The Magic Lantern Shines Brighter Still

 

With trembling hand this optimistic blogger returns after over a year of silence with the hope that there’s still a reader out there willing to take a chance on me again. 

 We act as if we didn’t believe the history of this injured world because with such sweet naiveté we think we can’t repeat what was. Racism? Fascism? Deadly pandemic that kills millions around the world? Nah. Things of the past. Lesson learned: they are very much not. During the time since my post about End Game, we not only lived through even darker moments than I wrote back then in this fragile democracy which is the United States of America, but we also confronted and confront a pandemic, which only in the U.S. and on the date I write this post has infected more than 27 million Americans and killed more than 460,000. Worldwide, 2.35 million people have died from COVID-19.

 I think a more conclusive rationale for my extended silence is hard to find.

 

Anya Taylor-Joy in Emma

I saw great movies during my intermission! More than ever I am cemented in my conviction that I survive whatever troubled times I face through this beautiful art that is film. The last time I went to a movie theater was March 6, 2020. It was to see Autum de Wilde’s Emma which, as the fan I am of movies based on Jane Austen novels, I enjoyed and recommend above all for its gorgeous photography, set and costume design. I miss the theater experience more than I can convey, and lament the toll the pandemic has taken on theaters, which even makes their sustainability uncertain. However, I subscribed to the many at-home movie viewing options and it was more soothing than ever to watch good and even great films. There were even movie history-in-the-making moments where I out right jumped for joy in celebration, such as when Bong Joon-ho’s masterpiece Parasite won multiple Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

 I could write post after post about the movies I saw in 2019 and 2020, but we’ll never catch up that way so I’ll just skate through my favorites, highlighting what I liked most. (Parasite certainly tops them all).

 

Jimmie Fails, Johnathan Major and Danny Glover in The Last Black Man in San Francisco

The movies seemed to absorb the complexity of the times and incrementally got better as 2019 ticked into the bizarre year that was 2020. Joe Talbot’s refreshingly creative direction in The Last Black Man in San Francisco was the treasure to see in 2019; a movie that says so much about race relations in America in such a profound and rather poetic fashion (it even has a Greek chorus-like group of young black men!). Jordan Peele’s US gave us the horror genre approach on race; good but I still much prefer his so-far grand opus Get Out. Some movies were gems for their acting. The unembellished alienation so majestically brought to screen by Joaquin Phoenix stood out in Joker, Todd Phillip’s psychological thriller which was part comic book backstory and part social inequality protest film. And there were other, less art house films, but still quite enjoyable ones such as the whodunit Knives Out in the mystery comedy genre, directed by Rian Johnson. And, of course, for the Marvel fan that I am, Spiderman: Far From Home more than satisfied.

 With all the good things that can be said about the films released in 2019, 2020 was really the great movie year. Maybe because of the surreal times we’ve been living, maybe because there’s a whole new generation of filmmakers out there being more creative than ever, 2020 has been a year full of excitingly good movies, and that’s that I’ve yet to see some of the critic’s favorites soon to be released, such as Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari, Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland, Shaka King’s Judas and the Black Messiah, Florian Zeller’s The Father, out this month.

 

Dennis Bovell and Saffron Coomber in Lovers Rock

Among the wonderful movies I have seen, Steve McQueen’s anthology, made up of five movies released on Prime under the series name Small Axe, include my favorites: Lovers Rock and Mangrove. Even though Mangrove, along with Red White and Blue, Alex Wheatle and Education, are London based and present the real-life experiences of black immigrants terrorized by racism in London’s West Indian community, in the year of the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in America, these films are most certainly part of the global call for change and the movement that is Black Lives Matter! McQueen, who directed the Academy Award Best Picture 12 Years a Slave (2013), is a master at presenting the infamy of racism and the urgent need to end this scourge.

 Eliza Hittman’s movie Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always does something similar for the issue of women’s rights, our bodies and the situations we are forced to face, in the most subtle, simple yet profound way ever. It is also a beautiful movie about the solidarity among women. A gem of a movie.

 

Daniel García in Ya No Estoy Aquí

Two movies from Latin America touch on the force of community in confronting strong issues of poverty and inequality, Fernando Fria’s Ya No Estoy Aqui (I Am No Longer Here), from Mexico, and Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Bacurau, from Brazil. Latin American is not only growing its film industry substantially but presenting the world with fresh styles that reflect the very broad cultural spectrum that exists in our countries, which defy how we’re many times treated as if we had a single, monolithically homogeneous culture.  Another foreign language film which, while less  dramatic than the two mentioned, also looks into a most curious aspect of a culture, this time in Denmark, is Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round, with the always fabulous (I’m a fan) Mads Mikkelsen.

 

Dick Johnson in Dick Johnson is Dead

I’m realizing I’ll lose the reader if I make this post too much longer, but I can’t leave it without mentioning the documentaries in 2020. I confess that I’ve not been as into documentaries as I should have been (in books I also prefer fiction) but this may change after this year in which some of the best movies I’ve seen have been documentaries. Dick Johnson is Dead by Dick Johnson’s daughter Kirsten Johnson, is probably one of the best movies about the love between a parent and a child that I’ve seen, the making of the movie itself is a testament to this. David Byrne’s American Utopia by Spike Lee is an energizing, hopeful, fun and great movie for progressive music loving fans, whether you are a Talking Heads fan or not.  There are others, including some I’ve yet to see, which are the social commentary documentaries, some hard to watch but amazing as films and testaments to the craziness of our lives and world: Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution by Nicole Newham and Jim LeBrecth, All In: The Fight for Democracy by Lisa Cortés and Liz Garbus, City Hall by Frederick Wiseman, Mayor by David Osit, The Social Dilemma by Jeff Orloski. 

 

Spike Lee's American Utopia

Something big happened starting the elections of November 2020, cemented by Georgia’s Senate runoff election in January this year: millions of people in the United States said ENOUGH! We voted to get off the dark road on which the country was travelling, which affected the whole world. Many millions of Americans said that we want to live in the 21^st Century and we want it to be a century of inclusion, of diversity, of science, respect, human dignity, and kindness. We want to live in a world that needs to come together to face this and any other pandemic that arises, to face the existential threat that is inequality, climate change, or any other menace that impacts human beings negatively. This big change in the direction of the country has helped me take up the pen again and share with the reader my love of film. I thank the artists that make movies for keeping the magic lantern shining, for keeping me going during those darkest of times, which I am hopeful we will all be determined to leave behind for good. Lessons learned.

Eros! (Not Thanos)

Spoiler alert - at end.

It’s always the child inside us that either kills or saves us. As dramatic as that sounds, I keep turning to mine to keep moving ahead. Yet I know, as the excruciatingly painful movie Patrick Melrose so amazingly reminded us (what a majestic Benedick Cumberbatch!), sometimes not letting go of the inner child can be one’s demise. But, again, that’s not my case. (Or not so much). And I mention all this because I’m back at this blog after such a long break because of my childhood affection for the Avengers.

It’s almost a cliché that these rather dark days in America can drain our enthusiasm for so much. I’m sure that’s not the case for everyone, but it is for this truth and inclusiveness-loving blogger. Another one of the reasons I kept feeling compelled to return to this blog was that I hated that the last movie I wrote about, the one a first time reader would see, was a movie I didn’t like at all. But despite there being many good movies between that one and the one I am commenting now, none of them lifted my spirit up enough to want to write again like Avengers: Endgame.

I know I have the child in me to blame. She steadfastly believed in the ultimate triumph of reason, of fairness; she believed in the truth of evolution, not in the Darwinian sense (though, that too), but in the sense that our species would always continue to better itself. We strove to leave the wrong things behind, those that hurt other people, like sexism, racism, classism. All the isms. We moved forward in inclusion, in respect, in empathy. We became a more global society. Globalization, to that child, didn’t mean a world governed by greed with no borders, but populated by humans with no borders.

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Dr. King said and I believed.

But then suddenly it didn’t. America, or at least part of it, has shown its very horrible side. Like in Jordan Peele’s movie Us (that everyone writes is the U.S.), we realized that those with any kind of privilege granted them in the past–so men, white people, the wealthy- were really not that predisposed to let it go. Nah-uh! They were suddenly empowered, in the Executive, Legislative and Judiciary branches of government, at a national and state level, and no amount of Black Lives Matter and #MeToo protests seem to make a dent in their armor of selfishness and greed.

So then, Avengers Endgame.

If in our daily lives we see America losing its battle with evil through these everyday villains that populate the White House, Senate, local courts, the dark web, well then at least when the lights dim and the camera rolls they fade into the obscurity where they belong. And the everyday Steve Rogers, Natasha Romanoff, T’Challa, Tony Stark, Sam Wilson, Hope Van Dyne, Bucky Barnes and the others step forward, rise from the ashes of this burnt out America, so to speak, and try to restore that balance that our inner child will always believe in.

 

Steve Rogers/Captain America (Chris Evans) and Natasha Romanoff /Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) 

Endgame does not disappoint its fans, as the billion dollar world-wide box office demonstrates. And it’s rather hard to comment much more without spoiling it for those that haven’t seen it, so suffice to say that the movie is like Tony Starks’s Möbius strip. It is an Endgame that we know really doesn’t end. It is a surge of hopefulness because our heroes know about balance, are capable of empathy and sacrifice, and believe that all humans -and those of other species too- are worth our loving them 3,000. While probably not the reason Jim Starling gave his character the name Thanos, I’ve always felt it was too close to Thanatos, or death in Greek mythology, to be just a coincidence; and its opposite is Eros, that is life, but also love. Endgame is about choosing life, choosing to love.

Some of the strongest characters of the previous 21 movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) carry the movie well, so it’s fine that many others have small parts. The Russo brothers, who directed some of the best films in the MCU -Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), Captain America: Civil War (2016) and Avengers: Infinity War (2018)- chose their leading Avengers well. (Maybe I would have had Groot in a few more scenes just ‘cause he’s hella cute; and… certainly not Natasha?!). These were the right directors for the film.

Captain America (Chris Evans) and Falcon ( Anthony Mackie)

I may write about more details of the movie as time goes by and more people have seen it. I’ve written about the MCU before on this blog (Heroes for All Ages / May 2013; We are Groot/ August 2014), so I can always get back on the Möbius strip and return to these, my childhood friends.  For now, there is one image from the movie I want to share, even though it’s a tiny spoiler (but the reader wouldn’t understand it out of context anyway). I want to share it because it’s one of those scenes one keeps close to the heart, like when Thelma and Louise hold hands in the car at the end of Thelma and Louise, or when Ellen Ripley picks up that cat to enter into her pod in Alien. You know, the kind that restores our faith in human beings and humanity and in how we can evolve to better ourselves. It is the scene when Steve Rogers, Captain America, passes on his shield to Sam Wilson.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

 When Dr. King said we had to learn to live together as brothers and sisters or perish like fools, he was speaking to the America of the Jim Crow era. This year marks a half a century since his assassination and, doesn’t it just feel like we’re going down that road of fools?! This utter lack of respect for one’s fellow citizen is really the unintended theme of the movie Three Billboards outside Ebbing Missouri, written and directed by Martin McDonagh. It is hard to find a movie more filled with derision for every marginalized group in America: women, black people, gay people, people with dwarfism. Many might have passed on the movie had McDonagh’s film not  received a Best Picture and 6 other Academy Award nominations and already won the Best Motion Picture Drama at the Golden Globes and the Screen Actors Guild Cast Ensemble award, among others. This is a travesty and a sign of the times.

Martin McDonagh has brought foul-mouthed, ugly-souled bigots to the screen before in dark comedies like In Bruges or Seven Psychopaths (and this director must have something against short stature people, because he derides them in In Bruges as well). The lead characters in those movies, however, were extremely violent mob criminals (Bruges) or, well, psychopaths! In Three Billboards, the racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and just plain detestable people are the everyday folk of a small rural town in America: the mother of a young woman who was raped, the father, the police officers, the dentist, the high school kids, you name it. Was there a message here from this white Englishman?

The basic plot of the film has been all over the internet. Frances McDormand, who plays Mildred the mother of a young woman brutally raped, killed and whose body was burned, decides she can’t wait for the local police to take any more time finding her daughter’s killers and puts up three billboards to try to light a fire under the police chief, played by Woody Harrelson, and his incredibly incompetent police officers, including one Officer Dixon, a violent, distasteful, hate filled bigot and fool, played by Sam Rockwell. McDormand and Rockwell have already won Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild awards for their roles, which are the central ones in the story.

 

Sam Rockwell as Officer Jason Dixon and Frances McDormand as Mildred Hayes 

Mildred and Dixon spend most of the movie showing us just how heartless and cruel people can be or become. The disturbing thing is that these two characters are not the “bad guys” of the film. It would be nothing new to have people shown as ruthless, but the director here is actually going for us to feel sympathy for Mildred and forgiveness for Dixon, who McDonagh makes go through some weird form of redemption in the film.

Mildred, in her “quest for justice” (we suppose this is what the billboards represent) is completely detached and unfeeling towards her much suffering son, disparages the family-loving chief of police who is dying of cancer, insults and harms the dentist (a fat man; fat people are also mocked and ridiculed by McDonagh in In Bruges), compares the Catholic church to a criminal street gang –and all its priests are either pedophiles or pedophile enablers- recklessly damages the town, and foul-mouths just about everyone else in the movie. How to feel sympathy for such a woman? You may think her ruthlessness is a result of her daughter’s brutal murder, but in the only scene where we see her with her daughter still alive, one where they are arguing over a ride to a date, Mildred responds to her daughter’s “I hope I get raped” with a “I hope you get raped too!” Such a detestable line between a mother and her daughter could only have been written into a screenplay by a man. 

That piece of dialogue isn’t even the worst in the film, as bad as it is.  I need to transcribe part of the one that is, and I note that I am not, of course, transcribing the N word, but these white characters certainly did use it in the movie:

MILDRED:  So how’s it all going in the N*****- torturing business, Dixon?

DIXON: It’s ‘Persons of color’-torturing business, these days, if you want to know. (…)

DIXON (to the Chief of Police): She said ‘N*****-torturing’. I said you can’t say ‘N*****-torturing’ no more. You gotta say ‘Persons-of-color’ torturing. Right?

Was this supposed to be one of the “darkly hilarious” scenes, as some critics have found the film to be?! Remember, it’s not the slave master using the N word in a movie that takes place in the 19^th century, it’s the modern day “suffering” mother, the one for whom we’re supposed to feel sympathy, talking to two police officers.

I guess McDonagh is one of those people of our degraded times that embraces living in a “post politically-correct” era.  Mildred’s son –the nice, suffering young man in the movie- calling his mother and sister “c**ts” is probably just him using “locker room talk” to this director. The one Latino in the film is called a “beaner”. The black actors in the movie are like props, none of their characters are developed. The great actor Peter Dinklage, of Game of Thrones fame, plays a character whose only purpose in the movie is to be the butt of the “midget” jokes. Hard to understand why he would accept this role.

 

Frances McDormand as Mildren and Peter Dinkglage as James

People in the theater laughed in some of these openly racist, misogynistic and just plain distasteful scenes. It is the sign of the times. When the current occupant of the White House is the first to disrespect people, referring to all the nations in the African continent as “s***holes”, calling citizens of Mexico “rapists”, saying of women he’d “grab them by the p****”, publicly mocking people with disabilities, disrespecting Native Americans, banning Muslims, and more, how to be surprised by this film director or the many awards his film is accruing? Too many Americans actually say they like how the President “speaks his mind.” What they are saying is that they agree with the racist, misogynist and hate-filled content and they want to “speak their minds” like this as well. McDonagh has spoken his in this screenplay and film.

One message to them: Respect!  Or perish like fools.

When Times Get Rough

Around the time I wrote the Beatriz at Dinner post last year, life threw me a curve ball. I didn’t duck on time. I was left stunned and unable to write. So, I turned off the lights and my blog went silent.

But I never stopped going to the movies. Surviving by film literally became what I did.

When the person whose been by your side for thirty-seven years suddenly leaves his half of the bed empty, when relationships you’ve had since you were old enough to talk get tangled in knots impossible to unravel, and you find yourself in a country where everything that is wrong is overtaking what should be, in this up-side down world of the new Demogorgons, there is still that big screen. The lights dim, the excitement of being transported away from everything that is troubling or scary or sad runs through your veins, and there they are: the films you love. For when times get rough.

 I would like to break my silence with five marvelous films that have brought different elements of understanding, solace, and wonder to my life: Gullermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water, Joe Wright’s Darkest Hour, Ridley Scott’s All the Money in the World, Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina’s Coco, and Sean Baker’s The Florida Project. These films excel in all aspects. They are directed with tremendous creativity and mastery; the cinematography, set design, score and especially the acting in all the films are extraordinary, and maybe most of all they touch on issues, provide insights, and bring forth positive values and hope to probably some of the darkest times this nation has faced in years.

Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour

Darkest Hour, by the director of one of my favorite romance movies, Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice, is the story of how close the British Empire came to caving to Nazi Germany and the variables that led Winston Churchill, played majestically by Gary Oldman, to resist by using the spirit of freedom and courage of its everyday citizens, the true heroes of World War II, changing the course of history. 

It is the soldiers that willingly gave their lives in Calais, the civilians who brought home the soldiers from Dunkirk, the men and women who withstood the blitz and were willing to persist that bring the tears to your eyes in Joe Wright’s masterful telling of this dark hour.  It is an inspiring film that speaks to leadership, made all the more striking as we live through these times where it is so lacking.

Christopher Plummer as John Paul Getty in All the Money in the World

In All the Money in the World, Ridley Scott has impressively opened the doors to an understanding or, at the very least, a glimpse of the minds of people who are born to wealth and for whom wealth has become a disease of the soul. Again, a parable to our times where greed has overtaken human compassion and empathy, where billionaires aspire to trillions while destroying the welfare, health and lives of many ordinary folk. The film uses the kidnapping of J. Paul Getty’s grandson as the story by which to represent the slow dehumanization to which these dangerous levels of greed lead.

Michelle Williams and Mark Wahlberg in All the Money in the World

Christopher Plummer and Ridley Scott both showed how experienced artists are able to do something as impressive as re-shoot 22 scenes in nine days, which Scott chose to do after the sexual harassment allegations against Kevin Spacey, who originally played Getty. Scott  stands out in any genre film he chooses to direct and always brings out the best in his collaborators, in this film that includes Michelle Williams and even rather unexceptional actors like Mark Wahlberg.

Bria Vinaite as Halley and Brooklyn Prince as Moonee in The Florida Project

At the other end of the wealth spectrum we find The Florida Project, which depicts the hopeless and abandoned poor in America, personified in the abandoned children we follow through a neighborhood in Florida. Director Sean Baker, who excels at bringing the marginal worlds of this nation to the screen, like he previously did so well in his film Tangerine about a transgender sex worker, shot entirely with iPhone smartphones, in this film takes us into the life of Moonee, a six-year-old girl and her single mother, Halley, who are just barely surviving in a budget motel near the Disney empire. Moonee and her friends run free and wild through these motels and abandoned houses, full of low-income families in a permanent state of transition.

Willem Dafoe and Brooklyn Prince in The Florida Project

This is more than just poverty in America, it is despair. Halley embodies the product of a society that has ceased to care about its citizens, leaving them to a day-by-day existence, where the world is pretty much reduced to a room in a motel, alcohol, drugs, anger and desolation. Willem Dafoe has been praised for his role as Bobby, the manager at the motel, although both Brooklyn Prince, who plays Moonee, and Bria Vinaite, who is Halley, are just as impressive or maybe more so. Bobby is sort of the remnant of a time where compassion and empathy towards those less fortunate was a little more prevalent, or at least where concern for the welfare of children still existed. But even Bobby, with all his good intentions, is faced with the very real and inevitable outcome for Moonee and her mother.

I’ve left the two films full of hopefulness for last. At a time when democrats in Congress are fighting for “dreamers” to remain in the country where they’ve grown, and are opposing the monstrosity that would be a wall with Mexico, Disney pictures released their most recent animated film: Coco, which takes place in just this neighbor country. Luckily the heads at Disney were wise in choosing a stellar Latino cast for the voices of Coco and his family, turned to Latino consultants for the screenplay, and used a Latino director to co-direct a movie that brings the beauty of Mexican traditions and values to the screen in a high quality artistic and moving way. 

Anthony Gonzales as the voice of  Miguel and Ana Ofelia Murguía as the voice of Mamá Coco in Coco

Will it give some of the racist supporters of this administration’s immigration policies pause? Who knows. It is a film that melts hearts, but one can’t help but wonder if those who support the current administration even have one. It did, in any case, not only melt mine but made me once again so proud to be Latina, ready to stand up for the beautiful cultures to the south of the Rio Grande, some of which are now part of this diverse nation to the North. Basing themselves on Mexican art and traditions, Coco exalts the values of honoring family and tradition, respecting our elders, carrying and caring for those loved ones that are no longer with us. It does this through music, art, and undying love.

Sally Hawkins and Octavia Spencer in The Shape of Water

The best for last. The Shape of Water. A caveat: you will love this movie if you love Guillermo del Toro movies. Del Toro is a singular artist who happens to love monsters. “Well –he’s said- the first thing is that I love monsters, I identify with monsters.” His characters in many movies are inter-species and he braves the boundaries of the “normal”. In his films, the true monsters - those dark, dangerous, violent things we traditionally call monsters- are the human beings incapable of humanity. They are Vidal, the fascist general in Pan’s Labyrinth, or Richard Strickland, the government agent in The Shape of Water. Del Toro also blurs the lines between reality and a world of magic, sometimes supernatural, sometimes science fiction, always splendorous in its details and imagination, reaffirming that there is so much more to our world than meets the eye. He is the director of magical realism in film.

Richard Jenkins and Sally Hawkins in The Shape of Water

The Shape of Water, like Pan’s Labyrinth before it, has at its core a heroine who appears to all as someone society considers “weak”, but who proves, through the strength of her love, that she is just the person to overpower the forces of darkness contained in the authoritarian, fascist-like figures that are the men-monsters in these movies. In Pan’s that was the young girl Ofelia, stepdaughter to the fascist Vidal, and in The Shape of Water it is Eliza, a mute cleaning woman, played brilliantly by Sally Hawkins, who confronts Strickland.

There are people in our modern world that want to reduce us to flat, one-dimensional individuals, easily stereotyped, stockpiled in binary, polarized boxes. For these people, almost everyone is completely dispensable. Del Toro’s movie demonstrates the fallacy of their proposition, how impossible it is given how very complex humans really are, how infinite our world and our imagination can be, and how through friendship and love we can break all imposed boundaries and not only resist, but become the remarkable beings we were created to be.

A Search for America's Soul

When a movie moves you deeply, you know there is a connection of lived experience. Beatriz at Dinner will be one of these movies for you if you are a member of the working class, if you are a mid-career struggling professional woman, if you are a Latino immigrant and, overall, if you have a heart.

Puerto Rican Director Miguel Arteta joins writer Mike White, with whom he made The Good Girl, to skillfully take to the screen a powerful script about the abyss between the very rich and unscrupulous and… the rest of us. What takes the film into a category of its own are the two actors that personify our society’s class and race conflict: Salma Hayeck and John Lithgow; no need to say who personifies what. While both are naturally amazing in their roles, Ms. Hayeck is downright superb. She is our heart and soul.

As the title indicates, the story develops at a dinner given for a wealthy real estate mogul who has razed, devastated and destroyed his way to wealth, played by Lithgow. Ms. Hayeck’s character, Beatriz Luna, is obviously accidentally present. 

The supporting actors to these two pillars are also subtly great -David Warshofsky, Chloë Sevigny, Connie Britton, Amy Landecker- and each contributes to the ebb and flow of tension that slowly builds throughout the film. But it is Ms. Hayeck’s soulful eyes and Mr. Lithgow’s soulless ones that give witness to the philosophies that are in such opposition in today’s world between those that care and those that don’t and for who the world is, as they say, “their oyster”. The critics have called this an allegory of the Trump-era.

You can almost hear Ms. Hayeck’s thoughts, as old as scripture, as she struggles to contain the feelings Lithgow’s character evokes in her (an “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God”- Matthew 19:24; Mark 10:25; Luke 18:25). This is an ancient conflict between those that amass wealth with voracious and insatiable greed and those that are constantly and painfully sorting through the debris the former leave behind.

That this now feels like the political scenario in the United States only makes this movie more relevant. We leave the theater knowing how true it is that we, the declining middle class, struggling immigrants, working women, seem powerless when confronted with the enormity of men like the character played by Lithgow. This is a man who cares nothing for his fellow human beings, who lives only for the present and his “highs”; a man who is catered to and pampered by those that make wealth for and from him. These are the ones lobbying for their interests and  looking to loophole their way through any legal system. We read about it in the papers on a daily basis these days. So the movie will feel like the clear and present danger we face.

Maybe that’s why we love Beatriz at Dinner just that much more; we’re reminded of who these people we’re taught to admire and envy really are. We are glad that there are movie makers out there that are skillful enough to bring that much reality and reflection to a dinner party. 

Guess Who’s Staying Past Dinner.

A half a century after Stanley Kramer’s Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner (1967), the Sidney Poitier - Katherine Hepburn - Spencer Tracy drama about a young white woman who brings her black fiancé to meet her parents, Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) is released; a movie about a young white woman who brings her black fiancé to meet her parents. This time it’s a horror movie, which says a lot about racism and persistent attitudes towards interracial relationships in America. Looking back on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, in its own way it too could be considered a horror movie. The blatant racism of the Hepburn/Tracy white parents towards the gentle, good looking, intelligent, humanistic, and all around amazing young doctor that is played by the talented Sidney Poitier is nothing if not horrific.

Daniel Kaluuya and Allison Williams in Get Out

As we contemplate the great divide in today’s America, without a doubt we find privilege and oppression at its core and, in particular, racism and sexism. It would probably take new treaties on social change (or lack thereof) to explain how in the twenty-first century we are unable to move past these systems of oppression. But thank heavens there are movies! Movies, like Peele’s Get Out, which use parody and symbolism so wondrously that, well, while maybe not being able to explain the why, certainly make it easy for those who have lived oppression to perceive the how. 

Jordan Peele said, of his directorial debut: “"It was very important to me to just get the entire audience in touch in some way with the fears inherent [in] being black in this country, (…) part of being black in this country, and I presume being any minority, is constantly being told that ... we're seeing racism where there just isn't racism."

Ruth Nega and Joel Edgerton in Loving

There have been a number of movies that have addressed the issue of racism through the lens of interracial relationships, most recently Jeff Nicol’s Loving (2016), the story of Richard and Mildred Loving, the interracial couple whose legal battle against Virginia laws banning interracial marriages led to a Supreme Court decision; a movie that received various Oscar nominations this Oscar season. Other notables include Todd Hayne’s Far from Heaven (2002) about a housewife (Julianne Moore) who falls in love with a black gardener (Dennis Haysbert) while going through the pain of discovering her husband (Dennis Quaid) is a closeted homosexual. Their interracial love is the real taboo in this melodrama set in the 1950’s. Marc Forester’s Monster’s Ball (2001), for which Halle Berry won a Best Actress Oscar, is a dark story about a white racist jail guard (Billy Bob Thorton) who falls in love with the black woman who is the spouse of man on death row.  

Julianne Moore and Dennis Haysbert in Far from Heaven

Others worth mentioning  include Robert De Niro’s A Bronx Tale (1993), Richard Benjamin’s Made In America (1993), a comedy with  the then real-life interracial couple Whoopi Goldberg and Ted Danson; or Katherine Bigelow’s Strange Days (1995), a thriller which is also a sci-fi romance, made great not by the script as much as by the passion with which the beautiful couple that is Ralph Fiennes and Angela Basset play out their relationship; this movie is a particular favorite of mine for just this reason and because the relationship here is never in question for the race of the couple (it takes place, after all, in the future).

Angela Bassett  and Ralph Fiennes in Strange Days

With the exception of Strange Days, the other movies were directed by white men. While they are good movies, all worth seeing, they were made by people who contemplate the system of racial oppression but have not lived the experience.  This marks a big difference. As W. E. B. Du Bois wrote so well many years ago about the black experience (also applicable to other discriminated groups):

“It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”

That is why movies about interracial relationships made by black men or women are so much more honest, real and strong.  In Get Out the black/white relationship is a metaphor; the movie is about the dangers that black men navigate in a society that is most definitely not post-racial. Black directors have tended towards comedy when addressing interracial relationships, maybe to make sure we understand that it is not the romance that is being examined, but rather the context of racism. Such is the case of Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever (1991) about a successful black businessman (Wesley Snipes) who begins an affair with his white coworker (Annabella Sciorra), or Kevin Rodney Sullivan’s Guess Who? (2005) in which a young black woman (Zoe Saldana) brings home her boyfriend (Ashton Kutcher) to meet her parents; it is Bernie Mac  and Kutcher's relationship and their racial conflict that is under the lens (Bernie Mac is particularly great in this movie).

Jordan’s Peele Get Out also uses comedy, as could be expected from one half of the brilliant Key and Peele comedic duo. It is the strength of the movie that it doesn’t fit into a single genre, and while this may not be a work of art-house film making, it is most certainly an original, more so because of the strong social commentary that is presented in such a creative way.  

Movie critics and, most importantly, the audience, are dissecting the movie, finding all the hidden and not-so-hidden messages. The movie has exploded on social media. And this is good. This is what needs to occur. People are talking about this divide, this open wound in America that will not heal until there is a willingness to surrender privilege, denounce the barbarism that is racism and sexism, and recognize and respect everyone’s humanity.

This Great, Diverse Nation

At midnight on the last day of the year in some countries people bring out their brooms, open the front door, and sweep out all the malice the old year brought with it in the hope that the new one can start clean. This year we’re more in need of a time machine to roll back the events that led to November 8 and reverse the outcome of the day that shook America to its core.

There has been too much loss this year!

We are deeply saddened by the departure of beloved activists Muhammad Ali and Tom Hayden; authors Harper Lee, Elie Wiesel, Edward Albee; film actors and directors Alan Rickman, Gene Wilder, Debbie Reynolds, Carrie Fisher, George Kennedy, Patty Duke, Curtis Hanson, Michael Cimino; musicians George Martin, Prince, Keith Emerson, Greg Lake, David Bowie, Maurice White, George Michael…and too many others. We carry the dead with us because they made our lives richer.

So we try to wrap up the year taking stock of what’s been. In film, this is usually a rather happy thing to do because film is art-is creation-is life. And while it has been a year of disappointment in many of our fellow human beings who allowed the November 8 outcome, it hasn’t been a disappointing year in cinema.  I have three films that prove my point: Moonlight, Hell or High Water and Manchester by the Sea. There have been more –Loving, Fences, Birth of a Nation, Queen of Katwe, Sully, to mention but a few other American films—but these three have commonalities that resonate with what is occurring in the United States.

First of all the three take place in present day America. Then, the protagonists of the films are all struggling, working class Americans trying to make ends meet in a country where the American Dream has truly become that and only that  for a growing majority: a dream. While showing the plight of everyday working folk, all three films also majestically show what a diverse and immense country these United States are. There is Chiron, the black, gay protagonist of Moonlight, who lives with his drug addicted mother Paula in a rough neighborhood in Miami and is assisted by a drug dealer and the love for his friend Kevin. Up north east is Lee Chandler, a white, Catholic Bostonian janitor who goes back to Manchester by the sea to take care of his nephew Patrick when the pillar that held them up, his brother Joe, dies. Finally there are the Howard brothers, Tanner and Toby, trying to stay alive in one of the dying small towns in Texas in Hell or High Water.  Such different places, such diverse races and cultures, and yet there they all are, Americans, a big part of a nation that has left them behind. The graffiti on the wall in one of the first sequences of the film Hell or High Water pretty much sums it up:

“3 Tours in Iraq, but no Bailout for People like us”

Another thing the three films share is the tremendously strong relationships of love among the male protagonists in the three stories. The scripts of the three movies are centered on men, not to say there aren’t important roles for women, like Chiron’s mother or Lee’s wife, but they are peripheral to the main relationships. And the casting of these male protagonists has been magnificent! Truly great acting. What’s more, I expect most of the main characters of these films will be nominated by the Academy for one acting award or another.

Trevante Rhodes as Chiron in Moonlight

There is the ever more impressive Mahershala Ali who plays Juan, the crack dealer in Moonlight. It’s not a big part, but his acting is perfect, as is Trevante Rhodes who plays adult Chiron.  Jeff Bridges is ever great as Marcus Hamilton, and Gil Birmingham is another perfect cast as his partner officer in Hell or High Water, but it's the Howard brothers that are the ones to watch in this movie. Chris Pine surprises as Toby Howard, given all the rather “light” movies he’s been in before this one, but it is Ben Foster that shines as his brother Tanner in Hell or High Water. The depth of these sibling’s love is only comparable to their grief and the hardships they faced growing up. That’s somewhat the case for the brothers Joe and Lee Chandler in Manchester by the Sea, but while the actor Kyle Chandler is just right for the part of Joe and Lucas Hedges is a true young acting revelation as Patrick, it is certainly Casey Affleck as Lee that grabs your attention and your heart. Very likely this actor will walk away with the Academy Award. The supporting actress nominations for Naomie Harris, as Chiron’s mother, and Michelle Williams as Lee’s wife, are also probably a given.

Jeff Bridges and Gil Birmingham (Hell or High Water), Kyle Chandler and Casey Affleck (Manchester by the Sea)

As the year ends, film award season begins. It is my hope that one of these three films will take the Best Picture award at the Academy Awards this year, my preference being Moonlight also because of the great directing by Barry Jenkins and James Laxton’s beautiful cinematography. However there is a film that seems to be creeping up on these strong contenders, according to film critics: Damien Chazelle’s La La Land, so I should mention it as well.

I confess I will be upset if the Academy or even the Golden Globes gives La La Land a best picture award. This is not the year to retreat to la la land, in any sense. Not that it isn’t a cute movie with a good score and the ever-charismatic Ryan Gosling; one in which Jon Legend delivers probably what amounts to the movie’s best and only original lines. But it is a nostalgic movie, of not the right kind. It is precisely that “return to” (Make America…) nostalgia that has already led the unimaginable to happen.  

Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling in La La Land

Much like The Artist was a tribute to silent films in its time (another “huh?!” Oscar winner nobody remembers now, as was predictable), La La Land is a tribute to Gene Kellly’s Hollywood, down to the shoes. Yes, boy those were great times of dance and fun IF you were a white “struggling artist” living the life of … Beverly Hills pool parties, where everyone owns Prius cars, jobs as a barista on the Metro Goldwyn Myer Studio set, with thousand dollar jazz collector items? Oops, those are the “struggling artists” of La La Land. The director still sees Los Angeles pretty much as the Hollywood of Rebel without a Cause, I guess, because despite the fact that only about 27% of the population of Los Angeles is non-Hispanic white, the only thing that reflects this in the film is the opening dance number. There is, of course, the jazz club full of only black people and Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling (like in the segregated fifties of yonder year), and maybe that’s why Gosling’s character talks about being the (white) savior of jazz music. Nope, not going to be happy if that film wins.

This is not a time for la la land. It is a time to speak out for the disenfranchised America shown in the other three movies I write about. Many of those disenfranchised have been fooled into shooting themselves in the foot voting into power an army of Goldman Sachs and bigoted one percenters that will only make things worse for janitors like Lee, gay black men like Chiron, or the white, angry folk living in the small, dying, southern and rust belt towns of this great, diverse nation. It never ceases to be a time for hope, but let’s bring in the New Year with what we really need: a time for action.