Movie Nation

Ready or not, pandemic-pounded movie year or not, here come the 93rd annual Academy Awards, Hollywood’s grasp at trying to return to something like “normal,” and hopefully with enough of a TV audience tuning in to make it worth their trouble.

Unlike the Zoomed and largely-ignored Golden Globes, in other words.

I’ve been looking at 2020 as the ultimate “asterisk year,” to use the sports analogy. There was no March Madness last year, not even a dinged-up and abortive version like the one we just witnessed. The Dodgers finally won a World Series in a shortened season.

And Hollywood spent all year postponing films, pulling releases and trying to figure out a way to get income from their pricey product out of streaming services, in most cases streamers they started up themselves. All the old rules about a movie “must play in a theater” went out the window, and that lingered on into awards season.

Like NCAA football and hoops teams, movies didn’t have a chance to go out, make an impression and make their case in this climate.

So we’ve got “Nomadland” and “Sound of Metal” and “Minari” as contenders, an actor who died (Chadwick Boseman of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”) as a sentimental favorite and Vanessa Kirby (“Pieces of a Woman”) and Andra Day (“The United States vs. Billie Holiday”) as legitimate contenders in movies that almost no one has seen.

Even in a year with theaters mostly closed and heavyweight studios not putting expensive product out in time to compete, this year’s Oscars promise to promote the least popular — in terms of ticket sales and streaming views — contenders and winners in Academy history.
Still, we got something resembling a “normal” awards season build-up to the Oscars, so based on the SAG Awards and Critics Choice Awards, even with the outlier BAFTAs (ALL “Nomadland”) maybe picking the winners will still be a breeze.

Do the betting odds reflect this, this time around?

“Nomadland” is the prohibitive favorite to take Best Picture. Netflix’s “The Trial of the Chicago Seven” is the only film within laughing distance, according to the site. I don’t know. Lots of actors are in “Chicago.” And lots of actors make up the Academy.
Still, as the old Oscars’ saying goes, “Best directors direct best pictures.” Chloe Zhao is just as favored to win Best Director for “Nomadland.”

Cary Mulligan (“Promising Young Woman”), despite not winning the BAFTA last weekend, is favored to run off with Best Actress. With Frances McDormand taking the BAFTA and Viola Davis winning Screen Actors’ Guild honors this is a real horse race.

Boseman is our Best Actor winner. Bet your pink slip on that. A wonderful actor who took a lot of iconic roles — Jackie Robinson, Thurgood Marshall, Black Panther — in his too-short life, this is the way Hollywood will commemorate him, and bless them for doing it. Another great performance by Anthony Hopkins and a brilliant “Sound of Metal” turn by Riz Ahmed won’t produce Oscars for them, alas.

Putting Daniel Kaluuya in the supporting actor category for “Judas and the Black Messiah” will almost certainly pay off with the Oscar. I’d say he ended that discussion with his SAG win and glorious, fun and self-effacing turn as “Saturday Night Live” host a couple of weeks back. The Oscar is just his victory lap.

So that means that an actor who played a real Black Panther and the actor who played the comic book “Black Panther” will both collect Oscars on the same night. Pretty cool, huh?

Best Supporting Actress down to the Youn Yuh-Jung, the grandma from “Minari” and the unladylike young “daughter” (Maria Bakalova) from “Borat Subsequent MovieFilm?” Youn seems likely, based on the SAG win. I think “Minari” and the “Borat” sequel are the two most over-rated contenders in this year’s Oscars. I’d to think Glenn Close, nominated for a disastrously tone-deaf “Hillbilly Elegy,” has a sentimental shot. She’s never won. Amanda Seyfried was the best thing in “Mank.” But they’re the longer shots in that field, along with Olivia Colman (“The Father”), and we’ll never know how close it was if they lose.

“Promising Young Woman” is the best original screenplay favorite, with “Trial of the Chicago Seven” given a shot.

I’m hoping the film I think was the best movie of 2020, “Another Round,” wins Best International Feature.

Best Documentary will go to either “Crip Camp” or “My Octopus Teacher,” sentimental pics with big fanbases.

Best Animated Feature seems like a lock for “Soul,” but anybody who’s seen both knows “Wolfwalkers” is better.

I figure Best Adapted screenplay is anybody’s guess, with an odd amount of love going to the “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm Team” up to now, but I’d like to hope “The Father” has a shot. “Nomadland” is also a contender, and as its the Big Picture favorite, this could be a big night for Chloe Zhao all the way around.

“Sound of Metal” should win Best Sound, “Emma.” is my pick for Best Costume, Best Production Design might be the best shot for “Mank” to win something (“News of the World” was better designed and more challenging, in my opinion), and “Tenet” LINK should have a shot at Best Visual Effects.

In any event, Oscar night is Sunday, April 25, and socially-distanced or not, could be a fruitful evening hoping fans show up for the TV event, and then go out theaters again to see any of these worthies still showing — or re-released — afterward.

A life of toiling the land and hard drinking put the old man on a box in front of a pool hall in Montgomery, Alabama in the 1930s. He’d use pencils and children’s “poster paint” to create art out of scraps of cardboard — the back of a Philip Morris cigarette standee, a window card, soft drink posters and the like.

That was the first time anybody “discovered” Bill Traylor. It wouldn’t be the last.

Montgomery found him and feted him, in the limited ways the Deep South city could manage to acknowledge a Black genius in their midst in the 1930s. New York took notice, but only really grasped his significance decades after his death.

And now editor-turned-director Jeffrey Wolf’s spirited, adventurous documentary, “Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts” brings Traylor’s “crude, primitive” and “simplistic” work back into the spotlight as one of the great, not-quite-forgotten self-taught artists of American history.

Wolf uses actors reciting works by Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, snippets of the blues, interviews with family, art experts and artists such as Radcliffe Bailey, and even a tap dancer to conjure Traylor’s story and the world he lived and created in, much of it concurrent with “The Harlem Renaissance,” just a long long way from Harlem.

The film fills in the blanks of a life that began in late-state slavery (he was born in 1853) and can only be sketched in, thanks to a few family memories, rare legal papers, the recollections of Charles Shannon — the major Montgomery cheerleader for Traylor’s work during the man’s lifetime — and even excerpts from the journal/log-book of the slave owner who owned Traylor’s family before Emancipation.

As the art itself is discussed and dissected (“Chasing Ghosts” is one of his more famous paintings) a portrait emerges of a man who “seemed to live a very small life, doing something big, nurturing a gift” and bringing a lost “world back to vivid life.”

After Traylor aged out of the farm work that had supported him and his family from Reconstruction to The Great Depression, he was homeless for stretches, drawing to supplement his Roosevelt Era “relief” checks. Or he’d stay with his adult children, nailing some of his pictures — spare, stylized representations of his life and African American life in the Cotton Belt — on the wall.

“What child drew these pictures?” one descendent — many are interviewed here — remembers somebody asking during a visit, deeply insulting Traylor’s daughter.

When the last member of Traylor’s family that he’d stayed with in his last years died, much of his work was tossed. The nature of it, painted or drawn on discarded cardboard, led to most of his decades of paintings disappearing, even as the art world was starting to recognize his genius and those works’ value. Only a couple of hundred pieces exist.

Admirers say “He just made the work. He didn’t ‘think’ the work,” which seems faintly condescending. But so-called “primitive” artists always face that sort of labeling.

The soulful, vibrant, expressive art is almost documentary in nature, like great cave paintings put on cardboard. Works like “Possum Hunt” and “Blacksmith Shop” stylize folkways, and “Drinking Bout” encapsulates Traylor’s own struggles with hard liquor — giddy abandon painted in the colors of doom.

He lost a foot and later a leg to diabetes gangrene late in life.

But unmentioned through all this is the treasure hunting aspect of Traylor’s career. As much of his work as has been lost, surely there’s art still extant outside of landfills or disintegration. Flea marketers would be well-served watching “Chasing Ghosts” just to pick up on his distinct style. You just know there’s art out there somewhere, maybe not even regarded as “fine art,” in somebody’s garage sale, waiting to be added to this prolific painter’s legacy.

MPA Rating: unrated

Cast: Radcliffe Bailey, Roberta Smith, Jason Samuels Smith, Sharon Washington and assorted family of the late Bill Traylor

Credits: Directed by Jeffrey Wolf, script by Fred Barron. A Kino Lorber release.

Running time: 1:15

Allow yourself a little cringe time in the opening act of “Jakob’s Wife,” a horror tale shot and set in quaint Canton, Mississippi.

Pay no heed to the fact that every “teen” you meet is up for the “thirtysomething” reboot. Don’t get too wrapped-up in the details of the “troubled marriage” between boorish, snoring, loud-eating and constantly-interrupting Pastor Jakob and his lovely, genteel but “had-enough of this” wife.

Just take note that Anne is played by horror veteran Barbara Crampton and Jakob is the always in-demand Larry Fessenden, and as the expression goes, “WAIT for it.”

Because when then vampire is biting and Anne can’t go out during the day, or even get her teeth whitened by UV light, you’re going to laugh. And Pastor Jakob, attentive to his flock and devoted to his wife, isn’t asking “Can this marriage be saved?” He’s hunting for the Holy Water and, his hammer and stakes of holly.

The key moment to me is when preacher stops worrying about missing members of his flock and has “the talk” with Anne, who is acting…differently. She’s still revolted by the violent, messy way he brushes his teeth, his table manners and such. But she’s taken to punching him in his sleep and he’s interrupted her for the last time.

“Let me FINISH my THOUGHT, G–dammit!”

Pasty, pristine Anne tells him “I feel more alive than I have in years.” But Jakob? He’s filling that Holy Water bottle because he has figured some things out. “Don’t get USED to it.”

The first two acts establish the failed dynamics of the marriage, Anne’s temptation, the arrival of “The Master” (Bonnie Aarons), the first victim (Nyisha Bell) and the situation that gives Anne a big secret to keep from her husband.

But the third act has gloriously icky makeup, over-the-top geysers of blood goofiness, down-and-dirty vampire trash talk laughs.

“I’m gonna TONGUE-f–k a hole in your neck until I puke blood!”

Pastor’s trying to save his wife and his marriage, and keep all this from the local sheriff (Jay DeVon Johnson) as he and Anne dispose of neighbors who’ve been bitten. A little girl watches them enter a house without knocking and threatens blackmail.

“Go inside,” the pastor coos.

“Tell me a SWEAR word, first!”

Crampton turned to the dark side of cinema with “Re-Animator,” and Fessenden’s been an indie darling whose horror turns (“Satan Hates You”) are his standout credits. Watching two pros throw themselves into a low-budget movie shot, on location, in BFE Mississippi isn’t just amusing, it’s inspiring.

Love what you do kids, and you’ll never get old, with or without the vampire’s kiss.

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic, gory violence, profanity, sex and brief nudity

Cast: Barbara Crampton, Larry Fessenden, Nyisha Bell, Jay DeVon Johnson and Bonnie Aarons

Credits: Directed by Travis Stevens, script by Kathy Charles, Mark Steensland and Travis Stevens. An RLJE release.

Running time: 1:38

Dry, deadpan and sober. Not easy to watch, in other words. But on the money and on message. Gervais and Waititi are the two main voices you hear.

A cryptic, allegorical tale with a lot of intellectual ambition, “At Night Comes Wolves” takes on toxic masculinity and the cultish way religion tends to amplify it in an emotionally remote and dramatically flat thriller.

It’s got a message, but sends it in ways that prevent it from ever chilling, thrilling or even roping in the viewer.

It starts with great promise. Leah (Gabi Alves) is married and making all the effort to make it work. Testy, demeaning and bullying Daniel (Jacob Allen Weldy) has some hold on her and a way of never apologizing after every fight he’s started, every insult he’s dropped.

He the sort who says “I’ve tried” to connect with her when we can see he’s done no such thing.

Leah dresses up as Wonder Woman and greets him at the door when he comes home for his birthday. And when she catches him watching porn later, she’s the one expected to say “I’m sorry.”

At long last, she flees, dumps her old life entirely, so it seems. Thus she becomes a sitting duck for the friendly, flirtatious Mary May (Sarah Serio) when she stumbles into a diner. Mary May is all “honeybun” this and “sweetie” that, suggesting Leah join her “in the forest” because “I have someone I want you to meet.”

And then she closes the deal. Who does she to introduce to Leah?

“The Lord our God!”

Vladimir Noel is Davy, a hunter of plants, seeker of herbs and maker of potions, a healer with an intense look Mary May seems to regard as charisma, but which spooks Leah. He offers her something that can “stop all men from acting the way your husband does.” It takes a lot of selling for her to buy into that.

Writer-director TJ Marine weaves in interlocking narratives built on coincidence — Leah’s husband is “known” to her new friends — and never quite explaining what the hell is going on. “Death cult” comes to mind, as the film introduces earlier recruitments, the idea of conversing with aliens and the hold the patriarchy exerts in such organizations. These revelations emerge from a story told in chapters titled “The Future, After the Incident” and “The Past, Origin Story No. 1” and later “No. 2.”

Whispers, wolf howls, crackling crackpot short wave broadcasts lend the entire affair a no-budget dream vibe.

But the suspense of the first scenes rather dissipates as flashback within flashback introduces off-camera violence committed by other characters, other members of this cult. The story sputters along on different threads and doesn’t cohere into anything particularly deep or remotely horrific.

We lose track of Leah’s plight, and even if we’re getting a feel for how unmoored she is in this new environment, when she’s not in the story there’s no one to identify with, nothing to fear and no one to fear for.

Whatever wavelength “At Night Comes Wolves” is operating on, it never tuned in for me.

MPA Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Gabi Alves, Sarah Serio, Jacob Allen Weldy and Vladimir Noel.

Credits: Scripted and directed by TJ Marine. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:17

“Godzilla vs. King Kong” rolled up another $13.4 million from ticket buyers this weekend, crushing the competition again, what little there is of it.

Globally it will clear the $360 million mark Monday. Not. Too. Shabby.

The Lionagate sci fi offering “Voyagers” didn’t even achieve liftoff, $1.35 million in proof that even having Colin Farrell in the first act was never going to make this Tye Sheridan/Lily-Rose Depp vehicle fly.

“Nobody,” “The Unholy” and “Raya” all cleared $2 million.

Figures provided by @BoxOfficePro

In villages in the hill country of extreme northwestern Italy life moves slowly, and can seem to revolve around an elite corps with names like Nina, Birba, Pepe, Leo and Siana, Tina and Jeri, Fiona and Titina.

They are the adored dogs with the million Euro noses, “The Truffle Hunters.”

Sure, their human partners are the ones who finish digging up the fungal morsels that assorted mutts and hounds locate. The old men clean the truffles with care, sell them to intermediaries who either offer them directly to restaurants, or auction their finds off. At 4500 Euros per kilogram and up, those affairs take on a Sotheby’s air.

But the dogs — coddled and nuzzled, rewarded and protected — are the stars of this charming and intimate slice-of-life documentary by Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw.

One fellow and his dogs have celebratory sing-alongs on the ride home from a fruitful day in the gloomy mud of early spring. His ancient Suzuki SUV saw its best days decades before, but the dogs are pampered, in the tub with him at home, cleaning off the day’s work.

Birbi gets a birthday cake. Fiona gets a rub behind the ears and cooing words of thanks. Nina is confided in. Because “If you don’t trust your dogs, you shouldn’t go truffle hunting.”

The codgers bump into each other in the woods and bitch about the “greedy” competitive nature of truffle hunting these days. They have to worry that about some resentful redneck leaving poisoned bait out to kill their dogs and thus gain a perceived edge.

“Why would they do that to the dogs?” one hunter’s companion cries. “They’re innocent!”

“Truffle Hunters” takes in a little of the root (they’re a fungus that grows on tree roots) to table life of this delicacy, the wheeling and dealing of direct sales and an auction. We see them served on this mouth-watering dish or in that one.

But mostly, this is dogs and men in the woods, the old men comparing life with a good dog to marriage, with their canine companions having the edge. And yes, most of the men we meet here aren’t married.

As one 84 year-old veteran of the forests around San Damiano d’Asti endures the pleas of a younger man who begs him, in Italian (with English subtitles), “Can you tell me your secret spots?” and replies “Never, NEVER,” you have to wonder how the filmmakers ever got close enough to these adorable curmudgeons to film the magic as it happens.

My guess? They told them, “Hey, we want to make a movie about your dogs.”

MPA Rating: PG-13 for some strong language (profanity)

Cast: Sergio Cauda, Paolo Stacchini, Carlo Gondola, Pierro Botto, Enrico Crippa

Credits: Directed by Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:24

A near-shooting interrupted by a woman (GW) who knows how to take care of herself triggers a revenge kidnapping and all the mayhem that follows in this June 18 release.

A dinner argument over Middle Eastern politics triggers a Marine vet (Dade Elza) who figures he needs a revolver to settle his dispute with a WEB designer, and shoots him.

The crazed shooter staggers down the street and into an art gallery, taking everyone at an “86 Melrose Ave” photography show opening hostage.

That’s the incredulous premise of this clumsy and atonal thriller, a pokey little flashback-cluttered indie that never remotely gets up a head of steam or amounts to anything.

Writer-director Lili Matta tries to shove a lot into a tepid tale that falls down before it gets up, and staggers into an anti-climax that is dramatic only in the sense that it’s embarrassing to all involved, especially the writer-director.

Travis, the shooter, is a married plumber whose abrupt snap at his wife’s high school pal seems…off. Topping that with a pistol seems insane, as an ex-Marine who works with his hands isn’t likely to figure he needs a gun to snap some tech nerd’s neck like a breadstick.

But “off” is just getting started. The gallery Travis stomps into is run by a gay couple, freshly coked, and features a Lebanese artist (Anastasia Antonia) who left her homeland for “a fresh start for my mind and spirit” away from her “war torn land.”

Naturally, she’s hit on by the only Israeli (Gregory Zarian) to show up for the opening. Her “never happening” rebuffs fall on deaf ears.

There are competing, bickering critics (amateurishly-played) there, and a “collector” for the already-spoken-for gallery owner (Richard Sabine) to flirt with, and a couple of others, all ordered “On the FLOOR” when our active shooter shows up.

As the cops lay siege, Travis fiddles with his pistol and stops and berates each customer in turn, they flash back to a son’s suicide, a therapy session, a traumatic childhood in Lebanon, a heated argument with a parent, and so on.

Travis? He flashes back to his military service, laying out the cause of his PTSD.

The combat flashback is briefly impressive, then hysterically over-the-top. None of the others impress in the least, thanks to unpolished acting and trite dialogue.

There are cringe-worthy flashes of English-as-a-Second-Language screenwriting (Matta is Lebanese-American herself) that sound like blown lines that no one corrected. “Inhabitated?”

And then the story staggers into the most ridiculous police interrogation ever filmed, a pointless third act that one hesitates to label an anti-climax, because that implies there is an actual climax.

There isn’t.

MPA Rating: unrated, bloody violence

Cast: Dade Elza, Anastasia Antonio, Gregory Zarian, Langston Fishburne.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Lili Matta. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:24

“Giants Being Lonely” is a dreamy, downbeat portrait of small town Southern teens, an impressionistic portrait of the idea that you never know what somebody’s dealing with.

Although it borrows, in the most overt ways, plot points from “The Last Picture Show” and “Hoosiers,” it paints an engrossing portrait of kids being kids — aimless, reckless and focused on “the now” even with the weight of the world on them.

Bobby (Jack Irv) is the handsome, curly-locked star pitcher of the Giants, his high school team. Everybody in this corner of North Carolina knows him and seems to just adore him. Bobby gets by on natural ability and unaffected charm. He has the confidence of being celebrated and the exhibitionism of toned and fit youth. Skinny dipping with the gang isn’t enough. He’s got to do a nude dive off the nearest bridge, girls trying not to gawk as he does.

But we see the loner in him, his walks along the tracks, sleeping outside in the gazebo in the park, sneaking into a junkyard to steal car parts to resell. We watch him put his drunken, broken father to bed on the couch of their double-wide.

Caroline (Lily Gavin) wears her “hottest girl in school” label with a certain reluctance. She has her posse, and a pretty but embittered divorced mom who rides her constantly. She’s sexually active, searching for some connection, some affection that’s missing in her life.

Adam (Ben Irving) has it worst of all. He’s another pitcher on the baseball team, but not the star. He’s shy and sensitive. And he’s the coach’s son. Coach (Gabe Fazio) is the first angry face we see in “Giants,” the first profane, bellowing voice we hear, chewing out his “privileged little bastard pipsqueak” team like a redneck who takes the wrong messages from watching John Oliver.

Coach is the sort of rural Southerner who stuffs his Glock in his pants before going out, even to practice, who lets off steam at the firing range and who relentlessly bullies his team, his fragile, sad wife (Amalia Culp) and his kid.

“Giants” isn’t a movie with a big “inciting incident” that prompts everything that happens in the third act. Director Patterson shoots for a dread that sticks to the viewer’s mind as we watch these kids drift toward something or somethings that will eventually go off the rails for them.

Baseball scouts are noticing Bobby. But like the walking cliche that he is, he can shrug that off.

Caroline gets asked to the prom, something that happens shockingly close to the date for “the hottest girl in school.”

And Adam is just about ready to rebel, to start demanding what he wants out of life from parents who either won’t or can’t consider that, because they never have.

This indie outing washes over you in ways that make its many dissonant notes recede into the background. The performances are understated, internalized, even the characters that we know are going to blow up at some point.

Bobby’s Dad looks more like a granddad, and the best way to calm him down is “put the record on.” Dad’s into Lou Reed.

The Coach seems to dote on his wife and is definitely abusing his son. But before we get too comfortable in a stereotype, he’s pushing a Grand Tour of Europe vacation at them, which his boy isn’t having.

“I’m going to prom!”

Adam asking Caroline to prom, in front of all her friends, is novel. So much for bashful. She doesn’t give away any idea that she’s smitten. He’s just the next guy who might get her away from her mother for a bit.

That makes “Giants” feel true to its sense of place at times, but more true to what outsider screenwriters (rarely high school jocks), recycling tropes from other coming-of-age dramas, understand it to be.

That said, the obvious artifice doesn’t change the film’s essential adolescent truth. High school is all about “being lonely.”

MPA Rating: unrated, violence, sex, profanity

Cast: Jack Irv, Lily Gavin, Gabe Fazio, Ben Irving and Amalia Culp.

Credits: Directed by Grear Patterson, script by Grear Patterson and Sam Stillman. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:18