Donald Glover’s long history of being on the money.
Donald Glover’s Atlanta — season two premieres March 1st — manages to be both very accessible and a nefariously complicated piece of entertainment. It deals in site-specific observational comedy, a subgenre of half-hour television that has been filling newfound niches on the higher end of cable subscriptions for some time, from the streets of Portlandia to whatever NYC satire HBO is slinging these days. Its first season was ample with surreal moments: strangers giving bizarre directives on buses, an entire episode taking place on a fictional talk show. In one narrative, it’s niche-ness and artsy cinematography connects Atlanta even further to its predecessors, like Louie C.K.’s Louie and Lena Dunham’s Girls, TV shows where weird things happen to unlikeable white people. The theory is problematic because a) Donald Glover is the most likable person on the planet and this is obvious the moment you see him, and b) Glover’s writing is never willfully obtuse, but rather cuttingly direct. In “Nobody Beats the Biebs,” when a music publicist (Jane Adams) confuses Earn (Glover) for someone named Alonzo and then threatens to ensure that he dies impoverished, the viciousness feels very real, but the case of mistaken identity feels like a Shakespearean gag rather than racism rendered as a looming presence, ready to strike at random.
A curious key to looking at Glover’s work can be found in a half-hour-ish film he made in 2013 with Hiro Murai, who later directed most of Atlanta’s first season. It was called Clapping for the Wrong Reasons and in a recent Esquire profile, Murai referred to it as the source of much of their later show’s DNA. In the film, Glover’s unnamed character wanders aimlessly around a large LA mansion in the search of a mysterious woman who knocked on his window that morning, played by Abella Anderson. The style, compared to the high concepts of some of Murai’s music videos, feels downbeat and almost like an LA version of mumblecore, micro-budget movies about creatives aimlessly searching for themselves.
The article Remember When Donald Glover Made a Mumblecore Movie Before Doing ‘Atlanta’? appeared first on Film School Rejects.
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