REVIEW: Concrete Cowboy

"Concrete Cowboy" has Stranger Things alum Caleb McLaughlin saddle up with Idris Elba in a father-and-son tale set against the backdrop of urbanization. McLaughin stars in the film as "Cole," a troubled teen whose escapades into trouble have him teetering on the edge of a life of aimless ruin. In an act of desperation, Cole's mother drops him off in Philadelphia at the apartment of his father (played by Elba) whom he hasn't seen in years. It's a drastic change of scene for Cole, but there's a chance for him to make something of himself here. If he can avoid the toxic influence of Smush, a local kid with dubious ties to local gang activity.

The premise sounds intriguing enough, but the finished product is so textureless that even after actually watching the film, you somehow don't feel you've learned anything more about it.

The movie relies a lot on the audience bringing their own preconceptions to the table. Opening with a shot of Cole looking forlorn as he hangs his head outside the principal's office is supposed to be enough to tell us that Caleb's mother is ready to dump him with his father that he hasn't seen in years. No explanation given to exactly how many schools he's been expelled from or even what he's done this time to get kicked out.

Because Cole's problem is so undefined, the movie is allowed to run him through an eclectic assortment of character-building experiences and we're just supposed to roll with it, telling ourselves that it's bringing Cole closer to his final destination, whatever that is.

A sizable part of Cole's development hinges on him establishing a relationship with Harp, with whom he has an estranged relationship. Indeed, "uninvolved" describes not only Harp's approach to fathering, but also his participation in this film. At least for the first half, there's a curious lack of Idris Elba in this film.

The movie tries cashing in on this relationship around the midpoint with a shouting match between the two, and you get the feeling this might have worked had we seen Cole actively reaching out to Harp and Harp pulling away. It all comes back to the movie's insistence on gliding off of the audience's built-in understanding of separated sons and fathers. The movie asks us to want Cole and Harp to reconcile more than either of them want to.

Both Elba and McLaughlin give fine performances, but we've seen them both do better. The one performance that does deserve a shoutout would be Lorraine Toussaint's "Nessie," a sort of maternal figure for Caleb who helps bridge the gap between him and Harp. Her comfortable confidence is palpable without ever feeling overbearing. She leads the ensemble cast for this film, many of which, we learn in the credits, are in fact real-life "Concrete Cowboys" of Philadelphia.

Little if anything about this movie is actively bad, but much of it is underdeveloped. The camaraderie between Cole and his cowboy clan feels genuine if somewhat undefined, and the cinematography creates some fascinating shots. There's not a sunset wasted in this film. Just so, a little more attention to characterization never hurt anybody.

--The Professor

Comments

REVIEW: WICKED

Historically, the process of musical-film adaptation has been scored on retention --how much of the story did the adaptation gods permit to be carried over into the new medium? Which singing lines had to be tethered to spoken dialogue? Which character got landed with stunt casting? Which scenes weren't actually as bad as you feared they'd be? Well, Jon M. Chu's adaptation of the Broadway zeitgeist, Wicked , could possibly be the first to evaluated on what the story gained in transition. The story imagines the history of Elphaba, a green-skinned girl living in Oz who will one day become the famous Wicked Witch of the West. Long before Dorothy dropped in, she was a student at Shiz University, where her story would cross with many who come to shape her life--most significantly, Galinda, the future Good Witch of the North. Before their infamous rivalry, they both wanted the same thing, to gain favor with the Wonderful...

My Best Friend's Wedding: Deconstructing the Deconstructive Rom-Com

Well, Wicked is doing laps around the box office, so it looks as though the Hollywood musical is saved, at least for a season, so I guess we’ll turn our attention to another neglected genre. As with something like the musical, the rom-com is one of those genres that the rising generation will always want to interrogate, to catch it on its lie. The whole thing seems to float on fabrication and promising that of which we can always be skeptical—the happy ending. This is also why they’re easy to make fun of and are made to feel second-tier after “realer” films which aren’t building a fantasy. You know? Movies like Die Hard … We could choose any number of rom-coms, but the one that I feel like diving into today is 1997’s underrated My Best Friend’s Wedding . I’m selecting it for a number of reasons. Among these is my own personal fondness for the film, and also the fact that it boasts a paltry 6.3 on IMDb despite its ...

REVIEW: MOANA 2

Way back in 2016 , Moana's quest to return The Heart of Te Fiti ran perfectly parallel to both Moana's own sense of unrest and her community's need to return to their voyaging roots, motivations that were all intrinsic--and also very well-established in that first act. The opposing forces were also clear--not just in the presence of lava monsters or killer coconuts, but in the attitudes she faced from her overprotective father and her swaggering demigod sidekick. Her ultimate discovery, that the island she was trying to restore and the monster she had to thwart were one and the same, was likewise an organic extension of her inherent compassion and discernment. That first film understood the basic chemistry of the adventure narrative, and how it sang when thoughtfully applied to the Disney aesthetic, so they don't really have an excuse for bungling the mixture this time around. For a film determined to fit in as many charac...

REVIEW: Belfast

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the world needs more black and white movies. The latest to answer the call is Kenneth Branagh with his semi-autobiographical film, Belfast . The film follows Buddy, the audience-insert character, as he grows up in the streets of Belfast, Ireland in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Though Buddy and his family thrive on these familiar streets, communal turmoil leads to organized violence that throws Buddy's life into disarray. What's a family to do? On the one hand, the father recognizes that a warzone is no place for a family. But to the mother, even the turmoil of her community's civil war feels safer than the world out there. Memory feels safer than maturation. As these films often go, the plot is drifting and episodic yet always manages to hold one's focus. Unbrushed authenticity is a hard thing to put to film, and a film aiming for just that always walks a fine line betwe...

REVIEW: The Super Mario Bros. Movie

Some die-hard fans of the franchise may have to correct me, but I don't remember Mario having a solid backstory. Or any backstory. I'm pretty sure he just emerged fully grown from a sewer pipe one day and started chucking turtle shells at mushrooms for fun. I remember, for example, that Mario and Luigi are canonically brothers, yet there's little opportunity in the video games to explore anything like a relationship between them. That's domain better trod by film. And this weekend's feature film adaptation from Illumination does succeed in carving out character, personality, and history for all the players on the board. The fact that Mario and Luigi are brothers isn't just a way to excuse their nearly identical apparel. Their relationship is the foundation for Mario's quest. Even more impressive is that the film reaches its degree of texture with its characters without cramming in exposition overload. This is one ar...

REVIEW: Cyrano

The modern push for the movie musical tends to favor a modern sound--songs with undertones of rap or rock. It must have taken director Joe Wright a special kind of tenacity, then, to throw his heart and soul into a musical project (itself a bold undertaking) that surrenders to pure classicalism with his new film Cyrano . Whatever his thought process, it's hard to argue with the results. With its heavenly design, vulnerable performances, and gorgeous musical numbers, the last musical offering of 2021 (or perhaps the first of 2022) is endlessly enchanting. Cyrano de Bergerac's small stature makes him easy prey for the scorn and ridicule of the high-class Victorian society, but there has yet to be a foe that he could not disarm with his sharp mind and even sharper tongue. The person who could ever truly reject him is Roxanne, his childhood friend for whom he harbors love of the most romantic variety. Too afraid to court Roxanne himself, he chooses to use the han...

The Great Movie Conquest of 2022 - Febuary

Welcome back, one and all, to my latest attempt to justify being enslaved to a million different streaming services. My efforts to watch one new movie a day all year haven't worn me out yet, but we're not even past the first quarter yet. My first film of the month brought me to Baz Lurhmann's Australia , and it reminded me what a beautifully mysterious animal the feature film is. My writer's brain identified a small handful of technical issues with the film's plotting, but the emotional current of the film took me to a place that was epic, even spiritual. I don't know. When a film cuts straight to the core of your psyche, do setup and payoff even matter anymore? I think this film is fated for repeated viewings over the years as I untangle my response to this film. One of my favorite films of all time is Billy Wilder's The Apartment with Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine. You'd think, then, that learning that the t...

REVIEW: Samaritan

It's only in a landscape like today's, one where the superhero myth is so deeply intwined in the pop culture fabric, that a deconstructionist superhero movie like Samaritan could feel warranted. There's no shortage of contemporary examples from which to learn. This makes the film's ultimate stumble all the more mysterious and all the more disappointing. The film's premise gives it every chance to be a thoughtful piece within the superhero craze and independent of it. Here's a story about a boy lacking a strong male role model just hovering above poverty and wondering where the heroes have gone. All the while, his community teeters on disarray and anarchy as the powers that be neglect the larger population. It's the kind of world where no one's expecting a hero, but the hopeful among us sure are hoping for one. Thirteen-year-old Sam thinks he's found the answer to his prayers in his aged neighbor, Joe. After witnessing a few displays ...

Hating Disney Princesses Has Never Been Feminist pt. 1

Because the consumption of art, even in a capitalist society, is such a personal experience, it can be difficult to quantify exactly how an individual interprets and internalizes the films they are participating in. We filter our artistic interpretations through our own personal biases and viewpoints, and this can sometimes lead to a person or groups assigning a reading to a work that the author did not design and may not even accurately reflect the nature of the work they are interacting with (e.g. the alt-right seeing Mel Brooks’ The Producers as somehow affirming their disregard for political correctness when the film is very much lampooning bigotry and Nazis specifically). We often learn as much or more about a culture by the way they react to a piece of media as we do from the media itself. Anyways, you know where this is going. Let’s talk about Disney Princesses. Pinning down exactly when Disney Princesses entered the picture is a hard thi...

PROFESSOR'S PICKS: 7 Best Songs Written for (Non-Musical) Film

This being a blog about film, I generally keep my observations focused on movies, but today we're going to expand the menu just a little. Most of the stuff I write here, I write with some film music playing in the background, usually a film score or a Broadway cast recording (right now I'm on a bit of a Raul Esparza kick, everyone deserves to hear his rendition of "Come to Your Senses" from this year's Miscast concert). I've been doing this for a while, yet I only recently had the idea to actually write about some of the songs that inform my writing process. The songs I can never get out of my head. To keep things mostly on-brand, I'm going to be writing about music that features in films, preferably songs written for their respective movies. Just to make things interesting (and to keep the door open for a future installment ... maybe ) I'm choosing to restrict the songs listed here to those written for non-musical films, and I'm cho...

Films and Feelings

Search This Blog