Month: December 2020

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (R)

The late Chadwick Boseman probably secures his Oscar with Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, a new Netflix movie, adapted from a play by August Wilson, which also features a standout performance by Viola Davis.

The bulk of this movie’s action is centered around Ma Rainey (Davis), a real-life founding mother of blues, showing up at a Chicago recording studio in 1927 to record a set of songs. Most of the scenes are either in a large recording room or a small rehearsal room where her band heads between recordings. The band consists of pianist Toledo (Glynn Turman), Slow Drag (Michael Potts) on bass, band leader and trombone player Cutler (Coleman Domingo) and Levee (Boseman), a trumpet player with a lot of ideas about his songs and the band he plans to form and even “better” more modern arrangements for Ma’s songs. Levee is certain his style of playing will better reach customers in the big cities, who might see Ma’s music as too country. The studio’s owner, Sturdyvant (Jonny Coyne), seems to agree with Levee, but Ma doesn’t care about the potential big city audience when she knows what the audience who turns out to see her likes. Her manager Irvin (Jeremy Shamos) might tend to agree with Sturdyvant but knows that ultimately Ma will have things her way. And as we see when she talks to Cutler about making these recordings, she might seem like a diva (demanding cold Coca-Colas or for a nephew to have a small part) but she always knows exactly what she’s doing and how to wring the most from a system that is inherently against her interests.

There are times when this movie very much feels like a play in the staging and the way people talk, but I didn’t mind that, even when it leads to monologues that would maybe feel unnatural in a more “out in the world” movie. Here, the strength of the performances easily pushes past any not-quite-cinematic staginess. The movie takes place, for the most part, on one day in 1927 in one building but also manages to serve up a good slice of late 1800s through mid 1900s American history (the ending of the movie mercilessly encapsulates the next at least 50 years in the American music industry).

Boseman, who died this summer, will likely get the bulk of the spotlight here. This movie shows how much more Boseman had in him, how much of a good-across-the-board performer he was. Boseman was someone who could be an anchor in a big popular blockbuster, a believable action hero and do more nuanced work. Even though he gets some big shouty moments here, you can see layers going on behind Levee’s words.

Davis, of course, is also great here because she is basically great everywhere. Davis is masterful at showing how Ma uses loud demands as protection in a situation of constant vulnerability. Davis doesn’t give us a perfect human being but does give us a rounded character whose life you can see in the expressions on her face. A

Rated R for language, some sexual content and brief violence, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by George C. Wolfe with a screenplay by Ruben Santiago-Hudson (based on the play by August Wilson), Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is an hour and 34 minutes long and distributed by Netflix, where it is currently available.

Freaky (R)

A high school girl swaps bodies with a grunting serial killer in Freaky, a fun horror movie with a particularly fun Vince Vaughn performance.

Teen Millie (Kathryn Newton) is having a hard time. Her father died a year ago, which has left her mother, Coral (Kate Finneran), a bit of a wreck and her police officer older sister, Char (Dana Drori), angry. Millie is so busy trying to smooth over their relationship and take care of her mom she doesn’t seem to have the space to grieve herself or to live her life. Her friends Nyla (Celeste O’Connor) and Josh (Misha Osherovich) urge her to go to the upcoming homecoming dance, take a chance on talking to the boy, Booker (Uriah Shelton), she likes and pursue her dream of heading off to college. You don’t want to get to the end of your life and realize you never lived it for yourself, Nyla tells her.

And that end may come much sooner than expected. The Blissfield Butcher (Vaughn) has long been a local urban legend, a spooky tale of a serial killer who hunts teens born from decades-earlier murders. Nobody much believes the stories until four teens are horribly, red-corn-syrupily murdered in the movie’s opening scenes. After the big football game, Millie, who plays the school’s mascot, is waiting alone outside the stadium for a ride home. The Butcher appears and chases Millie before stabbing her in the shoulder with a strange, old blade he stole from the scene of the movie’s first murders.

Char arrives just in time to scare him off but not before Millie notices that the Butcher started bleeding from the same spot on his shoulder where he had stabbed Millie in hers. When she wakes up the next morning, she finds herself not in her cheery bedroom but on a mattress in a murder-lair (complete with disfigured mannequins and dead animals) and in the giant (and smelly) body of the Butcher. Which, of course, means that back at her house the Butcher is waking up to her unsuspecting mom and sister.

Quickly, we figure out the rules to this situation: The knife has curse-bestowing properties, the bodies have been switched for 24 hours, Millie has to stab the Butcher to switch the bodies back or their situation becomes permanent. Though a pretty solid sketch of the Butcher is all over the news — making it hard for Millie to move around her town unnoticed — she does get some help from Nyla and Josh, whom she’s able to convince of her true identity. They work to get the knife from the police evidence locker and find the Butcher to get her body back. She also needs to stop the Butcher, who quickly realizes that his physically weaker new body nevertheless has the benefit of lulling people into seeing no threat until it’s too late. Also, Millie irritatingly notices, the Butcher seems to have done a better job at styling her body (a bold red lip, a sassy red leather jacket) then she usually does.

The Butcher, both as Vaughn and as Newton, is just a grunting kill machine; it’s Millie where the actors get to do a performance, particularly Vaughn. Sure, it’s a little gimmicky to have big, extra-scruffy 50-year-old Vince Vaughn nervously biting at his finger and screeching like a teenager. But he does a really solid job making us see Millie and her feelings, fears and conviction.

Beneath all this silliness, Freaky — not unlike Happy Death Day, which this movie’s director, Christopher Landon, also directed — has some interesting beats about grief and learning how to come back from loss. A scene between Vaughn as Millie and Finneran’s Coral (Millie’s mom) does a good job of being silly and funny, bittersweet and filling in the details of the family’s relationships with each other in a way that really pays off later. There are also some interesting moments about power and gender that transcend what you expect from a movie with this much gleeful gore.

I will admit that I am definitely more in the tank for this kind of horror — horror plus laughs, weighted more toward laughs — and this movie puts you even more at ease by not only making the kills extravagantly stagy but also making everybody other than Millie who is attacked by the Butcher extremely unsympathetic. So, it’s all fun with very little serious “keep you up at night” terror. B+

Rated R for strong bloody horror violence, sexual content and language throughout, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Christopher Landon with a screenplay by Michael Kennedy and Christopher Landon, Freaky is an hour and 42 minutes long and distributed by Universal Studios. The movie is currently in theaters and available on video on demand.

Godmothered (PG)

A godmother in training tries to prove her godmothering prowess before her academy of godmothers is shut down and everyone is sent to work as tooth fairies in Godmothered, a live action movie new to Disney+.

Eleanor (Jillian Bell) has never done proper godmother work and it doesn’t look like she’s going to get the chance. Even though she is the rare eager young recruit, there isn’t much call for fairy godmothers these days and the school’s headmistress, Moira (Jane Curtin), is considering shutting the whole thing down. In a desperate attempt to save the Motherland, as the godmother headquarters is called, and prove her own godmothering abilities, Eleanor finds an old letter to a godmother from a young girl named Mackenzie and decides to go to Boston to find and help her.

When she arrives, she learns that Mackenzie (Isla Fisher) is now “old,” an Isla-Fisher-aged single mom with two daughters — teen Jane (Jillian Shea Spaeder) and younger Mia (Willa Skye) — and a crummy job on a fifth-ranked local news show. Eleanor is surprised but still determined to help her; Mackenzie thinks she’s doing an act and calls security. Eventually, by showing Mackenzie her old letter, doing some magic and getting a raccoon to help with household chores, Eleanor convinces Mackenzie that she is a real fairy godmother. But Mackenzie, who is still grieving the death of her husband, says she doesn’t want the ball gown and happily-ever-after with a prince that Eleanor has been trained to provide. Might that change if it turns out that colleague Hugh Prince (Santiago Cabrera) is interested in more than just Mackenzie’s producing abilities?

This has a very Enchanted feel — with the earnest visitor from fairyland learning the strange and grimy ways of the unmagical modern-day Earth. But this movie isn’t quite as, er, enchanting — not quite as smart in its story or its writing, even though I am a fan of Bell and Fisher does solid work here too. This has that second-tier-ish-ness of a direct-to-video sequel (with some direct-to-video-level special effects too). But for that, it’s not the worst. Common Sense Media gives this an age 8 rating and I would say it’s that primarily because younger kids might be a little bored but it wouldn’t necessarily scare or traumatize them. (There is maybe one extremely veiled sex joke that I only half caught because my kids were sort of in and out of the room during the movie; there for the singing and the fairy magic but wandering away during the emotional talking stuff.)

I think Godmothered could have been a more substantial movie with a little rewriting; it has a solid cast, some nice ideas (does True Love really have to be about finding your Prince? And what does “happily ever after” truly mean?) and some cute moments. B-

Rated PG for some suggestive comments, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Sharon Maguire with a screenplay by Kari Granlund and Melissa Stack, Godmothered is an hour and 50 minutes long and is distributed by Walt Disney Studios on Disney+.

Featured photo: Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom