Moonlight, directed by Barry Jenkins

wasn't the Veloso song juxtaposed against the scene of Chiron on the turnpike? It didn't work.

Yeah. It's on the turnpike, towards home. Worked for me.

wasnt it in a WKW film too? (i forget which one)

ML reminded me a *bit* of carol, not just cos of the LGBT theme, but in how that also felt a bit removed and overly stylised, though moonlight wasnt nearly as distant as that one, and carol didnt make me well up like ML did at the end

its more a festival fave than a big crowd pleaser.

The movie won the Oscar as a Trump-counterrevolutionary act + OscarSoWhite corrective.

wasnt it in a WKW film too? (i forget which one)

ML reminded me a *bit* of carol, not just cos of the LGBT theme, but in how that also felt a bit removed and overly stylised, though moonlight wasnt nearly as distant as that one, and carol didnt make me well up like ML did at the end

― StillAdvance, 2. marts 2017 12:58 (seventeen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Could be, Jenkins has underscored how much he was inspired by Wong and Hou (and it has annoyed me bit to see the disconnect between how much Jenkins talks about Asian cinema, and how often reviewers just say it looks 'European') but they sing it live in Talk to Her :) Fantastic scene.

With both Carol and Moonlight, I thought the stylization connected well with the narrative. Carol is of course stunning to look at, and much more self assured than Moonlight, and is based on fifties photographs, many of them by female photographers, such as Therese. I thought it worked as a way of underlining how so much of what Therese has to do is to learn how to look at and be looked at differently. Moonlight almost seemed to try and figure out what it was in realtime, what a black gay film in 2016 even means, the same way that Chiron has to. And not everything worked - for me it was a lot of the camera-movements, that seemed stereotypically American indie-film - but I was captivated by all of it.

The Caetano song was in Wong's HAPPY TOGETHER.

carol is very icey. a film that seems to think being 'cold' makes it a superior film experience.

with hou, most people dont know his films. and his style of filmmaking is so different to american or european arthouse, im not sure most ppl know what to make of it.

wong is an interesting one, as no one seems to talk about *him* since the 90s. his ranking isnt what it was. so its interesting to see jenkins almost rescuscitate his reputation. obv, in the mood for love is still a classic, but WKW is sort of forgotten about IMO.

icey is sort of a compliment. i just think the characters and their relationship were poorly developed. amazing to look at, nothing to connect with.

Carol lept to my mind too as it was another film half in love with easeful repression.

seriously, i demand a sequel to ML

you cant have chiron tell kev what he did (trying top avoid spoilers here) in that last scene and end it there.

Kev didn't put the cilantro on Chiron's beans.

The ending didn't bother me at all tbh.

finally watched this. 2 walkouts at the midday screening. presumably people who found it 'slow' and not what they expected from a best picture winner. or maybe it was just too black and gay

I nearly had to walkout for at least a break cuz I felt vaguely motion sick from the camera movement

Both Jenkins and Hayes seems obsessed with performativity, the way gender and identity is acted out. Chiron being told he has to walk and talk a certain way, so as not to be instantly recognizable as gay. And when he becomes stereotypically straight, he also becomes stereotypically black - his final name change is a bit on the nose - at least in the eyes of others.

This was very, very good.

i happen to be reading john updikes 'the centaur' ~ interesting to learn abt the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiron

I feel bad, but I found this kind of... bland? Some great performances (Harris aside) but so much cliche.

I really wish it was better. I couldn't say I could give it any more than 5 or 6 /10. It's just so... underpowered.

I like that quietitude about it. Very breezy film, given its abrupt ending. Great soundtrack. Overall, the journey to that fragile masculinity was well done but some of it just didn't scan.

Happy Together is a good call - like to re-watch it now.

I was watching some of OJ - Made in America. The first part where it talks about the projects and its traumas immediately after, so a lot of that story seemed well captured.

its a very delicately put together movie. sometimes too much so. very aware of its own sensitivities. but thats this kind of filmmaking for you.

does make me think more of in the mood for love in that sense, more than HT.

I found it flimsy - as a character study, as a mood piece, as a Miami movie - but I couldn't tell if that was deliberate (i.e. vagueness-as-universalism) or bad screenwriting, or just me as a Brit missing some obvious signifiers. The repellence of that Sunday Times writeup made me want to like it more than I actually did.

the Miami part of the movie was its least convincing

You'd know by default, Alfred, but I kinda liked how it was showing a Miami that was empty. Not deserted, just...quiet, and unlike the media stereotype which is all I've ever known of the area.

http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopoly_fs/1.2581256.1459270695!/img/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/article_750/296williamsl-20010630-10812-jpg.jpg

http://www.awesomelyluvvie.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/DorothyCondoms.gif

As I say!

I've heard it all the way here, back in St. Olaf!

No queer cultural touchstone is safe from a Horny Grandmas ref

In this case, offered merely as a corrective to The Turdcage.

A quick point... there's something significant i haven't seen discussed in the first (major?) scene btwn the 7-year-old boys: the urging by Kevin that Little not "be soft," and the fight/play/wrestling that follows. No one (outside of a clinical context) is allowed to say out loud very often in America that children are sexual beings, but given the future path of these two boys, it seems partly like an act of nascent sexplay.

That plus the behind-closed-doors comparison game.

right, I forgot!

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/2o7V1f7lbk4/hqdefault.jpg

Won Best Kiss at MTV Movie & TV Awards

and Best Handjob

The Edge of Seventeen might have taken that one.

My bro recommended this, so I put it on hold at the library. At the time I was #270 in line. My number came up and I finally watched it a couple of days ago. I would not call it a great film; it had too many flaws for that. But it was just damned refreshing to see a story about being a black man in the USA, told from the perspective of a young black man in a large US city.

Incarceration was just a common fact of life. Drug dealing was a thing that happened down on the corner and drug use was a common problem you worked around the best you could or used to numb the stress. These elements weren't sensationalized, unlike most Hollywood treatments of urban black life. Even the violence was unsensational: mostly taunts, shoves, kicks and punches instead of blazing Uzis.

Oddly enough, the plot elements around being gay weren't particularly compelling, even though that was supposed to be the central theme of the film. For me, the larger subtext was of lives so thwarted, circumscribed and precarious that just surviving another day was a full time job. Being gay seemed like just one more burden in a life that would have been soul-crushing, even without being gay.

Barry Jenkins will direct his adaptation of James Baldwin’s 1974 novel If Beale Street Could Talk. The Hollywood Reporter’s Mia Galuppo notes that it’s “set in ‘70s Harlem and follows engaged couple Fonny and Tish. When Fonny is falsely accused of rape, Tish, who is pregnant, races to find evidence that will prove Fonny's innocence. . . . Jenkins, who has worked closely with the Baldwin estate on the project, wrote the screenplay during the same summer in 2013 when he penned Moonlight.” Jenkins is also currently writing and will direct an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, a limited series for Amazon Studios.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/moonlight-director-barry-jenkins-adapt-james-baldwin-novel-next-movie-1019669

The leads are gorgeous, supporting cast is strong, but If Beale Street mostly a stiff.

I liked most of Beale Street--parts of it, in no small measure because of the score, are beautiful--but didn't care for the detour to Puerto Rico, and thought the last 20 minutes in general meandered.

Just saw a commercial for Beale Street that used "Killing Me Softly." Did I miss that in the film? Not a song I've ever cared for, and it wouldn't be the first commercial that used a song not in the actual film, but if it is, I didn't notice it at all.

I dont remember it either,
Clem.

agree completely alfred

with....?

your review!
I also thought it was a stiff. Too tied to the source material - the structure is exactly the same as the book and its discursive tendencies don't work when copied exactly to film. the book is able to meander, in the film it's just fragmented and rudderless

Of note!

This is a thing we did 🙏🏿

MOONLIGHT
8 x 11 in. / 224 pages
- Forward by Frank Ocean
- Essay by Hilton Als
- Academy Award Acceptance speeches

pic.twitter.com/ubbRSjMShS

— Barry Jenkins (@BarryJenkins) September 26, 2019

by the end, i had forgotten my annoyance at how chiron stumbled across the most sensitive, supportive, and lovely drug dealer ever because i am so tired of protagonists that announce their struggles by simply not speaking when spoken to. at least the movie is self-aware enough to make a joke of it in act 3.

there's something evocative and vivid in the filmmaking, and some charming moments in the 3rd act, but as hard as jenkins tries to make you forget it, it's a play and not a very good one.

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."