2022 Oscar Results! And Nothing Crazy Happened!

I'm lying, something really crazy did happen. Power of the Dog (2021) only had one win, for best director! This is surely controversial. Sam Elliot has a lot of sway in Hollywood, I guess. Such a shame that otherwise the ceremony was just trite and boring.

Yeah, okay, we know what happened. Everyone has a take and it's all pretty obvious. To me, I'm glad he got his Oscar because Will's not going to work again. Or he will because Hollywood is crazy, and seems to be mostly on his side for some reason. But this is the kind of thing you remember for a long time, which is bonkers because Will Smith has sooo many things that are worth remembering. So, let's talk much more about this throughout this whole article, but let's get into our all-time stats:

2021: 12/23

2020: 13/24 

2019: 13/24 

2018: 16/24 

2017: 13/24 

2016: 14/24 

2015: 13/24 

2014: 20/24 

2013: 14/24 

2012: 16/24 

2011: 14/24 

2010: 12/24

I'm really so bad at this. Anyway, let's do it.

Best Picture:

I'm realizing I forgot to make a prediction for this. It was DOG in my head. CODA ended up winning. CODA was surging a bit towards the end, but honestly I didn't think it would upset Power of the Dog, which I guess everyone actually just Sam Ellioted, so whatever.

0/1

Best Director:

Prediction: Campion

I got this one!

1/2

Actor:

I said Garfield, Smith was the front-runner but I just didn't trust it. I fumbled perhaps the most obvious category, but if Garfield had one I would have looked like a genius. Now I look like...a dumbass. I just feel like Tom Cruise is going to make a movie where he stars as John McEnroe's dad to get his Oscar, finally. And Will's presence throughout the ceremony and speech were totally normal.

1/3

Actress:

Kirsten Stewart did not win this. I'm happy for Chastain, I didn't pay much attention to her, but looking back, this does feel like an acknowledgment of an impressive body of work, mostly Dark Phoenix (2019). I don't know. The Academy always awards folks like this unless it doesn't.

1/4

 Supporting Actor:

At the time Smit-McPhee, of Dark Phoenix fame seemed like the unstoppable lock. In the past few weeks this turned into all-Kotsur. Clearly, CODA struck the chord I thought Dog would. Fuck this, I'm just making my predictions the week of next year.

1/5

Supporting Actress:

No real question, DeBose got this, well deserved and very exciting.

2/6

Adapted Screenplay:

Just read my words. "This could go to CODA but I think Campion goes all in." Half of that was true. The Academy just clearly ended up loving this movie. Also Will Smith slapped Chris Rock.

2/7

Original Screenplay:

Even leading up to this I thought this would go to Pizza. What's a boy got to do? I have no real interest in Belfast (2021) if Jamie Dornan doesn't sing about how his heart is torn between an Albino and midwesterner played by the same actress while running through the sand and climbing a palm tree like a cat who's decided to climb up a palm tree.

2/8

Animated Film:

I still haven't seen Encanto (2021) but I want to! Does that count? I actually read the wind on this one.

3/9

Animated Short Film:

Always a crap shoot, but I did say Wiper would be in the top three. I mean, whatever. As long as it kept Will Smith's wife's name out of its fucking mouth.

3/10

Costume:

I didn't really buy that this should be Cruella (2021) but all the pundits were unanimous, and imagine that, I listen to people and get a category right.

4/11

Short Film:

Suck it. Got this one. "Long Goodbye"

5/12

Score:

DUNE (2021). Okay, here come all the technical awards that DUNE won, which will generally save me, except for one which I doubted. Well-earned, it was a great score.

6/13

Sound:

I still want two categories. But what I want more is more obvious DUNE wins to salvage my terrible night. Almost as terrible as Chris Rock's left cheek.

7/14

Cinematography:

I deviated from the DUNE and got punished. I was clearly in on Doggy and got bit for it. That bite like the Philadelphia cream cheese running off Chris Rock's face. Oh boy.

7/15

Documentary:

Listen, I didn't actually watch the ceremony. What the hell was ?uestlove's acceptance speech like. Just stunned audience at this point? It's just mind-blowing. What does Ricky Gervais thnk?

8/16

Doc Short Subject:

This went to "Queen of Basketball" which fits in with Kobe Bryant's win a while back instead of Benazir, which sounds probably sad. I mean, alopecia isn't even fatal.

8/17

Editing:

Thanks, DUNE.

9/18

French Film:

This was a pretty clear lock as well. It kind of goes without saying, although Worst Person in the World (2021) could have swept in. I need to watch Drive My Car (2021) on HBOMax and you should, too!

10/19

Makeup and Hairstyling:

WHATEVER. I know. I know. I just couldn't fall in line and go with Tammy Faye. This was just some black hole for me, I knew nothing about it. I blame Hillbilly Elegy (2020) which got me off the "make-up makes the movie a lock" vote. You know who doesn't need hairstyling?

10/20

Original Song:

Stan Sitwell. I don't want to talk about losing this category, but I'm glad Billie Eilish is an Oscar Winner.

10/21

Production Design:

Thanks, DUNE

11/22

Visual Effects:

You complete me, DUNE

12/23

Well, I feel like a real Peacock. Same score as last year. Meh, looking back, I probably should have gotten four more right, the obvious locks for Actor, Supporting Actor, Makeup, and Song. I misread the lack of power for Power of the Dog and it bit me, losing a lot to CODA.

Also, we all know that Will Smith is insane, right? Like, just watch After Earth (2013). Or better yet, Winter's Tale (2014). That's right. We remember you in Winter's Tale. First of all, Chris Rock's joke was certainly tasteless. They're allowed to both be wrong. But like, no one would remember that joke tomorrow. Ya'll remembering this on stage assault during one of the most watched live programs we have left. This just feels like the culmination of cancel culture - we need to find the zone between genuinely caring about each other and creating jokes that don't personally offend, but also being able to laugh at ourselves and not freak out over things that we could probably just move on from and aren't a big deal in the long run.

I don't know. I at least like that song by The Anxiety.

52 for '22: Double Team

Movie: Double Team (1997)

Method: Netflix Streaming

And to a lesser extent, the Van Dammes!

Why Did I Watch This?

Oof. I don't know. I saw that it starred Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dennis Rodman and was on Netflix and it was 96 minutes long. Simple as that. I had actually seen it a few weeks before when I was casually searching for good Van Damme movies to watch. Okay, Van Damme movies to watch. I had never heard of this and it felt like it had slipped under the cultural radar. So, here we go.

What Did I know about it?

Not really much of anything. This was operating at both peak Van Damme and peak Rodman. But I didn't know anyone else who was in it or what the plot could have possibly been. I mean, it was clearly stupid, and had some kind of buddy cop element, but very very little was in the hopper when I pressed play.

What Did I think?

This was certainly a movie. It was directed by Tsui Hark in his English language debut, and it feels like part of the attempt to bring the Hong Kong action wave over to the US that everyone went through in the 90s, with this and Rush Hour (1998) and John Woo films. Except Hark is not very good at all. Or at least a Hong Kong director directing a Belgian action star might have had some language barrier issues. Dennis Rodman doesn't help anything.

There are good things here. It is well-paced and there is a lot of stuff that continues happening. The opening scene is a fantastic chase in an armored vehicle and the amount of kicks that Van Damme does is reliably entertaining. And they let him square off against opponents who are equally good kickers and that's a fun challenge. The best may be when he's incarcerated and has to subsequently escape from the weird retired spy island, but more on that later.

Things keep moving, but it is excessively difficult to understand why or what anyone is trying to do in this movie. I've never seen a film like this where scenes just end and then another one begins with little to no editing or thematic transition. I was sitting here watching it the whole time, but there were moments, especially early on when they're trying to establish the plot where I had no idea if Van Damme was even the good guy or the bad guy. There is hardly anything that's ever concluded or leads into the next scene. This underlying incompetency really makes everything cool in this film difficult to follow.

But Dennis Rodman does play Dennis Rodman in this film. I found myself just thinking about when we blew off the Bulls in the middle of their second three-peat to party in Vegas for a weekend. I feel like he just flew to Europe sometime between training and filmed this. He's introduced relatively early on, but then leaves for the entire Secret Island sequence, to the extent that I was bummed out. I was promised a Van Damme / Rodman buddy cop picture, and dammit, that's what I was going to get! He's a glorified Q at the beginning. Only when Van Damme returns from the Secret Island does the buddy love really pick up, and those are some of the best moments in the movie, but it's really only the last third. Rodman earned a Razzie for his performance in this movie, but he's really just playing Rodman. His wardrobe is not changed at all, but his hair does in nearly every scene. I think they should have pushed this further and had his hair change colors in mid-conversation in the same scene.

This movie is basically three movies at once. After the initial scene where Van Damme fails to apprehend Mickey Rourke, he just retires, and then three years later is brought out of retirement to assassinate Mickey Rourke at a very crowded amusement park. Parts of this felt downright MacGruber (2010)-esque, as Van Damme is clearly the bad guy here, who kills his opponent's wife and child and gives him all of his motivation for revenge.

So, after he fails because he got blown up by grenades (by the way, the grenade explosions in this movie are all the biggest explosions of all time. Grenades are like, dangerous but will not destroy an entire in-ground swimming pool!), Van Damme is sentenced to a Secret Island where old spies go who have failed too many missions. Belloq is there, which is fun. He seems nice, but he isn't! No, he definitely is. There are some cool bits here, where it really feels like they are in the future or something. They might be. But Van Damme has to check in with a thumb print every so often or nerve gas will be deployed in his room. That doesn't seem to be that big of a deal if he's not also in the room, but whatever. I guess they'll hunt him down or something.

The best scene in the movie his his escape, where he slices off his thumbprint to fool the machine and then straps his way onto a cargo plane to escape. I don't know what Cargo was moving off the island, but whatever. This was Uncharted (2022) before it was cool. All this stuff is then just dropped until the end of the movie when Belloq shows up again to kill Van Damme, but definitely just laughs around with Dennis Rodman and then the movie ends. It's absolutely bizarre. You really feel like you missed something.

So, the last third features the ultimate team-up, finally! I mean, this movie is called Double Team for fuck's sake. They travel around Europe trying to find Mickey Rourke, who definitely just lays traps for them. They end up at the Roman Colosseum, which is definitely not the actual Colosseum, but Mickey Rourke has Van Damme's newly born baby in a ring with mines and a tiger! His wife is okay, but should have figured something was weird when they wheeled her into the Colosseum to give birth.

In the end, Mickey Rourke steps on a mine and gets eaten by a tiger. All I could think of where his final thoughts, which definitely had to be something like "I really wish I hadn't brought all these mines and tigers here." The baby is okay and like I said, Van Damme sort of just drives away while Belloq laughs after failing to kill him.

I mean, this movie is weird. This movie is really weird. It just doesn't really make sense, although it's entertaining and creative. The CGI is late 90s bad and there is an extremely high amount of Dutch angles for no reason. Like a Battlefield Earth (2000)-level amount. Van Damme is still great at kicking people and it's generally fun. But it's really not very good by any stretch of the imagination. Still, the Rodman novelty, especially knowing he was in between NBA Championships is spectacular.

Check out more of our 52 for '22 here!

52 for '22: The Sugarland Express

Movie: The Sugarland Express (1974)

Method: Netflix DVD

They're slowly getting away, Chief

Why Did I Watch This?

This is the first of one of the LONG-standing films on my Netflix DVD queue that I'm trying to aggressively work through this year, and quite frankly, a major basis for the impetus of this series! This has been on there for a while, wholly because it was Steve Spielberg's last film before JAWS (1975) and his first theatrical feature (Duel [1971] obviously comes first, but that was a TV movie that was later released theatrically). With West Side Story (2021) making the rounds, it felt very appropriate to pull the trigger on this and see what early Spielberg was like, if I could predict his greatness, and spy any future trends.

What Did I know ahead of time?

Surprisingly nothing. I especially realized that when it got going. First of all, Goldie Hawn was in this?! And the bad guy from Ghostbusters and Die Hard? As it got rolling I said outloud, "Is this the whole plot?" referring to the continuous chase scene. I really knew nothing except for Spielberg's directing participation, which really shows how potent he is as a director. Yet, I imagine many more of us are familiar with this film's follow-up.

What Did I think?

This was reliably good. The premise is kind of wacky, but based on a true story. Goldie Hawn busts hubby William Atherton out of a super-minimum security prison in order to save their baby boy from foster care. That's really it. Hilarity ensues. Nah, they hitch a ride with an old couple, who gets pulled over for going under 25 miles an hour on a highway. The couple gets the wrong idea when they are talking to the police officer, take off, and then end up taking that cop as a hostage. It all spirals out of control until nearly the whole state of Texas (and Louisiana) is on their tail.

There is a fundamentally painful question at the center of all this. Clearly Goldie Hawn and Atherton aren't really suitable to be parents, they are awfully unstable in every possible way. Except they do love their son and want very badly to settle down and be a happy family. But they're just not going to ever be in that position, especially as they dig themselves into a bigger and bigger hole. So, you're cheering for them the whole way, but at the same time, there's just no way this film can end well.

It doesn't. Spoiler for this 50-year old film, but when they finally approach the foster home, it's a trap! Atherton should have followed his gut, but he can't resist the pleas of Goldie Hawn (or his own desire), he approaches the house and gets shot in the gut. This is again an age-old film whose political statements reverberate today. Do they deserve to be shot and killed for their actions? Undeniably not, but hey, this is Texas. Everyone seems really eager to shoot them. Except for the main Sherriff guy, who is well-acted by Ben Johnson, who had won the Academy Award a few years before for The Last Picture Show (1971). He practices some restraint without losing any of his masculinity or authority, and his inability to keep his promise to the couple along with his duty to the law is a tragic conflict.

This is a surprisingly funny film, and while watching it, I did sort of realize that Spielberg's humour just sort of became mainstream blockbuster humour. There are bits where a character will react, say a broad joke, or the camera will linger just enough to demonstrate a punchline. It's stuff I see everywhere from Batman Begins (2005) to Captain Marvel (2019) these days. There's very much that sort of wry irony to the whole affair. Despite all this, the ending is an incredible downer. I wonder if that's why this hasn't really been propped up as high in Spielberg's canon, or that it's just so overshadowed by JAWS and his sci-fi work. He never really directed another roadtrip crime caper movie like this.

It does make it a weird film of its time. It feels like halfway between Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Smokey and the Bandit (1977). There were a lot of these kind of movies in this era, and nowadays this stands out because of its Spielbegisms. The reaction shots, the steady hand, the incredible sense of space and location. The humour. You always have a keen sense of what's going on and it's a remarkably capable film. It constantly feels as if the talent behind the camera is outreaching the material. There were a few sunset shots that were really remarkable, but my favourite is the reverse mirror shot that I posted up above.

But as I remarked about the plot, once it gets going, it's basically just one drawn out car chase. Sometimes in slow motion when they run out of gas, sometimes in other cars when they get away, and sometimes on foot or in a portapotty. It spins its premise in quite a few unique ways and remarkably keeps driving its momentum forward.

I enjoyed this, it's a solid movie on its own footing, and assuredly a get watch if you're a fan of Spielberg, or just the craft of filmmaking. This was his first collaboration with John Williams and remains a solid film, fifty years later.

Check out more 52 for '22 right here!

52 for '22: Canadian Bacon

Movie: Canadian Bacon (1995)

Method: Amazon Prime

"I heard Spider-Man was there"

Why Did I Watch This?

Can you believe that I actually found something worthwhile on Amazon Prime? I was just hanging out on a lazy Saturday morning, my intent wasn't really to find something for this series, since I JUST went off the rails with Soylent Green (1973). But, I saw this on Prime and thought it could be fun, and I had somehow never seen it before. Soon while watching it, I knew I had to add it here.

What Did I Know?

Not too much, as it turns out. I knew John Candy was in it, and it had something to do with Canada, but hell, I thought Candy would be the Canadian (as he is in real life). I kept waiting for Rick Moranis to show up until I realized I was waiting for this movie to become Strange Brew (1983), which does not actually feature John Candy at all, but rather Dave Thomas. So, I very quickly realized I knew nothing about Canadian Bacon.

What Did I Think?

I don't know how certain films get on the all-time comedy list. Looking back on it, the 90s seem now like a huge boon for this, although that's maybe just because that's when I grew up and cemented things like Dumb & Dumber (1994) and Billy Madison (1995) to memory. What helped this status? Well, probably just playing a lot on TV and having some huge stars attached, but there's also this wild anarchy to some of these early films from these guys.

Canadian Bacon is in this silly vein, but it's also a much more global film. It's assuredly a John Candy film, but it focuses less on a specific character journeys and more on being a political farce. The cast is wide and sprawling and it's more enthralled in satire than a prototypical 90s doofus. It's also Candy's last completed film after his death in 1994.

It occupies this weird space. It is definitely a 90s comedy, but it also doesn't act like many of its contemporaries. It is extremely goofy, has a well-rounded cast of characters, doesn't take itself seriously at all, and does feature plenty of drunken male idiots. I am also intrigued by how many 90s films like this, Dumb & Dumber, and Tommy Boy (1995) always chose to take place in the worst, most depressing Northern locations. Dumber in Rhode Island, Tommy in Sandusky, this in Niagara Falls. You just don't see the leafless brown trees and destroyed plains of yellow grass on film anymore. It gives these films such an underdog grit to them.

I don't know how this passed me by for so long. I'm from upstate New York originally and have literally been to these locations. Like, the streets and power plant and stuff, not just the Falls. Why wasn't this movie ever a bigger deal? I just think it was tougher to get into. It doesn't have a super easy premise to dig into. The just of it is that when a President's ratings are slipping post-Cold War and America loses its direction without factories producing weapons for the military-industrial complex, an artificial enemy is generated, this time in the form of Canada.

Maybe that was too much of a stretch for the 90s. It isn't now! Not the Canada thing, but a government obsessed with distracting its people's real problems through war propaganda, power-hungry executives, mortgaging our country's future with industrial contracts, and vilifying artificial enemies are all common practice in mass media in 2022. Watching this right after Soylent Green (1973) was impactful as another film that seems tailor-made to our time, if not its own time.

Watching it he week that Russia invaded Ukraine is also frightening. A lot of the early parts of this film centers on how the US wants to re-instigate Cold War tension with Russia because they were such a convenient force of ire to direct the public's attention and monger fear. Well, here we are. There is an amazing bit of dialogue when the war room is spitting out ideas for who the next enemy could be and someone actually says, "insurgent terrorists" and the idea is quickly dismissed as someone who could pose no real threat to the USA. Take that one however you'd like.

It may make more sense to learn that this was directed by Michael Moore for some reason. Yes, that Michael Moore. It's the only feature he's ever directed, and despite this headline, I can't really find a reason for that. It was not well-liked at the time, and Moore says it was because it was too liberal for mainstream audiences. That's possible, although it really doesn't feel like it these days.

There does feel like this weird Canada feud in the 90s. Well, just this and South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut (1999) features wars with Canada. This movie is filled with Canada jokes, some of which are clever (John Candy chastised for not writing anti-Canadian graffiti in English AND French), others hokey and expected (debates on how to pronounce the letter "O"). Canadians are always depicted as exceptionally polite and with an astounding health care system, and much of the humor comes from the fact that these are abhorrent qualities to Americans. I mean, it's not wrong. There's also conflict about the quality of Canadian Beer. I will take a Labatt's any day!

For some reason I have picked a lot of movies in this series that upend some gender dynamics. This movie is shit with female representation because it was a mainstream comedy made before 2014, but Rhea Pearlman appears at first as a damsel needing saving beyond enemy lines (Canada), but very quickly manages to secure an assault rifle and storm the CN tower.

This leads to the ending, where she actually saves the world from Nuclear Annihilation through good ol' fashioned American violence and anti-Canadian racism, but it's also weird because there's two big groups we follow whose paths influence each other but never meet. It's kind of cool. John Candy does save the President, and they're aware of each other, especially as he keeps bungling up relations on the border, but their goals don't really intersect. It's that rare film where the main hero never meets the main villain, or even knows that the other one exists (see also: The Fifth Element [1997]). I'm unsure if this weakens the film or not. It impedes the focus a little bit, but in general, there is enough irony, silliness, and conniving satire to keep audiences satisfied.

I recommend this, I think it's a pretty famous comedy that perhaps more folks have heard about rather than seen for themselves. It deserves to be higher in that 90s comedy movie pantheon and is worth a look. Hockey hosers!

52 for '22: Soylent Green

Movie: Soylent Green (1973)

Method: HBOMax

"We've got to ship these to that train going around the world, STAT!"

Why did I watch this?

Well, first of all, it just popped on HBOMax. They're really good about this stuff. But also, it was a film I had somehow never seen before, and it's famously now set in 2022! So, I really wanted to check out a look at our time from the lens of 1973. This was not on my pre-set list, so it's our first spontaneous BONUS of the year!

What did I know going in?

Not much, actually. This really shouldn't be a spoiler for anyone, but I of course knew the "Soylent Green is people!" bit and that it was Charlton Heston. That's pretty much it. I was very eager to see how an actual plot was woven around this huge reveal.

What did I think?

I'm surprised that contemporary reviewers didn't seem to enjoy this that much. Soylent Green in my mind has always been a seminal science fiction film, like a Planet of the Apes (1968) or Logan's Run (1976), although I don't actually think many folks have seen the latter. But it was largely dismissed at the time. The ending is really the clincher that put this film over the top, but with 2022 vision...damn a lot more of this rings true.

The 70s were just the beginning of the environmental movement, and as the pace of life accelerated we had suddenly a lot of panic about our changing world. It's fascinating see the filmmakers extrapolate our current trends fifty years, which may have been mocked at the time, but are now largely true, or at least realistically true. Sci-fi works when it takes one step beyond where we are now, and although we're not in the zone where no natural food exists yet, there's a lot of prophecy in this movie.

The basic premise is that in the future, overpopulation, climate change, and poverty have gotten so bad that all natural food costs hundreds of dollars and is exceedingly rare. Instead, most people live off food from the Soylent corporation (the fact that there actually IS a Soylent corporation these days is bonkers), which are purportedly made from either Soybeans or plankton farms in the ocean.

New York City has a population of 40 million people, about half of which are unemployed. In 2022 the city proper is 8 million and the metro is 18 million, so we're not quite there yet. But Soylent Green pictures a society so overcrowded that most people sleep in stairwells, have no possessions and wait in long lines to eat their friends.

There is a wealthy elite, though, who notably made their wealth on literally killing the poor and feeding it back to them, and the movie kicks off by one of the Board of Directors learning this fact and becoming unstable. He's murdered, and Charlton Heston plays the detective trying to investigate why. It's a good framing to get into this world. I like how easygoing corruption and accepted was among the police force and how bad their uniforms were. It demoted police to a real blue collar level, who are scraping by like anyone else.

Also always in the background is the fact that climate change has gone crazy. They comment that it's 90 degrees at night, everyone is sweating all the time, and the reason for food shortages is that we've destroyed the soil, polluted the air, and poisoned the oceans. Whenever they are outside there is a green haze over everything, which is a nice bit of cinematography. Like I said, one degree removed from today, but a world where we have rampant food insecurity, an enormous and growing gulf between rich and poor, and out of control climate change, heat and humidity sounds very familiar.

There is more magnificent worldbuilding. At one point Heston comments that farms and countrysides have become like fortresses, built up to protect precious food, lest starving roving people storm their garrisons. The dead are transported to waste disposal plants (which are definitely the same as Soylent plants, how did no one see this coming?), which are also fortified. Basically, people who want to change their station in life have no option of doing so.

You could become a house whore, or "furniture" and live in a nice apartment with running water and just get banged all day, as some women do. This movie is not without its 70s smarm, Heston definitely doesn't rape a girl, but it's such a casual and transactional sexual encounter that...it's an uncomfortable area. But then he defends them and stops them from being beaten by their landlord / pimp, so...good?

My thought is that when we first hit this kind of stuff in the 70s we panicked. We could sense our lives changing and our thoughts went to the worst possible place, which is something we still see today. Johnny Mnemonic (1995) comes to mind when the Internet first took off and we got so scared we made a dystopian future about it. See? This all comes together. Now, I know the source for this film was Harry Harrison's 1966 book, Make Room! Make Room! but wikipedia says the film was heavily changed and Harrison locked out of the production, so I'm going with a more contemporary attitude influencing this film's creation.

Also, a dump truck for cleaning up pesky rioters!

The cast here is great. Charlton Heston is so good. His career did take a weird sci-fi turn, but he really is a good actor. He unfortunately makes everyone else look bad in comparison, especially when he's talking to Shirl and the bodyguard. I did not even recognize him, but this was also Edward G. Robinson's last film, and his death scene was the last scene he ever shot. He passed away twelve days after shooting wrapped up. Also, my mind was blown, because I knew that scene from The Simpsons and never realized they were ripping it off from Soylent Green. And Dick Van Patten is in that scene! I don't know why!

I really enjoyed this movie. I do feel like the reveal where Heston realizes Soylent is people isn't well connected. Like, he sees bodies going in a big soup and then he sees a conveyor belt of Soylent Green. He later claims "I've seen it! They're turning people into food!" Like no you didn't. They could have been unrelated. I rewound and re-watched to make sure I didn't miss anything. I didn't. It sticks with you, though. The ending is ultimately ambiguous.

It's a lot of fun, watch it, even if you know the ending. The point is the whole movie, which hits harder in a 2022 that doesn't feel that off.

More 52 for '22 here!