Category Archives: 2024

Bob Marley: One Love

Bob Marley: One Love                    2 stars

Bob Marley: One Love by director Reinaldo Marcus Green brings the legendary reggae artist to the big screen, focusing on the singer’s rise to fame during the two years from 1976 to 1978. So instead of doing the standard musical biopic we start and stop with two important concerts in Marley’s life, a free concert in Jamaica intended to quell the violence in the country over which political party would be in control, and the One Love Peace show when he returned to his home country. In between we see an attempt on his life, how he and his wife, Rita, had to leave the country for their own safety with Marley going to London, the creation of the Exodus album and their European tour. Of course, we also get plenty of performances of the music of Bob Marley and the Wailers with that distinctive reggae sound. The thing I didn’t get was a sense of anything special about Bob Marley, or his vision for peace. It feels a little too much like a standard music biopic with flashbacks to his childhood growing up poor and having a father who didn’t care for him. The actor playing Marley, Kingsley Ben-Adir (who previously has portrayed Malcolm X and a Ken doll) does a creditable job with the performances, but the whole film felt rather ordinary. One criticism that I rarely make of movies is how the dialogue is very difficult to make out. The heavy Jamaican accents really call for the use of subtitles. Without them there were many points in the film that I just couldn’t understand. In particular, there are conflicts within the band and between Bob and Rita that didn’t make sense to me because I couldn’t understand what they were saying. And there is a frequently used word, Rastafar that is important to Marley, but I have no idea what it is. Director Reinaldo Marcus Green previously did much better with King Richard in 2021. It was good to hear the music and to remember Bob Marley’s impact in the world, but overall, One Love was a miss for me.

Limbo

Limbo    4 ½ stars

Limbo is a film noir set in the Australian desert that follows the investigation or “review” of the murder of an indigenous girl that occurred 20 years earlier. Director/screenwriter Ivan Sen has created something very stark and bleak in this film depicting the disregard for indigenous people’s lives by the white population of Australia. Besides directing and writing, Sen was also responsible for the cinematography, the music, the editing, and the casting. He doesn’t star in the movie though. That is up to Simon Baker who plays Travis, the officer who must question those originally involved and affected by the case 20 years earlier. If you remember Baker from the TV show The Mentalist, you won’t recognize him. He has a buzz cut, is sporting a beard, and has glasses and many tattoos. Travis arrives in the town of Limbo where the crime occurred. He takes up residence at the Limbo Motel, an isolated building dug out of the earth. The town has few buildings and is sparsely populated with some indigenous and some white inhabitants, all of whom are poor. Many live in homes that are carved out of the earth like the hotel in order to escape from the heat of the desert. The name of the town is symbolic of the conditions they live in, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. Travis, who besides being a cop is a heroin addict, sets out to question the murdered girl’s relatives and others who were originally questioned years before. There is a brother and a sister of the girl who resent that so little was done by the police after the disappearance. It would have been very different if it were a white girl. There are others who were questioned by the police before, but that investigation went nowhere. Travis with his drug use and way of speaking, appearing distant makes him seem very aware of what this world is like. The movie isn’t so much about solving the crime as it is about exploring the hopelessness of these characters and how they have to struggle to survive. The landscape appears vast and barren using wide shots, including drone footage with everything filmed in black and white. It makes the people of the town appear small and insignificant. Don’t expect there to be any justice realized in this case. None of the characters do, including Travis. I have seen other Australian movies depicting the divide between the races in the country and this one is among the starkest and most unnerving among them. Ivan Sen is noted for directing a crime drama TV show set in the outback called Mystery Road. Judging by his work in Limbo that would be a series to check out.

The Beast

The Beast (La Bête)         4 ½ stars

The Beast by director Bertrand Bonello (Titane) has to be one of the most unusual films of the year so far and can be described as surrealistic. Based on a novella by Henry James, this science fiction drama is set in the near future at a time when AI has taken over society. Unemployment is very high as most available jobs are menial and meaningful jobs are hard to get. Technology also allows people to erase their feelings from past experiences that they find painful. Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux of Midnight in Paris, The Grand Budapest Hotel as well as the James Bond movies) applies for a better job, but in order to do so she must undergo a procedure that will make her relive and confront her past lives. (Yes. Reincarnation exists here.) It is while undergoing the procedure that she finds she is destined to be linked to Louis (Adam MacKay of 1917), a young man who pursues her both in the past and in the present. Louis is also present for a procedure so the two meet and find that they may or may not share memories of the past. For the rest of the movie this pair relive their past lives together, first in France in the early 1900’s when Gabrielle is married to a less interesting man and the couple run a doll making company and Louis is a sophisticated Englishman. Later, they meet in the early 2000’s when Gabrielle is a model in Los Angeles trying to get into acting. But Louis is a disturbed misogynist vlogger who is out to make women pay for his lack of success with women. Both actors give excellent performances in this movie that is about love (but only sort of). Seydoux plays each role very distinctly and often is on screen alone but makes each scene quite emotional. There are some interesting devices used in the film including pigeons, dolls, and fortune tellers and even a Roy Orbison song! I was never sure where the movie was headed but it kept my interest throughout. The dialogue is in both French and English. (Both actors are fluent in French.) At the end of the movie instead of rolling credits, a QR Code appeared on screen giving the audience the chance to view it on their phones instead of on the screen, but I wasn’t fast enough to catch it. Is this something we will see more of?

The American Society of Magical Negroes

The American Society of Magical Negroes             2 stars

The American Society of Magical Negroes by screenwriter/director Kobi Libii has one of the oddest titles I have seen in years. I heard of the movie at Sundance Film Festival where it was first screened this year but didn’t see it then. It was just released so I took it in at a local theater and I have to say the premise is just as odd as the title. In the movie we learn that there is a secret organization of Black people whose mission it is to rescue white people in America who feel uncomfortable around black people. The society has existed since before the American Revolution and its members have magic powers that allow them to detect this feeling in white people and track them throughout the country. They occupy a secret section at Monticello and can transport themselves in an instant. This idea of Magical Negroes was first expressed by director Spike Lee in reference to movies that have fictional black characters that support white people, such as Driving Miss Daisy and The Green Mile. Lee found this concept to be offensive and I find I agree with that view. The movie is considered to be a satirical comedy and ultimately counters the whole magical negro concept but takes forever to get there. As far as the story goes, it concerns a young Black man, Aren (Justice Smith) who is an artist and always seems to be apologizing around white people. A member of the Society, Roger (David Alan Grier) watches him, rescues him from some white thugs and recruits him into the Society. There, he learns of the mission, how Black people can be saved by their rescuing of white people from their own feelings through compliments and encouragement. Aren gets an assignment to help a young white man at a tech company, so gets a job there as a designer. But the plot loses its way as it turns into more of a rom com with a love triangle involving a young woman within the startup company. After a while I found the movie boring. I thought maybe this would have worked better as a short instead of as a two-hour movie. Though it was meant as satire, I still found the whole view to be racist and demeaning to Black people. While I was at Sundance, I had heard that Black audience members at the premier largely felt this way as well. The film falls flat and I don’t look for the film to gain much popularity.

Love Lies Bleeding

Love Lies Bleeding           4 stars

Love Lies Bleeding from second time director Rose Glass first played at the Sundance Film Festival this year and was one hot ticket that I could not score as the movie was so popular. It was just released this past week and it is as hot and violent as it is reputed to be. As the title suggests, there is a lot of love based on the steamy sex scenes, many lies are told and there is a whole lot of bleeding. “Love” is a classic B movie sexual thriller where you just know the characters are doomed and bad decisions will be made from the moment you see them. I thought of 1990’s Revenge starring Kevin Costner as I watched it. Kristen Stewart (Twilight Saga, Clouds of Sils Maria, Personal Shopper and Spencer) is in her queerest role yet as Lou who passes her days managing a gym in a small town in the middle of nowhere, New Mexico in 1989. The film begins with Lou cleaning a clogged toilet, telling you this is a dead end existence. One day, Jackie, a young pumped up body builder (who dreams of competing in the women’s World Bodybuilding Championship in Las Vegas) enters Lou’s life and judging by the hot sex scenes that follow, the two hit it off immediately. Jackie is played by Katy O’Brian whose bulging muscles, ripped abs, and raised veins practically pop out of the screen at us. She has managed to land a job at the local gun range that is owned by scumbag number one, Lou’s father (Ed Harris who looks like a decrepit hippie from Tales from the Crypt) and who has become rich by running illegal guns to Mexico. Over the years anyone who dares to stand against him has a way of mysteriously disappearing. Of course, it helps that the local cops take orders from him. Also, the FBI has been sniffing around asking questions of anyone including Lou. We learn that the only reason that Lou has stayed in this unnamed godforsaken town is for her sister, Beth (Jena Malone) who has a family and is married to scumbag number two, JJ (Dave Franco in a mullet) who likes to take out his frustrations on Beth’s face. One more character in the mix is Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov), a young woman who frequents the gym and finds Lou very attractive and forces her attention on Lou. With this mix of characters, criminal behavior, and bad judgment it is only a matter of time before things spiral out of control and the bodies begin to pile up. The feel of the movie is enhanced by the filming of most of it at night, the intense musical score and satanic looking images of Lou, Sr. in red. Add some hallucinatory images that give Jackie a fantasy-like appearance and you have a thrillingly hot and sexual B movie. I am hoping that Love Lies Bleeding has a good run and that Rose Glass has some more plans for such movies in her future. It will also be interesting to see what is next in Kristen Stewart’s career.