Another Round is the latest film from Danish film maker Thomas Vinterberg. Vinterberg was, together with the more combustible Lars von Trier, one of the co-founders of the Dogma 95 collective, a ‘movement’ that managed to be at once fecund and puerile in equal measure. His 1998 film, Festen was by far and away its most successful production.
Another Round is a relatively high concept film and challenges you, knowingly, with what seems to be a perfectly reasonable, indeed a logical idea. Four male, provincial teachers facing up to their fast-approaching mid-life crises decide to conduct an experiment. They’ll spend every day moderately inebriated to see what effect it has on them.
After all, drinking is only bad for you in excess. And everyone knows how much more confident, loquacious and amusing we all become after those first few swift ones. All one need do, surely, is drink forever in careful moderation.
The film engages winningly for the first hour or so, not least because of Mads Mikkelsen’s powerful central performance. But inevitably, the film runs out of steam in its final third when Vittenberg opts for both a moral and an anti-moral ending, that is to say an ending that is both Hollywood and anti-Hollywood. Which, necessarily, ends up being neither.
It’s a film you’ll not be sorry to have taken the time to watch. But neither is it one you’re likely to sit down and view again in, say, 5 or 10 year’s time.
Summer of Soul, on the other hand, is a film you’ll joyfully revisit every single time you’re offered the opportunity. Over the course of half a dozen weekends in the summer of 1969 a park in Harlem hosted what amounted to a black Woodstock.
30–40,000 almost exclusively black New Yorkers were treated to a dizzying spectacle of outlandish sartorial exuberance and effortless musical sophistication by the likes of a teenage Stevie Wonder, the 5th Dimension, The Staple Singers, Mahalia Jackson, Nina Simone and the personification of peerless cool, Sly with his Family Stone.
It would have been nice to have been surprised to learn that this footage had lain around ignored for the last 50 years. But that of course is very much part of the story that the film tells. Now re-discovered thanks to the diligence of The Roots’ Questlove, he and his editing team have produced what is quite simply one of the great music docs. Never have two hours flown by so quickly nor quite so pleasurably.
Short films are so reliably disappointing that I only very reluctantly sat down to watch Rough because of the word of mouth that preceded it. How refreshing occasionally to be proven wrong.
Immaculately scripted, impeccably performed, it’s everything that a short should be, and delivers an ending that is both deft and quietly moving. Written and directed by Adam Patterson and Declan Lawn you can (for the moment at least) see it on the RTE Player.
You can see the trailer for Summer of Soul here:
And the trailer for Another Round here:
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