Archive for category: Spotlight

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, or Belfast–Italian Style, Paolo Sorrentino’s love letter to growing up in Naples in the 1980s captures La Famiglia in all its frictions and closeness. His style is distinctive: every scene is short and self-contained, without musical background (except once). His characters, too, are distinctive: the lusty aunt, the prankster mother, the misanthropic matriarch and on and on. Best is the film’s sense of humor. There are no–well, only one or two–overt jokes, but the situations and people had me laughing the whole time. There’s a nod to Fellini, but more to Italian realism. And how beautiful Sorrentino makes the world. Like young Fabietto will make his movies.

A delightful snapshot of a pivotal time for one young boy growing up in Belfast. The well-publicized fact that the boy was based on director Kenneth Branagh eliminated any anxiety that the story would turn out well, which allowed us to sit back and enjoy spending time with this family, played by the estimable Judi Dench, Ciaran Hinds and Caitriona Balfe, who grabbed the screen every minute she appeared. If we hadn’t known it to be Branagh’s story I suspect we would have been left hanging at the end, but no matter. The unresolved political conflagration that backgrounded the film was only one of many parallels between Branagh’s Belfast and Cuaron’s similarly engaging Roma.

Although I gave Mangrove my vote for (co-)best film of 2021, I haven’t separately reviewed the other four installments of Steve McQueen’s five-part reminiscence of West Indian life in racist London in the ’70s and ’80s. Each film stands on its own, although all share a common venue and sensibility: Black Londoners trying to get along and make a life–indeed, improve their lives–despite being put down, intentionally or just sytemically, by the white society that refuses to acknowledge them, let alone absorb them. To learn that the stories are all based on real people, including McQueen’s, adds to the power of the message. More than anything else I’ve seen about racial discord, there was less preaching and less melodrama, although plenty of drama. By being real, the stories didn’t have to hit you over the head; the moral was plain to see.
Of the five, my least favorite was Lovers Rock, which was more about interactions among the Blacks and between the sexes than about the always lurking white presence. It was a meditation on the music of the community. Red, White and Blue, the story of a young Black who becomes a police officer, featured a starring turn by John Boyega, and like all the series presented diverse characterizations: there were good people and bad, among both races. Alex Wheatle and Education would both be depressing for the litany of hardships and prejudices young Black men are thrown against were it not for, true story, the amazing successes both heroes became. Again, if these were fictional tales produced for American TV to celebrate Black achievement, I probably would have been turned off. But by presenting the characters in convincing compexity and building a world around them–1970s London–that was foreign to me but eminently believable, I was chastened and heartened and felt the better for having shared the experience.

Stunning photography, both above and underwater, made this a pleasure to watch, and the novelty of an octupus’s life, up-close and personal, made it fascinating. Like almost all nature docs, there was a fair amount of anthropomorphism: I submit that the title character was acting on (animal) instinct, not employing “intelligence” to teach his human visitor. Craig Foster’s disdain for Scuba gear was a bafflement: how could he be so patient in observing an octopus in its den when he must regularly and repeatedly resurface for air? Presumably whoever was filming him–another mystery–had an air tank, making possible the shots of pajama sharks swimming around. The overlay of Foster’s finding himself added little, but the brief lifespan of the octopus was enough.