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Review: It Felt Like Love

Max Weiss — Mon, 13 May 2013 16:55:10 +0000

Rating:

4 stars

So, sigh. . . Is there anything more annoying than a glowing review of a film you can’t see? I know, I know. . . But I saw this film at the Maryland Film Festival this weekend and fell in love with it and just needed to write about it. If there’s any justice, it’ll be coming soon to an independent cinema house near you (hint-hint, film distribution companies).

The noted philosopher Britney Spears once famously sang that she was “not a girl, not yet a woman” and that paradox perfectly describes the status of Lila (Gina Piersanti), a 14 year old spending a long, listless summer on the beaches of Brooklyn.

Her best friend Chiara (Giovanna Salimeri) may only be a year older but she’s miles ahead in terms of her own sexual development. A dancer, Chiara has a knowledge of her body and its seductive powers. She’s already slept with boys and nonchalantly mentions that her new boyfriend, Patrick (Jesse Cordasco), needs practice in the oral sex department.

“I hate when they need practice,” Lila says, tentatively.

Lila’s own burgeoning sexuality has put her in a kind of fugue state—everywhere there is flesh, skin, and heat, and first time director Eliza Hittman creates a mood that is both innocent and erotically charged, just like Lila herself.

Lila’s next door neighbor Nate (Case Prime) is a precocious 7th grader—he might very well be the most self-aware person in the film—but he’s a child compared to Chiara and her grownup-seeming friends. Lila is literally stuck between the child next door and the almost-woman her best friend has become.

Her grieving father is no help. Lila’s mother has recently died of cancer and he feels so ill-equipped to advise a daughter going through puberty, he barely bothers to try.

In some ways, and more than any other film I can remember, It Felt Like Love is about the female gaze. Lila gazes at Chiara for clues to her own sexuality, but soon she becomes fixated on a new subject: The handsome, college-aged Sammy (Ronen Rubinstein), a decent enough kid, but hardly worthy of such worship. Lila starts hanging around him at the pool hall where he works, awkwardly flirting with him. He seems amused and slightly nonplussed by her presence. She convinces herself he might become her boyfriend.

There is a bit of sexual menace in the film, mostly from Sammy’s bored friends, who see the needy Lila as ripe for the plucking. One scene in the den of Sammy’s home veers close to unwatchable, but Hittman’s film is too gently affectionate toward its heroine to put her in real peril.

Hittman coaxes unbelievably natural performances out of her young cast, mostly non-actors, and gets the cadence of their voices and conversations just right. (The boys unself-consciously chant rap songs on the bus, as the girls watch adoringly, and the texts between Lila and Sammy are written in hilariously indecipherable codes of teenspeak.)

And Hittman gets the cadence of lazy, hazy, sensuous summers of self-discovery just right, too. To see a sexually frank coming of age story from the perspective of a teenage girl feels downright revelatory.

A 14-year-old girl has a summer of self discovery

Review: The Great Gatsby

Max Weiss — Fri, 10 May 2013 21:30:07 +0000

Rating:

2.5 stars

The official title of Baz Luhrmann’s new film is not Gatsby! or The Great Gatsby 3D or even Baz Luhrmann Presents The Great Gatsby, but it could very well be any one of these things.

The best film adaptations of novels help us see and experience the book in a new way. Luhrmann’s gorgeous, gaudy, overstuffed Gatsby merely answers one question: What would The Great Gatsby look like as a Baz Luhrmann film?

Well, it would look a whole lot like his Moulin Rouge, mixed with a generous dose of his Romeo + Juliet (Leo is even in it!) and a dab of his Strictly Ballroom.

So the question remains: Is Luhrmann’s gonzo, over-saturated cinematic world actually a good fit for Gatsby? Yes and no. Like Jay Gatsby, Luhrmann sure knows how to throw a party. And the parties here are decadent, eye-popping affairs—with champagne flowing and roaming acrobats and giddy flappers mixing in with the society swells (all in 3D! It’s like you are there!). It’s the rest of the film that falls a little flat. All of this carefully orchestrated stimulation can be a bit stultifying—the film doesn't give us any room to breathe. (And the hip-hop infused soundtrack, while catchy, makes no sense. It's just another Luhrmann tic.)

DiCaprio is no longer the beautiful golden boy of Titanic or Romeo and Juliet (when co-star John Leguizamo famously called him “that talented little shit”) but his slightly dissipated good looks actually work well here. Gatsby, of course, desperately wants to recreate his own past—or at least, his myth of his own past—and DiCaprio’s faux old money affections (cheerfully calling everyone “old sport”) have a proper edge of paranoia and sadness.

Carey Mulligan does what she can with the role of Daisy Buchanan, who, even in Fitzgerald’s novel, is less a character than a fantasy projection. Mulligan plays her that way—a woman used to being admired and coddled and projected upon.

It’s poor Tobey Maguire, stuck in the role of the wide-eyed, neutered (here at least) Nick Carraway, who doesn’t fare quite as well. All he does, basically, is fanboy over Gatsby. It’s slightly embarrassing. (I loved however, Elizabeth Debicki’s Jordan Baker. She’s so cool and fabulous and louche she would make Downton Abbey’s Lady Mary blush.)

The Great Gatsby is certainly worth seeing, but I can’t heartily recommend it. In America, Fitzgerald’s novel—with its tragic but appealing characters and its big ideas about American reinvention and optimism—is considered nearly perfect. Luhrmann apparently sees it as an excellent backdrop for his work.

This Gatsby adaptation says more about its director than the novel.

Review: Downloaded

Max Weiss — Wed, 08 May 2013 20:34:11 +0000

Rating:

3.5 stars

Hey film fans! The Maryland Film Festival starts tonight! This is the last film I’ll be sneak previewing. It’s sort of great.

Before Facebook and Twitter—hell, before MySpace and Friendster—there was Napster, the music file sharing company that revolutionized, democratized, and completely freaked out the music industry.

Downloaded, the documentary on Napster, directed by Alex Winter (yes, that Alex Winter, from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure), is about the rise and fall of this audacious start-up. But it’s also about the seismic generational divide between those who grew up expecting free things from the Internet and those who didn’t.

Napster started, as revolutions often do, in the mind of a young person—in this case, teenager Sean Fanning, a coder and music lover who wanted to find a more efficient way to share music with his friends. He developed the code for Napster and watched it take off like wildfire. First a few hundred people using it, then thousands, then millions.

He eventually joined forces with Sean Parker (later to be played by Justin Timberlake in The Social Network), an entrepreneurial-minded buddy he’d met online. They hired a few more music-loving friends who were good at writing code and off they went.

This was the day of Internet startup businesses—the guys from Google, for example, idolized Napster and hoped to emulate its success—when venture capitalists were throwing billions at companies with 21-year-old CEOs in blue jeans who didn’t necessarily have a way to make money.

The record companies didn’t get it at first—saw Napster as a nuisance, not completely unlike the bootleg music you would see being sold in the streets. “We were ambushed,” says one record company exec, in hindsight. When they realized that Napster was allowing hundreds of thousands of people to download and share music for free, they pounced. Lawsuits were filed. Congressional hearings were held.

As for the artists themselves? Their reactions were mixed.

The Spice Girls, shown in archival footage, claim ignorance (convincingly). “We’re not that into computers,” says Posh Spice.

The jam band Dispatch, interviewed today, feel they owe their success to Napster, which allowed their music to reach a much larger audience.

While instinctive iconclasts Henry Rollins and David Bowie both embraced the Napster revolution, the file sharing site also had some surprising and powerful musician foes—namely, metal band Metallica and gangster rapper Dr. Dre.

“Metal and gangster rap,” Sean Parker muses in the film. “The two least likely to be going after us.”

Downloaded, which is being distributed by VH1, has access to MTV’s frontline reporting of the Napster controversy. (The scenes of Lars Ulrich from Metallica holding a sit-in of sorts in front of Napster’s offices are priceless—possibly the least metal thing anyone has ever done.) There are also clips of Jon Stewart cracking wise about the greed of record companies on The Daily Show.

In the end, Napster’s model was unsustainable. Sean Parker, who made the mistake of using the word “pirated” in an internal memo (lawyers instructed them to use “shared” instead) was scapegoated and fired (ironic in light of his treatment of Eduardo Saverin—if you believe The Social Network’s version of events, that is) and the company was forced to file for bankruptcy and eventually folded.

Of course, Napster may have failed, but online music sharing is here to stay. (Steve Jobs, visionary genius that he was, was the first to truly monetize it, with iTunes.)

And Sean Fanning, a poor kid from suburban Massachusetts who had no idea what he was getting himself into, still seems shell-shocked, even 10 years later.

He’s able to talk about his experiences articulately, but he has a far-off look in his eyes, as if contemplating a digital horizon that should’ve belonged to him.

To find out when you can see Downloaded, and all the other films at the Maryland Film Festival, go here.

Smart doc on the rise and fall of Napster

Good Ol' Freda

Max Weiss — Tue, 07 May 2013 16:51:07 +0000

Rating:

3 stars

Another solid offering from this year's Maryland Film Festival.

When she was 17 years old, Freda Kelly took a job as a secretary—and that job made her the most envied girl on the planet.

You see, her bosses went by the names John, Paul, George, and Ringo (“Richie” to her). Okay, technically, she worked for Beatles manager Brian Epstein (“Eppie”), but she hung out with the lads all the time—her crushes rotating based on who was nice to her on a given day.

Good Ol’ Freda tells the story of this smart, sensible, capable girl from Liverpool—a Beatles fan, but not an overly breathless one—who got a front-row seat to Beatlemania. A dedicated, protective employee, she ran the Beatles fan club—which included writing their newsletter and handling their sacks and sacks of mail (featuring all sorts of arcane requests for locks of hair and pillowcases that Ringo slept on)—like a tight ship.

Good Ol’ Freda also gives us a somewhat priceless glimpse at the Beatles when they were first starting out—just a bunch of fun-loving, wide-eyed blokes from Liverpool, prone to clowning around Freda’s desk, with no idea of what was in store for them.

In a world where it seems that everyone who came into even the slightest contact with the Fab Four has tried to cash in on their name, Freda has never exploited her ties to the band. (This documentary is really her first time discussing her past at any length.) She gave away most of her priceless collector’s items to fans (for whom she felt an eternal solidarity) and kept just a few tucked away in her attic. Even some close friends and family have no idea she was once the “good ol’ Freda” referenced in a Beatles Christmas recording.

If there’s one complaint I have with the film it’s this: I appreciate that Freda’s tact and reserve is what made her so indispensable to the Beatles. But at times, I wish that filmmaker Ryan White had told us a little more about her life. (There is mention of an ex-husband as well as a son who died tragically —but no further explanation.) To the film’s credit, we’ve come to care about Freda—even separate from the Beatles—and we want to know more.

We do, however, know this: Now in her 60s, Freda is still working as secretary in Liverpool. She no longer gets requests for her bosses’ locks of hair.

Beatles fans won't want to miss this documentary about their fan club secretary

16 Acres

Max Weiss — Mon, 06 May 2013 14:53:20 +0000

Rating:

4 stars

Here's an absolute can't-miss from this year's Maryland Film Festival.

This astonishing documentary—part Greek tragedy and part absurdist comedy—takes a look at the 16 acres in lower Manhattan where the World Trade Center once stood. (“The most valuable 16 acres on earth,” as one observer describes them.)

Consider that space, if you will. Even under the best of circumstances, developing such priceless real estate in Manhattan would be quagmire of zoning regulations and various financial and political agendas. But when you consider that the space didn’t just have to be big and profitable and safe from future terrorist attacks—it also had to essentially heal a nation, you can imagine the depth of conflict. “It’s not just a commercial site,” says Philip Nobel, the architect and critic who serves as a priceless voice of perspective and insight in the film. “It [has to be] a symbol of defiant renewal and healing.”

Oh, is that all.

So what we’re left with is, basically, a fiasco. And that’s what the film gives us a front row seat to.

For starters, there’s Larry Silverstein, the developer who had fulfilled a lifelong dream of buying that property a mere six weeks before 9/11. Silverstein doesn’t come across as unusually craven—he lost employees that day and his grief feels genuinely heartfelt—but he is a businessman, with a businessman’s expected concerns. (His most creative trick is trying to convince the insurance company that 9/11 was two separate catastrophic events, and therefore, he’s owned twice the settlement. Okay, maybe that is a bit craven.)

There are gigantic town hall meetings, to get the feedback from the people of New York. There are international design competitions, egos, grandstanding, name-calling, photo-ops.

The politicians, in particular, come across as shamelessly opportunistic.

Every time there’s a bit of public restlessness over the delay in the construction, then-Governor George Pataki would don a hard hat and have a new naming ceremony or release a dove or, in one so-absurd-you-couldn’t-make-it-up piece of political theater, install a cornerstone on a spot where, it was later decided, the new towers could not possibly be built. Also? “Towers don’t have cornerstones,” Noble offers, ironically.

(At some point, once the project is moved elsewhere, the cornerstone is literally removed from the premises in the dark of night.)

Well! I’ve given away too much already. The film really needs to be seen to be believed. (I spent most of 16 Acres slapping my forehead in disbelief. )It’s a monument to the perils of bureaucracy, but also to the unprecedented complexity of this 16 acres of consecrated space.

To filmmaker Richard Hankin’s credit, 16 Acres also has some extraordinarily moving scenes—especially those focusing on the sister of a fireman who lost his life in 9/11 and her pilgrimage to the dedication of the site’s memorial. (Even that memorial, sacred and beautiful as it is, was wrought with political infighting.)

Oh, in case you were wondering, the new One World Trade Center is apparently almost complete. It will be the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere.

For a complete festival schedule, go here.

On the bureacratic and moral quagmire of developing the site where the Twin Towers once stood

Zero Charisma

Max Weiss — Fri, 03 May 2013 20:29:35 +0000

Rating:

3 stars

Here's another impressive one from this year's Maryland Film Festival.

Before there was nerd chic, there were just plain old nerds, and they were notorious for engaging in elaborate role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons in their parents’ basements. In recent years, the Dungeons and Dragons crowd has been overtaken by the computer gaming industry, but in this funny and dark and a little sad (but mostly funny!) film, we meet the 20-something Scott, who still plays his own “RPG” with his adult buddies in his grandma’s den. But, of course, they’re not really adults at all—instead, arrested adolescents who retreat to this imaginary world because the real one hasn’t treated them too kindly. Scott is the group’s leader. He’s the one who has created the game, and also the one who makes the rules, does the voices of the various kings and damsels and dwarves—creating his own little captive theater in the round. Scott’s happiness and self-esteem is completely wrapped up in this isolated fifedom, where he isn’t an underemployed, virginal loser, but a gamemaster—a geek god.

All of this changes when two monumental events occur in Scott’s life. He recruits a new member to the RPG—Miles (Garrett Graham), who genuinely enjoys playing but is definitely more of the hipster nerd variety. Miles scandalously brings beer to his first game (Scott and his buddies drink sugary sodas) and is the editor of a popular pop culture blog. Because Miles is affable and kind of cool and doesn’t instantly bow to Scott’s authority, he poses a real threat.

Also, Scott’s wayward hippie mom (Cyndi Williams) is back in town to (allegedly) help care for his no-BS granny, who just suffered a mild stroke. Her presence brings up all sorts of abandonment issues for the repressed Scott. Unfortunately, the segments featuring Scott’s mom are a bit underdeveloped and not nearly as engaging as all the gamer stuff.

I really have to give enormous credit to Sam Eidson, the actor who plays Scott. He’s a massive hulk of a man, with a fuzzy Renaissance-style beard and a protruding gut. He’s the kind of guy you give a wide berth to at a rock show, not just because he’s so big, but because his anger seems a little too volatile. Eidson keeps that balance where we’re both rooting for Scott, but a little afraid of him, too. (Credit also to writer/directors Katie Graham and Andrew Matthews for their funny, compassionate work).

Scott’s self-revelation at the end of the film (I won’t give it away here) feels believable and earned—and gives us hope that he just might emerge from that basement, after all.

Can an obsessed gamer ever learn to emerge from the basement and join the real world?

I Am Divine

Max Weiss — Fri, 03 May 2013 15:16:29 +0000

Rating:

3.5 stars

The wonderful Maryland Film Festival starts next Wednesday. Over the next few days, I'll be posting reviews of select titles from the event.

To those of us from Baltimore, it sometimes seems that Divine, the plus-sized “cinematic terrorist” with the double-stacked eyebrows, freakishly receding hairline, and bad-girl-on-a-bender attitude, emerged, fully formed, on our movie screens.

But, of course, Divine was just a character—his portrayer, Glenn Milstead, didn’t even see himself as a drag queen (although the world would never quite agree)—just an actor playing a particularly fabulous part.

In that sense, I Am Divine, Jeffrey Schwartz’s affectionate, lively, and appropriately ribald documentary about Divine, featuring great interviews with his friends, family, and admirers (including John Waters, Pat Moran, and The Village Voice’s Michael Musto) is best seen as an origin story.

We find out about Milstead’s childhood. He grew up closeted and confused in Baltimore. (His refuge from bullying at school was food, a lifelong compulsion.) He had a love of hair and makeup—when he and his high school girlfriend (gamely interviewed in the film and as adoring of Milstead as everyone else seems to be) went to the prom he styled both of them.

Life changed for Milstead when he bonded over Russ Meyer films with a budding punk auteur named John Waters.

It was, indeed, Waters who dreamt up the Divine persona—a sort of plus-sized vixen stuffed into a too-tight dress, with a love for filth and a surly attitude—but Milstead made her come to life, and created a world-wide phenomenon in the process.

True confession: I didn’t know much about Divine beyond the scope of Baltimore, but she was quite the superstar—rubbing shoulders with Mick Jagger at the opening of Studio 54, packing houses off-Broadway in plays like The Neon Woman, and even topping the charts as a disco drag queen. It was a dream come true for Milstead—who had always wanted to be a movie star but never felt it was a realistic goal. Milstead, however, also wanted to break free of this character, which he saw as both a blessing and a curse. Ironically, he had been offered a recurring role—as a man—on the hit sitcom Married With Children just days before he died of a massive heart attack.

Milstead’s untimely death adds a melancholy air to this otherwise joyful, freewheeling film. (Waters still seems on the verge of tears when he talks about it)—which also gives you a great entry into the go-go pre-AIDS world of gay drag culture. You’ll leave the theater feeling that Divine lived up to her name—both as a movie star and a human being.

For a complete schedule of the films playing at the Maryland Film Festival, see: http://mdfilmfest.com/festival/film-guide

A love letter to a true Baltimore original

Pain & Gain

Max Weiss — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 20:03:47 +0000

Rating:

2 stars

I'm tempted to call Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain a clever film for dumb people. It operates under the guiding principle that if you put ironic air quotes around everything, you are immune from all criticism. The characters can be vile, the violence gratuitous, the film can be casually misogynistic and anti-Semitic, but hey, that’s okay because it’s all just a joke, people. Lighten up.

The film begins to insulate itself right out the gate by saying, “This is based on a true story . . . unfortunately.” (I laughed.)

It’s Miami in the 1980s. Our “hero” is Daniel Lugo (Mark Wahlberg), a body builder and personal trainer who believes that his own physical perfection is merely his first step toward the American dream. One of his clients is a self-made millionaire named Victor Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub), a greedy and grasping little man with a giant Star of David dangling from his hairy chest (for reals). Lugo gets the idea to kidnap Kershaw and get him to sign away his fortune. He recruits two body building cohorts: Paul Doyle (Dwayne Johnson), a former cokehead just out of prison, now a guileless born-again Christian; and Adrian Doorbal (Anthony Mackie), a gym rat who’s been made impotent by his steroid habit.

We’re supposed to find these guys likeable but dunderheaded—overgrown, misguided kids who just happen to do extremely violent and even vicious things. We’re meant to laugh at their stupidity, but root for them, too. Lugo, in particular, is so sentimentalized that once he steals Kershaw’s house, he fulfills his dream to ride atop a giant lawn mower and bond with members of the neighborhood association.

The scene where the boys try to kill Kershaw, several times, in bumbling fashion, is played for laughs—right down to the moment they drive a truck over his skull and Bay shows us a close-up of the tire tread ramming into his head. Kershaw lives, for what it’s worth—so later we can be treated to a glorious scene where his obese hospital roommate has explosive diarrhea all over the bathroom stall. (And if you don’t think Bay shows us aftermath in the stall, you haven’t been paying attention.)

Did I mention the misogyny? Lugo has a stripper girlfriend who's so dumb she makes him seem like a mensa. At one point, he hands her off to Doyle, as if she’s some sort of relay baton.

Yes, Pain & Gain occasionally scores as a black comedy and the acting is committed across the board—Ed Harris brings a much-needed touch of gravitas as a grizzled private eye hired by Kershaw—but, on balance, I found the experience of watching it fairly. . .painful.

A clever film for dumb people

Oblivion

Max Weiss — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 16:34:01 +0000

Rating:

2.5 stars

There is a lot to celebrate about the new sci-fi film Oblivion.

For one, it is neither a remake, a sequel, nor based on a comic book.

Two, it stars a remarkably well-preserved 50-year-old Tom Cruise, who—as an Internet meme recently confirmed—is the same age Wilford Brimley was when he appeared in Cocoon. (Feel free to laugh or cry over this tidbit.)

And three, it has some rather slick visuals.

I enjoyed the film, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call it original. In fact, Oblivion plays a bit like a “Greatest Hits” compilation of many films that we’ve seen before: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stars Wars, WALL-E (yes the Pixar film), Total Recall, and, even a bit of Top Gun. (Almost all of Tom Cruise’s films could be dubbed Maverick Goes to X. This one would be Maverick Goes to Space.)

Here’s the plot: The year is 2077. Earth has been rendered uninhabitable by a war with aliens. Now, survivors of the war are living on a moon off Saturn. Cruise plays Jack, who lives in a space station with his partner/lover Victoria (excellent Andrea Riseborough), to scavenger for Earth’s last remaining resources and tend to the drones that protect the planet. Once his assignment is complete, he and Victoria will be able to join the others on Saturn.

But Jack, whose memory of before the war has been wiped (to protect himself and the earth, he’s been told), still has an affinity for his native planet. He also keeps dreaming about a beautiful woman (Olga Kurylenko) on the Empire State Building.

One day, while hunting for downed drones, he stumbles across a several grounded astronauts, kept alive in bio-pods of some sort. Yes, one of them is Julia, the woman from his dreams.

I’m making this sound a bit more romantic/dewy than it actually is.

For the most part, Oblivion is squarely in the action/sci-fi genre, with lots of scenes of Jack bravely zooming through space in a futuristic plane (and at one point, a motorcycle) and shooting at what he believes to be are aliens and rogue drones.

There’s a twist, of course, that I won’t reveal, except to say: A man who has had his memory wiped tends to be an unreliable narrator.

Oblivion is a solid choice for fans of sci-fi and Tom Cruise—but probably not Wilford Brimley.

Solid sci-fi action flick with a remarkably well-preserved Tom Cruise

42

Max Weiss — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 17:30:37 +0000

Rating:

3 stars

It’s really rather stunning to me that there hasn’t been a biopic of Jackie Robinson since 1950’s earnest The Jackie Robinson Story that starred the barrier-breaking baseball player as himself.

Spike Lee, reportedly, pursued the subject for many years, but never got the funding.

That’s a shame, because Lee would’ve definitely made a better film— one with more grit, depth, and ambiguity. But he couldn’t have made a more crowd-pleasing one. 42 tells an important story—a story that needs to be shared with a new generation—in a slick, highly entertaining way. As directed by Brian Helgeland, it’s a nifty piece of old-fashioned American mythmaking.

Robinson, just in case you didn’t know, was the first baseball player to crossover from the Negro League to the majors, at a time when Jim Crow was the law of the land in the south. (His jersey number, now retired in all of baseball, was 42.) He played for the Brooklyn Dodgers and he was great—more importantly, he was tough and virtually unflappable. All the taunts and abuse just made him a better ballplayer.

Newcomer Chadwick Boseman plays Robinson with a pleasingly cocksure physical presence (he couldn’t talk back to racist pitchers, but he sure as hell could torment them on the base paths and in the batter’s box). He also displays a lot of charm, especially in those scenes when he interacts with his beloved bride Rachel (Nicole Beharie). (Their love story, like the rest of the film, is essentially true, but perhaps a little too perfect.)

The real revelation here, though, is Harrison Ford, playing a character role for the first time ever, as far as I can recall. As Branch Rickey, the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, he’s feisty, stubborn and avuncular—and the actor sports bushy eyebrows and grandpa glasses. He’s having fun—something I truly haven’t seen Ford do in years. He obviously fell in love with the character—and with good reason. Rickey was the man.

Some of the film’s best, most ingratiating scenes involve Robinson’s evolving relationship with his teammates. At first, many are so affronted by the thought of playing with a black man, they sign a petition to get him off the team. But little by little, they are won over by his strength, both on the field and off it. (42 shows that how that great, bonding equalizer of team sports works its magic.)

The film winningly recreates two famous photographs: The first with Phillies manager Ben Chapman (Alan Tudyk), who taunted Robinson with racial epithets from the dugout but—in a sign of the evolving ethos that Robinson was no small part of changing— was later forced to make nice. The second is with Pee Wee Reese (Lucas Black), the Dodger’s popular shortstop, who wrapped his arm around Robinson as a show of solidarity in front of hostile fans. (If that scene doesn’t give you goose bumps, nothing will.)

No, 42 isn’t a great film, but it’s certainly a good one. People will see it and love it and recommend it to their friends. And for that, this one definitely goes in the win column.

A solid and crowd-pleasing biopic of Jackie Robinson