42
Directed by Brian Helgeland
(PG-13, 128 minutes)
Jackie Robinson wore No. 42 when he became the first black American to play major-league baseball for the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947.
In the bio-pic 42, the athlete (born in Georgia and raised in Pasadena, Calif.) is played by Chadwick Boseman, a relative newcomer who greatly resembles his character. Harrison Ford, wearing a fat suit, wig and false eyebrows, portrays Brooklyn Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey. The film tells the story of how they battled prejudice to integrate the game.
Rickey “was a man who was passionate about social justice,” Ford said in an interview in USA Today. “He cared a lot about ethics and morality.”
Like so many sports films based on actual events, the ending of 42 won’t surprise anyone. That doesn’t affect its impact.
“Jackie Robinson’s story is so engrossing that it can be retold endlessly without getting stale,” says our critic Dan Lybarger. Still, he continues, “Writer-director Brian Helgeland’s (A Knight’s Tale) bio-pic lacks the courage and the imagination that Robinson brought to the diamond. You can guess when Mark Isham’s score will get louder and when one of the characters will spout an inspirational quotation. That said, Helgeland would be a fool to tinker excessively with a legend, especially since some of the prejudices Robinson shattered on the field are still with us. Robinson’s full story is complicated and fascinating, so the ideal film about him would be one where his risk-taking offensive strategy would be reflected in the storytelling. Helgeland hugs the base, whereas Robinson would have stolen it.”
Lord of the Flies (not rated, 90 minutes) This first adaptation of William Golding’s provocative novel about the brutality of human nature, now available on Blu-ray, concerns 30 British boys stranded on an island after a plane accident where they decide that Ralph (James Aubrey) will betheir leader and Jack (Tom Chapin) will lead a group to hunt and butcher pigs for food. A battle for leadership ensues. “Peter Brock’s 1963 film of the modern classic novel was done entirely with author William Goldman’s consent and is largely faithful to the book,” says Andy Kaiser on the website Andy’s Film Blog. “Made with an extremely narrow budget and shot on location (in Puerto Rico and Jamaica) with nonactors, the result is an authentic and ultimately chilling rendition.”
Arlington Road (R, 118 minutes) In this thriller from 1999, which seems oddly prescient in light of modern-day concerns about terrorism, college professor Michael Farady (Jeff Bridges), whose FBI agent wife was killed by members of a right-wing terrorist group, begins to suspect his neighbors Oliver and Cheryl Lang (Tim Robbins and Joan Cusack) are not who they appear to be. With Hope Davis;
directed by Mark Pellington. “This is something of an indie thriller in big-studio sheep’s clothing … darker and more intimate than you expect,” says reviewer Rob Gonsalves in eFilmCritic.com.
Solomon Kane (R, 104 minutes ) Solomon Kane (James Purefoy) is a well-armed 16th-century soldier who, upon learning after an encounter with demonic creatures that his brutal actions have damned him, swears to redeem himself by living a life of peace and goodness. But, as often happens in these situations, he is forced to fight once more when a dark power threatens the land.
With Pete Postlethwaite, Max von Sydow; directed by Michael J. Bassett. “Solomon Kane succeeds by embracing its identity as a straightforward genre exercise, complete with bone-crunching and blood-spurting action,” says critic Mark Olsen in the Los Angeles Times. “By not aiming for more, it hits its target.”
MovieStyle, Pages 29 on 07/19/2013