Bryce Dallas Howard voices the doggy in this “Incredible Journey” knockoff.
The author of “A Dog’s Purpose” wrote it, and reliable kids-and-animals director Charles Martin Smith (“A Dolphin’s Tale”) is behind the camera.
Yeah, the trailer seems a tad insipid, but I’m still not sure why Sony shied away from previewing this one. Must be marketing on Nickelodeon and The Disney Channel.
There’s something comforting in the way the ageing action star Jean-Claude Van Damme is wearing his years. He’s letting the mileage show, and not losing a lot of sleep about the fact that his punches aren’t what they once seemed to be, his kicks not quite the fight-ending footwork they used to be.
The “Muscles from Brussels” is well-cast as “The Bouncer,” a Belgian thriller (in French, Flemish and English) tailor-made for a world weary man of violence. The thriller, about a nightclub bouncer with a mysterious past caught between the local mobster he works for and blackmailing cops who want a piece of that hoodlum, isn’t all that. But Van Damme’s screen presence carries it as far as it goes, even if that isn’t all the way to a satisfying finish line.
“Lukas” (the film’s title in the rest of the world) is living in his native Belgium, a single dad raising a young daughter (Alice Verset) on a the salary he earns at a local nightbclub.
He spends his evenings breaking up fights, picking up ODs, defending waitresses and generally cleaning up the mayhem in the maelstrom of thumping techno in a club illuminated in flashes of blue and grey.
He injures a guy who was shoving a waitress around and loses his job. But his younger got-your-back boss (the rapper Kaaris, an arresting presence) knows of “this strip club in Ixelles.” Lukas has, at least an interview.
Here’s the first JCVD moment in “Bouncer.” Lukas shows up at the Funny Pony, is led to the basement where there are many other candidates for the job.
“It’s simple,” the boss (Kevin Janssens) growls. “The last man standing gets the job.”
Lukas is bloodied and dropped in the brawl that follows. But never count out the Muscles from Brussels.
Things turn complicated when the cops want to ask him questions about losing that previous job. Charges have been filed, and the police notice this Lukas is a man without a past, whose daughter is in private school under a false name.
“Who are you hiding from?
It’s OK, the EU agent (Sami Bouajila) assures him. Inexplicably, based on the accident that happened to the punk in the club, the EU special police want Lukas on their team and are willing to blackmail him — get the charges dropped — to get him to agree to it.
They want to know what the ruthless, mob-connected club owner (Sam Louwyck) is up to.
And Jan, that club owner, has his own questions of his new employee.
“Where are you from? Nobody knows you. You have one number in your phone.”
He, too, is instantly impressed with Lukas, entrusting him to guard the valuable Italian blonde (Sveva Alviti, given too little to do), bringing Lukas along for the hard jobs — kidnapping the expert drug cooker, etc.
The plot is strictly hash, with coincidences, obvious clues and twists we see coming, with a couple of half-speed fights and half-hearted shootouts and car chases tossed in for variety.
The director gave the world “The Assault” and “The Crew” and the screenwriter scripted “The Night Eats the World.” So as we say in English, not Flemish or French, “It is what it is.”
But Van Damme, wearing a hoodie over a hoodie in most scenes, eyes cast down, staying on task, is a mesmerizing presence at the heart of it all. He’s not just playing a guy who has seen it all before, fought his way through this sort of thing too many times to count.
That’s sort of who he is now, a grizzled, melancholy tough guy — at least in the movies.
He was never Mr. One-Liner, never quite Stallone or Statham or the rest, even as they all aged into action heroes who relied on prop guns instead of fight choreography to get by.
And unlike the rest, he’s letting the years and miles show even if the movies shrink to fit his diminished screen profile as he does.
MPAA Rating: R for violence, language and brief nudity/sexuality
Cast: Jean-Claude Van Damme, Sami Bouajila, Sveva Alviti, Alice Verset, Kaaris, Kevin Janssens
Credits: Directed by Julien Leclercq, written by Jérémie Guez. A Blue Fox release.
Running time: 1:34
What’s great, worth going to see and buying? What’s hot in the art world, worth investing in?
Whatever we tell you is, darling.
“Velvet Buzzsaw” is a satiric thriller from Dan Gilroy (“Nightcrawler”) about a new “discovery,” already dead and thus valuable to art dealers and collectors, whose paintings and other works exert a murderous influence over those who come into contact with them.
“We’re trending on Instagram!”
Love Gyllenhaal’s eyesight-challenged taste-setter in this, and yes — he’s re-teamed with Rene Russo, his “Nightcrawler” object of desire, for it.
Toni Collette and John Malkovich also star in the film, in Netflix and select theaters on Feb. 1.
There’s nothing like the smell of a new multiplex. Every one I go into advances the state of the art, it seems, and some even improve the movie-going experience.
A new Epic Theater where I live has all this digital ticket buying and concession buying that eventually, like fast food joints, will be able to cut staff and run the place paperless, if not entirely cash-less, with virtually no one to man the snack bar, tear tickets, etc.
The upselling of “reserved seating” is sweeping the business the way digital projection did in the mid-2000s.
But not every theater is new, and even a lot of the new ones leave a lot to desired for quality of experience, customer service, quality seating, decent food and cleanliness.
And believe me, I’ve seen some disasters, and not just the ones up on the screen.
I’ve been reviewing movies since the 1980s, and as part of that, I’ve written stories for various newspapers over the years over a beloved local cinema that has fallen on hard times, others that have been allowed to fall apart.
I’ve written “The Last Drive-in” story more times than I can count. At the Orlando Sentinel, I visited every surviving drive-in in Florida for a story that took months to finish (most of them have since closed).
But I also surveyed all of the region’s movie theaters when I first started there for another story. Many were aged dumps where it took effort to lift yourself out of broken chairs, to lift your foot off permanently-sticky floors.
Ewww.
A truism then and now? Theaters don’t do a lot of fixing of things that get busted. Seats, bathrooms, etc., are just roped off. This has been going on since the ’90s.
The great “purge” of smaller theaters and multi-plexes that happened around 2000 wiped out many of these dumps, though a few survive as second-run houses.
“The rescreening of America,” as the National Association of Theater Owners (NATO) used to characterize it at their annual ShowEast convention in Orlando (which I covered) put new 14-24 screen theaters all across America in the mid-2000s, oddly at the same time as the Great Purge of Newspaper Movie Critics began.
But bad movie-going experiences still abound. I duck into theaters in small towns and big cities on my travels. And a few experiences, often repeated (as necessity takes me back to some “bad” cinemas repeatedly) stand out as the worst I’ve seen, perhaps the worst in America.
Decades of rumors that “it’s closing” have dogged the Oviedo Marketplace Regal outside of Orlando, a cinema that over the years has developed a bad reputation for botched showings.
Dank second run houses are pretty much the same everywhere, Deland or Durham, New York or Newport News.
But a few first-run theaters stand out, in my 35 years or so of reviewing experience, with recent visits burning the memory into my brain.
Check out the negative Yelp! and Google reviews for the Stadium 10 at Northgate Mall in Durham, NC, a theater I have visited a couple of times while checking in on elderly relatives.
It’s scorching hot in the summer, see-your-breath cold in the winter. I am only now getting over the bronchitis that I am sure I contracted while freezing through something there last Thanksgiving. And online customer reviews have been bitching about this for YEARS.
The pleasant-enough staff sell last-night’s popcorn, and apologize for the heat. Or the AC. The busted, torn and sticky seats and often filthy auditoriums? Not so much.
It’s a terrible theater, not the worst staffed (a lot of AMCs seem to best it in that regard), but a real dump that city inspectors ought to close until they fix it.
Is it the worst theater in America? I think it might be.
The Satellite Cinemas in a dead mall in Titusville, Florida, lost their gear, their management and their monopoly when a shiny new Epic multiplex opened down the street.
Mall management, as is often the case, desperately wants that foot traffic the theater generated (not enough to keep the mall from converting into dance and gymnastics studios, an antiques indoor flea market, etc.). So they reopened it, as some mall management companies do. Second run. Rented projection gear.
And virtually no usable seats. It’s a pit. I took a tip about it and ducked in there the other day. A disaster.
But what about you? Are you stuck in a neighborhood or town with a zombie cinema, a smelly, cold and underlit corpse where “I’ll wait to watch it on Netflix” changes your moviegoing habits forever?
Feel free to name your candidates in the comments. Shaming them might not do any good, but with this site’s Google Search position, management will get an eyeful of abuse about what they need to correct, even if they’re ignoring Yelp! and Google Reviews.
Kevin Hart’s got a movie that might have, at one time, been looked at as a “game changer” for him, to promote.
“The Upside” was filmed a few years ago and is just now coming out at what has felt like the Peak Kevin Hart Moment. He’s King of Hollywood, the biggest box office comic of the day. Even his middling movies make a mint.
He was even picked to be the host of the Oscars. But we all know what happened after that.
Old tweets and jokes came back to haunt him, he said he’d already apologized for that, when he hadn’t.
Gave up the hosting gig, finally got around to apologizing.
Got a “Get out of Hollywood Jail Free” card from Ellen DeGeneres, which didn’t pan out. And then on “Good Morning America” he found his new catch-phrase. Enough apologizing, enough of this public pillorying by the Interweb’s Social Justice Warriors.
He says “I’m over it.”
All of which was preamble to his appearance on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.”
Where he had to deal with this controversy yet again, and get lectured by Colbert on how “The audience decides when they’re over it, not you.”
Being in the hot seat in front of a TV camera is not a comfy spot, not where you do your best thinking on the fly. Even if you’re prepared to be asked about this.
Hart, whose stand-up documentaries are what made him blow up a few years ago, has come off in the most recent of those films as a guy rich, successful and surrounded by people who don’t challenge him — sycophants. The last stand-up film he put into theaters showed him reveling in excess, success and weak jokes that nobody around him had the guts to say, “Let’s hire some writers to build your set up a little. Because this isn’t cutting it.”
So he A) might have thought he’d apologized, or thought saying “I’ve already apologized” was correct, because nobody around him said otherwise and he just forgot or blocked it out of his memory. He didn’t realize that B), when you say “I’m over it” to your entourage, they laugh and that’s that. “Good Morning America” isn’t your entourage. Nor is Colbert. Colbert is right. Hart doesn’t get to decide. The audience does.
But being on the hot seat he missed his surest “out” with Colbert and with this whole stink. Every time he says “I’m over it,” the audience applauds. He should have said, “Right, Stephen. And what did the AUDIENCE here just do when I said ‘I’m over it?’ They APPLAUDED.”
He’s not the only comic to have played the gay gag card, not even the only one to have made that “If my son told me he was gay” threat joke.
In the current climate of crime and recriminations, eight year old tweets aren’t even a misdemeanor.
But I think I get what DeGeneres was trying to do. You can’t selectively enforce shaming of acts within the broad umbrella of intolerance. You can’t deliver the death penalty to celebrities who don’t kowtow quickly enough. And those often nameless online “police” — can’t be allowed to trample the celebrity-scape unpoliced themselves.
Lady Gaga and her “Monsters,” at the forefront of the Social Justice Warrior crusading (and OSCAR campaigning) seem awfully tolerant of her collaborating with R. Kelly when every predatory thing about him has been on the public record and well known since 2003. And she STILL did a duet with him. Why should she be even CONSIDERED for an Oscar?
For that matter, somebody piece together all the times Bradley Cooper cracked “That’s so gay/Don’t be gay” in “The Hangover” movies. Comedies are where “The best joke on the set wins.” Did he improvise the line, or just think it was scripted funny and not challenge it?
Bradley Cooper wants an Oscar as badly as his “A Star is Born” co-star. Why not net-troll that chance away from him?
The answer, at least to Cooper’s case, is that this is no James Franco/Kevin Spacey level offense. Nor is Hart’s.
So yeah, he’s “over it.” We’ll see how the box office for “The Upside” turns out, but my bet is the audience (And he knows his audience, especially.) is “over it” too. It’s not terrible, and one suspects that a lot of reviews of it panned Hart over the controversy and not necessarily the overlong and slightly heavy-handed crowd pleaser that Neil Burger directed.
Maybe the rest of us should take a hint, including those short attention span Internet assault leaders. You ruined Hart’s Oscar hosting high. Considering the crime, that’s enough.
Comics who take the easy, broad gags are said to be reaching for low-hanging fruit.
Kevin Hart? He treats reachable, easy laughs like piñatas. He pounds the heck out of them.
“The Upside” gives Hart the chance to check his swing, just a smidge. He still pummels the laugh-lines and gets the most out of the comic bits. Comics are angry people, by definition.
But he surprises when he lets us see a sensitive side that his antic character comedies never do. The film is a manipulative drag, at times, entirely too obvious with the emotional tugs and try-too-hard laughs standing out more than they should. But Hart, Bryan Cranston, Nicole Kidman and others in the cast make it tolerable, more or less from start to finish.
It’s a remake of a not terribly ambitious but warm, bracing and accessible French comedy based on a true story, “The Intouchables.” Director Neil Burger (“The Illusionist”) leans heaviest on the sentimental elements of this story of a rich man rendered quadriplegic by an accident who hires a grumpy, unqualified and unempathetic ex-con as his caregiver.
The job description is “life auxiliary,” which the ex-con Dell (Hart) has never heard of.
“White people got a name for everything!”
But he’s desperate to show his parole officer applications that demonstrate his job hunt, so he tags along to a penthouse interview with a score of other, more caring, more qualified and generally more insufferable applicants. Dell is bitter, estranged from his ex (Aja Naomi King, wonderfully bluff and blunt) and son. And he’s disconnected from society and the job market. All he wants is “proof” he’s job hunted.
Phillip (Cranston) is a grieving widower whose world has shrunk to whatever he can see from his bed or his mouth-controlled wheelchair. He suffers the attentions of his executive assistant (Kidman) only so long as she hears his demands that “DNR” get attached to every medical instruction.
That stands for “do not resuscitate,” for those who haven’t written their living will.
Phillip hires the rude, unqualified and unsentimental punk at least in part, we suspect, because surly Dell would let the him die. The way Dell flings “DNR your ass” around, we buy that.
Yvonne (Kidman) has to be bullsied into accepting the hire, and Dell has to be convinced to accept the offer. The designer bathrooms, expensive art on every wall, garage full of collectible cars and bookshelves full of first editions get his attention.
“I think your plantation is bananas,” he sneers, “but I ain’t nobody’s servant.”
A big paycheck changes his mind. Along with the chance to drive the boss around in a Ferrari or Alfa Romeo, “running errands,” trying to win his son over and buy his way back into their lives by paying back child support in the process.
I’m always amazed when the well-heeled Hart can still summon up his inner “street” for a movie. The guy was a child actor, for Pete’s sake (“Freaks & Geeks”). The self-described “Little Man” does the chip on his shoulder thing well, and he makes Dell’s utter tactlessness with Phillip seem genuine and bracing.
“Don’t get up,” he says without thinking. A bet is secured the usual way, but without Phillip’s willing ascent. Not having the use of his limbs ensures that.
“You shook my hand!”
“You think THAT’s gonna hold up in COURT?”
It all gets to be a bit much, Dell’s wallowing in the lap of luxury (cars), Dell’s on-the-make efforts to hook Phillip up with a woman who will give him a reason to live — “How’bout Mrs. Botox, here? You’re perfect for each other. You can’t move your body, she can’t move her face.”
The story arc — the streetwise black man trying to bring a little Aretha into the rich writer’s life, giggling through the rich man’s operas until he starts to appreciate the vocal glories of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” — is comfort-food familiar and predictable.
But Hart makes the laughs that the non-caregiver wrings from his first effort to replace a catheter fenuine and cringe-worthy. It’s no shock, given Hart’s recent run-ins with gay rights advocates, that he plays the “phobic” in “homo-phobic” in that scene with great comic conviction.
The upside of “The Upside” is that Hart’s fans will find just enough here to warrant the ticket price. But those on the fence about him thanks to his reaction to unearthed homophobic remarks he made and was slow in taking back won’t be as forgiving.
It’s a movie that swings too hard, tries too hard and sticks around too long to be an easy winner for the cinema’s hottest comic. But if you’re willing to see Hart try something new, with eager support from Cranston (Kidman is plainly slumming here), there are worse ways to spend two hours than watching Kevin Hart play a fellow who learns empathy and learns to love the opera.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for suggestive content and drug use
Cast: Kevin Hart, Bryan Cranston, Nicole Kidman, Aja Naomi King, Juliana Margulies
Credits: Directed by Neil Burger, script by Jon Hartmere, based on the French film “The Intouchables. An STX release.
Running time: 2:05
The laughs may be low-hanging fruit — “What in the name of Black Jesus” and “We’ve got a BMW situation here; Black Mama Whuppin'” — but this African American “Big” twist has them.
Three or four, just in the trailer.
Regina Hall is the bitchy boss lady who gets cursed and turned “Little,” Issa Rae of TV’s “Insecure” brings the funny are her flunky who finally gets hers when the boss is within “spanking” distance.
Tina Gordon Chism of “Drumline” and “Peeples” and the big screen “ATL” wrote and directed this April 12 release.
So Kevin Hart’s having a rather rough go of it. No, he isn’t hosting the Oscars. Yes, he did FINALLY get around to apologizing for one liners and old tweets of the Tracy Morgan “Kill my kid if he told me he was gay” variety.
But he’s got a semi-serious and sentimental movie, “The Upside,” coming out. And even though it’s screening a bit late here (reviews are already up from other markets), it looks good.
Bryan Cranston and Nicole Kidman co-star in this remake of the French film, based on a true story, “The Intouchables” (my review of the original film is here).
Has “The Upside” really been sitting on the shelf for two years?
At one point in the French documentary “Jihadists,” a snippet of an ISIS recruiting video sends us hurtling down the highways and streets of Iraq, as the “fighters” inside randomly shoot-up cars full of people, pedestrians on the street, all as a dream catcher dangling from the rear view mirror of their SUV bounces hither and yon in bloody irony.
Coming near the end of this “their beliefs, prejudices, goals and practices, in their own words” film, one can be forgiven for throwing up your hands, asking “What can we do with such barbarians?” Aside, of course, from forcing some reduced in number 1.5 billion Muslims to bow to the radioactive cinders of what once was Mecca five times a day in prayer.
But that’s not what co-director Francois Margolis, who appears on camera several times in the film to explain himself and his movie, has in mind. The film, titled “Salafistes” in France and other countries which know what that Sunni movement represents, is Margolis and co-director Lemine Ould M. Salem’s attempt to “listen to what these people say. They are not crazy… They are not isolated…They have an ideology.”
He set out to find “the people who have decided to wage war on us…an important minority in Islam,” and talk to them where THEY were in control, in areas of Mali, Tunisia and Mauritania where Islamic jihadists run the show and Sharia Law is the only law that matters.
Tracking down Imams and Islamic police, militia leaders and rabid adherents in Africa via Facebook and Twitter, escaping the clutches of Boko Haram despite making an effort to include the Nigerian fanatics and electing not to go to ISIS territory “because we would have been killed,” Margolis and Salem got unfiltered versions of the beliefs that gave birth to the attacks on 9/11, on Britain and Spain and France’s “Charlie Hebdo” magazine.
They say what they really believe, really think and really plan to do “in safety,” Margolis says. And then the screen goes black with a quote Guy Debord — “Shame should be made even more shameful by making it public.” There’s nothing as damning as letting cranks explain themselves, giving their beliefs as they understand them.
As this or that leader of the various movements “Jihadists” visits and hears out declares “International opinion is of no concern to us,” the film’s “real” audience becomes clearer. They’re trying to reach Muslims “who do not think like this,” who are embarrassed to be tarred with the same brush that murderous extremists “who long for (an idyllic Islamic) past that probably never existed.” And they’re trying to show we Westerners why what we’ve been doing to combat this ideology hasn’t worked.
We ride around on a moped with AK-47-armed “Islamic Police” in Timbuktu, forcing women to put on their veils, cracking down on smoking and other vices they deem “not allowed by the Prophet.”
A man, his face covered by a hood, admits (in French and Arabic, with English subtitles) “I am here because of Bavaria.” A can of beer got him arrested.
An accused murderer is executed because the mother of his victim refused to forgive him, the judge shrugs. And we see lashes administered to this accused wrongdoer, or a hand lopped off (not on camera) of an accused thief.
A cleric named Hamada As-Shinqiti explains why a married male adulterer “will be stoned to death,” but a single man will only receive “100 lashes,” a lighter sentence which he then tries to explain “biologically.”
We hear from Omar Old Hamaha of the Timbuktu group Ansar al-Sharia, a 55 year-old college-educated jihadist fluent in French and Arabic, remembering the “divine intervention” that made him a jihadist.
He takes a literal passage of the Prophet’s edicts and dyes his beard red “to contradict (Confound?) the Jews and the Christians.”
Hamaha marvels at the “paradise” he and his armed, ruthless comrades have created in “the minaret of Islam” (Timbuktu’s motto).
“Sin all over the world. Discos, debauchery, music everywhere. Now, there is no more beer drinking, even little girls in Gao wear veils.”
One articulate Salafiste mullah, fighter or Imam after another gives his interpretation of the Koran and the will of the The Prophet, explaining away the sexism, the patriarchy of the culture, the violence.
“Here, there were alcohol sellers,” a young tour guide notes. “We used to preach in the mosques, and then went out into the streets ” to spread the word. It wasn’t until “we took up arms” that they were able to impose their will on the nation.
“There’s no more sin now!”
“Jihadists” makes for a fascinatingif talking-head heavy indictment of a myopic ideology that claims “We just want to be left to ourselves” to do as they see fit “in our own lands.” Sharia Law, enforced by armed thugs and justified by narrow-minded, selective, context-twisting clerics, is what they want — Saudi Arabia without the trappings of wealth or feigned concern with what the West thinks about their Sharia State repression.
A young Muslim man sees this version of Islam as “a new religion. We follow it because what the force says is what you do.”
“There is no opposition” in these corners of the world, Margolis explains. Conformity and intolerance of criticism of The Prophet and his faith are enforced by the Men with Guns.
As we see accused homosexuals tossed from the roof of a Mosul, Iraq hotel (an ISIS video), watching stonings and canings and see propaganda videos of Westerners as they’re about to be murdered by ISIS, as various Africans Margolis and Salem interview ponder the idea of going to ISIS lands where at long last “the caliphate” has been reestablished, the viewer begins to grasp that this violently intolerant, nativist/quasi-nationalist conservatism merely puts the Jihad movement ahead of the global curve on “Making Arabia/Africa/Syria Great Again” timeline.
“What is my problem with democracy?” one educated young Imam laughs in a moment that abandons “shame” and zeroes in on mockery. It’s the secularism of voting rights, and the fear that “What if the people decide wine is allowed?”
We in the West may be enraged at the smug “America got what it deserved/’Charlie Hebdo got what it deserved” declarations. It’s hard to cling to the idealism of tolerance for others’ beliefs when those beliefs are slaughtering in the name of a religion they believe can never be criticized, questioned or ridiculed.
There is virtually nothing in the line of contrary local or Islamic voices, criticizing or critiquing the value system and twisted “morality” of the jihadists. That’s mostly left to Margolis himself. That’s a shortcoming of this “in their own words” film.
And as Margolis discusses his reasons for making the film, the family he lost in the Holocaust, a vow of “never again,” any Muslim who’d care to dismiss his movie can say, “He’s a Jew,” followed by more invective of the type we’ve heard throughout “Jihadists.”
“We cannot have compassion as they are not innocent people, insulting The Prophet…They have only one destiny on Earth, to be hated.”
But as one dogmatic true believer declares “I only believe what can be proven!” and we remember how little of any supernaturalist religion can actually be “proven,” as one more young believer wishes for the chance to make the journey to join ISIS, as another Westerner appears on an ISIS video and blames the West for the state of bloodstained state of the Middle East, as yet one more young cleric spits out George W. Bush’s blundering use of “crusade” back at us with the cleric’s Muslim victimhood interpretation of the Crusades (which followed Islamic expansion by the sword across the Middle East), the viewer cannot help but embrace the point of “Jihadists.”
Getting Islam to shout down the murderous cranks in its ranks is far more likely to work against such movements than all the bombs and bullets and bloodshed that’s been tried thus far.
MPAA Rating: unrated
Credits: Directed by Francois Margolis, Lemine Ould M. Salem. A Cinema Libre release.
Running time: 1:12
Sometimes, it’s fun to dive into a film by dissecting its credits to figure out how it, out of all the screenplays flooding into the indie cinema marketplace, got made.
The first thing that jumps out in reading the credits of “The Untold Story” are the surnames.
It’s a light, stumbling romance that stars veteran character actor Barry Van Dyke, with people like Jason Connery, Ellen Travolta, Omar Gooding and Jordan Ladd in the supporting cast.
For the life of me, I cannot recall a film that had so many offspring and siblings of film and TV stars in its cast. Dick Van Dyke’s son, Sean Connery’s son, John Travolta’s sister, Cuba Gooding’s brother and screen legend Alan Ladd’s granddaughter — it’s like a whole season of “Murder She Wrote.”
But kudos to co-writer/director Shane Stanley for figuring out you can get your movie financed and filmed like that. And as it’s a Hollywood story — aged actor, trying to get back in the cutthroat business that turned its back on him — who knows Hollywood better than those who grew up in it?
Yet “Untold” is a tedious tale whose editing shows signs of the struggle to give those cast in it their “fair share” of screen time — pointless montages of the mundane details of life (not mundane to rich Hollywood folk), scenes that carry on past their (tepid) payoff.
That’s a common failing of movies where you’ve got a lot of “names” to keep happy and not a lot of cash to offer them. And pacing? That’s the Achilles heel of modern movie making. It’s not the flaccid recycled scripts, it’s the lack of ruthless editors who can hack 104 minutes into a faster, tighter 70 minutes that comes closer to working.
We meet Edward Forester (Van Dyke), a veteran of some 40 films, Broadway and a popular TV cop series “The Six” as he’s downsizing and watching his life shrink, right before his eyes. He still has the Jaguar he earned when the money was rolling in, but now it’s parked in front of an under-sized dump of an apartment out in The Valley.
He had “a tabloid incident” or two that made him less employable. The bigger reason his agent (Connery) is dumping him? He’s 64.
Edward reaches out to colleagues (Ladd) and employees he mistakenly regards as “friends.” They’re no help, and most of them don’t have his good manners.
But this young would-be writer/director (ex-child star Miko Hughes) has a script he wants him to do. It makes Edward laugh out loud. If only he can get the role, get the financing, get this “comeback” project under way. If only he can find Jeremy (Hughes), who drops out of sight when their first shot at financing the film falls through.
People still call Edward (nice dye job) “handsome,” and women from “the business” are still interested in him sexually. But he’s got this feisty Latina neighbor (Nia Peeples, who broke out on TV’s “Fame” in the ’80s, and was on “Walker: Texas Ranger,” for years). They “meet cute.” She’s getting dressed in front of an open window and cusses him out for looking.
She’s broke, works as a car touch-up painter and detailer and there’s a little boy of four in her care who doesn’t speak. So she’s quite short tempered with the man she keeps deriding as “Abuelo” (grandpa) and “viejo” (old man).
As in, get your moving truck out of the way, “ToDAY viejo!” Plainly, they’re destined to be together.
So yes, the plot has a few standard elements and the characters have the promise of “color.” And your cast is experienced at filming quickly (lots of TV work) and making the most of any script.
What could mess it up? Because scene by pointless or painfully overlong scene, Shane Stanley (also born into the business, he’s the son of co-writer, actor and sometime director Lee Stanley) does.
Start with the endless banalities the movie opens with. There’s the moving-in montage, the housekeeping montage, the grocery-shopping, cookware-buying, noisy neighbors keeping you awake, and drippy faucet and “I’ve never done my own laundry,” and a scene in yet another movie that is shocked SHOCKED by how ill-mannered cell-phone addicts are on dates, and then having our hero finally recognized by the cable guy.
“Wait, you’re Edward Forester!”
A solid 20 minutes of that begin the film and almost nothing happens in them to make it worth watching. Catarina (Peeples) is speaking for us all when she barks at her new neighbor.
“Come on, abuelo!
It takes forever to get around to Edward’s last hope — the script for “The Best Medicine” — to show up and give the picture a hint of forward momentum.
Yes, the details that come out of meeting with an accountant, finding out how little income even a successful actor can expect from residuals from past work ($25K per year), how your peers can be seriously put-out if you ask them for career help, are modestly interesting.
Medical suggestions, “little blue pill” hook-ups and the like? Everybody shares those.
“Oxy…it’s magical. Takes away all kinds of pain!”
“The Untold Story” feels threadbare, a comedy creaking along on a walker. It’s not the cast that’s “old,” it’s the screenplay’s paucity of new ideas, new observations about life, fresh gags or situations that seem “ready for the home.”
A movie where “Times and people have been known to change” is its byword loses itself instead on pointless minutia — scenes and characters (Catarina’s workplace, for starters) that clutter rather than advance the script, caricatures that are the least funny examples of “the funny agent,” the “kvetching accountant,” the “Latin spitfire” in memory.
Peeples, playing a woman who knows her own age (pushing 60) and yet still calls her neighbor “old man,” gives fair value and sets off a couple of sparks. Aside from her, a cameo by the late Dan Haggerty (“Grizzly Adams”) may be the sweetest moment in the picture. It arrives, too little and entirely too late to save “The Untold Story.”
I’m all for actors getting work into their AARP years, but you’ve got to give them a story much more worth telling than this one, which should have remained “untold.”
MPAA Rating: unrated, with profanity, suggestions of drug abuse
Cast: Barry Van Dyke, Nia Peeples, Miko Hughes, Jason Connery, Dan Haggerty
Credits: Directed by Shane Stanley, script by Lee Stanley and Shane Stanley. An Ammo Content release.
Running time: 1:44
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