Movies
When I was watching Vox Lux, I assumed that this story of a school-shooting survivor turned pop star was taking the tired position of having the pop music machine represent the vapid squalor of modern American society. And it's not not that—the journey of Celeste, the movie's pop-star protagonist, is clearly supposed to be an illustration of the way our society feels more comfortable in trading banal platitudes rather than actually grapple with and address legitimate trauma like mass shootings. As such, I also assumed that the director, Brady Corbet, was having a joke at pop music's expense by having the music of the film (written by none other than Sia) be intentionally thin and bad. But then, after I finished the film, I read a few interviews with Corbet where he spoke in rather glowing terms about the film's music and insisted that he loved pop music and was interested in the intersection of the the corporate, exploitative side of the industry with the artists within it making music people find legitimately meaningful, and like... I dunno, maybe this is just me being a snob, but to my ears the movie's pop music is incredibly generic and uninteresting and, ya know, bad, which seems like a complete failure in execution of Corbet's exploration of at least one side of that intersection. And without any sort of investment on my part with the film's music, it's hard to feel like the central symbolism of pop music representing America isn't just thin and cheap—not helped by the fact that the movie jumps right from 9/11 to sometime in 2017, thus robbing us of a lot of the symbolic narrative. Like, those Bush/Obama years are crucial to the ways in which our current society treats national traumas, right? Corbet has some interesting aesthetic ideas, but in lieu of a more fleshed out story and verisimilitude, I just can't get too excited about the thematic aims of the movie. Grade: C+
A completely forgettable and heavily tropey pregnancy movie that chooses the easiest path at every turn. You've seen every piece of this movie already elsewhere, only this time, any interesting or thorny texture has been sanded off. Even the differences in class and race between the movie's two protagonists—a dynamic that has the chance to be the movie's heart—is only gestured at in the most gentle ways, until it culminates in an argument scene that only tells us about the differences between the protagonists rather than showing or dramatizing it meaningfully—lazy writing that tries to make up for its laziness in the laziest way possible. On a completely different note, I was struck by some of the school details early in the movie; maybe it's just the difference between teaching in Knoxville versus teaching in Chicago, or maybe it's the difference between the rural(ish) school I teach at versus the urban school featured in this film, but I spent way more time than I should have being kind of blown away by how foreign the school environment seemed: teachers openly swearing in front of students? teachers personally driving students home? a school clinic giving out free condoms to students? This is a different universe. Grade: C-
It's far from perfect—the pacing is pretty dodgy, and I don't think the movie ever quite justifies the amount of time it spends developing the platonic relationship between the union organizer Reuben and Norma (largely because Reuben really doesn't have a lot going on as a character, being basically a laundry list of "New York Jew" stereotypes). But when this movie is on, it's on. Sally Field is radiant, and the movie has a strong finger to the pulse of the nuances of the gender dynamics of the idea of a woman doing the work of union organizing. Also, on that note, I really appreciate how this movie depicts the process of political activism; sometimes it seems like the narrative that gets peddled is that people (be it a marginalized racial ground, a gender, a group of workers) are just waiting to be liberated by an activist, when in reality, the extent to which, say, workers have internalized the company line is much thornier to untangle, and Norma Rae does a great job dramatizing the work of organizing in a divided community that not only has a lot to gain but potentially a lot to lose (from some people's perspective) by unionizing. It's deeply empathetic, but also deeply aware of the frustrations of dealing with people in the flesh—as famous as the movie is for the pure idealism of the "Norma stands in the factory holding the UNION sign" scene, the majority of the movie has a lot more dirt under its fingernails. Grade: B+
One of the most bracing cinematic documents of the praxis of speaking truth to power I've ever seen. At least as portrayed in this searing documentary, this is an entire community bent around the support of labor, not just the cessation of work but also the challenging of law enforcement and the seizure of public assets and the carving out of public spaces for organizing to the blistering life of the region's musical culture to the very real blood on the picket line. On the one hand, there's something a little dispiriting about how distant this Appalachia of forty years ago feels from the region's 2019 present--de-industrialization and the erosion of any kind of communal public life and the dominance of mass media and its erasure of cultural and social history have left deep scars on the area. But at the same time, the meticulous vivacity of the people captured on film here is a rousing inspiration. The world has changed in forty years, but the potential of the human spirit remains the same. Grade: A
No comments:
Post a Comment