The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/author/maxfattal/page/2/)
Asking someone to watch a film that taps into that trauma, in the hope that the difficult material will recontextualize the way they see their experience, risks just as much that it’ll set them back in grappling with said experience.
The Everything Everywhere All at Once sweep at the Oscars shouldn’t be surprising to anyone who’s been familiar with the race for the past six or so months. It’s been in the driver’s seat the whole time, and the ceremony proved to be the coronation that most expected, with few other films finding their place on the stage. Sweeping every above-the-line category in which it was nominated, the film has now entered Oscar history as one of the most decorated films ever at the Academy Awards. Such an honor couldn’t have happened to a stranger film, representing at once one of the first genre exercises recognized, an absurdist comedy with a distinctly contemporary sense of humor, and a film with a diverse cast about the Asian-American experience. It’s been quickly canonized and attributed classic status, but how good really is it?
The opening sequence to Everything Everywhere is spectacular, easily the best in the entire film.
In my quest to review all of the Best Picture nominees at a rate of one film per week starting with the beginning of the semester and leading to the Academy Awards, I neglected one fact: The date of the Oscars. Unfortunately, as I recently realized, I am now out of time to write and publish the remaining few reviews in such a time span. As such, this article will cover three of the remaining nominees, excluding one which is the presumptive winner and another which is an optimistic hedge (you may guess which is which). Those articles should be coming next week, and if neither film ends up as the actual best picture winner, I apologize.
Triangle of Sadness
There was a period of time (somewhere between the 1950s and 1970s or so) when European anti-capitalist satires were some of the best in film. I refer mostly to the brilliant exploits of Luis Buñuel, but also to a more general satirical inventiveness, even including such terrifying classics as Salò.
As a technological feat, it impresses, but never quite justifies its own broader damage to the industry or surpasses the visual effects it’s apparently supplanting.
It’s been observed that the American populace of the Great Depression loved to watch films about millionaires. Ironic though it may seem, the dire straits of the average citizen manifested itself in a deep desire for escapism. Nevermind the reality that the depicted wealth would be partially to blame for the suffering, nor the wide gap of relatability between such rich characters and the economically insecure viewers. The need to imagine a world where money isn’t a concern superseded them all. It’s unfair to say that we live in a Depression-like era nowadays (for one thing the government response to contemporary malaise is hardly so radical), but to look at the modern condition and not understand a need for escapism is delusional.
The last time a filmed adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front was nominated for Best Picture, Variety suggested distribution by the League of Nations, its premiere was sabotaged by Hitler’s Brownshirts, and the film was banned in Australia for fear that it would undermine faith in the military. Its then-radical pacifistic message proved to be a prescient omen between two World Wars and the filmmaking language it’s credited with inventing became a blueprint for the entire war genre subsequent to its release.
The 2022 remake, a German-language Netflix production from relatively unknown director Edward Berger, attempts to argue for existence on the same grounds. A war in Ukraine and apparent proximity to nuclear catastrophe would suggest the need for a reminder of the horrors of war. In reality, the new All Quiet on the Western Front represents a lateral step in the history of the war film; it ironically retreads the same path of the genres’ previous decades while undercutting its own premise through distanced filmmaking and attempts at distinction.
The 2022 All Quiet on the Western Front opens cleverly, depicting a horrifying battle through the eyes of non-characters, all rapidly dying. Very quickly, we realize that the continuity between the opening and the main plot is the uniforms, taken off the dead men before being washed and recycled for the next stage of recruits.
While it may be too much to ask for an Oscar-vying film to suggest the possibility that neither justice nor liberation is a legitimate outgrowth of sexual violence or proto-fascism, the absence of cynicism produces a far more sinister notion.
Where Elvis manages to ever so slightly break free of genre conventions, it supplements dullness with disgust. Ultimately, Luhrmann has produced an exercise in grotesquery, as unpleasant to watch as it’s entirely regressive to think about.