What Does the Disney Downturn Mean?

"Wish" bombed.  "The Marvels" crashed.  The less said about "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny," the better.  The studio that was the first to have five $1 billion movies in one year, back in 2019, was supposed to be celebrating its centenary in 2023.  Instead, its box office fortunes have been so poor that Disney is estimated to have lost over a $1 billion on its 2023 movie slate.

Before I get any further into this, I want to point out that the entertainment business is cyclical and Disney has been in this position several times before - in the 40s, the 80s, and the mid 2000s.  You could almost say that the studio is right on time for another stint in the wilderness.  However, Disney's never experienced such a steep fall from such lofty heights before.  The 2010s were dominated by Disney blockbusters from its Marvel, "Star Wars," PIXAR, and Walt Disney Animation Studios (WDAS) brands.  This year, with the exception of one Marvel movie and one PIXAR movie, everything underperformed - sometimes outright bombing.      

The severe downturn in Disney's fortunes across all of its filmmaking units was due to the convergence of a lot of different factors.  There was the overspending, the oversaturation, the overconfidence in franchises and Disney branding, behind the scenes leadership difficulties, and an unfortunate mindset of quantity over quality.  When you look at why so many of the 2023 films failed to impress, it almost always came down to rushed productions and corner cutting.  Pumping out content for Disney+ was a massive misstep that changed consumer behavior in unpredictable ways.  COVID was an absolute wrecking ball and the dual strikes last year piled on the pain.  Every Hollywood studio has been suffering from similar blows, and Disney is far from being the one in the most trouble right now.  Things could get much worse - I'm worried about Nelson Peltz worming his way onto the board of Disney and potentially becoming another David Zaslav.  

One element I've been chewing over is that the alt-right has declared war on Disney over some of their DEI measures, and has been taking credit for their bad year.  There was also the whole tiff between Disney and Florida governor Ron DeSantis that got so much press in 2022.  A paranoid part of me is worried that this might be indicative of the whole American culture taking a hard turn to the right, the way it tends to after major national crises.  However, despite a few outliers like "The Sound of Freedom," the beneficiaries of Disney's misfortune have been movies like "Barbie," "Super Mario Bros.," "Wonka," and the latest "Hunger Games" movie - all just as progressive as any Disney product that came out in the last year.  Anti-Disney campaigns are nothing new, and while the latest ones may have had some impact, clearly it was only to exacerbate the deeper underlying issues that were already in play.  

Frankly, people are exhausted of the MCU.  The most recent animated films look lackluster next to the competition.  The live action remakes of the animated films have worn out their welcome. "Star Wars" has spent several years floundering, and doesn't look to right itself anytime soon.  All of this is perfectly normal and foreseeable, especially considering how hit-or-miss these movies have been since 2020.  The bad luck was that multiple Disney franchises and brands hit their low points in the same year.  "The Marvels" and "Wish" bombed in the same month.  After years of successes, people forget Disney's long history of box office disasters like "John Carter" and "Prince of Persia" and "The Lone Ranger."     

But if Hollywood history tells us anything, it's that Disney will be back on top eventually.  They're not even doing all that badly right now.  The superhero boom may be over, but it doesn't mean that Marvel films are all going away - just that they can't be counted on to be bulletproof anymore.  I expect that we'll see Marvel refocus on its "X-men" and "Fantastic Four" characters over the next few years.  PIXAR actually broke its streak of box office duds with "Elemental," and I expect both PIXAR and WDAS will reorient and adjust with the times.  The animation slate is currently sequels as far as the eye can see, which I'm not happy about, but it'll buy them some time. Somebody will get "Star Wars" right again, eventually, even if Jon Favreau's "Mandalorian" movie is a bust.     

This is a dip, not a nosedive, and recovery is very possible.  There will be fights (proxy and succession) behind the scenes, restructuring, reorganization, and possibly regime change.  It's probably going to get pretty ugly, and there's going to be way too much "Moana." However, in the end the Mouse isn't going anywhere.

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"Maestro" and "Society of the Snow"

I could probably write a full post for both of these movies, but I'm keen to get through the Oscar contender glut, and there are a lot more titles coming.

Bradley Cooper's biopic of Leonard Berstein - well, it's not the movie that I was hoping for.  It's certainly not a bad attempt.  There's some wonderful cinematography and lovely bits of dialogue, and Carey Mulligan is just impeccable.  However, I went into this movie not knowing very much about the great American composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, and I came out not knowing much more.  I'm starting to feel tired of biopics like "Maestro" and "The Theory of Everything" that decide the best way to tell the story of a famous man's life is to tell the story of that man's marriage, while haphazardly jamming his better known accomplishments around the margins.

Bernstein (Cooper) is a bisexual man who we first see with a boyfriend, David Oppenheim (Matt Bomer), at the start of his career in the 1940s.  However, he's soon wooing the actress Felicia Montealegre (Mulligan), who he marries and has three children with.  As his fame grows, so do Bernstein's substance abuse problems and the risk of scandal due to his continuing infidelities.  The marriage becomes strained, but endures over the decades.  Cooper, who directed and co-wrote the movie, uses black and white for the older sections of the film and color for the more recent sections, with a brief documentary framing device.  It's a gorgeous film to look at, thanks to cinematographer Matthew Libatique, and the biggest thing I was worried about - Bradley Cooper's performance - is perfectly adequate.  Even the much discussed prosthetic nose plays.

Unfortunately, the movie never feels like it's about Leonard Bernstein.  I'm mostly only aware of Bernstein through his media appearances in the 1970s and '80s,and I wonder if the movie would have worked better for me if I knew more about his earlier work.  Cooper includes a few sequences of him conducting and teaching in "Maestro," and Bernstein's compositions appear on the film's soundtrack, but there's almost no depiction of Bernstein's relationship to music - not the creation, not the interpretation, nothing.  There are parts of the film meant to be understood in the context of Bernstein's career, but offer no commentary on the career itself.  So "Maestro" is a perfectly fine melodrama about a bisexual man navigating his intimate relationships in a specific cultural milieu, but I couldn't recognize that man as Leonard Bernstein, and his musical career seemed to be a totally arbitrary circumstance.  I hate to draw comparisons to "Tár," because these are very different movies, but I have to say it achieved a significantly better depiction of a composer and conductor than this one.  

Now on to "Society of the Snow," a dramatization of the 1972 Andes disaster where an Uruguayan plane carrying 40 passengers, including a rugby team, crashed in the snowbound, inaccessible Andes mountain range.  The survivors had to endure months of exposure and starvation until two of them managed to hike out of the mountains and find help.  The film is told from the perspective of a group of crash survivors, including Numa Turcatti (Enzo Vogrincic Roldán), Roberto Canessa (Matías Recalt), and Nando Parrado (Agustín Pardella), covering the entire ordeal from the doomed flight to the eventual rescue.  A great deal of emphasis is placed on the spiritual struggle of the survivors, many of them Catholic, especially their reluctance to resort to cannibalism in order to stay alive.  

"Society of the Snow" was directed by Juan Antonio Bayona, who has some experience with disaster movies.  He made the excellent tsunami film, "The Impossible," in 2012.  "Society of the Snow" is a much larger and more ambitious project, one that hews much closer to historical fact.  There is a day by day accounting of events, including the rising tally of deaths - all identified by name onscreen.  I'm impressed with the grim realism that Bayona committed to, and that Netflix committed significant resources to making sure this was done right.  The plane crash alone is a difficult watch, with several deaths and grievous injuries shown onscreen.  The sound design is almost worse than the visuals, complete with terrified screams and snapping bones.  Subsequently there's a horrific avalanche that kills more people, other accidents and injuries, and close-up looks and the effects of frostbite, exposure, and starvation.  I have no idea how some of the effects work was achieved, and I'm a little afraid to find out.  It certainly looks like they shot the whole thing on the breathtakingly beautiful, frozen mountainside, where the accident took place, and recklessly endangered all the cast and crew involved.   

Roger Ebert famously remarked that he wasn't sure that there was any way to properly tell the story of the Andes disaster on film, after Hollywood tried in 1993 with "Alive."  I've never seen "Alive," but I feel that Bayona got about as close as anyone could have with "Society of the Snow."  The harrowing voiceover narration and the constant memorials to the dead set a somber tone, eschewing any sensationalism.  The actors are strong, but the focus is on the survival of the group rather than any individual.  There is heroism and triumph, especially at the end of the film, but it's mostly overshadowed by reverence and awe for the larger forces of nature and God.  Maybe it's simply that the disaster is now over half a century in the past, and the filmmakers' urge to preserve the memory of the event is that much stronger.  In any case, this is a rare disaster film from a rare director, and I'm very glad to have seen it.   

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The Nasty Delights of "Saltburn"

Let's get one thing straight from the start.  "Saltburn" can be categorized as part of the recent run of satires about the class divide, but this isn't the only thing on its mind.  No, "Saltburn" is also a torrid Gothic romance with an obsessive love story at its core.  The structure is very Hitchcock's "Rebecca," with the titular Saltburn standing in for Manderley, and an oddball Oxford student named Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) as our second Mrs. DeWinter.  Except, Saltburn and its residents are not too difficult to parse, while Oliver turns out to be much more of a mystery.

The first, pre-Saltburn part of "Saltburn" follows Oliver at Oxford, where he's a quiet, friendless nobody.  However, by lucky happenstance he comes into the orbit of the rich, popular Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi) and his more hostile cousin Farleigh (Archie Madekwe).  Oliver and Felix's friendship has some ups and downs, but the two are chummy enough by the holidays for Felix to invite Oliver to his family home, Saltburn, an outrageously opulent mansion.  The rest of the family includes Felix's parents (Richard E. Grant, Rosamund Pike) and his sister Venetia (Alison Oliver) - all privileged and terrible in their own ways.

Writer and director Emerald Fennell tries to do a lot in "Saltburn," and some of it really doesn't work.  Every time she tries to make "Saltburn" a thriller, it feels clumsy and tonally off.  She throws lobs at the narcissism and thoughtlessness of the upper (and upper middle) class, but there's nothing deeper to the criticism.  However, whenever the focus is on Oliver's increasingly lurid obsessions, or about luxuriating in the hedonism and excess of being so stinking rich, the film is mesmerizing.  I find myself absolutely willing to forgive all manner of cinematic sins because I'm so thrilled that Emerald Fennell went this hard being this aesthetically indulgent.  The fantasies on display are downright vulgar, but rendered so gorgeously that it all ends up being breathtaking.  The frequent exhortation in filmmaking is to "show, don't tell," and Fennell shows us everything, and then some.  

I also love what every single actor in the cast is doing.  Barry Keoghan has made a career playing creeps and oddballs, and he makes Oliver a total freak in every sense of the word.  It's a slow burn to the degeneracy, but worth the wait.  This may not be Keoghan's best performance, but it's the one he's likely going to be best remembered for.  Likewise, Jacob Elordi has established himself as the heartthrob of the year with "Priscilla," and as Felix he's utterly perfect at embodying effortless pulchritude.  Felix is such a scumbag, but you almost love him for it.  Richard E. Grant and Rosamund Pike as the elder Cattons are a pair of well-practiced villains, operating in such myopic terms with reality that they're as funny as they are horrible.  They're very thin caricatures, but endlessly entertaining ones. 

Then there's Saltburn itself.  The film takes place mostly in 2006, which informs the music and fashion choices, but there's a timelessness to the Cattons and their circle that eventually subsumes everything.  The house is stuffed with priceless antiquities and heirlooms, with a stone-faced butler (Paul Rhys) always hovering somewhere nearby.  There's some humor milked out of mundane household activities and detritus existing in contrast with such extravagant surroundings.  However, by the end of the film Oliver and the Cattons are throwing bacchanals and reenacting Greek tragedies, while playing out class warfare in very unsubtle terms.    

I'm not surprised that "Saltburn" has been very polarizing, or that there are viewers who think the film was a total failure.  I don't think that Fennell quite worked out the details of the finale well enough to pull off what she tried to pull off.  However, I think it's important to remember that the anti-hero is also an unreliable narrator, and I suspect that what some are taking at face value is actually his reframing of events to suit his own chosen narrative.  And I think Oliver was in love, really, the entire time.  But then, I'm a sucker for fancy cinematography and lonely outsiders.

And good grief, I love an old fashioned, deeply twisted love story.     

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"Fargo," Year Five

Noah Hawley took a few years off from the "Fargo" series, and has returned with one of the best seasons the show has had yet.  Set in 2019, the plot hews much closer to the original "Fargo" film than any of the others, with lots of references and homages to other Coen brothers projects too.  There's a kidnapping, followed by several murders.  Many of the memorable characters are wonderful decent people, while others are decidedly not.  However, there are also some novel twists and digressions, and parts of this year's story end up going in completely different directions from its progenitors.

The wife of a Minnesotan car dealership owner is kidnapped, but this time the husband, Wayne Lyon (David Rysdahl) had nothing to do with it.  It turns out that his wife Dot (Juno Temple) is hiding parts of her past, specifically that she was previously married to a North Dakota sheriff named Roy Tillman (Jon Hamm), who will do anything to get her back.  Other characters include local law enforcement, Deputy Olmstead (Richa Moorjani) and State Trooper Witt Farr (Lamorne Morris), Wayne's wealthy mother Lorraine (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and her lawyer Danish Graves (Dave Foley), and Roy's son Gator (Joe Keery).  And it turns out that one of the kidnappers, Ole Munch (Sam Spruell) may be some kind of immortal supernatural sin eater.

"Fargo" has a lot on its mind, as usual.  There are allusions to recent politics culture wars swirling in the background, with various characters standing in for certain types that have become more familiar since the Trump administration.  Sheriff Tillman is clearly modeled after Joe Arpaio, with a dash of sovereign citizen thrown in.  Lorraine Lyon is an evil capitalist with deep political connections.  However, at its center the story is very simple.  It's about Dot doing everything she can to thwart the violent, misogynistic forces that keep trying to take her away from her family.  The early episodes are action-heavy, and feature some thrilling home invasions, shoot outs, escapes, and a lot of improvised security measures.  Dot's a one woman army with a range of combat skills that would seem over-the-top if we weren't operating in an allegory-heavy universe where curses and sins seem to be very real, palpable things.  Sure, the pacing's still very measured and there's a lot of ponderous discussion of the nature of good and evil, but this season of "Fargo" is more gosh-darn entertaining than it's been in years.

A big part of this is due to the performances, which are sensational across the board.  Juno Temple and Jon Hamm are the anchors, playing new variations on their established screen personas - the bubbly optimist and the suave alpha male.  Sam Spruell, however, ends up running away with the whole season as Ole Munch, this ancient folkloric figure that doesn't seem to quite fit into the story, until you realize he's the whole point of it.  There are so many characters this year, like Lorraine, Danish, Deputy Olmstead, and Gator, who initially come off like these ridiculous caricatures, and then reveal their more human inner depths as the season goes on.  The show hasn't always been able to pull that sort of thing off, but this year does so beautifully.      

Noah Hawley also seems far more sure-footed this year, maybe because his targets are much more straightforward - toxic masculinity and cutthroat capitalists - and maybe it's because the connections to the Coens' work are stronger.  Nearly every character in this season correlates to someone from the original film, and there are more direct dialogue and visual quotes here than in any season since the first one.  The humor seems like it's hitting the mark more often too, maybe because of the mix of actors (Dave Foley in an eyepatch!) and maybe because it's so necessary as a counterweight to the dark subject matter.  There's some particularly upsetting instances of domestic violence this season, so heed the content warnings. 

Finally, though I'm sure we'll see another season of "Fargo" somewhere down the line, if this is where Noah Hawley decides to shop, the season finale offers one of the best endings I've seen for any television show, ever.  It's uplifting, wholesome, deeply spiritual, and offers a lovely sentiment of hope and forgiveness.  And after ten years and five seasons, it feels very earned.

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"Priscilla" and "Past Lives"

It's difficult not to view Sofia Coppola's "Priscilla" as a response to Baz Luhrmann's "Elvis," in which Elvis Presley's wife barely appeared and was a totally inconsequential character.  "Priscilla" gives Priscilla Presley (Cailee Spaeny) a full narrative centered on her relationship and marriage to Elvis, and it's as compelling as any Elvis story I've ever seen. Where Luhrmann's film was full of spectacle and recreations of Elvis's famous performances, Coppola's is far more intimate, limited to the subjective view of Priscilla (Cailee Spaeny), who was always waiting in the wings.  

There's a very Southern Gothic vibe to the narrative, based on Priscilla Presley's memoirs.  She met Elvis (Jacob Elordi) when she was a sheltered fourteen year-old and he was already a famous singer ten years her senior.  The early parts of the film have a certain giddy romantic air, as Priscilla and Elvis carry on their romance through sporadic meetings and trips, and gradually shift Priscilla out of the care and supervision of her parents (Dagmara Domińczyk, Ari Cohen), and into Elvis's orbit full time.  Unfortunately, Graceland doesn't give Priscilla the freedom she expects, and marriage doesn't improve their relationship.  

This is one of my favorite Coppola films in some time, because of the way that it plays with the familiar Elvis Presley mythos.  There's so much attention paid to clothes and makeup and the little details of domestic life that are usually the window dressing of other biopics.  Here, they're used as major parts of the film's storytelling.  From Priscilla's POV, Graceland is suffocating despite the luxury, Colonel Parker is only a voice on the other end of the phone, and Elvis in private is very different from his public persona.  Jacob Elordi gives us an Elvis who is both tragic and the kind of nightmare domestic partner every girl is warned about.  However, he's also recognizably Elvis Presley, who no one can say no to.  Cailee Spaeny makes an excellent Priscilla, in part because she's able to look so young in those early scenes.  It gets across how unbalanced and how unhealthy the relationship is from the very beginning, and makes Priscilla's eventual empowerment very satisfying.  

I feel obligated to write something about "Past Lives," which is never a good mindset when reviewing anything.  However, "Past Lives" is a major awards contender and has a lot of buzz around it.  Like "Aftersun" last year, it's a very personal, intimate story about a relationship.  And like "Aftersun," I didn't get anything out of it at all.  Greta Lee stars as Nora Moon, a Korean immigrant who reconnects with her childhood friend Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) as an adult.  The two were on the path to romance until Nora left South Korea with her family to immigrate to the United States.  The movie follows them as twelve year-olds, twenty-four year-olds, and finally at thirty-six.

The performances are good, but the tone of the film is very casual and very sedate.  Initially the stakes don't seem too high, as Nora and Hae Sung are always tentatively circling around romance, and never fully committed to each other.  However, the film suggests that the two would have fallen in love in other circumstances, with much discussion of the Korean concept of "inyun" - the amount of which will affect fated connections.  In this life the two don't have enough inyun - they're separated by distance, by their personal ambitions, by lifestyle choices, and by Nora also falling in love with Arthur (John Magaro), who is consistently not jealous of the man his wife is possibly also in love with. 

In theory, I like the idea of a film with very little conflict, focused on navigating adult feelings and relationships in very intelligent terms.  In reality, "Past Lives" left me cold.  I like the actors and their choices fine.  The filmmaking is lovely and intimate, and has a wonderful sense of patience.  However, the story was just so slight, and the characters so quiet that it was difficult to care about them.  I don't think this has anything to do with the characters having Korean origins or the language barrier.  I guess the film just didn't ever convince me that Nora and Hae Sung's potential relationship was ever worth so much consideration.      

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Catching Up With "The Artful Dodger"

There are reimaginings, and then there are reimagings.  "The Artful Dodger" is a period medical dramedy, set in Australia in the 1850s, and the lead characters are a grown-up version of the Artful Dodger and an aged Fagin from Charles Dickens' "Oliver Twist."  Dodger, now Dr. Jack Dawkins (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) is a brilliant young surgeon in the fictional town of Port Victory.  Unfortunately, in this era surgeons aren't paid and he has to survive off of tips from spectators when he performs his operations.  He also has a gambling problem.  In the first episode he finds himself in debt to dangerous people, and coincidentally his old mentor Fagin (David Thewlis) has just arrived as a transported convict from London.  

Dawkins isn't happy about this turn of events, because he and Fagin parted on bad terms fifteen years ago, and he's determined that his past as a thief should stay in the past.  However, as the situation grows more dire, he may not have a choice about returning to a life of crime.  Then there's the matter of the show's third lead, Lady Belle Fox (Maia Mitchell), the governor's headstrong daughter who is keen to escape her dreary life of feminine pursuits and become a surgeon herself.  However, she's not allowed to attend a surgery, let alone learn how to perform one.  A few chance encounters with Dawkins and some minor blackmail, however, give her an opportunity to start training.  She also introduces germ theory and anesthesia to the hospital, because this is that kind of show.

Fundamentally, "Artful Dodger" is built around capers, where every episode involves some kind of heist or scheme or bad situation that the characters have to finagle their way through.  The tone is very light and fun, despite the sometimes gruesome subject matter.  Port Victory is full of dangers from both the criminals and those who would civilize them.  The law is represented by the awful Captain Gaines (Damon Herriman), who quickly develops a grudge against Dawkins, and Belle's weak-willed father, Governor Fox (Damien Garvey), who is easily corrupted.  Our heroes have to outsmart both of them regularly.  There are also dangerous surgeries in most episodes.  We never see them up close, but there's a lot of black humor about amputations and practicing on corpses.  The pace of the show is so quick, and the mood so energetic, however, there's not much chance to dwell on the nasty bits.

"The Artful Dodger" boasts some of the best casting that I've ever seen for a series.  Thomas Brodie-Sangster, let's face it, could probably still get away with playing the kid version of Dodger despite being in his thirties.  It's difficult to imagine anyone better suited for the role, and he's clearly having a ball doing it.  Hopefully leading roles continue to come his way in the future.  Meanwhile, I kept forgetting that it was David Thewlis playing Fagin, a somewhat hardier version of the character who can get into scraps with the Australian locals, but is still the silver-tongued, sly old rascal we all remember.  Finally, bright-eyed Mitchell is well suited for all the bickering and flirting with Brodie-Sangster. Of course their characters are romantically entangled by the end of the season.

I was surprised at how much of a romance this turned out to be in the last few episodes, but it's handled very well.  I don't see many shows these days that really commit wholeheartedly to a full throated love story, with big emotions, big declarations, and the whole works, and it's refreshing to see.  By the time the dramatics really kicked in, the show had gotten me thoroughly attached to all the characters and invested in their problems.  The actors are able to switch from farcical attitudes to more serious ones without any trouble at all, and the writing is strong enough that I was genuinely delighted to discover that this is where we were headed the whole time.  It might feel like a bait-and-switch to some, but this is an approach I wish that more creators had the guts to try.  

 

"Dodger" is an Australian production, and the show pings as more Aussie than Dickensian.   Most of the characters are British, but there are a few Aboriginal Australian characters in the ensemble, including a robber named Red (Miranda Tapsell), who isn't shy about pointing out who she thinks the real criminals are in Port Victory.  I wish we could have spent more time with them, but there's a lot going on.  Maybe if there's a second season of "The Artful Dodger," we'll get out of Port Victory and see some of  the rest of Australia.  I hope that happens, because this is one of the few shows I've seen from 2023 where I immediately wanted another season after the finale.    

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"Extraordinary," Year Two

Spoilers for the first season ahead.

The second season of "Extraordinary" is better than the first, because it's more comfortable being a comedy about a group of friends first, and a comedy about people with superpowers second.  There's a lot going on this season.   Jen and Jizzlord have gotten together, while Kash and Carrie have come apart.  We learn a lot more about Jizzlord's pre-cat life, and meet his wife Nora (Rosa Robson) and son Alfie (Alfie Harrison).  Carrie develops a crush on a co-worker, Clark (Kwaku Mills).  Jen starts working with a therapist, George (Julian Barratt), to try and get a superpower.    

Many of the characters from the first season don't return, such as Jen's sister and ex-boyfriend.  However, many of them do, such as Kash's vigilante friend group, who get a little more time to register as individuals this year, and seem way more fun to hang out with than I'd first assumed.  Our leads are still in the process of figuring themselves out.  Carrie and Kash have to learn to be independent, though they have very different journeys.  Jen finally has to deal with some long-ignored personal issues.  Jizzlord has to face sudden fatherhood.  Everyone screws up constantly, but they also make a lot of progress.  

The budget this year goes less toward flashy superpowers (though there are still plenty), and more toward production design.  Jen spends a lot of time in a physical manifestation of her mind with George this season, which looks like a cluttered library.  There are a ton of sight gags here, with books on every subject from "Inappropriate Crushes" to "Weird Things You've Thought About While Masturbating."  "Lies" have their own section, available as audiobooks read by Derek Jacobi.  Nora is a hyper-perfectionist who writes self-help books, with a stifling home and wardrobe to match.  Then there's Kash's big project this year - an elaborate vigilante musical, complete with ridiculous costumes and pyrotechnics.  

With only eight episodes, and the status quo constantly changing, it feels like the season never slows down.  I like that "Extraordinary" pays off storylines that might have been dragged out in a more typical sitcom  fairly quickly.  Kash and Carrie are able to get over the breakup and stay friends, though not without some awkwardness and misunderstandings along the way.  Jen and Jizzlord's relationship actually progresses fairly maturely, though of course Jen ends up in a feud with Nora that results in a lot of shouting and chaos.  There's a shameless cliffhanger capping off another major arc, but that one also comes with a good amount of resolution too.  This is one of the few current comedies with serialized elements I can think of, where every episode is distinct enough that they don't all run together in my head, because the creators ensure fun ideas like Jizzlord-babysits-kittens don't outstay their welcome. 

"Extraordinary" continues its wonderful execution of all kinds of superpowered silliness, including a restaurant you have to shrink to get into, a swirling void that's being used as a convenient trash dump, and that creepy guy at work who knows too much about  all the women's menstrual cycles.  However, it's better at the character moments and absolutely great with the one liners.  It's genuinely touching when Kash and Carrie realize that they miss being together, but not as romantic partners, and when Jen has to say some important goodbyes.  And every time somebody announces that they've done something really stupid with a big grin on their face, I can't help laughing.  

So, enjoy the Halloween episode.  And the birthday party episode.  And the one where there's a gay panic subplot that gets subverted in probably the best way that I've ever seen.  I don't know how much longer this show is going to be around - it already feels like one of those cult television programs that blows up in popularity years after it's canceled.  I'm rooting for at least one more season, to resolve the shameless cliffhanger, but even if I don't get one, I'm happy to declare that "Extraordinary" lives up to its name.      

 

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My Favorite Norman Jewison Movie

I try not to let the passing of certain directors influence who I write about next, but I admit it's a futile effort.  Norman Jewison was one of the greats, with such an eclectic career that it's a little hard to believe that he was responsible for directing everything in his filmography.  He started his film career with Doris Day comedies and ended up being nominated for the Best Director Oscar three times in three different decades for films in three different genres.  He relished challenging social dramas, but was a deft hand at romantic comedies, thrillers, capers, and -  in a decade when they were not very popular - musicals.

It's a famous story that Norman Jewison had to break it to the folks who wanted him to direct the film adaptation of "Fiddler on the Roof" that he wasn't Jewish, despite his name.  However, he was being courted for the job because his resume had several excellent movies about fostering better cross-cultural relations like "The Russians are Coming, The Russians Are Coming," and "In the Heat of the Night."  And after Bobby Kennedy's assassination in 1968, Jewison wanted to make something positive and hopeful.  So his next film would be about Tevye the milkman, his wife, his five daughters, and the people of the little Jewish village of Anatevka in Tsarist Russia.  

I didn't see "Fiddler" until I was an adult, but I knew many of the songs from growing up in a musical household.  And after a single viewing of the film, it felt like an old favorite that I'd been watching all my life.  Aside from Topol I didn't know any of the actors, but the characters were so vivid and so well defined, it felt like they were all dear friends.  The age-old themes of tradition versus progress, love versus propriety, and the endless struggles with the generation gap were beautifully expressed in the context of a culture and religion that I didn't know very well, but found it very easy to relate to, with the help of Tevye's jovial commentary.  As many critics have pointed out, the musical's appeal was in its universality within a very specific experience.  And "Fiddler" reached a wide audience, topping the box office charts and winning warm critical notices.     

Jewison has appeared in several documentaries and other media about the film, talking about the production.  His approach seems to have been to get the best possible people involved, and to not fix what wasn't broken.  He loved the stage musical, having seen it in its opening week, and claimed to have cried through the whole second act.  He considered "Fiddler" an important work, and took the film version as seriously as he took any of his social dramas.  Cuts were made for easier adaptation to the screen, but the film was designed to be a roadshow musical, and enjoyed a brisk three hour running time.  This is almost certainly why I'd never seen it broadcast on television.  And though there was plenty of Jewish talent behind the scenes, including screenwriter Joseph Stein and the Misrichs, authenticity was sometimes still a battle. Jewison had to fight to get Topol cast instead of a bigger star, Zero Mostel, and to convince the great violinist Isaac Stern to contribute to the soundtrack.

It's the humanity of the characters that makes "Fiddler" so memorable.  Jewison could make pretty much any kind of film, but he once expressed that he had no interest in big action spectaculars.  He wanted to make films about people the audience could recognize themselves in.  And in "Fiddler," I recognized everybody from the busybody local gossip to the three hopeful sisters to Tevye himself, struggling in the face of a changing world, and soon to become another immigrant on his way to the New World.  It's been nearly twenty years since I first saw the film, and fifty years since its premiere, and it hasn't aged at all.

I'm well aware of the irony of writing this installment of "Great Directors" directly after the one for "The French Connection," which famously beat out "Fiddler" at the Oscars for Best Picture and Director, to Jewison's chagrin.  I happen to think that Jewison was right and that he made the better picture.        

What I've Seen - Norman Jewison

The Cincinnati Kid (1966)

The Russians Are Coming, The Russians are Coming (1966)

In the Heat of the Night (1967)

The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)

Fiddler on the Roof (1971)

Jesus Christ Superstar (1973)

Rollerball (1975)

… and Justice For All (1979)

A Soldier's Story (1984)

Moonstruck (1987)

Bogus (1996)

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"Our Flag Means Death," Year Two

Minor spoilers ahead.

This season of "Our Flag Means Death" is a little shorter than the last one, was filmed in New Zealand instead of Los Angeles, has fewer big name guest stars coming to play, and generally feels a little less polished and put together.  And honestly, for a comedic show about pirates that's far from a bad thing.  The first season took a while to reveal that it was actually a romance between Stede Bonnet and Edward "Blackbeard" Teach, but the second immediately makes it clear that the relationship is the point of the whole show.  For better and for worse, everything else is secondary.

When last we saw Stede and Ed, they'd broken up and were on very bad terms.  This season, while Ed continues a reign of terror over the oceans and his own crew, Stede and the Revenge regulars end up being recruited into the employ of Chinese pirate queen, Zheng Yi Sao (Ruibo Qian), and her strict first officer Auntie (Anapela Polataivao).  Pretty quickly all the crew members are reunited, Jim gets a new love interest in Archie (Madeleine Sami), while a few dead people turn out not to be dead.  There's not a whole lot of plot other than Stede and Ed continuing to navigate their messy, messy feelings for each other.  Stede's career in piracy is looking up, and there are some fun encounters with various guest stars - Rachel House and Minnie Driver show up to play Mary Read and Anne Bonny as a destructive lesbian couple - but not much else is going on.  Most of the Season One concerns with winning over the crew and Stede's complete uselessness as a pirate are over and done with.  We do get a new gentleman villain, Richard Barnes (Erroll Shand), but he's not very formidable.

If you're not interested in the love story, this season might come off as a disappointment.  However, if you've bought into the characters and you're invested in the relationships, you might like this season better than the first.  Like the similarly offbeat "Good Omens," it comes down to how much you enjoy watching this group of performers, who are increasingly moving away from the genre-based antics and more toward a general, LGBT-friendly hangout vibe.  Rhys Darby and Taika Waititi are so much fun as Stede and Ed that I didn't mind at all that there were less pirate hijinks and fewer comedic setpieces happening.  I also don't mind that Waititi has essentially become the co-lead of "Our Flag Means Death."  He hasn't had a great track record as an actor in recent years, but he's really compelling as Ed in a way that he hasn't had a chance to be with any other character in a long while.  

The production values are still strong despite a few shakeups behind the scenes.  There's less time spent on the ship, but more time on real locations, including some fun battle sequences.  I thought the Chinese design influences coming in with Zheng Yi Sao were a nice change, even though they make no sense historically, of course.  The sets and costuming remain incredible - my favorite example this year by far was an unrecognizable Bronson Pinchot showing up for an episode as musical pirate Ned Low.  Another highlight comes when Rhys Darby ends up on a monofin briefly to play a merman in a fantasy sequence.      

I'd love to see "Our Flag Means Death" continue, but I suspect that this will be the last season since the show has reached a natural stopping point, and most of the big conflicts have been resolved.  There are a couple of major cast exits that are very well done, and I don't think the show will ever be quite as good without them.  Frankly, I'd be perfectly content leaving Stede and Ed here, and watching the talented cast and crew move on to other projects. 

  

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My Top Ten Films of 1941

This is part of my continuing series looking back on films from the years before I began this blog. The ten films below are unranked and listed in no particular order. Enjoy.

Charley's Aunt - Sometimes all you need to love a film is one good performance, and here it's Jack Benny in the epic drag performance of a lifetime.  The love farce is old hat, but Benny as the unstoppable Donna Lucia from Brazil, "where the nuts come from," would cement his comic reputation, and influence every other drag artist for decades.  The second the dress goes on, something is unleashed in Benny that he could never showcase in masculine garb, and I couldn't get enough.

Hellzapoppin' - A fourth wall breaking, meta-gag pioneering, absurdist comedy about the cast and crew of a theater revue whose show is being adapted for the big screen.  Several members of the cast are playing themselves, bent on sabotaging the movie within the movie, there's a ton of tricky business with shifting frames of reference, and all kinds of humorous nonsense results.  It all ends happily of course, but the film takes the twistiest, silliest  possible road to get there.   

Penny Serenade - Irene Dunne and Cary Grant are two of my very favorite movie stars, but the movie's best scene is of Edgar Buchanan as the old print-worker who has to show the young couple how to diaper their adopted baby.  "Penny Serenade" is unapologetically sentimental, but honest about all the demands and heartaches of parenthood, and its toll on relationships.  Grant's speech near the end of the film is a heartbreaker - and got him a well deserved Oscar nod.   

Sullivan's Travels - My favorite Preston Sturges film is a self-aware comedy about a naive actor who wants to make important films, only to learn that what most audiences really need is a good honest laugh.  This contains my favorite appearance by Veronica Lake, and oddly one of the best uses of Disney's Pluto in any medium.  And though the film is uplifting, Sturges still manages to give us a clear-eyed look at the darker parts of this era of America too.  

Citizen Kane - Well, I'm certainly not going to say anything about Orson Welles and "Citizen Kane" that you haven't heard before.  Practically every shot has been referenced, homaged, and dissected by somebody, and David Fincher made an entire film about how the script got written, eighty years later.  "Citizen Kane" is not just a monumental achievement in American filmmaking, but remains a cornerstone of the mythos of Hollywood, even after all this time.  

The Devil and Miss Jones - One of the more delightful pro-labor films of the era stars Charles Coburn and an out-of-touch business tycoon who decides to go undercover at his own department store in order to root out union organizers.  Working in the shoe department, he learns to sympathize with the common man, admire the spirit of his co-workers, and even appreciate some female companionship.  I just don't understand why Coburn is somehow a "supporting actor."  

Dumbo - The first movie that I ever identified as my favorite movie.  It's darker than you probably remember, with the pink elephant segment representing Disney at their most unhinged, yet so universal that even the smallest children can watch and understand the movie.  Understandably there are elements that have aged poorly, but the messages of empathy and friendship are timeless.  The animation, likewise, still holds up just fine.  

Ball of Fire - A screwball delight that I'd describe as kind of like "Pygmalion" if Eliza Doolittle were a mobster's moll played by Barbara Stanwyck and wasn't remotely interested in learning to speak properly, and the professor was played by Gary Cooper, and he was the one who ended up getting schooled.  It's also kind of like "Snow White," but instead of dwarfs you had a houseful of stodgy professors and the Wicked Witch was a gangster named Joe Lilac.   

The Maltese Falcon - Like "Casablanca," this is the originator of so many detective and noir tropes that "The Maltese Falcon" can look cliche in retrospect.  Detective stories were commonplace, but not with John Huston's scintillating style and flair.  The femme fatale, the MacGuffin, the hardboiled detective, and both Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre as sinister villains would all become mainstays of the genre going forward - in short, "the stuff that dreams are made of."

Suspicion - Let's have an Alfred Hitchcock.  1941 saw the release of a great one with Cary Grant in the complicated role of possible murderer.  There was controversy behind the scenes because the ending, and therefore the whole meaning of the film, was changed from Hitchcock's original intent.  However, I still think the film works, and it works largely because Grant and Hitchcock were able to keep up doubts about Grant's character almost all the way to the end.

Honorable Mention

Meet John Doe

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Oscar Reactions 2024

The 96th Academy Awards have come and gone.  It started an hour early, yet still six minutes late.  It was completely predictable and yet pulled off some welcome surprises.  This was Jimmy Kimmel's fourth time hosting the Oscars, and he's found a good groove that'll get him invited back again.  There were a lot of little adjustments for the sake of time, like most of the song performances being significantly shortened, that helped to speed things along.  This meant that longer segments like the actor presentations and the epic "I'm Just Ken" production number could run as long as needed.  

I've never been great at predictions, but I got a decent chunk of the winners right.  My biggest error was assuming that "Barbie" was going to win in the production categories that went to "Poor Things," which got four Oscars, the second highest of any film.  "Oppenheimer" had such a sweep with seven that several of the Best Picture nominees ended up going home with nothing - "Killers of the Flower Moon," "Past Lives,"  and "Maestro."  I really thought that Lily Gladstone was going to win Best Actress after she won the SAG Award, but the Oscars have been getting more international by the year, and the old bellwethers aren't always right.  

Everyone seems to have gotten the memo that acceptance speeches needed to be short and sweet.  There weren't as many endless lists of names this year and only one really unfortunate speech - the "Godzilla Minus One" Visual Effects team trying valiantly to deliver their thanks and memorialize their departed producer in a language that none of them spoke.  However, we had some great ones from dependably entertaining people like Robert Downey Jr. and Emma Stone.  Even better were the presenters, most of them handling out two awards apiece, and delivering bits and banter that actually worked.  Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny Devito reuniting and heckling Michael Keaton as their "Batman" villain characters was great.  Kate McKinnon and America Ferrera roping Steven Spielberg into their nonsense was great.  John Cena's tribute to the 1974 Oscars streaker is an all-timer.  There were several blink-and-you-miss-em jokes that wouldn't have landed nearly as well if they were longer.       

The stagecraft this year was generally very good, with multiple screens and elements constantly rotating in and out of the space.  The big vertical panels  for the award presentations and the big circular element for the musical performances were especially eye-catching.  However, there were a few missteps.  The most obvious was the "In Memoriam" segment, which had way too much going on - distracting dancers, Andrea Bocelli and son singing "Con Te Partiro," and different tributes popping up on different screens, with a bunch of names stuffed together at the end.  Lance Reddick and Kenneth Anger deserved better!   Then there was the stunt montage that felt like a poor consolation prize for a community that's been gunning for their own category for a while.  Some of the transitions were jarring, such as cutting from the sobering "20 Days in Mariupol" acceptance speech straight into "I'm Just Ken."  

But speaking of "I'm Just Ken," it's easily the most memorable piece of spectacle that the Academy has put together in years.  Ryan Gosling essentially got to star in a genderbent "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend" with all the Kens from "Barbie," Slash showed up for a guitar solo, and the crowd was loving it.  Half the fun was the delighted reaction shots from Greta Gerwig and Billie Eilish in the audience as Gosling belted in his hot pink, bedazzled suit.  A big reason that this year's show was so successful was because it actually got to make use of some star power.  It's been too long since the Oscar frontrunners were popular hits like "Oppenheimer" and "Barbie," and the Best Song category wasn't terrible.  I mean, it was still terrible this year, but two songs from "Barbie" helped a lot.  

As for Jimmy Kimmel, he's clearly not as funny as John Mulaney, but he understood how to work the crowd, how to interact with the presenters, and how to keep his own shtick brief.  He handled material about the 2023 strikes, Donald Trump, "Madame Web," and Messi the dog about as well as anybody could be expected to.  I think the show works better with a host, and a seasoned professional like Kimmel has proven to be a sure bet.    

That's two Oscar ceremonies in a row that have been decent.  Fingers crossed that this is the new normal.

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Rank 'Em - The 2024 Best Picture Nominees

It was a very good year for the movies, and there were some legitimate surprises among the Best Picture nominees.  However, as usual, my taste varies from the Academy's quite a bit and the frontrunners may not be where you expect them in my rankings.  There's a notable lack of traditional Oscar bait this time around, however, which I appreciate.  From best to least, here are the Best Picture nominees of 2023, ranked.

1. The Holdovers - I've had to stop myself from calling this a throwback, because it's really not.  You could make current day films like "The Holdovers," about average people going about their daily lives and making the best of bad situations.  Alexander Payne has made several others.  But this is a Christmas film.  And it's a found family film.  And it's got Paul Giamatti and Da'Vine Joy Randolph giving performances that are all-timers.  And in so many other ways, this one is special.  

2. The Zone of Interest - I'm stunned that this was nominated, because this isn't typical Oscar fare at all.  Despite the British director, this is a very European art film that is completely different from the usual Holocaust narrative.  It's practically a photo negative, focusing on the experiences of Nazis as they try to compartmentalize the horrors of literally existing next to a death camp.  On the other hand, the subject matter is not only timely, but completely relevant to the state of the world right now.  

3. Anatomy of a Fall - Courtroom dramas can be tricky things, especially the ones with ambiguous outcomes.  This one clicked for me when I realized the film was about the whole family unit, not just the central couple, and we weren't here just to solve a typical mystery.  The thoughtful ending plays out beautifully.  The argument sequence is also magnificent filmmaking, not just for the tour de force performances, but because of how it's built up and deployed within the story itself.  

4. Poor Things - This was kind of the movie I was hoping "Barbie" would be, but of course never could be.  Yorgos Lanthimos is back for a female "Frankenstein" fairy tale, told as only he and Tony McNamara could tell it.  It won me over the moment the black and white switched to color, and I realized that it was doing a "Wizard of Oz" homage with the big moment of discovery being the heroine's first go at sexual intercourse.  I have a feeling this is one of those films I'm going to like more the more that I watch it.  

5. Killers of the Flower Moon - Have you ever felt guilty that you don't like a movie more than you do?  Martin Scorsese does everything right here.  DeNiro and DiCaprio play despicable men so well, and the plight of the Osage tribe is a dark chapter of history that I'm so happy is getting some attention.   However, I'd have much rather gotten this project as a miniseries instead of a lengthy feature.  The film totally exhausted me by the end, as touching and beautifully made as it was.  

6. Oppenheimer - I feel this is the movie that Christopher Nolan has spent his whole career building up to, and while it magnifies all of his greatest strengths, it magnifies all of his weaknesses too.  I spent most of the running time playing spot the familiar face, and never got all that invested in the subject of the film.  There are some beautifully orchestrated sequences, some fine performances, and I don't feel that my time was wasted, but I was never convinced the film was as epic as its production.  

7. Barbie - I appreciate "Barbie," but there was so much cultural baggage around the film that it was difficult for me to evaluate it on its own terms.  In the end, I think it has many highs and a few lows, makes lots of interesting points about gender relations, and yet isn't nearly as incisive or smart as I wanted it to be.  However, it gets a lot of points for being a whole lot of fun.  Margot Robbie is a treasure, but Ryan Gosling as Ken is perhaps the comedic performance of the decade.

8. American Fiction - This is going to sound terrible, but I'm so glad this made it into the race and not "The Color Purple."  "American Fiction" is as tired of African American struggle narratives as I am, and is trying something new.  I really admire the creative impulse behind the film, and the willingness to try something out of the box, even if the end result is often messy and inconclusive.  Unlike most viewers, I like the personal side of the story more, though the satire is very enjoyable.  

9. Past Lives - I keep forgetting this got nominated for Best Picture, and frankly that's not a good sign.  I'm one of those people who just couldn't connect with the film.  I appreciate all that it's saying about immigrant narratives and diverging life paths, but when it comes down to it, I didn't care about these people and their relationships.  I may just be at the wrong point in my life for it, or in the wrong state of mind, because I want more intimate films like this.  Just not this particular film.

10. Maestro - This is a perfectly good film, but it's a film about someone who only seems to be a famous composer and conductor by coincidence.  Bernstein may have been an unfaithful, closeted, substance abuser in a marriage of convenience, but it confounds me to no end that Bradley Cooper had so little interest in depicting Bernstein's career and relationship to music - the things that actually made him famous.  I don't think "Maestro" works as a Bernstein biopic without this. 

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"Only Murders," Year Three

Minor spoilers ahead.

There was never a more star-studded season of "Only Murders in the Building."  Not only do we have a victim played by Paul Rudd and a major suspect played by Meryl Streep, but the show's habit of having guest stars playing fictionalized versions of themselves is very much still a thing.  This year, Oliver Puttnam is back in the director's chair, and the big mystery revolves around the Broadway production he's determined to make a comeback with.  However, when the lead actor, Ben Glenroy (Rudd), turns up dead, Oliver, Charles, and Mabel have to figure out whodunit while making sure that the show doesn't fall apart.  

Our long list of suspects include cast members like Loretta (Streep) and Kimber (Ashley Park), producers Donna (Linda Emond) and Cliff (Wesley Taylor), an obsessed fan (Adrian Martinez), Ben's brother and manager Dickie (Jeremy Shamos), the camera guy Tober (Jesse Williams), a tough theater critic (Noma Dumezweni), and more.  Howard (Michael Cyril Creighton), a recurring Arconia neighbor from the first two seasons, becomes a series regular this year.  As for our intrepid trio, they're juggling mystery solving and Oliver's show with new love connections and some competing interests - which may spell the end of their podcast.  

Speaking of Oliver's show, the best part of this season is following the evolution of the nutty murder mystery musical "Death Rattle Dazzle" as it goes through rewrites, recasting, rehearsals, and all kinds of other behind-the-scenes chaos on its way to opening night.  "Only Murders" has always been a very New York show, and it makes sense that they should go full Broadway for a season, and make use of some of the local talent.  "Death Rattle Dazzle" is a ridiculous mystery where infant triplets may have committed the murder, and it's fun to see bits and pieces of it being performed throughout this season.  It also gives Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Meryl Streep a chance to sing on camera, which I appreciate greatly.  Quite a few other Broadway actors make appearances, and veteran songwriters Marc Shaiman and Scott Whitman were recruited for the musical numbers.

I like that there's less emphasis on the trio's personal lives this year.  The show-within-a-show provides plenty of melodrama, so there's less pressure to make Charles, Oliver, and Mabel the source of the big twists and turns.  All the romances are kept to the background and play a fairly minimal part in the plot.  However, I will say that the flirtation between Mabel and the cameraman doesn't really work, because she clearly has much more chemistry with Theo Dimas (James Caverly), a season one suspect who returns for a guest appearance.  Also, the show's creators clearly took pains to give Streep and Rudd plenty of the spotlight - they're clearly both having a ball, and I hope other actors of their caliber will show up in future seasons.   

And I'm glad that there will be future seasons.  After year two, I was a little worried that the show was starting to run out of steam.  As much as I love the cast, I prefer "Only Murders" when it's about solving murders and less when it's about the main characters muddling through bad relationships, dark secrets from their pasts, and other things that feel like filler.  I noticed that almost none of these past issues played any part in the current season, and there was almost no mention of characters like Oliver's son, Charles' ex's kid, or any of Mabel's exes.  The writers had no trouble keeping things interesting this year though, and this season had no pacing problems or dull subplots, like there have been in the past.   

Crime podcasts may be on the ebb, but I hope "Only Murders in the Building" has a few more seasons left in it.  Onwards!

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The Best "Hunger Games" Movie

I've consistently liked the "Hunger Games" movies, and consider them the best of that wave of YA genre films that started with "Twilight."  The latest entry is an oddball for several reasons - YA genre films are a rarity now, and this is also a prequel, subtitled "The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes."  The main character is Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth), one of the main villains of the series, but at a point in time when he was a young man with the potential to be a force for good.  The Hunger Games themselves are also new-ish, having been around for only ten years.  The game maker Dr. Gaul (Viola Davis) is looking to make changes to the Games to increase their ratings, including assigning the participants mentors from the Capitol.  Snow is one of these mentors and ends up with a mentee from District 12, a singer and entertainer named Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler).

"Songbirds and Snakes" is the best "Hunger Games" movie by a pretty wide margin.  It's got a smaller budget and isn't the greatest when it comes to action or spectacle, but the main concepts and worldbuilding are absolutely fascinating.  It was a great choice to mirror the development of Snow as a villain with the start of the Hunger Games' transformation into the huge, malevolent propaganda production they would become decades later.  I appreciate that Snow is someone who actively makes the choice to go bad, and has both good and bad mentors and friends.  There's a refreshing complexity to a lot of the characters here.  The Capitol is a cutthroat environment, still recovering from a terrible war, and most of the youngsters who act badly do so out of self-preservation.  By contrast, Coriolanus's compassionate, anti-Hunger Games friend Sejanus (Jose Andres Rivera) turns out to be extremely naive about how the world works.  Peter Dinklage also briefly appears as Highbottom, the self-hating creator of the Hunger Games and the head of the Academy where Snow is a student.  

Like in the previous films, the dialogue sometimes takes the melodrama to silly extremes.  The writers can't resist the urge to drop in eye-rolling references and on-the-nose pronouncements that the excellent cast gamely deliver with  straight faces.  Then there are Lucy Gray Baird's songs, which are numerous enough that this film might qualify as the first "Hunger Games" musical.  Zegler is very talented and mostly gets away with it.  However, these movies are supposed to be larger-than-life, and there's a good amount of dark humor and satire in the mix to keep things lively.  Jason Schwartzman plays the first Hunger Games host with smarmy panache, and Viola Davis seems to enjoy being the sinister Machiavellian figure and mad scientist.  This version of the Games is so rudimentary that it sometimes borders on farce, with crashing delivery drones and a passel of unwashed participants who are literally dumped out of a truck at one point. 

As usual, the combat of the Games is a high point of the film, taking up the entire second act.  Crucially, however, it's not the climax of the story.  The third act goes in an entirely different direction, narrowing in scope to focus on Coriolanus and Lucy in a new context and bring Coriolanus to an eventual epiphany.  It's one of the only times in the series where the conflict is driven by internal instead of external forces, and it's very effective.  I honestly forgot that I was watching a franchise action film in a few sequences.  And I was especially grateful for Blyth and Zegler here, who handily outdo all of the prior "Hunger Games" protagonists in the romance department.  

Prequels and origin stories are generally tough, because they often feel so unnecessary.  In "Songbirds and Snakes," however, it feels like the franchise is trying to grapple with some of the fundamental questions of its premise in a way that it didn't get around to in the earlier movies.  Coriolanus is asked multiple times to explain what the Hunger Games are for, and he and the movie deliver some satisfying responses.  So I wouldn't mind a few more visits back to this universe if Susan Collins, Francis Lawrence, and their collaborators have more stories to tell.             

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My Most Anticipated Films of 2024 Part II

This is the second part of my "Most Anticipated Films" feature, devoted to the non-mainstream films.  I'm listing these entries by director because the titles at this stage often don't stick.  

So many films that I was anticipating from last year's art house/indie/foreign movies list got delayed to 2024.  "Nightbitch," "Hitman," and "Blitz" will not be appearing on this year's list because I've already written about them.  This year's picks are listed below:  

Luca Guadagnino, "Challengers" - I was very disappointed when this was delayed from last fall due to the strikes, because I was so ready for this particular combination of actors - Zendaya, Josh O'Connor, and Mike Faist - in this particular film.  Luca Guadagnino has been consistently good at making sexy movies over the past decade, and there are simply not enough sexy films these days.  Also, we haven't gotten a good onscreen tennis romance since "Wimbledon" at least.   

Alex Garland, "Civil War" - I know it looks like a Roland Emmerich disaster movie from the trailer, but this is an Alex Garland film from A24, so it belongs on this list.  We've got Jesse Plemmons and Kirsten Dunst in the mix, Nick Offerman playing a tyrannical three-term president, and a whole lot of military hardware on display.  Until I hear otherwise, I'll be treating this as a sequel to "Leave the World Behind."  Oh, and did we forget that 2024 is going to be an election year?  The discourse is gonna be fun! 

Alex Scharfman, "Death of a Unicorn" - However, of all the A24 films currently in the pipeline, the one that has me most intrigued is this oddity, where Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega play a father and daughter pair who accidentally run over and kill a unicorn, with spiraling bad consequences.  I expect this is some flavor of black comedy, but it may cross into horror, especially since John Carpenter is apparently working on it as one of the composers.  First time director, so fingers crossed. 

Betrand Bonello, "The Beast" - This one got good notices from the Venice film festival.  It's a dystopian science-fiction romance about a couple played by Lea Seydoux and George MacKay, which involves past lives and "purging" of emotions.  It sounds enough like "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" to be intriguing, and yet at the same time very different.  I'm not too familiar with Bonello, but I liked "Nocturama," and this is reportedly his most ambitious project to date.  

Mike Flanagan, "The Life of Chuck" - I don't know much more than that this is based on a Stephen King novella, naturally, and stars Tom Hiddleston and Mark Hamill.  Frankly, I don't want to know more.  Flanagan's track record has been so strong these past few years, I trust him implicitly to knock my socks off.  This will be his first theatrical film since "Doctor Sleep," and honestly I'm not sure that this belongs on the indie list since Warner Bros. appears to be handling distribution.  

Sam and Andy Zuchero, "Love Me" - There seem to be  a lot of robot and AI love stories making the rounds this year.  However, "Love Me" is a clear standout for pairing Kristen Stewart with Steven Yuen as two post-apocalyptic, non human lovers - one is a buoy and one is a satellite - who run into difficulties trying to navigate a romantic relationship.  I have a great affection for weird little sci-fi indies like this, and "Love Me" definitely has one of the weirder premises I've seen in a while.  

Joshua Oppenheimer, "The End" - Oppenheimer has made some of the greatest documentaries of all time, including "The Act of Killing," and now after a long break he's making his first narrative film.  It's a post-apocalyptic musical about a family emerging from a survival bunker after the fall of civilization.  And it'll star Tilda Swinton, George McKay, Michael Shannon, and Moses Ingram.  I have no idea if it'll be any good, but I have got to get a look at this thing whenever it comes out.  

Robert Eggers, "Nosferatu" - This will only be the third version of "Nosferatu" after the F.W. Murnau and Werner Herzog versions, and I can't wait to see what Eggers comes up with.  There's no one I'd rather see tackle a new "Nosferatu," and I'm glad this is finally getting made.  Obviously, I'd rather see Anya Taylor-Joy as the leading lady instead of Lily Rose Depp, but Eggers still managed to get Nicholas Hoult and Willem Dafoe onboard, not to mention Bill Skarsgaard as the title fiend.   

The Cairnes Brothers, "Late Night With the Devil" - This is an Australian found footage horror film that premiered at SXSW a year ago and ended up in distribution limbo for a bit.  However, IFC and Shudder acquired it, and it'll finally be surfacing this spring.  David Dastmalchian plays the host of a fictional '70s late night talk show that puts on a macabre Halloween special.  There's reportedly a lot of meta fun going on with this one, and I've been keeping an eye out for it.

Yorgos Lanthimos, "Kinds of Kindness" - This is the project formerly known as "And," an anthology film with a bunch of actors including Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, and Hong Chau.  I have no idea what the plot will involve, but at this point any new Yorgos Lanthimos project is one to keep an eye out.  Also, I wouldn't trust that title.  

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