Queen & Slim
It's a simple premise: A young couple meet on their first date and before they know it, end up on the run. The film boasts a pair of very good central performances by Jodie Turner-Smith and Daniel Kaluuya, as we follow the pair as a burgeoning romance begins to take shape while being on the run necessitates some additional criminal acts under these conditions, including a series of narrow escapes, and without realizing the extent of their actions effecting a much wider community.
There is more than a little touch of Bonnie & Clyde here - a reference even characters in the story acknowledges, and much more recent, one that immediately sprang to mind was The Hate U Give. It's a promising directorial debut and will be most interested to see what Melina Matsoukas does next.
Richard Jewell
Clint Eastwood's latest offering is one of the more disappointing and undewhelming of his long and lauded directorial career. Unlike most films, I am really struggling to understand why this movie even exists.
There are so many true miscarraiges of justice out there in the world, let alone those whose plight have been commited to film. Even recently highlighted in a film like
Just Mercy that is representative of the tip of the proverbial iceberg of those who have been targeted through profiling, have been convicted, tried, imprisioned and sometimes even died for crimes that they didn't commit.
By contrast, and with respect to the real life Richard Jewell, being inconvenienced for less than 3 months during which time he was never detained in custody seems to lack gravitas. Obviously noone should be subject to assumptions based on profiling and likewise, everyone deserves to be treated as innocent until proven guilty. Nor is it was right that he had to go through that in the first place.
However, without the context of why was it felt necessary that this story had to be told, and indeed, why now, I really don't see the point of this movie. It's like they were looking for a hard hitting subject matter and landed on this watered down store brand diet-cola of a story. Other than it is a white guy being subjected to profiling instead of an African-American character in a Hollywood film, but still begs the question.. why this story? And why, if it was such a big deal or socially relevant, why wait 25 years to tell it?
Paul Walter Hauser (in the title role) feels as though he walked straight off the
I, Tonya lot and without missing a beat or bothering to change character wallked onto this set. And as good as the entire cast was in I, Tonya, this kind of feels like that character has been given a spin off, to having his own movie here, so similiar do they feel. He is an actor with ability but this feels like the only direction he was given is, "liked what you did in that movie. Do the same thing here." which he will have to be careful lest end up typecast. Sam Rockwell is steady as Jewell's lawyer and Kathy Bates likewise as his mother.
In truth, I dont really see why Bates has been Oscar nominated here. Bates is a fantastic actress and is great in just about everything, but there is nothing really special here. Her character, like all of the supporting roles, are written pretty one-dimensionally, and despite some early suggestions of health issues early on, nothing is made of this. That Bobi Jewell is only ever presented as Richard's mother concerned for her son. Aside from that, what do you actually ever learn about Bobi Jewell in her own right? This is not Kathy Bates' fault, as she can only make the most with what she has been given to work with. But that is the problem, not just for her, but the entire cast and even the director.
The material they have been given is crap.
The writing is truly the central flaw here. Billy Ray's last 4 films were
Overlord, Gemini Man, Terminator: Dark Fate and now this. The script plays fast and loose with facts, the supporting characters are more caricatures (especially Hamm's FBI agent and Wilde's journalist), and Jewell is presented as a bit odd, over-zealous but good intentioned, while downplaying much of his checkered past and when it is brought up it's treated almost like a joke; that it's all a bit inconsequential. Likewise every cheap ploy and trope is used to paint the FBI and the media circus in as poor a light as possible, using questionable tactics, engaging n unethical behaviour and being fixated on Jewell instead of trying to track down the real culprit.
There is a trend here. If the writing is bad, a bad movie will follow. Doesn't matter how much money you throw at a project, how skilled the cast is or how notable the director, if at it's heart is poor writing, then the best anyone involved with the project can do is make the best of what you have, If that happens to be a pig, and basically everything else is lipstick on a pig.
If you want to see a movie about someone being profiled and framed, a vastly better film about a vastly more serious miscarriage of justice, how it impacts not just one innocent person but an entire family, and in particular a parent caught up in this who was also Oscar Nominated which is much better developed character then ladies and gentlemen, may I refer you to,
In the Name of the Father.