Emilia Perez

I found the trailer for Emilia Perez to be really intriguing (to say the least) so I went to a matinee at the Broadway yesterday.  This crime thriller that is also somehow a musical is incredibly bold and, even though it doesn't always work, it is never boring.  Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldana) is an overworked and underappreciated lawyer in Mexico who is disillusioned by the number of violent criminals that she is forced to defend.  After winning a big case, she receives a lucrative offer from Juan "Manitas" Del Monte (Karla Sofia Gascon), a notorious leader of a drug cartel, that she cannot refuse.  He asks her to help him become the woman he has always wanted to be so she secretly finds him a doctor to perform gender affirming surgeries, arranges for his wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and his two children to relocate to Switzerland, and helps him fake his death in return for an exorbitant amount of money.  Manitas begins a new life as Emilia Perez but, four years later, she is desperate to see her children.  She contacts Rita and has her arrange for Jessi and the children to return to Mexico to live with her in the guise of a distant cousin.  As Emilia sheds her old identity, she is still haunted by her violent past so she and Rita create a nonprofit organization to locate the missing victims of her former cartel so she can atone.  She also begins a relationship with Epifania (Adriana Paz).  However, she cannot escape who she really is when Jessi resumes a relationship with Gustavo Brun (Edgar Ramirez), with whom she had been having an affair during the marriage, and takes the children away from her.  I enjoyed the songs individually (none of them are particularly memorable) but the shifts in tone are all over the place with big choreographed group numbers raging against violence and hypocrisy, poignant ballads about identity (my favorite is "Papa" when Emilia's son tells her that she reminds him of his father), a campy sequence detailing the surgeries involved in transitioning, and upbeat pop songs about love.  There are also issues with pacing because the scenes involving the search for those who are missing go on a bit too long while the romance between Emilia and Epifania and the fiery climax both seem a bit rushed.  The theme of living authentically is very compelling but I'm not sure how I feel about the assertion that you can never change who you are because that seems to diminish Emilia's arc as a trans woman (I was especially disturbed by a scene in which Emilia threatens Jessi using the voice she had before she transitioned).  Having said all of that, my attention never waved because everything on the screen is so audacious and all three actresses give amazing performances, particularly Gascon in a powerful double role.  I didn't totally love this (my favorite genre-bending musical is Annette) but I recommend it for its creative swing for the fences.

Anora

I am a huge fan of Sean Baker's films (my favorite is The Florida Project but Tangerine is a close second) because they are always provocative but humane character studies about people on the margins of society.  His latest, Anora, is no exception and I was really excited to see it last night at the Broadway last night with my nephew.  Anora "Ani" Mikheeva (Mikey Madison) is a Russian-American who lives in Brighton Beach with her sister and works as a high-end stripper at a club in Manhattan.  Because she speaks Russian, the owner of the club introduces her to Ivan "Vanya" Zakharov (Mark Eydelshteyn), the son of a wealthy Russian oligarch, who hires her for a lap dance and then for sex at his family's mansion in Brooklyn.  After several nights together, he hires her to spend the week with him as his girlfriend and then proposes marriage so that he can get a green card to stay in America and avoid his controlling parents back in Russia.  They get married in Las Vegas and have a whirlwind romance before his minders Toros (Karren Karagulian), Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan), and Igor (Yura Borisov), who have been lax in their supervision, are ordered by his father to deal with the situation.  Ani eventually proves that she has more class than the feckless Vanya and his wealthy parents (Aleksei Serebryakov and Darya Ekamasova).  This is surprisingly hilarious (I laughed out loud when Ani bests the two henchmen who are trying to subdue her) and incredibly poignant (the final scene is absolutely devastating but hopeful).  I especially loved the relationship between Ani and Igor because he sees the vulnerability behind Ani's bravura and she finds an unexpected ally against people who see her as transactional.  Madison gives one of the most magnetic performances I've seen in a long time (one that is garnering a lot of much deserved Oscar buzz) and Borisov is quietly powerful.  My only criticism is that the narrative sometimes drags in places, particularly the sequence where Ani and the henchmen wander around Brighton Beach searching for Vanya.  I loved this and highly recommend it (with the proviso that it is very explicit).

Here

The second movie in the double feature my nephew and I saw last night was Here.  I was really intrigued by the premise but I was ultimately disappointed in the execution of it.  This portrays events that occur at one location, and one single point of view, from prehistory to today.  The narrative is non-linear and includes the extinction of the dinosaurs, an indigenous man (Joel Oulette) and woman (Dannie McCallum) who live on the land where the house will eventually be built, the colonial governor of New Jersey (Daniel Betts) who lives on a plantation that becomes a museum across the street from the house, a man at the turn of the century (Gwilym Lee) obsessed with flying and his disdainful wife (Michelle Dockery) who are the first inhabitants of the house, an inventor (David Flynn) and his pin-up model wife (Ophelia Lovibond) who live in the house during the 1930s, and Devon Harris (Nicholas Pinnock) and his wife Helen (Nikki Amuka-Bird) and son Justin (Cache Vanderpuye) who live in the house during the COVID-19 pandemic.  However, most of the timeline involves Al and Rose Young (Paul Bettany and Kelly Reilly, respectively), a couple who buys the house at the end of World War II and raises their family there through the mid-2000s.  Their son Richard (Tom Hanks) marries Margaret (Robin Wright) when she gets pregnant and they also live in the house and raise their daughter Vanessa (Zsa Zsa Zemeckis) there.  The static camera angle is really clever at first but then it left me feeling kind of bored and detached from the action.  The scenes are short and move through the timelines very haphazardly (the transitions occur with an outline of a shape through which you see one timeline inserted into another one) so a lot of the emotional impact is lost because, just when you feel a connection, the scene changes.  Hanks, Wright, and Bettany, especially, are great but almost everyone else inexplicably overacts.  At one point, my nephew and I looked at each other and had to stifle laughter behind our hands during what is meant to be a poignant moment.  I found the message to be very depressing (my nephew disliked it even more than I did) because Al and Rose buy the house thinking that they are achieving the American dream after the war but the house eventually stifles all of Richard's dreams.  I also think the score by Alan Silvestri is incredibly manipulative.  This movie thinks it is more profound than it actually is and I recommend skipping it (or at least waiting for it to stream).

Juror #2

My nephew and I went to a double feature last night and we started with Juror #2 at one of only 50 theaters showing it in the U.S.  I'm not sure why it is getting such a limited release because our screening was packed and there were a lot of positive comments from people after it was over.  My nephew and I really enjoyed it.  Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult) is a recovering alcoholic expecting his first child with his wife Allison Crewson (Zoey Deutch) when he is selected for jury duty in a high profile murder trial.  The prosecutor, Faith Killebrew (Toni Collette), thinks it is an open and shut case and is eager for a win to bolster her campaign to become district attorney.  James Sythe (Gabriel Basso) is accused of beating his girlfriend Kendall Carter (Francesca Eastwood) to death and leaving her body in a ravine after a fight in a local bar but he and his lawyer Eric Resnick (Chris Messina) staunchly maintain his innocence.  As Kemp listens to the testimony, he is horrified to realize that he was at the same bar on the night of the murder and that his car accident, which he believed to be a collision with a deer, may have killed the victim.  He is tormented by guilt when the jury begins their deliberations but he is also disconcerted when another juror (J.K. Simmons) starts asking questions about Sythe's guilt.  This is a slow burn in which the crime is shown from several different perspectives and I liked the fact that there was always some doubt about what actually happened.  I also enjoyed the discussion about culpability as Kemp tries to rationalize the fact that Sythe is a dangerous man who deserves to be punished even though he may not be guilty of the specific crime he is charged with as well as the criticism of a judicial system in which expediency is favored over the actual truth.  Hoult gives an incredibly powerful performance as a man desperate to believe that he is a good man and so does Collette because her character has a similar, though more understated, arc.  I found this to be very thought-provoking and I think it is a shame that most people won't have a chance to see it in a theater.

Ballet West's Jekyll and Hyde

Last night I went to Ballet West's amazing production of Jekyll and Hyde and I loved everything about it.  Robert Louis Stevenson (Jake Preece), who is ill and in a drug-fueled haze, has a dream about a respected man who secretly wrestles with his inner demons and this brings the character of Dr. Jekyll (Dominic Ballard) to life.  Jekyll attempts to treat a patient's mental illness with one of his potions in an insane asylum but it is a failure so, when he returns with Stevenson to his laboratory, he experiments on himself.  Stevenson glimpses the character Mr. Hyde (Adrian Fry), who represents the evil inside Jekyll, in the shadows waiting to be revealed.  Jekyll attends a party at the home of Sir Danvers Carew (Jeffrey Rogers), the father of his fiancee Nellie (Amy Potter), but he is distracted and joins the men at a tavern where he meets the prostitute Rowena (Nicole Fanney).  When he becomes aggressive with Rowena, he realizes that his potion has been successful and flees to his laboratory where Hyde finally emerges.  He ventures out on the streets of London, with violent results, and has interactions with both Nellie and Rowena before an epic confrontation with Jekyll for control.  Hyde is victorious but he is finally repressed when Stevenson succumbs to his illness.  The integration of Robert Louis Stevenson, the author of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, into the narrative is absolutely brilliant because his hallucinogenic interactions with the characters he created mirror their conflict with each other.  The staging is incredibly innovative and I really loved the use of reflective black surfaces and strips of LED lights that are raised and lowered for effect and turn from white to red to indicate the presence of Hyde.  I also loved the dynamic choreography because the emotions are conveyed by movement rather than by text and it is captivating, especially the frenetic sequences inside the insane asylum, the passionate Pas de Deux between Hyde and Nellie followed by a more restrained and lyrical one between Jekyll and Nellie, and the dramatic confrontation between Jekyll and Hyde in which they push and pull against each other.  I enjoyed having the focus on the men in the company and it was really impressive to see Preece, Ballard, and Fry so perfectly in synch as their movements mirror each other.  I always enjoy seeing Fry because he is amazing but I was really blown away by Ballard's expressive performance because I felt his every emotion.  The Victorian costumes are beautiful (I loved seeing the tails of the frock coats twirling) and the subtle integration of red in the scenes with Hyde is very effective as are the masks used during the transitions between Jekyll and Hyde.  Finally, the music is powerful and I particularly loved hearing a portion of Prelude Op. 28 No. 15 by Frederic Chopin (it is a favorite of mine because it is so melancholy) during the final scene.  This is now my favorite Ballet West production and I highly encourage getting a ticket to one of the four remaining performances (go here).