REVIEW: “Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)

February 7, 2020 by Keith Garlington

There wasn’t much good that came out of 2016’s “Suicide Squad”. The lone shining light was Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn. She was a fun, energetic show-stealer and people instantly wanted more. But as “Suicide Squad” (thankfully) vanished from most of our memories, so did thoughts of a sequel. But apparently Robbie (who co-produces this film as well as stars) never gave up on her character and now we get the product of her labors.

“Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)” is every bit as loud, brash and chaotic as its trailers teased. It’s clearly an attempt by DC Films/Warner Bros. to tap into the “Deadpool” audience. Much like its Marvel counterpart, “Birds of Prey” is an R-rated romp mixing action with comedy while dropping loads of violent potty-mouthed mayhem. Frankly that seems to be all you need to get some people onboard.

“Birds of Prey” is considered the eighth film in the seemingly rudderless DC Extended Universe. The thought of rewatching “Suicide Squad” to prepare for this film was too depressing (thankfully there’s Wikipedia). Turns out I didn’t need to. Smartly, director Cathy Yan and screenwriter Christina Hodson steer clear of the previous film aside from tossing in an Easter egg or two. The only carryover is the Joker who is never seen but mentioned numerous times.

Storywise, all you need to know is this: Harley Quinn (Robbie) has been kicked to the curb by her once beloved Joker. It gets out that she is no longer under Mr. J’s protection so all of the criminals she has wronged in the past make her a target. High on the list of those who want her dead is manic nightclub owner and mob boss Roman Sionis (Ewan McGregor). He’s also known as Black Mask, a great Batman rogue who the movie turns into a ham rather than a menacing villain.

The one thing Roman wants more than Harley’s head is a priceless diamond snatched by a young pickpocket named Cassandra Crain (Ella Jay Basco). Harley agrees to retrieve the diamond in exchange for Roman sparing her life. But there are other characters in the mix including Montoya (Rosie Perez), an underappreciated Gotham police detective, a vigilante named Huntress (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) who targets mobsters with her crossbow, and a nightclub singer called Black Canary (Jurnee Smollett-Bell) who possesses an untapped superpower.

And that’s really all there is to the surprisingly bare-bones story. We do get a lot of Tarantino-inspired time jumps and backstory flashbacks coated in non-stop narration. They’re more style than substance and do more to mask the paper-thin plot than add meaningful depth. With her “Bumblebee” script Hodson showed that she can jump into the franchise space and energize it with a smart, fresh perspective. With “Birds of Prey” she seems to be mimicking a formula rather than offering an original take. And the characters suffer as well. Huntress is uneven, Montoya is bland, Cassandra is forgettable, Sionis is one-note. The one I enjoyed most was Canary.

Most disappointing is Harley who is a shell of a main character. She’s still a hellion. She has the attitude. She has the quirky, off-kilter personality. But what is her aim? What does she want? The movie’s title tells us “Emancipation“, but it’s so vaguely portrayed in the movie itself. So that leaves Robbie clinging to the showy external things (which she does really well), doing everything she can to make the character something other than one-dimensional. It’s a valiant effort but she can only do so much when given so little.

But at least we have the action, right? Well sort of. Occasionally it’s simply too much to swallow. Take the scene where Harley tears through what must be the most inept police station in cinema history with a beanbag glitter gun. It’s pretty ridiculous. The scene ends on a better note with Harley showing off her skills with a baseball bat and Yan showing off her eye for stylish, intensely choreographed fight scenes. There is also a terrific sequence near the end when all of the film’s moving parts finally come together.

As a general defender of the DCEU I really wish “Birds of Prey” wasn’t such a mess. In many ways it should be commended as progress. It’s a female-led action-comedy directed by a woman, written by a woman, and essentially about getting on in life without a man. Together those things are an overdue breath of fresh air, but they don’t automatically make for a good movie. Here too much time is spent chasing a hard R rating and too much effort is put into channeling its anarchic style. It’s good for short attention spans and those just there for the bombast. But for the rest of us, Robbie’s hard work can’t save the film or make it the statement of empowerment that it could have been.

VERDICT – 2 STARS

My Guest Appearance on Tavern Talk – Oscar Special

February 6, 2020 by Keith Garlington

I’ve had the privilege of guest appearing several times on a terrific local movie show called Tavern Talk by Initial Reaction. A few days ago I was invited by the show’s host Phillip to appear on a special Oscar episode where we talked about this year’s nominees and tossed in a few predictions along the way. We had a great time.

Please check out the show below. I would love to hear your thoughts on our discussion, what we got right, and what we didn’t.

First Glance: “The Roads Not Taken”

February 5, 2020 by Keith Garlington

Filmmaker Sally Potter’s new film dropped its first trailer a few hours ago and Bleeker Street could have a winner on its hands. Potter’s last film was the biting and witty satire “The Party”. Her latest “The Roads Not Taken” looks to be going in a much different direction and Potter seems to have some good pieces in place.

The movie features the intriguing match of Javier Bardem and Elle Fanning who play a father and daughter. It looks like Bardem plays a detached writer in the middle of an existential crisis. To make matters worse his declining health adds a layer of what looks like delirium. Meanwhile his loving daughter (Fanning) struggles to connect with her emotional distant father over the course on one single day.

“The Roads Not Taken” is scheduled to hit theaters on March 13th. Check out the trailer below and let me know if you’ll be seeing it or taking a pass.

REVIEW: “The Last Black Man in San Francisco”

February 5, 2020 by Keith Garlington

The opening scene of “The Last Black Man in San Francisco” is a stunning slice of filmmaking. It’s beautiful, elegant, and provocative. It highlights a budding filmmaker already showing off terrific instincts when it comes to harmonizing music with cinema’s visual language. And it sets the table for this clear-eyed love letter to a city and thoughtful meditation on the meaning of ‘home’.

“Last Black Man” is the inspired feature film debut of director Joe Talbot. He conceived the story alongside his long-time friend and the film’s star Jimmy Fails with Rob Richert co-writing the screenplay. The story sees Fails playing a version of himself while telling a version of his actual life growing up in the ever-changing city of San Francisco.

Photo: A24

The aforementioned opening begins with a young girl looking up with childlike curiosity. We then see the object of her gaze – a man in a hazmat suit picking up trash. She begins skipping and a tracking shot follows, eventually settling on a street preacher and his audience of two. The two men, Jimmie (played by Fails) and his best friend Montgomery (Jonathan Majors), are there to catch a bus but decide they have waited long enough. The scene then transitions to the friends scooting across San Francisco neighborhoods on Jimmie’s skateboard, their destination still undefined. The use of slow-motion and the way the camera draws in on faces are just parts of the effective technique.

The two friends arrive in the Fillmore District, stopping at a particular Victorian home. This is our introduction to what could be considered the movie’s central relationship between Jimmie and this house. We learn it was Jimmie’s childhood home and his grandfather built it in 1946. Exploring the idea of gentrification, the house is now occupied by an older middle-class couple and the neighborhood has a much different look than when Jimmie was a kid.

Jimmie and Montgomery live in a cramped house with Mont’s grandfather (Danny Glover) in the poorer Bayview-Hunter’s Point. But Jimmie dreams of owning the house of his youth and sneaks in to work on the old Victorian whenever the older couple are away (They would rather he not). It’s an impulse driven by powerful memories but also a deep personal yearning for a dream that may already be out of reach. That taps into one of many thematic threads that run through the sometimes meandering but always honest story.

From its earliest moments to its crushing final shots, Talbot makes San Francisco itself a fundamental part of every scene, either visually or through the characters who always convey some element of the city’s effects. The rich cinematography from Adam Newport-Berra give sight to the tangible, organic love Talbot and Fails share for the Bay Area. And the harmony of Emile Mosseri’s operatic score along with a couple of beautifully employed cover songs add to the film’s ever-present sense of love and longing.

Photo: A24

“You’re not allowed to hate it unless you also love it.” By the time Jimmie utters these words we have already watched him endure hardship and disappointment. Yet he defends his city even as his city ignores him. Fails speaks from his heart and rarely does his screenwork come across as a performance. It is soulful, funny, and full of feeling. And I can’t say enough about Jonathan Majors and the life he brings to Mont whose story is in itself both tender and heart-rending.

“The Last Black Man in San Francisco” has a lot to say about a lot of things. But it never loses sight of its most important element – humanity. The movie is a window into the human experience from some truly enlightening perspectives. And even during some of its slower moments it never loses that effect. It makes the film’s final shots more tragic and the sting of it will stick with you for days.

VERDICT- 4 STARS

REVIEW: “The Rhythm Section” (2020)

February 4, 2020 by Keith Garlington

‘Tis the season for January new releases. Known as a veritable wasteland of movie projects which studios have no faith in, a January release is usually a bad sign for the film and the audience. Enter “The Rhythm Section”, a globe-trotting revenge thriller with some interesting names attached. Unfortunately it feels right at home among the usual January movie doldrums.

Revenge thrillers are a dime a dozen these days and finding one that can stamp its own identity is pretty rare. “The Rhythm Section” looked promising. A gritty female-led tale of vengeance featuring Blake Lively, Jude Law, and Sterling K. Brown sounds alright. But 30 minutes into it I was still looking for a spark, something to energize a movie that frankly never generates any real excitement or suspense.

Photo: Paramount Pictures

“The Rhythm Section” comes from cinematographer turned director Reed Morano and from a screenplay written by Mark Burnell (adapting his own novel). In it Lively plays Stephanie Patrick, a former Oxford student with a bright future. But that life is gone following a plane crash that killed her entire family, a plane she too was supposed to be on. The tragedy sent her spiraling into a world of depression, prostitution and heroin addiction. We don’t see how she got there. Instead the first act spends most of its time showing her in various states of misery.

She’s contacted by a journalist named Proctor (Raza Jeffrey) who has information that the plane her family died on was actually blown out of the sky by a terrorist’s bomb. He identifies the bombmaker who was doing the bidding of an unidentified higher-up who ordered the bombing. Stephanie wants payback but going from street worker to avenging angel is no easy task.

Enter Boyd (Jude Law), a disgraced MI6 agent living off the grid in a remote part of Scotland. If you need quick lessons on how to become an assassin he’s the kind of hard-nosed guy you go see. After some tried-and-true, cliche training sequences Stephanie heads out, tracks down Sterling K. Brown who plays a pretty hilarious (unintentionally) CIA operative and information broker, and sets her sites on the terrorists responsible for her family’s death.

You have to give Lively a lot of credit. She really commits to her role, deglamorizing to the extreme and squeezing whatever emotion she can out of the character she’s given. Unfortunately her performance is undercut by a script that is painfully dull. You can see what it’s trying to be, but it never gets there and sadly Lively is the biggest causality. She deserves better. As for Law, he’s kinda fun but you can’t help but think he’s cashing a check or doing a favor.

Photo: Paramount Pictures

As for the action, there is nothing to it that really sticks with you. The lone exception is an inspired scene involving a car chase where the camera sits in the passenger seat next to Lively. It plays like one continuous take with the camera looking out the front windshield, panning to Lively driving, looking out the back, and so on. It’s a relatively short scene but visually impressive. Everything else is pretty run-of-the-mill.

Part Bourne, part Bond but with none of the vigor or personality of either, “The Rhythm Section” has some good ideas but not enough original ones. And despite a determined Blake Lively performance, the bland low-energy script simply can’t match the film’s ambition. I really wanted to like this movie, but wading through the implausibility and monotony proved to be chore.

VERDICT – 2 STARS

First Glance: “Fast & Furious 9”

February 3, 2020 by Keith Garlington

I feel I say this every time, but it blows my mind that the Fast & Furious movies make up one of the most popular and profitable franchises in existence today. With a total of ten films (so far) and a combined gross of over $5 billion, it’s easily Universal’s biggest franchise. It begs the question, how long can the series keep its head of steam? Well, if the trailer for the latest film is any indication, they still have a lot left in the tank.

“Fast & Furious 9” or “F9” or “F9: The Fast Saga”, whatever they want us to call it, has finally dropped it’s much anticipated first trailer. It’s a solid four minutes of familiar faces, a big new baddie, ridiculously over-the-top car chases, and an interesting surprise at the end. Ultimately it looks like F9 is sticking close to their proven formula which should make franchise fans really happy.

“Fast & Furious 9” is set to hit theaters May 22nd. Check out the trailer below and let me know if you’ll be seeing it or taking a pass.