![]() ![]() Jason Segel plays Harber’s eldest son, a skeptic who’s deeply troubled by the pandemic of suicides that have been triggered by the discovery - arriving at his father’s Rhode Island fortress to find that the good doctor is more or less leading a cult, he meets an emotionally stunted girl (Rooney Mara) and begins searching for the answers that have eluded our species since the dawn of time. Thomas Harber (Robert Redford) has scientifically proven the existence of an afterlife, “The Discovery” leverages its high-concept premise into a contained family drama that’s less about death than it is the things that mortality forces into focus. ![]() ![]() Making good on the promise of 2014’s “The One I Love,” writer-director Charlie McDowell returns with a provocative slice of theoretical sci-fi that dives even deeper into the rift between fantasy and reality. Backstopped by Devon Terrell’s brilliant lead performance (and helped out by a huge assist from Anya Taylor-Joy, as a composite of Obama’s old girlfriends), this is an urgent testimony to the power of pluralism, a movie that uses the story of a bi-racial man to argue that being American means not having to pick a side, means not having to be white or black at the expense of being anything else. And, once upon a time, he went by the name “ Barry.” Set in 1981, when the future President was attending Columbia University and struggling to negotiate between whiteness and blackness, Vikram Gandhi’s film is much more than another cutesy time piece about 44 (in other words, this ain’t “Southside With You”). He didn’t make every decision based on how it might affect his political career. ![]() He knows what it means to be an outsider in this country, to be rejected for attempting to make good on the promise of his homeland. “Barry”īarack Obama came to lead America in large part because he is America, a one-man melting pot whose vagabond life was driven towards a singular destiny. So, in the spirit of meeting our brave new world head-on, I’ve highlighted seven Netflix Originals that are worth seeking out and streaming today. There are a zillion new avenues to watch movies these days, but all of those streets are filled with cracks, and all of those cracks are filled with vital classic and contemporary cinema (or, in Netflix’s case, filled with contemporary cinema). Something that I neglected to mention in the piece - and which I’ve been thinking about quite a bit in the days since it was published - is how the proliferation of streaming options has required critics to be pivot from being advocates to being curators as well. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
December 2022
Categories |