Emilia Pérez, the not-so-quiet musical, has quickly become this year’s Oscar darling over awards season, racking up 13 Academy Award nominations, three more than any other film. It is one of the more divisive Best Picture nominations in recent memory. Critics like it but don’t love it, as evidenced by its 75% fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes and 71 on Metacritic. Those scores alone suggest it’s one of the year’s better movies, but it is far from a consensus. Worse are the audience scores, with a meager 27% fresh Rotten Tomatoes audience score and 6.2 on IMDB. Some are comparing its surge to Crash (2004) and Green Book (2018), two great films that may have earned their Best Picture Academy Award wins, based more on where we were in American society during those periods than on the timeless quality of the movie itself. While that is not something I would say, I would agree that neither film was the best of those years. I have Crash as my sixth favorite and Green Book as my third favorite movie of the year. Similarly, Emilia Pérez is not the best movie of 2024, but it will finish in my top ten. Like those above, it’s not perfect, and its timely, topical relevance is a factor of its generated steam.
Category Archives: Zoe Saldana
Avengers: Infinity War (2018)
Why did the Mad Titan Thanos (Josh Brolin – W., Sicario) need to grab hold of the power of the six Infinity Stones to destroy the universe? I think it’s important to understand what causes a villain to do certain actions rather than just to have a bad guy. The stronger the villain’s arc and the more we sympathize with them on any level, the more we understand and appreciate the underlying of who they are. In Avengers: Infinity War (directed by Anthony Russo and Joe Russo), we have a powerful bad guy motivated by a tortured past and willing to destroy all the good guys in the universe to atone for it. After the planet Titan is no longer inhabited, he is not allowed to prevent things from destroying it; he thinks he will prevent it. Instead, he lost his planet and everyone on it. Vowing not to let something like that happen again, he makes it his mission to balance the universe by completely wiping out half of it. But to do so, he’ll need all six of the Infinity Stones that will power his Infinity Gauntlet, allowing him to bend time, space, energy, and the laws of physics and reality.
Live by Night (2016)
For the last three or four years, I hope Ben Affleck can be our generation’s Clint Eastwood. Affleck has completely transformed himself into a Hollywood A-lister. With a career that began with Kevin Smith movies like Mallrats and Chasing Amy, Affleck became a household name when he won an Academy Award (best original screenplay) for Good Will Hunting, a film in which he co-starred with Matt Damon. Affleck then stars in big-budget blockbusters such as Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, and The Sum of All Fears. But after he started dating Jennifer Lopez and co-starred with her in both the forgettable Jersey Girl and Gigli, a movie that many people have called one of the worst movies ever made, his perception as an actor began taking a turn for the worse. Forgettable money grabbers like Daredevil, Paycheck, and Surviving Christmas accompanied tabloid fodder, and seemingly, in the blink of an eye, Affleck became sort of a joke in Hollywood circles.
Out of the Furnace (2013)
Finally, a gritty drama for 2013 to win you over with complex characters and excellent acting performances. This movie is, first and foremost, about flawed characters who want to do the right thing but don’t always know how. Well…I say that except for Woody Harrelson’s (The Messenger, Rampart) character. He is as vile, violent, and rotten to the core as he’s ever been. There are no redeeming qualities in Harrelson’s portrayal of Harlan DeGroat, a fight organizer/crystal meth dealer who drinks way too much, dabbles a little too much in his product, and looks to physically hurt anyone and every one every time they do anything to set him off, regardless of what it is. He is a ruthless jerk to the nth degree. Unfortunately, he plays his role perfectly. Without giving anything away, he dominates the movie’s first scene and makes him the person we are to fear for the next two hours.
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