#david whitfield

[allthemusic]

Week ending: 7th MArch

I have been waiting for this week! Not because it's a particularly big or significant song, or anything. No, even better - it's David Whitfield's final hurrah! Present since the early days of the charts, David's become a perennial irritation of mine, and I am so happy to see the back of him. He gets one more chart hit after this, but it doesn't make the top 10, so for our purposes, doesn't matter. Farewell, David!

The Adoration Waltz - David Whitfield (peaked at Number 9)

Even the title of this one sounds old-fashioned, and not in a good way. In an era of rock and roll dancing and cheeky teenage flirtation, waltzing and adoration sounds hopelessly behind the times - but let's see?

Okay, as expected, we've started with some rather syrupy strings, and a very, very sedate pace. It's not the worst thing ever - it's got the feel of a classic Disney romance theme, the sort of thing that would play in the background of a montage of two people falling in love with each other and doing lovey-dovey things. It's a very sleepy vibe, but it's pretty enough - I sometimes find that with waltzes, they just feel elegant, somehow.

David does his best to wreck it with his delivery, of course. But he doesn't even really let loose with those belting, warbly high notes that have plagued his other songs. His voice is still not my cup of tea, that said. It's very mannered, slightly nasal, and has these very forced sounding "ooooh" sounds on lines like the one about how I adore everything you doooooo. Also, the slide up to a high note at the end of the song needs to be mentioned here. It's particularly horrible, and genuinely set my teeth on edge. But as David's songs go, overall it's not the worst I've heard.

Lyrically, it's also fine. There's something way too earnest about describing your love as perfection without any faults, and rhymes like Skies are blue / Dreams come true / While I'm holding you aren't exactly cinvincing me either, but the only thing you can really accuse these lyrics of are a lack of originality.

Honestly, I could have this playing in the background and not object too much to it. As a piece of unobtrusive mood-setting, it's fine - barring that final note, perhaps.

Well, that's it for David. I kind of wondered if I'd feel any sense of nostalgia or sadness for his final song. But no, I'm mostly just happy we're not going to hear from him again. And in terms of final songs, this inoffensive number is about as good as it was ever gonna get.

Favourite song of the bunch: The Adoration Waltz

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Live Nation/Ticketmaster is buying Congress

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me THURSDAY (May 2) in WINNIPEG, then Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), Tartu, Estonia, and beyond!

Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. Monopolies are intrinsically destabilizing and inevitably implode…eventually. Guessing which of the loathesome monopolies that make us all miserable will be the first domino is a hard call, but Ticketmaster is definitely high on my list.

It's not that event tickets are the most consequential aspect of our lives. The monopolies over pharma, fuel, finance, tech, and even beer are all more important to our day-to-day. But while Ticketmaster – and its many ramified tentacles, like Live Nation – may not be the most destructive monopoly in our world, but it pisses off people with giant megaphones and armies of rabid fans.

It's been a minute since Ticketmaster was last in the news, so let's recap. Ticketmaster bought out most of its ticketing rivals, then merged with Live Nation, the country's largest concert promoter, and bought out many of the country's largest music, stage and sports venues. They used this iron grip on the entire supply chain for performances and events to pile innumerable junk fees on every ticket sold, while drastically eroding the wages of the creative workers they nominally represented. They created a secret secondary market for tickets and worked with ticket-touts to help them run bots that bought every ticket within an instant of the opening of ticket sales, then ran an auction marketplace that made them gigantic fees on every re-sold ticket – fees the performers were not entitled to share in.

The Ticketmaster/Live Nation/venue octopus is nearly impossible to escape. Independent venues can't book Live Nation acts unless they use Ticketmaster for their tickets. Acts can't get into the large venues owned by Ticketmaster unless they sign up to have Live Nation book their tour. And when Ticketmaster buys a venue, it creams off the most successful acts, starving competing venues of blockbuster shows. They also illegally colluded with their vendors to jack up the price of concerts across the board:

https://pascrell.house.gov/uploadedfiles/ful.pdf

When Rebecca Giblin and I were writing Chokepoint Capitalism, our book about how tech and entertainment monopolies impoverish all kinds of creative workers, we were able to get insiders to go on record about every kind of monopoly, from the labels to Spotify, Kindle to the Big Five publishers and the Google-Meta ad-tech duopoly. The only exception was Ticketmaster/Live Nation: everyone involved in live performance – performers, bookers, club owners – was palpably terrified about speaking out on the record about the conglomerate:

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

No wonder. The company has a long and notorious history of using its market power to ruin anyone who challenges it. Remember Pearl Jam?

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/pearl-jam-taking-on-ticketmaster-67440/

But anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. Not only is Ticketmaster a rapacious, vindictive monopolist – it's also an incompetent monopolist, whose IT systems are optimized for rent-extraction first, with ticket sales as a distant afterthought. This is bad no matter which artist it effects, but when Ticketmaster totally, utterly fucked up Taylor Swift's first post-lockdown tour, they incurred the wrath of the Swifties:

https://www.vox.com/culture/2022/11/21/23471763/taylor-swift-ticketmaster-monopoly

All of which explains why I've always given good odds that Ticketmaster would be first up against the wall come the antitrust revolution. It may not be the most destructive monopolist, but it is absurdly evil, and the people who hate it most are the most famous and beloved artists in the country.

For a while, it looked like I was right. Ticketmaster's colossal Taylor Swift fuckup prompted Senator Amy Klobuchar – a leading antitrust crusader – to hold hearings on the company's conduct, and led to the introduction of a raft of bills to rein in predatory ticketing practices. But as David Dayen writes for The American Prospect, Ticketmaster/Live Nation is spreading a fortune around on the Hill, hiring a deep bench of ex-Congressmen and ex-senior staffers (including Klobuchar's former chief of staff) and they've found a way to create the appearance of justice without having to suffer any consequences for their decades-long campaign of fraud and abuse:

https://prospect.org/power/2024-04-30-live-nation-strikes-up-band-washington/

Dayen opens his article with the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, which is always bracketed by a week's worth of lavish parties for Congress and hill staffers. One of the fanciest of these parties was thrown by Axios – and sponsored by Live Nation, with a performance by Jelly Roll (whose touring contract is owned by Live Nation). Attendees at the Axios/Live Nation event were bombarded with messages about the essential goodness of Live Nation (they were even printed on the cocktail napkins) and exhortations to support the Fans First Act, co-sponsored by Klobuchar and Sen John Cornyn (R-TX):

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/08/arts/music/fans-first-act-ticket-bill.html

Ticketmaster/Live Nation loves the Fans First Act, because – unlike other bills – it focuses primarily on the secondary market for tickets, and its main measure is a requirement for ticketing companies to disclose their junk fees upfront. Neither of these represents a major challenge to Ticketmaster/Live Nation's control over the market, which gives it the ability to slash performers' wages while jacking up prices for fans.

Fans First represents the triumph of Ticketmaster/Live Nation's media strategy, which is to blame the entire problem on bottom-feeding ticket-touts (who are mostly scum!) instead of on the single monopoly that controls the entire industry and can't stop committing financial crimes.

Axios isn't Live Nation's only partner in selling this distraction tactic. Over the past five years, the company has flushed gigantic sums of money through Washington. Its lobbying spend rose from $240k in 2018 to $1.1m in 2022, and $2.38m in 2023:

https://thehill.com/business/4431886-live-nation-doubled-lobbying-spending-to-2-4m-in-2023-amid-antitrust-threat/

The company has 37 paid lobbyists selling Congress on its behalf. 25 of them are former congressional staffers. Two are former Congressmen: Ed Whitfield (R-KY), a 21 year veteran of the House, and Mark Pryor (D-AR), a two-term senator:

https://www.bhfs.com/people/attorneys/p-s/mark-pryor

But perhaps the most galling celebrant in this lavish hymn to Citizen United is Jonathan Becker, Amy Klobuchar's former chief of staff, who jumped ship to lobby Congress on behalf of monopolists like Live Nation, who paid him $120k last year to sell their story to the Hill:

https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/lobbyists?cycle=2023&id=D000053134

Not everyone hates Fans First: it's been endorsed by the Nix the Tix coalition, largely on the strength of its regulation of secondary ticket sales. But the largest secondary seller in America by far is Live Nation itself, with a $4.5b market in reselling the tickets it sold in the first place. Fans First shifts focus from this sleazy self-dealing to competitors like Stubhub.

Fans First can be seen as an opening salvo in the long war against Ticketmaster/Live Nation. But compared to more muscular bills – like Klobuchar's stalled-out Unlock Ticketing Markets Act, it's pretty weaksauce. The Unlocking act will "prevent exclusive contracts between ticketing services and venues" – hitting Ticketmaster/Live Nation where it hurts, right in the bank-account:

https://www.klobuchar.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2023/4/following-senate-judiciary-committee-hearing-klobuchar-blumenthal-introduce-legislation-to-increase-competition-in-live-event-ticketing-markets

It's not all gloom. Dayen reports that Ticketmaster's active lobbying in favor of Fans First has made many in Congress more skeptical of the bill, not less. And Congress isn't the only – or even the best – way to smash Ticketmaster's criminal empire. That's something the DoJ's antitrust division could power through with a lot less exposure to the legalized bribery that dominates Congress.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/30/nix-fix-the-tix/#something-must-be-done-there-we-did-something

Image: Matt Biddulph (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/mbiddulph/13904063945/

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

--

Flying Logos (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Over_$1,000,000_dollars_in_USD_$100_bill_stacks.png

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[sconesfortea]

Countdown to the 60th anniversary rewatch | 4.17: The End Of Time Part 1

[badmovieihave]

Bad movie I have The Retirement Plan 2023

[camyfilms]

FRIENDS 1994-1995

Gum would be perfection. Gum would be perfection. I could have said gum would be nice, could have said I'll have a stick. But no no no no no, for me, gum is perfection. I loathe myself.

[mikesfilmtalk]

The Retirement Plan: Deadly Grandad Saves His Baby Girl

The 2023 film The Retirement Plan is all about a deadly grandad who saves his grown baby girl. And his granddaughter. This bit of Nicolas Cage hokum offers up nothing really new. Sadly, despite a weighted cast list, The Retirement Plan falls that little bit short of cinema nirvana. The Story Jim and his wife Ashley, have stolen something belonging to Hector. She sends a plethora of bad men…

[boricuacherry-blog]

Norman Whitfield captured the raw soulfulness of the Stax-Volt/Atlantic school - Sam and Dave, Solomon Burke, Johnny Taylor - as well as incorporating a psychedelic sounding flavor into the arrangements, giving Motown the modern edge it needed. The centerpiece of Whitfield's music was a traditionally brawny male vocal. His associations with the Temptations began in 1968.

Whitfield and [Marvin] Gaye made brilliant music together. He brought out another side of Marvin - tough, aggressive, angry. The great Whitfield-Gaye matchup, MPG, came in 1969. Here Whitfield's songs mirrored Marvin's tortured resignation to the collapse of his marriage. (Marvin and Anna wouldn't actually get divorced until 1977).

The last of the Gaye-Whitfield projects, That's the Way Love Is, produced two hits in 1969-1970, the title song and 'How Can I Forget.' The highlight of the album, though, was Marvin's version of Lennon-McCartney's 'Yesterday.'

-David Ritz

[insidecroydon]

Farewell but no thanks: troubleshooters leave BxB's board

Step by tiny step, the winding up of failed developer Brick by Brick is coming to an end, reports BARRATT HOLMES, housing correspondent The deckchairs are being re-arranged on the deck of Brick by Brick, seemingly for one final time. The difference between the SS Titanic and Brick by Brick, though, is that this re-organisation of the furniture is happening after the vessel is already slipping…

[fromthestacks]

The Retirement Plan

[plus-low-overthrow]

PHOTO 45: David Ruffin - Me and Rock and Roll (Are Here to Stay) (Tamla Motown)

arr. Paul Riser, wrt. & prod. Norman Whitfield, 1974.

[filosofablogger]

♫ Ain't Too Proud To Beg ♫ (Redux)

Interestingly, the one other time I played this was on April 20, 2020 … almost three years ago to the day!  Tonight I was in the mood for me some Motown and nothing else was gonna do!  If you read my earlier rant, you’ll understand why I needed some of that Motown Magic before heading to bed! Sometimes there is just nothing that will do but the Motown Sound. This was written by Motown writers…

[allthemusic]

Week ending: 26th April

Ugh. That's it for today. Just... ugh.

My September Love - David Whitfield (peaked at Number 3)

I didn't see who this was by, at first glance. Instead, I saw the title, and thought, "Hey, neat title. Kinda reminds me of September Song, or the one that goes do you remember". I was briefly quite optimistic. Then I saw that we are in for another David Whitfield number, so... eh.

Off the bat, I'm hoping for a sort of melancholy song about falling in love later in life, or after being in love with somebody else for metaphorical "summer" season. That feels like how the seasonal metaphor ought to work, right?

Wow, okay, so we've started with some very Disney strings, which are actually quite nice. And to his credit, David, when he comes in, is kept quite low in the mix, so he doesn't overpower them early on, even though he's clearly singing at full volume from the get go. So kudos to whoever made that decision while recording, I guess? And also, kudos to whoever did the string parts here, more generally, because they're lovely.

David, as per usual, I can take or leave. Despite the aforementioned good mixing, he still does belt just about every line here, with two settings: loud and REALLY LOUD. It's not the worst performance I've heard from him, though, and there are no moments that made me actively wince. Actually, I think the song just about fits David's style quite well, with its slow pacing and its gradual buildup to a fairly moderate high note. It's fine, which is better than I expected going into this.

The song itself is pretty short, actually, just a verse and then a chorus that repeats. At least I think that's what I'm getting here. And thematically, it's also pretty simple, with David thinking back to time spent with his love, back in September. We get Lazy autumn days in all their glory, followed by Nights that saw the start of our love story, which almost feels like its hinting at something a bit steamier - but then we're back in safe territory with leaves that match her golden hair. It paints a postcard-worthy picture of autumn. There's none of that melancholy I was predicting, just a nice song about being in love in autumn.

Except it is all about memories and remembering a love who it sounds like has left, for whatever reason. Which I guess adds a layer of melancholy, especially since we don't really learn what's happened to David's love, only that And in December, still glows the embers / Of my September love. Which... okay? Did she leave him? Did she die? Did they just drift apart? I don't know, and in a way, that's even better - it can be a song about anything, applicable to whatever situation you've got going on in your life, like so many of the best songs.

Yeah, I surprised myself here. It's still not going to top any personal favourite lists, but for David, this was a surprisingly respectable outing, and I have no qualms with naming it as my favourite. I have to confess, I do wonder how people saw music like this in 1956. We're still pretty early on in the charts, but already, music like this really does feel a bit dated. Sometimes in a charming way, but dated nonetheless.

Favourite song of the surprisingly okay bunch: My September Love

[wait-a-minute-lassie]

If I were Jo, I would have said, "I'm very sorry you have to stay in your office to ride the storm," look briefly at his shocked face and then walk away. That would be more satisfying. *"Satisfaction" plays in the background*

[jules-has-notes]

Boy Bands in 5 Minutes — VoicePlay music video

People have been singing together since there have been people, but the specific phenomenon of boy bands really took form during the mid-20th century. In that grand tradition, VoicePlay had been performing a medley of songs from their mainstream counterparts infused with their own trademark silliness at live shows for years. With a few tweaks and a lot of hard work, they created this incredible audio-visual tour through decades of pop, rock, motown, and hip-hop hits. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride. That is, if you can resist dancing along.

Details:

title: Boy Bands in 5 Minutes

original songs / performers: "I Want It That Way" by Backstreet Boys; [0:16] "I Want You Back" by The Jackson 5; [0:42] "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" by The Beatles; [1:02] "Ain't Too Proud To Beg" by The Temptations; [1:23] "Walk Like A Man" by The Four Seasons; [1:54] "Candy Girl" by New Edition; [2:05] "Poison" by Bell Biv DeVoe; [2:23] "You Got It (The Right Stuff)" by New Kids on the Block; [2:39] "Thank You" & "Motownphilly" by Boyz II Men; [3:08] "The Hardest Thing" by 98 Degrees; [3:29] "I Want It That Way" (reprise); [4:03] "Pop" by *NSYNC; [4:29] "Best Song Ever" by One Direction; [4:50] "Fake Love" by BTS

written by: "I Want It That Way" by Andreas Carlsson & Max Martin; "I Want You Back" by Berry Gordy, Freddie Perren, Alphonso Mizell, & Deke Richards; "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" by John Lennon & Paul McCartney; "Ain't Too Proud To Beg" by Norman Whitfield & Eddie Holland; "Walk Like A Man" by Bob Crewe & Bob Gaudio; "Candy Girl" by Maurice Starr & Michael Jonzun; "Poison" by Elliot "Dr. Freeze" Straite; "You Got It (The Right Stuff)" by Maurice Starr; "Thank You" by Dallas Austin & Boyz II Men; "Mowtownphilly" by Dallas Austin, Michael Bivins, Nathan Morris, & Shawn Stockman; "The Hardest Thing" by Steve Kipner & David Frank; "Pop" by Justin Timberlake & Wade Robson; "Best Song Ever" by Wayne Hector, "John the Blind" Ryan, Ed Drewett, & Julian Bunetta; "Fake Love" by "Hitman" Bang Si-hyuk, Kim "RM" Nam-joon, & Kang "Pdogg" Hyo-won

arranged by: Geoff Castellucci

release date: 14 June 2019

My favorite bits:

easing into things with harmonies of a memorable song from their own youth, then jumping back to the early stuff

Earl at nearly 40 sounding just as good as preteen Michael Jackson on those high vocals

the clever camera wipe transitions that allow them to change outfits and positions to reflect each group

the rhythm section doing some air instrumentation during "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" 🎸🥁

J.None actually not being too proud to ask his bandmates to come back after they jazz-square-slide away

using the whip pan to and from the gossipers to make another costume change

Geoff pushing past Earl, which propels Eli off screen and into the right order for the next dance sequence

the beautiful juxtaposition of the "Single Ladies" choreography done to "Walk Like A Man" 💃🕺

the airy decending sounds Layne makes as they all fall down and the camera spins into the next song

getting back to their barbershop roots for "Candy Girl"

bracketing "Thank You" with the unmistakeable bell chords from "Motownphilly"

Layne doing the quick change "wrong" and yanking off his dickie with dramatic flair as he starts beatboxing again

the whole montage of "Pop"-able items, particularly the intense Bubble Tape™ stand-off, and J.None being showered in bubbles

playing up the dork-itude of the One Direction dance moves

that chromatic descent transitioning into the final song

the delightful floof of Geoff's hair as he rebounds the cascading movement back down the line

that lush ending, complete with Eli's fantastic riff

Trivia:

○ This video was the result of a Patreon poll, and the option the guys least wanted to win, because they knew how much work it would be. But they committed to it like the professionals they are, going all out on the music, costumes, and choreography.

○ The medley is an update / expansion of the previous version they had been performing at live shows for many years. They took the opportunity to swap out some songs in the earlier arrangement for others by the same artists:

Jackson 5 — "ABC" ⇒ "I Want You Back"

Four Seasons — "Sherry" ⇒ "Walk Like a Man"

*NSYNC — "Bye Bye Bye" ⇒ "POP"

One Direction — "What Makes You Beautiful" ⇒ "Best Song Ever"

○ To get the dance moves right, they called in a ringer — choreographer Kristin Denehy from The Sing-Off competition show and live tours, who they'd also worked with on their "Cheerleader" video several years before.

○ The group of gossipers during "Walk Like a Man" is all of VoicePlay's spouses at the time — Nick Perez, Kathy Castellucci, Cyndi Stein, and Ashley Jacobson.

○ The sandwich delivery guy in "Thank You" is the fellas' longtime friend and collaborator Rek Dunn. Given that Boyz II Men are proud Philadelphians, he's probably handing over a cheesesteak.

○ Eli sings some of the Korean lyrics in the closing BTS section. Given that he speaks Japanese, he was probably the most likely of the guys to get the pronunciation right. (And judging by the YouTube comments from BTS fans, he did a good job.)

○ When Geoff was rehearsing the choreography at home, he got some personal coaching from Kathy and little William.

○ The guys also had group dance rehearsals at a local studio.

extracted from Geoff's Instagram farewell post for J.None

○ Things got a little out of hand while they were filming the bubble wrap section of the "Pop" montage.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by VoicePlay (@thevoiceplay)

○ They got their act together for the transition to the next song, though.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by VoicePlay (@thevoiceplay)

○ The long day of filming and dancing aggravated Earl's old foot injury, so he spent the next day wearing a brace to help it recover.

○ The streaming audio version is separated into 4 tracks with 3 or 4 songs each, primarily due to licensing restrictions.

○ The 4:2:Five boys had opened for 98 Degrees at Sea World all the way back in September 2001, just a few months after they'd released their first professional EP. When VoicePlay appeared on the fourth season of The Sing-Off in 2013, working with Nick Lachey again was a little bit of a reunion.

[blogger360ncislarules]

EXCLUSIVE: HBO‘s The Gilded Age has tapped six for supporting roles in Season 3: Dylan Baker (The Good Wife), Kate Baldwin (Broadway’s Hello, Dolly!), Michael Cumpsty (Severance), John Ellison Conlee (Boardwalk Empire), Bobby Steggert (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel), and newcomer Hannah Shealy (The Rose Tattoo).

Baker plays Dr. Logan, a family doctor who treats a number of high society families, with Baldwin as Nancy Adams Bell, the older sister of John Adams (Claybourne Elder). Cumpsty portrays Lord Mildmay, a British nobleman who comes to dine at Sidmouth Castle, with Conlee as the successful, educated and polished businessman, Weston; Steggert as the famed artist John Singer Sargent, who has just begun his career painting the great ladies of society; and Shealy as Charlotte Astor, the married daughter of Mrs. Astor (Donna Murphy), recently returned from an eventful trip abroad.

Currently filming its third installment, The Gilded Age is an ensemble drama telling the story of The American Gilded Age, a period of immense economic and social change, when huge fortunes were made and lost overnight. With the old guard officially deposed, New York society finds itself turned upside down, and all must get their house in order. But even those at the helm of this new era may find that change comes at a cost.

Other newcomers in Season 3 include Bill Camp as JP Morgan, Merritt Wever as Monica O’Brien, Leslie Uggams as Mrs. Ernestine Brown, Lisagay Hamilton as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Andrea Martin as Madame Dashkova, Paul Alexander Nolan as Alfred Merrick, Hattie Morahan as Lady Sarah Vere, and Jessica Frances Dukes as Athena Trumbo.

The Gilded Age is created by Julian Fellowes, who writes and exec produces alongside Sonja Warfield. Other executive producers include Gareth Neame, David Crockett, Michael Engler and Salli Richardson-Whitfield (who also direct), and Bob Greenblatt. Erica Dunbar serves as historical consultant and co-executive producer.

A co-production between HBO and Universal Television, a division of Universal Studio Group, the show’s casting directors are Bernie Telsey and Adam Caldwell from the Telsey Office.

Baker is represented by Innovative Artists and Viking Entertainment; Baldwin by Paradigm and Schachter Entertainment; Cumpsty by Innovative Artists; Conlee by Innovative Artists and Meghan Schumacher Management; Steggert by Wolf Talent Group; and Shealy by Untitled Entertainment and CESD Talent Agency.

[moorheadthanyoucanhandle]

BAR NONE

In theaters this weekend:

Sing Sing--A troupe of actors, all incarcerated, work to put up a show in the notorious maximum security state prison in New York. They're members of the institution's Rehabilitation Through the Arts program (RTA). At the center of the company is John "Divine G" Whitfield (Colman Domingo).

In prison for a crime he did not commit, Divine G not only throws his soul into his theatre work, playing Shakespearean leads like he should be onstage in Central Park, he also assists his fellow inmates with appeals and preparation for parole hearings.

His anger at the injustice of his circumstances is unmistakable, yet it's less scary than the intensity with which he works to control and channel it; he knows too well that giving vent to rage would be futile and harmful to his cause. Besides, he's a true believer. His positivity is an act of faith, sometimes a Herculean one.

Like its hero, the movie, directed by Greg Kwedar from a script he wrote with Clint Bentley, is taut and melodrama-free. Perhaps because so many of the actors were actually incarcerated people--many of them RTA veterans playing themselves--Sing Sing has almost a documentary feel at times. Yet it also has, with almost no violence or other prison-movie cliches, the charge of high drama. Clarence "Divine Eye" Maclin and Sean San José are particularly memorable among the other company members. A word should also be said for Paul Raci, who plays Brent Buell, the diplomatic, unflappable director and playwright. 

But the core of the film is Colman Domingo. Rarely does an actor gives us so much heart to invest in with so little hamming or telegraphing. It's a classic performance, both for its emotional impact and for its discipline.

My Penguin Friend--It's hard to go wrong with penguins. They've been amusing us for a long time, not just in zoos but in movies. like George Miller's mad animated musical epic Happy Feet and its sequel, and Surf's Up, and the crack team of penguins in the Madagascar franchise, and Mr. Popper's Penguins, and the 2005 French documentary March of the Penguins, back though the exploding penguin and the giant penguin in Monty Python, not to mention Chilly Willy and Bugs Bunny's friend "Playboy Penguin," who wept tiny ice cubes when he was sad.

It's also hard to go wrong with Jean Reno. Best known as menacing killers in Luc Besson films like La Femme Nikita and The Professional, the rugged-looking French actor projects an air of effortless authority. So My Penguin Friend, which has both Jean Reno and a jaunty, spirited penguin in starring roles, starts out with certain advantages. And it ends up needing both of them.

This family film is, to use its opening titles, "Inspired by a True Story." In 2011, a man named Joao Pereira de Souza living on Ilha Grande, off the coast of Brazil, found a weakened, oil-slicked Magellanic penguin outside his house along the beach. He cleaned the poor flightless castaway up, fed him some sardines, and soon became friends with him. Dubbed "Dindim"--a grandchild's mispronunciation of the Portuguese word for penguin--the bird disappeared back into the Atlantic some months later. But he returned for many years thereafter, to hang out for the winter with Joao along his migratory route.

This fictionalized retelling of the story, directed by David Schurmann from a script by Kristen Lazarian and Paulina Lagudi Ulrich, starts off on the wrong foot with a tragic episode that seemed entirely gratuitous to me. And in its second half, it follows Dindim's encounters with researchers at his other home in Patagonia. These scenes feel very strained, with dialogue so stilted I began to wonder if it had been written by AI. And the movie's final stretch, which attempts to generate some danger and suspense, feels extremely half-hearted.

In between all this, however, we get to see Jean Reno, looking scruffy and soulful and beaky-faced as Joao, tenderly interacting with a penguin. That can carry a movie a long way. Reno seems to enjoying playing a childlike sweetness here, as Joao proclaims that Dindim "comes and goes as he pleases" and is "not my pet...he's my friend." The other humans in the film, including Adriana Barraza as Joao's wife, are all attractive, even when the dialogue coming out of them seems canned.

The movie is visually impressive, too. Dindim was played by several different penguins, and presumably his adventures, particularly underwater, have been at least partly enhanced by CGI, but it's pretty effective and seamless; he comes across as a character. And the scenery, both in windswept Patagonia and idyllic-looking Ilha Grande, is breathtaking.

So it will be a matter of personal calculation for you to decide if a penguin, a bona fide international movie star and gorgeous settings overcome feeble kid-movie devices enough to make My Penguin Friend worth your time. For me, it was; the penguin tipped the scale the farthest.

Alien: Romulus--A band of young scavengers bust into a huge derelict spaceship in orbit around the cheerless, sunlight-free mining planet on which they live. They're hoping to filch equipment that will allow them to escape their indenture, and they repeatedly express confidence that they'll be in and out in half an hour, and nothing can go wrong.

So in they go, get the stuff they need, and sail off to a new world where they live happily ever after. The end.

Just kidding. The result, in this seventh entry in the Alien series, is of course another gory encounter with an infestation of the elegantly spindly, terrifying creatures in all of their various stages of development, from "facehugger" to "chestburster" to full-grown fang-bearer.

Though it's not close to the 1979 original, Romulus is on the more watchable end of the franchise, deliberate and creepy for the first half, and non-stop in the second. It's a little unvaried and dark, however, and until the climactic scenes it doesn't really give us much that's new. Toward the end, the shots of the ice ring around the planet that the ship is approaching have a certain magical beauty, but otherwise we're mostly stuck in the chiaroscuro space dungeon.

The star is Cailee Spaeny, who played the fresh-faced young journalist in Civil War earlier this year. She's sympathetic, but the movie is stolen by David Jonnson as her companion Andy, a sweet, dad-joke-dispensing android who gets a reboot that gives him an upsetting personality change. Andy may be the best robot with divided loyalties since Robby in Forbidden Planet.

One more note: I'm a little over the vogue for gynecological/obstetric body horror. We got a big dose of nasty surgical instruments and moaning, keening young women birthing unnatural spawn earlier this year in The Last Omen; we get more natal splatter here. The gifted director of Romulus, the Uruguayan Fede Alvarez, also showed unsavory interest in coercive pregnancy in his terrific 20I6 shocker Don't Breathe. Even the title Romulus refers to one species nursed at the teat of another.

Could all this be a reaction to post-Roe reproductive chaos? I'll leave that to graduate students with stronger stomachs than mine.