Author: Don Malvasi

The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them is a distillation of two separate movies subtitled “Him” and “Her.” Viewers will get a chance to see the original two films in October. After watching “Them” a disturbing paradox presents itself. Admittedly, what seems like a half-baked, occasionally dull synthesis might have been caused by too harsh a pruning. The problem is “Them” hardly leaves you wanting more and hankering to watch the other two films.

Writer/director Ned Benson manages to strike an emotional chord at various stages of the film, largely due to the presence of Jessica Chastain as Eleanor Rigby, a woman struggling with the death of her child. After a quick opening scene where she and her husband Conor (James McAvoy) relate with a loving, charged-with-fun energy, Chastain’s character, Eleanor Rigby, withdraws to her parents home in Westport, Conn. Conor (James McAvoy) tries to figure out why she just jumped off the Manhattan Bridge and then after surviving, went incognito without a word to him. He sulks in his Village bar/restaurant with his bud and chef Stuart (Bill Hader), moves back in with his successful restauranteur dad (Ciaran Hinds), who’s emotionally distant, and eventually decides to basically stalk Eleanor once he gets a lead from Stuart on her whereabouts in New York. Throw in a subplot where Eleanor binds with a cynical but caring professor played by Viola Davis and you’ve got a framework that would be more promising if its fleshing out didn’t seem so much like watching our pained couple from far too great a distance. The two rarely appear onscreen together and when they do what is probably meant as an organically uncertain tenuousness on how to proceed with a reconciliation comes off more like an irresoluteness of the screenplay.

It sure is never a waste of time to watch Chastain in action, however. She displays a marvelous ability to say so much with her eyes and her body language, and the striking difference between her character before her attempted suicide and afterward is testimony to her singular talent. No slouch in the supporting role of her mom is fellow redhead and stellar thespian Isabelle Huppert.
Always an enticing performer, Huppert injects a wine-swilling, witty but ostensibly slight maternal figure with a sneaky depth. On the other side of the coin, Eleanor’s dad (William Hurt) is a shrink who speaks with such a deliberateness that this idiosyncrasy manages to disrupt whatever scene he’s in.

Incidentally, his last name is Rigby and he couldn’t resist naming his daughter after the Beatles song from Revolver. That novelty is merely lost in the shuffle of The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them–she may as well have been named Penny Lane or Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds for all it matters. Unfortunately expectations that the two forthcoming films will satisfactorily expound on the themes presented here seem remote. When “Them” itself contains more than a little flab and is in need of further editing, it’s hard to get jazzed about two more hours of this, Chastain’s wondrousness notwithstanding.

Painstaking Rapprochement/Partially Obtuse Style….3 out of 5 stars

Veteran screenwriter Scott Frank (Get Shorty, the underrated Out of Sight) directs revenge movie honcho Liam Neeson in this at once ugly and grim suspense-cum-horror tale. Based on the novel by Lawrence Block, Neeson portrays Matthew Scudder, an unlicensed private investigator and former NYPD cop. The film contains plenty of familiar crime movie fodder: Scudder’s a recovering alcoholic who attends A.A. meetings, and he’s got a ghost in his closet that is slowly revealed in the film. Along the way to solving a series of murder/kidnappings, he’s at first a reluctant participant in helping a drug dealer (Dan Stevens, Downton Abbey) who can’t go to the police. The goal is to get back at the kidnappers, who enjoy extorting hundreds of thousands of dollars in ransom money and then returning the chopped up female victim in pieces.

Once Scudder commits, he bumps into a wiseass young teenager, T. J. (rapper Brian “Astro” Bradley), in a library while going through microfiche–yea, microfiche. This is 1999 and our hero Matt doesn’t get along well with things like cell phones. We’ll be reminded of his Luddite tendencies a few times in the film (along with his deliberate voiceover rendering of The A.A. 12 steps while Scudder contemplates his payback.) The kid, too, feels familiar but at least he provides a little excitement with his banter and older-than-his-years bravado, even if his knowledge of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe annoys more than it amuses.

T. J. throws out a lot more energy than any of the other supporting characters provide. While Neeson, now 62, is his usual charismatic force–he’s especially great in barking orders over the phone to two kidnapping suspects–the villains and the drug dealers who surround him are disappointingly drab. A cemetery groundskeeper (Olafur Darri Olafsson) seems so cuckoo he creates an expectation that he might provide some fun, as do a pair of kidnappers whose brutality is uncommonly vicious. Yet, they, too, come off more lackluster than scary. They mutilate their victims, then bore the viewers.

The film’s depiction of sadism can be downright discomforting, yet most of the nastiest stuff is alluded to rather than depicted. For no good reason, the pair of killers also appear to be gay. Frank gets the atmosphere right as he captures the seedy interiors and street scenes of Brooklyn’s Red Hook. For a better crime movie also with a run-down Brooklyn setting, check out The Drop, which received an almost simultaneous release as this film. That is, unless you’re hooked on Neeson–I can think of a lot worse guilty pleasures. In A Walk Among The Tombstones, it’s refreshing to watch him move so effortlessly from quiet and guilt-ridden to forcefully concise and powerful.

Neeson’s At It Again, This Time With Floating Body Parts…2.5 out of 5 stars

A viewing of The Drop prompted a repeat examination of Tom Hardy’s “one man” film from earlier this year: the unique and compelling Locke. Taken in tandem, it’s hard to think of two recent performances that have displayed such a stunning array of acting chops. In The Drop, Hardy plays Bob Saginowski, a skittish, deliberate, and perhaps slow-witted bartender who seems out of place working for his cousin Marv (James Gandolfino in his last film role), a small-time hood who manages a bar he once owned but forfeited to some nasty Chechen mobsters. Bob is a character that is polar opposite in temperament from the confident lead in Locke who goes through that film impressively dealing with a series of stressful phone calls while driving in his car. What they have in common is an admirable earnestness, an at times painful honesty. With this film, Locke, and Lawless, where he played the unforgettable Forrest Bondurant, you get the idea Hardy’s versatility knows no bounds.

Scripted by Dennis Lehane (Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone) and based on his story Animal Rescue, The Drop won’t remind you of Martin Scorsese’s ludicrous misfire of Lehane’s Shutter Island, but it’s far from flawless. An air of artifice occasionally besets the film but it builds a nice head of steam as it works its way toward a finish that jells almost perfectly. What’s fun along the way is watching the British Hardy not only take on a character from working class Brooklyn, but define him in such a way that his dead serious eccentricity both amuses and gets under our skin. His scenes with Gandolfino, the consummate pro, impart The Drop with an edgy, mostly plausible impetus. Noomi Rapace, from the Swedish version of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, portrays Bob’s equally demure counterpart, Nadia. They meet when Bob rescues an injured dog from her trash bin. He names the dog Rocco, and upon meeting Bob after noticing him going through her trash, she demands his drivers license so she can protectively send copies of it to several of her friends. What could have been a dangerously ill-begotten start to a film manages to get saved by Hardy’s presence. He repeatedly dodges cliches from the screenplay with an agile finesse. As does Gandolfini, who died in 2013 at 51. It’s a little eerie that one of his last lines in his last film he utters the phrase, “I’m not feeling well.”

Redolent of many other crime dramas, The Drop never fully rises above its many predecessors. However, it contains more than enough interesting and surprising touches to satisfy even viewers who feel jaded with the genre. The two leads, especially Hardy, are largely responsible for squeezing every last drop of suspense out of the screenplay. Also not shabby are strong supporting performances by John Ortiz as a smily and sarcastic investigating detective, Matthias Schoenaerts as a psycho who tries to reclaim Bob’s newfound dog, and Ann Dowd (see her in Compliance) as Marv’s sister, who sadly, seems to be the only one in Marv’s world who is not a hood of some sort. Marv casts her off emotionally like so many empty beer bottles from his bar. Incidentally, The Drop refers to the hidden nature of Marv’s shot-and-beer joint: it’s a destination for dirty money to be delivered and store for future pick-up. Throughout the film it’s apparent this ostensibly dim-witted bartender is going to transform in some perverse way. Have fun trying to guess what’s coming.

3.5 Creepy, Well-Acted Shocker (out of 5 stars)

When it comes to an intensely raw portrayal of prison life, it would seem hard for any film to top Steven McQueen’s Hunger (2008). Startlingly, Starred Up submerges itself into even deeper territory. Weaving a father/son (they’re new prison mates) plot with starkly observed, uncanny realism, David Mackenzie’s film also includes three of the year’s best performances. Jack O’Donnell, soon to make his presence felt in the film adaptation of Unbroken, absolutely stuns with his gritty yet nuanced portrait of Eric, a take-no-shit new inmate deemed dangerous enough upon admittance that he’s placed in an individual cell. A transfer from a juvenile jail, he fends off what seems like an insurmountable response from prison guards after he accidentally injures a prison mate. A calm yet intense psychotherapist, Oliver (Rupert Friend), saves him from more severe payback from the wardens and introduces him to a possible way out of further turmoil via group therapy sessions.

Eric is recalcitrant on all fronts. His explosive fury often comes as such a shock that its accompanying violence elicits a laugh as often as a shudder. O’Donnell, often nonverbally, allows us to feel his anguish and his defenses. His rejection of both Oliver and his dad, Neville (Ben Mendelsohn) seem natural given who we know him to be. Reforming him will be one rough road for either of these guys, even though they’re polar opposites in temperament. Oliver zones in to the feelings of his subjects like a samurai, immune to even the most violent of exchanges among the group. Oliver’s empathy is all-encompassing, while Neville feels the best he can give his son is to impart the hardness necessary to survive prison life. He often implores Oliver to “teach him a lesson” in behavior. When Neville attempts to enter Oliver’s group as a participant, we’re suspicious of his having undergone an emotional change; rather, he seems to be utilizing a last-resort effort at spying on his son. Father-and-son scenes are painfully vacant of any connection.

Full of hush-hush corruption, bureaucratic indifference in this prison is certainly given its full measure here. With grotesque displays of inmate power struggles, the film’s plot advancement is ripe for melodrama of the highest order. Yet Jonathan Asser’s screenplay, buoyed by the three amazing performances, avoids pitfalls of the overly straightforward. Asser himself volunteered as a therapist at HM Prison Wandsworth in London and it shows. In Starred Up, redemption and connection come in unexpected ways, and with each success comes a flip-side of sadness and desperation. Oddly the most inhumane of hellholes provides the perfect backdrop for its characters’ deep-rooted inner demons to transform, like suddenly blooming flowers in a dump heap, into a grounded expression of the boundless human spirit.

A Brutal Yet Beautiful Prison Drama…4.5 stars (out of 5)

British comics Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan share an amusing penchant for performing incessant spot-on impressions in The Trip To Italy. In Michael Winterbottom’s sequel to 2011’s The Trip, the semi-fictional pair have the enviable task to take an all-expenses-paid excursion along Italy’s Liguria and Amalfi coast. Their mission: write a few reviews of high-end restaurants and lavish hotels for The Observer. Of course, it’s all an excuse for Rob and Steve to relentlessly outdo each other with competing impersonations of Michael Caine, Roger Moore, Hugh Grant, Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro. The brilliant-looking food is intermittently tossed in as so much window dressing, as are scenes of the two exploiting their celebrity and humor for the sake of exploring the good graces of a couple of female hosts they meet along the way.

The Trip is Coogan and Winterbottom’s fourth feature together (see the remarkable 24-Hour Party People). Coogan, best known in England for his portrayal of spoof talk show host Alan Partridge, this time around takes a backseat to the even-lesser-known-in-America Brydon. Coogan’s aloofness is offset by Brydon’s directness. In between the clowning, Brydon makes a half-hearted attempt to deal with his unfaithfulness to his unseen wife, who is home juggling the kids and the household. He briefly further laments the taking of a job as a lead in a fictitious Michael Mann movie that will keep him away from home for an even greater length of time but as soon as these more serious subjects come along they’re just as quickly set aside for more jokes and impressions. Coogan’s fictitious teenage son joins the pair toward the end of the trip, and Coogan makes an attempt to bring the two, who’ve been less than close, into a more meaningful space. Without these asides, there is essentially no plot here. With them there is a plot unsatisfying in its half-baked attempt at pathos. But, boy, those impressions!

Winterbottom’s impressive film catalog brags a variety of styles, from the excellent documentary The Road To Guantanamo to the nefarious X-rated 9 Songs. Here he’s managed to make a film about two guys visiting one of the most beautiful areas of the world, sharing a camaraderie yet squabbling every chance they get, affectionately bickering while also managing to earnestly critique each other and themselves. Of course, the how-much-of-it-is autobiographical question is the elephant in the room. The pair use their real names to make more immediate their intriguing exploration of male competitiveness and vanity. They have a go at mortality as well. Much is made of their retracing sites important to the lives of romantic poets Byron and Shelley, both British expatriates who died at 36 and 29 respectively. Brydon recalls many tidbits of their lives, including their intemperate personal lives. When he recites lines from Shelly in the perfect voice of fellow-Welshman Richard Burton, it’s both hilarious and poignant.

Now for a couple of spoilers. The funniest bit may be Brydon donning a man-in-a-box voice and carrying on a conversation with the plaster cast of a dead Pompeiian locked in a glass case. The funniest joke: Coogan, who throughout the film has been lamenting his own waning sexual attractiveness: “She has a lovely gait.” Brydon: “Probably padlocked.”

4 Celebrity Impressions Gone Wild, With A Dash of Pathos (out of 5 stars)

Family values, family values. It’s not whether you win or lose but how you play the game. There’s no “I” in team. The wording of these bromides is changed slightly but they come thick and heavy in When The Game Stands Tall. Jim Caviezel plays high school coach Bob Ladoucer whose team at De La Salle high school has won 151 straight games, and he turns into a twitching teapot of repressed rage at the mere mention of “the streak.” It’s enough to give you a heart attack, something coach Bob Ladouceur (Jim Caviezel)) experiences early in the film. The Bible he often quotes makes no endorsement of the cigarettes Bob sneaks after practice but, unlike his team, he’s not perfect.

His perky wife Bev (Laura Dern) finds him distant and ignoring of his kids in favor of all the football. Banned from coaching by his doctor, he’s given a chance by the heart attack to get closer to his teenage son, a wide receiver who finally is ready to move into a starting role on the team. Not so fast. “When I needed a father, I got a coach. Now that I need a coach, I get a father,” he complains. Sounds like his son needs to fill out one of the “commitment cards” coach Bob has his players compose.

Cazaviel has some fine moments, especially in dealing with a subsequent tragedy that befalls the team. Mostly, though, the former star of The Passion Of The Christ comes off pure vanilla and often listless. Bev tells him a story that his father, a clergyman, relays to her just before he died: if he wasn’t wearing his collar and she encountered the two men, she would definitely think his son was the minister. Yet Bev’s own leanings are anything but secular by film’s end when she righteously straightens out an obstreperous parent of a player. Yep, in a tall tale concocted just for the film, the star running back of the team is at odds with his dad. Chris Ryan (Alexander Ludwig) buys the team-first message but dad (Clancy Brown) keeps pushing him to think of himself and break an individual scoring record of which he’s within shouting distance. The dad is such an overwrought character director Thomas Carter might as well have had him in military gear brandishing a revolver while he robs little old ladies. He’s a brute even more menacing than an enormous defensive lineman named Buster, one of many 300-pounders who line up for the Long Beach Poly team that is De La Salle’s climactic foe in the film.

To give you an idea of the film’s religiosity, the time frame of this legendary game between the two powerhouses is drastically altered. In reality it was played in 2001, during DeLa Salle’s massive streak. In the film it is moved up three years to well after the team begins to lose. Without the change, this is just another sports movie, albeit one with dramatically well-done football sequences thanks to veteran stunt coordinator Allan Graf. With the change, the screenplay, based on the book by Neil Hayes, can proceed to drag out the old saws of male bonding, self sacrifice, and piety. Not that the film isn’t entertaining. When De La Salle players celebrate championships by sliding head first into the end zone, or coach Bob admonishes Ryan for a somersault over the goal line, the film creates sparks of adrenaline produced by the best of sports films.

In the big game Long Beach Poly suits up 100 players on a 100-degree day while De La Salle’s roster contains less than half as many. Since some exhaustingly play both on offense and defense, Ladoucer appoints the team trainer to actually make the second-half substitutions, informing him that under no circumstance will he sacrifice any player’s health for a win. Enter Arturo (Matthew Frias), a Rudy-like character who weighs closer to 100 pounds than 200. You can guess what happens.

What is less easy to foresee is the resolution between Chris and his cartoonish dad. It’s so preposterous it’ll have you scratching your head. (It’s even more preposterous that the film substitutes the white Chris Ryan for the black Maurice Jones-Drew, who played for De La Salle in the big game and is currently an Oakland Raider). Interestingly, controversial former Eagle wide receiver DeSean Jackson played at Long Beach Poly just after the big showdown with De La Salle. For a sequel, Bray could focus on a rematch between the two teams with Jackson giving Ladoucer one of his infamous gang salutes that helped him get in Chip Kelly’s doghouse.

Based On A True Story With A Lot Of Made Up Stuff… 2.5 (out of 5 stars)

As a chaser to Richard Linklater’s monumental Boyhood, take a peek at this Sundance award-winning documentary profiling three destitute white kids from rural Missouri. Their level of poverty and all-around impoverishment makes Linklater’s screen kid look like he’s part of the Trump family.

Three distinctively different kids emerge. One is all-get-out upbeat, another, mostly dour misanthropic; the third, an interesting mess of charismatic, vain, and simpleminded. They hook you.

Directors and first cousins Tracy Droz Tragos and Andrew Droz Palermo return to a town that Tracy’s dad grew up in, and whose mom was a pillar of the community as an influential teacher. Trust was granted and it shows. When kid #3 (Harley) reveals a big secret mid-film, you get the idea he felt safe doing so–something that was certainly not part of his prior worldview. He sleeps on a couch at his paternal grand mom’s. When it”s time for Halloween trick-or-treating, even though he’s 15 and a little old for it, he designs an ingenious Insane Clown Posse costume. All this repressed creativity going to waste. He makes a point to ask grandma to make sure she captures him smoking a cigarette as she takes photos….

….Kid #2 (Appachey), who’s only 12, also smokes like a chimney. His mom is quite distant although we understand. She explains she jumped from growing up herself at 17 years old at her mom’s house to becoming a mom herself shortly afterward. Near the conclusion of Rich Hill, as her son is headed off to a hearing that will likely send him to a juvenile detention center, she suddenly wakes up and offers him solace. Is she propelled to offer kindness once she’s alleviated of the nuisance of having to deal with this monster on a daily basis?

Kid #1 (Andrew, 14), meanwhile, perseveres despite his family moving their residence what seems like weekly. We wait for a shoe to drop on this kid–it all seems too good to be true. He bonds with his twin sister and even offers his own infirm mom a little parenting. The farthest he goes in losing his positive spirit is a contemplative moment when he wonders aloud if God will see fit to include him in his plans. Meanwhile, his itinerant Dad seems content with pursuing a musician career pipe dream as a Hank Williams impersonator, and with idle dreams of “prospecting for gold.” As a parallel, Appachey dreams of working in China as some sort or art history adept even though he shows no academic chops whatsoever.

Meanwhile Droz Tragos, who won an Emmy for the 2004 documentary Be Good Smile Pretty, spreads the Terence Malick dust a little too thick. While subsequent Fourth of July celebrations bookend the film, there’s a little too much meandering in filler shots of nature that may offer a cultural context alright but seem excessive. But I quibble. Rich Hill is a hell of a documentary. It will have you wondering what happens to these kids as time goes on. It also convincingly portrays American poverty as anything but an urban-and-black exclusive enterprise.

4.0 Rural Poor Kids You Won’t Soon Forget (out of 5 stars)

The goal: get rid of suffering and dissension and along with them, any shade of diverse thinking. First, trash emotion–have everyone pop pills everyday to suppress it. Leave out books, animals, and any changes in the weather while we’re at it. Now eliminate color. Yes, color.

Such is the world of The Giver, the new film based on the 20-year-old enormously popular Lois Lowry young reader novel. It’s a classless (and apparently race-free) society where everyone is so robotically numb that no one seems to notice the presence of the establishment’s shackles on their every thought and emotion. Jonas (a bland Brenton Thwaites) is chosen as the one young person who will get lessons in the old ways of the world, as The Receiver of Memory if you will. (Strangely, he’s not even a teenager yet in the book, yet here he’s of college age).

Jonas, to his own surprise, is chosen as the one lucky person who will have the wizened The Giver (Jeff Bridges) as a mentor who will convey to him humanity’s old, abandoned ways….Before you start thinking, “Hey who,wouldn’t want Jeff Bridges as a teacher?” the film quickly warns that the last young person (a brief Taylor Swift cameo) who ventured into a tutorial with The Giver ended up going through some horrible experience. And just in case you’re feeling skeptical about all this foreboding, Meryl Streep is around as The Chief Elder, a high lord of some sort who goes through the film materializing holographically to repeatedly warn The Giver not to go too far. The Giver seems to have an immunity from receiving any real discipline from The Chief Elder, though. At least at first.

Before I get into just how badly this world of uber-conformity sucks, I can’t help but point out that the esteemed Bridges (coming off a starring role in the bomb R.I.P.D) seems out of sorts here. Maybe it’s the “accent” he curiously adopts for the film–a speech peculiarity that seems like either someone in desperate need of major dental bridge work or a far more pedestrian suffering from a mouthful of marbles. Streep is no less annoying. The woman who can usually do no wrong merely goes through the motions here. She seems as bored by this well-meaning but vacuous film as the rest of us.

Now imagine a world where emotions like love are never expressed, where people seem to all do the same things, where curfews exist, and sex, pejoratively referred to as “stirrings,” apparently rarely rears its head. (The screenplay never addresses it but the assumption is soon made that offspring are cloned in this “perfect” world). War and hunger have been eliminated but little of any worth remains. Everyone smiles, nonetheless, which seems extra strange since there’s no fun going on.

Essentially it’s a phony world but what especially stings here is the film itself does such an utterly
lousy job making this society believable. A world that discards its elders into a fuzzy “Elsewhere” ought to be bad enough to wake up a rebellious streak in Jonas once he stop taking his pills. However, not until until Jonas’ dad (Peter Skarsgard) is exposed doing an even bigger nasty, does Jonas feel compelled to act. By this time, he’s been given a magical gift from The Giver to actually be able to feel the very things missing in his world: love and joy but also war and racism. Unlike the novel, which conjured up micro portions of these forbidden experiences, screenwriters Michael Mitnick and Robert B. Weide decide to go macro. By the time Jonas is done with his experiment, he’s been to both the Tiananmen Square rebellion and under fire on the frontlines in a Vietnam.

Director Phillip Noyce’s The Giver, rife with undeveloped potential, sputters toward a climax and an ending that are both as laughable as they are gratuitous. They involve a baby and a sled and wads of misguided hooey. In case it’s all a bit much, comedic irony is aptly provided in the character of Jonas’ mom. Even more robotic than the rest of them, it’s none other than Katie Holmes. One can only wonder, given all the practice she received bearing the brunt of Tom Cruise’s Scientology claptrap, if this role wasn’t a lot easier to grasp.

A Toothless, Shabby Warning of What Visionless Conformity May Deliver….2 stars (out of 5)

The main thing I wished to grab hold of from a James Brown biopic was a facsimile of the incredible rush I’d received when I saw him live at The Arena in Philadelphia in the late 1960’s. Get On Up may not quite get all the way there there but it’s a more than adequate job given the Herculean task of an actor having to actually step into Brown’s iconic shoes and make magic. Chadwick Boseman (Jackie Robinson in “42”) has the added advantage he doesn’t have to actually sing since the film wisely uses original, remixed Brown recordings. As far as the intense choreography and urgency of Brown’s stage movements, according to my memories of Brown live and from film and TV takes, Boseman gets about three-quarters of the way there on the energy scale. Brown at his peak may have been the most intense live frontman in the history of pop music, so that’s no small feat.

Boseman adroitly navigates the various spans of James Brown’s myriad career. Director Tate Taylor, however, skitters around a bit too haphazardly in his flashback-and-then-forward-again hopscotching between the various phases. The film’s continuity is hardly neat and clean yet what Taylor lacks in cohesion, he makes up for in drawing up dramatic scenes from a decidedly self-reliant and courageous life. Brown was not only Mr. Dynamite on stage, but he was an instinctive entrepreneur, a creative if controlling perfectionist as a musical arranger, and an almost comical mess in his personal life. Get On Up cuts through the clutter with an earnest attempt to explain communication and personal relationship failures with juxtaposed scenes of Brown’s terribly sad and nightmarishly brutal childhood.

Abandoned by both parents, he went from a South Carolina sharecropper’s shack to growing up in a Georgia brothel, then spent nearly three years in jail for attempting to steal a man’s three-piece suit (he’d previously swiped a pair of shoes off a lynched man). The film connects the dots for us that Brown’s lifelong mistrust of people had an easily identifiable cause. When a middle-aged Brown is apprehended after a mad police highway chase scene, he finally gives up after finding himself cornered. The camera shifts from a plethora of cops with their guns cocked and pointed back to Brown’s stopped pickup truck. The adult man inside the truck who previously had been waving a loaded shotgun has suddenly transformed into Brown as a young boy (played alternately by the twins Jamarion and Jordan Scott).

Taylor also directed The Help and he again brings along Viola Davis (as Brown’s mom) and Octavia Spencer (as an aunt who runs the brothel), and some decently done emotional money shots. He makes sure Brown’s legacy doesn’t come in for too big a beating despite Brown’s practice of domestic abuse and his equally troubling bluntness toward his band mates, especially lifelong partner Bobby Byrd (Nelsan Ellis). There’s an admirable appreciation here for Brown’s fresh charisma and essentially smart worldview as his saving grace. He doesn’t always play nice but he usually plays real.

Now back to those live scenes. It’s all here: the groundbreaking early 60s Live At The Apollo shows, the riot-preventing post-King assassination Boston concert, the splits, the jumps, the twirls. We’ll have to wait for the forthcoming “Mr. Dynamite” documentary to fully show Brown in action, but Get On Up is a great start to acquainting yourself with the Godfather of Soul, the most sampled musician of all time (4,000 samples and counting), and a one-of-a-kind unforgettable genius, personal flaws and all.

4 Slides Across this Stage Like Nobody Else Before or Since (out of 5 stars)

Colin Firth plays Stanley, a frenetic, highfaluting Houdini-like magician who performs in Chinese makeup and relishes debunking spiritual mediums in his spare time. In Woody Allen’s Magic In The Moonlight, his 44th film, Stanley poses as an “import-export” businessman and goes after young spiritualist Sophie Baker (Emma Stone). Stanley, according to his fellow magician sidekick, possess “all the warmth of a typhoid epidemic.” We first encounter the steel-eyed, unflinching Wei Ling Su berating his employees after a magic show. Stanley provides us with a witty ride behind a swank 1920s French Riviera backdrop. He quickly attempts to unravel Sophie but before long the tables are turned and his armor of rationality loosens up–first gradually, then in a sudden epiphany.

Allen maintains his usual rhythmic finesse, perfectly balancing the metaphysical musings with his idiosyncratic counterpoint wisecracks. At first. As the film proceeds, however, the screenplays tightness gradually goes somewhat flaccid. One of the final scenes, an extended drawing room interplay between Firth and his aunt (a very good Eileen Atkins) goes on about twice as long as it might have. Firth and Stone also get caught in a rainstorm and need to take refuge in a curiously unoccupied, yet wide-open observatory (a blatant reprise from a similar scene in Manhattan.)

Allen’s bag of tricks, however, even when they skittishly drift into the formulaic (he’s been doing a lot of the same themes for 45 years) still deliver. Magic In The Moonlight, while hardly top-shelf Allen, is far from a dud. Stone, recently cast as a lead in Allen’s next film project, doesn’t miss a beat in picking up the Woody rhythms. Highly capable of non-verbal expressiveness, she entertainingly brings to life a unique character. Sophie is exotic not just because of her chosen trade, but also by virtue of being a working class American amidst a backdrop of monied Americans and Brits in Europe. The family who hosts her ooze wealth through their pores. The matriarch in the family happily anticipates Sophie’s seance conjuring up the spirit of her dead husband, while her son serenades Sophie with a ukulele and proposes marriage to her barely after meeting her.

Even when Allen gets a little stuck, plenty of transporting, intelligently sardonic observations sneak through. Serious spiritual themes (rationality versus spirituality) are allowed freer rein here than in previous Allen works, and it’s still fun to watch such a pro in action. And while the film’s ending may, to some observers, seem intellectually dishonest, or even a puerile form of consoling, it can also be viewed as ironically charming. Amidst the plethora of crap summer comedies so far, you could do a whole lot worse than this.

3.5 Amusing Debates On Rationality And Delusion With Quirky Allen Strokes (out of 5 stars)