The Fast and the Colorful

Fast Color (2019) is a kind of film I’m just starting to recognize. It’s a “small” film, independently produced about someone with superpowers, but not a superhero film. It’s more grounded in character, and the lead characters are people of color. I’m thinking of Kin, Sleight, and maybe Midnight Special.

This one stars Gugu M’batha-Raw (Wrinkle in Time). We meet her coming out of an abandoned building, removing ropes from her wrists, and driving away into an America (or world?) where it hasn’t rained in seven years. At a diner, she meets a sympathetic man, Christopher Dunham, kind of an accountant type. She reluctantly takes a ride with him, and sure enough, he’s actually a government scientist, trying to bring her in for study. But she escapes and continues to make her way home.

For that is where she is headed - to see her mother (Lorraine Toussaint) and daughter (Saniyya Sidney) at their little Southwestern farm. Toussaint has a superpower - she can disassemble objects to dust and re-assemble them. The daughter can as well, but is still learning. M’batha-Raw, it turns out, has an anti-power - when she sleeps or loses control, it causes earthquakes. To skip ahead, when she was a teenager, she got in with a bad crowd, and got pregnant. She cleaned up for the child, but her seizures were a threat to her and she went away. Now she’s come back, sober and wanting to learn to control her powers. But will Toussaint forgive? What will her daughter think when she finds out this is her mother? And will they figure it out before the government gets there?

This synopsis might sound like a bit of an action film, or a dystopia, but that’s not how it plays. It’s about the three generations of black women more than anything else. A key scene shows them around the table, with young Sidney showing her power. She levitates a coffee cup and turns it into a whirling galaxy of dust. But as the camera circles the table, it stays focused on the faces of the women - the miracle is taking place at the top of the screen, almost out of view. Now, not all of the character stuff worked for me - I never felt like M’batha-Raw had a wild past, for instance. She seemed too together to be an ex-addict. Also, David Strathairn as sheriff doesn’t quite ring true to me.

But overall, this is a great film - the kind of mid-budget film everyone feels is missing these days. It also has a great song - “Germ Adolescents” by the X-Ray Spex. Wasn’t expecting 80s punk here!

Send Me an Angel

I feel kind of funny about this, but we liked Alita: Battle Angel (2019). Maybe you’ve already forgotten about it - it was that live action anime where Rose Salazar has freakishly huge eyes.

It starts in a huge scrap heap in a dystopian future world. Another, better city, the last of its kind according to the titles, is levitating above the heap, dumping their garbage below. Dr. Christoph Waltz is looking for spare cyborg parts, and comes across a head - still alive.

He puts the head on a spare cyborg body and that’s how Alita, Rose Salazar, wakes up. She doesn’t remember anything - including what food is. Waltz and his nurse Idara Victor take her out for a walk in the rather cool looking city. She meets a unicycle riding street punk (with good manners and a paying job), Keean Johnson. He later introduces her to the sport of Motor Ball (or Murder Ball - I’m not sure if I misheard or if it’s slang), a version of Rollerball.

But this city isn’t all fun and games - there are murderers roaming the streets, killing women and stripping them for parts. And the Hunter-Warriors, civilians licensed to hunt (and war upon) these murderers. And after a little misdirection (is Waltz the murderer?), it turns out that Waltz is a Hunter-Warrior.

As you can guess, Alita figures out who she is and gets to be a hotshot Motor Baller. It’s not much of a spoiler to tell you that she doesn’t make it up to the flying city, but she’s headed there for the sequel, if any.

I guess we liked this for 1) the cool, fun dystopian city, 2) the appealing actors, and 3) the action. The action may have even been a little lower on the list - not as important as you might think. Also, Salazar’s weird eyes are off-putting at first, but after a while, we even got to like them. Maybe it comes down to Robert Rodriguez directing, with an assist from James Cameron on the writing and production teams. At least, that can’t hurt.

For the Hell of It

For some reason, we just didn’t get into Hellboy (2019). It wasn’t just the lack of  Ron Perlman, we kind of felt the same way about his sequel.

This one starts out in Days of Old, with Mila Jovavich as the sorceress Nimue fighting King Arthur et al. She’s pretty indestructible, but Excalibur could cut her up into little pieces, which were dispersed throughout the land. I guess you can figure out how that will go.

In the present day, Hellboy (David Harbour) goes to a Mexican wrestling match to retrieve an operative whose methods have become unsound. Turns out he has become possessed, and prophesies that Hellboy will bring about the End of All Things. As he runs around on various missions, he hears this from everyone, and begins to think that might be his fate, and what the hell.

He runs into a number of fun critters - giants, an ugly fairy, Baba Yaga (the old Russian witch, not John Wick), and a spiritualist whose life he once saved. This is Sasha Lane, a lovely woman who livens the proceedings up a bit.

But mostly is seemed like a grind. Like with Hellboy 2: The Golden Army, I felt like interesting things were going on, but I wasn’t taking them in. Maybe it was the grimness - although there was still some of that old Hellboy humor. This felt a little like that Vin Diesel movie, The Last Witch Hunter. That is, a little straight-to-streaming, although it had a real budget.

So, maybe it’s just me or just the mood I was in. Of course, it didn’t do too well at the box office, but what do they know?

Another Marvel

Shazam! (2019) is technically a DC comic movie, but doesn’t really feel like it. At least, it doesn’t have the gritty Zach Snyder/Christopher Nolan feel. It has a light, kid-friendly Disney feel, which makes sense, because they now own everything (note - this movie was made by New Line/Warner Bros., not Disney).

It starts with a boy in the backseat of a car, with his older brother and father in the front nagging him. He finds himself in a strange cave, with Djimon Hounsou asking him to become the world’s hero - if he can pass the test. The test is temptation, and he fails. He winds up back in the car, just in time to cause a huge crash.

Then we meet our hero - thank goodness, because that other kid was not fun. This kid, Asher Angel, is fun. He pulls all sorts of pranks on some cops, trying to find his mother. He got lost at a carnival when he was around five and has been running away from foster homes looking for his mom every since. As a last resort, he’s put in a group home run by a cool couple. His roommate is Jack Dylan Grazer, a nerdy boy with a bad leg.

Although he tries to stay aloof from this new family, he winds up helping Grazer avoid some bullies. While running away, he gets taken to Hounsou’s cave and given the test, which he somehow passes. So Hounsou turns him into Shazam - a hunky slab of adult man-meat (who looks oddly like Brad Garrett) wearing a caped costume, Zachary Levi

He returns and reveals himself to Grazer - and there’s a long fun scene where they try to find out what his powers are while Grazer videos everything. They also bumble around, doing what kids might do if one of them turned into a powerful adult: Trying to buy beer, then foiling the traditional convenience store robbery, and so forth.

But while Shazam is getting to be a bit of a dick with his powers and all, the boy from the start of the movie is all grown up, and has become Dr. Sivana, the evil head of a corporation dedicated to him getting that Shazam power. So he will be coming for Shazam, and his foster family.

I found this movie a fun. The kid actors were great, especially Faiths Herman, Angel’s hug-happy little sister. The section with Angel figuring out his powers was great, and convincingly modern. The basic setup may have had some flaws, but the denouement was perfect.

It’s weird to see Levi in this role - we watched a lot of Chuck, where he was a convincing schlub. And I’ll admit that we mainly watched because we had finished Limitless, and it was kind of similar. So, good for him, and I hope we see him in a sequel with the Rock as Black Adam.

Kind of a Hush

I didn’t have to blog Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), since it didn’t come from Netflix - I got it from the library. You see, Ms. Spenser watched What Ever Happened to Baby Jane on a plane, and didn’t really like it, but wanted to see more of the genre (Wikipedia calls it “psycho-biddy”).

It starts with Charlotte, Bette Davis, in her old Louisiana mansion. The government is getting ready to bulldoze it to put in a highway, and she runs them off with a shotgun. This gives them a chance to give us the setup, and queue the flashback: When Davis was young, her daddy threw her a fancy ball. Her daddy, played by Victor Buono (who I always get confused with Bruno VeSota), is trying to buy off her lover, a married Bruce Dern. But when Davis goes to see Dern, she comes back to the party covered in blood - Dern has been killed, and everyone assumes Davis did it.

Now, she lives with shrewish white trash housekeeper Agnes Moorhead in seclusion, and most people think she’s crazy. But her cousin, Olivia de Havilland, comes to help get her packed up and moved out. She is helped by Davis’ doctor, Joseph Cotten. It doesn’t look like it’s going to be easy. A minor complication is insurance investigator Cecil Kellaway, from Lloyd’s of London, trying to figure out why Dern’s widow never collected on his insurance.

So, SPOILER - de Havilland and Cotten are driving Davis crazy. Their method is based on Clouzot’s Diabolique. Director Robert Aldridge (Kiss Me Deadly, Baby Jane) weaves a twisty tale and gets some ripe acting out of the cast. Overall, I liked this a lot, maybe more than Ms. Spenser - definitely more than she liked Baby Jane.

Simply Amazing

Amazing Grace (2018) has an amazing backstory. In 1972, Aretha Franklin went into a Los Angeles church and recorded a live gospel album, Amazing Grace. Director Sydney Pollack filmed it to make a movie, but they were unable to sync the sound. They solved that problem in 2007, but now Aretha didn’t want it released, so it had to wait until her death to be released.

It features Rev. James Cleveland as MC, piano player and singer. The band includes Chuck Rainey on bass and Bernard “Pretty” Purdie on drums. The audience included gospel luminaries such as Clara Ward, who wrote “How I Got Over”, and Aretha’s dad. Also, Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts.

Aretha’s singing is also amazing, soaring, ecstatic. However, I have to say that I wish she spent more time on the straight song. Her “Amazing Grace”, for instance, stretched each line into an entire verse, filled with melismatic flourishes and swooping runs. Just sing the simple, swinging, funky song.

But I sure felt shivers when she sang those wild runs. The church, its preachers and singers, as well as Ms. Franklin made this Buddhist feel the Holy Spirit. And, while she did not talk much, or reveal much of herself, she looked radiant and sweet - at some times girl-like, although at ~30, she wasn’t really a girl. Glad this was finally released.

This is Us

Us (2019) is Jordan Peele’s follow up to the horror comedy Get Out, with a lot less comedy this time.

It starts in the 90s, at Santa Cruz. A mom, a dad, and a little girl are visiting, and the girl wanders off. In a creepy house of mirrors, she meets her mirror image. When her parents find her, she is traumatized.

That girl grows up to be Lupita Nyong’o. She has a husband (Winston Duke) and a young son and daughter. The family is going to Santa Cruz, to her deceased mother’s place, and this makes her very nervous. We aren’t sure if she’s the little girl yet, and she hasn’t told her family about it. Duke is obliviously bent on enjoying a vacation. He even buys a boat, partly to impress his white friends Tim Heidecker and Elisabeth Moss, also vacationing in Santa Cruz.

Then one evening, they discover four figures at the end of their driveway. Duke tries to run them off, but they come in - and they are doppelgangers for the family, except only Nyong’o’s double can speak, and they are all malevolent and violent.

That’s the set up - soulless doubles of some or all of us live underground in unused tunnels. They have a psychic connection to us, and want to replace us. And now they are coming out.

This works well as a plain old slasher or maybe zombie horror movie - it’s plenty bloody. It also is stuffed with cinematic references to other movies. In the opening scene at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk, they mention that a movie is being made there - plainly Lost Boys, but I think they mention the Giant Dipper, which was in The Sting.

But mostly, this is a movie about privilege, class, and America. The underground doubles are clearly the underclass, the repressed id that will have to emerge. That the black family is well-to-do and fairly bougie lets you know this isn’t about race per se - except it is, because America has to be about race.

Then there is a twist at the ending. I am not going to spoil it except to say that we thought it was ambiguous - didn’t want to accept it, and didn’t think we had to. In retrospect, we have to accept the twist.