BEST NOMINATED FILM? DON’T EXPECT OSCAR TO REWARD IT

Fernanda Torres, star of I'm Still Here

By Dominique Paul Noth

Of the 10 films nominated for best film Oscar, the last one to open in Milwaukee in February turns out to be the champion -- viscerally, in acting artistry and in importance to the world’s current political environment.

Yet I don’t expect I’m Still Here to win best film, or even best international film for which it is also nominated, though it might win best actress for Fernanda Torres, who is the center of the movie as Eunice Paiva, the wife striving to get news about her imprisoned husband.

In Brazil, Torres is an acting star in film, theater and TV, second only in fame to her 96-year-old mother, who also appears in the film as old Eunice suffering from Alzheimer’s.

The film is Brazilian, in Portuguese with English subtitles, and even though L.A. viewings are much better than here, it may not even have gotten full viewership from Oscar’s 10,000 voting members. It has not advertised its thriller elements. There are many Oscar-named films to see even beyond the 10 nominated. 

It is based on a true story about the disappearance during the military dictatorship in the 1970s of former legislator Rubens Paiva, based partly on the memoir of his son, Marcelo, about 11 when Rubens was taken away from his family by military men in plain clothes.

The film is deliberately playing on our emotions. We see Rubens and his loving family first, playing sports on the Rio de Janeiro beach, teasing each other, eating dinner with only a few signs of the emerging trouble, such as the passing military trucks of the right-wing dictatorship that has swept Brazil, growing from the mid-19060s into the 1970s. 

Rubens, played warmly by actor Selton Mello, is the vibrant father, a solid citizen who may be helping expatriates on the side. He is carted away, leaving four daughters, his only son Marcelo, a housekeeper and mainly his wife, Eunice. Her affluent middle-class home is further invaded by these mysterious men, and she is driven to an unknown place, interrogated again and again before being freed after days in solitary confinement because of lack of evidence.

As embodied by Torres, Eunice is stoic in the face of pain, dangerously inquisitive about her absent husband, and a tigress protecting her children, who even in their teens are slapped by her, rather than told what has happened to their father.

She keeps her family together and moves to another city, secretly convinced he has been killed.

 The movie also shows how it took 25 more years for the Brazilian government to reveal a death certificate for her husband, who was murdered by the dictatorship. In the meantime, she has become a noted civil rights advocate.

The movie also moves briefly ahead into the 21st century – it’s best for viewers to discover the details but the purpose is to lock in the tenacity necessary for this family – and by implication ours -- to survive government control, and maybe even triumph.

Director Walter Salles, distinguished in Brazil and clearly a veteran of cinema storytelling (he also directed Torres’ mother, Fernanda Montenegro,  to her best actress Oscar nomination in 1999 for the film Central Station)  makes us feel and dread for this family in those early years, slyly reminding us how the pain inflicted on one affluent family was barely noticed by neighbors -- until it comes for  them. 

As Eunice (from her forties into her sixties). Torres is strong enough to confront the men watching the family from their parked car and expert at the secret ways she must use to sell property, gain money and retain family control.

Salles is masterful in showing how a busy house becomes an empty one, how doorways lead Eunice from one shock to another. Another technique, to suddenly switch to family videos in the middle of a pleasant realistic memory, is forecasting the finale when the actual photos of the Paiva family remind viewers that this is a true story.

Salles has cast the growing family for physical familiarity as well as acting appeal, so that the grownups remind us of the children we want to protect.  He is not a showy film-maker. He moves us through tried and true cinematic techniques such as editing, found music and realism, even more impressive in this age of experimentation. 

Ironically, I’m Still Here is one of three films with thriller aspects nominated for best international film. The German entry, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, is about a threaten Iranian judge. Another “best international” – this one from France -- is also nominated for best overall film: Emilia Perez, whose actress Karla Sofía Gascón is also nominated as is Torres for best film actress.  (A sideshow social media dispute about whether supporters of Torres and Gascon have bad-mouthed each other may have somewhat unfairly taken both out of the best actress discussion.)

Torres is also not showy but gripping in every scene, whether washing the dirt of prison from her body, jousting with her absent husband’s friends to discover what they know, whether taking her children for ice cream or sternly warning them to be quiet.

I watched this film on my 83rd birthday, and that is not a stray observation. My age may relate to my praise for the film.  I think I’m Still Here will have meaning for all ages but particularly true for many of us who lived through the events.

I was 29 when Rubens Paiva was taken.  Since I was active in a newsroom, I knew something of what was happening – not just in Brazil, but in Chile and Argentina. Because there were also left-wing agitations there (considered Communist in those days), the US government under LBJ and then Nixon was supportive of the right-wing military dictators in all those countries. You could argue that the US leaders didn’t know the extent of the cruel disappearances, but even now that is a difficult defense.  The media was also guilty of keeping too quiet.

I was working for The Milwaukee Journal, where my late brother was the national international editor, more conservative than I but angry that he couldn’t get more stories into the newspaper about what was happening in South America.

Things changed by the 1990s, but I’m Still Here reminds us of how easily restrictive things can happen to the leadership in a supposedly comfortable society.  The film is a testament to the tenacity necessary for families to survive those tragedies. Whether Oscar pays attention or not, movie audiences should. 

About the author: Noth has been a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic as well as editor in charge of its arts and entertainment staff. 

He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives still at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly. 

A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee. 

WICKED PART 1 A LONG FLIGHT OF COLORFUL FANCY

 

Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande in Wicked Part 1

By Dominique Paul Noth

That famous revolving globe – Universal’s opening logo – spun green. The closing five minutes of this 260-minutes movie were packed screen after screen with the real heroes of the new Munchkin universe -- technicians, designers, costumers, animal pretenders, tech experts, audio mixers, production crews, special effects masters and three screens worth of tireless dancers, all  extra busy in this land of Oz.

Courtesy of Covid and other delays, Wicked Part 1 represents years of accomplished production, including fits and starts. And yes, this is just the Broadway musical’s first act, somewhat reinvented for the expansive possibilities of screen magic and the old studio insistence on character development. Part two, tentatively titled Wicked: for Good, is scheduled for release November of 2025.

The break into two for what theater audiences gulped in one sitting obviously lengthens this meditation on what happened before and after Dorothy got her red shoes.

But the movie doesn’t tread on MGM’s 1939 commercial touches (yellow brick road, squeaky voices, famous songs) except as obvious inspiration.  Using Frank Baum’s original stories – and also throwing most of them into the trash bin – Wicked Part 1 carves its own roads. That and invention make the break into two films emotionally right, even if a bit like milking the golden cow, since part one is a box office success.

Now the first part can focus on the positive aspects of Elphaba and why she has erroneously gone down in (fictional) history as the Wicked Witch of the West. The movie concentrates on Elphaba from troubled childhood. Her sorcery gifts grow out of anger over how her green skin is treated. She moves through Shiz (the University -- I love the name) as she learns to protect herself from the crooked society of Oz.

On Oscar night March 2, expect the film to clean up in the technical categories – if there is any justice in the movie industry. Director Jon M. Chu   (who demonstrated technical mastery in Crazy Rich Asians) should not be dismissed as a mere technician for his command of the color palette, the spinning choreography, the juggling of sets and actors and the studied  attention to emotional crescendos. It took artistic sensibility to control all this, and the length of the movie may be a bit much, but you can’t say it wasn’t purposeful.  Much of the movie is just enjoying how well the money was spent – and yes, that is partly a criticism.

Within the film there is also a powerful performance by Cynthia Erivo, not only making us feel for her sadness, her lip-clenched anger and her wistful miles behind her dusky green (her skin was named Cynthis Green by the studio specialists to separate it from the brighter and subtler shades of green that are part of the fantastic kaleidoscope palette).  But Erivo is also a great singer, not just in the big notes but in the quieter separation and control she brings to the gentler passages. 

Movie singing is always suspect because of all the lip-sync tricks that can be pulled, but this is a distinctive voice backed by a distinctive mind, so quite all right for Oscar to nominate her for best actress.

As Glinda, who becomes a better person when she drops a vowel from her Galinda name, Ariana Grande is up for a best supporting actress Oscar.  But the film vignettes by the most famous Broadway stars, Kristin Chenoweth and Idina Menzel, remind everyone in the audience that the hair-tossing blonde is not only a traditional Hollywood trope but that it was Chenoweth who established that impish selfish nastiness (with a bigger voice) that Grande is only echoing. Erivo is more original as Elphaba (no offense to Menzel who did impossible things onstage while flying looks normal on the big screen).

The musical had two giant hit songs -- “Popular” and “Defying Gravity” -- but song composer Stephen Schwarz has produced an engaging back-set of tunes to move the story along and give director Chu plenty of places to expand.  He elongates not only the fight scenes between Elphaba and the shallow Galinda, but the hand-arching  dance movement that captures the moment the two become friends.

Then there is “Dancing Through Life.”  It has little story purpose but it spins wheels of dancers and likeable co-star Jonathan Daily through loopy-doops in one of the film’s extended (maybe too extended) sequences.

The film also features Michelle Yeoh as Madame Morrible, the Shiz Dean of Sorcery, and Jeff Goldblum as the Wizard – quality personalities who may do something more meaningful in part two.  Smoothly effective as a voice actor for the talking goat professor is Peter Dinklage.

The entire concept makes the popular musical look deeper than just hit songs, and I think even children will seize on this. Its talking animals threatened with extinction and its reversal of our expectation about the school matron and the famous wizard raise important questions about judging by appearance, what evil really is and what standing up for your beliefs entails. Director Chu plays well with too many toys, but he keeps the meaning lurking, and that is no small accomplishment.

About the author: Noth has been a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic as well as editor in charge of its arts and entertainment staff. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives still at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly. A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee. 

DYLAN’S METEORIC RISE EVEN MORE METEORIC IN FINE ‘COMPLETE UNKNOWN’

Elle Fanning and Timothee Chalomet in A Complete Unknown

 By Dominique Paul Noth

While it tracks closely to events in Bob Dylan’s life from when he arrived in New York in 1961 until he turned to electric guitars four years later at a famous rowdy concert at the Newport Jazz Festival, A Complete Unknown is lovable mythology.

This was a prolific period for Dylan, who remains a vital force in 2025.  Composers  have bursts of creativity and this was one, somewhat compressed for filmic purposes -- “Blowing in the Wind,” “Like a Rolling Stone," "It's All Over, Baby Blue,"  “Don’t Think Twice.” 

Dylan filled notebooks with his ideas. The film may speed the time frame, but it brings  alive song after song from these early years  – along with the lovers and hangers on. Mythology or not, it is an unassailable tribute to his music and his perverse individuality.

 Whether he cooperated or not, whether he told the filmmakers he had no trouble with flat-out invention, they freely analyzed his personality and impact to tell the story. Legends as well as truth affect the editing, the visual choices, the songs chosen and other methods by which we are manipulated.

This movie is thoroughly enjoyable, even  romantic and expertly engineered by director James Mangold. No ground-breaking but solid film-making with a few hiccups, even making us think real rather than computer generated those far-away rows at outdoor concerts.

It is also authentic in its feeling for the times, in the dress and storefronts in the Greenwich Village of the early 1960s.  I can testify to that with authority, since I spent the same years right there as a folk singer performer in group sessions at the clubs and cafes of the era.

This is also the best work I have seen from Timothée Chalamet, star of another Oscar-nominated film, Dune: Part 2, and probably the hottest leading man right now in movieland.  Not only does  he become a believable Dylan imitator on guitar and harmonica, he sings much like Dylan, as he has proven on NBC’s “SNL.”

Interestingly, he has mastered the mumbled wry speech, inscrutable behavior and constant smoking of the real Dylan.   But in singing, his enunciation is as clear as Frank Sinatra’s – something not always true about Dylan even though I love his lyrics. Director Mangold can also not resist thrusting the famous Chalamet face  before the camera in scenes where we think of the actor first rather than Dylan.

The troubadour’s fan base is no longer as cleanly divided between his acoustic guitar time and electric surge but the acoustic civil rights anthem, “The Times They Are A-Changing,” is a big part of the movie.  It may not have galvanized as rapidly as the movie portrays (with audience singing it at first hearing) but it galvanized nonetheless.  (If there still is a split in the public over  his now standard power electronics, it is mainly about being able to hear the lyrics at his concerts.) 

Much of the movie is about camaraderie and duets among musicians, some of it true, some invented, including a moment when good friend Johnny Cash hands Dylan his acoustic guitar. There are great re-creations of Dylan harmonizing with Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro, Oscar nominated for best supporting actress, who has her own fine non-Baez voice and is appealing as she is attracted to and spars with Dylan).

Much of the script is fixated on the romantic triangle involving Elle Fanning as the fictionally created Sylvie Russo (Dylan’s now deceased girlfriend and cover album companion was the closely named Suze Rotolo). Fanning communicates the wistful and political effect the character has on Dylan, even as the director chooses to have her well up with tears each time she sees Dylan perform with Baez.

The prominent sub-protagonist is Pete Seeger, and the “Wimoweh” sequence confirms how brilliantly Ed Norton has captured the facial looks, walking style, singalong appeal and even the banjo picking of the late Seeger, who played a key role in Dylan’s explosion on the folk scene. Norton also has a best supporting actor nomination.

Norton as Seeger also serves as the older generation folk purist finger-wagging at Dylan, again a slightly exaggerated version for dramatic purposes.  Seeger himself in interviews denied that he took an ax to Dylan’s electric guitar cables.  The movie compromises on the legend by showing him eying the ax and being stopped by his wife.

Dylan may not have exploded quite so amazingly on the folk scene, but within two years his ability to write modern songs in the vein of folk music indeed made him a force – the same force that makes him the only songwriter to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. 

 You don’t have to love Bob Dylan to enjoy this film, though it sure helps – as long as Dylan purists don’t nitpick everything. Mangold has concocted events from his life to convey the original cultural sensation. In terms of best actor choice, Oscar will have a tough time choosing between Chalamet and Adrien Brody in The Brutalist. 

About the author: Noth has been a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic as well as editor in charge of its arts and entertainment staff.  He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives still at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly.  A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee. 

‘ANORA’ NICE VEHICLE FOR ACTRESS BUT NOT FOR OSCAR

Mikey Madison enjoying new star status at the Golden Globes (Getty Images)

By Dominique Paul Noth

One of the most award-winning films of 2024 – now getting both an Oscar best film nod and best actress nod – is assuredly high-energy and familiar in idea, if not in name -- eye-catching actors in a romantic bedroom romp that turns into a Keystone Kops chase drama.

 It actually opened in November but has a mixed record in theater screen time.

It’s a Cinderella tale of wealth-flouting youth and the working stiffs they allow into their privileged atmosphere of raunchy sex, sugar candy, fancy parties and frank behavior. The twist is how much we want to care for the central hottie, who seems in control at first but is emotionally whipsawed by this bullying world.

If this was simply being offered as a star-making vehicle for actress Mikey Madison, with her expressive face and courtesan appeal, I would understand. If it was to simply create, as many of director Sean Baker’s films do, empathy and understanding for sex workers in our topsy-turvy world, I also say yes.

But a best picture Oscar for Anora? Not from me. 

I think much of the positive reaction to Anora is how it legitimizes the methods of the adult movie to explore the romantic sex comedy genre. It doesn’t break new cinematic ground, but it is expert updating old-fashioned methods. Any coyness in depicting Julia Roberts’ actual livelihood in “Pretty Woman” (1990) has vanished. 

The film turns randy spunkiness into a virtue. It lets us fume at how married rich grownups interfere with the excesses of youth. But even though the manners of the wealthy are buffoonish and overbearing, we the audience are also being asked to embrace the shallow.

Anora, who prefers to be known as Annie (Ani), is a lap dancer (and more) at a New York club loaded with girls for hire and riddled with locked doors and peep rooms, where she makes a lot of money. Since she speaks some Russian, she is invited to entertain Ivan, who acts 15 but is actually 21.

Ivan is the wayward son of a rich Russian oligarch. Even while sexually smitten, he incessantly plays video games, vapes, snorts drugs and drinks. But he also takes Ani to Las Vegas to marry her.

At which point the outraged family steps in, led by an American-based fixer (a cussing Armenian priest) and his two thugs. They all look and act like the Russian Mafia but are mainly stumblebums. Confronted with his childish behavior, Ivan runs off to get intoxicated, leaving Ani to defend the marriage and endure the thugs (one of whom, played nicely by Yura Borisov, begins to feel affection – what red-blooded man wouldn’t).

This is where the film shifts the appeal of Ani from voyeurism to a put-upon woman speaking her mind to a cruel world. As if we hadn’t seen this coming.

I’m fine with the film elevating Mikey Madison.  A lot of films are fantasies. But this one is playing hard and loose with a real world. 

About the author: Noth has been a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic as well as editor in charge of its arts and entertainment staff. 

He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives still at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly. 

A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee. 

WELL WORTH DWELLING INSIDE ‘THE BRUTALIST’

A24 image -- Adrien Brody and Guy Pearce in The Brutalisst

By Dominique Paul Noth

Expanding the Oscar “best” list to 10 nominated films has changed forever the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and its nearly 10,000 voting members.

Oscar – now scheduled March 2 -- is trying to make sure that list now incorporates box office values along with the industry view of top meaningful pictures – which means that this year Oscar announced a range of genre films as well as independent features, including some not yet seen in Milwaukee. 

In this environment, there seems to be growing admiration for The Brutalist, which clearly has the desire of Oscars’ past – that sense of a sweeping epic. It is a gripping compilation of acting values and cinematic techniques, only available for now in movie theaters.

You will hear a lot about the intense naturalism and subtle reactions of Adren Brody (a leading nominee for best actor Oscar) but the acting scenes are rapidly interwoven with purposeful sequences where the visual and audio expertise take over: 

Cameras speeding down roads and train tracks much as new arrivals in this country experienced;  immigrants packed into ships seeing the Statue of Liberty upside down; male newcomers after World War II relieving themselves at brothels and street corners; blocks upon blocks of  landscapes put together in rapid editing as the film moves from Pennsylvania to Italian quarries;  travelogs in the style of old Hollywood short subjects; examples of Brutalism architecture exposed as interwoven wires (imagine a LEGO display without wood or plastic) -- and a brilliant sound background.  

Here composer Daniel Blumberg’s lush European orchestral eye-openers and pounding chords alternate with vintage tracks (Dinah Shore singing “Buttons and Bows,” a JFK interview in a whispering background) for events centered  1947 to 1961, plus an epilog in 1980.  

The soundscape serves a dynamic role as envisioned by director Brady Corbet, also co-author and producer, and one of my favorite nominees for best director. (This year is notable for best directors who are Oscar choices for the first time.) 

Corbet, 36, is new to most filmgoers but is truly a Hollywood baby, having started as a child actor and voice-over actor before moving into TV and film acting roles and then into producing-directing.  The result is an astonishing and intellectual command of the cinematic universe, plus inventing a story that is based on history but is pure imagination.

The lead character is not a historic person but is based on many Brutalist architects put together and by many immigrant experiences.

In promotional material – including pretending there is a Laszlos Toth-designed Margaret Van Buren Center for Creation and Activity -- Corbet has provided a compelling cover ethic (including postcards) to make the story feel real. Brutalism in architect was a serious movement associated with post-war  society if you count both world wars.  Corbet largely invents the pretense that Toth’s Brutalist designs – heavy on concrete building blocks and geometric exactitude -- were inspired by German concentration camps.

There are handouts to the audience (at least in the 70-millimeter showings, blown up from the 35 mm the film was shot in, plus a deliberate 1950s VistaVision screen size to further deepen Corbet’s idea).

Brody plays Laszlo Toth, a celebrated architect from the Bauhaus movement who survives a Buchenwald concentration camp, leaving his wife behind. An incessant smoker and drug addict (partly for physical pain), he is one of the flood of refugees after WWII forced to work as a laborer or draftsman.

He relies on relatives who know his stature and take advantage of it – relatives who have Americanized their names and cheapened their Jewish past to fit in.  So they are quick to renounce him and his hooked nose when a volatile rich American (the cleverly named Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr.) accuses him of fraud.

Brody’s performance is compellingly natural – an intellectually stubborn, sarcastic and believable modernist who stands up for his training yet is also drawn to the power of money despite his fury and disappointment. He doesn’t regard visiting prostitutes as negating his love of family. Brody’s performance, seen often in facial closeups even during sexual activity, is serious and believable. (Need I point out there are adult themes, even sexually disturbing ones.)

At the story unfolds, the same rich American who scorned him re-emerges contrite and eager for Toth to build a shrine to his late mother. Van Buren is a dominant control freak attempting to talk to Toth as an intellectual equal, recognizing he will get great press by commissioning serious architecture.

This villain role has won a best supporting actor nomination for Guy Pearce, who is not bad though I confess I longed to see what the original acting name chosen, Mark Rylance, would have done with the part. 

The story depends on our understanding that Van Buren is the ultimate ugly American, whose violent male rape of Toth triggers much of the finale (by this point we understand the moral implications and hardly need the rape to deepen our understanding, though it is nice that the film lets Van Buren disappear off screen as anger rings around him).  

Felicity Jones emerges halfway through the film as Toth’s wife, crippled by years of famine. It is fine performance – also Oscar nominated -- relying on intellectual depth as well as humane support of her husband.  The conclusion is something we understand in its moral meaning while we may not buy all the events and techniques in its unfolding. 

But this is a brilliant film despite my reservations, even though divided into somewhat fancy sounding chapters:   Overture, The Enigma of Arrival, The Hard Core of Beauty and Epilogue: The First Architecture Biennale. 

You may be daunted hearing of its three-hour 45-minute length plus a 20-minute intermission (with a time clock on the screen to make us look hard at the family portrait before us). I would have liked the intermission about an hour later, when I found the film stretching a bit, but the placement is just right for the concept.

The length and bustle onscreen will not interfere with the audience’s thinking while absorbing.  The film indirectly made me contemplate what the recent L.A. wildfires revealed about the fleeting value of most American wealth and architecture – a big point in the film.

Van Buren’s fascination with his own worth makes us look again at our current view of wealthy Americans and corporate bullies.  The painful efforts at human connection make us think back at what really creates our motives and our goals. 

It is a further effort by Corbet to make us aware we are on a journey to understanding American society as well as how the past help shape it. It is a necessary rather than a brutal cultural lesson.

About the author: Noth has been a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic as well as editor in charge of its arts and entertainment staff. 

He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives still at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly. 

A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee. 

GROTESQUE EXPLAINS THE PRESENCE OF THE SUBSTANCE ON BEST OSCAR LIST

Demi Moore, midway through The Substance

By Dominique Paul Noth

The current publicity blitz  in favor of Demi Moore is not totally accurate. Though best known since the 1980s as movie eye candy and making more headline for her liaisons with Bruce Willis and Ashton Kutchner than for her filmic range,  she did attempt to deepen her acting chops in “G.I. Jane,” “A Few Good Men” and “Ghost,“ reportedly taking home as much as $11 million a film outing.  She emerged still thought of as eye candy with smooth line readings, not an actress worthy of Meryl Streep type accolades.

The current huzzahs are for her willingness in her 60s to look both beautiful and as deformed as the ugliest witch in literature.  This has helped The Substance win a surprise nomination for best film Oscar with Moore also earning a best actress nomination, bolstered by her surprise win in that category at the Golden Globes.

Oscar notably chose her rather than Nicole Kidman in Babygirl, Pamela Anderson in The Last Showgirl (yes, a similar plot device in a less honored film about an aging sex symbol) and Angelina Jolie as Maria, which I reviewed at http://urbanmilwaukee.com/2024/12/29/movies-maria-is-a-star-vehicle-for-angelina-jolie/

Also nominated as the only woman among the five best Oscar directors is European cinematic specialist Coralie Fargeat, while (in not-a- surprise) the film is also up for its main strength, a best makeup and hair-styling Oscar. (The film is available for TV streaming customers and because of the nominations should be making a resurgence at Milwaukee movie theaters.)

The shocker comes when you try to define The Substance.  At its base it is a sci-fi film, if we broaden the definition of sci-fi to include a scientific breakthrough that doesn’t exist.  By this definition, “The Man in the White Suit” – a 1951 Ealing Studios satire starring Alec Guiness – is sci-fi, since a chemist invents an ever-enduring thread, which up-ends the British labor system. Similarly, The Substance attacks society’s fixation on the alluring young body by inventing a series of tubes, pumps and plastics that allow an aging person to create, out of their own body, a younger more beauteous replacement, with each partner alternating weeks in charge.

Now on the one hand this is intended as deep social criticism of our cosmetic fixation on youth and beauty, with Dennis Quaid in a delightful over-the-top performance as a studio boss blowing smoke and chewing shrimps right into the audience face as he rhapsodizes about the ratings appeal of female beauty.  On the other hand, the film is no more illuminating about the scientific process than an animation fantasy.

Moore is the amusingly named Elisabeth Sparkle. Even at 50 (in the film) she uses her lithe body in Jane Fonda type gym classes to retain her nubile-inspired fame. (You get the feeling that, in the real world, the current media is the leading perpetrator of the body fixation issue, since their news stories are in awe that Moore in her 60s can still look so good in a gym suit playing 50.)

Sparkle senses her grip on public adulation is waning and decides on The Substance process, which involves opening her backbone in bloody cinematography to eject a younger version of herself – the talented actress Margaret Qualley, who becomes the flirty new eye candy. Despite their need to cooperate, the young is trying to get rid of the old and vice versa.

Margaret Qualley midway through the film.

So now the film becomes what it really is – a horror movie, more specifically a body horror movie where director Fargeat gets to expertly employ a range of prosthetics and makeup effects to create four-eyed blobs who crawl on the floor, bodies stretched under their skin by food the other one has eaten in fat-intended rage and deformed limbs warring with youthful limbs, while a never seen control voice warns the two women they are risking disaster.

That is an understatement. Now I’ve been hanging out with a young crowd that loves horror movies and rattles off the shrieks and scares in many movies I have yet to see, since I went through that horror craze decades ago.

Frankly I think this one is more likely to inspire puking among this younger crowd – or laughter rather than reverence.

Fargeat, a European expert in this genre, has conceived a story that mixes soft-porn voyeurism (what the trade calls “a T and A show” for tits and asses) with genuine repulsive wreckage of the human form, so that Moore smears her mouth and converts her glowing hair into ragged gray strands while Qualley wonders over the turkey leg that  pulsates inside her anus.

 From surgical stitches to bloody stumps, the full range of Hollywood special effects are employed, though amusingly at key moments of the body transformations Fargeat relies on the old 2001: A Space Odyssey light show trickery of speeding objects.

As giving over as Moore and Qualley are to having their naked bodies – with and without realistic prosthetics --  exposed to the camera and having their ugliest behavior  live side by side with their physical appeal, we the audience are mostly watching the effects dispassionately, recognizing that nothing is too intimate for this moviemaker. And nothing is actually real.

Moore may deserve some applause for going over to the darkest side of her image. Qualley and Quaid also have fun acting moments.  But this film didn’t deserve its Golden Globe honors or anything from the Oscars, except maybe makeup.  But it sure knows how to play the audience for both indulging and criticizing our society’s emphasis on youth.

About the author: Noth has been a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic as well as editor in charge of its arts and entertainment staff. 

He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives still at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly. 

A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee. 

 

YOU MAY NOT BELIEVE EMILIA PEREZ BUT YOU WILL BELIEVE ITS FILM MAGIC

Karla Sofía Gascón as Emilia Perez

By Dominique Paul Noth

In January on a hunch I used my Netflix account to check out Emilia Perez, which at that point had gotten some of the oddest film reviews in my memory. 

I’m glad I did and can now recommend it as one of the most provocative and different movies of 2024, truly a visionary attempt worth thinking about. It’s still a hard sell but bear with me.

I was  happy to see it on the Oscar list of best films and even more pleased that its openly trans actress, Karla Sofía Gascón, is rightly nominated for best actress.

I doubt if Oscar voters will have the strength to throw aside 90 years of tradition and vote a transvestite as best actress – not actor – though the ascendance of Trump may give voters enough rebellious instinct to do so. 

 But it is a phenomenal acting job, though I don’t think the transition is completely believable.  From an acting standpoint,  she has to sing in two vocal ranges and be a frightening gold-tooth threat (the Marlon Brando voice) before she becomes Emilia Perez, the more soft-hearted lovable aunt of her own children and female confidante of her one-time wife.

Gascon as Manitas

It is an extraordinary thrust of an idea that makes no sense given what we know about machismo Mexican drug lords. It ends up as a philosophical debate for the audience. But this is the power of film visionaries who can take us on a ride of vivid imagination that is hard to justify when we return to the real world.

Even more remarkable, French director Jacques Audiard (who films almost entirely in Europe) initially conceived as Emilia Perez as a modernized opera.  The characters sing their feelings in group numbers interwoven with strong dialog acting. The mere juxtaposition of such diverse characters carries its own fascination.  Who will discover the real Emilia Perez or is his transition into a her carry enough justification for the changes the character goes through?

The story unfolds not just in song but in sinewy dance numbers and nimble camera work, so intensive and successful that Audiard does have a legitimate chance of winning the best director Oscar. The music is hardly hummable but it is transfixing in its rhythms and thrusts.

With his command of camera, acting movement, editing and musical insight Audiard has more in common with Fellini and Bunuel than with Spielberg or Scorsese.

The plot revolves initially around Zoe Saldano (nominated as best supporting actress for a role that actually carries much of the film).  She portrays a smart Mexican lawyer who sings her dismay at the way the court system works and then agrees with great fear and threats to her life to represent Manitas, the most ferocious drug lord the Mexican cartels had ever seen.

He wants to disappear and come back as a woman. (Yup, the story is hard to believe, but see it, it almost makes sense in opera terms – we just have a problem accepting  “La Traviata “ agonies in a modernistic drug-murdering way.) 

How his money and authority can survive when he convinces authorities he is dead and returns as a woman – well, no wonder the legions of victims of Mexican drug cartels find the whole idea hard to accept.  And yet, for much of the hypnotic movie, we go along. We even cheer for Emilia's desire to rescue families torn about by the drug wars.

After years of surgery and domestic transformation from a frighteningly macho drug lord into a smiling Emilia Perez, the story returns to Saldano  -- the only character who knows who Emilia really is.  Now as a friend she  concocts a new life disguising the  past from Manitas’ wife and children.

 The wife is played and sung by Selena Gomez (who strangely is not Oscar  nominated for anything yet is well known to audiences for things like the TV series Only Murders in the Building). She  is restless without a man, not recognizing the roots of Emilia.  She rekindles an illicit affair -- and suddenly Emilia, who has led efforts to reunite families who lost children to the drug cartels he once ran, reverts to Manitas rage, threatening as a rich aunt to take the children.  His wife turns as nasty  and limb-chopping as he once did and the story enters into truly operatic-size bloody tragedy.

Actress Gascón almost brings off this remarkable transformation – I would argue that almost anything an actor could do she employs, first to scare us as the ferocious Mexican drug lord and then melt after a sex change into the lovable aunt who tries to help those hurt by drug lords. But will this be enough for Oscar voters?  The concept is not wholly realized, but few of her competitors faced such challenges.

There is a message here from the director that carries us along through a story difficult to accept on a realistic level but always fascinating on a humanistic level.  I don’t know how far its grip will extend to receiving Oscar honors.  But those who understand what Emilia Perez is attempting will find it a film living in memory deeper than mere realism could ever allow.

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic as well as editor in charge of its arts and entertainment staff. 

He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives still at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly. 

A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee. 

WILL OSCAR IGNORE ‘CONCLAVE’ SEARCH FOR A POPE?

 

Ralph Fiennes (left) and Stanley Tucci in "Conclave."

By Dominique Paul Noth

The wildfires in Los Angeles have delayed the announcement of Oscar nominations until Jan. 23, which may help manufacture more excitement over which films will be included in the March 2 ceremony.  At this writing it is all a guessing game, complicated by such recent awards ceremonies like the Golden Globe, which scattered honors among many films that may or may not make the Oscar best list..

For example, I would be amazed and even appalled if the Oscar best film list included Conclave, director Edward  Berger’s lavish old school thriller (a box office success) where cardinals gather within sumptuous imposing Vatican trappings to choose a new pope.

Personally I felt the enterprise was shallow but beautifully mounted.  There was a manufactured aspect to the whodunit as every cardinal seemed to have a base political motive as they jockey for position to influence the cardinal in charge, played as if this was a major Shakespearean role by a fine actor, Ralph Fiennes, as the holy man tasked with leading the search. (This is the first of several subtle historical inventions since the actual process of choosing a new pope is always invisible.)

But here is the problem for Oscar, because it will be hard to ignore the many fine performances (cardinals all) in this lush, physically lovely and secretive imagining of the hushed corridors and flamboyant politicizing of the cardinals gathered to confidentially carry out their duties.

The acting is a who’s who – many of whom Oscar has honored before:  Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, even Isabella Rossellini (Ingrid Bergman’s daughter) somewhat wasted as a thoughtful nun.  Then there are a series of actors not familiar right now to American audiences, but they could be.  Chewing the scenery with the best of them as a vehemently conservative cardinal is Italian actor Sergio Castellitto (not surprisingly a well-traveled stage veteran and also a director) and as the surprise contender for pope, a last-minute elevated cardinal  with an unusual gender past, Mexican actor Carlos Diehz, chosen as much for his look and gentle manner as his acting, qualities the screenplay sorely needed.

A key attraction is the sense of intrigue and mysterious but perfectly symmetrical surroundings that color every minute of Conclave (which induces claustrophobia as we and the cardinals are sealed within the Vatican). The  dramatic screenplay adapted from Robert Harris’ novel allows every cardinal, just about, to have his own suspicious agenda. 

Now I am not a naïve Catholic. As a newspaper editor I covered Timothy Dolan, when he was Milwaukee archbishop and later when he was elevated to New York City cardinal.  I seldom ran into a more adept dissembler playing one side against the other, reminding me of how cardinals are also master politicians.  So is Pope Francis – look at his recent deliberate in-your-face-Trump choice of Cardinal Robert McElroy of San Diego (a noted fighter for immigration rights) to take over the D.C. archdiocese.

But Conclave and almost all of its melodramatic moments are about backstabbing among the cardinals – which I’m sure goes on but not as simplistic, nasty and obvious as in the screenplay. While intended to elevate the human mysteries of faith, the film emerges as intellectual Pablum, spoon feeding the worst impressions of  how obvious the in-fighting can be among the plush red clergy.

Looking back decades, Hollywood has a tendency to view with melodramatic and theatrical alarm the doings of the Vatican and its pope – Anthony Quinn (“Shoes of the Fisherman”) and Raf Vallone (“Godfather 3”) have assumed that holy mantle as have Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce, all making us feel that some theatrical master of the epigram was involved in creating the dialog.    Apparently, being a cardinal means you can’t speak as people normally do.

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic as well as editor in charge of its arts and entertainment staff. 

He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives still at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly. 

A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.