The Award season is upon us again. With the Academy Award nominations announced this week, I realized how behind I am this year at seeing most of the Best Picture nominees. I have quite a few left to see, but here is a quick summary of what I have seen so far this month!
La La Land
With Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling singing and dancing, La La Land is a beautiful and whimsical original musical, that also acts as an ode to Los Angeles. In the current political climate, La La Land also serves as a nice escape.. The story is simple enough, even amongst the flashy dance numbers throughout the Los Angeles freeways and hilly streets. It also shows the realistic struggles and disappointments young people face in their career choices. While the film ends a bit bittersweet, the visuals and songs are bright. Gosling and Stone maybe aren’t the best dancers or singers, but that adds to the charm of the film. Something I couldn’t quite shake was a tinge of disappointment as the film ended though. While everything seemed so great on the outside, I still left feeling a bit conflicted. This was similar to my reaction to 2011’s The Artist (which one Best Picture at the 2012 Academy Awards). Maybe because both were hyped so heavily and displayed a callback to older Hollywood films that I had my hopes set a bit too high.
Manchester By The Sea
Manchester By The Sea has been big on my “must-see” list ever since I started to read about it at different film festivals. I expected it to be a touching story of a man who is appointed his nephew’s guardian after his brother’s death, but I did not expect the emotional punch the film delivers. I’ve never been overly fond of Casey Affleck’s performances, but here, he really does a great job dealing with the difficult emotions the story presents. His performance as Lee Chandler is subdued, but has layers of complexity as his past is revealed slowly through flashbacks. The other cast members provide strong performances, with Michelle Williams playing Lee’s ex wife, Kyle Chandler as his deceased brother, and Lucas Hedges as the teenage nephew he now is in charge of. The downside of this film is that it is just so sad and bleak at times, the small moments of humor don’t really make you feel much better. The Massachusetts scenery is a key element to the film, and adds to the beauty and darkness of the story. The film is surprisingly long at 137 minutes, and when I left the theater I felt like I had to slowly come out of the bubble the story trapped me in, but I also felt slightly hopeful.
Patriot’s Day
Although I was mixed on certain things about the previous two films, this one I am the most mixed about primarily because I’m not really sure this should have been made at all. The Boston Marathon bombing was an incredibly intense few days for the country to follow, as well as a strong display of Bostonians coming together after the hateful attack. My feeling is that if you are going to make a straight forward story on this tragedy, the film did a solid job relaying what happened in all aspects and departments. While most of the characters are the real life people who were involved that day, the lead character is a fictional person, with Mark Wahlberg taking on the role. He acts as the guy to bring together all the parts and locations of the film together, but it does take away from the true-story aspect of the film as his character unrealistically ends up in every possible place where important moments happened. I still remember the day, and the events that followed, quite clearly, so seeing it all reenacted didn’t do much for me. The film interestingly used the real footage of the bombers that was taken from cameras, which almost gave the film a documentary feel at times. The film even ended with a short documentary featuring the real people the movie highlighted. If the story was more focused on one person though, it may have felt like a more important tale to tell (there is a film coming soon focusing on Jeff Bauman, who was seen in one of the most unforgettable images from that day), but instead the movie left me indifferent. The film was a great way to show off the city of Boston and celebrate how they handled the spotlight on their city, but the real event seems like it happened too recently for a film to be desired at all.
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