Cheer: Pain & Perseverance

When I started watching Cheer, I had no idea what I was getting into. I thought it was a simple documentary about an ambitious college cheerleading team. When I watched the final episode, I sobbed like a child, thoroughly invested in these kids, their dreams, and their insane journey to the Grand National Championships.

The show is a six-part documentary series that follows the 2019 Navarro College cheerleading team. Navarro is in Corsicana, Texas, a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, that has become renowned for its elite cheerleading squad. This is mostly thanks to Monica Aldama, their cheerleading coach who took over the program in 2000 and turned it into a dynasty through her innovative routines, perfectionism, and tough love. Emphasis on the "tough." The kids on this team worship this woman (she is known as "the Queen") and you'd get drunk pretty quickly if you took a shot every time someone said "I would do anything for Monica." However, sometimes that entails suffering through incredible pain and pushing through horrific injuries.

If by “cheerleading” you’ve been picturing a bunch of women on the sidelines with pom-poms, you are sorely mistaken. This is a demanding sport, requiring unsurpassed athleticism, gymnastic skill, and brute strength. The men are lifting and tossing the women all over the mat, while the women are flipping, tumbling, and flying through the air like angels. Unfortunately, they don’t actually have wings and you will rapidly lose track of the number of injuries as people plummet to the ground. No other sport is so heavily reliant on the notion of teamwork - if your teammates do not catch you, that could very well be the death of you. And so these kids are constantly forced to communicate and bolster each other, and work through their complicated adolescent drama for the sake of the team.

And there is so much drama. Cheerleading is an expensive sport, but Monica has a tendency to recruit kids who come from difficult backgrounds. And what this documentary does masterfully is slowly parcel out the back stories of some of these kids and get you invested in their personal struggles. The common refrain is “Cheer saved me.” These kids came from broken families, with histories of abuse or neglect, but being a part of this team has given them a sense of self-worth and confidence. Many of them view Monica as a second mom, and she is an exacting disciplinarian. She understands that cheerleading is not something these kids can do forever and insists that they also get good grades and develop life skills that will serve them well into adulthood. She has very traditional values, but at one point she talks about how she has had talks with her pastor about how there is nothing wrong with the gay boys on her team. She fights for these kids and supports them, but if they step one toe out of line, it's game over. After six episodes, I still don't know if she's a hero or a villain (I think the correct answer is that she's just a human being). But what I do know is that the kids are incredible and I rooted for them with every fiber of my being.

Cheer will play on every emotion you possess. Director Greg Whiteley is a consummate filmmaker and knows how to tell his story well. Like any good sports documentary, you develop a thorough appreciation and love for this high-octane and demanding sport. But you will also fall in love with these kids, who can alternately seem so wise and introspective and then so troubled and helpless. It is an apt summary of the human condition and is one of the most moving and powerful shows you can expect to see this year. You think you have no interest in cheerleading? Think again.

The Two Popes: Who Is Fit to Lead?

I'll confess (ha!) I was dreading watching The Two Popes and only did so because it got nominated for a bunch of Oscars (oh the things I go through for this blog). But I was pleasantly surprised, and once I was done, I fully understood the nominations for Best Actor and Adapted Screenplay (Best Supporting Actor not so much, we'll get into it). So if you're at home this weekend and feeling bad because you haven't seen any of the Oscar nominees, you could do worse than to turn on Netflix and settle in for this movie.

The movie begins in 2005 with the election of German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI (Anthony Hopkins). During the papal conclave, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio (Jonathan Pryce) receives the second highest number of votes after Ratzinger but he has no desire to be Pope. In fact, we follow him over the next few years and get to 2012 when he decides to resign, feeling like he can do more good as a parish priest than the Archbishop of Buenos Aires. It probably does not help that the church is in the middle of the Vatican Leaks scandal. However, when he tries to deliver his resignation to the Pope, he is continually rebuffed. The two have a long conversation, covering a breadth of topics. And in the end, well, you know what happens.

There's obviously no twist to this story: we all know that it will end with the resignation of one Pope who was traditional and mired in controversy, and the rise of our current Pope Francis, who was a reformer, expected to bring disillusioned Catholics back into the fold. But the dynamic between these two men is what makes this film such a pleasure to watch. I felt like I was watching a play, and then discovered that this movie is actually based on a play, which was adapted for the screen by its writer, Anthony McCarten. Once I finished, I immediately wanted to know what the play was like, because while the conversation between the two popes is obviously easy to imagine onstage, the movie employs several flashbacks to tell us about Bergoglio's early days in Argentina, and I'm not sure how the play pulled that off. Also, no stage could do justice to the remarkable replica they built of the Sistine Chapel. The two actors spend a significant amount of time alone in the Chapel and it was mesmerizing throughout.

Jonathan Pryce does a simply magnificent job as Cardinal Bergoglio. He looks eerily like the man, has nailed the Argentinian accent, and moves and talks with a humble, easy grace. This movie is absolutely a hagiography of Pope Francis, but I'm willing to buy it all, because I like to think that good men like him still exist in the world today. We have a lot of insufferable world leaders - one who likes to advocate for the poor and is fully cognizant of his own evolution and prior faults is a refreshing change of pace. On the flip side, we have Anthony Hopkins, who does a perfectly fine job as Pope Benedict XVI. But the man isn't even TRYING to be German. Both Pryce and Hopkins are Welsh; you'd never know that from listening to Pryce act in this movie, but you'll certainly know it from listening to Hopkins. While Pryce disappears into the role, I was aware throughout this film that I was watching Anthony Hopkins, so as far as I'm concerned, that was a waste of a Best Supporting Actor nomination. But at least he gave Pryce something to work of off.

The Two Popes was directed by famed Brazilian filmmaker Fernando Meireilles, and you can certainly tell he paid more attention to getting the South American scenes exactly right while minor details like German accents could fall by the wayside. Of course, one could ask why he didn't cast a Latino in the lead role, but at least he got Juan Minujin to play the young Bergoglio for the flashbacks that were mostly in Spanish. In fact, a lot of this movie is subtitled, which I was not expecting but did enjoy - I haven't heard conversational Latin since my sophomore year of college. The end credits of this movie also surprised and delighted me and felt like something only a Brazilian director would think of. This movie never feels ponderous; it tells its story compellingly and efficiently, makes you root for Bergoglio but feel some mild sympathy for Ratzinger, and shines a light on the debate between the traditional Catholic church and the need for reform. That's a lot for a movie to accomplish in two hours, but thanks to a great leading man, deft direction, and a zippy screenplay, you'll get a good history lesson, as well as some musings on religious and moral philosophy. That's a worthy investment. 

1917: Another Reminder That War Is Hell

In the tradition of all great war movies, 1917 is a brutal watch. The fact that it is shot and edited so that the entire movie enfolds as one single, unbroken take, means that it is even more brutal than usual. It's a marvelous conceit to get the point across, but as an audience member, it is an unrelenting reminder of the horrors of World War I.

Dean-Charles Chapman and George MacKay star as Lance Corporals Tom Blake and Will Schofield. Stationed in northern France in April 1917, they are given a mission to carry a letter across enemy lines to the 2nd Battalion of the Devonshire Regiment, who are currently headed into a trap. They think the Germans are in retreat and are planning to attack them, but instead, these 1600 British soldiers are headed straight for an ambush unless Blake and Schofield can get to them before the morning and call off the attack. As if the stakes couldn't be higher, Blake's older brother is serving in the 2nd Battalion, so he has an added incentive to ensure he can call off this attack in time. 

That's all the plot you need to know. What follows is a nail-biting two hours as you follow these men on a perilous journey across no man's land, dodging planes, snipers, rats, bombs, and all manner of horrors in their dogged determination to get this letter to their fellow soldiers on the front line. It is visceral and claustrophobic - at the very outset, Schofield injures his hand on some barbed wire, and before he can even wrap up his hand in some gauze, he falls over and plunges his hand into the body of a dead, decomposing solider. There are rats in the trenches, everyone is covered in mud, wounds are festering, bodies are indiscriminately piled up on battlefields. You are only focused on the journey of these two men, but around them, the bloody business of war keeps carrying on and it is barbaric and sickening. 

Director Sam Mendes (who co-wrote this film based on stories he heard from his grandfather who served in WWI) has done a brilliant job of capturing both the humanity of war in his two central characters, as well as the utter inhumanity of it all as you watch them make their way through trenches, battlefields, and ruins. Cinematographer extraordinaire Roger Deakins certainly deserves his sixteenth Oscar nomination for making the one-take trick feel so effortless and granting so much urgency to the piece (kudos to editor Lee Smith are also needed for seamlessly blending these shots together). The use of natural light in this movie is extraordinary and further brings home the incongruity of war in the midst of a peaceful sunrise and the sounds of birds chirping in the woods. And production designer Dennis Gassner certainly had his hands full. In fact, throughout the movie, I was struck with how much activity was happening in the periphery. Hundreds of extras are milling about, there are so many props littered everywhere, and even though you are focused on the movie's central mission, it would mean nothing without the bleak atmosphere and palpable distress emanating from everything else taking place on the screen. 

1917 is a cinematic tour-de-force, an example of every single department coming together to create an extraordinary movie that captures one of the most brutal periods in human history. The plot is very Hollywood, but at no point does this film shy away from the horror and pointlessness of war and the toll it takes on soldiers and civilians. It is stark and unflinching, and given current geopolitical events, yet another much-needed reminder that war should always be a last resort. 

Uncut Gems: Tense & Thrilling

I don't think I have felt more clenched as I did during the two hours I spent in the theater watching Uncut Gems. It is an excellent movie but probably not great if you have a heart condition. A sensory onslaught from start to finish, this movie is relentless, constantly upping the ante and making you bite your fingernails as you wait for everything to either go horribly wrong or horribly great. And until the last minutes, you have absolutely no idea what kind of ending you're going to get.

Directed by Josh and Benny Safdie (aka the Safdie brothers), based on a script they co-wrote with Ronald Bronstein, this is a story about Howard Ratner, a man who owns a jewelry store in New York's Diamond District but also has a gambling problem. As you can imagine, that is not a good combination when you have easy access to jewels that you can pawn off to make terrible bets. Ratner is played by Adam Sandler, and you may have heard this already, but this might be the best performance of Sandler's career. It's a dark, twisted character--no goofy SNL hi-jinks here--but his comedy timing helps enormously in the moments when the Safdies decide to give the audience a bit of a break and inject some humor into the proceedings before the next pulse-pounding sequence begins.

The movie takes place in 2012. Howard owes money to a lot of people who are starting to send increasingly violent collectors. However, he thinks he has hit upon the perfect bet when he lends a rare black opal to Kevin Garnett (yes, THE basketball player Kevin Garnett, who has a whole Supporting Actor-level performance in this film and is astonishingly good). Howard also has family drama; he has been cheating on his wife, Dinah (the fabulous Idina Menzel), with his employee Julia (the remarkable Julia Fox, in her first acting role), and as the movie proceeds, we see the dangerous toll his behavior could take on his wife and kids.

The plot is twisty and so compelling, and despite knowing nothing about basketball sports betting, I was thoroughly engrossed in the machinations of Howard's bets and found myself rooting for his teams and his players as feverishly as he was. If you've ever been disdainful of gamblers and wondered how they could take the risks they do, this film will steep you in their psychology and make you understand why this is such a debilitating addiction. Everything about this movie is loud and overwhelming: the dialogue is fast and furious with people constantly talking over each other and yelling, the score by Daniel Lopatin is always thrumming in your veins, never giving you a chance to breathe, and the cinematography by Darius Khondji is vivid and filled with extraordinary colors that reflect the black opal that has set off all this mayhem.

Uncut Gems is an audiovisual feast that genuinely feels like a cinematic rollercoaster. You feel a little bit sick while you're on the ride, but the twists, turns, and thrills make it all worthwhile. Everyone is perfectly cast (listen for some fun voice cameos from Natasha Lyonne and Tilda Swinton!), the story is propulsive and sucks you in, and as a New Yorker, there's of course that added joy where I can recognize the locations, and say "hey, I know that bus stop!" It's a chaotic thriller that injects itself into your veins and you will stumble out of the theater feeling a little bit worse for wear, but so glad you chose this adventure.