It’s not been a genre that the streaming service has been that impressive in before now.
They buy horror titles that earned no real release anywhere else. And their in house fright fare hasn’t dazzled.
But two beautiful young cellists/perhaps lovers trapped in a terror only relieved when they whack off their own limbs?
Allison Williams and Logan Browning are the stars of “The Perfection,” a literal “skin crawling” tale of terror, due out May 24.
This week’s version of “She’s Out of Your League,” a rom-com concept Hollywood — well, male Hollywood — never tires of, stars Charlize Theron as the accomplished, runway-ready object of desire and Seth Rogen as the dumpy beard-o who totally has a chance.
“Long Shot” it’s called, for obvious reasons. As coarse and clean as a porn star’s loofah, witty as a haiku on a bathroom stall and as politically deep as a bumper sticker, it’s a stumble-footed two hour+ comedy about a shrill, unemployed journalist winning the heart of his old baby sitter, as her speech writer as she runs for president.
You can’t tell, but I was looking forward to loving this.
It’s slow, the jokes and gags that deliver are mainly about drugs, flatulence, masturbation and Boyz II Men. The political humor is a punch-pulling riff on America Today. And everybody comes off as trying too hard.
Too harsh? One of Rogen’s go-to moves as a funnyman is bugging his eyes out and delivering a line — punch-line or zinger — at a bellow. He bellows almost from start to finish here, playing Fred Flarsky, a newly-unemployed investigative journalist, muckraker and gadfly.
Theron? Oscar-winner she may be, but her comic chops seem limited to “too beautiful to bother with you and knows it.” See “Young Adult” and no, she wasn’t that funny in that, either. She’s got “mean girl” written all over her.
We meet Flarsky in the most promising circumstances, under-cover infiltrating a meeting of the skinhead brain trust known as “White Nation.” His “F-the-Jews” and “Heil…everybody” aren’t that convincing. He’s about to get a swastika tattoo when the jig is up and he’s out the window.
BIG Rogen pratfall.
But all is for naught, as Flarsky’s publication, The Brooklyn Advocate, has just sold to a Murdoch-esque right wing media empire. Andy Serkis plays this version of Rupert.
Flarsky’s college bud, Lance (O’Shea Jackson Jr. of “Straight Outta Compton”) takes off from running his tech firm to buck our boy up. A little drinking, an invite to a reception.
Hell, that lady it’s for, the Secretary of State? She was my baby sitter!
How an alleged journalist missed making the connection when Charlotte Field was first appointed we can only ponder.
They connect, and even though he’s dressed like a 38 year-old unkempt hipster and comes off as a tad angry and entirely too profane to be articulate, she is intrigued.
Nostalgia? Boyz II Men are performing at the reception. All we’ve learned about Field is her workaholic tendencies and loneliness.
How lonely? Male wish-fulfillment fantasy lonely. Apparently.
He’s a connection to the passion for political causes (the environment, etc.) she had before she started selling out to appease her ex-TV star president (Bob Odenkirk, amusing). And Fred’s funny, if off-color. He’ll be perfect to punch up her speeches and give her a sense of humor.
There’s a handsome Canadian prime minister (Alexander Skarsgård, funny for the first time ever) who’d be suitable dating material for a presidential candidate.
But does he stand a chance against a ball-capped goof who can turn her on to all the latest jams, introduce her to Molly and sneak her out clubbing?
The script by Liz Hannah and Dan Sterling doesn’t give the leads a believable and funny arc, or the supporting players much that’s funny to play. The political jokes, about the press baron who “believes that hurricanes are caused by gay marriage,” the “Fox & Friends” type show so sexist it’s supposed to be more over-the-top and funnier than the real thing, fall flat.
The introduction of the perils of being a female candidate (double standards, etc.) covers no new ground and is rarely brought up in a funny way.
But sometimes it is. And sometimes Rogen, a veteran of the “Funniest line on the set wins” school, finds a laugh on their global Secretary of State tour — receptions in Hanoi (“Sorry for what we did to your country.”) and Buenos Aires.
“It’s cool to be in Argentina. I think some of the guys who killed my grandparents are here!”
But the whole affair is so slow as to let the mind play casting exercises. This seems instantly dated in 2019. Would it have worked with a male candidate and frumpy female speech writer who used to babysit for him?
Nah. Rebel Wilson’s got as much work as she can handle.
MPAA Rating: R for strong sexual content, language throughout and some drug use
Cast: Charlize Theron, Seth Rogen, O’Shea Jackson Jr., June Diane Raphael, Alexander Skarsgård and Bob Odenkirk
Credits:Directed by Jonathan Levine, script by Liz Hannah and Dan Sterling. A Summit/Lionsgate release.
Running time: 2:05
If “Dumbo” taught us nothing else, it’s that if you’re going to make a movie with children interacting with animals, you need real animals for that to connect with an audience.
So if you’re making a movie about a girl who grows up to be great friends with a lion — a “white” lion, mind you — you’d better tie down a lot of time in the child actor’s schedule. And you’d best have a white lion handy that you can follow and bond with from oversized kitten to King of the Veldt.
“Mia and the White Lion” has that going for it, a three years-in-the-making Franco-South African production which paired up a child — played by Daniah de Villiers — with a lion cub for a story of family, the bond between humans and animals and the harsh reality that a lot of “rescue” work for orphan wildlife is just a business.
The “years-in-the-making” is both a tribute to the filmmakers’ perseverance, and an explanation for how choppy, jerky and repetitive “White Lion” is. Performances can’t find a rhythm and the melodramatic narrative suffers for it.
How many times can Dad say, “He’s not a bloody pet!” before the actor (Langley Kirkwood) is entitled to yell, “Can we get a rewrite, here?” When you’re piecing together a movie over years, bending your script to fit the reality of the growing cat’s personality and the maturing of your leading lady (de Villiers), and working with a large and potentially dangerous creature we are constantly reminded is “still a wild animal,” you’re constantly shooting at a moving target.
“Mia” is the story of a London family — South African husband, French wife (Mélanie Laurent) and their two kids (de Villiers, and Ryan Mac Lennan) — who move back to the husband’s family farm in rural South Africa.
His dad’s business was rescuing, raising and breeding lions and other wildlife for zoos, circuses and most controversially, preserves and other operations where big game hunters like that creep who owns a U.S. sandwich shop franchise can bag their trophy animal.
John constantly reminds us he’s not going to do with his forbears did. He’s given to griping about losing money on the farm, even as we can’t help but notice the Land Rovers, Jeeps and scooters he’s able to afford as they prep their two story farmhouse and grounds for a planned transition to a wilderness preserve bed and breakfast.
The animal that can make or break that business is the miraculous white lion born there, one connected to tribal legend. Mia, whom we meet at age 11, is slow to bond with the cub, named Charlie. But she warms up and gives up on her shallow London Facetime friends to become Charlie’s constant companion.
Older brother Mick (Mac Lennan) was traumatized by the move, has nightmares and is skittish around the kittenish cub.
The kid-friendliest moments of Gilles de Maistre’s film are Charlie’s bull-in-a-china-shop life in their house, knocking stuff over, roughhousing, cleaning the dinner table before anybody else has a chance to eat.
Young de Villiers shows a lot of brass, first scene to last, in interacting with something her on-screen parents constantly remind her is “a wild animal. And a wild animal’s a wild animal.”
The viewer can fixate, quite understandably, on everything that can go wrong. And even though this film has the kids talk to the animals (an elephant, for instance), giving them instructions which they apparently abide, de Maistre doesn’t shy away from showing us the very real dangers involved.
A growing lion won’t realize his strength, how lethal his teeth can be as he affectionately mouths his human pal, how damaging those claws can be, just by accident. The aftermath of a lion-mauling is shown.
Keeping Mia away from Charlie as he reaches young adulthood proves easier said than done. One can only hope she’ll learn the rules, “Never let yourself be below a lion. Never look a lion in the eye,” etc.
The best special effect here is the semi-trained lion, who knocks over furniture, gnaws on lamps and looks at Mia with what we can assume are big loving blue-grey eyes. Charlie proves to have some personality, even if the implicit menace is never quite out of the picture.
The human acting is, for the most part, indifferent, with even the polished Laurent (“Inglorious Basterds,””Beginners,” “Night Train to Lisbon”) underwhelming owing to the lack of big emotional moments in the script.
The tale takes nothing but predictable turns, considering how this farm operates and Mia’s growing connection with her “best friend.”
I was pretty forgiving of all this dry-eyed (meant to be a weeper) kid-friendly content until that moment when teen Mia points a gun at her father.
That’s jarring enough to take one right out of a movie that wasn’t exactly magnetic in pulling us in.
MPAA Rating:PG for thematic elements, peril and some language
Cast: Daniah De Villiers, Mélanie Laurent, Langley Kirkwood, Ryan Mac Lennan and Brandon Auret
Credits: Directed by Gilles de Maistre, script by Prune de Maistre and William Davies. A StudioCanal release.
Running time: 1:38
Sure, they don Catholic habits and call themselves nuns, even though they aren’t Catholic or even practicing Christians.
But that’s neither here nor there. Other religions have devout sisters who call themselves “nuns” just to keep it simple.
And it’s barely worth a raised eyebrow that these spiritual “Sisters of the Valley” raise marijuana to create medicinal oils out of this year’s “miracle cure-call,” CBD (cannabidiol). That THC (tetrahydrocannbinol) pot biproduct that gets its user’s high? Not their business. So they say.
Yes, the leader of this not-a-convent is activist entrepreneur Sister Kate, real name Christine Meeusen, formerly a Reagan-voting married working mom who found a “disruptive” way to start life over again in tiny, impoverished Merced, California.
“Weed is like honey. Local is best!”
But she claims they’re giving away their curative herb-infused oils to those who can’t afford to pay for it and decries local law enforcement, which seems to have a point when it notes a spike in gang-like activity as armed robberies of pot fields become the new crime of choice in their busted, broke, dead-end town. She heralds the job-creation benefits of her business without proof, and lets us see her fellow “sisters” in their habits without us knowing what their story is and how far down the “true believer” rabbit hole they’ve gone with her.
So “Breaking Habits,” a documentary mainly told from Sister Kate’s point of view, could use a serious dose of skepticism in its semi-droll narrative of Meesune’s life and hard times. She’s had it rough, but the leap from wronged-wife, wronged-sister to cannabis crusader needs something more than “She’s suffered, she deserves a break” to cross that chasm.
A little less cheer-leading and a little more questioning — of Sister Kate and her acolytes — was in order.
Writer-director Rob Ryan lets Sister Kate’s compelling story — communications consulting work that took her to the Netherlands, made her a millionaire, and then a victim as her con man husband stole all her money — and how MUCH of that story Sister Kate wants to tell, hijack his movie.
As in, she spent all that time in Amsterdam, came home to the Central Valley of California and settled on pot as her business model, and the two aren’t connected? She talks up the merciful, charitable, compassionate component of what the Sisters of the Valley do, but shows us no actual evidence that they give this stuff away.
Ryan does a good job of setting up Sister Kate’s obstacles — the heel of an ex-husband, the unethical brutish brother, the ten gallon-hat wearing sheriff who calls her “Sisters” “drug dealers, and they’re trying to say it’s medicine.”
The less antagonistic local prosecutor and Sister Kate’s lawyer are more on her side as she struggles to get her business registered, legal and above-board in a town reluctant to join California’s “weed revolution.”
There are laws to fear and rules to flout, or at least bend. We hear of thieves chased off with gunfire and watch the pot preparation process of Kate and her fellow sisters, see the smokey rituals they’ve invented to “bless” the kitchen and the greenhouses where they start their crops.
L. Ron Hubbard has nothing on them.
And if the ridiculously fertile ground of “the most depressed community in the state” becomes the Napa Valley of weed, the world will remember Sister Kate as its prophet, its pioneer.
But as we see her glassy-eyed in some interviews, and see the drug problems visited on at least one of her children, Ryan is just letting us know that he didn’t get around to telling the full story.
MPAA Rating: TV-14
Cast: Sister Kate and the Sisters of the Valley
Credits: Written and directed by Rob Ryan. A Good Deed Entertainment release.
Running time: 1:27
A boom town is always more attractive on the outside looking in.
For many of those there before the gold, oil, timber or Big Ag rush began, the despair and isolation isn’t lessened by the fact that suddenly a lot of new people pour in. They bring their own problems, jack up demand, drive up prices and strain fragile systems and barely-scraping-by people in an under-regulated, unplanned for deluge.
“Little Woods” is an intimate underbelly drama of quiet desperation set against the North Dakota fracking boom. It’s about two half-sisters stuck in a place where the only good money to be made comes from pole dancing or pill dealing.
First-time writer-director Nia DaCosta may have filmed her Northern Plains tale on the outskirts of Austin, Texas. But she has a firm grasp of the loneliness and hopelessness of lives left behind by a boom in a state where working class women’s career and OB-GYN options are limited.
And having the wider horizons of Canada just across the border doesn’t help.
Tessa Thompson is Ollie, short for Oleander, a twentysomething piecing together a living by hustling coffee and sandwiches to oil rig workers. But a prologue, which showed her burying a bag in the woods, hints at a darker recent past. She’s on probation for selling pills. And her “regulars” are still hassling her for oxy.
In a town where medical facilities are overwhelmed by the increase in population with no spike in state or federal funding, working people in pain have the money to self-medicate, but not the time to wait all day in the emergency room.
There’s a foreclosure notice on the door of the house her mother left behind when she was hospitalized, her former pill supplier (Luke Kirby) and her probation officer (Lance Reddick of “John Wick”) are on her case and her sister (Lily James of the upcoming “Yesterday”) has just shown up, little boy in tow.
Deb is broke, pregnant and unable to lean on her man (James Badge Dale). She’s there because Ollie is the one person she knows who’s reliable.
“You never hope. You do.”
Over the course of a stressful, downward spiral of a week, Ollie will try to deal with the bank, her sister’s problem pregnancy, a job interview and the mounting pressure to get back into the one business that paid her enough to keep the wolves at bay.
DaCosta sends Ollie into those woods to dig up her stash, and to roadhouses, strip clubs, a rodeo, oil rigs and truck stops where she sells her wares. We also track Deb’s misery at a world that is closing in around her ears, raising a little boy by herself and despairing at anything ever getting any better for her or her kid.
“I hope he grows up big and strong and worthless, like his daddy.
There are traces of “Winter’s Bone” in this world of oxy and meth and working class folks addicted to them. The lure of the border, which Ollie used to cross to buy drugs, is reminiscent of “Frozen River.”
As in those films, the stories are driven by stellar actresses in the lead roles, letting us see the weight bearing down on them both. Thompson and James both generate pity and make us feel their frustration.
Kirby stands out in the supporting cast, the smooth-talking good ol’boy who wants Ollie back in the biz, and on his terms — “We’re partners,” he hisses.
The best line? “Your choices are only as good as your options.”
Best moment? It might be in a clinic, in Canada, where neither a nurse nor a patient with forged Canadian ID has to say anything to get across desperation and the sisterly/motherly pity it inspires.
The ending is entirely too pat, considering all the complications that precede it. “Little Woods” lives more on the threat of violence, arrest or homelessness than anything overt. There are no big confrontations that give the story a satisfying finality.
But DaCosta has zeroed in on a place with a lot of money pouring in, and nothing much good coming of it. She has created a modern Western of trapped women who have to make their own way, by hook or by crook, with no cowboy riding up to save them.
MPAA Rating: R for language and some drug material
Cast: Tessa Thompson, Lily James, James Badge Dale, Lance Reddick
Credits: Written and directed by Nia DaCosta. A Neon release.
Running time: 1:43
A modern day Western about women who work “outside the law” to get what they need? I’m there.
The town of the title, “Little Woods,” is supposedly in North Dakota. I used to LIVE in North Dakota. They told me, “Move here, Rodg. There’s a single woman behind every tree.”
So a town called “Little Trees” in a state with very few if any trees? I have my doubts.
Tessa Thompson and Lily James are the leads — fans of both. James Badge Dale is in it, too. “Little Woods” opens Friday.
Back in 1970, Dr. Edwin Land, the genius who invented the Polaroid/Land Camera, did a cryptic short film — just him in a lab coat wandering through a gutted factory talking about the future.
Land pulled a wallet for size comparison out of his pocket and spoke of “a camera that would be like, oh, the telephone…our long awaited ultimate camera that is a part of the evolving human being.”
More than one wag has suggested, with cause, that Land was predicting the birth of the cell phone camera.
“For a product to be truly new, the world must not be ready for it,” he said. The world wasn’t ready for cell-phones then, any more than it was ready for instant “one-step photography” which Land’s camera, unveiled in Feb. of 1947, heralded.
But one thing Land could not have envisioned was the photographers, artists and others who would not let go of his out-of-date tech even after his death (in 1991) or his company’s demise (2008).
“Instant Dreams” is an ethereal, trippy look at the properties of the film favored by aficionados, the “Impossible” chemistry that made these “develops in 60 seconds” images and the nostalgia for this very human, analog technology from a time before “the digital dark ages took over our lives.”
Dutch filmmaker Willem Baptist has a hint of Werner Herzog about his style. His truth-in-advertising “dreamy” documentary follows quirky German-born artist Stefanie Schneider, who wanders the deserts of the American Southwest in a vintage pink bathrobe and Crocs, taking Polaroid art shots of her hen and whatever model she can engage for the day.
Schneider has a hoard of foil-packet expiration-dated Polaroid film stockpiled in her vintage fridge (naturally) because “Colors show up in a very very different way, not what you actually see with your eyes” on these photographs. She relishes even the splotches, bars or streaks, the age-or-light induced imperfections of such images.
We track Stephen Herchen, a retired Polaroid chemist as he works with “The Impossible Project” trying to decode “a perfect chemical formula” that “changed the way we captured and imagined the world” which Land and Co. came up with for their almost magical process, but which was lost as the company died.
And New York magazine editor and author of “Instant: The Story of Polaroid” Chris Bonanos provides the history of Land and the camera and preaches and practices its use to one and all, a prophet for an analog religion that has all but disappeared in our digital age.
Baptist treats us to lurid images of chemicals mixing and molecules bonding.
We hear snippets of voices from the past — such as Land himself, both explaining the camera and philosophizing about how it changes the world and where it fits in human evolution.
We hear newsman Lowell Thomas on old newsreels extolling the virtues of this “new” technology — “press a button, and have a picture.”
Long-dead science fiction writer and futurist Arthur C. Clarke discusses how tricky it is, predicting the future and being ahead of your time, as Land was.
And we hear a performance by Werner Herzog himself, passionately, creepily, seductively instructing the listener on how to use these amazing old school cameras.
There are TV commercials, mostly from Europe, advertising this product of American ingenuity (not, alas, the famed James Garner/Mariette Hartley ads from “Peak Polaroid” here in the US).
Bonanos describes and even demonstrates (Baptist follows him in to parties, out in public with his camera) the “social” interchange” that is part of why he thinks of this process as inherently human, because waiting for the shot to develop “forces you to make small talk to fill in the moment.”
The cameras were knocked, back in the day, for not providing images as sharp and deep as 35mm film, an idea which Bonanos scoffs — “The eye forgives everything if it’s a good photograph.”
Missing from all these unidentified speakers, models and witnesses, is any sense of the tactile connection that has made all things analog — from watches to turntables to real wood to celluloid — so popular with the young and the hip.
Baptist loses himself in the artist’s reverie, a little mini film within a film starring the actor Udo Kier in the desert, and in the swirls of chemicals that tie the various sequences together.
“Instant Dreams” still turns out to be a pretty good argument for the magical in a world that is “losing magic.”
MPAA Rating: unrated, nudity, a couple of instances of profanity
Cast: Stefanie Schneider, Stephen Herchen, Chris Bonanos
Credits: Written and directed by Willem Baptist. A Synergetic release.
Running time: 1:31
Bob Probert was a hockey goon from the Golden Age of Hockey Goons, a two-fisted brawler who made Detroit fans care more about the fights than the scoreboard when he skated for the Red Wings.
From the mid-80s into the early 2000s, the tall and bulky Probert was “The Heavyweight Champion” of the NHL. He scored some goals and never made it to the Stanley Cup, the National Hockey League’s championship series.
But he loomed large over his sport for over a decade. Probert’s career, as the new documentary “Tough Guy: The Bob Probert Story” reminds us, was measured in fights and penalty minutes, not in goals and assists and affixing your team’s name to the Cup.
It was Probert vs. Stu Grimson or Probert vs. Donald Brashear and Probert vs. Wendel Clark.
And it was Probert vs. Tie Dormi, where even a “loss,” bloodied on the ice, earned a little Probert spin — “I didn’t get hurt. It wasn’t a solid punch. I didn’t get beat. He just got lucky.”
Geordie Day’s somewhat unwieldy film dwells on what hockey fans used to show up to games for — the fights — in painting a portrait of a Windsor, Ontario cop’s son who was taught to be tough, to never back down and never cry.
We get a taste of an unhappy childhood that never really ended, thanks to the sport’s way of identifying promising players young, taking them out of school and putting them in the junior ranks on their way up the ladder to the NHL.
Probert, at 6 foot three, over 200 pounds, with long arms and the permanent chip on his shoulder of a team “enforcer,” “protecting” his more vulnerable teammates, was a brute on the ice.
Watch him cheap shot a goalie or two and try to find sympathy for the guy. It’s hard.
In interviews over the years, he comes off as a foul-mouthed kid, a hulking child with impulse control issues and a drinking and drugs problem that started in his teens, put him in rehab a score or more times and landed him in Federal prison in Rochester, Minnesota, at one point.
Teammates, foes, family, coaches and longtime host of “Hockey Night in Canada,” Don Cherry, marvel at the brawls — two ungainly men wrestling and swinging on ice, on skates, covered in protective gear that would inevitably get torn off in the 30-100 second “bouts.”
When former teammate Bruce Bell declares, “He didn’t like fighting…he did it because he had to do it” in “protecting his teammates” in the film, it helps that this assertion comes before we’ve seen the man split a player’s helmet open with a stick.
It’s a miracle this coked-up brute didn’t kill somebody. And as we learn of his many wrecks and DUI arrests over the years, we marvel at the miracle that he didn’t kill somebody, or himself, off the ice as well.
“There was two sides of Bob, and you didn’t want to be on the wrong one,” a former foe notes.
Day’s film touches lightly on the CTE (brain injuries) that can come from incessant bare-knuckle brawling, and on the many efforts to keep Probert sober, which his teammates and fans helped him to dodge.
We hear Probert boast of “fighting my way into the big leagues,” see him meet that goal and gain the infamy that let him meet the Carlson Brothers of “Slap Shot,” and D.B. Sweeney of “The Cutting Edge,” and hear Mr. T give him a shout out as “the toughest man on ice.”
But we also get a dose of the addictions that held him back, and a taste of Probert’s bitterness at being caught out drinking with teammates in a playoff series with Edmonton in which the Red Wings had a shot at playing for the Stanley Cup.
Keith Gave, the beat writer on the Red Wings for the Detroit Free-Press, is scorned for reporting on that incident and Probert’s years of run-ins with the law over his imbibing. Gave is more forgiving now, but not Probert’s teammates.
Filmmaker Day doesn’t make the movie’s hero very heroic, from cocaine to steroids, arrests to fights on and off the ice. He was “out of control” those who knew him admit.
But cut quite the figure, in his time. And he left a mark.
If the game is more civilized now, it’s thanks to the excesses of bullying brutes like Bob Probert. That’s a message Day doesn’t take the time to get across, leaving “Tough Guy” a little thin in the “And your point is?” department.
MPAA Rating: unrated, violence and discussions of drug abuse
Cast: Bob Probert, Tie Domi, Dani Probert, Stu Grimson, Don Cherry
Credits: Written and directed by Geordie Day. A DarkStar release.
Running time: 1:32
“The Goodbye Girl” is, like any modern classic, a film you not only remember seeing, you remember where and who you saw it with if you’re of a certain age.
I remember those facts because of an argument I lost.
The film’s star, Richard Dreyfuss, was in two smash hits in the winter of 1977-78. The other is an iconic science fiction picture beloved by fans of the genre as one of the smart, adult blockbusters in a playground of fantasy, action and space cowboys.
So if you were dating at the time, you had the choice to two Dreyfuss must-see movies to catch, typically not in the same day as the multi-plex was only just emerging as the new cinema model.
I wanted to see “Close Encounters,” and was waiting for date night to do it.
My girlfriend, similarly inclined, preferred “The Goodbye Girl,” a Neil Simon romance. Ok, a “chick picture,” as we said at the time. She attended a college 140 miles from the one I where I enrolled. There was a long drive involved. It was winter. It snows in the mountains of western Virginia.
But you let the lady choose the movie, in the end, right?
So Kelly and I saw “The Goodbye Girl” at the old Virginia Theatre in Harrisonburg, home to James Madison University, on a snowy evening close to Christmas in 1977.
Want a chance to connect this classic film to your own memories, a movie night to remember?
Dreyfuss is coming to the Florida Film Festival (tickets at the link) this year for a special showing of “The Goodbye Girl,” a way of celebrating his career and that of the playwright/screenwriter Neil “Doc” Simon, who scripted the role that won Dreyfuss his Oscar.
It’s at 7:30 Friday night, April 19 at the Enzian Theater in Maitland (north Orlando). You’re going to want to be there, to see one of the great screen romances of the ’70s, to catch a very funny film star on the rise, to relish the movie that spoiled Dreyfuss’s chances of ever playing “Richard III.” Because once you’ve seen his character’s director-mandated approach to the infamous sovereign in “Goodbye Girl,” you can’t see Richard III any other way.
I’m moderating a Q & A with Dreyfuss after the screening, and I hope you’ll show up with some real “Inside the Actor’s Studio” questions to add to the ones I’m planning on asking.
C’mon. The guy’s 120+ credits into a career that’s included “Tin Men,” “Down and Out in Beverly Hills,” “Let it Ride,” “Stake Out,” “Whose Life is it Anyway?” and “Lost in Yonkers.” You’ve got questions. You know you do.
The creators of “Penguins,” this year’s DisneyNature Earth Day gift to moviegoers, walk a fine line between cute and “cutesie.”
The producers hired comic actor Ed Helms (“The Office,””The Hangover”) to narrate. They anthropomorphize the Adélie penguins the film is about, naming one “Steve” and his mate Adeline.
Disney has been doing this since getting into the nature documentary business in the 1940s. Who remembers “Perri the Squirrel?” Anyone?
So DisneyNature’s “Penguins” is considerably more kid-friendly than 2005’s “March of the Penguins,” a classic of the genre, and a French-made blockbuster that earned $127 million at the box office while showing the world the epic struggle of emperor penguins to survive, make and hold their own in the harshest climate on Earth — the frozen wasteland of Antarctica.
We meet Steve as he returns to the continent for the first time as an adult, a guy in the make. For a mate.
“Is she looking at me? She’s looking at ME…Annnnnd she’s walking away.”
Helms not only narrates, he takes on Steve’s interior voice as he clumsily tries to attract a female, courts and gets down to the business Adélie penguins are famous for — collecting pebbles to build a nest.
Helms gives Steve an underdog’s charm, even if it’s impossible to make the little 15 pound birds more adorable than nature already made them.
But he’s perfectly sober-voiced in describing the harsh living conditions, the steep odds and the major threats facing these small penguins, clustered in colonies during the chilly Antarctic summer.
You remember some of them from “March of the Penguins” — terrible cold, blizzards, the predatory skuas (birds) who eat their eggs and kill their young, Orcas and leopard seals.
Co-directors Alastair Fothergill (“Planet Earth,” “Chimpanzee,” “Bears”) and Jeff Wilson may play up the cute, here. But they don’t sugar coat this world, either. Having the narrator call Orcas “Killer Whales” is apt.
And if they’ve done their jobs right, their movie will show the awful consequences of leopard seal attacks. You could have heard a pin drop during those scenes — in a theater crowded with children — when the seals, working in tandem, hunt the little birds through the ice floes. Life is scary, and life in the wild doesn’t favor the cute and cuddly — an important bit of growing up movies like this should deliver.
In the years since “March of the Penguins,” cameras have gotten smaller, drones have become handy filmmaking tools and “Penguins” benefits from these advances — capturing the scale of the size of the colony and bringing us the most magnificent under-ice/underwater photography the cinema has ever seen.
“Penguins” isn’t just adorable. It is, in many moments, beautiful.
The “cute” gets to be a bit much, with “romantic” moments underscored with REO Speedwagon’s “I Can’t Fight this Feeling Any More” and Steve’s end-of-summer trip back into the sea with Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again On My Own.”
It won’t supplant “March of the Penguins.” But DisneyNature has scored another kid-friendly natural world documentary about wild creatures we all connect with and that today’s kids will grow up wanting to protect from climate change and the other man-made threats facing them.
MPAA Rating: G, some animals-in-peril moments
Cast: The voice of Ed Helms
Credits:Directed by Alastair Fothergill, Jeff Wilson, script by David Fowler. A DisneyNature release.
Running time: 1:16
Movie Nation 