As a gambit to legitimize the reboot of a franchise that should have been put to rest years ago, this sequel to the potently effective Creed works surprisingly well, but probably for the wrong reasons. Though it continues the story of fighter Adonis Creed (Michael B. Jordan), the illegitimate son of Apollo Creed, the early nemesis and then BFF of Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone), who has made his own name as a professional boxer thanks to the ministrations of Rocky, it flatters moviegoers with long memories, since it basically revisits the original Rocky series’ most gaga installment, Rocky IV, in which Apollo Creed was killed in the ring by the Soviet-engineered bruiser Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren), who then had to fight Rocky in what everybody understood was a revenge match. In Creed II, Adonis, who has recently won the heavyweight title, is pretty much forced to fight Drago’s son, Viktor (Florian Munteau), to defend that title.
Though Ryan Coogler, who wrote and directed the first Creed, is installed in the credits as a producer, the sequel is directed by Steven Caple Jr. and written by Stallone and Juel Taylor, and as such it returns with shameless aplomb to the original Rocky style—long on elliptical montages, short on rich character development, ripe with feelings that aren’t earned. That said, Caple is the equal of Coogler when it comes to action set pieces, and the boxing segments are as brutally absorbing as they need to be. More to the point, Adonis’s relationship with his girlfriend, a singer named Bianca (Tessa Thompson) with a genetic hearing problem, is fleshed out in ways that makes the romantic subplot so much more affecting than the Rocky-Adrian relationship in the original series. Moving into marriage and then fatherhood while his life is thrown for a loop due to celebrity, money, and the attendant need to prove himself as a symbol of modern American masculinity, Adonis approaches his new responsibilities with understandable trepidation, and Jordan and Thompson’s chemistry in this light is visceral to the point of painful. If Creed II succeeds as anything, it’s as a mature love story that doesn’t avoid the ugly truths.
But that isn’t what the movie is selling. It’s selling the legacy fight between Adonis and Viktor, who is trained by his father in the Ukraine for one purpose only, to seek vengeance on Rocky for Ivan’s own humiliating defeat years ago, which destroyed his marriage and made him an exile in his own country—even after the breakup of the Soviet Union. An opportunistic American promoter (Russell Hornsby) seeks out the Dragos, knowing it’s what they want, to propose a fight with the newly crowned Adonis. Rocky is against it for reasons that make sense only within the parameters of Rocky movies, but those reasons manifest unfortunately when Adonis is beaten badly and almost dies. Of course, there is going to be a rematch, and the movie is nothing if not honorably realistic about the time frame, but during the year of his recovery and rehabilitation there is plenty of time for babymaking and those montages, not to mention patching up Adonis’s relationship with Rocky, which was shattered with the loss.
Creed II thankfully avoids the jingoistic hyperbole of Rocky IV (which some saw as satire). The US-Russia relationship in the movie is strictly focused on Drago’s desire for payback, and the movie’s cleverest comeuppance in this regard is bringing back Brigitte Nielsen as Drago’s ex-wife (as well as Stallone’s) to taunt him as a loser in order to spur him to greater things. How Ukrainian this is, I’m not sure, and I certainly don’t think Ivan has much love to lose for the Russians in his corner. In a way, it’s a lost opportunity, since Drago is potentially the most interesting character in Creed II (Viktor, as played by the neophyte Munteau, is a lunkhead nonentity). Which is to say the movie has too many things going on for its own good. It could have been a contender. As it stands, it’s just another good boxing movie.
Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Marunouchi Picadilly (03-3201-2881), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Shibuya Toei (03-5467-5773), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024), Cinema Sunshine Ikebukuro (03-3982-6388), Toho Cinemas Ueno (050-6868-5066).
Creed II home page in Japanese.
photo (c) 2018 Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures Inc. and Warner Brothers Entertainment Inc.
Film noir is defined as much by atmosphere as by any other visual or narrative attribute. The first film by director Dong Yue, a noted cinematographer, is drenched in heavy weather per the title. Ostensibly a murder mystery, The Looming Storm tries to say many things about its milieu—a factory town that’s slowly dying—and how it affects people who have perhaps had their hopes elevated too high.
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There’s nothing like a cleverly made documentary to bring up the obvious and somehow make you believe you’re hearing it for the first time. The general purport of David Batty’s nostalgic romp through 1960s Swinging London is that the milieu announced the triumph of the working class over the gentility that dominated British culture up until that point. As their mouthpiece, Batty and screenwriter Dick Clement and Ian L Frenais use Michael Caine, who’s more than game to make the case that he and his Cockney-inflected cohort changed England for the better and forever. No one who has owned a pulse for the past fifty years is going to argue with that, and while the film’s visual design and pacing makes for lively discourse, the narrative rushes through so many sub-themes—pirate radio, sexual liberation, revolutionary fashion photography—in its brief 85 minutes that you wonder why they just didn’t make a TV series out of it. Actually, maybe they did, given how ubiquitous feel-good 60s nostalgia is at the moment…for the third or fourth time.
The album as a delivery device for music has been dying for more than a decade now, or, at least, that’s what the pundits say. What struck me more than anything about the way new music was presented this past year is how the album form was adapted to the way streaming has changed our mode of listening. This is only partially due to technological changes. The idea of the album as a unified work of art that developed in the late 60s changed organically over the years as the sheer volume of available music has grown exponentially. Two of the “albums” on my list would, under old rules, be categorized as EPs, but were nonetheless presented to the public as albums in the sense that they were designed to be heard in one sitting. The fact that they’re brief could be taken as a sop to the shorter attention spans brought about by online lifestyles, but I’d like to think they turned out the way they did because of a particular vision.
I lost my last paying gig as a movie reviewer this year, which means I now watch movies for free, in every sense of the term. I still get invited to press screenings, and attend one or two a week, but writing about them has become more or less a hobby, though publicists and distributors seem to pay attention when I post the reviews on this blog. What’s that worth, I’m not sure, other than the notion that they’ll keep me on their mailing lists. Maybe they’re just being polite. God knows, I feel sort of silly if I tweet links to movie reviews. I have no idea who’s reading them, and haven’t really checked to see how many people are.
It didn’t take much to make the latest iteration of A Star Is Born better than its immediate precedent, the Streisand-Kristofferson vehicle, which has become something of a camp classic while retaining its critical rep as a dog. Nevertheless, there are parallels worth exploring, the most obvious being the provenance of their four respective leads. In 1976, Kristofferson was probably better known to the general public as an actor than he was as the singer-songwriter that first brought him fame. Casting him as an arena rocker seemed predicated on his particular hirsute handsomeness, but his naturally gruff amateurism made the character, if not the performance, more sympathetic than it should have been. Streisand, on the other hand, was playing as furiously against type as her own immediate forebear, Judy Garland, had been in the 1954 remake: one of the hugest stars of the moment pretending to be an ingenue. This push-pull between her image and Kristofferson’s at the height of rock’s ascendance in pop culture was ridiculous to behold, despite a script by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne that turned the melodrama back on itself.
I’m probably not the first person to think that Ralph Wrecks the Internet would have been a better title for this sequel to the Disney hit Wreck-It Ralph, since it would have taken better advantage of familiarity with the original. However, these days people know more about a Disney-related film before it’s released than after, and having enjoyed Wreck-It Ralph without necessarily being invested in it—the digital video games it referenced had no traction on my life back in the day—the possibility that the main characters—the lamebrained, sentimental, muscle-bound title character (John C. Reilly) and the sweet-voiced, diminutive, super competitive race car driver Vanellope (Sarah Silverman)—would be moving out of the circumscribed universe of arcade games into the infinite possibilities of the Internet—a world, for better or worse, that I am invested it—was immediately intriguing.
It seems, well, almost Grinch-like to complain about a new Christmas movie while we’re smack dab in the middle of the Christmas season, but, then again, The Grinch isn’t new. This is the third film iteration of the beloved Dr. Suess holiday story and people my age who grew up with the half-hour TV special will probably tell you that was good enough for them, especially when compared to the 2000 live-action feature film version starring Jim Carrey at his most scene-chewing obnoxiousness. Both that version and the latest one, a CGI animated creation by Illumination Studios, require a lot of padding to make a feature and Theodore Geisel had nothing to do with the script, so you sort of get what you might expect when Hollywood takes a classically idiosyncratic piece of art and tries to stretch it out.
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