In “Southside with You” director Richard Tanne spends 80 leisurely minutes recreating the first date of Barack Obama and Michelle Robinson. It’s a quiet, romantic movie made up of the hopes and dreams of two young people who will one day be the most powerful couple in the world.
Set in Chicago in 1989, where the couple met when she was his advisor at a law firm, when the film begins she likes him but doesn’t like him. In fact she tries to set him up with one of her friends. Michelle, an ambitious second year associate at a tony law firm, doesn’t want to be known as the junior who “swooped down and dated the first cute black guy who walked through the door.” He gets her out on the pretence of inviting her to a community meeting at a church. Before the meeting they get to know one another on an informal date. “It’s not a date until you say it is,” he says to her. “I’m more inclined to describe this as a hostage situation,” she replies, fending off his charm offensive.
They walk through Southside Chicago, getting to know one another. Barack recites poetry and talks about Jimmy ‘Dyn-O-mite’ Walker’s artistic aspirations. At the community center he delivers a fiery speech about the importance of unity as Michelle repeatedly tells the church ladies she’s not Obama’s wife or girlfriend. Later they talk family history—her dad has MS, his dad went to Harvard, got kicked out and later died in a drunk driving accident—and bond over the love of Stevie Wonder. An encounter after a screening of “Do the Right Thing” almost ends their relationship before it has a chance to begin, but his persistence, charisma and some ice cream win her over.
“Southside with You” is a visit with people we already think we know but get to know a little bit better. It’s a conflict free slice of life, an easygoing stroll through the early moments of a relationship. The most obvious cinematic comparison would be Before Sunrise, the Richard Linklater film that observed the walking-and-talking first meeting of two fictional characters played by Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke. The two films are connected, but “Southside with You” ups the ante by portraying two very famous people as the leads.
Fortunately Tika Sumpter and Parker Sawyers, as Michelle and Barack respectively, don’t try and impersonate their famous counterparts. Instead the actors wisely choose to simply catch the essence and subtle mannerisms of the future president and first lady. A tribute to the performances is that we look at the characters as people and not caricatures of famous people. I suspect “Southside with You” would be just as effective if Michelle and Barack were Jane and Jim or any other couple. It’s a comfortable, intelligent look at the first sparks between two interesting people.
There was a time when pulpy New York noirs were a popular genre. Claustrophobic and edgy, movies like “Scarlet Street,” “The Dark Corner” and “The Naked City” exposed the Big Apple’s dirty urban underbelly in gritty and entertaining ways. It’s been sometime since we’ve taken a cinematic walk on NYC’s wild side, so a 50’s style noir placed on present day Manhattan streets should be a welcome thing, right? “Manhattan Night” is a based on author Colin Harrison’s award winning New York Times Notable Book of the Year “Manhattan Nocturne.”
“I sell fear, scandal and mayhem,” says investigative reporter Porter Wren (Adrien Brody). “I sell newspapers. With three deadlines a week, I’m always looking for a good story.” It is that search that leads him to Caroline Crowley (Yvonne Strahovski), a femme fatale with a murdered husband (Campbell Scott) and a favour to ask. She uses her seductive powers to convince him to use his skill to find out who offed her husband. Smelling a good story, Wren becomes infatuated with her and investigates the case placing his marriage and life in danger.
Director Brian DeCubellis certainly knows his way around the genre. “Manhattan Night” is ripe with blackmail, danger, moral ambiguity, slick city streets and abuses of power. It hits all the right notes but seems slightly out of tune, like a cover version of a popular song that doesn’t quite capture the magic of the original.
Brody is suitably world-weary and Strahovski is mysterious and dangerously seductive. Both are stereotypes that feel airlifted in from another, better, movie. As far as the baddies go, Scott nails it as the troubled and threatening husband, a man who projects his neurosis on everyone around him. He’s over the top, chewing the scenery to such an extent you fear he might actually gnaw through the screen, but at least he’s captures the eye. Ditto Steven Berkoff as a Murdoch-esque media baron who seems to exists to add an unsavoury element to an already grubby affair.
As “Manhattan Night” slowly winds its way toward its anti-climatic final scenes it becomes clear that no amount of stylish direction or outrageous characters can make up for the far-fetched and convoluted story.
Natalie Portman is best known as an actress, an Oscar winner for portraying the dark side of perfection in “Black Swan,” and a box office champ, recently playing comic book heroine Jane Foster in the “Thor” movies. In “A Tale of Love and Darkness,” she expands her resume to include director.
Based on the worldwide Amos Oz best-seller, this Hebrew language film is an ambitious debut that details the beginnings of the State of Israel. The story centers on Oz (Amir Tessler), a child of six-years-old when we meet him in 1945 as Israel is comes into being. His parents, librarian Arieh (Gilad Kahana) and devoted mother, Fania (Portman), soon find that after years of persecution the peace they hoped for is just out of reach. Violence and the First Arab-Israeli War take a terrible toll on Fania.
By necessity Portman, who also wrote the script, has condensed the ideas in Oz’s book, stripping away some of the coming-of-age elements and political commentary to present the personal of a woman’s struggle as seen through the eyes of a child. The film does not lack for sincerity and never feels like a vanity project. This is a deeply felt film that deals in sensitive and complex feelings. Frequently it realizes Portman’s ambition to make a personal film about a world event. The stories Fania tells her son are beautifully rendered but “A Tale of Love and Darkness” is less successful in its attempts to portray the mother’s building depression.
Overall “A Tale of Love and Darkness” is a handsome film that relies a bit too heavily on narration to forward its story. As an actor-turned-director Portman aims high, taking chances and never allowing the weight of the material to bog down the film.
Welcome to the House of Crouse. By definition the term ‘war dogs’ refers to “bottom feeders who make money off war without ever stepping foot on the battlefield.” In the new film War Dogs Jonah Hill plays Efraim Diveroli, a true to life twenty-something arms dealer who fits that description to a tee. This week Hill stopped by the HoC to chat about the movies and how he gets inside the head of the characters he plays.
“‘Often filmmakers now aren’t emphasizing the fact their films are Canadian because there’s a stigma attached,’ lamented film critic Richard Crouse, who says another obstacle is that Canada’s film industry lacks a star system. ‘Our stars are our politicians, not our movie actors,’ he says…” Read the entire Movie Entertainment “Oh, Canada! Our Home and Native On-Screen Land” article by Michael D. Reid HERE!
Richard and CP24 anchor Karman Wong talk about the weekend’s big releases, including the remake of “Ben-Hur,” the neo-western with Chris Pine, Jeff Bridges and Ben Foster “Hell or High Water,” “War Dogs,” starring Jonah Hill and Miles Teller and the stop motion animated “Kubo and the Two Strings.”
Richard sits in with Todd van der Hayden to have a look Jonah Hill as a twenty-something arms dealer in “War Dogs,” the magical stop-motion animation of “Kubo and the Two Strings,” the neo-western “Hell or High Water” with Chris Pine, Ben Foster and Jeff Bridges and the pointless remake of “Ben-Hur.”
Ben-Hur director Timur Bekmambetov compares the legend of a Jewish prince falsely accused of treason by his adopted Roman brother to Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet “and any story written by Chekhov.”
Ripe with betrayal, revenge and redemption but shaded with love and compassion, Bekmambetov says the story of Ben-Hur is “timeless.”
“The conflicts the characters experience are as relatable today as they were in Roman times or 1880, when Lew Wallace wrote the novel. It’s human nature and that doesn’t change,” says producer Sean Daniel.
The human story is the engine that propels the Ben-Hur narrative, but throughout film history it’s the tale’s chariot race that entertains the eye. In version after version the showdown between the hero and his duplicitous brother is the centerpiece of the action.
This weekend Bekmambetov’s big-budget version of the story stars Jack Huston as Judah Ben-Hur and yes, there is a chariot race. “It was very, very dangerous work,” the director says of the scene that took 45 days to shoot and featured 90 trained horses. Each chariot was attached to four horses and could reach speeds of 65 to 70 km/h.
“There’s no suspension,” says Bekmambetov. “It’s shaky, it’s vibrating. The horses are snorting around you, behind you. It’s absolutely unprotected. You feel like you’re in the hands of fate.”
No animals were harmed during the shooting of Bekmambetov’s chariot race and, remarkably, the only human injury was a broken arm. Historically, however, shooting the chariot scenes has been fraught with problems.
Toronto-born director Sidney Olcott’s 1907 silent version focused on the race. Shot on a beach in New Jersey with local firemen as the charioteers and firehouse horses pulling the chariots, the scene was lifted directly from the novel, which triggered the first major copyright infringement case in movie history. It wasn’t standard practice to ask the author’s permission before adapting their work, but after Ben-Hur the Supreme Court decreed film companies must obtain rights to previously published work.
According to an MGM memo 1925’s Ben-Hur A Tale of the Christ’s chariot sequence took 42 cameras and two months to shoot at a cost of $500,000. The result was 60,960 metres of film which was whittled down to 228.6 metres. The completed sequence was named the Most Edited Scene of all Time by The Guinness Book of World Records and was copied, almost shot-for-shot in the animated film The Prince of Egypt and in the pod race scene from Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace.
The spectacular scene featured thousands of extras, including William Wyler, who would go on to direct the most famous version of the story, the 1959 movie starring Charlton Heston.
Legend has it that a stuntman was killed during the shooting of the Wyler’s legendary sequence but according to Snopes.com the rumour is false. In fact it was 1925 shoot that claimed the life of a stuntman who was killed when his chariot wheel broke and he was thrown in the air.
On Wyler’s set a stuntman was injured when his chariot overturned and two other horse drawn carts crashed into a bank of cameras but no one was hurt. Later, when Heston, who did most of his own driving in the scene, was asked if he liked shooting the scene he said, “I didn’t enjoy any of it. It was hard work.”
By definition the term ‘war dogs’ refers to “bottom feeders who make money off war without ever stepping foot on the battlefield.”
In the new film War Dogs Jonah Hill plays Efraim Diveroli, a true to life 20-something arms dealer who fits that description to a tee.
“You try to understand why someone would end up like that,” Hill says when I ask how he got inside the head of the fast-talking character. “It might be a combination of wiring, lack of empathy, ego and insecurity and obsessiveness. I don’t know. I try to approach it from a therapeutic point of view. Get into the psychology of why people behave the way they do. Probably most actors do that.”
He wasn’t able to meet the real-life Diveroli but he was able to piece together the character without a face-to-face.
“I would always prefer to meet the person but if someone was playing me in a movie I would give them the best version of myself. A lot of times when you meet the person you end up having to be a really good editor, choosing what to include, but always I found meeting the people around them ends up being more helpful to me because they are giving you a warts-and-all portrayal of the person at that time.”
Hill found that version of Diveroli from many sources.
“I had a lot of help,” he says. “I got to meet David, who Miles (Teller) plays, and a few people who knew Efraim at that time. The biggest key was that they are from Miami and Miami culture is very specific. There is a very big sense of the American dream there, in a positive and negative way. There’s a big immigrant culture. People from Cuba and Haiti end up in America for the first time through Miami. Efraim is a corruption of that (American) dream.”
In the film Efraim is a self- described “Ugly American,” a borderline sociopath for whom belligerence is a default setting.
The unhinged nature of the character and Hill’s venal glee in playing up the worst in human nature keeps War Dogs interesting but some audience members see it differently.
Recently a crew of South African arms dealers approached Hill in a restaurant after seeing a trailer for War Dogs.
They were impressed and wanted to high five the actor. He says the same thing happened after he made Wolf of Wall Street, another film where he played a morally ambiguous character who struck a chord with the very people it was satirizing.
“A lot of times Wall Street bros will come up to me as if the movie is their Goodfellas or Scarface. People see what they want to see. It is a little scary sometimes when people misinterpret.”
He describes the run in with the arms dealers as “uncomfortable.”
“You don’t want to make it an overly uncomfortable environment while that is happening,” he says, “but you also don’t want to lie and be dishonest that you are agreeing with them. You don’t want to make them feel bad about their misinterpretation. It’s an unusual an awkward situation to be sure. In the end, we all want to be seen as heroes in our own story, I guess.”
In “Southside with You” director Richard Tanne spends 80 leisurely minutes recreating the first date of Barack Obama and Michelle Robinson. It’s a quiet, romantic movie made up of the hopes and dreams of two young people who will one day be the most powerful couple in the world.
