Also in Anora, Ani (Mikey Madison) has a problem. She lives in a squalid apartment with a disagreeable roommate, and only sex work in a nearby strip club can afford her even this meager existence. Since the strip club does not provide her health insurance and a 401K, she'll have to keep working there under a work schedule of their choosing unless she can solve this problem.
A certain sum of money can solve both their problems. For Vanya, it's the amount of money necessary to make Ani his girlfriend for a week, which includes enough lavish living to tempt her into a marriage that can get him a green card. For Ani it's the same amount of money, but really, it's never having to think about money again after she's the wife of the son of a Russian oligarch -- and certainly never having to work at the strip club again.
I also had a problem I needed to solve, and money -- a much smaller amount of money -- was also the solution.
I'm looking at less than three weeks to see about 20 more movies I want to/expect to see before I close off my 2024 rankings. Some of these are movies I can scrounge up on rental, streaming or the plane ride back to Melbourne. Most are not.
In fact, my list of unseen "important" end of year awards contenders just released or not yet released in either the US or Australia includes, or up until recently included, the following, listed alphabetically:
Anora
The Brutalist
A Complete Unknown
Conclave
The Nickel Boys
Nightbitch
Nosferatu
Queer
A Real Pain
Sing Sing
Possibly all of these movies will be available in theaters in Los Angeles. I can't say for sure and will be able to check with a clearer head when I get there later today. But even so I will get to see at most two of them before we leave on Saturday night.
Then some others will be available in Australian cinemas after I return, but again, I'll only be able to prioritize three at most in what will then be 11 days before my deadline.
So on Sunday night, our second and final night staying outside San Jose with hosts who go to bed early, I needed to fit in one of these titles available on iTunes -- even if it meant I had to throw money at the problem to make it go away.
The choices were Conclave and Anora, both of which would cost me $19.99 to own. No option to rent, though I would have happily paid that same price to do so.
As you know from this post, I don't like to buy movies via digital purchase -- even ones I know and love, but especially those I've never seen. But I also like to make problems go away, especially at this time of year.
Conclave had the benefit of being 18 minutes shorter, and as the movie I thought I might like less, I was less worried about the less optimal viewing environment of the child's bedroom we've overtaken the last two nights while we've been staying here. (It's actually the guest bedroom, but she's informally moved into it because she no longer wants to share a room with her eight-year-old brother, three years her junior.)
However, I was also taking the long view here, a logical approach when it comes to permanent ownership. Sean Baker has made two movies that made my year-end top ten, while Edward Berger has only made a remake of All Quiet on the Western Front to which I was rather indifferent (that I've seen, anyway).
The clincher for Anora, though, was that there was no future rental date visible for this movie on iTunes, while Conclave will be available to rent on January 10th, a full week before my deadline -- possibly even at the lower rental price of $5.99 or $6.99. And while both will be available in Australian cinemas when I return, I shouldn't be watching either that way given that there will be other titles on the above list where I'll only have the theatrical, not the iTunes, option.
So for the second time this week I added a movie I haven't seen to my permanent iTunes library. Hey, it's that time of year.
Repeat viewings of Anora will probably be somewhat unlikely, but that's all I'll say about it until I post my rankings -- though there will also likely be a review posted in the next few days, linked to the right, if you want to know my thoughts. That was another problem I solved by buying Anora -- the movie, not the person like Vanya did -- which is that I wanted to write and post one more review before returning to Australia, and it needed to be a movie already released there. Anora qualified in that regard as well.
I've heard the phrase "mo money mo problems," but never any musical contemplation of the problems the small sum of $19.99 can solve.
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