ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI... - BFI London Film Festival 2020 - Day 5

 

ONE NIGHT IN A MIAMI... is a film that is transparently an adaptation of   s stage play.  Short of a couple of boxing matches at the start, almost the entirety of the film takes place in a crappy motel bedroom, where four powerful famous black men discuss how best to advance civil rights.  As a result, debut director Regina King (Watchmen) has little opportunity to show her visual flair.  But where  she excels is in casting her four protagonists and extracting performances of real force.  

As the film opens, we think it's going to belong to Muhammad Ali, as played by Eli Goree (Riverdale). He has the physicality and the speech pattern down pat in a way that Will Smith never did, and that has me begging for a full on biopic. But back to this film, it starts with Ali defeating Henry Cooper and then Sonny Liston against the odds.  He's on the cusp of converting to Islam and rejecting his slave name. But as the film will show, Ali's mind is already made up. He has already decided to become a civil rights activist thanks to Malcolm X's tutelage. So there's no discussion to really be had, other than a rather embarrassing admission from Malcolm X that he's about to leave the Nation of Islam because of its corruption.

Neither does the film belong to NFL player and wannabe actor Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge - THE INVISIBLE MAN).  He's the least famous of the four, his mind is also basically made up to leave the NFL and pursue acting, but he also seems quietly impervious to Malcolm X's recruitment drive.

No - this film belongs to Sam Cooke and Malcolm X and the long intellectual argument they are going to have with each other about how to advance the black cause.  As played by Kingsley Ben-Adir, Malcolm X is a far more familial, kindly and quiet character than Denzel Washington's version. In fact, it comes as no surprise that he played Barack Obama in The Comey Rule.  He castigates Cooke for playing in the South and spending his life drinking and having fun on the West Coast, as if he can somehow outrun racism. But Cooke has an equally powerful argument about the end justifying the means: after all, if the Nation of Islam wants the black man to be proud and economically independent, hasn't Cooke achieved just that?  

Leslie Odom Jr. (Hamilton) OWNS this film as Cooke.  The way in which he holds in his anger at Malcolm X's condescension is just masterful, and then when he finally lets rip his argument it's powerful and impressive. But there is nothing more impressive in the film that Cooke appearing on the Johnny Carson show at the end, and giving a performance of A Change Is Gonna Come. Not only does his voice match the silky power of the real Sam Cooke, but the emotion he brings to it destroys you.  Maybe that's because while the stakes of this film couldn't be higher, we are painfully aware that two of the four protagonists aren't going to be alive more than a year later. That all this talent and justified anger and desire for change was so stupidly wasted is as crushing as realising that the change that Cooke sheds a tear for has not yet occurred, 56 years later.

ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI has a running time of 111 minutes. The film played Venice, Toronto and London 2020 and will be released on January 15th 2021. 

VIJAY AND I

VIJAY AND I is a risible and borderline offensive farce in which a disillusioned actor (Moritz Bleibtrau) exploits the mistaken announcement of his death to see what his family and friends really think about him. With the help of his north Indian friend (Danny Pudi - COMMUNITY), the actor browns-up, gets a beard and a turban and starts to court his apparently grieving wife (Patricia Arquette).  Clearly, it's absurd to think that a woman could sleep with a man and, despite some waxing, not realise it's her husband. But we have to give any kind of farce the benefit of the doubt, as we would with TOOTSIE or MRS DOUBTFIRE. No, where this film fails is in its lack of real laughs and lack of real insight.  Both those films saw genuine emotion in their relationships and proper guilt-ridden conflicts. By contrast, "Vijay" seems petulant and spoiled - quite content to cause distress in order to get more respect, and indeed pussy, as a respected Indian man than as an actor playing a children's cartoon character. The problem is that the tone is ambiguous.  The directors should've gone for zanier farce or real relationship depth or something truly dark and depressing (DEATH TO SMOOCHIE style).  Instead we just have something very very odd, very unfunny and at times simply wince-inducing.   In fact, seeing the wonderful Patricia Arquette trying to play it straight - as though she were in a real drama - was the most painful thing of all. Avoid at all costs.

VIJAY AND I was released last year in Germany and Belgium and earlier this year in Italy and Hungary. It is available to rent and own.

THE CALL

Brad Anderson, the director behind the surreal, bleak, stunning THE MACHINIST, descends into genre features for THE CALL - a thriller starring Halle Berry that starts off brilliantly but descends into implausibility.  In some ways, the movie is set up in the same way as OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN. In a thrilling prologue, 911 operator Jordan (Halle Berry) has to listen while a creep (Michael Eklund) offs a young caller.  Move to the main body of the film, and Jordan, like Gerard Butler's Banning, is a guilt-ridden specialist trying to redeem herself.  In this case, she's called in when the same creep abducts a young girl called Casey (Abigail Breslin) and puts her in the trunk of a car. The majority of the movie sees Jordan guiding Casey through tricksy attempts to alert passing drivers and the tension is palpable,thanks partly to DP Tom Yatsko's superb digital lensing, but mostly to the strong performances by Breslin and Berry.  The problem is that in the final act, the movie gets into Scooby Doo territory with the standard stupid chase in the spooky cabin in the woods that Whedon spoofed so brilliantly. 

THE CALL is on release in the USA, Russia, Canada and Lithuania. It opens on April 5th in Brazil; on April 18th in Argentina; on May 3rd in Sweden; on May 9th in Greece and on July 5th in Turkey.

THE CALL has a running time of 94 minutes and is rated R in the USA.

Overlooked DVD of the month - OFFICE KILER

Still photographer Cindy Sherman is famous for photographing herself in poses taken from B-movies, horror movies and film noir. In 1997 she made a feature length film called OFFICE KILLER that has been described as a mix of all these genres. It's a story about a dowdy secretary who starts killing people in her office. While not short on gore, the movie singularly fails, however, to work either as horror movie or as noir.

In fact, the film only really works as an increasingly ridiculous and perhaps unintentionally funny spoof. Carol Kane is wickedly brilliant as the dowdy copy editor turned killer, with her high-pitched voice, frowsy costumes and nervous ticks. Molly Ringwald is cast against type as the office flirt and is clearly having a ball in her pastiche-50s outfits. Barbara Sukowa (of ZENTROPA fame) is ridiculous as the Joan Collins'-style magazine editor. All together, we have a pastiche of the way in which women have been represented film.

Apart from the unintentional laughter, what else can OFFICE KILLER offer a contemporary audience? Well, there is a hint of the middle-class neuroies that hit the US and UK when "off-shoring" and "down-sizing" became buzz-words. And the way in which the staff react to the introduction of email and laptops makes for fascinating social history. Finally, Cindy Sherman's use of colour is admirable. I particularly love the exterior shots of the office building - shaded purple - contrasted against the unhealthy acid yellow coming from the windows. Sherman also frames her shots particularly well - always looking through desk lamps, over in-trays, and through doors.

OFFICE KILLER played Toronto 1007 and was released in the US that year. It played the London Fashion in Film Festival 2008. It is available on DVD.