FILM
THE END HAS NO END Reconciling 2024 through cinema BY MICHAEL J. CASEY
T
he call came around 8:30 on a Friday morning. As these things do, it came without presage or pageantry. A friend had died. It happened while he was on a typical bike ride — nothing nefarious, nothing significant, just a simple fall, and that was all. He left behind two small children and a wife. She was the one who called my spouse to let us know that her husband was gone. Then she hung up, and my wife and I went about our day. Four days later, I saw My Old Ass — a thoughtful coming-of-age story that plays by the rules but never feels derivative or stupid. It charmed me, disarmed me,
brought me under its spell and then socked me in the gut. I don’t want to give away the diabolical twist to writer-director Megan Park’s heartfelt story, though you can probably guess through association that My Old Ass has to do with the death of a loved one. It does. But Park constructs it in such a way that I hope my friend, the wife who lives, never sees the movie. It might be too much for her. Hell, it was too much for me to see it when I did. It’s been months, and I still don’t know if I’ve recovered.
EMOTION V. EMPATHY
This will go down as the year I stopped watching stories and started watching people. That might sound simple to you, but it’s been a watershed moment for me. It’s easy to get swept up in movies. The form is inherently kinetic and undeniably exciting. Even when nothing is happening on screen, the mere presence of a camera invites possibilities. And then there’s the narrative. Sometimes, I haven’t a clue where the movie is taking me, and it’s thrilling. Other times, I know exactly where it’s going and can’t wait for it to get there. But now and then, those emotions come at the detriment of empathy. Nickel Boys clarified this. Watching the movie floored me. Here is the story of a Southern reform school more interested in eradication than reformation, operating via racial oppression and abuse, Mikey Madison and Mark Eydelshteyn in Anora. Courtesy: NEON
Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson in Nickel Boys. Courtesy: Amazon MGM Studios
presented with such immediacy that filmmaker RaMell Ross shoots the entire movie from the perspective of his main characters. “This is the Black mother’s worst nightmare,” Ross told me. I spoke to Ross when he was in town to receive the 47th Denver Film Festival’s Excellence in Directing Award. I came to the interview armed with questions about form and theory, his use of first-person cinema in both Nickel Boys and his 2018 documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, his 2019 Film Quarterly essay, “Renew the Encounter” — “Repeat after me: The God of the camera is a colonizer” — but it wasn’t until he said the word “nightmare,” relayed to him by two Black mothers upon seeing the film, that I heard what Nickel Boys was really saying.
ROLE-PLAYING
Cinema can humanize us. It can also distance us. Consider the story of Tuesday: A mother of a terminally ill child tries to cheat Death out of its due and sends the world into chaos. It’s poignant and funny — maybe not ha-ha funny, but you laugh. Writerdirector Daina Oniunas-Pusić knows just about anyone, especially a mother, would sacrifice everything and everyone for just a few more minutes with a loved one. This is what binds the viewer to the narrative and makes the whole Deathas-a-mangy-talking-bird conceit accessible. It certainly worked for me. But the more I think about Tuesday, the more I can’t help but acknowledge the pain and suffering caused by the mother’s act to avoid her own.
Mike Feist, Zendaya and Josh O’Connor in Challengers. Courtesy:
Lola Petticrew and Julia Louis-Dreyfus in Tuesday. Credit: Kevin
Paul Raci, Sean San José, Colman Domingo, Sean “Dino” Johnson
Amazon MGM Studios
Baker / Courtesy: A24
and Mosi Eagle in Sing Sing. Courtesy: A24
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DECEMBER 26, 2024
BOULDER WEEKLY