I really really enjoyed this movie (if enjoy is the right word to use)
A late-December release with a murderer's row of actresses tackling a weighty, heavy topic that's essentially just characters talking to each other sounds like Oscar bait to the nth degree, but it manages to be eminently watchable with a sub-2-hour-runtime and without feeling Very Important
This could've sagged under its own sense of self-importance or come across as highfalutin preaching but it never does. It could've just boiled down to men bad, religion bad, women good ra ra sisterhood and it doesn't, nor does it resort to triumphantlism in women made a decision together and now they're united and unstoppable against the world (another would-be awards contender mining similar ground, She Said, also mostly side-stepped this, focusing on the nuts and bolts of tracking down a story and piecing it together bit by bit). One of my favorite things to watch is when a group of (usually marginalized) people seemingly all united in one goal are shown to be almost tearing apart at the seams, all agreeing on the goal but when talking about the means on achieving the goal are fractious, with the group almost threatened to be consumed by fighting each other rather than against their common enemy (see: French movie BPM about ACT UP and who gets a say and how big a say in the group's activism; Germany's And Tomorrow the Entire World where a group of anti-fascist activists squabble over how far to push their fight against fascism; and at least the early episodes of the miniseries Mrs. America about the effort to pass the Equal Rights Amendment in America and the prioritization (or lack of) of women of color and LGBTQ in the movement). The women here very clearly do not all share the same feelings but argue and disagree and quote Biblical passages at each other and swing back and forth between wanting things to change, imagining life without the constant threat of violence, then withdrawing from that imagined life when it the cost is giving up the only life they've known for the unknown and the lack of security that entails vs the lack of security in their current situation.
It deals with its heavy topic, philosophizes, moralizes, but also manages to squeeze in a recurring joke about 2 horses named Ruth and Sheryl, a budding romance sub-plot, and 2 excellent jokes ("I'm sorry, I think I'm dying" & "Oh fuck it off!" "I think it's just fuck off")
I've seen a lot of criticisms about the dialogue and how the women talk to each other but I've also seen a very good rebuttal in that, while they are illiterate, they've been raised on Biblical passages and sermons and have memorized many of them by heart thereby informing how they speak
Excellent performances all around, no surprise there, both from the name actresses along with faces that may not be immediately recognizable to most. Claire Foy finally, finally getting a part that lives up to her talents after The Crown. Frances McDormand basically just makes a cameo appearance, likely more involved in producing it and just popping in for an appearance to help sell the movie (though even that brief appearance has her marking an x on a sheet of paper in the most Frances McDormand-character way possible).
I've also seen a ton of complaints about the color-grading, about it being almost black-and-white, about it looking cheap made-for-television...did not bother me at all. Did not even realize it was an issue until looking up comments online. I was too entranced by the actresses (plus a lot of it takes place at night albeit people also complained it was too dimly-lit) to care.
Music was lovely (by Hildur Guðnadóttir of Joker and Chernobyl fame). Hair-braiding was lovely. Costuming was nice. Editing was wonderful and made what could've felt like a filmed stage play feel a bit livelier and cinematic. There was no need to show any violence or gore and there are just enough quick snippets of the immediate consequences to turn the audience's stomachs and drive home the repeated, regular violations these women endure
I'm 2-for-2 in liking awards-season movies that've seen their awards prospects go up in a puff of smoke, barely made money at the box office, and got a lukewarm shrug from filmheads (along with Armageddon Time).
Can't stand most movies/shows that have journalists as characters: it's either Very Noble Very Brave Borderline Infallible people uncovering some horrible covered-up crime and the music swells when the story's published and they're treated no less as some superhero without much personality other than Tenacious Benevolent Protagonist or dig-through-your-garbage shove-recorders-in-the-face-of-victims swarming-like-locusts-type characters who skulk in the dark and will do anything to get a scoop. The actual humdrum work of journalism is often sidelined in favor of just overemphasizing the heroics/rattiness of the journalist character (exception: the superb Australian drama The Newsreader which combined interesting characters and pound-the-pavement work of 1980s TV reporters in a very watchable package). Didn't know what to expect going into She Said, was afraid it'd fall into the Journalists-as-Heroes genre or hit the points of the #MeToo movement too much to treat the expose of Weinstein as The Moment The Patriarchy Ended.
It didn't (for me anyways), and even better it focused a lot on the day-to-day work in getting the story published (with a bit of the requisite 'these journalists have families and personal lives too' scenes but played very naturally and intertwining nicely with their work scenes): Getting leads, interviewing, verifying stories, double-sourcing triple-sourcing information, gingerly initiating conversations with victims who may want nothing to do with them (scenes handled very well by all parties involved), following threads and all the while seeing the scope of Weinstein's crimes grow bigger and bigger. It just focused on the work and I really enjoyed that. (Samantha Morton also pops in for a scene to remind everyone how. damn. good. she. is.) It's definitely not perfect, it has a Big Dramatic Moment that felt very Hollywood & artificial when Zoe's character gets a call about someone going on the record (the music was swelling then, right?), the use of Ashley Judd playing herself but then decidedly not-Gwenyth Paltrow playing Gwenltltyth Paltrow was jarring as hell (why didn't they just shoot the scene without showing Gwynith's actual face?!). But all in all an awards season movie that stands on its own without feeling like a Very Important Issue movie shoehorned into a fall release date for awards.
It's rejection by awards & audiences is understandable, it's almost like the movie came both too soon and too late, too soon as Weinstein is still going through the courts and appeals but too late as a lot of this story has been told (and re-told and re-examined along with reporting about Farrow's investigations) that the average moviegoer can have a "what, again?" reaction when hearing this was being released.
tl;dr I'm just really happy Zoe Kazan got a (co-)lead role in a major studio movie
It's like someone watched the 2019 HBO Theranos documentary and tried to do the same thing with JUUL but worse in every aspect.
Episodes of The New York Times Presents (and its precursor The Weekly) have been very hit and miss (with the average episode usually slightly-above-meh) and not really having any stand-out episodes (even its biggest hit the Britney Spears episode felt so copy-pasted from prior reporting that even someone with only cursory knowledge of the FreeBritney campaign would find little new or enlightening, though its success probably stemmed from packaging prior reporting from an extended span of time into a more easily digestible 1-hour television format) but I'd never been as frustrated watching an episode of the series as here.
Why why why did they spend SO much time with the one teenage(?) girl??? If there was a 'teen smoking/vaping epidemic' as the episode repeatedly mentioned, it'd be useful to back it up with more stats & figures (other than the 3 charts they showed) instead of repeatedly coming back to a total of ~15-20 minutes on one anecdotal story so patently played to pull at heart strings. So she ended up smoking 2-3 pods a day (with the episode saying one pod ≈ 1 pack of cigs)...how is that the fault of JUUL? JUUL was not saying go out and smoke multiple pods a day (or was it? the episode doesn't dig into it!). Taking one extreme example to represent a larger problem undercuts the position the episode is trying to put forth (or WAS it an extreme outlier? the episode doesn't dig into it!). Digging deeper into the company's advertising practices and comparing how it's different/more insidious than other companies (especially ones that are restricted from advertising to youth but dance around the legal restrictions) would bolster the story's case a lot more (and when the girl's mom starts crying 'cause she found e-cigs in her teenage daughter's room was...not as big of a bombshell as the episode's director/editor thought it was...lingering on the shot long after it was obvious the episode was trying to hit you over the head with a Big Emotional Scene). The story was told from a generalist point of view when someone from the digital advertisement/tech beat would be better suited to add a lot more background and details around companies skirting age-restrictions in advertising as more money & focus flows to digital.
This episode, more so than others in the series, was clearly trying to make a case against JUUL instead of a more straightforwardly objective documentary, and there is probably a case to be made against them, but this was so sloppily made I finished the episode with frustration not at JUUL but at NYTP for wasting an hour of my time on such a scatterbrained, unfocused, poorly-argued episode. It flits from subject to subject instead of building its case brick by brick, it spent a decent amount of time on Monsees's childhood and education, but sort of just flits past Monsees's demotion to CPO (why? did other co-workers see any problems with him? he gave one bad performance at a congressional hearing but WHY was he so unprepared? the story barely delves into what he did day-to-day. and did it really matter? CEOs get dragged in front of congressional hearings all the time to get raked over the coals for members of congress to grandstand and they've held onto their jobs, why was it different in Monsees's case)? Practically every speaker feels so nakedly slanted against the company...which actually makes them less effective as talking heads as the story is already operating at a hysterical level throughout. There's a lot more meat in the story of the way JUUL presented itself as better than smoking and how much worse the health effects are/were than what it originally put out there, and the episode touches on that but more science and more breaking that down was needed to drive the point home than how it was conveyed (talking head of someone with an axe to grind against the company, footage of health official's dry press conferences). And again, Instead of covering any of that it spent almost half the bloody episode on one anecdotal human-interest-angle interview that was a lot less effective than the reporter seemed to think.
At the end of the day, the tone (quickly) devolves into Helen Lovejoy shouting "won't somebody please think of the children!" and pikachu shocked face that teenagers smoke. Not that teenagers smoking is a good thing, but your argument is made much less effective and causes the audience to instinctively tune out when your tone (for a whole hour!!! this could've been 45 minutes!! or less!!!) is so strongly of paternalistic moral shock.
Shoddily directed, shoddily edited, with so much strong long-form video journalism being put out there by other outlets this pales in comparison
