This is a crass cash-in meant to prey on our pandemic anxieties, not grapple with them. MaryAnn’s quick take: An appalling melange of insipid disaster drama and implausible romance with a bit of dystopian satire thrown in. Near the centre of the web of lonely souls is dreamy young motorcycle courier Nico (KJ Apa) whose relationship with his artist girlfriend Sara (Sofia Carson) is as charged as it can be given that it’s restricted to FaceTime, or exchanging sweet nothings from either side of a door. Songbird movie review: screechingly out of tune. Songbird does something to exploit these possibilities, though not enough to compensate for the absence of interesting characters or much of a story. But it seems ripe for reinvention in light of the pandemic, especially since new communication technologies have meanwhile multiplied the ways that filmmakers can bring people together while keeping them apart. The set of Songbird, a thriller set during the pandemic, and shot in Los Angeles in July, 2020. This is a form especially associated with a Los Angeles setting – and with the 1990s and early 2000s, from Robert Altman’s Short Cuts through to Magnolia and Crash. Rather, it’s a tepid, abbreviated example of the so-called “network film,” in which parallel sub-plots illustrate how we all lead separate lives of quiet desperation but are mystically connected. There’s a certain amount of action, but lavish spectacle this is not. That said, Songbird is far from anything Bay himself would have directed. The man to thank is producer Michael Bay, the mastermind behind the Transformers films, who has never let himself be held back by considerations like taste or good judgement. Truth be told, I can picture half the screenwriters in Hollywood spending their downtime working on versions of this thing, but I can picture an equal number of money people shaking their heads.
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