Rich Heldenfels, Pop Culture Wanderer

Close to 20 years ago the ACLU released a report, "Driving While Black: Racial Profiling on Our Nation's Highways."  It's not new. Neither, for that matter, is getting shot just for being black, too many times by police, on the flimsiest of excuses. But for too many people, there's no connection to those victims because the news audience does not see itself in the people who have been wronged. This is where the movie The Hate U Give, and the thematically similar third episode of the CW drama All American, titled "i," become important. Each takes its time to let us know the characters, to see lives, to understand fears -- before we see the terrible wrongs done to them. Although they are fictional, the characters force us to look at the real world. And it does not do it through allegory -- the way, for instance, Supergirl is a prolonged discourse on immigration -- but by direct presentation of incidents which should dishearten any audience. The...

When writing about director Damien Chazelle's "La La Land " back in 2016, I said, " Too often the homages seemed too calculated to generate real feelings, the lush settings overdone to the point that the eyes wandered away from the character." There's something of the same problem in "First Man," Chazelle's chronicle of astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon. Although it has some breathtaking visuals, it never gets an emotional grip on Armstrong, or a way to his interior life. For some, that is not the only problem. Articles such as this one  have pondered why "First Man" has not done as well at the box office as some expected. (Theories include conservatives' ire over the omission of a flag-planting scene, a comment by Ryan Gosling, strong competition from more obvious crowd-pleasers, and more.) None of those issues factored into my thinking. As the son of a NASA engineer*and a pre-NASA NACA mathemati...

At times "Bohemian Rhapsody" threatened to collapse under the weight of some much-repeated ideas, such as Queen as not just a band but a family, and Freddie Mercury's wanting love and respect for his offstage, oft-hidden, real self. Some audience members may have been on edge during a key late scene which, like too many movies, found heavy rain pouring down on our main, mournful character. But the rain passed, and so did the fear that "Bohemian Rhapsody" would be no more than a remarkable performance ("Mr. Robot's" Rami Malek as Mercury) and a phenomenal soundtrack. Instead, the movie regained its early footing as Mercury, facing his own mortality after contracting AIDS, rejoined Queen at the mammoth Live Aid concert and an explosive set which as much deserves to bring moviegoers to their feet as the real thing did the fans at Wembley Stadium for Live Aid in 1985. While Mercury died in 1991, "Bohemian Rhapsody" uses Live Aid as ...

"A Star Is Born" surprised me. Not because it is good. I had seen the trailers enough times to expect that. And I was ready to see a good movie, having come off a couple of moderately interesting ones ("A Simple Favor" and "Searching," more about which another time) and a stinker ("Night School," a horrible waste of Tiffany Haddish and Kevin Hart). Still, I was not prepared for how very, very, very good "A Star Is Born" proved to be, and how often it moved me. Even most of you tuning in late know that this is the fourth go-round for the "Star Is Born" story, and I've seen two of the previous ones, the James Mason-Judy Garland gem and the misguided Kris Kristofferson-Barbra Streisand version. (Find John Gregory Dunne's essay about his and Joan Didion's involvement in the writing of that one, a process that -- as Dunne says in "Gone Hollywood" -- included "three drafts, an arbitration, a threa...