The critical battlefield was outlined by POTUS 44 with the mid-December release of his annual list of favorites from the closing year (2025) which includes the top movies he has watched in the hours that remain after reading many books and listening to a lot of music. Because he's a capitol (D) donkey I figure Barack gets to watch all of these pictures for free plus hear the industry chit-chat about what celebritards are paid to promote. As longtime KOTCB readers know, I do NOT usually watch the films critiqued here because, for the most part, I don't need to but unlike Barry I do give commentary regarding the themes in these flicks to explain WHY they make anyones list. The Enigma just lobs his picks skyward like he's shooting hoops with LeBron and hopes the rock falls into the hole.* For me it's one battle after another in the cinephile war and in the spirit of years past I humbly submit my reviews.
Through a series of odd circumstances, I have actually watched a most of the movies nominated this year and (to my surprise) I kinda liked them:
BEST PICTURE - NOMINEES
BUGONIA - watched it on an jet plane at 30,000 feet above the earth even though I hate Yorgos Lanthimos I think this QAnon inspired movie is well worth a few precious hours of your time. The plot is Ted Kaczynski kidnaps Gwynne Shotwell, shaves her head and interrogates her for days of, from my standpoint, glorious revelations that confirm every crackpot "conspiracy theory" on the internet. The acting performances from Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons are riveting as the twists and turns in the story unravel with a predictive programming finale that shows multi-cultural globalist elites are fatigued by the unteachable human nature. Conclusion: The Earth Is Flat.
F1 - do I have to watch this? I couldn't do it. Old man Brad Pitt in a Jerry Bruckheimer car racing extravaganza bankrolled by Apple computer is not my idea of a good time. I'm not a car guy. I don't care about auto racing. It's probably a perfectly good movie but I'm not the target audience and I can't imagine what would have to transpire in this well documented field of sports racing movies to get me interested in watching it. Conclusion: Machines are slaves.
FRANKENSTEIN - nope. Guillermo del Toro is a great director but I'm still processing his "Nightmare Alley" remake from 2021. Mary Shelley's story is too bleak and, as it turns out, prophetic for me to watch when visualized by this master of the craft. Like F1 and race car movies, the topic of the Dr. Frankenstein's creation is not an original subject and the sheer volume of this monster content has turned this cautionary tale into pop art kitsch. Conclusion: The Aries Project Has Failed
HAMNET - I watched it, with trepidation, on a streaming service where I didn't have to pay for it because, as long time readers of this blog know, I don't believe Will Shakespeare wrote the plays and this movie proves my hypothesis. First the good - the costumes and sets from 16th century England are very good, I love the hawk symbolism and scenes in The Globe, while highly stylized, were very cool. Now the bad - there is a common misconception that the play Hamlet is somehow based on The Bard's son Hamnet who tangentially had a similar name and from this error an entire false narrative has been concocted. To make matters worse, this tale is decidedly feminine in its theme and reduces the greatest theatrical character in recorded history to a girlyman proxy for a mother's anguish. As a corrective we must turn to William Hazlitt and his "Characters of Shakespeare's Plays" published in 1817 which describes the Prince thusly:
Hamlet is a name: his speeches and sayings but the idle coinage of the poet's brain. What then, are they not real? They are as real as our own thoughts. Their reality is in the reader's mind. It is WE who are Hamlet. This play has a prophetic truth, which is above that of history. Whoever has become thoughtful and melancholy through his own mishaps or those of others; whoever has borne about with him the clouded brow of reflection, and thought himself 'too much i' th' sun'; whoever has seen the golden lamp of day dimmed by envious mists rising in his own breast, and could find in the world before him only a dull blank with nothing left remarkable in it; whoever has known "the pangs of despised love, the insolence of office, or the spurns which patient merit of the unworthy takes"; he who has felt his mind sink within him, and sadness cling to his heart like a malady, who has had his hopes blighted and his youth staggered by the apparitions of strange things; who cannot be well at ease, while he sees evil hovering near him like a spectre; whose powers of action have been eaten up by thought, he to whom the universe seems infinite, and himself nothing; whose bitterness of soul makes him careless of consequences, and who goes to a play as his best resource to shove off, to a second remove, the evils of life by a mock-presentation of them--this is the true Hamlet.
The thespian Will Shakespeare who performs as the ghostly King did not poses the depth of soul to pen the hero Hazlitt describes in the paragraph above. Conclusion: Marlowe Wrote The Plays.
MARTY SUPREME - saw it at the Alamo Drafthouse with my son who likes Timothée Chalamet and all I can say is that, according to Josh Safdie, it's tough to be a Jew. The opening title sequence is fantastic, performances are strong and it has a relatively "happy" ending - or at least as happy as is possible for this guy. Ping-pong as a MacGuffin in any film is a stone cold loser in my mind and Safdie's hyped up cinéma vérité gets tedious as the story moves along. Odessa A'zion is very authentic and beautiful in this role and encapsulates 3,000 years of tortured history in her feminine strategy for survival. Conclusion: Guerre tout le temps
ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER - my wife and I are big Paul Thomas Anderson fans so we saw this on the big screen. OBAA Breakdown: The French 75 (Antifa) has been well organized and active in the USA fomenting revolution, drug trade and mass migration human trafficking (including children in tunnels) for decades. Miscegenation is a bad idea. Female revolutionaries are psychopathic whores. The network of subversive revolutionaries within the US borders is vast, multi-layered across all strata of society with advanced methods of communication and distribution. These radicals work in a symbiotic relationship with civil law enforcement and the security state. Joe Biden runs a clandestine white nationalist club. The freaks in the revolutionary movement, even when they are presented in the absolute most favorable light, are utterly detestable losers, the white nationalists do eventually liquidate their bad actors, the struggle never ends and the left will always and forever work to destroy our civilization due to their envy and hatred. Conclusion: All Hail Saint Nick
THE SECRET AGENT - saw this one at the Virginia Film Festival in a crowded UVA theater filled with fellow travelers with deep sympathy for the protagonist of this film and the unfortunate predicament he finds himself in. It's basically the Brazil/Evolution meme played out over 2 hours. Conclusion: Race Is = Racism
SENTIMENTAL VALUE - yeah, I'm not going to watch this film. "Sisters Nora and Agnes reunite with their estranged father..." is the kind of plug that makes me want to gouge my eyes out and wander in the wilderness for eternity. "The two sisters must navigate their complicated relationship with their father — and deal with an American star dropped right into the middle of their complex family dynamics" - Argh! Conclusion: Wear A Bonnet
SINNERS - watched this picture on my home TV via HBO broken up over 2 days. It's a fun movie. Acting, cinematography, set design and music are all great high end Hollywood quality. It's the Afro-American version of "Inglorious Bastards" - a cosmic revenge fantasy that never happened but the daydream mirrors the primordial envy and nihilism of its creators. The White Devil in the film takes the form of a southern cracker progressive preaching collectivism and the Lord's Prayer. The protagonists are two brothers, "Smoke" and "Stack", who return home to open up a Speakeasy with stolen booze from the Chicago mob. If you're stupid enough to steal controlled substance from organized crime in 1930's Mississippi you will get a visit from the Klan and if you do it in 2020's you will get a visit from the Simon City Royals. Conclusion: 100 years of failure.
TRAIN DREAMS - I watched it on Netflix late at night and appreciated this meditative reflection on the life of a hermit in northern Idaho. The Mountain West of America is special territory and the people who populate it are some of the freest people on planet earth. However, the Academy’s DEI Production Rules skew this movie about a frontiersman into a Chinaman's ghost story. I think the casting director hired the same Indian who was chasing vampires in Sinners. If a black guy from Texas walked into a Lumberjack camp and shot someone in the back he would get tossed from the from the bridge same as anyone who breaks bad in a dangerous land. Conclusion: Love is the light in the darkness.
The Best Picture is "One Battle After Another" because, like "Civil War" in 2024, it is a movie made during the Biden presidency as a gloating dunk on the MAGA rubes who "lost" the 2020 (s)election and would NEVER get back into the White House to thwart the revolution. It's a glorious, self-righteous hissy fit encased in a VistaVision time capsule to be seen by future generations as a shocking example of America's 50 Years Of Failure.
* Do you remember when BHO used to do his NCAA Tournament brackets on ESPN every year? Good Times.
Comments