The Nominees Are Showing Up

The award nominees from the beginning of this year are starting to come through from the library. I have started to use a couple streaming services also through the library. Comcast had a Watchathon week. But the top one on this list is a series from network TV.

This Is Us (Season Three) – 2018 (3.2). The series maintains its high standards as it both advances the story lines and also gives us further filling on the back stories. Relationships remain the focus with plenty to explore between the various central characters as their lives continue to play out. These are all people viewers have come to know and care about enough to want to stay up to date for what happens next season.

Green Book -2018 (3.1). Based on a true story and with an Oscar winning script for original screenplay, this drama tells of a nightclub bouncer in NYC in 1962 who was hired to be the driver and body man for a black pianist making a musical performing tour of the South. The bouncer takes the job because he is out of work for two months while the club where he works is closed for renovation. The men are an odd couple, but they find though they have very few things in common, they can and do learn to understand and appreciate each other. Mahershala Ali won his second supporting actor Oscar for this role and had goos chemistry with Viggo Mortensen.

My Brilliant Friend (Season One) – 2018 (3.1). Four novels about two women growing up in a poor neighborhood in Naples are the basis for this Italian series. Boasting great production values and good acting, the first season captures the feel of the place and time where two elementary school girls grow up to young womanhood midst the tension and turmoil of their families, schools and neighborhood. Told as the memory of one of the girls in her old age, the series beckons for three more seasons to finish the full story of the four books.

Free Solo – 2018 (2.9). This documentary is riveting in following a young climber as he becomes the first to successfully climb El Capitan solo. The feat itself is amazing and the cinematography is equally dazzling.

Bright Lights: Starring CarrieFisher and Debbie Reynolds – 2016 (2.8). Celebrity mother and daughter both died shortly after this documentary movie was made. We get to follow them in their adjoining homes and on the road doing shows and we contrast what we see with footage from old home movies and past performances on the stage and screen. There is no denying the bright appeal of Debbie even in her final months of deterioration, and the wit and humor of Carrie persists even as her personal failings are also on display. The exhilaration of stardom definitely takes its toll.

Mavis! - 2015 (2.8). This upbeat documentary charts the Staples Singers and lead singer Mavis through the decades, using archival footage, interviews and lots of face time with Mavis, her sister Yvonne, backup singers, band members and other artists. Her robust voice and buoyant love of music, family, life and people is uplifting.

The Providers– 2018 (2.8). A medical doctor, physician's assistant and nurse practitioner are each followed in this documentary as they serve their low income patients in rural northern New Mexico. The three people are inspiring in their dedication to their work. The patients are a mixed bag of older people who have paid their duew to society and younger ones who are struggling with addiction issues. The movie largely follows the practitioners interfacing with their patients but also covers some of their personal lives. There is no injection of expert opinion or political argumentation, just the work the people do so faithfully and with such caring.

The Bookshop -2017 (2.7). Adapted from a novel, the Northern Irish village setting of this drama seems to have tried to cram all the characters and plot lines of the novel into a two hour movie, but leaves the viewer wishing for more time spent getting to know the characters and their back stories better and not being in any hurry to have a plot devolve. Though not a particularly good movie, this could have hope if made into a TV series.

Puzzle -2018 (2.7). Apparently a remake of an Argentine movie, this drama starts slow and never effectively catches on, mostly because of a poor script. A dull housewife with two grown sons living at home is given a jigsaw puzzle and discovers she has a knack for quick assembly. This prompts her to visit a puzzle store and answer an ad for a partner for a puzzle contest. She meets the partner seeker, an exotic Asian immigrant who is a successful inventor, and they hit it off beyond just puzzles. But she ends the fling and returns to her family a changed woman. However, we never form an attachment to any of the characters.

BlackkKlansman-2018 (2.6). The first black police detective in Colorado Springs in the 1970s posed by phone as a white KKK recruit and partnered with a Jewish colleague who joined the local KKK branch pretending to be the man on the phone. The black detective wrote a book about the experience and pitched a movie to Spike Lee who was receptive, especially in the context of Trump post Charlottesville. The resulting movie takes too long to tell an uneven and ultimately not overly deep story about a fluke short term undercover operation. There must be a better way to make a movie about the KKK in the 1970s.

Bohemian Rhapsody – 2018 (2.6). This biopic took too long to tell quite little in a shallow way about Freddie Mercury, the lead singer of Queen. We barely meet his family and his end of years lover. His lady friend is around throughout the movie but we never really get to know anything about her, just as we learn very little about the band members. The movie is all about Freddie the performer and the music. And once again the best actor Oscar went to a portrayal of an actual person.

The Favourite – 2018 (2.6). The premise fpr this costume drama was to take the real Queen Anne of the early 1700s and change her story to make it more interesting and modern, with powerful women and ineffective men in makeup and wigs, and film it with unusual lighting, lenses and camera movements. The tale of competition to be the favorite of the feeble queen casts three good actresses and once again the Oscar for best acting went to someone playing a person with mental problems. Bottom line; watchable but not meaningful.

Listen to Me Marlon- 2015 (2.6). Using old introspective audio tapes Marlon Brando had recorded and matching them to footage from his movies, interviews and other film, this documentary comes across as pretentious, which is actually the way Brando was. The result is only as good as your opinion of Brando himself.

Mrs. Wilson – 2018 (2.6). Inspired by a true story and starring an actress playing her real life grandmother, this under three hour drama tells the tale of a man who worked for Brit MI-5 in intelligence during WWII and married a much younger clerical co-worker, with who he had two sons before he died about 20 years later. After his death, the widow began to discover that the man led a double life or maybe even more. He obviously was a philanderer and liar, but how much of it was because of his work as a spy and how much was just him is the question. The script has big holes involving the man being a published fiction writer and it never actually answers the basic questions.

Camilla Dickinson – 2012 (2.5). An Australian 21 year old plays a 15 year old New Yorker and Spokane stands in for Manhattan in 1948, but those are not the main reasons why this adaptation, of the Madeleine L”Engle coming of age novel is not very good. The whole thing is slow moving and just awkward feeling. Maybe that is the way the novel was also, so this screenplay by her Goddaughter may have captured the tale accurately.

I Am Not a Witch – 2017 (2.4). It is not clear what the intention is behind the story told in this movie. Satirizing the belief in witchcraft in a small African country and the exploitation of that belief by an inept government bureaucrat who uses a young girl supposed witch are part of it. In fact that might be all of it.