Late Stage Films

  With Fall Film Fest season just around the corner, the return of the "Oscar pundit" is quickly approaching. And why? For what? It can be fun enough to see 30 movies at a festival and try to guess what will win what, but sight unseen these predictors go off of conventional wisdom. If the last few years have shown us anything (in regards to the silly and frivolous world of cinema awards), it's that the Academy's push to get in younger and more international members has made all of the old rules meaningless.  I really want to hammer home the latter part of that sentence, because I think it gets overlooked in the Academy's diversity push. Yes, the membership got more racially diverse, and added more women, but there was also a massive  expansion in members who never made an American film. And the result of that has been really, really obvious. In the 94 years of Academy Awards history, there have been 13 Best Picture nominees that weren't in English. 4 of those ...

  It may take years to sift through the wreckage that "Bohemian Rhapsody" has laid to the musician biopic genre. The 2018 film, which was (credited as) directed by (alleged) sex pest Bryan Singer, was kind of terrible. It's an incoherent mess that very much feels like the epitome of the phrase "we'll fix it in post!" Nevertheless, it made over $700 million at the worldwide box office, and won multiple Oscars, in spite of being one of the most reviled nominees in recent history by most highbrow film critics. Allow me to openly and unambiguously back the highbrows here. "Bohemian Rhapsody" established the musician biopic as a sort of superhero movie for fully grown adults: the audience sees a thing they recognize and claps, with no regard for the filmmaking itself. We know this because that film's custodian, Dexter Fletcher, released his own directing project "Rocketman" about 6 months afterwards. "Rocketman" is a much better ...

  This past weekend saw 3 new releases completely and utterly fail at the domestic box office. This is, on one level, unsurprising: none of "Fall", "Bodies Bodies Bodies", or "Mack & Rita" were distributed by a major studio or got a major advertising campaign. On a more detailed second glance, it looks somewhat surprising to me. People (on social media, anyways) claim to want high quality and original films. "Bodies" has great reviews (a 91% tomato rating) and comes into the market armed with the A24 branding that got rather respectable launches for summer horror movies such as "Hereditary" and "Midsommar". Fall has decent reviews (the 71% tomato rating is surely good enough to not actively scare away a teen thriller crowd) and shares a pair of producers with the "47 Meters Down" franchise, a couple of truly awful movies that nevertheless made solid money as widely released indies in the summer months. And if the...

 In the modern blockbuster era, where "subverting expectations" is treated as both a radical political act and an inherently good way to tell a story, even a filmmaker as talented and creative as Jordan Peele can feel trapped. "Get Out" was a phenomenon when it released in 2017, one of the rare occasions in recent memory where... audiences embraced a wholly original concept. The film's domestic box office take, over $175 mil, was the biggest for an original film released that year (that was not historically based, or animated). The only films since to hit that number with that criteria were 2018's "A Quiet Place" and Peele's next film, "Us", in 2019. the major awards shows embraced a horror movie. We can go back and forth forever on what technically counts as "horror", but I would think that the most common answer for the last horror film to get love at the Academy Awards before "Get Out" is "The Sixth Sense...