This 'Exorcist' didn't make me a believer

 

  If you've been yearning to watch a fitfully engaging attempt to reinvent a franchise, The Exorcist: Believer might be your kind of movie. 

 Director David Gordon Green, who added three latter-day installments to the Halloween franchise, stuffs his movie with elements that seem intended to update its reach but wind up diluting its power.

 And who would have thought that the word of exorcism would be possessed by the need to give the whole business an interfaith gloss? Roman Catholic priests, long established as the devil's premier big-screen opponents, almost become an afterthought in this sometimes silly battle with the devil.

  Fifty years ago, director William Friedkin made us believe that a foul force of hell could despoil the innocence of a child. An epic struggle of will and ritual played out in the bedroom of a 12-year-old girl, all of it fueled by the furor created by William Blatty's bestselling book.

  Fair to say that Green adds a mildly secular flavor to the proceedings, delivering a message about the importance of working together to combat evil. It takes a village to beat the devil, I guess.

   Green's most significant addition to the Exorcist canon involves dual possession. After a Haitian prologue in which Angela, one the demon's victims is born. Thirteen years pass and Angela (Lidya Jewett) and her friend Katherine (Olivia O'Neill) disappear in the Georgia woods. 

    A frantic search ensues. The girls eventually turn up. Of course, they've been possessed.

   The cast includes Leslie Odom Jr. as Angela's widowed dad. His wife died while giving birth in Haiti. Displaying oodles of conviction, Anne Dowd appears as a nurse with a religious background; and Ellen Burstyn shows up to link this edition to the original. Believer is being billed as a direct sequel to the 1973 movie.

    To fulfill that promise, Odom's increasingly desperate Victor visits Burstyn's Chris McNeil. He's seeking advice about how to save his daughter. Who would know better than the mom from the first movie?

   Turns out Chris hasn't seen her once-possessed daughter in years; the two became estranged after Chris published a book about her experiences. Young Regan evidently didn't want to go public.

    The second possessed girl hails from a churchgoing family, which affords Green an opportunity to show the disruption of a Sunday service. When the demon gets the best of poor Katherine, she marches down the church's center aisle growling about the body and the blood.

    The two girls benefit from make-up, faux bad teeth, snarls, and the use of a familiar devil-like voice that sounds as if its gargling bile.

    Green whips up a couple of jump scares, but what once was frightening sometimes feels like another fulfillment of genre obligations by the first of a reported trio of movies.

   Some of the preview audience with which I saw Believer laughed as the movie fired off fan-oriented references. I guess certain kinds of horror have become less a source of big-screen terror than an occasion for in-group affirmation.

     Oh well, nothing new here: If Believer succeeds, it won't be because of divine intervention: The power of box office will compel the franchise's present and future. 

    

Life before the Tony Soprano era began

 

   During the course of six seasons, The Sopranos established itself as one of the greatest series ever seen on American television. There are many reasons for this, including our endless fascination with gangster culture, if the word "culture" isn't too much of a stretch here.

    Steeped in violence, betrayal and duplicity, The Sopranos was a gangster story with a difference. It centered on Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini), a mob boss with an impressive suburban home, a wife and two kids. We got to know every member of the Soprano immediate and extended family -- and know them well. 

    The series also introduced a twist that, at first, seemed preposterous. Tony regularly consulted a shrink (Lorraine Bracco) but seldom faced up to his massive appetites. I never counted, but scenes of Tony eating were as abundant as his many infidelities. It seemed impossible for Tony to pass a refrigerator without opening it.

    Over time, The Sopranos acquired depth worthy of a Russian novel. We couldn't stop watching.  

   Now, David Chase -- the show's creator -- has made The Many Saints of Newark, a movie that functions as a kind of prequel to The Sopranos.  At 120 minutes in length, the movie can't offer the complicated flavors and personal intrigue of a series. 

    We get profanity, violence, infidelities and a look at the young Tony Soprano (played by James Gandolfini's son, Michael Gandolfini). But Many Saints is more period piece — the New Jersey mob circa 1967-1970something — than a probing character study.

    Young Tony doesn't occupy the movie's center. That job falls to Dickie Moltisanti (Alessandro Nivola), the father of Christopher Moltisanti, who provides the movie's narration from behind the grave. If you're a series fan, you know that Christopher didn't make it to the end.

     Hot-headed and profane, Dickie is Tony’s uncle -- or at least that's how Tony thinks of him. Tony idolizes Dickie and the sequel (screenplay Chase and Lawrence Konner, direction by Alan Taylor) makes Dickie a pivotal figure in determining whether Tony, a bright kid with a penchant for trouble, will follow a mob path or make a different choice.

   I have no idea whether non-Soprano fans can relate to the movie because much of the time we're looking for hints of what's to come in the characters we meet. 

   Does Corey Stoll, for example, make a credible Corrado "Junior" Soprano? (Pretty much).

   Does Vera Farmiga, as Tony's mom Livia, seem as if she could develop into the character Nancy Marchand so brilliantly created in the series? (Definitely).

   References to the series abound, but The Many Saints of Newark is its own movie — albeit one that’s hampered by a running time that makes it seem as if an entire season of the Soprano's has been reduced to short hand. 

   Casualties accompany such condensation. Tony's father (Jon Bernthal) doesn't become a big enough figure. We learned almost as much about him in the series when Tony discussed his father with his therapist.

   Ray Liotta portrays Aldo "Hollywood Dick" Moltisanti, Dickie's father.  Dickie is involved in a vivid and revolting bit of violence that would have made us gasp had it occurred in a series where we already had spent considerable time forming opinions about Dickie.

   Perhaps to add a social wrinkle to the movie, Chase begins the story in 1967; a.k.a., the Summer of Love and continues it in the 1970s. 

   In 67, racial tension are boiling in Newark, where much of the mob activity takes place. Dickie forms a relationship with a young black man (Leslie Odom Jr.), who eventually develops criminal aspirations of his own.  

   The Newark riots play a role in creating the movie's atmospherics, but the attempt to give the racial conflict thematic weight feel anemic -- doing little more than underscoring the idea that the world once ruled by these mobsters is changing.

   Liotta also plays Dickie's uncle, a man serving life imprisonment for a mob hit. What seem like attempts to turn him into the movie's conscience don't really go anywhere.

   Then there's Michael Gandolfini. Although Tony isn't the main character, everything in the movie insists on being weighed against the character we know Tony will become and the world he’ll create. Gandolfini incorporates Tony's mannerisms into his performance, but Michael’s performance can't help but live in the shadow of his late father’s work.

   At its best, Many Saints laces vivid brutality with humor and New Jersey color, but it's most stirring moment comes at the end when we finally hear Alabama 3's Woke Up This Morning, the song that played over the opening credits in every Sopranos' episode. Maybe that's where the movie should have begun. 

   And then there's this: When an artistic endeavor achieves greatness, it might be best to leave it alone. 

Four men hold an epic meeting

 

     A wave of sadness swept over me when I finished watching One Night in Miami. The movie isn’t particularly sad. In fact, it's lively, provocative, and engaging. 

    But I also realized that all but one of the movie's principal, real-life characters — football and movie star Jim Brown — are dead.   Brown is now 84. Had Muhammad Ali, another of the movie's characters lived, he’d be on the verge of turning 74. 

     So I guess the sadness has to do with the passing of a cultural guard, all of whose members were prominent figures during the tumultuous 1960s, a time when I was still young.

     Set in 1964, the movie introduces us to an Ali who was about to claim his boxing title and to announce his decision to join the Nation of Islam. Most Americans then knew him as Cassius Clay, a mouthy kid from Louisville.

    The other main characters in director Regina King’s movie are singer/songwriter Sam Cooke and activist Malcolm X.

    In the hands of King and screenwriter Kemp Powers, who adapted his 2013 play, the movie stands as an informed construction of what might have been discussed as the men gathered on the night Clay defeated Sonny Liston, an outcome that shocked nearly everyone in the boxing world except Clay.

     All the characters are going through major life changes. Tired of football, Brown ponders retiring from the NFL.  Clay’s victory came on the eve of his ascendance to global stardom. 

     Cooke, perhaps the most satisfied of the group, was plotting further commercial success, and a troubled Malcolm X was about to break with the Nation of Islam.

    A gifted actress, King moves behind the camera easily. She provides a fluid cinematic prologue and finds ways to escape the confines of Malcolm X’s suite in the Hampton House, a Miami hotel with a mostly black clientele.

    As the men solidify and test their friendships, the movie  becomes a complex mixture of brotherly love, mutual admiration, chiding banter, and sharply stated positions.

    As Clay, Eli Goree often plays the surprising role of peacemaker. Kingsley Ben-Adir creates a smart, ideologically devoted Malcolm who's more rigid than any of his companions, even as he fears for the safety of his family. As Jim Brown, Aldis Hodge creates a character of strength and conviction.

     None of the men treat the others as icons, even though each of them understands that none of them can be considered "ordinary." They're all too famous for that.

   One Night revolves around debates about the best way forward for black men in 1964. Economics? Political action? Learning to turn a racist system to one’s advantage? 

    Leslie Odom Jr.’s Sam Cooke creates the sharpest conflict with Malcolm X.  At one point, Malcolm X chides Cooke for not having written a song as relevant as Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind. 

    Malcolm plays the role of provocateur, spoilsport, and conscience. Neither Brown nor Cooke is ready to renounce wine, women and song -- and they're not shy about letting Malcolm know where they stand.

     One Night becomes tribute to the characters depicted, to the actors who play them, and to the way it makes an event that took place almost 60 years ago feel intensely present.

     Malcolm was murdered in 1965. Later in 1964, Cooke was killed later in a shooting at the Hacienda Motel in Los Angeles. He was 33. Ali, of course, died in 2016. 

    One Night takes us to a moment when the men were all young, vital and relevant. Because their conversations haven't lost much currency, One Night never becomes an exercise in nostalgia. It's got plenty of bite and although it's about a now-fading moment, it hasn’t lost its relevance.

'Hamilton' for the multitudes. No waiting.

Reviewing Hamilton at this stage of the game  —  nearly five years after the show premiered on Broadway — is a bit like debating the virtues of the candidates in the presidential election of 1904. The verdict already has been reached. Theodore Roosevelt clobbered his Democratic opponent, Alton B. Parker. What you don't remember Alton B.?

Unlike poor Parker, Hamilton has not wanted for media attention. It has been reviewed with its original cast, with performers who have taken over for the originators and with companies that have staged touring productions. Now, Disney has made a filmed version of the original cast available for streaming. 

As I said, the verdict on the show already has been reached: Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip hop approach to American history brims with the exuberant energy of a story recast in a "revolutionary" way. Hamilton's mostly black and brown actors capture the cockiness, impudence, and energy of men seized by an intoxicating blend of ambition and vision; i.e., our so-called "Founding Fathers." 

The version that’s being brought to the screen by Disney offers immediate advantages. You don't need to take out a bank loan to see it. You needn't get up at the crack of dawn to score a ticket or enter a lottery in hopes of being lucky enough to gain access to Hamilton-world.

You also get to savor the work of the original cast as it brings rap rhythms to dialogue that's delivered with snapping, rapid-fire elan. A key theme appears in a recurring line. "I'm not throwing away my shot,"  Hamilton repeatedly insists. The line underscores Hamilton's piercing ambition, echoing almost from the moment Hamilton arrives in New York City from the Caribbean until he falls in a duel to Aaron Burr. 

The cast is fine: Leslie Odom Jr.’s Burr tries to elevate fence-straddling into a virtue.    Christopher Jackson’s George Washington projects the requisite authority, and a deviously entertaining Daveed Diggs makes Thomas Jefferson into a bit of a fop — if it’s possible to be foppish while rapping. 

The women, too, are well represented. Phillipa Soo portrays Hamilton’s wife, Eliza; Renee Elise Goldsberry commands the screen as Eliza's sister,  Maria Schuyler; and 
Jasmine Cephas Jones brings seductive allure to Maria Reynolds,  a married woman with whom Hamilton had an adulterous affair.

Don’t forget Jonathan Groff who turns King George III into some of the best comic relief ever to grace a musical stage, sometimes in close-ups that show the spittle that accompanies speech loud enough to resonate in the back rows of a theater.

And, of course, there’s Miranda’s audacious, energetic, and ever-striving Hamilton, who -- oddly, I think -- isn't always the most compelling presence on stage.

Directed by Thomas Kail, who also directed the Broadway production, Hamilton rightly can be seen as a gift to all of us for whom the Hamilton experience has been confined to reading the endless quantities of ink that have been spilled on the show’s behalf.

Now, having said all that, I need to tell you that Hamilton neither should be seen as a static filmed record of a play or a completely cinematic experience.

The decision to film before a live audience presented Kail and cinematographer Declan Quinn with serious challenges. Many cameras were used but keeping camera operators off the stage meant that Kail wasn’t always able to use the stage’s space in the most dyadic ways. 

On the other hand,  the presence of an audience helps overcome any distance viewers may feel as Hamilton unfolds. From the show's opening moments, audience excitement spills off the screen. The movie is two hours and 41 minutes long with a brief intermission. It should be watched straight through.

More apparent in the movie’s opening act, the film's limitations tend to fade as the stage becomes less crowded in the play’s post-revolutionary second half. In one of the show's best bits, Kail captures the biting energy of a rap duel between political foes Jefferson, champion of agrarian virtue, and Hamilton, lover of cities with their rude, bumptious energies.

Miranda was inspired to write Hamilton after reading Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography, Alexander Hamilton.  In Miranda's hands,  Hamilton provides an occasion to reflect on the importance of who’s telling a historical story and how a bold new choice in that area can expand and enrich the conversation. Moreover, the play contains enough references to the racial injustices of slavery to bring it into alignment with the current moment.

Still, I'd like to offer a small addendum. I hope that a gifted director someday totally reimagines  Hamilton for the screen, keeping Miranda’s book and music intact, of course. It might not work, but then again it might just be a glorious thing to behold.

Harriet Tubman reaches the screen

Cynthia Erivo gives one of the year's most compelling performances in director Kasi Lemmons' Harriet.

In Harriet, actress Cynthia Erivo comes across as a determined female warrior who battles the evils of slavery, freeing as many enslaved people as she can. With a face full of fury, Erivo creates a portrait of flinty resolve and unshakable faith. Tubman, who escaped slavery at the age of 27, became a "conductor" -- someone who guided the enslaved to freedom -- on the Underground Railroad. She already had won her freedom but wasn't satisfied, not when so many others were left behind to suffer.

As directed by Kasi Lemmons (Eve's Bayou and Talk to Me), Harriet paints a portrait of a woman who came to realize she had only one choice: Be free or die. Once Tubman decided that she'd rather be dead than enslaved, everything else followed.

In Maryland, Tubman was known as Minty. She grew up on a plantation and watched a sister being sold away from the family, an event that permanently scarred her, as did the lashes from the whips of slave masters.

Determined to flee, Tubman made a journey of 100 miles -- from Maryland to Philadelphia. She traveled alone.

Erivo creates a portrait of a woman possessed. Tubman was struck in the head as a child, an event that some say accounted for the religious visions that she claimed to have. Erivo's fierce portrayal leaves little doubt that if Tubman said she talked to God, you'd best believe her. She's like an American Joan of Arc. Employing a different religious reference, frustrated plantation owners dubbed her "Moses."

Part action hero and part American icon, the Harriet that emerges on screen kicks butt and, yes, that's satisfying, given the people whose butt she's kicking. A born leader, she refuses to allow anyone (even the politically cautious abolitionists she meets in Philadelphia) to define her.

The evil white slavers find their fullest representation in a character named Gideon Brodess (Joe Alwyn),
a severe slave master who won't rest until he returns Tubman to his plantation. At one point, he hires black slave hunters to help him in his quest. Gideon's mother (Jennifer Nettles) can be even worse, a hysterical woman who sees her beloved plantation sinking deeper into debt.

The movie's Philadelphia setting produces the movie's strongest supporting characters. Janelle Monae plays a woman who owns a boarding house and Leslie Odom Jr. portrays an abolitionist who introduces Tubman to the Underground Railroad. At various points in the movie, Clarke Peters appears as Tubman's father.

Lemmons sticks pretty much to surface, and, at times, Harriet seems more of an action movie than it needs to be. Put another way, Harriet sometimes feels more attuned to the demands of contemporary moviegoing than to rhythms that would have been more reflective of the period in which Tubman lived.

With Harriet, what you see is what you get and the movie emerges as a kind of primer on Tubman's life that's built around a compelling performance. I agree with those who think it should have been more than that, but Lemmons' big-screen biography sets its own terms and lives within them.

Kenneth Branagh rides the Orient Express

Branagh directs and stars in Murder on the Orient Express, but his version of the 1934 Agatha Christie novel seldom clicks.

I'd be lying if I told you that I recall every detail of director Sidney Lumet's 1974 hit Murder on the Orient Express, but I do remember that the movie was fun. Albert Finney appeared as the great Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot, heading an all-star cast that included Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, John Gielgud and Sean Connery.

The trouble with Kenneth Branagh's new version, which stars Branagh as Poirot, is that the movie can't wring enough enjoyment out of the journey from Istanbul to Calais -- not for the train's passengers and, more importantly, for us.

Murder on the Orient Express mostly serves to showcase Branagh's turn as Poirot in his version of Agatha Christie's classic 1934 mystery, and, no, Branagh isn’t as good as Finney.

Before the preview screening of Orient Express, I wondered why Branagh had bothered to remake it. After the movie concluded, I could find no special reason for him to have taken another go at material that also has yielded a 2001 TV movie in which Alfred Molina portrayed Poirot.

In this latest outing, Branagh upstages a hefty cast, which includes Michelle Pfeiffer, Josh Gad, Willem Dafoe, Penelope Cruz, Derek Jacoby, Judi Dench, Daisy Ridley and Leslie Odom Jr. Johnny Depp signs on, as well.

Branagh tries to provide visual bang for the buck with exterior shots of the mountains across which the train speeds, an avalanche that derails the engine, and even a few scenes outside of the train. The drama’s resolution takes place in a tunnel where the suspects are lined up at a long table as if they were about to stage a news conference.

I tired of Branagh's Poirot, particularly given the movie’s monotonous structure: Poirot interviews suspects (i.e., the supporting cast) one after another, each appearing in perfunctory fashion as if Branagh is following a time table rather than a script.

Nothing, of course, is as it seems, but Branagh doesn't optimize the participation of a strong cast. Only Pfeiffer comes close to receiving her own small showcase. Mostly, the supporting characters fail to generate keen interest.

For those who haven't read Christie's novel or seen the 1974 movie, there's no point spoiling the mystery, although it's worth noting that lots of attention seems to have gone into the movie's production design, creating the illusion that we're on a most opulent journey.

When Poirot finally solves the mystery, the movie hits its stride, but much of Orient Express proves a snooze-worthy ride in the company of a morally insistent detective who so values balance that he only eats eggs of precisely the same size.

If the light from your mobile device weren't likely to disrupt the experience of others, I'd suggest that this is one journey on which you might consider bringing a book -- perhaps something by Agatha Christie.