Seth Harris

Movie Review – Erin Brockovich

Erin Brockovich (2000)
Written by Susannah Grant
Directed by Steven Soderbergh

Steven Soderbergh had quite a year in 2000. In March, he released this film, and in December, Traffic came out. In both these films and others, Soderbergh focuses on themes centered around working-class/poor people being victims of a cruel, uncaring system. Even Ocean’s 11 is about an ex-con with nothing trying to screw over selfish, evil, wealthy people. Magic Mike is all about people struggling to make ends meet and raise themselves out of the poverty they seem stuck in while being exploited. Soderbergh doesn’t make traditional advocacy films and is more interested in telling character-focused stories that touch on economic struggles & hardships.

Movie Review – Billy Elliot

Billy Elliot (2000)
Written by Lee Hall
Directed by Stephen Daldry

In 1984 in the United Kingdom, the Thatcher government led an effort to shut down coal mines and oppose strikes as a means of union breaking. This led to violent clashes between striking miners and police to protect the corporation’s property and help get scabs into the mines. These strikes were declared illegal by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and by 1985, the unions had been weakened to the point that they took concessions that were much less than they had been fighting for. This is the background of Billy Elliot, an unexpected time and place to set this story. When I first saw this film around 2001, I did not expect to be introduced to this conflict, and it is a pretty great thematic element for Billy’s story.

Movie Review – The Nest

The Nest (2020)
Written & Directed by Sean Durkin

It’s been a full decade since Sean Durkin’s last film, Martha Marcy May Marlene. That movie was the subject of my first and so far only Cinematic Immersion Tank, an experiment where I watched the same film for five days in a row and recorded my evolving thoughts and interpretations. I am a big fan of Durkin’s work and was highly anticipating this picture. The two lead cast members are fantastic actors, and Durkin knows how to build compelling character-centered dramas that border on psychological horror. He most certainly lives up to this with The Nest.

Black Actor Spotlight – November

John Amos

John Amos is an actor that feels like he should be more revered as a veteran of film & television. Life for Amos began in 1939 in Newark, New Jersey. Amos lived in a working-class family and attended Colorado State University. While there, he played football while attaining his sociology degree with plans to become a social worker. Football led to a position on the Denver Broncos, but a pulled hamstring sidelined Amos after two days. This sent Amos into the minor leagues with stints in the United Football League, the Continental Football League, and Atlantic Coast Football League. He finally made his way back onto the AFL with the Kansas City Chiefs. It was his time with the team that led Amos’s coach to tell him he “wasn’t a football player, you’re a man trying to play football.”

Movie Review – Gladiator

Gladiator (2000)
Written by David Franzoni, John Logan, and William Nicholson
Directed by Ridley Scott

I am not a fan of Ridley Scott, a statement I’m sure I’ve made multiple times on this blog. I have certainly said it out loud plenty of times. I think he is a fantastic production designer, building worlds in intricate detail. But he is not a consistently strong storyteller or director of human beings. Filmmakers with prolific careers often reveal their personal views for their work, especially if they make big-budget Hollywood pictures. In Scott’s work, I see themes centered around a disdain for how humanity is crushed by institutions and the military’s glorification. In this film, Blackhawk Down, and others, he romanticizes and mythologizes the warrior figure in a personally uncomfortable way.

Comic Book Review – Wonder Woman by John Byrne Volume 2

Wonder Woman by John Byrne Volume 2 (2018)
Reprints Wonder Woman #115 – 124, Annuals #5,6
Written by John Byrne
Art by John Byrne, Norm Breyfogle, Dave Cockrum, and Tom Palmer

The one thing that can’t be denied about John Byrne’s run on Wonder Woman is that he most certainly made it his own thing. At this point in his career, his name carried tremendous clout, and he could essentially do what he wanted. In the early 2000s, he rebooted the Doom Patrol during his run on JLA and completely scrambled established continuity that rippled through characters in the Teen Titans and didn’t care. His run on Wonder Woman definitely carries on George Perez’s rebooted version of the heroine and the Amazons, but he seems much more interested in pitting her against very different foes.

Movie Review – Traffic

Traffic (2000)
Written by Stephen Gaghan
Directed by Steven Soderbergh

Steven Soderbergh’s career has been one of the most eclectic and prolific of most modern directors. It was a slow burn, though. His directorial debut, sex, lies, and videotape, was a massive breakthrough in 1989. However, for all his promise, it led to a decade of commercial failures and an embrace of independent filmmaking and experimentation. It was 1998’s Out of Sight that changed things and led to his reemergence as a mainstream film director. Soderbergh never lost sight of those formative experimental years, and Traffic served as a bridge between more conventional filmmaking and the director’s insistence on playing with form and presentation.

Traffic is a film based on a BBC mini-series that follows three separate but intersecting plots centered around the War on Drugs in the United States & Mexico. In Tijuana, we follow police officer Javier Rodriguez (Benicio del Toro), who is brought into General Salazar’s inner circle, a high-ranking official that wants to take down the Obregón brothers who head the local cartel. Rodriguez and his partner become further intertwined with Mexico’s corruption, quickly realizing every side is out to have a piece of the drug trade and is only interested in eliminating the competition.

In the Midwest, we meet conservative judge Robert Wakefield (Michael Douglas) is appointed to head the President’s Office of National Drug Control Policy. It becomes clear to Wakefield from his predecessor and longtime staff members that the War on Drugs is unwinnable, but he keeps moving forward with the transition. Meanwhile, his daughter Caroline (Erika Christensen) has become involved in drugs, her latest vice being freebasing cocaine. She and her boyfriend (Topher Grace) hole up in a cheap motel room where they spend the day blasting their minds with drugs. When her addiction comes to light Wakefield and his wife (Amy Irving) struggle with the best way to help their daughter.

The final plotline centers on Helena Ayala (Catherine Zeta-Jones), who’s husband is arrested by the DEA for his role as a drug trafficker. Meanwhile, DEA agents Gordon (Don Cheadle) and Castro (Luis Guzman) are leading the investigation on Ayala’s operations, which also involves surveilling his wife. Helena finds herself becoming financially desperate. People whom her husband owes come around making threats, and she finds herself reaching the edge. Gordon and Castro get their hands on a significant witness against Ayala, Eduardo Ruiz (Miguel Ferrer), whose testimony makes him a valued asset of the US government and the cartels’ target.

Soderbergh bit off so much with this film and does an excellent job developing each plot thread, allowing light crossing over but making sure each story has its own complete arc. One technique he uses to help the audience is by using three different color correction techniques for each story. Rodriguez’s sun-bleached Mexico story is shown in an overexposed sepia, Wakefield & his daughter’s journey through addiction is presented in a stark, cold blue. The California storyline looks the most conventional, with colors just slightly oversaturated. Soderbergh was an early adopter of digital filmmaking, and it shows here as those first cameras could show a lot of grain & distortion in the video. This was a detractor in some pictures, but here it helps with the cinema verite style that Soderberg was going for, a semi-documentary atmosphere with handheld camera work.

The best thing about Traffic is how Soderbergh presents the War on Drugs as an unwinnable conflict. Wakefield delivers a speech in the third act about how we are asked to go to war with our own children, and that understanding and offers of help will do more to curb the desire for drugs. The film does an excellent job of showcasing how overly complicated and pointless the mission to wipe out drugs is. It’s pointed out early in the movie that the cartels would have no power if the demand in the white suburbs of America weren’t there. The very law enforcement that claims to be fighting the spread of drugs regularly turns out to be on cartels’ payrolls.

The way Soderbergh delivers this message is not through the characters didactically spouting platitudes (I’m looking in your direction, Aaron Sorkin!). He keeps that documentarian style that distances his own views from the characters and never editorializes things. A few moments, particularly with the Wakefield character, come close to that, though, but the director manages to avoid going over that cliff into a movie of the week.

Traffic’s biggest problem is the scope of its story and how, even with a three hour running time, so many characters are still relatively undeveloped. I have to think that the original television version could do this, but you lose that in a feature film. Caroline is a non-character for most of the movie, just a drug-addicted teenager with minimal other defining characteristics. I also think Helena deserved some more development because we see her story arc rushed along to make her the head of her husband’s operations without really seeing her struggle along the way. Traffic certainly still holds up, one of those movies that created an aesthetic for the 2000s that is even mimicked today.

Movie Review – Chuck & Buck

Chuck & Buck (2000)
Written by Mike White
Directed by Miguel Arteta

Discomfort is a feeling often avoided in mainstream cinema. Movies made by large studios are interested in getting a return on profit, which usually involves making their products pleasant & easy to digest. Independent cinema in the late 1990s/early 2000s didn’t seem very interested in that route. For the most part, movies were transgressive, sometimes cleverly and other times in clunky, awkward ways. Even then, they tried to cater to their imagined audiences. Kevin Smith spoke to his fellow Gen X pop culture kids with Clerks while Tarantino delivered tense machismo in Reservoir Dogs. Neither of them really made the audience deeply uncomfortable beyond some sex or violence. Mike White was a different story, a writer/actor whose career is built around cringe.

Buck (White) has just lost his mother and invites childhood friend Chuck (Chris Weitz) to the funeral. Chuck brings his fiancee Carlyn along, and the encounter ends with Buck trying to touch his friend’s crotch in the bathroom. It’s not clear at first, but we begin to realize that the two men were sexually intimate as children. For Buck, this has been a defining experience in his life, fully embracing his sexuality. Chuck saw it as a passing phase and wants to live what he perceives to be a “normal” life. Buck can’t let go and cashes out his bank account to move to Los Angeles to be closer to Chuck. There’s a theater across the street from Chuck’s office, and Buck decides to write a play about them, put it on, and invite his friend in the hopes everything will be understood. But life doesn’t turn out that way.

There’s a cutesy veneer over the entire movie but is most certainly a dark comedy that is fearless about embarrassing its main characters and making the audience feel deeply uncomfortable. There is never a villain in the story, but you do have characters being terribly cruel, almost immediately regretting it or saying things because they are upset. In that way, it reflects how people really engage in challenging, uncomfortable situations. At first glance, this appears to be a story about unrequited love and heartbreak, but Mike White has so much going on underneath that.

Chuck & Buck is ultimately a film about allowing nostalgia to stop us from progressing as people. Buck brings along bags of artifacts from his childhood bedroom when he comes to Los Angeles. At one low point, he surrounds himself with these toys and baubles to derive comfort. The play he writes is a fairy tale interpretation of his situation with Chuck, framing Chuck’s fiancee as a wicked witch. The theater is putting on a production of the Wizard of Oz at another time, so the background during Buck’s play is the Yellow Brick Road going into Emerald City. It’s another visual signifier of wistful nostalgia.

At first, this feels like it might end up being a creepy dark comedy about Buck becoming a stalker, maybe hurting Chuck. But White is smarter than that and, while he does show Buck has stalker tendencies, the film is more human than exploitative. There’s a lot of question to the nature of what the men’s relationship was like as children. Did Chuck take advantage of Hank? During the play, Chuck’s analog expresses regret to Buck’s for having him eat magic cookies. He tells him he was too young to do that, and he took advantage of him. The arc here is how Buck will become a fully realized person, and that won’t happen until he works through these things that have kept him stunted.

Chuck & Buck ends on a hopeful note, the idea that we can move on from our traumas and find new places where we flourish. Through staging a play, Buck finds a family with the actors and the stage manager. He learns that creating art in a place where he can really soar, expressing difficult emotions, and finding connections with others. This is a pretty fantastic human-centered film that doesn’t lean into its indie quirkiness but relies on great performances and White’s solid script.

TV Review – Monsterland Season 1

Monsterland (Hulu)
Written by Nathan Ballingrud, Mary Laws, Scott Kosar, Wesley Strick, and Emily Kaczmarek
Directed by Anne Sewitsky, Kevin Phillips, Craig William MacNeil, Eagle Egilsson, Logan Kibens, Nicolas Pesce, Desiree Akhavan, and Babak Anvari

Oh, dear. As I have said many times before that television horror anthologies are a tough feat to pull off. So, I want to acknowledge that making this series had to be a challenge. You have a new cast every episode with a new director. That can’t be easy to do. You have between forty-five minutes to an hour to tell a full character arc, which is another near impossibility. All of this said, I really hated Monsterland. It was a real slog to get through all the episodes, and I found myself forcing the last two down just so it could be over.

Movie Review – O Brother, Where Art Thou?

O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)
Written by Ethan Coen & Joel Coen
Directed by Joel Coen

The Coen Brothers were coming off some iconic films by the time the new millennium rolled around. In the 1990s, they established themselves with pictures like Miller’s Crossing, Barton Fink, Fargo, and The Big Lebowski. Their first entry into the 2000s was a big-budget comedy based on Homer’s Odyssey. It was just the sort of strange left turn their entire career has been filled with. The result was a decent movie, most certainly their most outstanding technical achievement but definitely not one of my favorites in their filmography.