Party Time

Films: Small Axe: Lovers Rock
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!

Say what you will about what the streaming market has done to the film industry, there have been some real positives. The amount of money that gets pumped into streaming companies has created an interesting renaissance in not just television but in film and what can be done with these media. The Small Axe anthology series is a case in point. Steve McQueen, fast becoming one of the premier directors working today, created a series of five films dealing with the lives of West Indies immigrants in the UK in the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s. The films are unrelated to each other but are connected instead by themes. Lovers Rock is the second of the five films in the series.

These are actual films, not episodes of a television show. Evidence of that comes from the difference in running times if nothing else; Lovers Rock clocks in at a slim 70 minutes, and even that might feel a little long for the slip of a plot this movie contains. That’s okay, though. There’s not meant to be a great deal of plot here. It’s just the story of a party and of two people who meet there and begin something like a romance.

Finishing Best Picture...Again

Film: 12 Years a Slave
Format: DVD from Northern Illinois University Founders Memorial Library on laptop.

There wasn’t a great deal of surprise in 12 Years a Slave. I pretty much figured it would be like watching a much shorter version of Roots, and I was right in the main. I can’t honestly imagine how someone might make a positive film about slavery and I’m sure I wouldn’t want to see someone try. There’s a part of me that wonders what the point of a film like 12 Years a Slave is. As soon as I have that thought, though, I remember that stories like this are important. We need to be reminded of our past.

The title of this says it all, of course. We’re going to witness the life of a man who was sold into slavery and lived it for 12 years. The man in question is Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a free man living in upstate New York. He is a talented violinist and is contacted by a couple of men who wish for him to come to Washington to accompany their circus. Of course, it’s a ruse. The men kidnap him and pass him off as an escaped slave named Platt. He is first purchased by a “good” master named William Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch). All is not peaches and cream, though. It’s immediately evident that Platt/Northup is an educated man, which brings him into direct conflict with Ford’s overseer, John Tibeats (Paul Dano). This conflict escalates to the point where Ford is forced to sell Northup to a man named Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender).

Tsk-Tsk!

Film: Skammen (Shame); Shame
Format: Video from The Magic Flashdrive on laptop (Skammen); DVD from NetFlix on kick-ass portable DVD player (Shame)

Ingmar Bergman’s Skammen (Shame) is a very odd film in an important respect. The film depicts a couple caught up in the middle of a war, essentially as victims rather than as people on one side or the other, but I have no idea what war it’s supposed to be. From what I can determine, the war here is an allegorical one that exists mostly because Bergman wants to make a particular point about war. It makes this film an odd mixture of something like fact and something very much fiction.

Jan (Max von Sydow) and Eva (Liv Ullmann) Rosenberg live on an island away from most of the madding crowd. Both are former instrumentalists an a symphony, but have since retreated to this island house to get away from an unspecified civil war. While it’s a real enough war in the film itself, I have no idea what war it is representative of, since Sweden doesn’t get involved in wars that often, which is precisely why I suggest that this is a real story that takes place in an allegorical war. Regardless, the war finally comes to the island, first as threats and then as reality.