May It Last: Philosopher Poets

I had heard of the Avett Brothers, but never listened to their music. I knew Judd Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio had directed an HBO documentary about them, May It Last, but I didn't bother watching it on HBO as I figured there was no point in watching a movie about a band I didn't follow. However, after being persuaded by my colleague Steve, an Avett super-fan, I gave this movie a shot. And by the time I got to the end, I was smitten.

The documentary is told in a classic style, beginning with the childhood of Scott and Seth Avett (the eponymous Brothers), commenting on their personalities and close relationship, their love of music and evolution from grunge fans to to a return to their North Carolina roots and embracing Americana and folk music. We get the story of how the band was eventually formed and are introduced to some of the bandmates they recruited along the way. After several independent releases they finally agreed to sign up with legendary music producer Rick Rubin, and this movie focuses on the recording of their 2016 album, True Sadness, the one that truly launched them into mainstream music consciousness.

Those are all the classic elements of a musical documentary. But what is so moving about this particular band is that the brothers are genuinely thoughtful and introspective men who love each other and love music. And not just music, but writing songs. The most incredible part of this documentary was its focus on the songwriting process, watching Scott and Seth work on songs together and find just the right lyrics to get their emotions across. Scott talks about how his grandfather was a preacher and he always thought that people would want to hear about his emotions. That is what he and Seth put into their music - their souls. As Seth remarks, every time they go on stage, they are reading their diaries out loud. They don't know how to do this without being completely open about the moments in their life that have made a genuine impact. And sometimes this even means writing a song called Divorce Separation Blues.

The movie contains long interludes where we simply watch the band play, whether it be in the recording studio, a giant concert hall, or an intimate venue. Their music is soulful and varied, but the final half hour of this film is my absolute favorite. At the recording studio, after a magnificent rendition of a song called No Hard Feelings, Scott gets taken aback by his producer's congratulations. He and Seth take a break and what ensues is a deeply philosophical talk about why it feels so disingenuous to be congratulated for performing a piece of music that needed years of living before it could be crafted. Scott hates the commercial side of music - after pouring his heart into this song, ultimately he is being told it is "good" because it is going to sell. And after a whole movie where everyone called Seth the sensitive younger brother who Scott looked out for, we see how Seth calms him down and knows just how to give him the right advice to keep going on. In this small moment, you see how brother leans on brother and they keep on singing because they simply can't do anything else. This movie is full of a sense of family and community and I never questioned the love between these two men as well as their bandmates who have weathered tragedies together.

And then we get the end credits. Which feature a pair of songs that almost stopped my heart. Both are songs about or for their children, and both reveal how these men can create a song seemingly out of thin air and imbue it with lyrics that are deeply personal yet somehow also universal. It's a magic trick that only the greatest writers achieve. So watch and listen to May It Last. You may think you don't care for this music, but you'll find that you certainly care about the men who make it. 

Tamborine: Chris Rock Gets Deep

Comedy = Tragedy + Time. However, if you're Chris Rock, that equation doesn't matter. He'll take the latest tragedies and mine them for insightful social commentary and comedy gold. So sit back and enjoy his Netflix special, Tamborine. It's a wild hour that will make you laugh and then somberly reflect about the current state of the world.

Tamborine is certainly one of the more topical sets of stand-up comedy I've seen in a while. Rock has always been a brilliant comedian, but he is particularly laying into the fact that he's a black comedian and there's much to be said about the state of race in today's America. He is incredibly funny, but a lot of his jokes hit home truths about what a terrible thing it is to be a black man in this country. One of his best jokes is, "People say young black men are an endangered species. That isn't true, at least endangered species are protected by the government." You'll also find out why George Bush should be hailed as a black revolutionary; it's a twisted and hilarious piece of logic.

Rock notes how as a black man, he doesn't really get the celebrity treatment until the cops actually recognize him. He knows he has had a fortunate life, but he isn't going to pretend it still doesn't suck to be black, even if you are famous. And this concern has now moved on to the next generation - he has two daughters, and we get a hilarious segment on how to raise black children so they fear all white people. And also some thoughts on how schools are too soft on kids in general and we need to bring bullies back. There's even a diatribe about how true equality would mean that police would shoot more white kids and we'd have white moms on TV weeping about how they need more justice for Chad. Yeah, Chris Rock really knows how to walk that tightrope. 

The emotional meat of this special comes from Rock's thoughts on relationships and his divorce. He wasn't a faithful husband and he takes full responsibility for the dissolution of his marriage. That may not sound particularly funny, but it's Chris Rock, so he finds a way. He doles out surprisingly wonderful advice that all couples should follow if they want to ensure a stable relationship. The title of the special, Tamborine, comes from the notion that a relationship is like a band, and not everyone can be the lead singer all the time. Sometimes, you have to take a backseat to your partner and play the tamborine. And play it like you mean it. If you haven't seen Chris Rock giving it his best shot as a tamborine player, you haven't seen anything yet.

I'll stop this review before I give away the rest of his great jokes or insights. Tamborine is a solidly constructed stand-up set that you will want to revisit multiple times. My friend Eva, who recommended the special to me last Saturday, had already seen the special twice, and now I have followed suit because I needed to re-hear some of these jokes and marvel at them. There are no frills and flounces - this is just a man at the top of his game, on a stage, doing comedy for an hour. And it is enlightening, revolutionary, and cathartic, all in one go. Grab your tamborine and join in the fun. 

Black Panther: A Superhero Who Matters

Marvel's Black Panther is on track to make a bazillion dollars at the box office. Many people are saying this "exceeds expectations," but let's be real. Everyone has been talking about this movie from the second that trailer was released. There was so much hype and excitement, and people were so ready for this movie. So let's not pretend that the amazing business this film did on opening weekend is a surprise. It was 100% expected and it's time Hollywood acknowledged that if they make a movie without a lot of white people, audiences will still go see it. In fact, they'll probably go see it a lot more.

This movie is revolutionary in many ways. The cast is almost exclusively composed of black actors, apart from Martin Freeman and Andy Serkis (the "Tolkien white guys" as per the greatest joke I ever read on Twitter). And they are the creme de la creme of acting talent - Chadwick Boseman, Lupita Nyong'o, Michael B. Jordan, Daniel Kaluuya, Angela Bassett, Forest Whitaker, the list goes on. All of these actors have proven themselves independently in movies where they're the sole black person, but now, they are all in one movie together and the screen crackles with their chemistry. Since we're talking about a superhero movie, a superhero analogy comes to mind - Captain Planet. While everyone might have their special powers by themselves, when they combine forces, they manage to create something absolutely unstoppable.

I know everyone is waxing poetic about this movie and perhaps you're someone who is rolling their eyes and saying what's the big deal? Well, the big deal is that we always see white people on screen. And because of that, we have no trouble empathizing with white people from all backgrounds and walks of life. We have seen white criminals, white CEOs, white ballerinas, white truck drivers, etc. But when it comes to seeing black people on screen, we have seen so little and therefore, have so little to empathize with. Black actors are almost always the sidekicks, or the slaves, or the villains, or the troubled schoolchildren. They are usually struggling to get by in life, an afterthought in some white person's story, or a sympathetic/sassy friend. But with this film, they get to be freakin' superheroes. And royalty. And save white people and make jokes about them and call them "colonizers" while the entire theater bursts into laughter.

Representation is crucial. If you are a young black child who only ever sees people like you on screen portrayed as drug dealers or cleaning ladies, it limits your ambition. It tells you that this is the most you can achieve in your life. A movie theater is a portal to a land of fantasy and make-believe, and yet for most black kids, even this land of endless possibilities tells them that only white people can be anything they want to be - the black ones are still only secondary characters with boring lives. But when they go to see Black Panther, they will see themselves portrayed as intelligent, proud, noble, daring, fierce, and marvelous. Even more importantly, the black women in this cast get equal screen time with the men. So this film is doing double duty, helping to represent women as well, and let little girls see themselves as incredible warriors who help to save men instead of needing to be rescued.

In terms of plot, Black Panther is a pretty straightforward superhero movie. There's a ton of action, lots of fights with multiple villains, and ample backstory involving the fictional African kingdom of Wakanda. But there's nothing straightforward about how these elements are portrayed on screen. First off, there's the eye-wateringly spectacular production and costume design, a blend of traditional African design and futuristic elements that blend harmoniously to create something you've never really seen before. The score is a similar blend of traditional African music, current hip-hop, and orchestral swagger that sweeps you off your feet from the very first second. And each character brings something different to the table. The Black Panther is an extraordinary fighter, but he also cares a great deal about his country and his family, and isn't simply a warrior in a black suit. He has a heart and a brain, and he spends a lot of time trying to keep the peace instead of punching people. The women around him are incandescent; some are fierce warriors who can casually speak Korean, throw spears, and are not averse to using their weave as a weapon to blind their enemy in combat. Others are tech geniuses, who use Wakanda's secret stash of Vibranium to develop technology that makes Wakanda a world leader in infrastructure, healthcare, communications, and every other field imaginable. 

Black Panther offers up a whole new vista of possibilities to a black audience and gives them a chance to dream. It also carries a particularly apt message in our current political climate where the US President can casually denigrate immigrants from "shithole countries." In this movie, Wakanda pretends to be a third-world country, a fact that gets thrown in its inhabitants' faces all the time, because they are afraid that if the world knew what they possessed, they would be invaded and colonized like all their neighbors. It's so on the nose, because that is the history of the African continent - anything they had of value was plundered by the West, until they were left with nothing but inadequate portrayals of themselves in Hollywood movies. Well, director Ryan Coogler and co-writer Joe Robert Cole are offering up a new vision of Africa and of the African people, as a leading light in the world that will save us all. That's the vision more people need to see, and it's about damn time. 

Molly's Game: Men Playing Poker

The best part of Molly's Game is, naturally, Jessica Chastain. Unfortunately, the worst part of Molly's Game is how Chastain is wasted in the role, thanks to writer-director Aaron Sorkin's inability to let women speak for themselves. Perhaps it's a question of timing - if this movie had come out a decade ago, I would have praised its storyline and production values, and the sheer novelty of seeing a woman as the protagonist. But nowadays, I expect more from Hollywood, and Molly's Game, while pretending to be the story of an extraordinary woman, quickly devolves into a story about the men around her.

The movie tells the true story of Molly Bloom, a brilliant young woman who was about to qualify for the Olympic skiing team and had been admitted to Harvard Law School. However, after a disastrous accident in her Olympic qualifying heat, she took a break for a year and moved to LA. She eventually started helping a hotshot Hollywood producer arrange his weekly high-stakes poker game with business moguls and celebrities. Naive at first, but quick to learn, Molly discovered she could make way more in tips from these poker games than at a regular job, and eventually, she struck out on her own.

The story is non-linear, with flash forwards to the present where Molly has been indicted by the FBI for allowing Russian mobsters to play at her game in New York. Through flashbacks we get the story of how things escalated to the point where Molly's perfectly legal games devolved into slightly more dubious fare, while in the present, her lawyer (played by the always suave Idris Elba) patiently tries to suss out his client and figure out how he can help a woman who is so adamant not to reveal the names of the people who played at her game. Molly doesn't want to destroy the lives of the men (always men, apparently no women ever played poker) who trusted her and shared sordid details of their lives that would prove incredibly embarrassing to their families. Our heroine has a heart of gold, and she would rather go to jail than compromise her morals. It's all very admirable, but also very cliched.

Molly has a voiceover throughout the movie where she explains what's going down, e.g. a particularly tense poker hand, or skiing the moguls. These sequences are well-done and snappily explain complex concepts. And yet at key moments, it's her lawyer or her emotionally distant father who explains why Molly did the things she did and tells her how she should be feeling. For a character who is so intelligent and introspective, one would think she could explain herself quite easily to the audience, but no, apparently we need the more authoritative voices of Idris Elba and Kevin Costner to get the message across. It's infuriating.

Sorkin's writing style is evident in every scene in this movie. It isn't just the rapid-fire dialogue between characters. It's the random segues into nonsensical facts (did you know the center of the galaxy smells like rum and raspberries? Now you do, but it sure doesn't advance the plot) and the casual elitism where the smart folk spout literary jargon about The Crucible while others are too dumb to discuss James Joyce's Ulysses. Everyone is either proving themselves by trading trivia, or inspiring a smirk by not knowing the answers to obscure questions. In Sorkin's world, people are either literary or Neanderthals, and this movie quickly descends into a mass of stereotypes where our heroine and her lawyer are up against a bunch of buffoons.

Molly's Game isn't particularly boring - my attention didn't waver and I sat through the whole thing without checking my watch. It's well-paced and certainly tells a story about a compelling woman. Unfortunately, that compelling woman is often a bystander in her own story. In another director's hands, perhaps this movie would feel more refreshing. However, as yet another man tells the story of a powerful woman, all we get is Molly's Game: The Men Tell All.

Mudbound: The Myth of the American Dream

The history of African Americans is deeply upsetting. No one is under any illusions that the United States treated them well in the past (most of us aren't under any illusions that we treat them well in the present). Every time I watch a movie about slavery or Jim Crow, I am shocked by the level of inhumanity and ignorance that was prevalent during that time, much of which persists to this day and age where we have Nazis parading with tiki torches in the street. So this Black History Month, one of the best things you can watch is Dee Rees' epic movie, Mudbound.

Based on the novel by Hillary Jordan, Mudbound is the story of two families living on a cotton farm in the Mississippi Delta during World War II. Henry and Laura McAllan (Jason Clarke and Carey Mulligan) are city folk from Tennessee who moved to pursue Henry's dream of being a farmer, and they are out of their element. Henry's father, Pappy (Jonathan Banks) also lives with them and he is unconscionably racist and cruel, a state of affairs that is shruggingly accepted by Henry and detested by Laura who has to put up with it. Then you have Hap and Florence Jackson (Rob Morgan and Mary J. Blige), the black tenant farmers who work on the McAllan's farm and are slowly building up their savings to one day own their own land and give their children every opportunity. The two families are poor, but the Jackson home is certainly filled with more love and hope for a rosy future. The first half of the movie is fairly slow, setting up these characters and the uneasy tension between the two families, as they both come to increasingly depend upon each other.

However, the eventual focus of the movie is the relationship between Henry's brother, Jamie (Garrett Hedlund), and the Jacksons' son Ronsel (Jason Mitchell). Both men enlist in the war effort and after victory is declared, they return home to find that America hasn't changed at all since they left. Jamie has severe PTSD and is coping with alcohol as he has no one to give him the support he needs. And Ronsel returns a conquering hero only to discover that unlike in Europe, black people are still treated like dirt in America. His struggle is the most potent, because he got a taste of what it felt to be an equal while he was away at war, and now he cannot even enter a grocery store through the front door. The two men bond through their shared experience in war and strike up a friendship, but if you thought this story has a happy ending, let me refer you back to the first sentence of this post. The history of African Americans is deeply upsetting.

The events in the latter half of this film are difficult to watch but they serve as a stark reminder of what happens when we allow racism and bigotry to continue unchecked in our society. It's a lesson that can never be hammered home enough. Many people allow ignorance and misinformation to fester, assuming that as long as they know it's wrong, it doesn't matter what other people think. But remember, if those other people start to outnumber you, you will be forced to witness atrocities, unable to fight back.

Mudbound is searingly well-told, and fully deserves its Best Adapted Screenplay nomination (writer-director Dee Rees is the first black woman nominated in this category). Mary J. Blige is wonderful and deserving of her Supporting Actress nomination, but I am shocked that Jason Mitchell didn't receive equal consideration as Best Supporting Actor. His performance shook me to my core and I defy anyone to come away from this movie without talking about how his character's story arc made them weep. Finally, Mudbound's cinematographer, Rachel Morrison, received an Oscar nomination for her work. And she is the first woman to EVER be nominated in this category. The first woman in 90 years - as my friend Katie said, I don't know whether to cheer or cry. Simply looking at a few stills from this movie should tell you why she was nominated - she brings Mudbound to life with her sweeping vistas of the farm at sunset, the mud and rain that makes life so difficult, and the flickering light or pitch darkness that surrounds these characters the minute the sun goes down. She captures the beauty and pain of this world, revealing why families would think that this is where they will realize their dreams, and then exposing the dark underbelly that will ruin their hopes. 

Mudbound is a painful but essential film. Watch it. And after you're done shaking your fist at the screen and bemoaning our past, remember that in two weeks, Marvel's Black Panther will be gracing our screens, with Rachel Morrison as cinematographer. And in that movie, her camera will be focused on a sweeping story of black superheroes who control their own destinies and save humanity. It doesn't change our past, but it certainly gives us a better vision of our future. It's about damn time.