Movie Nation

“Green Book” is a tonic for our toxic times,  a “Driving Miss Daisy” road dramedy through America’s increasingly retrograde racial history.

It never shies away from an easy laugh and may have all the makings of holiday cinema season comfort food. But the terrific lead performances and potent and timely social justice message make this film from one of the guys who gave us “Dumb and Dumber” the movie America needs to see — right now.

It’s based on a true story. In 1962, a classically-trained piano virtuoso is about to tour the racist American Midwest, upper South and Deep South. He needs a driver, one with particular skills and mass.

Because Dr. Donald Shirley, PhD, is black, African American — “colored.” And whatever level of tolerance he can expect from the performing arts halls, country clubs and Antebellum mansion “house concerts” on his itinerary, there are miles and miles of potential trouble in between.

He interviews potential drivers in his New York home. It’s an art-packaged apartment upstairs from Carnegie Hall. And Shirley (regal Oscar winner Mahershala Ali), multi-lingual, with impeccable manners, accent and carriage, sees fit to carry out these interviews from a throne.

Literally.

We’ve already met the burly, two-fisted Tony Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen). At the Copacabana, where he works as a jacketed waiter/bouncer, and among “the boys,” he’s “Tony Lip.”

He’s 40something, a family man with a comically voracious appetite, big enough to have been a bully, brutish enough to still have those tendencies. He’s always looking for an angle, “misplacing” the right mobster’s hat to create a scene and “come to the rescue” and thus inviting an obligation from the boss. But the Copa is closing down for renovations, and he can only score so much spending money by winning hot dog eating contests.

Also, he’s a racist. His wife gives drinks of water to two black plumbers working in their crowded flat and Tony tosses the glasses in the trash afterwards.

He and his relatives switch to Italian when they’re talking about non-Italians, and the slurs come quick and easy. Interviewed by his social superior and informed he’ll need to launder shirts and serve as valet on Shirley’s tour as well, he suggests a previous candidate, “the little (Asian slur)” might be better suited for the gig.

But he’s got the right throw-weight for the job and they come to terms. Just keep this “Green Book,” a “guide” for “The Negro Motorist” handy. Shirley, who fronts a trio with two white musicians backing him, will have to stay in “colored” motels and hotels and eat in “colored” dining establishments from Kentucky to N.C., Atlanta to their final stop, right before Christmas in that oasis of tolerance, Birmingham, Alabama.

Tony is crude, boorish and badly misinformed about much in this world — including black people. He smokes constantly and offends almost as often. Forcing Kentucky Fried Chicken — “ALL you people love fried chicken!” — on Shirley, pricking his new boss’s pretentiousness at every turn, Tony is not the sort of vulgarian you introduce in the circles Shirley travels in. Might a makeover be in order?

“I can help you. You can do BETTER Mr. Vallalonga.”

Tony ain’t having it. And Shirley’s sarcastic comebacks fly right over his head most of the time.

Then he hears the man play, “Like LIBERACE, but BETTER — a genius, I think,” he writes to his wife. “VIURTUOSO,” he says, echoing the boss’s introduction to a fellow driver. “That’s Italian. It means he’s really good!”

But those letters home to Dolores (Jennifer Cardellini, warm and wonderful) start to soften up Tony Lip. Shirley dictates literate, evocative paeans to true love and devotion. Tony goes to school.

And in seeing Shirley’s first class behavior when repeatedly faced with second class treatment is a lesson, too — in “maintaining your dignity.” Not that this mug is swallowing that. Not right away.

Director Peter Farrelly may seem outside of his comfort zone, here. But he’s had a sentimental streak, and he’s done road comedies (“Kingpin”) before. And while he never ever leaves an obvious joke untold, while we just KNOW these two are going to wind up A) in jail and B) in a “juke joint,” and we know precisely what will go down in each locale, he stays out of the way of his dazzling leads.

The little confessional scenes between the two men in the car have a familiar snap to them as Tony learns he’s underestimating his prissy employer and that employer gets an earful about how “black” he isn’t.

“That’s Little Richard! You never heard of Chubby Checker? Aretha?”

Ali gives Shirley the fey demeanor of the pampered artist with barely a hint of the hurt and rage bubbling beneath. Mortensen makes Tony so lived-in that you forget how much of his career he spent on horseback, herding hobbits.

The film tilts towards patronizing at times. White viewers and black ones are almost sure to react to Shirley’s giving in on the fried chicken thing differently Don’t overthink the fact that a guy Tony’s age and generation and ethnicity would be more of a Louis Prima fan, or that the wonderful Mortensen is a little long in the tooth to still be “the muscle.” Accept the jokes you see coming and delight in the ones you don’t.

“Green Book” (opening Nov. 21) invites you to come along for the ride, the comfort food, the socio-political sparks and the laughs.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic content, language including racial epithets, smoking, some violence and suggestive material

Cast: Viggo Mortensen, Mahershala Ali, Linda Cardellini

Credits:Directed by Peter Farrelly, script by Nick Vallelonga, Brian Hayes Currie and Peter Farrelly. A Universal release.

Running time: 2:10

Matt Green is a natural politician.

Affable, a real “people” person, he can strike up a conversation with it seems like anyone he meets. He meets a lot of people in New York City, not known for friendliness.

Eight and a half million people living, working and getting around in a metropolis with over 8,000 miles of of streets, highways, park paths, piers and cemeteries, you’re bound to have a conversation or two.

That’s Matt’s six year quest, to walk all of those streets and byways. On occasion, a camera crew or newspaper or magazine photographer follows him, because Matt’s quest is quixotic and folks, not just the news people with him, are curious about it.

“Only in New York,” one friendly stranger guffaws.

“The World Before Your Feet” is a disarmingly charming documentary about Green’s walk, the people he meets and oh, the things he’s seen.

He’s a history buff, a nature lover, a cell-phone camera photographer and a writer with an eye for the poetic, creating accounts for his “I’m Just Walkin” blog of each day’s treks and the sites he saw — the “oldest living thing” (a Tulip Poplar), a “George Washington Passed Here” marker, the location of New York’s slave market, the spot where the first birth control clinic in the U.S. opened.

The 30something Green, in baseball cap and beard and on warm days, cargo shorts, could pass for any other Park Slope hipster. But the civil engineer who gave up a desk job to start walks (he hiked across America, first) is curious, informed and learning every day of his life.

Aimless? He hears “How do you earn a living” almost every time he describes what he’s up to. But here is a guy living lean (house sitting, dog sitting, cat sitting and staying with friends all over town), spending little on food and nothing else but time as he gives up a normal life for this one thing he really loves doing.

Filmmaker Jeremy Workman did the filmmaker portrait “Who is Henry Jaglom?” and the documentary “Magical Universe” about an obsessive Barbie doll artist, and turns out to be just the right guy to film Green’s odyssey. He is as disarmed as the rest of us by the man and makes sure to include the occasional “What are you doing?” and “Stop taking pictures!” encounter, to show Green’s natural charm winning over “real” New Yorkers.

Using the World’s Fair scale model, the Panorama of the City of New York, to orient us, Workman lets Green do almost all of the talking — a tour guide who relishes details that even the folks who live right next to them are unaware of. He’s marveling at Coney Island in mid-blizzard, stumbling into a pick-up football game during another snow storm (He’s invited to join in, and does.), waxing lyrical about curbside gardens, the city’s Redwoods — that’s right, Redwood trees — and figs.

Workman uses the occasional meditative drone shot to capture this stretch of abandoned Staten Island or the scale of this or that cemetery.

His movie is like a sweeter version of “The Cruise,” a documentary about the quirkiest of  tour-guide’s bus tour of Manhattan

Green gasps at sunsets, and reveals why there are little painted dots on sewer grates (city workers keeping track of which they’ve fumigated to stop the spread of the mosquito-borne West Nile virus.

On Day 1151, he does 15.3 miles on Staten Island. Another day he’s on Cobble Hill, or Vinegar Hill, down on Wall Street or over at Battery Park. Brownsville, Brooklyn to Oakwood and Crescent Beach, Staten Island — he’s not being particularly methodical about where he walks, though he is about recreating those walks for the blog.

The Jewish, Ashland, Virginia native  might note another “churchagogue,” a church that’s moved into a synagogue abandoned when its congregation moved away from the city.

The whole point of doing it might seem “To get somebody to make a documentary about me doing this,” especially in New York (The odds that a documentarian would contact you have to be pretty high, right?), but Green professes to see “no commercial possibilities” in a film or a book or even his little-visited website.

It just “seems important” that he finish this personal mission.

Interviewing others who love walking the city gives us few clues. A visit to Ashland and talking with his family is more revealing.

And chatting with an ex-fiance and ex-girlfriend, we learn a little about the cost of being “quixotic,” even if we envy the guy who has decided material things are not for him, who has mastered New York on $15 a day and who is redefining “a purposeful life” on the fly.

“The World Before Your Feet” suggests an entirely new way of visiting New York, or living there. As Green stops to take another picture of a 9/11 memorial mural, pauses to admire the Palmas de Caribe Community Garden and share a beer with the the retired Caribbean islanders gardening there, you can’t help but think “THIS is the way to SEE New York.”

And “THIS guy should run for mayor.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, one bit of profanity

Cast: Matt Green

Credits:Directed by Jeremy Workman. A Greenwich release.

Running time: 1:35

Watching the new Mahershala Ali/Viggo Mortensen film that takes it as its title, I was wracking my brain, trying to remember the first time I heard of the publication known as “The Green Book.”

I know my hearing about it pre-dates this PBS documentary.

There was a play that took “The Green Book” as its title, but I’ve never seen that. But having interviewed a few elderly black comics and actors who worked the last years of “The Chitlin’ Circuit,” I think it was Sherman Hemsley who brought it to my attention, this fascinating and depressing cultural artifact that named “Negro friendly” establishments all over America for “The Negro Motorist” or touring performer who could not get served in much of the country.

In the film, “inspired by a true story,” the book is what an Italian American dese-dem-dose tough (Viggo M.) has to refer to as he drives and books accommodations for his employer, the jazz pianist Dr. Donald Shirley (Oscar winner Ali, of “Moonlight”).  So white America gets to experience what black America deals with just taking a simple road trip.

Outhouses for restrooms, most restaurants refusing to serve black patrons, hotels refusing the esteemed Shirley a room, clothing shops not letting him try on a suit.

“The Negro Motorist Green Book” didn’t spare the traveling African American third rate service. It did protect you from the rudeness and racism that we thought had been tamped down until a racist got elected president two years ago.

Donald Shirley I remember from my days working in public radio stations, hosting jazz programs. The trailer to “Green Book” doesn’t give away his chosen field, but Shirley was classically trained and a Phd. and kind of pushed into jazz by a record company who was sure audiences wouldn’t stand for a black classical pianist (Tell Emmanuel Ax that).

Actually, that’s not true. He played Tchaikovsky with the Boston Pops as a teenager, had pieces played by the London Philharmonic.

The man had a degree and was a practicing psychologist for a while. In the film, he is fluent in several languages, which his Wikipedia bio omits but is almost certainly true (he studed in Leningrad, among other cities).

Here’s a “Cool Jazz” hit of his, performing with his cello/bass/piano trio.

“Green Book,” directed by Peter Farrelly, opens Nov. 21.

So you’ve got Samuel L. returning as the title character, and Bruce Willis from “Unbreakable,” James McAvoy from “Split,” and Sarah Paulson and Anya-Taylor Joy and a “facility” to tie this one through-line in M. Night Shyamalan’s interesting but wildly uneven career up in a neat three-fer bow.

The back engineering to these things is always impressive, thought “Split” was already grafted onto “Unbreakable.”

It’s all about creating “universes,” letting films mimic long-form cable TV shows, making connections that inspire deeper fan devotion and engagement. It’s smart business, though I find that the movies that are coming out of this Hollywood MBA fad a tape loop grind.

Universal wanted to do this with its classic horror title remakes, but that was never going to work.

With “Glass,” we are intrigued, even if we remember “Last Airbender” and “The Visit” and “The Happening” and “Lady in the Water” and…

Fangirls and fanboys and M. Night’s Knights should let “Glass” own a slow January (Jan. 18 is the release date.). That much seems certain.

Well, the folks at Lionsgate/Summit waited until tonight to “preview” their movie, which opens in less than 24 hours.

Many others have already reviewed the thing, so I will get to it later.

Instead, tonight presents one with a choice, and I choose to check out “Green Book” some weeks before its release.

I cannot recall the first place I ever heard of the famous green-covered guide to African American-friendly businesses — restaurants and hotels — compiled during the dark days when America was “great,” and discrimination/segregation was the rule and in many cases, the law of the land.

I think PBS did something on it (might have seen something on “The History Detectives”), but I had heard of it first hand from one late comer to the showbiz “chitlin’ circuit” of African American entertainment.

Bernie Mac brought it up, I think, in an interview we did shortly before he passed.

In any event, the subject is fascinating and damned timely, considering the direction of the country, “Back to the Confederacy!”

It’s a “Driving Miss Daisy” twist, a true story and  at around 2:10 in length, “Oscar level serious.” Even though Peter Farrelly directed it.

“Green Book” opens Nov. 21.

Something is coming for your  kids. “The creature!”

“PLEASE DON’T TAKE MY CHILDREN!”

Great Dane Susanne Bier directed this “Quiet Ones” with blindfolds instead of muzzled mouths muffled sounds.

John Malkovich, Sarah Paulson and Tom Hollander also star in this Dec. 21 Netflix release. 

“Bohemian Rhapsody” is framed perfectly — beginning and ending with Queen’s triumphant, show-stealing turn in the star-studded Live Aid benefit concert in 1985.

Director Bryan Singer trots us through the standard musical biopic “Moment When They Met” and “Moments of Creation” with brisk, efficient skill and wit.

The movie traverses the familiar, almost formulaic arc of such films with a fan’s brio — highlights, low-points, tests and triumph.

Everyone Singer cast, from star Rami Malek, who gives a break-out turn as the flamboyant, talented and lonely Freddie Mercury, to the lads hired as the rest of Queen is both a dead ringer for the person they’re playing and a fun performance.

Casting Mike Myers of “Wayne’s World” as a record company Doubting Thomas –“This will never sell…radio stations will never play this” — is an inside joke that works hilariously.

So let others quibble about the story’s hero, Mercury, not being portrayed as gay enough. It’s a movie about Queen, for Pete’s sake. There are a couple of baccanales, bar and truckstop pickups making overt what was ALWAYS known and accepted about Mercury in that Golden Age of Rock Androgyny (Bowie, Bolan, Elton, etc.).

And make whatever peace you can with the cloud that the director’s #MeToo reputation and lawsuit over an alleged rape casts over the film. Others appear to be reviewing “Bohemian” with that foremost in their minds.

I found “Bohemian Rhapsody” an unadulterated delight, a longish quick-brush-strokes depiction of the band, their times and the creation of the music that made them stadium rock staples, Classic Rock mainstays and idolized the world over.

That’s why picking that Live Aid peak to frame it is perfect. They could and should have been irrelevant in the mid-MTV mid-80s. But as Mercury played the Wembley Stadium crowd and the worldwide TV audience as just an extension of his concert grand piano, we all remembered that we knew the words he was demanding that we sing along to. And most of us, and generations that have followed, haven’t forgotten them.

We meet toothy Farrokh Bulsara (Malek), a Parsi Zoroastrian whose family was chased from Persia to Zanzibar (where he was born) to the United Kingdom, so that his fellow airport baggage handlers and others could ask, “‘Oi! Oo’s the Paki?,” rolling out their favorite slur.

The rock trio Smile finds itself in need of a new lead singer, and their most attentive, hopeful fan, Farrokh, offers his services (shyly arrogant) and auditions on the spot. Astrophysics major and guitarist Brian May (Gwilym Lee) and drummer-studying-to-be-a-dentist Roger Taylor (Ben Hardy) are gobsmacked. Not just that the guy knows their tunes and can instantly harmonize with them. It’s his range.

From the first, they’re in the thrall of the renamed “Freddie,” his singing voice, his ear for catchy melodies and clever lyrics, and his theatricality. His “exotic” look is played up by the shopgirl (Lynn Boynton) who is smitten by Freddie and becomes his lover and later wife.

The movie might have peaked too early, rushing through Queen’s name change, “Like her Royal Highness,” image building, feuds with record companies and the BBC, jumping almost straight into the conception and amusingly painstaking and analog construction of their most famous song.

We’ll give rock fans “A Night at the Opera,” Freddie tells the record company folks (Aiden Gillen, Tom  Hollander and Myers), dropping the needle on an aria from “Madame Butterfly.” And so they did.

What they went through to achieve this cryptic, genre mash-up epic — recording portions and recording them via speakers swung past the mike in the studio, etc. — could have taken up the entire film.

But other tunes — “We Will Rock You” and “Another One Bites the Dust” get similar “This is where that came from” treatment. Any fan will thrill to these moments.

Freddie’s double-life tests his devotion to Mary (Boynton) and Queen’s growing fame pressures the “family” the band members claim that they are. Freddie was a self-styled diva, taking his cues from Callas and Garland (always tardy, temperamental, credit hogging). It’s hard to be a band of brothers with that much ego in the room.

The money, fame, drugs, orgies, mansion and wealth cannot fill the loneliness Freddie carries around with him. One manipulative employee turned lover/manager (Allan Leech plays Paul Prenter) roils the waters and breaks the bonds.

And then…AIDS.

As I said, it’s a time-tested musical bio-pic story arc, with Singer taking a shot at structuring this in the style of “Bohemian Rhapsody” itself — overture, crescendo, and onward — “the scale of opera,” as Freddie says in the film, “the wit of Shakespeare,” rock as musical theater.

With two of the surviving band members signed on as producers, the picture never gets past the surface dynamics of that relationship — lightly mocking the foibles of this or that member, backing into fresh appreciations of their role in the group in creating their best songs.

As for their guardianship of Mercury, this is the way Freddie would want to be remembered.

Freddie’s family comes off as more of a hoary plot device than the font of his talent. But his every relationship has a sort of chill that stems from that, a marriage never shown to be particularly romantic, a gay life that connected with who he really was, but unfulfilling in a lot of “finding love when you’re already famous” pitfalls.

It is the performances that lift “Bohemian Rhapsody” above formula, with Malek’s on stage lip-syncing of Mercury’s singing showmanship eerily on the money and accurate. He wields a mike stand like a pro (we see the evolution of this) and Malek even copies Mercury’s stage-crossing skip-step, a memorable piece of his Live Aid turn.

Every concert moment (using live Queen recordings for sound) packs a thrill, every studio moment a fun realization of “Oh, THAT’s how they did that.”

Maybe it’s for fans only and whatever its relevance culturally, Queen is very much a product of the 70s’ and 80s. So Lady Gaga’s legions and Kendrick Lamar’s customers might not appreciate it on that level.

But “Bohemian Rhapsody” and Rami Malek cleverly and warmly distill an era and its music into a thoroughly entertaining piece of music history.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic elements, suggestive material, drug content and language

Cast: Rami Malek, Lucy Boynton, Gwilym Lee, Ben Hardy, Joseph Mazello, Tom Hollander, Aiden Gillen, Allan Leech,  and Mike Myers

Credits: Directed by Bryan Singer, script by Anthony McCarten. A 20th Century Fox release.

Running time: 2:14

All actors, the old joke goes, want to play Jesus. It’s a Messiah complex that comes with the vocation.

Gay actors, the out ones anyway, want to play Oscar Wilde.

The greatest wit of his age, perhaps of any age, a brilliant playwright — “The Importance of Being Earnest,” “An Ideal Husband” — and homosexual martyr from an era when Britain jailed such men for “gross indecency,” Wilde was a worthy subject for the wonderful Stephen Frye 20 years ago (“Wilde”) and a grand challenge for Rupert Everett, who wrote, directed and stars in “The Happy Prince.”

It’s a witty, sad film focusing on Wilde’s final years, after he “scandalized” London, sued the Marquess of Queensberr ( who outed him for his affair with Bosie Douglas, the louche son of the Marquess) and had that suit turn into a criminal trial and two years of hard labor for his sins.

Self-exiled to the continent — France mainly — this is Wilde at twilight, the man peddling “De Profundis,” his melancholy “Letter from Reading Gaol.”

A profligate wag out of cash, he is begging from old friends and longtime fans, one of whom (Anna Chancellor) spies him, tipsy and downcast on the streets of Paris.

“How kind of you to speak to me,” he says, humbled and hoarse, before asking for a fiver. “I am wedded to poverty,” he declares to an old friend, “and the marriage has not been a success.”

Everett’s Wilde has decided “There is no mystery as great as suffering,” that he himself is “a broken man…too cold to finish his play.” He drifts through his last days, renewing his practice of impromptu storytelling to children — once his own sons, now the street urchins of Paris. He tells them of The Happy Prince and the King of the Mountains of the Moon, “black as heaven,” and their rivalry and struggles.

Everett makes this Wilde a magnificent ruin, reveling in self-pity rather than wallowing in it. Spat upon in his home country, hounded by boorish British gay bashers on a holiday in Dieppe, Wilde takes one last lunge at love, begging forgiveness from his sickly, indulgent but humiliated wife (Emily Watson, soft and brittle), taking the attentions of his devoted former lover Robbie (Edwin Thomas) for granted, desperate for a reconciliation with the wastrel Bosie (Colin Morgan) who loved him, but also used and ruined him.

“I cannot live without the atmosphere of love. I must love and be loved!”

Everett gives these doomed years a wistful melancholy interrupted by moments where Wilde reminded everyone within earshot how he could still be the life of the party — affecting a girlish voice for flirtatious jokes, forever picking up the check, serenading rowdy French barflies with “The Boy I Love is Up in the Gallery” and remembering  in flashbacks his many theatrical triumphs, addressing the audience with ready wit after every hit.

“Your appreciation has been MOST intelligent. I congratulate you on the success of YOUR performance…You think almost as highly of the play as I do myself!”

Everett brings genuine warmth as writer, director and star to Wilde’s moments with children — indulgent (to a fault) — and crushed resignation to his fate. He “dined on shame” in prison, where “in the cell, there is only God and man.” We see the humiliation of his head-shaving  and dunking upon admission to jail and his cowed misery at enduring how the hoi polloi turned on him.

But his wit, famously, never left him — paying off a rent boy with “Our purple hours are sullied by green notes,” commenting on decor, even on his death bed.

“My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.”

Colin Firth added his Oscar-winning name and prestige to “The Happy Prince,” helping Everett get it made (Watson and Tom Wilkinson, as a priest, give marquee value as well). Firth effortlessly plays Wilde’s loyal confidante, the novelist and gay wit Reggie Turner, here seen as one of Wilde’s go-to actors in his heyday.

Everett didn’t attempt a “complete” life of Oscar, focusing so narrowly on the end. But the once rakish star, novelist and chat show mainstay creates a performance with a post-vanity vanity about it, a man who remembers what youth and beauty and fame once gave him and yet cannot give himself wholly over to mourning what only he knows he’s lost.

He has given us a portrait of Wilde that revives his memory and his martyrdom, but that allows the endlessly quotable genius to be not the great man and icon, but just a man — a funny, charming one whose indulgences and foibles bring him to life.

And for that he deserves thanks in words Everett gives to Wilde as he responds to a small kindness.

“Thank you…for a moment’s harmony in a discordant fugue.”

MPAA Rating: R for sexual content, graphic nudity, language and brief drug use

Cast: Rupert Everett, Colin  Firth, Emily Watson, Colin Morgan, Tom Wilkinson

Credits: Written and directed by Rupert Everett. A Sony Classics/BBC Films release.

Running time: 1:45

A little Poe, a bit of Agatha Christie Rod Serling and a touch of Pirandello? Six characters in search of an…escape.”

Trapped, threatened with near certain death, reason it out, find the “clues” and get out of “Escape Room.”

This one opens in the Oscar-contender wasteland of early January (Jan. 4).

The model/”Blurred Lines” stripped object of desire is making her way through the B-movie ranks, and Aaron Paul is re-starting his leading man career about a few Big Studio fizzles, and taking a paid Italian vacation while he does it in “Welcome Home,” a Vertical Releasing thriller about a broken couple hoping to mend fences in Italy.

Their landlord has different ideas.

Limited release, Nov 16.