If Sinners and One Battle After Another are up for movie of the year then it's no wonder no one is going. One is a fun but ultimately forgettable horror action movie. The other is a movie that just based on its major theme would attract less then half the country and even in those remaining is a very polarizing movie. It's up for best picture because to preach, not because it's actually good.
The obvious political stance of One Battle After Another notwithstanding, given how much the film succeeds as an exercise in using the language of cinema to tell a compelling story, it comes across (ironically) as idealogically motivated to say the movie isnt nominated in part for its merits with regard to craft and construction.
No doubt it appeals to people at the Academy in its persuasion, but if we were to strip it down to film technical aspects it would no doubt still be a frontrunner for film of the year.
Your first sentence is confusingly worded. Do you mean the GP is ideological for saying the movie is unpopular? Or that he's ideological for saying the movie isn't good?
I haven't seen the movie in question but it looks like it underperformed pretty badly (-$90M) at the box office.
As if box office is a proxy for quality. I seriously question whether your comment is made in good faith to begin with, are you intentionally misunderstanding me?
Their assertion that "It's up for best picture because to preach, not because it's actually good," just flat out doesn't hold under scrutiny. Why? Consider that there is a lineage of people who are essentially writing statements using a language "of the screen," people like Hitchcock, Bergman, Tarkovsky, Kubrick, Scorsese, to name a few. No matter what the film is ``about," the person crafting the film must grapple with the same things: how do I order the events? How does this work psychologically? Is this coherent? Does this say what I want it to? And such concerns scale down to very practical problem-solving on the day-to-day so that the vision may be best served.
Whether you agree with the values the film espouses or not, it succeeds as a work of cinema, full stop. That's true even if it was never shown in a theatre. People who work in the film industry know that, which is why the Oscars isn't precisely a "what is the wokest film" contest every year. Therefore if you assert it's just "preaching" correctly that is basically reducing something that has enormous value in terms of craft into just "messages;" ironically, you are doing so because you can't see past "messages."
I can’t agree with this statement because One Battle After Another is actually a movie about fatherhood and the lengths you go to to raise a child, and very explicitly makes fun of how many “fight the power” movements are often ineffective or devolve into making the problem you’re fighting against worse.
It’s a movie about family loyalties transcending and persisting through all else, which is a pretty universal message.
I agree that it paints both sides as silly, but it does so incredibly badly. This is evidenced by, eg., the comments on Letterboxd, who all seem to either think their outgroup is lampooned (yay 5 stars) or their ingroup is slighted (grr 1 star). The movie set out to combat division and failed catastrophically. At least that’s my charitable interpretation. It’s also too long, lol.
I just didn't think that either of them were very good. Sinners was okay, and One Battle After Another was just kind of silly, I think regardless of your political views.
I’m also in the camp ”I respect the authors but here am not impressed”
Regarding wider adoption ”One Battle Another” is incomprehensible mess unless you are familiar with US. I understand the white supremacist conspiracy but nothing else makes sense _at all_. I trust when people say it’s super intelligent but I just don’t have any of the context.
Sinners is a cool music video that is about 5x too long - the few dances are really nice, some of the characters have very strong presence and few dialogues really are strong but … I would not categorize it as industry leading in anything unless the industry reference points are super low
Two organizations that love money (Apple & F1) collaborating to make a ton more money.
The tech for in-cockpit capture and presentation of the races themselves was great, but the dialogue and basically everything off-track was boring or rote.
> The other is a movie that just based on its major theme would attract less then half the country and even in those remaining is a very polarizing movie. It's up for best picture because to preach, not because it's actually good.
I am not sure why you see "One Battle After Another" as preachy. It was ultimately a chase movie, perhaps you did not like the intent of the revolutionaries who kicked off the chase, but there was no lecturing as far as I could tell. All of the characters were flawed and broken. Moments where characters could do the "right thing" many ended up doing things out of self interest. The movie was deeply cynical and piercing critique on radicalism left and right.
The movie also has a metacritic score of 95, so you are objectively wrong.
