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Zellweger Stages a Full-Throated Comeback In ‘JUDY’, A Sturdy Biopic That Doesn’t Quite Find Next Gear

Fame is toxic. Particularly for the young. Ask River Phoenix. Or Lindsay Lohan. Brittany Spears. Macaulay Culkin. We’ve seen the tragedy of adolescent fame, one as old as the concept of fame itself, play out across history time and again. In Judy, the prepubescent bargain for fame opens the film. Flanked by a yellow brick road, a young Judy Garland (played by Darci Shaw) trades her songbird voice and every ounce of independence for the opportunity to be more than “just a mother” or another “office girl”. For the chance to be seen, admired, beloved by a nation. Unknowingly selling her soul to the devil of entertainment and damning herself to a challenging life of self-commodification, Judy is the OG tragedy girl struck down by fame’s cantankerous venom.  Read More

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Out in Theaters: GET ON UP

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Get On Up
doesn’t know how good Chadwick Boseman is. Bursting with energy, filled with soul and one-hundred-and-sixty-nine percent committed, Boseman is a firecracker. Hell, he’s straight dynamite. How appropriate that he plays the man they once called Mr. Dynamite. It’s a certifiable shame then that the movie that surrounds Boseman’s accomplished concerto of a performance is overstuffed, poorly edited and, like the king of soul himself, doesn’t know when to quit.

Tate Taylor‘s (The Help) second feature starts, as all musical biopics apparently must, with the long, lonely saunter up to a final show of sorts. Old and beleaguered with regret, the icon is but a silhouette dwarfed by the enormity of a vacant hallway. Cut to Old Man Brown quite apparently hopped up on something of the Schedule 1 variety ranting at a room full of bootstraps-business folks and waving a shotgun over his head. This made-up Boseman’s all gums and shades but the scene only manages to paint the man as a Looney Tune.

Cut to bedazzled, toe-tapping Brown all get-up and no humility barking at a press conference. Cut to 6-year old Brown and his backwoods family eking by in some pinewood shanty. His momma turns to prostitution and his daddy beats him raw. All he wants is a lullaby. Cut to a teenage Brown stealing a three-piece suit and getting five to 13 years for it. Cut some more.

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Cut, rinse, repeat. Cut, rinse, repeat. It allows for some mighty good scenes but makes for some mighty long-winded ones too. And while there’s lots rave-worthy stuck in there like gummies in a Cadbury Black Forest bar, the convoluted mess that is traveling from one scene to the next is an exercise in reckless abandon.  

If only the editors had the good sense to slash 30 minutes of the film, we could have been dealing with something great. Had he tightened it up like Brown did his facial skin around the 90s, Taylor might have been working towards a gold statue nomination. Trim the fat, Tate. Trim the fat.

As is, Get On Up is a mostly pleasing patchwork of scenes that each contribute to a time, a place, and a feeling that then gets all that jumbled up and mismatched. Elephant heads end up on rhino bodies. A scene where friends feud with no sign of respite fades into them being immeasurably close confidantes. It’s not that we’re not smart enough to connect the dots, it’s that we shouldn’t be forced to do that work for Taylor and co. It’s like watching someone try to piece a puzzle together with one bright, shining star at its center; a star so massive and so bright, it apparently blinds, distorts and sucks in everything around it.

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And boy oh boy is Boseman a star. As the one, the only James Brown, he’s surpassed impersonation, he’s transcended imitation. He lives and breathes James Brown. Every rubbery dance move, every superhuman split is Brown’s. That sagging eye and sneering falsetto; bonafide Brown. His salt-and-pepper speech crackles like a record player. I can’t tell if he’s actually singing or just doing the world’s best lip-synching. In all aspects, he’s Brown reborn.

Usually cloaked in beads of sweat, the character even gestures towards the camera every once in a while, occasionally monologuing in head-shaking fourth-wall breakage, but Boseman’s so catastrophically good that you actually welcome it. And props to the makeup team who for once hit the nail on the head when they age the 32-year old talent well past his prime. He doesn’t look the flour-face abomination that is Leonardo DiCaprio’s J. Edgar. But then again, Brown 55-year old visage looked like a drooping eggplant anyways. He’s a supernova but he’s paying the hefty price of admission for it. You can’t be a sun and not get burned.

But again and again, we must reckon with the fact that Boseman is merely the Shamu to Get On Up‘s Sea World. He’s a mighty presence but you’ll soon discover there’s not much else to the park. His role in Get On Up is the equivalent of using morels to make a cream of mushroom soup. You’ve got the finest ingredient in the world and you’re watering it down with a pool of a blasé, sometimes even flavorless, base.

It’s as if the editors found his each and every scene too indispensable to hack so they just shrugged and left it all in there. But you’ve got to trim even the prized rose if you want to win the trophy. Taylor seems too scared to bust out even the measliest of trimmers and ends up stabbing himself in the foot for it. His repetition of form is so ad nauseum that you’d think the prankster was trying to rickroll us. But goddammit if Boseman is not his savior; his knight is shining purple sequin. He’s so good, I can’t help but hyperbolize some more.

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As Brown, Boseman’s got the magnetism of Tom Cruise, the jitters of Jagger, the paranoia of Scarface, the drive of Jordan Belfort and the moves that only Brown can call his own. He’s plays the Godfather of Soul like a black Marlon Brando. Commitment is his cup of tea. You believe it when he tells you he feels good. He even manages to dance circles around Academy Award-nominated co-stars Octavia Spencer and Viola Davis. And how perfectly suiting for a story about a man who the world could never keep up with.

And as much as it’s the story of Brown’s triumph, it’s also the story of his defeat. About his pride getting in the way of friends and family. About his shark and minnow relationship with Bobby Byrd (Nelsan Ellis) and how that would become the defining relationship in a string of failed ones. After all, you can move a million miles a minute but what’s all that fancy footwork worth if you don’t have anyone to share it with at the end of the day?

C+

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Out in Theaters: DIANA

“Diana”
Directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel
Starring Naomi Watts, Naveen Andrews, Douglas Hodge, Cas Anvar, Daniel Pirrie, Charles Edwards, Geraldine James
Biography, Drama, Romance
113 Mins
PG-13

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A princess locked away in her castle has never been quite as dull as in Diana. Even her knight in shining armor is a touchy troglodyte, so petrified of being in the public eye that he’d sooner bury his passion under a callused doctoral turtle shell than mumble “I love you” one more time. Diana keeps telling us to root for this unlikely and spotted relationship and yet we see it clearly for how fickle and irrevocably broken it is, eviscerating all emotional attachment and leaving its audience with cold feet.

While Diana the woman was a visionary humanitarian, Diana the movie is blind to its own half-baked inconsequentiality – a relic of biography as bore that has no place in the rom-com market it nearly exists in. A shining example of the tail wagging the dog, Diana is tugged through the mud with its lackluster “universal love story” front and center, a mistakenly proud icon of this flunky biopic.

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Rather than focusing on Princess Diana’s chest of civil achievements, Oliver Hirschbiegel contents himself with this turkey of a love story. In doing so, he misses out on establishing historical interest and wholly makes us wonder why he chose to make a film about Diana at all since this lame love story could have belonged to pretty much anyone else.

Entirely uninterested in stirring the pot, Diana presents events that take place behind closed doors as fact and headlines as monuments to her character. With a narrative that’s pierced by moments of tabloid iconography and held in place by the glue of hearsay, there’s nothing to learn about Diana here apart from that one fated schoolgirl crush on an unlikable doctor.

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As Diana, Naomi Watts is sadly unremarkable. Rather than a woman of action, she drifts like a puppy dog, hopping from cause to cause like they’re islands in the tropics, never taking a moment for deeper introspection. While Watts assumes some of Diana’s physical tendencies, there is little to award for her performance as Diana: The Princess of Tedium. Naveen Andrews is similarly disappointing, embodying a character that you never really like much less fall in love with. It’s hard to tell though how much fault belongs to Andrews though as his character is unfitting of this love saga – his hardened, driven persona incongruous with the stuff of true love fables.

Worse than the parts of their two fruitless performances is its sum. Even a blind man could see that there is no great love here. In fact, there hardly seems to be any love at all. Chemistry between Andrews and Watts is mostly invisible and consistently as sultry as a wool blanket. Little more than a wet dream fantasy overcooked in an Easy Bake Oven of delusion, their relationship is borderline pathetic, much less inspiring.

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Having based the entire film around this floundering relationship, Hirschbiegel has set it up for inevitable failure. In romance, there is joy, but there is no joy here. No, just a wandering stream of historical conscientiousness built on a creaky foundation of overwrought infatuation.

Perhaps most unforgivable of all is how long Diana seems to stretch on – it’s an endless desert of enjoyment without the mirage of anything better to come. A mere ten minutes in, I was checking my watch. From there on out, it hardly improves.

The most harrowing aspects of Diana’s life are surely found in her relationship with her celebrity status but even that is treated with clumsy hands. For Diana, every outing is a exercise in dodging her inescapable fandom. The claustrophobia of the public forum – a space that’s constantly transformed into the most intimate of photo shoots – is palpably noxious. But as she waffles between celebrity and infamy, her relationship with the press remains largely unchanged, as if no one thought to account for the impact of her shifting public persona.

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For all the psychological trauma that these snapping cameras seem to cause Diana, little light is shed on her emotional burden. Rather, Hirschbiegel vilifies the press – here seen as an animalistic force operating solely under the “sharks to blood” mentality. Like a maiden set for sacrifice, Diana’s destruction comes across as inevitable. As if her high horse was just waiting to buck her off while everyone snapped photos and passed judgment. But for all of the supposing about Diana’s frail mental state, nothing ever sets. There’s nothing definitive about Diana in Diana, a film that is definitively dull.

There must have been some attempt along the way to reciprocate Diana’s perpetual boredom, a state brought upon by her princess locked away in a tower qualities, but boring your audience is something else entirely – something you steer clear of at all expenses. Closer in kind to a Hallmark movie than any biopic of substance, this torpid film gives ennui the royal treatment.

D-

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