'Dolemite Is My Name'

When Eddie Murphy is firing on all cylinders, being funny and charming and in command, he’s hard to stop — and in the new biographical story “Dolemite Is My Name,” it’s great to see him keep on going.

Murphy plays Rudy Ray Moore, who is introduced as a struggling comedian and musician in 1970s Los Angeles, working as emcee in a blues bar and a cashier in a record store. He hits on a great idea, adapting old-school African American street tales into a character, Dolemite, pimp extraordinaire. His routine is an instant hit, and soon he’s recording albums that are best-sellers, even though they’re too rough to get radio play.

What’s the next step for Moore? Why, movies, of course. The bulk of the movie centers on Moore willing himself into being the producer and star of a Dolemite movie — enlisting a socially progressive playwright (Keegan-Michael Key) to write a script, a vain and alcoholic actor (Wesley Snipes) to direct, and a bunch of UCLA film students to act as the crew.

Director Craig Brewer (“Hustle & Flow”) mines the rich vein of ‘70s culture, and the blaxploitation genre that Moore accidentally exemplified, for a fast-paced Kodachrome spectacle. The screenwriting team of Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski are masters at comical biography — they were the guys behind “Ed Wood,” “The People vs. Larry Flynt” and “Big Eyes” — and their chronicle of Moore’s career and influence is an exuberant delight.

The movie boasts a strong roster of comic talent, including Craig Robinson, Tituss Burgess, Mike Epps, and particularly Da’Vine Joy Randolph as Lady Reed, Moore’s comic protege and groundbreaking leading lady. Rap stars, including T.I. and Snoop Dogg, also pop up to pay homage to Moore, whose rhyming routines earned him the nickname “the Godfather of Rap.”

But “Dolemite Is My Name” is Murphy’s movie, start to finish, and he knows it. He embraces Moore’s foul-mouthed stage persona and his do-it-yourself optimism — in the vein of “Ed Wood” or “The Disaster Artist,” but with an infectious joy that outdoes both of those movies.

——

‘Dolemite Is My Name’

★★★1/2

Opened Oct. 4 in select markets; opens Friday, Oct. 25, at the Tower Theatre (Salt Lake City), and on Netflix. Rated R for pervasive language, crude sexual content, and graphic nudity. Running time: 117 minutes.

'Countdown'

The thriller “Countdown” doesn’t break new ground in PG-13 horror — but it’s quick, efficient, and gets the job done.

The premise is everything: At a high-school party, a bunch of beer-drinking teens dare each other to try a new app that will tell the user exactly how long he or she has to live. It’s all fun and games, until one girl, Courtney (Anne Winters), sees that she has only three hours to live. When she avoids a ride with her drunk-driving boyfriend, Evan (Dillon Lane), the app flashes a notice — “user agreement broken” — and something dark and unseen makes sure she dies when the countdown clock hits zero. 

After introducing the set-up, rookie writer-director Justin Dec settles in on the main story. That starts with Quinn Harris (Elizabeth Lail), a newly graduated nurse, in the same hospital where Evan is soon to undergo surgery. Evan is in a panic, because his death app says he’s going to die on the operating table, and he also gets the dreaded “user agreement broken” notice before dying messily and mysteriously.

Before Evan dies, though, half the hospital staff tries the app — and Quinn learns she has three days to live. She tries various technological means to disable the app, to no avail, though in the process she teams up with Matt Monroe (Jordan Calloway), a nice guy who’s also working on very short time. Quinn and Matt, taking along Quinn’s teen sister Jordan (Talitha Bateman), go to a priest (P.J. Byrne) whose alarming fascination with exorcisms makes him ideal to explain the internal logic of demon narratives.

Dec sets up the horror sequences with a minimum of fuss, and some solid old-school scares. He also injects a nice bit of humor, mostly through Byrne’s overeager priest. Where things go off the rails is when a #MeToo subplot, involving a handsy doctor (Peter Fascinelli), makes an unwelcome return in the final reel.

“Countdown” isn’t too original, with notions about cheating fate that come right out of the “Final Destination” series. But it delivers the goods enough to satisfy one’s appetite for not-too-bloody horror on the weekend before Halloween.

——

‘Countdown’

★★★

Opens Friday, Oct. 25, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for terror, violence, bloody images, suggestive material, language and thematic elements. Running time: 90 minutes.

'Paradise Hills'

The teens-in-danger thriller “Paradise Hills” is a feast for the eyes, as Spanish director Allice Waddington puts painterly settings to an engrossing thriller with a generous dollop of science fiction.

Emma Roberts stars as Uma, who wakes up in a strange bed, and finds herself in an even stranger facility on a remote island that something between a spa and a rehab clinic. She’s there along with several other teen girls, all wearing white dresses — corsets with white-vinyl straps by day, pouffy taffeta numbers by night — in a tightly regulated environment, overseen by someone called The Duchess (played by Mita Jovovich).

Uma — who, in a prologue set two months later, is getting married to a young capitalist shark (Arnaud Valois), so something must have worked — bonds quickly with three other guests. Chloe (Danielle Macdonald) is a plus-sized southern belle whose mama wants to be a pageant queen. Yu (Awkwafina) is being taught manners to please her Beijing grandparents. And Amarna (Eiza González) is a pop star who says she sent to the facility because her rebel streak was threatening her managers’ bottom line.

Uma plans to escape, to go back to her boyfriend Markus (Jeremy Irvine), of whom her mother disapproves because he’s not upper class. But when Markus suddenly appears on the island, working as a groundskeeper to be near her, Uma starts to realize something more sinister is happening.

Screenwriters Nacho Vigalondo (“Colossal”) and Brian DeLeeuw — fleshing out a story by Waddngton — steal from the best, with elements of Ira Levin’s “The Stepford Wives” and Patrick McGoohan’s surrealist ‘60s series “The Prisoner” at play here. The narrative train nearly careens out of control toward the end, though, as the dark reality of The Duchess’ realm can’t quite be reconciled with its shimmering artifice.

But Waddington, a photographer and designer making an assured feature-film directing debut, polishes that artifice until it gleams, so it’s easy to get sucked into it. She finds the perfect visuals in the spa (the movie was filmed in the Canary Islands), a seductive trap of beautiful conformity, and places her headstrong heroines there to rise from pampered princesses to valiant valkyries. 

——

‘Paradise Hills’

★★★

Opens Friday, Oct. 25, at the Megaplex Gateway (Salt Lake City), Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy) and Megaplex Thanksgiving Point (Lehi). Not rated, but probably PG-13 for violence, sexual content and some language. Running time: 95 minutes.

'Where's My Roy Cohn?'

It’s only after death that we fully understand the toxic effect the New York lawyer Roy Cohn had on the American landscape — and Matt Tyrnauer’s intimate, frightening documentary “Where’s My Roy Cohn?” shows how he did it.

Cohn was an intense attorney, equal parts bulldog and bully, who made his early reputation by following J. Edgar Hoover’s playbook for attacking Communists wherever possible. His first national headlines came when he prosecuted Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for treason, and put them both in the electric chair despite a worldwide campaign for mercy.

Cohn’s work got the attention of the anti-Communists in Congress, and soon he was counsel to the subcommittee chaired by Sen. Joseph McCarthy as he worked to ferret out Communism in all walks of life. Cohn helped create the M.O. of McCarthy’s committee, where bluster and attack were the order of the day. A major facet of Cohn’s work was to smear anyone who criticized McCarthy’s efforts so the critics would themselves be labeled commies. 

This demagoguery worked for a while, until the U.S. Army embarrassed Cohn by denying a waiver in the draft for his “friend” David Schine. Cohn urged McCarthy to bring Army brass before the committee and question their patriotism — a stunt that ended with the Army’s counsel, Joseph Welch, unloading on McCarthy with the famous quote, “Have you have no sense of decency, at long last?”

After McCarthy’s committee fell apart, Cohn returned to private practice in New York, displaying techniques that were less about knowing the law and more about knowing the judge. He ended up representing such mobsters as Carmine Galente and John Gotti. Cohn, ingratiating himself to Manhattan’s elite, also took under his wings a protege: A cocksure real-estate wheeler-dealer named Donald Trump.

Tyrnauer digs deep to find footage of Cohn in interviews, and augments that with fresh interviews with historians and journalists who have studied Cohn’s Machiavellian traits and their influence on McCarthy and Trump. (Former Trump consultant Roger Stone is among the first talking-head interviewees in the movie, and his presence onscreen prompted a wave of laughter with the Sundance audience at its January premiere — the same day Stone was arrested and indicted as part of the Mueller investigation.)

What’s remarkable about “Where’s My Roy Cohn?” — besides the title, taken from a quote from Trump in the White House — is that Tyrnauer manages not to humanize or make us empathize with Cohn. The movie reminds us that as McCarthy’s committee counsel, he was a closeted gay man who led persecutions of homosexuals, and that he denied he was gay even as he was dying of AIDS.

——

‘Where’s My Roy Cohn?’

★★★1/2

Opened September 20 in select cities; opens October 25 at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated PG-13 for thematic content, some sexual material and violent images. Running time: 97 minutes.

——

This review first ran on this website on Jan. 26, when the movie premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival.

'The Great Alaskan Race'

Earnest intentions can only carry a movie so far — and not as far as the sled dogs and their human guides in the fact-based drama “The Great Alaskan Race.”

It’s 1925, in Nome, Alaska, where a diphtheria epidemic has broken out, specifically threatening the town’s children. The town’s physician, Dr. Welch (Treat Williams), says the last shipment of medicine didn’t include antitoxin, and the supplies he has have expired. The only hope is to get more antitoxin shipped in from Anchorage, more than 1,000 miles away.

In Anchorage, an argument ensues about the best way to get the antitoxins to Nome. A forward-thinking newspaper editor (Henry Thomas) urges the governor (Bruce Davison) to send an airplane, but the governor distrusts the untested aviation technology. He sides with the Nome city fathers, who organize a relay of dog sleds to cover the 700 miles between Nome and the nearest train station. (The movie waits until the ending to state what the title already implies, that this incident inspired the famous Iditarod race.)

That’s where Leonhard Seppala, played by the movie’s writer-director, Brian Presley, comes in. Seppala, we’re told, is the best musher in Alaska. We’re also told, through an eyeroll-inducing narration by an character identified as a “shaman,” that Seppala was adopted into the Inuit community — and married an Inuit woman, whose death years before has turned him sullen and withdrawn from the townsfolk.

The light in Seppala’s life is his daughter, Sigrid (played by Presley’s daughter, Emma), Sigrid is also a favorite of her church choir director, Constance (Brea Bee) — who’s also Dr. Welch’s daughter and head nurse, and has an obvious crush on Seppala. When Sigrid becomes one of the children hit by the diphtheria epidemic, Seppala’s motivation to drive his dogs just grows.

The movie is clearly a labor of love for Presley, but it’s often just laborious to watch. Chunks of dialogue, and even entire characters, exist to provide constant exposition that beats the lead characters’ heroism into the audience’s skulls. 

There are high spots. Williams brings a gravitas to the role of kindly town doctor. The action sequences, as Seppala and his dogs brave freezing weather and unstable ice to get the serum home, are energetic and well-staged, given the miniscule budget. Too often, though, “The Great Alaskan Race” is as much a slog as anything the sled dogs have to navigate.

——

‘The Great Alaskan Race’

★★

Opens Friday, October 25, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for thematic material, brief bloody images, some language and smoking. Running time: 84 minutes.

'Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool'

Few biographical documentaries touch all the bases — chronicling its subject’s life, analyzing the subject’s work, and providing the context for the subject’s legacy — as masterfully and as effectively as “Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool” does.

Miles Davis had quite the life to recount. He left East St. Louis, Ill., where his father was a well-to-do dentist who sometimes beat Davis’ mother, for New York, to play the jazz clubs of 52nd Street. He worked early with such greats as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and with them created what became bebop. Davis was after a different sound, a tone more pure, more polished. more personal.

Forming his own quintet, with a young John Coltrane on tenor sax, Davis revolutionized jazz with his improvisation-heavy 1959 album “Kind of Blue.” His later combos brought in other fresh talent, such as a 23-year-old Herbie Hancock, and he explored flamenco (“Sketches of Spain,” 1960), Disney melodies (“Someday My Prince Will Come,” 1961) and a radical departure into funk and rock (“Bitches Brew,” 1970).

His personal life was marked with substance abuse — heroin in the ‘50s, cocaine and alcohol at other times in his life, and painkillers after a botched hip surgery — and a string of marriages and lovers. Some of those women speak up in the film, describing incidents of domestic abuse, often fueled by the drugs.

Director Stanley Nelson — whose past films have covered such topics as Marcus Garvey, the Jonestown massacre, black colleges, Freedom Riders and the Black Panthers — collects a wide range of interviews. They include Davis’ old friends, fellow musicians (including Carlos Santana and Quincy Jones), and historians and music experts who help explain to the uninitiated the importance of Davis’ musical evolution and his status as a prosperous, proud African American man.

But Nelson’s best two weapons are Davis’ words, read by the actor Carl Lumbly, and his music, which speaks volumes with every note. “Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool” will be a treat for jazz fans, and an essential guide for anyone looking to understand the mark Davis left on the second half of the 20th century.

——

‘Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool’

★★★1/2

Opened August 23 in select cities; opens Friday, October 18, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for language, and descriptions of substance abuse and domestic violence. Running time: 115 minutes.

'Becoming Nobody'

When one becomes frustrated with one’s guru, the reason usually circles back to the person asking the questions — and having outsized expectations about the answers, expectations the guru has no obligation to fulfill. 

That’s a lesson the spiritual teacher Ram Dass learned from his guru. It’s one the filmmaker Jamie Catto learns from Ram Dass, and it’s one anyone seeing Catto’s documentary about Ram Dass, “Becoming Nobody,” will learn as they watch.

Catto’s documentary handles the basics of biography, of Dass started his life as Richard Alpert, a Harvard psychologist and author looking for ways to expand his mind. His first experience was when Timothy Leary, the famed advocate for hallucinogenics, first gave Alpert psilocybin. From then on, as Ram Dass describes in lectures preserved in his archives, he tried all manner of chemicals to replicate that high — but every time, he came back down.

On a trip to India, Alpert finally met someone “who never came back down.” That man, Neem Karoli Baba — whom Ram Dass calls “Maharaj-ji” — became his teacher, and gave him the name Ram Dass, meaning “servant of God.” Ram Dass brought Maharaj-ji’s message to America, and became a leading figure of the counterculture movement.

Catto doesn’t give more than a brief synopsis of Ram Dass’ biography. More prevalent here are the reams of footage of Ram Dass’ many years giving lectures and teaching his philosophy.

He talks of acceptance of what life brings, noting the Hindu belief that “you are born as what you need to deal with, and if you just try and push it away, whatever it is, it’s got you.” He talks of unconditional love, and how so few of us are able to avoid putting conditions on it. He talks of how people strive to become somebody in this world, but that “the game is … about becoming nobody.”

It’s all very deep, and one probably needs to be in the right frame of mind to take it all in. A viewer might wish Catto was doing more to help, like augmenting Ram Dass’ words with images that could broaden one’s understanding of them. On that level, “Becoming Nobody” is a movie that works better as an audiobook.

Catto’s main role is to interview Ram Dass now, living in Maui, in his 80s. Ram Dass appears quite frail, and talks about being ready for death — a topic he has studied for decades, in his hospice work helping others prepare for death. Even in his suffering, though, Ram Dass says he has found a kind of grace that helps him understand what’s going to happen next.

Catto’s interviews, unfortunately, boil down to the filmmaker spouting his opinion about some part of Ram Dass’ philosophy, only to have Ram Dass — like the psychologist he once was — reply something akin to “Is that what you think it means?”

One might hope, watching “Becoming Nobody,” that Ram Dass would berate Catto for his ignorance, like Marshall McLuhan telling the blowhard in “Annie Hall” that “you know nothing of my work.” But Ram Dass instead smiles, displaying that unconditional love toward his acolyte, which may be the point of it all anyway.

——

‘Becoming Nobody’

★★1/2

Opened September 6 in select cities; opens Friday, October 18, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably PG-13 for language and some sexual content. Running time: 82 minutes.

'Maleficent: Mistress of Evil'

If giving The Joker a sympathetic backstory was tough, that’s nothing to what Disney has been doing for the past five years with Maleficent, the satanic sorceress who put Sleeping Beauty under.

First in “Maleficent” (2014) and now in a daring and sometimes dark sequel, “Maleficent: Mistress of Evil,” the dragon lady with the black horns dances on the line between the light and the dark — and, thanks to star Angelina Jolie, makes each step captivating.

Read the full review at sltrib.com.