‘Color Purple’ musical reaches the screen

 

  

  Credit Ghanaian director Blitz Bazawule with blending  earthy naturalistic images, musical numbers, energetic performances, and superior production values in the big-screen musical version of The Color Purple. 

 At its best, Bazawule's musical seems to burst from the Georgia soil on which the story takes place.

   The source material, Alice Walker’s 1982 novel, doesn’t seem an ideal springboard for a musical; the need to entertain, almost an inherent requirement for musicals, might conflict with a story that contains so many harsh and disturbing elements.

  Bazawule and his team lean toward entertainment, while trying to ensure that The Color Purple doesn't lose all of its impact as a story steeped in cruelty and adversity, as well as hope. 

  Fantasia Barrino, who starred in the Broadway version from 2007-2008, takes on the principal role of Celie, a young woman whose infant child is taken from her early in the movie. 

  Soon the man Celie knows as her father -- and who fathered her child -- gives her to the brutal and boorish Mister (Colman Domingo). He mistreats her at every turn.

   The story derives much of its drive from Celie's need to assert herself and claim a place in the world. 

    Barrino and Domingo anchor the movie while a strong supporting cast adds to the mix, notably Danielle Brooks as the no-nonsense Sofia, a woman to be reckoned with. Brooks' seizes the screen as if it belongs to her -- and it does whenever she's on camera.

  Corey Hawkins's Harpo, Mister's son, eventually establishes the juke joint that provides the stage for one of the movie's more rousing numbers. 

    That brings us to Taraji P. Henson, who gives a showcase performance as the seductive Shug, a woman who shed the restrictive shackles imposed by her pastor father.  Shug is the only woman Mister treats with respect, probably because he knows he'll never control her.

     Shug also opens a window through which Celie glimpses another possible future for herself. The story begins in the early 1900s and continues through the 40s. culminating with Celie’s assertion of her womanhood.

      Jon Batiste makes a late-picture appearance as Grady, the man who ultimately wins Shug's heart, and Ciara portrays Nettie, Celie's sister and best friend. Early on, Netty flees the small Georgia town where the story unfolds after Mister tries to abuse her sexually.

     The musical numbers -- from one staged in front of a waterfall to another on a glamorous deco stage -- seem to emerge organically, often with an infectious beat, and Bazawule knows how to spotlight the entrance of each important character.

      A screenplay credited to Marcus Gardley, Alice Walker, and Marsha Norman relies on melodramatic twists that might be glaring in a dramatic rendering but become acceptable in a musical environment, although late-picture plot points pile up without much grace.

     Dan Laustsen’s richly realized cinematography and Jon Poll's sharp editing deserve attention and a cameo by Whoopi Goldberg, who played Celie in Steven Spielberg’s 1985 movie, provides connective tissue to the story’s lineage.

      After a novel, a movie, and numerous stage productions, Celie’s story still provides enough of an emotional framework for a retelling, this time with a palpable sense of the life that derives from vividly drawn characters and the deeply committed actors who play them.

     

An unlikely alliance in Durham, N.C.

The Best of Enemies is a stranger-than-fiction story buoyed by a strong cast.

The essential part of the story told in the new movie The Best of Enemies is true. In 1971, during a fierce argument over the integration of the public schools in Durham, N.C., a black woman and a Ku Klux Klan leader co-chaired a charrette at which the future of the city's schools was to be decided. Rather than impose a solution, the idea was to allow Durham's residents to determine how to proceed.

A Raleigh-based community organizer named Bill Riddick came to Durham to run the two-week charrette, a big meeting at which issues were hashed out in hopes of presenting several resolutions that would be voted on by a committee of Durham's citizens, half white and half black.

The story of an uneasy relationship between a Ku Klux Klan leader and a no-nonsense black activist is one of those stranger-than-fiction tales that can't help but intrigue. And you needn't be a genius to know that the resolution will involve a major transformation on someone's part.

The movie owes much of its success to casting. Taraji P. Henson plays Anne Atwater, a woman who has spent much of her life fighting with Durham's white power structure and upholding the rights of the city's black residents. Sporting outfits that add considerable enlargement to her body, Henson virtually disappears into the role of a woman whose determination and sense of righteousness speak of a drive that will not accept defeat.

Sam Rockwell, who already played a racist in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, portrays another in Best of Enemies. Rockwell's CP Ellis faces a challenge when he's asked to rub elbows with members of the city's black community.

The white power elite -- represented in part by a smooth-talking councilman (Bruce McGill) -- wants a reliably racist person to uphold support for segregated schools and to serve as its man on the inside of the charrette.

Rockwell's performance reflects the inner struggle of a man whose sense of belonging has been challenged. CP can seem a bit goofy, but we know there's something percolating inside this gas station owner. CP unexpectedly finds himself immersed in a major debate.

When CP tries to persuade the liberal owner of a local hardware store (John Gallagher Jr.) to vote with the white majority, a saddened CP is taken aback. CP learns that this man who employees blacks served in Vietnam. He fought for his country. CP didn't. For once, CP has no comeback. His world has begun to fall apart.

The supporting cast helps. Anne Heche plays CP's wife and Babou Ceesay portrays Riddick, a man with the unenviable job of trying to get the blacks and whites of Durham to listen to one another.

To me, the Klan venom in Best of Enemies seemed a trifle toned down, but Wes Bentley does a convincing job as a Klansman who has no interest in examining his values.

Robin Bissell, who has spent most of his career producing movies, makes his directorial debut. He smartly relies on his actors to carry the day.

Look, no one likely will mistake Best of Enemies for a great movie and there's always a danger that a movie such as Best of Enemies encourages people to elevate the anecdotal to something more than it is. I wish Bissell had found ways to show more of the discussions that took place at the charrette, and the movie sometimes loses dramatic steam.

Still, you could do worse than Best of Enemies and Hollywood has, many would argue that the Oscar-winning Green Book is one such example.

A small aside: Three recent major movies -- The Best of Enemies, Green Book, and BlacKkKlansman -- have been set in the 1960s and 1970s. Whatever you think of these movies, another truth must be acknowledged: It's past time for Hollywood to catch up and give stories about racism some present-tense urgency.

What men want? Maybe less contrivance?

Taraji P. Henson stars in What Men Want, a comedy about a sports agent who can hear men’s thoughts.

Taraji P. Henson finds a big-screen showcase in What Men Want, a gender-flipping version of 2000's What Women Want, a movie that featured Mel Gibson as a Chicago ad man who has an accident and suddenly is able to hear women's thoughts. Guess what? A macho man becomes more sensitive.

In the female version -- directed by Adam Shankman -- Henson portrays Ali Davis, an Atlanta-based sports agent who's constantly passed over for a partnership she’s more than earned. In the male-dominated world of sports agency, Ali works with a major handicap. Try as she may, she's just not one of the boys. How could she be? The boys are making all the rules.

Henson dominates the movie, but can't entirely rise above the movie's sitcom conceits. In this version, Henson's Ali hits her head and suddenly can hear what men are thinking. She's initially appalled but soon realizes that this unique skill might give her the edge she needs to win the partnership she's craving -- and which her performance record clearly justifies.

Formulaic and predictable, the movie does include one bit of oddball casting that clicks: Erykah Badu plays Sister, a long-haired psychic with fingernails that resemble talons. Sister is hired by one of Ali's girlfriends to work a bachelorette party for a soon-to-be-married gal pal.

The cast also includes Josh Brener, as Ali's gay assistant, Tracy Morgan as the father of a prime basketball prospect (Shane Paul McGhie) that Ali is determined to sign. Richard Roundtree plays Ali's dad, a widower who runs a boxing gym and has instilled his daughter with a spirit of toughness.

Aldis Hodge does love-interest duty as Will, a single dad who works as a bartender and who catches Ali's eye. Hodge's Will eventually gets caught in strained plot antics in which Ali decides to fake a marriage to impress Morgan's Joe "Dolla" Barry, a self-proclaimed family man. She thinks the ruse will help her to sign Joe's son.

A variety of athletes turn up for cameos. Among them: Grant Hill, Shaquille O'Neal, and Karl-Anthony Towns.

The movie tries to find the kind of raunchy spirit that enlivened last year's much funnier Girls Trip but the R-rated results are mixed.

Hollywood comedies have a tendency to get preachy, so it's no surprise that before the picture ends, Ali must realize that she doesn't have to play a man's game to succeed. She needn't concern herself with what men think: She can make it on her own.

It's almost as if the screenwriters are lecturing both the character and the audience, another instance of a movie that can make you feel as if you're reading a book someone else already has underlined.

Race, not space, the final frontier

A little-known story about the black women who helped make the space program fly.

The old adage constantly seems to be proven wrong. What we don't know usually does hurt us -- or at least makes us intellectually and spiritually poorer.

Consider that while watching Hidden Figures, a movie about the little-known role played by a group of black women in the space program during the 1960s. Director Theodore Melfi deals with a story that has remained as hidden from most Americans as the women who inspired it.

Melfi delineates the racism experienced by black women employed by NASA in a pre-computer world in which humans did the necessary calculations for space missions, confirming the trajectories of rockets, for example. The sophisticated mathematical work conducted by these women was an essential part of NASA's operations.

The story focuses on three women played by a talented trio of actresses: Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monae.

Henson's Katherine Johnson receives the most attention. Johnson, a math whiz, is selected to leave the anonymity of the computation squad and work with the big boys in NASA's Space Task Group during a variety of important missions. Hell, in those days, all the missions seemed important.

Spencer's Dorothy Vaughan quickly realizes that computers eventually would replace the humans who did the calculating. So she learned about computers, and made her charges learn about them, as well. As a result, the women of the black computation pool were fully prepared to continue working when NASA began automating things that previously were done by hand.

It's interesting to recall a time when computers were room-sized; the one purchased by NASA didn't fit through the door to the room where it eventually was housed.

Finally, Monae's Mary Jackson pursues her ambitions by making the transition to a full-fledged engineer, a route that required defiance of Virginia norms in segregated education.

Melfi (St. Vincent) brings upbeat energy to his adaptation of Margot Lee Shatterly's book Hidden Figures: The Untold Story of the African American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race. The movie's star trio is more than equal to the task of showing us the inequities these women faced and the determination it took to overcome them.

We're talking about a time when bathrooms for the races were separate, when educated white engineers had difficulty believing black women possibly could be their equals, and when segregation was so ingrained that Johnson's white co-workers insisted that she drink from her own coffee pot.

Kirsten Dunst portrays an aloof supervisor who refuses to acknowledge that Spencer's Vaughan is doing the work of a supervisor -- work that Dunst's character couldn't begin to tackle. Still, Vaughn receives no extra pay.

Kevin Costner plays the gruff but understanding white guy who focuses on the mission to the exclusion of everything else, including race. Costner's Al Harrison insists that Johnson advance in the hierarchy by joining the Space Task Group. Johnson's skills in analytic geometry are better than anyone else's in the group, he realizes. End of story.

Jim Parsons takes the role of the opposition, a white engineer who has no interest in seeing black women enter a domain previously reserved for white men.

Too few of us know the story of these women, so Hidden Figures instantly qualifies as a revelation. Beyond that Henson, Spencer and Monae are playing women who succeed for reasons that most movie characters -- men and women included -- seldom do: They're smart.

For a movie about math wizards, the story is pretty much told by the numbers, but a talented cast gives Hidden Figures enough freshness to overcome its formulaic moments.

Besides, it's worth remembering that while sophisticated scientists and engineers were trying to reach the stars, social conditions at home didn't always reflect an equal amount of intelligence and daring.

Two romances: one with real signs of life Reviews of The Lucky One, Think Like A Man

Zac Efron and in another adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks novel. Just what we've been waiting for.

Nicholas Sparks seems to write novels that automatically turn themselves into movies; it's almost as if the romantic vapors of Sparks's prose waft off the page and then seep their way into the nation's multiplexes.

The Lucky One, the latest Sparks novel to reach the screen, displays most of the hallmarks of Sparks's re-heated romanticism in a story that focuses on an apparently accidental event that brings two people together.

These Sparks-inspired movies -- and The Lucky One is no exception -- are the dramatic equivalent of elevator music, melding pretty pictures with the kind of soulless drama that allows audiences to guess each line of dialog before a character even recites it. Some people like these carefully packaged, easy-on-the-eyes love stories, which also seem to require the presence of an actor with cred in the hunk department. I'm not a fan.

In this case, Zac Efron plays Logan, a combat-weary Marine who returns from Iraq with a case of post-trauamatic jitters. After a little research, Logan and his faithful German shepherd walk (yes, I said walk) from Colorado to Louisiana to look for a woman (Taylor Schilling) in photograph he found on a bombed-out Iraqi battlefield. He finds her running a small business that boards and grooms dogs.

Logan's about to explain about the snapshot, but Schilling's Beth is focused on something else, and he can't bring himself to tell the story anyway. Instead, he takes a job at the kennel, where he quickly endears himself to the woman's young son (Reily Thomas Stewart) and to her grandmother (Blythe Danner).

Beth is slower to warm to Logan, but we know that she'll eventually fall for him. We also know that there will be obstacles, the principal one arriving in the person of Beth's bullying ex-husband (Jay R. Ferguson), who also happens to be the local sheriff.

And then there's Logan's looming secret about the photograph, which leads to a scene that's supposed to threaten to knock the characters off their pre-determined tracks. We know better: No one in movie such as this gets knocked off his or her tracks.

As the mysterious stranger, Efron gives a minimalist performance, which is a kind way of saying he makes an actor like Channing Tatum, who also has appeared in an adaptation of a novel by Sparks, look expressive. Schilling brings more life to her role, but this is the kind of movie in which acting comes awfully close to posing. Maybe that makes sense. The characters in The Lucky One don't really have relationships; they romp through montages.

Director Scott Hicks, who hasn't exactly been breaking new ground since he came to international notice in 1996 with the much-accalimed Shine, opts to follow the Sparks formula, which means that even Louisiana's fetid, swampy waters emit a lustrous, romantic glow.

Lively, attractive cast brings life to formulaic Think Like a Man

If you're looking for a livelier romantic fantasy than The Lucky One, you may want to try the big-screen adaptation of Steve Harvey's best-selling Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man.

Harvey's book of strategic advice for women isn't exactly a natural source for big-screen entertainment, so don't expect miracles.

Worse yet, the movie seems designed to sell even more copies of Act Like a Lady by making constant references to it or having characters read it while prominently displaying the cover. There's even an appearance by Harvey himself.

One more caveat: Think Like a Man is little more than a glorified sitcom, but it's made tolerable by an attractive cast that manages to add humanity to what amounts to a fantasy set in the world of bright, mostly successful black professionals with a few white folks around the movie's fringes.

I don't know about Harvey's book, but the movie seems to take aim at a thirty-something audience that believes in a post-racial world that we'd all like to believe has arrived -- even if we're not entirely sure it has.

A lavishly appealing cast includes: Meagan Good as Maya, a woman who decides to invoke Harvey's 90-day rule: No sex with a new suitor until three months have passed; Taraji P. Henson as Lauren, a CEO who's skeptical about the Harvey approach, and Regina Hall as a single mom who tries to woo a mama's boy (Terrence J) away from his domineering mother.

The guys, who convene at a small gym for basketball and chat, include Romany Malco, as a budding composer and the movie's resident "play-ah," and Kevin Hart, as the movie's source of comic relief. Jerry Ferrra, familiar from HBO's Entourage where he played the often hapless Turtle, fares better here as an indecisive young man who has the good fortune to be living with Kristen (Gabrielle Union). Fans of this kind of movie will be treated to a self-referential cameo from a slightly older veteran of similar fare, Morris Chesetnut.

I laughed a few times and found the general vibe to be pleasant enough in a movie that at least isn't out to convince us that it's anything more than date-night fluff.