Move Over Miles, Let Chet Baker Take A Solo

BORN TO BE BLUE (Dir. Robert Budreau, 2015)

There are obvious similarities that Robert Budreau’s Chet Baker film shares with Don Cheadle’s Miles Davis film, both in current release.

They are both unconventional biopics about legendary jazz musicians, both trumpeters who struggled with drug addiction. Both center around the artist being on the verge of making a comeback. Both have film noir-ish black and white flashbacks to previous glories in younger years. And both take the facts and riff on top of them in an attempt to make the films feel like jazz itself, man.

But writer/director Budreau – a Canadian film maker that’s made nearly two dozen Canadian features, none of which I’ve seen – has fashioned a meta angle for his portrait of Baker, that involves him filming a movie in the ‘60s about his life in the ‘50s, and having a relationship with an actress who’s playing his first wife in that film.

While it is true that producer Dino De Laurentiis did approach Baker about playing himself in a movie, the project was abandoned long before any shooting took place, and the actress, named Jane Azuka, is a fictional character, a composite of several women in Baker’s life.

In possibly his finest performance, Ethan Hawke is fearlessly fragile as the used to be hot mess that was Baker, a heroin-addicted, almost toothless shell of a man who we first meet doing hard time in an Italian prison in 1966.

Jane, played by Carmen Ejogo (SELMA, THE PURGE: ANARCHY), helps Baker to stay clean and get work but his mouth injury from a beating by drug dealers (something that really happened albeit in a different way) has made it painful to play (he constantly fiddles with his ill-fitting false teeth). Slowly, Baker begins to get his groove back and with the help of his producer Dick Bock (Callum Keith Rennie) scores a special studio session for a small audience of record execs in which he nails the standard “My Funny Valentine.”

Hawke does his own singing on that and the film’s climatic “I’ve Never Been in Love Before” and it’s an effective interpretation of Baker’s vocals that nicely doesn’t come off like a self conscious impression. Kevin Turcotte beautifully plays all of Baker’s trumpet parts as none of Baker’s actual music is in the film for some reason (I assume it’s a legal matter).

In bookending scenes at New York’s iconic Birdland nightclub, Miles Davis * (Kedar Brown) and Dizzy Gillespie (Kevin Hanchard) watch Baker on stage and feel his genius but they also seemingly know that he has to have smack in order to perform. Jane definitely knows this, and whether or not he will yet again succumb to addiction is what the film ultimately hinges on.

Hawke has put in a lot of solid work in his career (particularly in the films of Richard Linklater), but his turn here as Baker is an Oscar-worthy piece of work. He terrifically plays off of his own image of a post prime pretty boy, and his scenes with Ejogo, which have a real desperate undertone to them, are as pointed as they are sometimes painful to watch.

BORN TO BE BLUE, which takes its name from a 1946 Mel Tormé song that Baker covered in 1965, may strain from its over artsiness at times but it’s largely a soulful , sad ballad about trying to reclaim past glories. It may be too on the nose that the fictional female love interest here is named Azuka, which she says means “past glory,” but Budreau’s Chet Baker biopic, which I liked quite a bit better than Cheadle’s Miles Davis movie I have to say, has the gumption to get away with it.

* That's right, Miles Davis is in Chet Baker's movie, but unsurprisingly Baker isn't even mentioned in Davis's.

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The Touching, Timely SELMA Should Be Mandatory Viewing

Now playing at a multiplex near you:

SELMA (Dir. Ava DuVernay, 2014)

Despite the accusations of inaccuracies, Ava DuVernay’s SELMA is the only 2014 film based on true events that ought to be mandatory viewing. As in, kids should be dragged to it, it should be shown in schools, etc.

SELMA’s stirring depiction of one of the most important episodes in civil rights history, the civil rights protest march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965, provides a profoundly powerful lesson about how people can pull together to rise above oppression.

It’s a timeless lesson, especially given the similarities to the protests and riots that have resulted from the fatal shooting of 18-year old African American Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, last summer, that hammers home philosopher and cultural critic George Santayana’s famous saying, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Although the bulk of the film concerns the campaign to secure equal voting rights in 1965, SELMA begins with a few scenes set in the years leading up to that period.

First, we see Martin Luther King Jr. (David Oyelowo) preparing his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. The legendary civil rights leader’s wife Coretta Scott (Carmen Ejogo) helps him with his tie in this backstage glimpse which shows him as a vulnerable, nervous man, not an unflappable icon.

Then, first-time screenwriter Paul Webb’s narrative takes us back to 1963, when the Ku Klux Klan bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four girls. Even if you know your history, the scene is a shocking sight; one that won’t soon fade from memory.

Those who don’t know their history may be confused by the chronology, but from this point on – that is, after King’s meeting with President Lyndon B. Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) in the Oval Office in December, 1965 – the film focuses on the tumultuous three-month movement in early ’65.

Wilkinson’s LBJ tells Oyelow’s MLK Jr. that because of a hundred other problems – Vietnam, poverty, Medicare, immigration reform, etc. - “This voting thing is just going to have to wait.”

Nonplussed, MLK Jr. travels to Selma to get the ball rolling with the help of of his Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which included such members as Andrew Young (Andre Holland), Ralph Abernathy (Colman Domingo), Reverend James Bevel (Common), James Orange (Omar Dorsey), Hosea Williams (Wendell Pierce) and Amelia Boynton (Lorraine Toussaint).

Meanwhile, LBJ deals with J. Edgar Hoover (Dylan Baker) who wants to discredit King, and becomes furious that Alabama Governor George Wallace (Tim Roth) has vowed to stop the march.

A violent scuffle in Selma, in which Oprah Winfrey (one of the film's producers) as Annie Lee Cooper, a hospice nurse who had previously tried several times to register to vote, punches ultra racist Sheriff Jim Clark (Stan Houston), leads to King and many of his people getting arrested.

The violence escalates when state troopers attack activists on a night march, and Jimmie Lee Jackson (Keith Stanfield) gets shot and killed by one of the police.

But the most devastating incident of the entire movement, and one of the most searing sequences on film of this last year, is undoubtedly the “Bloody Sunday” confrontation, in which 600 marchers were attacked by Alabama police and angry posses who tried to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965.

The massacre as it intensely unfolds can be hard to watch, but Duvernay’s cut-aways to folks’ horrified reactions – most notably LBJ’s - as they watch it on grainy black and white television sets – got me so caught up in the outrage that is was impossible to look away.

SELMA gets so much right in its portrayal of the passion of the protesters in the face of the severe stakes involved, that the quibbles about its mischaracterization of LBJ’s motivations are seriously misplaced.

In real life, LBJ wasn’t as hesitant to introduce a voting rights bill as shown in the film, but the film hardly depicts him as a villain. Wilkinson (who like Oyellow is British) brings a stressed-out air to the role, something he’s used to great effect in a great many movies playing morally questionable characters, but here the notion is that he’s a politician first and foremost.

This can still be seen as a flaw in the film’s framework, as are a few moments that are wrapped in melodrama, but not one that takes away from the heart pounding impact of this excellent epic.

Oyelowo, a name that everybody should learn, is sure to get an Oscar nomination for his amazing performance as MLK. He brings a gravitas to King that I’ve not seen him muster before, particularly when compared to his role as the subversive son of THE BUTLER just last year. Oyelowo doesn’t really resemble King, but he successfully channels him in both the quiet, troubled moments behind the scenes, and the famous, powerfully moving speeches we’ve all heard throughout our lives.

Cinematographer Bradford Young is also certain to get award season action for greatly giving the imagery what he called in an interview a “period, Kodachrome-esque look.” (If Young isn’t nominated for an Oscar for this then his superb work in J.C. Chandor’s A MOST VIOLENT YEAR will certainly get a nod).

The touching, timely SELMA is the best historical drama of 2014. It’s unfortunate that its story is still strongly such a necessary one to pass down, but even without recent events, it’s one that should be forever told.

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THE PURGE: ANARCHY: A Big Bunch Of Scare Fails

THE PURGE: ANARCHY
(Dir. James DeMonaco, 2014)

Last summer’s surprise hit THE PURGE was a crappy movie with a cool premise: In the near future, America legalizes all crime, even murder, for one night per year. All police and emergency services are suspended for 12 hours for the Annual Purge, all government-sanctioned by “The New Founding Fathers.” 

But while the first one was a contained home invasion scenario (revolving around Ethan Hawke as a wealthy security system salesman trying to protect his family and fortress), the second installment, out today at a multiplex near you, spreads out across the streets of Los Angeles with the promise of a lot more bloody mayhem.

So the theme of the rich killing the poor as population control is reheated via the tale of a small group of people trying to make their way on foot through the scary murderous masses of those looking to “release the beast.”

None of the five folks thrown together here is a “name” actor, and I doubt this movie will change that.

Zach Gilford and Kiele Sanchez are our married couple representatives whose car breaks down (actually it was sabotaged by creepy face-painted or grotesque mask wearing thugs lurking around before the Purge began) on the way out of town. Their storyline is that they are getting separated but haven’t told family yet. Will their night-long struggle for survival bring them back together? Is this Times New Roman font that you’re reading?

Then there’s Frank Grillo, maybe the closest to a “name” as he’s been in big stuff like CAPTAIN AMERICA and ZERO DARK THIRTY, as our grizzled ex-cop cliché set on avenging the death of his son. Grillo is the group’s leader as he thinks fast and is great with guns as I bet you could’ve guessed.

Mother and daughter duo Carmen Ejogo and Zoë Soul, who are on the run after their apartment in the projects is ambushed, symbolize the underclass, and provide cultural criticism of the event by way of badly written exposition.

Oh yeah, there’s also an anti-Purge resistance force led by Michael K. Williams (The Wire, Boardwalk Empire) mixed up in all this repugnant noise.

It’s incredible how little excitement and suspense is generated by all the edgy elements on display here. The desperately over-the-top THE PURGE: ANARCHY is a big bunch of scare fails. 

Director/writer DeMonaco apparently thinks that thrusting someone suddenly into the frame is the best way to frighten an audience, but within the tone and rhythms of this movie that only mildly startles once or twice; afterwards every other instance can be felt way before it happens.

There’s only so many times you can see somebody get machine-gunned down and it have any impact too.

THE PURGE: ANARCHY is markedly better than the original, but it’s still a terrible movie. It’s a horror spectacle disguised as moral fable with no political statement to make beyond ‘hey, look at how evil the one-percenters are – exploiting and hunting down poor people for their own entertainment! The 99 should rise up!’ It’s just an excuse for a showcase of hundreds of killings, not to forget a few horribly edited fight scenes too. The few random moments of humor here seem almost accidental as well.

But I know that the kids will probably eat it up and we’ll most likely get an endless SAW-style franchise that will extend way beyond 2023, the year this one is set. Sigh.

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