Deaf Culture Gets A Gooey Coming Of Age Drama in CODA

When the nominations for the 94th Academy Awards® were announced last month, the only one that I wasn’t familiar with in the Best Picture category was Sian Heder’s CODA. It probably went under my radar because of its limited distribution, and/or lack of buzz in my media feeds as I was unaware that it’s been available for streaming on Apple TV+ since last August.

Like Darius Marder’s SOUND OF METAL, which was a nominee for Best Picture last year, CODA (standing for Children of Deaf Adults) deals with deaf culture, and music. But while SOUND OF METAL is a gritty depiction of a former junkie drummer’s bout of hearing loss, CODA is a gooey family melodrama that, despite some sex jokes, is more akin to an ABC Afterschool Special (dated reference lost on younger readers?).

Emilia Jones stars as Ruby, the only hearing person in her Gloucester, Massachusetts household, which is made up of her parents Frank and Jackie, portrayed by Troy Kotsur, and Marlee Matlin (the Queen of Deaf thespians -deafspians?); and her brother Leo (Daniel Durant).

Ruby is a familiar angsty teenager, captured with the right amount of awkwardness by the 19-year old Jones, whose crush on a fellow student (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) leads her to sign up for choir at her high school. There she is inspired by another familiar archetype, the acerbic, and demanding instructor played by Eugenio Derbez to find her singing voice. Actually, Jones’ Ruby seems to have already found it as her vocal performance sounds like she’s had some previous training. Her takes on Joan Baez’s “Both Sides Now,” and Ashford and Simpson’s “You’re All I Need To Get By” are pretty damn polished.

CODA, which is a remake of Éric Lartigau’s LA FAMILLE BÉLIER (2014), comes down to Ruby deciding if she wants to leave home to follow her dreams via an audition for a scholarship at Berklee School of Music, or if she should stay home, and help her family with their fishing business. This is a scenario as old as the Hollywood hills, without a surprising story-beat to be found; but it’s an earnest, well-meaning attempt at uplift aided greatly by its likable cast.

As Ruby’s father, Kotsur scored a Best Supporting Actor nom, but as appealingly authentic as he is as the grizzled, concerned character, I wouldn’t bet on him winning. Matlin, who has some sharp moments (“If I was blind, would you want to paint?” she unfairly asks Ruby), but perhaps because she won Best Actress back in 1987 for her first film, the also deaf culture-entric CHILDREN OF A LESSER GOD, she wasn’t nominated here. That leaves Director Heder’s Best Screenplay nom, another doubtful candidate due to the film’s fluffiness.

So, I’ll go on the record to predict no Oscar wins for the all-too cuddly CODA.

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Hey Kids! Funtime 2021 Oscar® Predictions!

On Sunday night, April 25, the 93rd Academy Awards will be held at the Dolby Theatre and Union Station in Los Angeles, but, you know, mostly on Zoom. Obviously this ceremony was delayed until much later in the year than usual because of the pandemic, and that same factor is what may mean even a smaller audience. The ratings for last year’s Oscars, which took place on February 9, 2020, hit an all-time low, and it seems like fewer people are even aware of the upcoming event.

There’s also the factor that a lot of folks haven’t seen or even know about many of the nominees. Sometimes the quarantine binge-watching of some show on Netflix, Amazon Prime, or Hulu, to name but a few streaming platforms is more appealing than watching some possibly depressing indie film. Still, there were some fine films that were released in the last year, and some of them got nominations.

Here are my predictions for the winners, a few of which I feel confident with, but most are definitive examples of “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe.”

1. BEST PICTURE: NOMADLAND

2. BEST DIRECTOR: Chloé Zhao for NOMADLAND

3. BEST ACTOR: Chadwick Boseman (MA RAINEY’S BLACK BOTTOM) Looks like everyone is in agreement on this one.

4. BEST ACTRESS: Carey Mulligan (PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN) There’s buzz aplenty that Frances McDormand is going to win for NOMADLAND, but she’s won twice before, and I have a feeling that Mulligan’s stunning performance in PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN will get more votes. Consider it this year’s wild card.

5. BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Daniel Kaluuya (JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH

6. BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Yuh-Jung Youn (MINARI)

7. PRODUCTION DESIGN: Donald Graham Burt, Jan Pascale for MANK

8. CINEMATOGRAPHY: Joshua James Richards for NOMADLAND

9. COSTUME DESIGN: Ann Roth for MA RAINEY’S BLACK BOTTOM

10. DOCUMENTARY FEATURE: MY OCTOPUS TEACHER

11. DOCUMENTARY SHORT:   A CONCERTO IS A CONVERSATION (Kris Bowers, Ben Proudfoot)

12. FILM EDITING:  SOUND OF METAL

13. MAKEUP AND HAIRSTYLING: MA RAINEY’S BLACK BOTTOM (Mia Neal, Sergio Lopez-Rivera, Jamika Wilson)

14. VISUAL EFFECTS: TENET (Andrew Jackson, David Lee, Andrew Lockley, Santiago Colomo Martinez)

15. ORIGINAL SCORE: SOUL (Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross and Jon Batiste)

16. ORIGINAL SONG: “Speak Now” from ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI (Leslie Odom Jr.)

17. ANIMATED SHORT:  IF ANYTHING HAPPENS I LOVE YOU

18. LIVE ACTION SHORT: TWO DISTANT STRANGERS

19. SOUND: SOUND OF METAL – I’m so happy that they combined the BEST SOUND EDITING and SOUND MIXES categories into this one, as I hated trying to figure what deserved what, and also the same film would often win both awards.

20. ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY: Emerald Fennell for PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN

21. ADAPTED SCREENPLAY: Christopher Hampton and Florian Zeller for THE FATHER

22. ANIMATED FEATURE FILM: SOUL

23. BEST INTERNATIONAL FILM: ANOTHER ROUND

As I always say, tune in Monday to see how many I got wrong.

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Finally! Film Babble Blog’s 2020 In Review

I know, I know – it’s April and I am only now getting around to look back at some of the most notable films of last year. Honestly, as 2020 was so compromised by the pandemic, and films were a lot fewer (many were delayed until this year); I decided against doing a ‘best of’ this time around. So I am going to do it differently as I’m not going to give the movies numbers in order to rank them. I’m going to just babble about a handful of titles, five to be exact, that stood out to me over this weird, sad year.

The last movie I saw on the big screen before the pandemic hit was Leigh Wannell’s THE INVISIBLE MAN, starring Elizabeth Moss. Sadly the theater I attended the film at, Six Forks Cinema, permanently closed not long ago. 

The film, which was originally supposed to be part of Universal’s Monsters Cinematic Universe (not to be confused with Legendary’s MonsterVerse or is it?), but after THE MUMMY flopped that franchise appears to be dead in the water. No matter, the film stands on its own largely due to the performance by Moss as a woman who is being stalked by an abusive ex (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) - a scientist who has discovered the formula for invisibility. This loose adaptation of H.G. Wells classic 1897 novel is a stylishly suspenseful treat that comes equipped with a number of genuine scares, and fiercely clever moments.

While under quarantine, I mostly caught up with TV series which I wrote about here, and watched older films, but I did catch some new releases like Christopher Nolan’s TENET. A new release Blu ray I should say. I almost braved the Covid 19 scare to see it at one of the few open theaters, but I chickened out and waited for home video. 

Nolan’s latest attempt at visionary filmmaking is certainly entertaining but I had difficulty understanding what I was watching. A great, gripping John David Washington, and Robert Pattinson, whose work keeps getting better, star as undercover CIA operatives travel backwards and forwards in time in order to prevent World War III. Got it? It’s hard to outright recommend as it’s so baffling, and purposely convoluted, but Nolan fans should dig it. I’ll give TENET this – it totally deserves its Oscar nomination for Best Production Design.

If I was posting a list with numbers, I probably would pick Aaron Sorkin’s THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7 for #1. This great historical drama features a well-chosen ensemble including Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Black Panther Bobby Seale, Sacha Baron Cohen as hippy (or yippie) activist Abbie Hoffman, Joseph Gordon-Levitt as prosecutor Richard Schultz, Frank Langella as Judge Julius Hoffman, Eddie Redmayne as Tom Hayden, Mark Rylance as defense attorney William Kunstler, and Michael Keaton as U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark. That barely scratches the surface of the actors involved as it’s a big-ass cast, and I don’t want it to take up the bulk of this paragraph. Sorkin’s screenplay may be his best yet. The dialogue is devoid of his weakness for cutesy wordplay, and each character is more compellingly drawn than some of his past endeavors, and I say that as a fan. If you don’t know anything about the Chicago 7, this is a recommended place to begin. I’ll be pulling for it to get some Oscar gold, which it should since it got six nominations including Best Picture.

Another fine film I enjoyed was Darius Marder’s SOUND OF METAL, which concerns a heavy metal drummer who has to cope with losing his hearing. The rightly Oscar-nominated Riz Ahmed portrays the deaf musician, who you really feel for as his life is emotionally upended, and he suffers through a stint at a rehab for the deaf run by a Vietnam vet (Paul Raci). Ahmed does warm up to his fellow residents, but his girlfriend (Olivia Cooke) disappears from his life. The authentic feeling movie is outfitted with a stirring sound mix that effectively depicts the sounds of deafness, which may seem impossible, but Marder and crew pull it off and received an Oscar nomination for their efforts (like TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7, SOUND OF METAL scored six well-deserved noms). The last bit and the ending may be rushed, but this film’s gritty realness, and lack of pretension make it a major must see.

Paul Greengrass’ NEWS OF THE WORLD is maybe the most stone-cold entertaining of the five films in this round-up. Based on the 2016 novel by Paulette Jiles, this western, set in 1870 follows Tom Hanks as Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd, an ex-Civil War confederate soldier who makes his money by reading select newspapers to captive audiences as he travels through Texas. One day on a road through the woods, he comes across a 10-year old girl (Helena Zengell) who either goes by Johanna or Cicada hiding out in an overturned wagon. Before long the duo are saddled together as Hanks takes the girl, who identifies as a Kiowa Indian, on the long trek to her supposed home in Castroville, Texas.

They get into a rocky mountainside gun fight, encounter a massive dust storm, endure a devastating wagon accident, and have to figure out how to get away from a rag-tag army of renegades ruled by evil land baron Farley (Thomas Francis Murphy). Now these elements may sound like frontier clichés, but Director Greengrass handles the material confidently, never needing to reach into his catalogue of BOURNE-isms. Hanks’ Kidd is a familiar persona – the everyman that he’s honed for decades – but he inhabits the character with the likability we expect from the two-time Oscar winner. As Hanks’ travelling companion, Zengall is the real stand-out with her driven, naturalistic performance. I’m betting we’ll be seeing a lot of her in years to come. NEWS OF THE WORLD received four Oscar noms, but with its competition I’m thinking it might not win any of the categories. If it does score at least one Academy Award, I would bet on Dariusz Wolski for Best Cinematography as his landscape imagery is ginormously gorgeous.

As I usually have spillover on these Best of entries, Here’s some other films I enjoyed in 2020: Lee Isaac Chung’s MINARI, Regina King’s ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI…, Thomas Vinterberg’s ANOTHER ROUND, Kelly Reichardt’s FIRST COW, Kitty Green’s THE ASSISTANT (excellent Julia Garner performance), George C. Wolfe’s MA RAINEY’S BLACK BOTTOM, Chloé Zhao’s NOMADLAND, and Charlie Kaufman’s weird, unwieldy I’M THINKING OF ENDING THINGS.

Also these documentaries: Alexander Nanau’s COLLECTIVE, Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk’s ATHELETE A, Jeff Orlowski’s THE SOCIAL DILEMMA, Garrett Bradley’s TIME, Bryan Fogel’s THE DISSIDENT, Seth Porges and Chris Charles Scott III’s CLASS ACTION PARK, and the Spike Lee Joint, DAVID BYRNE’S AMERICAN UTOPIA, which is more of a concert film than a doc but they often reside in the same category.

Alright, so I finally tackled 2020 in review. With hope, I'll be back on my game next year.

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