MA RAINEY'S BLACK BOTTOM

It's a searingly hot day in 1920s Chicago.  A black blues band is shut into a dank dark basement to rehearse for a recording session.  The session is run by rich white men.  The star is late. And she is well aware of the delicate power balance that lies between her - the moneymaker - and the men who control access to the record business.  She is Ma Rainey - the Mother of the Blues - a big butch black woman who wears greasepaint make-up and a horse-hair wig and sings and speaks with an authoritative growl. She knows what she wants - whether that's the complete devotion of her lover Dussie-Mae, or a cold coca-cola, or her stuttering nephew to speak on her track. She holds both her manager and the studio boss in contempt and with good reason. She knows full well how the North is just as racist as the South. Most importantly for the plot of this chamber piece, Ma Rainey has no time for the pretentious jazz stylings of Levee Green, or for his eyeing up her lover, or for any kind of destabilising of her core style when Bessie Smith is rising up as a rival.  Levee is, by contrast, a man who still thinks his talent will win him a fair shake by the recording studio. Although we realise as the film goes on just how angry, and damaged, and traumatised, and violent, he is. Because this is a film that does not shy away from describing and showing the most brutal forms of racism - whether rape and lynching, or the exploitation of black talent. Life is truly a brick wall behind a locked door.  Ma Rainey knows this from the start: Levee comes to a painful realisation during the course of the film.

The resulting film is good if you take it as it is - a filmed play.  As such the language (Ruben Santiago-Hudson adapting August Wilson) is stylised and the action largely confined to either the rehearsal room or the recording room.  We have moments of high drama in the form of powerful monologues by Ma Rainey and Levee, and a final act release of tension. If you take it as it is, this really is a powerful and moving drama. Viola Davis' Ma Rainey is an instant icon of queer and black cinema - a powerful and uncompromising figure who speaks honestly to the racism of her time. Kudos to the costume and make-up designers that gave her heft and sweat and revolting make-up - underlining the fact that she was not going to survive a more superficial mass marketing age. But it's Chadwick Boseman in his final role that steals the show, with his two powerful monologues. The latter is a violent indictment of an absent God, and given what we now know about Boseman's fatal illness, and can see in his thinner frame, it has an extra pathos. I suspect that he will be posthumously nominated for Awards and deservedly so.

MA RAINEY'S BLACK BOTTOM is rated R and has a running time of 94 minutes. It is streaming on Netflix.

THE FIFTH ESTATE

You can listen to a podcast review of this film below, or subscribe to Bina007 Movie Reviews directly in iTunes.

I rather enjoyed the new Wikileaks movie, THE FIFTH ESTATE, despite its rather cartoonish characterisation of the two protagonists.  Julian Assange is very much painted as an odd fish: egomaniacal, deceptive, paranoid, with a casual disregard for human life.  By contrast, his early collaborator Daniel Berg, upon whose book this movie is partly based, is portrayed as a man of conscience and humanity.  Where Assange wants to publish and be damned, arguing that THAT is the very mission of Wikileaks, Berg wants to protect innocent sources and take the time to do actual fact-checking.  He sees the irony of Assange: a liberator of secrets who is himself secretive;  a noble idealist who treats those around him ignobly; the man who would bring institutions to account, but is accountable to no-one.

I'm not sure how much truth there is to such an account, and while it seems to mesh with other reports of Assange's idiosyncrasies and ego, one must also remember that he is subject to a smear campaign.  What I CAN say is that it makes for a highly compelling movie, with every broad stroke characterisation over-ridden by the voyeurs joy at seeing inside (supposedly) the most important news organisation of our time.  This is helped by a charismatic and note perfect impression of Assange by Benedict Cumberbatch, and another fine and sympathetic performance from Daniel Bruehl (RUSH) as Berg.  I also thought that just as David Fincher found an imaginative way to present programming in THE SOCIAL NETWORK, so director Bill Condon (TWILIGHT: BREAKING DAWN) has found a really neat visual trick to show us how Wikileaks operates.  He uses the metaphor of a room filled with old fashioned desks with computers and name plates.  By showing us who is sitting at them., what they are doing, how they are being destroyed at various points in the film, he helps us understand the various shifts in power no the reality behind Assange's facade.

I guess my frustration is that with the movie starting at the point at which Assange meets Berg, and given that our only view on his past is mediated by Assange, I'm not sure we get at the truth of what motivates him.  He clearly had a weird childhood, to put it mildly, and maybe it's too early to really get the full perspective on what makes him tick.  Still, as a biopic suffering from the fact that the sources only gives us one side of the story. THE FIFTH ESTATE, still manages to give us what seems to be an authentic and fascinating picture. It's well worth a watch.

THE FIFTH ESTATE has a running time of 128 minutes and is rated R in the USA.

THE FIFTH ESTATE played Toronto 2013 and is on release in the UK and Ireland. It opens next weekend in the USA, Canada, Estonia and Lithuania. It opens on October 25th in the Czech Republic, Italy, Brazil, Finland, Poland, Spain; on October 31st in Germany and Norway; on November 8th in Australia, Denmark and Iceland; on November 14th in Argentina and Singapore; on November 21st in Belgium and Hong Kong; on November 28th in Greece; on December 4th in France; on December 6th in Sweden and on December 19th in the Netherlands.

BATTLESHIP - Surprisingly good!

I appreciate the irony of me telling you to ignore the critics - at least the paid ones - because BATTLESHIP is a lot of fun. And I say this as someone who couldn't watch TRANSFORMERS and generally doesn't do mindless action summer blockbusters.  I can see why the critics are being sniffy. BATTLESHIP is, no pun intended, an easy target to hit.  It has more than it's fair share of ludicrous action sequences and clichéd dialogue.  Its plot is a pick'n'mix from BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, INDEPENDENCE DAY, STAR WARS and TERMINATOR - utterly predictable from start to finish.  And worst of all, it stunt-casts a Sports Illustrated model (Brooklyn Decker) and a pop star (Rihanna). It's also pretty long.

But forget all that. Here's the deal.  NASA has sent  out signals to an earth-like planet that have resulted in an early-invasion alien task-force targeting a satellite station in Hawaii, putting up a forcefield that keeps out the US navy.  Luckily, BSG-stylee, a few ships are trapped inside the field, and it falls to them to destroy the alien force, eventually decommissioning an old battleship complete with vets on board.  Part of this involves tracking the alien ships, battleship game style, by trying to hit grid co-ordinates. Meanwhile, on the island, a geek, a girlfriend and a war-vet come together to knock on the communication satellite via which the aliens are due to bring in the rest of the invasion force.

There are a lot of battles and fights and whatnot and the vis-effects are all top-notch.  But what makes the film a success is that it takes its time establishing character, so that when it gets to the battles we actually care about the outcome and the character development they engender. The movie starts with a clean-cut Naval officer Stone Hopper (Alexander Skarsgard) witnessing his love-able loser brother Alex's (Taylor Kitsch) attempt to woo the daughter of an Admiral (Brooklyn Decker).  The intro is genuinely funny, just as the opening scenes with Kitsch as John Carter trying to break jail were really funny.  And what this movie does right is that it recognises that Kitsch has a Harrison Ford like loveable-rogue quality and rather than squashing that (as in John Carter) it actually lets it run throughout the movie.  All the way through we have him wise-cracking even as he becomes more mature and takes on command of the ship. 

Moreover, whenever, the dialogue gets too hammy, you have another character commenting on that. A lot of critics have criticised Kitsch's character using the line "I have a bad feeling about this" after a destroyer has pretty much been shot to shit. But I think they're missing the fun that the screenwriters are having with the genre they're in. How else can  you explain having Hamish Linklater play the science geek Cal looking basically like a young George Lucas?  And a couple of times he even explicitly says things like "who talks like that?!" This is a movie that internalises its own critique - it knows it has a mockingly self-indulgent attitude toward the genre conventions its playing with.

What's interesting is that this self-indulgent, gentle mockery sits alongside a very earnest, patriotic streak that runs throughout the film.  Early on, we have a scene where Korean War vets are saluted.  They play a key role later on.  And real-life vet Gregory D Gadson plays a pivotal role in the island storyline.  I like the fact that alongside all the action sequence nonsense, the movie looks us straight in the eye and shows us the true cost of war - men with their limbs shot off.  And it doesn't do this is in a sensational way - it just quietly makes its point.

So for me, BATTLESHIP is pretty much the perfect summer blockbuster. It's a mindless action movie that actually has a lot of intelligence - combining respect for vets with a conciliatory attitude towards the US' historic enemies.  It deals in cliché, but does so in a funny and self-aware manner. And we finally get a movie that understands that Taylor Kitsch is best used in a role which shows off his easy charm.  I'm all about this movie and look forward to the sequel.

BATTLESHIP was released on April 12th in Belgium, France, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Taiwan, the UK, Australia, Denmark, Germany, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Finland, Iceland, India, Italy, Japan, Spain and Vietnam. It opens on April 19th in Hungary, the Czech Republic, Greece, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Bulgaria, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Turkey.  It opens on May 11th in Brazil and Colombia; on May 18th in Canada, Paraguay and the USA.