timgowen.com

This is a film that takes a Pixar-style narrative and puts a cheeky and irreverent spin on it. Plus it’s on Netflix. The story is about a phone-based AI which turns against humanity, and the line “It's almost like stealing people’s data and giving it to a hyper-intelligent AI as part of an unregulated tech monopoly was a bad thing” just shows who is in the firing line here. But the Mitchells though. A nuclear family who’s chaotic and tempestuous, and they think they’re the only dysfunctional ones, and that everyone else has it together. The focus is teenage film-maker Katie ( Abbi Jacobsen ) who is particularly embarrassed by her family, except perhaps her brother. Her father Danny ( Rick Mitchell ) struggles to connect with her and he makes things ‘worse’ by planning her trip to college for the first time as a family affair—much to her annoyance. It all takes a turn for the better after things get worse. A tech billionaire who has developed PAL (the voice of Olivia Coleman ) ha...

  The days of frothy Oscar-winning films are apparently gone. The Moonlight win was bungled and seemed like an over-correction in the first place. But Parasite was an incredible win too. Frothy, fun films like Shakespeare In Love with stunt-performer awards like giving someone a statuette for a brief performance: all that may be a thing of the past as the Oscars go into their Ninetieth decade. And even if the ceremony might have not been popular, and might have been weird—I didn’t watch it!—It’s certainly true that there’s a profound brilliance and simplicity about the overall winner: Nomadland . Not just because a woman has won Best Director for the second time. And also not because Frances McDormand won an award for the third time… The sensationally good McDormand is one of two names in the film, along with David Strathairn. McDormand is Fern: a woman who has chosen to live a life that’s away from working to pay down debts. She doesn’t understand why the objective of most peo...