Director: Tate Taylor
Runtime: 138 minutes
If Hollywood is listening properly, they will know that a new star has come roaring to life. Chadwick Boseman, who previously starred as Jackie Robinson in last year's 42, is here to make a case for himself, and he does so thrillingly. Moving from the world of sports to music, Boseman's performance as James Brown - the Godfather of Soul himself - is an electric take on an icon that easily transcends mere mimicry. The film around him, as directed by Tate Taylor (The Help), is quite good as well, but it's Boseman who undeniably leaves the biggest mark in Get On Up, which is only appropriate, given the Godfather's massive legacy.
Though Get On Up does cover the majority of its subject's life, Taylor and screenwriters Jez and John-Henry Butterworth have sidestepped the Achilles heel of such an approach. As opposed to something like J. Edgar, which moved in mostly linear fashion and came off as a greatest hits tale, Get On Up jumps around in time in a style closer to Ray. One minute, we're in Brown's childhood, the next, we're somewhere in the middle of his career, and then we're somewhere around his first big break. At the very least, this choice of structure keeps the film from falling into the creaky arc used by so many showbiz biopics.
The Butterworth brothers' script is certainly comprehensive, and Taylor has evolved nicely from the nice, but somewhat schmaltzy emotions of The Help. Only as the film enters its final lap does the structure feel less elegantly thought out. Rather than have one framing device to act as a narrative hub, Get On Up has three or four (I think). Some don't even seem like framing devices until, late in the game, the film suddenly returns to a setting to mark an important development. The film's last half hour or so isn't exactly messy, but it is a bit cluttered.
Yet overall the storytelling is solid, and it certainly avoids the heavy drudgery that so many showbiz films fall into (the film touches on Brown's drug use, but never becomes mired in it). However, there are a few areas that might have benefitted from just a bit more probing, namely Brown's sometimes abusive relationship with his first wife, and his own musical inspirations. Regarding the latter area, yes, it's true that Brown was a trailblazer in multiple ways, but a richer look at the actual influences would have been beneficial. At the very least, the film does capture the relationships between Brown and the public, the establishment, and the socio-political environments that shifted during his lifetime (sometimes directly because of him).
All in all, it's a solid film that's immensely watchable, though so much of that is owed to Mr. Boseman himself. 42 proved that he could hold his own at the center of the film. Get On Up proves that he can absolutely burst through it. It's a big, barn-burner of a performance that feels entirely complete, despite some limitations imposed by the PG-13 rating. Boseman (who plays Brown from 16 into his 60s) so effortlessly inhabits the man's skin that the mere feat of talking and sounding like him quickly ceases to be a simple sketch show gimmick. In the film's biggest and smallest moments, he shines as bright as the sun, embodying the Godfather's big personality and showmanship (on and offstage) with riveting results. Boseman also holds his own musically. Though many of the big performance scenes had the actor lip sync, in other scenes it's Boseman's own voice. The resemblance is pretty damn impressive.
The film establishes that Brown could easily hold his own as a solo artist, and that his bandmates were easily replaceable (at least in the eyes of music execs). The same applies to Boseman and the rest of the ensemble. Though big names like Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer, and Dan Aykroyd help round out the cast, their overall contributions are dwarfed by Boseman's hurricane-strength turn. However, Nelson Ellis (of TV's True Blood) as Brown's right hand man Bobby Byrd, does nicely as the diplomatic co-leader of Brown's musical entourage. And Davis, despite a tiny role, lends convincing gravitas to a stock character (albeit one based on a real person).
So even though Get On Up may not shoot up to the top tier of musical biopics, it certainly cements itself as a solid (and very lively) piece of entertainment. Biopics that span decades of a subject's life outstayed their welcome somewhere in the last decade, but Get On Up proves that the subgenre isn't quite dead yet. If that means more star-making vehicles for actors like Chadwick Boseman, then that's hardly a bad thing. Hollywood is always looking for the next Brad Pitt or Johnny Depp. It's rarely looking for the next Denzel Washington (if it was, Idris Elba would be everywhere by now) or Viola Davis. Here's hoping that enough people take notice of Boseman's towering take on a supernova-sized icon, and move him closer to the place in the stars he deserves to occupy.
Grade: B
Director: Bong Joon-ho
Runtime: 126 minutes
It's somehow fitting that a film like Snowpiercer opens on the same weekend as the latest Transformers product. Together, the pair represent opposite ends of a spectrum of would-be summer blockbusters, even if Snowpiercer's background and limited release dooms it to be confined mostly to art houses. Yet even though Transformers will rake in obscene amounts of money, it's Snowpiercer that really deserves to pack in the crowds at the theater. Chameleonic South Korean director Bong Joon-ho's English language debut is a resounding success, one that blends pulpy genre tropes with first class filmmaking. Transformers is what Hollywood thinks its blockbusters should be. Snowpiercer is what they should actually strive towards.
Though post-apocalyptic settings are hardly new by this point, Snowpiercer's main set-up certainly moves it far ahead of the pack. The year is 2031, and after a disastrous attempt to counter climate change, Earth has been completely frozen over. Humanity's last few remainders are stranded not in the icy wasteland, but on an advanced train designed to circle the globe in perpetual motion.
Life on the train is good. That is, if you entered it as a member of the wealthy elite. While the 1% still live lives of comfort and luxury in their numerous train cars, everyone else is crammed into the slum-like tail end. For the downtrodden masses, including Curtis (Chris Evans), the gross inequality needs to be overturned. Unfortunately, that involves finding a way to break through the security forces and steel gates that prevent them from accessing the train's middle and front sections.
English-language debuts can prove troublesome for foreign-born directors. For Snowpiercer, the results were almost disastrous. Harvey Weinstein fought with Joon-ho over a specific American cut that would be 20 minutes shorter, and include heavy voice-over work to fill in the plot gaps. Thankfully after plenty of sensationalized exchanges between director and distributor/producer, Joon-ho emerged victorious. Whether you take to it or not, it feels instantly like it belongs along side the director's Korean-set films, which run the gamut from police procedural to monster movie.
Of course, when foreign sensibilities collide with the English language, there can be some bumpiness along the way. The current South Korean New Wave cinema is known not only for mashing genres together, but also tones. Gruesome violence and chaos is often puntuated by humor that ranges from darkly satirical to broad and slapstick. It's an easy thing to lose in translation (despite being a South Korean-American co-production, 95% of the film is in English).
Yet Joon-ho and Kelly Masterson, in adapting the acclaimed French graphic novel "Le Transperceneige," have retained the former's sense of humor, while still making the whole enterprise quite accessible to average audience members. Joon-ho's style and vision may have been translated, but the finished product shows that such translation can occur without any watering down.
This becomes apparent the moment Minister Mason (a thoroughly hagged-up Tilda Swinton) first enters the scene. While punishing a disruptive passenger, Mason delivers a monologue about the train's pre-ordained order that is both terrifying in its implications and rich with black humor. Swinton, decked out in fake teeth and ugly prosthetics, has an absolute bawl with the role. The actress turns her native Scottish accent up to 11, not so much chewing the scenery as swallowing it in a single lascivious gulp. It's smartly over-the-top work that inspires just the right amount of laughter and nervous familiarity. Whatever fantastical pseudo-science has been worked into Snowpiercer's world, the echoes of truth presented remain unnerving.
The rest of the cast are, in their own ways, perfectly in tune with Joon-ho's vision. Yet rather than keep everyone entirely on the same wavelength, the director makes some go broader, while others stay more grounded. Evans trades in his optimisitic, clean-cut Captain America look for a grizzled, haunted stoicism, and proves he's up to the task of carrying more than just super-hero fare. While cast members like Swinton, Bremmer, and Octavia Spencer go bigger, Evans holds the film together without being left as a boring audience cipher. As the casualties mount and the scenario grows grimmer, the actor's more genuine acting style helps Snowpiercer stay firmly on the rails. His interactions with John Hurt and Joon-ho regular Song Kang-ho are a nice counterweight for the film's bigger, flashier moments.
Yet when Snowpiercer gets to its claustrophobically entertaining stretches, Joon-ho and his technical collaborators keep everything flowing along beautifully. Hong Kyung-po's cinematography and camera-work creates plenty of space within the various train cars, all of which are brilliantly conceived by Ondrej Nekvasil and Stefan Kovacik. The variation of the train cars, especially as the rebel masses push forward, is not only beautifully varied, but it plays nicely into the film's visual representation of how much the 1% have, while the rest are confined to cramped squalor.
And when the action sequences arrive, Joon-ho ensures that they pop. His use of slow-motion, particularly in one tableau-like shot of Evans wielding an axe, is put to smart effect. Some action beats are more frenetically shot, and the director knows when to slow things down to really let the viewer drink in everything that's happening in the frame. Marco Beltrami's score, though it lacks any distinctive themes, is a perfect compliment to everything going around, enhancing the atmosphere without drawing too much attention to itself.
In Snowpiercer, Joon-ho and company have walked on quite the filmmaking tightrope, making the film's success that much more impressive. Snowpiercer provides the sci-fi thrills and bloody violence, yet it also has quite a bit on its mind regarding distribution of wealth, resources, and our treatment of the environment. Films like Memories of Murder and The Host (the monster movie, not the dreadful teen sci-fi romance) have some pointed commentary about South Korean officials. Snowpiercer's target is bigger, and smartly amplified by the occasional glimpses of the outside world; the failure at the top of the food chain to respond to climate change won't be selective in its victims. It may not be subtle, but that doesn't mean the handling of the execution here lacks elegance.
And with a runtime just over two hours, it's hard to find a moment worth jettisoning. Snowpiercer is a film that knows how to use its time well to truly build up characters and tension, as brief as certain performances are. Editing ensures that the film's set pieces and contemplative moments are carefully paced, allowing neither to drag or throw things out of balance. One could have easily trimmed down a scene involving an elementary school for the wealthy, and their eerily enthusiastic teacher (Alison Pill), but the scene's inclusion only enriches the rest of the story.
Despite the bleakness of Snowpiercer's message, however, the film never sinks into full blown misery. Joon-ho and Masterson have beautifully merged entertainment and message so that each compliments the other. In a way, Swinton's Mason character is onto something. Balance is key to success. Yet where Mason's idea of balance stems from nonsensical notions of a pre-ordained hierarchy, Bong Joon-ho's idea of balance involves actively working to achieve a much more equitable sense of harmony. Blockbusters don't need to be all razzle dazzle or all overly serious brooding. They can, in fact, take the best of both sides of the coin and merge them into something singular and spectacular.
Grade: B+/A-
Director: Ryan Coogler
Runtime: 85 minutes
At the Q&A session after a screening of Fruitvale Station, director Ryan Coogler said that he felt more connected to characters whose lives unfolded over mere hours, versus characters whose lives take up decades on the big screen. This take on time and character is the driving force behind Coogler's writing and directing debut, which took the top prize at this year's Sundance Film Festival. By keeping his 85-minute film's focus largely on a few hours of his protagonist's life, Coogler achieves an intimacy and power that would have likely been diluted had he tried to expand the scope. Fruitvale Station (originally titled Fruitvale) is more than just a remarkable debut. It's a beautiful film about life and second chances that feels like the work of a socially conscious veteran filmmaker.
Moments of Fruitvale Station may be embellished or even entirely made up, but the film opens with the blunt truth: cell-phone footage of 22 year-old Oscar Grant III (played in the film by Michael B. Jordan), being violently abused, and subsequently shot to death, by police at a train station. The footage is heavily pixelated, but its impact is undeniable. With this key moment out of the way, Coogler then rewinds, and jumps into Grant's life in the hours leading up to that fateful incident on New Year's Day.
What Coogler accomplishes with his take on Grant's final hours is a deeply human treatment of his subject without turning him into a saint. Even with the inevitability of Grant's death established at the outset, Coogler and his talented cast create an atmosphere that, for all of its narrative ups and downs, is a celebration of life. Jordan, best known for his work on the acclaimed TV series The Wire and Friday Night Lights, delivers a star-making, naturalistic performance as Grant. A young man capable of extreme tenderness and spontaneous rage, Oscar clearly wants to turn his life around (a brief flashback informs us that he was once imprisoned).
As he suffers both setbacks (his boss' refusal to rehire him at the local supermarket) and minor triumphs (his relationship with his daughter), Coogler avoids the one pitfall that could have sunk his film. Rather than hammer home Oscar's upcoming death at every turn, Fruitvale Station remains life-affirming even when Oscar fails. Take away the story's tragic end, and what remains is a simple (but not simplistic) and effective character portrait, told with smart efficiency. With straightforward camera-work and direction, the film is emotional, without ever becoming cloying. Coogler's script may not go to the absolute depths of Oscar's negative traits, but he still manages to give a sense of fully understanding his complex protagonist.
And even though the film is all about Oscar, Coogler never simplifies the people he interacts with. We may not have quite the same level of interaction with Oscar's girlfriend Sophina (Melonie Diaz), or his mother (Octavia Spencer), but they exist as more than mere sounding boards to show us another angle of Oscar's personality. It's a credit to both Coogler and Diaz that Sophina comes off as a compassionate and understandable character, rather than a stereotypical shrill girlfriend. Sophina rarely cuts Oscar slack, but it comes from a place of tough (at, at times, very frustrated) love, rather than lazy one-note bitchy antagonism.
Yet it's Spencer who nearly runs away with the film in her minimal screen time. In the aforementioned prison flashback, the actress is able to communicate a detailed and textured relationship with her son. The inherent mother-child love is there, but so is the conflict and dismay at some of his decisions. In a film that, out of necessity, is mostly focused on one character, Spencer's vital supporting turn is packed with tiny moments and nuances that elevate it miles above a stock mother character. Compassionate, yet never manipulative or histrionic, Spencer is as much the heart of the film as Oscar.
When it comes to the death of Oscar Grant, issues of race and racial profiling are necessary aspects of the conversation. For Coogler, however, the intent appears to be less about throwing up a middle finger to unjust profiling so much as it is to celebrate the lives of people who, for all of their faults, are trying their hardest to better themselves and make their way in life. Even when the film's recreation of the New Year's Day shooting arrives, Coogler smartly refuses to slip into heavy-handed political sermonizing. As overly aggressive as the train station police officers are, they are never turned into mindless thugs or mustache-twirling villains, even as they remain the guilty party.
Fruitvale Station clearly has the power to lend some texture to discussions on modern day race and racism, yet the film is mature enough to function completely outside of that realm as well. Whether it's taken as nothing more than a tragic character study, or as a statement on the way snap-judgements and profiling dehumanize certain segments of the population, Coogler's film is a standout debut, one whose Sundance hype appears to have been fully justified.
Grade: B+
