'Sheep Detectives' on the case

  What a preposterous idea. Who wants to watch a movie about a flock of sheep intent on discovering who murdered their beloved shepherd? Director Kyle Balda (Despicable Me 3, Minions: The Rise of Gru) turns to live action in The Sheep Detectives and finds more charm than any movie about sleuthing sheep deserves. 

  Based on German novelist Leonie Swann's Three Bags Full, Sheep Detectives has its eye on younger viewers but doesn't leave their adult escorts far behind. Sheep Detectives smartly follows a standard whodunit arc, arriving at the expected plot points with pleasing efficiency.

   The sheep know the mystery formula because the shepherd -- Hugh Jackman's George Hardy -- used to read them detective novels before they retired to the barn for a night's rest. Balda adds a bit of darkness to the bucolic background. The good-guy shepherd is murdered early on, reducing Jackman's screen time, and the story makes room for greedy ambition among its human characters.

   Overall, though, The Sheep Detectives involves endearing CGI animals who speak to one another in English. (Human characters can't hear them). Lily (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) portrays the flock's leader. Regina King gives voice to Cloud, a sheep who gets by on good grooming. 

   Previous to the loss of their caretaker, the sheep had been living an idyllic life. They suppress bad memories, and soothe themselves with a belief about the afterlife: Sheep don't die; they turn into fluffy clouds. Chris O'Dowd's Mopple is the only sheep who remembers the flock's history. Byran Cranston voices a ram who lives apart from the rest of the group.

   A winter lamb, rejected by the others, paves the way for an instructional layer about tolerating creatures who don't fit in.

   The town's human population includes Derry (Nicholas Braun), a policeman of blatant incompetence. Emma Thompson signs on as a brittle lawyer who tries to administer the late shepherd's will.  Molly Gordon plays the shepherd's daughter; she hasn't seen her father in years. The town's butcher, the appropriately named Ham (Conleth Hill), regards the sheep as potential source of profit. Nicholas Galitzine portrays a reporter who's investigating the murder, and Hong Chau plays the operator of the town's hotel.

   The human characters add some of the eccentric flavor of an Ealing comedy to a story set in the English countryside. 

   It's a stretch to think of The Sheep Detectives as a family-oriented classic, but the movie proves amusing enough to earn its place in the world of talking animals that speak the language of quirky entertainment.

A Western with contemporary kick

 

    The history of the Hollywood western has been a massively white affair, hardly a revelation to anyone who has spent more than a few years watching movies. Director Jeymes Samuel may have had that in mind while directing The Harder They Fall an almost entirely Black helping of genre tropes set in the Old West -- or Samuel's version of it.

   Samuel, who's British, has assembled a first-rate cast that includes Jonathan Majors, Idris Elba, Regina King, Zazie Beetz, Delroy Lindo, and LaKeith Stanfield.

  A revenge saga at heart, the movie wastes no time putting its brutal cards on the table. When he was only eight, Love watched Buck murder his mother and father. Buck then carved a small cross on Love's forehead.

   The movie takes place with the now-grown Love leading a gang of thieves who rob from other thieves. Nat also wants to avenge  the death of his parents. He's out for blood.

   Samuel embellishes the movie's genre ploys with rap music, jazz, and, most unusually, a modern dance interlude set in a saloon. Jay-Z and Kid Cudi's My Guns Go Bang turns up, not a tune you'd expect to find in a western -- and some of the more profane language obliterates the line between historical and contemporary talk.

    The melding of approaches is part of the point: The Harder They Fall is no throwback; it's intentionally styled to be of the moment; i.e., it’s fluent in the language of 21st Century cinema. 

    So, no, John Wayne couldn't ride into this movie and find a comfort zone.

   Although Majors's Love  is the main character, the movie has an ensemble feel and Samuel makes sure not to shortchange the female cast members. King portrays Trudy, a tough-talking, no-nonsense assistant to the soft-spoken but no less menacing Buck. 

   Beetz appears as Stagecoach Mary, an independent woman who provides Nat with a love interest -- but never plays second fiddle to him.

   Not only is the music anachronistic but so are some of the movie's gender variations. Danielle Deadwyler plays Cuffy, an outlaw of ambiguous gender identity. 

   The  story advances toward the all-Black town of Redwood City where Buck, newly sprung from prison by Trudy and cohorts, plans to establish his empire. The revenge-hungry Love has other plans.

   Samuel's over-reliance on looming close-ups can be annoying and the plot tends to trip over itself here and there. But the movie has a quality of the unexpected that fends off dullness and the actors all work at peak form, many operating in both comic and serious veins.

   The movie makes one brilliant satirical joke when Nat and his crew head to an all-white town to rob the local bank. The town  has been drained of color by a production team with a cutting sense of humor. 

   I don't know the history of the movie's characters who are based on real people, but it's clear that Samuel, who co-wrote the screenplay with Boaz Yakin, has taken great liberties in order to produce a no-holds-barred western that blazes across the screen, sometimes falling off its horse, but always creating a strong vibe -- presuming there was such thing as a "vibe" in the Old West.

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.

Love in the time of racism

In If Beale Street Could Talk, director Barry Jenkins adapts a James Baldwin novel that pits the innocence of lovers against soul-crushing racism.

If you stop to think about it, you might be hard-pressed to come up with a long list of movies that portray love with tenderness, soul-deep commitment, and true devotion.

Among other things, a tender depiction of such a love is precisely what distinguishes If Beale Street Could Talk from normal Hollywood fare. director Barry Jenkins' follow-up to his Oscar-winning Moonlight, has moments that are illuminated by the characters love for each other and by Jenkins' love for them.

But if Beale Street -- set in New York during the '70s -- only dealt with love, it would not be doing justice to the 1974 James Baldwin novel of the same name. If Beale Street Could Talk also assays the impact of racism on the innocence of two lovers who have known they should be together since childhood.

Tender feelings collide with harsh realities that test the devotion of a young man and woman who want little more than to live, raise a family and continue loving each other.

The casting of the couple obviously becomes crucial in a movie such as Beale Street and Jenkins' has done well. Stephan James portrays Alonzo, a.k.a. "Fonny," a 22-year-old with ambitions to make sculptures from wood. KiKi Layne portrays Tish, Fonny's 19-year-old fiancee and also the story's narrator.

Jenkins invites us to fall in love with this sweet couple and we do, but he also plans to break our hearts. Tish is pregnant and it's entirely possible that Fonny will be in jail when his child is born.

Set up by a racist cop (Ed Skrein), Fonny faces a false rape charge. Tish fights to clear his name. She knows that the Puerto Rican woman who identified Fonny in a line-up did so in a confused panic. Fonny wasn't even in the vicinity of the crime.

The movie contextualizes the relationship between Fonny and Tish by bringing their respective families into focus as it shifts between the present with Fonny awaiting trial in jail and the past in which Fonny and Tish developed their relationship.

Fonny's mother (Regina King) supports her pregnant daughter; her father (Colman Domingo) also makes his love for Tish clear; he understands that he's going to have to get involved with some hustling to raise money for Fonny's defense.

In an early scene, the two families meet and sparks fly. Fonny's religious mother (Aunjanue Ellis,) disdains Tish and treats her as a wanton woman who's ruining her son's life. Fonny's father (Michael Beach) takes a different view. He hauls off and belts his wife in the kisser, a slap that turns a comic scene into something harsh and harrowing.

Perhaps Baldwin was trying to highlight poles of belief within the black community: staunchly religious conservatism vs. love-infused tolerance, the latter born of an understanding about what's needed to carry on.

Brian Tyree Henry turns up as an old friend of Fonny's who has just been released from jail and who can't shake the emotional damage of incarceration. He didn't belong in jail any more than Fonny will.

Jenkins respectfully extends scenes to allow the actors to live within them, but some of them go on too long and you begin to feel the movie's length.

Maybe it doesn't matter because If Beale Street Could Talk doesn't feel rooted in a specific time and place as much as it feels like an extension of imagination lodged in an essential moment -- one built around a deep understanding of harsh American realities and an unconquerable capacity for hope and survival.

If Beale Street Could Talk poses a heartfelt and heartbreaking question: Why must two lovers pit their happiness against a world that doesn't want to give them a chance? That sounds like the trailer for a romance novel, but -- in this case -- it's an indictment of racism that tries to crush the sweetness out of everyday life.