Review by jesserifkin

'Sing Sing' suffers from what you might call "great acting, but bad movie" syndrome.

There are two main characters. Right now, Gold Derby has Colman Domingo as #1 in the odds for Best Actor, and Clarence Maclin at #2 for Best Supporting Actor. Agreed: they were both great.

I'd compare it to 'Oppenheimer' in that way. Just this past March, it won both Best Actor for Cillian Murphy and Best Supporting Actor for Downey. No complaints from me. The acting in 'Oppenheimer' was great. But I didn't think it wasn't actually a great film.

Same thing here. Any time that an actor or actress cries real tears on camera, that's excellent acting, you know? And both Domingo and Maclin did. But even though Gold Derby currently has it at #1 for Best Picture, I had a lot of problems with the screenwriting and directorial choices of the actual film.

Here's an example. This isn't a spoiler, because it's literally the opening moments! But you know what the plot is about, right? It's about an acting program at the New York prison. The film starts with a scene of the actors on stage, performing a scene as characters of nobility.

Now, I get the screenwriter's and director's intentions there. "We want the viewer to perceive these characters as they see themselves, strutting about regally, rather than locked up in chains. To show that these men still have dignity, even behind bars." Okay, I get the point.

But personally, I though the film should have begun literally the exact opposite way. Because they *are* behind bars. As the expression goes: you never get a second chance to make a first impression. And our first impression of these characters should be as they... you know... actually are?

You start off by seeing Harry Potter living under the cupboard in his evil uncle's basement, you start off by seeing Luke Skywalker as a simple farm boy on the planet Tatooine, you start off by seeing Peter Parker as a nerdy high school student in NYC who can't get a date. Then they become a wizard, then they become a Jedi, then they get bitten by a radioactive spider. It doesn't work if they start off that way in the viewer's mind.

I could give plenty more examples beyond the opening scene, which I won't because I don't want to spoil anything.

But here's what you should watch instead. Actually, what you should listen to instead: the 2002 episode of 'This American Life' titled "Act V." It's essentially the same plot as 'Sing Sing,' following a group of inmates in a theater program.

Everything about it was better than the film. Everything. A few examples, none of them spoilers:

= The fact that the inmates are performing an actual drama, Shakespeare's 'Hamlet,' gives the story so much more resonance and weight. 'Sing Sing' strikes a weird tone: it's a drama, but the play the inmates are staging is a comedy. So the film is a drama about the making of a comedy. Some of my favorite films have successfully struck the "half comedy / half drama" balance, from 'CODA' to 'La La Land' to 'Crimes and Misdemeanors.' But I don't know, this one just didn't land for me.

• The real-life acting coach and play's director is a woman. In 'Sing Sing,' the fictional equivalent role is a male character. Which didn't work for me nearly as well. Because to me, the whole message in the 'This American Life' episode is that in this all-male violent and criminal environment, from the inmates to the guards to the warden, with stabbings and rape and all that, it's literally the only woman in their lives who helps these gangsters bring out their actual emotions and confront their vulnerabilities. It's just much harder for me to envision a male doing that.

• The episode actually goes into some of the inmates' crimes. The movie doesn't. I get that the director Greg Kwedar wants us to see these inmates as actual people, not just as the felony they committed decades back. "They were different people back then, everybody deserves a second chance," all that jazz. Sure, but... what crimes did they actually do? To not tell us is like having a massive itch that you can't scratch. It's kind of maddening.