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| gromit |
 Posted: Sat Mar 02, 2019 8:16 am |
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Joined: 31 Aug 2004
Posts: 9008
Location: Shanghai
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I thought Bo Rhap did a solid job of what it set out to do. It just wasn't ambitious enough or intended to be very revealing. The two or three cheesy moments in the last third of the picture brought it down a bit for me. It could have been more. But I did like the cats.
There's an Elton John biopic in the works, entitled Rocketman . . . |
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| Syd |
| Posted: Sat Mar 02, 2019 9:14 am |
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Location: Norman, Oklahoma
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gromit wrote: Watched Green Book last night and it's a very accomplished film. If I had seen it earlier, i would have been sure it would win the Oscar. Roma had 3 strikes against it. It was a non-English film; there's another award for foreign films, and it was <gasp> a Netflix film.
It's funny how everybody seems focused on how the black experience during segregation is filtered through a white character/perspective. I can understand that -- and I've long derided African films that have done the same, Biko being probably the most egregious. But no one seems to talk about how the black character is the intellectual, cultural and moral superior in the film, who teaches and trains up the lower-middle-class white guy. I thought that was a noteworthy twist which I didn't expect going in. And very much against the grain of most films about blacks in pre-civil rights days or even often much later.
I thought it was quite a good film. Very polished, good dialogue, satisfying scenes. Yeah, it's rather a feel-good story and makes it seem like race relations are on the upswing and might just work out fine given a little time and integration . . .
It's focused on the white guy since it's based on his experiences (though how it won for ORIGINAL screenplay is beyond me).
I liked the film a lot, but I thought it missed a dramatic point: why in hell did a prominent black musician decide to tour the segregationist Soutn in the 1960s? We're focused on the wrong character. |
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| gromit |
| Posted: Sat Mar 02, 2019 11:30 am |
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Joined: 31 Aug 2004
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Location: Shanghai
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But it's a film about segregation and even the title announces it as part of the black experience during that time. Then it focuses on the role of the white guy in the pairing. I think folks get rankled because it just seems like white writers and producers and directors filtered a story about the black experience through a white character because he provides an in for them and it makes it more relatable to white middle class America. Focusing on the wrong character is exactly the criticism the film has been receiving. Dr. Stanley remains something of an enigma while we learn all about the white driver/bodyguard.
The film tries to explain why the black pianist tours the Deep South. The Russian musician at the end says that Dr. Stanley could make 3x the money and play in nice places in NYC with less racist hassle. But he relates that when Nat King Cole played in Birmingham AL a half-dozen years earlier, a number of whites rushed the stage and beat him up. The implication is that Dr. Stanley is doing his part to open opportunities for blacks by pushing against the racist traditions and slowly gaining acceptance for black performers and black people in general. And indeed immediately after the NKC anecdote, Stanley fights against racist tradition by demanding to eat in the main restaurant. On his tour, he's doing his small part to break down racial barriers and of course he succeeds quite well in the case of Tony Lip.
I thought it was interesting that they showed how uncompromising the racial animus could be. From Tony throwing away the glasses the colored repairman drank out of, to the Birmingham club not willing to make an exception for one prominent black man, for maybe a one hour meal.
I remember reading an article a few years ago about the last apartments above Carnegie Hall, the tenants there and the tenants past. I seem to recall it was coming to an end. |
Last edited by gromit on Wed Apr 29, 2020 3:47 am; edited 1 time in total
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| bartist |
| Posted: Sat Mar 02, 2019 12:42 pm |
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Joined: 27 Apr 2010
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Location: Black Hills
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billyweeds wrote: The farther I get from my viewing of Bohemian Rhapsody, the more I realize I disliked it...
Was my reaction to both BR and The Favourite, which speaks to the reality that cinematic arts are always potentially a kind of con job. I get swept up for those moments, then have a hangover later.
Seeing Green Book this weekend, if we survive. In the USA, two municipalities, Rapid City SD and Miles City, Montana just had the coldest February on record...and looks like we might be going for some kind of record in March. Two below this morning, and is now droppping to minus 15 by evening. Fahrenheit, just to be clear, and not factoring in wind-chill. It's interesting to me how, after a month of this, perception of temperature changes. We had one day where it got near 30 and it felt like golf weather. This is how, in some sort of Body Snatchers scenario, you are converted into a South Dakotan. |
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| Befade |
| Posted: Sat Mar 02, 2019 2:05 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
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Location: AZ
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I still like Shoplifters and Capernaum best. They are small foreign family stories. Roma is more of a monumental film.
The focus on black history. Where the heck is the cry for focusing on the native Americans, the Indians?
Malik will be a villain in the next Bond movie. I can’t see ever liking him in anything. There’s something slight about his presence. |
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| gromit |
| Posted: Sun Mar 03, 2019 2:43 am |
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Joined: 31 Aug 2004
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Location: Shanghai
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Native-Americans were nearly wiped out, relegated to reservations in out of the way scrubland, with their culture largely obliterated. So they haven't featured much in American life in the past 100+ years. A sad tale, but true. Movies could be made about the current poverty or any cultural revival, or a few who have succeeded, but that would almost certainly take the intervention.action of white people. Just doubt there's much demand for such, that few whites know anything about Native-American life these days, etc. Films are expensive projects requiring a lot of people and money getting on board. I wouldn't expect much. Maybe a scattered film popping up every couple of decades.
Windtalkers (2002) is the last major film I can recall, and that focused on Navajos helping the US Gov't in WWII. So a small issue feel-good film about a limited group of Native-Americans.
Dances with Wolves 1990, set around the US Civil War and Indian Wars on the Western frontier.
Both of those focus mainly on a white character's interaction with Indians.
There was also the Disney film Pocahontas in 1995.
Maybe we're ripe for a film about modern-day Native Americans, but it's hard to see how that's going to get off the ground, who cares enough to do it, what the drama will be, and how to get people to go see it.
Blacks in contrast are roughly 13% of the US population, with signifciantly higher representation in many American cities, and play a significant role in American culture, notably music and sport. There's enough population and wealth in the black community to fund an essentially segregated series of black films for the past two decades, which I'm guessing most white-Americans rarely see and are barely aware of.
Really, I'm guessing we're going to start seeing more Asian-American films over the next decade or two. Whether that's about hyphenated Chinese-, Indian- Vietnamese-, Korean-. Asian-Americans are concentrated in CA and NY and are achieving significant wealth and numbers. Some of them are going to write their stories. And with the rise of China and the increasing importance of the world film market, producers and studios are going to look to cash in. Arguably, this has already started with Rich Crazy Asians (2018), which made a ton of money. |
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| gromit |
| Posted: Sun Mar 03, 2019 4:42 am |
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Joined: 31 Aug 2004
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Location: Shanghai
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Maybe a film about treaty breaking, and how white racism was extreme enough to determine that you didn't have to keep your legal contracts with Indians.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/blogs/national-museum-american-indian/2018/10/31/treaty-fort-laramie/#a8TGhLxJfHxztI92.01
That way you can have historical sections and modern-day native-Americans bringing lawsuits. Maybe contrast the way Native-Americans lived when they controlled the western lands to their lives there now,, as well.
Have their been any films about treaties with Indians and how they were usually broken by the US without consequences? |
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Killing your enemies, if it's done badly, increases their number. |
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| bartist |
| Posted: Sun Mar 03, 2019 10:00 am |
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Joined: 27 Apr 2010
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Location: Black Hills
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We get a fair amount of white lens movies here (I live in the most NA area of the US, per capita), like this...
https://a24films.com/films/woman-walks-ahead
"Wind River" was another, and did a fairly good job of capturing the spaces out here, and the mindsets, and some aspects of white ignorance, so a step in the direction NA films might go. |
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He was wise beyond his years, but only by a few days. |
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| Befade |
| Posted: Sun Mar 03, 2019 10:01 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
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Location: AZ
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I just saw a short film at the local film festival called Horizon. A reservation Indian driving a beat up pickup truck runs over a Mexican woman lying on the road. Thinking she is dead he takes her home and lays her on the ground. He then injests multiple OxyContin tablets with some liquor. He stumbles out of the house and falls to the ground near the woman.
Amazingly, the woman comes to and tries to waken the man. She tells him a coyote beat her up smuggling her across the border. He doesn’t understand Spanish. But he gives her a peanut butter sandwich and says he’ll drive her back to the spot where her shoe fell off. Unfortunately he collapses and gets her to drive. When they arrive she puts her shoe back on and realizes the Indian who had been so kind to her has ODed
The acting was great. The filming was beautiful. A good story. The director is working with the actor on a film about Lakota hoop dancing. |
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| knox |
| Posted: Sun Mar 03, 2019 10:35 pm |
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Joined: 18 Mar 2010
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Location: St. Louis
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| Green Book certainly succeeds as a warm and likable buddy film. If it hadn't been so well acted, I might have questioned some bits. I want to look up Don Shirley (not "Stanley") and know if he really blew off that last gig. Very rare for a musician to do that. I know a lot of musicians and they're all saying, no way he would do that, and have word get around he and potentially other musicians were prone to walk away. It's very feelgood, but is it historically accurate? |
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| gromit |
| Posted: Mon Mar 04, 2019 8:10 am |
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Joined: 31 Aug 2004
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Location: Shanghai
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Christopher Robin was disappointing. there were a number of times where I was on the verge of actively disliking the film. But it's just mediocre. The animated dolls don't look that good. Pooh is especially unexpressive. Pooh and Eeyore are the two Hundred Acre Woodsians to have much of a role, and they say suitably Pooh and Eeyore things. Eeyore gets a few good humorous fatalistic and depressive lines.
But the human drama of a harried grown-up Christopher Robin as an efficiency expert who neglects his wife and young daughter because he's working too hard is mostly blunt and annoying. And of course he applies some Pooh philosophy to his work just as things look bleak and it saves the day and everyone is happy. It's the kind of pap Disney was churning out on TV in the late 70's if you ask me (and you did by reading this post. ha ha).
So the film is respectful of the animal characters. Though most have little do except Pooh, Eeyore, and some belated screen time for Tigger. But overall, there's not much reason for this film to exist. And there's not enough likable about it. Best I can say is that it didn't become offensive or irritating, though it neared the border and looked at the view a few times. |
Last edited by gromit on Sun Apr 07, 2019 1:45 pm; edited 1 time in total
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| bartist |
| Posted: Mon Mar 04, 2019 9:50 am |
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Joined: 27 Apr 2010
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Location: Black Hills
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I found much to like in Green Book, a warm dip in what may be some fantasy, which does provide a good buddy dramedy and an amusing role reversal. Seemed like the two guys save each other, to some degree. I doubt that the pianist, from what I know of musicians (living with them), actually blew off his final gig. At the end of the day, you know that hurts the next group who wants a booking there. And the next.
In a fictional interpretation, however, it delivers an easy feelgood moment. And cements further the bond between the two.
Not a best pic, imo, but a compelling look at loneliness and oddly matched friends.
Random obs:
It actually took me a minute to grasp why Tony tosses out the drinking glasses. I can be dense.
Shirley is from a Jamaican family and he's never eaten fried chicken. Pull the other one, mon!
Viggo's rendition of gluttonous eating habits: audience loved this. I feel Viggo went full Method there.
Would Shirley or Tony really have thought a black man had any chance of trying on a suit, in a shop like that, in the deep south, in 1962? Again, this felt like a fabrication (no pun intended) to deliver a dramatic confrontational moment to viewers too young to remember.
Who throws garbage in a piano? This seems an OTT slur against Southerners. Maybe in Dogpatch, but not in a city's main concert venue. Again, the feeling is that viewers need stereotype and caricature to glom onto the setting. Hmm. |
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He was wise beyond his years, but only by a few days. |
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| gromit |
| Posted: Tue Mar 05, 2019 3:27 am |
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Joined: 31 Aug 2004
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Location: Shanghai
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I thought the uncouth mannerisms of Viggo's character were overplayed.
I thought the idea was this was a somewhat junky unused piano they got out of storage for the Negro Pianist to play. But that whole scene wasn't very convincing. Pop the worker in the head and suddenly he cooperates? Where did they get the Steinway from on short notice, etc?
I think it would have played better if they made it clear they pulled out some random crap storage piano for Dr. Shirley (hence the garbage) and put their Steinway in hiding. Then reversed course, when Viggo and Shirley were insistent.
It would have flowed better. And made the racism/insult more direct.
The tailor incident seemed somewhat unlikely, but they are from the North and it was a spur of the moment idea. I might have played it as a teaching moment for Viggo with Shirley fairly aware what was probably going to go down.
I thought Green Book was well done and very much the type of film the Oscars tend to reward. |
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Killing your enemies, if it's done badly, increases their number. |
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| bartist |
| Posted: Tue Mar 05, 2019 9:56 am |
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| knox |
| Posted: Thu Mar 07, 2019 3:46 pm |
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Joined: 18 Mar 2010
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Location: St. Louis
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| Did Shirley really get Bobby Kennedy to call up some yokel sheriff and chew him out? Of all the cheesy bits mentioned here, that one struck me as the most egregious. |
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