FANTASTIC BEASTS: THE CRIMES OF GRINDELWALD

For a very long film, CRIMES OF GRINDELWALD has a lot of characters with very few lines, and even less to do.  There's the troubling casting of a pretty Asian woman as a mysterious but almost mute Nagini.  There's Ezra Miller (WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN) as the troubled, mysterious but almost mute Credence.  Even the lead character, Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) says little except in a cryptically shy mumble, his eyes shyly averted from his interlocutor's face and yet somehow aimed at their boobs. 

For a very long film, CRIMES OF GRINDEWALD also seems rather rushed and haphazard.  Scenes end in a jarring manner, mashed up against the next one. There's a feeling that things are happening in between that have been left on the editors floor.  Things that would help us understand what the frack is going on.  It's been quite some time since I've had to google the ending of a film to figure out what just happened, but I had to with this film on two counts!

So what's actually going on? There's a powerfully magically destructive kid called Credence. He may be able to take out Dumbledore (Jude Law).  Grindelwald (Johnny Depp) is a kind of fascist anti-muggle bastard who's escaped prison and now wants to manipulate Credence into helping him take out Dumbledore.  It's not clear why Grindelwald can't go after Dumbledore directly. But maybe it's for the same reason that Dumbledore has to use his proxy - Scamander - to go after Grindelwald - because the two have a blood oath not to attack each other. Apparently this is because they used to be gay lovers. I know this because of the interwebs, rather than from anything the film might helpfully tell me.

What the movie actually consists of is a bunch of different characters wandering around Paris trying to find each other.  This is all very dull. What makes the movie worth watching are two things - first the absolutely ravishing costume and production design evoking an inter-war Paris - and the occasional moments of emotional impact - mostly revolving around the character of Leta Lestrange (Zoe Kravitz.)  Leta is, like Credence, filled with self-hate and conflict. She's an old school friend of Newt, engaged to his elder brother, anxious about some childhood guilt, and flirting with joining Grindelwald.  By contrast, the less I had to watch Redmayne's Scamander - a bag of cliched tics and mumbles - the better. And his purported love interest - played by Katherine Waterston - is a charisma vacuum.  Dan Fogler is far more engaging as the muggle comedy sidekick but is criminally underused. And as for his lover, Tina Goldstein (Alison Sudol channelling Marilyn's breathy high-pitched voice), it's not clear why she would react to not being allowed to marry a muggle by following a fascist who wants to enslave muggles.

Not much of this movie makes sense.

FANTASTIC BEASTS: THE CRIMES OF GRINDELWALD is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 134 minutes. It is available to rent and own. 

ROMAN J ISRAEL ESQ

Denzel Washington gives an impressive performance as the schlubby, socially awkward, but earnest and gifted lawyer in this social drama.  As the film opens, Roman's long-time legal partner has fallen into a coma, forcing Roman to confront the morally messy reality of the law-firm he has spent his life in, and to accept a job with the slick corporate lawyer George Pierce (Colin Farrell). One expects the plot to revolve around the moral tension between the two men. Roman is a veteran civil rights lawyer who wants to file a class action lawsuit to end plea bargains that compromise his clients' civil rights, landing them in prison to apparently save on legal costs. Pierce wants him to do paying work and make money. But actually it's really about the inner fight within Roman - between his old idealism, and the reality that he now has to confront, and whether he will give into that new cynicism.

What I love about this film is its lack of flash.  Even the Colin Farrell character, while slick, isn't a caricature Wall Street style guy - he does actually want to do what's right without going bankrupt.  And the way in which writer-director Dan Gilroy (NIGHTCRAWLER) and his DP film the LA law offices shows them to be messy, cramped, with a camera that sneaks up behind people and lingers over their shoulders. Moreover, it's a courtroom drama without a courtroom scene - which I guess is kind of Roman's point - that the general way in which American law operates, people DON'T get their day in court.

I also love the way the film so delicately walks the line of creating a quirky, eccentric character, but not allowing him to become a collection of ticks.  Roman is genuinely believable, if exaggerated in his look and feel. Moreover, the script allows Roman to be far more morally complex than a mere earnest self-described chivalrous man of old. There's a point at which he makes a decision that is legally and ethically complex and its consequences drive the final act of the film. The result is a drama that is far more adult, nuanced, and perhaps less simply satisfying than the typical fare. 

ROMAN J ISRAEL ESQ has a running time of 122 minutes and is rated PG-13 in the USA and 12A in the UK for infrequent strong language and moderate violence. The movie played Toronto 2017 and opened last year in the USA and Canada. It opened earlier this month in Malaysia, Estonia and Poland. It opens in the UK and Ireland on February 2nd, in Spain on February 9th, in Argentina on March 1st and in Germany on April 19th.

BORN TO BE BLUE

Chet Baker - mellifluous crooner and first-rate jazz trumpeter - grew up in the shadow of Miles Davis and his West Coast distance from the cool jazz scene of New York.  In this new fake-fiction biopic, Ethan Hawke plays him as endlessly charming but vulnerable, most of all to Davis' harsh note that he needed to go away and experience life to be truly great.  And per Robert Budreau's inventive but ultimately psychologically reductive script, Baker decided not just to emulate Davis' playing but what he perceived to be the secret to that greatness - being high.  And so our hero becomes a junkie, to the point where drug-dealers break his jaw and destroy his ability to play. That's the tragic irony of his life - a drug fiend so addled that he destroys the very physical ability to play because he thinks the drugs make him play better. This is the dramatic set-piece finale of the film.  Baker finally cleans himself up and teaches himself how to play again, and his promoter finally let's him play one night at the hottest jazz venue in town, in front of all-time greats such as Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie.  But Baker gets nervous, injects heroine and falls right of the wagon. And that's where he stayed up until his death.  The price of the addiction, according to this movie, is the loss of love - depicted here by Carmen Ejogo as the composite lover who walks out on him.

SELMA

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SELMA is a handsomely made, beautifully acted and devastatingly searing movie about the 1965 Voting Rights March from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.  It's also a movie about the difference between having a right in theory and having a right in practice, and as such, is a profoundly important and timely film.  What it isn't, and thank goodness for that, is a conventional hagio-biography in the Great Man does Great Things genre.  This isn't, and sorry to keep going on about it, as dumb as THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING.

The movie opens with Martin Luther King already a major political force. He has the ear of President Johnson and wins the Nobel Peace Prize. But despite the end of segregation by Federal Law, in Governor George Wallace's Alabama, African Americans are still subject to extreme racism.  In an elegant, swift and brutal opening triptych we are therefore given King's Nobel acceptance speech; the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing; and Annie Lee Cooper being denied her application to register to vote on the most spurious and humiliating of grounds. 

SPARKLE

SPARKLE will be remembered as the last film Whitney Houston shot before her untimely death.  And its only redeeming feature is her care-worn, slightly bloated but forever poised and authentic presence as the religious, reformed mother of three talented daughters. At around half way through the film, Houston goes back to her roots in gospel and sings a rendition of His Eyes Are On The Sparrow that is so full of meaning and pain and power that we are transfixed.  That song is worth the price of entry alone.  And throughout the rest of the film we are ever alert at the resonances between her character, and the advice she gives her daughter Sister (Carmen Ejogo) - a beautiful talented woman who falls for an abusive, addicted man. As the mother chastises the daughter for failing to use her life as a cautionary tale, we wonder how self-aware Houston was in saying those lines.  

That morbid curiosity is about as much interest as there is in this rather trite remake of the Joel Schumacher musical.  It reads as a pale echo of the critically acclaimed DREAMGIRLS, with hackneyed dialogue, banal performances and pat answers.  Set in the late 60s, the story sees three sisters form a girl group in the manner of The Supremes, playing local clubs in search of a recording contract.  The eldest sister, Sister, falls prey to a rich husband who abuses her and feeds her cocaine to the point where she ruins herself and the band .  The second sister gets an afro, gets empowered and leaves to become a doctor.  That leaves Sparkle (American Idol winner Jordin Sparks), to write her songs and get enough confidence to actually sing them for the all important record company executive.

As tales of empowerment go, it's not very convincing.  Sister has by far the most interesting story in the manner of Ike and Tina until she is rather summarily sent to the sidelines.  Dolores seems to have been born a fully formed activist and leaves the film before she can do much of anything.  And Sparkle is just about as bland as Jordin Sparks wide smile.  The only faint interest is in the treatment of Satin (Mike Epps) - a comedian who plays to white audiences.  There's still a shudder at the language he provokes and the material he uses.

SPARKLE was released earlier this year in the USA, Canada, Argentina and Italy. It opens this weekend in the UK and Ireland; on October 11th in Germany; on October 25th in Australia and New Zealand; on November 16th in Bulgaria; on November 23rd in Norway; and on November 29th in Portugal. 

SPARKLE has a running time of 116 minutes and is rated PG-13 in the USA.