SELMA: An Impressive Movement

Director: Ava DuVernay
Writer: Paul Webb
Cast: David Oyelowo, Carmen Ejogo, Wendell Pierce, Common, Tom Wilkinson, Oprah Winfrey, Tim Roth
Runtime: 128 mins.
2014

I saw Selma a few weeks ago and tried to start a write-up, but nothing materialized. Then the Oscar nominations happened. Among the many reasons to be annoyed, perhaps the most pressing is the absence of Selma from all but a very few categories. No nods to Bradford Young for cinematography, no nods to Ava DuVernay for direction, not even a nod to David Oyelowo for what is clearly one of the most chameleonic performances of the year. I won't take any time now to complain about the Academy. Instead, watch this video interview with DuVernay in which she perfectly characterizes the issue in a matter of minutes.

http://www.democracynow.org/2015/1/27/selma_director_ava_duvernay_on_hollywoods

In my reviews I typically like to dig into the minutiae of my positive and negative feelings toward a film, and connect that to a discussion of the quality, or at least the success of a film. Does the movie accomplish what it sets for itself to accomplish? Does it hinder itself, or trip over its own feet in any way? Criticism is a hard conversation for many reasons, foremost among them being the need to approach a work on its own merits, rather than what you as a subjective viewer want to see. Then there's the semantics of whether a film being good means it is important, or entertaining, or challenging, or airtight, or inspired, and so on. The simple and endlessly complex answer is: It just depends.

WE ARE THE BEST!: It's the Best

In which three young girls kick ass and take names--ideologically.

Director: Lukas Moodysson
Writer: Lukas Moodysson
Cast: Mira Barkhammar, Mira Grosin, Liv LeMoyne
Runtime: 102 mins.
2014

Normally going into these things I have a structure outlined in my head, and I work through the review beat by beat. I don't have that for We Are the Best! I think, in the spirit of punk, I'll bang this one out as I go along.

We Are the Best! follows two thirteen year old girls in 1980's Sweden as they sort of fumble around from day to day, hating what they hate and loving what they love, until they happen into this idea that they should really just start their own punk band--despite having no previous musical experience. Once they recruit an unlikely third member--a young Christian girl who has years of experience on the guitar--the band starts becoming something and taking on a central importance in their lives. Meanwhile they deal with drama and trauma surrounding school, parents, and especially love interests.

More than all that, this movie is about the spirit of PUNK. And the spirit of GIRLS. And the spirit of GIRLS doing PUNK.

But more than THAT this movie is about those girls--as people.

I'm going to reiterate because that is the most important thing I can say about this movie, as it is 2014 and this sort of thing is still a revolutionary concept in cinema:

We Are the Best! treats children as though they are people. We Are the Best! treats girls as though they are people. These are two of the most egregiously uncommon achievements of contemporary film, and two reasons why We Are the Best! has to be considered one of the most incredible things to be released in 2014.

The Great BOJACK HORSEMAN Experiment

Disclaimer: I have since finished watching Bojack Horseman, and it is one of the best shows on television. I am leaving this post up as a monument to drunken hubris.

Long ago I watched the first episode of Bojack Horseman in an airport. I was so viscerally displeased that I immediately swore the show off and launched into a series of theories about the problems with Netflix's original content model.

A month or so later, a good friend of mine was texting me in the midst of his marathon session of watching the show. He agreed wholeheartedly that the show was very bad, but he found his experience of marathoning the show all at once inexplicably engaging, and he recommended that I do the same.

Now it is many more months later, and I finally have.

What follows is the live journal of my experience watching the entirety of Bojack Horseman, transposed from a notebook to the world wide web without any alterations. Just pretend you can see the handwriting degenerate as time passes.

This blog post is brought to you by Admiral Nelson's Spiced Rum.

WHIPLASH: Crack That Whip

In which the protagonist's task is more challenging than getting pictures of Spider-Man.

Director: Damien Chazelle
Writer: Damien Chazelle
Cast: Miles Teller, J. K. Simmons, Paul Reiser, Melissa Benoist
107 mins.
2014

When you're young, movies have a direct line into your soul. They're like a flu shot--sometimes shocking, sometimes painful, inserting themselves into your body and altering your nervous system. Whether a child enjoys a movie or hates it is not necessarily beholden to quality or craft. Sometimes the things that make or break viewing experiences for kids can be a familiar image, or a character who talks a certain way, or the fact that the main character has a cat. This is why children can so easily watch movies with a sense of wonder, or a sense of terror, or a sense of unlimited empathy. It's also why children sometimes attach themselves to complete dreck.

As we stuff more and more movies into our craw, that sense of wonder gets calloused. We grow harder to please. We recognize obvious sentiment as obvious sentiment; tropes and cliches finally register as we see them for the seventh or twentieth time. We acquire expectations. We watch movies with our third eye open and wary. We criticize.

I just now made up that opaque reference to a third eye so let me try to explain it. One eye open picks out colors and shapes. Two eyes open situate those shapes in three-dimensional space. It would make sense that having a third eye open would situate physical objects in a greater contextual fabric, a fourth dimension if you will. That which is seen becomes important within the tapestry of time--it becomes historical, cultural, social. That third eye is our critical awareness, our consciousness of meanings and implications.

All of this speculation is totally irrelevant to Whiplash, because all I want to say about it is this: