Doomsday's Andrei Tarkovsky Love Fest

The Farewell

A few years ago an old family friend of ours fell and broke his arm.  This otherwise healthy, happy guy went to the hospital and when he got his X-ray the doctors noticed something suspicious.  A few tests later they found out he had terminal cancer.  Three weeks later he was dead.  I always wondered to myself 'what would have happened if he never broke his arm?  Would he have just not woken up one day?  Would the cancer have suddenly exposed itself somehow leaving him to die in a matter of days?  Or would he have outlived those three weeks not having cancer on his mind only to pass away further down the road?'  I'm no doctor and I certainly don't know the answer to any of those but it weighed on my mind as to whether his mental condition just wore him down after finding out what was going on.  Strangely enough The Farewell has a lot of those same themes that hit pretty close to home.  

When a Chinese family learns that their grandmother and matriarch has terminal lung cancer, they choose not to tell her so she can live out her final days without the worry of impending death.  That sounds like a pretty simple and depressing storyline but believe it or not it isn't entirely uncommon, even here in the United States.  I've heard of people who have chosen to hide terminal illnesses from their (usually) much older loved ones and while I'm not sure how that plays out legally and while I know there are some ethical issues with it I know it's something that certainly happens.  It's an idea that raises a lot of questions as to how you allow someone to live out the time they have left.  I think I would want to know if I have a condition that will end my life so I can take care of those things people usually do when they know the clock's ticking; see family, visit places you've never been, whatever floats your boat.  At the same time I suppose I can wrap my head around the idea of letting someone live in peace until the end comes.  In any case I hope that's not something I'll have to worry about for a long time.  Instead I got to watch a movie where that theme is the focal point.

While The Farewell seems like a somber concept on its face, Awkwafina does a good job in bringing a level of frustration to the surface.  She plays Billi whose grandmother 'Nai Nai' is diagnosed with terminal cancer.  At her family's request not only do they not tell Nai Nai of her diagnosis, they also plan a spur of the moment 'wedding' in China that's actually meant for the family to gather one final time to honor her.  Not only that, they ask that Billi not attend so her emotions don't get the best of her and spill the secret to Nai Nai.  Naturally Billi comes to China and over the course of her stay she forges a closer bond with the grandmother whom she hadn't seen in years.

A movie like The Farewell is grounded in the performances of its cast and everyone here does a fine job in portraying a family that's grieving while trying to act happy and excited, all the while their secret is gnawing at them.  It's a drama that's unique but relatable and surprisingly ends on a pretty upbeat note.  The Farewell while good doesn't strike me as a Oscar-worthy film but it succeeds in eliciting emotions, both positive and negative, and that's not something that can be said for a lot of movies these days.

B+ so says Doomsday

AFI Motion Pictures of the Year

1917
The Farewell
The Irishman
Jojo Rabbit
Joker
Knives Out
Little Women
Marriage Story
Once Upon A Time In Hollywood
Richard Jewell

Special Award
Parasite

Marriage Story

For an institution that's been around as long as we have, we still manage to screw marriage up pretty royally.  At this point we all probably know someone who's gone through a horrifying marriage and came out worse for wear on the other end.  The basic ground rules might sound easy, don't bang someone you're not married to for example, but the whole 'lifetime commitment' arrangement often doesn't sit well with some people once the honeymoon period is over.  

I can imagine that there are some unsuspecting people who turn on a movie called 'Marriage Story' and expect to see a turbulent but happy-ending movie, not a movie that begins at the end of the actual marriage.  As the movie is constructed and laid out though, I just don't know if I completely buy it.  Maybe part of it has to do with me being married myself, maybe it's because I've been witness to my fair share of failed marriages that family and friends have gone through, it's hard to say because each of us have different experiences in this heavy and tumultuous life event.  From the start it just didn't seem like the criteria was met for the focal couple to actually get divorced.  If you were to pin it on one thing you could say it was Nicole wanting to get something out of her life while her husband wanted the family to stay where they were at.  Okay, that's a reason I suppose but the whole 'I wanted to go live my life' is a crummy reason to split your family apart and unfortunately is one that many people can relate to only too well.  I know the characters were meant to be unlikeable but I shouldn't be disliking the characters.  The movie tries to demonstrate that both Charlie and Nicole share equal parts of the blame but that clearly isn't the case, Nicole is the one who's painted to be the instigator in just about every downturn in the movie and to prove this point further they use a quick, pointless scene to establish that Charlie had an affair that really didn't have much to do with anything and has no effect on the movie as a whole, it's just a tool to give Charlie a bit of tarnish.  I suppose it just doesn't help me sympathize with anything that's going on, all I could think about was that these two people are lousy at relationships and their problems are pretty easy to fix. That's not really where I wanted my mindset to be when watching this.  Everything that happened in the movie, from the upgrade of divorce attorneys to the confrontation in Charlie's apartment, it all stemmed from the fact that this couple threw in the towel for dumb reasons and the movie tried to portray the characters as being equally responsible for the dissolution of the marriage when it's not the case at all.  It was hard for me to buy the base premise of the movie so everything that came from it was questionable.  Assuming that I did buy it though, it was often sentimental albeit predictable (we all knew that list from the beginning was coming back) and the acting by all involved was great especially from Laura Dern.  When you really start to dislike a character, that's when you know the actor is doing something right.  I think the movie could have cut down a few of the obvious 'give me an Oscar nomination' closeup monologues that seemed to bring the movie to a standstill at points but it's hard not to feel the anger and grief that these actors successfully brought to the table.

Marriage Story is a movie that emphasizes the lows and even lower lows that occur when a family breaks apart.  It's clear that the creatives involved brought some of their experiences to the table as little things such as trick or treating or eating dinner and bigger things like finding a competent divorce attorney are put front and center to tell you just how complicated things can be.  From that standpoint it's a good way to profile that part of the human experience but at the same time it was filled with maddening, often infuriating decisions by the main couple.  I wouldn't say this is a movie I would recommend to everyone and while I wouldn't put it on any top 10 list it's altogether a good watch that has convinced me to never, ever get divorced.

B so says Doomsday


AFI Motion Pictures of the Year

1917
The Farewell
The Irishman
Jojo Rabbit
Joker
Knives Out
Little Women
Marriage Story
Once Upon A Time In Hollywood
Richard Jewell

Special Award
Parasite

Whoops forgot about little women. That and 17 are the last ones for me.

Ooh, overrated lists, those always lead to civil conversation and good feelings.

You've hit a couple actually. And Chris Nolan doesn't make an appearance. It's been a while since we've had a good dust-up on these boards.

Don’t get too excited. He’s gonna put Nolan in his worst-of list.

Doomsday's Top 10 Most Overrated Movies of 2010-2019


Honorable Mention: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
It might be a bit unfair for me to say this movie is 'overrated' considering how it got pretty bad reviews and most people disliked it by and large.  Still, it got an effing Best Picture Oscar nomination.  This is a bad, lousy, unenjoyable movie from start to finish and if I remember correctly it's one of the lowest-rated movies, if not THE lowest-rated, to get a Best Picture nom.  Most people might share a low opinion of this movie but I felt I should include it so we remember just how low the standards of awards voters can be.  It's trash through and through. 

10. Lady Bird
Talk about a movie that does not hold up.  In fact it didn't hold up very well on the first go-round.  As someone who went to Catholic school as a kid I wish a movie would come out that accurately depicts what it's like going to one.  Considering the buzz this was getting I was hoping to watch a film my youthful self could relate to, maybe about someone with a sense of dilemma, confusion or angst about youth, spirituality, internal conflict.  Instead it was just another typical coming of age film that offers no real surprises and is predictable as well as uninteresting.  I'll certainly give credit where credit is due and acknowledge that Laurie Metcalf was fantastic but everything else about the movie was same old, same old.  

9. Moonlight
I was going to say something short and sweet about Moonlight but any avenue I took diverted to criticism of the Oscars, mostly because hardly anyone would know about this movie if it weren't for it's upset Best Picture win.  Apart from that though, I just never really found this movie thought provoking or moving and made me wonder if I was watching the same movie as everyone else.  This along with a number of other Best Picture winners is the product of a flawed voting system that is awarding smaller, low-grossing and arguably lower-quality films that many/most people wouldn't see if not for their awards prestige.  Moonlight for me just happens to be the most forgettable of the bunch, a movie that tried so hard to get its point across and tug at my heartstrings that it felt pandering and desperate.  I haven't seen it since its release and frankly I don't think anyone else has either.  Part of me wishes that director Barry Jenkins had released If Beale Street Could Talk first, a movie that's superior in almost every way.

8. Hugo
I've been pretty public about my disdain for this movie so there's not much else to say.  It's a poorly written, poorly acted, poorly executed movie with shoddy at best visual effects (the fact that it won so many technical awards is a complete joke).  It ranks near the bottom of Scorsese's filmography and it baffles me to see his name on it, the only part even remotely Scorsese-esque is the final sequence.  The insultingly unfunny toilet humor (this is Sacha Baron Cohen at his absolute worst), the 'children acting like adults' which is one of my ultimate movie pet peeves, the blatant wrecking ball exposition, it all amounts to a children's movie that no child would ever like.  The worst part is that it could have been good, I just don't know what the hell was going on in Scorsese's mind at the time.

Before I read that first paragraph, I was about to type "Does ANYBODY on here like Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close?"