Rich with Peculiarities

If you love music, if you love art, if you crave a story of a community that unites in the face of adversity, you’ll want to see The Choral, a very British film set in a small mill town during World War I.

This prime time, end-of-year release stars Ralph Fiennes, the only recognizable name (to an American) in the cast. That may be one reason it had little chance of gaining any notice much less nominations for an Oscar. Instead of riding the wave of holiday attention, it was drowned out by other prime time releases with more well-known names, including another from the English countryside called Hamnet.

Fiennes plays a choral master brought to town when the one who held the job for years signs up to join the Army. He brings with him “peculiarities,” including having lived in Germany, which makes him suspect. As he has the choral preparing the St. Matthew Passion, a brick shatters the window. On it, a remark about “the Hun,” which the mill owner tries to reassure the conductor is not about him, but about Bach who wrote the piece.

Fiennes’ conductor laughs it off, “Given the quality of our singing, it could well be from a music critic.”

Before long, they drop Bach and turn to Sir Edward Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius. Good news when Elgar approves, but when they find they do not have the number of musicians required for the grandiose production, they downsize, and a string orchestra becomes a string trio. Ingeniously, they also adapt, and the old Gerontius becomes a wounded soldier, and an angel is recast as a nurse. And then Elgar shows up to see how things are going…

The film is rich with intrigue that only begins with German vs. English and Protestant vs. Catholic. With hints of what today is called post-traumatic-stress-disorder, it’s a test of what separation does to relationships. As one young man flippantly quips to his friend, a young postal carrier who at times brings bad news to young women, “One’s grief can be another’s opportunity.”

Rich also with subplots that are developed almost without dialogue, almost just as movement in the background, such as the grief-stricken wife of the mill owner who sees his role as to keep the town’s morale up. The Choral at times veers into mystery, dropping random clues, as when we overhear a singer tell another that the conductor is in the library daily, looking at the latest issue of the paper, always turning to the “Wartime Naval News.”

For comparison, The Choral is as spirited and rewarding and satisfying as so many Brit flicks that deliver both comedy and tragedy, reminding me of The Phanthom of the Open, Living, The Miracle Club, See How They Run, The Duke. And that’s just in the past five years.

Safe to say that, the characters we meet in all of these films have populated England for centuries. Otherwise, there would be no Hamnet or Hamlet.

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“The Hun,” followed home and pelted by pebbles from the hands of kids no doubt overhearing their parents’ gripes.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt31851518/

Possible Oscars & a Docujoke

Quite a delightful surprise to see Kate Hudson nominated for the Best Actress Oscar.

I’ve seen very few of her films, but I am relieved to see Song Sung Blue gain at least one nod. The Academy tends to dismiss feel-good features when awarding its statues, and what could be more feel-good than “Sweet Caroline”? But there’s a lot more to Song Sung Blue than Neil Diamond. Listen to the lesser known songs–some tracked for the film’s most intimate scenes–and you’ll find there’s a lot more to Neil Diamond than “Neil Diamond.” Moreover, put Neil Diamond aside, and the film has a lot to say about musicians trying to make a living–in this case two who combined to form a tribute band and a few who joined it.

That may be a second reason I should recuse myself from making picks. I haven’t seen Sinners with its 16 nominations, most ever in the history of the awards. Nor have I seen four others nominated for best film, which makes for half the field of ten. Of the five I have seen, I could make a strong case for both Hamnet and Sentimental Value. Marty Supreme not so much, and Bugonia not at all.

Of the five, One Battle After Another is the one most relevant to 2026, the one with the most urgent message. A comedy so dark and undeniably real that it dares you to laugh, it’s the one I’m most inclined to favor. I would certainly like to hear acceptance speeches from those who made it, but for all I know, the others may be just as willing to speak against America’s current War against the Arts as Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn. Those two and Benicio del Toro all have nominations–DiCaprio and Penn were funny, but del Toro was beyond hilarious.

As for Kate Hudson’s chances, she’s contending with Jessie Buckley in Hamnet and Renata Reinsva in Sentimental Value. I could make strong cases for all three. Buckley has the advantage of being at the center of Hamnet‘s finale, which might make the Academy consider adding an Oscar for Best Single Scene. However, I haven’t seen If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, and since I found Bugonia about as watchable as Fox “News,” I’ll neither pick nor predict a winner.

Speaking of the unwatchable, I wonder if it is mere coincidence that the so-called documentary, Melania, is released the very week that Oscar nominations are announced. Reviews make it sound like a worthy rival to Blair Witch Project for the most vacuous, pointless slop ever put on a screen, most all of them as brutal as Karoline Leavitt’s treatment of the White House press corps. Which reminds me that my next project will be a spoof of a Neil Diamond song I’ll rename: “Sour Karoline.” (…Lie! Lie! Lie! Lying never felt so good! So good! So good! So good!)

The predictions of failure at the box office, however, proved wrong, as the MAGA faithful packed cinemas, buying up tickets as willingly as they purchase $400 Trump sneakers, $200 Trump bibles, $99 Trump trading cards, and on and on. Can the MAGA crowd sustain these grosses for a film that the Hollywood Reporter calls “an unabashed, fly-on-the-gilded-wall fawn job”?

From what I’ve gleaned, the Epstein “associate”-turned-First Lady comes off about as warm and charming as her “I don’t care do U?” jacket and her Boris & Natasha hat. Even more damning are the memes proclaiming, “If syphilis was a movie…” or the mock–but very truthful–advertisements proclaiming: “She’s in the pedo-files!” Not only is she in the Epstein files, so too is a photo of Melania director Brett Ratner cozying up with one of Epstein’s trafficked girls. Bet you didn’t know that MAGA prefers movies over government files.

Not to worry, all may not be lost. My friend Kurt Kaletka in his history-rich and linguistically playful blog, “Truth or Better,” proposes that Melania might “have some worth” in the years ahead:

I can see Rocky Horror-type screenings of it, where the boys come dressed in suits and super-long red ties, blond wigs and orange makeup plastered almost entirely on their faces. The girls can show up with makeup and prosthetics to recreate the Mar-a-Lago Face phenomenon. You can go with other Trump White House characters, too! Use ghastly white face paint to copy Stephen Miller’s cadaverous look! Dress up like a Kristi Noem-style buckarette! Or copy the style of your favorite January 6 rioter!*

Kaletka obviously does not work in a cinema. Nor did I when Rocky Horror was released in 1975. But from the time I was hired in 1998, I did hear the Screening Room’s owners still bemoaning the mess they had to clean up every night of its run. After 23 years, they could laugh a bit, but the anger was still there.**

Let my friend make his appeal to the cineplexes with their high-powered cleaning machines. I’d rather watch Kate Hudson. Come to think of it, back in 2000 when still a new face, she had a moment in Dr. T and the Women that is as memorable as any I’ve ever seen. When her ringtone sounds during an exercise class, the annoyed instructor motions for her to leave the room. Hudson’s character holds up phone and announces, “It’s an emergency.” Far from any urgency, she says it as if talking about a napkin falling to the floor.

Yes, a three-word line, but at that moment I realized that cellphones had already turned “emergency” into the biggest one-word joke in the history of language. The Academy may also want to consider adding an Oscar for Best Single Word.

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*For Kurt Kaletka’s entire case for Melania Horror Picture Show, go to:

https://trueorbetter.blogspot.com/

**True story: About 2/3rds into a showing of Rocky Horror in Portland, Maine, some fifty years ago, a projectionist stopped the film to ask the audience to stop throwing things at the screen. Screens are delicate, easily stained, torturous to clean, and quite expensive to replace. He turned up the lights, but before he could get down from the booth and into the hall, the audience simply thought that the film was over. They were getting up, smiling, laughing, and ready to hit the nearby bars. He held his tongue and let them leave, which is exactly what I’d have done.

Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson as “Lightning & Thunder” in *Song Sung Blue*:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt30343021/

Two for the Holiday Show

If you’re considering films to see this holiday season, there are two I’m tempted to recommend with just one word each: WOW! and WOW!

Neither Sentimental Value nor Hamnet will ever be called celebrations or described as feel-good, but they leave audiences feeling good and celebrating those who persevere. What recommends both for the season can be stated in one word: Redemption.

Stories–the settings and the time as much as the plot–are so different that it’s hard to believe they have so much in common. You may, for example, wonder if they share the same screenwriter and editors. I’ll refrain from hinting at anything else for fear of spoilers, but I can name similarities that have nothing to do with plot:

Both lead actresses, Norwegian Renata Reinsve (Worst Person in the World 2021) and Irish Jessie Buckley (Wicked Little Letters 2023) deliver performances as convincing and with as much range of emotion as any I’ve ever seen.

Worth noting here that Sentimental Value Director Joachim Trier earned two Oscar nominations for Worst Person, and that Hamnet Director Chloe Zhao won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2020 for Nomadland.

Also in common: Screening Room audiences have been very slow to get out of their seats when Sentimental Value and Hamnet are over, and they let us know why on their way out. Their words, their tones, and their facial expressions are very much the same.

It is the sound and the look of redemption.

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