A heist film is usually focused on the heist: who’s the mark, what’s the
take, who brings what skills to the table, what goes wrong, and how do they
get away with it? Steve McQueen’s Widows turns all of that on its
head, giving us a heist film about a band of unskilled reluctant criminals
stealing for someone else from a place they have to determine for
themselves. The plan of this particular heist is pretty straightforward;
it’s everything else that’s hard. And that “everything else” encompasses
the very idea of the city of Chicago, where the movie is set.
Looking as androgynous and funky as Little Richard in Jimi Hendrix's duds, Prince wrote music that was sexually charged, playfully lewd and enthusiastically impudent. In other words, he was precisely the tonic the Eighties needed. "Prince is bad," Johnny 'Guitar' Watson once remarked. "It's like seeing Sly [Stone], James Brown and Jimi Hendrix all at once." Right at a time when sex was again becoming a mortal sin, Prince turned sex into a quest for salvation. His album, Dirty Mind (1980), was a blissfully torrid celebration of eroticism. His band, both racially and sexually integrated, was supercharged, just as Sly & the Family Stone had been before them. Also like Sly, Prince mixed musical genres which caused mass confusion at radio stations that couldn't decide whether he was R&B or rock. By the time his third album, 1999, came out in 1982, however, it didn't seem to matter. The infectiously coy "Little Red Corvette" shot into the American Top 10. Thanks to MTV and the video culture it bred, Prince became the first black crossover artist (along with Michael Jackson) to help broaden the network's musical palette.
At the height of his success in 1984, Prince made his movie debut in the R-rated Purple Rain. James Dean had made his astonishing debut in East of Eden almost thirty years earlier, playing a misunderstood loner. Prince (calling himself 'the Kid'), followed the same pattern, portraying a moody, struggling artist. Purple Rain mythologized his status in the pop world, and one song from its soundtrack ("Darling Nikki") generated the type of controversy that captured the attention of Mary Elizabeth 'Tipper' Gore. She was so horrified when her young daughter bought the record with a song about a guy who meets a woman masturbating with a magazine that she helped launch the PMRC in order to toilet train pop performers. So in both memory and tribute to the artist known as Prince, it seems fitting to send him off with one of what Gore would call the "Filthy Fifteen" songs which launched the censorious body that Frank Zappa, Dee Snyder and John Denver stood before Congress to fight.
Tom Hiddleston as Jonathan Pine, in AMC's adaptation of' John le Carré's The Night Manager.
“[Pure Intelligence] meant turning a blind eye to some of the biggest crooks in the hemisphere for the sake of nebulous advantages elsewhere.”
– John le Carré, The Night Manager
“Guns go where the power is…Armed power’s what keeps the peace. Unarmed power does not last five minutes. First rule of stability.”
– Richard Roper, in John le Carré's The Night Manager
Note: This review contains spoilers.
Part of what made John le Carré’s version of the Cold War so fascinating was the way it avoided a Manichean view of the universe. Shading, ambiguity, and doubt
were qualities absent in earlier examples of the thriller from Le Queux, Buchan or Fleming but not in a le Carré Cold War novel. Only the most obtuse
reader would fail to recognize how alike Smiley and Karla were, secret sharers on either side of the Iron Curtain. Smiley represented the better side –
decent, compassionate and endowed with a healthy skepticism – and he believed that Karla’s fanaticism would be his undoing. However, Karla defected for the
love of his lost daughter. Smiley regarded himself as an archetypal liberal – reasonable with measured responses – but he could sustain a murderous hatred
for someone who betrayed him, an antipathy that could cloud his judgment. This does not mean that Smiley became Karla: the Soviet spymaster ordered the
murder of agents while Smiley did not. Smiley believed in the power of Western democracy but feared that if his side succumbed to Karla’s methods, the
decencies he professed will become illusions and feared that he could lose his own humanity. While he agonized over these moral conundrums, Smiley and the
intelligence services were civil servants who pursued their opposite numbers. Communist agents were often ruthless murderers but, unless they were moles
inside British intelligence, Smiley (or le Carré) did not regard them as evil villains. Then the Cold War ended and le Carré became an angry man.
That anger radiates throughout le Carré’s first post-Cold War novel The Night Manager (1993). It is as if the author is questioning whether the
principles that inspired the West to fight the Cold War were nothing but hollow rhetoric. If its purpose was designed to protect freedom and capitalism,
how is Richard Roper – a wealthy and powerful illegal arms and drugs smuggler operating out of the Bahamas
to peddle weapons to anyone who will provide him with a profit and admirer of the odious Idi Amin – possible? Masquerading as a respectable business magnate, he is frequently described as “the worst
man in the world” – and le Carré is not intending any sense of irony – because Roper’s greed and callousness without any redeeming features, render him a
villain rarely depicted in the Cold War novels.
Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby bears little resemblance to the slender masterpiece on which it is based – F. Scott Fitzgerald’s now iconic 1925 novel – but that probably won’t come as much of a surprise to anyone who has followed this director’s career. While his critics see him as a sort of Andrew Lloyd Webber of movies whose histrionic period pieces (Moulin Rouge!, Romeo + Juliet) put one in mind, to borrow a phrase from Pauline Kael, of “a dog with the broken bones of a cat sticking out,” few of Luhrmann’s fans would likely contest that characterization. To them, Luhrmann’s movies are carnival sensations, romances to excess that celebrate the hysterical pace of the modern age in brazen, trashy style (and anyone who doesn’t like their cats grafted messily onto dogs is just a purist, patrician snob). There’s a faint odor of schoolyard allegiance that clings to the debate around Baz Luhrmann, and it never fails to make me feel like the teenager who chooses to stay home with a book while all her friends go out to a rave.
Gugu Mbatha-Raw in The Cloverfield Paradox, currently streaming on Netflix.
Note: This review contains spoilers for The Cloverfield Paradox (as well as Bad Robot’s other Cloverfield films).
I’m very fond of Dan Trachtenberg’s 10 Cloverfield Lane, but as I mentioned when I wrote on that film in 2016, its connection to Bad Robot’s Cloverfield brand is not only unnecessary, it’s actively detrimental to the film’s overall quality. But, since it wouldn’t have been green-lit without this connection, I have to grin and bear it, because the taut little thriller living inside that brand-name wrapper is worth it. The Cloverfield Paradox, unfortunately – the next in what has apparently become a series of spec scripts turned into franchise films by Bad Robot – does not have the added benefit of being excellent on its own. It’s a scattered and inconsistent sci-fi thriller whose Cloverfield connections are even more painfully shoehorned in than its predecessor’s.
Henry Cavill and Armie Hammer in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (Photoby Daniel Smith, Warner Bros. Pictures)
The bar for espionage antics in 2015 has been raised unreasonably high by Ethan Hunt and his Impossible Missions Force, so I wasn’t
sure at all that an old-fashioned Cold War caper like The Man From U.N.C.L.E. could even compete. Sure, it was the first film by Guy Ritchie since
his Robert Downey Jr-led Sherlock Holmes sequel, A Game of Shadows, and sure, the trailer promised a
heaping helping of old-school charm and mid-60s mod fashion. But is that enough to put it in the ring with what is, in my opinion, the best action spy
thriller in recent memory?
