REVIEW: The Plot Against America

Nellie Shih Leave a comment

The Plot Against America is a new HBO limited series based on the 2004 novel of the same name by Philip Roth. The series is an alternate history following a working-class Jewish family living in New Jersey as Charles Lindbergh wins the Presidency over FDR. Lindbergh is most known for completing the first solo transatlantic flight, his belief in eugenics, as well as his Nazi-reminiscent views on race and religion.

 

The series will consist of six episodes, the first having premiered on Monday. Critics and viewers have already drawn parallels to the current political climate, with celebrities-turned-politicians and America being taken over by hatred. As the source material was initially interpreted as a commentary on the second Bush administration, it’s interesting that the text is still relevant 16 years later. However, the series almost tries too hard to remind viewers that many individuals today can relate to this anxiety and grief. For example, the father of the family says “But we’re American,” in response to a radio broadcast of one of Lindbergh’s speeches. This rhetoric is very on-the-nose, as well as a very present-day thing to say. The line was evidently added in to jump out at viewers, but it comes across as too jarring and trying too hard. Critic Ani Bundel who has seen the series in its entirety has said the show would be more poignant if it were more subtle: “HBO’s refusal to respect the audience’s intelligence to make the connections themselves erodes the impact the series might have had otherwise.”

 

Ultimately, this isn’t to say the series doesn’t have any potential. Although there is a stereotypical tough guy character, many of the other characters provide varying insights and opinions on their situation. For example, the older son of the family, sees Lindbergh as a pilot and hero. His parents provide an interesting dynamic: the mother grew up as a member of the only Jewish family in her area whereas his father had never felt uncomfortable about being Jewish, and denies the rise of fascism in the US.

 

We will see whether the show picks up in the next few episodes, how it will conclude, and if its message gets lost along the way. The Plot Against America airs on HBO every Monday at 9PM.

 

Sources:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/03/plot-against-america-hbos-alternate-history-series-is-too-stuck-on-the-present/

https://www.jns.org/opinion/mining-for-hate-in-the-plot-against-america/

 

REVIEW: The Last Black Man in San Francisco

Joseph Patrick Raney 1 Comment

Available through Amazon Prime Video, I recommend, for the audience’s consideration, Joe Talbot’s directorial masterpiece, The Last Black Man in San Francisco. This gem of a picture places itself in definitive rank with some of the greater films in Studio A24’s arsenal, with a portrayal of hope like that of The Disaster Artist, a restrained desperation to live well like While We’re Young, an awe-filled richness of color palette like that of The Florida Project, and the pain of family brokenness in a fashion similar to Mid90s. The trailer alone accurately represents the craftsmanship poured into this project, with cinematographically-sharp imagery, a speechless array of colors, and a somber yet familiar loyalty to the legacy of San Francisco.

This film centers around two friends, Jimmie and Montgomery, in the wake of this city’s gentrification. Montgomery is a poet working to better his craft, and Jimmie Fails dreams of repossessing a Victorian Mansion once built by his grandfather. Jimmie possesses an assured and quiet vibrancy, while Montgomery is of a sweeter, more analytical spirit; however, the ties that bind these two comrades are their individual and collective hopes for the future. A heart-warming feature of this film is the childlike nature of these two characters, and their graspings towards the good and the beautiful, as those who have seemingly lost a piece of their boyhoods due to homelessness, parentless-ness, or a lack of belonging. A movement of this film represents Jimmie and Montgomery as they struggle with being outcasts from the local group of black males who are portrayed as emotionally-aloof and hyper-masculine. Jimmie and Montgomery do not only fail to feel at home in their family circles, but are ridiculed and excluded by their old friends who belong to this group.

Great tragedy strikes when Kofi, an old friend of Jimmie’s and member of this group, loses his life in a shootout while trying to prove that he is intimidating and worthy of esteem. This tragic loss of life is the implicit product of extreme social pressures against authenticity that are pushed by the leaders of this posse. This seems to call into question the necessity and healthiness of friendships that don’t encourage you to be authentic. From this death, you see several posse members develop into a willingness to express vulnerability and heartbreak over the loss of their friend. This, and more, seems to critique the superficial standards for contemporary friendship, and also acts as a stark contrast to the brother-like, vulnerably-open relationship that is between Jimmie and Montgomery. These two are set apart from the crowd, because they dare to be authentic, and possess the courage that is to embrace suffering that inevitably is hand-in-hand with the raw joys of life.

This film is a burgeoning triumph, not only because it showcases the quietly-accompanying pain that is often present in our day-to-day lives, but paints a picture of the beauty in the mundane, simple hopes for one’s future. The viewer will be in great company as they resonate with the vein-ed question woven into this film: Who am I to be if there is nowhere to belong? Consistently throughout, this picture possesses a bravery in its storytelling as it fervently struggles to settle on a clear sense of “home.” What is home? Could it be the Victorian Mansion with a mysterious past, or simply a reassuring friend who offers companionship for the road ahead? The audience of this film will not only take pleasure in its craft and color, but will be convicted of the need for authenticity, alongside the encouragement that is a shared understanding in that they are not alone in feeling misplaced from time to time.

REVIEW: Talisk at the Ark

Joseph Patrick Raney Leave a comment

As Talisk’s performance began, their rich music charged into the audience of the Ark not unlike a great gush of water breaking past a dam. It is truly exciting to witness a band’s live set after hearing their recorded music, but Talisk presented a set that would blow anybody’s expectations out of the water. Their bright, booming entrance brilliantly set a high musical bar that instantly pulled me to the edge of my seat.

Each member of this group brings a specific and unique element that contributes to their overall quality: BBC Radio Scotland best summarized the stage presence and musical talent of Mohsen Amini when they called him a force of nature. With a speaking voice that sounds the way a rich, dark lager tastes, Amini’s concertina playing is the lifeblood of Talisk. Accompanying the concertina is the seemingly-effortless violin playing  from the sweetheart of Talisk, Haley Keenan, who possesses musical range and technical excellence. Lastly, guitar player Graeme Armstrong, newest member of Talisk, provides a strong and constant presence through his powerfully precise pickings and strummings.

Talisk’s musical set at the Ark was so sharply delivered and seamless that I often wondered if this performance had been pre-recorded. Not so! Through ever-so-slight onstage communication, Talisk took their audience through corridors of traditional acoustic folk music only to thrust them into great halls of pulsing Celtic rock. How enchanted I was by the genre barriers they crossed, and the ease at which they operated their respective foot pedals and switches that allowed them to pivot back and forth into various  musical modes.

I had the pleasure of chatting with the Talisk members after the show, and it really struck me how charming each member was.  It left me wishing that they had shared more stories during the set. Additional banter and camaraderie between the individual members during a performance would definitely round-out their collective stage presence. Alongside this, I believe that an attention-getting opener is well placed for a venue like the Ark, however, Talisk could have allowed themselves a bit more space and time to build their sound and reveal all of their musical tricks, lest they exhaust their audience’s excitement with no direction to expand.

Turnout for this event was unusually low, I believe, because of Ann Arbor’s social-distancing initiative to slow the spread of corona virus. This is a true shame, especially as Ann Arbor faces an artistic desert for the foreseeable future. With a musical set that was tightly synchronized and an off-the-hook ambiance, Talisk really blessed their audience with a warm and lively spirit that I truly hope carries over into our daily lives through these unique times to come.

REVIEW: EMMA.

Emma Rose Leave a comment

I’m a longtime fan of Jane Austen’s novel Emma. Did I secretly want it to be my favorite book because it has my name as the title? Yes. Did that lead me to read it when I was too young and couldn’t understand much of it? Uh huh. Have I finally gotten to the age where her storyline as an occasionally selfish and insensitive young woman resonates with me? Yep.

Let me start with how good a job I think Anya Taylor-Joy did as Emma. I grew up with the 1996 Gwyneth Paltrow version of Emma. Though as a 10, 12, 14-year old, I wouldn’t have told you I liked that movie from over the games on my first-gen iPod touch, between my parents on the couch, I have every second of it memorized. Paltrow completely is Emma in my mind. I worried that this would make it impossible for me to like Taylor-Joy in the movie. I worried for nothing.

I really appreciated how true to the character’s age she seemed. How young and my age. It made her fussiness more endearing and excusable. She wasn’t old enough for me to think she kept stubbornly messing up. I didn’t like as much how they portrayed Harriet’s youth, though. For the whole movie, I felt like she was putting on airs to seem younger and ditzier than I could quite believe. Yes, Harriet is supposed to be young and ditzy, but in this version, I was consistently a little uncomfortable with how undignified she was. I suppose she’s a hard character to nail…maybe it’s easier to concentrate on your cleverness as Emma than on your dippiness as Harriet. I can see how childishness is harder to fake than precociousness.

Comedy really set this version apart from the ’96 version. 2020 went much harder. Emma’s father, played by Bill Nighy, and Mr. Elton, played by Josh O’Connor, pulled most of the weight. I grew a little tired of Mr. Elton, but I loved Bill Nighy in this role–I’m so glad they got him! His tight-lipped, willowy kind of physical comedy always made me smile or laugh when he was on. I feel like it takes a special kind of actor to do very predictable, trite bits and still make everyone in the audience laugh, and it was never quiet in the theater when he was on screen.

I think it’s a hard thing to make Emma fans like a new version when they’ve liked others and feel close to the story. They succeeded with me. Now I want to try to speak for some people who didn’t know the story beforehand: they were not very clear about the nature of Mr. Knightley’s relationship with the family at the beginning (or anytime). In the novel, Austen explains that he is a neighbor-turned-close-family-friend who is 16 years older (yes) than Emma. The movie (and I extend this sin to the ’96 version, too, if I must) doesn’t give any of this context! He appears in the living room and everyone acts like friends.

For how long have they been friends? How old is Mr. Knightley? Has the father already thought of them together at all? More importantly:

Why hasn’t Emma see Mr. Knightley as a love interest earlier? It’s because she’s seen him only as a mentor her whole life, since childhood. Conversely, why hasn’t Mr. Knightley see her as a love interest earlier? Because she’s only just recently a woman and not a child. The movie never answers these.

Do I think the movie put a few more fingers in the comedy pot than it needed to? Yeah, I do. Do I think it should’ve worked harder to contextualize Emma’s and Mr. Knightley’s relationship? For sure. Did I enjoy this movie a lot? Yes. Should you go see it? Absolutely.

PREVIEW: sometimes something

Sarah O'Donnell Leave a comment

The  Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design will hold their 2020 MFA Thesis Exhibition, sometimes something, from March 13th – May 2nd at the Stamps Gallery at 201 South Division St in Ann Arbor.

sometimes something will showcase projects by Sally Clegg, Kim Karlsrud, Erin McKenna, and Abhishek Narula. The art projects feature themes such as social and urban ecosystems, privacy, self pleasure, creation, and our digital world.

I am excited to see the artistic works this cohort has created. The online exhibition preview features sneak-peak images from the projects, and each artist looks like they have created work that is both enticing and stimulating.

Coming out to support these graduate students in their MFA Thesis Exhibition is a perfect way to get out of the house and escape from the strange world we are currently experiencing!

 

REVIEW: Miss Americana

Aria Gerson Leave a comment

During a scene in her Netflix documentary “Miss Americana,” Taylor Swift ruminates on her impact on a generation of fans.

“There is an element to my fanbase that feels like we grew up together,” she says.

I have an inkling that I’m one of those fans she’s referring to. I’m not going to kid myself that Taylor Swift and I grew up together. She’s 10 years older than me; the two of us have always been in different stages of our lives. But as I watched “Miss Americana,” I couldn’t help but think that the two of us did go through a lot of similar things around the same time, and that the documentary — which focused on her experiences as an ambitious woman in a male-dominated world, struggling to find her voice — helped me understand not just her, but myself.

“Miss Americana” has obvious appeal for Swift fans, interspersing lots of concert footage as well as a behind-the-scenes look at the composition of her new album “Lover.” But the thing that sets it apart from a traditional concert film-slash-documentary is that it also speaks to those very same fans Swift references in the beginning, the girls who fell in love with her tales of young romance but are no longer so naïve. How do you navigate life as a good girl grown up, as a woman unsure what to do with her ambition?

That’s the question Swift answers in “Miss Americana.” The documentary focuses less on the development on Swift as an artist and more on her development as a person, making it simultaneously a fascinating look at a celebrity who has long been known for openness, a commentary on the state of ambitious women in American society and a roadmap for those very same fans who grew up with her.

In the beginning of the documentary, Swift shows us the journals she had as a kid. The scenery is very feminine; lots of pink and glitter. She tells us how she always wanted to be thought of as a good girl and always wanted to make people happy. Praise was the thing that drove her; as long as people liked her work, she had everything she needed. That worked when she was still a 20-year-old country darling, but as the documentary progresses, we see footage of her ongoing feud with Kanye West, a bout with disordered eating and media criticism — all while Swift felt like she had no one to turn to.

Like Swift, I approached my work in a male-dominated field — in this case, sports writing — as trying to please people. I glowed every time someone praised my work. I picked up extra work shifts when someone needed a person to cover. I did everything I thought people wanted, but it eventually backfired. I put so much pressure on myself to do everything right, and when things didn’t go my way, I did a lot of things I wasn’t proud of. There came a point in my life, just as there did in Swift’s, that I realized my reputation didn’t at all reflect the person I wanted to be.

The second part of the documentary explained how Swift powered through and took control of their own identity. I remember reading all the criticism of Swift as a “snake” when I was in high school and thinking that some of the criticism was valid. But I’d been a fan of hers longer than I had of anyone else, and I didn’t want to abandon that, either. In “Miss Americana,” Swift doesn’t shy from the criticism. She shows what she learned.

In one scene, Swift discusses her struggle with disordered eating — something I, too, struggled with in high school — and says she realized she’d rather be called fat than look sick. She takes us through the process of deciding to finally speak up about politics. As a woman in country music, she was told to avoid becoming like the Dixie Chicks. It wasn’t until 2018 that she realized that more important than her reputation was speaking out for the things she believed was right. She wasn’t the “good girl” anymore, and in a way, she was never going to be that. So why not use her platform for things she believed in? It was “frilly and spineless,” she said, to wish people happy pride month at her concerts but not speak out any further.

Swift also discusses her sexual assault trial and the dehumanizing feeling of the whole process. The documentary shows footage from one of Swift’s concerts, where she gets candid about what happened to her and acknowledges that she was one of the lucky ones, and that many others who didn’t have pictures and witnesses aren’t believed. She begins to use her platform to not just create her own image, but to speak out for others in similar situations, too.

“There’s this thing people say about celebrities, that they get frozen at the age they got famous, and that’s kinda what happened to me,” Swift says at the end of her documentary. Finally, she’s able to say that she’s not perfect and never was, that she knows there were times she was wrong. But the way she got through it was by allowing herself to grow up and learning to use her voice for good.

As I struggled to get past my own rough patch in my life, I thought about a lot of the same things. How do I acknowledge that I hurt people and moved on, even if they hurt me too? How do I use my voice correctly? How do I come to define my own identity as something more than just a woman in a male-dominated space. Watching “Miss Americana,” I saw someone else struggling with those same questions, and after I finished, I felt closer to being able to find the answers myself.

The experience of ambitious women in male-dominated fields is oft-discussed, but rarely shown so intimately as it is in “Miss Americana.” Going into the documentary, I expected a behind-the-scenes film that would be fun to watch as a fan, but what I got out of it was so much deeper.