Top Five

Chris Rock’s Top Five is heartfelt and funny and a great time at the movies.

Here’s the setup: Rock’s character is a former comedian and comic actor whose attempts at dramatic film have fallen flat.  Now, on the eve of the opening of his latest film (a misconceived epic about the Haitian Slave Revolt of 1791), he’s juggling a ‘New York Times’ interview, promotion duties for his film, and his upcoming celebrity wedding extravaganza.  Oh, and he’s trying to stay sober.

The ‘New York Times’ reporter is Rosario Dawson, which robs the celebrity wedding storyline of much of its urgency, but that’s ok.  This isn’t a film about dramatic tension: it’s a film about one day in a man’s life, a crossroads day in which nothing blows up and nobody gets shot, but in which everything changes.

Watching it, I found myself comparing Top Five to Birdman, another film about an actor in crisis.  Both films feature a style of heightened dialogue in that everyone’s funny in the former and everyone’s overwrought in the latter.  But there’s a key difference: Top Five’s characters feel like real people saying real things, even when they’re clearly speaking for comic effect.  That naturalism draws us into the story, and it makes the jokes land.  This film may have a serious premise, but it’s also very much a laugh – out - loud comedy written by a genius.  It’s just wonderful.

No kidding: I laughed.  I cried.  I loved Top Five.  I look forward to seeing it again.

Cadillac Records

CADILLAC RECORDS is your basic music biography, but the twist here is that it’s the biography of a company, Chess Records, rather than an individual. The film centers on two men, Muddy Waters and Leonard Chess. Muddy is the natural blues man, a gifted musician with no head for business, while Leonard is the natural promoter, a gifted businessman with an ear for quality commercial music. When Muddy plays Leonard’s club, Leonard knows he has lightning in a bottle: all he needs to do is record it. And record it he does, founding Chess Records and signing, in addition to Waters, people like Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter, Chuck Berry, Etta James, and Willie Dixon. Everything’s champagne and Cadillacs, at least for a while, but anyone who has seen an episode of “Behind the Music” knows how things will go from there.

Sure, CADILLAC RECORDS has a familiar arc, but it has a few things to recommend it. First, there’s the music: if you don’t like the blues, there’s something deeply wrong with you. Second, there are the performances: what’s not to like about a cast with people like Jeffrey Wright, Adrien Brody, Gabrielle Union, Mos Def, and the duly beringed Beyonce Knowles? Not to mention this other guy, this guy who comes out of nowhere, Eamonn Walker as Howlin’ Wolf, a force of nature who blows everyone off the screen just by walking into a room. Third, and perhaps most importantly, there’s the history: there is no rhythm and blues, there is no rock and roll, there is no soul, there is no hip hop without Chess Records.

So, hey, if you like good music and you enjoy seeing excellent performers do their thing and you want to learn some history, CADILLAC RECORDS is for you. Think of it as reading a particularly engaging biography, and enjoy.