Rental Family seems to have dimmed after its reception on the festival circuit. But all it took was a screening at the Middleburg fest with writer/director Hikari in attendance to show some support among attendees, and the film tied with Hamnet for the audience award.
For some perspective, last year, Conclave and September 5 tied. It seems strange that there was a tie two years in a row, eh? I’m not sure how they count it, but that’s how it has turned out.
Middleburg is among those film festivals that I count in the Oscar publicity category, like Palm Springs, Savannah, and Santa Barbara. As opposed to festivals that are more about screening new films for potential buyer,s like Cannes and Toronto. Telluride sits somewhere in the middle, though it probably leans more toward the publicity side of things now.
At any rate, Middleburg has some prominence because notable Oscar bloggers are invited to attend and intermingle with “the talent.” Because Hikari was in attendance, it is a little harder to judge whether the film itself wowed the crowd or participants were just happy to meet and hang out with Hikari.
That meant two films by Asian women tied at Middleburg. Hikari (Mitsuyo Miyazaki) is Japanese, born in Osaka, and Chloé Zhao is Chinese, born in Beijing. Kind of interesting, that.
What does this mean for Rental Family? I don’t know, but if it goes anywhere, it will be entirely due to Hikari, so the more she mingles amongst voters, the better the film will do. It does have a 95% on Rotten Tomatoes so perhaps its story is not yet fully told.
The Critics’ Choice begins its passionate love affair with One Battle After Another by awarding some of its cast members the ensemble award for the 8th Annual Critics’ Choice Celebration of Black Cinema & Television. To put it mildly, I imagine the film will also do well with the Critics’ Choice awards.
It’s quite possible that the One Battle train is moving too fast to slow down and it’s about to dominate awards season and the Oscar race. It certainly feels that way. It would be not just an expression of love for PTA who is overdue but also a rallying cry for the #resistance (cough cough ruling class cough cough). Here the cast was at the Academy.
Note how they sit, by the way, with the men man spreading and the women with their legs crossed. Men need the breathing room to keep the family jewels cooled, and women need the protection. I thought it was funny anyway.
Here they were at SAG/AFTRA, though they had varying degrees of leg crossing and sitting positions. Not that it matters, but in fairness.
There is no question that, at this moment in time, this movie has the wind at its back. There is a good chance they don’t care about the box office because the film gives them what they desire in other ways. In fact, they are mostly cut off from the economics of it entirely because that is what the industry is now and why streaming sites like Netflix are likely to survive. They don’t need box office numbers to justify their place.
The other thing One Battle has going for it is that the Right has attacked the movie by calling it out for what it is. That has led to a defensive reaction from Variety and likely Hollywood. Since they hate the Right, whatever the Right hates, they will love. So those attacks will only help the movie. Because it is well-intentioned and it sends exactly the right message, people are protective of it.
I would be remiss if I did not include this hilarious review from The Spectator — I include it because it’s refreshing to read writing like this which only exists on the non-Left, sadly:
One Battle After Another may be the worst movie ever made. Not in the petty and obvious way of a normal bad movie, though. It is a grand, multifaceted masterpiece of badness. It is dramatically bad, morally bad, historically bad and even erotically bad. And to cram in all this badness, it is an hour too long. But you won’t be bored – it is even entertainingly bad. This film is so bad that most people will think it is good, and it will probably make a lot of money. Proving only that America is the kingdom of Cain. But we knew that.
And:
Fundamentally, One Battle is a religious film. It is entirely set in the fantasy landscape of the great American religion, progressivism, the 20th-century evolution of our ancient Puritan tradition. If you are a true believer, imagine watching Battlefield Earth without being a Scientologist. For non-progressives, One Battle may be necessary viewing. It displays the interior landscape of the narcissistic narrative of our world’s dominant cult of power. We seldom get to strap a GoPro to the inside of a lib’s forehead.
And:
Even by the 1980s, though, all this homegrown terrorism was in the past. One Battle is a fantasyland where the 1930s and 1960s are still alive in the 1990s and the 2000s. And in the 2000s, they are even still the 1930s. Reality has voted differently. Yes, there is real-world 21st-century leftist violence. I estimate that this movie will probably inspire between one and ten murders – maybe even my own. Stuff happens. But the leftist murderers of the 21st century are all lone nuts. They are actually just like the rightist murderers, except that their murderous ideas come from Whole Foods, not the dark web. At most, they might have a few equally deranged accessories on a Discord server. They are as likely to form a new revolutionary state as Jacob Chansley, the QAnon Shaman. Horseshoe theory as murderous farce. Again: America is the kingdom of Cain.
And:
So this film is out there – recruiting damaged people by presenting them as romantic heroes in a propaganda fantasy. Few will kill. But many will clap. When bad movies succeed, as One Battle will, they diagnose something bad in the audiences they entertain. Corrupt art is the pathognomonic mark of a corrupt society. Shitty people will watch this shitty film, and love it. Shitty journalists have already given it a standing ovation – the politics makes them hard, like Lockjaw. This evil is at the very heart of our culture.
As Leonard Cohen noted: “I have seen the future, brother. It is murder.” Murder is as old as Cain. The anonymous internet is young. Nobody asked for the combination. But they’ll get it.
Good stuff. You want to defeat AI, learn to write like that.
We still have time and movies left, so this isn’t the end of the Best Picture race. I’m still wondering about Hamnet and how that will play as the months wear on. If every Oscar year tells a story and this is the year Hollywood has reached new levels of insanity, beyond any imagining, where Trump is concerned, One Battle would surely best reflect that fury.
I remain skeptical that Rotten Tomatoes’ audience score has stayed stubbornly at 85 and hasn’t budged. It would seem logical that it would be review-bombed, and RT might do something to prevent that from happening. It just doesn’t seem accurate when you read the audience reviews themselves, but who knows.
I would have predicted the audience score to be around 70%. Either way, Sinners beats the film with that, and probably every other movie that will come out this year.
At Gold Derby, they’ve gone all in on One Battle After Another — with a few holdouts choosing other films, like Hamnet and Sinners.
We’ll be discussing this more on our podcast in a couple of hours. Stay tuned.
