'CODA' is the Best Movie of 2021 (So Far)
#140: "CODA," "All My Life," "Field of Dreams," "Untold: Malice in the Palace"
Edition 140:
Hey movie lovers!
As always, you can find a podcast version of this newsletter on Apple or Spotify. Thank you so much for listening and spreading the word!
In this week’s newsletter: I’m so excited you all get to see CODA! Loved that movie at Sundance. This week we’re talking about emotional, sentimental movies. There’s a new rom-com out on HBO Max, and for something old…who isn’t romantic about baseball? Plus that “Malice in the Palace” documentary and in “Trailer Watch,” Denzel Washington directs Michael B. Jordan.
CODA
(AppleTV+)
Let’s get the technicalities out of the way right off the top. CODA is the best movie of the year so far, I stand by that, but under the stipulation that we don’t count the movies that competed in the 2020 awards season. Which is kind of dumb, because I first saw Judas and the Black Messiah, for example, at the (virtual) Sundance Film Festival in March, the same weekend I saw CODA. So on my own personal 2021 rankings list, which goes by the calendar year, I do have Promising Young Woman and Judas ahead of it, and one could easily make an argument for Nomadland or The Father in any order for the top five.
But now you know the rarified air that this movie occupies.
CODA was my favorite movie at the festival, and went on to sweep pretty much every award there it was eligible for, plus the more important prize of a $25 million check from Apple for distribution.
Folks, AppleTV+ is up to something. “Ted Lasso” is massive hit — so much so that when I made a jokingly-disparaging comment about it this week on Twitter I got assaulted with a whole wave of backlash. Apple has Boys State, my No. 1 movie of last year. I’ve really enjoyed “Mythic Quest.” Like 3 different people have told me I have to watch “For All Mankind.” They have “The Morning Show,” the upcoming Jon Stewart show, and they’re getting the streaming rights to Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth starring Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand.
Basically, they’re becoming the tastemaker boutique streamer that Amazon tried so desperately to be until they gave up and started dropping hundreds of millions on “Lord of the Rings” and MGM Studios.
Enough industry mumbo jumbo, let’s talk about why you simply cannot miss this movie when it drops on the service Friday (if you’re reading this, it’s available).
CODA is an acronym for “child of deaf adult,” and this story centers around a 17-year-old girl who can hear perfectly but whose father, mother and brother are all deaf. In a beautiful stroke of narrative complication, our young heroine loves to sing, and has the talent to attract a possible music scholarship to an arts college.
Complicating matters further is the family business, which is operating a fishing boat off the coast of Massachusetts, a system they cannot possibly maintain without the help of someone who can hear.
That’s the sort of awesome premise you can just wind up and let go. It’s a coming-of-age movie, a young romance movie, a family drama, a music movie, and a legitimate tearjerker all wrapped into one well-crafted package.
I was blown away by the authenticity and empathy in the film. The deaf characters are all played by deaf actors, and the movie approaches the deaf community not as a disability but as a worthy subculture.
Lead actress Emilia Jones said in a Sundance Q&A she learned ASL (sign language), singing, fishing, and boat handling for the film, all while putting in one of the best performances I’ve seen from a young actor in a long time. She’s only 19, but she’s charming and talented and takes her work seriously and I’m letting you know now that she’s going to be a massive star.
The production quality here is modest, as was the budget, but the movie gets a lot of mileage out of pointing the camera in directions it doesn’t go for many movies — fishing docks, lower middle class houses, deaf communities, backwoods — and the best compliment I can give is that the production supports and at times even elevates the remarkable storytelling.
The use of sound to alternate point of view between deaf and hearing characters, a technique that proved fruitful in Sound of Metal, is played for maximum emotional impact here. You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll feel like a part of the family by the end.
Coming out of Sundance, all of the high-minded, heartless fuddy duddies critiqued this movie for being too sappy or saccharine. And me, secretly envious of said fuddy duddies, was willing to accept that I may have been swept up in the warm and fuzzies. But in the five months since Sundance this movie has only grown in my estimation, and when I watched the trailer before writing this newsletter to refresh myself my heart was fluttering and my eyes were moist once again.
So I guess what I’m saying is that if you have a heart, you’re going to love this movie.
If you’ve been on the fence about subscribing to AppleTV+, now is the time.
I cannot wait to watch CODA again this weekend.
Something New
All My Life (HBO Max): I promise…I tried. I logged on to HBO Max this week to watch The Suicide Squad, because I felt like I had to have an opinion on the latest comic book brand maintenance exercise. But director James Gunn’s comments on Martin Scorcese had me still so angry that I practiced some self-care and used those 132 minutes doing something I wouldn’t actively hate, once I saw this movie positioned in the adjacent box on the service’s new release scroll.
This is basically a Nicholas Sparks-style weepy romantic comedy, with one key difference. And that difference is the primary reason this movie exists, and the reason why it’s not a great (or even particularly good) movie.
It’s a true story.
Similar to my usual complaint about rock star biopics, this movie is a slave to reverence towards its source material (except in this case, that reverence is much more understandable than, say, protecting Freddie Mercury’s hedonism). Every character is essentially a perfect person, no flaws, and all of the conflict comes externally from factors beyond the characters’ control. That just makes everything less interesting.
This movie also a great example of what budget does for a movie. Every aspect of production is competent but looks…cheap. And everyone knows that the most important part of a rom-com is the casting of the romantic leads. Lead actor Harry Shum Jr. is handsome but really just can’t pull off the complex emotional territory needed here, and Jessica Rothe, who I loved in La La Land (briefly) and Happy Death Day and think is really talented, is from a movie star standpoint basically just a discount Zoey Deutch (who is basically just a discount Emma Stone). There are levels, and this movie is a basement dweller’s version of a potentially lovable rom-com.
(But still better than The Suicide Squad.)
Something Old
Field of Dreams (1989, Peacock): On Thursday, the White Sox and the Yankees played an actual MLB baseball game at a field built into a cornfield in Iowa, just down the road from the filming location of this Kevin Costner classic. I’m hoping and assuming you’ve seen it before. In the lead-up to the game, clips of this movie have been circulating everywhere I look. And as long as we’re talking about CODA and movies that are over-the-top sentimental in a way that you simply cannot resist, we have to honor the greatest example of all time. Plus, it’s a movie that you could rewatch 10 times, 100 times, 1000 times and enjoy/probably tear up every time.
(And fun fact, did you know a teenage Matt Damon was an uncredited background fan during the Fenway Park scene?)
Something to Stream
Untold: Malice in the Palace (Netflix): The 2004 brawl between the Indiana Pacers and NBA fans in Detroit has long been the juiciest story for a sports documentary. And now it’s here, with a tidy recap of the pressure cooker that led to the explosive events and some never-before-seen footage of the riot-like chaos that was going on in the arena as the brawl unfolded.
But this documentary is just as interested in the larger cultural discussion of racism that took place after the brawl, when nearly every prominent media personality immediately and entirely blamed the events on the “thugs” or “thug mentality” of Pacers players and NBA players more broadly.
It’s a fascinating hour of documentary, even if it begins to expose itself in the final minutes as less of a societal critique and more of a personal revenge play from Jermaine O’Neal, who produced the documentary and inserts himself as the primary victim of the unfair treatment. That angle is harder for me to accept, considering he made over $167 million during his 19-year NBA career.
Trailer Watch: A Journal for Jordan
The craziest thing about this fairly conventional weepy drama is not that it’s being directed by Denzel Washington, but that the lead part is such a classic Denzel Washington role that it appears he’s told star Michael B. Jordan to literally do a Denzel Washington impression the entire time during the movie.
If you close your eyes during lines of voice over in this trailer, I doubt you’ll be able to tell if it’s MBJ talking or a young Denzel. Crazy. It’s a sign of the times that Denzel, just a couple years removed from playing “The Equalizer” again, has officially moved into an elder statesman phase of his career — which isn’t a concession, mind you. He’s staring in Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth this year and will no doubt be at the center of awards conversation for it.