Last-minute Oscar movies
Happy Friday. Welcome back to Jacob’s Letter, a free pop culture newsletter full of puns and occasional badly-PhotoShopped dog photos.
This week’s newsletter is full of smaller news tidbits from the week plus some smaller capsule reviews of Oscar-nominated films that I’m still catching up on. I’ll post another newsletter Monday morning with some Oscars armchair quarterbacking and then things should go back to normal. With that, let’s get to it.
Oscar the Grouch
This week, I watched four Oscar-nominated films, and I think these are the last ones I’ll get to see before the ceremony on Sunday. I saw “Little Women,” “Joker,” “Harriet” and “Judy” this week.
“Little Women” was the strongest of the four. I was not expecting to straight-up weep during a matinee screening when I bought this ticket (although I did that a lot attending movies in 2019, so I should’ve been prepared). I love hangout-type movies anyway, and this film is like the ultimate hangout movie. The only conflict in this film is the interpersonal relationships between these four sisters and how they grow up into the world, and that’s enough. This is a film made up of little vignettes and throwaway moments that lodge themselves in your mind, like most memories of that sort do. “Little Women” is the perfect cloudy-day, stay-at-home-with-a-blanket-and-some-coffee movie. Greta Gerwig was robbed of a Best Director nod and Laura Dern should have been nominated here for her “I’m angry every day” monologue alone.
I liked “Harriet” better than I liked “Judy,” but both feature stellar performances in sub-standard films. Cynthia Erivo takes on the persona of Harriet Tubman and both mythologizes her and makes her more human. The film treats her as a biblical myth of tall tale proportions and simultaneously presents her as a new Moses and a new Joseph and a new Jeremiah. She delivers and leads her people to freedom while condemning the society that forced them to flee in the first place. Despite that incredible performance, “Harriet” still seems content to follow a typical biopic structure.
“Judy,” on the other hand, only focuses on the last months of Judy Garland’s life, penniless and begging for gigs to put food on the table for her kids. Her life is told in flashback, in a kind of “Judy has to think of her whole life before she sings ‘Come Rain or Come Shine’” kind of way. Despite that, I truly think Renée Zellweger is a lock for Best Actress for this movie, with the way she sings and embodies the late Garland. This review from my former colleague Eric Webb says it better than I can.
Meanwhile, I had hoped to get out of this awards season without seeing “Joker,” but when it’s nominated for 11 Oscars, including Best Picture, I felt like I needed to see it. (I know I said I’d never see it, but as luck would have it, I found a discarded digital copy code laying around at the library, so I still managed to never give money to this thing).
I have a much longer review on Letterboxd, but the bottom line is this: Joaquin Phoenix is good in this movie, but it’s a misanthropic, nihilistic movie that doesn’t care about anything and wants to trick you into thinking that’s a worthy stance to have in 2019. I did love the score, but how it got nominations for editing and adapted screenplay is beyond me.
I still need to see “Jojo Rabbit,” “1917” and “Ford v Ferrari,” but right now my Best Picture ranking is as follows:
“Parasite”
“Little Women”
“The Irishman”
“Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”
“Marriage Story”
“Joker”
Doctor Sam Strange Raimi
Last month, director Scott Derrickson walked away from helming “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” Disney/Marvel’s 2021 follow-up to 2016’s “Doctor Strange.” He cited creative differences as the reason for the mutual split, which might imply his vision for the film was a little too weird for Marvel’s liking.
If rumors from this week turn out to be true, they might be getting a director who’s even weirder — “Evil Dead” and “Spider-Man” director Sam Raimi is apparently in talks to take over for Derrickson. Nothing’s been confirmed yet, but it would be a trip to see Raimi return to Marvel now that the franchise has taken off.
Unlimited movies. $9.95/month. 7 chapters.
MoviePass declared Chapter 7 bankruptcy on Jan. 29, along with its parent company Helios and Matheson Analytics, driving the final nail in its coffin. Rest in Peace, you flew too close to the sun. Thanks for allowing me to see “Annihilation” for basically no money and thanks for forcing the rest of the movie theater landscape to adapt to subscription models. MoviePass was a failure, but it changed the face of moviegoing forever.
2 Knives 2 Out
Grab your detective sweaters and your donut holes, ‘cause “Knives Out” is officially getting a sequel. According to Birth.Movies.Death., Lionsgate CEO Jon Feltheimer said Thursday during the company’s third-quarter earnings call that a sequel is officially a go. Rian Johnson has yet to sign on, as has Foghorn Leghorn impersonator Daniel Craig. But both have said they would be interested in returning to this franchise with different mysteries in each movie, à la Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot.
Normally I’m not a fan of every original movie getting a sequel, but I’d watch 10 of these things if the quality was the same as the original. Bring it on.
The screening room where it happened
“Hamilton” fans, your wait is over. You can finally see a filmed version of the original Broadway play, thanks to Disney. The studio will release a film of the original cast performance of “Hamilton” on Oct. 15, 2021. Mark your calendars.
Islands in the Stream
“Islands in the Stream” is where I’ll discuss any and all happenings on the streaming front every week, since there’s so much of it now. While you’re here, read my deep dive for WFAA about how diverse the streaming landscape is becoming.
This week:
Have we moved away from binge-watching? I think so. Read why in this piece I wrote at Book & Film Globe.
Roku and FOX made a last-minute deal to allow the over-the-top service to stream the Super Bowl live after FOX initially yanked its apps from the streaming box. This is a marketing gimmick, for sure, but a cruel one, and one that will only become more prevalent as channels move from cable to streaming.
You can now pause the annoying auto-play thing Netflix does. Thank God.
Last week I talked about how Disney+ had the most initial app downloads of any company in November. Those numbers were expanded upon in a recent earnings call from Disney this week. For Q1, total revenue was up 36% annually to $20.9 billion. Disney+ had 26.5 million subscribers at the end of Q1 and 28.6 million as of Monday, with 10 million of that coming from launch day.
Those numbers also helped ESPN+ and Hulu, which were sold in a bundle with Disney’s service. ESPN+ grew to 6.6 million subscribers from 1.4 million a year ago, and the number of Hulu subscribers grew 33% annually to 30.4 million.
Trailer Park
Want more trailer news for all the movies coming out this spring? I have just the thing: Read my spring movie season preview here at jakeharrisblog.com.
“F9: The Fast Saga”
My, oh my. This franchise keeps getting bigger and dumber and I am always here to see how the Furious #Fambily grows with each new installment. This trailer is absolutely bananas, somehow more crazy than I could have imagined yet also fairly grounded in the themes the series has explored recently.
This time, John Cena shows up as Dom’s long-lost brother Jacob (I’m sure we’ll get a good backstory for why this sibling was never mentioned by Dom, Mia or Letty) and also features the return of long-thought-dead Han Seoul-Oh. This series is a soap opera now. I will watch every installment with glee.
Again, for more tailer news, check out my spring movie preview here.
Letter of Recommendation
What I’m listening to:
Pearl Jam released their first new single in two years last month (seven years if you’re only counting singles that wound up on a full-length album). “Dance of the Clairvoyants” debuted after a big social media marketing campaign and a lot of hype about how the bands switched around who played what instrument for the song. A new album, “Gigaton,” was announced and set for release for the end of March.
Most fans (including myself) were cautiously optimistic; Pearl Jam’s main draw has primarily been live shows for decades now, and while I liked their last two albums more than most, their best work so far was in the late ‘90s.
So maybe I was blessed by low expectations, but I loved the new song. “Dance of the Clairvoyants,” like its lyrics suggest, burns people’s assumptions and saves their predictions of what a Pearl Jam song is. Talking Heads-style bass lines and synths fill out the song, while Eddie Vedder growls like David Byrne and sings some of his most introspective lyrics since “No Code.” This is the most life the band has shown in a while, and I’m hoping the rest of the upcoming album takes as many chances as this song does.
Friday News Dump
A list of online writing I really liked this week:
I had a really great time seeing “Bad Boys for Life” in a theater last weekend. It was also a packed theater, and this piece in The Ringer highlights the joys of the communal experience of moviegoing. (via in The Ringer)
Speaking of “Knives Out,” I thought this piece on Medium was really smart about the way the film handles immigration, and why it’s fantastical. (via Wesley Yiin in Gen Medium)
I didn’t really like this article but I did find it funny: A right-wing radio host is threatening to sue the NFL for jeopardizing his eternal soul because the league aired Shakira and Jennifer Lopez’s halftime show. Really. (via Kyle Mantyla in Right Wing Watch)
Also in The Ringer, Shea Serrano wrote about all of the conflicting emotions he felt upon hearing about the death of Kobe Bryant last month. It’s heartbreaking, honest writing about a heartbreaking, conflicting event:
We’re all at the mercy of the universe, or God, or fate, or chance, or whatever. And there’s nothing to be done about it. That’s what has been sitting in the back of my brain since Sunday. Because if something as catastrophic as that helicopter crash can happen to somebody as immensely undeniable as Kobe Bryant, then what chance do any of the rest of us have?
(via Shea Serrano in The Ringer)
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See you next week,
Jake