I know this film has been out for a while, but I finally got a chance to see it in a theater last weekend. It’s a strong film and is worthy of its Best Picture nomination, but it’s unlikely to be named the Best Picture of the year. As much as I enjoyed it, I wouldn’t vote for it and would rank it somewhere in the middle of the pack of this year’s nominees. I’m glad the Academy recognized it, however, because it’s an interesting character study, and it has the vibes of a modern-day fairy tale.

WARNING! SPOILERS!

On the surface, Anora is a modern-day Cinderella, but it has a much darker ending than the version Disney gave us more than 70 years ago. There is no happy ending in this movie, and Ani (Mikey Madison) doesn’t get her Prince Charming. In fact, Anora is a film that is reflective of the times we currently live in, and screenwriter/director Sean Baker clearly looks at our world as bleak, especially for marginalized people.

Anora is about Ani, an exotic dancer and call girl who performs for Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), the son of a Russian oligarch. Striking up a connection with each other, Ivan pays for her services for a week. She falls in love with him, and he seemingly falls in love with her. On an impromptu trip to Vegas, they get married. Once his parents get wind that their son married a prostitute, they demand that the marriage be annulled and send their henchmen, Toros (Karren Karagulian), Garnik (Vache Tovmasya), and Igor (Yura Borisov) to force Ivan and Ani to the courthouse sign the annulment.

And mad-capped mayhem ensues.

Baker’s script, which was nominated for Best Original Screenplay, is fantastic. As a screenwriter, Baker hit all the right beats and gave us a script with a tight Hero’s Journey and a complex set of thematic components that made this a stunningly thoughtful film. There is a lot of sex and nudity, but none of it feels gratuitous. We see the world that Ani lives in. She is navigating it as best she can, and she is good at what she does. She even seems to enjoy it on a personal level for the friends she has and the people she interacts with, but it is a world in which she is objectified. This is her archetypal Ordinary World, and she needs to escape it. She Crosses the Threshold, entering the Special World that Ivan introduces her to, and she fights hard to remain in it.

I am going to write a more detailed breakdown of the screenplay in a future blog, so stay tuned.

From there, the story is dramatic, and the characters are dynamic. Madison is nominated for Best Actress, and Borisov is nominated for Best Supporting Actor, and the chemistry between their characters carries the second half of the film until its utterly heartbreaking ending. Madison brings empathy, sympathy, and likability to a character who is so far on the margins that we should not be able to relate to her. But her performance allows the audience to engage with her on an emotional level and to empathize with her struggles so that we care for her and root for her in surprising ways.

Borisov’s performance is much more subtle as the tough guy with a heart of gold who seemingly understands the moral and ethical ambiguity of what he’s doing. We spend much of the second half of the film looking at Ani through his eyes, even though she seemingly couldn’t care less about his opinions.

Aside from his screenwriting, Baker also distinguishes himself as a director, and he has garnered an additional Oscar nomination in that category. Baker crafted a film with dynamic, thoughtful cinematography, outstanding acting performances, and a story with a tight dramatic structure and attention-grabbing thematic components.

I mentioned earlier that this is like a Cinderella-type of story, however there was no happily ever after in Anora. If this movie had come out a decade or two ago, it’s entirely possible that Ani would have ended up as a rags-to-riches story on a beach with her billionaire husband. However, the times we live in today are not as optimistic as times of the past, and Baker gives us a powerful, heavy ending that leaves the audience asking, “Now what?” The ending was reminiscent of the final shot of The Graduate, but it was a much more intense scene. Baker brilliantly ended the film by giving us an emotional meat grinder and then cutting to black with no score. Just a silent role of the credits. I was in a crowded theater, and no one said a word as they exited. The ending hung heavily in the air like a balloon made of lead. It was raw and palpable and took us 180 degrees from the hedonistic frivolity with which the movie started.

What started out as a movie showing life as a big party ended with a devastating hangover. It was a cruel twist that left us feeling pessimistic about Ani and her future, and no words at that time would have appropriately described anyone’s feelings. That’s how powerful the ending of Anora was.

I would be shocked if Anora won Best Picture, but I’m glad I saw it. I’m glad filmmakers are creating modern fairy tales and turning the fairy tale trope on its ear. They make for powerful stories that stay with us long after we’ve left the theater, forcing us to examine the world we occupy. The fact that I have this feeling after seeing Anora was completely unexpected and totally satisfying.

I finally got to see The Substance over the weekend, and although my feelings are mixed, I came away impressed. This isn’t a perfect film. Of the films that are nominated for Best Picture this year, I would rank it somewhere in the middle of the pack. However, it is a powerful film that, in many ways, is like a modern-day fairy tale. Fairy tales are known for clear themes and points of view, and The Substance absolutely checks those boxes. The film also has an excellent screenplay, thoughtful and innovative cinematography, and acting performances worthy of Oscar consideration.

Director Coralie Fargeat channeled her inner Stanley Kubrick to deliver a powerful film about the objectification of women and how our society mistreats them as they age. When women are treated as objects, valued only for their beauty, they are cast aside as their beauty and bodies betray them with age. Many women (and men) cling to that beauty as long as they can through plastic surgery and other synthetic methods, and the results over time are often far more detrimental to their appearances than the natural aging process would have been.

Fargeat tackled that issue head-on in this film, and she also did something else that was very interesting. She also took a critical look at how women treat each other. While women broadly support each other through various organizations, there is a hyper-competitiveness among many women in the workplace, and this film bluntly shows two women who will mutually benefit by working together, but the selfishness of one of them leads to vindictiveness in the other, which leads to the ultimate downfall of both. That is the biggest reason that it was essential for a woman to direct this film. She tells women through this film that there is nothing women cannot accomplish when working together, but their inability to do that is ultimately what holds them back.

Bill Burr put it ever so concisely in a comedy routine several years ago. Take a look at it here.

Body Horror with a point

The term body horror has been used to describe The Substance, but I’m not sure it applies in the traditional sense. There are some disturbing and graphic images of mutilation and deformations, but it was never scary or even gratuitous. It was, in fact, a metaphor for the point made above. We are so focused on beauty in our society that women (and men) are willing to destroy their bodies at a cellular level to hold onto their beauty, even for just a few more fleeting years and even at the expense of the last several years of their lives. This is visual storytelling at its best. It shows us everything we need to know without telling us a word.

If you are a screenwriter trying to figure out how to tell a story visually and metaphorically, this is a film you should study.

The screenplay is excellent in other ways as well. Fargeat was also the screenwriter for the film, and she is justifiably nominated for Best Original Screenplay. Not only does the script excellently and effectively tell a compelling visual story with poignant thematic components, but it also has a riveting dramatic structure and rising levels of tension and drama that all screenwriters can learn from. The script also has a tight Hero’s Journey that helps guide the story and build the drama. All the stages of the Hero’s Journey are represented, and it’s written in such an organic way that very little of the script feels contrived or forced.

This is an excellent story that is very well told

I mentioned above that as a director, Fargeat channeled her inner Standly Kubrick, and that was meant as a compliment. Anyone who follows this blog with any regularity knows that Kubrick is my favorite director, and many of his films are on my personal top-5, top-10, and top-20 lists. It is clear from watching The Substance that Fargeat is very familiar with The Shining, A Clockwork Orange, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. From camera angles, to color palette, to story points, Fargeat produced a work of art that would have made Kubrick proud. If you are a fan of Stanley Kubrick, this is a film you should see.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the acting. Demi Moore, every straight Gen-X male’s first celebrity crush, gives what might be the best performance of her career as Elisabeth Sparkle, the Hollywood bombshell on the back end of her career, being pushed aside for a younger, prettier model. She deservedly won the Golden Globe. I’m not sure if she’ll win the Oscar, but I, for one, would not have the least problem with it. She brought brooding subtlety to a performance that was searing with hot emotion bubbling just under the surface, waiting to be unleashed. But she didn’t carry this film alone. Margaret Qualley more than held her own as Sue, the younger version who ends up trying to destroy Elizabeth and take over her life. There’s an Anne Baxter-Betty Davis (All About Eve) quality to the relationship taken to new and disturbing levels. Finally, Dennis Quaid, as Harvey, the sexist, disgusting TV executive who sets all this in motion, gives a performance that is over the top but also weirdly spot-on.

This is not a perfect film. I felt like it went off the rails a little over the last 20 minutes or so. I didn’t dislike the ending, but I felt like Fargeat drew it out too long. I might have liked it more if it had been the last 10 minutes instead of 20. I felt myself thinking, I really am ready for this movie to end, but it kept going. It obviously didn’t ruin the film for me, and it may be a bit of a nitpick, but it prevented the film from reaching the upper echelon of this year’s Best Picture nominees.

The Substance is the deepest film of 2024

That said, even though it might not be the best film of the year, in my opinion, I do believe that it is the deepest film of the year. The Substance has a powerful message and strong themes. It is a modern-day fairy tale that harkens to the darkest stories of the Brothers Grimm to teach us that beauty is fleeting and should never be tied irrevocably to our self-worth.

The main thing I want to say about The Brutalist is that I will be pissed off if it wins Best Picture. I have a feeling it will, so I’m going to hold off on doing a full-fledged review of it now. If it wins, it will be included in my Best Picture Blog series. If it doesn’t… well, I already spent three and a half hours sitting through it in the theater, and I’d rather not spend more time than I have to writing about it.

Perhaps I’m being too hard on this movie. I realize I am deep in the minority on this one. It’s currently got a 93% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes and 81% from the fans. To be honest, I don’t understand those numbers at all. I thought The Brutalist was too long, too slow, and too boring. Too many things were planted that were never paid off. Too many of the characters were unlikable. Not nearly enough happened to make me care about any of the characters or anything that happened to them, other than maybe Erzebet (Felicity Jones).

Here is what I will say about The Brutalist that is positive. It’s not a film so much as it is a work of art. Every once in a while, over the last couple of decades, a movie comes out that disregards the standards of Hollywood filmmaking. These films are often very long, very deliberately paced, and take place over several years. I’m thinking about films like Boyhood, The Power of the Dog, and Killers of the Flower Moon, with the latter straddling the line between a traditional Hollywood film and this more artistic style to which I’m referring. The Brutalist fits this mode. It’s long, deliberate, and takes place over several years. Like Boyhood, the deliberate pacing makes it akin to watching a painting. It’s a painting that’s moving, but a painting, nonetheless. The earliest movie like this was probably Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon. These films are largely character-driven without a clear, cohesive story in which the protagonist has a goal for the audience to root for. The movie is more a character study of the character’s life.

The Brutalist is more character study than story.

There is a story in there. It’s not much of a story, but it’s there. The story follows Lazlo Toth (Adrien Brody), a brilliant architect who escaped the Nazis and ended up in Philadelphia and was taken in by his brother, but a failed business venture causes him to move into a shelter in Philadelphia. But his talent catches the eye of Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pierce), a wealthy industrialist who wants a community center built to honor his late mother. Van Buren hires Lazlo to design the center, and a battle of wills ensues as cost overruns and artistic differences, along with Lazlo’s continued addiction problems and issues with his family, threaten to derail the project.

The main issue I had with the story was the lack of drama. There were dramatic moments, but I found myself not caring about anyone in the movie or anything that happened to them. There were opportunities for the script to get very dramatic and a couple of jarring moments got my attention. But for the most part, this movie was one big long yawn.

A Real Pain is one of those movies that feels like a gut punch you want to take over and over again. It’s a beautiful work of art that simmers with drama and emotion. Screenwriter, director, and star Jesse Eisenberg did a masterful job of weaving emotional relationship-building with a story that is as much an internal journey as it is an external one. Both Eisenberg’s character, David Kaplan, and Kieran Culkin’s Benji Kaplan, are broken in their own way, and those fissures are exacerbated when they come into contact with each other.

The brilliance in the screenplay and the film lies in the fact that they’re cousins who are forced to spend time together on a pilgrimage to see the birthplace of their grandmother, a Holocaust survivor who recently passed away and had vastly different relationships with the two of them. David is (almost painfully) introverted and a rule follower. He can’t mask his discomfort when things go against protocol, and he does his level best just to go along to get along. He’s strait-laced and plays life by the rules as an adult with a good job, a wife, a child, and a comfortable home. It seems important to him that everyone likes him.

Benji, on the other hand, wears his heart on his sleeve and doesn’t flinch in telling people his true feelings, however much discomfort that might bring to the situation. He is emotional, loud, and vibrant, and he never has a thought that he doesn’t express. It’s not as important to him to be liked, but his upfront nature, while off-putting at the moment, earns him the respect of almost everyone who meets him.

These two divergent personalities are thrust together on a trip that reveals to both of them what they need to fix, but in a very satisfying way, leaving them without the motivation to fix it. Often, in films like this, we’re presented with broken characters who go through an emotional meat grinder that is the story and end up fixed at the end.

Warning! Spoilers!

There is no such fairytale ending in this script. Movies like that are great. Alexander Payne is the master of fixing broken characters, and his films are wonderful. However, A Real Pain gives us the brutal reality that things aren’t always ready to be tied up in neat little bows. The film’s title is descriptive. There is real pain in this film, and that kind of pain isn’t healed overnight. It also isn’t healed if the person feeling it isn’t ready, able, or willing to heal it. That might make some people feel like this long internal journey resulted in a dead end, but that isn’t the way it really feels at all. This is a story about confronting your pain. Whether you get over it or not is immaterial. The act of confronting it, acknowledging it, and experiencing it is the film’s catharsis. You can’t appreciate the good in your life unless you experience life’s pain, and David is especially in need of that confrontation. He arrives home, hopefully with a renewed sense of self and an appreciation for the good things in his life.

Benji, on the other hand, starts the film out way more in touch with who he is. His whole life is in pain, and that pain has broken him. He ends the film in the same place, both emotionally and physically, that he starts it. It’s an incredible bookend, to be honest. While it gives the film a melancholy ending, it’s what gives the film that raw realism that makes the pain real in A Real Pain.

The plot has some very powerful moments as the cousins join a tour group touring the places where some of the most notorious Nazi atrocities occurred during World War II. Benji, disturbed by the idea of this holocaust tourism, calls it out, which causes a lot of discomfort for David and the other people on the tour, but his raw emotion speaks to the other tourists. Despite David’s attempts at appeasement and his opening up as much as he can to them, they all seem to love Benji more in the end, or at least they all have deeper emotional connections to him. Their farewell to the tour group is a telling sign of how cathartically revealing pain can be and how damaging it can be to hold that pain inside.

There is a lot going on under the surface in this screenplay. Eisenberg showed his true talent as a screenwriter, and this is a script that screenwriters should reference when attempting to write compelling subtext. A Real Pain is one of those movies you really need to reflect on, and it might even require multiple viewings to get the full breadth of what it’s trying to say.

I hope it gets more love at the Oscars than it did at the Golden Globes. No one plays broken characters like Kieran Culkin, and his GG was well-deserved, and he’s certain to be, at the very least, nominated for an Oscar. But Eisenberg deserves recognition for the masterful screenplay he wrote and for his subtle direction that produced one of the most powerful movies of the year.

I will preface this by saying that I have always been a casual fan of Bob Dylan. I’ve never owned any of his albums, but I likewise never change the radio station when one of his songs comes on, and I never skip a song of his if it comes up on my Spotify playlist. There are a few songs he’s written that could find their way into my personal top 50 favorite songs, like Tangled Up in Blue, The Times They Are a-Changing, A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall, and Blowing in the Wind. He’s one of the greatest songwriters in the history of pop and folk music, so it would be impossible to name all the great songs he’s responsible for and keep this blog to a reasonable length.

I was looking forward to seeing A Complete Unknown because it was directed by James Mangold, who also directed Walk the Line, the Johnny Cash biopic, which was one of my favorite films of 2005. I was a fan of Walk the Line because it took a deep dive into not only Cash’s music but the trauma he experienced that led to drug and alcohol abuse that nearly destroyed him. It also was a poignant love story about his relationship with June Carter. It was a deep film with conflict, drama, and an emotionally satisfying ending.

There was very little of any of that in A Complete Unknown. Drugs and alcohol didn’t play a huge role in defining Dylan’s career, although he claims to have been addicted to heroin for a brief time in the 60s. He did, however, have a tumultuous relationship with Joan Baez that inspired her to write the powerful song Diamonds and Rust after their breakup. In fact, the first half of the film felt like an extended concert movie. It was entertaining. There was a lot of great music. But there wasn’t a ton of drama or great storytelling.

That changed about halfway through the movie.

One thing that started to create drama in the first half of the second act was when Dylan started to achieve fame that he wasn’t prepared for. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Timothèe Chalamet here, who delivers an amazing performance as Bob Dylan. He nails Dylan’s soft-spoken, almost slurry syntax, as well as his pitchy singing style. He also nailed Dylan’s contrarian attitude as he devised to break cultural norms of everything from politics to how people view folk music. He was especially effective in showing the internal struggle Dylan had in coming to grips with his fame and how it was changing his world in ways that weren’t always for the better.

A Complete Unknown became an actual movie about halfway through. The love triangle between Dylan, Baez (Monica Barbaro), and Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning) comes to a head, but not in the emotionally satisfying way that it should have because Mangold didn’t take the time needed in the first half of the movie like he did in the first half of Walk the Line.

What makes the second half of the film the most dramatic is Dylan’s embracing of electric guitar when his fans, especially folk fan,s believe the acoustic guitar is the only way to play music. He wants to play new electric songs at the upcoming Newport Folk Festival, but the concert organizers and his mentor, Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) pressure him to only play on the acoustic. This is the only real drama in the story, and it is paper thin.

Mangold also wrote the screenplay along with James Cocks, and it’s based on the book Dylan Goes Electric by Elijah Wald. I have not read the book, but the title implies it’s about Dylan, already one of the great folk singers of his time, embracing the electric guitar, which would have been seen by his contemporaries as the most unholy of acts possible. I hate to second guess a great filmmaker like Mangold, but I can’t help but wonder if this wouldn’t have been a much more dramatic film if he had focused the script on that idea and coincided it with his relationship with Joan Baez. I feel like Mangold’s mistake in this film was biting off more than he could chew. In trying to show as much as possible of Dylan’s life leading up to him going electric, he couldn’t dive deeply enough into any of it, leaving us with a broad but flat story that was begging for depth.

That said, it’s an entertaining film. Fans of Bob Dylan will likely love this film, as there is a whole lotta music in it. The story essentially serves as a vehicle to get us from one musical number to another. I will say that my favorite moment in the film was when he first sang The Times They Are a-Changing at the Newport Folk Festival. The crowd slowly gets into it as he sings it, and that moment catapults him to superstardom in the film.

I enjoyed A Complete Unknown, but it, unfortunately, left some plays on the field due to the surface-level nature of the storytelling. It had some great moments, and I would certainly watch it again. But it’s a tick below the best films of this year. It will get some Oscar recognition in the form of nominations, but it’s not likely to take home many, if any, awards. It’s one of those films that could have and probably should have been better. But it’s worth seeing as it is.

It’s safe to say that the Golden Globes are not what they used to be. For many years, the Golden Globes were the antithesis of the Oscars. Where the Oscars were stodgy and proper, the Golden Globes always had an edge to them. People still got dressed up, but at the Oscars, everyone stays in their seat, and there is a fair amount of pageantry to the proceedings. At the Golden Globes, people get up and mingle, and the host is often irreverent.

Say what you want about the Hollywood Foreign Press and the issues they’ve had over the past few years that led to their ultimate demise. They used to put on a great awards show.

Nikki Glaser was terrific as the show’s host and MC. She was funny and just irreverent enough to make us remember the good old days. But then there was some weird stuff going on outside of Glaser’s excellent performance.

The camera angles on presenters offered a kind of fish-eye view that was distracting and disconcerting. The writing for the presenters was also subpar. Many of the jokes fell flat to the point of being uncomfortable. The overall show lacked the entertainment value of its HFP predecessors.

Then there were the awards.

Just focusing on the awards for cinema, there were some headscratchers. Admittedly, I still need to see The Brutalist. By all accounts, it’s fantastic and I’m looking forward to seeing it. So far, my favorite film of the year is Conclave, and while I was glad to see it win Best Screenplay, I felt like it should have at least won Best Score, if not Best Motion Picture Drama.

But the real snub of the night went to Wicked. I don’t know who votes for these things anymore, but whoever voted for Emilia Perez over Wicked should be ashamed of themselves. If ever there was a prototypical movie that was made to win Best Musical or Comedy, it was Wicked. And I don’t want to hear about how they’re probably waiting for Wicked II to come out and award it then so it’s like an achievement for both. That’s nonsense. Wicked was the best musical and the best comedy to come out this year, and it deserved to win that award.

Nor do I want to hear about how it won for Cinematic and Box Office Achievement. They might as well name that award Best Blockbuster and treat it like the consolation prize that it is. Wicked deserved way better than that.

There were plenty of other head-scratching moves like Flow winning Best Animated Feature over Inside Out 2 and The Wild Robot. It used to be that the Golden Globes kicked off awards season as a preview of what was to come. If this is what we’re going to see for the rest of the awards season, it will be a strange year indeed.