What in Hell Are These Animals Doing Here?
Reviews and Comments by Ken Burke
I invite you to join me on a regular basis to see how my responses to current cinematic offerings compare to the critical establishment, which I’ll refer to as either the CCAL (Collective Critics at Large) when they’re supportive or the OCCU (Often Cranky Critics Universe) when they go negative.
Concrete Cowboy (Ricky Staub) rated R 111 min.
Opening Chatter (no spoilers): The Oscar awards ceremony slowly approaches on April 25, 2021, but in the meantime some of the various filmmaker guilds (with many significant overlaps in Academy membership) are making their own choices: the Screen Actors Guild says The Trial of the Chicago 7 (Aaron Sorkin; review in our October 22, 2020 posting) features the Outstanding Cast (their equivalent of Best Picture), Viola Davis is Lead Female Actor for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (George C. Wolfe; review in our December 31, 2020 posting), Chadwick Boseman is Lead Male actor for the same film, Yuh-Jung Youn is Supporting Female Actor for Minari (Lee Isaac Chung, 2021; review in our March 4, 2021 posting), Daniel Kaluuya is Supporting Male Actor in Judas and the Black Messiah (Shaka King, 2021; review in our February 18, 2021 posting); the Writers Guild of America says Promising Young Woman (Emerald Fennell; review in our January 28, 2021 posting) wins Original Screenplay while Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (Jason Woliner; review in our October 29, 2020 posting) wins Adapted Screenplay; the Producers Guild of America goes with Nomadland (Chloé Zhao, 2021; review in our February 25, 2021 posting) as their choice for Outstanding Motion Picture; coming soon, Directors Guild of America awards will be given out on April 10, 2021, followed by American Society of Cinematographers awards on April 18, 2021.
What I’m reviewing this week, however, won’t likely be on awards nominees’ lists next year (except maybe technical achievements for Godzilla …) but they’re both highly watchable (within limits as tastes dictate for … Kong) so check out my comments, see if you want to indulge in either of them. Concrete Cowboy’s adapted from a novel, but that book’s based on the reality of an equestrian collective in North Philadelphia trying to keep alive the almost-unknown-tradition of American Black cowboys, with this story centered on a difficult coming-of-age-tale about a stern father (Idris Elba) determined to instill some values and goals for the future into his rebellious teenage son (Caleb McLaughlin); prominent presence of some horses as well. In the Short Takes section I’ll explore the aforementioned Godzilla vs. Kong, which may not have much to offer beyond the expected battle between 2 gigantic beasts but at least delivers on that front while setting up possibilities for more from this Monsterverse. Also in that section I’ll offer suggestions for some choices on the Turner Classic Movies channel (but too much extra text for line-justified-layout like you see here [Related Links stuff at each posting’s end is similarly-ragged], at least to be done by this burned-out-BlogSpot-drone—oh, ye tedious software!) along with my allotted dose of industry-related-trivia.
Here’s the trailer for Concrete Cowboy:
(Use the full screen button in the image’s lower right to enlarge it; activate
that same button or use the “esc” keyboard key to return to normal size.)
If you can abide plot spoilers read on, but this blog’s intended for those who’ve seen the film or want to save some $. To help any of you who want to learn more details yet avoid those important plot-reveals I’ll identify any give-away sentences/sentence-clusters like this:
⇒The first and last words will be noted with arrows and red.⇐ OK, now continue on if you prefer.
What Happens: Cole’s (Caleb McLaughlin) a teenager at a Detroit high-school, in trouble with the principal for fighting, another exasperation for his mother, Amahle (Liz Priestly), a nurse, as this latest incident is part of a string of run-ins with other school officials (she’s had to transfer him more than once) and the police, so in a desperate move to pound some cooperation into the boy she packs up his belongs in a couple of large trash bags, drives him (despite ongoing objections from her angry son) to North Philadelphia, leaves him on the street in front of his stern father, Harp’s (Idris Elba), flat, then tearfully drives away. Harp’s not home that night, but next-door neighbor Nessie (Lorraine Toussaint) knows Cole from previous visits, directs him to nearby Fletcher Street where Harp hangs out with his urban cowboy friends as they keep horses in stables there, continuing the long-standing-tradition of such Black equestrians (male and female) in this city, until fairly recently, in those businesses using horse-drawn delivery wagons or tourist excursions (the group complains about how Hollywood obscures the notable history of Old West Black cowboys* [nicely countered by Ned Logan’s {Morgan Freeman} presence in the magnificent Unforgiven {Clint Eastwood, 1992}]). Cole meets up with Harp, but when they go home the kid’s horrified to find a horse, Chuck, a resident in the living room (the kitchen’s not much better, just a few beverages in the fridge); with no other choice, though, Cole sleeps on the couch (near the horse), vows to leave the next morning (with no particular plan of what to do next). While wandering the streets Cole meets up with old friend Smush (Jharrel Jerome), nominally a member of the Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club but now tooling around in a car, selling drugs, trying to make enough to escape this environment. After Nessie refuses to take Cole in (she helps a few other kids but insists this boy work things out with his father), Harp allows his son back in his home on the conditions he works at the stables, stays away from Smush (Cole accepts this day job but still sneaks off at night to ride around with his hip-buddy).
*See this article, and this one, plus this one for more info about that notable—neglected—subject.
Cole’s complete ignorance of anything equine shows up at the job when he attempts to haul horse poop out to the dump one shovelful at a time until Paris (Jamil Prattis)—wheelchair bound from being shot—shows him how to use a wheelbarrow; he also has to clean up around excitable Boo, a horse Paris named for his dead younger brother. Surprisingly, Cole finds some harmony with Boo, a rare bond for anyone to this independent animal, but continues to have tension with Harp, wants to move on, team up with Smush (who ultimately wants to buy a ranch out west), so Dad tries to explain to Son how he named him after John Coltrane, always wanted a better life for both of them although his earlier days were upended by a stint in prison which prevented his former hopes of being a cop. ⇒Complications arise: Boo gets loose, the group has trouble recapturing him until Cole calms him down; police arrive on Fletcher St. to round up all the horses, falsely claiming they’re malnourished; Cole and Smush wind up in a busted drug deal but manage to run away, then in another action gone wrong Smush is shot dead, Cole wounded so Harp attends to his son, then the whole community gathers to pay homage to Smush. Harp and Cole go to the police stables at night to break out their horses, but a friendly cop helps them scatter all the animals so it won’t be so obvious what happened (he’ll round up the others the next day, allowing the Fletcher St. ones to go home). At this point, things come to a (strangely quick and peaceful) closure (although the city’s still threatening to shut down their neighborhood stable) with the horses out on the street in front of their owners’ homes as Amahle suddenly appears in Philly to reconcile with Harp, reconnect with Cole.⇐
So What? Concrete Cowboy’s based on a novel, Ghetto Cowboy, by Greg Neri (2009), itself inspired by the actual Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club, founded in 2004 by Ellis Ferrell in North Philadelphia, which you can learn more about at their official website and through this useful article noting how they might lose the land for their stables to the city; both sources can direct you to a GoFundMe FSURC donation site to help raise money to keep this group in business, wherever they may have to locate, in case you’d like to help out. (I’m on the donor list, trying to not just “talk the talk” where this unique situation's concerned.) However, despite inspirations the actual FSURC brings to this movie’s plot and the shooting of it on location in North Philly, the story we see on screen is completely fictional, although that actuality is further smudged by the use of some actual FSURC members in the cast, mostly in background roles but a substantial presence of Prattis as Paris (as himself he gives some testimony about the FSURC as the final credits roll). I liked this movie—despite it being consistently a bit melodramatic, bringing us a few crucial conflicts that aren’t properly resolved (as best I understood what was happening here) while the whole narrative swiftly comes to an unlikely tranquil ending as if either the concept or the events (or, even more likely, the budget) just couldn’t sustain itself any further after alternately staying on point then wandering a bit for almost 2 hours with a sense of being an odd amalgamation of Boyz n the Hood (more on that in this review’s next section), Nomadland, Posse (Mario Van Peebles, 1993), and Buffalo Soldiers (Charles Haid, 1997), with no attempt (although none absolutely needed) to lighten things up with a touch of Blazing Saddles (Mel Brooks, 1994), so I can’t say this movie fully rises above the sum of its parts even as some of those parts are extremely well done; if nothing else, its hints at a history of Black riders we could all stand to know more about along with exploring more specifics about their descendants keeping the faith as best they can on the streets of North Philadelphia's neighborhoods.
(As in Boyz n the Hood's use of Ice Cube, here’s a recognizable hip-hopper, Method Man, as Leroy.)
Bottom Line Final Comments: As with Godzilla vs. Kong (reviewed below; I never did figure out how they determined top billing for that one—maybe some form of rock/paper/scissors for giant monsters but with the dragon able to trump [first time I’ve used that word in a neutral manner in years] anything the ape offers with a blast of his atomic breath), the CCAL’s also supportive overall for Concrete Cowboy, the Rotten Tomatoes reviewers giving it 77% positive responses while the folks at Metacritic are their usual more-restrained-selves with a 67% average score. There’s a useful story here, bringing attention to a unique equestrian organization that, unless you were previously aware of it, would likely seem like the most imaginative kind of fiction—especially the horse, Chuck, abiding in Harp’s apartment, although I have to assume that aspect of this oddball-story's the result of creative license—along with the bounty of very-well-acted-interpersonal-scenes between Harp and Cole anchoring it all (however, we also get impactful-screen-time from Nessie [Toussaint’s had nice recognition previously as part of the SAG 2015 award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series for Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black along with many other wins and nominations] and Paris [an actual member of the FSURC, making his acting debut here; you can get more about him in the second item connected to this movie in our Related Links way down below]).
Yet, I must admit the whole experience does come off as easily predictable at times along with a seeming-too-close-for-coincidence-plot compared to the notably-better Boyz n the Hood (John Singleton, 1991) where another kid, Trey Styles (Desi Arnez Hines II), continues to cause more social turmoil than Mom Reva (Angela Bassett) cares to keep patching up so he’s sent to live with his no-nonsense-father, Furious Styles (Laurence Fishburne), where the boy grows into teenhood (Cuba Gooding Jr.), becoming a more aware, productive person as he comes to better understand the causes of racial injustice threatening the stability of his community. Of course, there are major differences between these 2 stories with Cole relocated all the way from Detroit to Philadelphia whereas Trey journeyed only from a more-stable-L.A.-neighborhood to crime-troubled-South Central where cruising in cars replaces riding horses but death in Boyz ... can come from a quick pistol shot while Cole’s troubles are more emotional than physical. None of this is intended to dissuade you—as long as you have a Netflix streaming account—from seeing Concrete Cowboy (just being honest about some minor flaws), especially with another chance to enjoy the powerful presence of Idris Elba (Caleb McLaughlin’s no slouch either as Cole must navigate the difficult choices facing him), even if the peaceful ending seems a little contrived given all the plot tensions we’ve seen previously built up.
(The selection of photos I had to work with here was quite limited, as you can probably tell by now.)
As I wind down my commentary on Concrete Cowboy I’ll turn to my standard-closure-tactic of a Musical Metaphor to speak once more to what’s been presented previously, although now from an enhanced-aural rather than a drier-verbal perspective. Ironically, the song I’ve chosen to go with this movie, Gordon Lightfoot’s “Sit Down Young Stranger” (from his 1970 If You Could Read My Mind album, originally released under the title of my chosen song until this other cut on the album became a hit, leading to the record's re-naming) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiqILSkr8l8 is kind of a haunting melody for me. The intriguing aspect of "... Young Stranger" is, as with other snippets of songs occasionally drifting into my just-above-subconsciousness, I’d been singing the last lines of this song recently but not remembering where they came from; then, as I pondered something to speak to this movie I had a flash of Lightfoot’s tune by name and a little bit about its opening lyrics so when I looked it up I was surprised to find “… Young Stranger” was what I’d been vaguely singing lately. Certainly, there are variances from song to movie narrative here but the opening bit—“Sit down, young stranger and tell us who you are […] And will you gather daydreams Or will you gather wealth? How can you find your fortune When you cannot find yourself?”—easily reminded me of Harp and Cole. Then as the song goes on it opens up larger challenges of generational-gaps* than those explored in … Cowboy (brought together in the lines “If Jesus had a reason I’m sure he would not tell They treated him so badly How could he wish them well?”) but then comes back home to Cole with “The answer’s in the forest Carved upon a tree ‘John loves Mary’ Does anyone love me?” By the end of this movie, though, Cole knows who loves him and if he fits into his new community, an assurance all of us seek, hopefully to find a positive answer even in these darkest of uncertain times.
*However, much as I love/respect this Lightfoot song (helped me somewhat during my own troubled times moving from undergrad to grad-student status back in 1970), I’ll offer another comparison to something along the same lines but even more intense (just as I do with Concrete … and Boyz …) in its dialogue of father and son, "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" (on the 1963 album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan). They're all appropriate/valid, though some songs/cinema-works achieve higher results.
SHORT TAKES (spoilers also appear here)
Our favorite giant monsters are back, but this time instead of aiding humans threatened by other enormous beasts in this emerging series from Legendary Pictures our protectors are fighting each other over world-dominance even as a rich industrialist hopes to unleash a mechanical version of Godzilla on these Titans as a means to get humanity back in control of our always-challenged planet.
Here’s the trailer:
Before reading further, please refer to the plot spoilers warning detailed far above.
Coronavirus pandemic be damned, it was clear for months before the March 31, 2021 release of this monster movie of enormous proportions (each combatant near 400 feet; production budget maybe $200 million) it would be a box-office blockbuster, which it is at $285.4 million worldwide in just over a week making it already #3 worldwide for 2021 (behind Chinese movies Hi, Mom [Ling Jia; $821.4 million], Detective Chinatown 3 [Sicheng Chen; $686.3 million]) as well as #2 domestically (U.S.-Canada) with $48.5 million (behind the animated The Croods: A New Age [Joel Crawford] at $56.3 million, even though that one opened Nov. 25, 2020). Being in 3,064 domestic theaters—the most since operating restrictions hit all our American moviehouses—also helped Godzilla … in its magnificent start (as did a 5-day-opening compared to usual 3-day-weekend-tallies, plus whatever its viewership is on the parallel [but unreported] videoscreens served by HBO Max). So, if it’s such a big deal, why do I consign it to Short Takes? Mainly because this theater-owners-lifesaver is a big, noisy dose of escapism but doesn’t do much else content-wise except pit 2 well-known-behemoths in battle scenes (and corresponding destruction of much of Hong Kong [maybe that’s why it’s done so well in China—$69.2 million]), showing off the wizardry of contemporary computer-generated-images but really not providing a lot else of intriguing interest, a frequent characteristic of this “Creature Feature” subgenre of Fantasy movies where at least a bit of character depth and probing of emotions beyond blind fear of a rampaging beast can be found in some aspects of the Marvel, Justice League, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, etc. larger-genre-realm’s “universes” while in this Monsterverse from Warner Brothers and Legendary Pictures it’s just extravagance as diversion from the cruel realities that face us when the lights go back up (not a bad thing to have such alternatives, just nothing in the art-zone of cinematic excellence here except for the image-creation-methodology).
You don’t have to be aware of any of the huge string of Godzilla tales from Japan’s Toho Co. dating back to 1954—especially the previous battle (on the right in the above photo) of these 2 creatures in King Kong vs. Godzilla ( Ishirō Honda, 1962)—nor the previous renditions of King Kong starting at RKO in 1933 because this latest version of the Titans’ clash has a mostly-different background based on Godzilla (Gareth Edwards, 2014; review in our May 15, 2014 posting [contains a size comparison of this thunder lizard’s growing height up to that point* but has atrocious layout; my apologies]), Kong: Skull Island (Jordan Vogt-Roberts, 2017: review in our March 16, 2017 posting), and Godzilla: King of the Monsters (Michael Doughhery, 2019; review in our June 6, 2019 posting).
*Along that line here's a video (10:55) showing an animated size comparison of all the enormous creatures from the Monsterverse movies and graphic novels featuring Godzilla or Kong, with brief notations of how these 2 keep growing over time (alluded to in these movies to help keep us oriented in these "criticial" matters): Godzilla because of nuclear radiation, Kong as an aspect of his species.
(Photo options weren’t great here either; the best available despite repetition from just above.)
Because of the long-promoted-lead-up to Godzilla vs. Kong (resulting in long-awaited-responses by many viewers who’ve already rushed out to see this battle) you’ve likely gotten a sense of the plot by now so I’ll be brief. After saving humanity from other Titan beasts from Hollow Earth (where, oddly enough, there’s sunlight, water, and foliage—Fantasy, remember? [more about such issues in a Related Links video far below connected to this movie]) at the core of our planet, Godzilla suddenly decimates Florida’s Apex Cybernetics, leaving grim CEO Walter Simmons (Demián Bichir) vowing revenge, recruiting Dr. Nathan Lind (Alexander Skarsgård) to lead an expedition underground to find the source of these Titans’ power; Lind goes to Skull Island, gets Titan Kong, chains him to a huge ship bound for a Hollow Earth portal in Antarctica (they communicate with him via a little deaf girl, Jia [Kaylee Hottle], who’s taught the ape sign language) but Godzilla, aware of any Titan threat to his dominance, attacks. Kong rips off his chains, the beasts battle* with Kong taking the worst of it so Godzilla leaves after which Kong’s hauled the rest of the way by helicopters, goes into Hollow Earth with a crew of humans following, finds the ancient power source and a huge battle ax. Meanwhile (major subplot) 3 more-comical-humans go far below the Apex ruins, find a speedy transport to Hong Kong, discover Simmons has constructed a huge robot, Mechagodzilla, to be powered by energy from Hollow Earth to destroy the Titans, but this mecha-presence brings Godzilla to Hong Kong also.
⇒Using the subterranean power source, Simmons activates the robot while Godzilla uses his atomic breath to dig a hole way down to where Kong is (?) so the massive ape can quickly come back to the surface. While Mechagodzilla temporarily defeats both Titans individually, they awaken, team up (the little girl helps), Kong uses his ax to demolish the robot, Godzilla swims away, Kong goes down under to rule Hollow Earth.⇐ I have no idea where else the Monsterverse may be headed after this story, although I’m sure it’s been a profitable-enough-venture to keep coming back. The CCAL’s reasonably supportive of this present installment—RT 75% positive reviews, MC 60% average score—so if you’ve got access to HBO Max it’s waiting for you, although Variety’s Peter Debruge says you should head out to a theater for the bigger-screen-experience. In the meantime, here’s my cheesy-fun-Musical Metaphor (to match this movie’s overall feel), “Gonna Fly Now,” theme song from Rocky (John G. Avildsen, 1976) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MR6FXpaEC Y8 in honor of Kong standing up to more-powerful-beings yet still finding his way to survive/triumph.
*Wingard offers us some analysis (3:37) of this scene (many scene-analyses of other movies follow if you want to indulge yourself for awhile); also a bit more from Wingard here if you'd be interested.
Suggestions for TCM cablecasts
At least until the pandemic subsides Two Guys also want to encourage you to consider movies you might be interested in that don’t require subscriptions to Netflix, Amazon Prime, similar Internet platforms (we may well be stuck inside for longer than those 30-day-free-initial-offers), or premium-tier-cable-TV-fees. While there are a good number of video networks offering movies of various sorts (mostly broken up by commercials), one dependable source of fine cinematic programming is Turner Classic Movies (available in lots of basic-cable-packages) so I’ll be offering suggestions of possible choices for you running from Thursday afternoon of the current week (I usually get this blog posted by early Thursday mornings) on through Thursday morning of the following week. All times are for U.S. Pacific zone so if you see something of interest please verify actual show time in your area for the day listed. These recommendations are my particular favorites (no matter when they’re on, although some of those early-day-ones might need to be recorded, watched later), but there’s considerably more to pick from you might like even better; feel free to explore their entire schedule here. You can also click the down arrow at the right of each listing for additional, useful info.
I’ll bet if you checked that entire schedule link just above you’d find other options of interest, but these are the only ones grabbing my attention at present. Please dig in further for other possibilities.
(Apparently TMC is running their selections in alphabetical order this week.)
Friday April 9, 2021
2:45 PM The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (Ellis Miller, 1968) Main reason I’m including this film is I have a vague—but very positive—memory of this film while, coincidentally, I’m in the slow process (days just go by so quickly for some reason, I get little done of the book each night) of reading the Carson McCullers novel (1940) from which it was adapted. Deaf-mute John Singer (Alan Arkin) is the main character of the film (the novel divides its time among various others, but as best I remember the Singer character’s the focus of the film, confirming for me back then Arkin’s mastery as an actor).
Monday April 12, 2021
2:00 AM Interiors (Woody Allen, 1978) If you’re not totally disgusted at me recommending an Allen film after ongoing allegations against him, this is 1 of his best in the realm of pure drama, patterned after the work of Ingmar Bergman, whom he highly respected. There’s a lot of serious intra-familial-drama here among parents (E. G. Marshall, Geraldine Page) and daughters (Diane Keaton, Kristin Griffith, Mary Beth Hurt) with Sam Waterston, Maureen Stapleton there as well; several Oscar noms.
7:30 AM It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, 1934) Hailed, sometimes as origin of screwball comedy, as a desperate-reporter (Clark Gable) chases a big story when an heiress (Claudette Colbert) elopes (Dad’s mad), then disappears until Gable encounters her. 1 of 3 (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest [1975], The Silence of the Lambs [1991]) ever to win the top 5 Oscars: Best Picture, Director, Actor (Gable), Actress (Colbert), and Screenplay, Adapted in this case (Robert Riskin).
Tuesday April 13, 2021
3:00 PM Key Largo (John Huston, 1948) Here’s another crucial gangster story, more in the film noir realm as exiled gangster Johnny Rocco (Edward G. Robinson, alluding to his earlier Rico role in Little Caesar [1931]) is smuggled back into the country during a Florida hurricane where he and his gang take hotel occupants Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Lionel Barrymore hostage. Claire Trevor as Rocco’s desperate-for-a-drink-moll, Gaye Dawn, won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar.
Wednesday April 14, 2021
11:00 AM La Strada (Federico Fellini, 1954) Cinema masterpiece, shows Fellini’s roots in Neorealism as he moves toward the realm of Lyrical Realism (before his full shift into Modernism). Story of a brutish strongman circus performer (Anthony Quinn) who buys a woman (Giulietta Masina) from a poor family to be his assistant, treats her badly, is violent toward a tightrope walker (Richard Basehart) who tries to befriend her. Superb acting. Won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.
8:45 PM The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971) (I guess TCM alphabetizes differently.) Maybe it’s because this film reminds me of my more nostalgic aspects of years in Texas, but I think it’s a marvelous adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s semi-autobiographical novel of growing up in an early 1950s version of the Lone Star State (filmed in Archer City, standing in for fictional Anarene) about interactions among strong characters played by Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, Ellen Burstyn, Ben Johnson, Cloris Leachman, Cybil Shepherd; Johnson and Leachman won Supporting Acting Oscars.
If you’d like your own PDF of ratings/summaries of this week's reviews, suggestions for TCM cablecasts, links to Two Guys info click this link to access then save, print, or whatever you need.
Other Cinema-Related Stuff: (1) April additions on Netflix: (2) April additions on Amazon Prime; (3) April additions on Hulu; (4) April additions on Disney+; (5) April additions on HBO/HBO Max. As usual for now I’ll close out this section with Joni Mitchell’s "Big Yellow Taxi" (from her 1970 Ladies of the Canyon album)—because “You don’t know what you’ve got ‘till it’s gone”—and a reminder that you can search streaming/rental/purchase movie options at JustWatch.
Related Links Which You Might Find Interesting:
We encourage you to visit the Summary of Two Guys Reviews for our past posts.* Overall notations for this blog—including Internet formatting craziness beyond our control—may be found at our Two Guys in the Dark homepage. If you’d like to Like us on Facebook please visit our Facebook page. We appreciate your support whenever and however you can offer it!
*Please ignore previous warnings about a “dead link” to our Summary page because the problems’ been manually fixed so that all postings since July 11, 2013 now have the proper functioning link.
AND … at least until the Oscars for 2020’s releases have been awarded on Sunday, April 25, 2021 we’re also going to include reminders in each posting of very informative links where you can get updated tallies of which films have been nominated for and/or received various awards and which ones made various individual critic’s Top 10 lists. You may find the diversity among the various awards competitions and the various critics hard to reconcile at times—not to mention the often-significant-gap between critics’ choices and competitive-award-winners (which pales when they’re compared to the even-more-noticeable-gap between specific award winners and big box-office-grosses you might want to monitor here as well as here due to many 2020 releases being tracked on the 2021 list, although the income situation for 2020’s skewed due to so many award-contenders getting limited or no theatrical releases)—but as that less-than-enthusiastic-patron-of-the-arts, Plato, noted in The Symposium (385-380 BC)—roughly translated, depending on how accurate you wish the actual quote to be—“Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder,” so your choices for success are as valid as any of these others, especially if you offer some rationale for your decisions (unlike many of the awards voters who simply fill out ballots, sometimes—damn it!—for films they’ve never seen).
To save you a little time scrolling through the “various awards” list above, here are the current Golden Globes nominees and winners for films and TV from 2020-early 2021
along with the Oscar nominees for 2020-early 2021 films.
Here’s more information about Concrete Cowboy:
https://www.netflix.com/title/81368729
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upVUkd9EIno (15:47 interview with director Ricky Staub
and actors Idris Elba, Caleb McLaughlin, Jamil “Mils Washington” Prattis—the latter an actor
[Paris] in the film and an actual member of the Fletcher Street Stables)
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/concrete_cowboy
https://www.metacritic.com/movie/concrete-cowboy
Here’s more information about Godzilla vs. Kong:
https://www.godzillavskong.com (click the little box in the upper left for more info)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pzz9RafYn3o (4:36 on small details you may have missed while watching the movie; Spoilers abound, of course) and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0YJJJtFIJ4 (6:11 ignored plot holes in the movie)
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/godzilla_vs_kong
https://www.metacritic.com/movie/godzilla-vs-kong
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If you’d rather contact Ken directly rather than leaving a comment here please use my email address of kenburke409@gmail.com—type it directly if the link doesn’t work. (But if you truly have too much time on your hands you might want to explore some even-longer-and-more-obtuse-than-my-film-reviews-academic-articles about various cinematic topics at my website, https://kenburke.academia.edu, which could really give you something to talk to me about.)
If we did talk, though, you’d easily see how my early-70s-age informs my references, Musical Metaphors, etc. in these reviews because I’m clearly a guy of the later 20th century, not so much the contemporary world. I’ve come to accept my ongoing situation, though, realizing we all (if fate allows) keep getting older, we just have to embrace it, as Joni Mitchell did so well in "The Circle Game," offering sage advice even when she was quite young herself.
By the way, if you’re ever at The Hotel California knock on my door—but you know what the check-out policy is so be prepared to stay for awhile (quite an eternal while, in fact). Ken
P.S. Just to show that I haven’t fully flushed Texas out of my system here’s an alternative destination for you, Home in a Texas Bar, with Gary P. Nunn and Jerry Jeff Walker. But wherever the rest of my body may be my heart’s always with my longtime-companion, lover, and wife, Nina Kindblad, so here’s our favorite shared song—Neil Young’s "Harvest Moon"
—from the performance we saw at the Desert Trip concerts in Indio, CA on October 15, 2016 (as a full moon was rising over the stadium) because “I’m still in love with you,” my dearest, a never-changing-reality even as the moon waxes and wanes over the months/years to come.
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