You is kind. You is smart. You is important."
I love The Help (2011). I don't care who knows it. So I'm immediately curious about Get On Up, Tate Taylor's follow up which reunites Minny & Aibileen though they both take a back seat since this time it's the story of rock legend James Brown (Chadwick Boseman). This trailer also starts with an affirmative.
You special. And your momma's a no account fool. But you ain't gonna be. One day everybody gonna know your name"
JAMES BROWN [*makes applause sound*]
Okay so that's not as universal an affirmation but... wait. oh. That makes Viola Davis the 'no account fool'? Do over! Not sure I'm okay with this. Time for a Yes No Maybe So™
YES
- Well, it has several "fun" beats and you don't watch to approach James Brown reverently since he shook things up and also was more than a little cartoonish in presence.
- Chadwick Boseman looks like he's having fun with it and that'll be important
Does it sound good? Does it feel good? If it sound good and it feel good then it's musical."
- Octavia Spencer gives good reaction shot as usual.
- Octavia Spencer & Viola Davis with Tate Taylor
- Costumes by Sharen Davis, Cinematography by Stephen Goldblatt, Production Design by Mark Ricker, Score by... hell the whole team is back together.
NO
- Viola Davis in old age makeup? Nooooooo. Hollywood is so mean to her. She's so vibrant and should be in leading roles, not older than she is roles that signal that they can ignore her now or roles that accentuate fatigue like Aibileen did or her "resting bitch face" as I recently heard it called online when shots of her waiting to talk to Ryan Seacrest did look, well, bitchy.
omg, I have been waiting for an opportunity to share this now that it's out of date post Oscar time but I WORSHIP this shot I didn't realize I had taken on Oscar night.
- LOL. I love her so much you guys. Viola Davis is only in the "No" column because I want more from her not because I won't take what I can get.
- I tried to watch 42 recently... and I know I shouldn't judge because I didn't actually finish the movie but Chadwick Boseman bored me stiff in that leading role so hopefully he's as energized here in the non-musical sequences as he looks to be in the musical sequences where he'll have an easier time resting on imitation.
MAYBE SO
- Trailers often simplify tone -- they have to -- so I'm not necessarily going to hold it against the movie that it's like "hardy har har" about people being shot at in Vietnam. But, yeah, that feels tone deaf and for a film with musical sequences to even hint at tone deafness does not make me comfortable.
- Listen. I use to harp on and on about how awful biopics were but I realized sometime during the Aughts that what I objected to was not the genre itself but the tiny tunnel vision of Hollywood that thinks only famous musicians / politicians / celebrities whose lives followed traditional rise and fall and rise again or triumph over adversity arcs. So I hope they can find something new here but it looks extremely much like basically every other biopic.
Are you a Yes No or Maybe So? And does the answer change if you remove your feelings about The Help from the equation? It does for me since I am a Maybe So due to the reunion but on the grounds of the trailer I'd be a No.