One Night in Miami: Compelling revisionist history

One Night in Miami (2020) • View trailer

Four stars. Rated R, for profanity

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.15.21

On Feb. 25, 1964 — on the eve of the name change that would prove so controversial — Cassius Clay became the world boxing champion after an upset victory over Sonny Liston, during a bout at Florida’s Miami Convention Center.

 

Basking in the euphoria of an historic sports upset by Cassius Clay (Eli Goree, second
from left), he and his friends — from left, Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.), Malcolm X
(Kingsley Ben-Adir) and Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge) — are about to debate how best
to "market" such an outcome.

Following the match, Clay returned to his room at the Hampton House Hotel, where he spent a quiet evening with friends Malcolm X, Sam Cooke and Jim Brown … under the watchful eye of Nation of Islam security. Nobody knows what they talked about — at least, not to any great degree — but playwright Kemp Powers became obsessed by the notion of what could have been discussed by that amazing quartet, at that seminal moment during the nascent Civil Rights movement.

 

The result was 2013’s One Night in Miami, a 90-minute one-act play that Powers has just adapted into a film — available via Amazon Prime — helmed with capable assurance by actress-turned-director Regina King (an impressive feature film debut). 

 

It’s a fascinating “what if” scenario. And even if hindsight has allowed Powers to shade the content of this encounter, the issues discussed certainly would have been just as relevant then, as they are today (sadly).

 

Making a movie from a play, particularly one of this claustrophobic nature, always involves the challenge of “opening up” the action, so that we don’t feel we’re merely watching a filmed stage performance. Powers and King get around this with some brief prologues that cleverly — and wincingly — blend Black oppression with failure.

 

Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.), despite possessing more than two dozen Top 40 hits by this point in his career, flops miserably before a white Copacabana audience that radiates contempt. Clay (Eli Goree), facing Henry Cooper in June 1963, is knocked to the mat. (The astonished look on Goree’s face is an early indication of the almost eerie way he channels the once-and-future Muhammad Ali.)

 

Brown (Aldis Hodge), just beginning to transition from NFL fame to an acting career — having just wrapped his co-starring debut in 1964’s Rio Conchos — drops in on a family friend (Beau Bridges) at a Georgia plantation. What initially seems a congenial visit between equals who like and admire each other, takes a sharp left turn with a line from Bridges — delivered so blandly, so matter-of-factly — that we’re left breathless.

 

The subsequent shift to Clay’s victory over Liston therefore is even more triumphant, with Cooke, Brown and Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir) cheering in the audience. When they return to the hotel room, it’s with different intentions; Cooke and Brown hope to party, while the abstinent Malcolm X has something more important in mind.

 

The Invisible Man: Nothing to see here

The Invisible Man (2020) • View trailer 
Two stars. Rated R, for profanity and strong bloody violence
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 2.28.20

It starts so well.

Writer/director Leigh Whannell’s re-boot of H.G. Wells’ 1897 classic has a terrific first act, beginning with a chilling, wordless prologue as Cecilia Kass (Elisabeth Moss) stealthily slips out of bed late one night. Her wary, frightened eyes never leave the sleeping man formerly beside her; her skittish movements are those of a trapped animal attempting a final shot at survival.

What you can't see ... could hurt you a lot. Cecilia (Elisabeth Moss) attempts to calm
herself with a soothing hot shower, little realizing that she isn't alone.

Whannell stages this sequence brilliantly, and Moss plays it with impressive conviction. We immediately know that she’s a long-abused, likely battered woman; we instinctively root for her to escape from this massive, heavily masculine estate of long hallways and electronically controlled doors (ominously sterile production design by Alex Holmes). Cecilia’s cautious departure seems to take forever, and we nearly scream when she pauses long enough to free their dog.

They make it. Barely.

Time passes. Still terrified, she shelters inside the comfortable suburban home of childhood friend James (Aldis Hodge), a San Francisco police detective and single parent to teenage daughter Sydney (Storm Reid). They’re kind and patient, even when Cecilia remains too terrified to step outside long enough to get the mail.

Then, a most unexpected release. Cecilia’s sister Emily (Harriet Dyer) arrives with phenomenal news: Cecilia’s abusive ex, Adrian (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), has killed himself. The nightmare is over.

Or is it?

Given the title of this film, it’s hardly revelatory to mention that Cecilia’s relief is short-lived. Thanks to preternatural senses honed during years of trying to anticipate Adrian’s hair-trigger explosions of temper and violence, Cecilia begins to feel uncomfortable in James and Sydney’s home. Empty rooms seem … wrong somehow. (Whannell and cinematographer Stefan Duscio have great fun with agonizingly slow pans of … absolutely nothing at all.)

The atmosphere remains unsettling and creepy, the suspense almost unbearable. And then Cecilia recalls (and we learn) that Adrian was a brilliant inventor and optics pioneer, and her paranoia rises to a shrieking point. If anybody could “haunt” a person by being invisible, Adrian would be the one; maybe he isn’t dead.

Or maybe she’s just losing her mind.

Hidden Figures: The female frontier

Hidden Figures (2016) • View trailer 
4.5 stars. Rated PG, for no particular reason
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.6.17

A film that moves its audience to cheers and applause, as the screen fades to black, is an exhilarating experience for the patrons involved.

But a film that also prompts such a response several times during the course of its story?

When John Glenn (Glen Powell) arrives at the Langley Research Center, he makes a
point of greeting members of the West Area Computing team: from left, Dorothy Vaughan
(Octavia Spencer), Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson) and Mary Jackson (Janelle
Monáe, partially obscured).

That’s a rare gift.

Director Theodore Melfi’s Hidden Figures isn’t merely a crowd-pleasing slice of actual history; it’s also a sly social statement, and a rich showcase for its three starring actresses. Melfi and co-scripter Allison Schroeder have turned Margot Lee Shetterly’s absorbing nonfiction book into an engaging drama that charms and fascinates in equal measure.

More than anything else, though, I remain stunned by the fact that half a century has passed, before this jaw-droppingly amazing story has been brought to our attention. What the heck took so long?

The setting alone is an eyebrow-raiser that somehow missed being discussed in any of my history texts. Much of NASA’s initial efforts during the early days of the space race, playing catch-up after the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik 1 and several subsequent spacecraft, took place at Virginia’s Langley Research Center, then very much a part of the Jim Crow South.

The campus included a remote, fully segregated arm known as West Area Computing, staffed entirely by African American women — all mathematicians — somewhat dismissively dubbed “computers.” When a group in the larger, posher east end of the center needed numerical verification (basically arithmetic scut-work), a lead engineer — all of said engineers being white and male — would send for “a computer,” much the way a temp secretary would be requested.

Shetterly’s book profiles four such women: Katherine G. Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson and Christine Darden. The latter has been omitted from this film; the other three have been brought to glorious life, respectively, by Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe.

(A quick bit of back-story not included in the script: The World War II-era recruitment of women allowed Vaughan, originally a mathematics teacher, to be hired in 1943 by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the precursor to NASA. Jackson and Johnson, also mathematicians, were hired in 1951 and ’53, respectively.)

Jack Reacher: Never Go Back — Deftly paced popcorn thrills

Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (2016) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity, plenty of action violence, and brief profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.21.16

All right; he’s growing on me.

Lee Child’s fans know darn well that — as a physical specimen — Tom Cruise couldn’t be further removed from the author’s depiction of honorable loner Jack Reacher. (Cruise: 5-feet-7, 148 pounds; Reacher: 6-feet-5, 210-250 pounds, with a 50-inch chest.)

Having learned that Samantha — a girl who might (or might not) be his daughter — is in
danger, Reacher (Tom Cruise) and Turner (Cobie Smulders) rush to her home ... only
to find signs of violence, and no trace of the teenager.

In Child’s novel Never Go Back — on which this film is loosely based — Reacher is said to have “a six-pack like a cobbled city street, a chest like a suit of NFL armor, biceps like basketballs, and subcutaneous fat like a Kleenex tissue.”

Sounds more like The Incredible Hulk, right? On his best day, it would take three Tom Cruises to make one Jack Reacher.

That said, I’ve gotta give Cruise credit (even if that seems superfluous, since his name pretentiously appears three times in the title credits, before the movie even starts). He’s an impressively fit 54-year-old, and he handles this film’s action scenes and stunt work with reasonable élan. And he’s still a dynamic sprinter, which he demonstrates a few times here.

(Tom Cruise action movies always have running scenes. He obviously believes he looks good doing them.)

All right, all right; enough joshing. Cruise’s second outing as Reacher is more satisfying than its 2012 predecessor, thanks to engaging supporting characters who do much to humanize the narrative. The primary plot is supplemented by a solid secondary mystery, and Cruise has softened the at-times laughably stoic manner he gave Reacher the first time.

I credit director/co-scripter Edward Zwick, who has a history of blending action epics with compelling character development, in films such as Glory, Blood Diamond and Defiance. Zwick and Cruise also worked together on The Last Samurai.

They chose this film’s source material wisely. Cruise’s first Reacher film was based on Child’s ninth novel, One Shot, a rather grim affair that did little but drip with testosterone, and frequently emphasized the many ways that Cruise didn’t look or sound like Reacher. This new film is adapted from Child’s 18th book — Zwick sharing scripting credit with Richard Wenk and Marshall Herskovitz — which is a much shrewder choice, with better mainstream audience appeal.

Zwick opens with a prologue of sorts, which allows Cruise to display the calm assurance with which he greets all perilous or life-threatening situations. It also establishes his connection to Maj. Susan Turner (Cobie Smulders), who has inherited his desk at the headquarters of his former unit, the 110th MP in northeastern Virginia. Zwick deftly establishes that the two have been trading intel and phone calls for awhile, but have yet to meet.

(In Child’s series, this long-distance relationship begins with the 14th book, 61 Hours.)