Posted on Wednesday, November 11th, 2020 by Bryan Young
(Welcome to The Soapbox, the space where we get loud, feisty, political, and opinionated about anything and everything.)
Hearing the gentle opening notes of Johnny Mandel’s folk anthem “Suicide is Painless” transports a person back to the Korean War and the combat medics of the 4077th.
As the pandemic crushes spirits and keeps people home longer and longer thanks to the bungled response of our elected leaders, I sought somewhere—anywhere—to be. And the place I landed was M*A*S*H. The show has been part of the cultural consciousness for so long, its ubiquity is taken for granted. I know I took it for granted, at least. It was just always around. I’d watched episodes as a child with my grandfather, who watched it whenever it was on TV. By the time I was aware of it, it was long over, but the reruns are still going strong.
It felt like a comfortable place to revisit chronologically, with the eyes of an adult and the discerning gaze of a critic. And what I found was more incredible than I remembered.
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(Welcome to The Soapbox, the space where we get loud, feisty, political, and opinionated about anything and everything.)
Director Aneesh Chaganty, co-writer Sev Ohanian, and producer Natalie Qasabian previously brought us the 2018 nail-biter Searching. Now, they have given audiences an exciting new thriller featuring a paraplegic lead. Kicking off the first night of Nightstream, a collaborative virtual film festival from the organizers of Boston Underground, Brooklyn Horror, North Bend, Overlook and Popcorn Frights Festival, Run tells the story of a teenage girl who uses a wheelchair and her overprotective mother.
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(Welcome to The Soapbox, the space where we get loud, feisty, political, and opinionated about anything and everything.)
Kingdom, one of Netflix’s original South Korean dramas, couldn’t be streaming at a more apt time.
The drama is, on the surface, a zombie show. It’s intriguing in how it puts the classic zombie trope into a historical drama format—the zombie outbreak has occurred during the Joseon Dynasty. But despite its classic zombie horror trappings and lush historical sets and costumes, Kingdom is a story about how a disordered society—one focused more on greed and status rather than the good of all people—can cause a pandemic to quickly grow out of control.
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Da 5 Bloods is a ghost story. It’s about the ghosts that exist in the minds of Vietnam War veterans — played here with stunning ferocity and pain by Delroy Lindo, Jonathan Majors, Clarke Peters, Norm Lewis, and Isiah Whitlock Jr. — haunted by the deeds they committed fighting a war that was not theirs. It’s about the ghosts of racism and imperialism that continue to thrive in contemporary society. But the most terrifying ghost in Da 5 Bloods is the ghost of the Vietnam War itself, which continues to haunt the American conscience to this day. In American minds, and in the Hollywood movies through which they process their guilt, the Vietnam War still stands as the great American failure — the war that represented the downfall of the U.S. as the shining beacon of democracy.
But with Da 5 Bloods, Spike Lee repurposes the typical Vietnam War movie narrative, which has long been an ode to the last gasps of traditional American masculinity, to instead examine Black trauma and reckon with the devastating consequences that American violence has wrought upon the world and its own citizens. Lee interweaves the familiar war narrative and iconography with the modern-day context of Black Lives Matter and America’s inherited racism (given form by Donald Trump’s “MAGA” movement), which in turn act in concert with the lingering effects of French imperialism in Vietnam. The oppression that Black people suffered at the hands of their own government, Lee suggests, is analogous to the oppression that the Vietnamese people suffered at the hands of American soldiers. The war is always being waged, Da 5 Bloods implies, whether it’s a war against white supremacy or a war against racism.
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It’s difficult to place into words the impact Italian Neorealism has personally had on me. The genre speaks to me on a visceral level. The old Italian films, born out of desperation, still hold up against the blockbusters of today. In an age where authoritarianism is making a comeback, we are witnessing a subconscious reemergence of the formerly communist left-supported Italian Neorealism movement. A genre “reboot,” so-to-speak, passionately defiant of the Donald Trumps, the Boris Johnsons, the Kim Jong-Uns, the Rodrigo Dutertes, paralleling the recent wave of democratic socialism and a greater societal readiness to accept left politics.
In order to contextualize the circumstances surrounding its reemergence, one must revisit the circumstances out of which Italian Neorealism was born. By drawing modern parallels to classics of the genre with recent films such as Roma, The Florida Project, Tangerine, Support the Girls, Cold War, American Honey, and Winter’s Bone, the sociopolitical and stylistic similarities between Italian Neorealism’s “reboot” and its cinematic predecessor succinctly emerge.
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This article contains major spoilers for The Lodge. It also contains discussion of self-harm.
Horror movies often rely on physical violence and cruelty to horrify their audiences. That’s fair; we all have bodies, and we’re afraid of them getting damaged. Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala’s The Lodge, however, isn’t particularly violent. It isn’t particularly bloody. There are no monsters, and barely any “scares.” Yet it hits harder, conjuring dread on a deeper level, than any conventional horror film of late. An intimate and emotional nightmare, the film wrings audiences into stunned submission, proving that psychological cruelty can hurt far worse than the physical.
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(Welcome to The Soapbox, the space where we get loud, feisty, political, and opinionated about anything and everything. In this edition: here’s the problem with our biggest movies relying too heavily on nostalgia.)
The end of any particular year in film and the beginning of the next – to say nothing of the transition between two entire decades – affords us the opportunity to introspect and pinpoint certain filmmaking trends and tendencies that stand out from the crowd, that recur over and over again and become representative of a larger ethos over time. Unfortunately for the ever-vocal “No politics in my entertainment!” crowd, this tends to manifest on an instinctive level for any artist trying to communicate through the movies they make. Human beings are natural storytellers, after all, which is why storytelling encompasses all our combined hopes, fears, triumphs, and flaws of any given moment.
So if movies can’t be neatly excised from the context of their time (as with all art, really), how did this past year put a bow on a decade of pop culture and what did it tell us about our unique and most pressing concerns? Looking back at the films that resonated most tangibly, it seems safe to say that one of the biggest themes of the past year was, well, looking back.
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Australia is burning. It’s hard to comprehend the scope of the disaster: a blaze covering an area that would stretch around the borders of the contiguous United States, leaving a billion animals dead, likely rendering numerous species extinct, and creating smoke plumes that cloud even New Zealand’s skies, two thousand kilometres away. It is, along with the climate crisis that helps fuel it, an ecological genocide of a scale that inspires almost religious levels of awe and terror. The inferno is much larger than the ongoing Amazon rainforest fires that made headlines in mid-2019, and there are many differences between them. But both bring attention to unsettling trends – in climate change certainly, but surprisingly also (more relevantly to this website) in entertainment.
Ten years ago, a movie called Avatar made billions of dollars, scored multiple Academy Awards, and heralded a new generation of 3D and performance-capture technology. It also, perhaps inevitably, suffered a backlash. Many criticisms were valid, but one has always rankled me: that of James Cameron’s environmental themes being too obvious, too blatant, too didactic. Another load of overwrought, tree-hugging “save the rainforest” FernGully bullshit, thought many audiences. Hadn’t we all agreed on that stuff years ago? Audiences rolled their eyes as IMAX screens played out images of ancient forests burned by industry seeking to profit off the land, displacing indigenous peoples in the process.
Then, ten years later, the news played out images of ancient forests being burned by industry seeking to profit off the land, displacing indigenous peoples in the process.
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(Welcome to The Soapbox, the space where we get loud, feisty, political, and opinionated about anything and everything. In this edition: let’s explore what the arcs of Kylo Ren, Finn and Rey actually mean.)
With over four decades of history, Star Wars has explored many themes. Overarching motifs include questioning the past, fighting for those you love, overcoming fear, and examining how extreme beliefs stifle growth and flexibility. The original trilogy also focused on overcoming adversity, no matter the odds. The prequel trilogy narrowed in on hubris, complacency, and the slippery slope of the ends justifying the means. As for the sequel trilogy? It highlighted in neon lights the need to look beyond bloodlines when determining a person’s inherent morality. It just didn’t do it by making Rey a “nobody.”
This article contains spoilers for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.
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(Welcome to The Soapbox, the space where we get loud, feisty, political, and opinionated about anything and everything. In this edition: why do modern Disney movie villains stink?)
Early in the new Walt Disney Animation Studios film Frozen II, our main quintet of characters plays a friendly game of charades. Queen Elsa of Arendelle, her goofy sister Princess Anna, their living-snowman pal Olaf, the ice-salesman himbo Kristoff and his reindeer Sven are just relaxing in the castle, with Anna trying to get the others to guess a challenging clue. Though they’re able to narrow it down based on her gestures to the long-gone Prince Hans of the Southern Isles, they don’t get the actual clue: “villain”.
That charade is a fitting word to see the characters struggle to guess, as it exemplifies a fascinating creative direction for Disney Animation over the past decade. Though many of the studio’s films have become bigger and bigger hits, they’ve become less defined by their antagonists, for both good and ill.
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