We watched quite a few movies over the past week or so. First there was Manchester By the Sea, which deserves all of the praise it has been getting. There’s a scene late in the film between Michelle Williams and Casey Affleck that is simply devastating. Essentially the movie is about how there are some things people are unwilling to forgive—in others or in themselves. The big reveal is a major gut punch, when it comes, it makes everything clear. Plus the scenery is gorgeous: reminds me of Eastern Canada, where I grew up, or the drive from PVD to NECON, except in winter.
Then we watched Barry on Netflix, which makes a good companion piece to Southside With You. This movie covers the year when Obama transferred to Columbia University. It’s a time when he’s not sure where he’s from (it’s a complicated story, and you get to see him fine-tune his answer to the question) or where he belongs. He doesn’t feel comfortable with the black community but he faces all the expected bias from the white community. He also has a serious girlfriend, but he wonders why she’s with him—his perception is somewhat skewed by his mother’s (Ashley Judd) relationship with his father.
Then we saw La La Land. Our decision to go came at the last minute, and we ended up in a tiny auditorium that was mostly full, having to sit in the third of those rows at the front where no one ever sits. If there was ever going to be a movie to see from that perspective, this would be the one. It’s larger than life and slightly skewed from reality. I thought it was beautiful—I was swept away by it completely, and I would happily have sat there and watched it all over again straightaway. The story is fairly simple: man and woman meet, eventually connect, but are thwarted by their careers—at first because of a lack of a success and then, later, the opposite. It doesn’t have the expected outcome, except you get that, too, kind of. The fact that people break into song-and-dance routines bothered me not the slightest, and the show-stopper by Emma Stone during her big audition was incredible. I’m also impressed by the fact that Ryan Gosling did all of the keyboard work for real. He’s very good.
We also enjoyed the Doctor Who Christmas special, which was a riff on superheroes. And I watched a British series called Paranoid that opens with a shocking murder and then gets a bit bogged down with some of the most screwed-up coppers to grace a miniseries. Their personal problems got in the way of the investigation time and time again. It stars Indira Varma (Ellaria Sand in Game of Thrones) and features a rather manic Kevin Doyle (Molsely from Downton Abbey). I liked Danny Huston in this—he was also in American Horror Story (as the Axeman), but on the whole I wasn’t terribly satisfied with the series compared to some of the others that have come out of the UK recently. We haven’t seen the new Sherlock yet, but soon.
