Movie Review: The High Note (2020)

Genre: Romantic Music Dramedy

Director: Nisha Ganatra

Starring: Dakota Johnson, Tracee Ellis Ross, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Ice Cube, Bill Pullman

Running Time: 113 minutes

Synopsis: In Los Angeles, Maggie (Dakota Johnson) is the personal assistant to music legend Grace Davis (Tracee Ellis Ross) but has ambitions to become a record producer. Grace's career has plateaued, and her manager Jack Robertson (Ice Cube) is plotting a Vegas residency. Maggie meets promising singer/songwriter David Cliff (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) and helps him in the recording studio. A romance blossoms between them, but Grace notices that her assistant is distracted.

What Works Well: The villain-free plot avoids many romantic comedy cliches, and the focus on in-studio creativity and sound optimization is handled with controlled verve. Dakota Johnson brings an amiable screen presence to Maggie, and Tracee Ellis Ross (Diana's daughter) finds texture beneath a diva's veneer. Ice Cube contributes streaks of gruff humour, while Bill Pullman adds character nuance in a third act appearance as Maggie's father.

What Does Not Work As Well: The mix of music, drama, comedy, and romance never extends beyond a cordial mid-range, and it's eventually painfully obvious that both superstar Grace and potential star David are more interesting than central character Maggie.

Conclusion: A pleasant enough tune, but lacking long-term sonority.

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Movie Review: Boyz N The Hood (1991)

A social drama and coming-of-age story, Boyz N The Hood is a stunningly clear-eyed look at the grim realities of the Black inner-city experience.

It's 1984 in Los Angeles, and 10-year-old Tre gets into trouble at school one time too many. His divorced mother Reva (Angela Bassett) transports him to live with his father Furious Styles (Laurence Fishburne) in the tough Crenshaw neighbourhood. Furious is a real estate agent and determined to keep Tre out of trouble by being a good male role model. The other neighbourhood kids, including brothers Darren and Ricky, are not so lucky and lack a father figure.

Seven years later, Tre (Cuba Gooding Jr.) is finishing high school, holding a job at the mall, and courting girlfriend Brandi (Nia Long). They are both planning to go to college. Ricky is already a father, but hoping his football skills will secure him a college scholarship. Darren has dropped out of school and is into thuggery as the neighbourhood crack cocaine dealer. Crenshaw is besieged by despair, frequent shootings, brutality, and police interventions. When Darren tangles with a rival gang, the violence escalates.

At 24 years old, John Singleton wrote and directed Boyz N The Hood based on his own experiences and the friends he grew up with in South Central Los Angeles. The first Black cinematic perspective of the treacherous environment where American Black youth are brought up, this is a painfully stark and often harrowing portrayal of a hell on earth. The language is coarse, the behaviour brazen and crass, the attitude towards women abhorrent, and it's all routine for youth coming of age unequipped to even seek a better future.

Young men like Tre, Ricky and Darren emerge from broken homes where parents are more than likely to be addicts. With limited opportunities and resources, they flounder to find their way out of a jungle dominated by violence, guns, drugs and abuse. Singleton underlines the siege mentality with the clatter of police helicopters hovering incessantly overhead, the Crenshaw residents' main interaction with government reduced to officers quick to aim guns at heads and hardware at the entire neighbourhood.

The film does have weaknesses. The opening segment with the kids sometimes slips into television drama mode, a warped mirror of The Cosby Show. The salute to Stand By Me threatens to slip into mimicry. Beyond Tre, Darren and Ricky, the film is littered with young men who remain stock representations. And Cuba Gooding Jr. at 23 struggles to convince as the 17 year old Tre.

While the messaging is preachy, it is also effective in its simplicity. A present and caring father is a starting point to improve the odds. Birth control tames the cycle of instability. Young Black males refraining from knee-jerk reactions to kill each other at the slightest provocation helps. Pursuing school and employment is a good idea. And broader society could contribute by stemming the flow of guns and drugs into neighbourhoods least equipped to survive the resulting carnage.

Singleton does not pretend any outsiders are actively seeking solutions, and in Furious Styles Boyz N The Hood finds the catalyst for a change that can only come from within. The path out of affliction requires uncommon fortitude, but the alternatives are depressingly dire.

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Movie Review: Three Kings (1999)

Faced with the choice to get rich or do the right thing, it takes strength and genuine courage to sacrifice wealth and help others. Three Kings presents this choice, with strong geopolitical consequences, in a fictional story inspired by the war to liberate Kuwait in the early 1990s.

The 1991 war to kick the Iraqi army out of Kuwait has started and ended with lighting speed: most of the American soldiers stationed in the desert saw little action. Restless and looking for adventure, Gates (George Clooney), Barlow (Mark Wahlberg), Elgin (Ice Cube) and Vig (Spike Jonze) stumble on a map revealing the location of hidden gold bullion that the Iraqi Army stole from Kuwait.

Setting out on their own, the four soldiers plot a quick smash and grab operation to locate, seize and keep the gold for themselves. Nothing goes as planned and they are soon embroiled in the middle of the Iraqi civil war that broke out in the shadow of the US military action: rebel forces are trying to oust the government of Saddam Hussein; the revolutionary guards are brutally suppressing the uprising; and the gold-seeking American soldiers are caught in the middle, AWOL with no back-up and no orders to interfere in the unfolding drama.

Barlow is taken prisoner, Gates connects with the rebels, and soon what was a treasure hunt turns into an international incident, with three surviving American soldiers choosing a side in the internal Iraqi conflict, against the orders of their government and commanders.

Hollywood re-imaginings of wars to correct the wrongs of history are common, and here director David O. Russell, filming his own script, goes back to the first war with Iraq to correct the travesty of the United States encouraging the overthrow of Hussein after the liberation of Kuwait, and then leaving the rebels to get slaughtered by the helicopters of the brutal regime. In Three Kings, Gates and his three co-conspirators refuse to abandon the rebels and their families, and pay a high price in lives and treasure lost in order to uphold the principle of loyalty.

Three Kings is also a strong anti-war statement, with Russell humanizing Iraqi rank-and-file soldiers, demonstrating their suffering and family losses as victims of American aerial bombing.

In story, style and comic elements, Three Kings borrows heavily from Clint Eastwood's Kelly's Heroes (1970), the fictional World War Two adventure also about a small group of soldiers attempting to steal gold and triggering much bigger events. Russell directs with an entertaining irreverence that captures the absurdity of war, and allows stars Clooney and Wahlberg to shine brighter than the stark desert sun.

Three Kings delivers its message with an eccentric and sometimes uneven combination of bluntness and humour: even the greediest and most jaded soldiers can see their way to doing the right thing. Perhaps it takes being there, near the battle, to distinguish right from wrong, and that's why the political puppet masters invariably get it wrong.

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