Late Stage Films

 I could write up a simple and to-the-point review of David O. Russell's newest conspiracy comedy, "Amsterdam". Like his acclaimed 2013 hit "American Hustle", this film carries a stacked cast and a thin script. It is both a passable comedy and a positively incoherent retelling of a deeply dumb criminal plot. The actors are mostly just fine, and few are given much to do, but Rami Malek as the quiet smarmy villain is good enough to single out. The sets and costumes look impressive (and expensive!). I don't think I wasted my time streaming the movie, and I even enjoyed it in spaces, but I certainly don't think it's a must see.  More interesting is trying to piece together how we got to this point, for everyone involved. David O. Russell got to this point by being a deeply awful person, who has behaved rudely and even violently to the stars of about half of his films. There's the groping his niece thing, which feels well beyond the allowable degree o...

 Hurrah, the useful practice of prognosticating film awards. It's hard to guess which way the wind blows - critics awards can be helpful, but hose people don't vote in the academy. Yes, I think these awards do matter, as it gives old people a list of movies to stream now that nobody sees dramas in theaters anymore. Anyways, here's my best guess at where the race is going.  Best Picture has who knows how many films seriously in contention to win it? The three best reviewed , most acclaimed films of the year are Tar , The Banshees of Inisherin , and Everything Everywhere All At Once . Any of these could be winners, and all have plenty of reasons why they might not win - "Tar" is challenging and doesn't make anyone feel good, "Banshees" is not particularly about  much (at least in the way that the Oscars usually want their big winners to be some kind of commentary on some kind of social issue), and "Everything Everywhere" is a strange genre f...

 I've seen an awful lot of movies this year. Very, very few of them were better than Megan Park's debut feature "The Fallout". This is technically a 2021 film, in the sense that it premiered at festivals in a year where theaters were disrupted by covid, then was dumped to HBO Max in January of 2022, destined to be forgotten forever. That release is an awful shame for a film that really should be seen, both for its quality and for its specific meaning to Gen Z.  When Gus Van Sant won a Palme D'or for "Elephant" in 2003, a naïve person could maybe believe that school shootings were a social issue dated to the late 1990s that wouldn't demand a greater place in pop culture. If only we lived in such a world. As anyone watching any news at any point in the past 20 years has surely accepted, school shootings are an epidemic that regularly destroys lives for American kids. This is obviously bad, and actual solutions to this problem should be made, but that h...