GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY***** - BFI London Film Festival - Closing Night Gala

I was not the world's biggest fan of KNIVES OUT - Rian Johnson's closed-house murder-mystery starring Daniel Craig as the detective with the broad southern drawl. I sat stony silent in a packed London Film Festival screening with the rest of the audience having the time of their life.  I thought the mystery wasn't complex or interesting and the performances fell flat for me. I just didn't get it. As a result, I had zero expectations for its high-budget sequel, GLASS ONION, and was cringing at the thought of its two-hour twenty minutes running time. 

Well reader, I can happily report that GLASS ONION is one of my favourite movies of the year!  It flew by its running time in a haze of laugh-out loud comedy; brilliantly-acted outlandish characters; and a proper mystery that's both tricksy, meta-textual and politically biting!

The movie stars Daniel Craig, once again returning as Benoit Blanc, and leaning even further into the camp of a fussily over-dressed and anachronistic famous detective in the Agatha Christie style. The new villain of the piece is Ed Norton's tech billionaire Miles Bron, clearly based on Elon Musk. He's a vainglorious fake-hippie who invites all of his old college friends to a yearly retreat, this time on his supervillain island lair.  As the movie unfolds, in good detective tradition, we realise that each of the characters needs Miles for his money or connections and has a motive to kill him. There's even a MacGuffin - a piece of a new renewable energy-producing crystal widget that is also - oh no! - rather dangerous!

The heart of the piece - or maybe its moral compass in a sea of characters that are more or less self-interested and despicable - is Janelle Monae's Andi Brand.  As the movie unfolds we discover that Andi was in fact the brains behind Miles' big invention and they haven't really spoken in years. So why has she shown up on the island? And who invited Benoit?

The first half of the movie explores the connections between the characters and leads us to the murder. The second half of the film goes back and reveals what was really happening. This might sound tedious but it's so damn clever, smart and involving I promise you it won't feel like a rehash. But I can't tell you exactly why it works for fear of spoiling the plot - so I'll just encourage you to watch.

GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 139 minutes. It played Toronto 2022 and will be released on Netflix on December 23rd.

DAVID BYRNE'S AMERICAN UTOPIA - BFI London Film Festival 2020 - Day 8

David Byrne's American Utopia is the concert film we need right now.  It's hard to believe this guy is 68 years old. His voice is still so strong and his creative instincts still so full of energy and innovation.  A year ago he took his new album American Utopia to Broadway, mixing it up with classing songs from the Talking Heads canon.  But rather than have a flashy stage set-up or costume changes or a conventional band playing static on stage, he decided to strip everything back to 11 people, wirelessly hooked into a sound system, with the same grey suits.  The joy and excitement of the stage performance comes - then - simply from their movement, their music and a kick-ass lighting design.  I've never seen something so kinetic and organic and authentically brilliant.  The music and message speak to a kinder, more inclusive America.  And it's sheer joy just to see so much talent on stage.  Praise should also go to Spike Lee for knowing just when to show the choreography in full, or when to focus in on the artists, and for matching the energy of the show with his kinetic, flowing camera work.  

DAVID BYRNE'S AMERICAN UTOPIA has a running time of 105 minutes. It played Toronto and London 2020 and was released in the USA yesterday. 

HARRIET

Watching HARRIET a day after QUEEN & SLIM was quite the provocative double-bill. The former is a film about a true-life hero - a woman who escaped from slavery and then went back to free others - a woman who became a Union scout in the civil war, and led a military raid - a woman who campaigned for women's rights.  What would she make of contemporary America - the world where QUEEN & SLIM are forced to go on the run after facing a racist police attack?  Would Harriet feel her race had progressed at all? And what of her sex?  In HARRIET we see her under-estimated by Thomas Still - as just a petite illiterate woman who could never be an Underground Railroad conductor.  And we don't see it in this film, but we know she was never paid properly for her work as a Union Scout because she was both black and a woman. That misogyny is still present in QUEEN & SLIM - not least in the character that Bokeem Woodbine plays.  And what of the meaning of iconography and history?  Harriet Tubman's story is not often taught in schools - Steve Mnuchin resisted putting her on the twenty dollar bill, leaving slave-owning Andrew Jackson on there.  Neither the film HARRIET nor QUEEN & SLIM have had the award-season recognition they deserve. Heck, HARRIET took decades to even get made. Taken together, they make for deeply, provocatively, depressing viewing.  Slavery is illegal now, but we have a white supremacist president. A white man could walk with impunity into a rich, FREE, black woman's house in 1850 and brutalise her.  A white police offer shoots an educated, FREE, black woman in the leg in 2019 without impunity....

Anyway - let's get to the film review! HARRIET is a handsomely made biopic about a truly heroic woman. Cynthia Erivo (TV's THE OUTSIDER) plays Harriet with a fierce, earnest, anger and an almost disturbing religious certainty.  It's interesting to me that writer-director Kasi Lemmons' chooses not to interrogate how far Harriet's religious visions were just the product of being brutalised with a head injury.  In general, this is a film of earnest faith, and that may be off-putting to some. The only doubt shown that her visions are just brain damage is signalled by a character who is clearly sexist so we're being told not give them credence. I did however like how a preacher (Vondie Curtis-Hall) that we are led to believe is an Uncle Tom appeaser actually turns out to be a node on the railroad, showing us the difficult choices facing black people - having to show an outward face of conciliation while being subversive.  

Harriet never doubts herself, though, and that makes her an almost unapproachable, and certainly irreproachable heroine. Characters in this film are either all the way good or bad. The most interesting character is therefore that of Marie, played by Janelle Monae (HIDDEN FIGURES). She's an elegantly dressed free rich black woman who is roundly censured by Harriet for not being sympathetic for what it means to be a slave. But she shows her own heroism in the end. I also liked the character of a young black boy who starts off helping slave-catchers before finding his conscience.  It's also rather brave to show that black people and indeed native Americans were complicit in slavery. 

But as we rapidly move through Harriet's work on the railroad into the civil war, I did wonder at Kasi Lemmons omitting Harriet's involvement in the notorious and disastrous Harper's Ferry Raid by John Brown. Maybe this was too difficult and complicated to include - and it remains a rather controversial event. Brown was an abolitionist and so one of the good guys right! But then again his rogue militancy didn't help the cause - in fact in made it harder for the abolitionists in congress to deal with increasingly paranoid slave states. The problem is that if we don't deal with Harriet's controversial judgements, then we are left with nothing more than almost religious icon.  

Still, there's a magnetic fascination with Erivo's performance. And for those of us outside of the US who have little US history in our schooling, the film serves a worthy purpose of educating us. I hadn't been aware, for example, of just how many free blacks lived alongside enslaved blacks in Delaware, and the legal and emotional complications of mixed marriages. I also loved John Toll's cinematography.  There's a kind of cliche of the southern slave film, bathed in warm yellow light and the heat of the cotton plantation.  It's good to recognise how far north slavery went.

HARRIET has a running time of 125 minutes and is rated PG-13. HARRIET played Toronto 2019 and was released in the USA and UK last November and is now available to rent and own.  

MOONLIGHT

In over a decade of watching over 200 movies a year, and trying to seek out independent movies, I've never seen a film about gay black men.  That's really quite something when you think about it.  And so it's deeply refreshing and heartening to see MOONLIGHT capture critical praise.  That said, while I found much to admire in its intent and some of its performances, it was a less moving and impressive watch than I had anticipated.  

The film is written and directed by Barry Jenkins, based on an unproduced play by Tarell Alvin McCraney and is based on their childhood experience of growing up gay in a deeply dysfunctional black community in Florida.  What's impressive is that they manage to subvert the stereotypes of the black drug dealer and the crack whore, and the entire concept of masculinity by showing us what they know. The result is a film that feels claustrophobic and melancholy - of a community that is fundamentally dysfunctional, in which its members feel trapped, but where there is some slight hope of escape. It's also a community that feels odd to English eyes insofar as it's so un-diverse - the only white face we see is a cop.

The formal structure of the play carries over to the film: we meet our protagonist at three ages, in three thirty-five minute segments.  In the first part he's a skinny schoolkid called Chiron (Alex R Hibbert), bullied for being camp, who finds solace from his crack addict single mother with a drug dealer called Juan (Mahershala Ali) and his girlfriend, Teresa (Jangle Monae).  Against all expectations, it's the drug dealer who proves caring, understanding and comforting - even going so far as to tell young Chiron that he doesn't need to figure out of he's gay yet, and even if he is, he shouldn't feel ashamed of it.  Moreover, Juan is morally complex, at once judgmental of Chiron's mother's drug addiction, but also conscious that he's the man selling to her.  The power of Ali's performance in this segment is quite dazzling, and I'm not sure the film ever really recovers from his absence.