Prankster dad meets brick wall daughter
Oscarssss, a German comedy-drama that blows socks, the tastemaker's grind, reckonings on One Battle After Another
There are few greater feelings than putting someone onto something. Adjacent to that is someone mutually engaging in the valiant effort of putting you on to a gem, except beating them to the punch cuz you’ve already consumed, absorbed and appreciated that thing 🥊
Today,
Words on the manic loop of taste making
A brand new Movie Meditation on an underrated work of German comedic ingenuity.
A refreshed look at the Best Picture winning One Battle After
But FIRST some prideful shoutouts
Monday night’s Oscar ceremony was a mixed bag, but if you’re a sentimental value head like myself, you came out smiling ear to ear . YES JOACHIM AND THE FAM! Not only that but Michael B Jordan was bestowed his long awaited (and deserved) Best Actor award for his smashing performance in Sinners, which, from a record stomping 16 nominations, SWEPT up a grand total of 4 oscars! <Big day!>
I take offense when a movie, book or song slips under my radar, especially when the thing plants its seeds of bliss into my soul. I can’t help myself from asking why I couldn’t discover it on my own. BUT this affliction comes from a place of what I call insatiable tastemakerdom. I picture it as a castle-ish structure within my mind that’s always sparsely furnished with the things I’ve seen, read and heard, the rest strewn about in boxes like they’d be inside the home of a fervid traveler, stuck in a transitory state of arrival and departure. Just outside the cave are unclaimed discoveries, accompanied by the restless hunger to find what’s next before even opening the boxed and putting things away. The good news though is when I manage to pitter-patter down the winding stairs of this castle into the great outdoors, I recognize the beautiful, communal qualities of taste making. I can interpret, with total clarity, that the cultivation of meaningful insights and stimulating knowledge, those yummy qualities of taste development, are contingent upon the generosity of others who point our attention toward what we might never have noticed alone. It’s why apps like letterboxd are dear to my soul, where I can take in the palettes of my reputable homies and touch noggins through an invisible wall of artistic investment.
Speaking of…
I am often in search of films to catch up on that deploy comedy with delicacy and tact. Not downright comedies but inter-genre comedies (comedy dramas, comedy thrillers, comedy horrors… comedy romances, if I’m forced). Sure, my palette for drama is always open to those meditative, zero-frill works that offer mere sprinkles of levity, if anything. Like last year’s Train Dreams or a recent horror I caught by Damian McCarthy Oddity. Those films that are coal black in tone and justifiably so, not relenting due to virtue of impact. But as far as my core cinematic appetite is concerned, I like a little sugar with my medicine. The films I love contain punchlines to be traced, but not in a gratuitous way. When the comedy is baked into things as intrinsic and circumstance and structure, I’m on board. Those “life throwing the gnarliest shit straight into your eyeballs and forcing you to make heads or tails of it” moments.
Toni Erdmann, a Maren Ade joint, is one of those films that manages to capture lightning in a bottle: absurdist comedic recklessness that preserves a raw, visceral humanity. It tells the modest story of familial turmoil between a prank-loving father with spontaneous eccentricities and his emotionally distant daughter who’s more invested in her career than matters of relationship—across the board.
The reckless abandon, emerging via circumstance and character, was by far its most captivating quirk and it kept me thoroughly captivated for its entire 2 hour, 43 minute run time, which I watched on a plane mind you.
<SPOILERS AHEAD>
For one, the movie is truly thrust into chaos when kooky father Winfried adopts an alter ego to disrupt his daughter, Ines’s rigid corporate world and pierce through her shield against closeness. This is a moment that unlocks a world of embarrassment for Ines that puts their central conflict, the struggle between genuine self-expression and societal performance, at the forefront. The humor that ensues refuses to pander to easy catharsis.
The complexities of their individual characters are to thank, as diverse in motivation as they are temperament, which seems to drive the film’s dependably unpredictable energy.
Ines’s socially self‑conscious disposition is wielded as a barricade against vulnerability, She measures every interaction by its professional stakes and resists anything that threatens her composed exterior. So, when she’s forced into excruciating situations engineered by her father, a reckless abandon manifests, in both of them, that can only come from extended periods of deep repression.
These moments happen in unorthodox ways.
On the tamest end, she uncharacteristically explodes into a vivacious karaoke performance in a stranger’s home
On the extreme, she strips down to the nude during a work party when she feels trapped in a tight dress.
But the extreme case isn’t immediate. It’s built up to periodically, after each moment plants a crack in her carefully manufactured persona and watching it felt like an invigorating release, which is swiftly escalated by the total inconceivability of the act to the everyman.
These stand-out moments of absurdist comedy have the distinct emotional resonance that many quirked up comedy-dramas don’t have the complexity to hold.
On OBAA
When I first saw it, I was an undeniable fan of One Battle After Another. Admittedly, as a socialist and film obsessive who’s regularly starved from scraps of progressive promise in film, I came out of the theatre with heart eyes and warm tingly feelings of optimism. Those feelings though have since been tempered by a few important structural and material reflections, the most pressing of which was triggered on Monday night when the movie won the coveted Best Picture award, subsequently hurling all qualms I had been ruminating on to the pressing surface. I owe this enlightenment, largely, to wonderful reads like this one, doing the thoughtful dissection, and to my anti-establishment predilection compelling me to reckon with the inevitable fact that a movie with this much institutional acclaim more than likely fails at acknowledging the grittier, less glamorous truths of its story. As it turns out, its sidelining of Black characters, its choice to then prop up white figures off the backs of those characters, and its glossing over the systemic injustices at the heart of the story are evidence enough for such skepticism. And in light of recent PTA interviews surrounding the film, his blatant circumventing of political conviction is equally off-putting. While the movie was a total blast, thanks to its energetic direction, striking visuals and electric cast, I would be speaking out of naivety to ignore the shortcomings of its revolutionary message.
Read Brooke Obie’s wonderful piece here:
Good riddance! Reflection and dissection is a beautiful thing. Let us all be stirred with emotion and compelled to sit with films long after they end. Cheers to more bangers in the new year, which we will go see in a movie theatre alone or with the homies.
