I am gearing up for the Academy Awards, which is coming up this Sunday, so I am trying my best to cram in as many movies as I can before the awards ceremony. To be honest, I haven’t made time to watch all of the movies. I’m still trying to finish up Killers of the Flower Moon, but to be honest, it is really intense and during the first hour and a half I found my stomach getting pretty queasy. But I had to chant Nam-myoho-renge-kyo about how I was feeling after the movie, and I realized that it wasn’t the director’s job to make me feel comfortable. This was a very disturbing movie about the Osage murders, and the murders weren’t pretty, so it would be a pretty big “fuck you” to the Indigenous community if someone watered down the history of the Osage murders. I haven’t read the book Killers of the Flower Moon yet unfortunately, but after watching the first half of the movie it reminded me that is why I need to study history, especially Native American history. I remember we studied about it in history class, but that was several years ago and that class flew by pretty quickly, so by the time I graduated I had forgotten most of what I studied. Also, it’s one thing to read a classroom textbook about white settlers’ exploitation of Indigenous peoples, but the thing about movies is that those images stay with you for a pretty long time. My experience watching Killers of the Flower Moon made me think of when I was in my junior year of college, and the summer before school started, I was reading a lot of reviews about the film 12 Years a Slave. Many people said it was harrowing to watch, and so when my professor put the film on the curriculum for the class to watch, my stomach dropped a little, and during office hours I expressed my reservations about watching the film. I ended up watching the movie after he gave me a very no-nonsense reality check about the movie, and I ended up watching it four times because I wanted to study and analyze the movie. Looking back, I think watching it one time would have sufficed considering my sensitivity threshold when it comes to violence in movies, but as distressing as it was to watch Solomon Northrup’s trauma unfold within the first ten minutes of the movie, from the minute those white men got him drunk and had him shackled in chains to the moment he left the plantation after twelve years of being whipped, prodded, beat, strung up in a tree and called the N-word, the acting was very spot-on and the film score was brilliant, beautiful and gave me chills.
A couple of weeks ago, I did watch Maestro, a Netflix movie that actor Bradley Cooper starred in, directed and produced. Honestly, I cried after watching it. At first, I was ambivalent about watching it because it received a lot of push back from people. Bradley Cooper had to put on prosthetics to look like the Jewish composer, Leonard Bernstein, and considering the history of Hollywood casting non-Jewish actors to play Jewish characters or real-life people in biographical dramas and other movies, I can see why it received some pushback. However, I read somewhere that Leonard Bernstein’s children didn’t mind that Bradley Cooper, who isn’t Jewish, was playing Leonard Bernstein. As someone who loves listening to classical music as much as I love playing it, I really appreciate that they made this movie. I don’t know a lot of movies where classical musicians, conductors or composers are the main characters on the big screen. I haven’t seen Amadeus, but I remember watching TAR with Cate Blanchett and thinking, Oh, man, this is the year for classical music! We’re not just playing on the film score; we’re actually acting! The girl who played Lydia Tar’s love interest in the movie is a real-life cellist named Sophie Kauer, and in general I was just happy to see a film about classical music. During the film Maestro, I remember getting goosebumps when Leonard conducts the orchestra in a performance of “Adagietto” from the composer Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 5. It was a beautiful performance and it really tugged at my heartstrings. I really loved that scene because it reminded me of when I was in my senior year of high school, and my orchestra played the “Adagietto.” It was honestly the highlight of my senior year because it is such a beautiful piece, and it challenged me as a musician, especially because it is a long piece and requires a lot of control when playing it. The cello part has a lot of whole notes, and the piece has a wide variety of sounds and colors, from the soft to the deeply intense. It is also hard to play in tune, and intonation has always been a pitfall of mine when playing the cello, so it really forced me to have a keener ear when working on the piece. As someone who feels intense physical reactions when I hear music, I remember while playing the piece during rehearsals I would often get teary-eyed because it was such a moving piece. The movie Maestro also reminded me of TAR because both of these conductors were members of the LGBTQ community. Of course, Leonard Bernstein was a real person and Lydia Tar was a fictional character, but it was encouraging to see not just representation of classical musicians on screen, but also classical musicians who identified as LGBTQ. I also saw the actor Gideon Glick from The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel in Maestro; he plays Tommy, a young man who Leonard has an affair with. In TAR, Lydia finds herself falling in love with a cellist named Olga, which puts a strain on Lydia’s marriage to her wife, Sharon.
I am currently watching The Holdovers with my family. I really wanted to see this movie because Da’Vine Joy Randolph won several awards for her performance in the movie, and I also really loved the trailer. So far it is a really good movie, and it has some heartfelt moments. Over the weekend I watched an animated feature called Nimona, which stars Eugene Lee Yang of Buzzfeed and The Try Guys, actress Chloe Grace Moretz, and Riz Ahmed. It was a really excellent film about a shapeshifter named Nimona who becomes a sidekick to a knight who is framed for a crime he didn’t commit. Nimona has a sharp wit and also kicks butt. I don’t have the stomach to see Chloe Grace Moretz in her earlier film Kick Ass, but I was at least able to see her kick ass in a PG-rated setting when I watched Nimona. I really resonated with Nimona’s struggle of being different and not feeling like you belong anywhere, and how it can put you in that dark place of despair sometimes because you don’t fit in anywhere and want to be accepted for who you are. I really appreciate the LGBTQ representation in this movie, too.
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