Robert Horton is a Scarecrow board member and a longtime film critic. This series of "critic's notes" is chance to highlight worthy films playing locally and connect them to the riches of Scarecrow's collection.
Two more from 2025, the year that doesn't end. Magellan is playing at SIFF Uptown (and the Grand in Tacoma on 2/10) and Song Sung Blue is still around at the Crest. The work of both directors is on the shelves at Scarecrow, of course.
Magellan
There were once many movies that glorified the explorer, and after that there were movies that critiqued colonialism. Magellan is not really like any of those. Of course Filipino director Lav Diaz is going to critique colonialism, but not in an expected way; for one thing, this movie is so extraordinarily beautiful to the eye that it demands (and rewards) your participation in its exercise in slow cinema. (The cinematography credit is shared by Diaz and Artur Tort, who shot the eye-filling Pacifiction.) The film does follow a portion of Ferdinand Magellan's life, mostly boiled down to a collection of very long scenes, including a significant amount of time chronicling the misery of the Portuguese explorer's circumnavigation of the globe.
Not that he actually made it all the way; Diaz concentrates much of the film's second half on Magellan's arrival in the Philippines, where he converted the locals to Christianity before getting himself killed. What Diaz achieves in his long-held shots—with the nimble complicity of star Gael Garcia Bernal, who is able to convey an exquisite streak of absurdity with a single sidelong glance—is the strangeness of the expedition, and by extension of colonialism itself, the grandiosity of it, the political chess-playing, the fumbling and bumbling of the presumed conquerors, the hollowness and danger of faith. You certainly have to commit to Diaz's deliberate pace, but the portrait of global catastrophe is complete. (It will help to read up on Magellan's life beforehand, because the movie offers little grounding in historical comprehension.)
One thinks of Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God, and that film's robust ridicule for the European colonizers; there's an early scene in Magellan where soldiers break out in laughter when their leader keels over in mid-speech, a distinctly Herzogian moment. But where Aguirre was scrappy and sarcastic, Magellan is measured and deadpan. These gorgeous shots invite the contemplation of this insane enterprise and the hubris the fuels it, and the result is not so much smirky self-satisfaction at taking down a historical giant but sadness at men as they befoul the world.
And this, too: Magellan is about the cinema's power to create scale and immersive there-ness. Diaz is too smart to believe the world was Eden before Magellan and the age of exploration, but he shoots it like a paradise. A scene of ships at night engaging in a cannon battle, for instance, is uncannily frightening but also breathtaking. This is a camera that engages, even while keeping its skeptical distance.
Song Sung Blue
At the other end of the movie world—but, I insist, nevertheless alive with cinematic energies—is this offering about a Neil Diamond tribute band from Wisconsin. Its outline certainly conforms to expectations, and you won't be surprised by too much that happens in the saga of "Lightning and Thunder," whose success on the local circuit has its professional and personal difficulties. You'll be even less surprised if you saw Greg Kohs' 2008 documentary, also called Song Sung Blue, which delightfully tracked this unlikely story.
But for certain kinds of movie-movie experiences, surprise is not the point. You want to hear the songs, and director Craig Brewer obliges; with something like the "Holly Holy" sequence, he demonstrates his skill at how to cut to music. He did the same thing with Hustle and Flow, and even—yes, I will dare to say it—in his Footloose remake. Kate Hudson and Hugh Jackman are in the zone as the two leads, embodying the zaniness of their world yet not mocking their characters. This is a line that Brewer treads nicely, the balance between drawing the humor out of a subculture without losing affection for the people on screen—I'm not going to say this is at the same level as Handle with Care/Melvin and Howard-era Jonathan Demme, but it does have residence in the next lot over. Case in point: Jim Belushi, cheesehead accent precisely deployed, as a second-rate bar owner who sort of becomes the band’s booker and definitely becomes their most enthusiastic fan. Choice.
February 6, 2026
