No Globe? No SAG? No Problem!....or Perhaps There IS a Problem?

For over ten years, one of the most consistent traditions we have had on this blog has been looking at a weird trend in Oscar predictions.  While the Oscars have in the past 15 years become almost annoyingly predictable in who their nominees are (I don't like it-I want mystery, and especially with the winners it's become ridiculous how you basically just need to watch one awards show to get a read on who will win), since 2006 we had had at least one of the twenty acting nominees who was nominated at neither the Golden Globes or the SAG Awards.  Here they are for the past ten years:

2024: No contenders

2023: America Ferrera

2022: Brian Tyree Henry, Andrea Riseborough, Judd Hirsch, & Paul Mescal

2021: Penelope Cruz, Jesse Plemons, JK Simmons, Judi Dench, & Jessie Buckley

2020: Paul Raci & LaKeith Stanfield

2019: Florence Pugh

2018: Marina de Tavira & Yalitza Aparicio

2017: Lesley Manville

2016: Michael Shannon

2015: Charlotte Rampling, Tom Hardy, & Mark Ruffalo

That trend, though, unfortunately ended in 2024.  While there were contenders (Stanley Tucci in Conclave and Marianne Jean-Baptiste in Hard Truths were my top guesses), no one ended up getting in without a previous citation.  Unlike 2006 (where it largely happened because of bizarrely uniform female categories and a BONKERS Best Supporting Actor season where spread-the-wealth got too many names in), this was led be a trend that we'll see in 2025, and why I'm a little scared there IS a problem for actors (hence the cheeky spin on the title) who can't compete earlier in the year: the Globes moving to six-wide nominations for all of their categories took out a lot of the "also-ran" names that sometimes pop with Oscar; someone like Brian Tyree Henry or Florence Pugh now would have earlier hardware to support them.  It's also part of an increasing trend of each awards house losing its own flavor.  The Globes used to be crazy (nominating movies solely due to movie stars they liked, quality be damned) while SAG would embrace milquetoast stuff like Helen Mirren in Woman in Gold, and then Oscar would come in late with a classy alternative like Lesley Manville or Charlotte Rampling.  This year, with the Globes still six-wide, and the bizarre shutout of Sentimental Value at SAG (which won't happen with Oscar but now means a lot more names don't qualify for this list), we have a LOT of names.

Hope springs eternal, though, and I will continue to pray we see some new names as it's far more fun to be wrong with Oscar predictions than to be right.  Below, ranked from least to most likely, we have a list of the ten contenders I think are most plausible to get into the race even without a nomination.  A quick reminder with this list before we dissect.  First, the nominees that fit this article's descriptor tend to fall into one of two camps.  They are either movie stars who worked their asses off all season and are getting in based on name recognition alone (Penelope Cruz being the best example of this from the above nominees), or they are someone who is getting a coattails nomination.  The thing about awards bodies is that if they like a film, they REALLY like it (look at Sinners clearing the deck this morning), and so most of the nominees that hit this criteria in recent years have been for films that voters are already choosing for Best Picture or a different acting prize, and they also include these names because they can't stop doting on their favorite movie.  There is technically a third group (people like Paul Mescal and Andrea Riseborough) who sort of just make it all season on vibes and then get in at the exact right moment...but they're harder to guess and I honestly don't really have one of those listed below (though I have a few listed in Honorable Mention)...would be cool though!  Always rooting for another Andrea Riseborough style nomination, mostly because it'll never happen again and it is one of my all-time favorite Oscar morning moments solely based on how unusual it was.

With that said, here is my list!

Honorable Mention: This list is honestly already a bit sparce, and the contenders I think that are real are ranked.  I haven't seen Marty Supreme, so I'm guessing the reason Fran Drescher has no traction is because she's barely in the movie, but she does fit the bill (longtime trouper who knows everybody) that sometimes sneaks in.  If there's a Mescal/Riseborough nominee, you'd probably look to Rebecca Ferguson (A House of Dynamite), Daniel Day-Lewis (Anemone) or Lucy Liu (Rosemead), all of whom got the kinds of reviews that would get you a nomination (well two did and one of them is Daniel Day-Lewis), even if they haven't shown up at enough of the precursors to be considered.  There's also recent nominee Jeremy Strong (Springsteen) or former nominee Hailee Steinfeld (Sinners) if the Oscars really like their films, but that feels like a stretch given the former's film has lost all heat and the latter has better options in the movie.  Also, I would be foolish not to mention Jacobi Jupe (Hamnet), though Oscar has stopped loving child performances the way he used to, and even when he did, it was usually in the female categories where child actors showed up.

10. Jennifer Lopez (Kiss of the Spider Woman)

For Her: Steinfeld definitely makes more sense here & probably should be number ten, but if we're going to get crazy, let's get loud (pun intended), and boy has Jennifer Lopez in recent years been loud about her lack of a nomination in her career.  Don't pretend you haven't seen the clip of her listening to the Oscars and tearfully realizing she wasn't getting in for Hustlers.  I'm not usually one to say someone is "due" but given her career...she should have a nod by now, and I suspect the Academy knows it.

Against Her: The film doesn't look like a contender in any other category, and it flopped pretty spectacularly earlier this year.  Lopez also has a reputation for being challenging to work with (Luis Guzman can't be the only Academy member who doesn't like her, even if he's one of the few on record), and people like to vote for people they enjoy working with...this nomination made a lot of sense a few months ago, but now not as much.

9. Hugh Jackman (Song Sung Blue)

For Him: Jackman, unlike Lopez, has an Oscar nomination to rely upon, but he's been in contention a few times since then and could feel like a comeback nomination is worthy of him (also, unlike Lopez, he has a more affable professional reputation).  Also unlike Lopez, he has a costar (Kate Hudson) who seems destined to get a nomination this year, and so Academy voters are likelier to be playing their screener for him.  There's not a lot of feel-good in this year's race, and this would be a good spot for it.

Against Him: Hudson outacts him, and the Academy has really moved away from this middle-of-the-ground crowd-pleaser (15 years ago he'd be a much better shot) in favor of more serious critical fare.  Truth be told, I would've assumed he was more of a "wild SAG nominee" than an Oscar nominee at this point.  Both of the lead acting races are crazy tough this year, as a lot of the nominees feel "locked" because they come with a probable Best Picture nominee (bizarrely, Jackman is the only lead contender I have on this list).

8. Emily Watson (Hamnet)

For Her: At one point in the 1990's, Watson felt like she might fall into default nominee status, but fell out of fashion for some reason and never really rebounded.  But Oscar loves a comeback, and they also love British character actresses.  Watson doesn't have a huge role, but it is a powerful one, and if they like Hamnet, it's possible she's the surprise this year.

Against Her: Here's the deal, and why category fraud truly SUCKS.  Paul Mescal is also campaigning for supporting for the same film, and if you told me he was in at least an hour more of this movie than Watson, I'd believe you.  Having Mescal (very good in this movie but completely a lead) campaigning here makes it feel like Watson isn't doing enough to warrant her citation...even though she is an ACTUAL supporting part.  It's likely costing her nominations, in addition to there just being a lot of contenders for Supporting Actress.

7. Regina Hall (One Battle After Another)

For Her: Hall is exactly the sort of person who sneaks into a last-minute nomination.  She's a well-loved character actor, one who has never been nominated despite Oscar connections (she's a former host), and she's appearing in a key, scene-stealing role in the likely Best Picture winner.  She's also been in the conversation before (Support the Girls), and has elevated movies (like Scary Movie) that pretty much everyone knows would not have had the cultural staying power were it not for her (not to mention the box office receipts).

Against Her: There are too many actors trying for nominations in One Battle After Another.  That's honestly the biggest issue-the film is already trying to get five acting nominations (which it got for SAG, so this is real), but adding a sixth nomination, as we discussed here, has never happened before, and she's likely going to end up just shy.

6. Tania Maria (The Secret Agent)

For Her: Her role as the scene-stealing landlady is the kind of role that frequently gets you an Oscar nomination, and despite SAG dropping the ball, Oscar is much friendlier to subtitled movies than any of the precursor awards.  She has several key moments in the film with likely nominee Wagner Moura, and if you've seen the movie, she'll stand out.

Against Her: Here's the thing-I'm confident Oscar voters are going to see the movie, and I'm confident that they're going to like her, but will they bother to learn her name?  Honestly, this is a legitimate question as, say, the cast of Parasite found out.  But I can't help but think about Roma a few years ago and how they ended up with a few nominations that came out of nowhere, especially in upended categories (which Supporting Actress is).

5. Glenn Close (Wake Up Dead Man)

For Her: She's Glenn freaking Close.  And not just is she an eight-time Oscar-nominated legend that pretty much everyone agrees is the greatest living actor without an Oscar, she's kind of having a moment right now between this and the wildly successful (but critically-maligned) All's Fair.  She's the standout in the film, and honestly in a year as unusual as this for Supporting Actress, if she got nominated I'd bet she'd win, which is why Netflix really should get behind her...

Against Her: ...but they aren't.  Rian Johnson's move to Netflix resulted in two very strong Knives Out sequels (in my opinion, both better than the original), but the last film had two totally worthy performances to cite for Janelle Monae & Kate Hudson (I personally nominated both of them), and yet neither got in, and I think Netflix took the lesson away from that that these films aren't worth giving attention.  Which is a pity, because I mean it-I think this might be Close's Oscar win if she could've gotten in, and there's room for her.

4. William H. Macy (Train Dreams)

For Him: On the flip side, we have a movie that Netflix IS getting behind, and a character actor who is likely due for another nomination (similar to Paul Giamatti a couple of years back getting a follow-up citation for The Holdovers).  I have not seen this film, but from what I can tell Macy has a plum part, and with both the film and Joel Edgerton in the conversation, I wouldn't be surprised if he snuck in (it certainly feels like the type of role that would).

Against Him: I can't quite tell where we're falling on the Train Dreams momentum train (pun not intended...also not sure if it's a pun).  Did its pair of Golden Globe nominations signal that we should be watching for it coming in the future, or was that the best it's going to do and other, flashier films get in its way for an Oscar nomination?  Edgerton is fighting for his life in the most crowded of the races, and I don't see Macy making it without him.

3. Andrew Scott (Blue Moon)

For Him: In 2023, Andrew Scott gave what (in my opinion) was the best cinematic performance of the decade to date, and got absolutely nothing from Oscar.  I suspect, though, that people are aware of this fact (i.e. more people saw All of Us Strangers in the interim), and Scott is on the precipice of movie stardom, regularly getting key roles in major films like Blue Moon.  This is a very subtle turn, and one that (if people are watching the movie) he should stand out for as it's critically important in making what Hawke does work.

Against Him: The top four are really where I think (if we have one) we're going to get our surprise nomination.  But the question hanging over all of them is "why didn't they get nominated at the Globes or SAG...and why would Oscar be different?"  With Scott this is particularly important because he's the only one not in a Best Picture contender, so the acting is really the only thing that he has going for him, and so there's more eyebrows as to where he has been all season (the other three, if Oscar loves the films more than the Globe or SAG, is how they sneak in).  Is this role just not clicking with voters?

2. Delroy Lindo (Sinners)

For Him: Lindo has been on the verge of an Oscar nomination for years.  He should've gotten in a few years back for Da 5 Bloods (again, I nominated him), but he's been in movies regularly for decades, everything from some of Spike Lee's best pictures (like Crooklyn) to box office sludge (like Gone in 60 Seconds & Ransom) to films Oscar DID go for but he wasn't nominated (specifically The Cider House Rules).  In another major Best Picture contender like Cider House...Lindo gives off the vibes of an actor Oscar wants to put his name on, so at 73, this is the time.

Against Him: Everyone else in this cast is getting nominated instead.  Seriously-we saw three cast members (Michael B. Jordan, Miles Caton, & Wunmi Mosaku) all get nominated this morning, so why wasn't his name there?  It's hard not to think that, like Emily Watson, Caton (who is in 25 more minutes of the film and definitely the co-lead of the picture) is hurting him by dwarfing a true supporting performance.

1. Gwyneth Paltrow (Marty Supreme)

For Her: In order to be #1 on this list, you gotta bring it.  Key part of a major Best Picture contender?  Check.  Coattail nominee when there's other actors in your film locked in already?  Check.  Former Winner/Nominee who is making a comeback of sorts with Oscar?  Double check.  And with Gwyneth, it's hard not to also notice that she's actively trying for this-she's hit every press junket she can think of, even interviews she wouldn't normally do (like Amy Poehler's Good Hang podcast), and clearly is hoping to finally get her second Oscar nomination.  That same sort of "please, I want this" plea from a major movie star worked for Annette Bening in Nyad a few years ago.

Against Her: Paltrow's public celebrity is (like Lopez's) polarizing, and she also has internal competition from Odessa A'zion (a fellow NepoBaby).  I haven't seen the movie, so I also do wonder if part of this is me judging a performance that's just not in Oscar's wheelhouse...but critics don't seem to indicate this is a throwaway part.  I've said it a few times this article, but I cannot stress enough-Oscar LOVES a comeback...

OVP: Missing Link (2019)

Film: Missing Link (2019)
Stars: Zach Galifianakis, Hugh Jackman, Zoe Saldana, Stephen Fry, Timothy Olyphant, Emma Thompson
Director: Paul Michael Glaser
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Animated Feature Film)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

We don't normally do double reviews on the same day, but considering that tomorrow is Oscar nominations morning, I figured it made sense to get a second review out for one of the films that seems likely to be competing for a trophy in a few weeks (and should get its first round of good news tomorrow).  Missing Link is an odd film to be going for Oscar's good graces, though its pedigree is high.  Laika has made four feature-length films, and to date all of them have competed for the Academy Award, though none of them have actually won.  Missing Link, though, was a box office disaster earlier this year, not coming close to taking back the movie's $100 million budget, and this is a category that values its hits.  Still, in a year that is brimming with sequels (and to date only Toy Story 3 has won an Oscar for Best Animated Feature as a sequel), this is one of the few critically-celebrated movies to be in contention for Oscar, not to mention its recent Golden Globe victory, and so I suspect Missing Link will continue Laika's tradition of Oscar nominations.  But the question remained for me as I finally caught it on DVD (I was part of the box office problem)-was it any good?

(Spoilers Ahead) The film centers on Sir Lionel Frost (Jackman), a man who wants desperately join an adventurers' club headed by Lord Piggot-Dunceby (Fry).  However, unlike most of the adventurers who hunt big game in Africa, Frost is more interested in proving the existence of mythical creatures.  In the hilarious opening scene, we see him and his over-his-head assistant try to capture the Loch Ness Monster with little success.  He makes a bet to finally gain acceptance into the club if he can provide proof of the Sasquatch, which Frost has received inside information on how to discover.  Turns out the creature actually wrote the letter and goes by the name Susan (Galifianakis).  Frost makes a second deal to Susan that if Frost finds Susan's cousins, the Yeti, in the Himalayas, Susan will provide proof of his existence to get Frost into the club.  As they adventure to the Himalayas, they come across Adelina (Saldana), a beautiful former flame/rival of Frost's.  When they get to the Himalayas, but they find the Yeti to be hostile and not welcoming of Susan, and he then realizes that Frost is the family he always wanted.  In the end, they become an adventuring duo, and both don't care about creating an identity when the one they already have is worthy enough.

It's pretty easy after seeing this movie to understand why the film was a box office bomb.  While Missing Link has at its center a cute, adorable sidekick, it doesn't have an entry point with a child protagonist for younger audiences like some of its past pictures (Coraline, ParaNorman, Kubo) that often countered some of the more mature and grotesque (beautifully so) imagery that the characters are bringing out.  In many ways this feels like something from Aardman, but even then it'd be filled with cuddly sheep and not old men dressed like a Robert Louis Stevenson character.  The movie has a rather traditional animated plot (unlikely friends, valuing your true self, etc), but its motif is unusual for such an audience, and really has only succeeded in recent years with a movie like Up (which is Pixar, and which also has a child as the sidekick, not to mention two adorable animals to latch onto).

But if we live in a world where animation isn't just for children, Missing Link has a lot to offers.  I loved the color palette (green & orange is a good combination), and Galifianakis' act works better in animation than it does in some real-life pictures (for that matter, so does Jackman's).  The movie is repetitive and occasionally drives home the same message over-and-over again (and the Adelina role feels too rife with cliche, a pity as it's the only major female character in the movie), but it's funny and has some solid sight gags (particularly the opening Loch Ness sequence).  Oscar has done worse than this with Animated Feature, and if this is what it finally takes to get Laika its long overdue trophy, so be it.

The Front Runner (2018)

Film: The Front Runner (2018)
Stars: Hugh Jackman, Vera Farmiga, JK Simmons, Alfred Molina, Sara Paxton
Director: Jason Reitman
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

My friend Pat used to say that he couldn't watch tennis movies because he would over-analyze them since the actors never looked like how actual players perform on the court, which would take him out of the movie.  I have occasionally had a similar struggle when it comes to films about politics.  About ten minutes into The Front Runner, I had already rolled my eyes exasperatingly twice and was worried my wonkish political heart couldn't take such a spoon-fed tale of 1980's politics because I'd spend the movie mentally fact-checking (for the curious, the first, when Hugh Jackman's Gary Hary called Walter Mondale "Walter" rather than "Fritz," as he certainly would have called his former Senate colleague since that's what every politician who has ever spoken about Mondale called him, and the second was when they pretended that Alfred Molina's Ben Bradlee didn't know who Michael Dukakis was, as it's impossible to believe that Bradlee wouldn't have known the sitting Governor of Massachusetts, then in his fifth year in office).  But the film settled in, largely ignoring the other components of the race (the only 1988 opponents of Hart's mentioned more than once were Jesse Jackson and George Bush), and seemed to want to say a lot of things about the state of politics rather than getting into the minutia of the Hart campaign.  Being that Reitman is a capable director, this succeeds more than I expected (I went in with low expectations as someone who is not a fan of Jackman's at all), but I left not knowing entirely what the filmmaker's views were on the former Colorado senator, a man who may well have been a very good president if he had understood the tabloidization of politics was about to claim him as its first high-profile victim.

(Real Life Doesn't Have Spoiler Alerts) The film focuses, smartly, not on Hart's rise to fame but instead on the three weeks in 1987 where he went from being the Democratic frontrunner for the White House (and the most likely candidate to succeed President Reagan), to being a has-been, dropping out amid a sex scandal that had not been seen in politics until that point (at least publicly).  Jackman plays Hart as an intense, frequently awkward man, which feels true-to-form.  Hart doesn't really have a modern equivalent, but if you needed one it might be a younger, handsomer Bernie Sanders.  He had a liberal perspective that hadn't worked in the previous two campaigns for the White House against the Reagans, but America liked the guy and after the aging years of the Reagans, he represented a new foothold for youth in America.  As a Democrat, I consider him up there as one of the most frustrating figures in our party's history (of the last 50 years or so) mostly because his views as president stand as such a stark contrast to the president we eventually got, and it's hard to imagine what would have happened had President Hart been able to lead environmental, education, and economic policy for years (climate change likely looks like a lot different in this circumstance).  Jackman, as I mentioned, is not an actor I really like but isn't a bad choice for casting here, as his bland, traditional handsomeness combined with the rugged outdoorsman that Hart longed to project to differentiate himself from the decades older Ronald Reagan is a strong combination.

The film's problem, though, is that it cannot get a clear depiction of who Hart was, which might be the point, but that gets lost in delivery.  Is Hart a great leader that was brought down by his own libido, or was he a great man who was sacrificed as the news media focused more on salacious headlines than on substance?  The film doesn't really have an answer here; every time you see someone like Mamoudou Athie's young reporter asking his editor questions about the ethics of questioning Hart's extramarital life, you also see him asking similar questions to Hart, perhaps serving as a proxy for director Reitman, who cannot seem to gage what the appropriate reaction to Hart's behavior is.  The closest we get is Ari Graynor in a solid, small role as Ann Devroy saying that she doesn't trust a man who abuses his power to take advantage of women.

This is telling because Reitman, a straight white male serving as director and screenwriter, toes the line on the sexist angles of this story.  Donna Rice, played well by Sara Paxton, is given less to do and say (we don't really understand much about her relationship with Hart, as Jackman & Paxton almost never share the screen...anyone have a clue why that is as it feels odd?), but she delivers a fully-felt performance as a woman whose life is torn asunder by Hart's actions.  He gets to go on being a former senator, a major public figure repeatedly given the benefit of the doubt, but she...she just gets to be a slut.  There's a number of good scenes between her and Molly Ephraim as a campaign operative, but I think I was most struck by the thinly-veiled sexism of her interactions with JK Simmons as Hart's campaign manager.  He makes a polite but clear crack about what Hart's obvious interest in her would be, and she reads him with the passive anger of someone who has been dismissed her entire professional life because she's too beautiful to be smart.  She disappears the second the Hart campaign stops protecting her, and while that feels intentional, I would have liked more of her story.  I have to imagine that Reitman cut her from the ending credits where-are-they-now-section in part because her politics became deeply problematic which might mess with the sympathetic portrayal he attempted to give her (she became a major Trump supporter and was even posting conspiracy theories about Christine Blasey Ford during the Kavanaugh hearings), but unlike Hart, who he never gains a firm grasp on, Reitman clearly empathizes with Rice as a human being, and it feels like he's undoing the sexism of the affair by eliminating the need for her the second the Hart campaign does.

All-in-all, I figured I would loathe this movie, but I see its merits.  I'm going with a 2-star because Retiman's lack of a viewpoint on Hart feels too meandering to call this a "good" movie, but it's one worth discussing and has elements that could have made this much better.  The cast is good, the story feels pertinent, and he modernizes it without it feeling too "woke" for a story in 1987.  If I did halves, it'd be a 2.5, and if it's ever on cable, it's probably worth an investigation, even if it's nowhere near as good as some of Reitman's best films.

John's Worst Films of 2017

Tonight, I will officially be announcing in my real life my favorites of the year (I do a teensy little awards show every year), and you’ll be getting my Top 10 best films list of the 2017 tomorrow on the blog.  However, in a year that was such a disaster in terms of the news, it has to be said that it wasn’t just politics that was causing anguish: it was also the movies.

While there was no egregiously-bad film like Stonewall that I managed to catch this year, there were surely a lot of bad movies that came out in 2017, or perhaps more damning, bland films.  Movies in 2017 were consistently “fine” or “okay” and rarely fascinating in a daring way, making going to the movies dull.  For that reason you’re not going to see movies that I thought took risks (like, say, mother!) mostly because I want filmmakers to take these kinds of chances, even if they aren’t always successful (it’s also because mother! is still better than all of these pictures, and that Razzy nomination for Lawrence in particular is just horrendous, as she’s good in the picture and not a little bit “the worst of the year”).  Instead, we go with the below failures, all of which I count as the last pleasant of the year (listed alphabetically):

Beauty and the Beast (dir. Bill Condon)

How do you ruin one of my all-time favorite movies?  Perhaps by draining it of humor, panache, or singers who can properly sing (sorry Emma, I love you but no, just no).  The film is underwhelming from the original in literally every way, and the sets look less like an organic castle and more like something you’d see in a Disneyland theme ride.  The cash grab clearly worked, but must Disney destroy everything special it makes with heinous duplication?

The Disaster Artist (dir. James Franco)

Franco’s last minute miss at the Oscars was almost certainly due to the sexual harassment allegations against him.  It should have been because he plays his role as Tommy Wiseau as a joke, a comic look at a man who has no understanding of himself.  He’s mysterious because Franco doesn’t do any homework, claiming “it’s just Tommy!” in a cheeky frat-boy move that cruelly tries to be a message movie about people without talent succeeding, but instead is a passionless, dull affair that feels less like talent letting loose and more like actors tricking their fans into paying for a bad film.  Also, Dave Franco gives arguably the most listless performance I recall seeing all year.

Downsizing (dir. Alexander Payne)

Stuffed to the brim with interesting ideas, Payne’s script ignores all of them, giving the audience just “passage of time” jumps when the picture itself could be at its most fascinating.  Weighed down by Matt Damon as a character that clearly has never had an original thought in his life, the movie meanders around major questions of the purpose of life, the foolishness of man, and the selfishness of “sacrifice,” but it doesn’t have a point-of-view on any of them.

The Greatest Showman (dir. Michael Gracey)

Though the music is occasionally fun (I liked “Never Enough” and “Rewrite the Stars” in particular), but this is a terrible actual movie.  No one is bringing their A-Game with the acting, with particularly awful performances from Jackman and Zendaya, both weakly connecting to their costars and in Jackman’s case, being in strained voice.  And that “This is Me” number might sound great coming out of Keala Settle, but the lyrics and back-half of the plot is so hackneyed it would have been cast out as too syrupy even in the fourth season of Glee.

Marjorie Prime (dir. Michael Almereyda)

Like Downsizing, this is not short on ideas or fine actors in the cast, but it has few answers for these questions.  It’s hard to criticize a film that finally gives Lois Smith a leading role, but her supporting cast does her no favors, with Jon Hamm playing his character as merely a plot device, and Geena Davis/Tim Robbins phoning in their roles with little care.  Coupled with a bizarre ending that feels so toss-away it’s difficult to figure out not only the purpose of this film, but also the point.

OVP: The Greatest Showman (2017)

Film: The Greatest Showman (2017)
Stars: Hugh Jackman, Zac Efron, Michelle Williams, Rebecca Ferguson, Zendaya, Keala Settle
Director: Michael Gracey
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Original Song-"This is Me")
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

I watched and defended Glee longer than I should have.  I realize that in hindsight, but at the time it was a great salvation for me.  I was lonely in a city with very few friends and no family, and Glee was a weekly reminder that "it was all going to be okay" a message I wasn't receiving from anyone I saw on a day-to-day basis.  As a result, when the show went completely off-the-rails (surely by the time they all went to college), I felt a civic duty to stand behind it, continuing to watch it, and not just because I really wanted Sam and Blaine to get together.

(Spoilers Ahead) What does Glee have to do with anything here?  It's because The Greatest Showman is almost completely copying what Glee did in those final few seasons of the series.  The movie is centered around PT Barnum (Jackman), the famed showman who did have a fascinating life, well worth a movie or four to investigate, but this is not really about The Greatest Showman.  This is instead about shoving a message down our throats while surrounding that message with a series of musical numbers...again, much like Glee.

The movie itself could be summed up in about four sentences.  Barnum is born from nothing, but ends up marrying a rich girl "out of his league" named Charity (Williams).  He decides, after tricking a bank into giving him money, to open a museum of curiosities that eventually turns into what we now call the circus.  Along the way he recruits a bearded lady (Settle), a beautiful trapeze artist (Zendaya), and a business partner in the form of Philip Carlyle (Efron), who falls for the trapeze artist.  Still wanting to fit in with the society set he can't ever reach thanks to class snobbery, he sponsors an opera singer named Jenny Lind (Ferguson), but in the process alienates his new "freak" friends, and in the end we find out that they are all the family that he needs.

If that sounds like a bad episode of Glee, you officially get where I was going with this opening.  The movie can occasionally cling to some solid music (Pasek & Paul are no slouches), but man is this a bad movie if you discount the music.  The acting is cheesy and under-baked (and not just in the way you'd expect from an old-timey musical)...no one is doing these characters justice, not even the usually reliable Williams and Ferguson.  Zendaya is a great dancer and a fun performer, but she needs to work on her acting chops.  At least she can claim she's relatively new to the screen, something neither Jackman nor Efron are able to do.  Jackman's singing voice I've never been a fan of, but here his acting is more troubling, as he plays Barnum too earnestly, even when he's meant to be a bit more conniving in order to make the plot believable, and both give off the aura of the guys who are too manly to celebrate the gaudiness of the movie they're in.  In a film with a lot of performances, no one is even hitting a ground rule double.

The script itself is the worst part, though.  Listen, I know that anti-bullying messages are important, and I was fine getting it when I saw Ferdinand the next day (review coming in the next week) since that's a movie for children, but is it bad that I point out that this message is insanely played out at this point?  I get when the actual president is a tyrant and bully, it makes sense that we need this reminder frequently, but this feels like a cookie cutter script from an after-school special, and it's in a film that is almost completely geared toward adults.  It does not deal with shades of grey well, which is a bummer as Barnum was an important but very complicated man, and you'll leave wondering why arguably the most saccharine and groan-inducing song in the film is probably going to be the Oscar-nominated one ("Never Enough" is far, far better than "This is Me," not to mention "Rewrite the Stars" which would have the added benefit of being a show-stopping duet).  All-in-all, this is a movie that, the best thing you can say about it is to just buy the soundtrack.  The worst you can say is that in the post-Moulin Rouge cinematic musical boom, this is about as good as the big-screen version of Rent.

Pan (2015)

Film: Pan (2015)
Stars: Levi Miller, Hugh Jackman, Garrett Hedlund, Rooney Mara, Adeel Akhtar, Amanda Seyfried
Director: Joe Wright
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

Yes, I had read the reviews, and I still went in anyway.  I have loved JM Barrie's story about the boy who doesn't grow up since I was a kid, and that love has grown through the year's, what with PJ Hogan's masterpiece in 2003 (if you haven't seen it, get thyself to thy Netflix queue) and just generally how the story has so many classic elements.  As a result, with actors like Garrett Hedlund and Rooney Mara, brilliant director Joe Wright, and the Pan lore, I couldn't miss this movie even with its giant splat of a tomato over on RT.  That was clearly a faulty logic considering what I ended up viewing, but there it is.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film has so many problems it's hard to know where to begin.  I think what might be the first and worst problem is the beginning.  The Peter (Miller) here is pretty nondescript, and not someone with any sort of real personality, which is sort of appropriate-Peter Pan is not known for being one of your deeper protagonists.  However it shows when you put him center stage and not Wendy, so thoughtful and full of contradictions.  Peter here is seen as an imp, but considering he's under the control of a cruel pirate nun (it comes across as ridiculously as it sounds in what is surely the worst portion of the film, though that's not for a lack of competition) it's seen as totally justifiable.  After the nun sells the boys to the pirate Blackbeard (Jackman), things get even weirder.

It must be discussed, since it's arguably the sequence that people have eye-rolled the most over, but the entire Nirvana/Ramones scenes are just terribly bad.  I'm not sure if Joe Wright spent too much time watching Mad Max, but I don't get why we had an elaborately-staged musical scene in a film with almost no other musical scenes, in the middle of the movie where Jackman and all of the Lost Boys perform Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" like we've just entered the Thunderdome.  Did Wright not realize that we would be getting another Mad Max movie this summer that would clearly make this parallel not only ridiculous but also people would pick up on it?  Either way, the entire scene is jarring in a bad way and doesn't jive with the rest of the film, and sort of puts you off of Jackman's Blackbeard during his very first scene.  While admittedly I am not nor have I ever been a Hugh Jackman fan, Daniel Day-Lewis himself could not sell this scene.

Jackman's performance is appropriately hammy given its nature, though it never finds the calculating brilliance that Jason Isaacs brought to Hook in 2003's Hogan adaptation (again, I would have nominated him for an Oscar that year-for real).  While Isaacs played his character as a cartoonish human, Jackman just goes full-on cartoon, a narcissist who doesn't really play on his narcissism, who is willing to ruthlessly dig up Neverland just to extend his rather pointless seeming life.  He isn't aided by much else in the film though.  We have Rooney Mara eyeing the racism line pretty hard as Princess Tigerlily.  While she never explicitly is stated as being a Native American, her father clearly is and considering Mara is white in real life, I feel like the filmmakers made a grave mistake here not casting an actual Native American actress to play the role (which PJ Hogan did #justsaying).  Mara's performance, like a lot of her work, is pretty hit-and-miss here (click the tag below for my complicated history with the admittedly-talented but not always consistent Oscar nominee), as she plays the role as too straight and kind of boring.  Garrett Hedlund, an actor I more consistently admire and follow, isn't much better, especially in earlier scenes where he seems to go from zero to ninety in terms of Captain Hook's lunacy.  The script does him no favors in this regard, it's worth noting; despite us knowing him as the future nemesis of Peter Pan, we get very few hints aside from fourth wall-breaking winks as to why Hook would eventually come to despite Peter.  Instead we get a horny, cranky, and manic piece-of-work from the actor, and the entire time I just kept thinking "but he was SO good in On the Road!"

The production work is sort of in the vein of How the Grinch Stole Christmas-there's so much of it that you want to think it's good, but in reality it's mostly gaudy and awful.  The steampunk design of the clothes is the sort of costume work that is showy, and maybe even wins accolades, but it doesn't fit with the film's motif, particularly when you compare it to the docile World War II sequences and the Hook-inspired Tigerlily and her tribe.  The Visual Effects are also bloated and gross-the Neverbird in particular is a weird creature, one you can't tell if it's good or evil, but just that it looks like the creature from Up!.  All-in-all even the visuals, which should have been a silver lining, are atrocious.

All-in-all then this is a failure.  I would normally bemoan this fact since Peter Pan is such a wonderful story, but as I've pointed out several times this has already been done, and quite well, by PJ Hogan so we have a definitive version of this tale.  Apparently we also needed a prequel for some reason, or so some now-fired studio executive thought.

OVP: X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)

Film: X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)
Stars: Hugh Jackman, James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Halle Berry, Nicholas Hoult, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Peter Dinklage, Evan Peters
Director: Bryan Singer
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Visual Effects)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

I have never been a big fan of the X-Men movie franchise.  There, I said it, and I stand by it.  I’m not sure why this is, particularly since I’m not averse to comic book movies (I particularly liked the Nolan Batman franchise and The Avengers films), but the X-Men movies may hit too close to home.  My brother, mom, and I would read Marvel comics all the time when we were kids.  We would go to the local Pamida (I swear, I’m not that old…I just grew up in a very small, old-fashioned town) and my brother and I would twirl the two comic book stands, pouring over every issue, wondering which one we’d spend our allowance on (again, I was born in the 1980’s-not that old).  Almost without fail one of us would buy one of the X-Men series and check-in on Cyclops, Jean Grey, and the gang.

The problem for me with the X-Men franchise has been both that it plays fast and loose with the chronology of the comic books (this is the ultimate nerd gripe, and one with little merit, and one that I truly hate, but one that I’m man enough to admit sways my opinion), but also because everything onscreen feels so lifeless.  For every inspired piece of casting (Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, Michael Fassbender as Magneto), there’s an equally lazy piece of casting (Halle Berry as Storm, James Marsden as Cyclops, and (not to earn enemies here) Jennifer Lawrence as Mystique).  The films also seem to obsess too frequently on one central character (in the original films this would be Jackman’s Wolverine, in the latter franchise it appears to be Lawrence’s Mystique and the Professor X/Magneto relationship) while teasing us with dozens of great characters from the series that appear as nothing more than props (Bishop, anyone?).

(Spoilers Ahead) That being said, I did go into this particular installment with a thrill, as Days of Future Past is easily my favorite of all of the X-Men stories.  I loved the way that it put the focus on a few characters that never get any sort of limelight (particularly Kitty Pryde, one of the best characters in the X-Men, who becomes the hero of the story even though she’s one of the most junior members of the X-Men at the time), and keeps the amount of characters to a relative minimum, with a ticking clock toward doom.  It’s a great dystopian plotline, and I remember wearing this comic book novel OUT as a child.

Of course, I knew I was in trouble when the directors didn’t have enough confidence in the story to put Ellen Page, Oscar-nominee and total badass, at the center of the film but instead shifted that over to the stalwart Hugh Jackman.  I truly hate when people complain about the source material being amended or upended for the screen, but I feel like this greatly limited the story and once again put Wolverine, whose story has been played out over these many, many films, at the center of the movie.  As a result, we see most of the next few scenes through his eyes instead of Shadowcat’s, and we get a similar perspective of him and his constant narcissistic attitude, rather than someone who could perhaps give us a smarter and more forward-thinking reaction to this “new” old world.

However, comic book nerds can’t have everything they want, and in some cases, they get something they didn’t know they want, and it’s completely fair to say that the film peaks in the first half hour or so of the film with the introduction of Quicksilver (Evan Peters of American Horror Story fame).  Quicksilver in the comic books is a very serious, driven and morally conflicted character who is the son of Magneto, whereas here he is a stoner loser kid who spends his day pulling pranks and eating junk food (there is a joke about his lineage, though unless you’re a complete comic book nerd it sailed right over your head).  I loved every second of Peters’ ridiculousness, as it was great comic foil for a film that desperately needed it, and because it allowed Professor X, the Beast, and Wolverine to have an eye-rolling common frenemy.  Plus, Peters is so damn delightful as Quicksilver (Aaron Johnson has a tall order for when he appears as the same character coming up), it’s hard not to smile and wish the entire film was really about him.

Alas, it is not, and the film continues toward familiar treads (Mystique is moral, then she’s not…Magneto is moral, then he’s not…Wolverine is quick-tempered, then he’s not…Professor X is short-sighted, then he’s not…and this is really all the characters we have time for despite casting nearly a dozen other big-name actors in these parts).  The films never realize their full potential because they’re too focused on spoon-feeding us more of what we already know.  I get that Lawrence and Jackman are the biggest names in the films, but what made the X-Men so fun and original is that you saw combinations of different mutants each week fighting together, and that the focus, like a television show, would shift from one main character to the next.  Here that’s simply not the case, and as a result you see some of the character and actor flaws on-display (Jackman’s Wolverine, for example, becomes boring to watch all the time since he essentially is immortal).  This wouldn’t be a problem if this were just one film, but it’s not-it’s a multi-film, major motion picture franchise, and it’s one that keeps rehashing and retelling without a true story arc to connect it.  Even The Avengers gets this, giving us different flirtations with Captain America, Thor, and the Hulk in one-off films instead of just spending all of their time with Iron Man.  Until the creators of X-Men understand this, they’re going to just be telling middling versions of truly great comic books.

Those are my thoughts-what are yours?  Do you agree that Peters is best-in-show?  If you do agree with me, which character would you like to be central to the next film?  And what X-Men are you holding out hopes to be in the next movie (Gambit and Jubilee spring to mind for myself)?  Share in the comments!