YOU PEOPLE****

Kenya Barris (BLACKISH) and Jonah Hill team up to write and then respectively direct and star in this new politically charged rom-com YOU PEOPLE.  Jonah Hill plays a Jewish broker called Ezra who feels lost in life and pressured to get married. He hates his office job and has an affinity for black hip-hop culture, which he expresses in a podcast with his best - black - friend Mo (Sam Jay).  He falls in love with a black girl called Amira (Lauren London) and it all goes swimmingly until they have to meet each other's respective parents.  

Ezra's parents (Julia Louis-Dreyfus and David Duchovny) are embarrassingly but unintentionally racist. Their racism is the kind that comes out of a lack of experience of inter-racial friendship, cultural ignorance, but an awkward desire to be woker-than-woke. It is no less demeaning to its target despite its lack of intentionality.   Amira's parents (Nia Long and a very subdued Eddie Murphy) are political activists inspired  by the deeply anti-semitic Louis Farrakhan, but after an early skirmish we never actually get into that.  Their racism seems intentional and well-considered, born of experience and ideology.  They simply do not trust or want their daughter in a non-black relationship.  

Things come to a head and then resolve in true rom-com style.  That is achieved through Ezra's mum apologising to Amira for her behaviour and - natch - on behalf of all Jewish people. Amira's dad apologises for his prejudiced behaviour toward Ezra, period. We never actually interrogate the anti-semitisim inherent in Farrakhan's teaching. Clearly there's an asymmetry here that David Baddiel has rightly called out, especially as it so clearly demonstrated in his superb and polemical essay Jews Don't Count. 

The thing is, I really agree with David Baddiel and I know I should mark this film down on account of it, but honestly, I just had a lot of fun with this film. It may be flawed but I think it made an earnest and honest attempt to deal with the reality of inter-racial dating in contemporary so-called liberal America. The conversations between Ezra and his friend Mo were fascinating, provocative and frankly entertaining. I would legit listen to that podcast if it existed. I believed in Jonah Hill's confused, frustrated and then touchingly sweet boyfriend. I believed in Amira's smart, strong, creative, supportive girlfriend. I rooted for them. And if the end was hokey, well that's just the genre, and if the apologies were imperfect, even that felt like a wish-fulfilment fantasy that wouldn't have happened IRL. So yeah, I really enjoyed YOU PEOPLE and I admired the relatively restrained deeply felt performance from Jonah Hill. More of this, please.

YOU PEOPLE has a running time of 117 minutes and is rated R. It is streaming on Netflix.

COMING 2 AMERICA

COMING 2 AMERICA is the feel-good, nostalgic comfort-watch we want and need right now. Released on the first anniversary of my personal Covid lockdown, at a time when we've all been deprived of friends, families and laughter, this movie feels like a personal gift from Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall to all of their fans.  And yes, I AM a fan of the original. I can't count the number of times I watched it as a kid, and on a recent rewatch I can attest that it holds up. The original was the story of a warm-hearted Prince and his rogueish sidekick going to Queens (pre-gentrification) to find a bride that will want the Prince for himself, rather than for his title. But along the way it poked fun at jheri curls, lascivious preachers, argumentative old black men in a barber shop and terrible pastiche bands. Let us NOT forget that Sexual Chocolate INVENTED the Mic Drop! Of course, it was a film of its time too. So my husband and I were wondering whether they'd keep the more luridly sexual stuff like the palace bathers or even the very concept of Murphy dressing up in Whiteface to play an old Jewish barbershop customer. Well, I am pleased to report that Kenya Barris' superb script keeps everything we loved about the orignal and doesn't water down the humour for a more PC time. The hat-tips and easter eggs are scattered liberally and really reward the ardent fan - from recasting Garcelle Beauvais as a rose-scatterer, to a rousing finale with Sexual Chocolate, to bringing back the rapping twins we met briefly at the bar. But best of all, we keep the foul mouthed My-T-Sharp crew, and dismiss any concerns of political incorrectness with a swift and brilliant short scene that neatly delineates the boundary between comedy and offense for us. 

So what's with the story? Decades after the original, Prince Akeem is happily married with three literally kick-ass daughters. The problem is that they cannot inherit his kingdom because they aren't sons. Accordingly, Akeem's dying father says he should find the illegitimate son he fathered in Queens after a quick drug-fuelled one night stand days before he met his still loving wife Lisa. We quickly bring this kid Lavelle (a rather anonymous Jermaine Fowler) to Zamunda, along with his mum (Lesley Jones) and uncle (Tracy Morgan) and most of the humour comes from these siblings from Queens getting used to the luxury of palace life.  The dramatic tension, such as it is, comes from Lavelle feeling he doesn't want to be a king in the mold of his grandfather, or to marry General Izzi's subservient daughter, much as his father before him. 

It's kind of strange to say but neither Murphy nor Hall steal the show in this sequel except in their prosthetic heavy avatars in the barber shop.  For me, Murphy and a old Jewish guy greeting Akeem and Semi after 30-odd years as "Kunta Kinte and Ebola" was worth the price of admission alone. Much of the comedy comes from Jones and Morgan as the Queens siblings. But all of them are thoroughly upstaged by Wesley Snipes as General Izzi, a neighbouring warlord who falls somewhere between kilt-wearing Idi Amin and Idris Elba in Beasts of No Nation, but with ALL the swagger. His costumes, dance moves, accent - it's all instantly iconic. And that's the key to why I found this movie successful - yes it's fanservice, and I was serviced - but there were enough fun new characters to make it feel fresh too. I couldn't have asked for more. 

COMING 2 AMERICA was released on Amazon Prime Video on March 5th. It has a running time of 110 minutes and is rated PG-13.

Random DVD Round-Up 1 - SHREK FOREVER AFTER

SHREK THE THIRD was a desperate movie - a commercial enterprise designed to squeeze every last buck from a franchise, no matter that the plot was confused and cobbled together. I barely sat through it, and hated every moment. When the franchise began, Mike Myers's Shrek was a loveable anti-hero subverting our idea of a fairytale Prince into a farting ogre and Cameron Diaz' Princess Fiona wasn't just a passive pretty girl waiting to be rescued but a feisty, whip-smart woman whose true self was fat and happy. The joy of those films was to see unlikely friendships form between Shrek, Donkey (Eddie Murphy) and Puss In Boots (Antonio Banderas), and to see Shrek and Fiona fall in love. To be sure, the humour was subversive of the Disney myth, but it was always warm-hearted, and after a pretty straight-forward adventure our anti-heroes would always emerge triumphant and true to themselves.

By contrast, by SHREK THE THIRD, Shrek had turned into a whiny little bitch, and the humour was particularly snarky and mean - coming in the form of cheap, lazy Exorcist spoofs of ROSEMARY'S BABY and teen-rom-coms. Fiona was less feisty woman that put-upon wife, and the whole thing had a rather mean-spirited, vulgar feel. So, when SHREK FOREVER AFTER rolled into our cinemas, complete with that ultimate commercial shake-down - 3D - I decided to give it a miss. Imagine, then, my surprise to discover that SHREK FOREVER AFTER isn't have bad at all!

The good news is that the writers have decided to focus on just one idea - and the big grand concept is that Shrek is so peeved with being a harassed father that he allows Rumpelstiltskin (Walt Dohm) to trick him into signing a contract in which he never existed. What then follows is a sort of IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE meets STAR WARS movie, in which Shrek sees what would have happened if he hadn't existed, and must get Fiona to give him "true love's kiss" in order to get back to normal. Donkey blanks him; Puss In Boots has become fat and lazy; Far Far Away is ruled by a tyrannical Stiltskin, and Fiona, having rescued herself, has become a Rebel Leader leading her fellow ogres in arms against Vader, sorry, Stiltskin! The great thing about this conceit, is that we get to see Fiona back to being feisty, and we get to relive what was wonderful in the first films - seeing Shrek and Fiona fall for each other again, and seeing Shrek and Donkey and Puss become friends again. It's as though the film-makers didn't want the franchise to end on the downer of Part Three and so restored us to the feel-good feeling of Part One. SHREK FOREVER AFTER is, then, a pleasingly good watch. Not as brilliant as Part One, partly because we can't get back that initial surprise, but good fun nonetheless. Hopefully, the film-makers will have the good grace to end it here.

SHREK FOREVER AFTER was released in summer 2010 and is now available to rent and buy.

MEET DAVE - mirthless

MEET DAVE is a truly mirthless comedy from the people that brought you NORBIT.

Eddie Murphy plays a human-replicant droid sent my a miniature alien species to drain earth of its water. The survival of their race entails the destruction of our world. However, when the robot, Dave, starts hanging out with a cute moppet from New York and his sweet mother, he learns the meaning of love and laughter, and loses his will to destroy humanity.

This film is high concept but low on laughs. We've all seen movies that have random strangers struggling to fit in with our weird earth manners. This sort of thing was done far better in the TV seris, THIRD ROCK FROM THE SUN, for instance. And as for the production design, it's distinctly low-rent. Compare the set design for the captain's bridge inside Dave's head with any sci-fi show, or the special effects in the decades earlier INNERSPACE.

Overall, then, a big fat thumbs down.

MEET DAVE is on release in the US, Iceland, Kuwait, Russia, Finland, Indonesia and Romania. It opens next weekend in the UK, Australia, Israel and Estonia. It opens later in July in Mexico, Venezuala and Greece. MEET DAVE opens in August in Belgium, Argentina, Brazil, Egypt, France, Singapore, the Netherlands, Portugal, Denmark, Italy, Autria, Germany, Hong Kong, Slovenia and Sweden. It opens on September 19th in Norway and on December 19th in Japan.

NORBIT - actually not so bad!

I refused to see NORBIT in the cinema because I didn't want to be party to yet another film in which someone (usually Eddie Murphy) dons a fat suit and makes fun of fat people. It seems that in these politically correct times, the only people we can still mock with impunity are chavs and the obese. But eventually, Doctor007 brought the flick over on DVD and actually I was pleasantly surprised, because once you strip away the fat jokes this is actually a very funny, if utterly predictable, romantic comedy. In addition, while I think the flick could've survived as happily without the fat jokes, you do have to admire Murphy and the make-up artist for creating a character, Rasputia, that is utterly believable.

As usual, Murphy plays a bunch of characters in this flick but the main one is a gullible orphan called Norbit. Early on in life he loses his sweetheart and is taken up by a mean fat girl called Rasputia and her criminal family. In adult life, he's bizarrely happily married (after all, Rasputia gives him a family), until his childhood sweetheart walks back into his life. She's played by Thandie Newton in full on "sweet" mode. The movie is about Norbit realising that he has the strength to walk out on adulterous Rasputia and expose his girlfriend's fiance as a con-man.

Against all expectations, there are plenty of laugh-out-loud moments, although tellingly these do not involve Rasputia. I loved the Eddie Griffin and Marlon Wayans characters, for instance. There's also something instinctively appealing about a movie filmed in primary colours in which good wins out over bad. So, surprised as I am to say it, NORBIT gets a thumbs up as a DVD movie.

NORBIT was released in February 2007 and is now available on DVD.

SHREK THE THIRD - Pop will eat itself

SHREK THE THIRD is about as funny as its lame tagline, "the wait is ogre". The screenwriters simply cannibalise the fun characters and gags from the first two flicks, but without the novelty the impact is attenuated. And as for the oh-so-clever pop-cultural references, the lunatics have taken over the asylum. SHREK used to be a clever kids flick with the odd gag for the old folk. Now it's a whole-sale satire. Watching horror spoof turn into teen-comedy spoof turn into whiny Zach Braff spoof turn into musical-spoof, I couldn't help hankering for the old days. You know, when a SHREK movie had proper messages for the young'uns: it's character rather than superficial appearance that matters; and hey, women don't have to be passive princesses rescued by swashbuckling princes. By contrast, SHREK THE THIRD is as whiny and over-long as your standard whiny indie thirty-something drama.

We find Shrek reluctant to inherit the throne of Far-Far Away and become a dad. He wanders off to find the next in line to the throne - a whiny young teenager called Arthur. (Do you detect a theme?) But in his absence, the previously thwarted Prince Charming has staged a coup and is going to kill Shrek by singing Andrew Lloyd-Webber songs. (Scary). That's pretty much it. Mike Myers voices Shrek with a diminished Scottish accent - a sop to global audiences perhaps? Rupert Everett plays his role as evil Spidey, sorry, Prince Charming, with some elan. Eric Idle has a passably funny cameo as Merlin. But all the other voice cast are on auto-pilot. And are Led Zep handing out music rights to any old rubbish, now?

SHREK THE THIRD is on release in Russia, the Philippines and the US. It opens in Malaysia and Singapore next weekend. It opens in Egpt, Slovenia, Australia, New Zealand, Estonia, Latvia, Turkey on June 8th; in France, Argentina, Hungary, Slovakia, Brazil, Mexico, Taiwan on June 14th; in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Iceland and Spain on June 22nd; in Hong Kong, Israel, Austria, the UK and Japan on June 29th; in Poland on July 6th; and in Denmark, Finland, Italy, Norway and Sweden on August 31st.

DREAMGIRLS is uneven and problematic

DREAMGIRLS is not so much good or bad as uneven and problematic.

It's a thinly veiled musical biopic of The Supremes focusing on the story of how musical impresario Berry Gordy made Diana Ross the lead singer over Flo Ballard. He decided that the real money was to be made by featuring a softer, higher-pitched voice singing bland pop hits to the dominant white demographic. This required sacrificing Flo's soulful, powerful voice as well as the original R&B sound. It also required studiously avoiding "race records". As riots raged in Detroit and artists like Marvin Gaye were asking "What's going on?", the Supremes carried on singing about love. Flo tragically died at the age of 32 having been pushed out of the lead role, out of the band and into alcoholism. Diana Ross became one of the most successful recording artists of all time. Together they left a collection of outstanding pop songs.

This story was transformed into an award-winning musical called DREAMGIRLS in the early eighties - a musical few in my generation will have heard of, let alone seen. So unlike a movie like CHICAGO, I came to this film fresh. Judging it simply as a musical I have to say that it fails horribly. (And I am a big fan both of musicals and of the Motown sound.) Barring an up-beat soulful number called Move On at the start of the film and a heart-breaking power-balled called And I Tell You I'm Not Going around a third of the way through, the songs are largely bland and forgettable. The Supremes may have sung pop but it was great pop - catchy hooks, light, up-beat, singable. Their movie-doubles, The Dreamettes, sing anodyne pop songs that drift over the ear without making an impression. And worse than that, the movie drifts on and ever on with one inocuous power-ballad after another. I felt like I was trapped in a ghastly cruise ship. At one point, around two thirds of the way through, the crypto-James Brown character, James Thunder Early, sings a race song which is clearly meant to mimic Sam Cooke's A Change Is Gonna Come. It's so bland and uninspiring compared to the real thing that I was wondering why they just hadn't stuck to the originals in all humility.

So how does DREAMGIRLS fare as a film? There are a lot of positives. It's handsomely filmed and the sixties and seventies costumes and settings are brilliantly recreated. The camerawork is fluid and you get the feeling that writer-director Tim Condon really understands how to film a musical. I'd love to see him get his hands on a better subject. Eddie Murphy really does deliver a moving and subtle performance as one-time headliner who slips into drug abuse as he tries to suppress his soulfulness, and his vocal performances are impressive.

And what of Jennifer Hudson, the American Idol contestant who is now nominated for an Oscar? Here we have a woman with a voice of supreme power, control and emotional range. She is as good as everyone says and then some. Can she act? Should she be up for an acting award? I'd argue yes, although some of the message boards would say no. And the reason is that when you watch her singing "And I'm Telling You I'm Not Going", this is acting. This is not simply rehearsing the lyrics of another song. This was the only moment of the film where I hand that spine-tingly feeling that you should get with the big number in a musical.

But there are a lot of disappointments. Jamie Foxx, who was such a revelation in RAY and COLLATERAL, is on auto-pilot here and his voice is too weak for a musical. Beyonce Knowles is the inverse of Jamie Foxx - a great singer and stage presence and face but flailing rather with the actual acting.

So much for the Uneven. Now for the Problematic. The problematic part of DREAMGIRLS is that is sails so close to the truth of what happened - with characters, album covers and narrative arcs that exactly mimic the story of Motown. This means that as an audience member I (perhaps unfairly) want the movie to respect the memory of the people it portrays - most notably Flo Ballard. And frankly, the way in which this movie unfolds in the final third strikes me as sweetening up a tragic story that deserves to be told properly. Now, I normally hate people who want movies to substitute for history teachers. But I do feel that when you co-opt so much on one woman's personal history, you need to see it through.

Another irony is that this is a movie that accuses the Berry Gordy and Diana Ross characters of selling out on their race in order to achieve commercial success - of suppressing their true musical roots to produce a saccharine product more palatable to white America. But with a few exceptions, this is exactly what the movie does - delivering music Celine Dion would be very comfortable with. Some of this is and should be deliberate - the Dreamettes' hit "Cadillac" has to be lame because it's deliberately "dumbing down". But I was astounded that the songs that serve as dialogue or monologue off-stage were so, well, bland.

DREAMGIRLS is on release in the USA, Australia, Italy, Mexico and Spain. It opnes in Argentina, Chile, Germany, Israel and Italy on Feb 1st; in Iceland and the UK on Feb 8th; in Hungary, Thailand, Austria and Denmark on Feb 8th; in Brazil, Estonia, Sweden and Japan on Feb 16th; in Netherlands, Singapore, Finland, Turkey and Venezuala on Feb 23rd; in Belgium and France on Feb 28th. It opens in Hong Kong and Norway on March 2nd and in Russia on March 8th.