Tuesday, July 14, 2020

Kenneth Branagh Embodies the Bard in Mesmerizing All Is True

Sir Kenneth Branagh has spent a major part of his career interpreting the works of William Shakespeare. His 1989 breakthrough in film featured Branagh as the star and director of Henry V (he won Oscar nominations for both jobs). So it only seems fair that Branagh should be the one to play the Bard in All Is True, directing a mesmerizing meditation on the last days of the greatest writer in the English language.

Such a grandiose statement may lead you to fear that Branagh and screenwriter Ben Elton mean to inflate their film into a bloated, and-then-I-wrote biopic. Nothing of the sort. Little is known for sure about the details of Shakespeares life. But as Shakespeare says in the film, I never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Neither does Branagh.

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The concept here is that the artist whose plays had the largest scope is now leading the smallest life. As All is True begins, in 1613, Shakespeare has returned to his home in Stratford-upon-Avon to retire after years of prodigious productivity. The catalyst is the fire that destroyed the Globe Theater, where Shakespeares plays were regularly performed. A spark from a stage cannon during a performance of All Is True, the original title of Henry VIII, reduced the Globe to ashes.

So now Will, as his family calls him, is done with it all. Hes no good at gardening, but gardening is what hell do. That and reconcile with the family he neglected for all these years. His wife Anne Hathaway (Dame Judi Dench), eight years his senior, treats him like a guest in his own house. His daughters harbor festering resentments. Susanna (Lydia Wilson), who is publicly denounced as a whore by Puritan society for cheating on her husband (Hadley Fraser), keeps her distance. And the unmarried Judith (Kathryn Wilder) believes her father holds a grudge against her for surviving her twin brother Hamnet, Shakespeares beloved only son, who died at 11, possibly from plague. Scholars have speculated about the connection between Hamnet to Hamlet, but Branaghs film isnt having it. Yet the ghost of his beloved boy is everywhere in Wills thoughts and waking dreams.

Its a telling irony that the women in Shakespeares time were never taught to read and write. Yet Dench, in a magisterial performance that never misses a trick, makes Anne a woman you trifle with at your peril. The closest All Is True comes to romance is Wills relationship with his patron, the Earl of Southampton (Ian McKellen), believed to be the inspiration for several of Wills most famous poems and sonnets. A conversation between the two men, wittily and movingly acted by Branagh and McKellan, is a high point in a film that cinematographer Zac Nicholson bathes in the autumnal light of time remembered.

Those expecting All Is True to replicate the romp of 1998s Oscar-winning Shakespeare in Love are at the wrong movie. And Branagh is even less interested in a fawning tribute. Though screenwriter Ben Elton is best known for the farcical zest of his TV sitcom work on Blackadder and Upstart Crow a teasing kick at the young Bard All Is True looks with gentle humor and stirring gravity at a lion in winter, who died in 1616 at 52, at home but hardly at peace.

Branagh, who directed five other Shakespeare film adaptations including Hamlet and Much Ado About Nothing and appeared in countless more on stage and screen, clearly holds All Is True close to his heart. Modeling his appearance on the best known painting of Shakespeare with an elongated nose accented by long hair on the sides and practically none on top, Branagh is the Bard incarnate. But his real achievement lies in capturing the internal life of an aging genius who claims that hes so lived so long in fictional worlds of his own imagining that hes lost sight of what is real. Branaghs performance is a triumph of ferocity and feeling that shuns Shakespeare the literary rock star to find the flawed, touchingly human man inside.


Kenneth Branagh Embodies the Bard in Mesmerizing All Is True

Why Amy Schumers I Feel Pretty Is Quietly Revolutionary

The most radical shot in the new Amy Schumer comedy I Feel Pretty is a mid-thirties woman staring at herself. In close-up, the stars face fills the frame: no glamour lighting, no genetically blessed cheekbones, no modern day digital retouching smoothing out the creases. Its what most people see when they look in the mirror, yet Hollywood rarely reflects it back unless the female character is a comic punchline hurled at a recoiling Zach Galifianakis.

Schumers Renee Bennett, an online service rep for a luxury make-up brand, is fixated on beauty. Shes a true believer who spends hours painting another face over her face. I Feel Pretty isnt a slob-to-chic makeover movie: From the beginning, her hair is perfectly curled, her Spanx hoisted, her outfits stylishly chosen, her nights spent studying YouTube cosmetics tutorials. Theres a false gag when Renee panics about visiting the corporate office carrying a purse thats a Bed Bath & Beyond shopping bag cmon, she wears heels to send emails in a basement! which works against Abby Kohn and Marc Silversteins point that this is a woman doing everything she can to look good.

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And its still not enough. The problem with being plain is that people wont tell you, like walking around with spinach tattooed on your teeth. Culturally, were supposed to pretend that if we asked a hundred strangers to pick between Schumer and Gigi Hadid, itd be a toss-up. Quietly, women like Renee know the ugly truth. Evasion is crazy-making, which is why we see New Yorkers treating our heroine normally yet she interprets everything as an insult. Even a crying baby hates her face extreme paranoia from a woman so insecure, she lies about her shoe size. The movie doesnt back her up, except to agree that inside her head, things look awful.

Which is partially why I Feel Pretty is a tough watch: It shouts the secrets we arent supposed to say. In the second act, Renee gets conked on the head and wakes up believing shes beautiful. A Kardashian! she beams. To us, she looks exactly the same, and the handsome idea is that self-confidence makes her beautiful. The lady nearly wins a bikini contest out of moxie. But the films attitude toward her shifts. Now, when Renee struts into a room, we see people shudder. A girl in an elevator is so repulsed by having to share four cubic feet of air with her, she rolls her eyes. Her tepid, but charming first date does a spit-take every time Renee brags about being hot. Beauty makes her ugly, vapid, obnoxious. The movie becomes cruel, spliced with bracingly glorious scenes where Schumer, the opposite of every screenplay girl whos beautiful but doesnt know it, pronounces herself perfect.

If thiscame out two decades ago, itd feel revolutionary. Back then, the bravest beauty standards comedy beauty hailed Jack Black for willingly bone Gwyneth Paltrow in a fat suit, who mostly just got to look like, well, Gwyneth Paltrow. Were still not really ready for an ordinary woman to play an ordinary romantic comedy lead, which is why even Schumers attempts have come at the genre askew.

The stand-up comic-turned-movie star would have been a pre-teen when the back pages of Seventeen Magazine peddled $12 diet tip booklets that were manuals for anorexia. (One advised girls to imagine dead mice on their food so they wouldnt eat it.) Those were quietly banned by the time Dove hired all shapes of women to sell body lotion in their underwear. Since then, more types of faces and figures are allowed to sell lipstick literal lip-service to the cultural conversation about inclusion. There are kids now who have always been alive in a time where corporations made room for normals, an idea I Feel Prettys fictional cosmetics millionaire Avery LeClaire (a phenomenal Michelle Williams) is just absorbing.

That generation might see I Feel Pretty as a step backwards. (I hope they do.) But that Nineties pre-teen is still inside Schumer and you see her childishness in pre-concussion Renees belief that its totally possible to swap out her moms thighs for Miss Hadids if shed just commit to SoulCycle if only shed just learn all the secrets and behave. Her magic moment is inspired by watching another 12-year-old make a wish in Big. Honest, adult conversations about beauty continue to be difficult (I love my curvy wife!) especially in an empowerment era where everyone says the correct koans about acceptance while digitally glossing their Instagrams. Insecurity was already painful. Now people are insecure about feeling insecure. From the way I Feel Pretty shudders as Renees new boyfriend Ethan (Rory Scovel) discovers an unphotogenic picture shes hidden out of embarrassment, insecurity is practically a sin.

But everyone is insecure. Ethan worries hes not macho; Avery frets that her voice is too squeaky; even Averys gorgeous, rich brother (Tom Hopper) is nervous over the notion that girls just date him for his fortune. Only Schumers character really wrestles with her shame until she stares at her true self in the mirror and sobs. Wed rather look away. Its easier to applaud cute girls who claim they love to eat pizza #cheatday #luvmybelly #happyfatty while wearing a size 2 crop top. Real ugliness, the kind that comes with someone revealing her worst inner and outer flaws, still makes us cringe. Maybe Schumer will go on to make the films people seem to want her to make, where a regular girl gets a regular rom-com happy arc. That would be revolutionary, too. But shes brave enough to show us her scars. Wanting her to cover them up is just another demand for a woman to show her best face.


Why Amy Schumers I Feel Pretty Is Quietly Revolutionary

Monday, July 13, 2020

Revisiting Hours: Pulse, The 21st Century Internet Ghost Story

Every Friday, were recommending an older movie available to stream or download and worth seeing again through the lens of our current moment. Were calling the series Revisiting Hours consider this Rolling Stones unofficial film club. This weeks last-column-of-2018 edition: David Fear on Kiyoshi Kurosawas J-horror cyber-nightmare Pulse.

Would you like to meet a ghost?

They are stains. Not there are stains though thats accurate enough. They, as in people. Young men and women that once stood in claustrophobic rooms and spent hours in front of screens are suddenly, inexplicably reduced to ashy outlines on walls and floors. Just, poof. Gone. Some of them have stumbled across an odd phenomena thats been slowly overtaking Tokyo, because theyd been checking on friends and loved ones whod been acting weird. Others merely logged on to the Internet, where malevolent spirits have found a way to get into our world. In early 21st-century cyberspace, no one can hear you scream. But it didnt mean a 56.6K modem couldnt sound like a spectral shriek.

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Made post-Y2K and pre-9/11, hitting audiences squarely between the age of AOL America Online and the invention of Twitter, Kiyoshi Kurosawas Pulse came cloaked in the hype of post-Ringu J-horror and the cultish embrace of psychotronic works blanket-termed as Asia Extreme. The wave started by the former had mostly receded by the time the film reached our shores; IRL horror-movie monster Harvey Weinstein had seen it at Cannes in the spring of 2001 and bought the rights, only to shelve it immediately. (All the better to eventually belch out an Americanized remake without the original being in circulation. Thankfully, Magnolia ended up taking Pulse 1.0 off Miramax/Dimensions hands and giving it a small domestic release in 2005.) As for the latter, Kurosawas slow-burner was the opposite of outr tales involving scarfaced yakuza and sympathetic vengeance-seekers. You could describe its pace as either deliberate or the drying of paint, depending on your mood.

If you stumbled across this movie via a before-BitTorrent bootleg back in the day or happened to go in blind during its brief theatrical run, however, you could tell it was different from the usual horror imports. There was something genuinely disturbing about the way it used post-millennial paranoia to suggest that something wicked this way was downloading its way into our cultural bloodstream. Even the silences and syrup-slow sections brim with a sickly sense of infection it is the most appropriately viral J-horror entry of the early aughts. The software and hardware in this ghost story couldnt be more dated, from the bulky P.C. set-ups to the fact that the plot is set into motion by a CD-ROM disk. Yet the dread, the center-cant hold vibe? That felt timeless back then. In 2018, it feels completely like an otherworldly transmission from our here and now.

It starts with an innocent inquiry: A young woman named Michi (Kumiko Aso) wonders where her fellow employee at a flower shop has been; hed been working on a computer program before going A.W.O.L. She goes to visit him, and notices he seems ok, if a little out of it. Then he goes into the other room and promptly hangs himself. Upon viewing the disk, Michi and her coworkers discover an image of their friend staring blankly into the wall. Beside him is a monitor, displaying what appears to be a webcam shot of the room hes in. Upon further inspection, they notice the monitor in the shot also has the same image of the room, and so does the computer in that picture, and so on to infinity. Theyre so bewildered they almost dont notice someone else reflected back on a different TV, off to the side .

Across town, Ryosuke Kawashima (Haruhiko Kato) a college student, slips an ISP start-up disk into his drive. Everything seems hunky dory, until his screen goes black (and so does the frame were watching a disorienting and disquieting touch). A series of twitchy, glitchy images appear, mainly of dark apartments and lost souls. A man sits in shadows, his legs barely visible in the gloom. A chat room-like message pops up: Do you want to meet a ghost? Freaked out, Ryosuke asks a young woman in the computer-sciences department, Harue (an actor named Koyuki), if this is the new online normal: Can the Internet dial you up itself? Upon further investigation, they come to the logical (?) conclusion that the netherworld has become too crowded. Restless spirits are taking it upon themselves to come here now, one log-in at a time.

Atmosphere takes precedence over jump scares here, which means there are long stretches of stillness, silence and the foreboding sense that something is simply watching these characters stumble around in literal darkness. Those bits are broken up by sudden left turns: a newscast gets static-y and freezes on an image of a man missing half his head; phone calls in which voices robo-croak Help; a woman in the background of a scene throwing herself off a silo. (Its climactic sequence, in which a flaming jet airliner crashes into a deserted metropolis, felt especially raw in 2001.) Kurosawa has admitted that, having seen that J-horror was becoming the next big thing, he wanted to make something that rode the wave; in an interview on the movies recent DVD re-release, he remembers thinking, In The Ring, a ghost crawls out of a TV screen. So what else has a screen? His exploitation-cinema eureka moment: Computers! Such Cormanesque opportunism also precipitated a sequence in which a lank-haired specter stutter-creeps across a room toward a victim cowering behind a couch.

But Kurosawa was a filmmaker who preferred to let viewers marinate in enigmatic unease, which is why Pulses recycled money shot involves a person simply being there one moment, and morphing into an eerie, vaguely stain without fanfare when the camera turns back to them the next. Its the horror of absence over presence, minus one skin-crawling scene in which, in the flick of a light switch, the process is reversed. And like his breakthrough serial-killer procedural Cure (1997), which suggested the homicidal impulse could passed person-to-person like porcine flu, this is a horror movie that turns an unexplained epidemic into ground zero for existential horror. The most spine-tingling bit of dialogue doesnt involve the rash of missing persons, the mass suicides, the suggest that this is happening globally or even the bit about stumbling across an Instagram of the damned. Its Harue musing about how, You might be all alone after death, too nothing changes, [death is] just right now, forever is that what becoming a ghost is about? Later, she suggests that everyone trying to connect while in their pods, their cubicles, their bubbles theyre already ghosts. They just have shuffled off the mortal coil yet.

Basking in the cathode-ray afterglow of such dour sentiments made Pulse the most chin-stroking of the eras J-horror entries, whether you saw it while the subgenre was hot or long after it had become a Wiki footnote. But go back to it now, if you havent in a while. And while Kurosawa tells his supernatural 3.0 tale on doomy drip-drop at a time, think about the idea of the Internet as a source of contagion, introducing sicknesses and diseases into the body politic.

Think about how ideas fester, like rot, then can become mobile, transmutable, clickable. Think about how often youre online, and what works into way into your mind without even knowing it. Think about the madness that lurks there. Think about the ability to slowly lose yourself, until you disappear altogether. Would you like to meet a ghost? In the dying light of 2018, the fear of it all remains. Only the software and the stains have changed.

Previously: Walk Hard


Revisiting Hours: Pulse, The 21st Century Internet Ghost Story

Bodied Review: Battle-Rap Comedy Fights P.C. Culture to a Draw

Theres a moment near the beginning of Bodied, Joseph Kahns brittle battering ram of a battle-rap comedy, where a character explains the difference between using lines and bars. You get off a handful of good lines when youre facing an opponent in a freestyle battle, just two people in a ring armed with nothing but envious vocabularies and beaucoup insults you can impress folks. They know you have some skills. But you come up with some kick-ass bars whats loosely categorized here as an interlocking, layered series of bap-bap-bap verbal jabs, characterized by complex rhyme schemes and a K.O. punchline? You can devastate an opponent. You can unleash hell, Hiroshima and holy war upon them. This is next-level stuff. This is what makes reputations.

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The person laying all of this out, it should be noted, is a Berkeley grad student named Adam Merkin. Hes played by Calum Worthy, a.k.a. the nervous, dorky kid from American Vandal who bragged about getting a handjob. Adam is a scholar about this sort of stuff; hes actually working on a thesis paper about the use of racial slurs as a poetic device in battle-rapping. (One epithet in particular, to be precise.) He is white. So is his painfully uninterested girlfriend Maya (Rory Uphold), the person that hes explaining the bars v. lines argument to. Theyre at an event in Oakland where one of the big names in the game, Behn Grym (Jackie Long), has just filleted a fellow wordsmith like a fish. Adam wants to interview the legend for his piece. Long story short, he ends up being forced to step to a poseur another pale loser in the parking lot. Guess who turns out to have some clean-em-up bars in the back of his cerebellum?

Soon, Adam gets invited to start participating in the circuit alongside Behn, an Asian-American rapper named Prospek (Jonathan Park) and a female rhymeslinger dubbed Devine Write (Shoniqua Shandai). He goes through the looking glass, eventually alienating everyone around him, and we follow this Caucasian Candide into some tricky, P.C.-baiting territory. This is what Kahn is setting up here: a fertile, first-rate satire about cultural appropriation, a big-screen screed on who gets the right to spit what and why, the final word on What the White Boy Means When He Says Yo. The smarts, the chops, the premise and the pedigree are all there. Ditto the broad stereotypes, from comically sensitive S.J.W.s to fake-gun-toting gangsters, but whats that thing about eggs and omelettes? You gotta break some to make some?

So youll understand if were a little underwhelmed once Bodied decides its totally cool taking the road far more traveled and slowly drops the side-eye critique. The left hooks get less frequent and softer even as the stand-offs get more heated, the digs on race more obvious and less drawn out in terms of deepening arguments. Points are tallied in terms of vicious wordplay onstage, while pro-or-con points about folks who Charles Aaron called fascinated wannabes who get jiggy in the safety of their own cul-de-sac get shuffled aside. Instead, the movie opts for a sort of Rocky of battle-rap template which, for those who saw 8 Mile and were hoping for something along those same lines but with jokes, will be throwing their hands in the air, etc. Eminem is a producer, by the way, and you get the sense that his nod of approval on the project isnt merely a favor to a friend. He knows what its like to be someone who has admiration for and common ground with a community but isnt part of it, who understands how race and class are hip-hop slippery slopes, whos stood in the middle of a crowd and massacred with couplets like his life depended on it.

Yeah, the battle rap sequences theyre 100-percent adrenaline. Kahns background is primarily, though not exclusively, in music videos and the man has racked up an insanely prolific, impressive back catalog of short, sharp shocks. (We apologize for the rabbit hole youre about to dive into regarding that link.) If Bodied succeeds in anything, its in capturing the thrill of two people using synonyms and superlatives to slay. Sometimes he gets creative, as when Adam imagines a cartoon folder marked Too personal regarding a combatant and then smashes it. Sometimes he merely tilts the camera for minimal effect and lets the actors just rip into each other in grimy, cramped spaces. Everyone from Worthy and Long who, predictably, must eventually go toe to toe in a mentor/student battle to supporting characters like a feared champ named Megaton (the first battle rapper quoted in a suicide note) have fast, furious flows. Park and Shondais self-immolating rhymes about being Korean-American and female, respectively, go nuclear. Someday, someone is going to make an incredible supercut out of all of these scenes.

Until then, weve got a half-hearted exploration of how being fluent in a culture, yet still thinking of those who make that culture as the other, mixed with the exhilaration of watching rap attacks en masse. Thats the real Boss Battle of Bodied: Major Rush vs. Missed Opportunity. Whether you pick a winner here or think they fight it out to a draw is your call. Personally, we have to tip our caps to Kahn & Co.s lines as an underdog story. We just know that satire-wise, theres some killer bars left on the killing floor here.


Bodied Review: Battle-Rap Comedy Fights P.C. Culture to a Draw

Sunday, July 12, 2020

Best Movies to See in July: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Lion King, Spider-Man

No summer doldrums this month not when theres a Sundance breakout drama, a new Pagan horror movie from the guy who gave you Hereditary and Quentin Tarantinos valentine to old-school Sixties Tinseltown on the horizon. All that, plus you get a pair of strong music documentaries and none other than Beyonc herself (in lion form, but still). Heres whats coming to a theater near you this July.

Crawl (July 12th)
Alexandre Ajas disaster-horror flick boasts a premise ginned up in B-movie heaven: a father-daughter pair (Barry Pepper and Kaya Scodelario) ignore their Florida towns evacuation order and attempt to weather a Category 5 hurricane in their home. It promptly fills with water which then brings in a slew of hungry alligators, setting the scene for a toothy, bloody battle between humanity and the untamed wild. Why should sharks get to have all the fun? If this is half as good as the French filmmakers gloriously gory 2010 remake of Piranha, were in for a treat.

David Crosby: Remember My Name (July 19th)
Hippie-rock legend David Crosby has enough anecdotes, musings, and assorted insights to fill his own cinematic world. (Long live the Crosbyverse!). Documentarian A.J. Eaton culls the best of them for this doc, though the one-time Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young member isnt kicking back and reminiscing about the good old days. Instead, we find him in repose, as a lifetime of self-destructive choices threatens to catch up with his declining health. None other than Cameron Crowe takes a producer credit.

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The Farewell (July 12th)
Lulu Wang adapted her own episode of This American Life for her breakout feature, weaving a poignant drama from the materials of her family life. Billi (Awkwafina) is a millennial unsure about her parents decision not to inform her grandmother (Zhao Shuzhen) that the elderly woman is terminally ill. So she travels to China for one last reunion under the cover of a wedding. Grief, identity, East-West frictions, and the question of what we owe our loved ones swirl together into a self-assured personal expression from a significant new filmmaking voice.

The Lion King (July 19th)
Gather round, children: Once upon a time, Disney used pens and ink to tell a tale of royal unrest in a musical jungle. Smash cut ahead a couple decades, and computers now bring us the Shakespeare-scaled epic of Simba (voiced by Donald Glover), Nala (Beyonc Knowles-Carter), Mufasa (Chiwetel Ejiofor), and Scar (James Earl Jones, reprising his role) in freshly photorealistic glory. With Billy Eichner, Seth Rogen, and John Oliver filling out the voice cast, one of the most beloved titles from the Mouse Houses library gets a complete rejuvenation. And this one has 100% more Beyonc. Simba isnt ready for this jelly.

Marianne and Leonard: Words of Love (July 5th)
The late, great Leonard Cohen met the love of his life, a beguiling Norwegian named Marianne Ihlen, while they were both living in an artists colony on the Greek island of Hydra. This documentary from Nick Broomfield (Kurt & Courtney) tracks the evolution of the tumultuous decades-spanning relationship between the famed musician and his muse. They eventually went their own way, yet they couldnt extricate themselves from one anothers lives and persisted in their intense partnership until they died three months apart.

Midsommar (July 3rd)
Hereditarys Ari Aster is back (already?), and this time around, he sends a group of American tourists to Sweden. They think theyre attending a cultural festival taking place once every 90 years an emotionally fraught, grieving young woman (Florence Pugh) keeps wondering whether the creepy villagers and their caged bear have stranger, more sinister plans. The colder you go into this movie, the better.

The Mountain (July 26th)
A motherless young man (Tye Sheridan) loses his father (Udo Kier). He joins a mercurial 1950s doctor (Jeff Goldblum) on his travels demonstrating a controversial lobotomy technique. Their journey takes them on a sightseeing tour through the dark soul of midcentury America, a land of bullying, egotistical men and quiet, serious women. Filmmaker Rick Alverson (Entertainment) brings his trademark mordant humor, hyper-controlled compositions, and habit for alienation to a story that unspools like a dense novel.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (July 26th)
Quentin Tarantinos ninth picture puts his sui generis style to work creating an immersive, impossibly detailed Los Angeles of the Sixties, when skirts were short and hair was long. Its here that washed-up actor Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stunt double Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) struggle to figure out how they fit into a rapidly changing industry, both men relics of an entirely different era nearly Their paths cross with that of a lively starlet named Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), blissfully unaware of the Manson Family forces gathering in the films margins. Its a far-out salute to the movies Tarantino grew up watching and the city thats sustained his fever dreams.

Spider-Man: Far From Home (July 2nd)
Your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man goes to Europe in the second installment of the franchises umpteenth reboot, with Peter Parker (Tom Holland) as a normal kid on a class trip through London and Paris. He wants nothing more than to snap some photos and canoodle with Mary Jane (Zendaya); the villainous Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal), however, has other plans for the Webslinger. Cue colossal CGI showdowns, Spidey on the Eiffel Tower, etc.

Stuber (July 12th)
Kumail Nanjiani is Stu, a regular guy making a few bucks as an Uber driver. (Now does the cryptic title make more sense? Yeah, we didnt think so either.) Then a detective (Dave Bautista) gets in the car while tracking a maniacal terrorist, setting in motion a deadly all-night pursuit best described as Collateral with jokes. Though hes technically the straight man, Bautista is delivering his deadpan punch lines with the same force as his actual punches if the trailer is to be believed. Dwayne Johnson who?


Best Movies to See in July: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Lion King, Spider-Man

The Black Panther Revolution

chadwick boseman black panther

Two years ago, Chadwick Boseman was in a movie called Gods of Egypt. It was not a very good movie. But in addition to its not-goodness, it also became infamous for whitewashing casting, as ancient African deities, a white guy from Scotland, a white guy from Denmark and at least seven white people from Australia. Boseman, the sole black lead, played Thoth, the Egyptian god of wisdom and inventor of mathematics. Before the movie came out, an interviewer asked him about the criticism, and Boseman said that not only did he agree with it, it was why he took the part so audiences would see at least one god of African descent. But, yeah, he added dryly. People dont make $140 million movies starring black and brown people.

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chadwick boseman black panther cover

What a difference two years makes. Because now we have Black Panther not just a $140 million movie starring black and brown people, but a $200 million one. Its very overdue. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created Panther, the first black superhero, way back in 1966, but he didnt show up on the big screen until 50 years later, when Boseman stole Captain America: Civil War. Now, after a decade of Marvel Universe films starring a demographically disproportionate number of white Chrises, the world finally has its first African superhero movie.

Its a sea-change moment, Boseman says. I still remember the excitement people had seeing Malcolm X. And this is greater, because it includes other people, too. Everybody comes to see the Marvel movie.

Hes not exaggerating. The film broke a ticket-presales record for superhero movies, and at press time it was tracking toward a $165 million opening better than every Marvel nonsequel except The Avengers and possibly enough to crack the top 10 movie opening weekends of all time.

A quick primer: Boseman plays TChalla, king of the fictional African nation of Wakanda the richest and most technologically advanced civilization on Earth. He also moonlights as Black Panther, an Afro-futurist warrior with superhuman powers charged with protecting his people. According to Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige, Boseman was their only choice for the role. And when the call came, he was ready. He said yes on the phone, recalls Feige. I didnt sense a lot of hesitation on his part.

Up until now, Boseman, 41, was most famous for being the biopic guy, playing an unprecedented run of trailblazing African-American icons: Jackie Robinson (42), James Brown (Get On Up), Thurgood Marshall (Marshall). In a way, Black Panther is the logical next step Thurgood Marshall with vibranium claws and a stealth jet. Boseman has for years wanted to play the character, keeping a journal with notes as far back as 2012. Its perfect casting, director Ryan Coogler says. His physicality, his reserved personality, the way he looks younger than he is, wise beyond his years.

Chad gave a hell of a performance, says Michael B. Jordan, who co-stars as his archnemesis, Killmonger. I couldnt imagine anybody else.

A few weeks before the movie opens, Boseman is trying to lay low, sipping peppermint tea at the hipster L.A. coffee shop where he used to come to write, back when he was an aspiring screenwriter freshly arrived from New York. Hes in head-to-toe black cardigan, T-shirt, chinos, socks except for some suede Valentino sneakers and a beaded necklace of Pan-African red, gold and green. Hes tall and lean, with long, elegant fingers and the knuckles of a boxer. (Coogler says they would sometimes spar on set to get amped up.) One of his strengths as an actor is a quiet, intense watchfulness, and hes the same in real life, taking in the world with a skeptical half-squint. (I see everything, Boseman says.) When he does speak, hes invariably thoughtful and thorough. Youre saying Im long-winded! he says, laughing.

In some ways, Boseman is a funny fit for a blockbuster action star. Hes 90 percent vegan, casually name-checks radical black intellectuals like Yosef Ben-Jochannan and Frantz Fanon, and says he gets anxious onstage or in front of crowds. (Going on a talk show? Oh, my God. Nah.) But he also knows hes a conduit for something bigger: I truly believe theres a truth that needs to enter the world at a particular time. And thats why people are excited about Panther. This is the time.

Its a watershed moment for African-Americans and Hollywood. The cast is a murderers row of talent in addition to Boseman and Jordan, theres Angela Bassett, Forest Whitaker and several actors of immediate African descent, including Star Wars Lupita Nyongo (who grew up in Kenya), The Walking Deads Danai Gurira (who was raised in Zimbabwe) and Get Outs Daniel Kaluuya (whose parents immigrated to England from Uganda). And its not just the first superhero movie with a predominantly black cast its the first with a black director, black writers, black costume and production designers, and a black executive producer. Community groups are renting out whole theaters to screen it; people are running crowd-funding campaigns to buy tickets for black kids who might not be able to see it otherwise.

chadwick boseman black panther

We were making a film about what it means to be African, Coogler says. It was a spirit that we all brought to it, regardless of heritage. The code name for the project was Motherland, and thats what it was. We all went to school on Africa.

The money and manpower it takes to create this entire African world its a huge production, says Boseman. But this is not Star Wars this is a black superhero movie! On one hand, he still cant believe its happening. But on the other hand why shouldnt it happen? Moreover, says Boseman, What would it mean if it didnt happen? Youd be saying theres a second class of Marvel movies. A second-class citizenship.

For Boseman, the films blackness is inseparable from its appeal. Some [black] actors will say, I dont want to play a character just because hes black, he says. And thats great, Im not saying theyre wrong. But thats missing all the richness thats been whitewashed.

He speaks passionately about black actors struggle for good material (Very often, the humanity for black characters is not there) and Hollywoods double standard when it comes to identifying young black talent. (Every year, agents fly to Australia to find the next great white actor. But where are they taking 14-hour flights to find the next black person?)

Theres a lot of great things happening, Boseman allows. If you think about Barry [Jenkins], Ava [DuVernay], Ryan its a renaissance of black film. But its still not enough. Its a numbers thing. If you have 15 shots, I got three. If you have nine chances to mess up, I have one. Each one of us knows that if you mess up, your career is done. I see the intensity. I see how Ryan is. If you have a dud, youll never work in this town again.

He laughs. Correct me if Im wrong!


Chadwick Boseman shares the first time he tried on the Black Panther suit, watch below.


We leave the coffee shop, and Boseman climbs into the back of an Escalade, en route to Larry King Now. Let me just call my mom real quick so I dont get in trouble, he says.

Hey, he says when she answers. Im good, Im just checking on you. Did you figure out what youre gonna wear to the premiere? The African skirt. Did I bring that back from Ghana? OK. Tell her to take a picture and send it to me.

They spend a few minutes talking about a Panther screening Boseman is setting up for 150 or so kids in his hometown. All right, Boseman says. I gotta go do this TV interview. He starts to hang up, but his mom stops him. I love you, too, he says. Bye.

Boseman grew up in South Carolina, in a small city called Anderson. His mom, Carolyn, was a nurse; his dad, Leroy, worked at a textile factory and had an upholstery business on the side. They still live there.

Chad, as he was called (I actually dont know why my mom chose Chadwick its a weird name for a black man), was the youngest of three sons. His middle brother, Kevin, is a dancer and singer whos toured in a production of The Lion King and danced with the Alvin Ailey company. His oldest brother, Derrick, is a preacher in Tennessee. I think its Baptist, Boseman says sheepishly. I just gave them money, but I cant remember what I wrote on the check.

Racism was a fact of life. His school district was still segregated until just a few years before he was born. Ive been called nigger, run off the road by a redneck, like, Fuck you, nigger of course, he says. Seen trucks flying Confederate flags on the way to school. Im not saying it was an everyday occurrence but ifsomebody was feeling tradition that day...

In the summer of 2015, two weeks after a white supremacist gunned down nine worshippers at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, Boseman, who was in Atlanta filming Captain America: Civil War, drove home to see his family. My cousins hit me, like, Dont go this way, because theyre doing a Klan rally in the parking lot, he says. So its not a thing of the past.

Boseman was a quiet kid who loved drawing and wanted to be an architect. He also loved basketball, and was good enough to be recruited to play college ball. But during his junior year of high school, a boy on his team was shot and killed. Boseman coped with the tragedy by writing a play in response to the incident, which he called Crossroads and staged at his school. He realized he liked telling stories. I just had a feeling that this was something that was calling me, he says. Suddenly, playing basketball wasnt as important.

He applied to study directing at Howard, the historically black university in Washington, D.C., affectionately known as the Mecca. In his book Between the World and Me, writer Ta-Nehisi Coates a contemporary of Bosemans at Howard and, coincidentally, a writer of the Black Panther comics calls it the crossroads of the black diaspora, where scions of Nigerian aristocrats in their business suits [give] dap to bald-headed Qs in purple windbreakers. Boseman ate it up. He got a job at an African bookstore and took a trip to Ghana. He also learned about a certain African superhero.

chadwick boseman black panther

At a historically black college, youre getting turned on to all these things the pantheon of our culture, he says. Its John Coltrane, its James Baldwin. And its Black Panther.

Boseman took extra acting classes to help improve his directing. One of his teachers was Phylicia Rashad, a.k.a. Clair Huxtable from The Cosby Show. She became his mentor. She would do a play in D.C. and youd go see it, and shed drive you home and talk to you, he says. How you eating? You look too skinny. You need a pork chop. We were just trying to aspire to her excellence.

Rashad has fond memories of Boseman. Chad was this lanky young man with big eyes and an endearing smile and a very gentle way, she says. What I saw in him was the sky was the limit. He never asked me to introduce him to anyone thats not his way. He was going to make it on his own merits.

While taking Rashads class, Boseman and some of his classmates applied to a prestigious summer program at Oxford to study theater. They were accepted, but they didnt have the money to go. She pushed for us, Boseman says. She essentially got some celebrity friends to pay for us to go. (I dont want to say who paid for me, he adds. No, its not Bill Cosby.)

While he was at Oxford, he studied the Western canon: Shakespeare, Beckett, Pinter. But I always felt like black writers were just as classical, he says. Its just as difficult to do August Wilson, and the stories hes telling are just as epic.

After graduation, Boseman moved to Bed-Stuy, in Brooklyn, where he fell in with New Yorks hip-hop theater scene, writing and directing plays featuring rapping stars and beatboxing Greek choruses. What Hamilton is doing now, he says with pride, we were doing 15 years ago. To pay the bills, he also taught acting to kids at the Schomburg Center, a black research library in Harlem. (He was so proud and fulfilled by that, says Rashad. When he talked about it, he became like sunshine he loved it so much.) Eventually he started booking gigs on the usual shows Law & Order, CSI: NY, Cold Case before his big break playing Robinson in 42. But through it all, he always looked for projects that had the same emotional weight he felt when he was 17 and a bullet took his friend and inspired his first play.

For me, doing this, it has to be meaningful, Boseman says. Because thats how it started.


When Boseman got the role of Black Panther
, one of the first things he did was ask his father to take a DNA test. He wanted to know more about his roots. AfricanAncestry.com, he says. They get specific about what ethnic group you come from, as opposed to just what country. (For the record: Yoruba from Nigeria, Limba and Mende from Sierra Leone, and Jola from Guinea-Bissau.) He says hes also traced his American lineage as far back as he could. To go any farther, he says with a wry smile, Id have to go to property records.

Boseman drew from a wide range of real-life influences for TChalla: Shaka Zulu and Patrice Lumumba, Mandela speeches and Fela Kuti songs. He read about Masai warriors and talked to a Yoruba babalawo. For his fight scenes, he trained in African martial arts Dambe boxing, Zulu stick fighting and Angolan capoeira. He also made two trips to South Africa for research. On one trip, a Cape Town street musician bestowed on him a Xhosa name: Mxolisi, or Peacemaker.

I think it was his way of saying, As an African-American, I know youre disconnected from your ancestors and your culture and your traditions, Boseman says. Heres my way of welcoming you back.

The most important thing to him was the accent. In the movie, the Wakandans essentially speak Xhosa, one of the official languages of South Africa, and when Wakandans speak English, its with a Xhosa accent. I had to push for that, Boseman says. I felt there was no way in the world I could do the movie without an accent. But I had to convince [the studio] it was something we couldnt be afraid of. My argument was that we train the audiences ear in the first five minutes give them subtitles, give them whatever they need and I believe theyll follow it the same way theyll follow an Irish accent or a Cockney accent. We watch movies all the time when this happens, he adds. Why all of a sudden is it We cant follow it when its African?

And then, of course, there was Obama. When the idea for a Black Panther movie was first hatched, a black man was president of the United States. I think his presence opened the door for it in a way, Boseman says. He borrowed from Obama the concept of a leader whos not going to respond to criticism the type of person who can hold his tongue and hold his ground. He also says he and Coogler talked about vibranium the ultravaluable metal that provides Wakanda its wealth and technological prowess as a kind of nuclear weapon. So its a similar thing, he says. Who would you want to get the call at three in the morning? Id rather it be someone like [Obama] or TChalla than...somebody else.

Which brings us to the current officeholder. What does Boseman think TChalla the genius trillionaire monarch of Africas most sophisticated kingdom would make of President Trump referring tocertain nations in Africa as shithole countries?

chadwick boseman black panther

Boseman who last year said Trump was giving voice to white supremacy today just smiles. Id love to answer that, he says. But I dont want to give him Panther time.

A few days later, Black Panther has its world premiere at a theater in L.A. It feels like half of black Hollywood is there: Don Cheadle munching popcorn in the balcony, Laurence Fishburne giving fist-bumps on the staircase, Donald Glover flossing resplendently in a tangerine suit, Jamie Foxx in a T-shirt that reads wakanda forever. When the movie plays, there are cheers, tears, laughter and multiple standing ovations. Its a celebration. People are feeling it.

Later that week, Coogler is sitting on a hotel balcony in Beverly Hills, trying to process it all. Premieres are emotionally overwhelming, man, he says. He was mostly focused on the 50 or so family members who came from the Bay Area to see it, some of them, like his grandmother, elderly and in wheelchairs. I was just trying to make sure theyre OK, he says. My mind was on ramps.

Much has been made about Coogler being the first black director on a Marvel movie, but comparatively little has been made about his youth. Hes only 31 shockingly young to be helming a movie this gigantic. Hes the youngest filmmaker weve ever hired, says Marvels Feige. Its a tremendous gift that he has.

The wunderkinds previous two movies 2013 Sundance darling Fruitvale Station, about the killing of Oscar Grant, an unarmed black man shot in the back by police while facedown on an Oakland subway platform; and 2015s Rocky reboot, Creed, about a young boxer who grows up in juvenile detention and learns to channel his anger in the ring were both critical and box-office hits, leaving little doubt Coogler was up to the challenge. But Jordan, who starred in both of those films, says it was still surreal being on the set of a $200 million movie with the same director who, five years ago, was shooting a $900,000 indie with, as Jordan puts it, some duct tape and one camera.

Every so often, wed be setting up the next shot, Jordan says, standing off to the side, just the two of us like, Man, this shits crazy!

For his part, Coogler has said he was too stressed to really enjoy it. But every day, youd see something and be like, Jesus. Im really doing this.

Coogler has said Black Panther is the most personal film hes ever made which seems unlikely, until he explains.

I dont know if youve ever listened to James Cameron talk about how he made Titanic? he says. Ive heard interviews with him, and he made Titanic because he wanted to explore the ocean. What he was really passionate about was deep-sea diving and finding underwater wrecks, and he looked at Titanic as an opportunity to do that, get paid and maybe get a movie out of it. He got this incredibly successful movie as a result of one guys curiosity.

Cooglers Black Panther is about many things: family, responsibility, fathers and sons, the power of badass women. Immigration, borders, refugees. What it means to be black. What it means to be African. What it means to be a citizen of the world.

But its also a movie about America the America of mandatory-minimum sentencing and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Its about how, in one characters words, leaders have been assassinated, communities flooded with drugs. And its about in the haunting last words of another character my ancestors that jumped from the ships, because they knew death was better than bondage.

When Coogler was growing up in Oakland, his father worked at a juvenile hall in San Francisco. Its called YGC Youth Guidance Center, Coogler says. Its where minors are incarcerated. And its shitty.

When Coogler turned 21, he got a job there too. Frisco is a city thats predominantly white and Asian, he says. But you go in there, and all you see is black and Hispanic kids. Youd see them facing an extended [sentence] that doesnt make sense. Or you get family-visit day and see their family: Oh, man. Thats what these kids go back to? These kids dont have a shot.

Some of the issues Coogler started grappling with at YGC would become themes of his first two movies: broken families, over-policing and over-incarceration, the dearth of opportunities for young black men. They also show up in Black Panther. Mainly its through the character of Jordans Killmonger, an abandoned member of the Wakandan royal family who grew up orphaned in Oakland and became a Navy SEAL-turned-black-ops-assassin. He returns to his ancestral country to unseat TChalla from the throne, as well as use Wakandas riches and weapons to spark an international racial uprising. Where Im from, when black folks started revolutions, they never had the firepower or the resources to fight their oppressors, he says at one point. His plan is to arm people of color worldwide, so they can rise up and kill those in power.

Jordan, like Boseman, drew from real-life figures for Killmonger: Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, Huey P. Newton, Fred Hampton, Tupac Shakur. This young black man from Oakland, growing up in systemic oppression, not having his mom and dad around, going to foster care, being a part of this system, Jordan says. With [Killmonger] being African-American like myself, I understood his rage, and how he could get to the point where he had to do what he had to do, by any
means necessary.

For Boseman, Killmonger and TChalla are two sides of the same coin. Not quite Malcolm and Martin because TChalla is down to fight, too but something similar. Radical versus diplomat, revolutionary versus peacemaker. Those ideas, that conflict Ive been having that conversation almost my whole life, he says. But its never actually happened on a stage where you can hear it. So the fact that we get to have that conversation, and you get to hear it and have to deal with it? Thats what makes this movie very different.

In other words, enjoy your black-superhero movie. But be prepared to reckon with more than 500 years of systematic oppression, too.

A lot of people bought tickets, Boseman says, grinning. But theyre not really expecting that.

After a long day of promo, Boseman is winding down at the Dime, a hip-hop cocktail bar near West Hollywood. Hes with Logan Coles, his writing partner and close friend from Howard, and Addison Henderson, his friend and trainer. Theyre here to celebrate: In addition to the movie, Coles lady is eight months pregnant with their first child. Shes about to pop, Boseman says. He raises his glass of tequila: To new life!

While the DJ spins Tupac and Nas, they huddle in a banquette and plot whats next. Well certainly see more of Black Panther this summer, when hell team with Captain America to defend the world against an alien invasion in Avengers: Infinity War. But Boseman seems most excited to get back to writing. He and Coles are about to start work on a screenplay about a minister and anti-gang activist from Boston, whom Boseman hopes to play. Theyre also fine-tuning a script they wrote called Expatriate, about a 1970s airline hijacking, which Oscar winner Barry Jenkins (Moonlight) has already signed on to direct.

Boseman has a lot he wants to do. Theres a plethora of stories in our culture that havent been told, because Hollywood didnt believe they were viable, he says. It would be cool to see slices of history that you havent seen with African figures. Like Africans in Europe the Moors in Spain. Or if you go to Portugal, they have statues of black people all over the place. So not only have we been here, Boseman says, but weve directly affected everything that you think is European.

Its remarkable, man, Coles says. I remember sitting in a coffee shop in Bed-Stuy, and we might have had enough money for two coffees. But we knew the homeboy that owned the place, theyd bring us soup, and wed be there until night working on scripts. We never imagined superhero stuff.

The waitress delivers more shots, and Boseman proposes another toast. To seeing the movie, he says. And to knowing that its good!

Before we part ways, Boseman has had a change of heart. Hes talking about the Oxford trip the celebrity who gave Rashad money. After we got back, we got a benefactor letter, he says. Denzel paid for me.

Yes, that Denzel. Im sure he has no idea, says Boseman. It was random. He wrote him a letter when he found out I couldnt wait to write my thank-you letter! but unless Washington is a hoarder or has a photographic memory, theres no reason to think he remembers an unknown college kid from 20 years ago. Ive been waiting to meet him, so I can tell him.

Theres a reason he didnt want to tell me before. You never want to make someone feel like they owe you something else, he says. Theyve already given you whatever it is they were supposed to give you. But I realized this morning that Ive gotten to a point where nobody would think that. He smiles. I dont need any more help.


The Black Panther Revolution

Wild Horses: How The Rider Became the Breakout Movie of 2018

Theres an epic magic-hour shot in Chlo Zhaos The Rider thats so gorgeous, every great Hollywood Western director might want to hang up their spurs. Real-life saddle bronc rider Brady Jandreau, a daredevil 20-year-old with a busted head, hand and hip, mounts a horse that could kill him. At his last rodeo, a stallion stomped on his skull. Jandreau barely survived, but his doctors orders to never ride again are just a slower kind of death here on South Dakotas Lakota-Sioux Pine Ridge Reservation. But there he goes,galloping past the sunset. You can imagine John Ford beaming somewhere.

Based loosely on the story of Jandreaus own true story of going from a rodeo up-and-comer to an injured cowboy without a cause (and a need for catharsis), The Rider follows this modern-day wrangler as he struggles to put his life back together. We watch his daily routines, his attempts to fit into normal society, his late-night hangouts with his friends and his frustrations at having to figure out his second act. (One scene, in which the character breaks a horse, features Jandreau actually taming the animal in real time.) Its an incredible, indelible reimagining of the mythology of the American West yet the Chinese filmmaker admits that while shes now directed two Westerns, shed maybe watched a grand total of three before picking up a camera. If her sophomore film proves nothing else, however, its that these images and feelings we think of as pure prairie Americana are universal. She has no sentimental baggage about the genre a freedom that gives The Ridersome of its unusual gait.

'The Rider' Review: Semi-Fictional Story of Ex-Rodeo Star Is Absolutely Stunning 10 Best Movies We Saw at 2017 Toronto Film Festival

I didnt grow up with that kind of archetype, says Zhao on the phone from her current home in Ojai, California. So when she ended up in the heartland and first met a teenage Brady Jandreau several years ago, the result wasnt: Heres the second coming of John Wayne. He was just another young trainer, albeit one with an uncanny gift for empathy. It wasnt, [The] Marlboro Man! Macho!' laughs Zhao. If he can manipulate the emotions of a horse, she recalls thinking, maybe he can manipulate an audience. Maybe he can act. Zhao saw him as a new breed of movie star: a stoic, sinewy guy who radiated authentic frontier masculinity and a palpable sense of presence. And though teeming Beijing is over 700 times the population of Pine Ridge, she unexpectedly saw herself in him. She understood what it was like to grow up with a sense that people have it better somewhere else.

Growing up in Northern China, Zhao would overhear her father cry while listening to ballads about going home to Mongolia a distant cousin to our home-on-the-range ballads of yore. But as a self-described wild child in Nineties Beijing, she had no access to classic films or any kind of indie or arthouse cinema. The first movie she ever saw, she says, was True Lies one of the very first American action blockbusters imported into China.After she was blocked from joining the Youth Communist Party for low grades I just wanted to get discount movie tickets! she left China to study political science in London. Then Zhao moved to New York and began to take film classes. After sampling three megalopolises, she flew to South Dakota on a whim, checked into a motel and introduced herself as a director developing a movie about the kids of the reservation.

If I was going to tell them I was making a documentary, I think it might have been a little bit harder to get people onboard, admits Zhao. Paradoxically, the locals were more honest when they could pretend their facts were fiction. Theres a healing process in art, to ask these young people to play out some of their intimate personal struggles sometimes [its] even more true than if you just point and shoot. Her first film, the semi-fictional drama Songs My Brother Taught Me, took her to Cannes and Sundance. Still, South Dakota kept pulling her back. Its my cinematic universe! laughs Zhao, complete with recurring characters, though at first, she wasnt sure of what the second story was that she was meant to tell. She just knew that kid who could tame stallions would be her next hero.

Meanwhile, as the director was bopping across continents, Brady Jandreaus life in South Dakota was stable. His dad, Tim, plopped him on a saddle when he was 15 months old and the kid pretty much never got off. He rode sheep in his diapers, and full-grown horses solo by three and a half. He met his best friend, Lane Scott, when they were toddlers; as they grew up, they straddled bulls and saddle broncs. Lane was the star. He was a badass, says Jandreau. Both figured theyd turn pro and bet their futures on eight seconds astride a bucking bronco; Lanes injury in a car accident sidelined that particular dream. But Brady kept going for the brass ring. You could be heading home with a gold buckle and a pile of money or you could be going home with a broken leg, he says. I would truly risk my life to keep doing what I love.

Then on April Fools Day, 2016, a bucking rodeo bronc cleaved a three-inch, knuckle-deep gash in Jandreaus skull. Manure and sand ground into his brain. Jandreau went into a seizure, then a coma. He woke up and ripped the tubes out of his body (I was trying to go home) and was forced back into unconsciousness. When he woke up the second time, he looked around for his girlfriend, Terri, and proposed.

Thats where Zhao found her start for The Rider, with the crazy-ass dreams a horse cloaked in shadows that her collaborator had in the hospital. The stapled scar on his head is real. Tim Jandreau plays his screen father; thats Brady teen sister playing the characters sibling with Aspergers syndrome, who points to his bandage and hums, This is a head. Its called skull.' The young man visits in the hospital thats the actual Lane. Above all, theres no kidding about his doctors orders to quit riding or else. For six months, as the plates in his head fused, Jandreau wasnt even supposed to jog. Instead, he was on a horse in two weeks.

After my head injury, I was, like, bipolar, an emotional wreck, he admits. Still, Zhao prodded him to concentrate on, and control his feelings. Jandreau may have been struggling. But at least his character, named Brady Blackburn, knew when he was supposed to cry. He told Zhao his saddest childhood memories, both of them about foals he bottle-fed before they died, until the tough cowboy began to sob on camera. That was a version of coping for me,Jandreau says. I had to find a whole new way to harness my emotions. I dont think youre very strong unless youve cried a few tears. Youve never really lived.

Thanks to its leads stripped-down, close-to-the-bone performance, The Rider makes you feel as if youre a fly on the wall of this characters heartbreaks, setbacks and small victories. (Zhaos hunch paid off: He has an amazing screen presence, though the young man isnt actively pursuing any more acting gigs.) And thanks to the movie, the now-22-year-old Jandreau can claim to have done a lot of living in the two years and some change since his accident. He married Terri (who has a small, compelling cameo in the film), walked La Croisette in France, traveled around the United States promoting the film and started his own breeding business, Jandreau Performance Horses. He also had a daughter, Tawnee Bay, who swayed on a stuffed pony when she was 10 days old.

Plus he taught Zhao to ride, too. On Pine Ridge, theres a joke that Im the Lakota girl with the weird last name, she laughs, a Chinese girl in braids constantly being mistaken for Native American until she opened her mouth. She made him an actor; he made her a cowgirl, even if after only an hour of guarding cattle, she was ready to slide off the saddle. And shes not done with the frontier yet: Zhaos third movie is going to be a historical piece about a black sheriff in Creek and Cherokee territory, now present-day Oklahoma. We tend to generalize nowadays, everything is so black and white when its very complicated, she says. But once upon a time, this was a place [where] these people from different backgrounds tried to build a nation together. And shes just the person to bring that American story full circle.


Wild Horses: How The Rider Became the Breakout Movie of 2018

Saturday, July 11, 2020

Watch Punk Rock-Loving Aliens in How to Talk to Girls at Parties Trailer

A teen punk fan unwittingly falls in love with an alien in the new trailer for How to Talk to Girls at Parties. The movie was co-written and directed by Hedwig and the Angry Inch director John Cameron Mitchell, based on an original story by science fiction author, Neil Gaiman.

Girls is set in London in the late 1970s, when punk erupted and became a national phenomenon. Enn, played by the actor Alex Sharp, attends a raucous show with two friends before meandering into a house party, where he encounters oddly dressed revelers with strange customs. They must be from California, one of Alex Sharps sidekicks decides.

Instead, this group which includes Elle Fanning as Zan turns out to be a passel of aliens visiting Earth to complete a mysterious rite of passage. Enn is smitten with Zan, and he takes her around London introducing her to various human pastimes. Parts of the trailer play like punk-1970s version of Will Ferrells Elf. Nicole Kidman also shows up as a rabble-rouser in her best punk-chic attire.

How to Talk to Girls at Parties does not yet have a release date.


Watch Punk Rock-Loving Aliens in How to Talk to Girls at Parties Trailer

Friday, July 10, 2020

Birds of Passage Review: Colombian Crime Saga Is Stunning, Surreal, Epic

Its tempting to think weve seen it all when it comes to gangster movies the Tommy-gunning tough guys, the cosa nostra capos and cutthroats, the tattooed yakuza hard men, the cartel-to-Chinese-triad thug lifers, the coked-out kingpins with their Everest-sized blow piles and ballistic little friends. Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerras stunning, sumptuous Birds of Passage isnt out to reinvent the wheel regarding drug-lord narratives, nor is it asking Tony Montana to hold its beer. But what it brings to the party by setting its near-folkloric narco tale within the insular indigenous Wayuu community deep in the hills of North Colombia is more than just genre exotica. Part anthropological study, part rise-and-fall epic and all-out mesmerizing, this regional spin on the family business saga makes you rethink the notions behind why we watch crime flicks past the vicarious thrills. Its both foreign and familiar. Its a capitalism-is-a-virus cautionary tale. Its the sort of second-hand trip too close to the sun that reminds you why history repeats itself the minute human nature enters the picture.

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We meet Zaida (Natalia Reyes) and Rafayet (Jos Acosta) during a ritual known as the Yonna dance, an elaborate pas de deux involving flowing red robes, a choreography that mimics bird flight and a need to keep up or bow out. For her, its coming-of-age moment; for him, its the first steps of a courtship. But given that shes the daughter of a prominent family among the tribes and he has only his uncle ones who a word messenger, a respected role in the community, but still to vouch for him, Rafayet has to prove he can be a provider. During a trip to move coffee with his friend Moises (Jhon Narvez), they come across some American Peace Corps volunteers who are looking to score some weed. His buddy sees a bunch of hedonistic hippie gringos. Rafayet sees a burgeoning, untapped market. A deal is made. Then the Americans introduce him to an importer/exporter. Soon, our man has a wife, a family, a regular supplier via his Machiavellian cousin (Juan Batista Martinez), an empire. Also: betrayals, assassinations, dealings with trigger-happy loose cannons, reminders about why you never mix the personal and the professional, perma-burnt bridges, bitter enemies, dead bodies.

Before Gallego and Guerra even bring on the ganja business plans and dreams of going global, the co-directors spends time immersing viewers in the Wayuus world the colorful, spellbinding Yonna dance is only the tip of the iceberg. Tradition, along with an inherent mistrust of alijunas (rough translation: outsiders), is what has kept them alive; god forbid you cross Zaidas mother Ursula (Carmia Martnez), the head matriarch in charge and keeper of ancient flames. And once wealth, along with greed and free enterprise, enters the picture, the respect for how we do things, per Ursula, is one of the first things to go out the window. Even without explanations on the art of dream-talking or why certain necklaces are considered sacred, the film takes great pains to immerse you in this way of life, the importance of family, the significance of their communal gatherings, centuries-old customs and superstitions. All the better, naturally, for showing us how easy it is for all of it to slip away one dope-business double-cross at a time.

In the duos previous movie Embrace of the Serpent (2015 Guerra solo-directed and Gallego produced), the age-old topic of colonialisms impact on indigenous culture was hashed out in two timelines worth of European explorers muddying the Amazonian waters. Here, via five canto chapterheads (Song 1: Wild Grass, 1968; Song 2: The Graves, 1971) and a 12-year timespan, they take on the corrosive effects of capitalism en extremis. Remember, say no to communism! squeak the Sixties longhairs that enable Rafayet and Moises to play lets-make-a-drug-deal for the first time. But when they say yes to the free market, theyre rewarded with wildest-dreams riches in the short term and social instability in the long run. The fact that its trickling in from the West represented here by freewheeling tourists and po-faced transporters only drives the point home quicker. The gringos provide the destructive infrastructure. The Colombian players themselves are the ones dealing with the blood-feud demises.

All of the above may sound like Birds of Passage is an academic PowerPoint presentation (Pulowi, Guns and Money: How the Marijuana Trade Wrecked South American Native Culture, 1960-1980 [slide-click noise]). It isnt. What Guerra and Gallego give you is indeed an old-fashioned gangster movie, one where you keep your friends close and your enemies closer, where business conducted without honor ends in bullets and drug wars have a way of destroying decades of prosperity. There are tense sit-downs and stand-offs, sieges on jungle compounds and a particularly brutal shoot-out at a narco mansion in the middle of the desert. (A command to bring in more men from Medellin immediately ties this carnage to an even bigger criminal enterprise happening in the same country at the same time.) Martnez plays her family-first mother like Don Corleone in a floral robe; Reyes turns the equivalent of a moll role into a study in complicity that Carmela Soprano would recognize; Acosta balances business savvy with a desperate attempt to keep Rafayets moral compass from cracking. Theres even a mad-dog character Zaidas blond little brother, Leonidas (Grieder Meza) that has to be put down. Payback trumps everything, even profit margins. Antiheroes or villains, everyone has their reasons.

And the filmmakers give you some truly surreal images, absolutely breathtaking wide shots of landscapes both lush and barren, a sense that youre voyeuristically peeking into a subculture and a superior exercise in bending a genre to make points without breaking it. Three viewings in, Im still flabbergasted by the scope and detail of this movie; three viewings from now, Ill probably continue to be in awe of the way its unique cover version of a crime-doesnt-pay story totally pays off. A wild grass that came as a savior, but destroyed like locusts, sings a balladeer right before the end credits. The line turns the tale into a fable. Birds of Passage treats it all like a widescreen gut-punch of a tragedy.


Birds of Passage Review: Colombian Crime Saga Is Stunning, Surreal, Epic

Watch Chance the Rapper Track Killer Werewolf, Deliver Pizza in Slice Trailer

Chance the Rapper andAtlantas Zazie Beetz try to track down a werewolf in between pizza deliveries in the new trailer forSlice.

The clip opens with the mysterious murder of a pizza delivery boy, prompting Beetzs character, as well as a few other amateur sleuths, to take on the case. Soon, the investigators realize theyre tracking a supernatural being that likely emerged from a gateway to Hell, situated beneath a pizza shop. Chance the Rapper only makes a brief appearance at the end of the Slice trailer, but the clip is still packed with plenty of delightfully campy slasher flick mayhem.

Austin Vesely directed Slice, which also stars Paul Scheer, Rae Gray and Joe Keery. A release date for the film has yet to be announced.

Slice marks Chance the Rappers film debut, though he previously collaborated with Vesely on several music videos, including Angels, Sunday Candy and Brain Cells.


Watch Chance the Rapper Track Killer Werewolf, Deliver Pizza in Slice Trailer

Monrovia, Indiana Review: Small Town U.S.A., Frederick Wiseman Style

You may expect sparks to fly in a documentary about an Indiana town whose citizens voted 76 percent in favor of the liberal punching bag who now occupies the White House. But nothing as simplistic as Trump-bashing though that would be so satisfying would ever occur to Frederick Wiseman, a master chronicler of American institutions (a hospital, a zoo, a racetrack, public school, a boxing gym, a police department). In more than a half-century of filmmaking, Wiseman, now 88, has always put journalistic integrity at the forefront of his documentaries, from the controversial 1967 work Titicut Follies (about a state prison for the criminally insane) to last years Ex Libris The New York Public Library. The elderly verit statesman has admitted that bias can show up in the editing, but he refuses to rely on narration or similar signposts to tell audiences what hes thinking or more importantly, what they should think.

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Theres no fake news in a Wiseman documentary. Monrovia, Indiana is his 42nd nonfiction feature and its rigorously non-judgemental. The farming town of Morovia (population 1,063), a part of Morgan County, is mostly white, aging, Republican, pro-gun and pro-God, but not necessarily in that order. A gun lobby ad states: Welcome to Indiana, home to a million concealed carry permits; enjoy your stay. Notice is taken of fields sprouting corn and soybeans, of cattle being numbered for sale. Wisemans camera follows the good folks into church at weddings and funerals. He listens to them in barber shops, beauty parlors and restaurants, follows them into town council meetings where the lack of workable fire hydrants is seriously and lengthily considered. Trump is never addressed directly. Monrovians dont talk politics, or at least Wiseman doesnt show them doing so. When a group of Hells Angels vrooms past on their hogs, its like a thunderclap. And another scene, with a vet, amputating the tail of a dog, plays like a horror film in this context.

What is he aiming to show us in this impressionistic look at business as usual in our aging republic? Recent Wiseman docs, such as At Berkeley and In Jackson Heights bustled with activity on a culturally diverse landscape. In this rural American town, citizens dont advance growth they worry about it, expressing concern about letting too much of the outside in. At two-and-a-half hours, Monrovia, Indiana often feels static and low-key to a fault. As always, Wiseman is working hard at being fair, refusing to condemn or even condescend to what his camera sees. Still, the thought persists that just maybe this portrait of a closed-off and threatened heartland is indicative of what goes on in the polling booth where folks vote their fears in silence. And that is a scary proposition, indeed.


Monrovia, Indiana Review: Small Town U.S.A., Frederick Wiseman Style

Thursday, July 9, 2020

What Do The Purge Movies Say About Us?

Imagine an America in which, for 12 hours, all laws are suspended and all crime is legal. Murder, rape, arson, robbery, jaywalking the minute the klaxon goes off, society gets a free pass to do whatever it wants. During this annual holiday where citizens get to release the beast, the 1-percenters barricade themselves in their state-of-the-art smart houses. The poor, wellyou can guess what happens to the poor. Theyre fucked per usual. But hey, whats a little class warfare when its open season in the name of collective catharsis, right? Happy cleansing, folks.

Thats the premise behind writer-director James DeMonocos The Purge, a 2013 movie that dropped Ethan Hawke and Game of Thrones Lena Headey into a yuppie nightmare. Now four movies into a bona fide franchise the latest, The First Purge, lands right before Independence Day, because of course this combo of home-invasion thriller, dystopic slasher flick and gore-soaked social satire has become one of the most successful low-budget, high-return series running. (The first three films combined worldwide box office is just under $320 million; their combined budgets probably cost less than a single five-minute CGI sequence in a Marvel movie.) And thats not even counting the 10-episode TV series thats dropping on the USA Network this September, which looks to deliver more of the bloodlust-rinse-repeat formula into the comfort of your own living room.

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Which begs the question: Why, exactly, are these films so consistently popular? Never mind the fact that horror is a reliable multiplex staple overall, and that Blumhouse the production company responsible for an ungodly amount of the scary movies youre seeing in theaters these days has figured out how to keep is finger on the primal-fear pulse of moviegoers while keeping the price-tags low. What collective chords are these movies continually striking?

You could point to the sheer relatability inherent the fantastic notion of the all-you-can-kill buffets that lies at the center. When the companys majordomo Jason Blum sat down with Bill Simmons for the hosts Ringer podcast, he explained the genesis (more or less) of the concept: Driving in Long Island, James DeMonoco was cut off in traffic. I want to kill that guy, the director allegedly said to his wife; her reply was What if you could? He then pushed the idea to the next logical blow-off-steam extreme, albeit one that has occurred to virtually anyone whos suffered through everyday indignities. Who hasnt wanted to punch the person who swerved in front of them? Which is one modest proposal away from: So then what if you, could, say, burn down your the house of your obnoxious neighbor, the one who plays their music too loud all the time, as well? What are these movies if not viewers violent vicarious thrills writ large?

And there are other factors as well. These movies have the most diverse casts this side of the Fast & Furious films, with a mix of African-American, Latino and white actors like actually reflect your typical movie audiences. Starting with the 2014 sequel The Purge: Anarchy, it gave the world a blue-collar action hero in Frank Grillo, an Italian-American actor who comes off like both the dude next to you in line at the deli and the toughest guy at your local MMA dojo. (Hes a tough-guy alternative to the A-list stars our generations Lee Marvin.) And bloody kills + creepy masks = asses in seats on a Friday night is not exactly rocket science.

But best of all, the Purge movies have a cake-and-beat-it-to-death-too when it comes to sneaking in digs about our nations class system. (Yes, America does have one. Please stop pretending that we dont.) In that same podcast, Blum also said that half the audience sees the films as cautionary tales and the other half as a great idea its a one-rage-fits-all notion that appeals to Bernie bros and MAGA nuts alike. It wasnt a coincidence that The Purge: Election Year, which dropped during the most divisive political campaigning in decades, featured white-supremacist villains, BLM-style public dissent, N.R.A. pandering and gun-control advocacy. You can be a Tea Partyer or Occupy advocate and find something here. Its as free-form outraged as your average Twitter feed.

And now we get The First Purge, a prequel that looks back at how this whole thing started with good intentions, greedy political power grabs, a blonde Marisa Tomei, angry citizens and a need to vent with violence on both sides. It will undoubtedly make a mint as well. You could say these movies predicted the current moral free-fall of the Trump era or were made for them really, were one tweetstorm away from our commander-in-chief jokingly suggesting something just like it. But the only real ideology behind these movies goes beyond partisanship. To quote the end of our Election Year review, the Purge movies shared connection is: America is violence. God bless the U.S.A. God save us all. The sentiment, eerily enough, feels even more potent and terrifying and real today than it did then.


What Do The Purge Movies Say About Us?

Fighting With My Family Review: Your Basic Suplex-to-Nuts Wrestling Biopic

Some parents expect their children to grow up and become doctors, lawyers, CEOs. Ricky and Julia Knight wanted their kids to become WWE superstars. Wrestling is the family business for the Knights, who run an amateur organization the World Association of Wrestling, were sure youve heard of it out of the small English town of Norwich. Dad (Nick Frost) is the mohawked terror known as Rowdy Ricky; Mom (Game of Thrones Lena Headey) dishes out pain under the name Sweet Saraya. And from the moment that their young daughter Saraya-Jade learned how to get out of a chokehold properly, she and her brother Zak were expected to get in the ring. The family that leg-drops together stays together, etc.

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Cut to the siblings in their teens, with Saraya-Jade (Florence Pugh) hitting the ropes as Britani and partner Zodiac Zak (Jack Lowden) giving local punters their moneys worth. Then, the call comes: WWE representatives are going to be in London for a Smackdown event. Theyve seen the siblings tapes and theyd like both of them to audition. After running into The Rock backstage (Dwayne Johnson in the role he was born to play, i.e. an even more charismatic version of himself), the Knights try out for a wisecracking drill sergeant of a trainer named Hutch (Vince Vaughn). Zak gets the boot. Saraya-Jade gets invited to train in pro-wrestlings equivalent of the minor leagues in Florida. Soon, our pale, Gothed-out heroine has renamed herself Paige and settled in to a physically punishing boot-camp experience. She also finds herself lost in America, a British Siouxsie Sioux among a sea of Barbies and one bad day away from seeing everything fall apart.

If you know Paiges real-life, ragged-leotards-to-riches story, you know how this all plays out. Even if you dont, Fighting With My Family makes no bones about telegraphing where its going and what kind of sports movie it is. There will be life lessons and setbacks and heel turns, especially when Zaks resentment over his sisters opportunity curdles into a personal downward spiral. Of course there are training montages, how could you even ask? Vaughns coach belongs to a long line of screen hard-asses determined to either push athletes past their limits or break their spirits one soul-crushing putdown at a time his aggro-sarcastic comic timing has not been this on-point since Swingers. But how many times do you think Mr. Side Eye will quietly smile to himself when Paige does something right, or give her a youre-ok-kid nod when she succeeds in winning over tough crowds? We stopped counting once that number hit triple digits. Just when you think Paige is down for the count, she finds the inner strength to come roaring back. The movie even plays like a wrestling match. Its Underdog Cinema 101.

Whats surprising is how well all of this suplex-to-nuts biopic works. Hiring Stephen Merchant, one-half of the braintrust behind the original U.K. edition of The Office and a writer-director with a droll wit, to tell Paiges story initially seems like an odd fit. But the skewed humor and warmth and scrappiness he brings to the family scenes, along with the fact that he doesnt treat pro wrestling like a hold-your-nose novelty, is enough to distinguish this from a million other started-at-the-bottom-now-were-champs tales. Temporarily liberated from scowling and shorn-haired walks of shame, Headey is clearly having fun with her grappling, faux-growling wrestler mom. Fans of Frost or Frostitutes, as the resident comic relief in Edgar Wrights repertory company has sometimes referred to us diehards will be ecstatic that hes given ample opportunity to indulge in goofballery, yet not at the expense of his characters paternal concern. (Hes not just a comic caricature, in other words.) If the sequences of Zac nosediving into self-destructiveness feel like weak links, the rapport between him and his sister nail the bond of siblings born into a family dynamic involving the regular administration of piledrivers. And we havent even mentioned the movies not-so-secret weapon yet.

That would be Florence Pugh, an English actor whos been slowly building an impressive resum of period-piece heroines with claws and fangs. Those who first saw her in hell-hath-no-fury mode in Lady Macbeth (2016) registered someone with a genuine fearlessness; anyone who caught her Cordelia in a recent King Lear adaptation and her steely queen in Outlaw King (both 2018) could tell she was meant for bigger things than corsets and cowering in musty castle corners. Before you could yell, Welcome home, Helena Bonham Carter 2.0!, we got her undercover recruit in AMCs John le Carr adaptation The Little Drummer Girl, and it started to feel like her talent was real-thing transcendent. This confirms it. Paige is the sort of role that requires her to be vulnerable, tough, rebellious, funny, determined, drained, someone capable of executing a move called The Paigeturner, everyones little sister and the sort of larger-than-life performer that can command an arena. She lets you see where all of this springs from, and how its all part of the same misfit. Youd be advised to see it for Pughs fireplug turn alone, which makes the just-north-of-oddball take on a warhorse narrative, the Rocks charm-offensive cameos and a really choice Vin Diesel dig almost feel like bonuses.


Fighting With My Family Review: Your Basic Suplex-to-Nuts Wrestling Biopic

Wednesday, July 8, 2020

Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love Review: A Ladies Man and His Muse

In the 1960s, on the Greek island of Hydra, a Norwegian ex-pat met a young Canadian poet. She was shopping in a market when this dashing, mustachioed figure appeared in the doorway. Would you like to join us? the handsome silhouette asked her. Were sitting outside. Their eyes met, and that was it: Welcome to the Mediterranean region of Smittensville. Her name was Marianne Christine Ihlen; his name was Leonard Cohen. You probably know the rest if you know Cohens story, or if you simply have a passing familiarity with the lyrics to So Long, Marianne. If not, Nick Broomfield is happy to fill you in.

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Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love charts the friendship, love affairs and off-on relationship between these two, which resulted in broken hearts, cold shoulders and several unbelievably beautiful songs. After instantly connecting, the two fell into what Ihlen describes as a fairly stock male artist/female muse relationship: He spent his days writing his novel Beautiful Losers (later described in reviews as verbal masturbation and that was the Canadian press!) and taking speed; she went shopping and prepped meals and supported him. Various friends, neighbors and fellow free spirits attest to the sort hippie-idyllic vibe of the islands community, as home movies portray this young couple smiling, swimming and swooning over each other.

Eventually, Leonard feels compelled to return to his native Montreal, where his career as the next Norman Mailer gets sidetracked. One day, he happens to play folk singer Judy Collins a bit of Suzanne. She records the song and turns it into a hit. Collins gets him to perform part of it at a fundraiser and Cohen leaves the stage halfway through, sobbing. She brings him back. They finish it together. A star is born. And the union between the musician and his lady love back in Greece experiences the first of many terminal diagnoses to come.

Both a memento mori and the chronicle for how there aint no cure for love, the doc continually underlines Cohens finicky nature (after begging Marianne and her son Axel to live with him in Montreal, the two fly out to meet him at which point he declares the invite a mistake) and his shark-like need to keep moving or perish. A few attempts at character psychology worm their way in cue footage of Leonards mom but mostly, we get a portrait of the poet for quasi-depressed women of his era. As for Ilhen, we get a sense of her loneliness, her attempts to balance being a mother and a partner, the toll of wanting something she cant have and someone who wont be tied down. Even as things are coming to their conclusion, Cohen is still using their bond as the basis for his art. His amore apparently disliked So Long, Marianne. The footage of Ilhen watching him sing the famous song that bears her name in 2009, however, suggests a tender pride at having been part of his arc.

And because this is a Broomfield joint, the director is also more than happy to tell you that he and Marianne were briefly involved with each other, to go on about how she gave him his first hit of acid and to include a contemporary scene of him visiting an old friend to talk about their glory days of hanging out with so much golden sun-kissed people of either sex. The way he pronounces the word lovers could not sound more world-weary, or more giggle-inducing and gauche; even though the veteran filmmaker actually has a legit first-hand connection to the story, the temptation to roll your eyes every time he tries to insert himself into the spotlight is irresistible. (Shockingly, the Kurt & Courtney documentarian does not bump into a single boom microphone once.) Everybody knows that you pay the ticket, you take the occasional but-enough-about-my-subject detours on the Broomfield ride.

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But the payoff is huge. Theres a lot of great Cohen footage, much of it taken from the invaluable 1974 tour diary Bird on a Wire, and you get his journey from early scribblings to late-tour comeback. And Marianne & Leonard doubles as a look at the darker side of the Sixties bohemian ideal, when Hydras utopia went from hedonistic freedom to marriages dissolving and both donkeys and kids being unwittingly dosed. People took it too far, one talking head notes, and the already fine line between anything-goes and everything-falls-apart gets blurred beyond recognition. There are cracks in the permissive postcard paradise thats how the darkness gets in.

What makes this film unmissable, however, is the fact that we get Mariannes story more or less in full as well. Its a fleshing out of someone who was more than just a muse, more than just an object of affection for a notorious ladies man, a famous singer and an infamous bastard. Weve heard the now-famous letter that the musician wrote to Ilhen as she lay on her deathbed, of how he was just a little behind you in terms of time running out. (Cohen would shuffle off this mortal coil three months after her final breath.) But to see that letter being read aloud, and to witness the run of emotions across her face as she processes one final affectionate so long, is to feel that the narrative has been handed back to her. Theres a reason her name comes first in the title. Marianne is no longer just Leonards muse. Shes a woman whos lived and loved and lost completely apart from the songs.

A version of this review ran in our Sundance 2019 coverage.


Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love Review: A Ladies Man and His Muse

Teen Spirit Review: Smells Like Elle Fannings Chance to Shine

Some singers start young, before they have a clue about how the music business can chew up their talent and package it for mass consumption. Take Violet, the 17-year-old dreamer played with shy loveliness and a tough core by the luminous Elle Fanning. Violet lives in a tight squeeze on the Isle of Wight, where shes mocked by schoolmates for singing for drunks at a local pub and berated by her Polish immigrant mother (Agnieszka Grochowska) for believing in fantasies that pay off in heartbreak. Then a British singing competition called Teen Spirit hits the Isle and fires her up.

Its a tale as old as American Idol, and the script goes exactly where you think its going. But writer-director Max Minghella, in a more than promising debut behind the camera, has a flair for dazzling detours and actions that define character. You may know Minghella as an actor hes Elisabeth Mosss forbidden love on The Handmaids Tale. Hes also the son of Oscar-winning director Anthony Minghella (The English Patient), who grew up on the Isle of Wight. And like his late father, the young Minghella is dedicated to getting the details just right.

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That he does. He shows us this shrinking Violet alone in her room, rocking out to Robyns Dancing on My Own and No Doubts Just a Girl. Later, at an audition, she nails the ache in Ellie Gouldings Lights. Offstage, her confidence disappears. She picks a boozy, grizzly bear of a manager in Vlad (Croation actor Zlatko Buric), a former opera star, to help sidestep her mother, whod rather have Violet stick to singing in the church choir. With Vlad at her side, the young woman travels to London where making it through the rivalries of the televised competition will make her or break her already fragile spirit.

In terms of the big picture, however, Minghella knows hes running on a formula wheel, and he doesnt do much with the subplot of Violets racially-mixed backup band, also recruited from the Isle of Wight. In an even worse collision with clich, he delivers Violet into pallid temptation with last years winner (Ruairi OConnor). Lets just say sparks dont exactly fly.

Things heat up when the great Rebecca Hall commands the scene as a record exec think a female Simon Cowell whose red lip gloss and seductive purr are the warning signs of an impure predator. As for the scenes of Violet singing her heart out in front of live TV cameras, the film benefits from the artful play of color and light contributed by cinematographer Autumn Durald, best known for her videos for Solange Knowles, Janelle Mone and Arcade Fire.

In the end, though, Teen Spirit rises to the occasion on the shoulders of its remarkable leading lady. Fanning, 20, handles the dramatic demands of the role like a seasoned pro. Thats to be expected given how bright she shone from her child-actress days in I Am Sam with Sean Penn through her growing maturity in Super 8, Somewhere and 20th Century Women. Her confrontations with Buric and Grochowska achieve a rare intensity that lifts the film.

Still, its Fannings singing that is truly revelatory. Violet is recessive on the surface (a TV no-no). So the challenge is to show how music illuminates the feelings burning inside this small-town girl whose default position is withdrawal. And Fanning who does her own singing (minus auto-tuning) makes believers of us all. Without resorting to the runs and glissandos that mistake showing off for vocal prowess, she lets it rip for the onstage finale with Sigrids Dont Kill My Vibe. You can kill the vibe of Minghellas film with nitpicking, but Fanning rides the movie home to glory. She is simply sensational.


Teen Spirit Review: Smells Like Elle Fannings Chance to Shine