While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences did him a solid by selecting him as a Best Actor nominee, it does feel, in a way, that Bill Nighy (Love Actually, Notes on a Scandal) was chosen for a remarkable lengthy career rather than his performance in Oliver Hermanus (Moffie, The Endless River) underwhelming Living. While it scores high on Rotten Tomatoes (critics – 96%, audiences 86%), the film has a more realistic 7.5/10 on IMDB and 81 Metascore. Even those marks seem high for a mostly unremarkable movie. It earned just $2,000,000 domestically, which isn’t necessarily bad for an independent film but is relatively low for a movie with multiple Oscar nominations (Best Adapted Screenplay was the film’s second nomination category).
All posts by bryanbuser
Babylon (2022)
Love it or hate it. There isn’t much middle ground or neutrality regarding Damien Chazelle’s (La La Land, First Man) divisive Babylon, a fantastical look at the debaucherous look at the rise and fall of the Hollywood movie industry during the 1920s. While some might believe its 56% /52 % scores on Rotten Tomatoes suggest it’s an ordinary movie, those average scores may result from people either loving or hating it. I enjoyed the movie. It is far from being in my top ten of the year. With only a couple of 2022 films left to watch, Babylon sits at #16 (out of the 74 2022-released films I’ve seen). It’s a fine film and one that is worth viewing.
The Inspection (2022)
Heavy military boot comp movies cannot help but draw comparisons to Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. The groundbreaking drama showcased the great lengths that United States Military Academies sometimes go too far to “break” their recruits. Another great example is the under-appreciated but long-remembered G.I. Jane. Both films featured recruits that were not wanted (Full Metal Jacket with the obese, dimwitted Leonard “aka Gomer Pyle” Lawrence (played fantastically by Vincent D’Onofrio) in Full Metal Jacket or Demi Moore as the lone trial candidate of a U.S. Navy female integration program in G.I. Jane. A similar example is Men of Honor, the story of Carl Brashear (Cuba Gooding Jr.), the first African-American U.S. Navy Diver.
Prey (2022)
For as impressive as Dan Trachtenberg’s (10 Cloverfield Lane) Prey, the origin story of the successful Predator franchise is, it’s a travesty that this movie did not receive a theatrical release. From Forbes.com about the movie’s release to Hulu/Disney+, over a theatrical fun.
Since ‘Prey’ was a holdover before Disney bought Fox in 2019, the potential for post-theatrical streaming boosts was contractually limited. Had it been released in theaters, its post-theatrical afterlife would have begun not on Disney+ or Hulu but on HBO Max. However, if Disney wanted the film in theaters badly enough, they likely could have worked out a post-theatrical deal akin to ‘Death on the Nile, ‘ which premiered at home after theatrical on both Hulu and HBO Max. It didn’t, so theatrical was never in the cards.
Close (2022)
While the lock for this year’s Best International Feature Film appears to be the fantastically made All Quiet on the Western Front (it’s the only international film nominated in the Best Picture category), 2022 has a slew of movies that may have had a chance to win the category in recent years. Most notable on the list include Argentina’s Argentina, 1985, Ireland’s The Quiet Girl, and Belgium’s Close, director Lukas Dhont’s (Girl) on the loss of innocence.