MICHAEL***

Like many, I was reluctant to watch a Michael Jackson biopic sanctioned by his family. I was a huge MJ fan as a kid - his Bad tour was my first live concert - and I was crestfallen when the abuse scandal broke. Like many, my relationship with his art has become tainted.  And yet I know from my childhood obsession that he was a victim of physical and verbal abuse, with extreme body dysmorphia, and an exposure to sexuality way beyond what was appropriate at an early age. I don't think any of us truly have a hand on what his sexuality was - maybe he didn't either. And for me the jury is still out on his crimes.  

So we come to the film - which I watched VOD rather than in the cinema. It's a handsomely made straightforward emancipation story featuring some breathtakingly good performances from Juliano Valdi as young Michael, and Jackson's own nephew Jaafar as the older MJ.  They are both absolutely stunning as Michael and one can only imagine the innate talent and artistry and rehearsal time to pull of his singing style and dance moves. Jaafar in particular is absolutely joyous and breath-taking to watch.  The movie is worth it for the iconic concert recreations alone - whether the first Billie Jean moonwalk, or the final recreation of Bad live.  Kudos to director Antoine Fuqua (THE EQUALISER) and cinematographer Dion Beebe (CHICAGO) for getting us as close to that feeling of seeing MJ live as we could hope for.

The problem was always going to be what was unsaid and unexplored.  How did MJ's mum really feel seeing the family abuse?  Nia Long is warmly supportive as MJ's mother in this version, but wasn't she collusive, and what impact did her strict religion have on MJ's sexuality.  That sexuality is of course not explored at all. We fast forward through puberty. We never see any interiority from Michael about that. Only his need to escape his father.  His sisters get short shrift and his brothers barely feature.  How did they feel when he moved away from them? This movie does not care.  Yes there is the rising eccentricity and the menagerie of animals. A passing mention of vitiligo.  The awful Pepsi commercial fire.  But no interrogation of Michael's deeply messed up mental health. It's such a damn shame. But given the family estate constraints, I guess this is a good as writer John Logan (GLADIATOR) could have done.  Moreover, even without the constraints, going inside of Michael's head would involve making judgment calls, which would be highly contentious. This movie is for the fans, and most fans (unlike me) have long-since acquitted Michael of any wrongdoing.

MICHAEL is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 127 minutes. It was released in cinemas in April and is now available on demand.

THE SPARKS BROTHERS*****

I came to Edgar Wright's new documentary thinking that Sparks was a novelty act. The weird glam rock singer and Hitler-looking grim keyboard player singing This Town Ain't Big Enough For The Both Of Us. I only new that they were still around when Leos Carax' brilliantly bizarre ANNETTE was released, with music by the duo. But by the end of this long and loving documentary I had come to a new found respect and eve love for the band, and can't wait to dive into their 25-album-and-counting back catalogue. I turned to my husband at the end of the movie and said that the fact that such a deeply weird, witty, intelligent and NICE band had survived all these years and had new generations of fans said something good about humanity. And certainly about them. It's nice to see a pair of musician-brothers not turn into the feuding Gallaghers, and not become commercial sell-outs, and not become parodies of themselves. Just carry on, making cool, weird records. 

This is Wright's first doc and he brings reverence for the music together with visual flair.  There are so many brilliant jokes in how the interviewees (Bjork, Beck, Katie Puckrick, Flea and sooo many others) are subtitled and how vintage footage is intercut with the interviews. But most of all Wright just has the grace to give this story the run-time it deserves and to give each album its due, no matter whether it was a hit or a bomb. And yes, there seem to have been a lot of ups and downs in their career. The result is that we feel invested in their success and if not their success then their happiness and artistic fulfilment. There's a deeply touching moment near the end where Ron thanks the audience and says that he doesn't take the fans for granted. They really are gentlemen. 

THE SPARKS BROTHERS is rated R and has a running time of 140 minutes. It played Sundance and SXSW 2021 and was released earlier this year.

BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY

Freddie Mercury was a superlatively talented and charismatic musician who lived a raucous, dangerous life.  He was a bold artist - his pop videos referenced Njinsky, and Fritz Lang and leather clubs - he gave a white hair band a provocatively queer name - he was both in the closet and out - he's one of the most famous victims of AIDS but only admitted he'd contracted the disease late.   And more than that, Freddie remains fundamentally opaque.  He didn't talk much about his private boarding school childhood in India, hundreds of miles from his parents in Zanzibar. He didn't talk much about how they felt to be transported from wealth and warmth to suburban London, and how he felt as a gay teenager of strict Zoroastrian parents, whose religion forbids homosexuality.  Do we really know why he went solo in the early 80s?  Do we really know why he returned to the band?  Do we know how he felt when gay friends starting dying of AIDS, whether he took precautions or altered his behaviour, or how he felt when he succumbed?

No. And this is not the film to tell us either.  Instead, what we have here is a sanitised, banal, paint by numbers biopic that does no justice to the audacity of its subject, or the interest of his fans. It's all surface. All staged set-up. There's barely a conversation that doesn't show a simplistic version of how some hit song was written. This is the stuff of pantomime villains and white-washed heroes.  Most insultingly, the film portrays Freddie as unaware he was gay until the late 70s, as basically straight laced until led down the path of danger and disease in the 80s by the villlainous parasite Paul Prenter (Allan Leech - DOWNTON ABBEY).  Even when he does come out to his parents in an absurd last minute hook up with Jim Hutton on the DAY OF LIVE AID!!! there's no confrontation or consternation. It's all just tied up nicely with a bow so that the stakes can be at their highest for that concert. Oh yes, and he supposedly also told the band he was dying just before it and was worried his voice wouldn't hold up.

This is all palpable bollocks of course.  And one would've hoped that the surviving members of the band would've been better than settling old scores with the original reviewers of BoRhap, or the original record producer who wouldn't put it out as a single.  One might even have hoped that they would be more honest about their shagging and drinking, let alone Freddie's, rather than just the odd sly comment about Roger Taylor's extra-marital affairs.   And for heaven's sake, could any of this have been done with slightly more subtlety that the leaden dialogue by THE QUEEN's Peter Morgan and Anthony McCarten? Seriously this was little more than an afternoon TV Movie of the week.

The only thing that saves the movie - I'm afraid to say as he's apparently a despicable man - is Bryan Singer's visual styling - particularly an opening dynamic walk through the backstage of Live Aid, and a lovely shot that takes us into the band's tour bus. 

Rami Mallek doesn't act - he does an impersonation. A very good one of Freddie's accent and physical performance.  But he struggles with his prosthetic teeth and an impersonation is NOT a holistic acting performance. That said, Freddie and Queen were just so bloody good, that even seeing an impersonation  inspires a lot of nostalgia and feel-good singalong warmth.  But that doesn't make this by any stretch of the imagination an awards-worthy film.

BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY has a running time of 134 minutes and is rated PG-13.  It is on global release.

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.

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS - meh

So here's the thing. INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS is not a disaster. It's quite watchable and occasionally leavened by good performances, both comedic (Christoph Waltz, Brad Pitt) and dramatic (Mélanie Laurent), not to mention beefcake (Til Schweiger). There are flashes of Tarantino craziness (in a superb basement-tavern set-piece for one) but somehow the movie never takes off - never quite convinces us that we are in a surreal alternate place. In a sense, Tarantino is too good. He does what he's never done before - he creates genuinely dramatic, emotional, credible situations of fear and tension. And then he expects us to switch back in Tarantino the Comic Fantasist mode. As a result, when Tarantino does something that really fracks with reality (e.g. the ending) it just feels wrong. Final reaction: flat. Meh. Walk out of the cinema thinking, what just happened here?

Now, down to the nuts and bolts. INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS is really two films. The first is a pretty serious revenge movie. Mélanie Laurent plays a young Jewish woman who has watched her family butchered by Nazis, and is now in a position, as owner of a Parisian cinema, to blow up the entire German High Command at a premiere of some Nazi propoganda. Melanie Laurent is excellent as Shosanna Dreyfuss - just watch her suppress her fear when she realises she is taking coffee with the man who butchered her family. Diane Kruger is also notably convincing as a German film-star who has to charm her way into the premiere in order to disrupt it. The tension when she is being interrogated by the same Nazi officer who terrified Shosanna is palpable. The second movie, which surrounds the first, is a more broadly drawn Tarantino comedy in which a bunch of American Nazi scalp-hunters, led by Brad Pitt, team up with Diane Kruger's German film-star and Michael Fassbinder's British soldier, to also blow-up aforementioned Nazis. The comedy comes from Brad Pitt as a sort of Dirty Dozen war hero and his interactions with the Nazi villain played by Waltz (whose performance unifies the two parts of the film). The comedy does not come from a particularly ill-judged cameo from Mike Myers.

My suspicion is that the movie won't satisfy anyone. Tarantino fans will want more Brad Pitt/Basterds craziness and tire of the Parisian drama. Not to mention the fact that, rather bravely, Tarantino has chosen to be vaguely credible in keeping most of the dialogue in French and German. Indeed, he goes further, with a great running gag about Americans not speaking foreign languages. I just wonder whether that gag will back-fire with his target demographic. The cult-fans looking for kick-ass violence and witty dialigue might also object to the fact that, ultimately, this is not really a movie about France, Nazis, the Holocaust or anything other than Tarantino's abiding love of cinema, and his childlike belief that movies really can change the world.

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS played Cannes 2009, where Christoph Waltz won Best Actor, Berlin and Melbourne 2009. It is released next weekend in Belgium, France, the UK, Australia, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, New Zealand, Russia, Slovenia, Ukraine, Austria, Canada, Estonia, Norway, Sweden, Taiwan, the USA and the Netherlands. It is released the following weekend in Iceland, Argentina, the Czech Republic, the Portugal, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Denmark. It opens in September in Finland, Romania, Israel and Spain. It opens in October in Italy, Japan, Singapore, Mexico and Brazil.

THE LOVE GURU - not quite good enough

Here's the thing. I don't find dick and fart jokes particularly funny. (This isn't judgmental - just a a matter of taste). Nor do I find comedians putting on ethnic accents at the cutting edge of humour: Peter Sellars had that down decades ago. Having said all that, I love WAYNE'S WORLD and the first AUSTIN POWERS movie. They were such warm-hearted joyful pastiches of genre-movies, I could overlook the occasional crude joke. Mike Myers' latest movie, THE LOVE GURU, tilts the balance firmly in favour of the crude and away from the thoughtful spoof. That's fine and if you like that kind of humour, as many of the people in the cinema I was in last night did, you'll have a really good times. The litmus test is this: is the idea of two lychees wrapped in pastry to look like balls funny to you? If so, go forth and enjoy!

If you don't find that funny, as I didn't, is there enough in this film to keep you satisfied? My answer is wishy-washy. I can't say I'd want to watch THE LOVE GURU again, and I did cringe every time Ben Kingsley portrayed a cross-eyed Indian guru. (Has Ganndhi come to this?!) The running joke using Marishka Hargitay's name may not play in the UK and Justin Timberlake is definitely worth more than his cameo as a camp Quebecois hockey player. And the scene where the trainee gurus joust with urine covered mops was truly tragic.

But there are a handful of genuine laughs in this movie, and I had an okay time with it. The basic idea is that Mike Myers is a LA based celebrity Guru, always striving to be bigger than Deepak Chopra. If Guru Pitka can reunite an ice-hockey star and his wife in time to restore his game and win the championship, the Guru will appear on Oprah securing his position as number one Guru. Pitka has a bunch of risible self-help techniques, signified by trade-marked acronyms, and the titles of all his books ARE funny. The early sight gag of the motorised cushion is also brilliant. I even liked the Bollywood song-and-dance number spoofs with Jessica Alba.

Still, as funny as the soft spoofery was, I couldn't help but think that THE LOVE GURU would've worked better as a SNL sketch. And, if truth be told, the funniest thing in it IS like a SNL sketch - Stephen Colbert's satire on sports commentators was sharper and edgier than anything Myers brought to the table.

THE LOVE GURU was released earlier this year in the USA, Australia and Israel. It is currently on release in Iceland, Italu and the UK. It opens later in August in Singapore, Sweden, Finland, Norway and Turkey. It opens in September in Belgium, the Netherlands, Venezuela and France. It opens in October in France, Germany, Austria and Spain.

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.