when they say "money can't buy happiness" it's meant in a very direct and temporary sense, though it's crucially wrong in that money can unlock security and comfort in ways that can make you happy. but it can't buy freedom.

wealth is nothing more than a mound of dirt. and from atop that mound you can see so much more than you could from the floor. but you can't stand on top of the mound without it slowly eroding below you, and your fear of returning to the floor demands you feed the mound even more. so you do. but the mound keeps eroding. so you feed it again. but it keeps eroding. so you continue to feed it, at…

every single year we arrive at the shallow end of the filmmaking pool known as awards season, and every single year there's a movie (or several) exactly like nomadland. a touristic faux-docudrama vehicle for the most banal form of misery porn, presenting itself with all the deliberately-adorned signifiers of 'authenticity' and 'deeply-felt emotion' that endear this insidious genre of film to a dishwater-dull critical audience desperate to see any portrait of society that vaguely acknowledges that weird and esoteric concept known as 'economic hardship'.

given that we're currently in a global depression the likes of which hasn't been seen since the 1930s, you'd figure that it wouldn't be exceedingly difficult for director chloe zhao to articulate at the very least…

absolutely fucking not!!!!! what a truly vile experience this was. i’ve seen republicans with more respect for the poor. feels like a fucking super bowl ad. Those celebrities singing “Imagine” at the beginning of the pandemic? This is that in movie form.

i was already suspicious of this movie when in the first few minutes, the main character Fern—a recent widow, gig economy worker and a nomad living out of a van—claims she loves her amazon job because it pays “good money.” (The book was written before Amazon went to $15 an hour!) 

When I found out that this movie was Frances McDormand cosplaying as a poor person surrounded by people who are actually poor, I was pissed. When I…

Third time. A real “What you give to it, it gives to you” film. If you’ve seen a lot of movies, it’s easy to get bogged down in what this wants to be, what it is aesthetically mining. And if you seek clean social morality, this probably isn’t the one. Too ephemeral, too specific, too hooked into the historical American tradition of liberty in the face of fear and the unknown. One long drive to freedom. There’s no judgment and no plan. The politics aren’t political, they’re social and humanistic. There is an evident philosophy that gets a big platform—a nomadic order of decency and connectedness. It’s sensitive but direct about loss—the amazing regret and What if? that powers life…

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There's a tension to Nomadland that ultimately fails the movie. It's initially found in the contrast between the docu style, with non-actors utilized for their stories and experiences, and the vanity of the project as a Frances McDormand vehicle. Her performance is quite good, as is David Strathairn, but they're both disconnected from the material. Too often the film is striving for an authenticity that isn't possible with professional actors in the mix. Watching her pretend while the people around her are fully existing in this experience is unsettling. "It should've been a documentary" is usually a reductive statement, but it's true here. Chloé Zhao found a balance with The Rider that was quite moving until it attempted to…