The Heart and Soul of A Star Is Born

Orson Welles, meet Bradley Cooper. Think I'm exaggerating? Well, think again. Because with A Star Is Born, Cooper has achieved a simply staggering directorial debut that is one of the most genuine, engaging and heartstring-tugging motion pictures I’ve seen in a long time. A Star Is Born opened back in early October, and am I ever glad I managed to catch it in theaters while it’s still connecting with audiences (it’s still in the top 10) – and does it ever connect. Cooper redefines himself here like few performers ever do, not just directing, not just starring, but also co-writing the screenplay and half the songs, having worked for two years with Lukas Nelson (son of Willie) learning to play guitar and be utterly convincing as a musician and songwriter. The energy on display is nothing short of electric. 

Cooper plays Jackson Maine, a country-fried rock guitar player who seems part Neil Young, part Eddie Vedder, by way of Greg Allman. Music is Jack's life, but his boss is alcohol. He's coasting through life in a foggy bubble when he drifts into a random post-gig bar and hears a singer's voice that stops him in his tracks and clears away the mist. Ally (Lady Gaga) is still waiting tables, but she's got a gift. Jack's never seen anyone quite like her, and the charisma of their mutual discovery is something to behold. Part of the film's magic is the gradual unwinding of the plot as lives intersect and change, so I say we forgo too many details and let you uncover them yourself. 

Lady Gaga is a revelation. I was amazed at her work here, and the layers of her performance. Her Ally is a woman with power who's seldom been taken seriously, suddenly finding herself on the threshold of unlimited possibilities. Gaga wrote much of the film's music as well, and the film's performances feel natural and often improvised at times. There's an incredible authenticity to A Star Is Born, from the atmosphere on stage, to the way intimate conversations unfold, that pulls you in and powerfully invests you in these people's lives and relationships. The supporting roles are phenomenal, with unexpected heart from Andrew Dice Clay, a long absent Dave Chappelle, and likely Best Supporting Actor winner Sam Elliott. All turn in superlative, naturalistic performances. Cooper's style as a director echoes the deceptively low key approach of Robert Altman, with a weight to the character-building and performances that both hypnotizes and haunts. 

  

Cinematographer Matthew Libatique (Straight Outta Compton, Black Swan, Iron Man) brings a seventies California shadows vibe to his images. Made for a modest $36 million, A Star Is Born is incredibly well shot, with a screenplay by Eric Roth (Forrest Gump, Munich, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) that gives rich new life to a story that's been told before more than once. It feels fresh and immediate. You should know that Roth and Cooper don't flinch when it comes to showing how brutal and damaging addiction can be. Audience members coping with trauma and addiction themselves may want to tread carefully, and should go with someone who cares, who's willing to talk. It's one of the most painful portrayals of how fragile we can feel when navigating the rocky shoals between the past and future. 

I'll be heavily, heavily rooting for Cooper on Oscar night, in more than one category - but what truly blew me away was the strength of the music these people created together. Original movie songs can feel taped together and stilted, but these songs feel like they've been well-loved and around for a while, with more than one instant classic that should start clearing some shelf space for itself. You can fall hard for people, but you can also fall for movies, and A Star Is Born has me in complete surrender. The heart and soul exhibited by all involved here leave no doubt this is one of the best pictures to come down the road in a long, long time. Very highly recommended. 

Go Big or Go Home: The Meg’s Colossal Bore

They say a shark has to constantly move forward or it dies. Consider this less a review, and more of a PSA – Warning: despite the promising trappings of cheesy, monster-carnage havoc and drive-in style glee, the only thing colossal about The Meg is what an enormous bore it turns out to be. I suspect like many of you, I missed The Meg in theaters last August, but thought the sure-fire premise would make it more than worth checking out on home video. I’m no snob – given the choice between Kong: Skull Island and Florence Foster Jenkins¸ I’m going Kong every time. Giant monsters are one of my favorite things, okay? And a colossal shark sounds like just what the doctor ordered. But in director Jon Turteltaub’s (National Treasure) aquatic opus, the titular terror doesn’t show up for-ever – so all we’re left with are the characters. So viewer be warned, this is one tedious, thinly-sketched collection of stock individuals.

Author Steve Alten published the first Meg book in 1997, and has turned the notion of a living fossil specimen of a Megalodon – a giant prehistoric shark – into a whole series of Meg titles, thanks to an easily digestible two-word pitch: “Jurassic Shark.” As deep sea submersible pilot Jonas Taylor, Jason Statham acquits himself as the protagonist in search of redemption and vindication – initially the one guy who believes it exists, due to a haunting encounter in his past. Now, years later when scientists from an undersea research lab are trapped inside a disabled sub, Statham gets the call to come save the day. The Meg feels shamelessly engineered to appeal to the overseas market. The book’s Japanese scientists and location have been unnecessarily swapped-out for Chinese counterparts, courtesy of production company Gravity Pictures.

The special effects in The Meg are decent enough, but there just aren’t enough of them, and the characters feel like they were written by an eager young lad steeped in the disaster movie/TV oeuvre of Irwin Allen. You’ll be bored senseless waiting for the shark to appear, and when it does, the filmmakers really hold back on the kind of chum-bucket antics you’d expect. The peril is restrained and antiseptic, with a near absence of “Wow” moments. Deep Blue Sea this ain’t. Characters randomly just fall into the sea for no other reason than to conveniently almost get chomped – which they seldom do. I was amazed at how boring it all was, and the nearly 2-hour running time felt twice as long.

Gravity Pictures’ involvement certainly paid off: with a domestic/international haul of $143 mill/$384 mill, a string of Meg sequels seems inevitable, even if they may be straight-to-video – which will make them completely indistinguishable stylistically from the film that spawned them – though hopefully one of them will be helmed by someone hungry enough to do something more exciting with the ingredients. This fish just lays there, nearly lifeless, stinking-up the dock.

The Unhinged Awesome of Overlord

Horror and action fans, have I got a movie for you!

 

When I first heard there was a J.J. Abrams-produced World War II horror hybrid with a Tomatometer score of 80%, my driveway echoed with the sound of burning rubber! Make no mistake: Overlord is one of the best action gore-fests I’ve seen in ages, and screams to be seen in the theater. Remember the name of director Julius Avery, because this cat is going places. Screenwriters Billy Ray (Captain Phillips) and Mark L. Smith (The Revenant) both roll up their sleeves and wreak all manner of havoc in what’s not just a great, nerve-annihilating nightmare assault on your senses, but also a phenomenal addition to the World War II genre. Saving Private Frankenstein. 

 

I thought the opening minutes of First Man were intense! But Avery gives that sequence one helluva run for its money, as a squad of GIs paratroopers about to jump into Nazi-occupied France gets the snot blown out of their plane by an artillery barrage. No question, it’s one of the most unforgettably gripping sequences in any film this year, which like most of this movie, seems to have been largely executed with practical effects.

The survivors of the air drop include the fantastic Jovan Adepo, the audience surrogate who’s in nearly every scene of the film, and he just kills it. Then there’s this hard-edged Corporal leading the mission who I’d never seen before. My brain’s going, “This guy’s Snake Plissken!” The voice! The sneer! Then I see it’s Wyatt Russell (son of Kurt), who is just sensational here as the nails-hard explosives guy who’s seen it all and then some. I haven’t seen Lodge 49, but I just may have to, as Russell’s fantastic.

Their mission? Take out at heavily fortified Nazi transmission tower within the ruins of an old French church – and lemme tell ya, there is just every kind of awful going on behind those ancient stones, and our guys have to go in there. Overlord simply never lets up. The tension is incredibly well sustained, and there’s no sardonic self-aware winking at the audience – the actors take it deadly serious, and sell the hell out of the situation. Massive kudos to DPs Laurie Rose and Fabian Wagner, who along with Production Designer Jon Henson create a beautifully realistic and rich environment that’s utterly convincing and seeping with detail. The sound team also does amazing work here. Every Nazi bootstep echoes with malice – sound and score beautifully coexisting to deliciously mess with the audience – and those Nazis!  Pilou Asbæk (Games of Thrones’ Euron Greyjoy) is just oozing with dreadfulness as the SS officer running the show. This cast – including the great Bokeem Woodbine – is simply phenomenal. When the picture ended, I was ready to go right back and see it again. Director Avery channels Hellboy, Michael Mann’s The Keep – STILL not on blu-ray! Come on!– and Where Eagles Dare, to deliver a ridiculously satisfying thrillride that never lets up. If you’re a genre movie lover, you need to seek this sucker out immediately, before the holiday release deluge whisks it out of theaters – though they’d better bring a mop.

 

And if you’re a young kid in Wisconsin, maybe heading for your junior prom? Then you should definitely see this movie –  because Overlord will teach you one of the most enduring and important lessons you will ever learn: that Nazis are the most messed up, evil and deserving of hellfire bastards to ever walk the Earth. Overlord is very, very highly recommended.

BlacKkKlansman’s America First Infiltration

These days, reality has become so outlandish that it routinely mops the floor with fiction. Political America has transformed itself into one surreal Can You Top This? Hold My Beer, occurrence after another. It'd be laughable, if not for the increasing rise of violence and barely suppressed entitlement of outright racism.

Incredibly, BlacKkKlansman is based on a true story. In the early nineteen seventies, Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) finds himself the lone black detective on the Colorado Springs Police Department. Upon seeing a newspaper recruitment ad for the Ku Klux Klan, he impulsively calls the number and convinces the voice on the other end of the phone that he's a like-minded angry white man who's had it up to here with black people, and who's ready to do something about it.

A meeting is arranged - which Stallworth can't exactly attend himself. So he sends fellow detective Flip Zimmerman (The Last Jedi's Adam Driver) in his place - and infiltration begins. Washington (son of Denzel) is fantastic. Initially sent to keep tabs on a black student union event featuring former Black Panther Stokely Carmichael, Stallworth is supposed to just blend in and listen. But the civil rights movement can't help but make you question your place in the order of things - and Stallworth is a cop: "The Man," a "pig," - and Carmichael's renamed Kwame Ture (Corey Hawkins) speaks with passion and truth about the injustice in their lives that resonates loudly with Stallworth - as does college activist Patrice (Spider-Man: Homecoming's Laura Harrier).

Driver is outstanding, as a Jewish detective who's neglected his sense of cultural self, now pushing it down even further to avoid exposure by his new Klan buddies. Ryan Eggold is all managerial earnestness as the President of the local chapter of "the organization," who man-crushes hard on new recruit Driver - but his right-hand man has plenty of doubts. Jasper Pääkkönen (TV's Vikings) is phenomenal as one of the more luridly charismatic and hateful characters we're likely to see onscreen this year. Pääkkönen weaves jealousy and suspicion into a truly disturbing role. Nominate this guy, seriously!

BlacKkKlansman is Spike Lee's most outright entertaining film since Inside Man, but probably his most important film since Do the Right Thing. While evoking the Serpico 70s, Lee (with screenwriters Charlie Wachtel, David Rabinowitz and Kevin Willmott) bravely uses the film to draw a straight and bloody line back to our here and now, with strident echoes of the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville. BlacKkKlansman is often hilarious, in an I, Tonya way, but the tone can whip unflinchingly into sickening portraits of unabashed racism and raw hatred that will turn your stomach. Hate inevitably leads to violence. Like Driver's character, the film may briefly convince you it's a wry comedy, but its agenda of social awareness and racial justice aims to infiltrate our sensibilities and when it finally emerges, the result is powerful and painful indeed. Easily one of the years best - and sadly, most necessary films. Not to be missed.