CADILLAC RECORDS

DIRECTED BY DARNELL MARTIN

Bottom line: The early days of blues and rock’n’roll, a rather run-of-the-mill music film spruced up by some terrific performances.

Grade (on a 1-10 scale): 6.5.

The movie is called Cadillac Records. You’ve never heard of the label? Well, the film is based on a real-life company of considerable renown in the ‘50s and ‘60s. But would you rush out to see a movie titled Chess Records?

If the answer to that question is an unstinting yes, then you should see Darnell Martin’s musical drama without hesitation. If you have any doubts, read on.

Actually, there’s a persuasive reason for the film’s title. Several decades ago, well before Detroit began its present disastrous decline, Cadillacs were unparalleled symbols of wealth and prestige, perhaps especially to folks too poor to afford decent housing.

That’s why, when any of Chess Records’ artists achieved their first hit, they would be awarded a brand-new Caddy by label head Leonard Chess. Think of it: Cadillacs were driven by bank presidents and the heads of movie studios. That idea that an indigent former sharecropper could, in segregated America, earn, own and drive one simply for belting a tune he learned in the Delta into a microphone in Chicago – why, that must’ve seemed like a revolution. A revolution with white sidewalls.

And so it was. While most of the well-known movies in this crowded genre deal with the early days of rock’n’roll -- roughly the mid-‘50s to the late ‘60s -- Cadillac Records takes an original tack by starting out a decade earlier. It chronicles how blues music by Southern blacks, recorded and marketed by Northern whites, laid the groundwork for both the sophisticated R&B/soul and the white rock’n’roll that dominated charts and defined American (and British) pop in the subsequent era.

Martin begins her tale the late ‘40s, inter-cutting blues guitarist Muddy Waters (Jeffrey Wright) leaving the farms of Mississippi for the streets of Chicago with Leonard Chess (Adrien Brody), an immigrant from Poland, trying his hand at running a music club, then sidling into the record business. When the two meet up, musical history is in the making. One of Muddy’s first recordings, “Rolling Stone,” earns him his Cadillac, and Chess Records is off and running.

We subsequently see the label’s musical family expand to include important artists such as Howlin’ Wolf (Eammon Walker) and Little Walter (Columbus Short) and, later, Etta James (Beyoncé Knowles). About halfway into the movie, however, a new kind of performer comes along. Looking for a crossover artist, Chess - at the behest of Muddy - signs Chuck Berry (Mos Def), a duck-walking, wise-cracking, womanizing character who many people consider a country musician. Berry’s “Maybelline” does more than earn him a Cadillac; it signals the end of “race records” and the advent of the country/R&B fusion that would be rock’n’roll.

I wish I could say Darnell’s film lived up to its title by being a Cadillac of music movies, but it’s more like a Dodge. Several notches below the likes of The Buddy Holly Story, Ray and Walk the Line, it perhaps should have debuted on pay cable rather than in theaters. The main problem is the script: The story has a lot of juice in its early sections, but gradually comes to feel repetitious and meandering in its chronicle of its subjects’ travails with fame, money, drugs, booze, infidelity, and so on. For my money, it also misses some of the menace and allure of early race music, and the searing racial tensions that formed its milieu. Finally, there are some absurd anachronisms, such as Elvis Presley appearing on the scene sometime after we’ve met the Rolling Stones and Beach Boys!

Still, the film has several huge assets in the performances at its center. Jeffrey Wright, one of my favorite actors, is solid and compelling as Muddy Waters. His excellence is matched by the goofy, electric charm of Mos Def as Chuck Berry and searing, poignant Beyoncé as Etta James, while the lesser known Eammon Walker and Columbus Short are terrific as Little Walter, respectively.

AUSTRALIA

DIRECTED BY BAZ LUHRMANN

Bottom line: An expansive romantic epic of the Outback, ravishingly mounted in the style of classic Hollywood.

Grade (on a 1-10 scale): 8.5

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised to have been thoroughly won over by Baz Luhrmann’s sweeping, three-hour romantic epic Australia, but the skepticism I took into the theater had solid reasons behind it.

First, how could anyone title a movie Australia? Wasn’t that an automatic promise of James Michener-style boring portentousness? Second, while I liked the cheeky ingenuity of Luhrmann’s breakthrough, Strictly Ballroom, I found the post-modern grandiosity of his Romeo & Juliet (with Leonardo DiCaprio) and Moulin Rouge brittle and uneven. Third, in the little universe I inhabit, advance word on the film was dismal. “Terrible” was one critic-friend’s blunt assessment.

Given all that, I was reflexively suspicious when the movie started out by announcing its concern with the “stolen generations” of aboriginal children taken from their parents by the Australian government for reeducation, then plunged straight into a lush, almost cartoonish romantic drama in which porcelain-skinned Nicole Kidman plays Lady Sarah Ashley, a tightly wound Brit who, as WWII approaches, comes to the Outback to force her husband to sell his ranch and return to England, but finds hubby dead and herself in the decidedly roughhewn care of one of his drovers, the aptly named Drover (Hugh Jackman).

Not only did the premise seemed contrived and clichéd, but Luhrmann’s style, as before, was spectacularly, insistently florid, the camera panning and swooping ceaselessly, the lighting unstintingly baroque, gorgeously scenic landscapes giving jarring against luminous close-ups of the stars, every impressive composition rushed toward the next by the film’s breathless editing rhythms.

I began to get over my suspicions when the story’s power began to assert itself, and I realized something: Luhrmann wasn’t kidding. This wasn’t some giddy stylistic exercise or self-regarding stunt. The director (who’s also credited with the story) believes in what he’s doing, both in terms of creating a grand romantic myth about Australia and in using his own updated version of a classic cinematic vernacular to do so.

Given both the novelty and the expansiveness of all this, it’s no wonder it takes a while for its peculiar magic to take hold. But I remember when I knew I was hooked. Lady Sarah ends up on her husband’s desolate (or rather, gorgeously primeval) ranch and the chill between her and Drover begins to thaw when they have to pull together a ragtag set of aborigine and female cowhands to attempt driving her herd of cattle across the desert to the territorial port in order to foil the local cattle baron’s designs on her land.

Yes, it’s the stuff of a thousand old westerns, not to mention The African Queen and other chestnuts that involve a sparring couple facing seemingly insurmountable physical odds. But in this case, the conceit overpowers all objections due not so much to its inherent mythic power as to Lurhmann’s skill and deliberate emotional conviction in mounting it, and to the steadily growing chemistry of Kidman and Jackman, who are both in top form. (The story’s third main character is a half-caste boy, nicely played by newcomer Brandon Walters.)

It’s a fitting coincidence that the tale begins in 1939, the fabled annis mirabilis for Hollywood that saw the release of Gone with the Wind, Stagecoach and other legendary classics, including one that Australia repeatedly references: The Wizard of Oz. Like Pedro Almodovar in Spain, Aussie Luhrmann comes from a background of adoring classic Hollywood moviemaking yet simultaneously mistrusting it. His whole career seems to revolve around a question regarding its influence: Can he adapt its seductive thematic and stylistic tropes without surrendering to its frequent banality and evasiveness?

His earlier movies, in their different ways, deconstructed the old formulas yet kept them tightly bound by tethers of knowing irony. In Australia, he replaces the irony with a sincerity that’s no less knowing and, in my view, is even more daring and mature.

I found Australia entirely persuasive, at once stylistically ravishing and emotionally satisfying. It is, more than any film Luhrmann’s made, a mass-market not an art film, much like the Hollywood classics it emulates. No doubt, various folks who’ve followed the director till now won’t cotton to its unapologetic romantic effusiveness. But maybe some will. Coming out of the theater, I heard a middle-aged woman behind me say, “Well, it wasn’t horrible.” Among the hipster set, that equals high praise, I would say.

QUANTUM OF SOLACE

DIRECTED BY MARC FORSTER

Bottom line: The new Bond falls far short of the last one, though star Daniel Craig is still riveting.

Grade (on a 1-10 scale): 6

It’s fitting that my first online film review for Metro concerns the new James Bond film, Quantum of Solace, because the movies’ master spy was among my first cinematic obsessions. I was 12 years old when I encountered From Russia With Love (1963), the second 007 outing, but I became an instant convert. Goldfinger, the next Bond film, sealed the deal, combining action, eros and wry British drollery in virtually the same moment that brought us the pop panache of the Beatles and Swinging London.

Flash forward more than four decades. The Bond cycle has grown bloated and hoary. But then comes the most unlikely and galvanic of resurrections. The family of longtime producer Albert R. Broccoli rethinks the brand and retools it from the ground up. The result, in Casino Royale, is stunningly smart and successful. The script hews more closely to Ian Fleming’s gritty fiction than any Bond film has in ages. The direction, by journeyman veteran Martin Campbell, welds breathtaking action to a new concern with character and mood. A welcome measure of visceral realism and emotional force replaces the former emphasis on giddy, hi-tech fantasy, while many of the old Bond stand-bys (martinis, gambling, cars, exotic locales) are persuasively updated.

Best of all, the new agent 007, feral and muscular Daniel Craig, is the most persuasive and charismatic Bond since Sean Connery’s original, a tough customer who’s as believable is brutal smackdowns as he is in a tux at the casino’s gaming tables.

I wish I could report that Quantum of Solace equaled or came close to its predecessor’s strengths, but it doesn’t. Expansive and energetic, it’s by no means a washout, or a return to the fanciful, fantastical Bonds of yore. The producers, thankfully, continue many of the changes made in the last film. Indeed, a curious facet is that this is the first 007 movie that’s premised as a sequel to the one that came before it. Our Bond this time is still reeling from the terrific personal loss he suffered at the end of Casino Royale. Unfortunately, if you missed that film or don’t recall its specifics, you may find the references to Vesper Lynn (Bond’s tragic love) just plain baffling.
There are several problems with the new film, most bespeaking a failure to build on the lessons of the previous movie. First, rather than returning to Fleming’s fiction (though the film’s title comes from one of his short stories), the screenplay comprises a mishmash of action-movie clichés and topical references. Much of it, alas, is murky and clotted to the point of incomprehensibility. The scene shifts from Italy to England to Haiti to South America to Austria and so on, but the plotting grows more opaque at every turn. If you come out of the movie knowing who the main baddies were working for, you’re a more astute observer than I. (Speaking of baddies, the chief one here, played by goofy French actor Mathieu Amalric, may be the weakest Bond villain ever.)

The film’s second big weakness is director Marc Forster, a craftsman known for art films (Monsters’ Ball, The Kite Runner) who’s demonstrably inferior to Campbell at the combination of visual brio and emotional nuance that made Casino Royale such a stunner. Granted, Forster mounts a full complement of action set pieces that, since they arrive like clockwork every ten minutes or so, keep the movie rattling along at a good clip and assure that most viewers won’t fall asleep (and may even feel like they’ve gotten their money’s worth). But these scenes have a mechanical, by-the-Jason-Bourne-playbook feel, and they don’t substitute for the dramatic and emotional textures that distinguished the last Bond.

As our favorite maverick superspy, Daniel Craig remains compelling and constantly watchable, the best single addition to the franchise in ages. But this film’s script fails him. In Casino Royale, Craig rode an emotional rollercoaster that brought out his tremendous gifts as an actor and thereby expanded and enriched Bond as a character. Here, he’s just put through the paces as an action hero, and we learn nothing more about the man. Given the lukewarm to chilly reviews the film seems headed for, let’s hope its producers find Craig a better script and director next time out.