Movie Nation

We all knew Aretha Franklin’s story would make an entertaining bio-musical, and “Respect” doesn’t disappoint. It’s as uplifting and ready-made for sing-alongs as any recent bio-pic, mostly because it’s just like them.

Tracey Scott Wilson (“Fosse/Verdon” ) is the credited screenwriter, but Oscar winner Callie Khouri (“Thelma & Louise”) came up with the story arc, and one of those two should confess to cribbing the structure and style of “Bohemian Rhapsody” before the ridicule steps in.

It’s a film that peaks with the recording of the title number and climaxes with a defining, emotional concert performance. And it scrubs its subject if not squeaky clean, at least sanitized enough for us to notice. Very “Bohemian.”

But “not surprising” also goes for the lead performances. You knew Oscar winning belter Jennifer Hudson was going to render the Queen of Soul as regally as the story demands. Oscar winner Forest Whitaker was never going to disappoint as her domineering, womanizing and abusive father, Pastor C.L. Franklin.

Broadway songbird Audra McDonald as Aretha’s singing, gospel pianist mom, Barbara? Another no-brainer in that she’s effortlessly imposing in the part.

It’s the players orbiting around this impressive leading trio who deliver unexpected delights in a film that leans on “Bohemian,” but has just enough “Ray,” “Get on Up” and “Walk the Line” sizzle to deliver.

Titus Burgess, flamboyant in “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” is sympathetically soulful (and musical) as the church choir director who impresses on tiny, abused Aretha (Skye Dakota Turner, dazzling) “Don’t let nothing come between you and your music…Music can save your life.”

And comic, podcaster and sometime actor Marc Maron gives a dead-on impersonation of Jerry Wexler, the Atlantic Records producer who rescued Franklin’s career by pointing her to the songs and the sound that would make her famous, who learned to be deferential to the “Queen” and entered American pop legend with her as the “producer behind Aretha.” Maron is so uncanny in the part that he plainly based his performance on Wexler’s memoirs and TV decades of interviews discussing his “handling” of the “difficult” star.

That’s a running thread through “Respect,” Franklin’s frequent succumbing to “the Demon” that made her temperamental, mercurial and unreliable for much of her career. The script lays this at the feet of the rape that made her a mother in her tweens, and on alcohol, and suggests she found a way through it.

But she was blowing off concerts and personal appearances up to the day she died, one of the ways this script scrubs her image out of “Respect.”

The hair-raising, electrical musical moments in “Respect” come from the friction-filled trip to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, where Wexler was sure he could spring Franklin from the mundane “jazz singer” trap her former record company, Columbia, spent five years and nine (flop) LPs building.

A Black gospel singer managed by an insecure, abusive husband (Marlon Wayans, quite good) shoved into a studio with a bunch of 1960s Alabama white boys, engineered by drawling Rick Hall (Myk Hall)? Yes, it came to blows. And yes, the session that preceded that abrupt exit produced  “I Never Loved A Man (The Way I Love You),” which announced her stardom.

And scatting with her backup singing sisters (Saycon Sengbloh, Hailey Kilgore) in the wee hours, at home to produce the “Just a little bit” and “Re Re Re” (Franklin’s family nickname) that turned Otis Redding’s “R-E-S-P-E-C-T” into the feminist soul anthem for the ages is a jewel of a scene.

If you aren’t moved by that, you should check your pulse.

Director Liesl Tommy graduates from her “Jessica Jones” and “Dolly Parton” TV movie background to features with a film that hits the waypoints of a legendary career just hard enough to remind us that they’re Aretha Lore, confirmed by myth and sometimes by fact.

And Hudson knocks the songs and the rising sense of empowerment that the Queen of Soul rode into a life as a diva’s diva out of the park. Her Aretha is sexual and soft, even at her most difficult. The intensely relatable Hudson makes Franklin likable, something the “Queen” spent decades defying.

The great novelty here is the depiction of Franklin’s middle class connected-to-the-arts0-and civil rights childhood. It’s easy to forget that Martin Luther King Jr. was “Uncle Martin” to her, that she sang and spoke out on civil rights issues, and that even as a child she was rubbing shoulders with Dinah Washington, Ella Fitzgerald and “Uncle Duke” Ellington, thanks to her father’s prominence in Detroit.

Stately as it is, “Respect” never quite becomes a “great film,” but Hudson, Whitaker, McDonald, Burgess and Maron ensure it’s never less than an entertaining one, a musical biography that gives the Queen of Soul her royal due.

MPA Rating: PG-13 for mature thematic content, strong language including racial epithets, violence, suggestive material, and smoking

Cast: Jennifer Hudson, Forest Whitaker, Marlon Wayons, Marc Maron, Audra McDonald, Titus Burgess, Kimberly Scott, Hailey Kilgore and Saycon Sengbloh

Credits: Directed by Liesl Tommy, script by Tracey Scott Wilson. An MGM release.

Running time: 2:22

I am at my favorite non arthouse cinema, the Regal Winter Park 20, Florida flagship of the chain, a lone white boy in a sea of Aretha fans of color.

Because some of us have taste.

MGM is having a nationwide Preview at 4 this afternoon, so if you’re close to a Cineplex, get busy.

I hope the long COVID winter that kept this onetime awards contender from release was worth. Killer cast, Jennifer Hudson was born to play this woman, and the songs still give me chills.

I’m most curious to see Marc Maron’s take on producer, believer, keeper of the Atlantic Records faith Jerry Wexler. He retired to the coast of Florida just before I moved here and a friend helped me track him down once I started work here.

A genuine fan, even after he and Aretha fallout, he had lots of stories about the diva’s diva and great talent that music was slow to discover and America was slow to embrace.

“The Swarm” is “Jean de Florette” meets “Little Shop of Horrors.”

It’s about an idealistic, “try something new” farmer who breeds bugs, only to discover that blood is what makes them thrive.

Only the French could think up this high concept variation on a buggy creature feature starring locusts.

It’s creepy and cautionary and culinary, because locusts have “more protein” per gram than any meat on the market. And “pretty soon, the entire planet will be starving, but you’re all too dumb to notice.

Suliane Brahim is Virginie, a struggling 40ish farm widow hellbent on keeping the land she and her late husband dreamed on. He thought goats were the way to go. He’s gone and she’s crunched the numbers and decided roasted locusts are the smarter bet.

But the strain has infuriated her young teen daughter Laura (Marie Narbonne) and upset her tween son Gaston (Raphael Romand). She’s annoyed her retail buyer and asked for one too many loans from vintner friend Karin (Sofian Khammes).

It doesn’t matter that they can be prepared in delectable “smoked paprika” or ginger-flavored ways. Her online support may keep the geodesic dome greenhouse hives alive, but they won’t thrive. She’s desperate, wearing fear and fury on her face.

And then our “Jean de Florette” makes her “Audrey” in “Little Shop” discovery.

Just Philippot’s film is a leisurely, somewhat tense amble down We Know What’s Coming Lane.

The twist to the classic “when bugs attack” thriller is that “Little Shop” touch, what the locusts and the desire to succeed do to Virginie.

The script finds clever ways to point us towards the “eureka” moment we know is coming — a little boy marveling at what a “pet” locust does to wart.

Icky locust closeups — eating, molting, cannibalizing, carnivore-ing — add to the fun.

The formula is the same in Hollywood or Caubeyres (Lot-et-Garonne), in English (dubbed) or the original French.

We see the first hint of “success,” and fret about its cost. We meet characters named Jacki and Huegette, and we get a sick feeling about their fate.

Brahim gives a fine fraught edge to Virginie, and Narbonne is reassuringly bratty, a teen with legitimate grief and beefs, but lashing out in ways that can only make things worse.

I thought the story had a few missteps, which may just be a reaction to lax French parenting practices. And the pace, when everybody knows the title (“La nuée” in French), seems entirely too deliberate and delicate. There’s a lean 85 minute thriller in this.

But as creature features go, this one plays and finds its pulse-pounding payoff in grand style.

MPA Rating: TV-14, violence, profanity

Cast: Suliane Brahim, Marie Narbonne, Sofian Khammes and Raphael Romand

Credits: Directed by Just Philippot, script by Franck Victor. A Canal+ film on Netflix.

Running time: 1:42

As it’s also available on HBO Max, this is a pandemic-depressed opening weekend that shouldn’t leave Warner Brothers in the red for James Gunn’s comic book reboot.

A $4.1 million Thursday night, the best Thursday night of the pandemic, Warners crowed, led into a $12 million Friday. That just won’t be enough to get “The Suicide Squad” over $30 million by midnight Sunday. Saturday is expected to see a steep fall-off from Friday.

“Black Widow” just cleared the $170 million mark for Marvel/Disney. But one wonders if the over-saturation of streaming comic book content hasn’t hastened the fall-off of this long-running blockbuster fad. The cost-benefit of such movies makes more sense for HBO Max, Disney+ or Netflix than it does as a theatrical money maker.

Are audiences finally tiring of Men in Tights?

Disney’s “Jungle Cruise,” more family friendly, hit the $50 million mark its first week and should hit the $teens in second place this weekend. It earned almost $3 million Friday alone.

“Old” is fading fast, but already in the black thanks to its low production/cast cost.

“The Green Knight” did a robust (for an indie film) $9.5 million its first week, and should sit comfortably in the top five, even in the low single digits, for one more weekend.

Not so for “Stillwater,” which has earned over $7 and will fade enough this weekend that it should join “Snake Eyes” in losing a lot of screens next weekend.

The year of the Sparks Brothers reaches its climax with “Annette,” a long-gestating musical created by droll rockers Ron Mael and Russell Mael.

So what was their fondest wish, after 50 years of flirting with pop stardom as “critical darlings” and pop look pranksters? Apparently, they wanted to attempt a new musical spin on “A Star is Born” in which two stars have a baby who turns out to be a prodigy, a baby played by an animated/animatronic redheaded toddler in director Leos Carax’s (“The Lovers on the Bridge/Les Amants du Pont-Neuf” was his) vision.

So, offbeat? A little bit. Fun? For a bit.

It’s a tragic satire, a commentary on the arc of celebrity, the craving for and eventual weight of fame and what one man will do to maintain it. It practically leaps off the screen in its opening act and steadily sours and slows as it makes its way through a somewhat predictable fall-from-grace saga.

Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard star as a singing performance artist/comic and a famous opera singer whose very public, seemingly-mismatched romance leads to marriage and the oddest offspring this side of “The Dancing Baby.”

Henry McHenry takes the stage in a boxer’s robe and trunks, backed by a quartet in nightgowns for his “mildly offensive evening” as “The Ape of God,” a George Carlin meets Steven Wright deadpanner who stalks the stage, stares “into the abyss,” and jokes-confesses in rhyme and song.

Yes, our stars do their own singing, with Driver a serviceable low tenor, crooning and teasing about “Why did I become a comedian? To make you ‘notice’ what you’ve always surely noticed until I ask ‘Have you ever noticed?'”

His French fiance Ann Defrasnoux (Cotillard) sings opera, “where everything is sacred” Henry complains. And she’s always “dying dying dying” every night as she sings opera’s oft tragic repertoire.

They greet each other backstage after their performances. Him — “I killed them, destroyed them, murdered them.” Her? “I saved them.”

This’ll never work. But they marry, have baby Annette, and tragedy strikes and strikes again.

The Maels, who appear here and there in the narrative, have their musical sprint out the gate with the cast — including comic actor/pianist Simon Helberg of “The Big Bang Theory” — parading out of a recording studio, singing their way down a Hollywood street the fun on-the-nose opening number, “Shall We Start?”

Helberg, playing another accompanist (also his role in “Florence Foster Jenkins”) has a nice solo bemoaning his “accompanist” lot in life, and his ambition to be a conductor.

Our lovers sing duets, nude and mid-coitus or on Henry’s motorcycle, and solo complaints and laments — backstage or on the toilet.

“Annette” is at its most operatic in its call-and-response songs between Henry and his devoted audience, paparazzi singing “Give us a SMILE, please” to the couple and in a childbirth scene scored as a musical round — nurses singing “breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out” while the doctors and Henry chant “Push push push!”

As the story takes its turn toward grim, one can feel the bubbles fizzle out of “Annette.” What is darkly comical at first turns just dark, with that damned digitized baby (played by a real child, eventually) hogging center screen.

Cotillard shocks, once of twice, hitting soprano trills that, considering they didn’t let her sing Edith Piaf in “La Vie En Rose,” impress. And Driver’s stage presence makes up for whatever he lacks vocally in songs that don’t demand range, but simple emotional honesty.

Sparks fans may be more attuned to the music and tone of the humor served up in “Annette.” Then again, considering the playful tunes and stage vamping they’re famous for, maybe not. I found it a movie musical that loses its way when it loses its sense of play.

MPA Rating: R, sexual content, including nudity, language (profanity) and smoking

Cast: Adam Driver, Marion Cotillard, Simon Helberg, Ron and Russell Mael, aka Sparks

Credits: Directed by Leos Carax, script by Ron Mael and Russell Mael. An Amazon Studios release.

Running time: 2:20

An American watching the Dutch war parable “The East” can’t help but see it through a Vietnam War lens. This film is about European soldiers fighting a phantom enemy and battling for “hearts and minds” in Indonesia, not Southeast Asia. And it takes nothing from the film to notice a little “Apocalypse Now” here, “Casualties of War” and “Platoon” story arcs and even a hint of “The Green Berets” there.

The Dutch commandos here even have their own green berets (like the British before them) to distinguish themselves from ordinary infantry.

Like Vietnam, The Netherlands experience fighting a different foe in different jungles was bathed in arrogance and racism. But as this bloody, unsettling and somewhat mythic combat thriller from musician, DJ and actor turned director Jim Taihuttu points out, there were distinctly Dutch failings and scars in play here.

Martijn Lakemeier stars as Johan DeVries, a volunteer in the corps shipped over to the former Dutch colony which Japan conquered in World War II. Johan and his comrades in arms are there to “restore order” to the islands of Java, Celebes, et al, governed out of Batavia, the city now known as Jakarta.

Their commanding officer declares “The disgrace ends with your arrival here” (in Dutch with English subtitles), which is the most psychologically telling line in the movie. Holland was invaded and occupied by the Germans in World War II. The queen under whose name these soldiers were sent to “fight peasants with swords and spears” spent that war in comfort, in London. And it’s not like she’s here, either.

Add to that national “shame” the stark reminder that some soldiers in this unit fought with the Resistance, but most assuredly did not.

They’re in country, taking up positions at remote jungle outposts, just as “the Japanese Nazis” are forced out at gunpoint. The ethnically and religiously diverse country is teetering on the brink of civil war, with the “terrorist” Sukarno fighting a guerilla war aimed at uniting them all in independence. This “war” is a series of patrols out of those bases, interrogations of civilians in the countryside. The attacks they face are ambushes, their reprisals include atrocities.

Sound familiar?

Johan throws himself into the routine, studying the Indonesian phrase book, thinking along the lines of what the American Pentagon later labeled “winning the hearts and minds” of the locals.

But Johan won’t be the classic “white savior,” the above-it-all “observer/watcher/narrator” of this story. He’s very much a participant. Just how much so becomes clear when he hears a tip from a local about a rebel cadre holed up in a nearby village, and his condescending commanding officer (Mike Reus) dismisses the idea of action.

Johan takes that tip to a soldier with the air of lethal, commanding mystery about him, The Turk. Marwan Kenzari plays his Greco-Dutch commando with bravado and self-righteous cool, a mustachioed man among men, the one some whisper “should be in charge of this war.”

He is ruthless and unwavering in his pursuit of the rebels, unflinching in the summary extra-judicial “justice” he metes out. He is Sgt. Barnes in “Platoon,” Col. Kurtz in “Apocalypse Now,” a monster lauded for his results, abhorred for his “methods.” Johan will become his (somewhat) devoted student.

Taihuttu tells this story along two compelling timelines. We follow Johan through his introduction to Indonesia, his “blooding” in combat and his immersion in local culture.

But as the opening image of the film is that of an older, weathered Johan returning home to Holland to protests, there’s a fictive present set after his service. “The East” is about what Johan did there, how it scarred him and what he brought home with him from that war.

The racism expressed by the soldiers for the “brown monkeys” they’ve traveled there to fight is jolting, and also a pre-Vietnam echo of the demonized, dismissed and under-estimated Asian “other” the United States and a few allies fought decades later.

And Taihuttu isn’t shy about revisiting other Vietnam elements with this fictional story. When the flame thrower comes out, we know what’s going to happen, the old “destroy the village in order to ‘save’ it” nonsense.

He lets us see the war lost exactly the same way Vietnam was lost almost 30 years later.

If the American legacy of Vietnam, echoed in film, history and literature of the war, was “going in like John Wayne” and realizing out that sort of simplistic heroism heedless of geopolitics exists only in that draft dodger’s movies, some 150,000 Dutch troops shipped East to fight to atone for what they, their parents and their leaders didn’t do from 1940-45.

The filmmaker isn’t above tumbling into the same “traps” filmmakers of the lesser Vietnam films succumbed to. Of course there’s a cocktail party. Of course The Turk is into opera. Of course there’s a hooker — played by Denise Aznam — whom Johan falls for.

But Taihuttu’s created a fascinating twist on the “reckoning-with-our-ugly-past” war film. By building it on a shamed national psyche and having that reflected in the characters, he’s found dark new explanations for how things happened, and why.

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, sex, smoking, profanity

Cast: Martijn Lakemeier, Marwan Kenzari, Jonas Smulders, Coen Bril and
Denise Aznam

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jim Taihuttu, additional material by Mustafa Duygulu. A Magnolia/Magnet release.

Running time: 2:21

A family vacation goes wrong thanks to two “drifters” in this September thriller.

“A Savage Nature” sets some sort of new slow-poke standard for thrillers, a lurching stiff with no pulse to speak of.

“Inspired by” a true home invasion a title tells us was in Virginia in August of 2007 (I can’t find evidence of this), it’s a twisty, twisted and theatrical melodrama about a waitress (Joanna Whicker), her deputy sheriff combat vet (Steve Polites) whose awkward anniversary celebration is interrupted by two thugs in a pickup (Jon Hudson Odom, Joseph Carlson).

It starts with a rough, grabby encounter in the diner where Beth (Whicker) works and escalates once the sheriff (Frank Riley III) roughs up the two when he spots them later.

That’s on the remote dead end dirt road where Beth and Pete live, and events conspire to put them all in that house, where everything is not what it seems and agendas are not necessarily what you’d expect.

The writing is often clumsy and unnatural, even when the thugs are reaching for laughs. On hearing Pete’s “in law enforcement,” one thug cracks “Looks like we’re in a complimentary field.” When said thug starts extemporizing on Socrates, it isn’t just the scripted mispronunciation of the Greek philosopher’s name that sounds wrong.

The “reasons” why characters seem guarded and wooden has an explanation, but that doesn’t begin to cover how slow-footed and creaky these performances are.

Surprises are no substitute for suspense and the lack of urgency in situations and character’s facing life-and-death peril never gives this film the chance to demonstrate its “Savage Nature.”

MPA Rating: unrated, violence and sex

Cast: Joanna Whicker, Steve Polites, Jon Hudson Odom, Joseph Carlson, Frank Riley III and Rayanne Gonzales

Credits: Directed by Paul Awad, script by Kathryn O’Sullivan and Paul Awad. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:22

Pardon me while I spend a few paragraphs gushing about “Vivo,” which for my money is Lin-Manuel Miranda’s best musical outing of the summer.

Miranda, aka “He can do no wrong,” makes the first-ever Sony Animation musical a bubbly, tuneful, Cuba-centric/Florida flattering kiddie romp that surfs along to the lilting crooning of Gloria Estefan and “Buena Vista Social Club” alumnus Juan de Marcos González, and just bounces when Miranda’s English language Latin hip hop kicks in.

The man even makes auto-tune fun.

“Vivo” (Miranda) is a kinkajou who duets with organ-grinder/guitarist Andres (González) on the plazas of Havana, a Central American transplant who plays the flute, the bongos and the timbales. And if Andres can’t literally “understand” what the monkey is singing, at least he’s in tune and they’re in sync.

News that Andres’ long-long love, the singer Marta Sandoval (Estefan), who used to sing with him and then left for Miami, is giving her farewell concert, hass them making plans. He’s invited to the Miami show, and he’ll sing a song for her, “Para Marta,” and finally let her know of his love.

When Andres dies, Vivo makes delivering that song his mission. And in Andres’ irrepressible granddaughter, Gabi (Ynairaly Simo, a pistol) he has a co-conspirator, or would if her mother (Zoe Saldana) didn’t have a “no more pets” policy.

Vivo stows away with them to Key West, and when Gabi finds him (little girl SCREAMS of delight are just the best) and her grandfather’s song, she schemes to get them to that night’s concert.

Plan A, B, C and D go by the boards as they battle a bus driver and Burmese python, nature-protecting Sand Dollar (girl) Scouts and encounter just enough of Florida to scare off the tourists.

Miranda’s hand in the lyrics is everywhere, when the plucky kinkajou sings “All I have to do is sing louder than my fear,” laments to his lost friend Andres “You fell asleep humming music,” and when Gabi gets her sugared-up hip hop on for her big number, the (kiddie) club-ready romp “I BOUNCE to the beat of my own DRUM!”

The animation is lively, varied in technique (a fantasy 2D flashback has a romantic postcard feel) and brightly-colored, very much on brand with Sony Animation’s house style.

The script is a little thin, getting giggles out of Vivo stumbling into Gabi’s “petting zoo,” a graveyard of all the critters she’s had for pets and let die. Key West is cute and cruise-ship-infested. A little more Florida weirdness and wackiness on the way to Miami was in order.

The python chasing them through the lower Everglades is menacingly hissed by Michael Rooker, the daffy, lovelorn roseate spoonbills are voiced and sung byBrian Tyree Henry and Nicole Byer. And the nature-obsessed Sand Dollars let the screenwriters get in all sorts of shots at the Girl Scouts and their “cookies” without having to apologize.

But this sinks or swims on its songs, and Miranda as a busking/hustling/rhyme-spitting monkey makes it swim.

“Yeah, I’ve adapted to my habitat…If y’all like that, won’t you pass the hat?”

MPA Rating: PG for some thematic elements and mild action.

Cast: The voices of Lin-Manuel Miranda, Gloria Estefan, Zoe Saldana, Ynairaly Simo, Brian Tyree Henry, Juan de Marcos González and Michael Rooker

Credits: Directed by Kirk DeMicco and Brandon Jeffords, script by Quiara Alegría Hudes, Kirk DeMicco, music by Lin-Manuel Mirada and Alex Lacamoire. A Sony Animation film for Netflix.

Running time: 1:38

Dwight Yoakam is well paired with the Old Man of the Cinema in this September 17 release.