The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
Wednesday, February 3, 2021 — 7
YOUR WEEKLY
ARIES
Focus on your social cirlce this week,
Aries, and on meeting people who
share your ideals, objectives and
outlook on life. It’s a very good week
for socializing in genereal, but you
may have little patience
for people who challenge
your worldview.
AQUARIUS
GEMINI
Venus’ arrival in your travel zone is
good news if you’re hoping for a
romantic getaway, a honeymoon or
even a holiday romance. If you are
single, this influence can bring a
strong attraction to someone from a
different culture, country,
or background to your
own.
SAGITTARIUS
CAPRICORN
SCORPIO
CANCER
This looks like a good week for
forgiveness – and not just of others,
Cancer. As Venus shifts into one of
the most psychologically important
zones of your chart, you will be able
to view past hurts more objectively
and less emotionally,
making it easier for you to
offer forgiveness to those
who have wronged you.
TAURUS
With Venus now in your career zone,
Taurus, it’s a very good time to make
an excellent impression when it truly
counts. Use this energy in job
interview, or when seeking promotion
or new clients. People will
warm to you because your
social skills and charm are
now off the scale.
VIRGO
PISCES
LIBRA
LEO
What’s not to love about Venus
arriving in your love zone this week?
With romance high on the agenda,
you could experience lots of joyful
moments, magical memories and
sentimental sweetness.
Read your weekly horoscopes from astrology.tv
Venus’ arrival in your everyday
routines zone is a helpful reminder to
give yourself a break every now and
then, Virgo. This gentle influence can
help to ease work stress, providing
you with time and space to
delegate or to ask for help
where needed.
Venus moves into your joy zone this
week, which has to be good news in
anyone’s book. This is a delightful,
playful, flirtatious influence, which is
excellent for dating someone new or
for spicing up you loe life in
an existing partnership.
Family life is top of you agenda this
week, and with Venus moving into
your family zone there is a comfort-
able, harmonious vibe around your
home. It’s an excellent week for
renovation or DIY projects, or
anything that involves
beautifying or improving
your home.
Your already strong natural charisma
gets a real boost from the arrival of
Venus in your communication zone
this week. you can use this charm to
your advantage as it will be easy for
you to persuade people to
back or support your
ideas.
There should be some financial good
news this week, Capricorn, with
Venus moving into your money zone.
However, Venus does love to spend,
so be careful that any financial boost
doesn’t evaporate almost as
soon as it arrives!
Venus’ arrival in your own sign of
Aquarius is a boot to your self-esteem
and your self confidence – and almost
certainly to your love life too. This is a
wonderful time to date someone new,
as you will be able to be your
authentic self on a date,
instead of putting on a
show.
It’s a largely calm and serene week,
astrologically, and nobody will feel
more centered and spiritually aware
this week than you, Pisces. With
gentle Venus now transiting this area
of the Pisces chart, you’ll find peace
and joy in meditation,
daydreams, and
mindfulness.
WHISPER
“Judas the stray cat, if you're
reading this please come
inside the house. It's too cold.”
“I’m kind of ready for the
semester to end.”
“Pinches and punches for the
beginning of February.”
‘Knocking’ tells a story all women know
Directed
by
Lyle
Mitchell
Corbine Jr. (“Shinaab”), a member of
Wisconsin’s Bad River Band of the
Lake Superior Tribe of Chippewa,
“Wild Indian” is a thoughtful film
that tells a narrative about trauma
and the experience of Native
Americans but struggles to hit the
mark. The film misses the resonant
pitch needed to leave a lasting
mark on the viewer. Corbine’s
directorial debut leaves something
to be desired, but the thematic and
cultural content is undeniably rich
and valuable.
At the beginning of the film, a
young Native boy named Makwa
(Michael
Greyeyes,
“Blood
Quantum”), abused by his father,
turns to violence as a coping
mechanism. In a defining moment
for Makwa and his cousin Ted-O
(Chaske Spencer, “The Twilight
Saga”), a schoolmate is murdered,
and the two boys are marked by
this trauma for the rest of their
lives. Makwa moves to California
and finds success as a businessman,
changing his name to Michael, while
Ted-O spends decades in and out of
prison. When they encounter one
another after a lifetime, that boyhood
trauma is reenacted, in a way.
Trauma is a central theme
throughout — intergenerational
trauma is an unfortunate fixture
of Indigenous culture in America,
and that motif supports the plot
of the film. The incorporation of
intergenerational trauma employs
negative,
often
stereotyped
portrayals of Native Americans
as violent people with substance
abuse issues. Whether or not this
sort of character is necessary to
tell a story of intergenerational
trauma
is
not
immediately
evident.
Greyeyes
addressed
the
subject during the Q&A session
after the film: “For a long time,
Hollywood
portrayed
us
in
grotesque ways …” Through this
film, he was able to “reclaim and
recontextualize that portrayal”
of the ‘violent Indian.’
Greyeyes’s character is defined
by a violent streak, a killing
instinct kept below the surface,
exercised from time to time in a
controlled manner. This instinct,
in the context of the film, reads as
a sort of warrior complex. Rooted
in childhood traumas, Makwa/
Michael’s sense of self is deeply
marred by societal perspective and
a sense of shame that borders on
self-loathing.
In sharp contrast, Ted-O’s
troubled life and time in prison
belie his kindhearted nature
and tremendous guilt. Whereas
Makwa grew away from his
home and past, turning to
religion to mollify his own self-
reproach, Ted-O has carried
his regret as a silent onus for
decades.
Both boys went to Catholic
school, where a priest told a
group of students in a chapel
that “a tortured spirit is an
unworthy sacrifice before God.”
This scene juxtaposes Makwa
and Ted-O with Cain and Abel,
a dichotomy that forms the
film’s key conflict. However, the
characters seem at times to be
too symbolic, too dichotomous
to convince the viewer. No man
is so simple as to be consistently
complex.
The story is an important
one, and the film is a victory for
Native American representation
in
cinema.
However,
despite
thematic
grandeur,
one
can
tell this filmmaker is a novice.
The dialogue occasionally feels
contrived and certain visual tropes
fail to elevate the film to great
heights.
In one of Corbine’s more
successful artistic choices, the
film is bookended by allegorical
scenes from the past, of a Native
man ill with smallpox, speaking
to his mother. This more subtle
allusion
to
intergenerational
trauma and the many masks it
wears throughout history is a
valuable part of the film. Greyeyes
also spoke about these scenes and
the physical wounds suffered by
his character throughout the film
as literal embodiments of trauma.
There is a valuable story in “Wild
Indian,” but much is missing. The
characters, though fully developed,
are given a calculated depth that feels
artificial upon reflection. Stereotypes
abound in the film, to varying effect
and impact. Could we do without
the alcoholism of Makwa’s father?
Would physical abuse, or even the
implied effects of having such young
parents (his mother was 13 and his
father 18 when Makwa was born)
have been sufficient?
All told, “Wild Indian” starts an
important conversation about the
enduring hardships of Indigenous
people in America. Unfortunately,
the execution of this storytelling
is flawed, and leaves the viewer
wanting more. That said, Corbine
certainly has more to say, and
I imagine his future work will
exceed and raise the standard set
by his debut.
ROSS LONDON
Daily Arts Writer
SUNDANCE 2021
There’s no horror like political
horror,
and
“Knocking”
is
no
exception. Director Frida Kempff’s
(“Winter Buoy”) debut feature is a
chilling exploration of mental health,
trauma and misogyny. Molly, played
by Cecilia Milocco (“The Circle”), has
recently moved into a new apartment
when she begins to hear a persistent
— you guessed it — knocking. The
film follows her as she attempts to
solve the mystery of the noises in her
ceiling. Is she the only one who can
hear it? Is it real? Are people lying to
her? Just as Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite”
spoke to class consciousness on a
universal level, rest assured that
watching “Knocking” in Swedish is
no detriment to its ability to strike at
bare-bones human fears.
It’s not the most subtle message
ever. Reading the synopsis on the
Sundance website made me feel a
little bit like it was created from an
algorithm that found that the phrases
“mental health” and “gaslighting”
were getting the most clicks online.
Then again, it’s not the most egregious
thing ever either, and if misogyny
isn’t subtle, then maybe art that talks
about it doesn’t have to be either.
In the director’s introduction that
played shortly before the film started,
Kempff simply said, “We knew that
whatever choice we made, we had to
be bold.”
While I’ve never experienced
the Sundance Film Festival before,
in-person or remote, I was a bit wary
about how “pure” the screening
could be when I could just turn on my
bedside lamp when I got too scared
— and I got scared a good amount of
times.
So whether you’re looking for
frights or social commentary, Kempff
has you covered. But actually, I
think watching this film at home
enhanced the experience. Hearing my
floorboards creak and my neighbors
arguing with each other upstairs
made me feel like I was on one of
those 4-D rides at the Detroit Zoo.
You know, where they have a machine
jerk your chair around so you feel like
you’re riding a dinosaur? Watching
“Knocking” when you’re a woman
living alone during a pandemic is like a
similarly budgeted, but higher quality,
4-D ride at the zoo.
Some viewers might find its pacing
frustrating, but if you lean into it, it’s
actually one of its major strengths. At
just 78 minutes long, you might think
that it’d try to cram as much action
as possible into its runtime, but its
self-restraint is admirable. I knew I
was watching a horror movie, so I
started out with my shoulders in my
ears, just waiting for something awful
to happen. Then it coaxed me into
complacency as the beginning lull
kept rolling, as Molly buys groceries,
smokes cigarettes on her balcony
and tries to cool off in a heatwave. It
doesn’t rely on jump scares, instead
letting the isolation and quiet slowly
drive screws into your spine.
‘Wild Indian’ is a win for Native American cinema, but falls short on storytelling
SUNDANCE 2021
Romeo and Juliet
make a modern
reappearance in ‘R#J’
Director
Carey
Williams
(“Emergency”) makes his feature-
length debut at Sundance this year
with “R#J,” a bold reimagining of one
of the most well-known love stories of
all time, told entirely through social
media. Shakespeare’s tragedy “Romeo
and Juliet,” like many of his other
plays, has a long and storied history of
adaptations. Williams’s take on it uses
Instagram, iMessage and Facebook
to tell this story in an innovative way,
switching from one character’s phone
to another, with the audience tuning
in to Instagram Lives and FaceTimes.
The film feels simultaneously
invasive — we see Romeo slide into
Juliet’s DMs before they actually meet
— and a little bit too familiar, as we are
already spending ample time in our
daily lives staring at exactly the kinds
of screens replicated in the film.
The most striking aspect of this
film is, of course, the form it uses to tell
the story. The form is both limiting, in
that we cannot see personal, intimate
moments between characters when
there is no phone in sight, as well as
creatively freeing because the film is
able to introduce new elements of the
characters. The filmmakers make
the bold decision, for example, to
have Romeo be a ‘dark-mode’ kind of
person, while Juliet is a ‘light-mode’
type, giving the phone either a dark
background or white background,
respectively.
This story invites us to make
judgments about the characters
based on something many viewers
are already experts on: social media
habits. Because of the very nature of
social media, we are instantly able
to place the characters into their
online archetypes: Juliet, with her
alt art account and a profile picture
of her black Doc Martens with two
differently colored shoelaces, and
Romeo with his artfully curated soft-
boy streetwear fashion feed.
This film takes the classic school
assignment of “modernizing” an
English class staple, using fake social
media to its extreme. This is every
fake celebrity Facebook page or
imagined feed of a fictional character
fully realized, with both the budget
and the creative and artistic talent
required to do so. Because of its roots
outside of traditional filmmaking, it
feels cheesy and strained at times,
but it manages to adequately achieve
its goal of a coherent story told
exclusively through social media.
The format takes some getting
used to, and sometimes it is still
shocking to see certain events played
out on screen. Juliet’s very public
suicide and Mercutio being murdered
on Instagram live seem shocking
until you realize that these events
merely represent a fantastical mirror
of exactly what our world is like now.
We see real violence, unedited
and raw, straight from strangers’
phone cameras to our own devices.
Seeing it in an actual film is upsetting,
especially because the reason it is so
impactful is that it’s familiar. Romeo,
played by Black actor Camaron Engels
(“American Pie Presents: Girls’ Rules”),
watches Mercutio (Siddiq Saunderson,
“Messiah”), also played by a Black man,
die in real-time on FaceTime. The
country watched George Floyd die at
the hands of the police in a video shot
on a cell phone, in much the same way
“R#J” presents its violence.
Aside from its novel format, the
film also breaks new ground by
having an almost entirely POC cast.
The Montagues are played by Black
actors and actresses, and the Capulets
are played by Latinx talent.
“Up to this point the status quo has
just been white people, blonde and
blue-eyed,” Juliet actress Francesca
Noel (“Selah and the Spades”) said in
the post-screening Q&A session. “It’s
revolutionary, but it’s also just the way
the world is.”
Other
members
of
the
cast
concurred. “As a person who does love
Shakespeare, I think that Shakespeare
is a beautiful poet, a beautiful artist, a
beautiful author,” said self-proclaimed
Shakespeare nerd Engels. “I think a lot
of people shy away from (Shakespeare’s
works) … especially as a Black youth.”
Perhaps Saunderson, who played
Mercutio, said it best: “It needed to be
flipped on its head, it needed a new life,
with some new color.”
Carey Williams thought of this
film as a “mashup” of modern and
Shakespearean language, which was
perhaps the most impressive part of
the film, although it, too, was a bit
confusing at first. “I knew early on
that I wanted to preserve the original
text, but I wanted to put that into
modern day,” said Williams.
Essentially, the characters use
21st-century slang in their texts and
posts, but almost all spoken language is
more or less the original Shakespeare.
In this way, “R#J” carries on the long
tradition of updating Shakespearean
literature for the modern times. It
manages to incorporate the beauty of
Shakespeare’s original lines while also
including current vernacular in a way
that shows the incredible perseverance
of Shakespeare’s storytelling.
In addition, music is an absolutely
integral part of this movie. “One
thing I thought about early on was
that this format was going to need
music to carry it,” said Williams. “It’s
going to need that soundtrack to pull
it through.”
Juliet listens to Clairo and FKA
twigs; Romeo listens to Snoop Dogg.
The music helps emphasize the
fact that the characters are really
just teenagers, something other
adaptations sometimes forget. One
telling example is when Juliet rebels
against her father and posts a photo
of her with Romeo. Her father calls
her, and she ignores the call, instead
turning up her music. “I was really
focused on finding this hormonal,
messy, tumultuous teenager who was
really vulnerable and falling in love for
the first time,” said Noel.
Despite its valiant effort to make
a Shakespeare adaptation that is
fresh, current and relevant, the film
seems like it will be dated once the
next Instagram or iOS update arrives.
The interfaces of these apps we use
everyday change, and since we use
them every day, we get used to the
graphics and aesthetics of these apps
very quickly.
However, this also means that
graphics that fall behind the curve —
which could take only a few months —
instantly feel dated and out of touch.
The point of the movie is that it is
exactly in the current moment, and
while it captures that moment as best
as it can with its format, it is also going
to be practically unintelligible to teens
of the next generation.
The staying power of this movie
can really only be determined with
time — either its graphics will age
it into oblivion fairly quickly, or its
classic Shakespearean backbone and
the innovativeness of its form will
allow it to remain relevant in the
cultural psyche.
SUNDANCE 2021
EMILIA FERRANTE
Daily Arts Writer
Courtesy of Sundance Institute
MARY ELIZABETH JOHNSON
Daily Arts Writer
Read more at
MichiganDaily.com