I watched the Nickel Boys. A truly terrible movie. Completely undermined by some of the worst cinematography I’ve ever seen. It was a chore to sit through.
It’s shot from a first person perspective. Mostly from the perspective of one character, ocassionally switching to another character. And it doesn’t work at all. It feels totally unnatural. Sort of like an uncanny valley feeling, where everything just seems off. A person is having a conversation and their eye contact and behaviour isn’t quite right. then you get a lot of weird shots of, like someone’s arms or feet. And, for some reason, a ton of shots looking straight up. It doesn’t work at all.
The first twenty minutes could have been skipped. They show a few disconnected parts of the main character’s childhood, it is disjointed and doesn’t really add all that much.
Throughout the movie, they splice in a lot of random scenes, like parts of the moon landing. Or close up shots of a leaf, or an orange.
The movie is about a bunch of Black kids put in some type of reform school. But they don’t really explain what it is or why they’re sent there (maybe that was the point to show that the kid was confused and as the audience we have the perspective of the kid). They occasionally jump in time to the future (closer to the present), and show that there were a bunch of bodies buried there. And they tortured some of the kids.
But they do a poor job of showing this. Mostly the kids are sitting around the cafeteria, or doing some hard labour, but not much to the actual point that the place is made to look as bad as it is supposed to be. The main characters sit around painting a deck and barely look like they are working. Again, maybe this is a product of the first person narration, where the kids hear about a lot of things, but don’t have a full picture of everything that’s happening.
What should be the most brutal scene in the movie is when the main character gets whipped. And instead of showing the whipping, something that would be very dramatic, they cut away to some extreme zoom in on an old photo. The entire movie is full of bizarre decisions like this.
It’s a long move too. About 2 hours and 20 minutes.