"Into The Woods" (2014)

directed by Rob Marshall
starring Meryl Streep, Emily Blunt, Chris Pine, Tracey Ullman, Anna Kendrick, Christine Baranski, and Johnny Depp

After growing up on the romantic expositionism of Rodgers & Hammerstein, I've found that Stephen Sondheim has taken some getting used to. I guess my first exposure was to his oeuvre was hearing the lyrics for Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story, a project I happen to love -- but which makes many Puerto Ricans grit their teeth over the film's main Puerto Rican characters being played by a Russian-American (Natalie Wood as Maria) and a Greek-American (George Chakiris as her brother Bernardo). But straight Sondheim has been more difficult for me to swallow; A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum is more memorable to me for its insane story line than its songs (quick, sing me any other song besides "Comedy Tonight"). Only recently did I fall in love with a revival of 1970's Company, thanks to a recent staging featuring Neil Patrick Harris, a meditation on marriage; and Sweeney Todd, which is his most operatic work, has become one of my favorites due to the impassioned performances the work demands.

I had never experienced Sondheim's James Lapine collaboration Into The Woods in any form -- had not seen the show nor even heard any more of the score than the repeated phrasing of its title song. But the idea of fractured fairy tales has always intrigued me because so much of my sense of story and storytelling is centered on those childhood tropes penned centuries ago by the likes of Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault, and Hans Christian Andersen -- formalized European folk stories that, when you get down to it, are actually horrifying and grim morality lessons. Into The Woods the musical looks with a wink at the perennial presence of "the woods" in so many of these tales, a mysterious place of retrospection, danger, trial, and magic that transforms those who enter there. The more dominant theme of Into The Woods -- which begins with many characters singing "I wish" -- is "Be careful what you wish for." Because what happens after you get your wish? What are the ramifications for your life and the lives of others around you? What must you give up to attain your wish? What and who have you sacrificed and was it worth it? By also touching upon the ever-changing nature of what it is to be human, the story examines what happens beyond the "happily ever after" of most fairy tales and the results aren't so pretty.

Into The Woods the movie is an attempt to take the stage action of this alternately charming and preachy little piece and put it into a semi-realistic setting. As such, I don't think it works as well as it probably did on the stage. But it's not for lack of trying.

This Into The Woods stars some extremely capable personalities: Meryl Streep (a veritable and literal blue streak of impressive acting, as always), Emily Blunt, Chris Pine, Tracey Ullman, Anna Kendrick, Christine Baranski, and a sly cameo from Johnny Depp, all under the direction of James Marshall, who did stellar work with Chicago (but also confounded us with the opulent but less cohesive 9, let's be frank). And it starts with promise.

A witch (Streep) reveals to the childless Baker (James Corden) and his Wife (Blunt) that because of an ages old dispute with the baker's father, she has cursed his descendants with barrenness. To reverse the curse, the witch tasks the couple with bringing her four items known from fairy tales. In the pursuit of these items the couple heads to the woods and crosses paths with an obnoxious, overeating red-caped girl headed to her grandmother's place; a dunderheaded kid who will trade a beloved cow for a pile of seemingly worthless beans; a conflicted, golden-gowned cinders hauler (Kendrick) weighing life amid familiar surroundings with a mean stepmother and stepsisters, or a restricted life of privilege as the bride of Prince Charming (Pine); and the witch's stolen and adopted daughter whose abundance of hair is the only entry to the doorless tower where she lives. Because we know the stories of Red Riding Hood, Jack & the Beanstalk, Cinderella, and Rapunzel, it's fun to see them given life in the first half of the film -- even when the story veers into the "I wish I hadn't just seen that," as in Little Red's confrontation with The Wolf (nice to see you, Johnny Depp, but did we really need you for those four minutes?).

After the momentum of its first half, the film's second half sags considerably. Though the audience already knows the fairy tales by heart, the author and director of Into The Woods count on this and choose not to show on screen the climactic moments of two of those tales. We do not get to see Jack face the giant and steal the goose that laid the golden eggs, nor do we get to see much of Cinderella's preparation for or interaction at the "festival" (OK, I tipped ou to the ladies', so correct me if I'm wrong) -- Cindy is whisked into a new dress by the spirit of her dead mother and sent on her way, pumpkin coach be damned, and escapes not because of the threat of being revealed in rags at midnight, but because of her own apprehension over being Prince Charming's choice.

Weighted down by issues of marital infidelity, fear of abandonment, class conflict, cowardice, disappointment, despair, disfigurement, and the ultimate downer -- death -- Into The Woods staggers like its unwieldy, half-seen, final act Giantess to an unsatisfying conclusion.

Into The Woods is a must-see if you have a real fondness for musicals and a musical Meryl. I think I'll have to see this one again at some point to get a deeper read on it. But if fantasy paired with passable music isn't your cup of RedBull, I'd say steer clear.

Belle (2013)

directed by Amma Asante
Starring Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Tom Wilkinson, Miranda Richardson, Penelope Wilton,Tom Reid


I don't always get to see the movies I want to see the moment they come out. While my schedule and my pocketbook play a part, it's mostly because not being in LA or NY means that the smaller movies pass me by.

One of the movies I got to see at last, thanks to RedBox, was Belle, the story of a mixed-race noblewoman living in England during the 1700s. Played by Gugu Mbatha Raw, whose career seems to be on an upward trajectory at the moment (see Beyond The Lights), Dido Elizabeth Belle was fathered by a titled Englishman who served as a naval officer in the West Indies. When her enslaved mother dies, Dido is scooped up from the islands and whisked to the seat of his family's vast holdings in central England.

While Dido's father makes very clear that he loves her and plans to provide for her, he cannot stay to raise her as his naval career is still in full swing. He instructs his elders to care for the girl. Dido's presence puts a serious crease in the alabaster foreheads of her grandparents, Lord and Lady Mansfield, and her maiden aunt, Lady Murray. After some initial "but she's black!" hemming and hawing, they cannot deny that the girl is heir to her father's fortune, and so must cope as best they can with creating rules for how this titled free person of color will live out her days in a society that hasn't yet learned how to deal with this sort of thing. As in the beginning of Beyond The Lights (as well as the forthcoming Black Or White), coping with the dressing of African American hair becomes a metaphor for the knotty dilemmas confronting white society with a black person in their midst.

Ghanaian-British director Amma Asante spends little screen time dwelling on the darker side of Dido's predicament at first, showing a beautiful young girl who wants for nothing in the way of clothes, jewels, nourishment and education under the protection of her grandfather at the well-to-do Mansfield Family estate. What's more, she has a companion thanks to the presence of another cousin, also named Elizabeth, who is around the same age. Dido is seemingly well loved and cared for, but when the family comes into contact with the rest of the world, she is generally kept out of sight. As she and Elizabeth come of age this becomes tougher to do. While her cousin prepares to marry without a dowry from her remarried father, Dido finds herself in an unusual bind: related to a good family and rich enough to provide an admirable dowry, with a mixed-race status that society sees as a literal stain on her attractiveness as a bride. Despite this, she is actively sought by the son of another respectable but impoverished family, but she is then physically disrespected by her fiance's bigoted brother. Money and race combine to unravel her engagement.

Meanwhile the intellectually curious Dido comes into contact with a brash vicar's son, James, who wants to go into the law under her grandfather's tutelage. Lord Mansfield is a distinguished and influential high court judge, and has had Dido assisting him with his letters. The film then becomes more about connecting Dido's story to the historically significant Zong massacre, a case appealed to the British high court in which the captain and crew of the British slave ship The Zong threw about half of their cargo of enslaved Africans overboard to drown, purportedly because there was not enough water on board to sustain them and the crew during a stormy passage, and filed an insurance claim when they reached Jamaica asking for reimbursement for the lost "merchandise." When the insurance company refused to pay, the case went to the high court. The truth emerges that poor conditions on the overcrowded, poorly managed ship led many of the slaves to sicken, considerably diminishing their worth on the open market. Rather than take the loss, the owners decided that the slaves were worth more dead than alive. The sheer horror of this -- as many as 142 African men, women, and children chained together and thrown to their deaths -- boggles the mind. The film has Dido and the vicar's son colluding to piece together evidence against the Zong's owners, and posits the idea that Lord Mansfield's own experience raising a person of color were what inclined him to rule against the Liverpool-based Gregson slave trading company that owned the Zong.

The 1783 case -- which was retried after this verdict -- was an important milestone in British history, because it turned popular sentiment toward the regulation of slavery in the British colonies and then to the eventual abolition of slavery altogether. The pressure was such that one prosecutor even attempted, unsuccessfully, to have the Zong's officers charged with murder, but formal accusations were never filed. Britain did abolish slavery some 90 years before the American South was forced to emancipate its slaves due to Lincoln's decree, with Lord Mansfield himself ruling in 1772 that slavery had never been authorized legally in the country and should never be.

The film is beautifully photographed, exquisitely designed, and wonderfully acted. The subject matter is fascinating -- most people are surprised to learn that a black woman of privilege existed in England during the 18th century -- but the difficulties she faced and the implications for society at large due to her presence are presented as mere inconveniences and not the racial lightning strikes they must have been. Part of the problem may be that the most notable thing about Dido was her anachronistic presence in the highly stratified English society of the times; she herself wasn't a rabble-rouser, she was a young woman born at a time when women didn't make much noise and where she had few other people of color with similar status or influence with whom to commune or commiserate. The script does what it can to make her a feisty, free-thinking young woman with an inherent sympathy for enslaved Africans, but Dido's journey doesn't seem to come with any moment of real revelation or change. She doesn't devote herself to the abolition movement, or make a voyage back to Jamaica to find her mother's people, or seek out other free born people of color in England. The film implies that she will marry the vicar's son, who has been elevated to a "gentleman" due to his acceptance as a law apprentice, and she will continue to live in an all-white world as a kind of social curiosity.

Kudos to Amma Asante for getting the film made. This is an important story that needed to be told. And Gugu is eminently watchable as an actress.

Cinderfella: Chris Rock's Clever "Top Five" (2014)

written and directed by Chris Rock
with Rosario Dawson, J.B. Smoove, Cedric The Entertainer, Gabrielle Union

I've always liked Chris Rock's comedic sensibilities. Even when I don't exactly agree with what he says, I'm impressed by the thought process that gets him there. Comics are highly observant creatures, always examining the foibles of what it is to be human and exploiting the cracks between sense and nonsense and widening them so we laugh at ourselves. In Top Five, the new film he's penned and directed, Rock delves deep into ego, fame, insecurity, friendship, family, loyalty, and modern romance -- not to mention a running commentary on the all-time best in hip-hop and the enduring impact of the Cinderella myth on both sexes. The result is a thoughtful, funny, sad, touching meditation on modern life.

The story centers on a day in the life of one Andre Allen, a successful comedian whose big screen persona is best exemplified by a bear-suited action character that's appeared in a series of box office hits. But as the day dawns, Andre is deeply dissatisfied by the Hollywood corner he's painted himself into (this might make a good double-feature with the wonderful Beyond the Lights, as an examination of the golden handcuffs of contemporary fame, particularly for people of color). Fast hemorrhaging all of his "funny" in the pursuit of more serious fare, Andre is promoting a well-intentioned, historically important but violently maudlin pet project about the Haitian slave uprising; chafing at his made-for-TV engagement and impending marriage to a self-involved reality TV star (Gabrielle Union, all acquisitive self-centeredness until desperation causes the mask to fall); and aching to ditch the outlandish, ursine comic persona he's ridden to riches for something much more meaningful. As such, Andre is up to his neck in conflict. He's so far out to sea, he's not even aware how close he is to drowning until he bumps up against a smart, multi-tasking, blunt-spoken journalist who holds up a mirror and reminds him that he'd better start swimming because there's no one going to throw him a life raft.

As journalist Chelsea Brown, Rosario Dawson is the cool New York chica who's been around (she's got a daughter, juggles assignments for various media and dabbles in photography) but not enough so she can't still be surprised. Assigned to shadow Andre for the day for a New York Times story, Chelsea is the measured voice of the Average Joe(sephine), the true fan from back in the day, able to ask the celebrity point blank why he made the life, love and career choices he has. At first, Andre is intrigued then challenged and angered by Chelsea's questions, which force him to confront himself. As with most defensive subjects, this causes Andre to fire back a few personal questions at Chelsea, and the two compare notes and perspectives.

During this daytrip around Manhattan, Andre addresses a group of Columbia University students, then with Chelsea in tow, visits Sirius XM Radio (hey, I see you, my former Billboard colleague Larry Flick, host of The Morning Jolt); goes back to the old neighborhood to visit with his family and friends, a great sequence in which it's clear that the roots of Andre's comedy come from this keep-it-real crew of hilarious and highly complicated people (including Ben Vereen, Sheri Shepherd, Tracy Morgan, Jay Pharaoh, and Leslie Jones). He tries on tuxes for his arranged TV wedding, and preps for a TV appearance later that night. Partially accompanied by his handler and longtime friend (J.B. Smoove), Andre and Chelsea meander from the upper West Side to Harlem to midtown to SoHo to The Village and back to midtown, philosophizing, sparring, comparing notes and analyzing events. Their separate flashback recollections are some of the raunchiest, realest, damn-near shocking parts of the film and you will not be able to stop laughing (look for Cedric the Entertainer to do one of his funniest film bits to date).

As it turns out, Chelsea has a few kinks in her own armor to work out, and as the day moves along, she bumps up against some ugly realities, including having one of her many masks slip. Chelsea's revelations turn the balance of power between interviewer and interviewee. But the hours sharing "rigorous" truths have bonded celebrity and journalist into a relationship of sorts that neither can turn their back on. In the process of his time with Chelsea, Andre ultimately gets his groove back. It's quite a journey for both that takes them places they didn't foresee.

With its "Walking And Talking in New York" premise, Rock himself has said that Top Five pays tribute to films by Woody Allen (Manhattan, Annie Hall, Stardust Memories) and Richard Linklater (Before Sunset, Before Sunrise, Before Dawn). Rock puts his own twist on things by examining the lengths to which we humans will go for ego gratification, and the overt fear that we all have of losing everything we've gained by taking a risk. While some of the situations may seem over-the-top, it's really the chemistry of Rock and Dawson -- two smart, engaging, opinionated and culturally aware New Yorkers both on and off the screen -- that keeps the film moving.

While the nod to the Cinderella myth that comes as a payoff toward the end will have some believing that the saga of Chelsea and Andre didn't wrap up at interview's end, we don't really know what will come next for them. What occurred to me is that in the fairy tale metaphor, Andre is the Cinderella, and Chelsea the fairy godmother.

Kudos to Rock on a great job with story, pacing, and a stellar talent (look for cameos by Adam Sandler, Whoopi Goldberg, and Jerry Seinfeld as well). This is a funny, funny movie. See it now.