By Susan Granger
Special to WestportNow
Based on Angie Thomas’ best-selling 2017 YA novel, the social justice drama “The Hate U Give” revolves around teenage Starr Carter (Amandla Stenberg), who is trying to maintain an emotional balance as she straddles two disparate worlds.
Raised in the poor, predominantly black Georgia neighborhood of Garden Heights, Starr goes to Williamson Prep a predominantly white suburban school. That involves constant code-switching.
Her conscientious parents — Maverick (Russell Hornsby) and Lisa (Regina Hall) — have made Starr, her half-brother Seven (Lamar Johnson) and younger brother Sekani (TJ Wright) acutely aware of police harassment of black people, drilling them on how to respond respectfully if/when they’re stopped.
One night, when Starr goes to a local party, she runs into Khalil (Algee Smith), a childhood pal, who is now dealing drugs for King (Anthony Mackie), the crime lord whose gang terrorizes Garden Heights.
As Khalil is driving her home, he changes lanes without signaling and they’re stopped. Standing alongside his vehicle, Khalil reaches inside for his hairbrush, which the policeman thinks is a gun. Khalil is shot and dies in the street with panicked Starr at his side.
As an ex-con, her devoted father understands the PTSD Starr is suffering, and her uncle Carlos (Common), a cop himself, tries to explain the nightly tension that law enforcement officers face.
Meanwhile, Starr wracked with worry over what would happen to her life at school — the reaction of her classmates and supportive boyfriend Chis (K.J. Apa) — along with King’s inevitable retaliation, if she goes public as the only witness to Khalil’s murder.
Working from the late Audrey Wells’ adapted screenplay, director George Tillman Jr. sharply delineates the conflict, threading the complex thru line of Starr gradually becoming a community activist.
The title refers to the late Tupak Shakur’s acronym: T.H.U.G.L.I.F.E., meaning the hate you give little infants affects everybody. And you can glimpse author Angie Thomas in the climactic protest sequence.
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “The Hate U Give” is a powerful, emotionally evocative 8 — with timely political/cultural relevancy.
What kind of person risks life and limb to climb the treacherous face of Yosemite National Park’s famous 3,200-foot granite wall, known as El Capitan, without a rope or any other safety equipment?
“Free Solo” is about seemingly carefree daredevil Alex Honnold, who has completed more than 1,000 solitary climbs and is thought to be the world’s greatest surviving free-soloist.
Recalling an emotionally isolated childhood in Sacramento and a “bottomless pit of self-loathing,” Alex keeps a meticulously detailed journal about his mountaineering, noting every hand and foot placement.
A self-confessed ‘dork’ and ‘loner,’ ascetic Alex eats beans from a hotplate and lives in a minimally equipped van without a bathroom. He dates occasionally but declares that he “will always choose climbing over a lady.”
At a book-signing for his memoir “Alone on the Wall,” Alex meets cheery Sanni McCandless, who shares Alex’s climbing passion. “I’m patient,” she says, supportively. “But I also have self-respect.”
Chronicled by his longtime friend/collaborator Jimmy Chin and his wife Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelvi (“Meru”), along with cinematographers Clair Popkin and Mikey Schaefer, this thoughtful documentary delves into Alex’s thrill-seeking motivations, including his receiving an MRI to see if his brain is askew.
Analysis of that test reveals that Alex’s amygdala (the brain’s fear center) requires unusually high levels of stimulation before the fear response actually kicks in.
His troubled mother, Dierdre Wolownick, wonders if he’s on the Asperger’s spectrum, although Alex recalls that one of her favorite sayings was: “Almost doesn’t count. As his fatalistic friend/veteran climber Tommy Caldwell notes “Everybody who has made soloing a big part of their live … is dead now.”
The 20-minutes covering Alex’s historic climb on June 3, 2017 is tension and vertigo-inducing, particularly on the big-screen.
On the Granger Gauge, “Free Solo” is an awesome, intense 8, particularly appealing to extreme sports enthusiasts.
Writer/director Drew Goddard’s “Bad Times at the El Royale” is a lurid, neo-noir crime thriller that begins ominously in 1959 with a bank robber (Nick Offerman) getting a back full of buckshot after burying a sack of cash under the floorboards in a Lake Tahoe hotel room. His assailant is seen in the doorway, backlit, toting a shotgun.
Flash-forward 10 years to the El Royale, a once-famous hotel/casino that straddles the border between California and Nevada. Once a hopping hangout, hosting the Rat Park and other celebrities, it was basically abandoned after its proprietor lost his gambling license.
Among its current guests are the bank robber’s brother, hard-drinking Father Daniel Flynn (Jeff Bridges); Motown backup singer Darlene Sweet (Cynthia Erivo), who never scored as a soloist; frantic, foul-mouth’d Emily Summerspring (Dakota Johnson) and her younger sister Rose (Cailee Spaeny), who has fallen under the spell of bare-chested, charismatic Bill Lee (Chris Hemsworth), a sociopathic cult leader.
Plus there’s Laramie Seymour Sullivan (Jon Hamm), a slick-talking traveling salesman from Biloxi, Mississippi, and guilt-riddled, heroin-addicted Miles Miller (Lewis Pullman), the hotel’s only employee.
They’re seven strangers, pretending to be someone they’re not, each hiding a secret, as we discover over a suspenseful, 12-hour period one night.
Evoking the voyeuristic quality of Goddard’s previous film (“The Cabin in the Woods”), the hotel’s surveillance system includes a dark hallway connecting each of the rooms — with a speaker-box and one-way mirror looking into each unit, and a camera at the end of the corridor — suggesting an unmistakable scent of scandal.
So who killed the bank robber? We never find out.
On the Granger Gauge, “Bad Times at the El Royale” is a seedy, slogging, self-conscious 6, concluding with Quentin Tarantino-inspired bloodshed and violence.
(Editor’s Note: Westport resident Susan Granger grew up in Hollywood, studied journalism with Pierre Salinger at Mills College, and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with highest honors in journalism. In addition to writing for newspapers and magazines, she has been on radio/television as an anchorwoman and movie/drama critic for many years. See her reviews at www.susangranger.com.)
