Moonlight, directed by Barry Jenkins

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."