Starting my 2022 movie dump in december.
She Said (Maria Schrader) - I feel this movie wanted to be important. Badly. Like the story on which it is based was important. I feel a movie about investigative journalists should provoke a sense of outrage. Like Spotlight did, or All the President's Men. Two movies who's shadows loom large over She Said. Perhaps She Said loses some of its oomph in the present due to the super saturation of news surrounding Me Too. Perhaps, for now, that sense of outrage is dulled and maybe She Said will be effective in a few years when we can be outraged over all if this anew. Perhaps its that those other two movies attacked the very foundations of entire institutions, institutions in which the public has shown its utmost trust. The kind of trust that Hollyweird and its sleazy gossip mill never had in the first place.She Said fails to ever manufacture any kind of suspense or emotional weight on its own, expecting merely the outrage of its story to accomplish that. It doesn't. It feels flat, despite the many scenes of reporters scurrying across news floors meant to convey otherwise.
TIll (2022, Chinonye Chukwu)- Why does everything look so clean in movies today? Someone's gotta tell me why the streets of 1950's Chicago or the backwoods of Mississippi look like everything's made of fondit. All fresh paint, and scrubbed concrete. Its hard to properly convey a sense of time when everything looks scrubbed for stage. Danielle Deadwyler gives a dedicated central performance as Mamie Till, but the Till's aesthetic artificiality never gives her a chance to truly levitate and I feel they let her down some. The Emmett Till murder stands out as one of the most shocking and vile cases of the Civil Rights era. The real Mamie Till Bradley made sure we would never forget what race hatred and violence did to her son. I don't think this long awaited retelling of her son's murder is headed for a similar fate. This is a movie that badly needed some grit and grime kicked on it, not one second of it feels lived in by real people. A plastic rendition, if you will. Actors on a stage reciting lines for a play.
