I'm Taking a Break (Sort Of)

What's this? A post that isn't a movie rant, a weird ranking of something overly specific, or predictions for an awards ceremony that are more thorough than accurate. Yes, this is me talking to you directly for a change.

I just want to give you a little update about what's going on. I'm taking a break for a bit. Most of what I've written lately has felt like a chore. I feel like I'm going on the same 10 rants repeatedly. Between keeping this up and a lot of the side-projects I work on, I'm getting burned out. Luckily, no one is forcing me to do any of these things. It's my own completionist compulsions driving me. That means, I can quit any time I want. 

I'm setting no timelines on this. I may be back next week. I may be back next month. I might be on a completely new site. I might remain here. I don't know. I'm figuring some things out.

In the meantime, enjoy my dump of Delayed Reactions I've been saving up. 

One thing I do want to make very clear:

I absolutely, 100% will be back.

Delayed Reaction: Tokyo Story

The Pitch: Not all Japanese movies need to be exciting like Godzilla.

An older couple come to visit their adult children in the city only to realize they've become a burden on them.

I have trouble with the two sides of my movie fandom. I love the entertainment factor of movies. I think there's nothing wrong with calling something a great popcorn movie. Comedy and action are as hard to pull off as anything but get a fraction of the respect of drama. I do also love "serious" movies. I've fawned over many critical darling. Even movies like Schindler's List or Citizen Kane, which I was initially determined to find overrated, I've since come to love. Occasionally, I worry that I've swung too far to the pretentious movie snob side of things. Then I run into a movie like Tokyo Story and realize that I'm not there yet.

I don't get the love for this movie. And there is a lot of love for this movie. Just check out the Critical Review section on its Wikipedia page. People adore this movie. And, by people, I mean film snobs (I say lovingly). I assume the average person isn't even aware of Tokyo Story, but the average person who regularly posts reviews on Letterboxd reveres it as a classic. I suppose I see some of the things people revere about it. The slow, deliberate pace helps to amplify the effect of it by the end. I liked the performances well enough. If you wanted to call this influential, well, I don't know about about international cinema from the 50s to disagree with you.

I just plain thought this was dull. No performance really popped. The movie refrains from melodrama so much that it becomes mundane. I know that much of this is the whole point of the movie, but "knowing what you're doing" isn't the same as "doing something that's good."

I should clarify that I didn't hate Tokyo Story. I try to keep my list of classics that I hate short. It's mainly just Network and The Tree of Life these days (and even those I'm leaving some room to change my mind about). My stance on Tokyo Story is that I don't get what is special about it. I'm not sure why Tokyo Story over so many other movies is regarded as special. If I watched it and several other movies from that era back to back in one afternoon, I doubt I'd be able to pick this out as the classic. Perhaps this will go on my "check back in 10 years" list.  

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Unicorn Store

The Pitch: Brie Larson has an Oscar and wants to direct.

A failed artist moves back in with her parents. While trying to adapt to the regular world, she keeps getting distracted by this strange man with a store who keeps promising her a unicorn.

There's this hilarious story that's been going around about Unicorn Store. So, some guy on Twitter tweeted something about how Brie Larson hadn't paid her dues enough to be directing a film already, also mentioning that she only got the chance because of "the Captain Marvel wave". Netflix decided to reply to that tweet with a big list of all her credentials which Brie Larson retweeted, simply adding "NETFLEX". It was a nice bit of social media brand-defense on Netflix's part, but otherwise, pretty forgettable.

I find this exchange interesting for a lot of reasons. That tweet was selected by Netflix for how perfectly misguided it was. Here his entire tweet:

Lol this looks like bleh. Take notes from Jonah Hill, who was mentored by Martin Scorsese, and took years before he made his directorial debut out of respect for the artistry of film and the position of director. This seems like she’s just riding Captain Marvel’s wave.

 First of all, the opening sentence is perfectly structure Twitter speak. That lets us know this guy isn't any kind of authority. He then brings up Jonah Hill as someone who did it the "right" way. I love Jonah Hill. He's in several of my favorite movies, but he shouldn't be anyone's template. His first film role was a part in I Heart Huckabees that he got because he was friends with Dustin Hoffman's kids. He's been able to leverage his different friendships into a lot of great opportunities throughout his career. He got two surprising Oscar nominations*. When he finally decided to direct, he made an indie movie using major studio connections and resources and asserted that the story about lower class-skater punks was inspired by memories of his childhood, even though he lived a comfortable upper-middle class life. Again, I love Jonah Hill and think he's delivered with every opportunity he's been given, but he is the worst person to point to when looking for an example of someone who "did it the hard way". I'm also not denying that Brie Larson has had a fairly easy path too. She's been a successful actress since she was a child. Larson and Hill's stories are far more similar than different.

*Neither nomination was locked up going into Oscar nomination morning. Based on the other precursor nominations, he was lucky to get both of them.

Finally, the tweet says that Unicorn Store is "riding the Captain Marvel wave". I mean, sure, it obviously got picked up by Netflix and released at a time when Brie Larson's visibility was at its peak. That is every studio's strategy with every release. In other news, they are releasing the next Star Wars movie when they think it will make the most money. Duh. More importantly, Unicorn Store premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2017. It was completed well before that. Brie Larson had been cast as Captain Marvel by then, but that's about it. If she was riding any wave, it would be the one from winning a fucking Oscar. I suspect that when she was selected to direct Unicorn Store, the producers were thinking more about that Oscar than the Captain Marvel casting news.

Look, I don't mean to pile on this guy. I think it's a little shitty that Netflix targeted him for that tweet. He's not a reviewer or even a verified account. He's just a guy who made a comment that was uninformed, but pretty harmless. Now he has an army of Netflix and Brie Larson fans calling him sexist among other things. I haven't researched his other tweets, but based on that one alone, he reads as more of a fool than anything more nefarious.

When I finally got to watching the movie, I realized that Unicorn Store is the exact movie I expected it would be, given all the parts. It's competently made. Brie Larson doesn't have any masterful directorial flourishes. She also doesn't make a mess of it. She does well enough to prove that she knows what she's doing. If she directs another movie in the future, I feel confident that it will be good too. Maybe a little better. There aren't any great performances in the movie. In the lead role, Larson is a little too quirky for my taste. I like sarcastic, quippy Brie Larson. I like grounded, dramatic Brie Larson. I'm not there yet for twee Brie Larson (yet). Everyone else plays their roles about 10% exaggerated, which fits the world of the film. No one showed me anything I hadn't seen from them before, but they also played to their strengths. I'd happily see Joan Cusack and Bradley Whitford play an overenthusiastic couple in anything. I like how much people smile in this. Martha MacIsaac has a great smile. I don't get why she doesn't show up more often in movies like this. Samuel L. Jackson is having a blast, as expected.

The lack of subtlety worked against the touches of surrealism. Either have a metaphor for the audience to figure out or drop the metaphor and have characters explain how they feel. Having both is redundant. Since the movie spells its message out, all the quirkier elements feel like overkill. Perhaps if a little more of the humor landed, that would've balanced things out a lot better.

I'm happy to watch that cast in a movie together. As director, Larson mostly stays out of the way to let the performers work. The deciding factor for me is that it lacks any one things that exceeded my expectations. No one thing - an inspired supporting performance, clever dialogue, an interesting design element - sticks out when I think about it, which is a shame. I wanted to like this a lot.

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Born on the 4th of July

The Pitch: Did you know that the Vietnam War wasn't good for the veterans of it?

A Marine gets injured in Vietnam and comes home to realize that the country isn't ready to embrace him.

Should Tom Cruise have an Oscar? He is the definitive movie star of the last 40 years. Without the help of Marvel, Star Wars, or animated movies, he's amassed a staggering lineup of hits. He's had at least two $150 million hits in each of the last 4 decades. I doubt anyone can match that. Movie stars don't have to have Oscars though. And that's what makes Tom Cruise's case interesting. He's chased Oscars almost this entire time that he's been box office gold. Rain Man won Best Picture. A Few Good Men and Interview With the Vampire were Oscar players. Born on the Fourth of July, Eyes Wide Shut, Magnolia, Vanilla Sky, Minority Report, The Last Samurai, Collateral: these were all Oscar hopefuls in their own way, almost all from auteur directors. Cruise even turned Jerry Maguire into a legitimate Oscar threat. Then, he shifted to producing Oscar hopefuls like Lions for Lambs and Valkyrie when he resurrected United Artists. He's mostly abandoned the hunt in the last decade. Only American Made has been anything close to an Oscar play. But, when you look at Cruise's career, does it seem like he should've snuck in an Oscar win somewhere? Think about it. Brad Pitt is an Oscar winner because he happened to produce 12 Years a Slave. Someone as connected as Tom Cruise I'd think would've stumbled into an Oscar somewhere.

The great missed opportunity of his career has to be Born on the Fourth of July. The stars were aligned, it seemed. He was fresh off being the actual lead in the Best Picture winner the year before (Rain Man). Director Oliver Stone's last Vietnam movie, Platoon, won Best Picture 3 years before. The year before Dustin Hoffman won the Lead Actor Oscar for Rain Main, Michael Douglas won the Lead Actor Oscar award for Wall Street (also an Oliver Stone movie). Born on the Fourth of July was even an Oscar behemoth. It got several major nominations and won Stone the Best Director award. A Lead Actor bid doesn't come in better situated than Tom Cruise's.

Tom Cruise gives a huge performance. Pure Oscar bait. He acts big. He acts hard. He never crosses into being cartoonish or melodramatic. Compare this to some of his fellow nominees that year. Kenneth Branagh was doing Shakespeare in Henry V. That kind of theatricality was decades past its Oscar viability. Morgan Freeman in Driving Miss Daisy was understated in a way that almost never wins. Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society was the "just happy to be here" nominee. Most years, Tom Cruise would've had the award locked up.

Then came Daniel Day-Lewis. Fuuuuck. That performance in My Left Foot overlapped and outdid everything Cruise did in Born on the Fourth of July. Tom Cruise can't walk? Well, Daniel Day Lewis can only move a single foot. Tom Cruise yells? Daniel Day-Lewis howls. And that movie came out of nowhere. Miramax was in its infancy still. Jim Sheridan was a first time director. Daniel Day Lewis was a first-time nominee that no one outside the art house theaters knew. If Tom Cruise really does care about winning an Oscar, this has to be the loss that keeps him up at night. His nomination for Jerry Maguire was a bit of a surprise to begin with, so losing to Geoffrey Rush that year wasn't a huge blow. The field was wide open when he lost for Magnolia in 2000. At the time, he undoubtedly figured there would be more nominations in the future. Instead, he's on a 20 year cold streak, despite seeing several costars getting nominated.

So, to answer my own rhetorical question: Yes, Tom Cruise should have an Oscar by now. The fact that he lost for Born on the Fourth of July should've necessitated a win later, as a "make-up call" at the very least. Personally, I found this movie about as subtle as a brick to the head, but it's one of Cruise's finest roles and unlike just about anything else that he's done.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend