Seemingly sharing the spotlight unintentionally here is the glum, despondent inebriated protagonist played by Renee Zellweger with mostly unearned musical or star power here, and the dreary narrative during the course of which an older Judy Garland's limited emotional range veers from cranky, whining and irritable to simply unsympathetically annoying. And for those younger audiences unfamiliar with the once exceedingly popular performer around in the last century, and not those in attendance for a sentimental dose of nostalgia, there may simply be a baffled, clueless response to the melodramatic proceedings.
And no fault of Garland's, the stilted presentation focusing on her final years abruptly cut short while living in London, is directed by UK filmmaker Robert Goold - with just a few productions to his credit counting mostly Shakespeare and British royalty dramas. And with Goold's primary body of work as a theater director, the film can't escape his more familiar claustrophobic theatrical sensibility of a staged production. While in fact a biopic actually based on a stage play End Of The Rainbow, revisiting the tragic entertainer's final concerts before her life came to a sudden end, following a barbiturate overdose at the age of forty-seven in 1969.
So unless the audience is comprised of the late legend's diehard fan base, one is more likely to feel locked in a room for two hours with a distressed sulking, gloomy diva - frustrating and annoying as well to those around her. Judy Garland or not.
Dolemite Is My Name: Raw And Real Class, Race And Cultural Divide Satire
Like the second coming of blaxploitation, Craig Brewer's Dolemite Is My Name is not only a stinging subversive homage to the gritty, stylishly rude and sassy genre back then. But taking aim as well secondarily at the film world, that both badmouthed those outsider movies and embraced them for profit.
Eddie Murphy in a simultaneously hot wired and heartfelt reincarnation of real life seventies inner city standup comic turned stage performer and blaxploit film star Rudy Ray Moore, has much more on his mind than simply gags and gross-out. With class, race and cultural divides up for satirical scrutiny as well, the entire explosive socio-political era that fed blaxploitation gets raw enlightenment. Along with the ignited rebel instinct, lucid moment of the marginalized uttered by the man later dubbed by a younger generation as The Godfather Of Rap - When did my life become so small.
And, beginning with the unheralded, own uniquely colorful expressiveness to be gleaned from the lower depths of the outcasts in the streets, the homeless and alcoholic broken lives which Moore first observed, conveyed and infused into his own innovative humor and style. Then at the moment of obsession with determination to break the color line in movies in a big way, the outrageously outlandish, comedic confrontational clash internally, exposed in racial communication breakdown between Moore's street sensibility and the black bourgeoisie in the personage of the intellectual stage playwright he approaches to recruit to craft his screenplay. And the sensational sidebar humor to be had as if on different planets, between the social justice warrior's loftier infused political vision and Dolemite's hilariously emphatic earthy streetwise sensibility.
Nor are film critics given a pass either, a
white corporate media
chorus of bashers denouncing Dolemite's released movie. But with zero impact on the marginalized African-American population from which the press in profound alienation, is alerted to their own lack of influence - as the film goes on anyway to rake in 10 million dollars.
Along with the rare sighting in practically any movie whatsoever, to be discovered in the resonating tender interlude of a deep friendship between a male and female (Murphy and Da'Vine Joy Randolph's Lady Reed). For a change not inevitably and predictably based on sex, but rather a soulful connection after Moore observes Lady Reed as a victim of domestic violence and draws her into his kooky fold. And which evolves into an eminently illuminated moment when Reed remarks with astonishing wonder - I've never seen anyone who looks like me in a movie.
Prairie Miller
