the Oscars are over, and another strange new movie year begins
everything that happened at Flick Filosopher between Monday, April 19th, and Sunday, April 25th, 2021
I did not watch the Oscars last night. I can’t say that I’m terribly upset about missing it this year. I’ve been feeling very blah about movies, finding it very difficult to manage the headspace watching a new film and pondering it for review — and then writing the review — requires.
I’ve been languishing, as The New York Times finally put a word to what many of us have been feeling. The Movies, the industry, has been languishing, too: last week Washington Post film critic Ann Hornaday asked “What do movies mean?” She meant, what have they become in this past year, when film ceased to be a communal experience. I know part of why I’ve not always been able to rouse myself to think about film in the way I did in the Before Times is because I lost the framework of “here are this week’s big new theatrical releases”… even if sometimes those releases were relatively small, perhaps opening only in New York or London.
There was a structure to the film milieu, not just in the ritual of going to cinema but in the sense that a theatrical release was an announcement: Here is one of the important movies of the year. Of course, not all movies that opened theatrically would be truly significant, and many movies that do not open theatrically are. But it was a start, at least in my head. And that’s been gone for more than a year now.
So I’m having to rethink my entire approach to film criticism. It’s a work in progress. In the meantime, I’ll continue languishing my way around all the movies getting released all over the place, and trying to figure out what they mean and which ones matter.
Stay tuned…
—MaryAnn
new at flick filosopher, Apr 19–25
my picks for tonight’s 93rd Academy Awards (the Oscars for 2020’s films) (winners indicated)
I correctly guessed 11 out of the 24 categories, which is slightly better than last year. [read more]
new and ongoing dvd/blu/vod releases, US/Can, Apr 20–23
Based-on-a-videogame action flick Mortal Kombat; more… [get the full rundown]
new and ongoing dvd/blu/vod releases, UK/Ire, Apr 19–23
Brutal — and brutally funny — Hollywood sendup I Blame Society; more… [get the full rundown]
Oscar Nominated Live Action Shorts 2021 (93rd Academy Awards) review [pictured]
The brilliantly unsettling “Two Distant Strangers” is not only the most important of the nominees but one of the movies of the year, of any length. Its surprises are more brutal than mere plot twists. [read the review | streaming globally, see review for links]
Oscar Nominated Documentary Shorts 2021 (93rd Academy Awards) review
“Hunger Ward,” an unvarnished vérité look at starving Yemeni children and the medics trying to save them, best encapsulates the human experience of pain and resilience that all the nominees embody. [read the review | streaming globally, see review for links]
One Night in Miami… movie review: the past, still prologue (#AmazonPrime)
An electrifying philosophical fantasia that imagines four towering figures of 1960s America arguing over how to navigate racism as Black men. Enraging, but also thrilling, bursting with cinematic joy. [read the review | streaming globally on Amazon Prime, see review for links]
Tweet of the week…
coming up at Flick Filosopher…
Oscar Best Picture Nomadland, Best Animated Feature Soul, Best International Feature Another Round, and Best Documentary Feature My Octopus Teacher
Mortal Kombat, even though I don’t know much about the game
maybe some of the others I’ve been trying to get to for the past few weeks…
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