I always forget, is it “graphic sex” and “explicit violence,” or the other way around?
Lots of explicit and graphic and nasty, sweaty, Type-B spattered sex and blood and “meat” turn up in this March release from Uncork’d — a Brazilian horror farce whose menu is man. And woman.
I can hear Abe Lincoln’s review of “The Cannibal Club” now — “Those who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.”
But we’ll be keeping an EYE on you. We will.
Bing Liu was just another sk8rboi, hanging with his dead-end pals in the struggling Rust Belt city of Rockford, Illinois, when he started video-taping their lives.
Skating stunts, pranks, parties, good times, he was the skater whose friends would ask, “Why are you filming EVERYTHING?”
“I always thought it was really cool that you could put all these great moments together in one long video and make it seem like The Best Time Ever,” Liu says.
Those early, improvised, DIY shot-and-edited scenes and montages would someday form the “historical” material in a feature length documentary. And now that film, “Minding the Gap,” is a Best Documentary Feature contender at this year’s Academy Awards.
A maturing Liu took that old footage, extensively interviewed his two best friends Kiere and Zack and created a moving portrait of boys growing up rough in Rockford — abused, with limited prospects and hellbent on not growing up, not giving up skating, making their friends their “family.”
“Minding the Gap,” a Hulu production, comes to PBS Monday, Feb. 18, as part of the documentary series “P.O.V.”
We meet Kiere at 18, a thoughtful black teen who declares “I do not fit in with my family.” His widowed mother Roberta agrees that he’s “very different” from his aimless siblings, especially the brother who steals from him. Roberta hopes he’ll “get real serious about what he’s doing.” Since he won’t be following his father into carpentry, what will that be?
And will his “strict” upbringing ever let him have a normal relationship? “I got disciplined…They call it ‘child abuse’ now.”
We meet the mustachioed Zack as he’s indulging. Hard not to do. Zack indulges a lot.
“Are you gonna put me smokin’ weed in the…thing?”
“Maybe.”
“I have no stipulations. I’ve given you free rein!”
So here Zack is, shotgunning Pabst Blue Ribbon.There he is, goggle-eyed and just-concerned-enough that he’s about to become a Dad.
“We have to grow up. And it’s gonna suck…I just wanted to skate.”
Bing’s polish as a cameraman and aspiring filmmaker grows, seemingly right before our eyes, as his fluid tracking shots capture guys who have had the time and support (SOMEbody fed them) to get very good at skateboarding in this withering (mass exodus of jobs and people) city.
But when we meet Bing’s half-brother Kent, and then his mother Mengyue, we see and hear of the abused childhood he lived through, experiences that making this film will help him process — he hopes.
“Minding the Gap” follows the three friends as they enter young adulthood, with Zack’s adjustment to fatherhood and the diminished expectations that a life as a roofer might mean to him.
It’s the most natural thing in the world that he and girlfriend Nina fight over parenting responsibilities in the most childish ways imaginable. Hearing Zack got smacked a bit as a kid just adds tension to these screaming matches — one of which Zack tapes on his phone (too rough to show) — which we know will end in violence.
Kiere lands his first real job, as a dishwasher at a restaurant. He’s the one who talks about the “trap” of Rockford, the one most eager to get out. But he’s got anger management issues and maturity issues. He gets his first car, and scratches it up doing skateboard stunts off the bumper.
Bing, seen working with a sound and camera assistant as an adult, with much more elaborate lighting and camera set-ups, gently confronts his friends, their families and his, about what they went through and what that means to them all today.
It’s an expertly cut film, with Bing letting Kiere mention he doesn’t care for his mother’s latest beau, cutting to his interview with Roberta as the soundtrack captures that bossy jerk of a boyfriend calling “Five minutes is up” from the next room. That’s all he expects Roberta to give her son’s friend, the aspiring filmmaker.
Billboards are cleverly used to punctuate scenes and messaging in “Minding the Gap,” as we see one for clinics that cater to skateboarding injuries after Kiere takes a fall, another that mentions “Dad’s the one who picks you up when you fall” after a skater loses his dad.
An “Adopt USA” billboard follows a Zack-and-Nina-can’t-get-it-together-for-their little-boy-Elliott moment.
“Minding the Gap” is a film of skill, pathos and humor, not the deepest movie up for an Best Documentary Oscar this year, but certainly the most approachable.
Whatever the future holds for these friends who were drifting away before this movie (guessing here) re-connected the three of them, Liu shows himself a skilled photographer, editor and documentary storyteller.
Don’t be surprised if his first Oscar nomination isn’t his last.
MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity (bleeped for PBS), alcohol, marijuana
Cast: Kiere Johnson, Bing Liu, Zack Mulligan
Credits: Directed by Bing Liu. A Hulu/PBS-POV release.
Running time: 1:25
This one a lot of high school and college kids who “like to party” have lived through — the horror.
That old movie critics’ maxim — “They rarely get better.” — kind of takes it on the chin with “Happy Death Day 2U,” the winded but game sequel to 2017’s “Happy Death Day.”
It starts badly. For five minutes or more we limp through a repetition of the same “Groundhog Day in Which You’re Murdered” routine — two rounds of it — featuring bland and charisma-starved Phil Vu as the tech nerd Ryan who busts in on college coed Tree (Jessica Rothe) and Carter (Israel Broussard), awakening her from her nightly “reset” after being murdered.
The horror of being stuck with Vu as our hero/protagonist almost sets in when the plot twists around into a science experiment with Tree–Theresa has been dumped in an alternate pathway in the Multiverse, an alternate college career with the same deadly day that ends with death.
Multiverses — God how I curse the day comic book writers and their Hollywood acolytes discovered those.
Even though Rothe provides “Death Day” with the same sort of lift she gave the original, the sequel has half the laughs and maybe one fifth the shocking death moments of “Happy Death Day.”
But it still has Rothe, of “La La Land,” over 30 and showing some miles, but giving her all to reprising her sorority girl Buffy the Mad Slasher Slayer trapped in “Edge of Tomorrow.” Her Tree knows the drill, knows that every detail she forgets, every would-be murderer she fails to guess, means she’ll have to duck, hide, run and fight her way through the trauma of being stalked and killed, one more time, by a nut with a knife.
In the alternate universe where she ends up, her snippy sorority rival Danielle (Rachel Matthews) is all about charity work, sweetness that is catnip to Carter. She’s auditioning for “The Miracle Worker,” and the best and brightest sorority pres has done her homework.
“Did you know Anne Frank was deaf AND blind?”
But what makes Tree think about fighting her way to success and remaining in this version of her alternate life is the third party at her birthday (and death day) lunch with her dad (Jason Bayle).
It’s her mom, her dead mom (Missy Yager) who is still around. And if you don’t think an experienced actress like Rothe can play the hell out of the shock and emotional release of having her mother (dead before the first film started) back, you aren’t giving the “Death Day” daughter her due.
Unfortunately, the slasher in the Bayfield U. mascot’s mask (The Bayfield Babies!) is still around, too. Veteran of this time loop or not, Tree is going to feel every fresh death she faces as she tries to settle into this “better version of my life.” And that gets old quickly.
Writer-director Christopher Landon is better at calling for cute camera angles and 360 degree pans and plotting — silly and farfetched as it is — than he is at jokes and zingers, which made the first film stand out.
Take away Rothe, and there is no movie.
Perhaps the clue is in the nerdy science boys trying to explain the temporal paradox to Tree in movie terms. They, at least, know where a big chunk of this movie came from — with only the jokes missing.
“Seriously, you’ve NEVER seen ‘Back to the Future?'”
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for violence, language, sexual material and thematic elements.
Cast: Jessica Rothe, Israel Broussard, Ruby Modine, Phi Vu, Suraj Sharma, Sarah Yarkin, Rachel Matthews.
Credits: Written and directed by Christopher Landon. A Universal/Blumhouse release.
Running time: 1:40
Kristen Bell’s still not letting it go?
Her ice princess isn’t getting her feet wet, if she can help it, in this briny blue action-packed (action only) trailer for “Frozen II,” opening Nov. 22.
Evan Rachel Wood and Sterling K. Brown are the “names” joining Kristen, Idina and Josh for this sequel.
Dazzling, or at least darned impressive.
Nicholas Hoult, who has a fun turn in “The Favourite,” has the title role here — a possible “serious actor” break-out moment for him in a picture that has prestige and fangirl/fanboy appeal built into it, sort of in that “Professor Marston and the Wonder Women” way.
Here, we’re given a love story (Lily Collins co-stars) and a taste of the events that gave J.R.R.’s imagination room to roam, and a woman he’d love to impress by writing the blockbuster fantasy trilogy of all time.
“Tolkien” opens in limited release May 10.
Oh, that every dark comedy to come down the pike was as playful as “Woman at War.”
It plays around with expectations, setting us up and tripping us — time and again.
It toys with conventions and worn comic tropes — identical twins, mistaken identity, running gags.
And Benedikt Erlingsson’s Icelandic caper comedy has fun with music, installing an offbeat trio (tuba, drums and accordion or piano or organ) who score the movie, live on set, standing behind our “Woman at War” as her odyssey is by turns serious, possibly tragic or — more often — just plain strange and whimsical.
When Halla finds out her adoption of a Ukrainian orphan might come through, a Ukrainian trio — in native garb — shows up, her very own Greek Chorus, an ironic commentary on Halla’s newly-complicated plight, singing in Ukrainian.
In “Woman at War,” Halla (Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir) is quintessentially “quixotic.” But unlike Don Quixote, famed tilter at windmills, this 50ish chorus director is tilting at power line pylons. Halla is an Icelander at war with the government’s high-handed plans to bring more work to the nation’s polluting smelting industry — “Chinese money” and all. Her way of fighting it? Take down the power lines that keep the metals and ores melting.
We meet Halla in full warrior princess mode. She’s hiked out across the lava fields that form Iceland’s terrain, brought her bow and arrows and has shot a cable across the power lines, shorting out the works.
When the black helicopter pops up to track her down, she’s resourceful enough to get away, but only as far as the nearest farm.
“If you want to help me, it has to be now.”
Her pitch, that this, her fifth act of sabotage, does not make her a criminal, that “I’m trying to stop crimes against us,” is unnecessary. The farmer (Jóhann Sigurðarson) figures they’re cousins, not a far-fetched guess on the tiny rock on the edge of the Arctic Ocean.
Halla has just made her first getaway, a skin-of-her-teeth escape back to her solitary life of bike-commuting to work, leading a chorale, maintaining contact with her government “mole” who updates her on the whole smelting conspiracy and covering her tracks as she single-handedly throws a spanner into the works.
Her latest sabotage has netted a suspect, a convenient Spanish tourist (Juan Camillo Roman Estrada) who becomes a running gag, always in the wrong place at precisely the wrong time. The cops jail him and let him go, but not without a jaunty “Welcome to Iceland!” — one of the few times anybody here speaks English.
Co-writer/director Erlingsson (He did “Of Horses and Men.”) loses himself in Halla’s cunning and resourcefulness. She’s not just handy with a bow and arrow. She knows she’s risking electrocution, messing with high tension lines. She’s got her rubber gloves.
And she’s careful in other ways, too — right on the edge of paranoid. Seriously, how easy would it be to catch an eco-terrorist on a remote island with only 350,000 people on it — especially an island with the omnipresent CCTV “security cameras” popping up in every corner of Reykjavik?
Erlingsson has her raise an eyebrow at questions Halla’s asked about the getaway car she parked on the street. The questioner is blond, wearing black, his eyes hidden behind Ray Bans. It’s only a moment or two later than she and we see he’s pushing a stroller. NOT a cop.
She wants to get her message out to the public, and when cutting up newspapers to create a lengthy “ransom note” styled “manifesto” proves impractical — she needs a typewriter, untraceable, preferably. Check out the way Halla procures it and then distributes her “message.”
Through it all, Geirharðsdóttir gives Halla this inscrutable poker face — until, that is, she gets the news that her long-ago filed-for adoption (a Ukrainian war orphan) has come through. She lets us see the shock, and later the delight that this news — in the middle of all the drama she’s filled her life with — gives her.
The deadpan whimsy spills out of many scenes in this “War” film. Halla’s farmer “cousin” lives alone with his sheep dog. He’s named the dog “Woman.” As in “Woman, STAY.” “Woman! BARK!” “SHUT UP Woman!”
But I can’t say enough about the way Davíð Þór Jónsson’s music and musicians are incorporated into “Woman at War,” setting the picture’s tone, having fun with scoring the film and providing visual/musical commentary to Halla’s adventures.
It’s not just that the simple rhythms — a snare drum march in some scenes, a folkish accordion or oomphs from a tuba in others — that tickle. We see the percussionist impatiently clicking his sticks together behind Halla as she reasons through her next plot and watch the ensemble perform as she sprints by, running from drones or police helicopters.
When Halla faces a decision, she makes eye contact with this or that performer before she — and they — decide what course she is taking, by virtue of the music that the performer scores it with.
When you see the source producing music in a scene in a movie, that’s called “diegetic sound.” Several movies have played around with this, but “Woman at War” has the best diegetic placement of music and musicians in a story since “There’s Something About Mary.” It’s just delightful.
Erlingsson takes a fairly cut-and-dried caper comedy and tosses twist after twist into it, letting “Woman at War” surprise us just as often as it repeats a running gag (the poor, cursing bicycle-camping Spaniard).
And as predictable as this might have been and sometimes is, Erlingsson and his stoic, poker-faced star save the best twists for the finale, letting this genial lope across the lava flows finish with a flourish and leave you with a big grin.
MPAA Rating: unrated, locker room nudity
Cast: Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir, Jóhann Sigurðarson, Juan Camillo Roman Estrada, Jörundur Ragnarsson
Credits: Directed by Benedikt Erlingsson, script by Ólafur Egilsson, Benedikt Erlingsson. A Magnolia release.
Running time: 1:40
It’s a little sci-fi, and a lot “Love Actually.”
Danny Boyle directed and Richard Curtis scripted this musical romantic fable.
Lily James, Ed Sheeran, Kate McKinnon and others are among the “names” that surround star Himesh Patel, who plays a struggling musician who could, you know, cash in. If, you know, nobody remembers The Beatles or holds those copyrights.
Just saying. Maybe our hero can afford to get his teeth fixed when, you know, he becomes the star that they were — in equally sudden and overwhelming fashion.
“Well, it’s not Cold Play…”
Stay all the way through it — two teases to the trailer are followed by the trailer proper.
This “Woman at War” has the potential for whimsy, I must say.
A quixotic figure who is tilting, like the Don Quixote who inspired “Quixotic,” not at windmills but at power lines.
Reminds me of this TV movie for the last millennium — “Ohms.” Remember that one?
“Woman at War” opens March 1.
The first thought — and perish that thought, if you can — that popped into my head was “impressive, in a ‘Prince of Persia’ way.”
But the source material here is a can’t-miss Disney musical, a cartoon classic given a live action remake.
Will Smith and a cast of mainly lesser-knowns here in the West bring “Aladdin” to the screen on May 24.
The trailers aren’t selling me, I have to say. This could go either way. But we’ll see.
Movie Nation 