A Moving Musical Documentary on Netflix

I watched a very moving documentary on Netflix last week: Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened, which tells a story of the highly anticipated original Broadway production of the Stephen Sondheim musical Merrily We Roll Along, and its immediate failure. The 2016 documentary was directed by Lonny Price, one of the production’s main cast members, and he interviews Sondheim, the production’s director, Hal Prince, a number of his castmates, and two notable audience members who saw the original run. I watched the movie as someone very interested in the work of Sondheim, and came away from it deeply touched by the experiences and perspectives of the people it features.

The documentary’s setting is the musical theatre of Broadway in the early 80s, but its subject is the expectations and frustrations – the dreams and subsequent hard reality – of any young person starting out in life. This happens to be a theme of the musical Merrily We Roll Along as well, and the plot, as relayed by Sondheim and Prince, is an apt parallel for the stories told by the once-young-and-aspiring real-life performers that Price interviews.

Sondheim and Prince had hired a cast of young performers, in their late teens and early 20s, each of whom was making their debut on Broadway, and who couldn’t have been more thrilled by the entire experience, including that of being a part of the history of their heroes. Price engagingly includes himself in the telling of the story, as well as the story of how the documentary got made, in part.

The show’s failure (closing after just 16 performances) had a devastating impact on all the documentary’s subjects, even Sondheim and Prince. Some of the young performers tell of struggling in a tough and competitive industry, one famous one struck on enviable success, and at least one left the acting profession entirely. More than the details of the production or what came after, the most engaging aspect of the entire movie is the affecting care and attention that Price pays to the people involved. The then-young performers are now all much older, and each carries a wealth of experience that’s instantly evoked in their interviews.

The weight of emotion that comes with that experience is brought poignantly to the movie’s forefront, and the documentary becomes a story that mirrors that of the show: Young people with big dreams transform into baffled, worldly, and keenly emotional older people. The tender observation – call it Love – with which Price shows their stories (including his own) is what enriches those emotions, and turns his documentary into a powerful experience.

“Wonderboy for President” and Inoffensive Satire

Available on Showmax.

In conjunction with the release of Kagiso Lediga’s new romantic comedy Catching Feelings, which was released last Friday, I watched the 2016 comedy Wonderboy for President, directed by John Barker and also starring Lediga, which is now streaming on Showmax.

Wonderboy for President is set up as a mockumentary in a political context. Shakes (Ntosh Madlingozi, who also appears in Catching Feelings) and Brutus (Tony Miyambo), two ostensible high-ups in the ANC back office, are remonstrated by leadership for the weakening public image of the party and its growing disconnect with its base, particularly among the youth and particularly in Johannesburg. They are tasked with travelling to the Eastern Cape to meet with a rumoured charismatic young leader named Wonderboy (Lediga), whom leadership believes will bring sufficient credibility and appeal as the face of the party to lure back voters.

Wonderboy is quickly brought up to Johannesburg, introduced to the big city and its ways, rapidly flung into the party leadership, and just as rapidly brought into the party’s disfavour when he falls for an attractive young leader (Thishiwe Ziqubu) in the DA, the main opposition party, which brings along a selection of predictable conflicts.

What to See This Weekend: Unexpected Journeys

On Fridays, The Back Row compiles a short selection of recommendations for readers’ weekend viewing. The links are for the convenience of those who wish to stream the films on the suggested websites (make sure it’s available in your territory before entering your payment details); readers may well prefer other sites with alternative arrangements for the streaming and downloading of films, and can’t be stopped from using those instead.

“I Am Not Your Negro” (Raoul Peck, 2016)

Available on DVD.

When James Baldwin died, at the age of sixty-three, from stomach cancer, he left unfinished a manuscript of the memoir Remember This House, detailing his personal interactions with the civil rights leaders Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. (Baldwin had also written a treatment of Malcolm X’s life for a screenplay, which he eventually adapted into his book One Day, When I Was Lost; this is what Spike Lee ended up developing into the script for his bio-pic Malcolm X, released five years after Baldwin’s death.) The Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck has now made a documentary to present his view of the story of black people in America, revealing that it’s the core of his idea of the story of America itself, and his text is derived entirely from the writings of Baldwin, with a particular focus on Remember This House and the three slain leaders.

Baldwin is a prominent fixture in the long and illustrious history of American literature, and especially noteworthy as a powerful practitioner of that strong American form, the philosophical-political essay, that developed from the republican revolution in the days of empire and colonies, the abolitionist movement leading up to the American Civil War, and through the various liberalising struggles of the twentieth century. It is now most potently remembered as a part of the civil rights struggle, where the great spiritual epiphanies were imparted in American political movements, and the anti-sectarian moralism and spiritualist aestheticism of Baldwin is closely related to the ecclesiastically awesome deliveries of King on the steps of national monuments. In fact, Baldwin himself spoke with the fervour of a preacher, a sight we’re treated to in the archival footage that Peck includes in I Am Not Your Negro, such as clips from Baldwin’s interview on The Dick Cavett Show, and his debate with William F. Buckley, Jr., at the Oxford Union. These are interspersed throughout the documentary, together with photographs and other footage of episodes in the civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 60s, as well as contemporary material of the protest activities carried out by Black Lives Matter.

What to See This Weekend: Mind Games

“Masterminds” (Jared Hess, 2016)

Showing on DStv M-Net Movies Premiere (Channel 104) on Monday, 9 October, at 16:55; Saturday, 14 October, at 13:00; available on Microsoft; on Amazon; on Vudu; on DVD.

Though Jared Hess’s frenzied new comedy is far more conventional in flavour than the earlier two that I’ve seen — Napoleon Dynamite, from 2004, and Nacho Libre, from 2006 — it’s just as much a delightful and distinctive treat. It’s based on the real-life Loomis Fargo robbery in North Carolina that took place in October 1997, in which David Ghantt, a supervisor for the cash handling company Loomis Fargo, stole over $17 million in cash from the regional vault in Charlotte, North Carolina where he worked, collaborating with an ex-employee, Kelly Campbell, her associate, Steve Chambers, and a number of co-conspirators. I don’t know the precise degree to which the film has stuck to fact — from what I can see on the Wikipedia entry on the robbery, the main points of the story were all kep intact for the film, but a high level of invention and imagination is displayed openly by Hess in his telling.

Zach Galifianakis plays David, a decent and naïve security employee, who falls for Kelly (Kristen Wiig) when she starts working as his partner, even though he’s already engaged, to a rancorous store clerk named Jandice (Kate McKinnon). When Kelly leaves the job and moves in with her childhood friend Steve (Owen Wilson), who is now a professional thief and scammer, she keeps contact with earnest and infatuated David, who, through his indulgent affection and eagerness to win Kelly over, is persuaded by Steve to help them rob the cash vault one weekend. They then get David out of the country while keeping the cash to themselves, while Kelly’s continuing contact with David introduces unforeseen complications to their plans. Jason Sudeikis plays an unnervingly avid (and zanily funny) hitman who is roped in as part of Steve’s attempts to simplify matters, and Leslie Jones plays an FBI special agent assigned to the case of the heist, whose hilarious efforts to secure a confession from her suspects reminded me of the task of a director who seeks to extract a meaningful performance from his actors — both have to modify their methods from one individual to the next, the moment they’re looking for may not arrive when and where they had expected or planned it, and both have to adapt quickly to changing circumstances and to capture moments as they arise.

What to See This Weekend: The Good Fight

Every Friday, The Back Row compiles a short selection of recommendations for readers’ weekend viewing. The links are for the convenience of those who wish to stream the films on the suggested websites (make sure it’s available in your territory before entering your payment details); readers may well prefer other sites with alternative arrangements for the streaming and downloading of films, and can’t be stopped from using those instead.

“Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets”

Now playing in theatres across South Africa.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is the first Luc Besson film I’ve seen, and it’s nowhere near as disappointing as other commentators would have had me expect. The general consensus in critical reaction is summed up in a sentence from Herman Lategan’s review of the film (which awarded it two stars) for the Beeld: “The storyline is weak, but it’s a visual spectacle.” But South African reviewers have been considerably more generous to the film than international ones; for Channel24, Gabi Zietsman, who awarded it four stars, compares it to Besson’s cult favourite The Fifth Element, writing that “it surpasses the scope of that world into something that can only be described as magical.” She goes on to criticise its plot, dialogue, and lead actors (Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne), but affirms that it “deserves its four-star rating just because of the sheer volume and awe of the universe that Besson presents to us.” Leon van Nierop, in another four-star review, for the Rapport, writes, “One seldom sees such strange creatures, futuristic cities, weird beings, and a totally ordinary hero and heroine. … Luc Besson enjoys himself immensely, and, visually, it’s one of the most overwhelming experiences yet.”

I have had even more memorable, more wondrous, and more singularly original visual experiences in the movies myself, but Besson’s film is indeed a treat. It’s understandably often been compared to James Cameron’s Avatar, which also featured an entirely invented CGI-scape of planets, natural wonders, races other than human, and alien animal and plant species, set centuries in the future and far from earth. But, where Cameron toured across a single planet (based on a factual location in our own solar system) and the specific spiritual contours of a single society inhabiting a part of it, Besson bounds through the universe, from one solar system to another, including intriguing interactions with a parallel dimension and the material threats inherent to a movie-maker’s satire of virtual reality experiences. And, where Cameron set out a rather standard — in fact, clichéd — political fable, Besson spins something far more original and daring, which, though related, bears much greater import for the moment.

What to See This Weekend: Pain and Prejudices

Every Friday, The Back Row compiles a short selection of recommendations for readers’ weekend viewing. The links are for the convenience of those who wish to stream the films on the suggested websites (make sure it’s available in your territory before entering your payment details); readers may well prefer other sites with alternative arrangements for the streaming and downloading of films, and can’t be stopped from using those instead.

“Metropolitan” (Whit Stillman, 1990)

Available on iTunes.

This week, we passed the bicentennial of the death of the matchless Jane Austen, responsible for no less than six of the language’s favourite novels of all time and over thirty direct adaptations of those works for film and television, not to mention the host of other movies based on or inspired by stories and characters of her creation. I myself have seen very few of those adaptations (Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice, from 2005, is the only one not featured in this blog post), but their number and popularity are enough to set them aside as a genre unto themselves. A far broader and more pliable genre is that of the loose adaptation, into which Whit Stillman’s remarkable indie comedy Metropolitan falls, as inspired by Austen’s Mansfield Park, along with better known films like Bridget Jones’s Diary (Pride and Prejudice) and its sequel (Persuasion), Clueless (Emma), and Material Girls (Sense and Sensibility).

I’ve never read Mansfield Park, but the characters themselves of Metropolitan make a pretty strong case for the novel when they debate its value, and the one championing it is revealed to be an Austen fanatic (which is hardly to put a foot wrong for Carolyn Farina’s level-headed and sensitive debutante Audrey) while the one against it — Edward Clements’s young socialist Tom, whose class-consciousness and self-consciousness are closely linked — has not only neglected to read it, but eschews the reading of novels altogether in favour of literary criticism: “That way, you get both the novelist’s ideas as well as the critic’s thinking.” It’s particularly shrewd of Stillman, who wrote and produced the movie in addition to directing it, to reference Austen in this way, and by it he shows how Austen has become an entrenched part of elitist culture, even (really, especially) when her name and work are thrown about in conversations that discuss the hubris and decline of that same American elite. (A peculiar delight of Stillman’s script is the bandying about of one character’s coined abbreviation for the class under discussion: U.H.B., which the others shorten to an acronym, “uhb,” standing for “urban haute bourgeois,” because none of the other terms like “preppy” or “Wasp” seem quite accurate.)

What to See This Weekend: Breaking Free

“I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry” (Dennis Dugan, 2007)

Available on iTunes; on Amazon Video; on Microsoft; on DVD.

There is a tendency among nominal liberal and progressive moviegoers to attend the explicit art-house political saga, and evade the ribald comedies obviously aimed at much broader, less discerning sectors of the population. It’s exactly the constituency that the Weinstein Company often depends on, as well as the one that had, until recently, provided the bulk of outside support to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles. The misguided refinement and unconsciousness prejudices of this interest group explain why one sees enthusiastic acclaim go to such disobligingly cautious works as The Imitation Game and Dallas Buyers Club, and little worthy recognition be afforded the sharper, more revealing, more personal, more daring — and, yes, more popular and entertaining — works of Judd Apatow and Eddie Murphy. The predominant disagreeable factor of the bulk of these recent outright liberal movies is that they reflect the views and verities of the liberal media establishment back upon itself with little of the insight or tension that leads to true art; the comforting platitudes and affirmations of these movies are generally yoked to a similarly complacent and unchallenging aesthetic. They expand the echo chamber shared by their well-meaning filmmakers and audiences, and do little to advance the political causes they’ve ostensibly taken up, or to influence the culture into which they’re released.

Into this palliative division of the cinema, the drop of something effervescent like Dennis Dugan’s 2007 bawdy entertainment I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, which this week crossed the 10^th anniversary of its theatrical release, is most welcome. No doubt a number of readers groaned at the sight of Adam Sandler in a movie recommendation by this blog, and the rest were disconcerted by the raucous bulk of his frequent comedy partner Kevin James. The film is popular enough to have been seen by most of this blog’s readers already, but those who haven’t, despite what you may have heard or previously experienced by way of Sandler’s Brooklyn-bro vulgarity, are heartily encouraged to indulge its frank sentimentality and ultimate moral message of homophilia, which it couples with a warm and heartfelt tone of sincerity and political activism. It’s not in quite the same aesthetic class as the films of Judd Apatow (though, frankly, few films of this century are) but it brings a forthright approach to satirising and transforming mainstream perceptions of the homosexual community it depicts. In that it delves into the personal lives of its characters and portrays private impulses and desires that don’t conform neatly to a conventional political cause — thus illustrating how politics are necessarily driven by the chaotic, multivalent individual lives they affect — it’s superior to the abovementioned issue-oriented films of overtly liberal politics. What’s more, at the time of its release, it was deliberately aimed at precisely the moviegoing market that generally had little interest in or exposure to LGBTQ causes, and did considerable more work in reaching out to a broader, more intersected group for support and empathy.

What to See this Weekend: Sucking Up

“Gosford Park” (Robert Altman, 2001)

Available on iTunes; on Amazon Video; on Microsoft; on DVD.

Those who love Downton Abbey will love Gosford Park just as well. Those — like myself — who detest Downton Abbey and all the trends that bring it great success will love Gosford Park much more. I had the advantage of seeing Robert Altman’s superb country house comedy a few years before the lumbering, sodden Julian Fellowes soap arrived on television, and the film shone too brightly in my mind for the series to obscure anything good. But I think that watchers of the series will find great delight and refreshment in the film as well, even if it doesn’t work powerfully enough to supplant all television from their lives.

I remember the sudden drop in my spirits when watching Downton Abbey, seven whole years ago, in the first ten minutes of the first episode. The earl’s cousin and nephew have tragically perished on the RMS Titanic and the family is consequently thrown into a constitutional crisis, since the next in line for the hereditary position of earl and holder of the estate — i.e., the next closest male relative — is some very distant middle-class cousin, and the eldest daughter of the family no longer has a second cousin to securely marry. The entire situation, from our vantage point of the 21^st century, is absurd, and, surely, any contemporary film or television show can only approach this story from the position of recognising its absurdity. But — lo! — not only did Downton Abbey not note and lampoon this idiocy — it positively extolled the old ways, and its six seasons merrily embraced the feudal traditions of living and thinking and oppressing.

I suppose it took an American to go at it the right way. Robert Altman merely begins by acknowledging what contemporary culture often seems eager to forget: that class distinctions exist, that the divisions are often jarringly visible and viscerally unpleasant, and that the system that requires you abide by those distinctions is barbarous. Here, the discrepancies between Gosford Park and Downton Abbey are so vast as to seem astronomical. A reasonable reader may ask why I’d bother mentioning them together in the first place. The reasons are clear and serve a simple purpose: the common ground between the two should prove good enough to lure any ITV-lovers into the cinematic fold. First, both are set before World War II and in an old and sumptuous country house in England, owned by some aristocrat and crawling with well-heeled inhabitants and servants who know their places. Both pay close attention to the minutiae of the social and political order and trappings of high English living. Both were filmed from scripts written by Julian Fellowes. And, most enticing, both star Maggie Smith as the Dowager Countess. Gosford Park brought the grand Dame her last Oscar nomination, and, aside from the acerbic remarks given to her by a screenwriter, it gave her a chance to bite at the others on set in her own words as well. Hence, we have one of my favourite and one of the most enduring lines from all of cinema in 2001: “Difficult colour, green.” Not much to look at, but a thunderbolt from her lips when caught by an able-bodied director.

What to See This Weekend: Battle Scars

“Transformers” (Michael Bay, 2007)

Available on M-Net Movies Action+ (DStv channel 106) on Sunday, 2 July, Thursday, 6 July, and Monday, 10 July; on ShowMax; on Google Play; on Microsoft; on Amazon Video; on iTunes; on DVD and as part of a DVD boxset.

As the fifth entry in Michael Bay’s Transformers film series holds consumers in thrall, readers of this blog are invited to revisit its earliest predecessor, simply Transformers, which recently enjoyed the 10^th anniversary of its theatrical release. Many other bloggers I read delight in taking cheap swipes at the blockbuster frenzy of Bay’s vulgar excesses, but I, like many other expectant moviegoers I know, never received the memorandum to deride the traditional forms of studio formula-tested tentpoles, nor the technological innovations of computer generated imagery, nor the primal thrill of blowing shit up. If you’ve seen a Transformers film, you’ll already know whether or not you can take what it’s giving, and, if not, this blog encourages you to try it out.

Bay links an intergalactic struggle, and our complacent obliviousness to it, to a far realer conflict that rages in the Middle East while a high school teenager tries to secure the affections of a girl. He glosses his traditionalist values (of family, civil liberties, and the troops) with a dazzling attention to detail, obsession with quality, and quick-witted tone of smooth dynamism. The cast he has gathered fills out his extravaganza with shining cinematic qualities and charisma (Shia LeBeouf, Tyrese Gibson, Josh Duhamel, Megan Fox, John Turturro, Jon Voight, and Bernie Mac all carry remarkable presence) and blend their moments with the special effects with an effortless fluidity that brings the fantasy to life. Leon van Nierop, in his somewhat positive review of the new film, describes the images as “assaulting every one of your senses”; I contend that they charm and engage your senses with an alluring swagger, as does the personality of their creator, which is illuminated clearly in every moment of the film’s 143 minutes.

In the Shadow of Camelot

“Jackie”

It may seem pointless to publish an entire post on a film that was released over two months ago and is now out of theatres, but Pablo Larraín’s Jackie was remarkable enough a film of 2017 for me to note it on this blog even after its run is finished. There were other films I watched and missed the chance to write about in the last few weeks, such as Fences and Hidden Figures (each of which has significant merit and appeal), but I found Jackie a particularly interesting and idiosyncratic work.

Since most readers who are interested in the film will already have seen it, and even those who haven’t are familiar to some degree with the real-life events it portrays, no plot summary or context is required of me here. Suffice it to remind you that it follows Jacqueline Kennedy (Natalie Portman) in the days from her husband’s murder to his funeral (plus a few flashbacks to before the murder, and a single day following the funeral), shown in hindsight, framed in a later interview of Jackie (as I’ll call the movie character to distinguish her from the real-life Jacqueline Kennedy) by an unnamed journalist (Billy Crudup). The story of the few days of arranging the funeral and Jackie’s life immediately afterwards is based in large part on the Life magazine interview by Theodore H. White, which is presumably what the fictionalised interview is meant to depict, or represent, as well as the deeper-probing interview with Arthur M. Schlesinger, which was only made public many years later. The flashbacks are taken from what we can guess about life in the Kennedy White House from the few public descriptions given of it by Mrs Kennedy, most famously in her 1962 televised tour of the White House.

Beauties and Beasts

“Moonlight”

Watching Barry Jenkins’s new feature film Moonlight is like being present at the very creation of the film – not just watching the scenes and performances being captured on camera, but witnessing the conception of it inside the director’s mind. He has filmed and presented it with such spontaneity, and with so thorough a transference of deep subjectivity, that, as François Truffaut once wrote of the films of Renoir, I had to watch it in a theatre a second time just to see if it would turn out the same way. Each shot we see is not merely the canny illustration of burning experiences being depicted and fierce emotions being expressed, but is itself the very expression of them, wrenched from the director’s mind, and arising naturally and spontaneously out of the situation of it being filmed and edited.

Take, for example, the scene playing about halfway through the middle of the film’s three chapters, in which the mother of the main character, Chiron, played by the remarkable British actor Naomie Harris, anxiously greets her son when he gets home one afternoon, and asks him for money (the implication is clear that it’s for more drugs, to feed her addiction). Jenkins has made clear in a large number of interviews and press statements that Harris’s character, Paula, as written by him and his co-writer Tarell Alvin McCraney and as filmed by him, is based in large part on his own mother. Her scenes in the film play with an especial and tremulous immediacy, and this particular one stands out for a peculiar visual invention as well – Jenkins, in the moment of filming the actor’s performance, got her to play it looking straight into the lens, and shot it at the higher rate of 48 frames per second. (Almost all video you see is shot at 24 frames a second; the heightened speed is a new industrial technological advance, notably used to shoot Peter Jackson’s recent Hobbit trilogy.) The result has the effect of an unnerving and rare proximity to the figure onscreen, intensifying her essence while simultaneously rendering it more opaque. Indeed, throughout the film, Harris’s performance is perhaps the most intricate (while Janelle Monáe takes the crown for distinctiveness, Trevante Rhodes for tender sensitivity, and Mahershala Ali for grandeur).

Dancers in the Dark

“La La Land”

La La Land is a ludicrous and a laborious film. It’s the work of Damien Chazelle, who previously gave us the grotesque sadomasochistic psychodrama Whiplash, and plays as ineptly on the subjects of music, musicians, art, and artistry as that earlier film did. Where the two leading figures in Whiplash were each a pile of clichés working tirelessly on performances of mediocre jazz numbers, the two leads in La La Land are empty shapes painted in bright artificial colours and emoting through unexceptional Broadway poperatic ballads. The film is explicitly a tribute to the plastic-coloured musical reveries that sprang up in the 50s and 60s, during the final great blast of energy at the death of the classical Hollywood system; a mixed bag of overt allusions is made to Singin’ in the Rain, Funny Face, Top Hat, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and other films. But Chazelle – though he works frightfully hard for it, and though that labour shows on the screen – does not have the sensibility of style and of wonder that made each of the works he obviously loves so memorable.

The trouble starts in the very first shot, which turns out to be a long tracking shot that appears to last for at least five minutes, right through the opening number, “Another Day of Sun”. In it, a traffic jam on a Los Angeles freeway turns into a song and dance routine. Drivers dressed in monochrome pastel colours jump out of and leap over their cars, mugging chaotically for the restless camera. A show is made of the tracking shot and how well-timed, well-placed, and well-coordinated are each of the dancers, yet the impression given is not of the geometric precision of sequences in classic musicals such as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes or 42^nd Street, but of the strenuous work and rehearsal that went into it. The dancers’ beaming smiles don’t evoke the joy of performance and of artifice, but preen at their technical achievement and conspicuous exertions. The self-satisfied multiculturalism of this opening scene feels contrived and then insulting as it yields to the whites-only love story of the film.

A Winter’s Tale

“Manchester by the Sea”

Kenneth Lonergan’s appreciation for and apprehension of music is made lustrously clear in his new family melodrama Manchester by the Sea. Not only does he movingly and thoughtfully use classic Baroque works by Handel and Albinoni (and the soothing tones of Ella Fitzgerald) to enhance his drama in certain scenes, but the very images through which he transmits that drama are carried by an inherent musical lilt. Lonergan is better known as a writer than a director – he is an accomplished playwright and, in addition to those of each of the three movies he directed himself, has written the scripts for other films, including Martin Scorsese’s epic Gangs of New York – but his artistry in directing this film (I have not yet seen You Can Count On Me and Margaret) is manifest and expansive. Beyond his mastery of the formally classical crafts and techniques he employs – his fixed compositions, broad establishing shots, clean movements, bright lighting, inconspicuous editing, credible dialogue and performances, definitive narrative structure, measured pace in unfolding the story, et cetera – there is a spark of ardour and originality to what we see on the screen, and it carries all the force of emotion and strength of substance that any film artist could bring to his or her work.

Manchester by the Sea stars Casey Affleck as the sullen handyman Lee Chandler in a large town in Massachusetts, just south of Boston, whose brother, Joe (Kyle Chandler), in the thrall of a chronic heart condition, suffers a heart attack and dies in their home town of Manchester-by-the-Sea, a few hours’ drive north along the coast. Lee is left with making all the arrangements for Joe’s funeral and afterwards, most importantly looking after his nephew, Patrick (Lucas Hedges). To Lee’s alarm, he learns that he has been designated Patrick’s guardian by Joe in his will; the prevailing crisis of the remainder of the plot is the tug between Lee, who is anxious to leave Manchester-by-the-Sea as soon as is proper, and Patrick, who is adamant that he will stay just where he is and continue his life in its current vein. Subsequent scenes survey the scope and dimensions of that vein: Patrick is comfortably set in a group of friends, the devoted lead guitarist of a comically earnest high school garage band, and is self-satisfied in the attention he draws from his prettier classmates, including Sandy (Anna Baryshnikov) and Silvie (Kara Hayward, Hedges’s entrancing costar in Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom).

Hell on Earth

“Hacksaw Ridge”

I’m given to understand that Mel Gibson is a rather devout Roman Catholic, and, if I were to judge that before this month from the only movie he has directed that I’d seen, I’d quite believe it. Besides anything else a viewer may say about it – and millions of viewers have had their say and much more – The Passion of the Christ looks to me like a sincere article of the ardent faith of a genuine believer. The finer details of that doctrine can’t really be discerned from the film, and probably shouldn’t be surmised from Gibson’s regrettable personal statements and actions, but there is one thing we were all made absolutely sure of by The Passion of the Christ, in ways that would never let us forget it: In Gibson’s worldview, human faith (of the kind he practices) and brutal violence are indissolubly linked in the immense suffering that each causes mankind. For Gibson, as necessary and rewarding as it is, faith brings tribulation and its force is met with a proportional ferocity in the violence (physical or psychological) one inevitably encounters.

As repellently violent as The Passion of the Christ is, Gibson managed to illustrate quite effectively the broader points of that worldview. His narrative, rather than demonstrating anti-Semitic biases, paints all humans (except his main character, of course) as inherently sinful, guilty, unworthy of God’s favour, and deserving of harsh punishment for their sins, which brings about a blazing contrast with the grace and mercy of Jesus, who undergoes just the kind of horrific scenes of torment and agony that grip Gibson’s imagination – and reinforce his ideas of man’s sinful nature – to deliver a remorseless human race from an even more remorseless judgement. With this kind of narrative underpinning the central doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church, it isn’t surprising that such tight bonds are drawn by so many Catholic artists between the notions of faith, guilt, and suffering, nor that the personal expression of Gibson’s religious convictions turned out as so off-putting to such large numbers of viewers. His obvious sincerity, allegiance to doctrine, and determination to cinematically represent those ideas explain its enormous success among equally large numbers of viewers.

The Year in Movies – 2016

2016 was not an excellent year for this blog. It’s not because I didn’t see many movies that I loved – on the contrary, I saw some of the greatest movies of my life, and a fair volume of them – but, due to a growing number of more pressing priorities, my duties on The Back Row were neglected, and I didn’t get the chance to share those elated experiences here.

Just about everyone else on the planet has already released their round-ups of 2016, and I’ve had a look at each of the movie pundits’ choices for the top films of the year. The results have fortified my conviction that the best thing for cinematic tastes to be is unruly and uninhibited. What one first notices looking through these lists is that many films are being hailed in London and New York that we haven’t had the faintest whiff of yet in South Africa; this is just a distribution and scheduling discrepancy. But what one notices next is that, besides a few differences in ranking and an oddball choice here and there, pundits and mainstream media critics are making all the same choices for their favourite films, and those choices converge closer and closer each year. One is led to believe that many critics are just as susceptible to hype as mass audiences are, only their hype is generated at film festivals and press conferences, instead of being stoked by trailers and supplementary merchandising.

What struck me while I surveyed these consensus choices on the masses of lists and polls (which I’ve compiled for you at the bottom of this post) is that the objects of this hype so rarely align with what I would consider commendable artistic achievements. Few lists contain more than a single film that I loved, and many don’t contain even one. It’s not a huge surprise to me; I read the reviews of my favourite movies throughout the year as I saw them, and saw quite quickly that the movies in which one viewer locates rapture and daring, many others find only confusion and obscurity. What I consider the greatest film of 2016 – Terrence Malick’s Hollywood reverie Knight of Cups – was designated “rotten” on the website Rotten Tomatoes (as useless a cultural phenomenon as any website could be) with a score of 45%, and Woody Allen’s crime comedy Irrational Man scored 44%. In terms of mainstream movie releases, not many people went to see either of those two films, and not many that did loved them. This in itself doesn’t discourage me – Malick and Allen have long been working in ways that don’t rely on commercial success and critical adulation, and their careers will continue without hindrance – but it is dismaying to see how many people think a movie must be good just because of the number and stations of others who say that it is. True appreciation of the cinema, just as success in the various realms of one’s life, depends on your capacity for imagination and independence of thought.

Lost in Space

“Passengers”

Having been introduced to 2016’s sci-fi scene with Dennis Villeneuve’s Arrival – a shamelessly manipulative, undistinguished rumination on how we should think beyond our paradigms, and work peacefully together towards common ends – and having seen only The Imitation Game from the same director – which I found to be both pretty dull and grossly prejudicial and narrow-minded – I dreaded Morten Tyldum’s next film, Passengers, set in space in the near future and starring Hollywood leads Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt. I can now report that dread is not the appropriate or required response to the film; however, nor are relief, elation, wonder, applause, thrill, or just plain pleasure. Passengers is more interesting than Arrival: the sentimentality is hard earned, rather than cheap, and the melodrama has a solid base, rather than being base itself. But the main event of the plot – i.e., the action that sets off the questions of who did what to whom and why, of which the trailer offers no hints, and which I won’t be giving away here – and the ethics it entails are so repellent that it’s difficult to imagine any serious endorsement of the film, despite its few merits and strengths.

Tyldum shows himself here to be a master of technical film-making; every scene – every shot, in fact – works perfectly to illustrate the progression of the narrative, the frames of mind of the characters, the implications of the action, the stakes and risks of the choices at hand, and the time and place of each moment within the setting of the film. Pratt and Lawrence hit their emotional markers like bull’s-eyes, rendering the emotional state of their characters with maximum clarity, and precisely marking the characters’ turns within a scene from one emotion to the next as the plot points are reached and developed. Michael Sheen, who plays a bar-tending robot of advanced artificial intelligence, manages an uncanny blend of calculated humanistic warmth and calibrated casualness in delivering lines that were ingeniously devised by the film-makers as just what a bar-tender that runs on gears and algorithms would say to a customer. The script, by Jon Spaihts, is painstakingly designed to withhold and reveal information at just the right moments, to effectively and efficiently envelop you in the characters’ backgrounds, and to move the plot at paces alternating between coherently brisk and romantically deliberate. The angles and editing give well conceived and full views of the action in each scene: what goes where, what’s coming towards whom, what the imminent dangers are, and how everything is positioned in relation to everything else. I was reminded of 2015’s popular action film Mad Max: Fury Road, so rationally and coherently filmed that you could plot a detailed map from the consecutive shots.

The Conjuring

“Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them”

The keenly anticipated prequel to J.K. Rowling’s hefty private school saga begins with shrieking newspaper headlines, indicating shock and distress on the part of the wizarding world’s media intelligentsia. If there were a more fitting outset to a blockbuster opening worldwide in November 2016, I can’t think what it could be. In a society whose politics and culture coil closer together and intrude more abruptly on one another each passing day, it’s impossible for the mainstream media not to reflect itself and its hysterias more frequently, however unconsciously this is done. The effect is heightened by the fact that the script for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, unlike each of its Harry Potter predecessors, was written by Mme. Rowling herself, a prominent personality both in popular culture and, increasingly, in political discourse. One highly doubts she’d ever pass up the opportunity to weave her own hot take on current events into a major Hollywood feature.

And one would be proven right when one sees the film. Rowling is a first-time movie writer, and the film language she employs is not so much richly symbolic or ironic, as it would be in a high allegory, as it is plainly metaphoric. One sees what she means and respects her right to say it, sensing that one is hearing blunt parables and moralistic fables during a bourgeois dinner party discussion rather than watching the creations of a potent imagination, committed to celluloid and projected in a dark theatre for expectant thrill-seekers.

The studies on racial discrimination and class struggles in the wizarding world, and how it parallels our own, became tedious somewhere in the middle of the Harry Potter film series, and reached a grand summit of banality with the fascist iconography and rhetoric in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I. Not quite satisfied that the full potential of the subject was fulfilled, Rowling has elected to focus the central struggle of her new series on the same issue. In this film and the four that shall follow it, the main villain is a nasty wizard named Grindelwald (you’ll have heard of him briefly in the two Deathly Hallow films), once again bent on exalting the pureblood wizarding race over all non-magical people, and bringing the wizarding world out of hiding, if only so that it can entrench and lord over a muggle underclass. How is he different from Lord Voldemort, then, you may ask. For one thing, he’s a properly formed human being, with suitably Aryan platinum-blond hair, instead of a contoured, serpentine English Patient; for another, speculation and rumours abound that Grindelwald is the feverish former lover of Professor Albus Dumbledore. Merlin’s beard! One awaits with a new avidity Dumbledore’s familiar injunction: “Wands out!”

Going Nowhere Slowly

“Everybody Wants Some!!”

The magnificent Oscar Wilde remarked that “the condition of perfection is idleness: the aim of perfection is youth.” I suspect it may be a little dangerous to kick off with Wilde after ending my last post the same way, but, as that great tutor and hero of mine also teaches, nothing that is not dangerous is worthy of our time. If the director Richard Linklater is adept in the trade of anything at all, it is idleness, and if the direction of his limpid though wistful gaze were to be measured, its targets can be none other than youth and verve. Don’t mistake me for judging Linklater’s films to be perfection – his fellow Texans Terrence Malick and Wes Anderson show that there is room yet for expansion in Linklater’s accomplishments – but I put it that Linklater has shown himself to be a great and valuable artist of our time. My assertion is unequivocal, and any possible equivocation would be brought on only by the presence of Linklater’s work itself: Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight make up an exasperating triptych of tedious moralising and rationalising, and Boyhood lingers in my mind in a haze of fusty sentimentality; but the vigourous pleasures of School of Rock, the shocking force of affection for both his subjects and his art that breezes through the director’s masterpiece Bernie, and now the quintessence of youth examined in the midst of a most dynamic idleness – Linklater’s new film, Everybody Wants Some!! – are enough to persuade me of his inordinate value as a modern film-maker and visionary artist.

The disparities in artistic value between these two groups of Linklater’s work – with his more overtly naturalist and apparently personal films on one side of the divide and his more synthetic and imaginary films (the real life roots of Bernie notwithstanding) on the other – is due, I feel, to an inconsistent approach to the artifice of cinema when confronting different types of content. When portraying a story of a seemingly more personal origin, Linklater aims for a naturalistic mode of representation, hoping to convey it with the perception that his portrayal matches up to how the events and conversations may well look and feel in reality. But his naturalism virtually reeks of the long calculation and meticulous rehearsal that went into it, leaving me with the sense of simulated and false emotions and experiences, rather than verifiable and credibly authentic ones.

Teen Queens

“G.B.F.”

Is it not a precious commodity to have a gay best friend? Those who have one may well inform you that it is; it’s not altogether commonplace nor inconsequential for one’s close associate to pass entirely truthful and helpful criticism on one’s appearance, social operations, endeavours of humour, navigations of sexual operations, linguistic agility, assertions of style, photographic aptitude, and overall personal flair, all in a swirling fusion of affectionate compliments and cutting slurs, sitting at a bitchiness quotient (BQ) of well over 120 – using standard metric measurements, of course. This is given its distinguishing twist in the fact that one either flourishes on this associate’s advice eternally safe from their resentment if one is female, or eternally safe from their competition in the sexual marketplace if one is male (as ever in the movies, “gay” refers exclusively to homosexual males). To such privileged individuals, it must seem that those without this kind of connection must either be woefully ignorant of its benefits, or just not trying damn well hard enough to acquire it. The high school comedy G.B.F., by the openly gay director Darren Stein, agrees on the value of this commodity, and hopes to show viewers that neither its price nor its potential worth are to be underestimated. As with any friendship, it must be worked for to really mean anything, and once earned the returns yielded are considerable and rewarding.

Tanner Daniels (Michael J. Willett) and Brent Van Camp (Paul Iacono) are two gay guys in their last year of high school, closeted from everyone except each other and two close friends (whose names evade me). Brent, being the more brazen of the two, plans to come out in a dazzling display of gay alacrity at the school prom, catapulting him from his current status as low-profile comic book geek to sought after bestie and prominent entourage member – a g.b.f. is touted as the new must-have in all the film’s teenage girls’ magazines, and lively competition is sure to break out among the most popular female students in order to win the allegiance of the only gay in sight.

A Rocky Picture Show

“A Bigger Splash”

During June – the month of Pride, LGBT-and-otherwise – this blog is meant to be devoted to the discussion of queer cinema, though nearly halfway through the month I’ve not published a single post on a film featuring a queer character. This post, alas, continues this evading pattern, containing my reaction to the new genre hybrid work now playing at Cinema Nouveau, A Bigger Splash, which features four promiscuous (thought heterosexually so) and wilful Anglophone figures, on an uneasy holiday on some small Italian island halfway between the mainland and Africa. And yet I feel as though the film could count in some way as being the first queer film of the month, because its tone – emotionally restive, and simultaneously sensual – its sensibility – dissolute and Eurocentric – and its substance – sexual mischief, shifting romantic allegiances, artists and their personal lives, and a tangle of friendships and partnerships and rivalries – all call to mind what one might call the orthodoxy of contemporary queer cinema, and are fleshed out copiously with the supple, shimmering flesh of its four stars, three of them staples of the independent cinema, and the fourth freshly powdered and re-strapped after appearing on our screens in the largest BDSM romantic fantasy adaptation of all  time. Hardly the mode of straight cinema that may be endorsed by, say, Focus on the Family.

Marianne Lane (Tilda Swinton) is a rock star, accompanied on her island holiday by her boyfriend of six years, Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts), a photographer. They’re dropped in on unexpectedly by an old friend, Harry (Ralph Fiennes), who brings along a hitherto unknown-of daughter, named Penelope (Dakota Johnson). Harry is a nightmare of zealous back-slapping bonhomie, virtually vomiting words from his arrival until his departure; at one point he mentions the literal translation of the Italian term for someone with verbal diarrhoea: “one who shits sentences,” but fails to connect it to himself. This is neatly, soothingly counterbalanced by Marianne’s muteness, in the wake of a serious ailment and subsequent surgery on her voice. She points out what she wants, and waves her arms in protest for things she doesn’t want, and Paul tenderly takes care of her every need. The two of them have developed a far more nuanced system of communication, and their quick, telling glances at one another and minute, spontaneous touches and other signals reach a vulnerable intensity, rivalling and often surpassing in exuberance Harry’s incessant monologues. The director, Luca Gaudagnino, permits us to see and understand as much as Paul does of what Marianne has to say, lending Swinton’s performance a most elegant and vital grace.