Tag: movies

Movie review: Belfast [Branaugh]

a breakthrough performance

In the summer of 1969, the stable life in the capital of Northern Ireland was suddenly disrupted by the Troubles. The father of one family has to go out of town to find work. Will the folks get caught up in the sectarian violence?

All of this is shown in the movie Belfast. And yet, the description misses the utter joy one feels after watching the film. It’s also about familial love in the face of adversity, a first crush, and the joy of cinema. One detail I read explains that the actors who sit in the movie theater are actually seeing that flick segment for the first as they are being recorded.

Kenneth Branaugh, the writer and director, was born on December 10, 1960, in that city. Check out this video. Much of the narrative of the film is seen in the eyes of Buddy, who is clearly Branaugh’s stand-in. Jude Hill, in his film debut, was very relatable. I believe the film works as well as it does because, in a child’s mind, the little things in life are just as important as the big issues.

The critics weigh in

In fact, the British Independent Film Awards for 2021 dubbed the youth’s work the Breakthrough Performance of the year. Other awards were presented to Caitriona Balfe, who played Ma, as Best Actress; Ciarán Hinds (Pa) as Best Supporting Actor; and Judi Dench (Granny) Best Supporting Actress. Also, the Best Editing went to Úna Ní Dhonghaíle.

Among the other nominees was Van Morrison, who was born in Belfast in 1945. His songs almost always fit the movie perfectly. My FAVORITE song in the movie was not his, however, but in the best scene, near the end of the film.

The Rotten Tomatoes score was 87% positive from the critics, 92% positive from the audiences. The negative reviews use terms such as inert, inorganic, cloying, over-directed, and contrived. I would disagree. Branaugh, I think, found the right balance between tension and joy.

The film won the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto Film Festival. Even the critical takes acknowledge that the film is beautifully shot in black and white.

My wife and I saw it at the Spectrum 8, a Landmark Theatre, in late November, the first we’d seen in the cinema in four months. And after the film, much of the audience milled around the aisles, clearly greeting old friends they had not seen in a while.

Reviews: Respect; Genius: Aretha

Take care, TCB

Respect PosterIn another rare sojourn into normalcy, my wife, our daughter, and I went to the nearby Madison Theatre to see the new biopic Aretha. Where else would one want to wait out the remnants of Tropic Storm Henri, which wasn’t as bad here as we feared?

Respect is a serviceable film. That’s damned with faint praise, I suppose. We thought Jennifer Hudson was excellent as the Queen of Soul. At times, I forgot it wasn’t Aretha herself on the screen. The creation of the title song I found particularly moving.

Quite probably, part of my difficulty sorting things out stems from having seen Genius: Aretha, a National Geographic eight-part miniseries back in March and April. Cynthia Erivo was equally good as the title character.

Genius: Aretha was long and occasionally unfocused, bouncing around chronologically. This NPR review notes that it “too often unfolds like a predictable biopic burdened by ham-handed storytelling.”

But it put to good use the young Re, played by Shaian Jordan, with a very fine voice, at all of those revival tours her father C.L. put her in. There was little for young Skye Dakota Turner to do in Respect.

Control freaks

genius-aretha-posterGenius’ C.L. (Courtney B. Vance) was oilier than respect’s C.L. (Forest Whitaker); that’s a compliment to Vance and/or how he was written. My wife wondered how the young Aretha got pregnant a second time in Respect, which is more explicit in Genius.

Both portrayers of Aretha’s abusive first husband Malcolm Barrett (Genius) and Marlon Wayans (Respect) were solidly villainous. It’s clear in both iterations that Aretha left her controlling and occasionally abusive father for her likewise disposed spouse.

Each story touched on her ultimately frustrating time with Columbia. And her first session for Atlantic at Muscle Shoals is told. It would be namedropping if it weren’t the case that the Franklin family really DID know all these folks who appear in one or both films: Sam Cooke, Clara Ward, Mahalia Jackson, Dinah Washington, King Curtis, Smokey Robinson, Rev. James Cleveland (of course), and in particular, uncle Martin, that is to say, MLK, Jr.

I think the real flaw in Respect is that Aretha’s mother Barbara (the great Audra McDonald) did not get the screentime required for the payoff of her last appearance. The Barbara in Genius is present enough that the feeling of loss is stronger.

Amazing Grace

The last major scene in Respect, a part also in Genius, is her Amazing Grace performance in Los Angeles. You’d be better served by seeing that documentary, or at least segments of it.

At least, Respect had the sense to end on that triumph. The storyline of Genius after that point wasn’t nearly as compelling. My bottom line is that they each had their strengths. Genius with the young Re. Respect with its shorter running time, although at two and a half hours (!) it was not compact.

The week after we saw Respect, my daughter and I were watching the 2004 biopic Ray, with Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles. Though I recorded it over a year ago, I had never seen it. Jerry Wexler of Atlantic Records was a character in all of them, working with Ray in the 1950s before his time with Aretha in the late 1960s. The remembering his mama in Ray worked better than a similar scene in Respect.

If you don’t know the stories, see one or the other, but probably not both.

Movie review: Collective [Romania]

medical establishment

CollectiveThe International Feature Film Oscar nominee Collective, representing Romania, is an intriguing docudrama. It’s in no small part because the viewer thinks the story is going to be about one thing, but there continues to be much more to the narrative.

The title comes from Bucharest’s Colectiv nightclub. A 2015 fire there killed 64 people. But the majority of them died well after the conflagration. Why is that?

A group of reporters from, of all things, a sports daily newspaper, keep finding bits of the story, led by Catalin Tolontan and Mirela Nega. These are dogged investigators who might put Woodward and Bernstein to shame. Think of the movie Spotlight or other investigative films, without the Hollywood lighting and mood music.

The newspaper initially reveals one villain, a medical supplier. Did the company director know about the discrepancies in the product line? But this turns out to be merely the tip of the iceberg.

Knight to the rescue?

It is at that point that director Alexander Nanau pivots, rightly so, I believe. He then focuses on the personable new minister of health Vlad Voiculescu, a former activist after his predecessor suddenly resigned. Vlad’s job is to initiate a whole redo of Romania’s corrupt and inept medical establishment. Naturally, he experiences pushback from the systems, plural: medical, bureaucratic, and political.

Near the end, Vlad notes the lack of interest in hospital reform from Romania’s doctors, while the public grows frustrated with how slowly change is coming. He notes, “It’s like we are living in separate worlds.”

A minor, but compelling storyline involved the recuperation of burn survivor Tedy Ursuleanu and her nifty new mechanical hand.

Critic Roger Moore notes, “One can’t watch the… documentary… without feeling as if the film is a snapshot of America’s future.” This detailed review in Indiewire tells a lot more than I’m sharing here. 99% of the critics and 88% of the general audience applauded this movie.

Despite the many setbacks experienced by the protagonists, Collective shows the value of truth, and the importance of a free press addressing countervailing forces. The movie’s pacing is slow, especially early on, but it’s worthwhile overall. I saw it on Hulu. It is in Romanian, with subtitles.

Movie on TV review: Sneakers

Test driver Tetrault

Sneakers.Gallery-1When the movie Sneakers came out in 1992, I had intended to watch it at the cinema, and for a specific reason. Yet I did not.

But when my daughter was flicking through the channels when we were on vacation at the end of June, there it was. We were introduced to the team led by Robert Redford as Martin Bishop. His company tests the security of banks and other businesses.

His colleagues include Crease (Sidney Poitier), the ex-CIA man with anger issues; Mother (Dan Aykroyd), the conspiracy theory nut who, two decades later, would probably spewing his nonsense on Twitter; Emory (David Strathairn), who’s blind but hears extraordinarily well; and Carl (River Phoenix), a brilliant hacker.

Martin is approached by two NSA guys to steal a newly invented computer decoder. He eventually susses out that his new clients aren’t who they say they are. He ends up asking his ex, Liz (Mary McDonnell) for help.

In many ways, this is a traditional caper movie in the Dirty Dozen/Mission Impossible/Ocean’s 11 traditions. But, in hindsight, it has the veneer of a sociological study about how the world changed – or didn’t – after the Soviet Union broke up.

Before its time?

The movie received 79% positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. I do agree with most critics that River Phoenix was underused in the film.

The most interesting negative review is this one from 2001. “But this MacGuffin… it could shut down the Federal Reserve, Air Traffic Control, the National Power Grid. Oh, the power! The sweet, warm, delicious power! With this thing I could, dare I say it, rule the world!

“Gack. How 1992. How so early post-Cold War. Here I am worried about cloned supersheep herding humans for food, and Sneakers wants to get me upset over a few crashed airplanes.”

And that is precisely the type of terrorism that we’re worried about in the past decade or so. Because the technology has nearly caught up with the imagination of the script.

I enjoyed Sneakers and I found it surprisingly relevant. My daughter was occasionally confused because it was tricky figuring out who the good guys were. The final scene, featuring a well-known actor, was played for laughs. The film also stars Ben Kingsley as Cosmo, Martin’s former colleague; Timothy Busfield; and Stephen Tobolowsky.

But the reason I always wanted to see Sneakers is that the late Ernie Tetrault, a long-time anchor of WRGB-TV, Channel 6 in Schenectady, NY played the news anchor; he performed the role credibly.

Movie review: Summer of Soul

(…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)

Summer of SoulIn the summer of 1969, there was a massively successful music festival in New York State. No, I’m not talking about Woodstock.

The documentary Summer of Soul recounts the Harlem Cultural Festival, which took place on six weekends, drawing about 300,000 people. It had big-name artists such as Stevie Wonder, B.B. King, the Chambers Brothers, and David Ruffin, recently of The Temptations, wearing a too-warm suit. The festival film was directed by the late Hal Tulchin, but the reels sat in a vault for nearly half a century.

Questlove (Ahmir-Khalib Thompson) of the band The Roots learned about the footage. He edited down over 50 hours of film that tells the story about not only the festival but the context in which it took place, a year after MLK’s death and, in the case of one show, during the Apollo 11 moon landing.

These are extraordinary performances. Gladys Knight and the Pips reminding us about how well the late choreographer Cholly Atkins trained Motown acts. The 5th Dimension, tired of some folks finding their sound “too white”, letting Billy Davis Jr. “go to church” on Let The Sunshine In. Sly and the Family Stone confused the crowd initially with their mixed-race/mixed gender/funkily garbed presentation as they performed Higher, which they later performed at Woodstock.

More artists

The concert also features Mongo Santamaria, the Edwin Hawkins Singers, the Staple Singers, Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach, and even the salty Moms Mabley, among many others.

Two highlights: Nina Simone, looking as she often does like a black goddess that she was, performing an early version of the anthem I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free. And Mahalia Jackson asking Mavis Staples for assistance singing Precious Lord.

But perhaps the most fascinating parts of Summer of Soul are the interviews with some of the people who attended the festival. Clips from the event made them feel as though they weren’t crazy. This remarkable thing really did happen. It was as wonderful as they re-remembered it, even though the concerts seemed to have been forgotten by the world.

See the film, subtitled (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), if you can in a movie theater. My wife and I caught it at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany. It is also available presently on Hulu.

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