Thursday, April 16, 2020 — 5
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
NETFLIX
FILM REVIEW
Netflix has long been an excellent source
of
cheesy
rom-coms,
those
delightful
90-minute movies that you can watch
all the way through while half paying
attention to something else and still feel
the satisfaction of a feel-good ending and
a dramatic kiss. With “Love Wedding
Repeat,” Netflix has delivered another one
of these movies, perfect for watching late at
night when you don’t
want to think much
about
what
you’re
watching. That said,
in terms of amusing
rom-coms,
“Love
Wedding Repeat” is
a bit of a doozy: there
are
dramatic
exes,
affairs, attempts to
spike someone’s drink
with sleeping meds
and an exploration of
multiverse theory.
For the most part, “Love Wedding
Repeat” presents itself as a typical romcom,
setting up complex interactions between
characters in the chaos of a wedding
reception. Jack (Sam Claflin, “Me Before
You”) has to keep everything together for
his sister Hayley’s (Eleanor Tomlinson,
“Poldark”) wedding in Rome, which means
navigating interactions between guests at
the “English table:” Jack’s challenging ex
Amanda (Freida Pinto, “Rise of the Planet
of the Apes”) and her boyfriend Chaz (Allan
Mustafa, “People Just Do Nothing”), quirky
characters Rebecca (Aisling Bea, “Living
with Yourself”) and Sidney (Tim Key, “This
Time with Alan Partridge”) and Bryan (Joel
Fry, “Game of Thrones”), their lovable but
sometimes unhelpful friend and Hayley’s
maid of honor (or “man of honor,” as he
insists). He’s managing all of this while also
trying to confess his feelings to Dina (Olivia
Munn, “X-men: Apocalypse”), Hayley’s
friend that Jack met three years ago and
failed to make his move with despite her
clear reciprocity.
But let’s make it more complicated.
When
Marc
(Jack
Farthing, “Poldark”),
an old classmate of
Hayley’s, shows up
to ruin the wedding,
Hayley
convinces
Jack to spike Marc’s
drink with sleeping
medication. This is
where the multiverse
theory
comes
in:
A
group
of
kids
comes to the table
and
moves
around
the
seating
arrangements.
There
are
thousands of ways the eight people at the
English table can sit, and the film claims
that these seating arrangements affect
the story differently. It takes you through
the worst-case scenario and the best-case
scenario, with quick glances at some of the
other possibilities. Which character gets
the sleeping medicine, it claims, will affect
whether love will succeed. These chances,
these decisions, will affect everything that
happens afterward. “Chance can be a real
bastard,” says the Oracle (Penny Ryder,
“Military Wives”), a random omniscient
narrator, near the beginning of the film.
The truth is that “Love Wedding Repeat”
should be able to succeed. The actors are
talented and well-cast; I especially liked
Sam Claflin’s wide-eyed and adorable Jack.
Relationships between characters are often
very sweet, especially that of brother-sister
duo Jack and Hayley. The wedding itself
is stunning, preceded with aerial shots of
Rome and held in a beautiful garden with
large, colorful flower beds. Much of the
comedy is found in awkward exchanges,
usually
involving
Rebecca
accidentally
insulting someone in a lovely Irish brogue
or Sidney and his choice to wear a kilt. Both
characters provide comedic relief through
their inability to know when to stop talking.
The film is certainly entertaining, but the
plot asks the audience to take a lot of leaps
that get more difficult to accept as the film
goes on.
The thing that sinks “Love Wedding
Repeat” isn’t the overwhelming chaos or
the long and horribly uncomfortable maid
of honor speech from a man hopped up on
sleeping medicine. It’s that its creators
had a chance to make a simple, sweet
romantic comedy, and instead they chose to
convolute the plot with something a bit too
complicated to feel necessary. No typical
romantic comedy begins with images of
galaxies and a truncated discussion of
physics narrated by a character billed as
“The Oracle,” and maybe there’s a reason
for that. If you dig deep, you can find a
pleasant romantic comedy with interesting
characters and a sweet message, but you
have to ignore the philosophical queries to
get there. In truth, “Love Wedding Repeat”
feels like a metaphor for itself: Every poor
decision leads to a consequence. Maybe if
some decisions had been made differently,
the film could have been able to succeed.
‘Love Wedding Repeat’ is convoluted, incongruent
KARI ANDERSON
Daily Arts Writer
BOOK INTERVIEW
Richie Jackson on politics, parenthood and his new memoir
EMILIA FERRANTE
Daily Arts Writer
In his new memoir, Broadway and TV producer
Richie Jackson is unapologetic and unabashed
while still maintaining a level of gentleness
throughout. “Gay Like Me” functions on multiple
levels — primarily as a sending-off to his college-
bound son, but also as the story of Jackson’s life, a
love letter to his husband Jordan Roth, a guidebook
for parents on raising a gay child and a political
statement about Donald Trump and his America.
Jackson makes it clear that being gay is an integral
part of his life and that it intimately shapes him
and his identity. In my conversation with him at
his Manhattan office, he made this point early and
eloquently. “Being gay is the best part about me,
and it’s the most important part,” he said. About his
son, he continued, “I want him to start to begin to
think of the things I need to share with him about
what it means to be a gay man.”
The memoir starts with the birth of Jackson’s
son through a surrogate. In this way, Jackson
sets up a timeline for his son immediately and
shows how his parents being gay was instantly
important to his life, even before the moment
of his conception. Jackson and his husband,
Broadway producer Jordan Roth, along with
Jackson’s ex-husband, Tony award-winning actor
B.D. Wong, parented the son together. When he
was 15, he came out to them, an experience that
Jackson says was the impetus for the book. At that
moment of coming out, his son said “Being gay is
not a big deal.” Jackson vividly recalls the phrase
“My generation doesn’t think it’s a big deal” from
his son, a pivotal moment that laid bare the chasm
between Jackson’s experiences as a gay man and
his son’s.
To put it simply, as Jackson states in his book,
“To live as fully gay as possible is how I am most
alive.” After that conversation with his son, he
realized the difference in the conception of being
gay between his generation and his son’s. Jackson
feels like this difference, while natural, means his
son and others his age have not been fully exposed
to the vast spectrum of the gay experience. “How
naive of me...to let myself believe that the colorful
lighting display illuminating our nation’s first
house was our real country,” he writes. “We cannot
rest on the glory of our being legally married.” But
he also saw his son as unprepared for the world
he was about to face, leaving the home of his
gay parents and sphere of guaranteed LGBTQ+
acceptance. Granted, he was only going a few
blocks away to NYU, but
Jackson felt like the
book was a necessary
warning in a world that
was not as accepting
as
our
generation
would like to think it is.
Though he was afraid of
“passing down trauma,”
of “clipping your wings
just as you are about
to set off,” the memoir
maintains a hopeful, if
not urgent, tone. Jackson
describes the experience through an anecdote:
“When (my son) was 7 or 8, and we would swim in
the ocean, we would talk about riptides. I was so
scared about riptides. I kept telling him, you swim
parallel to a riptide, you never swim into it. Not so
with this riptide of hate.” Despite his son’s more
blasé attitude, Jackson said, “It’s going to be harder
for my son to come out in 2020, to come out into
the world as a gay adult, than it was in 1993 when I
came to New York to be a gay adult.”
That “riptide of hate,” headed by Donald
Trump, Mike Pence and Mitch McConnell, can
be combatted — but Jackson thinks it requires
a kind of politics that has become a taboo word.
He began to chuckle knowingly when I brought
up some people’s qualms with identity politics,
mainly that they ignore a whole person in favor
of cherry picking an aspect of identity. Jackson
sees it differently. “Think about it, we all sit in
our classrooms and learn history. But it’s only cis,
white, straight men are ever taught they can go
the distance in whatever way they want,” he said.
“Women aren’t taught it, people of color aren’t
taught it, LGBTQ kids aren’t.” For that reason alone,
he says, identity politics are valid: simply to get
those marginalized groups into positions of power
to pave the way for others
to come behind. Not
only that, but the unique
experience of a person
from
a
marginalized
group is in and of itself
valuable.
As
Jackson
put it, “When you are
other, when you are
different, when you are
marginalized, you just
have a different way of
feeling and looking at the
world, and you have this
enormous well of empathy.”
These statements are thrown into especially
sharp relief when considering that Donald Trump
was present at Jackson’s 2012 wedding to his
now-husband, Jordan Roth. At the time, Trump
was merely a New York businessman. Despite his
repudiation for Trump’s policies, Jackson said his
wedding “was the most beautiful day, so it’s very
hard for me to want to change anything about it,
because it was so perfect.” That, combined with
the fact that it was a “very large wedding,” makes
Trump’s presence more of a supporting detail
rather than an earth-shattering event for Jackson.
From systemic political change to systemic
social change, Jackson sees so many places we can
improve while still acknowledging how far we have
come in terms of gay representation. First, he brings
attention to the fact that the closet is still a painful
reality for many gay people. To put it bluntly, as
Jackson did in our interview, “the other thing we
have to remember, and I think young people who
come out so young might not appreciate so much, is
that the closet is not a Four Seasons. It’s not a resort,
it’s a prison.” This came up when I mentioned the
Generation Z distaste for Pete Buttigieg, which
Jackson took as an opportunity to highlight this.
“Could he be fired in 28 states for being gay? Yes, he
can. Would our adversaries think he’s gay enough
to discriminate against? Yes, he’s gay enough to be
discriminated against in all the ways that we are,”
he said. “A gay person who lives in the closet for 31
years because of self-loathing, because of fear that
the life they want for themselves is not possible, is
as legitimate of a gay experience as these children
that are coming out so young.”
Yes, it is true that there is much more gay
representation in the media than there was when
Jackson himself came out, but the book calls this
a “false salve.” Because “the entire scaffolding of
America is constructed for straight people,” the
reality is that “the miracle of vulnerability hasn’t
made us whole,” Jackson wrote. Representation
is nice, he said in the interview, but it “hasn’t
made us whole, it hasn’t made us safe.” Because of
this heterosexual scaffolding around which our
country is built, “Gay people have had to highlight
our similarities with straight people in order to get
what we want politically,” Jackson wrote.
“Gay Like Me”
Richie Jackson
Harper Collins
Jan. 28, 2020
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“Love Wedding Repeat”
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