Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone is wondering if Tate Taylor‘s Get On Up (Universal, 8.1), the James Brown biopic starring Chadwick Boseman, will get slapped around for being a white person’s take on a black man’s saga. Or that the gritty realism of Brown’s story will somehow be soft-pedaled or watered down or tidied up. A little while ago we talked it over. I read a month-old riff by HE reader Anna Zed: “Brown’s bombastic personality and unmistakeable personal style, not to mention his checkered personal life, really don’t seem like they would lend themselves to this kind of glossy wash . [Brown] was a very dark-skinned black man, intensely muscular and frenetic, thick necked and small (not matinee idol or even lead-singer material for the period that he emerged from) who just burst past all these hindrances by sheer force of will, fantastic charisma and unstoppable originality as a musical stylist. Boseman is lithe and handsome but sort of winsome and sweet and nonthreatening, and I see none of Brown in him.” Again, our brief exploration of this and other matters.
Sasha and I also briefly discussed Life Itself, the Roger Ebert doc, as well as the just-out trailer for David Fincher‘s Gone Girl.