'Cruella' Tops CDG on Its Way to the Oscar

Cruella won the costume designers guild award, as well as Dune and Coming 2 America, since they separate by genre, but I don’t think there’s any stopping the Disney movie from taking this Oscar (which is perhaps the reason why this particular award wasn’t kicked off the telecast, as Disney owns ABC?) Blech. I thought the costumes in this movie were ridiculous and not in a good way. And yes, technically Cruella is set in the 70’s (inexplicably), but what about those costumes screams “period”? It’s straight up fantasy and they should have just put it there and shown us whether it can beat Dune head to head.

2022 CDG WINNERS

Period: Cruella

Sci-Fi/Fantasy: Dune

Contemporary: Coming 2 America

'Dune' Tops the VES Awards

No surprise here, as Dune won the top prizes from the Visual Effects Society at their guild awards tonight. It could win the Oscar too, unless the Academy really wants Spider-Man to take home an actual Oscar and not just the fake twitter award they’re going to rig for it.

2022 VES WINNERS

Outstanding Visual Effects in a Photoreal Feature: Dune

Outstanding Supporting Visual Effects in a Photocell Feature: Last Night in Soho

Outstanding Visual Effects in an Animated Feature: Encanto

'The Lost Daughter' Nearly Sweeps the Indie Spirit Awards

A good afternoon for The Lost Daughter today, which won Feature, Director and Screenplay at the Independent Spirits. The Indie Spirits are usually the day before the Oscars, but this year they decided to separate themselves completely from them, by taking place weeks ahead of time. Good for them. At this point I would be surprised if The Lost Daughter was blanked on Oscar night, so I am kind of expecting a screenplay win for Maggie Gyllenhaal.

2022 INDEPENDENT SPIRIT AWARD WINNERS

• Best Feature - "The Lost Daughter"
  Best Male Lead – Simon Rex, “Red Rocket”

• Best Female Lead – Taylour Paige, “Zola”

• Best Supporting Female – Ruth Negga, “Passing”

• Best Supporting Male – Troy Kotsur, “CODA”

• Best Director – Maggie Gyllenhaal, “The Lost Daughter”

• Best International Film – “Drive My Car”

• Best Screenplay – Maggie Gyllenhaal, “The Lost Daughter”

• Best Cinematography – “Passing”

• Best Editing – “Zola”

• Best First Screenplay – “Pig”

• Best First Feature – “7 Days

• Best Documentary – “Summer of Soul”

'King Richard' Wins ACE Eddie; 'Dune' and 'Nightmare Alley' Win at ADG

At the ACE Eddies tonight, the big surprise was King Richard winning the top drama award, beating out Belfast and Power of the Dog, not just showing the strength of King Richard, which is expected to win Best Actor for Will Smith, but also revealing some real weakness in supposed Best Picture frontrunner POTD, which certainly isn’t just walking away with the guild wins. We’re going to have to see what the story is with the PGA, whether that or something else can win on a preferential ballot. On a side note, the ceremony was interrupted roughly six times with very angry objections from the editors to having the editing Oscar cut from the live broadcast on Oscar night. If you ask me they should ALL boycott the show and nip this mess in the bud right now.

2022 ACE EDDIE WINNERS

• Best Edited Feature Film (Dramatic): King Richard

• Best Edited Feature Film (Comedic): tick, tick…Boom!

• Best Edited Animated Feature: Encanto

• Best Edited Documentary Feature: Summer of Soul

Over at the Art Directors Guild awards, things went as expected, with Dune and Nightmare Alley taking top honors in their genres- I think Dune is the likely winner of most of these tech awards, but since production design is yet another award deemed “not important” enough to air on the live show, we’ll be getting the Oscar winner of this category tweeted at us during the red carpet instead. Which is again, BULLSHIT, and all of these nominees should refuse to show up and make ABC eat their toothless threats. They’ll walk this all back in an instant with enough pushback, trust me. All they need is the big names to sign on.

2022 ADG WINNERS

PERIOD: Nightmare Alley
FANTASY: Dune
CONTEMPORARY: No Time to Die

Brad Pitt Does Comedy Action in 'Bullet Train'

Another Brad Pitt/Sandra Bullock team up? You only hear her voice, but that’s definitely her. I guess they agreed to do cameos in each other’s comedy action movies this year. Who knows if this’ll work but it seems like Brad Pitt hasn’t done a big studio action movie since what, World War Z? I guess Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was a similar type of role. He can’t not be appealing, that’s for sure.

'CODA' Wins Big at SAG Awards; Jessica Chastain Takes Best Actress

CODA won some big prizes from SAG-AFTRA tonight, including Best Ensemble and Best Supporting Actor, making history for its largely deaf cast and throwing a wrench into the Best Supporting Actor race in particular. With Troy Kotsur taking this award tonight, that places supposed frontrunner Kodi Smit-McPhee on the backburner, so we’ll have to see what happens at BAFTA (where if say, Ciaran Hinds were to win, we’d have a very split race). Will Smith won his Best Actor prize as expected, but Jessica Chastain upset Nicole Kidman in Actress, and for that race specifically, that’s the only tea leaf we’re going to get. None of the Oscar nominees are up at BAFTA, so that will tell us nothing. We’re going in blind on that one, but Chastain is as likely to win now as any of them (and she’s on her third nomination and hasn’t won yet, unlike say, Kidman, Colman and Cruz).

2022 SAG WINNERS

BEST ENSEMBLE: CODA

BEST MALE ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE: Will Smith, King Richard

BEST FEMALE ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE: Jessica Chastain, The Eyes of Tammy Faye

BEST MALE ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE: Troy Kotsur, CODA

BEST FEMALE ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE: Ariana DeBose, West Side Story

CODA was beloved at SAG and likely to win at least one award on Oscar night

'The Lost Daughter' Wins the USC Scripter Award

In a surprise, The Lost Daughter won the USC Scripter prize last night for its screenplay and the book by Elena Ferrante. This was expected to go to The Power of the Dog, as it usually portends the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar, so it may be a knock against POTD’s overall strength, but then again maybe not. It was just two years ago that the streak for this award corresponding to the Oscar was broken, as Little Women won it and then Jojo Rabbit took the Oscar, so perhaps this is another case of that.

Lightning Round Reviews 2021: Plan B, Summer of Soul, Pig, The Green Knight, The Suicide Squad, Free Guy

I’m going to be posting my reviews of the 2021 movies I saw in the order I saw them in the coming days- for this batch I’d have to say see Oscar nominee Summer of Soul, which is an incredible can’t miss documentary.

PLAN B * * 1/2 (Dir. Natalie Morales)

Teen movies are hit and miss, but this one has its charms

This predictable, road trip buddy movie is the comedic companion piece to last year’s Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always- a journey about two teenage girls in a red state on a quest for reproductive care (in this case, the morning after pill). What makes this one memorable are the two girls themselves, winningly played by Kuhoo Verma and Victoria Moroles, and directed with a surefooted, light touch by actress Natalie Morales, gifted in turning out raucous set pieces that go in unexpected directions. It actually might have more common with Booksmart in terms of plot, the other recent, raunchy comedy about the friendship between two teen girls, but the difference here is that girls of color get the spotlight for a change. While that’s refreshing, it unfortunately does not negate the movie’s beat for beat predictability, as anyone who’s ever seen a teen movie or a buddy movie or a road trip movie will see every turn of phrase and action coming. You may still get a good chuckle or two out of it, but you’ll have to decide if it’s worth it for that alone.

SUMMER OF SOUL * * * 1/2 (Dir. Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson)

A moment in time, rediscovered

Questlove’s documentary about the Harlem Cultural Festival of 1969 is something of a revelation, because the incredible archival footage unearthed by the filmmakers has been sitting in a basement for the last 50 years undiscovered until now. The three day festival took place during the summer of the moon landing and Woodstock, and was of course overshadowed by the latter as “the” outdoor concert of the year, but this film works as a time capsule that does as much for that era as Woodstock did in encapsulating what the mood of the the country was at that time. What this concert did was encompass all those vibes that happened to be percolating in the national mood as much in Harlem as upstate. The movie gives us these unseen performances by people like Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone and Sly and the Family Stone at their best, but it also shows the black festival goers and the politicians who worked with organizers to stage this communal event at a time when revolution really felt like it was in the air, and the movie coveys the essence of that better than any documentary since perhaps the original Woodstock.

PIG * * 1/2 (Dir. Michael Sarnoski)

We tend to forget what a good actor Nic Cage is, until he reminds us

At first glance Pig feels a lot like a John Wick premise- a retired five star chef has turned into a recluse with only his truffle hunting pig as company out in the woods, when his pig his kidnapped and he’s forced back into the world of competitive (and apparently threatening) high class restaurants in Portland to track down his beloved. It sounds fairly ridiculous but unlike John Wick, this is played for high drama and serious emotional stakes. Nicolas Cage gives one of his best performances as the broken, talented genius, so much so that you almost buy into this story if only for his utterly nihilistic worldview. Almost. But not quite, as the world this movie creates involving underground fighting rings and mob bosses doesn’t go far enough in the camp direction to be entertaining, and taking it on a deadly serious level just feels…odd. It’s an unusual, overly ambitious movie that doesn’t quite work in its attempts to play around with genres. 

THE GREEN KNIGHT * * * 1/2 (Dir. David Lowery)

A new take on an Arthurian legend

David Lowery’s medieval epic is a strange, visually mesmerizing fantasy that challenges the audience to adapt itself to its tone, a slow moving yet never dull experience that has a hypnotizing effect, carried by Dev Patel in the lead as Gawain, King Arthur’s nephew who is challenged by the Green Knight to a potentially fatal confrontation. The film is filled with haunting imagery and episodes that force you to wonder whether anything happening is real or perhaps all imagined. Alicia Vikander plays a dual role as Gawain’s peasant mistress and married lover, while Joel Edgerton, Sarita Choudhury and Sean Harris play roles in support of the troubled young knight of the roundtable. The cinematography is some of the most striking of the year, and the visuals of giant, walking stone figures, a headless maiden ghost, and the Green Knight himself (an amazingly and unusually effective CGI creation) all provide the dreamlike quality of a movie that is best experienced on the big screen, if you can manage it. The meditative quality of the film proves to have a lingering effect- if you allow yourself to be taken in by it, the rewards are plenty.

THE SUICIDE SQUAD * 1/2 (Dir. James Gunn)

Getting tired of the James Gunn schtick

As someone who, along with most of the world, was not a fan of the original Suicide Squad, it’s difficult for me to say the James Gunn helmed sequel is not a better movie. It undoubtedly is- it’s better shot, better acted, it’s actually edited, and it has most of the little factors that make a James Gunn joint. But for me, those factors are at the point of being heavily played out, recycled and overdone. Which doesn’t make this movie good. In fact, it’s an R-rated Guardians of the Galaxy, which will thrill most superhero fans, but the humor and characters fall flat, and victim to the inevitable third act overblown CGI mess- even if that mess is a gigantic starfish spraying glop out of its armpit. Do we really need to watch that gag for twenty minutes straight? To Gunn’s credit, and our collective relief, he basically dismisses the entirety of the first movie, even if some characters return, like Viola Davis’s stern and humorless Amanda Waller, Joel Kinnaman’s Rick Flag (really? he’s back?) and of course…sigh. Margot Robbie’s obnoxious, irritating and useless Harley Quinn. You may be thinking that my rage at the sight of this character is biasing me against anything going on in the rest of this movie, and hey, maybe you’re right. Or, maybe the Gunn formula of mismatched unlikable characters, violent throwaway gags, contemporary music montages and just a splash of heart in the right place for the team bonding moment is showing him to be a very one trick pony whose original trick I wasn’t that impressed with in the first place.

FREE GUY * * * (Dir. Shawn Levy)

A surprisingly delightful comedy about gaming

Video game movies have a long history of tanking, both critically and with audiences, but perhaps movies about video games and gaming in general (in this case, online gaming) have a brighter future? Ryan Reynolds’s latest puts a stake to that claim, as it turns out to be a partially charming romantic comedy action movie that’s much smarter and more detailed about the world of online gaming than you’d expect. Reynolds stars as Guy, an NPC in a popular online role playing game called Free City, who develops sentient capabilities and starts taking over the game because he wants to change his life. The movie takes place both within and outside of the game, as we follow Guy on his quest and then in the real world two programmers who created the game (Jodie Comer and Joe Keery) fight to preserve it from destruction by the CEO who stole their code (Taika Waititi in a way over the top performance). There are a lot of familiar elements to this plot- we have stuff from The Truman Show, along with Tron and The Matrix, but the character Reynolds plays is charming and innocent enough for us to want to root for him, especially as he turns out to be a legitimate AI, which ups the stakes quite a bit in both worlds we’re seeing. The action scenes are nothing new though, with the usual uninspired CGI taking over (though since it actually is supposed to be a video game, this time I’m more forgiving of it), but the slight romantic plot twist at the end gives the movie a heartwarming finale that leaves you feeling satisfied, even if this ostensibly original idea is likely the start of yet another franchise to be. We can’t get away from it even when we do, can we?

'Coming 2 America' and 'Cruella' Win at Makeup & Hairstyling Guild Awards

The first guild awards were presented tonight, and I’d say despite Coming 2 America winning a few, this was probably good news for Cruella, which I’m now thinking will likely win both makeup and costumes at the Oscars. It’s not good news for Tammy Faye, which a lot of people thought would win this award easily (and may be something of hint that Jessica Chastain is unlikely to win in the wide open Best Actress race too? Even Being the Ricardos got something here).

2022 MAKEUP & HAIRSTYLING GUILD WINNERS

Best Contemporary Make-Up: Coming 2 America
Best Period and/or Character Make-Up: Cruella
Best Special Make-Up Effects: Coming 2 America
Best Contemporary Hair Styling: Coming 2 America
Best Period Hair Styling and/or Character Hair Styling: Being the Ricardos

Austin Butler is The King in Baz Luhrmann's Long Awaited 'Elvis'

The real story of this trailer is what the hell Tom Hanks is doing in a fat suit and a vague, mysterious foreign accent as Colonel Tom Parker- could this be his worst performance ever? I was so distracted by his voice that I started laughing at the beginning and had to watch this twice. I think they overdid it on the makeup a bit, don’t you (for both of them)? And frankly, considering this is a Baz Luhrmann film (yes, that Baz, director of Moulin Rouge and The Great Gatsby) it looks a little more straightforward and earnest an approach from him. It reminded me of Bohemian Rhapsody, which unfortunately made me think people are probably going to love it. We’ll see. It comes out this summer.

Dr. Strange and Scarlet Witch Confront Evil Versions of Themselves in New 'Dr. Strange' Trailer

This trailer premiered during the Super Bowl yesterday, and people seem pretty hyped for it, which would be quite the turnaround from the first Dr. Strange movie, which I’m pretty sure no one cares about to this day. But he is coming off the Spider-Man juggernaut and the multiverse hysteria, so good for Benedict Cumberbatch, currently riding quite the career high. This one pairs him with the other Marvel magic person, Elizabeth Olsen’s Scarlet Witch, who’s returning to the MCU straight from WandaVision. Not to mention that little Patrick Stewart voice cameo we hear in this- Professor X, is that you? I have a feeling this movie’s going to be huge.

Aliens Invade in Jordan Peele's 'Nope'

At least I think that’s what’s happening here. The trailer for Jordan Peele’s latest horror flick is vague and more of a teaser than anything, but it looks intriguing, as usual. I do wonder if he wants to be pigeonholed into very specific genre with his third horror/satire movie in a row- I guess he probably does? Still, I’m in.