The Runaways: Road to Ruin

The Runaways (2010) • View trailer for The Runaways
Three stars (out of five). Rating: R, for underage drinking, drug use and sensuality, and relentless profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 4.15.10
Buy DVD: The Runaways

As immaturity, frayed tempers and atrocious lifestyle choices take their toll, the other four members of the ground-breaking all-grrl punk-rock band The Runaways turn on their photogenic lead singer, objecting to the way that she repeatedly steals the spotlight.

"We're not the Cherie Currie band," one of them snarls, "we're The Runaways!"

While Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart, left) watches nervously, newcomer Cherie
Curie (Dakota Fanning, center) is humiliated into exposing her inner slut
during an "audition" that feels more like a casting-couch session for a porn
film, in a seminal moment during the creation of the all-girl band that is
destined to become The Runaways. Are these girls really having fun?

Well, here's the irony: This film may be hitting theaters as The Runaways, but that's untruth in advertising. It should be called The Cherie Currie Story.

On one level, at least, that shouldn't come as a surprise; writer/director Floria Sigismondi's screenplay is adapted from Currie's memoir, Neon Angel. Small wonder, then, that this film spends so much time on Currie, at the expense of the other four girls ... even though one of them is Joan Jett, the only member to have clawed her way into a solid and respectable career after The Runaways crashed and burned.

Small wonder, perhaps, but bad filmmaking. Dakota Fanning's Currie and Kristen Stewart's Jett are front and center for 99 percent of this picture.

The other three band members are ignored to a degree that's initially puzzling and eventually just plain silly, and one of them — Alia Shawkat's Robin — is a fictitious construct apparently intended to stand in for the various "minor" girls (Micki Steele, Peggy Foster, Jackie Fox, Vicki Blue and Laurie McAllister) who were part of the tempestuous line-up that also included Sandy West (played here by Stella Maeve) and Lita Ford (Scout Taylor Compton).

Sigismondi similarly plays fast and loose with actual Runaways history, and has a terrible sense of the passage of time.

Although the film has a firm beginning in 1975, we never really know how many years actually pass as the fledgling band builds up a following that climaxes with a tour of Japan (for the record, in 1977) that rivaled The Beatles' original arrival in the United States, for sheer demented fan adulation.

And that — again, for the sake of accuracy — essentially was it. Currie decamped after the band returned to the States, a crucial event that Sigismondi depicts of necessity ... but then "time passes" and, in something of an epilogue, we see Jett, following the smash 1979 single ("I Love Rock 'n' Roll") that put her on the solo map. Cue power anthem, roll final credits.

Well ... not quite.

The Secret Life of Bees: Strong buzz

The Secret Life of Bees (2008) • View trailer for The Secret Life of Bees
Four stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, for violence and dramatic intensity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.17.08
Buy DVD: The Secret Life of Bees • Buy Blu-Ray: The Secret Life of Bees [Blu-ray]

Certain historical flashpoints remain popular subjects for stories, because savvy authors recognize that we bring cultural awareness to the relationship between artist and audience: If the fictitious characters are constructed persuasively enough to co-exist with real-world events, the drama becomes even more intense.

August (Queen Latifah, left) is surprised to discover that Lily (Dakota Fanning)
doesn't fear the winged insects that fill the hives and produce the sweet honey
for which the Boatwright sisters have become famous. Indeed, Lily seems to
understand — in a deeply spiritual way — when August speaks reverently of
"the secret life of bees."

Director/scripter Gina Prince-Bythewood's deeply moving adaptation of Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees is just such a story. Set in 1964 South Carolina, at a time when the rising civil rights movement actually made an already toxic racial environment even more combustible — because, to the hysterical rage of hard-core racists, African-Americans were daring to stand up for themselves — the narrative unfolds in a constant state of tension and suspense.

All sorts of bad things seem to await these good characters.

Grief battles with pragmatism and hope, in a film highlighted by strong performances that allow us intimate and at-times painful access to these characters and their thoughts. And, as was the case with To Kill a Mockingbird — with which this film shares both subject and tone — these events are filtered through the dawning awareness of a child, and her subsequent loss of innocence.

In the case of 14-year-old Lily Owens (Dakota Fanning), she's not that innocent to begin with. As depicted in a brief but horrifying prologue, Lily believes herself responsible for her mother's death, years earlier, and has suffered ever since at the hands of a father, T. Ray (Paul Bettany), prone to casual cruelty.

T. Ray isn't exactly abusive, and we get a strong sense that he, too, is in a state of constant despair — such is the impressive subtlety of Bettany's performance — but that doesn't make his needlessly stern and unloving treatment of Lily any less heinous.

Things might be worse, were if not for the sheltering care extended by Rosaleen (Jennifer Hudson), who works for T. Ray and has become something of a surrogate mother to Lily. The girl, in turn, has grown to care for Rosaleen: enough to be quite concerned when the older woman quietly shares her intention to walk to a nearby town and register to vote.

Sadly, an almost inevitable encounter with some vicious white crackers goes as badly as could be expected.

Prince-Bythewood does not exploit this scene, but Rogier Stoffers' camera also doesn't flinch from it; we cannot help sharing Lily's sick and heavy-hearted reaction to what she witnesses. (Bullies are nothing new in the world, I realize, and yet I still find it difficult to comprehend that people would behave this way to another human being, based solely on skin color ... and that such behavior was considered acceptable, as recently as 44 years ago.)

Finally fed up with her own father, and worried about Rosaleen's likely future, Lily orchestrates a plan of escape and the two hit the road. Their destination — Tiburon, also in South Carolina — is governed solely by the fact that this town's name is printed on the back of one of the few mementos Lily has from her mother.