Film

We Are Human: 2014’s ‘Dear White People’

July 5, 2015 by Adam Membrey

When we first meet Sam White (Tessa Thompson), she’s speaking on her college radio show, Dear White People. She’s got opinions about the racial culture of her Ivy League college, and the serve both as a manifesto for the black students who want to be heard and a reminder to everyone else – who think seeing Good Hair means they know everything – that they know nothing.

As we meet the characters that populate this fictional college, it feels as if the radio show never stopped. It continues throughout, with each character’s dialogue feeling like it’s own radio channel. Opinions are given and expressed, and it becomes difficult to understand where the speech ends and the character begins.

But that’s the point. Everyone at this school is a walking facade, trying their best to establish their place in the world by espousing the cultural conversation they think they should push. Sam wants everyone to know the black students won’t be pushed around; the main white character, Kurt Fletcher (Kyle Gallner), wants his little college magazine to mean something. They’re all chasing something, even if they’re not sure exactly what it is. And so it goes – characters getting angry and struggling with the intangible.

The movie continues to build towards an all-out culture war on campus until it hits an almost literal crossroad: just before Sam is about to join a protest that her followers have been clamoring for, a protest she’s not even sure is the right thing to do, she gets a phone call that stops everything. For the first time in the film, she seems human. She has feelings. She has family she cares about. And she retreats. It’s a necessary reprieve from the escalating atmosphere, a way to show us that deep down, these are just kids struggling to find and fight for their place in the world.

The film’s climatic moments, at an incredibly racist college campus party that’s unfortunately ripped from the real world headlines, show just how far we haven’t come. The culture is still bruised and tattered. Misunderstandings are as ever-present as before. The school’s president and vice-president show they’re not as interested in fixing it as they are in getting some cash and attention off it.

But writer/director Justin Simien, understanding that underneath it all we’re built with the same needs and wants, pulls back the focus at the end to show us what motivates Sam. It’s not about the radio show. It’s not about the uprising. It’s about having a place in which you can comfortably hold the hand of someone who looks different from you and no one will care. Of course, the student body walking by notices Sam’s final gesture. It shows how far we haven’t come and still have to go. But Dear White People is an impassioned, entertaining reminder that we’re made far more of the same things than we’re not.

Fare Thee Well: ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’

July 5, 2015 by Adam Membrey

There’s a moment where I thought the film lost me. Driving on a long, empty road, with one-word-mumbling beat poet Johnny Five (Garret Hedlund) steering beside him and jazz musician Roland Turner (John Goodman) in the back seat punctuating his tedious non sequiturs with short naps, our main character Llewyn struggles in and out of his sleep, unsure of just how long this damn trip will be. Each time the film cut to the road, it seemed to grow longer. It felt like no end was in sight, even if we knew the final destination.

No way the Coen Brothers would lose their pacing like this, I thought. Something is up. This must be a magic trick of sorts.

It’s not until we see Llewyn, playing a rather quietly intense version of “The Death of Queen Jane”, only to be told “I don’t see much money in this”, that we realize what they’re after. They’re allowing us to feel the struggle; the frustration of losing the cat people have trusted you with; the constant need for a couch or money or something to keep you going when your dream alone isn’t enough to sustain you. By the end of the film, Davis, growing weary, is ready to give up. And just as he leaves the nightclub, Bob Dylan is about to play. Folk music is about to have some money to it. He just had no way of knowing.

It’s often said about any Coen Brothers movie that even their minor characters suggest an inner life; they arrive on the scene so fully-formed that even when they don’t say a word, they surely make an impression. This film is no different. From Carey Mulligan’s sweet-voiced but quietly agitated Jean to Justin Timberlake’s happily aloof Jim to the aforementioned John Goodman’s Roland and Hedlund’s Johnny Five – all these characters pop on the screen and keep you smiling, even when the story isn’t exactly a bright spot of sunshine.

This film would make an interesting double feature with their 2009 gem A Serious Man: both films feature men who suffer throughout the film and are aghast at the forces that seem to conspire against them. The difference, however, is that A Serious Man’s Larry Gopnik is a good man while Davis is more than kind of an asshole. Gopnik does his best, providing for his family, being kind to others – even listening to angry parents who want their underachieving teenage students to be given a totally undeserved higher grade. He takes it all in, all these maladies he by no means deserves, and does his best to find answers. Davis, on the other hand, is shown time and time again to be oblivious to the concerns of others. He regularly finds new ways to ask for a couch to sleep on, only showing a slight twinge of guilt. He talks down to the people who try to help him, assuring them they just don’t get what this music is and why it’s important.

In the film, Davis runs into a military boy, Troy Nelson, who gets a music contract. He’s perfectly harmless military man. There’s no edge to him. He’s just a good, wholesome man who wants to play good music for others, another service for the people to partake in after his tour of duty. Davis has no patience for him. It’s people like him, he decides, that take folk away from what it can be. But in A Serious Man, Larry Gopnik doesn’t go blaming people. He goes to three different rabbis looking or answers, and when they ultimately prove unsatisfactory responses, he still does not blame anyone. This is the life he’s been given, he decides, and there’s not much more he can do about it.

So is this a film that celebrates sucking it up and making the best of everything? Of not being an asshole to others because your time may be around the corner? As always, the Coen Brothers don’t explain their films. They stitch these beautiful yarns together and then leave them on the floor, ready for viewing but not for sale. They keep the secrets inside, like the dust that gathers underneath.

‘Paddington’ AKA ‘Utterly Delightful’

July 5, 2015 by Adam Membrey

You could call this movie Utterly Delightful and my eyes would do the exact opposite of roll. This film, from start to finish, is a joyous, delightful, and incrementally heartwarming exercise in storytelling. There’s an increasingly welcome amount of gentle British humor. Paddington himself, a CGI creation, avoids the uncanny valley by having the kindest brown eyes ever. The characters are as charming as they are relatable. I thought I knew what I was getting with Paddington before it even started, and where I went wrong is where the film goes ever more right.

The most delightful thing to me, and which makes it as pure a moving picture book as I’ve ever seen, is how Paddington is received by the world. It’s rather odd seeing a 3-foot-6 bear walking around a train station. Even more so that he speaks rather perfect English. But there are no alarms. There is no Animal Control Center salivating at the scene. Paddington simply is who he is, an upright-walking, English-speaking bear looking for a home, and that’s that. In a culture that seems to want to explain everything away – ‘origin story’ and ‘prequel’ seem to be even bigger buzz words in Hollywood than ‘profit’ – it’s rather refreshing to see all the unusual business accepted for what it is.

And there’s a lot of delightful unusual business in this film: an incredibly charming backstory (this is an origin I can get excited by) regarding an overprotective father; a bizarre, but well-meaning neighbor in Peter Capaldi; Jim Broadbent’s white shock of hair; a grandmother who judges the weather based on how her knees feel. The list goes on. In fact, the most usual, standard bit of business in the film – a villain played by Nicole Kidman – almost seems at odds with the rest of the story’s whimsical nature. They sanded just enough edges off of Kidman’s character and ultimate plans to keep it from letting the darker parts overwhelm the lighter parts of the story, and by the end it all works out.

Speaking of the ending: Devin Faraci referenced this during his own screening of Paddington, and it’s a very real thing here. There is a moment where you really do fear for Paddington’s well-being. You know there’s no way he will die, but like the furnace scene from Toy Story 3, there is an element of danger that is pushed about as far as it can go.

What is Wider Aspects?

February 1, 2015 by Adam Membrey

Anyone who’s ever tubed down a river knows one thing: the narrower the river, the faster and more perilous the ride. Everything dips and turns faster than you’re comfortable with, and all you can do is react. Sometimes that means some embarrassing shrieking. Sometimes it means ripping your favorite new bathing suit. Sometimes that means a good hit up the buttocks that leaves a souvenir. The river, bubbling and babbling, holds your full attention as you navigate your way through. There is no time to look for a better way. All focus has to be on staying afloat.

Floating on a wider river, however, means you can not only float, but you can actually see what’s around you. You can take in the surroundings. You can have a good time and live to tell about it. You can have conversations with people that go far deeper than you ever expected because, hey, what else can you really do?

This is the heart of Wider Aspects.

This is about taking a step back and finding a wider angle. When I was in high school, one of my favorite happy accidents was stumbling on those late-night movie viewings on AMC – back before it was the land of Mad Men and those Breaking Bad – and seeing this wonderful, vivid films with a wider screen ratio. Letterboxed but never boxed in, these films, with their wider and true aspects, just felt like so much more. They felt more epic, more emotional, more like something approaching Life – even when you saw an alien burst forth from the chest of a screaming, convulsing man.

Wider Aspects is about finding that wider aspect ratio. This is about making life as wide as it is long. This is about doing as much as it’s about talking. This is my attempt to move from a narrower river to one wider, one that allows me to indulge in the things I really want to indulge in; have the conversations I want to have, tell the stories I want to tell, draw the pictures I’ve always wanted to draw. To be slow to draw conclusions, and quicker to find new perspective.

This is my outlet. Free for you to see; free for you to respond to. It’s going to be interesting. It’s going to be fun. And it’s going to, at times, be goofy as hell.

We are living in a word dominated by input. We go from screen to screen – our phone, our computer, our TV, our tablet, and back to our phone – and are receiving millions of messages throughout the day. We have no lack of input. What we do have, however, is a lack of output.

This is my attempt at output. May it run as wide as it runs long. And may you enjoy it.