City Pages Flashback: Rocketman Is an Extravagant Jukebox Musical with Heart

This is a revised version of a 2019 City Pages review. The Minneapolis alt-weekly came to an end in 2020, and the entire site disappeared some time afterward. 

Elton John Biopic Rocketman Is an Extravagant Jukebox Musical with Heart--and Sex 

Tuesday, June 4, 2019 by Kathy Fennessy in Music 

Elton is leaving tonight on a plane. Photo provided by Paramount Pictures 

Rocketman is biography as surreal, impressionistic musical. It shouldn't work, but it does. Beautifully. 

As an Elton John fan of long standing, I was cautiously optimistic when the artist first announced the project in 2011. That was seven years before Bohemian Rhapsody racked up almost a billion dollars to become the highest-grossing music biopic of all time, and eight years before Rami Malek won the Oscar for his toothy turn as Queen frontman Freddie Mercury. 

John and his production team considered Ewan McGregor, Guy Pearce, and Justin Timberlake, but ultimately decided on Tom Hardy in 2013. I was doubtful the buff, swaggering actor could pull it off, but was eager to see him try. Though Malek lip-synced his way through Bohemian Rhapsody, the idea was for Hardy to do his own singing, except everyone—Hardy included—agreed that he wasn't up to the task. He dropped out and Taron Egerton, the fresh-faced kid from Matthew Vaughn's Kingsman series, signed on. (Elton John appeared with him in 2017's Kingsman: The Golden Circle.) 

This seemed like a step back, especially after Egerton's 2018 Robin Hood failed spectacularly with audiences and critics, mustering a measly 15 at Rotten Tomatoes. But Dexter Fletcher previously directed the 29-year-old Welshman in his third feature, 2015's Eddie the Eagle, so they had already established a working relationship. In retrospect, it appears preordained, even if the opposite is true. A Hardy Rocketman would've been a more intense affair, but Egerton brings a welcome buoyancy to the role (though Hardy as butch-era Freddie Mercury really would've been something). 

Right: Taron Egerton in 2015's Kingsman

Before he steps into it, Matthew Illesley and Kit Connor acquit themselves nicely as the young Reginald Dwight, a piano prodigy with a disinterested father (Luther's Stephen Mackintosh), a distracted mother (a virtually unrecognizable Bryce Dallas Howard), and a supportive nan (the delightful Gemma Jones). Once Reg reaches adulthood, Egerton takes over. 

In real life, Elton took his stage name from Elton Dean and Long John Baldry. In the film, a certain Beatle inspires the surname, a move that plays more as a nod to the friendship that produced John Lennon's 1974 hit "Whatever Gets You Thru the Night" than to the historical record, but then Rocketman is billed as a "real fantasy." That gives Fletcher, who completed Bohemian Rhapsody after Bryan Singer's ignominious departure, license to slice and dice the truth in a way that's less egregious than in a literal-minded venture like his previous one.  

Fletcher got his start as an actor, and not just any actor: blessed with full lips and thick, wavy hair, he played the title role in groundbreaking queer filmmaker Derek Jarman's 1986 Caravaggio. (Jarman was also the director who introduced his otherworldly co-star, Tilda Swinton, to the world.) 

Among Fletcher's 107 acting credits, his most Rocketman-relevant include 1976's kiddie musical Bugsy Malone, Mike Leigh's 1999 Gilbert and Sullivan docudrama Topsy-Turvy, and the 1998 Vaughn-produced Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (also with Stephen Mackintosh).

If Rocketman is hardly an arthouse proposition like Todd Haynes' multifaceted Dylan portrait, I'm Not There, it's better than most music biopics, and not so much for what it has to say—it's a fully authorized motion picture, after all—but for the visual flair Fletcher brings to it. Elton doesn't just sing; he floats, flies, blasts off into space, even communes with different versions of himself. It's tempting to compare it to Bob Fosse's All That Jazz, though it never gets that dark, not even during the depths of Elton's drug-alcohol-sex-food addiction, but characters break into song at key moments just as they break into dance at key moments in Fosse's autobiographical fantasia. 

Other possible references include Pasolini (the nightmarish disco sequence), Ken Russell (the "Pinball Wizard" sequence…among others not directly connected to Tommy), Baz Luhrmann (the way songs fit the mood or theme rather than the year), and possibly even Liverpool laureate Terence Davies, since Reg's family congregates at the local pub like so many of Davies' working-class families over the years—families that often included gay sons. 

If Egerton, who sang Elton's "I'm Still Standing" in the animated feature Sing, isn't a great vocalist, he's unforced and engaging. That may sound like faint praise, but he does justice to Elton's '70s catalog, and that's no mean feat. I had to suppress the urge to sing along to every lyric, a temptation filmgoers of a certain age may find impossible to resist. 

If the comparisons between Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman already feel like overkill, the filmmakers have only encouraged them by working manager John Reid into both scenarios--and by casting compact, dark-haired Game of Thrones actors for the roles; Aiden Gillen (Littlefinger) for the former and Richard Madden (Robb Stark) for the latter. After Reid, a seductive, Machiavellian figure in Madden's precise portrayal, the most significant person in John's on-screen life is songwriting partner Bernie Taupin (Jamie Bell). While Elton is shopping around for a record deal, music publisher Dick James (a hilarious Stephen Graham) by way of A&R man Ray Williams (Charlie Rowe) brings the two together. 

In Lee Hall's script, we're meant to believe that John and Taupin never had a single argument, which is patently untrue (Elton to The Guardian: "We've had arguments"), but the actors sell the partnership wonderfully. 

Bell, the more seasoned performer, nicely underplays his scenes, thus confirming that the more conventionally attractive Taupin wasn't meant for the stage, though his affection for Elton is never in doubt. Nor is his concern when his partner goes off the rails. It's a totally idealized relationship, though their composer-lyricist chemistry speaks for itself through the quality of the 24 John-Taupin songs featured in the film, from "The Bitch Is Back" (sung by Elton as a 10-year-old) to "I'm Still Standing" (sung by Elton as a thirtysomething). Hall wrote Billy Elliot, the 2000 movie that made then-14-year-old Bell a star, and knows how to write to the actor's strengths; he would go on to work with Elton on the musical version of that film. 

Rocketman is less skittish than most major-studio features about gay sex. While the PG-13 rated Bohemian Rhapsody took a judgmental view of homosexuality, particularly in the Cruising-style sequence with Freddie and a bit of rough trade at a shadowy gas station, Rocketman earns its R rating with a sunlit sex scene set to "Take Me to the Pilot" in addition to a few other tasteful same-sex sequences (all of which were excised when the film opened in Russia). As Elton told The Guardian in May, "Some studios wanted to tone down the sex and drugs so the film would get a PG-13 rating. But I just haven't led a PG-13 rated life." Granted, if the sex was straight, the MPAA would've been more lenient, but the ratings board's double standards regarding gay vs. straight sex and male vs. female nudity are well known. 

The R rating allows for a more honest look at Elton's life than that of the neutered Freddie Mercury; it's also just one of the reasons why Rocketman won't sell as many tickets or win as many awards as Bohemian Rhapsody. 

Once Elton gets clean, the film, which uses a group therapy session as a framing device, is over. Unlike biopics about Buddy Holly, Selena, and other artists who didn't even make it to 25, there's no tragic death to wring the audience's tears. In strictly dramatic terms, Elton made the mistake of neglecting to die before he got old (though his suicide attempts indicate that he made a valiant effort). The now 72-year-old, still-touring artist would, instead, keep going, and doing all of the things Freddie wouldn't get a chance to do: marrying his partner (artist manager and CEO David Furnish), raising children, and receiving a knighthood for his charitable efforts. 

If there's no real tragedy here, and the film doesn't exactly rewrite the rules of the music biopic, it's exhilarating in a way so many others have tried and failed to be. At the very least it gives us the moment when Elton, clad in a bathrobe, sits down at the piano in his childhood home to sing a song while he and Taupin are bunking with his mother and stepfather. There are no glitter sunglasses, no sequined jumpsuits, no backup dancers clad in colorful outfits. "I hope you don't mind that I put down in words," Elton sings clearly and plainly, "How wonderful life is while you're in the world." Taupin steps into the room, and from the way his face lights up, it's clear that he knows exactly who Elton, in that moment, is singing about. He proceeds to give his friend the kind of look any of us would be lucky to receive even once in our lives. If that was the only thing Rocketman gave us, it would be enough.  

Rocketman is available on Blu-ray and DVD through Paramount, in addition to the usual pay operators. Images: ABC News (Taron Egerton in Kingsman), Fandom (Bryce Dallas Howard and Gemma Jones), Empire (Egerton, Richard Madden, and the press), and YouTube (Egerton and Madden get close). 

You Are Trapped in the Middle, Punk: Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing with Austin Butler

CAUGHT STEALING 

(Darren Aronofsky, 2025, USA, 107 minutes) 

The police, the police and the thieves (oh yeah) 

You gotta lick the ground 

But you are trapped in the middle, punk

--The Clash by way of Junior Murvin (1977)

Darren Aronofsky's Caught Stealing isn't a film noir–it's an action movie, a thriller–but it's based around the noir trope of the ordinary joe who gets in over his head. Waaay over his head. And not because he's done anything wrong, but because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, or because he was associating with the wrong people. In this case: every one of those things. When the antihero's fortunes take a turn, which happens immediately after the film begins, the downturn accelerates from bad to worse to hellacious. 

Granted, Henry "Hank" Thompson (a never-better Austin Butler, last seen mostly looking cool in Bikeriders) is hardly perfect, but he doesn't mean anyone any harm. He's his own worst enemy, and he knows it, but he's also a relatively young dude who doesn't realize how good he has it--until he starts to lose it all--because he's so focused on what he doesn't have. 

When he was in high school, Hank had a shot at a professional baseball career–until a car crash took that dream away from him forever. Not to give too much away, but I suspect that Aronofsky--or Charlie Huston, who adapted the screenplay from his own novel--is an animal lover, because the four-legged creatures in the film make out pretty well, while the two-legged ones don't (a hungry creature inadvertently sets the crash in motion).  

Hank's regret is understandable, not least when the director reveals the extent of the damage, but the accident wasn't really his fault. I mean, it was, but his attempt to do the right thing at the time went spectacularly wrong. If he wasn't completely sozzled then, his life now revolves around booze.

The "now" of the film: 1998. Mr. Stop and Frisk himself, Rudy Giuliani, is Mayor, and the Twin Towers dominate the skyline. Hank works at a bar on the Lower East Side (an unrecognizable Griffin Dunne, who navigated a nightmarish New York 40 years before in Scorsese's After Hours, plays his boss), he has a hot girlfriend, Yvonne (tiny, smoky-eyed Zoë Kravitz), who works as an EMT, and he checks in regularly with his SF Giants-obsessed mother (a voice on the telephone). He's also a functional alcoholic. 

If Hank keeps drinking, his functioning will surely suffer, and Yvonne may strike out for greener pastures, but for now, he's holding it together, for the most part–aside from the Requiem for a Dream-like nightmares in which he's back behind the wheel of an out-of-control car in the middle of nowhere. He's less than thrilled when his punk-rock neighbor, Russ (Doctor Who's Matt Smith with towering mohawk and cockney patois), sticks him with his bitey tabby, Buddy (Tonic the Cat), when he leaves for the UK to visit his ailing father, but with Yvonne's encouragement, Hank takes him in.

Car crash and alcoholism aside, this could almost be the start of a romantic comedy until two Russians (Nikita Kukushkin and Yuri Kolokolnikov), who come looking for Russ, beat the shit out of Hank instead. Russ has something they want, and he has no idea what it is, but others will come looking for the same thing, including a tough-talking Puerto Rican (Benito A. Martínez Ocasio, aka Bad Bunny), a sarcastic cop with a yen for Kosher delicacies (Regina King), and two Hasidic henchmen (a perfectly-matched Liev Schreiber and Vincent D'Onofrio), equally capable of extreme sadism–they like to remove the eyes of their victims–and charming sweetness, a trait inherited from their beloved Bubbe (Carol Kane, capping off a run of great Yiddish-speaking roles going all the way back to Joan Micklin Silver's 1975 Hester Street). 

Like recent NYC thrillers, from Benny and Josh Safdie's Uncut Gems to Spike Lee's Highest 2 Lowest, our protagonist races all over a gentrifying city to solve the mystery, to stay alive, and to keep his loved ones from harm. 

As with Oscar Isaac in the Coen brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis, he has a cat with him all the while. As cat daddies go, Hank transforms, over the course of the film, from disinterested--and even cavalier--to gold-metal material. 

Just as the Safdies turned to electronic composer Daniel Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix Point Never, to keep things moving in Gems, Aronofsky turned to British post-punkers Idles, who offer my favorite score of the year next to Young Fathers' quasi-psychedelic work for Danny Boyle's 28 Years Later (Rob Simonsen wrote the instrumental tracks; Idles performed everything). 

The band's bass-heavy sound is perfect for the scuzzy, darkly humorous tone the director establishes, and that includes their heavy, slowed-down cover of Junior Murvin's reggae classic "Police and Thieves," which arrives at the opportune time and plays like the Clash's 1977 cover on Quaaludes. 

The diegetic songs by other artists serve mostly as ironic counterpoint, none more so than Magnetic Fields' "The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side," which premiered on 69 Love Songs in...1999, but no matter. Hank doesn't "have wheels" and won't be taking anyone "for a ride," since swearing off cars after he once destroyed one. (If you're expecting to hear Jane's Addiction's "Been Caught Stealing," however, you’ll leave disappointed.)

Left: Sean Gullette on the Lower East Side

I won't say how things end, but it's everything Aronofsky's last film, 2022's divisive The Whale, was not. The director has had a rollercoaster career since his 1998 debut, Pi–also set in the Lower East Side–which impressed me with its originality and striking imagery. I'm not sure I understood it all, but it left me dazzled anyway.

Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan, The Wrestler, and Mother! also offered plenty of razzle dazzle--I haven't seen The Fountain or Noah--but the unrelenting gloom of The Whale made me think he'd lost his way. 

In comparison, his ninth feature film plays more like an exercise in genre than an artistic statement, which may sound programmatic–and to some extent, it is–but as darkly comic New York thrillers go, it's a total blast. 

Though I was impressed as anyone by blond, blue-eyed Austin Butler in Baz Luhrmann's Elvis, a counterintuitive casting choice that paid big dividends, he's never impressed me more than he does in Caught Stealing, in which he gives a more relaxed performance in a film that is anything but relaxing. 

For what it's worth, I've been a fan of the actor since the CW's shockingly good Sex and the City prequel The Carrie Diaries, in which Butler played Carrie Bradshaw's more sexually-experienced love interest. In Aronofsky’s film, he plays a version of that character after all of his dreams have died; still young, still sexy, but on the precipice between a decent, if unspectacular life and a tragic one. 

Beyond the running, the fighting, and the fucking, Hank loves his mom (who gets a reveal at the end), learns to love a cat, and cries without seeming hapless or pathetic--Charlie Huston's pitiless screenplay combined with Darren Aronofsky's dynamic direction gives him a lot to cry about. 

Like the movie star he has become, Butler also manages to look good, even when he looks bad, if you know what I mean, and his transformation at the end pushes that idea to the extreme in ways both hilarious and ingenious.

In a manner of speaking: punk rock (and a cat) saves Hank's life.  

Caught Stealing opens in Seattle on Fri, Aug 29, at the Meridian, Pacific Place, the Varsity, and other area theaters. Images from the IMDb (Austin Butler and Tonic the Cat in the flesh and on the poster, Butler and Zoë Kravitz, and Butler and Matt Smith) and Artisan via Rotten Tomatoes (Sean Gullette in a screen shot from Pi's 25th anniversary re-release trailer).  

Generations Unite, At Least Momentarily, in Hong Sang-soo’s Reflective By the Stream

BY THE STREAM / Suyoocheon 

(Hong Sang-soo, 2024, South Korea, 111 minutes) 

It wouldn't be a Hong Sang-soo film if the characters didn't include an artist of some kind, if his partner (Kim Min-hee, winner of the Best Performance Award at Locarno) wasn't involved, and if someone didn't end up drinking too much. 

As his 32nd film begins, after last year's Traveler's Needs with Isabelle Huppert, Jeonim (Kim), a textile artist and instructor at a women's university in Seoul, meets up with her long-lost uncle, Sieon (Kwon Hae-hyo, in his 10th Hong film), a former television actor and director who has traveled from coastal Gangneung, where he runs a bookshop, to write and stage a short play with her students. 

Junwoo, the previous director (Ha Seong-guk, a frequent Hong player who last appeared in Traveler's Needs), got the boot after dalliances with three of the performers, though he's a student himself, possibly a graduate student. He will return later in an attempt to finish a few of the things he started. 

Sieon, as it turns out, has a history with the school, which he will reveal toward the end. When Jeonim introduces him to her mentor, Jeong (Cho Yun-hee, Kwon's wife and another Hong veteran), an attractive and vivacious professor who adores his work, she offers to take them both out for dinner and drinks, where she admires the older man's "upper body." Jeonim looks simultaneously amused and embarrassed, but it's a mutual appreciation society, since Jeong feels that Jeonim is "a real treasure," not least because the students love her. The three, all beautifully played by actors attuned to the director's unique rhythms and techniques, will continue to enjoy more dinners and more drinks, a staple of Hong's cinema. 

Men usually do most of the drinking in Hong's films, but not always. 

Jeonim drinks so much during one outing that she sets up a blanket and a lamp in the dark outside her studio in order to sober up. She's soon joined by students who want to get in on the campfire-like fun. It's one of a few nearly pitchblack sequences in which she and/or her students commune in the dark (though the four young actors are quite good, their characters aren't distinguished by name.)

Jeonim is, in other words, a unique individual. As glamorous as Kim has appeared in pre-Hong films, like Park Chan-wook's erotic thriller The Handmaiden (below left), Jeonim favors shapeless outfits with roomy pockets. The former engineering student carries a sketchbook and watercolor kit everywhere she goes, so she can draw or paint as the mood strikes. Both her paintings and loom-woven pieces use water as a motif. 

Though she’s grateful to Sieon for helping with the play, she's concerned that he might be interested in Jeong. Since she has nothing but respect for the professor, her wariness comes across as jealousy or protectiveness, even if it isn't either; it could just be curiosity. Though Hong's films are dialogue-driven, that doesn't mean he spells things out. He really doesn't. 

And that's certainly true of By the Stream. I enjoyed spending time with these creative people, who embody three different generations, with 40-year-old Jeonim as the midway between the students and the professor, but I'm not sure what it all means, other than that people can change--if they want to. 

Sieon has a romantic history of which he isn't proud, in addition to some sort of scandal that led to his abandonment of acting, whereas Junwoo doesn't feel he did anything wrong, but maybe someday, he'll learn to see things more clearly and take responsibility for his transgressions. 

Jeonim doesn't really change by the end, in part because she already made a significant change when she switched from engineering to art after a rather disturbing and unexplainable phenomenon a few years before. Hong gives no indication she needs to make any changes, other than to suggest, with the professor's blessing, that she might take Jeong's place someday.

The filmmaker never defines her sexuality either, which is unusual for his work. The unisex outfits and lack of apparent interest in romance could mean anything, or nothing. She could be gay, straight, or disinterested one way or the other. It never comes up. She's an artist. She loves her work, she loves her students, she loves her mentor, she loves fried eel and ramen, and she loves her mother and her uncle–even if they can't stand each other. 

I don't think By the Stream was intended as a film about love, but rather regrets and new beginnings. For me, though, that's what resonated most. 

By the Stream plays Northwest Film Forum Aug 23 and 29-31. I've never met a Hong Sang-soo film I didn't like, but my favorite is the B&W Novelist's Film, about a writer who makes a breakthrough. With his 33rd film in the can, he's now working on the 34th. I've written about Oki's Movie, Nobody's Daughter Haewon, Our Sunhi, On the Beach at Night Alone, The Novelist's Film, Walk Up, and In Our Day--a mere 25% of his unstoppable output. 

Images from Variety (Kim Min-hee and Kim with Cho Yun-hee and Kwon Hae-hyo) and the IMDb (The Handmaiden poster with Kim and Kim Tae-ri).

Honey Don't!: In Which Margaret Qualley Plays a Rotary Dial Woman in a Touch-Screen World

HONEY DON'T! 

(Ethan Coen, 2025, USA, 

89 minutes) 

Writer/director Ethan Coen and co-writer/co-editor Tricia Cooke set themselves up for a very specific critique when they decided to title their second "lesbian B-movie" with Margaret Qualley Honey Don't! 

I get that it's a reference to a few different things: the 1956 Carl Perkins B-side (famously covered by the Beatles in 1964), Qualley's gumshoe character's name–Honey O'Donoghue–and Honey's rather heedless approach to romance, but the film's detractors are likely to describe the film as a "don't," as in "Don't go to this movie." I mean, it's right there in the title. 

I understand the impulse, but I'm not wild about cheap shots, and Qualley makes Coen and Cooke's black comic take on the sunshine noir or hardboiled detective story worthwhile–I just wish the film rose to her level.

It begins, as these things must, with a dead body. Disheveled Detective Marty Metakawich (It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia's Charlie Day) assumes it was a suicide, but the prologue suggests that it may have been murder, or a  convenient accident for a Bakersfield evangelist (Chris Evans, most recently of The Materialists) with a sideline in various vices. 

Honey, who had recently met with the victim, is certain something hinky is going on, so she decides to look into it. Though she's openly gay, she doesn't use words like that. She simply tells the detective, "I like girls," but he's too dense or too besotted to take her meaning. Not even after she says it several more times.

Honey dresses like a George Cukor heroine in puff-sleeve dresses, crisp white shirts and beige trousers, red lipstick, and "clickety-clack high heels." She refuses to use a cellphone and stores her contact information in a Rolodex. She's a woman out of time, except she's unapologetically queer and as hot-to-trot as Jamie, Qualley's Drive-Away Dolls character. 

While looking into the mystery, for which no one appears to be paying her, Honey meets with potential clients, like an uptight germaphobe (Billy Eichner), who believes his partner is cheating on him. She also has a fling with the police department's evidence custodian (Aubrey Plaza). 

I wasn't bored by any of these developments, but I wasn't fully engaged either. The actors are game, but the writing hems them in. Evans' Reverend Drew, for instance, is a thoroughly repellant individual–greedy, self-obsessed, and narcissistic–but once that's established, the character has nothing left to offer other than an unseen comeuppance that isn't nearly as satisfying as it should be. For a more effective heel turn from Evans, look no further than Knives Out.  

Coen and Cooke also present bondage gear as something inherently shocking, except it feels more like kink-shaming, which probably wasn't their intention, though Honey's enthusiasm for sex toys, including the dildos and anal beads she washes with loving care, doesn't merit the same treatment. 

As with Drive-Away Dolls, their first narrative, Honey Don't! has a screwball vibe, but lacks the requisite energy. It isn't long, slow, or listless, but it's consistently behind the beat. Something is off. Coen and Cooke are working with some of the same ingredients as Rose Glass's Love Lies Bleeding, but that lesbian noir had a sense of urgency this one lacks, though it shares a predilection for gory violence that crosses into horror-movie territory. 

Though the film doesn't do Evans or Plaza many favors, Talia Ryder (Never Rarely Sometimes Always) shines as Honey's niece, a fast food worker and goth girl with lousy taste in boyfriends. 

Coen and Cooke don't give Ryder anything funny to say or do--to the extent that she seems to have wandered in from a different, possibly better, film--but she's genuinely sympathetic. When she disappears after an encounter with a strange old man (Kale Browne), the film comes to life in a way it hadn't previously before returning to the less interesting central mystery. 

The filmmaking duo intends to make a third film with Margaret Qualley called, um, Go Beavers, but it remains to be seen if they're able to pull it off. Drive-Away Dolls didn't exactly light up the box office, and Honey Don't! may not fare much better--not even after Qualley's dazzling turn in Coralie Fargeat's The Substance--but she certainly acquits herself nicely.

For me, the film isn't a "do" or a "don't" so much as a maybe.

   

Honey Don't! opens on Fri, Aug 22, at SIFF Cinema Uptown, Pacific Place, the Meridian, and other area theaters. Images from Screen Rant (Margaret Qualley), Wikipedia (1956 Sun 78, "Honey Don't", Carl Perkins), the IMDb (Qualley and Aubrey Plaza), and Thought Catalog (Qualley and Plaza). 

As Long as We Live, It's You and Me Baby: On Spike Lee’s Music Biz Thriller Highest 2 Lowest

HIGHEST TO LOWEST 

(Spike Lee, 2025, USA, 133 minutes) 

Highest 2 Lowest, Spike Lee's idiosyncratic reinterpretation of Akira Kurosawa's 1963 High and Low, is the kind of overstuffed film a late-in-life director makes when they're still bursting with energy and ideas even as dozens, if not hundreds, of younger guns are nipping at their heels. 

Might as well remake a favorite film, reunite with a favorite actor, shoot on location in a favorite city, and throw all your favorite stuff--Toni Morrison, Jean-Michel Basquiat--at the screen. After all, you've earned it. 

That isn't to say it's nostalgic. Despite the 62-year-old source material and the references to an elder's past glories–from gold records to magazine covers–it's very much about today, and Lee has decidedly mixed feelings about that. Though he has shifted the business from ladies footwear to music, the allusions to the movie business aren't hard to miss, since both have been transformed by social media, streaming, and digital technology. 

Left: Toshirô Mifune and Kyôko Kagawa in High and Low

To be sure, 68-year-old Lee has embraced all of these things, but that doesn't mean he isn't skeptical, and who can blame him when it comes to AI, which merits a few mentions–it's helpful when the cops are trying to identify the voice of a kidnapper, but it's no replacement for the flesh-and-blood artists music mogul David King (70-year-old Denzel Washington in his fifth go-round with the director since 1990's Mo' Better Blues) signed in his younger years.

If King was a different kind of cat, he would have retired to live out his days with his glamorous wife, Pam (Ilfenesh Hadera, who recalls Lee's wife, Tonya Lewis Lee), in their dee-luxe apartment in the sky, but he's been hustling for so long, he doesn't know how to quit. If there's one characteristic that unites the different versions of the character, starting with the blond, broad-shouldered shoe magnate in Ed McBain's 1959 novel, King's Ransom, it's that they came from nothing, worked hard, and made it to the top. 

Though Kurosawa set the story in Yokohama, Lee brought it back to McBain's New York, except he opts for the city over the suburbs--King's Brooklyn penthouse is spectacular--and begins with the news that he needs to come up with a staggering amount of cash fast lest he get sidelined at the record label he made legendary. He may be rich, but it's more than he can afford, so he decides to roll the dice with everything he has. Pam, with her designer wardrobe and diamond-encrusted jewelry, is less than thrilled. 

Then, King gets a call that his teenaged son, Trey (Aubrey Joseph), has been kidnapped. To bring him home, he needs to pay 17.5 million in Swiss Francs. He'll do anything for his only son, but when he discovers that the kidnapper mistakenly abducted his chauffeur's son, Kyle (Elijah Wright), he balks, even though he's Trey's best friend, and even though Paul (Elijah's father, Jeffrey Wright, who first caught my attention in 1996's Basquiat), a Muslim ex-con, is as much a surrogate relative as a trusted employee. 

It causes a rift in the family with mother and son united against the father until he finally relents. Up until that point, I had my doubts about this film, which is too static in its early stages. King and Paul, who trade rhymes whenever they go for a ride, are terrific together, but too often Pam comes across as shallow and humorless. Lee and Hadera have worked together before, starting with his 2013 Oldboy remake, and I quite enjoyed her chemistry with Forest Whitaker on Godfather of Harlem, but a looser, warmer presence would have been ideal (Hadera is also 30 years younger than Denzel, though Alan Fox's screenplay suggests they're the same age). 

Once King and the anonymous kidnapper–Surprise! It's A$AP Rocky–come to an agreement about the ransom drop, which will take place at some to-be-determined stop during a subway ride, Lee lets his freak flag fly, and Highest 2 Lowest finally takes flight, not least because it takes place during an exuberant Puerto Rican Day Parade and just after a Yankees/Red Sox game. 

Left: Spike and Nick Turturro's brother, John, at a Knicks/Bulls game in 2013.

Prior to the game, the film gets in a few jabs at Boston, one involving former Celtic forward Rick Fox, who plays a high school basketball coach, but once King gets on the train, the Yankees fans who follow in his wake go absolutely and hilariously apeshit. Their ringleader: longtime Lee associate Nicholas Turturro (another Lee associate, Rosie Perez, appears as herself during the Puerto Rican Day sequence). 

In a move that recalls Clint Eastwood's Play Misty for Me, which incorporates footage from the Monterey Jazz Festival, editors Barry Alexander Brown and Allyson C. Johnson cut repeatedly from the ransom drop, which involves black-clad motorcyclists zipping across the city, and a performance by the Eddie Palmieri Salsa Orchestra. It's a significant improvement over Howard Drossin's orchestral score, which can be distractingly heavyhanded, though Drossin shifts to a lighter, brighter register for the subway sequences. 

Then, once King and Paul follow a lead to the Bronx, where the mogul grew up, Lee throws James Brown's thematically appropriate "Payback" into the mix. By that time, I was willing to forgive Drossin's score, because I believe–or I would like to believe–that it represents the rich man's rut in which King has found himself; hustling to stay on top, taking his family for granted, and losing touch with the human-made music that once invigorated him as the producer and A&R guy with "the best ears in the business."

And that's the film in a nutshell: old dude gets his groove back. Not everyone needs a board coup or a kidnapping to get their head straight, but King let his get twisted, and what could have been a by-the-books genre exercise feels deeply personal, something I couldn't say about High and Low, a superior effort in many respects--though I can't imagine Toshirô Mifune spitting bars like Denzel Washington--but not one that tells me as much about its maker. 

If Highest 2 Lowest is Lee's most successful remake to date–a low bar in light of his misguided Ganja & Hess update Da Sweet Blood of Jesus–it's neither his best nor his worst film, but rather a Spike Lee joint through and through, and I'll be damned if the not-so-young dude doesn't still have it. 

Highest 2 Lowest opens at SIFF Uptown and Regal Meridian on Fri, Aug 15. It comes to Apple TV+ on Fri, Sept 5. Images from the IMDb (Denzel Washington times two and Toshirô Mifune with Kyôko Kagawa as Kingo and Reiko Gondo), Screen Rant (Washington with Ilfenesh Hadera), and VIBE (Spike Lee with John Turturro / Photo: Bruce Bennett / Getty Images).

Anchorage Daily News Flashback: Herzog: A Little Risk Keeps Life Interesting for Director

In 1986, my mom, Doreen Ransom, interviewed Werner Herzog for The Anchorage Daily News. 

I don't recall that she had done any other film writing, before or since, though she certainly enjoyed going to the movies regularly, often with her only child. The following year, she won an Alaska Press Women award for the piece. 

In 2021, after being diagnosed with dementia in 2019, she moved to an assisted living facility in Anchorage. Her symptoms include aphasia, which has greatly reduced her ability to communicate with any cohesion.  

Mom's journalism career was relatively brief--she spent more time working for the State of Alaska Department of Corrections as an institutional counselor and pre-sentence reporter--but this is one of the best things she ever wrote, and she worked hard on it. Getting things right was very important to her; I would like to think I inherited the same trait. The interview isn't archived at the Daily News site, so I have reproduced it here.

Right: candids of Mom, probably from sometime in the 1970s.  

In 2005, I also got to see Herzog in person, presenting four of his documentaries--or documentary hybrids in the case of that year's The Wild Blue Yonder--at the Seattle Art Museum, in his inimitable style. It was a real treat, though I regret that I didn't get to meet the filmmaker, let alone to have a sit-down conversation with him.

Note: I have reproduced this piece exactly as published with the exception of the images and the captions. I was unable to find a copy online of the original Michael Penn portrait of Herzog that accompanied it, so I found another I liked (above), though it's from 1977 rather than 1986.

HERZOG: A little risk keeps life interesting for director

by DOREEN RANSOM

Daily News correspondent

    Seeing his early movies again, according to internationally acclaimed German filmmaker Werner Herzog, is "like looking back on my own childhood."

    Herzog was in Anchorage last week to speak about his recent offering, "Ballad of the Little Soldier," the 1984 documentary about the Miskito Indians and their rebellion against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

    Growing up in Nazi Germany, the maker of "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" and "Fitzcarraldo" didn't see his first movie until the age of 11. The film industry at the time was suffocating in the repressive atmosphere of the Third Reich.

    "I had to invent cinema for myself," he says, explaining how he developed his unique cinematic vision, incorporating intense personal themes and hypnotic visual images.

    Herzog, who is vacationing in the Alaska bush, spoke at the Anchorage Museum of History and Art. Here are excerpts from an interview.

HERZOG: Director's career has thrived on calculated risk [Continued from Page D-1]

Do you write all your own scripts?

    Yes, I have done that all my life. I am also producer of my own films. I became producer out of necessity. I have never found anyone who would have produced the kind of films I wanted to do.

You received a strong reaction to "The Ballad of the Little Soldier."

    I didn't expect the reaction to be that strong. But of course, there is a tendency, particularly among the dogmatic left, to (treat) the Sandinista movement like a sacred cow. There must not be anything negative said about them or shown about them.

    It is evident that the minority of the Miskito Indians have an enormous cultural problem in their own country and that the Sandinistas have never understood these people. You can read it in the government statements from the Sandinistas -- they admit they committed grave and dramatic mistakes.

    Unfortunately, the tragedy is still going on. There is so much military pressure from outside on the Sandinista government. As long as this pressure continues internally, they will only find military answers to the challenge of the Miskito Indians. And that's a tragedy of big proportions.

Right: journalist Denis Reichle, co-director of Ballad of the Little Soldier.

Did you have an anti-war film in mind before you arrived in Nicaragua?

    No. I didn't know too much about the situation beforehand. I went with a friend of mine, Denis Reichle, a French reporter who spent eight months with the Miskitos. He advised me to join him with a movie crew. He is a very trustworthy man. He has spent his last 35 years doing intimate reports on oppressed minorities all over the world. He was in Timor, in Cambodia, in Angola, in Lebanon, and I just trust in his competence.

    Many of the things were a big surprise for me, in particular that there are such young kids fighting in the war. When you read about Iran and Iraq -- the war there -- everyone is upset that there are very young soldiers, 13, 14, 15, 16 years old. But they are already in puberty and halfway grown up. In Nicaragua you find soldiers who are kids age 9, 10 and 11. They are real children, and that's very upsetting and disturbing.

Is this your first trip to Alaska?

    No, I was here a year ago. I spent a few weeks west of the Alaska Range on Lake Telaquana.

You have mentioned in other interviews that the landscape is a character -- a character you can direct. In your movies, you have focused on very extreme landscapes, such as the jungle and the desert. Is this on your mind during your visit here?

    Oh, it's not an extreme landscape. It's how landscapes should be It's exactly like God wanted the Earth to be.

The films you've produced are often shown in art-film theaters in this country, while "Rocky IV" draws long lines. Are German audiences so different?

    It's like everywhere else in the world. People would rather see "Rocky" than one of my movies. I don't worry too much about it. Some of my films have become more successful over time, even in the United States. In the third re-release of "Aguirre," the film became successful at the box office. A film like "Rocky" is used up as a consumer good and then it's gone. But some of my films will be seen 20 years from now. I have no doubt about that.

You've taken many personal risks. But you've said most of these risks have been calculated.

    Yes, actually. I have to emphasize that I am a professional worker. For the sake of professionality, you try to avoid difficulties. You have to look for the safest solutions you can find. There's only one exception, "La Soufrière," which was a sheer gamble because nobody knew whether the mountain would explode. It was a situation like Mount St. Helen. We stayed on the crater and shot the film. In this case -- and it was the only one -- it was sheer roulette.

You said that Western society is over-concerned with safety and that this makes our souls sterile.

    Yes, I see that danger. I sense it everywhere. Every single one of us has to make his own decision -- how far to go, where to limit the risks, when to put it on the shoulder of an insurance company. But something like life insurance sounds scandalous to my ears because there's only an assurance of death. That's the only sure thing. I have an attitude that's a bit against this over-insurance kind of life. It becomes sterile, boring, inhuman and uninspired.

I understand you were disappointed you couldn't continue to work with Mick Jagger in "Fitzcarraldo."

    Yes. The problem with Mick Jagger was that he went overtime in my production. Jagger at the time had signed contracts for a world tour with the Rolling Stones. In the second round of shooting, we decided that it wouldn't make sense to shoot around him for eight days. It would have been insane. So I decided to let him go, which was very sad. It was so sad that I wrote the entire part out of the screenplay. I didn't want to replace him.

In your 1982 Rolling Stone interview, you said of the late director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, "He was like a sweating, grunting, fat and nasty wild boar who would just run through the underbrush and open a path behind him that was passable for everyone else." I thought that was great writing. Do you do other kinds of writing?

    Yes, I have published some poetry and have written prose books like "Of Walking in Ice," which was released here in the U.S. It's a book almost like a diary, when I walked once from Munich to Paris in the winter. I walked because a very good friend of mine, Lotte Eisner, an old lady, was dying. Out of protest and despair, I walked on foot for three-and-a-half weeks in a straight line as quickly as I could. I somehow knew if I came on foot she would survive and be out of hospital. And she was actually out of hospital. It was a pilgrimage, and I wrote the book, which I like better than all my films together.

Images: Rolling Stone / Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone/Getty ("The film-maker Werner Herzog giving a press conference, Stockholm, Sweden, January 27th, 1977"), the IMDB (Ballad of the Little Soldier), MUBI (Denis Reichle), Harvard Film Archive (Klaus Kinski in Aguirre, the Wrath of God), and Goodreads (Of Walking in Ice: Munich-Paris, 11/23 to 12/14, 1974).    

Capitalism Proves Crushing in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Satirical Thriller Cloud (Though People With Guns Can Be Pesky, Too)

CLOUD / Kuraudo 
(Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2024, Japan, 124 minutes) 

"You operate on impulse and instinct? No effort whatsoever?"--prospective seller 
"That's how I work."--Yoshii

Yoshii (The Boy and the Heron's Masaki Suda) works in a laundry factory by day. Though he could earn more as a manager, a promotion his pushy boss offers more than a few times, he would prefer to manage things rather than people. Company man Mr. Takimoto (Yoshiyoshi Arakawa from Bong Joon-ho's Tokyo! contribution "Shaking Tokyo"), who mistakenly believes they're cut from the same cloth, can't understand why his employee wouldn't want to trade freedom and unpredictability for stability and repetition. 

In his spare time, Yoshii pursues his true passion: buying and reselling medical equipment, collectible figurines, and knockoff luxury goods. He takes photos of the items, posts them online, strings together a few persuasive key words, and waits for customers to click the "buy" button. 

Granted, Yoshii isn't a thief, and he ships the products he sells, but he underpays for merchandise, uses deceptive pricing, and fails to verify authenticity before listing designer wares, generating resentment among buyers and sellers alike. Initially, though, no one reaches out directly to complain, so he feels no shame and suffers no consequences. Granted, he uses a pseudonym, Ratel--the Dutch word for honey badger--so it isn't as if disgruntled associates can look him up online, though that will soon change. 

Yoshii might sound like a loner, except he isn't, and Suda doesn't play him as someone especially off-putting. Moral complications aside, he looks and acts like a regular guy. If he isn't a hero–and he doesn't necessarily qualify as an antihero–he isn't a villain either, but rather the catalyst for an uprising against a virtual world that has exacerbated capitalism's worst tendencies. His enemies list, which grows throughout the film, consists of buyers, sellers, and others even shadier than him. 

Though his sweet-faced girlfriend, Akiko (Kotone Furukawa from Ryûsuke Hamaguchi's Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy), initially seems like a port in the storm, she's possibly the worst kind of partner for someone like Yoshii, because she encourages him to amp up his activities regardless as to the repercussions, so she can quit her job, buy a fancy espresso maker, and move to a bigger place. "I'll buy this and that," she enthuses. "There's so much I want." Her avarice makes it easier for Yoshii to justify his actions. 

One day someone leaves a dead rat outside his door. Then someone strings a trip wire between trees in front of his building, causing him to take a spill on his scooter. Could it be an unhappy seller, his resentful boss, or the schoolmate who becomes peevish when he refuses to invest in his new auction platform? One way or the other, Yoshii feels like he's being watched. 

So, it's presumably a good thing when he and Akiko relocate to a modernist house by the lake, just outside Tokyo, where he resumes his business and hires an eager young local named Sano (Mother's Daiken Okudaira) to assist him. 

Despite the move, Yoshii still feels like he's being watched. It's a common experience for a character in a Kurosawa film. Though Cure took inspiration from Silence of the Lambs, and Pulse was remade in English in the wake of the Ring phenomenon, his films aren't horror in the conventional sense. 

Cloud can be chilling at times, but the disorienting ambiguity recalls Michael Haneke's psychological thriller Caché, more than the average American narrative with a known antagonist. Once the source of the antagonism becomes known, however, the film switches into a different register. 

Joseph Heller's famous Catch-22 adage "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you" applies, because strange things keep happening, and I don't think it's all in his head, though knowing Kurosawa, it could be (for what it's worth, I've always associated that quote with the Nixon presidency, though Heller's book was published in 1961). 

Yoshii hasn't changed his ways, in fact, he's expanded his operations, and so the stalker--or stalkers--maintains their campaign of intimidation, undeterred by the change in location. As it turns out, resentment has been building over Yoshii's tactics for so long that the online furor has spilled over into the physical world. 

What he didn't know didn't hurt him, but Sano helps him to connect the dots. It's Kurosawa's way of showing how the things that happen online can have real-world consequences beyond the obvious. A customer who feels ripped off, after all, isn't just a screen name, but an actual human being. 

By the end, Yoshii is on the run from an armed posse, and the film segues from horror chills to satiric thrills involving a man who has made so many enemies that even his girlfriend, his assistant, and the cops–who know about the counterfeit goods–can't be counted on to get him out of the jam. 

It's one of Kurosawa's best thrillers in years, not necessarily because it represents a return to his roots, though it does, but because he's working with some of the same thought-provoking themes and spooky cues as before, while brightening the corners with his mastery of action and humor, and just when it seems as if the film couldn't get any darker or violent, it doesn't. It swerves, though the underlying message is blacker than black. 

That said, it's also a return to films about men, which is hardly a crime--for years, Kurosawa and Kōji Yakusho had a Scorsese/De Niro thing going on--but I was impressed by two semi-recent films featuring women as the focal point: 2019's To the Ends of the Earth, a lyrical character study set in Uzbekistan, and 2020's Hamaguchi collaboration, The Wife of a Spy, a wartime thriller. 

I assumed they marked a new direction for the veteran filmmaker, but he's previously taken detours into other genres, like science fiction, and other countries, like France, so I guess it's not surprising that it wasn't.

It isn't disappointing either, since Yoshii, and his honey badger ways, turns out to be one of his more captivating protagonists. With Masaki Suda's placid appearance and pragmatic affect, he has a certain blank quality; not bland, but open to a variety of readings. Where some saw a scoundrel, I saw someone who was a victim of the same system that ensnares us all. Love him or loathe him, you'll want to see exactly how his story plays out. 

Cloud, which premiered in Seattle at SIFF 2025, opens at SIFF Cinema Uptown on Fri, Aug 15. Images from the IMDb (Masaki Suda and super-creepy stalker), Wallpaper Magazine (Suda and Yoshiyoshi Arakawa), MovieWeb (Suda and Kotone Furukawa), and Austin Film Society (Suda).