Although I give away many of my advanced screenings to other writers for my site, I make sure to hoard the ones that will serve a purpose for me personally. In the past six weeks I've had a large quantity of those, three in total, which are movies whose Australian debuts are scheduled for much later in the film year and closer to my ranking deadline. That makes three films I don't have to worry about while catching other important end-of-year films, to say nothing of the blockbusters that also get released in late December.
Those three films are Sentimental Value, Nouvelle Vague and No Other Choice, and given how they've done in this week's Golden Globe nominations, they were good films on which to concentrate. Each of those films was nominated as best feature in one of the two best feature categories.
I've already written some about the last two, but it's the first one that I saw longest ago, all the way back on October 29th. And it's the first of these that has succumbed to some of the perils of not writing about it right away.
Normally when I see a film I'm planning to review, I write the review within 24 hours, and that's usually out of necessity. In many cases I'm planning to post the review the very next day, so writing it immediately is essential. In fact, in the review I wrote of Jay Kelly this week -- see here if you want to read it -- I finished the movie at about 1 a.m. on Tuesday night, and had a review up by 10 past 10 on Wednesday morning. That isn't maybe a typical turnaround, and in this case required some finishing touches during my first hour of work. It also helps that I am consistently waking up just after 6 a.m. when the sun rises. But it just gives you some idea of the sort of timeframe I'm usually working with.
In the case of Sentimental Value, which does not release in Australia for another two weeks, my timeframe for writing the review was almost two months.
Before I get into the particulars of what's happened with it, I want to say I'm not sure I understand why it's a benefit to screen a movie so far in advance of its actual release. Surely the publicists don't want you to post your review until your readers have a chance to go purchase a ticket within the next few days, right? Yes you could write about it early, but that only contributes to the general buzz without having something concrete readers can convert into action. In our short attention span times, you don't want to let the iron cool down for two months.
On the publicist's side, there are also logistical headaches because they have to remember who they invited to the screening, and check over the course of those two months to see if the critics have written their review -- because hey, they theoretically could post it at any time.
Because I had a take on Sentimental Value and a clear way to open the review, I wrote my opening few paragraphs almost straight away. In fact, it was one of those reviews where I couldn't wait to get to a computer, because the words were already spilling out in my brain and I wanted to make sure I didn't lose the ideal phrasing I was concocting in my head.
But what then happens that is that in about the third paragraph, I start to give a couple paragraphs of plot synopsis, and this is where the urgency to continue writing dissipates. I usually know how I'm going to start my view, but I don't always know how the final four or five paragraphs of analysis are going to play out. With a movie not coming out for almost two months, I've got plenty of time to work that out.
So it was another ten days? two weeks? before I continued my Sentimental Value review, and then ultimately finished it in that same sitting.
During that time, I became fuzzy on details. Points I thought I might have wanted to make at the time have gotten hazier. And more to the point, I'm hazier on my defenses for why this film didn't work like gangbusters on me, despite its win of the Grand Prix at Cannes (which is actually the festival's second most prestigious award, contrary to its name).
So I did finish the review, and thought to myself it was okay I didn't love it, ultimately issuing it a 7/10 in our ReelGood rating system. Although Cannes is often totally in sync with the zeitgeist -- Oscar best picture winner Anora last year also won the festival's Palme d'Or -- there are times when Cannes' top prizes are awarded to very polarizing films, some of which people actually hate. Don't forget, this is the festival where people either give a film a ten-minute standing ovation or walk out. It's okay if I don't love one of the films honored here.
But over the last month in particular, I've learned just how much most people think of Sentimental Value. My first surprise was the realization that it was very likely to get a best picture nomination at the Oscars, which we won't actually find out until the 22nd of January, but which surprised me because foreign language films have historically had a steeper hill to climb on this front. (There's also some English in this movie, considering that Elle Fanning is one of its stars.) The Oscar bias against foreign language films is falling away a bit in recent years with the expansion of nominees from five to ten, and now each year we seem to get at least one foreign film nominated for best picture. I guess I just didn't know Sentimental Value would be this year's example of that. (And while we're at it, Nouvelle Vague and No Other Choice are also primarily in foreign languages, and they also have realistic Oscar ambitions.)
So now I'm looking at what I've written for Sentimental Value and trying to figure out ways of softening my criticisms. Clearly this film came together better for others than it did for me, but am I wrong or are they?
If I had just been writing about and posting my review of Sentimental Value in late October, this wouldn't have been a problem. If history proves me wrong on a movie, so be it -- it's happened plenty of times before. The problem comes when the review is in a state of unpublished limbo, meaning I can have second thoughts, I can tweak it, I could even change the entire thrust of my review if I wanted, contradicting my initial impression of the movie only on the basis of a fear of looking stupid and being wrong.
At least with Sentimental Value, the writing portion is out of the way. Correct or incorrect -- as if you can ever really say that when aesthetic judgments are involved -- at least I have something that is based confidently on things that actually happened in the movie. It's a little different with the other two.
I saw Nouvelle Vague on November 27th, so not nearly as long ago. It comes out on January 8th. As with Sentimental Value, I had a good couple opening paragraphs and I wrote them right away. And as with Sentimental Value, I lost the sense of urgency at the point of doing my plot synopsis.
I've only just picked up the writing again this morning, and I did force myself to finish it. The last 600 words of my review are reasonable and I'm reasonably proud of them. But there was a delay of 16 days in there and I'm not sure what things I thought I wanted to say were lost in the interim. And though Nouvelle Vague is my favorite of these three, with an 8/10 score, I'm still wondering if my knowledge of its subsequent accolades are informing what I've written in some way.
Then you've got No Other Choice. This I saw only ten days ago, making it relatively fresh. But in this case, I have not even written the opening yet. I have an idea of how I'm going to open it, but maybe knowing that the review before it, Nouvelle Vague, was not even in the can yet prevented me from getting started. This comes out latest on the calendar, January 15th. By which point I will have endured another six weeks of accolades about it since the time that I saw it.
When I start to fret about this a bit, I have to remember that I once had a whole gig reviewing movies where I wrote the review years after both the movie had come out and after I had seen it. How does that even work, you ask?
Well when I was writing for AllMovie in the early part of the 2000s, I was actually trying to make a living at it for a short period of time. They were only paying me $20 for each 300-word review, so this endeavor was always doomed to failure. However, the thing that made it marginally possible was that I could write a review for any film that currently didn't have a review on the site, as long as I was approved to do so. I'd go hunting and I'd send them lists of 20 movies I wanted to review, of which they would usually approve all 20, or sometimes denying me on one or two token films. Oh those blessed times when there was a financial incentive for them to have me do this.
In any case, those reviews have to be considered highly compromised in that a) I had not seen the film in many years in most cases, meaning I was reviewing it based on a general impression and a plausible take, and b) I already knew what everyone else thought of the movie, so I was factoring that in to what I was writing, either leaning into the popular take or defining my thoughts in opposition to it.
So I do suspect there is some imperfection in the way these things go. Critics see movies all the time with huge advanced buzz, and they have to clear that noise out of their heads if they want to write about those movies purely and without bias. And because of the way life works, sometimes you can't write that review straight away, especially if you don't have that deadline.
I guess I'm just glad, at this point, that I am not likely to have any more of these, at least this year. I'm scheduled to see another movie with awards buzz, The Secret Agent, on January 15th, which will also help me get it in before my deadline. But at least in that case the movie comes out only one week later.
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