With this entry in my 100 Essential Films series, I’m now a tenth of the way through the list. (If you missed the first one, you can find the explanation for what I’m doing here.) At this rate, I should be finishing the project up sometime around 2039… As Jack Nicholson once said, “So much to do, and so little time.”
Film number ten is a movie about the Great Depression made while it was still very much happening. Although FDR’s New Deal policies had started to turn things around in America, the country had not yet entered World War II in 1940, and the economic precarity of a huge swath of the American people (as I note in the review, the more things change, the more they stay the same) was the main concern of the country.
The novel The Grapes of Wrath is one of my favorite books of all time. I was introduced to it by one of the best teachers I had in high school, Terry Taylor, who taught American History. I’m happy to say that the movie mostly does the book justice. For this screening, I rented Wrath through Amazon Prime. The transfer looks great; Gregg Toland’s beautiful black-and-white cinematography is stunning. He shot the movie a year before his seminal work on Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane.
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Prince Akeem has a problem. When he becomes King of Zamunda, he’s troubled by the centuries-old tradition of his kingdom which dictates that only a male heir can inherit the throne. Akeem has three daughters and no sons. Luckily for Akeem (and the movie), it is revealed that he does in fact have a male heir, albeit an illegitimate one, living in America. Unfortunately for us, Coming 2 America leans on an outmoded story of Akeem being desperate to cement his legacy through his son, only to make an enlightened realization, in the movie’s final minutes, about his daughters. (This barely counts as a spoiler, since it’s painfully obvious what’s coming within the first fifteen minutes of the movie.) It’s a story that might have felt progressive had it been made in 1988, the same year this sequel’s original installment was released.
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The fatal flaw of documentarian Errol Morris’s latest film, My Psychedelic Love Story, can be summed up in one quote from the movie’s subject, Joanna Harcourt-Smith. At one point during an interview, Harcourt-Smith is relating that one of her lovers died. She says that she felt like the man was killed, then immediately follows up that assertion by saying, “You know, don’t ask me for any proof.” If that caveat doesn’t bother you, then you’ll most likely enjoy My Psychedelic Love Story. If you enjoy listening to someone spin conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory without being bothered to offer the slightest shred of evidence to corroborate any of it, Harcourt-Smith’s tale will be a wild, irresistible ride. If, like me, the prospect of listening to a string of unrelated stories so outlandish that they might have come straight from a QAnon message board makes you want to tear out your hair, avoid Morris’s movie at all costs.
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Judas and the Black Messiah is like a drink of water after days in the desert. It exists and was made to upend the kind of fascistic patriotism that demagogues like Donald Trump and the recently departed Rush Limbaugh wallow in like so many pigs in shit. While their ilk pushes a cretinous version of history that worships power and the violence that flows from that power, truth-tellers like director Shaka King and screenwriters Will Berson and the Lucas brothers are making art that exposes state-sanctioned terror.
King has also made a riveting morality tale about loyalty and betrayal within a revolutionary movement. His picture is incendiary and features performances from two of the best actors working today, Daniel Kaluuya and Lakeith Stanfield. Kaluuya and Stanfield’s performances couldn’t be more different, but they are both wonders to behold, each in their own way.
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Director Chloé Zhao’s inspired blurring of truth and fiction in her newest film Nomadland reveals an emotional truth about the American spirit that is more profound than even the most probing documentary could capture. Her movie, in its own quiet way, celebrates the beauty and grandeur of American western landscapes and the human desire to drink them in, much like Sean Penn’s Into the Wild. It also documents, like a modern-day Grapes of Wrath, the crushing poverty that forced these beauty-seekers on the road in the first place. It’s the blending of these two aesthetics that make Nomadland such a delicate treasure.
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It’s an exciting, confusing, and scary time to be a film lover. Director Steve McQueen has decided to hasten the blurring of the already very fuzzy line between cinema and television with his Small Axe anthology of films. He’s done it with the help of a global pandemic. McQueen began working on the idea for Small Axe as early as 2010, and he had the project in some form of development since 2012. Originally conceived as a more conventional television series for the BBC, McQueen realized that he had enough material to make five distinct, standalone movies.
When the premier of the first picture in the series, Mangrove, was cancelled because of the 2020 Cannes film festival shutdown in the spring, due to COVID, the director decided to try a hybrid approach to distribution. Small Axe would run on BBC One, as originally planned, but it was also featured in the fall at the virtually held 2020 New York Film Festival. The film community got a collective case of the vapors trying to decide how to classify Small Axe. Is it television? Is it cinema? After seeing Mangrove – and being highly anxious to visit the rest of the films in the series – I am coming down firmly in the camp of, “when the movie is this damn compelling and well-made, who the hell cares what you call it?”
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The emotional exuberance of Minari is exemplified in a scene midway through the film. The Korean-American Yi family have made their way to rural Arkansas from California. The father, Jacob, has bought a huge plot of land with the dream of starting a farm in order to grow Korean vegetables to sell in surrounding urban centers with large Korean immigrant populations. He will save money by digging his own well for irrigation, avoiding using the county water supply or paying an exorbitant fee to a local “water dowser” who promises to be able to divine a water source using his dowsing rod. Jacob is skeptical at best, believing the man is little more than a con artist.
Instead, Jacob uses his brain, explaining to his five-year-old son David that water is likely to be in a down-hill location, close to trees. They pick the most likely spot and start to dig. When they hit water, Jacob yells in triumph at his success. Little David mimics his father. The two go back and forth shouting at the top of their lungs in celebration. It’s an ecstatic moment for the Yis and for us.
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The North Texas Film Critics Association (NTFCA), of which I am a member, voted last month to honor the best films of 2020. As an organization, the NTFCA is proud to call attention to outstanding achievements in the craft of filmmaking. I consider movies to be not only entertainment, but in the best examples, they are also art. They teach us about the human condition. Here are the winners for each category in which we voted:
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I put off publishing my top ten films list this year by a little over a month. I’ve had a very strict deadline in years past of publishing this list on the anniversary of starting my website (December 20th). But this year has been like no other, at least that I’ve lived through. So, as I ended my sixth year of writing film criticism, because I was tired, and because I wanted to squeeze a few more films in before I made the list, I held off.
I’m glad I did…
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Direct cinema documentarian Frederick Wiseman’s 46th feature film is called, simply, City Hall. It chronicles the workings of the local government of a great American city, Boston, Massachusetts. Shot during the fall of 2018 and the winter of 2019, Wiseman and his crew give us glimpses into Boston Mayor Martin Walsh’s administration and examines in incredible detail what makes a city run.
Over the course of its 4.5-hour runtime, we witness moments like Walsh giving a state of the city address, city employees holding a meeting about reducing evictions, and garbage collectors tossing waste into the maw of a garbage truck. It might sound mundane – much of the film is devoted to presentations by city employees and city meetings in which people troubleshoot issues – yet in Wiseman’s expert hands, it’s anything but.
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“Power just means a world where we’re safe to be ourselves.”
That’s a quote in the film One Night in Miami… from the character Muhammad Ali – more accurately, Cassius Clay, as the story takes place on the eve of the legendary boxer converting to Islam and changing his name. What power means to the Black community, and the best way to obtain it, is the preoccupation of both the film and the four iconic real-life figures at its center. The movie is all about power, both in the Black community and among these four characters, who would all shape the world in their own ways. It’s a gripping character study that addresses the ongoing struggle of the Black movement to secure that basic sense of safety that Ali is talking about.
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I’m taking a little time off, but instead of going silent, I’m publishing something I wrote a few months ago for a pop culture writing class I took last fall. You’ll probably notice that it seems a little dated (because the world we are living in seems to change dramatically every week or two), but I don’t think it’s so dated that it’s not still relevant. A few of the facts and figures are old, but I added one parenthetical aside that addresses the momentous, awful events of this week. Please enjoy, and please be kind to each other. I’ll be back next Friday with a new review.
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I’m doing something a little different with this review. My wife, Rae, felt so strongly about Promising Young Woman when we finished watching it together that she felt compelled to write about it. I thought it would be cool to get a male and female perspective, for this movie especially. Whenever I write about a movie that focuses on a historically oppressed class of people, I try to seek out someone in that particular group to give me feedback before I publish, to make sure my white, straight, cis, male point-of-view isn’t causing me to write insensitive or unintentionally ignorant things. For this review, I’m including the entire perspective in the form of Rae’s review. I hope you enjoy the experiment. Please let us know what you think in the comments section!
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Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is destined to be remembered as the final screen appearance of the immensely talented, gone-way-too-soon Chadwick Boseman. The actor, who died in August of 2020 at the age of 43, from colon cancer, is absolutely electric in the roll of Levee Green, a trumpet player in the titular character’s band. Boseman’s performance is a testament to his formidable acting abilities and a stinging reminder of what we’ve all lost.
Aside from Boseman’s performance, there are numerous other pieces of the puzzle that make Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom a superb, taut, devastating film. The formidable presence of Viola Davis, as Ma Rainey, is one. The assured direction of George C. Wolfe is another. The powerful words and ideas of playwright August Wilson is one more.
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There’s a tradeoff made when producing an authorized work of art examining the life and career of a famous person. The documentary Zappa, which focuses on the life and times of musician, filmmaker, and iconoclast Frank Zappa, makes that tradeoff with mostly successful results. Director Alex Winter – an actor who moonlights as Bill S. Preston, Esq. in the Bill and Ted movies – had full access to Zappa’s extensive personal archives for his film. The extensive amount of concert video, behind-the-scenes home-movie footage, and interview archives allow Winter to paint a portrait of Zappa – who died from prostate cancer in 1993 – that feels exhaustive and intimate.
The danger with authorized biographies is the risk for them to slip into hagiography. The biographer might smooth over some of the rough edges of a subject in an effort to keep in the good graces of those offering the unfettered access. Zappa doesn’t shy away from some of its subject’s negative qualities. We learn about Zappa’s serial philandering and his tendency to treat his musical collaborators like props who only existed to fulfil his vision. There are darker strains to Zappa’s work, though, that Winter fails to explore. The enfant terrible creative genius, who used satire and comedy in his music to great effect, often incorporated sexist-bordering-on-misogynistic lyrics and racist cultural appropriation into his art. Winter looks the other way from all this, and his film suffers for it.
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“You cannot capture a man’s entire life in two hours. All you can hope is to leave the impression.”
So says Herman J. Mankiewicz early in the biopic about his greatest professional achievement, writing the screenplay for Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. In Mank, that’s precisely what director David Fincher does with Mankiewicz. Here was a man of principle, Fincher shows us. Here was a man of character. Here was a drunk, an inveterate gambler, but above all, here was a man with an absolute conviction in what he believed.
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There are two bravura sequences in director Brandon Cronenberg’s waking nightmare of a film, Possessor. Brandon, the son of legendary horror director David Cronenberg, proves with Possessor, his second feature after 2012’s Antiviral, that he’s up to taking on the family business: creating mind-bending cinema centered around queasy body-horror special effects.
Possessor follows Tasya Vos, a contract killer who works for a company with a revolutionary process for carrying out its assignments. Vos is a possessor; using the company’s technology, her consciousness is implanted in a host body to do the killing. After each hit, Vos is pulled out of the host body, leaving that poor soul to deal with the consequences of a murder that he or she had no choice in committing.
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The uninspired comedy Buffaloed takes a handful of gags and uses them over and over again to fill its feature length. The way the locals of Buffalo, NY speak is one of those gags. They way they look is another. And that’s really about it. The classic film Fargo also pokes fun at the way its characters speak. But there’s so much more under the surface of that film. Buffaloed is a one-note comedy that ends up feeling disposable.
Set in Buffalo, NY, the debt-collection capital of the world, Peggy Dahl is determined to be successful and break out of the chain of poverty in which she was raised. Her father died when she was very young, and her mother pays the bills (just barely) by running an unlicensed beauty salon out of her house. (Ten cent wing night at the local bar – this is Buffalo, remember – helped keep Peg and her brother fed on their mother’s tight budget when they were growing up.)
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Even if Sound of Metal weren’t one of the best, most emotionally pulverizing cinema experiences of the year, the outstanding lead performance from Riz Ahmed would be reason enough to praise the film. The English actor/rapper/activist’s incredibly rich performance comes down to the level of interiority that Ahmed is able to convey to us. Through nuanced looks and gestures, most often conveyed with no words at all, Ahmed accomplishes with his character, Ruben, one of the most noble goals of the arts: the ability of the audience to truly see the world through someone else’s eyes.
Ruben Stone is a drummer in the two-piece metal band Blackgammon. His romantic and artistic partner, Lou (short for Louise), plays guitar and sings. A recovering heroin addict, Ruben is faced with a life-upending situation when he suddenly and almost completely loses his hearing due to the nightly abuse of Blackgammon’s metal shows.
It’s a simple setup – almost high-concept: the elevator pitch might be, “Metal drummer loses his hearing overnight and must face radically changing his life in order to adjust.”
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There’s a risk in adapting a play for the screen. The typically confined nature of the source material can lead to a stage bound feel in the movie. That locked, static aesthetic is anathema to an art form that’s known, after all, as motion pictures. (Take a look at many movies made in the wake of noisy, bulky sound equipment being introduced to the process in the early 1930s if you don’t believe me. The worst of them look like filmed plays.) One of the best examples of a director and movie that thrillingly breaks free of the source material’s stage roots is Miloš Forman’s dazzling Amadeus. Chicago, too, adds a cinematic spectacle feel to its musical number sequences.
Joe Mantello’s adaptation of playwright Mart Crowley’s seminal LGBTQ melodrama The Boys in the Band only breaks free of the source material’s stagy feel in a few key sequences. Each time it happens is thrilling; it injects the wider world into the hermetically sealed one of the story. While the rest of the movie could have easily taken place on a stage, Boys has plenty more going for it to make it an electric experience.
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