Movie Review : ' Moonlight '

In Moonlight (2016), the PROTAGONIST is a black boy called Chiron Harris or Little, who is thin and small. His PROBLEM in the first 10 minutes is that he is chased by three boys, who try to bully him. His WEAKNESS is that he is always bullied by others, but he is quiet and shy that he is not being willing to talk to strangers or speak out. Hence, he is a rebellious teenager. This causes him to display BAD BEHAVIOR by not returning to his home like he supposed to, rather he spends the night with Juan and his girlfriend Teresa. He hates his mother because she doesn’t care about him.

2006764 Ms. Szymski Composition & Media 5th March, 2015 Best Picture Analysis #1 – The Graduate Criteria: 1. The movie should have more to it than just pure entertainment. It should have a deeper message that will impact me in one way or another. 2.

This is a criticism of Moonlight, a film directed by Barry Jenkins. It is a coming-of-age story, telling the journey of a young gay black man named Chiron. Through linear character development the film follows a young Chiron from adolescence into adulthood while growing up with alpha males in Miamis black ghettos. The Story is told in three parts, with a different actor playing the lead role in each section: a young Chiron named “Little”, as a teen named “Chiron”, and an adult named “Black”. Despite a compelling lead performance by Mahershala Ali and Naomie Harris, and its great soundtrack, Moonlight falls flat and never gets out of the shadow of its typical cliche plot, all the while, the film continued to never overcome the obstacle of

Part two of the documentary which was labeled as “High and Low” struck out to me the most. This part brought up issues that we can all for the most part say we have at least saw in our daily lives. This section also brought up some of the many struggles that African-Americans have to deal with every day. For example, two women brought up the point that the label “Bourgeois” is a constant problem within black America. If a black person works hard to make a lot of money, get a good education and become successful, the black

Through the depiction of Chiron and his struggle in the film Moonlight Jenkins shows that the system one lives in and the internal self results in domination against oneself. Chiron the protagonist of the film is considered weak and fragile in comparison to his classmates and the people in his community and thus Chiron is targeted by his peers and even within his own household. In Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks it is argued that the black man plays a part in their own domination by constantly viewing themselves as less than the white men.

Moonlight is a movie that follows the life of Chiron as he grows up. Starting from an abusive childhood at his mother’s house, and through his struggle filled highschool years, Chiron ultimately ends up an independent adult. From the beginning of the film, Chiron face abuse at the hands of his mother as well as from bullies at his school, which leads him to find Juan, who acts as a type of mentor to him as he grows up. Juan’s girlfriend Teresa also acts as a mentoring figure through Chiron’s youth and adult life, while Chiron’s own mother slips into drug use and prostitution. In Chiron’s younger years, he befriends Kevin, who remains significant throughout the film as his love interest. While in school, Chiron must battle with bullies, while growing up in a rough home situation. This constant struggle for physical safety and well as safety in his sexuality causes high tension throughout the film. As he discovers himself, Chiron looks to Juan and Teresa for guidance, but eventually lashes out at the violent bullies in his life.

The three movies I decided to watch were Leave It on the Floor, New Muslim Cool, and Terrors of Tiny Town. Leave It on the Floor is a musical about a young man named Brad who gets kicked out of his home and finds refuge in the drag community. New Muslim Cool is a documentary about a man who converts to Islam and turns his life around. He once was a drug dealer and now is a man who helps others and spreads the word of Islam. Terrors of Tiny Town is a musical and a Western with a cast made up entirely of dwarfs. The film is about a feud between two families. I chose to write my film review about Leave It on the Floor because it was the most interesting and entertaining to me. It is one of those movies that you cannot stop thinking about after you watch it. We talked a lot about the LGBTQ community in another class I am taking this semester so I thought this movie was a good choice for me to dive deeper into. Paris is Burning came up a lot in our discussion of this topic and it was great to finally watch it. The documentary is incredibly enlightening with regards to the struggles of young adults who identify as LGBTQ.

Barry Jenkins’s 2016 film, Moonlight, is a work that is characterized by its silences, both in what is unsaid, as well as the unresolved nature of many of its central tensions. In the film, silence functions to emphasize the interiority of the film’s subject, and to make the audience aware of itself. Such strategic use of absence recalls John Cage's groundbreaking composition, 4'33; a work that is distinguished by its lack of any audible musical accompaniment. For many, the piece is reflective of Cage's sexual identity as a gay man; the silence functioning as a metaphor for the “closet” (Katz 241). The scholar Jonathan Katz has pushed against such a totalizing reading of Cage's oeuvre, by noting that silence was part of his larger aesthetic and religious practices, and thusly cannot be considered as simply an aural manifestation of the closet (242). Katz argues that, "Silence was much more than conventionally unmusical; it provided a route toward an active challenge of the assumptions and prejudices that gave rise to homophobic oppression in the first place. For Cage, silence was an ideal form of resistance, carefully attuned to the requirements of the cold war consensus, at least in its originary social-historical context." (241).

Barry Jenkins’ award winning film Moonlight is based on the coming of age play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, written by Tarell Alvin McCraney. This story follows Chiron Black in three different phases of his life. This film highlights many of the things that plague black boys questioning their identity, but does so in a way that captures the innocence and vulnerability of the process. At first glance, one may think Moonlight is just another stereotypical coming of age story – a young black boy with a drug addicted mother and no father, living in a neighborhood riddled with drug addiction, who is confused about who he is. It does play into those stereotypes, but with good reason. Those tropes highlight the contrasts between the life he is ‘supposed’ to live, and who he really is (even if he doesn’t realize it).

I can see why this film is the required film in the section, it fits perfectly, I really can’t think of a better film to display stereotypes and behaviors related to them. This film really plays on a person’s emotions. There is so much that could be discussed. I have seen this film before, but I don’t remember it having such an impact on me after watching it through this context. I noticed a lot more stereotypes than I ever had before. It’s almost as if every contact we see there is stereotypes being presented, different ethnicities colliding.

“Good Night, and Good Luck” is not your typical Hollywood film full of conventional action, cliff hangers, and romance. It is however a masterpiece of its time, about an era that many Americans try to forget. George Clooney, an esteemed American Actor and director of this film tried to capture a period of time known as the McCarthy Era where the “red scare” or fear of communism allowed the Senator from Wisconsin to try and convict suspected traitors. Its historical accuracy with real footage, quotations, and individuals, along with the distinct characteristics of Edward R. Murrow by actor David Strathairn are remarkably accurate. The film takes place virtually entirely in

“Selma”, I have a love hate relationship with this movie every time I see it. Mostly because it depict the horrible terror, that most of us American don’t want to take into consideration. The movie “Selma” give a vivid depiction of our dark past. While also explaining and bringing to light the things we are currently battling as a nation. In the movie we see the iconic Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other iconic civil right leaders come together in the small southern time call Selma.

Moonlight, a film directed by Barry Jenkins in 2016 is mainly about the life of a young black man growing up in Miami; he encounters his journey through his teenage years and into manhood. Chiron is a ten-year-old adolescent nicknamed "Little" who is taken in by a Cuban drug dealer “Juan” and his girlfriend. Chiron explores his sexuality as he falls in love with a close friend and reconnects with faces. Chiron then reconnects with faces from his past. The director Barry Jenkins captures several important moments in the elevation of human everyday experience. Chiron seeks out a father figure, Juan, in which he loses him to an early death. Juan directs Little to shape meaning of his own identity and self acceptance. Jenkins also portrays the real life aspects of violence, subjectification that demoralize his mental and physical appearance throughout Moonlight. Jenkins utilizes violence and drugs in Miami as a perception of realism based on how Chiron’s sexaulity is conditioned by the deriding of adolescent masculine becoming. Moonlight plays a significant role in the representation of the black community, hardship and gender identity performances. Chiron hides his sexuality while living in poverty, finding one’s true self and the emergence as an African American male.

Moonlight is really a unique coming-of-age story about an infinitely more ignored demographic of homosexual, and black people.Told in three parts, the movie follows Chiron first as a new child , whose early signals of homosexuality produce him the mark of school bullies. Later, we see Chiron being an uncomfortable teenager visiting phrases together with his hidden needs while attempting to avoid the drugs and crime that infest his neighbourhood.The last part examines Chiron being an adult. He is seen as strong and macho man, however the hard outer is a disguise for a soft heart wounded by a community that's never acknowledged his kind.Several people play a big role in his life: Chiron's drug abuser mom Paula,the neighbourhood drug supplier

Theorist Vsevolod Pudovkin claims that narrative films are mainly a “product of construction” and cautious compilations of “selections of images that have been shot” (Renée).