Oscar Season Lightning Round 3! (Patreon)

The Miseducation of Cameron Post (Desiree Akhavan, 2018)

I should begin by stating for the record, I have not seen Boy Erased. Nevertheless, it strikes me as curious, and more than a little sexist, that that film has eked its way into the year-end awards conversation (as a longshot, admittedly), while no one seems to be talking about Cameron Post at this point. Chloë Grace Moretz's performance here is the strongest I have seen from her. She plays the title character as defiant at times, but just as often susceptible to doubt and self-scrutiny, emotions that the God's Promise conversion camp are hoping to mold into absolute self-loathing.

Like The Hate U Give, which was similarly based on YA literature, Cameron Post is frequently over-directive in its messaging, and if it has one particularly notable flaw, it's Akhavan's direction. She is clumsy with blocking and pacing, and too often underlines material that is highly explicit in the first place. When she allows space for the performers to expand on the text, as Owen Campbell does in his monologue as Mark, the film attains a higher plateau. Also, the inclusion of a character like Adam Red Eagle (Forrest Goodluck) is a very smart bit of intersectionality, since it directly parallels gay conversion camps with the Native American re-education schools. But I suspect that's a move the book makes as well.

Minding the Gap (Bing Liu, 2018)

The documentary of the year for many, I feel churlishly contrarian for not loving Minding the Gap to pieces. (So many innocent skateboards gave their lives for this film!) But I do like it quite a lot. To say Liu is preternaturally gifted as a filmmaker is probably an understatement, but I fear that it could also cause us to ignore the incredible hard work -- both physical and intellectual -- that clearly went into making MInding the Gap. Despite its effortless appearance, this clearly didn't just flow out of the milieu like it was there for the taking.

Part of what's so impressive about Liu's film is how it gradually shape-shifts. At first it seems like just another documentary about skater dudes, a sort of Bones Brigade video with a bit of money and craft behind it. Almost imperceptibly it evolves into a story about the limited options and expectations of growing up in Rockford, Illinois, and the various crises that face young men as they achieve adulthood. Zack, the white guy, gets multiple chances and squanders them. And as we eventually learn, his entitlement extends to the use of violence against women. Kiere, meanwhile, is a young black man who, as the saying goes, must work twice as hard to go half as far. This is a personal essay film that treats skating as its hook, and as such might insinuate itself into the lives of viewers that a Varda or Marker film just can't reach. Killer stunt.

Leave No Trace (Debra Granik, 2018)

Possibly my biggest disappointment so far this year, Leave No Trace is obviously a film of considerable quality. But it didn't take long to discern that it was adapted from a novel (My Abandonment by Peter Rock), largely because its organization of incident felt wholly inorganic to me. Things developed in "chapters," each revealing a new fissure in the relationship between Will (Ben Foster) and Tom (Thomasin McKenzie). Even the lush forest cinematography felt overtly literary, as if the camera were describing the landscape in words. 

Nevertheless, Granik is particularly skillful at making the mundane things of everyday domestic life seem strange and offputting, conveying Will's detachment from the ordinary world. Seeing the way he and the camera stare at the couch or the kitchen appliances in the Walters house, or the all-too-relatably awkward sequence in church, we get a clear sense of Will's alienation. But then again, it's also a form of foreshadowing, since it tells us that he doesn't have the capacity to grow. In this regard, Leave No Trace is really about Tom and her evolving emotions, but this leaves Will as a kind of static emblem for our nation's damaged men. We can empathize with him, about as much as we would if we passed him on a street corner asking for change.