This week on the InSession Film Podcast, JD and Brendan are joined by Ben Miller of the Target Audience Podcast to discuss Billy Wilder’s 1945 Oscar-winner The Lost Weekend! We also discuss Pixar’s new direction and a controversy surrounding JD’s latest hockey adventure.
Check out this week’s show and let us know what you think in the comment section. Thanks for listening and for supporting the InSession Film Podcast!
– Controversy! (5:05) We open the show this week with injustice! A travesty! A robbery! JD talks about how he scored the goal of his life in beer league hockey, but it was taken away by the refs in what can simply be labeled as a dubious call. This time we have video to prove it.
– Pixar / Scott Wampler (12:55) Recently, Pixar executives made headlines for comments about a new direction they are taking after films such as Luca and Turning Red apparently not satisfying them. Evidence suggests that they were well liked and gave propulsion to the Disney+ app, so pointing out those films leaves some very murky questions. On a different note, we end the segment by discussing the heartbreaking passing of film critic Scott Wampler and the unity shown by everyone on social media.
– Best Picture Movie Series: The Lost Weekend (53:03) We continue our Best Picture Movie Series in the 1940s with Billy Wilder’s 1945 Oscar-winning film The Lost Weekend! The film, in many ways, is a first of its kind and might have hit certain pockets of America in a big way as the War was coming to an end. Ray Milland gives one of the best actor wins of the era with a striking performance that enhances the films visceral quality. It might not be Wilder’s best film, but so many movies (especially about addiction) are influenced by The Lost Weekend in some way.
Best Picture Movie Series: The Best Years of our Lives
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Josh O’Connor is one of those actors whose performances feel like a mountain climb. The higher he gets, the more guttural his portrayals become. He conveys a whole range of emotions, from tenderness to sensuality and disgust.
It started with his career-turning performance in The Crown where Emma Corrin’s haunting and en pointe interpretation of Princess Diana didn’t eclipse his subtle and toned-down take on Prince Charles. O’Connor’s performance garnered him deserved accolades and increased respect within critical circuits.
O’Connor has spread his wings even further with two powerful performances electrifying this year’s slightly boring, slightly calm movie scene: Arthur in La Chimera and Patrick Zweig in Challengers.
Technically, La Chimera was released last year, so it won’t be eligible for this year’s Best Actor race at the Academy Awards. But it’s a great predisposition for his award potential for multiple reasons. Through the lens of La Chimera’s female director Alice Rohrwacher, O’Connor appears on the verge of a seance, a man feverish with memories and despair, harboring a sensitivity for hidden artifacts more than he understands how to communicate with people. Rohrwacher has seen the tormented, shy introvert inside O’Connor and exploited him, bringing him full circle in front of our mesmerized eyes. As he rests his head on stone, cowers in tight spaces, and caresses the stolen heads of statues, O’Connor’s Arthur is a madman torn with fragile masculinity, a visible lightness both difficult and enjoyable to watch. Like the fragile artifacts he holds between his palms, Arthur is a ceramic piece on the verge of cracking.
In Challengers, Luca Guadagnino, one of modern cinema’s most baroque masters of sexual subtext, pushes the docile man further down the drain of O’Connor’s psyche, bringing out the coy, seductive, bitter monster in him. Patrick is a seductive pansexual beauty. Unlike Art, the poetic lover, always needing a dominant woman or a passionate man to coax his internalized emotions, Patrick is a stallion, too wild to tame but too bored to care about being tamed.
O’Connor has impressive post-production and pre-production projects ahead. He has recently worked with diverse and international directors with different visions and artistic perspectives. He also has a supporting role in the drama Lee, co-starring Kate Winslet, due in September 2024.
He has another Luca Guadagnino project, Camere separate, in development. Brazilian-Algerian director Karim Aïnouz is directing him alongside festival darling Kristen Stewart in Rosebushpruning. He is also starring in South African director Oliver Hermanus’s latest creation, The History of Sound. The news of O’Connor’s casting in the third Knives Out installment with Daniel Craig, Cailee Spaeny, Kerry Washington, and Glenn Close has rocked the internet and trended on Twitter. That’s a lucrative career like no other and in a very short time. The tricky question in this case would be: Could O’Connor’s impressive performance in Challengers garner him a Best Actor nod this year? Does his Patrick Zweig deserve award recognition? After Cannes premieres like The Apprentice and Bird, and big players like Gladiator II in the second half of the year, the Best Lead Actor race is yet to be defined. So far, most male performances seem to be on a subdued, lukewarm level of ‘okay’ acting. The actors have yet to shine and cast shadows on each other in this so-far dull season.
Unlike female performances—notably Zendaya’s stunning, broken (but outwardly all-collected) mess as Tashi in Challengers—that predict a tough, competitive season, male performers are more laid-back as we near mid-2024. Their competition is unlike the thrilling past seasons, when it has been nearly impossible to pinpoint a deserving one over the other.To answer the big question, I would like to know if his performance in Challengers will give him an award nod. But do I feel he deserves it? Absolutely. I prefer his turn in La Chimera, but that doesn’t detract from his wild, subtly seductive turn as Patrick Zweig. We may see O’Connor for award consideration sooner than we think if voters, critics, and Academy boards recognize the Challengers cast as young Hollywood shakers.
Historically, the Best Director category has been primarily filled by directors with films that come out late in the year, the classic awards season that starts in late November. This isn’t necessarily the rule anymore, with the past two Best Director awards going to Christopher Nolan for Oppenheimer and Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert for Everything Everywhere, All at Once, released in July and March of their respective years. It’s possible to be nominated for the Oscar award with any release date and win the top prize. For all we know, this year’s winner has already been released.
Thus far, we have seen one clear frontrunner in Denis Villeneuve for Dune: Part Two. Frankly, this film is the current frontrunner for many awards, both above and below the line. This would make Villeneuve’s second nomination for Best Director, his first coming for the science fiction film Arrival. Many thought he could squeeze in for Dune: Part One at the 94th Academy Awards, but was ultimately edged out from the already stacked list by Kenneth Branagh for Belfast and Ryusuke Hamaguchi for Drive My Car, the latter of which displayed the continued growing success of international films and filmmakers garnering more attention by the Academy over the past decade.
Villeneuve’s popularity among film lovers has skyrocketed since the release of the first Dune, and he’s proven capable of several different kinds of films. Whether it’s a smaller, more intimate story like Enemy or Prisoners, a high-stress crime thriller like Sicario, or large-scale action adaptations like Dune, Villeneuve delivers entertaining, thought-provoking films time after time. He also offers a unique visual style, which puts some people off. His films are hyper-realistic in lighting and color without much extra flare to brighten things up. This near-brutalist imagery gives audiences something different than the bland color palette of a streaming show or film. It’s also the antithesis of over-stylized cinematography that blasts neon colors into every frame. This style sets him apart, allowing him to bring something only he could envision to the screen.
Another Spring contender could be director Luca Guadagnino for Challengers, a film that has already been memed to death on social media. Its instant online popularity may fade quickly, but ignoring a movie like this that takes the world by storm is impossible. Ironically, Zendaya is one of the stars carrying this one and Dune: Part Two. While Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name was nominated for Best Picture, he has never gotten a nod for directing. There’s clear evidence that the Academy responds to his films, and this is easily the most accessible film of his since the Best Picture nomination at the 90th Academy Awards. It’s also important to note that his film was meant to come out last fall, and another film will be released sometime this year. Queer, starring Daniel Craig, is also being eyed as a potential awards player, and whichever film is more palatable to audiences and voters alike could get Guadagnino a nomination that encapsulates love for both movies.
Thankfully, there are many more films to look forward to this year, and the release of George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga this past weekend will likely shake things up in several categories. As it stands, Denis Villeneuve is the clear-cut favorite in our eyes, but he will have to weather many storms in the coming months to keep that momentum going.
Directors: Lindsey Haun, Nick Roth Writer: Nick Roth Stars: Toby Bryan, Jacob Demonte-Finn, Clare Grant
Synopsis: A man and his sentient napkin friend save the world from a dark evil in a cabin deep in the Utah mountains, and also learn to love.
A no-longer-than-an-hour-and-a-half, solid, horror comedy has become a rare gem recently. Thus my surprise to find Hanky Panky, a silly, tongue-in-cheek feature debut from Lindsey Haun and Nick Roth, an emerging new director duo on the horror scene. Imagine bringing in a bunch of genres, and mixing them in the blender while sprinkling the top with some shrooms, the result…is a chaotic mess.
The film’s premise is as adorable as it is absurd: A cabin in the snow. A group of unfortunate misfits. A two-faced woman called Lilith. A man and his talking, excessively swearing handkerchief. And a setting suitable for a murder or an orgy. In a secluded, snowy mountain cabin, our protagonists gather for a retreat by a quirky ayahuasca wannabe shaman. Things get complicated when bodies start piling up and a talking hat is the villain, wreaking havoc on our protagonists and their handy friend the wanky handkerchief.
The film relies on all the complacent horror tropes; extreme close-ups and awkward Dutch angles, over-the-top actors’ reactions, dialogue that runs towards ridiculous at times, and off-camera murders with copious amounts of fake blood splatters, and yet, all those elements seem to make it work. It’s funny without being overt, it’s got some decent jump scares, and it’s a great companion on a trip, that is, if the trip is toned down to below 30 Fahrenheit.
The fun behind the camera and the feel of the gone-and-forgotten indie movie where people brought along their friends and non-actors to a non-existent set where everyone got high and went home happy is there.
One of the key things that makes Hanky Panky work is Toby Bryan’s voice as Woody, the foul-mouthed, talking handkerchief, and the main protagonist, Sam’s, best friend. Woody seems out of a Wong Kar-wai alternate universe if Cop 663’s house items have decided to talk back to their lonely, chatty owner in Chungking Express. Woody is gross, witty, and doesn’t miss a chance to let out a crude remark or a sneaky chuckle. He’s the perfect antithesis to Sam, and he makes sure to make himself heard. He has a voice unlike his human friend Sam, whose isolation and social discomfort make his voice come out sputtering and fiddling with self-expression unless he’s trying to flirt.
Roth excels as the co-director, and his on-screen presence as Dr. Crane is always a joy. It reminds me of David Cross’s portrayal of Tobias Fünke in the same deluded gullible existence that seems unaware of its incredulousness. Clare Grant shines as the stereotypical Southern, friendly neighbor, and plays her role with such saccharine-heavy positivity even when her truth is eventually exposed.
Everything about this movie rules. Characters -possible actors- are stoned and goofing around. The plot is too idiotic to notice any plot holes. Seeking fun and laughs for laughs is the name of the game so wrapping the audience’s mind on the turn of events or continuity seems unnecessary and sucking the enjoyment from the movie-watching experience. This is a film made with love and for the love of giggles. People who want to get a laugh at being scared, Scary Movie style are welcome to come aboard this humble abode. Hanky Panky is just for gigs. No need to go hard on it without taking into consideration the amount of brilliance Nick and Lindsey have exhibited to make such a moronic premise not only work but surpass initial skepticism. The dialogue and the acting are its strongest points, and while it falls short of its horror scope sometimes, it has a lot to make up for what it is lacking.
Director: Tayarisha Poe Writer: Tayarisha Poe Stars: Leon Bridges, Aya Cash, Kiersey Clemons
Synopsis: It follows a young woman grappling with the meaning of love and commitment, follow her over her non wedding day.
The Young Wife’s writer and director, Tayarisha Poe, is a filmmaker with a singular and unique vision so distinct that there is nothing like her films out there. Her movies are obsessive about language, filling her script with witty and intense dialogue that is sharp. They sting or touch you in a way that most filmmakers can only dream of. As you get caught up in her words and stunning visuals, you begin to fall under the grip of a filmmaker who wields her camera frame with the intent of affecting her audience in a way that sneaks up on you that is holistic and honest.
As a case in point, a breathtaking scene in The Young Wife moved me in a way a film has not done so in quite some time. All with a single piece of dialogue, Poe has the character of Sabrina (a scene-stealing Aida Osman) tell her friend, lovingly and dripping with empathy, how it is a “privilege that others are affected by you.” The scene is beautiful, even lyrical, in a way only achievable when writing, acting, and atmosphere achieve a certain harmony.
It’s this quality that always keeps The Young Wife present and in the moment for the audience.
The story follows Celestina (Heart Beats Loud’s Kiersey Clemons), a young woman in her late twenties who is about to get married. Yet, Celestina is doing everything she can to tell friends and family it’s a “non-wedding.” She is engaged to River (a terrific Leon Bridges), and Celestina is keeping a secret–she has just quit her job but hasn’t told him. The only person Celestina has told is her mother (Sheryl Lee Ralph), who is less than thrilled with her daughter giving up her high-paying gig when her fiancé doesn’t have the means to support them.
That leads to some delightful and thought-provoking scenes about individuality and conformity. The script takes that theme with the ability to weave together an eclectic group of characters that are so different they can be placed in their specific genres (and arguably even a few tropes). Many will complain about this being unattainable whimsy, but this is not the point. Celestina is surrounded by unique individuals who stand out among the crowd, and she’s afraid of blending into it. When she marries River, Celestina seems to be asking herself if she will lose her sense of self. Will she only be known as River’s wife?
In one of the film’s best scenes with Clemons’s former Transparent co-star, Judith Light, who plays River’s grandmother, she tells Celestina how a man can break you down into little pieces, “Let your husband choke to keep yourself whole.”
It has been interesting to see how artists, particularly actors and directors, have been influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic by looking at their films before and after. In the case of The Young Wife’s director, Poe’s debut film was the 2020 Juvenalian satire Selah and the Spades, which had some of the sharpest commentary about the social justice political climate in recent memory. However, in The Young Wife, the lines of social justice commentary are erased, and you have a lovely eclectic mix of all backgrounds bonded through love and friendship.
The story is set in a futuristic background where climate change is rapidly causing rain and forest fires, and the world has begun to embrace the burden of alleviating mental health globally. (Be looking for a Lovie Simone cameo in a recurring scene called “The Meditation Minute.”) Celestina is a woman who is consumed by her anxiety about her future while experiencing depression about her past. Her character is never mindful or in the moment but experiencing what most of us have had during and now (yes, it’s still going on).
The scenes with her friends are chaotic because they are present. The scenes on the news of impending doom are present, causing Celestina to look past them as a defense mechanism to ignore the present. What Poe has created here is a controlled chaos constantly in motion and revolving around Celestina. When you break it down, the tone and feel of Poe’s The Young Wife is akin to the first act of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia. As the film progresses, the looming sense of a world’s rotting at its core becomes more prevalent and brought to the forefront. This plot point mirrors the reason for Celestina’s internal turmoil that she cannot seem to bring under control.
However, all Poe accomplishes here is possible because of Clemons’s best career performance. That’s because the young actress begins to realistically depict the twenty-something sense of existential dread against the backdrop of extraordinary circumstances. Clemons can show great strength and vulnerability in a single glance as her characters slowly come apart at the seams and are repaired by the ones she loves around her. This comes back to the “privilege that others are affected by you.”
The Young Wife is a metaphor for a new world, still seen through a feminist lens that reveals the more things change, the more they stay the same. While many may stick their nose up at the film’s idiosyncratic composition and claim there is a purple prose to its subtext, the final act of Tayarisha Poe’s film becomes profound. One that causes the audience to have a visceral reaction to the chaos happening all around us.
Director: John Makens Stars: Neil Young, Chad Muska, Steve Alba
Synopsis: Embark on the epic ride of Jim Phillips, the genius behind skateboarding and rock culture’s electrifying art. This documentary explores Phillips’ unyielding commitment to his craft, embodying a testament to resilience in art and life.
The corporatization of the relatively informal Santa Cruz skating scene and the wider countercultural movement was, of course, inevitable but there’s still a bittersweet sense of loss that emerges when one thinks back to the halcyon days in which simply hanging out with a bunch of other social outcasts could be read as a countercultural gesture. We live in a world in which capitalism eventually comes to encompass everything, but we find ourselves desperate to hold onto the few things that appear to stand outside of the realm of commercial product. Fortunately, artists have found productive ways of responding to the complicated, often destructive relationship between art and commerce. The clash between pure, authentic artistic expression and soulless, draining financial concerns is not as simple as I have made it out to be. Many of the illustrators who flourished during the 1970s were willing to explore the contradictions inherent in producing commercial art in an irreverent manner.
One of the most prominent artists of this period was illustrator Jim Phillips, who hit his stride when he began working as the sole art director for NHS Inc. The sports equipment distribution company primarily targeted the youth market and Phillips became increasingly immersed in Santa Cruz’s burgeoning skate and surf subcultures. He found a way to achieve a form of artistic expression in a cut-throat professional environment, while also forming genuine bonds with other skating enthusiasts. His life story is captured in Art and Life: The Story of Jim Phillips (2024), a loose, affectionate portrait of a turning point in the history of the hippie movement. Phillips serves as a warm and engaging interlocutor; ready and willing to throw out amusing anecdotes at a moment’s notice, while also commenting on the links between the social climate of the 1970s and his development as an artist.
The documentary’s easy, free-floating structure allows it to jump fluidly from one shaggy dog story to the next and prevents it from feeling like a simple hagiography. Director John Makens wisely limits the scope of his documentary to a point where Phillips’s specific preoccupations as an artist can come into focus. There is always a danger, when attempting to tackle such an extraordinary, overwhelming subject, that a project will end up losing a sense of focus altogether. Makens offers up tantalizing glimpses of the bigger picture here but stops short of attempting to craft a Diaries, Notes and Sketches (1968) for the internet age. In narrowing his project’s focus down to the specifics of Phillips’s life story and professional successes, he finds a microcosm through which a larger story can be hinted at. It’s a fruitful approach to treading over ground that has already been subjected to a frightening level of close analysis.
There is also something enormously moving about the documentary’s joyful deconstruction of the Santa Cruz logo, which has come to be seen as Phillips’s magnum opus. This documentary asks us to view this iconic piece of branding as the centerpiece of a wider artistic movement within Phillips’s oeuvre. We get a greater sense of the build-up to the creation of this signature piece and the difficulties that an artist faces when challenged to keep producing after hitting a creative peak of sorts. A lot of this material will seem familiar to viewers who have watched a wide assortment of documentaries about the creative process but Makens’s take on this particular phenomenon is heftier than the likes of Jeff Koons: A Private Portrait (2023). He might not unearth anything groundbreaking but the journey ultimately serves as the destination and there’s plenty to enjoy if you go along with the ride.
The picture will naturally find its viewership among young aspiring artists who are likely to already be familiar with Phillips. However, I would recommend that those who aren’t already deeply embedded within the Santa Cruz underground scene still make an attempt to seek this film out. It has a certain universal appeal that taps into the deep need that humans have to find a sense of belonging within a larger community. The heyday of the Santa Cruz skate and surf subcultures might have passed but this documentary gives you a nostalgic yet clear-eyed vision of what it might have been like to experience those glory days firsthand.
Synopsis: Follows Nora, Ginny, and Mary, three childhood best friends who used to spend every summer at a sleep away camp together. After years, when the opportunity to get back together for a summer camp reunion presents itself, they all seize it.
First of all, since when do summer camps have reunions? It’s a question I’ve been asking since having to sit through the trailer for the cortisol-fueled women of a certain age comedy, Summer Camp. As baby boomers begin to retire, more and more of these types of movies have been made over the past decade. From the Book Club (gulp) franchise, Poms, Las Vegas, and Going in Style, you have a series of movies being shoved down the throats of moviegoers to watch with their parents on Mother’s or Father’s Day.
Summer Camp is that movie, but at the very least, it has its heart in the right place.
The film stars three legendary performers: Academy Award winners Kathy Bates (Misery), Diane Keaton (Annie Hall), and Academy Award nominee Alfre Woodard (Cross Creek). The story follows three childhood friends who, yes, have been best friends since finding each other at that recreational outdoor camp. Ginny (Bates) is a life-hack guru and has conquered social media stardom, unlike any woman her age.
Ginny has been trying to get her friends, Nora (Keaton) and Mary (Woodard), together for ages, but life happens and gets in the way. Nora is a widow, lost her husband of 34 years, and buried herself in her work. Mary is a nurse who regrets never finishing medical school to become a doctor. Mary’s husband, Mike (Seinfeld’s Tom Wright), is too needy and over-reliant on her, calling her during her shift in the emergency room to see where the remote has been placed.
So, Ginny buys a gigantic recreational vehicle, practically abducting her two friends, and goes off for a nostalgia-filled week of reliving old memories while making new ones.
Castille Landon, director of the After franchise of underwhelming films, brings the same sort of shallow and saccharine storytelling and characters with such little three-dimensionality that a couple of fat heads on your child’s wall would be more well-rounded. Not only is the story incredibly lame, but everything from the story, main characters, and supporting roles comes straight out of the studio machine artificial playbook.
This regurgitates the same old story we have seen countless times before and in any age bracket. Three friends get together, check. Three friends enjoy their time together, check. Three friends meet members of the opposite sex, rekindling romantic feelings they haven’t felt in years. Finally, those friends fight; they leave angry but get back together for an apology, leaving everyone with that warm and fuzzy feeling studios pander to their audiences with, check and check.
My issue with movies like Summer Camp is that their scripts treat their targeted audiences like children’s movies. They try to teach and send positive messages to older adult men and women who are fully formed as if they haven’t lived their entire lives with more experience than anyone. Cliché, cut-out romantic lead (and villain) male characters highlight these issues.
Eugene Levy’s Stevie is the nerdy and anxious one. Of course, he pairs with Keaton’s anxious and nerdy character. Dennis Haysbert’s Tommy is a different kind of trope; that good guy cliché is looking to fill that romantic void. (It’s a role he has played hundreds of times before and was tailor made for.) Even Wright’s Mike is a one-note, toxic male villain type we have seen countless times before, with no redeemable qualities.
Yes, Kathy Bates has one or two feisty retorts that are humorous. Josh Peck has an amusing yet predictable running gag. The only reason that Summer Camp is tolerable is the infectious supporting turn by Betsy Sodaro, who has the film’s only laugh-out-loud moment, which, unfortunately, is all about product placement. Besides that, this is one of the more underwhelming comedies in recent memory.
Now that we’ve had a few months for more films to come out, we can start to see the (incredibly) early beginnings of the Best Sound race. The year has given us both letdowns and surprises across the board, but a couple of contenders have risen to the top of the list. As it stands today, two films seem to stand out when you consider the sound category: Dune: Part Two and Civil War.
Dune: Part Two is the easiest case to make, so let’s start there. The love for the sound design in this film is already apparent, given the first installment took home the prize at the 94th Academy Awards just a few years ago, beating out Steven Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story, among other worthy options. The sound in Part Two is equally impressive, adding different elements to the world alongside familiar sounds from the first film. The full inclusion of the shai hulud (giant sandworms) introduces a whole new aspect of sound design that was teased in Part One. Voters may find it difficult to look at the star power behind Dune: Part Two and the franchise’s prior awards success and convince themselves to vote elsewhere.
Our other contender, Civil War, is a divisive choice. Whether you enjoyed the film or not, it’s hard to deny the wonders of its sound design, especially when seen in IMAX. During the intense war sequences, the sound alternates between some of the loudest gunshots I’ve ever heard to cutting out completely as Lee (Kristen Dunst) and Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) snap photographs of the gruesome scene. This variation in design, combined with how the sound swirls around the theater, makes Civil War one of the more impressive achievements in recent memory. Civil War benefits from doing two things that voters love to see in this category: having big, loud sounds and playing around with the lack of sound. This could help put it above other films that do only one element well.
This year’s dark horse for Best Sound could be the Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt vehicle, The Fall Guy. This love letter to stuntmen and action films has plenty of action scenes with speeding cars and booming explosions likely to wow audiences and critics alike. However, for The Fall Guy to have a chance, it must turn its box office performance around and be seen more widely. The marketing may have made people think this would be too comedic and silly or not quite the action spectacle director David Leitch delivered. There’s one massive upcoming film to look out for regarding the Best Sound award, and fortunately, we will get to see it in just a few days. Visionary director George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is likely to make a splash in all the technical categories. Its predecessor, Mad Max: Fury Road, won both Sound Editing and Sound Mixing in 2015 when the award was split into two separate categories. It is a blessing and gift that we get technical marvels like Furiosa and Dune: Part Two in the same year. They’ll be competing for all the technical awards, and it will be so fun to see who will come out on top here.
This week on Women InSession, we continue our critic spotlight series as we get to know Jaylan Salah and talk about how her experience as an international critic! Jaylan has some unique experiences that distinguishes her amongst the crew and we have a lot of fun talking about how that influences her perspective on film.
Panel: Kristin Battestella, Zita Short, Jaylan Salah
On that note, check out this week’s show and let us know what you think in the comment section. Thanks for listening and for supporting the InSession Film Podcast!
Director: Joachim Rønning Writer: Jeff Nathanson, Glenn Stout Stars: Daisy Ridley, Tilda Cobham-Hervey, Stephen Graham
Synopsis: The story of competitive swimmer Trudy Ederle, who, in 1926, was the first woman to ever swim across the English Channel.
At some point during Joachim Rønning’s woeful biopic of champion swimmer Gertrude “Trudy” Ederle, one can imagine Russell Crowe as Maximus walking into the frame and proclaiming, “Are you not inspired!” Not content to let Ederle’s remarkable achievements in competitive women’s swimming stand on their own merits, Jeff Nathanson’s trite script embellishes so often that one begins to doubt Trudy’s existence. There certainly was a Trudy Ederle, and she was an Olympic swimmer who grew up on Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan and was the first woman to swim the English Channel in 1926. She had a sister named Margaret and was the daughter of German immigrants. She had measles as a child which affected her hearing. She trained under Charlotte “Eppy” Epstein and the WSA and was guided by both Jabez Wolffe and Bill Burgess. So far, so true. However, Young Woman and the Sea goes about telling Trudy’s story in a manner that stretches credulity to breaking point.
The film opens with Gertrude (Daisy Ridley) facing the Channel from the shore of Cape Gris-Nez in France. She sings “Ain’t We Got Fun” to herself before she enters the water and the film cuts back to where it all began – Gertrude (Olive Abercrombie) and Meg (Lily Aspell) as children living above their father Henry’s (Kim Bodin) butcher shop. There are the sounds of sirens as the General Slocomb sinks, taking with it a portion of “Little Germany’s” residents including children. Frau Ederle (Jeanette Hain) frets so much that she makes sure her children will learn how to swim to avoid such a tragedy. However, a more personal tragedy is looming as Gertrude almost dies from the measles. Her fever breaks and soon she is forcing her parents to let her swim along with Meg. Because she was infected, she learns by being tied to a barrel on the Jersey shore and Coney Island. Meg has the more traditional lessons and, at first, it seems that she will be the champion swimmer – but Trudy’s pluck and courage find her training with Charlotte “Eppy” Epstein (Sian Phillips) and overcoming her bad technique (“Kick, Trudy, kick!”).
Meg (Tilda Cobham-Hervey) and Trudy (Daisy Ridley) are now teens and dealing with sexism and disapproval. Young immigrant women don’t get to go past Amsterdam Avenue and make a name for themselves in any endeavor beyond marriage. Except they do – as Trudy and other members of the WSA go to the Olympic Games in Paris in 1924 and score a lot of medals despite the dastardly James Sullivan (Glenn Fleshler) hiring Jabez Wolffe (a petulant Christopher Eccleston) to stymie their efforts in favor of the male swimmers who include Johnny Weissmuller.
Somehow, winning medals is the death of women’s swimming and they’ll never be allowed back at the Olympics (patently false as American women swam the next Olympics and all of the Olympics America was involved in – but never mind that) so Meg decides to take one for the Ederle team and marry a nice German boy because, “that’s what happens to girls here,” and “no one wants two girls from the butcher’s shop to be heroes.” No nice American boy for Meg, and no swimming for Trudy especially not when it is so immodest, and the police are checking the length of bathers on Coney Island Beach.
Yet Trudy isn’t going to let a little thing like backlash against women’s suffrage, insecure men who failed to reach their dreams, and paternal negating stop her from being the one who does the marathon swim – especially when little girls think she’s neat.
Aided by Eppy and Meg, Trudy makes a bet that she can swim from Battery Park to Sandy Hook in a matter of hours – if she wins Sullivan will pay to sponsor her English Channel crossing. Win she does, but she doesn’t reckon on Jabez being set up as her coach – a man who is told to do everything in his power to ensure she fails, or drowns, or some such.
It almost works as Jabez indulges in dirty tricks. Luckily the over-the-top Bill Burgess (Stephen Graham) is there to ensure there are no more attempted drownings and both Henry and Meg turn up to help Trudy get back on her feet and make the crossing – even ensuring she can escape from Sullivan’s guarded cabin.
Wave after wave of ridiculous challenges hit Trudy. The weather! Jellyfish! Goggles taking in water. But golly, gee whiz, our girl isn’t going down without a fight. Trudy looks determined. Trudy is indefatigable. Trudy yells a lot. Meg is amazed and even does a bit of swimming. Everyone is astounded or having a tantrum (Jabez is humiliated). The score by Amelia Warner insists everyone is impressed. Cutting between Mother Gertrud and Henry Jr., (Ethan Rouse) listening to the report on the wireless at home in New York is dramatic tension. So too Charlotte whooping, “You go, girl!” from her apartment window; “Kick ya feet!” (Somewhere, someone is also yelling “Run, Forrest, run!”).
There is a memetic saying, “Of all the things that didn’t happen, that didn’t happen the most.” Young Woman and the Sea indulges in so many patent falsehoods that no one even has to do even the briefest fact check to know they are being fed an idiotic narrative masquerading as truth. There were enough factors in Trudy’s life which made what she did exciting and groundbreaking, so why go the making stuff up route? Heroic young woman completes a marathon swim in record time is enough. Between terrible accents, over acting, and ridiculous plotting, Trudy Ederle becomes dimensionless. Young Woman and the Sea is not only a bad film it is wrongheaded. If eye rolling was the intended effect, Joachim Rønning has hit the jackpot. If honoring a champion was what the film had in mind – the movie not only flops, it sinks, taking almost everyone involved with it to the bottom of the ocean.
Synopsis: Riley is given the chance to cheer with the all-star squad, Thunderhawks. With a competition looming, Riley must navigate her crippling anxiety, her relationship with her girlfriend, and her desperate need for approval from her new coach.
“This body’s not a cage, this body’s not a prison, this body’s no mistake, this body’s pushing limits.”
D. W. Waterson’s competitive cheerleading film begins with movement and music. The kineticism introduces the audience to the incredible athleticism of the young people hitting the mats with force and grace.
Riley (Devery Jacobs) is the captain and backspot of her mid-level team – the one who supports the flyers. The base of the pyramid is under her supervision. If someone falls, it’s because she wasn’t thinking fast enough. After the tumbles and backflips, an actual tumble occurs when flyer Rachel (Noa Diberto) crashes to the mat because of a dip by a base. Almost immediately the air is sucked out of Riley – she didn’t fall, but in her mind she failed. “Don’t go all dark,” her teammate and girlfriend Amanda (Kudakwashe Rutendo) tells her.
Cheerleading is Riley’s home. Her other home is Amanda. “Such a pretty girl,” according to Riley’s anxiety riddled Mom, Tracy (Shannyn Sossamon) whose perfectionism borders on obsessive disorder. Something which Riley also suffers from as she deals with panic attacks and trichotillomania. Riley is in a battle with herself, she must exercise precision and control to succeed. She sees her mother’s eagerness to please her father (who is just a hand with a remote-control playing sport at increasingly loud volumes) as self-effacement. But Riley’s own eagerness to please confuses her and the brutality she visits on her body is disproportionate to the dopamine fix of executing a perfect tuck.
The person she most wants to please is Eileen McNamara (Evan Rachel Wood), the coach of the professional team The Thunderhawks. Making it on to that team, especially with Rachel and Amanda is a dream – yet inside the dream is a waking nightmare she can’t parse. Cheerleading is something she’s done for years – her community is there. The love of her young life is there. So why does it hurt so much? And who is she willing to hurt for it?
The psychology of any athlete is complex. That complexity is multiplied when it is filtered through the malleable identity of being a teen. Riley’s fight or flight modes are in overdrive. Eileen’s coaching style is a mixture of negative and positive reinforcement, something which adds to Riley’s own confusion. The assistant coach, Devon (Thomas Anthony Olajide) is withering and snappy, but he is a sequined blanket for the team; he may scratch a little, but he is there to make them shine. What Eileen is aiming for is keeping the young women off balance to reshape them. Life is hard for gay sportspeople in Eileen’s estimation. Reject to protect. Become steel. Be unimpeachable. Yet she’s also the only person who manages to calm Riley properly during one of her panic attacks. In more than one way Eileen is a cult leader and Riley allows her personality to be subsumed.
“She has a wife! Could she be any more perfect?” Riley gushes to Amanda about Eileen. Amanda is more grounded. She can’t afford to only be a cheerleader despite being an accomplished one. Her mother, Denise (Olunike Adeliyi) is generous and chaotic but she’s also a single mom raising three kids. Amanda doesn’t have the money Riley does. She can’t spend every moment training because she needs to work. Amanda sees damage where Riley doesn’t – not only on the bodies of the young athletes but on their sense of self.
D. W. Waterson’s script written in conjunction with Joanne Sarazen displays immense sensitivity and understanding of how young people attempt to negotiate who they are. At no point does the film move into the “queer misery” trope. Riley and Amanda don’t suffer because they are gay. Their relationship is challenged because of reasons outside of their queerness. Money, mental health, slipping off the same page they believed they were on. When Riley swallows the Eileen Kool-Aid and physically assists in hurting Rachel to ensure she stretches into a wider split, Riley is breaking the trust of her friend and becoming a stranger to her girlfriend.
Backspot belies its modest budget and quick turn around shooting time. D. W. Waterson uses their musical and design aesthetic in conjunction with James Poremba’s whirling cinematography to make the film move in physical and psychological sync. It certainly doesn’t hurt that everyone in the film is beautiful even if they don’t feel they are. Laila (Marlee Samson) doesn’t conform to what would be considered ‘perfect body standards’ for a cheerleader and D. W. Waterson acknowledges that there are issues with the sport. At the same time Laila is shot to be glorious.
“Smile, happy, energy!” is the mantra for cheerleading. Make it look easy. No All-Star sport is easy. Its blisters, bruises, concussions, possible hospitalization. It’s using a tampon to stop a nosebleed. But it’s also flying like one is weightless, bodies moving in harmony with a rhythm built through a specific sorority. Cheerleading has little to do with the crop tops and false eyelashes – it is faith in teamwork. The sexiness of the sport is because it is athletic dance mixed with gymnastics. Once Riley realizes that what the sport gives her is belonging to her friends, she can find victory and a sense of calm. She can breathe and experience weightlessness.
Devery Jacobs is a force – physically and psychologically. The fierceness of her performance is matched by her raw vulnerability. Riley loves with passion, fear, and anger until she is shown by the “middle-aged” Devon (a perfect Thomas Anthony Olajide) that what she needs to be is messily human. That means letting go of the idea that she must fix every perceived bodily and emotional flaw. She doesn’t need to make herself Eileen’s “brick shit house” to be the best. Being the best in any competition is fleeting. Being a winner is not losing or denying yourself.
Noa Diberto is also superb as is Kudakwashe Rutendo. Both actors embody the brilliantly chaotic nature of youth. Diberto has incredible warmth and comic timing. Rutendo is sensitive, supportive, brave and switched the hell on.
Wonderfully shot, choreographed, scored, and acted, Backspot is not only everything you could wish for in a sports film, but also everything you want in a queer coming of age story. Dark and light collide to create magic under neon and laser lights. D. W. Waterson will have you cheering for their energetic, affecting, and intelligent work. Elite level filmmaking.
The month of June is a massive month of Criterion releases because an astounding six films and a miniseries are all coming out. From a piece of Mexico’s golden age of cinema to a contemporary portrait of gender fluidity, these releases really stack up well into the middle of summer. It is becoming all the more important as physical media dies a slow death and this preservation of old and contemporary films keeps the dream alive of collecting them all like Carrie Coon and Tracy Betts (owning 10,000 DVDs makes them heroes). Here’s the list for this June.
Victims of Sin (1951)
In his own version of film noir, director Emilio Fernández tells the story of a cabaret dancer (Ninon Sevilla) who rescues an infant from abandonment despite her boss (Rodolfo Acosta) disapproving of her sudden motherhood. When a rival nightclub owner (Tito Junco) is willing to help and falls for her, it sets up an explosive love triangle and climatic crime of passion. It is considered one of the best Mexican films during their Golden Age and a standout of cinema south of America’s border early after the end of WWII.
Querelle (1982)
The last film from Rainer Werner Fassbinder before his untimely death, Jean Genet’s gay erotica was Fassbinder’s only English-speaking film with Brad Davis as a sailor in a 1930s French port. He kills a man during a drug deal and uses his bisexual seduction to frame others for the killing. With screen legends Jeanne Moreau and Franco Nero, Fassbinder takes an expressionist route in telling Genet’s story with the complete absorption of desire and masculinity hiding the gay love underneath it all.
Blue Velvet (1986)
One of two rereleases this month, David Lynch’s shocking masterpiece still haunts with this disruption of quiet suburbia through the eyes of a young man (Kyle MacLachlan) after he discovers a severed ear. As he gets close to the detective’s daughter (Laura Dern), he gets sucked into the bosom of a singer (Isabella Rosselini) and her captor, the psychotic Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper). Rich in cinematography, Lynch opens up a much darker side of life that lures us with the titular melody and slaps us with a dose of harsh realism in such seedy quarters.
Bound (1996)
Before The Matrix, sibling duo Lana and Lilly Wachowski made a splashy, sexy debut about a conwoman (Gina Gershon) who catches the eye of her neighbor (Jennifer Tilly). They start an affair in which they target a mobster (Joe Pantoliano) and steal money, but they find themselves perilously close to being found out about their plan and the affair. It is a neo-noir that cackles with delight in this exciting and dangerous tale that gave the Wachowski’s the power to make something so influential, a franchise came out of it.
Fear And Loathing Las Vegas (1998)
The second re-release is the adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s gonzo novel about a journalist (Johnny Depp) and his lawyer (Benicio Del Toro) covering a motorcycle race, only to suddenly embark on an LSD-soaked nightmare of a trip. Director Terry Gilliam makes the best of a very difficult book and explodes on the screen a radical story of society’s neurosis living in a capsule during the 1970s, the height of Thompson’s language-changing work. While it failed at the box office, Fear And Loathing has remained a cult classic 26 years later.
The Underground Railroad (2021)
Barry Jenkins took Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize winning book about a historical reimagining during the era of slavery and transformed it into a magical realistic miniseries. A slave named Cora (Thuso Mbedu) witnesses the brutal death of an escapee, but this does not deter her from making her own escape. She eventually finds the underground railroad – an actual train underneath in secret – to take her stop-by-stop out of the South towards liberation while a slave catcher (Joel Edgerton) remains on her tail. All ten episodes are a journey, completely different to what we would expect, courtesy of Jenkins and company.
Orlando: My Political Biography (2023)
Spanish writer and academic Paul B. Preciado took his first shot at filmmaking with this personal essay on gender by having numerous trans and nonbinary people (like himself) to reenact Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando: A Biography. Everyone reads passages that very much shape them as it does in the book on giving their identity as a human regardless of being trans in an era of hostility. It’s a transcendent piece of a story from across the centuries that resonates to this day.
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The film landscape has changed so much in recent years that a film and a performance, with the right narrative, can be a contender long into award season. Voters seem to have much longer memories now. They have been ignoring films that attempt a final push in the last weeks of December for the films they’ve loved all year. Everything Everywhere All at Once was released in March of 2022, yet nearly a year later, Michelle Yeoh strode across the stage to accept Best Actress. The greatest performances often supersede time and space. Zendaya gives an immortal performance in Challengers, making her the top Best Actress contender of 2024 thus far.
There’s no doubt that moments after seeing Challengers, people did an internet search for Tashi Duncan. Her character is so indelible that she has to be based on a real person. Like Cate Blanchett’s Lydia Tár from two years ago, Zendaya has pulled off an acting feat of epic proportions. It’s refreshing to see a woman so three-dimensional from an original script.
Zendaya takes the reins of the film from her first silent moments until her final primal scream of ecstasy. She is the one who carries the heft of the story. Her machinations drive her “little white boys” mad with the need to please her. She broods with the best of them, and her silences say even more than each of her careful and cuttingly terse words.
The performance is one for the ages and shows the brilliant actress Zendaya has become. It’s impossible to take your eyes off of her, even when she’s doing something despicable. Zendaya’s Tashi has the power to keep us on her side, even at her worst. She never telegraphs a move. Only the subtleties in Zendaya’s expression give us the barest hint as to Tashi’s true intentions.
It’s obvious Zendaya is the frontrunner at this point, but she will likely have some stiff competition. The strongest contender so far is another child star turned prestige player, Kirsten Dunst. The loudest pundit voices have championed her understated but powerful work in Civil War. Her narrative is the opposite of Zendaya’s up-and-comer. Dunst has had an illustrious career with too few accolades. She’s due for more love with only one Oscar nomination under her belt. However, whether or not Dunst has a chance is hinged on how much love Civil War can carry through awards season. Even if Challengers fails everywhere else, Zendaya is too much of a presence to ignore.
Other actresses from the spring releases who could nab a nod:
Regina King’s performance in Shirley will be in the mix.
Kristen Stewart’s brilliant turn in Love Lies Bleeding is talked about but might be a tough sell on this ballot.
Anya Taylor-Joy will likely have her moment in the blistering sun with Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.
Anne Hathaway’s charms in The Idea of You are undeniable.
Zendaya has a terrific narrative behind her. She’s the 21st-century version of the Hollywood actress. She can balance prestige TV as well as franchise films. Not only that, but she’s also a producer who is a fierce advocate for her films. Two of last year’s Best Picture contenders were produced by their lead actresses— Emma Stone’s Poor Things and Margot Robbie’s Barbie. With the press and engagements for Dune: Part Two behind her, Zendayacan focus the rest of the season on advocating for herself and for Challengers. There’s a good chance another spring queen will be walking across the Oscar stage this coming March.
“Garbo still belongs to that moment in cinema when capturing the human face still plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy, when one literally lost oneself in a human image as one would in a philtre, when the face represented a kind of absolute state of the flesh, which could be neither reached nor renounced.”
Greta Garbo used to be really, really famous. That’s something that us modern consumers of celebrity can’t really understand anymore. A lot of people are famous now, and fame doesn’t really seem that hard to come by. For an actress whose career lasted from the last years of the silent era to just before the US entered WWII, Greta Garbo made a relatively small number of films in Hollywood while other actor’s film performances sometimes numbered in the hundreds She was also known to be fiercely private, even by the standards of the era. I think it is because of this wanted privacy and because of her relatively scarce film output that made her as big a mega-star as she was. Absence, Garbo proved, does make the heart grow fonder. Regardless of her wishes to remain private, her face (and what a face it was) was everywhere.
Garbo’s legendary loneliness started at a young age as a child in Stockholm, as she recalled: “It was eternally grey—those long winter’s nights. My father would be sitting in a corner, scribbling figures on a newspaper. On the other side of the room, my mother is repairing ragged old clothes, sighing. We children would be talking in very low voices, or just sitting silently.” In public and in private, Garbo always spoke with a sort of melancholy. At the time, this made her seem more mysterious and attractive. Now, we would likely recognize this to be a manifestation of depression. She participated in local theatre as a child, worked as a fashion model, and appeared in some commercials. In an interview with Orson Welles by Jack Parkinson, the two begin reflecting on the lost days of Hollywood stardom. Parkinson asks Welles: “Either the camera loves you or the camera doesn’t. I presume that was more true about Garbo than anybody else?”. Welles agrees, then brings up a handful of Garbo’s early commercials he had seen while touring the Swedish Film Institute:
“There was this great galumphing ‘Swedish cow’ having a picnic. There was NOTHING to show you that you were looking at the most divine creature who would ever be on the screen. And two years later she was Greta Garbo.”
Though I don’t subscribe to such degrading terminology, I too admit that there is a vast difference between her appearance in these commercials compared to even her earliest film performances.
Greta would go on to study at the Swedish Royal Dramatic Training Academy. Super fans may recognize this as the period during which she developed a close relationship with fellow actress Mimi Pollak. Garbo’s bisexuality (or something of the like), about which much has been speculated, appears to have at least a semblance of truth within the letters written between these two friends. Upon hearing of Pollak’s pregnancy, Garbo wrote: “We cannot help our nature, as God has created it. But I have always thought you and I belonged together.”
At only 19, Garbo was recruited by Finnish director Mauritz Stiller to appear as the lead of her first film, The Saga of Gösta Berling. This was soon followed up by a leading role in G.W. Pabst’s The Joyless Street, a controversial and highly censored film about prostitution, theft, murder, and all sorts of unsavory characters suffering from post-war poverty. Somehow (there are several stories) she gained the attention of MGM Dictator Perpetuo Louis B. Mayer who brought her to Hollywood and signed her to a studio contract. It didn’t take long for a star to be born.
Garbo arrived in Hollywood during the tail end of Silent Era Hollywood, which was all the same to her because she didn’t speak english. At the time, “foreignness” was an asset for stars, who used their exotic beauty, style, and often manufactured backstories to their advantage. Garbo was heralded in the style of European-born stars like Alla Nazimova and Pola Negri. Though such comparisons are obvious, I am more likely to compare her to Rudolph Valentino, who would die the same year Garbo made her first Hollywood movie. Literary theorist Roland Barthes makes the same comparison:
“A few years earlier the face of Valentino was causing suicides; that of Garbo still partakes of the same rule of Courtly Love, where the flesh gives rise to mystical feelings of perdition.”
Valentino was the original Latin Lover, and used his exotic charm in such a way that caused fainting spells and hysteria amongst his fans. Yet there was something obscurely feminine about him, in his grace and passion on screen. I wonder if, conversely, Garbo was so attractive to male audiences not in spite of her masculinity, but because of it. If she was something of a taboo to heterosexual men, and therefore all the more exciting and desirable.
Though such language would be used in this manner at the time, audiences of the 1930s could probably tell there was something “queer” about her – in her face, in the way she dressed and walked, in the roles she played – she was not inherently feminine, not sweet like Mary Pickford or glamorous like Gloria Swanson. Garbo almost seemed unfettered by the nonsense of gender. “The androgyne is certainly one of the great images of Camp sensibility” writes Susan Sontag, referring specifically to “the haunting androgynous vacancy behind the perfect beauty of Greta Garbo”. In her face, frame, and style, Garbo personified art deco.
Garbo’s career was fast tracked when she became associated with Jack Gilbert, at the time one of the most popular leading men in Hollywood. Unfortunately, the outcome of their relationship would turn out like a messier version of A Star is Born. While Garbo succeeded in the early days of talking pictures, Gilbert’s career became less and less stable. The reasons for Gilbert’s downfall are as varied as any Hollywood legend: Maybe it was because spoke with a distinct diction trained for the theatre that just didn’t work in the movies; maybe it was because he was an alcoholic; maybe it was the result of a personal vendetta by Mayer. Probably, it was a bit of all three. Gilbert and Garbo’s three silent film pairings were all hits, capitalizing on their rumored off screen love affair. The legitimacy of this relationship is up for debate, as it lacks no concrete proof beyond studio publicity rags. One story states that the two planned to be married in a double wedding ceremony alongside King Vidor and Eleanor Boardman, but Garbo got cold feet and left Gilbert at the altar. There was a relationship there, that’s for certain. What we don’t know is exactly what sort of relationship it was.
When Gilbert’s career was in significant decline, Garbo did him a solid by having him cast as her romantic lead in Queen Christina, an eerily true-to-life piece that stands as a pillar of early queer cinema. The film is a fictionalized account of the final years of the reign of Queen Christina of Sweden in the 17th century. Christina was known to be a highly-educated woman who sought to make Stockholm the “Athens of the North”. While queen, she lived an unconventional lifestyle for a woman of her time, notably dressing mostly in men’s attire. At 28, she decided to convert to catholicism and abdicate her throne. She never married, and spent the rest of her life traveling around Europe. In Queen Christina, the queen’s interest in the catholic religion is replaced by her love for a catholic man, a Spanish courtier played by Jack Gilbert. In real life, Christina was known to have a close relationship with one of her ladies in waiting, a relationship which is not-so-subtly alluded to in the film with a kiss and a wink. Garbo spends the first half of the film in male-attire, looking perhaps as beautiful as she ever did. She meets the Spanish courtier in this attire, and he mistakes her for a man. Thus, they share a room together at an inn. When the Spaniard realizes that Christina is a woman, his attraction turns from one of camaraderie to one of lust. In a love scene typical of the early 1930’s, the chemistry between the two is palpable. Still in her masculine attire, the scene possesses a paradoxical sense of homoeroticism, as if a love scene between two men, further twisting the film’s somewhat radical portrayal of gender and sexuality.
This was only one of many love scenes between Garbo and her male co-stars throughout her filmography that appear, in their staging and dialogue, to be a little “queer”. Physically, she’s often in the dominant position, holding the man’s face in her hands, and instigating every kiss and movement. In a 1930 Photoplay article titled “The Private Life of Greta Garbo”, there are numerous references to her masculinity, and her bachelorhood:
“She wore men’s tailored shirts. She owned dozens of men’s silk ties, in all colors. At night, she wore men’s pajamas, in soft shades of silk and in stripes. Her hats were of soft felt in mannish style. . . When her manservant brought her shoes, she would laugh and say, ‘Just the kind for us bachelors, eh?'”
Some of the lines in the article may seem unremarkable to the untrained eye, but stick out to a certain few:
“In the summer of 1929, Garbo did not seem to be devoted to any particular man.”
“Garbo has always been fond of flowers. Her favorites are pansies and violets.”
Maybe I’m reading too deeply into this, but something about these particular terms reads as tongue in cheek, as if perhaps it was an open secret that Greta was a little “different” from the other girls. During this time period, queer moviegoers had to look for these sorts of subtleties wherever they could so that they might have something, and someone, to identify with. How did her queer fans see her? Did they recognize something in her that others didn’t?
Queen Christina concludes in a fashion that is eerily similar to the real life scenarios of Garbo and Gilbert. Woman is a ruler, woman falls in love with a man, man dies, woman loses interest in the whole thing and gives up the crown. Three years after Queen Christina, Jack Gilbert was dead from a heart attack brought on by severe alcoholism. Garbo was not in attendance at his funeral. Garbo would go on to make six more films, including some classic costume period dramatic romances, and arguably her greatest and most iconic role: Ninotchka. This was Garbo’s first proper comedy, written by Billy Wilder and directed by Ernst Lubitsch. The marketing for the film capitalized on Garbo’s melancholic and dramatic persona, with the film’s posters proudly proclaiming “Garbo laughs!” She’s sensational in it, totally mastering her comedic timing and deadpan humor with the sophistication of “The Lubitsch Touch”.
In 1941, Garbo starred in her last film: Two Faced Woman, a comedy with a plot akin to The Lady Eve. The film was a box office and commercial failure, and Garbo and MGM came to a mutual agreement to not renew her contract at the studio. And that was it. I don’t believe that one bad box office performance was the cause for her retirement. I think she was sick of the whole thing, as she’d likely been for several years.
When she retired in 1941, that enigmatic “face of the century” became an even more rare and valuable find. In 1949, she did a screen test for a Max Ophüls adaptation of a Balzac novel, which can be viewed on Youtube. If this footage had been publicly available in 1949, her face would have been very different to audiences who remembered her from the 1930s, but certainly no less beautiful. That once smooth face is marked by laugh-lines and crow’s feet. She looks, perhaps for the first time ever on film, to be genuinely happy. But financing fell through, and the screen test never amounted to a real film. I can’t help but play out the scenario in my head of how different her legacy would be if the film had come to be. Would she have had a second career in European film? Would she have been cast as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, as Wilder had initially intended, and been introduced to an entirely new generation of filmgoers? Maybe. But she didn’t, and from there, she essentially vanished. Or at least, she tried to.
“There just aren’t any faces like that anymore. Maybe one – Garbo.”
Like spotting Bigfoot (an apt comparison considering how she was often characterized by and teased about her supposedly large foot size) the act of Garbo-spotting became a niche pastime of in-the-know New Yorkers. Many would have their stories of “that time” they swear they saw her on a walk in Central Park, or in an expensive clothing store. She moved through the city like an apparition, only visible in a particular light, at a certain angle. The sight of her was overwhelming, halting onlookers in their tracks while leading to twisted tongues and fumbling fingers. There are many photos of her in this transient, almost ephemeral state. She moves about like a rare animal evading capture from a wildlife photographer. Today, I despise the selfish ways in which fans flock actors and singers in public spaces for pictures, totally disregarding that they are, in fact, human. But I can’t blame those who approached Garbo in awe, if you had the wherewithal to do so. If I had the opportunity myself, I would have done the same thing. To some, it would have been like encountering a saint, a sight that thrusts worshippers into a state of rapture. To her, it was a mere disturbance, a memory of a time in her life she was happy to let go of. Obviously, on screen and in real life, before, during, and after stardom, she very much wanted to be left alone.
The Un Certain Regard (translated to “a certain glance”) section of the Cannes Film Festival offers a lens into the perspectives of the world. This section mainly consists of filmmakers on the rise and debutants, who are given the chance to premiere their new or first works and stamp their names in the history books. Unfortunately, I couldn’t see many of the films on this slate. But I caught a few of them, some showing potential and others not so much, yet there’s some cadence. In this capsule review piece, I will talk about three of them: Holy Cow, The Story of Souleymane, and When the Light Breaks.
Holy Cow (Vingt Dieux) (Directed by. Louise Courvoisier)
The first film in this piece is Holy Cow (Vingt dieux) by French filmmaker Louise Courvoisier. Coming-of-age films always have a space in the Cannes Film Festival. But they often arrive as a 50/50 split of creative and by the numbers—with levels of artistry or, to put it slightly, plain, vanilla-flavored. Unfortunately, the latter applies to the aforementioned film, leaving me without much of an impression. The film follows Totone (Clément Faveau), an eighteen-year-old kid who used to spend his time drinking at local pubs with his crew in the Jura region of France, but after his father’s passing, his life has shifted entirely. He is left alone to care for his little sister and make ends meet to keep the house.
To make a “quick buck,” Totone and his friends enter a cheese-making competition in the Comté region. The winner gets a gold medal and thirty thousand euros, which will help Totone and his sister get a fresh start. We have seen hundreds of stories like this, where the “last resort” starts as an exploit to earn money, but later, the protagonist views it from a different perspective – connecting their suffering to their work process. In this case, cheese-making represents taking things slowly in life, where we shouldn’t rush things out of our control. It is a lovely message, with some moments having a genuine dramatic sensibility that wants to take a piece of the audience’s heart and break it.
However, since, on a cinematic level, it is manufactured like the ones that came before, you don’t tend to care much about the story or its characters. Instead, you keep on guessing where everything is headed in your mind. But that isn’t the only reason why Holy Cow doesn’t work. While the performances are solid, the emotions in the narrative don’t ring true. There’s an artificiality that distances the viewer from the characters, leaving us without much to hold onto after the credits roll. This is not the worst film I saw at the Cannes Film Festival this year. However, it is the most straightforward and cinematically ambitionless, which is a far worse experience than watching a bing-swing disaster.
Grade: D
The Story of Souleymane (L’histoire de Souleymane) (Directed by. Boris Lojkine)
The second film in this capsule review piece is The Story of Souleymane (L’histoire de Souleymane) by Boris Lojkine, which won the Jury Prize for the Un Certain Regard section as well as its Performance Award. Lojkine sometimes delves into a Dardennes-esque type of direction with the narrative, where we follow a lost soul in a rural city as he deals with life’s difficulties – feeling detached as he makes ends meet and has his family troubles. He also used this inspiration in his previous feature, Hope. But the difference is that the social commentary here is sharper and more nuanced, albeit a tad too expository for its own sake.
The story follows Souleymane Sangare (Aubu Sangare), who is waiting for an interview call that might get him his residency in France. The film tells a forty-eight-hour tale about Souleymane preparing for that meeting as he encounters some troubles in his bike delivery job—dealing with cruel customers, the chaotic streets of Paris, and personal struggles. Like many of the characters in Lojkine’s filmography, Souleymane is fighting hard to fight for a better life. Regarding his monetary situation, most of his wages go to his contractor, Emmanuel (Emmanuel Yovanie), and the man helping him get his residency, Bary (Alpha Oumar Sow). This is where the narrative creates its tension.
There’s uncertainty about what will happen to Souleymane the following day regarding his citizenship and buying his necessities. Aubu Sangare, in his debut performance, does a tremendous job at keeping everything genuine, personal, and impactful. He treats the calmness as a welcoming friend, even in the most challenging situations, and it makes each scene contain some emotional weight, even though the screenplay can often feel heavy-handed. The film lives and breathes under his wing, and Sangare guides it with empathy and sincerity. The problem lies in how Lojkine and co-writer Delphine Agut handle the Dardennes-esque sensibility of European social realism, which renders The Story of Souleymane rather maladroit at the film’s back end.
Grade: C+
When the Light Breaks (Ljósbrot) (Directed by. Rúnar Rúnarsson)
The third (and final) film in this capsule review piece is When the Light Breaks (Ljósbrot) by Rúnar Rúnarsson, the opening film of the Un Certain Regard section. This is a film about the stages of grief and how we handle and go through it in different ways, yet it all leads to the emotional catharsis that unites us all in our mourning. There’s a beautiful subtleness attached to each scenario that holds the film together on an emotional and cinematic level. However, there are certain directorial decisions that Rúnarsson applies, which make When the Light Breaks lack the potency of its topics and the relatable power of the performances.
The film centers around Una (Elin Hall), a young art student with a bright future. She’s happily living with her boyfriend, Diddi (Balduer Einersson); the two spend their days together, hoping that they’ll get the opportunity to have a more prosperous life. But that day, at least together, will not arrive. An explosion in a tunnel has killed many people, including Diddi, who was heading out of town for a few days. Una now goes through an array of emotions – rejection, sorrow, guilt, remorse – as she grieves the death of her partner, one of the few people who accepted her as she was.
When the Light Breaks is divided into sections, each set in a different location that reflects a stage in the grieving process. These places help translate the characters’ emotions into a step-by-step process of acknowledgment and understanding – learning about different ways people approach a loss. However, with this structure comes a necessity to turn up the emotional valve and tonnage in each location. This causes some scenes, although well-performed by the young talented cast, to lack that vulnerability of the story. The performances dictate that feeling, yet Rúnarsson makes it weaker by layering out the film in this fashion.
In addition, the editing and scene-by-scene transitions bothered me. Each scene in the various locations culminates abruptly, leaving little breathing space so the audience can be more immersed in the story. A specific frame captures what Rúnarsson wanted to say with the film. He aligns two characters between a glass door, one in front and the other behind; their faces align, signifying how we all, despite our differences, go through this process the same way internally. It is a beautiful image that speaks louder than words. If only the film could have more vivid, striking imagery to have a stronger sentimental backbone.
Director: Mark Dindal Writers: Paul A. Kaplan, Mark Torgrove, David Reynolds Stars: Chris Pratt, Samuel L. Jackson, Hannah Waddingham
Synopsis: After Garfield’s unexpected reunion with his long-lost father, ragged alley cat Vic, he and his canine friend Odie are forced from their perfectly pampered lives to join Vic on a risky heist.
Since the boom in nostalgia culture that has ravaged all of mainstream entertainment, there has been a culling of the depths to find familiar properties to make new again. It’s branded entertainment and the saddest aspect is it’s working. People are spending their money, or worse their time, with entertainment that has no value other than the profit the company makes off our stupidity. That’s what The Garfield Movie is. It’s a cash grab with a familiar face on it.
Nostalgic adults who read the comic strip, enjoyed the “Garfield and Friends” cartoon show, or even thought the live action Garfield: The Movie from 20 years ago was all right, are going to waste their time. This Garfield is unrecognizable from the 46 year old fat, lazy Monday hating, lasagna loving cat. It feels like writers Paul A. Kaplan, Mark Torgrove, and David Reynolds wrote a script for an animated movie and while they pitched it to Sony, the executives said, “You know who would be great for this? Garfield.”
The plot is finely tuned. It has all of the elements of a basic story with a nice tidy bow of a wrap up. It’s just not actually a Garfield story. It’s overly and unnecessarily saccharine. It has none of Garfield’s bite or wit. The characters are the shallowest interpretation of their familiar selves. Odie is mentally and emotionally intelligent. Jon has no personality or presence. Liz the veterinarian shows up for two scenes and Nermal is a blink and you miss it cameo. The new characters are all stock animated archetypes. The absent father, the jilted crime partner, the hapless henchmen, the overzealous security guard, the beaten down hero of the hero. It’s nostalgia without the actual nostalgia. It makes one wonder if they hired Chris Pratt because he seems to have no interest in doing a familiar inflection to a well known character.
It’s hard to get excited to see Chris Pratt’s name on an animated film. He just doesn’t do anything new with his voice to get into the character. It worked for him when he was cast in The Lego Movie because that’s a new character in a new universe and his vocal style worked for the enthusiasm of the character. It worked again for him in Onward because before he got into great shape, he used to exude that sort of going nowhere, older brother energy. But with last year’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie and now The Garfield Movie, he’s just not getting the assignment. His voice is a distraction from what’s going on in the film.
Though it’s a bad film for child free, nostalgic adults, it’s a decent film for families. It’s a movie that any kid who doesn’t know Garfield from Heathcliff can enjoy. The animation is very slick with every pet and animal looking like they are very fuzzy and pettable. The environments are colorful and intriguing. The food looks so good you’ll wish the film had smell-o-vision for those parts. The action is engaging and the jokes are familiar, but can land with the right audience with some for the adults and some for the kids.
That is the trouble with thrashing a film like The Garfield Movie. The film does no real harm in the world and is something for families to enjoy being at together. Nostalgic adults should try much harder not to be nostalgic adults and let the kids have their new version. This version isn’t for anyone who wants to see a real Garfield movie. It’s a sort of split between a C grade family comedy and an F grade adaptation of a well known character. It’s really not worth it either way unless you just can’t find anything else to do for the long weekend.
This week on the InSession Film Podcast, we continue our Best Picture Movie Series with Leo McCarey’s 1944 Oscar-winning film Going My Way! We also discuss this year’s Cannes Film Festival winners and once again we try to decipher the box office woes of 2024.
Check out this week’s show and let us know what you think in the comment section. Thanks for listening and for supporting the InSession Film Podcast!
– Opening Discussion (0:45) We open the show this week with JD talking about his recent trip to Walt Disney World and celebrating his 10-year wedding anniversary.
– Cannes Winners / Box Office Woes (9:49) In this segment, we talk about this year’s Cannes Film Festival winners and why Anora talking the Palme d’Or is extremely exciting. Sean Baker rules and this win has us really hyped up for his latest. And as usual, the box office discourse continues to be exhausting, and the Memorial Day weekend did nothing to remedy the recent woes. We, of course, felt the need to dive further into that once again.
– Best Picture Movie Series: Going My Way (53:03) We continue our Best Picture Movie Series in the 1940s with Leo McCarey’s 1944 Oscar-winning film Going My Way! Given the context of the time, this is a pretty bizarre winner. Not because it’s bad (we do debate its quality), but because 1944 was such a pivotal year for the War. And after discussing Miniver and Casablanca, two films that are heavily influenced by the conflict, Going My Way is the complete antithesis. Which made for a really fun conversation.
If you want to help support us, there are several ways you can help us and we’d absolutely appreciate it. Every penny goes directly back into supporting the show and we are truly honored and grateful. Thanks for your support and for listening to the InSession Film Podcast!
On this episode, JD and Brendan discuss George Miller’s latest spectacle in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga! We, as was the rest of the world, were blown away by Mad Max: Fury Road back in 2015. So we were quite intrigued by the opportunity to go back to the Wasteland with Furiosa, even if Furiosa herself was going to be portrayed by another actress. Or in this case, two other actresses. And Miller did not disappoint.
Review: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga(4:00) Director: George Miller Writers: George Miller, Nico Lathouris Stars: Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemsworth, Tom Burke, Alyla Browne
The award for Best Animated Feature has been one of my favorites to follow over the past few years. Every year, some of the best films have been awarded in this category, and we even saw a battle that came down to the very end this past season, with The Boy and the Heron besting the favorite, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. This year is no different, with some big-name sequels being released from the giants of animated film studios; however, as we’ve seen over the past few years, maybe those giants aren’t as big anymore. While there are bound to be some under-the-radar films that are released and gain momentum—who saw Robot Dreams coming last year—this is my early look at how the Oscar race for Best Animated Feature could play out.
The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie (Warner Bros. Animation)
Director: Pete Browngardt Cast: Eric Bauza, Candi Milo, Peter MacNicol Synopsis: Daffy Duck and Porky Pig try to save the Earth from an alien invasion. Release: Fall 2024
The Looney Tunes series has never done well in terms of the Academy Awards, making this film a massive wildcard. So, while this movie might be good, will it be enough to tear down that barrier? The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie could follow a path similar to that of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles last year; while Mutant Mayhem was one of the best animated films of 2023, it missed an Oscar nomination.
Despicable Me 4 (Illumination)
Director: Chris Renaud Cast: Steve Carell, Kristin Wiig, Joey King, Miranda Cosgrove Synopsis: Maxime Le Mal escapes from prison to enact revenge on Gru, who is now living peacefully with his new son, Gru Jr. Release: July 3, 2024
I do not think a nomination for Despicable Me 4 is a real possibility; however, the minion craze shows no signs of slowing down at the box office. Notably, no film from this franchise has made it into the final Oscar 5 since Despicable Me 2 in 2014. So, will the fourth installment of this series bring them back to the Dolby Theater? There’s at least a chance.
Fixed (Sony Pictures Animation)
Director: Genndy Tartakovsky Cast: Adam DeVine, Idris Elba, Kathryn Hahn, Fred Armisen Synopsis: A blue bloodhound finds out he will be neutered in the morning. Release: 2024
An argument could be made that, had there been a Best Animated Feature category back in 2000, South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut would have been nominated, given that it still came away with a nomination for the song “Blame Canada.” However, since the introduction of the category, there has never been an adult R-rated comedy in the Oscar 5. Fixed has a stacked cast, but will it be monumental enough as a film to change the “kid” narrative that has plagued this category for years?
The Garfield Movie (Sony)
Director: Mark Dindal Cast: Chris Pratt, Hannah Waddingham, Samuel L. Jackson Synopsis: Garfield reunites with his long-lost father, who draws him into a high-stakes heist. Release: May 24, 2024
While I highly doubt a nomination for The Garfield Movie is likely, it would be ignorant not to include it on this list. Over the past few years, films similar to The Garfield Movie have garnered awards buzz, like Minion: The Rise of Gru and The Super Mario Bros. Movie. While neither film performed exceptionally well critically, both had massive box office earnings, keeping them in the conversation, and with the film already making $50 million, there’s a chance for a massive turnout. Time will tell with The Garfield Movie, but if the money is there, so is the possibility.
Inside Out 2 (Pixar)
Director: Kelsey Mann Cast: Amy Poehler, Phyllis Smith, Tony Hale Synopsis: Riley is now a teenager and is experiencing all-new emotions. Release: June 14, 2024
Pixar is in a lull regarding the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. The 11-time winning studio has gone without a win since 2020’s Soul. Inside Out was a massive hit; however, no sequel has won this award since Toy Story3 and 4— and technically Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. While Inside Out 2 has a clear advantage, it’s still an uphill battle. But, if we have learned anything, it’s not to count out Pixar.
Kung Fu Panda 4 (DreamWorks)
Director: Mike Mitchell, Stephanie Stine Cast: Jack Black, Awkwafina, Viola Davis Synopsis: Po is positioned to be the next Spiritual Leader of the Valley of Peace, which means he must find a new Dragon Warrior. Release: March 8, 2024
There is precedent here, as both Kung Fu Panda and Kung Fu Panda 2 were nominated for an Oscar; however, it seems unlikely, given the tepid response to the film and the early release date. It is still important to mention it as a possibility, but as you will see with a movie later on this list, DreamWorks might have more on its mind.
The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim (Warner Bros. Animation)
Director: Kenji Kamiyama Cast: Brian Cox, Miranda Otto, Shaun Dooley Synopsis: The untold story of Helm’s Deep and its founder, Helm Hammerhand. Release: December 13, 2024
There has been a resurgence in Lord of the Rings properties over the past few years. First, the Amazon Prime series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power broke records for being the most expensive TV show ever made. It was also just announced that Andy Serkis will direct a new live-action film, The Hunt for Gollum, releasing in 2026 with Peter Jackson set to produce.
This could be a perfect time for one of the most awarded franchises, including a film that went 11/11 at the Oscars, to return to the Oscar stage. While no anime outside of Miyazaki has ever won the animated feature Oscar, name recognition for the Lord of the Rings could be a big selling point.
Moana 2 (Disney)
Director: David G. Derrick Jr. Cast: Auli’i Cravalho, Dwayne Johnson, Alan Tudyk Synopsis: An older Moana ventures deep into Oceania after receiving a mysterious call from her ancestors. Release: November 27, 2024
The announcement of Moana 2 shocked most people, given that a live-action remake of the original was announced in early 2023, and this sequel was only announced at the beginning of this year. Still, the original Moana was a remarkable film that maybe should have won the Oscar back in 2017. Will this be the time to fix that? Or will this be another close call? No matter what, I’m looking forward to seeing how far they’ll go.
Orion and the Dark (Netflix)
Director: Sean Charmatz Cast: Jacob Tremblay, Paul Walter Hauser, Colin Hanks Synopsis: A boy with an active imagination faces his fears alongside a new friend: Dark. Release: February 2, 2024
Netflix released Orion and the Dark in February, and it opened to generally positive reviews (91% on Rotten Tomatoes). Even though the release seems a bit early, Netflix has proven to be a force when it comes to the Best Animated Feature category. They have garnered five nominations (I Lost My Body, Klaus, Over the Moon, The Sea Beast, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio) and one win (Pinocchio). Along with those five nominations, two additional nominees were distributed by the streaming service (Mitchells vs the Machines and Nimona) I don’t think Orion and the Dark will break into the Oscar five, but you can’t count Netflix or screenwriter Charlie Kaufman out yet.
Spellbound (Netflix)
Director: Vicky Jenson Cast: Rachel Zegler, Nicole Kidman, Javier Bardem Synopsis: Princess Ellian must go on a daring quest to save her parents and kingdom after her parents are transformed into monsters. Release: 2024
Vicky Jenson is directing Spellbound, and if that name isn’t familiar to you, then let me just say she also directed a movie by the name of Shrek. Yes, the director of the first-ever Best Animated Feature winner is now taking her talents to Netflix in a brand new animated musical with a stacked cast of Javier Bardem, Nicole Kidman, and one of the hottest young actresses in Hollywood, Rachel Zegler. This film has been tossed around for years, bouncing from studio to studio, but it looks like Netflix will ultimately reap the rewards that come from it—if it manages to be a good film.
Thelma the Unicorn (Netflix)
Director: Jared Hess, Lynn Wang Cast: Brittany Howard, Will Forte, Jon Heder Synopsis: After Thelma the Pony is covered with glitter and stuck with a carrot, she becomes pop sensation Thelma the Unicorn. Release: May 17, 2024
The trailer for Thelma the Unicorn didn’t wow me in any way, but the movie looks cute enough to be a possibility, and the Netflix name doesn’t hurt. There is also a massive cast attached to it. Will Thelma be unique enough to break into the Oscar 5?
Transformers One (Paramount Animation)
Director: Josh Cooley Cast: Chris Hemsworth, Brian Tyree Henry, Scarlett Johansson Synopsis: The untold origin of Optimus Prime and Megatron. Release: September 20, 2024
Something intriguing about Transformers One is that it has been quite some time since this franchise has returned to its animated roots. However, the big question is, is it too little too late? Transformers as a brand has been all over the place in the years post-Michael Bay, with films like Bumblebee resetting the timeline once again. It is unclear where this franchise is going, and while Transformers One could be a hit and follow a similar path to that of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles last year. Doing yet another origin story is a considerable risk that might not pan out as well awards-wise as it might at the box office.
Ultraman Rising (Netflix)
Director: Shannon Tindle, John Aoshima Cast: Christopher Sean. Rob Fukuzaki, Hiro Nakamura Synopsis: A superstar baseball player returns to Japan to carry the mantle of Ultraman. Release: June 14, 2024
Once again, I am including this because of the Netflix factor, but Ultraman: Rising at least has a level of wonder because it is based on a long-running Japanese character. This film could gain enough worldwide attention to make it into the Oscar lineup, or it could be an interesting Netflix release made for fans.
The Wild Robot (DreamWorks)
Director: Chris Sanders Cast: Lupita Nyong’o, Pedro Pascal, Catherine O’Hara Synopsis: An intelligent robot named Roz is stranded on an abandoned island after a shipwreck. Release: September 27, 2024
DreamWorks has not released an awards contender in quite some time, with its last win coming in 2006 for Wallace and Gromit: the Cure of the Were-Rabbit. Puss in Boots: The Last Wish was a major surprise in 2022, but Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio was just too strong a contender. That being said, the trailer for The Wild Robot looks breathtaking and genuinely feels like something new to DreamWorks. It will have stiff competition, especially from a few sequel projects from major contending studios. Still, if the film is as good as the trailer showed it could be, we could be looking at something extraordinary.
Untitled Wallace and Gromit (Aardman Animations)
Director: Merlin Crossingham, Nick Park Cast: Ben Whitehead Synopsis: Gromit is concerned that Wallace has become over-dependent on his inventions. Release: 2024
Don’t ask me why, but the academy loves what Wallace and Gromit have been doing. Aardman Animations has picked up four nominations, including a win for Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. This will be the first mainline film in the series since 2008, and since both spin-offs of Shaun the Sheep: The Movie and Shaun the Sheep: Farmageddon picked up nominations, I feel pretty confident that the academy enjoys these films.
There are always bound to be surprises throughout the year, but now, this is where I see the race. I think it will be heavy on the sequels and IP-driven projects, but ultimately, The Wild Robot will capture hearts like Wall-E did years ago.
Imagine this: you have read about a great new thriller movie online or heard about a superb comedy movie from your friends overseas. As anyone else, you will be excited to watch this movie soon. However, encountering the “Geo-blocked” notification can kill all the joy.
While it may seem like you have no other way to stream your favourite movie, you do not have to be so pessimistic. Movie enthusiasts know no bounds, especially when it comes to streaming new and exciting releases.
If you are also tired of being geo-blocked, here are some of the most beneficial ways to consider.
Use a Reliable VPN
Using a VPN is one of the most trusted ways for movie enthusiasts to stream their favourite movies that are not available in their country. Reliable VPN providers such as Surfshark make it so much easier for movie enthusiasts to stream the movies they love from wherever they want.
A VPN provides you with secure and encrypted access to the internet. While many people know VPN as a tool to protect their identity online, they often overlook how it also enables individuals to mask their identity and change their region.
Once you disguise the country you are in, you can easily access the company’s streaming profile. This feature provided by VPNs makes it so much easier for you to enjoy your favourite shows from any region without any restrictions.
Download Your Movies
Whether you frequently travel because of work or as a hobby, you may have faced a lot of problems with streaming your favourite movies. Every region can have its own regulations and restrictions that must be adhered to. However, it should not limit you from streaming your favourite content.
If you do not want to lose access to your favourite movies, it is always recommended that you download them before travelling. Even the best streaming services are empathic with the needs of their clients and allow them to download movies and episodes on their devices. This way, you can watch it even if you do not have access to the internet.
Keep Multiple Applications
Just because one streaming platform does not let you stream a movie does not always mean that it is restricted on every platform. Before giving up hope, you can try different applications to stream your favourite TV shows and movies.
If you are travelling abroad, you can look into local streaming services with a range of movies that may interest you. Before you visit the destination, make sure you look for a free trial option to ensure that the service is suitable for your needs.
Consider Something New
While there are several ways for you to watch geo-blocked content, it is impossible to find your favourite movies sometimes. Instead of being sad about what you are missing out on, you can look at the brighter side and explore more content to stream.
Being flexible can do wonders for you. There are brilliant movies on Netflix, Mubi, and Amazon waiting to be discovered by cinephiles.
