Review: Aretha biopic "Respect"

by Patrick Ball

The scene is a packed movie theater in Oakland, California on Christmas Day, 2006. The film is Dreamgirls. We’re finishing up the iconic musical number “Listen”, a solid 75-80% into the movie. Beyoncé’s Deena Jones hits the last passionate note and the audience loses it, clapping and hollering, and a woman stands up and screams “You GO, EFFIE!” That was how powerful Jennifer Hudson’s Academy Award winning performance was, that this woman was ascribing every fabulous moment in the movie to her and her character, even when another character/actress was onscreen.

Hudson has had a bumpy road as a film actress since then, but is back in a big way in Respect, the long awaited Aretha Franklin biopic...

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Review: Sofia Coppola's "On the Rocks"

By Lynn Lee

What happens to a poor little rich girl when she grows up?

That question has fueled Sofia Coppola’s career, both to her benefit and to her dismissal by those who find her voice out of tune with the times.  I’m not one of the latter, so I sometimes feel oddly defensive about enjoying her films.  Although she’s far from the only writer or director to focus on the interior lives of wealthy white people, there’s something about her work that provokes a particularly insidious disdain in a way that Downton Abbey or Wes Anderson, say, does not.  Gender is an obvious factor in that difference, plus the shadow of her father and the advantages she’s assumed to have derived from him, as well as the limitations on her perspective of her own privilege.  Impatient viewers chafe at her characters’ seeming lack of chafing or rattling of the bars of their gilded cages, which Coppola presents less like cages than delicately tinted soap bubbles, their inhabitants’ discontents and subversions more often internalized than explicitly articulated.

Coppola’s latest feature, On the Rocks, plays in many ways like a wryly self-aware response to her critics...

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