Movie Review Back to Black

Back to Black (2024) 

Directed by Sam Taylor Johnson

Written by Matt Greenhalgh

Starring Marisa Abela, Jack O'Connell, Leslie Manville, Eddie Marsan 

Release Date May 17th, 2024 

Published May 21st, 2024 

Why did director Sam Taylor Johnson want to tell this story? Is she a fan of Amy Winehouse? It's hard to say based on Johnson's new movie Back to Black. This is nothing biopic that offers no insight on Amy Winehouse, her art or her tragic death. The emptiness of Back to Black reminded me more of Johnson's Fifty Shades sequel than her slightly more accomplished John Lennon movie, Nowhere Boy. In that film, at the very least, we sensed that there was joy in the discovery of artistic talent and the forming of bonds that would become legendary. Back to Black carries little joy beyond playing Amy Winehouse's music. I could have gotten the same insights sitting at home next to my record player. 

Back to Black opens on an odd image. Amy Winehouse, played by Marisa Abela, is running down a London Street alone. The camera is shooting down at her from overhead. If this were a male director I'd want to ask why they have decided to aim the camera in a way that centers Marisa abela's cleavage as it bounces while she runs. The odd angle is perhaps, if I were to stretch a little, a visual comment on the strange way we view celebrities, but that's a pretty big stretch. Realistically, I can't think of a good reason for this visual. It's also a piece of a scene that unfolds later in the movie, not the end, it's not a preview of the end of the movie, it's a piece from around the end of the second act. So why does the movie start with this? I can't think of a reason. 

From here, we bounce back in time. A family party has Amy showing off her love of Jazz standards a mind for memorizing classic songs that she can repeat with out accompaniment. For someone as young as Amy to have memorized songs by Jazz legends speaks not only to her influences but her talent for adapting that style into her own remarkable pop styling. This, again, is an observation I could have made from listening to an Amy Winehouse record, but whatever, Marisa Abela sounds great and she has a big presence to her, reminiscent of Winehouse's outsized personality. 

Find my full length review in the Beat Community on Vocal Find my full length review in the Beat Community on Vocal 

Movie Review Tulip Fever

Tulip Fever (2017) 

Directed by Justin Chadwick 

Written by Deborah Moggach, Tom Stoppard

Starring Alicia Vikander, Dane DeHaan, Jack O'Connell, Tom Hollander, Christoph Waltz 

Release Date September 1st, 2017 

Published August 31st, 2017

Tulip Fever tells the story of an orphan girl named Sophia who is plucked from a Dutch orphanage to become the wife/concubine of a rich trader named Cornelis Sandvoort (Christoph Waltz). Sophia’s life is a relatively dull routine but nothing she really notices as, aside from the orphanage, it’s all she’s ever known. Sophia’s worldview changes when the outside world comes crashing into her secluded domesticity in the form of a lusty painter named Jan Van Loos (Dane Dehaan) who awakens the kind of desire within Sophia that her arranged marriage could never possibly create.

Not a bad story? So why is Tulip Fever such silly nonsense? It’s illogical. Director Justin Chadwick covered similar period drama lustiness in The Other Boleyn Girl to fine effect and Tom Stoppard won an Academy Award for writing Shakespeare in Love and also wrote Brazil and Empire of the Sun. Add to this the rising star Alicia Vikander, two time Academy Award winner Christoph Waltz and the ingredients are here for an incredible film. Tulip Fever even has Academy Award winner Judi Dench and it’s still a miserable sit.

The simple fact is that the simple plot I described has been done to death. Stoppard’s own Shakespeare in Love is little more than a less haughty and more prestigious version of this same story. To attempt to escape the notion that the film is a poor copy of previous period movies, Tulip Fever adds two more characters and convoluted plot about faked pregnancy and a faked death and while the plot wheels spin in desperate effort to avoid repeating period cliché we in the audience grow ever more weary of the whirring, blurring silliness of the plot.

Jack O’Connell and Holliday Grainger play Willem and Maria. Maria is Sophia’s servant and Willem is the local fish-monger. They’ve fallen madly and love and Willem has a plan for them to escape servitude. Willem is entering the high stakes trade of Tulips which have become the hottest commodity in all of Denmark at this time. When Willem comes into luck, growing a rare Tulip that could get he and Maria out of their poverty only the lame contrivance of the plot can intervene and boy does it.

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review: Unbroken

Unbroken (2014) 

Directed by Angelina Jolie 

Written by Joel Coen, Ethan Coen, Richard LaGravenese, William Nicholson

Starring Jack O'Connell, Domhnall Gleeson, Miyavi, Garrett Hedlund, Finn Whitrock

Release Date December 25th, 2014

Published December 24th, 2014 

Angelina Jolie's "Unbroken" is an incredibly powerful experience. The story of real life war hero Louis Zamperini is a confidently directed film that evokes the best of Clint Eastwood, Jolie's director on "Changeling," while also showing Jolie as a sensitive, inquisitive and assured artist. Far more accomplished and commercial than her directorial debut "In the Land of Blood and Honey," "Unbroken" is the announcement of Angelina Jolie as a director of exceptional talent.

"Unbroken," based on a book by Laura Hillenbrand, tells the story of Zamperini, the son of Italian immigrant parents. He became an Olympic athlete and then a war hero, fighting in World War II in the Pacific. Zamperini, played by English actor Jack O'Connell, was just a teenager when he traveled to Germany to compete in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. He was barely into his 20s when he was sent to the Pacific Theater and wound up spending 45 days on a raft after the crash of his B1 bomber.

For most, a plane crash and surviving for 45 days in a raft with two other soldiers would be enough for a lifetime. But Zamperini's story has barely begun. Zamperini and fellow crash survivor Russell Allen "Phil" Phillips were saved from their predicament. Unfortunately, their rescue was a Japanese war ship off the coast of Marshall Island, a Japanese stronghold in 1943. Zamperini would spend the next two years, until the very end of World War II, in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps. On top of that, his status as an American Olympic athlete earned him the ire of the sadistic Japanese camp commander Matsushiro Watanaba, nicknamed “The Bird.”

The Bird repeatedly tortured Zamperini, forcing him to race camp guards, despite his obviously emaciated condition. When Zamperini loses the race, The Bird strikes him with a bamboo cane, a sadistic device that The Bird employs almost exclusively in relation to Zamperini. A bizarre relationship develops between the two, one that Zamperini doesn't want but indulges to avoid further torture. The Bird chooses to confide in Zamperini as if they are somehow bonded. This strange bond is what pays off the film's final, triumphant moments, when The Bird gives Zamperini an almost-impossible task and Zamperini uses what strength and will he has left to stick it to The Bird.

That Zamperini survived the war is remarkable given the extraordinary obstacles he faced. Director Jolie dramatizes these obstacles in visceral, frightening fashion. The crisp, beautiful cinematography of Roger Deakins, likely on his way to a 12th Oscar nomination, gives "Unbroken" a classic Hollywood look without taking away any of the gut-wrenching power of the story. The film proceeds fearlessly from one set piece to the next, creating both a entertaining and moving portrait of an American hero without becoming simpleminded hagiography.

Much credit belongs to star Jack O'Connell, who delivers a natural, human performance. O'Connell captures the complex dimensions of Zamperini, who began the war as a devout agnostic and slowly came to give his life completely to God. Stories abound about Zamperini who, after the war, preached the word of God and traveled back to Japan to meet with the guards who tortured him for two solid years. Zamperini returned to forgive them for what they did and to tell them about the word of Jesus Christ. Zamperini allegedly even converted a couple of his former tormentors (but The Bird refused to see Zamperini).

Jolie beautifully captures the life and defining faith of Zamperini in "Unbroken." It's easy to be cynical about how someone who survived such trauma would have a “come to Jesus” moment, but "Unbroken" doesn't linger on that. Instead, Jolie sticks to the fact of Zamperini's faith that created within him the will to survive and drove him to become an inspiration to his fellow prisoners.

"Unbroken" is a remarkable portrait of heroism and triumph, filled with rich details of an extraordinary life. Here’s a man who punched a shark, even captured and ate a shark raw. He accomplished incredible feats in about a decade of his life that was so vast its individual pieces could be complete movies on their own. 

That Jolie has made this life into one singular, incredible film is another feat to be celebrated.