BEFORE: Happy New Year! All of the counters reset except the big one, the overall total, which is going to start inching closer to Movie #5,000 in - April? I don't even know yet what that will be. I spent a few hours yesterday coming up with a plan for January, only knowing where I wanted the month to start and where I needed it to end. To make things a little easier for myself, I've increased the debt ceiling, the number of films on my "available on streaming" list is now 350 instead of 325. This was done because of a sudden influx of movies, probably due to the upcoming awards season - however the danger is then having too many choices, and thus creating too many available linking pathways to choose from. With the larger list, though, I was able to find a January plan in just a couple of hours, and then also link from the end of the romance chain to something very Irish for St. Patrick's Day, so really, I'm good for the next two and a half months now. What a relief.
And the path goes through several of the movies I mentioned in my 2024 preview, like "Dune: Part Two" and the recent "Joker" movie, so I'm looking forward to what's coming up. If you want to play along at home, here are the links I came up with for January: Sandra Huller, Matt Dillon, Peter Dinklage, Mackenzie Lansing, Allison Janney, Stephen Root, Paul Walter Hauser, Paula Pell, Will Ferrell, Steve Coogan, Robert De Niro, Jesse Plemons, Karl Glusman, Tom Hardy, Anya Taylor-Joy, Babs Olusanmokun, Eiza Gonzalez, Colin Woodell, Channing Tatum, Anne Hathaway, Bill Camp, Mamoudou Athie, Catherine O'Hara and Griffin Dunne. That should get me to right where I need to be on February 1. And I only had to add ONE film that wasn't already on my list, that was needed to connect tonight's film back to films with Hollywood actors in them.
I probably won't have a chance to watch many films that will be competing in this year's award season, unless they pop up on streaming this month AND they fit in with my chain. I could squeeze in "Venom: The Last Dance" because I'll have a Tom Hardy thing already going on, but for other films, it's less likely. I don't even KNOW what films are Oscar contenders yet, I guess we'll all find out this weekend after the Golden Globes? Or is that awards show no longer a thing? Didn't it get culture cancelled a couple years ago? Anyway, I've seen a few films from 2024 already, so maybe I can just roll with that.
You may remember "Anatomy of a Fall" from last year's award season - I remember my boss got many MANY e-mails for screenings, they really publicized this one hard. And so even though the film was not nominated for Best International Feature, it somehow got a nomination for Best Picture. And then there was one actress from this film who was ALSO in another Best Picture nominee, that's the kind of thing I notice, and I file that away in my brain in case it becomes important later - and it did. I'll get to that film tomorrow, they formed a dyad of sorts, and so it's a no-brainer to watch them together at the start of the year, but then, umm, where do I go from there? The problem was solved by adding that one film...
Oh, right, I forget to issue my annual dedication, sent out to someone who passed away last year - man, there's really a lot to choose from. David Soul, Chita Rivera, Carl Weathers, Richard Lewis, M. Emmet Walsh, Louis Gossett Jr., Roger Corman, Dabney Coleman, Morgan Spurlock, Willie Mays, Donald Sutherland, Bill Cobbs, Martin Mull, Shelley Duvall, Dr. Ruth Westheimer, Shannen Doherty, Richard Simmons, James Sikking, Bob Newhart, Gena Rowlands, Peter Marshall, Phil Donahue, John Amos, James Darren, James Earl Jones, John Ashton, Maggie Smith, Kris Kristofferson, Pete Rose, Cissy Houston, Mitzi Gaynor, Teri Garr, Quincy Jones, Tony Todd, Chuck Woolery, Olivia Hussey, Jimmy Carter, and Linda Lavin. Those are the names I remember from my travels and my movies. While I'd love to send a shout-out to Donald Sutherland or James Earl Jones (who I tried once to track down to get his autograph for my collection) there's one person on the list who I met in person - several times, in fact.
So my annual Really Long-Distance Dedication this year goes out to Morgan Spurlock, director of "Super-Size Me" and several other documentaries I watched. I'm sorry I never got to watch "Super-Size Me 2" or "Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden?" and now it's kind of too late for both. Spurlock directed 2 docs and produced a whole bunch more, but then in 2019 he kind of cancelled himself for his own sexual misconduct and disappeared from the public eye for a while, much like last year's appearances champion, David Letterman.
THE PLOT: A woman is suspected of murder after her husband's death; their half-blind son faces a moral dilemma as the main witness.
AFTER: When you add it all up - foreign film, Oscar-nominated, links to just one other movie on my list - how could I NOT pick this one to kick off the year? Especially since a few weeks ago, I tripped and fell myself while on the job. My head hit either the ground or the building, I'm not sure which, but it was hard - really, I'm lucky that I wasn't seriously hurt, I just got a little cut and that was it. No bump, no concussion, no permanent damage as far as I can tell, my shoulder is still sore, though, so it's nice to have this time off around the holidays before the next semester starts in a week or so, I'm catching up on my sleep and trying to not sleep on that shoulder so I'll be ready to set up tables and chairs again. During the Christmas party as I was saying goodbye to co-workers, I got a hug and someone asked me why I smelled all minty - umm, no I don't have a candy cane hidden in my shirt, that's the smell of Icy Hot, which allows me to walk around with less pain. You kids might learn about it in a few years.
This film falls into the "Murder mystery" category, I think - I'm taking pro-active steps to play Sorting Hat with my movies this year, in hopes of making things a bit easier after Christmas when I have to write another wrap-up post. The more work I do now, the less work I'll have to do then. Theoretically, at least. I'm also placing this one on the "Longest movies" list, because it's two hours and 31 minutes long, which might not be the longest film of the year, but it could be in the top ten. Still, that's way too long for a movie that really only asks one question, and then spends the rest of its time trying to not answer it. Sure, there's a murder trial, and those can go on for a very long time, and if you watch this film, you're going to FEEL that - I had to take a break after 90 minutes and got very discouraged when I realized I still had an hour to go. And I'd started well after the New Year's ball dropped, so really, I didn't finish until about 3 am - thank God I'm mostly at home this week, and I can sleep in every day. Every day is Blursday for a while, it's like we're back in the pandemic.
This is the kind of story that "Law & Order" or "CSI: Hotlanta" could solve in 44 minutes, and here it takes 150 minutes? It's too long, no matter how you slice it. The trial instead chooses to highlight each new revelation that the lawyers discover about the relationship between writer Sandra Voyter and her now-dead husband, lecturer and non-writer Samuel Maleski, and use it as another thing to discuss for the next twenty minutes. Their son had an accident that partially blinded him - OK, so what effect did this have on their relationship? Sandra had started to see other people, and so what effect did THIS have on their relationship? The lawyers find out that she took an idea from a book that Samuel abandoned and turned it into a best-seller, so what effect did THAT have? And so on. Naturally we can't deal with all of these things at once, so they have to come one by one, and each one is a game-changer. But they all tend to distract from the main issue before us, namely did Samuel fall from the attic window, or did he commit suicide, or was he pushed?
There's enough physical evidence - and enough forensic experts - to support each theory, making the whole process a bit maddening. Something hit Daniel in the head before he landed, but was it an object wielded by someone trying to harm him, or did his head strike something on the way down? Sandra brings up an incident from a few months before her husband's death when he'd come off of anti-depressants and tried to overdose on aspirin, which I didn't even know was possible. Is she bringing this up to throw suspicion off of herself, or because it was a real thing that happened that could support the suicide theory?
Now, a few months back, I saw what I thought was some kind of spoiler - I turned away or closed the browser window as soon as I could, but I thought I saw the words "The dog did it." So as a result of this, I spent the whole time thinking that the dog was somehow responsible for pushing Samuel out of the window - but that's impossible, because the dog is a service dog and was out for a walk with Daniel at the time of the incident. Still, my brain kept trying to work out ways in which the dog was responsible, and it's just not part of the story. (Or, is it? JK). The film opens with the dog, though, and ends with the dog climbing into bed with Sandra - that would be a really bad thing the dog did, though, to kill him just to get more alone time with her. But this is NOT a bad dog, this is a really GOOD dog. He might even be the most impressive actor in the whole film - he somehow won the "Palm Dog" at Cannes, but I'm not sure if that is a real award.
The most revealing scene, however, is probably the flashback based on the recording and the transcription of the argument that Sandra and Samuel had the day before his fall. They really nailed the way that a married couple might argue, it feels like somebody was writing this from their own experiences - the way that people rewrite their own personal history in the middle of a fight, just to have more ammunition. Some people might start blaming their spouse for their own failures, as Samuel did - while Sandra, the German wife, uses logical rebuttals to point out that he's doing this, which is very German of her. How can Samuel be mad at HER for trapping him at home, doing renovations on the house and having no time to work on his own book, when it was his idea to move there in the first place? Yeah, maybe I'm guilty of this myself, to some degree, and I'm willing to recognize that and own it. I also realize it's not easy to live with a person of German descent, because we're all control freaks, though I've tried over time to be less like that.
However, it's also a NITPICK POINT that this recording of the argument exists at all - who the hell sets their phone to record an argument they're about to have with their spouse? Simply nobody - however, the movie then kind of bends over backwards to explain to us that since Samuel was a writer, maybe he wanted to get a recording of a REAL argument so he could write a fictional one. They say "Write what you know," right? So if he had an argument with his wife and could transcribe that into a novel, then it would feel really real? That feels like cheating, but maybe he was desperate enough to do that. Still, not cool - and also it raises the possibility that maybe he didn't really believe the things he was blaming his wife for, maybe he was saying them JUST to make her mad and fight back, and I don't recall any of the lawyers at her trial bringing this up, which they should have.
One of the most stressful things that can happen to someone in life is the death of a parent or the death of a spouse - but then if you throw a child with a disability, a public murder trial, and a news media that's obsessing over every detail revealed in court, that's just stress upon stress upon stress. Living in a tri-lingual household can't be easy either, where he speaks French and she speaks German and they can only communicate in English, well that's probably not easy either. There's so much to unpack here, over two hours worth, so I'm going to give this film the benefit of the doubt, but I still maintain it could have been at least a half hour shorter. Well, at least I watched it during the holiday break, when I really didn't have anywhere to be the next day.
Also starring Sandra Hüller, Swann Arlaud, Milo Machado-Graner, Antoine Reinartz, Samuel Theis, Jehnny Beth, Saadia Bentaieb, Camille Rutherford, Anne Rotger, Sophie Fillieres, Juljen Comte, Pierre-Francois Garel, Savannah Rol, Ilies Kadri, Cecile Brunet-Ludet, Antoine Bueno, Anne-Lise Heimburger, Wajdi Mouawad, Sacha Wolff, Kareen Guiock, Arthur Harari, Nola Jolly, Emmanuelle Jourdan, Messi (the dog)
RATING: 6 out of 10 thrown sticks
No comments:
Post a Comment