Category Archives: Drama

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.

Blonde

Blonde                  1 ½ stars

Blonde from 2022 is a fictionalized biopic of Marilyn Monroe by director Andrew Dominick (2007’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford). Fictionalized is correct as the movie is out to emphasize Monroe as a victim, exploited by Hollywood and the men around her and sexually abused through much of her career. Missing from the movie are how she was a true acting talent and was able to influence others and control a room as well as any sense of joy. With Ana de Armas doing a decent job as Marilyn (usually referred to as Norma Jeane), we follow the actress from childhood to her untimely death starting with her mentally disturbed mother trying to kill her, being sent to an orphanage at age eight, being abused by studio executives and being misunderstood by her husbands. She is consumed by a portrait of her absent father constantly dreaming of him returning to her someday. There are even scenes where she imagines seeing him passing on the street and hearing his voice saying he will see her. Then there is the horrible treatment of Monroe hoping to have a baby but being forced to have abortions or having an accidental miscarriage. These scenes are played out on the screen with graphic detail which was unnecessary. I found the scenes with Norma Jeane communicating telepathically with her unborn children (a la Lady Jessica in Dune Two) to be just weird. We get a dose of the abuse she experienced from husband Joe DiMaggio (Bobby Cannavale) who doesn’t seem to understand what he signed up for, but things do go better for her with husband Arthur Miller. (The credits refer to them as the Ex-athlete and the Playwright which I find to be pretentious.) She always refers to her lovers and husbands as Daddy like a child apparently showing how she wants to be united with her real father who she has never met. The style of the movie changes throughout using different aspect ratios and alternating between color and black and white for reasons unknown. In general, the movie is obsessed with showing Marilyn Monroe’s life as hell and I found it to be the most depressing thing I have seen in years. At 2 and three quarters hours it is more a test of endurance than entertainment.

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?