Tag Archives: Kelvin Harrison Jr

The Photograph

Reporter Michael Block (LaKeith Stanfield) flies to New Orleans to interview Isaac (Rob Morgan) about his first love, celebrated photographer Christina Eames (Chanté Adams), recently deceased. Back home in Manhattan, Michael follows up with an interview with her daughter, Mae (Issa Rae). Mae is a successful art curator, and doing a retrospective on her mother’s work is a way to get in touch with her grief; the only love that Christina could express was that for her work. Mae and Michael pool their resources to better understand the enigmatic artist, but after a while it’s pretty clear that this is just an excuse to spend more time together. Mae and Michael are falling for each other.

They don’t intend to, of course – she’s focused on her career, he’s about to move to London – but when has intention ever stopped cupid’s arrow? So we’re really getting two love stories for the price of one – young Christina and Isaac before she moved away to pursue her passion, and Mae and Michael, who are in the middle of pursuing theirs.

Writer-director Stella Meghie doesn’t quite figure out how to co-mingle the two stories satisfactorily, but the chemistry between Rae and Stanfield is so electric it almost doesn’t matter. Issa Rae was of course recently seen dazzling in The Lovebirds, and in The Photograph she proves that wasn’t a one-off; 2020 is the year of Issa Rae, and we can only hope that 2021 will be too.

Meghie’s love story is modern and grown-up: sensitive, vulnerable, unapologetically sexual. Rae and Stanfield have an easy and smart flirtation that draws us in too, rather intimately, as if we’re rooting for our own friends to finally find the love they deserve. Of course, adult love stories make one thing obvious: finding love is the easy part. Keeping love, maintaining love, nurturing love, sacrificing for love – those are the difficult, unglamourous things often left out, simply brushed under the rug with the mother of all euphemisms, “happily ever after.”

The High Note

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Grace Davis (Tracee Ellis Ross) is a mega music star. She’s touring the world, selling out stadiums, and she’s not slowing down. But she’s not recording new music, either – not in a decade. She’s a middle-aged woman of colour, not exactly the stuff of 2020’s Billboard #1 artists, as her manager (Ice Cube) and label guys keep not-so-gently reminding her. The safe bet is to keep playing those same beloved songs to her ever-fervent fans, maybe do a nice, safe Vegas residency, and every so often repackage those hits into a “new” greatest hits album. Grace Davis is a fictional star but I’m sure these credentials are reminding you of more than one of yesterday’s top recording artists. Maybe even of Tracee Ellis Ross’s own mama, Ms. Diana Ross.

Grace’s personal assistant Maggie (Dakota Johnson) has been fetching her green juice and dry cleaning thanklessly for the past 3 years. Maggie keeps hoping her role will be a stepping stone to where she’d actually want to be – a producer – but not only is Grace not recording music, she’s adamant that Maggie stay in her lane. So when Maggie bumps into David (Kelvin Harrison, Jr) on an errand for Grace, she’s pretty open to following her dream in another direction. David’s playing the grocery store’s parking lot, but his talent is legit so she fudges the details and convinces him to let her produce his album.

Does the moonlighting go well? It would be a crummy movie if everyone just lived happily ever after forevermore. There’s going to be some major bumps. Ellis Ross is terrific as Grace, but she’s definitely not just channeling her mother. She’s made Grace the hardest of things: a pop icon, and an actual woman. She’s worried about staying relevant, about aging, about work-life balance, about being the only woman in a room full of men trying to determine her future. Meanwhile, Maggie is trying to break into a male-dominated field that tries to discourage her by having her fetch coffee. Thematically, this film is the perfect follow-up for director Nisha Ganatra, who gave us Late Night last year.

The Dakota Johnson arc is a little pat, a little too rom-commy; The High Note actually shines when Ross is on screen stealing scenes. I almost wish we could have just stayed with her and lived in her skin, a true testament to Ross and the layered character she crafts. Still, the ensemble is talented, and if at times the script veers toward formulaic, the film is glossy, the songs are catchy, and Ross is indeed a star.

Waves

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This is my business card. I’m showing it to you today because this is the review that’s going to get my critic card revoked. You’re going to ask to see it, and you’re going to rip it up.

I considered seeing Waves at TIFF but couldn’t make it work and wasn’t that sad about it until the buzz started going around the festival that it was good. That it was this year’s Moonlight. Damn.

But no worries, these movies hit theatres eventually and I recently made my acquaintance with it. Waves, how do you do?

It’s about an overachieving suburban family – a mom, a dad, two kids – but particularly about golden boy Tyler (Kelvin Harrison Jr), a hard-working student athlete who excels socially and academically, at home and at school. He has a girlfriend, a part-time job working for his father, skill with the piano, power on the wrestling mat. He trains faithfully with his loving but domineering father, Ronald (Sterling K Brown). He is loving toward his little sister Emily (Taylor Russell) and mother Catharine (Renée Elise Goldsberry). But nobody makes a movie about a good life that stays good.

The truth is, Waves keeps me at arm’s length from the get-go, the camera spinning panoramically inside a car, my stomach lurching. The teenagers inside are idiotic, driving so distractedly I brace myself for the an accident that never comes. But try telling that to my nervous system. I watch the film on tenter hooks; never has a film so quickly and so fully established a sense of foreboding. I cannot relax. Tyler’s life looks perfect, but perfection has a habit of being fleeting. You’re sure that something is coming, something bad, but what? Slowly things start to cave in: riffs between he and his father, a fight with his girlfriend, an injury in the ring. Tyler internalizes it all, self-medicates, keeps to himself. Surely something’s about to give. And as awful as it is, it’s almost a relief when it does. I’ve never been kept on the edge of tachycardia at a non-horror film before. But as I allow my body to relax, my blood pressure to fall back into the safe zone, I wonder if I can possibly claim to have liked the film when it was so hard to watch. It was interesting though – well told, well acted. Beautiful, really, and thoughtful. And just as I rise to my feet to head home, the screen begins to tell another story. And I begin to lose my mind.

It feels like we should be done, but we’re not. We’re starting a second chapter, this one about Tyler’s little sister, Emily. Her family has ruptured, is wounded. She isolates herself and you start to dread her following in her brother’s footsteps when she is “saved” by meeting a boy, Luke (Lucas Hedges). Witnessing Luke lose his estranged father to cancer gives Emily a new perspective on family, but I had little tolerance for it. The first story felt whole and complete to me; now I felt duped. I resented this second story for keeping me in my seat after I had so triumphantly survived sustained angina. I could only survive this new onslaught by whispering to Sean about manatee poop (somewhat topical) and taking long, meandering pee breaks (chicka-cherry cola) after which I’d return reluctantly to the theatre 10 minutes later and Sean would lean over and fill me in: “They went fishing.” Oh the agony.

There’s the agony the film is causing me, and the agony I’m causing myself, beating myself up for praying for the end of a film I just can’t like despite its being universally, critically praised. It’s an embarrassing time for me, embarrassing to have preferred a Jumanji sequel to this Oscar bait. But I just can’t. I’m sorry guys, but I just can’t.