Poet Paul Éluard said that to understand Jean Cocteau’s 1946 version of “La Belle et la Bête”—“Beauty and the Beast”—you must love your dog more than your car. It’s a good line that suggests Cocteau’s adaptation values the organic elements of the film — even the special effects are handmade—while refusing to allow the technical aspects of the film to interfere with the humanity of the story.
The same can’t be said of the new, big budget live action Disney version of the story. Inspired by their classic 1991 animated story of belle and beast, the remake relies too heavily on computer generated splendour and too little on the innate charms of the story.
Emma Watson plays the bright and beautiful Belle, the independent-minded daughter of eccentric inventor Maurice (Kevin Kline). She is, as the townsfolk warble, “strange but special, A most peculiar mad’moiselle!” She has caught the eye of dimwitted war hero Gaston (Luke Evans) who unsuccessfully tries to win her hand.
Taking one of his new gizmos to market Maurice picks a rose as a present for Belle but runs afoul of the Beast (Dan Stevens). Once a self-centered prince, he was changed into a part-man, part-wolf, part Chewbacca creature by a witch as punishment for his hedonistic life. The only way to beak the spell, she cackles, is to find someone to love him before the last petal falls off an enchanted rose. “Who could love a beast?” he asks.
Enter Belle.
On the hunt for her father, she makes her way to the Beast’s remote castle only to find Maurice locked up for rose theft. She pleads with her hairy host for a moment with her father, and while giving him a hug pushes him out of the cell, slamming the door behind her. Trading her freedom for his, she is now the Beast’s prisoner. The staff—once human, now transformed into the enchanted candlestick Lumiere (Ewan McGregor), Cogsworth the clock (Ian McKellen), a teapot Mrs. Potts (Emma Thompson) and wardrobe (Audra McDonald) although it feels like a missed opportunity to not have Daniel Craig play a eavesdropping microwave—see Belle as just the person to look past his ghastly appearance and see the true princely beauty within and lift his curse and theirs.
Director Bill Condon has made a classic big screen musical with state of the art special effects. Up front is a perfectly cast Emma Watson, who brings more tenacity to the character than we’ve seen in past versions as well as a considerable amount of charm. She is the movie’s beating heart, the human presence in the midst of a considerable amount of pomp and circumstance.
Condon decorates the screen, over-dressing almost every scene with layers of pageantry and CGI. It entertains the eye, particularly in the Busby Berkeley style “Be Our Guest” sequence but overwhelms the film’s humanity. This is a movie that loves its car more than its dog.
“Beauty and the Beast” is a handsome, straightforward movie that adds little to the animated classic. Some of the details have changed. Belle and Beast mourn their deceased mothers and Gaston’s minion Le Fou (Josh Gad) is now gay but the dreamlike of the 1991 version is lacking. The story just seems less magical when built from a collection of pixels.
This weekend Jessica Chastain stars in the political thriller Miss Sloane. The title refers to the lobbyist main character but the film could easily have been titled Drain the Swamp.
Made before Donald Trump became president-elect, it only takes about 20 seconds before the word “trump” crops up in the dialogue. He’s never mentioned by name, but this look at “the most morally bankrupt profession since faith healing” paints exactly the ugly picture of behind-the-scenes machinations that Trump railed against on the campaign trail.
Chastain is Elizabeth Sloane, a sleep-deprived D.C. lobbyist “at the forefront of a business with a terrible reputation.” She’ll represent anyone, it seems, except the gun lobby, who offer her a lucrative contract, only to be laughed at and rejected.
Soon after she leaves her firm — one of the biggest in the country — to join a small, scrappy group who aim to whip up support for a bill that will demand background checks for all gun owners.
It’s a new hot-button peek behind the curtain of a political process, but Hollywood has been making Drain the Swamp movies for years.
The explosive Advise and Consent is based on former New York Times congressional correspondent Allen Drury’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the ratification of a secretary of state and the dirty little secrets people in public life must keep hidden. Political battle lines are drawn as a full frontal attack is launched on the character and credentials of the new nominee.
Director Otto Preminger almost pulled off one of the great casting coups of the 1960s when he offered civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. a role in Advise and Consent. The mercurial director thought King would be perfect for the role of a southern senator, despite the fact that no African Americans were serving in Senate at the time. King gave the offer some thought, but declined fearing the backlash and possible harm to the civil right movement.
More recently, in The Ides of March George Clooney (who also directed) played a Democratic Party candidate; the kind of guy who would make the top of Bill O’Reilly’s head pop off. He’s pro-ecology, anti-oil. He wants to tax the rich and legalize gay marriage. If he leans any further left he’ll topple over.
Although Clooney has spoken out about many of these topics in real life, he didn’t make a left-wing film. Instead he made a warts-and-all political movie about dirty dealings on the campaign trail.
The first hour is good stuff, great acting from Ryan Gosling, Paul Giamatti and Philip Seymour Hoffman and a fascinating, if occasionally dry look at life in the political fast lane. Then comes the blackmail, the meetings in darkened stairwells and double-crossing journalists.
Finally The Campaign, a comedy starring Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis as incumbent congressmen, begins with a quote from former presidential hopeful Ross Perot: “War has rules. Mud wrestling has rules. Politics has no rules.”
Neither does the movie; no rules or boundaries. These candidates go beyond the usual name-calling — “He looks like Osama Bin Laden” — to dirty tricks that would make Tricky Dick blush. It’s a through-the-looking glass-vision of how politics works that features ambition, greed, corruption and even a candidate who punches a baby.
The title of political thriller “Miss Sloane” refers to the main character, a lobbyist played by Jessica Chastain, but the film could easily have been titled “Drain the Swamp.” Made before Donald Trump became President Elect, it only takes about twenty seconds before the word “trump” crops up in the dialogue. He’s never mentioned by name, but this look at “the most morally bankrupt profession since faith healing” paints exactly the ugly picture of behind-the-scenes machinations that Mr. Trump railed against on the champagne trail.
Chastain is Elizabeth Sloane, a sleep-deprived D.C. lobbyist “at the forefront of a business with a terrible reputation.” She’ll represent anyone, it seems, except the gun lobby, who offer her a lucrative contract, only to be laughed at and rejected. Soon after she leaves her firm—one of the biggest in the country—to join a small, scrappy group who aim to whip up support for a bill that will demand background checks for all gun owners.
The bulk of the film consists of the inner-workings of a campaign, the dirty tricks and money management it takes to influence the influencers. Sloane, focussed on the win, pushes protégé and mass shooting survivor Esme Manucharian (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) front and center, making her the face of the issue. Soon unexpected personal consequences of Sloane’s aggressive antics and a congressional enquiry into her behaviour threaten to derail all her hard work.
“Miss Sloane” is a fast paced political suspense that reverberates with echoes of Armando Iannucci, Paddy Chayefsky and Aaron Sorkin. Zippy dialogue flies off the screen probably easier than it would actually fly off the tongue, giving voice to colourful characters who say mostly interesting things. “When this town guts you like a trout and chokes you with the entrails don’t come snivelling to me,” snarls Sloane. It’s a catchy line and Chastain spits it out with conviction and often transcends the rat-a-tat dialogue by bringing some actual humanity to a character largely made up of bon mots and a bad attitude. It’s a struggle for Chastain to grow Elizabeth Sloane as a character but in her rare quiet moments, when she isn’t mouthing Jonathan Perera’s carefully crafted words, she finds warmth and vulnerability in a person described as the “personification of an ice cube.”
All the good work, the dialogue, the character work, the timely “drain the swamp” subject, all of it, is undone in just a few minutes as “Miss Sloane” climaxes with one of the worst endings in recent memory. There will be no spoilers here, but in the movie’s final moments a crescendo of over plotting takes over, pushing the story into a melodramatic territory. Instead of echoing Armando Iannucci, Paddy Chayefsky and Aaron Sorkin, Perera appears to pay tribute to Agatha Christie with a series of ridiculous revelations that defy logic.
“Miss Sloane” feels timely but its determination to live up to Sloane’s ethos—“It’s about making sure you surprise them and they don’t surprise you.”—undermines it effectiveness.
There is an interesting story to be told of the exploits of rebellious Mississippi farmer Newton Knight but “Free State of Jones” is not it.
The “action”—mostly raggedly bearded men sitting and speaking in lilting Podunk accents—takes place over the course of fourteen tumultuous years, from 1862 to ’76. When we first meet Knight (Matthew McConaughey) he’s a war nurse doing triage for Confederate soldiers blown apart by musket and canon fire. After a young relative is killed he goes AWOL, fed up with the brutality and the Confederate Army’s illegal pillaging of locals for supplies. Hiding out with runaway slaves he fights back, becoming a force for change and a champion of freedom for all men.
Intertwined in the narrative are the rise of the KKK, fixed elections, burned churches, surprise attacks and much more. Not content to tell the sprawling Civil War story “Free State of Jones” intermittently jumps forward 85 years to tell the story of a relative of Knight who was prosecuted in Mississippi for the crime of being 1/16 black and marrying a white women.
“Free State of Jones” aims to be an epic but in biting off more story than it can chew ends up a didactic mess, bereft of emotional content or revealing historical perspective. It feels as if it was shot as a mini-series and cleaved down to feature length. Parts seem to be missing, and by that I mean the interesting parts.
A surprise attack that is heavily featured in the film’s trailers should have been a rousing showstopper but instead comes and goes in the blink of an eye, barely raising the movie’s pulse rate. Better are the opening moments that effectively, if grimly, display the realities of face-to-face combat.
McConaughey has been on a remarkable career upswing of late but it feels like the McConaissance has hit a bump in the road. He’s less a character than a saviour, an empathic speechifying rebel with rotten teeth who embodies all that is righteous. He kills dogs and people and is a bigamist but he’s also apparently on the side of the angels and that is all we really get to know about him.
More interesting and human is Mahershala Ali as Moses, an emancipated slave who joins forces with Knight.
“Free State of Jones” has its rebellious heart mostly in the right place. In our time of continued racial unrest it is important to have a historical perspective but this movie can really only be described as problematic in some of the tone deaf ways it approaches its subject. For instance a speech that begins with, “Everybody is just somebody else’s n-word,” is meant to be rousing, a call to solidarity, but clumsily equates conscription with the plight of people taken from their homes, shipped to a new country and enslaved. Like the rest of the movie it means well but falls very flat. I gave it one star because it has aspirations to greatness and fails on all accounts. It’s done in by its own ambition.
“Concussion” is a movie about the discovery of long-term neurodegenerative changes in professional athletes. That synopsis conjures up images of people in lab coats peering into microscopes and that is certainly part of the story, but there’s more. Add in a David and Goliath storyline, some romance and a condemnation of complacency and you’re left with a movie that has something important to say but doesn’t know exactly how to say it.
Will Smith is Dr. Bennet Omalu, a Nigerian forensic neuropathologist who happens to be on duty the night the body of football legend Mike Webster (David Morse) is delivered to the morgue. As a scientist Omalu can’t understand the events leading to Webster’s death. Why did the seemingly healthy man act irrationally and slowly waste away?
A study of Webster’s brain uncovers irregularities likely caused by concussions suffered on the football field. Naming the condition Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) Omalu publishes his findings in a medical journal and almost immediately finds himself under fire from the NFL who feel the doctor’s study implies playing football is bad for your health. If it is bad for football, they suggest, it is bad for America.
Death threats and looming legal action punt Omalu and his new wife’s (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) lives into the end zone as new cases of CTE come to light.
“Concussion” is the kind of movie you know is going to feature at least one figurative Gatorade Shower, a feel good moment geared to excite audiences. The resolution of the David and Goliath angle is meant to be a crowd-pleasing story element. Smith plays Omalu as a proud, moral man, someone with the strength of his convictions who is pushed aside by an evil empire. When he is proven right—that’s not a spoiler, just historical fact—it should be a rousing moment but like much of the film it simply doesn’t quicken the pulse.
Smith is understated and strong as Omalu, bringing every ounce of his movie star charisma to the lead role. A script bogged down by a tagged-on love story and heavy-handed exposition, however, thwarts his good work. The core of the story—how the NFL ignored potentially life-saving information—should provide enough righteous indignation to fuel the movie but doesn’t. “Concussion” doesn’t back down from pointing the finger at the suits who demeaned Omalu’s work but it lacks the passion to truly work up a head of steam.
Hollywood is in the habit of remaking everything these days, relying on brand recognition to sell their movies, so it’s hard to understand why this remake of “The Bodyguard” is called “Beyond the Lights.” Sure, the character names are different, it was written by different people, Kevin Costner is nowhere to be seen and it’s an “original” story but a sense of déjà vu hangs heavy over the movie’s every frame.
When we first meet Noni Jean she’s a young girl with a set of pipes to revival any American Idol contestant. Her mother and manager—her momanger—Macy Jean (Minnie Driver) is a determined presence with her eye set on superstardom for her daughter. Cut to a few years later, Noni (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) is now a hip hop star à la Rihanna. She’s on the cusp of fame, has a rapper boyfriend and a record about to come out that is guaranteed to be a hit. One night, just days before a big performance at the Billboard Awards, the pressure gets to be too much and Noni tries to jump off the balcony of her hotel room. She is rescued by Kaz (Nate Parker), a handsome police officer working on her security detail who grabs her hand just as she is about to tumble in to the tabloid headlines.
A romance blossoms between the two, despite the protests of their parents. Kaz’s father (Danny Glover), a retired police officer is grooming his charismatic son for a career in politics while Macy Jean simply wants sever any ties to the suicide story. Noni and Kaz, however, have a special bond, one born out of an understanding of what it’s like to have pushy parents and wanting to do your own thing.
Director Gina Prince-Bythewood trowels the melodrama on thick in this sensationalistic show-biz fable but that doesn’t stop her from commenting on the downside of notoriety in a way that hasn’t been done since “A Star Is Born” chronicled the decline of singer John Norman Howard (Kris Kristofferson). It’s an occasionally scorching look at the world of fame, but defaults to soap opera theatrics to keep the plot moving forward.
None of this would register if Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Nate Parker weren’t such compelling performers. Mbatha-Raw wowed in last year’s “Belle” and shines here playing both sides of Noni’s personality, the onstage diva and conflicted offstage woman. If anyone sees “Beyond the Lights” a star may be born. Her chemistry with Parker is undeniable and together they overcome the film’s unnecessary plot theatrics.
