Nick Vallelonga, Brian Hayes Currie, and Peter Farrelly, 2018
no votes for Best Picture but rated #215,
2018 Skandies
AMPAS Best Picture
I see we have a discrepancy here. Of the films to have even been viewed by at least nine of the thirty-four voters for the 2018 Skandies, Green Book would have finished dead last if not for Vice. And it won the Oscar for best movie of the year. Well then! After I watched it, I poked around and discovered that this was more than a difference of opinion over its cinematic quality; apparently the movie was the object of some controversy. It’s about “Tony Lip”, a meatball from the Bronx who needs a gig while the nightclub where he works as a bouncer is undergoing renovations. He’s not in the mob, but has done favors for enough mobsters to get offers to pick up some work as well-paid muscle. Instead, he takes on a contract to serve as chauffeur and bodyguard to Don Shirley, an African-American piano virtuoso with multiple doctorates who is about to undertake a concert tour through the Deep South, where he’ll need the protection. Though Tony is so bigoted early in the movie that he throws away a couple of glasses that African-American workmen had been drinking out of, he pretty much immediately gets over this and becomes a steadfast friend of Dr. Shirley. Indeed, in the aspect of the story that most irked the critics, he teaches the overeducated Dr. Shirley some street smarts, as well as helping him to loosen up, encouraging him to stand up for himself more, and most offensively of all, introducing him to the African-American culture with which Dr. Shirley is unfamiliar, as represented by Little Richard and fried chicken. It’s the old “white guy is better at your culture than you are” trope, these critics contend. Others counter that, no, the movie portrays Tony as a good-natured oaf, and we’re supposed to be rolling our eyes at his presumption in suggesting that he is “blacker” than Dr. Shirley. But I think the movie points us toward a different objection. It’s the flip side of the trope: Dr. Shirley insists that while the record companies force him to play a sort of jazz fusion that their audiences won’t be threatened by seeing an African-American performer play, no one can play classical music by European composers like he can, and one of his great resentments is that he never gets a chance to demonstrate his skill at the “white” music he truly loves. Genes do not encode culture; culture is what you imprint on. Dr Shirley has no inherent link to Chubby Checker. He does have every right to claim Chopin. The movie’s big misstep is to muddy this point by paying off Tony’s loutish insistence that Dr. Shirley eat the fried chicken with a virtual KFC ad.
I also saw a number of reviews that did decry the cinematic quality of Green Book, pointing out the tired filmmaking tactics used throughout. One example: Tony asks Dr. Shirley, who lives alone, over to his house for Christmas dinner. Dr. Shirley declines. Throughout the dinner, Tony is a little distracted. A knock on the door! Could it be? Tony opens it… but no, it’s just the local pawn shop owner and his wife. Tony’s a bit disappointed, but what was he expecting? After directing the new arrivals to the table, Tony goes to close the door—and standing there is Dr. Shirley after all! I can see how this sort of thing could ruin the movie for some; I’ve certainly been turned off by less. But all in all I actually liked this movie more than I disliked it. A lot of these movies are a chore to sit through, but every time I had to take a break from this for one reason or another I found myself looking forward to getting back to it. Pattern 24 says that I’m into stories that are strongly grounded in a time and place, so the tale of a road trip circa 1962 would have to be worse than this for me to actively dislike it.
(However much Dr. Shirley might disdain the concept of a postscript, here’s one: when I saw a calendar open to “OCTOBER 1962” prominently on display in one shot, I assumed that I was in for a movie about the Cuban Missile Crisis. But it only gets a passing mention! I wasn’t around at the time, but didn’t the Cuban Missile Crisis pretty much bring normal life to a halt, like the September 11 attacks? Or has everything I’ve ever read overstated its importance, and people just thought of it as “something in the news”?)
Peter Morgan, Anthony McCarten, Bryan Singer, Newton Thomas Sigel, and Dexter Fletcher, 2018
no votes for Best Picture but rated #186, 2018 Skandies
I’m not sure why my past self put this biopic of Queen’s Freddie Mercury on the list. I mean, I guess Queen is fine—I even have “Under Pressure” in my MP3 collection—but I have “Cruel Summer” in the same directory and you don’t see me spending two hours of my life watching a movie about Bananarama. In any case, this is another one that, despite its success ($200 million at the box office plus the Oscar for Best Actor), attracted quite a bit of criticism. One complaint is that there’s not much of a story here, and there isn’t: at first it is basically “band with flamboyant frontman forms, quickly and easily hits it big, and entertains a lot of people over the years but doesn’t particularly change the world or anything”. (For instance, the song after which the movie is named is famously silly, isn’t really about anything, and is now forever linked in the public imagination—as the movie itself acknowledges, in its casting of Mike Myers—with the fuckin’ Wayne’s World movie.) There is eventually some drama, but that runs into an even more frequently voiced complaint: it’s made up. I rolled my eyes at an obvious goof early on, when a superimposed title declares “MIDWEST USA” and then we cut to a road sign that is clearly from the state of Georgia. And I grumbled a bit when another title declares that it’s 1980, and we see the band creating the song “We Will Rock You”; I actually owned that song on 45 as a kid because I thought it was cool when arenas played it during basketball games. It’s from 1977. But whatever—a few errors of geography and chronology are no big deal for what is not a documentary but a feature film. A bigger deal is that the fundamental narrative of the climax of the film—Freddie Mercury decides he’s gotten too big for the band and quits for a solo career, he discovers he has AIDS, he realizes that he wants to spend his remaining time on Earth playing with his old bandmates rather than random session musicians, he returns hat in hand, Queen reunites and is added to the Live Aid concert at the last minute, the band members all have some trouble knocking the rust off after such a long break from performing together, Freddie reveals his diagnosis to the rest of them, and, inspired, they all rock Wembley Stadium with a set of songs that have taken on tragic new meanings—turns out to be false in almost every detail. I didn’t know the real story until I read up on it, but it seems that Queen never broke up, the band was on the Live Aid bill from the very beginning, its members had no rust to knock off because they’d been touring quite recently, and Freddie Mercury didn’t receive his diagnosis until two years after the big show. It was enough to make me wonder whether the real Freddie Mercury even had any cats.
He did at least actually die of AIDS, a sad historical landmark, which brings us to yet another charge critics leveled at the movie. To back up a bit from the account above, the narrative of the second half of the movie is basically that Freddie Mercury, finding that wealth, celebrity, adulation, and artistic fulfillment do not fill every void in his psyche, and struggling to come to terms with his sexuality—for, like Don Shirley, Freddie Mercury is not straight—turns to a sybaritic lifestyle full of apartment-trashing parties, drugs, and leatherboys. But when he discovers that his chief companion among the leatherboys has been manipulating him (e.g., not telling him about calls from the Live Aid organization asking him to perform), and is diagnosed as HIV-positive, he cleans up his act, cuts the manipulator out of his life, and returns to his true family, the other members of Queen. Chief consultants on this movie: the other members of Queen. So, yeah, a lot of people were unhappy that a movie about Freddie Mercury, gay icon, ended up suggesting that in order to get back to what really mattered—the music, man—the gay subculture was a destructive temptation he had to overcome.
Madeleine L’Engle, Jeff Stockwell, Jennifer Lee, and Ava DuVernay, 2018
no votes for Best Picture but rated #194, 2018 Skandies
Speaking of music: while jazz fusion is generally not my sort of thing, I could recognize that the Don Shirley music in Green Book was good stuff. And while I can see where critics are coming from when they charge that any kind of music biopic is going to be an exercise in celebrity karaoke—if you want to see a Queen concert, why not just pull the real thing up on Youtube instead of watching some actors lip-sync?—Queen is good enough that the musical segments add to rather than detract from the movie. But the music in A Wrinkle in Time? Shockingly terrible. I think I said the same thing about the music in the Cloak & Dagger TV show. I guess that suggests that maybe the issue is not so much this movie in particular as what the people choosing the music have to pick from. I don’t follow modern music other than Poppy so I don’t know how representative this is of what’s on the radio. If it is remotely representative, then heaven help us. (Of course, people have been saying this forever; in 1990 my high school newspaper office had a Life in Hell cartoon on the wall in which Bongo asks, “Is today’s music as bad as it sounds?”)
But enough about the music; the rest of the movie is also pretty dreadful. I do know why my past self added this to the list despite it checking in at #194: the book A Wrinkle in Time and its first two sequels meant a lot to me in my early years. But this is a poor adaptation. The storytelling is weirdly disjointed. Special effects sequences that come off like a Giggle Time All‑Mo version of Avatar are featured at the expense of establishing crucial relationships and personality elements, though the screenplay seems to realize something’s missing and attempts to fill in the gaps with transparently expository dialogue. Possibly the biggest challenge in any adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time would be making Charles Wallace remotely bearable, and this movie goes splat on that count. Apparently it went splat at the box office, too, with $130 million in losses. I guess that spares me the decision of whether to sit through a version of A Wind in the Door by this same team purely for the sake of nostalgia.
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