Movie Nation

“Rocketman” is a proper musical, with lots of tunes, big production numbers and the actors doing their own singing.

As the songs are from the extensive, radio-dominating Elton John songbook, there are scores of them most of us know by heart. And as star Taron Egerton is better at enunciating than Elton ever was, Bernie Taupin’s lyrics pop out to great effect.

The lead is a reasonable facsimile of the former Reginald Dwight turned Elton Hercules John. And if Egerton’s singing voice isn’t exactly a chart-topper, he’s an acceptable singing alternative at least faintly resembling the real thing.

Elton John’s life and dirty laundry are hung out, and “Rocketman” is far more open about the singing sensation’s sexuality than say, “Bohemian Rhapsody” was, as indeed Elton was and Freddie Mercury wasn’t. He taught a generation the word “bisexual,” and how it could be used to soften the news of a famous person “coming out.”

But damn, “Rocketman” is a slog, a nearly joyless musical that threatens to take flight at several near-tingling moments and never does.

It’s as if the “miserable Elton” of his alcoholic years, and his latest years (the grumpy tantrum tossing concert-quitter) was final arbiter of the tone of this. And so it’s all “I’ve had an unhappy time of it, now it’s YOUR turn.”

Little Reggie (Matthew Illesley) can show off his uncanny ear and piano score memory and burst into an underage “The Bitch is Back,” and you grin and think, “Here we GO!” Teen Elton (Egerton, of “Kingsman” and the godawfulest Robin Hood on record) can play, dance and duck through a pub as director Dexter Fletcher’s camera chases him into the streets belting out “Saturday Night’s Alright” (for fighting), and you lean into the picture, expecting more of the same.

Nope. It’s more about a little boy’s “When’re you going to HUG me?” to his priggish, heartless dad (Steven Mackintosh), a tween Reggie (Kit Connor) stumbling across his cheating, self-involved Mum (Bryce Dallas Howard at her beady-eyed, Brit-accented best) or a drinking, lonely superstar Elton hearing “Nobody’ll ever love you” from that same Mum, or the seductive, handsome but faithless lover-manager John Reid (Richard Madden)

And Taupin? As portrayed by Jamie Bell, who almost steals the picture with a single alternative take on “Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road,” Taupin is Elton John’s savior, champion and the movie’s patron saint.

“Rocketman” is told in a flashback his first visit to AA, in a Satanic vamp stage costume, perhaps the corniest framing device in the history of musical bio-pics. The film tracks his story from piano prodigy, with only his beloved grandmother (Gemma Jones) keeping the faith and encouraging him as he dazzles the family, then a Royal Musical Academy teacher by repeating the “Rondo Alla Turca” (by Mozart) she just played, even though he’s never heard it before.

We get a taste of his first rock band, a moment of touring in a van, a not-their-real-names bit of backstage advice and seduction from an American 1960s soul music tour — “You’ve got to KILL the person you were born to be in order to become the person you WANT to be!”

How…screenwriterly.

That magical first meeting with the man who would become his real life partner, “the brother I never had,” his lyricist Bernie, is held in freeze-frame. So is that first “I’ve got some lyrics that need music” passing of a manila envelope.

There’s just a touch of the young agent (Charlie Rowe) who hears and sees something in him, and the crusty grump (Stephen Graham) who doesn’t.

A favorite sequence in such movies is that “breakout” moment. For young Elton, who stole his name from a bandmate and John Lennon, that was a canny booking (by that crusty old agent) at LA’s Troubadour, run by the flirtatious, hip and “Far out!” Doug Weston, given a laid-back charm by Tate Donovan.

Fletcher, who did “Eddie the Eagle” with Egerton, lets his star get away with a few too many closeups jammed with bad, hammy, mannerisms. And he can’t keep this picture moving forward to save his arse. “Rocketman” lurches along between songs.

But what songs. You may be startled, as I was (and I owned a lot of these records in my youth), at the breadth and complexity of what this duo composed and recorded, something brought out in the tempo changes to some of the performances and Egerton’s care in making every word heard.

We get precious little of the “magic in the studio” stuff that “Bohemian Rhapsody” made its bread and butter. A little “Border Song” here, a bit of Kiki Dee there.

The film rearranges the chronology of the tunes to use them as devices to fill in the biography, and that highlights the Achilles Heel of the Elton/Bernie songbook, their maudlin streak, a tendency to lapse into bathos.

The film, likeable though it generally is, despite having the best possible screenwriter (Lee Hall of “Billy Elliot”) on board, echoes that. It actually resembles “A Star is Born” more than “Rhapsody” in that crawl-into-a-bottle-and-cry regard.

And its celebration of sobriety, rehab and AA meeting therapy is commendable, if dramatically blasé and nothing new.

Which begs the question, as the closing credits celebrate the triumph over that old agent’s warned pitfall — “Don’t kill y’self with booze and drugs!” Which is better, a posthumous hagiography presided over by the adoring and investment-protecting surviving members of your band, or a downbeat, supervised/subject-approved “my version” big screen “autobiography?”

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout, some drug use and sexual content

Cast: Taron Egerton, Jamie Bell, Bryce Dallas Howard, Richard Madden and Tate Donovan, Steven Mackintosh

Credits: Directed by Dexter Fletcher, script by Lee Hall A Paramount release.

Running time: 2:01

Nicole Kidman, Sarah Paulson and Ansel Elgort star in this uplifting or disturbing drama about a lost boy. Looks fascinating, though I can’t get a handle on what they’re going for. MOT a bad trait for a trailer to have

‘John Wick: Chapter 3’ Wins Top Prize at Golden Trailer Awards https://t.co/9KPMgntH0o https://t.co/l0HesC44w9 https://twitter.com/Variety_Film/status/1133992956220678144?s=17

Tweet from Cool Hand Luke Evans…
“Last night in Bolton, we got to surprise this incredible man for his 80th birthday. A magical night, full of laughter, tears and a bit of singing too! Happy birthday to you @ianmckellen You are my Hero!! you do so much for so many, you make me proud to call you a friend! ❤️😚 https://t.co/kJMqlD7RSW https://twitter.com/TheRealLukevans/status/1132203274835288064?s=17

Here’s an intriguing spin on the whole “found footage” mockumentary genre, a thriller built around a documentary filmmaker’s misadventures with online “cam girls.”

As depicted in “Use Me,” these are dominatrixes who make money off humbling, using and humiliating men with very particular sexual peccadilloes.

Actor and sometime documentary-filmmaker Julian Shaw plays himself, an Aussie obsessive who films “everything” — whose next subject is to be the porn performers/sex workers of America’s online sex trade. He will immerse himself in this world and get close to the queen bee of this universe, porn actress and “cam girl” Ceara Lynch.

Lynch, in the film and in real life, bills herself as a “humiliatrix,” a nubile young woman who play-acts and interacts with male clients via video. In various states of undress, she fulfills assorted unconventional fantasies, be they tongue-sucking or cuckolding, being bossed around and insulted –each and every one billed extravagantly for the privilege.

She’s been written up on Salon.com, bills herself as having a psychology degree and insists she’s “helping” these men by showing off her thongs and cleavage, teasing and taunting them to fulfillment with come-ons in her distinctly coquettish vocal fry.

“People pay her vast sums of money, basically for the privilege of being used,” Shaw explains to an interviewer. It’s an online shortcut for those who don’t have the time to court, marry, buy a woman a house and get used the old fashioned way, in other words.

He flies to Portland, Oregon (of course) to meet her, to “find the truth behind me” for this woman who purrs, “The Internet is my dungeon.”

Shaw’s film purports to show 71 days of his immersion in this world, leaving behind his ex girlfriend, whose break-up with him he taped (pausing camera so that she could video his reaction, too), kickstarter funding the film when he and Ceara burn through his cash too quickly, and generally crossing all sorts of moral and documentary-ethical lines as they do.

Shaw rather clumsily sees this as an “American Dream” story — hers, getting rich by providing a service no one else can provide as well as her, using her sexuality to entice “clients” (interviewed in masks or shadows) to give her money and baubles for her sexual attention.

She sells her used panties and excrement to the more monied of her weirdo clientele, which her lawyer says makes her “a genius of capitalism.”

And “everything’s virtual,” she insists. She “never meets a client in person,” which is why her dad, interviewed on camera, is OK with it.

Assorted randoms of the “vox populi” persuasion are interviewed about what “The American Dream” represents, and an Australian therapist differentiates between Ceara’s clients fetishes,”paraphilia,” and sexual or behavioral addictions.

“These are all male desires, they aren’t my desires,” Ceara adds.

Trotting out her psychological bonafides (sort of), the “humiliatrix” gives us her guidelines. No full nudity, no sexual intercourse on camera and no “in person” sessions. Those are Ceara Lynch’s rules.

Julian Shaw’s “rules” as a filmmaker are to “never cut,” never let his camera operator shut down. Ignore everybody who says “You’re not recording this” and “Please stop recording.”

These two, the film implies, were made for each other — at least in that compulsive/”services” compulsives way. And as Julian tumbles into her world, burning through cash, having hot tub romps and lewd limo lust-offs, we watch the narcissist moviemaker indulged by Ceara and her friends in “the biz,” all of them very pretty people rolling around doing what comes naturally, in assorted payment plans.

Her “whole brand is that I’m unattainable,” but we’ll see about that. The entry-button on her Cearalynch.com website is “Use Me” but we’ll have to figure out who is using whom here.

Because that’s the game “Use Me” plays. The leads use their real names, but not much of what we see is real — actress playing a girlfriend, actor playing a shrink, etc.

Where “Use Me” goes off the rails is in the contrivances Shaw pieces together out of “Thrillers for Dummies” to set up the third act melodrama that takes over the film.

The mockumentary stuff, with Ceara purring on camera “If you didn’t have money, I wouldn’t even spit in your general direction…Do you want to be my dog?” to clients, the costumes, contortions, writhing and lip-licking exhibitionism of her sex trade “acting” on camera? That’s fascinating.

So is the accounting part of her business — billing clients while she leaves them on hold, “my ignore line,” $5 a minute.

The “actress” Ceara comes off as confident, with the right setting, revealing wardrobe and makeup taking her from pretty to “bombshell.”

Shaw ably plays the eager obsessive, always taping, often lying, keeping his distance but plainly into being around Ceara and her leading competitor and protege, “Princess Cassie” (Jazlyn Yoder of “Chicago P.D.” and “Chicago Justice.”).

And by “being around” I mean naked in a bed, a tub, wherever with these compliant “professionals.”

Hearing Ceara’s stories, seeing where and how she grew up, compels Julian to “open up” himself — about sexual experiences, his mania for filming his entire life and the like.

That interaction, with the sobering transgressions of inventing your own ethical lines in this ever-evolving situation, with the documentary-real treatment of the business, was a pretty good movie.

But Shaw had to muck it up with a corny, under-developed and over-explained riff on “The Grifter” that doesn’t surprise, inform, delight or appall in the later acts.

This was never going to become “a thriller.” Its first, best destiny was to find its way as a pair of character studies, with mystery and intrigues dropped in along the way.

“Use Me” is a mockumentary that works only as long as its still mocking.

MPAA Rating: unrated, adult sexual subject matter

Cast: Julian Shaw, Ceara Lynch, Jazlyn Yoder

Credits: Written and directed by Julian Shaw.   A Green Light release.

Running Time: 1:30

“Wild Nights with Emily” was close, but not canonical “Drunk History” in feature film form. Deadline.com says the producers/creators are talking about having a go at making a movie themselves.

https://t.co/a7c4TZUDiN https://twitter.com/DEADLINE/status/1133816548777316352?s=17

With Europe and America flirting with fascism in ways we haven’t seen since the McCarthy Era, here’s a sour and generally unsatisfying parable set in the Spanish Civil War to remind us of how these things go down and how quickly their lessons are forgotten.

Ana Murugarren’s Spanish film, “The Bastards’ Fig Tree,” based on a Ramon Pinilla novel, is about a members of a fascist murder squad so shaken by a child who watched him kill his parents that he becomes a hermit and nurtures the fig tree the boy planted over their graves — for decades.

The promise of that title, of a modern man becoming a hermit to spare himself the revenge of a child who will grow up determined to avenge his family, is one of poignant reflection, repentance and maybe a hint of whimsy.

But it’s hard to lighten the tone after we’ve watched Rogelio, played with a guilty grimace and a twinkle by Karra Elejalde of “Timecrimes,” dispatch multiple “Reds” in the brutal late-night murder missions Franco’s Falangists carried out against teachers, activists or anybody else fingered by a snitch whose motives were never questioned.

Rogelio wasn’t an officer, he was just one of the trigger-men. The rich hidalgo in charge (Mikel Losada) did the driving. And sniveling Ermo (Carlos Areces) was the snitch, who denounced anybody whose land or house he coveted.

Don Pedro Alberto may declare, “We don’t kill kids, and that’s that,” (in Spanish, with English subtitles) sparing the little boy (Marcos Balgañón Santamaría). But Rogelio knows knows better. He insists they shoot the child as well.

“You’re going to kill me…in six years, when you turn 16, aren’t you?” Rogelio demands of the child. “Have you chosen a method?”

The boy just fixes him with a “Danny doesn’t live here Mrs. Torrence” stare — hate and accusation incarnate.

When the right wing hit squad took his brother and father, he slipped out after them. When they gunned them down in the rain, he watched. And when they left, the ten year-old spent all night digging their graves. He planted a fig sapling there to remember them.

Rogelio isn’t exactly wracked by guilt and doesn’t show a great deal of fear. But he takes the implicit threat in the child seriously. It’s the wife of the newly-converted (insincere) Falangist mayor, Cipriana (Pepa Aniorte of “Volver”) who gets in his head. She’s sure he’s had a graveside conversion.

“Our Lady spoke to you tonight?”

No, she didn’t. No, he hasn’t repented. No, the kid isn’t speaking. So Rogelio fixates on that damned tree, which cows or wildlife might munch to death and Ermo is anxious to pull up. He takes on the job of ensuring it gets watered and becomes round-the-clock guardian of a fig sapling in a remote field outside of Getxo, Bilbao.

He abandons his murderous duty, but not his Make Spain Great Again hat, uniform or pistol.

He’s entirely too profane and trigge- happy to admit it, but Cipriana knows.

“You’re a hermit paying for your sins!”

Murugarren, an editor turned writer-director, finally hits on a tone that suits this dark but potentially comic subject in the ensuing decades of the story, as Rogelio becomes a famous “tourist attraction” hermit, adopted by the town but keeping the dark secret of why he’s really guarding this fig tree.

His beard grows, the kid leaves home to go to seminary (at Rogelio’s desperate, self-serving insistence) and festivals and fairs are thrown on his hermitage, this plot of land with the fig tree and two ugly reminders of Spain’s past hidden beneath it. Pilgrims seek “miracles” at the hands of this cynical assassin, who never really reforms.

There are many places she could have taken this story of guilt, redemption, the lack of remorse of the “winners” and the short memories of everybody else. Perhaps they were all too conventional for the novel and the script she wrote from it.

What all concerned wound up with was a parable without a righteous payoff, a frustrating film that seems more aimless than it rightfully is, that plays darker than it wants to be.

As Rogelio takes on the hermit’s rags, he almost grasps the search for truth that comes with the job. Questioning a priest is as close as “The Bastards’ Fig Tree” (“La higuera de los bastardos”) comes to delivering a moral to the story.
“What do priests do when they get the urge to kill?”
The priest answers, “Cause a war so others kill for you.”

Mururgarren has made a “Belle Epoque” for time too dark to support it, a grim grasp at whimsy that isn’t there and probably not the fable about fascism that Western Civilization needs or even wants to see right now.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, nudity, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Karra Elejalde, Pepa Aniorte, Carlos Areces, Mikel Losada, Andrés Herrera

Credits: Written and directed by Ana Murugarren, based on a Ramon Pinilla novel. A Dark Star release.

Running time: 1:43

Oscar winner Octavia Spencer brings it, and how, in “Ma,” a real world horror tale blessed with a top-drawer cast and a grimly satisfying third act.

But you know that if you’ve seen the trailers. Two Academy Award winners, plus Juliette Lewis, Luke Evans and Missi Pyle, an up-and-coming young actor contingent headed by Diana Silvers of “Booksmart,” all fodder for the vengeance of a woman who never got over her high school disappointments.

It’s a screenplay that gives away its mystery fully and all too easily, and as directed it just sort of ambles along — flashbacks over-explaining the motivation of the villain, her history. The fact that we’ve seen the money shots in those trailers makes “Ma” play longer than its 100 minute running time.

It’s just that there’s much to recommend it outside of those failings, sharp observations about the trap of small town life and the persona you take on in your teens than you never escape, the casual cruelty of teenagers that can (in the movies, anyway) leave scars that linger forever, the craving for acceptance that once denied, you never outgrow.

Maggie (Silvers)  and her divorced mother (Lewis) move back to mom’s old hometown in Ohio. Mom’s too old to be wearing cocktail waitress fishnets, but here she is, starting over at the casino that popped-up near where she grew up.

Maggie? She’s cute enough to make friends easily.  Haley (McKaley Miller) may be a born mean girl, but she and her crew (Dante Brown, Gianni Paolo, Corey Fogelmanis) invite her in. Parties, cruising around town in cute-guy Andy’s van, drinking binges and bonfires at “The Rockpile,” an abandoned industrial site outside of town, are sure to follow.

If they can only score some booze! It’s just that every customer they approach to make the purchase for them at the local liquor store blows them off. Even the lady in nurse’s scrubs (Spencer). But Sue Ann lets us see the wheels turning, the thinking that moves her from “You want to spend the night in jail?” to “I used to do the SAME thing when I was your age.”

She fills their shopping list, but she also talks them into a “safe” place to party. It’s her basement, but it can be their hangout. Just a few rules. Surrender your car keys, for starters. She wants to ensure no drunk get behind the wheel, she says.

“Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain. Don’t spit on my floors,” and above all, “DON’T go upstairs.”

Thus is the bond made between a bunch of tipsy teenagers and the veterinary nurse they call “Ma.” It starts out looking like charity and quickly turns to something darker and more desperate.

Ma is all “Now you know where the PARTY is!” and flirting with Maggie and the guy who has Maggie’s interest, Andy (Fogelmanis), telling them “I don’t drink. You REALLY don’t want to know,” and social media blasting them with the only question that matters, if they’re “all down to clown?”

The signs that Ma isn’t what she seems are everywhere. The audience gets flashbacks, sees Sue Ann swiping phones to grab numbers, social media stalking and skulking around their homes and school.

The kids? They’re subjected to a temper that flashes in view and a practical joke that involves a gun — right at the outset. And still they’re slow to catch on. That’s liquor for you.

The backstory stuff is how actor-turned-director Tate Taylor and screenwriter Scott Landes landed Spencer, her fellow Oscar winner Janney (playing her mean-with-good-reason veterinarian boss), Lewis, and quintessential Mean Girl Grown Up Missi Pyle and Luke Evans as locals who peaked in high school and never moved away.

But all that stuff, the flashbacks, the relationship dynamic that hasn’t changed since the ’80s, explains too much. It gives away the whole game.

Ma’s little mood swings may tease us into thinking “Here we go,” but we don’t. It takes an hour of stripping away mystery and “motivating” everybody for this picture to truly get on its feet.

Better to leave Ma’s tricks and her backstory for the third act? I think so.

Spencer makes “Ma” malevolent and motivated, but there’s little shock value to the character’s plunge into “unhinged.” The adult stories are interesting, if on the nose, trite and true. And that strips screen time from the kids, who are just pawns in the Big Game and are so underdeveloped that rooting for them takes effort.

The finale may fool you into thinking all that came before was necessary, even if you’ve forgotten it as soon as you toss your popcorn box. But the preliminaries slow “Ma” down and soften its blows for far too long to make that final punch the knockout this might have been.

MPAA Rating: R for violent/disturbing material, language throughout, sexual content, and for teen drug and alcohol use

Cast: Octavia Spencer, Diana Silvers, McKaley Miller, Corey Fogelmanis, Juliette Lewis, Missi Pyle, Allison Janney and Luke Evans

Credits: Directed by Tate Taylor, script by Scotty Landes. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:39

It’s all just man/boy sex with peaches to some folks.

https://ohnotheydidnt.livejournal.com/114916965.html

She didn’t want to have her picture taken next to the Gateway to India monument like a tourist or pilgrim to Mumbai. But something about his pitch, about how she’d “look back, see the sun on your face” and have a memory she’d never forget worked.

She didn’t mean to stiff him and not pay for it, but that’s just what she did when friends called her away.

It’s just that the photo left him transfixed.

Maybe she’s feeling guilty, as her friends are all stunned at how flattering the shot turned out as well.

And in one of the most crowded cities on Earth, all they’ve got to do it, you know, run into each other again.

That’s the twitter-length set-up of “Photograph,” Ritesh Batra’s colorful but tepid and utterly inconsequential follow-up to the chaste romance of “The Lunchbox.”

Rafi (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) is a dark-skinned provincial, 30ish and still hustling up money to pay off an old family debt back in Balia. Miloni (Sanya Malhotra) is a painfully timid college coed, studying to be a chartered accountant.

Whatever Rafi doesn’t have in his life, sharing a railside attic with four friends, at least he can call himself a photographer, at least he can send money home to buy back the family home for the grandmother (“Dadi”) who raised him.

Miloni? We’re told she was a student actress, but that dream is as unlikely as Malhotra’s interpretation of Miloni. She is meek as a mouse, bending to whatever her family’s will might be, rarely speaking at all and never speaking in anything above a timid monotone.

“Actress?” Far-fetched.

The first act has them meet-but-not-meet, and sets up an amusing community support system of cousins, uncles and anybody who relocated to Mumbai from Balia, ALL of whom know way too much of Rafi’s business.

Specifically, the taxi driver, the street cart kulfi seller, the shop stall owner, the roommates, each and every one repeats his dadi’s demand that he “find a wife.” Dadi, they tell him, has stopped taking her medication, such is her woe at his lack of urgency in providing her with a great-grandchild.

He sends her a terse note to knock that off, as he’s met someone in the city. Noorie, he says, has “eyes full of questions, but also full of answers.” He sends along the unclaimed photograph of Miloni (he doesn’t know her name) as “proof.”

That’s all Dadi (Farrukh Jaffa) needs. Next thing he knows, the pushy old crone is on a train, coming to meet them, withholding her approval until she does.

Other versions of this old “fake fiance” trope are filled with panic and urgency as the liar (Rafi, in this case) must secure the cooperation of the young woman he’s only met once and whose name he doesn’t know set against the ticking clock of Dadi’s impending arrival.

Batra’s solution to this fraught situation is to skip over it, pretty much, finesse it with some cultural quirks that serve as shortcuts. It’s not the first time he cheats us of “the good parts.”

The second is Miloni’s acquiesence. A lovely moment on a bus, a boldly proffered seat next to her, seemingly wholly out of character for the mousie Miloni.

Batra’s film, in English, Gujarati and Hindi with English subtitles, takes some pointed jabs and Indian pigment prejudice. Every friend, cousin or working slob on the street feels he has the license to question why fairskinned, cosmopolitan Miloni is hanging with a “raisin…your face is black as doomsday.”

Miloni is, conversely, “too delicate” for the street-life and street cuisine he can offer her. “Delhi Belly” isn’t confined to New Delhi. “Ice Candy,” basically a snow cone? You’re asking for intestinal issues, dear.

I love Indian cinema that gives us a sense of the ecosystems of the street, Rafi’s world. That’s the best element of “Photograph.”

But I puzzled and puzzled over the connection between the two. All they seem to share is the sad eyes of resignation. The tiny droplets of empathy that pass between them feel almost meaningless, simply not consequential enough to merit her hiding this play-acting she’s doing with the village guy from her family. What is she playing at, here? Is it nostalgia, a longing for the righteous ruralism of Gandhi?

So much is undeveloped or under-developed. Miloni’s guide to this peasant world might have been her family’s village-born servant. Rafi’s ambition is fired by their meetings, and that has potential, too, only to be dispensed with in cryptic, unsatisfying way.

Only the fiery nuisance Dadi pays off as a character, unschooled and untraveled with wise to the ways of her family.

“Why should I be a bone in your kebab?”

It’s unfair to impose Western standards of screen “chemistry” on movie couples on the Subcontinent, but we’ve got to buy in to the relationship, root for the couple to find common group and hunt for the character arc that will let each grow in the direction of the other.

This couple and this “Photograph” remain undeveloped.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some thematic material

Cast: Sanya Malhotra, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Farrukh Jaffa, Jim Sarbh

Credits: Written and directed by Ritesh Batra. An Amazon release.

Running time: 1:50