Get On Up

 James Brown

James Brown and the Famous Flames

James Brown with the Rolling Stones at the TAMI show, 1964

GET ON UP                C+        
USA  (138 mi)  2014  d:  Tate Taylor               Official site

Like most Hollywood biopic tales, this one barely scratches the surface and tells us little about the man that we don’t already know, where you’d think with Mick Jagger as a producer that the film would at least offer proof positive as to how he changed or altered the music industry, but except for an early run-in with Little Richard, a man Brown idolized, few other musical acts are even mentioned.  Making matters worse, despite a heartfelt performance by Chadwick Boseman, seen earlier in the Jackie Robinson story 42 (2013), the music is entirely lip-synched, which certainly takes the starch out of any live performance, though every note he sings in the film is sung by James Brown.  Having seen Brown perform in documentaries on soul music or the decade of the 60’s, none of which is included in the film, Boseman is a pale substitute, especially with the camera continually cutting away after a few seconds, never capturing any extended dance moves, lacking the quickness, stamina, and dexterity of the man who largely invented break dancing, possessing astounding acrobatic agility, where the man knew how to use the microphone to great effect, often kicking it with his feet where it bounced right back into his hands, while building theatrical tension near the end of his performance of James Brown performs "Please Please Please ... - YouTube (6:15), usually his closing number, as they keep pulling him away from the microphone, throwing a cape over him, and leading him away, only to have him resurrect himself in a surge of energy that was repeated several times for dramatic effect, as the audience was simply enthralled by his showmanship.  White audiences may have preferred Elvis, even as a Vegas act, calling him the King, but James Brown was likely the most electrifying performer on the musical stage that we’ve ever seen, the man all others aspire to be.  That legendary quality simply doesn’t come across here, where unfortunately Chadwick Boseman isn’t in the same league as imitators Prince or Michael Jackson (interestingly joining Brown onstage Michael Jackson & James Brown (High Quality) YouTube, 3:33), who stole nearly all their onstage moves from James Brown (as did MC Hammer, Usher, Bruno Mars, Chris Brown, and even Janelle Monae), acquiring the undisputed title of the Godfather of Soul.  While others had a similar flair for showmanship, like Jerry Lee Lewis and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, or the incomparable Tina Turner, but they never had such a powerhouse band behind them, rehearsed to perfection, where the jolt of raw electric energy pulsating from that stage has never been seen before or since, especially accompanied by such fabulous dance moves performed while literally screaming the songs, sweat pouring off his face, earning the reputation for “the hardest working man in show business.”   

Born under a backdrop of scarcity from such remote isolation, basically growing up in a rundown shack in the woods with a physically abusive father (Lennie James) who was rarely at home and a terrified mother (Viola Davis) that eventually left to save her skin, Brown experienced dire poverty and stark deprivation as a young boy, where he’s seen as a child getting his first pair of dress shoes by removing them from the feet of a lynched man.  As Brown describes in his memoir, James Brown: The Godfather of Soul, “Being alone in the woods like that, spending nights in a cabin with nobody else there, it gave me my own mind.  No matter what came my way after that—prison, personal problems, government harassment—I had the ability to fall back on myself.”  Young James is played by two boys, Jamarion and Jordan Scott, both of whom are stellar, where eventually he was dropped off by his father to live with his Aunt Honey (Octavia Spencer), the Madame of a whorehouse, where he was expected to help bring in the customers.  While the film skips around a lot, not really in any coherent fashion, it was written by English brothers Jez and John-Henry Butterworth, who also wrote the Tom Cruise alien, sci-fi movie EDGE OF TOMORROW (2014), directed by white director Tate Taylor, who also directed The Help (2011), really missing a major opportunity here, leaving out major chunks of his life, while strangely opening with the worst scene in the film, an embarrassingly bad, cringeworthy, drug-induced, shotgun-toting stage of his life that doesn’t really connect to anything except to suggest by that time in his life he’d lost his mind, most likely due to drugs.  The movie tries to probe his inner psyche throughout, where somehow the choice to convey a near psychotic state through hallucinations is probably not the best way to do it, as to many in the audience that opening sequence shows him as just another crazy, gun-carrying “Negro” that we need to be afraid of, as the scene is expressed in such blatant stereotypical terms.  While the movie attempts to suggest his physical abuse in childhood led to his own tyrannical abuse of others, including his second wife (Jill Scott) and members of his band, who were rehearsed to death, never given a day off, while ruled over with an iron fist and either fined or fired should they fail to meet his standards of perfection.  It’s ironic, then, that the film is perfectly willing to overlook so many of his own personal transgressions, like drug abuse, physical violence, domestic abuse, rape allegations, numerous extramarital children, or legal troubles, quickly skimming over them or omitting them altogether, never really placing them in the context of his life.  In a near surreal moment, Brown and his band are heading for an appearance before the American troops when they come under Vietcong fire in a U.S. plane in 1968, where Brown is crazily haranguing the pilot about how he’s not afraid of death, when he then turns to the camera and asks the audience, “You ready?”  The film then jumps back into his childhood.  This ridiculous device, continually used throughout the film, was similarly used in Eastwood’s Jersey Boys (2014), a carryover from the Broadway stage.  In both instances it just feels silly, where unlike the theater, in film you already have the audience’s undivided attention, and this only detracts from that interest, feeling more like trickery, a gimmick that just doesn’t work.  

Brown was a middle-school dropout with no formal musical training (he could not read a chart, much less write one), but he had an intuitive grasp to remember and reproduce any tune or riff he heard, but also to hear the underlying structures of music and make them his own.  Like most black artists from the era, his roots are singing gospel music in church, the flamboyant hand-clapping, stomp-and-shout, get-down-on-your-knees and wail style of gospel music that Ray Charles first brought to popular music in 1959 with “What’d I Say” Ray Charles - What'd I Say LIVE YouTube (4:15).  Brown is the source of more hits than anyone of any color after Elvis Presley and stands virtually unrivalled as the preeminent pioneer and practitioner of the essential black musical styles of the 60’s and early 70’s—soul and funk—and the progenitor of rap and hip-hop, where the estate of James Brown earns millions each year on royalties from rap samplings.  While he screams and howls in nearly every song he ever recorded, there is very little, if anything, in the range of vocal emotion that he cannot express, and the same can be said of his almost perpetual motion onstage.  Even in the early years, his daring was unparalleled, as he was determined to be sensational, even if that meant swinging from the rafters, doing flying splits from atop a grand piano (causing his knees to bleed), and even leaping from a theater balcony into the orchestra pit, where his outrageousness was carefully calculated to convey that he was always in control.  Despite his lack of education, Brown always exhibited a dogged interest in financial matters, where in 1962 he wanted to make a live record at the Apollo Theater, where King Records producer Syd Nathan (Fred Melamed) opposed the idea, claiming it would never receive radio airplay.  So Brown put up his own money to record what went on to become a fixture on the playlist of many R&B radio stations, many playing the entire first half of the album, breaking for a commercial, and returning for the second half.  It spent 66 weeks on the Billboard Top Pop Albums chart, peaking at #2.  It remains to this day one of the more electrically charged live recordings available, listed as #25 on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.  Soon afterwards, Brown began a campaign to wrest ownership of the royalty-generating master tapes in the King archives, obtaining a measure of creative and commercial control that no popular musician, black or white, had quite achieved, and for years afterward he kept the tapes in a bag that was with him at all times.  At the peak of the Civil Rights struggle in 1968, he released one of his hit songs, “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud)” James Brown - 1968 Say It Loud (I'm Black and I'm Proud ... YouTube (5:58) simultaneous to the Tommie Lee Smith and John Carlos Black Power salute at the 1968 Summer Olympic Games in Mexico City, becoming embraced as an anthem to the civil rights movement.  James Brown wasn’t just unapologetically black, he was the darkest-skinned American performer to ever achieve such stardom.  This racial component, so significant in defining the overall importance of this man, is altogether missing from the film.  According to Gregory Allen Howard from Portside, July 31, 2014, The Whitewashing of James Brown | Portside:

There are over fifty black iconic biopics and black-themed movies in development in Hollywood, including multiple Richard Pryor projects, five Martin Luther King projects, multiple Marvin Gaye projects, and civil rights projects, and only one or two have an African American writer. Our entire history has been given over to white writers…

Let me tell you who James Brown was, really, not the Wikipedia James Brown.

He was a civil rights icon. Put James in the pantheon of the most impactful black men of the 20th century, and he would not be out of place. How can I make such an assertion? One song: "I'm Black and I'm Proud."

Before that song, if you wanted to start a fight with a man of color, all one had to do was call him black. Up until the mid-sixties, we were trying define ourselves: not colored anymore, now Negro. But black was not something we called ourselves. And along comes this little man and proudly states, "I'm black and I'm proud!" He took the thing that the oppressor used to bludgeon us and made it a weapon of pride for us.

That song caught on like wildfire. One day, our heads were down, the next day, our heads were held high, proud of who we were. We had all these groups, civil rights groups, Muslims, Panthers, but it was JB who gave us our swagger. That song lifted up an entire race! He put us on his back and carried us. Dr. King gave us our rights. JB gave us our dignity. Civil rights icon? You better believe it.

When that song came on the radio, cars stopped in the street. People turned up their radios, came out of their houses, and sang along with it; radio stations put it in a loop and played it for hours. The next day people greeted each other with "Hello, black man!" "My black brother." JB made black beautiful overnight.

While the film is largely a showcase for James Brown’s music, including unending set pieces of Brown in performance from the early 60’s through the late 80’s, it’s also about the people that he pushed out of his life, leading him to become a sad and tragic figure at the end of his life when he’s largely alone.  Outside of Brown, the other star of the show is his soft-spoken sideman Bobby Byrd (Nelsan Ellis), a man with a moral conscience, whose family took in Brown as a young 17-year old offender with no family of his own and in need of a permanent address to meet the conditions of parole.  These two hit it off immediately, where Byrd’s gospel group The Starlighters visited the prison where Brown was serving time for petty theft, becoming his most loyal and devoted friend throughout his life, a backup singer often brought to the front by Brown, grateful to be sure, even awestruck by Brown’s musical genius, but also resentful of what he was forced to put up with in Brown, becoming cognizant of his failings.  Together they formed the original group The Famous Flames, seen at a club impressed by none other than Little Richard (Brandon Smith, also excellent), taking the vacated stage during a break and creating a sensation, playing the Chitlin' circuit where Brown was introduced to his longtime manager Ben Bart (Dan Aykroyd), becoming the star of the act, eventually introducing Maceo Parker (Craig Robinson) as leader of an electrifying horn section that moved in unison as they played — check them out here in the concluding number that comes at the end of a frenzied 18-minute performance on the TAMI show in 1964, James Brown performs and dances to "Night Train" - YouTube (5:01), a song Sonny Liston used to listen to during his boxing workouts.  The entire 18-minutes, featuring “Out of Sight” (3:30), “Prisoner of Love” (3:30), “Please, Please, Please” (6:15), and “Night Train” (5:01), may be the best performance footage of Brown and his band currently available on YouTube, James Brown - Full TAMI Show Performance, 1964 - YouTube (18:15).  As Brown puts it in his memoir, James Brown: The Godfather of Soul, “We did a bunch of songs, nonstop, like always…I don’t think I ever danced so hard in my life, and I don’t think they’d ever seen a man move that fast.”  Another superb example of Brown in action is here seven years later with Bootsy Collins(!) on bass, James Brown Italy 1971 - YouTube (15:10), performing “Get On Up” (5:30) with sideman Bobby Byrd, “This Is a Man’s World” (4:10), and “Soul Power” (5:30).  Brown could captivate audiences anywhere around the world with a daring boldness and ferocity of spirit, a volcanic force that when he played, gyrating asses could not sit still, but had to move.  And for those who only heard James Brown shout and holler and never believed he could sing, there are these performances, literally days from one another, James Brown performs "Try Me". Live at the Boston Garden. April 5, 1968. YouTube (2:03), while in one of the first color recordings of Brown, James Brown performs "Try Me". Live at the Apollo Theater, March 1968 YouTube (2:43).  “Try Me” is also the bring-down-the-house final song of the film, a ballad that shows what he could do in a slow song with all its nuances, changing the lyrics to fit the moment, sung late in their lives with Bobby Byrd sitting in the crowd, creating a tender message that is all the more poignant for expressing the connectedness and inescapability of the past, not only the shared love, but all that has been lost between these two friends.  It’s a heartbreaking moment. 

Behind the Candelabra

Scott Thorson on stage with Liberace in Las Vegas in 1979

 

Scott Thorson taking Liberace to court for palimony in 1983

 




  

BEHIND THE CANDELABRA – made for TV           B  
USA  (118 mi)  2013  d:  Steven Soderbergh 

The summit of sex—the pinnacle of masculine, feminine, and neuter. Everything that he, she, and it can ever want… a deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavoured, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love. 

—Liberace description by Daily Mirror columnist Cassandra (William Connor), 1956

I call this palatial kitsch. Don’t you just love that?   —Liberace (Michael Douglas)

For some reason, the intimate story of Siegfried & Roy kept coming to mind, perhaps the closest thing to the Vegas glitz and glamor of Liberace (Michael Douglas, age 68) in our current age, where one could imagine white lions and tigers peacefully laying across the bed as if they were part of the furniture.  But this is an earlier era, where Liberace was introduced as “Mr. Showmanship,” a workaholic and consummate professional who made his millions wearing outrageously flamboyant costumes including hand-designed, gold inlaid outfits, minks, capes, and ostrich feathers while showcasing plenty of gold bling in his Vegas acts that routinely featured a candelabra on his piano.  That he should attract mostly older women was perhaps a curiosity of the times, maybe wishing this was the son they never had, viewed as rich, highly successful, and living in the lavish comfort of aristocratic royalty.  Little was made of sexual orientation in the 50’s, where the term “gay” was still used to express frivolity, such as the lyrics of Judy Garland singing “Make the Yuletide gay” in Judy Garland - Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas - YouTube (2:30) from MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS (1944), or Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers asking “Why do birds sing so gay?” in their 1956 hit Frankie Lymon - Why Do Fools Fall In Love (1965) - YouTube (2:19).  This film is much more successful in portraying what goes on behind closed doors than Clint Eastwood’s earlier effort J. Edgar (2011) which only hints at FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s secret homosexual love affair with his second in command, Clyde Tolson, the Associate Director of the FBI for forty years, with Tolson inheriting Hoover’s estate after he died.  Adapted from the 1988 memoir of Scott Thorson, Behind the Candelabra: My Life with Liberace, the film is largely told from Thorson’s point of view, where Soderbergh wastes no time in the opening pickup scene in a gay bar where Scott (Matt Damon, age 42) is a tender 17-year old still under the guardianship of the state foster care system.  We can tell from the reaction of his foster family that this is certainly not the first time, but no one could have guessed what would happen next.

Scott’s friend takes him to Vegas to see a Liberace show, meeting backstage where the maestro’s roving eye, some 40 years his senior, fell for Scott, inviting him to his home, where he literally kicked out all the other house boys, replacing them with Scott, bestowing lavish gifts upon him, including expensive clothes, mink furs, gold jewelry, a gold-plated Rolls Royce on his 21^st brithday, and even a home in Vegas that Liberace co-signed.  Yes, there is something a little creepy about seeing the cosmetically enhanced, leering face of an aging Michael Douglas leaning over onto Matt Damon’s side of the bed that very first morning as he initiates their first sexual encounter, as this would legally be considered an act of rape with the underage teenager, but the tone of the film is all about how Liberace is literally smitten by this kid, like he’s a godsend, the answer to his prayers, where the two of them are quickly seen sipping champagne in the hot tub, one of Liberace’s favorite places of relaxation.  This is one boy toy Liberace didn’t want out of his sight, while his wealth and success makes him something of a father figure to the fatherless Scott.  While Liberace’s extravagant mansion is something of a museum piece itself, with a pool in the shape of a piano, not to mention 17 pianos, a casino, marble everywhere, an ermine bedspread, portraits of Liberace, and a reproduction of the Sistine Chapel painted on the ceiling with Liberace portrayed as one of the cherubs.  Despite the performances where the two leads literally lose themselves in their roles, as well as wigs and facial reconstruction, part of the problem is the undeveloped chemistry between these two stars, lacking humor and any real emotional depth, though there are various kinds of human need, but these two simply have nothing in common, where it remains a mystery how this kid could consume so much of Liberace’s life.  The film suggests both are lonely, friendless and alone, where love may express itself as much in human companionship as anything else, though Soderbergh and his two lead actors hold nothing back, as there is certainly a blatantly raw-tinged sexual presence onscreen, complete with the use of amyl nitrate poppers, which was the club culture ecstasy drug of choice at the time.

Some of the secondary characters are equally outstanding, especially the completely unrecognizable Debbie Reynolds as Liberace’s mother, still speaking in a thick Polish accent, amusingly winning big while playing the slot machines in her son’s house, but when no cash comes tumbling out, as the machine has not been refilled, she insists upon a check.  Dan Aykroyd plays Liberace’s sour-faced and brutally demanding manager, who accepts no excuses for missing stage appearances, where Liberace was a Vegas headliner for decades, even incorporating Scott into the act, garishly dressed as a chauffeur driving the performer’s rhinestone decorated Rolls Royce onstage, where he would open the door for Liberace who would emerge in an outrageously elaborate fur coat with a 16-foot train.  Also stealing the show is Rob Lowe as the sleazy and morally compromised, yet ridiculously successful Beverly Hills plastic surgeon of the stars, advertising a veritable fountain of youth, always promising to make his patients look decades younger. Perhaps the most hideous aspect of their relationship was Liberace’s insistence that Scott undergo plastic surgery to make his young protégé look more like himself, including a new chin, a nose job and enhanced cheekbones, and also an accompanying “Hollywood diet,” a cocktail of doctor-prescribed drugs that included pharmaceutical cocaine.  This eventually led to their falling out, forced to pawn most of Liberace’s lavish gifts, where Scott’s heavily out-of-control cocaine use takes a turn into the nightmarish REQUIEM FOR A DREAM (2000) territory.  Scott is quickly jettisoned from Liberace’s life, just like the others before him, filing a highly public $113 million dollar palimony suit that was the talk of the tabloids in 1983 but coming up empty, reduced to accepting a $95,000 out of court settlement from Liberace in a death bed reconciliation before the flamboyant performer died of AIDS in 1986.  While obviously remembering the good years in the film’s finale, it’s ironic that Scott Thorson’s life has been a mess ever since, where in 1990 he was shot five times while under the witness protection program, later spending four years in prison on drug and burglary charges, and was recently just arrested on credit card theft where he’s currently in prison awaiting sentencing, noting the prison TV doesn’t have HBO, so it may be years before he’s able to watch the film based upon his own life story.  Allegedly, still hard up for cash, he’s contemplating writing a second book about his relationship to Liberace.  While the film is explicitly gay-themed, the final outcome is anything but gay.  

Cedar Rapids

CEDAR RAPIDS                                                        B                     

USA   (87 mi)  2011  d:  Miguel Arteta 

The title is a little misleading, as despite the supposed Iowa location, most of the characters come from other Midwest states like Wisconsin, Minnesota and even Nebraska, while the film itself was shot entirely in the state of Michigan.  While it’s not easy to wrap yourself around the semi-comatose happenings of a small town insurance convention, probably no place on earth one would rather not be, yet for all its attention to Midwestern detail, this film starts extremely slow but eventually finds a tailwind of crude comedy that’s actually pretty funny.  Ed Helms is perfectly cast as the ultra ordinary and socially awkward Tim Lippe, a conservative and near invisible mid 30’s insurance man covering the farm towns of Brown Valley, Wisconsin, a place where the world changes at a glacial pace, and where Tim’s once-a-week “pre-engagement” girlfriend is none other than his 7th grade science teacher (Sigourney Weaver).  After the strange death of their leading sales rep, the boss sends Tim to win the company’s coveted 2-Diamond Award, which they’ve won three years running, though Tim is strangely apprehensive, thinking the world is suddenly moving too fast.  His boss has confidence in him, but places extra pressure on him as he expects results.  Honestly, there’s nothing at this point to suggest it’d be a good idea to remain in the theater unless perhaps you’re Amish and you skipped school to see it.  But it’d be worth your patience.        

With little fanfare, Tim boards a plane for the first time in his life and heads for a thriving big city metropolis where he immediately lands in insurance convention nirvana, a place he describes as Barbados once he sees his first indoor swimming pool.  In order to save costs, he’s got two roommates, one is probably the first black man he’s even seen, Isiah Whitlock Jr. as Ronald, a polished, smooth talker whose voice alone has the calming assurance of a radio host, and finally, in a stroke of excessively bad taste, John C. Reilly as “Deanzie” Ziegler is the most obnoxious man on the planet and a man his boss specifically warned him to avoid, a guy who guzzles free booze like it’s candy and unleashes a barrage of crude, sexually offensive remarks that you can’t believe you just heard, turning everything into sexual innuendo, as if he’s an older and less successful version of one of Saturday Night Live’s “wild and crazy” guys, Steve Martin and Dan Aykroyd as the world’s worst pickup artists on the loose.  And in perhaps her best role ever is Anne Heche, nearly unrecognizable as Joan, an outgoing girl, her married inhibitions unleashed as she’s out of town, who just wants to be one of the guys, except she’s flirtatious as hell.  Once the players have been introduced, they start drinking and loosening up (and did I mention there’s a scavenger hunt?), where little by little their inner souls, locked in a vice grip of their own hard corps conventionality, struggle to become liberated.  Major conflicts ensue. 

After leading the audience exactly where they think this is going, writer Phil Johnston sends them on an express train veering out of control, where Reilly’s humor actually becomes hysterical and the straight-laced Ed Helms becomes the bon vivant man about town, where his heartfelt earnestness turns him into a chick magnet, which all but knocks playboy Ziegler off his feet in admiration, immediately declaring him a best friend for life, even if he just got to know him.  The zaniness is crude, but appealing, as by the end of this picture, despite a series of setbacks and moments of extreme anguish and despair, a man constantly challenged by unforeseen forces, the perennially uptight Helms will try just about anything, as he’s at the end of his rope, yet his inner self is basically so admirable that the fun is seeing him get mixed up on a road journey with lowlifes and swindlers, all thinking he’s easy pickings, as he has to somehow navigate his way through this moral purgatory of lost souls.  It’s no less than a WIZARD OF OZ (1939) journey, as our everyman hero, with the help of his friends, is forced through his adventures, which include a rollicking ride with a friendly convention prostitute (Alia Shawkat), to re-evaluate what really matters in his own life and damn if there’s not a surge of Capra-esque emotion by the end of this picture—remarkable that something that started so predictably lame became so irreverently enjoyable by the end, continuing the bad jokes even over the end credits.