Drive My Car

Explicit content warning

03/10/22 • 43 min

Drive My Car is a special movie. It’s Japan’s most Oscar-nominated film ever—and its first to be up for Best Picture. It enters the final weeks of awards season as the first non-English-language film to be picked at Best Picture by all three major American critics groups (including the New York Film Critics Circle, for whom one David Sims tallied the results).

And its Oscar run comes at a time of tentative hope for the future of international film. Drive My Car won Best Foreign Language Film at the Golden Globes, an award whose last two winners were Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari and Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite. Minari’s nomination was controversial as a film set in Arkansas that deals with very American experiences around immigration and isolation. In both English and Korean though, Minari was put in the “foreign language” category.

Reflecting on that recent history then, should Drive My Car’s success offer some hope for international film? After Parasite’s 2019 Golden Globe win, director Bong Joon Ho urged viewers to “overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles.” Are audiences closer than ever to that goal?

The language of Drive My Car isn’t just remarkable for its domestic success too: Based on a story by Haruki Murakami and directed Ryusuke Hamaguchi, the film is also a deeply moving examination of language itself.

David Sims, Shirley Li, and Lenika Cruz came together to unpack the film, its message about how we communicate with one another, and why it resonated as widely as it has. They also discuss their love for Murakami, despite his gendered flaws and storytelling crutches. (“And then the phone rang and it was a secret agent!”)

Further reading:

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Further reading:

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Previous Episode

The Power of the Dog

The Jane Campion western drama The Power of the Dog is the most Oscar-nominated film this year. But does it—as Spencer Kornhaber has written—have a queer problem? Based on a 1967 novel, the movie’s found praise as an incisive study of masculinity. Does its dated source material also make it a collection of cliched gay narrative though?

Spencer joins Shirley Li and David Sims to analyze the film, as well as the Oscar race it’s currently leading. David also breaks down some recent Oscar history with how the reforms that followed #OscarsSoWhite in 2015 have shaped the Best Picture award in particular.

Further reading:

Spencer: The Power of the Dog Has a Queer Problem
David: The Biblical Clash at the Core of The Power of the Dog

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Next Episode

The Batman

The Batman is already 2022’s highest-grossing film. In some ways, it’s yet another comic-book adaptation to dominate theaters. In others, it’s a return to a pre-MCU cinema experience free of the weight of universe-building. Robert Pattinson stars in the first standalone Batman movie in a decade, bringing a grim detective story with the caped crusader that seems to draw more from David Fincher than DC Comics.

While superhero films still top box office charts, the types of stories they’re capable of telling seems broader each year. Should The Batman make us optimistic for the future of comic-book movies—or cynical that any big-budget film has to include capes?

David Sims, Sophie Gilbert, and Spencer Kornhaber discuss Robert Pattinson, their favorite Batman, and the state of our superhero monoculture.

Further reading:

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