Oscars 2023: 'All Quiet' Is the Best of the Year. But 'Triangle' Also Delivered.
The BAFTA Best Film winner should sweep, but Oscar doesn't always agree with the Brits. 'Triangle of Sadness' was so effective it caused a leading film critic to break protocol.
I was going to post another heavy screen about the Woke Inquisition’s cult of victimhood, but people are still digesting ‘Drag Is a Form of Blackface.’ As a Kashmiri saying I’m fond of quoting puts it, “When you give someone chilis, give him a glass of water, too.” So here’s your Evian, dearest readers.
We’re coming out of our monthlong pilot period. Hopefully the kinks are ironed out. Stats indicate that you prefer my campfire ghost stories about the Evil Woke, but I need a break myself from the intensity. So here’s a little Hollywood fluffy froufrou for ya, even though it’s about two films that are intense in their own right.
As always, I’m just following Substack’s instructions about promotion to the letter: If you haven’t upgraded to a paid subscription already, please consider it — these anecdotes about Asia ain’t cheap:
Also: Please hit the heart icon at the bottom of the post if you chuckled one or more times. Thanks!
WHERE HAVE ALL THE YOUNG MEN GONE?
This year’s Oscar Best Picture nominees are a worthy bunch. And there are so many of them: ten, the maximum allowed. I usually agree with max four of the nominees, but this year the only choice I don’t agree with is Avatar; I almost walked out in the middle, then remembered how much I paid for the ticket and stayed seated on principle, although I did take advantage of yet another water-splashy, rubber-flying-dinosaur montage to treat myself to a leisurely pee — in the gents, not on the screen, much as the movie deserved it.
From my point of view as a filmmaker, All Quiet on the Western Front is worthiest of the top award, by far. It’s already won the BAFTA, which isn’t as big a predictor of the winner as one might think: Oscar and BAFTA have agreed only 30% of the time in the past decade; 40% in the past 20 years. I tend to agree with Mama Britannia more often than Hollywood — Moonlight? Green Book? Coda? — because she has better taste and fewer silly prejudices, even if both of the awarding institutions must share some of the same voting members.
Full disclosure: It turns out that nominee Edward Berger, All Quiet’s co-writer and director, and I share the same agent in London. I didn’t know that until a few weeks ago, when our agent said he was coming to town for the ceremony, and asked if would I like to induce alcohol poisoning have drinks with him. But I’d made up my mind about Berger’s masterpiece months ago. As I said in a WhatsApp text to our agent, “I’m too awestruck to be envious of that man.”
Indeed, so stunned was I after watching the film when it dropped on Netflix in late October that I was glad I hadn’t seen it on the big screen; it might have overwhelmed me, even more so than Saving Private Ryan, which was the best war film ever made until All Quiet came along and tied it for that honor. I still can’t say which is the better piece of filmmaking.
I tried to comment about All Quiet in my usual short-n-snappy review of films on Facebook the next day, but couldn’t; I was too shattered and respectful of the WWI trench-warfare experience, and the soul-eating inferno of ground warfare going on right now in Ukraine, that it demanded silence and contemplation. I put it off till the next day, and then the next and the next, until never. There is no praise or thought that I can add that’s any different from what’s already out there, and my grieving for the violence and destruction we so wantonly, senselessly inflict on each other is something I choose to keep privately.
A subtheme of this entire post is critics’ negative reactions to last year’s masterpieces. Another full disclosure: the second part of this piece about Triangle of Sadness (ToS) was posted months ago on Facebook, and later on my website, Pure Film Creative. Because the Wokeness has seeped into every corner and niche of the Liberal world, and because two of the nominees for Best Picture, ToS and Tár, deal with the current cultural Reign of Terror 2.0, I’ve been curious how the usual spreaders of what Elon the Great rightly calls a “mind virus” like The New York Times and The New Yorker talked about All Quiet.
The general complaints are about its sensory assaults, which are meant to impart the sense, however feebly and fleetingly, of what it was like to be in the trenches, as well the long lulls between battlefield action. The complaints read like kids in the back seat whining “are we there yet?” on a short trip to Disney World.
Rather than shit on their opinions with my own, I asked my good friend Nathan Schoemer, the star dog trainer from Animal Planet and former Marine who served in two tours of duty in Iraq, what he thought about its authenticity:
Me: “Any thoughts as a former Marine about the realness of its effect, understanding that it’s not the same as real warfare?”
Nathan: “I thought it was excellent. I’m halfway through the book. Although the combat during WWI was way more extreme than anything I saw.”
Me: “I can imagine. My feeling is that the few complaints about it having long lulls of nothing are silly because they are merely representations of the yawning periods of boredom in any war. How do you feel about that?”
Nathan: “The long lulls of nothing are an accurate representation of the periods of boredom in war. I spent 16 months in a combat zone and was only involved in 2 battles and 9 firefights.”
Firefights are usually brief periods of gunfire, not the same as trench battles for months over the course of several years, which is why Nathan can say “only,” when to most of us two battles and nine firefights sound like more than we can imagine being subjected to. But, much as I’ve poked and prodded over the years, Nathan has no residual trauma from his experience, so the dismissive qualifier “only” is in character. Still, we thank you for your service, sir — may you never be asked to do it again.
To me, the lulls in the action are also an unspoken hat tip to the enduring cultural significance of the title. Per FreeDictionary.com:
The phrase “all quiet on the Western Front” has become a colloquial expression meaning stagnation, or lack of visible change, in any context.
The New Yorker didn’t deign to lower its snobby monocle to review the film properly, that I can find. Rather, it too recently published a voter-influencing piece about how it did a disservice to the book. Astoundingly, there wasn’t a single mention of the horrors of what we’re seeing daily in images from the frontlines of trench warfare in Europe; they could be stills from the film. Who cares about faithfulness to a book written almost a century ago? Look at the browser window of any news service, you pretentious, cringing Nancy.
See, this is why I’m doing this: the willful cluelessness of my hometown’s establishment media has reached geostationary orbital heights, round and round the world we go, never moving, never changing — all’s quiet in Midtown Manhattan.
For my Euro-attuned sensibilities, there is something equally profound about this version being German; the other two, a 1930 feature directed by Lewis Milestone, which won Best Picture, and a 1979 CBS TV movie, were both American. The making and release of this version signal a general emergence of German culture from a three-generation period of atonement for the Holocaust, which I think is overdue, and I grew up in post-War Italy with deep prejudices about everything German that will never leave me completely. I remember being shocked to hear that a high school friend was studying German; it’s essential for any serious art history study, with so much scholarly text in German that was as yet untranslated. I was secretly envious: despite the many mocking impersonations of the accent and language by Brits and Italians, I’d always loved the sound of German.
At the risk of coming off like anti-Semites Kanye and Dave Chappelle, my concerns about All Quiet’s Best Picture chances are because of those same lingering prejudices about Germany in Hollywood, which ironically the Brits don’t have anymore, despite their direct suffering during WWII and a sizable Jewish presence in UK entertainment industry.
I’m reminded of an incident that happened in 2016, after a script meeting with an Oscar-nominated Jewish producer and a notable German director, a Gentile. Over pizza after the meeting, the producer asked the director about German guilt and remorse over the Holocaust, and then proceeded down a rabbit hole of prejudice about Germans so shocking that I stepped in and changed the subject. I got a text message a few days later from the director stating, “I’m not impressed.” It took me a few years, but I’m no longer impressed, either.
Still, it might be for that very reason that the Academy will also choose to let history live where it belongs: in the past, and with historians. Perhaps they will remember that the American way is supposed to be merit over politics and ideology; however, our media titans and Hollywood culture in general have become very lost in the black forest of Wokeness, which tries to keep historical narratives that are no longer relevant alive in the present to justify this pseudo-activism to liberate the perpetually oppressed, who are really just fine, if they’d only finish their spinach, wash their hands, and hippity hop hop without stop to bed, and then if they’re very quiet and good we’ll read them a story, but no drag queens.
IN WHICH A.O. SCOTT FORGETS HIMSELF
The first thing I did after watching Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or-winning Triangle of Sadness was to look up the New York Times’ review. The fact that A.O. Scott eviscerates it is a testament to how accurately the film hits its target: Scott himself, as represented by Woody Harrelson's drunk, negligent, isolated, self-obsessed, pseudo-Marxist American captain.
In Scott's words,
"...I still find the tendency in European cinema that those directors represent to traffic frequently in facile provocation and sadomasochistic arousal of the bien-pensant bourgeois audience’s eager self-contempt."
Of course you do: the emperor's been walking around naked, thinking he's wearing raiments both beautiful and righteous, for way too long now.
Scott is correct that ToS is of a type of European art house cinema that spanks America for our frequent narcissistic derelictions of duty as purveyor-guardians of a cultural hegemony over much of the world, but it's no lesser than von Trier, Haneke and Wertmüller's previous explorations of similar themes. I would add Fellini's Orchestra Rehearsal, Buñuel and Resnais to Scott's potpourri of references.
"This, in the end, is a very bad movie," Scott writes, deliberately breaking a cardinal rule in critical writing that prohibits resorting to lazy qualitative adjectives like "bad," "good" or "great." That personally wounded indignation is a measure of how thoroughly Östlund achieves his purpose.
The Gray Lady doth protest too much: She still doesn't get the full extent of the damage she has done to Anglosphere culture in particular. She insists on being the drunk pseudo-Marxist diva caught in an unending circle jerk in an echo chamber. She has moments of self-awareness, but they aren't enough.
What likely upsets Scott the most is the film's final truth: that all men and women truly are created equal, without exception, that even the Nonwhite person formerly oppressed by whites will embrace exploitation and violence if given the chance. All power corrupts; absolute power, like that of the NY Times, corrupts absolutely.
To wit, Scott resorts to a device his colleagues have perfected, and abuses his position as America's preeminent film critic in an attempt to cancel a film that is by no objective criteria of filmmaking "bad," or at least ruin its chances during awards season. How meta.
Scott's overreaction and near-breach of professionalism isn't just because a European has dared mock Americans and our current culture, it's because it's directed at Liberals. Brits flying an enormous helium balloon of Trump in diapers during his visit to the UK is one thing; that reinforces Liberal America's belief that Pugsley and his minions irreparably damaged our once-spotless reputation overseas, adding to the tally of the horrors he committed. For Europeans to dare mock Liberals with a similar effigy in the form of the Captain is intolerable for a group of people who in reality have done as much damage as Trump has. Like Republicans, they perceive that damage as having been holy and for the greater good, when it really is just an outrageously silly mess of vomit and shit.
The American film community, makers, critics and scholars alike, have always had a contentious relationship with Cannes. One of the reasons Robert Redford set up Sundance was to give American indie films that were consistently rejected by Cannes, probably for being too milquetoast, safe and unimaginative. I have my own issues with the festival’s occasional pretentiousness, but it has always been genuinely diverse, equitable and inclusive.
Americans still don’t fully grasp what that means, but they’re convinced that Marx and postmodernist philosophers, ironically most of them French, will guide the way. The reality is that there is philosophically no difference between holding Marx up as a standard of equality and posting a swastika on Twitter. The horrible reason American Liberals think Marx is acceptable is that Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot didn’t kill millions of the kind of people they consider deserving of outrage.
I'd hoped this tinfoil-halo sanctimoniousness would be over by now, but the culture the Times represents continues to double down on its dystopian view of a world that is really doing just fine. Oppression, oppression everywhere, nor another thought to think.
It's pure cognitive dissonance, fantasies corrupted by paranoia, popular dogma, and the financial imperative of clickbaiting — it cannot be sustained. New York's true intelligentsia, having been forced underground, has long wiped its hands of a senile Gray Lady deluded that she's bien pensant, when she's really a spinner of mauvaises cauchemars.
At some point the Sulzbergers will have enough, if they haven't already. They'll politely slip out of the party, and remove their patronage. Onward.
It’s hard just to rewatch the trailer: