Guest Post: Death on the Nile (2022)

Get a Clue. Death On The Nile Refuses To Invite Armchair Detectives To The Show

 

By Jonas Schwartz

 

Director Kenneth Branagh has adapted an Agatha Christie masterpiece for the second time, following his 2017 remake of Murder On The Orient Express. For Death On The Nile, he has pulled out all his filmic tricks to create a stunning tapestry of production design, costumes, and camera moves. He has assembled a stellar cast, who all perform at their top form. What he has NOT done is direct a murder mystery.  And if he's made that conscious decision, then WHY make a subpar version of a classic whodunit if you have no interest in the audience following the clues by choosing to exclude so many clues?

 

A young heiress (Gal Gadot) and her new husband (Armie Hammer) recruit master Belgian detective Hercules Poirot (Branagh) to protect them from a scorned past lover of his (Emma MacKey). But as the wealthy and beautiful Linnet Ridgeway travels down the Nile River during her honeymoon, she confides in Poirot that she fears for her life — not only from her friend whose fiancée she stole, but from most members of the wedding party. Poirot must dig through the secrets and lies to discover who has motive enough to kill before it's too late.

Branagh uses his team from Murder on the Orient — cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos and production designer Jim Clay — to transport the audience first to WWI trenches and then the opulence of '30s Egypt with its ornate 5-star hotels, extravagant river cruise boats, and the treasures along the Nile — The Temples of Abu Simbel, the Sphynx, and the Pyramid of Giza. The costumes by Paco Delgado and JobanJit Singh are gorgeous, particularly those worn by Gadot.

 

In a cast led by Branagh, Gadot, Hammer, Jennifer Saunders, Dawn French and Annette Benning, the standout is Sophie Okonedo as a blues singer ala Mahalia Jackson. Commanding the screen whenever present, Okonedo plays a character very different from the Salome Otterbourne in the novel and in the '78 film, where Angela Lansbury was delightful as the dipsomaniac writer.  Here Otterbourne is an African American woman living in a CIS White Male world, who exudes dignity even when she's not respected as she deserves to be.

 

Salome is not the only character reevaluated in the new film. A host of characters are added and refocused, which gives some of the actors more to sink their teeth in, and leaves some with nothing to play. Scriptwriter Michael Green falls into the same traps he had with Orient Express. He turns the film into a character study, which is admirable, but inappropriate for an Agatha Christie mystery. He lifts vital clues, waters down the suspects motives, and even makes the audience care about the victim while removing much of the victim's culpabilities.

 

Branagh uses the film to pay homage to the great Orson Welles. His high and low angles, deep focuses, sepia photography mixed with one color item, are visually arresting. The opening, taking place on the war fields of Belgium, treats our protagonist with a backstory to fit Branagh's theme that Love is Nature, and Nature is Deadly — hammered home with different animals striking their prey throughout the film — but it does NOTHING for the story.  Welles didn't care about story. In the masterpiece Touch Of Evil, he didn't give a hoot who put a bomb in the old man's car. Touch Of Evil was a losing battle for the soul in one opulent man's body (played winningly by Welles). Alfred Hitchcock also didn't care about plot. He coined the phrase McGuffin, which is the item that the protagonists/antagonists fight for, but of which Hitchcock himself has brushed away as piffle. That's why Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock would never have adapted a Christie mystery.

 

You can't deconstruct Agatha Christie. The components of the plot are essential. That story is a tightly constructed machine. Branagh ripped it all apart and put it back together and many necessary pieces were swept under the rug. It's not a question of reverence to the source, it's that a mystery of this caliber must reveal enough to keep the audience intrigued.  The suspect list must be long, the hints must be truthful, and the audience should be distracted enough to NOT deduce the murderer but should have every clue that could have given them the opportunity to make that discovery themselves. Death On The Nile denies the audience that treat. Most suspects have grievances, not motives. The killer disappears for a good third of the second act. Branagh reveals clues at the conclusion that were not in evidence already, leaving the audience befuddled.

As a meticulously designed, lavish display of art, Death On The Nile is a feast. But as a mystery, Branagh's overindulgence is a detriment of the plot, turning it into Kenneth's folly.

Guest Post: Respect (2021)

 

By Jonas Schwartz

 

There's a tantalizing movie inside the brick wall that is Respect, the new biography of Aretha Franklin. But due to poor direction, poor writing, and incoherent editing, it's impossible to penetrate it. Jennifer Hudson is volcanic singing the role, but it is impossible to track the character presented because of narrative issues, so the audience loses interest in the story of this musical genius. 

 

Respect follows Aretha from her childhood, as the daughter of a controlling Baptist minister (Forrest Whitaker) and an estranged mother (Audra McDonald). Aretha suffers both the wrath of her father and the sexual abuse of a congregant (who fathers two of her children according to Wikipedia, but that fact was cloudy in the film itself) and jumps at the chance to escape her repressive family home with a man (Marlon Wayans) just as manipulative as her father. At first, Aretha flounders as she can’t find her distinctive style, but the musical phenom discovers her voice and creates a catalog of monster hits like “R-E-S-P-E-C-T”, “Think”, and “(You Make Me Feel Like) a Natural Woman.'

The script by Tracey Scott Wilson (story by Callie Khouri, Oscar winner for Thelma and Louise), follows every bio cliché, without adding any dazzle to keep audiences invested, but also clutters the story so that it’s unclear of the facts that led the young girl to sprout into the iconic diva. The film skips around ferociously. One moment, a predatory family friend is locking himself in the bedroom with adolescent Aretha (Skye Dakota Turner), and then she has children. There’s no conversations about a 12-year-old being raped and having a child at that age. She just all the sudden has children running around the house. Later, Aretha scores a huge comeback with “R-E-S-P-E-C-T” but the audience never sees anything from the moment she revamps the song in her unique style with her sisters (back-up singers) forming her version of the already popular Otis Redding song to performing at Madison Square Garden. How does she feel when the song comes out, when her years of being ignored have ended?  I’m not sure. I’ll have to look it up on Wikipedia because the script doesn’t care. 

 

There are a few scenes the script gets perfectly. First, an argument in a dressing room with family friend Dinah Washington (Mary J Blige) that sets Aretha on her course of finding her groove. Second, the moments that demonstrate the creative process are effective. The scenes at the Alabama studio where — under the eye of her producer, Jerry Wexler (Mark Maron), the studio founder Rick Hall (Myk Watford), as well as her hot-headed husband — Aretha and the band of southern Caucasians turn a bland song into the hit “I’ll Never Love a Man (The Way That I Love You)” are riveting.  Also observing Franklin and her sisters restructure “R-E-S-P-E-C-T” into the blockbuster it became is exhilarating.  But those scenes are few and far between. 

 

Director Liesl Tommy, who comes mostly from Broadway and episodic television, is directing her first major motion picture and her direction on the film lacks the epic scope required for the subject matter of this caliber. The movie drags, mostly because every scene seems lifted from a TV-Movie biopic you’d find on Lifetime. There are no surprises in store for the audience OTHER than THAT VOICE.

 

It's no wonder Franklin personally picked Jennifer Hudson to play her. Hudson sells a song like she’s expelling a deadly toxin from her body before it eats her alive. Her intonation, her vocal heft, her kindness towards the lyrics, exemplify a master Diva. She can act a tune and make the audience feel every emotion flooding from her. Her acting in book scenes, though, is fair. She’s not a poor actress, but her caliber while singing far surpasses her depth when speaking for the character. Her Oscar® for Dreamgirls was mostly due to “And I’m Telling You I’m Not Going” and “I Am Changing” — NOT for her dialogue. And for those two songs, she deserved every ounce of the gold.

 

The rest of the cast give fine performances, particularly Whitaker, but the script gives them little on which to chew. Audra McDonald, a multi-Tony-winning dynamo (she could walk across the stage and still win a Tony), is wasted in the underwritten role of her mother. She shines in her moments interacting with young Turner, but the audience should get to spend more intimate moments with the two. 

 

Respect features an outstanding soundtrack, with Hudson owning all the songs that made Franklin a star. But the film itself makes little sense. It feels like the film canister accidentally mixed the reels and left two or three in the trash. Aretha Franklin deserves more RESPECT. And so does Jennifer Hudson. 

Guest Post: Black Widow (2021)

“God Help The Tyrannical Russian Agent Murderer/Brainwasher Who Comes Between Me And My Sister…"

By Jonas Schwartz

After years of speculation and promise from the MCU, the standalone Black Widow has finally reached theaters -- and, for an additional fee option, on Disney+.  The action film rests solely on the high caliber cast and without them, the pedestrian writing and direction would have dragged the film to the depths of the hollow DC films. Oscar® winner Rachel Weisz, Stranger Things, star David Harbour, and wunderkind Florence Pugh work with Scarlett Johansson to keep audiences captivated.

In 1995 Ohio, a typical American family receives the signal that the jig is up.  It turns out none of the “family” are blood-related, but an active Russian sleeper cell. They have been discovered by S.H.I.E.L.D, and escape to Cuba for a meetup with their leader, General Dreykov (Ray Winstone), to pass along the intel they stole. He sends the father-figure, Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian (Harbour), and the mother-figure, Melina Vostokoff/Black Widow (Weisz), back to Russia and the two little girls to the mysterious “Red Room’ to be trained and turned into assassins Natasha Romanoff (Johansson) and Yelena Belova (Pugh).  

The film flashforwards to the time between Captain America: Civil Wars and Avengers: Infinity Wars, where Natasha is currently wanted by the government for the ramifications of breaking the Sokovia Accords along with Steve Rogers/Captain America. Her former “sister” Yelena pulls Natasha back into a mission regarding fellow Black Widow agents, mind-controlled by a nefarious former enemy. The two break their surrogate father out of Russian prison and rendezvous with their surrogate mother in an off-the-boards mission to save Earth from an evil plot of world domination. 

Directed by newcomer Cate Shortland and written by Eric Pearson (Thor: Ragnarok and Godzilla Vs Kong), the film lacks a compelling storyline, and the action scenes are underwhelming. Black Widow’s biggest problem is its lack of urgency.  The current film takes place long behind where the MCU is currently residing. Audiences must re-remember the consternations of Captain America: Civil Wars and follow a character who died several films ago. Had the film been made during Phase 3 before Infinity Wars, it would have had more impact. As it is now, only the post-credit sequence (really the best moment in the entire film) takes place in the current MCU world. When one goes back and re-binges the MCU films, their hearts and minds are focused on the tasks at hand, but to have a new film act as a prequel of a protagonist who has now passed away, feels like an also-ran

So, is Black Widow worth watching? Without question. Because of the performances. Weisz, Harbour, Johansson, and especially Pugh seep subtext and unwritten cohesion into the film as they deal with past rejections, betrayals, and frustrations, and attempt to re-create a familial bond that had many years ago been thrusted on them for purposes against the United States. Edit out the chases, the explosions, the double and triple-crosses, turn off the volume completely, and you still have a family drama as in-depth as a Eugene O’Neill play. It is just not from the dialogue, but it’s all there in those talented actors’ eyes.