Fatale: A shiny surface with pulp beneath

 

     It always starts with infidelity.

    An otherwise successful man veers from the straight-and-narrow by sleeping with an alluring woman who seems free of any moral constraints. Of course, it’s an illusion and his slip will lead to catastrophic consequences.

    Fatale — which stars Hilary Swank and Michael Ealy— presents itself as an unashamed piece of pulp entertainment that bends itself out of shape trying to add new wrinkles to a Fatal Attraction formula. 

     Ealy portrays Derrick Taylor, a  highly successful sports agent and partner in a super-profitable company. Swank’s Valerie Quinlan, the movie’s femme fatale, is a detective.

    I won’t say more other than to tell you that Derrick winds up as the suspect in a double murder that introduces more infidelities and betrayals into an already strained plot.

    Director Deon Taylor takes full advantage of the upscale aspirations of his characters. Derrick's home proves magazine-worthy and even Valerie's downtown loft seems stylish and desirable. 

    Put another way, just about everyone in the movie seems to have lost touch with the meaning of the words “middle class.” 

    At the same time, the screenplay by David Loughery imagines that the nouveau-riche sports agents — who happen to be black — can’t entirely escape motivations that push them into dangerous territory.

    Whatever the movie has to say about race comes across as inadvertent as Fatale tries to score with a mixture of glitz and voyeurism to which it applies dabs of violence and motivation.

    Mike Colter appears as Derrick's partner, a businessman who's eager to sell the firm, and Damaris Lewis appears as Derrick's beautiful wife. Neither actor gets much chance to stand-out.

    Danny Pino portrays a corrupt councilman who once was married to Valerie and now has custody of their daughter.

    Swank gives Valerie just enough suggestions of sanity to create some doubt about her motivations but formula demands that her character yield to the required extremes. 

    The rest of the cast serves the story but Fatale winds up as another helping of glamorized nonsense that shows little interest in anything more than its own glossy surface.

A musical that's all exclamation points!!!

   

      Garish and bubbly, The Prom makes no attempt to disguise its message, something on the order of the now-familiar yard sign that says, "We believe love is love." 

     Put another way, The Prom  tells us that a high school senior who happens to be a lesbian should be treated no differently than any other teenager. She should be able to attend her high school prom with her girlfriend.

     Of course, if Emma (Jo Ellen Pellman) were easily able to attend the prom with her girlfriend (Ariana DeBose), there's no movie ...

    So.....

    Director Ryan Murphy, working from a screenplay by Bob Martin and Chad Beguelin, does what the Broadway production of The Prom did: He follows a scenario in which four not-entirely-successful Broadway actors travel to middle America -- specifically Indiana -- to oppose the bigoted forces that want to cancel the prom because they're outraged at the prospect of having "a gay prom."

    To make the movie version, the filmmakers have swallowed an A-list pill, employing the services of Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman, and James Cordon. 

    Watching The Prom, I wondered whether every cast member was required to down a case of Red Bull before filming. If you like high energy, The Prom provides it and for the first hour or so it works so hard to be giddy you can almost feel it sweat.

    Streep portrays Dee Dee Allen, a diva of Broadway musicals, who -- along with Cordon's Barry Glickman -- is coming off a massive flop, a musical about Eleanor Roosevelt. 

     In trying to assay what went wrong, Barry, who describes himself as "gay as a box of wigs,” decides that the actors must change their images. They must prove that they're not narcissists, that care about something.

    Joined by chorus girl Angie (Kidman) and actor turned bartender Trent Oliver (Andrew Rannells), they set out for Indian to support Ellen's efforts to attend her prom. 

     In Indiana, they find a principal (Keegan-Michael Key) who's totally on their side and who happens to be a fan and long-time admirer of Streep's character, so much so that the story later takes a love tilt in his direction.

     Opposition to the gay prom is led by Kerry Washington's Mrs. Greene, whose daughter, it turns out, is (what else?) gay.

      The Prom -- with songs such as One Thing's Universal -- can't help but fall prey to obvious right-thinking, surrendering f the mild satirical bristle that marks the movie's first half.

     There's no faulting the performances. Kidman happily accepts a second-fiddle role that's enliven by Zazz, one of the movie's signature numbers. Cordon may have been born to appear in musicals and Rannells has fun as a failing actor who consoles himself with reminders that he once attended Juilliard.

      Streep knows how to do diva and gives it her all.

      At 131 minutes, the whole thing goes on a bit too long and the movie's mixture of glitz and sincerity won't raise the curtain on every viewer's enthusiasm. Me, for example: I'm not one to surrender to material that's delivered with nothing but exclamation points. I tended to forget each song, the minute it ended. 

       Yes, The Prom has its moments, but on screen it often feels as if it has been factory produced to become a hit. Damn, if it doesn't want to please the daylights out of us.

    

    

A whimsical (heaven help us) romcom

 

     Writer/director John Patrick Shanley's new movie -- Wild Mountain Thyme -- takes place in Ireland where Emily Blunt and Jamie Dornan star as a couple of farmers who've known each other all their lives. 

     Their families own adjacent farms, but Blunt's mother (Dearbhla Molloy) refuses to sell a strip of land to Dornan's father Tony (Christopher Walken). 

  Although this squabble over land creates mild tension, the bulk of the movie involves the halting relationship between Blunt's Rosemary and Dornan's Anthony. 

    The savvy Rosemary understands that they're supposed to be together. Preternatural shyness keeps Anthony from popping the question. 

    Shanley sets us up for a flavorful romcom, but whimsy, romance, and occasional splashes of rue aren't enough to give this adaptation of a Shanley stage play (Outside Mullingar) new life. 

   Trailers for Wild Mountain Thyme riled the Irish press. The movie was mocked for cliched Irish accents that seemed tailored for characters who felt as if they'd been drawn from fantasy. 

    Fair enough and casting Walken as an Irish father with a highly variable accent doesn't help.

    American audiences, who may not be quite so unhinged by the accents, will find an otherwise slender movie in which Blunt gives the stand-out performance.

     Frank and cynical, Rosemary knows what she wants. She doesn't need to be romanced. She's eager to arrive at the destination. Reticent but not lacking in self-insight, Dornan's Anthony doesn't make for the most interesting counterpoint to Rosemary's determination.

     The arrival of an American cousin (a bland Jon Hamm) threatens the already tenuous relationship between Rosemary and Anthony.     

    Scenes that are intended to be funny (Anthony practicing his proposal speech by kneeling before a donkey) don't quite work  and Shanley's effort to preserve the play's darker currents don't really pay off. Rain soaks several scenes and an early encounter involving Walken and Molloy is steeped in talk of death.

     Shanley gives the characters a wary sense of skepticism, but  for all its trying, Wild Mountain Thyme doesn't stir the heart. 

     Shanley, who wrote and directed Doubt (2008), also wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay for Moonstruck (1987), a charmer that was directed by Norman Jewison. Those were two strong movies, but this time, attempts at quirky authenticity feel strained.

     Weird, no? In Wild Mountain Thyme, what must have been intended as idiosyncratic and flavorful too often feels stereotypical.

      

African immigrants in Brooklyn

By nature, stories about immigrants are tales of adjustment. In Farewell Amor, immigrants must not only adapt to a new country but to one another. Having fled Angola, Walter (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine) has been in the US for 17 years. After almost two decades, Walter has succeeded in bringing his wife Esther (Zainab Jah) and his teenage daughter (Jayme Lawson) to the US. By the time, mother and daughter arrive,  Walter's adjustment to a new life has radically altered his ability to accept some of the ways he left behind. During his 17 years in the US, Walter earned his living driving a taxi. He also developed a relationship with Linda (Nana Mensah), a nurse. His  daughter, an infant when he left Africa, is a virtual stranger to him. His wife's religious devotion no longer makes sense to him. Director Ekwa Msangi divides the story into three acts, each focused on the perspective of one of the principal characters. Msangi enriches the film with nicely observed scenes illuminating Brooklyn's immigrant Africa culture and Joie Lee registers as a neighbor who advises Esther about how to navigate this somewhat free-form world. Dancing plays a role in the movie. Both father and daughter see dance as an important means of self-expression. By the time the movie concludes, we have a sense that we've lived with these characters. Happily, Msangi isn't out to vilify anyone. He knows these characters and he wants us to know them, as well.

Three friends on an uneasy crossing

 

     Some viewers may decide that Steven Soderbergh's new movie reminds them of the work of John Cassavetes. Dialogue in Let Them All Talk can feel improvised, the movie's structure  slowly reveals character and the whole enterprise relies heavily on its actors.

     The same could be said about most Cassavetes movies. But Cassavetes often seemed to elbow his way toward urgent truths that were deeply embodied in performance. Soderbergh's approach is more casual, elegant even.

     Working from a screenplay by Deborah Eisenberg, Soderbergh places his cast on the Queen Mary 2 as they journey from New York to London. Luxe onboard settings can't entirely calm the tensions that ripple among three women played by Meryl Streep, Candice Bergen and Dianne Wiest. 

    Streep's Alice Hughes has sponsored the trip, which Soderbergh filmed on an actual eight-day Atlantic crossing.

    A novelist, Alice has been awarded a literary prize and must travel to London to receive it. She refuses to fly so her publisher books her on the Queen Mary 2. She insists that she take two friends from college along. 

     And let's be honest: The suites, decks and restaurants on the Queen Mary II give the movie an additional layer of pleasure.

     Bergen's Roberta lives in Texas.  Because her marriage to a wealthy man crumbled, she's been reduced to selling lingerie in a department store.  A Seattle resident, Wiest's Susan devotes her life to advocating for women in prison.

     Alice's nephew Tyler (Lucas Hedges) accompanies his aunt, as well. Young and smart, he's supposed to keep tabs on Alice's friends while she attends to her latest manuscript. 

     Alice doesn't know that her literary agent (Gemma Chan)  also has boarded the ship. She's eager to learn whether Alice's new the new book will be a sequel to her best-received work. 

     Bergen gives the movie's most outsized performance.   Dressed in near-parodic Texas style, Robert overtly scans the ship for wealthy prospects, as if her rights have been violated by no longer being rich. 

      Roberta also believes that Alice appropriated part of her life for her book. She feels betrayed and does her best to keep contact with Alice to a minimum.

     Initially, Wiest's Susan seems the most timid of the three, but as the story unfolds, she emerges as a woman of substance. She and Roberta often are seen playing games (Scrabble or Monopoly). When she wins, Susan turns a simple phrase into a surprisingly resonant statement of character.

     "Bow down, bitch," she orders Roberta. 

      To further complicate matters, Alice not only must contend with her friends but with the presence on the ship of Kelvin Kranz (Dan Algrant), a super-successful mystery writer.

     Despite initial efforts to belittle Kelvin, Alice eventually acknowledges that he's a decent man who speaks perceptively about her work. Alice, of course, sees herself as a literary figure. A formulaic writer, Kranz neither deludes himself nor apologizes for what he is.

      So what about Streep? Her portrait of Alice might be the most meticulously conceived of the three women. Alice never seems entirely comfortable around her old college pals or perhaps anyone else for that matter. Sometimes, it seems as if speech has become an effort for her. 

     Let Them All Talk demands one more comment. When aging male actors are brought together for movies, they usually try to reenact their youths, often making fools of themselves.

     Here, we watch three accomplished actors flirting with cliche but subverting it in favor of something Soderbergh has the good sense to appreciate: The imaginative exploration of character.

A movie about men and their crazy ideas

 

If Another Round, the latest film from director Thomas Vinterberg, is any indication, Denmark might be badly in need of a national 12-step program.  As the title suggests, Another Round takes on the subject of excessive drinking, tying it to the sagging ego of its main character, a high school teacher convincingly played by Mads Mikkelsen. 

    Mikkelsen portrays Martin, a middle-aged man who seems to have lost his Mojo. He's become an indifferent teacher and husband. His wife (Maria Bonnevie) works nights and he doesn't pay a lot of attention to his teenage children. 

    The story kicks in when Martin attends the 40th birthday celebration of a colleague (Magnus Millang). As the evening’s designated driver, Martin initially resists taking a drink but finally decides to join the party.

     Not long after this celebratory night, Martin has an idea. Citing a Norwegian psychologist, he suggests that he and his pals test a hypothesis that claims they all need to raise their alcohol content by .5 points. The four men agree. Suddenly, they begin to snap out of their doldrums. Martin once again reaches his students and his cronies seem to be faring equally well. 

   It takes no crystal ball to predict where all this alcohol consumption will take the men, especially when they decide to push things to dangerous heights. Physical ed teacher Tommy (Thomas Bo Larsen) fares worst and Vinterberg doesn't shy from questions about addiction. 

    But what keeps Another Round from becoming another cautionary tale about excessive consumption is its recognition that men living deadened lives are willing to risk everything to feel the soaring intensity of being fully alive, of breaking from the routine that seems to have numbed them all.

      Sure, these guys should have known better than to fool with a substance that has life-wrecking potential but Vinterberg isn't one to wag a finger in the faces of characters who’ve chosen obviously ruinous paths. Together with Mikkelsen, he makes the movie’s theme clear: Martin becomes a case study in what can happen to men when all sense of promise drains from their lives. 

Two fine actors, one muddled mess

Some movies just don't work -- nearly from start to finish.

Director April Mullen's Wander, a thriller starring Aaron Eckhart and Tommy Lee Jones, fits the description. Muddled to the max, Wander tells the story of Arthur Bretnik (Eckhart), a former cop who spends his time investigating conspiracy theories. Bretnik is the quintessential emotionally wounded man: An automobile accident resulted in the death of his daughter. As a further result of the crash, his now hospitalized wife (Nicole Steinwedell) has withdrawn into a catatonic state. Did all this havoc result from a crash or was the crash representative of something more sinister? Arthur occupies himself with an assignment: A woman asks him to look into the death of her daughter. A major question arises: Is Bretnik a nut or is he really onto something -- with help, of course, from his pal Jimmy Cleats (Jones)? Arthur and Jimmy host an amateur radio show in which conspiracy-minded folks call in to vent and air their thoughts. Not worth belaboring, Wander is one of those WTF movies that drowns inside its endless convolutions, dodges, and cuts.  The overall confusion breeds wide-eye disbelief and offers the viewer little choice but to give up caring.

Scarred by war, she visits Luxor

 

Sometimes a movie can be so inward-looking it threatens to vanish inside its own navel. That may be the case with Luxor, a movie about a physician who has been emotionally scarred by serving in a Syrian war zone. 

  Luxor is one of those movies in which setting, performance, and atmosphere far outweigh anything that might be considered a plot. 

   Andrea Riseborough plays Hana, a doctor who has chosen to take a bit of R&R in a city whose main tourist attraction consists of ancient tombs and temples, sobering reminders of lost civilizations.

   Director Zeina Durra builds her movie around Riseborough, who conveys deep spiritual fatigue, delivering a solitary aria of self-imposed isolation. 

    The film's main interaction brings Hana into a chance reunion with Sultan (Karim Saleh), a Yale-based archaeologist who's doing a stint in Luxor. 

    Durra hints that Hana may have wanted to see Sultan and we feel as though their relationship once involved a deeper connection than what we're now seeing. 

    But what are we seeing? 

    Hana does touristy things. She has a meaningless but regrettable sexual encounter. She comes to the aid of a woman who passes out while touring a temple. She wanders outside of the luxury hotel where she has taken up temporary residence. She has conversations, mostly initiated by others. 

   Durra makes intermittent use of music, but for the most part, Luxor feels encased in tomb-like quiet with Hana attempting to touch a long-vanished past. 

    Clearly, Hana needs some kind of rebirth before traveling to her next assignment in Yemen.  

    A man of generous spirit, Sultan provides a strong contrast with Hana. Significantly, his memory hasn't been marred as has Hana's. It's as if she's depriving herself of the sensory input that triggers memory, perhaps because for Hana the act of remembering means recalling scenes of unspeakable horror. 

    Honesty compels me to say that I didn't quite know what to make of Luxor. Durra and her cast make the movie seem entirely believable as a portrait of westerners in an Arab country but, for me, its purpose never comes clearly into focus.

    It's possible that Luxor springs from an unresolvable contradiction: It asks us to involve ourselves with a person who’s — at least — temporarily lost her taste for involvement.

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

      Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, a big-screen adaptation of August Wilson's 1982 play, may make you sorrowful. It did me. Not only does the material contain a fair measure of heartbreak but it also marks the last performance by Chadwick Boseman, the actor who died of colon cancer last August at the age of 43. 

    Best known for playing T'Challa in Black Panther, Boseman also portrayed a variety of signature historical figures -- Jackie Robinson, Thurgood Marshall, and James Brown.  

     Ma Rainey offered Boseman a different kind of opportunity. He plays Levee, a mercurial trumpet player with a fiery temper and a big talent. Levee plays trumpet in a band assembled by Ma Rainey (Viola Davis), a woman known as Mother of the Blues.  Levee's talent may be too big for Ma, who keeps tight control over the music she performs.

     Director George C. Wolfe's playing with an A-team. In addition to Boseman and Davis, he's helped in his efforts by Glynn Turman, who plays Toledo, and Colman Domingo who portrays Cutler, two other members of Ma's musical ensemble.

     Although Wolfe attempts to open the play for the screen, there's no mistaking Ma Rainey’s origins as a powerhouse piece of theater, even as performances from Boseman and Davis ignite the sparks of conflict.

     Much of the movie takes place in a Chicago basement room where the band members await Ma's arrival. They're getting ready for a recording session, having just blown in from one of Ma's gangbuster tours of the Black south. The year: 1927.

     As portrayed by Davis, Ma is a woman of tornadic force. She wants things her way -- and if that means holding up the session while someone runs to the store to get her a bottle of Coca Cola then that's how things will be. 

    Ma has her eye on Levee for other than musical reasons. Her lover (Taylour Paige) has caught Levee's attention. He has no qualms about moving in on the highly territorial Ma, a woman so strong-willed she insists that her stuttering nephew (Dusan Brown) deliver a spoken introduction to one of her signature tunes. 

     A complex character, Levee wants to start his own band. He has a taste for independence: Wilson gives him a monologue that allows us to understand the raging forces that incite his mood shifts, as well as his refusal to kowtow to the older members of Ma's band.

     Wilson's play includes plenty of emotive fireworks and the supporting cast sets them off with old-pro precision that does justice to each character and to the movie's larger themes, among them, the way whites exploit black talent. 

     A fine cast makes us feel every bit of humor and sting in Wilson's writing, but Ma Rainey's Black Bottom has an effect Wilson couldn't have anticipated: It leaves us wondering at the cruel fate that ended Boseman's life too soon.