John & Yoko meet the counterculture

  If popular culture were to make room for saints, John Lennon already would have been canonized. After his murder in 1980, Lennon's legacy expanded -- as a former Beatle, as a solo performer, as a rebel ("nothing to kill or die for"), and as a figure indelibly linked to a period of jarring social upheaval in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

  During this period, Lennon married conceptual artist Yoko Ono. John and Yoko became a thing, a two-person team sharing music, performance art, and unexpected appearances. In 1972, for example, they spent a week co-hosting Michael Douglas's popular daytime TV show. Guests ranged from Chuck Berry to Eldrige Cleaver.

  A new chapter in Lennon's life unfolded after he and Ono chose to live in New York's West Village instead of London. The couple eventually would move to Manhattan's Upper Westside, occupying an apartment in the Dakota, a building already ripe with celebrities: Judy Garland, Lauren Bacall, Leonard Bernstein, and Roberta Flack lived there. Not bad company.

   When I first started watching One to One: John & Oko,  director Kevin Macdonald's documentary, I was put off. Macdonald, it seemed, had assembled a jumbled collage of news footage, interviews, home movies, photos, and snippets of TV shows that Lennon watched. Nixon, George Wallace, and Charlie Chaplin were among those who hit TV screens with flashbulb pop. 

   But as Macdonald's film progresses, it begins to feel as if chaos might be its point. Macdonald deftly immerses us in the cultural splatter that marked the late '60s and early '70s. The Vietnam War still raged and countercultural figures -- Jerry Rubin turns up as someone Lennon and Ono admired -- suggested that the US was on the verge of a major social change, maybe even a revolution.

    The documentary derives its title from benefit concerts Lennon staged at Madison Square Garden in the summer of 1972 to raise money for mistreated children at Willowbrook, a New York facility for mentally disabled children. Wisely, Macdonald includes plenty of music, linking it to Lennon's growing social awareness. At one point, he organized a concert for John Sinclair, a poet and activist who was serving a 10-year sentence for a marijuana-related offense.

     Considering that Rubin, who died in 1994, eventually became a businessman, you may wonder whether Lennon and Ono weren't too quick to board the activist's hippie ship. But that's the thing, I suppose. In the early '70s, lots of folks were floundering, trying to determine what they believed and in whom they should or could believe.

   Perhaps that's why we see Lennon feeling his way through performance art (Lennon and Ono encamped in their bed), new musical directions, and personal issues (his relationship with his mother). That's not to say that the Beatles didn't produce art-worthy music before Lennon and Ono, but in teaming with Ono, Lennon began to see himself in more expansive ways.

   Snippets from phone calls made to Lennon and Ono crop up. Throughout the film, Ono's assistant tells her about his search for thousands of flies she needed for an art piece; Macdonald also touches on Ono's quest to reunite with the daughter who had been separated from her by her former husband, then a member of a Christian cult.

    Macdonald (One Day in September, The Last King of Scotland) skillfully creates a portrait that revolves around Lennon and Ono while holding up a mirror to the period in which their relationship blossomed.

  One to One can be wobbly, but some wobbles do more than shake you up, they recall a moment when the culture was forming, decomposing, searching, experimenting, finding moments of nobility, and, yes,  making a fool of itself. To quote another movie, everything was happening everywhere and all at once -- or so it seemed, and Lennon and Ono were part of it.

The tragic fall of Whitney Houston

The late Whitney Houston's life followed an arc that bordered on cliche. The singer soared high and then plunged to earth in a downward spiral fueled by cocaine, possible abuse as a child and who knows precisely what else.

Directed by Kevin Macdonald and featuring formal and informal footage of the late star, Whitney follows Whitney Houston as she ascended from her days as a Newark, N.J. gospel singer to the upper reaches of the celebrity stratosphere, a place few have occupied and where even fewer have managed to take up permanent residence.

Whitney's story isn't entirely unfamiliar to those who follow celebrity news, although Macdonald does point to an incident of child abuse that may have figured in shaping the singer’s fragile personality. Houston's assistant -- Mary Jones -- understood the singer as well as anyone and says that it was none other than the late Dee Dee Warwick, a singer and one of Houston's older cousins, who molested young Whitney as a child, perhaps building the groundwork for a life in which trust wasn't easily given.

Macdonald contextualizes Houston's showbusiness life by offering flashes of events that took place during Houston's career. He also takes us deep into Houston's ill-fated marriage to singer Bobby Brown. It's arguable that Brown served as an antidote to suggestions that Houston had sold out her blackness to achieve cross-cultural fame, a claim once advanced by Al Sharpton among others.

Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland) knows how to keep a movie moving and he certainly appreciates the power of Houston's voice. Her version of I Will Always Love You became an anthem of sorts.

Speaking of anthems, Macdonald also shows Houston's performance at the 1991 Super Bowl, a goose-bump inducing version of the Star Spangled Banner that the singer hadn't rehearsed.

Whitney also introduces us to the Houston family, as well as to those who surrounded her. Eventually, Houston got crosswise with her father, John Houston, who served as her manager. We also learn about the singer's relationship with Robyn Crawford, a woman Houston's family distrusted but who is portrayed as someone who really cared about Houston. We wonder what might have happened had Houston felt freer to explore the fluidity of her sexuality without worrying about public condemnation.

Houston's mother, Cissy Houston, taught her daughter the discipline required to develop her talent but wasn't around much when Whitney was a child. Cissy Houston often took to the road, singing back-up for Elvis Presley, Dionne Warwick (also a cousin of Whitney's), Aretha Franklin and others.

You'd have to have been living under a rock not to know that Macdonald's movie is headed toward a bathtub in the Beverly Hilton Hotel, the place where Houston's dead body was found in February of 2012. The death of her daughter Bobbi Kristina Brown several years later stands as an awful epilogue to Whitney's already sad tale.

Whitney tells a tragic story -- and blame for the tragedy accrues partly to Houston and those around her and partly to a society that put her in a double bind situation. She was a gifted young woman from the ghetto suddenly propelled onto a global stage where it wasn't always easy for her to be herself -- or perhaps even to remember who she was.

Whatever you thought about Whitney Houston, you'd have to be pretty callous not to let Whitney break your heart. Her funeral took place at the New Hope Baptist Church in Newark, the place where young Whitney sang in the choir. The Voice, as Houston sometimes was known, was silenced. She was 48.

Tension on a rundown submarine

Jude Law leads a group of rogues on an undersea adventure.

Black Sea, the latest in a long line of submarine thrillers, has the ragged feel of a B movie, not necessarily a bad thing. Once you give up the idea that you're watching another over-hyped thriller, you can relax and enjoy the tension that inevitably builds when men -- especially greedy men -- are jammed into cramped spaces.

Populated by unwashed Russian and British men on a treasure hunt, Black Sea unapologetically dives into action, ratcheting up pressure as the crew faces danger: from the sea and from one another.

Led by a disaffected, unemployed submariner (Jude Law), these crew members bicker, allow greed to conquer their better impulses and deal with a steady stream of life-threatening situations.

The goal: To retrieve a fortune in Nazi gold from a German U-Boat that has been languishing at the bottom of the sea since the end of World War II.

Law's Robinson learns about the treasure from a former shipmate. He then meets with an American (Scoot McNair) who works for a wealthy tycoon who agrees to finance the mission for 40 percent of the haul.

Law's Robinson accepts the terms, but champions equality among the men: He insists that the crew divide its share of the loot equally.

In a movie that takes a dim, genre-appropriate view of human nature, it's hardly surprising that some of the crew members think they deserve bigger shares than others.

It's possible to regard the movie's submarine as another character. A rusty, wreck of a Russian vessel, the sub had been left to rot off the Crimean coast. It has the look of a low-tech, submersible boiler room.

The Russian sailors are jumpy from the outset. They object to the fact that Law's Robinson has brought an inexperienced young man (Bobby Schofield) on board. The Russians think the 18-year-old is bad luck because they believe (incorrectly) that he's a virgin. He is, of course, a novice at sea.

Director Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland and Touching the Void) efficiently builds tension, particularly in a sequence in which several crew members leave the sub to retrieve a drive-shaft from an abandoned U-boat. This dangerous maneuver is the sub's only hope of getting off the bottom, where it has unceremoniously crashed.

Why isn't Black Sea a perfect deep-sea saga?

Several reasons: Anyone familiar with Ben Mendelsohn, who plays one of the crew members, knows that this edgy Australian actor has cornered the market on loose-cannon characters. To make the matters even more obvious, we often see Mendelsohn's Fraser toying with a knife.

Put another way, the movie can't help but telegraph the moment when Fraser will turn violent.

That bit of predictability aside, the screenplay by Dennis Kelly is burdened by occasional sprays of lame dialogue, and it's not easy to accept Robinson's transition from a down-and-out working man to a kind of crazed Captain Ahab.

About that working-man angle: Black Sea isn't as convincing as a lower-class anthem as it is as a cinematic pressure cooker, but it does take a swing at working-class resentment.

At the outset, Robinson loses his job on a salvage submarine. His 20-year devotion to a single company cost him his wife (Jodie Whittaker) and young son. Penniless and put upon, he sees himself as a victim of bankers and corporate types made rich by working stiffs who ultimately are played for suckers.

OK, so Black Sea isn't perfect, but it's good enough. Darkly hued and making the most of the sub's claustrophobic chambers, Black Sea offers the kind of thrills that arrive coated with grease, sweat and, of course, desperation.

Bob Marley's short but amazing life

Simply and obviously put, Marley -- director Kevin Macdonald's involving and comprehensive documentary -- focuses on the life of singer/musician Bob Marley. But Macdonald's film has an expansive quality that goes beyond the simplicity its title suggests. Marley and its many tangents tend to waft over you like the irresistible rhythms of reggae, exposing us to a life that was about music, race, ganja, Rastafarianism, poverty in Jamaica and Marley's kaleidoscopic series of personal relationships. That's a lot of territory even for a 144-minute documentary, but Macdonald's big-screen biography covers most of it well while sampling enough of Marley's music to keep fans happy. Marley, we learn, was born to an 18-year-old black woman and a 50-year-old white British Royal Marine, who had little contact with his mixed-race son. Marley spent his early years in impoverished Jamaican backwaters, moved to Kingston, and eventually found a way to use his alienation to spur his musical creativity. Early on, Marley and the Wailers, offered their rendition of A Teenager in Love, adding soul and flavor to the Dion and the Belmonts hit, but Marley remains best known for such songs as I Shot the Sheriff , No Woman, No Cry and dozens more. As with many great creative figures, Marley can seem elusive, a charismatic star seen by Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland) through a variety of prisms: the observations of his wife Rita, the recollections of a daughter (one of 11 children), and of his fellow musicians and cohorts. We learn about the development of Marley's religious faith and about his womanizing, just about everything that Marley packed into a life the ended in 1981 when he succumbed to cancer at the age of 36. Neither an act of hagiography nor an expose, Marley takes an intriguing look at a life in which music, politics and spiritual fervor sought harmony and coexistence.

Russell Crowe keeps the presses rolling

The new thriller "State of Play" should make newspaper folks happy -- not because it's a great movie, but because it's packed with dialog that sings the praises of old-school journalism as opposed to blogging and other forms of Internet flotsam.

For me, the most moving part of the movie arrives during the end credits. We watch as the presses roll and an edition of the fictional Washington Globe makes its way toward the streets. Those of us who've spent much of our lives working for papers may not be able to view those credits without feeling a trifle obsolete. With more and more papers vanishing from the publishing landscape, the mighty roar of the presses threatens to go silent -- or at least be reduced to a sporadic growl.

OK, now that I've got that out of my system, a look at "State of Play," a tolerable thriller that stars Russell Crowe as an appropriately disheveled reporter for The Washington Globe. After a gripping opening involving a couple of murders, Crowe's Cal McAffrey finds himself in the middle of a story that involves his old college roommate (Ben Affleck), now a Congressman. Affleck's Rep. Collins has been working to expose a company called PointCorp, which is busy accumulating too much power. Cal's involvement in his new story is complicated by his friendship with the Congressman. It also doesn't help that he once slept with the Congressman's wife (Robin Wright Penn).

For all its topical journalistic references -- the Globe just has been bought by a media conglomerate that can't take its eye off the bottom line -- "State of Play" winds up having less to do with the fate of newspapers than with a web of conspiracy that has engulfed Washington. By now, the ingredients have become movie staples: corporate greed, an unchecked lust for power, sexual hijinx and the kind of personal rot that makes people want to run for cover -- or at least for the next cover-up. I kept wishing "State of Play" would reveal something new. I didn't want it to be satisfied with jaded beliefs that have become de rigueur. In "State of Play," cynicism feels like yesterday's news.

Say this, though: Crowe looks almost as bad as any journalist I've worked with. Hey, I said "almost." Rumpled, pudgy and sporting unfashionably long hair, Crowe's Cal refers to the whiskey he drinks as "Irish wine." He lives alone, a newspaper monk who's known to every cop in the city. Fortunately, Crowe adds touches of compassion to the role of a hard-boiled reporter who's annoyed that his editor (Helen Mirren) has teamed him with one of the paper's Internet reporters (Rachel McAdams). Cal regards McAdams' Della Frye as little more than a gossip monger. Of course, they develop a bond, and, no, it's not romantic.

As befits a good thriller, a complicated plot is dotted with small, tasty roles. Jason Batemen is slick and sleazy as a PR man who knows where bodies are buried, and Jeff Daniels proves convincing as the House majority leader. Mirren, who's given a lot of arch one-liners, makes the most of them.

The plot gets a bit too dense at the end, piling on details and twists, and I had the feeling that director Kevin Macdonald ("The Last King of Scotland") was trying for something more meaningful than anything he's been able to achieve. "State of Play," which adapts and Americanizes a highly regarded British TV mini-series, proves entertaining enough, but it's not likely to write any lasting big-screen headlines.

WILL THE MOVIES EVER GRADUATE FROM HIGH SCHOOL?

Watching "17 Again" I felt as if I were turning pages in a book I'd read a thousand times -- and which wasn't all that great to begin with. Familiarity definitely bred a bit of contempt with this teen-oriented comedy, although fairness compels me to rank it as a middle-grade helping of high-school fare.

And, you can breathe at least one sigh of relief. "17 Again" magically turns a grown man (Matthew Perry) into a teen-ager, but spares us the agonies of time travel. Transformed into a kid, Perry's Mike O'Donnell doesn't go back in time; instead he joins his daughter and son in high school, an adult in a kid's body. Of course, Mike's children don't know that the handsome new kid in school is their dad. Wouldn't he look vaguely familiar to them? Evidently not.

The movie grows out of discontent. Mike has been stewing in bitterness for years because he refused a college basketball scholarship so that he could marry and support his high school sweetheart (Leslie Mann). She was pregnant, and Mike did the right thing. Years later, he's mired in regret. He has allowed his life to become one long look backward, a perpetual longing for what might have been.

Seventeen-year-old Mike is played by Zac Efron, a TV heartthrob and "High School Musical" star. If I cared about TV heartthrobs, I'd have gotten around to Efron sooner. He may well turn "17 Again" into a teen/tween success, and if the movie works at all, it's because Efron holds it together.

Of course, you don't believe a minute of "17 Again," but that hardly matters. I saw the movie several three weeks ago, and my precise reaction has been mercifully forgotten. I think I chuckled a few times. Nonetheless, I'll venture a prediction: Look for "17 Again'' to win the weekend at the box office and to enjoy a profitable life on DVD, thus proving that one should never underestimate the power of medium-grade comedy -- not in these distressed times.