Sound of Metal: Embracing Silence

I watched Sound of Metal because it had been nominated for a slew of Oscars, it had garnered widespread critical acclaim, and I expected it to be a great movie. What I did not expect is that I would become so passionate about this movie's nomination for Best Sound. I never pay attention to that category, because I don't understand the artistry behind cinematic sound mixing and design. But this movie made me sit up and pay attention to the non-score elements of a movie's sound design. For the first time, I finally appreciated what my ears have been doing for me my entire life. 

Written by Abraham and Darius Marder (who also directed), the movie tells the story of Ruben (Riz Ahmed), a drummer in a heavy metal duo (the other half of the duo is his girlfriend, Lou, played by Olivia Cooke), who suddenly starts to lose his hearing. When he sees a doctor, he is advised that his hearing has already deteriorated to the point where he can only hear about 20%, and he needs to avoid loud noises to prevent further deterioration. Naturally, if you're a heavy metal drummer, that's a tough course of action. He's also told that cochlear implants might be an option to restore his hearing, but they aren't covered by insurance and would be frightfully expensive. 

Ruben is a recovering drug addict, and this news is not good for his sobriety. Concerned that he will suffer from a relapse and desperate to get him away from performing, Lou calls up his Narcotics Anonymous sponsor who helps Ruben find a place at a rehab program that is specifically for deaf addicts. The program is run by Joe (Paul Raci), a recovering alcoholic who lost his hearing in the Vietnam War. Ruben has no desire to join this program and confront his change in circumstances, but eventually, he is forced to give in.

This movie takes you on an incredible journey. Riz Ahmed has always been a wonderful actor, but this role is particularly perfect for him. At one point, Joe anoints Ruben with his American Sign Language name, which incorporates the sign for "owl" because when he first met Ruben, he looked like an owl with his big startled eyes. Ahmed's eyes are the keys to this performance, flashing with frustration or bewilderment, or abject fear as he contemplates his future. And Paul Raci, who was hired for this role because he is actually the child of deaf adults, is an absolute revelation. He is so compassionate, and patient, and stern, and while this movie is specifically about how to deal with becoming deaf, the advice Joe dispenses to Ruben about learning how to be still and deal with the emotions roiling through his body is something that we could all stand to incorporate in our daily lives.

But back to the Sound. This movie alternates between regular sound and then dampening everything so we can sense what Ruben's hearing must be like. It's a muffled sound, like being underwater, and I felt so hopelessly lost when plunged into that soundscape that my empathy for Ruben was off the charts. I won't spoil what happens later in the movie, but let's just say the sound design veers into another direction that was so jarring and catastrophic that it made me teary. Ordinarily, I wish I could see movies in theaters so I could experience the cinematography on a big screen. But this time, I just wished I could be in a theater for the Dolby surround sound and be immersed in the silence and cacophony that accompanies Ruben's journey. 

Sound of Metal is that rare and wondrous thing: an original screenplay, telling a brand new story about people and situations you have probably never encountered in real life, but which plunges you into their lives and helps you empathize with their plight. It's a transformative film that will make you want to learn sign language immediately so you can understand what people are saying throughout the film (cleverly, there are no subtitles so you have to figure it all out like Ruben does) and teaches you to view the deaf community in a non-ableist way. Watch this movie as soon as you can; it is quite perfect. 

Best Actress Showdown: Pieces of a Woman & The United States vs. Billie Holiday

It is a common phenomenon that the nominations for Best Actress and Best Picture are out of sync, where women are nominated for searingly good performances in movies that are otherwise mediocre. So when the Oscar nominations were announced, I discovered I needed to watch Vanessa Kirby in Pieces of a Woman and Andra Day in The United States vs Billie Holiday. I embarked on this journey with trepidation, assuming that while the performances would be great, the movies would be awful. I was half right.

Pieces of a Woman: I don't know if I'm grateful that I got to watch this movie at home. Full disclosure, I watched the first half hour at night, and then finished the rest of the movie the next afternoon because I needed a break. It opens with a thirty-minute birth scene that is raw and intense and is kind of the reason Kirby got this nomination. We get one long tracking shot that follows her from the moment she starts having contractions, to when her water breaks, to her momentary panic when her partner (played by Shia LaBeouf) discovers her midwife won't be able to make it, to the acceptance of the substitute midwife (played by Molly Parker), to the pain of giving birth, to the anxiety of not quite knowing what's going on, to the joy of delivering the baby, and then...things go wrong.

Spoiler alert: the baby dies, and what follows is a movie about how Martha (Kirby) deals with the grief of losing a child, while her family is increasingly distressed and opinionated about how she needs to do a better job of expressing her grief (which is always oh so helpful). There's also the matter of prosecuting the midwife for negligence, and for a while this movie appeared to dangerously veer into territory of questioning midwifery and home births, but I was ultimately quite satisfied with the resolution. 

Directed by Kornel Mundruczo, from a screenplay written by his partner Kata Weber, this movie is actually based on a play the two of them wrote about their own experience of losing a baby after a failed pregnancy. As such, there's an emotional resonance to this film that is hard to ignore. I also appreciated the artistry of the film - several scenes, including that first birth scene, are shot in one long continuous take, which sucked me in and kept me watching even at times when the going got tough and I wanted to wrench my eyes away. There are also some beautiful shots of a bridge and the Charles River used to showcase the passage of time, and some bizarre moments that stuck with me, like when Kirby sticks a cigarette butt on an exercise ball she's sitting on and slowly deflates. You can also watch the evolution of Kirby's nail polish throughout this movie - it's chipped when she's at her most vulnerable, then she's clearly gotten a manicure as she's trying to put herself back together. Those little details signify a care and attention that make this movie so visually compelling.

Kirby was extraordinary throughout in her portrayal of Martha's slow evolution through the stages of grief, but I also want to shout out Molly Parker, who simply looked and acted exactly like all the midwives I've seen. She exudes a kindness and warmth that makes this story all the more tragic, and while she doesn't get that much screentime, she's very effective with what she gets. I was less enthused by Shia LaBeouf and Ellen Burstyn, who more often delivered affected performances that would remind me this was originally a play. But overall, this is a powerful movie that is well worth your time. Try to stick through it in one sitting for maximum impact, but obviously, I can't judge you if you don't. 

The United States vs. Billie Holiday: First, let's talk about that voice. Andra Day, who plays iconic jazz legend Billie Holiday, has absolutely nailed her voice in this movie. She did so by smoking cigarettes and drinking a lot of gin to give it that gravelly quality. Considering Day's actually a singer and should absolutely not be roughening up her vocal cords in this manner, you can see why the lady already deserves an award for that kind of acting commitment. In addition to the voice, she absolutely nails this performance with every look and action. She is wholeheartedly committed to telling Billie Holiday's story and at no point was I distracted by her performance. It was sublime.

But oh this movie is terrible. It goes off the rails so fast and I really couldn't find anything to like about it apart from Day and the gorgeous costume design by Paolo Nieddu. Written by Suzan-Lori Parks (partly based on the book Chasing the Scream by Johann Hari) and directed by Lee Daniels, this film is an incoherent jumble, employing an unnecessary flashback structure (at one point there's a flashback within the flashback, so it all becomes very Inception), and provokes an incredible amount of narrative whiplash as you move from one scene to the next with wild abandon and no proper transitions. No Best Editing nominations here. Also, no Best Cinematography noms either: I think Lee Daniels thought he needed to smear Vaseline on the camera and then occasionally switch to black-and-white to remind us that this was a movie set in ye olden times, but all he succeeded in doing was make scenes occasionally look oddly blurry and then confuse my retinas as the color went in and out for no good reason. 

There's also an incredible amount of exposition being delivered by the very concerned men in Billie's life who talk about how fragile she is and the traumas she faced in her childhood. But then we get to see those traumas via flashback anyway, so how about we simply show, and don't tell? This is a visual medium after all, you don't have to explain every moment with dialogue. The same is also true of the many moments in the film where we get to see Billie on stage singing many classic songs. Are these wonderful songs? Yes. Do we need to hear all of them in their entirety when they don't serve to push the narrative forward? Nope. Also, this movie has way too much nudity. The affair Holiday has with an FBI agent was completely fictional, and it added nothing to the movie except forcing Day to take her kit off, which is bitterly ironic as the entire movie is about Holiday constantly being exploited by the men around her. The nudity was particularly startling to me after I had just watched Pieces of a Woman, a movie that literally forces you to watch a woman give birth, and yet you never see her completely naked. Come on.

It's unfortunate that this movie is out at the same time as Judas and the Black Messiah, another movie that features the FBI targeting a Black person for their political activism and pitting Black people against each other. That movie told a much more compelling story, but in this film, while yes, Day does manage to stir up your empathy for her heinous treatment by the FBI, the script is so choppy and the other actors are simply going through the motions that there's nothing you can really hang on to. (Speaking of the actors, Natasha Lyonne as Tallulah Bankhead was an unintentionally hilarious cameo.)  So yeah - watch this movie if you want to understand what all the fuss is about regarding Day. But spare yourself if you're in the mood for a good movie. That's not what you're gonna get. 

Weekend Movie Roundup: Tenet, Moxie, Coming 2 America, Hillbilly Elegy

It's Weekend #126346823987 of the pandemic. You need some movie reviews. I have watched anything and everything. Let's do this!

Tenet: I had been jonesing to see this movie since last year when it kept flailing about for a release date and finally whimpered into video on demand. I love everything Christopher Nolan does and had high hopes, but then the reviews of this movie were so bad, and the jokes about its plot so plentiful, that I kept delaying the inevitable. But I finally sat down with it, and yup, everything I heard was true. 

The movie stars John David Washington as the Protagonist (yes, he has no actual name), a CIA agent who gets recruited by a mysterious organization called Tenet, where he learns about inverted entropy and the fact that they've discovered "inverted" objects that seems to signal a war in the future but which have arrived in the past. What follows is an extremely twisty palindrome of a movie where he teams up with various folks to stop an arms dealer from kicking off World War III, and navigates all the insane complexities of time travel and inversion. This movie reminded me of the Inception party my friend's husband threw years ago, where we watched the movie and plotted out its logic on a whiteboard. That was a joyous exercise, but in the case of Tenet, I think it would simply be frustrating. 

Once it's safe to go back to the movie theatre, I might watch this movie on the big screen. It is action-packed and set in gorgeous locales, and now that I've seen it once, maybe I'll have a better grasp on what to be looking out for to make more sense of the plot. It's so confusing, but so artful that I have to admire the audacity even as I shake my head at the execution. I didn't like what any of the actors were doing and they simply weren't compelling enough to pull off this story and keep me engaged. Also, Nolan really needs to stop delivering important exposition via characters who are completely unintelligible because they're wearing masks. But Ludwig Goransson's trippy mind-melting score and the extremely bizarre action sequences turn this into a true cinematic spectacle. This is a movie that truly suffered from not being in theatrical release, and as much as I disliked it while watching at home, I might have to consider giving it a second chance. 

Moxie: When I turned on my Netflix account and saw that a new movie directed by Amy Poehler had premiered on Netflix, I texted two college friends and we immediately set up a Zoom movie night. Poehler adapting Jennifer Matthieu's YA novel about a girl who starts a feminist zine in her high school? Sold!

The movie is exactly what you would expect if Leslie Knope directed a movie. It is terrifically earnest, deals with a lot of serious issues about sexual harassment and the way girls are treated in high school, and has a lot of rah-rah moments where you can cheer on these women for standing up to the patriarchy. Poehler plays the uber-feminist mother of the central teen character, Vivian (Hadley Robinson), who starts off as a shy wallflower but ends up leading a movement at her school. It's a great story, but it certainly all happens at a very heightened pitch, and struggles as it tries to cater to everyone and every wave of feminism. I also wasn't quite sure if this story was outdated - it seems to portray how bad things might have been a generation ago, but high schoolers have gotten a lot more woke since then, and I found it hard to imagine that there would be this much blatant harassment in schools now. Two of the actors from the Saved by the Bell reboot are in this film (Alycia Pasqual-Pena and Josie Totah) and I couldn't help thinking that show represented the current state of high school much better. 

You're probably not going to learn something new, but Moxie will certainly help to reinforce the importance of the things you knew already about how we should be treating women and young girls, that everyone comes to feminism in their own way, that women can sometimes be the most misogynistic people on the planet (Marcia Gay Harden plays the school principal and oh is she awful), and that perfect men do not exist except in fiction (Nico Hiraga plays the world's most wonderful and therefore most unbelievable high school boy in this movie). Go forth and have a pleasant afternoon demolishing the patriarchy!

Coming 2 America: I had never seen the original 1988 film, Coming to America, so my journey to the sequel involved first watching the original, then listening to the Rewatchables episode about it, before I finally watched this film. As such, it was a rapid fire introduction to the world of Zamunda and Prince Akeem (Eddie Murphy). Though given the current debacle with Meghan Markle and the British Royal Family, this certainly seems like an odd time to be caring about a story about a Black Prince.

The original movie told the story of how Akeem and his aide, Semmi (Arsenio Hall), travelled from the fictional African country of Zamunda to New York to find Akeem a wife (naturally, he figured the best place to find his future queen was in...Queens). That movie was R-rated and I found it weird and mildly problematic, although my friend Anthony and the men on the Rewatchables assured me it was eminently quotable and a beloved classic to most men who watched that movie in their formative years. The sequel is rated PG-13 and spends less time in America. Instead, the story revolves around Akeem discovering he fathered a son in Queens and he brings him back to Zamunda to be his heir as he has only fathered three daughters who cannot ascend to the throne (maybe the people of Zamunda need to watch Moxie). 

Almost everyone from the original movie returns in this sequel and it is a joyful homage to all the characters and one-liners that became so famous in 1988. Both movies are also essentially just romcoms masquerading as male comedy showcases. They both feature a quest for true love and everything else is just filler. New characters played by Jermaine Fowler, Nomzamo Mbatha, Tracy Morgan, KiKi Layne, and the always wonderful Leslie Jones liven up the piece, and there's definitely an attempt to update things for the 21st century as far as the female characters are concerned (let's just say the bathing scenes from 1988 and 2021 are all you need to watch to know exactly how things have changed). This sequel is a fitting tribute to what people love from the original and makes a valiant attempt to fix the problematic elements. It also immediately caught my eye that Ruth E. Carter was the costume designer. She won an Oscar for Black Panther, and she brings that same proud Afrofuturistic vibe to the costuming of this film. 1988 Zamunda was an awful satire of "Africa" and while the 2021 version is still regressive, it gets a complete makeover by the end and is much less cringeworthy. So watch this film if you want some light, silly entertainment, or to see what mild progress looks like over three decades. It isn't perfect, but at least it's something.

Hillbilly Elegy: This movie came out in November. I was expressly avoiding it, hoping it didn't get nominated for any major Oscars. But on Monday, Glenn Close snagged an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress, which meant I had to watch this movie. The sacrifices I make for this blog.

Based on the memoir by J.D. Vance, this is the story of his upbringing in Ohio, as well as the story of his mother and her parents who were "hill people" from Kentucky. The older J.D. is played by Gabriel Basso, while his younger self is played by Owen Asztalos; his sister, Lindsay, is played by Haley Bennett; their mother, Bev, is played by Amy Adams; and her mother, Bonnie (but mostly referred to as Mamaw), is played by Glenn Close. It's a good cast, being led by director Ron Howard, but they are working with some extremely thin material, and as the movie wears on, it all becomes a bit over-the-top. They're playing into every stereotype available about white trash and rednecks, and while this is a true story about folks from rural areas who have few opportunities and are also dealing with the opioid epidemic, the performances start to veer into comedy as they spout hillbilly aphorisms that don't amount to more than a hill of beans. 

This movie made me uncomfortable. Probably because J.D. Vance makes me uncomfortable. This is very much his story, and he is out to look like the hero, but there's a lot of martyrdom being portrayed here and no real sense that we're getting anyone's side of the story aside from J.D.'s own interpretations. The whole movie hinges on his sacrifice of driving down from Yale to sort out logistics after his mother takes an overdose, but that sacrifice amounts to all of 24 hours. His sister is clearly the one who has taken on the usual woman's burden of staying behind and being the caretaker while the "man of the family" discharges his familial duties via his credit card. It's all a bit icky and paternalistic and his final actions felt almost cruel to me. But at the end of the film, when we see footage of the real Vance family, the real Mamaw is almost indistinguishable from Close and the rest of the cast look eerily like their real-life counterparts too. So, if nothing else, this movie definitely deserves that Best Hair & Makeup nomination! Otherwise, this is mostly poverty porn that isn't particularly inspiring. But if you're a "pick yourself up by your own bootstraps" kind of person, you may have found your perfect weekend movie.

Call My Agent: Farcical French Fabulousness

Over the past month, I binged all four seasons of the French TV show Call My Agent. Are you one of those people who think you have nothing left to watch on Netflix? Think again buddy, your mind is about to be blown.

The show is about the fictional ASK (Samuel Kerr Agency) and the four agents who are the senior partners of the firm. There is Andrea (Camille Cottin) who is fierce and fabulous and will move mountains for her clients in the name of great French cinema. In contrast there is Mathias (Thibault de Montalembert) who is the sleazy, corporate one, and cares more about generating revenue and having the biggest stars on his roster. Gabriel (Gregory Montel) is the "nicest agent in Paris," a sweet man who genuinely cares about all of his clients and gets into a lot of scrapes as he tries to please everyone. And finally, there's the grande dame, Arlette (Liliane Rovere) who was there when Samuel Kerr originally founded the agency and calmly watches on while everyone loses their minds around her.

Below the four lions of the agency, we also have their assistants, Noemi (Laure Calemy) and Herve (Nicolas Maury), the receptionist, Sofia (Stefi Celma), and the newest member of the agency, Camille (Fanny Sidney), who is a big mystery when she arrives and spends a lot of the first season getting into hilarious trouble and hiding away her secrets until everything gets far too shambolic. These four characters may not be the official stars of the show, but by the end of the four seasons, they are the ones who have definitely seen the most growth, becoming more confident, self-assured people who finally know what they want from their careers and have the support of the folks at the top to reach for their dreams.

However, the key gimmick of the show is its guest cast. This is where it reminded me of the BBC show, Extras, that featured a famous actor in each episode. Given my appallingly poor knowledge of French cinema, it took me about three episodes before I realized that the people playing the famous actors represented by these agents, were the actual famous actors themselves. These actors are remarkably well-known in France (and as the seasons go on, you can tell the show must have gotten popular, because the guest stars started to be internationally famous folk like Jean Dujardin and Monica Belluci, people that even my feeble brain could recognize). Like in Extras, the actors get to play insanely heightened versions of themselves, people who take their craft too seriously or are fed up with the grind and just want to retire and have to be coaxed back into their careers. It's clear they are all having a blast, and while I won't spoil the surprise, if you stick with this show through Season 4, you'll find a guest appearance from a Hollywood A-lister. 

Each season only consists of six episodes, which means that they are tightly scripted and nutty as can be. Most of the plots escalate into a raucous French farce, but there are also resonant emotional beats that make you deeply invested in these characters and their futures. This is such a witty and barbed but loving satire of the French film industry, and in later seasons, it also takes on issues like #MeToo and the things that women in the industry have had to put up with for far too long. You get a delicate balance of a new story with new guest actors each episode, but then the overarching shenanigans with the series regulars who are going in and out of relationships, having personal and professional revelations, and a neverending series of tangled complications that must be resolved. The only reason it took me so long to binge this show is because each episode is so dense. They often ended on a cliffhanger that left me wanting to press Play Next Episode, but I also needed my brain to recover from the wild ride. 

Call My Agent is sublime storytelling and impeccable TV. Also, it's all set in France, mostly Paris, which means that as soon as the pandemic is over, I'm booking a trip to go eat some croissants while I aimlessly wander along the Seine. This show is both intellectually and aesthetically stimulating, and you should be watching it immediately. Think of it as the perfect dose of entertainment to inoculate yourself against the pandemic doldrums while you're waiting to inoculate yourself against actual Covid! 

(Was that a labored metaphor? Yes. Have I been bingeing things in lockdown for a year now? Also yes. FORGIVE ME.)

WandaVision: A Trippy Ode to Television

Like most of the planet, I watched the WandaVision finale on Friday night and thus ended the run of appointment television that began in January. In our current age of binge watching, it was rather a novelty to have a show that I was excited to see on a weekly basis. And given the storyline, each episode was like watching a brand new show each time. As a TV lover, this show was a delight; as a Marvel lover, this show was a treat. It essentially amounted to a 6-hour Marvel movie (the nine episodes ran anywhere from 29-49 mins), and while I am not enough of a fan girl to get all the references (or frankly, care), given that I couldn't watch a new Marvel movie in theaters this year,  it was nice to get one in my home every week for two months.

The show starts out as a black-and-white 1950s sitcom starring Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) and Vision (Paul Bettany). For the uninitiated, Vision is an android (one of my favorite facts is that Paul Bettany began his journey in the Marvel Cinematic Universe in 2008 as the voice of J.A.R.V.I.S., Iron Man's AI helper - decades later, that simple voiceover work has morphed into him having to endure hours of makeup and costuming to bring Vision to life). Despite Wanda's telekinetic and magical abilities and Vision not being an actual human, the two are attempting to blend into the town of Westview, which is brimming with sitcom characters and tropes. Their house is almost identical to the Petrie household from The Dick van Dyke Show, and there's a typical sitcom plot of misunderstandings where Vision tries to bring his boss and his wife home for dinner while Wanda is unprepared and turns into a flustered housewife who has to seek help from the nosy but helpful neighbor, Agnes (the great Kathyrn Hahn, who I was so happy to see in the first episode, and then increasingly happy to see as the series progressed and she got to show us everything she's got). 

Yes, that's how the first episode begins, but it all gets a bit eerie towards the end and it becomes clear that something is amiss. However, you're not going to get any clarity on what exactly is amiss until Episode 4. Until then, the show takes you on this marvelous parade of evolving television, bursting into a glorious technicolor 70s style at the end of the second episode, where things get much more Brady Bunch-esque. Even after the reveal of what's happening in the real world outside this fictional Westview sitcom, we get to see WandaVision traipse through the decades, as they head into a more 80's Family Matters show, enjoy a little Malcolm in the Middle action, and eventually get to homages to Modern Family and the mockumentary-style that became so popular in the 2000s (when Vision does a very Jim Halpert-esque look to camera at one point, I laughed out loud - it was amazing). If you've watched any of those shows, you will deeply admire what is going on in WandaVision, because there is so much detail being poured into every frame as they recreate these sitcoms. The production design and costuming is absolutely spot on, the cinematography is excellent, with different camera lenses and aspect ratios being used depending on the decade being portrayed, and the actors studied these sitcoms assiduously, changing their accents and mannerisms to capture the nuances of each passing phase. Watching this show is like taking a seminar on the history of television, except far more entertaining.

Directed by Matt Shakman and created by Jac Schaeffer, this show is intricately plotted and a storytelling tour-de-force. You can tell they were paying attention to plot and pacing because the show is only nine episodes - it was initially meant to be ten, but they whittled it down to suit the narrative, which is a level of humility that is rare to find among many American showrunners. That commitment to story is what I have always loved about Marvel. They don't make bloated movies, they tend to hone in on exactly what needs to be told and get on with it. That being said, I watch Marvel movies more for the levity and fun action rather than the emotional baggage of superheroes. And this is a show that is exceedingly about emotional baggage. Olsen and Bettany are incredible actors and I was rooting for them all the way, but the finale was too dialogue-heavy for my liking. I have never been able to care when Marvel movies get too involved in their own mythology - I don't remember any of it, I don't read the comics, I am not invested in those intricacies. As such, my enjoyment of this show centered on the excellence of the television gimmick and its execution - everything else was...fine. I realize that Marvel fans may had the exact opposite reaction, and that speaks to the genius of this show. Whether or not you care about the MCU, there's something in here for everyone. 

WandaVision is a modern TV classic, a show that manages to glorify all the TV we watched before it, as well as signaling how far TV has come along since the 1950s. It was complex, twisty, slightly unsettling, and kept you guessing. It was firing on all cylinders in every department and was clearly a labor of love for everyone involved. And during a pandemic, it was a much-needed watercooler show that helped keep the days from blending together like a ceaseless blur. Did I love every second of this show? No. But was it a solid piece of entertainment for two months? Hell yes.