Category Archives: Biography

Elvis

Elvis                       4 ½ stars

The new movie Elvis promised to be a grand extravaganza about the legend, the King of Rock and Roll, Elvis Presley and in the hands of Baz Luhrmann, it is all that and so much more. Luhrmann has previously brought us visually stunning movies like Moulin Rouge and The Great Gatsby. He does it again in this biopic about Presley and his longtime manager Colonel Tom Parker, telling it in a very nonlinear style that highlights the triumphs and tragedy that this relationship brought to them both. Tom Hanks portrays Parker as the carnival promoter who is always looking for the next big act that will make him rich, and the man who would exercise power over Elvis through his entire career. The transformation of Hanks into this bloated master manipulator is amazing. Look for an Oscar for the Makeup category for this one. Austin Butler who has had several small movie roles takes on the challenging job of capturing the spirit and energy of Elvis’s performances and his inner conflicts and I would say he just about has it. The movie hits all the major points of Elvis’s life, his rise to stardom, the controversy over his hip wiggling performances, his stint in the army overseas, the Hollywood era, the Las Vegas Elvis and his addiction to barbiturates and alcohol that shortened his life. But it also effectively shows how he was influenced by the Black music that he was surrounded by growing up in Tupelo, Mississippi. His performances are interspersed with those of B. B. King, Rosetta Tharpe and Little Richard and many others, so we see that without these Black artists there would have been no Elvis as we remember him. But the main story of the film is of the ties between Elvis and Parker as told through Parker’s eyes starting with his memories commanding that “The only thing that matters is that that man gets on that stage tonight.” This one deserves to be seen on the big screen. Next year look for Austin Butler as the notorious villain Feyd-Rautha in the sequel to Dune!

Flee

Flee                       4 ½ stars

For a remarkable achievement in storytelling and animation you won’t do better than the documentary movie from Denmark, Flee. Released at Sundance in 2021, this film finally made it to theaters at the end of last year. It has been on my list for a long time and I just viewed it recently. It tells of the unlikely years long journey of a gay Afghan refugee, Amin, who was forced to leave Afghanistan as a child in the 1980’s with his family. His story is told by combining recordings of his voice with stark animated images of the pain and anguish he and his family had to go through. There is a certain amount of unraveling of a mystery as elements of the story slowly emerge over the course of the film. The family, including Amin’s brother, mother and two sisters try to make their way to Sweden after the father is detained by the Afghan government and disappears. Amin tells his story after keeping much of it secret after twenty plus years, one that is full of persecution and suffering at the hands of the powerful and greedy. Flee is notable for having received three Academy Award nominations this year, in Animated Feature, Documentary and International Film. It is one that is truly worth watching.

Till

Till           4 ½ stars

In this season of Halloween when children become little monsters begging for candy, a film has come along that reminds us there are real monsters in the world that bring terror greater than what we see portrayed in the movies. Till brings a retelling of the all too true and familiar story of the kidnapping and murder of teenager Emmett Till who was visiting cousins in 1955 Mississippi and made the mistake of whistling at a white woman in the Jim Crow south. The well-known crime and the trial of the men responsible is told primarily this time from the point of view of Mamie Till-Mobley (Danielle Deadwyler (from The Harder They Fall as a male character!)), the boy’s mother, who went from grieving the loss of her son to becoming an icon of the Civil Rights Movement of the fifties and sixties. The screenplay is a straight forward telling of the events that shows us her concern for her boy’s safety and her historic decision of putting Till’s battered body on display for the world to see. We are fortunately spared any scenes depicting the actual torture and murder, but do see the terror of the family when Till was kidnapped during the night by the two men who committed the act. The importance of the event becomes clear when the NAACP becomes involved and Mobley is encouraged to go to Mississippi to testify at the murder trial. The heartfelt performance of Deadwyler is absolutely engaging as she expresses the pain and resolve of dealing with the overwhelming situation. I definitely look for an Academy Award nomination for Deadwyler. Other than young Jalyn Hall as Emmett the rest of the cast is not nearly as memorable. The highly accurate sets and the use of the popular music of the time evokes the feeling of what fifties were like. As a reminder of where we have come as a country and where we are today, Till needs to be seen. Also, for a good documentary on the history of lynching in the US, I highly recommend Always in Season from 2019.

King Richard

King Richard       4 stars

If you want to see another inspirational sports movie then go see King Richard, directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green and written by Zach Baylin. But the movie is more than that as it is also about the unwavering belief and determination of Richard Williams, father of future tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams. Will Smith portrays Richard, the girls’ father who has a written plan for his two daughter’s success and will not accept defeat even in the face of the odds against them, coming from the streets of Compton in the early 1990’s. Even though we know what the eventual outcome is, stardom in the all-white tennis world for two young black women, the obstacles facing them appear all too real. Richard works with the young girls on run-down neighborhood tennis courts while having to fight off the young men of the streets threatening them and forces his way into meetings with the white coaches who are needed for the girls’ success. Richard tells a lot of stories of his growing up in a world of racial prejudice with a father who would not look out for him. (The movie does not even include the worst of it.) He is determined not to have this experience repeated on his daughters. Fortunately, there is also a mother, Brandy (Aunjanue Ellis) who looks out for their interests and calls out Richard when he tries to go too far without consulting her. The white coaches are perplexed at Richard’s insistence that the girls be pulled from the junior tournament circuit when he sees how the parents of the other girls are treating their daughters and the resulting behavior as spoiled brats. Of course the movie would not be the success it is without Will Smith’s convincing acting performance as the father who won’t take No for an answer. He is deserving of the acting Oscar he received (despite all the ceremony controversy). This sports movie delivers with the expected climactic competitive scene as is the tradition, but the focus shifts from the father to daughter Venus when she faces the best in the world. The movie is available on HBOMax.

Back to Black

Back to Black      2 stars

One genre of film that I really like is movies about the making of music. These are the ones where we see the process of coming up with and writing a good song. They can be either fictional or about a real artist. Unfortunately, we don’t get that in the new Sam Taylor-Johnson biopic called Back to Black, the movie about the rise and tragic end to British pop star Amy Winehouse (starring Marisa Abela) who died of alcohol poisoning back in 2011. Instead, the movie focuses mainly on her troubled romance to husband Blake (Jack O’Connell) who was addicted to drugs and alcohol and played a major part in allowing Winehouse to share in the addiction. We do get several stage performances of Winehouse and her disagreements with the record producers. (She could certainly stand up for herself.) But I didn’t see enough of her composing music and feeling it in the process, other than one scene early in the movie. Abela does a decent job portraying the singer, even using her own voice in some of the songs. (It’s unlike Elvis then where Austin Butler only did lip syncing.) Much better examples of artist biopics were Rocketman (Elton John), Bohemian Rhapsody (Freddy Mercury) and even Ray (Ray Charles). We also get too many scenes of her getting more tattoos, but we do see how that enormous signature beehive hairdo came to be. If you saw the documentary, Amy, from 2015 you would see some significant details that are left out of Back to Black. The movie treats her father, Mitch (Eddie Marsan) far too sympathetically as he in reality only returned to Amy’s life after she became famous and did little to help her out of her addiction. Her record producer and band members are treated as mere background characters, and her bodyguard is left out altogether, even though in the movie she is hounded by the paparazzi. In the end the movie is reduced to one about a bad romance and I think we already have plenty of those.

Navalny

Navalny                5 stars

If you are going to see one documentary from 2022, Navalny by Daniel Roher must be the one to choose. Alexei Navalny is the Russian dissident who challenged Russian President Vladimir Putin, calling out the brutal nature of the government and the lies he tells the people of Russia. The film follows Navalny and investigative journalist Christo Grozev starting from the attempted assassination of Navalny until he is arrested and put in prison upon his return to Russia. The film plays like a thriller as we see him suddenly fall ill on a flight to Moscow forcing the plane to land in Omsk to seek medical attention for him. There he is kept by the authorities, however his colleagues fearing the worst find a way to fly him to Berlin, Germany where it is determined he was poisoned, a sure sign that the Kremlin was involved. While in Berlin and on the path to recovery, Navalny and Grozev undertake an investigation using telephone records and flight records to find possible candidates for assassins with Kremlin ties. The rest is fascinating to watch as the truth is uncovered and the crime is broadcast around the world revealing the monstrous practices of Putin. All of this happened well before the invasion of Ukraine, thus we now know just how corrupt Putin is and what he thinks of the common people. The film also includes moments with Navalny’s family so we see what he is risking with his political moves. The film serves as an effective reminder of how bad things can be when living under an authoritative dictatorship. This is the film that won Best Documentary at the Academy Awards this year. If you are interested in documentaries that tell provocative stories as they happen, you should really see it.

Sound of Freedom

Sound of Freedom          no review

I have not seen the Jim Caviezel movie Sound of Freedom, nor will I ever see it. The ads for it have been appearing regularly on television. The movie has had some very high box office numbers and has created a stir in the right-wing world so I felt compelled to make a public service announcement and warn people about it. The thriller action movie appears to be part of a crusade against child trafficking and features Caviezel as a sort of one man super hero out to rescue the victims of the sex trade. (Caviezel is best known for his portrayal of Jesus Christ in the Mel Gibson movie The Passion of the Christ.) In reality, it is a propaganda piece put out by the people who adhere to QAnon fantasy conspiracy theories such as the traffickers are harvesting children’s organs and extracting adrenochrome before killing them. The movie appears to be appealing to a mostly older white audience who are there to reinforce their views of what is wrong with the government and the country. Based on what I have read of the movie it is full of implausibilities and condemnations of the government. The movie was reportedly made in 2018 and it took this long to find someone to distribute it as it was considered to be a money loser. I have a suspicion that certain churches and right-wing groups have been buying out theater tickets in order to inflate the numbers. This has been a practice for other such propaganda movies. If you have not seen the movie you are warned to stay away from it. If you have seen it then you have my sympathy for enduring the pain.

Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer   4 ½ stars

“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” These are the words that J. Robert Oppenheimer, played by Cillian Murphy says early in the Christopher Nolan new epic film Oppenheimer about the life of the theoretical physicist who was chosen to head the Manhattan Project during World War II. We don’t know if Oppenheimer really said this but it demonstrates just how troubled he became as he would come to terms with the incredible destructive power unleashed with the atomic bomb. The film gives us the story of Oppenheimer’s life and how he led the project located in the desert at Los Alamos, New Mexico, including the scandal of an affair and the drama of two court hearings. The movie packs a heck of a lot in the three hour running time. It is about the creation of the bomb, but is just as much a tense political thriller. It follows multiple time lines and a myriad of characters from academics and the military using both color and black and white footage sometimes interspersed with images of explosions and rotting corpses and faces. Nolan often uses short scenes with only a few longer ones all of which are packed with dialogue jumping from one time to another. It would be nice to see the years the scenes occur in, but there are many clues given as the time lines stretch from the nineteen twenties to the nineteen fifties. Oppenheimer’s (Cillian Murphy) main enemy in the film is Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission after the war who first recruits Oppenheimer then seeks to destroy his career. One may be surprised to see that the achievement of completing the first atomic explosion happens about two-thirds of the way through the film with the hearings taking up the remainder of the movie. In the first, occurring around 1954, Oppenheimer is accused of being an agent for the Soviets with communist leanings when it is brought out that his views toward the weapon changed with the development of the H-bomb and that his wife, Kitty (Emily Blunt) may have been a member of the Communist party many years before (the worst accusation in the America of the 1950’s). In the second, a Senate hearing is held for the confirmation of Strauss as the Commerce Secretary for President Eisenhower in 1959. We seem to go through endless testimony from individuals who played a role in the Manhattan Project, some on Oppenheimer’s side and some who are not. Throughout the entire movie, it is Murphy’s performance that makes it a success more than anything letting us see Oppenheimer’s talent as a visionary who is also deeply troubled by the threat brought to humankind by this creation. There are a great many actors with supporting roles in this complicated story that will be familiar to audiences. To mention a few there are Matt Damon, Josh Hartnett, Rami Malek, Kenneth Branagh, Casey Affleck, Florence Pugh and Jason Clarke without going into the individual roles. (Gary Oldman is great as Harry Truman being a real jerk.) To really understand what is going on, one would have to see the movie more than once. I can guarantee that it will keep your attention throughout, thanks to Nolan’s writing and an excellent score by Ludwig Goransson. I would say though that the sex scene in a hallucination that Oppenheimer has could have been left out and nothing would be lost. It is safe to say that this is one of two must see movies of the summer. We will be looking for many Academy Award nominations for Oppenheimer next year, I am sure.

Dumb Money

Dumb Money                    4 stars

The new based on real events movie Dumb Money by Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya) starts by introducing the players on screen showing us their estimated worth. That way it becomes clear who the good guys are and who the bad guys are in the stock trading world, or who are the billionaire hedge fund managers and the retail traders (who the billionaires refer to as Dumb Money). In the early days of 2021 while America wasn’t watching the news about Donald Trump’s second impeachment, they were following a story about a small publicly traded company called Gamestop that was being promoted by a single nerdy small investor named Keith Gill (Paul Dano of Little Miss Sunshine and There Will be Blood). He broadcast his message of belief in the stock on Youtube and Reddit under the name of Roaring Kitty, convincing thousands of small investors to buy it to show the big guys on Wall Street that the stock was undervalued, making the phrase “I like the stock” a rallying cry. The hedge fund managers are all betting against them, selling Gamestop short, allowing them to make a lot of money when and if the stock crashes in value. (I don’t really understand how this works but the movie helps to explain it.) The billionaires are portrayed by Seth Rogen, Vincent D’Onofrio and Nick Offerman who strut around in their luxury suites and tennis clubs. The little guys who buy into the stock and hold it with religious fervor are a nurse named Jenny (America Ferrera), a retail clerk (Anthony Ramos), and a couple of college students (Talie Ryder and Myha’la) who are all desperate for money. The movie provides some non-investing characters to ask questions about what is happening, allowing Gill to explain it in easy to understand terms. These include his wife, Caroline (Shailene Woodley) and his idiot brother Kevin (Pete Davidson in another well executed smart-ass role). All this eventually leads to the climax of a congressional inquiry when there is an apparent impropriety that protects the billionaires from further losses. The movie effectively tells the story of what happens when Wall Street greed collides with the power of social media combined with the isolation brought on by the pandemic. Dumb Money is not The Big Short by any means but dramatizes a story about stock trading done in a way that makes it relatable to the average viewer. Also, fans of hip-hop artist Cardi B should be pleased by the choice of music.

Napoleon

Napoleon            1 ½ stars

The long-anticipated Ridley Scott epic Napoleon about the man who sought to conquer all of Europe appeared in theaters on November 22 and I was there for the first day. It combines my interest in movies and military history so it was a must see. Joaquin Phoenix (of Walk the Line and Gladiator) portrays the emperor from his rise to power from an artillery officer to claim the throne through a coup, to his ultimate demise and exile from France. We also get a big dose of his love life with his wife, Josephine, taking up way too much of the film. The movie can be described as a spectacle of grand scale battle scenes, grandiose balls with aristocrats decked out in their finest and comical love scenes between the horny Napoleon and the standoffish Josephine. One would expect it to be a difficult task to cover such an expanse of history in a two and a half-hour film, but Scott’s version of it is especially hard to follow to the point of being laughable. There is little to connect the scenes as we pass through the events of history. During the revolution there is a representation of Robespierre, but we don’t really see what he is about or why he was so powerful. A few Marshals of the French army are there, such as Junot, Ney and Berthier, but they are just characters in the background with Napoleon barely interacting with them. During the movie there are scenes depicting the battles of Toulon, Austerlitz, Borodino and Waterloo with great looking clashes of soldiers and cavalry charges, but we never get much explanation of why they are being fought. There is no mention of the peninsula war, very little about the Prussians, a major participant in the wars, or of any naval actions. After the burning of Moscow in 1812, we immediately go to Napoleon’s ouster from being emperor ignoring the two years of the war in Prussia. In much of the movie we see a very petulant Napoleon who is all about settling scores with other heads of state, but none of his genius in his vision of a united Europe. In the battle scenes themselves there is nothing to show the tactics of warfare of the time, not to mention all the historical inaccuracies. The British were not entrenched at Waterloo like the movie shows us and there is nothing to show how the British defended farm buildings or used slopes of hills to their advantage. In one scene, Napoleon points to Waterloo on a map saying that is where he will defeat the enemy. (Nevermind that it is the defender that chooses the site of battle, not the attacker.) The funniest line is when Napoleon rages against the British saying “You think you’re so great just because you have boats!”. I had to laugh. Also ridiculous were the sex scenes between the emperor and Josephine making them appear like animals in the act. I would have to say that they did a good job with the uniforms of the soldiers and the weapons of the time. The firing of the artillery and the effects on people and horses did look realistic. But the movie was not worth two and a half hours of my time and I am sure there are much better dramatic works available about Napoleon and the wars in Europe of this period. I don’t know what came over Ridley Scott to create this mess.