The American Dream has been a staple of art and literature since the country's founding. The subject has inspired some of the greatest American works of art from The Great Gatsby to There Will be Blood. Two new entries in the canon are Minari and Nomadland.
Minari, directed by Korean-American Lee Isaac Chung, follows the travails of Korean immigrant family in the 1970s as they try to stake their claim on America's promise. Nomadland, by Chinese director Chloé Zhao, tells the story of an American woman who is kind-of forced, but really chooses, to spend her time wondering America with a bunch of people for whom the Dream has failed. Zhao's film has the heat, storming into awards season with all but a couple of critics falling over themselves to heap praise on a work that is dishonest at its core. Having gained access to film within Amazon's distribution facility, Zhao presents it as a great place to work. Is this because she doesn't understand? Or is it because Amazon is one of the main streaming venues for films these days? Either way, ball dropped. Worse, though, is that Frances McDormand is literally a tourist among real drifters, and once you realize this, it becomes impossible to suspend disbelief. Chung's movie, on the other hand, may be populated by actors, but viewers end it with a little more understanding of the real immigrant's plight. Here is a wonderful article that looks at the landscapes of both films. Saint Maud, the first feature film by Rose Glass, is a strange and unsettling but extremely good. Morfydd Clark creates a compelling and believable Maud, whose life is spiraling downwards - or upwards, depending on how you look at it. The film may well leave viewers with questions, which is where this great article comes in. Watch the film and then read the article to see if you agree about what happens in the end.
It has always interested me to see the way texts are interconnected. A education in the arts that skips periods and movements is lacking crucial pieces. You can't understand Virginia Woolf, for instance, without understanding the texts that she read. While a less cerebral work can probably do its job perfectly well for the less widely read, seeing how it refers to other texts remains an interesting exercise. Here is a great primer for anyone interesting in delving deeper into To All the Boys: Always and Forever.
Those of us who make it to adulthood are survivors of a volatile, scary time of life. While the late-teen, early-adult period has been the topic of many movies, young adults being a very lucrative market, not many have dug past the surface.
Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret is a rare exception. Anna Paquin bites off the lead role with relish and her scenes with J Cameron-Smith, who plays her mother, more realistically portray the tensions of that particular relationship than any I have seen. Here is an excellent article by Aurora Amidon in Screen Queens about the film and how it manages to portray a period we all remember, but rarely get to see depicted accurately. |
Scarcely Perceptible AttachmentsThis is my blog. Here I will share things I've written and sometimes write something new about things that interest me. Archives
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