Monday, September 13, 2021

The Card Counter

 

Those of us who have acquired a taste for director Paul Schrader's films -- especially those he also wrote -- know he sets many of his stories in the territory between the lead character's interior and exterior worlds. These men -- and they are almost always men -- are often struggling with self-examination while negotiating some troubling event or circumstance. The cerebral quality of Schrader's texts sometimes belie the films' reptilian intensity.
In The Card Counter, Schrader's subject is a pathologically fastidious professional gambler who calls himself Will Tell (it's unclear whether the irony is deliberate), played by Oscar Isaac. Tell joins the World Series of Poker casino caravan with the help of a gambling broker La Linda (Tiffany Haddish), who secures backers for Tell's high-stakes gaming. La Linda is curious about the circumspect Tell and tries, unsuccessfully, to get his story, but that doesn't keep sparks from igniting.
When Tell has a chance encounter with a young man named Cirk (pronounced Kirk), played by Tye Sheridan, we learn Tell was a guard at Abu Ghraib, under the supervision of the sadistic Major John Gordo (Willem Dafoe). Cirk, recognizing Tell as one of the men who along with his now-dead father was prosecuted for torturing prisoners, invites Tell to join him in executing murderous retribution against Gordo, who was not prosecuted. Tell counter-offers by inviting Cirk to join him on the road, for reasons that become clearer as the story burns on it.
Schrader's pacing is deliberate, and the story is punctuated with voice-over notes from Tell taken from journal entries and others that explain gambling strategy. I did not find this gaming metaphor, if that is indeed what it is, altogether successful but the dynamic among the film's three principal players was interesting.
Haddish, who is not often cast in dramatic roles, was fine in a part that was oddly underwritten, especially in light of the film's final frame, and Sheridan's character was nearly as much of a puzzlement as Isaac's, with the young actor offering a combination of naivety and malice.

Malignant



James Wan's movies (Saw, Insidious, The Conjuring) are not known for subtlety. In his horror-hackemup pictures, actors are walking, muttering bags of viscera, lurching from frame to frame, waiting to be gutted or bludgeoned. Everyone is fair game and the endless bloodletting is all in good fun.

For his latest film, Malignant, which he also co-wrote, Wan has cast a group of highly exchangeable, mostly unfamiliar faces, no doubt because a hairy, hateful demonic force in Seattle is laying waste to all who have crossed him, which means the audience shouldn't get attached to anyone.
Young Madison Mitchell (Annabelle Wallis), a tour guide to underground Seattle (who knew?) sees the killings as they are happening because she has a mysterious connection to the fiend, the explanation of which is the thread that drives the story.
Madison is aided in her quest to greater or lesser degree by her sister Sydney (Maddie Hasson) and two Seattle police officers, the handsome and gutsy Detective Kekoa Shaw (George Young) and his older and short-tempered partner Detective Regina Moss (Michole Briana White). To say the big reveal is hair-raising is too bad of a pun to be avoided.
Wan's Malignant is riddled with plot holes and implausibilities that are outlandish even for a horror flick but, darn it, the picture still manages to be audaciously entertaining.

Saturday, September 4, 2021

The Sparks Brothers


For the familiar, "idiosyncratic" does not begin to describe Ron and Russell Mael, better known as Sparks. Director Edgar Wright (Baby Driver), a smart and crafty Brit who is also a huge fan, uses the venerable band (50 years old and counting) to explore the nature of creativity and orthodoxy in a most engaging way in the loving documentary The Sparks Brothers.


I was introduced to the group's recordings while on staff at my college radio station. Sparks had released two albums --Kimono My House (a punning recast of the title of Eartha Kitt's Come On a My House) and Propaganda the year before -- that garnered much attention by the alternative music crowd for the cleverness and complexity of the songwriting. Ron Mael has been the principal songwriter of the group's enormous catalog (close to 1,000 songs) and Russell has been the indefatigably nimble singer (some of the vocalizations are herculean feats). 


Wright interviews the Maels, former band members, and other fans (many of them musicians with more prominent profiles, who were inspired by the group) to carry viewers through what is ostensibly the group's impressive discography of 25 studio albums. In so doing, Wright delves into the brothers' intuitive creative process, their hits (there have been several) and misses (more than a few), their need to push themselves and their vision, and, yes, Ron's mysterious moustache. (Hitler or Chaplin?)


It will be apparent from the film that Sparks has remained overwhelmingly the darlings of white audiences, despite their ventures into techno and dance music in the late '70s. Their image as a cult band for Euro posers may not have been helped by the tongue-in-cheek "White Women" on Big Beat (1976), whose chorus intoned


"White women everyday

To me it doesn't matter that their

skin's passe

As long as they're white

As long as they're white

As long as they're white from head to toe

As long as they're white

As long as they're white

As long as they're white I'll have a go"


Full disclosure, I mistook the song's meaning when I first heard it, failing to consider the entire album's edgy facetiousness and mockery of cultural standards. Wright argues that this and similar sharpness, which eluded many a record company, has endeared the "Sparks Brothers" to a core fan base that has aged and grown over the past two generations. In this way, the film is an affectionate biography of a group too outré for true commercial success and a statement on the nature of celebrity and compromise.

Friday, September 3, 2021

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

 

Director Dustin Daniel Cretton's athletic, nimble and robust Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings amazes with cinematic acrobatics and warm family tension but doesn't quite stick the landing in an overlong climactic cacophony of dragon magic and blurry martial arts.

Simu Liu is every bit the leading man the picture needs as the fantastically gifted Chinese immigrant running from a tyrannical father (Tony Chiu-Wai Leung) who possesses the mystical rings of the title and has used them to extend his life and dominate the world (echoes of the Lord of the Rings). That father and son would ultimately face each other is a given, but the road to the battle royal, set in a hidden mythical realm that was the home of Shang-Chi's lustrous mother (Fala Chen), is circuitous and occasionally foggy.
Most mysterious is the presence of Shang's best friend Katy, a winning Awkwafina delivering her rat-a-rat comic timing and, as befitting perhaps the biggest player in the screen aside from the venerable Michelle Yeoh, getting to strike a winning blow for the good guys. Katy is not Shang's love interest and not quite a totem to feminine agency -- the picture has Chen, Yeoh and the wonderful Meng'er Zhang as Shang's sister, Xialing, bringing truckloads of Asian Girl Magic. Her role is unclear.
Katy's uncanny transformation into a warrior princess in the final reel pestered me, and indications that she will be Shang's companion through the rest of the enterprise is even more mysterious. It may be a brilliant calculation or nagging casing gaffe.
One thing is sure, Cretton's staging of the "Bus Boy" fight early in the film is for the ages and is not bested by any other action sequence in the picture.

Saturday, August 28, 2021

Reminiscence

 

The exactitude that Lisa Joy commits to the creation of Westworld is largely missing from her first feature film, Reminiscence. Joy's stringy sci-fi rumination on love and lawlessness and memory is set in a time when the oceans have risen, flooding coastal cities, and the heat of the day drives human activity to after sundown. That is a rich concept and the production elements are highly effective but aren't enough to sustain interest in the doings of the humans in this world.

Hugh Jackman plays a former soldier / now memory guide named Nick, who helps people mine better times by connecting them to a device that is not fully explained and immersing them in a tank of water, pulling their remembrances from the recessed soup of their consciousness. Helping him is Thandiwe Newton (one of the stars of Westworld) as an alcoholic fellow vet, Watts, who is actually the most interesting character in Joy's drippy story. Into their bleak world comes the mysterious Mae, an oddly tuneless nightclub chanteuse played by Rebecca Ferguson, whom Nick falls for and when she disappears obsesses over. Little time is devoted to Nick and Mae's romance and even less time to building the underworld that Mae and a gallery of rogues inhabit. Much is left to supposition, which isn't sufficient when trying to sell characters as worthy of empathy or enmity.

Candyman (2021)

 

Writer Nia DaCosta's second full-length feature as director, Candyman (2021), is a grisly hodge-podge of cinematic and cultural references that builds on the original 1992 film's commentary on racial injustice and other evils men do.
DaCosta and film producers / co-writers Jordan Peele and Win Rosenfeld have enhanced the original picture's mythology but not altogether for the betterment of the storytelling. The picture pulls some interesting threads but it doesn't successfully tie them off, making arduous work parsing the meaningful from the trivial and the gratuitous.
In the film, the hook-handed avenger of Chicago's South Side has been reawakened by the brutalization of black men by the police. Stifled artist Anthony McCoy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II of Watchmen) is introduced to the Candyman story by a gregarious laundry operator (Colman Domingo of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom) for reasons that aren't immediately clear. The story of the murderous spirit who is summoned by the recitation of his name before a mirror (yes, a Bloody Mary allusion) inspires some disturbing painting by Anthony, who is living with his curator / girlfriend Brianna (Hopkins, South Carolina's own Teyonah Parris). Brianna is at first intrigued by Anthony's new vision but soon her fascination turns to dread. Her backstory could have been handled more effectively to lend more gravity to her fears.
Anthony's work takes a disfiguring toll on him and leads to the bloody deaths of some fairly unpleasant folks but these two events are not as neatly connected as they could have been. More explication and less bloodletting would have served the film well, and made its important and relevant message more impactful.

Monday, August 23, 2021

The Protégé

 


Veteran action director Martin Campbell works convolution overtime as he puts Maggie Q through her paces as seemingly indestructible top-dollar assassin Anna in The Protégé, which co-stars Samuel L. Jackson and Michael Keaton, as fellow wetworkers, Moody and Rembrandt, respectively.
Anna, as an orphaned Vietnamese child, was saved by Moody, smuggled out of Vietnam and brought up in the ways of the hired gun. When Moody and Anna become targets of a nefarious Mr. Big (David Rintoul), Keaton's Rembrandt and others are brought in to shut down nettlesome inquiries, which leads to a little globetrotting (Bucharest, London) and a showdown during a charity gala back in Vietnam.
Maggie Q.'s Anna is lethal in both form-fitting black leather and Manolo Blahniks, and her banter with Keaton is sharp as her aim. Both Jackson, 73, and Keaton, 70, are especially impressive as seasoned bagmen who can still take a punch and deliver a stinging line with the best of them.

Saturday, August 21, 2021

Move Captions

 


I chose the captioned version of “Respect” at the AMC and left with two annoying observations.


In two prominent instances when the N-word was used in the film, the captioner spelled the first one ending with an -a and the second ending with -er. In the first instance, Rev. Franklin was referring to daughter Aretha’s shifty beau, Ted. In the second instance, shifty Ted was challenging a white Alabama studio producer, saying the producer was itching to use the word. This was an interesting example of code switching by the captioner, that is, apparently -a was the form used intra-racially and -er was the interracial form of the epithet, even though both instances were hostile.

The other observation was the mislabeling of Aretha’s considerate second beau Ken Cunningham as Ted White, her malicious first husband. Such a rank amateur mistake, even
though both men sported a short Afro and mustache. They represented two very different periods in Aretha’s life.

Long-in-the-tooth copyeditors shouldn’t watch captioned movies. *Sigh*

Friday, August 20, 2021

The Night House

 

David Bruckner's The Night House is a tour de force for Rebecca Hall, who plays the grieving widow of a man who before the film's action has taken his own life. Hall's Beth wanders through the couple's beautiful lake house trying to piece together possible reasons why her loving husband (Evan Jonigkeit) would shoot himself in the head. She stumbles upon clues between tumblers of whisky, failing to heed warnings from best friend Clair (Sarah Goldberg) and neighbor Mel (Vondie Curtis-Hall) that she should step back from what has become an unhealthy obsession. Night visitations from whispering specters keep Beth, and the audience, on edge as she uncovers one mystery after another about the man she'd loved but, apparently, did not know very well.
Bruckner and writers Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski have crafted a clever mind-bender that doesn't commit to one genre -- it's part mystery, part thriller, part horror, part psychodrama -- but it's wholly Hall's picture; she owns every frame of it as her character careers from heartbroken to spiteful to delirious and back. And the ending is sure to prompt many exchanges long after the credits have rolled.

Wednesday, August 18, 2021

Don't Breathe 2

 


Uruguayan writer / director Rodo Sayagues takes the helm in the sequel to 2016's home invasion thriller Don't Breathe. In that picture, a blind former Navy Seal thwarts a trio of adolescent thieves who break into his home to steal the man's insurance settlement for a wrongful death. Stephen Lang played the blind man whose combat training is more than a match for the three, who are not without their own set of skills. It was a pretty good ride.
In Don't Breathe 2, Sayagues amps up the gore considerably and ratchets down the plausibility substantially, as a grungy gang of organ harvesters led by the psychopathic meth dealer Raylan (Brendan Sexton III) go after Lang's daughter Phoenix (played by Madelyn Grace) in an exhaustingly depraved series of attacks where every sharp weighted object will be turned into a weapon.
The picture has little real cinematic value, if you don't count the imaginative ways Sayagues has devised of snuffing out human life when all the bullets have been spent.

Sunday, August 15, 2021

Respect



Singer/actress Jennifer Hudson shoulders the weight of audience expectations as Aretha Franklin, the iconic subject of Respect. Hudson (who won an Oscar for Dreamgirls) acquits herself through force of will and vocal performances that are so much better than the film's narrative, which feels like a pastiche of religious and secular tropes.
This feeling is present from the start, in the film's first scene, when 10-year-old Aretha (Skye Dakota Turner) is roused out of her bed by her father, Rev. C. L. Franklin (Forest Whitaker), to sing for the crowd of luminaries assembled downstairs, whom she greets as Aunt and Uncle. She performs a sassy blues for the likes of Dinah, Ella and Duke, and is accompanied on piano by Art Tatum. This fantastic scene capsulizes not only the child Aretha's verve but her father's vise grip on her body and spirit.
The theme of domination and control is carried through the picture, and epitomized later by her abusive husband Ted (a terrifically menacing Marlon Wayans) and alcohol and ultimately became the clarion call for her own liberation. They're infused in the lyrics of her biggest hits.
With Franklin as the subject, music must be a central element of the story. Director Liesl Tommy -- in her first feature -- stages wonderful showcases for Hudson's pipes and fans of Franklin will not be disappointed. And yet tissue connecting these stellar moments often feels incomplete, scattered, wispy. For example, aside from the young Aretha, the half-dozen or so other children in the film are never fully placed within the story world, the ages of principal characters are poorly defined, locations are suggested and not firmly planted, except for Aretha and Ted's trip to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, for an early recording session. That segment of the film has substantially more color and flavor than the rest of the film. So much important stuff seems to be going on beyond the frames, in different spaces. And that's frustrating.
The film weaves together love and sexual frankness, domestic violence and tenderness, vulgarity and Jesus in ways that will likely be familiar to many moviegoers, who will compartmentalize the disparate elements of the picture. They will heed the wisdom of Rev. James L. Cleveland (Titus Burgess) who counsels a dejected Aretha to set aside her demons (they never existed anyway) and just be in church.
That might be the best way to fully enjoy a movie that shines but not nearly as brightly as it could.

Saturday, August 14, 2021

Free Guy

 


Ryan Reynolds has real bankability. Not only is he tall, square-jawed and handsome, he chooses roles that call for full-bodied expressiveness. In that way, he's like a latter-day Buster Keaton, whose commitment to physical comedy during the Silent Era is legendary.
Reynolds' most celebrated role is as Deadpool, a costumed crime fighter who put both the "smart" and "ass" in the Marvel Universe as a horribly scarred but seemingly indestructible bad boy / good guy. To my mind, Reynolds IS Deadpool; both seem to be indifferent to others' expectations, plowing ahead, cracking heads and cracking wise.
In Shawn Levy's Free Guy, Reynolds is a non-player character named Guy in a popular video game, Free City, who, following an encounter with a winsome avatar Molotov Girl (Killing Eve's Jodie Comer), discovers he has a mind of his own and does not have to settle for being highly dispensable fodder for virtual gunplay.
Guy's journey to individuation tracks along with the "real world" story of Millie (the player behind Molotov) and her game-writing partner Keys (Joe Keery), who are trying to wrest their original game design from the clutches of a greedy corporate clown played by the always reliable Taika Waititi.
The game-world machinations involve eye-popping visual effects and some pretty heavy social commentary -- mainly personal liberty and freedom of choice. A cameo by another fully committed actor -- Channing Tatum -- is a high-point of the film's second reel, when Reynolds' Guy and his best friend Buddy (Lil Rel Howery), meet an adoring avatar (Tatum) who is taken with Guy's liberation crusade.
It's two enjoyable hours of smirks, slapstick and satire.

Tuesday, August 10, 2021

Nine Days

 


In his first feature film, Nine Days, writer/director Edson Oda reframes ancient questions about life and conscience into an original meditation. Set in a lonesome house in the middle of what appears to be desert salt flats, the story (an extended allegory) depicts the work of a solemn, humorless man named Will (Black Panther and Us's Winston Duke in an award-caliber performance) who must choose which of five unborn souls (played by Zazie Beetz, Tony Hale, Bill Skarsgård, David Rysdahl, Arianna Ortiz) will get a chance at life.


In retro form befitting his character's personality and previous existence, Will has his subjects watch television screens that are windows into the worlds of previously selected souls. The unborn must take notes on what they see. Will reviews the notes, looking for evidence not that the unborn souls are spiritually worthy, as one might expect, but that they will survive the harshness of human existence, which Will himself was unable to do.

Will's companion in the selection is Kyo (Benedict Wong of Doctor Strange), who is sunny counterpoint to his friend's darkness. Kyo is also concerned about Will's peculiar obsession with one long-ago selected soul who seemed to have everything but committed suicide. This seems to be making Will even more tentative and guarded in his selection process.

Yes, much of the film is brooding but there are also moments of joyfulness, channeled mainly through Zazie Beetz's (Atlanta) wonderful character Emma. The final three minutes of the film -- an extended monologue by Will -- is the most remarkable exhibition of pure acting craftsmanship I've seen so far this year. The script is a melding of Whitman and Shakespeare; and Duke is exuberant and thrilling.

Highly recommended.

Friday, August 6, 2021

The Green Knight

 

Writer / director David Lowery's The Green Knight is a beautiful puzzle, whose visual elements might over-power the 700-year-old legend's core allegory of triumph over baser concerns. The term "trippy" has been aptly attached to the film.
Dev Patel, who never fails to engage, stars as Sir Gawain, a member of the household of King Arthur (Sean Harris) who is elevated to a seat at the Round Table one Christmas. Emboldened by this demonstration of the king's favor, Gawain accepts a blow-for-blow challenge from the mysterious Green Knight (Ralph Ineson), beheads him, and promises the revivified corpse that he will submit to the same blow the following year.
Most the film is about the journey to the knight's Green Chapel, and Gawain's encounters with the mystical and the mundane. Some sequences are opaque, quite disorienting, and will likely leave audiences scratching their chins to parse the meaning. Gawain's visit with the spirit Winifred (Erin Kellyman) and a generous Lord and Lady (Joel Edgerton and Alicia Vikander) are important, dreamy encounters whose meanings may become more apparent as time passes.

The film is stunning and frustrating, taking viewers on a quite a trek but we're not sure where we are once we've arrived.

Old

 


M. Night Shyamalan may not always hit it out of the park but he always swings for the fences. The auteur of twisty thrillers evokes eye-rolls from many serious movie goers, but I'm usually entertained by the audacity of his ideas -- when they work and when they don't.
"Old" doesn't work completely -- the dialogue is stilted and implausibility (something Shyamalan is rarely burdened by) rules the day -- but it's not as bungled as other pictures in Shyamalan's oeuvre. Maybe having source material kept the movie from going off the rails.
In the film, a group of resort vacationers are taken to a secluded beach to spend the day. Soon, the youngsters in the group begin to show signs of aging, the oldsters start dying, minds get muddy, wrinkles settle into brows, and hearing and vision begin to fade. And there's no way to leave.
Shyamalan is a stagey creeper who knows how to balance nuance and grotesquerie, so his films are not full-blown horror blood-fests but they have enough gruesome spiciness to jolt callous viewers and enough out-of-frame suggestiveness to unnerve the rest.
"Old" cast is led by Gael Garcia Bernal and Vicky Krieps as a feuding couple and parents to two children. It is through this quartet that much of the movie is told and through whom the big reveal is delivered.

Wednesday, August 4, 2021

Stillwater

 


In Tom McCarthy's Stillwater, a bulky Matt Damon plays Bill Baker, an Oklahoma roughneck on a mission to free his daughter, Allison (a fine Abigail Breslin) from a prison in Marseille. While studying at university, Allison was found guilty of killing her Arab girlfriend. During one of their visits, Allison asks her father to pass along a tip to her lawyer that might clear her of the murder. The information is not persuasive to the lawyer but leads Bill to enlist the help of his neighbor, Virginie (Camille Cottin) in finding the real killer.
Damon's Bill is a dutiful but dour mass of regret, as he lumbers through the winding streets of Marseille, hoping to prove his daughter's innocence and earn her respect, which he lost during his years as a drunken ne-er-do-well. Damon's performance, and he appears in nearly every scene of this beautifully shot film, feels measured and meticulous, and lends gravitas even to some of the narrative elements that don't quite square. Damon's scenes with Breslin are especially compelling.
Despite its length (2:20), Stillwater is does not drag; the narrative, while ostensibly a murder mystery, is mostly an insightful exploration of the foreign in the age of raging nationalism.

Saturday, July 31, 2021

Pig


Michael Sarnoski's debut feature film Pig slowly and deliberately ponders human emotions without being ponderous.
The story, which he co-wrote with Vanessa Block, is a quest tale about a loner truffle hunter named Robin (Nicholas Cage) searching for his hunting partner and companion, a beloved pig, who is kidnapped one night from Robin's cabin in the wilderness outside of Portland. Assisting Robin, albeit reluctantly, is Amir (Alex Wolff), a flashy young striver with "Daddy issues" who peddles Robin's truffles in the highly lucrative gourmet restaurant supply chain.
In many ways, the evolution of Robin and Amir's relationship can be anticipated. That's not to say watching it develop is dull; as Cage's taciturn wild man clashes with Wolff's brash urbanite. Both actors are terrific.
What was more surprising to me was the elegance with which Sarnoski, whose camera blends tones and temperatures throughout, discloses the truths that are driving the unlikely pair -- Robin's past notoriety and enduring pain and Alex's essential emptiness that Robin's mix of genius and madness seems to fill.


Wednesday, July 28, 2021

Noah Reid of Schitt's Creek

 



When Noah Reid's character Patrick Brewer was introduced in the third season of the highly celebrated Canadian comedy Schitt's Creek (nine Emmy wins last year), viewers no doubt wondered if the kind, understated and disarming business consultant, who was also closeted, could survive the lunacy that is life in the Creek, much less stoke a romantic spark he felt for the cluelessly affected and self-absorbed budding entrepreneur David Rose (series co-creator Dan Levy).

The casting and storyline was a calculated risk that paid off; that spark turned into an inferno among Creek chat room fanatics, both queer and straight, who pulled for the couple and, by extension, David's transformation from a wounded warrior scarred by big city romance into someone open to happiness and fulfillment.
Noah Reid is a triple-threat (as the aging soap opera queen Moira Rose would aver) -- actor/singer/dancer -- and his reworking of Tina Turner's "Simply the Best" in the fourth season episode "Open Mic" was for many viewers a high point of the show's six seasons. It is a thoroughly engaging and tender moment that is wonderfully affirming.
Despite the utopian openness of little Schitt's Creek to the relationship of these two men, many fans, straight and queer, set aside cynicism and posted that everyone deserves a Patrick. Which is to say, everybody deserves to be valued and loved.

Sunday, July 25, 2021

Black Widow

 


If Cate Shortland's Black Widow was as sure-footed as its leading character, the film might have more staying power. For a Marvel "origins" picture, it spends most of its screen time on Natasha Romanoff's discovery of her past through present battles with old foes and new (or rediscovered) allies. Shortland has assembled a half dozen exciting action pieces on both sides of the human story, which gives the movie tones that are mixed but not necessarily well-matched.
We're told that Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) was one of many "widow" soldiers bought or kidnapped as children and turned into lethal weapons by the diabolical Dreykov (Ray Winstone) for purposes that are not entirely clear, although one might assume, this being a Marvel story, it has something to do with vanquishing Shield or the Avengers.
In its strange prologue, we're introduced to the 10-year-old Natasha, her younger sister, Yelena (played as an adult by Florence Pugh), and their parents, Russian agents Alexei (David Harbour) and Melina (Rachel Weisz). It's strange because it spends no time establishing for us the connections shared by this quartet, choosing to rely on familiar narrative constructs as shorthand and devoting most of the opening to a daring airplane escape (from whom is not clear) to Cuba, where the girls are delivered to Dreykov.
The picture's two hundred million dollars bought a lot of locations and vehicular destruction, but the banter (what would an MCU film be without banter) between Johansson and Pugh and Harbour's scenes as the regretful, washed-up, incarcerated former Russian Super Soldier the Red Guardian are priceless.

Tuesday, July 20, 2021

Roadrunner

 


Morgan Neville's Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain -- despite its questionable but generally undetectable AI enhancements -- offers a thoughtful reassessment of the public and private life of the eponymous media icon, celebrity chef, gourmand and world traveler. The audience will undoubtedly know that the charismatic Bourdain committed suicide in 2018, after a period of international celebrity as the author of Kitchen Confidential and host of CNN's culinary travelogue Parts Unknown. That knowledge does not dull the edge of the film's point that his death was painful to many, made more so because Bourdain lived with gusto and daring.


Neville pairs archival footage of Bourdain with accounts from friends and family, all of which depict a man with an unquenchable thirst for exploration and, perhaps, distraction. A recovered drug addict, Bourdain discovered new obsessions in his work, exploring and writing about the folkways of people around the globe, particularly in unfamiliar corners and quarters. 


Failed romances, late fatherhood and a grueling travel schedule took a toll, unnoticed at that time, on Bourdain's mental and emotional health. His fall, in the last year of his life, was precipitous and puzzling, involving the idolization of a new muse, actress and women's rights activist Asia Argento, and the rejection of old friends, who, the film suggests, feel not only loss but betrayed by a man they loved dearly but who didn't love himself enough.



Respect trailer



I've seen the trailer for the Jennifer Hudson-starring Aretha biopic, Respect, several times now and am always left feeling uneasy about this film, which will be released next month. The art direction, costuming and hair all appear top notch, but some of the lines are clunky and land harshly on the ear. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTtxoz3OIlU)



For example, the flawless Audra McDonald's instruction to the child Aretha (Skye Dakota Turner) to demand "respect" from others is so lacking in nuance that it might as well have been carved in the side of a mountain. Forest Whitaker plays Aretha's father C.L. Franklin and delivers a line that reads "You have a talent that folks call genius," which is so awkwardly phrased it nearly doesn't make sense. Marlon Wayans plays Aretha's husband/manager/controller Ted White, with whom Aretha butts heads over her "bidness," a word she spits with a Sistahgirl neck swivel, though the scene is set in the '60s. And her clap back to Daddy Franklin when he accuses his daughter of losing her mind is pure Sapphire: "Maybe I found IT!" 



The film will undoubtedly snap and crackle and I'm saying a little prayer the music will sweeten what the trailer suggests will be some sour notes.



I've seen the trailer for the Jennifer Hudson-starring Aretha biopic, Respect, several times now and am always left feeling uneasy about this film, which will be released next month. The art direction, costuming and hair all appear top notch, but some of the lines are clunky and land harshly on the ear. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTtxoz3OIlU)



For example, the flawless Audra McDonald's instruction to the child Aretha (Skye Dakota Turner) to demand "respect" from others is so lacking in nuance that it might as well have been carved in the side of a mountain. Forest Whitaker plays Aretha's father C.L. Franklin and delivers a line that reads "You have a talent that folks call genius," which is so awkwardly phrased it nearly doesn't make sense. Marlan Wayans plays Aretha's husband/manager/controller Ted White, with whom Aretha butts heads over her "bidness," a word she spits with a Sistahgirl neck swivel, though the scene is set in the '60s. And her clap back to Daddy Franklin when he accuses his daughter of losing her "damn mind" is pure Sapphire: "Maybe I found IT!" 



The film will undoubtedly snap and crackle and I'm saying a little prayer the music will sweeten what the trailer suggests will be some sour notes.





Saturday, July 10, 2021

Zola

Why 'Zola' Is the Must-See Movie of the Summer - Variety

Television director Janicza Bravo's first feature film, Zola, which stars Taylour Paige in the title role, is based on waitress and part-time pole dancer A'ziah King's now legendary 2015 "Ho Trip" from Detroit to Tampa with a young woman, Stefani (Riley Keough), a sketchy dancer/stripper she waited on one day, Stefani's menacing "manager" (Colman Domingo) and her clueless boyfriend (Nicholas Braun). King posted 148 viral tweets during the weekend escapade, which involved prostitution, extortion, gun play and an attempted suicide. The story is told almost entirely in "hood rat" and features "internetual" embellishments -- emojis, bells and whistles -- for added spice. While the picture is most assuredly a hilarious "pitch black" comedy of the ill-mannered, it is also a pretty astute study of cultural appropriation, sex trade economics and the truly hard work of knowing one's worth.

Tuesday, July 6, 2021

F9: The Fast Saga


Justin Lin's F9: The Fast Saga is an unbelievably expensive and shameless exhibition of all that has made this fearless fast-car franchise so bankable --  a negligible storyline (which I won't bother to recount here), neo-family values sanctimony, multi-culti casting and preposterous vehicle chases that defy the laws of physics. It's gotten so bad (or good, depending on your POV) that characters are now commenting on their own indestructibility. All of the bruising insanity is held together by Vin Diesel's inscrutable visage and his ability to maintain his composure (and facial expression) from the first implausible racing set piece to the big family dinner that has become the epilogue for the series. Wonderfully explosive stuff.

Friday, July 2, 2021

Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go For It

 


Mariem Pérez Riera's loving documentary on the life and career of actress / activist Rita Moreno is an often-revealing tribute that occasionally wanders into cringe as Moreno, a self-described "attention seeker," hams and mugs for the audience between the tears. The stronger elements of the film are the stories of Moreno's nearly exclusive early casting as "island girls" and "dusky beauties" and her victimization by Hollywood's studio machinery. The maltreatment included a sexual assault by her agent (whom she does not name) and publicity pairings with movie actors, one of whom she disastrously married -- Marlon Brando.

Moreno's on-camera recollections are supported by friends and admirers, many of whom are also Puerto Rican, and scholar / historians who provide the important backdrop of racial and sexual discrimination that will inform viewers' understanding of Moreno's bouts with self-doubt and self-destructiveness.
Moreno, 90, has worked steadily in film and television for 70 years. Though perhaps best known by some of us as the fiery Anita in 1961's West Side Story (she will also appear in this year's remake), younger generations will know her work on The Electric Company, HBO's OZ and most recently Netflix's One Day at a Time. Moreno was first billed as Rosita Moreno in 1950, and the story of her evolution from that star-struck "island beauty" to an EGOT-winner is an important part of the intricate fabric of America's cultural history.

Monday, June 14, 2021

In the Heights

 


Fans will hear and see musical and narrative similarities between Lin-Manuel Miranda's "Hamilton" and his earlier Tony-winning work "In the Heights," both now delivered as motion pictures (though Hamilton was a filmed stage production and In the Heights fills city streets).
Both shows blend musical genres (hip-hop, Latin and more conventional theatrical structures) and weave together stories that explore how families (broadly defined) fight for self-identity and validation, albeit against vastly different backdrops.
Hamilton's sweep was grander -- America's liberation from Britain -- and In the Heights covers more intimate ground, the indomitability of the human spirit, represented here by immigrants and Dreamers from the Caribbean living in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan. Audiences will likely be moved to laughter and tears by these denizens and their dicey dilemmas.
Director Jon M. Chu's color palette is saturated; reds, greens, blues and yellows run down the sides of the screen (figuratively speaking) and wash over the audience, as his camera trots along with and flies above the film's wonderfully winning troupe of principals (Anthony Ramos, Corey Hawkins, Leslie Grace, Melissa Barrera and Gregory Diaz IV) and scores of dancers over the course of three steaming summer days in New York, before a citywide blackout.
The film's pacing is vigorous and, like Hamilton, the score is nearly through-sung; long passages have nearly no spoken dialogue. Also, like opera, the songs are heavily expositive, bearing the characters' own stories (Breathe, Paciencia y Fe), rousing anthems for community and solidarity (In the Heights, Alabanza, Carnaval del Barrio) and bawdy romps (No Me Diga).
In the Heights is an unquestionable cinematic achievement, which, as I shared with my screening partner today, will likely sweep during award season. It's biggest competition will no doubt be Steven Spielberg's West Side Story, scheduled to open during the winter holidays.

The Naked Gun (2025)

  Those familiar with SNL alum/writer/actor/director Akiva Schaffer's humor will be better prepared than the uninitiated for his revival...