Bessie Imbues Some Unique Details Into The Music Biopic Genre

Bessie Smith was a one-of-a-kind music legend. Born in Chattanooga, Tennesse, Smith was raised in a troubled household and struggled to find steady work as a singer. A chance to work Ma Rainey (Mo'Nique), however, gives Bessie Smith the breakthrough she needs. Soon, Smith is her own solo act and one that's becoming quite famous. As the years go by, the highs for Bessie Smith are high but the lows, including her worst struggles with addiction, those sink very deep. All the while, Smith also grapples with her inability to really emotionally connect with others as well las torment from the past that's informing her iconic blues music.

Dee Rees' Narrative Film Directorial Debut Pariah Vividly Realizes Coming-of-Age Queer Experiences

SPOILERS FOLLOW 

In my review for BlacKkKlansman last year, I mentioned how one virtue of the feature was how it was clearly made without any thought of placating or sugar-coating things for white viewers, it was about the stark reality of how racism permeates American society to this very day. A similar quality informs Dee Rees' 2011 feature Pariah, though in this case, it's a movie clearly made explicitly for and from a queer perspective. Pariah is a film exploring the turmoil that ensues when a family isn't accepting of their child's sexuality and benefits mightily from not wasting time to assure heterosexual viewers that "not all heterosexual people are like that" or similar platitudes. That's not what Pariah is here for. Its focus is bringing specifically queer experiences to a cinematic format of storytelling and it does that marvelously.

Mudbound Is Compelling Character-Driven Fare That Knows The Power of Well-Written Dialogue

 

The individual characters in Mudbound have their own stories to tell and their own personalities to convey but there are threads that do tie certain characters together. Some of these individuals find themselves connected by the fact that they're a family while a pair of characters find themselves intertwined to one another due to both of them being soldiers returning home from World War II with intense trauma impacting their psyches. But what unites them all, whether they realize it or not, is the soil, the mud on the land they all share. In this harsh environment of rural 1940's Mississippi, you're at the mercy of the very land you live on, a land that entails all kinds of fascinating human beings that populate the new Dee Rees motion picture Mudbound.