(HI! Welcome to Caterpillar Steps, a newsletter by the writer and photographer Corbin Smith. The other night, I was talking to Nanpei at a bar and I said I want to write a blog post but I don’t know what about, and he said hey, what don’t you write about the Oscar nominations and I said oh shit that’s a convenient format, thanks Nic. Now I didn’t see some of these movies but that will NOT determine if I will write something critical about them anyways. Is this unfair? Sure but not as unfair as Hollywood Directors having so much and Corbin Smith having so little. I doubt I will employ subscriptions here, but if you like the newsletter and want to buy me a treat, you can feel free to deposit some cheddar in my Venmo account, @BigCorbs. Also please share with anyone you think might enjoy it.)
BELFAST
Absolutely fucking not. I refuse to see a movie about Ireland During The Troubles where Heroic Republicans aren’t doing righteous violence to Imperialist crownfuckers who seek to retake the whole island as a way of recapturing the glory of their hideous colonial past. 32 Counties. Only movie about Belfast I need, right here buddy:
Also, Judy Dench sucks. Laziest actor going by a mile. Act dignified and have a British accent and you become a fucking treature. Wack.
CODA
I didn’t see CODA because no one told me it was good before it left theaters. I will say this though: it’s kind of incredible that, for the second time in the last 20 years, we are looking at a possible split card where a superlative movie about a gay cowboy featuring a haunting masterwork of a performance at its center, craftedby one of the world’s preeminent film artists, wins Best Director and loses Best Picture to a movie whose name starts with “C.”
DON’T LOOK UP
I feel like everyone I know who saw this turn only watched it because they knew they would hate it, and then they did. I simply do not hate myself enough to watch a two and a half hour comedy polemic about climate chan… ahahaha just kidding it’s about how sucky the dang media is! The media. That’s why the only people who liked this movie were mainline political writers who needed something to fill a 900 word column. (Monumentally hypocritical, Corbin)
Watching Sirota during this process has been a psychodrama the likes of which online rarely graces us. He is just so sincere about how important his dumb movie where his loser whinging about the media is transmuted into a bad comedy. Really, man? You CRIED because your friend said “David seems like he’s doing good” on Facebook? At some point he said “People are saying this is the best climate change movie ever made,” which is true, but only because Don’t Look Up is the only movie political media people have ever seen because they are incapable of consuming anything that isn’t about themselves.
Check out First Reformed for the actual best movie about climate change. Who can know the mind of God?
DIVE ME CAR
I didn’t see Drive My Car because no one told me it was good before it left theaters, and if I’m watching a three hour movie not in the theater, I am going to watch one of the many three hour movies I have been meaning to watch for a long time. A Bright Summer’s Day, Red Beard, Andrei Rubelev, Barry Lyndon, The Godfather Part II, Short Cuts, It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World: Drive My Car should honestly be honored to join this list of extremely long movies I have meant to watch for a while now.
DUNE
It’s fucking sick. So sick that I read the book because I wanted to know more about Arrakis, the desert planet with the spice. That book absolutely rips. Good, functional prose, wild ass world building top to bottom, a ton of writing about fake ecology. What else could you want?
After I saw Dune I rewatched Arrival, Villenuve’s other shit hot sci-fi banger, which is a stone masterpiece. But my viewing did a disservice to Dune because it has music by Jóhann Jóhannsson, Villenuve’s collaborator until JJ’s death in 2018, and that snakey, subtle, expressive, truly alien music makes everything about that movie hit so much harder. Dune, on the other hand, employed the services of Hans Zimmer, who unleashed some of the great BWOMS in between serving the movie exactly how you would assume he would and adding nothing novel to the proceedings whatsoever. Dune is a great movie with default sci-fi music and it’s a huge bummer that’s how it turned out. He will probably win best score just to irritate me. (I will be at a Guided By Voices concert so I will not see this happen.)
KING RICHARD
I missed a lot of Oscar movies this year. Why am I writing this, again?
I almost don’t want to write anything about King Richard because I want to critique the premise of the thing without seeing it which isn’t really fair but no one is paying me for this so I will indulge in as much bad faith as I want, I guess.
I was talking to a friend about Ted Lasso recently. I said I liked a lot of stuff about the show (Sudekis and Golstein and Juno Temple are really swell!) but as a sportswriter who has a better-than-average idea of what the culture of professional sports are like, I had trouble swallowing the big fucking lie at the center of the show, which is that professional sports are a space where WARMPTH can reign, as long as you just give it a chance.
This is horseshit, of course: Roy Kent and Jamie Tart are kind of realistic depictions of athlete dysfunction, but the idea that ONE Positive Coaching Alliance guy is all it takes to cure these dudes of their biggest problems and bring everyone into the beautiful light of learning to love yourself and other is really just nonsensical. High pressure environments like pro sports breed weirdos and lunatics, and keeping the ship together is more often a matter of subtle manipulation than hugging and learning. It’s a show about a good youth coach succeeding in the pros, which is… kind of dumb.
I say this because King Richard’s depiction of a SportsSuperDad as a low key saint doing his best is… well, man, I just don’t really think society needs to extol that particular form of Coach/Parenting even if it worked well enough THIS TIME that his daughters were in a position to produce a hagiography to him. What I’m saying is that I think what the world actually needs is a biopic about Earl Woods, a harrowing cautionary tale about the price of excellence and the dysfunction and madness that went into creating the greatest golf swing of all time.
LICORICE PIZZA:
Every American guy out there who gets beyond the Tarantine Stage of enjoying the cinema has an entirely unhealthy relationship to Paul Thomas Anderson, a reverence bordering on religiosity and I am no expectation. Licorice Pizza is another banger, like they all are, though I can safely say I liked his previous two pictures a little more. The biggest Oscar Snub this year is Bradley Cooper in this movie. LP is great, but the half hour where he is in the movie is the greatest half hour of a movie in human history. Hollywood is just scared of Jon Peters. Cowards.
NIGHTMARE ALLEY
Why didn’t I see this? I swear I tried really hard. I kept saying yeah I’ll go tonight it’s playing at the theater near my house and then not going. It was sick. I’m a sick person.
THE POWER OF THE DOG
Best movie I saw last year. When that floaty last 45 minutes snaps togethers when Plemmons says “Phil Was usually so careful,” that’s the fucking shit hottest moment you could engineer in a movie, a pure revelation that makes the whole thing work even after I had some doubts in the span of like two seconds. I think I audibly gasped in the theater. It was like a magic trick.
I also like that there is finally a movie about how being a true Chad means that you cherish and protect your sainted mother. When Phil chews out his parents for no good reason, that is when you see that he is actually a little blue blood boy chasing fulfillment through this wack Bronco Henry performance, and Peter is a hardened frontier creature who protects the herd and sees the truth of nature. King shit. Shoutout to Peter, the all-time cinema pimp.
WEST SIDE STORY
I haven't seen the original, which is highly regarded by my kind (Musical dweebs) so I skipped it. I’ll catch up someday. I’m tired of writing now post over.