Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Here’s a filler post as I’ll soon be boarding for Miami, and have little to say except to express sorrow for the wildfires on Maui, whose latest toll is at least 55 lives, as well as a ton of property destroyed.
Here’s a video showing how they make animal noises for the movies (you didn’t think the animals made them, did you?).
The YouTube notes:
Foley artists use objects to create sounds based on a character’s movements and interactions in movies and TV shows. Sometimes, they will find themselves making sounds for animals. Marko Costanzo is a veteran Foley artist for c5 Sound, Inc. He has who worked on movies like “Ice Age,” “Life of Pi,” and “True Grit.” Costanzo explained how complicated it was to make the sounds of a dragonfly flapping its wings in “Men in Black,” and how he captured the footsteps of a dog at different ages in “Marley & Me.” Then, we showed him an animal clip he has never seen before and had him come up with the proper sounds on the spot.
In a “3-minute read” (oy, I hate this timing thing), yahoo! entertainment has announced that it will make a “limited series” of my favorite modern novel of the last several decades, 2014’s All the Light We Cannot See, which won the fiction Pulitzer Prize for author Anthony Doerr in 2015. I described and lauded the book in August of last year, and if you haven’t read it yet, you’re a schnook.
Here’s the too-short trailer:
I have to add that I recently read another great modern novel, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, published in author Muriel Barbery’s original French in 2006 and then two years later in a wonderful English translation rendered by Alison Anderson. This is right up there with the novel above, but it will take a few years to see which made the greatest impression on me. (I just found out there’s a French movie, “The Hedgehog,” based on Barbery’s book, and it gets an 87% critics’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I must see it).
I also have to say that I’m worried that the Netflix version of Doerr’s book won’t come up to snuff, as only very rarely has a movie equaled or surpassed the quality of a book I’ve loved (two notable instances are The Last Picture Show, a great book and an even greater movie, and The Bridges of Madison County, a horrible stinkeroo of a novel but a pretty good movie).
I think most of us form a picture in our minds of the character’s appearance, the nature of the surroundings, and even what voices sound like. And the movie rarely matches these, causing somewhat of a letdown. I can already sense it coming from the trailer above: the girl Maurie-Laure looks nothing like what I imagined.
I will watch the “limited series,” but I’m definitely dampening my expectations. As my motto goes, “A pessimist is never disappointed.”
Each year my nephew Steven, a huge movie buff and critic, presents his own personal list of nominees for the best movies, actors, and scores: the “Golden Steves.” I announced his nominations on March 4, and today we have the WINNERS.
First, his humble introduction to the awards and the criteria for nomination.
Presenting…the 2022 Golden Steve Awards.
Far and away the most coveted of motion picture accolades, Golden Steves are frequently described as the Oscars without the politics. Impervious to bribery, immune to ballyhoo, unswayed by sentiment, and riddled with integrity, this committee of one might be termed in all accuracy “fair-mindedness incarnate.” Over 200 of the year’s most acclaimed features were screened prior to the compilation of this ballot. First, some caveats:
1) Owing to a lifelong suspicion of prime numbers, each category comprises six nominees, not five.
2) A film can be nominated in only one of the following categories: Best Animated Feature, Best Non-Fiction Film, Best Foreign Language Film. Placement is determined by the Board of Governors. Said film remains eligible in all other fields.
3) This list is in no way connected with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences—a fact that should be apparent from its acumen. Please look elsewhere for Oscar analysis.
And now, the worthy honorees:
I’ll list the give nominees and winners in the seven categories I listed a month ago, adding “Best Animated Feature”. At the Golden Steves site, though, you’ll see winners in 12 categories.
And he told me this, which he’s quite proud of:
“I went rogue this year — zero overlap with the Academy!”
Click below to see all the nominees and winners; again I’ll include eight categories. The winners of the Golden Steves are in bold. My own comments are flush left.
Best Picture
Aftersun Benediction EO
The Fabelmans
Return to Seoul
Saint Omer
I saw two of these: “EO”, which I find overrated, and “The Fabelmans”, which I also find overrated. I haven’t seen any of the others, though the absence of “Tár” and “The Banishees of Inisherin” is mystifying. Remember, though that these nominations are not to be taken lightly. It’s best if you see them all.
Best Director
Davy Chou, Return to Seoul Terence Davies, Benediction Alice Diop, Saint Omer
Jerzy Skolimowski, EO
Steven Spielberg, The Fabelmans
Charlotte Wells, Aftersun
Didn’t see the movie so I missed this performance.
Best Actor
Colin Farrell, The Banshees of Inisherin
Caleb Landry Jones, Nitram
Jack Lowden, Benediction
Paul Mescal, Aftersun Bill Nighy, Living Mark Rylance, The Outfit
I saw only Farrell in “Banshees,” which was excellent, but missed the other peformances.
Best Actress Cate Blanchett, Tar
Danielle Deadwyler, Till Rebecca Hall, Resurrection Vicky Krieps, Corsage
Park Ji-min, Return to Seoul
Andrea Riseborough, To Leslie
Saw only Blanchett, whose performance was great.
Best Supporting Actor
Paul Dano, The Fabelmans Brian Tyree Henry, Causeway Anthony Hopkins, Armageddon Time
Alex Lutz, Vortex
Matthew Maher, Funny Pages
Ke Huy Quan, Everything Everywhere All at Once
I saw Dano’s and Quan’s performances (though I didn’t watch all of that vastly overrated film “Everything Everywhere All at Once”); missed the others.
Best Supporting Actress
Kerry Condon, The Banshees of Inisherin
Judy Davis, Nitram
Dolly de Leon, Triangle of Sadness
Nina Hoss, Tar
Stephanie Hsu, Everything Everywhere All at Once Guslagie Malanda, Saint Omer
Saw Condon’s, Hoss’s, and Hsu’s performances.
Best Non-Fiction Film
All That Breathes (Shaunak Sen) All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (Laura Poitras) Bad Axe (David Siev)
Moonage Daydream (Brett Morgan)
Three Minutes: A Lengthening (Bianca Stigter)
Young Plato (Declan McGrath, Neasa Ni Chianain)
Sadly, I missed all of these,
I’m adding this category because I did see the winner, and it’s a gorgeous animation. Don’t miss “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On”!
Best Animated Feature
Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood (Richard Linklater)
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (Guillermo del Toro, Mark Gustafson)
Mad God (Phil Tippett) Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (Dean Fleischer Camp) My Father’s Dragon (Nora Twomey)
The Sea Beast (Chris Williams)
Feel free to comment on his choices. If you have a beef or question like “why on earth did you nominate this?, put it in the comments, and I’ll ask him to answer.
I will add that Steven’s taste in films is very good (i.e., he’s clued me in to many good movies I’ve missed), so you might look in on the nominees above.
Finally, below is a photo of Steven tucking into a pastrami sandwich at Katz’s Deli in NYC when I took him on a Lower East Side Jewish Eating Tour in 2010. He would have won the award for Best Deli Lunch except he chose a beer as Best Accompanying Beverage, while the real winner should be Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray Tonic—a celery-flavored soft drink that’s the PERFECT match to corned beef or pastrami sandwiches. (Notice that I have one at lower right.)
For those of you who think Bill Maher is a covert “alt-righter”, here’s his take on progress in the Oscars, from Sacheen Littlefeather (real name Marie Louise Cruz) getting booed when rejecting Marlon Brando’s Oscar to the likelihood she’d get cheered today. Maher sees this as real progress, and I suppose many will be surprised at his approbation of progress and his chastising of liberals for being behind on the arc of history.
This isn’t one of his funnier monologues (except for the instructions to the kids at the beginning), but it does show where he stands. Note that John McWhorter appears to be on the panel, but I can find no words by him on yesterday’s show .
It turns out that Littlefeather wasn’t of Native American descent at all, but that is irrelevant to the point Maher is making.
Here’s Littlefeather’s speech while rejecting Brando’s award. I hope you recognize the presenters. She pushes the Oscar away, and during her short speech can hear mixed boos and cheers from the audience.
Reader Wayne called my attention to a Washington Times article about how the Oscars are “under pressure to replace actor, actress awards with gender-neutral honors”. Indeed, the Los Angeles Times, published at the home of the Academy Awards, ran this op-ed (by the whole editorial board) last December (click to read):
The Times article gives the pros and cons in two paragraphs:
The Academy Awards face mounting pressure to follow the Grammys, the MTV Movie & TV Awards, the Gotham Awards and the Independent Spirit Awards by replacing the male and female acting awards with “best performer” or “best performance” as entertainers increasingly identify as nonbinary and transgender.
The trend has opened another front in the debate over fairness versus inclusion, raising concerns that actresses, much like female athletes, may wind up bearing the costs of the campaign to reconfigure sex and gender classifications.
One difference is that almost nobody wants a single category for athletic competitions, while a lot of actors favor eliminating sex-specific awards (see below).
Now if you create just two non-gender-specified awards for winners in categories that were previously “best male” and “best female,” that’s an explicit nod to the sex binary, something that may not fly in today’s woke Hollywood. But that’s what the L.A. Film Critics Association did.
Further, if you create just one award, a lack of gender equity in the industry will mean that it’s likely to go to a male, and that doesn’t look good either. Many people think that in the Oscars, like athletics, women should be given an equal chance to shine. But since there’s no reason that women can’t be as competitive as men in acting (though there may be barriers to success that men don’t face), this is not identical to the situation women face in athletics.
However, the L.A. Times feels that women don’t have equal acting opportunity: even though they make up between 45% and 47% of scripted leads, only 25% of Oscar-winning movies have female leads. The paper still recommends ditching the gender-based solution:
Dissolving gendered categories for Oscars or Emmys would not magically give women parity with men in accessing substantial acting roles and being celebrated for their work. Despite some notable recent gains for women, the entertainment industry is still weighted in favor of men. The last thing we would want to see are nongendered acting categories full of male nominees and winners.
. . .But as Josh Welsh, the president of Film Independent, which puts on the Spirit Awards, said, “Keeping gendered award categories is not a solution to the problem. The change needs to come with diversifying the gatekeepers who make decisions about what films and shows get financed and marketed.”
This assumes, of course, that the gatekeepers are more likely to recognize or nominate acting talent in their own gender or ethnic group. The article continues:
He’s right, but awards still play a part in the ecosystem of Hollywood. An acting award can raise the profile and influence of the winner. It would be unsettling if a new approach to award-bestowing makes it even more difficult for women to win an award and achieve that profile.
But it’s past time to get rid of these categories — and we believe that awards shows can smartly lay out a plan to do that.
In a survey of actors, the NY Times showed them to be split: all favored “inclusivity”, but women in particular expressed worries about being shut out of acting awards.
I don’t have a dog in this fight, so I don’t much care what they do so long as everyone is given equal opportunity to succeed in directing, acting, and so on, and awards are based on merit. There does seem to be something hypocritical in eliminating gendered awards but still retaining two categories. It would seem better that if you don’t want gender categories there should be just one winner.
One difference between acting and athletics, though, is that if you combine the sexes in sports, the winner is invariably going to be male, and the unfairness of that is much more evident than it would be for acting. Given their sterling performances to date (e.g., Cate Blanchett in Tár), surely many women could win a the single acting Oscar.
Another solution is just to eliminate awards altogether, but few would go for that (I wouldn’t care).
So if the Oscars can “smartly lay out a plan” for the Academy Awards that recognizes actors of any gender or sex, what is it to be? Readers?
Each year (see here) my nephew Steven, a movie buff and critic who proclaims himself a far better judge of cinema than is the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, comes up with his equivalent of the Oscars: the renowned “Golden Steve Awards”. There is no modesty here, but the proclamation of the best of last year’s cinema, bar none. (This dogmatism must run in the family!) He added this in his email:
Here’s this year’s crop. At age 96, Mel Brooks has become my all-time oldest nominee!
The award season begins with his list of nominees, some of which I present here (there are other categories as well). As he notes in his introduction below, the winners will be announced on April 1.
Presenting…the 2022 Golden Steve Awards.
Far and away the most coveted of motion picture accolades, Golden Steves are frequently described as the Oscars without the politics. Impervious to bribery, immune to ballyhoo, unswayed by sentiment, and riddled with integrity, this committee of one might be termed in all accuracy “fair-mindedness incarnate.” Over 200 of the year’s most acclaimed features were screened prior to the compilation of this ballot. First, some caveats:
1) Owing to a lifelong suspicion of prime numbers, each category comprises six nominees, not five.
2) A film can be nominated in only one of the following categories: Best Animated Feature, Best Non-Fiction Film, Best Foreign Language Film. Placement is determined by the Board of Governors. Said film remains eligible in all other fields.
3) This list is in no way connected with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences—a fact that should be apparent from its acumen. Please look elsewhere for Oscar analysis.
Winners will be announced on Saturday, April 1. And now, the worthy nominees (click the screenshot to read them all):
The nominees, by category:
Best Picture
Aftersun
Benediction
EO
The Fabelmans
Return to Seoul
Saint Omer
Best Director
Davy Chou, Return to Seoul
Terence Davies, Benediction
Alice Diop, Saint Omer
Jerzy Skolimowski, EO
Steven Spielberg, The Fabelmans
Charlotte Wells, Aftersun
Best Actor
Colin Farrell, The Banshees of Inisherin
Caleb Landry Jones, Nitram Jack Lowden, Benediction Paul Mescal, Aftersun
Bill Nighy, Living Mark Rylance, The Outfit
Best Actress
Cate Blanchett, Tar
Danielle Deadwyler, Till
Rebecca Hall, Resurrection
Vicky Krieps, Corsage
Park Ji-min, Return to Seoul
Andrea Riseborough, To Leslie
Best Supporting Actor
Paul Dano, The Fabelmans
Brian Tyree Henry, Causeway
Anthony Hopkins, Armageddon Time
Alex Lutz, Vortex
Matthew Maher, Funny Pages
Ke Huy Quan, Everything Everywhere All at Once
Best Supporting Actress
Kerry Condon, The Banshees of Inisherin
Judy Davis, Nitram
Dolly de Leon, Triangle of Sadness
Nina Hoss, Tar
Stephanie Hsu, Everything Everywhere All at Once
Guslagie Malanda, Saint Omer
Best Foreign Language Film
EO (Jerzy Skolimowski)
Fabian: Going to the Dogs (Dominik Graf)
No Bears (Jafar Panahi)
Return to Seoul (Davy Chou)
RRR (S.S. Rajamouli)
Saint Omer (Alice Diop)
There are five other categories, and Mel Brooks is nominated for “Best Original Song,” “At the Automat,” The Automat. Here’s the song:
As usual, I’ve seen almost none of the nominated movies or performances. Of all the Best Picture nominees, I’ve seen only “The Fabelmans”, and I thought it was so-so. And where is “Tár”? But Steven’s nominations are not to be sniffed at, for he’s introduced me to many good movies I wouldn’t have seen otherwise (“Tokyo Story” is one).
Of the other movies mentioned for performances, I have seen “Tár”, “The Banshees of Inisherin,” “Till” (overlooked for Best Film) and “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” which I thought was a stinkeroo and couldn’t finish watching. (I did love “Tár and “The Banshees of Inisherin”.) I want to watch “EO” badly, as it’s been on many best-movie lists, but I haven’t had time.
If you’ve seen any of the nominated films, or want to weigh in on the nominations, please do so below. And, of course, come back on April 1 to see the winners, which according to Steven represent the genuine best in cinema.
It must have been at least two years ago when a group of young but eager filmmakers came to my lab in Chicago to spend several hours filming my lucubrations about free will for a movie they were making. I didn’t hear much about the project after that, and assumed that it had died, but no: I just heard that the movie, “Free Will? A Documentary” was out. It’s two hours long, very absorbing for those of us interested in this question, but you’ll have to pay to see it. (As an interviewee, I got a free viewing.)
You can watch the short trailer on YouTube by clicking below; the notes say this:
Free Will? A Documentary is an in-depth investigation featuring world renowned philosophers and scientists into the most profound philosophical debate of all time: Do we have free will?
Featuring physicist Sean Carroll, philosopher Daniel Dennett, writer Coleman Hughes, neuroscientist Heather Berlin, and many more.
The website for the film is here; it was directed by Mike Walsh, produced by Jeremy Levy and Mitch Joseph, and the cinematography is by Matteo Ballatta. They did an extremely professional job, complete with animations, movies, photos of the relevant scientific papers, and so on. You can rent it from either Vimeo or Amazon for only $2.99 (“rentals include 30 days to start watching this video and 48 hours to finish once started”), or buy it to watch permanently for ten bucks. I enjoyed the hell out of it, and if you want to watch it via rental, three bucks is a pittance, especially because it’s as long as and as well produced as any documentary you can see in theaters. And it has a lot of food for thought. I put a few notes below.
The trailer:
The movie is largely a series of talking heads: nearly everyone who’s ever weighed in on free will is here (a notable exception is Robert Sapolsky). You can see physicist Sean Carroll, Massimo Pigliucci, Trick Slattery, Gregg Caruso, Derk Pereboom, Coleman Hughes (new to me on this topic, but very good), and neuroscientist Heather Berlin (also new to me, and also very good). And of course there’s Dan Dennett, who gets more airtime than anyone else, perhaps because he’s the most well known philosopher to deal with free will (he’s written two big books about it), but also because he speaks with vigor, eloquence, and his trademarked confidence. I appear in a few scenes, but the concentration is on philosophers.
On the whole, the film accepts naturalism, giving little time to libertarian “you could have done otherwise” free will. There are two libertarians shown, though: psychologist Edwin Locke (an atheist) and Rick Messing (an observant Jew and, I think, a rabbi). I don’t find them convincing, for, as Carroll points out, the laws of physics have no room for an immaterial “agency” that interacts with matter (our brains and bodies). I would have liked to see a full-on religious libertarian, some fundamentalist who insists that we all have free will because God gave it to us. (Remember, most people are libertarians.)
But everyone else interviewed is a naturalist, all believing that at any one moment you have only one course of action. Whether that can be made compatible with some conception of free will, as do “compatibilists” like Dennett, is a subject of some discussion in the film. But there are also hard determinists like Caruso and me who spurn compatibilism. In fact, at the end of the film several people, including Dennett, suggest that the free will “controversy” between naturalists one hand (i.e., “hard determinists” who accept quantum indeterminacy as well) and compatibilists on the other is a purely semantic issue, and perhaps we should jettison the idea of free will altogether. With naturalism settled as true and libertarianism held only by a few philosophers and a lot of religious people, getting rid of the term would make the debate purely philosophical. That’s fine with me, for once you accept naturalism, one can begin dealing with the important social consequences, including how to judge other people in both life and the legal system.
There’s a good discussion of the science, including the Libet and more recent Libet-like experiments (I find them fascinating, and a good argument for naturalism, but libertarians try to find ways around them). The filmmakers do neglect a wealth of information and neurological phenomena that also support naturalism (e.g., confabulation explaining actions caused by brain operations on conscious subjects, the fact that we can remove and restore consciousness, or trick people into thinking they are exercising agency when they aren’t, and vice versa). That’s one of only three quibbles I have with the film. Another is the failure to connect libertarian free will to Abrahamic religions, of which it’s an essential part—a connection that accounts for why more than half of people surveyed in four countries accept libertarian free will. Finally, the philosophers talk a lot about “desert”, which means that, in a retrospective view of your actions, you deserve praise or blame, but the film never defines the term (if they did, I missed it).
But I think they’ve done as good a summary of the issues involved as is possible in two hours, and have neatly woven together in “chapters” the conflicting ideas of people from all camps, letting the academics do all the talking. (There’s a wee bit of necessary narration.) I would recommend that those of you who like to talk about free will on this site ante up the measly three bucks and rent the movie. (The site for renting or buying it from Amazon or Vimeo is here.)
There are eleven “chapters” of the film, which I’ll list to whet your appetite:
What is free will?
The problem of free will
Libertarian free will
Compatibilism
Free will skepticism (includes “hard determinism”)
The great debate: responsibility
Neuroscience
Physics
The “morality club” (i.e., do we need free will be to morally responsible?)
Free will and the law (I think this section should have been longer, but I do get some say in the movie about this issue)
Should we stop using the term “free will”?
Now if you go to the movies for escapism or to see happy endings, this isn’t the film for you. It’s aimed at people who want to see a serious but eloquent intellectual discussion that involves philosophy, physics, ethics, and neuroscience. And the filmmakers did a terrific job, amply fulfilling their goals. Remember, you can’t even get a latte at Starbucks for three dollars, but for that price you can have a heaping plate of brain food!
UPDATE from GCM (12.i.2023): Last night, the film won the Golden Globe award for best “comedy or musical” and Colin Farrell won for best “comedy” actor. Do not be misled: it is not a comedy, despite some touches of humor. As Jerry wrote below, it is not a happy film. I don’t know what the award category nominators were thinking. To cement the insanity of the Globes’ categories, Austin Butler won for best dramatic actor for singing the role of Elvis Presley in the musical biopic, Elvis! If both Farrell and Butler deserved awards, the categories should have been reversed. (On the quality of Banshees, I concur with Jerry: Farrell was great, and the film is a “See it!”)
I found this film because it was highly rated on all the “Best Movies of 2022” list, and then saw that it received a 97% critics’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes (though only a 76% audience rating). And so I watched it, and am very glad I did. Here’s the promotional poster:
. . and the trailer:
I’m not going to give away any spoilers except to say that you need to see this movie. The veneer itself is appealing, for it takes you back to the year 1923, during the Irish Civil War, and to a tiny and fictional island Inisherin lying close to the mainland. Life on the island is hard, and since people are social animals they form a network of mutual support, as well as antagonism. The search for connection—similar to the theme of The Last Picture Show, my favorite American movie, which takes place in an isolated Texas town—is to me the movie’s theme. And, ironically, it’s the rupture of that network, in the form of a broken friendship between the two protagonists (Colin Farrell as Pádraic Súilleabháin and Brendan Gleeson as Colm Doherty) that propels the movie.
The acting is terrific, and I have to add here the performance of Kerry Condon, who plays Pádraic’s sister Siobhán. I suspect the movie will produce several Oscar nominations, as it’s already been nominated for more Golden Globe awards than any other movie this year—eight of them.
This is neither a happy movie nor an action film, but if you like movies about human relationships and their fragility, go see “The Banshees of Inisherin”. There’s also an adorable miniature donkey, which you can see in the trailer above, but I’ll say no more.
Since I wasn’t able to be in Poland over the holidays, I read books and watched movies. One book I recommend highly is Beartown, loaned to me by a friend (image below links to Amazon site). It’s the first book of a trilogy by Swedish writer Fredrick Backman, and this one’s about the way high-school hockey takes over a small Swedish town and then tears it apart. The language is spare but lovely, especially when the author becomes more philosophical near the end. It starts off with a simple narrative about the local hockey team, but then becomes very dark very fast. I won’t give away the pivotal event of the story.
It’s engrossing, was a best-seller in Sweden and then in the U.S. The theme is about community and loyalty, and I’m considering continuing on to the last two novels of the trilogy. I’d recommend this one highly. It’s not a world classic or a masterpiece, but it’s an absorbing and disturbing read. (Disturbing books are the best books.)
I didn’t go to the movies much last year because of the pandemic, and the University movie series, Doc Films, had a pared-down schedule. I’m catching up online now, and here are two that I watched and liked. I found them because they both appeared on at least two “best films of 2022” lists.
Granted, it was only February when I saw this, but director Joaquim Trier’s wonderfully humane Norwegian import and nominee for last year’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar is still, hands-down, the best film of 2022. I’ve blown hot and cold on some of Trier’s earlier films, but this one is an instant classic in large part due to Renate Reinsve’s luminous performance as Julie—an aimless Oslo woman on the cusp of 30 who’s trying to figure herself out in ways that are so funny, sad, and realistically messy that it feels like we’re spying on someone we’ve known for years. The title might give you the impression that Julie is trouble, leaving chaos and broken hearts in her wake. But the title actually isn’t about her. Plus, she’s far more complex than that implies anyway. Told in 12 chapters plus a prologue and an epilogue, The Worst Person in the World is anything but neat and orderly. Like life, it’s complicated, unpredictable, bittersweet and indecisive. It’s also brimming with so much empathy for Trier’s female lead that you can’t help but fall in love with her even when you know she’s making mistakes. After all, who are we to judge? Trier tracks Julie’s relationships with men, but it’s far more interested in getting inside of her head and figuring out what makes her tick, which is a rarity in Hollywood films. We’ll see if anything in the coming months can match Trier and Reinsve’s masterpiece, but they’ve set an incredibly high bar.
That pretty much says it all, but I wouldn’t rate this as the best even among the few movies I’ve seen this year (that would be “Tár”). The main character ,Julie (played by Renate Reinsve), turns in a creditable performance, but I don’t understand all the critics’ hulabaloo. (It was rated 96 by the critics and 86 by the audience on Rotten Tomatoes.) Julie is aimless, flaky, and lovable, and makes a mess of her life, especially when dealing with men, but that aimlessness itself, and the attendant sadness and tragedy, don’t carry the picture. To my mind, Julie wasn’t sufficiently developed to be absorbing, and the reviewers seemed to conflate flakiness and confusion with complexity and depth. I would rate this as a good+ movie, but the best? No way. But watch it for yourself. Here’s a trailer:
“Kimi“, directed by Steven Soderbergh, was better, and though also not a classic is clever, absorbing, and a crime thriller to boot. Kimi is an AI device like Alexa, made by a company that employs the protagonist Angela, played very well by Zoë Kravitz. Angela is an extremely introverted and agoraphobic women who almost never leaves her flat, but her job can be done from home: she listens in on requests to Kimi to figure out how to improve the AI device. By accident she hears a crime being committed, and it’s her attempts to report the crime, and the opposition she faces from a criminal conspiracy, that make for an edge-of-your-seat experience. I’m surprised I liked this better than the one above, as I usually like long, slow, movies with character development and not that much action. This movie gets a “very good” from me and I recommend that you see it if you get the chance.
I also watched a movie that was on many lists as a “best of 2022”: “Everything Everywhere All At Once“, starring Michelle Yeoh, but I found it tricked out and tedious, and stopped watching 45 minutes in. (It’s about the multiverse.) Many of my friends liked it, so I’ll just say, “Go see it and report in”, or report below if you’ve already seen it.
Now it’s your turn: which movies did you like best that were made last year?
I was pleased to get two lists of great movies (I’m a sucker for lists of great art) from Justin Remes, associate professor of film studies at Iowa State University (he also wrote Absence in Cinema: The Art of Showing Nothing). I’ll quote his email with permission:
I know you occasionally post about cinema, so I thought you might be interested to know that the highly respected Sight and Sound poll of The Greatest Films of All Time (which is only published every ten years) was just released today. You can find the critics’ poll here and the filmmakers’ poll here. For what it’s worth, my personal pick for the greatest film of all time is 2001: A Space Odyssey, so I was happy to see that at the top of the directors’ poll. As for Jeanne Dielman, which is at the top of the critics’ poll, I think it’s a great film, although it wouldn’t make my own personal top 10. It was a shock to see it there, however–I really don’t think anyone could have predicted it would come in at number 1. (In the last Sight and Sound poll, it was 36!)
I’ll give the top ten in each of the two polls. First, the top ten in the CRITICS’ POLL, with the best put first (remember, there are 100 movies in each poll). Click on each screenshot to go to the site describing the movie. At the bottom I’ve put a link to my own list of best films, posted here twelve years ago.
I haven’t even heard of this Best Film!
I’ve seen this one and it’s very good, but not #2:
A great film, better than “Vertigo”:
This and Kurusawa’s “Ikiru” are my favorite foreign films. And Ikiru isn’t even on the list! See both of them!
Just okay, but that’s it:
I am ashamed to admit that I’ve never seen this film—Justin’s favorite:
Haven’t seen this one, but I should:
Nope. Gripping, but not worthy of #8, much less #80:
Haven’t seen this one (I’m getting ashamed):
A very good musical—one of the best of the genre—but not one of the best films:
“The Godfather” is #12, and Ozu’s “Late Spring” comes in at #21 (all the films in Ozu’s “season cycle” are excellent).
Second, the top ten in the DIRECTORS’ (FILMMAKERS) POLL, with the best put first. There’s a fair amount of overlap with the previous list.
Maybe I should see this film!
“Citizen Kane” is at the top of every “greatest movies” list, as it should be.
This is a very great film. Aren’t we lucky to have seen it as a first run (well, those of us who are older)?
A reminder to see this movie. If you are the action-movie type, you may not like it: it’s a family drama and slow paced. I love it very much.
Okay, now I gotta see this film!
These next two are tied, and I wouldn’t put them in my top ten.
There is no #7 because of the ties. I haven’t seen this one:
These next three are tied for the #9 slot. None of them would be on my list, and I’m not a Bergman fan at all:
Gotta see this one, too, as I haven’t:
At least “Ikiru” makes it on this list, though only at #72: tied with “Chinatown” (a superb film) and “The Seventh Seal”, another Bergman film.
Now I posted my own list of “Best Movies” back in 2010, and it hasn’t changed, though perhaps I’d add 2019’s “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” to it. (I left “Citizen Kane” off my list because it’s everybody’s choice.) The one movie missing from both of the lists above is my favorite American movie, “The Last Picture Show” (1971). The omission is shameful!
Now it’s your turn, as always. Post the list of your “best movies”, preferably the top five. After all, it’s a great way for all of us to find new things to watch.
