Film Words

It’s a little surprising that Will Ferrell has never made a “Eurovision Song Contest” movie before. His career is littered with roles in which he pokes fun at relatively minor sports (which Eurovision kind of is) whose small and quirky sub-cultures make for good natured goof-fests. Ice skating, NASCAR, 1970s basketball, youth soccer; to describe this new film’s plot would be to assume you’re totally unfamiliar with Ferrell’s work. Be honest, you know what you’re in for when you pull this one of the Netflix shelf.       As is so often the case Ferrell plays a dopey loser with a big dream and a more talented teammate, who this time out is played by Rachel McAdams with a lot of bright eyed naiveté and a poor Icelandic accent (though no one else fares any better in that department). A humorously violent plot contrivance gives the duo a chance to represent Iceland at Eurovision, and what’s nice is that the movie seems to be as genuinely enthused about the annual music/weirdn...

One of my biggest movie pet peeves is when people opine that Do the Right Thing (or any Spike Lee film really) is “sadly still relevant” to whichever current civil unrest is rocking America. Lee’s masterpiece may have been released in 1989, but it would be naive to think it’s only concerned with 1989 problems, as opposed to the awful fundamental flaws woven into every aspect of society, as present now as they were hundreds, if not thousands of years ago. Like saying Einstein’s theories of gravity are “still relevant today”. Of course they are; they are a universal constant that permeate all our lives, whether we notice their effect or not.             To wit, it would be both obvious and insufficient to call Lee’s new film Da 5 Bloods “perfect for our present moment” or “the film we need right now”. It’s not about right now, it’s net is cast wide in terms of both subject and theme, including the often downplayed parts of the Vietnam war, the history...