Something to watch tonight: Friday 21 February

High Flying Bird (Soderbergh, 2019)

Before we get into High Flying Bird, I need to explain to new subscribers why this newsletter is called Funerals & Snakes.

In Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (1963), the legendary German director Fritz Lang plays himself – a curmudgeonly version of himself. Lang famously complains about the new fashion for widescreen cinema – Cinemascope, VistaVision and the like – and says that the format is only good for shooting “funerals and snakes” (or snakes and funerals, depending on which translation you get).

There’s not much about the development cinema that Lang didn’t have a hand in. He basically created dystopian science-fiction with Metropolis, the true crime thriller with M and then, after arriving in Hollywood as an emigré from the Nazis, helped invent film noir.

His 1952 Western Rancho Notorious starred Marlene Dietrich and gave the name to my podcast.

Here is Herr Lang (with monocle) in his Berlin apartment in 1934.

A living room to aspire to, I’m sure you’ll agree.

While I was reviewing Soderbergh’s latest, Presence, in the new releases slot last week, I was reminded of his experiments with iPhone cinema but had forgotten that I had actually reviewed one of them for RNZ back in the day.

On this very day in 2019 (21 February) I reviewed High Flying Bird, a drama set in the world of professional basketball:

The results are spectacularly apparent with his first film for Netflix – High Flying Bird – which was shot with an iPhone, a single 12-inch LCD light for illumination and a wheelchair instead of a dolly. It’s not as intensely in-your-face as his first iPhone picture, Unsane which came out in theatres last year, but it does encourage a free-flowing mobility to the camera and multiple set-ups for each scene which might have been tricky with more infrastructure to wrangle. The editor in him is positively giddy with all the extra choices available.

“But what is it about?” I hear you ask (with justification). Firstly, it’s about 90 minutes long which is just about perfect. Secondly, it’s about the African-American experience, especially athletes who sell themselves to white team owners and then lose control over most aspects of their lives in the process. There are obvious parallels with other aspects of African-American history and the film makes sure they are powerfully made.

These are the responsibility of screenwriter Tarell Alvin McCraney who wrote the original play that the Oscar-winner Moonlight was based on. High Flying Bird has the feel of a play, too. The dialogue is zippy and constant and so dense at times it’s not always easy to follow. It has a Sorkin-esque kind of feel about it – that same kind of hyper-articulacy – but Sorkin himself would struggle to approximate the many black voices on offer here with any kind of authority.

André Holland (who played Kevin the short order cook in the final sequence of Moonlight) is Ray Burke, a sports agent with a long list of professional basketball clients. This would normally be a good thing except we join the film in the middle of a lockout – a labour dispute if you will in which the Players Association (in the form of Sonja Sohn from The Wire) is trying to get a bigger cut of a new TV deal from the owners (represented by Kyle MacLachlan) – and nobody gets paid during a lockout.

Burke’s newest client is a rookie named Erick Scott (Melvin Gregg) who hasn’t been on the team long enough to receive a single paycheck and whose naivete has him borrowing money from sharks against the big pay day that’s coming (but nobody knows when).

Something has to give and it is Burke’s gift that he sees a way out of the dispute so his players can get paid again but that he also sees another way forward entirely – one that will restore some personal and professional agency to those same players.

---

---

Where to watch High Flying Bird

Worldwide: Streaming on Netflix