VICTORIA & ABDUL

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+

It can be fun to hear untold stories about hugely famous historical figures, and in the case of Queen Victoria, it was only revealed within the past decade that her close friendship with a Muslim Indian man had been kept secret for over a century.

To call this a juicy story would be an understatement, and that's what makes the film adaptation of Victoria & Abdul somewhat disappointing. One can only presume the book of the same name on which it's based, by Shrabani Basu, gets into much more depth. For the movie, director Stephen Frears (The Queen, Philomena) turns it into little more than a pleasant diversion. And there is a lot to mine in a story like this, considering the story begins only three decades into Britain's rule over India, and the context of overt racism of the British toward South Asians.

Queen Victoria is the one person in her house who not only doesn't seem to care that Abdul isn't white or Christian -- she even enlists him to teach her his native language of Urdu -- but is largely ignorant of the geopolitical details behind the racial resentments among her household staff, or among the rest of her country for that matter.

A lot of this is touched on in Victoria & Abdul, but it is also largely glossed over, in favor of telling this amusing "opposites attract" story. Within that context, Frears offers something fairly entertaining, but fails to impress upon the audience how historically significant this really was. The tone is very "isn't it funny this happened!" rather than demonstrating how extraordinary it was, both that it happened, and that Victoria's successor, her son, King Edward VII, nearly succeeded in scrubbing Abdul completely from the historical record.

But, I suppose there's another approach you could take with this film. It's telling a story not yet told on film, at least, and a unique one at that. It gets a tad corny at times ("Based on true events ... mostly," we are told at the beginning), and with a different approach it could have been much more profound. Still, the performers elevate the material.

How can anyone resist Judi Dench as Queen Victoria -- twenty years after she played the same character in Mrs. Brown, also about another scandalous relationship with a servant? Dench is now 82 years old and is as commanding a screen presence as ever. Ali Fazal, as Abdul, is plenty convincing as the exotic man who charmed the queen. And it's a treat as always to see Eddie Izzard, here playing her son Bertie with unusual subtlety.

I do wish Frears did more to unpack the gender politics of a Muslim man fawning over a British queen in the 19th century, while the wife and mother-in-law the queen insisted he bring out from India spend all their time in burqas. That was a bit too heavy for the tone Frears was going for, though, so Abdul's family is just regarded as exotic curiosities rather than figures of cultural misogyny. I guess racial prejudice and classism were enough for Frears to tackle -- and even there only superficially.

Realistically, the criticisms I have for Victoria & Abdul are not going to be on the minds of most people actually bothering to watch it. This is the kind of movie that makes it easy for viewers to convince themselves they can feel good about how much progress has been made since the time of its setting, and admire the independent streak of an unusual woman in power. In much the same vein but to far less a degree than Gone with the Wind, it gets more problematic the deeper you dig but within the context of undeniably compelling storytelling.

Judi Dench and Ali Fazal are an internationally platonic odd couple in Victoria & Abdul.

Overall: B

BLADE RUNNER 2049

Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B+
Cinematography: A-
Editing: A-
Special Effects: B+
Production Design: B+

If "Future Noir" actually is a genre, then the 1982 film Blade Runner both originated it and remains the gold standard. How long that has been the case is perhaps up for debate, given the film's definitively lesser version that was seen in its original theatrical run; its much-improved tenth-anniversary "Director's Cut" in 1992 (which director Ridley Scott, ironically, did not directly work on); or the 25th-anniversary "Final Cut" released in 2007, which Scott did supervise and which remains widely considered the definitive version.

This puts Blade Runner 2049 into a peculiar position, with a uniquely rich cinematic history behind it, which includes what is arguably the most influential science fiction film of the past forty years, something it took years to be recognized as the masterpiece it remains, and gives this sequel truly impossible standards to live up to. Those of us with a working knowledge of the original Blade Runner are left to wonder: How does Blade Runner 2049 play to the many people likely to see it that have not seen its predecessor?

This movie, made 35 years after the first but set only 30 years later (so the aging actor Harrison Ford is playing five years younger than his real age -- typical), does work on its own terms. But is it a wholly original, or even potentially influential, cinematic vision? Plainly it is not. But that doesn't mean it isn't worthy of our attention -- original writer Hampton Fancher returns as story writer and co-script writer; Ridley Scott serves as an Executive Producer; and visionary director Denis Villeneuve, who brought us the likes of Prisoners, Sicario and Arrival, steps in as director. All of these things are to its benefit.

But those things alone are not enough. I don't usually focus as much on production design as other elements of a film, and perhaps I should, but the world of Blade Runner commands it. What made Blade Runner unique was its very deliberate film noir aesthetic, set in the future -- right down to its 1940s-influenced fashions, Sean Young with her sculpted hair and high shoulder pads. Not one single scene was bathed in bright light; all exterior shots were at nighttime, and any daytime interior shots featured deliberately dimmed beams of daylight filtering in through tinted windows at sharp angles. This shroud of darkness served a dual purpose: it kept the film's look in line with film noir, and also helped obscure any set designs that might otherwise look far more dated over time. Almost every detail of that movie still holds up after all these years, with few exceptions (perhaps most notably, all the indoor smoking, which never occurs in 2049).

And while Blade Runner's claustrophobic and crowded cityscape was exclusively confined to Los Angeles -- that film's characters never leave the city -- Villeneuve goes out of his way to expand those horizons in Blade Runner 2049: there's even a fleeting glimpse of a sign that says NOW LEAVING GREATER LOS ANGELES. Police Officer K (Ryan Gosling), on a mission to unravel a new mystery very much tied to the first film, visits a vast area of San Diego turned into a gargantuan waste dump, and spends an extended sequence in a post-apocalyptic Las Vegas, virtually uninhabited and shrouded in orange fog, "radiation: nominal." This makes for several exterior shots featuring no crowds whatsoever, Ridley Scott's world of overpopulation replaced with vast, open spaces. It succeeds in making Blade Runner 2049 its own thing, but also pulls it rather far from the film noir aesthetic on which this world was originally predicated. Even the office of LAPD's Lieutenant Joshi (Robin Wright, continuing her late-career trend of delivering all her lines like a robot), is stark white -- so stark, in fact, that one can easily imagine that set looking dated within just a few years.

So what of the story itself, then? There really is too much to spoil, preventing me from saying much about it -- true fans of the original film in particular will want to experience on their own how this film turns what is accepted to be true on its head. Anyone who hasn't seen the first film should be able to follow, but they won't have a full grasp on the historical significance of 2049's twists, within the Blade Runner universe.

As such, I am left to comment on that universe itself -- the very thing that made the original Blade Runner the cultural touchstone it is. One thing slightly bugs me: the worlds of Blade Runner's 2019 and Blade Runner 2049 are a tad too similar. Villeneuve takes Ridley Scott's original vision of a future Los Angeles and successfully expands on it, but I hesitate to say he updates it. The world changes dramatically in three decades. Consider what an average crowd looked like in 1982 versus today -- most notably how today's crowds are made up of people looking down at mobile devices. The key change here is that in 1982, what Ridley Scott presented seemed like a completely new, but still plausible future. But that film's setting is essentially our real-world present, clearly turned out to be nothing like it, and by necessity turns Blade Runner into an alternate rather than future universe. Even within that framework, I would expect greater cultural shifts over three decades than what we see here. The Los Angeles cityscape remains the same kind of dense world of giant advertisements, just switched from screens to holograms and rendered with crisper special effects.

Yet, for all that nitpicking, I found myself completely absorbed by Blade Runner 2049, both its story and its world. Does it really need to be two hours and 43 minutes long? Probably not, but even for a film with very little in the way of action set pieces, that times goes by without a dull moment. Not even the friend I saw it with, who had never seen the first film and even declared "I'm just not that into sci-fi," complained about the run time.

And Blade Runner 2049 certainly has provocative and beautiful and haunting moments all its own. The themes of what it means to be human remain, and are expanded; not only does this world contain the original "replicants" -- synthetically created humans with shortened life spans whose rebellious members are hunted by the officers known as Blade Runners (of which Officer K is one) -- but here we have the addition of Joi (a luminous Ana de Armas), a holographic companion K keeps at home, who seems very convincingly to develop real feelings for him. If a replicant sex worker says, "Oh, you don't like real girls" as means of recognizing her own rejection, what are we to consider "real"?

It's hardly a spoiler to acknowledge that Blade Runner 2049 answers the defining question of its predecessor: whether Rick Deckard himself was a replicant. This alone is sure to disappoint some fans of the original, as many hold dear the joy in the mystery. But once Officer K catches up to Deckard, solving that particular mystery only gives way to myriad new ones. 2049 occasionally suffers from clunky dialogue like "If this gets out, it breaks the world," but there is something to the way this film expands that world. It can't possibly live up to what came before it, but it is still filled with riches that are their own reward, which likely increase with repeat viewings.

A Blade Runner takes a 2049 detour to a post-apocalyptic Las Vegas.

Overall: B+

BATTLE OF THE SEXES

Directing: B+
Acting: A-
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+

Here is a movie that is fun from the very start. The moment the 20th Century Fox fanfare begins the picture, the sound design as deliberately made to come across as though it's something literally from 1973. And thereafter, the detailed seventies-era production design is very impressive, at least to someone who wasn't quite born yet. Maybe it's different if you were actually around at the time.

But it can hardly be argued that Emma Stone and Steve Carell aren't both perfectly cast as tennis champions Billie Jean King and Boby Riggs. Carell had to wear clearly prosthetic teeth, but with the makeup and hair design, the actors' similarities to the real-life people they played is uncanny.

There is much to love about Battle of the Sexes, not least of which is its depiction of King's sexuality. Here it is seen with a unique level of understanding in historical context -- King's fears regarding secrets being made public at a time when homosexuality was far less accepted in American culture. That said, her husband, Larry King (Austin Stowell, classically handsome and almost pointedly unthreatening), is depicted as so supportive and understanding it's almost suspect. It's not unrealistic to think the two of them remained friends, but was he really so understanding so quickly?

It's just a movie, after all -- but an effectively entertaining one, with just the right amount of subtle poignancy. Battle of the Sexes is clearly intended as a rallying cry for feminism, but never at the expense of its existence foremost as a fun time at the cinema. This is the almost curious thing about Bobby Riggs, in fact -- Carell makes him easily sympathetic, in spite of his bloviating about being openly chauvinistic. He may be a genuine tennis champion, but he's also a showman, something Billie Jean King always understands. "He's just a clown," she says. It's Jack Kramer (Bill Pullman) she has a problem with, as he's the guy going out of his way to keep woman players unfairly paid a fraction of what the men get.

Bobby Riggs as a character is somewhat problematic, being characterized as this "lovable sexist." But when Riggs wins his publicity stunt of a match against women's champ Margaret Court, who buckles under pressure, King finally takes on his challenge because she can't stand Riggs getting publicly validated as he declares men the superior sex, no matter how ridiculous the context. She largely plays along with the silly publicity, but when it comes down to it, what matters is the match.

There's a lot going on in Battle of the Sexes, a sports movie that triples as a women's liberation period piece and a coming-of-age lesbian love story. In lesser hands, it could have been a mess. This is a quasi-biopic that necessarily oversimplifies things, but in all the right ways, moving the story forward at a steady clip but never feeling rushed. King falls for a hairdresser, and honestly Emma Stone's onscreen chemistry with Andrea Riseborough is moderate at best -- this might provide a little weight to the argument for casting actually gay actors in gay parts. Stone is otherwise wonderful, however, fully convincing otherwise as Billie Jean King and playing well off of Carell.

With unusually well-executed cinematography for a film about athletes, Battle of the Sexes is always nice to look at. And since it's not so much challenging as it is a reflection of changing times and one of the key women in manifesting change, it qualifies as a crowd pleaser, offering a story easy to get pleasantly lost in. The movie itself isn't shattering any of the barriers that Billie Jean King did herself, but a reflection of where we once were as a society and how far we've come from it. It's subtle on this point, but it's hopeful and comforting.

Emma Stone and Steve Carell turn showboating into a match point.

Overall: B+