Metlakatla is Alaska’s last Native Indian reserve. While linking these seemingly disparate histories of violence, the film confirms Reyes as one of the most potent voices in American independent cinema.
Commentary on david brent life on the roadmovie movie#
Provocative, unique, and strikingly cinematic, 499 mixes non-fictional and performative elements with elements of the road movie to show how past traumas continue to affect contemporary reality. As the anachronistic fictional character interacts with real-life victims of Mexico’s failed drug wars and indigenous communities in resistance, the filmmaker portrays the country’s current humanitarian crisis as part of a vicious and unfinished colonial project, still in motion, nearly five hundred years later. Through the eyes of a ghostly conquistador, the film recreates Hérnan Cortés’ epic journey from the coasts of Veracruz to the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, the site of contemporary Mexico City. The character endures, however hard or mean the world gets.To reflect on the 500-year anniversary of the Spanish conquest of Mexico in 2021, director Reyes offers a bold hybrid cinema experience exploring the brutal legacy of colonialism in contemporary Mexico. All of us – from the boss who signs off an email about redundancies with details of his holiday plans to the Hollywood star who says he has no problem playing gay because he’ll “stand with his arm around his best mate in a pub. Still, the world isn’t getting any cleverer. The Office - two series, two Christmas specials - was finished near-perfectly. The bravest being leaving him where he was. There were braver things that Gervais could have done with the character. Gervais and Merchant built this character too well. At the same time, you can’t just throw a situation at him as you could with, say, Edina and Patsy. Brent’s no Partridge and Gervais isn’t Coogan. The threat of a younger audience not getting David Brent is real, as is the danger that those of us who were there the first time might tire of him. It’s a problem that’s acknowledged twice: once via a scene in which a local DJ doesn’t know who Brent is, but says he was on a show “like The Call Centre” (a genuine workplace documentary that aired years after The Office) the next in a scene where Foregone Conclusion are booked to play a student union’s Shite Night (“the shittest bits of culture of the last 20 years”). Ricky Gervais sings Lady Gypsy from David Brent: Life on the Road GuardianĪll of this relies on the audience liking, or even loving, David Brent as much as they once did, on giving him as many chances as Gervais has. To Brent – as adrift in his friendship with a black man as he is delighted by it – this is the ultimate acceptance. Dom, appalled, acquiesces because the cameras are rolling. In one difficult, but pointed scene, a very drunk Brent insists Dom call him “my nigger”.
A nice bloke who basically wants the best for Brent, even if he’s often the butt of his assumptions about race. Dom, a decent guy who can see the desperation behind Brent’s bluster, is the film’s Tim. There’s a heavy reliance on talking heads to sway us in Brent’s favour, particularly from rapper Doc Brown, who reprises his Comic Relief turn as Dom, an aspiring MC who’s been sucked into Brent’s orbit. We’re never sure when the fictional camera crew is in attendance. The mockumentary format, used so brilliantly in the original show, goes for a wander once the action gets going. The moderating influence of his Office co-creator Stephen Merchant (not involved - something about “schedules”) is missing, leaving a patchy comedy that lacks discipline. It’s clear from early on that this is a Ricky Gervais solo outing. Mockumentary … Ricky Gervais, left, in The Office in 2001 – with the Wernham Hogg crowd including Martin Freeman, Mackenzie Crook and Lucy Davis.
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