Blu-ray Review: Black Nativity (2013)

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As diverse as director Kasi Lemmons’s impressive yet varied filmography has been since the actress turned filmmaker burst onto the scene with the masterful indie Eve’s Bayou (which she later followed up with the misunderstood, ambitious yet uneven Caveman’s Valentine and the terrific underrated Don Cheadle starring Talk To Me), Lemmons has always been attracted to tales of complicated family relationships.

Usually centered on a fractured dynamic between father and child (with a particular focus on father/daughter dramatics), it’s no wonder that Lemmons has stated that her favorite film is Denmark’s debut Dogme 95 dramedy feature The Celebration from director Thomas Vinterberg, in which grown children square off against their abusive patriarch.

Yet as drawn as she is to the heavy-hitting tales of domestic woe, Lemmons also has a strong appreciation for the power of music to convey what words cannot – similar to the way she uses the tools at her disposal via her cinematographer’s camera and editing eye to tell a story in a multitude of ways that require multiple senses to understand.

To this end, she confessed to NPR that the Fox Searchlight distributed Once from director John Carney is the one film she could watch a million times. And what better place to merge her love of music with the topical themes that fuel her work than Fox Searchlight, where she spent nearly six years working to get her own adaptation of poet turned playwright Langston Hughes’s holiday themed gospel pageant production Black Nativity to the big screen.

A stellar achievement due to the talent on both sides of the camera given the star-studded cast of Oscar award nominees and recipients from Forest Whitaker to Angela Bassett and Jennifer Hudson combined with music producer Raphael Saadiq, Black Nativity is a lovely if understated musical adaptation. As such, it does in fact owe more to the influence of Carney’s naturalistic Once than the genre razzle dazzle of recent musical theater cinematic interpretations like Dreamgirls, Chicago and Nine.

Using Langston Hughes’s own life and legacy to inspire in addition to the landmark nativity play, Lemmons sets out to honor his version of Harlem (wherein he once famously stated he’d rather be a lamppost than the governor of Georgia).

Resisting the temptation to set the film in the past, Lemmons compromises with a presentation of contemporary life that’s been heightened with both magical realism and old-fashioned wholesomeness. And even though it tackles issues from teen pregnancy to crime, Black Nativity reminds us that while times have changed, the same issues facing pervade regardless of race, class or religion.

Rather than opting to go for a straightforward adaptation of the African-American retelling of the birth of Jesus, Lemmons infuses the themes of the storyline in a new narrative as we’re introduced to Jennifer Hudson’s hardworking single mother Naima.

After being evicted and doubling up on jobs and shifts over the Christmas holiday, Naima reluctantly sends her teenage son (aptly named Langston and played by Jacob Latimore) to stay with his estranged grandparents in the form of Whitaker’s proud reverend and Bassett’s supportive wife.

Desperate to uncover the truth about his mother’s own relationship with the two who, despite being pillars of their community given their well-attended sermons at Holy Resurrection Church, have never been a part of their daughter and grandson’s life, the angry Langston finds himself in the middle of a family mystery involving his own birth.

And while admittedly you can see one key plot twist coming as inevitably Langston crosses paths with his own father (whom he has never met), Lemmons does an admirable job of layering the two interrelated plot strands together so that all of the characters cross paths in a dramatic finale wherein the secrets of the past that are still holding everyone back are finally revealed.

Less focused on divine intervention than on delving into the interpersonal relationships of the main cast and empowering her strong characters so that they can finally find peace, Lemmons has succeeded in making a film that champions the power of the human spirit and the importance of love, family and friendship in a way that’s never preachy or heavy-handed.

And by walking that fine line, she’s made a much more spiritually inclusive picture that can attract film fans of any (or indeed little) faith, where – like Vinterberg, she places people first while following her own directorial dogma by incorporating the same family-centric themes that first attracted us to Eve’s Bayou with her love of music on display in the DJ-biopic Talk to Me.

Weaving in the author’s own quotations while paying tribute to his strong sense of community pride, Kasi Lemmons’s gorgeously lensed holiday work that honors the man who taught us to “hold fast to dreams” moves fast enough for us to forgive some minor musical genre contrivances and a slightly wooden performance from Latimore.

And by hitting a chorus of sweet-sounding notes both gospel-based and its cinematic approach where we see reflections of characters in Christmas ornaments and carolers sing “Silent Night,” Black Nativity serves up a slice-of-Harlem-life according the praiseworthy gospel of Lemmons and Hughes.

Text ©2014, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy of this title in order to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.

Blu-ray Review: Out of the Furnace (2013)

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“Let me make this right,” is more than just a line uttered by one of the main characters near the end of writer/director Scott Cooper’s feature filmmaking follow-up to Crazy Heart. When it comes to the core ensemble of individuals that populate the unforgiving terrain of a blue collar coal town in Pennsylvania, the desire to make things right is more than just something to say – in Out of the Furnace it’s a way of life.

Filled with men who long to right wrongs, regardless of the cost – what the characters onscreen realize far too late is that even if they have the best of intentions, sometimes scores simply cannot be settled since every single person has a slightly different definition of right and wrong in this gritty, existentially driven revenge picture.

Bogged down by wrongs right from the start following the film’s horrific introduction to Furnace’s embodiment of pure evil as played by Woody Harrelson as the unmercifully twisted, sadistic Harlan DeGroat, we encounter a pair of brothers whose lives will be forever changed once they cross his path.

With the deck stacked against them right from the start, it isn't too long before we realize that although they're related, we've been introduced to two very different brothers with two very different ways of coping with the hands they’ve been dealt.

The older of the two, Russell Baze (Christian Bale) keeps his head down and shovels coal in the very same factory that put their father on his death bed. Willing to risk the same fate (before he realizes, the plant is inevitably closed in favor of cheaper foreign labor) in order to put food on the table and pay his bills, Russell has unofficially taken over his father’s role as the family patriarch as the dutiful, good son.

Unwilling to do the same, his restless younger brother Rodney (scene-stealer Casey Affleck) took the first opportunity he could to get out of the dead-end town. Enlisting in the military and stop-lossed into a total of four tours before he finally returns home to stay, Rodney has tried everything to sublimate the pain and reproduce the primal adrenaline rush of battle.

But when gambling only leads to debt (which in the past Russell worked double shifts to keep at bay without informing his prideful, troubled brother), before long Rodney begins taking part in underground fights as an agreement with his money man John Petty (Willem Dafoe).

Tired of the minimal paydays, Rodney forces John to arrange a higher stakes match in order to resolve the outstanding debt once and for all that he not only owes John but John in turn owes to Harlan, which leads to a fateful meet that has a domino effect on every member of the ensemble cast in unimaginable ways. And it’s this key decision that winds up forcing Russell out of his daily grind, leaving him no choice but to put down the shovel and pick up a rifle to fight the war that has been waged in his own backyard.

Incredibly downbeat and emotionally exhausting, although Cooper’s take of brotherly vengeance was initially planned as a vehicle for actor Leonardo DiCaprio and his Body of Lies director Ridley Scott (both of whom still serve as producers), it’s hard to imagine anyone other than Bale in the role, given the way he once again manages to disappear completely into the role.

Filled with character actors as opposed to A-listers that stand out too conspicuously as DiCaprio may have done (through no fault of his own given the way it’s hard to forget who you’re watching in a number of his films), Out of the Furnace is therefore helped by the lack of obvious megawatt star quality. Likewise, since the work owes a great deal to its ambient surroundings which help convey mood and atmosphere, the Pennsylvania town becomes a character in its own right.

While the main theme of the film as well as the arc for our lead character is incredibly straightforward, Furnace makes one fatal mistake along the way by working one too many dubious contrivances into the film’s plotline that call attention to themselves amid the simplicity.

From a cell phone call that transforms into a digital recording at the exact right moment in order to capture audio of a murder and a few too many cruel twists of fate that intersect at the exact same time for Russell with regard to his brother, his girl etc. (that seem better suited to a bad country song), when Furnace tries to get too complex, it loses its way completely.

And with so much affecting Russell, you begin realizing that plot might have been strengthened considerably by sharing some of the wealth of the storyline among the rest of the cast to build up the back-stories and characters played by Zoe Saldana and Forest Whitaker in particular in order to adequately pay off on a narrative revelation that is revealed in the film’s second half.

These shortcomings aside, overall Cooper proves to have an even greater cinematic handle on filmmaking his second time around and uses the various resources at his disposal to rich effect. By calling on multiple senses at once, this technique particularly stands out via a symbolic hunting sequence that is echoed in the movie’s penultimate sequence.

From the effective use of Pearl Jam tunes and Dickon Hinchliffe’s understated score to help punctuate the mood of vital moments to a terrific visualization of the darkness of the color palette (which is virtually free of bright colors) to transport you to the setting, Cooper does an admirable job of externalizing the internal struggle of the characters through the cinematic medium. It’s these smart, subtle touches that stand out even more in Fox’s flawless Blu-ray transfer.

A deceptively simple tale of vengeance, in Out of the Furnace, Cooper weaves a multi-layered tapestry that reinforces at every turn his characters’ desire to try to make things right, even if they risk getting burned in the process.   

Text ©2014, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy of this title in order to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.

Blu-ray Review: Fruitvale Station (2013)

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The pop culture mantra to take life one day at a time provides both the framework and the thesis of filmmaker Ryan Coogler’s deeply felt feature debut Fruitvale Station, which nonetheless winds up getting smashed to pieces in its arresting eighty-five minute running time.

In Fruitvale, Coogler takes a docudrama/neorealist approach to tell the fact-based tale of twenty-two year old California father who was gunned down in a gross miscarriage of justice under heightened circumstances in the wee small hours of New Year’s Eve 2009 morning by a flustered BART officer running on adrenaline and fear.

And although it opens with the horrific cell phone video documented footage of the actual shooting, Coogler has much more on his mind than that one awful snapshot that ushered in the end of a man’s life.

Instead of dwelling on the senseless nature of Oscar Grant’s death and the questionable handling of events that would follow in the upsetting judicial aftermath of an obvious case of racial profiling (made that much timelier in its theatrical release which coincided with the Trayvon Martin verdict), Coogler sets the clock back twenty-four hours to show what a difference a day makes.

A beautiful thought-provoking work of cinematic portraiture that focuses on the most otherwise mundane, monotonous aspects of life from driving to shopping to haunting effect, Frutivale makes us feel the weight of Grant’s future loss as more than just an anonymous name on the evening news by showing us the amount of love that exists in his large circle of friends and family.

And the multitude of interactions Grant has over the course of a day reveal a number of different sides of the exact same man in a way that’s relatable and authentically true to life as everybody experiences and relates to a person in a slightly different way than anyone else. And this phenomenon (along with many other ones with which we can instinctively identify) are all chronicled in this modern work that recalls Agnes Varda’s French New Wave classic Cleo From 5 to 7.

Managing to transcend what in someone else’s hands could’ve been a far too melancholic and heavy-handed film, Coogler (who also wrote Fruitvale) has achieved an impressive feat by producing a deceptively simplistic yet overwhelmingly powerful film that leaves an even greater impression on viewers after we press eject and have time to reflect on its significance for our lives.

Unwilling to emphasize the tragedy, Frutivale Station’s celebration of life serves as a lesson to all of us to cherish the here and now that’s so naturalistic that we’re not even aware of its power in a way that flies in the face of The Butler style pomp and circumstance filmmaking.

Challenging the idea that we must wait a full day or even – as the film would ironically hinge the most fateful changes on – a New Year to change our life, over the course of a long day, Oscar proves that we can always venture down a new path to start a new journey by any number of choices we make.

Whether it’s opting to help a complete stranger embark on a culinary adventure by phoning his grandmother to offer them advice to letting the lessons of past mistakes finally sink in to keep from selling a bag of weed despite financial obligations, Oscar finds himself tested on a number of levels during the course of a very important day.

Not content to only frame the events via a Cassavetes style depiction of American Neorealism –some artistic liberties are taken to uplift the film from its docudrama approach and lend a sense of poetry to the proceedings. This stylistic balance is best epitomized by a moving scene where Oscar comforts a stray dog before and after he’s hit by a car, which helps add an even greater existential weight to Oscar’s eventual fate.

And while admittedly it’s slightly on-the-nose in its narrative convenience, Coogler doesn’t allow himself to punctuate that moment longer than he needs to in order to drive the messy, beautiful irony of it home before quickly moving back (along with Oscar) to the tasks that remain in his busy day.

To his great credit, every moment of onscreen peace feels earned as – true to life – Grant is a man juggling many responsibilities and relationships at any given moment including his undeniably loving yet slightly strained relationship with the mother of his bright, four year old daughter.

And matching actor Michael B. Jordan’s charismatic chameleon-like turn in the lead role as a man who goes from charming to conflicted at a moment’s notice is the always wondrous indie film MVP Melonie Diaz as his true love Sophina.

Though the chemistry of the two leads sizzles from their first shared screen, in reality we’re quick to discover that the couple they’re portraying have hit a slight rough patch that comes to a head over the course of the film.

Understandably enchanted by his magnetism, Sophina finds her heart pulled in several directions during the exact same day – having a hard time fully trusting Oscar not only because he has a habit of only telling her what he needs to when he needs to do so but also because he’d cheated on her offscreen before the film’s events took place.

Moving a year back in time when Grant was in jail to show us how much has changed (and how some of the repercussions of his old life have yet to go away), we witness a heartbreaking visit from his beloved mom (Octavia Spencer) that have challenged him to go straight and set him on the path we find him on today.

Masterful in his presentation of the two separate days and the way that the concept of time becomes in Coogler’s hands as fluid as the ocean Grant parks by in an important scene, one of Fruitvale’s most impressive achievements is in the way that lines and moments in that particular flashback echo and reverberate in a multitude of ways the closer we get to its stunning final scenes.

Produced by Forest Whitaker (whose own loosely biographical starring role in Lee Daniels’ The Butler shares a street date with this superlative release), although Fruitvale is succinct, not a single frame is wasted in Coogler’s auspicious feature filmmaking debut.

Through its devotion to honoring the last day in the life of Oscar Grant, Fruitvale Station acts as a mirror for the audience, forcing us to check any stereotypes or preconceptions at the door. Likewise, in its summation that no one is one thing to all people, Fruitvale also makes it clear that we could just as easily be any person in the film if we’d been born at a different time or a different place.

Arguing that we have a far greater capacity for goodness than evil and the gift of humanity lies in our ability to choose good over evil countless times in any given day (as opposed to one day at a time), Coogler takes what could’ve been a straightforward moral lesson movie and presents these ideas with a fresh urgency that makes us feel like we’ve never heard them before.

Instead of watching this as a film that asks us to hold events therein at arm’s length, Fruitvale Station brings you aboard and includes you in each life-like frame for the good times and the bad.

Transferred with breathtaking clarity in this 1080p high definition Blu-ray, Fruitvale Station’s award-season timed release boasts behind-the-scenes featurettes, interviews and two additional formats (including DVD and Ultraviolet HD) that fittingly make Coogler’s Sundance and Cannes Film Festival award-winner viewable on the same handheld devices that captured the beginning of Oscar Grant’s untimely end.

A vital work that celebrates not only his life but the existence of life in general that’s sure to inspire you to put your arms around those you love, Fruitvale Station is the definition of must-see movie-making and one of the very finest films of 2013.

Text ©2014, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy of this title in order to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.

Blu-ray Review: Lee Daniels' The Butler (2013)

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Before it was ever put into words, from his youngest days working under a sadistic boss on a cotton farm to his thirty-plus years spent serving eight U.S. presidents as a White House butler, Cecil Gaines understood precisely what was meant when he was advised to possess two faces – his own and the one he would show to white folks.

 

While that sentiment alone has slavery era literary roots, in director Lee Daniels’ The Butler, which was written by Emmy award-winning historical screenwriter Danny Strong, it serves as something beyond mere advice to become an actual way of life for the eponymous lead portrayed by Forest Whitaker in a role that was inspired by – (read: very loosely based upon) – fact.

Gorgeously crafted and undeniably well-intentioned with all departments from cinematography and production design to hair and makeup firing on all cylinders, one of The Butler’s biggest problems in fact is its picture-perfect, museum-like approach to its subject matter.

From its convenient plot points that hit the desired emotional beats at precisely the right time to some awkward transitions between presidential administrations, everything feels so extremely choreographed that most of what occurs onscreen ends up feeling melodramatically manipulative rather than natural. The end result is a film that holds us at arm’s length rather than one that successfully transports us into the film to fully buy into the story the filmmaker is trying to tell.

And while their names and faces looks great on a poster, the Cameo Carousel approach of offering viewers a Where’s Waldo like game of “Spot the Movie Star” – wherein a new A-lister enters and exists every ten minutes as if part of a Hollywood parade –  pulls us out of the plot with each new walk-on and detracts from the work as a whole.

From a storytelling standpoint, this gimmick makes the episodic nature of Strong’s script that much more apparent. But more troublingly it calls far too much attention to itself as one by one we identify the movie star currently onscreen and just as frequently find ourselves disappointed by the casting choice of selecting someone for the sake of name recognition rather than addressing the question of whether or not they’re actually right for the role or look anything like the people they’re supposed to play.

While the actors try their best with Liev Schreiber’s fiery Lyndon Johnson a film highlight, when most feel so grossly miscast, what it ultimately boils down to is stunt casting and it’s condescending to its audience – making the whole picture less effective all-around.

And at the same time, the commanding lead turns by not only Whitaker but in a surprisingly powerful supporting role by Oprah Winfrey (that reminds us just how effective she was in Spielberg’s The Color Purple), help anchor the film and prove just how beneficial it can be to cast the right actors in the right parts. Winfrey is so good in fact that it makes us wish she’d spend more time acting and less time focusing on conquering the small screen as a media mogul.

While she’s a bit shortchanged in her performance due to peculiar editing choices that force us to guess far more than we’d like about particular indiscretions or behavioral motivations of the character based on a look here or a throwaway line there, her scenes with Whitaker are the strongest in the picture.

In fact, the two are so good together that it makes you wish the film was far more emotionally riveting than it actually turned out to be, not only to be worthier of the audience but to its stars as well.

While nowhere near as naturalistic and impactful as another 2013 film that Whitaker was involved with behind the scenes while serving as the producer on another biographical effort Fruitvale Station, (which incidentally shares today's release date with The Butler), the stunning production values and stellar turns at the heart of the film make it worthy of at least one spin.

And while every fiber of my being wanted to like the picture and indeed, Lee Daniels’ The Butler appears to be as eager to please as Gaines was in his White House role, nearly stamping “For Your Awards Consideration” onto each gorgeously composed frame of this Forrest Gump-like ode to old-fashioned storytelling, it just doesn’t live up to its enormous ambition or potential.

 

Instead of merely presenting both of Gaines’s faces to the audience, this Butler tries to be all things to all people. From the gross manipulation of the facts that were either heightened or completely changed for maximum soap-opera effect to not having enough faith in Gaines’s plotline so that they had to invent a fictional militant son to serve as a political counterpoint for the era, this Butler is a mess of a missed opportunity.

For one of the greatest problems is that we’ve seen the alternate histories of the ‘60s done so many times before that the fictionalized Freedom Rider turned Black Panther son should’ve been left on the cutting room floor altogether.

As instead of Vietnam War unrest and civil disobedience struggles we’ve faced onscreen before, the thing we’d never encountered is the story of Cecil Gaines and unfortunately, it’s his story that Daniels and Strong seemed least interested in telling (aside from a chosen anecdote here or there).

And while I can only yearn for what was missed and indeed can’t critique a film I wasn’t shown, you can’t tell me that serving eight presidents didn’t generate enough valid material for a great movie. Unfortunately the one we’re left with is beautifully executed enough but far too bland for us to remember anything about The Butler we were so looking forward to getting to know.

Using the same manipulative tricks he employed in Precious, Daniels knows how to play his audience like a fiddle, while also inspiring some staggeringly raw, honest performances. But unfortunately this time around he doesn’t achieve the impact we’d been braced for by all the pomp and circumstance established by the film’s first act build-up or the promise of its award season campaign.

While worth a look for history buffs as well as Whitaker fans – with the caveat that it’s also a good idea to seek out the original source material to separate the small amount of fact from a massive amount of fiction – ultimately history will be the best judge of the film’s longevity long after award season passes and those easily influenced by it will be able to watch with more perspective.

Of course, it could become a cult classic in future years but something tells me that producer Whitaker’s masterfully made Fruitvale Station will far surpass Lee Daniels’ The Butler not only with regard to Forest Whitaker but in terms of the cinematic year of 2013 in general, inspiring future generations to come with its celebration of life on a small scale vs. this star-studded, sprawling soap.    

Text ©2014, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy of this title in order to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.

Blu-ray Review: Our Family Wedding (2010)

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In pursuit of matrimonial bliss and to encourage good fortune, the saying goes that every bride should have something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue on her wedding day. And although you could perhaps best liken the task of a movie director to a wedding planner instead of a bride, essentially Brown Sugar and The Wood filmmaker Rick Famuyiwa followed the exact same advice in bringing 2010's Our Family Wedding to the screen.

By playing up the angle of the overbearing patriarch best epitomized in the classic and contemporary versions of Father of the Bride the movie takes something old but manages to turn it into something uniquely new while introducing us to two dads of completely different ethnicities than the lily-white genre usually presents as we meet the African-American groom's father Brad Boyd (Forest Whitaker) and the Mexican-American bride's father Miguel Ramirez (Carlos Mencia).

In setting up all of the culture clashes, misunderstandings and mishaps that will follow to help fuel the comedic plot, the director along with his co-writers Wayne Conley and Malcolm Spellman borrow heavily from far more successful comedies and dramas including the classic Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (another “something old”) as well as the Meet the Parents franchise among others.

Likewise, in lifting a sequence where the Father of the Bride runs into trouble while scoping out the bathroom of the groom's father, this time instead of Steve Martin's shenanigans, we experience Carlo Mencia's as he knocks a bottle of something blue – namely Brad's Viagra -- down the sink.

Similarly it replaces another Bride plot device of an athletic display that works in the groom's favor instead of the dad's by changing out basketball for softball. Thus, while giving us more loony relatives in some ethnic caricature scenes that rival My Big Fat Greek Wedding for most cringe-worthy, all of these “somethings” collide.

And although everything about Our Family Wedding feels overly familiar and predictable and you could play a game of “spot the influence” as you watch, shouting out The In-Laws or Meet the Parents from one scene to the next, it's a benign and affable film that manages to squeak by based on the charm of its crackerjack cast.

To this end, the bride and groom fit the genre prerequisite of being both bland and adorable so that the dads get the opportunity to shine as America Ferrera's Lucia and Lance Gross' Marcus are reminded that it's their marriage but their family's wedding when the plans for a tasteful, intimate gathering blow-up into an overwhelming affair.

While Mencia provides a great deal of the laughter in the film, despite the fact that he and Whitaker are forced to overplay their first meeting to unbelievable effect as Miguel fills in for a sick employee and tows Brad's luxury car away before his eyes, it's particularly refreshing to see the Oscar winning Whitaker in a comedy for a change.

Yet stealing away most of Whitaker's thunder is the under-utilized Jerry Maguire MVP Regina King as Angela, Brad's long-time best friend who helped raise Marcus. Similar to her work in Maguire which reminds you on repeat viewings of the fact that half of Cuba Gooding Jr.'s Oscar truly belongs to her, King is flawless here, playing the supportive ally of Brad who deserves to be a more permanent fixture in his life, which we see gradually escalate as friendly banter moves into flirtation and then into one of the movie's multiple cake fights.

Still when a film script repeats itself with duplicate cake fights and far too many scenes involving the recitation of the same song lyrics, it's a sign that the writers were scrambling blind which is apparent throughout as problems brought up in the film are glossed over far too easily including one heartbreaking scene when Lucia's mother overhears her two daughters ridiculing her lot in life as the type of Latina they've vowed never to become.

Moreover, we never really understand why Lucia has been keeping both the existence of Marcus and her decision to drop out of law school to pursue volunteer teaching work from her entire family aside from the fact that it helps build the plot and make everything awkward when the two families get together.

These issues create some conflicting viewpoints when it comes to the character of Lucia – possibly indicative that the script was written by three men – as just one of a handful of females both on and off screen including an overly clingy wife of Taye Diggs and Whitaker's cruel ex-wife who abandoned her son that feel just as stereotypical as some of the racial insults and ethnic barbs the two dads throw at each other.

Thus you can't help wishing that another writer (or a different team altogether) had taken an additional pass at the screenplay to offer us much more in the “something new” department since the premise was promising and it broke through the color barriers of most Caucasian wedding pictures without of course, the name Tyler Perry being attached to it.

Nonetheless, while the ingredients don't all blend together smoothly during its 103 minute running time despite the gorgeous production values that amp up the Fox Searchlight Blu-ray presentation of the film with some sparkling night shots, overall this forgettable but mildly diverting Wedding boasts a few genuinely entertaining moments to keep you interested enough to remain on the movie's guest list.


Text ©2010, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I received a review copy of this title in order to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.

Blu-ray Review: Powder Blue (2009)

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With all the '80s musical and dance film remakes either in the works or in pre-release from Fame to Footloose to, yes, Girls Just Want to Have Fun-- Powder Blue is proof that instead of an audition, if they ever decided to remake Flashdance, Jessica Biel could just send the filmmakers a screener of this film from writer/director Timothy Linh Bui.

Of course, aside from Biel's scenes as an exotic dancer which have long been the talk of the sleazier side of the internet (including humiliating leaked photos of Biel topless etc.), those imaginary producers of the possible Flashdance remake would have to endure the rest of the film which simply put is one of the absolute worst movies I've seen in a long, long time. I could just say "end of review" but if you're interested why, go ahead and read on.



For honestly, the thing is-- sadly Biel (whom I first saw in The Illusionist and felt she showed great promise) would've done much better by deciding to show her frankly extremely impressive and athletic skills as a dancer in Flashdance since (unlike that film's talented star Jennifer Beals) she completes all of her own highly stylized routines in this one.

However, in Blue she stars as a single coke-snorting stripper so desperate for companionship she comes on way too strong with every man she meets--nervously talking about Annie Hall for example which any film geek will tell you isn't a good idea. Why the coke and latching onto fantasies of men who will take her to Paris, you ask? Well, the filmmaker is only so pleased to constantly remind you that it's as a way to avoid thinking about her coma-ridden son and missing dog (yes, as if one of those plot-lines wasn't depressing enough).

Obviously, Biel is completely wasted here and to add further insult to insult, she's now been made the subject of online sleaze for believing in a filmmaker so much that she pours hot wax all over her bare chest in a pretentious film that on paper was most likely trying to become the next in a long line of Short Cuts, Crash, 21 Grams, Magnolia, Garden Party, Crossing Over, The Air I Breathe, and dozens of other hopelessly lonely movies about the bleakness of life in La La Land. And as everyone knows we can never have too many of those!

While the film's central premise as promised in the synopsis and on the back of the box is that we're going to encounter "the destinies of four people desperate for connection and redemption," in a way that "movingly chronicles the imperfect lives of people teetering on the edge of despair and the miracles that bring them back," basically throughout its unspeakably mind-numbing 106 minute running time that makes Chariots of Fire and Reds feel like "short films," Bui introduces us to an endless parade of losers. He does this in an attempt to as the filmmaker describes in the making-of-featurette (which I watched both as a critic and as a viewer just simply in shock that this picture had been made in the first place) to create "a study of loneliness in a city of 8 million people."

Inexplicably an obsession of the filmmaker for four years as he struggled to get it made-- even going as far as to live in a seedy motel he'd read about in the paper where failed dreamers and transients who'd ventured to Los Angeles all with the hopes of "becoming somebody" go to rot-- Powder Blue tries its best to dress up the devastation of the piece with religious symbolism and dialogue throughout from the opening frames of the film.



Setting it right around Christmas, Bui makes his "miracle" a bizarre one wherein at least three characters wind up dead. Oh yes, there's a happy present for you and frankly I would've preferred Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia style rain of frogs which freaked the hell out of me but did so with style!



And early into the movie we also meet a suicidal Forest Whitaker willing to pay any given stranger 50 grand to shoot him in the heart (most likely for agreeing to produce and star in this film), Ray Liotta as a terminally ill ex-con and a quirky asthmatically shy mortician so unrealistic he's named for the keyboard-- Qwerty (Eddie Redmayne). Oh and I think it goes without saying that Qwerty whose last name is actually Dolittle who has never had a real girlfriend and entertains kids with puppets.



As if that wasn't enough drama, the film also somehow manages to work in creepier subplots and wasted cameos by incredibly talented actors including Lisa Kudrow as a good-natured waitress who-- lonely but still functioning after a divorce-- provides an early romantic possibility for the suicidally depressed and grieving widow Whitaker (whose wife we see in flashbacks was played by the impressive Sanaa Lathan).

Likewise we encounter Kris Kristofferson as another underworld type who always arranges to meet Liotta on a city bus (not exactly something out of the typical wiseguy playbook), a hooker transvestite trying to raise money to undergo surgery to become a woman, and Patrick Swayze as Biel's lecherous strip club boss who-- similar to the girl playing his employee-- would've been much better off in an '80s musical or dance movie remake.

I will grant that it is intriguing indeed on Bui's part to cast Liotta as a soft-spoken against-type character who lets his eyes do most of the talking in a storyline that also involves Biel yet he ruins it as it's also one of the most predictable "gee, how are they related?" connect-the-dots of the wretchedly gritty script and to top it all, the payoff feels like a cheat.



Despite this, the sole bright spot of the film is found in Kudrow who manages to work wonders with her tiny role making us wish she not only was offered more work but that Powder Blue (by the way, I still don't get the title) would've centered around her.

Moreover, by this point I'm seriously questioning Forest Whitaker's motives (along with Liotta's actually) in never finding a role they decide to turn down as they both recently starred in equally bleak ensemble pictures like Whitaker's The Air I Breathe and Liotta's Crossing Over which you know wouldn't have garnered them a big salary at all.

Yet in the case of Powder Blue, mostly you just feel the sorriest for Biel. Not her character mind you as Biel's Rose-Johnny (again with the stupid names) could've disappeared along with the rest and we would've been fine but instead during the film, I felt incredibly badly for the actress herself.



As despite all of the online chatter about her body and beauty including quips about her acting chops by agreeing to appear in some downright silly movies like I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry (although to her credit, I wouldn't have turned down a Sandler picture either)-- not to mention the endless gossip fodder surrounding her relationship with Justin Timberlake-- she's a strong onscreen presence. And much like she did given her great yet underwritten role in The Illusionist, she plunges completely into Blue with a fierce dedication and loyalty that makes you painfully aware that she should be offered the chance to prove herself in something far more worthwhile than this film.

Downright ugly and extremely unpleasant (so much so that I'd rather watch a double feature of two other contemporary horrors--Margot at the Wedding and The Savages before I'd ever watch this again), Powder Blue is the type of movie that should come with a prescription for an antidepressant or perhaps a tranquilizer so that you could sleep through its entirety.

Additionally, the work that even seems visually grainy in high-definition despite a strong sound balance goes against its tagline that "hope is found in the darkest places" by proving that it can only be found when you hit eject. Since ultimately, the only thing it makes you want to do is avoid Los Angeles like the plague, any future films by the director, and ask yourself just when filmmakers decided that the only subject to make an independent film about is devastating loneliness, suicide, terminal illness, and/or lost causes. For Bui-- perhaps realizing he'll never have the chance to make another movie-- opted to just go for the 2009 Sophie's Choice Depress-a-thon Award of the Year and put them all in the same film.

The Air I Breathe

Director:
Jieho Lee

Since the inspiration for director Jieho Lee’s feature film debut The Air I Breathe derived from the Chinese proverb categorizing the four pillars of life into (as IMDb notes) the “emotional cornerstones” of happiness, pleasure, sorrow and love, it seemed only fitting that his work reminded me of another ancient Chinese proverb dictating that if you save’s another person’s life, you are responsible for it.

Formatted into four distinct vignettes that-- in true Altman and P.T. Anderson fashion-- overlap in surprising ways throughout the course of the picture, Lee’s usage of his four primary emotions that are even echoed by some characters which share the same names, are constantly evolving. While each twenty to thirty minute segment is introduced with the corresponding emotion, basically it seems as inconsequential as a name-card at a crowded wedding reception where people table hop at will, as ultimately in the hands of Lee and co-writer Bob De Rosa, they merge into one super emotion that isn’t quite "sorrowfully-happy-pleasure-filled-love" but—perhaps truer to life—one that seems to better fit our frequent transient states in the human experience as we go about our days surprised by several emotional ups and downs. Although of course, filmmaker Lee ratchets his character’s plots to overwhelming dramatic heights where lives are either cut short or given a second chance and the destiny of those involved in these decisions are thus forever entwined, holding all individuals accountable for each twist of fate or rash decision. And if it sounds incredibly ambitious, it is and it’s not always successful but one has to give Lee points for walking his talk.

Despite a clunky start that fails to separate Lee’s film from the rest of the trendy pack of independent vignette works using any random connective tissue to overlap the lives of a seemingly diverse population of film characters as we’re introduced to a predictably pulpy noir inspired beginning which finds hardworking bank employee Happiness (Forest Whitaker) making a perilous bet on a horse race, we’re snapped to attention with a genuinely engrossing second storyline. In Pleasure, we encounter the emotion’s ironically corresponding namesake played by Brendan Fraser as the loyal, right-hand man of gangster "Fingers "(Andy Garcia), who according to the movie, earned the nickname because all he has to do is snap his terrifying fingers and Fraser’s Pleasure will strong-arm anyone at will.

What separates Pleasure from what ordinarily would be a typical noir cliché is his character’s peculiar ability to see the future, or-- even more frighteningly-- the ultimate destiny and death of those whom he encounters which makes him the handiest man to have on your side in a fight as he babysits Fingers’ immature, pig nephew Tony (Into the Wild’s Emile Hirsch). Soon he finds his gift at risk when he sees a poster of Trista (Sarah Michelle Gellar), a gorgeous singer to whom he’s attracted and realizes that not only can he not see into the beguiling young woman’s future but also feels a strange pull towards Trista, wondering if perhaps she is his own destiny. Fraser's character is so fascinating that I half-wished the film's entire four handed bridge game of Chinese proverbs would have been abandoned for a classic narration of Pleasure’s penchant for psychic premonition and the problems that are undoubtedly tied up within the questionable gift but Lee proved he wanted to explore several ambitious ideas with his first crack at direction.

Pleasure's instinct that Trista is his future proves to be an accurate assumption as Trista (who doubles as Sorrow in the film) finds herself bartered by her sleazy manager who trades her contract to Fingers in order to make good on an astronomical debt. Longing to escape the intimidation of Fingers who wants to milk his newest employee for all she’s worth like the cattle he considers her, Trista falls under both the protection and spell of Pleasure, embarking on a dangerous romance before her journey eventually leads to a fourth unevenly tacked-on segment involving crusading doctor Kevin Bacon who struggles to save the life of his married college sweetheart Julie Delpy at all costs.

Unfortunately, the film’s final act doesn’t quite fit the noir mold that Lee perpetuated with the nearly monochromatic color scheme and brooding tone for more than the film’s first hour and does slightly pull one out of its darkly seductive allure as a modern day homage to classic German expressionist influenced American noir works of the 1940’s, largely because the majority of the finale is filmed in predominant sunlight. And, given the genre, in the harsh light of day, Air's flaws along with its ability to cloak its shortcomings in noir style become glaring to the viewer.

However, it’s still a highly compelling film where earlier actions build on one another in unexpected ways and also one where-- more than just using the four emotions as a convenient structural device-- responsibility and accountability comes into play with the lives that are spared, making it a worthwhile proverbial Chinese puzzle to be solved for movie lovers who are game for viewing something out of the ordinary on DVD.


Rent It!