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2019 Mediocrities

10/10/2019

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Best Film

First Man
First Reformed
Logan - WINNER
No Country For Old Men
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
Take Shelter
Best Performance

Javier Bardem, No Country For Old Men - WINNER
Josh Brolin, Inherent Vice
Michael Fassbender, Frank
Ethan Hawke, First Reformed
Garance Marillier, Raw
Michael Shannon, Take Shelter
Hailee Steinfeld, True Grit

Masturbating Kevin Memorial Award for Most Uncomfortable Moment

Armstrong family dinner, First Man
Toller wraps himself in barbed wire, First Reformed
Frank and Jon perform at SXSM, Frank
Hair vomit, Raw
Bikini wax sequence, Raw
Curtis explodes at a community potluck, Take Shelter - WINNER
Dingo Award for Best Pet


President Pierce the terrier, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs - WINNER
Brandy the pit bull, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Borras the mutt, Roma
Quicky the German shepherd, Raw
SP//dr, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

Jon Kissel Award for Best Monologue

Ray speaks to a youth group, High Flying Bird
MacGruber details his romantic history, MacGruber
Sheriff Bell describes his dreams, No Country for Old Men
Sheriff Bell's getting too tired for this job, No Country for Old Men
Curtis explodes at a community potluck, Take Shelter - WINNER
JR Peters Award for Best Scold

Jong-su scolds Hae-mi for dancing topless, Burning
Ray foster scolds Queen about Bohemian Rhapsody's length, Bohemian Rhapsody - WINNER
Reverend Jeffers scolds Reverend Toller about his negativity, First Reformed
Balq tells Toller to mind his own business, First Reformed
Justine scolds her classmates for eating meat, Raw

Tom Topper Artisanal Award

Scotch and Pepto cocktail, First Reformed
Folded whole pizza, Green Book
Chocolate popsicle, Inherent Vice
Giant plate of weed, Inherent Vice - WINNER
Wolf brand rat-flavored dog food, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Human finger, Raw
Joe Setnor Headstrong Award

Ernst Toller, First Reformed
Ralph, Ralph Breaks the Internet
Bigfoot Bjornson, Inherent Vice
Kingpin, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
MacGruber, Macgruber - WINNER

Shane Setnor Aggressive Accent Award

​
Jeff Bridges, Rooster Cogburn, True Grit
Boyd Holbrook, Donald Pierce, Logan
Rami Malek, Freddie Mercury, Bohemian Rhapsody
Viggo Mortenson, Tony Lip, Green Book - WINNER
Allison Sudol, Queenie, Fantastic Beasts
Ambulators Award for Best Physical Performance

​Michael Fassbender, Frank, Frank
Dafne Keen, Laura, Logan
Rami Malek, Freddie Mercury, Bohemian Rhapsody - WINNER
Ezra Miller, Credence, Fantastic Beasts
Brad Pitt, Cliff Booth, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Worst Performance

Leonardo Dicaprio, The Beach - WINNER
Alden Ehrenreich, Solo: A Star Wars Story
Carmen Ejogo, Fantastic Beasts
Josh Gad, Murder on the Orient Express
Allison Sudol, Fantastic Beasts
Worst Movie

The Beach
Bohemian Rhapsody
Green Book
Hold the Dark
Unicorn Store - WINNER
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Good Boys

9/25/2019

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B-
2.83

Three adolescent friends go on a series of adventures in advance of their first coed party.

Directed by Gene Stupnitsky
Starring Jacob Tremblay, Keith L. Williams, and Brady Noon
​Review by Jon Kissel

Picture
I came upon an article through a link in a recent Atlantic or Slate article that I suspect Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky, the writers of Good Boys, may also have read.  The article, located at The Good Men Project, a clearinghouse for the expression of 21st century masculinity, reviewed a book about adolescent male friendships, friendships that the author categorized as affectionate and intimate in a way that no one would categorize older teen or adult friendships.  Through hundreds of interviews across classes and races, the author was herself surprised at the language the boys used to describe their closest friends, and the review placed that plainly expressed love against the loneliness and resultant ‘deaths of despair’ that have lowered the US life expectancy for the first time in modern history.  Both the review and the book redefine that loneliness as mourning for that childhood emotional intimacy, which for many men, isn’t replicated ever again.  Is Good Boys a good or thoughtful enough movie to generate that kind of comparison or global psychological interrogation?  Amidst all the dildos and dislocated shoulders, the answer is… sort of.  Eisenberg and Stupnitsky, with the latter directing, effectively remake Superbad for the tween set, adding enough mournfulness to the foul-mouthed gags and making the resultant film deep enough to persist once the laughs have died down.


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Mary Poppins Returns

9/17/2019

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C
​2.00

The magical English nanny returns to help the next generation of the Banks family.

Directed by Rob Marshall
Starring Emily Blunt and Lin-Manuel Miranda
​Review by Jon Kissel

Picture
​I like to think of myself as open-minded enough that the phrase ‘this movie is not for me’ doesn’t apply.  I can generally get on board with a film pitched at any audience, about any segment of the population, and find something to appreciate or a problem that doesn’t simply distill down into an inability to ‘get’ it.  Live-action musicals might be the exception to the rule.  Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music were both in regular rotation in my parents’ home, and they always kept me at arm’s length.  I just can’t get onto their whimsical wavelength, and it’s persisted through the modern musicals of Rob Marshall like Chicago and Mary Poppins Returns.  A decades-later sequel to a film I’ve at least come to respect, Mary Poppins Returns gets minimal credit for not simply being an updated shot-for-shot remake of an old Disney property a la The Lion King, but that credit doesn’t count for much when it’s applied to a member of my least favorite genre.


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True Grit

9/11/2019

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A-
​3.53

A teen girl hires a drunken US marshal to help her find the man who killed her father.

Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen
Starring Hailie Steinfeld, Jeff Bridges, and Matt Damon
Review by Jon Kissel

Picture
​For Joel and Ethan Coen, some things, like scenes that don’t seem to fit in a movie’s structure or unreliable fantasy sequences of indeterminate meaning, are expected.  That makes it all the more noticeable when they leave all that stuff out.  True Grit contains no Mike Yanagita sidebar, nor an eerie stagecoach ride towards what may or may not be the afterlife, but it’s still unmistakably a Coen Brothers film, and their highest-grossing one to boot.  Persistently versatile and effective across genres and time periods, the Coen’s include all the hallmarks of the Western, with cowboys and Indians and outlaws and grand vistas, but they can’t help but put their pet themes of cosmic scales of justice onto a recognizable framework.  The result is a thing that works, an actor’s showcase and a joyful adventure, a reminder of why Westerns have persisted for so long and a modern rejoinder to the kinds of films the Western archetype John Wayne, star of the original as this is a remake, used to churn out.  True Grit is evidence that the Coen’s can be purely entertaining whenever they want to, one more gift for a pair that can do no wrong.


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First Man

8/27/2019

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A-
​3.67

Neil Armstrong experiences personal and professional upheaval, leading up to his landing on the moon.

Directed by Damien Chazelle
Starring Ryan Gosling and Claire Foy
Review by Jon Kissel

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​The Mercury Seven got their epic in The Right Stuff and so did the crew of Apollo 13, and now Neil Armstrong gets his cinematic apotheosis in Damien Chazelle’s First Man, a Kubrickian masterwork from a director who’s said all he has to say about jazz.  Finding fertile new ground in the space race, Chazelle instills his historic representations with the flintiness of his Whiplash characters, portraying Armstrong as a difficult man who, in his difficulty, may have been the only person capable of emerging from the trying 1960’s intact.  Utilizing you-are-there filmmaking and the best of Ryan Gosling’s oft-internal performances, First Man signifies Chazelle’s emergence as a singular auteur in total control of his art.  


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