March will get some shine with the earnest 'Sapphires'

Early 2013 has had just a few bright, fresh releases. After a few months with the best specialty films the year has to offer, there's nothing to appeal to audiences who like quality, thought-provoking features. Auteur-bait Stoker came out a couple of weeks ago, and now there's another film worthy of arthouse applause and crossover success: The Sapphires. The story of four Aboriginal young
women in Australia who style themselves as an R&B quartet and play for American troops in Vietnam is sweet story that will have you rooting for their success--but it also packs a punch, with insights about race and identity that will feel both familiar and foreign to American audiences. In Australia, the movie has been a huge success, as anyone who read a recent "Day and Date Down Under" column can attest.

The movie bills itself as a true story based on the experiences of the mother of playwright Tony Briggs, who also co-adapted the screenplay. He took a lot of liberties with the material, but the heart of what went actually happened is there. What's most shocking is how overtly racist Australia was in 1968. A trio of girls try to enter a contest at a local watering hole, where they receive a completely indifferent reaction despite their stunning harmonies. Still, their performance catches the attention of a down-and-out
promoter/manager (Chris O'Dowd), who tries to get them a contract to sing in Vietnam. In the city, the girls track down a long-lost cousin who was taken away from them as a girl, because of her light-colored skin, and raised as white--a common practice at the time. She joins the group, but the bossy leader of the quartet has trouble keeping in her anger at the light-skinned girl for abandoning her Aboriginal identity, despite the fact that as a young girl she had little choice in the matter.

Once they're in Vietnam, the girls flirt with the troops, wow them with their R&B hits, and narrowly avoid getting caught in the crossfire. Here the movie can lag a bit, but overall The Sapphires is an entertaining underdog story that offers education about another country's history of racial oppression. The Help set to music, with a less pat outcome. The girls refer to themselves as the "blacks" of Australia, sometimes as way of explanation to the American troops. In American terms, the Aboriginals suffered from the kind of government policies and cultural beliefs that oppressed both Native Americans and Blacks. They were alternately assimilated and separated out into poor, rural areas, and openly discriminated against. While thousands of miles away, the United States is something of a touchstone for the singers. They're aware of the Civil Rights movement that is afoot in the U.S, which they see expressed in the country's soul music. That makes their performances of the music that much more powerful. As they learn to sing in that style, you can feel them changing, and rebelling against the structures that have constrained them. The Sapphires is launching in four theatres this Friday, and it's my vote for those who need a reprieve from the action films and thrillers that have been dominating the release slate.

Bradley Cooper and Omar Sy pair up for 'Chef'

Omar Sy starred in the French hit The Intouchables. Bradley Cooper segued from The Hangover to Silver Linings Playbook and The Place Beyond the Pines. And thanks to a fortuitous set of connections, the two will star in Chef. The Weinstein Co., which released both The Intouchables and Silver Linings Playbook, has international distribution rights to the comedy, which centers on Cooper as the disgraced chef of a Michelin-starred restaurant in France. He absconds to London, where he
opens up a new restaurant with the help of Sy. Cooper has not only played a chef before, in the sitcom "Kitchen Confidential," he speaks fluent French. That may come into play if there is a smattering of French dialogue (and I bet Cooper dubs himself), but it also may help him and Sy strike up conversations on the set.

Yet another connection ties the project together. Derek Cianfrance (Blue Valentine), who directed Cooper in The Place Beyond the Pines, will helm. Cianfrance has mainly focused on dramas, so the move to comedy is a surprising one. My bet is that this is the kind of movie where plot comes before comedy, my favorite kind. Right now, Cooper's the one with the busiest schedule, though Cianfrance and Sy also have projects on the table. Steven Knight (Eastern Promises) a screenwriter whose works are often set in London or involve immigration, will pen the tale--considerably lighter than his usual fare. With no set production start date, it might be a while before Chef takes off, but it has all the ingredients needed to cook up another specialty hit from the Weinsteins.

Teens offered 'Submarine' or 'Matched'

By Sarah Sluis

What do teens want? Movies like Twilight roll out and break box-office records, but the formula isn't quite as replicable as, say a blue-chip teen sex/coming-of-age comedy. Today, there's two pickups at each end of the spectrum.

Up at the Toronto Film Festival, the Weinstein Co. picked up Submarine, a teen coming-of-age comedy that had me at "[avoids] the obvious moves of Wes Anderson-inspired preciousness that often sink young filmmakers," according to the LA Times Blog, Submarine sounds like it could have been just such a film, containing such pastiche touches as Super 8 footage and "typeface reminiscent of '60s-era Godard films," with a tone that "establishes an oddball mixture of sincerity, self-consciousness and teen-angst moodiness." But, although another blogger called director Richard Ayoade a "Wes Anderson," it appears the movie goes in a somewhat different direction. The protagonist's main goals involve the more standard concerns: losing his virginity and dealing with parental strife, but it seems like it's done in a classy way with an all-ages appeal. I'm putting this on my to-see list in 2011.

On the epic side of the teen movie game, Disney, which has been pursing franchise films and other "big" filmmaking opportunities, signed on to adapt an unreleased novel (planned as a series) called Matched.

The teen film follows a pretty standard dystopian plotline: a world where the government controls the media and teens are permanently "matched" with someone when they turn eighteen. From this broad description, I'm actually reminded of the wonderful children's book The Giver (stuck in development at Warner Bros.!), which similarly featured a controlled environment. In Matched, a young woman is matched with one man but sees another person's face on the computer screen doing the matching for a brief second. As she develops feelings for the man that is not her "match," she starts to doubt the society that put such a system in place. I won't get my hopes up for a film adaptation yet. Disney also acquired a sci-fi romance series Fallen recently, so it will probably develop a few projects and choose one of the best to move forward into production.

So which project wins? While Submarine sounds like a film I want to see, Matched has an original bent. I'm curious if studios will be able to spin off the success of Twilight into a whole new popular genre. These types of fantasies seem like a pit stop in between Disney princesses and romantic comedies, and they could be the answer to the similarly fantasy-fueled superhero movies that appeal to teen boys.