Three Films Make A Post: Band Together

Bandslam (2009): In part, Todd Graff’s film is of course your typical teen music comedy drama with a bit of a conventional streak, but since I’m not usually complaining about this sort of thing when it comes to other genres, it would be weird to suddenly start with that sort of thing here. Particularly since the film may be typical to some degree, it’s also a great example of the form, certainly not lacking in imagination on how to fill out the genre format it inhabits, and charming as a level 20 bard. Its portrayal of a certain type of teenage alienation isn’t quite as paper-thin as it seems, either, it’s just treating those parts of its tale with a very light hand, so it can enable the proper hopeful happy ending where most everything is set right with the world without needing to pretend the world is perfect.

You Were Never Really Here (2017): From a bit of a different planet comes the great Lynne Ramsay’s movie about a mercenary vigilante (and PTSD sufferer) portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix in an un-showy and therefore brilliant mood, who is specialized in hitting people with a hammer while finding kidnapped girls. The film’s really not interested at all in fulfilling any genre expectations, instead using the loose genre framework to draw a portray of a deeply alienated personality in a way that must be consciously chosen to alienate most viewers at least a little. The film’s approach is somewhere between the dreamlike and the oblique, editing out actions and only showing us their consequences, divorcing acts from those committing them. The film’s not called like it’s called by chance or committee.

Burning aka 버닝 (2018): Speaking of alienation, that’s a core concern of Lee Chang-dong’s film, too. Here, though, like in many South Korean films made in the second half of the 2010s, it’s an alienation mainly caused by class divides and by poverty and all the pains and indignities and deepening of certain personal traumas and flaws that come with it. This is also a pretty oblique film, slowly exploring the world of its main characters, circling themes and ideas through careful, detailed observation but never quite turning into the thriller some of its plot elements suggest,  keeping a distanced and observant poise throughout. It also teaches that you can’t really be an effective thriller protagonist when you call yourself a writer of fiction but really don’t get when somebody talks to you in metaphors, or that it is a very bad sign when (the same) somebody tells you he has never cried in his life and doesn’t know if he’d recognize sadness if he felt it.


But seriously, it’s a great film if you don’t go in expecting it to eventually turn into a tight South Korean thriller and are fine with it staying the slow but thematically rich character and social portrait it starts as.