AMMONITE Review

While Lyme Regis, a coastal town in West Dorset that lies in Lyme Bay on the English Channel, may very well be a beautiful place to visit and/or live Director Francis Lee (God’s Own Country) has made it seem as if it is anything but in his second feature film, Ammonite. It’s not only the location, but it's as if everything in Lee’s film was designed to match the color palette and tone of the fossils our main character, acclaimed self-taught paleontologist Mary Anning (Kate Winslet), found in the cliffs along the Channel in Southwest England: grey and dead. From the furniture and fixtures inside Mary’s shop she now supports herself and her ailing mother with to the weather that constantly seems to be sweeping up on shore. Ammonite is grey, cold, and dreary to a fault. It’s almost as if Lee was so hell bent on having the audience mentally inhabit the mind of Anning that he determined it best to have the pacing, aesthetic, and attitude mirror that of Anning’s daily routine which is to say it's all exceptionally tedious. Tedious that is, until the narrative finds it surprisingly convenient to usher in an actual plot that couldn’t feel less natural or organic to the aforementioned tone set thus far. Strangely convenient in that the type of story this film wants to tell is abundantly clear and thus everything that happens seems to cater to this very particular set of circumstances; the problem being that as such developments unravel it becomes clear the depths of the core relationship won’t generate a strong enough investment to make such conveniences forgivable. It would almost be easier to dismiss the film as pure Oscar bait had it more scenes featuring characters explicitly yelling at one another about their forbidden love, but Lee’s intentions are more honorable than this. Though I've yet to see the filmmaker's debut feature that put him on the map from 2017 it would it would seem Lee was very much interested in making a similarly compelling if not subdued drama for his follow-up. Still, outside a single night of passion, Ammonite remains a somber and sometimes even dull experience that never fully lands the complicated and conflicted heart at the root of the dynamic the film seeks to establish and explore.

ROCKETMAN Review

“I Guess That’s Why They Call it the Blues” is one of my favorite songs of all time. Like, I would rank it as being among one of the best song's ever written...that's how much I love it. My mother's side of the family being from England I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know who Elton John was. It’s not so much the lyrical content itself that moved me as a young man for I couldn’t have grasped what Bernie Taupin was expressing through his lyrics, but there was always something about the tone of the music and the clarity of the melody in an Elton John song that would inherently move myself and countless others, obviously. I don’t know what exactly was meant by, “And it won't be long before you and me run-to the place in our hearts where we hide,” but I know how it made me feel; I know that it made me stop and take more time to recognize what was happening in my life at that given moment and realize that no matter what stage of life I’m in that it won’t be that way for long and to cherish those moments as life isn’t measured by how long we have, but by what we do with the time we’re given. A little deep, right? To say that I was hoping for the same type of emotional reaction to director Dexter Fletcher’s Rocketman is accurate and while it would be largely impossible for a two-hour visual interpretation of Elton John’s life to measure up to such high hopes there was the optimism that Fletcher might be able to pull it off as the opening moments of the film suggested this wasn't your typical musical biopic. Sure, we begin with the Elton John of the early eighties entering rehab with it serving as a platform for John to reflect on the entirety of his life, but while the framing device may be familiar you've never quite seen it service the story as it does in Rocketman. Fletcher's film is a full-on fantasy in many regards meaning this isn't a movie about Elton John's life as it actually happened, but the story of Elton John's life as Elton John remembers it. This setting of expectations paired with the flashing through of John's childhood that culminates in "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting" and a full-on, flat-out, undisputable musical number complete with dance interludes gives the impression that Fletcher mastered how not to just convey the events of his subject's life, but capture the essence of what it might have been like to live as Elton John. From this moment on though, Rocketman never gains the same momentum that it bubbles over with during "Saturday" and though it offers some technically inventive filmmaking and creative interpretations of several Elton John classics the film itself is never as emotionally moving or rousing as the songs themselves. 

New Trailer for ROCKETMAN Starring Taron Egerton

After releasing a slight featurette focused on the fact star Taron Egerton (Kingsman) would be doing all of his own vocal work as Elton John in director Dexter Fletcher's upcoming biopic, Rocketman, earlier this week Paramount has now followed it up with the second, official trailer for the film and it must be said that this thing looks a thousand times better than it initially did after the reveal of that first teaser. That first teaser was released around the same time Bohemian Rhapsody was gracing theaters last year and after Rhapsody more or less followed the traditional beats of a music biopic and given Fletcher was brought in to finish the film after the firing of Bryan Singer it was easy to see why that first look left a feeling this might be more of the same despite John obviously being a singular and unforgettable figure both in both music and pop culture. What is great about this new, full-length trailer though, is that while it does somewhat stick to the familiar beats of the "rise to stardom" arc we've seen countless times before in movies of the same ilk it also really lends a sense of getting to know the man behind the facade, behind the excess, and behind the extravagance. There is a particular shot in the trailer where Egerton, dawning the famously sequined Dodgers uniform John wore during his 1975 show at Dodger stadium, goes from backstage to out in front of the overwhelming audience and the change in his facial expression so perfectly captures not only the essence of what the character might have been feeling at the moment, but also speaks to how much of and how good of a showman John was and still is to this day. There are also hints of the more whimsical, weird movie Rocketman is no doubt destined to be as Fletcher is said to have tried to display John's larger-than-life stage presence through what is more of a fantasy-like approach that channels the music and personality of John more appropriately rather than keeping things completely straightforward a la Rhapsody. Rocketman also stars Bryce Dallas Howard, Richard Madden, Jamie Bell, Gemma Jones, and opens on May 31st, 2019.