#TheWeekendWarrior
Text
The Weekend Warrior 5/7/21: WRATH OF MAN, HERE TODAY, THE UNTHINKABLE, MONSTER, THE WATER MAN and More
It’s a new month, and I guess going by previous years pre-COVID, this weekend would normally be the start of summer. This year, we’re instead getting a summer with a lot of movies that would normally be dumped into April or February or some other uneventful month. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t or won’t be any good movies, but really, there’s nothing that feels like a summer movie until A Quiet Place Part II and Disney’s Cruella open on Memorial Day weekend.
There’s been lots of great developments, though, including the Alamo Drafthouse in Brooklyn reopening this Friday and then in a few short weeks, theaters may be allowed to be open with no capacity rules although social distancing and masks will probably still be in place. Believe me, it’s been a confusing week as the city that got used to being on the backburner when it comes to reopenings, especially with movie theaters, is now dealing with arguing politicians competing to see who could throw open the then most doors fastest. It’s actually pretty embarrassing.
That aside, this week’s The Weekend Warrior column is brought to you by the new album “Coral Island” from Liverpool band The Coral, which I’ve decided to listen to on loop until I finish this column, because it’s taking me so long to get through it. (Eventually, I switched to Teenage Fanclub’s “Endless Arcade,” since I hadn’t had a chance to listen to it yet…. And to an old standby, Royal Blood, with their own excellent new album, “Typhoons.” At least the record business seems to know it’s the summer!)
Before we get to this week’s new movies, a couple tidbits. First of all, I’m thrilled that my friends Larissa Lam and Baldwin Chiu’s documentary FAR EAST DEEP SOUTH can finally be seen by the entire world, or at least the United States. It debuted on PBS World Channel on Tuesday night as part of the “America ReFramed” series, but for the entire month of May until June 3, you can watch it On Demand HERE, and that is huge! (There will be other ways to see it that you can read about here.)
This is an amazing MUST-SEE doc that looks into the little-known Chinese communities that took root in Mississippi in the early 20th Century and how they became such a huge part of that area with their markets, also bonding with the African-American communities that were similarly dealing with racism from the typically white post-Civil War South. It’s not just a history lesson, and it’s an incredibly moving story about a family trying to find its roots in the most unexpected places. There was a good reason why the couple’s short “Finding Cleveland” won the Oxford Film Festival while I was on the jury that year, and Far East Deep South similarly won an award there last year after its World Premiere at Cinequest was almost scuppered by COVID. It’s amazing how much more relevant and important this film has become since I first saw it last year, since both Asians and African-Americans are dealing with serious racial issues, and this movie shows that more than anything, they should be working to boost each other rather than fighting. Do check it out On Demand this month if you get a chance!
Another musician making movies is Mr. Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters. I mentioned his documentary WHAT DRIVES US last week, but I actually only got to watch it on Thursday, and like his previous film Studio City and HBO mini-series, Sonic Highways, it’s a fantastic look at the music biz, this time through a variety of artists who began their careers by piling into vans and driving around the country. That is, except Lars Ulrich from Metallica, who mentions that the band was never so small or indie that they didn’t have a bus. But Grohl has used his vast connections to bring in a lot of great musicians including The Edge from U2, Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and more, making this a very entertaining movie both for fans of the various bands but also live music fans in general. I gotta admit that as much as I loved What Drives Us, it did bring me down a bit since it’s been almost 14 months since I’ve seen any live music, and I really miss it. This is now streaming on The Coda Collection, which you can subscribe to through Amazon Prime Video.
Guy Ritchie is back with his latest movie, WRATH OF MAN (Miramax/MGM), which reunites him with Jason Statham for the first time since 2007’s Revolver, I believe. Statham plays the enigmatic Paul “H” Hill who works at cash truck company Fortico, responsible for moving hundreds of million dollars around Los Angeles each week. Fortico has recently been hit by a lethal robbery, and H’s team soon learn that there’s a lot more to their new coworker, who happens to be looking for revenge against the man who murdered his son.
(Unfortunately, reviews for the movie are embargoed until Thursday at 6pm, so I can’t tell you whether it’s any good or not. Until Thursday night. Sorry!)
But I will talk about the movie’s box office prospects, because why not? Ritchie’s last movie, The Gentlemen, opened in January 2020, during the “before times,” with $10.6 million, but that was more of a classic Ritchie ensemble crime-comedy. Wrath of Man is more of the type of movie Statham has been making over the past few years, a cross between a revenge thriller and a heist flick. In fact, Statham has done a pretty good job creating his own brand through a variety of action-thrillers as well as a number of franchises including “The Transporter” movies, “The Expendables,” and eventually joining the “Fast and the Furious” franchise as Deckard Shaw with Furious 7 in 2017. Statham then went off to make Hobbs and Shaw with Dwayne Johnson, which didn’t do bad with $174 million. Before that, Statham starred in The Meg, a summer shark attack movie that grossed $145 million. Statham going back to help his old mate i.e. the director that gave Statham his start is pretty huge.
But as I said earlier, those were all in the “before times” and with the box office the way it is, it’s hard to imagine that the exciting reunion of Statham and Ritchie can open with more than $10 million but maybe closer to $8 million, because MGM/UA just doesn’t have the marketing clout of a Warner Bros. or Universal. Even so, that should be enough to be #1 this weekend as both Mortal Kombat and Demon Slayer continue to fall away. Unfortunately, if the movie *is* any good -- and I can’t tell you one way or another -- then by the time reviews hit, people will already have other plans for the weekend than to go see the movie. So yeah, that’s pretty dumb on the part of MGM, huh?
UPDATE: MGM is putting the movie into 2,876 theaters and maybe I'm being overly optimistic, because, as you'll read below, the movie IS pretty good and reviews have remained positive with the American reviews rolling in last night, still at 70% Fresh at this writing. Maybe that'll help the movie do a little better, maybe as much as $9 million, although I'll probably owe MGM an apology if it cracks $10 million, and I don't think it will.
Mini-Review: If you’ve seen the trailer for Wrath of Man, you might go into Guy Ritchie’s latest thinking you know what to expect, because it’s sure being sold as another typical Jason Statham revenge thriller. Don’t be fooled by the marketing, the movie really is Ritchie’s chance to make his own version of Heat, an L.A. heist movie that owes as much to Rashomon as another movie being released this week.
Wrath of Man begins with the heist of an armored truck that turns deadly with the wanton murder of a couple guards. From there, you might think we know where things are going when Statham’s “H” company whose truck was hit, and on his first day, he stops a similar heist by killing the truck’s attackers. H is immediately the hero of the company, although he still has quite a few suspicious coworkers and the feeling is quite mutual. Ritchie’s film then slips into the second episodic chapter which goes back five months to that initial heist where we learn that Statham’s son was killed by being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I don’t want to go too much deeper into how the movie and story play out, because like The Gentlemen and some of Ritchie’s more intricate films, there’s a lot that purposefully isn’t made very apparent at the beginning. To many, this movie will be seen as even more macho than most of Ritchie's films, to the point where even the only woman guard, Dana, being just as macho as the men. As the movie begins, there’s a lot of joke-cracking and crotch-grabbing, all while Statham’s character silently observes and only acts when necessary.
The film’s shift to more of a classic Ritchie ensemble does slowly take place, but by the third chapter, it shifts to the group perpetrating the cash truck heists with an “inside person,” taking the movie to yet another place that makes it more obvious that this is Ritchie’s attempt at delving into the L.A. heist genre that other filmmakers have done so well.
Oddly, Statham doesn’t have too many lines, acting almost like a Terminator in his determination to right wrongs, but as always, Ritchie puts together a fantastic ensemble cast including a number of great American character actors who we rarely get to see in such great roles. I was particularly impressed with Jeffrey Donovan, who has appeared in a number of otherwise forgettable crime films this past year. The same can be said for Holt McCallany as H’s truck driver “Bullet,” but Ritchie also cast the likes of Josh Hartnett and Scott Eastwood in smaller yet still significant supporting roles, all of whom become more interesting as you start figuring out who all the players are.
Like I said, the movie is fairly macho and the few women play very small roles, but it’s how things are set-up in the first few acts to then change course and build to an absolutely amazing third act that will undoubtedly bear comparisons to Heat. And yet Wrath of Man (which is actually based on a little-seen French crime-thriller) does branch away from some of Ritchie’s standards, first of all by being far darker and even more violent with any of the wisecracking humor that pervades a lot of Ritchie’s work to counterbalance such violence disappearing once the flashbacks begin. It’s all punctuated by a fantastically tense score by Christopher Benstead, which seems a bit much at first but eventually settles into the perfect pace and tone for the action.
Despite disappearing for a good chunk of the movie, Statham is still great, basically killing everyone as his characters are wont to do, but watching how all of the different ideas come together leads to such a satisfying conclusion that one hopes those who might be put off, thinking they know where it's going due to the somewhat pathetic and obvious marketing will give it a chance to see how Ritchie has changed gears as effortlessly as he did with Aladdin a few years back.
Rating: 7.5/10
After even a longer time since he directed a movie, Billy Crystal once again takes the helm for HERE TODAY (Sony/Stage6), a movie in which he plays comedy writer Charlie Burns, whose chance encounter with Tiffany Haddish’s lounge singer, Emma Payge, leads to an unlikely friendship, as he struggles with early stage dementia.
I’ve known about this movie for over a year now, and I was pretty excited to finally get to see it, since I was such a fan of the other movies Crystal has directed, 1992’s Mr. Saturday Night and 1995’s Forget Paris, and it’s just amazing to me that he hasn’t directed a movie since.
At first, it seems like it’s the type of meet-cute we’ve seen so much in Crystal’s past filmography, but his pairing with Haddish isn’t something that might work on paper, but in fact, their comic styles mesh so perfectly together that it’s amazing that no one thought of putting them together before.
Crystal wrote the film with comic Alan Zweibel, who adapted it from his own short story “The Prize,” which refers to Haddish’s character winning Charlie in an auction for a lunch. Actually, her ex won the lunch, and she decided to use it because… free lunch! It’s a pretty simple set-up but one that allows the filmmakers to explore some of the odder things that happen in life.
Much of the movie’s humor plays upon the differences between the two characters, and how unexpected their friendship is. I can totally relate, because I have a lot of good long-time friends who most people might never expect us to be friends, but Crystal, Zweibel and Haddish pick up on that and create a movie that’s very funny but has enough other characters around the duo toa allow their characters to show how they’re just really nice people. We see that with how Charlie takes a young writer at his late night show under his wing or how Emma livens up the bat mitzvah of Charlie’s granddaughter. Oh yeah, and Haddish sings. She actually has a number of great performances in the movie, and seriously, anyone who watches this movie is gonna wanna see a smart filmmaker put Haddish in a musical immediately.
The film also acts as a truly touching tribute to Crystal’s friend, the late Robin WIlliams, who was diagnosed with the exact same type of dementia after his suicide death, and knowing that fact, makes the film even more poignant. More importantly, it doesn’t use Charlie’s condition for laughs, and for that alone, I feel like this is ten times better than that overrated Oscar winner The Father.
Here Today’s biggest problems come in the third act when it feels like the movie is starting to over-extend its welcome, even going into somewhat expected places, but it recovers from that rough third act to land a really nice ending. Crystal has always proven himself to be a really strong mainstream filmmaker (ala Rob Reiner and others) who makes crowd-pleasing movies, and it’s so nice seeing him going behind the camera for a movie that’s obviously very personal but also highly relatable.
As far as box office, I certainly have high hopes that Crystal still has an older audience of fans who might want to see him on the big screen again. I’m just not sure if this will be in more than 1,000 theaters, and though I’ve seen quite a bit of marketing, I just haven’t seen Crystal or Haddish do nearly as much in terms of getting out there that would be necessary to reach an audience that might want to venture out into movie theaters to see the movie vs. waiting until it’s on cable/streaming. There’s also Tiffany Haddish’ fanbase, and there could be some benefit for the movie coming out the same week as her new CBS show “Kids Say the Darndest Things.”
I’d love to be optimistic with this making $4 to 5 million but it’s probably more likely to be closer to $3 million especially with capacity limits still in place for most theaters and the audience generally being older.
UPDATE: Maybe I was a little too optimistic, because I enjoyed the movie so much and it will probably be closer to $1 or 1.5 million since other reviews aren't as great.
Next, we have two movies finally being released many years after their festival premieres…
The Swedish apocalyptic thriller THE UNTHINKABLE (Magnet), directed by Victor Danell, is finally being released after playing genre fests in 2018 and 2019. It stars Christoffer Nordenrot as Alex, a young piano virtuoso who ran away from home due to his abusive father Bjorn (Jesper Barkselius). Years later, he returns home for his mother’s funeral after she’s killed in a terrorist attack on Sweden. At the same, there’s a virus that’s erasing people’s memories, but Alex is still in love with Anna (Lisa Henni), the girl he had a crush on when he left, and the three of them will have to help each other face all the horrible things hitting their home at the same time.
As I was watching this movie, a lot of it felt eerily familiar to me, but I couldn’t figure out why. The more I watched it, the more I realized that I actually HAD seen the movie before. Sure enough, I saw this movie over two years ago at the “What the Fest?!” in New York two years ago, and I honestly don’t remember loving it. Still, I decided to give it a fresh look, hoping to get more out of it on second viewing.
Some of the same things bothered me on this second viewing, because it’s really hard to figure out exactly what is going on and whether the horrific events are natural, man-made or a combination of both. For some time, we get so mired into Alex’s lame relationship with Anna, and when he returns home, his conspiracy theory-driven father is busy protecting a bunker that’s being invaded by foreign military troops he thinks are Russians. We cut between these two disparate scenarios while sometimes returning to the capital of Sweden and throwing in a few big set pieces. It’s so disjointed that you feel like you’re watching a lot of random unrelated events, maybe a bit like last week’s About Endlessness -- maybe it’s a Swedish thing?
There are aspects of The Unthinkable that are quite commendable, particularly those action moments and how the mystery about what is happening develops as the film goes along. Eventually, the film does find a more consistent pace, and things start becoming a little clearer, which makes the final act better than much of what we’ve watched earlier. Even so, it’s still quite annoying how long it takes to figure out what’s going on, even on a second viewing, and for most people, that may already be far too frustrating to get through it.
Hitting Netflix on Friday over THREE years after it premiered at Sundance is music video director Anthony Mandler’s directorial debut, MONSTER (Netflix), based on the novel by Walter Dean Myers. It stars Kelvin Harrison Jr. (Waves) as Steve Harmon, a 17-year-old film student put in jail, accused of murder in a bodega robbery. His defense lawyer (Jennifer Ehle) is trying to help him be released, but he’s fighting against the odds of a judicial system that sees him as a “monster” because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I have to be honest that I did go to see this at Sundance the week it premiered, and for whatever reason, I just wasn’t feeling it, so I only really caught about twenty minutes of it. Watching it now with more time and a little less weary than I usually am towards the end of Sundance, I was able to appreciate Monster more for what it is. On the surface, it’s just about Steve’s case and how what really happened unfolds before our eyes and we learn more about those around Steve and how their influence may have pulled a smart and studious young man into the criminal world that now has him in prison with much more violent life-long criminals.
We already knew that Harrison was a great actor, but Monster shows us that he was already on his way to greatness with this movie that for whatever reason got buried even as it dealt with issues that have been in the headlines almost every day since this debuted.
Mandler takes an interesting approach, both non-linear and also with blatant nods to Kurosawa’s Rashomon, which is even cited by Steve’s teacher, played by Tim Blake Nelson. Jeffrey Wright and Jennifer Hudson are decent as Steve’s parents, but they’re generally smaller and non-showy roles compared to the moments between Harrison and Ehle. Much of the film takes place in the courtroom with flashbacks showing what happened through the viewpoint of whomever is on the stand, which eventually includes Steve himself.
The way Mandler handles the material may lean more on the artiness rather than something more mainstream -- Michael B. Jordan’s Just Mercy comes to mind -- but it’s just as powerful in showing how someone like Steve can be othered by society into being a criminal. Sure, there have been other handlings of this sort of material that I thought were better films, but if you know anyone who has ever had dealings with the “justice” system and know how unfair and horrible it can be even to the innocent, then Monster will certainly strike a chord.
Also hitting Netflix this week is the new series based on Mark Millar and Frank Quitely‘s comic books, JUPITER’S LEGACY (Netflix), another kind of twist on the superhero genre ala Amazon Prime Video’s series based on Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson’s The Boys. I love the comics, and I can’t wait to finally get around to seeing Netflix’s first adaptation of a Millarworld property.
David Oyelowo makes his directorial debut with THE WATER MAN (RLJEfilms), a movie about a young boy named Gunner Boon (Lonnie Chavis), whose mother (Rosario Dawson) is battling leukemia. In an effort to cure her, Guner goes off on a journey along with a teenage girl named Jo (Amiah Miller) to find the mythical Water Man, who can provide them with a magic token that might save Gunner’s mother’s life.
I’ve interviewed Oyelowo a few times before, and I really like him a lot, so I had really high hopes for him as a director since I feel he’s just a terrific actor. Unfortunately, the material here is just not strong enough that I think even a far more experienced filmmaker could make something out of it.
Set in PIne Hills, we meet Gunner, a bright kid who loves drawing comic books, but he has trouble connecting with his father (Oyelowo), so when he has an idea that might help his sick mother, he goes off with a head-strong teen named Jo, in search of the Water Man, a summertime adventure permeated by a lot of very bad low-budget visual effects.
Honestly, I’m not even sure where to begin with where The Water Man falters, because Oyelowo has such a great cast, including Alfred Molina and Maria Bello in tiny parts. The story is a problem, as is the writing, which is just so bland and dull, that there’s really nothing in Oyelowo’s direction or any of the performances that really can salvage it. Neither of the child actors have much charisma or personality, and even Dawson’s performance, which would normally be a showstopper is repeatedly lessened by the constant cutting back to the kids. (And as someone who beat leukemia myself, I’m never a fan when cancer is depicted in movies as a death sentence rather than just another hurdle in life that needs to be overcome.)
Oyelowo himself may be one of his generation’s best actors, but he brings so little to the role of Gunner’s father, maybe to not take away from his younger star, but it hurts that he doesn’t do more to create a stronger conflict by making the character more horrible to drive Gunner away. The actual Water Man doesn’t improve things when he finally shows up, essentially talking like a pirate but not even remotely paying off.
Honestly, The Water Man seems like such a misguided venture -- Exec. Produced by Oprah, no less -- and it might have been totally forgettable if the characters didn’t keep saying the title of the movie every five minutes.
Hitting theaters Friday after a festival run is Tran Quoc Bao’s action-comedy THE PAPER TIGERS (WELL GO USA), starring ALain Uy, Ron Yuan and Mikel Shannon Jenkins as martial artists once known as “the three tigers but now middle-aged men must set aside old grudges and dad duties to avenge the murder of their teacher. I’ve had a screener of this since last summer when it played at Fantasia Festival in Montreal, and I just never got around to watching it, but if I’m able to squeeze it in before the weekend, check back here for my review.
Streaming on Shudder this Friday is Ryan Kruger's South African comedy-thriller FRIED BARRY (Shudder), starring Gary Green as Barry, a violent street junkie who is abducted by aliens who take over his body in order to… well, actually… they do a lot of drugs, have a lot of sex and other craziness. It’s a pretty strange and bizarre movie that reminds me a little of movies like a lower-fi Under the Skin or Beyond the Black Rainbow, and much of it is driven by the insane and unique performance by Green and the odd characters he encounters that I think will find its fans for sure, but it will definitely be for a very select audience of genre festival fans, as this is by no means a mainstream genre film.
Speaking of which, another movie out this week which I wasn’t allowed to see in advance is Gia Coppola’s MAINSTREAM (IFC Films), starring Maya Hawke as a young woman seeking internet stardom by making YouTube videos with a charismatic stranger, played by Andrew Garfield, until “the dark side of viral celebrity threatens to ruin them both.” Yup, it’s one of THOSE movies. It also stars Nat Wolff, Jason Schwartzman and Johnny Knoxville, but I haven’t heard anything good about it, and I’m not sure my curiosity is piqued enough to spend any of my own personal money to check it out.
Hitting Amazon on Friday is the doc THE BOY FROM MEDELLIN (Amazon) from Matthew Heineman (City of Ghosts, Cartel Land), a portrait of musical superstar J. Balvin, as he prepares for a massive sold-out stadium show in his hometown of Medellin, Colombia, which is hindered by the growing civil unrest in the area.
Lots of other movies this week, but a few that i just wasn’t able to get to this week, including:
ABOVE SUSPICION (Lionsgate)
INITIATION (Saban Films)
ENFANT TERRIBLE (Dark Star Pictures)
QUEEN MARIE (Samuel Goldwyn Films)
SILO (Oscilloscope)
CITIZEN PENN (Discovery+)
That’s it for this week. Next week, Chris Rock and Samuel L. Jackson star in SPIRAL: FROM THE BOOK OF SAW (Lionsgate) and Angelina Jolie returns for the thriller THOSE WHO WISH ME DEAD (New Line) and Timur Bekmambetov’s thriller, PROFILE (Focus Features). That’s right. This will be the first weekend in over a year where we’ll have three or maybe even four new wide releases.
2 notes
·
View notes
Photo
The last time I was at @franklintonfridays inside? February 14th - Valentine's Day💘💖. It was great to return to @400westrich and @chromedgestudios, after back to back months of outdoor markets, which was a return to normal, but with masks and social distancing. It was strange to not hug people you knew. What do you miss, was the question in the back of Chromedge. I'm curious, what do you miss the most, what have you missed the last seven months and 200-plus days? 🎨🎸🌃🌆 #franklintonfridays #franklintonartsdistrict #artmakescbus #theweekendwarrior #400westrich (at 400 Square) https://www.instagram.com/p/CGK2ai7jRnU/?igshid=wf3tmuoonmxt
0 notes
Photo
More meals and meetings. #theweekendwarriors @weekendwarriorsthefilm (at Los Angeles, California) https://www.instagram.com/p/ByVecElgI-9/?igshid=15ow765xoq1oz
0 notes
Photo
When #theweekendwarriorsshow pops up first when you log on to @amazonprimevideo #theweekendwarriors @the_weekend_warriors_show (at Lowell, Massachusetts) https://www.instagram.com/p/BsPQAvTlKqW/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=13v7z2oe4cyu4
0 notes
Link
By reading this book, you will learn what is the life of a soldier!
Watch the short video of soldier's life on YouTube!
0 notes
Photo
Ready for this effect @aeze22 @cdthepooh @jasminelovenn #TheWeekendWarriors #SummerLookBook2017
0 notes
Text
The Weekend Warrior Christmas - New Year’s Edition – WONDER WOMAN 1984, NEWS OF THE WORLD, PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN, ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI..., PIECES OF A WOMAN, HERSELF, SYLVIE’S LOVE and More!
Welcome to the VERY LAST Weekend Warrior of the WORST YEAR EVER!!! But hopefully not the last column forever, even though I already plan on taking much of January off from writing 8 to 10 reviews each week. It just got to be too much for a while there.
Because it’s the last week of the year, there are a lot of really good movies, some in theaters but also quite a few on streaming services. In fact, there are a good number of movies that appeared in my Top 10 for the yearover at Below the Line, as well as my extended Top 25 that I’ll share on this blog sometime next week. I was half-hoping to maybe write something about the box office prospects of some of the new movies, but after the last couple weeks, it’s obvious that box office is not something that will be something worth writing about until sometime next spring or summer.
(This column is brought to you by Paul McCartney’s new album “McCartney III” which I’m listening to as I finish this up… and then other solo Beatles ditties picked for me randomly by Tidal.)
First up is easily one of the most anticipated movies of the year, or at least one that actually didn’t move to 2021, and that’s WONDER WOMAN 1984 (Warner Bros.), Patty Jenkins’ sequel to the 2017 hit, once again starring Gal Gadot as Diana Prince. I reviewed it here, but basically the sequel introduces Wonder Woman arch-nemeses Barbara Minerva aka Cheetah, as played by Kristen Wiig, and Pedro Pascal’s Max Lord and how an ancient artifact gives them both their powers, as well as helps to bring Diana’s true love Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) back despite him having disappeared presumed dead in WWI. As you can see by reading my review, I thought it was just fine, not great and certainly not something I’d make an attempt to see a second time in a 25% capacity movie theater. Fortunately, besides debuting in around 2,100 movie theaters across the nation, it will also be on HBO Max day and date, which has caused quite a stir. Being Christmas weekend with no work/school on Monday, I can see it still making somewhere between $10 and 12 million, but I can’t imagine it doing nearly what it might have done with most theaters only 25-30% full at the maximum and that theater count being roughly half the number it might have gotten during the “normal times.”
Paul Greengrass’ Western NEWS OF THE WORLD (Universal) reteams him with his Captain Phillips star Tom Hanks, this time playing Captain Jefferson Kidd, a Civil War soldier who travels from town to town in the Old West reading from newspapers to anyone who has a dime and time to listen. After one such reading, he discovers a young girl (Helena Zengel) on her own, having spent the last few years with a family of Native Americans who were killed by soldiers. Together, they travel across America as Kidd hopes to bring the girl to her last surviving family members.
I already reviewed Greengrass’ movie for Below the Line, and I also spoke to Mr. Greengrass, an interview you can read that right here (once it goes live), but I make no bones that this was one of my favorite movies I’ve seen this year, and it’s not just due to the fine work by Greengrass and his team. No, it’s just as much about the emotion inherent in the story, and the relationship between the characters played by Hanks and Zengel.
I’ve watched the movie three times now, and I’m still blown away by every frame and moment, the tension that’s created on this difficult journey but also where it leaves the viewers at the end that promises that there can be hope and joy even in the most difficult and turbulent times. It’s a wonderful message that’s truly needed right now.
Listen, I’m not gonna recommend going to a movie theater if you don’t feel it’s safe – I’ve already spoken my peace on this at a time when COVID numbers were much lower – but this is a movie that I personally can’t wait to see in a movie theater. I honestly can’t see the movie making more than $3 or 4 million in the open theaters considering how few people are willing to go to movie theaters. Obviously, this isn’t as big a draw as Wonder Woman, but it is a fantastic big screen movie regardless.
Also opening in theaters this Friday is Emerald Fennell’s directorial debut PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN (Focus Features), starring the wonderful Oscar-nominated Carey Mulligan as Cassie Thomas, a woman who has revenge on her mind. Cassie spends her nights picking up guys in bars by pretending she’s so drunk she can barely walk, then humiliating them and presumably worse. When she encounters an acquaintance from med school in the form of Bo Burnham’s Ryan, the two begin dating, though he ends up awakening a darker side to Cassie that seeks revenge for something that happened back during their school days. (Honestly, if you’re already sold, just skip to the next movie. That’s all I want you to know before watching it.)
I was ready to love Fennell’s movie when it opened with a disgusting shot of gross stock market bros in loose-fitting suits gyrating in slow motion before one of them tries to pick up a totally soused Cassie at the club. It’s a scene that really plays itself out quite well, and then leads into Mulligan’s character allowing another clear scumbag (played by Christopher Mintz-Plasse, maybe as a slight-older McLovin?) before turning the tables on him as well.
There’s going to be a lot of talk about this movie after people see it, since it’s one of those great films that begins a lot of conversations. I imagine most women of a certain age will love it, but some men might see themselves in some of the characters (even Burnham’s) and wonder whether Cassie just won’t take crap from any man or if she’s a full-on misandrist. One thing we do know a lot is that she does this sort of thing a lot, and there’s something from her past that has driven her involving something that happened to her female friend in med school. I’m going to stop talking about the plot here, because I definitely don’t want to spoil anything who hasn’t seen the movie, but the second half of the movie is as deeply satisfying as Tarantino’s Kill Bill in terms of the surprises.
You’ll realize while watching what a treat you’re in for when you first watch Mulligan’s amazing transformation from pretending to be drunk to being completely cognizant and just all the emotions we see her go through after that. Of course, we never really know what she’s actually doing to the guys she lets pick her up -- she keeps a notebook with guy’s names and a quizzical counting system, so we can only imagine.
Fennell’s screenplay is fantastic but her work as a first-time director in maintaining the the tone and pacing of the movie is really what will keep you captivated, whether it’s the amazing musical choices or how Cassie dresses up to lure men. There’s also a great cast around Mulligan whether it’s comic Burnham in a relatively more serious role, but one that also allows him a musical number. (No joke.) Fennel’s amazing casting doesn’t just stop there from, Jennifer Coolidge as Cassie’s mother to Laverne Cox as Gail, her workmate/boss at the coffee shop – both of them add to the film’s subtle humor elements. Alfred Molina shows up to give a show-stopping performance, and Alison Brie also plays a more dramatic role as another one of Cassie’s classmates. I can totally understand why the Golden Globes might have deemed the movie a “comedy/musical” (for about two days before going back) , but putting so many funny people in dramatic roles helps give Promising Young Woman its own darkly humorous feel. All that darkness is contrasted by this sweet romance between Cassie and Ryan that’s always in danger of imploding due to Cassie’s troubled nature.
The biggest shocking surprise is saved for the third act, and boy, it’s going to be one that people will be talking about for a VERY long time, because it’s just one gut punch after another. I loved this movie, as it’s just absolutely brilliant – go back and see where it landed in my Top 10. As one of the best thrillers from the past decade, people will be talking about this for a very long time
Promising Young Woman hits theaters on Christmas Day, and presumably, it will be available on VOD sometime in January, but this is not one you want to wait on. If you do go see it in theaters, just be safe, please. No making out with random men or women, please.
Regina King’s narrative feature debut, ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI... (Amazon Studios), will ALSO be in theaters on Christmas Day, and though I’ve reviewed it over at Below the Line, but I’ll talk a little more about it here just for my loyal Weekend Warrior readers.
Yet another movie that made my Top 10, this one stars a brilliant quartet of actors -- Kingsley Ben-Adir, Leslie Odom Jr., Aldis Hodge and Eli Goree—as four legendary black icons: Malcolm X, Sam Cooke, Jim Brown and Cassius Clay, on the night after the last of them wins the World Boxing Championship against Sonny Liston in February 1964. The four men meet in Malcolm X’s hotel room to discuss what’s happening in their lives and the world in general, as well as Clay’s decision to join the Nation of Islam, just as Malcolm X is getting ready to leave the brotherhood due to philosophical differences with the group. In fact, all four men have philosophical differences that are discussed both in good humor and in deep conflict as they disagree on their place in a white-dominated world in a year before the Civil Rights Act would be signed.
First of all, there’s no way to talk about this movie without discussing the Kemp Powers play on which it’s based, and we can’t mention that without mentioning that Powers also co-wrote and co-directed Pixar’s Soul, which will be available on Disney+ this Friday. It’s a fantastic script and King put together a fantastic cast of actors who really give their all to every scene. In the case of Leslie Odom, Jr., you really can believe him as Cooke, especially in a number of fantastic performances pieces. Likewise, Goree looks a lot like Clay both in the ring and out, carrying all of the swagger for which he would become more famous as Ali.
I’ve seen the movie twice already and if you’ve looked at my Top 10, then you already know this is another one that made my cut, so I don’t think I need to give it a much harder sell. I’m sure you’ll be hearing a lot about this one on its journey to Oscar night when hopefully, King becomes the first woman of color to be nominated in the directing category. Or rather, she’ll probably tie for that honor with Nomadland director Chloé Zhao.
If you don’t feel like going to theaters for this one, you’ll be able to catch it on Amazon Prime Video on January 15, too… you’ll just have to wait a little longer.
Also, the new Pixar animation movie, SOUL, directed by Pete Docter (Up, Inside Out) and co-directed by Kemp Powers (remember him?), will hit Disney+ on Christmas Day, and I reviewed it here, so I probably don’t have lot more to say about it, but it’s great, and if you have Disney+, I’m sure you’ll be watching it.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t get a screener for Matteo Garrone’s PINNOCHIO (Roadside Attractions), which also opens in about 700 theaters on Christmas Day. This adaptation stars Robert Benigni as Geppeto, who famously starred as Pinocchio in his own version of the classic fairy tale from 2002. That other movie was “Weinsteined” at a time when that just meant that a movie was ruined by Harvey Weinstein’s meddling, rather than anything involving sexual assault.
Another great movie hitting streaming this week is Eugene Ashe’s SYLVIE’S LOVE, which streams on Amazon Prime Video today. It stars Tessa Thompson as Sylvie and Nnamdi Asomugha (also a producer on the film) as Robert, who meet one summer in the late 50s while working at Sylvie’s father’s record store. He is a jazz musician who is on the rise, but their romance is cut short when he gets a gig in Paris but she refuses to go with him. Also, she’s pregnant with his child. Years later, they reconnect with her now being married with a young daughter (clearly Robert’s) and they realize that the love between them is still very real and true.
This is the first of three movies I watched this week where I went in with very little knowledge and absolute zero expectations. Like everyone else on earth, I am an avid fan of Ms. Thompson’s work both in movies like Thor: Ragnarok and smaller indies. She’s just a fantastic presence that lights up a screen. While I wasn’t as familiar with Asomugha’s acting work – he’s produced some great films and acted in a few I liked, included Crown Heights – there’s no denying the chemistry between the two.
What’s kind of interesting about the movie is that it combines a few elements from other great movies released this week, including Soul and A Night in Miami, but in my opinion, handles the music business aspect to the story better than the much-lauded Netflix movie, Ma Raimey’s Black Bottom. Frankly, I also think the performances by the two leads are as good as those by Boseman and Davis in that movie, but unfortunately, Amazon is submitting this to the Emmys as as “TV movie” rather than to the Oscars, so that’s kind of a shame.
This is a movie that’s a little hard to discuss why I enjoyed it so much without talking about certain scenes or moments, or just go through the entire story, but I think part of the joy of appreciating what Ashe has done in his second original feature film is to tell the story of these two characters over the course of a decade or so in a way that hasn’t been done before. That alone is quite an achievement, because we’ve seen many of those types of movies over the years (When Harry Met Sally, for instance).
What I really liked about Sylvie’s Love over some of the other “black movies” this year is that it literally creates its own world and just deals with the characters within it, rather than trying to make a big statement about the world at the time. Maybe you can say the same about Soul in that sense, but you would be absolutely amazed by how much bigger an audience you can get by telling a grounded story in a relatable world, and then throw in a bit of music, as both those movies do.
So that’s all I’ll say except that this will is now on Amazon Prime Video , so you have no excuse not to check it out while you wait for Regina King’s equally great One Night in Miami to join it in mid-January.
Hitting Netflix on Christmas day is Robert Rodriguez’s WE CAN BE HEROES, his sequel to his 2005 family film The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl – not his best moment -- which follows the kids of the Heroics, a Justice League-like super group. They’re all in a special school for kids with powers but they have to step up when the Heroics are captured by aliens. Want to know what will happen? Well, you’ll just have to wait for Christmas Day for when my review drops to find out whether I liked it more or less than Rodriguez’s earlier film which SPOILER!! I hated.)
The first thing you need to get past is that Shark Boy and Lava Girl are now man and wife, and just that fact might be tough for anyone who only discovered the movie sometime more recently. There are other familiar faces in the Heroics like Pedro Pascal, Sung Kang, Christian Slater, Priyanka Chopra Jonas and more, so clearly, Rodriguez is still able to pull together a cast.
The movie actually focuses on YaYa Goselin’s Missy Moreno, daughter of the Heroic’s leader (Pascal) who has also retired. Just as aliens are invading the earth, Missy is put into a school of kids with superpowers, all kids of various Heroic members. Sure, it’s derived directly from The X-Men and/or Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, so yeah… basically also the X-Men. We meet all of the kids in a great scene where we see them using their powers and learn their personalities, and honestly, they really are the best part of the movie.Probably the most adorable is Guppy, the very young daughter of Shark Boy and Lava Girl, played by Viven Blair. Oddly, Missy doesn’t have any powers so she feels a bit fish-out-of-water in the group even though, like her father, she proves to be a good leader.
As much as I really detested Rodriguez’s Shark Boy and Lava Girl movie, I feel like he does a lot better by having a variety of kids in this one, basically something for everyone, but also not a bad group of child actors. (There’s also a fun role for Adriana Barraza.) There are definitely aspects that are silly, but Rodriguez never loses sight of his audience, and wisely, Netflix is offering this as a Christmas Day release which should be fun for families with younger kids who might see this as their first superhero movie.
More discerning viewers may not be particularly crazy about visual FX, all done as usual in Rodriguez’s own studio but some of them look particularly hoaky and cheap compared to others. (I mean, that’s probably the appeal for hiring Rodriguez because he’s able to do so much in-house. In this case, he got all four of his own kids involved in various capacities of making the film.)
We Can Be Heroes is clearly a movie made for kids, so anyone expecting anything on part with Amazon’s The Boys will be quite disappointed. It’s probably Rodriguez getting slightly closer to Spy Kids than he has with any of his other family-friendly movies, but one shouldn’t go in with the expectations that come with any of the much bigger blockbusters released these days. Personally, I enjoyed that fact, and I totally would watch another movie with this superteam.
Michel Stasko’s BOYS VS. GIRLS (Gravitas Ventures) is a fun retro-comedy that follows a war between the male and female counselors at Camp Kindlewood, which has just gone co-ed. At the center of it all is Dale (Eric Osborne) and Amber (Rachel Dagenais) as two teens who are in the middle of a meet-cute romance in the middle of a inter-gender competition called “Lumberman vs. Voyagers,” which I have no idea whether it’s a real thing or not.
I probably should have known I’d like this one from the catchy New Order-ish song in the opening credits, but listen, Wet Hot American Summer is one of my all-time favorite movies, and that was basically made to satirize ‘80s movies like Meatballs. This one falls more towards to the latter in terms of humor, but it also feels authentic to the ‘80s summer camp experience.
It helps that the grown-ups at the camp are played by the likes of Kevin McDonald from New Kids on the Block, Colin Mochrie from Whose Line is It Anyway and others, but it’s really about the younger cast playing teen boys and girls in the throes of puberty, something we all can in some way relate to. The young cast play a series of stereotypical young but there are a lot of funny tropes within them, as each of the cast is given a chance to deliver some of the funnier gags. This isn’t necessarily high-brow humor, mind you, but I love the fact that you can still make a movie about a time where you could still make fun of girl’s periods in school. (I’m kidding. I just put that in there cause I feel like I need to throw things like that into this column just to see if anyone is ACTUALLY reading it.)
The presumably Canadian Stasko is another great example of an independently-spirited filmmaker who has an idea for a fun movie and then just goes about making it, regardless of having big stars or anything to sell it besides many funny moments that can be featured a trailer, so that those who like this kind of movie will find it. Listen, Wet Hot American Summer wasn’t a huge hit when it was released. I still remember it having trouble getting a single screening at the multiplex in Times Square when it was released but over the years since it became sort of a cult hit (kind of due to Netflix having it to rent on DVD, I think).
Besides a fun script and cast, Stasko also find a way to include tunes that sound so much like real ‘80s songs we would have heard on the radio but aren’t quite the big hits that would have cost him thousands of dollars, but I really just enjoyed the heck out of the tone and overall fun attitude that went into making this movie.
Also on VOD now is Ian Cheney and Martha Shane’s fascinating and funny doc, THE EMOJI STORY (Utopia), which I saw at the Tribeca Film Festival when it was called “Picture Character.” (That’s what “emoji” in Japanese means, just FYI.) As you can guess it’s about the origins and rise of the emoji as a form of communication from its humble beginning in Japan to becoming one of the biggest trending crazes on the globe. I’m not that big an Emoji guy myself – I tend to use the thumbs up just for ease, but I do marvel at those who can put together full thoughts using a string of these symbols, and if you want to know more about them, this is the movie you should watch.
Now let’s cut ahead to some of the movies that will be opening and streaming NEXT week…
Hitting select theaters on Wednesday, December 30 and what really is my “FEATURED FLICK” for this column is Hungarian filmmaker Kornél (White God) Mundruczó’s PIECES OF A WOMAN (Netflix) before its streaming premiere on Netflix January 7.
Written by Kata Wéber, who also wrote Mundruczó’s earlier film, it stars Vanessa Kirby (The Crown) and Shia Labeouf as Martha and Sean Weiss, a Boston couple who lose their baby during a particularly difficult home birth and follows the next year in their lives and how that tragic loss affects their relationship with each other and those around them.
As you can imagine, Pieces of a Woman is a pretty heavy drama, one that reminded me of the films of Todd Field (Little Children, In the Bedroom) in terms of the intensity of the drama and the emotions on screen from the brilliant cast Mundruczó put together for his English language debut. I’m not sure I could use the general plot to sell anyone on seeing this because it is very likely the worst possible date movie of the year after Netflix’s 2019 release, Marriage Story, but it’s just as good in terms of the writing and performances.
At the center of it is Kirby – and yeah, I still haven’t watched The Crown, so shut up! I’ll get to it!!! – who most of us fell in love with for her role in Mission: Impossible - Fallout, but what we see her go through as an actress here really shows the degree of her abilities. But it also shows what Mundruczó can do with material that (like many movies) started out as a play. For instance, one of the first big jaw-dropping moments is the home birth scene that goes on for a long time, seemingly all in one shot, and Kirby is so believable in terms of a woman going through a difficult birth, you’d believe she has had children herself. (She hasn’t.) I also don’t want to throw Shia Labeouf under the bus right now just because that seems like the trendy thing to do. (Without getting it, I believe FKA Twigs… but that doesn’t deny the fact that Labeouf is just the latest great actor that everyone wants to cancel.)
Anyway, to change the subject, we have to talk about Ellen Burstyn, who plays Martha’s meddling mother, who is quite clingy and overbearing, so when the couple lose their baby, she steps in to take to task the midwife she deems responsible (played by the highly-underrated Molly Parker). Or rather, she hires a family lawyer (Sarah Snook) to take her to court to get compensation for the loss of her daughter’s baby. The film’s last act culminates as their case goes to court.
Again, the film covers roughly a year after the tragedy and deals not only with how Martha and Sean’s relationship is affected and how it emotionally affects Martha in particular, but also how others around them start behaving towards them. It feels so authentic and real that you wonder where the screenwriter was drawing from, but Mundruczó has more than prove himself as as filmmaker by creating something that is visually compelling and even artsy while still doing everything to help promote the story and performances over his own abilities as a director. Doesn’t hurt that he has composer Howard Shore scoring the film in a way that’s subtle but effective.
Listen, if you’re looking for a comedy riot that will entertain you with funny one-liners and pratfalls than Pieces of a Woman is not for you. This is a devastating movie that really throws the viewer down a deep spiral along with its characters. The first time I watched it, I was left quite broken, and maybe even more so on second viewing. (As we get closer to Oscar season… in four months … I hope this film will be recognized and not just thrown under the table due to Labeouf’s involvement. That would be as big a tragedy and misjustice as much of what happens in the movie.)
So yeah, in case you wondered why this also made it into my prestigious Top 10 for the year, that is why. :)
Also in theaters on Wednesday, December 30 is another terrific drama, the Phyllida Lloyd-directed HERSELF (Amazon Studios), co-written and starring Clare Dunne, as Sandra, a mother of two young girls, trying to get out of an abusive marriage, while making ends meet and providing shelter for her kids. One day, she learns about a way that she can build her own home, and one of the women she cares for offers a plot of land
Another movie that I really didn’t know much about going into, other than Phyllida Lloyd being a talented filmmaker whose movie The Iron Maiden, which won Meryl Streep her 500th Oscar, I enjoyed much more than the popular blockbuster hit musical, Mamma Mia! This is a far more personal story that reminded me of Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake, a smaller and more intimate character piece that shines a light on British actor Clare Dunne, who as with some of the best and most personal movie projects, co-wrote this screenplay for herself to act in.
There are aspects to the film that reminds me of many other quaint Britcoms in terms of creating a story where one person’s challenge is taken up by others who are willing to help, and in this case, it’s Sandra’s desire to build a house for her two quite adorable daughters while also trying to keep it secret from her abusive ex.
Dunne’s performance isn’t as showy as some of the other dramatic performances mentioned in this very column, but she and Lloyd do a fine job creating an authenticity that really makes you believe and push for her character, Sandra, surrounding her with characters who can help keep the movie on the lighter side despite very serious nature of spousal abuse (which also rears its ugly head in Pieces of a Woman). Oh, and don’t get too comfortable, because this, too, leads to an absolutely shocking and devastating climax you won’t see coming. (Well, now you will… but you’ll still be shocked. Trust me.)
Still, it’s a really nice movie with the house being built clearly a metaphor. I know there’s a lot of truly fantastic movies discussed in this week’s column but don’t let this wonderful British drama pass you by, because you can tell it’s a labor of love for everyone who made it.
Herself will be in theaters for roughly a week starting December 30 before streaming on Prime Video on January 8.
In select theaters and on VOD on New Year’s Day is Roseanne Liang’s WWII thriller SHADOW IN THE CLOUD (Vertical/Redbox Entertainment), starring Chloë Grace Moretz as Flight Officer Maude Garrett, who is assigned to deliver a top-secret package on the B-17 bomber “The Fool’s Errand” with an all-male crew that throws her into a turret “for her own safety.” She ends up getting trapped down there as the plane is attacked by a creature that no one believes is out there, as they fight back against the unseen enemy, many secrets are revealed.
This is yet another movie I didn’t know that much about other than it has Moretz on an airplane, but there’s so much about the movie that both had me scratching my head but also has me quite deliriously amused that filmmakers could get away with some of the craziness that we witness. Maybe it’s not a surprise that the movie was co-written by Max Landis -- not exactly the most beloved screenwriter in Hollywood these days, and certainly not a critical favorite.
Again I really didn’t know what to expect so after Moretz’s character gets on the plane and is trapped in the turret under the plane, I thought that maybe I was seeing something similar to the one-location thriller 7500, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, which I wasn’t too big a fan of even though the actor was good. Moretz continues to be quite a phenomenal actor, but the mix of Mahuia Bridgman-Cooper’s music, which borrows as much from Soulwax (look ‘em up on Spotify) as John Carpenter, and the sexist attitude by the male crew towards Garrett made me unsure of what the movie was meant to say.
Much of the movie just has Moretz on her own with the men’s voices over the comms, which is not something that could possibly sustain a whole movie. Part of it is borrowed from a very well-known episode of “The Twilight Zone,” in fact.
but fortunately, it breaks from out of that deceit but then just starts getting crazier and crazier. I’m not even gonna tell you about what happens or what’s in the box Garrett is carrying or where things go, because honestly, I don’t think you would believe me.
I haven’t seen any of Ms. Liang’s previous films but when you realize how much crazy stuff she’s able to get way with, I’ll be really interested what she does next. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen any movie that’s quite as crazy as Shadow in the Cloud or one that makes me want to watch it again for that very reason.
Oscar-winning Icarus director Bryan Fogel’s doc THE DISSIDENT (Briarcliff), which opens in theaters Friday then will be On Demand January 8, follows the horrific assassination of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey in September 2018, thought to be the work of the Saudi kingdom and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman aka MBS.
I’m really fascinated by movies like this one and Ryan White’s recent Assassins – both which could be in the Best Documentary race at the Oscars in April, by the detective and investigative work done by both filmmakers to get to the bottom of murders that shouldn’t be possible and find those that are responsible. I’ll admit that I didn’t really pay much attention to this story when it was happening a few years back, so I don’t know how much of the details are new and exclusive to Fogel’s doc. He does get access to Kashouggi’s fiancé Hatice who had gone with Jamal to the Saudi embassy in Turkey to get proof that he was single and could marry when he vanished for days and then turne up dead.
Fogel also meets with another Saudi dissident now living in Quebec who goes through the events that led up to Kashouggi’s murder that involved a social media campaign against the journalist within a country where 80% of the population is on Twitter (!).
This is another fascinating doc by Fogel that I’m sure some will be more interested in due to its subject, but when it comes to investigative pieces that really take a deep dive into news from the headlines, Fogel has created another unforgettable doc. (Also, it was absolutely little surprise to me that Fogel’s film is co-written by Mark Monroe, who has been involved with some of the best docs I’ve seen over the past 15 years or so… just look up his IMDB credits!)
Opening at the Film Forum Virtual Cinema in New York for a one-week qualifying run is Russia’s movie for Oscar consideration, Andrei Kochalovsky’s DEAR COMRADES! (NEON), a black and white dark dramedy set in 1960s Kruschchev-era Russia. It involves a strike by locomotive workers when the government raises food prices, leading to chaos and a massacre that leaves a Communist party loyalist, Lyuda (played by Julia Vysotskaya) who the film then follows. Unfortunately, I had a choice of either writing this column or watching this two-hour movie. I opted for the former (obviously) but I do hope to get to this later in the week and should be adding more on this movie once I do.
Also streaming in Film Forum’s Virtual Cinema starting next Wednesday, December 30, is Mario Monicelli’s 1960 film, The Passionate Thief.
Unfortunately, I also wasn’t able to get to Two Ways Home (Gravitas Ventures), In Corpore or Fire Will Come, which will open in Metrograph’s digital ticketing system.
Metrograph will also continue showing Tsia Ming-Liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn, Fruit Chan’s Made in Hong Kong, and lots of great programming over the holidays. It would be a great time to get yourself or a loved one a digital membership for just $50! (James Gray is also programming some of his own films like Little Odesssa and other favorites, like Richard Quine’s Strangers When We Meet, over the holidays.)
By the way, if you read this week’s column and have bothered to read this far down, feel free to drop me some thoughts at Edward dot Douglas at Gmail dot Com or drop me a note or tweet on Twitter. I love hearing from readers … honest!
#TheWeekendWarrior#Movies#Reviews#WonderWoman84#OneNightInMiami#NewsOfTheWOrld#PromisingYoungWoman#PiecesOfAWoman#SylviesLove Herself TomHanks
3 notes
·
View notes
Text
The Weekend Warrior Is Back!!! Raya and the Last Dragon, Chaos Walking and More
Welcome back to the Weekend Warrior!
This is probably going to be a little different from any of my previous columns, because New York City theaters reopen on Friday, and I swore that once they do, I would be writing about box office again. But this will also essentially be a previous column, so it will include reviews, it will include festivals and repertory series, and basically, whatever the hell I want to write about.
But let’s be realistic here. While there are a lot of movie theaters in New York City, not all of them will open, and they’ll all still have a capacity ceiling at 25% or 50 people in the larger theaters. Many of the larger multiplexes like AMC will be able to show films on two, three or more screenings to be able to make up for the limited capacity, but smaller theaters and those who have been doing well with the virtual cinema may remain closed. I know that the Angelika will be reopening to show some of the indies that haven’t had a theatrical release in NYC yet like Minari, and the IFC Center is reopening but with insanely strict protocols. (Don’t you DARE take off your mask even if you’re watching a three-hour movie! The good news is that they’re showing a lot of great movies on reopening including a comedy series that includes a number of Lynn Shelton movies.)
There’s also the issue of New Yorkers who are still petrified of being out in public, even those who have already been vaccinated and are possibly spending time in congregate settings that are just as likely to cause COVID spread than movie theaters. (I’m not gonna go on a rant about the egotistical and elitist film critics and journalists who have been ranting about movie theaters reopening for the past six months – for some reason, they think they’re as important as essential workers. Guess what, NAME REDACTED, you’re not.)
The big release of the weekend is the Disney animated movie RAYA AND THE LAST DRAGON, which will hit probably around 2,400 theaters on Friday as well as be available for a premium on Disney+. I honestly don’t know a ton about this premium streaming release, but this is the second one after last year’s Mulan, which came out (better sit down for this) six months ago!
This magical fantasy adventure centers around Raya (a teen girl voiced by Kelly Marie Tran), who is trying to save her world that has been relegated to dust by the destruction of a valuable magical gem that contains destructive spirits imprisoned there by the legendary dragons. When Raya finds the last dragon, Sihsu (voiced by Awkwafina), the two of them must travel across the land collecting the separated pieces of the gem to reassemble them and restore their world. Raya is thwarted along the way by her arch-nemesis Namaari (Gemma Chan) who wants to reunite the gem pieces to help her own city of Fang.
(Raya is preceded by the animated short Us Again, which is a nice wordless short about a cranky old man who reflects back on his younger days dancing with his wife. It’s okay, nothing particularly memorable.)
Raya and the Last Dragon, on the other hand, is pretty wonderful, a mix of action, adventure, magic and humor, directed by Don Hall (Big Hero Six) and Carlos Lopez Estrada (Blindspotting) in a way that blends those disparate elements in fun ways. I’ll freely admit that I was a little worried that Akwafina’s schtick was going to annoy me, but after a while her wise-cracking dragon grows on you. In fact there are actually so many other funny characters to add to the laughs that the more brought in the mix on Raya and Sihsu’s journey, the more enjoyable the film gets.
One of the reasons the film works as well as it does is that unlike last year’s Onward, it wasn’t just the two characters and what they had to offer but how their situation changes as it goes along and they visit different cities. I was pretty surprised by how well the film keeps you entertained and invested in the journey.
I also absolutely loved the score by Thomas Newton Howard, which may be even better than his score for News of the World, which I honestly think he’ll get another Oscar nomination for. This is a film that explores all sorts of emotions as well as its Southeast Asian myths, so I feel that I was always going to be a complete and total patsy for this movie since it combines a lot of things I like such as fantasy and Asian mythology. In that sense, Raya is also a nice companion to the recent Mulan, which made my Top 10 last year, but sadly never even got a nominal theatrical release.
So let’s talk about box office, something I haven’t done in almost a year. Last weekend, Warner Bros’ Tom and Jerry had a fairly spectacular opening of $13.7 million. Raya is the first new wide release Disney movie since Pixar’s Onward literally a year ago. That ended up opening to $39 million in 4,310 theaters but only grossed $61.5 million domestic after its legs were cut short by COVID one week later. Raya will likely open in about 2,500 theaters by comparison and that’s with limited capacity for safety, but it should fare decently against the second weekend of Tom & Jerry, and I could easily see it bringing in $15 million or even as much as $18 million, but again, we’re in the baby steps part of the reopening, and things are going to start slowly and keep building as the vaccine continues rolling out.
Being released theatrically by Lionsgate this Friday is CHAOS WALKING, the adaptation of Patrick Ness’ future-set young adult novel The Knife of Never Letting Go, which stars Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley. Holland plays Todd Hewitt, a young man living in a world with no women where men’s thoughts can be perceived by everyone around them. One day, he discovers a mysterious girl named Viola (Ridley), when she crash lands on this planet but her very presence puts Viola’s life in danger, so Todd agrees to accompany her to find her own people.
Yeah, where do I even begin with the latest film from director Doug Liman that was probably filmed two or three years ago and was being delayed even before COVID came along? That’s already a bad sign, but when see how “The Noise,” the way that we hear all of characters’ thinking emerges, it immediately feels like it’s gonna be a problem. Sure enough, it’s such an awkward plot device to watch smoke billowing from the heads of the various characters as we hear their thoughts that it takes most of the movie to get used to it, and yet, it’s still so comically inept a concept that you can’t help but laugh when Holland continually rants, “My Name is Todd Hewitt,” over and over to keep Ridley’s Viola to hear his pubescent teen boy thoughts on experiencing his first girl.
The thing is that the scenes with just Holland and Ridley aren’t bad, but when you have a movie with actors like Mads Mikkelsen, David Oyelowo, Demian Bechir and Cynthia Erivo, it’s disappointing that they can’t elevate the movie above anything other than the most obvious sci-fi (and Western) pastiches. Mikkelsen is the town mayor who is so obviously another bad guy, that he doesn’t bother to put too much into his performance cause we’ve seen him do it so many times before.
Liman is more than a competent filmmaker but he clearly is unaware of how watching clouds pool around the heads of characters as we hear and see their thoughts become material, and even the introduction of the particularly silly-looking aliens – called, get this, the “Spackle” -- makes you forget that this is a sci-fi film from the director of Edge of Tomorrow (or whatever it ended up being called). It’s not even particularly surprising when we find out what really happened to the women in Todd’s community.
I have a feeling that the problems within Chaos Walking come straight from the Patrick Ness source material and the fact that he decided to adapt it himself may have made him tone-deaf to how hard it is to make the film’s central premise work without eliciting guffaws even from the most dedicated or devout fans.
This is also opening in IMAX theaters this weekend, and when it comes to New York, that might be the ideal way to see it (if you so choose) since it’s generally bigger theaters with a maximum of fifty people. Honestly, I don’t think Chaos Walking will make more than $5 million this weekend even in what should be over 2,000 theaters and with the presumed star power of Holland and Ripley from their franchise work. This could be seen as counter-programming from the animated movie, although any teens ready to go back to the movies might stick with Raya as well. Honestly, how this didn’t end up getting dumped to streaming compared to some of this weekend’s better movies is beyond me.
Offering a bit of indie counterprogramming for the two (relatively) big studio movies is Eddie Huang’s BOOGIE, the directorial debut of the Fresh Off the Boat producer, being released by Focus Features into who knows how many theaters? (1,000 or less, I’d Imagine.) It’s a coming-of-age movie starring Taylor Takahashi as Alfred “Boogie” Chin, a Queens high school basketball ace who dreams of one day playing in the NBA but whose temper gets him in trouble with the scouts for college where he’s hoping to get a scholarship.
I was kind of looking forward to this one, because I generally enjoy Fresh Off the Boat, and I’m interested in what stories Huang has to offer as a filmmaker. The film has its merits but it’s not necessarily Takahashi, who isn’t strong enough to really keep the viewer’s interest.
On the other hand, Huang was wise to cast the amazing Taylour Paige (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom) as Boogie’s love interest and even better than both is Pamelyn Chee as Boogie’s “Tiger Mom” mother who is sugary sweet when it comes to wooing possible recruiters but also is a complete nightmare to his ex-con father (Perry Yung).
Thinking back on the movie, I definitely didn’t hate it as there were character relations and dynamics I enjoyed, but not all of it clicked with me, and it’s hard to imagine this one connecting with audiences as well as some of the other movies out this week, unless you’re into college hoops, which I am not.
As far as box office, I’m not sure this will be in more than 1,250 theaters (if even that) and even if it plays in New York City (where it would normally find its biggest audience), I just don’t think there’s much awareness for the movie out there. In fact, I see it only playing in one movie theaters in NYC, and that’s way up in Harlem, presumably hoping to get the street ball fans, but I’m not so sure too many up there will be interested in an Asian-American story, so honestly, I don’t think this will make more than $500,000 or $600,000 tops.
Besides the reopening of movie theaters, the other big excitement this week is the launch of Paramount+, the relaunch, spin-off, rebranding of CBS All Access that I had also been considering checking out. It will launch on Thursday, March 4, with the animated family movie THE SPONGEBOB MOVIE: SPONGE ON THE RUN, which was supposed to be released by Paramount Pictures last year and did get a bit of a theatrical release in Canada while theaters were open there last year. This one involves SpongeBob and his buddy Patrick trying to retrieve SpongeBob’s beloved pet snail Gary, who has gone missing.
I generally enjoyed the first to SpongeBob movies, even though I never watched the show, and the regular creators and voice actors always seem to step up their game in terms of the wackiness whenever they’re given a chance to bring the lunacy to the big screen. In this case, it comes in the form of some of the guests including Snoop Dog and Danny Trejo in an odd Western section complete with musical number or Keanu Reeves introduced in the same section as a tumbleweed named Sage. (Oddly, this also features Awkwafina providing the voice of a robot, and I kind of liked her in more of a subdued role like this.) Although SpongeBob and his friends are CG animated, the movie doesn’t try too hard to integrate the live action in as fluid a way as last week’s Tom and Jerry – live actors just kind of show up – but it’s still pretty darn entertaining to watch another movie in which everyone involved, including director Tim Hill (who shockingly directed last year’s awful The War with Grandpa!), just going about making the movie as crazy and wacky as possible, something that should appeal to kids and… THC-laced adults (preferably not those watching with kids) … to get an overall enjoyable experience. Maybe it’s no surprise that I was particularly tickled with SpongeBob and Patrick’s adventures in Las Vegas.
Along with that, the streamer will have a new animated series called KAMP KORAL: SPONGEBOB’S UNDER YEARS, which is a CG-animated series that focuses on SpongeBob and friends when they were younger, which actually is one of the funnier bits in the movie as well.
There’s a lot of great stuff coming to Paramount+ that should make it a real player in the streaming world, and that includes all of the Paramount movies that will be streaming on it, both those that are getting a theatrical release this year and the studio’s absolutely vast library over the past 100 or so years.
And that’s not all! This weekend also sees the release of the sequel thirty years in the making, COMING 2 AMERICA, which will launch on Amazon Prime Video on Friday (after being sold to the streamer by Paramount, oddly), so yeah, there’s plenty of options to keep people home this weekend even with theaters reopening.
Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall are back as Prince (now King) Akeem of Zamunda and his trusty aide Semmi, and in fact, almost every character and actor from the movie has returned, as the duo return to America to find Akeem’s illegitimate son Lavelle (Jermayne Fowler) in queens, hoping to teach him the Zamundan way so he can take over as King after him. Unfortunately, Lavelle is joined in Zamunda with his family which includes mother Leslie Jones and uncle Tracy Jordan.
Unfortunately, reviews are embargoed until Thursday, so I’m not sure I’ll get to review this one, but I did like the movie, more than I thought because my rewatch of the original 1989 movie led me to believe there was a good reason I hadn’t watched it in over thirty years. The sequel offers a lot of originality and humor in the forms of Leslie Jones and Tracy Jordan, but that’s all I’ll say about it for now.
Incidentally, you can check out an interview I did with director Craig Brewer over at Below the Line AND I also talked to the film’s make-up team, and after you see the movie, you’ll understand why I’m holding it until after people have seen the movie.
Another movie that would probably have gotten a theatrical release but now will be seen on Hulu is the Joe Carnahan-directed BOSS LEVEL, reteaming him with long-time collaborator Frank Grillo as a man who cannot die, because he’s living in a single day that’s being repeated over and over as he takes on a series of assassins sent to kill him.
This as a really fun action-comedy that never lets down in terms of either half of that genre, and it’s kinda groovy to see Mel Gibson playing a fairly key role since he became the master of that action genre with the Lethal Weapon movies. But this really is Frank Grillo’s show as a leading man, and while I can understand some thinking him not having enough charisma for that sort of thing, I respectfully disagree.
We get into this high-concept premise pretty quickly as we watch his character, Roy Pulver, take on a string of assassins for his over 100th attempt to do so, and as per the title, it is a lot like a video game where Roy has to defeat all of the assassins on his way to the big boss, Gibson’s The Colonel. Apparently, Roy’s wife Gemma (Naomi Watts) has been killed by the Colonel or his thug (Will Sasso) so Roy is now on a quest for revenge. But first he has to survive the onslaught of killers, all of whom he’s given cute nicknames.
Easily my favorite of the killers is Selina Lo’s Guan Yin, a feisty swordswoman who proves to be the most formidable opponent for Roy. I won’t say how he bests her, but it does involve Michelle Yeoh, who has such a strange nothing appearance in one section of the movie, you wonder what she’s doing there. In fact, the movie does hit a slight lull after the initial concept is introduced, but it
Listen, I’ve long been a fan of Carnahan’s dark sense of humor and to some, it might seem mini-spirited, to me it harks back to one of my favorite movies he directed, Smokin’ Aces, a similar movie with a crazy ensemble cast, though maybe a slightly smaller budget. Still, Carnahan is a terrific action director, which makes this one of the stronger action movies in a while, and he finds a way to take a fairly simple premise and make it bigger in that Roy’s dilemma turns into something where he has to save the world, but also something more emotional and personal as he tries to bond with his son before said world ends. I guess in many ways, it’s hard to put into words what makes Boss Level so special, but I can only hope that Ryan Reynold’s Free Guy is as good as this after being delayed so many times, because this will be a tough act to follow for sure.
Over at the Metrograph, still closed physically unfortunately, they’re doing a series this week called “David Fincher/Kirk Baxter” which looks at the relationship between the director and his frequent editor, showing a series of movies over the course of the week: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Social Network
The Metrograph has a lot of movies as part of its digital membership (just $5 a month) including Chloé Zhao’s very first film, Songs My Brother Taught Me, which was available to members through Wednesday night. (Sorry, I tweeted about it multiple times if you missed it.)
This week also launches the 26th annual “Rendezvous with French Cinema” up at Film at Lincoln Center, which was actually one of the LAST events to happen up there LAST year. This year, they’re keeping things safe by holding it virtually. It runs from March 4 through March 14, kicking off on Thursday with Sébastien Lifshitz’s Little Girl, which will be released by Music Box Films in the Fall. There’s a lot of fairly recent French films with an all-access pass available to rent all 18 films for $165. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen anything, so can’t really recommend anything but I’ll probably be checking out the free talk “How Music Makes the Film” on Monday, March 8.
Margaret Qualley (Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood) and Sigourney Weaver star in Philippe Falardeau’s MY SALINGER YEAR (IFC Films), based on Joanna Rakoff’s book. Set in New York of the ‘90s, Qualley plays Joanna, a grad school student who dreams of becoming a writer who gets hired as an assistant to literary agent Margaret (Weaver), whose biggest client is J.D. Salinger. Although Joanna’s role is more of a glorified secretary, she gets to go through Salinger’s fan mail from around the world, and she decides to start answering some of the letters to the author, an experience that helps her find her writers’ voice.
I wasn’t sure if this movie would be for me, but I find Qualley to be quite delightful, and this was a light film with a comedic tone from the Canadian filmmaker of the boxing movie, Chuck, and the Oscar-nominated Monsieur Lazhar. I enjoyed its look at the New York literary world of the 1990s, and it kept me quite invested even if I’m not particularly invested in Salinger’s work or an obsessive with The Catcher in the Rye as many are. Weaver is also fantastic as Joanna’s boss – think of a lighter version of Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada – and also enjoyed the tentative relationship between Joanna and her writer boyfriend Don, played by Douglas Booth.
Basically, Falardeau has created another generally wonderful and crowd-pleasing movie that sadly missed its opportunity at a festival run to build an audience after debuting at the Berlinale almost exactly a year ago. Presumably, this will open at the reopened IFC Center this weekend. (In fact, IFC Center released its reopening schedule and it’s a pretty cool mix of IFC Films movies from the past as well as some of the Netflix movies that weren’t released in NYC previously.)
Okay, let’s get to some other releases from the week, beginning with Ivan Kavanagh’s SON (RLJEfilms/Shudder), the latest film from the Irish director of The Canal, a fantastic horror film that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival about seven years back. In this one, Andi Matichak from Halloween plays a single mother whose son David (Luke David Blumm) suffers from all sorts of maladies but when she starts getting closer to a local detective (Emile Hirsch), he discovers that there’s a lot more to her past and to her son’s ailments.
Honestly, I do not want to say too much about the plot, because there are so many shocking surprises in the movie once you think you know where it’s going, although I will say that it has connections to films like The Lodge and shows like Servant, but it also does a good job fucking with the viewer’s head, so you never know what’s really happening and what might be in the characters’ heads.
I will say that the movie is very dark and quite disturbing with lots of gruesome gory sequences, but if you’re a fan of smart horror, you’ll want to check out Son. (I’ll have an interview with Kavanagh over at Below the Line next week.)
Sony Classics is finally releasing Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw’s doc THE TRUFFLE HUNTERS (Sony Classics), which has been playing on the virtual festival circuit all the way back to Sundance last year, so we’ll see how many people are left to see it. It’s set in the forests of Piedmont, Italy where a handful of 70-to-80-year-old men are on the hunt for the rare white Alba truffle, which has resisted all modern science to be cultivated.
For whatever reason, I procrastinated on watching this movie for most of last year, maybe because I’m not that big a fan of cinema verité docs, but this is infinitely entertaining between the various men featured – including a lot of real characters in there – and how the movie shows their close bond with their truffle-sniffing dogs. This is a genuinely enjoyable movie that I feel can appeal to a wide range of viewers, although be aware that is in Italian, so maybe one should consider that even with the cute dogs, this should probably be watched by teen or older rather than small kids. (I don’t remember anything particularly racy, but the movie is Rated PG-13.)
Staying in the dog realm, Magnolia Pictures is releasing Elizabeth Lo’s documentary STRAY on Friday, which documents the life of Zeytin, a stray dog living on the streets of Istanbul, and some of his dog frenemies. Actually, this was a pretty wonderful film that I quite enjoyed, although there were a few dog fight sequences that disturbed me a little bit. But it’s a great look at Turkey through the eyes of some of the canines on the street, how they interact with the humans around them. Essentially, Stray is the dog version of Kedi, but I’ve seen other similar docs like this including Los Reyes – this one is just as strong as either of those movies, the images of all the beautiful dogs accompanied by gorgeous string music by Ali Helnwein that helps you understand the dogs’ complex emotions. Seriously, if you like dogs, you can definitely do worse than the previous two movies mentioned. Stray is available via Virtual Cinema, including that of the Film Forum.
Filmmaker and EDM artist Quentin Dupieux (Rubber) is back with his latest, KEEP AN EYE OUT (Dekanalog), starring Belgian comedian Benoît Poelvoorde as police officer, Commissaire Buran, investigating a guy (Grégoire Ludig) who has discovered a dead body in a puddle of blood outside his apartment building. The prime suspect is then left alone with a one-eyed rookie, and if you’ve seen any of Dupieux’s other films, you’ll probably know to expect the unexpected as things get crazier and crazier. (I seem to remember seeing this last year at some festival, maybe FantasticFest, but I’ll have to watch again before remembering if this was one of Dupieux’s movies that I liked.) This will be available in select theaters and also in virtual cinema this Friday. (Oddly Dupieux’s last movie, Deerskin, debuted at last year’s “Rendezvous with French Cinema” right before theaters shut down for a year, and I don’t want to be superstitious, but yeah, I’m worried.)
Barnaby Thompson’s Ireland-set crime thriller PIXIE (Saban/Paramount) stars Olivia Cooke (Sound of Metal) and Alec Baldwin with Cooke playing Pixie Hardy, a young woman who wants to avenge her mother’s death by pulling off a heist that will allow her to leave her small town. The crime goes wrong, and she’s forced to team up with a group of misfits including Baldwin’s Father McGrath.
Bradley Parker’s action-thriller THE DEVIL BELOW (Vertical) deals with a team of researchers who are investigating a series of underground coal mines in Appalachian country that have been on fire for decades where they discover a mystery. It’s getting a combined theatrical, VOD and digital release Friday.
Phil Sheerin’s directorial debut THE WINTER LAKE stars Emma Mackey (Sex Education) as Holly, a young woman with a secret that’s uncovered by her unstable neighbor Tom (Anson Boon from Blackbird) and the two of them are pulled into a confrontation with her father, who wants to keep the family secret buried. This will be in select theaters on Friday, On Demand on Tuesday, March 9 and then on DVD March 23.
Dylan McCormick’s SOMETIME OTHER THAN NOW (Gravitas Ventures) stars Donal Logue and Kate Walsh, Logue playing Sam who is stranded in a small New England town after his motorcycle crashes into the ocean seeking refuge at a run-down motel run by Walsh’s Kate, a similarly run-down and lost soul. When Sam learns that his estranged daughter Audrey, who he hasn’t seen in 25 years, lives in the town, he starts to learn more about why he ended up there.
Jacob Johnston’s DREAMCATCHER (Samuel Goldwyn) stars Travis Burns as Dylan aka DJ Dreamcatcher who meets up with two estranged sisters at the underground music film festival, Cataclysm, where they become entrenched in 48 hours of violence and mayhem after a drug-fueled event. Sounds delightful.
Some of the other VOD stuff hitting the ‘net this week include: 400 Bullets (Shout! Studios), Sophie Jones(Oscilloscope), Dementer (Dark Star PIctures), Black Holes: The Edge of All We Know (Giant Pictures)
That’s it for this week. Next week, theaters hopefully will remain open, and we’ll have some new movies to write about.
1 note
·
View note
Text
The Weekend Warrior 12/4/20 – HALF BROTHERS, THE PROM, I’M YOUR WOMAN, BLACK BEAR, LUXOR, ANOTHER ROUND, ALL MY LIFE, NOMADLAND, MANK and Much More!
I hope everyone had an absolutely wonderful Thanksgiving. Mine was relatively uneventful, and I only spent most of my time watching movies. And holy shit, there are a LOT of movies out this week, but at least a few of them I’ve already seen and reviewed, and there are others that are actually pretty good, so I might as well get to it, hm?
First up is this week’s Focus Features theatrical release, HALF BROTHERS, a buddy road comedy directed by Luke Greenfield (Blue Streak, Let’s Be Cops) that’s fairly high concept but also with quite a bit more depth than the director’s previous movies. It stars Luis Gerardo Méndez as Renato Murguia, a wealthy Mexican businessman whose father left him to come to America when Renato was just a child. Just as Renato is about to get married while having issues connecting to his future stepson Emilio, he gets a call that his own father is dying, so he begrudgingly goes to see him. Once there, Renato’s dying father sends him on a scavenger hunt to find someone named “Eloise” with his annoying slacker half-brother Asher (Connor del Rio), because that will provide all the answers Renato is looking for on why his father never returned from America, remarried and had another son. What could possibly go wrong?
If you’ve seen any of the ads for Half Brothers, you may already presume that this is a fairly high-concept buddy road comedy that is constantly going for the zaniest and craziest of laughs. That probably would only be maybe 25% of the movie. Instead, this fairly mainstream comedy finds a way to take a very common comedy trope and throw in enough heartfelt moments that you can forgive the few times when it does go for low-hanging fruit. We’ve seen so many movies like this where two guys (or sometimes ladies, but not as often) are paired with one having zero patience or tolerance for the other, who is beyond aggravating to them. (Planes, Trains and Automobiles is one of the better ones.) Obviously, Renato fits snugly into the first category, and Asher could not be more annoying, very early on stealing a goat for no particular reason.
The Mexican angle and the fact that a lot of the film is in Spanish – Focus getting into Pantelion territory here? – does add to make Half Brothers feel like more of a personal story than we might normally see in this kind of movie, touching upon the immigrant experience, from the viewpoint of a low-paid worker as well as a well-to-do industrialist. It also deals with things like fatherhood and brotherhood and what it means to be one or both, so everything ultimately connects far better in the end than some might expect. I also want to give the filmmakers credit for putting together a cast of mostly unknown or little-known actors and getting such great results out of them.
On the surface, Half Brothers seems like just another buddy comedy, but underneath, it’s a heartfelt and emotional journey that touches in so many ways and ends up being quite enjoyable.
Another movie opening nationwide this Friday is ALL MY LIFE (Universal), starring Jessica (Happy Death Day) Rothe as Jennifer Carter and Harry (Crazy Rich Asians) Shum Jr. as Solomon Chau, whose wedding plans are thrown off when he is diagnosed with liver cancer. They realize they have to get married sooner since he might not live to make their planned date, so their friends launch a fundraiser so that they can get married in two weeks. The movie is directed by Marc Meyers (My Friend Dahmer), who is a more than capable filmmaker with this being his third movie in the last two years.
Now that I’ve actually seen the movie… I’ll freely admit that this is not the kind of movie I usually have very high expectations for, and maybe that’s because I’ve already been burnt twice this year with real-life romantic dramas, first with the faith-based I Still Believe in March and then more recently with Two Hearts. In both cases, I could count the issues and why they failed to tug at the heart strings as they were meant to do. Even though I’ve generally enjoyed Meyers’ past movies, I wasn’t even sure he could pull off this type of studio romance movie without having to cowtow to the corny clichés that always seem to slip in – or at least find a way to make them more palatable. (And let’s be realistic. This is the kind of movie that snobby film critics just LOVE to trash.)
First of all, Meyers already has two truly fantastic leads working in his movie’s favor. I’ve been a true Jessica Rothe stan ever since seeing her kill it in Happy Death Day and its sequel. Shum is perfectly paired with her, and the two of them are so good from the moment they first meet and we meet them. In every scene, you feel like you’re watching some of that rare on-screen romantic chemistry that’s so hard to fake. Their relationship is romantic and goofy, and you’re just rooting for them all the way through even if you do know what’s to come.
Eventually, Sol does fall ill, and it does lead to some more dramatic and tougher moments between the couple, but all of it is handled so tastefully, including their need to raise money so they can have their wedding rather than waiting. I am living proof that people really do come together to step up when they see someone in real need, so I couldn’t even tut tut at something like their fundraiser getting so many people to chip in. On top of his two leads, Meyers has assembled such a great cast around the duo, the most recognizable being Jay Pharaoh from Saturday Night Live, everyone around Jess and Sol handles the requisite emotions with nary a weak link.
There’s just so much other stuff that adds to the enjoyment of watching All My Life from the use of Oasis and Pat Benatar in the soundtrack just to the quality storytelling that makes it all feel quite believable. These sorts of movies tend to be rather corny and the diehard cynic who doesn’t have an ounce of romance or love in their body will find things to hate.
All My Life finds its way into your heart by being one of those rare studio romance movies that understands how human emotions truly work, and there’s nothing corny about that. It’s a beautiful movie that entertains but also elicits more than a few tears. Watch it with someone you love.
This week’s “Featured Flick” is Chloe Zhao’s amazing film NOMADLAND (Searchlight), which I reviewed out of its Toronto International Film Festival premiere, but it’s (sort of) being released in theaters this week. It stars Frances McDormand as Fern, a woman living in her van as she moves from place to place taking odd jobs within a community of nomads. It’s another amazing film from the filmmaker behind The Rider, who will make her foray into the Marvel Cinematic Universe next year with The Eternals, which I’m just as psyched about. There’s no denying that McDormand gives a performance that’s a knock-out, even better than the one in 3 Billboards if you ask me, and there’s also a great supporting role for David Strathairn, who I’ve been hoping would have another role as good as this one. Zhao is just a fantastic filmmaker, and I’m glad to see that The Rider was no fluke.
Unfortunately, Nomadland is only getting a one-week Oscar qualifying run, and I’m not even sure where it’s getting that run since theaters in New York and L.A. aren’t even open yet. Maybe Searchlight will do some drive-in screenings like they did for the New York Film Festival and Telluride? It will get a stronger theatrical release (hopefully) on February 21, just to make doubly sure it qualifies for Oscars.
Opening in theaters this week before streaming on Netflix December 11 is Ryan Murphy’s adaptation of the Broadway musical THE PROM, the first feature film he’s directed in ten years. The multiple Tony-nominated musical is about a high school girl named Emma (newcomer Jo Ellan Pellman) who wants to take her girlfriend (Ariana DeBose) to their senior prom, but the head of the PTA (Kerry Washington) cancels the prom instead. The national outrage the situation creates gets the attention of a quintet of self-absorbed Broadway actors who decide to improve their PR by taking up Emma’s cause. Oh, yeah, and those actors are played by Meryl Streep, James Corden, Nicole Kidman, and actual Broadway stars Andrew Rannells and Kevin Chamberlin. What could possibly go wrong?
I’ve never had any sort of positive or negative gut reaction to Murphy’s work on television over the past few years, but I’ve definitely been mixed on the three movies he’s directed to date. I wasn’t a huge fan of his Eat Pray Love, though I vaguely remember enjoying his debut, Running with Scissors. Either way, he certainly has found his niche with musicals from Glee (a show I’ve never watched) and finding a musical like The Promseems to be a perfect fit between filmmaker and material.
Having not seen The Prom on Broadway – surprise, surprise -- I was a little worried that it was going to go down the path of nudge-nudge wink-wink inside Broadway path that helped Mel Brooks’ The Producers become a Broadway hit. That I saw, and I didn’t hate the movie based on it, although I’m by no means a total movie-musical stan. There’s some obvious older ones I love, some newer ones that others love but I hated – Rob Marshall is about 50/50 for me -- and you might be surprised by which of them I liked best.
What I thoroughly enjoyed about The Prom is that Murphy manages to truly surprise everyone watching it, whether it’s in Kerry Washington’s single song – who knew she had such an amazing singing voice? – or how enjoyable Keegan-Michael Key is as the school’s Principal Hawkins, who not only loves musicals but actually admires Streep’s two-time Tony-award winning Dee Dee Allen. Considering my frequent disdain for Streep’s over-confidence, knowing full well that she’s one of the best living actors working today, she’s actually pretty amazing in the role of what many must assume Streep is like in real life, which makes her character more than a little META. In some ways, I can say the same for Corden, who is pretty fantastic as Dee Dee’s frequent stage co-star Barry Glickman, who has his own connections to Emma’s plight having been disowned by his mother (Tracey Ullman, who only shows up for one brief scene late in the movie) when he came out to her. Corden has one dramatic moment so powerful I was taken quite aback.
Even with those two actors and Kidman likely to get much of the attention, there’s no denying that the romance between Hellman and Debose, and the three or four numbers they have together, makes up the true heart and soul of The Prom. So here you have this amazing cast, and it’s a musical made-up of very fun and quite catchy songs, and that’s long before you get to Andrew Rannells as out-of-work actor Trent Oliver, who practically steals the whole movie with his showstopper of a number, “Love Thy Neighbor.” And then watching Key holding his own with Streep, both musically and dramatically, you might start wondering, “What is going on here?”
Like I said before, it’s pretty obvious that Murphy has fully poured his passion of movie-musicals into every second of The Prom, and it shows on the face of everyone joining him on this adventure. As much as the subject at the film’s core is fairly serious and a hurdle that many gay kids across the world every day, it’s also quite funny. Kudos must be given to Murphy for being able to emphasize those moments as well as the more dramatic ones. Besides that, Murphy really takes advantage of being able to go to different locations, including a sequence on Broadway that could have been done during the pandemic (it actually was built on a soundstage), another number at an actual mall and even at a monster truck rally. It also doesn’t hurt that Murphy hired Matthew Libatique, a god-like cinematographer in my book, to film the movie either.
Like most musicals, The Prom might lose a little as it goes along, since it gets to be too much that goes on for too long, but then there are more than enough great moments to pull you back. It’s by far one of the stronger movie musicals I’ve seen in a very long time, and just the right feel-good experience we all need right now.
I’ve already reviewed David Fincher’s MANK – a few times, in fact – but if you’re in one of the places where it opened theatrically in November, you can finally see it on Netflix starting this Friday. This is the general problem with the way things are these days because even though this only opened a few weeks ago, I already feel that it’s been discussed and forgotten before most people will have a chance to see it. Anyway, if for some reason, you’ve managed to avoid things about the movie, it essentially stars Gary Oldman as Herman Mankiewicz, the Hollywood screenwriter who ended up co-writing Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane in 1940. The film follows Mankiewicz as he mingles with the Hollywood elite in the 30s, including billionaire William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance) and his young ingenue girlfriend Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried) who would be the influence for his Oscar-winning screenplay. I expect to be writing a lot about this movie as we get closer to Oscar season sometime next year.
Also on Netflix this week is Selena: The Series, starring Christian Serratos. It’s the kind of thing that I probably would never watch unless I have an excess of time, and as you’re about to learn from the rest of the column, that doesn’t happen frequently.
The third chapter of Steve McQueen’s “Small Axe Anthology,” RED WHITE AND BLUE, will debut on Prime Video this Sunday, starring John Boyega as Leroy Logan, a young black man who joins the Metropolitan Police after seeing his father assaulted by police and wanting to make a difference in the racist attitudes from within. You might remember that I reviewed this out of the New York Film Festival a couple months back, so not much more to say there.
A week from Sunday, on December 13, McQueen’s fourth film, ALEX WHEATLE, will hit Amazon, and guess what? I’ve already seen it, so I will review it now. How about that? Alex Wheatle is also a true story, this one starring Sheyi Cole as the award-winning young adult writer when he was a younger and just learning the ropes as a drugdealer/DJ in Brixton before his involvement in the 1981 Brixton riots gets him thrown in jail.
As with the other three movies in the “Small Axe Anthology” there are recurring elements and themes in Alex Wheatle, mostly about the way the immigrants to England from Jamaica and other islands are treated by “The Beast” aka what they call the Metropolitan Police. It does take a little time to get to that, as McQueen, working from a screenplay co-written by Mangrove’s Alaistar Siddons, takes a far more non-linear approach than the other three films. We first see Wheatle being taken into prison where he’s thrown into a cell with a constantly-shitting Rastafarian, but we then cut back to his schooling for a short sequence that reminded me of Alan Clarke’s Scum. Both in prison and in school, we see Alex being abused by classmates and head matron alike, and this portion of the film includes another one of arty moments of actor Cole laying on the ground eyes wide open staring for what seems to go on forever. In some ways, this sequence reminds me of McQueen’s fantastic early film Hunger, since it seems to be cut from similar cloth.
Eventually, Alex gets to Brixton and that’s where this chapter in “Small Axe” really takes off as we see how naïve and green he is while dealing with quite a tough crowd and trying to adjust to city life among the Rastafarian community.
As with the other “Small Axe” chapters, I love how McQueen and his team used reggae music to help set the tone and vibe for the episode, because like Baz Lurhman’s Netflix series The Get Down, the music is frequently a key to this biopic working so well. Of course, it’s also due to the performance by Cole and the actors around him that helps make you feel as if you’re seeing a real part of history.
As with Mangrove, this chapter culminates with an amazing recreation of the 1981 Brixton Riots, done in protest after a house party fire in New Cross that the police don’t bother investigating. The actual riots were a much bigger and scarier event going by Wikipedia which says that 279 police were injured and 56 police vehicles set fire, which makes it sound more like the ’92 L.A. Riots.
I’m not sure Alex Wheatle does as good a job explaining how the young man goes into prison as a DJ and comes out as an author, but like Red, White and Blue it’s still an important and inspirational story that adds quite a bit to the previous three “Small Axe” films.
And once again, here is my interview with McQueen from over at Below the Line.
Also, I should mention that Darius Marder’s excellent Sound of Metal movie, starring Riz Ahmed, hits Amazon Prime Video this Friday, too. Check out my review!
The magnificent Andrea Riseborough stars in Zeina Durra’s LUXOR (Samuel Goldwyn), playing British aid worker Hana who while spending time in the ancient city of Luxor, runs into her former lover Sultan (Karim Saleh), as she reflects on past decisions and her current uncertain situation.
I was quite interested in this one sight unseen, not only because it’s another great starring role for Riseborough. (Honestly, she is one of the best actors working today, and I strongly believe she is just one role away from being the next Olivia Colman, who had been amazing for years before everyone in America “discovered” her in The Favourite and then The Crown… which I still haven’t watched! ARGH!). I was a little anxious about the movie, having seen Rubba Nadda’s Cairo Time, starring Patricia Clarkson and Alexander Siddig, which seemingly had the exact same plot.
Durra is a much more capable and confident filmmaker and there’s a lot more overall value in watching Riseborough exploring Egypt as Durra quietly allows Hana’s story to unfold through her interactions with others, as well as her time alone, often languishing in one luxurious hotel room or another. Then there are the quiet and sometime awkward scenes between her and Saleh, the two of them having been lovers when they were both much younger. We also see Hana in far more vulnerable moments, so we know that she’s by no means actor, and it takes a great actor to really pull off such a dichotomy and bring such dimension to a character with so few words.
There’s something that’s almost comforting watching her dealing with emotions like loneliness in such a tranquil way. I’d even go so far to say that Luxor works in many ways similar to Nomadland, which obviously is getting the far more high-profile release with lots of festival love long before its actual release. Like that movie, Durra’s film benefits from having masterful cinematography by Zelmira Gainza and an equally gorgeous score by Nascuy Linares, to boot.
Luxor is a quiet, beautifully-made film that really took me by surprise. It acts as much like a travelogue of the title city as it does a tourist’s map to what it must feel like being a woman very much on her own in a foreign land.
I also spoke with Luxor filmmaker Zeina Durra, an interview that will be up at Below the Line hopefully sometime later this week.
With all the talk about Aubrey Plaza in Happiest Season (now on Hulu!), this would be a great time to release another one of her indies that played at the Sundance Film Festival this year, right? What can possibly go wrong?
In Lawrence Michael Levine’s BLACK BEAR (Momentum Pictures), Plaza plays Allison, an actor/filmmaker who arrives at the remote lake house of Christopher Abbott’s Gabe and his pregnant partner Blair (Sarah Gadon), to relax and work on a screenplay, only for the night to turn into philosophical discussions that transform into angry and even violent squabbles. In the second part of the movie, Gabe is the director, and Allison his actor wife, who thinks he’s sleeping with Blair, who is also acting in Gabe’s film.
That plot might seem a little vague, and I can’t exactly tell you whether there is much connection between the two parts of the movie other than it features the same three characters. The first half turns from a drama into a thriller before ending abruptly, while the second part is equal parts comedy and drama as we see a larger part of the world around the trio. In fact, the second part of Black Bear reminded me somewhat of Olivier Assayas’Irma Vep, one of my favorite movies, and that might be one of the highest compliments I can pay a movie.
But first, you have to get through the more quizzical and dramatic first part, which easily could have been done as a three-handed stageplay as we see the changing dynamics between the three people as things get crazier and crazier with one “Holy shit!” moment after the next. (It reminded me a little of Mamet or the play “Gods of Carnage,” although I only saw that as the movie version Carnage, directed by Roman Polanski.)
The fact the connection between the two parts is never explained might confound some people who were otherwise enjoying what is a pretty decent three-hander, but the common theme involves jealousy between the two women. Plaza is a fine dramatic actor when she wants to be, and Gadon is absolutely fantastic, which makes Abbot almost literally the odd man out, but the three of them just have great scenes together.
Black Bear is certainly an enigma of a movie, as much a mystery about what must be going on inside Plaza’s head during some of her softer and crazier scenes, but if you want to talk about range, this gives her so much material for her demo reel that no one could possibly doubt her as an actor again.
Thomas Vinterberg’s new movie ANOTHER ROUND (Samuel Goldwyn) reteams him with his The Hunt star Mads Mikkelsen for a comedy…. Ish… about a group of four middle aged Danish teachers who decide to hold an experiment to prove a theory that people only reach their maximum effectiveness and creativity when they’re .05% drunk. It starts out innocently enough but soon, the men are drinking heavily at school, leading to horrible and unfortunate side effects. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?
Even knowing Vinterberg’s knack for strange and twisted “comedies,” Another Round is definitely on another level, opening with a scene of drunken kids playing a drinking game that gets them so out-of-control drunk and rowdy. We then meet Mikkelsen’s Martin, a history teacher, whose rowdy seniors are so bored by his classroom technique that Martin is put in front of an inquisition of parents who think he’s going to make their kids fail their final exams. Martin’s home life isn’t much better with his wife Anika (Maria Bonnevie) or his own teen sons. Although Martin says he won’t drink when he has to drive, his friend Nikolaj (Magnus Millang) convinces him by announcing his theory about how everyone needs to always maintain a certain percentage of alcohol in their system. Over the course of the rest of the movie, we’re shown the alcohol level of our “heroes,” although most will see their behavior as some kind of synced-up middle life crisis. For Martin, it’s a breakthrough, as he starts feeling more confident and assertive towards his students, even trying to connect with them via their drinking activities, as seen in the opening montage.
Another Round is quite a different beast from The Hunt, because there’s a more humorous tone to the point where I could totally see an American studio trying to remake this with the likes of Will Ferrell and Adam Sandler, which would probably lose a lot of the poignancy of what Vinberberg was trying to achieve here. At one point, he throws in a montage of seemingly drunk world leaders, which is kind of amusing even if it’s not quite so apparent why it’s there. There’s a lot of really bad white guy dancing, too, for anyone who is into that sort of thing.
There is definitely a good amount of grief and sadness to the way this story resolves, although Vinterberg still finds a way to leave Martin in a place of joy with a closing scene that may surprise a lot of people. Another Round is another tremendous feather in the cap of the Vinterberg/Mikkelsen collaboration, and it will be in select theaters this Friday before going to digital on December 18.
Another Round will be in select theaters this Friday and then on digital December 18.
Fast Color director Julia Hart returns with I’M YOUR WOMAN (Amazon), once again co-written with husband Jordan Horowitz. It stars Rachel Brosnahan from The Amazing Mrs. Maisel (which I haven’t seen) as Jean, a woman unable to have a baby with her small-time crook husband Eddie. One night, Eddie brings home a baby for Jean, but then he quickly vanishes and Jean finds herself on the run with a stolen baby and one of Eddie’s accomplices, Cal (Arinzé Kene), and there are bad men wanting to question Jean about her missing husband’s whereabouts.
This is another movie where I really didn’t know what to expect, and having not watched Brosnahan on her award-winning show, I was watching this movie trying to figure out what all the fuss was about. It’s evident from the start that Hart/Horowitz were trying to make a ‘70s-set movie with all the trappings of ‘70s fashion and music, but when you throw in the crime element, it comes across a little too much like last year’s The Kitchen, which wasn’t very good but also wasn’t based on very good source material.
One would presume that the genre elements and a few scattered set pieces, like a shootout at a club, would be the main draw, but it’s almost 30 minutes before we even get any sort of plot, and that’s a big problem. An even bigger problem is that I’m Your Woman just drags for so much of the movie, and it’s pretty obvious that Hart-Horowitz were trying to create a ‘70s movie like some of the films by Scorsese and the movies John Cassavetes made with wife Gena Rowlands. By comparison, I’m Your Woman is stylized almost to a pretentious degree. Brosnahan does show a few glimpses of there being a good actor in there, but the material just really isn’t quite up to snuff. It also doesn’t help the movie to have the baby crying almost non-stop throughout.
Jean eventually pairs up with Cal’s woman Teri (Martha Stephanie Blake), her son Paul and Cal’s father (played by Frankie Faison), and this is when she learns more about Eddie’s life that she doesn’t know about. Eventually, things start to pick up in the last act, but the multiple problems Hart has with maintaining a steady pace or tone only mildly is made up for by her terrific DP and whoever put together the musical score. Essentially, the last 30 minutes of I’m Your Woman does make up for the previous 85 minutes, but it’s going to be very hard for many people to even get through how dull the movie is up until that point.
This is a week with some very fine docs, the first one being Weixi Chen and Hao Wu*’s cinema verité film 76 DAYS (MTV Documentary Films), which goes behind the doors of the Wuhan ICU Red Cross hospital over the first 76 days of the COVID pandemic after it hit the rural area of China. (*One of the film’s co-directors/cinematographers shot the film anonymously.)
Here I thought that Alex Gibney’s Totally Under Control would be the best or maybe even only movie about the pandemic released this year, but here we have a fantastic documentary that captures what it was really like in one Wuhan hospital as it was nearly overrun months before COVID started to rear its ugly head in the States. The film begins in January 23, 2020 and follows a number of cases as we watch the personnel, all decked out in head-to-toe PPE, trying to save lives and keep people calm while trying to struggle with all the stresses that come their way. There’s actually a little bit of humor in a cranky elderly man (clearly with some form of dementia) who keeps wandering around the hospital, frustrating his tenders, but there’s also a very moving story of a young pregnant woman who has contracted COVID, who ends up being separated from her baby after a Cesarian section.
There are moments early in the movie where you can see panic starting to set in as we see how out of control things begin, but the anonymous health care workers soon get things underhand and manage to find a way to deal with the panic that’s setting in. There’s no question that these doctors and nurses – many whose faces we never even see -- are the definition of frontline workers, trying to deal with this unknown virus without all the answers and solutions that have been discovered over the past ten months.
76 Days will open via the Film Forum Virtual Cinema as well as other places presumably.
I’m glad I had Dana Nachman’s DEAR SANTA (IFC Films) to watch after 76 Days, because I don’t think I could have handled another dark or deep movie after that one. This doc is all about “Operation Santa,” the amazing group of volunteers and adopters who receive the letters young kids write to the North Pole and go out of their way to fulfill the kids’ wishes.
I was a big fan of Nachman’s Pick of the Litter, so I’m thrilled to say that Dear Santa is just as wonderful and joyous, starting with a bunch of kids explaining Santa Clause enthusiastically, because they really believe in Jolly Saint Nick. Over the course of the film, Nachman profiles a number of Adopter Elves, who look through the letters written to Santa by unfortunate kids and pick a few to fulfill their wishes. A lot of them are in New York and Chicago where the program has led to a number of non-profits, but Nachman also goes to Chico, California where many of the families from Paradise, the town destroyed by fires in 2018, ended up relocation. One story of an Adopter Elf named Damion is particularly wonderful, since he, like many of those who get involved in the program, are trying to give back and pay it forward.
Operation Santa is such a great program and Dear Santa is such a wonderful movie, I challenge anyone to watch it and not tear up from how big their heart will grow while watching it.
Julien Temple’s doc CROCK OF GOLD: A NIGHT WITH SHANE MACGOWAN (Magnolia Pictures) is pretty self-explanatory from its title, but as someone who was never really a Pogues fan, I was almost as entertained by Temple’s film as I was by Alex Winter’s Zappa about a musician who I actually was a fan of. Temple uses MacGowan’s own narration to tell his story from growing up in Ireland, the early days of punk that led to the Pogues and eventually, mainstream success.
My absolute adoration of well-made music docs is fairly well-known at this point, and you can’t really get much better in terms of music doc makers than Julien Temple, who had his cameras rolling in the early days of punk, captured one of David Bowie’s more interesting mainstream phases and also made a very cool movie about The Clash frontman, Joe Strummer.
Although I never really cared for The Pogues, that’s probably because I didn’t know them from their rowdier days and more from their mainstream success from “Fairytale of New York” but Temple’s movie rectifies that with some amazing footage from the band’s earlier days. Even more impressive is the footage and pictures of MacGowan during the late ‘70s dancing in the audience at Sex Pistols and other punk shows. (Temple even interviewed MacGowan during this period in the ‘70s, then put the footage in the movie.) As MacGowan tells his own story about growing up in Ireland, Temple frequently uses varied animation to recreate the stories being told, and that does a lot to embellish the cartoon nature of MacGowan’s storytelling.
I still think MacGowan is a bit of an asshole -- I’m sure he’d agree with that assessment -- but Temple has found a way into this very difficult musician, sometimes using close friends like Johnny Depp (a producer on the film) and Bobby Gillespie from Primal Scream to try to get MacGowan to open up about as much as he ever might. Crock of Gold is certainly an eye-opening portrait of the Pogues frontman that surprisingly offers something to enjoy even for those who never got into his music, but it also shows another dimension to his many fans. If nothing else, it’s a fine testament to why Temple is one of the best music doc filmmakers.
Magnolia held a bunch of one-night only theatrical screenings on Tuesday and will have more on Thursday, but if you miss those, you can catch it On Demand/digital this Friday. (I also have a really enjoyable interview with Julien Temple over at Below the Line that you should check out.)
A.J. and Jenny Tesler’s doc MAGNOLIA’S HOPE follows four years in the life of their young daughter Magnolia (aka Maggie), who has Rett Syndrome. Maggie’s filmmaking parents talk about noticing her strange behavior and finding out that she had a genetic disorder that makes it harder for children to retain what they’ve learned in terms of movement but also might led to far worse disorders. It makes it almost impossible for her to communicate with her parents, which makes it heartbreaking but also quite inspirational that the parents would allow us into their very own difficult journey to try to get their daughter to use and develop all of the skills she learns by making her practice them every single day. The movie will be available to watch for the month of December on the streaming platform Show and Tell, but it’s such a personal movie and another one where I think it will be hard for many to watch without getting a little teary but more out of joy than sadness.
Also out this week is David Osit’s MAYOR (Film Movement), which follows Musa Hadid, the Christian mayor of Ramallah during his second term of office and determined to make his city a beautiful and dignified place to lived despite being surrounded on all sides by soldiers and Israeli settlements. It will open today at the Film Forum’s Virtual Cinema in New York after winning the Grand Jury Prize at the 2020 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival.
What there’s more? How about Braden R. Duemmler’s WHAT LIES BELOW (Vertical Entertainment), a thriller starring Ema Hovarth from Quibi’s Don’t Look Deeper as Liberty (aka Libby), a teen girl returning from camp only to learn her mother (Mena Suvari) has a hot younger boyfriend named John (Trey Tucker), who Libby soon begins to question whether he’s human. What could possibly go wrong?
I knew I was in trouble when Suvari is picking her daughter up from archeology camp (that’s a thing?) and I misheard her asking her daughter “Any nice digs?” (think about it), especially since Suvari is playing a stereotypically over-sexed cougar, something that becomes far more obvious once we meet her boyfriend that she’s been sexing up at her lake house. There’s certainly a danger of What Lies Below turning into a prequel to a Pornhub video, but thankfully, Duemmler gets away from the inappropriate sexuality inherent in John’s presence and into the weird behavior that gets Libby suspicious.
Sure, maybe calling the movie “My Stepfather is an Alien” would have been more apropos, and there’s elements of the movie that reminded me of the Tom Hanks’ movie The ‘burbs, and not in a good way. Even so, Hovarth, who really looks like Suvari’s daughter, does a fine job holding this together and keeping you invested in how things might pan out, as things get weirder and weirder and the movie eventually transforms itself into a halfway decent and creepy “body horror” flick.
Weird but well-done, What Lies Below is not even close to the worst thriller I’ve seen this year. That might seem like damning praise, but it’s the best I can do for this one.
Debuting on Shudder this Thursday is Justin G. Dyck’s ANYTHING FOR JACKSON (Shudder), a “reverse exorcism” movie in which a seemingly kindly couple, played by Sheila McCarthy and Julian Richings, kidnap a pregnant woman (Konstantina Mantelos) in hopes of getting the spirit of their grandson Jackson, who died in a car crash, and put him into her baby… with the help of demons. What could possibly go wrong? (If you hadn’t guessed, this is the theme of this week’s Weekend Warrior.)
I’ve been thoroughly impressed with the horror delivered by streamer Shudder this year, and Anything for Jackson is no exception. In fact, going over Dyck’s filmography, it’s kind of surprising how decent a horror filmmaker he is, because most of his other movies seem like Hallmark-style Christmas movies? Crazy. There are aspects of Anything for Jackson, written by Keith Cooper, who wrote some of those holiday movies for Dyck. I honestly can imagine the two of them making this movie just to be able to do something different, so they come into the horror realm with tons of fim making experience and easily transition into horror.
At the heart of this movie are McCarthy, Richings and Mantelos, who are all fine actors who do a great job selling the horrors but do just as well during the quieter dramatic moments. Not that there are that many of them, as Dyck/Cooper throw so many absolutely horrific moments at the viewer so that diehard horror fans will not be disappointed. Things shift into another gear when Josh Cruddas joins in as a Satanic cult leader they bring in to help them when they realize they’re out of their league. The results are something akin to Insidiousin terms of the types of demons and ghosts thrown at the viewer.
At times, Anything for Jackson was a little hard to follow, maybe due to its non-linear storytelling, but at least it has a substantial amount of decent replay value, since the demons and kills are so gloriously gory.
Eric Schultz’s dark and trippy sci-fi thriller MINOR PREMISE (Utopia) stars Sathya Sridharan as neuroscientist Ethan, who gets caught up in his own risky experiment involving memory loss when he becomes trapped in his home with his ex-girlfriend Allie (Paton Ashbrook), and he doesn’t remember how they both got there.
For his directorial debut, Schultz has taken the cerebral indie sci-fi film route that we’ve seen in other filmmaking debuts like Shane Carruth’s Primer, Darren Aronofsky’s Pi or Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko, and if you’re a fan of those movies, you’ll already know if this would be for you or not. This is also the kind of movie that really requires the closest attention and fullest focus, which is not something I’m great at right now. Because of that, I don’t have a ton to say about a film that does a good job pulling the viewer in with its intriguing premise.
Schultz is a pretty decent filmmaker and discovering Sridharan, who has done a lot of single-episode TV appearances but nothing major, is quite a coup since this is quite a solid showcase for the young actor. I wasn’t as crazy about Ashbrook, which makes it for a rather uneven two-hander.
Minor Premise is just fine, and I think some people will definitely like it more than I did. I definitely will have to watch it again when I’m not so distracted by ALL THOSE OTHER MOVIES ABOVE THAT I JUST FUCKING REVIEWED!
It will be in theaters, in virtual cinema, and digital/On Demand this Friday, so check it out for yourself.
And finally…
Director Dennis Dugan of Big Daddy and Happy Gilmore directs LOVE, WEDDINGS AND OTHER DISASTERS (Saban Films), a “Love American Style” rom-com anthology with a cast that includes Maggie Grace, Jeremy Irons, Diane Keaton and more. Grace plays Jessie, a fairly inexperienced wedding plan hired to orchestrate the high-profile wedding of Boston mayoral candidate (Dennis Staroselsky), and then… oh, you know what? I’ll leave the rest of the description to the review portion of our review.
We meet Grace’s character as she and her soon-to-be-ex boyfriend are skydiving, which goes horribly wrong as they end up fighting all the way down and crashing through an outdoor wedding, caught on a viral video that gets her dubbed the “Wedding Thrasher.” Imagine what a PR disaster that would be for mayoral candidate Rob Barton to have her planning his wedding, but Jessie quickly bonds with his fiancé Liz (Caroline Portu) and begins preparations. Meanwhile, Barton’s problematic brother Jimmy (Andy Goldenberg) has gone on a game show called “Crash Couples” (that’s hosted by no less than Dugan himself) and he allows himself to be chained to a Russian “lawyer” named Svetlana (Melinda Hill) who is actually a stripper. They’re willing to stick it out since the winner gets a million dollars.
Surely, that’s more than enough stories, right? Nope. Turns out that Jessie’s main competition to plan the wedding is a legendary caterer named Lawrence Phillips (Irons) who is set-up on a blind date with Diane Keaton, who is blind. Oy vey. Also, there’s Andrew Bachelor as Captain Ritchie, who gives humorous sightseeing tours of Boston via the Charles River in an odd land/water vehicle, but one day, he encounters a young woman with a glass slipper tattoo, and he becomes quite smitten. We’ll get back to him. Maybe. In fact, Duggan spends so much time setting up different stories and relationships without much connection that you wonder whether he can tie things up in the oh-so-predictable way these things normally go.
Although the movie starts out fine, and it’s actually not a bad role for Grace, as soon as Duggan introduces the game show, then we learn that Svetlana (real name Olga) is a tripper connected to the mob and they get involved, things just start going downhill very fast. Also, the idea that Keaton -- who I haven’t seen in a good movie in almost two decades -- would not think twice about playing a klutzy blind person. As soon as she shows up and immediately knocks over one of Phillips’ signature champagne glass fountains, I knew we were in for a very long haul. I didn’t even mention the other storyline involving a musician named Mack (Diego Boneta) whose band Jessie is trying to get to play the wedding – one of the multiple meet-cutes in the movie -- although Mack is squabbling with his bandmate Lenny (Jesse McCartney) who has a new Asian girlfriend who is intruding in their friendship. (I’m sure the fact her name is “Yoni” is meant as as Yoko Ono reference.)
Then on top of that, Dugan steals the gimmick from There’s Something About Mary, by constantly cutting back to Elle King and Keaton Simmons as they’re playing folksy songs in the park. Okay, the fact that Dugan wrote many of those pretty decent songs they perform is pretty impressive.
But the movie is very predictable, especially how it all comes together for the finale, which obviously has to take place at the wedding to which everything has been building up to.
Otherwise, Dugan’s film is maybe 20% an okay movie but the other 80%? Yeesh!! It’s about as romantic as a date with the Marquis de Sade, and it somehow manages to be an equal opportunity offender... in terms of offending blind people, Asians, Jews, Arabs, gay people and even strippers and Russian mafia. It took Dugan 14 years to get this passion project made, and it’s pretty obvious why.
As usual, there were a couple movies I didn’t have time to watch, but not quite as many as the ones I did make time to watch:
King of Knives (Gravitas Ventures)
End of Sentence (Gravitas Venture)
Billie (Greenwich)
Godmothered (Disney+)
Wander (Saban Films)
Music Got Me Here (First Run Features)
Stand! (Fathom Events, Imagination Worldwide)
HAM: A Musical Memoir (Global Digital Releasing)
In the Mood for Love (4k Restoration)
By the way, if you read this week’s column and have bothered to read this far down, feel free to drop me some thoughts at Edward dot Douglas at Gmail dot Com or drop me a note or tweet on Twitter. I love hearing from readers … honest!
#TheWeekendWarrior#Movies#Reviews#ImYourWoman#Mank#Nomadland#CrockOfGold#TheProm#BlackBear#Luxor#AnotherRound#HalfBrothers#AllMyLife
1 note
·
View note
Text
The Weekend Warrior 10/16/20: SYNCHRONIC, FRENCH EXIT, TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7, LOVE AND MONSTERS, HONEST THIEF, THE KID DETECTIVE and More!
After the last couple weeks, I really need a break, which is why I’m writing most of this in transit to Columbus, Ohio to see my mother, sister and all (or some) of the friends that I made during my sabbatical to the city seven years ago for cancer treatment.
On, and look... Variety wrote about the movie theater chains and NATO lobbying Governor Cuomo to reopen movie theaters, showing that there’s been no proof of any cases leading back to movie theaters. (And more from The Hollywood Reporter…) New York leads and the world follows? More like ED leads and the world follows. Been saying this shit for months now and putting up with all sorts of needless abuse for it.
This week’s “Featured Flick” is actually a movie coming to theaters on October 23, but since I’m not sure I’m writing a column next week, I’m gonna review it this week! Cool? The movie is SYNCHRONIC (Well Go USA), and it’s the follow-up to Aaron Moorehead and Justin Benson’s amazing sci-fi film The Endless from a few years back. This ome stars Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan as parademics in New Orleans who have been coming across a series of bodies that have died in gruesome ways, all connected by a designer drug they were all taking.
I’ll just say right from the start that I loved almost everything about this movie from the amazing performances by Mackie and Dornan to the entire look and tone of the movie, which shows the duo taking huge steps forward as filmmakers, particularly Benson as a screenwriter. Unfortunately, I’m not sure what I can say about the movie and its plot without spoiling other’s enjoyment. I will say that it involves a designer drug and time travel and Mackie’s character has something odd about his brain that makes him better suited to figure out what is happening to the victims than others might be. Also, Dornan’s character Dennis has family issues, particularly with his daughter Brianna (Ally Ioannides), who disappears mysteriously, but it’s so nice seeing Katie Aselton as Dennis’ wife, as well as in another movie out this week.
I’ll also say that people who watch this movie will inevitably make comparisons to the work of Alex Garland and maybe even the more-versed ones might see a little of David Cronenberg’s Videodrome in the film’s trippy nature. The thing is that the movie is super-smart, and it’s obvious that Moorehead and Benson must have done a lot of research to make every aspect of it feel authentic. It’s just amazing what this duo can do with a small fraction of the money that Christopher Nolan had to make Tenet, and yet, they can create a complex and unique premise that’s actually easy to understand. Things like the camerawork, the music and sound design all add to the amazing tone and the mood that the duo have created.
I also think it’s Mackie’s best role and performance in many years, maybe even going back to The Hurt Locker, so as a long-time fan, I’m glad he connected with Moorehead/Benson to show that he’s more than capable of leading a movie like this.
Again, Synchronic will be in movie theaters and drive-ins NEXT Friday, October 23, but I want to give you an advance heads up, because Synchronic is likely to be the most original sci-fi or genre film you see this year. If you can’t get to the drive-in and don’t feel comfortable going to a movie theater, then I’m sure it will be on digital soon enough, but you definitely shouldn’t miss it!
Next up is Aaron Sorkin’s THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO SEVEN, streaming on Netflix starting Friday and the movie I was most looking forward to seeing this week. I was such a huge fan of Brett Morgen’s Chicago 10 documentary, which opened Sundance in 2007, especially with how he recreated the court trials using animation and a talented roster of voice actors including Hank Azaria, Mark Ruffalo and Geoffrey Wright. Sorkin has just as an impressive list of actors for his version, including Mark Rylance, Eddie Redmayne, Sacha Baron Cohen, Frank Langella, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and many more.
If you don’t know about the protests outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago – you see, back in those days, the Democrats were the bad guys… how times have changed!! Those protests led to a number of arrests but a few years later, the federal government charged a number of individuals with inciting the riot. The accused include Black Panther leader Bobby Seale, played by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II from Aquaman and Watchmen, Abbie Hoffman (Cohen), FBI agent Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne), Jerry Rubin (Jeremy Strong), David Dellinger (John Carroll Lynch) and two more. The six white guys are defended by Mark Rylance’s William Kunstler, who faces the tough Judge Hoffman (Langella) who is not putting up with any guff from these young revolutionaries.
All of the characters are quickly introduced with a quick-cut opening montage with actual newsreel footage, but then we’re quickly moved to a meeting to the Attorney General (Keaton) with the trial’s prosecutor (Gordon-Levitt). From there, we’re right into the trial about 16 minutes into the movie, although Sorkin frequently cuts back to the actual day of the Chicago protest to recreate what happened as testimony is given. Probably the part that will have the most impact and resonance is the way Seale was mistreated compared to the others, getting so riled up at the judge that the judge orders him chained and gagged. The trial would end up taking place for almost 7 months even though the results were eventually overturned.
This really is perfect material for Sorkin, and maybe if I hadn’t seen Chicago 10 first, I would have been a lot more fascinated by the trial sequences, though Morgen did an equally great job working from the transcripts. Basically, what happened happened. Where Sorkin’s screenplay and film excels is showing what’s going on outside the courtroom, whether it’s the recreations or just conversations taking place between the plaintiffs. As might be expected from Sorkin, the screenplay is great with lots of fast talking, making for a movie that moves at a kinetic pace for its two hours.
If I had to pick a few of the best performances, I’d probably focus on Cohen’s Abbie Hoffman, which is more than just an accent, he and Strong’s Rubin bantering back and forth like a seasoned Vaudeville act; Rylance’s Kunstler is spot-on, and Langella is just great as the crusty judge, the film’s only true antagonist. I also appreciated John Carroll Lynch and in fact, all the performances, although I felt that with so many characters, Sorkin wasn’t able to give Bobby Seale the time his story truly needed. Still, I would be shocked if this isn’t considered a SAG Ensemble frontrunner.
Ultimately, The Trial of the Chicago 7 is a fine recreation of a certain moment in history that still feels relevant and timely fifty years later, even if it’s so heavy at times you either need to focus or, like me, watch it on Netflix in two sittings. I still liked Steve McQueen’s movie Mangrove that takes place in a similar era and also culminates in a trial just a little bit better.
Before we get to the rest of this week’s new movies, I have one last review from the New York Film Festival, and it’s the closing night film, FRENCH EXIT, from director Azazel Jacobs and writer Patrick Dewitt, who has adapted his own book. The film stars Michelle Pfeiffer as Frances Price, a Manhattan widow from wealth who discovers she has no more money, just as her son Malcolm (Lucas Hedges with longer hair than usual) has decided to marry his girlfriend Susan (Imogen Poots) though he hasn’t told his mother that yet. With no other options, Francis takes her son on a ship to live in Paris for a while at the home of one Mme. Renard (Valarie Mahaffey), an elderly woman who is a genuine fan of Francis and welcomes them as her guests.
This is one of those ensemble character dramedies that I wouldn’t even be able to begin to tell you why you should see it unless you miss seeing Pfeiffer in a semi-decent performance, but one that doesn’t do much as the film itself is so boring and insufferably pretentious most of the time I’m not sure I can even recommend it for that.
Jacobs and Dewitt previous made the movie Teri maybe ten years ago, and I was never really a fan, so I’m not sure why I thought that Dewitt adapting his own book would bear better results. Once Frances and Malcolm get to Paris, there’s just an influx of odd characters who show up, some who have more impact than others. I liked seeing Danielle Macdonald as a psychic medium the duo meet on the ship across the Atlantic who Malcolm bonks. She’s brought back when Frances wants her to conduct a séance to communicate with her late husband who she thinks is now inhabiting an omni-present cat. Like everything else, the relationship between Malcolm and Susan and how that’s affected by her meeting a new guy just never goes anywhere.
For the most part, the whole thing is just dull and uninteresting, and so pretentious it never really leads to anything even remotely memorable. I have no idea why the New York Film Festival would decide to close with this one. (Although the 58th NYFF is over, some of the movies will hit its Virtual Cinema soon, so keep an eye out! For instance, this Friday, FilmLinc begins a Pietro Marcello retrospective as well as showing his latest film Martin Eden in FilmLInc’s Virtual Cinema.)
Liam Neeson stars in Mark Williams’ HONEST THIEF (Open Road), a crime-thriller in which he plays Tom Carter, the uncaught robber behind 12 bank robberies who decides to settle down with Kate (Grey’s Anatomy) Walsh’s Annie Wilkins, who he meets while renting a storage space to hide all the money he’s stolen. After a year of things getting serious with Annie, Tom decides to retire so he calls the FBI and says he’s ready to give back the 9 million, but two crooked FBI agents (one played by Jai Courtenay, the other by Anthony Ramos) decide they’re going to take the money instead. Their plan to steal the money Tom’s trying to return leads to a number of deaths, including putting Annie in the hospital. When that happens, Tom has had enough, and honestly, there’s no one better at getting revenge than Neeson. (Did we mention that Carter is ex-Marine? I mean, of course he is!)
Many will go into Honest Thief expecting the typical Neeson action revenge flick ala Taken or maybe one of his high-concept thrillers, but Honest Thief isn’t nearly that exciting. It starts out fairly slow and dry with no real crime or action elements, although Williams does throw them in from time to time. The whole thing is pretty dry, and it’s a good 54 minutes before we get to the revenge aspect of the story and that’s after a lot of bad decisions being made across the board. Anyone who is still wondering how Jai Courtney has a career won’t be changing that decision by his turn as the villain, and it’s a lot odd when the movie tries to make a sympathetic character out of his partner, played by Ramos.
Regardless, any elements that make Honest Thief unique from other Neeson action movies are quickly tossed aside for the same usual cliches, and the action scenes aren’t even that great. While Honest Thief may not be an awful or unwatchable movie, it’s probably not the action movie you might be expecting from Neeson – more like a bargain basement The Fugitive with one plot decision that almost kills the whole movie.
Delayed a number of times and now dumped to PVOD (with minimal theatrical) is Paramount’s LOVE AND MONSTERS, which is written by the prolific Bryan Duffield (The Babysitter, Spontaneous), directed by Michael Matthews and produced by Shawn Levy’s 21 Laps Entertainment. In the movie, Dylan O’Brien plays Joel Dawson, a young man surviving the apocalypse with a small community after the government’s plot to blast a couple asteroids heading to earth backfires. Instead, it creates giant, carnivorous monsters out of the earth’s animals who eliminate 95% of the earth’s human population. (We learn all of this through a Zombieland-like animated prequel getting us up to speed.) Before the earth fell into disarray, Joel was in love with Jessica Henwick’s Aimee, but they were separated by the fateful events. Seven years later, they’re reconnected via radio and Joel has sworn to travel the 85 miles across the creature-covered wasteland to reunite with her. Hence, the title “Love and Monsters.” Get it?
I actually didn’t hate this movie, although it’s not really a family film or one meant for young kids, because it’s PG-13 for a reason, including mild violence i.e. people being chomped by monsters, and some sexuality. Dylan O’Brien does a decent job carrying it, but it relies just as much on the other people he meets, particularly Michael Rooker’s Clyde and his young ward Minnow, played by Ariana Greenblatt, the latter who is such a scene-stealer that it’s disappointing they’re only in the movie for a small chunk. They’re probably the funniest part of the movie.
I like giant monsters and these ones are certainly … interesting. They seem to have been toned down a bit maybe to be more kid-friendly, more like the kid-friend Godzilla than the terror we’ve seen in recent incarnations. There are also a number of great action set-pieces, and some good post-Apocalyptic ideas we haven’t seen, especially when Duffield’s dark sense of humor is able to come out and keep things fun.
Still, Love and Monsters is not a kids’ movie, and there’s something about it that might make people wish the filmmaker just went full-on R, because going further towards PG would have made even the best parts quite painful to get through. As it is, Love and Monsters is a suitably fine boy and his dog adventure – oh, did I mention the dog? – that would make a perfectly fine streaming movie.
We’ll get back to some of the other theatrical releases in a bit, but I wanted to get to two movies that were pleasant surprises, maybe because I went into them with absolutely zero expectations.
I wasn’t really sure what to think about Cooper Raiff’s SH#!%HOUSE (IFC Films) at first, maybe because it’s title is a little off-putting and not really particularly representative of what the movie is. Raiff himself plays Alex Malmquist, a fairly new arrival at his college but already missing home and his mother (Amy Landecker) and not really adjusting to the crazy college lifestyle as exemplified by his roommate Sam (Logan Miller). After a party at a frat called “Shithouse” (hence the title), Alex meets and connects with his dorm’s R.A. Maggie (Dylan Gelula) and the two spend the night bonding and hanging out.
Obviously, someone at IFC Films loves these platonic indie two-handers about people meeting and hanging out over the course of a night, because Shithouse is the second such movie after Olympic Dreams earlier in the year. They also must know that I’m a sucker for these kinds of semi-rom-coms, because just like with that other movie, I totally ate up everything Raiff was trying to do and say with his movie. The chemistry between the two leads is undeniable, and maybe it won’t be a surprise that Gelula also appeared in Raiff’s previous movie.
As with any relationship, things do come to an end, and this one crashes and burns in a very sad way for Alex the very next day. Maggie starts to pretend she doesn’t even know him, and she ignores his incessant texts saying how much he enjoyed their night together. Boy, I have been there back in my reckless and romantic days of youth.
At first, I wasn’t that into Raiff as an actor – remember what I’ve said about filmmakers casting themselves? – but Alex definitely grew on me. Gelula is absolutely amazing, and frankly, I can see someone “discovering” her in ten years and becoming a new Parker Posey, Kate Lynn Sheil or other similar indie ingenue.
The combination of the two is what makes Shithouse such a special experience, since their situations are quite relatable and Raiff does a great job with the characterization in his writing to make this quite enjoyable to see how things will resolve themselves.
I also wasn’t quite prepared for how much I’d enjoy Steve Byrne’s THE OPENING ACT (RLJEfilms), maybe because I was unfamiliar with Byrne, and as usual, I didn’t read the description of the movie before sitting down to watch it. If I did, I would have known that Byrne is a stand-up comic and presumably this movie is somewhat based on situations that have happened to him. It stars Jimmy O. Yang from Crazy Rich Asians (a great comic in his own right) as Willy Chu, a young comic who has always dreamed of making it in stand-up but instead, has been stuck trying to get slots at an open mic night, while holding down a day job working at an insurance company. One day, his friend (Ken Jeong) sets him up for an MC gig in Pennsylvania at the Improv where his idol Billy G (Cedric the Entertainer) will be performing, so Willy quits his job to pursue his dream.
Much of Byrne’s movie deals with Billy’s “adventure” in Pennsylvania with the club’s womanizing featured act (played by SNL’s Alex Moffatt) and trying to face the struggles of stand-up in hopes of getting to the next level. There have been better movies about the subject, like Mike Birbiglia’s Sleepwalk with You, but Byrne’s film is a nice addition, particularly because Yang plays such a likeable, benevolent character you want to see him do well even after he crashes and bombs on a Saturday night and is at risk of losing the Improv gig.
It’s obvious that Byrne pulled in a lot of favors from friends to get such a great cast of comics – even getting Whitney Cumming to make a cameo – but the likes of Bill Burr actually take on key roles, like Willy’s boss in that case. Moffatt is particularly hilarious expanding on some of his outrageous SNL characters to play a stand-up who actually does help Willy, even as he puts him in pretty awful situations. Cedric also gives another fantastic performance as Willy’s idol who gives him the cold shoulder at first but eventually comes around and offers him the mentoring that Willy needs.
The Opening Act isn’t anything particularly revelatory, but it is thoroughly entertaining, and a nice little indie that I hope people will discover for themselves, especially those who like (or perform) stand-up.
Edward James Olmos directs THE DEVIL HAS A NAME (Momentum Releasing) starring the great Oscar-nominated David Strathairn as almond farmer Fred Stern, who has been running his orchard for three decades with trusty second Santiago, played by Olmos himself. Things are going well until they notice that some of the trees are rotting. It turns out they’re being poisoned by the water that’s been sullied by crude oil run-off from the nearby Shore Oil rigs. Around the same time, an opportunist named Alex Gardner, played by Haley Joel Osment, offers Fred a very low-ball offer to buy the farm, though Fred suspects something is up, and sure enough, Shore Oil is responsible.
Another movie I didn’t know what to expect other than a few cursory elements is this movie “based on a true story” movie about the little farmer taking on “The Man.” In this case, Shore Oil is represented by Kate Bosworth’s Gigi Cutler, a tough exec. at the corporation who thinks their lawyers (one of them played by Katie Aselton!) can crush this local troublemaker. When Stern’s lawyer (Martin Sheen) sues the oil company for 2 billion, they need to start taking things seriously, bringing in a tough “fixer” played by Pablo Schreiber.
I’m not sure where to begin with this movie that certainly has noble intentions in telling this story but suffers from quite a few issues, mostly coming from the script. I was a little concerned once I knew the premise, because I was not a huge fan of Todd Haynes’ Dark Water from last year, although I did enjoy the Krasinski-Damon-Van Sant ecological venture, Promised Land. This one falls somewhere in between, and probably its biggest issue is that it tries to create some humor out of the erratic behavior of the characters played by Bosworth and Schreiber; both performances are so off-the-rails at times it regularly takes you out of Fred’s story. (Osment is also pretty crazy but at least he fits better into his role.) Strathairn is great and well-cast, and Olmos is equally good, and I imagine that it’s partially because many of their scenes are together, allowing Olmos to direct with his acting. Aselton and Sheen are also decent, especially in the courtroom scenes.
Oh, and did I mention that Alfred Molina plays the Big Boss, who is interrogating Cutler as a needless framing device? Yeah, there’s a lot of characters, and when you hold this up against something like The Trial of Chicago 7, it’s just obvious that the film has too many elements for any filmmaker to be able to juggle at once.
Because of this, The Devil Has A Name is an erratic real-life dramedy that’s too all over the place in terms of tone, it ends up shooting itself in the foot by trying (and failing) to be funny despite the serious subject matter.
Next up is 2 HEARTS (Silver Lion Films/ Freestyle Releasing), another movie based on a true story from the Hool Brothers, who I really wasn’t very familiar with. I assumed this was going to be a faith-based movie, and maybe in some ways it is, but not really. It essentially tells two stories set in different time periods that you assume will somehow be connected. Ooh, boy.
First, there’s Jacob Elordi of Euphoria and The Kissing Booth – neither of which I’ve seen, mind you – who plays Chris Gregory, a college kid who connects in a meet-cute way with Tiera Skovbye’s Sam. Before we get too far into their story, we cut back to what looks like Cuba in the ‘50s and 60s, and meet Jorge Bolivar (Adan Canto), the son of an alcohol magnate, a soccer player who suffers a serious lung issue that puts him in the hospital. Years later, Jorge is travelling to Miami when he meets Radha Mitchell’s Leslie working as a flight attendant.
Both guys are pretty suave smooth-talking pick-up artists, and the movie spends almost an hour cutting between two very corny and cheesy romance stories that really don’t offer much in terms of story. Instead, it keeps following Chris and Sam’s life as they have kids, taking forever to get to the connection between the stories. I was getting pretty bored of the movie, but I felt like I had to stick it out to see what happens.
When you call a movie “2 Hearts,” you kind of expect it to be about a heart transplant of some kind, right? But no, it’s actually about a dual lung transplant that Jorge receives. Want to take a wild guess who the donor is? I certainly don’t want to spoil what happens, but for a movie that spends a good hour setting up the relationships between the two men and their pretty blondes with ups and downs that makes it seem like a Nicholas Sparks movie, it really throws a spanner into the fairy tale with all the melodrama that’s to come. It’s such a whiplash in terms of tone it pretty much destroys any chance of one enjoying the movie for what it is. It also loses a lot without Elordi, since the actors who play his family aren’t very good at all.
I had to actually look up the story to see how much if it was true, only to learn that Jorge was based on Jorge Bacardi who actually received a double lung transplant from one Christopher Gregory, inspiring him to create the Gabriel House of Care. The problem is that the time periods get so messed up by setting one story decades in the past. Using the same actors to play the people over that time with pretty shabby make-up just makes things that much more confusing. The big problem is that it spends so much time avoiding the actual plot and point of making the movie that by the time it gets to it, you just don’t care about the characters anymore.
The whole thing is very by the books and predictable, but ultimately, it’s hard to believe any of it, despite it being based on a true story. If you go into this movie expecting love and romance and all that kind of mushy stuff from the title, you’re likely to be disappointed when the movie finally gets to its point. (In other words, it could have used some giant monsters.)
Here’s another movie that I didn’t really know what to expect going in and that probably should have helped me enjoy it more… if it was anything resembling a good movie. Picked up at the Toronto Film Festival where it premiered last month, Evan Morgan’s THE KID DETECTIVE (Sony) stars Adam Brody as Abe Appelbaum, the “kid detective” of the titles, who as a child was one of those super-smart kids who have the deductive powers to help the people in his community, but as a 32-year-old, he just isn’t taken as seriously any more. When a high school girl named Caroline (Sophie Nélisse) comes to Abe to find out who murdered her boyfriend, Abe finally realizes that he has his first grown-up case, though he’s still obsessed with the disappearance of the mayor’s daughter (and his kid receptionist) Gracie many years earlier.
I’m sure there’s gonna be people out there who watch and appreciate The Kid Detective for what it is, a wry and slightly clever noir pastiche pseudo-comedy, but anyone who has seen Rian Johnson’s first film Brick or the underrated Mystery Team (starring Donald Glover very early in his career) might feel that this doesn’t live up to either. Besides the fact that Brody really hasn’t developed much personality as an actor, the film rolls along with a fairly flat, deadpan tone that just never gets remotely exciting. The humor is subdued and yet it feels like everyone is constantly trying too hard, particularly Morgan, while at the same time not really taking any chances. This is a movie that could have been edgier but instead, it milks its flimsy high-concept premise as long as possible before giving up.
Like Love and Monsters, Sony is releasing The Kid Detective into theaters on Friday, and hopefully parents will check that rating before assuming it’s a kid flick. Although there isn’t so much bad language or anything that wouldn’t warrant a PG… other than the fact that it’s not particularly funny or even entertaining and kids will be super-bored.
I can’t believe there’s still more! Amazon’s “Welcome to the Blumhouse” anthology series continues this week with two more movies in the series of eight, which you can now watch on Prime Video:
Easily my favorite of the four movies I’ve seen is Zu Quirke’s NOCTURNE (Amazon), which follows a pair of twins, Julie (Sidney Sweeney) and Vivian (Madison Iseman), who are both competitive concert pianists at the Lindberg Academy, although Vivian is clearly the better, as she’s heading off to Julliard while Julian is taking a gap year.
Before we meet them, we see a young violist jumping off the balcony to her death for some reason, and we learn that she was the finalist to play a concerto, so now that slot is open and both Julie and her sister desperately want it.
Nocturne is certainly more like the horror movies we expect from Blumhouse, which is both good and bad. The good is that it is indeed quite scary as Quirke’s team uses really eerie lighting effects and other things to create suspense. But there’s also an artiness to what Quirke does that elevates Nocturne above the normal high-concept horror-thriller.
Quirke, who also wrote the film, delivers all the characterization you expect from a good horror film so that you really care about the characters, and she’s put together such a fine cast, particularly Sweeney who has to run a gamut of emotions as Julie. I also like Rodney To as Julie’s tough instructor Wilkins
Again, I won’t say too much more about the actual plot, although if you can imagine a Faustian bargain and how that plays out for those around Julie, you can probably understand why a super-fan of The Omen might dig what Quirke did in this environment.
The fourth movie in the “Welcome to the Blumouse” series is EVIL EYE (Amazon), from Indo-American filmmakers Elan and Rajeev Dassani, a relatively innocuous thriller based around the relationship between Pallavi (Sunita Mani from last week’s Save Yourselves! and GLOW) and her mother Usha, played by Sarita Choudhury. Pallavi is in her late 20s and single and her mother keeps wanting to get her set-up with a nice man, as a good Indian mother is wont to do. When Pallavi meets Sandeep (Omar Maskati), things are going well since he has money and her mother thinks her daughter has hit the jackpot, until she realizes that Sandeep has a dark secret.
Here’s another thriller where it’s really tough to talk about the plot, because obviously the filmmakers want the story to unfold in the specific way it was written. Apparently, this one was once an Audible story, and the first thing I noticed was how amazing Sunita Mani looks from her fairly glammed down roles in other things. I think she’s just wearing make-up and has her styled different but I’m not sure I would have known it was the same actor in Save Yourselves! Because I had to do a double take.
The problem with Evil Eye, and it’s been a problem with some of the other “Welcome to the Blumhouse” movies, is that it isn’t necessarily what I’d consider horror. It really plays a lot more like a romantic drama, other than the fact that Pallavi’s mother has visions and believes in astrology enough to send her daughter trinkets to protect her from the “evil eye.” In fact, the movie just gets weirder and weirder, as it starts introducing supernatural elements, and without giving the big plot twist away, it does expect one to believe in reincarnation.
I wish I could have liked this more, but it really seems like it would be better suited for a show like “The Outer Limits” or “The Twilight Zone,” since the premise is stretched so think for about 30 minutes longer than necessary. I think the filmmakers did perfectly fine with what they had to work with – the two main actresses are just fab – but I think I’d need to see some of their other work to see if the issues I had were just cause the story isn’t that interesting or by their limitations in making it.
(And I promise that I do have a feature on all the filmmakers from the first four “Welcome to the Blumhouse” series coming over at Below the Line, but it’s been a pretty tough piece to write.)
I reviewed Alex Gibney’s new doc Totally Under Control (Neon/Participant), co-directed with Ophelia Harutyunyan and Suzanne Hillinger, in last week’s column but it’s now available to watch On Demand and then it will be on Hulu starting next Tuesday, October 20. Obviously, everyone wanted to get this out there and make sure people see it before they get too in-deep with the election.
I also reviewed David Byrne’s American Utopia (HBO), directed by Spike Lee, a few weeks back, but it will be on HBO and presumably HBO Max on Sunday night. Not as big an event as Disney+’s Hamilton but still worth watching, especially if you’re a fan of Byrne or his band the Talking Heads, because it actually acts as a nice counterpoint bookend to the late Jonathan Demme’s fantastic Stop Making Sense, one of the best concert documentaries ever made, or at least top 5. I’m bummed I missed Byrne’s show on Broadway, and it doesn’t sound like Broadway will be coming back anytime soon so I guess this HBO documentation is the best any of us can wish for.
Of the movies I didn’t have time to watch this week, the two that I’m hoping to still get to are two docs: Inna Blockhina’s SHE IS THE OCEAN (Blue Fox Entertainment) and Rick Korn’s HARRY CHAPIN: WHEN IN DOUBT, DO SOMETHING (Greenwich). She Is the Ocean explores the lives of nine women who all have a passion for the ocean. The Harry Chapin doc may be more self-explanatory, and I wish I was a bigger fan of Chapin, the famed singer/songwriter/activist, because maybe I would have watched this movie earlier. (But seriously, look at how many movies came out this week, when I was hoping it would be “slower”!) Also, I’m a little bit interested in the K-Pop doc #BlackPinkLightUpTheSky that will air on Netflix, just because, I dunno, I like adorable, young Asian women, so sue me?
Premiering on Disney+ this Friday is Justin Baldoni’s CLOUDS, starring Fin Argus as musician Zach Sobiech, who has only months to live when his cancer starts spreading, but he follows his dream to make an album and becomes a viral music phenomenon. I’m not sure if this is a true story but it certainly sounds a lot like a faith-based film called I Still Believe that hit theaters just before they all shut down due to the pandemic. Coincidence? I think not.
Also this week, the 32nd ANNUAL NEWFEST LGBTQ FILM FESTIVAL begins on Friday, running through October 27 with opening night being the well-regarded Ammonite, starring Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan, but it will be done as a drive-in, so I’m out. Over in Los Angeles, the AFI FEST starts on Thursday and runs through October 22, and that’s also showing a lot of cool festival/awards films that I haven’t had a chance to watch yet like The Father, I’m Your Woman and more. I missed my chance to get press accreditation, so yeah, I guess I’ll be waiting on that.
And then we get to all the movies that I didn’t have time to see or didn’t receive a screener, so here we go. This week’s unfortunate dumping ground:
Lupin III: The First (GKIDS) (This anime film is being released as a Fathom event on Oct. 18 – dubbed, and Oct. 21 – subtitled)
Belly of the Beast (I’ve actually heard good things about Erika Cohn’s doc about illegal sterilizations being conducted in a woman’s prison.)
Don’t Look Back (Gravitas Ventures)
Rom Boys: 40 Years of Rad (101 Films)
The Antidote (Cinetic/Brand New Story)
Monochrome: The Chromism (Tempest)
J.R “Bob” Dobbs and the Church of the Subgenius (Uncork’d)
Monster Force Zero (WildEye Releasing)
Ghabe (GVN Releasing)
The Accidental President (Intervention)
In Case of Emergency (Kino Lorber)
I’m not sure how much of a column I’m gonna write next week since I won’t have nearly as much time to watch movies or write about them in the coming week, while I’m in Colmbus. There are a couple high profile movies I hope to get to, so we’ll see what happens.
By the way, if you read this week’s column and have bothered to read this far down, feel free to drop me some thoughts at Edward dot Douglas at Gmail dot Com or drop me a note or tweet on Twitter. I love hearing from readers … honest!
#TheWeekendWarrior#Movies#Reviews#VOD#Streaming#Synchronic#TrialOfTheChicago7#FrenchExit#LoveANdMonsters TheKidDetective#Nocturne#2Hearts#Shithout#THeDevilHasAName#TheOpeningAct
1 note
·
View note
Text
The 30 Minute Experiment - Introduction
You may or may not have noticed that there hasn’t been a Weekend Warrior the last few weeks, and I’m not 100% sure that I’ll finished what I started for a movie column this week, because honestly? Writing about box office and theatrical releases and repertory series has been my only joy about writing a weekly column since leaving the Beat since I’m not making any money with the time it takes to write a column. But we’ll see. Most of the movies coming out tomorrow will be available digitally and On Demand forever so there’s no need to rush out a column I’m not happy with. But that brings us to what I’m doing now and what this is...
Maybe it will be obvious what my “30 Minute Experiment” will be after a couple days, but let me explain. This is something I’ve thought about doing for a few weeks now, and it’s my ongoing attempt to write about other things than movies in the time when there are no movies or at least no movie theaters in which they can play. So this is what the 30 Minute Experiment will be.
Every day (hopefully), I will sit at my computer with Tumblr open and start writing for exactly thirty minutes. I will set a time for that 30 minutes and wherever I’m at when that 30 minute elapses will be where that day’s column ends.
This experiment will have me writing about anything on my mind, but each day will have a specific topic that I might want to write about, and these might be topics where my take differs from you. Some of these topics might be exceedingly personal and intimate and maybe you’ll find out some stuff about me that you never knew before. Who knows? It’s called an experiment for a good reason. Oh, yeah, and the other thing is that when those 30 minutes are over, I will not go back and read over or edit anything i wrote. I kind of have done this before with one of my Oscar pieces last year and my eulogy to my friend William Wolf reminded me that I can really write quite quickly and efficiently when I just sit down and do it.
And that is actually the advice I give anyone who wants to write about ANYTHING. I think I stole this from “Throw Momma from the Train” but it’s true... A writer writes... always. Whether you have anything to write about or not. Hey, I have a penpal in prison who is probably as bored on a daily basis as some of you are quickly getting during the current self-quarantines . I really have to make an effort to write him so I don’t lag behind by months as I did lst year. Usually when I write to this penpal it’s using a similar method where I write him about what I’m going to write him about (or answering one of his previous comments) and when I’m done, I mail it out. I do this because he writes to me, sometimes PAGES of thoughts, in pencil or pen. He doesn’t have a computer or Word or a way to edit his thoughts, and I feel it’s only fair I do the same even though I can type out my letters.
But that’s what I mean. I think we all take for granted all the good things we have in this world right now including spell check and ways to overwork our own writing to the point where we no longer want to ever read what we’ve written. I’ve been there many many times...
Who knows? Maybe I’ll put a call out to people on FB or Twitter for ideas or topics that maybe someone wants me to write about, and I’ll add it to the long list I’ve already created for myself. But the point is that I’ll pick a topic, start the time, and start writing and when the 30-minute mark arrives, it’s done. I hit “send.”
By the way, I set the time on this introduction and I have 19 minutes left!!! So okay, maybe this intro will be a little shorter and I’ll start for real tomorrow.
But I guess I can use my remaining time to talk a little about writing in general. If it isn’t obvious, writing has been a passion of mine for over 25 years. Obviously, i prefer being in a situation where I get paid for my writing (and I sort of am right now) but I also have tried to maintain a weekly movie column for over 19 years even though I only had four places that were paying me for said column during that time.
I was hoping to start a new MONTHLY movie column at one of the places where I sometimes write for but that was quickly by all the movies being delayed, and that still seems to be the case. Maybe I’ll even finish the movie column I started this week, but honestly, my passion is theatrical releases, even when it’s smaller movies -- indies, docs, foreign films -- and knowing that all the people I know at my favorite theaters like the Metrograph and Film Forum and Lincoln Center are not working right now just really bums me out more than the fact that I can’t go see movies in theaters.
Believe me, I have PLENTY of movies to watch and write about as far as screeners, although I try to use my evenings after writing my current assignments to relax and enjoy some of the work of others that are trying to keep us all entertained while we’re stuck at home.
Honestly, being stuck at home is not a big deal for me since (this may be hard to believe) I’m not really that social, at least in terms of riding the subway and dealing with my fellow New Yorkers. When I get to the screening room, there’s plenty of friends, colleagues and acquaintances that I love to talk to and catch up with, and I’m missing many of them as much as I did in 2013 when I got stuck in Columbus, Ohio fighting cancer. If you don’t know about this adventure, I might talk about it sometime in the next few weeks or months or however long I decide to do this.
Right now, what’s going on in the world feels very much like when I returned to NYC in 2014 and in that case, I was the one worried about getting sick since I had a very weak and new immune system from a stem cell transplant. But more on that later. That’s not really what I want to talk about right now.
Oh, yeah, and if you read this and think “Boy, Ed really likes writing about himself” ... fine, that’s a fair assessment. I mean, I’ve always been a bit of an over sharer in the 25 years I’ve been on the internet, which was the point where I finally declared myself to be a writer and was already writing weekly comic book reviews.
Oh, God... just thinking about what’s going on in the comic book industry right now. That’s a 30-minute column in itself. So I have 12 minutes left... what else?
I definitely would love some feedback as this experiment continues as well as thoughts on topics you’d like me to cover. I think the worst thing a writer has to experience is having a lack of feedback, whether it’s from editors or readers. Every once in a while, it’s nice to know that someone read something I wrote and it touched them or it made them think about something that they hadn’t thought about before, and yes, even if something I said makes them angry. I always appreciated people reaching out and telling me this stuff.
Since I have... 10 MORE MINUTES?!?...I’ll also mention that I’ve been using this downtime to reach out to people I don’t see or talk to as often, just to see how they’re doing during this national crisis. Just seeing how it’s affected so many people both in positive and negative ways has been really interesting to me as someone who likes to analyze people and the human condition.
I also want to use this time to work on some of the screenplays I’ve started developing since that was part of the point of leaving ComingSoon 4 years ago. In hindsight, that may have been a mistake but the idea was that I could use some of my time working on more personal projects like these screenplays. What instead happened was that I was scrambling to find freelance work and struggling to make a living with the piecemeal assignments I’m getting.
To be perfectly honest, I’m still in that last position as I haven’t had a proper full time job in almost two years now, although I had a part-time job most of last year on top of my movie writing stuff.
Who knows how things will pan out after this whole thing is over, but this is a much bigger topic that definitely can wait since we’re nowhere close to the situation in New York right now. Maybe i’ll write a bit more about that in the next few days since a lot of my friends and colleagues from other states and countries have been worried about me. Some of it was for good reason if you knew what I personally was dealing with my ghost town of a neighborhood, but believe me, I’m doing fine. No symptoms, no qualms... just want to get back to some semblance of normal life even though I’m gonna have plenty of time to rethink whether “getting back to normal” would be a good thing in my case.
I only have five minutes left so not sure I can get into that idea of “the new normal,” something I know about all too well from my experience with cancer, since that’s 30 minutes in itself, so instead, I’ll say... thanks for reading up to here (if you indeed have) and I hope you enjoy this experiment and don’t find yourself bored by my droning on.
The above is what I can write in just 25 minutes so imagine how much worse this might be with that extra five minutes. :)
3 notes
·
View notes
Text
The Weekend Warrior Home Edition May 8, 2020 – CLEMENTINE, SPACESHIP EARTH, BLUE STORY, VALLEY GIRL, ARKANSAS, HOW TO BUILD A GIRL and more!
And the summer that never was continues with no new movies in theaters unless you include a number of select drive-ins scattered across the country. There’s a lot of new stuff out this weekend, some good, some bad, but we’re getting to a point where every distributor big or small is dumping their movies to VOD in hopes of making money. But I guess that means there’s a lot more options of things to see, right?
The Virtual Oxford Film Festival continues this Friday with the virtual premieres of Steve Collins’ comedy I’ve Got Issues and the unrelated doc feature, I Am Not Alone (Note: both of these are only available for folks in Mississippi!). Also, the Hello, Gorgeous Shorts block (love the names they come up with to put these shorts together!) will debut with 8 new shorts, including Bad Assistant. You can get tickets to all of these things at the festival’s Eventive page.
For the next few days only, you can also win the Oxford Film Festival award-winning short Finding Cleveland right here for free! The film directed by Larissa Lam that follows husband Baldwin Chiu’s journey to Mississippi to investigate his roots will have its feature version, Far East Deep South, premiere as part of Oxford’s virtual festival in June.
One of the better films I watched this week (I guess that makes it this week’s “Featured Film”) is Lara Gallagher’s feature debut CLEMENTINE (Oscilloscope), a seemingly simple two-hander indie drama showcasing two fantastically talented actors in Otmara Marrero and Sydney Sweeney (HBO’s Euphoria). Marrero plays Karen, a young woman looking to get away after ending a relationship with a significantly older woman, deciding to break into her lover’s isolated lakeside home. There, she encounters Sweeney’s Lana, a mischievous younger teen of indeterminate age who Karen befriends. The two of them get closer as Karen is still in mourning for her previous relationship, but as she learns more about Lana, things clearly aren’t what they seem.
Gallagher has written a sweet and subdued character piece that at times veers into thriller territory but never goes so far across that line to take away from the drama. At the film’s core is the mystery about the two young women and their respective pasts, because we don’t even learn that much about Karen before heading to the lakeside house.
where there’s a lot of mystery about both of the young women at the story’s core, There were aspects of the movie that reminded me of the recent dramatic thriller Tape, where there’s also an aspect of sexual abuse and revenge, but it really never goes to places that might be expected. I’m a little bummed that I missed this at Tribeca last year, and part of that can be blamed on the enigmatic title which doesn’t really give a sense of what the movie is about at all. But Gallagher and her cast have done a fantastic job with a film that’s not necessarily easy to define or describe but leaves you with a warm feeling that films like this can still be made. (See Never Rarely Sometimes Always as another example of this.)
Now might be the perfect time for Matt Wolf’s new doc, SPACESHIP EARTH (Neon), which is all about the eight people who locked themselves into Biosphere II in the early ‘90s with the plans to live inside the ecologically self-contained environment for two years. Neon had two amazing scientific docs in 2019, Apollo 11 and The Biggest Little Farm, both which were in my Top 10 for the year, so imagine my disappointment when neither of them received Oscar nominations. Wolf previously directed 2013’s Teenage and last year’s Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, the latter being a decent doc using archival footage, and Spaceship Earth mixes all of the amazing archival footage with interviews with many of the key characters. In case you weren’t familiar with Biosphere II, it was an experiment set up where 8 individuals would spend two years inside an environment that’s meant to be fully self-sufficient. Wolf’s film goes back to the start of what was essentially a theater group who put together a number of global projects before tackling Biosphere II, a project that wasn’t taken very seriously by the scientific community because there were no scientists among the group. It was seen as “ecological entertainment” by some and a cult by others, and those feelings increase when it was discovered that not everything is what it seems. When an accident causes one of the “biospherians” to have to go outside, she ends up sneaking things back into Biosphere II, which is against the rules set up by the group. It’s a fairly fascinating doc if you were around during this time but only heard about it filtered through the news and the PR, but Wolf’s film goes deep into the project and the controversy surrounding it, as well as when it inevitably goes wrong. Wolf manages to get many of those involved, including the group’s leader, John Allen, and there’s even an appearance by another figure from U.S. politics who had their own documentary just last year! This is a really strong doc that is getting a digital release and apparently, it will even be screened on the sides of some buildings, which is a cool idea in this time where there aren’t many theaters.
A relatively big hit in the UK, BLUE STORY (Paramount), the directorial feature debut of British rapper Rapman, adapted from his own YouTube series, is now available via digital download, having originally been planned to get a US theatrical release in March. It’s about the friendship of two young British teens, Timmy and Marco, from the Peckham area of London but from opposite sides of what’s become a violent street gang feud. I saw this movie way back on March 11, and I had to rewatch it more recently since I had forgotten whether I liked it or hated it. I’m probably somewhere more in between, as I thought the young leads, Stephen Odubola (Timmy) and Micheal Ward (Marco), were both terrific in a movie that generally had some storytelling and pacing issues.
Honestly, I didn’t understand a lot of what was going on due to the heavy accents (even with the necessary subtitles), but it also didn’t really stand up to last year’s Les Miserables, a film set in a similar setting in France, but that one was nominated for an Oscar after being submitted by France. Besides writing and directing, Rapman also acts as the film’s ad-hoc narrator through a number of raps that gives his film a bit of a hip-hop musical feel. I’m not sure I was crazy about this decision since a lot of the time he is recapping something that we just saw take place.
The film definitely has a unique energy, as the first half alternates between youthful innocence and faux machismo, neither which generally does very much for me. I did enjoy the film’s romantic underpinnings as it shows young love between Timmy and a classmate named Leah (Karla-Simone Spence) , but that storyline comes to an abrupt and shocking halt about 45 minutes into the movie before the story jumps forward three years into something very different. (To be honest, the romantic aspects were handled in a far more interesting way in the recent indie Premature.) The movie does get far more dramatic and tense in this last act, while it also shows what a talented cast Rapman has put together in order for them to shift gears into the very different tone the movie then takes. It’s a jarring change, but it adds to what Rapman was trying to do in making Blue Story an almost-Shakespearean coming-of-age story set against an authentic urban landscape. I’m not 100% sure Blue Story will connect with young urban Americans in the same way as it clearly did in the UK, because the dialect and slang that pervades the film often makes it difficult to follow, but it’s quite a striking debut from the rapper/filmmaker.
Next up is VALLEY GIRL (Orion Pictures), a musical remake of Martha Coolidge’s 1983 movie that introduced many people to one Nicolas Cage. The new movie is directed by Rachel Lee Goldenberg (A Deadly Adoption, “The Mindy Project”), and it stars the wonderful Jessica Rothe (Happy Death Day) as Julie Richman, the valley girl of the title who is going to high school with her valley girl friends but becomes enamored with the punk kid Randy (Josh Whitehouse), who comes from a very different world. I’m not sure what else I can tell you about Valley Girl, since I’m under embargo on this one until Friday, so I’m not sure if I can tell you if it’s good or bad. I will say that if you like popular ‘80s groups like Modern English and others, the movie may give you a smile. It also stars Alicia Silverstone as the older Julie, telling her own daughter this story in a framing sequence, as well as Judy Greer as Julie’s mother and others, such as Mae Whitman, who can really belt it out in her role as Randy’s bandmate, “Jack.” This is supposed to open in some of those aforementioned drive-ins, as well as being available digitally.
Getting away from this week’s musicals, Clark Duke co-wrote and stars in his feature film directorial debut, ARKANSAS (Lionsgate), based on John Brandon’s novel. I haven’t read the novel, but Clark plays a lowlife named Swin, a drug-runner along with his partner Kyle (Liam Hemsworth), both of them pretending to be park rangers. Kyle is particularly interested in learning more about their enigmatic boss, the Arkansas-based drug kingpin known only as “Frog,” but their business arrangements get more complicated.
I had a few problems with this movie, much of it coming from the relatively weak writing that comes across like it was made by someone who has watched way too many Scorsese or Tarantino movies without really understanding why those filmmakers’ movies are so brilliant. I hate to say it, because I generally like Duke as an actor, but casting himself in the role of Swin without doing much beyond growing a moustache to make himself look sleazier really didn’t much for the material. He was a very odd pairing with the rugged and tougher Hemsworth.
The best part of the film is when it flashes back to 1985 West Memphis and we meet the actual “Frog,” played by Vince Vaughn, and we see him interacting with Michael K. Williams’ “Almond,” who he betrays to take over his drug business. I liked this bit of the movie even if Vaughn’s accent wasn’t great, but then we’re back to Duke and Hemsworth in present day, and that doesn’t hold up as well. Clarke overcomplicates things by creating a non-linear narrative that jumps back and forth in time and between two storylines – again, like Pulp Fiction – but the storytelling and dialogue doesn’t do enough to make up for the confusion this cause.
Clark certainly has brought on some decent actors, such as John Malkovich and Vivica A. Fox, but making himself the focus of much of the movie compared to the far more charismatic Hemsworth, hurts the movie more than helps it. I didn’t hate Eden Brolin as Swin’s love interest, Johnna, but they really didn’t enough chemistry to make them believable as a couple. Don’t get me wrong. I definitely commend Clark on taking on such a big project as his directorial debut, and it definitely grew on me, but it’s an erratic piece that pays tribute to far better films and that is its biggest detriment. Originally planned for a theatrical release on May 1, Arkansas will instead hit Apple, Amazon, On Demand platforms, DVD and Blu-Ray on Tuesday.
Beanie Feldstein from last year’s Book Smart stars in Coky (“Harlots”) Giedroyc’s HOW TO BUILD A GIRL (IFC Films) as Johanna Morrigan, an ambitious 16-year-old from Wolverhampton, England who gets a job at music magazine “D&ME.” She creates an alter-ego pseudonym for herself in Dolly Wilde, and quickly learns she has to be mean in order to succeed and earn the respect of her peers as one of the UK’s most hated music journalists, even after falling in love withs (and then betraying) rock star John Kite (Alfie Allen, who also was on “Harlots”).
Based on British journalist Caitlin Moran’s 2014 semi-autobiographical novel of the same name, I definitely should have liked this movie more, having been a regular reader of the Melody Maker around the time Moran would have been writing for it. The screenplay she’s co-written adapting her own book isn’t great, and everyone involved just seems to be trying too hard to be funny and failing miserably.
I guess the biggest issue, once you adjust to Beanie Feldstein’s British accent, which falls somewhere between Harry Potter and the Beatles, is that it’s hard to care about her character even a little, since she’s acting all quirky one second and then becomes a monster as the film goes along. Johanna is just annoying and when she transforms into “Dolly,” she becomes even worse.
Paddy Considine plays Johanna/Dolly’s father, who still has aspirations of being a rock star after giving birth to a huge brood of children. There’s a few other small roles from other actors like Emma Thompson, Michael Sheen and Gemma Anderton, many of them portraying Johanna’s author inspirations talking to her from her wall of idols.
How to Build a Girl is just another example of the sad state of British comedies, although there are a few shining stars like last year’s Yesterday, which was in my top 10, and this year’s Emma. This one just isn’t particularly funny, and there’s a general feeling of been-there seen-that, as it tells a fairly typical rise and fall story where Dolly’s debauchery turns into an awful human being, and it’s not like I liked her much to begin with. She isn’t as funny as intended and then she gets awful, and it’s impossible to feel bad for her when things ultimately go wrong. Anyway, five minutes later, everything is fine.
It’s the type of autobiographical thing that a writer writes to make themselves look like some kind of hero, and it reminds me a bit of last year’s Blinded by the Light in some ways. h I know a lot of people liked the movie, but I wasn’t really a fan at all. This movie is even less funny and not particularly original, making it feel about as pretentious as the British music press became in the ‘90s. Either way, it will be available to watch at home via VOD as well as in some open drive-ins where applicable.
There are a ton more movies this week, and unfortunately, I didn’t get to fully watch many of the movies below, though I still hope to watch more of these over the next few days and may add a few more reviews.
I heard good things about Christophe Honoré’s comedy ON A MAGICAL NIGHT (Strand Releasing), particularly about Chiara Mastroiani’s performance as Maria, which won her an acting award at last year’s Cannes. She plays Maria, a woman dissatisfied with her marriage of 20 years, who moves into a hotel room across the street after getting into an argument with her husband (singer Benjamin Biolay). I haven’t gotten through it yet as it seems, like so many French movies, to be very talky, but I’ll try to get to it. It will open virtually as part of Film at Lincoln Center’s virtual cinema, following its debut at the “Rendezvous with French Cinema” series that was unfortunately cut short midway this year.
Also continuing this weekend is Cinema Tropical’s “Cinema Tropical Collection” of Brazilian films, this week’s being Caetano Gotardo’s YOUR BONES, YOUR EYES, in which the filmmaker stars as João, a middle class São Paulo filmmaker who has long conversations and monologues with the people around him.
There are a few other docs available virtually this week, including Sasha Joseph Neulinger’s REWIND (FilmRise), a collection of home videos from 20 years ago, when his father would film family gatherings but also documenting a family secret that would lead to a media firestorm and a court battle. The film will be available to stream and download on iTunes, Prime Video, GooglePlay and Microsoft this Friday, and then will air as part of PBS’s Independent Lens on Monday, May 11.
The Maysles Cinema in Harlem is continuing its virtual cinema with Alex Glustrom’s MOSSVILLE: WHEN THE GREAT TREES FALL, which will be available for a 48-hour VOD rental for $12 from Thursday through April 14 with a Zoom QnA with the filmmakers on Saturday at noon Eastern. The film centers around Mossville, Louisiana, a community founded by former African-American slaves that has been overrun by petrochemical plants and toxic clouds that have forced residents from their homes. Glustrom’s film focuses on Stacey Ryan, a man who refuses to abandon his family’s land and fights for his own human rights.
Apparently, William Nicholson’s HOPE GAP (Screen Media) is getting a second chance to be seen on VOD after a rather half-hearted theatrical release on March 6. It stars Annette Bening as Grace who is dealing with her husband of 29 years (Bill Nighy) leaving her and how that break-up affects their grown-up son (Josh O’Connor).
Following its premiere as part of the virtual Tribeca Film Festival, Emily Cohn’s sex comedy, CRSHD (Light Year), will get a virtual theatrical release in New York, LA and other regional markets. It stars Isabelle Barbier as college freshman Izzy Alden who goes with her best friends (Deeksha Ketkar, Sadie Scott) on a journey to help Izzy lose her virginity.
Also in select theaters, on demand and digital this Friday is José Magán’s The Legion (Saban Films/Paramount), starring Mickey Rourke, Bai Ling and Lee Partridge. It takes place during the invasion of Parthia where two Roman legions are brought to a standstill in Armenia’s snowy mountains where they’re dying from the cold. Their only hope against the cold and the Parthian patrols is half-roman soldier, Noreno, who must cross the mountains to find the men who can help them change the course of this losing battle.
On VOD starting Thursday is Spa Night director Andrew Ahn’s Driveways (FilmRise), starring Hong Chau from HBO’s “Watchmen” and Alexander Payne’s Downsizing as Kathy, a single mother who is travelling with her 8-year-old son Cody (Lucas Jaye) to her dead sister’s house with plans to clean and sell it. There, she befriends a Korean war vet named Del (played by the late Brian Denneny), who quickly bonds with her young son.
Also in theaters and On Demand is Tom Wright’s Walkaway Joe (Quiver Distribution), starring David Strathairn and Jeffrey Dean Morgan, a film about an unlikely friendship between a young boy and a wandering loner, who helps the boy look for his father in pool halls across the country.
STREAMING AND CABLE
This week’s Netflix offerings including the comedy special, Jerry Seinfeld: 23 Hours to Kill, presumably taped at one of his nights in residency at the Beacon Theater. The hour-long special is now available and has been said might be Seinfeld’s last special. The Michelle Obama doc, Becoming, will also be on Netflix by the time you read this. It’s the first feature length doc from Nadia Hallgren, and its produced by the Obamas, much like the recent Sundance opener, Crip Camp, and last year’s Oscar winner, American Factory. The second season of Dead to Me also debuts on Friday as well as a number of other series.
In case you missed it earlier in the week, you can now watch last year’s Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker on Disney+, which means the entire nonology is now on Disney+. You can also watch a new docuseries about the making of last year’s hit, The Mandalorian, called Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian, which has Jon Favreau doing roundtables with some of the creatives with the first episode, “Directing,” now on the service and the second episode, “Legacy,” premiering on Friday.
The new Hulu animated series, Solar Opposites, will premiere on the streaming service this Friday. It’s the new series co-created by Justin Roiland and Mike McMahan (respectively the co-creator and former head writer of Rick and Morty), and it features a voice cast that includes Roiland, Thomas Middleditch, Mary Mack and Sean Giambrone with a huge line of guest voices, including Alan Tudyk, Alfred Molina, Christina Hendricks, Tiffany Haddish and many, many more!
The final film in Lionsgate’s Friday Night at the Movies will be Keanu Reeves’ John Wick, which will show for free on the Lionsgate website on Friday night starting at 9pm Eastern.
Next week, more movies not in theaters!
By the way, if you read this week’s column and have bothered to read this far down, feel free to drop me some thoughts at Edward dot Douglas at Gmail dot Com or drop me a note or tweet on Twitter. I love hearing from readers … honest!
#TheWeekendWarrior#Movies#Reviews#Arkansas#BlueStory#ValleyGirl#HowToBuildAGirl#Clementine#SpaceshipEarth#Streaming#VOD#Digital
1 note
·
View note
Text
The Weekend Warrior 4/16/21: IN THE EARTH, JAKOB’S WIFE, GUNDA and LINCOLN CENTER REOPENS
This is hopefully gonna be a relatively lighter and more streamlined column, because I have so much going on over at Below the Line, including a full weekend of awards this weekend past and another even busier one coming up. Because of this, I wasn’t really able to watch nearly as much stuff as I would have liked and have written fewer than normal reviews. (I know you’ve heard this tune before, but unfortunately, this state will continue for at least the next week, but once Oscars are done and past, I can get back to this column.
The big news this week is that New York’s Film at Lincoln Center has reopened with a retrospective celebrating the 50th Anniversary of FilmLinc’s long-running collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art, New Directors/New Films, which will begin on April 28. You can see the full line-up of the 2021 New Directors/New Films here, though I’m not sure how much I’ll be covering this year. (see above) It will take place in the virtual cinemas of FilmLinc and MOMA for people across the country and for those in New York City at the reopened FilmLinc theaters.
Leading up to that date, there will be a two-week retrospective called New Directors/New Films at 50, which will screen at the FilmLinc theaters as well as on Virtual Cinema, and that line up is:
Duvidha dir. Mani Kaul
Following dir. Christopher Nolan
The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick dir. Wim Wenders
The Living End dir. Gregg Araki
Lucía dir. Humberto Solás
My Brother’s Wedding dir. Charles Burnett
Peppermint Candy dir. Lee Chang-dong
Playing Away dir. Horace Ové
Les Rendez-vous d’Anna dir. Chantal Akerman
Sleepwalk dir. Sara Driver
Twenty Years Later dir. Eduardo Coutinho
Speaking of festivals, apparently there is a Brazilian genre fest going on right now called Fantaspoa 2021 that takes place on the Brazilian streaming horror service Dark Flix.
I have family in Brazil including a filmmaking cousin so I wonder if they know about this, but they seem to have a lot of cool and interesting films to share… and someday I hope to watch some of them. :)
Let’s get into some of the theatrical releases, shouldn’t we?
Filmmaker Ben Wheatley (High-Rise, Free Fire) is back with his eco-thriller IN THE EARTH (Neon), which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. It stars Joel Fry and Ellora Torchia as Dr. Martin Lowery and Alma, two park rangers sent into the woods in search of missing researchers only to encounter an odd and eccentric hermit woodsman named Zach (Reece Shearsmith), who has lots of crazy ideas about nature and its effects on humans, so he proceeds to capture and torture the two rangers.
This is another one of Wheatley’s stranger films, one that he completely filmed and completed during the pandemic, and I’m not even sure what I can completely explain in the second half of the movie, not just due to spoilers but also because it just goes into some fairly out there places. But no mistake that this is true horror, especially when you see how the two main characters have to deal with the situation they found themselves in.
What’s interesting is that the story takes place during a pandemic but not necessarily the one we’re currently in, but as Martin and Alma get deeper into the woods, horrible things start happening. They’re attacked in their tents while sleeping and their shoes are stolen and then Martin gets a nasty cut on his foot that gets infected with something almost plant-like, which leads to a fairly tense and horrifying scene later on.
The movie shifts pretty drastically in the second half as the duo encounter another researcher named Olivia (Hayley Squires), who happens to be Zach’s wife AND Martin’s ex-girlfriend. Yeah, it’s that kind of movie, but it’s also one where it’s never really more than the two or three characters at a time. The movie can be slow at times but it always maintains the viewer’s interest in what is happening and what might happen next. And then it just gets so strange in that last act, really trippy and surreal and crazy with lots of fast-cut images and loud noises that really puts the viewer even further on edge. OH, and as you can see from the picture, Zach has an axe, which takes the film into places more akin to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and away from the more cerebral stuff.
Where In the Earth really transcends is that it’s just such a great looking movie, and when you have a composer like Clint Mansell providing the score, as he did with Wheatley’s High-Rise, then you end up with a movie that works quite well for what it’s trying to do, which is to astound, disorient and puzzle the viewer but in a way that makes them want to watch it again and try to figure out more with each viewing.
As weird as the movie is, I could see there being an audience for the movie, particularly when you consider how movies like The Witch and Hereditary and Midsommar and The Lighthouse have found a niche audience or auteur lovers. Oddly, all four of those movies were released by A24, offering further proof that NEON is trying to get in on their turn.
I’m not quite sure how many theaters NEON is putting In the Earth into, but Wheatley’s latest eco-thriller maybe a harder sell with no known stars, and it’s definitely gonna be looking to bring in cinephile and auteur-huggers more than the normal Joe or Jill off the street. I expect NEON will try to get the movie into at least 1,000 theaters with many screens and reopened movie houses looking for content, but I’m not sure I’d expect this to do that much better than last week’s Voyagers, but maybe $3 million or so. It just doesn’t have much chance against a mainstream movie like Godzilla vs. Kong.
Anyway, check it out. I’ll have an interview with Ben Wheatley over at Below the Line probably early next week.
Another movie I highly recommend for horror fans is Travis Stevens’ JAKOB’S WIFE (RLJEfilms/Shudder), which stars the terrific Barbara Crampton and equally great Larry Fessenden as Ann Fedder, a woman married to the local small town pastor (aka Jakob), who feels that she hasn’t been able to live her full life while married to him for 30 years. When she has an encounter with a mysterious figure known as “The Master,” she finds herself gaining powers that allow her to live a new life but it has dark effects on her and everyone else in the town.
One thing I probably should mention is that I’ve known Larry Fessenden for a long time -- a friend of mine co-starred in his early movie Habit -- and I’m just a huge fan of Barbara Crampton from her classic horror films and more recent ones like my pal Ted Geoghegan’s We Are Still Here, which starred both of the actors.. And was produced by director Travis Stevens. See, how it all comes together?
This is another movie I don’t want to say too much about, as to not spoil your enjoyment of watching the various elements coming into place. Fessenden and Crampton are great as always, but I particularly like how Stevens has made a fairly contemporary horror movie that throws back to classic tropes like Cronenberg body horror and straight-out giallo blood flying everywhere.
I will say that the story involves a bit of a twist on the vampire movie, but more in vein of the weirdness from that 1988 Nicholas Cage movie, Vampire’s Kiss, versus anything like a studio Dracula movie, but it gives the two actors (especially Crampton) a chance to shine and really show different aspects of their abilities. Oh, also there’s lots of rats… lots and lots of rats...
Jakob’s Wife is a pretty fine independent horror film that certainly will deal a number of shrieks and squeals, and though it’s opening in theaters, On Demand and digital, much like most of RLJEfilms/Shudder’s offerings, I wish there were more of the local genre movie houses in which to watch it with a crowd cause even the SXSW Premiere probably wasn’t the same without an audience. Sigh, when will this fucking pandemic be over?!?
Oh, and by the way, I have an interview with Stevens over at Below the Line, so check that out to learn more.
Before we get to the rest of the new movies, let’s check out what’s going on at a few of my local digs, the Metrograph and Film Forum. Metrograph is just wrapping up another Aaron Sorkin retrospective, just three movies this time that wrapped with The Trial of the Chicago 7 (again) last night. On Friday, you can catch Thomas Vinterberg’s Oscar-nominated Another Round, starring Mads Mikkelsen, running as part of its digital Live Screenings series… I keep saying and will keep saying until you list. It’s $5 a month to join and watch a ton of cool movies!
Michael and Christian Blackwood’s Monk in Europe runs until next Monday and then there’s a few others also running through the weekend. Just click on that link above and join already!
At the Film Forum, Hitchcock’s great Rear Window is just wrapping up today, and I’m bummed I didn’t get a chance to see it on the big screen again. Starting Friday is Alec Guinness and Kind Hearts and Coronets, which had a pretty successful run at Film Forum in the before-times. The doc Gunda (right below) is also starting there in its reopened theaters as is the Norwegian Oscar entry Hope, starring the always great Stellan Skarsgard.
Victor (Aquarela) Kossakovsky’s acclaimed documentary GUNDA (NEON), which played most of the festivals last year is finally getting a bonafide theatrical release. It’s a black and white cinema verité that follows the lives of a number of farm animals, a mother pig, some chickens and a herd of cows. As a fan of The Biggest Little Farm, this is a movie that I’m apt to enjoy since I love nature docs, but it also involves staring at a screen (mostly my TV set) watching animals, which I really have to be in the right mood for, and it’s really been tough to get into that mood in the past year.
Sebastian Stan and Denise Gough star in Argyris Papadimitropoulos’s MONDAY (IFC Films) as Americans living in Athens who meet and have a whirlwind weekend one hot summer. Gough plays Chloe, whose time in Greece is coming to an end, but she has to decide whether to pass up a big job back home to see if the weekend she had with Stan’s Mickey is worth exploring and turning into something more serious. I do hope to get to this one eventually, but who knows when?
Gabriel Carrer and Reese Eveneshen’s FOR THE SAKE OF VICIOUS (Dread) stars Lora Burke as Romina (Lora Burke), single mother and nurse, who returns home after a late shift on Halloween night to find a maniac hiding in her home with a beat-up hostage. When a mob of intruders invade Romina’s home, the three have to work together to survive. The movie will hit theaters on Friday, be available via On Demand on Tuesday and then hit Blu-ray on May 4, so you’ll have lots of options to see it.
Barry Pepper stars in Brad (“24,” “Homeland”) Turner’s TRIGGER POINT (Screen Media), which will hit theaters this Friday and be On Demand on April 23. In it, he plays retired U.S. special operative Nicolas Brazer, who worked as a shadow assassin for the government but disappeared into a life of solitude after being accused of killing his team. Two years later, he’s drawn back into the world to clear his name and maybe turn a new leaf.
I don’t have a ton to say about this film, especially cause we just saw it in a much better version of this movie called Nobody. Pepper’s a great actor and that’s probably what saves Trigger Point from being a total loss, but it’s a fairly dry by-the-books crime thriller with a fairly generic plot that we’ve seen plenty of times before and often quite a bit better.
Also out this week is Christo Brock’s craft beer documentary BREWMANCE (Giant Pictures), which looks at… you guessed it… the history and obsession that a number of brewers have with craft beer. This is a fine doc, but like Gunda, I have to be in the right mood for it, and I’m just so busy that I never was able to just sit down and just concentrate on watching this.
Alan Yuen, the screenwriter of New Police Storyand director of Firestorm return with THE ROOKIES (Shout! Studios!), starring Alu Wang and Milla Jovovich. Wang plays daredevil and extreme sports lover Zhao Feng, who gets caught up in an illegal trade scheme when he crosses paths with Jovovich’s Special Agent Bruce and she recruits him for the Order of the Phantom Knighthood. The group is dedicated to fighting evil in all its incarnations, and it’s a ragtag outfit of four rookies with different skills. This sounds like my kind of jam, and at any other time, I would have had more time to watch and review it. Two weeks before the Oscars is not that time.
Devereux Millburn’s HONEYDEW (Dark Star Pictures/Bloody Disgusting) stars Sawyer Spielberg and Malin Barr as a young couple forced to seek shelter in the home of an aging farmer (Barbara Kingsley from “Jessica Jones”) and her odd son until they start having strange hallucinations and cravings. It’s a little odd that two horror sites, Dread Central and Bloody Disgusting, have movies out this week as they venture in distribution. But I just didn’t have time to see either movie. Sorry, guys!
And then the other movies I wasn’t able to get to this week include:
BEAST BEAST (Vanishing Angle)
VANQUISH (Lionsgate)
NIGHT OF THE SICARIO (Saban Films)
BILL TRAYLOR: CHASING GHOSTS (Kino Lorber)
OUR TOWNS (HBO/HBO Max)
GOODBYE BUTTERFLY (Gravitas Ventures)
That’s it for this week. Next week is actually the release of the new Mortal Kombat from Warner Bros. although I’m expecting a very busy weekend with awards over at Below the Line, so we’ll see how far I get. Wish me luck!
0 notes
Text
The Weekend Warrior 3/19/21: SXSW, Zack Snyder’s Justice League,The Courier, City of Lies, Happily and More!
Remember a couple weeks back when I stated the plan was to bring back the Weekend Warrior as a regular weekly series again? Yeah, well if you looked for a column last week and wondered what happened, I just didn’t have time to write one. And I also just haven’t been able to get back on the ball in terms of writing reviews. It just takes a lot of time to watch all the movies let alone review them the way I did last year. I honestly have no idea how I did it last year, but things have been busier than ever at Below the Line, which does throw a bit of a spanner into any extracurricular plans.
The big event this week is the annual SXSW Film Festival, which I’ll be taking part in virtually, and somewhat tangentially, watching as much as I can while still doing other things. It’s been a while since I’ve attended SXSW in person, but it tends to have great docs, especially music docs. In fact, this year’s Opening Night Film is the documentary, Demi Lovato: Dancing with the Devil, about Demi Lovato’s drug overdose from 2018 and its aftermath. Other music docs of interest include Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliché, about the late frontwoman from early punk band X-Ray Spex through the eyes of her daughter; Mary Wharton’s doc Tom Petty, Somewhere You Feel Free made from archival footage of the late singer making his 1994 record “Wildflowers”; Alone Together about Charlie XCX’s pandemic record; Under the Volcano about George Martin’s AIR Studios Montserrat; and it gives another chance to see Edgar Wright’s excellent, The Sparks Brothers, which was picked up by Focus Features after Sundance. There’s also an amazing doc about Selma Blair’s fight with MS, Introducing, Selma Blair, which is equal parts heartbreaking and inspirational.
SXSW also has pretty solid Midnighters, and there’s a number of those I’m also looking forward to, including Travis Stevens’ Jakob’s Wife, starring horror legends Larry Fassenden and Barbara Crampton, who were so great in my buddy Ted Geoghegan’s We Are Still Here. (No coincidence since Stevens produced that movie.) And I hope to watch a few others like Lee Haven Jones’ The Feast, Jacob Gentry’s Broadcast Signal Intrusion, and Alex Noyer’s Sound of Violence. We’ll see how much I get to see this week, cause it’s a lot of movies over only a couple days, basically from Tuesday through Saturday.
Closer to home at the Metrograph, the still-closed movie theater is doing a virtual series called “Bill Murray X6” which has already shown Lost in Translation and What about Bob? With Rushmore screening until Thursday, and then The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou available through Friday. Become a digital member for just $5 a month! This past weekend I saw a really amazing 7-part doc series called Untitled Pizza Movie by David Shapiro. In fact, I stayed up late on Sunday to watch the whole thing since it was leaving the digital screeners, but it’s a very entertaining, intriguing and personal story about the director, his friend and partner in crime Leeds, who he went around to different NYC pizza shops in the ‘90s trying to find the perfect slice, and then they come across pizzaman Andrew Belluci at the world-famous Lombardi’s in Soho. The project that took over 20 years to make follows what happened to the three men, but mainly Leeds and Belluci as they have ups and downs that ultimately leads to Belluci starting his own pizza joint in Queens. Everything that happens in between is quite fascinating.
I saw a couple other movies this past weekend including Robin Wright’s Land, which I quite enjoyed, and the rom-com Long Weekend, which came out last Friday but I totally missed. Land is a pretty amazing directorial debut that’s mostly a one-woman show with her character alone in the wilderness until she runs into trouble and meets Demian Bichir’s kindly Samaritan and they become friends. Directed by Stephen Basilone, Long Weekend stars Finn Wittrock and Zoe Chao in what starts as a meet cute rom-com and turns into something much deeper with a couple sci-fi-tinged twists, a bit like Palm Springs, but much more grounded. I loved the two leads and how Basilone made a romantic comedy that actually was romantic and very funny, as well. Both movies I recommend.
Getting into some of the streamer offerings this week, ZACK SNYDER’s JUSTICE LEAGUE will hit HBO Max on Thursday, so we can finally see whether or not that extra money and work paid off. I’ll be reviewing this over at Below the Line, so won’t spend too much time here. I figure that anyone who has been waiting for this will watch it, as will anyone who has been curious about it. As you can read from my review, I was quite impressed by the film as an achievement in finishing what is clearly a far superior film to the 2017 theatrical release. Some of the highlights include great stuff between Ray Fisher’s Cyborg and his father, a far more fun introduction to The Flash that was cut from the 2017 release and just some insanely crazy good action. I can’t wait to watch the movie again.
Kicking off on Friday is the anticipated Marvel Studios series, THE FALCON AND THE WINTER SOLDIER (Disney), bringing back the title characters played by Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan, who were introduced in one of the MCU’s better movies, Captain America: The Winter Soldier. I was sent the first episode and unfortunately, there’s an embargo until Thursday afternoon, but I do think that MCU fans are gonna be thrilled with the first episode, especially with the Falcon’s opening action sequence, which is like something right out of the movies.
Okay, fine, so let’s get to some new movies and some real reviews…
Probably the movie with the widest release this weekend will be THE COURIER (Lionsgate/Roadside Attractions), starring Benedict Cumberbatch, which I’m guessing will be in 1,000 or so theaters. The movie premiered at Sundance way back in 2020 under the significantly worse title of “Ironbark” with plans to release it later in the year, but then COVID happened. I’m not sure if Roadside Attractions planned for this to be an awards movie, but after a few delays, releasing it in mid-March just days after the Oscar nominations, I’m guessing probably not?
Directed by Dominic Cooke (On Chesil Beach) from a screenplay by Tom O’Connor (The Hitman’s Bodyguard… wait, WHAT?), this Cold War spy thriller set in the early ‘60s stars Cumberbatch as Greville Wynne, a British businessman who is coerced by agents from MI6 and the CIA (repped by Rachel Brosnahan) to smuggle Russian secrets from military man Oleg Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze). Greville’s trips to Moscow start getting more and more dangerous under the shadow of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and his wife (the always great Jessie Buckley) wants him to stop taking the trips. It all leads up to a pretty exciting second act as the KGB starts to figure out what Greville and Oleg have been up to and work to put a stop to it.
I have to admit that as much as I enjoy a good spy-thriller, a lot of this reminded me of Cumberbatch’s earlier film Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – yes, the John Le Caree adaptation, which I was never a particularly big fan of. This has similarities in that it starts out fairly slow, making me think this might be one of those well-made, well-acted movies that are just plain boring cause the subject doesn’t interest me. I’m sure when this was greenlit, there was probably more relevance to the situation between the U.S. and Russia, although this is obviously a British production and maybe something better to watch on the Beeb than in a movie theater.
In general, the stuff with the two men and their families tends to be the best part of the movie. I wasn’t familiar with Merab Ninidze beforehand, but he’s a really good actor who holds his own in scenes with Cumberbatch. Although Cumberbatch’s performance is significantly better here than in The Mauritanian, that’s definitely a better movie, so even in the last act which sees Wynne in a Russian jail, it just doesn’t compare. This is the second film with Rachel Brosnahan in which she didn’t really impress me much after hearing how great she is on Mrs. Maisel. Even so, the movie did make me want to go back and rewatch the beginning again to see if maybe I wasn’t as focused on it, as it should be.
As far as box office, I don’t have much hope for this making more than $2 or 3 million this weekend, since it seems more like a prestige platform release that would have to build audiences from rave reviews or positive word-of-mouth. Coming out so long after its festival debut (kinda like that Thomas Edison movie a few years back) may have helped people forget about the midling festival reviews. Even so, this movie just doesn’t have much buzz or interest from #FilmTwitter who has had its tongue so far up the superhero movie ass this week between Zack Snyder’s Justice League and Marvel’s The Falcon and the Winter Soldier to pay much attention to this. (Hey, facts is facts!)
Johnny Depp and Forrest Whitaker star in Brad Furman’s crime-thriller CITY OF LIES (Saban Films), which is about the real-life search for the killer of the Notorious B.I.G. aka Biggie Smalls with Depp playing Detective Russell Poole, who ended up on the case in 1997, and Whitaker playing reporter Jack Jackson, doing a story on Smalls for the 20thanniversary of the unsolved murder.
Based on the book “Labyrinth” (the movie’s original title), it’s a story that takes place in two time periods, Los Angeles in the ‘90s after the Rodney King beating and L.A. riots and how it’s made the criminal element that surrounds rap mogul Suge Night. It begins with Poole investigating the death of a black police officer named Gaines, shot by a white police officer (Shea Whigham) in what is seemingly a road rage incident. As Poole investigates, he learns about police corruption in the force including a number of officers tied directly to Knight.
As Jackson interviews Poole to try and find out who killed Biggie, we flashback to Poole’s investigation and interaction with some of those corrupt cops and being put into extremely dangerous situations. The movie isn’t bad, especially the scenes between Whitaker and Depp, who gives a far more grounded performance than we’ve seen from him in recent years. Even so, the performance that really impressed me was Toby Huss as Poole’s superior, who just brings something new to the tough head detective role we haven’t really seen.
Regardless of what you think of Depp’s activities off-camera, this is a fairly solid crime thriller (as was Scott Cooper’s Black Mass), and though you never actually get to see Biggie, Tupac or Suge Night, it’s an interesting examination into a period in L.A. that seems so long ago but still rings true to what’s been going on in the last year.
BenDavid Grabinski’s HAPPILY (Saban/Paramount) is a dark comedy-thriller starring Joel McHale and Kerry Bishé as Tom and Janet, a happily married couple who annoy their friends by still having sex on the regular whenever they possibly can. In fact, their friends decide to uninvite Tom and Janet to their planned couples’ weekend because they’re so annoyed by them. One day, a mysterious man (played by Stephen Root) shows up at Tom and Janet’s house, one thing leads to another and they kill and bury him. Thinking that the man’s visit might be part of a friend’s prank, they go to the planned couples’ trip, trying to figure out if the prankster has gotten suspicious about what they’ve done.
For the sake of transparency, I met Grabinski at my very first Sundance ever as he was friends with some of my colleagues, but I never spent a ton of time talking to him. This film impressed me, since it’s a prtty strong debut from him, one that benefits greatly from a strong cast that includes Paul Scheer, Breckin Meyer (who I didn’t even recognize!), Charlyne Yi, Natalie Morales and more, making for a really solid ensemble dark comedy that reminded me of the tone of last year’s The Hunt or Ike Barinholtz’s The Oath or a great lesser-seen movie from last year, Robert Schwartzman’s The Argument. Dark comedy isn’t for everyone, and this is definitely a little mean-spirited at times, but more importantly, it’s very funny and tends to get crazier and crazier as it goes along.
More importantly, I loved Grabinski’s musical choices from Devo’s “Working in a Coal Mine” to not one but two OMD songs, and great use of Public Image Limited as well. The way Grabinski puts this together comes across like a hipper and fresher Hitchcock, and while it might not be for everyone, I could totally see this killing at a genre fest like Fantastic Fest or even this week’s SXSW. It’s clever and original and rather intriguing how Grabinski puts all the various pieces together.
Hitting Shudder on Thursday is Elza Kephart’s horror-comedy SLAXX (Shudder) about a possessed pair of jeans brought to life to punish the practices of a trendy clothing company, which it does by terrorizing the staff locked in overnight. Didn’t get to watch this before getting bogged down in SXSW but definitely looking forward to it.
Another horror film coming out this week is the horror anthology PHOBIAS (Vertical), exec. produced by the filmmaking team “Radio Silence” (Ready or Not) with segments directed by Camilla Belle, Maritte Lee Go, Joe Sill, Jess Varley and Chris von Hoffman. The stories follow five dangerous patients suffering from extreme phobias at a government facility with a crazed doctor trying to weaponize their fears.
Jeremy Piven stars in Paolo Pilladi’s LAST CALL (IFC Films) playing real estate developer Mick, who returns to his old Philly neighborhood and must decide whether to resurrect his family bar or raze it. I actually watched a few minutes of this, but apparently, IFC Films isn’t allowing reviews, so I have nothing more to say about the movie beyond the fact that it’s coming out on Friday.
Opening at the newly reopened Film Forum – currently doing a hybrid of in-person and virtual cinema – is Chris McKim’s doc WOJNAROWICZ: F**K YOU F*GGOT F**KER (Kino Lorber), premiering virtually on Friday. It’s about David Wojnarowicz, one of the loudest voices in the ACT-Up movement during the ‘80s who died of AIDS himself in 1992. (Correction: Film Forum actually isn’t reopening until April 2.)
A few other things this week include Aengus James’ doc AFTER THE DEATH OF ALBERT LIMA hitting Crackle about Paul Lima, a son obsessed with capturing his father’s murderer who has remained at large in Honduras due to a failed legal system. Because of this, Paul travels to the Honduras with two bounty hunters to find and capture the killer.
Lastly, streaming on Topic Thursday, there’s Parliament, directed by Elilie Noblet and Jeremie Sein, about a young man named Samy who arrives in Brussels after the Brexit vote trying to get a job into the European Parliament without really knowing how it works.
That’s all for this week. It might be a while before I can get The Weekend Warrior back into some sort of fighting weekly shape, but I’m doing the best I can right now, so let me know if you’re reading any of this.
0 notes
Text
The Weekend Warrior’s January 2021 Preview
Happy New Year!
So we’re gonna do things a little different this month. If it works out, I might do this as a regular thing until I feel comfortable writing about box office on a weekly basis again. It may be a long while. As you’ll see, this is a fairly comprehensive preview of the month ahead, as it stands on the first day of posting this, which hopefully is Wednesday, January 6.
I will be updating this post regularly with reviews and any date changes, etc. If you want to keep track of which movies I’ve reviewed, your best option is to bookmark my Rotten Tomatoes page, since more than likely, any new reviews will be added there at the same time they’re posted here.
Why do I have this bad feeling that doing the column this way is just gonna give me more work? (I was correct. Instead of writing about 6 movies every single week, I ended up writing about nearly 30 movies in one week.)
What’s surprising is that there are far fewer wide releases in January than any previous year, as I only count two or three in total. That’s not good.
Definitions:
Theatrical – Movie will play in any number of movie theaters, either in select locations or nationwide. Some of these may have a digital/VOD component.
Streaming – Movie is available to watch any time as part of a subscription streaming service aka Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, HBO Max, Apple TV+, Shudder, Hulu, etc.
Virtual Cinema – Movie is available to watch through a ticketed system which shares profits with any number of local or nationwide arthouses or festivals. Some of these may be geoblocked.
VOD – Video on Demand, movie can be rented, downloaded and watched either for a set amount of time (24 hours+) or bought to watch any time, available on a variety of platforms including iTunes, Amazon Prime Video, Fandango Now and others. (Also may be called “Digital,” “PVOD,” “TVOD,” or merely “On Demand,”)
TUESDAY, JANUARY 5
Digital/VOD:
Gun and a Hotel Bible (Freestyle Digital Media)
Scooby Doo director Raja Gosnell teams with Alicia Joy LeBlanc to adapt the award-winning play starring Bradley Gosnell as Pete, a desperate man who is about to commit a violent act when he encounters Daniel Floren’s Gideon, a personified hotel bible, as they get into a philosophical discussion. It will be available to buy or rent on iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, DirecTV, On Demand, YouTube Movies, Vudu, Xbox, & FandangoNOW.
Streaming:
History of Swear Words (Netflix)
No less than Nicolas Cage stars in Season 1 of the “educational series” on swear words that goes into the origins of all of your favorites!
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 6
Virtual Cinema:
MY REMBRANDT (Strand Releasing)
Dutch filmmaker Oeke Hoogendijk’s documentary looks at a few of the just 37 private owners of Rembrandt paintings, particularly Amsterdam’s Jan Six, a young art dealer and member of a family who has owned many Rembrandts, but he’s obsessed with an unknown painting that might even have Rembrandt having painted himself into the picture. Another owner, Baron Eric de Rothschild, is obsessed with selling two paintings, creating a bidding war between two top art museums. The film will be available through New York’s Film Forum Virtual Cinema and others.
Streaming:
SURVIVING DEATH (Netflix)
The new six-episode doc series is directed and exec. produced by Ricki Stern (Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work) and based on Leslie Kean’s best-selling book that looks into the possibility of an afterlife.
THURSDAY, JANUARY 7
Streaming:
FEATURED FLICK!
PIECES OF A WOMAN (Netflix)
Kornél Mundruczó’s drama starring Vanessa Kirby and Shia Labeouf as a Boston couple who lose their baby in a difficult home delivery will hit the streamer. You can read my review of the film here.
FRIDAY, JANUARY 8
Theatrical:
FEATURED FLICK!
ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI… (Amazon Prime Video)
Regina King’s narrative directorial debut will open in more theaters after playing in Miami over the past few weeks will expand to other cities nationwide for a one-week theatrical release before streaming on Prime Video. You can read my reviews of the film here and here.
FEATURED FLICK!
THE REASON I JUMP (Kino Lorber)
Naoki Higashida’s best-selling book that was translated into English by David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas) is turned into an arty doc directed by Jerry Rothwell. It’s based on Higashida’s revelations as a 13-year-old boy suffering dealing with autism blended with portraits of five other young people with autism.
Quick Thoughts: I haven’t read Higashida’s book or its English translation, but it makes a beautiful and lyrical accompaniment, as narrated by Jordan O’Donegan, for this look inside the life of a number of young autistic people, as their parents talk about trying to help their children without fully understanding what they’re going through. In many ways, this doc may offer some of the best insights into what it’s like to be autistic or dealing with an autistic family member in order to create some much-needed empathy for a condition so many face. The film is haunting and even horrifying at times, but it’s beautifully filmed to create a fully immersive experience.
REDEMPTION DAY (Saban Films)
Hicham Hajji’s action thriller stars Gary Dourdan (CSI) as U.S. Marine Captain Brad Paxton whose wife Kate (Serinda Swan) is kidnapped by a terrorist group while working in Morocco, which forces him back into action to save the woman he loves. It also stars Andy Garcia, Ernie Hudson and Martin Donovan, and it will get a limited theatrical release and be available on Tuesday, Jan. 12, On Demand and Digital.
Quick Thoughts: While Hajji seems to bring some authenticity to this Mideast revenge thriller, the film starts out as a tribute to our fighting troops but then soon turns ridiculous, first with the kidnapping of his wife less than 24 hours after going to Morocco, and then some of the politics involved with helping her. Eventually, Dourdan goes in guns a-blazin’ in a way more apt for a movie from the ‘90s, and Hajji undoes a lot of the good will the film would have received if things were handled even somewhat tastefully. Appearances by better-known actors like Garcia, Hudson and Donovan tends to distract from the story more than adding or enhancing what was already a problematic premise.
IF NOT NOW, WHEN? (Vertical)
Actors Meagan Good and Tamara Bass make their directorial debuts with this movie about four high school friends (Good and Bass are two of them, presumably) who are brought back together to help one of them during a crisis. From the official summary: “It’s a story of love, forgiveness and the incredible bond between women.)
Digital/On Demand:
STARS FELL ON ALABAMA (Samuel Goldwyn Films)
V.W. Scheich’s romantic comedy stars James Maslow as successful Hollywood agent Bryce Dixon who returns to Alabama after 15 years for his high school reunion, only to learn that he is one of his few friends not married with children, so he pretends his client Madison Belle, to pretend to be his girlfriend. American Idol winner Taylor Hicks appears in the movie as himself.
FEATURED FLICK!
THE DISSIDENT (Briarcliff
Bryan Fogel’s documentary about the murder of journalist Jamal Kashouggi will be released On Demand today via ITunes. Reviewed in the previous Weekend Warrior column.
Deon Taylor’s thriller Fatale (reviewed last month) will also be available to watch via VOD starting today.
Streaming:
WORTH WATCHING!
PRETEND IT’S A CITY (Netflix)
No less than Martin Scorsese directs this 7-part limited series about his long-time friend, critic and essayist Fran Lebowitz, as they explore New York City, presumably pre-pandemic. As someone who is celebrating my 34th year in New York City this week, I absolutely loved the series. Lebowitz is absolutely hilarious and Scorsese really pulls some amazing stories from out of her in this series that’s like a “how-to” for anyone who might ever want to live here. A truly joyful albeit crotchety take on New York living, which is the perfect combination to keep this series entertaining.
FEATURED FLICK!
HERSELF (Prime Video)
Phyllida Lloyd’s dramedy, starring Clare Dunne (who co-wrote the script) as a single mother trying to create a home for her two daughters and who decides to build an affordable home for them, hits the streamer today. Also reviewed in the previous Weekend Warrior column.
SUNDAY, JANUARY 10
Critics Choice Super Awards
The inaugural edition of the Critics Choice’s genre film and television awards show will be broadcast on the CW tonight, hosted by Kevin Smith and Dani Fernandez.
******************************************
TUESDAY, JANUARY 12
Digital/VOD:
SKYFIRE (ScreenMedia)
The Simon-West directed thriller is set on the Tianhuo Island in a Pacific Rim volcanic belt where a young scientist (Hannah Quinlivan), who has invented a volcanic warning system, returns to prevent more death only to find that it’s been turned into a volcano theme park by Jason Isaacs. Okay, then. This will available On Demand.
THE BID (GVN Releasing)
Marquis Boone’s directorial debut has him and co-writer Richard Harris (not that one) playing Philadelphia rappers who get framed by a police officer who sends them to prison to fight the prison system from the inside. As I started that last sentence, I presumed it was a comedy until I got to the last half of it.
CURSE OF AURORE (Freestyle Digital Releasing)
Mehran C. Torgoley’s horror film is about a “Dark Web” thumb drive found by a YouTuber that involves a trio of American filmmakers including Liana Barron’s Lena, who are in Quebec researching the true crime case of a young girl named Aurore Gagnon, murdered in 1920 by her parents in a case of child abuse. As the filmmakers investigate the place where she was killed, they experience paranormal occurrences… and yes, it’s 2021 an we’re still getting Blair Witch Project “homages.”
GO/DON’T GO (Gravitas Ventures)
Alex Knapp writes/directs and stars in this “psychosexual thriller” in which he plays the sole survivor after an unknown cataclysm with visons of his best friend Kyle (Nore Davis) introducing him to Olivia Luccardi’s Kay, the love of his life. It will be out via digital and cable VOD platforms.
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 13
2021 New York Jewish Film Festival
This long-running series from Film at Lincoln Center will run virtually this year, beginning with the Ophir Award-winning Here We Are from director Nir Bergman (who won Best Director), a road trip tale of a divorced dad hitting the road with his autistic son. The festival’s centerpiece is Winter Journey, co-directed by Anders Østergaard and Erzsébet Rácz, and starring the great Bruno Ganz. The festival also includes Israel’s entry to this year’s Oscars, Ruthy Pribar’s Asia. You can read all about the films in the program here and can get a 17-film All-Access pass for the entire line-up for $125.00.
FEATURED FLICK!
THE WHITE TIGER (Netflix)
Ramin (99 Homes, Man Push Cart) Bahrani directs this comedic adaptation of Balram Halwai’s 2008 Man Booker Prize-winning bestseller. Halwai is played by Adarsh Gourav, as it follows his journey from being a poor driver who uses his wit and cunning to become a successful entrepreneur in India. Although Balram has been trained by society to only be a servant, he finds a way to work his way up through the system and try to change things from a new position within society. This will get a very limited theatrical release today before hitting Netflix on January 22.
Streaming:
STALKER: THE HUNT FOR A SERIAL KILLER (Netflix)
Tiller Russell’s docuseries tells the story about a serial killer that struck Los Angeles in 1985 in the middle of a record-breaking heatwave, the victims ranging from six to 82 years old.
THURSDAY, JANUARY 14
Theatrical/On Demand:
BLOODY HELL (The Horror Collective)
Alister Grierson’s violent horror-comedy stars Ben O’Toole as a man with a mysterious past who flees the country to escape his personal hell only to end up somewhere much worse. It opens in select cities and On Demand, and then will be on DVD and Blu-ray on Tuesday, January 19.
Streaming:
LOCKED DOWN (HBO Max)
The Doug Liman-directed romantic comedy, starring Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor, about a heist set during a pandemic that’s written by Steven Knight will hit the streamer today. This movie was fully made during the pandemic.
HUNTED (Shudder)
The live action English debut from Persepolis and Chicken with Plums director Vincent Paronnaud will stream on Shudder today. It stars Lucie Debay as Eve, who becomes the target of a misogynistic plot against two men who pursue her through the forest where she’s forced to survive. From the synopsis: “But survival isn’t enough for Eve. She will have revenge!” (Okay, that exclamation point is my own. Definitely sounds like something that would require one.)
FRIDAY, JANUARY 15
Note: This is Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday weekend, so many government agencies and schools are off on Monday. Not sure that will really have an effect on anything.
Theatrical:
THE MARKSMAN (Briarcliff/Open Road) (NEW REVIEW!)
Liam Neeson stars in his second theatrical release in the past six months, Robert (Trouble with the Curve) Lorenz’s action-thriller in which Neeson plays a rancher on the Arizona border who ends up defending a young Mexican boy who is trying to escape from cartel assassins that followed him into the States. I haven’t seen this yet, nor do I know if I’ll have a chance. I’m guessing this is being released as a typical January release and not as an awards contender with the Oscar deadline pushed back to February 28.
Mini-Review: Here we’re into a brand new year, and yet, we’re getting the third movie about an old man watching over a young child. This time it’s Liam Neeson as Vietnam sniper Jim Henson, who is living on his ranch in an Arizona border town with his dog Jackson with financial problems that might take his home away from him. A chance encounter on the border when Jim witnesses a single mother with her son being chased by the cartel, leaves the mother dead and the young, Miguel (Jacob Perez), in danger of being next. Jim decides to take the boy across the country to his family in Chicago, chased the entire way by the cartel.
While The Marksman attempts to create a topical action-thriller, it isn’t one that necessarily feels very timely, only because we’ve seen so many border-set movies over the past few years, maybe for obvious reasons. Director Robert Lorenz is a long-time Clint Eastwood collaborator, both as producer and assistant-director, and you probably will notice a number of similar stylistic flares in common – you also can totally see Eastwood playing the Neeson role if he was twenty years younger.
The movie comes across more like last year’s Let Him Go rather than Neeson’s own 2020 movie, Honest Thief, and maybe that’s for the better since this seems to be better suited for his specialized skills, both in terms of action and drama. Not that there is a ton of action in the movie, but the few shootouts and chases are decent enough, but nothing too insane. I’m sure ultra-liberals might have issues with certain scenes like how easy it is for Jim to buy a gun or teaching the young Miguel to use one, but that just seems creating an unnecessary political overlay.
While the majority of the film is Jim and Miguel on this road trip, there’s a nice role for Katheryn Winnick as Jim’s border police—well, it’s never really clear if she’s his daughter or not--but otherwise, the Mexican actors are not particularly good compared to Neeson – sadly, very stereotypical – and the writing is probably on the weaker side compared to the score by Sean Callery that goes a long way towards enhancing the emotions and tension when needed.
The Marksman is a decent enough dramatic thriller that feels a little by-the-books but gains enough humanity from Neeson’s performance to make it a worthwhile watch.
Rating: 7/10
THE DIG (Netflix)
Carey Mulligan and Ralph Fiennes star in this drama that takes place just before WWII with Mulligan playing a wealthy widow wo hires Fiennes’ archeologist to excavate the burial mounds on her estate in which they make a historic discovery. I like when movie titles are very literal like this one. Will be released to select cinemas before its Netflix debut on January 29.
MLK/FBI (IFC Films)
Sam Pollack’s doc that’s had a successful festival run will get a small limited run as well as be available On Demand today. As the title implies, it studies the FBI’s attempts to discredit Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as his movement towards the Civil Rights Act continues to gain momentum. I didn’t like this as much as a few of Pollack’s other docs, including the recent Two Train Runnin’ and his co-directed doc, Mr Soul!
SOME KIND OF HEAVEN (Magnolia Pictures)
Lance Oppenheim’s first feature doc, co-produced by Darren Aronofsky, looks at the largest retirement community in America, the Villages in Central Florida, where a few residents are unable to find happiness despite the community’s pre-packaged paradise.
Quick Thoughts: This was a very different movie than I was expecting, since at first it seemed to thrive on the quirky personalities of the resident and their party-centric activities, but it then quickly focuses on three very particular cases, an elderly man named Dennis who is living in his van on the site of the Villages, trying to find himself a relationship (hopefully one with money). There’s also a couple who has been married for 47 years with a woman who has to deal with her husband’s ever-increasing eccentric behavior that involves drugs and troubles with the law. Lastly, there’s a widow who is trying to find happiness and companionship in the Villages, which is a particularly lonely experience as she goes from one group or club to another. All three of these stories keep the viewer invested but especially Oppenheim’s look at loneliness of people in that age group, which made it impossible for me not to think of my mother who has been suffering through the loneliness of the pandemic and not being able to be around other people her own age because of it. A terrifically insightful film that makes you think and hard about your own aging and mortality.
FLINCH (Ardor Pictures)
Camron Van Hoy’s crime-thriller stars Daniel Zovatto as a young hitman who lives with his mother (Cathy Moriarty) who falls in love with a girl (Tilda Cobham-Hervey) who sees him kill someone. Since he can’t kill her, he instead brings her home and learns there’s more to her than he thought. This will ALSO be on TVOD starting on Tuesday, Jan. 21.
ACASA MY HOME (Zeitgeist, Kino Lorber)
Romanian filmmaker Radu Ciorniciuc’s directorial debut doc, which premiered at Sundance last year (receiving an award for its cinematography), about the Enache family who lives in harmony with nature in the wilderness of the Bucharest Delta. When the area is turned into a public national park, they’re forced to move to the city where things are very different. It will open in select cities and via virtual cinema.
GOODBYE, BUTTERFLY (Gravitas Ventures)
Tyler Wayne’s directorial debut is this crime thriller starring Adam Donshik (House of Cards) as Ryan Olsen, a family man whose five-year-old daughter is murdered, but with no leads, Ryan starts suspecting his oddball neighbor Stan (Andy Lauer), so Ryan takes the law into his own hands. This is getting day and date theatrical with TVOD (no idea what that is) and digital.
VOD:
AMERICAN SKIN
Nate Parker’s second film as a director following the Sundance Prize-winning Birth of a Nation has him starring as a Marine veteran working as a school janitor who tries to fix things with his son, who is killed by a police officer who isn’t even put to trial for the death so he takes matters in his own hand. The drama also stars Omari Hardwick and will be available on iTunes and other VOD platforms.
Two of my favorite movies of 2020, Emmerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman (Focus Features), starring Carey Mulligan, and Paul Greengrass’ News of the World (Universal), starring Tom Hanks, will be available starting today via PVOD, rentable for 48-Hour rental. These both should be in the Oscar race, so don’t miss them!
Virtual Cinema:
TRIBUTE TO SAM POLLARD
Film at Lincoln Center is running a one-week retrospective to editor, producer and director Sam Pollard to tie in with the release by IFC Films of MLK/FBI, which played at the New York Film Festival last year. It will include some of his own docs (including, hopefully, the excellent Mr. Soul!), as well as his collaborations with Spike Lee, St. Clair Bourne and Henry Hampton. Hopefully, there will be a line-up as it gets closer to the series start, and I’ll add that when it becomes available.
FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO (Cinema Guild)
Over a period of 35 years between 1984 and 2019, Lynne Sachs used various media, including 8 and 16mm film, videotape and digital images to capture a portrait of her father, Ira Sachs Sr, a Park Cit, Utah businessman, in order to understand the web that connects a child to her parents and a sister to her siblings. This will open in Virtual Cinema through the Museum of the Moving Image, Laemmle and others around the country. MOMI will also be holding a 30-year virtual retrospective of Ms. Sachs’ work, starting on Jan. 13.
MY LITTLE SISTER (Film Movement)
Switzerland’s official Oscar entry is Stéphanie Chuat and Véronique Reymond’s drama starring Nina Hoss (Phoenix) as Lisa, a brilliant playwright who has stopped writing and now lives with her family in Switzerland. She dreams of returning to Berlin to be with her stage acting twin brother Sven (Lars Eldinger from Proxima) who is facing an aggressive leukemia. Lisa’s attention to her brother causes a rift in her marriage, but she hopes to write something that will get Sven back on stage before the inevitable. You can find a list of theaters showing this via virtual cinema here.
THE WAKE OF LIGHT (Laemmle)
Renji Phillip’s drama stars Rome Brooks as a young woman who has to choose between seeking love with Cole (Matt Bush), a young man she meets who wants her to join him on his road trip, or caring for her aging father . This will have a virtual theatrical release through Laemmle Theaters today and then be available through Digital Platforms on February 15.
MANDABI (Janus Films)
Senegalese novelist and the “father of African film” Ousmne Sembène’s 1968 film about an unemployed man who finds a windfall of money will get a release through Film Forum’s Virtual Cinema.
Streaming:
OUTSIDE THE WIRE (Netflix)
Anthony Mackie stars in Mikael Håfström’s sci-fi thriller, playing android officer Leo who is teamed with drone pilot Harp (Damson Idris) to locate a doomsday device in a militarized zone before insurgents do.
WANDAVISION (Disney+)
The long-awaited Marvel Studios television series that ties directly into the MCU, spinning-off Elisabeth Olsen’s Wanda and Paul Bettany’s Vision into their own series that seems to be playing with other dimensions and worlds but also
ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI… (Amazon Prime Video)
Regina King’s powerful drama will finally stream on Prime Video, so those who haven’t had a chance to see it at a festival or awards screening or in theaters will get to see it. Woohoo!
SATURDAY, JANUARY 16
Streaming:
SERVANT (Apple TV+)
Season 2 of the M. Night Shyamalan produced thriller series will debut. I hope to have some more to write about as it gets closer, since it’s currently under embargo.
******************************************
MONDAY, JANUARY 18
VOD/Digital:
STALLONE... FRANK, THAT IS (Branded Studio)
Derek Wayne Johnson’s documentary takes an in-depth look into the life and career of Frank Stallone, the younger brother of the far-more-famous Sylvester Stallone, whose own four decade career has earned him three Platinum Albums, ten Gold Albums and five Gold Singles… which is odd, since I don’t think I could name a single one of his songs. He’s also done soundtracks for many of his brother’s films including The Expendables 2, the first three Rocky movies, Rambo II and more and appeared in 75 films and TV shows. Obviously, I’ll need to watch this doc to learn more about him.
YUNG LEUN: IN MY HEAD (Momento Film/Nonstop Entertainment)
Henrik Burman’s doc about Swedish hip-hop artist Yung Leun aka Jonathan Leandoer, who turned his love for rap music into a career by making music on his computer and putting the results up on YouTube, but soon, the imaginary character he has been portraying starts to take over, leading to drugs and mental illness.
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 20
Virtual Cinema:
THE SALT OF TEARS (Distrib Films)
Philippe Garrel’s black and white drama about toxic masculinity involving one young handsome man put amidst three vulnerable women will play as part of Film Forum’s Virtual Cinema.
FRIDAY, JANUARY 22
Theatrical:
NO MAN’S LAND (IFC Films)
Conor Allyn’s thriller stars Frank Grillo as border “vigilante” Bill Greer, whose son Jackson (Jake Allyn) accidentally kills a Mexican immigrant boy while on patrol. Although Bill tries to take the blame, a Texas Ranger, played by George Lopez, urges Jackson to flee south via horseback into Mexico to hide out, chased by both rangers and Mexican federales, as he seeks forgiveness from the boy’s father (Jorge A. JIminez). Simultaneous theatrical and VOD.
FEATURED FLICK!
OUR FRIEND (Gravitas Ventures/Universal)
Casey Affleck, Dakota Johnson and Jason Segel star in Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s adaptation of Matthew Teague’s novel The Friend: Love is Not a Big Enough Word (adapted by filmmaker Brad Ingelsby), which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2019. It tells the story of the Teague family – Afleck’s Matt, a journalist, his wife Nicole (Johnson) and their two daughters – and how their life is upended when she’s diagnosed with terminal cancer, forcing Matt to take on more responsibilities as her caretaker and parent, so the couple’s friend Dane (Segel) offers to help out. The film will be in select theaters and On Demand.
THE HUMAN FACTOR (Sony Pictures Classics)
Oscar-nominated doc The Gatekeepers director Dror Moreh takes a look at the peace process between Israelis and Arabs over the past thirty years through the eyes of American mediators, spending time with all of the key players in the conflict trying to find a solution.
BROTHERS BY BLOOD (Vertical)
Jérémie Guez’s revenge thriller, based on Pete Dexter’s novel, stars Joel Kinnaman as Peter Flood, who as an 8-year-old saw his little sister be killed in a reckless driving accident, for which his father sought violent revenge. 30 year later, he’s still trying to deal with his guilt and tries to distance himself from his family crime business and his cousin Michael (Matthias Schoenarts) who has been rising up in the business. In select theaters, and on VOD/Digital.
PG: PSYCHO GOREMAN (RLJfilms/Shudder)
Steven Kostanski’s horror-comedy follows siblings Mimi and Luke (Nita-Josee Hanna, Owen Myre), who resurrect an ancient alien overlord who had been entombed million years ago, nicknaming the evil creature “Psycho Goreman” aka PG (Matthew Ninaber), using an amulet to make him obey their wishes. Soon, lots of PG’s friends and foes from across the galaxy realize he’s been released, and they come to Mimi and Luke’s town to resume their battle. This will also be in select theaters, On Demand and digital.
BORN A CHAMPION (Lionsgate) (NEW ADDITION!)
Dennis Quaid and Sean Patrick Flanery (The Boondock Saints) star in this mixed martial arts film directed by Alex Ranarivelo (American Wrestler: The Wizard) that hits select theaters, digital, and On Demand today before being released on Blu-Ray and DVD on Tuesday, January 26. Flannery plays fighting legend Mickey Kelly, who lost a blood-soaked jujitsu match in Dubai only to learn many years later, that his opponent cheated, so he has to get in shape for a revenge match.
Digital/VOD/Virtual Cinema:
IDENTIFYING FEATURES (Kino Lorber) (NEW ADDITION!)
Having just won the Gotham Award for Best International Feature on Monday (after winning the audience and screenplay awards in the World Cinema category at Sundance last year), Fernanda Valadez’s Mexican border thriller will be released on Kino Marquee and via various virtual cinemas nationwide. It stars Mercedes Hernandez as middle-aged Magdalena, who has lost contact with her son after he’s left their town to cross the border into the U.S. to find work. She ends up following on an equally dangerous journey to find him while a young man named Miguel (David Illescas), recently deported back to Mexico crosses paths with her.
ATLANTIS (Grasshopper)
Ukraine’s Oscar selection is this film from Valentyn Vasyanovych set in a desolate post-war Ukraine where former soldier Sergiy delivers the rare resource of water and volunteers his time to recover the dead bodies of fellow soldiers in hopes of healing. This will open exclusively in Metrograph’s Virtual Cinema system Friday.
NOTTURNO (Super) (NEW ADDITION!)
Gianfranco (Fire at Sea) Rosi’s new documentary is Italy’s entry to the Oscars, as the filmmaker spent three years on the borders of Iraq, Kurdistan, Syria and Lebanon capturing the day every day life that follows the tragedy of the dictatorships and civil wars within those countries. It will get an exclusive virtual cinema launch today and then be available on Hulu and On Demand starting Jan. 29.
COMING CLEAN
The new doc from Ondi Timoner (Dig!, We Live in Public) takes a comprehensive look at the opioid crisis, and the part in it played by Purdue Pharmaceutical and how it deceived patients (and doctors) to lure them in and get them hooked. Available via Virtual Cinema after its virtual festival run.
PREPARATIONS TO BE TOGETHER FOR AN UNKNOWN TIME (Greenwich)
Hungarian filmmaker Lili Horvát makes a love story set in the male-driven world of neurosurgery, starring Natasa Stork as Márta Vizy, who returns to Hungary after time in America to discover that a colleague with whom she had a passionate affair says he’s never seen her before. This will open in Virtual Cinema at Film at Lincoln Center and other places. Part of Lincoln Center’s Virtual Cinema, as well as Hungary’s official entry for the International Film Oscar.
BREAKING FAST (Vertical Entertainment)
Mike Mosallam’s romantic dramedy set in West Hollywood stars Haaz Sleiman as Mo, a practicing Muslim who recently had his heart broken. When All-American Kal (Michael Cassidy) agrees to come to nightly Iftars (the traditional Ramadan meal), they soon learn that they have more in common than they thought. Available on VOD and digital.
Streaming:
THE WHITE TIGER (Netflix)
Ramin (99 Homes, Man Push Cart) Bahrani’s comic adaptation of Balram Halwai’s bestseller hits the streaming service today.
THE SISTER (Hulu)
Neil Cross adapted his own novel Burial into this four-part original series starring Russell Tovey as Nathan, who has been keeping a secret from his past, a party that ended with the shocking death of a young woman. Only Nathan and Bob (Bertie Carvel) knew what happened, but then Bob appears on Nathan’s doorstep with horrifying news.
PIXAR POPCORN (Disney+)
The Disney streamer debuts a series of short films starring your favorite Pixar characters from Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Cars and The Incredibles.
Blown Away and Busted! (Netflix)
Season 2 of the glass-blowing competition reality series and Season 3 of the amateur celebrity sleuth series begin.
Fate: The Winx Saga (Netflix)
Brian Young’s live-action version of the Italian cartoon “Winx Club,” a coming-of-age journey that follows five fairies as they enter the magical boarding school called Alfrea.
Derek Delgaudio’s In and Of Itself (Hulu)
The comedy directed by Frank Oz and exec. produced by Stephen Colbert that’s “a new kind of lyric poem.” Telling “the story of a man fighting to see through the illusion of his own identity, only to discover that identity itself is an illusion.” Yeah, no idea what that means but even Oz isn’t able to describe it, so that’s pretty weird.
******************************************
TUESDAY, JANUARY 26
Theatrical:
WRONG TURN (Saban Films)
Mike P. Nelson’s remake of the 00’s horror franchise will debut as a Fathom Event today. It stars Charlotte Vega, Adain Bradley, Bill Sage, Emma Dumont, Dylan McTee, Daisy Head, Tim DeZarn and Matthew Modine. It involves a group of friends hiking the Appalachian Trail who… you guessed it… make a wrong turn and end up in the land of the Foundation, a community of mountain dwellers who want to protect their lifestyle.
Digital/VOD:
CAGED (Shout Factory)
Aaron Fjellman’s thriller stars Kenyan-born actor Edi Gathegi (The Blacklist), Melora Hardin, Angela Sarafyan, Tony Amendola and James Jagger. Gathegi plays an affluent African-American psychiatrist who is convicted of murdering his wife (Sarafyan) and sentenced to life and put in solitary. While trying to file an appeal, he’s pushed to the breaking point by an abusive female guard (Hardin), causing him to question his innocence and sanity.
#LIKE
Sarah Pirozek’s thriller stars Sarah Rich as a Woodstock, NY teenager named Rosie who a year after her sister Amelia’s death from suicide after being cyberbullied learns that the man responsible (Marc Menchaca) is back online looking for new victims. It will be available via TVOD on iTunes, Amazon Prime, Vudu, FandangoNow and more.
A WOMAN’S WORK: THE NFL’S CHEERLEADER PROBLEM (1091) (NEW ADDITION!)
Yu Gu’s documentary, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2019, will be released on VOD today. It looks at a couple cases of professional NFL cheerleaders who re making far less than deserve, almost working at minimum wage while having to pay out of pocket for their own beauty, transportation and uniforms, putting them into debt. So they sue the Oakland Raiders in a class-action lawsuit.
WEDNESDAY, JANURY 27
Streaming:
PENGUIN BLOOM (Netflix)
Glendyn Ivin’s adaptation of Bradley Trevor Greive’s novel stars Naomi Watts as Samantha Bloom, an Australian mother of three boys who travelled with her husband Cameron (Andrew Lincoln from The Walking Dead) in 2013 and became paralyzed from the waist down after falling from a rooftop. She ends up bonding with a black and white bird her kids name “Penguin” that helps her heal.
THURSDAY, JANUARY 28
The Sundance Film Festival begins today, running until February 3. Hope to have some coverage here and on Below the Line.
FRIDAY, JANUARY 29
Theatrical:
FEATURED FLICK!
THE LITTLE THINGS (Warner Bros/HBO Max)
John Lee Hancock directs this psychological thriller that puts Oscar winner Denzel Washington back into Bone Collectormode, as he plays Kern County Deputy Sheriff Joe “Deke” Deacon, who is sent to Los Angeles to gather evidence but ends up looking for a killer terrorizing the city with a local Sergeant, played by Oscar winner Rami Malek (Bohemian Rhapsody). Getting involved in the case, brings up secrets from Deke’s past. A third Oscar winner, Jared Leto, presumably plays the killer. This will be in theaters and streaming on HBO Max day-and-date. I will have a review for this closer to release.
FEATURED FLICK!
SUPERNOVA (Bleecker Street)
Harry Macqueen’s drama stars Colin Firth and Stanely Tucci as twenty-year partners Sam and Tusk, who travel across England in a camper van visiting friends, family and places from their past after a life-changing diagnosis that will test their love for each other. Look for my review of this very soon.
FEATURED FLICK!
MALCOLM AND MARIE (Netflix) (NEW ADDITION!)
A week before its debut on the stream, Euphoria creator Sam Levinson’s new drama, starring John David Washington and Zendaya, will hit select theaters. Made during the pandemic, Washington plays a filmmaker on the night of the premier of his first feature gets into a very heavy conversation about their relationship with his partner (Zendaya) who doesn’t think he appreciates her and her contribution to his craft. Will have a review of this sometime later this week.
SAINT MAUD (A24) (NEW ADDITION!)
Rose Glass’ acclaimed directorial debut starring breakout star Morfydd Clark as Maud, a hospice nurse who becomes obsessed with saving the soul of her dying patient (played by Jennifer Ehle) but sinister forces try to stop her. This will get a theatrical release today and then will get some sort of Epix Pay TV release on February 12. The movie just received eight nominations from the London Film Critics Circle, but honestly, I saw the movie so long ago, I don’t really remember it very much.
APOLLO 11: QUARANTINE (NEON) (NEW ADDITION!)
This new doc short by Todd Douglas Miller follows up his Emmy-winning documentary, Apollo 11, this one covering the astronauts of the first spaceflight to the moon as they quarantine for three days after arriving back on earth. This will open in IMAX theaters this day and then be available On Demand starting February 5.
FINDING YOU (Roadside Attractions)
Brian Baugh’s adaptation of Jenny B. Jones’ novel There You’ll Find Me is a romantic drama starring Rose Reid as violinist Finley Sinclair who is studying abroad at an Irish coastal village after failing to get into a New York music conservatory. Once there, she meets heartthrob movie star Beckett Rush (Jedidiah Goodacre) who is there filming his fantasy-adventure franchise, and a romance blooms between them.
THE NIGHT (IFC Midnight)
Kourosh Ahari’s horror-thriller stars Shahab Hosseini and Niousha Noor as a married couple with a baby who take shelter in the eerie Hotel Normandie after a night out partying with friends. Over the course of the night, they realize they’re locked in with a malevolent force.
HAYMAKER (Gravitas Ventures)
Nick Sasso wrote, directed, edited and stars in the action-thriller in which he plays a retired Muay Thai fighter working as a bouncer who rescues a transgender performer (Nomi Ruiz) from a thug and becomes her bodyguard and protector in a relationship that also forces him back into the world of fighting. It will open in select theaters, On Demand AND Digital.
Virtual Cinema:
DEAR COMRADES! (NEON) (NEW ADDITION!)
Andrei Konchalovski’s 1962-set Russian drama about a rebellion and a strike following the rising of food prices in the industrial town of Novocherkassk and the massacre that follows. Following its December one-week qualifying, it will open in virtual cinemas this Friday (Jan 29) and then will be available On Demand and on Hulu starting February 5.
On Demand/Digital:
SAVAGE STATE (Samuel Goldwyn Films)
David Perrault’s French-tinged Western takes place at the start of the Civil War as a family of French colonists in Missouri decide to return to France, but first they have to cross the entire country to get back to New York, led by a dangerous mercenary named Victor (Kevin Janssens).
Virtual Cinema:
WHAT HAPPENED WAS... (Oscilloscope)
Actor Tom Noonan’s 1994 directorial debut is a dark comedy about dating based on his own play, starring Noonan and Karen Sillas as co-workers who are stuck together on a Friday night after an intimate dinner that goes sideways. This won the Grand Jury Prize and Screenwriting Award at the 1994 Sundance, and will be added to Film Forum’s Virtual Cinema.
THE FUNERAL HOME (Uncork’d Entertainment) (NEW ADDITION!)
Mauro Iván Ojeda’s supernatural thriller, which premiered at the Fantasia Fest last year, will hit virtual theaters today before its digital release on Tuesday, February 2. It’s about the dysfunctional family of an undertaker who experience all sorts of paranormal manifestations, but it could just be that they’re all MAAAAAD!
THE REUNITED STATES (Dark Star Pictures) (NEW ADDITION!)
Ben Rekhi’s doc is about a group of unsung heroes trying to bridge the political and racial divides in the country as it’s being ripped apart at the seams.It will be available via virtual cinema today and on VOD platforms February 9.
Streaming:
THE DIG (Netflix)
The Cary Mulligan-Ralph Fiennes drama is scheduled to hit the streamer.
PALMER (Apple TV+)
Justin Timberlake stars in the Fisher Stevens-directed drama as an ex-convict who strikes up a friendship with a boy from a troubled home, played by Ryder Allen. It also stars Juno Temple and June Squibb.
BEGINNING (MUBI) (NEW ADDITION!)
Georgia’s (the country, not the state) Oscar entry is the debut feature from writer-director Dea Kulumbegashvili, a drama about a Jehovah’s Witness who undergoes a dramatic crisis of faith. Ila Sukhitshvili plays Yana, the wife of a Jehovah’s Witness leader whose community is attack from an extremist group that creates Yana’s discontent to grow.
WE ARE: THE BROOKLYN SAINTS (Netflix)
The new four-part docuseries from Rudy Valdez (The Sentence) looks at the youth football program in East New York, Brooklyn, where the Brooklyn Saints program gets 7 to 13-year-old boys ready to play and succeed in athletics, while also creating a community.
That’s it for January. Again, check back over the course of the month to see what reviews/movies have been added. Hopefully, we’ll be back to your normal weekly Weekend Warrior by February, but we’ll see.
0 notes
Last Seen Blogs
guntis321
Без названия
feverinfeveroutfic
a defiant menorah 🕎
doortotomorrow
doortotomorrow
marylily4ever
Obsessed with every gay fandom
raypakorn
inside of me's a personal canvas