Check out my reviews, online at Phoenix Magazine, of Ryan Coogler's badass Sinners...
...and the anthropomorphic footwear adventure Sneaks...
Showing posts with label MICHAEL B. JORDAN. Show all posts
Showing posts with label MICHAEL B. JORDAN. Show all posts
Monday, April 21, 2025
Thursday, November 22, 2018
A LONG STRANGE TRYPTOPHAN
Happy Thanksgiving everybody!
Check out my reviews, on Phoenix Magazine online, of Creed II...
...and the Milestone Films Blu-Ray release of the exquisite 1926 animated film The Adventures of Prince Achmed...
...as well as a preview of the "No Festival Required" showing of the Rural Route Film Festival Touring Shorts at Scottsdale Center for the Arts.
Eat hearty!
Check out my reviews, on Phoenix Magazine online, of Creed II...
...and the Milestone Films Blu-Ray release of the exquisite 1926 animated film The Adventures of Prince Achmed...
...as well as a preview of the "No Festival Required" showing of the Rural Route Film Festival Touring Shorts at Scottsdale Center for the Arts.
Eat hearty!
Friday, February 16, 2018
COOL CAT & ROCK STARS
Good stuff this weekend:
Black Panther--Dreamed up by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, Black Panther was the first black superhero of any significance, debuting in Fantastic Four in 1966, and gradually taking over the pages of Marvel's Jungle Action in the '70s. He made his movie debut in 2016's Captain America: Civil War, played, as he is here, by Chadwick Boseman.
The roll that Marvel movies have been on continues, and maybe reaches a high point, with this extravagant, stirring saga. The title character is T'Challa, a royal in Wakanda, a tiny, isolated African nation. He's a rare (maybe singular?) specimen of both the Superman-Captain Marvel type of superhero, in that he has psuedo-scientifically and/or mystically bestowed superhuman powers, and the Doc Savage-Batman-James Bond school, in that he's a rich kid with unlimited technological resources and official sanction.
Wakanda, you see, has a secret: to the outside world it looks like a bucolic third-world backwater, but the big mountains in its center are a projection masking a futuristic, technocratic civilization far in advance of the rest of the world. It's powered by the deposits of an element called "vibranium" on which the country sits and which, along with training and traditional rituals, are also what give our hero his abilities. The Wakandas keep their real nature secret to keep the vibranium from falling into the wrong hands, and to protect themselves and others from the corruption of interfering in other people's affairs. They're like Switzerland, or Star Trek's Federation with its annoying "Prime Directive."
Near the beginning of the film, we see a Wakandan airship cruise into the skyline of this utopia. At the screening, I was sitting next to an African-American friend who leaned over and whispered in my ear "Thanks for the help during slavery." I must admit that, in all my readings of the comic, this potential for resentment of the Wakandans by other people of African descent, and by disadvantaged people in general, had simply never occurred to me. But it turns out to be the center of the movie's conflict.
The story here involves two villains. Klaue (a version of "Klaw" from the comics), a tatted-up South African weapons peddler with a vibranium-powered mechanical arm and a grudge against T'Challa, is played by Andy Serkis, out from behind the CGI for a change, and grinning with jolly murderousness. But in the course of the story he's overtaken as antagonist by Killmonger, a veteran of the U.S. military with an even deeper and more complicated grudge against our hero. Killmonger is played by Michael B. Jordan, who played the leads in director Ryan Coogler's previous films, the enjoyable Creed and the terrifyingly direct Fruitvale Station.
Coogler, who co-wrote the script with Joe Robert Cole, nails nearly every element in Black Panther. The narrative unfolds conventionally, but with a precision and a steady pace that makes it feel mythic. The movie is unhurried, yet I can't remember a boring moment, and the strength of the emotional payoff in the final minutes may sneak up on you. The costumes, sets and cinematography have a lush visual whimsicality--an affectionate hint of an old-Hollywood idea of Africa--that borders on the tongue-in-cheek but avoids kitsch.
Better than any of this, however, is the cast. Boseman plays iconic figures--Jackie Robinson, James Brown, Thurgood Marshall--so often that it's easy to miss that he plays them as human beings. His princely bearing as T'Challa is used, often and wisely, to comic effect. He's a frequent straight man to the ridiculously glamorous women in the cast: Lupita Nyong'o as his spy love interest, Letitia Wright as his tech-genius little sister--equivalent to Q in the Bond flicks--Angela Basset as his mom, and Danai Gurira as the leader of Wakanda's corps of shaven-headed warrior women.
Jordan, on the other hand, brings a touch of the tragic to his performance without milking it. Other cast members, like Forest Whittaker, Daniel Kaluuya of Get Out, Winston Duke and Martin Freeman as a CIA man, something like Felix Leiter in the Bond stories, bring warmth and individuality to what are, essentially, stock characters.
This movie perpetuates the Star Wars/Lion King idea of royal bloodlines and birthrights being central to society. And it shares the same limitation as most superhero stories: Boiling its conflict down to a climactic fistfight. But within the context of these obligatory elements, this Black Panther is about as good as big-budget blockbuster moviemaking can be.
Early Man--There are armored rhinos in Black Panther, by the way. Did I neglect to mention that? Yeah, there are armored rhinos in Black Panther, and there are armored mammoths in Early Man, Nick Park's stop-motion animated caveman travesty. This is my kind of weekend at the movies.
It wasn't clear from the initial American TV ads, but Early Man, directed by Park of Wallace and Gromit fame from a script by Mark Burton and James Higginson, is a sports movie--specifically, a soccer movie. Set "near Manchester" (hence its very title is a pun) during the transition from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age, it offers an origin story for the "Beautiful Game."
It's about a tribe of Stone Agers who are dispossessed from their homeland by technically advanced Bronze Agers who want to mine it. The Bronze folk worship football, so Stone Ager Dug (voiced by Eddie Redmayne) challenges them to a match for the right to return to their Valley or, if they lose, to work "down the mine" for the rest of their lives. A young Bronze Age woman, Goona (Maisie Williams), joins the Stone Agers and coaches them, because girls aren't allowed to play back home. Dug's warthog pal Hognob would like to play too, but everybody ignores this. At first.
I'd guess there are lots of soccer-related jokes and references in this movie that are lost on us Yanks, as it both follows and spoofs the template of the underdog sports tale. But at another level, it's a parody of old-school caveman flicks like One Million Years B.C. or When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, and thus it offers us such showpieces as a towering, fanged duck, the ultimate proof of the dinosaur ancestry of birds.
I'm so in sympathy with this movie's nuttiness that I'm reluctant to admit that it's probably not quite on the level of some of Aardman's other feature efforts, like 2015's Shaun the Sheep Movie, or 2012's The Pirates! Band of Misfits. Besides, so what? Second-tier Aardman is still better than ten regular movies.
Black Panther--Dreamed up by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, Black Panther was the first black superhero of any significance, debuting in Fantastic Four in 1966, and gradually taking over the pages of Marvel's Jungle Action in the '70s. He made his movie debut in 2016's Captain America: Civil War, played, as he is here, by Chadwick Boseman.
The roll that Marvel movies have been on continues, and maybe reaches a high point, with this extravagant, stirring saga. The title character is T'Challa, a royal in Wakanda, a tiny, isolated African nation. He's a rare (maybe singular?) specimen of both the Superman-Captain Marvel type of superhero, in that he has psuedo-scientifically and/or mystically bestowed superhuman powers, and the Doc Savage-Batman-James Bond school, in that he's a rich kid with unlimited technological resources and official sanction.
Wakanda, you see, has a secret: to the outside world it looks like a bucolic third-world backwater, but the big mountains in its center are a projection masking a futuristic, technocratic civilization far in advance of the rest of the world. It's powered by the deposits of an element called "vibranium" on which the country sits and which, along with training and traditional rituals, are also what give our hero his abilities. The Wakandas keep their real nature secret to keep the vibranium from falling into the wrong hands, and to protect themselves and others from the corruption of interfering in other people's affairs. They're like Switzerland, or Star Trek's Federation with its annoying "Prime Directive."
Near the beginning of the film, we see a Wakandan airship cruise into the skyline of this utopia. At the screening, I was sitting next to an African-American friend who leaned over and whispered in my ear "Thanks for the help during slavery." I must admit that, in all my readings of the comic, this potential for resentment of the Wakandans by other people of African descent, and by disadvantaged people in general, had simply never occurred to me. But it turns out to be the center of the movie's conflict.
The story here involves two villains. Klaue (a version of "Klaw" from the comics), a tatted-up South African weapons peddler with a vibranium-powered mechanical arm and a grudge against T'Challa, is played by Andy Serkis, out from behind the CGI for a change, and grinning with jolly murderousness. But in the course of the story he's overtaken as antagonist by Killmonger, a veteran of the U.S. military with an even deeper and more complicated grudge against our hero. Killmonger is played by Michael B. Jordan, who played the leads in director Ryan Coogler's previous films, the enjoyable Creed and the terrifyingly direct Fruitvale Station.
Coogler, who co-wrote the script with Joe Robert Cole, nails nearly every element in Black Panther. The narrative unfolds conventionally, but with a precision and a steady pace that makes it feel mythic. The movie is unhurried, yet I can't remember a boring moment, and the strength of the emotional payoff in the final minutes may sneak up on you. The costumes, sets and cinematography have a lush visual whimsicality--an affectionate hint of an old-Hollywood idea of Africa--that borders on the tongue-in-cheek but avoids kitsch.
Better than any of this, however, is the cast. Boseman plays iconic figures--Jackie Robinson, James Brown, Thurgood Marshall--so often that it's easy to miss that he plays them as human beings. His princely bearing as T'Challa is used, often and wisely, to comic effect. He's a frequent straight man to the ridiculously glamorous women in the cast: Lupita Nyong'o as his spy love interest, Letitia Wright as his tech-genius little sister--equivalent to Q in the Bond flicks--Angela Basset as his mom, and Danai Gurira as the leader of Wakanda's corps of shaven-headed warrior women.
Jordan, on the other hand, brings a touch of the tragic to his performance without milking it. Other cast members, like Forest Whittaker, Daniel Kaluuya of Get Out, Winston Duke and Martin Freeman as a CIA man, something like Felix Leiter in the Bond stories, bring warmth and individuality to what are, essentially, stock characters.
This movie perpetuates the Star Wars/Lion King idea of royal bloodlines and birthrights being central to society. And it shares the same limitation as most superhero stories: Boiling its conflict down to a climactic fistfight. But within the context of these obligatory elements, this Black Panther is about as good as big-budget blockbuster moviemaking can be.
Early Man--There are armored rhinos in Black Panther, by the way. Did I neglect to mention that? Yeah, there are armored rhinos in Black Panther, and there are armored mammoths in Early Man, Nick Park's stop-motion animated caveman travesty. This is my kind of weekend at the movies.
It wasn't clear from the initial American TV ads, but Early Man, directed by Park of Wallace and Gromit fame from a script by Mark Burton and James Higginson, is a sports movie--specifically, a soccer movie. Set "near Manchester" (hence its very title is a pun) during the transition from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age, it offers an origin story for the "Beautiful Game."
It's about a tribe of Stone Agers who are dispossessed from their homeland by technically advanced Bronze Agers who want to mine it. The Bronze folk worship football, so Stone Ager Dug (voiced by Eddie Redmayne) challenges them to a match for the right to return to their Valley or, if they lose, to work "down the mine" for the rest of their lives. A young Bronze Age woman, Goona (Maisie Williams), joins the Stone Agers and coaches them, because girls aren't allowed to play back home. Dug's warthog pal Hognob would like to play too, but everybody ignores this. At first.
I'd guess there are lots of soccer-related jokes and references in this movie that are lost on us Yanks, as it both follows and spoofs the template of the underdog sports tale. But at another level, it's a parody of old-school caveman flicks like One Million Years B.C. or When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, and thus it offers us such showpieces as a towering, fanged duck, the ultimate proof of the dinosaur ancestry of birds.
I'm so in sympathy with this movie's nuttiness that I'm reluctant to admit that it's probably not quite on the level of some of Aardman's other feature efforts, like 2015's Shaun the Sheep Movie, or 2012's The Pirates! Band of Misfits. Besides, so what? Second-tier Aardman is still better than ten regular movies.
Wednesday, November 25, 2015
GLOVE STORY
Opening today:
Creed—The title refers to the son of Apollo Creed, Rocky’s opponent-turned-friend in the Rocky films. Our hero, Adonis Johnson (Michael B. Jordan) is the posthumously-born and then orphaned product of an extramarital affair by the fighter, rather graciously raised by Apollo’s widow (Phylicia Rashad). Adonis grows up a rich kid, but pursues a boxing career anyway, not using his Dad’s name initially because he wants to make it on his own. Unable to get L.A. trainers to take him seriously, he travels to Philly and talks his dad’s old pal Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone), now a widower and restaurateur, into training him. Word of his lineage leaks, and this leads to a heavyweight title bout in Liverpool with a Brit brute (Tony Bellew) desperate for a payday.
This seventh Rocky movie is the one that most reminded me of the original, and that’s probably not by accident. Except for Rocky the first and Rocky V, it’s the only film in the series not directed by Stallone. Creed’s director is the talented Ryan Coogler, of 2013’s intense yet lucid Fruitvale Station. His naturalistic touch is similar to that of John G. Avildsen, who gave such a lived-in, convincing atmosphere to the 1976 Rocky.
Creed needs this edge, because it’s every bit as melodramatic, sloppily sentimental and realistically dubious as any other Rocky movie. And as with the original, knowing this isn’t likely to help you resist. Creed is a hair overlong—it has a plot complication or two more than it needs—but it quickly pulls us into investing in the hero’s fortunes, and Coogler’s handling of the fights is speedy and supple.
Stallone slips easily into his classic old role and is very entertaining. After four decades his line readings have become such a cliché that it's hard not to chuckle at them, but the chuckles are affectionate.
Creed—The title refers to the son of Apollo Creed, Rocky’s opponent-turned-friend in the Rocky films. Our hero, Adonis Johnson (Michael B. Jordan) is the posthumously-born and then orphaned product of an extramarital affair by the fighter, rather graciously raised by Apollo’s widow (Phylicia Rashad). Adonis grows up a rich kid, but pursues a boxing career anyway, not using his Dad’s name initially because he wants to make it on his own. Unable to get L.A. trainers to take him seriously, he travels to Philly and talks his dad’s old pal Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone), now a widower and restaurateur, into training him. Word of his lineage leaks, and this leads to a heavyweight title bout in Liverpool with a Brit brute (Tony Bellew) desperate for a payday.
This seventh Rocky movie is the one that most reminded me of the original, and that’s probably not by accident. Except for Rocky the first and Rocky V, it’s the only film in the series not directed by Stallone. Creed’s director is the talented Ryan Coogler, of 2013’s intense yet lucid Fruitvale Station. His naturalistic touch is similar to that of John G. Avildsen, who gave such a lived-in, convincing atmosphere to the 1976 Rocky.
Creed needs this edge, because it’s every bit as melodramatic, sloppily sentimental and realistically dubious as any other Rocky movie. And as with the original, knowing this isn’t likely to help you resist. Creed is a hair overlong—it has a plot complication or two more than it needs—but it quickly pulls us into investing in the hero’s fortunes, and Coogler’s handling of the fights is speedy and supple.
Stallone slips easily into his classic old role and is very entertaining. After four decades his line readings have become such a cliché that it's hard not to chuckle at them, but the chuckles are affectionate.
Probably the biggest key to the film’s success, however, is
Michael B. Jordan, who also starred in Fruitvale Station. His Adonis is both
wary and callow in a way that’s disarming; you can believe that Rocky would
take an avuncular interest in him. He’s also given a love interest, a club
singer (Tessa Thompson) who lives in the apartment downstairs. This strand felt
obligatory at first, but the two play their scenes together with such
directness that I came to care far more about their relationship than about the
silly fight.
Victor Frankenstein—“You know this story,” we’re told. “A crack of lightning. A mad genius. An unholy creation.” This retelling has all of the above, but is, of all things, a buddy picture. The buddies are the mad visionary of the title (James McAvoy) and Igor (Daniel Radcliffe), here not a toadying assistant but a brilliant collaborator, liberated from cruel servitude as a circus clown and self-trained big top physician. The doc even cures his new pal of his spinal curvature.
The two of them get up to all manner of gruesome mischief in 19th-Century England—piecing together a flyblown chimpanzee-creature is barely the start of it—while they are stalked by a pious, obsessed police detective (Andrew Scott). Igor even gets some romance this time, with a beautiful trapeze artist (Jessica Brown Findlay) from his old gig.
It isn’t the first movie to push the “Igor” character to center stage; the idea goes back at least as far as the 2008 animated feature Igor. Nonetheless, this nutty, headlong gothic, directed by Paul McGuigan from a script by Max Landis, is a spin on this story you haven’t seen, throwing staggeringly improbable character development—when we first meet him, Igor doesn’t even have a name and says he’s never known any kindness, yet he can read, has somehow taught himself human anatomy, and draws like Albrecht Durer—together with 21st-Century-style psychobabble and self-esteem boosting, gore, theological conflict and wild melodramatic action. It’s often ridiculous, but I never found it dull, and McGuigan and Landis lace it with enough sly gags to reassure us that we aren’t being asked to take it seriously.
Radcliffe, with his sympathetic everyman quality, is pleasant company as usual. But it’s McAvoy who really puts on a show. Dashing and manic, he has some of the droll ebullience of the young Tim Curry. McAvoy is the true zap to this movie’s neck-bolts.
Still in theaters:
Brooklyn—This simple, straightforward account of a young Irish girl’s immigrant experience in the title borough gently grips like the reminiscence of a relative. Based on Colm Toibin’s novel and directed by John Crowley, it follows Saoirse Ronan as Eilis, who sails from County Wexford in the early ‘50s, through seasickness, homesickness, love with an Italian-American guy, family tragedy and a choice between her old and new worlds. Ronan is luminous and sympathetic, the period detail has an idealized radiance, and the plot, though believable, isn’t predictable. You can take your grandparents to this one—it might be their story.
Victor Frankenstein—“You know this story,” we’re told. “A crack of lightning. A mad genius. An unholy creation.” This retelling has all of the above, but is, of all things, a buddy picture. The buddies are the mad visionary of the title (James McAvoy) and Igor (Daniel Radcliffe), here not a toadying assistant but a brilliant collaborator, liberated from cruel servitude as a circus clown and self-trained big top physician. The doc even cures his new pal of his spinal curvature.
The two of them get up to all manner of gruesome mischief in 19th-Century England—piecing together a flyblown chimpanzee-creature is barely the start of it—while they are stalked by a pious, obsessed police detective (Andrew Scott). Igor even gets some romance this time, with a beautiful trapeze artist (Jessica Brown Findlay) from his old gig.
It isn’t the first movie to push the “Igor” character to center stage; the idea goes back at least as far as the 2008 animated feature Igor. Nonetheless, this nutty, headlong gothic, directed by Paul McGuigan from a script by Max Landis, is a spin on this story you haven’t seen, throwing staggeringly improbable character development—when we first meet him, Igor doesn’t even have a name and says he’s never known any kindness, yet he can read, has somehow taught himself human anatomy, and draws like Albrecht Durer—together with 21st-Century-style psychobabble and self-esteem boosting, gore, theological conflict and wild melodramatic action. It’s often ridiculous, but I never found it dull, and McGuigan and Landis lace it with enough sly gags to reassure us that we aren’t being asked to take it seriously.
Radcliffe, with his sympathetic everyman quality, is pleasant company as usual. But it’s McAvoy who really puts on a show. Dashing and manic, he has some of the droll ebullience of the young Tim Curry. McAvoy is the true zap to this movie’s neck-bolts.
Still in theaters:
Brooklyn—This simple, straightforward account of a young Irish girl’s immigrant experience in the title borough gently grips like the reminiscence of a relative. Based on Colm Toibin’s novel and directed by John Crowley, it follows Saoirse Ronan as Eilis, who sails from County Wexford in the early ‘50s, through seasickness, homesickness, love with an Italian-American guy, family tragedy and a choice between her old and new worlds. Ronan is luminous and sympathetic, the period detail has an idealized radiance, and the plot, though believable, isn’t predictable. You can take your grandparents to this one—it might be their story.
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