Sunday, March 3, 2019

Roma

From the very beginning of Roma, we are witness to a young domestic worker taking care of a family and cleaning up the house. This woman is Cleo, and she's played by Yalitza Aparicio. A large part of Cleo's duties is to clean up after the dog. It's Mexico City in the early 1970s, and one thing that hasn't changed is the omnipresence of barking dogs, one of the very worst things about that city. Cleo is also sort of a guardian angel of four young children, no small task. The house they live in is a tidy, upper-middle class house owned by a doctor and his wife. The family of six live there with a grandmother, a dog, and two domestic workers, one of whom is Cleo. The house wouldn't be quite as remarkable if not for the gorgeous black-and-white cinematography of director Alfonso Cuaron, who won three Oscars last week for his work. Cuaron had hired his collaborator Emmanuel Lubezki, but Lubezki had to depart from the project after the schedule had augmented. Thus, Lubezki practically trained him.

Cuaron, whose most famous Mexican film up to this point has been Y Tu Mama Tambien and whose most famous English-language films are probably Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Children of Men, and Gravity (for which he previously won an Oscar for Best Director), has decided to make a film honoring his childhood nanny, Liboria Rodriguez (Libo). Roma has a certain tremendous, palpable feeling of guilt throughout this film, which will likely endure as one of his best.

The parents (played by Marina de Tavira and Fernando Grediaga) do not always come across in the best light. The father is unfaithful and abandons his family, while the mother is concerned about her daughter getting fat and sometimes lashes out at Cleo. In one scene, she strikes one of the boys, quickly apologizes while weeping, and then blames Cleo. The children seem to not notice this cruelty; this youthful ignorance likely is what sparked the film's conception. (Cuaron is not making things up. Domestic workers around the world are undoubtedly mistreated.) In Cleo's case, she is not an authoritarian figure to the children, probably because it's not in her nature and probably because she knows it might cost her her job. Because she's so kind to the children, they really adore her. Her adult employers, maybe not.

Aparicio, whose father is Mixtec and whose mother is Triqui, made her debut performance in Roma, and she was nominated for Best Actress at the Academy Awards, making her the first indigenous actor to do so. She hasn't decided if she will continue acting or not, but I hope she does. De Tavira was also nominated, and her performance is terrific as well. There's a lot to read in between the lines with her performance. In the scene where she takes Cleo to the hospital, for example, she practically destroys her husband's car as she squeezes it between two trucks. She either has too much on her mind due to his abandonment, or she just wants revenge, or perhaps it's both. There's complexity to her. This makes sense, as Cuaron has stated that the film is a tribute to both his mother and his nanny.

Cuaron's cinematography, which won him one of his Oscars last week, is remarkable, at times helping him to visualize a marriage of realism and surrealism. Some might find it to be kind of smug filmmaking, and that's fair, I guess, but it does demonstrate his dedication and creativity. The dog heads as decoration and the shooting spree in the woods come to mind as examples, as does the forest fire scene, in which everyone drunkenly tries to extinguish a fire, all while a man dressed as...something...decides to stand around singing. There's also a martial arts scene that most likely be unlike anything you've seen in a movie. Aparicio's acting during this scene, I think, helped secure her nomination. She says everything with just a few looks, most of which express a feeling of bemusement and kind quasi-toleration for another's unique behavior. Unique would be a kind word for this character, Fermin, played by Jorge Antonio Guerrero, one of the most detestable characters in recent memory.

Needless to say, Roma does require some patience, but the payoff is worth it. There's so much calm in the filmmaking here, and it's also proof that it's usually in everyone's best interest to give the film makers as much freedom as possible. After all, this is a black-and-white film from Netflix staring mostly non-actors. I do hope we see more like this. 


Friday, March 1, 2019

Bohemian Rhapsody (And a List of the 50 Best Queen Songs)

It's hard for me to hate a film that celebrates some of the greatest music of the past century from start to finish, so hate it I shall not. It should be noted, however, that many people do hate this film, the Freddie Mercury biographical film Bohemian Rhapsody, but it's also a deeply popular film that many have adored, especially those who were around during the Queen years. My mother, for example, has called it one of the greatest films she has ever seen, and one couple has apparently seen it at least 24 times, calling it "two hours of freedom."

I don't share their enthusiasm for Bohemian Rhapsody. I'm not sure why it was nominated for Best Picture (although it would have been more worthy of the win than the winner, Green Book). It won a handful of Oscars last Sunday, and I'm not sure it deserved any of them, to be honest. What to really make of this film?

Rami Malek, most famous before this film for playing the lead role in the television series Mr. Robot, took over playing Queen lead singer Mercury after Sacha Baron Cohen dropped out over creative differences. Malek certainly looks like Mercury, though he also seems a bit too thin. At any rate, he won the Oscar for Best Actor, making him the first Arab-American to do so. I'm not sure I would have picked him for the award. For one, I've grown tired of watching the Academy reward imitation, as they always seem to do. Second, I'm impressed with Malek's ability to convincingly portray the famous singer, but it is Mercury's singing voice they've used, not Malek's, which is distracting. Bradley Cooper provided his own vocals for A Star Is Born, so perhaps he would have been more deserving.

Malek is joined by Ben Hardy as drummer Roger Taylor, Joe Mazzello as bassist John Deacon, and Gwilym Lee as guitarist Brian May (that's Dr. May, now, for he has his PhD in Astrophysics, something the film jokes about). Mercury, Taylor, Deacon, and May. You won't find many bands quite like that, one in which all created different songs. (As a matter of fact, the Beatles are the only other one presently coming to mind.) The four actors do a decent job portraying them, with Lee's voice sounding remarkably similar to May's. Both May and Taylor served as creative consultants for the film, and both appeared with Adam Lambert to open this year's Oscars. Allen Leech, Aiden Gillen, Tom Hollander, and Mike Myers (in lots of makeup) appear in supporting roles.

I think the biggest complaint about this film that everyone can agree on is that it checks all the boxes in the biographical film format. We see how Queen met, we see their rise, we see Mercury become a bit of a drug addict, we see them rise again. It was sort of tolerable when Walk the Line and Ray did it years ago, but after the parody film Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story ripped the formula to shreds, it's remarkable that those involved in making Bohemian Rhapsody didn't consider that many would roll their eyes at a movie employing all these tropes once more.

  

You'll hear a lot of the famous songs and sometimes how they were made. These scenes are generally good fun. Much of the rest of the film, however, is a bit of a bore. There is not much emotional weight here, save for a few moments, but it basically drops them in an instant and moves on to the next bit of action. The highlight of the film is probably the re-creation of the band's highly acclaimed performance at Live Aid in 1985, which everybody has watched or re-watched on YouTube over the past few years. It's the one part of the movie no one can object to. That being said, all they're really doing is re-creating a moment in pop culture history that everyone likes, so it's debatable as to whether or not that's much of an accomplishment.

Much has been written about Mercury's sexuality and how the film portrays it. Even when the very popular trailer was released, people were up in arms over the film's supposed mishandling of the issue. When Malek accepted his Best Actor Oscar, he identified Mercury as a gay man instead of bisexual. I'm not sure I sympathize with their argument. May, in an interview with Terri Gross in 2010, gave what sounds like a clear answer. Gross said we don't know exactly everything about Mercury's sexual orientation, and then May told her that Mercury would often say, "I'm gay as a daffodil, darling." So I don't think this film qualifies as bi-erasure. That being said, if you'd like to read a fair critique of how Bohemian Rhapsody addresses queerness, I recommend reading Jude Dry's article from IndieWire and Taylor Henderson's article from Pride.

Is Bohemian Rhapsody a bad film? I'm not sure I would go there. I would not want to snobbishly lecture so many people who've fallen in love with it. But it's forgettable, and certainly not worthy seeing twice, let alone 24 times.

Best Queen Songs:

50. Made in Heaven
49. Millionaire Waltz
48. Thank God It's Christmas
47. Bring Back That Leroy Brown
46. The Miracle
45. The Prophet's Song
44. I Was Born to Love You
43. Headlong
42. Invisible Men
41. Hammer to Fall
40. Man on the Prowl
39. Melancholy Blues
38. Fight From the Inside
37. Seaside Rendezvous
36. I Want It All
35. Innuendo
34. Sail Away Sweet Sister
33. It's a Beautiful Day
32. Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon
31. Play the Game
30. Death on Two Legs (Dedicated To...)
29. Track 13
28. A Kind of Magic
27. Good Company
26. Teo Torriatte
25. The Loser in the End
24. Save Me
23. It's a Hard Life
22. Now I'm Here
21. In the Lap of the Gods
20. '39
19. Keep Yourself Alive
18. The Show Must Go On
17. Who Wants to Live Forever?
16. Princes of the Universe
15. Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy
14. Somebody to Love
13. Crazy Little Thing Called Love
12. Bicycle Race
11. Don't Stop Me Now
10. You're My Best Friend
9. Killer Queen
8. Radio Ga Ga
7. Fat Bottomed Girls
6. I Want to Break Free
5. We Are the Champions
4. Another One Bites the Dust
3. We Will Rock You
2. Under Pressure
1. Bohemian Rhapsody