The battle to license a video game

  Alert for gamers: Tetris isn’t a movie based on a video game you’ve probably played at some point in your gaming life. Tetris deals with a different kind of game: hardball business dealings.

  Taron Egerton stars as Henk Rogers, a Dutch-Indonesian entrepreneur who was raised in the US but lives with his wife and kids in Japan. 

   Rogers discovers the game at a trade show, immediately sees its potential, and spends the rest of the movie trying to license it.

  Director Jon S. Baird surrounds Egerton with a strong cast, many of whom play characters who try to thwart Rogers’ ambition. 

   Toby Jones signs on as Robert Stein, a businessman who thought he had purchased the rights to the game.  Roger Allam (as Robert Maxwell) and Anthony Boyle (as Maxwell's son Kevin) further complicate matters as they also jockey for position. 

  Nikita Efremov plays the Russian programmer who invented the game before the fall of the USSR, an oddly marginal figure when the story begins, mostly because of how the Soviets play the licensing game.

    During the Cold War, the state version of Communism dictated that all licensing agreements be made with the Soviet Union, not with  individual inventors.

 That's why Hank visits Moscow, meets with  Soviet bureaucrats, encounters a corrupt Soviet KGB agent, and a translator who seems eager to help.

   For Rodgers the stakes are high; he's betting everything he has on emerging victorious. 

   Tonally, Tetris resembles a spy movie -- only one that revolves around the complex maneuvering of those who seek to work deals with big companies such as Nintendo and Atari.

   How true to life is Noah Pink's screenplay? Beats me, but an action-oriented ending including a car chase seems like a stretch, a last-minute attempt to add thriller flourishes

    Entertaining in parts, Tetris doesn't totally click as a story about a little guy who's trying to make it big, as a movie about international business, or as a depiction of the final days of the Soviet Union. Tetris seems more like a sidebar to the larger stories that form its backdrop.

    On the plus side of the ledger: Egerton's Rogers turns out to be a good-guy hustler whom we root for and animated game-style introductions to various segments help sort things out, at least until they begin to feel repetitive.

  And there’s this: Lively and never dull, Tetris could be the only movie I’ve seen recently in which the outcome hinges on the invention of a hand-held device — Nintendo’s Game Boy — that’s not designed to blow anything up. 

   

'Rocketman': a blast of pop energy

Taron Egerton delivers a major performance in this Elton John biopic.

A simple description of Rocketman makes the movie sound like one more celebrity biopic. Here's how such a summation might go: A boy who feels unloved establishes himself in the world of music, attains international celebrity as a rock star, almost loses himself to sex and drugs, enters rehab in the nick of time and emerges whole.

All true, but of little help in understanding what director Dexter Fletcher achieves with Rocketman, a movie about Elton John, one of rock's most successful artists. Fletcher refreshes genre cliches with storytelling strategies that turn Rocketman into an infectiously energetic look at the life of a rock star.

To begin the story, John -- in a red costume with wings and devil's horns -- marches down a hallway. We suppose that this man in red plumage is about to burst onto a stage, which -- of course -- would be the cliched way to begin a rock 'n' roll biopic. The star emerges. The crowd goes wild. The music begins.

But when John pushes through a set of doors, he's not putting himself on display for adoring fans. He's entering a rehab therapy session where he confesses to a multitude of failings. Among them: alcohol, drug and sex addictions, anger-management problems and shopping issues.

Without wearing it out, Fletcher uses the therapy format to take us back to the childhood John spent in a London neighborhood of British council homes. His mom's mind seems to be elsewhere and his unloving martinet of a father shows no appreciation for the talent of a son who wins a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music.

Fletcher turns this "flashback'' into a beautifully staged musical number, thus tipping his hand. He's not going to allow his filmmaking to be shackled by convention. The movie will stake its claim as a quasi-musical.

I won't say more about Rocketman’s stylistic flourishes. Fletcher includes enough of them to turn the movie into a heady tribute to the pop-cultural energy that's embodied in Taron Egerton's terrific performance as Elton John.

Of course, when a movie runs on so much high energy, it can't help but create a few spaces where the pace lags. Overall, though, Rocketman should appeal to those who enjoy cinema with a creative kick, as well as those who count themselves as Elton John fans.

Key songs are included. They're sung by Egerton who so thoroughly inhabits his character that his performance proves exhaustive and exhausting. I mean that in a good way. Egerton rides the wave of energy that elevates John’s stage presence even as it smashes his off-stage life into walls of pain. What Egerton does qualifies both as an amazing feat of talent and will.

Fletcher doesn't flinch from John's gayness. As his career begins to take hold, the singer falls for John Reid, a music manager (Richard Madden). A self-possessed operator, Reid eventually makes it clear that his approach to John has a cruel business edge. And Elton himself isn't always likable. He flies into rages or submerges himself in drug-induced stupors.

At one point, John tells his longtime collaborator Bernie Taupin (Jamie Bell) that musical ideas pop into his head so quickly he hardly can keep up with them. And that, I suppose, is the key to understanding John's pre-rehab years. He's surfing the waves of his talent, never entirely safe from the big breaker he won't be able to ride. The movie charts John's ascendance quickly, almost a biography in shorthand.

Amid all this, Fletcher tells the story of an unloved child who seems to be appreciated only by his grandmother (Gemma Jones). Matthew Illsley and Kit Connor play John as a boy and an adolescent. The name -- Elton John -- is an invention. The movie shows how the young man born Reginald Dwight -- hit on the name he'd make famous.

Essentially, Rocketman consists of three acts. The first covers John's childhood. The second deals with his meteoric rise to success. In the third, John feeds his ravenous audience -- touring, performing and indulging his addictions. A fourth act -- John's recovery, marriage, and journey into fatherhood -- appears only in information and photos that accompany the end credits.

The supporting performances are all good. Bell creates a loyal friend in Bernie Taupin, a lyricist who eventually must step outside the tornadic spiral of John's success. Handsome and self-assured, Madden’s Reid wins John's heart before the relationship with his client/lover turns sour.

As John's mother, Dallas Bryce Howard paints a telling portrait of a woman whose refusal to be corralled by a stifling marriage leads her down a path that’s not likely to win any mother-of-the-year awards.

Elton John, who's now 72, served as one of the movie's executive producers, so it's fair to wonder what has been elided or omitted entirely. Still, it would be unfair to think of Rocketman as an act of cinematic hagiography. The movie is in love with John's music, but how could a biopic about Elton John be otherwise?

Rocketman includes an attempted suicide and plenty of despair. That's why it feels strange to say that the movie generates a feel-good vibe that follows you out of the theater. Maybe that's because even in the turbulence of John's rollercoaster life, the joy of music and performance can't be denied.

'Kingsman' goes too far, but ....

Not for every taste, but this spy spoof has some kick.

If you're planning to kick some butt, it pays to be well-dressed. We're not talking well-dressed in the sense of neatly pressed jeans and a clean T-shirt. We're talking impeccably tailored Savile Row suits that might cause an opponent to underestimate your ferocity.

The secret agents in the new action comedy Kingsman: The Secret Service base their small, private army (members are named for Knights of the Round Table) at an upscale British clothing store named Kingsman.

The agents of Kingsman do not work for any government; they're privately funded James Bonds who fight for truth, justice and well ... expensive clothes.

This entirely crazy notion fuels a movie from director Matthew Vaughn, who became known to most moviegoers in 2010 for another equally bold action comedy, Kick-Ass.

Kingsman may not be an unalloyed triumph, but its high points soar and its finale -- or should I say many finales -- create a woozy intra-movie competition in which each additional set piece tries to top its predecessor.

That's no easy task for a movie in which the heads (as in craniums) of a group of elites already have exploded, creating gorgeous smears of color that travel upward with silky grace. All of this to the accompaniment of Edgar Elgar's stirringly patriotic Land of Hope and Glory.

Clearly, Kingsman is not a movie for all tastes; it requires a tolerance for mordant humor that brushes up against (but doesn't fully embrace) political satire.

Vaughn has taken on a difficult task: He's out to spoof spy movies without entirely abandoning their pleasures.

That means the movie can be as rash as it is brash.

Consider: At one point, an agent named Galahad (Colin Firth) goes berserk in a fundamentalist Christian church in the U.S., wiping out the entire congregation. It's not possible to say with any certainty whether Vaughn is straining to push the envelope or engaging in a perverse exercise in counter-cultural wish fulfillment.

Behind all Vaughn's bold excess, you'll find a plot of sorts. Firth plays an agent who recruits a street tough (Taron Egerton) for Kingsman. The movie follows Egerton's character as he trains to become a Kingsman, competing with other hopefuls for the lone open spot.

Of course, there's a villain. Samuel L. Jackson plays Valentine, a genius who wears Yankee baseball caps, lisps (huh?) and has contrived a brutal population reduction scheme that he believes will save the planet.

Valentine's aide (Sofia Boutella) has two, spring-loaded prosthetic legs that look like those that carried Oscar Pistorious to fame in the Olympics. These artificial limbs are also equipped with blades that can cut a man in half as neatly as you please.

Michael Caine adds a bit of gravitas as Arthur, the seasoned veteran who runs the Kingsman operation.

Now, when someone attempts a movie such as Kingsman, chances are that some of its violence will cross lines that shouldn't be crossed. In this area, you'll have plenty of eligible candidates.

Recognize, though, that Vaughn has tried to make a movie that might be called a "violent romp." When it's working -- which I'd say is more than half the time -- Kingsman is a kick.