My Year in Film 2021, How to Fix the Oscars, and an Announcement
In 2021, I fell. I was conquered by the great wave that is Streaming and Infinite Content. I caught bad habits — comfort food TV, the hyped series of the moment. By God, I’ve been watching Pamela and Tommy. Even worse, though, watching nothing. Browsing through the endless scroll as slumber encroaches. I may very well have spent more time browsing through Netflix, HBO MAX, and Criterion over the past year than I spent getting dressed, traveling to a theater, buying tickets, and watching trailers in 2019.
I watched about 40 new movies in 2021 vs. about 80 in other recent years. I never claim a comprehensive view, but much less so this year. Yet I want to take back what I said. I haven’t fallen; I’ve stumbled. I haven’t been conquered; I’ve been cast to the sideline. Limited though they were, my visits to the movie theatre in 2021 gave me as much joy as ever. Catching the only Toronto screening of La Piscine during a brief respite between COVID waves felt like providence. And the Rockaway Film Festival reached new heights this year with a new, huge outdoor screen and Shaka King’s only appearance at a public screening of Judas and the Black Messiah, amongst many other highlights. Yes, I am shamelessly plugging the festival that I co-founded. If you love the art of film and chill vibes, you will be hard pressed to find a better time. Mark your calendars for September 19–25, 2022, Rockaway Beach, NYC.
My Favorite “Movies” of “2021”
Appropriately enough then in this odd, off year, none of my favorite movie-ish experiences are even eligible for tonight’s Academy Awards. One was a limited series on a streaming network, one was first releaseed 50 years ago, and one hasn’t been released at all.
My favorite moving picture of 2021 was The Beatles: Get Back. It is seven hours of footage of guys hanging out, loosely developing songs, followed by 45 minutes of them playing some of those songs in full, two or three times each. It isn’t exactly a home run pitch, and it certainly isn’t for everyone, but it was something for a a lot of people. I venture to guess that the last time an artistic vision so uncompromising was this successful was The Passion of the Christ.
So why was it so appealing? Well, because it was The Beatles, of course! But this movie was by no means fan service, and its appeal wasn’t comfort of familiarity — or at least these weren’t the biggest things.
Get Back shows us that John, Paul, George, and Ringo are pretty much the people we thought they were — just better. They are nicer, more supportive, more go-with-the-flow, more committed to the work than we could ever learn from one of their interviews or scripted movies. Their camaraderie is touching, as are their interactions with everyone around them, especially the giddy, majestic Billy Porter. The Beatles don’t come across as the least bit naïve, but still a sense of innocence pervades.
I know people who went through the three episodes in a couple of days, but I drew it out over almost a month. Get Back gave me the same feeling as a long novel; it became a part of my life for a time, and I was a bit melancholy that it had to end.
This was unadulterated emotional response — something that creators dream of producing. But that response doesn’t just happen. The directing and editing accomplishment of this series is one for the history books. A calendar device keeps the audience in tune with the story — and there is a story, as loose as the movie is structured from scene to scene. Title cards and cutaways to news events or footage of the Beatles earlier in their careers are used judiciously, almost minimally, although minimally isn’t quite the right word. I think that the word I am looking for is “perfectly.” The filmmakers neither cut away unnecessarily nor commit themselves to uncalled-for verité purity.
On the WTF podcast, director Peter Jackson expounded on the process. He was introduced to the 60 hours of footage almost by accident. It’s a joy to hear him, a massive Beatles fan, describe the personal journey of discovery he went through while watching the footage in chronological order. The series is told this way. It may seem like an obvious thing to do — show the footage in the exact sequence in which it happened — but it is very rare in documentary. In life as in Get Back, things happen for reasons, but rarely in a straight line. Jackson was very bold to not show that straight line to the audience. And this, almost as much as hanging out with the Beatles, is the point of the film. It shows the creative process in all its messy glory.
I want to double-plug the Marc Maron podcast. If you watched all of Get Back, you undoubtedly will find it interesting. But more than that, it gives you another hour of that love that comes across so clearly on the screen.
One wouldn’t guess that “rich people in southern Europe leading vacuous lives” is an endless well of cinematic greatness, but it certainly appears that it is. This micro-genre stretches back at least to the releases of L’Avventura and La Dolce Vita in 1960, extending through the work of Paolo Sorrentino, amongst others, today. 1969’s La Piscine, semi-lost, restored and rereleased this past summer, is yet another jewel. Francois Truffaut once said that making an anti-war film was impossible because violence is inherently glamorous. Every attempt to condemn it ends up effectively promoting it. That certainly applies here! Who wouldn’t want to live with uber-chic and beautiful of La Piscine? The fashion, the architecture, the colors, the perfect faces and bodies, presented for your ogling. If this is emptiness, sign me up!
At the precise other end of the spectrum is His Name is Ray, a documentary about a homeless heroin addict in my Toronto neighborhood. I sometimes see Ray panhandling and that is how director Michael del Monte came across him. Shot wide screen cinema verité, I don’t believe that I am exaggerating when I say that this film is as honest as art gets.
It would not be right to call His Name is Ray inspiring (except as filmmaking), but I object to calling it “dark.” Yes, Raymond Martin is a heroin addict. Yes, he has abandoned his family. Yes, he drinks himself into a stupor very often. But Raymond Martin remains a compassionate and caring human being with hopes, fears, and aspirations.
His Name is Ray has not been distributed and, in a time where documentary festivals are thoroughly dominated by films aspiring to draw attention to the marginalized, it didn’t even play a festival. I wish I could tell you where you could watch it. Ray remains invisible.
Movies Nominated for Best Picture Tonight
Power of the Dog
Power of the Dog is a very slow movie. Frankly, if this movie wins Best Picture the year after Nomadland won…yikes for Hollywood! Me though, I love slow cinema —or at least I love it in the theater, where you give yourself over to the film. At home, the first half of Power of the Dog made me restless. It comes into its own, though, when, unexpectedly, the focus of the film becomes the relationship between Benedict Cumberbatch’s Phil and Kodi Smit-McPhee’s Peter.
The one nominee across all categories I am rooting for tonight is Smit-McPhee for Best Supporting Actor. I have a director friend who says, “You can’t teach an actor intelligence,” and that is the case here. Smit-McPhee’s odd face and gangly body subtly drive the plot. You see the quiet and awkward Peter gain confidence as the movie progresses. Very little is spelled out in the dialogue. It is only through Peter’s unspoken decisions that the movie’s plot pays off.
Drive My Car
Drive My Car is a movie that earns its expansiveness. It reflects on art and relationships in ways I haven’t seen before.
Licorice Pizza
Paul Thomas Anderson has two core styles: Serious PTA tells mostly solemn, nuanced but straightforward stories (Hard Eight, There Will Be Blood, The Master, and Phantom Thread), and Carefree PTA follows charismatic characters around for a while and has a good time. Serious PTA — and his partner, Histrionically Serious PTA, director of Magnolia — has earned the loose designation of Best Filmmaker of his Generation; Carefree PTA has almost gone unnoticed. I admire and enjoy Serious PTA, but Carefree PTA, writer-director of Boogie Nights and Inherent Vice, appeals equally to me. Licorice Pizza is widely perceived as an outlier in PTA’s ouvre, but it very much splits the different between those two films in both form and spirit.
Leads Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman, both making their big screen debuts, are a study in naturalism. The film starts the moment they meet and tracks their relationship over a period of years. To the film’s own detriment, though, it repeatedly departs from that core story. Meandering is what Carefree PTA does, and when you have the effortless, unpretentious chemistry that these two have, meandering with them is a fun way to spend a couple of hours. But why is Sean Penn in this movie? Bradley Cooper nails “cokehead asshole,” but his plotline, part of which feels like the film’s climax, adds nothing to how we know the characters that we actually care about. These diversions are so perplexing that I thought perhaps I was missing something — that more astute or emotionally attuned viewers were fitting these pieces together. I have come to find out that every story in this film, central or peripheral to the plot, is based upon a real event in the life of Gary Goetzman, the Hollywood producer on whom the movie is based. It’s curious that PTA believed that including these essentially random events improved a film that is about a strong central relationship. Licorice Pizza is a bit “Spike Lee Joint” — by stretching the scope to include a gamut of subjects, he weakens the core thread that works so well.
Dune
Hollywood has many theories on the middling commercial and critical success of Dune. The industry seems to have the feeling that Dune nailed it on the star power and the action, but that perhaps the plot was too complex. The reality is that Dune is inert because of the impositions Hollywood put upon it.
See the wildly entertaining documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune for background on Hollywood’s long history of handwringing over the complexity of Frank Herbert’s popular novel. In practice, the esoteric mysticism and “deep sci-fi” that the industry has feared is the strength of this film. It is personified by the character of Lady Atreides, whose historically brash arrogance hides behind a submissive veneer. Stellan Skarsgard and Dave Bautista as father and son villains are badass as hell. Dune’s weaknesses come from its efforts to fit into the contemporary action movie paradigm. The extended action sequences feel inconsequential, despite the stakes being clearly defined. Such is the nature of trying to pass off animation as reality. If director Denis Villeneuve had used 20 of those battle minutes to suss out the strange relationship between Lady Atreides and her husband or her son, we would have more to care about. A betrayal key to the film’s plot is emotionally neutered by the complete omission of the relationship between the characters until that moment. I think Josh Brolin and Jason Momoa both got killed off, but I’m not sure because their characters were both so forgettable. Believe me, there are no forgettable characters in the book.
In place of character development, modern action movies ask the audience to be awed over and over again. Dune is probably going to win several craft Oscars, and deservedly. They did a great job with the digital FX — but it is still digital FX. We are about 30 years removed from the Terminator 2 / Jurassic Park era when pixels created awe on their own accord.
Curiously, the movie kind of whiffs the big sandworm moment. Giant quasi-religious beasts that emerge from the earth to destroy and be worshipped are about as awe-inducing a set-up as one could possibly get.
I hope and suspect that these two-plus hours were a throat clearing for what lies ahead. The ground covered in Part 1, however, could be summarized in a few sentences. You can skip this movie. Call me and I’ll tell you what happened, and we’ll go see part two in fall of ‘23.
Nightmare Alley
Guillermo del Toro has a consistent, rich, synthetic aesthetic across his work and he is great at creating monsters. I’m not so into that aesthetic, and there are no monsters in Nightmare Alley.
Don’t Look Up
Don’t Look Up director Adam McKay has found comedy in the most serious of places before. The Big Short handled complex subject matter intelligently and hilariously. Don’t Look Up ups that ante on seriousness and outrageousness and fails on both accounts. Comedically, it is all big swings. Some of those swings miss the target; some are glancing blows; none are knock-outs. Is Leonardo DiCaprio’s character screaming at the camera on the morning talk show supposed to make us laugh? I honestly don’t know. Could any actor have pulled off a role representing the brain and conscience of the human race in a world gone mad? Maybe, maybe not, but Leo did not. He is not a comedic actor, and frankly, he hasn’t been an actor of great depth in quite some time. He’s a movie star now and brings to his movies all the limits that entails.
Cate Blanchett, though…by God. If acting is about transformation, she might be the greatest actor who ever lived. Role after role she proves she can do anything. Timotheé Chalamet? Not as much! The man can play different shades of serious, but slacker-skater? Oh man, he can’t do that. It was such a shameless moment of “We need to fit one more movie star into this movie — especially a young one.”
Don’t Look Up is a movie that wants to be important. It wants to bring attention to climate change, but I honestly wonder, does it want to change minds? Is it really trying to affect action? Conservatives are portrayed as both absurd clowns and complete lemmings — the title of this movie refers to a campaign slogan telling the right-leaning masses to literally not look to the sky where their impending doom is literally visible. And OK, American conservatives are led by complete clowns right now, and for that matter, they are the ones choosing those clowns. But people who live in aggressive willful ignorance (a phrase that really should not make sense) are not people whose minds you will be changing.
No, the main problem with Don’t Look Up is not that it won’t change conservative minds, it is its lack of interest in changing liberals’ minds. “You agree with us,” the movie shouts, “Aren’t you smart for agreeing with us, a who’s who of America’s most enviable celebrities, while these science-hating idiots live in denial?” My question: of the tens of millions of people who saw this movie, how many joined a climate change protest as a result? How many donated to climate-related charities? This movie posits a literal end of the world. Did a single social activist reprioritize their efforts after watching it?
Recommendations
I don’t remember the last time a black and white movie came out and I didn’t read somewhere that it was “shot in stunning black and white.” Gunda earns that statement. It is cinema verité about animals at a farm, especially the eponymous Gunda and her litter of piglets. If that doesn’t sound the slightest bit appealing, fair enough! If it does, though, then you should see it, because it is a masterful film.
As far as individual accomplishment goes, Bo Burnham: Inside is astonishing. Damned funny, too.
In a year when I saw far too few foreign films, El Planeta stood at the top with Drive My Car. Set in today’s Spain, still reeling from the 2008 financial crisis, El Planeta is a comedy about making it, faking it ’til you make it, and doing anything and everything that is necessary to get by in high style (or the facsimile of it). Perhaps my favorite moment in film last year were the two “hands on face” shots toward the end of the awkward date. Subsequent scenes make the moment more, not less, powerful. (If that sounds pretty cryptic, hey, we’re just that serious about avoiding spoilers here on the Istic Illic medium page! Would love to discuss these moments and this great film if you’ve seen it. Istic Illic bloggers respond to all emails!)
Roy Andersson is a global treasure. If you haven’t seen any of his films, there is little I can say on About Endlessness that would not kind of be a spoiler. If you have seen any of his films, there is little I could say that would be a spoiler. About Endlessness is Andersson’s last film and, in the context of this moment in which I am writing, the single film I most regret not seeing before putting fingers to keyboard is Being a Human Person, a documentary about the making of About Endlessness. Forgive me, dear reader!
HBO launched Music Box, a new music documentary imprint last year, and it hit the ground sprinting. They put out six feature docs, all of which were well received.
I was in my late 20s and still watching MTV when Woodstock ’99 happened. It seemed crazy as hell from my couch, full of mud and fire. We had no idea. This explosion of avarice, testosterone, and directionless angst turned into an eruption of sexual assault. It was an out-of-control inversion of the original Woodstock in 1969, run by the same promoters who threw that legendary festival. They got, um, a little greedier over those 30 years. Yet these personifications of the failure of boomer promise somehow serve as secondary baddies in Woodstock 99: Peace, Love and Rage. Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit embraces the villain role so thoroughly that it is almost hard to believe you are watching a human being in real life. Bizkit’s performance of “Break Stuff” stands as one of my favorite scenes of the year in any genre.
Listening to Kenny G is a documentary about the smooth jazz saxophonist whose story is more compelling than you probably think. With this charismatic figure and his unwavering ear to ear smile as a jumping off point, Listening to Kenny G investigates the nature of personal taste. It is creatively conceived and super fun. There are no bad guys here, as much as some of Kenny G’s critics (adversaries? enemies? prosecutors? assailants?) would have you believe otherwise.
If you were trying to make a music documentary aiming to be the opposite of everything that is Listening to Kenny G, you couldn’t do much better than DMX: Don’t Try to Understand. Spare, gritty, dark, authentic, religious. It is a fascinating thing how the tortured life of an artist becomes powerful art. What form would Earl Simmons’ talent have taken had he not suffered through the youth that he did? How much was his talent magnified by those experiences? The film doesn’t ask these or any other questions directly. It is a film of observation, only touching on Earl’s childhood when he spontaneously chooses to divulge those experiences. Cinema verité must be amongst our most underappreciated art forms. If the artist’s role is that of society’s emotional antennae, as I often believe it to be, its makers are amongst our greatest artists.
The Academy Awards
Confession: I don’t release this annual blog on Oscar Day because I care so much about the Oscars. In fact, I rarely watch the broadcast and care very little who wins. No, the main reason that I release this on Oscar Day is that in December, when the professional critics are putting out their year-end wrap ups, I haven’t had watched many of the year’s movies yet. I’m buying myself time.
Notwithstanding, the fact is that of any day of the year, today is the one on which people care most about movies. And people do still care. Every newspaper has several stories about the Oscars today; certain websites have been going on about them for months. But people care far less than they used to. Last year’s Academy Award ratings were — wait for this — 95% below their peak and 70% below just five years ago. Last year was the first year ever that the Oscars broadcast did not finish in the top 100 broadcasts of the year. Back in the old days, it consistently finished number two behind only the Super Bowl.
The movies that are nominated matter — a lot. The years that blockbusters Titanic and Avatar were in the running had by far the highest ratings of their respective decades. Last year, when Nomadland swept three major prizes, it was the opposite. The Academy is far from oblivious to all of this, but the actions they’ve taken have not helped at all. Some are just embarrassing: DJ Khaled and Shawn White are presenting awards tonight. This is not going to bring in new audiences, folks. The Academy did make two big changes that, to my mind, made sense: the Best Picture category was expanded to 10 nominees with the idea that a couple of very popular films would be included; and the Academy’s membership was dramatically expanded, predominantly with younger people, in hopes that more movies targeted to younger people would be nominated. I was wrong. These changes have failed.
The insurmountable and existential problem is that young people, by and large, simply do not care about feature films. Numbers show beyond any doubt that the bulk of millennials and nearly all Zillenials go to Youtube and TikTok for their passive entertainment. They are a horse that you can’t lead to water, much less make drink. Worse, though, the movies that are being elevated by the new rules don’t have broad appeal across any demographic. By personal anecdotal evidence, young people who go into film professionally have tastes that are more or less antithetical to what broad audiences want.
This is no attack. When I brag about the movies that I’ve produced (often!), I talk not of their smashing success, but about the film festivals they played in and the critic’s “best of” lists that they appeared on. I wish I could say this is driven by humility, but it isn’t. Mytastes are antithetical to what broad audiences want, too. So one might think I would be happy that Power of the Dog and Drive My Car are getting recognition. They are, in fact, two of my favorite movies in this off-year.
I’m not happy, though. The Academy Awards are not the critics’ awards. Many critics’ awards already exist (IndieWire’s poll is, in my opinion, the most authoritative, which, for the record, is not a euphemism for “the one I most agree with”). The Academy Awards are supposed to be the best in mass entertainment. The Movies as mass entertainment; The Movies as glue in our social fabric.
I genuinely do not care much at all about who is nominated or who wins, but I care that the Oscars exist and that they matter to Americans. Why? Because movie-going, and in particular, movies in theatres for grown-ups, is under existential threat. The Academy Awards are perhaps the strongest tentpole holding the art form aloft.
I promised right in the essay title: I have a fix for this.
I lied right in the essay title. There really is no “fix.” But I do have an idea.
Only two of the ten nominees for best picture earned more than $20 million at the domestic box office — by design. Three of the five documentary nominees earned less than $20 thousand. Few people have more passion for the theatrical experience than I do, but The Oscars need to stop kidding themselves about its significance in 2022.
We all know that some of the highest quality moving pictures with much of the best talent, both behind and in front of the screen, now appears on television. There is no longer a prestige gap; the heights of television match the heights of film. The Oscars need to represent the Moving Picture, not the movie theater, and they need to, well, steal the prestige that the Emmy Awards clearly cannot capitalize on.
The Oscars should create two new awards: Best Series and Best Documentary Series. The key to not simply becoming the Emmy’s is this: every show is only eligible to apply for nomination one time. Euphoria, for example, might have waited for season two; The White Lotus might have gone for it in season one. Limited series like Get Back obviously apply in their only year. Squid Game might break into the nominations where Spiderman could not.
Best Scripted Series would be the second to last award presented, just before Best Picture. I make the case that this would give more prestige to feature films. The Best Series, which is far more likely to have captured the nation’s rhetorical water cooler talk, comes first and then the winners of that prize sit in the audience with everyone else waiting to hear the Best Picture.
Bringing in the top series’ is about recognizing the art of telling stories through the moving image. It would arouse genuine excitement. If this change were to happen, filmmakers — which is what prestige television showrunners are — would care a hundred times more about the Oscar Award than they do about the Emmy Award. Get it done, Academy. Totally fuck over the Emmy Awards and protect the future of long-form moving pictures!
Rage, rage against the dying of the light
I think it is reasonable to say that The Movies as a central part of our culture began in 1915 with the release of, most unfortunately, The Birth of a Nation, and ended in March of 2020 with the COVID lockdowns. Nothing lasts forever and a century is a long time.
This, to say the least, brings me no joy. Some of the most moving moments of my life have taken place in movie theatres. It is only when we take away the pause button and the cell phone that we surrender ourselves to the artist’s vision, and thus it is only then that we fully experience the artist’s vision. Add to this the enveloping experience and the small community of strangers around you. There is nothing like it.
How nigh exactly, is the end? Here, I am more hopeful. I think that movie theaters may exist at least through my lifetime and perhaps for another 105 years or much more, but not in the model in which they currently exist. I believe that like opera, dance companies, and orchestras before them, movie theaters will need to adopt a business model based on patronage. It would be nice if I were wrong, but I am not willing to wait until all my most beloved movie theaters shut their doors to find out.
I am very proud to announce that ISTIC ILLIC has signed up to become the name sponsor for an annual TIFF Cinematheque Series. This year’s entry: Close-Up: The Films of Abbas Kiarastomi. The Series will begin on May 20 with Taste of Cherry and end on June 26 with Close-Up. These two films are, in my always humble opinion, two of the best films ever made. Six more films will be shown in between. including the entire Koker trilogy. My heart expands as I write this. I have four tickets for each screening, so if you made it to the end of this and live in Toronto, give me a shout.
