#5. Zen and the Art of Pandering to White Folks
Thelonious “Monk” Ellison is an upper-class black writer in a bit of a slump. His new book isn’t getting bites from publishers, he’s been put on leave from the college where he teaches for yelling at a white student for complaining about the n-word being written on the white board. Man, but is thinking you shouldn’t even have to see that word written down ever white privilege. In the midst of this, his sister, who’d been holding the family together, suddenly passes in front of him, and now Monk has to find a way to care for his mother, who’s slipping into dementia, reconcile with his estranged brother, and grapple with learning that his father wasn’t who he thought.
And while all this is happening, he hammers out a dumb and exploitative novel about gang life in the ghetto, has his publisher send it out under a fake name, and it swiftly becomes the most successful thing he’s ever written, to his eternal frustration.
The family dynamics work. The satire of black creators being forced into a stereotypical bubble forged by white expectations also works. Some people have claimed the satire is “tired,” but I don’t think you get to say that if the problem it’s satirizing hasn’t gone away. By way of a for instance, Ryan Coogler delivered two massive hits for Marvel with the Black Panther movies but hasn’t been discussed as a potential director for an Avengers movie, maybe Feige asked and he wasn’t interested, only saying. But since I’ve brought up Marvel anyway, American Fiction has a Punisher season two problem, in that it has two stories that don’t really blend. Monk’s refusal to come clean about his novel to his brother, mother, or new girlfriend mean that the family conflicts and satire plots are just awkwardly staring at each other from across the gym and never finding the courage to ask each other to dance.
That said, each story works. In any year where Best Actor wasn’t a knife fight between Cillian Murphy and Paul Giamatti, Jeffrey Wright would be a bigger part of the Best Actor conversation. Likewise Sterling K. Brown is excellent as Monk’s brother, a little too busy dealing with his family breaking apart after his wife caught him with another man to care too much about Monk’s issues with publishers. He’d also have a better shot if every award body weren’t so determined to congratulate Robert Downey Jr. for returning to Serious Acting after 11 years of being the face of the medium’s most successful film series. And without going into detail, the ending (a great meta-piece on endings in general) is very fun.
This one works, it just works, maybe not as a cohesive whole but the parts sure work, and it’s in and out in under two hours, which is nice.
Would I have watched it without being nominated? I only barely even knew this movie existed when it started getting buzz as a Best Picture candidate, would I have even known about it otherwise?
Am I glad I did? Yes, this was an overall fun one.
Films of 2023 Ranking: It comes in at 9, over Blackberry but under the year’s most legitimately under-appreciated movie at the box office, Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.
#4. Simply Having an Awkward Christmas Time
An elite boarding school’s least popular professor is assigned to watching over the handful of students not going home for Christmas, including one student who’d been ready for a tropical holiday only to be ditched by his mother in favour of a honeymoon with her new husband. When said mother refuses to respond to phone calls, he’s the only Holdover not whisked off to a ski holiday by another student’s rich father. And so it’s just cantankerous classics professor Paul Hunham, being punished for costing a legacy student his ivy league admission by failing him in classics, antagonistic student Angus Tully, and school cook Mary Lamb, whose son has just been killed in action in Vietnam.
Oh yes this is very much set in the 70s, and is filmed to look like it was made in the 70s, from the period-appropriate studio logos to the imperfections of the “film stock.” It helps set an atmosphere, settling us into the period, when the culture war was still Democracy (ie. captialism) vs Communism, not “Woke” Vs. Ethno-State Christo-Fascism (still the only thing “anti-woke” means).
This is, simply put, a charming and funny “broken people find each other and begin to heal” story, and it is very Christmas, so Christmas at its core I regret watching it in February. The core trio is excellent, and while it’s top-half for runtime, doesn’t really feel it. It avoids schmaltz by avoiding neat, happy endings. Nobody’s in a tragic spot, but I’d be hard pressed to say anyone’s problems are solved. But maybe we see some paths forward. It’s sweet and fun and touching and maybe that’s all you need sometimes, you don’t need to be about the Holocaust.
Would I have watched it without being nominated? I feel like I heard enough glowing praise I’d have gotten there.
Am I glad I did? Yup! Good times.
Films of 2023 Ranking: It’s at number 7, over DND: HAT (high praise for me) and under our next entry.
#3. The Miracles of Science (derogatory)
I’m not usually a fan of biopics. Many of my least favourite best picture nominees of the past 15 years are empty calorie Great Man Biopics that only seem to exist to get Eddie Redmayne/Benedict Cumberbatch/Will Smith an Oscar. But not this one. This one is a ride and a half.
We don’t burn a lot of time on Oppenheimer’s youth. Sure we do have a dueling framing device that leans close to “Don’t you know that before he sings Dewey Cox needs to remember his entire life” territory, as Cillian Murphy’s Oppenheimer tells the story of the A-bomb to a committee determining if his security clearance will be renewed, and Robert Downey Jr.’s Lewis Strauss tells his side while attempting to get confirmed as Eisenhower’s Secretary of Commerce. But Christopher Nolan moves quickly to the main event: Oppenheimer being asked to lead the Manhattan Project, inventing the A-Bomb before Hitler’s people do it first. Something plagued by Oppenheimer’s connections to people who would be declared Unamerican by petty conservative tyrants.
The cast is perhaps the most stacked I’ve ever seen. It’s so filled with notable actors in every nook and cranny that for a while there I thought Nolan had only given Rami Malek three seconds of screentime. And they’re all good, there was talk that Oppenheimer might finally beat All About Eve’s twice-tied record for most nominations as it had enough great performances to justify five acting nominations (it got three, the more rationally expected number, and fell one nomination short of the record). And for being a movie about slowly, painstakingly doing the work of experimental nuclear physics, it’s gripping. Also those framing devices I mentioned have a killer third act twist where it suddenly becomes a new and fairly thrilling movie. Plus for a director known to struggle with human emotion, Nolan does a great deal of portraying Oppenheimer’s unspoken horror at what his invention just did to Hiroshima.
I admit it was a little goofy when John F. Kennedy gets name-dropped with the tone and gravitas of Nick Fury saying “I’m here to talk to you about the Avengers Initiative,” like we were teasing the sequel or something, but if that moment irks you enough to affect your overall opinion of the movie, I don’t know what to say other than “Congrats, you found a Cinema Sin. Ding.”
Would I have watched it without being nominated? I was all in on Barbenheimer from the announcement of the shared release date. I’m a low-key Nolan Bro, I was in.
Am I glad I did? This is one I actively want to watch again. Just haven’t found three spare hours.
Films of 2023 Ranking: At number 6, over The Holdovers but under 2023’s very best Part One, Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning.
#2. The Frankenstein Who Fucks
Bella is a science experiment of Dr. Godwin Baxter, a (relatively calm) mad genius surgeon who spent his childhood the subject of his father’s insane experiments into the functioning of the human body, and thinks that’s just normal now. She has the brain of an infant, but the body of Emma Stone, which means yes we are into Born Sexy Yesterday territory, but I believe that we’re in a subversion of it, because the men infantilizing, objectifying, and seeking to control Bella are uniformly villains, while the men just trying to connect with and appreciate her for who she is are the ones we like, even twisted Godwin.
Bella’s mind develops at an exponential rate, going from learning to speak in the beginning to making eloquent speeches at the halfway point and taking over Godwin’s physician practice in the final act. However, between having a fully functional adult body and being raised by a hideously scarred physician who grew up with “thirst for knowledge” in place of “fucks to give about societal conventions,” Bella discovers sexual gratification way, way faster than she does the concept of shame, a concept she finds odd and illogical. Something lawyer Duncan Wedderburn is willing to take advantage of, and again, that does not mark him as someone we like.
This movie is gorgeous. Just stunning. I’m glad I saw it in theatres because this whole story is playing out in a series of beautiful expressionist paintings. Gothic Fantasy Lisbon is one of the most stunning sets I saw all year. The entire cast is great, Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo are holding nothing back, and it is a great dissection of the patriarchal need to control and corral female sexuality. It turns out westerns society’s hang-ups about sex need to be taught, and if you are raised in the absence of them, they make no sense. This movie is a primer to be radicalized against purity culture, because the more a man wants to control Bella, the bigger the monster they are, and the harder the movie is on them.
This would be top of the list except for one little thing, and that little thing is related to runtime. There came a moment when I thought all had come to a satisfying conclusion, only to suddenly enter a new (if not overly long) chapter. Yes, there was an unfired Chekov’s gun that had been established maybe an hour earlier (we hadn’t thought much about it but Bella’s body used to be someone else, didn’t it), but still, even with how into it I was, there was an element of “Oh. So… we’re not done” when it happened.
Look. Blame TikTok, blame YouTube, blame MTV, blame whatever attention span boogieman you need to for why people aren’t flocking to a 3.5 hour movie about a real-life mass murder, but we in the audience still love a tight 90, and I have seen maybe one movie over three hours that didn’t struggle to justify its runtime.
I was not nearly as upset that the movie was still happening as I was with Maestro or The Irishman, but I was a little irked, and that puts Poor Things in second place.
Would I have watched it without being nominated? This one sounded like my jam, so yes.
Am I glad I did? Sure am, wanna see it again, hope my TV does it justice.
Films of 2023 Ranking: Third place, right over Godzilla Minus One, which was the better 2023 movie about the legacy of the A-bomb, fight me Oppenheads.
#1. Life in Plastic Was Indeed Fantastic
Sue me, I like being moved and entertained when I pay twenty bucks to watch a movie. In 1983 a decision was made that Oscar movies had to be Serious Art and I think it is past time to unpack and discard that choice.
This was the single greatest theatrical experience I had in 2023, and yes, a great deal of that was the energy of the opening night crowd, flocks of people in pink here for a good time, loving every second of this movie, laughing and cheering and adoring it. But if a movie can do that, if a movie can make sold-out crowds react like that for 100 solid minutes (love a short queen this Oscar season, I told you), using actually clever dialogue and characters rather than just saying “Hey look everybody it’s Andrew Garfield back as Spider-man” (I did not have a crowd that cheered over that, I tell you what, and yes I went opening night), isn’t that worth awards attention? Everything is terrible and not improving, can we not come to a place where joy is as artistically valid as sorrow?
Anyway this movie is exquisitely crafted. The world of Barbie is competitive with Gothic Fantasy Portugal, the cast is outstanding, the laughs hit and yeah, there were big cheers for America Ferrera’s big speech. Sure, it’s feminism 101, especially compared to the deeper, richer Poor Things, but if we can learn anything from the conservative right’s ongoing efforts to drag the western world into a restrictive society even the Taliban thinks is taking things too far, it’s that a lot of y’all out there are very much still on the tutorial level of this game. You can complain we’re still teaching Feminism 101 when the fail rate of the class stops being so fucking high.
This was more of a rant than a review and I’m sorry about that but, well, this one is just so excellent in so many ways. Brilliantly written, directed, acted, and realized by talented artisans in every department, it’s a real achievement and I loved it so.
Would I have watched it without being nominated? As I said earlier, I was Team Barbenheimer from day one.
Am I glad I did? Very yes, Greta Gerwig simply does not miss.
Films of 2023 Ranking: Despite all that praise, it’s still second. I loved Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 just that much and y’all gotta deal with it because I’m not sorry.
And there we have it. Ten movies ranked, and only a handful of complaints. The Best of 2023 (by Academy standard) is very nearly all killer, no filler, and even at it’s worst we’re still doing miles better than King Richard.
Some people on reddit are trying to predict what the nominees will be next year. Feels like madness to me. I hadn’t even heard of most of the movies on this list before September. Anyway, my favourite won’t win, but I’m unlikely to be mad at whoever does, even if there is a shock upset from the very predictable course we’ve been on so far.
Hopefully I’ll be back here soon, until then, see you at the ceremony.
