Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. (15.)
Directed by George C. Wolfe.
Starring Viola Davis, Chadwick Boseman, Glyn Turman, Coleman Domingo, Michael Potts and Jeremy Shamos. On Netflix from December 18th. 95 mins.
Boseman's final screen vehicle is a cracking film... for about five minutes. The opening scenes of blues legend Ma Rainey (Davis) performing in a tent in the deep south, followed by old black and white photos that suddenly spring into life crackle with energy and invention. But then we're in Chicago in 1927 with four bickering musicians, yakking away in the rehearsal room of a recording studio waiting for the star to arrive and the encroachment of those four walls communicate that the play is about to begin and the entertainment has ended. From now on, everybody is going to be a wind instrument.
August Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle of plays is held to be one of the greatest achievements of 20th century American Fearta. Having already put Wilson's most famous play, Fences, on the big screen, producer Denzel Washington is getting Netflix to film the remainder of the ten-part cycle but this adaptation has surely hobbled whatever impact it had on the stage. The performances are terrific: the interaction between Boseman as ambitious Trumpeter Levee and the rest of the musicians is sharp, though Davis dominates every scene she is in. But acting can only get you so far and Wilson's text appears to have been chopped up and abridged (take away the end credits and some exteriors and this runs probably less than 80 minutes) in its adaptation; Wilson's language doesn't flow and the melodramatic events and speeches appear to spring out of nowhere.
Ma Rainey is a bona fide star in 1927, an impossible diva, but the film indicts the music industry for the way it used black music. It made some of them stars but was more concerned with repackaging it so that white musicians could sell it to white audiences. None of which can be argued with and it kept doing it for the rest of the century. But, in its defence, the music industry is an equal opportunities exploiter: it rips the hearts out of the dreams of the young and the old, the black and the white, the talented and the talentless. It is colourblind in its belief that all humanity is just an obstacle between it and the next buck.
Directed by George C. Wolfe.
Starring Viola Davis, Chadwick Boseman, Glyn Turman, Coleman Domingo, Michael Potts and Jeremy Shamos. On Netflix from December 18th. 95 mins.
Boseman's final screen vehicle is a cracking film... for about five minutes. The opening scenes of blues legend Ma Rainey (Davis) performing in a tent in the deep south, followed by old black and white photos that suddenly spring into life crackle with energy and invention. But then we're in Chicago in 1927 with four bickering musicians, yakking away in the rehearsal room of a recording studio waiting for the star to arrive and the encroachment of those four walls communicate that the play is about to begin and the entertainment has ended. From now on, everybody is going to be a wind instrument.
August Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle of plays is held to be one of the greatest achievements of 20th century American Fearta. Having already put Wilson's most famous play, Fences, on the big screen, producer Denzel Washington is getting Netflix to film the remainder of the ten-part cycle but this adaptation has surely hobbled whatever impact it had on the stage. The performances are terrific: the interaction between Boseman as ambitious Trumpeter Levee and the rest of the musicians is sharp, though Davis dominates every scene she is in. But acting can only get you so far and Wilson's text appears to have been chopped up and abridged (take away the end credits and some exteriors and this runs probably less than 80 minutes) in its adaptation; Wilson's language doesn't flow and the melodramatic events and speeches appear to spring out of nowhere.
Ma Rainey is a bona fide star in 1927, an impossible diva, but the film indicts the music industry for the way it used black music. It made some of them stars but was more concerned with repackaging it so that white musicians could sell it to white audiences. None of which can be argued with and it kept doing it for the rest of the century. But, in its defence, the music industry is an equal opportunities exploiter: it rips the hearts out of the dreams of the young and the old, the black and the white, the talented and the talentless. It is colourblind in its belief that all humanity is just an obstacle between it and the next buck.
