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: Musical and Performing Arts
A Complete Unknown (2024)
Entertaining, engrossing, and educational, it’s hard not to leave James Mangold’s (3:10 to Yuma, Ford v Ferrari) A Complete Unknown disappointed. While many will call it a paint-by-numbers musical biopic (which is completely justified), it does three things that recent films, such as Bob Marley: One Love, Rocketman (Elton John), Back to Black (Amy Winehouse), Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody, and Elvis couldn’t do. It held my interest throughout its 140-minute runtime. It implored me to read Bob Dylan’s Wikipedia page. It led to an interest in looking up the songs performed in the film that I had not heard before. The musical biopic genre has been bad for nearly 20 years (Bohemian Rhapsody and Straight Outta Compton are outliers). A Complete Unknown feels like a companion piece to two fabulous turn-of-the-century musical biopics with terrific lead performances in 2004’s Ray (Jaime Foxx as Ray Charles) and Walk the Line (Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash). Each film landed the lead performer an Oscar nomination, including a win for Foxx.
Once (2007)
I’ve watched John Carney’s (Begin Again, Sing Street) Once in its entirety three times. I saw it in 2007 during its theatrical run. I saw it another time between that and my 2024 rewatch. I have felt myself connecting with it less with each subsequent viewing, yet appreciating it more. What is ironic is that when I first saw the film, it felt like an original masterpiece, and that is something I don’t feel anymore. Perhaps that was because I needed to see more movies following the fairly generic formula. Or maybe it was because I’ve seen too many films that have followed that blueprint, resulting in Once feeling less original than I initially found. As I write this review, I try to balance that original perception against how I react to the film 14 years later.
Maestro (2023)
Each year, a handful of movies are made in a way that is less interested in audience consumption or interest and more in earning awards. The term for this is “Oscar bait.” The 2023-released movie most associated with this term is Bradley Cooper’s (A Star Is Born) sophomore directorial effort, Maestro. It will earn a few Oscars. Cooper might even earn one for Best Director. He’s likelier to earn one for Best Lead Actor for portraying the title character, Leonard Bernstein.
Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody (2022)
Bohemian Rhapsody, Ray, What’s Love Got to Do With It, or Walk The Line, Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody is not. Kasi Lemmons’s (Harriet, Talk to Me) is not even on the same level as this year’s disappointing Elvis. Naomi Ackie (Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Lady Macbeth) did not encompass the legendary Whitney Houston nearly as well as Rami Malek (Bohemian Rhapsody), Jamie Foxx (Ray), Joaquin Phoenix (Walk the Line), Angela Bassett (Angela Bassett) or Angela Bassett (Elvis). Under the right direction and with the right lead, Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody should have at least been a lock for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role. But, alas, it wasn’t meant to be.
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