Editor’s Note: Freeline Media’s movie critic, Mike Fried, wants to know what’s up with the Academy Awards bias against actor Jesse Plemons. Since Freeline Media would like to know the same thing, we dived right into his article!
By MIKE FRIED
Jesse Plemons is his own man. He is not Mr. Kirsten Dunst.
Ever since his breakout role as Todd on Breaking Bad, he has been nailing his roles both large and small. Here are three instances in which Plemons deserved an Oscar nomination, two for Best Actor and one for Best Supporting Actor. And I’m not even including his hysterical turn as Gary, the security guard with issues, in Game Night.
Even though Bugonia was ruined by the end of the film, if Emma Stone could be nominated, then Plemons absolutely deserved an Oscar nomination because he was way better than she was.
For Your Consideration:
BUGONIA
*** 1/2
Two conspiracy theorists believe that the CEO of a multinational company is an alien from the galaxy Andromeda and believe that there is going to be an alien invasion four nights hence on the evening of the next lunar eclipse.
I have to be honest: this is one weird fucking movie. But, having said that, it’s not a bad one; however, it just doesn’t reach the heights it was capable of.
A lot was made about Emma Stone shaving her head for this movie and, yeah, sure, there’s that. But she delivers a striking performance as the CEO, Michelle Fuller, who is an A-type pushy personality who mandates that people must leave work at 5:30 p.m. so they can be with their families to achieve a solid work-life balance — unless, of course, they have work to do (of course). She is terrific in her determination to get out of a bad situation by trying to reason with her abductors.
However, it is beyond doubt that it’s Jesse Plemons who steals the shit out of this movie. His Teddy is too smart for his own good, maybe even smarter than he thinks he is, but he is convinced beyond doubt that Stone is an alien, and he has facts and figures to back this up. He sounds like one of these guys on ham radio (or, unfortunately, regular radio and TV) who babbles on about nonsense and strings together random ideas to create a worldview in line with his expectations — but still thoroughly irrational. His mercurial and dynamic performance is one that will be, in true Oscar fashion, doomed to be ignored during award season, which is a damned shame because he powers the piece and he brings to life a pretty good screenplay by Yorgos Lanthimos, that is very biting, very dark and very pleasing – at least up until the last ten minutes.
And as good as Stone and Plemons were, I was blown away by the performance of newcomer Aidan Delbis as the co-abductor and Teddy’s cousin, Don, who is intellectually disabled. He just doesn’t want to be involved in this abduction but is so manipulated by Teddy that he engages in forced, chemical castration in order to, as Teddy puts it, avoid letting all that gunk obscure their thought processes. This is his acting debut, and he plays the role to absolute perfection.
The musical score by Jerskin Fendrix is bombastic and grandiose but in the very best of ways. It highlights tension when it needs to and is also restrained when it needs to be. Similarly, the production design – which involved building a house with a camera-friendly basement from scratch — and Robbie Ryan’s cinematography were excellent, especially the latter emphasizing Stone and Plemons’ visages. It was filmed in VistaVision and the use of this process really shows and makes a difference. I am really glad it is making a comeback because it looks so good on the big screen.
Now, many of you who know me are aware that I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed — far from it — but I saw the ending of this movie coming from a mile away (albeit played out a little differently in my mind, and of course my way was better) and the way Yorgos handled it just, in all honesty, left me flat. It was almost as if the previous 105 minutes of the movie was a distraction from what was to come and, quite frankly, the ending was a bit of a letdown. I would have filmed it differently and I know I can hear you all collectively saying “What the fuck do you know, Mike? You’re not a fucking filmmaker so shut the fuck up!” and I take your point.
But once again, if you’d like Jesse Plemons as I do, you will really enjoy this movie.
WATCH IT and keep an open mind.
KINDS OF KINDNESS
****
Sweet dreams are made of this
Who am I to disagree?
I’ve traveled the world and the seven seas
Everybody’s lookin’ for something
Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest film is an anthology with a loose connection between the three stories and has a Night Gallery/Black Mirror quality to it. In the first episode, a man will do whatever it takes to please his demanding boss, even committing crimes. In the second, a wife, lost at sea, is rescued and seems like a different person so that the husband thinks she is not his wife. In the third, a man and a woman in a sex cult are looking for a woman who is able to reanimate the dead, a woman that was dreamed about by the woman in the sex cult; unfortunately other things happen.
The cast is uniformly excellent but it’s Jesse Plemons that is the true standout — which is a miraculous achievement considering that the cast includes Willem Dafoe, Emma Stone, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau and Mamoudou Athie, all of whom are excellent. But Plemons, who won Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival, delivers a career best performance.
I’m not going to say it’s Lanthimos’ best film but it is wildly entertaining, especially if you enjoy offbeat motion pictures. I thought Poor Things was the better picture.
Margaret Qualley singing “How Deep is your Love?” is one of my moments of Zen. And the dogs!!!!
It’s not going to be for everyone but if you like the offbeat — okay, the very offbeat — you should watch it.
WATCH!
THERE IS A MID CREDIT SCENE SO WATCH THAT!
CIVIL WAR
This was not the movie I thought it would be — I was expecting an action movie about a civil war. This movie is about journalists and war photographers and what they have to do to carry out their jobs.
And on that level it succeeds, being reminiscent of Salvador or The Killing Fields (although not in their same league).
Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Stephen McKinley Henderson and Cailee Spaeny play three world weary journalists and one newbie — bright eyed and bushy tailed — on a road trip from NYC to Washington DC via Pittsburgh during a national civil war. Unlikely bedfellows, Texas and California, have seceded from the country and their army — dubbed the western forces — is on the move trying to get to the White House to capture or kill the three-term president — and the journalists are also on the way there to interview the President (nicely played in an extraordinarily small role by Ron Swanson).
Amazingly, the film is devoid of politics. There is a secession, like I said, but the underlying causes are not known — and, quite frankly, are unimportant.
What is important are the encounters that they have along the way. Those encounters are unnerving, from men with guns showing off “traitors” hanging by their thumbs to a shootout in which experienced war photographer Dunst and newbie Spaeny shoot pictures in battle with bullets flying by, the pictures shown in black and white as taken by the photographers.
But it is a thoroughly scary encounter with two guys with machine guns tending to a mass grave that is the hallmark of the film. When one guy asks, “What kind of American are you?” it is a gut punch — and not because the actor playing the lunatic with the AR-15 is perfectly portrayed by Jesse Plemons (Mr. Dunst), but because this could happen now. And if you doubt me, just google shootings on YouTube. This scene was most reminiscent of two guys in Texas who had a dispute with a neighbor which ended up with that neighbor being shotgunned. If there’s any politicizing in the film, it’s the guns in the hands of civilians angle. But it’s minimal. Mostly it’s fighting between the two armed forces.
It’s amazing to me to how this movie got review bombed — on Google it had a 2.5 rating last time I checked and very few of the 1 star ratings had accompanying detailed reviews. People just assumed it was anti-whomever and bombed it without seeing it, much like people did to The Last Temptation of Christ, The Passion of the Christ and many others without Christ’s name in it — oh yeah, and Ishtar.
Is the acting magnificent? Not really. Aside from Plemons, who has been a shining star since Breaking Bad, Wagner Moura was good in his outrage and Stephen McKinley Henderson as the wizened old veteran were outstanding. Dunst wasn’t bad but it seemed that she went through the movie with sort of a bland expression on her face.
I saw it on Regal’s RPX large screen format and it was impactful. I think the reviews that knock the film were looking for more of an action film and I understand where they were coming from. The trailer for this movie gives the impression that the movie is something else entirely.
WATCH IT.
Michael Fried has no formal training in movies, except having watched over 26,000+ movies — if not more — in his 60-plus years on this planet, starting with Goldfinger as his first cinema experience. He knows what he likes and he knows what he doesn’t like, and it’s quite often different from the conventional wisdom. He knows that the best franchise is Godzilla and he loves action movies and comedies. He has not been nominated for any awards except some boring insurance awards which has no applicability to movies (with the possible exceptions of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity and John Cassavettes’ Big Trouble). He is part of a team that won the 1980 SUNY Albany Trivia content by correctly guessing the question, “Who played the president of Klopstockia in Million Dollar Legs?” So he has that going for him, which is nice.
Contact Mike at moviemike3@yahoo.com and mike.fried@yahoo.com.
