Doris Baizley, Lisa Freedman, and Kirsten Johnson, 2016
#5, 2016 Skandies
I’m not even going to rate this one. I am willing to take a look at documentaries should they pop up on a Skandies list, but this isn’t even a documentary. It is a compendium of outtakes from as assortment of documentaries for which Kirsten Johnson served as cinematographer. I gave it half an hour and found no narrative through-line, unless you agree with what Scott McCloud said about non-sequiturs in comics:
And yes, I can see how people might argue that this montage of clips adds up to a life in cinematography or what have you. I can imagine it playing in one of those little theaters you see in art museums. I don’t say that to be dismissive—ten years later, my mind remains blown by Christian Marclay’s The Clock, a few minutes of which I saw in one of those little museum theaters. But this is not the sort of thing I am going to watch as part of a project to catch up on well-regarded filmed stories of recent years.
Damien Chazelle, 2016
#6,
2016 Skandies;
AMPAS Best Picture
I once talked to a music professor who said that he couldn’t bear to watch movies because, given his vocation, his primary focus was always on the scores, and most of them were terrible. I found this interesting, but as I am not a music professor, I often don’t even notice the score of a movie—though there are of course many exceptions, most scores set a mood but otherwise don’t call particular attention to themselves. La La Land, however, is a musical. The music is front and center. The only music I like anymore is by Poppy. These songs are not Poppy songs. Therefore, bad movie.
That is a joke, but it is a “ha ha just serious” kind of joke. This is a musical, it is therefore largely a showcase for its music, and I did not like the old-timey showtunes, the old-timey jazz, or the modern jazz fusion that constitute nearly all of the music. There is a scene toward the beginning of the film that pulls a fun little trick: we’re shown a pool party, we hear the distinctive synth riff to A‑ha’s “Take On Me”… but it soon becomes evident that it is not the original but a mediocre cover, à la “making friends with you was never second best” in Sky High… except then as the camera makes its way around the backyard, we discover that this is diegetic music played by an ’80s cover band standing in the corner. This is meant to show how far the male lead has fallen, and to twist the knife, the female lead calls out a request for “I Ran” by A Flock of Seagulls, which the band dutifully plays. “Requesting ‘I Ran’ from a serious musician, is just—it’s too far!” he protests to her a short while later. The problem is that “I Ran”, even as performed by a mediocre cover band, is infinitely better than all the movie’s original music put together, so drawing the comparison is a fatal misstep.
There are some good bits, but even these were similar to sequences I’d seen done better in other films. When the female lead goes for a movie audition (thereby running afoul of Pattern 43), does a great job, but has to freeze in mid-emote when the audition is interrupted by the casting director’s assistant, it showed off Emma Stone’s chops as an actress, but also called to mind a better sequence from Mulholland Dr. The “what might have been” home movie at the end does pack a punch, but not only does it feel unearned by the movie that preceded it, it also called to mind the ending of a better movie, 25th Hour. And when the leads sang to each other, the pairing of Ryan Gosling’s weak singing voice with Emma Stone’s stronger one reminded me of the Xander-and-Anya sequence in “Once More With Feeling”, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode, which is a superior musical in pretty much every way.
(Also, in the opening montage, about half the cars have “PCI” as the letter cluster in their license plates and I found that distracting.)
Tarell Alvin McCraney and Barry Jenkins, 2016
#8, 2016 Skandies; AMPAS Best Picture
This one’s pretty good! It gives us three long glimpses into the life of a character named Chiron at three different stages: as a nearly mute boy in an impoverished African-American neighborhood in Miami, taken under the wing of a local drug kingpin who serves as a surprisingly beneficent father figure; as a teen, tormented both by his crack addict of a mother and by his classmates, who are certain that he’s gay and relentlessly pummel him for it; and as a young adult, now a drug kingpin himself up in Atlanta, but still trying to come to terms with his sexuality and his identity more broadly. After pretty much bouncing off every 2016 Skandie movie so far, I was concerned that I had just lost my ability to watch movies in general, but I found this one pretty absorbing. And though Moonlight is generally pretty far removed from my own experience, I actually found a character I could really relate to—this guy:
