Yes this is the latest in a series getting its first new entry since I watched My Left Foot in late February, meaning this is an unusually short amount of time between entries in Audient Bridesmaids.
But the real headline here is that this is the first blog post I have ever written, and will likely also publish, while on a plane.
I'm currently en route from Auckland to Los Angeles, where I'll spend about four hours before flying to Atlanta, where I'll spend about two days before meeting relatives for a reunion at a lake house that's about a three-hour drive from there.
It was while I was en route from Melbourne to Auckland that I watched I'm Still Here, the only 2024 best picture nominee I had yet to see, which usurped the spot of John Boorman's Hope and Glory (1987) as next up in this series by failing to beat Anora for 2024 honors. It was a good reminder that I need to pick up the pace a bit here, unless I want every movie I watch in this series to be a usurper.
But what a good usurper it was.
Before we get to the film proper, let me tie off this "blogging on a plane" topic.
This isn't the first flight I've ever had that had WiFi open to the internet at large -- you may recall how I enjoyed watching baseball on a plane in this post -- but it's definitely the first time I've blogged on a plane. This flight is 11+ hours and that one was only 5+, so you can appreciate that I'm craving the variety, even though I'm less than half the way in and have only watched one movie so far. So here I am. Because I'm typing with just one thumb on my phone, I might keep it short.
I'm Still Here, the Walter Salles film not the Casey Affleck film, immediately inserted itself right into the mix in a year where I had six best picture nominees in my top ten. It might have only been seventh, but then again Conclave, which my wife watched and loved while I was watching this, might have beaten it as well. Anyway it would have definitely beaten Anora and A Complete Unknown, likely top 15 material and definitely top 20.
Because it's a recent film and is only just coming off the period where it was being widely feted, I won't subject you or my thumbs to a plot synopsis or a full analysis of its merits.
I will say that the first half of this film absolutely floored me, from setting the mood of the joy this family was experiencing in their lives of 1970 Rio, without overplaying that, to overturning it with both parents spending time as disappeared, temporarily or otherwise, while being questioned, imprisoned and tortured. You can describe the performance of an actor, in this case Fernanda Torres, as strong in all her scenes, but I think the good acting you remember is in little moments. The one I noted most with Torres was something she's doing with her mouth when she's s being questioned, a kind of tremor, which marks the moment she goes from being perturbed and unnerved to truly frightened. Maybe you saw that moment too.
I think it was the movie's two time jumps in its final 30 minutes that prevented it from truly sticking the landing and being able to bypass some of those higher ranked nominees on my list. (On this flight, my wife continued running through the nominees with Emilia Perez, my #4 of last year. I lost track of how far into it she was and thought she'd had to quit it early, but to my relief she watched the whole thing and liked it.)
Sorry for the tangent. Although I appreciated seeing what became of the family in the long run -- and seeing the elderly Eunice Paiva played by Torres' mother, Fernanda Montenegro, herself an Oscar nominee -- I found myself taken out of the intensity of the story and those characters at that age, just a bit.
Okay, rest time for my thumb. I hope to get to Hope and Glory before next Oscars.
Note: I didn't actually end up being able to post in flight. Although the WiFi allowed me to download the I'm Still Here poster, Blogger wouldn't let me upload it to the post. *shrug*
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