“Beyonce’s ‘Lemonade’ Film Offers Stunning Visuals, Urgent Themes - RollingStone.com” plus 1 more

Jeni Ekim 16, 2022

“Beyonce’s ‘Lemonade’ Film Offers Stunning Visuals, Urgent Themes - RollingStone.com” plus 1 more

Beyonce’s ‘Lemonade’ Film Offers Stunning Visuals, Urgent Themes - RollingStone.com

Posted: 24 Apr 2016 12:00 AM PDT

Saturday's HBO debut of Lemonade, a 58-minute "visual album," wasn't the first time that Beyoncé Knowles has trumpeted a new album with a suite of video clips. Yet unlike the slick scenes that accompanied 2013's Beyoncé, which found her shifting through an array of glamorous and hopelessly unreal dioramas, Lemonade is freighted with meaning. Taken as a whole, the new film may be a state-of-the-art piece of advertising – seven directors worked on the project, including Knowles herself – but it's also a substantial artistic statement strong enough to be consumed without hearing the album it promotes (which, at the moment, requires a Tidal subscription).

Lemonade is structured around symbolic chapter titles, and touches on themes including black identity, marital infidelity, sisterhood, Christian faith and a final "Reconciliation." Black women surround and support Beyoncé throughout. Some of them are familiar as the "Formation" dancers from her zeitgeist-tilting Super Bowl 50 performance in February. In the "Apathy" sequence, Serena Williams twerks as Beyoncé lounges in a queenly chair; "Hope" finds model Chantelle Brown-Young among the conclave of women seated at a long dining table placed within a Southern forest. Beyoncé posits herself as part of a community, and calls on "1,000 girls [to] raise their arms." She may ultimately be unable to submerge her innate fabulousness within group dynamics, but it's striking to watch how Lemonade is almost completely populated by black women engaged in ritualistic exercises that some critics have compared to Julie Dash's atmospheric masterwork Daughters of the Dust.

Each chapter begins with Beyoncé speaking the words of poet Warshan Shire as if they were hers, and then dipping into the tracks that comprise the Lemonade album. She and her fellow directors employ a music-video language – one scene finds her curled into a fetal position in the middle of New Orleans' Mercedes-Benz Superdome, while another shows her swaggering in a dimly lit garage, her fur coat accentuating her badness. Meanwhile, her spoken-word introductions, and the songs that follow, give the visuals a sharp edge. "Dear moon, we blame you for floods," she says on "Emptiness" in reference to menstruation cycles as the camera zooms down a dark-red hallway reminiscent of a David Lynch film. The beginning of "Anger" is just as startling in its verbal precision: "I don't know when love became elusive. I just know no one I know has it. My father's arms around my mother's neck. Fruit too ripe to eat. I think of lovers as trees, growing to and from another."

Shire's pungent and expressive verses, as well as the barbed lyrics of some of Lemonade's songs, have led some to conclude that Beyoncé is airing out her marriage to Jay Z, a union that's frequently treated by her audience as a tabloid spectacle. "Are you cheating on me?" she asks on the "Denial" segment. It should be said that Jay Z appears as a remarkably tender and attentive husband at several moments, particularly in a scene where he adoringly massages Beyoncé's ankles. Ultimately, we don't know if Beyoncé draws from personal experience for these songs. More important is how she illustrates a cogent argument that strong and empowered women make better societies.

As in any Beyoncé project, there are plenty of moments here that find her in stunning repose. On the "Emptiness" chapter, she's bathed beautifully in crimson filters as she travels around in a limousine and trumpets her career acumen. For "Hope," she's drenched in sunlight as she rides a horse calmly. Such moments underline her otherness as a celebrity. But the pointed sociopolitical and romantic critiques that course through Lemonade tell us that she's engaged in the national conversation on race, class, gender and feminism, even though she does so from a vantage point of being an immensely talented first among equals.

New this week: Beyoncé, Alanis Morissette and Emmy noms - ABC News

Posted: 27 Jul 2020 12:00 AM PDT

This week's new entertainment releases includes Beyoncé's "Black Is King," a "visual album" that arrives Friday on Disney+ and is a companion piece to last year's Beyoncé-curated album "The Lion King: The Gift."

The Associated Press

July 27, 2020, 8:40 PM

4 min read

Here's a collection curated by The Associated Press' entertainment journalists of what's arriving on TV, streaming services and music platforms this week.

MOVIES

— "Black Is King": Written, directed and executive produced by Beyoncé, the pop star's "visual album" arrives Friday on Disney+. Given that the last time Beyoncé made something similar she crafted the dazzling film "Lemonade," "Black Is King" — like most things involving Beyoncé — is a major event. This one, a fantasia celebrating black identity, comes as a companion piece to last year's Beyoncé-curated album "The Lion King: The Gift." She has described it as "a story of how the people left most broken have an extraordinary gift and a purposeful future."

— "Stockton on My Mind": Mark Levin's documentary, debuting Tuesday on HBO, charts the journey of Michael Tubbs, who became the youngest mayor of a major American city by the age of 26 and the first African-American mayor of his hometown, Stockton, California. Tubbs has helped make the low-income working-class community in Central California an incubator for new ideas in combating institutionalized racism, gun violence and economic hardship.

— "The Fight": Elyse Steinberg, Josh Kriegman and Eli Despres' documentary, honored for social impact filmmaking at this year's Sundance Film Festival, follows the work of the American Civil Liberties Union during the presidency of Donald Trump. It's multi-front battle that, in this riveting account, encompasses conflicts over immigration, abortion and voting rights. As the directors showed in the excruciatingly entertaining 2016 Anthony Weiner documentary "Weiner," they have talent for colorful fly-on-the-wall filmmaking of politics in action. Here, they focus on four tireless ACLU attorneys. Magnolia Pictures releases "The Fight" on-demand Friday.

— AP Film Writer Jake Coyle

MUSIC

—That's what new friends are for: Musical icon Burt Bacharach and Kacey Musgraves producer Daniel Tashian have teamed up to release a new five-song EP. "Blue Umbrella," out Friday, was recorded in Nashville and features Bacharach on piano and Tashian on vocals. Tashian has worked with a handful of country music acts, but he's best known for his magic on Musgraves' epic 2018 album "Golden Hour," which earned him his first pair of Grammys. Bacharach, a six-time Grammy winner and three-time Oscar winner, is one of music's most revered composers, known for tracks like "That's What Friends Are For," "(They Long to Be) Close to You" and "Arthur's Theme (Best That You Can Do)," among others. "Blue Umbrella" is Bacharach's first album in 15 years.

—R&B powerhouse Brandy is releasing her first independent album. "B7," her seventh studio release, will be out Friday and is the Grammy winner's first album in eight years. It features collaborations with Chance the Rapper, Daniel Caesar and her daughter Sy'rai, who sings on "High Heels" and performs background vocals on the single "Baby Mama." Sy'rai also co-wrote both tracks. Brandy had a hand in writing all 15 songs on "B7" with helpers including Darhyl Camper Jr. (H.E.R.), Kim "Kaydence" Krysiuk (Ariana Grande), Akil "Fresh" King (Beyoncé) and others.

—It's been a busy year for Grammy-winning rocker Alanis Morissette: She celebrated the 25th anniversary of her groundbreaking "Jagged Little Pill" album, and a musical version of the record debuted on Broadway in December. She's also been working hard in the studio to make "Such Pretty Forks in the Road," her ninth album to be released Friday. It's her first new album in eight years and was originally supposed to drop in April but was pushed backed because of the coronavirus pandemic. Morissette also had an anniversary tour planned for her 1995 album, but that was also scraped due to COVID-19.

— AP Music Editor Mesfin Fekadu

TELEVISION

—The Emmys, the awards that honor TV's best, will be unveiling this year's crop of nominees on Tuesday — but online and not on TV. The usual announcement ceremony at the TV academy in Los Angeles was canceled because of the coronavirus, with Leslie Jones instead hosting a virtual event to be found at Emmys.com. How the Sept. 20 ceremony on ABC will play out is anybody's guess, but we do know that Jimmy Kimmel will host. As for the contenders, with last year's winners "Game of Thrones" and "Fleabag" having hit the road, there's room for fresh faces including the comedies "Ramy" and "Insecure."

— AP Television Writer Lynn Elber

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Catch up on AP's entertainment coverage here: https://apnews.com/apf-entertainment.