2019 Best Picture Nominees: Place Your Bets

For the first time in a long time, I actually saw all nine of the Best Picture nominees this year. Here’s what I found notable about them, and a stab at prognostication

FORD V FERRARI – It’s been called a “Dad Movie” and it is: A Boomer story about the one thing Boomers really care about: cars. In this film you can see the humble origins of all the obnoxious high-performance supercars currently being driven around by midlife-crisis millionaires and decadent oil-money royal nephews: Ferrari, Shelby, McLaren, etc. Feels like a fill-in nominee, but Christian Bale has a slim chance to score a win.

THE IRISHMAN – A Netflix offering from Martin Scorsese. I’d argue that, like JOKER, it's an imitation of a Scorsese core cinematic offering, despite the fact he directed it. Really more of a Robert De Niro film: he was instrumental in packaging the deal and bugging Joe Pesci 20+ times until he came out of retirement to participate. It’s overly long, which has a lot to do with the production oversight methods of Netflix (more below) then actually having three hours of story to tell. Look at a few acting nods, but not a Best.

JOJO RABBIT – This is the one film that I consistently forget is in the running. Not that it’s forgettable: it’s such a singular, unique film that it doesn’t fit into the mental framework of Oscar movies. It’s a comedy / drama about 10-year-old Hitler Youth member during the last months of World War II. His imaginary friend is Adolph Hitler, and his core beliefs are challenged when he discovers a Jewish girl hiding in the attic of his house. So it’s a strange setting for a comedy, but a very worthy film-- one that I’m afraid will get passed over because stories like this make some people queasy.

JOKER – Perhaps the first superhero movie (or rather a supervillain movie) from either major imprint to get a Best Picture nod. It may well take the big prize: JOKER has a polished look with solid art direction. It’s also a nihilistic story that is centered on explaining away the creation of a murderer as a product of hard times. It does not quite justify him, though, which is where Joaquin Phoenix’s remarkable performance comes in, pushing against the amoral narrative. It may well take the big prize.

LITTLE WOMEN – This is a fine film, filled with great performances and meticulous art direction (it will get Best Costume because, as we all know by now, Best Costume always goes to the movie where actors wear clothes that look like costumes). The story was given the Tarantino script-blender treatment, transformed from a time-linear narrative to a flashback / flash forward style that breathes a considerable amount of surprise and energy into the familiar tale. Great Gerwig did not get a Best Director nod, which usually means it won’t take the big prize.

ONCE UPON A TIME… IN HOLLYWOOD – QT really mended some fences with me with this film, which luxuriated in the sunny universe of Hollywood in 1969. It will appeal to Academy voters ‘cos it is a very flattering look at their own industry, giving it the standard glossy take as a creative, glamorous place where dreams come true. However the gory, historically inaccurate, needless ending will sink this film.

MARRIAGE STORY – Another Netflix joint. The performances by Scarlett Johansen and Adam Driver are electric, riveting and devastating. I get the feeling one or both will be rewarded. The film itself was… fairly good? It felt like a TV movie, and it suffered from the same problem most Netflix features have: it’s sloppy, underbaked, feeling a lot more like a first edit than a final cut. This has a lot to do with how these films are financed: Netflix is not trying to sell movie tickets. These films are made to generate buzz for a streaming service, which is trying to increase subscriptions. Absent the need to compete one-on-one, Netflix does not insist on one more script polish, one more effects pass, one more edit. Look at the downstream offerings on Netflix and you can really see this oversight philosophy in action.

PARASITE – This is, hands down, the best film of 2019. Enormous creative energy in the direction, photography and design, the acting is superb, and the story is both timely and utterly unique. It tells the story of a poor family which figures out a way of gaining the employment of a rich family through deception and clever thinking. Unfortunately it a Korean film in Korean: there are a certain percentage of film viewers who simply do not like reading subtitles. I HOPE it gets best picture, so I’ll just make it my personal pick.

1917 – a visually and technically superior gimmick film that is staged as one long continuous take. It tells the story of two young soldiers on a perilous mission to deliver a message behind enemy lines. The problem with gimmick movies is the gimmick overwhelms everything else, like story or acting performances. So even though it is a visual spectacle, 1917 is an emotionally static affair. I spent most of my time looking for the parts where they hid the cuts— when a tree is in the foreground or when the scene enters darkness. This film already took some significant pre-Oscar industry awards, and Hollywood may well reward it: they do love their bright, shiny objects.

In a few weeks, we’ll see how I did!

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Here it is! Thanks to ALEXIS KILEY for the good advice.

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Concept by Alexis Kiley

Harley Motherf***ing Quinn

[Warning: adult language and situations. No spoilers, though.]

Harley Quinn, voice supplied by "The Big Bang Theory's"
Kaley Cuoco. So less of the insane Brooklynite attitude from
previous iterations, more of a scary SoCal girl.

I don’t review TV shows that often, animation almost never, and I’m not a comic book fanboy. But I chanced upon a review on io9 that was so intriguing I had to check it out— and I was not disappointed.

“Harley Quinn” is a comedic adult animated web-based show now streaming on DC Universe, behind an $8-a-month paywall. It tells the story of Harley Quinn, the Joker’s lover and sidekick, as she dumps him and tries to invent herself as an independent person and supervillain in her own right. She does this with the help of her best friend / roommate Poison Ivy (Lake Bell, a wonderfully dry voice performance), and her crew of minor villains who I would know if I actually read comic books.

Harley and Poison Ivy, roommates. These two characters
may be the most 'shipped couple on the internet. So far
they are depicted a just close friends, but the season
is not over yet.

The dynamic between Harley Quinn and Joker has been well-documented, and they’re even going to make it big deal out of it in the Margot Robbie-starring live-action film coming out next month. Her character has been described as suffering from dependent personality disorder: in her former life she became so obsessed with Joker while treating him in Arkham Asylum she abandoned everything to become his often-abused sidekick. As a super villain origin stories go it may be the most mundane one ever: Harley was a victim of abusive, manipulating partner, a trauma untold thousands of people are suffering every day in the real world. It has given her character a special resonance with fans: even though Harley is a supervillain, her personal emotional issues have a human scale and her efforts to break free of her abusive partner make her even more relatable. The show does not shy away from this unhealthy dynamic, and in fact it casts most of her personal growth as an anodyne to Joker, her romantic obsession transformed into professional competition. Harley a fun character, given considerable depth: she is "a bad guy, but not a bad person," and her story arc probably has her headed to antihero status.

The creators of “Harley Quinn” made a strange but ultimately transformative decision: As it is not a broadcast show there are no real restrictions to language and content, so they decided to make a show for adults. It's a bit of a shock. To give a feel for the dialog:


Harley (to Joker, in a subconscious confrontation): “You think you created me, but no one did. My fucked-up parents didn’t create me. Neither did Jessica Sarner when she lied to the whole fucking camp and said I lost my virginity to a horse! A HORSE!” (applies baseball bat to Joker’s crotch: he doubles over) “Neither did those cops who questioned me for hours about what happened to Jessica Sarner! And YOU sure as hell didn’t fucking create me, Puddin’!”

And the sexual innuendo is of the single-entendre variety:


Bane (to Joker on phone): “Harley is at Penguin’s nephew’s Bar Mitzvah.”
Joker: “She crashed the stupid thing?”

Bane: “Yeah. Seems like she’s doing pretty well. Brought a tiger. Pretty cool!”
Joker: “What? Anyone can buy a tiger. You know she has HPV, right?”
Bane: “Most sexually active adults do.”
Joker: “Shut up!”

Dr. Psycho, after the second time he called someone a c**t.

Yeah, the filter is off and this makes it for fairly exhilarating viewing. There are some limits: no female nudity (yet*), but lots of pixelated male crotches. The show even has a line, and one character crosses it: Dr. Psycho, one of Wonder Woman’s nemeses, is blackballed out of the Legion of Doom for calling her, in the heat of battle, a c**t. (it’s the only profane utterance bleeped on the entire show.)

I know adult-oriented animated series are not exactly a new phenomenon: “South Park” is 20+ years old, seriously raunchy, and the movie was legendary in that regard. Every episode of the immensely popular Adult Swim series “Rick and Morty” is filled end-to-end with bleeps and blurred-out genitalia.

What makes “Harley Quinn” exceedingly unusual is the fact it is camped dead center in the DC Universe. It is not a sidecar, like the way Deadpool— the foul-mouthed, violent antihero from Marvel— is a sidecar, peripheral to the X-Men universe (several X-Men make an appearance in the sequel) and completely walled off from the big-money Avengers universe. Deadpool will never crack dick jokes with Captain America. (Professor X, maybe.)

In her show Harley regularly interacts with the big hitters, Batman and Superman and the like. The iconic superheroes they spend hundreds of millions of dollars to make movies about. And by “interact,” I mean when Harley meets The Batman in the first episode, she adamantly insists he is called that because he fucks bats.

Wonder Woman, eating her own brand of breakfast cereal,
realizing all the ground rules have changed.

This juxtaposition turns an amusing series into a surreal one. What we have is a series which has IP-critical superhero guest cameos— and they basically stand in inhibited silence while a collection of supervillains dance around them, calling them out with ripe curses and sexual innuendo. The decision by DC and Warner Bros. to execute this vision is mystifying.

The other exhilaration that comes from ”Harley Quinn” is how this adult theme remakes every character anew. All the profanity and frank sex talk draws attention to the eroticism that rushes like a deep undercurrent under all superhero stories.The supervillans and superheroes depicted in the blockbuster movies are (mostly) extensions of their juvenile, sexless origins as juvenile, sexless comic-book characters, still hewing to a long-gone 70-year-old Comics Code. Not on “Harley Quinn:” on that show, everyone depicted are People Who Fuck.

People Who Fuck are all around us: it is the normal state of the human race. The great majority of DC and Marvel movies and TV shows still depict their intellectual property as non-existent from the waist down, like Muppets. This is my biggest peeve with the MCU: missing the normalizing dimension as People Who Fuck, for all the significant kisses and long, lingering gazes they’re all just cardboard simulations of real people.

This is the liberating synthesis of “Harley Quinn,” the result of the thesis of comic book characters mixed with the antithesis of real-world People who Fuck. Even though they are set in an unbelievable, unrealistic universe of magic and superpowers, the characters depicted within seem more real than any version of them that came before.

*One of the most confounding things about Adult or R-rated entertainment of late: no problem with profanity and verbally describing sexual situations-- but nudity is increasingly rare. I think, in the case of this show, the influence of the internet is the major deciding factor. If the showrunners ever decided to show Harley Quinn running around with her tits out, every fanboy image server on earth would promptly explode. So that will never happen.

Weekend Box Office

I got laryngitis, so this week just read it yourself.

Box Office Report

Weekend box office

what am I, a leprechaun?