Month: January 2022

For every Pirates of the Caribbean, there is also a Country Bears or The Haunted Mansion. This fits somewhere in between those two extremes. Dwayne Johnson portrays his usual character, an amiable, wisecracking something or other (here an Amazon riverboat captain, similar to those who pilot the Disneyland ride). He’s hired by Emily Blunt to take his boat to search for a mythical tree with magical flowers. The two of them have a stupidly negative amount of chemistry between them. Portraying German Prince Joachim, Jesse Plemons squanders almost every opportunity to ham it up as a villain. Sadly Paul Giamatti would likely have done an incredible job in the role, but is relegated to a lesser antagonist. Though quite heavy on the CGI, the settings are colorful and appealing, but that doesn’t offer enough to explain why a sequel is being made. 

Accountant Johnny Depp travels to a company town for a new job, only to be told by owner Robert Mitchum that the job has been filled. He drowns his sorrows by spending the night with a prostitute and ends up in a shoot-out with her former lover, Mitchum’s son. It’s a surrealistic journey as he travels, accompanied by a native man named Nobody and trailed by bounty hunters, west to the Pacific Ocean to die due to the bullet that is lodged near his heart. Between scene jumps and vision quest hallucinations, I had a bit of a tough time following the narrative a bit, but that seemed to be deliberate and at some point just went with the general flow to the fatal end.  

After rising rodeo star and horse trainer Brady suffers a horrific brain injury, similar to one a friend of his had experienced that now confines him to a wheelchair, he is forced to reexamine the direction he wants to take his life. It feels like a fairly authentic portrayal of life amongst the Lakota Sioux on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, perhaps made further so by having Brady’s family played by his real life father and sister. After Nomadland, I was interested to check out Chloe Zhao’s other films. She has incredible eye for the wide expanses of middle America and some of the less celebrated people who incorporate those areas.  

In this fictionalized account of the 1920s gang war between the Italian/Jewish mafia and the Black gangsters, Laurence Fishburne has recently been released from prison and comes home to Harlem where mobster Tim Roth, under the command of boss Andy Garcia, is battling local crime boss Cicely Tyson. It’s the tale of one man’s lone rise up the ranks, ignoring advice and the trail of bloodied bodies left in his wake. The Harlem setting and focusing less on the Italian community makes it unique for a 1920s gangster film. It’s a bit slow in its telling, but does have a lot of star power, especially in its largely black cast, including Loretta Devine, Vanessa Williams, Chi McBride, and Queen Latifah. 

Based on the story of the 1961 sinking of the Albatross, Jeff Bridges and his wife Caroline Goodall are instructors on a school at sea sailing boat filled with a crew of white teenaged boys. Bridges runs a strict, extremely disciplined ship but that isn’t enough when the ship runs into a storm that some believe was a white squall. It has an appealing cast of 1990s heart throbs including Scott Wolf, Jeremy Sisto, and Ryan Phillippe but the story takes a bit long to get to the actual storm and the attempts at building characters whose fates the viewer is supposed to later care about fall flat.

Little Women really seems to be a story that has to be re-filmed every decade if only to give that generation’s group of young actresses a chance to portray a classic, female-centric story. As fitting for a made for television film, this version has the sisters being portrayed by some well-known television actresses of the time: Meredith Baxter, Susan Dey, and Eve Plumb. Ann Dusenberry, whom I’ve never seen in anything else, as Amy is the weakest link of the bunch. Her accent is bizarre for the New England setting and her characterization is shrill even for normal Amy standards. I always find it weird when a production doesn’t actually bother having a burn mark on Jo’s dress, but I do like how hacked off her hair looked here and that it was shown to re-grow over the following years. It’s barebones, but certainly holds up as well as any of the other editions I’ve seen.

This silly mockumentary chronicles the career of Jackie Washington, played by Jenifer Lewis, a Diana Ross-like diva, who rose to fame as a singer in an all girls group and is now launching a spectacular comeback concert. It’s a bit rough on the edges, being a made for cable TV film, but it makes up for it with the astounding number of cameos, celebrities either portraying versions of themselves or as fictional characters. Lewis thoroughly embraces the role in all her full-throttle divaness. As with The Five Heartbeats, director Robert Townsend really has an eye for portraying realistic tales of early R&B characters.