Movies – Stokey Scribe

Roma: Or Why We Can’t Stop Worrying And Love Netflix

One of the greatest threats to the movie theatre experience is the predominance of Netflix and more people opting to watch movies at home. Ironically, the best recent defense for the cinema-going experience is the Oscar nominated Netflix film Roma, an autobiographical film from director Alfonso Cuarón, that is based on his childhood in Mexico City. The story behind how Netflix became the distributor of Roma and how the filmmakers teamed up with the streamer highlights the state of the media business today.

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Netflix doesn’t normally release their original films theatrically but in the past year they’ve changed that strategy with a few exceptions. Netflix appears to be doing this in a bid to be taken seriously on the movie front by racking up Oscars and to attract more top talent, who might be hesitant to work for a company that is mostly associated with TV. Netflix tested this out with a limited theatrical release for The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, the latest film from the Coen brothers, but the results were mixed. In the case of Roma, the theatrical release was quite limited, with a number of theaters refusing to screen the film, but the estimated grosses have been quite positive. Netflix hasn’t released the exact figures but estimates have the film grossing $2.2M in the US at the end of December, making it the highest grossing subtitled film of 2018. As a point of comparison, Cuarón’s Spanish-language film Y Tu Mama Tambien made over $33M globally, but that was in 2002 when the only way you could see the film in its initial run was theatrically. Despite Roma’s encouraging theatrical figures, the majority of people who do watch Roma will do so at home or on their devices because the film is available on Netflix.

Netflix now commands such a strong dominance over the global marketplace that other companies are struggling to compete. Participant Media, the company that produced Roma talked to six different distributors and all except Netflix were worried about the commercial potential for a black and white foreign-film without any stars, according to an interview with the head of Participant Media, David Linde in Indiewire. In the same interview Linde spoke about their decision to have Netflix distribute the film, “We had to really think it through and figure out the best way for the film to be seen in theaters, but also to reach the largest audience possible. As we thought a lot about how the film would be presented around the world, Netflix’s presentation was very convincing.” Once a film is released on Netflix it instantly gets exposed to 139 million subscribers. Even though Netflix doesn’t release their viewing numbers, they made an exception to brag that their film Bird Box had been seen by 80 million accounts in the first four weeks of its release. Comedian Stephen Colbert joked that “given how many people share their passwords, that’s like 7 billion people”. The measurement company Nielsen tracks Netflix usage in the US and said that almost 26 million people watched the film over the initial seven days of its release and continued to perform well after that first week. Bird Box (which also had a small theatrical release a week before it was released online) was a viral hit and likely benefited from people being home over the holidays to watch it and not miss out on what everyone was talking about. Since Roma is an “art-house” film it won’t match Bird Box’s numbers but just that level of exposure can be very appealing to filmmakers.

Netflix is enticing other top-name filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, who’s next film The Irishman has a reported budget around $200M and Steven Soderbergh (The Laundromat). Despite Netflix’s market dominance and exposure, there are still some pitfalls to working with them. Roma was rejected by the Cannes film festival because it didn’t have a traditional theatrical release. There was also a controversy when Netflix had first released the film with “European Spanish” subtitles as an option even though it is mostly in Mexican Spanish and should be understandable to any fluent Spanish speaker, regardless of where they’re from. Cuarón and others were offended and Netflix had to reverse course and drop the “European Spanish” subtitle option. Similarly Netflix has gotten into hot water over its decision to censor an episode of Patriot Act With Hasan Minhaj in Saudi Arabia, due to pressure from their government. In an op-ed in the New York Times the writer Ursula Lindsey wrote “one has to choose artistic freedom over complying with a repressive and arbitrary law. Netflix would have done better to let Saudi Arabia censor Mr. Minhaj’s work than to censor it itself on the kingdom’s behalf.”

Outside of the film space, some artists who have worked with Netflix in the past are starting to look at other options. The comedian Jim Gaffigan whose last two specials were released by Netflix, found an alternative distribution strategy for his latest special, Noble Ape. In an interview with Forbes he said that Netflix releases so many comedy specials that it’s a “foregone conclusion” that any major comedian’s latest special would be exclusive to that platform. He opted to go for a different release strategy that would allow the special to be released on multiple platforms at the same time and potentially exposing it to more people, and not just Netflix subscribers. Gaffigan can make that decision because he is a sought after comedian, but increasingly for artists like Cuarón who want to expose their work to as many people as possible, Netflix is still the best game in town.

Fresh Take on “Disobedience”

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Sebastián Lelio’s Disobedience moves with the force and determination of a slow-moving train gradually picking up speed. The film starts out in a London synagogue with an Orthodox Jewish rabbi named Rav Krushka (Anton Lesser) talking about the beauty of what makes us different from all other beings on the planet is our ability to choose. We can follow the norms of our society or we can choose to be disobedient. We are introduced to his daughter Ronit (Rachel Weisz) who is living a world away in New York when she gets a call that her father has died of pneumonia. The contrast between the two scenes couldn’t be starker. In the first the room is dominated by old, bearded men with almost their entire body covered in cloth and then we’re in an open studio where a woman is photographing a shirtless old man covered in tattoos. Both opening scenes are simple and beautiful. Though the film is about a repressed society, the characters are presented honestly and fairly, despite some of them being quite rigid in their views, and throughout the film Lelio is careful not to pass judgement on his characters.

Ronit travels back to London and the relationships between the characters are slowly revealed to the audience. She reconnects with Dovid (Alessandro Nivola) who was Rav’s disciple and heir. When Ronit and Dovid see each other after so many years, at first they appear to be siblings because of their familial bond, but over time we discover they were best friends as kids, with another girl named Esti (Rachel McAdams). Esti and Dovid are now married and she appears hostile at Ronit’s return but this initial reaction is not exactly as it seems. Lelio unravels the intimate bonds that exist between the characters and their complicated history. To give a more detailed plot summary of the film would be an injustice to the nuanced way that Lelio, his screenwriting collaborator Rebecca Lenkiewicz and editor Nathan Nugent lay out the story and its intricacies.

Lelio’s films showcase women who are defiantly pushing against the arbitrary and fluid societal boundaries that exist in their community. Lelio’s last film, A Fantastic Woman (Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film) was about a trans woman who suffers the abuse and humiliations of her deceased partner’s family after his sudden death. There is a scene where she is literally walking against the powerful wind that almost knocks her over and her body is nearly at a 45 degree angle struggling to stay up. The imagery in Disobedience isn’t as overdone and the elders in their community are more passively-aggressive but the push against that culture’s norms are just as powerful.

The film takes the event of the death of a patriarch to examine the relationships of the three individuals at its core. Though the film is set in a very narrow environment, the themes it explores are universal – that of the burdens of those who stay and those who leave. To that end, the three leads are terrific with Rachel McAdams standing out. Her performance is measured and powerful, continuing the fine work she’s done in other recent films like Spotlight. Weisz manages to show the pain of someone who had the courage to leave her home and the strictures of her society but now lives permanently on the outside from her friends and family. Nivola resists the urge to make his character oppressive despite trying to maintain the patriarchal restrictions of his community. The film slowly builds tension throughout and the ending is one that is surprising, touching and resonant.

Fresh Take on “A Star Is Born”

There is a particular formula which takes place when a popular actor tries his or her hand at directing or when a popular singer switches gears to act. Critics either judge them harshly and are eager to tear them down, or over-praise them if they show a modicum of competence in their new roles.

The new film A Star Is Born marks the directorial debut of actor Bradley Cooper and also presents a big jump into acting for the singer Lady Gaga but unfortunately their movie falls into the over-praised category. The new version is the fourth, with the original dating back to 1937 so the story is clearly one that seems to connect with audiences enough to revisit it every few decades. Bradley Cooper, who also co-wrote the film, plays Jack, a famous singer who is miserably drinking himself to death. Once he meets Ally (Lady Gaga), a waitress and aspiring singer at a drag show he becomes smitten after seeing her sultry rendition of an Edith Piaf classic, drawn to the purity in her singing and wide-eyed aspirations. Jack has a complicated relationship with his manager and brother Bobby, played by Sam Elliott who gives a standout performance. Cooper proves himself to be a more than competent director and he does some of the best acting of his career in the process. He puts the camera right up close to himself and his fellow actors and this works well in the concert scenes, particularly the one that opens the film. The camera follows Jack as he enters an arena filled with thousands of adoring fans and shows how he can disconnect enough to perform as if he’s alone.

The movie has some fine moments throughout, particularly a sequence that features Dave Chappelle, playing one of Jack’s childhood friends, George “Noodles”. There’s a sweet scene where Jack creates a ring out of the string of a guitar to propose to Ally but it’s surprisingly upstaged by one of George’s daughters who is having a full blown conversation with herself in the background that has nothing to do with the proposal. It’s an honest moment of spontaneity that Cooper wisely leaves in the film adding nice texture.

The biggest problem with the movie which seriously holds back its potential is the casting of Lady Gaga, who is being hailed as a “revelation”. Gaga doesn’t offer up much emotion in her face and this is particularly noticeable with Cooper’s use of close-ups throughout the film. Gaga is obviously a gifted singer and in the musical scenes she lights up in a way that is unfortunately not present throughout the rest of the movie where her performance feels flat. Gaga’s performance calls to mind the film 8 Mile starring Eminem. Both movies have a star performer channeling their personal life in ways that resemble their own stories but while Eminem’s performance was hailed as being raw and powerful at the time it doesn’t hold up today. Whether this will be true for Gaga’s performance here and if the film as a whole will live up to its hype remains to be seen.

Fresh Take on “The Miseducation of Cameron Post”

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In the new film The Miseducation of Cameron Post a group of teenagers are placed in a gay conversion therapy camp called “God’s Promise” and aren’t allowed to leave until their supervisors and guardians feel they’ve been properly “healed”. The title character, Cameron (Chloë Grace Moretz) is brought there after her boyfriend discovers her making out with another woman in the backseat of a car during their prom. The film has echoes of the classic One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and the leader of the programme, Dr. Lydia Marsh (played by a terrific Jennifer Ehle) is a terrifying modern day Nurse Ratched. Marsh runs the programme with her brother, Reverend Rick (John Gallagher Jr.) who was “successfully converted” from a prior life of homosexuality after her intervention. God’s Promise is made up of a diverse group of kids who have varying degrees of commitment and belief in the benefits of the programme. Cameron is drawn to two of the more rebellious students, Adam (Forrest Goodluck) and Jane (Sasha Lane) and the three of them sneak into the woods to smoke up whenever they can.

The tone of the film is a bit uneven from time to time and you get the sense that the filmmaker’s aren’t entirely sure of themselves, but in a way this helps to connect the audience with the confusion that the kids are faced with being placed in this strange environment. Besides for Dr. Marsh, the organisers of God’s Promise are presented in a surprisingly sympathetic light. There is a touching scene when Reverend Rick is counseling Cameron about a tragedy that took place there and she ends up comforting him instead. She asks him if they have any idea what they’re doing and instead of pretending that he does, he breaks down and says he doesn’t know how to answer her question. Gallagher Jr. has a sense of vulnerability that he displayed well in the mini-series Olive Kitteridge that is put to good use here. Another standout performance is from Emily Skegg who plays Cameron’s roommate, Erin. When we first encounter Erin she is presented as the typical, obedient student, but Skegg unveils the complex layers of her character throughout the film, particularly in a scene when she wakes Cameron in the middle of the night to scold her for having a dirty dream and then ends up seducing her instead. The scene is shocking at first but then becomes bittersweet. Chloë Grace Moretz unfortunately gives a weak performance as the lead character and that along with the tonal problems hold the film back of its potential. The film ends with a nice homage to The Graduate with the fate of the characters decidedly up in the air.

Fresh Take on “Faces Places”

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In the film Faces Places, which is now playing in cinemas and on demand in the UK, the legendary French film director Agnes Varda teams up with photographer JR on a road trip through France presenting large scale photographs of people in unique and odd locations. They drive around in a truck that has a giant photograph of a camera lens that operates as a mobile photo booth and printer. People step inside the truck, take their picture and the print comes out of the side of the truck. The pairing of JR and Varda is a perfect cinematic juxtaposition. The 33 year old JR is young, hip and always wears his trademark hat and black sunglasses, refusing to take them off as much as Varda pleads with him. Varda, with her two-toned bowl haircut is incredibly petite, as if gravity is trying to pull her 88 year old body into the ground. She is wonderfully eccentric, calm and confident in the knowledge that her time on this planet is certainly nearing its end and embarking on a project that satisfies her. “JR is fulfilling my greatest desire. To meet new faces and photograph them, so they don’t fall down the holes in my memory” she says.

Though the film is a documentary, it has some nice moments of fancy. The film begins by showing how the two of them didn’t meet with comical scenes of missed opportunities like Varda dancing in a night club with JR just a few feet away or at a bus stop where an annoyed Varda can’t be bothered to wait the three minutes and decides to walk instead. The two set off trying to meet people in remote villages of France and try to connect them to each other and the audience through their work. The final result of the first set up is over a dozen portraits connected by a giant baguette.

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One of the things they address is how as technology has improved we are becoming more and more isolated. They photograph one farmer who was able to cut his entire staff because he can do the work of a few people alone with his modern equipment but laments that it has made him anti-social. They paste a massive portrait of him that takes up his entire barn and saying that they’ll make him the star of the village of 140, to which the man replies he already is.

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One of the film’s most poignant stories features a woman who refuses to leave her childhood home, the last of a row of houses in an old mining village. They memorialise her by placing her photograph on her entire home which moves the woman to tears.

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The nature of JR’s work is ephemeral and they paste one of Varda’s cherished photographs of an old friend on a German bunker which fell into the beach and within a day the photo is washed away. “The sea always has the last word” Varda says. The simple and profound film is also a meditation on death with Varda talking about friends and loved ones who have passed, including her husband the director Jacques Demy. There is a scene at the end of the film which is so painfully beautiful that I won’t spoil it for you, but it’s something that will certainly stay with me for a very long time. Varda’s eyes tell a story in themselves of a lifetime of hurt, betrayal, tolerance but also joy. JR is keen to this and ends the film by pasting her eyes on a train saying they will travel to places Varda has never been.

BlacKkKlansmen review

*Warning-this review contains multiple spoilers to the plot and ending of the film*

There’s a scene at the end of Spike Lee’s documentary 4 Little Girls, about the 1963 bombing of a baptist church, where the segregationist former governor of Alabama, George Wallace is interviewed. Wallace was quite old and visibly frail at the time (he passed away in 1998, a year after the documentary came out) and he tries to highlight the positive things that he did as governor, including providing free textbooks to African-American schoolchildren who couldn’t afford it. An African-American man who knew Wallace said that when you were alone with him one-on-one, he was the nicest man you’d ever meet, but when the cameras and the political spotlight was on him, it was a different story. The interview ends with Wallace calling forward his caretaker and aide, an elderly African-American man named Eddie Holcey and while holding his hand repeatedly says that he is his best friend. Holcey, visibly uncomfortable, stands there holding his hand and then tries to move out of the frame. The scene is incredibly powerful and memorable (after 20 years it’s still burned into my memory), but in a way it feels out of the place in the documentary. You get the sense that the footage was so good, showing how broken this once-powerful man was, that Lee couldn’t resist including it in the film. The scene also serves to humanise this racist monster of a man, who was implicit in the deaths of the four little girls that the film is about and so much more. Wallace is practically pleading to the camera for history to remember him kindly, and even though it won’t, nor should it, you can’t help but feel empathy for him. There’s a scene at the end of Lee’s latest film, BlacKkKlansmen that shows a montage of footage from the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia last August and the violent attack against counter-protestors where a man drove a car through the crowd and killed Heather Heyer. Similar to the Wallace scene in 4 Little Girls it’s incredibly powerful and visceral but feels even more out of place in this movie. Lee is trying to draw a line between the fictionalised depictions of the KKK of the 1970s in the movie and what the deadly real-life result is in the end. The footage is undeniably powerful and Terence Blanchard’s score, beautiful on it’s own-but not quite fitting throughout the movie, is used to great effect during that end sequence. The movie is problematic because so much of what we see before that end sequence is so sloppily put together.

The plot of the movie is the semi-true story of Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) who was the first African-American police officer in Colorado Springs. After suffering through working in the records room and having to deal with a particularly racist cop, Stallworth gets to do some investigative work and is assigned to go undercover at a meeting of the Black Student Union where Kwame Ture, formerly known as Stokely Carmichael, is speaking. He meets the president of the student union, a young woman named Patrice (Laura Harrier) and a romantic plotline is built around that. Stallworth sees an advertisement for the local KKK chapter and decides to call and pretend to be white and interested. A meeting is set up and since Stallworth obviously can’t attend it because of the colour of his skin, his partner Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver) is sent and pretends to be him. Their investigation into the KKK leads them to discover a terrorist plot where they are planning on bombing the Black Student Union, and in the process Stallworth manages to become phone buddies with David Duke (Topher Grace), the grand master of the KKK, who comically doesn’t realise he’s discussing white supremacy with an African-American cop.

One of the main problems of the movie is that the filmmakers take such liberties with the actual facts of the story that most of the plotline feels completely implausible. In real life Stallworth did speak to the KKK and Duke on the phone, while his partner pretended to be him in person but in the film the two actors sound almost nothing alike. Flip’s character has none of the charisma that Washington’s portrayal of Stallworth has which makes them pretending to be the same person even more implausible. The depiction of the klansmen are almost all played for laughs and most of them are presented as painfully stupid or at the very least inept. This depiction of them strangely serves to render them harmless. The characters are saying the most vile racist things and planning out terrorist attacks, but because they’re presented as so comically inept, their sense of danger is removed. As the climax approaches with the attempted bombing, the stakes are surprisingly low because you don’t think these fools can actually pull it off (and of course they don’t, some of the more vile KKK characters end up getting killed and another is arrested).

Topher Grace’s performance of David Duke is a great light-hearted mockery of the man and there is something to be said for stripping a dangerous person of his power by making him slightly buffoonish, but it’s then quite striking when you see footage of the real David Duke at the end of the film. The real Duke is dangerously charismatic (you don’t climb the ranks of an organisation like that without a real sense of charisma) but to see the juxtaposition of the real Duke and Topher Grace’s version of him is quite jarring. Imagine if Chaplin showed actual footage of Hitler at the end of The Great Dictator?

The biggest problem of the movie is that it plays directly to the liberal audience that’s watching it and doesn’t challenge them at all. There is a scene in the middle of the film where a white police officer is telling Stallworth how David Duke is trying to change the perception of the KKK to normalise it so that eventually they will have someone sympathetic to their cause as the President of the United States. Stallworth says that will never happen and the other officer chastises him and tells him to wake up. The scene is played for cheap laughs given the current occupant of the Oval Office but it feels completely out of place in the film. Are we to believe that a black man in 1970s America doesn’t think that America could produce a racist president? These events are taking place while Richard Nixon is the sitting president after deploying the “Southern Strategy” to gin up support by appealing to racism against African-Americans like Stallworth. The scene isn’t meant to make logical sense and is so ham-fisted that it wouldn’t be out of place if the characters turned to the camera and winked to the audience. There is also a subplot of a token “bad cop” named Andy Landers, (Frederick Weller) that doesn’t seem fully thought-out. Landers seems to take pleasure out of roughing up African-Americans and in one scene he goes so far as to feel up Patrice after he pulls her over. Stallworth asks his colleagues why they don’t report Landers and Flip says they’re a family and they protect their own. True enough, but then inexplicably towards the end of the film there is a scene when the cops, Flip included, set up Landers and take him down. When Stallworth shows up to work the next day, he struts down the hallway and his fellow cops are giving him high-fives. Are we to believe that there is only a single truly racist cop in a Colorado Springs police department in the 1970s and the only African-American officer takes him down and is treated like a hero? This scene and so much of the movie completely lets the audience off the hook. A liberal audience member (the only people that would likely see the movie to begin with) watches that scene and can be happy that the one “bad apple” cop has rightfully received his comeuppance.

The movie is meant to be an homage to the blaxploitation movies of the 1970s and the liberties taken with the story and presenting Stallworth as an unparalleled hero fit that but the more heavy-handed connections to present day America are what make this movie so problematic. America, and so much of the world, is clearly going through a racial crisis at the moment and Spike Lee could be the perfect artist to address this, but unfortunately he fails spectacularly with this movie. The visceral montage of the Charlottesville rally at the end of the film highlights what a missed opportunity the film that came before it represents. Similar to what he achieved with 4 Little Girls or his documentaries about Hurricane Katrina (When the Levees Broke and If God Is Willing and da Creek Don’t Rise), if Lee used his skills as a documentary filmmaker instead it might result in a more focused artistic effort tackling the same issues head-on.