I Used to Be Famous (2022); Puss in Boots (2022)
An aging musician struggles for a comeback. A swashbuckling animated cat is on his ninth life.
I Used to Be Famous (2022)
Streaming on Netflix
Vince (Ed Skrein) busking on London’s streets, trying to re-ignite that old spark
Combing through Netflix the other day, I came across this laid-back charmer. It’s a disarming self-reinvention tale centering on Vince (Ed Skrein) a washed-up British musician who in his youth was a member of a high-flying boy band. He got used to basking in the adoration of screaming crowds.
Since the group broke up, however, he’s never succeeded as a solo artist.
Today, some 20 years later and close to giving up, he doesn’t dare dream of making it back to pop music’s platinum heights. Landing a few bar gigs would do nicely.
But none of the bars in London’s edgy Peckham neighborhood care to book a singing keyboard artist with no recent work history.
Which means cash-strapped Vince is reduced to busking, hauling his keyboard through the streets on a converted, wheeling ironing board.
Occasionally a loyal female fan recognizes him from the old days and records video showing her onetime idol playing joylessly, forcing a smile, rarely attracting any listeners.
Then one day, a watchful 19-year-old stranger, Stevie (Leo Long), listens intently to Vince’s playing and begins striking his wooden drumsticks on nearby benches and trash bins. It makes an electrifying counterpoint to Vince’s keyboard harmonies.
Vince sways joyously to this spontaneous jam. The call-and-response lifts his spirits. The two suddenly feel connected, pushing and challenging one another, musician-to-musician.
Vince (Ed Skrein) and Stevie (Leo Long) exulting in their newfound musical connection
When that diehard female fan records the sizzling duo and the posted video gets 100,000 views, Vince’s hopes are reborn. This is what he’s needed. To work with another musician who’s also aching to be heard.
But Stevie is on the autism spectrum. He drums brilliantly, but his eyes don’t always seem to be taking in the audience, and he bends his head downward, as if hearing sounds his listeners can’t quite pick up.
His worried mother Amber (Eleanor Matsuura) fears that Vince is misleading her son into thinking he can adjust to a stressful performing environment that will only make his autism worse. She orders Vince out of Stevie’s life.
What neither man has quite yet grasped is that music is a beacon, not a cure-all. It’s the making of music that matures you as an artist, not the size of the venue or even the exhilaration of your unique sound.
Comeback over? Well, maybe not. When Austin (Eoin Macken), an old boy band member whose career is still going strong, watches the pair’s video, he’s captivated by Vince’s sprightly keyboarding.
As it happens, Austin’s act is about to go on tour. How would Vince like to open for them?
Would he ever. But Austin warns Vince that there’s one non-negotiable clause in the contract: Stevie can’t come along. Austin and his producer insist that a live, swooning pop audience would never be comfortable watching an obviously autistic player.
Can Vince and Stevie overcome Amber’s anxiety plus the prejudiced putdown of two coldhearted music pros?
Here’s all they’ve actually got going for them. Vince wants to regain a professional sheen, if not superstardom. Stevie wants to convince his mother that he’s approaching adulthood and can take care of himself onstage and off.
What neither man has quite yet grasped is that music is a beacon, not a cure-all. It’s the making of music that matures you as an artist, not the size of the venue or even the exhilaration of your unique sound.
Vince and Stevie take in this truth gradually, note by note, not triumph by triumph. Only after they’ve had to fight to be allowed to perform do they realize music’s only lasting potency.
When you’ve moved even the smallest audience, you may have done as much as music ever does, or ever needs to.
This is director Eddie Sternberg’s first feature, and he pulls appealing musical and dramatic performances from his cast. The script, by Sternberg and Zak Klein, starts off feeling formulaic, but as I became immersed in these characters’ self-doubts and missteps, I didn’t know where their drives and questions would take them next.
The actors kept me happily off balance. Skrein remains watchable because while you understand Vince’s self-doubt, his yearning to make music burns like a cool blue flame. It’s a busy performance – Vince can be hotheaded and self-centered – but Skrein makes the rough edges seem essential.
Leo Long, autistic in real life, is excellent as Stevie. He shows us the younger man’s hesitation and confusion along with his need to step beyond his mother’s hold. It’s not so much what we hear from his drumsticks as it is the elation performing puts in Stevie’s eyes that we take away.
This movie first appeared on Netflix in September 2022 and is slated to continue streaming there at least through January 2023. It could do so even longer. Sternberg and Netflix are already developing a second feature together.
Catch this perceptive, skillful director now. It feels like his beat will go on.
Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022)
Puss in Boots, armed and ready to take on all comers, never backs down from a fight
Antonio Banderas returns as Puss in Boots, the fearless, swashbuckling Spanish cat, standing a scant three feet tall, who in this story’s enchanted opening slays a living tree monster who looks 20 times taller than he is.
Soon we learn that triumphs like this one have made him a folk hero – but have also inflated his ego to the perilous extent that he feels himself invincible.
Like every cat, though, he has nine lives, and so far, he’s sacrificed eight of them for the greater good, leaving him with only one left.
Panicked, he learns that he can gain more lives only from the power inherent in the Wishing Star. That sacred object is secreted deep within the Dark Forest. And no one gets there without finding the elusive map that points the way in.
Fortunately, Salma Hayek is on hand as Kitty Southpaws, smitten but not bamboozled by Puss in Boots, who agrees to help him find the map. They’re joined by a loyal, sweetly innocent chihuahua, Perrito (delightfully voiced by Harvey Guillén), who keeps them looking on the bright side as treacherous rivals for the map close in.
Kitty Southpaws and Puss in Boots eye one another suspiciously, as Perrito looks on
Goldilocks (Florence Pugh) and the Three Bears (Olivia Colman as Mama, Ray Winstone as Papa and Samson Kayo as Baby) desperately seek the map, too. They want the Wishing Star to free them from their knockabout trade as bounty hunters.
The “Little” Jack Horner we may remember from the fairy tale appears here as the malicious, nihilistic Big Jack Horner (John Mulaney), a gargantuan man-child bent on using the Wishing Star to bring havoc into the world.
Most frightening is the Big Bad Wolf (Wagner Moura) with his shifting, hooded eyes, bright slavering tongue and two rows of neat, eerily proficient-looking teeth. Wielding two scythes, he’s an augur of Death, warning Puss in Boots that his days are numbered.
The animation here is so sharp and gorgeous, bends and balloons so suddenly, it achieves effects so rapidly that I found myself transfixed. The jagged images are slowed down or speeded up on a dime, and sparkle as they splay out like lightning.
The lines of the figures, human, animal and mythical alike, aren’t artfully rounded, like cuddly animation. Everything unapologetically looks hand-drawn, giving an almost dashed-off impression that ensures the audience is paying attention.
Puss in Boots may be right to believe he’ll win his next nine lives. But he still won’t be beyond time, and the Big Bad Wolf promises they haven’t seen the last of one another. A sequel would seem to be promised. I shivered in my seat hoping that might happen.
Goldilocks and The Three Bears, for instance, don’t just ramble along pursuing Puss in Boots. They bicker, stop to devise competing strategies, then snuggle up to one another as they come to an agreement. So, you feel the bristles on the bears’ backs as irritants that can suddenly form soothing brushes or a comfortable seat.
When Goldilocks hops on the bears’ backs and starts barking orders, they’re a crew again, the bears’ bristles lie flat, the drawing smooths out, the band of four marches forward again.
Banderas’ voice zips from buoyant to sarcastic to sad to silly with disarming speed. It’s not just a performance, it’s an onslaught of macho showing off. His bluster makes Puss in Boots feel as though even at his lowest points he’s eventually going to triumph.
The actor’s energy and precision never flag, so we can keep up with his highs and lows without believing that he’s won his new lives just yet.
Under Joel Crawford’s well-calibrated direction, the rest of the cast is bewitching and funny by turns.
Pugh is surprisingly ferocious in hunting down Puss in Boots and trying to beat him to the Wishing Star. Yet she’s familial and cozy with the three bickering bears, keeping them in line affectionately, actually sounding philosophical by the end.
The most harrowing, and, aside from Banderas, the most memorable performance comes from Moura as the Big Bad Wolf. He gives off such a quiet menace that he haunts you even when the Wolf isn’t on screen.
He represents an absolute fate for Puss in Boots, a harbinger of the climax life has in store for all of us, not just at the conclusion of this story’s search for the Wishing Star.
Puss in Boots may be right to believe he’ll win his next nine lives. But he still won’t be beyond time, and the Big Bad Wolf promises they haven’t seen the last of one another. A sequel would seem to be promised. I shivered in my seat hoping that might happen.
In the small, packed theater where I saw the movie, as the end credits rolled and the bouncing score filled the auditorium, children were up and dancing, as if they couldn’t help themselves.
This movie works for the whole family. Those transported children, arms waving, feet flying, were a marvelous sight, getting the New Year off to a rousing start.