{"id":3886,"date":"2025-02-03T12:28:56","date_gmt":"2025-02-03T12:28:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/?p=3886"},"modified":"2025-07-27T19:56:52","modified_gmt":"2025-07-27T18:56:52","slug":"nickel-boys-and-saturday-night","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/2025\/02\/03\/nickel-boys-and-saturday-night\/","title":{"rendered":"Oscars 2025: Nickel Boys and Saturday Night"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nickel Boys<\/strong> is the first drama film from experimental documentarian RaMell Ross and it takes a grim story (from the novel by Colson Whitehead) and presents it in a very striking way which doesn\u2019t always help. This is a very choppy, piecemeal film, in which short scenes end with hard cuts and material from other sources (and sometimes timeframes) is cut in unexpectedly. This I could have coped with, although some of the metaphors from the Apollo 8 mission and the Martin Luther King marches was a bit heavy-handed for my taste.<\/p>\n

What I had a harder time with was the decision to shoot almost everything first person. Ross is smart enough not to be wedded to this technique, but he doesn\u2019t stray from it often, and the idea presumably is to place us directly in the shoes of the main protagonist Elwood. We look out through his eyes and see the world that he sees. But drama is watching one person changed by another, and if we can\u2019t see our protagonist\u2019s face, we have to guess how he might be reacting. Near the middle of the film, Elwood\u2019s friend Turner is also given the power of the point-of-view shot which means we can finally cut between two people having a conversation \u2013 but these conversations tend not to be the crucial ones, so we\u2019re still stuck with only half the story.<\/p>\n

In a second strand, taking place years after the boys\u2019 incarceration, adult Elwood is shot over his own shoulder, so again we can\u2019t see his face but now it\u2019s harder to frame shots so that we can see who he\u2019s talking to. A bit life Alfred Hitchcock\u2019s Rope<\/em>, this struck me as an interesting formal experiment, but ultimately one which didn\u2019t have the effect of immersing me more fully in the story \u2013 in fact just the opposite, it held me at a distance. That\u2019s a shame as there\u2019s much to appreciate here. This isn\u2019t a true story, but it was inspired by ghastly places like the Dozier School which deserve to be exposed, and the Jim Crow era is a horrendous stain on American history, which some Americans seem only too happy to forget about.<\/p>\n

I do have a nasty suspicion that the camerawork is designed at least in part to facilitate a final rug-pull which struck me as confusing and unlikely. Other people have found more thematic resonance in this, and maybe if I watched it again, knowing what was coming, I\u2019d see that too, but I was too busy trying to work out the crossword puzzle which the film had set me to be truly moved or to appreciate the themes. There\u2019s great work here from Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson and especially Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, but I didn\u2019t get as much out of this as I expected or wanted to. I seem to be in the minority, though, so the failing may well be mine.<\/p>\n

Saturday Night<\/strong>, Jason Reitman\u2019s account of the final ninety minutes before the first episode of \u201cNBC\u2019s Saturday Night\u201d went on the air is a work of obvious artifice, but it\u2019s greatly to Reitman and co-writer Gil Kenan\u2019s credit that most of the backstory about events taking place outside of this very narrow window goes down very easily. There\u2019s even a nice visual metaphor in one of the aspects of the show which I\u2019d be prepared to bet never happened. This succeeds very nicely in making a somewhat trivial event seem of momentous importance, and the cast is having an absolute ball, anchored by Gabrielle LaBelle as the earnest, almost unflappable Lorne Michaels \u2013 but shout outs too to Tommy Dewey as Michael O\u2019Donoghue, Matthew Rhys unrecognisable as George Carlin, Nicholas Braun in a remarkable dual role and most deliciously of all JK Simmons as a revoltingly vulgar evocation of Milton Berle. Good fun and buoyed by an appropriately demented score from Jon Batiste.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nickel Boys is the first drama film from experimental documentarian RaMell Ross and it takes a grim story (from the novel by Colson Whitehead) and presents it in a very striking way which doesn\u2019t always help. This is a very choppy, piecemeal film, in which short scenes end with hard cuts and material from other […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[25],"tags":[12,13,19],"class_list":["post-3886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-the-cinema","tag-movies","tag-oscars","tag-reviews"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5JY5l-10G","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3886"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3886\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4005,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3886\/revisions\/4005"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}