Things beyond my ken.
Man, I don’t know what to do with all the Oscars discourse. I don’t want to minimize the importance of the award as a means of exponentially increased visibility for people and projects deserving of industry recognition. If you’re, say, a budding animator and your short gets nominated, you will be eating good (sushi power lunches) in the neighborhood (Studio City) until your Google Calendar collapses under its own weight. Every barrier of race or gender that’s broken means the Academy is less likely to use “received wisdom” as an excuse to gatekeep. AND YET, how can Oscar look himself in the mirror after Paul Haggis’s Crash (2004)?
That said, 2023 was a strong year for movies and 2024 does seem like a strong year for nominees. The entirety of liberal white womanhood was up in arms about the Gerwig/Robbie shutout, until people bothered to learn what actually was on the list, but by then their attention was elsewhere.
Recent Viewing/Recent Thinking
One more thing about Barbie. Someone on Insta blocked me the other day; they were like, “Barbie would have been better if the Real World had shots of some unhoused folks or migrants,” and I was sort of annoyed because that’s not the movie, and I’m pro-DEI and pro-decolonization but I’m okay with art not trying to tick every box. Gerwig’s Real World is nearly as off-the-ground as Barbie World. It may inhabit the West Side of Los Angeles, which IRL is rife with economic and cultural tensions, but for Gerwig’s vision to work cohesively, both worlds have to share a tonal leaping-between, a tempered gaeity in which America Ferrera’s plaintive speech remains of a piece with the fantastical exuberance inspired by Almodóvar, Donen, Tati. (I could see Agnès Varda cracking the appropriate inflection for whimsy-plus-migrants. Too bad she’s not here.)
I really do try to critique a work of art as it exists and not judge it against a hypothetical thing I wish it could be. As it exists, there’s a forgotten underground film called 1 Berlin-Harlem (Lothar Lambert and Wolfram Zobus, 1974), which showed a few nights ago at the Anthology as an entry in a retrospective on Skip Norman. As it exists, it’s a moving portrait of a discharged Black American GI (Conrad Jennings) adrift in Germany in the waning days of the war in Vietnam, taking refuge in different social spaces of Berlin and growing ever disillusioned as he’s cast out and treated like a criminal. As it exists, it makes a compelling case for the overall grossness of midcentury European exoticization and sexualization of Black bodies; it’s a recurring plot point. And as with Yorgos Lanthimos’s puerile Poor Things, the immutability of its male gaze ultimately hinders its petition for progressivism and diminishes the potency of its wild creative flourishes. Lambert/Zobus could easily depict the ick in the women’s come-ons, and the GI’s unease receiving them, WITHOUT writing the offending female characters as aging, soft in the middle, sometimes Jewish-coded. Because writing them that way conveys that such sexualization is only bad if the guy doesn’t find the women fuckable, and that it’s absolute clownshoes for someone unattractive to be out in public doing something as desperate as dancing at a nightclub. It also chips away at the strength of Lambert/Zobus’s social polemic that the reason for the GI being treated as a criminal is… actual statutory rape. It is a cool little movie though. Great soul music on the soundtrack. Fassbinder is in it for a minute. There’s peen.
Speaking of “brooding men at the ends of wars,” I loved Godzilla Minus One. Situating the prequel in the devastation of WWII gives the West a chance to reflect back on a Japan at a pivot point of national identity, with a disconnect between the hardships of everyday citizens and a geopolitical death-drive for expansionism and fascism. Is Godzilla the American enemy? Is it Hirohito himself? It’s remarkable how there’s no patriotism in this movie, neither for Japan nor against the Allied forces, and it’s occasionally bitter about Japan’s treatment of its soldiers. The depressed kamikaze pilot (Ryunosuke Kamiki) tasked with taking out the monster is doing it for the future of an orphaned toddler and her presumed-dead guardian. The fighter plane in the hangar looks straight out of Top Gun, and yet the mood is bravado minus one. It’s a beautiful film visually too, with grain and softness in the digital print and a fluidity to the CGI of Godzilla’s epic water ballet.
