Oscar Catch-Up Part 1: Aftersun, Causeway, Blonde

Every year I think I have watched every conceivable movie and will be all caught up when Oscar nominations are announced. And every year, the Oscars throw me a curve ball and nominate a bunch of movies and performances I missed. So I have been diligently trying to make my way through the nominees in the major categories. Here are my reviews of what I've seen so far: spoiler alert, I've arranged them from best to worst, so pick your poison accordingly.

Aftersun: I knew Paul Mescal was a fantastic actor when I saw his breakout role in Normal People. So it is hardly surprising that he has brought that same emotional vulnerability and acting prowess to this movie and garnered an Oscar nomination. Written and directed by Charlotte Wells, this is the story of 11-year-old Sophie (played by the sublime Frankie Corlo), a Scottish girl who is on holiday with her father, Calum (Mescal) at a resort in Turkey. She is filming their vacation on a small video camera, so the film is interspersed with some of that grainy footage, as we are both following the events of this vacation, but also looking back on the events from the perspective of the adult Sophie, twenty years later. 

This movie is a feat of subtle storytelling and it does demand your attention. I regret not watching it when it was out in theaters, as I fear I may have given it too distracted a viewing. But despite my less-than-diligent home viewership, I was still captivated by its melancholy vibes. You have to let the narrative unfurl around you, so I won't give away any plot. But this is emphatically a tale of the hero worship young girls can have for their fathers, the ways in which parents hide things from their children, the ways in which children can be both perceptive and oblivious to what's going on around them, and the many ways in which individuals simply cannot know what the people around them are going through. It's a beautiful movie, gorgeously shot, empathetically acted, and delightful to behold. 

Causeway: Brian Tyree Henry is a phenomenal actor, so I'm excited he has gotten his first Oscar nomination for his work in this movie. Directed by Lila Neugebauer from a script by Ottessa Moshfegh, Luke Goebel, and Elizabeth Sanders, this is the story of Lynsey (Jennifer Lawrence), an American soldier who has returned home to New Orleans after suffering a traumatic brain injury in an IED explosion in Afghanistan. She gets a job cleaning pools and is living with her somewhat flighty mother (Linda Emond), and seems unwilling to reckon with her depression, desperate to get a clean bill of health from her doctor so she can go back to active duty. However, she then strikes up a friendship with James (Henry), and together, they might be able to help each other.

This is a well-acted film: Lawrence and Henry are unsurprisingly excellent in it, and the evolution of their friendship feels real and true. I'm less convinced that this is a well-written film, and in the hands of any other actors, it might have been a slog. The silences where we just watch these actors emote or reflect on their trauma is where this movie shines, but otherwise it doesn't feel like it has anything particularly revelatory to say. I'm glad Henry bagged an Oscar nomination, but I look forward to the day he wins an award for a much more memorable movie. 

Blonde: Oh what a travesty. It is devastating that Ana de Armas, who is a fantastic actress, should have received her first nomination for this awful film. She fully deserves that nomination, acting her heart out as she effects an astonishing transformation as the iconic Marilyn Monroe. But written and directed by Andrew Dominik, who based the script on Joyce Carol Oates' pseudo-biographical novel about Marilyn Monroe, this movie is an exploitative, deeply weird, and unnecessary piece of cinema. And it clocks in at a runtime of nearly three hours, which is inhumane. This movie truly is an act of cinematic terrorism.

The film proffers a fictionalized look at the life of Marilyn Monroe. It aims to be a biography, but most of what it has to say is a complete fiction. We all know that Monroe was exploited by Hollywood and mainly viewed as a sex symbol, but this movie goes absolutely overboard by turning her life into nothing more than a series of rapes and tragic encounters with greedy men. It doesn't allow her to experience an iota of joy. There are brief flashes of her wonderful intellect, but we never spend too much time exploring this woman's inner life and rich mind. Instead, the director was too busy telling de Armas to take her top off and do another violent sex scene.

This movie also has weird arthouse pretensions - we keep moving from black and white to color and back again. There are scenes with a talking fetus. There are weird transitions and cinematic effects that feel like they are the product of a film student who has just been allowed to direct a movie for the first time and is trying to see what tricks he can get his camera to do. So yeah. Go watch Ana de Armas in literally anything else but do not watch this movie. Unless you want to make Marilyn roll over in her grave.