We must find a way to stop Emilia perez
Please god
Happy new year and shit it’s officially 2025!
Everything is scary and all the news I read frightens me!
Luckily I have no clue what day of the week it is and I have drank so much alcohol.
After having a very quiet couple of weeks of mostly just seeing Gabby, I had a very intense two weeks of being very social. I am a little tired and ready to return to anti-social Daniel for at least a week or two.
A Complete Unknown: The Argument for Musician Biopics
I have been seeing so many movies! I will continue to see so many movies this week! Also the Golden Globes are on Sunday and I will give my thoughts on the winners.
My first movie of the year was A Complete Unknown starring Timothee Chalamet. Quick thoughts, great musician biopic, one of the better ones for sure. Timothee makes this movie what it is, he is a star, he is our generations Brando, he is so fucking good.
Following the film’s title, the movie presents Bob Dylan as a really unknowable figure, focusing entirely on his life between 1961 and 1966, never straying into his backstory or later life. I think this really worked as throughout the movie Dylan is struggling to be himself while no one really knows who that is. There is little discussion on his influences and what inspires his songs, it leaves it up to the audience, much like the enigmatic figure does in real life. In fact, the movie does almost no hand holding. There is very little dialogue with a lot of singing and really good acting from everyone. This wasn’t your usual musician biopic with drug montages and rants about fame. It focuses almost entirely on Dylan’s strained relationships and treats him as an almost unknowable messianic figure who’s come to bring authenticity back to folk. Dylan doesn’t really change, or he does but Timothee manages to portray it in such a subtle and imperceptible way. His friends and enemies seem more to change around him and in response to his development. Overall I thought it was beautiful, well done, and unique in the genre.
However, Gabby and I both agreed that there were times that it fell into the tropes of modern musician biopics which held it back from greatness. There is a spectrum of the biopic, on one side we have arthouse films exploring someone’s life, and on the other we have the marvelization of the genre with films like Bohemian Rhapsody. I hate Bohemian Rhapsody, It’s fucking long, it’s fucking boring, and at the end of the day it is poorly made and has almost nothing to say. It is the “amusement park ride” movie that Scorsese warns us of, with Queen’s songs being reduced to marketing tools. I think it’s unfortunate that Bohemian Rhapsody can garner so much award recognition, and a god-awful Best Editing win at that, while something like A Complete Unknown that I actually liked has to scrape and crawl just to get Acting Noms (which it totally deserves). The end of the film however leans a bit too far into this messiah thing and presents Bob Dylan as he changes to electric. I am sure people were outraged and I’m sure these events happened, but they kind of overdramatize them in a funny way. These musicians don’t have to be superheroes, sometimes they’re just people, and sometimes that’s much more interesting.
My Oscar thought so far (having not seen the Brutalist at the time of writing this) is that Timmy deserves it but if he loses it will be due to a career or legacy award for Ralph or Adrien Brody.
Silver Linings Playbook
This movie was great. Just simply amazing. It fits nicely into my favorite genre of movies, drama/comedies that are simple, hilarious, and deep and awesome and shit. Others in the category include classics like Little Miss Sunshine and A Real Pain from this year. I won’t go into too much detail butI just thought it was such a good portrayal of mental health struggle and redemption. Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence are icons and they did amazing. I was almost thinking, is it fucked up how silly they are? Like often they were so blunt and strange it seemed like children and I wonder how accurate it is to bipolar disorder. BUT from what I know about mental illness, I thought it was great!
Babygirl: Tumblr-Chic
Gabby had it right when she said, “I thought this was gonna be a 365 days sex movie, but I forgot it was an A24 drama.” There really wasn’t that much sex and it was mostly about inner desires, guilts, and shame. I honestly really liked it and thought it handled what it wanted to say very well. Sexual pleasure or the lack of it, despite being arguably one of the most important human motivations, is rarely discussed in major films and is usually used as a metaphor for something else. This is probably due to it still being taboo in our culture and yadda yadda yadda. Babygirl walks the line between being a tumblr fan fic and an avant garde thinkpiece. The beginning starts out as a kind of awkward and almost unrealistic portrayal of this CEO (Nicole Kidman) getting with her intern (Harris Dickinson, who I totally thought was the guy from Queer the whole time), and they develop a kinky dominating relationship which obviously fulfills some deep desire of Nicole Kidman’s. The start is unrealistic because how could anyone talk to their boss like that? Nuh uh! But then it gets really interesting, realistic, and intimate. The characters are genuine and the emotions are as sympathetic as they are unethical. It was kind of like if Tar was directed by Emerald Fennell. It got kind of slow and left a lot to be desired plot-wise, but there were some killer sequences, like the club scene. Overall, I enjoyed it but it didn’t quite accomplish the camp 50 shades romp it was advertised as or the french new wave thing it set out to do. Worth seeing, especially in a crowded theater, but not worth seeing twice.
Nosferatu: Babygirl in Gothic Font
Okay now we’re really cooking. I absolutely love the director Robert Eggers, despite the only other film I’ve seen of his being The Lighthouse, which if you haven’t seen is fucking crazy. If you want to see Robert Pattinson have sex with a mermaid then watch. This one is equally sexual and equally historically grounded. I saw a tweet that said “most historical fictions star characters that are effectively 21st century liberals, but Eggers manages to write his characters so that they feel like products of their times.” I really couldn't agree more, especially when watching a horror movie, nothing makes you feel more unsettled than by being presented with a character who is completely cognitively different from you to the point where their actions and opinions seem unthinkable.
The acting was phenomenal mostly, Nicholas Hoult and Willem Defoe kill it and I love them. Lily Rose Depp was interesting, she was also really good but oftentimes I thought about her doing the whole “possessed face” and I just couldn’t stop laughing. The whole moaning head bobbing drooling thing is a little funny. The star of the show, however, was Bill Skarsgard, you may know him as Pennywise the clown. I have to say, it is a crime how little the Oscars and other award shows acknowledge character work! Skarsgard’s acting in conjunction with the hair and makeup team made him completely unrecognizable. His voice and look are completely crazy. Do yourself a favor and don’t look it up until you see the movie.
The real treat of the movie was the cinematography. Every shot is beautiful and the ending is terrifying. I left work after writing the first paragraph and have now lost my train of thought. It was good, so weird to me that the academy doesn’t respect horror movies.
Carry-On
Jason Bateman scary. No TSA agents have ever cared this much they would fo sho let me die. Mid to bad tier writing but exceptional action sequences. Sometimes you gotta get high and let your eyes glaze over when people punch each other.
The Brutalist: To Be or Not To Be Israel Propaganda.
The Brutalist is everything you’ve heard it is. It is a beautiful story of epic proportions. After the three and a half hour runtime I felt like I had spent a lifetime with the characters, a beautiful and scary and at timed VERY unsettling lifetime. It was completely worth it, it was a movie that I knew I’d be thinking about for the rest of my life. The acting was perfect, the cinematography was perfect, the set design and costumes and music and everything else felt perfect. I honestly am convinced it will become movie of the year at the Oscars… if it’s Emilia Perez I will kill someone. With everything being so purposeful and perfect, it’s hard to critique anything other than the themes and political messages it presents.
The Brutalist is subtle… very subtle… There is currently lots of online discourse about whether the film is zionist, not zionist enough, etc. If you know anything about me you know that I am against Zionism, so when watching this beautiful movie that I loved, I couldn’t help but give it the benefit of the doubt. All the artists involved are being quite coy about the issue but it’s important to note that Guy Pearce (who is amazing in this) is vehemently pro-Palestine and one of two actors to wear a Ceasefire pin at the Golden Globes and has consistently worn them at events over the years. I firmly believe that he is the Mario to Brad Pitts’ Wario. Meta-politics aside, the film itself revolves around the American Dream, Jewishness, trauma, and the relationship of the ruling class to the immigrant experience. In many ways it feels like an obvious metaphor, a wealthy American, Harrison, commissions a skilled jewish architect and holocaust survivor, Lazlo, to create a monument for his mother. There’s complexities too with Lazlo’s strained relationship to his wife after their forced separation, his drug addiction, their niece, Harrison’s somewhat evil son, their relationship to the nearby towns of Pennsylvania, and of course Harrison’s inner shame that gets incredibly unsettling later in the film (though I won’t say more).
My theory is that the film is subtly anti-zionist and more so about the American Dream, simultaneously a critique and a renewal. Let me explain what I mean. The central relationship of the film is between Laslo and Harrison. Although there is an obvious power dynamic with Harrison having wealth and Laslo being a broke immigrant, Harrison is in awe of Laslo’s mind and abilities, always saying “my conversations with you are so intellectually stimulating” and remaining in favor of Laslo’s ideas and goals for the monument. The monument itself is meant to be both a community center and memorial for Harrison’s late mother. A major tension in the film is the insistence from the community for the center to also be a chapel. Laslo seems to have no issue constructing a Christian place of worship but the people of the town are wary of him. The monument itself could be symbolic of many things but in the end of the movie it’s revealed that Laslo designed it so the rooms were the same measurements as his cell in the concentration camp. Despite this, the ceilings are incredibly high (a fact that is argued about at many points and Laslo has a seemingly egotistical insistence upon), and if you look up to the glass ceiling they represent a sort of freedom despite the confined space. In this way, Laslo took this location of Protestant worship and made it his own.
Israel is seldom mentioned in the very long runtime of the film but it appears important towards the end. As Laslo and his wife begin to feel like they are unwanted and despised in the US, they decide to follow their Niece to Jerusalem and at the end of the film, now in the 1980s, Laslo presents his architecture at the Israel pavilion of the Venice Biennale. One might assume the film leads us to believe that Israel is the only safe place for Jewish life and other lies of Zionism. I don’t think it’s that simple. All of the buildings he presents at the Biennale are in the United States. They are churches, community areas, synagogues, and other places of worship. A speech he gives earlier in the film sheds some light on this topic.
At one of the first dinners Laslo is invited to, he sits and speaks with Harrison who asks him, “why architecture?” Laslo responds by saying something along the lines of “the best way to define a cube is by its construction.” He then goes on to say that in his town of Budapest, as people respond to the wars and ultimately turn to reactionary violence and hatred, his buildings and the ideas they represent will survive. In a way, the best way to define a society is to define its constructions. I believe this to be a subtle jab at Israel and the reactionary violence that has ensued. I think there is a reason that very little of his buildings were in Israel. Despite what the US has done to him, despite what it is and represents, he has made these buildings his own, and their survival is the most important part.
So briefly back to the monument. Laslo is torn between serving the interests of this protestant and serving his own people in the state of Israel, perhaps a metaphor for immigrants serving the country that rejects and hates them. In the end he makes his art his own. That construction is what’s most important.
Golden Globes
Okay this will be a brief overview on my thoughts of the Globes. Ultimately, I think the Globes are far more corrupt and annoying than the Oscars but they have a significant impact on them. Nikki Glaser was amazing, she was funny and brought much needed fun back to the event after Jo Koy’s Booby joke. Here are my thoughts on the winners. (I’m gonna be honest, I’m only gonna do the movie ones because I haven’t watched much current TV):
Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in any Motion Picture
Zoe Saldaña, "Emilia Pérez" — Winner
Ariana Grande, "Wicked"
Selena Gomez, "Emilia Pérez"
Felicity Jones, "The Brutalist"
Margaret Qualley, "The Substance"
Isabella Rossellini, "Conclave"
We can all agree that Zoe Saldaña was the lead of Emilia Perez and we’re all just kidding ourselves. I think Saldaña was good and one of the better parts of the movie but like… EVERYONE ELSE OF THIS LIST WAS FAR BETTER THAN HER (other than Selena) IM SORRY. Grande killed it in Wicked, Jones was like fucking amazing in The Brutalist, Qualley did some crazy shit and deserves something, and Rossellini had a small part but killed it. Sorry! First of many Emilia Perez upsets I fear.
Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in Any Motion Picture
Kieran Culkin, "A Real Pain" — Winner
Yura Borisov, "Anora"
Edward Norton, "A Complete Unknown"
Guy Pearce, "The Brutalist"
Jeremy Strong, "The Apprentice"
Denzel Washington, "Gladiator II"
Okay I love Kieran and he deserves this. I hope he wins the Oscar too! However, look at this category! I can’t remember the last time a category was this fucking stacked. Every single one of these actors were like my favorite part of the movie they were in. They are all so good that Kieran should break the statue like in Mean Girls. Jeremy Strong you will get your Oscar one day.
Best Screenplay — Motion Picture
Peter Straughan, "Conclave" — Winner
Jacques Audiard, "Emilia Pérez"
Sean Baker, "Anora"
Brady Corbet, Mona Fastvold, "The Brutalist"
Jesse Eisenberg, "A Real Pain"
Coralie Fargeat, "The Substance"
They don’t separate adapted and original at the Globes so this makes sense but I just really want “A Real Pain” to win the original one! It seems like Conclave is a shoe in for the adapted though. It makes sense! It was a very talky movie and tense and interesting! I support.
Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture — Musical or Comedy
Demi Moore, "The Substance" — Winner
Amy Adams, "Nightbitch"
Cynthia Erivo, "Wicked"
Karla Sofía Gascón, "Emilia Pérez"
Zendaya, "Challengers"
Mikey Madison, "Anora"
Like a dark horse in the night this shit came out of nowhere, but thank god it did. Demi Moore really deserved this for her long career and honestly amazing and crazy performance in The Substance. Although I think the movie was weird and definitely had issues, she was amazing. Like she should get something more than an Oscar for the shit she had to do. I still do hope that Mikey Madison gets the Oscar because she was really good, but this is an amazing outcome as well. ANOTHER stacked category this year.
Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture — Musical or Comedy
Sebastian Stan, "A Different Man" — Winner
Jesse Eisenberg, "A Real Pain"
Hugh Grant, "Heretic"
Gabriel LaBelle, "Saturday Night"
Jesse Plemons, "Kinds of Kindness"
Glen Powell, "Hit Man"
What’s the opposite of a stacked category? Let’s just say Stan had a very easy season winning this one. I loved Eisenberg but other than that this was a clean up job. I wish I could see A Different Man, though… Please A24…
Best Motion Picture — Animated
"Flow" — Winner
"Inside Out 2"
"Memoir of a Snail"
"Moana 2"
"Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl"
"The Wild Robot"
Can I be so honest I didn’t see any of this shit. I will be watching Wallace and Gromit because that’s squad and my day 1s. No other animated movies really compelled me to watch this year, though. I heard inside out 2 was good but also… I am tired of sequels and remakes Disney! Pixar is “officially focusing on IP and stories that can relate to a general audience” or whatever because they suck! I am done with Disney right now. They used to make real things. Now they’re like one of the studios leading the charge into the abyss.
Best Director — Motion Picture
Brady Corbet, "The Brutalist" — Winner
Jacques Audiard, "Emilia Pérez"
Sean Baker, "Anora"
Edward Berger, "Conclave"
Coralie Fargeat, "The Substance"
Payal Kapadia, "All We Imagine as Light"
Yeah he fucking deserved this. Sean Baker you will win one day but not today I am sorry.
Best Original Score — Motion Picture
Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, "Challengers" — Winner
Volker Bertelmann, "Conclave"
Daniel Blumberg, "The Brutalist"
Kris Bowers, "The Wild Robot"
Clément Ducol, Camille, "Emilia Pérez"
Hans Zimmer, "Dune: Part Two"
I share in Elton Jon’s excitement when he announced this. It’s just nice to see nontraditional scores winning! It was amazing and year-defining! Also thank god Challengers won something!
Cinematic and Box Office Achievement
"Wicked" — Winner
"Alien: Romulus"
"Beetlejuice Beetlejuice"
"Deadpool & Wolverine"
"Gladiator II"
"Inside Out 2"
"Twisters"
"The Wild Robot"
This is the dumbest category on the planet bruh. Inside Out 2 got the most money and deadpool and Wolverine is the highest grossing rated r movie. I loved Wicked and it definitely deserved something, but this is a nothing award and always will be.
Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture — Drama
Fernanda Torres, "I'm Still Here" — Winner
Pamela Anderson, "The Last Showgirl"
Angelina Jolie, "Maria"
Nicole Kidman, "Babygirl"
Tilda Swinton, "The Room Next Door"
Kate Winslet, "Lee"
Literally never heard of this movie but excited for her! Glad it was a shakeup! This is the only category where I haven’t seen many of the movies. There’s always those one-off acting nom movies that I barely catch. Idk, women in comedy ruled this year I guess.
Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture — Drama
Adrien Brody, "The Brutalist" — Winner
Timothée Chalamet, "A Complete Unknown"
Daniel Craig, "Queer"
Colman Domingo, "Sing Sing"
Ralph Fiennes, "Conclave"
Sebastian Stan, "The Apprentice"
It’s very hard when you have 5 actors giving the best performances of their career. Brody deserved it as much as I hate to admit it. It was one of the best things I’ve seen Craig in, Fiennes was at his career best, Stan was unthinkably good at Trump. The outcome I dream for is Timmy winning it. He is quite possibly the best of our generation. Him as Bob Dylan is amazing and my favorite performance this year. I think Brody will win the oscar but… damn… One day. They’ll give it to him for a war movie in 2050 or something. And lastly about Colman Domingo, he always ends up being nominated in these acting nom movies that get no other press. There really hasn’t been very many talked-about films with black actors in starring roles in the last two years and that sucks! I feel like he will be nominated like a billion times before winning.
Best Motion Picture — Drama
"The Brutalist" — Winner
"A Complete Unknown"
"Conclave"
"Dune: Part Two"
"Nickel Boys"
"September 5"
Yeah, this was the only way this was gonna go. As a complete movie… it clears.
Best Motion Picture — Musical or Comedy
"Emilia Pérez" — Winner
"Anora"
"Challengers"
"A Real Pain"
"The Substance"
"Wicked"
Wow… I have to say… I feel insane. I watched this movie and do not understand what any one else sees in it. Is there something good? The music is laughably bad? The blocking and acting is awkward? I don’t even know what to say. There’s a lot of controversy about it because the director doesn’t even speak Spanish and didn’t bother to learn about Mexican culture at all. It’s an international film… from France!
Overall Thoughts
Generally this is to be expected. Every couple of years, awards voters hyper-fixate on some weird ass movie like Green Book. My only hope is that The Brutalist can continue to come out on top. Very sad for Anora it definitely deserves something. The Golden Globes left me feeling two things, frustration and excitement. I felt frustration because awards seasons continuously forget about genre films. Dune 2 and Nosferatu were some of the best films I’ve seen not just in 2024 but in a while! Dune 2 actually defined my year and my life in many ways. It is the most memorable and probably one of my favorite films in my life!! Unfortunately awards season never gives horror and sci-fi what it deserves. Hopefully when the third one comes out it gets amazing awards like the third Lord of the Rings. It is truly a defining picture of our decade imo. The excitement I feel comes from the technical awards the Oscars will have. Wicked can get some flowers on production design hopefully and the heated cinematography battle will be epic. I just hope Dune is a part of the conversation.
SAG NOMS
Okay, while I was writing this the SAG noms came out. As I’m sure you know, these are only acting awards. Everything is about what you expected with the Brody, Chalamet, Fiennes war waging its second battle. In leading women, it’s all the expected comedy and music actresses with a welcome nom for Pamela Anderson (seeing the last showgirl this weekend!). Supporting actress has three surprises, Monica Barbaro for A Complete Unknown, Jamie Lee Curtis for the last show girl and Danielle Deadwyler for the piano lesson. It is very sad that many of the great performers like Jones, Rossellini, and Qualley don’t get acknowledgement (seems like SAG kinda hated the Apprentice?). This will definitely come down to the fake supporting actress Saldaña and of course Ariana.
THE BIGGEST upset was in supporting actor category. JONATHAN BAILEY??? He was fun so I support, and then Edward Norton and Yura Borisov which is somewhat expected. My sons Kieran Culkin and Jeremy Strong are there which is important. One of them will win. THE BIGGEST UPSET is that there is no Denzel Washington or Guy Pearce. Genuinely some of the best performances I saw all year so I am very surprised. It seems like they didn’t like the brutalist or something.
The SAG nominations for the “performance by a cast” are interesting as well. A Complete Unknown, Anora, Conclave, Emilia Perezm and Wicked. I don’t think the Bob Dylan movie is getting it. People were good but Timmy really stole the show. Anora would be fun, I thought everyone was awesome and it’d be cool to let those comic actors get some love. Conclave is my safe bet on who will win. Lots of star power and strong performances there. Wicked would be surprising but fun. Please god not Emilia Perez I’m sorry.
The End
Yes, I know this one had very little to do with my life and was all about movies but I had fun writing it. I will be back with life updates next week. I started another improv class and also got a city bike subscription. IM NEVER GOING BACK. It’s like 2 degrees outside but I have been loving biking. Anyway…
BYE