☆☆☆☆☆
Rocketman is the reason we go to movies. It is a joyful, exhilarating, imaginative, captivating, moving, nostalgic success, a journey to a music-filled planet that revolves around the sun of Taron Egerton's spectacular central performance. Egerton has had leading roles in movies like Kingsman and Eddie the Eagle, but to watch Rocketman is to see him for the first time and to witness a star being born.
Last year's distressingly homophobic, disappointingly sanitized Bohemian Rhapsody got a mind-numbing number of accolades, and also had a substitute director named Dexter Fletcher, who quietly helped finish that film even while he was making this one. And this one is everything that one was not: It is bold, stylish, and within the confines of an R rating, frank and revealing.
What's most surprising (and moving) about this musical recounting of the life and times of Elton John is that it's so strongly rooted in a dimensionalized person: a talented boy named Reginald Dwight who heeds early advice, "You've got to kill the person you were born to be in order to become the person you want to be."
Enormously satisfying musical numbers -- overflowing with energetic dancing, kinetic camera work and real cinematic flair -- punctuate the story of John's rise from obscurity to global superstardom. Rocketman may play fast and loose with the facts, but never betrays the complexity and feeling in the story of a massive star who, in the end, wants nothing more than to figure out who he is.
Viewed June 1, 2019 -- AMC Burbank 16
1900
Last year's distressingly homophobic, disappointingly sanitized Bohemian Rhapsody got a mind-numbing number of accolades, and also had a substitute director named Dexter Fletcher, who quietly helped finish that film even while he was making this one. And this one is everything that one was not: It is bold, stylish, and within the confines of an R rating, frank and revealing.
What's most surprising (and moving) about this musical recounting of the life and times of Elton John is that it's so strongly rooted in a dimensionalized person: a talented boy named Reginald Dwight who heeds early advice, "You've got to kill the person you were born to be in order to become the person you want to be."
Enormously satisfying musical numbers -- overflowing with energetic dancing, kinetic camera work and real cinematic flair -- punctuate the story of John's rise from obscurity to global superstardom. Rocketman may play fast and loose with the facts, but never betrays the complexity and feeling in the story of a massive star who, in the end, wants nothing more than to figure out who he is.
Viewed June 1, 2019 -- AMC Burbank 16
1900
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