Post 03/02/18

Issue

In This "We're Like Everybody Else" anna harvey 3

Faces, Places, Cable Car Spaces

liza edwards-levin 2 JOSH WARTEL & JAMES FEINBERG 4

The Shape of Hollywood

postCover by Miranda Villanueva

MAR 02

VOL 21 —

ISSUE 5

written By Liza Edwards-levin – illustration by Nayeon michelle woo

Bringing French film to Providence

Faces, Places, Cable Car Spaces

FEATURE

I

walked down College Hill to Cable Car Cinema on a rainy Sunday. That afternoon, I planned to see the Academy Award-nominated film Faces Places (Visages, villages), screened as part of the Providence French Film Festival.

I predicted the scene I would be met with: a quiet, cozy space soundtracked by the hum of a coffee machine and the comings and goings of occasional customers. I thought I might even get some work done before the movie started.

Instead, I found Cable Car full, in every sense of the word.

College students made up just a fraction of the afternoon rush. Alongside them crowded the middle-aged and elderly, couples, families with young kids. The festival was organized in collaboration with Brown’s French department, but the day’s attendance was by no means limited to campus dwellers.

Cable Car’s eclectic decor and merchandise echoed the lively, varied crowd. On the brick wall behind the counter, beers, juices, copper tea containers, and decaf espresso beans sat alongside T-shirts and tote bags, arranged like 3D wallpaper. Cable Car’s snack selection, simultaneously old-fashioned and hip, featured individually-wrapped brownies and peppermint patties alongside whole food protein bars. Popcorn toppings included Old Bay seasoning, curry powder, and nutritional yeast, labeled with colorful markers in home kitchen-style shakers.

Every couple of seconds, cafe employees slid fresh orders across the counter. With every announcement, another item from Cable Car’s extensive menu came to life. One tomato basil panini with a soup of the day! Toasted sesame bagel! Red eye, London fog!

With all of Cable Car’s six round tables occupied, I noticed many orders were eaten standing up. Behind a roomful of conversations, the espresso machine whirred and the ceiling fan buzzed. I overheard customers ordering tickets days in advance. A bell rang after each transaction.

“Sold out,” the cashier told me. “I recommend buying in advance.” I bought a ticket for Tuesday’s showing of 12 Days (12 Jours).

By 1:30 p.m. a line extended out the front door and into the rainy drizzle. *** Cable Car may be known for its intimate, idiosyncratic space, but since its founding 40 years ago, the cinema has also served as a community hub. Its showcases of recent independent and art films, roster of guest speakers, and abundance of panels draw an audience from across the city of Providence. According to Richard Blakely, French film festival director and research associate in French studies at Brown, the festival represents this same collective, communal effort, both past and present.

Beginning in October, an informal committee headed

by Blakely worked to brainstorm and assemble the 2018 film

Letter from the Editor

Cable Car may be known for its intimate, idiosyncratic space, but since its founding 40 years ago, the cinema has also acted as a community hub.

selection. The group included Cable Car owner Daniel Kamil, professors, graduate and undergraduate students: in Blakely’s words, “whoever’s interested, really.” As the festival drew closer, a range of Brown administrators helped design the festival’s web presence and promotional materials. Kamil reached out to film distributors, gradually narrowing down a preliminary list of about 150 films to just 15.

Blakely feels especially excited about this year’s film festival lineup and high audience turnout. Besides a retrospective showing of The Crime of Monsieur Lange (Le crime de monsieur Lange), Blakely said all films shown were made within the past year and a half. For instance, the festival makes Cable Car one of the first theaters in the United States to screen Raoul Peck’s The Young Karl Marx.

In many ways, the festival has remained consistent over its 21 years of existence. For instance, it has always taken place at Cable Car during the final week of February—“a nice time to signal the beginning of springtime,” as Blakely put it. The festival began when a group of interested Brown students and faculty began working together to seek out films and funding; today, Blakely still views active student involvement as a hallmark of the festival’s success.

For example, I ran into Angie Kang at the festival, a sophomore Brown-RISD dual degree student studying comparative literature and illustration. On Sunday, she saw two movies in a row: The Big Bad Fox (Le grand méchant renard et autres contes) followed by Faces Places (Visages, villages).

Angie was required to attend the screenings for her French course, but she is a long-time French film enthusiast.

Since last summer, Angie has spent a portion of her free time

Dear Readers,

Movies that Should Have Gotten an Oscar

A year ago, I was on the unpopular side of the

This issue explores the different roles movies

La La Land vs. Moonlight debate. When the

play in all of our lives: Anna Harvey describes

topic arose again a week ago, I was surprised

her relationship to her mother through the

by my visceral reaction, which had been

lens of Lady Bird, Liza Edwards-Levin takes

undiluted by the passage of time. I realized

us to the state of cinema today in Providence,

I wasn’t defending the movie on solely

while our very own Arts & Culture staff

3. The Bee Movie

“objective” grounds—I was also defending

examines this year’s curious Best Picture

its place in my life. Inextricable from its

race. We hope it gets you thinking about the

4.

inherent magic is the memory of watching

special place of movies in our lives, no matter

it after having been reunited with my family

what your opinions about any specific one

after two years of moving across continents

may be.

every six months. This year’s movies are no different: getting thoroughly drenched in the rain to see Dunkirk, watching Lady Bird side-by-side with my mother, sneaking into a sold-out theatre for Black Panther — these will all be moments I will remember for a long time.

2 post–

Happy Oscars watching!

Saanya - editor in chief

1. Justin Bieber: Never Say Never 2. Suicide Squad (oh wait) Fifty Shades of Gray

5. Pikachu's Vacation 6. The Power Rangers Movie (the new one with Bryan Cranston) 7. The Princess Bride 8. Parent Trap 9. High School Musical 10. The Shawshank Redemption (this is not a joke, this movie was robbed)

NARRATIVE

"We're Like Everybody Else" Seeing ourselves in Lady Bird By anna harvey

For about a week and a half in mid-December, the Avon Cinema became my second home. While I love the Avon, it wasn’t the retro decor, or the campy pre-show commercials, or the people-watching (a funny mix of elderly couples and college students shirking their responsibilities) that drew me in. It was Sacramento, circa 2002-2003, and faded red hair dye, and communion wafers (not consecrated!), and Dave Matthews Band. Lady Bird kept me coming back to the Avon, again and again. Greta Gerwig’s directorial debut stars Saoirse Ronan as opinionated Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson and Laurie Metcalf as Marion, her exasperated, strong-willed mother. The movie explores the contours of their relationship over the course of Lady Bird’s senior year. Each viewing was slightly different (slightly better), but without fail, I would watch the credits roll with tears running down my face, fishing out my phone to text my mom. I hounded her until she saw Lady Bird herself, and though we talked about it a little right after, I wanted to discuss it in more detail with her. Like both protagonists in the film, my mom and I grew up in the same town (Evanston, Illinois), attended the same high school, and, and this is where it goes even deeper...grew up in the same house. We took over the family home after my grandparents moved to a condo a few minutes away, so I spent my adolescence sleeping in my mother’s teenage bedroom. I have always wondered how strongly my teenage years paralleled hers, especially because in the hubris of youth, I spent so long thinking we were fundamentally different

people, when really, like Lady Bird and her mom, we might have been operating on two sides of a very similar coin. What follows is a conversation we had in February, while she was driving home from work.

I started by asking her what her experience of seeing the movie was like.

“It was on my radar,” she answered, “but the fact that you demonstrated [interest] and went out of your way to say, ‘This is amazing,’ made me that much more interested in going and seeing it too.

Then while watching it, I have to admit that there was, for me, this parallel processing. As I’m taking it in and being Mom, being Linda, and experiencing it from my own point of view, it was also ‘I wonder how Anna liked that. Oh I could see totally why Anna liked this scene. Oh I totally see how this resonated with her. Huh? Is that really what she thinks of me?

Is that what she might say about me?’”

I laughed. If she was thinking of the part when Lady Bird’s first boyfriend, Danny, describes her mom as “scary and warm,” I probably would say something like that. Also, pretty whip-smart; she dropped the phrase “meta-processing” into the next bit of conversation, describing her relationship with her own mother.

“There were aspects of some of the scenes that reminded me of me in both roles, Lady Bird and her mom. And I went to the place of, ‘Was I that way with Sophie (my grandmother, who passed away when I was eight)? I bet I probably was.’ And so, that also has it take on an additional meaning because Grandma’s not here.”

Obviously, I’m not a mom yet, so my viewing of the movie was a bit more one-sided. But what struck me most about it was that it felt like, watching Lady Bird and Marion, I was watching my mom and me. I had never seen anything capture our relationship so well, fiction or nonfiction. I tried to articulate this to her.

Illustrated by Claribel Wu

watching French TV shows to practice listening comprehension outside of class (without “slaving over a textbook”): Her favorites include Call My Agent! (Dix pour cent), about the lives of film agents, and Miraculous, an animated children’s show.

Angie described the vibe of Faces Places as playful but also meditative, even existential. In the film, Angès Varda and street artist J.R.—also the film’s writers and directors—travel around France to take pictures of strangers and paste the photographs in public spaces. While Angie admitted some of her French classmates considered the assignment a burden during midterm season, she said the films prompted her to notice nuances in French humor and colloquial speech.

Angie also paid attention to the festival’s attendees: While she heard “a lot of squeals and little kid laughter” in the earlier screening of The Big Bad Fox, a middle-aged and older crowd arrived for Faces Places.

“Two distinct generations,” Angie called it— although, she noted, one guy slept through both.

Over the years, Blakely has noticed a group of faithful attendees take shape in the audience, a group he describes as “people retired and involved in the community but not necessarily affiliated with Brown.” Blakely said he thinks more community members anticipate the festival each year, looking forward to a quality selection. The French Film Festival recently gained funding support from the city of Providence, a nod to the festival’s growing local identity.

“The [festival’s] aims have always been to provide a link between the community and France,” Blakely said.

In the future, Blakely said he hopes the festival will just “keep doing what it’s doing.” *** When I arrived at Tuesday’s 5 p.m. showing of 12 Days (12 Jours), Cable Car was nowhere near as crowded as it had been on Sunday afternoon. Half of the cafe’s tables were unoccupied; the loudest noise came from the popcorn machine.

But even on a weeknight, the auditorium was about three-quarters full—about half the audience members appeared college-aged. Two student volunteers checked my ticket as I entered.

12 Days, a documentary directed by Raymond Depardon, addresses the French law that requires people checked into a psychiatric hospital against their will to be assessed by a judge after 12 days.

The film showed a series of these assessments punctuated by long, lingering shots of hospitals, inside and outside. Uninterrupted by narration, statistics, or interviews, this was unlike any documentary I’d ever seen.

There I was, seated in a soft leather couch, watching a movie alongside mostly strangers. Some attendees, I assume, showed up for French language and culture; others, an assignment; others yet, out of habit or invitation. For a little while though, the festival brought us all a little closer to something far from home.

"My stomach is the most enduring part of my body."

"My favorite thing to microwave is absurdism."

"Jo's is such a cheap date." march 03, 2018 3

NARRATIVE “I was thinking about it from your perspective, Mom, because I would see Lady Bird do something and be like, ‘Oh shit, I’ve done that.’ And in the context of a movie, [I] can be like, ‘Well, that was not a nice thing to do,’ but in the context of my own life, I know that I’ve definitely snapped at you when we were trying to...buy a prom dress or whatever, you know, as many times as it happens in the movie. And seeing how that was reflected for Laurie Metcalf’s character, I was like, ‘Oh wow.’ But then also, [I] felt like it was so, just us, and it was so genuine.”

My mom immediately retorted: “But the other piece on it, and what I think makes it such a remarkable movie, is that so many mothers and daughters see themselves in Lady Bird and her mom.”

And she’s right. We’re not the only pair of women who have tried to buy a prom dress in a thrift shop, arguing over the whole ordeal (“Are you tired?

I’m not tired! Well, it looks like you were dragging your feet!”) until one of us finds the PERFECT dress and everything is okay again. We’re not unique.

We’re just like everybody else.

ARTS&CULTURE I wouldn’t say that I was necessarily desperately homesick, but what I found myself doing, and what you clearly are not doing, is that I would invite people to come back to Evanston with me from Grinnell. Granted, I wasn’t going to Grinnell because it was more sophisticated and more cultured than Evanston/Chicago. It was a completely different place. So it’s almost like, in reverse. I wanted to show the people that I met at school how awesome home/ Evanston/Chicago was and [what it] meant to me.”

I was also curious about why she moved back to Evanston and decided to raise her family there. I remember lots of conversations I’ve had with friends from high school, who even now, at age 19 or 20, will passionately declare that they want to do the same.

Spend a few years in a college town somewhere, then move to a big city for another little while, but ultimately settle down at home. That’s the kind of place Evanston is—it draws people back. I wanted to know if my mom was like my friends. Despite loving my hometown, I’ve never felt that strong “pull” toward it. There’s a sense of rootlessness to me that I can never shake.

“I don’t think I ever thought hard about it, long and hard about it, to be perfectly honest.”

I felt a little better then. She talked about the discussions she and my dad had when they decided to move back to the suburbs, about how she had to trust the process and hope that he’d realize that of all the communities on the North Shore of Chicago, Evanston is “so much better.”

She continued: “It wasn’t like in my young adulthood I ever thought, ‘Oh yes, of course I’m going to come back and bring my family here.’

Maybe because the family never left and 2149— our address, and what everyone in the family calls the family home—was always there, I always knew that there would be aspects of home that my family would have, that my kids would have. Now we’ve taken it to the nth degree, getting 2149 and really being true boomerangs.”

I asked her about that, about raising us in the house she was raised in. Was it creepy or cool? It’s good, she said, for the most part. She likes that I sleep in her old bedroom (“100%”), that she knows where the “skeletons are buried.” But she also knows we wouldn’t be in this situation if my grandma were still alive, if she hadn’t gotten sick and had to downsize at exactly the time her daughter’s family was looking to upgrade. It’s bittersweet.

I gave us both a few seconds to breathe after that. Then I switched gears. I had one more question (and the one that, without spoiling too much, is why Lady Bird is, to me, the perfect film about growing up and leaving home).

“Did you get emotional the first time you drove in Evanston?” I asked.

“First time coming back from school or as a parent?”

“No, I was thinking the first time after getting your license—like the first time you drove alone.”

“Oh absolutely, without a doubt. Without a doubt.”

While I love the Avon, it wasn't the retro décor, or the campy pre-show commercials, or the people-watching (a funny mix of elderly couples and college students shirking their responsibilities) that drew me in.

But maybe in some ways our story is unique.

In terms of geography, we had the same exact surroundings from ages 0 to 18, those years that every developmental psychologist hammers home as integral for personal development. Lots of our milestone experiences were the same, or if not the same, about as similar as they could be with a 30-year time gap. Yet there’s a part of me that has always felt like my hometown is not my mother’s.

Was her Evanston fundamentally different from the one I knew? I asked her about it: “Obviously Sacramento is not Evanston, but I feel like this kind of applies in our situation. Because the movie feels like a love letter to Sacramento even though Lady Bird kind of hates it and talks about how much she hates it, you realize at the end of the movie that she actually has this really deep affection for it. And I found that that was something that really resonated with me, because I know in high school I could really hate Evanston a lot. And I really did, like want to ‘go to the East Coast, where culture is’ and thought there was nothing [in Evanston] for me. And now I find, here I am, on the East Coast, where the culture is, I guess, at Brown specifically, and I find that I miss home a lot and find aspects of Evanston that I think are really, really great. So I’m wondering, did you have a similar experience when you went to college, of finding out that the place you wanted to leave so badly actually wasn’t that bad?”

Her answer came quickly: “I’m not so sure that I actually wanted to leave Evanston as desperately—as passionately—as you felt you did. I think I had a different experience of my hometown than I think you did coming through.

And I think it also speaks to our temperaments. I don’t know, but I think you’re more like Lady Bird in that you play in the poles, like on the ‘I love it/I hate it.’ Not that I’m easygoing, but I don’t think I’ve ever had those full-on, strong opinions about home, about place, about our hometown in the same way. Except to say that, and here’s what’s funny, 4 post–

The Shape of Hollywood

A post- conversation on the Oscars

By Josh wartel & James feinberg Josh wartel: We're here to talk about the Oscars ahead of it happening on Sunday. James, I guess, starting off, do you have an Academy Awards category that’s particularly important for you?

James Feinberg: Well, I’ll tell you, what I’m going to end up being disappointed by is the Best Actor category because the way that the guilds have ended up—the Actors’ Guild and all the various awards leading up to the Oscars—Gary Oldman’s won them all for Darkest Hour. He’s the overwhelming favorite; and he’s winning basically because he has good makeup in the movie. And meanwhile, Daniel Day-Lewis in Phantom Thread, who gave what I thought was one of the greatest performances of the year, has won practically nothing at all leading up to the Oscars. So, that’s a category I already know is going to frustrate me; I’ve resigned myself to it.

JW: I think we’ll get more to Phantom Thread a little bit later because I really liked Phantom Thread. It’s interesting just looking at the list of the nine films for Best Picture—yes, you have Darkest Hour, which is this kind of dinosaur historical film, but it was only six or seven years ago that a film like The King’s Speech won Best Picture—but this year, Darkest Hour’s almost an afterthought, and it’s alongside another film that’s set in almost the exact same period—Dunkirk. So how do you compare Darkest Hour to Dunkirk?

JF: The core of Darkest Hour is incredibly hard to find. It’s not personal because you don’t see much of Churchill’s personal life, but it’s not historical either because the evacuation from Dunkirk and Churchill’s elevation to prime minister happens in a second in Darkest Hour, whereas Dunkirk is an incredibly deep dive into one event, and it’s almost like an anti-event film because you barely know any characters’ names. You’re engulfed in the action; you’re experiencing it as someone on the beach would have experienced it, which is the uniqueness of the film. People have often said it’s like a featurelength beach scene from Saving Private Ryan, which is reductive, but it’s true in the sense that it’s powerful from start to finish. It’s definitely an apt comparison.

JW: I again go back to Dunkirk just for the brilliant Tom Hardy scenes and mesmerizing flight.

Nolan, we almost take him for granted because he’s done it all, with Interstellar, with Memento, The Dark Knight, which some people still believe is the best superhero film. But I think what he did as a director in Dunkirk is unmatched by what the other nominees did and unmatched by what he’s done in his own career.

JF: Compared to The Shape of Water, the way that Dunkirk treats water is so unique—water is almost another character in that movie—the underwater scenes were so engulfing in a way that the scenes in The Shape of Water weren’t.

JW: Yeah, and I think one difference between The Shape of Water and Dunkirk is that all this history, this film history which we know Del Toro just loves, comes forward as a sort of just pastiche.

Like, why is that film set in the ’60s in Baltimore?

While something like Dunkirk really doesn’t give

LIFESTYLE much big ‘H’ history but is very viscerally about this historical moment and event.

JF: The Shape of Water has so many things that it forgets to utilize. That’s my feeling about the movie. It forgets to utilize the fact that the main character lives above a movie theater. You never see her watching a movie in the movie theater, there’s no connection to the movies, and yet that’s hyped up as being an important plot point. It forgets to use the fact that the character is mute as something that would other her in her community.

On politics and what role the Oscars might have in the “Age of Trump” JF: I think there’s a bit of pop psychology that has factored into the Oscars discussion this year because of who the president is. Inevitably, every movie is trying to frame itself as being the ultimate response and rebuke to President Trump, which is obviously ridiculous—there is no movie this year that can really be said to have been made as a response to President Trump mostly because most of them were written before he came to power...

And in a way it’s sort of like preaching to the choir because most of the people who are watching the Oscars are not going to be particularly swayed from their political viewpoint.

would deserve that award. It definitely deserved a nomination for Best Screenplay, in my view. There are about a thousand things that it should have been nominated for that it wasn’t nominated for. And the reason is exactly what you’re talking about. Every time Paul Thomas Anderson and Daniel Day-Lewis make a movie, they usually deserve to win Oscars for it, and people have taken that so much for granted.

JW: Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri has probably gotten the most backlash of any of the nominees.

What did you think of the film?

JF: It was my favorite film last year. I thought its script was incredibly tart and tight, and Frances McDormand’s performance was probably the second greatest of her career after Fargo, and she'll likely win the Oscar, too, which she would absolutely deserve. The important thing about discussing Three Billboards, I feel, is to recognize that not every movie necessarily has to be a morality play, that not every character who does bad things is going to be punished by fate.

It’s a movie about people who do bad things and are forced into bad situations, and I thought it was interesting that it didn't try to excuse them for that.

JW: I was of two minds with Three Billboards.

I think Sam Rockwell, who’s going to win Best Supporting Actor, beautifully played this figure of hurt white masculinity that had a lot of

There is no movie this year that can really be said to have been made as a response to President Trump mostly because most of them were written before he came to power.

JW: For me, Lady Bird, which some people were talking about in the context of the #MeToo Movement and feminism, is just kind of about middle-class liberalism in a way that isn’t fundamentally different from what Diary of a Teenage Girl or 20th Century Women have done in the past few years. I think in some cases you get films like Lady Bird that are good films but are somehow put in this category of award-worthy for really no reason.

JF: I agree absolutely. The thing that I feel about Lady Bird is that Greta Gerwig absolutely deserves to be nominated for Best Director—the things that she did with light and texture in that movie were very impressive, and I greatly admire the way that she worked with actors. But all of the great moments in that film, I feel, were in the trailer, and I don’t think it should be nominated for Best Picture.

JW: The intention to talk about films as being politically relevant I think only brought into sharp relief how happy people were to see Phantom Thread be a sort of unexpected Best Picture nominee because you always get a sense that P.T. Anderson and Daniel Day-Lewis are kind of just working in their own little world.

JF: I’m thrilled that Phantom Thread was nominated for Best Picture. It’s not going to win Best Picture. Still, it was snubbed for Best Production Design; that scene where Woodcock follows Alma to the New Year’s Party alone

resonance, and without him I don’t think the film would have worked in any sense. On the other hand, I find the critiques of it extremely strong.

Even starting from the murder of the daughter, the events of the film are just very contrived, and there is not quite a point in which the film seems to either operate fully on a sort of allegorical level or a moment where it actually feels realistic again. How it portrays race relations and its minority characters are not lived-in. You either have to move in the symbolic direction fully, in which case you still have to be held accountable for your ideas, or you need to be much more realistic and naturalistic. I don’t think Three Billboards ever really quite pulls off that balance.

JF: The town felt lived-in to me, but it’s all a question of perspective. Ebbing, of course, doesn’t really exist, and it’s a movie produced by the British, written and directed by an Irishman [Martin McDonagh], about an imaginary version of America...I think it just opens up a lot of avenues for discussion, a lot more, I feel, than any other movie except Get Out...It was one of the only films I walked out of last year when I felt as if I had seen something that occupied a lot of space.

JW: I guess the big distinction I draw is that, for instance, Get Out really takes its setting very seriously, and even though it imagines the setting, it imagines place in a way that is very allegorical for black pain and trauma. The issue that I have with Three Billboards is it feels extremely closed off from the rest of the world in the sense that it's not like people are spending lots of time online. It's not like people are engaged with culture or outside politics, even though it shouldn't be that far from somewhere like Ferguson. Ebbing is still a place where local TV is the dominant controlling form of media, and that feels so unrealistic.

JW (continued): It’s interesting to move from Three Billboards and the sort of imaginary setting to another film that has an imaginary, except much more romantic, setting, and that’s Call Me

by Your Name...I think that’s another example where the performances were praised above everything else. Did you feel moved by the central relationship in that movie?

JF: I felt exactly the opposite. I thought the first half of that movie was extraordinarily comfortable, Illustrated by Phoebe Ayres rich, beautiful, lived-in, as march 03, 2018 5

ARTS&CULTURE

If there was any power in Call Me By Your Name for me, it wasn’t necessarily the relationship but just the duration—the sense that, as the season passes, the romance could never reach a sort of climax, because it’s destined to almost immediately fade away into fall. we’ve been talking about. I felt as if I was seeing something completely real...Then I felt as soon as Armie Hammer’s character got together with Timothee Chalamet’s character, the movie fell apart, in my view. I felt that, like Luca Guadagnino’s last film A Bigger Splash, the movie could not handle its central transition.

JW: What I took away from Call Me By Your Name is, number one, the heat and the warmth of the Italian countryside there. And it’s a shame that this film has to be released in November or December, when to me the enduring strength of the film was from Timothee Chalamet, in the sense that summer romance is really a category of experience and of living, and if there was any power in the film for me, it wasn’t necessarily the relationship but just the duration—the sense that, as the season passes, the romance could never reach a sort of climax, because it’s destined to almost immediately fade away into fall. And I thought that was the beauty and relevance of the film, which made it feel to me more relevant as a teenage film than Lady Bird.

On the last Best Picture nominee, The Post, Steven Spielberg's latest historical drama JF: I thought it was entirely enjoyable except for the very end, when it did something completely ridiculous. I wish the film had ended about a minute and a half earlier. My feeling about it is that it is a worthy inclusion in 21stcentury Spielberg. Because 21st-century Spielberg is a category that includes films like Munich, The Terminal—films that some people like that I don’t tend to like. It’s not like Spielberg used to be. He doesn’t care about big thrills. He doesn’t care about, necessarily, intricacy of story. He cares about conveying history and its significance from his own viewpoint.

JW: My critique is, again, entirely based on how the film takes this as a very important historical moment. The release of these papers, going to the Supreme Court, The Washington Post being this bulwark of liberalism. But if it’s supposed to be a contemporary story that’s newly relevant in the age of Trump, it can never quite deal with this dissonance that, if this was such an important battle and we still ended up here with the press decaying, with Trump once again attacking liberalism, perhaps this event in history didn’t mean anything.

JF: What the film does suggest is that history, that progress, is not a straight line, that things go back and forth, that the progress

made by The Washington Post in the ’70s does not necessarily directly translate to the power of the newspaper now.

A few final thoughts on who will—and who should—win on Sunday night JF: Well, it’s a difficult question to answer, of course, because there wasn’t anything that totally knocked me out. In my view, it would be a threeway battle between Three Billboards, Dunkirk, and Get Out—possibly also Phantom Thread. Since my instinct is that Three Billboards probably is going to win, I’m gonna go with Three Billboards.

JW: I’d really like to see Phantom Thread just

pick up something. It’s such a collective effort in all the categories, in how P.T. Anderson directs and Daniel Day-Lewis, Vicky Krieps and Lesley Manville act. For that film to get just one win would boost it a lot, and it would get people to continue giving P.T. Anderson and these sort of directors money to do their idiosyncratic projects.

JF: The interesting thing this year is not what we have but what we don’t have. There’s no battle of the titans as with last year between Moonlight and La La Land. The race is wide-open, and that’s partially because, apart from a few isolated examples, it just wasn’t a terrific year for movies.

Get Out is instantly iconic, but because it isn’t going to win, my perspective is the winner will be uncontentious and in fifteen years we’ll all have forgotten who it was.

Editor-in-Chief Saanya Jain Feature

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“La La Land was the best movie of the year. La La Land was one of the best movies I've seen in a long time. I don't expect everyone to agree with this, and I'd wager the film's creators don't expect that either” —James Feinberg, "California Dreamin'" 2.23.17

6 post–

Section Editors

Illustration

Celina Sun

Heads

Marly Toledano

Miranda Villanueva

Julian Castronovo

Phoebe Aynes

Design Sarah Saxe

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