As the Academy Awards approach, nominations having been announced, I make the usual effort to see the Best Picture contenders, which this year include Ford v. Ferrari, The Irishman, Jojo Rabbit, Joker, Little Women, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Marriage Story, 1917 and Parasite.
Of these, I have already seen The Irishman, Joker, Little Women, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Marriage Story, and 1917. By far the best were Little Women and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and both were excellent indeed. I do not see where either Joker or 1917 deserve to be on the list.
Last Night I watched Marriage Story. For starters, this falls into a category of films that generally irritate me--films about actors playing actors occasionally overplaying their characters while glorifying the business of being actors. That said, this is indeed a well acted film which features in its costarring role Scarlett Johansson, whom I have been in love with ever since her role in the old Bill Murray film Lost in Translation. Regrettably, her appearance and, in part, her character in Marriage Story reminds me of a particularly toxic woman I had known in my past, thus undermining my sympathy. There is, as I have said, in my opinion anyway, some fairly cringeworthy overacting here (though not on Johansson's part), but that can be overlooked given the type of venue the film lies in to begin with.
Overall, however--no matter how well-acted--I found the film keenly depressing in its all-too-real presentation of the pain of divorce, and how even those who love one another at the outset end up getting churned by the gears of the process, the detached maliciousness of lawyers, the dredging up of negatives theretofore tolerated for the greater good so that those negatives may be elevated to preeminence in the interest of a positive--that is, victory in the legal sense.
I dunno. Having personally gone through these dramas three times and experienced first hand their varying degrees of unpleasantness, there seemed nothing informative or redeeming about Marriage Story--unless it was impartation of relief at having avoided a divorce quite so ugly as the one depicted here. In a certain sense, we (my wives and I) simply didn't have the money to purchase such painful contentiousness.
Of these, I have already seen The Irishman, Joker, Little Women, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Marriage Story, and 1917. By far the best were Little Women and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and both were excellent indeed. I do not see where either Joker or 1917 deserve to be on the list.
Last Night I watched Marriage Story. For starters, this falls into a category of films that generally irritate me--films about actors playing actors occasionally overplaying their characters while glorifying the business of being actors. That said, this is indeed a well acted film which features in its costarring role Scarlett Johansson, whom I have been in love with ever since her role in the old Bill Murray film Lost in Translation. Regrettably, her appearance and, in part, her character in Marriage Story reminds me of a particularly toxic woman I had known in my past, thus undermining my sympathy. There is, as I have said, in my opinion anyway, some fairly cringeworthy overacting here (though not on Johansson's part), but that can be overlooked given the type of venue the film lies in to begin with.
Overall, however--no matter how well-acted--I found the film keenly depressing in its all-too-real presentation of the pain of divorce, and how even those who love one another at the outset end up getting churned by the gears of the process, the detached maliciousness of lawyers, the dredging up of negatives theretofore tolerated for the greater good so that those negatives may be elevated to preeminence in the interest of a positive--that is, victory in the legal sense.
I dunno. Having personally gone through these dramas three times and experienced first hand their varying degrees of unpleasantness, there seemed nothing informative or redeeming about Marriage Story--unless it was impartation of relief at having avoided a divorce quite so ugly as the one depicted here. In a certain sense, we (my wives and I) simply didn't have the money to purchase such painful contentiousness.
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