THE COLOR PURPLE (2023)**

Alice Walker's iconic novel of African American female endurance, THE COLOR PURPLE, has a new life as a movie-musical.  I cannot fault the look of the film, clearly inspired by Julie Dash's iconic DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST, nor its production values, cinematography, costumes, or performances.  Fantasia Barrino is deeply moving and convincing as the heroine, Celie - a woman we first meet as the victim of her father's sexual abuse. We watch her children abducted, her marriage to the equally abusive Mister (Colman Domingo), and late in life discovery of her sexuality and economic power.  By the end of the film she is a late middle-aged woman, with all of the physical change that that implies. She is framed by two other impressive performances. Taraji P Henson plays the renamed Shug Avery - the glamorous nightclub singer who has to reconcile with her faith and father. And Danielle Brooks plays Sofia - Celie's no-nonsense duaghter-in-law who is humbled by a racist white woman.  

Every individual element of this film is calculated to impress but I just could not get over the fact that it was a musical, and moreover that the music was not contemporary to the period in which the film is set (the first half of the twentieth century).  As a result, whenever the production design and performances pulled me into an emotional space, the anachronistic music pulled me right out.  It also didn't help that the director Blitz Bazawule chooses to have the actors lip synch to the ruthlessly studio clean soundtrack. Given that so many scenes are outdoors with the sounds of nature around, I feel this is really a film where it would have been of benefit to have the actors to sing live, as in Tom Hooper's LES MIS, or at least make the songs sound less airless and clean.

The upshot was that I never felt involved with the characters or their story and while I admired it theoretically I was not moved.  The original film made me cry, I felt keenly the humbling of Sofia, and the more discreet relationship between Celie and Margaret sizzled with sensuality. I didn't need the awkward intervention of anachronistic music. 

THE COLOR PURPLE is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 141 minutes. It was released in the US on Christmas Day 2023 and will be released in the UK on January 26th.

WHAT MEN WANT

WHAT MEN WANT is exactly the kind of film you watch after a year in lockdown when you have no social life and nothing better to do. I knew the reviews were bad, but I had a genuine fondness for the 2000 original WHAT WOMEN WANT and saw Tracy Morgan on the cast list and thought, well, how bad can this be? 

The answer is very, very bad indeed. This film is so humourless, joyless, lacking in originality or surprise, that it genuinely boggles the mind. Adam Shankman (BEDTIME STORIES) directs like a hack. Scenes slickly move forward, but nothing coheres, nothing moves, whether to laughter or tears. It's all just deeply blah.

Taraji P Henson is utterly wasted in the Mel Gibson role. She plays a tough as nails sports agent raised by her single dad (Richard Roundtree). She fears she's being blocked from promotion because she's a woman. But one of the more troubling aspects of this film is that while she IS being disinvited from the boys' poker games, she's actually being blocked not because she's a woman but because she's just not very nice, and certainly not a team player. So essentially this is a film about how its progonist is a dick, and the men are actually okay. Weird. 

Also this may be one of the very few films in which Tracy Morgan - playing the dad of the young sports star the heroine has to sign to make promotion - is just annoying and unfunny.  What a crime against cinema! All of the scriptwriters -and there are many - need to go and sit in the corner and think very carefully about what they have done.

WHAT MEN WANT was released in 2019 but is now streaming on Netflix. This makes the marginal cost of watching it zero but that's still too much.  It is rated R and has a running time of 117 minutes. 

Blu-Ray / DVD Release - THE KARATE KID (2010)

The Jaden Smith-Jackie Chan remake of THE KARATE KID is a high quality, intelligent enterprise, with just enough charm and good humour to get you through the two-hour plus run-time. But it lacks the effervescence of the original, and by making the Kid a twelve year old rather than a sixteen year old, the screen-writers have fundamentally altered the dynamic of the story. Thus, while the original KARATE KID is as much about getting the girl as it is about winning the tournament, in this remake it's pretty much all about the karate and the Mentor-Mentee relationship.

The story follows the original closely. A Kid is uprooted to a new town when his single mother moves to a new job. Immediately, he's singled out but the cool kids as a loser and beaten up, turning up to school on his first day with a black eye.  The bullying continues until finally he's bailed out by the janitor, who turns out to have mad kung-fu skills.  Except, this knowing rename tells us, it's not kung fu, it's karate. The janitor negotiates a truce with the bullies and their mean karate teacher - leave the Kid alone until all matters can be decided at a karate tournament. During the truce, the Kid does repetitive chores for the janitor, not realising that he's really learning mad karate skills, as well as how to respect his elders. And, obviously, when the tournament finally comes, the Kid gets the trophy and the chick, but most importantly, self-respect and a much-needed father figure.

If the story is basically the same, the look and feel of the film is very different. Nothing in director Harald Zawart's back catalogue (which includes the risible PINK PANTHER remakes) could've prepared me for his elegant portrayal of a long-haul flight, or his lush photography of the Chinese landscape. There's also a light touch in his handling of the pre-teen crush that the Kid has for a Chinese violinist that is entirely absent from Zwart's PANTHER movies or indeed the AGENT CODY BANKS flics. There's also a lot to like in the script from relative newcomer, Christopher Murphey. I like how he plays with our expectations for the film, and nods to our nostalgia for particular scenes. For instance, the first time we see Mr Chan, he looks like he's about to catch a fly with his chopsticks, the classic move Mr Miyagi pulled. But, no, Mr Chan, actually just uses a fly swat.  And while Mr Chan is repairing a car, Mr Miyagi style, the reason is quite different than in the original film. The source of Mr Chan's sorrow manifests itself tragically where Mr Miyagi's sorrow was darkly comic. And while Jackie Chan was more than able to convey that tragedy, I couldn't help but be relieved that he hadn't been asked to mimic Pat Norita's Oscar-nominated performance.

There's a lot to like in this remake. The film-makers clearly took a lot of time to work out how best to use the Chinese locations, and incorporate some small details that feel authentic - such as Chinese fascination with curly hair. Jackie Chan and Jaden Smith have real chemistry, and while we all know that Jackie Chan is a charismatic and sympathetic screen presence, Jaden Smith holds his own.

But there are problems with the film too. First, it is woefully sentimental, right from the opening scene. The Kid's best friend gives him his skateboard to take to Beijing. The Kid protests but the bet friend insists. Cut to the Kid looking out of the window as his best friend runs after the car in slo-mo. Please.  Later, we get to Beijing, and Jackie Chan has just given it his all, letting us into the reason for Mr Chan's sorrow. And what happens next? The Kid leads him out of himself with a device that is pure fructose syrup.  It totally brought me out of the moment, and out of the film.

Still, all this syrupy nonsense was more than offset by the film's earnest attempt to give us some insight into modern China, and the intrinsic charm of Chan and Smith. What really sunk the film was its closing scene. All of us who grew up in the eighties know how important the final two scenes of the film are. First, we get the Karate Kid defeat his opponent with a highly difficult, daring move that Mr Miyagi taught him. It shows his courage and self control and skill. Ralph Macchio totally pulls it off. But in this remake we get Jaden Smith have to pull of a hypnotic-cobra-type movie that looks utterly punk and ridiculous. I mean, seriously, it's one thing to train for balance and kick your opponent in the head. It's another to think you can move like a cobra and hypnotise your opponent into losing his guard! When the Kid started shifting his head from side to side I started laughing, and not in a good way.

Worst still, the final scene of the original film is arguably the strongest of all - it's the ultimate victory - but it doesn't even exist in the remake. In the original, sure, the little bully teenagers are vicious but basically they've been made that way by their mean teacher. The Karate Kid has a good teacher in Miyagi and so can defeat them, but the real battle is between two ways of teaching - two different ways of forming children. Accordingly, it is right and fitting that the final scene of the movie sees Miyagi face off against his rival teacher, beat him, but not with brutal force but with kindness. It is the ultimate victory of the Miyagi way.  But in this flick, there is no wider message. The Kid wins, the bullies acknowledge his victory, honour Mr Chan and it's game over.  It was just too simplistic and kid focussed - I wanted closure for Mr Chan too.

Am I being too harsh on the remake? Am I holding it up to an impossibly high threshold - the high bar of eighties nostalgia?  I hope not. I watched the original Karate Kid recently, when it was re-released on Blu-Ray, and the movie still holds up. It's still funny, romantic, tragic, heart-warming and wise, all at the same time. This new movie takes the production values to a new level, and does a genuinely good job of showing us modern China, and Jackie Chan and Jaden Smith are just fine. But I definitely feel the script-writers short-changed us with too much syrup, a too hasty ending, and too long a build-up in the first hour.

THE KARATE KID was released in summer 2010 and is available on Region 2 DVD and Blu Ray tomorrow.

Random DVD Round-Up 3 - DATE NIGHT

There's something almost impressive about the fact that director Shawn Levy has taken two of the funniest comedians working today - Steve Carell and Tina Fey - and create a romantic comedy so utterly joyless and inauthentic. I honestly would not have believed it possible. This movie misses the mark so badly it's like the PEARL HARBOUR of romantic-comedies. Fey and Carell play a happily married but tired couple whose regular date night turns into a caper movie when they are mistaken for a couple that's blackmailing a local politician. Chased by organised crime and some bent coppers, it just so handily happens that Mrs Suburbs was a realtor to a super-buff Mission Impossible type special agent. Whenever I get mistakenly chased down by gansters, I am definitely going to ensure that I too can call on my friendly neighbourhood James Bond type. Anyways, there are shenanigans, and the couple turn out to be far more plucky and ingenious than is plausible, and it all ends with Tina Fey in a strip club. The only reason you might possibly watch this flick is for the James Franco-Mila Kunis scene in which they show the grown-ups how to do it. Presumably you can just you-tube that clip.

DATE NIGHT was released in April 2010. It is available on DVD and on iTunes.

Additional tags: Jimmi Simpson, Josh Klausner, Leighton Meester

THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON - technically brilliant, emotionally sterile

THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON is a very, very long, oppressive movie based on a very, very short, funny story about F Scott Fitzgerald. The only commonality is that both book and film are about a man called Benjamin who is born as an old man and ages backwards - through decrepitude, into middle-age, to the sexual immaturity, childhood to infancy and then death. His life experiences come in the right order, but his body rebels. As a newly born old man he has cataracts and arthritis. As a long-lived infant he suffers from dementia. In middle age, he has to grapple with how to live someone who is "going the other way".

The movie is broadly speaking, an elegy. An elegy for the young men who died needlessly in World War One and the old men slaughtered in front of Benjamin's eyes in World War Two. It's an elegy for lost opportunity and failed marriages. It's an elegy for those who we condemn to death before their time, shutting them away in nursing homes, fit only for ceremonial visits once a year. Finally, most clumsily, it's an elegy for the New Orleans that was destroyed in Katrina.

Insofar as the movie works at all, the first ninety minutes pass quickly. The viewer is mesmerized by the fairy-tale feel of the story - enlivened by the fabulist prologue concerning a blind watchmaker and tales of a man struck by lightening seven times. I could have used more of that charming whimsy. The movie simply looks fantastic, and as David Fincher and DP Claudio Miranda take us into steamy brothels, misty tug boats, and shabby Soviet hotels, the senses are overwhelmed. 

Where the movie falls down is when the traveling stops and Benjamin returns home after the war and we focus on his relationship with Daisy. She was fascinated by him as a child, throws herself at him as a twenty-something, rejects him at thirty and finally has a passionate affair with him in her forties. They "meet in the middle", but their tragedy is that they cannot grow old together. I think this part of the movie failed for me because I just didn't buy into why Daisy would find Benjamin so fascinating - a character who has become a passive observer of a world he is separated from by his freakish aging process. I find passive heroes very hard to get a hold of. I also just didn't buy into the motivation that underpins a major decision at the centre of the second half of the film. And if you don't buy into it - if you don't feel you are being swept up in an emotional tragedy - the second half of the movie is a pretty tedious affair.

All of which got me thinking what I really liked about the film. It certainly wasn't the passive performance from Brad Pitt as Benjamin or the rather typically good but not outstanding performance from Cate Blanchett as Daisy. Rather, I responded to the little vignettes, and the colourful characters that filled the margins of the story.  Taraji P Henson, Tilda Swinton and Jared Harris all give strong performances but the latter is particularly charismatic as the drunken Irish sailor who takes a semi-decrepit Benjamin from his "child-hood" home in New Orleans to Communist Russia and thence to World War Two. In addition, there's also something fascinating and funny about "fish out of water" stories. To that end, seeing an old-looking but pre-teen Benjamin visit a brothel or get drunk is wonderfully funny. But let's not get too pretentious. It's the same brand of entertainment as FREAKY FRIDAY.

So, in the final analysis, for me BENJAMIN BUTTON is a game of two halves - a beautifully made, elegaic fable enlivened by the odd flash of raucous humour, somehow hitched to a film that tries to be an epic love story but left me cold. 

THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON opened in 2008 in the US and Australia. It opened earlier in 2009 in Turkey, the Philippines, Brazil, Sweden, Egypt, Greece, Portugal, Denmark, Poland, Argentina, Germany, the Netherlands, Russia, Switzerland, Austria, Iceland and Venezuela. It opens this weekend in Belgium, France, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Serbia, Singapore, Slovakia, Estonia, Italy, Norway, the UK and Japan. It opens next weekend in South Korea and on February 20th in Finland.

HUSTLE AND FLOW - Isaac Hayes is in this movie - do you need another reason to see it?

HUSTLE AND FLOW is one of the best films released this year. It is funny, dramatic, has elements of a thriller and a domestic farce. Trust me – you don’t have to be into rap music to get a lot from this movie.

How can I describe how awesome a movie this is? First off, every acting performance is superb. Terrence Howard is having some kind of year. First, his superb performance in Paul Haggis’ “Crash” as the TV producer dealing with racism in modern day Los Angeles, forced to look on helpless as his wife is finger-fucked by a LAPD officer. Now his break-out-role as D-Jay, a low-level Memphis p*mp, who wants to become a rap star. Howard raps on all the tracks, combines the necessary mean business-like attitude of a p*mp with occasional flashes of integrity and tenderness. Plus, he reportedly spent months trying to get the Memphis drawl just right. (I am no judge, I live in London.)

The gaggle of prostitutes controlled by D-Jay are not one-dimensional screeching cr*ck-heads – they are real women in a bad place. In particular, Taryn Manning, who plays Nola, is fantastic and will surely get picked up for mainstream Hollywood roles on the back of this. Ludakris is great as Skinny Black, another local kid made good, and James will be thrilled to see that Isaac Hayes has a small walk-on part. Behind the camera, the cinematography by Amy Vincent, who directed the 2nd unit on “Lemony Snickett” is decent. Far better is the fact that the tracks D-Jay is writing actually sound like they could chart. We actually believe in Terrence Howard could be a rap star and this makes us invest a lot of emotion in the challenge of getting him noticed.

I honestly cannot think of a bad word to say about HUSTLE AND FLOW, but others have. The movie has attracted a lot of criticism because it was written and directed by – shock! Horror! a white man, namely Craig Brewer. And it is true that when you see TV footage of Brewer he does come over a bit Ali-G. But as John Singleton, the film’s producer and director of the superb “Boyz’n the hood” said, “What is a black film? Is an Eddie Murphy film a black film.” I quite agree. If Eddie can do such populist studio crap as "Doctor Doolittle", why shouldn’t Brewer do a movie about a p*mp turned rapper? I mean it’s not like he isn’t at home with the material. Like his protagonist, Brewer’s Mrs. was a stripper who had to give up when she got pregnant. And surely the only benchmark should be whether or not he makes a good movie? Brewer seems to be aware of the minefield he is about to step in to when he introduces a young white boy who helps D-Jay out with his music. When they first meet, D’Jay asks his black friend, Key, “Who's this niggah?” Key replies, “That's Shelby, he plays piano in my church. I thought he could help us develop your sound.” D’Jay looks aghast, “You know he's white, right?”

The film also took a lot of heat from black critics for portraying “the worst of Memphis”, as though the city was only about p*mps, h*okers and decrepit housing. But surely you can’t have it both ways. If "The Cosby Show" was too unrealistically upper-middle class, at least HUSTLE AND FLOW is telling you what is actually happening at the bottom of the heap. The movie never pretends to give you a comprehensive picture of society but to take you for a short time into D-Jay’s world. Surely this is as valid as Charles Dickens only showing the seamy side of Chancery Lane in "Bleak House"….

HUSTLE AND FLOW opened in July in the US, and is released in the UK on the 11th November, in Germany on the 17th November and in France on the 7th December 2005. Terrence Howard has been nominated for an Oscar for his performance in this film.