Movie Diary
a) Hamnet
I was disappointed that Jessie Buckley wasn't nominated for an Oscar for Wild Rose, I thought she really deserved one. I did not think Hamnet was nearly as good a movie, but her performance was absolutely the best thing about it, so I'm still pretty glad she won for it. I've never seen Shakespeare in Love because the premise just didn't seem like something I wanted to see, and as I watched Hamnet I felt like I'd been lulled into seeing basically what I'd been pointedly avoiding for 25+ years. The talented cast and crew did a lot to make it a relatively subtle and affecting version of that idea, I still just didn't think it was a very good idea, especially that awful "to be or not to be" scene.
Now this is a Best Picture nom that I thought was deserving, definitely up there with Sinners and One Battle as the best Oscar flicks this year. It was also the rare '70s period piece that actually had the pacing and texture of great '70s movies, Wagner Moura was great but there were a lot of really wonderful ensemble moments, particularly Kaiony Vinancio and the late Udo Kier.
c) Oh, Hi!
I felt like this could've been better if they'd committed to it being a light battle-of-the-sexes movie, or if they'd gone further in the direction of making it a horror movie, but it just landed somewhere in the middle with a shrug. Geraldine Viswanathan is in it, though, so I have no regrets about watching it, I adore her, every scene she was in was funnier than the scenes without her.
I grew up on Naked Gun movies and "Police Squad!" and I think Akiva Schaffer is a genius for Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping. So I was reasonably sure I'd enjoy this, but I was laughing at loud through the entire thing, it was really fantastic. The only thing I was a little skeptical about was Pamela Anderson, who's more 'not a serious actress' than a comedic actress per se, but her big musical number was the peak of the whole movie, just ridiculous.
e) 10x10
A pretty good minimalist thriller, I never really kept up with "Yellowstone," but sometimes I wish I had because of Kelly Reilly, she's great.
I really don't think Kit Harington has the juice to lead somemthing like this werewolf movie, he just feels like a lightweight to me.
g) Nuremberg
I don't think Russell Crowe was necessarily bad in this movie but I wish someone else was the lead, I just look at him and seen an over-the-hill hack now. It definitely felt like it had the potential to be an Oppenheimer-level movie with a better director and better star.
h) Lion
I barely have any memory of this movie from when it came out 10 years ago, but apparently it had 6 Oscar nominations. Pretty good but I kind of just put it on as background noise one day, maybe I didn't give it the attention it deserved.
I went into this kind of expecting a depressing recap of all the reasons Chevy Chase is not particularly beloved in show business, but it ended up being a pretty entertaining and often charming look back at why he became a star in the first place that put his personal flaws and failures in context without letting him off the hook. And it was nice that Garrett Morris had some positive things to say about him. My jaw did drop when Chevy referred to his second wife as his first wife and someone else had to remind him about a woman he was married to for four years. I don't know if that's senility, narcissism, or a combination of both.
I wasn't familiar with the poet Andrea Gibson, who died of ovarian cancer last year, but this documentary about their marriage and final years is pretty touching, it's kind of hard to watch something this intimate and share in someone else's grief and tragedy, but I appreciate that they let the filmmakers capture these moments.
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