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Archive for the ‘Jamie Foxx’ Category

Just Mercy

19 Jan

Just Mercy—directed by Destin Daniel Cretton. Docudrama. 147 minutes Color 2020.
★★★★★
The Story: A law student volunteers in the Alabama prisons and, after he earns his law degree in Harvard, comes back to Alabama to free the wrongly accused, his first case being a thorny one.

Docudramas stand tall in recent releases. Boy Erased tells of the experience in and liberation from a homosexual cure institution. And here Michael B. Jordan and Brie Larson join forces to fight for the liberation from an institution of a misprision of justice so ruddy its racial suppression had to be fast, sudden, final, and resolutely colluded in.

We don’t go to such movies to see character development or even depth of motivation. All those are “given,” — meaning tacit — meaning the audience must supply them — and indeed the audience wants to do just that. It knows how to. Each audience member is watching this dramatization of a piece of history in order to be informed, to follow gratefully history’s deep complications, setbacks, casualties. We do not watch Hamlet for Danish history. And we do not watch docudrama for the kind of high tragedy Elsinore delivers in Hamlet.

No. Docudrama offers a great and different drama for our interiors in tension, urgency, inspiration, education, concern for the living or once living. I Want to Live with Susan Hayward is a more harrowing audience experience than Star Wars. We go right into the gas chamber with her and all the delay and clumsy ritual attached. We die for her. We weep for her human suffering, for she was once a living being. Docudramas enlarge our compassion. And we leave the theatre determined to ally ourselves with the right side, take up causes in conversations and marches, write to our representatives, or back up our stirred ideals with contributions. And when the curtain comes down, we applaud all those involved for having the guts to tell the truth finally.

Just Mercy fully lives up the potential of the form.

Mind you, docudrama acting performances do not as a rule have an arc. Characters do not necessarily start somewhere and slowly and eventually end up internally somewhere else. Here they certainly do not. What you have here is an actor, Michael B. Jordan, who remains stalwart throughout — and that is as it should be. He is an actor who can hold the screen like nobody’s business — with his fine carriage, spacious face, sensitive instrument, and keen, open, direct gaze in which so much can be read because nothing is forced or imposed. All he need do is remain before us to convince of his firmness of purpose. As an actor he makes everything — the merest furrow of his brow — as small as he can — which is also correct — for it induces the audience to put themselves in his shoes.

Brie Larson plays his second in command, and the opening position the actress assumes of adherence to her cause encases her in the easy strength of loyalty to the business at hand. No hanky-panky, here but always at work toward the realization of justice for the wrongly condemned. It is a performance of humor and refusal to steal a single scene. No character development here, either. For the character remains as she started, and if the character did not, there would be no story to tell. Kudos to her.

Jaimie Foxx as the death row prisoner is less reserved, but the role clamors for emotion and tempts him into it, which ever and ever deprives the audience of feeling it themselves. Actual his change comes early in the story and his character remains constant afterwards.

I won’t disbar myself from your love by describing the great scenes, but, besides these, there are super-duper performances. Tim Black Nelson in a very well-written part as the false witness —is he up for an Oscar for this? Rafe Spall as the D.A. you want to strangle but it’s always too late; he walks around inside the role so that you never know where he will finally come out from it, if at all. Ted Huckabee as the sheriff holds the insolence of his position in wise reserve. Hayes Mercure creates a story without words of a prison guard who finds his lost humanity as the great case of righting the wrong unfolds.

Docudramas provide a great theatrical experience all their own. Each member of its audience creates in themself the response system particular to the form. Arcing inside each member are the emotional eyes which know how to see this form, experience it, enjoy it, weigh it. Those intestinal eyes are bent upon the form in ways which in some ways do blend with those which Hamlet requires, but they are essentially a system all their own.

Bryan Stevenson was the young lawyer who came back to Alabama with a mandate to free the unjustly condemned to death-row. 135 prisoners have by now and by his efforts been freed from that malign fate — many of them accused on racial grounds — to become cases of bitter and frustrated freedom, as did Walter McMillian.

The fight does not end with this movie or his deeds. And this movie revitalized us in the certainly that Stevenson’s fights are all our fights and thrill us to engage in.

 

Annie

16 Jan

Annie – directed and written by Will Gluck. Musical. 118 minutes Color 2014.

★★★★

The Story: An orphan becomes publicizable as a prop to a politician’s election.

~

In silent film there was a lot of noise. People on the screen were talking all the time. The most famous film stars whose work we see nowadays were mimes: Harold Lloyd, Harry Langdon, Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, but most films then involved dialogue. In dramas, melodramas, westerns, and straight comedies, there was lots of words exchanged, and always lots of music from the piano player in front of the audience, following sheet music written to ornament the scenes. Of course, you couldn’t hear a word anyone said.

Annie is just like that. When they are singing, you can’t hear a word anyone said. Oh, a word may drift into intelligibility from time to time, but for the most part, the singers are as mute as Mary Pickford. The orchestrations crush them. The booming sound system of the multiplex cooks them to death.

So what I did, and I counsel you to do the same, is to sit back into the inevitable and enjoy yourself.

For there is much to enjoy. Having to set aside the songs and the music, one expects to see a dance musical, but to call the dancing dance is to misapply strutting for choreography. It is not a dance musical. It is a prance musical.

But as such it is imaginative and entertaining. The prancing is original and daring and fun. Everyone is good at it. And once you get the gist of it from a song’s title, everything fits in real good. I would almost say it’s the most entertaining thing about Annie.

Except we have a couple of delightful players up there. Two people who belong in film work like anything! Two people the rest of us humans pay willingly to just to watch. Two humans we want to get close to because they have so much human juice available to them. Two naturally gifted entertainers.

The one is Mr, Jamie Foxx. The other is the inestimable Quvenzhané Wallis, whom we were privileged first to meet in Beasts Of The Southern Wild. She’s just entrancing. She is a great star. She will led the nation to freedom. But only if she never reads this. She is about 10.

 

Django Unchained

05 Jan

Django Unchained – written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. Western. A bounty hunter joins with his slave to make a killing in the bounty business and to liberate the slave’s wife. 165 minutes Color 2012.
★★★★★
If you want to watch A Quentin Tarantino movie properly you must gauge whether he pleases you with the way he pleases himself in telling his tale, for the way he tells his tale pleases Tarantino so mightily, so obviously, and with such relish, there is no way of avoiding it with pleasure at all. He is a show-off. A great show-off. You either put up with it, or you go ice-skating.

And we find wonderful performances in his pieces, here from Cristoph Waltz, as a bounty hunter disguised as an itinerant dentist, and speaking an English so elaborate no one in Texas has a clue as to what he is saying. This joke is replayed again in reverse by Bruce Dern speaking in an argot no one in his vicinity, or in the theatre audience itself, can gather at all, save Leonardo DiCaprio who understand every word immediately.

For Tarantino is a witty director indeed. And he is one who knows how to structure a scene powerfully, so the movie moves forward not so much through its story as through our expectations of another even wittier scene. These are interlaced with spectacularly shot vistas of the West. Waltz and the slave adventure assassination after assassination, buffaloing among others Don Johnson as a vicious slave-owner, and collecting bounties hither and yon.

All this works well until the last act when they come up against two formidable actors, Samuel L. Jackson as the Uncle Tom major domo of a vast cotton plantation and its owner whom he cow-tows to, bullies, and influences. Jackson’s is a stunning performance and a ruthless exposé of the Negro favoring the white tradition over the hearts, minds, and bodies, of his fellow slaves.

The owner is brought off by Leonardo DiCaprio brilliantly, with every requisite furbelow of the Southern plutocrat on display. Finally, DiCaprio is in a character lead! He is not a leading man, he does not have the technical substance to fake it or the acting instrument for it to begin with, but give him a part with some character, an accent, a costume, (The same is true of Meryl Streep), and you’ve got an actor doing what God made him for to do.

Jamie Foxx plays the slave, and our surprise is a tribute to his gifts to see what a fine actor is in him, for he starts off unrecognizable as a shackled slave, and he gains in character and stature as the story goes on and the costumes and facial hair change. Dressed in rags, his soul is in rags; dressed in cowboy rig, he grows into man of position high on a horse; dressed in turquoise knee breeches, he is a disdainful fop; dressed in work pants and an old shirt, he is a captive renegade. Then dressed in Zorro duds, he is a Hollywood star on a trick horse, ready to bust out into “Home On The Range.”

The film is richly entertaining. Until it isn’t, and that means that Tarantino plays 52-pick-up with his finale, which consists of five, count them, five hugely detailed slaughters. Sharp and imaginative as these bloodlettings are, we are drenched numb by them, and they cancel one another out, and us along with them.

We do not need the second. All we need is his being handed the gun. A blackout with gunfire. Cut to his removing the weapons from the bodies.

We do not need the third. All we need is the six men lounging in the cabin, the shadow of Django in the doorway, and his walking away with the cabin on fire behind him.

As to slaughter number four, we need less dialogue. The slaying of the sister is wonderful, but the scene needs fewer slain, two would do, the castrator and the sister – who are those other people anyhow?

The major domo must meet his comeuppance in slaughter five, which I shall not tell you about.

Anyhow, Tarantino lacks, here, the sense of narrative selection which would stop the movie from being a film he himself would want to see and let it be the film the audience would want to see. Self-indulgence is the worst crime an artist can engage in. But show offs are always showing off for themselves. It’s a problem with the type.

But still, Tarantino has given us a first class drama of retribution. The white race is totally annihilated. How gratifying. Everyone dies who should.

Did we ever think they wouldn’t?

No, but up to the last ten miles, the trail that meanders through a maze of surprises to that inevitability is stunning. Who would ever have thought to make a movie like this?

Quentin Tarantino.

Right.

 

Horrible Bosses

20 Jul

Horrible Bosses – Directed by Seth Gordon. Low Comedy. The Three Stooges take on The Axis Powers. 94 minutes Color 2011.

* * *

What a disappointment! No wait a minute. I went to it because of the stars, and the stars do not disappoint, which is why three stars are allotted to this. The three stars are actually very funny. Colin Farrell plays a drugged-out dauphin with a comb-over to Donald Sutherland, who is an ideal boss, but who dies in his first appearance, so his chief of staff falls under the crazy sway of Emperor Farrell, and misery ensues. Jennifer Aniston plays a nymphomaniacal dentist who longs to have her otherwise engaged dental technical drill her. And Kevin Spacey who slave-drives everyone around him like Simon Legree plays the CEO From Hell with gorgeous relish. Spacey is given and rewards the most film time of the three. His grandmother scene is almost worth playing money for, except that one would have to subject onesself to the rest of the movie to do so. It is the only time I laughed. Or smiled. Or didn’t feel like leaving. For the problem with the film lies not fall with the three stars who play The Axis Powers, but with The Three Stooges who conspire to kill them. It’s a wonderful premise, especially when Jamie Foxx comes along as a professional hit man to fortify their resolve. He is delightful. As is Bob Newhart as a replacement boss. It is the style of playing of the three victims which I find distressing. What they do is actorish, indeed acteroid. You would call it hammy if it aimed at a high style, but since it aims at a low style, you would call it improv. They never shut up and they never stop Rube Goldberging responseses to the situation and to one another that read like the contents of a trash basket. That is, their collective playing is a conglomeration of what any good actor would throw out.  They drain every ounce of humor from the premise by trying to make everything, and I mean everything, funny. And as a result we the audience can find nothing funny. I didn’t laugh. Neither did the other three people in the movie house.  The only three people having fun were those three actors. They found one another infectious. So did I, except in a quite different way.

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