BEFORE: Chadwick Boseman carries over from "Da 5 Bloods", and I go from a film nominated for 1 Oscar to one that's nominated for FIVE Oscars this year. See, Spike, that's what can happen when you don't publicly complain about your last film not winning. "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" is nominated for Best Actor (Chadwick Boseman), Best Actress (Viola Davis), plus Production Design, Best Costume Design, and Best Make-Up and Hairstyling. How many will it win? I'll be able to make a better guess after I watch it...
There are two other nominated films that fit in with my theme, Black History (April/May edition) that I don't think I'll be able to get to - one is "The United States vs. Billie Holiday", nominated for 1 Oscar, and "Judas and the Black Messiah", nominated for 6 Oscars. That last one is still in theaters, but also aired on HBO Max in February, I think - only I didn't know that was just for a limited time, and I also didn't know I'd be doing this as a theme. Neither film seems like something I could link to this month (though Robert Longstreet from "Judas and the Black Messiah" was also in "Ain't Them Bodies Saints", and Jonathan Higgins from "The United States vs. Billie Holiday" was also in "The Greatest Game Ever Played", so maybe...). Ah, but in that direction, madness lies. I can't keep second-guessing my process, the only thing to do is put both films on the list, and look for future linking opportunities. Maybe I'll focus on Black History again next April if it goes well this time around...
Let's check the TCM "31 Days of Oscar" schedule for tomorrow, Saturday, April 10, then we can get into it:
6:45 am "Hide Out" (1934)
8:30 am "High Society" (1956) - SEEN IT
10:30 am "Hold Back the Dawn" (1941)
12:45 pm "Honeysuckle Rose" (1980)
3:00 pm "Hope and Glory" (1987)
5:00 pm "How the West Was Won" (1962)
8:00 pm "Hud" (1963)
10:00 pm "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" (1939)
12:15 am "I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang" (1932)
2:00 am "I Married a Witch" (1942)
3:30 am "I Never Sang for My Father" (1970)
5:15 am "I Remember Mama" (1948)
Ugh, I knew this was coming, I've only seen 1 out of 12 in tomorrow's line-up - and even that is just the remake of "The Philadelphia Story". I meant to watch "How the West Was Won" before, just never got around to it - but as a Best Picture nominee, I really should make the time for it one day, if things ever slow down around here. Same goes for "I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang", I meant to watch it but I think maybe opted for "The Defiant Ones" instead. "Hope and Glory" is one of just three Best Picture Nominees from the 1980's that I haven't seen, along with "A Soldier's Story" and "The Color Purple", but I'm finally going to watch that last one at the end of this month. (From the 1990's nominees, I'm only missing two, "Il Postino" and "Secrets & Lies".) But my "31 Days of Oscar" record now drops to 52 seen out of 113, or 46%.
THE PLOT: During a recording session, tensions rise between Ma Rainey, her ambitious horn player and the white management determined to control the uncontrollable "Mother of the Blues".
AFTER: My record of seeing all the Oscar nominees from the years 2000-2009 is pretty damn good, the only Best Picture nominee from that decade that I haven't seen is "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon", so I should probably address that. Things in the next decade got more difficult, because in 2009 they opened up the field to MORE than five nominees in the Best Picture category - still, between the years 2010-2019, the only Best Picture nominees that I haven't seen are 2012's "Amour" and 2018's "Roma" and "Bohemian Rhapsody". That last one is on my DVR, I just haven't been able to link to it, so soon there will be only TWO nominees from the 2010's that I haven't seen.
2020, however, is another story. It looks like the only Best Picture nominee that I'll be able to work in will be "The Trial of the Chicago 7", and I'm kind of OK with that. There are still 10 Best Picture WINNERS that I haven't seen, which range from 1928 to 1952, but maybe one day I can get there, just not under the current selection system. Again, one day, if things ever quiet down, I'd love to just knock out those 10 films, just to say I've seen every year's Best Picture. But watching "Wings", "Cimarron" and "The Greatest Show on Earth" could be a bit of a slog. Someday, maybe. This year I guess I'll watch one Best Picture nominee and hope for the best.
"Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" is NOT nominated for Best Picture - now I kind of understand why. First off, there hasn't been a Best Picture nominee with an ass joke in the title since, I don't know, "Forrest Rump"? "Terms of En-rear-ment"? "American Booty"? "Ass-ablanca"? Sorry, I couldn't resist. I get that "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" is the name of the play this is based on, and the play is named after a song that Ma Rainey recorded, which allegedly refers to a dance called the "Black Bottom", but come on, she's really singing about her ass, right? It's a double entendre, a phrase with two meanings, one of them illicit.
A lot of those early soul songs - which heavily influenced rock and roll three decades later, had heavy but well-disguised sexual content. I remember episodes of the Dr. Demento show that tried to highlight songs from the 30's that were more scandalous than some people realized at the time. The very phrase "rock and roll" came from songs that were really about sex, like "My Man Rocks Me with One Steady Roll", sung by Trixie Smith. Bessie Smith recorded the song "I Need a Little Sugar for My Bowl" in 1931, then there was Bo Carter's "Banana in Your Fruitbasket", Clara Smith's "It's Tight Like That", and Blind Boy Fuller's "Sweet Honey Hole".
One vaudeville song from two black performers, Butter Beans & Susie, was called "I Want a Hot Dog for My Roll", and it's not too hard to see what that female singer might really have been looking for.
(As blues evolved into rock and roll, the obscene lyrics sort of carried over. If you have a moment, look up the original lyrics for "Tutti Frutti", not the ones that eventually made it to the recording that Little Richard made. Umm, adults only, please... See also "Long Tall Sally", "Willie and the Hand Jive", "My Ding-a-Ling" and "Big Ten Inch Record".)
But we're here tonight to talk about the movie, not just salacious records. Will Chadwick Boseman win an Oscar for this? Hmm, possibly, he did make the savvy career move of dying before the film was released, and that sure helped Heath Ledger out. Also Peter Finch for "Network". This film does (eventually) give him some great soliloquies, and that could help, too. But I really didn't like how the film GOT to them, it really spent the whole first half hour (1/3 of the film!) wasting time. After a stage performance of Ma Rainey singing "Deep Moaning Blues", the film then focuses on the recording of the titular song. The problem is that the story then becomes about the band setting up and rehearsing, or failing to rehearse, or debating about which version they're going to record, also who's really in charge of the rehearsal, and this goes around and around for 30 freakin' minutes, with NOTHING being resolved. Seriously, around and around, while we also see Ma Rainey leaving her hotel and driving to the studio. So, basically, the first half-hour of the film is a total waste, nothing happens, it doesn't even need to be there.
Unfortunately, the pattern continues for most of the rest of the film. There's a delay because the studio manager forgot to arrange to have a cold bottle of Coke for Ma. There's another delay when the band members realize that Ma wants her nephew to introduce the song on the record, and he's got a bad stutter. Then there's a problem with the microphone. Delays, delays, delays. Really, I think there's only ten minutes of story in this 90-minute film, and the rest is just stalling. This is clearly not how you get a Best Picture nomination, and as proof, the film didn't get one.
Sure, of course it's about the struggle of a powerful black recording artist, who finds herself at odds with her white manager, and also the white man in charge of the recording studio. But did they have to waste so much of my time to tell this story this way? Then after about 72 takes of the song, they finally get a recording that they can work with, but then everything falls to pieces as Levee, the trumpeter, pushes his weight around just a little too hard and gets fired on the spot. Then he's forced to sell his songs for nearly nothing to the studio manager, who will eventually record them with white musicians years later, and probably never pay the black songwriter any royalties or even credit him on the album. And then things sort of get even worse from there, and the recording session ends.
This is based on a play by August Wilson, and if I'd paid money to see this play, where nearly nothing happens, man, I'd be really cheesed off, probably demand a refund. I suppose it's fine to watch the film on Netflix, because you're not really paying by the film, so who cares? Still, almost entirely a grand waste of time. If there was a point made, beyond the fact that it was tough to be a black musician in the 1920's, then I must have missed it.
Some specific things just plain didn't work - the band leader always started the band with "One, Two, You Know What to Do..." Every. Single. Time. If any band leader did that in real life, the other people in the band would rise up and smack him, like on their second day together. And then, NITPICK POINT, after this lead-in, which is what dictates the tempo for the upcoming song, Levee complains that the other band members are playing at the wrong tempo. Well, why didn't he realize from the lead-in that the tempo was wrong, why did he only realize it a few bars into the song? Makes no sense.
I do, however, marvel at the magic and mystery of making vinyl records - I think I've written about this at length in the past. In the 1920's, how, exactly, did sound waves cut a groove into a master vinyl record in a way that somehow captured or portrayed that sound in the groove, so that when a similar needle would be run through a copy of that record, the shape of that groove would transmit similar sound waves through that needle, and then out into a speaker, which would then cause a sound similar to the one made by the musicians in the recording studio? I've researched this many times, and I still don't understand it. It's magic, or sorcery, maybe voodoo - Edison invented it, of course, but with wax cylinders at first. How the hell did someone figure out that if you cut a groove into a wax cylinder, and that cutting device was somehow controlled by the sounds from a microphone, that the groove would physically reproduce the sound later, when you run a needle through it? A camera, sure, I understand how that functions, light comes through a small hole into a tiny black box with a light-sensitive film in it, and the light changes chemicals on the film, and later other chemicals are used to turn that into a negative, and from the negative you can make a positive, but HOW THE HELL DO RECORDS WORK?
Also starring Viola Davis (last seen in "State of Play"), Glynn Turman (last seen in "Dolemite Is My Name"), Colman Domingo (last seen in "Lucy in the Sky"), Michael Potts, Jonny Coyne (last seen in "Nightcrawler"), Taylour Paige (last seen in "White Boy Rick"), Jeremy Shamos (last seen in "Bad Education"), Dusan Brown (last seen in "42"), Joshua Harto (last seen in "Gold").
RATING: 4 out of 10 signed release forms
No comments:
Post a Comment