Zootopia (2016)

On the surface, it is an animated buddy cop comedy (helmed by a strong, dominant female lead), but there is so much more to it. Zootopia is a brilliant allegory that is funny, relevant, and witty. Predators and prey live together in harmony, or so they believe. But stereotyping and discrimination run abound. It is not a perfect analogy to the real world. Nor can it be expected to capture all of the complexities and intricacies of our society. But Disney creates its own world with its own imperfections, a utopia that cannot reach the high bar it sets for itself. It is very thoughtful and thought provoking. It preaches a message of tolerance that falls upon American ears that need to hear it. But the message is never too blatant--it is balanced well with genuinely funny jokes (including references to The Godfather and Breaking Bad) and modern animation. 

The Tonys 2016

Every once in a while, a cultural phenomenon takes Broadway by storm. Hamilton follows in the footsteps of The Book of Mormon and The Producers and Rent, though I'm not sure if those are even proper comparisons for the groundbreaking musical. Already with a Pulitzer, the hip hop history play is the hottest ticket in town. Just how many awards will it win? The record of 12 was set by the Producers. Out of 16 nominations, Hamilton is up for 13 unique awards, all of the awards for which it was eligible. Many are predicting that Hamilton is a lock in 7 categories. Personally, I think Hamilton will tie the record, losing just the Lead Actress in a Musical Tony. James Corden, a Tony winner himself for One Man, Two Guvnors, is hosting. He did a Carpool Karaoke segment with Lin Manuel Miranda, Audra MacDonald, Jane Krakowski and Jesse Tyler Ferguson already for his own show. I think he will do a Crosswalk the Musical segment for the Tonys (I'm hoping for In the Heights on an actual street in Washington Heights). Full disclosure, the only eligible show I have seen is On Your Feet, which is up for 1 Tony for choreography.

Best Play
Will win: The Humans
Watch out for: Eclipsed

Best Musical
Will win: Hamilton

Best Book of a Musical
Will win: Lin Manuel Miranda (Hamilton)

Best Musical Score
Will win: Lin Manuel Miranda (Hamilton)

Best Revival of a Play
Will win: A View From the Bridge
Watch out for: Long Day's Journey into Night

Best Revival of a Musical
Will win: She Loves Me
Watch out for: The Color Purple

Best Actor in a Play
Will win: Frank Langella (The Father)
Watch out for: Mark Strong (A View from the Bridge)

Best Actress in a Play
Will win: Jessica Lange (Long Day's Journey into Night)
Watch out for: Michelle Williams (Blackbird)

Best Actor in a Musical
Will win: Leslie Odom Jr (Hamilton)
Watch out for: Lin Manuel Miranda (Hamilton)
Unless they split: Danny Burstein (Fiddler on the Roof)

Best Actress in a Musical-- Hamilton's Loss
Will win: Cynthia Erivo (The Color Purple)
Watch out for: Phillipa Soo (Hamilton)

Best Featured Actor in a Play
Will win: Michael Shannon (Long Day's Journey into Night)
Watch out for: Reed Birney (The Humans)

Best Featured Actress in a Play
Will win: Jayne Houdyshell (The Humans)
Watch out for: Andrea Martin (Noises Off)

Best Featured Actor in a Musical
Will win: Daveed Diggs (Hamilton)
Watch out for: Jonathan Groff (Hamilton)

Best Featured Actress in a Musical
Will win: Renee Elise Goldsberry (Hamilton)
Watch out for: Jane Krakowski (She Loves Me)

Best Director of a Play
Will win: Ivo van Hove (A View from the Bridge)
Watch out for: Joe Mantello (The Humans)

Best Director of a Musical
Will win: Thomas Kail (Hamilton)

Best Choreography
Will win: Hamilton
Watch out for: Shuffle Along

Best Orchestrations
Will win: Alex Lacamoire (Hamilton)

Best Scenic Design of a Play
Will win: The Humans
Watch out for: Therese Raquin

Best Scenic Design of a Musical
Will win: Hamilton
Watch out for: She Loves Me

Best Costume Design of a Play
Will win: King Charles III
Watch out for: Eclipsed

Best Costume Design of a Musical
Will win: Hamilton
Watch out for: Shuffle Along

Best Lighting Design of a Play
Will win: The Humans
Watch out for: The Crucible

Best Lighting Design of a Musical
Will win: Hamilton
Watch out for: American Psycho

Update: 19/24 categories. Hamilton came away with eleven awards, falling just short of the record 12 set by the Producers. But to be fair, the Producers won a sound award that no longer exists. Hamilton lost just two races, one to The Color Purple and one to She Loves Me. 

Beyonce: The Formation World Tour (2016)

Beyonce is the undisputed Queen. She slays for two hours. Now 19 years into her career, she has climbed to the top of the industry and can do no wrong. She unapologetically ("I Ain't Sorry") embraces her femininity, her sexuality, and her blackness. Her unprecedented visual album Lemonade is visually striking and provokes questions about race, gender, marriage and strength in the face of infidelity. It is an admirable accomplishment, but I am not sure all of these complex ideas shine through in her concert. The movie was such a force that it is perhaps too much to ask for a concert to convey such deep messages. But this is not to detract from what Beyonce does well in concert.

What is abundantly clear is the power of womanhood. Beyonce leads her all-female backup dancers in a militant march. In solidarity, they support Beyonce in mesmerizing, overtly sexualized dance. They project the a silhouette of Beyonce's figure perched atop a chair against the audience. The dance style is characterized by sharp, bold movements and Beyonce's ferocity comes through most in the dance sequences. I would say she dances as much as she sings, especially in the first half while she has energy. Luckily, she is a good dancer. The lighting actually detracts from the dance, blinding the audience and obscuring the dance, which is the strongest aspect of the concert.

The main set piece is an enormous LED box that revolves and splits down the middle. Clips of Lemonade are shown on all four sides. They keep the audience engaged during Beyonce's many costume changes. The stage is otherwise empty. The band is nowhere to be seen, save for a drummer and a bassist. The backup singers are in the shadows. It's really not about the music--dance is the showcase.

The most stunning part of the show is the final set of songs. The thin, long runway that bridges the main stage to the smaller platform out in the audience is revealed to be a conveyor belt. And that smaller platform reveals a shallow pool of water in which they dance clad in white and raise hell. Wet and alive, Beyonce slays "Freedom" and Destiny's Child's "Survivor."

After her performance at the Superbowl earlier this year, SNL aired a skit in which white people discover (much to their surprise) that Beyonce is black. It's funny because there is some truth behind it. There were more white people in the audience than I was expecting. New York is perhaps not a good representation of white America, but I have a hard time believing that middle America would enjoy DJ Khaled's hour long opening featuring a slew of names I was only vaguely familiar with. Each of them only rapped part of one song (none of which I knew) on a very small section of stage. I didn't think I was that out of touch with hip hop, but I was wrong. Make no mistake--this concert experience isn't about what fans want or are familiar with. It is about embracing the black experience. Lemonade represents a thematic evolution in Beyonce's music that reflects both our time and her ability to do whatever she wants. She is the Queen and she doesn't need to worry about what anyone else thinks.

PS. I thought I was much more familiar with Beyonce's music than I actually am. I think I recognized less than 50% of the songs she performed, many of which were just partial songs. Nonetheless, Beyonce's performance at Citi Field was a religious experience. Did Jay Z cheat? Maybe, but at the end of the day it doesn't matter. What matters is this story gave Beyonce a vehicle to project her strength as a black woman.

The Long Night of Francisco Sanctis (La Larga Noche de Francisco Sanctis) (2016)

A Long Look at the Dirty War (For Those Familiar With It)

            Based on a novel of the same name by Humberto Constantini, The Long Night of Francisco Sanctis (La Larga Noche de Francisco Sanctis) runs just a brief seventy-eight minutes yet it feels much too long. It would have made an excellent short film, but it makes for a generally slow feature film.

            First-time directors Andrea Testa and Francisco Marquez drag out a single tension-filled day in the life of a middle-class worker living a quiet life in Buenos Aires. The opening scene expertly shows (and refrains from “telling” at any point in the film) the audience everything to know about the daily life of Francisco Sanctis, portrayed by Diego Velazquez. In a single take with a still camera, Sanctis and his wife hurry to prepare breakfast for their two children. The four of them barely fit in the cramped kitchen, let alone within the frame. Like a typical family, they are running late in their morning routine. The children complain like children do, and Sanctis talks about his anticipated upcoming promotion like a proud breadwinner does. It is evident that this average man lives a mundane life. The drama and impetus of the plot is whether Sanctis will break out of this banal lifestyle.

            He is soon given such an opportunity when an old acquaintance, Elena, phones him at work ostensibly to talk about a poem he wrote in college.  This phone call misled me, as I assumed this poem was about love and this call about an affair. The dialogue with his co-workers hint at an affair as well. After all, extramarital sex is seemingly the most common theme in the films screened at Cannes this year.  But this film was one of just a few I saw that contained no sex. Rather, this was a suspenseful encounter about politics, though the average American viewer would not have realized it. For this reason especially, this arthouse feature is not immediately accessible to a general audience below a certain age.

            The first thing you need to know is that the film takes place in 1977 under the rule of a brutal military junta, right in the midst of the Dirty War. The protagonist uses pay phones several times, but the viewer is never explicitly told what year the film takes place. Perhaps the old fashioned costumes and mustache might suggest that the film takes place in the 1970s, but it was very difficult to confirm my suspicions about the context of the plot otherwise. Testa and Marquez make a very bold assumption that the audience is familiar with the Dirty War. While that may be true of Argentinian audiences, and even Western audiences who lived through it, the typical young American viewer is not well versed in the Dirty War. I can say with certainty that the Dirty War is not included in the American high school history curriculum. Thousands of Argentinians who were thought to oppose the military dictatorship were disappeared, often never heard from again. They were thrown into prisons and flung into the ocean from helicopters left to drown. In this period of terror and uncertainty, everyone was scared and no one could be trusted for they could be spies of the government.

 The only reason I was familiar with it (and was able to form a hypothesis about the plot while watching it) was because I have seen The Official Story (La Historia Oficial), one of the first films released internationally about the Dirty War, in which it is revealed that children of the disappeared were given to families with close ties to the military for adoption. Without the necessary background knowledge, the viewer is left completely in the dark, figuratively and literally. And even with this knowledge, I could only make assumptions as the dialogue is necessarily cautious and consequently vague. This vagueness feeds suspenseful mystery. Viewers clamoring for explicit answers never get them as the mystery lingers past the end credits.

            There were a few specific words that tipped me off, but they could have easily been missed. The first was the name of the military branch that Elena’s husband works for, which sounded aerial in nature, implying death flights (vuelos de la muerte). The second was the use of the word “taken” though the more common term in the context of the Dirty War, “disappeared” (desaparecidos), is never used and the mysterious “they” is never specified. Lastly, Sanctis’s left-leaning poem uses the word “comrade,” revealing his past political activism as a student and providing a motive for why he might be interested in helping Elena warn two people in imminent danger, though Sanctis is unsure just how imminent, adding to the suspense. Talking about the Dirty War without coming right out and being explicit is a means of testifying. If we are to read this film as a primary source on contemporary Argentina, why this film had to be made at this point in time, such testimony is necessary for national healing. It is impressive that these ideas could be conveyed with minimal dialogue, evidence of strong storytelling ability. It is not easy to read between the lines but it is quite rewarding.

            The opening scene in the kitchen probably has more dialogue than any other scene in the film. It is used to introduce the viewer to the ordinary Sanctis family which is implicitly put at risk.  If Sanctis acts on behalf of the strangers and gets caught, he will be disappeared, and his wife probably would be too. And yet if he does nothing, the strangers will surely die as a result of his inaction. It is an impossible moral dilemma. The rest of the movie is characterized by long silences, filled only with ambient street noises, though even those are infrequent in the empty streets of suburban Buenos Aires in the middle of the night. There is no score to fill these silences either, forcing the viewer to simply marinade in the silence of an uneventful night—and that is why the film feels so long, and how it so masterfully builds suspense.

            The reason for the excruciating silence is that everyone is scared. Everyone tries to keep to themselves, because it is not worth the risk of engaging with a stranger who might betray you. An extended scene on a bus gives each of the eight passengers a solid fifteen seconds each to themselves. Each individual is terrified, doing nothing but sitting silently afraid.  Make no mistake—it is suspenseful but you must be prepared for a very slow burning film. The directors succeed in creating this atmosphere of fear that will compel those in the audience who can understand the tension. The uncertainty is unsettling, disquieting. The haunting mystery of the unknown nags at you incessantly. I think that is why despite my slight confusion the movie lingered with me.

The scenery is extremely dark, with just street lamps periodically providing a slight orange tint. This fosters a bleak atmosphere building suspense and quiet anticipation.  The viewer feels the tension and fear that Sanctis does, not knowing what or who may be lurking around the corner or in the shadows. Maybe I have just seen too many scary movies during the Festival, but the dark quiet alleyways made me shiver. Testa and Marquez convey the horror that the Dirty War was by using elements of the horror genre. Thankfully, no one ever does jump out from the shadows, but it is the suspense that something could take you by surprise that keeps the viewer scared.  

Unlike other films about the Dirty War that focus on the disappeared themselves, Testa and Marquez look at a man who is uninvolved in politics.  This is a study in the dilemma ordinary Argentinians simply trying to get through life faced on a daily basis. Sanctis faces a tough situation, one that the viewer as an ordinary person can sympathize with. We suffer along with Sanctis and question our own convictions asking what we would do in his situation. He did not ask to be dragged into this dangerous situation and yet he cannot simply do nothing. He struggles with this internal struggle as he meanders through the city. He perhaps wavers a little more than is necessary to convey the same message. The lack of dialogue hinders the viewer from getting inside Sanctis’s thought process, which would have made for some more eventful scenes. The viewer is left to simply read Velazquez’s facial expressions. A monologue would have been helpful though understandably out of character.  But if you have a family, maybe you do not exactly need Sanctis to spell out his dilemma. The viewer is (probably intentionally) forced to look inside himself to transpose his own thought process to Sanctis. Nonetheless, I think the message is clear that the dark reality of politics is inescapable no matter how far removed one may wish to be from conflict. We can comprehend the horror on a personal level because ordinary viewers can plausibly place themselves in Sanctis’s ordinary shoes. The viewer may have no stake in politics, but neither did Sanctis. And that is what is so scary about this situation, if you can comprehend it. 

X-Men: Apocalypse (2016)

What I love about the X-Men series is the complex discussion of politics and the revisionist history making for an engaging story. This movie doesn't do that. Instead, like a typical superhero movie, it delves into mythology, which is less interesting. And X-Men has gotten extraordinarily confusing in terms of timeline. How could this big huge Apocalypse thing have happened in the 80s and we never heard about it in the original trilogy? There is the welcome re-insertion of Jean Grey (Sophie Turner from Game of Thrones!), Nightcrawler, Storm (who is apparently Egyptian now?) and Cyclops, but Angel is a puzzle. Is this a different Angel than the one from the original trilogy? Because his appearance in this film does not fit in with his role in the original. There is a small cameo by Wolverine, which is bizarre because Wolverine usually has a bigger part in X-Men. And if he wasn't going to have a real role, we didn't need the two minutes. The after-credits scene also alluded to something related to Wolverine, probably to connect this to his next standalone movie. The film's greatest strength is fitting Jean Grey's development back into the narrative, seeing as she is one of the most important mutants.  Usually, one of the high points is the Magneto-Professor X dynamic, but I don't think they got enough scenes together this film. And there was really nothing added to their relationship in this story line. Hopefully, the next X-Men movie returns to its roots.

The Taming of the Shrew (The Public Theater) (2016)

This all-female production of a rather misogynistic play was interesting, but certainly strange. It is a twist to make outdated Elizabethan gender roles tolerable and accessible to a modern audience. Janet McTeer as Petrucchio is excellent. She plays a man well. And Cush Jumbo is versatile as Katherina both unruly and tamed. But what was weirdest about this production is the transposition of the Italian-set play to America, specifically Texas. They don't change any of the place names, but the costumes include cowboy hats and leather jackets and plaid. The set looks carnival themed. They read Shakespeare with a twang. Shakespeare is meant to be read with a British accent.

There is an inexplicable beauty pageant in the beginning and end of the play that definitely wasn't written by Shakespeare. It is used to cleverly jab Donald Trump. And maybe a knock at Steve Harvey too? But I'm not entirely sure where it fits into the play. The production is supposed to move away from Shakespeare's original reading of gender stereotypes, but a pageant seems to reinforce them. Unless it's all just to set up the very last moment when tamed Katherina has the title stripped away from her. Maybe that is the intention. I don't know, but it's kind of bizarre.

The Good Wife (2009-16)

The Good Wife has consistently been one of the best shows on TV. In the era of cable television, The Good Wife has been the lone standout on the networks, delivering 23 episodes of high quality drama per season. It was procedural without ever feeling procedural. It was definitely the best legal drama, showing audiences different types of courts, a cast of quirky judges and lawyers, and interesting and innovative interpretations of the law. It glorifies the legal profession and, as an aspiring lawyer, inspires. Apart from the law, the politics was always engaging, especially behind the scenes of the campaign. The show always did a good job reflecting reality, bringing in stories from the current newspapers, like the brilliant NSA arc. Plus the writing was funny. It was overall an enjoyable show to watch--a show I would actually look forward to watching every week.

I didn't really like the finale.  It's one thing to leave us with uncertainty, but doesn't Alicia deserve some finality? Don't we deserve to know that she can be happy? I will always remember Josh Charles's last episode, a shocking moment coming out of left field in the middle of an episode in the middle of one of the best seasons, so we were given plenty of time to process what we'd just seen.

Not only was the main cast excellent, including Emmy winners Julianna Margulies and Archie Panjabi and my favorite Alan Cumming, but the recurring guest cast was phenomenal and memorable as well. Michael J. Fox and Carrie Preston are particular standouts. But each season had several new names worthy of praise. It was a show full of strong female characters played by strong female actors. Julianna Margulies will forever be known for playing The Good Wife. The show's title is a bit of a misnomer. The show quickly became so much more than a show about a woman who stood by her man. She was defined by her own accomplishments and prowess, never merely by her role as a wife.