An unpredictable Oscars season is nearly over, plus the week’s best films in L.A.
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Hello! I’m Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.
The Oscars are this weekend, bringing to a close one of the most unpredictable awards seasons in recent memory. First of all, the movies under consideration have been extraordinarily good, with many of them surprisingly un-Oscar-ish. Titles like “Anora,” “The Substance,” “The Brutalist,” “Emilia Pérez,” “I’m Still Here” and “Nickel Boys” would have been seen as too oddball for the academy even just a few years ago. Even films like “A Complete Unknown,” “Dune: Part Two” and “Conclave,” which seem traditional from the outside, reveal themselves to be playful, self-aware and also kind of weird.
Setting aside the controversies that have engulfed “Emilia Pérez,” I can’t remember the last time I didn’t end up hating on movies I started out liking just due to the grinding overfamiliarity of the season. Honestly, I would watch pretty much any of these again right now.
Times critic Amy Nicholson gave her own rundown on what should win from the nominees, as well as those that should have been in contention. In picking the film she would like to see win best picture, she wrote, “I like most of this year’s nominees just fine — I even love a few — but I’m convinced that decades from now, we’ll consider ‘Dune: Part Two’ the movie of the year.”
I may actually have cheered when I read her support for Aubrey Plaza’s performance in “Megalopolis.” Amy writes, “She often seemed like the only actor onscreen who knew exactly what movie she was in. … Still having a hard time trying to pin down the film’s tone? Just look at her.”
I was also very excited by her support for Annie Baker’s screenplay for “Janet Planet,” noting how the film, “feels so organic you might think it scarcely has a script at all. Baker knows just how long to pause so that the audience will fill in her gaps with their own answers. As [Julianne] Nicholson’s lovelorn codependent shifts personalities as she changes from partner to partner, Baker asks how headstrong girls grow up to become malleable women. It’s a great question, even if her screenplay never says it out loud.”
I was at the Spirit Awards last weekend, where “Anora” won best feature, as well as prizes for director Sean Baker and lead performer Mikey Madison. Baker’s speech accepting his directing prize was easily one of the best of the season and brought the crowd to its feet.
“I’m an indie-film lifer,” Baker said, adding, “Some of us want to make personal films that are intended for theatrical release with subject matter that would never be green-lit by the big studios.”
He spoke about the precarious state of independent cinema and how difficult it is for filmmakers to sustain themselves.
“The system has to change because this is simply unsustainable,” Baker continued. “We are creating product that creates jobs and revenue for the entire industry. We shouldn’t be barely getting by.”
Godard’s ‘A Woman Is a Woman’ in 4K
On Thursday, the Academy Museum will host the West Coast premiere of the new 4K restoration of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1961 “A Woman Is a Woman.” The film is among Godard’s most accessible and makes for a fine place to start for anyone looking for a point of entry to his formidable body of work.
In the film, Anna Karina plays Angela, a dancer in a cabaret, who desperately wants to have a child with Emile (Jean-Claude Brialy), who isn’t ready. Emile’s best friend Alfred (Jean-Paul Belmondo) also has feelings for Angela and maneuvers himself into sleeping with her. All at once a musical, a romance, a comedy and a drama, the film has an exuberant energy, due in no small part to its three wildly engaging stars. Godard and Karina would marry soon after the shoot concluded and the film captures the feeling of their falling in love, immersing the spectator in flirtatious energy. The film will also begin runs next month at the Laemmle Royal on March 21 and Laemmle Glendale on March 28.
For anyone who likes to complain about needing to wait a few extra weeks for a movie to make it to streaming, know that “A Woman Is a Woman” didn’t open in Los Angeles until 1965, a full 4 years after it premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, where Karina won the actress prize and the film received a special jury prize for its “originality, youth, audacity and impertinence.” Our faithful Kevin Thomas reviewed it in 1965 and again for a re-release in 2003.
In his original review, Thomas wrote, “Godard has taken this rather amoral little tale and turned it into both a touching tribute to the beauty of his wife and a witty, affectionate comment on woman’s capacity for romanticizing. … It is Miss Karina’s sense of beauty that gives her the strength to survive. Having created this paradox, Godard sends off his heroine to a happy ending — a movie, after all, is a movie.”
In a 2003 interview with Sorina Diaconescu, Karina described the making of the film, saying, “I was very happy, because it was a comedy… in color! At that time, only the big American films were in color. … There was only joy, you know? At the time we were all just very young people who wanted to have fun and do pictures in a different way than the old folks did it — make it all more spontaneous and more alive and more natural. We had little money, so we made the best of the little we had.”
A Goldie Hawn and Chevy Chase double bill
On Tuesday and Wednesday, the New Beverly will host a double feature of movies starring Goldie Hawn and Chevy Chase: 1980’s “Seems Like Old Times” and 1978’s “Foul Play.”
Directed by Jay Sandrich (son of “Top Hat” director Mark Sandrich) from a screenplay by Neil Simon, “Seems Like Old Times” finds Chase as a man innocently implicated in a bank robbery who goes to his ex-wife (Hawn) for help, but her new husband (Charles Grodin) is the Los Angeles district attorney who has it in for him. He also has larger political aspirations. A lot of complications ensue.
In his original review, Charles Champlin wrote that the movie belongs to Hawn, “revealed once again to be a light comedienne, with skills to match any of the glorious ladies of the film past. No one handles tumult, chaos and civil disorder any better, with an ear-wide ingenuous smile that suggest the difficulties are all in our imagination and that what we heard in the kitchen was mice and not the collapse of society as we know it.. … She has come a remarkable way from ‘Laugh-In,’ and one watches now with a double-pleasure, at witnessing a true professional working and at the product of that work, which is a beguiling portrait of a kook.”
“Foul Play” was the feature debut as writer and director for Colin Higgins, who wrote “Harold and Maude” and would go on to make “9 to 5.” Hawn plays a San Francisco woman unwittingly wrapped up in an espionage plot while Chase is a police officer attempting to protect. Dudley Moore has an outrageous cameo as a lonely wannabe ladies’ man.
In his review of the film, Charles Champlin wrote, “‘Foul Play’ does offer a kind of duplex pleasure — as a celebration of the movies the way they used to make them, sleek, funny, exciting but unworrying, and in its own terms as a vividly adventurous romantic comedy.”
Points of interest
Two by Elaine May
This week there will be opportunities to see two movies directed by Elaine May. Tonight, 1987’s “Ishtar” will play at the Aero and on Monday, 1972’s “The Heartbreak Kid” will play at Vidiots.
Now rightly seen as the bold, daring comedy it is, “Ishtar” is a playful satire of both show business and interventionist American foreign policy, perhaps even drawing a line connecting the two. Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman are an aspiring pair of singer-songwriters who find themselves stuck in the fictional Middle East country of Ishtar, caught between local rebels and the CIA who wants to maintain the current regime.
In her review at the time, Sheila Benson wrote, “In the guise of a sort of liberal’s rethinking of the Hope-Crosby ‘Road’ movies, Elaine May has created a love letter to show-biz dreamers and called it ‘Ishtar.’ It is a smart, generous, genuinely funny affair. Sometimes, like the camel who almost ambles away with the picture, it’s longish in the tooth, but it is based on an extremely astute vision of life. … It’s merely an entirely intelligent, drolly funny comedy with something on its mind.”
Notoriously left in an unusual rights limbo that makes it rarely shown, “The Heartbreak Kid” was directed by May from a screenplay by Neil Simon. Any chance to see it with an audience is not to be missed. Charles Grodin plays a man who ditches his wife (Jeannie Berlin, May’s daughter) while on their honeymoon in Florida to pursue another woman (Cybill Shepherd).
In his review of “The Heartbreak Kid,” Charles Champlin wrote, “We are in the presence of a harsh social commentary, revealing again the dark side of Simon’s humor as well as some of Miss May’s own angers (reflected in her first feature, ‘A New Leaf’) about the having it their own way, to everyone’s discomfort. … The performances which Miss May got from her principals and all the players are very good indeed, and the more impressive because they arise in a kind of limbo between farce and black humor.”
‘Female Perversions’ in 4K
A new 4K restoration of Susan Streitfeld’s 1986 “Female Perversions” will play at the Los Feliz 3 on Saturday, with Streitfeld in person for a Q&A. Tilda Swinton made her U.S. debut with the film, playing a Los Angeles attorney whose increasingly risky sexual behavior jeopardizes her aspirations of being appointed a judge. The cast also includes Amy Madigan, Karen Silas, Marcia Cross, Frances Fisher, Paulina Porizkova and Clancy Brown.
In his review from the film’s release, Kevin Thomas wrote, “‘Female Perversions’ sounds like a porno title, but it is in fact a deadly serious exploration of how society — indeed, the entire weight of culture and history — shapes and can distort a woman’s sense of her own sexuality, consciously and unconsciously, and therefore her identity as well. It suggests how this in turn affects her whole life — her self-esteem, how she sees herself and how she conducts herself at every turn of her existence. … Even if it works better as a provocative psychological treatise than as art, it does come alive and does provide major roles for Tilda Swinton and Amy Madigan, formidable actresses who are more than up to the challenge.”
In other news
‘Fish’ swims on
Last week I spoke to Charles Burnett about “The Annihilation of Fish,” his 1999 film only now getting a proper release. The film will begin a run this week at the Lumiere Music Hall in Beverly Hills for anyone who didn’t get a chance to see it. The film will also play at Vidiots on March 11 with Burnett in conversation with Maya S. Cade, creator and curator of the Black Film Archive.
Gene Hackman, dead at 95
I can only imagine there will be many tribute screenings in the coming weeks for Gene Hackman, the two-time Oscar winner who died this week at age 95. Hackman, who retired from acting in 2004, was discovered dead along with his wife, Betsy Arakawa, and their dog in their home in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Roles in films such as “The French Connection,” “Scarecrow,” “The Conversation,” “Night Moves,” “Superman,” “Hoosiers,” “Unforgiven,” “The Quick and the Dead,” “The Birdcage” and “The Royal Tenenbaums” proved Hackman to be a versatile performer.
Sydney Pollack, who directed Hackman in “The Firm,” said that the actor, “always had an element of danger about him. You’re never completely sure of what he’s going to do.”
Hackman himself largely avoided giving interviews. In 1994, he explained to The Times, “Well, only because I don’t like talking about myself. I guess I’m a private person. For me, acting is a kind of private thing and I just don’t like sharing it.”
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