MILES AHEAD

MILES AHEAD is a movie I admired more than enjoyed, which is odd because I love jazz, spent much of my early 20s in a Miles Davis, and have great respect for the talent of Don Cheadle - the lead actor, director and engine behind this whole production.  He conceives of the biopic of the iconic jazz trumpeter as a story within a story.  The framing device sees Miles in his later years, on the verge of coming out of his self-imposed, drug-fuelled exile, and inventing a funky electronic afro-jazz.  Our window into the story is a journalist played by Ewan Macgregor - a kind of enabler and partner in crime who will do anything for access to the Davis story, including scoring him drugs and brandishing a firearm as they careen around time in some kind of caper whose purpose is never quite clear, all the time scored to Davis' music.  Every now and then Davis sees an album cover featuring a photo of his wife, and this prompts a flashback to his earlier days as a pioneer of Cool Jazz. Miles mark one has short hair and a preppy jacket that were later replaced by a more race-conscious look. We realise that he loves his wife, but this doesn't prevent him from being abusive.  The regret at his marriage's failure stays with him into the later framing device years.  

The movie is really good at conveying the excitement, pace and freedom of Davis' playing, and visually underlines it with chase and fight scenes, cut to his tunes.  But the movie is at its most emotionally affecting when it slows down and shows us the real struggles he faced. The most poignant scene occurs when a flirtatious white woman asks him to escort her out of the club at which he's playing.  The beat cop takes against this inter-racial couple, even though they aren't one, and provokes Davis into a scuffle which results in his arrest.  All of this remains deeply relevant to our times.

I regret that there aren't more quiet moments of power like this and that the movie is too caught up in the Macgregor/Cheadle chase scenes in the framing story.  I admire the intent of conveying improvisation in music through improvisation in life but it feels as though this movie is caught between too stalls - between a more conventional approach and a free jazz style. The result is a film that is curiously uninvolving.

MILES AHEAD is rated R and has a running time of 100 minutes. The movie played Sundance, Berlin and SXSW 2016 and opened earlier this year in the USA and Canada. It's currently on release in the UK and Ireland and opens in July in Norway, Portugal, Denmark, Peru and Spain, in September in Poland and in December in Japan.

THE PAPERBOY

THE PAPERBOY is a superbly trashy tawdry movie in the best tradition of the Southern Gothic. Set in a late 60s bumblefuck town in Florida, the movie opens with a racist obese cop having his guts eviscerated in a parking lot and closes with a sunkissed teen ferrying brutalised bodies over an alligator swamp. In between, we're going to see a convicted murderer command his infatuated fiancée to simulate oral sex in front of the journalists trying to prove him innocent. We're going to see that same fiancée pee on the sunkised teen lashed by a jellyfish.  We're going to see his elder brother brutalised in a sadomasochistic act in which he might have been complicit. And we're going to see a man rip the guts out of a gator as if it ain't no thang. 

In all this craziness, it's questionable where our focus is really meant to be?  Are we really meant to care about proving the innocence of creepy Hillary van Wetter (John Cusack)? To be sure, reporters Ward (Matthew McConaughey) and Yardley (David Oyewolo) do some investigating but I never really got a hold of what they were meant to be uncovering and how it got him released, or even why Ward was so convinced of his innocence after the way he talked to his fiancée Charlotte (Nicole Kidman).  (I figured Yardley never cared one way or another, just so long as he got to publish something.)

No, the focus of the movie seemed to be far more on kid brother Jack (Zac Efron), his infatuation with Charlotte (so slippery for the narrator to keep calling it love), and his unending loyalty to his brother, despite everything that he saw in that plastic sheeted motel room.  There are moments between Ward and Jack, amid the garish grotesquery, that are so intimate and authentic they make you realise how rare it is to see true sibling love on screen. I'm thinking of a snatched conversation on the banks of a swamp - and the way in which Ward cradles a drunken Jack as they sail out to see Charlotte in the movie's final act. And let's be honest, the flash of anger in which Jack uses the N-word in front of his beloved housemaid, Anita (Macy Gray) and then makes up with her says so much more about the reality of race relations in that period than THE HELP ever could. 

So, while THE PAPERBOY might fail as a conventional investigative procedural, while it's focus might be fuzzy, it succeeds like no film I know in holding us rapt - just waiting to see what on earth could happen next to these characters that, after all, we have come to care about. Because, yes, I did want the oversexed trailer trash prison groupie to be happy. And I did care about Jack and Ward, and wince every time someone mistreated Anita. 

I love the way that Lee Daniels (PRECIOUS) and DP Roberto Schaeffer's Super 16mm photography and impeccable production design make the movie jump off the screen. I love the way we can feel the sweat, and the taste the dirt and smell the filth.  And I have to say that as much as Nicole Kidman got a lot of award season glory this really is an ensemble cast that has no shame, no pride and every willingness to look trashy in service of the story.  I guess we've come to expect this from Matthew McConaughey who's reinvented himself as the king of sleaze, but I was shocked at John Cusack's transformation.  Macy Gray is also wonderful as Anita, in one of the rare examples of a narration that really works. 

THE PAPERBOY played Cannes and Toronto 2012 and was released last year in Croatia, the USA, Belgium, France, Canada, Israel, Russia, Bulgaria, Greece and Portugal. It opened earlier this year in Poland, Lebanon, Finland and Australia. It opens this weekend in the UK and Ireland, in Chile on April 4th, in Mexico on April 5th, in Turkey on April 12th and in Argentina on May 9th. 

THE PAPERBOY has a running time of 107 minutes and is rated R in the USA.