Month: April 2021

A Korean family of four, having escaped poverty in their own country, buys hardscrabble farmland in Arkansas in the 1980s. The father is driven and willful, the mother seethes with regret and worry, the older girl is all lightness, and the young son has a heart condition. When his grandmother joins them, and water problems strike the farm, conflicts bloom even as disaster beckons. “Minari” is an exquisitely unfurled and filmed immigration tale, one that reminded me of the endless struggles of my refugee parents in a new land, and I sat transfixed. Emile Mosseri’s soundtrack is elegiac and dramatic in turns, somehow lifting the ordinary into poetry. Alan S. Kim steals the show as the son but it’s the wonderful, shaded performance of Steven Yeun as the classic striving father that knits Minari together. A most worthy cinematic experience.

Do I patronize the viewing market when I offer the view that “Mrs. America” must be one of the more unappealing streaming series to emerge over the last year? Whenever I mention to friends that they simply must delve into this complex nine-episode history of America’s attempt to enact the Equal Rights Amendment over the 1970s, I see their eyes glaze over. When I began my journey through Mrs. America, I had zero knowledge about the battle between the feminist titans that emerged in the hippy 60s, headlined by Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, and relentless conservative Phyllis Schlafly (unheard of). After the first two episodes, I almost dropped out, chiefly because the subject matter seemed too arcane. But the series quickly gains momentum and becomes a riveting window into the times of Presidents Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan. The ERA, seeking to right myriad wrongs, needs 38 state ratifications to be tabled, and in the heady early seventies, that seems a gimme, but Schlafly, complicit with or manipulated by male politicians, proves too durable, and today it remains a paper monument. Each of the nine episodes ends up being a monument to a major or minor character, and the series is blessed with stunning performances: let me single out Cate Blanchett as Schlafly, Rose Byrne as Steinem, Margo Martindale as Bella Abzug, Tracey Ullman as Friedan, and Melanie Lynskey as conservative field worker Rosemary. Not knowing the history, that is, the climax of this stellar series, I was gripped as I approached the finale of Mrs. America. Highly recommended.

George Clooney can do no wrong, whether he sparkles in big budget movies or smoulders in arthouse flicks. “The Midnight Sky” is an exceptional science fiction film directed by him, in which he stars with intensity and conviction. Based on a slim, feted novel by Lily Brooke-Dalton, it is firmly in the dystopia genre, and powerfully so. When a human Armageddon engulfs the globe, a lonely space pioneer in the arctic realizes he needs to head further north for one last frantic attempt to stop a returning space expedition from landing. Burdened by a left-behind young girl, he strives through riveting, beautifully composed snow wilderness scenes, even as equally majestic space scenes track the returning astronauts. Besides Clooney’s career-crowning performance in the lead role, Felicity Jones stuns as a space journeyer, as does Caoilinn Springall as the girl. Some of the swelling strings of the soundtrack intruded (I’m old-fashioned: I hate orchestral film music) but melancholy piano songs compensated. The plot, presumably the book author’s plot, is sneaky, in the best possible way, and the elegaic ending has stayed with me ever since my viewing. In the end. The Midnight Sky is about the human spirit driven by love, and unlike most films that subside into sentimentality, it emerges triumphant. A 2021 highlight.

When 40-year-old man-child Lucky gets a call from his mother in Perth to say she’s dying, he plonks his childhood upright piano in a trailer and heads off from Sydney. Runaway teenager Meg crashes into him in the desert. Thus commences “Upright,” a flowing, unpredictable, wonderful road trip across Australia, peopled with grey nomads, amphetamine-crazed truckies, and gangster women, a journey that slowly reveals the secrets of these two flawed, credible individuals. Tim Minchin is brilliant as Lucky, as is Milly Alcock playing Meg. The backdrops are filmed wonderfully. The plot twists and buckles, nothing is predictable yet all slots into the grand plan, and emotions are wrenched and pure, The eight episodes sit perfectly as mini stories, and the whole is transcendent. Wonderful.

A recounting of a bizarre event that occurred as recently as 2018, exactly as the title says, “The Salisbury Poisonings” is as fresh as headlines. Indeed, usage of news footage unfurling the Russian nerve agent poisoning of two Soviet ex-spies in a peaceful British town is one of the devices employed dramatically by the directors and scriptwriters. Real-event dramas can readily leach narrative tension or flow, simply because the facts must be observed, but this four-part series manages to forestall that pitfall by focusing heavily on two core participants in the thick of things. Rafe Spall is flawless as a hapless police officer early on the scene, and, even more vital to the story, Ann-Marie Duff captures the horrid pressures on the key public safety official. Perhaps the echoing shape of Covid-19 invigorates the early episodes – I mean, this incredibly deadly toxin is creepily like the pandemic – but I found myself horrified at an event I’d barely followed at the time. The later episodes lose potency as a result, but the storyline artfully segues into a study of post-traumatic stress. The Salisbury Poisonings could have been a lame retelling using cutout performances overlaid by a dreary voice, instead it is a skillfully made, absorbing drama well worth your time.