Monthly Archives: February 2025

Editorials

Cinematic Grandeur – The Rise, Fall and Legacy of the Hollywood Roadshow

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One of the most audacious movies to come out las year was the new film from Brady Corbet called The Brutalist (2024).  Starring Adrian Brody as an immigrant Holocaust survivor and architect, the movie tells the story of one man’s experience striving for the American dream by way of gaining favor with a wealthy benefactor who wants him to build a megastructure using the titular architectural style.  The movie is a complex character study about the faults lying within the pursuit of the American Dream and what toll it takes on the artist, but that’s not what makes the movie audacious.  The film is a staggering 3 and a half hours in length, which is not uncommon for a period set drama, but for this particular film, the director incorporated some long dormant Hollywood traditions that help to make the film feel even more monumental.  Baked into the film’s runtime itself is a 15 minute long Intermission, and the movie even opens with the announced Overture.  These elements are not used very often today in movies, but those who watch classic films from the 1950’s and 60’s will instantly know what they are.  They are throwbacks to a style of film exhibition known as the Roadshow format.  The use of the Roadshow format is certainly intentional on Brady Corbet’s part, since the whole movie is a throwback to a different time period, one in which this kind of movie experience existed.  In addition, to filming the movie in the classic and rarely used Vistavision format, the movie revitalizes the Roadshow style of presentation, even if it’s not quite the full Roadshow experience as it plays in local multiplexes.  But, why is the Roadshow such a novelty today compared to the Golden Era of cinema when it was used very frequently.  The answer reveals a lot about the way cinema itself has evolved over time, and it shows that even movies like The Brutalist will not bring it back to it’s full glory ever again.

The cinematic experience was much different 60 years ago than it is today.  From it’s early days and up through the post-War years, going to the movies literally meant “going to the movies” in the plural sense.  You paid a ticket at the box office, and then the cinema would be open to you for the remainder of the program that day.  That’s why people would just come and go throughout the day.  Unless there was a sell-out, audiences had free reign to choose what they would choose to watch that day.  In many cases, the availability of movies depended on how many theaters there were in town, and for some small communities that sometimes meant only one.  So, theaters practiced would run multiple films on the same bill, with one movie being the main attraction, while another smaller movie would be scheduled right after that.  This is where the terms “B-Movie” and “Double Feature” that still exist in movie lingo today come from.  In between the films, there were other short programming to fill the time, including news reels, animated cartoons, movie trailers, and various other shorts.  The heyday of the studio system stuck with this format for a long time, but as movies got more ambitious and lengthy, the industry was looking to a different kind of way to exhibit their films in a way that spotlighted the cinematic experience as something special.  What helped to inspire them was a form of entertainment that Hollywood had over the years been supplanting; which was live theater.  Shows performed on the Broadway stage, or in opera halls across the country used intermissions to break the performances into different acts, giving both the performers and the audiences a break.  Operas, musicals, and stage dramas by this time were considered prestigious forms of entertainment compared to the more provincial entertainment that cinema provided to the masses.  So, Hollywood looked to what the theater community was doing to create their own kind of prestige cinematic experience.

The Roadshow movie experience was meant to create a unique experience that emulated the feeling of attending the opera or any other high brow form of entertainment, but within the confines of a movie theater.  Roadshow films were often presented in a limited fashion, playing at only the most elite theaters in town, and at a premium ticket price.  To emulate the experience like you were going to the theater for a stage performance, the movie would open without trailers or any accompanying shorts attached.  Instead, the speakers would play a specifically orchestrated Overture before the film started; mostly with the screen blank, unless a specific preshow artwork was meant to draw the eye.  Then, depending on which theater you were at, the curtains would be drawn back as the studio logo was projected on the screen and the movie would play through.  If the film was longer that the average movie, there would be an intermission that would break the film into two acts, giving the audience time to either hit the bathrooms or to get more snacks at the concessions.  And at the film’s conclusion, once the words “The End” fades out the curtains close and another track of Exit Music would serenade the audience as they left their seats and walked out.  In whole, it made watching the movies that much more special.  The movie being projected on the big screen would be the same, but aura would be different.  To make the experience even more worthy of a premium ticket price, special souvenir programs would be handed out to you by an usher as you entered, just like you would receive at the theater.  It was a lucrative way to add an extra bit of revenue for the film, and also to help generate extra buzz and prestige around a movie before it was released to the wider market.  But, you couldn’t just do this with any kind of movie.  The films that would receive the Roadshow treatment had to be worthy of such a classy style of presentation.

What set the trend for the modern Hollywood Roadshow was the release of producer David O. Selznick’s Gone With the Wind (1939).  While Gone With the Wind was not the first film to use the Roadshow format for it’s release, it was definitely the one that set the trend for all the movies that came after.  Selznick’s gargantuan Civil War epic really could not have been released in any other way.  At a staggering four hours in length, the longest studio film ever made up to that time and for several years after, Gone With the Wind had to be presented in a Roadshow format no matter where it played.  The Roadshow fit well into Selznick’s zeal for showmanship, and the demand was there for a premium movie experience with the film.  After premiering in Atlanta in 1939, the movie sold out in every large market it was presented, shattering every conceivable box office record, and this was even before receiving a wide release after it’s Roadshow run.  But, while the Roadshow proved to be a valuable source of revenue for some films, the success of Wind was still something that Hollywood found difficult to replicate.  That was until the 1950’s, when the advent of widescreen helped to make cinema feel like a prestigious experience again.  This revitalized the Roadshow format for a new generation, as big screen sword and sandal epics like The Ten Commandments (1956) and Ben-Hur (1959) benefitted from the larger than life experience that the format offered.  The Roadshow experienced offered something that you couldn’t get from watching television alone in your living room.  It made going to a movie palace feel as enriching as going to an opera or concert hall.  And the experience wasn’t just made for biblical stories either.  Historical dramas like How the West Was Won (1960), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and Doctor Zhivago (1965) also adopted the Roadshow format for their prestige releases.  But the Roadshow’s rise in success throughout the widescreen boom would face a different challenge as viewership patterns changed.

Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) fundamentally changed the way people went to the movies, as it’s shocking first act twist made people realize that they had to watch a movie from beginning to end, and not just casually dive in like movie goers would do in the past.  The way movies were released changed accordingly; movie trailers would still play prior to a movie’s start, but double features along with accompanying shorts and newsreels were a thing of the past.  One ticket meant one movie, and the appetite for lengthy 3 hour plus Roadshow features dried up.  Cinemas wanted more showtimes, which meant leaner movies without all the bells and whistles of the Roadshow, including Intermissions.  The ballooning budgets of the Hollywood epics, which used to be justified because of the Roadshow’s premium ticket prices, also became a problem.  The end seemed near for the Roadshow format as a means of theatrical release, especially after 20th Century Fox’s colossally expensive Cleopatra (1963) nearly drove the studio into bankruptcy.  But an unexpected reprieve came for the Roadshow format with the remarkable success of movie musicals in the 1960’s.  Fox was able to recover from their financial woes with the monumental box office of The Sound of Music (1965), becoming the biggest money maker in Hollywood since Gone With the Wind.  Disney and Warner Brothers likewise saw great fortune in their releases of Mary Poppins and My Fair Lady around the same time in 1964.  But what the movie musical also did was use the Roadshow format to perfection.  It harkened back to what inspired the Roadshow in the first place, which was musical theater.  The musicals even had their Intermissions already baked into the show itself, making it easy for Hollywood to know where to put them in their film adaptations.  For a time, this worked out well, and the Roadshow format would survive a bit longer.  But, it unfortunately would be short lived.  The success of Sound of Music and My Fair Lady made Hollywood mistakenly believe that there was a widespread appetite for these prestige Roadshow musicals that actually wasn’t there, and the resulting glut of Roadshow movies in the back end of the 1960’s spelled disaster for the format as a whole.

While Hollywood was rapidly changing, with counter culture films like Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Easy Rider (1969) becoming all the rage, the Roadshow format was representing all that was wrong with the industry at the time.  Big budget musicals that were trying to emulate the success of The Sound of Music were continuing to fail at the box office.  These included musicals like Doctor Doolittle (1967), Camelot (1967) and Hello, Dolly (1969), the latter of which almost wiped out all of the profits that 20th Century Fox had recovered with their Sound of Music success.  Going into the 1970’s, Hollywood was weary of using the Roadshow release format to generate buzz for their tentpole films.  A couple movies of the era did cautiously try to use it, like Patton (1970) and Fiddler on the Roof (1971), but when the big epic of the era, The Godfather (1972), released to great success without using any of the Roadshow features, it all but killed the format.  Hollywood still put out 3 hour plus epics in the decades that followed, but they would run like a regular movie would without an overture or intermission.  This includes some major prestige films that went on to awards season success, like Schindler’s List (1993) and Titanic (1997).  Neither film has any of the same features of Roadshow epics despite sharing their epic lengths.  The rise of the Hollywood blockbuster also changed the movie going experience as well.  With higher demand for blockbuster franchise films like Star Wars (1977), Back to the Future (1985) and many other crowd pleasers, the multiplex supplanted the movie palace as the primary destinations for movie goers.  Hard to replicate the same prestigious experience on the same level of attending a musical or opera when it’s in a small dark box of a room next to many others just like it.  After being the pinnacle of Hollywood prestige at it’s best, the Roadshow was reduced to being a relic of the past.

But the memory of the Roadshow format managed to survive through an unexpected avenue; home theater.  As Hollywood began going through their archives to find movies to release in the rising home entertainment market, they found these longer versions of films that were made in the Roadshow format that they could put out on video as a collector’s edition.  Spotlighted as the “Roadshow Edition,” these home video releases gave cinephiles the oppurtunity to see these movies in their original format, complete with the Overtures, Intermissions, and Exit Music included.  It was like rediscovering all of these movies again, seeing the way that they were originally meant to be seen instead of the truncated versions that were either re-released in multiplex theaters or aired on television.  It renewed an interest in the film enthusiast community towards the bygone era of the Roadshow.  Movies like Gone With the Wind, Lawrence of Arabia, The Ten Commandments would subsequently be given restorations that re-incorporated the entire Roadshow format into their home video releases, and those same restorations would likewise be used in all future theatrical exhibitions as well.  The same went for all of the movie musicals released over this same period.  In some cases, the people who worked on the restorations would include graphic art for the Overtures and Exit Music, as modern audiences are not as familiar with these features and would probably be confused why they are included in the presentation.  While Hollywood hasn’t fully reembraced the Roadshow format completely as a part of their film releases, it’s at least worthwhile that the memory of it is being preserved with the restorations of these older films.  It’s probably a good thing that the Roadshow format is not used for every epic length movie; hard to imagine it being used on something like Avengers: Endgame (2019) or Avatar: The Way of Water (2022).  It’s a special kind of format to be used on certain kinds of movies; ones where the use of Intermissions to break the film into two acts is essential to the experience.

Which brings us back to Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist.  Corbet could’ve released his film without the trappings of a Roadshow style presentation, but he included them in his movie because of the way it evoke the era that the movie takes place.  It’s a film that has the feel of an old school epic, while still being fairly modern in it’s sensibilities.  The Overture and Intermission are integral features of the experience and not a necessity of the presentation because of it’s colossal length; though I’m sure audiences are pleased to finally have a long movie with a bathroom break.  It’s all the more astounding that Corbet was able to make a movie that felt like an old Hollywood epic on a miniscule $10 million budget.  My belief is that using the Roadshow format features helps to reinforce that evocation of grandeur, even with the movie being small and intimate in true scale.  And while Corbet is getting a lot of attention for his expert use of the format, he’s also not the only one that has attempted to revive the Roadshow style in recent years.  Quentin Tarantino famously put out his film The Hateful Eight (2015) in a Roadshow style version that played in select theaters nationwide.  It included the same Overture and Intermission features you would find in Roadshow movies, which Tarantino specifically paying  homage to, especially with regards to the Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone that released in the format.  In select screenings, you would even receive a souvenir program, just like they used to give out in the old Roadshow days.  And while both The Hateful Eight and The Brutalist both are loving recreations of the format, they are unlikely to make the format reach the heights that it once held within the industry.  The way people go to the movies these days has changed too much to support such a format now.  We’re even seeing epic productions like Dune and Wicked choosing to release as two separate films a year apart rather than a single two act Roadshow style film, and it’s working pretty well for Hollywood that way.  Could there still be Roadshow style releases in the future; probably, and with any luck more frequently thanks to The Brutalist’s success.  But it’s future will still likely be that of a novelty rather than the norm.  And that in a way is what’s best for the format.  The Roadshow was the pinnacle of Hollywood prestige and the rarer the treasure the better.  With the industry recognizing the special quality it brings to making the art of film feel as important as that of the high arts of theater and opera, it’s a good thing that it stands as the high water mark of cinema at it’s peak.

Movie Reviews

Captain America: Brave New World – Review

It’s interesting to see what taking some time off can do to your health.  For Marvel Studios, the post-Endgame years have been a bit of a roller coaster.  The delay in releases caused by the Covid-19 pandemic forced Marvel to reshuffle their plans, and this created a bit of a backlog for them as they were trying to move forward with their newest phases.  As a result, their yearly output nearly doubled, with as many as three or four new titles making it to theaters within a given year.  This was coupled with the studio also making their big push into streaming aboard their parent company’s newest platform, Disney+.  For a moment, audiences were happy to see the MCU back on the big screen, but as the bombardment of new titles kept coming as Marvel tried to relieve themselves of the backlog, audiences started to feel a sense of fatigue from all of the stuff Marvel had to offer.  Couple this with the inner turmoil at the Disney Corporate offices with the chaos caused in the short lived Chapek era, and people were starting to believe that Marvel had lost it’s magic touch.  The movies were not being received as warmly as the ones released in the lead up to the end of the Infinity Saga, and people cared even less about the shows that were appearing on Disney+, with some notable exceptions.  This growing super hero fatigue was also not unique to Marvel either, as DC was also experiencing the final death throws of their struggling DCEU.  It all came to a head in the year 2023, where Marvel saw it’s biggest losses as a brand.  Though Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 managed to succeed at the box office, the other films that year (Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and The Marvels) became the first ever money losers in MCU’s stellar history.  All of this led to Disney CEO Bob Iger making the decision to slam on the brakes with Marvel’s output and have the studio take a break in order to get things back on track.

In the whole of 2024, Marvel only had one film release in theaters; a significant reduction in their yearly output.  But, that single film would end up being the sure fire Deadpool & Wolverine (2024), a long awaited sequel to one of the bigger franchises around one of Marvel’s most popular characters.  While Marvel didn’t have the benefit of multiple mega-hits to carry them through the whole year, they still benefited from having Deadpool & Wolverine carry the spotlight all by itself.  The movie would end up grossing $1.5 billion at the worldwide box office, their biggest hit in years, and second only to Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) in the post-Endgame era.  The pause in the output also allowed the studio more time to re-organize themselves and put more work into the projects that were having trouble in production.  This year, Marvel is getting back to their regular ambitious output of 3 in one year.  Later this summer, we are getting the team up movie called Thunderbolts* (2025) and the long anticipated The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025).  But before then, we are getting the release of one of the more troubled productions Marvel has had in their whole history.  This new film is Captain America: Brave New World (2025), which is the fourth film centered around the iconic character, although this version is not the same Captain that we’ve known up to now.  At the end of Avengers: Endgame (2019), the original Captain America Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) literally aged out of the persona, and he left his iconic shield to his trusted friend Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie), aka The Falcon.  In between then and now, there was a Disney+ plus series called The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, which followed up the events of Endgame by having Sam Wilson make that transition even more towards accepting the role of Captain America, a position that he was reluctant to take before.  Now, having finally donned the red, white, and blue, Brave New World gives Sam Wilson’s Captain the full cinematic spotlight.  The only question is, does the new direction of Captain America as a character mark a fresh new path for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or does the film unfortunately still bear the scars of their misfortune and disorganization over the last couple of years.

The story of Brave New World begins after the events of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.  Sam Wilson (Mackie) has fully assumed the mantle of Captain America, fulfilling the wishes of the late Steve Rogers who bestowed him the Vibranium shield.  The next generation Captain America has been conducting missions in assistance of the United States army alongside his wingman Joaquin Torres, who has inherited the role of The Falcon from him.  After successfully retrieving a key piece of cargo necessary for the US Government to sign a peace treaty, Wilson and Torres are invited to the White House to meet with the newly elected President, Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross (Harrison Ford).  Ross wants Sam to rebuild the Avengers team, which is a shocking proposition from him considering he used his influence to dismantle the Avengers with the implementation of the Sakovia Accords, which landed Sam in prison for a brief while.  Along with Sam and Joaquin is an old friend named Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly), who is a super soldier serum enhanced fighter that later was abandoned by his country and thrown into prison for decades in order to hide the truth about his powers.  While President Ross is giving a presentation to world leaders at this White House Summit, Bradley suddenly stands up and attempts to assassinate him.  He is arrested and after questioning reveals that he has no memory of the incident.  Against the President’s wishes, Sam seeks answers and begins investigating further based on his assumption that Bradley had been set up.  He does some digging and finds a secluded, off the grid army base where it appears secret scientific experimentations had been taking place.  There, they find Dr. Samuel Sterns (Tim Blake Nelson), who had been imprisoned there ever since he helped create the Abomination that attacked the Hulk over 16 years prior.  After being exposed to gamma radiation himself, Sterns’ brain had doubled in size and functionality, and he had been exploited for his intellect by then General Ross for all these years.  He’s now seeking revenge on Ross, and it involves manipulating world governments into fighting each other over a new element called Adamantium that was discovered in the newly emerged Celestial Island in the Indian Ocean.  Complicating matters even more, Captain America is also dealing with a rogue mercenary named Sidewinder (Giancarlo Esposito), head of a group named Serpent.  Captain America and the Falcon must act fast in order to unravel Sterns’ master plan and clear Bradley’s name.  But Stern’s plans run even deeper than they thought, including a stealth plan in place involving President Ross himself.

The road to the big screen was not easy for Captain America: Brave New World.  Greenlit towards the end of the Chapek era, the movie seemed to struggle from the very beginning.  It was delayed multiple times, with a major one forced upon it in the middle of shooting by the strikes of 2023.  It also faced multiple rewrites and reshoots, as it seemed like Marvel and Disney were desperately trying to salvage what had been a poorly planned out production.  But, the movie has finally arrived in theaters at a time that Marvel hopes to start off a major revival of their struggling MCU.  And after all the trouble that went into making the movie, it unfortunately results in a movie that is just okay.  It’s far from the worst thing that Marvel has made, and yet it also pales in comparison to it’s best.  Of the four Captain America movies that have been made by Marvel, this is unfortunately the weakest one, which is a sad thing to say for a movie that is meant to introduce us to the next generation of the beloved character.  The main problem with the movie is that you can  really feel the mechanics of all the re-workings this movie went through.  The different acts of the film all feel like they came from entirely different drafts by different writing teams.  The first act is an exposition heavy re-introduction of the characters, while the middle act is a taut mystery thriller, and the final act is yet another bombastic, CGI-enhanced Marvel action sequence.  There are individual moments throughout that do work on their own, but the movie struggles to hold it all together.  And you can definitely feel where the reshoots happened in contrast with the other scenes; they stick out like sore thumbs.  Giancarlo Esposito’s Sidewinder was one of those late editions to the film added in reshoots, and you can definitely tell that he was shoe-horned into the movie.  None of it though is exactly awful to watch; it’s just disappointing when all the different elements don’t lead to a cohesive whole.

One of Marvel’s major problems since Avengers: Endgame is that they have struggled to define their direction in the next phase.  The Multiverse Saga as it’s been defined has certainly had some high points, but the track record that Marvel had sustained for most of the last decade at a high point has more recently been more of a roller coaster.  The big problem is that more of their movies now feel more like a new episode of an on-going series rather than films that can stand well on their own.  That’s what made the MCU so special in the Infinity Saga years; that they were working with so many different flavors and allowing them to define themselves in addition to serving toward the ultimate goal of the Avengers films.  Now, each Marvel property is beginning to feel the same.  Some of it has still worked (Guardians, Deadpool), and I’ve been a bit more forgiving than other critics of Marvel’s recent direction, because as long as I come away entertained I will still give a movie a pass for some of it’s faults.  The problem with Brave New World is that the faults get in the way of the entertainment value of the movie.  It’s humorless for the most part, and the action scenes are showing me nothing new that I haven’t seen before from Marvel.  There is still some competency in it’s production that helps it to avoid the basement of the MCU.  I wasn’t angered by the film like I was by Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania or Iron Man 3 (2013).  But, the lack of anything special about the movie also leaves this in the bottom half of the MCU.  But, Marvel at it’s worst can still be better than most.  The best thing I can say about the movie is that I would definitely choose it over any of Sony’s Spiderverse films, but that’s a phenomenally low bar.  It’s about on par with some of the average DCEU films at worst.  Marvel definitely needs to relearn how to allow these movies to stand on their own again.  For this movie, not only is it necessary to have seen The Falcon and the Winter Soldier Disney+ series, but the film also references the previous Captain America movies, the Avengers movies, 2008’s nearly long forgotten The Incredible Hulk, and surprisingly also Eternals, which thankfully gets a long overdue resolution to one of it’s hanging plot threads.  And with the introduction of Adamantium in this film, it’s likely that this movie will be a stepping stone for the eventual introduction of the X-Men in the MCU.  There’s a lot going on in this film, but what it’s not doing is making you care for the actual plot that’s happening in the moment within the movie.

The saving grace for this movie is the very talented and entirely game cast.  Anthony Mackie is charming as ever, and brings an infectious magnetism to the role.  While the character himself seems to feel lost in his own movie, Mackie’s performance still shines through and you can’t help but like the guy through all the movie’s faults.  What is really impressive though is just how well Harrison Ford fits in playing the role of President Ross.  Ford is taking over a role that had previously been played by the late William Hurt in a span of 13 years and 5 movies.  He had some big shoes to fill in a role that so many people associated with another legendary actor, and yet Ford manages to make the part his own and successfully carry on the legacy of the character into this new chapter.  I love the sincerity of Ford’s performance here.  Though this is Ford’s first ever performance in any super hero movie, let alone a Marvel one, he actually feels right at home and you quickly get used to him in the role of Thunderbolt Ross.  The villains of the movie also stand out.  Credit to Tim Blake Nelson for patiently waiting for his chance to return to the role of Samuel Sterns after a 16 year absence.  While some of his villainous plan doesn’t make a whole lot of sense in the script, Nelson still gives Sterns a menacing presence that helps him to feel like an actual threat.  And despite feeling like a last minute addition shoehorned into an already crowded film, Giancarlo Esposito does make the most of his time and steals every scene he is in as Sidewinder.  But perhaps the best performance of the film belong to Carl Lumbly as Isaiah Bradley.  He brings a subtle bit of gravitas to the character, and you really feel the weight of the history of this forgotten man.  He brings a lot of powerful emotion into the film that it otherwise lacks, and you can imagine a whole film’s worth of backstory that would be worth exploring about his character.  So while the script leaves a lot to be desired, the actors still make the film enjoyable enough to warrant at least a watch.

The visuals are a bit of a mixed bag.  In some moments, the movie feels flat like an episode of a Disney+ Marvel series.  But in other moments, it has some impressive visuals that live up to the high standards of the MCU.  The finale in particular really feels like it had the majority of the budget invested into it, as we see Captain America go into battle with a big CGI creature that you probably already can guess who it is.  The third act, which is by far the most cohesive part of the movie, feels like the section that experienced the least amount of changes during the re-working of the film, and it shows in the visuals.  The way that some scenes feel bland and lacking in style while others are inventive in their visuals is another tell tale sign of the re-shoots that occured after principle photography.  The re-shoots probably had a very different crew working on them, and that’s what leads to this feeling of inconsistency in the look of the film.  The movie definitely lacks the visual punch that the Russo Brothers brought to the other Captain America movies, or the distinct styles of Taika Waititi, James Gunn, or Ryan Coogler who left their mark on the MCU over the years.  Director Julius Onah is a competent enough director, but his approach here doesn’t deliver anything striking.  His style just falls into the same house style that Marvel movies have become increasingly more reliant upon.  The air battles in particular don’t have the visceral impact that they should.  Marvel probably should’ve taken some cues from the flight scenes in Top Gun: Maverick to help make their moments feel more exciting.  Again, it’s not terrible, but you really get the sense that it could have been better.  There’s no risk-taking involved in the making of this movie.  You can sense the makings of a great MCU movie within the ingredients on display here, but the complete product just stands as safe and predictable.  As Marvel heads towards their final phase of their Multiverse Saga, they need to do a bit better than safe and predictable.

Captain America: Brave New World has elements that work, and potential to be great; but unfortunately it just doesn’t justify it’s need to exist in the greater continuity of the MCU.  It’s a small chapter in a greater narrative, and one that most people are likely going to forget they even watched at all.  Marvel is loosing the way that their movies felt like events.  While they can still knock one out of the park occasionally, like last year’s Deadpool & Wolverine, they are more often making films that just barely cross the line into acceptability.  There are some great performances in the film, notably from Mackie, Ford and Lumbly.  But, the plot feels thin and inconsequential compared to Marvel at it’s best.  The sad thing is that it undermines Anthony Mackie’s debut as the star of the Captain America franchise, which should matter especially if he’s got a bigger future as a part of the MCU going forward.  He’s demonstrated that he can fill the part quite well; it’s just that Marvel needs to find a better story to play to his strengths as an actor much more.  I would like to see a more about his friendship with Isiah Bradley, and why it matters to Sam Wilson to be carrying that torch of Captain America, which holds a special kind of burden in itself, especially given the fact that unlike Steve Rogers and Isaiah Bradley, he has not been enhanced with super soldier serum.  My hope is that the mediocre elements of this film were more of a bi-product of the tumultuous Chapek era, where Marvel had less in-house creative control, and that the future films in the MCU are able to stand well enough on their own in addition to being part of the cinematic universe.  I’m actually really looking forward to the rest of the 2025 MCU slate; especially with the very promising Fantastic Four reboot.  Captain America: Brave New World is a shining example of the things that Marvel has been loosing their grip with in terms of quality control in their movies, but hopefully it’s also the point where their creative backslide starts to reverse itself.  It’s hard to know if the reshoots did more good than bad for this film.  We do know that they weren’t enough to reverse course completely.  Brave New World still resulted in a flawed by still watchable film.  Longtime Marvel fans may get a kick out of some of the more fan service moments in this movie, but otherwise most people will move on quickly to the greener pastures that are on Marvel’s horizon coming later this year and into the future.

Rating: 6.5/10

Tinseltown Throwdown

Tinseltown Throwdown – Rocketman vs. Bohemian Rhapsody

If there is one pattern that people tend to notice about the awards season it’s that performances that imitate real, noteworthy people usually get a lot of attention.  Even more so, it’s performances based on famous entertainers that are recognized even more so.  It’s through this that you really start to notice the internal bias of the film industry, where they will be extra generous to movies or performances that reflect kindly onto their own community.  In many cases, it helps if an actor is portraying a public figure that many in the voting bodies of Hollywood either knew personally or had a strong familiarity with.  Of course, it matters that the performances are good as well.  People know who these public figures are, so the imitation has to be spot on.  But sometimes the accuracy of the imitation may end up lamp shading the faults of the movie, and that’s where you see the bias come out the most as industry insiders may cast favor on a movie that doesn’t deserve the praise as long as they got the imitation right.  Even more so, it also helps a movie to have a killer soundtrack to go along with their entertainer’s life story.  In recent years, we have seen a proliferation of a subgenre known as the musical biopic and it’s mainly due to a recognition that there is that built in bias in the industry when it comes to celebrating movies about their own community.  We’ve had movies devoted to legendary performers such as Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, the rap group N.W.A., Aretha Franklin, Whitney Houston, and this season’s golden boy Bob Dylan.  And on the horizon, there are musical biopics being devoted to Michael Jackson and Bruce Springsteen.  While these movies have varying degrees of success, there is also something that has become apparent about the subgenre, which is that it is very much defined by formula.

Like a lot of other biopics about famous figures, the musical biopic definitely sticks with the cradle to grave template of telling a life’s story.  But what many of these movies usually fail to do is to treat their subjects like real people.  There are some laughably mediocre biopics that make it appear like the famous singer or performer came into this world pre-formed and ready to change the world from the day they were born.  It’s the same formulaic progression, the performer takes the stage for the first time, gets noticed out of the blue by someone with connections, becomes an instant success, goes through a burnout period because they can’t deal with being controlled and then finally achieves their greatest success on their own terms.  What a lot of these movies leave out is the actual tedious hard work that these performers had to get through in order to build their careers.  Essentially, these movies want to be about the icon and not the human being.  Musical biopics read like a bullet point list of all the benchmarks of the entertainer’s career, and quite a few fail to do much more than to show the highlights.  One of the reasons this happens is because, particularly when it’s about famous singers and musicians, in order to have the rights to the music the filmmakers must first get the approval from the actual person that the movie is about, or get permission from their estate if they are no longer around.  Because of this, you see a pattern of musical biopics that treat their subjects with kid gloves, which often ends up taking all of the intrique and conflict out of their life story.  But, not all musical biopics fall into this trap, and some actually manage to rise above formula by actually taking risks.  There are two recent musical biopics in particular with a shared history that represents this dichotomy between playing things safe and taking risks, and it’s interesting comparing how one clearly understands the idea of making a cinematic story out of a real person’s life so much better.

“I’m Elton Hercules John”

In 2018, 20th Century Fox embarked on the making of a musical biopic based on the legendary rock band Queen.  That film would take it’s title from the band’s signature song, the ground-breaking Bohemian Rhapsody.  Two of the surviving band members, Brian May and Roger Taylor were very involved in the making of the movie while the other surviving member, John Deacon, refused to participate.  Of course, the fourth member of the band, front man Freddie Mercury, has been long deceased, which makes the portrayal of him in the movie a bit skewed.  The portrayal of Freddie Mercury within Bohemian Rhapsody is mostly being presented to us second hand based on those who worked with him.  Mercury never got a chance to tell his own story his way, so with Bohemian Rhapsody, we are being presented with a portrait of him as others saw him.  It’s a prime example of a movie presenting a figure more as an unknowable icon rather than a relatable human being.  Sure, the movie gives us an impressive imitation of the man with Eygptian- American actor Rami Malek doing a fair send up of the British-Persian music icon, but the movie doesn’t know how to delve any deeper than to show what a dynamic performer he was.  Meanwhile, the following year saw Paramount Pictures deliver a musical biopic based on the life of singer Elton John called Rocketman (2019).  In this case, Mr. John himself gave his own personal consent to everything that was going to be shown in the movie about him, and the surprising thing about the film is just how brutally honest it is.  While Bohemian Rhapsody is so careful to create an idealized version of it’s subject, Rocketman presents a warts and all portrait of it’s subject, which in many ways feels more honest and true to the character of Elton John himself.  It’s a very strong contrast between these two examples of musical biopics, and it makes it all the more perplexing knowing that they shared a director.  Well, 1 and a half of the movies were directed by the same person.

“There’s only room in this band for one hysterical queen.”

The making of Bohemian Rhapsody was something of a disaster for the most part.  The film was originally set up to be directed by Bryan Singer of X-Men (2000) and The Usual Suspects (1995) fame.  However, Singer proved to be a highly unreliable presence on the set.  There was a weeks long period of absence that Singer himself says was related to family emergencies, but others involved with the film attested that there was a pattern of Singer showing up late to filming constantly, which was putting a strain on the film’s shooting schedule and budget.  Ultimately Fox had to fire him mid-way through the shoot, leaving the movie without a director and in danger of shutting down.  And this was bad considering the years it took for the movie to actually get off the ground in the first place.  Eventually, Fox turned to actor/director Dexter Fletcher to get the movie past the finish line.  It wasn’t easy, given that Fletcher was preparing to film his own musical biopic, which just happened to be Rocketman.  Bohemian Rhapsody did get finished, but it’s troubled production is still very visible in the final film.  The movie is very awkwardly edited together, which is evident of the patchwork assembly of all the footage they had to work with from two different shooting teams.  This accounts for the formulaic way that the film comes across, merely going moment by moment through the high an low points of Queen’s history as a band.  It’s a movie without a vision.  Contrast that with Rocketman, which was Dexter Fletcher’s baby from the get go.  You see a much clearer vision presented in that film as it flows through a much more consistent style.  What even better is that Rocketman accepts the trappings of cinema even more, as it is presented less like a straight forward drama, and more like a musical.

Rocketman avoids a lot of the pitfalls of musical biopics by not making the story just a linear line from beginning to end.  It’s given a framing device of Elton John entering rehab for the first time (hilariously still dressed in one of his elaborate stage costumes) and pouring out his heart to everyone, which gives us the more insight into him as a person.  The songs we all know from his career are present, but they are woven into the plot rather than used as a road marker.  There’s a great one-shot style presentation of “Saturday Night’s Alright” to show John in his rebellious youth days, or the song “Honky Cat” to show a musical montage of him living it up in the high life.  Like all great musicals, these songs move the story along, while the story itself presents a portrait of the man as he tries to find his identity.  The framing device of him being in a rehab works very well, as we keep cutting back to him throughout the film, taking one more piece of his costume off each time in a metaphoric disrobing of the man, until he finally is just himself by the end, sans the flamboyant character he created.  He walks in as Elton the icon, and by the end we are left with Reginald Dwight the man, comfortable about who he is and what he had to do to get there.   Dexter Fletcher uses the medium of film in a much more creative way than what we see in Bohemian Rhapsody.  You can’t fault Fletcher for that part, as he was there to merely help get the film past the finish line.  The movie is definitely more of a reflection of Bryan Singer’s indifference to the subject.  It was clearly a movie made without love or care, and it just follows the formula without passion.  The sad thing is, if there was ever a band that deserved an unconventional biopic, it was Queen, given just how genre defying they were.  It especially reflects bad on the music, as the songs are just there without anything remarkable about them.  It even has that musical biopic cliché where you see the band members hear one of their team play a new tune, in this case John Deacon (played by Joseph Mazzello) playing the guitar riff of “Another One Bites the Dust,” and they all together say we should make that into a song.  No such scene happens in Rocketman, by the way.  The only musical moment in Bohemian Rhapsody that actually has cinematic weight to it is the recreation of Live Aid that makes up the finale, and that’s only because it’s Live Aid, a monumental moment in Queen’s history.

“Real love’s hard to come by.  So you find a way to cope without it.”

Of course, the thing that gets these movies made to begin with is the opportunity for an actor to portray an iconic entertainer, which as we’ve seen gets some attention during Awards season.  Both of the leads in each film are appropriately cast.  You look at Rami Malek compared to the real Freddie Mercury and he does pull off the look very well.  Of course, he needed the help of the prosthetic front teeth that recreated Mercury’s famous protruding upper jaw, which some have surmised helped Mercury to hit those high notes better as a singer.  Malek also manages to pull off a decent British accent, though his speaking voice is perhaps a bit too deep compared to the real life singer.  On the other side, Taron Edgerton also made a good lookalike for Elton John.  It’s especially uncanny when you see him wearing the singer’s famous thick rimmed glasses.  And he didn’t ave to fake a British accent either.  But there is a very big distinction between the two actors in their performances, and it has to do with the ability to sing.  Rami Malek can sing as an actor, just not like Freddie Mercury, so the majority of his musical performance is lip-synched to Mercury’s own original recordings of the songs.  Edgerton on the other hand didn’t lip synch a single word in Rocketman.  All of his performance is 100% his own voice, and it’s an astounding imitation of Elton John’s own performance style.  And it’s not just Edgerton that does his own singing in the film, it’s the entire cast, keeping with the movie musical aspect of the movie.  It was important to have a whole cast that could sing to Elton’s iconic tunes, and actors like Jamie Bell, Bryce Dallas Howard, and Richard Madden all contribute surprisingly soulful and spirited covers of these songs.  Bohemian Rhapsody by contrast is karaoke.  And yet, when it came to Oscar time, Rami Malek was the one who came away with a win while Edgerton and the entire Rocketman cast weren’t even nominated.  Art can be subjective, but at times you’ve got to think that the members of the academy are musically tone deaf as well.

Thus far I’ve discussed just how much these two films contrast in terms of how they either stick to formula or break from it.  Clearly Rocketman is the more groundbreaking film of the two, but there is one thing that undisputedly puts Rocketman way above Bohemian Rhapsody, and that’s the honesty that it displays with regards to it’s two subjects.  It should be noted that Bohemian Rhapsody is a PG-13 rated movie, while Rocketman proudly wears it’s R-rating on it’s sequined shoulders.  Anyone who knows about Queen, and in particular it’s front man Freddie Mercury, is that they did not live a PG-13 life.  A lot of the true story of the band is left out and the whole thing makes the movie feel sanitized.  In particular, it seems that the movie downplays Freddie Mercury’s sexual orientation in what may be an attempt to allow the movie to have broader appeal worldwide, including countries where something like that is forbidden.  The movie can’t hide it completely, since it was such a major factor in Freddie Mercury’s public identity, as well as his eventual death from AIDS.  But, there is unmistakably an effort to minimize it’s presence in the movie.  It even has the audacity to make it seem like Mercury remained a frustrated bi-sexual in his final years, still with a crush on his first girlfriend, even though in real life he was almost exclusively with men towards the end.  By contrast, Rocketman celebrates Elton John’s status as a queer icon and a major part of the movie is him gaining the courage to come out of the closet, a move that the movie presents as triumphant.  These two movies both center around two of the first pop entertainers to ever declare their homosexuality to the world, and yet one of the movies isn’t ashamed to have that as a major feature of it’s story.  It’s disgraceful if the decision was made to sanitize Freddie Mercury’s story purely for the sake of higher box office.  Rocketman not only is the more cohesive and enriching cinematic experience, it’s also the more honest and braver of the two films as well.

“I’m going to be what I was born to be; a performer that gives the people what they want: a touch of the heavens.”

Sadly, the selling out that Bohemian Rhapsody did may have worked in it’s favor.  It did have the higher box office of the two movies, with nearly a billion dollar in grosses worldwide, as well as four Oscar wins, including Best Actor for Rami Malek.  But critically, Rocketman was much better received and it has held up better in the years since.  Since it’s released, Bohemian Rhapsody has been pointed to as the poster child for the worst kind of musical biopic.  Every musical biopic cliche you can think off has a correlating example in the movie.  It is by definition a movie by formula, where the biographical elements are presented purely as a bullet point outline of what happened, and not a deep dive into the psyche of it’s subject.  It makes it all the more insulting that the original band members signed off on the film too; or at least two of them, given that one wisely refused to participate and the other is sadly no longer around to have his say.  They’ll say that the movie is not supposed to be a Freddie Mercury biopic, but is instead a Queen biopic.  But given just how much the movie centers around Freddie Mercury (because whether they like it or not he was the most famous member), the fact that they okayed a movie that underplays his status as a queer pioneer in entertainment feels a bit exploitative.  Rocketman on the other hand boldly presents Elton John’s story with all the bad stuff included.  John shows a great deal of self reflection in the movie, allowing the film to show him even as a major asshole sometimes.  In many ways, it’s not a self aggrandizing film, but rather Elton John’s love letter to the people who helped to set his life right, in particular his long time lyricist and best friend Bernie Taupin (played by Jamie Bell in the film).  It’s fitting in the end that Rocketman’s sole Oscar win was for an Original Song written just for the movie by both Elton and Bernie; the first time they’ve ever shared the honor.  The movie is honest and personal, and ultimately is not a soulless cash grab like Bohemian Rhapsody turned out to be.  Some of the better musical biopics in recent years, like Elvis (2022) and Better Man (2024) have thankfully followed more in Rocketman’s footsteps, and shown that it’s better to understand the singer more than the songs that they’ve created.  What we see on a stage is a persona, but cinema helps us to see beyond that and find the character within.  Bohemian Rhapsody merely just tries to pull you in with the music and the iconography.  Rocketman presents us with a journey and ultimately it is the one “still standing” at the very end.

“For my next trick… I’m going to f***ing kill myself.”

Editorials

Unlikely and Unliked – The Backlash That Followed the Best Picture Win of Crash

One thing that people like to see at the Oscars is an underdog story.  There are plenty of instances of a movie or a performer that unexpectedly defies the odds and pulls off an upset win.  Think Olivia Colman winning over the heavily favored Glenn Close in the 2019 awards ceremony, or Moonlight (2016) pulling off the upset of the century by beating La La Land (2016), with it’s record tying number of 14 nominations, in the Best Picture race.  The reason why people love these wins is because it’s sometimes offers a moment of spontaneous surprise in a show that can often be a tad too predictable, especially when you are following the momentums of the race closely.  But there are wins in past years that didn’t come as pleasant surprises, but instead left many people scratching their heads.  We tend to forget that the Oscars is more or less another race based on internal politics within the industry, and that sometimes the winner is not always the popular choice but rather the one who’s campaign strategy was the most well executed.  There are movies that are liked well enough for a nomination, but feel out of place if they actually win the award, especially if there are better movies in the same race.  And these movies tend to be cursed after winning the top award as they are looked at as being undeserving of the award they won due to the fact that the movies they beat have had longer staying power over the years; some even achieving all-time classic status.  Think How Green Was My Valley (1941) beating Citizen Kane (1941), or Ordinary People (1980) beating Raging Bull (1980).  But it’s also worth noting that the backlash against these movies may be bit too harsh, solely due to the fact that they fall short by comparison to their more famous competitors.  A movie may still be good even if it was undeserving of the Best Picture honor it snagged away from better movies.  It’s happened numerous times throughout Oscars’ long history, but perhaps the most severe backlash was leveled at the winner of the 2006 Academy Awards ceremony: 2005’s Crash.

Crash came out in the early summer of 2005 to mostly positive reviews.  It was the feature directorial debut of longtime TV writer Paul Haggis who only a year prior had been nominated for his screenplay for Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-winning Million Dollar Baby (2004).  Crash was an ambitious exploration of race relations in the city of Los Angeles, told through interconnected vignettes of characters both black and white, rich and poor, criminal and law enforcement, etc.  It was also blessed with an all-star ensemble that included future Oscar-winners like Sandra Bullock and Brendan Fraser, as well as rising stars such as Don Cheadle, Terrence Howard, Thandiwe Newton, and Michael Pena.  The movie has thought provoking moments here and there, but as a collective whole it kind of misses the mark of the message it’s trying to impart on the audience.  Generally, people were pleased with the movie, but it came as a bit of a shocker that it managed to earn a Best Picture nomination.  That’s where people thought it’s meteoric rise would end.  The favored movie of that evening was destined to be the groundbreaking tragic queer romance movie Brokeback Mountain (2005), which had received the most nominations of the season and was racking up wins across the board before Oscar night came.  Crash did pick up a Screen Actors’ Guild win for it’s impressive ensemble, but Brokeback Mountain had won the Golden Globe, the PGA, DGA and WGA honors leading up to the ceremony; all major bell-weathers.  On the night of the Oscars, Brokeback was winning the bulk of the preamble awards that Best Picture winners usually take away, such as Original Score, Cinematography, and Adapted Screenplay.  Paul Haggis came away with an Original Screenplay win, which many saw as Crash’s consolation for the night.  With director Ang Lee’s expected Best Director win for Brokeback, the final award seemed all but certain.  And then Jack Nicholson who was presenting the Best Picture award that evening delivered a shockwave across the Dolby Theater and the entire Hollywood industry when he opened the envelope and announced Crash as the winner.  It was definitely a surprise win to everyone, and as we would see, it was also not a popular one either.

Brokeback Mountain’s nomination was seen as a profound statement of support for the LGBTQ+ community when it was up for Best Picture.  This deconstruction of the American Western that featured a romance between two closeted gay men came out in a time when the rights of queer people were under assault.  The Bush Administration that was in power at the time were pushing hard for a Constitutional Amendment that defined marriage as being between two people of opposite genders.  This would have enshrined into the founding document of this nation a discriminatory ban on same sex relationships.  Attitudes towards gay marriage would thankfully change in the following decade, but in the 2000’s, it was still a hotly contested issue, and the Queer community was facing intense opposition to their right to marry.  That’s why Brokeback Mountain was seen as such an important movie for it’s time, because it was a sympathetic portrayal of a queer relationship made and promoted by a major film studio (Universal, under their Focus Features banner) that openly condemned the persecution that the community had been facing (and sadly still does to this day).  Hollywood, despite some faults, has mostly been a place that champions marginalized groups and this was the time to shed a light on the LGBTQ community and give them the much needed mainstream exposure that they had been lacking for so long.  But sadly, despite winning quite a few awards, Brokeback Mountain came up short of the top award of the night.  How could this destined to be sure thing, a profound statement of support from Hollywood towards the Queer community, fall short to a movie like Crash which didn’t have a lot to say about prejudice that hadn’t already been said plenty of times before.

One reason why Crash came away with the upset is because of the social make-up of the Academy itself.  Hollywood is for the most part, and always has been, a progressively liberal majority industry.  It is also a very insulated community as well.  While social progressiveness is something that many in Hollywood value, they also absorb politics in a way that fits within their Cosmopolitan lifestyles as well.  That’s why members of the Academy responds to movies that appeal to their sense of personal experience, which in some ways may ignorant of causes and issues that fall outside of their inner circle.  In this case, it might have been what pushed Crash over the top at the Academy Awards.  Queer themes in mainstream movies were still a bit of a novelty in Hollywood, while at the same time, racial politics still hit close to home.  This was of course the city that saw the riots erupt after the beating of Rodney King, as well as the O.J. Simpson trial that also stirred up racial discussions across the country.  Paul Haggis’ contemplative feature about collisions of racial tensions within the City of Angels just rang more true to the Academy than Gay Cowboys.  It doesn’t mean that the bulk of the Academy didn’t support the rights of the LGBTQ community; though the true intentions behind most individual voting is unclear.  In many ways, Brokeback Mountain may have been the victim of it’s own historic status.  Queer cinema was still niche, and gay rights was only just starting to gain traction in America.  Academy voters may have felt that supporting such a movie for Best Picture was going to be too much of a statement against the establishment at the time, and they didn’t want that backlash to come down on them.

But by doing this, the Academy only created a different kind of backlash.  People rightly viewed Hollywood’s timidity towards supporting gay rights fully as an insult to the community, and over time as the right to marry thankfully became more of a mainstream position, this decision on the Academy’s part has appeared more and more out of touch.  But, is Crash deserving of all the scorn that it has received in the 19 years after it’s Best Picture win.  The complaint about the movie that feels most apt is that it is tone deaf about the subject it is covering.  It’s very clear that this is a story about racial tensions in America told from the perspective of a middle aged white guy.  Haggis has good intentions with his writing, but not a lot of nuance when it comes to tackling racism from multiple sides.  It probably would have helped if was writing scenes with a collaborator from one of the marginalized communities depicted in the film.  There are a lot of far fetched scenarios in the movie that undermine the message that it’s trying to deliver.  One involves Terrence Howard’s character taking the police on in a wild high speed chase with him ultimately trying to egg them on to use force against him, and yet he still walks away free and unharmed.  Another scene has two black men played by Ludacris and Larenz Tate discussing the hypocrisy of racial profiling right before they carjack someone.  Haggis’ screenplay are filled with these far fetched scenarios that get spiced up with platitudes about the sad state of racism in America, and in the end it just make the whole movie feel hollow and disingenuous.  Its like Haggis believes that he’s delivering something profound to the world, but the wild swings only make his attempts at it feel less impactful, and it just shows him to be an outsider looking in without any actual real world insight.

Are there positives about the movie.  Sure there are.  The performances by the cast in particular really help to elevate the film.  Of special note is Don Cheadle, who gives the movie it’s most subtle and assured performance, as the character that’s closest to being the central figure.  This film would come out immediately after his breakout Oscar-nominated role in Hotel Rwanda (2004), and it helped to cement him as one of the most reliably solid actors in the business, helping to lead him to a great franchise role in the MCU as the hero War Machine (ironically taking over the role from his Crash co-star Terrence Howard).  Thandiwe Newton also delivers a strong performance as  woman who deals with two different levels of discriminations in the movie, both as a woman and as a woman of color.  But the standout performance in the movie surprisingly belongs to Matt Dillon in a role that in other less capable hands could have become an insultingly tone deaf character to include in a movie about race.  In the film, Dillon plays a racist cop who also commits a sexual assault on one of the minority “suspects” he chooses to pull over (played by Newton).  But, later in the film, he saves the same woman from a car wreck in a harrowing rescue scene, showing that he has the capacity within him to be a hero at the right moment.  This is one of the more far fetched elements of the movie, and people point to this character as one of the major problems with Haggis’ tackling of racial tensions in the movie by trying to go out of his way to depict the racist cop with an eye towards sympathy.  And yet, Dillon’s performance nearly makes it work, because he manages to ground the character in a nuanced way.  He doesn’t go over the top with the character, especially with the racism, and it makes the character far more complex than he probably reads on the page.  Naturally, this nuanced performance helped Matt Dillon to be the sole nominated actor for this film, and it’s still one of the actor’s best.  Given the level of strong performances from a pretty stacked all-star cast, it’s no surprise the film was awarded the Ensemble prize at the SAG awards.  And given that the largest voting block of the Academy is the Actors’ Branch, this likely was another key towards the film’s upset victory.

The years haven’t been kind to the movie since it won Best Picture.  Cries of homophobia plagued the Academy, but the movie Crash itself doesn’t represent any contradiction to LGBTQ rights.  It’s its own message movie that unfortunately gave the wrong message at the wrong time.  But as flawed as it is, it’s nowhere the worst Best Picture winner of all time.  There’s even a more egregiously tone deaf movie about race that took the Best Picture prize more recently with the film Green Book (2018).  Crash gets away a lot more with it’s shallow depiction of racial issues, because it’s ultimately harmless fiction.  Green Book on the other hand whitewashes the story of real people to make it look like the white character was more tolerant than he was in real life.  While Green Book’s depiction of racial issues may be more ethically dubious, it still is reflective of the same faults that Crash has, in that it’s coming from a one-sided, white male perspective that doesn’t have the nuanced insight of people who actually face real racism everyday.  The movies may mean well, but it also is observing the issue from the perspective of people who are least likely to face the actual repercussions of racial injustice.  The same critique could also be leveled at Brokeback Mountain too, because that film was written, directed and starring cisgender straight people who don’t have first hand knowledge about the gay experience.  However, there was a deeper sense of empathy felt in Brokeback Mountain that helped the movie feel genuinely truthful about the persecution that it’s queer characters faced.  Crash by comparison is heavy handed and unsubtle, and it undermines it’s message in the long run.  The backlash it faced may be a bit harsh, but it’s also understandable.

In the end, Crash’s sole noteworthy accomplishment is that it pulled off one of the biggest Oscar night upsets.  But, it came at a price, because now it is viewed as an unworthy recipient of that award.  While I wouldn’t disagree that Crash is not exactly the best choice for Hollywood’s top honor, I also wouldn’t say it deserved the severe backlash it received either.  It’s naïve, but ultimately harmless, and in some moments actually elevates to being better than just okay.  Divorced from the Oscars, I think the movie would’ve garnered a better reputation over the years.  Like so many movies before at the Oscars,  it is over-shadowed by the runner-up, which has eclipsed it many times in popularity and importance.  The Oscars are a snapshot in time, and Crash’s win is an interesting look back at a time when the crossroads of gay rights and racial politics intersected in our pop culture and spurred on a renewed conversation about the necessity of cinema to shed light on injustice in this world.  Brokeback Mountain may have benefitted from it’s runner-up status, as it shifted focus more onto the issues of the LGBTQ community as Hollywood was trying to make amends for passing them over at the Oscars.  Queer representation only grew stronger in the decade since, and in 2017, it was a queer themed film called Moonlight that pulled off the upset, and over a self-indulgent movie about Hollywood that the Oscar voters tend to prize more than others.  Crash on the other hand is remembered more as an infamous misstep by the Academy.  But it’s not a horrendous movie by any means, and it certainly is less insulting about racial issues than Green Book is.  You see these movies that rise up with momentum at just the right time, and then are forgotten to time quickly thereafter, with only the Best Picture win to give them any note of worth.  Crash is definitely that kind of movie, only the backlash it faced was stronger than most others.  20 years after it’s release, it’s still a movie that carries a lot of baggage with it.  But, let’s not forget that it won the Best Picture race in a fair fight.  It should be noted that it was widely praised in it’s day; critic Roger Ebert even named it his Top Movie of the 2005 that year.  Time has a funny way of changing perspective on things, and in the years since Crash beat Brokeback Mountain at the Oscars, I’m happier that attitudes have shifted more towards gay rights and less towards lip-service gestures towards race relations in America.