Movie Box Review

MIDDLE OF NOWHERE, which won the Sundance US Dramatic Directing award for Ava DuVernay last night, is in no rush.  The films moves with deliberation as it establishes its leading character and her difficult situation:  Ruby (Emayatzy E. Corinealdi) isn't a single mom, but she might as well be, with husband Derek (Omari Hardwick) doing a 8-year stretch in prison.  Ruby sacrificed her own dreams of being a doctor so that she could raise their son and make the weekly trek to visit Derek in jail; she struggles with her nursing career, her difficult relationships with her disappointed mother (Lorraine Toussaint) and sister (Edwina Findley), and her own loneliness.

The main body of the story takes place 4 years into Derek's sentence, when he has his first chance to be released on parole for good behavior.  Ruby's life becomes more complicated when, even as she's in the midst of raising the funds for her husband's appeal, she meets a charming bus driver (David Oyelowo), and then learns increasingly shocking facts about her husband's time in prison. 

The melodramatic bones of this story could have resulted in a Lifetime movie (although it's not exactly Lifetime's demo), but the restraint and precision of DuVernay's script bring it to a different level.  Middle of Nowhere is also aided immeasurably by Corinealdi's powerful performance as Ruby--she's a woman constantly aware that her every action has consequences for everyone in her life, and her attempts to crawl out from under that weight are quietly moving.  Hardwick and Oyelowo are also excellent as the men who orbit her life, although Toussaint, despite a bravura dinner table monologue, is hindered by DuVernay's decision to keep Ruby's family life somewhat vague.  Sharon Lawrence, as Derek's attorney, has a small but very nimbly written role that she plays to the hilt.

DuVernay makes smart use of what must have been limited production resources, and the cinematography by Bradford Young (who also shot Pariah) belies the film's low budget with handsome visuals that mercifully mostly eschew the urban-movie cliche of shaky hand-held camerawork. 

Middle of Nowhere sometimes bears the burden of its own cinematic dignity, and it can feel stolid, especially in the mid-section (a little re-editing before theatrical release might help).  But Corinealdi is never less than compelling, and Nowhere feels like it's taken Ruby--and the audience--on a genuine journey by the time it ends.  

FILLY BROWN, directed by Youssef Delara (who also wrote the script) and Michael D. Olmos, falls into a recognizable Sundance genre:  sagas of poor young women (usually ethnic) struggling to escape their poverty and make a better life.  Celebrated examples in festival history include Girlfight and Real Women Have Curves; Filly Brown, while it has its definite strengths, doesn't quite measure up to those.

Although she uses the name Filly Brown when she's rapping, the movie's LA heroine is actually named Majo Tonorio (Gina Rodriguez).  She has a hard-working contractor dad (Lou Diamond Phillips) and a bratty younger sister (Chrissie Fit), and she works in her uncle's tattoo parlor, but the key event of her young life is that her mother Maria (Jenni Rivera) is in jail on drug charges and has been since Majo was a child.  Her father has kept his daughters distant from their mother, but one day Maria sends Majo a poem with the idea Majo can use the text as lyrics for one of her songs.  When Majo goes to visit, Maria tells her that there have been developments in her case, and with a little money in the right places, her conviction could be overturned.  Majo, desperate for the chance to have her mother come home, does what she needs to in order to raise the cash--in particular, she signs with the loud-mouth manager Big Cee (Noel Gugliemi) who can push her toward a hit.

As the synopsis suggests, unpredictability is not what makes Filly Brown work.  The people in the movie who appear trustworthy when we meet them generally are--Majo's father, her uncle, her mother's attorney (Edward James Olmos), the loyal DJ who only wants her to create her best work--and the seemingly sleazy turn out to be exactly that.  Delara's dialogue, too, is often ham-handed and obvious, with few gradations between light and dark, and visually, the direction is rarely more than rudimentary.

And yet the picture has real force and emotional payoff.  Some of that is simply because of the old saw that cliches become that way for a reason, but much of it is due to the acting.  Rodriguez, in particular, is a powerhouse both as an actress and rapper, and she carries much of the movie on her back.  Phillips, too, has his best role in years and runs with it.  The final scene, in which Majo performs a capella and her father is among those who watch, has fire and pain to spare.

Filly Brown is more likely to be a calling card for its makers, particularly Rodriguez, than a broad success on its own.  Despite its flaws, the movie delivers some of the raw talent that Sundance is all about.  

If you squint at the post-apocalyptic desert wasteland settings of PRIEST, I swear you can see the camera crews from The Book of Eli, Jonah Hex, Resident Evil and Ultraviolet trying to duck out of frame.  At this point, I don't think any self-respecting vampire would even consider stalking those sands; they may rip human heads off their throats and drink blood, but they've got some pride.  

Priest manages to make Legion, which was last year's religio-horror mash-up starring Paul Bettany and directed by Scott Stewart, look like a modern classic.  What, short of vampiric possession, could have made Bettany--a skilled actor in films like A Beautiful Mind and Master and Commander, not to mention the upcoming Margin Call--want to work twice in two years with Scott Stewart?  Are there embarrassing photos of Bettany that Stewart is threatening to show Jennifer Connelly?  Is Stewart holding one or more of their children hostage?  It's a mystery more fascinating than anything in either movie.

Priest, for those who insist on knowing about it, is yet another terrible movie based on graphic novels, a genre quickly becoming the bane of coherent filmmaking.  In the backstory we're given via some opening animation, vampires have been fighting humans over the centuries, and were only able to be killed or driven out into that post-apocalyptic desert by specially gifted fighters who are ascetic, chaste "priests" abducted by the all-powerful church from their normal lives as soon as their powers are in evidence, and tattooed with giant crosses on their faces.  Once the vampires were disposed of, the church abandoned the priests. But now the vampires are back, even if the pompous Head Priest (Christopher Plummer) won't admit it, and they've killed Bettany's brother and kidnapped his niece (Lily Collins, who'll soon be Snow White in the movie competing with Kristen Stewart's version).  Bettany--who has no name in the movie other than "Priest"--sets off with the niece's boyfriend (Cam Gigandet) and eventually a Priestess (Maggie Q) to get the girl back or kill her if she's already been "infected" by the vampires (shades--very very pathetic shades--of The Searchers).  

Stewart and screenwriter Cory Goodman have no idea how to make this even guilty fun, and the picture lurches through its 87 minutes without the budget for decent CG vampires or a single original idea.  Bettany is glum, as well he should be, and only Karl Urban, as (spoiler alert!) Bettany's former colleague who's now the leader of the vampires, seems to be enjoying himself.  The picture has an advanced case of the dark, bleached-out ugliness we've become used to in 3D movies that aren't very carefully transferred, so even though Don Burgess (Spiderman, Cast Away) is behind the camera it doesn't help, and the music by Christopher Young is of the electronic quiet-then-SCREECH style endemic to modern horror movies.  (It is, by the way, quite graphically violent for its PG-13 rating.)

It's anyone's guess why Screen Gems, usually a canny studio (the lower-budget subsidiary of Sony), would release this cheap, unexciting thing just as the summer's blockbuster action movies are starting to arrive, but that's their accountants' problem.  Priest deserves to be buried out in that desert, with only its fellow post-apocalyptic fantasies for company.