PIECE BY PIECE

Directing: B-
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+
Animation: B+

Pharrell Williams really wants you to know how pleased with himself he is that he wants the documentary about him and his music career to be a LEGO movie. Lego Pharrell comments on it multiple times, on camera.

It’s cute. And undeniably entertaining. It’s also a transparent tactic, a way for Williams to put up a wall between him and his viewers, so we never really get to know him. Piece by Piece is little more than a broad overview of his three-decade career in hip hop and pop, touching on all of the key beats, tracks and singles Williams worked on or released. Quite the parade of superstars he’s worked with appears onscreen as LEGO talking heads (Snoop Dogg, Justin Timberlake, Gwen Stefani, Busta Rhymes, Timbaland, Jay-Z, and countless more, including Chad Hugo, Williams’s other half in The Neptunes), none of them given enough screen time to offer anything in the way of real insight.

I went to this movie already knowing to expect this. But director and co-writer Morgan Neville really won me over in the first half of the 93-minute runtime, employing clever visual flourishes that can only be possible by animating the stories being told. Some great visual gags get sprinkled into the narrative, some of them LEGO-specific: a young Pharrell watching Star Trek attempts the Vulcan salute, only to discover it’s not possible with his cylindrical LEGO hands. Plenty of other whimsical delights pass across the screen, particularly when talking heads throw out a hypothetical aside, such as E.T. freaking everyone out at the mall.

So, for a good while, I was thinking Piece by Piece was actually much more fun than I had been led to believe. The LEGO animation is very colorful and imaginative, making this a singular moviegoing experience, even among documentaries that play with form and genre.

But later, things get genuinely weird, and not necessarily in a good way. Making a big deal out of the fact that Williams’s wife, Helen Lasichanh, is giving her first-ever on-camera interview doesn’t quite mean as much when we only ever see her as a Lego Lady. And when the content turns serious, it’s easy to become ambiguous about the use of LEGO to tell this story. There’s a moment when Pharrell breaks down crying, in gratitude for all the friends and family that stood by him over the years. A LEGO version of Morgan Neville—who gets a surprising lot of screen time—offers him a box of tissue. Seeing this scene play out among LEGO pieces is fundamentally ridiculous and undermines the impact.

And I haven’t even mentioned the LEGO representations of moments of historic import, including the Martin Luther King rally on the National Mall, and even the protests in Ferguson, Missouri. I saw these scenes flash onscreen and thought: okay, this is bonkers. Outside of these visual references, the vast majority of Piece by Piece renders its subjects with the same childlike joy that we’ve seen in nearly all the characters in previous LEGO movies. Their vocal delivery, as sitting interview subjects, indicates their expressions are much more neutral most of the time, and yet their LEGO selves typically speak with some manner of smiles on their faces.

After a while, this stuff creates a unique sort of cognitive dissonance, even more pronounced by the use of this gimmick to create some distance between Pharrell Williams and those who are interested in him. Certainly nothing in Piece by Piece reveals what makes him tick, or even gives much of a sense of who he truly is as a person. The whole exercise feels like an attempt at having his cake and eating it too: he let someone make a movie about him, but he didn’t have to reveal anything genuine about himself. I’d have settled for some insight into how becoming one of the first superstar producers ever to exist really affected him on a deep level, but, no such luck.

In the end, we’ll just have to let Pharrell Williams’s work speak for itself, which it does plenty well with or without Piece by Piece. As I write this, I am listening to the soundtrack, packed with all the biggest hits he produced along with five new tracks, and that is a spectacular experience, highly recommend. This is a man with jaw dropping talent, in a movie animated by people with incredible talent, and the two just don’t much inform each other. At least we get clever gags like “PG Spray” used in the room where Snoop Dogg is interviewed, keeping things family-friendly in a story about a guy your young children don’t likely know or care about.

Clap along if you feel like LEGO’s what you want to do,

Overall: B

DUMB MONEY

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B-
Editing: B

I’m honestly surprised no one has titled a movie Dumb Money before now. This movie itself informs us that “dumb money” refers to investments made by individual, non-institutional investors. Here that money is represented, first and foremost, by Keith Gill, a regular guy who inspired an investment revolution aimed at hitting hedge fund managers where it hurts.

This is the GameStop story you likely remember from the news—from literally just two years ago. It’s not often that a true story gets optioned, greenlit, produced and released to theaters with that kind of turnaround time. The height of the GameStop buying frenzy occurred in March 2021, and this film’s script writers were hired the following May.

What curious timing this film has. On the one hand, it tells the story incredibly soon after it actually happened—in movie production time, two years is not a lot. On the other hand, early 2021 was also the height of the covid pandemic, with most people working from home unless they were essential workers, and right now that feels like an entire world away.

It’s worth noting that more people are seen walking around in face masks in Dumb Money than any other wide release film I can think of. The way director Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya) represents mask-wearing in this movie is strange inconsistent and sometimes outright odd. Of course, any director wants his actors’ faces to be visible wherever possible, so for instance, we see hospital staff removing masks when only two people are in a room together, even though at the time hospital staff would be masking around anyone at all. A bar waitress removes her mask to gawk at Keith Gill’s stock portfolio on his phone. A GameStop store manager is constantly telling his employee to wear his mask properly, which is actually right and correct, and yet we are meant to think of the manager as a nag and the employee as the one to root for. We get it, the whole mask thing was annoying. Does it make sense to subtly villainize the people insisting on doing the right thing to actually save lives?

Dumb Money isn’t so much concerned with the details of a pandemic, however—only with the “little people” who stuck it to the man while one was happening. It’s relevant that many companies raked on record profits at the expense of essential workers, and kind of odd that no one in this movie ever mentions it.

Still, the whole business, in this particular context, is undeniably fascinating, and kind of surprisingly fun. Given the time in which the story occurred, we don’t get any crowd scenes, yet Dumb Money features a large ensemble cast, of people mostly existing in separate locations. I find myself wondering if Keith Gill and his actual family are as colorful as depicted onscreen here, with Keith played by Paul Dano; his brother Kevin played by Pete Davidson, and his parents played by Clancy Brown and Kate Burton. Having Kevin employed as a DoorDash delivery guy who constantly grabs bites out of the food he delivers is an odd detail. Anyone whose OCD was exacerbated by the hygiene practices of peak covid are certain to be triggered by that.

A lot of other stars are featured among the rest of the supporting staff. A couple other random “regular guy” investors, among a handful, are represented by America Ferrera and Anthony Ramos. Shortsighted billionaires are played by Nick Offerman and Vincent D'Onofrio; a multimillionaire by Seth Rogen. Shailene Woodley is Keith’s wife, Caroline, here depicted as uniformly supportive.

The pacing moves at a steady clip, keeping the runtime at a tight 105 minutes, although it relies heavily on YouTube and TikTok clips, not to mention memes. On the whole, Dumb Money is unexceptional, but I enjoyed it. It’s certainly a unique story worth being told. I can’t say it commands viewing in a theater, much as I advocate for the theatrical experience. This is a movie worthy of an eventual couple of hours on your television.

Well this guy was not as dumb as he looked.

Overall: B

OPPENHEIMER

Directing: A-
Acting: A-
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+
Special effets: A

Oppenheimer is based on a 721-page biography, written by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin and published in 2005, called American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. For director and co-writer Christopher Nolan to adapt a book of that length and density, it’s of little surprise that this film is a solid three hours long, and doesn’t feel like it due to its own density.

I have mixed feelings about the editing, which jumps around multiple timelines, albeit with parallel arcs—more than one detailing a hearing. In one, Oppenheimer, expertly played by Cillian Murphy, is being interrogated as someone with “leftist” and communist ties. In another, Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.) is facing a Senate confirmation hearing for Secretary of Commerce, and at first it seems like he is being scrutinized for his own associations with Oppenheimer, but the dynamics of that hearing evolve over the film’s run time.

Does any of this sound like a movie that commands being shot entirely in IMAX film stock? The expansive marketing for this movie sure made it seem so, which was easy to assume to be true given Nolan’s filmography. To be clear, I was very impressed by this movie, but I did leave it at the end wondering why it was so essential that it be seen at a legit IMAX theater—which I had gone out of my way to do. I am here to tell you: it is not essential. It does look great that way, but also the vast majority of this movie is just people in rooms talking. That can be just as effective at a standard movie theater, or even, arguably, on a home entertainment system.

There are some visually awe-inspiring moments, to be fair. A great deal of time is spent building up to the test of the first-ever atom bomb, which Oppenheimer was perhaps most instrumental in inventing–that being the very reason this film exists. And, much has been made of this movie having no CGI shots in it, which is impressive indeed. The practically rendered (yet still, thankfully, not a real example of precisely what was being rendered) mushroom cloud, a giant plume of fire steadily expanding into the sky, makes a memorable sight on an IMAX screen. I had to lean forward so I could take the image in in its entirety, from the bottom of the screen past the people in rows ahead of me, to the top.

These moments, though, it really should be noted, are comparatively fleeting. Again, this is a solid three-hour film, and only a small percentage of that time is dedicated to explosions. The rest is dedicated to scientific theory, math equations, moral quandaries, a bit of philandering, and a bit of backstabbing. A memorable line: “The truly vindictive have the patience of a saint.” Having not read the biography, which in all likelihood I never will, I wondered to what extent this protracted personal rivalry between Strauss and Oppenheimer was invented, or embellished, for cinema.

I can say this much: seeing Robert Downey Jr. as any character besides Iron Man is truly a breath of fresh air. The man is 58 years old and he actually looks his age in this movie, something that hasn’t happened in so long, it took me multiple scenes before I even realized it was him I was looking at. Plus, he’s finally been given a role that showcases his genuine talent for the first time in about fifteen years.

Cillian Murphy may be the clear star of this cast, but it’s still a huge ensemble, packed with one recognizable face after the other: Matt Damon (also excellent) as General Leslie Groves; Alden Ehrenreich as a Senate aide; Kenneth Branagh as Danish physicist Niels Bohr; Josh Hartnett as nuclear physicist Ernest Lawrence; Matthew Modine as science administrator Vannevar Bush; Benny Safdie as theoretical physicist Edward Teller; Casey Affleck as military intelligence officer Boris Pash; Dane DeHaan as civil engineer Kenneth Nichols; David Krumholtz as physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi; and Rami Malek as an aide whose testimony provides a critical plot turn. (Malek appears in two scenes with no dialogue at all first, and only later gets the pivotal scene with actual lines.) That’s just a liberal sampling, and doesn’t even mention the only two female parts with any substantiveness: Emily Blunt, excellent in a part that’s easy to feel ambivalent about, as Oppenheimer’s alcoholic wife, Kitty; and Florence Pugh as Jean, Oppenheimer’s mentally unstable mistress. Pugh in particular is kind of wasted here, barely recognizable in a minor role that does nothing whatsoever to showcase her ample talents.

All of these people populate multiple interwoven, cross-cutting narrative threads, and that they are edited together with coherence is an impressive achievement, a big part of what makes the film move along at a steady clip in spite of its length. Oppenheimer is getting astoundingly positive reviews, will likely be on a ton of “best of the year” lists, and all but guaranteed to garner a ton of Oscar nominations, perhaps more than any other film this year. None of this presents as a mystery to me; I get it. I even have a feeling that I would gain deeper appreciation for this movie by seeing it multiple times. But, I mean, who has the time!

Whether I can say I think Oppenheimer is overrated, if only slightly, is something only time can tell. I really enjoyed it, and many others clearly have as well. There’s certainly something to be said for the consistency with which Christopher Nolan can make original films, that are not sequels or reboots or part of broad IP, legitimate event movies. The man is in a class of his own, particularly among filmmakers of his generation.

I still feel compelled to reiterate this film not especially worth the premium pricing of the IMAX experience. It’s great on a big screen, but is likely just as much so in a standard movie theater. I’d have felt my money were better spent seeing this using my AMC subscription rather than shelling out an extra $21 for it.

Sure it’s illuminating, but is it worth a special trip?

Overall: B+

ELVIS

Directing: C+
Acting: B+
Writing: C
Cinematography: B+
Editing: C-
Music: B+

The most astonishing thing about Elvis is how a movie so long (159 minutes) could still be overstuffed—and somehow leave out crucial, well-documented details of the singer’s life. It barely mentions his movie career, which included over 30 film roles between 1956 and 1969. There is a depiction of Priscilla Presley (Olivia DeJonge), but no mention of the fact that she met Elvis when she was only fourteen and he was twenty-four. That wouldn’t be convenient for the depiction of Elvis Baz Luhrmann is going for—one of objective reverence, even in light of his infidelity and drug habits.

The second most astonishing thing about Elvis is that it’s biggest liability is, of all things . . . Tom Hanks. Why this script focuses so heavily on “Colonel Tom Parker,” as depicted by Hanks, is truly a mystery. Plenty of music biopics have adopted this framework of storytelling, with a person close in the star’s orbit telling the story, but Elvis feels just as much about Parker as it does about Elvis himself. And even by Luhrmann standards, Parker’s element feels like it’s a different movie, not least of which because Hanks is put into a poorly conceived “fat suit,” given a huge fleshy chin, and apparently encouraged to go with a Dutch accent far heavier than Parker reportedly actually spoke with. Everything about Hanks’s performance in this movie is a constant distraction, and never a good one—and yet the movie spends far too much time on him at the expense of relevant details in Elvis’s own life.

Is there a third most astonishing thing about Elvis? You bet there is! This movie addresses how so much of Elvis’s music was influenced by Black music and Black culture, but does it in a blatantly revisionist way. This movie would have us believe that Elvis Presley simply grew up in a poor white family in a predominantly black neighborhood, found success using the musical styles he was surrounded by, and the Black community was delighted by his success. This is demonstrably untrue. Now, no one would ever turn to a Baz Luhrmann film for historical accuracy, but this is egregious stuff, right there in “white savior” territory.

I’ve long said that the best biopics narrow their focus, on either a particular incident or at least a single period in a person’s life. Trying to tell a person’s entire life story in the space of just one movie—even a long movie—generally renders it dull, and Elvis is no exception, its frenetic editing notwithstanding. What’s more, this style is well suited to Luhrmann’s earlier work, most notably Moulin Rouge! (2001) but also Strictly Ballroom (1992) and even Romeo + Juliet (1996), those films being the only ones regarded as “classic” in Luhrmann’s filmography, even by Luhrmann fans. (Although a fair number seemed to enjoy The Great Gatsby in 2013; I wasn’t that impressed.) There’s something about Luhrmann’s style that sets the viewer at a remove from the story, never offering a chance to connect on a deeply emotional level—something that should really be possible in the telling of Elvis Presley’s story. Luhrmann was always more interested in visual innovations than emotional resonance, and his style is so recognizable now that it could hardly even be called innovative anymore.

In other words, Elvis would have been much improved if told by another director. Instead, we get a production depicting a quintessentially American figure that was filmed in Australia, exclusively on movie lots and with recognizable American landscapes and skylines rendered in obvious CGI. Luhrmann’s earlier films were set in obvious fantasy worlds, in which this sort of artifice worked for the story at hand.

But! All that said, Elvis does have some redeeming qualities, by far the most important of which is the performance of Austin Butler, who is eminently convincing as Elvis Presley. He has a naturally passing resemblance to the man, at least when he was young (oddly, Butler is never in any obvious fat suit when depicting “older, fatter Elvis”), and his actual singing voice is used in many of the performances. Butler has a magnetic screen presence, just as Elvis had a magnetic stage presence, and both of those facts are bizarrely obscured by telltale rapid-fire editing.

Elvis is also packed with music, though, and the music is almost uniformly great—at least when it’s classic Elvis tunes, as well as Black singers performing the songs Elvis later covered (those are arguably the best tacks on the soundtrack). Elvis does sprinkle in several contemporary tracks, often with rap vocals, as if in an attempt to acknowledge the lasting influence of Black music. The rap tracks are a bit misplaced, though. Honestly, someone should make a movie “about Elvis” that focuses on the Black artists who either “inspired” him or from whom he outright stole, depending on how you (or they) look at it.

Butler’s performance and the music throughout the movie are almost enough to make Elvis worth what is clearly made to be a theatrical experience rather than something viewed at home. Almost. It might well have gone all the way if there were less “Dutch Hanks” and a lot more of Butler, singing as well as acting (his performance is excellent).

It’s also hard not to wonder if this movie kind of missed the boat, having been released about twenty years too late. There were some clear Elvis fans in the row behind me at the theater, and they were deeply invested in the story, quite openly commenting on how they felt about certain characters’ behaviors, all of them depicting as hangers-on who were bringing down an otherwise innocent Elvis Presley. Huge fans of Elvis today, who would now almost exclusively be among the elderly set, will surely enjoy this movie. But, Elvis has not been an active part of the pop culture conversation in decades, and this movie could have found a lot larger audience back when more of his own fans were still alive.

In other words, Baz Luhrmann stopped far short of the greatness his movie Elvis could have been, and is offering it too late. Clearly I am not the only one who feels this way; the film has already grossed over $55 million worldwide, although with a budget of $85 million, it will likely barely break even, if even get to that point. I don’t regret having gone to see it, and found it moderately entertaining for what turned out to be far too long a time, but this is not re-watch material. The memory of this movie will get filed away in the back of my mind, in a drawer that never needs to be pulled open again.

You can’t look away . . . whenever he’s actually onscreen.

Overall: B-

THE EYES OF TAMMY FAYE

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-
Makeup: B+

The Eyes of Tammy Faye is not garnering a lot of attention or box office receipts, and to be honest, it’s not all that much of a surprise. Even setting the quality of this film on its own terms aside, what possible relevance could Tammy Faye Bakker have to the current culture, easily forty years after the peak of her cultural cachet, and fourteen years after her death? Does anyone under the age of forty even remember her? I barely do, and even that’s only because of the famed cult documentary of the same name that was released in 2000, programmed as part of queer festivals, and focused far less on Jim Bakker and quite a bit more on her pointed support of the queer community—something I only learned from that documentary film, at the age of 24.

It may seem like a leap that this film brought to mind the recent Aretha Franklin biopic Respect. That film, also on its own terms, is no better or worse than The Eyes of Tammy Faye, but, crucially, it does far more easily justify its own existence. Aretha Franklin passed away far more recently (2018), her life’s work continues to have a profound impact on ongoing art and culture, and we can safely assume it will continue to for decades to come. None of these same things can be said of Tammy Faye Bakker, whose cultural influence at its peak was niche at best, and for the later years of her life she was unfortunately the largely unfair target of ridicule. This would have been due to her notoriously clownish makeup, the stereotype of her constantly crying, and just her general loopiness—which this current film suggests was largely due to prescription drug addictions.

The 2000 documentary set out to humanize her, and it did a pretty good job of it. This new, narrative film version of The Eyes of Tammy Faye, as directed by Michael Showalter (The Big Sick), clearly has the same intention. But, in 2021, how much does it even matter anymore? In 2000, Tammy Faye was still alive and vry much active; she was indeed an active participant in the filming process. What all this boils down to is, the current film is not just too little too late, but it is definitively redundant. You’d be far better off just seeking out. the original documentary—which, incidentally, is officially credited as the source material.

None of this is to say that this The Eyes of Tammy Faye is without any redeeming value, however. There’s always the unfortunate fact that more people are interested in narrative features than they are in documentary films—that documentary earned all of $1 million at the box office, after all, although the fact that the current film has earned all of $1.5 million 10 days into its run isn’t painting the greatest picture either. On the other hand, like it or not we are in the streaming era, and a fair number more people will will likely see it that way soon enough.

The best thing about this movie, actually, is the acting. Well, although Andrew Garfield has proved capable of greatness in many other parts, he is merely serviceable here as Jim Bakker, donning his own slightly distracting facial prosthetics and varied and evolving hairstyles through the many years this movie covers. Jessica Chastain, however, is legitimately impressive as Tammy Faye, somehow transcending the truly ridiculous amount of makeup and prosthetics. In fact she disappears into this part in a way she arguably never has before, achieving the aforementioned goal of humanizing the woman she plays.

It could even be argued she's too good at it. There are side-by-side stills at the end of the film, showing the actors playing their parts next to the real people they played. It's only when Chastain is seen up next to the real Tammy Faye that it's a little jarring. After sitting through that entire 126-minute movie, it becomes clear that Chastain actually dialed it down: Tammy Faye Bakker, to put it as sensitively as I can, was a truly nutty lady.

And the story we are privy to here, details the rise of the Bakkers as televangelists, their public marital problems, and their deep-dive fall from grace when Jim Bakker was indicted on charges of fraud, thereafter even serving a prison sentence. There are even allusions to secret gay affairs on the part of Jim, although the movie us never really straightforward about them. All we know, based on this movie anyway, is that Tammy Faye was along for the ride, largely oblivious, or perhaps more accurately, wilfully ignorant. The two are both massively materialistic, using their televised "ministry" as an excuse for their excesses, which build up in some ways independent of each other.

I enjoyed The Eyes of Tammy Faye for what it was, but still found myself wishing it were better. It could have been improved by, say, making direct connections between the lives of these two personalities and what the far-right in America has become today. But this movie isn't interested in that; it just wants us to be interested in their story, and to be impressed by the performance of it. I can give it that much, at least—and it's worth mentioning that Cherry Jones is also excellent as Tammy Faye's mother—but, in the end, it's still just not quite enough.

A great performance, still no substitute for the real thing.

Overall: B-

SIFF Advance: POTATO DREAMS OF AMERICA

Directing: B-
Acting: B
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B-
Editing: C+

Potato Dreams of America is a locally produced film with a small budget, and it shows. I don’t say that to shit on it, because I actually enjoyed a lot of it, but I think it’s also a bit of fair warning, to viewers for whom that might be a barrier to entry into the story. And this is tricky, criticizing a movie that is a clear passion project by a writer-director who is telling an acutely personal, largely autobiographical story. There is no doubt that this film means a great deal to the people who worked on it, and especially writer-director Wes Hurley.

It’s certainly a story worth telling. There are just some challenges in execution, particularly in the first half, which is set in Vladivostok, the Russian west-coast city where the title character (as well as Hurley) is from. The production is highly stylized, giving it a feel rather like watching a well-designed local play. Unfortunately, with one notable exception, these “play” scenes are filled with supporting actors who give distractingly wooden performances.

The exception would be Lea LeLaria, easily the most famous person in this cast, here cast wildly against type as Potato’s uptight and conservative grandmother. She loses herself in the role so effectively, it took me a while before I even realized it was her. Still, these scenes could have used some tightening up in editing. Some of these scenes feel like Hurley decided he didn’t need very many takes. (For all I know, he didn’t have time for a lot of takes.) In one memorable shot, DeLaria’s grandma casually twirls a shotgun with her index finger, and the shot that’s used doesn’t even show it twirling very well. As a result, the vibe of the production becomes somewhat amateurish.

But, here’s a compelling concept: Hurley cast different actors for Potato’s family in Russia vs. his family in America, after he and his mother move to Seattle so his mother, Lena, can get married and in so doing escape post-Soviet Russia. Potato is much younger in the Vladivostok half of the film, and played by a boy named Hersh Powers; in the Seattle half, he’s played as an older teenager by a young man named Tyler Bocock. Bocock’s peformance is nuanced in a way unlike almost anyone else in the film, and he’s easily the best actor in it; I might even say he saves it. The woman who plays his unconditionally supportive mother, Lena, in Seattle (Marya Sea Kaminski), comes close.

Also, curiously, Lena and Potato speak with American accents in the Vladivostok half, and they speak with Russian accents in the Seattle half. This effectively highlights their “otherness” as a family unit in both contexts, although the delivery is more successful in the latter half.

“Potato,” incidentally, is just the nickname Lena has given him—one of the fictions added to an otherwise true story, according to Hurley just to help give himself some distance and see Potato as a character and not just as himself. There’s a bit of a shocking twist in the last act of the film regarding Potato’s American stepfather, which would be easy to dismiss as implausibly contrived, except apparently it’s actually part of his true story. There is a nice, organically multi-ethnic sense of intersectionality to Hurley’s story, with a bit of both lesbian and trans representation. Also, Potato’s circumstances are very specific, while the essence of his story, and its relatability, is universal. The semi-flamboyant imaginary-friend Jesus is a nice touch.

To be fair, some of the script, and particularly the dialogue, really is controvied—oversimplified representation of conservative talking points, particularly mirroring how they speak now rather than twenty or thirty years ago. (This is just my own pet peeve so I’ll forgive it, but a few shots of the Seattle skyline meant to be decades ago are clearly far too contemporary—but, we already established this is a small production. I’m sure there were no resources for making composite images of Seattle of the past.)

Potato Dreams of America isn’t quite as “quirky” as the title might suggest, although the film certainly does have its quirks. A lot of it, particularly in the first half, has some unrealized potential that bogs it down a little—but, by the end, it still spoke to me.

I’d like to see more of this potato.

Overall: B-

THE UNITED STATES VS. BILLIE HOLIDAY

Directing: B-
Acting: B+
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B-
Editing: B-
Music: A-

There’s a moment in The United States vs. Billie Holiday, maybe two thirds of the way through, in which the camera closes in on the face of star Andra Day, playing the title character, singing her signature song “Strange Fruit.” We see her perform the entire song—three haunting verses about the lynching of Black people in 1930s America—while she never breaks eye contact with us, the viewers. The scene has an unforgettably confrontational power to it, much as Billie Holiday herself had in the era, as she insisted on singing the song live in spite of government pressure not to do so.

If only the rest of the movie had that kind of power. This latest offering by director Lee Daniels is a little too preoccupied with sporadic artistic flourishes that make little sense, editing meant to resemble really old stock footage at distractingly inconsistent moments, and cinematography that briefly slips into black and white for only a few seconds at a time. Almost as if it’s a trick to fit more into the film’s already-long 130 minutes, in the second half we get several montage sequences that seem only to serve as narrative shortcuts.

A biopic is always better when it focuses on one specific time or one specific element of a person’s life—this was precisely what kept Lee Daniels’s 2013 film The Butler from quite achieving greatness. The United States vs. Billie Holiday, however, attempts to have it both ways, narrowing focus on that song “Strange Fruit,” but still covering her life through two different decades.

The end result is something that lacks focus or narrative cohesion, with Daniels’s gaze into Holiday’s life often turning away from the specificity of that song. The U.S. government is obsessed with silencing her by any means necessary—a frequent theme in films of the past year or so, reflecting an unfortunately frequent theme of the U.S. government for decades—and they often use Holiday’s heroine addiction against her. In some cases they literally framed her, couching their actions in the “war on drugs,” illustrating how very old that naive and misguided notion really is. This might have made a better film if it were more explicitly about that exploitation, but instead it’s a film that doesn’t quite know what it wants to be about. All of these things are worthy of attention in film, but they also need a dramatic center.

If anything makes The United States vs. Billie Holiday worth the time, though, it’s Andra Day, in her first starring role, in which she also songs a bunch of Billie Holiday songs incredibly well. The film would be truly dull affair without her in it, as she’s the only character given much in the way of nuance, all the other parts being too small to allow for performance to rise above Suzan Lori-Parks’s relatively aimless script. Holiday moves from one relationship with an abusive man to another, the most complicated being that with FBI agent Jimmy Fletcher (Moonlight’s Trevante Rhodes), the one you could argue was the least directly abusive but still doesn’t treat her right.

Fletcher, as it happens, is one of multiple supporting characters who are fictionalized. There’s nothing inherently bad about that, as it depends on how it’s done. For instance, The United States vs. Billie Holiday is also given a loose structure that barely holds together, wherein the story is told in flashback from a radio interview Holiday is giving to “Reginald Lord Devine,” also fictional, played by Leslie Jordan with a wig of curly white hair with so much body that at first I thought the character was supposed to be an old lady. The movie only returns to this interview so infrequently that you nearly forget that’s where we started, and it leaves you wondering why they bothered with the conceit at all.

The great Natasha Lyonne also appears as Tallulah Bankhead, with whom Holiday was romantically involved. Lyonne is only in a few scenes, and although I would not suggest that more white people need to be included in a Black person’s story, it seems odd to cast Lyonne in this part if her talents are just going to be underused. Someone else needs to give Natasha Lyonne better roles, in other movies. If nothing else, Daniels could have delved deeper into Holiday’s open bisexuality, as it exists here exclusively as yet another thing for the government to attempt using against her.

That said, The United States vs. Billie Holiday had every chance to be better, and it just overall slightly misses the mark. It tells a story that is too broad when so much of Billie Holiday’s story requires pointed focus, but at least it has a memorable performance at its center. Here’s hoping this jump starts Andra Day’s career, and she gets starring roles in better movies herself.

Just hearing her sing is the best thing.

Overall: B-

HARRIET

Directing: B-
Acting: B+
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B

There are great things about Harriet, and there are less-than-great things about Harriet, and the first thing about it to distract me was a little odd: as soon as Harriet and her husband John opened their mouths in the opening scene, I thought to myself, damn—those slaves sure had excellent dentists! Their teeth shone with such pearly-white perfection, it made them look like . . . actors.

Which is to say: there’s a lot wrong with Harriet. Or if not wrong, then certainly sort of off. There’s a vague indecisiveness to its tone, as though director Kasi Lemmons can’t decide if it’s a straightforward biopic or a spiritual treatise. This makes it all the more impressive how often star Cynthia Erivo, as Harriet Tubman, rises above all that. Any time Harriet is absorbing in spite of its imperfections, it is because of her. She has a unique talent for conveying vulnerability and strength in equal measure, easing from the former to the latter over the course of the film.

There is no denying that Harriet Tubman, as a historical figure, was an extraordinary woman. A century and a half after she escaped a life of slavery in Maryland, she remains an enduring symbol of both racial justice and feminism. Learn just a fraction of her accomplishments, and it becomes clear that it is far from hyperbole to say she deserves to be the both the first black person and the first woman to be pictured on American currency. (The complications of conflating her accomplishments with material wealth is a conversation for another place and time.) And setting the inevitability of artistic license in movies aside, Harriet depicts a large number of real, historical events that are genuinely amazing. For that reason, you could make the argument that Harriet commands attention. I can see this being a useful tool in near-future American school classrooms.

I just wish a better movie had been made about her. A woman as towering a figure as Harriet Tubman deserves representation in a film that is better than “not bad.”

Which brings me to the genuinely weird bits. Harriet has been subject to some debate as to whether she is depicted as “psychic.” And it is true, she has several premonitions throughout the film, which seem to guide her path as she moves back and forth from north to south and back, leading increasing numbers of slaves to safety. In my view, this isn’t a suggestion of psychic ability so much as Kasi Lemmons, who co-wrote the script with Gregory Allen Howard, infusing into her an element of the divine. This begins relatively early, in a scene in which Harriet leads a group of fugitive slaves safely across a river, apparently thanks to the power of prayer. It doesn’t quite make Harriet Tubman Christ-like, but it does bring her within a stone’s throw of it.

Now, it’s well known that Harriet Tubman was a deeply religious woman, who indeed believed she was guided by God. And I don’t even have issue with her being depicted thus in film. It’s just that Harriet takes it one small step further, taking that notion rather seriously. It seems to say: she was right. Is it so wrong to want a depiction of this woman in which she becomes extraordinary on her own merits?

No human being is without flaws, and Harriet falls into the trap of rendering its hero an unassailable saint. Even when she talks of being “humbled,” it is just more evidence of her sainthood. By the end, Harriet devolves momentarily into sappy dreck, with the requisite “inspirational speech” met by a rapt audience offering her appreciative applause, like countless other movies over the past countless decades. I saw that and could only think: Really?

Such scenes of misguided corniness are augmented by an intermittently obtrusive musical score by Terence Blanchard. And I don’t often note the music in movies, except in Harriet the score often gives way to beautiful spirituals, sung by the slave characters. Harriet is peppered with these interludes, and they possess a powerful, haunting beauty. Lemmons wisely makes use of the incredible voice possessed by Cynthia Erivo, whose vocal talent has already been showcased in last year’s Bad Times at the El Royale. As such, Harriet would have benefited from less of its cheesy score, and a lot more of those acapella spirituals.

Erivo is well supported by others in the very large cast, most notably by the almost ethereal Janelle Monáe as a proprietor friend of Harriet’s in Philadelphia. And, in spite of its moderately fluid tone, Harriet does pack an impressive amount of detail into its storytelling without ever making it feel rushed—a true rarity in biopics. There is much to debate about Harriet, not about the woman but about how this particular movie depicts her. At least Cynthia Erivo carries the weight of an often odd and sometimes contrived script with a dignity all her own. Setting aside the supposed premonitions, it might just still teach us something about the weight and importance of our own history.

Harriet as superhero: she means business.

Overall: B

DOLEMITE IS MY NAME

Directing: B-
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B

Perhaps it’s just a quirk of Eddie Murphy’s career that he manages one role per decade that showcases real acting chops, which he never had much reason to tap when he was making money hand over fist with the countless comedies of his early career. But then came Boomerang (1999), a film I never liked particularly but which caught the attention of critics in a way Murphy never had; he followed that up with several years of dumb comedies which, again, made him lots of money. And then he came within striking distance of Oscar gold with his supporting part in Dreamgirls (2006).

Now comes Dolemite Is My Name, Eddie Murphy’s first starring role since technically 2016, but his first that anyone has paid any attention to since about 2012. It’s fair to say the 2010s has not been this man’s most fruitful decade, and certainly not his greatest in terms of quality. It would also be fair to call his part in Dolemite Is My Name a comeback role, as it’s easily his best film in nearly twenty years.

Unfortunately, that’s not exactly a high bar, and although it’s generated a fair amount of buzz, Dolemite Is My Name is not going to be part of any 2019 Oscar conversations. As directed by Craig Brewer (Hustle & Flow, Black Snake Moan), this film has moments where it kind of feels like he’s not paying attention to everything going onscreen. More than once I noticed supporting actors, who were barely more than extras, basically over-acting. How many times does a person need to shrug nervously?

The story of “Dolemite,” an alter ego created by a musician and comedian named Rudy Ray Moore (here played by Eddie Murphy), is a true one, however. And if that story tells us anything, it tells us the importance of a target audience—and in this case, the target audience is not especially Academy voters. I wouldn’t say it’s particularly critics, either, although by and large they are certainly on board with this movie. There is a scene rather late in the film that is very telling: in a limousine on the way to the premier of the Dolemite movie, the “blacksploitation” flick that was actually the first of many featuring Moore in the mid- to late-seventies, the actors read the movie’s terrible reviews to each other. They are briefly dejected, until they notice the massive crowd at the theatre, eagerly waiting to see the movie. In other words, no matter what the critics say, there’s an audience out there if you know how to find it.

That said, I’m not sure Dolemite Is My Name will find the same kind of passionate audience. A movie about a guy who made blacksploitation movies is a little different from actual blacksploitation movies, after all. There’s no doubt that people within the industry have real affection for “Dolemite,” given the actors involved: Keegan-Michael Key as the script writer; Wesley Snipes as the movie’s perpetually exasperated director (and giving a delivery, curiously, very similar to the one he gave in To Wong Foo, even though this time he plays a straight character). Smaller supporting roles are filled also by the likes of Snoop Dogg as a radio DJ; Craig Robinson as a fellow musician; Chris Rock as yet another DJ; and Tituss Burgess and Mike Epps as more of Rudy’s friends helping him make the movie. All of these actors have their fans, to be sure, but we now live in an era where box office depends far more on IP than on actors, and how many people actually remember Dolemite?

That has no bearing on how good this movie is, to be fair. I would call it “decent,” but as a gay white guy, I’m not sure I fit all that squarely into the target demographic. I hate pretty much any movie by Tyler Perry, after all, but that is a man who knows his audience and he makes shit tons of money. I will say this: Eddie Murphy’s performance is good enough to elevate the film single-handedly, and honestly, the acting is solid all around. Even Snoop Dogg, who is not exactly known as an “actor,” holds his own. Dolemite Is My Name is also very well shot, and has excellent production design, and especially, costume design. It’s set in the seventies and the outfits are almost worth the price of admission on their own.

I still have a couple specific quibbles. Rudy casts a very heavy woman, Lady Reeed (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), to stay in Dolemite, and the script of Dolemite Is My Name makes multiple references to her being supposedly “unsexy.” In one exchange, she literally says, “I may not be sexy, but…”—would it kill the people making this movie to have even one other character tell her she actually is sexy? Let alone have her come to the realization herself? Similarly, Tituss Burgess is revealed to be playing in openly gay character in only one scene, at a barbeque where he makes a crack that indicates his desire for men. Rudy says something along the lines of, “Come on, we’re eating,” and the script just leaves it at that. To the movie’s credit, it’s very clear all the other characters accept this man for who he is. Why include that line at all?

Beyond such nitpicks, though, Dolemite Is My Name tells the tale of a man so tenacious and ambitious he made his dreams come true on his own terms even when people were closing doors on him at every turn. I can’t decide whether this movie would work as well had it been a complete work of fiction, but knowing it’s based on a true story changes the context, as well as what it generally means to the viewer. And as a personality, in his truly unique way, Rudy Ray Moore was an inspiration. And this movie has that much going for it, at least.

Fuckin’ up mothafuckas is his game. He reminds us of this frequently.

Overall: B

JUDY

Directing: B+
Acting: A-
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+
Music: B

When I first saw Bradley Cooper’s A Star Is Born nearly a year ago, I expressed appreciation for how pleasantly surprised I was by how it made me feel seen, as a gay man. The film featured drag queens and gay characters fairly prominently, and it felt very much like a nod to the gay fans of the woman who first made the title role so famous: Judy Garland. She didn’t originate the role, nor was she anywhere near the last one to play it, but she certainly made it hers: if Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz were not her most iconic role, her role in the musical version of A Star Is Born would be.

It’s odd, then, that Judy, the new biopic directed by Rupert Goold and starring Renée Zellweger, never once mentions it. There are several references to The Wizard of Oz, and it ends with a wrenchingly emotional rendition of “Over the Rainbow.” Judy is a bit uneven overall, but one thing it does quite memorably well is the same thing last year’s A Star Is Born did: it goes out of its way to acknowledge how much Judy Garland meant to gay people.

This is not something biopics of this sort did much of fifteen or twenty years ago, and it’s a nice change. A Beautiful Mind making no reference to John Nash’s homosexuality is just one example. Filmmakers at the time stated they opted not to mention it because they feared viewers would make the wrong connection between Nash’s sexuality and his schizophrenia, but it feels likely that if the film were made today, they would have found a respectful way to fully represent the man. And here, with Judy, Garland isn’t presented as at all queer. But her decades-long status as a gay icon is certainly recognized.

It’s not just a passing reference, either. Judy is set during the last year or two of Judy Garland’s life, with occasional flashbacks to her teenage years as a budding superstar treated so horribly by the studio that they are essentially blamed for her addiction to pills. In this final stage of her shortened life and career, she is desperate to make a living, has a terrible reputation as an unreliable performer, and she moves temporarily to London for an extended residency. Her star has faded enough by this point that she only has two fans waiting for her out the side stage door, and they are a middle-aged late-sixties gay couple, who have been buying tickets to every night’s performance — something Judy notices. In one extended sequence, she invites them out to dinner, and, being too late for anything to be open, they invite her for eggs at their place. They bond over being lonely, misunderstood, emotionally isolated people. It sounds like something so easily corny, but I was deeply moved by it.

In fact, I was so moved by Zelleger’s career-high performance — if she’s not nominated for an Academy Award it will be a miscarriage of justice — it was relatively easy for me to overlook the fact that her singing, while perfectly decent, does nothing to illustrate what a uniquely powerhouse voice Judy Garland had. Granted, this is at the end of her life, she’s two years past a suicide attempt that damaged her voice, and she refuses even to rehearse; it would make sense her voice is not at its peak ability.

That said, it’s a curiously long time before any singing is heard at all, and it’s only ever heard by the elder version of Judy. The teen Judy, played otherwise competently by newcomer Darci Shaw, is never heard or seen singing at all, and her youth is the period in which he voice catapulted her to stardom. Although no modern singer could ever match the unparalleled cadence of Judy Garland’s voice, this still feels like a bit of a travesty. How is anyone watching this film supposed to understand and properly contextualize this woman’s life story without ever hearing her voice at its peak? With the right skill and finesse, even lip syncing to Judy’s real voice could have worked. It certainly would have lent this film greater weight. As it is, her enduring status as an icon as presented here feels a tad too abstract, and that’s a pity. This is a woman whose voice made her, and in a biopic about her, we never actually hear it.

So really, Judy relies heavily on aging movie-goers who still have a working memory of when Judy Garland was still alive, or at least have working memories of when her movies and music outlasted her for decades in cultural impact. In that context, the movie still works surprisingly well, avoiding the typical trap of trying to cram a person’s life into two hours and instead mostly focusing on just a couple of years. The editing keeps it at a brisk pace without ever feeling rushed, because this story is focused on the end of a fading megastar.

And most importantly, Renée Zellweger sells it. Some have called her performance “a gimmick,” but that’s now how I saw it at all. This is a woman with a distinctive look, easily recognizable in nearly all her roles, and she disappears completely in this movie, totally transforming into Judy Garland. Seeing clips taken out of context may make it seem odd or idiosyncratic, but Zellweger embodies her wholly as a character, giving her wide ranging dimension. I totally forgot the actor I was looking at, and completely bought her as Judy. How else could the moment where it reaches “Over the Rainbow” be so emotionally affecting? I was nearly as moved by that as I was by the earlier scene with the gay couple, and all she was doing was singing a song. I made a mistake not bringing tissues.

Judy is an imperfect but effectively respectful portrait of an icon, without ever even representing when she was at the top. All we ever see is the beginning of her rise, or the end of her wane, and still it paints a complete picture, and it’s one worth considering.

No, we won’t forget you, Judy.

Overall: B+