Wednesday, September 20, 2017

Mother!

Maybe I’m just officially a part of the older generation but I remember when Boyz in da Hood first came out in the theater and it reminding me, along with every other Black male out there, that if you had a kid before you graduated from high school that your life was basically over! It didn’t matter how smart or how talented you were, society would never fully accept you simply for the fact that you fell right into the stereotype that had slowly evolved over the previous decades. Look at Ricky from that movie, even though he was a badass football player who ended up getting a full ride at USC, he still wound up getting shot in an alley while holding some powdered sugar donuts and a lottery scratch-off ticket. And why was that you ask? Because he had a kid! At least that’s what I took away from it.

But now, in every hip hop song that’s come out the past five years or so, every male rapper out there and their female RnB counterpart talks about either planting seeds in someone or getting seeds planted in them! What in the world happened? When did it become so cool to not pull out? Granted I haven’t seen a porn in quite some time but this can’t be the latest hotness? "Oh, I’m gonna explode so hard inside of you!" I refuse to accept this! Somewhere out there Ron Jeremy is rolling in his fried chicken batter!

Well hip hop may have finally jumped the shark as Russian weirdo Darren Aronofsky seems to have been affected by its charms. In his latest film, he examines the May December marriage between Javier Bardem and Jennifer Lawrence. And in it, you are immediately introduced to what’s at the core of their marital issues. Bardem is a poet who is going through the worst possible writer’s block imaginable meanwhile Lawrence’s entire life seems to be centered on supporting and appeasing him. It doesn’t matter how much patience or love she shows, nothing seems to inspire him, not even the fact that his wife is singlehandedly rebuilding his childhood home from the ground up after it burned to the nothing but ashes.

But one night a stranger in the form of Ed Harris shows up at their random house in the country mistaking it for a bed and breakfast. Bardem immediately takes a liking to him and invites him to stay the night given the fact that it’s so late and he’s obviously lost. The problem however, just to name one, is that he doesn’t ask his wife if it’s ok with her and it’s soon after this that Harris starts ignoring some of her rules for the house; like no smoking inside. Now I know that on the surface that sounds like small potatoes but things start to escalate the second his wife shows up the next day. Not only does she not respect Lawrence’s rules but she also seems to have little respect for her or her privacy. Imagine if your drunk mother in law showed up to your house and had no filter; well that’s Michelle Pfeiffer (Harris’s wife) to a tee.

Now again, at first these seem like they’re just slight annoyances but things soon get out of hand the second this weird couple’s sons randomly show up and someone gets murdered. And yet even after all of this, it still isn’t enough for Bardem to ask the couple to leave. It instead somehow oddly enough triggers a passion inside of him that was nonexistent to this point and he winds up impregnating Lawrence. And it’s at this point that he once again finds the inspiration to write and what he writes is apparently good. So naturally things will get better at this point, right? Well if you thought that then you clearly have never seen an Aronofsky film.

First let me say that the first two acts were tough for me to sit through as a Black man because anyone who has grown up in a household with a Black woman knows that this film would have been over within the first 20 minutes. The second Ed Harris disrespected her, she would’ve cussed him sideways and kicked him out along with Bardem. And if Bardem had the audacity to say anything back, he would’ve been met with a swift right to the jaw and a not so friendly reminder that he was a shitty writer! "I’m up in here cooking these biscuits every day and your sorry ass can’t even write a Jack be nimble, Jack be quick? I knew I should’ve married Jerome with the good benefits! "

But once I finally got past that, I settled into the third act only to be immediately taken out again. Now anyone who knows me knows that I love artsy flicks but I hate when people are artsy for the sake of being artsy. Look, if your weirdness naturally comes out (see Thom Yorke dancing during Radiohead shows) I’m all for it but when it’s forced, it’s obvious that you’re just trying to get laid by French models who are too dumb to truly understand what’s going on. I get the visual chaos that ensues in the third act, and to be honest with you, some of it worked, but ultimately there was just too much nonsense in it that played absolutely no role in telling the story or expressing the theme behind this visual and visceral experience.

The film’s crowning moment occurs when Lawrence finally has the baby and there’s a stare off between her and Bardem. So much is said about their relationship in this moment that it honestly stands out way more than the infamous and supposedly unforgettable scene that immediately follows it. Everyone talks about that scene but in my opinion, everything that follows the stare down is just filler at that point, but I guess you have to wrap the film up in some way.

In the end, the acting is on point and the overall theme of the film is a clever take on today’s society but you just have to sift through too much trash to get to the payoff. I give this film a rating of barely FRESH!
 

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