The must see for this week is Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always, currently on VOD
That’s right. I’m finally back with the first batch of new movies I saw this year, which is admittedly, a pretty paltry amount. Even so, there are some really good movies in this first group, and though I choose Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always as the must watch, I also highly recommend Da 5 Bloods, which is on Netflix, Emma (VOD) and Howard, currently streaming on Disney Plus. Check them out.
BIRDS OF PREY (OR THE FABULOUS EMANCIPATION OF HARLEY QUINN) * * (Dir. Cathy Yan)
Margot Robbie won’t rest until she makes this character work
Cathy Yan’s Birds of Prey has the unfortunate luck of being a sequel/spinoff to the much reviled Suicide Squad, but even though this is a more coherent, well made film in comparison (which is a pretty low bar), it’s not much to write home about in its own right. Margot Robbie returns as Harley Quinn, this time with the lead role, as she has recently been dumped by the Joker (Jared Leto remains unseen in the movie, only mentioned) and has to figure out how to stand on her own two feet. The movie wants to be a kind of feminist Deadpool, as the bad guy adjacent, amoral Harley narrates the movie in that god awful, inexplicably made up accent that does not sound anything like the New York one I think it’s trying to be (Robbie should have really watched some episodes of Batman: The Animated Series, where the Harley Quinn character was originally created, to see what she’s supposed to sound like). And the movie possesses a colorful, glitter filled aesthetic and some high energy action scenes, while giving Harley herself an arc that remains consistent, but in the end, this movie just doesn’t amount to anything memorable. The Birds of Prey are kind of a pointless addition to a movie that clearly wants to be about Harley Quinn, so random characters like Huntress (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), Black Canary (Jurnee Smollet-Bell) and Renee Montoya (Rosie Perez) are in here to add to the forced girl power dynamic, yet for what real purpose? Who cares about any of them and none have any relationship to Harley in the first place. Ewan MacGregor gives what’s quite possibly his worst performance ever as Black Mask, a villain who runs a nightclub and kills people, but MacGregor’s camp flamboyance is so over the top that it’s distracting and almost embarrassing. The movie, as many of these movies do, devolves into mindless action scenes by the climax and leaves me with some rather annoying nitpicks about how or why on earth Harley Quinn can beat up twenty guys at once with a baseball bat when last time I checked, she does NOT have superpowers or is in any way technologically equipped to do anything of the kind. She’s literally just a person in a clown outfit who’s never been trained to fight, what makes her an assassin of the highest order? That bothers me, as does Harley herself, who frankly is just irritating and annoying, not a character who’s ever possessed anything more interesting than her sad, twisted origin story and damaged psyche as the enabler of a murderer. She’s not special. And neither is this movie.
DA 5 BLOODS * * * (Dir. Spike Lee)
Journey back to the jungle goes haywire
A new Spike Lee joint is always a must-see. Even when it’s all over the place and veering in different directions (as this one does), it feels unmistakably alive, relevant and important to our current moment. He just has a handle on what feels right. This film is his Vietnam War epic, meshed with a bit of Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and as a tribute to genres like those that have mostly left out the African-American experience, it’s essential in that regard. But of course, he also wants to talk about right now. The Bloods, five Vietnam vets who vowed to reunite and return to the country to find the remains of their buried friend who died in the war (Chadwick Boseman), also plan to dig up the stolen gold they buried there along with him. The journey takes several twists and turns as the characters interact and face a myriad of surprising conflicts, from encounters with the country that no longer resembles what they experienced, to the PTSD and psychological torment of Paul (Delroy Lindo), who never got over his time in ‘Nam and has morphed into a Trump supporter (much to the horror of his friends), to shootouts with a double crosser (Jean Reno) that tosses a splash of French colonial history into the mix. Paul’s son (Jonathan Majors) comes along on for the ride, along with a French landmine defuser (Melanie Thierry), and all the while we get flashbacks to the story of what really happened in Vietnam all those years ago (with the older actors playing their younger selves, no de-aging required). Yeah, there’s a lot going on in this movie, and at 156 minutes, there’s so much that it doesn’t feel long, yet the messiness can be a bit unfocused. You get the feeling Lee wants to say a lot about a lot of things, and yet singularly memorable moments abound, from the Bloods joyously dancing in a nightclub upon their reunion, to the aforementioned over the top shootout, to Delroy Lindo’s astoundingly powerful performance as a deeply disturbed individual who commands the screen at every moment. There may be too much at play for you to know quite what to make of it when it’s over, but you’ll be thinking about it for days.
EMMA * * * (Dir. Autumn De Wilde)
Sometimes you just can’t go wrong with a luscious period romance
Jane Austen has been one of the luckiest deceased authors in the hit to miss ratio of the many, many adaptations of her work. There are countless BBC versions of any one of her novels, and classic films like 1995’s Sense and Sensibility or 2005’s Pride and Prejudice. Not to mention modern day adaptations like Bridget Jones’s Diary and Clueless, still the very best version of Emma you’ll ever see. Speaking of the latter, it also boasts a straightforward period piece starring Gwyneth Paltrow, which was in itself delightful, but this latest version, the feature debut of director Autumn de Wilde, is a lush, vibrant retelling of the story, filled with its own memorable quirks of humor and style, to at least equal, if not surpass the 1996 film. Anya Taylor-Joy makes for a confident, likable heroine in spite of Jane Austen’s famous citation that Emma Woodhouse was a character that “no one but myself will much like.” Somehow, in spite of her privilege and wealth paired with a willful wrongheadness and bluster in every direction, Emma has always been liked, from Paltrow to Alicia Silverstone and now to Taylor-Joy. She’s an innocent after all, and her intentions aren’t malicious. Of course, the presence of Mr. Knightley on her shoulder to rap her knuckles when she’s wrong doesn’t hurt either. This time around, de Wilde infuses Emma with a palpable sexuality, introducing Knightley (played by singer-songwriter Johnny Flynn) quite literally in the buff and making clear the heated physical attraction between the two buttoned up, young Brits. The movie looks simply scrumptious, with colorful cinematography and spectacular costumes evoking regency era paintings rather than the grittier, roughhewn quality of some of the lower key Austen adaptations, but Emma is a member of the upper class elite, after all. It’s fitting. The film starts shaky with bouts of idiosyncratic humor that seem to recall Wes Anderson’s dollhouse aesthetic, but improves vastly as it goes along, in no small part due to the strength of Austen’s romantic comedy master-plotting. It’s hard to screw up her best works, let’s be honest. Emma is a classic for a reason, and there will always be a new Mr. Knightley for every generation to swoon over. This one works.
NEVER RARELY SOMETIMES ALWAYS * * * 1/2 (Dir. Eliza Hittman)
We make it hard for life in the poor side of America
When Obvious Child came out a handful of years ago it depicted the experience of what it was for a woman to get an abortion for whom access and opportunity was not a problem, but a fact of life, no matter what your circumstance. Never Rarely Sometimes Always is its mirror image, the other side of the coin in an America where poverty, situation and circumstances collide to make it extremely difficult for someone who needs to obtain this legal procedure to get the care she needs. The impact is heartbreaking and stays with you long after the movie ends. Director Eliza Hittman films in a neo-realist, docudrama style, dropping us into the uncomfortable life of Autumn (Sidney Flanagan), a 17-year-old from a conservative small town in Pennsylvania, who needs an abortion and whose only resource, the local clinic, gives her a pregnancy test from the store and then lies to her about the sonogram and pushes her against her inclinations. We are not given the circumstances of the pregnancy, as an unhappy home, school, and work environment is hinted at and subtly observed, leaving us to surmise what may or may not have happened. Autumn and her cousin Skylar (Talia Ryder) eventually steal the money to take a bus to New York and find a Planned Parenthood that will help her get what she needs. The movie is a look at how abortion clinics work but also a journey with two teenagers as they objectively face a world of abuse and predatory transgressions that young girls have already, unfortunately been forced to learn how to navigate by the time they’re in high school. It’s their fact of life. Recognizable at every turn, uncomfortable but familiar, sorrowful in its quiet depiction of desperation and internal pain. The most devastating scene in the film is Autumn’s questioning by a Planned Parenthood counselor where we get a slightly bigger window into the life she’s been subjected to and feel our hearts being crushed as hers has been for so long. This is an unforgettable portrait of a girl’s life in a world that still tries to make being one as hard as possible.
MISBEHAVIOUR * * 1/2 (Dir. Philippa Lowthorpe)
Women’s lib takes off at the 1970 Miss World pageant
In a coincidence of timing, Misbehaviour is kind of a perfect companion piece to this spring’s Mrs. America, the FX miniseries about the women’s liberation movement of the 1970’s- it could literally be a prelude, as this film covers an incident from the other side of the pond that was seen as putting the movement on the map of global politics. Directed by Philippa Lowthorpe, it’s a comedy-drama of the type that British filmmakers excel at (sort of in the Full Monty vein), starring a large ensemble cast that more or less gives everyone a chance to participate. Too bad the event itself is so minor as to question whether a whole movie about it was really warranted. Based on true events, Keira Knightley stars as Sally, a divorced London mother attempting to go back to school and get her degree, who joins a branch of the movement in 1970 made up of communal feminist activists, including the working class Jessie Buckley (who shines here). The protesters decide to disrupt the annual Miss World competition, a relic of a supremely patriarchal system led by Greg Kinnear as the dinosaur himself, a sleazy Bob Hope, who uses the hosting gigs to pick up contestants under the scolding eyes of his long suffering wife (Lesley Manville). Meanwhile, the contestants themselves include Miss Grenada (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) and Miss “Africa South” (Loreece Harrison), who’re attempting to start their own kind of cultural revolution in becoming the first black Miss World. The movie tries to explore the intersectional feminism of the white protesters wanting to upset the sexism of the pageant itself against the desires of the black contestants striving to show black women the world over that they too can be seen as beautiful, but whatever message it wants to convey about that is never brought to a real conclusion. The movie is amusing and breezes along at an entertaining clip, but despite this pageant (which was seen by over 100 million people at the time) turning into a free for all on live television, this incident still feels small in the grand scheme of things. It’s fun, but wasn’t there something else to mark the beginning of the women’s movement that merited further exploration more than this?
HOWARD * * * (Dir. Don Hahn)
Some people are gone far, far too soon
Howard is a movie about a man whose work we all know, but whose name we probably don’t. That man is Howard Ashman, the lyricist and mastermind behind the Disney Renaissance of the late 1980’s and 90’s, without whom the stunning creative comeback of the Disney corporation would likely never have happened. He was a theater director from New York, whose off Broadway Little Shop of Horrors was a smash success and who, when he came to the floundering animation department at Disney, revitalized their ability to tell stories through music and pioneered the overwhelming success of The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin after a two decade run of middling to terrible animated films. The music of course, was key, and together with his composer Alan Menken, the score and songs to those films have been absorbed into popular culture in every way imaginable- after the movies came the soundtracks, theatrical productions, and currently the live action remakes. We’re still experiencing these movies, long after the man himself succumbed to AIDS in 1991 at the age of 40. His impact on Disney cannot be overstated, where he was given creative control and compared to Walt Disney himself in terms of influence by company head Roy Disney at the time, but the tragedy of his story, just as his success was was becoming triumphant, is impossibly poignant and bittersweet. This documentary is kind of a sister film to director Don Hahn’s Waking Sleeping Beauty (2009), which tracked the ups and downs of the Disney company in the 70’s and 80’s, but is more illuminating of Ashman’s personal story, tracing his life as a stage obsessed kid in 1960’s Baltimore to his time in New York theater circles in the 1970’s. We only get to his arrival at Disney in the second half, and given the enormous amount of activity during that time, I could have watched another hour of this film, exploring in depth the making of each movie and Ashman’s creative process, which he explains in archival interview footage that Hahn has unearthed for this documentary. There’s a fascinating arc here that shows an artistic genius stolen from us far too early as the AIDS crisis swept through the gay community in the 1980’s, producing his longest lasting work in the final three years of his life, literally as he was dying. Could he have imagined the impact it would leave after he was gone? According to this movie, he could and did, as he whispered to his colleagues from his hospital bed after an early screening of Beauty and the Beast stunned test audiences. But how much more could he have given us?
