FILM REVIEW: GET ON UP

James Brown (Chadwick Boseman ) in Get On Up.

A man's man's world in America

By Ed Rampell

Tate Taylor’s well-directed Get On Up is a 138-minute biopic about “The Godfather of Soul," James Brown. Features about actual persons often suffer by not explaining the actions and behavior of their subjects, which is especially frustrating in movies about tortured artists who act in self destructive ways. For example, in the otherwise excellent 2000 biopic, Pollock, with its director Ed Harris depicting the action painter, Jackson Pollock’s alcoholism, abusive treatment of women, etc., is explained away with a line of dialogue or two while he’s strolling on a beach and refers to his unhappy childhood.

Well, that of course is “Freud 101”, but in Get On Up co-screenwriters Jez and John-Henry Butterworth provide details from James Brown’s (the stellar Chadwick Boseman) childhood that serve to explain and provide insight into the singer’s violent behavior, as well as into his talent and success as a singer. After a flash forward to a later criminal episode, the film progresses, more or less, in chronological order, but with frequent flashbacks that portray Brown’s turbulent childhood and life/career trajectory. The film also creatively includes scenes wherein Brown addresses the viewer in a pseudo-doc, “you-are-there” manner, and takes us into his thought process while Brown is performing, which are illuminating as well as imaginative.

As a boy growing up near Augusta, Georgia in the 1930s, James witnessed domestic abuse, which caused his mother, Susie Brown (the great Viola Davis), to abandon James. He’s then raised in a brothel by its madam, Aunt Honey (Octavia Spencer).

All the fame and fortune on Earth can’t compensate for a troubled childhood like this -- and it doesn’t. The singer who performed, composed and wrote the lyrics for 1965’s hit, "I Feel Good" didn’t always feel quite so good. Brown’s talent and drive propelled him to the top of the charts, yet he still beat his wife, DeeDee (Jill Scott), and mistreated others. The driving beat of Brown’s funkadelic music and his frenetic stagecraft often gave form to and expressed his inner demons through musical sublimation of tortured impulses.

Overall, Get On Up is a challenging, complex portrait of a complicated artist with, but of course, fabulous musical and dance numbers. This feature about “the hardest-working man in show business” is surely the hardest working biopic on the silver screen. And along with the upcoming Hendrix feature, Jimi: All is By My Side, and the sly post-racial comedy, Dear White People, Get On Up is riding the cinematic wave of black-themed of movies surging the theaters.

FILM REVIEW: SAL

Sal Mineo (Val Lauren) in Sal.

He, we, were robbed

By Don Simpson

James Franco’s bio-pic of Sal Mineo (Val Lauren), the teen idol and co-star of Rebel Without a Causeand Exodus, Sal is most likely destined to suffer the same cultish fate as most films about gay protagonists (Howl being an all too perfect example). This is extremely unfortunate, because this beautiful, sexually ambiguous portrait of a gay film star’s final day of existence deserves a lot more attention than it is expected to get.

Making a film that takes place within the rigid confines of the final day of its protagonist’s life places one hell of a burden on a filmmaker — especially when the protagonist’s death is foretold on a title card — but it also adds a certain amount of, well, je ne sais quoi to the narrative. As much as I hate knowing how a film is going to end before it even begins, Franco’s narrative builds upon the fact Mineo had a happy, productive and fulfilling last day on earth. For one, Mineo finally secures a deal to direct his first feature film — an adaptation of Charles Gorham's McCaffery. He is also in the final days of rehearsal as a lead actor in a theatrical adaptation of James Kirkwood, Jr.’s P.S. Your Cat Is Dead at the Westwood Playhouse; under the direction of Milton Katselas (James Franco), the play is all but ready for an audience…despite Keir Dullea’s (Jim Parrack) inability to remember his lines.

Christina Voros’ handheld vérité camerawork ogles Mineo, observing every movement of his immaculately buff body as he tirelessly works out at a gym or as he lounges around his apartment in various states of undress. If Mineo loved one thing, it was his body, and Sal functions as a testament to that. With no trace of expository dialogue, we are never privy to what Mineo is thinking or feeling; our only insight into Mineo is what we can piece together from watching him. Mineo spends at least half of his screen time alone; since he does not talk to himself or to inanimate objects, this means his dialogue is very limited. Sure, there are a few phone conversations — of which we only hear his side — but they are not very revealing, other than Mineo really wants to get people out to attend the upcoming premiere of his play.

Sal is not an entry into the cannon of queer cinema; other than focusing on a prominent gay figure, there is absolutely nothing “gay” about Sal. Franco avoids social commentary and political activism. (By the way, Mineo's killer served less than half of his 57-year prison sentence.) Instead Franco opts for this project to be a scholarly exercise in authenticity and realism. Handcuffed by an unspoken pledge that seems to resemble the “Dogme 95 Manifesto”, Sal is stripped of any entertainment value, but it is quite a commendable testament to the contemporary neo-realism movement nonetheless.

FILM REVIEW: LULA, SON OF BRAZIL

A scene from Lula, Son of Brazil.

Rise for the classes

By Ed Rampell

In the past few years a slew of biopics about recent European rightwing leaders have been released, including The Conquest (about Nicolas Sarkozy’s rise to France’s presidency), The Iron Lady (with Meryl Streep as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher), The Queen (about Queen Elizabeth and Britain’s sellout and warmonger, Prime Minister Tony Blair), as well as Il Caimano, which lampoons Italy’s buffoonish Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Now there’s a feature to cheer for about one of the good guys, as Fabio Barreto’s Lula, Son of Brazil joins Clint Eastwood’s ode to Nelson Mandela, Invictus, as a biopic about a left-leaning leader.

This stylish, stirring, poignant picture follows Luis Inacio Lula da Silva from his birth and humble origins in Brazilian hinterlands to his migration to the urban squalor of São Paolo’s favelas. Lula is real salt of the Earth, a man of the people, who during his childhood was a shoeshine boy and fruit peddler. His father is a ne’er-do-well who deserts the family, although his mother, Dona Lindu (Gloria Pires) is a loving, nurturing, encouraging pillar of strength. Several actors portray Lula from childhood to adulthood, and newcomer Rui Ricardo Diaz incarnates the grownup metal worker as he rises in the ranks of the trade union movement that challenges the factory bosses and Brazil’s military dictatorship. Like Mandela, Lula becomes a political prisoner (albeit for a far shorter time than his South African counterpart) who eventually became head of state.

Along the way, Lula endures personal tragedy and loss, as well as public struggles against the military regime. Sequences of factory strikes, occupations, rallies, demonstrations and government crackdowns are shot with cinematic verve and gusto by Gustavo Hadba, and reminded me of 1969’s Z, the Costa-Gavras classic about the Greek colonels’ coup that won the Best Foreign Film Oscar. However, Barreto and his cinematographer Hadba also have keen eyes for filmically rendered, often exquisite close-ups that bring viewers into the drama.

It is this balance of the political and the personal, in terms of film form and content, that makes Lula, Son of Brazil so gripping. The private family and romantic elements are organically linked to the mass drama – just as they are in real life, too. Like the moving father-son relationship in A Better Life, the mother-son relationship between Lula and Lindu is extremely touching, and of course emphasizes how parenting is the most important job in the world. This is one of the best silver screen depictions of a mother-son relationship set against a social backdrop since V.I. Pudovkin’s 1926 Soviet revolutionary silent masterpiece, Mother, based on Maxim Gorky’s novel.

The acting has a neo-realist flavor to it in the sense that a working class milieu is truthfully depicted, although most of the lead parts are played by professional actors. Diaz, an unknown, had theatre training; this turn in the title role of an epic is his first film role. In addition to Diaz and Pires, Cleo Pires as Lula’s first wife Lurdes and Sostenes Vidal as Ziza, the brother who is to the left of Lula, also excel. Cleo is the real life daughter of Gloria, a telenovela star who also acted in 1995’s O Quatrilho, an Oscar-nominated drama directed by Barreto.

Politically, Lula, Son of Brazil depicts its proletarian protagonist as an honest trade union militant who repeatedly asserts that he is not “a communist.” Lula was more or less a social democrat, and the successful Workers Party candidate for president in post-dictatorship Brazil ruled the country in that way. While he was part of the Bolivarian trend of left-leaning South American leaders portrayed in 2010’s great Oliver Stone documentary South of the Border, he is clearly not as radical as his counterparts in Cuba, Bolivia and Venezuela. However, after serving two terms in office he reportedly reduced poverty, left Brazil better off than he’d found it before becoming president, remained immensely popular, and handed the presidency off to a democratically elected woman and former guerrilla, Workers Party candidate Dilma Rousseff.

The movie’s final credits become propagandistic, with a hagiography of Lula consisting of titles telling boasting about his achievements and photos of him meeting with various world leaders. The transition from fiction to factual is jarring, and also strange, because the rest of the biopic has a far greater ring of truth. But this is a mere quibble; otherwise, Lula is a marvelous motion picture experience about a man and a movement that shook South America’s largest nation to its core. If you happen to love great movies, don’t miss Lula, Son of Brazil.  

  

                                                                   

AFI 2011: SNOWTOWN

Jamie (Lucas Pittaway) in Snowtown.

Brain freeze

By Don Simpson

Sixteen-year-old Jamie (Lucas Pittaway) lives with his single mother, Elizabeth (Louise Harris), and two younger brothers in Adelaide’s severely disenfranchised northern suburbs. On one fateful day, Elizabeth brings home a new boyfriend, John (Daniel Henshall). Jamie instantly connects with John, discovering the father-figure he has always desired. John seems like a nice enough guy and he provides Jamie’s entire family with a stability and sense of family that they have never known.

Eventually, though, John chooses to indoctrinate Jamie into his self-righteous world of bigotry and malice. An ultra-conservative redneck vigilante, John has made it his life’s mission to rid the world of unacceptable behavior. John assembles a consortium of like-minded townspeople to assist him with compiling a target list of anyone who is rumored to be a child molester, drug addict, gay, obese, or otherwise deemed abnormal.

Jamie begins to tag along with John’s gang of simpletons as they capture, torture and murder their prey. Seemingly by osmosis, Jamie begins to take on some of John’s personality and philosophy. All the while, Jamie retains enough reason to be uncomfortable with the killings and some of John’s motivations, but loyalty and fear cause him to continue down the downward spiral of senseless bloody mayhem.

A biopic about Australia’s most notorious serial killer — John Bunting — Snowtown is a surprisingly restrained and contemplative film. True, it does delve quite graphically into the very darkest recesses of brutality; but rather than showcasing (glorifying) violence in order to merely shock and awe the audience, writer-director Justin Kurzel is much more interested in coercing the audience to relate to Jamie and therefore sympathize with him. We are wooed by John just as Jamie is. It is difficult not to believe, at least at first, that John means well -- that he is merely trying to protect Jamie’s family.

Snowtown relies heavily upon the audience’s belief in Jamie’s story. Kurzel certainly reveals no doubts in Jamie’s version of the events, but that does not mean it is historically accurate. Remember, this is a very specific perspective of John Bunting’s story — whether or not you believe it is totally up to you.