Tag: movies

Review: Judas and the Black Messiah

betrayal

Judas and the Black MessiahThe movie Judas and the Black Messiah was the finest of the Best Picture nominees for this year’s Oscars. It presents a piece of American history that has either been forgotten or, more likely, heavily distorted.

Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya) was chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party and deputy chairman of the national BPP. In this capacity, he founded the Rainbow Coalition and “an alliance among major Chicago street gangs to help them end infighting and work for social change.”

FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (Martin Sheen) considered Hampton a threat to decency in America and wanted him surveilled from the inside. Enter Bill O’Neal (LaKeith Stanfield), a con man captured by the feds. Under the direction of his FBI handler Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons), Bill infiltrates the Panthers and gets close to Fred.

The two leads were nominated for Oscars, oddly both as supporting actors. They are excellent, as is the rest of the cast. Kaluuya imbues the charisma Hampton must have possessed at such a young age, 21 at the end of the film. Even though I knew how the story resolved, I was tense throughout.

It’s impossible to totally separate the movie from the events, not only of the late 1960s but the early 2020s. s one reviewer noted, “Although the events occurred so long ago, the ramifications that they led to are clearly still being felt in the US.”

Think Christian

Two months before I saw the movie, I read an article in Think Christian called Judas (Iscariot) and the Black Messiah. “The Bible’s Judas and history’s Bill O’Neal share more than a record of betrayal.”

The premise is this: “Eyes worn, bloodshot, and on the brink of tears, the disciple looks his teacher in the eye and performs his final act of betrayal.” It’s an emotional strain to be a rat in an organization built on loyalty and discipline.

“Though drawn from the final scene between Bill… and Fred…, the fact that this description could fit an imaginative retelling of Judas Iscariot and Jesus illustrates the unique impact of the film.

“A tense and stunning historical drama, Judas and the Black Messiah explores a neglected moment in our national history. At the same time, it presents a fresh angle on the complex weight of guilt, especially if we consider the interpretive interplay between Stanfield’s O’Neal and the biblical Judas.

“The film’s Judas figure—and the way Stanfield embodies guilt—help us think about the biblical Judas and vice versa, with a call to contemplate the Judas tendencies that lurk within us.” And I think Stanfield reflects that pain.

The story was written by identical twin brothers Kenny and Keith Lucas, along with Will Berson and Shaka King. Berson wrote the screenplay with King, who also directed.

Highly recommended.

Movie review: Promising Young Woman

director/writer Emerald Fennell

Promising Young WomanPromising Young Woman is a movie I was wary of watching. But from the beginning, it rang with a level of truth. Three guys are at a bar complaining about women in the workplace. This conversation I’ve heard about quite a bit.

Cassie (Carey Mulligan) is the title character. She has a dead-end day job at a coffee shop run by one of her few friends, Gail (Laverne Cox). At night, she hangs out at bars with a surprising plan. She has a stare that will shut up construction workers.

It takes a while for the audience to understand why this clearly intelligent and clever woman, turning 30, is still living at home with her parents, Stanley (Clancy Brown) and Susan (Jennifer Coolidge).

Then she meets Ryan (Bo Burnham), a charming former classmate with seemingly endless patience. They seem to have a real connection as they dance through the pharmacy.

Still, there are wrongs to be righted, including the big one. The movie also stars Alison Brie, Alfred Molina, Connie Britton, and Chris Lowell.

Er, ah…

I have no idea how to write more about this without massive spoilers. This I’ll say: for something described to me as a rape-revenge fantasy, I thought it was surprisingly sweet and funny in parts. The music is important to the storyline. It certainly uniquely addressed #MeToo.

And I loved the ending, even if it was too tidy. In a couple of big-time spoiler articles, NPR hated the ending but Vox loved it.

The movie title, BTW, was a reference to Brock Turner. The Stanford swimmer received a six-month sentence for rape, serving half of it because he was, in the words of the judge, a “promising young man.”

This is the debut feature film for director/writer Emerald Fennell, and she was nominated for an Oscar in both categories. She’s written for the TV series Killing Eve and has acting credits, including playing Camilla Parker Bowles in The Crown. She also has an uncredited cameo in Promising Young Woman as a how-to video guru.

This is a polarizing film. I’m sure there will be people who will hate it. 91% of the critics in Rotten Tomatoes were positive. The negative reviews used words like “stylised to the point of styrofoam flatness” (stylized, yes); and a “polemic” (probably). Even those hating the film often praised Carey Mulligan.

I rented the film on Amazon Prime.

Movie review: Minari (Lee Isaac Chung)

Yuh-Jung Youn

MinariMinari is the first movie I’ve seen with another human being in over a year, in this case with my wife. It was a nice date night in front of the television.

It’s your basic American dream story, set in 1980s America. Except that the family is Korean and they have moved to rural Arkansas. More correctly, the father Jacob (Steven Yeun) really wants the dream. His wife Monica (Yeri Han) is not sold on the plan, especially when she first sees her new home. Yet she wants to support his plans to start a farm, selling vegetables. Part of the story arc is this tension.

And they’ve traveled all that way with their two kids, the daughter Anne (Noel Kate Cho), who is almost a second mother to her younger brother David (Alan S. Kim), who has a heart condition.

The most interesting relationship, though, is between David and his maternal grandmother Soonja (Yuh-Jung Youn). She was ostensibly brought in so that Anne wouldn’t be so lonely. But David finds her foul-mouthed ways unbecoming of a grandmother. She does know a lot about minari, a type of water celery, and how to grow it.

The audience summary for Minari in Rotten Tomatoes says to “prepare for an ambiguous ending.” I didn’t find it unclear at all. Perhaps the movie sagged just before that. I would agree that “this is a beautifully filmed blend of comedy and drama, brought to life by a wonderful cast playing well-written characters.”

Drawing on his childhood

Much of the credit for that goes to writer/director Lee Isaac Chung, who mined elements of his own growing up. I saw him in one recent interview, he was going to have to find a “real” job if this movie didn’t work out.

It has, of course, “worked out.” It’s been nominated for six Oscars, including Best Motion Picture of the Year. Steven Yeun is the first Asian-American and the first person of East Asian descent to be nominated as Best Actor. Chung was nominated for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. Emile Mosseri is up for Best Original Score.

Unsurprisingly, Yuh-Jung Youn has been Oscar-nominated as Best Supporting Actress. She’s already won the Screen Actors Guild and BAFTA awards. The role is a hoot.

It is a small film, a quiet film. Not a lot happens, and most of what does is often supplied by Jacob’s most peculiar friend Paul (Will Patton). The movie uses subtitles, but so much of the dialogue is expressed in gestures and facial expressions that one almost doesn’t need them.

I liked Minari quite a bit. If I wasn’t wowed by it might be that I fell into that dreadful “buzz” effect. “This is Oscar-nominated?” In normal times, I might have seen it, and in a movie theater, before the awards season. Ah, well.

Movie review: Another Round

tragicomedy

Another RoundThe premise of the film Another Round involves the lives of four male teachers in Denmark. They have all become rather prosaic in their teaching, and for at least some of them, in their lives.

Perhaps they need to engage in an experiment. Someone noted that Norwegian psychiatrist Finn Skårderud claimed that human beings are actually experiencing a Blood Alcohol Content (BAC) shortfall of 0.05%. (The legal limit before being intoxicated in NYS is 0.08%.)

Sure enough, small doses of booze make them more creative educators. Martin (Mads Mikkelsen) riffs with imaginative dialogues with his history students about Churchill, FDR, and Hitler, making them think. Tommy (Thomas Bo Larsen) becomes an inspired tactician of the elementary school soccer team so that even the least likely player shines.

As social scientists, would it not require them to engage in more analysis to discover the optimum BAC for productivity? Naturally. And eventually, things go awry. It isn’t just the work that had become routine. Early on, Martin asked his wife Trine (Maria Bonnevie), “Have I become boring?”

Best International Feature Film nomination

Another Round is described in Rotten Tomatoes as a comedy/drama or a tragicomedy, and that’s about right. The educators made a pact as though they were teenagers in a buddy movie. And their early success is appealing. Generally speaking, these are engaging characters.

They have been hiding depression and/or a mid-life crisis. I don’t think the movie makes light of the drinking. They do delude themselves, though. “We’re not alcoholics,” says Nikolaj (Magnus Millang) “We decide when we want to drink. An alcoholic can’t help himself.”

Thomas Vinterberg, who also co-wrote the screenplay, was the only Oscar-nominated director this year whose film was NOT nominated for Best Picture. Another Round WAS nominated for Best International Feature Film, formerly Best Foreign Film. The film is in Danish with subtitles. The working title was Drunk, which would have been misleading.

I saw this on Hulu in my desperate dash to see as many films during the free trial as possible. I enjoyed this film, probably more than I expected to.

Time: movie documentary review

60 years

Time amazon-documentaryTime is a black and white documentary film put together by the New York Times’ Op Doc folks, which I saw on Amazon Prime. It starts out as a series of snippets of home videos by Fox Rich, about her and her husband Rob, pursuing their American dream to start a clothing store.

Then things went south, financially. We discover Rob and a cousin decide to rob a bank, with Fox as the getaway driver. They are caught and both are given jail time. Fox, who was pregnant with twin boys, received a few years. But Rob got 60 years, without a chance of parole.

So the bulk of the film is about Fox trying to make sure her six sons remember their father while working unceasingly over two decades to get her husband out of prison. As the tag suggests, “this bears witness to the power of one woman to overcome seemingly insurmountable odds with the aid of her faith and family.”

Time was one of fifteen films that were considered in the “Documentary Feature category for the 93rd Academy Awards. Two hundred thirty-eight films were eligible in the category. Members of the Documentary Branch vote to determine the shortlist and the nominees.”

I’ll admit that it took me a while to see where the film was going. Once I picked up on the narrative direction, I found it fascinating and inspiring.

On Rotten Tomatoes, it received 98% positive reviews from the critics. But only 46% of the general audience felt the same. And I understand why, I believe.

This is NOT a story about persons falsely accused. These people clearly did the crime. Ought not they do the time? Perhaps. But 60 years?

Why is life so complicated?

Here’s a paragraph from an IMDB review from ferguson 6, 7 out of 10 stars. “There are some mixed messages delivered here, which is understandable given how complicated life can get. Perhaps the most vivid message is the impact incarceration has on a family.

“Fox is an extraordinary woman devoted to raising her sons as strong and smart young men. But she also decries that her boys have never had a father and don’t even know the role one plays. While Fox displays the ultimate in polite phone decorum despite her frustrations with an uncaring, inefficient system, we do see her sincerity as she stands in front of her church congregation asking for forgiveness of her poor choices.”

If you watch Time, please be patient. It probably won’t grab you at the outset. It’s only over the course of the film that you get to see the effect that  lengthy incarceration has on a family.

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