There are a fair number of movies on my watchlist that came out at the start of the year, meaning they've been available for rental for ages.
But I want to do one better than that. I want to watch them for free.
So I figured, the longer I wait to cross these movies off my list -- I'm looking at you, Palm Trees and Power Lines -- the greater chance there is of them finally arriving on one of my streaming services.
This is especially the case with my white whale, Killers of the Flower Moon, which I know will be streaming for free on AppleTV+, I just don't know when. That represents a $20 difference from the current rental price.
So I've started out 2024 trying to clean up movies that are already available to me, in the hopes of saving a few measly bucks here and there.
Hey, having just spent several paychecks on Christmas presents (or it feels like that anyway), I need to save as many measly bucks as I can.
And so I've started out 2024 with two movies about Black composers, one available on Disney+ and one available on Netflix. (And this just a short time after watching Maestro, another film about a composer/conductor.)
The first on Tuesday night was Chevalier, the story of 18th century composer and virtuoso violinist Joseph Bologne, the bastard son of a French slaveowner in Guadeloupe, who is brought to France as a child after his father dies. (I'm not entirely clear why he was not allowed to stay with his mother, if his father didn't recognize him.) Raised in aristocratic society into becoming a brilliant musician, he gains the notice of Marie Antoinette and is considered a candidate to lead the prestigious Paris Opera. However, his race provides an obstacle at every turn, as we would expect in a society far more white 250 years ago than it is today.
Kelvin Harrison Jr.'s performance in the title role is a curious one, as it resists the possible impulse to make him saintly. Not wanting to make him a needy character who would cower at the feet of this society, eager to accept whatever bread crumbs they will throw his way, director Stephen Williams takes him a bit in the other direction, meaning he is less sympathetic than he should be. He reacts to his life's various disappointments with a sense of entitlement that verges on petulance, and while I suppose this is preferable to groveling, it doesn't particularly ingratiate you to him. This might well be a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation, but the character also has an affair with a married woman and is seen publicly dressing down royalty, so his behavior is a bit brutish no matter who he is or what his background is.
I actually thought the movie was going to be a comedy at the start, since the opening scene involves him going up on stage during a concert by none other than Mozart, challenging Mozart to a violin duel almost as though it were a rap battle. (That's how we would see it in modern times, anyway.) When he wins the crowd over and Mozart storms off stage, Mozart shouts at someone "Who the fuck is that?" I thought this was actually a great start to the film if it was going to take a non-traditional approach to depicting this time period and this subject matter, but that instinct is immediately abandoned, to the film's detriment.
I did note that the film makes an interesting companion piece to Ridley Scott's Napoleon, as it ends on the verge of Marie Antoinette's execution, which is where Scott's film begins. Napoleon is even mentioned in a post script, where I learned that Napoleon reinstituted slavery in the French colonies in 1802. Boo to that.
I followed that up the next night with American Symphony, the latest documentary in Barack and Michelle Obama's deal with Netflix, which is starting to seem Adam Sandler-esque in its duration. This focuses on musician Jon Batiste, who my wife and I came to know as the band leader on Stephen Colbert's show, where we immediately fell in love with him. Batiste's career has soared since then, as he composed the jazz score for Soul, was nominated for 11 Grammys in a single year and conducted the titular symphony at Carnegie Hall, a magnum opus with all sorts of musicians representing all sorts of musical styles and cultural perspectives.
The film's main draw, from an emotional standpoint, is the cancer of his wife Suleika Jaouad, who was diagnosed with leukemia as a young twentysomething and had it return with a vengeance ten years later, when all these amazing things were happening in her husband's career. The film provides a really compelling balance between such highs as Batiste winning five of those 11 Grammys and such lows as Jaouad's return to the hospital for a second bone marrow transplant, and learning that she may have to continue doing chemotherapy indefinitely to keep the cancer away.
Overall it's a really engaging portrait of this relationship, characterized by its touching devotion and mutual support, and of the man's attempt to carve out his place in a musical landscape that predefines what he can and can't do. The film depicts how Batiste is scoffed at for being nominated in a classical category because, apparently, Black people don't make classical music. Then there are hurtful comments after his Grammy wins, when he defeated artists more widely listened to by the mainstream, about how he seems to have come straight out of Pharrell Williams' "Happy" video, and that most people were unfamiliar with his work.
Hopefully this film will make more people familiar with this man faithfully doing his share to make the world a nicer place, and to expand people's conception of what Black musicians are capable. It's a role he understands has been thrust upon him as it is on any Black person, and he's fighting the good fight the whole way.
Now, Killers of the Flower Moon, end this madness and show up on AppleTV+ already.
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