You may or may not have noticed that there hasn’t been a Weekend Warrior the last few weeks, and I’m not 100% sure that I’ll finished what I started for a movie column this week, because honestly? Writing about box office and theatrical releases and repertory series has been my only joy about writing a weekly column since leaving the Beat since I’m not making any money with the time it takes to write a column. But we’ll see. Most of the movies coming out tomorrow will be available digitally and On Demand forever so there’s no need to rush out a column I’m not happy with. But that brings us to what I’m doing now and what this is...
Maybe it will be obvious what my “30 Minute Experiment” will be after a couple days, but let me explain. This is something I’ve thought about doing for a few weeks now, and it’s my ongoing attempt to write about other things than movies in the time when there are no movies or at least no movie theaters in which they can play. So this is what the 30 Minute Experiment will be.
Every day (hopefully), I will sit at my computer with Tumblr open and start writing for exactly thirty minutes. I will set a time for that 30 minutes and wherever I’m at when that 30 minute elapses will be where that day’s column ends.
This experiment will have me writing about anything on my mind, but each day will have a specific topic that I might want to write about, and these might be topics where my take differs from you. Some of these topics might be exceedingly personal and intimate and maybe you’ll find out some stuff about me that you never knew before. Who knows? It’s called an experiment for a good reason. Oh, yeah, and the other thing is that when those 30 minutes are over, I will not go back and read over or edit anything i wrote. I kind of have done this before with one of my Oscar pieces last year and my eulogy to my friend William Wolf reminded me that I can really write quite quickly and efficiently when I just sit down and do it.
And that is actually the advice I give anyone who wants to write about ANYTHING. I think I stole this from “Throw Momma from the Train” but it’s true... A writer writes... always. Whether you have anything to write about or not. Hey, I have a penpal in prison who is probably as bored on a daily basis as some of you are quickly getting during the current self-quarantines . I really have to make an effort to write him so I don’t lag behind by months as I did lst year. Usually when I write to this penpal it’s using a similar method where I write him about what I’m going to write him about (or answering one of his previous comments) and when I’m done, I mail it out. I do this because he writes to me, sometimes PAGES of thoughts, in pencil or pen. He doesn’t have a computer or Word or a way to edit his thoughts, and I feel it’s only fair I do the same even though I can type out my letters.
But that’s what I mean. I think we all take for granted all the good things we have in this world right now including spell check and ways to overwork our own writing to the point where we no longer want to ever read what we’ve written. I’ve been there many many times...
Who knows? Maybe I’ll put a call out to people on FB or Twitter for ideas or topics that maybe someone wants me to write about, and I’ll add it to the long list I’ve already created for myself. But the point is that I’ll pick a topic, start the time, and start writing and when the 30-minute mark arrives, it’s done. I hit “send.”
By the way, I set the time on this introduction and I have 19 minutes left!!! So okay, maybe this intro will be a little shorter and I’ll start for real tomorrow.
But I guess I can use my remaining time to talk a little about writing in general. If it isn’t obvious, writing has been a passion of mine for over 25 years. Obviously, i prefer being in a situation where I get paid for my writing (and I sort of am right now) but I also have tried to maintain a weekly movie column for over 19 years even though I only had four places that were paying me for said column during that time.
I was hoping to start a new MONTHLY movie column at one of the places where I sometimes write for but that was quickly by all the movies being delayed, and that still seems to be the case. Maybe I’ll even finish the movie column I started this week, but honestly, my passion is theatrical releases, even when it’s smaller movies -- indies, docs, foreign films -- and knowing that all the people I know at my favorite theaters like the Metrograph and Film Forum and Lincoln Center are not working right now just really bums me out more than the fact that I can’t go see movies in theaters.
Believe me, I have PLENTY of movies to watch and write about as far as screeners, although I try to use my evenings after writing my current assignments to relax and enjoy some of the work of others that are trying to keep us all entertained while we’re stuck at home.
Honestly, being stuck at home is not a big deal for me since (this may be hard to believe) I’m not really that social, at least in terms of riding the subway and dealing with my fellow New Yorkers. When I get to the screening room, there’s plenty of friends, colleagues and acquaintances that I love to talk to and catch up with, and I’m missing many of them as much as I did in 2013 when I got stuck in Columbus, Ohio fighting cancer. If you don’t know about this adventure, I might talk about it sometime in the next few weeks or months or however long I decide to do this.
Right now, what’s going on in the world feels very much like when I returned to NYC in 2014 and in that case, I was the one worried about getting sick since I had a very weak and new immune system from a stem cell transplant. But more on that later. That’s not really what I want to talk about right now.
Oh, yeah, and if you read this and think “Boy, Ed really likes writing about himself” ... fine, that’s a fair assessment. I mean, I’ve always been a bit of an over sharer in the 25 years I’ve been on the internet, which was the point where I finally declared myself to be a writer and was already writing weekly comic book reviews.
Oh, God... just thinking about what’s going on in the comic book industry right now. That’s a 30-minute column in itself. So I have 12 minutes left... what else?
I definitely would love some feedback as this experiment continues as well as thoughts on topics you’d like me to cover. I think the worst thing a writer has to experience is having a lack of feedback, whether it’s from editors or readers. Every once in a while, it’s nice to know that someone read something I wrote and it touched them or it made them think about something that they hadn’t thought about before, and yes, even if something I said makes them angry. I always appreciated people reaching out and telling me this stuff.
Since I have... 10 MORE MINUTES?!?...I’ll also mention that I’ve been using this downtime to reach out to people I don’t see or talk to as often, just to see how they’re doing during this national crisis. Just seeing how it’s affected so many people both in positive and negative ways has been really interesting to me as someone who likes to analyze people and the human condition.
I also want to use this time to work on some of the screenplays I’ve started developing since that was part of the point of leaving ComingSoon 4 years ago. In hindsight, that may have been a mistake but the idea was that I could use some of my time working on more personal projects like these screenplays. What instead happened was that I was scrambling to find freelance work and struggling to make a living with the piecemeal assignments I’m getting.
To be perfectly honest, I’m still in that last position as I haven’t had a proper full time job in almost two years now, although I had a part-time job most of last year on top of my movie writing stuff.
Who knows how things will pan out after this whole thing is over, but this is a much bigger topic that definitely can wait since we’re nowhere close to the situation in New York right now. Maybe i’ll write a bit more about that in the next few days since a lot of my friends and colleagues from other states and countries have been worried about me. Some of it was for good reason if you knew what I personally was dealing with my ghost town of a neighborhood, but believe me, I’m doing fine. No symptoms, no qualms... just want to get back to some semblance of normal life even though I’m gonna have plenty of time to rethink whether “getting back to normal” would be a good thing in my case.
I only have five minutes left so not sure I can get into that idea of “the new normal,” something I know about all too well from my experience with cancer, since that’s 30 minutes in itself, so instead, I’ll say... thanks for reading up to here (if you indeed have) and I hope you enjoy this experiment and don’t find yourself bored by my droning on.
The above is what I can write in just 25 minutes so imagine how much worse this might be with that extra five minutes. :)
The Weekend Warrior 5/28/21: A QUIET PLACE PART II, CRUELLA, CLIFF WALKERS, FUNHOUSE, MOBY DOC and More
It’s Memorial Day weekend, and yes, I’m fully aware that I completely missed last week’s column.
Did you see what came out in wide release?! Basically, Bleecker Street’s Dream Horse in about 1,200 theaters where it made less than a million. Warner Bros. released its animated film SCOOB for the first time into about 2,500 theaters, and THAT made more than Dream Horse despite being available On Demand for over a year. (I’m not quite sure if that will end up on HBO Max fairly soon, but I guess they’re giving back to the theaters by giving them something new to show on a VERY slow weekend.)
Anyway, as mentioned before, this is Memorial Day weekend and the first REAL weekend of summer, so of course, we’re all hoping that the hoary days of the past year might magically be over, and we’re back to the $100 million opening days of the summer of 2019. Nope. Not happening, but at least two movies will give it the old college try.
Before we get to this week’s new wide releases, box office and everything else, a couple of weekends ago, I caught up with Zhang Yimou’s latest film, CLIFF WALKERS (CDC Entertainment), a terrific period spy thriller that’s really unlike any of the master’s other films. I ended up going to see this at the IFC Center, because my screener expired, and I really wanted to see it. Zimou has previously covered the war between Japan and China in the 1930s that eventually led to World War II, and the horrors that took place.
This one is a bonafide spy thriller as four individuals are sent into China to try to get information about the Japanese plans in a certain region. I’ll admit that it took me a little while to figure out exactly what was going on, because the characters were wearing heavy winter coats when first introduced, so I had no idea who some of them were once wearing regular clothes. But this is just a terrifically stylish film that also has a good share of ‘30s action, and it really shook me up in a way not unlike a film from Director Zhang in a long time.
I’m not sure if Cliff Walkers is still playing in theaters, but definitely keep an eye out for it, since it’s one of the master’s best movies in quite a while.
The biggest wide release of the weekend is John Krasinski’s A QUIET PLACE PART II, which is the first movie released theatrically by Paramount Pictures in over a year, having dumped much of its 2020 line-up to Amazon and Netflix for some quick cash. It once again stars Emily Blunt as now a single mother trying to survive an invasion by murderous alien creatures that detect their prey via sound. This time, her family meets an old family friend, played by Cillian Murphy, and her daughter Regan (Millicent Simmonds) goes off on her own adventure to try to put an end to the creatures.
I reviewed the movie at Below the Line and will have an interview with Composer Marco Beltrani sometime soon, and I won’t have much to say about the movie in that sense. I will say that I did like the movie even more than the first one, but basically that’s been all over the place in terms of people liking it more, some people not liking it much, yadda yadda yadda.
But let’s look at some box office history, shall we? Krasikinski’s A Quiet Place came out on April 6, 2018, and it was kind of a breakthrough, because it opened a time when Marvel Studios’ Black Panther had been dominating the box office for months, Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One had opened a week earlier and was already a close to $100 million i.e. it was the “before times.” The movie opened with $50.2 million and was one of those huge-buzz PG-13 horror movies that people were talking about and going to see to the point where it ended up grossing $188 million domestically. Although it dropped to #2 in its second weekend against Rampage (remember that movie?), it was back at #1 the week after that and was one of the big buzz genre movies of the year. It got an Oscar nomination for sound and Blunt won herself a SAG Award for her performance.
But again, that’s the before times, and we’re now looking at a movie that was supposed to come out over a year ago that was delayed by COVID, a theatrical wasteland with many theaters still closed, most of the others still doing limited capacity, a lot of the country vaccinated but not enough to make people completely comfortable sitting in a theater with strangers (though that’s getting better), and one wonders what a popular movie that grossed $188 million in 2018 can do in the new world of 2021. I mean, we already saw what happened to Wonder Woman 1984 when it tried to open over Christmas, only with an HBO Max screening component, but then we saw Godzilla vs. Kong open big, but it STILL hasn’t grossed $100 million domestically.
Sure, there are more theaters open now, except for in a lot of Canada, and we’ll have to see how many theaters above 3,000 that Paramount can get, but I can definitely see this opening in the $45 to 50 million range. It should also be able to stick around a while, because there aren’t a ton of big movies opening in coming weeks. I’m gonna stay on the moderate side of things just because we’re not quite there yet, so I think this will probably creep its way to $150 or 160 million but will eventually have to give up theaters/screens for F9 next month.
The other big release of this Memorial Day weekend is CRUELLA (Disney), starring Emma Stone and Emma Thompson, which as might be determined from the title, is a prequel to the evil villain from the 101 Dalmations, Cruella de Ville. She was famously played by Glenn Close in the 1996 Disney hit that grossed $136 million domestically after a $33 million Thanksgiving weekend opening. That kind of money in 1996 is pretty damn good, because it’s before all of those $90 to 100 million plus openings we’d be getting in a few years or the $400 plus domestic grossers that became the norm. The movie is directed by Craig GIllespie, best known for directing I, Tonya and a slew of other movies over the years that most people forgot like Lars and the Real Girl and the Fright Night remake and Million Dollar Arm. (Remember that one?)
Obviously, a key to the movie’s success is the popularity of Stone in the Amazing Spider-Man movies, the musical La La Land (for which she won an Oscar) and The Favourite (for which she got another nomination). Stone benefits from having been acting for over 14 years with early hits like Superbad and Zombieland and The Help leading to a place where can she be considered an A-lister. Cruella is Stone’s first live action movie since 2019’s Zombieland: Double Tap, although she could be seen last year as a voice in The Croods: A New Age, a relatively big COVID hit with the $58 million it made domestically.
One also can’t neglect the popularity of Thompson, also a beloved Oscar-nominated actress, who has been appearing in popular and beloved movies for over thirty years on both sides of the pond, and she’s absolutely great in the movie. I think even the most negative reviews of the movie will point that out.
The thing is that we also can’t completely ignore the fact that Cruella can be seen on DIsney+ for a $30 premium fee, which when you have a whole family wanting to see the movie over the holiday weekend, that’s looking a lot better than the $100 to 150 that it would cost to take a family of five to a movie theater. Hey, don’t yell at me, but that’s reality.
I think some have been saying that Cruella might be able to make $35 to 40 million over Memorial Day weekend, but I think that’s not taking into account a lot of the factors I’ve mentioned, and because of those, I think it will end up more in the $28 million range for the four-day holiday. I write this without having seen how reviews panned out, but as you can see from my review below, I was mixed on the movie, and I’m guessing that reviews won’t all be positive despite the raves from #FilmTwitter.
Mini-Review: I didn’t go into Cruella with much in terms of expectations and only a little more knowledge. I remember hearing for a long while that this might get dumped to the Disney+ streamer and only part of that happened, but just cause it’s the Emmas, I was already in.
We meet Stone's Estella as a scampish young girl (not played by Stone) living in poverty in ‘60s London with her mother, who is suddenly killed while visiting a posh gala to try to get money from a mysterious woman. Now orphaned, Estella makes friends with two fellow orphans, Jasper and Horace, and over the next few years, they help each other while masterminding thievery plots. At the same time, Estella proves to be quite a good seamstress and fashion designer, and she ends up getting a job working for Emma Thompson’s Baroness, the height of a fashion icon but also a horrible person, especially to her employees. Eventually, Estella’s two thieving friends (played as adults by Stephen Fry and Paul Walter House) come up with a scheme to rob the Baroness of a keepsake that belonged to Estella’s mother. To do this, Estella creates an alter ego named Cruella, who hopes to beat the Baroness at her own game, unwittingly becoming a fashion icon in her own right.
That’s all the plot I’m going to get into, because there are a lot of twists in Cruella that I won’t reveal, but it’s also a movie with so many tonal and pacing issues, starting from the very beginning with all the kids’ capers. It then shifts into this dark, dark comedy that’s punctuated by pratfall humor that is definitely better when done by Fry and Houser, but it’s still a tone that is constantly shifting and drifting trying to find where to settle... and it never does.
I thought Stone was just fine in what is essentially a dual role, but it’s when she transforms into Cruella with half white and half black hair and an even more ridiculous British accent than her normal one where things start going sideways. It’s especially bad when you see Thompson crushing it as the Baroness, who is almost better as a villain then Glenn Close was in 101 Dalmations.
People have been raving about the Cruella soundtrack, and this is where I have to passionately disagree, because as much as I love the classic songs of the ‘60s and ‘70s played, not all the needle drop choices work. Many of them just seem shoehorned in to distract the viewers from the weak writing. When you have an amazing composer like Nicholas Britell (Moonlight, Succession), why on earth would you not USE him to do what he does?
One of the things that might bother me the most is that this is definitely a PG-13 movie, and when you’re taking a character from G-rated Disney animated movies and PG-rated Disney movies, sure, you can assume that fans of those movies will be older, but it also feels that it should be something that can be watched by your kids. I’m sure that some young girls will enjoy this, and it’s not like the sort of cattiness on display isn’t something they might experience in their own real-life classrooms, but it’s also kind of nasty in a similar way as I, Tonya, which I was never that crazy about either.
Cruella is just a disjointed mess that shows off a lot of beautiful costumes, and sure, Emma Thompson is a lot of fun, too, but ultimately, the whole thing just fell flat for me.
Rating: 6/10
Jason William Lee’s horror film FUNHOUSE (Magnet) is the kind of movie that I absolutely hate. How’s that for a preview? Yeah, this is a movie about a guy who kidnaps obnoxious reality stars to put them through their paces and kill them off one-by-one in grisly ways. If you know that is the premise, and you think, “That movie sounds like it’s for me!”... well, then, good luck with it. I mean, it starts with a woman hacking a guy’s heart for money, so I probably should have guessed that it was going to continue down the torture porn route, and sure enough... We’re soon introduced to a group of obnoxious and pretentious faux celebrities from YouTube and reality TV who are pitted against each other in a Big Brother-like popularity contest called “Furcas’ House of Fun” where the contestants with the least votes have to fight it out to eliminate one of them. The winner and survivor of this show gets $5 million. It pretty much goes exactly where expected, and I could barely get through most of it, because it just seems like the filmmaker watched the “Saw” movies too many times and just got the wrong thing out of them. I honestly think that critics who trashed the recent Spiral, which wasn’t bad, should be forced to sit through this one, as I feel that’s an apt punishment.
I was kind of interested in Rob Gordon Bralver’s MOBY DOC (Greenwich Entertainment), which debuts in theaters and digital platforms, when I first heard about it. I have a weird history and relationship with Moby, as I first saw this nerdy guy giving a DJ demonstration at the New Music Seminar in the late 80s and then by the early ‘90s, he was this huge superstar. I actually enjoy a lot of his records from the time so as not to take anything away from his success, but there’s something quite pretentious about the way he portrays himself in this talking heads movies where he’s the one mostly doing the talking. I’m sure anyone who is a bigger Moby fan than I am might find it interesting, but I just remembered how annoying he was in the '80s and '90s and could barely get through it.
Opening in theaters Friday and then on digital and demand June 1 is Danielle Lessovitz’s PORT AUTHORITY (Momentum Pictures) starring Leyna Bloom from the show Pose on FX, Fionn Whitehead and McCaul Lombardi. Whitehead plays Paul, who arrives at NYC’s Port Authority bus depot after being kicked out of his home in Pennsylvania. He has an encounter with Bloom’s Wye, a trans woman of color and falls in love with her, but as they get to know each other, she learns more about his false narrative and the double life he’s been living.
Also opening this week is Lynn Roth’s SHEPHERD: THE STORY OF A JEWISH DOG, a typical boy and dog movie set in 1930s Germany at a time when the Nuremberg Laws forbid Jews to own pets, so German Shepherd Kaleb is separated from his 10-year-old master Joshua (August Maturo) and becomes a street dog. Kaleb is eventually captured and adopted by an SS dog trainer (Ken Duken) at a Nazi work camp. As the son of German Jews, I really have to be in the right mood to watch a movie like this, and I just haven’t been in that mood lately.
Also launching on Disney+ this Friday are the LAUNCHPAD SHORTS, a series of live action short films by filmmakers from underserved backgrounds, which I probably will watch eventually but didn’t have time to do so before writing this column.
Other movies out this week include:
SWIMMING OUT TILL THE SEA TURNS BLUE (Cinema Guild)
BLUE MIRACLE (Netflix)
AHEAD OF THE CURVE (WolfeVideo.com )
That’s it for this week! Next week, a new month with a new Conjuring movie, The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It, and another horse movie with DreamWorks Animation’s Spirit Untamed.
The Weekend Warrior 5/7/21: WRATH OF MAN, HERE TODAY, THE UNTHINKABLE, MONSTER, THE WATER MAN and More
It’s a new month, and I guess going by previous years pre-COVID, this weekend would normally be the start of summer. This year, we’re instead getting a summer with a lot of movies that would normally be dumped into April or February or some other uneventful month. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t or won’t be any good movies, but really, there’s nothing that feels like a summer movie until A Quiet Place Part II and Disney’s Cruella open on Memorial Day weekend.
There’s been lots of great developments, though, including the Alamo Drafthouse in Brooklyn reopening this Friday and then in a few short weeks, theaters may be allowed to be open with no capacity rules although social distancing and masks will probably still be in place. Believe me, it’s been a confusing week as the city that got used to being on the backburner when it comes to reopenings, especially with movie theaters, is now dealing with arguing politicians competing to see who could throw open the then most doors fastest. It’s actually pretty embarrassing.
That aside, this week’s The Weekend Warrior column is brought to you by the new album “Coral Island” from Liverpool band The Coral, which I’ve decided to listen to on loop until I finish this column, because it’s taking me so long to get through it. (Eventually, I switched to Teenage Fanclub’s “Endless Arcade,” since I hadn’t had a chance to listen to it yet…. And to an old standby, Royal Blood, with their own excellent new album, “Typhoons.” At least the record business seems to know it’s the summer!)
Before we get to this week’s new movies, a couple tidbits. First of all, I’m thrilled that my friends Larissa Lam and Baldwin Chiu’s documentary FAR EAST DEEP SOUTH can finally be seen by the entire world, or at least the United States. It debuted on PBS World Channel on Tuesday night as part of the “America ReFramed” series, but for the entire month of May until June 3, you can watch it On Demand HERE, and that is huge! (There will be other ways to see it that you can read about here.)
This is an amazing MUST-SEE doc that looks into the little-known Chinese communities that took root in Mississippi in the early 20th Century and how they became such a huge part of that area with their markets, also bonding with the African-American communities that were similarly dealing with racism from the typically white post-Civil War South. It’s not just a history lesson, and it’s an incredibly moving story about a family trying to find its roots in the most unexpected places. There was a good reason why the couple’s short “Finding Cleveland” won the Oxford Film Festival while I was on the jury that year, and Far East Deep South similarly won an award there last year after its World Premiere at Cinequest was almost scuppered by COVID. It’s amazing how much more relevant and important this film has become since I first saw it last year, since both Asians and African-Americans are dealing with serious racial issues, and this movie shows that more than anything, they should be working to boost each other rather than fighting. Do check it out On Demand this month if you get a chance!
Another musician making movies is Mr. Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters. I mentioned his documentary WHAT DRIVES US last week, but I actually only got to watch it on Thursday, and like his previous film Studio City and HBO mini-series, Sonic Highways, it’s a fantastic look at the music biz, this time through a variety of artists who began their careers by piling into vans and driving around the country. That is, except Lars Ulrich from Metallica, who mentions that the band was never so small or indie that they didn’t have a bus. But Grohl has used his vast connections to bring in a lot of great musicians including The Edge from U2, Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and more, making this a very entertaining movie both for fans of the various bands but also live music fans in general. I gotta admit that as much as I loved What Drives Us, it did bring me down a bit since it’s been almost 14 months since I’ve seen any live music, and I really miss it. This is now streaming on The Coda Collection, which you can subscribe to through Amazon Prime Video.
Guy Ritchie is back with his latest movie, WRATH OF MAN (Miramax/MGM), which reunites him with Jason Statham for the first time since 2007’s Revolver, I believe. Statham plays the enigmatic Paul “H” Hill who works at cash truck company Fortico, responsible for moving hundreds of million dollars around Los Angeles each week. Fortico has recently been hit by a lethal robbery, and H’s team soon learn that there’s a lot more to their new coworker, who happens to be looking for revenge against the man who murdered his son.
(Unfortunately, reviews for the movie are embargoed until Thursday at 6pm, so I can’t tell you whether it’s any good or not. Until Thursday night. Sorry!)
But I will talk about the movie’s box office prospects, because why not? Ritchie’s last movie, The Gentlemen, opened in January 2020, during the “before times,” with $10.6 million, but that was more of a classic Ritchie ensemble crime-comedy. Wrath of Man is more of the type of movie Statham has been making over the past few years, a cross between a revenge thriller and a heist flick. In fact, Statham has done a pretty good job creating his own brand through a variety of action-thrillers as well as a number of franchises including “The Transporter” movies, “The Expendables,” and eventually joining the “Fast and the Furious” franchise as Deckard Shaw with Furious 7 in 2017. Statham then went off to make Hobbs and Shaw with Dwayne Johnson, which didn’t do bad with $174 million. Before that, Statham starred in The Meg, a summer shark attack movie that grossed $145 million. Statham going back to help his old mate i.e. the director that gave Statham his start is pretty huge.
But as I said earlier, those were all in the “before times” and with the box office the way it is, it’s hard to imagine that the exciting reunion of Statham and Ritchie can open with more than $10 million but maybe closer to $8 million, because MGM/UA just doesn’t have the marketing clout of a Warner Bros. or Universal. Even so, that should be enough to be #1 this weekend as both Mortal Kombat and Demon Slayer continue to fall away. Unfortunately, if the movie *is* any good -- and I can’t tell you one way or another -- then by the time reviews hit, people will already have other plans for the weekend than to go see the movie. So yeah, that’s pretty dumb on the part of MGM, huh?
UPDATE: MGM is putting the movie into 2,876 theaters and maybe I'm being overly optimistic, because, as you'll read below, the movie IS pretty good and reviews have remained positive with the American reviews rolling in last night, still at 70% Fresh at this writing. Maybe that'll help the movie do a little better, maybe as much as $9 million, although I'll probably owe MGM an apology if it cracks $10 million, and I don't think it will.
Mini-Review: If you’ve seen the trailer for Wrath of Man, you might go into Guy Ritchie’s latest thinking you know what to expect, because it’s sure being sold as another typical Jason Statham revenge thriller. Don’t be fooled by the marketing, the movie really is Ritchie’s chance to make his own version of Heat, an L.A. heist movie that owes as much to Rashomon as another movie being released this week.
Wrath of Man begins with the heist of an armored truck that turns deadly with the wanton murder of a couple guards. From there, you might think we know where things are going when Statham’s “H” company whose truck was hit, and on his first day, he stops a similar heist by killing the truck’s attackers. H is immediately the hero of the company, although he still has quite a few suspicious coworkers and the feeling is quite mutual. Ritchie’s film then slips into the second episodic chapter which goes back five months to that initial heist where we learn that Statham’s son was killed by being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I don’t want to go too much deeper into how the movie and story play out, because like The Gentlemen and some of Ritchie’s more intricate films, there’s a lot that purposefully isn’t made very apparent at the beginning. To many, this movie will be seen as even more macho than most of Ritchie's films, to the point where even the only woman guard, Dana, being just as macho as the men. As the movie begins, there’s a lot of joke-cracking and crotch-grabbing, all while Statham’s character silently observes and only acts when necessary.
The film’s shift to more of a classic Ritchie ensemble does slowly take place, but by the third chapter, it shifts to the group perpetrating the cash truck heists with an “inside person,” taking the movie to yet another place that makes it more obvious that this is Ritchie’s attempt at delving into the L.A. heist genre that other filmmakers have done so well.
Oddly, Statham doesn’t have too many lines, acting almost like a Terminator in his determination to right wrongs, but as always, Ritchie puts together a fantastic ensemble cast including a number of great American character actors who we rarely get to see in such great roles. I was particularly impressed with Jeffrey Donovan, who has appeared in a number of otherwise forgettable crime films this past year. The same can be said for Holt McCallany as H’s truck driver “Bullet,” but Ritchie also cast the likes of Josh Hartnett and Scott Eastwood in smaller yet still significant supporting roles, all of whom become more interesting as you start figuring out who all the players are.
Like I said, the movie is fairly macho and the few women play very small roles, but it’s how things are set-up in the first few acts to then change course and build to an absolutely amazing third act that will undoubtedly bear comparisons to Heat. And yet Wrath of Man (which is actually based on a little-seen French crime-thriller) does branch away from some of Ritchie’s standards, first of all by being far darker and even more violent with any of the wisecracking humor that pervades a lot of Ritchie’s work to counterbalance such violence disappearing once the flashbacks begin. It’s all punctuated by a fantastically tense score by Christopher Benstead, which seems a bit much at first but eventually settles into the perfect pace and tone for the action.
Despite disappearing for a good chunk of the movie, Statham is still great, basically killing everyone as his characters are wont to do, but watching how all of the different ideas come together leads to such a satisfying conclusion that one hopes those who might be put off, thinking they know where it's going due to the somewhat pathetic and obvious marketing will give it a chance to see how Ritchie has changed gears as effortlessly as he did with Aladdin a few years back.
Rating: 7.5/10
After even a longer time since he directed a movie, Billy Crystal once again takes the helm for HERE TODAY (Sony/Stage6), a movie in which he plays comedy writer Charlie Burns, whose chance encounter with Tiffany Haddish’s lounge singer, Emma Payge, leads to an unlikely friendship, as he struggles with early stage dementia.
I’ve known about this movie for over a year now, and I was pretty excited to finally get to see it, since I was such a fan of the other movies Crystal has directed, 1992’s Mr. Saturday Night and 1995’s Forget Paris, and it’s just amazing to me that he hasn’t directed a movie since.
At first, it seems like it’s the type of meet-cute we’ve seen so much in Crystal’s past filmography, but his pairing with Haddish isn’t something that might work on paper, but in fact, their comic styles mesh so perfectly together that it’s amazing that no one thought of putting them together before.
Crystal wrote the film with comic Alan Zweibel, who adapted it from his own short story “The Prize,” which refers to Haddish’s character winning Charlie in an auction for a lunch. Actually, her ex won the lunch, and she decided to use it because… free lunch! It’s a pretty simple set-up but one that allows the filmmakers to explore some of the odder things that happen in life.
Much of the movie’s humor plays upon the differences between the two characters, and how unexpected their friendship is. I can totally relate, because I have a lot of good long-time friends who most people might never expect us to be friends, but Crystal, Zweibel and Haddish pick up on that and create a movie that’s very funny but has enough other characters around the duo toa allow their characters to show how they’re just really nice people. We see that with how Charlie takes a young writer at his late night show under his wing or how Emma livens up the bat mitzvah of Charlie’s granddaughter. Oh yeah, and Haddish sings. She actually has a number of great performances in the movie, and seriously, anyone who watches this movie is gonna wanna see a smart filmmaker put Haddish in a musical immediately.
The film also acts as a truly touching tribute to Crystal’s friend, the late Robin WIlliams, who was diagnosed with the exact same type of dementia after his suicide death, and knowing that fact, makes the film even more poignant. More importantly, it doesn’t use Charlie’s condition for laughs, and for that alone, I feel like this is ten times better than that overrated Oscar winner The Father.
Here Today’s biggest problems come in the third act when it feels like the movie is starting to over-extend its welcome, even going into somewhat expected places, but it recovers from that rough third act to land a really nice ending. Crystal has always proven himself to be a really strong mainstream filmmaker (ala Rob Reiner and others) who makes crowd-pleasing movies, and it’s so nice seeing him going behind the camera for a movie that’s obviously very personal but also highly relatable.
As far as box office, I certainly have high hopes that Crystal still has an older audience of fans who might want to see him on the big screen again. I’m just not sure if this will be in more than 1,000 theaters, and though I’ve seen quite a bit of marketing, I just haven’t seen Crystal or Haddish do nearly as much in terms of getting out there that would be necessary to reach an audience that might want to venture out into movie theaters to see the movie vs. waiting until it’s on cable/streaming. There’s also Tiffany Haddish’ fanbase, and there could be some benefit for the movie coming out the same week as her new CBS show “Kids Say the Darndest Things.”
I’d love to be optimistic with this making $4 to 5 million but it’s probably more likely to be closer to $3 million especially with capacity limits still in place for most theaters and the audience generally being older.
UPDATE: Maybe I was a little too optimistic, because I enjoyed the movie so much and it will probably be closer to $1 or 1.5 million since other reviews aren't as great.
Next, we have two movies finally being released many years after their festival premieres…
The Swedish apocalyptic thriller THE UNTHINKABLE (Magnet), directed by Victor Danell, is finally being released after playing genre fests in 2018 and 2019. It stars Christoffer Nordenrot as Alex, a young piano virtuoso who ran away from home due to his abusive father Bjorn (Jesper Barkselius). Years later, he returns home for his mother’s funeral after she’s killed in a terrorist attack on Sweden. At the same, there’s a virus that’s erasing people’s memories, but Alex is still in love with Anna (Lisa Henni), the girl he had a crush on when he left, and the three of them will have to help each other face all the horrible things hitting their home at the same time.
As I was watching this movie, a lot of it felt eerily familiar to me, but I couldn’t figure out why. The more I watched it, the more I realized that I actually HAD seen the movie before. Sure enough, I saw this movie over two years ago at the “What the Fest?!” in New York two years ago, and I honestly don’t remember loving it. Still, I decided to give it a fresh look, hoping to get more out of it on second viewing.
Some of the same things bothered me on this second viewing, because it’s really hard to figure out exactly what is going on and whether the horrific events are natural, man-made or a combination of both. For some time, we get so mired into Alex’s lame relationship with Anna, and when he returns home, his conspiracy theory-driven father is busy protecting a bunker that’s being invaded by foreign military troops he thinks are Russians. We cut between these two disparate scenarios while sometimes returning to the capital of Sweden and throwing in a few big set pieces. It’s so disjointed that you feel like you’re watching a lot of random unrelated events, maybe a bit like last week’s About Endlessness -- maybe it’s a Swedish thing?
There are aspects of The Unthinkable that are quite commendable, particularly those action moments and how the mystery about what is happening develops as the film goes along. Eventually, the film does find a more consistent pace, and things start becoming a little clearer, which makes the final act better than much of what we’ve watched earlier. Even so, it’s still quite annoying how long it takes to figure out what’s going on, even on a second viewing, and for most people, that may already be far too frustrating to get through it.
Hitting Netflix on Friday over THREE years after it premiered at Sundance is music video director Anthony Mandler’s directorial debut, MONSTER (Netflix), based on the novel by Walter Dean Myers. It stars Kelvin Harrison Jr. (Waves) as Steve Harmon, a 17-year-old film student put in jail, accused of murder in a bodega robbery. His defense lawyer (Jennifer Ehle) is trying to help him be released, but he’s fighting against the odds of a judicial system that sees him as a “monster” because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I have to be honest that I did go to see this at Sundance the week it premiered, and for whatever reason, I just wasn’t feeling it, so I only really caught about twenty minutes of it. Watching it now with more time and a little less weary than I usually am towards the end of Sundance, I was able to appreciate Monster more for what it is. On the surface, it’s just about Steve’s case and how what really happened unfolds before our eyes and we learn more about those around Steve and how their influence may have pulled a smart and studious young man into the criminal world that now has him in prison with much more violent life-long criminals.
We already knew that Harrison was a great actor, but Monster shows us that he was already on his way to greatness with this movie that for whatever reason got buried even as it dealt with issues that have been in the headlines almost every day since this debuted.
Mandler takes an interesting approach, both non-linear and also with blatant nods to Kurosawa’s Rashomon, which is even cited by Steve’s teacher, played by Tim Blake Nelson. Jeffrey Wright and Jennifer Hudson are decent as Steve’s parents, but they’re generally smaller and non-showy roles compared to the moments between Harrison and Ehle. Much of the film takes place in the courtroom with flashbacks showing what happened through the viewpoint of whomever is on the stand, which eventually includes Steve himself.
The way Mandler handles the material may lean more on the artiness rather than something more mainstream -- Michael B. Jordan’s Just Mercy comes to mind -- but it’s just as powerful in showing how someone like Steve can be othered by society into being a criminal. Sure, there have been other handlings of this sort of material that I thought were better films, but if you know anyone who has ever had dealings with the “justice” system and know how unfair and horrible it can be even to the innocent, then Monster will certainly strike a chord.
Also hitting Netflix this week is the new series based on Mark Millar and Frank Quitely‘s comic books, JUPITER’S LEGACY (Netflix), another kind of twist on the superhero genre ala Amazon Prime Video’s series based on Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson’s The Boys. I love the comics, and I can’t wait to finally get around to seeing Netflix’s first adaptation of a Millarworld property.
David Oyelowo makes his directorial debut with THE WATER MAN (RLJEfilms), a movie about a young boy named Gunner Boon (Lonnie Chavis), whose mother (Rosario Dawson) is battling leukemia. In an effort to cure her, Guner goes off on a journey along with a teenage girl named Jo (Amiah Miller) to find the mythical Water Man, who can provide them with a magic token that might save Gunner’s mother’s life.
I’ve interviewed Oyelowo a few times before, and I really like him a lot, so I had really high hopes for him as a director since I feel he’s just a terrific actor. Unfortunately, the material here is just not strong enough that I think even a far more experienced filmmaker could make something out of it.
Set in PIne Hills, we meet Gunner, a bright kid who loves drawing comic books, but he has trouble connecting with his father (Oyelowo), so when he has an idea that might help his sick mother, he goes off with a head-strong teen named Jo, in search of the Water Man, a summertime adventure permeated by a lot of very bad low-budget visual effects.
Honestly, I’m not even sure where to begin with where The Water Man falters, because Oyelowo has such a great cast, including Alfred Molina and Maria Bello in tiny parts. The story is a problem, as is the writing, which is just so bland and dull, that there’s really nothing in Oyelowo’s direction or any of the performances that really can salvage it. Neither of the child actors have much charisma or personality, and even Dawson’s performance, which would normally be a showstopper is repeatedly lessened by the constant cutting back to the kids. (And as someone who beat leukemia myself, I’m never a fan when cancer is depicted in movies as a death sentence rather than just another hurdle in life that needs to be overcome.)
Oyelowo himself may be one of his generation’s best actors, but he brings so little to the role of Gunner’s father, maybe to not take away from his younger star, but it hurts that he doesn’t do more to create a stronger conflict by making the character more horrible to drive Gunner away. The actual Water Man doesn’t improve things when he finally shows up, essentially talking like a pirate but not even remotely paying off.
Honestly, The Water Man seems like such a misguided venture -- Exec. Produced by Oprah, no less -- and it might have been totally forgettable if the characters didn’t keep saying the title of the movie every five minutes.
Hitting theaters Friday after a festival run is Tran Quoc Bao’s action-comedy THE PAPER TIGERS (WELL GO USA), starring ALain Uy, Ron Yuan and Mikel Shannon Jenkins as martial artists once known as “the three tigers but now middle-aged men must set aside old grudges and dad duties to avenge the murder of their teacher. I’ve had a screener of this since last summer when it played at Fantasia Festival in Montreal, and I just never got around to watching it, but if I’m able to squeeze it in before the weekend, check back here for my review.
Streaming on Shudder this Friday is Ryan Kruger's South African comedy-thriller FRIED BARRY (Shudder), starring Gary Green as Barry, a violent street junkie who is abducted by aliens who take over his body in order to… well, actually… they do a lot of drugs, have a lot of sex and other craziness. It’s a pretty strange and bizarre movie that reminds me a little of movies like a lower-fi Under the Skin or Beyond the Black Rainbow, and much of it is driven by the insane and unique performance by Green and the odd characters he encounters that I think will find its fans for sure, but it will definitely be for a very select audience of genre festival fans, as this is by no means a mainstream genre film.
Speaking of which, another movie out this week which I wasn’t allowed to see in advance is Gia Coppola’s MAINSTREAM (IFC Films), starring Maya Hawke as a young woman seeking internet stardom by making YouTube videos with a charismatic stranger, played by Andrew Garfield, until “the dark side of viral celebrity threatens to ruin them both.” Yup, it’s one of THOSE movies. It also stars Nat Wolff, Jason Schwartzman and Johnny Knoxville, but I haven’t heard anything good about it, and I’m not sure my curiosity is piqued enough to spend any of my own personal money to check it out.
Hitting Amazon on Friday is the doc THE BOY FROM MEDELLIN (Amazon) from Matthew Heineman (City of Ghosts, Cartel Land), a portrait of musical superstar J. Balvin, as he prepares for a massive sold-out stadium show in his hometown of Medellin, Colombia, which is hindered by the growing civil unrest in the area.
Lots of other movies this week, but a few that i just wasn’t able to get to this week, including:
ABOVE SUSPICION (Lionsgate)
INITIATION (Saban Films)
ENFANT TERRIBLE (Dark Star Pictures)
QUEEN MARIE (Samuel Goldwyn Films)
SILO (Oscilloscope)
CITIZEN PENN (Discovery+)
That’s it for this week. Next week, Chris Rock and Samuel L. Jackson star in SPIRAL: FROM THE BOOK OF SAW (Lionsgate) and Angelina Jolie returns for the thriller THOSE WHO WISH ME DEAD (New Line) and Timur Bekmambetov’s thriller, PROFILE (Focus Features). That’s right. This will be the first weekend in over a year where we’ll have three or maybe even four new wide releases.
The Weekend Warrior 4/30/21: SEPARATION, LIMBO, THE OUTSIDE STORY, WITHOUT REMORSE, ABOUT ENDLESSNESS and More
Everyone recovering from the Oscars? I’m certainly not, but trying hard, especially cause I gotta jump RIGHT into the Emmys cause the nomination process begins in just six weeks… WTF?! Well, if it’s any consolation, I plan on continuing to include my thoughts on box office as things seem to be slowly getting back to some semblance of normalcy.
There aren’t a ton of new wide theatrical releases this week, at least not many particularly high-profile ones. Open Road/Briarcliff, one of the first studios to begin releasing movies during the pandemic with Liam Neeson’s Honest Thief and The Marksman, neither which grossed more than $15 million domestically, is the only studio taking on the 2nd weekends of Mortal Kombat and Demon Slayer.
eThis week, they release William Brent Bell's supernatural thriller SEPARATION (Open Road/Briarcliff), which stars Rupert Friend as Jeff, a failed comic book artist, whose wife Maggie (Mamie Gummer) wants a divorce and is fighting for custody of their daughter Jenny (Violet McGraw) in said divorce, before she's killed in a hit and run. That leaves Jeff and Jenny alone in their brownstone with Maggie’s father (Brian Cox) wanting to take Jenny away, and...oh, yeah, the vengeful ghost of Maggie causing all sorts of trouble.
Before we get to my review, which I wasn’t able to run until Thursday anyway, let’s talk about box office. We’re coming off one of the best weekends at the box office since the pandemic hit with both Mortal Kombat and Demon Slayer opening with over $21 million each. While I don’t expect Separation to have much of an effect on either, there’s no denying that both movies are very likely to be frontloaded, and I would be surprised if either of the movies has less than 55% drop-of from opening, but I think Mortal Kombat may stay ahead for a second weekend at #1 with around $10 million. I’d put Demon Slayer at closer than $9.5 million.
I’m not sure how many theaters Open Road will get for Separation, although theaters chains should be grateful to them for taking a chance on movies back in the fall when New York and L.A. were yet to reopen. I think it may be able to swing close to 2,000 theaters and that should be enough for it to do around $4 million this weekend, which would be better than Screen Gems’ The Unholy a few weeks back. I wouldn’t expect good reviews or a CinemaScore above a C-, so it’ll act like most horror movies and will probably will end up in the $12 million total domestic gross.
So let’s get to that review of Separation, which looks like your typical cliché-ridden horror movie, because guess what? It is!! Bell is a perfectly capable filmmaker, but somehow, he keeps directing complete horror schlock like last year’s very bad Brahms: The Boy 2. I have to assume his Orphan prequel next year isn’t going to be much better. It’s another classic case of white male filmmaker failing upwards, because he keeps getting movies to direct after every bad previous movie.
We meet young Jenny as she's talking to her creepy dolls while her parents fight, and when Jenny falls, it’s the last straw for Maggie who files for divorce with her lawyer father really putting the screws to Jeff. To be honest, Maggie is such a bitch that you don’t really feel much sympathy when she’s suddenly dead. Her father has no sympathy for Jeff and just wants to get Jenny away from him. During this time, Jeff starts getting work as a comic book artist, and while references to the Eisners and Maus are certainly entertaining, there’s another part of the movie that just gets the whole “comic book artist lifestyle” pretty wrong.
The thing is no one will come into Separation for most of that stuff, which is why one wonders why Bell would spend so much time on the family drama aspect of the movie while throwing in a few occasional scares, mostly of the variety we’re used to seeing in “ghost movies” these days, complete with the “bendy bone” apparition, in this case with a creepy clown face.
Even though the cast is good, especially the adorable Violet McGraw, who is constantly stealing scenes from her more experienced co-stars, there is just too much about the movie that makes you laugh, and not deliberately. Besides the odd overall portrayal of the comic book business, there’s also Jeff’s adoring babysitter Samantha (Madeline Brewer from A Handmaid’s Tale), who starts making overtures towards him despite their obvious age difference.
Then every once in a while, we get a creepy scene like Jeff’s experience on a subway or we see a black robed ghost that represents Jeff’s angry wife, and the whole way through this, you can’t help but think, “Boy, Mamie Gummer was lucky to get hit by a car early on, so she wouldn't have to be here for the rest of the movie.”
It all leads to a last act where the movie suddenly starts to get good then throws an absolutely horrible twist at the viewer that just doesn’t work. That and all of the many horror clichés that pervade the movie just makes this an awkward and disjointed mess that never really manages to define itself from dozens of similarly bad horror movies.
Another movie getting some sort of of moderate to wide-ish release is Ben Sharrock’s LIMBO (Focus Features), which was recently nominated for a couple BAFTA film awards. It stars Amir El-Masry as Omar, a Turkish refugee in a dreary Scottish seaside farming village, who is just trying to make his way surrounded by other refugees.
Every once in a while -- like every other movie -- Focus Features releases a movie that I just don’t get why they’re bothering with, and here is one of those quirky movies that I feel will appeal to a very small niche audience. I have no idea how many theaters Focus might get this into, but this would be a platform New York and L.A. platform release at best in the “before times,” so trying to put this into more than 100 theaters is just asking for a lot of near empty rooms. Facts are facts.
I guess I can say a few words about this, even though I don’t have much to say. It’s certainly strange -- not necessarily witty or even laugh-out-loud funny -- and that doesn’t exactly make it very good. The main actor has the charisma of a piece of cardboard, so he struggles to get the audience really behind him. Most of the time he spends interacting with other characters and talking on a remote payphone in the middle of nowhere to his mother and father back in Turkey.
Oddly, this movie reminded me of the movie Lemon for some reason -- maybe the four letters in common?-- and as “luck” would have it, two of the actors appear in ANOTHER movie opening this week -- how’s that for a strange coincidence? It might be due to the couple of Helga and Boris who are teaching the refugees on Western ways, including an opening dance sequence that’s actually a class titled “Sex: Is A Smile An Invitation?” (Spoiler: It’s not.) They are generally more interesting than any of the refugee characters, which probably wasn’t Sharrock’s intention. The refugee performances are just kind of dry and non-dynamic, and that’s a real hindrance in getting the audience to empathize with them.
To Sharrock’s credit, Limbo never goes to some of the more obvious places in terms of putting Omar in a romance, and it only starts paying off in the last act when we get an emotional moment between Omar and his brother, and we finally get to see him playing the “oud” (a Turkish lute, of sorts), which he’s supposed to be a master of. Otherwise, the movie just seems to drive home the obvious, that life sucks for refugees, and that’s about it.
Limbo isn’t a terrible movie, but it’s just so bland and disjointed and even somewhat generic for so much of it that even the eventual payoff doesn’t necessarily win you over.
Also getting a theatrical release this weekend is Chinese auteur Zhang Yimou’s latest film, CLIFF WALKERS (CMC Pictures), which I tried to get a screener for but sadly, too late to review it. It’s a spy thriller about four Chinese special agents who embark on a secret mission to the puppet state of Manchukuo in the ‘30s. It stars Zhang Yi, Yu Hewei, Qin Hailu and Zhu Yawen, and I wouldn’t be surprised if CMC gets this into 200 or 300 screens. With very little promotion here in the States, I don’t expect this to make much of a mark here.
Apparently, Terrence Howard also has a new movie out this week called TRIUMPH, in which he co-stars with RJ Mitte from Breaking Bad and is directed by Brett Leonard. Apparently it’s only in Cinemark Theaters, and it’s inspired by Michael D. Coffey’s true story with Mitte playing a high school senior who tries to be a wrestler despite having cerebral palsy.
Also if you’re looking for something to see in theaters, Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is finally getting its 10th anniversary re-release in theaters this weekend, including Dolby Theaters for the first time. That’s what I’m doing on Sunday with my movie pals, Erica and Mike Streeter.
Another movie getting a limited theatrical release is Roy Andersson’s ABOUT ENDLESSNESS (Magnet), the latest from the auteur king of Swedish existentialism, which will also be available via virtual cinema as well as in those select theaters.
I’m not quite sure what to say about Andersson’s latest, because I’ve never really understood the appeal even as other film critics rave about movies like A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence and You, The Living and others. Like those, Andersson seems to specialize in disparate episodic segments about random characters that seem to have absolutely no connection. In this case, there’s a priest who has lost his faith who is first shown dragging a cross up a hill as onlookers barely batting an eye that turns out to be a nightmare.
If you think the movie is going to spend any time following this priest’s struggle, you obviously don’t know Andersson, because instead, we keep being introduced to different characters from a bored woman’s voice-over, every once in a while cutting to a couple floating over the city for no apparent reason. Every once in a while, a few words are spoken but then we’re off to the next vignette.
Sorry, but I have very little time to watch a movie that doesn’t seem to have any interest in plot or story, two of the most important things for any movie in my book, and believe me, this is not the first time I’ve tried to give Andersson a chance because a few hundred cinephiles can’t be wrong, can they?
Yes, in fact, they can and they are, because the almost-80-year-old Andersson is the type of filmmaker who will continue along with this super-niche audience enjoying his quirky non-sequiturs that I just find super dull and pointless.
The latest movie based on a Tom Clancy novel is TOM CLANCY’S WITHOUT REMORSE, which begins streaming via Amazon Prime Video starting Friday. It stars Michael B. Jordan as Navy Seal John Kelly, who has a mission go South in Aleppo, Syria, and when he comes home, he becomes a target for Russian Nationalist soldiers who end up killing his wife. In order to find those responsible, Kelly is pulled into a mission by CIA Agent Robert Ritter (Jamie Bell) and fellow Seal Karen Greer (Jodie Turner-Smith from Queen and Slim) to go after those responsible for his wife’s death only to discover a plot to try to put America and Russia back at war.
Before you get to my review, you can read my interview with director Stefano Sollima over at Below the Line.
So let’s get in this. I’m by no means any sort of Tom Clancy fan, neither of the books nor the movies, not that I haven’t tried, at least with the movies, as I haven’t read any of the books, nor have I gotten around to watching John Krasinski’s Jack Ryan yet, but other than the Harrison Ford movies, nothing has really gotten me very interested in the “Ryanverse”... so WIthout Remorse and join the list of not-particularly-interesting movies based on Clancy books.
It’s certainly not Michael B. Jordan’s fault, since he’s a great lead, and I even thought Sollima did a decent job particularly with the bigger action set pieces that would have been great to see on the big screen rather than on a television set.
I guess part of it is that I really didn’t have any particular interest in knowing more about the John Clark character from the Clancy movies I have seen to see his origins modernized and pulled out of the ‘80s Cold War in which Clancy very deliberately set them vs. the modern political world with everything happening overseas.
Part of my problem is that I just didn’t really care for Jodie Turner-Smith as a soldier with her beautiful hair shaved off, as I just didn’t think she could pull off the toughness that one expects from a soldier of Greer’s status, especially after seeing her in Queen and Slim. I know I’ve seen Jamie Bell in things I’ve liked and better than he is in this movie, which seems to be him basically phoning it in as a character who should have far more layers.
I guess when it comes down to it, we do have to blame Sollina for not working from a stronger script, even though this movie has been in development for over a decade, but it’s also not too surprising after watching it why Paramount Pictures figured it would make more money selling it off to Amazon than releasing it theatrically.
Essentially, Without Remorse is another action-thriller with lots of bullets and explosions that still comes across as exceedingly dull and bland. Surely, Clancy’s books must be better than this to have built such a fanbase over the years.
Opening digitally and for download is Casimir Nozkowski’s THE OUTSIDE STORY (Samuel Goldwyn Films), starring the great Brian Tyree Henry, recently seen in Godzilla Vs. Kong, as editor and filmmaker Charles Young, who is getting over his break-up with his girlfriend Isha (Sonequa Martin-Greents) when he gets locked out of his apartment building. As he tries to get back in, he (and we) meet all sorts of strange and funny characters who may or may not help him.
I ended up really liking this movie a lot, because as with most of his characters, Henry creates a really likeable hero for us, and Nozkowski gives him a great story to really explore a lot more areas of humor than we get to see him do in most movies. This is pretty much a straight up comedy of errors, but it also offers quite a bit of poignancy through Charles’ interactions with various neighbors and them commenting on how he misses his girlfriend. (He broke up with her because she confessed to making out with another woman.) Oddly, I can relate to a lot of what Charles goes through, which definitely helped me connect more with his character.
Nozkowski’s fun script managed not only to get Henry on board, but also the likes of the great Sunita Mani as a beat cop writing up cars whose meters have expired and Matthew Maher, who you’ve seen in everything. The only real weak link as far as the ensemble was young Olivia Edward, who just isn’t up to the other actors in terms of the humor. I can understand why Nozkowski would want to include a young girl in the movie as one of Charles’ neighbors but that was my least favorite part of the film.
Otherwise, The Outside Story is a wonderful and lovely indie, showing off Brian Tyree Henry’s terrific range as a genuinely likable character, and I guess that makes it my favorite movie of this particular week.
Another movie opening this via streaming this week is Dave Grohl’s WHAT DRIVES US, which will be available via something called “The Coda Collection,” which I really have no idea what that is, and unfortunately, I also didn’t get to see this, because I’m sure I would have liked it as much as Grohl’s previous docs and the HBO series Sonic Highways. If I do find time to watch it, maybe I’ll add a few thoughts in an upcoming column.
Hitting Disney+ on Friday is the Soul prequel short, 22 Vs. EARTH, directed by Pixar editor Kevin Nolting, who I also interviewed. It features Tina Fey voicing her lead character from Soul, 22, and it takes place before she meets Joe Gardner as she’s trying to find a few young souls to help her in her boycott of going to Earth rather than remaining in the Great Before. It’s fun and quick (just six minutes) but it’s cute, and something obviously only meant for those who want to know more about her Soul character.
A movie I missed when it was released back in late February but will be available on DVD this week is Nicholas Jarecki’s CRISIS, a tense ensemble thriller about a different pandemic, the rise in opioid addiction and the huge criminal (and legal pharmaceutical) industry that feeds that addiction to the tune of billions of dollars a year. It features an impressive cast that includes Gary Oldman, Armie Hammer, Greg Kinnear, Evangeline Lilly, Lily-Rose Depp, and Michelle Rodriguez, and it’s a really strong dramatic thriller that reminded me a bit of Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic.
I have a feeling that all the issues Hammer was facing around the time (and still) may have prevented Jarecki’s movie from getting much publicity, but Hammer plays one of the three main characters, so if his presence bothers you, I can’t really do much about that. Hopefully that doesn’t put you off learning about a very serious situation facing many families, and Jarecki takes a tough situation and manages to explore it with a decent and entertaining movie. I also thought Lilly was fantastic as a mother trying to get over her own addiction when her son dies seemingly of an opiate overdose. She doesn’t believe it, so she starts her own investigation.(Hammer's federal agent also deals with a family member addicted to opiates, in this case his sister played by Lily Rose-Depp. Of course, Oldman is always great, and that’s the case here, too. It’s just another intense drama from the director of 2012’s Arbitrage that goes as far and deep into the topic of opioid addiction as that movie did with the stock market.
Also on digital this week is Michael Loven’s dark comedy-thriller MURDER BURY WIN (Gravitas Ventures) about three close friends trying to make a game, and it’s quite witty and entertaining. Also out digitally this week is Michael Parks Randa and Lauren Smitelli’s inclusive summer musical, BEST SUMMER EVER (Freestyle Digital Media), which is also kicking off this week’s ReelAbilities Film Festival on Thursday.
The new Apple TV+ series THE MOSQUITO COAST will also debut on that streamer service on Friday, while the very entertaining animated feature THE MITCHELLS VS. THE MACHINES, which I reviewed last week will stream on Netflix starting on Friday, as well.
This week also sees the start of the 50th Anniversary New Directors New Films at Film and Lincoln Center and MOMA (Museum of Modern Art), which I wrote about a few weeks ago, but unfortunately, there really isn’t much in there that interests me, so I haven’t seen anything.
Movies that I just wasn’t able to get to this week, mostly available digitally:
DUTY FREE (This is actually opening for a one week preview at New York’s reopened IFC Center)
WILDCAT (Saban Films)
THE RESORT (Vertical)
PERCY vs. GOLIATH (Saban Films/Paramount)
THE VIRTUOSO (Lionsgate)
FOUR GOOD DAYS (Vertical Entertainment)
GOLDEN ARM (Utopia Films)
That’s it for this week. I always feel a sigh of relief when I actually get to sit down and write this column, and I’m actually able to finish it. It feels like a bit of a pyrrhic victory, but I’m still not quite up to where I was last year in terms of watching and reviewing. We’ll see if things improve this summer. The next few weeks are absolutely slammed with new movies, too, because even though Black Widow has been delayed until July, there are a ton of movies still being released. Next week, the latest from Guy Ritchies, Wrath of Man, reuniting him with Jason Statham.
The Weekend Warrior 4/16/21: IN THE EARTH, JAKOB’S WIFE, GUNDA and LINCOLN CENTER REOPENS
This is hopefully gonna be a relatively lighter and more streamlined column, because I have so much going on over at Below the Line, including a full weekend of awards this weekend past and another even busier one coming up. Because of this, I wasn’t really able to watch nearly as much stuff as I would have liked and have written fewer than normal reviews. (I know you’ve heard this tune before, but unfortunately, this state will continue for at least the next week, but once Oscars are done and past, I can get back to this column.
The big news this week is that New York’s Film at Lincoln Center has reopened with a retrospective celebrating the 50th Anniversary of FilmLinc’s long-running collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art, New Directors/New Films, which will begin on April 28. You can see the full line-up of the 2021 New Directors/New Films here, though I’m not sure how much I’ll be covering this year. (see above) It will take place in the virtual cinemas of FilmLinc and MOMA for people across the country and for those in New York City at the reopened FilmLinc theaters.
Leading up to that date, there will be a two-week retrospective called New Directors/New Films at 50, which will screen at the FilmLinc theaters as well as on Virtual Cinema, and that line up is:
Duvidha dir. Mani Kaul
Following dir. Christopher Nolan
The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick dir. Wim Wenders
The Living End dir. Gregg Araki
Lucía dir. Humberto Solás
My Brother’s Wedding dir. Charles Burnett
Peppermint Candy dir. Lee Chang-dong
Playing Away dir. Horace Ové
Les Rendez-vous d’Anna dir. Chantal Akerman
Sleepwalk dir. Sara Driver
Twenty Years Later dir. Eduardo Coutinho
Speaking of festivals, apparently there is a Brazilian genre fest going on right now called Fantaspoa 2021 that takes place on the Brazilian streaming horror service Dark Flix.
I have family in Brazil including a filmmaking cousin so I wonder if they know about this, but they seem to have a lot of cool and interesting films to share… and someday I hope to watch some of them. :)
Let’s get into some of the theatrical releases, shouldn’t we?
Filmmaker Ben Wheatley (High-Rise, Free Fire) is back with his eco-thriller IN THE EARTH (Neon), which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. It stars Joel Fry and Ellora Torchia as Dr. Martin Lowery and Alma, two park rangers sent into the woods in search of missing researchers only to encounter an odd and eccentric hermit woodsman named Zach (Reece Shearsmith), who has lots of crazy ideas about nature and its effects on humans, so he proceeds to capture and torture the two rangers.
This is another one of Wheatley’s stranger films, one that he completely filmed and completed during the pandemic, and I’m not even sure what I can completely explain in the second half of the movie, not just due to spoilers but also because it just goes into some fairly out there places. But no mistake that this is true horror, especially when you see how the two main characters have to deal with the situation they found themselves in.
What’s interesting is that the story takes place during a pandemic but not necessarily the one we’re currently in, but as Martin and Alma get deeper into the woods, horrible things start happening. They’re attacked in their tents while sleeping and their shoes are stolen and then Martin gets a nasty cut on his foot that gets infected with something almost plant-like, which leads to a fairly tense and horrifying scene later on.
The movie shifts pretty drastically in the second half as the duo encounter another researcher named Olivia (Hayley Squires), who happens to be Zach’s wife AND Martin’s ex-girlfriend. Yeah, it’s that kind of movie, but it’s also one where it’s never really more than the two or three characters at a time. The movie can be slow at times but it always maintains the viewer’s interest in what is happening and what might happen next. And then it just gets so strange in that last act, really trippy and surreal and crazy with lots of fast-cut images and loud noises that really puts the viewer even further on edge. OH, and as you can see from the picture, Zach has an axe, which takes the film into places more akin to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and away from the more cerebral stuff.
Where In the Earth really transcends is that it’s just such a great looking movie, and when you have a composer like Clint Mansell providing the score, as he did with Wheatley’s High-Rise, then you end up with a movie that works quite well for what it’s trying to do, which is to astound, disorient and puzzle the viewer but in a way that makes them want to watch it again and try to figure out more with each viewing.
As weird as the movie is, I could see there being an audience for the movie, particularly when you consider how movies like The Witch and Hereditary and Midsommar and The Lighthouse have found a niche audience or auteur lovers. Oddly, all four of those movies were released by A24, offering further proof that NEON is trying to get in on their turn.
I’m not quite sure how many theaters NEON is putting In the Earth into, but Wheatley’s latest eco-thriller maybe a harder sell with no known stars, and it’s definitely gonna be looking to bring in cinephile and auteur-huggers more than the normal Joe or Jill off the street. I expect NEON will try to get the movie into at least 1,000 theaters with many screens and reopened movie houses looking for content, but I’m not sure I’d expect this to do that much better than last week’s Voyagers, but maybe $3 million or so. It just doesn’t have much chance against a mainstream movie like Godzilla vs. Kong.
Anyway, check it out. I’ll have an interview with Ben Wheatley over at Below the Line probably early next week.
Another movie I highly recommend for horror fans is Travis Stevens’ JAKOB’S WIFE (RLJEfilms/Shudder), which stars the terrific Barbara Crampton and equally great Larry Fessenden as Ann Fedder, a woman married to the local small town pastor (aka Jakob), who feels that she hasn’t been able to live her full life while married to him for 30 years. When she has an encounter with a mysterious figure known as “The Master,” she finds herself gaining powers that allow her to live a new life but it has dark effects on her and everyone else in the town.
One thing I probably should mention is that I’ve known Larry Fessenden for a long time -- a friend of mine co-starred in his early movie Habit -- and I’m just a huge fan of Barbara Crampton from her classic horror films and more recent ones like my pal Ted Geoghegan’s We Are Still Here, which starred both of the actors.. And was produced by director Travis Stevens. See, how it all comes together?
This is another movie I don’t want to say too much about, as to not spoil your enjoyment of watching the various elements coming into place. Fessenden and Crampton are great as always, but I particularly like how Stevens has made a fairly contemporary horror movie that throws back to classic tropes like Cronenberg body horror and straight-out giallo blood flying everywhere.
I will say that the story involves a bit of a twist on the vampire movie, but more in vein of the weirdness from that 1988 Nicholas Cage movie, Vampire’s Kiss, versus anything like a studio Dracula movie, but it gives the two actors (especially Crampton) a chance to shine and really show different aspects of their abilities. Oh, also there’s lots of rats… lots and lots of rats...
Jakob’s Wife is a pretty fine independent horror film that certainly will deal a number of shrieks and squeals, and though it’s opening in theaters, On Demand and digital, much like most of RLJEfilms/Shudder’s offerings, I wish there were more of the local genre movie houses in which to watch it with a crowd cause even the SXSW Premiere probably wasn’t the same without an audience. Sigh, when will this fucking pandemic be over?!?
Oh, and by the way, I have an interview with Stevens over at Below the Line, so check that out to learn more.
Before we get to the rest of the new movies, let’s check out what’s going on at a few of my local digs, the Metrograph and Film Forum. Metrograph is just wrapping up another Aaron Sorkin retrospective, just three movies this time that wrapped with The Trial of the Chicago 7 (again) last night. On Friday, you can catch Thomas Vinterberg’s Oscar-nominated Another Round, starring Mads Mikkelsen, running as part of its digital Live Screenings series… I keep saying and will keep saying until you list. It’s $5 a month to join and watch a ton of cool movies!
Michael and Christian Blackwood’s Monk in Europe runs until next Monday and then there’s a few others also running through the weekend. Just click on that link above and join already!
At the Film Forum, Hitchcock’s great Rear Window is just wrapping up today, and I’m bummed I didn’t get a chance to see it on the big screen again. Starting Friday is Alec Guinness and Kind Hearts and Coronets, which had a pretty successful run at Film Forum in the before-times. The doc Gunda (right below) is also starting there in its reopened theaters as is the Norwegian Oscar entry Hope, starring the always great Stellan Skarsgard.
Victor (Aquarela) Kossakovsky’s acclaimed documentary GUNDA (NEON), which played most of the festivals last year is finally getting a bonafide theatrical release. It’s a black and white cinema verité that follows the lives of a number of farm animals, a mother pig, some chickens and a herd of cows. As a fan of The Biggest Little Farm, this is a movie that I’m apt to enjoy since I love nature docs, but it also involves staring at a screen (mostly my TV set) watching animals, which I really have to be in the right mood for, and it’s really been tough to get into that mood in the past year.
Sebastian Stan and Denise Gough star in Argyris Papadimitropoulos’s MONDAY (IFC Films) as Americans living in Athens who meet and have a whirlwind weekend one hot summer. Gough plays Chloe, whose time in Greece is coming to an end, but she has to decide whether to pass up a big job back home to see if the weekend she had with Stan’s Mickey is worth exploring and turning into something more serious. I do hope to get to this one eventually, but who knows when?
Gabriel Carrer and Reese Eveneshen’s FOR THE SAKE OF VICIOUS (Dread) stars Lora Burke as Romina (Lora Burke), single mother and nurse, who returns home after a late shift on Halloween night to find a maniac hiding in her home with a beat-up hostage. When a mob of intruders invade Romina’s home, the three have to work together to survive. The movie will hit theaters on Friday, be available via On Demand on Tuesday and then hit Blu-ray on May 4, so you’ll have lots of options to see it.
Barry Pepper stars in Brad (“24,” “Homeland”) Turner’s TRIGGER POINT (Screen Media), which will hit theaters this Friday and be On Demand on April 23. In it, he plays retired U.S. special operative Nicolas Brazer, who worked as a shadow assassin for the government but disappeared into a life of solitude after being accused of killing his team. Two years later, he’s drawn back into the world to clear his name and maybe turn a new leaf.
I don’t have a ton to say about this film, especially cause we just saw it in a much better version of this movie called Nobody. Pepper’s a great actor and that’s probably what saves Trigger Point from being a total loss, but it’s a fairly dry by-the-books crime thriller with a fairly generic plot that we’ve seen plenty of times before and often quite a bit better.
Also out this week is Christo Brock’s craft beer documentary BREWMANCE (Giant Pictures), which looks at… you guessed it… the history and obsession that a number of brewers have with craft beer. This is a fine doc, but like Gunda, I have to be in the right mood for it, and I’m just so busy that I never was able to just sit down and just concentrate on watching this.
Alan Yuen, the screenwriter of New Police Storyand director of Firestorm return with THE ROOKIES (Shout! Studios!), starring Alu Wang and Milla Jovovich. Wang plays daredevil and extreme sports lover Zhao Feng, who gets caught up in an illegal trade scheme when he crosses paths with Jovovich’s Special Agent Bruce and she recruits him for the Order of the Phantom Knighthood. The group is dedicated to fighting evil in all its incarnations, and it’s a ragtag outfit of four rookies with different skills. This sounds like my kind of jam, and at any other time, I would have had more time to watch and review it. Two weeks before the Oscars is not that time.
Devereux Millburn’s HONEYDEW (Dark Star Pictures/Bloody Disgusting) stars Sawyer Spielberg and Malin Barr as a young couple forced to seek shelter in the home of an aging farmer (Barbara Kingsley from “Jessica Jones”) and her odd son until they start having strange hallucinations and cravings. It’s a little odd that two horror sites, Dread Central and Bloody Disgusting, have movies out this week as they venture in distribution. But I just didn’t have time to see either movie. Sorry, guys!
And then the other movies I wasn’t able to get to this week include:
BEAST BEAST (Vanishing Angle)
VANQUISH (Lionsgate)
NIGHT OF THE SICARIO (Saban Films)
BILL TRAYLOR: CHASING GHOSTS (Kino Lorber)
OUR TOWNS (HBO/HBO Max)
GOODBYE BUTTERFLY (Gravitas Ventures)
That’s it for this week. Next week is actually the release of the new Mortal Kombat from Warner Bros. although I’m expecting a very busy weekend with awards over at Below the Line, so we’ll see how far I get. Wish me luck!
The Weekend Warrior 4/9/21: VOYAGERS, THUNDER FORCE, HELD, THE POWER
Well, things certainly picked up last week, didn’t they? We finally had a relatively big hit with Kong vs. Godzilla, and by that, I mean that it made more in its first five days than most of the other pandemic releases have made during their entire theatrical runs. Sure, it’s great start and a good sign for the recovering theatrical economy, but it’s just a mere start. It will be a long time before theaters can be safe for larger crowds of 50% or more and that’s probably going to be needed to counter-balance the cost of keeping these theaters open. L.A., which reopened after NYC, seems to be going that route, while Cuomo still seems to care more about other businesses and artforms. It’s been a month since NYC theaters opened at 25% capacity or 50 people tops, and other theaters and venues are opening with up to 150 people, so I’m not sure what Cuomo is waiting for. It’s fine, even if it’s the same old shit we’ve been dealing with for a year.
The widest release of the week is Neil Burger’s original sci-fi thriller VOYAGERS (Liongate), starring Colin Farrell, Tye Sheridan, Lily-Rose Depp and Fionn Whitehead (from Dunkirk), and this is an interesting high-concept movie that feels a bit like “Lord of the Flies” in space. Set in 2063, Farrell plays a counselor put in charge of a group of bioengineered teens shot into space in order to populate a new world hundreds of light years away, a trip that will take them 90 years. Things soon start to go wrong as the kids learn that the “blue” drink they’ve been taking is meant to repress their emotions and urges so that they don’t have so much sex that the cramped ship becomes overpopulated before they get to the new earth. Two of the teens, Sheridan’s Christopher and Whitehead’s Zack, discover this info about the “blue” and decide to stop taking it, and then other stuff happens.
Voyagers is definitely a fairly high concept space movie that you’re likely to appreciate more if you don’t know too much about what happens as it goes along. Colin Farrell has a decent role as the mentor and overseer of these bioengineered kids in space, but at times, it goes into fairly expected places once the kids start getting off the “blue,” creating a conflict between Christopher and Zac, especially since both have their eye on Depp’s Sela.
Of course, comparisons will be made to the fairly recent outer space movie Passengers, mainly due to the long space travel trip, but this is more about a lot of young people cramped into a spaceship and testing out their muscle as they start getting physical in more ways than one. The look and feel of the film is partially what makes the film so intriguing, as it seems to be influenced by films like George Lucas’ THX-1138 or of course, 2001: A Space Odyssey, but this is a far more primal film rather than one that necessarily tries to be cerebral.
Although the performances are a little flat, possibly as a deliberate decision, the film does build to a fairly satisfying climax and ending, and I quite enjoyed Neil Burger’s exploration of more literary science fiction and world building than other films of this ilk.
As far as box office, I wish I was a little more confident in the movie, although I don’t even know if this will get released into 2,000 theaters by Lionsgate, and there’s still that relatively huge Godzilla vs Kong, which is likely to drop 55% or more in its second weekend but that’s still a second weekend of $14.5 million, which isn’t attainable by Voyagers. I figure this will be shooting for second place with around $4 or 5 million just based on the genre and lack of much else for young people in theaters.
You can also read my interview with Neil Burger over at Below the Line
Melissa McCarthy and Octavia Spencer star in Ben Falcone’s new superhero comedy, THUNDER FORCE, which will stream on Netflix starting Friday, and while I’m under embargo until then, there isn’t a ton that I can say as you read this. McCarthy and Spencer play Lydia Berman and Emily Stanton, two very different people we meet when they’re young girls living in a world where people who have powers are known as Miscreants, and they dream about having powers themselves but as teens, they have a falling out. Many decades later, they reconnect and Emily has a teen daughter Tracy (Taylor Mosby) and the two end up taking part in an experiment to get super powers themselves, sort of. Thunder Force hits Netflix on Friday and hopefully I’ll have a review to share just as it goes live.
MINI-REVIEW (Coming Soon!)
We have quite a bit of horror this week, including HELD (Magnet Releasing), the new thriller from the directors of The Gallows and its sequel, Travis Cluff and Chris Lofing. The movie stars Jill Awbrey, who also wrote the script, as Emma Barrett, a woman in a marriage that’s having problems but is really put to the test when she and her husband Henry (Bart Johnson) decide to spend a romantic weekend away and end up trapped in a luxury home by a malevolent voice commanding them to do whatever he tells them.
I was really hoping to like this one because I was hoping for it to be an original take on the home terror genre, but it opens with a fairly ugly date rape sequence that doesn’t seem to do much for the story when it’s introduced. At first, I thought that maybe that’s an important set-up for what’s to happen later, but it’s actually a bit of a skeevy red herring. This story really begins when Awbrey’s Emma arrives at a luxurious house and waits for her husband to arrive. The first night they’re there, a mysterious man in a leather mask visits them and actually changes Emma into a different night gown. Once the couple realizes that they were drugged and something happened to them while they slept, a voice over an intercom starts to make demands on them, giving them massive shocks when they disobey.
There’s so much potential in this premise but the fact is that neither Awbrey nor Johnson are particularly good actors, and while I’ve never actually seen The Gallows, I wasn’t particularly impressed by Cluff nor Lofing as directors either. They do a fine job with creating the proper mood and environment but there’s aspects to the movie that feel so skeevy that it was really hard to get into much of this.
While Held isn’t violent enough to be considered “torture porn” perse, there’s something quite voyeuristic about it that I found disturbing and not in a good way that a thriller might make you feel uncomfortable. The situation gets worse and worse, almost painful to watch at times, leading to a pretty awful Stepford Wives rip-off of a twist that really seems to come out of nowhere.
While Held might start off like it another one of those #MeToo revenge thrillers, by the end, it becomes far clearer that this was not a particularly well-thought premise that just goes downhill as the filmmakers try to prove themselves to be far more clever than they actually are. The whole thing just feels kind of ugly and unpleasant.
While we’re into the horror section of this week’s Weekend Warrior, streaming on Shudder starting Thursday is Corrina Faith’s THE POWER, a period horror film starring Rose Williams as Val, the newest matron at a big scary hospital during wartime in London when power is being shut off at night to conserve energy.
This very eerie horror film already has a pretty daunting setting by being set in one of those old hospitals during wartime, where there isn’t a ton of things going on but when the power goes out, things start getting crazy as Val starts seeing and experiencing things in the dark, only really having a gas lantern to light her way.
I wasn’t really familiar with Rose Williams, but she gives an amazing performance as a seemingly innocent matron who is particularly scared of the dark and who gets thrown into so many horrifying incidents that she goes through this remarkable transformation from the introduction until the end. There’s also a great group of characters around her, including the evil blonde Babs (Emma Rigby), a bully from Val’s past (a real c-word) and a number of creepy male characters with seemingly lecherous intentions. Another level is brought to the mix by the young girl named Saba (Shakira Rahman) who Val bonds with and tries to protect from whatever malevolent spirit is haunting the hospital.
Faith’s debut feature is quite an achievement, and it certainly feels like she and Williams are two women to watch, because they’re destined to do interesting projects in the future. In the meantime, this is another great offering by the horror streamer that’s really been delivering the goods the past two years. (I also point out how much I loved the score by Gazelle Twin, who also scored the Blumhouse/Amazon horror film Nocturne.)
I haven’t had a chance to see Oliver Hermanus’ BAFTA-nominated MOFFIE (IFC Films) yet, but it’s definitely on my radar as a film set in 1981 South Africa as the white minority government is in a conflict on the southern Angolan border. Nicholas Van der Swart, like all white boys over 16, has to spend two years of compulsory military service to defend the Apartheid regime from “die swart gevaar” (the so-called black danger) is at its height but Nicholas must face the brutality of the army as he makes a connection with his fellow recruit. Definitely gonna try to watch this when time permits, although this coming weekend, there are four awards shows I’m covering for Below the Line.
On Sunday, I watched this amazing independent coming-of-age film called GIANTS BEING LONELY (Gravitas Ventures), written and directed by Grear Patterson, which played at the Metrograph as part of its Live Screening series, plus it will also be released via digital download this week. It stars brothers Jack Irving and Ben Irving as small-town football heroes Bobby and Adam, both of whom have caught the eye of Lily Gavin’s Caroline, but both boys have family issues, Adam whose father (Gabe Fazio) is the coach, and Bobby who is sleeping with the coach’s wife. It’s a pretty amazing movie that reminded me of early Richard Linklater, because it’s so raw and honest in dealing with young people in a small town that goes into some really dark places as it goes along. It’s now available via DVD, Blu-ray and On Demand.
Also, fans of Leos Carax’s Holy Motors will get to see the movie as part of the Metrograph’s Live Screenings program from now through next Tuesday. ($5 a month for a digital membership!) Also playing at the Metrograph until Monday is Michael and Christian Blackwood’s doc Monk (1968) about Thelonious Monk, which is running until Monday and then followed by Monk in Europe starting next Tuesday. Orson Welles’ The Stranger will start streaming Monday for a week On Demand as part of the Metrograph’s “Welles Monday.”
As mentioned last week, New York’s Film Forum is also reopened, and I watched Fellini’s La Strada this past Sunday, which has been extended until April 15. Hitchcock’s Rear Window will also play for a week starting Friday, while Pedro Almodovar’s The Human Voice and A Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and the doc The Truffle Hunters will continue in the theater, as well as the Film Forum’s terrific Virtual Cinema programming, which has added Eric Rohmer’s A Tale of Springtime.
Also, now available via digital is Michael Carnick’s THE FORBIDDEN WISH (Conduit Now), a two-hander drama that follows a young man named Isaac (John Berchtold) who visits an Ethiopian born rabbi named Nate (Sammy Rotibi) on the eve of Yom Kippur, Isaac wanting Nate to read him the Mourner’s Kaddish. I have to say that part of me really hated this movie because Berchtold just isn’t as strong an actor as Rotibi, but the writing itself is quite wearisome and not great, although it did grow on me as the scene between the two gets more dramatic and emotional. Still, it’s hard not to imagine this more as a filmed stage play then an actual movie, and maybe I just didn't understand what Carnick was trying to say with this meeting of two men from different backgrounds.
Streaming on Amazon Prime Video this Friday is the new horror anthology series, THEM, which I haven’t watched yet but hearing mixed things. Hope to write more about this once I get a chance to watch.
Other films out this week include Charlene Favier’s #MeToo drama Slalom (Kino Lorber), which will play at the Quad Cinema in New York, and Khyentse Norbu’s Looking for a Lady with Fangs and a Moustache (Abramorama), which will be available digitally.
That’s it for this week. Next week was supposed to be the release of Warner Bros’ new Mortal Kombat movie, but that was delayed a week, which means the only wide-ish release is Ben Wheatley’s In the Earth (NEON), which premiered at Sundance earlier this year.
The Weekend Warrior 3/19/21: SXSW, Zack Snyder’s Justice League,The Courier, City of Lies, Happily and More!
Remember a couple weeks back when I stated the plan was to bring back the Weekend Warrior as a regular weekly series again? Yeah, well if you looked for a column last week and wondered what happened, I just didn’t have time to write one. And I also just haven’t been able to get back on the ball in terms of writing reviews. It just takes a lot of time to watch all the movies let alone review them the way I did last year. I honestly have no idea how I did it last year, but things have been busier than ever at Below the Line, which does throw a bit of a spanner into any extracurricular plans.
The big event this week is the annual SXSW Film Festival, which I’ll be taking part in virtually, and somewhat tangentially, watching as much as I can while still doing other things. It’s been a while since I’ve attended SXSW in person, but it tends to have great docs, especially music docs. In fact, this year’s Opening Night Film is the documentary, Demi Lovato: Dancing with the Devil, about Demi Lovato’s drug overdose from 2018 and its aftermath. Other music docs of interest include Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliché, about the late frontwoman from early punk band X-Ray Spex through the eyes of her daughter; Mary Wharton’s doc Tom Petty, Somewhere You Feel Free made from archival footage of the late singer making his 1994 record “Wildflowers”; Alone Together about Charlie XCX’s pandemic record; Under the Volcano about George Martin’s AIR Studios Montserrat; and it gives another chance to see Edgar Wright’s excellent, The Sparks Brothers, which was picked up by Focus Features after Sundance. There’s also an amazing doc about Selma Blair’s fight with MS, Introducing, Selma Blair, which is equal parts heartbreaking and inspirational.
SXSW also has pretty solid Midnighters, and there’s a number of those I’m also looking forward to, including Travis Stevens’ Jakob’s Wife, starring horror legends Larry Fassenden and Barbara Crampton, who were so great in my buddy Ted Geoghegan’s We Are Still Here. (No coincidence since Stevens produced that movie.) And I hope to watch a few others like Lee Haven Jones’ The Feast, Jacob Gentry’s Broadcast Signal Intrusion, and Alex Noyer’s Sound of Violence. We’ll see how much I get to see this week, cause it’s a lot of movies over only a couple days, basically from Tuesday through Saturday.
Closer to home at the Metrograph, the still-closed movie theater is doing a virtual series called “Bill Murray X6” which has already shown Lost in Translation and What about Bob? With Rushmore screening until Thursday, and then The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou available through Friday. Become a digital member for just $5 a month! This past weekend I saw a really amazing 7-part doc series called Untitled Pizza Movie by David Shapiro. In fact, I stayed up late on Sunday to watch the whole thing since it was leaving the digital screeners, but it’s a very entertaining, intriguing and personal story about the director, his friend and partner in crime Leeds, who he went around to different NYC pizza shops in the ‘90s trying to find the perfect slice, and then they come across pizzaman Andrew Belluci at the world-famous Lombardi’s in Soho. The project that took over 20 years to make follows what happened to the three men, but mainly Leeds and Belluci as they have ups and downs that ultimately leads to Belluci starting his own pizza joint in Queens. Everything that happens in between is quite fascinating.
I saw a couple other movies this past weekend including Robin Wright’s Land, which I quite enjoyed, and the rom-com Long Weekend, which came out last Friday but I totally missed. Land is a pretty amazing directorial debut that’s mostly a one-woman show with her character alone in the wilderness until she runs into trouble and meets Demian Bichir’s kindly Samaritan and they become friends. Directed by Stephen Basilone, Long Weekend stars Finn Wittrock and Zoe Chao in what starts as a meet cute rom-com and turns into something much deeper with a couple sci-fi-tinged twists, a bit like Palm Springs, but much more grounded. I loved the two leads and how Basilone made a romantic comedy that actually was romantic and very funny, as well. Both movies I recommend.
Getting into some of the streamer offerings this week, ZACK SNYDER’s JUSTICE LEAGUE will hit HBO Max on Thursday, so we can finally see whether or not that extra money and work paid off. I’ll be reviewing this over at Below the Line, so won’t spend too much time here. I figure that anyone who has been waiting for this will watch it, as will anyone who has been curious about it. As you can read from my review, I was quite impressed by the film as an achievement in finishing what is clearly a far superior film to the 2017 theatrical release. Some of the highlights include great stuff between Ray Fisher’s Cyborg and his father, a far more fun introduction to The Flash that was cut from the 2017 release and just some insanely crazy good action. I can’t wait to watch the movie again.
Kicking off on Friday is the anticipated Marvel Studios series, THE FALCON AND THE WINTER SOLDIER (Disney), bringing back the title characters played by Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan, who were introduced in one of the MCU’s better movies, Captain America: The Winter Soldier. I was sent the first episode and unfortunately, there’s an embargo until Thursday afternoon, but I do think that MCU fans are gonna be thrilled with the first episode, especially with the Falcon’s opening action sequence, which is like something right out of the movies.
Okay, fine, so let’s get to some new movies and some real reviews…
Probably the movie with the widest release this weekend will be THE COURIER (Lionsgate/Roadside Attractions), starring Benedict Cumberbatch, which I’m guessing will be in 1,000 or so theaters. The movie premiered at Sundance way back in 2020 under the significantly worse title of “Ironbark” with plans to release it later in the year, but then COVID happened. I’m not sure if Roadside Attractions planned for this to be an awards movie, but after a few delays, releasing it in mid-March just days after the Oscar nominations, I’m guessing probably not?
Directed by Dominic Cooke (On Chesil Beach) from a screenplay by Tom O’Connor (The Hitman’s Bodyguard… wait, WHAT?), this Cold War spy thriller set in the early ‘60s stars Cumberbatch as Greville Wynne, a British businessman who is coerced by agents from MI6 and the CIA (repped by Rachel Brosnahan) to smuggle Russian secrets from military man Oleg Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze). Greville’s trips to Moscow start getting more and more dangerous under the shadow of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and his wife (the always great Jessie Buckley) wants him to stop taking the trips. It all leads up to a pretty exciting second act as the KGB starts to figure out what Greville and Oleg have been up to and work to put a stop to it.
I have to admit that as much as I enjoy a good spy-thriller, a lot of this reminded me of Cumberbatch’s earlier film Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – yes, the John Le Caree adaptation, which I was never a particularly big fan of. This has similarities in that it starts out fairly slow, making me think this might be one of those well-made, well-acted movies that are just plain boring cause the subject doesn’t interest me. I’m sure when this was greenlit, there was probably more relevance to the situation between the U.S. and Russia, although this is obviously a British production and maybe something better to watch on the Beeb than in a movie theater.
In general, the stuff with the two men and their families tends to be the best part of the movie. I wasn’t familiar with Merab Ninidze beforehand, but he’s a really good actor who holds his own in scenes with Cumberbatch. Although Cumberbatch’s performance is significantly better here than in The Mauritanian, that’s definitely a better movie, so even in the last act which sees Wynne in a Russian jail, it just doesn’t compare. This is the second film with Rachel Brosnahan in which she didn’t really impress me much after hearing how great she is on Mrs. Maisel. Even so, the movie did make me want to go back and rewatch the beginning again to see if maybe I wasn’t as focused on it, as it should be.
As far as box office, I don’t have much hope for this making more than $2 or 3 million this weekend, since it seems more like a prestige platform release that would have to build audiences from rave reviews or positive word-of-mouth. Coming out so long after its festival debut (kinda like that Thomas Edison movie a few years back) may have helped people forget about the midling festival reviews. Even so, this movie just doesn’t have much buzz or interest from #FilmTwitter who has had its tongue so far up the superhero movie ass this week between Zack Snyder’s Justice League and Marvel’s The Falcon and the Winter Soldier to pay much attention to this. (Hey, facts is facts!)
Johnny Depp and Forrest Whitaker star in Brad Furman’s crime-thriller CITY OF LIES (Saban Films), which is about the real-life search for the killer of the Notorious B.I.G. aka Biggie Smalls with Depp playing Detective Russell Poole, who ended up on the case in 1997, and Whitaker playing reporter Jack Jackson, doing a story on Smalls for the 20thanniversary of the unsolved murder.
Based on the book “Labyrinth” (the movie’s original title), it’s a story that takes place in two time periods, Los Angeles in the ‘90s after the Rodney King beating and L.A. riots and how it’s made the criminal element that surrounds rap mogul Suge Night. It begins with Poole investigating the death of a black police officer named Gaines, shot by a white police officer (Shea Whigham) in what is seemingly a road rage incident. As Poole investigates, he learns about police corruption in the force including a number of officers tied directly to Knight.
As Jackson interviews Poole to try and find out who killed Biggie, we flashback to Poole’s investigation and interaction with some of those corrupt cops and being put into extremely dangerous situations. The movie isn’t bad, especially the scenes between Whitaker and Depp, who gives a far more grounded performance than we’ve seen from him in recent years. Even so, the performance that really impressed me was Toby Huss as Poole’s superior, who just brings something new to the tough head detective role we haven’t really seen.
Regardless of what you think of Depp’s activities off-camera, this is a fairly solid crime thriller (as was Scott Cooper’s Black Mass), and though you never actually get to see Biggie, Tupac or Suge Night, it’s an interesting examination into a period in L.A. that seems so long ago but still rings true to what’s been going on in the last year.
BenDavid Grabinski’s HAPPILY (Saban/Paramount) is a dark comedy-thriller starring Joel McHale and Kerry Bishé as Tom and Janet, a happily married couple who annoy their friends by still having sex on the regular whenever they possibly can. In fact, their friends decide to uninvite Tom and Janet to their planned couples’ weekend because they’re so annoyed by them. One day, a mysterious man (played by Stephen Root) shows up at Tom and Janet’s house, one thing leads to another and they kill and bury him. Thinking that the man’s visit might be part of a friend’s prank, they go to the planned couples’ trip, trying to figure out if the prankster has gotten suspicious about what they’ve done.
For the sake of transparency, I met Grabinski at my very first Sundance ever as he was friends with some of my colleagues, but I never spent a ton of time talking to him. This film impressed me, since it’s a prtty strong debut from him, one that benefits greatly from a strong cast that includes Paul Scheer, Breckin Meyer (who I didn’t even recognize!), Charlyne Yi, Natalie Morales and more, making for a really solid ensemble dark comedy that reminded me of the tone of last year’s The Hunt or Ike Barinholtz’s The Oath or a great lesser-seen movie from last year, Robert Schwartzman’s The Argument. Dark comedy isn’t for everyone, and this is definitely a little mean-spirited at times, but more importantly, it’s very funny and tends to get crazier and crazier as it goes along.
More importantly, I loved Grabinski’s musical choices from Devo’s “Working in a Coal Mine” to not one but two OMD songs, and great use of Public Image Limited as well. The way Grabinski puts this together comes across like a hipper and fresher Hitchcock, and while it might not be for everyone, I could totally see this killing at a genre fest like Fantastic Fest or even this week’s SXSW. It’s clever and original and rather intriguing how Grabinski puts all the various pieces together.
Hitting Shudder on Thursday is Elza Kephart’s horror-comedy SLAXX (Shudder) about a possessed pair of jeans brought to life to punish the practices of a trendy clothing company, which it does by terrorizing the staff locked in overnight. Didn’t get to watch this before getting bogged down in SXSW but definitely looking forward to it.
Another horror film coming out this week is the horror anthology PHOBIAS (Vertical), exec. produced by the filmmaking team “Radio Silence” (Ready or Not) with segments directed by Camilla Belle, Maritte Lee Go, Joe Sill, Jess Varley and Chris von Hoffman. The stories follow five dangerous patients suffering from extreme phobias at a government facility with a crazed doctor trying to weaponize their fears.
Jeremy Piven stars in Paolo Pilladi’s LAST CALL (IFC Films) playing real estate developer Mick, who returns to his old Philly neighborhood and must decide whether to resurrect his family bar or raze it. I actually watched a few minutes of this, but apparently, IFC Films isn’t allowing reviews, so I have nothing more to say about the movie beyond the fact that it’s coming out on Friday.
Opening at the newly reopened Film Forum – currently doing a hybrid of in-person and virtual cinema – is Chris McKim’s doc WOJNAROWICZ: F**K YOU F*GGOT F**KER (Kino Lorber), premiering virtually on Friday. It’s about David Wojnarowicz, one of the loudest voices in the ACT-Up movement during the ‘80s who died of AIDS himself in 1992. (Correction: Film Forum actually isn’t reopening until April 2.)
A few other things this week include Aengus James’ doc AFTER THE DEATH OF ALBERT LIMA hitting Crackle about Paul Lima, a son obsessed with capturing his father’s murderer who has remained at large in Honduras due to a failed legal system. Because of this, Paul travels to the Honduras with two bounty hunters to find and capture the killer.
Lastly, streaming on Topic Thursday, there’s Parliament, directed by Elilie Noblet and Jeremie Sein, about a young man named Samy who arrives in Brussels after the Brexit vote trying to get a job into the European Parliament without really knowing how it works.
That’s all for this week. It might be a while before I can get The Weekend Warrior back into some sort of fighting weekly shape, but I’m doing the best I can right now, so let me know if you’re reading any of this.
The Weekend Warrior Is Back!!! Raya and the Last Dragon, Chaos Walking and More
Welcome back to the Weekend Warrior!
This is probably going to be a little different from any of my previous columns, because New York City theaters reopen on Friday, and I swore that once they do, I would be writing about box office again. But this will also essentially be a previous column, so it will include reviews, it will include festivals and repertory series, and basically, whatever the hell I want to write about.
But let’s be realistic here. While there are a lot of movie theaters in New York City, not all of them will open, and they’ll all still have a capacity ceiling at 25% or 50 people in the larger theaters. Many of the larger multiplexes like AMC will be able to show films on two, three or more screenings to be able to make up for the limited capacity, but smaller theaters and those who have been doing well with the virtual cinema may remain closed. I know that the Angelika will be reopening to show some of the indies that haven’t had a theatrical release in NYC yet like Minari, and the IFC Center is reopening but with insanely strict protocols. (Don’t you DARE take off your mask even if you’re watching a three-hour movie! The good news is that they’re showing a lot of great movies on reopening including a comedy series that includes a number of Lynn Shelton movies.)
There’s also the issue of New Yorkers who are still petrified of being out in public, even those who have already been vaccinated and are possibly spending time in congregate settings that are just as likely to cause COVID spread than movie theaters. (I’m not gonna go on a rant about the egotistical and elitist film critics and journalists who have been ranting about movie theaters reopening for the past six months – for some reason, they think they’re as important as essential workers. Guess what, NAME REDACTED, you’re not.)
The big release of the weekend is the Disney animated movie RAYA AND THE LAST DRAGON, which will hit probably around 2,400 theaters on Friday as well as be available for a premium on Disney+. I honestly don’t know a ton about this premium streaming release, but this is the second one after last year’s Mulan, which came out (better sit down for this) six months ago!
This magical fantasy adventure centers around Raya (a teen girl voiced by Kelly Marie Tran), who is trying to save her world that has been relegated to dust by the destruction of a valuable magical gem that contains destructive spirits imprisoned there by the legendary dragons. When Raya finds the last dragon, Sihsu (voiced by Awkwafina), the two of them must travel across the land collecting the separated pieces of the gem to reassemble them and restore their world. Raya is thwarted along the way by her arch-nemesis Namaari (Gemma Chan) who wants to reunite the gem pieces to help her own city of Fang.
(Raya is preceded by the animated short Us Again, which is a nice wordless short about a cranky old man who reflects back on his younger days dancing with his wife. It’s okay, nothing particularly memorable.)
Raya and the Last Dragon, on the other hand, is pretty wonderful, a mix of action, adventure, magic and humor, directed by Don Hall (Big Hero Six) and Carlos Lopez Estrada (Blindspotting) in a way that blends those disparate elements in fun ways. I’ll freely admit that I was a little worried that Akwafina’s schtick was going to annoy me, but after a while her wise-cracking dragon grows on you. In fact there are actually so many other funny characters to add to the laughs that the more brought in the mix on Raya and Sihsu’s journey, the more enjoyable the film gets.
One of the reasons the film works as well as it does is that unlike last year’s Onward, it wasn’t just the two characters and what they had to offer but how their situation changes as it goes along and they visit different cities. I was pretty surprised by how well the film keeps you entertained and invested in the journey.
I also absolutely loved the score by Thomas Newton Howard, which may be even better than his score for News of the World, which I honestly think he’ll get another Oscar nomination for. This is a film that explores all sorts of emotions as well as its Southeast Asian myths, so I feel that I was always going to be a complete and total patsy for this movie since it combines a lot of things I like such as fantasy and Asian mythology. In that sense, Raya is also a nice companion to the recent Mulan, which made my Top 10 last year, but sadly never even got a nominal theatrical release.
So let’s talk about box office, something I haven’t done in almost a year. Last weekend, Warner Bros’ Tom and Jerry had a fairly spectacular opening of $13.7 million. Raya is the first new wide release Disney movie since Pixar’s Onward literally a year ago. That ended up opening to $39 million in 4,310 theaters but only grossed $61.5 million domestic after its legs were cut short by COVID one week later. Raya will likely open in about 2,500 theaters by comparison and that’s with limited capacity for safety, but it should fare decently against the second weekend of Tom & Jerry, and I could easily see it bringing in $15 million or even as much as $18 million, but again, we’re in the baby steps part of the reopening, and things are going to start slowly and keep building as the vaccine continues rolling out.
Being released theatrically by Lionsgate this Friday is CHAOS WALKING, the adaptation of Patrick Ness’ future-set young adult novel The Knife of Never Letting Go, which stars Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley. Holland plays Todd Hewitt, a young man living in a world with no women where men’s thoughts can be perceived by everyone around them. One day, he discovers a mysterious girl named Viola (Ridley), when she crash lands on this planet but her very presence puts Viola’s life in danger, so Todd agrees to accompany her to find her own people.
Yeah, where do I even begin with the latest film from director Doug Liman that was probably filmed two or three years ago and was being delayed even before COVID came along? That’s already a bad sign, but when see how “The Noise,” the way that we hear all of characters’ thinking emerges, it immediately feels like it’s gonna be a problem. Sure enough, it’s such an awkward plot device to watch smoke billowing from the heads of the various characters as we hear their thoughts that it takes most of the movie to get used to it, and yet, it’s still so comically inept a concept that you can’t help but laugh when Holland continually rants, “My Name is Todd Hewitt,” over and over to keep Ridley’s Viola to hear his pubescent teen boy thoughts on experiencing his first girl.
The thing is that the scenes with just Holland and Ridley aren’t bad, but when you have a movie with actors like Mads Mikkelsen, David Oyelowo, Demian Bechir and Cynthia Erivo, it’s disappointing that they can’t elevate the movie above anything other than the most obvious sci-fi (and Western) pastiches. Mikkelsen is the town mayor who is so obviously another bad guy, that he doesn’t bother to put too much into his performance cause we’ve seen him do it so many times before.
Liman is more than a competent filmmaker but he clearly is unaware of how watching clouds pool around the heads of characters as we hear and see their thoughts become material, and even the introduction of the particularly silly-looking aliens – called, get this, the “Spackle” -- makes you forget that this is a sci-fi film from the director of Edge of Tomorrow (or whatever it ended up being called). It’s not even particularly surprising when we find out what really happened to the women in Todd’s community.
I have a feeling that the problems within Chaos Walking come straight from the Patrick Ness source material and the fact that he decided to adapt it himself may have made him tone-deaf to how hard it is to make the film’s central premise work without eliciting guffaws even from the most dedicated or devout fans.
This is also opening in IMAX theaters this weekend, and when it comes to New York, that might be the ideal way to see it (if you so choose) since it’s generally bigger theaters with a maximum of fifty people. Honestly, I don’t think Chaos Walking will make more than $5 million this weekend even in what should be over 2,000 theaters and with the presumed star power of Holland and Ripley from their franchise work. This could be seen as counter-programming from the animated movie, although any teens ready to go back to the movies might stick with Raya as well. Honestly, how this didn’t end up getting dumped to streaming compared to some of this weekend’s better movies is beyond me.
Offering a bit of indie counterprogramming for the two (relatively) big studio movies is Eddie Huang’s BOOGIE, the directorial debut of the Fresh Off the Boat producer, being released by Focus Features into who knows how many theaters? (1,000 or less, I’d Imagine.) It’s a coming-of-age movie starring Taylor Takahashi as Alfred “Boogie” Chin, a Queens high school basketball ace who dreams of one day playing in the NBA but whose temper gets him in trouble with the scouts for college where he’s hoping to get a scholarship.
I was kind of looking forward to this one, because I generally enjoy Fresh Off the Boat, and I’m interested in what stories Huang has to offer as a filmmaker. The film has its merits but it’s not necessarily Takahashi, who isn’t strong enough to really keep the viewer’s interest.
On the other hand, Huang was wise to cast the amazing Taylour Paige (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom) as Boogie’s love interest and even better than both is Pamelyn Chee as Boogie’s “Tiger Mom” mother who is sugary sweet when it comes to wooing possible recruiters but also is a complete nightmare to his ex-con father (Perry Yung).
Thinking back on the movie, I definitely didn’t hate it as there were character relations and dynamics I enjoyed, but not all of it clicked with me, and it’s hard to imagine this one connecting with audiences as well as some of the other movies out this week, unless you’re into college hoops, which I am not.
As far as box office, I’m not sure this will be in more than 1,250 theaters (if even that) and even if it plays in New York City (where it would normally find its biggest audience), I just don’t think there’s much awareness for the movie out there. In fact, I see it only playing in one movie theaters in NYC, and that’s way up in Harlem, presumably hoping to get the street ball fans, but I’m not so sure too many up there will be interested in an Asian-American story, so honestly, I don’t think this will make more than $500,000 or $600,000 tops.
Besides the reopening of movie theaters, the other big excitement this week is the launch of Paramount+, the relaunch, spin-off, rebranding of CBS All Access that I had also been considering checking out. It will launch on Thursday, March 4, with the animated family movie THE SPONGEBOB MOVIE: SPONGE ON THE RUN, which was supposed to be released by Paramount Pictures last year and did get a bit of a theatrical release in Canada while theaters were open there last year. This one involves SpongeBob and his buddy Patrick trying to retrieve SpongeBob’s beloved pet snail Gary, who has gone missing.
I generally enjoyed the first to SpongeBob movies, even though I never watched the show, and the regular creators and voice actors always seem to step up their game in terms of the wackiness whenever they’re given a chance to bring the lunacy to the big screen. In this case, it comes in the form of some of the guests including Snoop Dog and Danny Trejo in an odd Western section complete with musical number or Keanu Reeves introduced in the same section as a tumbleweed named Sage. (Oddly, this also features Awkwafina providing the voice of a robot, and I kind of liked her in more of a subdued role like this.) Although SpongeBob and his friends are CG animated, the movie doesn’t try too hard to integrate the live action in as fluid a way as last week’s Tom and Jerry – live actors just kind of show up – but it’s still pretty darn entertaining to watch another movie in which everyone involved, including director Tim Hill (who shockingly directed last year’s awful The War with Grandpa!), just going about making the movie as crazy and wacky as possible, something that should appeal to kids and… THC-laced adults (preferably not those watching with kids) … to get an overall enjoyable experience. Maybe it’s no surprise that I was particularly tickled with SpongeBob and Patrick’s adventures in Las Vegas.
Along with that, the streamer will have a new animated series called KAMP KORAL: SPONGEBOB’S UNDER YEARS, which is a CG-animated series that focuses on SpongeBob and friends when they were younger, which actually is one of the funnier bits in the movie as well.
There’s a lot of great stuff coming to Paramount+ that should make it a real player in the streaming world, and that includes all of the Paramount movies that will be streaming on it, both those that are getting a theatrical release this year and the studio’s absolutely vast library over the past 100 or so years.
And that’s not all! This weekend also sees the release of the sequel thirty years in the making, COMING 2 AMERICA, which will launch on Amazon Prime Video on Friday (after being sold to the streamer by Paramount, oddly), so yeah, there’s plenty of options to keep people home this weekend even with theaters reopening.
Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall are back as Prince (now King) Akeem of Zamunda and his trusty aide Semmi, and in fact, almost every character and actor from the movie has returned, as the duo return to America to find Akeem’s illegitimate son Lavelle (Jermayne Fowler) in queens, hoping to teach him the Zamundan way so he can take over as King after him. Unfortunately, Lavelle is joined in Zamunda with his family which includes mother Leslie Jones and uncle Tracy Jordan.
Unfortunately, reviews are embargoed until Thursday, so I’m not sure I’ll get to review this one, but I did like the movie, more than I thought because my rewatch of the original 1989 movie led me to believe there was a good reason I hadn’t watched it in over thirty years. The sequel offers a lot of originality and humor in the forms of Leslie Jones and Tracy Jordan, but that’s all I’ll say about it for now.
Incidentally, you can check out an interview I did with director Craig Brewer over at Below the Line AND I also talked to the film’s make-up team, and after you see the movie, you’ll understand why I’m holding it until after people have seen the movie.
Another movie that would probably have gotten a theatrical release but now will be seen on Hulu is the Joe Carnahan-directed BOSS LEVEL, reteaming him with long-time collaborator Frank Grillo as a man who cannot die, because he’s living in a single day that’s being repeated over and over as he takes on a series of assassins sent to kill him.
This as a really fun action-comedy that never lets down in terms of either half of that genre, and it’s kinda groovy to see Mel Gibson playing a fairly key role since he became the master of that action genre with the Lethal Weapon movies. But this really is Frank Grillo’s show as a leading man, and while I can understand some thinking him not having enough charisma for that sort of thing, I respectfully disagree.
We get into this high-concept premise pretty quickly as we watch his character, Roy Pulver, take on a string of assassins for his over 100th attempt to do so, and as per the title, it is a lot like a video game where Roy has to defeat all of the assassins on his way to the big boss, Gibson’s The Colonel. Apparently, Roy’s wife Gemma (Naomi Watts) has been killed by the Colonel or his thug (Will Sasso) so Roy is now on a quest for revenge. But first he has to survive the onslaught of killers, all of whom he’s given cute nicknames.
Easily my favorite of the killers is Selina Lo’s Guan Yin, a feisty swordswoman who proves to be the most formidable opponent for Roy. I won’t say how he bests her, but it does involve Michelle Yeoh, who has such a strange nothing appearance in one section of the movie, you wonder what she’s doing there. In fact, the movie does hit a slight lull after the initial concept is introduced, but it
Listen, I’ve long been a fan of Carnahan’s dark sense of humor and to some, it might seem mini-spirited, to me it harks back to one of my favorite movies he directed, Smokin’ Aces, a similar movie with a crazy ensemble cast, though maybe a slightly smaller budget. Still, Carnahan is a terrific action director, which makes this one of the stronger action movies in a while, and he finds a way to take a fairly simple premise and make it bigger in that Roy’s dilemma turns into something where he has to save the world, but also something more emotional and personal as he tries to bond with his son before said world ends. I guess in many ways, it’s hard to put into words what makes Boss Level so special, but I can only hope that Ryan Reynold’s Free Guy is as good as this after being delayed so many times, because this will be a tough act to follow for sure.
Over at the Metrograph, still closed physically unfortunately, they’re doing a series this week called “David Fincher/Kirk Baxter” which looks at the relationship between the director and his frequent editor, showing a series of movies over the course of the week: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Social Network
The Metrograph has a lot of movies as part of its digital membership (just $5 a month) including Chloé Zhao’s very first film, Songs My Brother Taught Me, which was available to members through Wednesday night. (Sorry, I tweeted about it multiple times if you missed it.)
This week also launches the 26th annual “Rendezvous with French Cinema” up at Film at Lincoln Center, which was actually one of the LAST events to happen up there LAST year. This year, they’re keeping things safe by holding it virtually. It runs from March 4 through March 14, kicking off on Thursday with Sébastien Lifshitz’s Little Girl, which will be released by Music Box Films in the Fall. There’s a lot of fairly recent French films with an all-access pass available to rent all 18 films for $165. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen anything, so can’t really recommend anything but I’ll probably be checking out the free talk “How Music Makes the Film” on Monday, March 8.
Margaret Qualley (Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood) and Sigourney Weaver star in Philippe Falardeau’s MY SALINGER YEAR (IFC Films), based on Joanna Rakoff’s book. Set in New York of the ‘90s, Qualley plays Joanna, a grad school student who dreams of becoming a writer who gets hired as an assistant to literary agent Margaret (Weaver), whose biggest client is J.D. Salinger. Although Joanna’s role is more of a glorified secretary, she gets to go through Salinger’s fan mail from around the world, and she decides to start answering some of the letters to the author, an experience that helps her find her writers’ voice.
I wasn’t sure if this movie would be for me, but I find Qualley to be quite delightful, and this was a light film with a comedic tone from the Canadian filmmaker of the boxing movie, Chuck, and the Oscar-nominated Monsieur Lazhar. I enjoyed its look at the New York literary world of the 1990s, and it kept me quite invested even if I’m not particularly invested in Salinger’s work or an obsessive with The Catcher in the Rye as many are. Weaver is also fantastic as Joanna’s boss – think of a lighter version of Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada – and also enjoyed the tentative relationship between Joanna and her writer boyfriend Don, played by Douglas Booth.
Basically, Falardeau has created another generally wonderful and crowd-pleasing movie that sadly missed its opportunity at a festival run to build an audience after debuting at the Berlinale almost exactly a year ago. Presumably, this will open at the reopened IFC Center this weekend. (In fact, IFC Center released its reopening schedule and it’s a pretty cool mix of IFC Films movies from the past as well as some of the Netflix movies that weren’t released in NYC previously.)
Okay, let’s get to some other releases from the week, beginning with Ivan Kavanagh’s SON (RLJEfilms/Shudder), the latest film from the Irish director of The Canal, a fantastic horror film that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival about seven years back. In this one, Andi Matichak from Halloween plays a single mother whose son David (Luke David Blumm) suffers from all sorts of maladies but when she starts getting closer to a local detective (Emile Hirsch), he discovers that there’s a lot more to her past and to her son’s ailments.
Honestly, I do not want to say too much about the plot, because there are so many shocking surprises in the movie once you think you know where it’s going, although I will say that it has connections to films like The Lodge and shows like Servant, but it also does a good job fucking with the viewer’s head, so you never know what’s really happening and what might be in the characters’ heads.
I will say that the movie is very dark and quite disturbing with lots of gruesome gory sequences, but if you’re a fan of smart horror, you’ll want to check out Son. (I’ll have an interview with Kavanagh over at Below the Line next week.)
Sony Classics is finally releasing Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw’s doc THE TRUFFLE HUNTERS (Sony Classics), which has been playing on the virtual festival circuit all the way back to Sundance last year, so we’ll see how many people are left to see it. It’s set in the forests of Piedmont, Italy where a handful of 70-to-80-year-old men are on the hunt for the rare white Alba truffle, which has resisted all modern science to be cultivated.
For whatever reason, I procrastinated on watching this movie for most of last year, maybe because I’m not that big a fan of cinema verité docs, but this is infinitely entertaining between the various men featured – including a lot of real characters in there – and how the movie shows their close bond with their truffle-sniffing dogs. This is a genuinely enjoyable movie that I feel can appeal to a wide range of viewers, although be aware that is in Italian, so maybe one should consider that even with the cute dogs, this should probably be watched by teen or older rather than small kids. (I don’t remember anything particularly racy, but the movie is Rated PG-13.)
Staying in the dog realm, Magnolia Pictures is releasing Elizabeth Lo’s documentary STRAY on Friday, which documents the life of Zeytin, a stray dog living on the streets of Istanbul, and some of his dog frenemies. Actually, this was a pretty wonderful film that I quite enjoyed, although there were a few dog fight sequences that disturbed me a little bit. But it’s a great look at Turkey through the eyes of some of the canines on the street, how they interact with the humans around them. Essentially, Stray is the dog version of Kedi, but I’ve seen other similar docs like this including Los Reyes – this one is just as strong as either of those movies, the images of all the beautiful dogs accompanied by gorgeous string music by Ali Helnwein that helps you understand the dogs’ complex emotions. Seriously, if you like dogs, you can definitely do worse than the previous two movies mentioned. Stray is available via Virtual Cinema, including that of the Film Forum.
Filmmaker and EDM artist Quentin Dupieux (Rubber) is back with his latest, KEEP AN EYE OUT (Dekanalog), starring Belgian comedian Benoît Poelvoorde as police officer, Commissaire Buran, investigating a guy (Grégoire Ludig) who has discovered a dead body in a puddle of blood outside his apartment building. The prime suspect is then left alone with a one-eyed rookie, and if you’ve seen any of Dupieux’s other films, you’ll probably know to expect the unexpected as things get crazier and crazier. (I seem to remember seeing this last year at some festival, maybe FantasticFest, but I’ll have to watch again before remembering if this was one of Dupieux’s movies that I liked.) This will be available in select theaters and also in virtual cinema this Friday. (Oddly Dupieux’s last movie, Deerskin, debuted at last year’s “Rendezvous with French Cinema” right before theaters shut down for a year, and I don’t want to be superstitious, but yeah, I’m worried.)
Barnaby Thompson’s Ireland-set crime thriller PIXIE (Saban/Paramount) stars Olivia Cooke (Sound of Metal) and Alec Baldwin with Cooke playing Pixie Hardy, a young woman who wants to avenge her mother’s death by pulling off a heist that will allow her to leave her small town. The crime goes wrong, and she’s forced to team up with a group of misfits including Baldwin’s Father McGrath.
Bradley Parker’s action-thriller THE DEVIL BELOW (Vertical) deals with a team of researchers who are investigating a series of underground coal mines in Appalachian country that have been on fire for decades where they discover a mystery. It’s getting a combined theatrical, VOD and digital release Friday.
Phil Sheerin’s directorial debut THE WINTER LAKE stars Emma Mackey (Sex Education) as Holly, a young woman with a secret that’s uncovered by her unstable neighbor Tom (Anson Boon from Blackbird) and the two of them are pulled into a confrontation with her father, who wants to keep the family secret buried. This will be in select theaters on Friday, On Demand on Tuesday, March 9 and then on DVD March 23.
Dylan McCormick’s SOMETIME OTHER THAN NOW (Gravitas Ventures) stars Donal Logue and Kate Walsh, Logue playing Sam who is stranded in a small New England town after his motorcycle crashes into the ocean seeking refuge at a run-down motel run by Walsh’s Kate, a similarly run-down and lost soul. When Sam learns that his estranged daughter Audrey, who he hasn’t seen in 25 years, lives in the town, he starts to learn more about why he ended up there.
Jacob Johnston’s DREAMCATCHER (Samuel Goldwyn) stars Travis Burns as Dylan aka DJ Dreamcatcher who meets up with two estranged sisters at the underground music film festival, Cataclysm, where they become entrenched in 48 hours of violence and mayhem after a drug-fueled event. Sounds delightful.
Some of the other VOD stuff hitting the ‘net this week include: 400 Bullets (Shout! Studios), Sophie Jones(Oscilloscope), Dementer (Dark Star PIctures), Black Holes: The Edge of All We Know (Giant Pictures)
That’s it for this week. Next week, theaters hopefully will remain open, and we’ll have some new movies to write about.
