Newsletter: Indie Focus: Fresh starts with ‘T2 Trainspotting,’ ‘Song to Song’ and ‘Contemporary Color’
Hello! I’m Mark Olsen, and welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.
Though many reports on the South by Southwest Film Festival tend to focus on food and parties, Jen Yamato and I were very busy during our time in Austin, Texas. Honest. (Though there may have been a late-night karaoke duet of Rihanna’s “Stay.”) There was an unexpected public appearance by the enigmatic filmmaker Terrence Malick, and rollicking premieres of “Baby Driver,” “Atomic Blonde” and “The Disaster Artist.” And Joe Biden was there too.
Despite the marquee names, the festival remains a vital point of discovery. Aaron Katz’s moody Los Angeles-set “Gemini” garnered a lot of talk around town and was picked up for distribution out of the festival by the new distribution outfit Neon. And there was the quietly radical politics of celebrating stories of women, immigrants, people of color and marginalized communities with the award winners, with Ana Asensio’s “Most Beautiful Island” winning the top prize for narrative film, while Jairus McLeary and Gethin Aldous’ “The Work” taking the documentary award.
And the Times’ Tre’vell Anderson put together this comprehensive oral history of the film celebrating the 20th anniversary of Theodore Witcher’s groundbreaking “Love Jones.”
Back in Los Angeles, we have two more exciting screenings coming up, with Marc Webb’s “Gifted” on March 30 and James Gray’s “The Lost City of Z” on April 3. These will both be very exciting events. Keep on the lookout for updates at events.latimes.com.
‘T2 Trainspotting’
Speaking of anniversaries, the sequel “T2 Trainspotting” has been a long time coming. Reuniting director Danny Boyle with the main cast of the original, the new film doesn’t shrink away from directly addressing issues of aging and the passing of time, becoming unexpectedly moving in the process.
Reviewing the film for The Times, Kenneth Turan wrote, “Looked at logically, ‘T2 Trainspotting’ should not work as well as it does. In fact, it shouldn’t work at all. But up there on the screen, where it matters, the dark magic remains intact and logic be damned … they’ve made an age-appropriate story that joins a taste of the original’s vitality with a meditation on masculinity, aging and the inevitable passage of time.”
The Times’ Steven Zeitchik sat down with director Danny Boyle and cast members Ewen McGregor, Johnny Lee Miller and Ewen Bremner to talk old times and new.
“Audiences will see this film and think about us as characters and actors,” noted Bremner. “‘These people aren’t kids,’ they’ll say. And then they’ll realize they’re not kids. For some that will be cathartic, and for others it will make them threatened; they’ll see the reality of age and want to step back from it. It all depends on how you want to look at it.”
At Time, Stephanie Zacharek wrote “‘T2’ squeaks by on the charm of its actors, all of whom still look pretty damn good — especially McGregor, who remains a charismatic wag. Yet it’s Bremner’s Spud, who’s struggling to stay clean, that you’re likely to feel the most for. It’s not always so easy to choose life, and watching Spud figure it out is one of ‘T2’s’ greatest pleasures.”
Amy Nicholson at MTV also spoke to Boyle, who told her, “In the first film, we benefited so much from their recklessness and carelessness, the fact that they didn’t even acknowledge time. And then you make a story about them now and you realize that they are beginning to realize that time doesn’t care about them.”
‘Song to Song’
After a long absence, Terrence Malick has now become unexpectedly prolific, discovering a language of filmmaking all his own that has now made him less a revered enigma and more a point of contention among critics. Some can’t get enough, others are long since done.
Malick’s new “Song to Song” is set amidst the music scene of Austin, including the, yes, the South by Southwest festival. In the film, Rooney Mara, Ryan Gosling and Michael Fassbender are a romantic triangle, with other shapes formed by the like of Natalie Portman, Cate Blanchett, Holly Hunter, Val Kilmer, Lykke Li, Patti Smith and Iggy Pop. For those who enter the film’s specific grammar and Malick’s vision of love, betrayal, faith and the world, it is delirious and overwhelming.
In his review for The Times, Justin Chang wrote, “In Malick’s eternally recurring vision of paradise lost, familiar patterns of human behavior — intoxication and disillusionment, seduction and betrayal — will reproduce themselves in any milieu .… This ruptured, convulsive style of image-making may test your patience and frustrate your desire for conventional dramaturgy, but it also gives exquisite visual form to human relationships and states of being that are fundamentally broken and incomplete. Stick with ‘Song to Song,’ and Malick’s elusiveness becomes surprisingly direct.”
In the New York Times, Manohla Dargis wrote, “Mr. Malick began embracing narrative fragmentation years ago and it has increasingly characterized his films .… Mr. Malick frames them his own way. They move the narrative forward, but inside these sections time can seem to stutter, like a song on repeat. Many scenes are so short that they don’t seem to be overtly driving the story forward, but instead pile up and nearly swirl, like leaves caught in a gust.”
In the New Yorker, Richard Brody wrote, “Terrence Malick is a romantic idealist. His films revel in the unity of the virtues, of beauty, truth, and justice fused in an ultimate realm that leaves its glimmers on Earth and finds its ordinary place amid humanity in the form of love. Even more than his flowing, fragmentary, allusive methods, it’s his transcendental world view that renders him grandly untimely, that makes critics who are smitten with television’s cynical ‘darkness’ repudiate the cathedral-like sublimity of his vision.”
At Vox, Alissa Wilkinson grappled with the religious themes running through Malick’s recent work, noting “But though ‘Song to Song’ can get repetitive and directionless, it’s also dynamic and satisfying by its conclusion. Even when it feels like a pastiche of Malick’s other films, it shouldn’t be dismissed — and the filmmaker shouldn’t be dismissed, either. He is chasing hard after something metaphysical, and his camera still works in service of the great beauty and pain of that pursuit.”
‘Contemporary Color’
Directed by Bill and Turner Ross, the documentary “Contemporary Color” captures a series of performances spearheaded by David Byrne in which musical artists — including Byrne, St. Vincent, Zola Jesus, Devonté Hynes, Money Mark and Ad-Rock and others — collaborated with high school color guards for a series of performances that are equal parts dazzling and charming.
Reviewing the movie for The Times, Robert Abele wrote that the film is about “what Byrne considers an underappreciated folk art: those flag-waving, plastic-rifle-twirling school dance squads known as color guards …. [with a] sustained ecstasy of vitality, synchronicity and emotion. If you aren’t bingeing color guard videos on YouTube afterward, you might not have a heart.”
In Rolling Stone, David Fear wrote, “There’s a tendency for a certain type of filmgoer to sneer at the whole idea of color guards or treat it as an mega-ironic goof. Byrne set out to show the artistic bona fides behind such heartland pageantry, and the filmmakers up the ante by making kids who ‘aren’t exactly prom kings and queens’ seem leagues cooler than the Williamsburg-approved artists scoring their interpretive boogies …. ‘Contemporary Color’ turns them into next-gen Bowies. Even the rock stars bow down.”
For the Village Voice, Eric Hynes wrote about the film’s production. As Bill Ross said, “You’re trying to represent what it was like to be there, to be the people that we’re trying to capture.”
Email me if you have questions, comments or suggestions, and follow me on Twitter@IndieFocus.
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