If I Had a Nickel for Every Wild Robot that Had no Substance...I'd Still Be Here

Sarah watches all the Oscar nominees every year. I’m a snob who prefers more oddball films, but I watch most of these with her. And I don’t complain during them, like a boor. I write about them here.

While she was watching Oscar bait, I watched Life is Cheap… but Toilet Paper is Expensive, a 1989 guerrilla quasi-documentary by Wayne Wang, who went on to direct The Joy Luck Club, and one of my favorite films, Smoke (and its companion piece, Blue in the Face.) This one just left the Criterion channel, but if you get a chance to watch it, do so. It’s like a cyberpunk story in ‘80s Shanghai, where a young man has a briefcase shackled to his arm that he’s told to deliver for a mob boss, and it sends him through the underbelly of the city. It is definitely of the time that produced Slacker and Run Lola Run, but it was never boring.

I’m not watching The Brutalist, Conclave, or A Complete Unknown because I hate brutalist architecture and the Catholic Church, and I don’t care about Bob Dylan. How many Dylan movies are there now? Is there anything new to know about him, or the Beatles? Has there been a Pete Seeger biopic yet? I doubt there ever will be. I’m looking forward to the Bruce Springsteen one next year, and I hope there will be movies about Joni Mitchell, Lux Interior, Kurt Cobain, Prince, and Patti Smith. (The documentary bios of Klaus Nomi, Kathleen Hanna and Grace Jones—The Nomi Song, The Punk Singer and Bloodlight and Bami—were great, if you haven’t seen them.)

Nickel Boys, the adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel about the black children beaten and murdered in Florida houses of detention, was excellent. It is filmed like a home movie, often from the perspective of an unseen protagonist or behind his head, hiding his face. The effect is that you feel like Elwood, a smart young man going to college, when he gets picked up by police for something he could not have foreseen. He becomes a slave at a state youth prison; this was how the U.S. replaced the unpaid labor of slaves after Emancipation; the 13th Amendment allows slavery as a punishment for crime.

Elwood makes friends with another boy named Turner, and they try to get by, but following the rules means nothing. They are used for free labor, and many are beaten to death and buried in unmarked graves. The film does not linger on this brutality, but focuses on the periphery; trying to see family, thinking about the Civil Rights movement going on outside, and how little it affects them. We see how trauma affects the survivors, as the ugly truth is revealed decades later. Based on a great Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, and filmed by cinematographer RaMell Ross as his first feature film, it is very different than what we have come to expect from Hollywood. It tells a story that mustn’t be ignored, without relying on salacious depictions of the atrocity. I think after The Underground Railroad, Whitehead wanted to find a different way to tell these stories, and the film retells his story in its own way as well.

The Substance was also very refreshing and different for an Academy Award nominee. A body horror film by Coralie Fargeat, who directed the over the top thriller Revenge, this one is an even more extreme satire. Demi Moore plays an aging has-been star who is now pitching aerobics on morning television, when she is dumped for being “too old.” (I wondered if this was a dig at Jane Fonda, who at 87, still looks amazing.) Her producer is played by Dennis Quaid, channeling Stanley Tucci’s Caesar Flickerman from The Hunger Games in a John Waters suit and a disgustingly smarmy persona that nearly steals the show. Demi gets passed a USB stick by someone sympathetic to her plight, and on it is an ad for a renewal procedure that promises to make her young again, by releasing “her best self.”

This best self is rather like The Picture of Dorian Gray directed by David Cronenberg with a dash of Brian Yuzna. How is best left a surprise, but she is able to get her old job back, and the lure of this youthful persona makes her break the rules about using the Substance, with horrifying results. Fargeat doesn’t make her character innocent, but the youth-lust of men and audiences is left with plenty of blood on their hands (and everywhere else) as the horror unfolds. I told Sarah that while I thought the third act was weak and overlong, I think what I liked best about what Demi Moore and Coralie Fargeat pulled off here is making every Academy member watch a grand guignol allegory of what their industry demands of women, and subject them to a visual approximation of the horror that women performers suffer because of it.

Fargeat has her own over the top style, reminiscent of Gregg Araki, Mary Harron, Gaspar Nöe, and Catherine Breillat. It’s not for everyone, but I can’t wait to see what she does next. Moore is very daring with this role, and part of the satire is that she is stunning, but considered worn out; her “best self,” played by Margaret Qualley, is practically grotesque in its perfection, a gravity-defying airbrushed glamour shot come to life. And the horrors… fans of practical effects will be talking about this movie for years.

To end on a more cheerful note, The Wild Robot is more of a typical Hollywood tear-jerker. Like The Substance, it went places I did not expect from the premise, but none of them were particularly new or surprising. A container ship loses some cargo, including a helper robot named ROS-1734, voiced by Lupita Nyong’o. She wakes up on a North American island in a post-apocalyptic world where the Golden Gate bridge is under water, and only rich humans who use helper robots for everything are left alive. We never see a single human being; the animals are fine in the climate-changed world.

“Roz” has a prime directive to help, and eventually learns the language of all the animals. There was a path here where this could have been a quiet and wistful film as a robot learns about life and communicates in ways we humans can’t, or won’t. But this is a big-budget kid movie, so Roz tries to help the terrified cartoon animals, who flee from her, attack, and steal her parts. She eventually kills a goose family except for one egg, and when it hatches and imprints on her, the movie becomes Wall-E meets Fly Away Home, with a Disney cast of talking animals. She raises the runt goose and teaches him to fly, and he gets bullied, but ends up being Rudolph the Red-Nosed Rein-goose and the bullies like him, and he has no lingering emotional trauma because that’s how you beat bullies in Hollywood—you make yourself useful to them. (Personally, I wanted Roz to cook them with her laser, but you can’t tell kids that violence is all that bullies understand.)

The story goes full Eddie Van Halen on the heartstrings with a robot learning mother-love, but also has killer robots with lasers as the corporation tries to take Roz back… for whatever reason. She’s broken and covered with moss at this point, but this is a weird future where corporations send attack ships to retrieve lost product, and all the animals band together to help her. We enjoyed it, but if I had a choice, I’d rather watch The Iron Giant again instead.

Perhaps the most prescient of the Academy Award nominees for Best Picture is I’m Still Here, about the dictatorship that rules for twenty years in Brazil. We meet the family of Rubens Paiva, a former congressman for the Labor Party, after a military coup takes over the country. They are wealthy and seem mostly unaffected, and we learn of the state of the government when the eldest daughter is pulled over by military police who are looking for “terrorists.” She leaves for college in England. A short time later, secret police descend upon the household and take Rubens, his wife Eunice, and the next-eldest daughter, Eliana. The women are hooded and questioned and imprisoned from one another; when they are released, the government denies having arrested Rubens, and Eunice must carefully work for his release without angering the government. Not to spoil it, but this is a true story and Rubens was murdered by the police and disappeared, leaving the family no closure or recourse. Eunice and the children survive; the young son Marcelo wrote the memoir this is based on. The most they get, even after the dictatorship ends, is a death certificate. The murderers are named but never punished. It is a quietly grueling story, and I felt the stress that the atrocity of “disappearing” inflicted upon the family. It is unknown how Rubens was murdered, but methods included torture and dropping people, alive, into the ocean from aircraft. And while Brazil now has a progressive leader, they elected another wannabe dictator prior to him; unlike Americans, they seem to have learned that these “leaders’ only lead countries into misery and our money into their pockets.

Of the films I’ve seen, my pick for the “best film” is between I’m Still Here, Nickel Boys and Anora. I wouldn’t mind if The Substance won, either. My bet is on the Dylan flick, because Boomers. I haven’t seen Emilia Perez and because of its problematic portrayal of a transgender person. I did watch Will & Harper, about Will Ferrell and his trans friend, comedy writer Harper Steele, on a road trip across the United States, hitting up greasy spoons and dive bars. Steele went on these road trips often throughout her life, but this is the first one after she transitioned, and she is unsure how she’ll be treated. Will comes along for support, and to better understand his friend. I cried more during this than when the Robot Mom saves her gosling, and my mother died this Christmas. That’s some serious emotion, and it’s from true friendship, not manipulative writing. It’s a great movie, and was not nominated for Best Documentary. But go watch it anyway.

Good reading:

How to Raise a Coward