Set in Jerusalem in the year 33 A.D., “The Book of Clarence,” now playing in theatres, is unlike any other biblical epic.
Funnier than “Ben Hur” and more faith-based than “Monty Python’s Life of Brian,” it has to be the first biblical story to feature chariot races, a disco dance number and language that might make your pastor blush.
“Atlanta” star LaKeith Stanfield is Clarence, the “village mischief-maker” (and resident drug dealer) who admits, “I am not a man without faults.” And how.
His twin brother Thomas (also played by Stanfield) is an Apostle, but Clarence is too busy trying to hustle a buck to buy into any kind of organized religion.
But when he loses a chariot race to Mary Magdalene (Teyana Taylor) and ends up deep in debt to merciless gang leader Jedediah the Terrible (Eric Kofi Abrefa), he takes note of the attention Jesus Christ (Babs Olusanmokun) is getting and hatches a plan to present himself as a new Messiah sent by God.
“I can just replicate what he does,” he says. “Imagine the money people will give us.”
John the Baptist (David Oyelowo) calls him a “blasphemous swine,” but his pals Elijah (R.J. Cyler), Zeke (Caleb McLaughlin) and Barabbas (Omar Sy) are all in. Thomas, however, has doubts. “You know what it takes [to be spiritual],” he says, “but you do not possess what it takes.”
“Clarence,” says Elijah, “you need miracles.”
“I have a plan,” says Clarence.
Just as Clarence gains traction as a new Messiah, however, Pontius Pilate (James McAvoy) and the Romans crack down, announcing, “Clarence, you are guilty of the crime of fraud for your ill-gotten gains.”
Subversive, yet somehow solemn, “The Book of Clarence” is a brash alternate gospel buoyed by Stanfield‘s charismatic performance. For much of its running time writer/director Jeymes Samuel presents an irreverent biblical reimagination, but then takes a pious, respectful u-turn in the film’s final third.
Before the traditional ending, Samuel takes us on a wild ride where Clarence and his friends float through the air, high on “lingonweed,” while the soundtrack plays like a best of old Hollywood with a contemporary bent to catch the ear. It’s bold, with traditional epic style photography and setting (it was filmed in the ancient city of Materna, Italy) mixed with Samuel’s often restless camera. It’s brash, exciting filmmaking that gives the biblical epic genre a facelift.
As Clarence, Stanfield leads the cast, and it is his shift from shiftless charlatan to conscientious do-gooder, that lies at the heart of the story. Clarence doesn’t suddenly become religious, he simply accesses the good part of his humanity, by thinking of others before himself. It’s this performance that smooths the film’s abrupt shift in tone, from sweeping epic to a personal story of suffering and redemption.
Clarence’s mother, played by Marianne Jean-Baptiste, tells him, “Be the body, not the shadow. Hold space,” and it’s clear Stanfield took the advice to heart. The final third is more traditional, less bold than the first two, but Stanfield’s magnetism keeps it on track.
He’s aided by an eager supporting cast, including McAvoy, who is equal parts imperious and manipulative as Pontius Pilate, Sy as the immortal and loyal Barabbas and Oyelowo as a quick-tempered John the Baptist.
“The Book of Clarence” is so layered, so original its reimagination of the gospel and pointed look at racism, that the odd misstep, like a third act miracle that seems like a plot contrivance rather than an organic story element, is easily forgiven.
The first instalment of “It,” Stephen King’s scary clown epic, was about overcoming fears. Specifically, the shape-shifting Pennywise the Dancing Clown a.k.a. It (Bill Skarsgård), the manifestation of all the character’s fears. The new film, inventively titled “It: Chapter Two,” is about resilience, about sticking your neck out for your friends.
The new one is set in 2016, twenty-seven years after the preteen Loser’s Club battled Pennywise in his sewers lair and kept the town of Derry, Maine safe from the child gobbling monster. Now, the childhood friends have gone their separate ways. Loser’s leader Bill (James McAvoy) is now a successful mystery novelist. Sexual abuse survivor Beverly (Jessica Chastain) went on to become a fashion designer, while Ben (Jay Ryan), the overweight, bullied kid is now an architect living in Nebraska and loud-mouth Richie (Bill Hader) is a DJ in Los Angeles. Other members fled town as well. Hypochondriac Eddie (James Ransone) runs a NYC limousine company and Stanley (Andy Bean) is now an Atlanta-based accountant.
Only Mike (Isaiah Mustafa) stayed in Derry. Traumatized by the events of his youth he battles a substance abuse problem but stays on top of Pennyworth’s existence by sleeping next to a police scanner. “Something happens when you leave this town,” says Mike. “The farther away, the hazier it all gets. But me, I never left. I remember all of it.” When trouble in the form of a clown comes back to town Mike summons the others Losers to come back home to conquer their fears, bond together and do battle with their old foe. “Did you miss me?” taunts Pennywise. “No one wants to play with me anymore.”
At almost three hours “It: Chapter Two” is an overindulgent mish mash, part horror, a splash of comedy and heaping helping of pop psychology. Oh, and a clown. To say the movie takes it’s time is an understatement along the lines of suggesting Pennnywise floss more often. It almost feels like you’re binging several episodes of a serialized version of the story without the benefit of being able to switch channels when the going gets repetitive.
And it gets repetitive. We are endlessly reminded of the character’s childhood traumas, told of Pennywise’s evil and if someone said to me, “We’ve got to stick together,” as many times Bill says it here, I would make a run for it and never look back. The movie says it best when Ritchie exasperatedly says, “We’re caught up, OK!” over an hour in, and yet the exposition and repetition continues.
There are several striking nightmarish images and Hader provides some much-needed comic relief but it feels as though director Andy Muschietti and screenwriter Gary Dauberman regarded King’s novel as some sort of sacred text and where unable to stray from the written word. One of the enjoyable things about King’s novels are there world building, his attention to detail and skill for weaving mythology into real(ish) world situations. The best adaptations of his work carefully parse these elements to boil down the essence of the story. “It: Chapter Two” does not make the effort. Instead it laboriously recreates the novel, frills and all. It may have worked in print but here it feels the running gag about Bill’s inability to properly end his stories has come to life, manifesting itself in the CGI heavy climax and the extended coda.
In this sequel Pennywise’s red balloon has finally popped.
The X-Men have a rich and textured history but almost none is more complicated than Jean Grey, the mutant played by “Game of Thrones” star Sophie Turner in this weekend’s “Dark Phoenix.”
A human with the superpower of telepathy, she’s an empath and, for good and for evil, is also the physical manifestation of the cosmic Phoenix Force, “the spark that gave life to the Universe, the flame that will ultimately consume it.” Over the years she has been included on Top 100 Comic Book Heroes and Comic Book Villains lists and been killed off several times.
The action in “Dark Phoenix” begins with the X-Men team heralded as heroes by the public who once feared them. Professor X (James McAvoy) is a celebrity, featured on magazines, getting medals from the president. He sees their do-good work as a way to keep them safe. “It’s a means to an,” he says, “We are just one bad day away from them starting to see us as the enemy again.”
When a group of astronauts find themselves in trouble Prof X sends Storm (Alexandra Shipp), Quicksilver (Evan Peters), Nightcrawler (Kodi Smit-McPhee), Grey and others to space on a daring rescue mission. During the operation Grey is hit by “pure and unimaginably powerful cosmic waves” that will eventually transmute her into the Dark Phoenix, a malevolent force with the potential to tear the world apart. The core of good inside Grey battles for supremacy until repressed pain and anger push her to the dark side. “You’re special, Jean,” says shapeshifting energy sponge Smith (Jessica Chastain), “and if you stop fighting that force inside you, if you embrace it, you will possess the very power of a god.”
The X-Men crew have been always been concerned with the greater good, doing what is best for the masses, but what happens when one of their own turns bad and needs to be stopped? That’s the question at the heart of “Dark Phoenix.” “When I lose control,” Grey says, “bad things happen to the people I love.”
At their best the “X-Men” movies are an ode to outsiders. Ripe with metaphor and nuance, they look at how society treats marginalized people. They also find the humanity in their outsider characters. Whether they have blue fur or can bend metal with their mind, their greatest superpowers are always qualities like forgiveness and loyalty.
Progressive ideas about acceptance are still at the heart of “Dark Phoenix” but all the nuance is consumed in a cosmic bonfire of CGI flames and the messaging is delivered with a mallet. “They can never understand you! What they can’t understand they fear and what they fear they seek to destroy!”
The film’s biggest (and only intentional laugh) comes with a good and timely line courtesy of Jennifer Lawrence. “The women are always saving the men around here,” says a huffy Mystique to Professor X. “You might want to think about changing the name to X-Women.”
Despite the pyro on display “Dark Phoenix” doesn’t catch fire. The tone is flat, passionless even as a hectic CGI-A-Thon of eye blistering action eats up much of the last reel. (MILD SPOILER AHEAD) Long-time fans may get a lump in their throats as one classic character makes their farewell but as Grey says, “emotions don’t make you weak, they make you strong.” Whether you’ll feel stronger or not after the end credits roll will depend on how much attached you are to the X-Men characters. If you’re not already a fan this lackluster movie is unlikely to convert you.
I’ll start this review with a spoiler to a movie that came out almost three years ago. This will be the last spoiler you’ll see here. Here we go, the twist at the end of M. Night “Let’s Twist Again” Shyamalan’s “Split” revealed that his story of serial killer with twenty-three established personalities also had a twenty-fourth, a superhuman character known as The Beast. What’s more—because why settle for one twist when you can have two?—The Beast lives in the same universe as the 2000 film “Unbreakable.”
Shyamalan’s new film “Glass” acts as a sequel for both films, bringing together James McAvoy as “Split’s” Kevin Wendell Crumb and “Unbreakable” stars Bruce Willis as the heroic David Dunn and Samuel L. Jackson’s mass murderer Elijah Price, a.k.a. Mr. Glass.
Here’s the spoiler free synopsis: Dunn, the invulnerable security guard with the extrasensory ability to sense the crimes people have done by touching them, is hot on the heels of Crumb’s collection known as The Horde, looking to end his killing spree. “When I find the Horde,” Dunn says, “I’ll take a mental health day.”
Following a confrontation Crumb and Dunn psychiatrist Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson) captures them, placing them in Ravenhill Memorial Pyschiatric Research Hospital, the same institution as Price. “It’s a place for people who think they are comic book characters,” says Hedwig, one of Crumb’s personalities. Convinced they all suffer from delusions of grandeur, her treatment involves convincing them that they are human, not superanything.
That’s all you get from me. Cue the plot twists.
I like a twist as much as the next person. I still remember having my head knocked back by movies like “The Crying Game” and Shyamalan’s “The Sixth Sense” but can we now call a moratorium on multiple twists? Shyamalan has made a career out of subverting people’s expectations but there are more twists in the last twenty minutes of “Glass” than you can shake a Syd Field book at. In this case more is not more.
Leading up to the twist-o-rama is an examination of what would happen if we learned that superheroes are real. To accomplish this Shyamalan has Paulson’s good doctor spend a good portion of the running time trying to convince the superhero that there is nothing special about them. It’s less than dramatic. Worse, the film’s ideas on the existence of extraordinary beings (AGAIN, NO SPOILERS HERE) have been beaten to death in everything from the “X-Men” films to “Watchmen” and “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.”
Despite a bit of fun from McAvoy’s ever shifting characters and Willis’s Gandalf / action hero robe “Glass” is a slog. Talky and meta, it’s being billed as a “film that took 19 years to make,” but doesn’t feel worth the wait.
“I got offered a lot of stuff in action movies that was either the girl behind the computer or the wife,” says Charlize Theron.
That was then, this is now. After dipping her toe in the action genre with Aeon Flux and Mad Max: Fury Road, the South African actress is kicking butt and taking names in Atomic Blonde, a wild spy thriller Variety calls “a mash-up of The Bourne Identity and Alias.”
Based on Antony Johnston’s 2012 graphic novel The Coldest City, it’s a Cold War thriller about an undercover MI6 agent sent to Berlin to investigate the murder of a fellow agent. “I didn’t just want to play a girly spy who depends on her flirty ways,” she says.
To prepare for the gruelling shoot Theron worked with eight personal trainers who taught her the stunt work.
“‘We’re going to pretend to do that, right?’” she asked director David Leitch during the preparation. “David was like, ‘No you’re actually going to throw big dudes.’ Alright, let’s throw some big dudes.”
Throwing big dudes around like rag dolls may look great on film but was a physical challenge for Theron. The Oscar winner twisted her knee, bruised her ribs and clenched her teeth so hard while shooting one of the over-the-top fight scenes she cracked two teeth, requiring dental surgery.
Theron joins a list of dangerous distaff action stars like Gal Gadot (Wonder Woman), Scarlett Johansson (Lucy, The Avengers), Michelle Yeoh (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), Jenette Goldstein (Aliens), Angelina Jolie (Wanted, Salt, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider), Milla Jovovich (Resident Evil) and Uma Thurman (Kill Bill, Parts 1 & 2) who give Jason Statham and Dwayne Johnson a run for their money.
All of those women owe a debt to two female action stars. Pam Grier and Tura Satana were larger-than-life pioneers, opening cans of whoop-ass on screen at a time when that was primarily the purview of the boys.
Quentin Tarantino directed Grier in Jackie Brown and says she may be cinema’s first female action star. Her films, like Foxy Brown and Sheba, Baby suggest he’s right. Grier could deliver a line and a punch, attributes that allowed her to cut a swathe in the male-dominated action movie market of the 1970s.
Perhaps the wildest female action movie of all time is 1965’s “ode to female violence,” Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! starring Tura Satana as the thrill-seeking go-go dancer Varla.
Experienced in martial arts, Satana did her own stunts and brought her unique style — black leather gloves, Germaine Monteil eyeliner and layers of Max Factor makeup — to the film.
She also supplied some of the movie’s most memorable lines.
When a gas station attendant ogles her cleavage while extolling the virtues of being on the open road and seeing America, Satana ad libbed, “You won’t find it down there, Columbus!”
Time critic Richard Corliss called Satana’s performance “the most honest, maybe the one honest portrayal in the (director Russ) Meyer canon and certainly the scariest.”
“I took a lot of my anger that had been stored inside of me for many years and let it loose,” Satana said of her most famous role. “I helped to create the character Varla and helped to make her someone that many women would love to be like.”
“I didn’t just want to play a girly spy who depends on her flirty ways,” Charlize Theron told W Magazine. Mission accomplished. Based on the wild ‘n woolly graphic novel “The Coldest City” by Antony Johnston and Sam Hart “Atomic Blonde” is a Cold War thriller that sees Theron dropkick Daniel Craig or Matt Damon out of the space they’ve occupied as film’s go-to super spies.
Set in 1989, just days before the fall of the Berlin wall, the film starts with the KGB assassination of an undercover MI6 operative in East Berlin. Theron plays Agent Lorraine Broughton, a high-ranking MI6 spy sent to the communist side of the wall to retrieve a dossier containing the names of other vulnerable British intelligence assets. “It’s an atomic bomb of information that could set the Cold War back 40 years!”
Toby Jones and John Goodman as MI6 and CIA head honchos respectively urge her not to trust anyone but she sparks up a personal and professional relationship with an inexperienced French agent Delphine Lasalle (Sofia Boutella). Because everybody wants the dossier she is teamed with shady Berlin station chief David Percival (James McAvoy)—a “feral” man who moonlights selling bootlegged Jack Daniels to tourists—to beat the US, UK, USSR and France to the punch. How? By folding, spindling, mutilating, punching, kicking and head butting. There’s death by cork screw, fist and bullet and everything in between in some of the most dynamic fight scenes we’re likely to see on screen this year (and that includes “John Wick 2).
The trailers make “Atomic Bomb” look like wall-to-wall action. It isn’t. It’s a cold war spy movie with intermittent wild and woolly fisticuffs. And that’s OK. The fight scenes definite highlights and get the pulse racing but to be truly effective all movies must have hills and valleys.
If it was all action it would be like a Jason Statham movie. All talking it would be “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.” As it is it hits the sweet spot between the two.
It’s a stylish film with visceral action scenes connected by an original cold war story, compelling characters and German versions of 80s pop hits.
This isn’t a Michael Bay style spectacular, it’s up-close-and-personal bare-knuckled warfare. Theron and her victims grunt and groan as fists hits faces and all manner of mayhem is unleashed. One particularly intense fight scene mixes and matches the above-mentioned grunts and groans with the catchy pop of George Michaels’ “Father Figure.” An even more effective sequence gets rid of the music completely.
The tour de force six-minute fight scene looks like a one-shot wonder. It’s hard to believe there isn’t some trickery involved but the sequence is dazzling nonetheless.
As Broughton, Theron is not a superhero. She comes out on top of most fights but emerges bruised and battered, which lends an air of unpredictability to the =storytelling.
“Atomic Blonde” is a violent, arty spy flick that doesn’t just open the door for Charlize Theron to create an effective spy franchise; it kicks it off its hinges.
Let’s twist again, like we did last summer! Or in this case, like we did a decade or so ago when director M. Night Shyamalan became the master of the trick ending. Remember the twist in “The Sixth Sense”? It was one of the best surprises in movie memory. Ever since little Haley Joel Osment uttered those four words that sent chills down audience’s spines—“I see dead people”—Shyamalan has been largely unsuccessful in recreating that kind of jolt for his audience.
His new film, a psychological horror called “Split,” comes close to re-establishing Shyamalan’s reputation as the ziggiest zagger of a storyteller in Hollywood.
The dark story begins in broad daylight with the kidnapping of teens Claire (Haley Lu Richardson) and Marcia (Jessica Sula) and Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy). The three friends are plunked down into an airless basement dungeon, held captive by Kevin (James McAvoy), a man with dissociative identity disorder. In other words his mind has cleaved into twenty-four separate and distinctive personas. Think “Psycho” times 12. To escape the girls must appeal to Kevin’s better nature or natures before the final personality, The Beast, shows up and they become, “sacred food.”
Shyamalan will earn a good chunk of the credit for “Split,” for writing the twisty-turny story, for choosing the anxiety-inducing soundtrack, for constructing a (mostly) taut and tense pulpy thriller with loads of black humour but it is McAvoy that makes the movie memorable.
From the button-down, neat-freak Dennis, to nine-year-old Kanye West fan Hedwig to the sinister Patricia, he jumps from personality to personality, breathing life into each of his characters. The changes are frequently lightening fast. A furrow of a brow, the tightening of the lips and presto-chango, he’s someone else. It’s bravura work, unafraid to go over-the-top, embracing each and every character as if they were the star of the show.
Like all good Shyamalan movies (and some bad ones too) there is a twist, and a good one, but you’ll have to buy a ticket to find out what it is. There will be no spoilers here. Suffice to say the curve ball works thematically as well as providing several ‘What the Hell!!’ moments.
“Split” is wild and wooly, uniting, for the first time in a long time, Shyamalan’s talent for keeping the audience on the edge of their seats and his ability to change the game in the final act.
“Hope for the best,” says Hank McCoy a.k.a. Beast (Nicholas Hoult) midway through “X-Men: Apocalypse,“ “but prepare for the worst.”
That’s the way I approach the X-Men movies. When a movie series spans a universe of stories—in addition to five X-Men flicks, this is the third “First Class” movie—caution is advised. The general rule of thumb is one of diminishing returns: the further away from the source, the weaker the story.
“Apocalypse” isn’t exactly the best of the X-Men movies, but it’s hardly the worst either. What it lacks in surprises, it makes up for in bombast.
“A gift can often be a curse,” we’re told in the opening narration. “Give them the greatest gift of all, power beyond imagination and they think they should rule the world.” Such is the case with En Sabah Nur (Oscar Isaac) an immortal Egyptian pharaoh betrayed a millennium or two ago, left in a fitful slumber under the rubble of a collapsed pyramid.
Cut to the early 1980s. Series regulars Magneto (Michael Fassbender), Nightcrawler (Kodi Smit-McPhee), Angel (Ben Hardy) and Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) are going about life as usual… or as usual as they can while shape shifting and instantly transporting from place to place.
Their lives intersect again when En Sabah Nur, now nicknamed Apocalypse (no foreshadowing there) emerges from his sleep, eager to take his place as king of the world. The mutant god absorbs television news to learn about the modern world before assembling his disciples—his four horsemen—and unlocking the one last power he needs to control the planet. With the world’s fate resting in his hands Professor X (James McAvoy) brings a team of X-Men to do battle.
The first X-Men movies were allegories for all manner of twentieth century intolerance but gradually over time the civil rights elements of the story have become more lip service than social comment. “Apocalypse” distances itself even further from the core of what made the originals interesting, leaving behind a serviceable action movie that plays more like a Successories unleash-your-power platitude than a cry for universal liberties.
Instead we are given a villain who melodramatically says things like, “Come! Rescue your weakling!” and a CGI climax that feels lifted from “Batman v. Superman” or “Age of Ultron.” The dumbed down story of friendship and teamwork may not engage the brain but it does, however, have outlandish visuals to dazzle the eye. A show stopping Quicksilver (Evan Peters) scene has the faster-than-light mutant rescue a dozen people from a bombed out building, frozen in time by his supersonic speed. It’s cool and like the movie’s best images has the verve and invention the script lacks.
When the film’s biggest reveal is James McAvoy’s bald Professor X head you know the movie is light on new ideas but “X-Men: Apocalypse“ transcends the law of diminishing rewards by upping the action.
At the 2012 Canadian premier of The Woman in Black a young woman yelled, “I love you!” as Daniel Radcliffe and I took the stage to introduce the film.
“I love you too,” he replied with a smirk. “But I think we should see other people.”
The audience laughed but probably missed the double meaning of his comment. For ten years Radcliffe was the face of Harry Potter, one of the biggest grossing movie franchises ever. Potter ended in 2011 (for Radcliffe, anyway) and the actor has moved on, and hopes his audience will follow along.
This week he’s taking on another classic character, one played in the past by everyone from Bela Lugosi to Marty Feldman. In Victor Frankenstein he transcends Igor’s traditional, “Yes master,” function to become the movie’s moral compass and emotional core. A reimagining of the Frankenstein story that focuses on the men rather than the monster, it’s a change of pace from an actor who likes to shake it up, career-wise.
“I want to try my hand at as many things as possible,” he told me in 2014. “Having played one character for a very long time, that builds up in you a desire to play a number of different characters and do as much different work as you can. I like that you can’t predict what my next thing is going to be.”
Since Potter wrapped he has kept audiences guessing. From the Gothic horror of Woman in Black and The F Word’s light romance to a biographical look at the Beat Generation in Kill Your Darlings and the twisted morality of Horns, the only predictable thing about his career is its unpredictability.
“It’s about finding out what I’m good at, finding out which things I prefer doing because I’ve only done Potter up until a few years ago, so now this period is really me going, ‘If I had my choice.’
“Being that I do have a semblance of control over my career, — which most actors my age don’t — I feel I might not always have this opportunity to try loads of different things.”
Radcliffe credits working with the likes of Alan Rickman, Gary Oldman and David Tennant on the Potter films with giving him some perspective on how to manage his career.
“The defining feature of Alan, Gary, David and many more that I’ve worked with, is that they never want to stop learning,” Radcliffe told me during an interview for The Women in Black.
“They never feel they are finished. Alan Rickman is constantly trying to get better and refined. When you see that in someone who is A) Brilliant and B) 30 years older than you, it’s very inspiring to see they have gone through their whole careers and never been satisfied.”
Radcliffe has perspective on where he’d like his career to go, but what about the fame that came along with playing Harry Potter? The next day after The Woman in Black premier I asked him about the screaming fans that greeted him and what that does to his ego.
“The thing you have to remind yourself is that it’s not about me. It’s about the fact that I played this character who became beloved. Anyone who took on this character would be getting this reaction. When I’m home, smoking a cigarette and it’s cold and I’m eating half a pizza — you have to take a picture of yourself then and play it to yourself when you’re on the red carpets and go, ‘Yeah, you’re not all that.’”
