making any kind of real headway in today's blog is slim. How is it that Sundays end up being the most stressful days of the week. I have oh-so-many goals per day and I've been squeezing these to-dos in the last hour. It's not through lack of trying either. So I'm trying to knock out a blog about Wallace & Gromit before I have to fold laundry and staple student essays. We'll see how much I can get done and go from there. We can all read the room on this one, right? Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl could be the best animated movie ever made. There's no way that it would win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. I have an oddly long history with Wallace & Gromit. My art teacher in high school used to put these things on all of the time and I started to love them. I already dropped the Cottage Core reference earlier, but they might be the most soothing form of children's entertainment while being simultaneously funny. In my head, there were dozens of Wallace & Gromit movies, but there are only two. Apparently, everything else was a short or a television program. Still, I forget how much I like Wallace & Gromit. I guffawed harder while watching this movie than I can say about any of the other animated features this year. It's not like I disliked the other movies so far. It's just that Wallace & Gromit has the ability to sneak up on you with an unexpected gag while providing some unfathomable impressive claymation. But I'm also forced to be critical. Wallace & Gromit, for what it is, never will be really challenging. I know. I'm bringing politics into what is the most vanilla content ever made. I know. I'm a bad person and some of you are rolling your eyes incredibly hard. Wallace & Gromit loves staying in its lane too hard. Again, it's been a minute since I've watch a Wallace & Gromit movie. But really, this series hasn't really grown all that much in terms of adapting to the 21st Century. Perhaps that comes from the notion that the world that Wallace and Gromit live in doesn't really make major leaps in attitude. Wallace entertains himself with making Inspector Gadget style technology. We live in a world where iPhone generations are the only major leaps in tech, yet we get these gear-and-sprocket hands that consume Wallace. Norbot, as adorable as he is as an attempt to talk to contemporary audiences, is a kind of invention that would have worked in the '90s as much as it would have worked today. It's cute. It's just not very heady. Spiraling out of this, while I liked the movie a lot, the story of Vengeance Most Fowl is painfully forgettable. I may have been influenced by a review of the movie when it first came out criticizing it for being almost superfluous as a story. I hate to agree --again, because I really enjoyed the movie --but that review might be right. Wallace and Gromit are afraid of changing. They pride themselves on being characters who are incapable of growth, despite the fact that we see some emotional frustration coming from Gromit. I think that Gromit keeps going through some kind of existential dread because Wallace is incapable of seeing him beyond the notion of being a sounding board for Wallace's obsession with Wensleydale cheese. (I'd like to point out: Vengeance Most Fowl might be the most cheese light Wallace & Gromit trope and I don't know how I feel about that.) But in terms of what does work, it does nail the heart of a story like Wallace & Gromit. I like the idea that two friends who have grown to know each other for so long have still fundamental issues with expressing that love. If anything, Vengeance Most Fowl is a reflection on not recognizing each other's love languages. Wallace uses his talents to try to make Gromit's life easier. The problem is that Gromit doesn't want his life easier. He's a bit of a luddite. Heck, the movie borders on being almost technophobic in its criticism of "these inventions these days." Norbot (whom I enjoy quite a bit) is an incredible piece of tech that Wallace almost accidentally creates. The intention behind the creation is wholesome if not crucially misunderstood. Gromit enjoys his frustrations with the garden while Norbit does the job of a hundred soulless gardeners in seconds. Gromit, being mute, is unable to express his frustration that his only outlet is being taken over by someone who doesn't belong there. But Wallace becomes the villain when he starts marketing Norbot to the neighborhood. And for a while, I thought that Vengeance Most Fowl was going to be a display of how tech will ultimately be the death of us all. In an era where AI is in every part of our society, I can kind of see where that would go as a story. After all, Norbot is hacked, turns evil, and makes an army of evil Norbot clones. If that didn't seem to be a condemnation on society's dependence on convenience at the expense of artistry, I don't know what it would be. But oddly enough, Gromit learns more of a lesson than Wallace does. I mean, a lot of that comes from the fact that Gromit --a dog --is more emotionally intelligent than Wallace --and fully grown man --is. But Gromit is the first one to forgive Norbot. (He should. Norbot steals the show of the movie and I get it.) Part of that comes from the fact that he's able to divorce himself from intention and result. He understands that Wallace created Norbot from a healthy place. Sure, he didn't think it through. Gromit gets Wallace's dopiness. And through that emotional intelligence, he learns to respect Norbot, despite the fact that Norbot is not conscious. I have to tell you. I like Feathers McGraw. I mean, I only kinda sorta remember the first story with Feathers McGraw. I was glad that this movie caught me up pretty quickly. But it's such a great and silly villain that kids can appreciate. It was odd though. I had to keep explaining that the rubber glove was a disguise for a penguin to look like a chicken. The disconnect was that my kids didn't understand why he wanted to disguise himself like a chicken. The inherent funniness was lost on them. It was even more lost on them when Feathers McGraw disguised himself as a nun. It doesn't matter. Violet was cracking up about all the slapstick so I didn't have to explain it. The more I think about it, Vengeance Most Fowl might be my favorite animated film of the year. I still have to watch a couple of them. But in a year where there hasn't been any real top notch, life-changing movies, Vengeance Most Fowl was a pleasant experience. An R rating almost exclusively for language. Like, it has enough f-bombs to definitely earn an R-rating. But it's not so much that I could even remember a single instance of the f-bomb being used. There's also a plot where children are prostituted to Nazi officers. Nothing is shown and, as far as we're informed, nothing actually happens. Maria ends up singing to the officer. But the implication is that something horrible happened to them. R.
DIRECTOR: Pablo Larrain I almost feel bad for writing about this one. This movie took way too long to get through considering that it had a fairly normal runtime. I have to thank whoever is running the IMDB page for Maria for putting the trailer right on the front page. I know they do that for every IMDB page, but I'm making a point. The trailer just started playing and I saw that this was directed by the same guy who directed both Jackie and Spencer. Both of these movies frustrated me a whole bunch, so it makes sense that Maria did almost nothing for me. (Does he name all of his female led biopics after single names?) This is probably an unfair take on the movie, but this might be the most sleep inducing movie ever. The reason that it took so long --four nights to be precise --is that I kept falling asleep. I am getting older. The couch puts me to sleep. But I've been watching other Oscar noms and I haven't had nearly the sleep issue with those movies. (Although, I dare say, that I have yet to really have my socks knocked off by any of the Oscar noms yet. It's still early.) I don't really want to write about a movie that kept putting me to sleep. I'll give myself some props. I'm really good at realizing that I just fell asleep and I will only have been out for a second. But it doesn't really bode well for having a unified understanding of what Maria is all about. These are issues that I carry with me. It's not that anything in Maria is outright bad or detestable. As a movie, this is a completely functional movie. If anything, it makes me appreciate Angelina Jolie more. My wife, who does not care for Jolie in the least, thought by the end of the movie that nothing changed her opinion. I gave Jolie credit. This is a heavier role than I'm used to seeing for her and she kind of nails what it means to bring this character to the screen. From what I understand, there was a splicing of Jolie's singing voice with Callas's unique singing voice. There's an intensity to Jolie that makes me believe that Jolie was earnestly invested in this role. It's not a role that I'm going to carry with me. Again, I kept falling asleep on this movie. (It's almost like I kept getting sung to sleep on my comfy couch.) It's just that I respect the craft that went into this performance. That's a tip in the right direction. But the real issue is that Callas doesn't have much of a story here. I'm actually surprised that this movie didn't grab me. While I tend to bemoan biopics in general, the format for Maria is my favorite way to do a biopic. I tend not to like biopics that cover a person's entire lifetime or entire career. I'm a big fan of the truncated timeline. This movie covers the last seven days of Callas's life. But maybe it is Larrain's fault because a very similar format was part of Spencer. Maybe Larrain is not-so-great at the spotlight on one moment story. Let me distance Maria from Spencer. While the format is similar, the effectiveness of the last days of Maria Callas works better than Diana Spencer's three days at Balmoral. These days give Larrain get to be a bit more artsy fartsy because there's no real way to say what Callas was dealing with. I respect the attempt. I don't necessarily love the execution. Part of it is that, while it is an examination of aging and mortality through the eyes of a celebrity, it doesn't really have a lot to say. Will I admit that I'm less-than-familiar with the historical Maria Callas? Yeah, probably. But the character comes across pretty clearly in the first moments of the movie. She's a celebrity who unabashedly loves her imprint on history. She's haunted by her own looming shadow and knows that her deterioration, while affecting her time on this earth, is doing more damage by forcing her to fall into obscurity. That's all great. But in terms of story beats, it really only has a few. Callas is rude-but-flirty to her house staff. She tries to sing. It's nowhere as good as it used to be in her youth. She walks out on the people trying to help her get to a good point. She interacts with some hallucinations where she stresses that she likes when people fawn over her. Repeat. It's a lot of that. While these scenes are great, it never really is a story of progression. Instead, we watch as Callas gets more and more desperate. While this could be intentional, I do also get the vibe that Callas herself has the same knowledge into dramatic irony that we do. We know that she's nearing the end of her life. It's almost like she watched the beginning of the film as well and has to get some kind of artistic success before the film. Really, it's a Monster at the End of this Book scenario, only she's really going to die. But where the film succeeds is serving the needs of character. It's funny. The movie is up for cinematography and the cinematography is pretty rad. But if this is just a study of character, it is fun to see these characters interact in the way that they do. I do find comfort in the most bizarre way with Callas's home life. The fact that she surrounds herself with people who adore her, yet are completely open to her causal abuses, somehow brings me a sense of reality to the whole thing. But it also stresses the fact that Maria Callas was a lot. Everything that she does is almost an attempt to build a wall between what most people find relatable and where art begins. She keeps doing these things that are incredibly frustrating from an outside perspective. But Callas never becomes unsympathetic. When the journalist has his "gotcha" moment, which seems a bit ridiculous considering that most people sound like hot death during the early days of rehearsal. Here's one thing that I'm having a hard time digesting. I get the superficial read on these moments, but I don't really connect the human element to these times. Maria Callas was a celebrity, one of the greatest singers in the world. She performed for sold out audiences and probably royalty. She did so much by herself. Yet, she's surrounding herself by old, gross, rich guys. Now, here's me trying to meet the movie where it's coming from. The young Maria Callas was in a rough spot growing up. Because she was prostituted, there had to be a moment where she relied on funds to allow her to sing. But she is married to a guy who is gross but rich. With whom does she have an affair? With a man who seems older and grosser than her husband? And even more insane than both of these things, so does Jackie Kennedy? I don't even understand the history of that. But it almost feels like the stories of the affairs doesn't really play out into the larger ideas of the film, what few moments really exist. Perhaps these scenes are to pad out the story. Maybe it's a bit of showing how insane her life was. But it feels more like it is a disconnect. Look, I should be writing more about this movie. But everyone is distracting me and I don't really have a good take on it. I honestly don't think that the movie has all that fascinating take on Maria Callas's life. Instead, it's a good performance and pretty visuals, but not much in terms of things to say. |
Film is great. It can challenge us. It can entertain us. It can puzzle us. It can awaken us.
AuthorMr. H has watched an upsetting amount of movies. They bring him a level of joy that few things have achieved. Archives
February 2025
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