The nice thing about unique and distinctive voices (or those voices that you know, from general hubbub, must be unique and distinctive), across mediums and across genres, is that when you finally get around to experiencing them, they very rarely are anything like you assumed.
The 2018 Oscar ceremony is nearly upon us, bringing to a close the annual tradition known in cinephile circles as “The Grouchy Season”!
In past years, I’ve grouched along, with alternative nominations for every category (either from the previous year’s releases or from the Nicolas Cage canon, as appropriate).
It’s an assumption, an article of faith, but it always bears repeating: every best-of list is a subjective snapshot, bound by what we could or would see, the genres to which we gravitate, the last-minute audibles called because we simply can’t bear to leave out a title.
Since its founding in 1984, the aptly-named Oddball Films has constituted one of the stranger spaces in the cinema world. An archive as interested in orphan home video, Italian psychedelic cartoons from the 60s, and instructional bumpers about hygiene intended for American classrooms as any neorealist classic or lost masterpiece, it was the brainchild of Stephen Parr, who passed away on October 24th.
At a pivotal moment in Jordan Peele’s unbelievably assured horror debut Get Out, something snaps in one of the characters, and he delivers the title’s imperative with wide-eyed urgency to our protagonist Chris (Daniel Kaluuya). “GET. OUT.”
It’s an appropriately self-referential moment for a film that knows exactly what it is doing.