RSS
 

Archive for the ‘DRAMA LITE’ Category

Black Or White

26 Feb

Black Or White – written and directed by Mike Binder. Drama Lite. 121 minutes Color 2015.

★★★★

The Story: The grandfather of a little girl of mixed race fends off adoption by her black grandmother.

~

I think I’ll stop going to movies written by the director. I’ll find out beforehand and save my time and fee.

For I’ve grown tired of seeing films as ill judged as they usually are by author/directors. Films such as this one where only one half of the story is honored, where only one half comes to life. Directors who write their own stuff have virtually no sense of the quality, needs, or truth of their material. It’s their baby. They just want to get it on. Blind love, like the love of the grandmother for her worthless son.

In this case the film comes to life because of the rich playing of Kevin Costner. The camera and the story monopolize him to the point of such absurdity that he is even provided with a comic gremlin in the form of a tutor for his granddaughter, that is a waste of time and an insult to the audience’s credulity.

All this while, the black side of the “or” is under-written and played essentially for comic relief. Which is shameful. Aren’t those black folks funny! Are they musical, though! Don’t they know how to yell! Isn’t Ebonics entertaining!

The grandmother needs to be a lot crazier than Octavia Spencer is allowed to act her, and her son, the father of the child, needs to be extracted from the stereotype of a drug addict, which is all the writer is capable of. The writer knows nothing of black drug addicts. Or black people entirely. Their presence here under his pen is a rude imposture. A deed of racial profiling. The writing of the black folks lacks, not fairness, but the essential ingredient for all story-telling: imagination!

This means there is no real drama, no true pull, nothing deep at stake. For there is nothing human on the black side of the “or” in a story that requires absolute balance of the weightiest sort to get itself told in a way that counts.

What we leave with is a hugely improbably kitchen table speech of Kevin Costner at the courtroom, which he does beautifully, however, and which has so much truth to it, it is almost worth seeing the film for it.

As it is, without true, significant opposition to him, we have nothing to digest, nothing to stick to our ribs.

 
Comments Off on Black Or White

Posted in DRAMA LITE, Kevin Costner, MIDDLE-CLASS DRAMA, Octavia Spencer, Social Drama

 

My Old Lady

28 Sep

My Old Lady – directed Israel Horovitz, 107 minutes Dramedy Color 2014.

★★★★

The Story: An impoverished American inherits a Paris apartment and its complications.

~

Time was in American films when you could see stories about grown-ups. Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer and Rosalind Russell and Claudette Colbert and Cary Grant were grownups. Love Story is a movie about people in their forties. So is Penny Serenade and Woman Of The Year, and they were enormously successful because grownups went to movies in those days, and because age added luster to the skills of the performers and made their exact age immaterial to the universal entertainment their gifts guaranteed.

In My Old Lady, we have such a picture. It is well worth seeing for the maturity of language dedicated to its predicament – for it is a talking picture – meaning that narration does not fall into the trap of being a function of motion only, of pictures only. The people before us are strong minded, articulate, and possessed of fully developed characters.

And they are brought to us by actors we love to watch, whom we have seen over the past twenty years and so are interested in their development.

Can Kevin Kline retain his relevance as a performer? That’s bound to be a question since his screen performances are fairly rare. The answer is up for grabs as you watch his finessing the role of a ne’er-do-well failed novelist on his uppers, as he bamboozles various French operatives out of their ready money trying to keep afloat while he sells or promises to sell a Paris apartment which is not quite yet his.

What prevents this is the presence in it of Maggie Smith who has right of residence as long as she lives – she who has already lived long and promises to live longer. And he is also met by the firm gaze of her daughter played by Kristin Scott-Thomas.

Scott-Thomas is a personality I have not cottoned to in the past, but she really takes hold here as an unmarried woman of fifty or so, learning the truth of her mother’s relations to the man who deeded her the apartment, Kline’s own father. She is interesting to watch and she presents a stern front breaking down as the truth of her life and her relations to Kline’s father emerge. Kline’s weakling breaks down too to reveal a piratical firmness at all odds. Maggie Smith herself, that past mistress of ambiguity nailed by eyes like two cockatoos, crumbles as the worst comes to be known.

The material comes from a stage play and in film form has three acts, the second of which is the richest. The first arranged the predicament for us, the second confronts it, but the third goes off into a siding of romance, which is out of character for Scott-Thomas and damages the weight of the material.

Still we have wonderful actors performing it, great support from the French cast, particularly Dominique Pinon as a real estate agent. We have a real Paris. A film beautifully filmed and well directed, and the spectacle of a virtuoso actor, Kevin Kline negotiating a role without falling into its tempting traps. Grownup fare. Dig in.

 
Comments Off on My Old Lady

Posted in ACTING STYLE: INTERNATIONAL REALISTIC, DRAMA LITE, DRAMEDY, Filmed in France, Kevin Kline, Kristin Scott Thomas, Maggie Smith

 

Robot and Frank

29 Aug

Robot and Frank – directed by Jake Shreier. SciFi Drama. An elderly man is assigned a robot to be his caretaker. 89 minutes Color 2012.

★★★★

Frank Langella is a wonder to watch as he gets to accept his odd companion, played by the voice of Peter Sarsgaard. Langella has been around the block as an actor so long that he surprises every nook and cranny he comes upon.

The story is by a half-wit writer (according to the moronic Extra Voice Over he supplies, a “sort of” Valley Boy, using “sort of” six times a clause), but, unlike him, it has its charms, which supply the robot with a moral and ethic denied to the Langella character who is cat burglar striving for his final hit. He teaches the robot to pick locks.

Supplying a welcome set of variations for these two, we have three fine actors, James Marsden, Liv Tyler, and the inestimable Susan Sarandon. Watching Sarandon these days one sits back as confident as in the company of the best claret and simply enjoys a skill which is as past expertise as the moon the earth. What ease! What human insight! What open presence!

These three circle around Frank and his robot and they work toward a perhaps too sappy denouement for such a grouch.

But never mind. The idea of a robot pal ordered-in to care-take a dotty senior has a fine simplicity to it, and we look upon the doings of these two as perfectly possible in the near future.

A pleasant way to spend time without wasting it.

 

 

 

 

 

 
Comments Off on Robot and Frank

Posted in ACTING STYLE: AMERICAN REALISTIC, DRAMA LITE, Frank Langella, James Marsden, Liv Tyler, Peter Sarsgaard, Sci-Fi, Susan Sarandon

 

Lilies Of The Field

24 Dec

Lilies Of The Field – written and directed by Ralph Nelson. Drama Lite. An itinerant handyman finds himself inveigled to build a chapel in the desert by a sharp-tongued German nun. 94 minutes Black and White. 1963.

★★★★★

Sidney Poitier created in the middle of The United States a lake larger than Superior. It was and is a lake that has its shores in every state in the Union.
What was he?

The first black movie star. It wasn’t like Ella Fitzgerald coming in over the airwaves; you actually had to go see Sidney Poitier. The public was part of it, and was ready for it. We all went to see a black man. It was easy.

But Sidney Poitier was, after all, only an actor.

As such, what did he bring?

Always the same: dignity, innocence, wariness. Also reserve. And, as an actor, he was always game. Also, he was a good-looking man of good figure with a marvelous smile and a distinctive speaking voice.

Whom would I be describing here, if I were not describing Sydney Poitier, but Barrack Obama?

Poitier paved the way and continues to pave the way for Obama, and there is no distinction between them in that way. Obama exists because the Poitier Lake exists. Obama swims in and exists in that Lake.

They have another point in common which accounts for their preeminence, their success, their possibility – and that is that both were born on far offshore islands, and neither of them were of American origin. Poitier is from Jamaica and returned to it as his home base. Obama’s father was from Kenya; neither was reared in the black male diminution of the mainland: Obama lived a significant portion of his childhood in Southeast Asia. Both men appeared to be U.S. citizens, not from charlatanism but by common public error, but they were not. Poitier is a naturalized citizen; Obama is first-generation. They are Americans once remove. Their appearance is African-American, but the truth is they are African-sports, Maverick-Americans. They are travellers. Their true home is not America but in themselves alone. America is a congeries of fifty-two nation-states. To have a home in the joy and jingoism of none of them is for both of them, naturally, to make a home of all of them. Distance is their intimacy.

Poitier made the Lake, Obama deepens its color.

And what is that color?

That color is the undeniable truth that this country is unthinkable without African American people.

Poitier gave gills to every black actor after him. Few resembled him, for Poitier was a leading actor always of limited but commanding presence. But his existence permitted the actors who followed him to play characters who were not innocent, reserved, dignified, wary, game, or even leading-man-good-looking. Wesley Snipes, Danny Glover, Matthew Perry got their license to act because the Poitier Lake already existed for them.

~ ~ ~

Lilies Of The Field is essentially a TV play of the kind that was done in the ‘60s live, and as such it has its satisfactions. To describe its predicament of a roving handyman asked to stand still and build a church is to say enough about it. It’s filmed by the great Ernest Haller. Poitier is good in it, although he overplays the first scene in the greasy-spoon. However, Poitier never does blackface, as Sammy Davis Junior sometimes lost himself in doing. Poitier’s another thing entirely, a black actor who never heard of blackface. He won the Oscar for it. It’s a good family film, worth a visit, if only to witness how astutely it ends.

 
Comments Off on Lilies Of The Field

Posted in ACTING STYLE: INTERNATIONAL REALISTIC, DRAMA LITE, FILMED BY Ernest Haller, Sidney Poitier

 
 
Rss Feed Tweeter button Facebook button Technorati button Reddit button Myspace button Linkedin button Webonews button Delicious button Digg button Flickr button Stumbleupon button Newsvine button