More Than One Lesson

In 1996, Danny Boyle’s adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s wildly popular novel chronicling the lives of Scottish heroin addicts quickly became one of the highest grossing British films of all-time and an international hit. Trainspotting was accused by many who did not see it of glamorizing drug use. While it was incredibly entertaining and often very funny, its style unflinchingly showed the horrors of heroin addiction without taking a heavy-handed stance about it. If you can watch a character dig into the “worst toilet in Scotland” on his hands and knees, another wake up in a pile of his own excrement, and another dying in squalor of AIDS and come away from that film believing that being a heroin addict is an exciting and glamorous lifestyle then your critical thinking skills are almost certainly broken. While Boyle didn’t back away from the horrors he also didn’t back away from what it is about heroin that creates addicts in the first place. Still, I would imagine that for a teenager, watching Trainspotting would make a far more effective anti-drug teaching tool than anything he or she could learn from D.A.R.E.

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As film lovers we watch different movies for different reasons. Sometimes we need to laugh, sometimes we want to be challenged intellectually; sometimes we’re looking for something with strong emotional resonance. And sometimes we want to see a gigantic gorilla smash things. If you like movies where gigantic gorillas smash things (and why on earth wouldn’t you?) then Kong: Skull Island delivers what you’re looking for in spades.

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For five seasons, Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key tackled any and all topics on their sketch comedy series Key & Peele. Over those 55 episodes, their love and encyclopedic knowledge of film- particularly horror movies- came through in several sketches, so it’s hardly surprising that Peele’s directorial debut is a horror film. What is surprising is that he displays a command and confidence that belies the fact that it is his directorial debut.

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They’re here. The biggest, most important movie awards ceremony on the planet that is named after a person whose name is a palindrome. There are no trophies, no red carpet, but there are Red Robin gift certificates that will arrive in the mail boxes of the winners sometime in the next four to six weeks.* My apologies to everyone from Mad Max: Fury Road last year for the non-existence of Red Robin in Australia. Please contact your local…whatever you call senators there; I can’t be bothered to look it up. I didn’t want them to go to waste so I just sent extra ones to a few of the Carol people. This is w- Wait. Where was I going with this? Oh, yes. The Bob Awards. The winners. They’re here. So read them. If ya wanna.

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In 2001, a relatively unknown 40-year old British comedian named Ricky Gervais burst onto the BBC. As David Brent, the hopelessly oblivious boss on The Office, the character describes himself as “a friend first, a boss second…probably an entertainer third.” Brent’s excruciating mugging, tone-deaf jokes, and attempts to be everybody’s friend, pained his employees and made the audience laugh and cringe in equal measure. Both in the lead role and as the co-writer and co-director of all 14 episodes (it was designed to be that short), Gervais managed to always walk a tightrope without falling off of it. Brent was almost a cartoon character but he remained just believable enough, as did the show, that viewers running across it unaware The Office was a mockumentary could have been forgiven for believing it was real.

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2014’s John Wick was not an ordinary action film. The directorial debut of longtime stunt coordinator and second unit director Chad Stahelski not only presented action in a unique way, it created a fascinating world populated by characters that were intriguing from the moment we met them. Primarily though, it was an action film as a character study of a man who had gotten out of a world seemingly no one gets out of and what happens when returning to it- “Just visiting” as he puts it- is the only choice he has.

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As a film fanatic in my teens and early twenties I took part in the time honored tradition that so many of us do. Waking up at 5:30 AM to watch the Oscar nominations and immediately begin complaining about them. After a few years of this I decided that if I wasn’t happy with the Academy’s choices then I should create my own awards. So I started the imaginatively named…Bob Awards. (It only occurs to me now that had I been named Oscar I’d have had a problem. Bullet dodged. Thanks, Mom and Dad.)

I have been doing these for a little over a decade now but this is the first time I will be sharing the Bob Award nominations as a writer for More Than One Lesson and I am very excited. I really hope you enjoy them. If you don’t like these nominees then by all means create your own movie awards. Go on. Do it! I dare you!… No, really, you’ll feel better. It works for me. (If your name is Bob or Oscar though then I’m so sorry, but you’ll just have to accept these.) Of course I still complain about the Oscar nominations. But slightly less. And I guess that’s something.

I will be back before the Oscars to reveal the winners in not only these categories but several others.

Best Picture
ARRIVAL
FLORENCE FOSTER JENKINS
HELL OR HIGH WATER
LA LA LAND
MIDNIGHT SPECIAL
A MONSTER CALLS
MOONLIGHT
SILENCE
SWISS ARMY MAN
ZOOTOPIA

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Martin Scorsese has never kept his Catholic upbringing a secret. While he has certainly never made Christian films, his lifelong internal struggle of faith has informed his work throughout his now 50 year career as a filmmaker. It is most overt in works such as Mean Streets, The Last Temptation of Christ, and Gangs of New York. But it is such a part of him that his films that don’t have at least a small piece of Christian iconography are notable for the absence of it. He is probably the only mainstream filmmaker of which that can be said. Now with Silence, Scorsese takes an unflinching look into what it means to truly be a follower of Christ under the harshest of circumstances.

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Several times throughout Hidden Figures, one of the film’s three protagonists- African-American women working at NASA in the early 1960s- will walk into a room, and dozens of white co-workers will turn to look, very surprised at who they see. Some of them look skeptical, some alarmed, some distrustful, and others still, are clearly upset. While this could have become a heavy-handed visual to repeat so many times, it quietly becomes an interesting thematic idea which ties into a claim one of the three women makes during the film. The idea of how important it is to be first. This was true of the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union and it was true for the women working for their opportunity to be a part of that race. What these women find is that the first one through the door isn’t always welcome there. The first is often greeted with hostility or incredulity. To be accepted, the first can’t merely be competent. The first has to be great.

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If his first two features are any indicator, Damien Chazelle really wants all of us to love jazz. We may be indifferent to it- or possibly even hate it- now, but with 2014’s Whiplash and now his musical La La Land, Chazelle appears to be making that his life’s work. Whether or not he reaches his ultimate goal, as long as he keeps making films at the level of his first two, he is certainly achieving something special.

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