Music, dance dominate 'Michael'

     It's probably a mistake to look at Michael as a biopic that explores every facet of Michael Jackson’s life with nuance and studied objectivity. Approved by the Jackson estate and made with its participation, the movie makes no mention of the widely known child sex abuse claims against Jackson. The deconstruction of Jackson’s image began in 1993. Michael concludes in 1988, offering a terse title card at the end, “The story continues.” 

  I’ll say.

  Whatever you think about Michael Jackson, director Antoine Fuqua concentrates on something incontestable: Michael Jackson’s riveting performance skills and the connection he made and still makes with his legion of fans.

   If you think that’s insufficient, stay home. Otherwise, you’ll find a movie that can be regarded as an entertaining slice of showmanship with selective biographical footnotes. 

   Fuqua begins with 10-year-old Michael (Julian Valdi). who’s under the dictatorial sway of his father Joe Jackson, a menacing Colman Domingo. 

   From the start, it’s clear that Michael occupies his own world, separate even from the brothers who make up the increasingly popular Jackson Five. 

    Michael's relationships with his brothers get short shrift. Instead, Fuqua concentrates on Joe’s command of his sons. When Michael errs during rehearsal, Joe beats him with a belt. Mom (Nia Long) remains sympathetic to Michael, but Joe runs the show.

     A father/son conflict sets the stage for the movie’s theme: Michael struggles to gain independence, to become the master of his destiny, without rejecting his family. Michael lives at the family home throughout most of the movie,  albeit a much improved version when the newly prosperous Jacksons relocate from Gary, Indiana, to Encino, Ca.  The entire movie takes place in pre-Neverland days.

     In many ways, Michael remains a child throughout. He reads illustrated versions of Peter Pan, amasses an army of stuffed animals, and then begins collecting real ones, notably Bubbles, a chimp that becomes his friend. (It's evidently a CGI creation.) The movie seems to accept all this at face value, leaving us to decide whether there's something slightly pathetic about Michael's juvenile preoccupations.

    The movie also deals with the business side of Michael’s life: his alliances with Motown and Berry Gordy (Larenz Tate); his work with Quincy Jones (Kendrick Sampson), and his move toward solo performing, which culminates with the firing of his father as his manager. Michael instructs his attorney, John Branca (Miles Teller), to deliver the news. He does so by fax.

      Another glimpse of Michael’s manipulative power comes into view when he meets with the head of CBS (Mike Meyers) and threatens to persuade the label’s major white artists— Bruce Springsteen among them — to quit the label unless Michael’s creative and dazzlingly produced videos are shown on MTV, which at the time didn’t play much work by Black artists.

    Without the right Michael, the movie would have been laughable. It doesn’t take long for the movie to be placed squarely on the shoulders of Jafaar Jackson, Michael’s real-life nephew and the son of Jackson Five member, Jermaine. 

    Jafaar looks like Michael, moves like Michael, and sings with a voice that — to my untrained ears — sounds like Michael. It’s either an amazing act of mimicry or an amazing performance. Either way, Jackson's presence in the movie feels real.

     Jafaar also gives Michael an aura of innocence; he visits sick kids in cancer wards and donates big money to the burn center where he's hospitalized after a serious accident during the filming of a Pepsi commercial. Michael's relationship with his mother remains tender throughout, and he plays peacemaker when he meets with Crips and Bloods to lower antagonisms. He also uses the gang members as inspiration for the choreography in his “Beat It” video.

    Michael's battle with Joe continues to the end. The elder Jackson tries to cling to Michael’s earning power as long as possible, even concocting a deal with Don King (Deon Cole) to promote the famous “Victory Tour.” 

    At its best, the movie functions as the best imitation act you’ve ever seen. Jafaar does his own singing and the score has been cranked to maximum effect. The infectious rhythms of a showcase number such as Billie Jean prove irresistible.

    Sure, reality, or what we know of it, casts a shadow of skepticism here, and it occurred to me that the family might still be riding Michael’s coattails, but if you see Michael as a show that captures the magnetism and performance energy that underscored Michael’s ascendance, you may have to agree that the King of Pop earned his crown.

'Emancipation': History as horror

    In  1863, President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. The Civil War was still raging and the news of liberation couldn't reach all those who were enslaved in the South.

   Compelling and often horrific, Emancipation begins when one enslaved man is separated from his family and sent to a Confederate work camp. 

   Known as Peter, the man learns of Lincoln's proclamation from an overheard conversation. When he finds an opportunity to flee, he takes it.

   Will Smith stars as Peter, a runaway who has two goals: to reach freedom and to reunite with the wife (Charmaine Bigwa) and the children from whom he has been separated.

   In the hands of director Antoine Fuqua (Training Day), Emancipation blends a variety of genres, often to striking effect: Historical horror and action movie tropes revolve around the barebones character Smith creates.

    Peter is a man of faith, determination, and grit. Unbroken by  the brutalities of enslavement, Peter always manages to suggest stature, which, unfortunately underscores Smith's star power. Peter's clearly a cut above his contemporaries.

    Fuqua and cinematographer Robert Richardson present the movie's images in near black-and-white with touches of color occasionally peeking through, greenery and such. Emancipation has a sustained starkness that matches the barbaric treatment inflicted on the movie's Black characters.

   If you're in the market for an actor to play a quietly mean white man, you definitely want to consider Ben Foster. Foster plays Jim Fassel, the relentless hunter who tracks Peter. The pursuers are on horseback; Peter often must run barefoot.

    Fuqua overdoes the adventure elements, notably in a scene in which Peter battles a swam gator. And at times, the movie's chase elements can't help but seem too conventional.

    Emancipation includes a lengthy epilogue involving a grisly battle that Peter joins. Fuqua strips Civil War combat of anything resembling glory, turning it into a wanton, chaotic bloodbath.

    The movie was inspired by a real photograph that was distributed during the war years. It was titled Whipped Peter. Abolitionists used it to persuade the world that there was nothing noble or genteel about the foundations on which Southern life was built.

   Fuqua stages a reenactment of the taking of the photograph toward the movie's end.

    Emancipation may suffer from an odd problem: By stylizing the movie so completely, Fuqua creates something that can feel disassociated from anything real, a super-vivid world full of desaturated color, ominous images, stark moods, gliding cameras, sneering brutalities, and venomous characters. 

      I found myself conflicted about this. It's difficult to argue against portraying the institution of slavery as worthy of blood-curdling treatment. It may not totally work but can we blame Fuqua for wanting to stamp the word "horror" on a shameful bit of American history? He does so at every chance he gets.

A cop tries to save a woman and her kids

 

Jake Gyllenhaal stars as a Los Angels cop in a remake of The Guilty, a 2018 Danish movie. The premise of the two movies is the same: A police officer who has been taken off street duty has been assigned to answering 911 calls. The story centers on a call that Gyllenhaal's Joe receives from a harried woman (Riley Keough) who says that she's been kidnapped by her disturbed former husband. The couple's two kids -- a six-year-old girl and an infant boy -- have been left home alone. The movie consists mostly of Joe's attempts to locate the white van in which he believes the woman is being held. He also  wants to ensure the safety of two kids too young to be without an adult presence. Because he's facing a court hearing the next day (we don't learn the reason for the hearing until near the movie's end), Joe receives intermittent calls from an aggressive Los Angeles Times reporter (Edi Patterson) who tries to convince him that she wants to hear his side of the story. Aside from a few colleagues at the LAPD call center, the other characters are unseen: They’re voices on the other end of Joe's calls. Perhaps to give the movie a topical boost, raging fires engulf LA and the police are so overwhelmed that they can't give Joe the instantaneous attention he feels his call deserves. Director Antoine Fuqua basically splits this narrowly defined movie into two related parts: The search for the purported hijacker and a character study of a tightly wound cop. Fuqua makes a movie out of what could have been a radio play and remaking The Guilty may have made sense in light of current US preoccupations with police behavior. But The Guilty suffers from lapses in credibility that didn't seem to plague the original. You may want to think of The Guilty as one big contrivance sparked by the simmering rage and regret Gyllenhaal brings to the screen.

Hard punch, but no knockout

Jake Gyllenhaal plays a boxer who hits the skids in director Antoine Fuqua's Southpaw.

In the realm of boxing movies (Body and Soul and Raging Bull being two of my favorites), Southpaw hardly qualifies as a contender.

Boxing movies tend to punch hard, but that doesn't mean they should be totally lacking in nuance. A predictable story about the rise, fall and ultimate redemption of a boxer played by Jake Gyllenhaal, Southpaw serves up plot points with all the subtlety of a clenched fist pounding a vulnerable face.

A Hip-Hop veneer masks some of the cliches, but director Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) creates an in-your-face drama that fails to stake out a claim either as an example of hard-core realism or Rockyesque fantasy.

Brutal and bloody, Southpaw revolves around Gyllenhaal's performance as Billy Hope, a light-heavyweight champion whose rage ignites a dramatic and precipitous fall from grace.

Gyllenhaal effectively communicates Billy's polarity: fury coupled with occasional tenderness. Reticent and emotionally bottled up, Billy mumbles through a mouth that never seems to fully open.

I'd say that Gyllenhaal was better as a rogue TV cameraman in last year's Nightcrawler, but he's never anything less than intense in Fugua's full-bore assault on the senses.

Raised in a New York City orphanage, Billy is married to Maureen (Rachel McAdams), another product of the city's indifferent child-care system. They live in a mansion, want for little and have a loving marriage.

Early on, we learn that Maureen thinks Billy should take a break from boxing; she believes he's only a few steps away from permanent brain damage.

Oona Laurence plays the cute, bespectacled daughter who increasingly figures into the plot.

I'll leave the family drama for you to discover in a theater, but you should know that a terrible calamity results in Billy hitting the skids and being discarded by his self-serving manager (Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson).

Billy also takes a Jake LaMotta style beating in the ring, a form of self-inflicted punishment. Billy apparently wants to pay for his sins.

When Billy finally embarks on the comeback trail, he receives help from the tough-minded proprietor of a run-down gym, a worn-looking Forest Whitaker.

Whitaker's Tick Willis, who works with poor kids, teaches Billy the fine art of defense, convincing him that his future depends on controlling his anger -- both in and out of the ring.

Fuqua goes to great lengths to make the audience feel the punches that are thrown in the ring, and he certainly conveys the dizzying excitement that surrounds a major fight, a couple in Madison Square Garden and another in Las Vegas.

But when the final bell sounds, Southpaw stands as a movie steeped in a fatal contradiction: It talks loudly and boldly, but has nothing much to say. It's full of intense close-ups, but almost totally lacking in elevating perspective.

A store clerk who' s really an avenger

Denzel Washington gets serious about taking out Russian mobsters.

Hardware store salesman by day. Avenger by night.

He's The Equalizer, the title character of a new thriller that reunites Denzel Washington with Antoine Fuqua, the director who guided Washington toward his best-actor Oscar in 2001's Training Day.

In The Equalizer, which is based on a 1980s TV show, Washington plays Robert McCall, a loner who works at a Boston big-box store called Home Mart. A believer in healthy eating and physical fitness, Robert helps an overweight co-worker prepare for a fitness test he must pass in order to become a security guard at Home Mart.

Health-oriented as he is, McCall is also an insomniac. He stays up all night, drinking tea in a 24-hour Boston diner and reading number 91 of the 100 great books he's set out to conquer.

Robert's monkish existence (as well as his reading of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea) is disrupted when he meets a young prostitute (Chloe Grace Moretz) who's been badly beaten by her pimp. Thus stirred, McCall's desire to protect the weak sets him on a course in which he tries to free the young woman from the tyranny of her vicious Russian mobster pimps.

In his battle with the Russians, McCall displays so much physical prowess we immediately know that he's no ordinary guy: After all, ordinary guys don't usually know how to push a corkscrew through an opponent's chin.

Later, we learn (as if we hadn't already guessed) that McCall's a former secret agent who's trying to live an anonymous life.

Washington wastes his gravitas and star power on a thriller that takes itself more seriously than it should and which culminates in an over-the-top battle in the Home Mart store, a series of deaths by hardware that's as gruesome as it is preposterous. Watch out for nail guns and power drills.

It's probably best not to think much about the social dynamics at work here. McCall is one of those disconnected characters who's trying to move through life without leaving traces.

The supporting cast tries to match Washington's intensity. Marton Csokas plays a sadistic Russian who has been sent to Boston to slow McCall's vengeful roll. Melissa Leo turns up in a small role as one of McCall's former associates, and, in what surely qualifies as the most thankless acting job of the year, Bill Pullman portrays Leo's husband, a true afterthought of a character.

The Equalizer probably will score big at the box office, but for my money, the movie traffics in the kind of revenge that works best when not presented in A-list, IMAX super-productions.

Washington's substntial presence pushes The Equalizer into the center ring, but the movie never really establishes itself as anything more than another over-amplified butt-kicker. And Fuqua's attempt to create a near-superhero -- while simultaneously maintaining an atmosphere of gritty urban realism -- hardly encourages plausibility.

Impressive as it is, McCall's vengeful spree doesn't prove emotionally satisfying. By the end, McCall's violence no longer express our collective outrage or our desire for moral balance: It's just what the man does.