Short Thoughts on Recent Releases

 Just a few words on a couple of good awards hopefuls and a couple of poor streaming releases. 


Sound of Metal: Dir, Darius Marder – Riz Ahmed, Olivia Cooke, Paul Raci

The best of the recent crop of awards hopefuls, Ahmed plays a drummer who loses his hearing and is forced to adjust to a new reality, leaving his partner/bandmate (Cooke) and joining Paul Raci’s home for deaf youngsters with nowhere else to go. This is stunningly sensitive, well researched and filled with believable humanity from all involved. New director Darius Marder skilfully avoids the saccharine and trite narrative pitfalls that one would expect from a story like this, instead tapping into a universal fear of the entropic ways our bodies begin to fail us, leading to desperate, futile attempts to regain an idealised status quo in our constantly shifting lives.

       

Minari: Dir, Lee Isaac Chung – Steven Yeun, Han Ye-ri, Youn Yuh-jung, Alan Kim  

An utterly charming tale of a family of Korean immigrants trying to find the American dreamTM, led by a father who is determined to start a farm and become self-reliant. It’s amazing how absorbing this manages to be given its gentle rhythms and quiet demeanour. That demeanour is largely created by a cast in lock step with each other, all finding a naturalistic middle ground between boring stoicism and melodramatic feistiness. Standouts Steven Yeun and Youn Yuh-jung are thoroughly deserving of their awards successes.

Interestingly atypical for this kind of film, the racism faced by the family is only lightly touched upon and almost completely non-threatening, allowing these people to be defined by something other than their endurance of and resistance to the all-encompassing force of American xenophobia. Chung is more interested in a father’s assimilation into his own family as opposed to the family’s assimilation into a community.   

If the film has a misstep it’s the ending, a rather contrived dramatic turn that feels out of place amongst the rest of the narrative conflicts. I understand why Chung felt the need for a climactic set piece, but it breaks the tonal and emotional rhythm of a story that had up till that point held me completely in its spell.  

 

Moxie: Dir, Amy Poehler – Hadley Robinson, Lauren Tsai, Alycia Pascual-pena, Nico Hiraga 

This follows a high school girl’s political awakening, as she is spurred to create a feminist magazine by a strong willed new classmate and the discovery of her mother’s radical past. Poehler is clearly telling a strongly autobiographical story here, filling the movie with 90’s punk rock, leather jackets, and a style of activism that feels totally out of step with the contemporary setting. The teens here are neither as funny or socially astute as they would be in real life, leaving the plodding story feeling out of date and nowhere near as radical as it needs to be. Poehler’s heart is in the right place, but radical politics needs a bit more bite than this.     

 

Coming 2 America: Dir, Craig Brewer – Eddie Murphy, Arsenio Hall, Jermaine Fowler, Leslie Jones, Wesley Snipes, James Earl Jones

Whereas the last Brewer/Murphy/Snipes team-up, Dolemite is my Name, was sweet, fresh and had a humble amount of reverence for the material, this belated sequel is a cheap and self-congratulatory mess of half-baked ideas. The laughs, when they occasionally occur, are due to the natural gifts of the assembled cast, most of them returning from the 1988 classic, who’s gifts for timing and expression are mercifully unaffected by age or laziness.  

The screenplay, which focuses on the illegitimate male air of Murphy’s African King, suffers from trying to shoehorn modern progressive values into a premise and setting which are inherently retrograde. Attempting to figure the films position on gender will have you tying your brain in knots all day, until you realize how dumb the whole exercise is and just give up. Why put in more effort than the filmmakers did, after all?       

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