by ·Comments Off on Deja Vu (2006, Tony Scott)

Denzel investigates a terror-bombing, focusing on a dead hotgirl (Ghost Protocol‘s Paula Patton) who apparently died before the explosion. He meets twenty round-faced white guys who all look the same, then gets pulled into a super-surveillance team with a magic technology that can see anywhere in the city four-and-a-quarter days ago, so they track Paula’s past in hopes of finding the bomber. This works out, but Denzel realizes he can influence the past through their portal and tries to stop the bombing before it happens.

“We’re combining all the data we’ve got into one fluid shot” – Scott loves a fluid shot. Branching universe theory: “is she alive or is she dead?” Some excellent pre-Tenet mind-twisters, including an incredible car chase where Denzel sees the current time through one eye and the past in the other.

Featuring Jesus Caviezel as the mad bomber, Adam Goldberg as the Jon-Wurstery scientist, Matt Craven as Denzel’s doubly-doomed partner. I worried this would be a dumb/bad movie reclaimed by the vulgar auteurists, but I have to admit it’s extremely awesome and I had the best time watching it.

Huber and Peranson in Cinema Scope (see also: John and Jake):

Deja Vu is upfront about the questionable nature of the whole government-funded enterprise; this is not about clearing your name (as in [Minority Report]). Saving the woman being watched, Claire Kuchever (Paula Patton), is not the goal, rather trailing her past will help the agents solve a terrorist bombing with echoes of both 9/11 and Oklahoma City. The projected futility of the investigation’s outcome for Claire makes Carlin’s obsession with her all the more poignant, but like in Vertigo the voyeuristic and necrophiliac aspects of his romantic feelings are foregrounded. “I get the weird feeling I’m being watched,” reads an entry in Claire’s diary after an uncomfortable Jumbotron-surveyed shower … More effective is his touching prior assertion to Claire: “Don’t you remember we held hands once?” It is also quite sinister, since this happened during her autopsy.

by ·Comments Off on Mo’ Better Blues (1990, Spike Lee)

Spike Lee manages a jazz band composed of trumpeter Denzel Washington, Wesley Snipes on sax, Radio Raheem on bass, Sweet Dick Willie on drums and Giancarlo Esposito on keys, and I’m fine, I’m very happy with all this, don’t need any kind of storyline. But we get one anyway, with Spike’s gambling debts and poor management, Snipes wishing to lead his own group, and Denzel juggling two girls: Joie Lee and Cynda Williams (later of the Arkansas-set One False Move). Movie is heavyhanded with its ideas, everyone telling Denzel that he doesn’t know what he wants in life. He gets what he gets – busted in the face by Sam Jackson while trying to defend Spike, ending up with a family with Joie and no music career, overall a halfway decent script, but with ten of my favorite actors and some of the greatest scene staging of the decade, an excellent movie. In Rosenbaum’s heavy jazz-analysis review he reports the movie was to be titled A Love Supreme “until Coltrane’s widow denied him permission, reportedly because of the film’s use of profanity.”

by ·Comments Off on The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021, Joel Coen)

Artificial, stagy-looking, stylish, with great transitions between scenes. Everyone has different speaking styles, not flattened into a single form. Kathryn Hunter obviously MVP, good to see Stephen Root and Harry Melling (Julie Taymor’s Puck). Most importantly, there are more birds in this version than in any other.

by ·Comments Off on The Book of Eli (2010, Hughes Bros.)

In a dismal grey-brown postapocalypse, Denzel hunts and cooks a cat, robs a corpse then relaxes to listen to his zune. Even babies wear sun goggles in town, the sun deadlier than ever since the nuclear event punched holes in the atmosphere. Local warlord Gary Oldman wants a bible to help control the populace and spread his influence, but passer-through Denzel has the only surviving copy, and is an unnaturally badass fighter, so a showdown ensues. Denzel and Mila Kunis leave town down the fury road, but Gary’s caravan catches up, and more showdowns ensue. The action’s not bad – an early slaughter, backlit under a bridge, puts a reminiscent scene from Resident Evil 6 to shame.

Most importantly, we are in Tom Waits Mode, and he appears in this movie as “the engineer,” aka he runs a barter shop across the street from Oldman’s saloon. He makes an uneasy deal to charge Denzel’s zune, then reappears at the end to open the lock on the bible, revealing that it’s in braille and D escapes to the Children of Men hope island with the entire book memorized. Waits is less pivotal here than in Seven Psychopaths, is mostly around to look cool.

by ·Comments Off on Fences (2016, Denzel Washington)

Denzel goes all-in on his performance of an oversized, talkative, opinionated garbage collector and family man who speaks mainly in baseball metaphors. I wondered near the beginning why his wife Viola Davis, who barely gets a word in, was getting awards talk for this. Then after Denzel grabs a couple of major personal victories – demanding and winning a promotion from his employer, and succeeding in crushing his son’s dreams of playing football – he reveals that he’s gotten another woman pregnant. And after that woman dies in childbirth, the long-suffering Viola steps up. “This child got a mother, but you a womanless man.” So for the second time in a row (Blackhat: “Am I being tangible… Gary?”) Viola has the year’s best line delivery.

The movie retains most of the cast from a recent stage production – and you can tell it’s based on a stage production. M. D’Angelo explains better than I can:

Really hammers home the fundamental difference between theater and cinema, showing that the difficulty in translation is more than just a matter of “staginess.” Washington uses the camera expressively, in an appropriately subdued way; every shot and cut has been carefully thought out, accentuating the performances while giving full weight to the environment surrounding them … Formally, this is very much a film. Nonetheless, it still feels like a play, because Wilson’s magnificent, musical dialogue is expressly designed for that particular medium.

Denzel’s best friend since his prison days (long story) and his trashman coworker until Denzel’s promotion leaves him behind is Stephen Henderson (a church guy in Red Hook Summer). Denzel and Viola’s high-school son is Jovan Adepo (The Leftovers) and Denzel’s older son, a jazz musician, is Russell Hornsby (Grimm and Eater). His highly symbolic trumpeter brother Gabriel with a plate in his head from WWII is Mykelti Williamson (Don King in Ali). Set in the mid-1950’s with an early 60’s postscript after the shell-of-his-former-self Denzel has passed away and the family reunites for his funeral.

I appreciate Ehrlich’s continuation of the baseball metaphors: “If Fences doesn’t quite knock it out of the park, it’s still a clutch double at a time when black stories are struggling to even get on base.”

Troy is at once both a disposable member of the underclass and a category five hurricane of humanity. His only way of reconciling those two wildly different feelings is to transmute his deficiencies and regrets into the stuff of myth — he might be the picture of the American everyman, but he’s also locked in a duel with Death, itself.