Marshall (2017)

Marshall (2017): written by Michael Koskoff and Jacob Koskoff; directed by Reginald Hudlin; starring Chadwick Boseman (Thurgood Marshall), Josh Gad (Sam Friedman), Kate Hudson (Eleanor Strubing), and Sterling K. Brown (Joseph Spell): Marshall plays a bit fast and loose with history in its tale of then-NAACP lawyer and future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall's participation in a rape trial in Connecticut in 1940. The major alteration come with re-imagining veteran Civil Rights lawyer Sam Friedman as a young, inexperienced Josh Gad.

Of course, this is a bit of a 'sauce for the goose' situation. The movie diminishes the contributions and experience of a white character (albeit Jewish and thus also familiar with bigotry) so as to foreground the competence and accomplishments of an African-American character. The movie does hew fairly closely to the facts of the case, so kudos for that.

Chadwick Boseman is riveting as Thurgood Marshall. The NAACP would send Marshall to consult on cases involving Civil Rights matters across America. How this hasn't been the basis for a TV show, I have no idea. Boseman has now played real-life characters Ernie Davis, James Brown, Thurgood Marshall, and Jackie Robinson. And he's the Black Panther!

Josh Gad is fine in a somewhat simplistic sidekick role. Equalizing the power relationship between Friedman and Marshall might have made for a quieter, better movie. But it's amazing that this film got made at all. And seemingly with the help of a lot of Chinese investors. What is up with that? Reginald Hudlin, whom I still associate with House Party, navigates a period-specific drama with grace and aplomb. 

The movie navigates the very, very hazardous territory of a false rape accusation with care and finesse. The reason for such a rarity of a false accusation are made perfectly clear, and the film foregrounds the sympathetic reasons that Kate Hudson's lonely socialite would have done such a thing. Sterling K. Brown is solid as the accused, a chauffeur with a checkered past (but not a rapey past). In all, recommended.

Dunkirk (2017)

Dunkirk (2017): written and directed by Christopher Nolan; starring Fionn Whitehead (Tommy), Damien Bonnard (French Soldier), Mark Rylance (Mr. Dawson), Tom Hardy (Farrier), Kenneth Branagh (Commander Bolton), and Cillian Murphy (PTSD Soldier): Between May 26 and June 4 1940, about 400,000 troops from Belgium, the British Empire, and France were trapped on the French beaches of Dunkirk. Then, for various reasons still argued about by historians, Nazi Germany chose not to overwhelm those trapped forces with infantry, tanks, and heavy bombing. 

The result was the greatest and most important Maritime evacuation in military history as a fleet of British military and civilian ships of about 800 evacuated approximately 350,000 of those troops to England. Lose those troops and the Allies probably lose the war long before the United States of America joins it.

Christopher Nolan doesn't attempt a wide-reaching, expository historical epic here. Instead, he focuses his film on three targets operating on three different but converging timelines. That would be a week on the beach with the waiting troops, a day on a civilian-piloted boat helping with the evacuation, and an hour in the air with RAF pilots engaging the Nazi air force over sea and land.

It all works beautifully. The only drag is a fictional sub-plot on the boat that seems clumsy and obvious. Otherwise, Dunkirk is a war movie that portrays the fear and tension of warfare in a number of set-pieces. The only traditional war-movie 'release' comes with the RAF's battles with the German fighters and bombers. Otherwise, Dunkirk is the war movie as psychological horror, with groups of men listening for the sounds of bombs dropping through the air, pinned down under fire from an enemy they can't see, or struggling to escape the flooding compartments of a sinking rescue ship.

Civilian boat captain Mark Rylance and Commander-on-the-beach Kenneth Branagh supply the personable acting here, with smaller turns from several of the young actors who portray the troops and Tom Hardy as one of the RAF pilots. The aerial combat scenes are thrilling and expansive; the rescues at sea are thrilling and horrifying. It's a marvelous, focused movie (less than 2 hours long!), and it may come to be regarded as Christopher Nolan's best. Highly recommended.

Duets

My Little Chickadee: written by W.C. Fields and Mae West; directed by Edward F. Cline; starring W.C. Fields (Cuthbert J. Twillie), Mae West (Flower Belle Lee), Margaret Hamilton (Mrs. Gideon) and Donald Meek (Amos Budge) (1940): Two of the biggest movie-comedy stars of the 1930's team up for 1940, while hating each other in real life all the while. Both Mae West and W.C. Fields were in the home stretch of movie stardom when they did My Little Chickadee -- West would live for another 40 years but without being a box-office star, while Fields would be dead by 1946.

Their comedy personas are fascinating, though overwhelmed somewhat by time and distance and changing taste. West really isn't all that funny, a problem caused in part by the escalation in movie censorship at the time. It's hard for a comedienne whose comedy is based on double-entendres if the censorship people won't allow them. Fields is a lot funnier. It helps that he does some physical comedy. That stuff never gets old. He falls into a bathtub. He mistakenly romances a goat. Hoo ha!

The two stars wrote their own lines; West also wrote the rest of the movie. Fields was a drunken boor during filming; West was a professional. You can still see the appeal of the then-47-year-old West in her scenes. The movie's certainly an interesting historical artifact, and it does point the way back in time to better individual projects for the two stars. Lightly recommended.

Gravity: written by Alfonso and Jonas Cuaron and George Clooney; directed by Alfonso Cuaron; starring Sandra Bullock (Ryan Stone), George Clooney (Matt Kowalski) and Ed Harris (Mission Control) (2013): The plot and characterization of Gravity creak and groan as if the movie had been penned in the early days of silent movies. The technology needed to make the film amazes, and the film's set-pieces and terse pacing won it a number of Oscars, including Best Director.

I like George Clooney and Sandra Bullock. I'm guessing that much of the movie-viewing public does as well: it's their film. There are almost no other characters. When their space-shuttle mission goes awry, survival in space becomes the movie's point. But because we live in the era of Hollywood Screenwriting 101 and the endless need to supply the viewer with "motivation," Bullock must also be supplied with motivation.

Yes, motivation for surviving in space. Motivation for NOT DYING. Writing in the movies hasn't gotten worse over the years, but it has gotten worse in the blockbusters and big-budget extravaganzas. Sandra Bullock can't just be a professional with a survival instinct. She has to have a sad past. She has to be emotionally crippled until someone gives her a lecture because even imminent death isn't enough to shake her out of her self-pity. Women! Am I right, Hollywood guys?

So some stuff happens in space and Bullock and Clooney have to deal with it. The effects are pretty nice, though occasionally ridiculous to anyone with a modicum of knowledge of physics and orbital mechanics. Stars impossibly twinkle in space. People suddenly become religious. There are pep talks and floating things and microgravity explosions. The title never really makes sense. The actual direction is as old as D.W. Griffith figuring these things out in 1915, and the old tricks still work, especially with CGI and 3-D and astonishingly complicated technical systems. So it goes. Recommended.

The Great McGinty

The Great McGinty: written and directed by Preston Sturges; starring Brian Donlevy (Dan McGinty), Muriel Angelus (Catherine McGinty), Akim Tamiroff (The Boss) and William Demarest (Skeeters) (1940): Zippy political comedy from the great writer-director Preston Sturges. Indeed, this was his first directorial effort, and it won the Oscar for best screenplay.

Set in a city that seems an awful lot like Chicago but is never named, The Great McGinty shows the rise and fall of, well, Dan McGinty. We first see him as a grifter and a drifter. But once he attracts the eye of backroom political power The Boss, McGinty's rise to the governorship of his state is assured.

Political corruption is taken as a given in this movie, which may surprise people who are unaware that political corruption wasn't created in the year 2000. Sturges was something of a cynic, though he held out hope that a person's good nature could be put to decent use, just so long as that person didn't end up owing the wrong people money.

Brian Donlevy is solid as the tough, hard-luck McGinty, and Muriel Angelus is mostly fine as his secretary/wife-of-convenience, though her odd mid-Atlantic accent can occasionally distract one from what she's saying. Akim Tamiroff blusters, sweats, and yells entertainingly as The Boss, the Eastern European mobster with a heart of lead. This isn't Sturges' best film performing double duty, but it is fun and entertaining and blessedly short and fast-moving, clocking in at under 90 minutes. Recommended.