BEFORE: I'm trying to remember now what I was thinking when I set up this chain - I've mentally paired the films "The Core" and "Sunshine", both about teams of scientists trying to save the world, and "Sunshine" has Rose Byrne in it, so I could have linked to that from "The Place Beyond the Pines", plus it also has Chris Evans in it, which would have neatly set up "Avengers: Endgame". This would have worked out great if I were seeing Avengers this Friday, I could have added a couple extra films with Chris Evans to get me there.
But, I'm not going to see "Avengers: Endgame" until Monday, so I want to see as many films as I can before then - yeah, that must have been my plan, let's go with that. If I choose this one today, with Mahershala Ali carrying over from "The Place Beyond the Pines", I can fit in FOUR more films between now and "Endgame", instead of two. It's a better fit, so I must have known I wasn't going to be able to see this blockbuster film on opening day - waiting until the following Monday is usually a good plan for me, like who wants to fight with the crowds on opening weekend? It's all going to work out fine, I think.
Plus, this one's been on the books for some time, it won the Best Picture Oscar like, what, two years ago? In my defense, it's a hard one to link to AND it's not available on most platforms, certainly not on Netflix, plus it's $2.99 on Amazon Prime and $4.99 on iTunes. I need to save a few bucks here and there, this hobby is getting too expensive, so it's another screener copy tonight. (Hey, if you want me to see it, maybe run it on premium cable, which I pay for...) I had a couple of opportunities to link to this before, like from "Hidden Figures" or "Welcome to Marwen" via Janelle Monae, but both times I had other agendas and other targets to meet, so although I had an intro film, I had no working outro. It's better to just sit on a film for a while and wait for another opportunity, this proves that if I keep my eyes open, another chance to fit this film in eventually came up.
THE PLOT: A chronicle of the childhood, adolescence and burgeoning adulthood of a young African-American gay man growing up in a rough neighborhood of Miami.
AFTER: Finally, I've now seen ALL of the Best Picture Oscar nominees for 2017 (films released in 2016). Without re-opening that whole "La La Land" vs. "Moonlight" debacle, I'm finally ready, only two years late, to make my prediction. Wait, a prediction won't work because the ceremony already happened - let's say that my personal favorite among the 8 nominees is not "Moonlight". Nor is it "La La Land", for that matter. Not "Fences" or "Hell or High Water", not "Hacksaw Ridge" or "Lion" or "Manchester By the Sea" - my faves were "Hidden Figures" and "Arrival", and I would give a slight edge there to "Arrival", because it was about aliens arriving and they had a different way of looking at time, and I found all that very cool. (Yes, I believe of the 8 nominated films, I gave "Arrival" the highest score. I'm good with that.)
Honestly, I just found "Moonlight" to be very boring. Like, be a bad film or be a strange film, just whatever you do, don't be boring. I fell asleep several times at the end of the second section, and each time I woke up, rewound until I figured out where I drifted off, then tried again, only to fall asleep again. I basically waited an hour for something of note to happen, and by the time it started to happen, my brain had already checked out. So I had to just call it, get some real sleep and then finish the film in the morning, when my brain was refreshed and I could concentrate again.
Now, I realize this is a different film from what I usually prefer - there are no aliens, there's no rocket launch, there's no musical numbers or bank robberies or animated characters, it's just a simple straight-forward drama (umm, maybe "straight"-forward isn't the best term, what about "gay"-forward?) and this is not my world, the street culture and the African-American culture and the gay culture, and I'm not really in the loop for any of those. That doesn't mean I can't find something here to appreciate or understand, but if my brain doesn't latch on to something, it's apparently going to want to shut down.
Like "The Place Beyond the Pines", there's a three-act structure here, three different time-frames, but here they all focus on the same character, only he goes by three different names/nicknames at these three different times in his life. First he's "Little", then "Chiron" and finally "Black". This movie is based on a theater production called "In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue", and in the original play, all three characters appeared on-stage at the same time, with their stories running concurrently, and it not being made clear that they are in fact the same character. And once again, I thank a film director for not maintaining that trick here, even though that's the current trend, because he could have easily made this film more difficult and inaccessible by toggling between the three storylines, then engineering some kind of reveal so we'd all know that Little grows up to become Chiron, who grows up to call himself Black.
That's a big point in this film's favor, that it took this split-narrative structure and laid it all out linearly, as it should be, and letting the story beats progress naturally from past to future. But again, I think it's a boring story, so in my opinion it's a lot of work for a very little payoff. The other problem concerns all three actors playing the central character, I just didn't get much emotion from any of them, they felt like total blanks to me. Was this on purpose, to suggest how little we know about what's going on inside Chiron's head? Or was it just examples of under-emoting, which is sort of a form of bad acting, or possibly being under-coached by a director who didn't give them enough information about how to react to things? Either way, I just wasn't feeling it from them. One of them barely even talked, in addition to not showing any emotion at all. Oh, he's shy, isn't that cute? Well, no, I prefer child actors who know what to say and how to say it.
As I said before, I'm going to enjoy getting one step closer to finishing off the list of "1,001 Movies You Must See Before You Die", but other than that, I'm just going to move on and move forward to the next film, because that's what I do.
Also starring Trevante Rhodes (last seen in "12 Strong"), Ashton Sanders, Alex Hibbert (last seen in "Black Panther"), André Holland (last seen in "Bride Wars"), Jharrel Jerome, Jaden Piner, Naomie Harris (last seen in "Collateral Beauty"), Janelle Monae (last seen in "Welcome to Marwen"), Patrick Decile, Edson Jean (last seen in "War Dogs"), Duan Sanderson, Stephon Bron, Don Seward, Larry Anderson, Shariff Earp.
RATING: 4 out of 10 swimming lessons
No comments:
Post a Comment