At the Movies

Since I moved to Mexico last October, Alejandro and I have been to the movie theater a number of times.  In fact, I think that this year we saw more of the Oscar nominated films than ever before.

Not long after my arrival, we saw "Oppenheimer".  It was an excellent movie.  It was quite long, and sometimes I had a hard time keeping track of all the characters, but I was pleased to see it walk away with the most Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Director.

Next, we saw "Killers of the Flower Moon" (titled "Asesinos de la Luna" in Spanish).  It also was an excellent movie which portrayed the systematic murders of members of the Osage tribe in the 1920s in order to steal the oil discovered on their reservation.  However, at well over two and a half hours in running time, it was too long.

We saw "Poor Things", which I thought began promisingly as an eccentric variation on the theme of "Dr. Frankenstein".  However, after a while I felt as if I were watching some sort of bizarre porno film.  I don't consider myself a prude, but, really, how many times do we need to see a naked Emma Stone bouncing up and down while she has sex?  It hit a low point when Stone's character, who is working as a prostitute, has a client who brings his underage sons to watch and take notes.  Disgusting!

We also watched a couple of Oscar-nominated films on Netflix.  I was looking forward to watching "Maestro", the biopic about the conductor Leonard Bernstein.  After about a half hour, I said "Turn it off."  I thought it was a totally pretentious piece of crap.

We watched "Society of the Snow", a film from Spain which was nominated as best foreign film.  It was a gripping movie which dealt with the 1972 crash in the Andes Mountains of a flight carrying a Uruguayan rugby team.  It won 12 prizes at the Goya Awards, Spain's equivalent of the Academy Awards.  I wish that it had won the Oscar.

Last weekend, we went to the movie theater twice, to see two more nominated films just before Oscar night.

On Saturday we saw "The Zone of Interest", a British-Polish German language production, that was nominated for Best Picture and for Best Foreign Film

Even though it won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, it was without a doubt the most boring film that I have ever seen.  It deals with the mundane middle-class life of the Commander of Auschwitz and his family in their pleasant home located next door to the horrors of the concentration camp.  I understand that the theme is the "banality of evil", but after a half hour of watching the family going through their daily routine, yeah, "We get it.  When is something dramatic going to happen?" I thought that the performances of the actors were wooden.  The running time was less than two hours, but it felt interminably longer.  As one sarcastic reviewer wrote, the title should have been "The Zone of Disinterest" or "The ZZZZZZone of Interest".

On Sunday we saw "May December" (in Spanish it was titled "Secretos de un Escándalo").  It was nominated for Best Original Screenplay.

In this movie, Natalie Portman plays an actress who is researching a role that she is going to play... a married woman who was imprisoned for her affair with an adolescent.  Julianne Moore plays the notorious sex-offender who, after serving her term in prison, marries and has a family with her young lover.  Many said that Moore should have received an Oscar nomination, and I agree.  We never really figure out the enigma of Moore's character, but it is an engrossing film.