Moonlight, directed by Barry Jenkins

This for the sake of the film critic who won't read this thread, StillAdvance, not you.

the kid was uninteresting, what was he into? music? art? anything? he just seemed like a scared punchbag for the entire movie. i didnt buy juan the good-hearted drug dealer either or the fact the main guy never had sex after all those years but was still dreaming about a sloppy hand job he got once

am worried there is no way this film can live up to the hype and wish i saw it last year before the hype had really kicked in. am also slightly wary about naomi harris. not sure about brits playing americans (also see: selma).

the fact the main guy never had sex after all those years but was still dreaming about a sloppy hand job he got once

https://media.giphy.com/media/OhEyhZgVqUkPm/giphy.gif

lol

Good, not great, IMO. It's a little underpowered. The main problem is the casting in the middle section, where the actors playing Chiron and Kevin couldn't feasibly (physically) be either the child or adult versions of themselves which, unfortunately, made me laugh because my movie-date leaned over at the start of the diner scene and said "how's he going to recognise him?" to which I replied that he should say "Chiron, you look so different. In fact I look more like you than you do".

I loved the diner scene.

I thought it was weird that they were drinking red wine.

That part made sense, especially if you know the restaurant. Lots of people drink awful red wine in Pizza Hut glasses.

Andre Holland as adult Kevin is perfect and sexy and beautiful, an ideal match for the adolescent Kevin. HE should've been the Oscar nominee.

What I couldn't get past is the cilantro on the black beans and rice, which would never happen in a traditional Cuban restaurant.

I could've done w/out most of the first act

This opinion is violence against me

also, is there any evidence for 'most people who like this movie are white/straight'? seems like a kind of fucked up thing to just claim based on anecdata (especially when made by another white person who then goes on to critique the movie)

whenever you let politics or social mores act as the frame for art, you've got it backwards. Art encompasses both and puts them in a larger context.

been bothered by this issue for years without really getting at what I really think but this is so lucid and elegantly expressed and gets it exactly. it is intensely satisfying. thank you v much aimless

This was fine, mostly. The third act is the most conventional, and i didn't believe all of it.

Him trapping, or holding onto a memory from high school so tightly?

the reunion, "You're the only man I let touch me," etc

I didn't buy that at all either, but loved the first two acts.

Just for clarification: The implication is that he's going to jail at the end of act 2, right?

I presumed his character would have gone to a juvie detention centre at least for his bit of gbh.

didnt realize barry jenkins studied @ the peter berg school of camera movement + closeups

Be sure to tell him.

am i the only one who's seen Medicine for Melancholy?

i've seen it!

my husband loves it and has loved it for years and made me watch it when we first started dating

i found it forgettable, but now i want to rewatch it

moonlight, i loved though.

not a white person, not a black person, not sure how to score the fact that i loved moonlight.

Moonlight > MfM, but not really by a million miles.

someone tell me about all these countless films about gay black people.

I know you're probably talking about "hits," but there are a fair number.

Medicine... is not very good, and the time is right for the Moonlight backlash to claim the first film as the superior.

it's not, but i suspect future barry jenkins films could resemble it more closely.

Best Picture! Didn't see that coming.

Neither did Warren Bratty.

Moonlight feels right

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/21/arts/music/moonlight-movie-score-music-oscars.html?_r=0

Chamber music might not seem like an obvious candidate to be “chopped and screwed”: remixed and slowed down in the style pioneered by DJ Screw when he transformed Houston’s hip-hop scene a generation ago. But that unlikely inspiration helped give the film “Moonlight,” whose score is nominated for an Academy Award, its otherworldly sound.

The unusual idea emerged when the film’s director, Barry Jenkins, was batting around musical possibilities with its composer, Nicholas Britell, and Mr. Jenkins mentioned his love of chopped and screwed tracks. (The style can give songs a woozy, psychedelic flavor.)

“When you slow the music down, the pitch goes down,” Mr. Britell, 36, said in an interview in his Manhattan studio. “And you actually get this audio texture which is deepened and enriched and you hear more things in it. It sort of opens it up and stretches it out.”

“I chopped and screwed the recording,”

Did you though? You pitched it down. Good job.

I've only heard the main theme that was on Song Exploder and it seems like people are making waaay too big a deal out of it. Haven't seen Moonlight yet however, so I'll assume it works really well in the movie.

I didn't buy the steady goodness of Ali and Monae but accepted it as part of the movie's structure.

Yeah, it helped that they played it just right.

The critic Mike d'Angelo wrote a lengthy critique on Letterboxd, the main points that struck me as solid were 1) Chiron is a total cipher, aside from the suffering inflicted on him by others and 2) the Act II climax is overdetermined, following up bliss with violence inflicted by the beloved.

"Raise the stakes," the Syd Field types insist, and so not only does Chiron regularly get bullied by assholes for being different, but said assholes also subsequently pressure the one person in the world who's expressed sexual desire for Chiron into beating the living shit out of him. It doesn't get much more shameless than giving the miserable protagonist a single fleeting moment of happiness and then instantly (I think it's actually the very next scene) snatching it away from him in the ugliest possible way. Likewise, I confess to mostly rolling my eyes at Chiron's final incarnation. Is it plausible that he would harden up considerably to escape his world of pain? Absolutely. But is it plausible that he would almost literally transform himself into the man who had been his childhood protector, right down to the wardrobe? That's more Screenwriting 101 nonsense: "Your ending should circle back to your beginning." .... Dial it down 50%, make him slightly more menacing rather than a barely recognizable musclebound badass (with a wounded little boy inside; kudos to Trevante Rhodes for conveying that so beautifully, even if I find the concept ridiculous), and I'd probably be as moved as everyone else.

https://letterboxd.com/gemko/film/moonlight-2016/1/

agree 100%

It doesn't get much more shameless than giving the miserable protagonist a single fleeting moment of happiness and then instantly (I think it's actually the very next scene) snatching it away from him in the ugliest possible way.

enh I think this is a pretty common experience for adolescents in one way or another, though I agree w/ everyone else on the third section being too far a leap

It's definitely not a movie that lends itself to this type of scrutiny

It does happen, but the script was in a rush to punish him.

Love hurts shrug.gif

imo Moonlight is an interesting inversion of the usual Oscar movie, where you generally have fine-enough writing paired with unremarkable / pedestrian directing (or worse) - for me almost everything that worked about Moonlight was purely aesthetic

kid who played teen Kevin was in my friend's son's class at LaGuardia (ie "Fame") High School, saw them in a play there

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C5p0RCZUsAA6kc0.jpg

is the transformation really that hard to believe? scrawny little kids become hulking adults all the time. they even make a big deal about his appetite. and it seemed to me that the incident at the end of the second section, with the chair, was him discovering a persona that could protect him. id almost go to other extreme; in that the performance showed his fragility so clearly it seems hard to believe anyone would buy that he was a tough guy in the first place.

worst part of this was the score and that they killed of Ali in the first act (but that's the source's fault)

I thought killing off Ali was a bold but brave decision. Story first, characters later.

is the transformation really that hard to believe? scrawny little kids become hulking adults all the time. they even make a big deal about his appetite. and it seemed to me that the incident at the end of the second section, with the chair, was him discovering a persona that could protect him. id almost go to other extreme; in that the performance showed his fragility so clearly it seems hard to believe anyone would buy that he was a tough guy in the first place.

― ryan,

I believed the metamorphosis; I didn't believe the movie's enchantment with repression.

yeah, Like Every Gay Film Ever ('cept not anymore, necessarily)

FWIW, this could be a relevant read (just published today)

http://www.theroot.com/to-be-held-by-moonlight-1792774994

I thought the score was the most outstanding element of this.

i like that that article emphasized the theme of touching, since that is the element i found most moving about it. franco berardi's eulogy for mark fisher defined depression as an "inability to be touched" and that phrase immediately brought this movie to mind. and even though i accept and defer to the smart critique above of the second act betrayal there's something about its inversion of "touch" into violence which seems meaningful for the struggle of the two characters. that being touched or allowing yourself to be touched also creates that vulnerability in the first place.

chiron stumbled across the most sensitive, supportive, and lovely drug dealer ever

Actually I thought it was more complicated than that, and this was one of the best things about the movie -- that Kevin says to him in the first part of the movie that he can't be soft in the world, he has to show he's hard, and that resonates with what he learnes from Juan, but does it work for Juan? No, Juan's visibly hard and so he gets killed and leaves Teresa alone. When Chiron finally shows he's hard and beats down Tyrell with a chair, that's what sends him to prison, that's what sends him down the path of helpless repetition of inadequate male role model and leaves him a sexless, locked-down fuckup who can't even either rage at or forgive his mother, he's just hard and stuck. And it all starts with Juan.

xyzzz otm: "I like that quietitude about it."