Moonage Daydream

 

Celebrated documentarian Brett Morgen nearly remakes the musical biography with his virtuosic film of David Bowie's chameleonic career, Moonage Daydream. He certainly raises the bar for the genre.

Morgen wrote, directed and edited this aurally and visually stunning story of a supremely talented man, whose professional life was a phantasm of outrageous personas that fascinated legions of followers while masking insecurities and feelings of isolation. Bowie was so much deeper than all of the rouge and glitter and stacked heels suggested.

Bowie's ever-changing public face, as he describes in thoughtful voice overs throughout the film, was at first a product of his need for attention and personal amusement, but eventually became a necessity to please his fans, who expected surprises from a man who seemed to have a bottomless bag of tricks. Bowie, who died in 2016, makes no apologies for giving his audiences what they wanted.

Morgen weaves through this mesmerizing film passages about Bowie's childhood, his relationship with an older sibling who turned him on to outré writers and musicians -- Kerouac and Coltrane among them -- and frequent references to his need for the creative exploration that defined his 50-year career, during which he released 27 studio albums and scores of live and compilation recordings while also working with other artists.

The film is organized roughly in the order of Bowie's musical output -- one of the main reasons to see the movie -- but Morgen uses several songs as contextual backdrops to offer additional insight and show how Bowie's vision was remarkably consistent. The picture's sound editing and mixing is masterful.

Some fans might point to the absence of any reference to Bowie's marriage to Angela Bowie or to his son, film director Duncan Jones, or to the absence of any voices other than those of the artist himself and the occasional weeping fan who thinks the bloke is "smashing."

But to my mind -- and ear -- Morgen's film accomplishes so much more than your standard celebrity bio-pic despite lacking completeness; it uses all of the tools of modern cinema to capture the essence of an artist who was wholly his own creation, and who, as he admits to an interviewer, used his body as a living canvas.

Pearl

 

In the second feature in his "X" trilogy, horror / creeper auteur Ti West teams with franchise star Mia Goth to offer a beautiful and highly stylized prequel to the first film.

In "X," an adult-movie crew in the '70s arrives on a secluded farm for some location shooting and end up being snuffed by the cranky old lady of the house, Pearl.

Goth played both the winsome adult film ingenue Maxine and the psycho granny in the first feature, which I thought was a fresh take on a pretty worn slasher formula.

West takes the story of "X" back to 1918, during the Great War, when Pearl was the twitchy daughter of an austere and mercilessly cruel mother (Tandi Wright) and a vegetative father (Matthew Sunderland). She is also the lonely bride of doughboy Howard (Alistair Sewell), who is overseas.

Pearl aches to be free of farm and wifely burdens and to become a chorine in the moving pictures, which she sneaks off to see when she can. Pearl just needs to be "perfect" and she'll surely be off to see the world.

Of course, none of this is to be, and its Pearl's realization that despite the flattery of a handsome projectionist (David Coresnswet) she is neither pretty nor perfect and that would lead to bloody reckonings being visited on everyone around her.

Pearl's fury is astounding but not because of its brutality, which is cartoon awesome, but because of the banshee wail of disconsolation she emits when doubted. It's truly frightening.

Most impressive to me was Pearl's long monologue toward the end of the film, during which she confesses her sins to her naive and stunned sister-in-law Mitsy (Emma Jenkins-Purro). The scene appears to be a single, uncut take of a remarkable bit of cinematic writing and the perfect bridge to the last reel when Pearl must clean up her mess before Howard comes home.

West's wonderful picture contains homages to Aldrich's Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and Polanski's Repulsion. Be sure to stay through the cringe-inducing credit roll at the end as Pearl's tortured wide grin seems to morph from corny to silly to unsettling to disturbing to pitiful before the iris closes on her teary face. Splendid!

We Cry Together

 

I've been trying to figure out how to approach Kendrick Lamar's incendiary "We Cry Together," probably the most talked about cut on his latest recording released in May, Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers, another powerful musical experiment and cultural statement.

Though I'm an unapologetic fan, I'm not in Lamar's target demographic, but neither were the members of the Pulitizer committee that awarded his 2017 record, Damn., the prize for music. To many of us, the 35-year-old Compton native is the gold-standard for consciousness-raising, an unalloyed lyrical genius.

"We Cry Together" is nearly 6 minutes of a couple (Lamar and the celebrated young actress Taylour Paige) verbally assaulting one another in a raw, brutal, profane exchange over a driving piano/bass/drums line. The insults, the teasing and the wounding hit the listener in the solar plexus first, but then, as with so much of Lamar's work, eventually worm up to the brain. As the kids might say, "Ohhhh, dammmnnnn. That's deep."

The argument is about more than these two seemingly unhappy people. I believe they are avatars for the delusion and dysfunction that, ironically, hold couples together. They are emblems as much as George and Martha in Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, first stage 60 years ago.

Both works are about the lies we tell one another to fill the time and the emptiness, to avoid examining ourselves. We often mask all of this pain with sex. (Hump the hostess?)

"We Cry Together" is part theater and part treatise. It's by turns painful and funny and it feels interminable. So in that way, it's a lot like life for many of us.

Beauty

 

Andrew Dosunmu's Beauty (Netflix) is a perplexing, frustrating film written by Lena Waithe, who wrote the powerful Queen & Slim (2019).

Beauty stars the lovely but miscast Gracie Marie Bradley as the gifted singing daughter of demanding, signifying church-going parents (the ever-reliable Giancarlo Esposito and Niecy Nash) who are all-about praise in the pew but are vulgar, chain-smoking martinets at home. The contradiction doesn't seem to rattle Beauty or her brothers, Cain and Abel (Kyle Bary and Micheal Ward, respectively) but gets the side-eye from Beauty's girlfriend Jasmine (Aleyse Shannon).

Others have said this picture's major fail is not having Beauty sing ... ever. I agree. That's not to say the film is bereft of music. It's not and includes a cavalcade of classic performances from Mahalia Jackson, Judy Garland and Patti LaBelle and a score of others. But no Beauty.

It seems a strange call but may be the filmmakers' attempt at lifting the story onto a more metaphorical plain, with the conflict between Beauty and her parents over the direction of the young woman's singing career serving to explore other issues -- greed, emotional displacement and repression, maybe. All of these are exhibited by Beauty's tyrannical father and envious mother, who was denied her own shot at greatness and relegated to the background on other singers' stages and records. She doesn't think Beauty's ready. Daddy does and is hoping for a big pay day.

Adding to my frustration is the wispiness of Beauty's relationship with Jasmine. They are often filmed snuggling or grazing each other's face but never generating enough heat to suggest there is passion between them. It all seems naive and pointlessly coy.

The film is beautifully shot but the story feels incomplete and uncertain about its purpose. Pity.

Eye of the Beholder Redux

 

Rod Serling, creator of the original Twilight Zone, pulled off a pretty neat trick when Eye of the Beholder aired 60 years ago.

The story takes place in a hospital where a bandaged woman is waiting to see if "treatments" to repair her facial malformations have worked. Interactions with the hospital staff reveal she's been in and out for treatments many times and this is her last go. If this doesn't work, she'll be relocated to live with other unfortunates like herself -- by order of the state.

Now, the trick I'm referring to is NOT the big "pig face" reveal after so much suspense had been building about what Miss Tyler's horrific face would look like.

No. The real trick was to have the escape sequence that closes the show read BOTH as Miss Tyler (the beauteous Donna Douglas) hiding her hideousness from the hospital workers (which would be consistent with the narrative) AND recoiling from their messed up mugs (which would be the audience's POV).

If the scene played too much as Douglas running in fright from their appearance, then the story's mythology would be trashed. And if the pig faces responded by recoiling, then the audience would likely respond by laughing and not sympathize with the running woman because it was all a big joke.

Miss Tyler runs barefoot down twisted corridors as the leader speechifies on suspended screens about rooting out non-conformity. It's meant to be surreal but also pointedly relevant as the U.S. was wrestling with its changing national identity and the rights of the minorities and unfavored. I'm sure Serling wanted viewers to wonder if they were Miss Tylers or Pig Faces.

Messing around with people's perceptions and expectations is a dicey proposition, and Serling was a master mindf***er -- for the good, in my estimation. This episode especially -- with its messages about state control of personal liberties and ghettoization -- was a powerful television moment that I think became clearer as the years passed.

The resolution might not sit well with today's viewers who resist its message of acceptance through segregation, but it was Serling's warning not his recommendation.

Under the Banner of Heaven

 

Jon Krakauer's true crime account of a double murder in Mormon country, Under the Banner of Heaven, has been serialized by Oscar-winning writer Dustin Lance Black for streaming on Hulu.

The series -- which features an Emmy-nominated performance by Andrew Garfield as a devoted Mormon who is the lead detective on the case -- is unsparing in its dissection of the psychoses that gripped the murderers, two brothers radicalized by Mormon fundamentalism, and that which directed the founders of the faith group -- Joseph Smith and Brigham Young.

The result is a chilling and mesmerizing depiction of what appears to be a cancerous patriarchal religious tradition that demeans and subjugates women and empowers all of its members with the belief that God speaks to each individually, supposedly guiding their actions but actually endorsing their desires.

What a seductive doctrine! And one not exclusive to the Latter-Day Saints. Even taken out of the religious context, we recognize controlling manipulation that is so appealing to those craving power over others for their own enrichment. And how destructive this is on those honest souls seeking nothing more than truth.

Where the Crawdads Sing

 

Olivia Newman's Where the Crawdads Sing works just well-enough as an elegiac romance that one can (almost) forgive the story's numerous implausibilities and its amateurish handling of the murder mystery that lies at its heart.

Crawdads stars the indefatigable English actress Daisy Edgar-Jones (Under the Banner of Heaven, Normal People) as Kya Clark, a young woman who grew up in the North Carolina marshes with her brutal, alcoholic father (the dependable Garret Dillahunt) after her mother and then her siblings abandon them one-by-one.

When her miserable Pa finally leaves too, the child Kya is left to fend for herself. She harvests mussels and sells them to the saintly Black merchant and his wife (Sterling Macer Jr. and Michael Hyatt, respectively) for provisions. She communes with nature, developing a keen eye for coastal flora and fauna, and growing into a remarkable young woman, apparently without the benefit of education or health care. She hides from social services and is abetted by the merchant and his wife in eluding capture.

One day she meets local good boy Tate (played as an adult by Taylor John Smith), who has been leaving feathers and other gifts for her in the woods. He teaches her to read, as she's never attended school, and encourages her interest in nature. She falls in love with him, only to be abandoned once again when he leaves for college and fails to return as promised.

(The order of the following events is changed a bit from the film's narrative for the sake of clarity.) Kya soon meets local bad boy Chase (Harris Dickson of The King's Man), who enjoys consorting with the Marsh Girl but keeps their relationship hidden from the status conscious townsfolk. Kya, who has become a published author of nature studies, rejects Chase's unwanted sexual advances after learning of his engagement to another young woman and is overheard threatening to kill him if he persists in stalking her.

Chase, as we know from the film's opening, ends up dead, Kya acccused of his murder and the kindly local attorney, played by David Strathairn, comes to her defense.

The case against the Marsh Girl is unbelievably weak, which relinquishes the story of any real element of suspense aside from that about Kya and Tate's inevitable reunion.

Newman has included some lovely scenes of wildife, mostly aquatic fowl, and the voiceovers by a reflective Kya looking back on these events contain some poetic passages, but the film, overall, feels precious and saccharine, despite the ghastly behavior displayed by many of its characters.

Severance

 

The world in Apple TV's Emmy-nominated series Severance chills viewers with the disciplines imposed on the workers of the mysterious Lumon Industries.

But the company's infamous "break room" -- cleverly named to reflect how workers are snapped like dry twigs -- has nothing on the "horrors" of the MDE, the Music Dance Experience, featured in Episode 7, titled Defiant Jazz (ironically enough).

MDE is ostensibly a reward for outstanding performance but actually mirrors -- fairly accurately, to my mind -- the kind of condescending juvenalia that is too often use to incentivize staff members. Rather than actually listening to employees, identifying what motivates them and trying to meet those expectations responsibly, bosses throw a party [or allow outstanding performers to park closer to the building].

What was most disconcerting about the MDE sequence, however, was how quickly workers who feel trapped in a system they can't control and deprived of self-agency will succumb to the company's meager enticements and dance to the music.

Shoresy

 

Much like his first Hulu hit, LetterKenny, Jared Keeso's Shoresy, a spin-off of the aforemention LetterKenny, is an acquired taste. It tests the patience and attention of non-Canadians far and wide, but rewards aforementioned patience and attention abundantly with belly laughs and a suprising amount of genuine humanity.

Keeso, with his creative partner Jacob Tierney, who directs Shoresy, immerse viewers in the alien minutiae of a Canadian backwater with stories that are eminently relatable even though the dialogue is regionally and culturally dialectal when it's not amazingly vulgar. We may not understand every word being said but the main elements are as a clear as a Canadian sunrise.

In Shoresy, Keeso plays the title character, an aging, cantankerous hockey player whose life, such as it is, revolves around the game. When the owner of his team (Tasya Teles) announces she's ready to fold the Bulldogs because they haven't won a game in ages, Shoresy assures her that with an investment of some marquee older skaters he could turn the team around. She agrees and promises at the first loss, the team would be gone.

How Shoresy, an unbelievable piece of work without a hint of cliche or predictability (a wonderful creation), tries to fulfill his promise and stave off professional uncertainty is what the show is all about. Yes, some of the delivery is deadpan, but that's the franchise's signature: lacerating putdowns delivered without ornamentation.

In this scene, the team's young coach and Shoresy proxy (Harlan Blayne Kytwayhat) announces the lineup in a ritual that would not fail to thrill even those without the remotest interest in the game. Shoresy, the team's erstwhile "C"aptain, addresses the crew with the weight of his promise and the team's future clearly in mind. It's brutal and a great television moment.

The Man Who Fell to Earth (2022)

 

I've found moments of true brilliance in Alex Kurtzman and Jenny Lumet's sequel to the Nicolas Roeg alt-cinema classic The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), whch starred David Bowie.

In both the film and the Showtime miniseries, an alien from a dying planet comes to earth in an attempt to save the home world being desiccated by a global catastrophe involving water. In the 2022 extension, Chiwetel Ejiofor is the alien answering a call from his mentor, the original explorer from '76, who adopted the name Thomas Newton (Bowie) and became a technological magnate who finds himself trapped on Earth.

In the latest installment, the Newton character is played Bill Nighy. His interactions with Ejiofor's Faraday are some of the more intriguing exchanges in a series filled with them, moments of deep existential pondering and examination of the meaning of life.

These are played most effectively by the wonderful British actress Naomie Harris -- Justin Falls, a physicist of international repute who disappeared after a tragic overreach. Her evolving relationship with Faraday offers layers of interpersonal intrigue to a narrative that has no shortage of them, probing climate change, societal fragmentation, governmental corruption and industrial conspiracy.

To my ear, some of the series' best writng is displayed in Episode 5, Changes, in which Faraday narrates in a transmission to his wife on the home world his discoveries about humanity and what makes Earthlings tick. It might seem trivial to some viewers, but the episode's comments about jazz and improvisation are surprising and inspired and neatly woven through the developing narrative.

Barbarian

 

The horror film genre is so done by now that filmmakers wanting to enter the field must do more than amp up the gore. They must think deeply about story and what the impalings, decapitations and eviscerations mean, and to my mind they MUST mean something.

Zach Cregger's refreshingly unhinged Barbarian doesn't just settle for the urp factor or wallow in mad violence but takes the viewer through a finely tuned and deliberately paced symphony of shocks, in three movements, that is more allegory than chiller.

The first features the British TV actress Georgina Campbell as Tess, a documentary researcher in Detroit for a job interview. She discovers she's been double-booked in a B&B already occupied by horror A-lister Bill Skarsgård (It). Despite our expectations about this frugal traveler nightmare, the night passes relatively peacefully but with the new day comes new revelations and horrors.

The second movement features Justin Long as a Hollywood project developer accused of sexually assaulting a co-worker. He owns the house in Detroit and comes to the city to sell it to pay a lawyer but finds Tess and Keith's belongings still in the house. He explores and follows the two into a warren of dark caverns where lurks God-only-knows-what, armed only with flashlight and a deboning knife.

The third movement is set in the '80s and features the house's original loner owner, Frank (Richard Brakes), who is shopping for plastic sheets and diapers for a home delivery.

Cregger folds all of these elements together into a beautiful origami of dread.

Black Hollywood Tropes

 

I've been thinking about Black Hollywood lately and celebrate the enormous bankroll that Black producers, directors, writers and performers command in motion pictures.

We've come a long way since Blacks were relegated to the margins of movies, entering the frame only to play maids and butlers, slaves and criminals.

Oh, Blacks still play these roles, but the maids put doodoo in their hateful employers' desserts, the butlers are in the White House, the slaves cut their masters' throats and the criminals, well, they run the world.

We've moved on from stale tropes but don't mistake, Hollywood being Hollywood, other tropes have moved in.

Here are a few movie tropes I feel I see a lot:

Black characters in a mixed cast are more likely to use profanity.

Black characters in a mixed cast are more likely to mention religious faith.

Black characters in a mixed cast are more likely to mention something grandma said.

Black characters in a mixed cast are more likely to "speak street."

Black characters in a mixed cast are more likely to be in a scene in which someone's face is slapped.

Black characters in a mixed cast are more likely to be stylishly dressed.

Black characters in a mixed cast are more likely to be physically adroit.

Black characters in a mixed cast are more likely to have a partner of another race.

Black characters in a mixed cast are more likely to die violently.

Black characters in a mixed cast are more likely to have fewer lines of exposition.

All of this is less true of pictures written and directed by Blacks -- but in the main, it still holds true.

Honk For Jesus. Save Your Soul.

 

One's response to Adamma Ebo's rousingly satirical "Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul." will no doubt depend on the closeness of one's walk with the prosperity gospel movement. One person's sacred cow is another's barbecue.

Sterling K. Brown and Regina Hall are a disgraced Atlanta megachurch pastor and his wife / the church's first lady, who deftly blend acquisitiveness with divine grace. A documentary film crew has arrived to record the pastor's return to the pulpit. The plan is to reopen on the upcoming Easter -- the symbolism of rising from the dead is both intentional and disastrous.

During the course of interviews with the pastor and first lady (seemingly blissfully unaware of the rank materialism that defines their mission and marriage), former congregants and others, we begin to see the fissures running through the reverend's posturing and the startling hypocrisy he's trying mightily to conceal.

Early reactionary comments have condemned the film, for which both Brown and Hall are producers, as an attack on Christians. This is not a surprising response, but Ebo, who wrote and directed the film, takes pains to draw a bead on a movement that too often has been shown to defraud the gullible through appeals to fear and guilt. This is the reverend's M.O., wrapped in sanctimony and delivered in a Prada bag.

Brown and Hall, both fine actors, give their all to roles that might seem cartoonish at first but are actually much more nuanced than the surrealism of the theatrics and hollow speechifying would suggest. Hall especially, who is actually the face of the film (in a very real way in the final 10 minutes), embodies Ebo's theme that you can despise both the sin and the sinner and not lose faith.