Conventional Wisdom Gets It Wrong

In many ways, Hollywood is a small town made up of oddly cautious people - at least the few who run studios. Movies are freakishly expensive to make and the public's taste is unpredictable, which explains why 2017 looks like the Year of Sequels and Reboots. Conventional wisdom says to stick with what you know - yeah, maybe the movie itself will stink like three-day-old fish, but it'll make money and really - isn't that better than art?

But a few tricky flicks manage to sneak under the velvet rope reserved for the art house pictures and make it into the mainstream. These are films that need to be supported to further encourage those who hold the purse strings to make more of these gems, so please - seek them out. Tell the theater manager how much you enjoyed them. Ask for more to be booked at your local theater.

Actresses with the real "hidden figures"

The first of these isn't really a "small film," but it's worth talking about in this post for another reason. Hidden Figures is doing gangbusters at the box office, taking in more last weekend than Rogue One, which is simply lovely when you think about it - a thoughtful movie about math made more than the latest from the Star Wars franchise.

The film is solidly-crafted with a number of very, very strong performances - all three female leads (Taraji P. Henson, Janelle Monáe, and Octavia Spencer), are each fully capable of carrying the entire film. The story itself is amazing and there is no reason why these women have been overlooked for so long. The sad fact that the film took so long to be made has to do with a subtle form of racism - movies are expensive. Will whites go see a "black movie"? For years, it was impossible to get financing for films that featured non-white actors in lead roles. Too risky, they said.

Then came Tyler Perry.

There's much more I can say about Hidden Figures, but I'll close with this. Seeing the everyday, casual racism make me grind my teeth. There aren't any true villains in this film; no one is using racial slurs or threatening violence. But the grime of a dozen little things every day, including not having access to all the books in the public library, would be enough to make many strong women give up.  To then see how these educated, dignified women dealt with a society that so devalued them -- well, this is a film that'll make you want to cheer and will also make you ask why on Earth haven't we gone back to the moon, especially since we have the trained brains to take us there.

The other film I want to encourage you to seek out is La La Land. Director Damien Chazelle loves jazz; in fact, he trained as a jazz drummer (he also co-wrote 10 Cloverfield Lane, but that's another story). His first big film dealt with jazz (a little film you might remember called Whiplash that went from the Sundance Film Festival to 5 Academy Award nominations) and that music plays a large part in La La Land as well. Basically, it's a musical love story and also a valentine to "old Hollywood." What happens when those two crazy kids (played with vulnerability and heartbreak by Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling) finally find each other and their career dreams begin to come true? When it happens, it's good to have tap shoes.

Look - it's astonishing. Drenched in color, filmed in CinemaScope, and unashamedly retro, this film has heart to spare. The film is worth the ticket price for the opening sequence, which looks like a six-minute oner. It's actually three two-minute shots, and that's incredible enough. Something this unusual, this original NEEDS to be supported. Please seek it out.

Last thing - I'm shortly off to Utah to attend several screenings at the Sundance Film Festival. I hope to report on the amazing things I saw when I get back at the end of February. Plus, we'll hopefully have some Babylon 5 news by then as well!

A Yes and a Warning

Black or White hit movie theaters this weekend. I wasn't so sure about this one - Kevin Costner's track record has been a bit spotty as of late, but Octavia Spencer tends toward the fabulous, so in I went. The film is not without a few problems - Jeremiah's (played the always reliable Anthony Mackie) speech to Reggie about his being a stereotype came across as a little pat to me - but the film is willing to tackle some tough issues without being After School Special-simple. Truly, the issues presented here are not black or white. A quick summary - Elliot (Kevin Costner) and his wife have been raising their bi-racial granddaughter since birth - their daughter died in childbirth and the father is addicted and shiftless. However, he comes from a good family who values hard work and when Elliot's wife dies in a car accident, Rowena (the paternal grandmother, played by Octavia Spencer) decides that Elliot can't raise the child alone and sues for full (not shared) custody.

I saw this in a crammed theater and the audience loved the twists. Elliot has money and can provide a host of creature comforts that Rowena can't, but she has a house full of children closer to Eloise's age and family matters. Both of them genuinely love little Eloise and want what's best for her - they just disagree on what that is. Reggie (Eloise's father) is a screw-up of the first order, the black sheep in this motivated, close-knit family, although you sense that he really does want to be a loving, responsible father, but he has absolutely no clue how to do that. And Elliot and Reggie have a couple of things in common that won't look good in open court.

I'm going to single out Paula Newsome, who plays the judge presiding over the custody case. She's to-the-point, but also compassionate and droll, so her character got several of the bigger laughs in this film, which always tinges the serious issues it's taking on with humor. And keep your eye on Mpho Koaho, who plays Eloise's tutor. He's going places. Not necessarily a big screen must-see, but Black or White is a solid effort and a gem to find in the doldrums of late winter, when studios often dump their stray dogs on screens across the land.

Speaking of stray dogs, I also saw The Loft this weekend. No, I'm not including a link. Or a picture. Or much of anything at all. (We were the only two people in the theater, which should have told me something.) The actors deserve better and goodness knows the movie-going public deserves better for their hard-earned cash than this contemptible mess of "Bros Before Hos" that is being foisted on you. It's not enough to not go to see this film, as a humanitarian gesture, you need to pull people who are thinking about going to see it out of the ticket line. They'll thank you later for saving them seven bucks and 108 minutes of their life. Seriously, in the first five minutes, I was stunned at one of the film's basic premises, which seemed to be "All of us are successful, well-off men, yet none of us have ever, in 20 years, watched enough Law & Order to know to ask for a lawyer when a dead blonde winds up in our shared love-nest." And it goes downhill from there. And when it reaches rock-bottom, it starts digging. Please stay away.