10. Talk to Me

Review: ari aster but make it Australian

9. Blackberry

Review: social network but make it Canadian

8. Poor Things

Review: this is the brand of contraption-core/petticoat-wave that I wanted from WONKA—dirigibles, foppish lawyers, ontological questions of personal continuity via swapping human brains and goat brains. excellent Fisher Price johnny greenwood score and the visuals sufficiently evoked Speed Racer. it sags like a doodie diaper at times but won me over in the end. one day Yorgos should adapt Pynchon’s “Against the Day.”

7. Barbie

Read: Our exit survey with Fatima, Darri, and William

6. Oppenheimer

Read: My full review of Oppenheimer for the Strawberry Criterion.

5. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.

Review: there’s a reason why they named a rest stop after Judy Blume on the Garden State Parkway

4. BEAU IS AFRAID

Review: this is how i have felt every day since i was born

3. The Zone of Interest

Review: the best score since Tenet, maybe There will be Blood. maliciously uncompromising, brimming with primeval haunted energy, should be required viewing for everyone whose tax dollars are bankrolling the bombs that Israel is dropping on Gaza. 100% a masterpiece in theory, 88% in practice. basically shows how the nazis didn’t lose WWII on the Defining Western Values Front. sledgehammer ending.

2. May December

Review: sooner than later I will present this film as part of a double feature with SOUND OF FREEDOM at a major film festival. directing was perfect/perfectly demented from the leads on down to the extras. the bro who plays the molested man-child husband turned butterfly breeder may give the performance of the year. i adored their disgusting under-furnished multi-jacuzzi 90s house. best line: “what if I had to x-ray myself?”

1. American Fiction

Review: the best Alexander Payne movie since Sideways. I am already SEETHING about them giving Jeffrey Wright’s Oscar to Leonardo DiCaprio. (Note from January ’24: NVM) director and score and screenplay should also be nominated. full disclosure: I am the bullseye of the target demo for a family drama slash literary satire set in a shore town. ending throws a real Hail Mary—and hauls in the catch!

Q: What’s your 280-character review of BARBIE?

Darri: I watched Barbie Birthday Party at Walt Disney World Epcot ’94 till the VHS broke, so I didn’t need feminist irony or even a plot to enjoy Barbie—I just wanted to be dazzled by the costumes and sets. And I was! But expecting the movie to say anything new/daring about womanhood/consumerism is setting yourself up for disappointment.

William: Barbie offers the silly fun, vibrant colors, and don’t-think-about-it-too-much plotting of late ’90s blockbuster comedy. The film has a lot more in common with Austin Powers than it does with Lady Bird, which makes it both a total pleasure and a minor disappointment.

Carmen: Barbie is a delightful film about a doll named Ken. It’s at war with itself every second of its runtime, and never once in a not-fascinating way. My eyes were either wide with glee or rolling back into my skull. ~4.42 strawberries out of 5.

Fatima: Delicious sets and costumes, a good amount of laughs, a very confusing plot that abandoned some of its most promising potentials for very safe and expected conclusions. (“Women have to be pretty but not TOO pretty…”) I felt the film wasn’t saying anything we hadn’t already heard from Chimimanda [Ngozi Adiche]. I wanted it to be weirder and wilder in terms of sex and gender. After all, Barbie is a doll — anything that could conceivably be in a child’s mind could be in the doll’s, so why not fully push that? As a movie about Ken, though, it was great.

Q: Aside from Ryan Gosling’s performance, what were the strongest elements of BARBIE?

Darri: Margot Robbie was great, too! I think her main strength as an actor is lending depth to characters who society doesn’t take seriously (trophy wives, hot crazy chicks, actresses). Her whole shtick is exposing the real, hot-blooded people behind the personas that beautiful woman are forced to adopt, and for that reason it’s like she was born to play Barbie, who obviously embodies that impossible plastic perfection. As Barbie she manages to be sympathetic and funny and ridiculous all at the same time. It’s a real testament to her talent that she makes me empathize with blondes!

As I said before, the costumes absolutely delivered. Barbie’s whole thing is that she’s defined by her clothes; that’s the medium through which her jobs/hobbies/nationalities are communicated, but they also have to convey glamour and fantasy to be appealing. I think costume designer Jacqueline Durran nailed that combo of major whimsy and minor practicality (her one miss was not interpreting a Bob Mackie look, which are pure, exhilarating fantasy). I appreciated that the costumes were neither too contemporized nor too ironized and were celebrated as the real feats of imagination and craftsmanship that they were. 

That said, I was triggered by the pink utility jumpsuits the Barbie junta is wearing at the end of the movie, when they’re celebrating their bloodless coup. They’re so 2017, so peak-Madewell, so Pussyhat. But of course the movies’ politics also end up being so 2017, peak-Madewell, and Pussyhat, and the jumpsuits represent that brand of corporatized feminism and its authoritarian daydream. That scene of the Barbies overthrowing the Ken government is like, Pantsuit Nation’s PG-rated fantasy of them doing their own January 6th.

William:

1. Rhea Perlman.  The biggest casting coup is Rhea Pearlman playing Barbie’s Creator, Ruth Handler.  She fills a godlike role similar to Ed Harris in The Truman Show or Ed Harris in Snowpiercer. There is a flawed and funny humanity in her divine presence that makes her the embodiment of both God and Everywoman.  Barbie works best when it functions like a spiritual/metaphysical fable about what it means to be alive, and Pearlman’s two brief scenes deliver that side of the movie’s storytelling perfectly.

2. The One-Liners.  The screenplay of Barbie is not some great achievement in structure or social commentary, but this movie has some of the best joke and gag writing I’ve seen in a while. My own favorite jokes involve The Godfather and a chorus of 2,000 young fathers.

3. The Design.  Along with Oppenheimer, Barbie makes a compelling case to Hollywood about the immersive limits of computer-generated worlds. No one fantasizes about living in Dr. Strange’s Multi-Verse of Madness or Ant-Man’s Quantum Realm. They are obviously fake and their lack of verisimilitude makes them unappealing.  Most of Barbie-Land is achieved with real sets built on Hollywood sound stages.  The world is tactile and fun to get lost in and all because the Barbie team is not afraid to choose old-school movie magic over CGI.

4. The Kens.  The Kens are almost too good.  I left Barbie wondering why a Ken-only musical number was the dramatic climax of a female empowerment blockbuster, but I think the script worked out like that because the Kens are the most compelling characters in the movie.  The Kens are allowed to be flawed.  They make mistakes.  They behave badly.  They feel alienated.  In a film that prides itself on deconstructing the myth of BARBIE and celebrating the lives of ordinary women, the film does not showcase a wide-range of female representation.

Carmen: Beyond the objectively impressive set design and world building, I was endlessly compelled by how Barbie was and wasn’t serving its competing artistic, political, and commercial masters. There is a direct reference to The Matrix (Weird Barbie’s demonstration of the high heel-Birkenstock dialectic), yet Barbie may owe a greater debt to another masterpiece from the Wachowskis: the necessarily imperfect Speed Racer. Like Barbie, that movie offers the viewer a choice between a zany, brain-off spectacle and a metatextual reflection on the impossibility of reconciling the demands of the market with the imperatives of the artist. The gender and legacy of Barbie The Doll adds layers that aren’t present in Speed Racer, however. On the screen, you have a pretty uneven, ham-fisted articulation of the double binds inherent in contemporary womanhood; off of it, you have to reckon with the possibility that a less flawed Barbie might be a lesser Barbie.

In terms of details and scenes, I have a deep respect and appreciation for the Matchbox 20 needle drop, Margot Robbie’s Lucille Ball-y physical comedy, Ken’s discovery of the patriarchy, Barbie’s one cellulite, the Gondry-esque cardboard stages that ferry the characters between Barbie Land and Real World, and the Kens’ dance sequence. Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach should receive the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for the last line alone.

Fatima: It was the DANCE SCENE with the Kens. I wish Barbie had more moments of homoerotic fantasy and camp like that; I loved where it got gay and Gene Kelly-esque.

Q: What elements of BARBIE were less successful for you? How might the film have improved these creative shortcomings?

Darri: I don’t think the movie was fully convinced by its own message. It seemed unsure of what it was really about; by the end, it landed on how it’s hard to be a woman and live up to all these conflicting societal expectations, but it felt like the movie gave up and settled without developing that (kind of trite) message all the way through.

There are all these dangling threads, as if other messages were considered then abandoned or forgotten about. Like… what do we do about men? What do we do about our moms/creators? What’s the deal with corporate consumer culture? What’s the deal with gender and biology? 

I can’t help but try to psychoanalyze Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach’s relationship via their films. I envision them in that scene from Friends With Money, sitting at their dining room table with their laptops facing each other, arguing over what the movie is going to be About, and Greta says it has to be about how it’s impossible to be a woman, and Noah says that’s too simple, and Greta says he wouldn’t understand because he’s a man, and Noah says maybe not, but it’s also impossible to be a man, and Greta gets up from the table and says, well it’s my movie, and Noah makes a bitter little laugh and says, I guess it is. That’s how we get to her attending the premiere without him. 

But the movie is also about how it’s hard to be a man, especially under patriarchy! And you know what, in theory, I support the Ken Rebellion. The Kens are second-class citizens; of course they’re within their rights to rise up against the Barbie regime. There were a few times where I was like, Wait—is this movie actually going to posit that the goal of feminism is abolishing systems that not only oppress women but also men? Will it show that absolute power corrupts absolutely regardless of gender? Will it address why the Barbies and Kens are so gendered although they have no biological differences? Will it end with the creation of a hermaphroditic utopia? But I was being naive. The way that whole subplot is tied up with the Barbies suppressing the Ken revolt is honestly chilling. 

William:

1. The Representation.  While I’m sure the casting director was kept up late into the night trying to ensure there was every type of physical female form (race, body type, gender identity, etc.) represented in this movie, most of her work only pays off at a surface level.  I understand that this is a Barbie movie and ultimately has to operate on a surface level.  I also understand that the Barbies cannot be flawed in the way the Kens are since they are the rulers of Barbie-Land.  However, I found their emotional sameness tedious.  Can they give Issa Rae something else to play besides beautiful, strong and powerful?  Any half-decent acting teacher will tell you that those are not playable actions.  Even if complexity can’t be found in the Barbies themselves, it would be nice to see it in some of the Real World Women.  America Ferrera’s life seems fine.  She’s a little stressed out about her job and has a distant relationship with her daughter––that’s never properly explained––but that’s really all she’s got going on.  Does she ever make a mistake or do something surprising?  No.  She’s not afforded that richness.  Her character appears to be an example of “powerful representation,” but there is something sinister in how little depth the movie gives her.  When she articulates the thesis of the movie in a third-act monologue, I couldn’t help but think, “This is a nice piece of writing, but I have not seen an arc that gets this character anywhere near having such a clear-sighted and impassioned revelation about the nature of womanhood.”  

A more interesting movie might put America Ferrera and her daughter in the center of the narrative and have them experience Margot Robbie’s Barbie as an exciting new presence introduced into their hum-drum lives––a kind of Barbie Poppins.  However, I’m sure that film is not what the studio or Gerwig wanted because God-forbid the Barbie movie wasn’t All Barbie, All the Time.

2. The Plot/The Writing  When watching Barbie, you can tell there were multiple ideas for the movie’s main storyline. The decision not to elevate and develop one (or even two!) of these stories, and the attempt to pack all of them into two-hours, is the film’s biggest mistake. The corporate hijinks with Will Ferrell and Mattel do not belong in the movie. A scene between America Ferrera and her daughter as they drive away from Barbie-Land is truly some of the worst writing I’ve seen in modern film. Kate McKinnon’s scene that sends Barbie out on her quest into the real world does what it needs to do but lacks any real meaning or stakes. A lot of scenes are like that.  They do what they need to do and are fun because the people in them are fun, but it often feels like there is a better version of the scene lurking below the shiny, scrubbed surface of the film. 

This movie is ultimately a silly comedy, and it always chooses fun over the internal logic of its world.  It’s fine for a movie to be that (a truly great example of this kind of movie is Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar!), but Barbie bothered me because it clearly has bigger ambitions and serves those ambitions less well in the name of silliness. Barbie undelivered by overpromising. 

Carmen: I would have left the opening 2001 homage in the trailer where it belonged. The Hellen Mirren voiceover was unnecessary, unfunny, and it breaks and rebreaks the immersive spell cast by the film. Most of the plot elements introduced in the second act flirt with disposability by the end (the Mattel executives, the mommy-daughter bonding, the ghost of tax-evading Barbie’s creator). America Ferrera’s Feminism Monologue could have worked if it was weirder and shorter, so it’s a shame that such a pivotal moment plays like a microwaved Hillary Clinton speech from Davos 2012. Finally, I have no idea what the hell is going on during the home video montage that seems to transform Barbie into a “real woman.” Are we meant to assume that Barbie’s personhood depends on being implanted by VHS-grain memories of random people going bowling? Derek Parfit is rolling in his grave.

Fatima: More or less as above. It felt safe as far as gender and identity were concerned. I really liked the concept introduced early on that Barbie and the child that plays with her share a mind and an imagination. I loved the idea of the doll consigned to a certain fate, as with Weird Barbie, because of what the child makes them be and do. But this seemed to be abandoned once Barbie found her girl, and the psychology of the mother and daughter pair seemed to disappear as a concern once the Ken plot line (which was very fun on its own, no hate) took over. I wish that the mind melding had been fully explored, and that we could see what the possibilities are for the dolls in a world of pure imagination. Also I think it was weird how small the Stath from Stath Lets Flats cameo was.

Q: What is BARBIE attempting to communicate about gender dynamics and commercialism?

Darri: Nothing very revolutionary. I don’t even think the movie was trying to say anything about commercialism beyond “heard of it.” The Will Ferrell sub-plot was doing absolutely nothing. Actually, that and the voiceover seemed mostly to be functioning as save-face for Gerwig, like she wanted to assure us that she knew making this movie was like, so corporate and uncool, but she wasn’t fully compromised and is still at heart an indie girl. Of course, that sort of brand sentience is corporate culture now (see Wendy’s Twitter). It’s boring to even explain, because everyone already knows this. Everyone is black-pilled.

William: Barbie the film is oblivious to Barbie the brand. It does not understand that any movie about a doll must also be about commercialism. I could maybe tease out a subtle interpretation of the movie about how gender is always commodified based on majoritarian positions about what gender means in the dominant culture.  The original Barbie could traffic in masculine and feminine stereotypes, later Barbies are career-oriented because of Second Wave Feminism, and this current version of Barbie is based on a post-MeToo Feminism in which the mere fact that a Barbie movie exists is––regardless of quality––a pure act of goodness.  I’m not sure Gerwig & Co. realize that the ideas being sold (and they are being sold) in Barbie now occupy a strong position in dominant culture because the movie’s plot relies heavily on this not being true.  While gender stereotypes have changed over time, exploiting those stereotypes will always sell more Barbies and Kens.  Perhaps it can be said that Barbie confirms our dependency on the gender binary, since its very existence is a catalyst for consumerism and profit.

Carmen: Assessing Barbie as a comment on gender politics, Gerwig’s intentions and execution are either ingeniously auto-critical and self-reinforcing, or inadvertently undermining and antipodal. Because, arguably, there is quite a bit of internalized misogyny in this movie. The camera, script, and direction are often more invested in Ken’s dramas and self-actualization than Barbie’s. Though the movie wants to champion the idea of a woman becoming president or winning the Nobel Prize, the tone and framing of the Barbies at work is almost always unserious and quasi-satirical. When Ken does return to Barbie-Land preaching the gospel of patriarchy, all the Barbies roll over and forfeit their power and agency immediately, and instead of refuting the female shallowness this connotes, the movie reconfirms it when the Barbies take back their autonomy after hearing a single poorly written speech. (Listening to that America Ferrera speech, I was reminded of Zoom meetings in which manipulative executives convince their employees to return to the office after the pandemic, or when Jared Leto appeared on the screen before my showing of MORBIUS and thanked me for watching MORBIUS in a real movie theater; you can hear the doublespeak descending from on high, asserting that Americans must return to the exploitative Before Times and start Spending Money Again.)

There is a cynical argument to be made that Barbie grossed a billion dollars because it is a Trojan Horse patriarchal narrative, a film that makes permissible an illicit mass cultural embrace, particularly among heterosexual women, of strict social binaries and rigid, regressive perceptions of gender. But the end of the film does throw that reading for a loop, somewhat. (Spoilers.) As I see it, Barbie’s visit to the gynecologist is as much about the humanization of an impossible ideal women as it is about the end of a very male and adolescent cinematic dark age defined by the ugly, incoherent, and sexless superhero movies of the Marvel and DC variety. Like the Barbies and Kens, the characters in those movies may as well have plastic nub genitals, since they lack the physical and psychological hardware to desire as flesh-and-blood people do. But maybe Barbie signals a change. If the blockbuster paradigm is shifting from braindead superheroes movies to half-braindead brand movies, we should welcome it. Life is better is the cooler circles of hell.

Fatima: That girls can be bosses too? That they can sell their own merch? That you need to collect all the pretty things to have a lovely, peaceful, Barbie life?  

Q: (SPOILERS) Since the film ends with Barbie becoming a “real woman” by growing a vagina, is BARBIE a bio-gender essentialist text?

Darri: I dunno, the movie is very confused on this front. Barbie-Land is sexless (both asexual and biologically undetermined) but deeply gendered. (How did their society develop this way? Is Ruth Handler like the Architect in The Matrix? Did she create Barbie-Land to subdue the Barbies and Kens? Is the relationship that Barbies have to the children who play with them in the real world actually parasitic?) 

Anyway, the Barbies seem to have implemented this extremely rigid gender hierarchy to consolidate their power—Is the movie low-key saying that women are just as ready and able to exploit others to preserve hegemony? Is this Noah Baumbach’s little secret dig at Greta? 

I am overthinking it again! But I mean, they really casted Hari Nef as a Barbie and then told audiences it was Stereotypical Barbie’s new vagina that made her a “real woman” (or did Barbie get gender-affirming surgery? omg is this a trans text? I must stop). 

I’m making myself crazy because, at times, it does seems like the movie wants to get QUEER, but it always pulls back. I’m a bitch about Greta Gerwig because I’m Team Jennifer Jason Leigh, but maybe the glimmers of queerness are Gerwig’s hand, and the The Wing Feminism is Mattel’s. It’s probably in Mattel’s interest to sell boy toys to boys and girl toys to girls.

William: See my answer above.  However, while I don’t agree with this line of argument, I will use it whenever I need to deliberately repel someone at a theater event or a gay bar.

I’d like to say something nice here. That last line of Barbie is one of the all-time great movie last lines.  Maybe the best since “Nobody’s Perfect,” at the end of Some Like it Hot. It’s pithy, surprising, witty, and encapsulates the movie perfectly. That was the only moment in Barbie where I almost cheered because I was so gobsmacked by the brilliance of the writing.

Carmen: The gender essentialism question is more 50/50 than it should be. While I want to respect Ms. Gerwig’s vision, a truly transgressive Barbie would have featured one more scene: We follow Barbara into her OBGYN’s examination room. Once inside, she meets her doctor, dons a paper gown, climbs into the procedure chair and places her feet in the stirrups. Then, from over the doctor’s shoulder, we see that Barbara has an absolutely gigantic, stud-horse-humongous penis between her legs. The OBGYN makes no comment and proceeds with the exam. Cue Nicki Minaj. Cut to black.

Fatima: Yes. But again, why should Barbie in 2023 be confined to normative womanhood? What is Barbie except the stories and situations that children create for “her”? I wanted Barbie and Ken to abandon gender essentialism all together. In this way, I thought Little Women was actually a more interesting Gerwig film as far as gender is concerned. Maybe because of Greta’s ideas about Alcott and Jo as potentially non-binary? It said all the stuff Barbie said, but with subtlety.

Q: How did BARBIE change your perceptions of Greta Gerwig as a director? Where do you see her going in the future?

Darri: Not much. Barbie is her second-least annoying movie, so that’s something.

As I mentioned, I am solidly Team JJL, who radiates righteous, Gen-X white female rage. Gerwig radiates privileged, Millennial white female discomfort, which gets transmuted into a flaccid, “well-behaved women seldom make history” performance of rage.   

The crazy thing is that it’s such low-hanging fruit to make fun of white feminism and girl bossery now; I’m honestly boring myself! We’ve been criticizing it for half a decade, and yet Gerwig makes a movie that traffics in it? It’s possible those really cringe parts were determined by Mattel. At the same time, I don’t think Gerwig has anything else to say yet. We might have to wait for her relationship to blow up to for her rage to become solid and interesting.  

William: This film didn’t change my perceptions about Greta Gerwig at all.  It was very much in line with what I thought she was capable of/limited to as a director.  I also reject the idea that making the film represents her “selling out.”  Anyone who thinks Barbie doesn’t fit well with her oeuvre has not been paying attention.

The biggest question I have is about the type of director she is.  Is she the type who makes the same movie over and over again, like a Wes Anderson or her romantic partner/Barbie co-writer Noah Baumbach? Will white women continue to self-actualize in all her films?  Or is she more like a Spielberg or a Scorsese, who is known for a particular kind of film but often branches out and works in a different genre? If you’ve seen Gerwig’s Letterboxd interview where she discusses the cinematic influences on Barbie, it’s clear she has a deep knowledge of film history.  She embraces the concept of the canon in a way some of her more zealous fans might find suspect.  Does this knowledge increase her curiosity about working in other filmic forms, or does it just give her more creative tools to tell the same story in a new way?  I’m curious to see what she’ll decide.

Gerwig going to have carte blanche on her next movie.  Will she go even bigger than Barbie, or will she make something smaller and more intimate like Lady Bird?  Lady Bird is a film I really love, and I strongly prefer it to her bigger budget efforts, so I hope she goes in that direction.  There’s a rumor that she’s going to direct two Narnia movies for Netflix, and I hope that doesn’t happen. Does anyone truly want to see a Frankenstein constructed from C.S. Lewis’s religious fundamentalism and Gerwig’s easily digestible brand of white feminism?

Carmen: As others have pointed out, Barbie does feel like Greta Gerwig’s Batman Begins moment, which will enter her into a recognizable populist auteur cycle of one-for-them-one-for-me. Which I’d be fine with. Since Lady Bird and Little Women were obviously smaller scale, I was impressed by how much indelible and deliberate image-making there was in Barbie–her permanently arched feet coming out of the heels, for instance. That feels like a visual that would imprint itself on a monoculture back when such a thing existed. I’m glad that there’s one more director seeking to produce those experiences for audiences.

Behind the camera, I really hope that Greta Gerwig stops co-writing movies with her husband, Noah Baumbauch, even if I consider him one of the best living screenwriters. There’s something unnerving about the fact that the two most prominent female writer-directors of the Xennial generation–Greta Gerwig and Phoebe Waller-Bridge–are romantically involved with male screenwriters (Baumbach and Martin McDonough, respectively) who are so overloaded with cultural capital. Though it’s never outwardly articulated, the industry seems to have elevated these particular women partly because of the cosign of their celebrated, literary-adjacent husbands. While I recognize the possibility that Baumbach’s co-writer credit was probably a financial decision whose logic derives from royalty payouts or his divorce agreement, his involvement does slightly muddy the waters in terms of celebrating Barbie as an accomplishment entirely belonging to Gerwig.

Fatima: It really didn’t. It just made me think she had to satisfy Mattel as a corporation.

Q: Where does BARBIE rank among the movies you’ve seen this year?

Darri: It’s not better than Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret? or the new Mission Impossible, but I did like it more than Oppenheimer.

Carmen: 5th. It’s below Beau is Afraid; Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret; Oppenheimer; and Past Lives.

William: I’ve seen 13 new releases in 2023.  Barbie ranks #5, just ahead of Beau is Afraid and Past Lives and behind (in ascending order) You Hurt My Feelings; Showing Up; Oppenheimer; and Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret. In fact, Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret is the only 2023 movie I’ve truly loved and can recommend unequivocally.

Fatima: Middle of the pack, alas. And I wanted to love it.

Oppenheimer, as an exercise in pseudo-high-minded populism, does play both sides of the studio system field; it delivers on the face-melting pyrotechnics promised by its subject matter while still, with the trademark Nolan clunkiness, insisting that it is more preoccupied with whimpers than with bangs when it comes to the end of the world. Like Dunkirk, Nolan’s earlier deconstructed World War II drama, Oppenheimer undertakes a formalist re-staging of a well-trod chapter from popular history, removing the expected waymarkers of date designations and location tags until time and place, cause and effect, have collapsed in on themselves, taking with them the linear triumphal narratives often imposed by conquering armies (and by writers who know how to effectively structure a screenplay). As in Nolan’s other largest-canvas genre experiments (Inception, Interstellar), the blockbuster heroism and action are granted equal face time as turgid existential musings about familial duty, unchecked technology, and the faultiness of memory. His films stumble but stop short of fully losing their momentum, mostly because they never sacrifice the A/V spectacle of waves as wide as continents and city neighborhoods that unfurl like Fruit Rollups.

At the start, end, and middle of Oppenheimer, the bombs have and haven’t fallen on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and we trace and un-trace their nonlinear hopscotch construction through a fractured J. Robert Oppenheimer, a Schrödinger’s Scientist who is simultaneously an ambitious young student, a wrinkled footnote on the verge of obsolescence, and a leader of men in his physical and intellectual prime. Once again, we have been prompted to set our watches to Nolan Standardized Time, a chronologically liminal zone where plot, like hot geopolitical conflicts and the air-conditioned bureaucracy that sustains them, doesn’t proceed in a comprehensible fashion. In this way, Oppenheimer functions as an inversion of the high octane nesting doll set pieces of Dunkirk, the film deprioritizing the battlefield to flit energetically between the inert, colorless spaces where wars actually happen. We are constantly in drab conference rooms filled with anonymous suited men, the powerbrokers whose circuitous conversations decide how civilization will stagger backwards or, more rarely, lurch ahead.

Twelve feature films into his career, the result of Nolan’s sophomoric preoccupation with time, along with his hallmarks of muffled dialogue and reflections on misunderstood genius, makes for yet another film whose “complex” surface arguments feel shallow while its compelling (and seemingly accidental) subtexts howl out for interpretation. Nolan seems convinced that he is a filmmaker of the superego, while the text itself brims with a repressed, borderline deviant id. It is this enduring tension between Nolan’s intricately planned intentions and his fumbling execution, perhaps more so than the meticulous craft and project management on display, that has elevated and limited his work since Following, his 1998 debut.

Twenty-five years removed from that promising, emotionally stunted film, Nolan is a genuine auteur with every dollar and technology and privilege at his disposal, and all he needs to do is tell a simple human story, but he remains fundamentally incapable of doing so, even hostile to doing so. (See: the weirdly distant, almost theoretical sex scenes in Oppenheimer.) While Nolan has proven that he can split the atom while navigating a black hole, it seems doubtful that his wooden characters will ever talk or move or desire in a manner that resembles actual, red-blooded life. The humanity in his movies is everywhere concealed despite this clear yearning for understanding, feeling, connection; it is omnipresent yet always out of frame, a globally operative psychological defense mechanism stymying vulnerability on 1,700 IMAX screens all at once. Oppenheimer, depending on whether you find these shortcomings infuriating or endearing, could qualify as Nolan’s magnum opus, or the most damning work yet from an artist who fetishizes knowledge but will never learn the most basic truths about being alive.

Regardless, Nolan’s delusional commitment to this deranged, ponderous, somehow commercially viable approach to filmmaking deserves attention at the least (and concern for the mental health of society at the worst). Once again, he has charged his philosopher-king directorial proxy (Oppenheimer) to build a hermetically sealed world-within-a-world (Los Alamos) where the realization of an improbable technological feat (the creation of the Atomic Bomb) depends on a ragtag team of straight men with the most homosocial bonds imaginable. Women and minorities, in the tried and true Nolan fashion, are either dead, peripheral, or set dressing–but is that a longing for a white patriarchal past, or well-researched historical accuracy, or Nolan smartly steering away from what he cannot comprehend, which is to say people who don’t look or think like him? All these readings are justifiable, arguably. What cannot be debated is how fucking cool it is when Oppenheimer builds his little team and they drop that bomb in the middle of the desert.

What’s most remarkable about the sequence in which the atom bomb is tested, aside from the crew’s reported overwhelming reliance on miniatures and practical effects, is how much silence Nolan packs into where terrible, essence-shaking noise should be. From Oppenheimer‘s schlocky, Beautiful Mind-y opening scenes through to its overlong courtroom drama third act, we are given intrusive fleeting hints of what a world-ending explosive device might sound like, a sort of nails-on-the-chalkboard-of-space-time motif, but when it finally arrives the detonation is quiet, not loud, a randomized series of whirs from oblivion instead of a single cascading, cathartic blast. The sounds belong neither to reality nor fantasy, the real world nor cinematic one; they are spectral, supernatural, occult. You may not hear them again until death itself passes over your body, carrying your soul away like a fish in a trawl.

Something far, far louder than an atomic bomb, however, is the cheering and clapping and feet stamping when Oppenheimer returns to Los Alamos as a shellshocked hero convinced that he has committed the worst conceivable sin in history. Looking into his crowd of admirers, he watches the heat from an imagined nuclear blast peel the skin from the skull of a beautiful woman, much as the atomic bombs would do to the more than 100,000 Japanese civilians they incinerated, irradiated, and killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Of course the genocidal consequences of Oppenheimer’s invention must be presented in the context of the same fantasized American vulnerability that facilitated the Korean War, Vietnam, the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. To have a scene in Oppenheimer that depicts what happened in Japan would wrongfully suggest that, 80 years after the fact, Americans have even started to reckon with what was done (and continues to be done) in their name.

Though Nolan may have built his brand on being the confused man-child of Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick, the director he shares the most spiritual DNA with may be Wes Anderson, his fellow neuro-divergent Gen-Xer. Though Oppenheimer will forever be linked to Greta Gerwig’s BARBIE due to their shared release date, the film’s more interesting companion piece is Asteroid City, Anderson’s mid-century ensemble science fair quarantine drama. Both films return to an age of American exceptionalism and techno-optimism, a period when, dissimilar to our present moment of digital addiction and declining empire anxieties, intelligent people could earnestly believe that technology could end wars, unite countries, and ease the griefs that have hounded our species since hunting and gathering. Nolan’s superior film rightly ends on a sour note because it’s less about the misused tech itself than the paranoia and division that it would foster, the Cold War status quo that persists in a mutated, progress-preventing form to this day.

To steal a line from Wes Anderson, Christopher Nolan is especially not a genius, yet he is smart enough to acknowledge–and to mourn–the fact that Americans can only muster a true communal spirit when it comes to enacting violence, either on ourselves or on other nations. And if you knew that the world’s most powerful country, much like Hollywood’s most powerful director, would likely never admit its mistakes and grow, might you not want to build a bomb big enough to change things? After all, what’s the worst thing that could happen? You could destroy the universe, yes. Or worse: You could accomplish what was once thought impossible and still be yourself.

Final Strawberry Verdict: 4.5 Strawberries out of 5

PS: We’re now on Apple Podcasts. Listen there or below.

The BPoFD TAR EXIT SURVEY SPECTACULAR

Key: Vincent (VS), Carmen (CP), Fatima (FK), William (WG)

What’s your 280-character review of TAR?

VS: A phenomenally gifted director — with Cate Blanchett as his indefatigable muse — offers up a portrait of a woman driven entertainingly mad by the power she’s ruthlessly managed to secure.

CP: 4.72 strawberries.

FK: TAR is a film in which you will feel intensely attracted to Cate Blanchett as Petra’s Papa; when she bullies that little child you’ll have much to work through with your therapist. It makes a powerful argument that everyone should look like David Bowie in a louche suit with a cashmere sweater. [Ed. Note: This response is 294 characters.]

WG: TAR is a contemporary Greek tragedy that is epic in scope, but also highly intimate because it is a true character study, never straying from the point of view of the central character. The film represents the first great work of art made about cancel culture and the effects of the Me Too movement on contemporary society, especially within high culture industries. [Ed. Note: This response is 379 characters.]

Aside from Cate Blanchett’s performance, what were the strongest elements of TAR for you?

VS: I thought it was just stunning to look at, on a very basic cinematographic level. I’m so glad I got to see it in a theater, on a big screen, because it was just beautiful to watch Field’s vision that way. I think the script is terrific, and terrifying. And I was surprised by just how well it built and sustained its narrative momentum; it certainly didn’t feel as if nearly three hours had elapsed when the last shot rolled.

CP: The awesome confidence and control of the filmmaking. Every micro and macro detail feels assured, considered, pored over but never overdetermined or didactic; it’s all contributing to the intricate layering of this character and her insular world. Though the movie is almost three hours long, not a second feels wasted because the screenplay, direction, and acting keep stacking ambiguity on ambiguity without ever once wandering into cheap moralization or lazy vagaries. I was left feeling both grateful and depressed when it was over. The essential disposability of most every movie I watch had been thrown into a very stark relief.

FK: The sublime nature of music; the deliciousness of the closed, collaborative world of an orchestra; the absolute satisfaction of watching somebody or something be excellent; the related idea that there are things (like Bach) whose true excellence is so immediate, inarguable, and rare that time and understanding are no barriers to perceiving it; the charisma that attaches to talent or the idea of it; Brutalist interiors; spaces that feel smoothly polished, wooden and glowing with light like the interior of a musical instrument; the function and creation of self-mythology, a thing which I suspect all great artists must engage in from the time they begin to perceive themselves and the world.

WG: Todd Field’s direction. His two previous films, In the Bedroom and Little Children, have great acting and writing, but he has developed a much more distinct visual vocabulary with TAR. He clearly watched a lot of Kubrick, Haneke, and Fassbinder during his time away from film. I also think the cold production design fits the movie well. It is almost like the film is set in a series of modern-day palaces and forts.

What elements of TAR were less successful for you?

VS: I suppose I might be alone in this, but I’ll say it all the same: Because Cate Blanchett is so fucking great at what she does, there are moments in a film like this where, because she’s so clearly a superior actor and artist, whomever she’s in conversation with in a scene seems to be, somehow, doing it wrong. I felt this most strongly in her scenes with Nina Hoss, whom I don’t think is a subpar actor by any means, but just didn’t seem, to me, to be quite holding her own. I didn’t sense any believable chemistry between them, maybe?

CP: There are a handful of moments in the film that, while they serve necessary functions with regards to narrative or character or world-building, feel somewhat affected or contrived in comparison to the stuff that really lands. I’m thinking of the assistant mouthing the words to Lydia’s introduction at the New Yorker Festival, or the triggered Julliard student’s restless leg syndrome, or the mob of protestors outside of Lydia’s book launch. These are admirable directorial choices in theory, but I’m not convinced they work in practice.

FK: I’m still not sure what to make of some aspects of the film. I think the Juilliard scene still confounds me a little — the set-up is so obviously on Tar’s side, makes us want to snap along, gives her eloquence and space and is so deeply seductive… while the student is reduced to the emptiest mumblings of identity and representation. I agree with Tar, and I wonder if I should be concerned about the extent to which I agree with her, and if I haven’t been manipulated. I’m still confused about who was texting. There are other things I haven’t fully processed yet, like the mother/daughter neighbours and the dog attack.

WG: The movie sometimes wanders into the surreal in a way that I don’t think is necessary or adds anything to the scenes happening in the real world. Lydia Tar wakes up thinking she hears a sound in the night a few too many times. The images she sees in the black void space are not welcome additions to the film for me. The only surreal scene I enjoyed is when Tar finds the ticking metronome in her cabinet. It’s not subtle, but it works.

What is TAR attempting to communicate about so-called “cancel culture”? Does the film present Lydia Tar as a tragic figure, or as an abuser who has been rightfully punished?

VS: Well, that false dichotomy is, I think, precisely what the movie is all about: that it’s possible to be both. Uncomfortable as that may make people.

CP: A big stink has been made about the scene in which Lydia mansplains separating the art and the artist to the triggered BIPOC music student, and for good reason. It’s a compelling exchange, but I think it’s important to note that Lydia is as much a Gen-X stereotype as the student is a Gen-Z stereotype; TAR is a lot more omniscient and objective than it lets on. And it’s objectively brilliant to place a conductor at the center of these aesthetic and ethical debates about cancel culture. I have no idea whether or not Lydia Tar is actually a once-in-a-generation conductor (in fact, the film may suggest the opposite), but I am entirely convinced that she has a genius-level understanding of how financial, political, and sexual power dynamics establish and reinforce the hierarchies within a creative industry. She is both victim and abuser, of course, but what feels novel is how her conducting and composition feel peripheral and secondary to the social artistry, self-mythologization, and brand management that she demonstrates away from her podium.

FK: After seeing the film a second time with my friends Meg and Mark, I asked them this and they said it can be a tragedy and it can be just. I think that Lydia was careless, unfeeling, reckless, and cruel. I think she used her power to hurt young women, to maim them beyond recovery. I think when she fell from grace, mediocrities were eager to step in and claim her place. I think reading art via identity and moral purity brings about the death of art. I think a lot also rests on the fact that the people we see Lydia elevate (like the cellist) are also talented. Then again, was Krista Taylor talented?

WG: First of all, I believe cancel culture is a real thing, so I wouldn’t put it in air quotes. My views of the film are certainly colored by that perspective. Todd Field and the team create a case study that allows the audience to both feel for and condemn Tar, allowing for a moral ambiguity around cancel culture that I think few works of art from the Trump and post-Trump years would dare depict. Smartly, they made Tar a queer woman. If this character has been male, the audience would have wholly condemned him. Field also makes sure the movie shows that Tar is guilty and responsible for her protégé’s suicide, so it is always clear that the wrongdoing was done and this is not a witch hunt. The film also makes us look at all the people/institutions/art forms responsible for giving Tar so much power, so it is very hard to only blame her. If I had to guess, I think the film is more empathetic to Tar than not, but it is very even handed. She is both a tragic figure and an abuser.

Though it plays a peripheral role in the film, what is the function of Lydia’s time spent researching indigenous music in Peru?

VS: I’d have to see it again to answer this question in any meaningful way. It didn’t strike me as notable, I guess.

CP: Well, a cynical reading would suggest that Lydia leverages her studies in indigenous music to forward her self-interests, which reflects the extractor’s mentality that she has had since she was a student. A more generous reading would view Lydia’s time researching indigenous music as a period of relative innocence and purity before her corruption by the classical music rat race, before the careerist ambitions and need for dominance took precedence. Catch me in the right mood and I’d argue these sequences hold the key to unlocking the whole movie.

FK: My friend Meg suggested that that, just as Lydia goes to Thailand in the first step of her PR recovery journey, she may have previously gone to Peru to hide out for a similar reason, or let some other scandal clear, then reemerged looking as though she had done a service to art. I think that’s a really interesting possibility. But Lydia presumably uses the indigenous music of Peru to, at the very least, burnish her CV and her image. If we know anything about her, it’s that she is highly political, or as she might say “highly considered” — we see her plan the cover of the album down to the tiniest detail, then suggest to the photographer on the day they do something “less considered” in the moment as if it never occurred to her. We know that she plotted and planned her way into the Berlin job, a situation that also involved her romantic partnership being a strategic choice to some extent. So everything in her life seems exacting, and why wouldn’t this be the same? A token from an ethnic world that is, for its white bearer, a token.

WG: This is one of the most mysterious elements of the film. I may even consider it one of the less successful ones. A generous view of it is that it shows Tar’s humble origin and suggests her work in Asia at the end of the film might lead to a kind of rebirth. A less generous view is that it is part of a mythology she constructs about herself as a form of self-promotion. A more honest view is that it is probably a little bit of both. I saw the film again yesterday, and I realized that the narration and singing we hear over the opening credits is from that time in Lydia’s life. It is clearly important to the character.

How would you describe TAR’s outlook on marriage and motherhood with respect to the “artist’s life”?

VS: I mean, aside from the wonderful scene in which Tar quietly berates the child who’s been bullying her daughter, the kid is kind of a cipher in the film, secondary by a long distance to Tar’s work as an artist. I don’t think the film has much to say about motherhood. It’s exactly as invested in motherhood as Tar is.

CP: Though she may only get mentioned once, the absence of Lydia’s mother and family in her current life in Berlin does offer some explanation for her imperfect relationship with her partner and their adopted daughter. It’s obviously significant that Lydia dedicates her post-cancelation piano composition to her daughter, and that Lydia is the one to confront her daughter’s bully–sometimes, it pays to have a parent who’s completely insane. Marriage and parenthood seem fraught for Lydia, but I don’t believe that’s because she’s a famous conductor. I think it’s because she is herself.

FK: I haven’t thought about this one enough! [Ed. Note: Maybe ask Meg?]

WG: I don’t know how well I can speak to this question because I’m not married or a mother, but I do think Tar’s relationship with her daughter, Petra, is her most genuine. However, even that is a little sad because Tar constantly performs her high status for her daughter. Petra calls her Lydia and she worships her completely, “You are the most beautiful person I have ever known,” Petra says after Tar’s face is injured in a fall. The most important scene with Petra involves a moment where Tar tries to take her to the park after she’s lost her position and Tar’s wife, Sharon, doesn’t let her. We watch this scene at a distance, from the inside of Tar’s car, but it’s the scene where I felt the most compassion for Tar. She needed to lose her job, but does she really need to lose the kid? Also, I think Sharon does not let Tar speak to Petra not from any real concern for her daughter but more because she wants to preserve her own position within the orchestra. That is one of the film’s more despicable acts.

How are we meant to interpret the ending(s) of TAR?

VS: I really loved the ending, though I can see why some didn’t, too. For me, it was this: on the one hand, yes, her cancellation is so debasing as to see her now conducting for cosplay-lovers in Thailand; on the other hand, it still means something to her, even this pitiful-seeming gig. It matters, what she’s doing — she has to believe it matters, else her whole self will unravel even further, to illegibility and meaninglessness.

CP: Lydia has been cosplaying as a cultured cosmopolitan elite her entire adult life, and now she is finally performing as her true self in front of a room of her fellow cosplayers. I thought the movie was about to end ten different times in the last 30 minutes, and I loved every last one of these suspected non-endings. Lydia’s tackling of her replacement, the Leonard Bernstein VHS, the back-and-forth with her brother, the waterfall, the brothel. It’s a deliberate and drawn out anticlimax, a conclusion that’s likely more truthful to the reality of the artist cast into exile. Sometimes, it feels like a perfectly inevitable end for Lydia. Other times, I wish she had gotten a much grander and dramatic finale. I like that I can’t decide between the two options; it gives me a reason to watch the movie again. May I never make up my mind.

FK: I think both symbolic and literal. The fishbowl of spa girls, the Monster Hunter soundtrack for which she is a guest conductor… sort of just stacks of symbolism that fit into her own narrative structures about the world, as she describes it early on at the New Yorker Festival.

WG: First, I think there is only one ending, and I think it’s the best film ending since “I drink your milkshake!” In that ending, we see both how far Tar has fallen, but we also see green shoots for her. The moment she vomits after being asked to select one of the masseuses/prostitutes shows genuine remorse and regret in a way we have never seen from her. The image of her conducing an orchestra for a LARPing (Live Action Role Play) Convention is degrading, but it shows she is still doing what she loves. She has lost the status she had in Berlin, but in some ways this new role is less elitist and less likely to create a culture of abuse that feeds and grows a Lydia Tar.:

Where does TAR rank among the movies you’ve seen this year?

VS: The best I’ve seen this year so far, though there are many I haven’t seen and still wish to before saying it was my favorite of the year.

CP: For now, above Memoria and below The Northman.

FK: As good as NOPE, which is to say very good.

WG: It’s the best film of the year and the best film of the decade (so far). [Ed. Note: Neither of these incorrect claims reflect the views of BPoFD or its sponsors.]

Track these ragtag conspiracy theorists to their dim basement apartments, or their unwatched YouTube channels, and they will swear on their rarest FunkO Pop that Jordan Peele’s The Twilight Zone ran for two seasons (20 episodes!) on a platform called CBS All Access, an obscure corporate streaming service whose realness invites scrutiny in its own right. If you second-guess them, they will cite the unmistakable influence of Rod Serling’s original series on Peele’s previous two features, how “The Trade-Ins,” from 1962, invented the Coagula Procedure more than 50 years before Get Out‘s Coagula Procedure, how “Mirror Image,” from 1960, presents a white midcentury model of the plot of US. They will show you IMDB pages, paper and digital reviews, and even zany promotional swag, but nothing an entry-level graphic designer or deep fake artist couldn’t forge. With a resigned sigh regarding the state of mental health in this country, you will leave these pitiable souls to their delusions, their stuffed animals and graphic tees. You will head to see Peele’s new film, confident that one of our most acclaimed writer-directors is far too talented, popular, and culturally significant to have produced a completely unwatched reboot of The Twilight Zone. Then you will sit through NOPE, and you will start to want to believe.

For skeptics, NOPE presents sufficient evidence that Jordan Peele, fresh off an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, had more than enough half-baked ideas to produce a multi-season remake of The Twilight Zone. The film, a contemporary monster movie masquerading as a throwback alien invasion movie, plays like a showcase for the leftover episode premises from Peele’s little-seen reboot, its Frankenstein of stitched-together high concepts never quite adding up to a satisfying, coherent whole. The main plot concerns a family of African-American horse handlers, the Haywoods, whose distant ancestor was purportedly the black jockey who appeared in Eadweard Muybridge’s The Horse in Motion, the two-second clip commonly cited as the first motion picture. Like their last name (only a few letters away from Hollywood), the Haywoods have for generations lived and worked at a close remove from the entertainment industry, competently operating on the periphery but, due first to their race and more recently to the diminished popularity of westerns, never invited in. From their LA county ranch, they have helped to keep the movie machine running without earning much more than horse feed money and an acknowledgement when the credits roll, their company’s name appearing on screen well after the last stragglers have left the theater.

The second, more engaging storyline concerns a traumatized former child actor, Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun), who starred in a hit 90s sitcom that was canceled after an enraged chimpanzee snapped on set, injuring and killing several members of the cast. Jupe was spared, for reasons that will be vaguely gestured at by the end of the film. Three decades later, Jupe owns and runs a Wild West-themed amusement park, Jupiter’s Claim, whose rides and attractions buzz and whir just across the valley from the Haywoods’ ranch. After the patriarch of the Haywood family dies in a mysterious accident (a coin falls out of the sky, tears like a sniper’s bullet through his head), his son and daughter, OJ and Emerald, played by Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer, start selling horses to Jupe to keep the ranch afloat. These are beloved horses for OJ, and as he promises his disbelieving sister, they are going to find the money to buy the animals back.

The psychic and physical wounds that bond these characters, all minorities harmed or disregarded by the Hollywood system, all members of communities traditionally left out of the mainstream American narrative, offer fertile ground for Peele’s imagination, if not for his storytelling and execution. Their interwoven dramas, while not occurring in precisely the same world as US or Get Out, are undeniably at home in Peele’s universe of racially charged sci-fi horror, and NOPE‘s strongest moments (see: the chimp attack, or Jupe’s museum documenting it) once again present the outline of an ascendent auteur, a filmmaker in the high-minded low culture tradition of Carpenter and Craven. John Carpenter’s third feature film was Halloween, however; Wes Craven’s was The Hills Have Eyes. These were seismic leaps forward not just for these directors but for their genre. NOPE isn’t a full step backwards, but it is more stasis than progress for Peele; if he had directed it under a pseudonym, critics and audiences might have characterized it as a fine Jordan Peele knockoff. Perhaps this is the downside of debuting with a film as assured, celebrated, and profitable as GET OUT–the writer-director lapses into self-commodification before the self can fully form.

Commodification of the self, and the exploitation of the self’s image, move to the foreground of NOPE with the arrival of Jean Jacket, the UFO-shaped flying monster that stalks the perimeter of the Haywoods’ farm. (The origins of the creature’s demented, incredible name will not be explained in these pages.) Jupe, in a bid to turn the transparently dangerous alien into an attraction for his business, has been feeding Jean Jacket the horses that he has been purchasing from the Haywoods, and here the film should turn into a mutually destructive competition between the amusement park and the horse farm, a desperate rat race to capture and monetize Jean Jacket by any means necessary. And NOPE does become that, partly. But along the way we have several almost amusing detours with an UAP-obsessed tech repairman, a Werner Herzog-esque German commercial director, and a nameless, faceless paparazzi reporter from TMZ who never removes their motorcycle helmet. These asides are either too brief to add anything substantial to the proceedings, or so long that they detract from the unity of tone and momentum. They are reminders of Peele’s background in sketch comedy and (allegedly) Twilight Zone reboots, coming across as ideas that might sustain an audience’s attention for five to 22 minutes but distract from the main action and characters of a 135-minute feature.

These would be forgivable shortcomings if the odd couple sibling protagonists, OJ and Emerald, didn’t also seem to occupy altogether separate movies. As the strong, mostly silent OJ, a man who prefers the company of horses to people, Kaluuya is admirably understated until outward emotion is called for–that’s when the sarcastic humor or pathos rings artificial. The character of Emerald is, how to put it, so obnoxious and unfunny that her inclusion feels like an editing oversight, and Keke Palmer’s performance most recalls a pity invite at a middle school sleepover; her anxious, beseeching acting makes ignoring her hard and admiring her impossible. None of these characters measure up, in presence or psychological nuance, to those in Peele’s two earlier features, which is a shame considering the names and capabilities involved. And as NOPE builds to the Haywoods’ final encounter with Jean Jacket, an irony emerges in Peele’s film about how Hollywood mistreats its talent, or in this case, merely underserves it.

Hidden, if you squint, among these underwhelming side characters and the inconsistent writing is a profound, inventive film about humanity’s relationship with animals, as well as the communities that powerful nations and industries have then and now perceived as animals, which is to say as less than human, as an unfeeling resource to be exploited until it is exhausted and can be disposed of without a second thought. NOPE should have more effectively interrogated the empathic solidarity, the inter-species kinship, that the Haywoods and Jupe have for Jean Jacket. (This unspoken solidarity is why the chimpanzee spared Jupe, after all; that a monkey can feel what people cannot may be Peele’s truest stroke of genius here.) But Jupe is sidelined for too long, and then summarily killed. We are left again in the middle ground that defines NOPE, a purgatory that does offer–but never synthesizes–dynamic allegory and epic spectacle.

Peele’s final action set piece is presented as redemptive, cathartic, as if he recalled this was a movie about children avenging their father’s death, but the logistics again muddle the takeaway. Jean Jacket, perhaps as a defense mechanism, begins to change form, its UFO shape blossoming into a cross between an orchid and billowing bedroom curtain. The creature dominates the sky, the most stunning image in a film with more than a handful of them. The Haywoods lure Jean Jacket into a vulnerable position, capturing its image before they kill it. “That’s why you don’t fuck with the Haywoods!” Emerald screams at the sky. OJ sits tall astride a horse, claiming his family’s overdue place in film history. More than a century after The Horse in Motion, the Haywoods have learned how to survive in the machine; Peele, maybe writing from experience, rightly suggests that this isn’t an accomplishment to celebrate.

The steps taken towards Peele’s conclusions in NOPE are shaky, but that makes them no less affecting or correct. Out there, in America as in Hollywood, it’s still a fight to the death at the bottom. Peele, to his credit and his detriment, killed none of his darlings in the making of NOPE, jamming the container of his third film so full of ideas and characters that it overflowed. Jordan Peele should be commended for this ambition, though its shortfalls suggest he now risks finding himself in a truly terrifying kind of horror movie: the tale of a wildly talented director whose art, arguments, and career failed to reach their full potential because an entire industry was scared to tell him no.

Final Strawberry Verdict: 3 Strawberries out of 5

Based on the 2000 novel by Joyce Carol Oates, Blonde is an impressionistic, heavily fictionalized account of the rise and fall of the actress Norma Jeane Mortenson, who is best known for performing under the stage name of Marilyn Monroe. “To live is to suffer,” an optimistic German philosopher once wrote, and from the first gorgeous, sumptuous frames of Blonde, Dominik is hellbent on ensuring that Norma Jeane is vividly, achingly alive with suffering. We meet her as a young girl living at the mercy of her domineering, unstable mother (Julianne Nicholson), a woman whose institutionalization will turn Norma Jeane into an orphan failed perpetually by the systems meant to house and protect and support her: foster care, Hollywood, marriage, wealth. Perhaps in an homage to (frankly one of the clunkier) elements of The Assassination…, much of Blonde‘s dramatic and psychological action relates back to a single framed image, a purported picture of the absent father that Norma Jeane will never meet. This portrait is the main driver of Blonde‘s minimal plot and maximalist cinematography, the form and narrative coming together, over a nearly three-hour runtime, to bore and baffle more often than they astound. Even the most glorious visuals, it turns out, cannot salvage such a straightforward adaptation of the Wikipedia page for the Father Complex. Marilyn, in a choice approaching parody, refers to all her husbands by the pet name “Daddy.”

If there is complexity or artistic value to be found in Blonde, it resides in Dominik’s visual style, which manipulates color and aspect ratio and perspective to evoke the era and glamour still reflexively associated with Monroe and her films. The visuals, even when they depict something repulsive or indulgent, are genuinely dazzling, so much so that the viewer can’t help but feel that Netflix has done a similar disservice to Blonde that Old Hollywood did to its protagonist: this deeply flawed film, like Marilyn Monroe, deserved better advocates (and a wider theater release). A defense of Blonde might cite this meta-critique of the entertainment industry as intentional on Dominik’s part, another juxtaposition reinforcing how the intoxicating splendor of his on-screen images contrasts the abominable, exploitative treatment endured by Marilyn behind the scenes, but the sheer monotony of the tone and messaging makes these defenses tough to sustain. The one-note quality likewise hampers the potentially stellar lead performance by Ana de Armas, who, following Dominik’s too-narrow direction, commendably embodies Monroe’s look without once being granted full access to her spirit, humor, or interior life. For de Armas, this dynamic eschews any need for creative license on her part, as the powerful man meant to elevate her acting, in the grand Hollywood tradition, had fated her to fail long before she was cast.

This isn’t to say that Blonde is absent a sense of humor, as many of its sequences present as hilariously heavy-handed or, in certain instances, so politically retrograde as to invite a kind of frightened laughter. The endurance cinema of Michael Haneke and Lars Von Trier are miscast influences here, and the two graphic abortion sequences, partially shot from the inside of Marilyn’s vagina, could have been directed (with far more aplomb) by Gasper Noe. Dominik deploys these influences haphazardly, applying them like an overconfident film major who has both misunderstood the readings and ignored the assignment. Those cited directors leverage disturbing images and discomfort as a means to illuminate the subtler violences and deeper anxieties that undergird contemporary European society, sparking difficult conversations about the continent’s history, identity, and decay. Blonde is, in contrast, more of a one-sided monologue, or a dull lecture that renders its compelling topic irrelevant. The most intriguing interpretative questions it raises stand outside the film itself, and primarily concern the psychological hangups that, first, attracted Joyce Carol Oates to the figure of Marilyn Monroe, and, second, drew Andrew Dominik to Oates’s particular rendering of beauty, fame, parentage, and artistic legacy.

In a recent interview with The New Yorker, Oates defended Dominik’s film by stating that the “real things that happened to Marilyn Monroe are much worse than anything in the movie.” By framing of the 50s sex symbol as a kind of ritual sacrifice, a pig brought to slaughter as bread and circus for the ascendant American empire, Blonde draws clear parallels to another (superior) big-screen fictionalization of midcentury superstardom, Baz Luhrmann’s ELVIS. Luhrmann’s film is showy and overstuffed in another manner, a fireworks spectacular as opposed to an art exhibit, yet the most consequential difference between the films lies not in the kindness or generosity that their directors show their subjects, but in the perfectly divergent levels of artistic regard that Dominik and Luhrmann have for Monroe, Elvis, and perhaps most importantly, their creative outputs. ELVIS indicts audiences for the indirect role they played in Elvis Presley’s death, its final scenes punishing the viewer by forcing them to confront the fragile, irreplaceable person and talent that was lost too soon. Blonde may want to indict misogyny, toxic fandom, Hollywood, or all of the above, but in practice, it only punishes Marilyn. The viewer is left too disinterested to feel implicated.

To complete that earlier quote from the German philosopher, “To live is to suffer; to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.” In Blonde, Marilyn Monroe is denied a childhood, physically and verbally abused by her husbands, belittled, raped, and driven to take a fatal overdose. She dies friendless and childless and alone, at thirty-six years of age. That the stewards of her story believe that these hardships were only a fraction of her true pain says more about their own reductive, pessimistic worldviews than it does about Norma Jeane Mortenson, Marilyn Monroe, or the culture that remains fascinated with her character, her movies, and her poetry. Blonde is too much suffering, too little meaning. The next time that the brave, uncompromising artists behind it want to make a movie or write a novel, they should just save us all the trouble and call their daddies.

Final Strawberry Verdict: 2.75 Strawberries out of 5

William’s ALmost Instant Reactions to the 2022 Academy Awards

BPoFD: The Oscars are relevant again! Does Will Smith’s staged slapping of Chris Rock usher in a new era of excitement and unpredictability at the Oscars?

William: If the Oscars can no longer be a dignified show where people celebrate the movies that they love, past and present, then having people tune in for shock value and what can happen on live TV is the next best thing.  I don’t really care if Chris Rock deserved it (he didn’t).  Or if Will Smith was just defending his wife (he wasn’t).  What I care about is that the moment brought surprise into what otherwise was an extremely predictable evening where the  frontrunners won in every single category.  The Academy should give both men special Oscars for making the Academy Awards must see TV again. They should also create a new Oscar called the Adult in the Room Award and give it to Denzel Washington. And Sally Field should send Will Smith flowers, because he has now topped her for most unhinged and overwrought acceptance speech in the history of the category.

BPoFD: Speaking of unpredictability, there wasn’t a single upset in any of the major categories. Would you support a proposal to add a sixth unknown “mystery nominee” to every major category next year?

William: No, this is a bad idea.  The way to solve this problem is to shorten the awards season.  It went from December to the end of March this year, allowing for a strong consensus to be formed.  The winners last night all won their respective guild awards. The preferential ballot should also be eliminated because it is allowing films that people liked just enough to win.

BPoFD: What changes to the show worked? What changes to the show backfired?

William: For me, the Oscars are about time and history.  It’s about having current stars and celebrities on stage with Hollywood legends, and I’ve always found that combination very potent. I was concerned the Oscars made too many concessions to Gen Z in their choice of presenters, but I actually liked the mix of old and new.  To have Rita Moreno, Judi Dench, Liza Minnelli, and Liv Ullmann in the same room together was a gay wet dream.  Lady Gaga presenting with Liza Minnelli was one of the most moving things that I’ve seen at an Oscar ceremony, and it honestly made me stop caring about whether CODA or Power of the Dog won Best Picture.  I was crying so hard. Moments like that are why I will never boycott the Oscars.

I also like having mini film reunions for the presentations (White Men Can’t Jump, Juno, Pulp Fiction). More of that please! I enjoyed the In Memoriam as well and the way they singled out particular legends. Let’s just be honest that some celebrity deaths, like some animal deaths, are more equal than others.

However, overall I thought the show was glib and flippant and had no reverence for the nominated films.  Initially, I thought that pre-taping some of the awards helped things move along, but apparently they did cut out sections of the speeches. That is totally unacceptable.

“And Sally Field should send Will Smith flowers“

–William

BPoFD: Should the Oscars bring back Amy Schumer, Regina Hall, and Wanda Sykes to host next year? Why or why not?

William: There were some good one-liners (“I guess they don’t look up reviews!”), but I thought that they made no sense as a group and all their bits were disposable.  Most of their jokes functioned as an ad for the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee.  They should not be asked back.  Chris Rock and Lady Gaga both made cases for why they would be better hosts.

BPoFD: How can a room full of guilty famous millionaires hope to end the war in Ukraine, if they cannot stop internecine violence within their own community?

William: I don’t care about this question.  Though if Sean Penn is going to burn one of his Oscars because they didn’t let Zolensky speak, I think it should be the one for Mystic River. (Note: It is the opinion of the editorial board that Sean Penn should be allowed to receive and smelt the Oscar that he should have won for I Am Sam.)

Let me talk about something fun instead. This Oscar ceremony perfectly mirrored the 1972 Oscars. We had a tribute to The Godfather, which won Best Picture.  Liza Minnelli came out for the 50th anniversary of Cabaret, which won 8 Oscars.  And we had a Best Actor winner who is obviously suffering from mental illness. Will Smith slapped Chris Rock.  Marlon Brando had a fake Native American woman accept his Best Actor Oscar. The clusterfuck of the 1970s is back, and I’m here for it!