2020's Oscar Nominees

i liked sound of metal for the same reasons i liked nomadland upthread - just a reasonably well-made adult drama that gave viewers credit for being slightly smarter than a 12y/o, unlike most of the others. picked it narrowly over nomadland bc while you didnt have to be a genius to figure out what plot beats were coming, it still felt slightly less familiar than nomadlands "white movie star grieves in beautiful places" thing. plus it had a cameo from the band surfbort.

all of the other movies would have benefitted from more surfbort imo

the "best picture" category should be replaced with "most surfbort"

*by, not with, prepositions are hard

and your game is soft

;)

I get the feeling Nomadland is gathering steam because many of the people watching it think of it as political when imo one of its biggest flaws is that it's *not* political.

It seems to be bending over backwards not to be political but it’s also empty enough that anyone can fill it with whatever level of political subtext they prefer be present.

It is a pleasant and sometimes affecting drama about grief. Nothing more, nothing less.

I've posted a couple of these monthly Zoomcasts I do with two friends; we talked about Sound of Metal the other night (also Town Bloody Hall, but it's a different clip).

www.youtube.com/watch?v=03Q_Q2U85SU

trying to watch all of these in the last week

Sound of Metal - engaging but dumb. a thinly disguised rehab movie.
Nomadland - pretty but there's nothing there
Mank - i dug the bad audio but otherwise it's very "why am i watching this". gave up halfway through.
The Trial of the Chicago 7 - the most aaron sorkin ever

Greil Marcus on Nomadland: "At least there aren’t any Leonard Cohen songs."

It's a good putdown, but--and I'm not a huge Cohen fan myself--McCabe & Mrs. Miller minus those Cohen songs just wouldn't be the same film or nearly as good.

I like to think that Nomadland being the frontrunner is just overdue recognition for The Rider

Watching Nomadland now and damn if this doesn’t match up a LOT with the conditions depicted in Phil A Neel’s _Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict_, tho deliberately shedding any political-economic talk

The Rider is the superior film, but Nomadland is great and obviously political. It's just not a treatise, it's a story about people. "But isn't it cowardly to show Amazon and not make a specific point about its awfulness?". Amazon/ billionaires making bank out of low wage jobs and the people who desperately need them are awful, but I think this film does right in observing life as a daily routine, not story beats or spectacular horror, I think it's more powerful because more believable to see these bad places just be a part of the characters' everyday life. Bob in the film: "If society was throwing us away and sending us as the work horse out to the pasture, we work horses have to gather together and take care of each other. And that's what this is all about. The way I see it is that the Titanic is sinking." There's camaraderie and joy in finding together just as there is despair at the system throwing people in the water to care for one another, and acknowledgement of the betrayal.

Mank is like Ready Player One for the TCM set. A tedious, self-congratulatory, and pointless film.

ugh, promising young woman. what a void of a film

If only! It's a Death Star exploding.

my sister loved Promising Young Women, kind of scared to check it out now

i'm so proud of the fake rape revenge film for not depicting the rape directly and yet managing to include a scene of traumatic violence against a woman anyway

even then i feel like i would enjoy it 20 percent more had someone taken the reins of the music supervision

the music was terrible

the last twenty minutes are just so rotten

what does this movie bring to the table that jennifer's body didn't a thousand times better

furious at this fucking movie

Sound of Metal - engaging but dumb. a thinly disguised rehab movie.

I don't know if thinly disguised as much as just misleadingly marketed!

well I was expecting a live film of an Iron Maiden concert so I was particularly disappointed

I thought it was going to be a tour diary of a noise rock duo, so same.

Actually I thought it was pretty good, but because Ahmed and Raci were so good. A good case of the right actors elevating the material.

sound of metal is an incredible film

Otm

the only one of these that i'm interested in rewatching