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    ‘O’Dessa’ Review: One Song to Save Them All

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    Sadie Sink (“Stranger Things”) rules this postapocalyptic musical with a guitar and an attitude.The director Geremy Jasper begins his new musical in such a bombastic manner, complete with a mock-spaghetti western score, that it’s hard not to be at least intrigued. What is this cinematic U.F.O.?We are, we quickly learn, in a postapocalyptic future in which a certain Plutonovich (Murray Bartlett, from “The White Lotus”) rules the airwaves and people’s minds with a reality competition beamed from his Onederworld lair in Satylite City — think “America’s Got Talent” at Thunderdome.Despite the goofy names, these are scary times. A fresh-faced farm girl named O’Dessa Galloway (Sadie Sink, of “Stranger Things”) is informed that “It ain’t safe for a 19-year-old gal with stars in her eyes.” It’s actually even less safe for her parents, who are both summarily dispatched from the story within a few minutes. O’Dessa’s daddy (the singer Pokey LaFarge) was a rambler, so off she goes rambling as well, armed with his guitar. She ends up, naturally, in Satylite City, where she falls for the sweet Euri Dervish (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), a sex worker and cabaret singer whose funky-cool abode has a heart-shaped tub.As he did for his previous film, “Patti Cake$” (2017), which was about an aspiring rapper in New Jersey, Jasper wrote the score with Jason Binnick. Their songs tend to be either emo Americana or power ballads; sometimes the first style builds into the second, as in “Yer Tha One.” And because O’Dessa has a mysterious prophecy to fulfill, she gets one song to rule them all, simply titled “The Song (Love Is All).” It’s worth noting that everyone sings well, sometimes surprisingly so. Sink, in particular, has an unforced elegance that carries even the by-the-numbers numbers.While you might assume Plutonovich is the antagonist, he is overshadowed by the enforcer and pimp Neon Dion (Regina Hall, having a ball), whose severe bangs, dramatic outfits and even more dramatic expressions position her as a villain retrofitted from a 1980s music video.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      ‘Genius: MLK/X’ Offers Portraits of the Icons as Vital Young Men

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      “We wanted to take them off the T-shirts and make them real,” said Gina Prince-Bythewood, who created the series with her husband Reggie Rock Bythewood.The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X are among American history’s most thoroughly chronicled figures, their voices and mannerisms captured forever on recording after recording, their lives picked over in book after book.By himself, Malcolm X has been the subject of two Pulitzer-winning biographies in the past 13 years and just last year Jonathan Eig’s “King: A Life” landed a spot on Barack Obama’s yearly best-books list. Both men adorn countless T-shirts, posters and memes. They aren’t just people; they’re also symbols — of civil rights, of social progress, of a decade that saw many of its heroes murdered.But symbols don’t make for particularly compelling drama. So when Kelvin Harrison Jr. and Aaron Pierre signed on to play King and Malcolm X, respectively, in the new National Geographic series “Genius: MLK/X,” which premiered earlier this month, they knew their imperative was to make their iconic characters as human as possible and leave more famous portrayals in the past.“The first thing I had to do, and the first thing I needed everyone around me to do, was to stop speaking about them as icons,” Harrison said in a video interview last month alongside Pierre. “I had to live in the moment that they existed. They did not know who they were or where they were going.”Gina Prince-Bythewood, who, with her husband, Reggie Rock Bythewood, are among the executive producers of the series, put it this way: “We wanted to take them off the T-shirts and make them real and tangible for an audience. And to do that, you need to show their humanity.”Jayme Lawson, as Betty Shabazz, and Pierre in “Genius.” The series emphasizes the strength and support of the men’s wives.Richard DuCree/National GeographicWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Chevalier’ Review: A Black Virtuoso Rocks the Court of Marie Antoinette

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      A new movie about Joseph Bologne, the Chevalier de Saint-George, may owe as much to “Bridgerton” as it does the history books.Set in 18th-century Paris, “Chevalier” begins with a flourish. In a concert hall in pre-revolutionary France, a man makes a beeline toward the virtuoso conducting a string orchestra to the rapt delight of his audience. The interloper’s back and his white wig give nothing away of his countenance. Cue the collective gasp when this man is revealed to be Black and suggests that the two play a piece together.The duo’s dueling fiddles will deliver a new star and prompt the hot-under-his-ruffled-collar violinist Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to ask, “Who the [expletive] is that?”This will not be the only intentionally discordant gesture in “Chevalier” — based on the story of Joseph Bologne, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges — but it is the boldest in a film that bows to “Bridgerton,” while lacing its intrigue with contemporary racial-cultural wounds.The real Chevalier de Saint-Georges looks commanding and impossibly handsome in a rare portrait from the era. And the actor Kelvin Harrison Jr. matches that beauty. He also makes believable Bologne’s celebrated vigor and grace. Harrison’s most recent roles have been in a trio of films — “Waves,” “Monster,” “Luce” — notable for featuring young men who are often as troubling as they are troubled. Here the actor brings swagger and hints of hubris to the slightly more mature Frenchman.Born on the island of Guadeloupe, Joseph Bologne was the son of an enslaved Senegalese woman and a French plantation owner. He was, for a spell, an incandescent figure in Marie Antoinette’s court and later, after a change of allegiance, a military leader during the revolution. Outlier and insider, he’s a figure ripe for reclamation. That this movie — directed by the Canadian filmmaker Stephen Williams and written by Stefani Robinson — leans too mightily on romance to the detriment of exploring more fully his genius feels like a missed opportunity.Joseph’s father’s parting words as he leaves his young son at an elite school will become Joseph’s raison d’être as he excels in music, fencing and pretty much anything else he takes on: “Joseph you must be excellent, always excellent. No one can tear down an excellent Frenchman.” As the movie unfolds, that final assertion will require a qualification — namely, unless that Frenchman is Black — but the drive it instills in Joseph also resonates with the current celebration of ‌Black excellence in the United States.In “Chevalier,” colonialism and paternalism have roles in shaping Bologne. But it’s his relationship with four women that proves crucial: his royal ally, Queen Marie Antoinette (Lucy Boynton); his enemy, the opera singer La Guimard (Minnie Driver); his muse and romantic consort, the Marquise de Montalembert, Marie-Josephine (Samara Weaving); and his mother, Nanon (Ronke Adekoluejo).Driver has wicked fun as the diva who throws her support behind the composer Christoph Willibald Gluck when the position as head of the Paris Opera opens. It is a post Joseph wants and feels he deserves. Whether he gets it is one of the movie’s central tensions.Adekoluẹjo brings a cultural shrewdness to Nanon, who arrives from the Caribbean shortly after the death of Joseph’s father. Their mother-and-man-child reunion is teary but also pointed and will usher in a slow dawning in Joseph’s understanding of his Blackness. Joseph has grown accustomed to operating at the top of his game among Paris’s elite. But as Nanon knows, the rules of the game are rigged.ChevalierRated PG-13 for thematic content, some strong language, boudoir scenes and violence. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Cyrano’ Review: Who Wrote the Book of Love?

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      Peter Dinklage wields pen and sword in a musical adaptation of the durable French romance.Cyrano de Bergerac is a lover and a fighter, but when we first meet him he is indulging in a brutal bit of theater criticism. Played with grace and gusto by Peter Dinklage, Cyrano emerges from a standing-room-only crowd to berate a pompous actor and drive him from the stage. With cutting rhymes and a sharp sword, he defends dramatic truth against the woeful thespian’s powdered preening. The audience, which had paid to see Cyrano’s victim, nonetheless mostly applauds his humiliation. The few who object are marked as fools, phonies or outright villains.Artifice mobilized in defense of authenticity. It’s a paradox as old as art, and one that “Cyrano,” a new screen musical based on Edmond Rostand’s French-class chestnut, embraces with a risky ardor. Directed by Joe Wright, with songs by members of the National (Bryce and Aaron Dessner wrote the music, with lyrics by Matt Berninger and Carin Besser) and a script by Erica Schmidt, this version wears its heart on its ruffled sleeve, pursuing its lush, breathless vision of romance with more sincerity than coherence.The original Cyrano, first performed in 1897, was an artful throwback to the poetic dramas of the 17th century, written in Alexandrine couplets and infused with lofty, archaic notions of love and honor. In the decades since, the story has become familiar through countless variations and adaptations. Cyrano, a soldier ashamed of his large, misshapen nose, is in love with Roxanne, who is smitten with a callow cutie named Christian. Cyrano uses his literary talents to woo Roxanne in Christian’s name. Each man becomes the other’s proxy. “I will make you eloquent, and you will make me handsome,” Cyrano says.The resulting confusion produces both comedy — a tangle of crossed signals and mistaken identities — and tragedy. Some versions soften or eliminate the tragedy, like Fred Schepisi’s sweet “Roxanne” (1987), starring Steve Martin and Daryl Hannah, and the recent Netflix teen charmer “The Half of It.” Wright and Schmidt’s “Cyrano,” which originated onstage in 2019, charges in the other direction, telegraphing its heartache in lyrics and building toward an operatic, death-haunted end.Along the way, it supplies some moments of fun, mostly thanks to Dinklage and Ben Mendelsohn as his conniving, predatory nemesis, the Duke De Guiche. He too is smitten with Roxanne (Haley Bennett), and as a high-ranking military officer holds the fates of Cyrano and Christian (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) in his hands. Mendelsohn excels at playing silky, sadistic bad guys like this, and he offers himself as a perfect foil to Dinklage, whose Cyrano is acerbic, cantankerous and openhearted.His small stature rather than his large nose makes this Cyrano think himself unworthy of Roxanne, who sees him as a close friend and confidant. She and Christian have an immediate physical spark, efficiently conveyed through smoldering glances. Bennett and Harrison do their part to infuse a technically chaste courtship with an element of horniness. Her cheeks are in a state of permanent semi-blush, and he conveys stammering, tongue-tied desire.They almost upstage Cyrano’s words, which are meant to supply the conduit for a truer form of love. Rostand’s play is built on an emotional rendering of the mind-body problem. Together, Cyrano and Christian add up to a perfect man — word and image, spirit and flesh, agape and eros — but only insofar as they succeed in deceiving Roxanne. Even though there is only one of her, she is also divided between the cerebral and the sensual dimensions of love.At one point, Wright tries to bridge this gap by staging part of a musical number in Roxanne’s bedroom, where she reads Christian’s — that is, Cyrano’s — letters in a state of soft-focus ecstasy, pressing the pages against her lips and bosom as she tumbles across the duvet. The earnest preposterousness of this sequence, which might have worked on MTV sometime in the early ’90s, is representative of the movie’s silliness and its longing for sublimity.A musical should be capable of embracing both. But Wright, while a canny craftsman, is too committed to good taste to go over the top into either melodrama or camp. The music strikes a pretty good balance between rock ’n’ roll economy and show-tune extravagance, though the soundtrack is like an album of second-best songs. Only a plaintive anthem sung by soldiers on the eve of battle stands out, partly because its sentimentality has little to do with the central love triangle.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More