Moonlight, directed by Barry Jenkins

http://www.indiewire.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/moonlight.jpg

Set in black Miami during the early '80s, based on Tarell Alvin McCraney's play, directed by Barry Jenkins. Extraordinary reviews: http://www.metacritic.com/movie/moonlight-2016

Hilton Als:

Did I ever imagine, during my anxious, closeted childhood, that I’d live long enough to see a movie like “Moonlight,” Barry Jenkins’s brilliant, achingly alive new work about black queerness? Did any gay man who came of age, as I did, in the era of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and AIDS, think he’d survive to see a version of his life told onscreen with such knowledge, unpredictability, and grace? Based on a story by the gay black playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney—Jenkins himself is not gay—the film is virtuosic in part because of Jenkins’s eye and in part because of the tale it tells, which begins in nineteen-eighties Miami.

i really wanted to see this at NYFF but it wasn't playing the weekend we were there!

Was about to create a thread about this but figured someone else would do it cause I'm lazy like that. Anyway, saw it a few weeks ago (played the local film fest here) and yes, it's as great as the reviews say. It's been awhile since a film has lingered in my mind like this.

Beingg 17 is my film of the year, also queer, so I'm optimistic.

Yep, it's very good. Very pleased that it's doing excellent business as well.

loved this. days later the intense, aching, almost unbearable vulnerability portrayed by the actor playing adult Chiron still lingers with me.

great double header this weekend with Certain Women

I had some problems with its staginess and certain character development, but I'm impressed it's becoming a hit.

Yeah, I found the very formal score a bit on the nose. It didn't need those orchestra swells.

beautiful movie. the score is nicely affecting, those parts (orchestra swells) not as much as the regular, recurring motif, which was grounding/comforting

I loved the use of the screwed "Classic Man"

i looked it up when i got home, somebody put up a screwed version (same speed) on youtube

hey is this playing @ the bro4dw4y LnB?

yep, yeah.. just opened yesterday

excellent

the string swells were overused and detracted a little, a shame, especially because in general i thought the use of music was pretty great.

ive other criticisms, the character of the mother was a little pat, though there was nothing wrong with the performance imo. dialogue could be overly terse for me at times due to how laconic the protagonist is.

but i watched it, in a full theatre which was nice, saturday night and it's stayed with me. very good movie.

I like that even as a cripplingly self-abnegating gay man, he still listens to "Tyrone" in the car.

I'm surprised how little this movie, which I liked, has stayed with me.

Thought the first section of this was great. Mahershala Ali was always my favorite performer in House of Cards, and he's just as good here. The second section was strong too. It was only the third section I didn't like as much. It was realistic enough--I'm sure everything would have unfolded exactly as it did--but dramatically, it seemed to take forever to get where it was going. (Having Chiron suddenly look exactly like Juan confused me at first.) "Hello Stranger," one of my favourite songs ever, didn't resonate as much as I would have expected with me--Kevin spoke of it as if it had significance earlier in the film, but that was its first appearance in the film, no? The half-speed "Classic Man" was strange. Is that a real version or were they manipulating the song for effect?

the third part is the one that still sticks with me, somehow. i found it incredibly romantic.

I liked the half-speed "Classic Man," a not-at-all-hard song dressed in black. (If anything it was a little on-the-nose.)

We finally got to this today. I agree that some of the self-conscious poetizing (both visual and verbal) gets in the way, and the score is over-determinative. But a lot of really good performances, and I was never bored -- I really liked the character, and Jenkins and the actors do a great job letting him develop over the course of the film. I was skeptical at the start of the third act, but Trevante Rhodes still carries enough of the boy he was to make it persuasive.

So, yeah, a good movie and also one that it's easy to cheer for in terms of the attention it's gotten.

so easy to forgive this any of its indulgences, just so tender. "a not-at-all-hard song dressed in black" re: the screwed classic man is otm, sounded so good (& prefer it to the original)

I haven't seen is yet but I'm looking forward to it.

May I ask a question? Are the three time frames played out sequentially, first, second, third or are they interspersed non-linearly? I wasn't to take my mum to see this but she's old not and losing her faculties a little and if it is non-linear she won't be able to follow it (even if it is simple, trust me).

I want to take*

It is sequential

Thanks, devvvine.

it's sequential but the difficult part might be recognizing that different actors (not always of strong resemblance) are playing the same characters in different time periods. especially the 2 > 3 part.

Yes and different names used for the protagonist from sequence to sequence.

I think the first act is absolute classic, it might go a bit awry after the second - but it is hard to be critical after such brilliance.

idk I think the rhythm and pacing of the diner sequence and onwards in the third act is breathtaking.

i prefer the third act as well. i think the other two give it emotional weight but it's just lovely.

The third act is when it gets sexy. I could've done w/out most of the first act -- and I do mean "act," for it betrays its play origins.

I found the last act really boring and didn't buy that his character hadn't got laid for ages.

The last act was terrific, but overall I couldn't embrace the movie because I'm tired of Brokeback stories. It's why it's not a great movie. My my review.

sorry I wasn't trying to be some strident warrior type here, just my first impression.

not at all! I want some resistance. Its enthusiasts are mostly straight.

Exact same reaction as Calzino--I would rather the whole film had been about the kid and Mahershala Ali.

I was really moved by the (suggestion of) emergence from extreme self-alienation in the third part of the movie. the third part distinguishes it from the character arc in Brokeback Mountain, I thought

I am curious why the photography/cinematography of this movie hasn't been talked about much...the bokeh, lens flares, luminosity, moments of suspended motion, and rotating camera shots were all amazing and felt different from anything I've seen

I didn't buy the steady goodness of Ali and Monae but accepted it as part of the movie's structure.

The received wisdom on Moonlight, a film about gay love in the black ghetto, is that it is “necessary” and “important”. It is an “urgent” and “relevant” examination of forbidden attraction in a world, “the streets”, that is largely hostile to gay men.

Only, relevant to whom? Certainly not the audience. Most will be straight, white, middle class. Nor is it particularly “urgent”: the story has been told countless times, against countless backdrops.

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/film-review-moonlight-and-hidden-figures-fxj5rf7qq

"Cinematography" is the film equivalent of "it's got hooks"

someone tell me about all these countless films about gay black people.

Who gives a shit if some white middle class audience members might say this story is "relevant" or "urgent"? How does that affect the quality of what's on the screen? Answer: it doesn't matter. The middle class delusions he imagines may be stimulated by the film do not make it either good or bad any more than the fact that an eleven year old boy may call a movie with kissing scenes "icky" or "gross".

And, if this critic hasn't noticed it before, allow me to point out that most stories have been told "countless times, against countless backdrops." That could just as well be said about Citizen Kane or The Postman Always Rings Twice, or just about any great film out there. What matters is how well it is told.

i would just prefer if there was some originality on our screens, rather than yet another story about gay black men.

reviewer is a she btw. and the review was for a popular british broadsheet. she has some odd kneejerk responses to films about 'niche' subjects (eg a united kingdom, which is actually a more subversive film than given credit for, and i daniel blake, which i have issues with as a piece of filmmaking, but its importance is about the subject, not how its been made)

Someone should clue her in that whenever you let politics or social mores act as the frame for art, you've got it backwards. Art encompasses both and puts them in a larger context.

also, admittedly speaking as someone yet to see this movie, its just bizarre to say its only for white middle class people, or created with them disproportionately in mind, when support in the US has been right across the board.

Let me, uh, point out that it's a film about Miamians and set in Miami and it's made a lot of its money playing in...Miami, a minority-majority city/county.

This for the sake of the film critic who won't read this thread, StillAdvance, not you.

the kid was uninteresting, what was he into? music? art? anything? he just seemed like a scared punchbag for the entire movie. i didnt buy juan the good-hearted drug dealer either or the fact the main guy never had sex after all those years but was still dreaming about a sloppy hand job he got once

am worried there is no way this film can live up to the hype and wish i saw it last year before the hype had really kicked in. am also slightly wary about naomi harris. not sure about brits playing americans (also see: selma).

the fact the main guy never had sex after all those years but was still dreaming about a sloppy hand job he got once

https://media.giphy.com/media/OhEyhZgVqUkPm/giphy.gif

lol

Good, not great, IMO. It's a little underpowered. The main problem is the casting in the middle section, where the actors playing Chiron and Kevin couldn't feasibly (physically) be either the child or adult versions of themselves which, unfortunately, made me laugh because my movie-date leaned over at the start of the diner scene and said "how's he going to recognise him?" to which I replied that he should say "Chiron, you look so different. In fact I look more like you than you do".

I loved the diner scene.

I thought it was weird that they were drinking red wine.

That part made sense, especially if you know the restaurant. Lots of people drink awful red wine in Pizza Hut glasses.

Andre Holland as adult Kevin is perfect and sexy and beautiful, an ideal match for the adolescent Kevin. HE should've been the Oscar nominee.

What I couldn't get past is the cilantro on the black beans and rice, which would never happen in a traditional Cuban restaurant.

I could've done w/out most of the first act

This opinion is violence against me

also, is there any evidence for 'most people who like this movie are white/straight'? seems like a kind of fucked up thing to just claim based on anecdata (especially when made by another white person who then goes on to critique the movie)

whenever you let politics or social mores act as the frame for art, you've got it backwards. Art encompasses both and puts them in a larger context.

been bothered by this issue for years without really getting at what I really think but this is so lucid and elegantly expressed and gets it exactly. it is intensely satisfying. thank you v much aimless

This was fine, mostly. The third act is the most conventional, and i didn't believe all of it.

Him trapping, or holding onto a memory from high school so tightly?

the reunion, "You're the only man I let touch me," etc

I didn't buy that at all either, but loved the first two acts.

Just for clarification: The implication is that he's going to jail at the end of act 2, right?

I presumed his character would have gone to a juvie detention centre at least for his bit of gbh.

didnt realize barry jenkins studied @ the peter berg school of camera movement + closeups

Be sure to tell him.

am i the only one who's seen Medicine for Melancholy?

i've seen it!

my husband loves it and has loved it for years and made me watch it when we first started dating

i found it forgettable, but now i want to rewatch it

moonlight, i loved though.

not a white person, not a black person, not sure how to score the fact that i loved moonlight.

Moonlight > MfM, but not really by a million miles.

someone tell me about all these countless films about gay black people.

I know you're probably talking about "hits," but there are a fair number.

Medicine... is not very good, and the time is right for the Moonlight backlash to claim the first film as the superior.

it's not, but i suspect future barry jenkins films could resemble it more closely.

Best Picture! Didn't see that coming.

Neither did Warren Bratty.

Moonlight feels right

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/21/arts/music/moonlight-movie-score-music-oscars.html?_r=0

Chamber music might not seem like an obvious candidate to be “chopped and screwed”: remixed and slowed down in the style pioneered by DJ Screw when he transformed Houston’s hip-hop scene a generation ago. But that unlikely inspiration helped give the film “Moonlight,” whose score is nominated for an Academy Award, its otherworldly sound.

The unusual idea emerged when the film’s director, Barry Jenkins, was batting around musical possibilities with its composer, Nicholas Britell, and Mr. Jenkins mentioned his love of chopped and screwed tracks. (The style can give songs a woozy, psychedelic flavor.)

“When you slow the music down, the pitch goes down,” Mr. Britell, 36, said in an interview in his Manhattan studio. “And you actually get this audio texture which is deepened and enriched and you hear more things in it. It sort of opens it up and stretches it out.”

“I chopped and screwed the recording,”

Did you though? You pitched it down. Good job.

I've only heard the main theme that was on Song Exploder and it seems like people are making waaay too big a deal out of it. Haven't seen Moonlight yet however, so I'll assume it works really well in the movie.

I didn't buy the steady goodness of Ali and Monae but accepted it as part of the movie's structure.

Yeah, it helped that they played it just right.

The critic Mike d'Angelo wrote a lengthy critique on Letterboxd, the main points that struck me as solid were 1) Chiron is a total cipher, aside from the suffering inflicted on him by others and 2) the Act II climax is overdetermined, following up bliss with violence inflicted by the beloved.

"Raise the stakes," the Syd Field types insist, and so not only does Chiron regularly get bullied by assholes for being different, but said assholes also subsequently pressure the one person in the world who's expressed sexual desire for Chiron into beating the living shit out of him. It doesn't get much more shameless than giving the miserable protagonist a single fleeting moment of happiness and then instantly (I think it's actually the very next scene) snatching it away from him in the ugliest possible way. Likewise, I confess to mostly rolling my eyes at Chiron's final incarnation. Is it plausible that he would harden up considerably to escape his world of pain? Absolutely. But is it plausible that he would almost literally transform himself into the man who had been his childhood protector, right down to the wardrobe? That's more Screenwriting 101 nonsense: "Your ending should circle back to your beginning." .... Dial it down 50%, make him slightly more menacing rather than a barely recognizable musclebound badass (with a wounded little boy inside; kudos to Trevante Rhodes for conveying that so beautifully, even if I find the concept ridiculous), and I'd probably be as moved as everyone else.

https://letterboxd.com/gemko/film/moonlight-2016/1/

agree 100%

It doesn't get much more shameless than giving the miserable protagonist a single fleeting moment of happiness and then instantly (I think it's actually the very next scene) snatching it away from him in the ugliest possible way.

enh I think this is a pretty common experience for adolescents in one way or another, though I agree w/ everyone else on the third section being too far a leap

It's definitely not a movie that lends itself to this type of scrutiny

It does happen, but the script was in a rush to punish him.

Love hurts shrug.gif

imo Moonlight is an interesting inversion of the usual Oscar movie, where you generally have fine-enough writing paired with unremarkable / pedestrian directing (or worse) - for me almost everything that worked about Moonlight was purely aesthetic

kid who played teen Kevin was in my friend's son's class at LaGuardia (ie "Fame") High School, saw them in a play there

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C5p0RCZUsAA6kc0.jpg

is the transformation really that hard to believe? scrawny little kids become hulking adults all the time. they even make a big deal about his appetite. and it seemed to me that the incident at the end of the second section, with the chair, was him discovering a persona that could protect him. id almost go to other extreme; in that the performance showed his fragility so clearly it seems hard to believe anyone would buy that he was a tough guy in the first place.

worst part of this was the score and that they killed of Ali in the first act (but that's the source's fault)

I thought killing off Ali was a bold but brave decision. Story first, characters later.

is the transformation really that hard to believe? scrawny little kids become hulking adults all the time. they even make a big deal about his appetite. and it seemed to me that the incident at the end of the second section, with the chair, was him discovering a persona that could protect him. id almost go to other extreme; in that the performance showed his fragility so clearly it seems hard to believe anyone would buy that he was a tough guy in the first place.

― ryan,

I believed the metamorphosis; I didn't believe the movie's enchantment with repression.

yeah, Like Every Gay Film Ever ('cept not anymore, necessarily)

FWIW, this could be a relevant read (just published today)

http://www.theroot.com/to-be-held-by-moonlight-1792774994

I thought the score was the most outstanding element of this.

i like that that article emphasized the theme of touching, since that is the element i found most moving about it. franco berardi's eulogy for mark fisher defined depression as an "inability to be touched" and that phrase immediately brought this movie to mind. and even though i accept and defer to the smart critique above of the second act betrayal there's something about its inversion of "touch" into violence which seems meaningful for the struggle of the two characters. that being touched or allowing yourself to be touched also creates that vulnerability in the first place.

I actually think Moonlight and MbtS complement each other in interesting ways w/r/t commenting on homosocial norms, trauma, and coming of age

Embarrassing admission: I don't remember Ali getting killed off.

it happens btwn the first and 2nd acts, is why you don't remember (though it is referenced)

I actually think Moonlight and MbtS complement each other in interesting ways w/r/t commenting on homosocial norms, trauma, and coming of age

― a serious and fascinating fartist (Simon H.), 28. februar 2017 00:15 (twelve minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That's interesting. I was all ready to write something about the similarities between Moonlight and La La Land, particularly that they both end with a reunion of old lovers after years apart. Though that was obviously also partly because they were the two frontrunners.

I mean, MbtS *also* features such a reunion...

Y'all should watch Being 17 when it's out on DVD in a few weeks: a better film about being gay, young, and black. But that's where I'll stop. It's not fair to compare André Téchiné, a 35-year veteran, with Barry Jenkins.

Hm. I might prefer Moonlight? Both are good, though, but there's a hunger to Moonlight.

Arrival also deals with how past trauma has unraveled a relationship, right?

I don't remember Ali getting killed off.

The reference is to not seeing Teresa since "the funeral." It's not explicitly stated he was killed, though the assumption by the viewer is natural and presumably intentional.

Did anyone else think Naomie Harris' performance was uneven at best, and her character rendered in overfamiliar terms? I didn't recognize her as Ms Moneypenny/28 Days Later/White Teeth/Brit actress etc.

she made no impression on me

i'd have to ReScreen to double check but iirc there is an explicit reference to Ali getting killed, one of the bullies saying "Juan's dead, can't save you now" or something?

explicit reference to him being dead, though not how he died

ohhh ok misread. i thought "killed off" in the context of the movies meant by the writers, not literally murdered

finally watched this. 2 walkouts at the midday screening. presumably people who found it 'slow' and not what they expected from a best picture winner. or maybe it was just too black and gay. either way, if i hadnt known about his previous film, id have thought this was a debut.

jenkins obv knows about images, but im not sure he knows that much about drama, or narrative, or connecting the viewer with emotion. for the first two parts, i felt like i was watching something very well observed, but not that felt, though obv the beach scene, and the beatdown scenes were hard not to feel, so maybe that isnt quite what i mean.. the last act is the one i wish had been longer. that ending, coming right after chiron reveals the most heartbreaking line of the film (and one of the most heartbreaking lines of any film ive seen lately actually) was almost jarring. it should not have ended there at all. ridiculous. i hope jenkins doesnt have the disease of the Abrupt Spike Lee Ending.

aside from all that, the performances in this were incredible, though mahershala ali's part was too small i think to deserve anything. the real prize winning parts in this are the guy who played grown up, gold fronts wearing chiron (who doesnt look like the teen but who cares) and the teenage chiron. their performances are quietly devastating. jenkins is brilliant at small scale drama, those small emotional moments, and he seems good at getting those out of his actors. not sure about the mothers addiction narrative. i think that should have been placed a little more in the background.

it is an odd best picture winner though. its more a festival fave than a big crowd pleaser. but if it introduces more ppl to modern arthouse fare, then thats no bad thing.

i loved the screwed songs on the soundtrack BTW (though the caetano veloso song seemed not to belong). not really listened to any C&S stuff in about ten years so it def made me wanna go and seek it out again.

the ending really annoyed me TBH. if it was an earlier era, id have maybe assumed they ran out of money to complete it but here, im thinking they just didnt write anything more for it. :( its like the ending to the pilot for a TV series, not an ending to a 2 hour feature.

I was taken out by the Caetano Veloso song as well, it's so connected to Talk to Her in my mind. But it's a Spanish song, and he's traveling back to Miami, so in a way it fits? Though it does seem to also pointedly go against expectations.

wasn't the Veloso song juxtaposed against the scene of Chiron on the turnpike? It didn't work.

Yeah. It's on the turnpike, towards home. Worked for me.

wasnt it in a WKW film too? (i forget which one)

ML reminded me a *bit* of carol, not just cos of the LGBT theme, but in how that also felt a bit removed and overly stylised, though moonlight wasnt nearly as distant as that one, and carol didnt make me well up like ML did at the end

its more a festival fave than a big crowd pleaser.

The movie won the Oscar as a Trump-counterrevolutionary act + OscarSoWhite corrective.

wasnt it in a WKW film too? (i forget which one)

ML reminded me a *bit* of carol, not just cos of the LGBT theme, but in how that also felt a bit removed and overly stylised, though moonlight wasnt nearly as distant as that one, and carol didnt make me well up like ML did at the end

― StillAdvance, 2. marts 2017 12:58 (seventeen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Could be, Jenkins has underscored how much he was inspired by Wong and Hou (and it has annoyed me bit to see the disconnect between how much Jenkins talks about Asian cinema, and how often reviewers just say it looks 'European') but they sing it live in Talk to Her :) Fantastic scene.

With both Carol and Moonlight, I thought the stylization connected well with the narrative. Carol is of course stunning to look at, and much more self assured than Moonlight, and is based on fifties photographs, many of them by female photographers, such as Therese. I thought it worked as a way of underlining how so much of what Therese has to do is to learn how to look at and be looked at differently. Moonlight almost seemed to try and figure out what it was in realtime, what a black gay film in 2016 even means, the same way that Chiron has to. And not everything worked - for me it was a lot of the camera-movements, that seemed stereotypically American indie-film - but I was captivated by all of it.

The Caetano song was in Wong's HAPPY TOGETHER.

carol is very icey. a film that seems to think being 'cold' makes it a superior film experience.

with hou, most people dont know his films. and his style of filmmaking is so different to american or european arthouse, im not sure most ppl know what to make of it.

wong is an interesting one, as no one seems to talk about *him* since the 90s. his ranking isnt what it was. so its interesting to see jenkins almost rescuscitate his reputation. obv, in the mood for love is still a classic, but WKW is sort of forgotten about IMO.

icey is sort of a compliment. i just think the characters and their relationship were poorly developed. amazing to look at, nothing to connect with.

Carol lept to my mind too as it was another film half in love with easeful repression.

seriously, i demand a sequel to ML

you cant have chiron tell kev what he did (trying top avoid spoilers here) in that last scene and end it there.

Kev didn't put the cilantro on Chiron's beans.

The ending didn't bother me at all tbh.

finally watched this. 2 walkouts at the midday screening. presumably people who found it 'slow' and not what they expected from a best picture winner. or maybe it was just too black and gay

I nearly had to walkout for at least a break cuz I felt vaguely motion sick from the camera movement

Both Jenkins and Hayes seems obsessed with performativity, the way gender and identity is acted out. Chiron being told he has to walk and talk a certain way, so as not to be instantly recognizable as gay. And when he becomes stereotypically straight, he also becomes stereotypically black - his final name change is a bit on the nose - at least in the eyes of others.

This was very, very good.

i happen to be reading john updikes 'the centaur' ~ interesting to learn abt the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiron

I feel bad, but I found this kind of... bland? Some great performances (Harris aside) but so much cliche.

I really wish it was better. I couldn't say I could give it any more than 5 or 6 /10. It's just so... underpowered.

I like that quietitude about it. Very breezy film, given its abrupt ending. Great soundtrack. Overall, the journey to that fragile masculinity was well done but some of it just didn't scan.

Happy Together is a good call - like to re-watch it now.

I was watching some of OJ - Made in America. The first part where it talks about the projects and its traumas immediately after, so a lot of that story seemed well captured.

its a very delicately put together movie. sometimes too much so. very aware of its own sensitivities. but thats this kind of filmmaking for you.

does make me think more of in the mood for love in that sense, more than HT.

I found it flimsy - as a character study, as a mood piece, as a Miami movie - but I couldn't tell if that was deliberate (i.e. vagueness-as-universalism) or bad screenwriting, or just me as a Brit missing some obvious signifiers. The repellence of that Sunday Times writeup made me want to like it more than I actually did.

the Miami part of the movie was its least convincing

You'd know by default, Alfred, but I kinda liked how it was showing a Miami that was empty. Not deserted, just...quiet, and unlike the media stereotype which is all I've ever known of the area.

http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopoly_fs/1.2581256.1459270695!/img/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/article_750/296williamsl-20010630-10812-jpg.jpg

http://www.awesomelyluvvie.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/DorothyCondoms.gif

As I say!

I've heard it all the way here, back in St. Olaf!

No queer cultural touchstone is safe from a Horny Grandmas ref

In this case, offered merely as a corrective to The Turdcage.

A quick point... there's something significant i haven't seen discussed in the first (major?) scene btwn the 7-year-old boys: the urging by Kevin that Little not "be soft," and the fight/play/wrestling that follows. No one (outside of a clinical context) is allowed to say out loud very often in America that children are sexual beings, but given the future path of these two boys, it seems partly like an act of nascent sexplay.

That plus the behind-closed-doors comparison game.

right, I forgot!

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/2o7V1f7lbk4/hqdefault.jpg

Won Best Kiss at MTV Movie & TV Awards

and Best Handjob

The Edge of Seventeen might have taken that one.

My bro recommended this, so I put it on hold at the library. At the time I was #270 in line. My number came up and I finally watched it a couple of days ago. I would not call it a great film; it had too many flaws for that. But it was just damned refreshing to see a story about being a black man in the USA, told from the perspective of a young black man in a large US city.

Incarceration was just a common fact of life. Drug dealing was a thing that happened down on the corner and drug use was a common problem you worked around the best you could or used to numb the stress. These elements weren't sensationalized, unlike most Hollywood treatments of urban black life. Even the violence was unsensational: mostly taunts, shoves, kicks and punches instead of blazing Uzis.

Oddly enough, the plot elements around being gay weren't particularly compelling, even though that was supposed to be the central theme of the film. For me, the larger subtext was of lives so thwarted, circumscribed and precarious that just surviving another day was a full time job. Being gay seemed like just one more burden in a life that would have been soul-crushing, even without being gay.

Barry Jenkins will direct his adaptation of James Baldwin’s 1974 novel If Beale Street Could Talk. The Hollywood Reporter’s Mia Galuppo notes that it’s “set in ‘70s Harlem and follows engaged couple Fonny and Tish. When Fonny is falsely accused of rape, Tish, who is pregnant, races to find evidence that will prove Fonny's innocence. . . . Jenkins, who has worked closely with the Baldwin estate on the project, wrote the screenplay during the same summer in 2013 when he penned Moonlight.” Jenkins is also currently writing and will direct an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, a limited series for Amazon Studios.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/moonlight-director-barry-jenkins-adapt-james-baldwin-novel-next-movie-1019669

The leads are gorgeous, supporting cast is strong, but If Beale Street mostly a stiff.

I liked most of Beale Street--parts of it, in no small measure because of the score, are beautiful--but didn't care for the detour to Puerto Rico, and thought the last 20 minutes in general meandered.

Just saw a commercial for Beale Street that used "Killing Me Softly." Did I miss that in the film? Not a song I've ever cared for, and it wouldn't be the first commercial that used a song not in the actual film, but if it is, I didn't notice it at all.

I dont remember it either,
Clem.

agree completely alfred

with....?

your review!
I also thought it was a stiff. Too tied to the source material - the structure is exactly the same as the book and its discursive tendencies don't work when copied exactly to film. the book is able to meander, in the film it's just fragmented and rudderless

Of note!

This is a thing we did 🙏🏿

MOONLIGHT
8 x 11 in. / 224 pages
- Forward by Frank Ocean
- Essay by Hilton Als
- Academy Award Acceptance speeches

pic.twitter.com/ubbRSjMShS

— Barry Jenkins (@BarryJenkins) September 26, 2019

by the end, i had forgotten my annoyance at how chiron stumbled across the most sensitive, supportive, and lovely drug dealer ever because i am so tired of protagonists that announce their struggles by simply not speaking when spoken to. at least the movie is self-aware enough to make a joke of it in act 3.

there's something evocative and vivid in the filmmaking, and some charming moments in the 3rd act, but as hard as jenkins tries to make you forget it, it's a play and not a very good one.

chiron stumbled across the most sensitive, supportive, and lovely drug dealer ever

Actually I thought it was more complicated than that, and this was one of the best things about the movie -- that Kevin says to him in the first part of the movie that he can't be soft in the world, he has to show he's hard, and that resonates with what he learnes from Juan, but does it work for Juan? No, Juan's visibly hard and so he gets killed and leaves Teresa alone. When Chiron finally shows he's hard and beats down Tyrell with a chair, that's what sends him to prison, that's what sends him down the path of helpless repetition of inadequate male role model and leaves him a sexless, locked-down fuckup who can't even either rage at or forgive his mother, he's just hard and stuck. And it all starts with Juan.

xyzzz otm: "I like that quietitude about it."