Movie Nation

A lot of critics older than “the kids these days” soured on Jim Jarmusch, maybe after the quite-credible plagiarism accusations re: “Broken Flowers.”

But he’s paid little price for that in the years since. And he’s still got Bill Murray taking his calls.

Murray is in “The Dead Don’t Die,” as are Tilda Swinton and the constantly-cast Adam Driver.

This is something of a departure for Jarmusch — deadpan is usually his thing, not the living dead/walking dead.

This isn’t Murray’s first zombie comedy. But then, he was playing himself in “Zombieland,” so maybe that doesn’t count. Bill Murray playing himself is, however, his greatest role.

It almost boggles the mind that the world’s first nuclear war didn’t happen in the weeks after the terror attacks on Mumbai, India in November of 2008.

The moment the coordinated assault on 12 locations in the coastal city, indiscriminate mass slaughter with machine guns and bombs, began, Indian TV and world cable networks were describing it as “military grade” carried out with military precision.

Nobody was surprised when Pakistan’s military intelligence services were implicated in the planning, training and equipping of the young, indoctrinated fanatics who carried them out. If ever there was an act of terrorism as act of war, this was it.

“Hotel Mumbai” is a harrowing, straight-no-chaser account of the assault, which climaxed with a murderous takeover–with hostages — at the city’s venerated Taj Palace luxury hotel.

First time feature-director Anthony Maras (he was an editor on the picture as well) builds a suspenseful multi-character/multiple locations narrative with a military precision similar to that of the attackers. He uses his few “name” stars well, takes care to paint a telling portrait of the gullible, naive Pakistani Incels who carried out the “mission” and neither flinches from nor magnifies India’s inept and slow-footed handling of the crisis or of cable TV’s clumsy culpability in live-shooter situations of this magnitude.

The result is a powerful, edge-of-your-seat thriller, with “Who will live/Who will not?” suspense, a “Die Hard” without laughable Hollywood swagger, tasty one-liners or heroics that defy logic, common sense and physics.

We meet the attackers as they boat in on a Zodiac, ear-pieces plugged in, exhorted (in Punjabi, with English subtitles) by the unseen “Brother Bull” that “God is with you” and “Paradise awaits you.”

They come ashore, laden with heavy duffel bags and backpacks, scattering into taxis.”Look at all they’ve stolen,” they gripe — the ultimate backward hicks resenting a neighbor experiencing an economic boom, with full shops, Western pizza and the decadence of indoor plumbing to flaunt over their violent, unstable Muslims next door.

But we also see Arjun (Dev Patel of “Slumdog Millionaire”) prepare for work, a poor man still trapped with his wife and little girl in the city’s slums, but a Sikh with hope for the future — thanks to his job at the swankiest hotel in town.

“Here at the Taj, guest is GOD!” Chef Oberoi (the wonderful character actor Anupam Kher) lectures his wait staff as he checks their uniforms and their hands for cleanliness. The early scenes in the hotel underscore this — VIPs such as Zahra (Nazanin Boniadi of “The Big Bang Theory” and “How I Met Your Mother”) and her architect husband David (Armie Hammer) catered to, even their Australian nanny (Tilda Cobham-Hervey) coddled.

Others are seen making their way to restaurants, including a secretive Russian oligarch (Jason Isaacs, always good) arranging the night’s visit by hookers via cell phone.

Meanwhile, at a train station, in restrooms, in the streets in front of a restaurant, the teams of two unfold their Kalashnakovs, storm out and open fire.

Their phones stay on, because Brother Bull crows that “I want to hear their cries with my own ears!”

If there’s an unrealistic touch to Maras’ treatment of “India’s 9/11,” it is the chilling silence after the bursts of gunfire. No one is wounded? Involuntary cries, screams and groans of the injured and terrified? Strangely absent.

The staff at the Taj is taken as utterly off-their-guard as everyone else. Tourists and locals flee down the street from the gunfire and grenade explosions, looking for sanctuary in this edifice of excess, gloved waiters and uniformed maids.

With monstrous thoroughness, the hit squads execute strangers, shoot up the first police car on the scene and converge on the Taj.

They massacre virtually everyone in the lobby, gun down the fleeing and start the process of going room to room — with helpless patrons and staff trapped in a restaurant, a kitchen, in their rooms awaiting death or not realizing until too late that death is coming.

John Collee (“Master and Commander”) co-wrote the script with Maras, and they break up the action into suspenseful episodes — an unaware nanny trapped with a baby in a suite, diners and staff cowering beneath the tables in a restaurant, and a take-charge chef (Kher) organizing his kitchen staff to save people until the police arrive.

Which they do. Except, they don’t. One of the most notorious cases of “waiting for orders” (and SWAT teams from New Dehli) of recent history plays out as only a couple of cops have the temerity to go in, realizing that every shot they hear and every second they wait, another person dies.

The Europeans, Americans and Australians in the hotel find panicked ways to mistrust the Indians on staff — the turban-wearing Sikh Arjun, the multi-lingual married-an-American Zahra (Boniadi). The crusty Russian takes a dim view of waiting for help and the offer of prayers when he decides to get out.

“You can SAVE your prayers,” he spits. “THAT’s what STARTED this s–t!”

The script finds amusement in the immature young brutes who do the killing, marveling at flush toilets, enjoying their first-ever leftover pizza, eaten off a maid service cart mid-carnage.

God forbid it have pork on it.

I was surprised at how much the motivation seems ascribed to class resentment and poverty and not just dogma and the easy leap to radicalization that Islam seems to provide. That’s smart and seems to jibe with the demographics of terrorism today — young, poor, desperate and easily manipulated.

But what Collee and Maras and their cast get across most clearly is the utter helplessness and hopelessness of the victims. Again, this isn’t “Die Hard.” In the real world, in a terrorist situation like this, the cops are outgunned and the other victims have little chance of collective action and no chance without that as the heavily-armed murderers are working in teams.

“Hotel Mumbai” makes it easy to recognize heroism, and to hope that some of the “lessons learned” can prevent this from ever happening again. But the region’s politics, religion, class and the age of the perpetrators (humanized, a bit, but cold-eyed killers to a one) ensures that it will.

And next time, the response, especially on the Subcontinent, could be radioactive.

MPAA Rating: R for disturbing violence throughout, bloody images, and language

Cast: Dev Patel, Nazanin Boniadi, Armie Hammer, Anupam Kher and Jason Isaacs

Credits:Directed by Anthony Maras, script by John Collee, Anthony Maras. A Bleecker Street release.

Running time: 2:03

“Amazing Grace” goes into limited release Friday. Trying to score a last minute screening of it, as it looks and sounds glorious — Aretha at her peak, a post-riots performance at a church in Watts, in front of the congregation and a smattering of musically discriminating celebrities (Mick Jagger had to be there).

Brie directed this “learn to love your yourself” dramedy, with Samuel L. Jackson and Joan Cusack and Bradley Whitford and, oh, Annaleigh Ashford surrounding her in the cast.

Good to see Netflix picked up 2017’s “Unicorn Store,” as its daft and odd enough to probably not have found an audience in theatrical release. See it April 5 on Netflix.

As I type this, I can see the Kennedy Space Center from where my live-aboard sailboat is moored.

Jimmy Buffett CDs are what make it a “home.” And the makings of “boat drinks” are never more than an arm’s length away, right below the chart table.

So there is nobody on Planet Earth better qualified to review Harmony Korine’s “The Beach Bum” than me — nobody.

A drunken, stoned fantasia on a lifestyle espoused by Buffett during his “wasting away again in Margaritaville” years, Korine’s film is like a Cheech & Chong version of “Cannery Row,” its “yacht rock” soundtrack provided by Mr. Buffett himself.

A gathering of colorful, gin-soaked and weed-addled “types” played by everyone from Zac Efron to Martin Lawrence, it’s a logical extension of Matthew McConaughey’s “JK Livin'” naked bongo player image, had an Oscar and a whole lot of Lincoln commercials not gotten in the way.

Matthew M plays Moondog, a dazed Key West poet with a gift for off-color verse (“Key Zest” is the title of one collection), an eye for women’s beach and cabana-wear and a nose for the nearest blow, weed or life-sustaining PBR until he can find some more coke or pot.

“Ah’m a BOTTOM feeder,” he drawls. “Ah gotta go LOW to get high!”

He can be found on a beaten-up dive boat where he can giggle without care, drink without drying-out and indulge in his love of Buffett music, living that “Pirate Looks at 40” line that we hear playing on the sound system. “I go for younger women, lived with several a while — though I ran’em away, they’d come back one day, and still could manage a smile. Just takes a while…just takes a while.”

But any possibility of dissipated charm in that, a sun-and-salt drenched down-and-out baccanale — orgies included — in the Key West of legend (pre-cruise ship tourist trap), is pretty much wiped out the moment we learn just who Moondog is admitting that “bottom feeder” ethos to.

It’s his filthy-rich, just as self-indulgent Miami wife, played by Isla Fisher. It’s not the character — who cheats on Moondog with their weed-dealing music-living friend Loungerie (Snoop Dogg) — or Fisher’s engagingly dipsomanical performance of her that deflates “The Beach Bum.”

It’s the knowledge that this “legend,” this “local character,” this barfly’s barfly revered for his poetry, drinking and company, is rich. And because of that, much of the rest of “The Beach Bum” takes place in Miami, which has the requisite beaches the “bum” requires, but also a seaside mansion, McClaren supercar and boats far more luxurious than the fishing skiff he somehow drunkenly steers from Key West to Key Biscayne (170 miles, but when you’re loaded, who cares?).

Their daughter (Stefania LaVie Owen) is 22 and getting married to a real stiff. Moondog has to keep it together and not wander off until AFTER the ceremony.

This is, of course, impossible.

He’s not writing enough to keep his drawling agent (Jonah Hill, impersonating Tennessee Williams during his Key West period) interested.

He’s not sober or faithful, both of which he admits to with the “I’m moist. I’m lubricated” declarations.

The public drunkenness and public fornication tolerated in Old Key West aren’t as acceptable in Rich Wife World.

McConaughey, as I mentioned, has an Oscar. But this “performance” seems so unerringly stoned and slack-jawed that you can’t believe it’s not filmed reality. His Moondog swoons as he skateboards, staggers as he strolls and cackles as he slouches at the tiller of the battered runabout he steers in circles around whatever bay or beach he is motoring to.

His drunken plunge into the mansion’s pool, a stunt that requires McConaughey to leap over a floating sun-bather and narrowly miss a concrete dolphin fountain, is the only big laugh I got out of “The Beach Bum.” Because I was imagining the heart attack it gave the completion bond company that insured this fiasco, and the agent who probably realizes how close his meal ticket came to a concussion, or worse.

The real Jimmy Buffett appears as himself here, a background figure providing background music like the retiring choir director of the Church of Buffett-Orthodox he founded, decades ago. The director of “Spring Breakers” has created an alcohol-fueled fever dream of Buffett’s Margaritaville of the mind — a place where over-the-hill white guys with money can take on a beach bum’s aimlessness, and drink and indulge to their heart’s content.

Maybe even share a J and swap lyrics with Snoop Dogg, a fellow-traveler in the laid-back luxury of a life in herb.

Buffett long ago passed from a parody of his musician/”God’s Own Drunk” lifestyle guru into a sell-out peddling Margaritaville Retirement communities all over Florida.

But whatever insults to narrative drive, coherence, cleverness or cinematic necessity Harmony Korine offers here, he’s shown Buffett — to his face — the real Margaritaville, or its closest dissolute approximation. The “charm” went out the door the moment the money came in.

MPAA Rating: R for pervasive drug and alcohol use, language throughout, nudity and some strong sexual content

Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Isla Fisher, Snoop Dogg, Stefania LaVie Owen, Zac Efron, Martin Lawrence and Jonah Hill

Credits: Written and directed by Harmony Korine. A Neon release.

Running time: 1:35

They got the tone right. “Shazam!”, the latest DC comic book superhero to arrive on the big screen, is an appropriately goofy, childish affair.

Because they stole borrowed from the right “origin story” in adapting this, the “other” Captain Marvel, for the big screen. It’s “Big” in tights, with a very fancy cape.

They cast it well, with Zachary Levi of TV’s “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” and earlier, “Chuck” managing to be childlike, unsophisticated and ungainly when it counts. He’s no Tom Hanks, but he gets across the novelty of a boy of 14 transformed into a buff, cut, cod-pieced do-gooder, a kid who can now buy beer (“YUCK!”) and get into strip clubs.

This is a comic book movie with all the DC Darkness washed out of it, pointed at a younger audience (in most ways) and content to make any fanboy/fangirl pandering so obvious as to be laughable.

Of course it’s a 75 minute picture, with maybe 30 minutes of good one-liners and sight gags, drowning in two hours and twelve minutes of Comic Book Event Picture excess. There’s nothing to justify that, but it’ll still be a big hit, so whatever.

They cast EveryVillain Mark Strong of the Robert Downey “Sherlock Holmes” and “Kick-Ass,” as the heavy — and gave him nothing to play, nothing to amusing to say — just a bald guy with a bright blue right eye to show us he’s got “the magic” and he’s not afraid to use it on “The Champion,” chosen by the last of the Seven Wizards (Djimon Hounsou, of course) to battle darkness, evil, what have you.

It’s a movie about two kids, one who was “interviewed” for the job of “Champion” back in 1974, and found wanting. He couldn’t resist the powers that the wizard, searching for “one soul who is worthy,” was tempting him with.

The other? He’s Billy Batson (Asher Angel), orphaned since the day he lost his mother at the fair even though he’d just won a compass “so you can find your way.”

Billy’s latest foster home is a kind-hearted house filled with kids, with the smart aleck Freddy (Jack Dylan Grazer) the one who shows him the ropes at home and in junior high.

Freddy uses a crutch, and that gets him bullied. When Billy stands up to the bullies, he becomes the wizard’s last, best hope to pass on what The Council of Wizards always wanted, “a champion to inherit my magic.”

Billy only has to say the wizard’s name and he’ll absorb “the wisdom of Solomon (S), the strength of Hercules (H), the stamina of Atlas (A), the power of Zeus (Z), the courage of Achilles (A),” the money-making power of Marvel (M).

Billy finds himself in a red suit with a cape, and “Big.”

Freddy is all “up on the supes” (super heroes), “the caped crusader stuff.” He’ll make the perfect sidekick.

The “other” boy, the one who didn’t pass muster, has grown up to be a scientist/oligarch, Dr. Thaddeus Sivana (Strong). And he’s out to corral Shazam’s powers for himself.

A great running gag — Freddy puts Billy through a series of “Super Hero” tests. Can he fly? Can he become invisible? How handy is it that they stumble into a convenience store robbery?

“Bullet proof? Let’s SEE!” Freddy records these experiments on his cell phone.

Another running gag, what to “call” our superhero — “Thunder Crack?” “Sounds like a butt joke.” “Mr Philadelphia” (the setting)? “Sounds like cream cheese.” “Maximum Voltage? “Sparkle Fingers?”

Yes, we see lightning shoot out of his fingers, a la “Captain Marvel” and others. The best effect might be the people/wizards/gargoyle villains turning to ashes, which also seems familiar. The effects are not that novel nor are the epic brawls, and the sight gags (“YOUR cell-phone is charged! And YOUR cell-phone is charged!”), on the nose and not surprising.

The director did an “Annabelle” horror movie and the screenwriter’s most famous credit is the limp kiddie sci-fi “Earth to Echo.” So if this was as good as some folks have been saying, that would be the surprise of surprises.

It’s not. The script and direction range from pedestrian to passable. Limp takes on bullying, a rehashed fight at the fair, under-developed side stories on “family” and Shazam assembling his “team.” Yawners, for fans only.

So as the only movies to compare superhero pictures to are other superhero pictures, let’s park “Shazam!” in its proper place. It’s a little more fun than “Aquaman,” not quite up to “Captain Marvel.” Like “Fantastic Four,” it’s a gateway drug comic book adaptation, a superhero movie on training wheels, best suitable for young kids (save for the insane and unsustainable running time) about to embark on a lifetime of fandom.

Or people who think “Thunder Crack” is the equivalent of Algonquin Round Table wit.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of action, language, and suggestive material

Cast: Zachary Levi, Mark Strong, Asher Angel, Jack Dylan Grazer, Grace Multon, Meagan Good, Djimon Hounsou

Credits:Directed by David F. Sandberg, script by Henry Gayden, based on the DC comic book. A Warner Brothers/New Line release.

Running time: 2:12

My LAST sailboat was bought from a dealership in Moneta Va., on Smith Mountain Lake in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

The dealer showed me a couple of boats, including one he swore was used in the movie “What about Bob?” He provided the boat used in a famous scene in that Richard Dreyfuss/Bill Murray comedy, filmed in Roanoke and on Smith Mountain Lake.

I didn’t buy that one, and have kicked myself about that ever since. But you know, a Hunter 23.5 had water ballast, was easier to trailer and a more easily stepped mast.

Anyhoo, today the Florida Film Festival announced its lineup for the 28th edition of the Festival’s special events.

They’re bringing in the Oscar winner, Dreyfuss, and the most successful home grown filmmakers Orlando has ever known — the collective known as Haxan Films, colloquially called “The Blair Witch Boys” by one and all.

They’ll show “The Goodbye Girl,” scripted by the late Neil Simon. And “The Blair Witch Project,” conjured up by committee. Below, the press release.

Continue reading →

“Nobody ever said abortion was pretty,” the cynical, corporate Planned Parenthood director (Robia Scott) tells her protege, Abby Johnson (Ashley Bratcher) in “Unplanned.”

Indeed. “Unplanned” shows you everything from the ultrasounds necessary to properly carry out the medical procedure, to the actual “vacuuming” of the uterus — with as much blood and gore and violence as its fevered creators can imagine.

If ever a subject deserved an R-rating in an explicit film treatment, it’s this.

It’s more pure propaganda from Pure Flix, this time about the subject that has roiled America for the better part of a century — for 50 years of Catholic backed illegality as women’s rights groups fought them, and for 50 years after the famous Supreme Court case, Roe vs. Wade, that took abortion out of back alleys and into medical practices across America.

It’s a heavy-handed sermon pitting clear-eyed, clear-skinned and perfectly “reasonable” protesters against those profiteering, murderous “corporate” butchers at Planned Parenthood.

Sure, the faithful bring up George Soros, the favorite rich whipping boy (with Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, also mentioned) of the Sold Our Souls to Foreigner-Founded Fox News set.

Women are its villains, including the hypocritical opportunist whose book it is based on — Abby Johnson. In incessant voice over narration she (Bratcher) insists “This could change everything.”

It already has. Abortion has so divided the country as to make the allegedly God-fearing endorse a criminal, pathological liar and whoremonger into the White House, where his Kentucky and South Carolina Senate minions can steal Supreme Court seats and at long last return control of women’s bodies to a theocratic leaning State and the Red State pinheads who back them.

Like-minded judges have lied their way into the courts, railroaded there by the most cynical politicians the country has ever produced — men who are not men in any meaningful sense of the word.

You did this. Take a bow.

So yes, “Unplanned,” about a Planned Parenthood clinic director (Johnson, played by Batchner) who “saw the light” after having two abortions herself, and facilitating thousands at Ground Zero for careless sex (apparently), Houston, Texas, has the feel of a victory lap for the myopically self-righteous.

Filmmakers Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon pound their points home like Madison Avenue vets, worried if they don’t use a ham for a cudgel, their audience might miss their meaning.

Medical professionals and birth control counselors are to a one, callous, unfeeling beasts. The scowling, money-grubbing doctor who oversees abortions in the film’s Texas clinic has a wisecrack at the ready when he turns on the pump that sucks a fetus out of woman experiencing a “crisis pregnancy.”

“Beam me up, Scotty!”

The screaming, name-calling, poster-waving protestors — the ones who make the evening news — are lightly glossed over and passed over in lieu of fresh-faced “40 Days for Life” preachers, who range in shrillness from passive aggressive to aggressive, smug in the assured rightness of their cause, dealing from a stacked deck in every argument the movie deigns to depict.

At this stage of the debate, nobody is going to have his or her mind changed by a lop-sided screed on the Big Screen, or a lopsided review ridiculing their dull, uncharismatic and colorless actors (save for Scott), pedestrian direction and script that is more rhetoric than dialogue. Voice-over narration is the laziest, most-heavy-handed cinematic storytelling device there is, and “Unplanned” is wallpapered with it.

Plainly, they were worried about being too subtle.

The fact that the movie is unintentionally patriarchal, showing a clinic run by and for women, with even the fanatical men baying at the fences surrounding it depicted as at least being “right,” is worth a laugh.

I used to visit an allergy clinic located next to a women’s health care provider in one state where I lived. The scary cranks shrieking at everybody coming in the door there were far enough down the rabbit hole that I was never able to hear of a doctor’s murder or the motives of an Atlanta Olympics bomber after that without saying, “Yeah, nobody saw THAT coming.”

Pure Flix, the Scottsdale studio that released the angry Christian victimhood Jeremiads “God’s Not Dead I and II,” is behind this one. They weren’t satisfied showing the women escaping problem pregnancies as weeping, the people who do the work as saleswomen meeting “quotas.” They use the rhetoric and images of violence to encourage violence. And they will be the first to go “Who, us?” when violence results.

For the sentient, the film’s “truth” in depicting Abby (a real person, her widely challenged –OK, debunked — book was the basis for this) suggests the holes one can most easily drive a truck through in her “true story.” The Texas-sized cow-patty of contradiction and hypocrisy doesn’t end with “I had two abortions, you can’t have any.” Abby, we’re led to believe, a middle class white Texan in a two-income home (her husband is, laughably, anti-abortion and stridently so) is helped to find another job by the zealots protesting outside her clinic’s fences.

Black and brown women? You’re on your own, kids. The abortion debate was racist long before Pat Robertson made that nakedly obvious.

For the blinded by faith? I just hope Pure Flix hasn’t gone out and actually made a violent, self-righteous propaganda film that incites its fans to violence. It’s not like there’s no precedent for that concern.

There’s blood all over the screen, here. Don’t be surprised if it spills off that screen.

MPAA Rating: R for some disturbing/bloody images

Cast: Ashley Bratcher, Brooks Ryan, Robia Scott, Jared Lotz

Credits: Written and directed by Chuck Konzelman, Cary Solomon . A Pure Flix release.

Running time: 1:46

Out of town much of last week and all weekend, aged parent issues.

But I’m back, baby. So let’s see what we momiss. *Unplanned,” “Hotel Mumbai, “Aftermath” and “Beach Bum.”

All before, or after “Shazam,” which previews here tonight.

Some of these I am looking forward to. All will get at least a fair shake. Here we go.

Netflix has this French comic comes to America comedy series, a couple of laughs in the trailer. Not sure how many episodes it merits (seems 80 minute feature length comedy material), but “Huge in France” streams April 12.