Oscars 2021: The Big Techies, aka Bad Dune Rising

Jeremy BeckOscars
Timothée Chalamet and Rebecca Ferguson in Dune

Quick trivia question: Which movie received the second-most nominations at this year’s Oscars (following The Power of the Dog’s twelve)? It wasn’t the emerging Best Picture threat CODA, or the technical marvel West Side Story, or the big-hearted crowd-pleaser Belfast. It was Dune, Denis Villeneuve’s mammoth sci-fi adventure about spice, dreams, and colonialism. In addition to raking in cash (its $108 million domestic haul far surpassed any other Best Picture contender), Dune racked up 10 total Oscar nods, with the Academy clearly admiring its bold visual style and maximalist craft. It’s an impressive showing that recalls Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity, which also scored 10 nominations in 2013 and won a whopping seven trophies (the third-most of any movie this century, behind The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King and Slumdog Millionaire), though it failed to win the big prize, falling to 12 Years a Slave.

Dune isn’t winning Best Picture either, but could it match Gravity’s overall tally? In yesterday’s piece, I analyzed eight miscellaneous categories, and while Dune is nominated in three of those, I’m predicting it to fare poorly (winning Sound, but losing both Costume Design and Makeup/Hairstyling). Thus, to keep pace with Cuarón’s smash hit, Dune virtually needs to sweep the following five fields, each of which encompasses a high-profile area of technical filmmaking (and which I’ve historically dubbed The Big Techies). What are its chances? Let’s find out. Read More

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Oscars 2021: The Odds and Ends

Jeremy BeckOscars
Emma Stone in Cruella

Welcome to Oscars week! Over the next five days, we’ll be running through all 20 feature categories in contention at this year’s ceremony—not to be confused with all of the awards that will actually be presented during the ceremony. Sharper and more knowledgeable critics than I have already and justifiably skewered the Academy for its laughable decision to announce the winners of eight different categories before the show proper and then somehow “edit” them into the telecast. Now, it’s possible to acknowledge that not all 23 categories (20 features, plus three shorts) possess an equivalent degree of luster; hell, I imply as much every year by titling this opening piece “odds and ends” before moving on to “the big techies” (which include film editing, original score, and production design… all of which won’t be presented live this year). But it’s foolish to pretend that this bizarre, fanboy-chasing maneuver—which is presumably designed to save time, though there are rumblings that the Academy will replace the missing minutes with, I dunno, more montages about the magic of movies, all while still limiting the telecast to three hours, we promise—will somehow attract potential viewers who were otherwise on the fence.

This makes no sense. If you don’t care about the Oscars, the prospect of not seeing the award for Best Makeup and Hairstyling presented live will not suddenly make you want to watch the Oscars. If you do care about the Oscars—if you annually follow cinema’s most prestigious, pretentious gala, and if you recognize the Academy’s value as a recordkeeping institution while still lamenting its general unwillingness to be truly adventurous—then the marginalization of a handful of categories (and of the hard-working artisans deprived of their chance to hear their name read aloud by a gorgeous celebrity) represents a pointless, self-flagellating smack. To quote a certain crime lord who made his share of disastrous decisions: It accomplishes nothing. Read More

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The Batman: A Dark Blight Rises

Jeremy BeckReviews
Robert Pattinson and Jeffrey Wright in The Batman

Who’s the big bad of The Batman? Modern superhero movies can scarcely subsist on just one antagonist, and this latest take on Gotham City’s caped crusader—directed with spirit and smarts by Matt Reeves, from a script he wrote with Peter Craig—piles on the villains the way his makeup artists slather prosthetics onto Colin Farrell’s face. Farrell, as it happens, plays the Penguin, but while his mannerisms seem to echo Robert de Niro’s work as Al Capone in The Untouchables, he’s hardly the film’s apex predator, instead operating as a mid-level mobster with women to leer at and masters to serve. One of those masters is Carmine Falcone (John Turturro), a slippery mafia don who’s too shallow and profit-oriented to fill the role of comic-book megalomaniac. It surely can’t be Selina Kyle (Zoë Kravitz), a waitress at Penguin’s sleazy nightclub who possesses several feline pets, some calf-high boots, and a knack for cracking safes; she may be Catwoman, but she’s not a madman. The most logical candidate is the Riddler, portrayed here by Paul Dano as a disturbed and disturbing serial killer who knows how to wield blunt instruments and a grudge. He’s a bad dude, no question, but The Batman has the nerve to suggest that his dastardly schemes are merely symptomatic—the inevitable consequence of a more pernicious evil. What if, the movie asks, the real villain is you?

Well, not you you; if you’re reading film criticism online, you’re surely more cultured than the particular brand of troglodytic malcontent that this movie places in its surprisingly topical crosshairs. The Batman posits, with unnerving fluency, that some of the creeps who swarm your social-media mentions are more inclined to blow up a theater than attend one. Remember the gun-toting monster who murdered 12 people and injured 70 others at a midnight showing of 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises? This time around, he might as well be a character. Read More

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Cyrano: A Nose by Any Other Name

Jeremy BeckReviews
Peter Dinklage and Haley Bennett in Cyrano

In the eighth-season finale of Seinfeld, Jerry and George are again bemoaning their inability to sustain a functioning relationship when the latter seizes on the concept of a “relationship intern”—a way of combining forces and channeling them into a single partnership. “Maybe the two of us, working together at full capacity, could do the job of one normal man,” George hypothesizes. This is a very funny conceit that also bears more than a cursory resemblance to the plot of Cyrano de Bergerac, the Edmond Rostand play in which a disfigured poet invisibly assists a dimwitted beefcake in his pursuit of a beautiful woman. Showing us a hero, Rostand wrote us a tragedy, but the comedy inherent in his premise has proved irresistible for American studios, which time and again—in the 1987 Steve Martin vehicle Roxanne, in the poorly regarded 2000 teen flick Whatever It Takes, in the tender 2020 queer romance The Half of It—have sweetened the original’s heartbreak with dollops of reassuring syrup. Among its many achievements, Joe Wright’s new big-screen adaptation, simply titled Cyrano, honors its progenitor’s abiding despair. It’s a movie full of big, bold emotions—lust and love, anger and hunger, jealousy and solidarity—but most of all, it is profoundly sad.

This isn’t to say that the picture is unduly dour or moribund. To the contrary, Wright has leveraged his considerable technical skill—alongside the contributions of his customarily skilled retinue of artisans—to create a spry and dynamic production, one that retains the essence of Rostand’s text while also updating it with lush cinematic vigor. This isn’t simply a matter of prettifying the screen, though the costumes and wigs (by Massimo Cantini Parrini and Jacqueline Durran) are appropriately fabulous, while Sarah Greenwood’s striking production design imbues the film with a bold degree of theatricality. Special mention must be made of Seamus McGarvey’s cinematography, which combines light and shadow in intoxicating ways; certain dusky scenes possess an ethereal glow as though the actors are being illuminated less by a lighting rig than by the moon. Yet the most obvious change from the stage version is structural: This Cyrano is a musical. Read More

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KIMI: Uneasy Listening

Jeremy BeckReviews
Zoë Kravitz in KIMI

Steven Soderbergh routinely turns his camera into a bullhorn, using the crispness of his images (which he photographs himself, under the pseudonym Peter Andrews) to voice his displeasure with the ugliness of modern society. His latest picture, KIMI, gestures toward any number of topical themes: the physical and emotional aftershocks of the COVID-19 pandemic, the dystopian possibilities of the encroaching surveillance state, the venality and brutality of the corporate aristocracy. Yet despite glimpses of social-justice protests and hints of conspiratorial malfeasance, KIMI isn’t really a message movie. It is instead a lean and efficient thriller: 89 precisely calibrated minutes of setup, tension, and payoff.

The economy is often one of Soderbergh’s narrative preoccupations, but drop the article, and it becomes one of his artistic strengths. It’s a gift shared by KIMI’s hero, Angela (Zoë Kravitz), an adept computer programmer who spends her work-from-home days scrolling through audio streams and slicing her way through lines of code. In essence, she’s an interpreter for KIMI, the Echo-like smart device that Angela is paid to make even smarter, updating its software to recognize that “peckerwood” is an insult and “ME!” is a Taylor Swift song. Sleek and tastefully designed, KIMI is shaped like an eggshell-white cone, and she’s all ears; whenever you say her name, her base glows neon-pink and she cheerfully announces, “I’m here.” (Her soothing voice, supplied by Betsy Brantley, is virtually indistinguishable from Siri or Alexa.) Her purpose is service, and her persistent monitoring of her environment—she is, quite simply, always listening—is merely a method of continually enhancing her performance. Surely there are no downsides to this sort of thing. Read More

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