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.
Dial 'M' for Murder: adapted by Frederick Knott from his own stage play; directed by Alfred Hitchcock; starring Ray Milland (Tony Wendice); Grace Kelly (Margot Wendice), Robert Cummings (Mark Halliday), John Williams (Chief Inspector Hubbard), and Anthony Dawson (Swann) (1954): Mostly minor Hitchcock has the cast but lacks a top-rate script: if you didn't know it was based on a play, you'd figure it out by the second act. Ray Milland's cunning plan to kill wife Grace Kelly by proxy turns out to have too many moving parts -- or perhaps too few. It's a nice time waster, and all of the leads are fine, including John Williams as an increasingly Columbo-esque English policeman. Originally shown in 3-D, only the repeated establishment of an extreme foreground in most shots overtly acknowledges the process. Lightly recommended.
The Wedding Ringer: written by Jeremy Garelick and Jay Lavender; directed by Jeremy Garelick; starring Kevin Hart (Jimmy Callahan), Josh Gad (Doug Harris), Kaley Cuoco (Gretchen Palmer), and Jorge Garcia (Lurch) (2015): Sloppy but engaging buddy comedy manages to graft the narrative apparatus of a Heist movie onto a wedding scenario. Josh Gad plays a lovable, insanely wealthy tax attorney who has no friends -- not even one to be the Best Man at his wedding. Enter Kevin Hart as a man who sells his services as a Best Man to the friendless. And the services of whatever people he can round up to fill the roles of Gad's imaginary groomsmen, Gad having invented and named those groomsmen and the imaginary Best Man to his fiancee and the wedding planner prior to engaging Hart's services. There are rough spots and sections that fall flat, but overall this is a decent, lightweight comedy buoyed by the charms of both Hart and Gad. Recommended.
The Terminal Beach (1964) by J.G. Ballard, containing the following stories: A Question of Re-Entry (1963); The Drowned Giant (1964); End-Game (1963); The Illuminated Man (1964); The Reptile Enclosure (1963); The Delta at Sunset (1964); The Terminal Beach (1964); Deep End (1961); The Volcano Dances (1964); Billennium (1961); The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon (1964); and The Lost Leonardo (1964).
Icy, engaging collection of early 1960's short stories from J.G. Ballard. Many of the stories are at least nominally science fiction. All of them are Weird, though in several cases this Weirdness is entirely a question of tone: nothing overtly fantastic or science-fictional occurs in five of the twelve stories. Nonetheless, even those stories disturb one enough that they straddle the line between the strange and the horrific.
Ballard was only a couple of years away from his avant-garde, experimental period. None of the stories included here are challenging in a structural sense. Several challenge the reader's perceptions of genre, however, along with one's ability to navigate subjective narration and altered states of consciousness. Ballard's concern with the fragility of the human psyche manifests itself again and again in various ways. So, too, the apocalypse, always observed in a cool and somewhat detached manner by either his narrators or the third-person narrative voice.
But as dry and cool a voice as Ballard can be, behind all those narrative masks exists the mind of an aesthete. The end of the world (if that's what it is) is a hauntingly beautiful place in "The Illuminated Man." Thoughts on art, and the art of Leonardo da Vinci, dominate the quietly horrifying "The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon" and the jolly fantasy "The Lost Leonardo." And a description of the decay of the body of a mysterious giant takes up the bulk of "The Drowned Giant," a description that haunts and troubles even as the story questions the very nature of the fantastic and people's reactions to unusual events.
One could call "The Drowned Giant" a horror story about familiarization and the ever-encroaching Un-fantastic. So too "The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon" and "The Delta at Sunset" with their mentally disturbed narrators seeking an escape into a fantastically distorted hallucination that surpasses the 'real' world in scope and beauty, the same 'real' world that reduces the drowned giant to a debased and dismantled normativity. In all, a fine collection. Highly recommended.
