It’s Oscar season, which means Liz and I are catching up on all of the high-brow Oscar contenders. Here’re my quick hit reviews of the ones that show up on various lists:
The Banshees of Inisherin was slamming.
I don’t have the right degrees to tell you if Tár was any good.
Fablemans was fine. My mom kept talking during it so I missed most of it.
Everything Everywhere All At Once was 95% amazing and 5%, “OK, I get it.”
I hate that I loved Maverick.
I already gave my opinion on Avatar: The Way of Water and why it should, but won’t, win Best Picture.
Pinocchio was beautiful.
We still gotta see Women Talking, The Whale, etc.
But I want to turn my attention briefly to my current pick for the 2023 Best Picture: M3GAN.
I’m still working on my Nick Cave discography piece. Maybe next week it’ll be done. But in that piece, I talk about pulpish material done perfectly. Just absolute filth subject matter in a genre that’s historically traded in dark corners and not put in storefronts done so beautifully that you forget you’re partaking in absolute trash. A lot of Nick Cave’s music falls into this bucket. Donald Westlake’s writing is another fine example. But this short piece is about movies, and M3GAN is a perfect example of shit content done beautifully.
First, for folks who don’t know about M3GAN, it’s a film about a girl who loses her family in a horrific snowplow accident and the aunt who offloads her new childcare responsibility to an android that was developed as the only toy a child would ever need but that happens to be apathetic, at best, towards life.
I can really only comment on how fantastic the writing is and, by golly, it is fantastic. The movie knows that its central concept is outlandish and can only exist as a movie and embraces it. But that, alone, isn’t what makes the writing fantastic. A lot of movies and TV shows embrace and have fun with their whacky premises. The coup de grace that M3GAN pulls off masterfully is how straight the primary characters play the plot, how reluctantly the secondary characters come along with the plot, and how perfectly flabbergasted the tertiary characters remain throughout.
It’s that last bit, those tertiary characters, that make M3GAN shine bright. The tertiary characters sit on the periphery of this farce, in disbelief of what they’re seeing or hearing, and they stay there. They’re part of the audience, reacting to the ridiculous events that the main characters are taking in a completely comfortable stride. They bring us into the movie with a raised eyebrow, a look of disbelief, a sense of, “There’s no way this is actually real right now.” And it’s done so sparingly that the device, itself, doesn’t become a gimmick - just a reality check played for the audience’s laugh.
Cobra Kai does something similar which makes it an equally brilliant show. The occasional scene where the primary characters are doing or saying things that do not happen in the real world, like discussing how to stop a dojo that’s trying to poison the moral tethering of the entire world, and a tertiary character will literally say something like, “I’m sorry…are you guys talking about karate?” Up until that moment, we are intensely following this drama which, on a global scale is completely inconsequential but within the narrative is the difference between sin and salvation, and then there’s some character who lives in the real world, our world, and pulls us back with a laugh.
That type of interaction has to be done at the perfect time, and M3GAN nails it the handful of times it does it. It’s a movie that’s aware of what it is, but with primary characters who are not aware of what it is, and tertiary characters who are sitting next to us, nudging us, and saying, “Can you believe this shit?”
A lot of goofy movies that embrace what they are will have a fourth-wall moment. Like maybe the main character will recap where we are in the plot to remind us of how ridiculous the plot is. What M3GAN does, instead, is pull us into the movie alongside the characters to show us how ridiculous it is. It may seem like a small difference, but it is the difference between a good, funny script and a great, hilarious script.
What I’m saying is, go see M3GAN.