MOVIES
Movie Reviews APRIL AND THE EXTRAORDINARY WORLD (PG)
1/2 The French don’t make many animated features – or if they do we don’t see them – but when they do, Zut alors! Apparently they wait until they have an idea worth filming, not a quota to fill. (Don’t worry, that won’t catch on here.) The country that gave us The Triplets of Belville does it again with a steampunk sci-fi thriller with a female protagonist and enough plot for a trilogy. (A live-action version could be a successful YA franchise.) In 1870 Gustave, a scientist, is commissioned to create an invincibility serum for military use. He fails, but his attempt gives animals the power of speech and two of them escape before the lab blows up. The 20th century is quite different from the one we knew (a cable car runs from Paris to Berlin in 82 hours!) because the world’s scientists all vanished on the brink of their greatest discoveries. In 1931 Gustave’s descendants are still working on his formula. Young April is separated from her parents and grandfather, who go dead or missing. Ten years later she’s living with her talking cat, Darwin. That’s when the bulk of the film takes place, with romance, dragons and answers to a lot of questions leading to a somewhat rushed finale. April... is original, thought-provoking, creative and fun. Vive le Franimation! –Steve Warren
BORN TO BE BLUE (R)
Born to Be Blue gives the impression that jazz trumpeter/vocalist Chet Baker wasn’t much fun to be around, except when he was high. Most of the movie takes place during a period when he wasn’t getting high, so it’s not much fun either. It’s 1966 and Baker (Ethan Hawke), fresh from an Italian prison, is on the comeback trail. He’s starring in a movie about himself until his return to heroin aborts the project, but by then he’s managed to start a relationship with his leading lady, Jane (Carmen Ejogo). Everyone’s rooting for Chet to stay clean, but the question is when, not if, he’ll slip. Unlike most biopics, this one doesn’t claim to be true; but it includes as much factual information as most. Much of it is sandwiched into terrible expository
CITY OF GOLD PG 12 • April 2016 • insiteatlanta.com
dialogue (“At least I didn’t abandon my wife and kid and become the world’s biggest junkie”), including a lengthy introduction when Baker headlines at Birdland, where he needs no introduction. Within the script’s limitations on the range he can convey, Hawke gives an excellent performance and does a spot-on impersonation of Baker’s singing voice. Dubbed trumpeter Kevin Turcotte doesn’t do as well on the instrumental side. We’re still waiting to see Don Cheadle as Miles Davis, but it looks like Audra McDonald’s HBO turn as Billie Holiday will be hard to beat in the sudden glut of films about jazz legends. –Steve Warren
CITY OF GOLD (R)
1/2 As documentaries about critics go, watching Jonathan Gold drive around L.A. looking for restaurants is more fun than watching Roger Ebert die in Life Itself. Gold, the first food critic to win a Pulitzer Prize, obviously enjoys eating the way I enjoy movies. (Fortunately I’ve never earned enough to afford the concession stands, so I’ve stayed relatively slim.) Despite filmmaker Laura Gabbert hitting me over the head with it, it only sunk in toward the end that Gold’s mission is to bring people together through sharing a basic part of their diverse cultures: what they eat. Instead of dining in style in trendy eateries, he combs the ethnic neighborhoods, eating in hole-in-the-wall restaurants and from food trucks, putting many of these places on the map when he praises them in print. His praises are sung in turn by restaurant owners (duh!), fellow writers and erudite experts in various fields. His editors love his writing but not the effort it takes to get him to turn it in on time. (Perhaps being dependable is what I’ve been doing wrong all these years.) The film has several inspiring stories of how immigrants brought their family recipes with them and started by selling street food before they could move indoors. I can’t say it gave me an appetite for fried grasshoppers, but City of Gold may make me more aware of the stories behind the food I eat. A handful of F-bombs earned a foolishly restrictive rating. –Steve Warren
FIREWORKS WEDNESDAY (NR)
APRIL AND THE EXTRAORDINARY WORLD Some Iranian films take a long time to reach the States, ten years in the case of Fireworks Wednesday. It was made by Asghar Farhadi five years before his Oscarwinning A Separation. I’m not sure it was worth the wait but it is worth seeing. If it were American I’d probably dismiss it as pure soap opera, but being set in an exotic culture where a man can beat a woman in public without consequence makes it special. It begins with a young couple planning their imminent marriage. Her fiancé drops Rouhi (Taraneh Alidoosti) at the agency that sends her on domestic jobs and we follow her on a day from hell that gives her reason to be less optimistic about wedded bliss. The couple she’s sent to clean for are fighting, with the wife threatening to take their young son and leave. She suspects her husband of having an affair with the hairdresser across the hall, a woman whose divorce is no happier than the other couple’s marriage. Rouhi’s sympathies – and ours - shift in the course of the day, keeping things from getting dull. The sense of danger women feel in the streets of Teheran is heightened because it’s New Year’s Eve and firecrackers are exploding constantly. –Steve Warren
THE FIRST MONDAY IN MAY (PG-13)
1/2 Can fashionista films replace foodie flicks, or is there room for both subgenres? The First Monday in May raises the question of whether fashion is “art.” It’s certainly commerce for New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has the largest collection in the world (more shoes than Imelda Marcos?) and holds their major annual fundraiser, the Met Gala, around the opening of a new fashion exhibition. Filmmaker Andrew Rossi had an all-access pass to the creation of last year’s show, “China: Through The Looking Glass,” and the accompanying gala. He used the occasion to focus on Vogue editor/museum trustee Anna Wintour (which will interest the Wintour Soldiers, or whatever her fans are called), who chaired the event and – no fool, she - seated herself between George Clooney and Bradley Cooper. From the clothes on display in the exhibition and on the red carpet, one would conclude that fashion qualifies more as art than as clothing, often appearing totally nonfunctional if the wearer has to walk, sit or squeeze into a studio apartment. Although the exhibition would be seen by more than 800,000 in the next four months,
the gala has an air of pre-revolutionary Versailles, with enough money expended on the evening, including donations to the museum, to raise a medium-sized country out of poverty. Rossi’s film is certainly star-studded, though most are glimpsed for less than ten seconds. It has its moments, especially if you’re into fashion, fundraising, Chinoiserie or stargazing; but is it Art? –Steve Warren
MARGUERITE (R)
1/2 While waiting to see – and hear – Meryl Streep as Florence Foster Jenkins, you can torture your eardrums and delight your other senses with a French adaptation of the same true story. Catherine Frot, who won the French César award for this performance, plays Baroness Marguerite Dumont, another wannabe opera singer of a century ago who has enough money that her total lack of talent doesn’t matter. She married a penniless baron for his title and is as blind to his infidelity as she is deaf to her own singing voice. Like Norma Desmond, she has a faithful butler who shields her from reality. After years of hosting charity concerts at home for a close group of wealthy friends, Marguerite (not to be confused with Margaret Dumont, who had her Night at the Opera with the Marx Brothers) is championed by avant-gardists with a sense of irony and decides to give a public recital. The delusional diva is tutored by a mediocre tenor whose entourage includes a deaf pianist and a bearded lady fortune teller. Laughable as she is, Marguerite is also kind and generous, so we’re not rooting for her total humiliation. There’s also a young love story between a music critic and a promising soprano, but that remains well in the shadow of the main plot. Writerdirector Xavier Giannoli has set a high bar for the Stephen Frears/Streep version to compete with. I’m saving a place on this year’s Top Ten list for Marguerite. –Steve Warren
MY GOLDEN DAYS (R)
1/2 Parts of My Golden Days are made from baser metals. It’s more a prequel than a sequel to Arnaud Desplechin’s 1996 My Sex Life...or How I Got into an Argument. In that one Paul Dédalus (Mathieu Amalric) was 30-ish. Now he’s well into middle age and reflecting on his past. (The French title, which translates as Three Memories of My Youth, was more accurate.) Played