So, today is THE day!!

Enjoy watching everyone!!! Fingers crossed!

 

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Local interviews about Better Man are started to appear as well.

 

Now it's The Sun.

 

OK, then, now there will be a series of the reviews in a very admired media.

 

Review: Giddy, imaginative ‘Better Man’ is the next evolution of the music biopic

 

By Amy Nicholson - Film Critic

Dec. 24, 2024 3 AM PT

The pop star Robbie Williams is leagues more famous in his homeland of England than here in the States, American tastemakers having capriciously chosen to ignore his chart-topping ’90s boy band Take That and megawatt solo career. Go see his biopic anyway. All you need to know heading into “Better Man” is that Williams considers himself a performing monkey. Some screenings even have a pretaped introduction where he tells you so himself.

 

The wildly creative director Michael Gracey (“The Greatest Showman”) fills you in on the rest with hilarious, no-holds-barred zeal: the drugs, the tabloid love affairs, the insecurity that made Williams desperate to be famous — a need to entertain that rewarded him with 14 No. 1 albums on the UK charts and a Guinness world record for selling 1.6 million concert tickets in 24 hours, as well as exhaustion and rehab. Through it all, the infamous party animal is played by a CGI chimpanzee. As Williams the monkey admits to his support group, “I’m unevolved.”

 

Willams produces and narrates the film and seems to have given the screenwriters Simon Gleeson, Oliver Cole and Gracey the go-ahead to rip him to shreds. Some superstars hide their megalomania under humility; Williams shields his tenderness with jokes about being a narcissist, only exposing his wounds in his muscular, vulnerable lyrics. He insults himself in the first minute of the movie, and from then on wears his humiliations like a Purple Heart pinned to his hairy, simian chest.

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It’s conceivable that the guy who titled his best-of album “The Ego has Landed” approved the chimpanzee gimmick because he simply couldn’t bear the idea of a casting director discovering a younger version of Robbie Williams. And it’s easy to accept the conceit. Both chimps and pop stars are prone to destroying furniture and grinning while ripping off your face. Even physically, Williams shares an ape’s frank gaze and defiant chin. He charges instinctively after what he wants, chiefly a crowd so deafening he can’t hear his own self-loathing.

 

Here, Williams acknowledges his struggles with depression. But his goal is the same as ever: Entertain at all costs. That’s been his modus operandi — a defense mechanism, really — since he was a 16-year-old, terrified that he was the least-talented and most-replaceable member of Take That, the biggest teenybopper pop act in Britain at the time. By moxie alone, he became Take That’s fan favorite, the cheeky one who would do anything for applause. Baring his bum on TV, Williams is the embodiment of the phrase “charm offensive.”

 

Yes, there are the beats you expect in a musician’s biopic: the scene where he quits the band, the song lyrics scribbled after a tragedy, the wrenching quest for validation from his absent father, Peter (Steve Pemberton, fantastic). If you could tear your eyes away from the screen enough to check a stopwatch, not one minute goes by without a flourish that’s either funny, ridiculous, stunning or emotional. Sometimes, they’re all at once, like when young Williams (played by Carter J. Murphy), mimics his dad, a two-bit club performer, as they sing along with Frank Sinatra on television. The moment is at once a lens into a power dynamic that will run the length of the film, and a send-up of monkey see, monkey do.

 

Jonno Davies is the ape performer under the Wētā FX motion capture and he’s terrific, as is the ensemble who acts against him with spectacular conviction. His Williams is always in motion: winking, gyrating, climbing in people’s laps. Millions of people watched the awards shows where Williams waggled his hips at Tom Jones, or challenged Oasis’ Liam Gallagher to a fist fight — moments that have been absorbed into pop culture. Williams was loose and free and likely blitzed out of his mind. Davies, however, nails it sober.

 

It’s unclear how much of the dance choreography Davies is doing under those pixels. He’s a proper theater actor who came to renown playing Alex in an onstage production of “A Clockwork Orange.” There’s a rousing musical sequence where the Take That lads rampage through the West End and, at the song’s peak, Williams leaps from the top of a double-decker red bus. Like everything in the movie, this heavily digitized fabulosity is all vibes — the gleeful mayhem of being rich and famous and 20 years old. The other four actors in the scene playing the human members of the band are fully exposed and great at both dancing and self-mockery. Jake Simmance, as songwriter Gary Barlow, gets one of the film’s biggest laughs. Incensed that Williams is falling down drunk at a stadium show, his Barlow flounces up in a thong to hiss, “You’re making us look like fools out there!”

 

The script toys with our awareness that pretty much everyone Williams feuded with is still alive — even his dad — and some, including Nigel Martin-Smith, the founder of Take That, have proven to be litigious. Fittingly, the humor bobs and weaves, setting up punchlines only to pivot to a zinger. Nigel, Williams says, is “an absolute sweetheart.” Cue a pause long enough to make you wonder if he’ll leave it there or drop the hammer. (He drops it, over and over.) For a bonus dig at the dawn of the grunge era, the hair and makeup team give Nigel (Damon Herriman) an icky, trendy chin-strap goatee.

 

As for Williams’ fans, they’re seen as equal parts thrilling and terrifying. After he leaves Take That in 1995, suicide hotlines are flooded with calls from sobbing girls. Here, during a nightmarish underwater rendition of his ballad “Come Undone,” those teenagers swirl around him like frenzied chum, their slashed wrists trailing blood as they threaten to sink him, too. The only thing scarier would be going ignored, a dilemma Williams satirized in his 2000 music video “Rock DJ” which, if you weren’t scarred by it at the time, climaxes with Williams impressing a room of women by cheerfully peeling off his own skin and pelting the crowd with chunks of his raw flesh.

 

Audiences who know his hits will see them gorgeously recontextualized as needed to suit his life story — the chronology of his singles doesn’t matter at all. In these mini-music videos, Gracey and his five-person editing team merge the present and future to cover as much ground as they can. The standout is the love song “She’s the One,” which starts with Williams meeting his early girlfriend, All Saints’ Nicole Appleton (Raechelle Banno), on a yacht. As the fledgling couple whirls into a ballet, the number flashes forward to show the heartbreak ahead, and then cuts back again so that we feel the sting of all that wasted promise.

 

There’s no need for the movie to look this good. Erik A. Wilson’s cinematography is warm and grainy; it and the script have been polished until the scene transitions flow like vodka down a frat party’s ice luge. Gracey gets an astonishing amount across in the details: the goofy creak of a leather jumpsuit, a camera angle tilted to show the utterly unspectacular pulley system that yanked Williams upside-down in front of a crowd of 125,000. The production designers are always pulling the rug out from under us. As soon as Williams ascends to a new height of fame, it begins to look tatty. There’s always someplace cooler he’s got to get to next.

 

Yet, even as the movie captures Williams’ recklessness, it’s also a convincing sketch of his artistic growth and commitment. We catch on that he’s a genuine songwriter before he does. There’s a moment where his new manager (Anthony Hayes) warns Williams that success will drain him of everything he’s got, and then the film launches into an exhausting montage of cocaine and crowds and puke that proves him right. So it says something about American hardheadedness that we’ve resisted learning about Robbie Williams for the last 35 years. We’re as stubborn as he is. But go to the movie anyway. Within two hours, you’ll be so caught up in his charismatic maelstrom that when one chimpanzee tearfully stabs a baby chimpanzee on a confetti-ed battlefield, that you’ll think, yes Robbie, I totally understand where you’re coming from.

 

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/...-biopic-profile

 

‘Better Man’ Review: The Boy in the Band

 

The singer Robbie Williams’s caustic, often vulnerable narration is the melody that enriches this musical biopic’s otherwise familiar beats of pop stardom.

 

By Jeannette Catsoulis

Dec. 25, 2024

 

Whatever your opinion of the troubled British entertainer Robbie Williams, it’s unlikely to be more scathing than his own. And if there is one thing that distinguishes the electrifying musical biopic “Better Man” — aside from the fact that Williams is portrayed throughout as a computer-generated monkey — it would be an unwavering commitment to its subject’s self-flagellating point of view.

 

Excerpted from 18 months of audio recordings obtained by the director, Michael Gracey, Williams’s caustic, often vulnerable narration is the melody that refreshes and enriches the movie’s otherwise familiar beats of pop-star meltdown and resurrection. Enumerating decades of suffered insults — “punchable” being one of the kindest — Williams describes a cocky, working-class kid who “came out of the womb with jazz hands” and a desperate need to please his fame-obsessed father (a moving Steve Pemberton). Those twin desires would drive him to teenage stardom in the early 1990s as a member of the boy band Take That, followed by a hypersonic solo career seemingly sustained as much by alcohol and cocaine as by talent.

 

There will be more than one crash and burn. Yet, remarkably, Williams never comes across as self-pitying. His consistently cheeky voice-over, along with the vivacity of Jonno Davies’s performance as his adult avatar (using the motion-capture wizardry perfected on the “Planet of the Apes” reboot), and the sheer verve of Gracey’s filmmaking ensure a tone that’s rarely less than exuberant. Smoothly combining comedy and tragedy, the movie sells its simian frontman with straight-faced sincerity. It’s astonishing how quickly and easily we embrace the gimmick, a brilliant visualization of how Williams at times saw himself, as someone with no more worth than a capering monkey whose preferred headgear reads “Northern Scum.”

 

Drawing on the work of Bob Fosse and Terry Gilliam, the director and his choreographer, Ashley Wallen, design dreamlike musical sequences that vault far beyond those in his polarizing debut feature, “The Greatest Showman” (2017): a flash mob erupting on London’s Regent Street to the sound of the Williams hit “Rock DJ,” stunningly captured by Erik Wilson’s soaring, snaking camera; a gorgeously romantic shipboard rendition of “She’s the One,” as Williams meets his future fiancée, the girl-band singer Nicole Appleton (Raechelle Banno), for the first time.

 

This fondness for spectacle can feel hucksterish, but “Better Man” is too tender and empathetic — especially in its surprisingly sweet finale — to settle for just the razzle-dazzle. Instead, Gracey paints a fabulously entertaining and touching picture of an insecure, complicated man hauling himself from a quicksand of grasping fans, greedy impresarios, unresolved addictions and father-son dysfunction. Neither hagiography nor hatchet job, the movie casts an understanding eye on a once-infamous musical artist who weathered dizzying highs and devastating lows. Think about it: Is there anything worse than losing your woman to a member of Oasis?

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/25/movies/b...man-review.html

* one of the best reviews so far *

 

 

‘Better Man’ Review – The Most Audacious Movie of the Year is Also the Best Musical of the Year

 

By Bill Bria

December 24, 2024

 

The new musical biopic Better Man dares to ask: who is Robbie Williams? It’s a question that applies equally to those not in the know about the notorious, award-winning British pop star, as well as those who have been following his career in the limelight ever since he was a teen. While those two groups can generally be labeled as “Americans” and “Brits,” don’t discount us Yank Anglophiles — there are dozens of us!

 

It would have been easy — or, more to the point, lazy — to make a biopic about Robbie Williams that was too fawning, too ready-made for his fanbase, and too dull. After all, Williams’ life and career have followed a typical trajectory in the broadest of strokes: a cocky young man, desperate to prove himself and earn the admiration of a wayward parent, gains an overwhelming amount of music fame at a young age. Following a failed romantic relationship, struggles with substance abuse, and some controversial run-ins with the press, he falls from grace and stages what could be one of the greatest comebacks of all time.

 

But in the hands of co-writer/director Michael Gracey (The Greatest Showman) and Williams himself, Better Man is the most atypical biopic made yet. The biopic, particularly the music biopic, has been under intense scrutiny ever since Jake Kasdan and Judd Apatow’s Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story was released in 2007. Thanks to that film’s pitch-perfect satire of the subgenre (using James Mangold’s Walk the Line and Taylor Hackford’s Ray as its biggest touchstones), numerous critics and pundits hence declared the music biopic to be a thing of the past.

 

However, despite uninspired efforts like Bohemian Rhapsody, Back to Black, and Bob Marley: One Love (or perhaps because of their varied box office and awards success), the music biopic has continued unabated. To be sure, the subgenre has tried to grow beyond the shots fired at it from Walk Hard, the admirable efforts of Rocketman being one example. There’s also a distinct difference between Mangold’s Walk the Line and this year’s masterful A Complete Unknown. But in general, the musical biopic has survived for much of the same reason that the slasher movie endures: the tropes are all part of the pleasure.

Robbie Williams as a young CGI monkey boy takes a bath with the help of his grandmother Betty in the musical biopic BETTER MAN.Alison Steadman in ‘Better Man’

Courtesy of Paramount Pictures

 

As previously mentioned, Michael Gracey’s Better Man doesn’t necessarily avoid such tropes in its rise-fall-rise-again structure. It introduces us to Robbie Williams as a young boy living in Stoke-on-Trent. The young Robbie enjoys the love of his grandmother, Betty (Alison Steadman), and his mother, Janet (Kate Mulvany), all while yearning for the approval of his father, Peter (Steve Pemberton), who soon leaves the family to pursue a comedy career. Then, upon landing a chance to audition for the opportunist producer Nigel Martin-Smith (Damon Harriman), his natural charm and snarky confidence open the floodgates, giving him a first taste of stardom as a member of the boy band Take That.

 

Robbie tragically falls down a self-destructive path, battling his own ego and image with substances, which leads to a falling out with the other members of Take That. Going solo, though, is what brings him face to face with one of the loves of his life, All Saints member Nicole Appleton (Raechelle Banno). Williams eventually finds his true voice as a solo artist, his songwriting acting as a transparent window into the tragedy he’s endured. Unfortunately, his self-hating downward spiral only gets worse, making Robbie push away whatever love and support he has left. Frankly, this is all fairly standard stuff for a biopic of a musician, especially one who’s still alive.

 

How Robbie Williams gets himself out of this dark hole and makes a successful comeback can be easily found on his Wikipedia page. However, and this is a massive however, there’s the elephant in the room, or should I say, monkey. That is the fact that Williams is not portrayed as a human being, as is everyone else in the film. No, in Better Man, he’s represented by a CGI monkey-man hybrid, with Jonno Davies and Williams himself sharing acting duties while wearing a mo-cap suit that has been replaced in post-production with a monkey character by the wizards at Wētā FX.

A CGI monkey Robbie Williams and the members of the boy band Take That take over Regent Street in London during the Rock DJ musical number in BETTER MAN. ‘Better Man’ courtesy of Paramount Pictures

 

In terms of how monkey Robbie Williams looks and acts, he’s not all that different from the remarkable apes Wētā helped create earlier this year in Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. Regarding why filmmaker Michael Gracey and company chose to have Williams represented by a monkey figure, stories vary; some sources say Gracey heard Williams refer to himself in one interview as a performing monkey, and others claim that Williams feels “less evolved” than those surrounding him. In truth, the “why” doesn’t matter, as the effect the monkey has on the movie as a whole is so audacious and astounding that it elevates Better Man from being a rote biopic into one of the most original ever made.

 

The inclusion of CGI monkey Robbie Williams is all the license Michael Gracey needs to really pull out all the stops for Better Man as a musical. Most biopics tend to avoid the trappings of an integrated musical, erring on the side of caution by presenting their musical sequences as staged performances. Even when Better Man has Williams and others performing to an audience, Gracey throws all pretense of realism to the wind, surprisngly more so than Baz Lurhmann did in the maximalist visual essay that he made out of Elvis.

 

Demonstrating his mastery of composition and choreography even beyond his previous work in The Greatest Showman, Michael Gracey makes every note of the musical numbers in Better Man count for as much as possible. Moreover, the precise and clever staging of the “Rock DJ,” “She’s the One,” and “Angels” musical sequences puts every other musical this year to shame. Gracey’s visual audacity lands somewhere between a modern Busby Berkeley picture and an alternate timeline where Michael Bay got super interested in dance combinations instead of explosions. At every turn where Robbie Williams’ external and internal conflicts might feel too overwrought or his arrogance might start to grate, Gracey illuminates these emotions with such visual aplomb that they become irresistibly compelling.

A CGI Monkey Robbie Williams hangs upside down over thousands of rabid fans at the Knebworth music festival in the biopic BETTER MAN. ‘Better Man’ courtesy of Paramount Pictures

 

Despite all of its maximalism and flirtation with vulgar auteurism, Better Man isn’t a mere lark or a flight-of-fancy. It’s a fascinatingly complex biopic beneath the surface, one which sees the film and Williams himself vacillate between irreverence and seriousness, between arrogance and self-loathing. There are many potential villains in Better Man — a too-rabid fanbase, predatory music industry authority figures, terrible parenting — yet the script points out time and again how Williams, or at least different facets of himself, is his own true antagonist.

 

Early in the film, one scene demonstrates how “Robbie Williams” isn’t technically even the real man born Robert Peter Williams, as “Robbie” becomes an identity he can hide behind. In this case, the CGI monkey becomes just another facade, a way that Williams can be honest about himself without having to be himself. The totality of Williams’ life is not necessarily encompassed in Better Man, and it can’t really be until long after he’s left us. His still ongoing struggle with his fame and legacy, though, is what makes Better Man remarkable, and more than worthwhile to anyone who can or cannot answer the question of who Robbie Williams is. After all, Williams can’t quite answer that question, either.

 

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 5 out of 5.

 

Better Man releases in select theaters on December 25 and then expands nationwide on January 10, 2025!

 

Release Date: December 25, 2024.

Directed by Michael Gracey.

Written by Simon Gleeson, Oliver Cole, & Michael Gracey.

Produced by Michael Gracey, Craig McMahon, Coco Xiaolu Ma, Jules Daly, & Paul Currie.

Executive Producers: Markus Barmettler, Domenic Benvenuto, Gianni Benvenuto, Zhe Chen, Li-Wei Chu, Daniel Fluri, Adrian Grabe, Dean Hood, Gregory Jankilevitsch, Andres Kernen, Philip Lee, Michael Loney, Stephen O’Reilly, Nina Parnaby, David Ravel, Thorsten Schumacher, Klaudia Smieja, Lars Sylvest, Slava Vladimirov, Andjelija Vlaisavljevic, & Mark Williams.

 

Main Cast: Robbie Williams, Jonno Davies, Adam Tucker, Steve Pemberton, Alison Steadman, Damon Herriman, Raechelle Banno, Anthony Hayes, Kate Mulvany, Frazer Hadfield, Jake Simmance, Liam Head, Jesse Hyde, Chase Vollenweider, John O’May, Chris Gun, Jack McMinn, & Jamie Condon.

Cinematographer: Erik A. Wilson

Composers: Batu Sener (score) & Robbie Williams (songs).

Production Companies: Sina Studios, Facing East Entertainment, Rocket Science, Lost Bandits, Footloose Productions, Azure Centrum, Partizan Films, & VicScreen.

Distributors: Paramount Pictures (United States), Entertainment Film Distributors (UK), & Roadshow Films (Australia).

Runtime: 135 minutes.

Rated R.

 

https://discussingfilm.net/2024/12/24/bette...illiams-monkey/

 

‘Better Man’ Makes a Monkey Out of Robbie Williams. No, Seriously

 

Imagine 'Raging Bull' starring a CGI bull, and that gives you a sense of this music biopic about a superstar who's literally portrayed as a self-loathing simian

 

By David Fear

December 25, 2024

 

Robbie Williams needs no introduction. Unless you live in America, in which case, let’s bring everyone up to speed: Born in 1974, Stoke-on-Trent’s favorite son was initially the designated bad boy in Take That, Britain’s late ’80s answer to New Kids on the Block. He lived up to his reputation as a kid who loved a good time not wisely but too well, which eventually got him booted from the band. Williams’ subsequent solo career was stratospheric — without getting too Wikipedia-page about it, let’s just say that 1997’s Life Through a Lens and 1998’s I’ve Been Expecting You proved that he could hack it on his own. When he played a three-night stand at Knebworth in 2003, it became known as “the biggest music event in British history.” The single “Angels” was voted the best British song of the past 25 years in 2005. His music is one part ’90s Britpop, one part 21st century dance pop, and three parts early-’60s Rat Pack. He never found a big audience stateside, for reasons that are a complete unknown. But honestly, who needs the U.S. when you have the world?

 

Williams is a superstar who’s had more ups and downs than a fleet of elevators, which gives him a life story perfect for a multi-part docuseries. (See: Robbie Williams, now streaming on Netflix.) And his success and failures and phoenix-like rebirths, plural, means that, in the post-Bohemian Rhapsody era that we live in, he’s due a biopic. Better Man is that movie — it’s called this partially because of Williams’ 2000 song, but mostly because director Michael Gracey had already used the title The Greatest Showman in his previous film. It ticks all of the requisite boxes, from childhood trauma to early fame, tabloid infamy to total flame-out, broken records to broken windows, hit singles to healed souls. You will leave with a good sense of who this man is, and why his music matters to so many.

 

Did we happen to mention he’s portrayed from start to finish as a CGI chimpanzee?

 

When we say that Better Man makes a monkey out of Robbie Williams, we’re not speaking metaphorically. “I want to show how I really see myself,” the singer says in an opening voiceover, and for the next two-plus hours, we will watch actors (Carter J. Murphy as Young Robbie, Jonno Davis as Adult Robbie) strut and fret across stages while rendered as a motion-captured, digitally rendered simian. Williams self-admittedly suffered from crippling low self-esteem, which he compensated for by putting up a blustery, self-regarding front; not for nothing was his 1999 compilation dubbed The Ego Has Landed. Yet he thought of himself as nothing more than a trained monkey, so that’s how his official movie biopic presents him as well. Which, in a way, fits how the movie treats his success story as if the subject is dragging himself from one station of the cross of the next. Imagine Raging Bull if Jake LaMotta was played by a photorealistically animated bull, and you’re halfway there. (It opens in limited release on December 25th, and goes wide on January 10th.)

 

Seriously, Better Man puts the PTSD back into “pop stardom,” and frames the entire notion of fame less as a reward for talent and artistry and more of a pathological condition made manifest. The password is “pathos”: A Sinatra sing-along with dear old dad, Peter Conway née Williams (Steve Pemberton, playing Pops in a way that makes his grotesques from The League of Gentlemen seem quaint) turns into a Freudian nightmare when the lad accidentally bumps the TV antenna. Soon, the patriarch is M.I.A. Later, Williams’ cheeky-chappy routine as a teen earns him a spot in Take That, where his faux-father figure Nigel Martin Smith (Damon Herriman) will humiliate and undermine him at every turn. He’s finally given encouragement by producer/collaborator Guy Chambers (Tom Budge), who helps the newly free crooner find the cocktail of swagger, schmaltz, sex and Jolson-era showmanship that will define him. An entire rise to mega-stardom is represented by a blur of radio-announcer voices and coke lines. That’s how Robbie experienced it. That’s how you’re going to experience it, too.

 

It’s all a very by-the-books music biopic, which the sole exception of which species is singing about manufacturing miracles and angels contemplating his fate. The self-deprecating notion stops feeling like a gimmick before the first act is done, and stops adding anything to the vibe until we get to Knebworth, which turns into Planet of the Apes outtake mid-concert as Williams fights his inner monkey demons to the death. As anyone who’s seen The Greatest Showman can tell you, Gracey excels at this kind of glorious excess, and you can’t say that he doesn’t make the most of this being a musical as much as it is a pop-star psychodrama. Williams’ meet-cute with All Saints singer Nicole Appleton (Raechelle Banno) is turned into an elaborate Fred-and-Ginger routine set to “She’s the One,” occasionally cutting away to show her forced into getting an abortion. Once Take That signs a record deal, Robbie and his mates turn London into an MGM backlot-slash-jungle-gym as “Rock D.J.” blares over the soundtrack and what feels like the greatest music video of 1998 unfurls before your very eyes. The whole sequence is such a showstopper that you can practically hear it asking Showman‘s big extravaganza “This Is Me” to hold its beer. (That the 2002 track “Me and My Monkey” doesn’t get its own set piece is either a major missed opportunity or the closest thing we get to restraint.)

 

Better Man ends on a several notes, some discordant, of forgiveness regarding both father and son, which admittedly tests your tolerance for sentimentality. Watching the star finally make peace with himself is indeed a salve after the nine circles of celebrity hell we’ve traveled with him; witnessing his climactic (and IRL) duet with his dad, who’s done little to earn it per this film’s portrayal, suggests the title should have been Oedipus Rob. More than anything, the movie gives you a portrait of the artist as an open wound, with self-mythologizing masquerading as self-loathing and self-deprecation taken to uncomfortable extremes. That flop-sweat desperation that makes what’s arguably his one true anthem, “Let Me Entertain You,” sound like both crystalized pop-genius and a cry for help is practically wafting off every frame. It’s not a vehicle for converting the non-believers. Diehard fans, the Robbie-curious and those who love to eavesdrop on therapy sessions, however, will adore it.

 

https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-m...pic-1235205650/

 

The Craziest Musical of the Year Is Finally Here

 

Dec. 24, 2024

By Bilge Ebiri, a film critic for New York and Vulture

 

“The energy I’ve used to be a showman, is: ‘f***, this is the biggest bluff ever, people are going to find out in the next three seconds…’” That’s how the British popstar Robbie Williams once described his attitude towards performing. “They’re going to find out! Move! Keep moving! Do some stuff! Do some stuff!” Williams said this around 2016, well into a discography that had already endured several waves of mega-superstardom. His words speak to an anxious, ongoing need not just to entertain, but to distract, to overact, to keep the audience unmoored, all in an effort to hide deep and intractable feelings of inadequacy.

 

Now, he’s gone and made a movie about it – a movie which not only depicts but embodies this sentiment. Better Man gives us an occasionally fictionalized overview of Robbie Williams’s life and career, from his beginnings as a show-offy working-class kid from Stoke-on-Trent (“the ass end of the north of England”), to his unlikely stardom as a member of the 1990s boy-band Take That, to his stratospheric success as a solo artist. The film hits all the expected pit-stops of addiction and alcoholism and heartbreak and egomania along the way. But it does so with a blazing, restless inventiveness that goes beyond mere sensationalism into something downright pathological. We sense behind the screen the terror of someone who still worries we’ll find out he’s been bluffing all along.

 

To be clear, Better Man is directed by Michael Gracey – and boy, is it ever – but Williams has definitely exerted his share of creative control. The movie marinates in his trickster theater-kid spirit. The singer performs the songs in this biopic, while the motion capture actor Jonno Davies plays him (and voices his dialogue) as a British lad with the face of (no joke) a CGI monkey. Introducing the picture at the Toronto Film Festival in September, Gracey and Williams noted that the monkey idea came from the director asking his subject early on what kind of animal he saw himself as. The singer first replied, “A lion,” then realized he wasn’t kidding anybody and admitted he saw himself as a monkey – a wild performer, whether in the service of others or for his own egomaniacal ends.

 

Amazingly, the monkey conceit, while certainly strange (and let’s also add, beautifully rendered, with human qualities that give us a full range of emotions while also looking a lot like Robbie Williams), is not the craziest thing in Better Man. That honor would go to the picture’s musical numbers, which Gracey (whose previous feature was the 2017 hit The Greatest Showman) stages with such berserk ferocity that once they’re over, we might have trouble believing what we’ve just witnessed. His camera swirls around and rises above and plunges below his actors, sling-shotting itself into and through scenes, even as the scenes themselves rapidly shift location and context. The performers strut and bounce and pirouette and leap into and out of costumes. Pogo sticks and gumballs and flares and fireworks and scooters and double-decker buses and cemeteries and country roads become putty in the director’s hands. Streetlights turn into the raging red fires of hell. The fields of Knebworth transform into medieval slaughter-fest, covered in blood and smoke. The movie isn’t just “crazy” – it’s crazy. Trying to describe it, one sounds like a lunatic.

 

The unpredictable, improvisatory vigor of these musical numbers is an artful illusion. They have clearly been choreographed and planned to within an inch of their lives, as evidenced by the precision of the cutting, by the way the dance moves echo distant gestures in other scenes. In what might be the film’s most moving section, Robbie meets Nicole Appleton (Raechelle Banno), lead singer of the all-girl band All Saints, one New Year’s Eve at a masked party on a boat. Gracey interweaves their ensuing duet with future episodes from their doomed, whirlwind romance (which would, in real life, last barely a year) – their hard partying, their engagement, as well as the abortion Nicole is forced into by her record company so she can continue to front a popular girl-group. An elegant dip in their lonely dance becomes a flashback to a quick, crouched drink at a crowded party. A few skips into a spinning embrace become one lover running after another inside a dark memory. And yet, here they are, still in the midst of their intoxicating first encounter. It feels like a classic musical romance; you’d never guess that Robbie Williams went on to have many high-profile lovers, or that he’s been happily married for the past 14 years to someone else.

 

There’s an interesting juxtaposition here: a paint-by-numbers biopic structure, neatly bookmarked (to a fault) with pat dialogue about the perils of fame and the double life of stardom and abandonment issues and whatnot, which is then constantly upended by completely batshit musical sequences. Could the collision be intentional? Weirdly, the familiarity of the biographical beats ease us into the formal daring. If its structure and script were as unhinged as its style, the film might have been unwatchable. In their own way, these disparate elements serve to undercut the musical biopic genre: one by replicating its tropes to a satirical degree, the other by sending the whole thing spinning into another dimension.

 

At this point, some readers might find themselves wondering: Who the hell is Robbie Williams? At that aforementioned Toronto screening, the singer himself acknowledged this dilemma with his usual mix of self-effacement and cheeky grandiosity, noting that he has almost no North American following and giving a playful shout-out to “My American fan down there,” in the Toronto audience. He then reassured us that “everywhere else, I’m kind of a big deal.” He really is; the guy has broken multiple industry records in the U.K.

 

I will admit that back during Williams’s 1990s and early 2000s heyday, I read the British pop press regularly and found him entertaining mostly as the Gallagher brothers’ favorite punching bag. (Liam would eventually marry Nicole Appleton.) I knew he was huge, but the few songs I heard, I quickly forgot. Still, the man was ubiquitous, constantly in the limelight, always saying or doing something silly, as if he was desperate for more attention despite having already achieved superstardom. This made him, as he himself would admit, quite annoying. (“A narcissistic, punchable, shit-eating twat” is how he introduces himself in the film. It’s also how he signs off at the end.) But watching Better Man, I found myself thinking back on why Williams’s antics made so many of us uncomfortable. Through the sheer audacity of its filmmaking, this movie articulates it better than we ever could. It’s the parasitic paradox of fame, and of that feedback loop of adulation: If they ever stop screaming for you, they’ll start to see right through you.

 

https://www.vulture.com/article/review-bett...f-the-year.html

 

Better Man: Chimpanzee Robbie Williams brings excitement to an otherwise conventional biopic

 

Director Michael Gracey’s portrayal of young Robbie Williams’ rise to pop stardom resembles countless other music biopics, only here, the star is presented matter-of-factly as a chimpanzee. A bizarre conceit, but somehow, it works.

19 December 2024

 

The tension between bravado and vulnerability, present on some level in so many pop superstars, has always been especially apparent in Robbie Williams. Understanding that the two go together, he has routinely spiked his cocksure image with arresting displays of insecurity. The pain is right there in his lyrics – “You think that I’m strong / You’re wrong / You’re wrong” – and has been elaborated on in a few unusually candid behind-the-scenes portraits, including Chris Heath’s remarkable book of reportage Feel (2004) and Netflix’s docuseries Robbie Williams (2023), which describe his struggles with the fallout from fame.

 

How then to tell the story of a man who has already bared his soul many times over – and to do it through the ossifying genre of the musical biopic? Like Piece by Piece (2024), the recent animated documentary that tells Pharrell’s life story with a Lego aesthetic, Better Man innovates through visual presentation. Here, the twist is that Robbie is depicted as a walking, talking, singing chimpanzee, rendered in CGI (courtesy of Peter Jackson’s Wētā FX; the motion-captured performance is given by Jonno Davies, who also voices the singer in many scenes).

 

This blunt and bizarre device is deployed matter-of-factly, with no comment, so that we get used to it fast. Monkey Robbie swaggers and stumbles through a narrative that otherwise resembles countless biopics – including director Michael Gracey’s P.T. Barnum musical The Greatest Showman (2017). Scenes of his working-class upbringing in Stoke-on-Trent are sketched out, mostly to provide nuggets of psychological motivation for his later behaviour. Steve Pemberton plays the flighty father who sparks his son’s love of showbiz but is fickle with his affections, while Alison Steadman is the nurturing grandmother. (Her death will cue the film’s ultimate needle-drop: ‘Angels’.)

 

Robbie’s recruitment into Take That leads to a dizzying rush of initial success, but he suffers wounding jibes from frontman Gary Barlow and manipulative manager Nigel Martin-Smith. The high-octane strangeness of fame takes its toll on the singer, who is increasingly overcome with depression and anxiety as his debauched solo career takes off, culminating in his record-breaking Knebworth shows in 2003. In Heath’s Feel, which covers the run-up to Knebworth, Robbie is a muted figure, some years sober yet hooked on Championship Manager.

 

Better Man leans throughout on the more cinematic shorthand of substance abuse to convey the sense of crisis. The portrayal of the singer is often unflattering and sometimes very funny: take the scene when he desperately sucks up to the self-serious Gallagher brothers in a pub. Musical interludes featuring Robbie’s hits are sprinkled anachronistically across this timeline, the songs chosen to match the mood of the moment. The euphoria of the early Take That years is marked with an exuberant rendering of ‘Rock DJ’ staged as a one-shot dance number on Regent Street. Outside these scenes, Gracey’s direction is less confident: a stray freeze-frame here, some erratic handheld camerawork there. Robbie himself, who also executive-produces, provides an intermittent voiceover that never feels fully integrated into the story.

 

But the chimp idea works. This is, after all, a man whose image is rooted in cheekiness. More to the point, the device, apparently inspired by Robbie’s description of himself as a “performing monkey”, is a novel way of capturing the feeling of alienation that seems to have dogged him over the years. The singer is never quite there, even in the rare scenes of apparent happiness – and especially during Knebworth, an outward triumph that, as the film tells it, brings out the worst of his self-loathing. At this point, in a dreamlike sequence, the crowd becomes populated with chimps who Robbie engages in a brutal video-game-style battle; the artificial VFX only heighten the eerie sense of dissociation. Trapped in his persona, he is doubly isolated: as has been noted elsewhere, if other characters never remark on the fact that he’s a monkey, it ’s because they don’t understand how he feels.

 

Robbie Williams, the self-styled entertainer who developed a fear of performing, is in this sense a rather different figure from Barnum (or Pink, the subject of Gracey’s tour documentary Pink: All I Know So Far, 2021). Gloom hangs over the film’s desaturated world. Robbie finds some redemption at the end, but this act is rushed and not wholly convincing. He is still a chimp in these scenes, alienated to the last.

 

https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/revi...entional-biopic

By TJRadio | December 26, 2024

Pink posts rave review of new movie about a fellow pop star

 

 

Do you trust Pink‘s taste in movies? Well, she’s got a recommendation for you if you’re looking for something to see this winter.

 

On Instagram, Pink shared the poster of the movie Better Man, which is about U.K. pop superstar Robbie Williams and his rise to fame. She wrote, “One of the best movies I’ve ever seen.”

 

Williams is a massive star who’s sold millions and millions of albums, both as a solo artist and with the boy band Take That, best known for their 1995 top-10 hit “Back For Good.” As a solo artist, he’s probably best known in the U.S. for his song “Angels.” Better Man takes the unusual approach of having Williams play himself, but as a CGI chimpanzee. Yes, you heard that right.

 

Pink may be biased, however, since Better Man‘s director, Michael Gracey, not only directed one of her other favorite movies, The Greatest Showman, but also her documentary Pink: All I Know So Far.

 

Copyright © 2024, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

 

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Well done, Pink!

Robbie, the Chef will be happy :lol:

I was at the movie screening here in Slovenia, Ljubljana. There were about 20 people in the cinema at slot at 20:45. About 5 couples above 40, and about 10 people from 18-30.

 

Overall I liked the movie but there was sooooo much cocaine and drug use. Non stop. And this movie stays with you. A couple of hours later I'm still thinking about it. I'll need to sleep on it. A truly unique experience.

Thank you for posting all the brilliant reviews Alex.

 

They make for wonderful reading.

 

Hoping members of the public want to go see it :cheer:

This post is suddenly trending on Reddit a bit. Maybe due to the epic movie climax? 😎

 

15.2k views and 150+link shares.

 

3 days to go- In 2003, Robbie Williams performed 3 consecutive nights at Knebworth, entertaining a staggering 375,000 people in total. This series of concerts is one of the largest live music events in UK history and underscores his exceptional ability to captivate massive audiences.

URL: https://www.reddit.com/gallery/1hkbl0u

Score: 23

How is Better Man doing in LA, New York, and Toronto?

How is Better Man doing in LA, New York, and Toronto?

 

Terribly.

 

Took just 12k on its first day and then dropped 57% on its second.

 

Would not be surprised if the wide release is curtailed.

 

Lots of chatter online but it is largely Americans digging their heels in about not liking Robbie or his music.

 

Went to see this tonight. :yahoo: :yahoo: :yahoo:

 

Really enjoyed it -it felt very honest and authentic. It was great to have an incite into how he was feeling at the time.

 

Choreography was amazing. :cheer:

 

My only little gripe was the chronology of it but I guess not everyone is as big a fan as we are and wouldn't know.

 

 

Terribly.

 

Took just 12k on its first day and then dropped 57% on its second.

 

Would not be surprised if the wide release is curtailed.

 

Lots of chatter online but it is largely Americans digging their heels in about not liking Robbie or his music.

 

I wonder how many theatres it's being shown in?

Answered my own question -it's only being shown in six theatres - according to this?