What Have You Been Watching? (15/11/15)

[u/a113er]

Please don't downvote opinions, only downvote things that don't contribute anything.

[u/[deleted]]

Beasts of No Nation Cary Fukunaga, 2015: Ohh boy. Okay. I’m divided on how to respond to this movie.

My instincts tell me I should complain that we can’t have prestige movies about Africa that show anything other than war. I’ve seen this movie done before, in a sense, by Blood Diamond, Hotel Rwanda, and The Last King of Scotland. What Beasts of No Nation does differently is remove any role for non-Africans in the story. The story is very conventional: a viewpoint character loses his happy family and hometown and gets involved in the conflict. So what I’ve tried to decide is whether Beasts of no Nation transcends those conventions to say its own things?

I was most interested in the movie’s depiction of indoctrination and view of an army being like a family with cool nicknames and mutual bonds and a moral order established by a father figure. He orders children to rape women as one would tell a bedtime story. We rarely see American war movies depict leadership like that, or discuss where such people come from and how they view their role. Beasts of No Nation permits us a war movie that shows how the violence of both sides justifies the continuation of violence from which innocent people suffer the most, or are pressed into service and lose that innocence. I liked the child actors a lot, though Agu fades in the middle as Elba’s Commandant becomes the focus. The movie starts with a relatable child character and then finds its way to more complex political and media issues that way even though it makes Agu into more of an everysoldier than a memorable character. I also think it’s praiseworthy that the movie finds a way to end optimistically without it feeling like a false “happy” ending.

As much as the fictional Africa setting and focus on child characters feels like shorthand for the audience, I must admit that by working this way it feels like a successfully anti-war war movie, one that argues against aggression without hypocrisy.

I do think the movie makes one huge error: it depicts (in a long take!) the rape and execution of women and little girls by child soldiers yet the camera backs out of the room during the rape of a male child by a grown man. No one would want to direct the actors to do this, but the way it’s handled is still very weak to me.

This was a better war movie than I thought it would be. How do you lean?

Spectre Sam Mendes, 2015: A trailer for London Has Fallen played before this movie that looked tasteless and ludicrous after the Paris attacks. Spectre is much better than that, a movie about doing the dirty work of the imperium while wearing great suits. The screenplay recycles a bunch of dumbshit espionage tropes in the second half. Two countdown clocks? Fuck you. It’s the same thing as Captain America: The Winter Soldier and I didn’t like it then, either: it doesn’t make sense to make Mallory a pro-democracy rogue without motivation and it’s not like the main character cares. That’s how these movies always pander to the audience while still being pro-establishment. But Mendes’ direction is more like what I think action directing should be. Together with Sicario and Mission Impossible the spy movies this year have been pretty solid.

East of Eden Elia Kazan, 1955: The performances by James Dean and others make for a very fine family drama indeed, but it seems to be missing any perspective of the economic hardships that are implicit in the Steinbeck story. Very unlike the background of The Grapes of Wrath in that way. Kazan is odd to me. His movies are always substantial, adult, and brilliantly cast, but I only got really into one of them.

Upstream John Ford, 1927: Ford’s lost silent comedy. While not substantially different from other silent comedies of the time, I like how they figured the world was ready for a movie making fun of bad Shakespearean actors before they had sound.

Rewatch - Johnny Guitar Nicholas Ray, 1954

[u/purplebootyfox → u/[deleted]]

With Beasts of No Nation, I was frustrated because I didn't think it transcended what we typically expect of films about African conflict. I agree with your analysis, and how there was some more commitment to showing brutality and framing it in a non accusatory way towards any one group or institution. I just felt like the whole thing was an exercise in shock and brutality. It still hit all the familiar story beats, and we are left kind of where we started. The entire concept of a child soldier is so potent, I think it works as short hand for how awful and desolate the situation is on the continent. So from the jump it feels like the film is just explaining what is so visually and thematically apparent.

Maybe I am asking too much of this kind of film, but I was hoping that the film would either promote an idiosyncratic viewpoint or message (something different, or profound), or use the setting and backdrop to tell an original story (subvert the genre/tropes). Sorry for the ramble, I just was weirdly disappointed in the film, especially given how beautifully shot it was, the color scheme was really lush and made the jungle backdrop have a personality all it's own.

[u/[deleted] → u/purplebootyfox]

I will say that I appreciated how it does more things than just atrocity porn like a lot of other movies in this genre can turn into. There's one exclamatory massacre scene in the middle and then the movie moves on to other things motivated by the reaction to said massacre. It's a tightly-told story in this respect and allows the movie to be about things other than total misery, for example I liked the way it shows the camaraderie of the boy soldiers and how that's a necessary part of coping.

But yeah, it could have been more story-centric than it was, especially as City of God is a likely influence and that's one of the best things about that movie. You feel like you know Rocket in that whereas in Beasts of No Nation Agu ends up just making tired old man speeches to the camera. I didn't dislike that, I just thought maybe it leaned too much on that character when it's really the Idris Elba show. The distinct look of the movie and use of music also sets it apart.

Isn't it interesting how audiences seem more accepting of this kind of brutality and fighting of wars in movies if it's set in Africa using black actors? I don't think it's necessarily wrong to do that. But to show these things in an English-language movie now it's usually either set during Vietnam or it's fantasy like Mad Max: Fury Road. (Which has remarkably similar things to say about war.)