he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
One Nice Bug Per Day
noise dept.
Monterey Bay Aquarium
sheepfilms
Misplaced Lens Cap
AnasAbdin
$LAYYYTER
祝日 / Permanent Vacation
pixel skylines
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Sweet Seals For You, Always
oozey mess
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Three Goblin Art
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
todays bird
Product Placement
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Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
seen from Poland
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@weekendwarriorblog
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Review: TURNING RED is Way Funnier and More Fun Than Anything I Was Expecting
I might have been a wee bit of a late-comer when it comes to Pixar movies – Monsters Inc. was my first, and no, I will not reveal my age when I first saw it. While there are definitely Pixar movies and characters I love more than others, I’ve definitely become more of a fan of their one-offs that don’t necessarily require spin-offs or sequels - Ratatouille, Up, Inside Out are three good examples. Turning Red is just such a movie from Domee Shi, director of the 2018 Oscar-winning short, Bao, and boy, did I enjoy this one quite a bit more than expected.
It circles around 13-year-old Mei-lin Lee, voiced by Rosalie Chiang, who lives in Toronto and is particularly enthusiastic about, well, everything, including math, drawing, boys, but especially boy group 4-Town, whom she swoons over with her three besties. Her family runs a temple, more like a museum really, dedicated to their elders and the family legends about the legendary red panda and its magical powers. One day, Mei-lin wakes up, and she actually has transformed into a red panda herself, though she soon learns that’s only the case when she’s excited or angry… which is pretty much all the time!
I have to say that right off the bat, I loved how this fairly high concept comedy introduces Mei as this bright and positive young person, who isn’t necessarily popular but also isn’t the sad and dowdy nerd we’ve seen in far too many movies set during middle school or high school. In other words, it’s more like Eighth Grade or Book Smart than Dear Evan Hansen – though I do feel the need to remind some of you that I actually liked all three of those movies. It’s just really nice to see a young person who finds things she loves and is able to surround herself with similar kids, which I feel is just part of what make Turning Red quite inspirational, regardless of your age. Sure, Mei has a vocal naysayer in Tyler, your typical snarky school bully, who just wants to feel better than someone as confident as Mei.
With a script co-written by Shi with Julia Cho, Turning Red alternates quite readily between being adorable and being hilarious. Sure, there may be concerns that Mei’s entire situation might just be an analogy for a young girl menstruating for the first time, and yeah, it does totally go there as Mei tries to adjust to “the change” with her parents being fully aware of this “blessing.” Those obvious euphemisms aside, the movie addresses the obvious and then quickly moves on. While I (a non-parent, mind you) think it’s important for kids – both girls AND boys – to eventually be made aware of the cycles of their mothers and older sisters, maybe that’s not so appropriate for a movie that will be shown to kids under 6? They have enough to worry about with not having a COVID vaccine yet (probably one of the reasons why Turning Red is still going to primarily be on streaming this weekend, despite the aggravation of many of my peers).
Chiang is quite an amazing voice find for this movie, her Mei Lee quickly becoming one of my favorite human characters in a Pixar movie since Russell from Up. I’d probably compare her more favorably to Auli'i Cravalho in Moana than Stephanie Beatriz in Encanto, even if this role doesn’t involve much serious singing. In general, all the voice actors cast by Ms. Shi are great, led by the inimitable Sandra Oh as Mei’s mother, Ming, who has her own mother issues, but she brings so much weight in terms of all the film’s many feels. I don’t think the humor would have worked quite as well if not for the terrific young actors voicing Mei’s besties – Ava Morse, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, and Hyein Park – all of whom play off her energy. The same can be said about the actors voicing Mei’s grandmother and her aunties, who introduce another entirely new level of humor to the proceedings. And of course, you can’t have a distinctly Chinese movie like this without the great James Hong providing his unmistakable voice!
After last year, it’s kind of nice to have an animated movie that doesn’t feel the need to be a Disney musical, but the movie does include songs written by Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas O’Connell, the latter who makes up one fourth of the five-member 4-Town boy band, who have some great catchy tunes. The movie also includes another wonderful score by Oscar winner Ludwig Göransson, who instills the movie with the necessary Asian references, and some suitably heroic moments but never losing sight of the film’s overall playful attitude and emotions.
Turning Red isn’t perfect, as it does go into a few obvious places and definitely lags a bit in its second act as Mei and her friends try to monetize on the adorableness of her red panda alter ego. Fortunately, it leads into a terrific last act involving the girls' anticipated 4-Town concert, and a few “giant monster” moments that helps kick the movie back into high gear.
Turning Red is quite wonderful, my favorite animated film since last year’s Raya and the Last Dragon, mainly because it just feels so natural as an extension of the filmmaker’s own interests without feeling like there’s a ton of modern animated tropes shoehorned into the simple story merely to appeal only to the kiddies.
Rating: 8.5/10
Turning Red will stream on Disney+ starting Friday, March 11 BUT if you’re in New York or L.A., you can still see it in theaters during its one-week run for Oscar qualification!
The Weekend Warrior 3/4/22 - THE BATMAN, LUCY AND DESI, GREAT FREEDOM, AGAINST THE ICE, HUDA’S SALON, and More
I’m sure you’re all here to read my thoughts on The Batman and its box office potential, but before we get to this week’s column, a semi-important announcement.
I’m not sure if I’m going to be doing this column for much longer, and honestly, I’ve started reconsidering if I even want to be a film critic anymore.
For full disclosure, today is my birthday, and I’m feeling older and crankier than usual, considering a certain milestone coming up in just three years. I’ve worked my ass off in this industry for the last 20 years with very little to show for it in terms of money or any true satisfaction, and the last couple years especially have just done me in. I’m not sure people know, realize or care how much work and time I put into delivering this column each week, how much time I spend watching movies – and a variety of movies of all sizes and shapes – but it’s probably far more time and effort than maybe 90% of the paid critics working today I’d imagine.
And what do I get for it? Well, I don’t get press credentials from SXSW to start with, only to be told that my efforts to maintain a steady stream of reviews on this blog is not enough, and that they want to get “new people” to cover SXSW. (Seriously, some of these festivals are heading towards a class action lawsuit, because some of the questions they ask on their press applications would not be appropriate for a JOB APPLICATION!)
That’s the kind of shit I’ve had to put up with for years now. I get very little thanks or appreciation from any of my fellow film critics including the ones, who I literally have helped them get to where they are now, not from the publicists who I’m always there to cover their smaller non-superhero titles, no one. And frankly, the whole business with Below the Line has pretty much destroyed any love I have for the movie business as a whole (and that’s all I’m going to say about that).
The pandemic has been used as an excuse for lazy film critics to get even lazier, and a lot of the elitist classism I've been seeing comes directly from the studios, who invite some “critics” weeks in advance of an embargo to see their movies and others just a few hours before. (If you've ever tried to knock out a decent review in less than an hour, you know what I'm talking about.)
As much as they claim otherwise, few of the studios want to support the theatrical experience -- Sony is one of the exceptions, and it's paying off for them. As one of a handful of critics who has been fighting tooth and nail to get physical screenings, and also as someone who will actually get off my butt and go see movies in a theater whenever humanly possible, it just sucks to be in the minority supporting theaters, especially here in New York. (One of the things that really set me off was going to a recent morning press screening and being the only film critic in a theater that held 300 people. It was just me and some other woman. Not one other NY film critic made an effort to go see this movie, since they knew they could get a screener.)
Don’t get me wrong. I love movies and I love writing about them, and for a long time, that has superseded my need to get paid for writing this column, but it doesn’t help me survive in a world where I can no longer get a job due to my age or gender or race or any other similarly inane reason, despite constantly proving my abilities as a capable and prolific writer and no matter how hard I work at everything I do.
This doesn’t mean I’m going to completely discontinue The Weekend Warrior straight-away – I’m just taking next week off, for now – but I need anyone who has read this far to know that I do not make a FUCKING CENT writing this column each week and having to deal with all sorts of other crap on top of that just gets tiring. Honestly, I have no idea if anyone even bothers to read this column anymore, and to spend all this time writing without any regular feedback really sucks more than anything else.
I just hope people can understand my frustration about this whole situation. As much as I love writing and I can literally do it all day every day if I have to, writing a column and so many reviews where I get next to no feedback and even less income, at a time when I desperately need a job, just makes me wonder if it’s worth continuing to do this. Maybe for now I’ll just take a couple weeks off and try to regroup my priorities. I certainly don’t mean to share so much sour grapes, but it’s really hard not to get annoyed with everything going on right now.
Before we get to The Batman – ain’t I a stinker? That’s what you all get for not saying anything to me about my column for so many years…
xUp at Lincoln Center, we have another series already, and it’s the annual Rendezvous with French Cinema, which runs from March 3 through 13, featuring a number of recent French films, some which will eventually get North American releases, because this year’s fest offers new movies from a great roster of filmmakers, including Jacques Audiard, Claire Denis, François Ozon, Cédric Klapische, Arnaud Desplechin, Christophe Honoré, and Mathieu Amalric, all of whom are Rendezvous regulars.
Denis’ film, Fire, is this year’s Opening Night selection (just a few weeks after its Berlinale premiere), starring Juliette Binoche (she also stars in Emmanuel Carrère’s Between Two Worlds, which also plays in this year’s series) and Vincent Lindon from the Cannes-winning Titane. I wasn’t a particularly avid fan of this movie, because it really lacks any of the “je ne sais quoi” (as they say in France) of Denis’ other films that I have enjoyed so much. This seems like a fairly typical French drama where Binoche’s ex-lover shows up, wanting to start a business venture with her current partner, which just causes a rift in her current relationship. The entire premise really did nothing for me at all.
I much preferred Jacques Audiard’s Paris, 13th District, which premiered at Cannes last year and won an award for composer Rone. It’s actually based on the comics work of Adrian Tomine, a pretty awesome creative who used to have a book called “Optic Nerve.” Apparently, Audiard and his co-writers took inspiration from four of Tomine’s stories to come up with Paris, 13th District, starring Lucie Zhang as Émilie, a young woman who begins a torrid affair with her new roommate Camille (Makita Samba). That goes south and he moves out, but at the same time, Emilie also has to deal with other tragedies, such as losing her job and her grandmother dying. At the same time, it follows Nora (Noémie Merlant) who is going to law school when she’s mistaken for cam girl Amber Sweet (Jehnny Beth), which leads to a humiliation that drives her out of school until she ultimately ends up working at the real estate office with Camille. It’s a movie about young people in Paris filled with sex and eroticism – maybe more like something Olivier Assayas might have made – but I quite enjoyed it, especially since I liked how Audiard and his co-writers/cast diverged from the source material, but also due to the fantastic performances by Zhang and Merlant. It’s nice to see some new talent in these films from France, since we normally see the same names and faces.
I was hoping to get to a few other press screenings for “Rendezvous” but I just couldn’t make it happen due to last-minute things that were thrown at me. I was hoping to see Amalric’s film Hold Me Tight, starring Vicky Krieps, and Desplechin’s adaptation of Philip Roth’s Deception, but had to miss both of those press screenings. I was also shocked to learn that Ozon had a new movie called Everything Went Fine at “Rendezvous,” which wasn’t screened ahead of time to critics. Anyway, you can see the full rundown of this year’s “Rendezvous” here.
Also starting this week on Wednesday (tonight!) is the Nighthawk Shorts Fest, which as the name might suggest is a film festival showcasing shorts, including many from the Brooklyn area where Nighthawk has two theaters. I haven’t had time to watch any of the shorts being presented, but my pal Leah Shore’s Puss is playing as part of the Midnite program on Thursday.
Okay, finally… that’s enough teasing for one column… Na na na na na na na na na na na na na …
THE BATMAN (Warner Bros.)!!!
I’ve already reviewed the movie, which you can read here, but let’s get into its box office potential, bearing in mind that a lot of the old analytics have been thrown to the wind thanks to COVID.
In case, you’ve been living under a rock (how’s the rent down there?) then you already know that this Batman is played by Robert Pattinson, the movie is directed by Matt Reeves, who helmed the last two Planet of the Apes movies. Maybe you even know that it brings back some classic Bat-friends and Bat-foes with Zoë Kravitz playing Catwoman, Colin Farrell playing the Penguin, and Paul Dano as the Riddler. Since I’ve seen the movie and you probably haven’t, I’m not going to get into any spoiler territory here, but the movie also stars John Turturro for you fans of indie New York films from the ‘90s. It also has Jeffrey Wright playing James Gordon and Andy Serkis as Alfred Pennyworth, plus more.
Before we get into some of the previous work of Mssrs. Pattinson and Reeves, we should look at Batman movies in general, because the character continues to be one of DC Comics’ most popular and long-lasting characters in so many mediums that it’s hard to keep track of them all.
We’re not going to go all the way back to Tim Burton’s “Batman” in 1989 or the rather hilarious 1966 “Batman” movie based on the old TV show starring Adam West and Burt Ward. The real big shift for the franchise came when Christopher Nolan tackled Batman for what would become the first of a trilogy with Batman Begins in 2005, starring Christian Bale. While that was a relative hit, grossing $205 million in North America after a modest $48.7 million opening. (To be fair, it did open on a Wednesday.) But it was popular enough that when Nolan introduced his Joker, played by the late Oscar winner Heath Ledger, the sequel The Dark Knight blew up with an $158 million opening, which was pretty impressive for 2008, a time when only two Marvel movies had been released. Dark Knight grossed $533 million domestically and almost hit a billion worldwide, setting up its sequel The Dark Knight Returns to slightly surpass The Dark Knight’s opening weekend and the global total, though fall short of the domestic.
Sharing the success of Nolan’s movies is not to take away from Zack Snyder’s efforts, which followed his hit Man of Steel Superman movie with the lofty-titled Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. In fact, it would pit Henry Cavill’s Superman against Ben Affleck’s Batman as a tribute to Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, but more to act as a prequel to the ill-fated Justice League, which Snyder had to leave before reshoots. Batman v Superman was still able to open with $166 million, more than both Nolan Batman sequels, and it grossed $330.4 million domestically. (There was also The Lego Batman Movie and Todd Phillips’ Oscar-winning Joker spin-off since then, the latter making almost as much as BvS, but let’s try not to go off on too many un-Bat-related tangents.)
Matt Reeves probably has as much clout as a director these days, or at least as much as Snyder did after making 300 and Watchmen. His 2008 JJ Abrams-produced Cloverfield earned a mere $80 million here and a little more overseas, but when he took over the Planet of the Apes franchise with 2017’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, that grossed $700 million, and allowed him to follow it up with War for the Planet of the Apes, which did fall slightly short box office wise, even though both received terrific reviews in the 90% range on Rotten Tomatoes.
Obviously, Robert Pattinson made it big with the “Twilight” franchise with Kristen Stewart, but that was after having a key role in “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.” Since that foray into tentpole franchises, Pattinson has starred in mostly artier and independent fare, from the Safdie Brothers’ Good Time in 2017, to the Zellner Brothers’ Damsel a year later, and Claire Denis’ sci-fi film High Life in between. After the final “Twilight” film, which came close to grossing $300 million domestically (as was the case with the other sequels), none of Pattinson’s starring roles has grossed more than $10.9 million, and that was Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse. Oh, yeah, and then Pattinson starred in Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, and honestly, there would be so many asterisks next to that movie’s box office, it’s barely even worth mentioning. So pretend I didn’t.
It will certainly be interesting to see how The Batman reviews pan out, because I know I loved the movie, but others might just be perplexed by how different a tone of storytelling is on display here. It’s a very cinematic movie for sure with amazing performances, but will the “geek squad” appreciate it as much as the cinephiles? Will the critics have their knives out before seeing a single frame?
In fact, reviews aren’t so bad at 90% on Rotten Tomatoes and 89% on the fledgling Banana Meter, so it’s definitely less divisive than I thought it would be, but Warner Bros. was smart to have all the reviews and social media reactions hit at the same time on Monday afternoon as it kicked off the narrative leading into the weekend. (I’ll be curious to know how many tickets were sold after reviews/reactions came out.)
So where does that leave us? The Batman is an interesting case, because the character both in movies and in comics is mostly a male-dominated one and presumably teen or older for the most part, even though there have been very popular Batman cartoons as well. Pattinson presumably has a larger female audience due to “Twilight,” but they haven’t exactly flocked to any of those indie movies mentioned, so would this Batman movie maybe skew a little more towards women than other ones? It’s hard to say, except that The Batman is not a movie for kids in the same way as many of the Disney/Marvel movies.
Batfans have been itching for another Batman movie as much as audiences in general have been itching for more big movies period, although it was odd the way the box office exploded with Spider-Man: No Way Home and then quickly dissipated with only Uncharted, Jackass Forever and Scream making much of a mark otherwise. We can clearly see that people have been coming back to movie theaters post-Omicron, and a visionary new take on the Dark Knight could be the perfect storm for The Batman to become the biggest opener of the year so far. (It also doesn’t hurt that we had a surprisingly mild weekend of releases this past weekend, making people more antsy to get back out to the movies.)
Honestly, we can probably go pretty big on The Batman since it will clearly be the biggest opener of 2022 until the Doctor Strange sequel opens in May, but the question is whether it will open with $125 million or $150 million or higher. I think it will actually be somewhere between those two numbers, maybe somewhere in the $140 to $145 million range, which would be the fourth-biggest opening for a Batman movie, but still pretty good for (hopefully) the tail end of this pandemic. The thing is that unlike many of those other movies, there’s almost literally nothing opening over the next couple weeks, so a strong opening could lead to a total domestic gross close to $300 million, which would be a pretty big boon for Warner Bros’ first major release of the year.
1. The Batman (Warner Bros.) - $142.6 million N/A
2. Uncharted (Sony) - $9.9 million -57%
3. Dog (MGM) - $5.6 million -45%
4. Spider-Man: No Way Home (Sony) - $3.2 million -45%
5. Death on the Nile (20th Century/Disney) - $2.5 million -45%
6. Jackass Forever (Paramount) - $1.5 million -52%
7. Sing 2 (Universal) - $1.3 million -44%
8. Marry Me (Universal) - $1 million -46%
9. Cyrano (MGM) - $700k -47%
10. Scream (Paramount) - $630k -53%
A great doc I saw at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and this week’s “Chosen One” is LUCY AND DESI, which will hit Prime Video this Friday, and believe it or not, it’s directed by comic actress and SNL and Parks and Recreation vet, Amy Poehler!
Some may remember that Aaron Sorkin’s Being the Ricardos made it into my Top 15 for last year, and there’s definitely a bit of crossover between the two movies. One thing that didn’t surprise me about Lucy and Desi is that Poehler worked with Mark Monroe as a writer and producer, because I’ve long been a fan of Monroe’s documentary work, both with other filmmakers and on his own. Check out his IMDB page and you’ll see that he’s been involved with quite a few Oscar-winning docs, but I’m particularly a fan of the music docs he’s done like Amazing Journey: The Story of the Who, who led to Monroe taking on similar duties on Dave Grohl’s Sound City and Sonic Highways. And yet, I also can’t really think of someone more suitable to direct this than Poehler, who has had her own experience as a funny lady on television and in movies.
Poehler secured a lot of great interviews, but probably the most significant one is with Lucy and Desi’s daughter Lucie Arnaz Luckinbell, who found all sorts of recordings of her parents, so we hear in their own words them talking about their lives and careers before they first met and began to make television history. There are also great interviews with descendants of some of the key players on “I Love Lucy.” Historians and other women talk about the impact of Lucille Ball, and the huge influence and inspiration she had on Carol Burnett (who appears in the film), Joan Rivers and many other women. It’s pretty amazing to hear Lucy telling her story in her own words, but then there’s also amazing archival footage like Desi talking to the audience before a shooting of “I Love Lucy,” much like we see in Being the Ricardos. In fact, there are quite a few moments in Lucy and Desi that hark back to Sorkin’s film. More importantly, the film covers all the stuff the duo did together even after getting divorced and marrying other people.
Although the movie does cover sadder times in the relationship of this beloved couple – the score by David Schwartz does its job at eliciting many feels in the viewer – there’s also a sense of play to Poehler’s movie that mirrors what Lucy was trying to do with her shows, making this doc a terrific counterpart and companion to the Aaron Sorkin drama. The doc is just able to cover a lot more ground before and after “I Love Lucy,” including when the show was “in reruns” (a first!) while Ball was on maternity leave. (The show also won its first Emmy for the second season during this time.)
Both great films will now reside on Prime Video forever, hopefully to inspire many younger people to watch the great “I Love Lucy,” and Poehler’s fantastic doc does a great job showing why Lucy and Desi have been considered TV icons ever since. I’ll be shocked if I watch another documentary this year that I love more than this one.
Another decent doc out this week is DEAR MR. BRODY (Greenwich) from filmmaker Keith Maitland (Tower), which looks at the 21-year-old millionaire hippie heir Michael Brody Jr., who in 1970 swore to give out his $25-million inheritance to anyone in need of money. (Seriously? Where are these guys when I need money to fund my own column/website?) He soon gets married to Renee, and the Brodys become instant celebrities who are mobbed wherever they go, but they also give out their home address for people to send them letters about why they should get part of his fortune. This doc wasn’t bad, as it goes through some of the thousands of unread and unanswered letters that cumulated at the Brodys’ place mostly unopened until they were later recovered. Maitland also got Renée Brody and her son to sit down for an on-the-record interview to talk about Michael Brody, Jr, which makes the doc even more interesting, while also finding some of the actual letter writers to see if they remember writing to Brody, in hopes he would share some of his vast wealth. Many of them read back their teary letters, which are made even sadder by the fact that many of them really needed the money, and their prayers were never answered. (Ultimately, Brody turned out to be a huckster with mental health issues, whose checks begin bouncing, and he eventually shot himself at the age of just 24.)
Sebastian Meise’s European Film Award-winning Austrian drama GREAT FREEDOM (Mubi) will open at the Film Forum on Friday after being shortlisted for the Oscar International Feature category. It follows the relationship between two men put into the Austrian prison system for different reasons. Franz Rogowski’s Hans Hoffman was put in jail due to soliciting “deviant sexual acts” in a men’s room. It’s not his first time in jail, because following the war, he went from a Nazi concentration camp right into jail where he meets Georg Friedrich’s Viktor, who has gotten a much longer sentence for murder.
This was a pretty interesting film that immediately appealed to me as a fan of the HBO show, Oz, but also from knowing people in jail. Meise has created an intriguing character piece that covers three periods in Hans’ imprisonment, while dealing with the German penal code known as Paragraph 175, which made him a criminal just for his sexuality and who he loves. (I don’t want to spoil the movie, but the title comes from the name of a gay club where the film’s protagonist visits after being released and once 175 is repealed.)
More than anything, it’s about the relationship between Hans and Viktor, who is horribly homophobic towards Hans when they first are made cellmates, becomingxn frenemies of sorts. The relationship is complicated by Hans falling in love with another young prisoner, a doctor who was busted in the secret film that got Hans two more years in jail, and how that bothers Viktor, who is dealing with his own drug addiction, and that allows himself to finally get close to Hans, who offers to help him through it.
Meisse uses an intriguing non-linear technique of telling this story, beginning in 1968 then going back to the men first meeting up in 1945 and then reuniting in the ‘50s, but it ultimately is more about Hans’ journey through the racism and homophobia of post-WWII Austria until he’s finally able to be himself and love who he wants to love.
I’m honestly surprised this didn’t make the Oscar nominations, because I liked it as much as at least one of the movies that got into the International Feature category and more than another, but I guess there can only be five total, so that’s always become a tough contest.
First and foremost, this is a particularly well-made prison film – a film genre I’ve always enjoyed – but it’s also just a fascinating and original human story, one that deals with a country’s awful history of homophobia and how it affected two men in a situation where they needed each other to survive.
After opening at Film Forum this Friday, it will open in a few theaters in L.A. on Friday, March 11, and then in other theaters after that.
Continuing with the international offerings this week – and breaking up the testorone-driven films above and below – HUDA’S SALON (IFC Films) is the new film from Palestinian filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad (Paradise Now, Omar), a thriller about a young mother named Reem (Maisa Abd Ehadi), who goes to a salon in Bethlehem run by Huda (Manal Awad), who blackmails Reem into joining the government’s secret service, which would be considered betraying her own people.
Abu-Assad is such a good filmmaker, and this is an interesting premise for such a regionally-relevent thriller that often feels more fly-on-the-wall than particularly cinematic. (There isn’t a lot of music, if any, to support the drama, for instance.) And yet, the filmmaker has two fantastic actors as Reem and Huda, as the film switches perspective between the two of them dealing with Huda’s blackmail attempt earlier in the film.
Huda is quickly found out and picked up by Freedom Fighters who are rebelling against the government secret service for whom she’s recruiting. That leads to a bit of a cat and mouse game between Huda and her interrogator Husan, as played by Ali Sulliman, who was so great in Paradise Now. Meanwhile, Reem is growing desperate and concerned for her life and that of her new baby, while trying to keep this secret from her husband, which ultimately just ends up putting a larger rift in their marriage.
Part of Huda’s Salon reminded me of the work of Iran’s Asghar Farhadi in that it’s very dialogue-driven, though that doesn’t mean there aren’t strong non-dialogue twists to raise the stakes. Oddly, you never see his two fantastic leading ladies together again after the opening scenes, but I still enjoyed the way Abu-Assad allowed this story to unfold in these two parallel and connected stories.
Huda’s Salon is a solid and significant slice-of-life dramatic thriller with a localized political edge to the story that bolsters Abu-Assad’s place in international cinema.
Rating: 7.5/10
Hitting Netflix Friday is AGAINST THE ICE (Netflix), co-written, produced and starring the great Dane, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, and directed by Danish filmmaker Peter Flinth. Coster-Waldau plays polar explorer, Captain Ejnar Mikkelsen, who sets out, along with the ship’s mechanic, Iver Iverson (Joe Cole), on a rescue mission to find Denmark’s historical Arctic Expedition, who had vanished and presumed dead. They journey across the frozen Greenland with a team of sled dogs, a dangerous mission, considered by many to be nearly suicidal, as the two men attempt to survive all the remote area’s dangerous elements until they too require being saved.
You know, if you’re going to make a pandemic movie with minimal cast and trying to maintain COVID protocols like social distancing, you can do far worse than having two actors and a team of sled dogs on a vast ice-covered wasteland, and you know what? I actually enjoy this sort of Arctic survival movie, and I like both actors well enough they were able to maintain my interest on this journey as another fine example of man’s ongoing fight against nature. Things become even tougher for this duo when they return to their ship, only to find themselves abandoned, and then start to succumb to madness as they wait for someone to come and save them.
This really was an impressive film, because the entire first half of it is literally one giant set piece in terms of the things these men face on their mission, and yet, within that, there are some particularly impressive moments, such as an encounter with a polar bear. But it always comes down to these two very different men spending over two years together in this wasteland, not only just trying to survive the elements but also each other. Not only did I enjoy the work by both actors, because the film is essentially a two-hander, but I was equally impressed by the screenplay and the fact that Coster-Waldau was involved with the writing. (I will say that if you’re a dog lover, you might not be able to handle part of the film, because on a dangerous mission like this one, not all the dogs will survive.)
Still, Against the Ice is another fantastic addition to the polar survival thriller genre that has produced such fine movies as Mads Mikkelsen’s Arctic, and it’s great when an actor’s passion project is able to come to fruition in such a compelling way to others. I have to say that I’ve really liked what the Danish actor has been doing lately, between this and the recent A Taste of Hunger.
Rating: 8/10
Also streaming on Netflix, Leighton Meester from… well, a lot of things, none that I can think of right now … stars in Kim (Angel of Mine) Farrant’s thriller THE WEEKEND AWAY, playing Beth, a woman on a weekend getaway to Croatia, which goes wrong when she’s accused of killing her best friend Kate (Christina Wolfe), which leads to her revealing a painful secret, while trying to clear her name. It also stars Luke Norris as Beth's husband, Ziad Bakri and more.
Mini-Review: Having not watched the trailer in advance, I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this thriller. Some might remember that I was quite a fan of Tom McCarthy’s Stillwater, which had similar DNA from the famed Amanda Knox murder case, as does this thriller based on a novel by Sarah Alderson.
In this case, it’s about two friends who agree to go away together for a weekend vacation with Meester’s Beth being a woman with a husband (Luke Norris) and newborn baby at home, and this being her first break away from them. Her friend Kate (Christina Wolf) is a bit wilder and she insists on the two having a fun night, but Beth wakes up the next morning, groggy and remembering nothing, and Kate is missing.
With the help of local cab driver Zain (Ziad Bakri), Beth travels around doing her own investigation into Kate’s disappearance, only to learn that she’s the local police’s main suspect when Kate’s body is found. Through her continued investigation, Beth starts learning many of Kate’s secrets, but also the secrets of those around her since most of the main players know more than they’re saying. There’s plenty of other suspects too, including the creepy Air B-n-B owner where they’re staying, who seems to have taken most of his social cues from Norman Bates.
That’s the general premise, and it’s the type of murder-mystery we’ve seen done before, so there isn’t that much new in that respect, but Australian filmmaker Farrant does a fine job with the material to create something more in the vein of The Flight Attendant with similar levels of intrigue. The movie also incorporates a good amount of action to make this a particularly well-paced thriller with plenty of twists and turns, including the identity of the real killer, which obviously, I won’t reveal.
The Weekend Away is a pretty decent and taut thriller, carried by a terrific performance by Meester, which made this a far more exciting film than I had been expecting.
Rating: 7/10
Next, we have two more movies that premiered at Sundance which I’ve already reviewed, but are being released to the public at large a little over a month since their premieres. (Actually, one of them premiered at Cannes last year.)
Streaming on Hulu this Friday is Mimi Cave’s horror film FRESH (Searchlight Pictures), which stars Daisy Edgar-Jones as a young woman having trouble with dating until she meets Sebastian Stan’s “perfect man” and they begin a love affair, only for him to turn out to be something other than he seems. (Spoiler: It involves kidnapping and cannibalism.) I wasn’t really a fan of this one, as you can read in my review.
Filmmaker Kogonada follows his critically-acclaimed Columbus with AFTER YANG (A24), which will be in theaters and streaming on Showtime this Friday. It stars Colin Farrell as the head of a household getting over the malfunction of their A.I. family helper Yang (Justin H. Min), and how he deals with it. The movie also stars Jodie Turner-Smith, Haley Lu Richardson, and Clifton Collins, Jr. As mentioned, I already reviewed this out of Sundance, and don’t feel like revisiting it either.
Stephen Fingleton’s Belfast-set thriller NIGHTRIDE (Brainstorm Media) is a real-time single-shot movie that follows small-time drug dealer Budge (Moe Dunford from Vikings), as he gones on a race against time to find a buyer for a load of his “product” that’s gone missing, which he hopes to sell to pay back a loan shark who wants his debt repaid… stat!
It’s gotten only somewhat interesting what has come out of the pandemic in terms of independent films being made that are meant to be as simple as just having a guy driving a car while talking on the phone. Some who watch Nightride might presume it to be quite ingenious, if we hadn’t already seen this exact same thing in the Steven Knight-Tom Hardy movie, Locke, just a few short years back.
Fingleton previously directed the apocalyptic thriller The Survivalist, which felt far more innovative. This one comes across as a decently-crafted film in terms of its direction, but not so much in terms of its writing. And just watching Dunford, a pretty decent actor, driving along and interacting with his phone by having it call various parties, is not something that’s able to sustain a movie for very long.
The way this story unfolds isn’t done in a particularly exciting or inventive way, except for when Dunford’s Budge gets out of the car and interacts with others, which is not very often. (The movie also suffers from bad timing since the story involves a gang of Ukrainians, who are regularly disparaged in the film – like I said… bad timing.) The last half-hour finally starts to offer the tension that should have been present from the beginning, but it still relies so much on the actors on the phone and the couple thugs Budget runs into on his drive.
Well-crafted but exceedingly boring, Nightride is better in terms of its concept than it is in execution, and it just isn’t able to keep the viewer invested for very long.
Rating: 6/10
Eamon O’Rouke’s feminist revenge thriller ASKING FOR IT (Saban Films/Paramount) stars Kiersey Clemons as Joey, a waitress who is sexually assaulted on a date, so she turns to a group of vigilante women, who seek social vengeance against a corrupt male-run society.
You know, every so often when a movie starts up, you immediately realize that you’re going to hate it, and that’s exactly how I felt as I watched Ezra Miller delivering his first rant as Mens First Movement founder Mark Vanderhill, which, as you may have surmised, is one of those angry, misogynist white men always blaming women for everything they don’t like. (We also learn later that Mark began as a pick-up artist, trying to teach other men how to “neg” women into having sex with them.) This character is so horrendous that you might be more surprised to learn that Miller is an exec. Producer on this film, and if you go through writer/director Eamon O’Rourke’s filmography, you may be able to deduce that he and Miller met when they both were in Sam Levinson’s Another Happy Day. Still, it's one of the worst things Miller has done, and that includes the original non-Snyder Justice League.
But that doesn’t explain why all the other great actresses agreed to do this movie, because O’Rourke’s cast is indeed impressive, and yet, the movie is just so godawful.
First, we meet Clemons’ character Joey, as she’s waiting on another similar-age woman, played by Alexandra Shipp, and soon after, Joey is interacting with a guy named Mike who ends up drugging and raping Joey. She’s pretty destroyed by the experience but then she runs into Shipp’s Regina, and she introduces Joey to her group of women whose whole existence is to take down men like Vanderhill and Joey’s rapist. The group includes Beatrice, played by Vanessa Hudgens, and characters played by Radha Mitchell, Precious star Gabourey Sidibe, as well as a few others. Hudgens and Shipp were both just so terrific in last year’s tick, tick… BOOM! That it’s shame to see them playing such one-note characters, Hudgens’ character just there to be a bitch towards Joey to counterbalance Shipp’s friendliness.
One particularly bad moment involves Australians Radha Mitchell and Luke Hemsworth as the women’s group matriarch Sal and local officer Vernon, telling others about their romantic past in suitable Southern drawls, but that happens right as the women are closing in on Vanderhill’s camp to take them down a peg. O’Rourke loves to use fancy cutting to try to make his movie more stylish, but he seemingly doesn’t understand a thing about pacing, or storytelling for that matter.
Watching this misguided movie, I could only think of a far better recent female-centric movie I saw at Sundance, Phyllis Nagy's Call Jane, which makes you wonder how a movie this bad could have been made. I honestly don’t know much about O’Rourke, except that I’m guessing he’s a white man himself, so why on earth did he think he would be the best person to tell this story?
Honestly, I’m not sure I could possibly hate this movie any more than I did. It's a poorly conceived feminist revenge thriller that's made even more disappointing by this filmmaker somehow convincing a bunch of great female actors to go down in flames with him.
Rating: 4/10
Before wrapping things up, I want to get into a bit of repertory stuff here, including the fact that my local arthouse theater, the Metrograph, are doing a series starting Friday called “Fern Silva Selects,” which includes John Carpenter’s The Fog and Robert Zemeckis’ Contact, as well as a one-week-only run of a 35mm print of Fern Silva’s latest experimental film ROCK BOTTOM RISER (Metrograph Press), and I don’t think I could describe this as well as the Metrograph description: “a sparkling essay film which, in addressing the worldview of indigenous Hawaiians, fluidly touches on matters pertaining to ethnography, geology, and the mysteries of the cosmos, while using a dizzying variety of filmic techniques.” Okay, then.
The Metrograph is also bringing back its A to Z series this weekend with Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante (1934) and resuming its Late Night series with animated features on Thursday through Saturday night, this week kicking it off with Beavis and Butthead Do America (1996). Metrograph is also bringing back its beloved “Play Time” matinees, screening 1979’s The Muppet Movie on Saturday and Sunday at noon, as well as two screenings on Monday.
Starting Friday, the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) will be screening week-long engagements of Nina Menke’s Magdalena Viraga (1986), which has never been released in the US, and her third feature The Bloody Child from 1996, both running for a week.
Movies I just wasn’t able to get to…
THE JUMP (Topic) A DAY TO DIE (Vertical) HELL IS EMPTY (1091 Pictures) THE TOURIST (HBO Max) THE LAST MARK (Epic PIctures) SURVIVING PARADISE: A FAMILY TALE (Netflix)
Next week… ???????
(Box office data courtesy The-Numbers.com)
THE BATMAN Review: You Are NOT Ready for Matt Reeves’ Vision of the Dark Knight
We’ve seen so many iterations of the Caped Crusader, the Dark Knight Detective, and his alter ego, billionaire Bruce Wayne, whether it’s in comics or television or movies that by now, some might feel it would be a fool’s errand to try to do something new that feels different from everything that’s come before. If nothing else, it would seem impossible to avoid comparisons, although Matt Reeves, director of two pretty fantastic Planet of the Apes sequels, has come along to give his own try, and he might just be the right man for the job.
It might be just as foolish, for me as a critic, to try and compare Reeves’ The Batman to any previous movies by Nolan, Snyder, Burton, or any filmmakers in between. It’s just not that kind of movie. Sure, I can go through some of the movies that clearly had an influence on Reeves and co-writer Peter Craig, but we’ll get to that.
Now that Robert Pattinson has stepped into the Bat-suit, in some ways, he rarely steps out of it, one of the major differences between him from Affleck, Bale, Keaton, West etc. etc. This Batman is a true detective at all times, and not just when it strikes his fancy. When Gotham’s Mayor is brutally murdered by a killer leaving darkly humorous clues and messages to the city’s fairly new vigilante, Jeffrey Wright’s James Gordon has to call upon the city’s other violent masked enigma to help find the killer.
The murder doesn’t stop there, and pretty soon, other high-ranking officials are killed in similarly brutal and cryptic fashion, the killer demanding “No More Lies” and pointing to a political and judicial system so corrupt no one is going to get off scot-free. Some of Gotham’s officials are killed using puzzle-like booby traps that will immediately get you thinking of Se7en and Saw, two of the more obvious reference for Reeves’ film without saying more or revealing spoilers.
The best way to describe The Batman is to go back to the very first TV incarnation from the ‘60s and how much that tried to be a comic book. When Tim Burton took over in ‘89, he also tried to make his movies rather comic book-like, and that was just fine for the ‘90s. Christopher Nolan promised to make his Dark Knight movies more grounded and modern, and yet, the comics were following suit so quickly that Snyder’s vision went right back to them.
Reeves has mostly taken your Batman comic book collection and thrown it out like your mother may have done after you went off to college. (Or even worse, sold your entire 40-year collection to Midtown Comics for just $6,000 – yes, I’m still fucking bitter about that, and I will be for the rest of my living days.) There are still vestiges of the comics and hints of storylines like “The Long Halloween,” but especially “Hush,” whose title character clearly plays more of a visual basis for Paul Dano’s The Riddler than any previous incarnation of the character, comics or otherwise.
Though Pattinson spends much of the time in the suit, he delivers a far more emo Bruce Wayne than we’ve seen before. There’s no billionaire playboy to be found, and he only has one mission that drives him: “Vengeance.” It’s almost jarring to first watch his Batman skulking through the Gotham streets to the tune of Nirvana’s “Something in the Way,” providing a first person voice-over that actually fits right in with a Frank Miller comic but is not something that’s been tried in the movies. Gritty would be an understatement.
I honestly wondered what Reeves might be able to bring to overused Bat-villains like Catwoman, Riddler, and the Penguin that we haven’t seen before or done better. Dano’s Riddler does create an impact on Gotham as big as some of the plots we’ve seen from the Joker, Bane and Scarecrow in the comics in recent years, but when we see them committing massive levels of devastation and fear on the citizens of the city. Maybe that’s the reason why it seems to be constantly raining in Reeves’ Gotham, but the place looks more like the dingiest parts of Brooklyn more than anything from comics. (I wouldn’t have been surprised if there was a big reveal that this Batman movie takes place in the same Gotham as Todd Phillips’ Joker, but thankfully it didn’t go there.)
Zoë Kravitz is easily the best Catwoman we’ve seen since the ‘60s Batman show, regardless of whether you preferred Eartha Kitt or Julie Newmar. She uses her sexuality to get the answers she needs in a way Batman can’t, but she also is quite vicious, acting as a counterpoint to a Batman who goes pretty far into violence but still won’t kill. Kravitz’s fight scenes involve a kicking style that’s as effective as Batman’s fists, and the scenes between her and Pattinson are all quite memorable.
Colin Farrell is almost unrecognizable as the Penguin, mostly referred to as “Oz” (as in Oswald Cobblepot), his face covered up in horrible scars as he gives a particularly flamboyant performance, many of his scenes with Turturro’s Carmine Falcone, going very much against type as a straight-up mob boss involved with the drug trade, which in Gotham’s case is something called “drops.” Essentially, every person in any sort of position of power – other than Gordon and the incoming Mayor – has some level of sleaze or corruption or just something from their dark past that threatens to tear them apart.
Even Wright’s Gordon gets far more involved with the interrogation of the criminals than we’ve seen from him before, and he’s the only person who has the Batman’s back in a system so corrupt where few of his colleagues can be trusted.
The master craftsmen and women that help create Reeves’ vision includes three people currently up for Oscars at the ceremony in a couple of weeks, and they’re all the top of their game, whether it’s cinematographer Greig Fraser or costume designer Jackie Durran. (I hope to get more into these over at Gold Derby.)
The film seems long at three hours but not many slow moments, as it works its way through an intricate plot that requires the viewer to absorb the experience. Some will be to acclimate to what Matt Reeves is trying to do better than others, but by the last hour, you’re so caught up in how he has been pulling the elements closer together that your jaw just drops when things finally and quite literally explode.
It may be good for some to know in advance that there are moments in The Batman that are truly disturbing and possibly even triggering for their prescience to things going on in the real world right now – like a gang of punks going after an Asian man fairly early in the movie – or other things most sane people try to avoid (or frequently even ignore). How events like these affect a flawed city like Gotham show how far Reeves is willing to go in stretching his movie’s PG-13 rating.
That aside, The Batman is an epic piece of film mastery that transcends its comic book origins, making it a movie that should elevate Matt Reeves to his well-deserved visionary status. He’s created a Batman that’s darker and moodier in a constantly raining Gotham City and an overall movie that’s far more emotional than any previous Bat-flick.
Rating: 9/10
The Weekend Warrior: Battle of the Bands Edition! - STUDIO 666 vs. CYRANO, THE DESPERATE HOUR, THE BURNING SEA, NO EXIT, CREATION STORIES, EL OTRO TOM, and More
Well, this is a rather dismal way to end the month as many of us hoped that things would improve after a fairly dead month of January, and this past weekend definitely offered some promise. Thankfully, we have The Batman next week, so if nothing else, the box office can look forward to what’s likely to be the biggest theatrical release since Spider-Man: No Way Home.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t help us this week where the only two new wide releases are a.) a movie that’s kinda been sitting on the shelf since September festival season, and b.) a horror movie made by the Foo Fighters that before seeing it, I knew nothing about other than that it’s a horror movie... made by the Foo Fighters. (Oh, and the other movie features music from The National, so it’s literally like a Bandcamp weekend! Plus there’s a limited release that features lots of other cool bands, too! Rock and Roll!)
Before we get to the theatrical releases, I want to draw attention to a great annual series up at Film at Lincoln Center, as Neighboring Scenes 2022 will run from February 24 through 28, showing the very best of Latin American cinema in conjunction with Cinema Tropical. And this year, it will all be in the Walter Reade Theater, one of the best places to see movies in New York City. The five-day series starting Thursday features international, New York, and U.S. premieres of 13 films from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela.
This year’s opening night film (on Thursday) is Rodrigo Plá and Laura Santullo’s fantastic El Otro Tom (The Other Tom), an amazing drama from the Uruguyan-Mexican duo, which I thought was more effective at exploring motherhood even than Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter. Based on the novel by Santullo, it stars Julia Chávez as Elena, a single mother in the border town of El Paso, Texas, who is trying to keep a job while also caring for her nine-year-old son, Tom (Israel Rodriguez Bertorelli), who suffers from ADHD.
I wasn’t sure what to expect from the film, which admittedly, is mostly in English, being that the majority takes place in Texas vs. Mexico, but it shows what one young mother has to deal with while trying to earn a living, get much-needed welfare help, while also dealing with a son who at times is precocious but other times, can be a real nightmare. One of the reasons why I did like this more than The Lost Daughter is because it throws in the added hurdle of poverty that faces so many people but just isn’t covered in movies very much.
Young Israel is quite a find to play Tom, because he gives such an organic performance and one that really makes you believe him to be Chávez’s son. The movie somehow manages to find some levity in this relationship, but something pretty horrifying happens about an hour into the movie that really changes the dynamic between the two. It then becomes more of a commentary on the use of medication on kids with ADHD and how it affects them in so many negative ways. Elena wants to take Tom off the meds prescribed by his therapist but that decisions puts her in the crosshairs of social services, who wants Tom to spend time at a Christian camp where he can be helped, but that also doesn’t seem like the best thing for the young boy.
El Otro Tom is just a wonderful movie, and I have a feeling it’s the tip of the iceberg of the great cinema coming from South of the Border (and even further south than that).
You can see the rest of the schedule for “Neighboring Scenes” here. Some of the movies that look interesting to me are the two Brazilian films, Medusa (on Friday) and The Joy of Things (next Monday), and the Venezuelan film Me & The Beasts looks pretty bonkers, as well.
Also, this Friday, the Oscar-nominated shorts are opening at select cities around the country, including the IFC Center in New York City, the 15 films being divided into four programs. I have yet to watch all of them, but I do hope to get into them in coming weeks, and maybe I’ll share some thoughts once I do.
Oddly, this weekend’s widest new release is going to be somewhat unconventional, because the horror movie STUDIO 666 (Open Road) stars rock band, Foo Fighters. Frontman David Grohl has directed a number of docs and doc-series over the past few years, but this one is actually directed by BJ McDonnell (Hatchet III). The movie is based on a story by Grohl, who stars in the film along with his bandmates, as they try to record a new album in a house with a notorious supernatural past. It’s not long before Grohl, who has a bit of writers’ block, gets mixed up wth some demon shit and becomes possessed himself.
As mentioned above, I really didn’t know much about this movie before I saw it – you can read my review below – and Open Road is apparently releasing Studio 666 into roughly 2,000 theaters, which seem like a lot. Then again, you can’t really beat the marketing and promotion that Grohl and the band have done to promote the movie leading up to its release. The Foos have a LOT of fans, going by the fact they regularly sell out stadiums at this point. (They also have 3 million followers just on Twitter.) I personally don’t know what the Venn Diagram is between the Foos’ fans and those who love horror, but this is a pretty grisly horror movie and not for kids, so I expect it will mostly appeal to the band’s teen and 20-something fans that might be up for some straight-up R-rated horror.
The movie also stars Jenna Ortega from Scream (in a much, much smaller role), comedians Whitney Cummings and Will Forte, Leslie Grossman, and Jeff Garlin from Curb Your Enthusiasm, but none of them really have any kind of box office track record to go by… yet neither does the band, who are front and center. Yeah, there isn’t a ton to go by here, which is a shame, since it means I’m just going by the shaky track record that horror has had over the past couple years with the almost non-existent number of movies starring rock stars, maybe going back to 1978’s Kiss and the Phantom of the Park. (UPDATE: After posting this week's column, I was reminded of another far better comparison, Tenacious D and the Pick of Destiny, Jack Black's comedy from 2006, which opened with $3.2 million in 1,919 theaters. That actually could be a good model for Studio 666, since it similarly mixes rock music with demonic symbolism, and such.)
Yup, that’s where we’re at, and since that movie is 45 years old, it’s not going to help us very much, although maybe we can look at 2020’s Impractical Jokers: The Movie, basically a comedy “band” bringing what they do to movies, and that opened with $2.6 million in just 357 theaters. I don’t have a confirmation that Studio 666 is actually going to be in 2,000 theaters, but if that’s the case, I can definitely see it making between $3 and 4 million this weekend but with little to no legs or long-term business.
Mini-Review: As stated before, I didn’t know what to expect from a horror movie made by the Foo Fighters, and maybe I was expecting something a lot more low-budget or indie than what they’ve delivered with director McDonnell, who is a camera operator as his day job, but also has horror chops, having directed the slasher, Hatchet III.
The basic principle is that the Foos’ manager (played by Jeff Garlin) needs them to deliver a tenth record to the label, so they hunker down at this abandoned house that offers Grohl killer drum sounds (ha ha) but has history with another rock band that were trying to achieve the same rock perfection thirty years earlier before they all ended up dead. As SCTV’s Count Floyd would say… “Oooo, scary!”
Studio 666 is by no means a serious movie, so maybe it can be labelled more as a horror-comedy, since much of the humor is similar to what Grohl incorporates into shows when the Foo Fighters play live. This includes a good amount of self-deprecating humor and inside jokes about the relationship between the band members. It’s also pretty obvious that Grohl (who wrote the story) is a fan of old school horror films, especially the ones involving demonic possession, since he puts himself into the role as the guy who gets possessed and starts wantonly killing anyone who shows up at the house. And yeah, he eventually gets to his bandmates as well, so that probably was quite fun for Grohl. All the kills are particularly gory and bloody, but the movie never loses its sense of fun, which makes it more palatable than, say, last week’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre requel. In fact, it's probably more inspired by something like the Evil Dead movies, and that's not a bad goal to set for yourself when it comes to horror.
Outside actors like Whitney Cummings and Garlin do help with the improvised comedy within the movie, and there’s other fun things like the one and only John Carpenter providing an appropriate theme and also making a funny cameo.
Unfortunately, the ending ends up being quite cheesy as it tries to take the whole demonic possession thing a bit more seriously – except for a physical fight between Garlin and Grohl, which is just silly – but it also seems very much like Grohl and the writers just didn’t know how to end things after setting everything up over the course of the movie.
Otherwise, Studio 666 seems like Dave Grohl and his band just having some fun with all the money they’ve made in rock, without being particularly concerned about whether anyone does or doesn’t see or even like the results.
Rating: 6.5/10
It’s hard to believe but Joe Wright’s CYRANO (MGM) if finally getting a nationwide release, but only into about 750 theaters, which really doesn’t seem like enough to make much of an impact on the top 10. Regardless, it stars Peter Dinklage as the title character (and he should have gotten an Oscar nomination for his performance, dammit!!) while Haley Bennett (Swallow, The Girl on the Train) is playing Roxanne. Kelvin Harrison, Jr. and Ben Mendelsohn play Roxanne’s two other suitors, the handsome Christian and the lecherous Duke. Oh, and this version of Cyrano is a musical with music and songs by The National!
I don’t think I’m going to review this movie, because I’ve seen it twice already, and I even included it in my top 2021 movies, but I did love everything about the movie from the fantastic performances by the four main characters to all the music and songs by the National.
Obviously, Peter Dinklage has many fans from his Emmy-winning role on HBO’s Game of Thrones, and he’s no stranger to movies, having been acting in them going back to the ‘90s. (If you’ve never seen it, check out Tom DeCillo’s Living in Oblivion, an amusing take on indie filmmaking, in which Dinklage appears in a small role.) Dinklage probably became more known when Tom McCarthy’s debut, The Station Agent and Elf were released on the same day in 2003, Dinklage starring in the former. Dinklage has been doing a lot around his starring role on Game of Thrones, bouncing between indies and superhero movies (Dinklage appeared both in X-Men: Days of Future Past and Avengers: Infinity War, as two different characters), and also providing his voice for a number of animated films. Just nothing that we can note as making its money due to Dinklage’s involvement. The rest of the cast is great, including Bennett, who is as impressive in this as she was in 2020’s indie Swallow.
It’s equally hard to tell if Wright’s involvement as a director might have any impact because his movies have generally grossed between $30 and $56 million domestically with his Oscar-nominated films, Atonement and Darkest Hour, doing the higher range, but his big studio version of Peter Pan, called simply Pan, just not connecting with critics or audiences. (It definitely won’t help to mention that Wright and his Netflix thriller, The Woman in the Window, starring Amy Adams, was nominated for no less than FIVE Razzie Awards right before the release of Cyrano, which only received a single Oscar nomination.
Because of this, we really only have any sort of reliable box office precursors when it comes to musicals, and the recent theatrical releases of West Side Story and Dear Evan Hansen just doesn’t bode well for Cyrano, especially when you realize that most of the biggest movie musicals have been from Disney with only eight non-Disney movie musicals making more than $100 million, the most recent one being The Greatest Showman, starring Hugh Jackman, which grossed $174 million domestically with a holiday release in 2017. That also was an originally musical, as was the Oscar-winning La La Land a year earlier, but those having that kind of success are even rarer.
While Cyrano is based on a musical originally on stage, it was also not on Broadway proper, so it never really became as big as the likes of Chicago or Les Miserables before being adapted to the screen, and that right there might be its biggest hindrance.
Unfortunately, opening in only 750 theaters is going to severely limit Cyrano’s box office, and even though those theaters will be in big cities where the band and actors will be more popular, I have a feeling this will fall short of $2 million this weekend, enough to get into the top 10 but not too far beyond it gets clobbered by The Batman next week.
I have interview with Joe Wright over at Below the Line, another one of my leftovers from last year, and you can also read my interview with musicians Aaron and Bryce Dessner from the National, which ran last year.
Also, The Godfather: 50 Years is being released into roughly 156 theaters next week, all Dolby Theaters, and I can't wait to see it on Friday. Either way, neither of the new movies will have much of an impact on last week’s big hits or movies like Spider-Man: No Way Home and Sing 2, which have pretty much cornered the market for movie-going audiences the past couple months.
Update: The official theater count for Studio 666 is 2,306 theaters, and because of that, I'm updating my prediction by a hair for the weekend.
1. Uncharted (Sony) - $21.3 million -52%
2. Dog (MGM) - $9.5 million -36%
3. Spider-Man: No Way Home (Sony Pictures) - $4.9 million -33%
4. Death on the Nile (20th Century/Disney) - $3.9 million -39%
5. Studio 666 (Open Road) - $3.6 million N/A (up .2 million)
6. Jackass Forever (Paramount) - $2.5 million -52%
7. Marry Me (Universal) - $2 million -46%
8. Sing 2 (Universal) - $1.8 million -37%
9. Cyrano (MGM) - $1.6 million N/A
10. Scream (Paramount) - $1.1 million -48%
From Norway comes director John Andreas Andersen’s oil rig disaster flick, THE BURNING SEA (Magnet), which continues the filmmaker’s series of ecological disasters after 2018’s The Quake. (This was also produced by Martin Sundland, who produced by The Quake and Roar Unthag’s The Wave.) It Kristine Kujath Thorp, as Sofia, and Henrik Bjelland as her boyfriend, Stian, the latter who has a young son named Odin. The movie is about how their lives are affected when a rift on the ocean floor opens up, taking out a string of oil rigs in the North Sea. Sofia, along with her co-worker Arthur (Rolf Kristian Larsen), operate underwater robots and are called in to survey one such rig for survivors when they realize that it’s much worse than the oil company is letting on, which eventually affects Stian, who works on one of the rigs.
I’m not sure quite how much of the detailed plot I should share, because part of the reason the this film works so well as an ecological thriller is not to know too many of the specifics going. There are at least a few plot developments that may be somewhat predictable, but otherwise, this is quite an original take on the disaster flick. Part of that comes from the way it examines the seriousness of how climate change is affecting the earth, as well as the corporate greed and political implications of staying ahead of it, and yet, it’s still quite entertaining.
The danger is revealed a tad bit more casually than something like the recent Moonfall, and at first, it’s not quite clear what took out the oil rig that Sofia and Arthur are surveying using their robot to find survivors. (Okay, I’ll admit it. I kind of was hoping that the oil rig was taken out by some Norwegian version of an underwater kaiju monster, but that was not meant to be.) As more information is revealed, we learn that there’s as much of a cover-up by the oil company who wants to protect its investment, maybe even more than protecting the people who rely on the North Sea for other resources.
You know who probably would really love this movie? James Cameron. Because here’s so much underwater footage from Sofia and Arthur’s robot as they look for survivors (and later, for Stian). The movie also has a lot of great CG setpieces, showing the danger and destruction the main characters face, but always keeping things grounded in a way that makes it feel more authentic than Moonfall (which I also loved).
Like a Norwegian cross between Deep Water Horizon and The Abyss, The Burning Sea is a fine ecological disaster thriller that gives the viewer lots to think about without boring them with too much science or politics.
Rating: 7.5/10
After premiering at TIFF last year as “Lakewood,” Phillip Noyce’s THE DESPERATE HOUR (Roadside Attraction), starring Naomi Watts, will hit theaters and be available On Demand this Friday. I liked it just fine then, but I liked it a lot more on second viewing, maybe because Watts is just such a terrific dramatic actor, and she excels at every aspect of what’s involved with this role. In The Desperate Hour – somewhat of a typical pandemic movie ala the recent Kimi with mostly a single character – she plays Amy Carr, a mother with two kids, who decides to go out for a run in the woods. Mid-run, she starts hearing about an active shooter situation at her teen son Noah’s school, and she worries about his physical and mental well-being.
With a script by Christopher Sparling (Buried, Greenland), The Desperate Hour is another fascinating cinematic look at the all-too-familiar in the school shootings that have plagued this country going back to Columbine in 1999 but also has delivered horrifying events like the ones that hit Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, and Parkland, Florida. And those are just the more well-known ones. If you want to really get freaked out, check out this listing of school shootings since 2020, and you see that there are so many school shootings we never hear about!
With apologies for that tangent, that’s an important fact to know about, because if you’re a parent with kids in school, I can only imagine what you must go through every time you hear about one of these tragic events. As far as Watts’ character Amy, she’s already going through some family issues after her husband died a year earlier, after which her teen son Noah just hasn’t been the same. Her first thought is for Noah’s safety, and the second is that maybe Noah’s responsible. This ever-present parental view has been covered in movies before, such as the recent Mass, We Need to Talk about Kevin and others. What sets The Desperate Hour apart is that we’re watching it from the viewpoint of a mother almost in real-time as she starts getting more information through a series of phone calls and ends up maybe getting a little more involved in the policework than any parent should.
Noyce is a fantastic filmmaker who really makes the most out of this simple one-actor premise which focuses mainly on Watts’ character running through the woods and interacting with Siri. Thankfully, this was not done as a pretentious cinematic done-in-one-shot movie, but one with pretty decent production values. The cinematography and editing in particular are used well to help build the tension, as is the fantastic score by Fil Eisler, who oddly, has scored mostly slapstick comedies before this.
As obvious and predictable The Desperate Hour might get at times, you can truly appreciate another terrific performance from Watts as a mother trying to remain strong in the face of unbearable adversity.
Rating; 7.5/10
Premiering on Hulu this Friday is Damien Power’s suspense thriller NO EXIT (Hulu), based on Taylor Adams’ novel, which is just the latest movie from 20th Century/Searchlight that’s just going straight to the streaming network. And great, it’s another streaming movie that’s embargoed until it hits the streamer, so I can’t even share a review of it just yet. Regardless, it stars Havana Rose Liu (who was recently in The Sky is Everywhere and May Day) as Darby, a young woman dealing with drug issues at a rehab place when she learns her mother is dying, so she escapes and heads to see her. Along the way, she gets caught in a blizzard and pulls off at a rest stop in the mountains where she discovers a young girl tied up in a van, forcing her to try to figure out which of the denizens of the rest stop is the kidnapper. Unfortunately, this is also embargoed until Friday, so that’s all I can say for now.
UPDATE: Sorry, but I've decided not to review this one.
Premiering at New York’s Metrograph Friday is James Vaughan’s FRIENDS AND STRANGERS (Grasshopper Films), a rather strange Australian comedy, of sorts, which stars Fergus Wilson as Ray, a 20-something guy from Sydney, who goes on a camping trip with his friend Alice (Emma Diaz). Things never get quite romantic, since he seems unable to commit. Once back in Sydney, Ray takes on a job with his friend Miles to videotape a wedding, but his car breaks down, and then one thing strange thing happens after another.
There isn’t really too much more to say about the movie since there isn’t a ton of actual plot, but in this case, it’s not necessarily a bad thing, since Vaughan’s characters and writing are just so original you’re constantly wondering what’s going through their heads. Although the first maybe half hour of the movie is carried by the awkward interaction between Wilson and Diaz, the rest of it continues sans Diaz with equally amusing interactions between Ray and the people he encounters. The film reminded me quite a bit of French auteur Eric Rohmer, who has many fans at the Metrograph, going by past programming and even the fact that Metrograph Press has picked up a few of Rohmer’s films to distribute to repertory theaters.
Friends and Strangers is a pretty decent showcase of what the younger generation of Australia must be going through, but if you’re my age, you might feel a lot like the homeowner who is just completely puzzled by Fergus’s behavior and the silly things that come out of his mouth.
Rating: 7/10
Prolific 2-time Emmy-winning television director and producer Stephanie Laing returns with her second movie, FAMILY SQUARES (Screen Media), a pandemic-set movie about a family dealing with the loss of its matriarch (played by June Squibb), who releases a number of shocking revelations that shakes up the already disjointed family. Because this happens during the pandemic, most of these discussions and squabbles happen over Zoom.
I honestly can’t remember if I saw Laing’s previous feature, Irreplaceable You, but what separates Laing’s latest from all the other pandemic Zoom films is that this one has a pretty large ensemble cast, but it’s also an insanely talented cast of comics and actors from Margo Martindale to Ann Dowd, Henry Winkler, Elsie Fisher, Judy Greer, Casey Wilson, Zoe Chao, Billy Magnussen, Sam Richardson, and so many more.
It was honestly a little odd watching this after seeing Ondi Timoner’s doc Last Flight Home, which is about her actual father gathering his family as he prepares himself for assisted medical suicide due to lethal health issues. This definitely is more comedic in nature as the family is gathered to say their goodbyes to June Squibb’s Mabel. Dowd plays Mabel’s lover, Judith, who the family hasn’t fully accepted, but even after death, Mabel has left her will in the form of a series of videos that threatens to tear apart all of the family’s darkest secrets. Fun stuff.
Despite Family Squares primarily being a Zoom movie, it does have better production values than these things normally have, as we see the various locations where the family members live. Unfortunately, while the family drama is amusing at first, it quickly grows a little tiring just as the family’s squabbling also makes them even more annoying. Fortunately, there are some decent moments, as Laing mixes it up with different configurations of the various characters, so we get some truly fantastic scenes between Martindale, Greer, and Wilson, for instance. There’s also a nice father-daughter sidestory between Timothy Simons’ widowed character and his daughter, played by Fisher, that makes up for some of the clunkier bits earlier. I also don’t think having Rob Reiner narrating the film and explaining everything happening was particularly necessary to understand the family dynamics.
Sure, the movie does get a little too weepy at times, and other times, it feels like Laing is trying too hard to win over the audience with sentimentality, but Family Squares has so much undeniable talent on display you can forgive the scattered moments that don’t deliver as well as others.
Rating: 6.5/10
I watched CREATION STORIES (RLJEntertainment/AMC+), when it premiered at Tribeca last year, but it will be on digital and On Demand this Friday as well as in a few theaters. If you’re not familiar with Alan McGee and Creation Records, they were responsible for some of the best music coming out of England in the ‘90s, releasing pivotal records by Primal Scream, My Bloody Valentine,Teenage Fanclub, and eventually, Oasis. McGee (Ewen Bremner from Trainspotting) tells his story to a journalist (Suki Waterhouse), from his teen years, escaping from his abusive father (Richard Jobson) to London with his band and literally falling into the role of record label head by releasing records by the cool bands he loves. It’s adapted by Trainspotting writer Irvine Welsh and Dean Cavaugh from McGee’s own autobiography, Creation Stories: Riots Raves & Running.
Exec. producer by Danny Boyle, Creation Stories is a movie that I should have absolutely loved, because the music released by Creation Records was absolutely my jam, especially during the period with some of the bands mentioned above. Sure, I was vaguely curious about McGee himself, but never read the autobiography on which this movie is based, and I have a feeling that’s better than the resulting movie.
Unfortunately, the idea to turn McGee’s autobiography into a movie may have looked good on paper, but the results of this movie, directed by Nick Moran (The Kid), just isn’t something I think would be of much interest to anyone BUT those interested in the early days of the Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine, etc. The movie’s biggest hurdle is that the screenplay isn’t particularly good, trying to create something non-linear by having McGee (as played by Bremner) telling his own story to Suki Waterhouse’s reporter, while cutting back to the younger McGee (played by Leo Flanagan).
All the cutting back and forth doesn’t work as well as it should – it’s clearly going for something similar to Trainspotting – since Bremner’s performance is quite over-the-top, and the scenes where he’s being interviewed by Waterhouse just aren’t nearly as entertaining as actually watching the stories being told. In general, the movie just feels like it’s up then down and all over the place.
Some might find there’s some overlap between this with 24 Hour Party People, but that’s just such a fantastic movie that makes it even more obvious how erratic and sloppy Creation Stories feels by comparison.
The whole point of Creation Stories is to make Alan McGee the hero of his own story, and yet the way he’s depicted just makes him seem like an A-1 asshole who just lucked into most of his amazing musical discoveries. Honestly, I’d just skip this movie and go back and listen to all the great records McGee released.
Rating: 6/10
Brian Petsos’ dark comedy BIG GOLD BRICK (Samuel Goldwyn Films) star Emory Cohen and Andy Garcia, the latter playing Floyd Devereaux, a middle-aged philandering father of two, who hires aspiring writer Samuel Liston (Cohen) to write his biography after hitting him with his car. In agreeing to do so, Samuel gets pulled into Floyd’s dysfunctional family life with his pyromaniac son Eddie, while Megan Fox plays Floyd’s significantly younger wife Jacqueline and Lucy Hale is his daughter Lilly, both with whom Samuel becomes infatuated.
This is a pretty strange comedy that in parts kinda reminded me of Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums a little, but obviously without being nearly as cool or clever. I probably should have liked a movie better that opens and closes with King Crimson’s “Red,” but it really took far to much time for me to really get into the awkward character played by Cohen, since he’s mostly ranting and raving through much of the movie. And then, there’s another later version of the Cohen’s character – presumably the one after publishing Floyd’s biography – that’s more calm and thoughtful. In general, his character just didn’t click with me in the same way that Garcia’s far more gregarious character does.
Oh, and Oscar Isaac is in this movie, but he doesn’t show up until about an hour into the movie as a mob boss named Aselm, and apparently, he has a henchman who looks like a cro-magnon man, but no one really says anything about that. In general, Garcia is the best part of the movie, followed by Hale, but in general, it’s never clear why she or Megan Fox’s character would be particularly interested in the schlub
Never quite clear where things are going or why people should be watching it, Big Gold Brick offers quirky characters and situations that never fully come together or justifies why it ended up being over two hours long!
Rating: 6/10
Movies I couldn’t get to this week:
THREE MONTHS (Paramount+) HELLBENDER (Shudder) GASOLINE ALLEY (Saban Films/Paramount) BUTTER (Blue Fox Entertainment) TYLER PERRY’S A MADEA HOMECOMING (Netflix)
Next week, The Batman, and a major announcement! (Maybe.)
The Weekend Warrior 2/18/22 - UNCHARTED, DOG, THE CURSED, TOO COOL TO KILL, THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, TED K, THE AUTOMAT, and More
It’s President’s Day weekend, which means that a lot of kids and government workers get another Monday off… lucky them! I don’t have a job so no day off for me!
As partially expected, this past weekend was a rather weak showing for movies with the #1 movie not even making $13 million. It’s a little hard to believe that the box office is in worse shape now than when NYC and LA movie theaters reopened last March. Spider-Man: No Way Home seemed to point to a recovery, but I guess that was only for that one specific movie. There has just been too many other options on television and streaming over the past few weeks, including the Winter Olympics and the Super Bowl this past weekend. We’ll have to see if now that those are both over, we can see a few movies break-out, and this weekend, there is a movie that could maybe do slightly better, even if The Batman is likely to be the big winner up until the summer box office kicks off in May.
This week’s most high-profile release is the first video game movie of the year, and it’s a doozy, as the long-in-development action-adventure UNCHARTED (Sony) comes to theaters, starring Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg. Mind you, while I am not much of a gamer, I also haven’t had a Sony Playstation console since the very first one, and “Uncharted” has always been a Playstation exclusive game, created by Amy Hennig, beginning in 2007 with “Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune” on the Playstation 3. The main reason I even know about it is that my old boss at ComingSoon.net was an avid fan, and I’ll be really curious to see what he thinks of the movie once he sees it.
Otherwise, we’re looking at a 9-game series, the biggest seller being “Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End,” which sold over 15 million copies in 2016 with the series looking at almost 42 million copies sold, so it’s probably no wonder why Sony has spent almost 15 years trying to develop a movie based on it with Spider-Man producer Avi Arad developing it. So many directors and writers and actors have come on board and eventually moved on, but it finally came down to Sony vet Ruben Fleischer of Zombieland and the first Venom movie being brought on board to make it happen.
Attaching Tom Holland was probably a big step to making the movie since Holland had starred in two previous Spider-Man movies that did very well, and this was before his most recent movie, Spider-Man: No Way Home became one of the top three biggest movies ever made. (That movie is close to passing James Cameron’s Avatar for third place all-time, as I write this.) Holland is playing a younger version of Nathan Drake, the popular protagonist of the puzzle adventure game that I imagine is a bit like a male Tomb Raider. Uncharted. It’s going to be the real test whether Holland can be shifted to A-lister status or can be considered a box office draw, since his last movie, Chaos Walking, with Daisy Ridley from the “Star Wars” movies, no less, bombed in March 2021, being released before theaters were fully open in NYC and L.A. Holland’s previous movies, Cherry and The Devil All the Time, were on streaming, and then he had a few voice roles, teaming with Chris Pratt for Disney/Pixar’s Onward, which was also hobbled by the pandemic, and a few months earlier, Holland teamed with Will Smith for a voice role in Spies in Disguise. In between was a voice role in the delayed Robert Downey Jr. vehicle, Dolittle, which actually did better than both animated movies. It’s not looking great for Holland to make Uncharted a good follow-up hit franchise for Sony, but you never know, because many of the younger fans of Holland’s Spider-Man will be older and possibly ready for a PG-13 movie.
The next step was to get Mark Wahlberg on board as Victor Sullivan, offering a bit of older support for the young star, though Wahlberg’s recent career has been spotty. His most recent action movie, Infinite, went straight to streaming, while his drama Joe Bell tanked after getting decent reviews out of the Toronto Film Festival. Wahlberg’s last big hits were the Daddy’s Home movies with Will Ferrell, and in between he starred in Michael Bay’s Transformers: The Last Knight, which grossed $602 million worldwide but was a disappointment compared to the three previous movies in that franchise. But then, Wahlberg also starred in Seth McFarlane’s hugely successful comedy, Ted, and its lower-grossing sequel. Either way, Wahlberg has become a legacy actor, one who may do a couple movies a year but never wears out his welcome. His pairing with Holland seems to be a wise one, at least on paper. Uncharted’s cast is rounded out by Oscar nominee Antonio Banderas as the primary villain, though neither having played the game or seen the movie (as I write this), I’m not sure if he’s playing a character from the games or not.
Either way, video game movies have been spotty at the box office with 2020’s Sonic the Hedgehog being one of the rare recent hits, grossing $146 domestically despite opening just one month before the pandemic shut down theaters. The 2021 reworking of Mortal Kombat made only $42 million after a $23.3 million opening, but that was also hobbled by the fact it was released day-and-date onto HBO Max. Still, the three biggest video game adaptations were Sonic, the Pokemon: Detective Pikachu movie released a year earlier, and then the first Lara Croft: Tomb Raider movie, starring Angelina Jolie, which made $131 domestic way back in 2001… that’s right. Over twenty years ago.
This puts a pretty big onus on Uncharted, especially with so many moviegoers transitioning to at-home viewing due to the pandemic. Still, God (and I) love Sony for continuing to mostly release its movies in theaters only, which definitely paid off big time with No Way Home, and having this trailer in front of that movie can only help Uncharted bring in some of Holland’s growing fanbase from that MCU-related franchise.
Reviews out of the UK came out late last week and they were generally terrible, at about 44% on Rotten Tomatoes as of this writing, but they’ve gotten better with American reviews. (You can read my review of Uncharted here.) Terrible reviews may have done more damage to Uncharted than anything else, but getting mixed reviews might mean it can give the box office a nice-needed bump.
Even with the 4-day weekend, I’m not sure if I’d go as high as $40 million when predicting the movie’s box office, but I think it can fare well with roughly mid-$30 millions including Monday, and then it has smooth sailing right until the release of The Batman in two weeks.
Channing Tatum continues his big comeback as the star of DOG (MGM)... with an actual dog as his co-star. It’s Tatum’s co-directorial debut along with his long-time production partner, Reid Carolin, who wrote Magic Mike and has been involved as a producer on many of Tatum’s movies going back to Stop-Loss in 2008 (for which he was an associate producer). This is a big return project for Tatum since he hasn’t had a major role in a movie since 2017’s Kingsman: the Golden Circle and Steven Soderbergh’s Logan Lucky. Tatum did have a small but key role in last year’s box office hit, Free Guy, though, playing a video game avatar opposite Ryan Reynolds, which seems like a fun bit of irony. (Only because his directorial debut is going up against an actual video game movie.) Tatum will also be appearing in the April release, The Lost City, opposite Sandra Bullock, which should continue the roll he seems to be on.
In this one, Tatum plays Briggs, a former Army Ranger who brings the army dog Lulu on a road trip down the Pacific Coast to get to a fellow soldier’s funeral. It looks cute but it’s also not the PG family film some might be expecting from the ads and trailers. (It’s actually PG-13.) Other than Tatum and the dog, the rest of the cast includes former wrestler Kevin Nash, who also appeared in Magic Mike, and Q'orianka Kilcher, who some may remember from her starring role in Terrence Malick’s The New World. Others will remember for how it is to remember how to spell her name during awards season.
Bearing in mind that Dog isn’t PG, it’s still a movie that will appeal to dog-lovers as much as to Tatum fans, and on the recent side of things, we got A Dog’s Purpose, which opened over MLK weekend in 2017 with $19.2 million and grossed $64.3 million domestic and $138.7 million overseas. Its thematic sequel, A Dog’s Journey opened two years later with just $8 million and $22 million domestic and $56 million overseas. Of course, we can’t forget Marley and Me, which was also based on a bestselling book, which opened over Christmas in 2008 and grossed $247 million worldwide with an insane $36.7 million opening weekend. Of course, that was also PG, benefitted from being a family movie over the holidays, and of course, it had Jennifer Aniston. Maybe that’s a factor? Who knows, but those are all very specialized factors, though ones that show the appeal of the dog genre, which should still be in play even with any effect COVID might have on Tatum’s latest.
Unfortunately, reviews are embargoed until Thursday evening (including my own), so it’s hard to tell whether critics will like this movie or whether it will even matter. It’s a little weird that there is this embargo considering that the movie had previews on Monday aka Valentine’s Day, presumably to bring in the date crowd of dog lovers. Even so, Dog also could be fairly review-proof, although we’ll have to see if Channing Tatum can still bring people into theaters or whether he’ll have a similar opening as JLo had last week i.e not great.
I think Dog should be good for somewhere in the $10 to 12 million range this weekend and might get a nice bump from Monday being a school holiday, but it’s hard to really tell whether a movie like this can do well in such a soft market. Still, if it’s good enough to get sneaks and reviews aren’t too terrible, it could have decent legs at least next week and maybe even as counter-programming to The Batman come March. While I can't review the movie just yet, I can predict that this will get an "A" CinemaScore, making it the first movie of the year to do so.
Mini-Review: I went into Dog slightly skeptical, because it seemed like a rather cutesy family-friendly film about a guy and a dog, and something we’ve seen quite a few times previously. Maybe I was a little dubious of Channing Tatum and his production partner making their directorial debuts with such softball material, but boy, was I wrong.
Tatum plays Army Ranger Jackson Briggs, who is itching to get back into the field even though a head injury he’s sustained has made him too much of a liability. Instead, he’s given an assignment to drive a Belgian Malinois named Lulu – whose handler and Jackson’s friend, Riley Rodriguez, recently died – to his family funeral in Arizona. Briggs is damaged goods but so is Lulu, and they try their best to get along on the days-long drive down the Pacific Coast Highway, although Briggs definitely doesn’t have the patience for Lulu’s demands and antics.
Dog is a movie that’s warm and funny pretty much from beginning to end. While a lot of both elements come from the relationship between Tatum and his highly-trained dog co-star, it’s also just a really well-written and realized story that finds some new directions to go with what’s otherwise a fairly simple road trip dramedy.
I was very impressed with Tatum in his latest role as a soldier, making it evidently clear that being more involved in the filmmaking process along with regular collaborator, Reid Carolin, gives the actor the venue to do some of his best work. Obviously, a lot of credit has to go to Lulu’s handler/trainer, but the film’s two stars contribute so much to each other’s performances as well.
Even though so much of the movie focuses on just Tatum and Lulu, one of my favorite scenes involved Kevin Nash (of the famed WCW group New World Order) and Jane Adams as a hippy couple they meet on their journey, the latter being able to create a bond with Lulu almost immediately, much to Briggs’ consternation. There’s also some solid shenanigans teased in the trailer of Briggs pretending to be a blind vet to get a hotel room – really, it’s for Lulu – but in general, there are as many moments that are humorous and fun as there are more dramatic ones.
Maybe it’s no surprise that the duo were able to get the likes of Newton Thomas Sigel behind the camera and Thomas Newman providing the score, but I especially liked the choice of songs put together by music supervisor, Season Kent (who has done a similar role for a lot of Soderbergh’s movies, as well as Magic Mike XL, directed by Dog producer Greg Jacobs). Any director will tell you that the three most important parts of making a good movie is having a great script, a great cast, but also great collaborators, and Tatum/Carolin do pretty well with their first movie as directors.
I’m not afraid to admit that the film did get me quite teary towards the end, because it’s really a wonderful story with a terrific message about how two broken creatures can help each other recover. Dog is just a wonderful film, an impressive emotive directorial debut from Tatum and Carolin, as well as the definition of a feel-good crowd-pleaser.
Rating: 8/10
British filmmaker Sean (Cashback) Ellis’ new movie, which premiered at last year’s Sundance under the title “Eight for Silver” is now being given a wide release into about 2,000 theaters as THE CURSED (LD Entertainment). It stars Boyd Holbrook (Logan) as pathologist John McBride, who arrives at a French village in the late 1800s to investigate a couple grisly murders by seemingly a savage animal. As he digs deeper into the murders, McBride starts thinking that this might be another case of lycanthropy i.e. a werewolf!
I had to do some actual research to tell you the last time we had a Gothic horror movie akin to The Cursed, the only ones I can think of being 2018’s Winchester, starring Helen Mirren, or 2012’s The Woman in Black, which starred Daniel Radcliffe, and its 2014 sequel, The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death, which didn’t. The Women in Black probably was the most successful of these, opening with $20.8 million and grossing almost $129 million worldwide. Its sequel opened slightly lower but only made about half the original did domestically. Released by CBS Films, Winchester did less than both those movies, opening with $9.3 million and grossing $25 million domestically.
I highly doubt The Cursed will open as well as either of them, being that Holbrook is the film’s biggest name star, having played a major role in Logan as well as in 2018’s The Predator, written and directed by Shane Black. He’s followed maybe by Kelly Reilly, who had a supporting role opposite Denzel Washington in Robert Zemeckis’ Flight, as well as a small role in Robert Downey Jr.’s Sherlock Holmes and its sequel. She’s also appeared in TV series like True Detective, Britannia, and Yellowstone, so maybe she’s a bigger star than Holbrook, but she has a smaller role in Ellis’ movie. The movie also stars Alistair Petrie, who you’ve seen on TV and in many movies (like the most recent Hellboy and Rogue One), but I certainly didn’t recognize him.
Horror is a genre that has generally done well during the pandemic, but I’m not sure that LD Entertainment has really been able to get this one out there with the marketing to let the younger audience who would thrill at this movie’s scares and gore to know about the movie’s existence. In some ways, this has about as much awareness as the January releases, The King’s Daughter and Redeeming Love, although at least the latter did pretty well without big name stars.
This is a brilliant movie – read my review below – and it’s a shame that it’s not being released by a much bigger studio, so this is very much the weekend underdog… or wolf… (Apparently, NEON is involved with the film’s distribution or marketing in some form? Who knows? I cannot keep track of this stuff.) Either way, I don’t see this making more than $2 million, and that’s over the four-day weekend, so it might just squeeze into the Top 10 but remain on the lower side.
Incidentally, I have an interview with Sean Ellis done out of Sundance last year over at Below the Line, which I hope you'll check out after seeing the movie.
Mini-Review: To think on how long it’s been since there’s been a decent werewolf movie and realize that it was probably Brotherhood of the Wolf all the way back in 2001, also makes me realize partially why I enjoyed Sean Ellis’ entry into the genre so much. Like Brotherhood, this is a gothic horror film that doesn’t skimp on the gore or the scares, while also feeling a little more of a prestige film in terms of filmmaking than we normally get from studio horror films.
In fact, it takes some time before you may even realize that’s where the film is going, because it begins by showing a group of village elders who are dealing with a protesting band of gypsies about land they claim is theirs. The elders get together a group of men to scare the gypsies off the land which instead turns into a bloodbath. (This raid on the gypsy camp is a 90-second single shot from a distance that’s absolutely breathtaking, like something we might expect from an Alfonso Cuaron or Allejandro Inarittu.)
Anyone who has seen The Wolf Man knows one very important rule: YOU DO NOT FUCK WITH GYPSIES. Sure enough, these ones have cursed the men who have done these horrendous deeds, burying a set of sharp teeth made from melted-down silver coins. This curse begins with the kids of the village experiencing nightmares, and then the son of Seamus (Alistair Prete), a prominent and wealthy village leader, simply vanishing. Other kids aren’t so lucky and their mangled bodies are found just as a pathologist, John McBride, played by Boyd Holbrook, arrives into town looking into a situation that sounds eerily like the one that took his wife and daughter years earlier.
I feel like I shouldn’t say too much more about the plot other than that, but I do feel it should be noted that there are scenes in this movie that are so horrifying and possibly triggering, I’m not sure this movie won’t cause a few viewers to have actual nightmares. At first, this seems to be Ellis’ commentary on the xenophobia and racism that has struck much of the world, but we’re then fully brought into the world of gothic horror with so many terrifying scenes, just one after the other.
Either way, if you’re a fan of Brotherhood of the Wolf (or if a little older school, going back to Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves), Ellis’ The Cursed is a truly satisfying entry into the genre offering gore and bonafide terror. Rating: 8/10
Here is how I have the four-day box office looking:
1. Uncharted (Sony) - $35.3 million N/A
2. Dog (MGM) - $11.2 million N/A
3. Death on the Nile (20th Century/Disney) - $9.8 million -26%
4. Spider-Man: No Way Home (Sony) - $6.5 million -14%
5. Marry Me (Universal) - $6.4 million -19%
6. Jackass Forever (Paramount) - $5.5 million -31%
7. Sing 2 (Universal) - $2.8 million -7%
8. Blacklight (Briarcliff) - $2.2 million -36%
9. The Cursed (LD Entertainment) - $2 million N/A
10. Scream (Paramount) - $1.9 million -33%
This week’s “Chosen One” is Xing Wenxiong’s stylish period crime-comedy, TOO COOL TO KILL (Well Go USA), which will remind some of the films of the great Stephen Chow (Kung Fu Hustle, Shaolin Soccer). The movie has already grossed over $200 million in China in its very first week in theaters there! It stars Wei Xiang as Wei Chenggong, an overzealous, overly-confident and quite hammy actor with high aspirations of being a leading man. He gets his chance when a famous actress named Milan (Ma Li) casts Wei to play the assassin “Killer Kang” in a fake movie, essentially to fool a mob boss threatening her and her director brother.
I honestly didn’t know what to expect from this one, but I was immediately tickled when I realized this was a period piece taking place on an island, and that the director had created a miniature of this entire city on that island, which pretty much sets up what is going to be an incredibly stylish film where the production design is almost a character in itself. I feel like I should be more familiar with the main actors in this, but they’re actually a fairly new breed of Chinese actors from the last decade who haven’t been in many films that have travelled over here.
But almost as soon as the film began, I was on board with its mix of comedy and stunts that is the mainstay of Chow, one of my favorite Chinese actor and filmmakers, so much so that I had to double-check that this wasn’t a film he made to follow up the excellent, The Mermaid. Wei Ziang is a terrific comic actor and he’s paired beautifully with Ma Li in a high-concept premise where he takes on the role of his career as an assassin facing real-world criminals while only he seems to think he’s actually making a movie. It’s a concept that allows for all sorts of zany and hilarious humor that’s so unique and original, although eventually Milan realizes things are getting too real and dangerous to not tell Wei the truth. (There’s a nice pseudo-romance that grows between the two, just one of the many wonderful aspects to the film.)
I have to be honest that I haven’t laughed this hard watching a movie in a very long time, and I just loved every minute of Too Cool to Kill – including its out-of-nowhere tribute to “Singing in the Rain.” Even if it does get somewhat morose in its third act, it ends on a great note by really playing on its truly meta storytelling. I personally can’t wait to see what Xing Wenxiong does next.
Rating: 8/10
Another cool movie worth seeking out is Lisa Hurwitz’s doc THE AUTOMAT, which will open at New York’s Film Forum on Friday and then will open in L.A. at the Laemmle Royal and Encino on Friday, Feb. 25. If you lived in New York City pre-1990s... then you’re probably as old as I am… but also you may have heard or even been to the Horn and Hardart Automat, of which only one was remaining until being shut down in the early ‘90s. I was lucky enough to go there in 1988 to attend the 40th anniversary of PIX 11, and it was a great New York tradition, although there was also one in Philadelphia, apparently. The idea was that people would go in, get their dollars exchanged for nickels, and they’d use those coins to get a sandwich or a nice piece of pie or maybe a hot cup of coffee, long before the existence of Starbucks. (As we learn in the film, the Automat was an influence on Starbucks founder Howard Schultz, kind of a funny moment when he’s talking about how it inspired his desire for “storytelling and romance,” neither things I’d ever associate with Starbucks.) Hurwitz fills the movie with everyone from Mel Brooks (who provides an original song, no less), Elliot Gould, and both the late Colin Powell and Ruth Bader Ginsburgh, sharing their personal memories of the Automat. Sure, some might see what was done by Horn and Hardart as a precursor for fast food, but it’s always stressed that they always tried to provide the highest quality of food, even if the Automat became a safe haven for the homeless during its latter days before shutting down. This is a a really fascinating doc at a quick and bouncy 79 minutes that keeps you interested with all the history being shared, and anyone who sees this will definitely understand why it was so sadly missed by those who had so many joyous visits to it.
Sharto Copley stars in Ted Stone’s TED K (Super LTD/NEON), which premiered at Berlinale a year ago, and will get a limited release this week. It tells the story of Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, who terrorized North America during the ‘90s with his deadly mail bombs, threatening to kill more people unless major newspapers published his 35,000 word manifesto, which The Washington Post did.
This movie really hit me like a ton of bricks, because after the announcement at the beginning that this film was shot on the same Montana location where Ted holed up with his brother before Ted began his terrorist crusade that killed many people, we get to watch Copley give one of the most inspired performances of his career. But the way that Stone tells this story, beginning with a beautiful shot of snowmobiles racing through the Montana woods… before we see Ted breaking into the owner’s house and taking an axe to those snowmobiles. If you aren’t briefed on Kaczynski, he had a thing against technology, but he was also one of those always-angry cranks who was constantly writing letters of complain. In this case, those snowmobiles were just annoyingly noisy and disturbing his piece in the cluttered shed he calls home.
I wasn’t quite sure how this movie would play, because Kaczynski is clearly quite crazy, but he also reminded me of Charlie Hunnam’s character in the recent Last Looks. It’s hard to deny that watching his day-to-day is endlessly fascinating, whether it’s watching him awkwardly riding a bike down the street or just, you know, building bombs.
What’s particularly eerie about this film is that even though it’s beautifully-made and very artsy – reminds me a bit of Spencer in that sense – it’s often hard to watch, because you know there are real people out there like Ted, possibly even building bombs. In fact, some who watch this might think that Ted reminds them of some of the Trumpsters that invited the Capital on January 6, 2021. Maybe they’ll even think that Ted K is an answer to that horrific event, but in fact, the movie was done well before that for it to have played Berlin in February last year.
The other thing that makes Ted K quite effective is that you might find yourself wondering if you could ever feel so disaffected and alone that you might be driven to some of what Ted does. You also might find yourself wondering why he wasn’t caught sooner, and how he was able to get away with as much as he did.
Stone really finds a great way into Kaczynksi’s mind, not just through the terrific performance by Copley but also the film’s mix of reality and fantasy, the narration taken directly from the famed manifesto, and the terrific musical choices – just really interesting songs as well as an equally-effective score by Blanck Mass.
Ted K is a deeply disturbing film at times, which makes it hard to watch but also hard to fully recommend as well, but if you want to see Copley give his career-best performance in such an endlessly fascinating character study, then Ted K is definitely worthwhile.
Rating: 7.5/10
Speaking of Berlin, a movie that premiered at Berlin TWO years ago finally was released into theaters last week, as Andrew (Lullaby) Levitas’ MINAMATA (Samuel Goldwyn), starring Johnny Depp, was quietly released into theaters. Based on true events, it stars Depp as war photographer W. Eugene Smith who travels back to Japan in the early ‘70s to document the effects of mercury poisoning on coastal communities. It also stars Bill Nighy as Life (or maybe Time?) editor Robert Hayes, and a couple Japanese actors we’ve seen in everything, Hiroyuki Sanada and Tadanobu Asano. I haven’t watched the whole thing yet to share a review, but just thought it was an interesting subject for a movie that sadly seems to be getting buried due to Depp.
Lao-based filmmaker Mattie Do’s THE LONG WALK (Yellow Veil Pictures), her third film, will be the first film from her country released in the United States, and it will be opening on Friday at the Metrograph (in theater and digitally) as well as a few other theaters around the country ahead of its digital and on-demand debut on March 1. It’s pretty amazing that this year, we’ve already gotten a great film from Bhutan (the Oscar-nominated Lunana*) and from Chad (Lingui: The Sacred Bonds), and now we get a rare film from Lao. The Long Walk is a quizzical film that involves elements of science-fiction and the supernatural while keeping things within a fairly simple village setting. It involves an elderly man in a society where people have bar codes in their arm that keeps track of their money, but the film involves a mysterious mute woman, a young boy, and a sick woman, who seems to be the old man’s mother, and it also involves time travel, of sorts.
Okay, I’ll be honest that I didn’t fully understand what was going on in this movie, at least not at first. This is nothing new, and also not merely to do with this particular movie this week, but that doesn’t mean that I didn’t like this, and Mattie Do certainly offers a rather unique voice to world cinema. But once I did start to follow what was going on, I really found the interesting mix of genre storytelling in a setting that one wouldn’t normally see in genre kept me quite fascinated.
I’m not going to spoil too much of the movie since there are a few interesting twists, especially in the third act, but the time travel aspect of an elder man being able to travel back in time in an effort to save his dying mother gave me Looper vibes, but it more reminded me of the movies of Benson and Moorhead, like The Endless and Synchronic.
Despite the simple setting, Ms. Do does a fine job directing this intensive thriller that doesn’t overemphasize the sci-fi elements but never forgets about them either. I particularly liked how her movie used sound design and a high droning tone to create more tension, which makes the viewer not confused so much as on edge, trying to figure out how these different characters relate to each other.
Still, Mattie Do is another fantastic discovery filmmaker from a rare place for cinema, and I’m glad it’s playing at Metrograph. Hopefully, it will do well enough that maybe the Metrograph will try to get Mattie Do’s other two films released over here as well.
Rating: 7/10
*Incidentally, my “Chosen One” from a few weeks back, Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom not only got nominated for an Oscar in the International Feature category but it’s returning to some theaters, including New York’s IFC Center. It’s only playing one screening a day at 6pm there, but if you want to catch a really enjoyable film from a part of the world we rarely get to see films from (Bhutan), do make an effort to check it out.
Also, the Metrograph is kicking off a new series this weekend called “Lowlands ‘70s & ‘80s,” looking at the “provocative and boundary-pushing film from Belgium and the Netherlands. Not sure how much of that will be available via the theater’s digital subscription.
Film at Lincoln Center is kicking off a Jonas Mekas Retrospective, running from Feb. 17 through 23. Although I’m familiar with Mekas by name and his involvement with the Anthology Film Archives (which is not too far from me), I really haven’t seen any of his movie. This program showcases eight of his features and two shorts programs, scattered across the next week.
Netflix’s big streaming release this week is the new version of TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (Netflix), written and produced by Fede Alvarez and his long-time collaborator Rodo Sayagues and directed by Austin, TX filmmaker David Blue Garcia (Tejano). This “requel” brings Leatherface back after 50 years of hiding to terrorize a new group of young people who disrupt his remote Texas town. Unfortunately, reviews are embargoed until Friday at midnight (ooo… scary) so I probably won’t be watching this until after this column goes live.
Mini-Review: I’ll freely admit that I’ve never been a huge fan of the original Tobe Hooper Texas Chainsaw Massacre, as much as I recognize it as a groundbreaking horror classic. It’s never really been my type of horror, but when it comes to genre, I fully trust Fede and Rodo of Don’t Breathe fame to create something that pays homage to the original but offers something new as well. Honestly, it’s a little bit of a drag that this is going directly on Netflix since these things just work so much better in a theater.
This is a full-on “requel,” as described in the most recent Scream, which we learn when the murders of the 1973 film are relayed on a television set just before we meet this film’s protagonists: famed chef Danté Spivey (Jacob Latimore), his fiancé Melody (Sarah Yarkin), and her sister Lila (Elsie Fisher of Eighth Grade). They’re travelling to the ghost town of Harlow, Texas in order to create a cultural mecca for Millennials, apparently, but after an issue with an old woman living there, they inadvertently wake the murderous tendencies of her son… who we quickly learn is Leatherface (as played by Mark Burnham). No, I could not tell you if this is the same guy from 50 years earlier or just a new guy inspired by him. I’m also not sure it really matters.
To be fair, it would be hard for the filmmakers, including director David Blue Garcia, not to make a movie than the horrid 2006 prequel, Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, but it didn’t take this one long to remind me whey I always had issues with the overall premise. In this case, we’re not even given a chance to like any of the characters before they’re systematically slaughtered in true gory fashion.
The entire point of this movie is probably to bring back Sally Hardesty (Olwen Fouéré), the sole survivor from the first movie, to get her revenge, taking on a role not too dissimilar from the one Jamie Lee Curtis plays in the recent Halloween movies. The problem is that like any true “requel,” it tries to modernize things to make it relevant for the kids, including Danté having to deal with the inherent racism of the area. It basically comes in the form of a confederate flag on display, but that’s about it. Jordan Peele this is not.
But when it comes down to it, it’s all about the slaughter, and this one goes as violent and gory as any of the filmmakers’ previous movies. Maybe I’ve just gotten too old for this kind of thing, because it’s really hard to get excited about a movie that shows how little innovation can be brought to the premise other than having Leatherface slaughter anyone he encounters.
To be fair, the movie looks great, and it’s suitably gory with all the expected body parts and innards flying everywhere, but it makes it far too clear that Leatherface just isn’t a particularly inspired “villain” compared to the Blind Man in the Don’t Breathe movies. I hate to be THAT guy, but there’s really no reason for this movie to even exist.
Rating: 5.5/10
Iko Uwais (The Raid) and Lewis Tan (Mortal Kombat) star in Roel Reiné’s FISTFUL OF VENGEANCE (Netflix), which hits the streamer on Thursday. The film takes place in Bangkok, and it’s a strange movie to say the least. I mean, the martial arts are just fine, but there’s just so much being thrown at the viewer that I’m not even really sure where to begin in describing it.
Listen, I’m not one to knock a cheesy martial arts movie if the martial arts are well-done, and this movie definitely has some fantastic fight choreography and work by the actors. The problem is that the story is just such a complete mess that it really feels like the writers (Cameron Litvack and Yalun Tu – I’m not going to let them off the hook without being named) were just throwing everything they could into the mix to make it more interesting. The fact you can watch this whole movie and the most memorable moment is an oddly choreographed and entirely unnecessary sex scene just tells you what you’re in for. What really kills any chance of this being good is that the generally decent fight sequences are marred by the filmmakers wanting to throw in a supernatural element and some mystical powers that come and go along with cheesy VFX to go with them.
At the heart of the story is Jason Tobin (who played a busboy in the cheesy kung fu classic Beverly Hills Ninja in 1997!) as William, a man trying to get revenge for the murder of his wife Jenny. In fact, it’s pretty much all he talks about. He meets up with the other characters, including Iko Uwais, who says so little in the movie, you kind of forget he’s there, and Lewis Tan, who is just one of a number of characters who are quickly introduced with very little fanfare before they start fighting. When they’re not fighting, they sit around eating food and talking about… you guessed it… Jenny.
This very much just looks like another international filmmaker trying to make a Hollywood-style movie complete with the cheesy hip-hop soundtrack we see in way too many bad American movies, and it’s clearly inspired by the Fast and Furious movies (complete with a BBQ and a toast to family at the end, no less!)
At the heart of this generically-titled martial arts movie is some absolutely horrid almost incompetent filmmaking of the highest (or rather, lowest) order from Reiné – who oddly, like the director of The Cursed, is his own DP. There are many great fight sequences, but that’s about it, because it’s pretty much unwatchable otherwise.
Rating: 3/10
Netflix also will be debuting Season 2 of Space Force, starring Steve Carell, but I never got around to watching Season 1 so [shrug emoji].
If you’ve been reading my column for a while (that’s presuming anyone is reading this at all), then you know I like a good mountain climbing or skiing movie, just anything with mountains, so in that sense, there’s Eric Crosland’s doc LA LISTE: EVERYTHING OR NOTHING (Red Bull Studios, Adventure Entertainment), which is now available on VOD. It follows free skier Jérémie Heitz, who back in 2016 made a list of the most daunting peaks in the Andes and then set to freeride down them at record speeds, making his name as the fastest free-skier in the world. The movie follows Heitz and his friend Sam Anthamatten, who set off to create a new list of some of the most amazing mountain ranges in the world for Heitz to free ride. Unfortunately, I haven’t had time to watch this one so that I could include a review in this week’s column, but I hope to get to this and write something more soon.
And then, on the other side of the mountain equation there is…
Howard J. Ford’s thriller THE LEDGE (Saban Films/Paramount) stars Brittany Ashworth as Kelly, a young woman who is in Italy to tackle a steep rock face with her best friend Sophie (Anais Parello), but when they encounter a group of four rapey bros and something bad happens, Kelly finds herself trapped on a ledge high above the ground with those guys threatening to kill her from above her.
I’m not even sure where to begin with this one, but as soon as I watched the trailer, I realized, “Yeah, I gotta review this one, because there’s no way this is going to be any good.” And I mostly was right… as I usually am. The general premise is that these four young people encounter each other while on a mountain-climbing expedition in Italy – not that you would know that other than the fact it’s mentioned a few times. As these things happen, they begin partying, things go wrong and then things go very horribly wrong as Kelly finds herself on the run with a video tape of the incident. The ring leader of the male group (and definitely the cause for most of the problems) is Ben Lamb’s Joshua, an alpha male who clearly has done wrong and gotten away with it before. Anyway, Kelly ends up free climbing up the face of the mountain, completely ill-prepared for such a climb, and the men follow with Josh taunting her the entire way.
And that’s pretty much the movie, although so much of the movie looks like it was filmed on a stage even with some of the impressive establishing shots that make it seem otherwise. Although Brittany Ashworth isn’t bad, the rest of the cast is pretty horrible (I mean, as actors, not just the character they play) and the script for this movie is just absolute garbage. But really, the worst of all is Lamb, whose character Josh is such a piece of work, constantly crowing at “Kelly!” from above her and clearly not one to let anyone escape this misadventure. In some ways, this reminded me of a much MUCH worse version of the movie Donkey Punch from a few years back. That’s all counterbalanced with these flashbacks to Kelly being trained in climbing by her dreamy European boyfriend, who apparently died in a climbing accident… that obviously didn’t appear a bunch of attempted rapists and murderers.
The film’s cast is made up of actors, who have been working and doing a lot of stuff but nothing you might have heard of, and actually, you can say the same for Ford, who seems to have been making movies since 1994 but not that you could tell from this one.
While clearly, there are worse movies out there – even this week – this is just a particular bad thriller that never quite recovers from its inept attempt at creating thrills from a really shoddy premise.
Rating: 4/10
There are a few movies for which I've received screeners but just didn’t have time to watch and review, so maybe I’ll get to some of the below when I have a chance.
Having played at Toronto and Fantastic Fest last year, British filmmaker Ruth Paxton’s A BANQUET (IFC Midnight) stars Sienna Guillory as Holly, a widowed mother whose teen daughter Betsey (Jessica Alexander) has a strange eating disorder in which she says her body is “in service to a higher power” and though she stops eating, she doesn’t lose any weight, and that’s about all I can say about this right now until I have time to really focus on it enough to write a review. (I will say that having recently seen Todd Haynes’ early film, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, it’s weird to see a more modern genre flick that’s an obvious allegory for anorexia and other eating disorders.)
Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney’s surrealist sci-fi film STRAWBERRY MANSION (Music Box Films), which premiered at Sundance in 2021, is finally being released this Friday. It takes place in the year 2035 where dreams are used for product placement and follows taxman James Preble (Audley) as he arrives at a house of an elderly woman named Bella (Penny Fuller) who records her dreams using headgear that records her dreams onto VHS tapes. As James audits her dreams, he starts to fall in love with her younger self (Grace Glowicki), and that is probably all that I can say about this movie other than it’s a very, very, very, very weird movie that reminds me of David Lynch at his most bonkers or like this movie The Greasy Strangler, which I absolutely loathed. There was part of me that appreciated how weird the filmmakers got, but honestly? I could barely get through this movie, so if I have problems recommending Ted K, a movie I generally liked, I’m not sure who I could possibly suggest this movie to… and sleep with myself at night (which I normally do anyway). In other words, Strawberry Mansion is weird almost to the point of being unwatchable.
Jason Isaacs and Levi MIller (Pan) star in Tyson Wade Johnson’s coming-of-age family drama STREAMLINE (Blue Fox Entertainment), which will open in select theaters and on VOD this Firday. Also starring Jake Ryan and Laura Gordon, it’s based on the true life of 15-year-old swimmer Benjamin Lane (Miller) who is getting ready for the meet that might qualify him for the Olympics, pushed by his coach and mother Kim (Gordon). When his estranged father is released from jail, Benjamin’s struggle to attain Olympic gold becomes even tougher.
Emile Hirsch stars with John Cuasack in “Skiba’s” action-thriller PURSUIT (LIonsgate), Hirsch playing Calloway, a hacker in search of his wife, kidnapped by a drug cartel, until he crosses path with Detective Breslin (Jake Manley) who has to team with a female cop (Elizabeth Ludlow) to reclaim Calloway after he escapes. Cusack plays Calloway’s crime-boss father. Yeah, this also has reviews embargoed until Thursday, so we’ll see if I feel like writing a review and adding it later or not.
Next week, it’s the last weekend of February and finally, after many delays, people are going to finally have a chance to see Joe Wright’s Cyrano (MGM), hopefully wide? Maybe? Also, the Foo Fighters made a horror movie called Studio 666.
All box office data provided by The-Numbers.com.
Review: UNCHARTED May or May Not Be As Good as the Games… but I Dug It!
I’ll be the first to admit that I know very little about the video game on which Uncharted is based, except that I know that it’s been a Sony Playstation exclusive while I’ve mostly been an XBox guy. (Where is the Overwatch movie already?!) In other words, if you’re looking for the definitive review comparing the movie to games, then sorry, kids. This ain’t it. Feel free to go to IGN for that.
On paper, this one could go either way. It stars Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg, both whom I generally like, and I could say the same for director Ruben Fleischer’s work when given the right script and cast – as he was with Zombieland and its sequel.
Going into Uncharted without much in terms of background knowledge or expectations, Holland plays Nathan Drake, a petty thief and history buff whose older brother Sam left Nathan when he was 10 to go out on his own adventures. In the present day, Nathan still has dreams of adventuring, specifically looking for Magellan’s fabled gold cache. He runs into Victor “Sully” Sullivan (Mark Wahlberg), a rather crooked gold hunter who wants to use Nathan’s knowledge and skills to find the gold. But they’re not the only people looking for that fortune worth billions, as Antonio Banderas’ already-wealthy Santiago Moncada also wants to get his hands on it, as does the deadly Braddock (Tati Gabrielle) and Sully’s sometime-accomplice Chloe Frazer (Sophia Ali), who has the other necessary key to find the gold. None of them trust anyone else and for good reason.
Oh, and before we get into all that, we meet Nate as he’s hanging high in the sky outside a cargo plane hooked onto said cargo as it’s flying out the back, but we’ll get back to what is already an impressive set piece in time. First, we have to meet the aforementioned characters and learn more about them.
The good thing is that most people will already know and like Holland from the Spider-Man movies, and that charm and sense of humor carries over to Drake. In fact, there’s a few moments in Uncharted where you can see Holland mirroring a young Tom Cruise, between doing those aerial stunts, some impressive juggling behind the bar ala Cocktail era Cruise, and also doing a lot of running, another Cruise mainstay. (In fact, Holland is about the same age as Cruise when he was in Top Gun, The Color of Money, and yes, Cocktail.) Holland effortlessly slips into a different type of action as easily as he does the Spider-suit with a combination of parkour and straight-up fist fighting, though never acting like the tough guy in the room.
Holland works particularly well, because he’s well-paired with Wahlberg, as they take verbal shots at each other, but also with Ali, who I thought was just fantastic in one of two pretty decent female roles, as the two women get just as much into the action as the guys. I’m not sure if either of these characters are from the games, but regardless, they work well enough that they frequently steal scenes from the two more famous stars. Although Banderas is great at playing sleazy money, Gabrielle is equally terrific as the film’s other villain, who is by no means secondary. The film does face a few hurdles as it transitions back and forth from action to puzzle-solving, but I never lost interest in the story being told or how it was being told.
As mentioned, I’ve generally liked most of Fleischer’s work as a director (not Venom), but he does particularly impressive work here from all the action set pieces, including a third act climax that will look just amazing on the larger screen format like IMAX. He has a great partner in cinematographer Chung-hoon Chung, who last shot Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho, and whose kinetic camerawork does a great job capturing all the jaw-dropping locations and action. Ramin Djawadi’s score is great as always, just perfectly suited to everything the story entails.
Maybe the results aren’t quite up to the first National Treasure, but Uncharted is so much better than all three Tomb Raider movies – though that probably wouldn’t be very hard. Ultimately, it’s an energetic first foray into a world of action and adventure I hope fares well enough to see more of these characters. It’s all about fans of this sort of international action-adventure genre getting off their butts and getting to the movie theater this weekend, I guess..
Rating: 7.5/10
The Weekend Warrior 2/11/22 - DEATH ON THE NILE, MARRY ME, BLACKLIGHT, GET BACK, CATCH THE FAIR ONE, KIMI, IMDEMNITY, and Much More!
Okay… so maybe movies aren’t as back as I had hoped last week. [sad trombone]
No, neither of last week’s movies did anywhere near where I thought they would be. For some reason, I thought the onslaught of Spider-Man moviegoers would lead to more people remembering what they love about going to the movies and itching to get to another movie, but no, that wasn’t the case, and sadly, I don’t think this weekend will help things much either.
First of all, it’s Super Bowl Weekend, which means that almost any movie that has any sort of male audience will tank on Sunday. On the other hand, Valentine’s Day is on Monday, and in the past, romantic date movies are a great offering to bring couples out to theaters, although being on Monday, will date night be Friday or Saturday? Who knows? There’s only one real romantic offering in theaters this weekend, the latest rom-com from J-LO, Marry Me, but that’s also doing day-and-ate on Peacock, so how will that fare? Read on…
The weekend’s biggest release (and I use that term loosely) will probably be the long-delayed ensemble murder mystery DEATH ON THE NILE (20th Century/Disney) from filmmaker Kenneth Branagh, who is likely to go into the weekend with two or three more Oscar nominations than he had when his movie Belfast was released last Fall. Branagh once again portrays the role Agatha Christie’s eccentric inspector, Hercule Poirot, this time as he spends time in Egypt and is invited to the wedding party of a rich heiress (played by Gal Gadot) aboard a riverboat travelling down the Nile. It’s probably a good thing he’s there, because people start dying.
This is actually a rare sequel for Sir Ken, the five-time Oscar-nominated perennial multi-hyphenate, but its predecessor Murder on the Orient Express (also based on a bestselling Agatha Christie thriller), grossed $351 million worldwide, including $102.8 million domestically, it made sense for the new owners of the newly-named 20th Century Studios to allow him to tackle another Christie novel. Of course, back when Nile was greenlit, no one knew that Branagh was going to follow that up with Belfast, a movie that has garnered so much Oscar buzz, including seven nominations just yesterday, despite not really doing that well at the box office. It’s definitely going to be interesting to see if the love for Branagh’s Belfast might sway some film critics to go easy on Nile, but I just don’t see that happening. More on that below.
With an all-star cast that included the discredited Johnny Depp, Murder on the Orient Express opened in November 2017 with $28.7 million to mixed reviews (60% on Rotten Tomatoes, but a lower score from audiences i.e. not good) but also a fairly low CinemaScore with a “B.” Still, it did well enough to not just tank after opening, possibly helped by Thanksgiving and the holidays which took it to $102.8 million domestically and another $250 million overseas. That was enough to be Branagh’s third highest-grosser after Disney’s Cinderella and the first Thor for Marvel Studios. In between those movies, he tried to resuscitate a spy thriller franchise with Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit starring Chris Pine; the independent Shakespeare drama, All is True; and the adaptation of Artemis Fowl, which was one of the first movies dumped to Disney+ after decades in development.
Like with Orient Express, Christie’s Death on the Nile had previously been adapted in 1978, following the success of the previous Orient Express adaptation in 1974. Like both those movies, Branagh’s film is chock-full of big stars with Wonder Woman herself, Gal Gadot, probably being the biggest draw for the movie, along with Letitia Wright from Black Panther, who presumably is still having a major expanded role in its sequel. Gadot has been doing a lot of big movies around her role as DC’s Amazonian heroine, appearing in a couple chapters of the Fast & Furious series, as well as reuniting with Dwayne Johnson as they teamed with Ryan Reynolds for the Netflix hit, Red Notice. The movie also stars Annette Bening, who has not been acting as much in recent years, and fans of British comedy should be thrilled to see the reunion of French and Saunders.
And then there’s one of the probably reasons why the movie has been pushed back, and that’s because Armie Hammer plays a significant role as the groom in the wedding to Gadot’s heiress. Hammer has been accused of all sorts of horrid things, including some that might put him in jail, or at least he’s been indicted, I think. It’s hard to keep track of these things, but he has been sufficiently canceled to have been replaced in an upcoming Taika Waititi movie and to not be doing any press for this movie. It’s always hard to tell how having someone like Hammer in the cast could hurt a movie, but Disney definitely shifted all the marketing from him even being in the movie to focus on Gadot and others. Will his very presence turn people off from seeing it, or won’t it matter, since Nile is a movie targeted towards older folk?
All I know is that I’ve honestly lost track of how many times this movie has been moved, although the success of Rian Johnson’s Knives Out a few years back shows that this kind of murder-mystery can theoretically do well, even though that had the benefit of Johnson’s sense of humor, as well as an equally impressive cast and generally better marketing.
An even bigger hurdle for Death on the Nile is that it’s a movie that’s primarily geared towards older audiences, similar to West Side Story and Nightmare Alley, and those movies just have not done well in theaters at all. Coincidentally, Branagh’s movie comes from the exact same studio as those other two, Disney’s 20th Century/Searchlight division and was probably greenlight before Disney bought Fox, and so it’s not gonna be seen as the same sort of priority for the studio. In fact, it finally getting a theatrical release after literally years of delay (only some blamed on COVID) may have been rather begrudging since it probably would have
Reviews broke on Monday, and as expected, they were mixed, but certainly more positive than I expected. (You can read my review of the movie here; I actually got what Branagh was doing, and preferred this movie over Orient Express.)
I just can’t see Death on the Nile doing that well with the amount of baggage it comes into the market with after being delayed so often, as well as the Hammer factor. It also might not be the first choice for that many filmgoers with few under 30s really caring, other than maybe the Gadot diehards.
Because of this, I’ll be surprised if this opens with more than $15 million this weekend, basically half the opening of Orient Express, and yet, with Jackass Forever probably dropping from its opening and little other competition, $15 million might be enough to make this the #1 movie. Yeah, the box office is not quite back after all.
Even though the romantic comedy MARRY ME (Universal), starring Jennifer Lopez and Owen Wilson and directed by Kat Coiro, will be playing on Peacock day-and-date with its theatrical release on Friday, it also is the only major romantic movie being released the weekend before Valentine’s Day, so presumably, it will be the first choice in terms of date movies. (Or second after Jackass Forever?)
Lopez returns to theaters for the first time since her 2019 appearance in Hustlers, the stripper drama that opened with $33 million in Sept. (Normally, a slower month) and got Lopez some of her first Oscar buzz as an actor, which was sadly sidelined when she failed to get an Oscar nomination after nods at the Golden Globes and SAG. A year earlier, Lopez starred in the comedy Second Act, which failed to make $40 million despite a holiday release. Her previous rom-com The Back-Up Plan ended up around the same place in 2010, and she did odds and ends and some animation work in the eight years between. Still, Lopez was the queen of the rom-com for a long time, or at least she would star in a lot of them, from 2001’s The Wedding Planner ($60.4m domestic gross) to 2002’s Maid in Manhattan ($93m) to 2004’s Shall We Dance? ($57.9m) and 2005’s Monster in Law ($82.9m).
In other words, Ms. Lopez has proven herself to be a rare actress — and a LatinX one, at that! – to be able to get moviegoers into theaters without having a stronger male lead, although she’s clearly been less of a draw as she’s gotten older, the kind of ageism that has sadly hit many actresses. (Although obviously, Lopez’s age didn’t stop people from wanting to see her play a stripper, huh?)
Marry Me benefits from it having Lopez play a very familiar role, that of a global pop star, who is set to be wed to her boyfriend, played by Colombian superstar Maluma – maybe you don’t know him but he has 60.8 million Insta followers… though that’s compared to JLo’s 194m followers. Again, Lopez has managed to maintain her fanbase, but bringing on Maluma can definitely help the film attract an even larger LatinX audience that already makes up a large percentage of moviegoers.
Lopez’s love interest in this one is played by Owen Wilson, whose career has been up and down and all over the place from appearing in hit family franchises like Night at the Museum, two Zoolander movies, and three Meet the Parents movies with pal Ben Stiller, not to mention Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tennenbaums and others. (Wilson got his start starring and co-writing Anderson’s Bottle Rocket, plus they reunited for last year’s The French Dispatch.)
Wilson’s non-Anderson non-Stiller comedies have been hit or miss, and his romantic comedies? Not so great. Anyone remember She’s Funny That Way? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. And yet, Wilson has been in a couple massive crowd-favorite dramas like Marley and Me (opposite Jennifer Aniston) and Wonder with Julia Roberts. Wilson is definitely a cool X-factor in Marry Me, especially being his recent entry into the MCU with last year’s Disney+ series, Loki, which helped find him a younger audience… as well as him hosting Saturday Night Live back in October. (I’m also looking forward to seeing what John Bradley brings to the mix, since he’s great in last week’s Moonfall!)
Either way, people still love JLo and are still interested in her every move, going by the way people went crazy when she reunited with Ben Affleck last year. What will be interesting to watch is whether the day-and-date to Peacock does for Marry Me’s theatrical box office. Last October, Universal released the horror sequel Halloween Kills onto the platform simultaneously with its theatrical release, but that STILL opened with $49.4 million, one of the better non-superhero theatrical openings last year. Peacock might be a little more popular these days, especially with it streaming the Winter Olympics, so those watching them will probably know about Marry Me being available for free there. Because of this, I think Marry Me might struggle to hit second place against the second weekend of Jackass Forever with somewhere in the $10 to 11 million region.
Mini-Review: I really liked the premise for Marry Me, as high concept as it immediately sounded, and even before watching a frame. I thought the pairing of Jennifer Lopez and Owen Wilson was fairly genius, plus I was really interested in seeing what John Bradley would bring to the movie after literally stealing Moonfall from that movie’s bigger name co-stars.
Not sure what I can say about this movie, because it is essentially exactly what is promised in the trailer. Lopez is mega pop superstar Kat Valdez, Wilson is a divorced math teacher named Charlie Gilbert with a young daughter Lou (the always great Chloe Coleman). The latter two are brought to the former’s concert by Charlie’s friend Parker (Sarah Silverman) where Kat plans on proposing to her popstar boyfriend Bastian (Maluma). When she finds out he’s been cheating on her, she instead proposes to and marries Charlie. So what happens when this ordinary guy is pulled into the world of this global star?
Therein lies the majority of the comedy, conflict and drama for a movie that modernizes the Notting Hill model for a fresh, younger audience. Working from a screenplay I was shocked to learn was based on a graphic novel that I never heard of, Kat Coiro does a fantastic job as a director for her first big studio film with lots of production value, including a huge musical production for Lopez to perform a number of (presumably) new still-very-JLo songs.
Lopez proves once again what a great dramatic actress she can be, even when (and maybe due to) playing a role that’s so close to someone she may easily be able to relate to. Wilson is also very good, especially in his scenes with Coleman, plus Silverman is there to add some sass when needed. And I really liked John Bradley in this as much as I liked him in Moonfall, since he’s able to bring humor to scenes when needed but also offers able support to Ms. Lopez in her more emotional scenes. Silverman is also there to provide a bit of the needed sass. Did I mention that already?
I was surprised how much I enjoyed this movie, because what clearly worked in theory on paper actually does legitimately work to deliver what the movie promises. Sure, there are a few overly cutesy moments like when Kat (the character, not the director – a little confusing) visits Lou’s class and there’s an extended dance montage with the kids. That probably will play better with the TikTok generation than it did for me. Same with when the school choir performs the song “Marry Me” back to Lopez when she agrees to attend the school dance with Charlie. On the other hand, whenever Lopez sings, it’s quite a showstopper, just like when she played the Super Bowl, and the movie’s bigger numbers are impressive indeed. (This is my first time hearing Maluma, and yeah, I get his popularity.)
In fact, this is exactly the movie most will be expecting with all the edges carefully rounded off, meaning that some might find it too saccharine even with the dab of PG-13 edginess Silverman brings. It also might be a little too predictable for its own good, because there’s only so much that can be done within the premise.
Regardless, Marry Me never promises to reinvent the rom-com wheel, though having Lopez playing a reinvented version of herself with all sorts of catchy new tunes makes it a worthwhile addition to the genre either way. If you are seeking romance this weekend, this is definitely one way to get there.
Rating: 7.5/10
The third wide release of the weekend brings back pandemic champ Liam Neeson, who had no less than two movies released before movie theaters reopened in NYC and L.A. in March 2021. His new movie has the intriguing title of BLACKLIGHT (Briarcliff), and it’s a political conspiracy action-thriller that’s right up his alley, with a good amount of action and intrigue. (You can read my review below.)
It reunites Neeson with filmmaker Mark Williams, who also directed 2020’s Honest Thief, which like Neeson’s follow-up, The Marksman, a few months later, both of them only grossed $15 million total. Granted, that was during a time when there were no movie theaters in NYC or L.A. open and many other places were only allowed to do reduced seating.
Even since Neeson was cast in the action-thriller Taken in 2009, the now 69-year-old actor has created a niche for himself with a number of action-thrillers to follow, including two sequels to Taken, and no less than four movies directed by Jaume Collet-Sera – Unknown, Non-Stop, Run All Night, and The Commuter. Non-Stop did the best of them with $91.7m grossed domestically and another $130.6m overseas, but the next two movies relied more on international money, as neither made more than $36.5 million domestically. (Neeson’s well-reviewed action-thriller Cold Pursuit ended up below that mark.) The thing is that Neeson was already a pretty big star and respected actor long before Taken. He starred in George Lucas’ first Star Wars prequel back in 1999, and six years later, he starred in Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins. Long before either of those, he was a respected actor, taking on a wide variety of roles including the title role in Sam Raim’s early superhero film, Darkman in 1990. Probably his biggest turning point was Spielberg’s Schindler’s List a few years later, but Neeson has continued to have an impressive career between smaller indies like Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House and A Monster Calls, and some outright studios duds like the Battleship movie, Men in Black: International, and Seth McFarlane’s Western comedy, A Million Ways to Die in the West.
The thing one has to wonder is where all of that leaves Neeson today when he’s starring in movies that feel very much like the movies Clint Eastwood is directing himself in, such as last year’s Cry Macho, which didn’t even do as well as his previous starrer, The Mule. Sure, you could blame that on COVID or the day-and-date on HBO Max, but it still goes to show that movies geared towards older males just aren’t doing well theatrically. Even with more theaters open now than when Neeson’s last two movies came out, its distributor, Briarcliff Entertainment, just doesn’t have the marketing clout of bigger distributors these days.
Also, the thing is that if any movie is going to get dinged by the Super Bowl this weekend, it’s gonna be this one, since the older males who might go see any movie Neeson makes would also be the type to watch the Super Bowl. The clash between two teams from big moviegoing places like L.A. and Ohio, that could take out a significant amount of moviegoers come Sunday.
With that in mind, I don’t think Blacklight (an odd title for a movie, since the word isn’t even said once in the movie explaining what that term even means) is going to fare well, and I’ll be surprised if it even makes more than $5 million this weekend, though I have it pegged to do less than $4 million since reviews probably won’t help.
Mini-Review: I bet you’re wondering what the title “Blacklight” means, huh? I do, too, and I actually watched this movie.
And yet, that is not the most frustrating aspect of Liam Neeson’s latest action-thriller, which delves more into the conspiracy or political thriller subgenre that probably peaked with the Bourne movies. In this one, Neeson plays Travis Block, your typical generic former police/military/security guy who has become the FBI’s go-to guy to help get undercover agents out of trouble when they’ve gotten too deep. One of these is an undercover FBI agent, Dusty Crane (Taylor John Smith), who has been trailing Sofia Flores, an activist who is running for Congress before she is brutally run down by a car. Travis’ handler Gabe Robinson (Aidan Quinn) Travis on the case, hoping he’ll take Dusty out of the field before he can reveal covert information about something called Operation Unity to a reporter (Emmy Raver-Lampmam).
Oh, and other agents are trying to kill basically everyone we’ve just mentioned. Travis just wants to leave this sordid business to spend more time with his daughter (Claire van der Boom) and adorable granddaughter (Gabrielle Sengos). Travis also has all sorts of OCD ticks, just to make sure anyone reading this already has completely filled out their action-thriller bingo cards.
That’s probably a lot of information to absorb and therein lies one of the many problems with Blacklight. While there is some decent action, including a number of respectable car chases – they even flip a garbage truck! – and lots of explosions, the plot and storytelling is such a mess that you never really have enough time to adjust to any one particular aspect of the film to enjoy it. There’s just also a lot of general silliness from the idea of the FBI killing to civilians to just an overall lack of understanding of how journalism works.
Neeson is mostly good, basically doing his usual teeth-gritting performance that keeps him in line to take over for Clint Eastwood when he finally retires. He also has a relatively cute relationship with the young actress as his granddaughter that gives the movie a very slight vibe like The Professional. Trying to maintain any sort of tone or pacing while bouncing back and forth just doesn’t work, because the writing isn’t great and Quinn gives a particularly bad performance. It’s further marred by a score that seems like stock action music…. By Mark Isham, no less.
It’s a little ironic this is being released the same week as Kimi and Indemnity, two similar but very different (and significantly better) suspense action-thrillers, because most people would assume having Neeson in the lead would make Blacklight worthwhile, but that just isn’t the case. It's just another weak overly-complex mess that throws in a couple action scenes trying to save it.
Rating: 5.5/10
As with many other Super Bowl weekends, this one is not going to fare very well with nothing making more than $15 million, but Death on the Nile only having the advantage of familiarity over the new JLo rom-com. We’ll see a bit of shifting as movies like Moonfall and Scream fall below some better holdovers, but I will be curious to see if the dud Redeeming Love somehow brings in some V-Day business just by the nature of having “love” in its title. What will also be interesting is to see how many of the studios with Oscar nominations expand their movies into more theaters, because otherwise, there won’t be a single Best Picture in the top 10. The best bets are West Side Story and Licorice Pizza which have been bouncing around the Top 10 for the past couple months.
Here's what we're looking at this weekend:
1. Death on the Nile (20th Century/Disney) - $13.8 million N/A 2. Jackass Forever (Paramount) - $11 million -52% 3. Marry Me (Universal) - $10.5 million N/A 4. Spider-Man: No Way Home (Sony Pictures) - $6 million -38% 5. Moonfall (Lionsgate) - $4.3 million -54% 6. Blacklight (Briarcliff) - $3.5 million N/A 7. Sing 2 (Universal) - $3.1 million -26% 8. Scream (Paramount) - $2.6 million -47% 9. Licorice Pizza (U.A. Releasing) - $900k +40% 10. West Side Story (20th Century) - $700k +70%
There’s just no way I couldn’t NOT (sorry for the double negative) make Peter Jackson’s THE BEATLES GET BACK: THE ROOFTOP CONCERT (Disney) this week’s “CHOSEN ONE.” Yes, this is the same rooftop concert that closed off Jackson’s Disney+ docuseries of the sort-of-same name that debuted in November. I got to see this hour-long concert in IMAX a few weekends back, preceded by an insightful interview with Mr. Jackson showing how they synced up the ten-cameras that were filming on that day, and it was just a fantastic theatrical experience for me. Jackson mentioned how Gilles Martin had mixed the concert specifically for IMAX sound systems, and the sound is amazing, especially when you realize how many of the performances actually ended up on “Let It Be,” recorded in that less-than-ideal situation/location. I was a little bummed that the cameras didn’t pick up enough of Billy Preston during the concert, since he had so many great moments in the concert and you barely see him. I’d probably rather have more of him than the man-on-the-street interviews asking their thoughts on what was happening well above street level that none of them were able to see. Anyway, getting to see the police arriving and their chatter with the people in the offices downstairs was fun to see, and apparently, Jackson has a LOT of interviews with the people who were there, including original documentarian Michael Lindsay-Hogg who directed the original Let It Be documentary. (Jackson says it’s really up to Apple if any of those modern-day behind-the-scenes interviews will be used for some sort of future release of the docuseries or on a Let It Be release.) Either way, I love seeing this long-lost concert up close, and I already have plans to see it again on Sunday, but in the even BIGGER Imax theater in NYC. (Sadly, I couldn’t get screeners there the first time cause AMC’s websites screwed me over.) Anyway, if you have an IMAX theater near you and have a chance to see this on the weekend – it’s only playing from Friday through Sunday – this is this week’s “Chosen One” for a damn good reason, to see one of the greatest and most influential bands in the history of rock ‘n’ roll playing their very last concert EVER.
Another great music doc that premiered at New York’s DOC-NYC back in 2020 and will be released at the Laemmle’s Glendale is Oliver Murray’s RONNIE’S (Greenwich) that takes a look at British saxophonist Ronnie Scott and the world-famous London jazz club he owned, which brought some of the absolute jazz greats to play there. Combining the footage from the club and archival recordings of people talking about both Ronnie and his club and the music that came out of there. I had the fortune of speaking with Murray over at Below the Line a few years back and also had a chance to speak with his Editor Paul Trewartha (who also edited The Sparks Brothers) last year. They have made an absolutely fantastic music doc with so much great archival footage of the jazz artists that performed at Ronnie’s over the years even if Ronnie Scott, himself, has a rather tragic demise as he suffered from depression when he wasn’t able to play the saxophone anymore. The way Murray put this movie together makes Ronnie’s an absolutely essential doc for jazz fanatics. Unfortunately, you’ll have to be in L.A. to see this in theaters, but it will also be on digital this Friday.
And completing our triumvirate of music docs with Mitchell Stuart’s WORST TO FIRST: THE TRUE STORY OF Z100 NEW YORK (Gunpowder and Sky), which will hit VOD and cable this Friday. It tells the story of Scott Shannon, the radio DJ who moved to New York to launch Z100 in the early ‘80s. It documents the incredible rise of the station via great intertviews with the likes of Jon Bonjovi, Joan Jett, Debbie Gibson, Nile Rogers, and even Tony Orlando weighing in on how Shannon and Z100 helped their careers by playing their early records and turning them into the hits. Sure, it’s the definition of a talking heads doc, but for fans of music – even those like me who maybe never actually listened to Z100 – the stories about Shannon and his morning “Zoo Crew” and some of the marketing stunts they pulled to literally take Z100 from “worst to first" is great stuff. Like Ronnie’s, this is another topic I really didn’t know much about despite living in NYC for so many years. I guess Top 40 was never really my thing, but I’m sure that over the years I’ve worked a job where Z100 was playing or knew something about the morning “Zoo Crew.” Anyway, this doc is fairly short (just over an hour), so it’s a great quick look into this world that was so influential on the entire radio music and talk format for many decades to come.
Hey, remember last week when I was slightly perturbed by the number of bad genre movies co-written by their lead actresses? Well, that was because I completely forgot all about Josef Kubota Wladyka’s CATCH THE FAIR ONE (IFC Films), which he cowrote with the film’s star, boxer Kali “K.O.” Reis, one of the movies I truly enjoyed out of the Tribeca Festival last year. (And also one of the few I actually got to see at a press screening.)
Reis plays Kaylee, an Indigenous boxer whose younger sister has gone missing, sending her on a desperate search through a very seedy portion of the region and getting her mixed up with a lot of shady and unscrupulous people. I got interested in this one in a rather roundabout way, but part of what intrigued me was the fact it was produced by Darren Aronofsky and Mollye Asher, the latter who recently won the Oscar for Nomadlad, plus she’s produced a lot of other interesting indies.
I don't really have a ton to say about this film, other than it's a great showcase for the talented Ms. Reis, a real-life boxer making her acting debut, and director Wladyka, who has directed a lot of television, though I wasn’t even really familiar with his work prior to this. They’ve made a really dark crime-thriller that gets pretty violent as it shifts into more of a feminist revenge thriller. Which genre in which you want to place Catch the Fair One, it just works wonderfully as a spotlight on the great talent of both Reis and Wladyka.
Rating: 8/10
My interview with Josef Kubota Wlayka is now live over at Below the Line.
Hitting HBO Max on Thursday is Steven Soderbergh’s latest, the conspiracy thriller KIMI, written by David Koepp and starring Zoë Kravitz. Kimi is a new voice-activated helper app ala Siri and Alexa, while Kravitz plays Angela, an agoraphobic Seattle woman living alone and working as a “voice stream interpreter” on the audio Kimi records, who think she hears proof of a crime during one such recording, so she decides to investigate herself.
Mini-Review: It’s been almost ten years since Steven Soderbergh “retired,” and Kimi is his seventh movie since 2017 and third in a row for HBO Max (with Magic Mike’s Last Dance to be his fourth). The premise starts out fairly simple and clearly a movie made during the pandemic with the first half mainly being Kravitz alone in her expansive Seattle apartment, going about her day-to-day work until she uncovers a possible assault on one of Kimi’s recordings, because yes, folks, your electronic “helpers” are indeed keeping track of everything you watch or listen.
In that sense, this is a perfect addition to Soderbergh’s run of conspiracy thrillers, and the subject matter seems perfectly suited to Soderbergh (and screenwriter David Koepp) since it allows them to play with the paranoia about our technology and a mistrust of corporations, very much in line with other Soderbegh works. It also works, at least as first, as a suitable pandemic movie that mostly involves one person in a single room. Thankfully, Kimi is much better than last year’s recent Razzie nominee Woman in the Window, despite having a few common threads, and it does branch out to different places including a full-on protest later on.
Soderbergh has already proven himself capable of this sort of modern-day Hitchcockian thriller with Kravitz playing a suitable lead, similarly to Claire Foy in Unsane. Kravitz gives a fantastic performance, which includes a good bit of action, getting me considerably more excited about seeing her as Selina Kyle in The Batman next month. (It was also nice seeing Erika Christensen’s name in the credited, being that she first appeared in Soderbergh’s Oscar-winning movie Traffic over 20 years ago!)
The thing is that Kimi starts out rather small and intimate, but then it becomes quite the action movie with Soderbergh’s terrific cinematography combined with yet another great score by Cliff Martinez.
Still, it’s somewhat ironic (and maybe even hypocritical) that Soderbergh decides to make a commentary about people getting out of their house and making connections… while making movies that will only stream on HBO Max. That aside, it’s sure to be as divisive as many of Soderbergh’s “second act” movies. One of his better movies but nowhere near his very best.
Rating: 7.5/10
Streaming on Prime Video Friday is the rom-com I WANT YOU BACK (Amazon), directed by Jason Orley of the festival fave Big Time Adolecence. It stars Charlie Day and Jenny Slate as Peter and Emma, who were recently dumped by their respective girl/boyfriends, so they decide to team up and figure out a way to get their exes to split up with their new loves.
It also helps those exes, Noah and Anne, played by rugged Scott Eastwood and really great Gina Rodriguez, are paired with others who are probably more suited for them, although Anne’s drama teacher boyfriend Logan, played by Manny Jacinto from The Good Place, might not be THAT much better than Peter. Either way, Peter decides to try to become best friends with Noah, while Emma decides her best approach is to seduce Logan, and both those things lead to some pretty hilarious moments.
You know that I like a good romantic comedy, especially when they’re actually funny, and this twist on When Harry Met Sally offers enough downright laugh out loud moments I couldn’t help but love it. Granted, I’ve long been a fan of Day, and I find him able to make any situation even funnier, as proven by It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and various film roles like Horrible Bosses. He’s pretty great being teamed with Slate as each other’s “sadness sisters,” but the things they get up to while trying to destroy the relationships of each others’ exes really delivers on the movie’s fairly high-concept premise.
The thing is that despite its high concept I Want You Back ends up being funnier than it should be, whether it’s Slate having to perform in an elementary school production of Little Shop of Horrors or Day and Eastwood doing a “guys’ night out” at an elitist nightclub, both these things lead to some great moments, elevated by the comedic talents of its stars. (And Gina Rodriguez is no slouch when it comes to bringing the funny.)
Ultimately, I Want You Back is the kind of warm and funny rom-com that doesn’t venture too far with its R-rating that it can offer a perfectly fine Valentine’s Day at home for couples who don’t feel the urge to go out in public.
Rating: 7.5/10
Hitting theaters and Apple TV+ on Friday is Josephine Decker’s THE SKY IS EVERYWHERE (Apple/A24), her follow-up to the great indie, Madeline’s Madeline, this one based on Jandy Nelson’s adaptation of her own debut Y.A. novel, and starring Grace Kaufman, Jason Segel, and Cherry Jones. Kaufman plays Lennie, a young woman whose older sister Bailey (Havana Rose Liu) has died, and while Lennie tries to get over it, she has to juggle a burgeoning relationship with her sister’s boyfriend Toby (Pico Alexander) and a fellow musician her own age (Jacques Coliman). I did get a chance to watch this before making this column live, but I won’t have time to review. It was okay, just not really for me.
Hitting digital and VOD Tuesday is Dante Basco’s THE FABULOUS FILIPINO BROTHERS (1091 Media), a movie which premiered at last year’s SXSW, which I quite enjoyed. It stars Basco and his three FilAm brothers as the title characters, living in Pittsburg, California, and it’s a very funny movie that follows each of the four brothers on their own journeys. I guess it’s sort of an anthology film but linked by the four brothers together at home interacting with each other and their various other family members.
This was a really fun film that assembles a number of very distinctive and original stories that range in tone from straight comedy to more dramatic fare, and of course, Basco gave himself one of the better stories that pairs him with the gorgeous Solenn Heusaff as an ex-girlfriend that he runs into while on a business trip in the Philippines, which leads to a tryst. The youngest Basco brother, David, also has a shorter but quite a hilarious scene with a beauty eating food (literal food porn!). Still, I couldn’t help but love the story involving the older brother, nicknamed “Danny Boy,” who is trying to get over a broken heart who ends up on a date with a pregnant woman, played by Liza Lapira, who I’ve been a fan of since she was in 21. (She also is one of the recurring actors on CBS’ The Equalizer, which I haven’t really watched very much.)
On top of that, the movie is filled with lots of delicious-looking food, and Basco proves himself to have such a distinctive voice, while also showing himself capable of so much variety in terms of the subject and tone of the individual pieces.The movie’s coll music also showed quite a bit of originality and ingenuity, even though there’s a bit of overacting and the general humor is a bit uneven.
Even so, this is a really sweet and funny movie that mixes Filipino and American traditions, and I recommend seeking out, because similarly to Catch the Fair One, there’s an amazing amount of talent on display.
Rating: 7.5/10
South African filmmaker Travis Taute’s INDEMNITY (Magnolia) stars Jarrid Geduld as Theo Abrams, a firefighter suffering from PTSD who is framed for the murder of his journalist wife, sending him on the run, and before you can say, “Hey, this sounds a lot like The Fugitive!”, the movie literally turns into The Fugitive.
Okay, I certainly don’t mean to immediately undermine Taute’s movie, because it shows quite a lot of skill and talent as it goes along, although it really does take some time before it’s more than something that feels very derivative of other better Western movies.
At first, it’s unclear whether Taute’s screenplay isn’t great or if it’s just that his leading man, Jarrid Geduld, is better at the action than the acting. I mean, we’ve seen that sort of thing before, and the fight choreography is decent with some fairly jawdropping stunts. It just seems like a lot of the other actors around him are better at drama, and it takes him some time to find his way into the role and story.
It doesn’t help that for a good part of the movie, it’s a very by-the-books conspiracy thriller, though there’s a distinct moment about halfway through where this feels like something more distinctly African rather than just being an American action film transplanted into this other country. At least this movie also explains its title, the name of this movie's government conspiracy, where I still have no fucking idea what “Blacklight” is.
What really helps Taute’s film find its identity is the fact that he uses a lot of South African collaborators, including the fantastic score by Kyle Shepherd, and having so many non-Hollywood people involved does help Indemnity stand out.
Sure, it could probably have had a good 10 to 15 minutes cut and gotten to some of the action sooner, but it does end with a fantastic setpiece – a nice book-end to the opening – and overall, Indemnity shows Taute to be promising filmmaker who may be able to flourish and do better if he’s given the right script to direct.
Rating: 7/10
Hitting theaters Friday and on VOD on Tuesday Feb 15 is Stacey Gregg's Irish dramatic thriller HERE BEFORE (Saban Films), starring the always-wonderful Andrea Riseborough, which somehow I missed at last year’s SXSW Film Festival. She plays a woman named Laura, whose own daughter died in a car crash, but when a family with a strange little girl named Megan moves in next door, Laura strongly believes that Megan may be her dead daughter.
I probably should mention that Here Before is not horror or even a psychological thriller, as much as it’s a slow burn drama with thriller elements that are kept fairly subdued. Riseborough’s mother meets the young Megan early in the movie, and she starts to become obsessed with the girl, whose own mother doesn’t seem to pay her much attention.
I don’t want to say too much more about what happens, and how things play out, otherwise. This is definitely a rather odd film, but also one that’s original and quite haunting at times. And of course, Riseborough is fantastic as always. Even with its pretty crazy twist ending, Here Before is a generally decent film that keeps the viewer quite invested and surprised throughout.
Rating: 7/10
Philippe Martinez’s A WEEK IN PARADISE (Screen Media) stars Malin Ackerman, Connie Nielsen, Phillip Winchester, and Jack Donnelly with Akerman playing Maggie, who escapes to the Caribbean after her failed marriage to stay at her cousin Fiona’s (Nielsen) resort, where she meets its charming chef Sam (Winchester) and begins to start a new life for herself. Being that Akerman is great at comedy, I’m assuming and hoping this is a comedy, maybe a rom-com, which would be great timing.
Opening at the Metrograph this Friday (in the theater AND digitally – you do know about the theater’s amazing digital membership, right?), and then the Laemmle Royal and Town Center in Los Angeles on March 4 is Dominik Graf’s FABIAN: GOING TO THE DOGS (Kino Lorber). The nearly three-hour adaptation of Erich Kästern’s 1931 novel stars Tom Schilling as an aspiring novelist who falls in love with a wannabe actress, played by Saskia Rosendahl, in the years before the Nazis have come to power. I will admit that I’ve only seen about half the movie – it’s just hard finding three hours to watch any one movie – but I did enjoy what I saw and will watch the rest on the digital platform when I have a chance.
The Film Forum is starting off another fairly regular series this Friday, and it’s always one of my favorites. Their semi-regular tribute to the great Toshiro Mifune, which runs from Feb. 11 through March 10, and features all of his great films with the equally great Akira Kurosawa like Rashomon, Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood (my favorite black and white Macbeth!), The Hidden Fortress (an eerie influence on George Lucas’ Star Wars!), and many, many more. I honestly wish I had more money right now to get tickets, since I would try to do a couple double or triple features… but money is sparse right now for me. Still, if you haven’t had a chance to see some of these movies on the big screen, DO NOT MISS THIS OPPORTUNITY!
The first part of Coodie and Chike’s docuseries, jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy, just premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, and Part 1 (Vision) will be released in theaters by Iconic Events Releasing and TIME Studios ahead of its debut on Netflix on February 16. It’s an “intimate and revealing portrait” of Kanye West from his early days through his current days, and I’ve actually heard a lot of great things about it from colleagues who have seen it.
Another movie I didn’t get to watch is Jefferson Moneo’s COSMIC DAWN (Cranked Up), which stars Camille Rowe and Emmanuelle Chriqui, which hits theaters and VOD this Friday, and also sports music from the rock group MGMT. Rowe plays Aurora, who saw an alien abduction as a child and joins the UFO cult The Cosmic Dawn after reading a book by its leader Elyse (Chriqui), although after a few years there, she begins to question Elyse’s sanity and looks for a way out. After the cult has dissolved years later, Aurora sees Elyse in a strange video and has to confront her own past.
A few other things out this week that I just didn’t have time to get to:
BIGBUG (Netflix) ←- The New Jean-Pierre Jeunet! THOSE WHO WALK AWAY (VMI) THE PACT (Juno Films) SHUT IN (Daily Wire/YouTube) I BLAME SOCIETY (Shudder) IRELAND (IMAX) SUPERCOOL (Vertical) GIVE OR TAKE (Breaking Glass PIctures)
Next week is President’s Day weekend with many schools and government employees having Monday off, and the releases include the video game action flick, Uncharted, starring Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg; Channing Tatum’s Dog; and the werewolf period movie, The Cursed from filmmaker Sean Ellis.
Have a great Valentine’s Day!
All box office data provided by The-Numbers.com.
Review: DEATH ON THE NILE Does Better Justice to Agatha Christie than ORIENT EXPRESS
I’ve been a Kenneth Branagh stan for quite some time, but I wasn’t really a fan of his Murder on the Orient Express. I couldn’t even tell you why since I saw it so long ago, I barely remember it. A period murder mystery should definitely be my kind of thing, and that definitely wasn’t, though I love the genre that has brought us Clue, and The Last of Sheila, and of course, most recently, Knives Out. They’re all great in their own respect, but it all leads back to author Agatha Christie and her character, Hercule Poirot
Branagh is back as Poirot for his second movie as the private detective, but first, we get a prologue, a flashback to Poirot’s time fighting in the French trenches during World War I, which essentially acts as an origin for the inspector’s famed moustache. (I wondered if Branagh was able to use Matthew Vaughn’s WWI trenches from The King’s Man when that movie was done.)
Decades later, Poirot is in a London nightclub listening to the dulcet tones of blues singer Salome Otterbourne (Sophie Okonedo) when he witnesses a meeting between besties Jacqueline de Bellefort (Emma Mackey) and billionaire heiress Linnet Ridgeway (Gal Gadot), the latter who graciously accepts an offer to dance by Jackie’s fiancé Simon Doyle (Armie Hammer), which ends up being a lot more risqué than Jackie expected. A few weeks later, Simon and Linnet are engaged to be married and having their wedding in Egypt, though the spurned Jackie still holds a grudge. Poirot himself is in Egypt, where he reconnects with his friend Bouc (Tom Bateman, the only other returnee from Orient Express), who is there with his mother (Annette Bening) for the big wedding.
All the aforementioned end up on the riverboat Karnac, which Linnet has rented out for her lavish party for friends and other wedding guests, which not only brings together the key players but also a wide cadre of hanger-ons from Linet’s business manager cousin Katchadourian (Ali Fazal) and her doctor (Russell Brand), but all sorts of others who have every reason to want the money inherited by Doyle through his marriage to Linnet.
It’s a good hour before the first “death” as promised in the title, and after that, bodies start piling up, as Poirot tries to find the killer or killers. For some reason, the investigation portion of the film works better than it did in Orient Express, so that the languid pacing of the first hour starts to pay off. Granted, much of those pacing issues are due to the number of characters being introduced, but Branagh seems to have a better handle on Christie and her beloved character than he did first time around.
Although the cast for Orient Express was impressive, Branagh has the benefits of a skilled casting director to get great actors into all the key roles, including Gadot, who has already been attached to play Egyptian Queen Cleopatra. When you see her in Death on the Nile you’ll immediately know why. She’s quite good, but this, once again, is very much an ensemble piece with each of the actors getting enough screen time for you to determine whether you like them or not. I thought Sophie Okonedo was quite good, playing a bit more of a character than we’ve seen from her, and she’s well-paired with Letitia Wright as her niece/manager, Rosalie. I wasn’t familiar with Emma Mackey’s work, but she has a great role as the fly in the ointment of the Doyle wedding going off without a hitch. We even get to see Annete Bening in a rare ensemble role, playing Bouc’s clinging mother, and I actually liked Bateman quite a bit both in his scenes with her and with Branagh.
To address the Armie Hammer in the room, the disgraced actor’s role as the sleazy snake Simon Doyle seems to suit him, amongst a cast where all of them have some sort of issue or imperfection. In fact, even Gadot’s Linnet acts like a bit of a bitch at times. Probably the best bit of casting is reuniting comedy legends Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders (best known simply as French and Saunders), but they’re playing very different non-comedic roles here. Still, it’s wonderful to see them in a major movie together.
More than anything else, Death on the Nile looks amazing, whether it’s the recreation of many Egyptian landmarks, the way Haris Zambarloukos’s camera bobs and weaves through the halls and stairwells of the Karnak, or just the many shots of the riverboat travelling down the Nile. It all just looks so beautiful thanks to a combination of production design, visual effects, and cinematography, although the latter’s camera calisthenics settle down for the movie’s second half, as Poirot goes into his interrogations, probably the enjoyable aspect of the film. After the big reveal of the killer, Branagh throws on an epilogue that’s probably as needless as the film’s prologue, though it does wrap things up in a nice bow.
What will be interesting to see is if the good karma Branagh has achieved with his autobiographical Belfast will carry over to the much bigger-budgeted Poirot mystery, especially since he was able to bring over many of his craft collaborators. I don’t see that happening, as Nile has the onus of being a sequel to a movie that received mixed reviews that was targeting an older demographic than the current critical pool.
Despite some pacing issues, Death on the Nile looks glorious, offers a great ensemble cast, and a final act that Agatha Christie fans should greatly admire. It’s good enough that I look forward with hopes that Branagh can play the role at least once more.
Rating: 7/10
MOONFALL Review: Master of Disaster Roland Emmerich Has Done It Again
You always know you’re in for a special kind of treat whenever you sit down for a Roland Emmerich movie. While the general concept of Moonfall might seem to be one of his sillier ideas, there’s also some interesting science fact (sort of) amid the fiction, which I’ll get to much further down this review, while still trying to avoid spoilers.
First, we get a 2011 prologue of Patrick Wilson and Halle Berry’s astronauts Brian Harper and Jocinda Fowler on a mission to repair a satellite above the moon when their space shuttle is struck by a torrent of debris coming from the moon. They barely survive, but Harper is discredited over the incident, despite having landed the shuttle safely. Fast forward ten years and John Bradley’s astrologist Dr. KC Houseman is working as a janitor at the UCal-Irvine, but he uses that job to acquire some data that can confirm his theory that the moon has been shifting out of orbit. Now in a high-ranking position at NASA, Fowler learns about this at the same time, so she has to call upon Harper to help her save the world by returning to space in a now-decommissioned space shuttle.
This should probably be pretty evident, but you’re not going into see a Roland Emmerich expecting high art – expect for Anonymous, which is still one of my favorite movies of his – but he’s just so good at creating movies that are entertaining escapist fare that, at times, might make you ponder what it might be like if something devastating happens to the earth. And yet, Moonfall actually features some of Emmerich’s most-rounded characters, ones you’re just as interested in as the storyline, with none of the actors taking things so seriously, they’re not above a quip or two here or there.
I’ve long been a fan of Patrick Wilson and Berry is quite good as one of the three key characters, but I think my biggest surprise was John Bradley (who some might know as Samwell from Game of Thrones), who not only instills humor into the movie with his character but also some genuine emotion with his relationship with his dementia-stricken mother, and as the film’s unlikeliest hero.
Then again, there are also more than a few of the hilarious Emmerich “escape scenes” where people are able to outrun an enormous, seemingly impossible to avoid catastrophe. In this case, one of the funnier ones is when Harper, Fowler and Houseman manage to get the space shuttle Endeavour off the launch pad as an enormous “Gravity wave” bears down on them. No, I have no idea if a “gravity wave” is a thing or not. That’s for Neil deGrasse Tyson to ascertain.
Another running subplot involves Harper’s son estranged Sonny (Charlie Plummer) on a side mission to help get Jocinda’s young son to a government safe haven in Colorado along with her Chinese exchange student governess Michelle (Kelly Yu). Michael Peña, who plays the jerk of a husband husband for Harper’s ex-wife, appears the most in this section of the film but doesn’t add as much humor as we know he can from the Ant-Man movies. Blink and you’ll miss Donald Sutherland, who just appears in a single scene.
Granted, there are aspects to the film that will remind some of the (in my opinion) far better Greenland from 2020, which was clearly inspired by Emmerich’s earlier films only with generally better filmmaking and characterization. Moonfall never loses track of the fact that people going to see the movie will want to see some epic-scale destruction, and of course, Emmerich delivers, destroying New York City (again), but in a waythat allows for a funny sight gag or two. (L.A. gets its fair share of destruction as well, so no one can say Emmerich is playing coastal favorites.)
I do want to get into a little bit of SPOILER territory here, though I’ll try to remain somewhat vague. Are you ready? For a long time, Emmerich was developing a movie called Singularity for Sony Pictures, and I have to assume that some of those ideas became Moonfall, since the reason the moon is out of orbit and heading towards earth involves a MUCH BIGGER idea involving nanobots and A.I. and other science fiction tropes we might have seen in the work of Frank Herbert or Isaac Asimov. Emmerich puts his own personal twist on it, implementing these big ideas in his own inimitable VFX-heavy fashion. I worry some might not like where the movie goes in its last act, which is a shame, since that’s straight-up science fiction world building and where it both diverges and merges with some of Emmerich’s past work.
I’m not expecting critics to suddenly give Emmerich a fair shake, but Moonfall is far better than both 2012 and The Day After Tomorrow, since it feels like more work was put into developing relatable characters despite the over-the-top craziness frequently on display.
In many ways, Moonfall isn’t just another Roland Emmerich disaster flick – it’s more like Roland Emmerich’s answer to 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Rating: 7.5/10
THE WEEKEND WARRIOR 2/4/22 - JACKASS FOREVER, MOONFALL, THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD, POLY STYRENE: I AM A CLICHÉ, THE LONG NIGHT and More!
Movies are back, baby! After a few quieter weeks with very low profile (or no) new wide releases, we have two bigger movies, one part of a very popular franchise, the other a new disaster movie from the modern-day master of said genre, Roland Emmerich. Also, the Winter Olympics begin on Thursday, offering another option for people who just want to remain home
The long-awaited (to some?) JACKASS FOREVER (Paramount) brings back Johnny Knoxville and his merry prankster/stunt crew, and it’s finally being released nationwide into theaters after being delayed from its original October release. It’s the second 2022 release from Paramount Pictures after delaying much of its 2020 line-up, and then deciding to delay some of its 2021 movies once again. And yet, in the middle of a third COVID wave, it released Scream and had relatively decent success, so now is the perfect time for the studio to follow that up with another sequel.
Back in 2000, Johnny Knoxville debuted his MTV prank and stunt series “Jackass,” which was a huge hit with the youngsters twenty years ago, running for three seasons with solid ratings. Still, because the series was required to follow the FCC guidelines for a basic cable channel, it meant they couldn’t swear or have nudity and such, so it made sense in 2002 for Knoxville to take it to theaters with Jackass: The Movie, which was intended to wrap up the series. Made for just $5 million, the movie exceeded many expectations (including my own), opening with $22.7 million and grossing $80 million worldwide. (I definitely underestimated it as I went into my second year doing box office analysis.)
Four years later, Knoxville returned with Jackass: Number Two, which opened a bit bigger and made a bit more both domestically and overseas. Fast forward four more years, and movies like Avatar and Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland had done huge big business by being released in 3D, so of course… that meant it was time for Jackass 3D, and that opened in October 2010 with $50.3 million, likely boosted by 3D ticket prices. Three years later, its followup Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa also made more than $100 million after an opening of $32 million.
Now, if you looked at that last number, you would think that Bad Grampa opening nine years ago would be a good sign for the first Jackass movie in almost a decade to open even higher. Unfortunately, we already have to take into account that after two years of a pandemic, millions of regular moviegoers have gotten used to just waiting to watch things at home. Then again, you also have to take into account over 8 years of ticket price inflation that can counterbalance said trend, which means that if the exact same number of people who went to see Bad Grandpa opening weekend do the same with Jackass Forever, it will open higher. (Then again, there’s just as good a chance that some of Knoxville’s audience have died, since anyone who loves these movies is also the type who might not be wearing a mask or getting vaccinated during a pandemic, so that loss of audience “counter-counters” the higher price for movie tickets.)
At one point, I was thinking Jackass Forever would be good for $40 million or more this weekend due to the power of the IP, combined with the lack of new movies in recent weeks. Those things, plus the fact that COVID numbers are coming down seems like the perfect storm for this movie to explode. Sure, some people might wait for the movie inevitable Paramount+ release, but others will want to see the comedy with a riotous audience as soon as they can. That said, I’ve been stymied a few times by overestimating moviegoers during the pandemic, so I’m going to scale my original prediction back to a more reasonable $33 to 36 million, though still easily being the #1 movie of the weekend. We’ll have to see if it can retain #1 for more than one weekend, though, since many previous movies in the series took a big plunge in week 2.
I won’t be reviewing this movie since I have yet to see a single Jackass movie, and I don’t plan on starting now.
Another movie finally seeing the light of day is Master of Disaster – I’m just going to keep calling him that until it sticks – Roland Emmerich’s latest, MOONFALL (Lionsgate), which puts him back in the realm of global destruction where he’s excelled going all the way back to 1996’s alien invasion movie, Independence Day, which also helped put Will Smith on the map. Since then, Emmerich has made two other hugely successful disaster movies with The Day After Tomorrow and 2012, and I guess in some sense, his Godzilla movie in 1998 was also kind of a disaster, whether intended or not.
It’s odd to think that the world might be ready for a disaster film after two years in a pandemic, but in fact, Moonfall offers the type of escapist fun that makes it worth going to see it in a movie theater. (My official review will be coming later this week even though I “paid” to see a preview last week.)
Emmerich always seems to be able to get good casts for his movies, and he has a fairly big star in Oscar winner Halle Berry, who seems to be making a comeback. She’s likely to be the biggest draw for Black audiences (male and even some female), an audience who will certainly welcome her return to the cineplexes that have been full of VERY white movies for months now. Her leading man is Patrick Wilson, an actor I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing a number of times, and he’s just done great things in his career, mostly his work with James Wan in horror movies Insidious and The Conjuring and their respective sequels, but he also played a major role in Wan’s Aquaman movie, which was an even bigger blockbuster.
The movie’s secret weapon is John Bradley – Samwell Tarly in the popular “Game of Thrones” – who plays Dr. KC Houseman, an astrology expert who simultaneously realizes that something is wrong with the moon at the same time as NASA. He’s very funny in the movie, but also has a few really moving subplots, like his mother suffering from dementia. There are others in the movie like Michael Peña, Donald Sutherland, and Charlie Plummer, but as with most of Emmerich’s films, it’s rarely about the cast, and it’s more about the big-scale destruction and ideas.
Emmerich has had a few duds in the past few years, although maybe his 2019 pre-COVID WWII movie Midway wasn’t that big a dud, since it won its opening weekend with less than $18 million and grossed $126.9 million globally. His White House invasion movie White House Down, starring Jamie Foxx and Channing Tatum, did slightly better with a $24.8 million opening weekend and made $205.4 million globally. Granted, that’s not a ton even by pandemic standards, but both of those were Emmerich doing something different compared to the straight-up disaster flicks that were Day After Tomorrow ($68.7 million opening over Memorial Day) and 2012 ($65.2 million opening). The latter two would give some more hope for Moonfall, even if it does have a similarly silly world-destructive premise as those other two. (At least Day After Tomorrow showed an absolute extreme of where the current climate change issue could go.)
Honestly, I’m not expecting rapturous reviews for Moonfall – probably why Lionsgate is holding them until Thursday – but that’s just typical with critics, but if you compare Moonfall to some of the movies mentioned above, it’s a far more fulfilling and fun experience, as well as playing with some very big science fiction ideas that might seem silly to cynics, I mean, critics. I’ll save some of those thoughts for my own review while trying to avoid spoilers.
One thing that could be a huge detriment to Moonfall, maybe even bigger than COVID or negative reviews, is that there have been some issues negotiating with Canadian theater chains that might to play the movie, who might end up not playing it. It’s sort of a shame, since a lot of Canada has been shutdown for most of January, and one would think all of them would want to play the latest Roland Emmerich disaster flick. Because of that, I don’t think this one will be able to make even $20 million, but it might still come pretty close.
You can read my own review of Moonfall here.
Since we’re back to doing box office, here’s how the Top 9 should look… nope, we’re still not quite in a place where it’s worth doing a top 10, since there are still a bunch of movies making under a million in the Top 10, unfortunately:
1. Jackass Forever (Paramount) - $33.6 million N/A
2. Moonfall (Lionsgate) - $15.8 million
3. Spider-Man: No Way Home (Sony Pictures) - $7 million -36%
4. Scream (Paramount) - $3.9 million -46%
5. Sing 2 (Universal) - $3.5 million -25%
6. Redeeming Love (Universal) - $1 million -44%
7. The King’s Man (20th Century/Disney) - $1 million -40%
8. The 355 (Universal) - $750k -44%
9. American Underdog (Lionsgate) - $700k -40%
Opening Wednesday in select theaters including New York’s Angelika Film Center, Norwegian filmmaker Joaquim Trier’s THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD (NEON) was already shortlisted in the Oscar International Feature category, but we’ll have to wait another week to see if it makes the nominations. After finally seeing the movie, I think it should be in good shape to be Norway’s first Oscar nomination in a decade. In fact, I’m making the movie this week’s “CHOSEN ONE,” because the movie is so good, and it might have made it onto my Top 10 list for last year if I had a chance to actually see it last year. (It played the New York Film Festival, but I wasn’t in town that first weekend.)
Trier’s film stars Renata Reinsve as Julie, who we meet as a medical student before she switches careers to being a photographer. While working at a bookshop, she meets and falls for controversial cartoonist, Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie), but a few years into their relationship, she meets the far less serious Eivind (Herbert Nordrum) at a party. The two begin to flirt in a way that could only lead to them having an affair.
Honestly, I’m pretty sure the title for Trier’s latest, and in my opinion, best movie to date is a little bit of a misnomer, since Julie really isn’t that horrible, even when an early chapter of this 12-chapter saga is outright labelled “Cheating.” Maybe the title is meant as the Norwegian version of sarcasm or some sort of dark humor, because a lot of the movie was probably meant to be comedy, but only with a small “c.” Trier ably plays with magic realism for one particularly memorable scene in the movie – which I won’t spoil – but so much happens in the life of Julie during the period of time covered in the film. Trier uses a similar method of telling Julie’s story with an unknown narrator filling the viewer in onto other things that may be relevant to the cross-section of Julie’s life on which the film focuses.
One of the reasons why this is just so much stronger than Trier’s earlier films Reprise and Oslo, August 31st is that he has this absolutely stunning leading lady in Renata Reinsve, very much the type of knockout Norway typically produce, but also one whose emotions runs the gamuts to create this 3-dimensional woman who can be playful one moment and deeply sad the next. Ms. Reinsve has obviously been getting a lot of attention (including an award at Cannes), but I don’t think that should take away from the equally strong performance by Anders Danielsen Lie, whose character leaves Julie’s life for a period but then they reunite when he is diagnosed with terminal cancer. The last act of the film puts the two actors into a much different place than when we saw them previously, and much of that is what drives the film to end in such a memorable way. (Oddly, I had never heard Art Garfunkel’s version of the Brazilian classic “Waters of March,” but it works so well as a closer.)
Despite its somewhat misleading title, The Worst Person in the World is easily one of Joachim Trier’s best realized films to date – some great ideas, a solid script, and a magnificent leading lady just go such a long way.
Rating: 9/10
Speaking of Scandinavia, I wasn’t able to get to Christoffer Boe’s Danish foodie drama, A TASTE OF HUNGER (Magnolia) last week, but I finally did get to watch it. It stars Nikolaj Coster-Waldau from Game of Thrones and Katrine Greis-Rosenthal as married couple Carsten and Maggie, him a chef prone to going into Gordon Ramsey-style fits of rage, and she, his loving wife and mother of two kids, who shares his dream of being awarded a Michelin star. Oh, and she’s also having an affair with his younger brother, Frederik. While I won’t write a full review of the movie, it was a very different movie than I was expecting, because it wasn’t just a bunch of food porn, but actually, it’s a really strong and terrifically realized drama, featuring two fantastic performances from Boe’s leads, but especially Ms. Greis-Ronenthal, who I’m shocked hasn’t broken out of her native Denmark. In fact, the movie as a whole just looked great and has such a great dramatic vibe, which pulls you in, and only gets predictable once or twice before throwing you for an emotional loop. I’m not sure how much longer this will be playing in the odd locations where Magnolia has the movie playing, but you can still watch it at home via a number of On Demand platforms.
And that seems about as good a tie-in as any to…
Opening in New York (Quad Cinema & JCC Manhattan) and Los Angeles (Landmark Nuart) is Beth Elise Hawk’s directorial debut BREAKING BREAD (Cohen Media Group), a wonderful doc for foodies, centering on the A-Sham Festival in Haifa, an Arabic food festival founded by microbiologist Dr. Nof Atamna-Ismaeel, the first Israeli-Arab to win Israel’s Master Chef. She invited Muslim chefs to cook in Jewish kitchens and vice versa, and the film shows how that worked out.
Opening with an Anthony Bourdain quote, Breaking Bread does the interesting thing of being about food but also very specifically about food of Arab origin, and how a number of chefs from different backgrounds work together to produce dishes for the annual Haifa food festival. The film follows three pairs of chefs who are working together for the first time, most of them having never met beforehand, as well as a cute married couple who take on “The Hummus Project.” Nof’s idea is for the chefs to work on specialties from their own restaurants but also bringing their own very distinct Arab backgrounds into the mix.
This is more than your typical foodie doc, though, even if all the food does look absolutely delicious, but I wouldn’t recommend watching this on an empty stomach, as I learned. Ms. Hawk uses the festival to frame the long-standing history of Arabs living in Israel. And yet, it’s not just about the politics of the conflicts and wars, but as much about the politics of food. Many classic Arab dishes were literally absconded and changed by Jewish emigrées, so for instance, what was once an “Arab salad” is frequently called “Israeli salad.”
Even bearing in mind that the general ego of chefs to want to do everything their own way could pose issues, the documentary spends quite some time with each of the chef pairings as they get to know each other, talking about food, family, and history. It’s an experiment that one might not think would work, but the proof is in the pudding … or the Kishek, as the case may be.
Besides the tantalizing cinematography by Ofer Ben Yehuda that will make you drool, Hawk’s doc also has a gorgeous score by Omar El-Deeb that perfectly realizes the traditions of the region where this wonderful food is being prepared.
I had a feeling Breaking Bread would be my kind of movie, and I was correct. Indeed, after watching this truly wonderful film, I had to order some Middle Eastern cuisine myself, knowing full well that it probably wouldn’t taste nearly as good as the food in this film looks.
Another movie that came VERY close to being this week’s “Chosen One” is Celeste Bell and Paul Sng’s documentary POLY STYRENE: I AM A CLICHÉ (Utopia), a terrific music doc that I saw at the virtual SXSW last year, and is now getting a limited release on Wednesday and then goes wider on Friday. (You can find out exactly where it’s gonna play here.) For those unfamiliar with the early punk goddess, Poly Styrene was in fact one of the pioneers and true icons. This doc being co-directed by Poly’s only daughter Celeste, this is a very personal look into the life of Marianne Joan Elliott-Said who died in 2011.
I’ll be honest that I wasn’t particularly familiar with the music of X-Ray Spex. I may have seen them perform in some punk rock film or other, but the band had broken up by 1979, and I really wasn’t getting into punk until a couple years later, mostly The Damned and the Clash, though.
Because Elliot was mixed race and half-Somali, she dealt with a lot of bigotry from both sides, but she also had a single mother, so there was that stigma that she had to deal with. In that way, I Am a Cliché also deals with a similar period of racism within the UK as covered in Steve McQueen’s excellent “Small Axe Anthology.” (On Amazon if you haven’t seen it!)
The filmmakers get access to some great archival footage and recordings of Ms. Styrene talking about her life, and it’s especially cool seeing her when she’s still a teenager with braces, but making her own clothes and helping to create what would become the punk rock style of fashion.
Marianne/Poly was just amazingly strong and inspirational for the likes of Neneh Cherry and other women who got into punk rock and new wave in the ‘80s. But the movie also includes the likes of Thurston Moore, who shares a great story of seeing X-Ray Spex at CBGB’s. Even so, it’s not just about the music or style, but a very intimate look into how her bipolar disorder started to affect her family life.
I really loved this movie, and I just love that Poly’s influence continues to this day with bands like New York’s Surfbort, and their amazing frontwoman Dani Miller. (Check out this amazing recent video from the band, directed by the one and only Fred Armisen.) So yeah, maybe Poly and X-Ray Spex weren’t able to really capitalize on the third, fourth and fifth waves of punk rock that allowed bands like the Damned and Sex Pistols frontman John Lydon to keep making money off their punk legacies, but Bell and Sng’s movie does a great job reminding people that Poly Sterene was there at the very beginning and was a true inspiration.
Chad’s entry into the 94th Academy Awards, which debuted at Cannes last year, is Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s LINGUI: THE SACRED BONDS (MUBI), which will open at New York’s Film Forum on Friday. This is only Chad’s third entry into the Oscars, and all three were written and directed by Haroun, who lives in France but has returned to Chad to make this one, which takes place outside the country’s capital of N’djamena, and it follows single mother Amina (Achouackh Abakar Souleyman) whose 15-year-old daughter Maria (Rihane Khalil Alio) is expelled from school for being pregnant. Because abortion is illegal and considered immoral by the highly-religious region of the country, Amna needs to find other ways to make the money to make sure her daughter doesn’t suffer the same scorn and ridicule she has had to endure as a single mother.
This was a nice surprise, since it starts with such simplicity in terms of its characters and storytelling, and I was appreciating it more as a portrait of this area of the world that we just don’t get to see very much in the West. The plight of Amina and Maria is something one hears about, but to actually see what they have to go through to try to change Maria’s path in life makes you really feel the desperation that they both must be enduring. It’s particularly interesting when you draw parallels to states in the U.S., which are supposed to be far less primitive than third world countries like Chad, and yet, women have to deal with similarly puritan views on women’s rights and how the religious right government constantly threatens them.
At first, I didn’t think much of the two main actresses, but as the film went along, you start to see Haroun’s skills and experience as a filmmaker coming to the fore and taking the story to unexpected places, as things get far more dramatic. Lingui is a fine bit of world drama that deserves to be seen by Western audiences, just to give a glimpse into what it’s like in places like Chad.
Rating: 8/10
Rich (The Curse of El Charro) Ragsdale’s THE LONG NIGHT (Well Go USA) is a dark and highly creepy movie involving Southern plantations and demonic snake cults, essentially adding to the film mythology of young liberals going South and facing all sorts of unsavory things.
It stars Scout Taylor-Compton (Rob Zombie’s Halloween movies) as Grace Covington, whose parents had gone missing years earlier. She’s come in contact with a man named Frank Covington who may be able to help her find out what happened, so she and her boyfriend Jack (Noland Gerard Funk) go down, but when they arrive at Frank’s Southern plantation, he’s nowhere to be found. They soon encounter something nefarious as they house is surrounded and they’re threatened by a group of hooded and masked entities who have some sort of control over Grace.
That’s probably all you really need to know about this horror film that is likely to draw comparisons both to the classic Race with the Devil and Ti West’s more recent House of the Devil. Ragsdale takes a fairly simple premise and a relatively small cast – Deborah Kara Unger and Jeff Fahey play the only two other significant i.e. unmasked characters – and creates an eerie and unnerving horror film that consistently keeps you on edge as things escalate.
Surprisingly, Ragsdale is not only a prolific music video director, but also a composer. For The Long Night, he worked with composer Sherri Chung (who has done music for shows like Riverdale, Batwoman, Kung Fu, and others), and she delivers an absolutely fantastic score for the film. With the best horror, that’s often all that’s needed to really put a movie over the top, but that score is enhanced by some aptly unnerving sound design, as well.
Things do get a bit crazy as the story progresses into its climactic third act (which was also a tad predictable), but the two leads do a relatively decent job selling the fear, and then, the absolutely horrifying things Ragsdale produces does the rest.
Rating: 7.5/10
Directed by Tim Kirkby (Brockmire) and based on the 2018 novel by Howard Michael Gould (which the author adapted into a film screenplay himself), LAST LOOKS (RLJEfilms) opens in theaters, on demand and digital this Friday. It stars Charlie Hunnam as Charlie Waldo, an ex-LAPD superstar living off the grid in a trailer out in the wilderness after leaving the force.. Mel Gibson (uh oh) plays Alistair Pinch, an eccentric Shakespearean actor who spends his days drunk on the set of his TV show. The latter’s wife is found dead and he’s the main suspect, so Waldo comes out of retirement to investigate what happened, only to deal with gangsters, Hollywood execs, and preschool teachers. The movie also stars Morena Baccarin, Rupert Friend, Lucy Fry, Clancy Brown, Dominic Monaghan, and Method Man.
After an odd ecological lecture as an intro, we meet Hunnam’s Waldo, a guy who clearly got sick of society and decided to do what we all dream of doing some day, only he’s limiting himself to owning just 100 items total. As the film begins, he’s visited by his P.I. ex Lorena (Morena Baccarin), who comes to find him after being ghosted for 3 years hoping he’ll take on the case investigating a famous actor’s dead wife. Waldo refuses to take the job at first, but when Lorena vanishes, Waldo is forced to return to L.A. to find her.
Although I was unfamiliar with Gould’s novel or the Charlie Waldo character, the film very much feels like the work of one of my favorite authors, Elmore Leonard, with its story firmly set in Hollywood, mixing crime and humor. Waldo is a particularly good role for Hunnam, and similar to Leonard, Gould populates the film with a lot of strange and amusing characters with tongue firmly in cheek as they’re introduced, even though some of them just appear once then are gone.
Probably the strangest choice is having Gibson playing a British actor with a Colonel Sanders beard – probably for Pinch’s TV role as a judge – which means he’s constantly switching up his regular accent with a Southern drawl. Again, it was a choice, but it’s one that takes some getting used to since it’s so oddly offputting. Other standouts include Lucy Fry from Bright as the kindergarten teacher of Pinch’s young daughter, an adorable little girl (played by Sophie Fatu) who is constantly stealing everyone’s scenes. Sadly, there just isn’t enough of Baccarin, who appears at the beginning and end, and that’s it.
The story itself isn't particularly innovative or original, your basic modern noir crime-comedy, but it does keep one entertained, even if, for every one scene, there may be one or two that just fall flat.Even so, Kirkby has a solid handle on how to direct such material into a movie with apt modern-day noir lighting at times, and the musical choices really bring a lot to the mix between the score by Peter Nashel and the songs.
To some, Last Looks may only be mildly amusing, but it features some great character work from the underrated Hunnam, and if nothing else, it works infinitely better than Inherent Vice.
Rating: 7/10
Emily Bennett stars, co-writes and co-directs Justin Brooks’ horror film ALONE WITH YOU (DarkStar Pictures), playing Charlie, a young woman preparing a romantic homecoming for her girlfriend, Simone. When she gets locked into their Brooklyn apartment, she begins to experience voices, shadows and hallucinations that “reveals a truth she’s unwilling to face.” It opens in select theaters Friday, and then will be on demand, digital and on DVD Feb. 8.
There’s no easy way to say that this movie is pretty terrible, very much like many movies being made during the pandemic, when filmmakers can get away with making a movie with a single person wandering around their apartment.
At least, this one involves Bennett’s Charlie video chatting with various others, including the great Barbara Crampton as her mother and her super-annoying friend Thea (Dora Madison). There are also some flashbacks to when Charlie and her girlfriend Simone are in the apartment, but we only hear the latter off-camera, again to be able to keep the movie just about the one person. I’ve always been into the idea of actors writing their own material, but that’s pertaining to actors who are far better than Bennett.
This is the absolute laziest form of horror filmmaking humanly possible i.e. the woman alone in her apartment, just walking around and acting terrified about things that are mostly added in post. I mean, this movie is only 81 minutes long, which tells you how long one can keep that deception going for. Alone with You is just a horrible piece of crap, a total waste of time, and there’s just no way to sugarcoat it otherwise.
Even though it does get a little better towards the end, as it turns into a full-fledged horror film with decent practical effects and some fun mindfuckery. By then, it’s already worn out its welcome with a lot of stuff that just doesn’t keep one particularly invested. Skip this, and seek out The Long Night instead.
Rating: 3.5/10
And yet, that wasn’t even the worst movie of the week… nope… and oddly, this next one is also co-written by one of the actors… maybe I need to rethink whether that is a good thing or not?
Matt Glass and Jordan Wayne Long’s southern ghost story GHOSTS OF THE OZARKS (XYZ Films), which will be in theaters, on digital and on demand starting Thursday, stars Thomas Hobson, Phil Morris, Tara Perry, Tim Blake Nelson, Angela Bettis, and David Arquette. Hobson plays James McCune, a young doctor who arrives at the walled-off town of Norfork in Arkansas after the end of the Civil War. After experiencing strange events in the forest outside, he learns that there’s darker dealings going on within the town than outside, although anyone who dares go outside might face “ghost punishment.”
I feel like I went into Ghosts of the Ozarks with a fairly open mind, but something immediately felt off about it. I couldn’t put my finger on it until Hobson’s doctor ventures inside the fort-like town of Norfork, and we start meeting the other townsfolk. This includes a blind bartender named “Torp,” played by Tim Blake Nelson, who has horrible scars where his eyes used to be. We’ll get back to him. James’ uncle Matthew (Phil Morris) seems to be running the show in Norfork, but he seems to be hiding many secrets, as does James, but in the latter case, it’s just a horrible scar on his arm.
The movie’s screenplay is written by Long and Tara Perry, who plays an Annie Oakley-like character (also called Annie) who does all the hunting for the Norfork compound. The dialogue for the movie is not good, or maybe Hobson and Morris just aren’t strong enough actors to give the writing much weight, so their scenes frequently come off like community theater. Every time the two of them are talking – or James is talking to anyone else in the town, for that matter – the film’s pace just crashes, as the filmmakers seemingly lose track that they’re trying to sell this as a horror movie.
Acting-wise, Tara Perry isn’t that bad, maybe because she gave herself one of the film’s stronger roles and better dialogue, while Joseph Ruud aka Erick Rowan from the WWE also is okay as her mute brother, William. David Arquette is actually a producer on the film, and he kind of flits in and out of the movie, as if maybe he realized he was going to be making Scream mid-shoot. The very idea of Arquette “phoning something in” seems hard to conceive, but at least he doesn’t try too hard doing an accent, unlike many others.
Now, I’m a pretty big fan of Tim Blake Nelson, but my excitement for him doing another Western was tempered when he started talking in an accent that at first seems to be Irish, but then a little Romanian, and finally, it starts making sense that his character Torp must be Dutch. This movie is about as far from Nelson’s finest moment as an actor can get, and this may be one of his worst career performances ever. (Midway through the film, there’s a scene with his character sans scars, eyes wide open, as if everyone merely forgot that major detail of the character.)
Otherwise, the film is filled with so many lame characters spouting such horrible dialogue you keep wondering if and when it’s going to ever get back to being a horror movie? There’s also a point where there’s so much “WTF?” stuff going on that you’re wondering if maybe you missed something… or everything. There are so many elements to the corruption and duplicity going on in Norfork that it’s hard to explain any of it, even the giant creatures that sometimes appear in the red mist outside the town. When things seem to be plateauing in terms of any story progress, Annie is attacked for no particular reason, just to add another nefarious subplot to an already confounding story. Eventually, the movie turns almost literally into The Wicker Man, so yeah… bad, boring, and not particularly original.
It’s hard to dump too much on this movie, because… hey, the filmmakers somehow got this movie financed and made despite COVID… and their clear incompetence, but maybe they can use the movie’s low budget as an excuse there? (Honestly, the scariest words I read after watching this movie was the claim that a “sequel will be made.” How? Why!? UGH.)
Ghosts of the Ozarks is an epic disaster that makes little to no sense. It’s sold as a Western-horror hybrid that’s neither a very good Western nor as hard as it tries, could it really be considered horror. I will be quite saddened and deeply disturbed if this doesn’t end up being the very worst movie I see this year.
Rating: 2.5/10
Jim Sturgess (remember him?) stars in Giga Agladze’s thriller THE OTHER ME (Gravitas Ventures), playing Irakli, an aspiring architect thrown into turmoil when diagnosed with a debilitating eye disease, which causes all sorts of other problems in his life, including his frustrated wife “Nutsa” (Antonia Campbell-Hughes) who has trouble staying loyal. And then, he falls for a mysterious and beautiful artist named “Nino” (Andreja Pejic), who becomes his muse. (I mean, at least her name isn’t “Nutsa,” am I right?) I’m not going to write a full review of this one a.) because it’s a very dull drama that just isn’t very good, and b.) In fact, it was so bad, I gave up on it after about about 20 minutes and decided to watch something else, so another reason not to review it.
Also premiering this week is the long-awaited Hulu series, PAM AND TOMMY, aka Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee, as played by Lily James and Sebastian Stan. The series is eight episodes long, but I’ve only had time to watch the first couple episodes, and it has a pretty incredible supporting cast that includes Seth Rogen, Taylor Schilling, and Nick Offerman. At least the first few episodes are directed by Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya, Cruella) who just seems to be killing it between his recent movies and his pervasive amount of television that he’s also directing.
Apparently, Bill Murray’s New Worlds: The Cradle of Civilization will open in select cities on Wednesday, but I have heard nada from any publicist about it, even as I’ve seen Murray doing lots of press for the movie, so [shrug emoji].
We’ll wrap up with some repertory stuff…
The Metrograph concludes its month-long Miklós Jancsó series, as well as its week-long “In the Streets” series, featuring documentaries with some classic docs featuring “man in the street” interviews, including Jafar Panahi’s Taxi Tehran. It’s all to coincide with the theater’s premiere of Pietro Marcello, Francesco Munzi, and Alice Rohrwacher’s Italian documentary, Futura from Grasshopper Films, which talks to the kids of today’s Italy. On Thursday night, you can see a repeat screening of Todd Haynes’ tribute to Bob Dylan, I’m Not There. This weekend also begins a retrospective to filmmaker John M. Stahl, whose work I’m really not familiar with, but the retrospective includes nine of the director’s films from the 30s and 40s, many of them to be shown on 35mm.
The Film Forum’s series “NYC’s Movie Renaissance 1945 - 1955” continues with screenings this weekend of Jules Dassin’s 1948 film The Naked City, paired with the more recent doc short, Uncovering the Naked City by Bruce Goldstein. There are a couple more screenings of Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront next week in case you missed the earlier screenings, as well. They’re also showing Morris Engel’s 1953 film, Little Fugitive, as part of its Film Forum Jr. program.
A few other movies I wasn’t able to get to this week (with apologies to their respective publicists): THE WOLF AND THE LION (Blue Fox Entertainment)
LAST SURVIVORS (Vertical)
Next week, it’s Valentine’s Day! Awww… Opening wide will be the long-awaited Kenneth Branagh murder mystery sequel, Death on the Nile; JLo and OWils’ rom-com Marry Me (perfect for VDay, huh?); and Liam Neeson in something called Blacklight.
Box office data courtesy The-Numbers.com.
SUNDANCE DAY 5 & 6: Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, Cha Cha Real Smooth, Am I OK?
I realize I’m falling behind on Sundance reviews, as I try to write other stuff, but next up, here are three reviews of comedies (of sorts), two of them better than the other.
GOOD LUCK TO YOU, LEO GRANDE
Directed by Australian filmmaker Sophie Hyde, Good Luck To You, Leo Grande is a fairly simple two-person-mostly-in-a-single-room dramedy that deals with sexuality and aging and just wanting to be loved or desired. In the movie, a middle-aged widow named Nancy Stokes (Emma Thompson) hires a gregarious gigolo known as “Leo Grande” (Daryl McCormack) (Wheel of Time, Peaky Blinders), as the two wrangle with their own pecadillos about sex and sexuality.
Nancy has only slept with her husband, and she’s never had an orgasm in that time, so she’s quite nervous and anxious about having sex with someone new. Instead of getting right to business, the two people from very different backgrounds sit down and talk, measuring each other out. Nancy is incredibly curious about his job and why he does it, and he tries to retain his swagger and charm, fielding her questions, but only to a point.
This witty and charming film could have easily been a play, so it’s an interesting decision to turn it into a film, but maybe that was the only way to get Dame Emma into a role she’s just so well suited to really kill. I wasn’t familiar with McCormack before this movie, but he holds his own in a dialogue-driven film that also harked back to Sam Levinson’s Malcolm and Marie without getting nearly as dark or cynical.
it’s a little surprising how much this has in common with Lena Dunham’s Sharp Stick, although this one just works far better and Leo Grande is everything that movie could and should have been.
This is a lovely film, one that relies so heavily on the script by Katy Brand (her first film screenplay!) and the brave performances by both actors, but kudos must also go to Ms. Hyde for her way of pulling things together and keeping the viewer invested.
Rating: 8/10
CHA CHA REAL SMOOTH
Cooper Raiff’s oddly-titled debut Shithouse was quite a delight, and he’s back with his second feature – the first at Sundance – in which he plays Andrew, a 22-year-old living at home with his mother (Leslie Mann) who has remarried. Andrew doesn’t get along with his stepfather Gregg (Brad Garrett) so much, and he has a dead-end job at something called “Meat Sticks.” At a bar mitzvah, he meets Dakota Johnson’s Domino, a single mother with a daughter Lola (Vanessa Burghardt), who is on the spectrum, and Andrew bonds with them but more out of interest towards the older Domino, who is also engaged to Joseph (Raul Castillo). Andrew also takes on a job as “babysitter” to Lola, and the two bond
In many ways, Cha Cha Real Smooth is a much more complex and evolved follow-up for Raiff, although at first, it seems like Raiff had too many ideas kind of smooshed together, which means the movie is also not as focused as Shithouse. Anyone curious about Raiff’s decision to make Johnson his romantic interest, even though she’s almost ten years old, I mean, if you’re a filmmaker, of course you’re gonna cast yourself in a romantic role opposite Dakota Johnson, wouldn’t you?
Even though the movie is very much from Andrew’s point-of-view, it doesn’t stumble down the path of most male-written-directed rom-coms where the woman is only there to be seen in the director’s male gaze. In fact, there’s this ongoing dynamic where you’re unsure whether Andrew and Domino will become more romantically-involved or not.
Raiff is a really good writer in terms of dialogue, which is often the hardest part of any comedy, let alone a quote-unquote romcom. He’s also surprisingly good at expressing feelings men go through when they’re not sure where they stand with a romantic interest, and that’s despite being significantly younger and yet worldly beyond his age.
Cha Cha Real Smooth goes into some really serious places, and Johnson is particularly good in this, possibly my favorite role she’s played so far, maybe because she’s been given a character that allows for far more dramatic moments.
She’s also well-matched with Raiff, and I enjoyed his dynamic with the younger actors, particularly Burghardt, who makes her acting debut in this film. I also really liked the parallels drawn between Andrew’s love problems and those of his younger brother David (Evan Assante), and some of my favorite moments where the ones with Raiff giving the young actor advice on love despite his own issues. Raiff also has included a few solid scenes between himself and the always great Leslie Mann.
The movie just really grew on me as it went along for the reasons mentioned, although it took me a little longer to warm up to some of the music and song choices. Those also seemed to get better as it went along (or I just started enjoying them more along with the movie), and the score by Este Haim and Chris Stracey worked particularly well.
It’s pretty amazing to see the incredible growth for this talented young filmmaker between his first and second movies, and it’s crazy he really is only 23 years old, since he’s exploring ideas which normally would come from a much older or experienced filmmaker.
It’s also nice to have a “romantic comedy” where there isn’t necessarily a pat happy ending. It’s partially why I loved (500) Days of Summer, and Raiff does a good job avoiding the clichés, so the movie doesn’t anywhere one might be expecting.
Cha Cha Real Smooth is by far the most effective movie I’ve seen at Sundance this year in terms of a filmmaker achieving something truly all-encompassing that should appeal to a wide variety of audiences.
Rating: 9/10
And then on the other side of things…
AM I OK?
This has been a pretty decent Sundance, so it was only a matter of time when we got a real dog, just a horrid movie that I absolutely detested. It’s more than a little odd that this one ALSO stars Dakota Johnson, who was so great in Cha Cha Real Smooth.
Directed by Tig Notaro and her wife Stephanie Allyn, who appeared in the Sundance movie In the World and have been together for nine years, this comedy about friendship was written by Lauren Pomerantz of The Ellen Degeneres Show. It revolves around lifelong besties Lucy (Johnson) and Jane (Sonoya Mizuno who appeared in Crazy Rich Asians), and how their friendship is challenged when Lucy realizes she’s gay and comes out to her best friend.
Like most, I was looking forward to this mainly since it’s Notaro’s directorial debut, and I was curious how she’d handle an LGBTQ+ comedy about coming out, but this really isn’t much of a comedy, as much as it tries to instill the likes of Sean Hayes as Lucy and Jane’s boss. As Lucy tries to figure out how to approach dating, Jane gets offered a job opening a London branch, which will separate the two friends. They also have a co-worker, Britanny (Kiersey Clemons), who seems interested in Lucy, so problem solved?
I didn’t find it very believable that people talk like this ever as Jane keeps trying to set Lucy up with a nice lesbian, and they spend most of their conversations talking about kissing woman. Lucy the ends up hanging out with Clemons, and they, too, immediately start talking about sex.
As much as this movie is supposed to be about this friendship, I just don’t buy that all women do is talk about is sex and dating, and in this case, about one of them being a lesbian. These just aren’t real people. The big conflict that breaks up the friendship is when they go to a big lesbian party and Jane ends up kissing a woman on the dance floor, and then she finds out Jane is moving to London.
Now, I would never consider myself any sort of expert on lesbianism or how hard it must be to come out, maybe later in life and having to change gears, but I do know when a script is slight and not particularly good, and that is the case here. It’s also only partially a comedy, because it starts to get serious at times and then just throws in random jokes to lighten things up again.
I should have been suspect when I realized this was written by the writer of The Ellen Degeneres Show (and a couple seasons of SNL, to be fair). Even the scenes between Jane and her boyfriend (Jermaine Fowler) were grueling, and none of the performances were particularly great. For the most part, all the characters are either dull or obnoxious stereotypes, and some of the shit that comes out of their mouths is just absolute tosh.
The craziest thing about this movie to me is how bad Johnson is in this movie compared to Cha Cha Real Smooth, but the filmmakers also glammed her down by putting her in a ski cap and leather jacket for most of the movie. So, of course, Clemons’ character needs to dress her up, presumably as an excuse to get her back to her place.
I really don’t think I should continue trashing Am I OK? without at least citing a far better movie about this subject matter, and that’s easy. 2001’s Kissing Jessica Stein, written and starring Heather Juergensen and Jennifer Westfeldt, found a way into this sort of material without being so dumb about it.
By comparison, Am I OK is such a trivial nothing movie with nothing new to say other than to just be more terrible Millennial-targeted claptrap. It was an absolute chore getting through this dumb movie that was so obvious and predictable. I just hated this movie so effing much.
Rating: 4/10
The Weekend Warrior 1/28/22 - WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT COSBY, CLEAN, SUNDOWN, A TASTE OF HUNGER, RIFKIN’S FESTIVAL, COMPARTMENT NO. 6, SLAMDANCE, and More!
After this past weekend, how could it possibly get any worse? Maybe because there’s absolutely ZERO new wide releases this weekend? Sony was supposed to open Morbius but they decided to push it back to April, and because of that, we have a lot of limited releases this week, but nothing new in wide release. I guess this is a good weekend to check out some of the great indie and foreign fare out there, but we’ll have to see how many of these movies open outside New York and L.A.
Before we get to this week’s mostly-limited releases, I’m excited to say that after 20 years covering movies, this will be the first year that I’m going to try to cover some of the SLAMDANCE FILM FESTIVAL, which will be running virtually from Jan 27 through Feb 6. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to watch much in advance, because I’ve been so buried in Sundance and stuff to watch for this column. But it does start on Thursday, and it’s all virtual, offering 100+ films that you don’t have to go trudging up Main Street in Park City to see. Some of the movies I hope to watch include Jordan Tetewsky and Joshua Pikovsky’s Hannah Ha Ha, Avalon Fast’s Honeycomb, and the docs Paris is in Harlem from filmmaker Christina Kallas and Regan Linton & Brian Malone's Imperfect, but there should be a lot of discovery films in there. One thing I find really interesting about Slamdance’s virtual festival is that it’s all happening on the Slamdance channel, which I honestly didn’t know was even a thing. I just need to find some time (probably this weekend) to dig through the vast library that’s been made available to me as press In fact, I’m hoping with fingers crossed that I’ll have time to watch stuff and write more about Slamdance this weekend for next week’s column.
Before we get to this week’s movies, we’ll begin with the sad story that we’ll be seeing at the box office (although there’s a Gamestop doc that could theoretically break in here depending on how many theaters in which it opens). I’m only doing 8 this week, because it’s just so pathetic. (Incidentally, Dune, No Time to Die, AND The Tragedy of Macbeth are returning to IMAX theaters on Friday to basically fill the screens that will be taken up by Roland Emmerich’s Moonfall nextd weekend.)
1. Spider-Man: No Way Home (Sony Pictures) - $10 million -29%
2. Scream (Paramount) - $7 million -45%
3. Sing 2 (Universal) - $4 million -30%
4. Redeeming Love (Universal) - $1.8 million -52%
5. The King’s Man (20th Century/Disney) - $1.4 million -23%
6. The 355 (Universal) - $1 million -36%
7. American Underdog (Lionsgate) - $900k -27%
8. West Side Story (20th Century/Disney) - $600k -30%
We’re gonna go in a bit of a different direction for this week’s “Chosen One,” because the first episode of W. Kamau Bell’s series, WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT COSBY, premieres on Showtime, Saturday night, Jan. 30, at 10pm. Fortunately, this was one of the things I chose to see at the virtual Sundance over this past weekend, so I actually watched all four episodes. (Hey, I don’t have Showtime, so I have to watch its shows whenever I can.)
I wasn’t really sure what to expect from Bell’s docuseries, maybe because I know who he is, but I haven’t really watched much of his comedy and more serious journalistic efforts, so wasn’t sure what to expect. As Bell himself has stated, he was inspired by Bill Cosby to become a stand-up comedian, so he uses the series to reckon with how he was “raised on Cosby” from his stand-up to “Fat Albert” to “The Cosby Show” and everything else with the assault and rape for which he was jailed… but only for a short time.
I have a feeling Bell felt about the same making this movie as I felt when I realized I had to write about Woody Allen this week (see below), since I actually did grow up on his films and the joy of seeing a nebbishy Jewish guy getting with beautiful and funny women.
Even though Bell’s series does act as a profile for the comic actor and his once-illustrious career, it doesn’t take long to get into his drugging and assaults on women which date back to the ‘60s. Bell sat down with many women to hear their stories about how they were drugged and assaulted throughout every avenue of his career. Many of the women's stories sound exactly the same, including the way he convinces the women to drink and be drugged, and how they all trust him, “because he’s Bill Cosby.” It really gets deep into their horrified feelings after realizing they had been raped by Bill Cosby. The way their stories match up are so absolutely convincing, no one can watch this series and question whether he did the crimes for which he was jailed... again, for only a short time.
This is by no means a simple career retrospective of Cosby because every episode balances talk about his career with all the bad things he's done and points out the hypocrisy of Cosby doing anti-drug PSAs while still using drugs to rape women. Kamau’s series just covers so much ground and territory, including his influence over many Black youth through “Fat Albert” and “The Cosby Show,” and it’s understandable why many are so outraged by him being released from jail on a minor technicality.
Bell also includes many comics commenting on Cosby’s comedy and bits from the Cosby Show and other standup bits that are virtually admissions to what he was doing, and watching certain select scenes from Cosby Show makes you realize that he was even creepy as “America’s Dad.” Cosby’s own audience already starts to turn against him in the ‘90s as he makes a speech blaming black kids for being shot over pound cake, which is right around when he’s accused of the first rape, too. The thing is that I don’t think I could possibly understand how it felt for the Black community to have someone that was once a guiding star of the heights one of their own could reach.
I wasn’t as crazy about some of the musical choices, like putting foreboding music under clips from Cosby’s standup special -- it seemed inappropriate and a bit manipulative, to be honest. Otherwise, Kamau manages to still include some humor in We Need to Talk About Cosby, but make no mistake that this is a serious and definitive thesis piece that examines how opinion has changed on Cosby, as well as how so many were willing to deny the truth of Crosby’s crimes due to his long-time status as an influencer.
This is a great series that I can highly recommend, and again, it starts on Showtime this coming Saturday.
Filmmaker Paul Solet, whose debut Grace had people fainting at Sundance (seriously!), returns with CLEAN (IFC Films), a movie starring Adrien Brody, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Solet. In it, Brody plays a trash collector named (appropriately enough) Clean, trying to live a quiet life but who soon is dragged back into his own violent past. The movie opened at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival, making this the third week in a row where I write about a Tribeca movie that I didn’t know anything about, since it probably wasn’t on the virtual platform. Either way, IFC is releasing this in theaters (including the IFC Center), digitally, and On Demand Friday.
Clean is framed as a modern-day noir, something made obvious as we watch the bearded Brody, coming off a bit like Jake Gyllenhaal, doing his job as a trash collector early in the morning with gritty voice-over bringing us into the story. Sure, we’ve seen plenty of movies like this before, about a guy who comes from a life of crime trying to find redemption in the world but being dragged back in.
This is very much an urban story with Solet showing a different side of New York City than we normally see in New York-set movies, because the circles in which Clean spends his time off-work are very much from the disenfranchised and poverty-driven areas of the city.
Here’s the thing. I really like Brody, not only as an actor but also as a person, so I’m excited for him to do something so character-driven as this, but also to be involved as co-writer and producer since it means he believes in the material and will do his best work as an actor. And he does. This is very much a New York story, and I truly believe that Brody is serious enough about his roles that he would do a trash collector ride-along to really know what’s involved.
This is a really different movie for Solet – at least compared to Grace – and he delivers a gritty street-level film that could stand toe-to-toe with some of the crime films being made by studios. It’s still a smaller character-based film, though, but he has a solid collaborator in Brody, and he creates a great villain in Glenn Fleshler (from Billions), and there are also some nicer moments between Brody and a young girl he befriends, played by Chandler DuPont, who he becomes protective of due to the rough neighborhood. (This relationship leads to some of the more emotional moments in the film.)
I certainly was cheering when Brody picks up a wrench and takes on a street gang tryng to assault Clean's charge, but my biggest “Holy shit!” moment was when I realized that Brody composed the amazing score for the film, as well.
Listen, I love a good gritty crime story, and while Clean has some issues and more than its share of clichés, I do think Solet has made a gloriously violent crime film that would have made Martin Scorsese or David Chase proud to be involved with (even if Scorsese has left many of these genre clichés in his past.)
Rating: 7.5/10
Tim Roth stars in Mexican filmmaker Michel Franco's SUNDOWN (Bleecker Street), a movie that premiered at last year’s TIFF, but I only got to see it fairly recently. In the movie, Roth plays Neil Bennett, a man on vacation in Acapulco with his sister Alice (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and her two kids. When they’re called to return to London on an emergency, Neil comes up with an excuse to stay behind and continue relaxing, even though It creates a literal and personal distance with his family.
I wasn’t really sure what to expect of this movie since I haven’t seen Franco’s acclaimed New Order from a few years back, but at first, it seems oddly similar to The Lost Daughter with its family on vacation aspect. One thing that might have made it easier to understand was if the brother-sister dynamic between Roth and Gainsbourg was made clearer earlier, since I thought doing that to his wife and children and then presumably cheating on the former would have made Neil’s actions much more horrendous. Since he’s their brother/uncle, it just seems like he’s wanting a bit more team to hang out on the beach drinking beer. Granted, he lies by saying he left his passport at the hotel, but when he starts sleeping with a pretty local woman there, it wouldn’t have seemed quite so horrendous.
But I’m not sure I could blame Neil, because if for some odd reason, I could spend time in Acapulco, I may have done the same to my sister and my nephews. (sorry, Kim!) That little bit of lack of clarity is enough to throw you off for a good amount of the movie, but when Neil’s sister finds him, in order to avoid a blow out with his sister, he offers to give her the rights to their parents’ “slaughterhouse company.” (Yes, it’s an odd choice but maybe not for a Mexican filmmaker.)
Still, there is a good 45 minutes (which is just over half the length of this 82 min. movie) where there isnt much of a plot other than Neil hiding out from his sister (who for most of that time I still thought was his wife.) We never really get a good reason other than having a Mexican girlfriend who likes to have sex. Roth is fairly decent in this fairly unchallenging role, but we get a surprisingly uncharacteristic amount of overacting by Ms. Gainsbourg, which did surprise me.
Overall, the pacing of Sundown is what kills it, as nothing happens for a long time and then there’s a huge burst of action, and then it slows down again and then it’s over. Again, there’s no real motive or explanation for Neil’s actions, so you don’t blame his sister or her family from wanting nothing more to do with him.
Sundown is an okay presumably English language debut from Franco where we get a few glimpses at the violent crime-ridden part of the Mexican vacation “paradise,” but ultimately, it leaves you realizing how much better a movie Maggie Gyllenhaal’s “The Lost Daughter” is, that being her first film as a director.
Rating: 6.5/10
Sundown is getting a theatrical release, and director Michel Franco will be doing many QnAs in New York City, including at the IFC Center and the Alamo Drafthouse Lower Manhattan.
It’s been a while since we’ve got a movie from Woody Allen, probably for good reason, but his most recent movie, RIFKIN’S FESTIVAL (MPI Media Group), which I think was released in Europe sometime in late 2020 is finally getting a release in the States in select theaters and digitally. Listen, I know the issues with Allen and the accusations against him, but the guy was never indicted or prosecuted for any crimes, so I gotta put the allegations aside and just review his movie as I would any other release. This one takes place in the San Sebastian Film Festival in Spain, and it stars the great Wallace Shawn, two reasons enough for me to be interested in it. Shawn plays Mort Rifkin – a name for a Woody Allen character, if ever there was one – who goes with his publicist wife Sue (Gina Gershon) to San Sebastian, but he starts suspecting his wife of infidelity with her director client Philippe (Louis Garrel) and when Mort meets the pretty doctor, Dr. Jo Rojas (Elena Anaya), he feels that what’s good for the goose is the same for the gander. She’s married to a crazy painter (Sergi Lopez), and since he’s cheating on her, Mort feels the need to jump in.
It’s always fun to see Allen exploring other places in the world, and his return to Spain after Vicky Christina Barcelona certainly will appeal to some. Granted, Allen has been to many film festivals yet he still has a strange vision of what a festival is like in a few set-up scenes which looks like someone’s living room. (Or maybe that’s how they do things in Europe – I’ve only been to Berlinale.) The premise seems amusing enough, if not for the fact that it’s yet another male power fantasy from Allen, another movie where a schmuck like Mort can even make a PLAY for someone as gorgeous (and considerably younger – there’s a 34-year age difference) as Anaya (who starred in Almodovar’s The Skin I Live In). Mort already has doubts about why his hotter wife stays married to him, as she is clearly canoodling with the gregarious Philippe, whose pretentiousness allows Allen to pull out his cinematic knowledge.
In fact, there are more than a few dream sequences and just homage scenes paying tribute or spoofing Citizen Kane, Truffaut, Bergman, and Bunuel. At first, these sequences are amusing, but at a certain point, they become grating since Allen keeps falling back on them. We get it. Mort is a cinephile, so of course, he’s going to see his world in relation to the cinema he loves. I guess Allen didn’t just put in a nod to Annie Hall or Manhattan, since that might have been a little too meta for his own good.
The problem is that very little of Rifkin’s Festival – again, it’s another male power fantasy – and the black and white sequences start to feel as pretentious as Philippe's films, although there is one cameo late in the movie that’s pretty hilarious. In other words, this is not Allen’s worst film, but it’s just another late-career movie that fails to miss its target… unless of course, you live at Film Forum, and then you’ll probably love it. (It’s a bit telling that the Film Forum won’t even play this movie or any Woody Allen movie anymore.)
Rating: 6/10
Opening on Wednesday (today!) at New York’s Angelika Film Center (corrected from earlier) and Cinema 1,2,3, as well as the Laemmle Royal in L.A., is the Finish Oscar contender COMPARTMENT NO. 6 (Sony Pictures Classics), which was shortlisted for International Feature, and we’ll have to wait a couple weeks to see if it makes it to the nominations. This was also the only movie of the week that I was able to watch at an in-person screening, so thanks, Sony Classics!
The film from Finnish filmmaker Juho Kousmanen won the Grand Prix at last year’s Cannes and is Finland’s entry to the Oscars, it’s already been shortlisted. Based on a novel, it stars Seidi Harrla as Laura, a young Finnish woman studying Russia and archeology in Moscow, who sets out to travel up North to the Arctic town of Murmansk to view some petroglyphs (ancient wall paintings). On the train, she’s paired with an obnoxious and frequently drunk Russian miner named Lhosa, who makes her feel uncomfortable at first, but they soon start to bond on their journey.
This is quite an interesting film, because it starts out very different than you expected, and it just keeps surprising you with where it goes, which is pretty hard to do. The simple premise is that Laura is going up to Murmansk to study paintings, not realizing that it’s something best to do in summer since roads are all snowed off. On the train, she ends up being paired with an obnoxious, drunken guy named Lhosa. She tries to move to another compartment with no luck, and then she’s stuck with this guy for the whole trip.
At one overnight stop, he invites her to visit a friend of his, and yes, I also thought this was going in the direction of a Hostel-like thriller at that point, but no, it’s actually a kindly old lady, and the two of them have fun drinking, maybe a bit too much fun. That night hanging out allows them to break the thick tension between them as Laura sees Lhosa in a different light. When they arrive at their destination, you think that’s it, but for some reason (and my memory is vague on this), Laura seeks out Lhosa at his mining job, and the two go off on one more adventure.
This is a great example of why I try not to read too much about movies before I watch them, and though this one has been out there at festivals since Cannes, I probably should have seen it sooner, but I just enjoy watching foreign films in a theater where I can fully concentrate. Kousmanen is a terrific filmmaker, who does a lot with the characterization despite probably not having a huge budget for production value. This is his third film, and while I’m not 100% sure it can crack the very competitive International Feature category at the Oscars, Compartment No. 6 is a solid enough effort that he’s going to get more attention outside Finland after this.
Compartment, No. 6 ends up being quite a warm tale about making friends where you least expect them, but it’s never saccharine or sappy while doing so.
Rating: 7/10
Danish filmmaker Christoffer (Beast, Everything Will be Fine) Boe’s A TASTE OF HUNGER (Magnolia), stars Katrine Greis-Rosenthal and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (from Game of Throne) as a “a power couple within the Danish gourmet scene run the popular restaurant Malus in Copenhagen. The couple is willing to sacrifice everything to achieve their dream – getting the coveted Michelin star.”
I'm going to try to watch this and review later on, but didn't want to delay the column to Thursday, same with the next film below.
A triple award-winner at the Tribeca Film Festival, Levan Koguashvili’a BRIGHTON 4th (Kino Lorber) opens in New York on Friday at the Village East Cimema, and then in L.A. at the Laemmle Royal on Feb. 11. It stars real-life Olympian Levan Tediashvili as wrestler Kahki, who travels from his home in Tbilisi in Georgia to visit his son in the Russian-speaking Brighton Beach, Brooklyn where he’s living in a boarding house full of Georgian immigrants. He also learns that his son is working for a moving company and has built up $14,000 in debt to a Russian mob boss. This sounds great, and I hope to still watch this and shares some thoughts, but unfortunately, this was the one movie I wanted to watch that I didn’t get to.
Speaking of docs, opening probably in a few hundred theaters (which might be enough for placement in the top 10?) is Jonah Tulis’ documentary GAMESTOP: RISE OF THE PLAYERS (Super Ltd.), which looks at the events of early 2021 when a bunch of traders took on the billion-dollar hedge fund companies by implementing a “short squeeze,” driving the price of game retailer Gamestop up with many of the hedge funds holding it short and thinking it would be extinct due to the mail order/download video game surge. I wasn’t really aware of the details of what happened, but unfortunately, reviews for the movie are embargoed until opening day, so we’ll see if I end up reviewing this one or not.
Streaming on Netflix Friday is the 6-hour limited series, THE WOMAN IN THE HOUSE ACROSS THE STREET FROM THE GIRL IN THE WINDOW, starring Kristen Bell, which at first sounded like it could be a hilarious spoof comedy before I saw the trailer and knew that it was definitely gonna be my kinda jam. Then again, I also thought this was a movie rather than a limited series, but I did watch a bit of it, and it was okay. Not quite sure why it needed to be three hours rather than a 90 minute movie, but hey, it’s Netflix’s money, not mine. I was expecting something a bit zanier, than what this was, but I generally enjoy Bell in anything she does.
Also on Netflix Thursday is the short doc, Behind the Scenes with Jane Campion, which shows the filmmaker working on her latest film, The Power of the Dog. It’s my #1 movie of last year, in case you missed my Top 15.
A great doc that I saw at one of the virtual film festivals this past year (Tribeca, I think?) is Bernadette Wegenstein’s THE CONDUCTOR (Music Knows No Bounds), which opens at the Quad Cinema in NYC on Friday, then at the Laemmle Royal in L.A. and San Fran’s Landmark Opera Plaza Cinema on Feb. 4, and then it will expand to other cities before eventually winding up on PBS. It covers the life and career of Marin Alsop, who has broken so many glass ceilings in the world of conducting by becoming the first female director of the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra, and first woman appointed as Chief Conductor of the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra), as well as the first conductor to receive a MacArthur Award. I really remember liking this when I saw it (at Tribeca, maybe?), and I definitely recommend it if you’re interested in the behind-the-scenes of the classical music/symphony entertainment space. Unfortunately, I just couldn’t find the time to rewatch to write a more formal review.
Also, apparently, the doc Charli XCX: Alone Together, which I saw at SXSW (I think) and generally liked, will be available this weekend somewhere and somehow, but I have heard NOTHING, so who knows? (shrug emoji)
Hitting Apple TV+ Friday is THE AFTER PARTY, the new murder mystery comedy series exec. produced by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the latter also acting as showrunner and director. The show stars Tiffany Haddish, Sam Richardson, Zoë Chao, Ben Schwartz, Ike Barinholtz, Ilana Glazer, Jamie Demetriou and Dave Franco. Unfortunately, I don’t know much about this, since I haven’t had time to watch it either, but the cast and the guys behind the series should make it worth checking out.
On Disney+, you can watch the animated THE ICE ADVENTURES OF BUCK WILD, a spinoff from the Ice Age movies, featuring the title character voiced by Simon Pegg. I have a screener of this, too, but reviews are embargoed until Friday, so we’ll see if I can get to this.
OOPS! Somehow I completely missed that Megan Park's directorial debut, THE FALLOUT, was premiering on HBO Max TOMORROW (Thursday)! I got a screener but again, so bogged down on Sundance that I thought it was opening next week. Well, it's probably too late to watch this coming-of-age movie starring Jenna Ortega (from the recent Scream) and Maddie Ziegler (from Sia's Music) for this week's column, so I'll watch and try to include next week, K?
Also, on Saturday, you can watch a sneak preview of Peter Jackson’s THE BEATLES GET BACK - THE ROOFTOP CONCERT, which was streamed on Disney+ over Thanksgiving, but the hour-long concert will be shown in IMAX screenings this Sunday, Jan. 30, before getting a wider (but probably moderate) theatrical release on Feb. 11.
A couple repertory series starting up this week include New York’s Film Forum doing NYC’S MOVIE RENAISSANCE: 1945-1955, which features quite an array of black and white films from that period, few of which I’ve seen and quite a few I’ve never even heard of. But there are some classics included such as On the Waterfront, Kiss of Death, On the Town, and others. It’s running from this Friday through February 10. On Sunday, the Film Forum is also doing a “Garbo Day,” showing four of the actresses’ films: Flesh and the Devil (1927), Camille (1937), Anna Karenina (1935), and Ninotchka (1939).
On Tuesday, February 1, the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) is kicking off its own repertory series called “Dames, Janes, Dolls, and Canaries: Woman Stars of the Pre-Code Era.” Maybe the title is self-explanatory, but essentially, it’s going to feature movies from the late ‘20s and early ‘30s, including many films that I have a feeling haven’t been shown on screen in New York in quite some time.
The Metrograph this weekend is showing a series of the music films of Todd Haynes including I’m Not There and his recent The Velvet Underground doc. Also, his regular DP Ed Lachman’s 1990 concert film Songs for Drella with Lou Reed and John Cale paying tribute to Andy Warhol will be screened, as well as a special “Secret Screening” on Saturday night! Gee, I wonder what it can be, but I'll be there to check it out, so I'll let you know.
Movies I wasn’t able to get to this week…
HOME TEAM (Netflix) I’M NOT IN LOVE (Gravitas Ventures) THE REQUIM (Saban Films)
Next week… new movies! Wide releases! Action! Excitement! Johnny Knoxville’s Jackass Forever goes up against Roland Emmerich’s Moonfall, and hopefully, movie theaters will be back and keep business going through February leading up to the release of The Batman in early March. Also, I’ll be back to doing box office analysis after a welcome week off.
SUNDANCE DAYS 3 & 4: Something in the Dirt, Dual, Resurrection, Emily the Criminal, You Won’t Be Alone
The amount of movies I’m trying to watch right now may be starting to get to me, especially since I still have a column to write for later this week. (It probably will go up on Thursday this week.) But today’s reviews will be a group of genre films, many quite unique in the way they deal with potentially familiar subject matter.
SOMETHING IN THE DIRT
I was pretty excited to hear that Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson were bringing their latest movie to Sundance. I have become a big fan of theirs over the years due to movies like The Endless – part of a very rare and complex indie trilogy – and then I absolutely loved Synchronic when I finally got to see it almost a year after it premiered at Toronto. This is clearly a pandemic film for the duo, as they play the two main roles, John and Levi, neighbors at an apartment complex who start experiencing seemingly supernatural or other-worldly events in Levi’s new apartment. They investigate and analyze and try to figure out the meaning of these strange events, setting up cameras to document it.
Moorhead and Benson’s movies tend to be notoriously difficult to review. They tend to include all sorts of strange occurrences, none of which be said too much without potentially spoiling the experience for the first-time viewer. I also feel like many of this duo’s movies need to be seen more than once to fully absorb the experience the filmmakers are trying to convey.
In that sense, the duo have eagerly taken up the gauntlet laid down by the likes of Shane Caruth’s Primer or Darren Aronofsky’s Pi, in terms of creating heady, intellectual fairly low-budget science-based dramas. (Or a more recent comparison might be Ben Wheatley’s In the Earth, which premiered at last year’s Sundance.)
The film starts simply enough with the two leads meeting each other and discovering the odd activities in Levi’s apartment, essentially a floating quartz ashtray, which they try to determine whether it’s attributed to ghosts or something more from the world of science. Much of the film involves the two guys coming up with theories about what’s going on, which are quickly debunked, but after a while, the friendship falls apart, and one can only expect they’re heading towards disaster.
There’s also an element in the movie that the guys are making a documentary, and doing recreations of events that we see, and at a certain point, it’s hard to determine if we’re watching a real conversation between the guys or something that they’ve written specifically for their doc. The movie gets very meta as the film’s real co-editor does an interview for the “documentary.” Whenever other people come into comment on what we’re watching as it happens, it just gets more confusing. Not that I minded being confused by it. At one point, I started wondering if maybe this movie was also connected to The Endless in some way, but hey, this is the kind of movie that almost warrants the need for harebrained theories from those who watch it.
I will admit that some of Moorhead/Benson’s work can be an acquired taste. Even they will probably admit that they make very strange movies. But these are also perpetually fascinating films in the way they create a mood with the music and editing to make their movies unlike anything else out there. I was also impressed with how visual FX were used in an unobtrusive way that don’t distract you so much from the characters or story, but instead enhance the overall experience.
Still, it’s always about the two characters created and played by Moorhead and Benson as their relationship falls apart and disagreements inevitably drive them apart. It's as much a performance piece, as it is a meta mind-fuck, and it's the type of movie I definitely will want to watch again, as I’m sure I’ll get more out of it on a second and third and more viewings, as with most of their work. Something in the Dirt will be distributed by XYZ Films, which is going into the distribution biz after producing many genre films.
Rating: 7.5/10
DUAL
Oddly, Riley Stearns’ new film, which appeared in the festival’s Narrative Competition, is another movie produced by XYZ Films, the Toronto production company that’s been doing some great things on the genre front the past few years.
In the movie, Karen Gillan plays Sarah, a woman who learns she’s dying after she starts vomiting up blood. She chooses to go the “cloning” route by getting a costly replacement that can absorb her personality and allow her friends and family to have a suitable substitute after she’s gone.
There have been quite a few movies about cloning in the past few years, including the very recent Mahershala Ali drama, Swan Song. Stearns’ film takes a somewhat different approach to the idea, because he’s particularly good at writing the darkest of humor. That’s on display here in the way Sarah learns that she’s dying, and other elements like the video showing how doubles learn the mannerisms and personality of their donor.
Sarah and her double just have very different personalities, and the double immediately infringes on Sarah’s life and horns in on her boyfriend Peter (Beulah Koale), who decides he’d rather be with Sarah’s double. When Sarah learns she will survive her “terminal” illness, the only way to get rid of her double is a fight to the death to decide which one gets to stick around. (So yes, the film’s title does have that rather obvious double meaning.) She then has to train to fight in that dual with Aaron Paul as her trainer, and actually, this is where it becomes a bit more like Stearns’ last film, The Art of Self Defense. (Another little odd coinkydink was that that film’s star, Jesse Eisenberg, had previously appeared in Richard Aoyade’s very different The Double, in which he played a dual role.)
I’ve been a fan of Gillan for quite some time, both in dramatic roles (the horror film Oculus, for example) and comedic ones (like the Jumanji movies), and seeing her playing such a dual role really shows her range as an actress. Gillan delivers Stearns’ dialogue at a fairly rapid pace that keeps the movie from going down the After Yang route of just being terminably dull, although some of the performances around her fall a little flat, including Aaron Paul.
I was kind of hoping the movie was going to be more about Sarah and her double coming to terms with each other. Instead, it becomes more about Sarah’s training and prep leading up to the fight. At that point, it also veers away from the darker humor I was enjoying, and becomes more serious with its genre element. Thankfully, we do get a bit more of Gillan as Sarah and her double together later in the movie, but for some reason, I thought we’d be getting more of that throughout the movie.
Dual is a decent genre dramedy, which I generally liked a little more than Stearns’ previous movie, though it’s hindered by the same tonal issues where you’re not sure whether to laugh at times. An even bigger issue I had was that it wasn’t the movie I was expecting, and yet, it still went exactly where I was expecting it to go anyway.
Rating: 6.5/10
RESURRECTION
It really wouldn’t be a Sundance without a Rebecca Hall movie, would it? After the wonderful surprise that was last year’s Passing (Hall’s directorial debut), she’s back leading a thriller that’s written and directed by Andrew Semans.
In the movie, Hall plays Margaret, a single mother having a successful life until she spots someone from her past and becomes increasingly more paranoid and panicked about him reentering her life.
This is another movie where you don’t really want to say too much in advance, since part of why it works as effectively as it does is by not knowing exactly what is happening, something Semans uses to disarm the viewer in terms of where things might go. The long and short of it is that Margaret had an abusive relationship in her past with a man named David Moore*, and that man (played by Tim Roth) is now back in her life, threatening her and her daughter Abbie (Grace Kaufman).
This is just a very heavy dramatic role for Hall, including an amazing monologue that proves her to be one of the best actors working today. (Anyone who saw Christine or any of the other movies she’s led already knows this.) Although we’re not sure what’s causing her character to panic at first, Hall is so good at really selling things that might seem incredulous, and it makes you wonder what is real and what is her just going completely insane. One thing I didn’t understand was exactly what Margaret does for a job. She has this interesting ongoing relationship with a younger woman named Gwyn (Angela Wong Carbone), who may be an employee or someone she’s mentoring? It’s never made clear.
There are points when Resurrection achieves the intensity of something like a Gaspar Noe film, although it may have been a mistake watching this so soon after the Evan Rachel Wood doc, Phoenix Rising, which I hope to review soon. Margaret’s turmoil seems to come from a past similar to what was done to Evan Rachel Wood by rocker Marilyn Manson, as documented in Amy Berg’s doc.
On top of that, Semans is just a fantastic filmmaker with some terrific collaborators from the way the film is beautifully shot by Wyatt Garfield (Nine Days) to the terrific thriller-appropriate music by Jim Williams (Titane).
The movie ends with a hugely disturbing climax on par with that famous scene from Takishi Miike’s Audition. In other words, you might need a strong stomach for this one, although it’s mostly a thriller steeped with tension and drama throughout.
Resurrection might not have the most original title, but the horrifying concept underneath that generic title is quite original. Semans has made a gorgeous and powerful movie, bolstered by another jaw-dropping and unforgettable performance from Rebecca Hall.
Rating: 7.5/10
EMILY THE CRIMINAL
Written and directed by John Patton Ford, this crime-thriller is a fantastic showcase for the super-talented Aubrey Plaza, who is also a producer on the project. Plaza plays Emily, a young woman having trouble getting a job to pay off her massive debt due to a previous criminal incident. She’s been working at some sort of catering company, but she’s given a tip for a gig that’s essentially a credit card scam, and it turns out that she’s good at it, and she can make a lot of money fast.
I wasn’t familiar with Ford, who apparently had made a short that may have also premiered at Sundance, but clearly, Plaza something in Ford’s script to want to along for this ride, and it truly pays off, since the movie is such a great showcase for what a fantastic dramatic actor Plaza is. In fact, it was interesting to watch this so shortly after Resurrection, which is a similar platform for Rebecca Hall.
Being an L.A. based crime-thriller, comparisons to Michael Mann would probably be appropriate, except that Emily the Criminal is very much set in the here and now and a bit of criminal activity that we haven’t really seen in many feature films. Essentially, Emily is hired to go out to places to buy high-priced items using credit cards created from stolen data. At first, it’s a simple purchase of electronics at a store where the staff could care less, but then Emily is promoted to using a no-limit black card to buy an expensive car, and that’s when things start to get messy.
Along the way, Emily gets closer with her handler Yousef, played by Theo Rossi, and that adds another dimension to why she goes along with some of their more dangerous crimes. She’s also very angry about the place where she’s put in life – I mean, how many of us aren’t? – something exacerbated when she has a horrible job interview with Gina Gershon, who is essentially offering her an unpaid internship. Seriously, I probably would have stormed out, too.
The film is shot with quite a bit of handheld camerawork by Jeff Bierman, which combined with the editing by Harrison Atkins, gives Emily the Criminal the sort of kinetic feel that works well for its quick pace (which even includes a car chase!). It was also wonderful hearing the score by Nathan Halpern, who I had a chance to speak to for Swallow last year, and it’s great to see him becoming one of those go-to composers for indie filmmakers.
Emily the Criminal is a solid indie crime-thriller, a grittier and possibly a more mature role for Plaza that offers many situations to show she can be quite a bad-ass when given the chance.
Rating: 8/10
YOU WON’T BE ALONE
This is the debut feature by Australian-Macedonian filmmaker Goran Stolevski, which I was mostly interested in since it stars the always-great Noomi Rapace, plus it already has a release planned via Focus Features, so obviously, that prestigious distributor saw something in it.
Before I share the plot (as best I can), I should say that there were parts of Stolevski’s film that reminded me of Terrence Malick, but that’s neither a compliment nor a detriment. I’ve always been mixed on Malick, and some of his films have worked better than others, at least for me. Stolevski is clearly a similar auteur, and he works with a great team to tell a story set during a primitive time in 19th Century Macedonia, a place where villagers are extremely wary and superstitious of outsiders, and seemingly, every woman’s only desire is to get pregnant and have a baby.
Before we come to that conclusion, we learn about the legend of Old Maid Maria, a shapeshifting witch who comes to claim a woman’s baby, to put the baby in a cave away from the rest of the world until she’s older. Years later, Maria’s new child, Bilia (Alice Englert), is now an innocent experiencing the world outside the cave, becoming more and more intrigued by the humans and what they do.
Also a shapeshifter, Bilia tries to integrate with the humans as best she can, but with no human contact beforehand, she’s puzzled by all their strange behavior, which includes a lot of sex. Bilia’s goals seem innocent enough, but she’s constantly being observed and taunted by the witch, played by Marija Opsenica, covered almost head to toe in prosthetic makeup.
In fact, Rapace is only in one section of the film, an early human whose body/persona Biliana takes over, and she goes through a series of different humans including a virile young man, a little girl, and others. I have to admit that at a certain point I did lose track which of the people we were watching was actually Bilia, since so much was happening. (The Malick comparison probably comes from the fact that Bilia never actually speaks, but we hear all of her inner thoughts.)
You Won’t Be Alone will be even more intriguing to those who’ve become familiar with Macedonia through the recent Oscar nominee Honeyland, though that was non-fiction, while Stolevski’s movie is a visceral bit of traditional lore.
As with other movies, the crafts are key, whether it’s Matthew (Blue Bayou) Chuang’s gorgeous cinematography or the music by Mark Bradshaw (Bright Star), who has written one of the most beautiful scores you’re likely to hear this year. The prosthetic makeup work (and all the blood and gore) is impressive, as is the production design, costume design and hair and makeup to transform the actors into the proper era and mindset. Like with the recent Lunana, I really had no idea which were actors and which were non-actors.
You Won’t Be Alone is a movie that absolutely SHOULD be seen in a movie theater, because it requires the type of concentration and focus needed that just doesn’t come when watching at home with interruptions and distractions. If you’re taken out of the experience even for a second, it’s hard to get back into it. Honestly, I have no idea how Focus is going to market this movie and get people into theaters to watch it, but Stolevski is clearly a filmmaker who will bring more attention to Macedonia with such a distinctive and unique folk tale-inspired genre flick.
Rating: 7/10
More reviews to come... probably after I finish this week's Weekend Warrior.
Sundance 2022 Day 2 & 3: Speak No Evil, Summering, Sharp Stick, Call Jane
Things are going fairly well as Sundance went through the weekend, and here are four more reviews, still focusing on narrative films even though I’ve been watching a few more docs over the weekend, as well.
SPEAK NO EVIL
Christian Tafdrup’s third movie is the first movie I personally have seen from the Danish filmmaker. Before the movie, Tafdrup said that he and his co-writing brother Mads were looking to make “The most unpleasant experience for an audience ever.” In fact, I had already been hearing comparisons to Von Trier and Haneke being bandied about before even knowing what the movie was about. The movie sets itself up with music that sounds foreboding that I really wasn’t sure what I was getting into, although this appropriately was the Day One Midnight movie for this year’s Sundance.
Danish couple Bjørn and Louise (Morten Burian, Sidsel Siem Koch) are on holiday with their daughter Agnes (Liva Forsberg) in Tuscany, where they meet a strange Dutch family, adding Speak No Evil to the long list of vacation movies we’ve seen in the past year, but also reminding us that the Swedish film Force Majeure started that trend a very long time ago. They accept an invitation to visit the other couple, Patrick and Karin (Fedja van Huêt, Karina Smulders) at their home. They have a quiet and sullen son Abel (Marius Damslev), who barely speaks, but they’re disturbed by how strict his parents are with him, which makes them uncomfortable. On top of that, Louisa is a vegetarian (or rather, a pescaterian, a term I hate), but Patrick still offers her the boar he has cooked and challenges
Patrick and Karin (Fedja van Huêt andKarina Smulders) keep putting their visitorsin odder and uncomfortable situations, including lots of PDA (public displays of affection) and spying on the couple while they’re having sex, so they decide to get out of there, leaving in the middle of the night. Things just get more awkward when they have to return for Agnes’ stuffed rabbit.
You can only imagine what’s going to happen… are they killers or swingers or something more horrible than either? It’s over an hour before Bjorn starts venturing around the house and starts realizing that things are even more wrong than they thought.
Essentially, Speak No Evil is the much darker non-comic version of Vacation Friends, another vacation-related movie from last year, oddly.. Like Haneke and Von Trier, Speak No Evil is more about the psychological terror of being put into a horrible situation, more than the type of horror with supernatural elements. The movie is filled with such great performances across the board, and there was a lot more English than I was expecting, not that I necessarily have any issue with foreign language films. Tafrdup does a terrific job with a movie that would surely have a difficulty tone.
This is just a fantastic thriller, one I do hope will get some sort of theatrical release, even if it means playing a few non-virtual festivals, although the streaming horror site Shudder has already picked it up for distribution.
Rating: 8/10
CALL JANE
Call Jane was actually my first Sundance movie this year that didn’t show up at the festival with distribution lined up, although it’s a bit of a misnomer that it’s the directorial debut by Phyllis Nagy, the screenwriter of Carol, since she previously directed the HBO movie, Mrs. Harris.
It stars Elizabeth Banks as Joy Griffin, a suburban housewife in the ‘60s, married to Chris Messina and with a teen daughter Charlotte. Joy gets pregnant but needs to get an emergency pregnancy termination due to how it’s physically affecting her. Joy’s case gets the attention of the Jane Collective, a group of women who helps women get illegal abortions in the ‘60s pre-Roe v Wade, and Joy ends up getting more and more involved, first offering support to women during the uncomfortable procedure and then doing some of the procedures herself.
I was mildly surprised that this film wasn’t actually written by Nagy, who was working from a screenplay by Hayley Schore and Roshan Sethi that may have been around for some time. But the writing isn’t that great, and you wonder why Nagy didn’t take more of a writing credit herself.
While I understand the timeliness of this film with what’s going on in Texas and other states, this is just not a situation that affects me at all, and therefore not a particularly interesting premise to me, despite my belief in women’s right to choose. It’s a fairly bland drama, even though there are moments that are quite difficult and uncomfortable to sit through, such as when Joy herself is getting the procedure.
That said, I liked the movie more and more as it went along, and much of that came down to the terrific performance by Banks, who is given a lot of room to really make Joy far more interesting than the typical Douglas Sirk heroine. (Originally, the role was supposed to be played by Elisabeth Moss, who may have been better, but Banks handles the material quite well.) The second most interesting performance comes from Sigourney Weaver, who is running the clinic, but unfortunately, Messina is back to playing another bland indie role, which I was hoping he had put behind him. Kate Mara plays their neighbor who adds absolutely nothing to the movie.
The rest of the cast is okay, but there are many scenes of the women sitting around talking, and the film is shot so blandly, that it does little to invigorate the film’s slower paced moments. Things definitely get quite dramatic with many great moments showcasing the actors, as well as showing off Nagy’s talents as a theater director.
The biggest problem with Call Jane, and this could just be due to Nagy’s inexperience as a film director, is that it’s two hours without needing to even be that long. The story could definitely have been tightened up to improve its pacing with more than a few scenes that served very little purpose.
The Jane Collective is an intriguing and timely subject to explore for a movie, but Call Jane’s closest benchmark is Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake, and it doesn’t come close to being that good. On the other hand, Call Jane is a fine showcase for Banks as an actor; I just wish the writing and filmmaking aspects of the film were better.
Rating: 7/10
SUMMERING
It’s always nice when James Ponsoldt has a new movie, especially since I was such a fan of his movie Smashed when it played at Sundance, or maybe it was TIFF, or maybe it was both? Summering is a very different movie, because it’s a coming-of-age movie about four young girls wanting to spend the last weekend of summer together before going to middle school. While on one of their adventures, they find a dead body, but instead of going the River’s Edge route, the girls try to find out who the man is and why he jumped (or fell) from a bridge above.
Summering comes into Sundance with distribution in place from Bleecker Street, and you can kind of understand why it appealed to the smaller distributor, because it’s a movie with definitely Stand by Me vibes, maybe a little bit of The Goonies?
Shot in Utah during the summer, the movie stars Lia Barnett, Eden Grace Redfield, Madalen Mills, and Sanai Victoria as the four best friends of different diversities and backgrounds but some seem more mature and taller than others. A nice touch is that for the majority of the film, all four young actresses do almost every single scene together, and Ponsoldt does a good job giving these talented young actors the direction to pull off some pretty complex scenes, as we follow them around, trying to learn more about the dead man they found.
All four young actresses are given their moments, and then on the flip side, their mothers are played by Lake Bell, Megan Mullally, Sarah Cooper, and Ashley Madekwe, who also have some nice scenes together. The fact is that Ponsoldt has managed to make a movie with almost no men whatsoever (except for the dead body and a small cameo).
It’s less successful at mixing genres ala last year’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife, because the comedy aspects aren’t particularly hilarious and the mystery and horror elements are rather subtle. The girls do get spooked after seeing the dead body, and even try to throw a seance to communicate with him.
Summering is sweet and cute and not particularly groundbreaking, but for what it’s trying to achieve, which is to make a pleasant movie that can appeal to younger girls, it offers some truly heartfelt moments and a wonderful ending that allows the girls to say goodbye to their childhoods as they head to middle school.
Rating: 7/10
SHARP STICK
Although Sharp Stick is Lena (Girls) Dunham’s first feature film since 2010’s Tiny Furniture, it’s actually her first movie at Sundance, since that other film premiered at SXSW. I wasn’t really a fan of Tiny Furniture, and honestly, I could take or leave Girls, but of course, it’s hard not to be interested in anything Ms Dunham does. This one could be seen as a character piece, and if it hadn’t played at Sundance so soon after I had seen Sean Baker’s significantly better Red Rocket, I might be a little less jaded and open to the story she wanted to tell here.
It stars Norwegian actress Kristine Froseth as 26-year-old Sarah Jo, a bright and bubbly caregiver to a young boy with Down’s syndrome named Zach (Liam Michel Saux). She lives with her mother, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, and her sister Treina, played by Zola’s Taylour Paige, who is obsessed with TikTok and being a social media influencer. There’s not much to be said about the latter characters, since they don’t really bring too much to the overall story/movie.
Still a virgin, Sarah Jo decides that it’s time for her to explore her sexuality, so she comes on to Zach’s father Josh (Jon Bernthal) and begs him to take her virginity. They end up having an affair, trying to hide it from Josh’s pregnant wife (played by Dunham herself). In hopes of being better at sex, Sara Jo starts watching a lot of porn, and eventually becomes obsessed with a porn star (Scott Speedman) and starts experimenting with the things she watches in his porn.
Due to the sexuality on display in this coming-of-age tale, it’s hard not to think of something like Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac, or some of the work of Todd Solondz, particularly Welcome to the Dollhouse, although Dunham does bring a uniqueness to it with her own writing voice. Froseth is quite a find to play the naive young woman looking to explore her sexuality, and it’s her performance that keeps the movie from becoming absolutely loathsome. She’s a little childlike herself, and more than once while watching the movie, I wondered whether Sarah Jo was meant to be on the spectrum or that it was decided not to state that outright.
The movie just takes Sarah Jo further and further down this wormhole of sex, and the film gets darker – again, much like Nymphomania – but at least there’s some redemption for Sarah Jo that at least things eventually end in a happier place. Dunham is definitely a better director now than when she made Tiny Furniture, and one thing I really liked was the choice of songs, which did a terrific job adding to the mood.
The problem is that Sharp Stick leaves the viewer with too many questions about what they just watched. Although it does end in a good place, there are elements of the movie that are just so icky, it’s hard to forgive them, making it harder to fully recommend the movie.
Rating: 6.5/10
More reviews coming soon…
Sundance 2022 DAY 1 & 2: Emergency, FRESH, When You Finish Saving the World, After Yang
The 2022 Sundance Film Festival kicked off on Thursday, January 20 with a bunch of Day One films in different categories, and I tried to watch a cross-section of films, although I have to spread my viewing out, and still have to watch movies for next week’s column. I guess it’s a good thing I don’t have a full-time paying job right now, huh?
EMERGENCY
Directed by Carey Williams, Emergency stars RJ Cyler (Power Rangers, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl) as Shaun and Donald Elise Watkins (Black Box) as Kunle, two college students going to Buchanan, best friends and roommates who are looking forward to a night of partying by doing aLegendary Tour, essentially attending seven frat and club parties in one night. Kunle and Shaun are very different, Kunle being a studious science student whose doctor parents put a lot of pressure on him to do well scholastically, while Shaun comes more from the streets. They’ve become friends as roommates, along with their even nerdier roomie Carlos (Sebastian Chacon). Before heading out to do the tour, Shaun and Kunle go home to find a comatose girl (Maddie Nichols) in their living room, and they have to figure out what to do with her. Kunle wants to take her to a hospital, but Shaun warns that if they call 911, as black men, they’re likely to be blamed or even get shot. As the three roomies try to figure out what to do with the girl, her older sister (Gillian Rabin) tries to track her phone with her friends, leading to a night of escalating events.
This is the second feature for WIlliams after last year’s R#J, also starring Cyler, which I had not seen. There’s more than a little bit of Superbad (and ergo Booksmart) in the plot, as it follows the events of a single night. It’s great to see Cyler having such a great role after playing the middle role in one of my favorite Sundance movies ever (Me and Earl and the Dying Girl). He really drives most of the laughs in this one, although there’s also a bit of situational humor in how these three college guys get caught up in an ever-worsening situation. The movie features a particularly sharp script by KD Davila that allows Williams and his talent to play with the ever-changing tone but maintaining a brisk pace that keeps the viewer invested.
Emergency was pre-bought by Amazon Studios before the movie premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, and when you watch it, you can tell why. I’s such a rousing film that’s both funny and moving, and Williams’ movie would have absolutely killed at the Eccles, so it’s a shame the filmmaker won’t have that experience.
Emergency works better as a comedy than it does as social commentary, and it might start to get a little too serious in its last act after setting itself up as a raunchy comedy. Still, there’s a lot of great talent on display here, and I imagine it should play well on Amazon.
Rating: 7.5/10
WHEN YOU FINISH SAVING THE WORLD
The next film is Jesse Eisenberg’s directorial debut after appearing in a number of Sundance premieres over his career. I’ve interviewed Jesse many times since first talking to him for The Squid and the Whale, and I’ve been to a few of his sets, as well, so I’m both excited and proud that he was able to make this movie and have it premiere on Day 1 of this year’s Sundance. It already has distribution planned from A24, to be released later this year, and it’s even produced by his Zombieland co-star Emma Stone with her husband David McCary, as well!
Set in Indiana, Finn Wolfhard – who apparently recorded an audiobook written by Eisenberg, which he in turn adapted into this film – plays Ziggy, a livestreaming social media singer/influencer who performs songs for global fans who tip him generaously. Julianne Moore plays his mother Evelyn, a social worker at a rehab shelter, who gives advice to parents having issues with their own kids. The two of them have not been getting along, and Eleanor takes a shine to the son of one of her patients named Kyle (Billy Bryk). Presumably seeing more in Kyle she’d like from her son Ziggy, she ends up spending more time with Kyle and interfering with his future against his real mother’s wishes.
Oddly, this actually reminded me of Squid and the Whale, although with different characters and situations and presumably not as autobiographical as Noah Baumbach’s earlier film. In some ways, it’s an interesting look and commentary on young people today, especially with how they want to be social media influences. Ziggy acts very self-important and narcissist about this own achievements getting followers, but to the other kids his age, he comes off as pretentious, making it all about himself while there’s so many bigger and more important concerns in the world. Ziggy likes a girl named Lila (Alisha Boe), who performs angry beat poetry, and he strives to sound more intelligent and political, which makes his mother mad at how he “takes shortcuts” rather than really trying to learn about global issues.
The movie feels very episodic in its storytelling as it slowly introduces these two characters who seem rather awkward in their own skins, lacking confidence when it comes to dealing with others, as much as they exude confidence in making some of their own bad decisions. As Eleanor bonds with Kyle, she lies to her husband and son about her activities, but it also seems like Ziggy pushes his mother away, pushing her to want to help Kyle, who actually has his own mother, who is in Eleanor’s care. It’s obviously a conflict of interests, but it’s just one of many things that she does that makes one question her motives.
In general, these are both generally unlikable characters at times, especially as Eleanor sometimes acts more childish than Kyle when they get into one of their fights. Honestly, I’m not a huge fan of Wolfhard, and Ziggy is more than a little annoying – maybe it’s just ‘cause I’m a crotchety old adult. At times, you may wonder if Eisenberg is following Woody Allen into the world of having younger actors playing iterations of himself. (Not that I’m saying Eisenberg himself is annoying, far from it, but he definitely has his strengths and tics, which Wolfhard, at times, seems to be emulating.)
The film also offers some interesting music and quite a varied score from Emile Mosseri, who did the music for Minari (and whom I interviewed a year ago.)
When You Finish Saving the World is a semi-decent character study with some funny moments in terms of its sociopolitical commentary, but it also feels very much like a Sundance movie, similar to many others we’ve seen before.
Rating: 7/10
FRESH
My first “Midnight” screening of this year’s Sundance is this horror film directed by music video director Mimi Cave, making her feature debut with a film that stars Daisy Edgar-Jones as Noa, a young woman who we follow on a series of bad dates until she meets a good-looking guy, played by Sebastian Stan, at a supermarket, and they hit it off. After a few dates, she goes off with him to a house in the middle of nowhere, and that’s where things get dark. That’s also when we get the film’s title credits, an odd new trend I first noticed in the acclaimed Drive My Car. Her best friend Mollie, played by comedian Jojo T. Gibbs, gets suspicious about whether her friend is okay and starts to investigate Noa’s disappearance.
I can’t really relate to the awful dating scene, because I haven’t really dated in many, many years (by choice!), but I guess it can be important in many a young person’s life.That part of the film starts out a little too cutesy and Millennial for this old man, but then the film’s tonal shift is also when it becomes the type of horror I’m not a big fan of either, when there’s women being preyed upon or tortured for entertainment. Noa ends up communicating with two other women who were also tricked into her situation, but the film just drags as Noa begins interacting with her charming kidnapper with no forward movement on the story until the last act, which mostly makes up for it.
Stan is really good, though it’s really hard accepting him as such an awful character, especially as he’s singing and prancing around. I also just don’t feel very comfortable with casual conversations about cannibalism, since as a long-time vegetarian, I can get queasy just thinking about eating ANY kind of meat. And watching lots of scenes of people eating human? Just not for me either. It’s one of the reasons I walked out of Julia Corournau’s after 20 minutes and have never seen the rest of it.
That said, FRESH is a very well-made and also a fantastic looking genre flick – Cave is a talent on par with Promising Young Woman’s Emerald Fennell, for sure – but it takes such drastic shifts in tone, it reminded me very much of American Psycho, which I really didn’t like the first time I saw it either. It also reminded me a bit of Misery, but with genders reversed, it comes off more sensationalistic and in the vein of Eli Roth’s Hostel (and other horror movies he’s made). Maybe FRESH is similarly an acquired taste. As with a few of the other movies reviewed above, FRESH premiered at Sundance with distribution already in place via Searchlight Studios and will stream on Hulu on March 4.
Rating: 6/10
AFTER YANG
So many critics went gaga over Kogonada’s previous movie, Columbus, which premiered at Sundance maybe five years ago. I was mixed on it, so I’m going into his latest movie with a bit more trepidation, even though apparently it premiered way back in July 2021 at Cannes. And of course, the critics went gaga for it as well. Plus it already has distribution from A24, since this is definitely their kind of thing.
Based on a short story by Alexander Weinstein called “Saying Goodbye to Yang,” it’s a sci-fi tinged drama, starring Colin Farrell and Jodie Turner-Smith as parents Jake and Kyra with a young daughter named Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja). It shows how this family has to deal with the malfunction of their “techno-sapien” Yang (Justin Min). Mika is particularly upset, but there are complications in reviving Yang, since he has things in his memory bank that might be good to preserve in a museum. One of the things Jake discovers is a girl within Yang’s memories (played by Columbus returnee Haley Lu Richardson), which may have been a romantic connection, which would prove Yang to have feelings.
Honestly, the best part of this movie is the opening titles with families of four synchronized dancing in a global competition, but it’s a sequence that gives off the false impression that this will be a movie with any sort of kinetic movement whatsoever. Instead, we follow Farrell’s character as he goes around meeting with different people trying to figure out how to save Yang, talking to various people including a mechanic named Russ.
The results are another contemplative piece that is at least slightly more interesting than Columbus, because it’s a far more interesting premise and story in the vein of Kubrickian science-fiction with beautiful production design across the board.
I did feel somewhat bad for poor Justin Min who has a few scenes including the opening and title, but other than a few flashback moments, he’s just lying there while everyone else talks about his character. Beyond that, the movie is just lots of philosophical and metaphysical blather about things like tea and about what it means to be human, and boy, I just did not have the patience for this at all.
Along with the production design, the score is quite pretty and adds a lot to the many nearly dialogue-free scenes, but probably my favorite part of the whole movie was the song that ran over the end credits. Because that meant it was over.
Honestly, this is not the kind of movie I would ever need to watch again, nor would it be something I’d recommend whole-heartedly to just anyone. In other words, it’s another yawner that doesn’t care if it keeps the viewer invested or entertained for long, as long as it can appeal to those who are more concerned with auteurism than anything resembling entertainment.
Rating: 6/10
I should have a few more reviews from Sundance tomorrow or Sunday.