The Media Tourist

New country music movie gets some things right—and a few wrong

The Neon Highway
Starring Beau Bridges & Rob Mayes
Directed by William Wages
Rated PG-13

In theaters Friday, March 15

In The Neon Highway, an aspiring singer-songwriter (Rob Mayes) hitches up with a washed-up former country legend (Beau Bridges) to get a song recorded in Nashville. But the “new” Nashville has changed a lot since yesteryear, and the two aren’t exactly greeted with open arms when they get to Music City. It’s a modest little music-centric melodrama with humor, heart and hope, a B-movie about second chances that features cameos by a handful of real-life music-makers, including Pam Tillis, Lee Brice and former BR-549 front man Chuck Mead, providing a backdrop of authenticity.

Bridges, a veteran actor with more than 200 movie and TV roles, gives his character, Claude Allen, an aura of weary experience, worn down by the grind after the hits have stopped coming. Mayes has done primarily television work and even released several singles as a singer-songwriter, which meshes with his role as Wayne Collins, whose fledgling career never recovered from a tragic setback several years ago. His song, “The Neon Highway,” is about hitting the road, taking the stage and performing again—a dream both characters share.  

But The Neon Highway is a bit off-key, alas, in its depiction of Nashville and its best-known export. For starters, it doesn’t look like Nashville, mainly because it was filmed almost entirely in Georgia, home to director William Wages, a former cinematographer turned TV director who’s also one of the film’s cowriters. There are no identifiable Nashville landmarks, but there is a plug for Leopold’s, the Georgia-based ice cream company owned—not coincidentally—by the film’s producer.

But one thing in particular rings realistically true: The rejection and indifference felt by Wayne and Claude when they get to Nashville is echoed by the experiences of thousands of songwriters and artists who know how rough the road to success can be. The movie hits some flat notes with cliches and hokum, and often seems dated about how the wheels of Nashville’s modern music business really turn; record execs, for instance, don’t dress like Urban Cowboy extras from the ‘80s, with Western shirts and rodeo-size belt buckles. And whatever the “sound” of Music City might be, wafting on the breeze as Claude and Wayne arrive on the outskirts of what the movie pretends is Nashville—well, it’s likely not a sonorous violin version of “Danny Boy.”

In the movie, Wayne’s job—as an installer for a telecom company—proves a novel (if highly unconventional) way of getting his song released. Don’t give up your day job, as the old showbiz adage goes.

Bridges, as movie fans likely know, has a younger brother, Jeff, whose long string of popular films include The Big Lebowski, Iron Man, Tron: Legacy, the Coen Brothers’ remake of True Grit, and his own country music movie, the well-received Crazy Heart. Both actor sibs have also dabbled in music, and they’ve made a handful of flicks together; one of them, The Fabulous Baker Boys, was nominated for four Oscars. Hey, maybe they should reteam for a movie about country music singers Buck Owens and Dwight Yoakam—and call it The Fabulous Bakersfield Boys. Just a thought.

The Neon Highway means well and it has its heart in the right place, somewhere in there between three chords and the truth. And it definitely does show how, as another old Nashville songwriting adage goes, it all begins with a song—even when things look a lot like Georgia. 

—Neil Pond

Return to ‘Dune’ is a sandy sci-fi spectacle with overtones of a scarily familiar world

Dune: Part Two
Starring Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Austin Butler, Florence Pugh, Josh Brolin, Javier Bardem & Dave Bautista
Directed by Denis Villeneuve
Rated PG-13

In theaters Friday, March 1, 2024

Summon your sandworm! One of the most anticipated movies of the year has arrived.

Returning director Denis Villeneuve’s sequel to his 2021 blockbuster certainly won’t disappoint fans of the acclaimed sci-fi franchise (which was also turned into a movie in the 1980s, and later two TV miniseries). It’s a spectacular, sprawling extravaganza that shows the remarkable effects, star-studded casting and thrilling big-screen world-building wallop a budget north of $120 million can get you.

It looks epic and feels epic—mainly because it is epic, a gobsmacking, action-packed, emotionally stirring return to the characters and story based on author Frank Herbert’s 1960s novel about humanity’s future on a distant colonized desert planet called Arrakis, sometimes known as “Dune.” And it sounds epic too, thanks to another masterful soundtrack by Oscar-winning Hans Zimmer, whose grandiose orchestrations perfectly underscore the excitement, danger and drama onscreen.

You heard of “dry counties.” Well Dune is even dryer, a dry planet where water is so precious, it’s extracted from dead bodies on the battlefield. The superheated desert air and relentless sun aren’t so great for humans, but they’re fine for the sandworms, monstrously large carnivorous alien creatures that burrow just underneath the surface. The desert dwellers on Arrakis use the gigantic worms as transport, summoning them with sounding devices then jumping aboard, clamping down and holding on, surfing the sandworm highway.

And sandworms are fundamental to the reason anyone lives on Arrakis, where the nightmarishly inhospitable conditions favor a secretion of the worms called mélange, or “spice.” It was discovered millennia ago to be a psychoactive narcotic that can make life better for humans in many ways, including precognition, seeing what’s coming before it gets there. And the whole ecosystem of the planet depends on harvesting the sparkly sandworm stuff.

The Duneverse, as it’s called, is dense with its own language, nomenclature, characters, history, mythos and symbolism; it might remind you of Lord of the Rings star-crossed with Game of Thrones and The Empire Strikes Back in a massive movie sandbox—and if you just happen to wander into it unaware, you may feel a bit overwhelmed and lost in the desert. It’s about nomads and royals, blood feuds and civil wars, enemies and allies, rebels and renegades, faith and hope, spies and traitors, and a world with a rigid, sometimes cruel caste system of slaves, barons and emperors. It’s about a love story that starts in a sand-swept cauldron of war, generational grudges and power struggles, and a people who’ve been promised “paradise” and look for a messiah to lead them there.

Even though the story is set in the distant future, it has overtones and undertones of our past, and even our present—conflict, religion, politics, exploited resources, war machines on the move. One side dehumanizes the other as “rats” to be exterminated, refusing to acknowledge them as human. The desert setting gives a definite vibe of the Middle East, where “spice” could be seen as a metaphor for oil, and people have been in-fighting for, well, centuries. Dune: Part Two draws comparison to some familiar territory—Hitler’s rallies, the atrocities of the Roman arena, holy wars, and even modern geopolitical, genocidal situations.

It’s a richly detailed, fine-tooled sci-fi depiction of a culture and a people in a faraway futuristic world that nonetheless looks and feels a lot like our own—what our world has been, and what it could again become.

And the cast—wow. You probably won’t see more stars in one place this side of the Milky Way, with many of them reprising previous roles. Timothée Chalamet leads the ensemble as the heralded heir of a disposed royal house, continuing to seek revenge on the conspirators who destroyed his family. Zendaya is Chani, a young desert warrior who falls in love with the exiled duke. Austin Butler (above) is a million movie miles away from Graceland (and his all-American Elvis swagger) in the role of a psychotic, ghost-faced sexy-beast villain. Stellan Skarsgård is a fat-cat baron who’s often seen soaking in a tub of black ooey-goo goop. (Hey, this is Arrakis, not the Catskills.) And then there’s Florence Pugh, Josh Brolin, Dave Bautista, Christopher Walken, Rebecca Ferguson, Javier Bardem, Charlotte Rampling and Léa Seydoux. It looks like everyone wanted to be in this movie. Even Anya Taylor-Joy makes a “surprise appearance.” It’s almost easier to name actors who aren’t in it.

So, sci-fans, the wait is over. Come for the stars, stick around for the sandworms. And stay tuned for even more: Dune Part 3 is already in the works.

—Neil Pond

Bob Marley biopic undersells the story of reggae’s global superstar

Bob Marley: One Love
Starring Kingsley Ben-Adair & Lashana Lynch
Directed by Renaldo Marcus Green
Rated PG-13

In theaters Wednesday, Feb. 14

The new movie about the late, larger-than-life Jamaican superstar depicts Bob Marley bringing reggae music and his Rastafarian mindset to the masses, becoming an almost messianic figure to fans and followers around the world. Focusing on one relatively narrow but significant segment of his life 1976-1978, it shows him as a family man, a rebel caught in the middle of the fractured politics of his home country, a Utopian musical shaman and an adherent to Biblical signs and symbols.

We hear Marley talk more than once about the Lion of Judah, making an Old Testament reference central to the Rastafarian religion.

But unlike a lion, this movie feels rather timid, failing to soar—or roar—with the depth or drama of other hit musical biopics, like Rocketman (Elton John), Ray (Ray Charles), Get Up On It (James Brown) or Bohemian Rhapsody (Freddy Mercury). We see Marley survive an assassination attempt, stage two concerts for peace, smoke prodigious amounts of ganga, release his groundbreaking Exodus album, and muse on his white-Englishman father, who abandoned little Marley when he was a just a lad. We see Marley when he learns he has a rare form of melanoma from an old soccer injury. But the story unfolds in what feels like a mostly haphazard, episodic fashion, showing us things that happen with little connective tissue or real consequence, and the movie never breaks out of its meandering biopic blahs.

In a repeated flashback, we see young Marley as a boy running from a literal ring of fire—without ever really knowing what it’s supposed to mean or represent. But the movie itself fails to catch fire and show us where Marley’s passion for peace was rooted, just how he became an emblem of laid-back, rasta-fied global groovery, or what made his music so uniquely popular in Jamaica and beyond.

British actor Kingsley Ben-Adair gives a solid, all-in performance as Marley, convincingly delivering dialogue in the singer’s Caribbean creole dialect and mimicking his ragdoll-like swept-away-in-the-music onstage movements. Lashana Lynch—who might be recognizable to Marvel fans from her recurring role as Maria Lambeau in MCU movies—is even better as Marley’s wife, Rita, especially in a scene where she smacks him for his infidelities and his unawareness of how he’s becoming corrupted by his success. “You swallow pollution, you get polluted,” she spews, her eyes ablaze.

We hear renditions of Marley’s greatest hits, including “Three Little Birds,” “I Shot the Sheriff,” “One Love,” “Jamming,” “War,” “Redemption Song,” “Get Up, Stand Up” and “No Woman, No Cry,” songs with potent messages—of rebellion, reckoning and reconciliation—that made him a musical hero to millions before his death in 1981, at the young age of 36.

Bob Marley: One Love was made with members of late singer’s family—including wife Rita and son Ziggy—involved as producers (along with Brad Pitt!). That kind of close-range, “hands on” might have steered the director and the project away from some of the broader, nitty-gritty that would have made it feel more lived-in and authentic, and less “deifying.”  

You may be happily “Jamming” to the jaunty sounds of this play-it-safe movie portrait, but music’s rasta messiah would have been better served by a more adventurous, more multifaceted flick about a complicated man and the music that became his message, and his mission.

—Neil Pond