The first trailer was sort of a “Hmmm, could it work?”
But the latest one suggests “Why not?” So we’ll go into “Mary Poppins Returns” with that in our hearts. We will. Emily Blunt tries to make us forget Julia Andrews.
Disney has an embargo on reviews that expires some days from now, so Bob’s your Uncle and Mum’s the Word until then.
Note the cute cameo from one of America’s greatest hoofers in this trailer, BTW. ‘e was in the original film, ‘e was. Guvnor.
Dec. 19, in theaters everywhere.
The Exotic East rarely seems more exotic than in the first 30 minutes or so of “People’s Republic of Desire,” a new documentary about online life in China built around the Chinese obsession with live streaming “hostesses” and “hosts.”
It’s wacky. You scratch your head at the training ground, a veritable digital brothel (quite chaste) where aspiring hostesses learn the art. You wonder who on Earth would spend money for “gifts” that impress these young women (and young men), and are also meant to impress their fellow “fans” with how “rich” you are.
Then it all starts to look and sound eerily familiar. The sales pitch, the affected air of superiority, the vocal fry in the girlish voice of Shen Man, a 21 year old “nurse” turned singer (I should put quotes on that, too.) who interacts and entertains from her elaborate home web studio, and pulls in $40,000 a month, seems almost…American.
Throw in a few would-be rappers and an NBA has-been or two, give her a big bottom, and this on-line entrepreneur could be the Chinese Kardashian.
Then there’s Big Li, the chain-smoking screamer/weeper who sings along with the pop songs he plays, hits the fake “applause” or “laughter” button on his keyboard a little too often, who begs and cajoles his fans and “bosses” — well-heeled fans who lavish gifts on their favorites to make reputations for themselves — to buy buy BUY.
He’s Glenn Beck or Alex Jones without the InfoWars politics.
Director Hao Wu — he did “The Road to ‘Fame,'” about Chinese kids staging the musical “Fame” — focuses on these two, a few select fans and big bucks sponsors — over the course of a couple of years and two big popularity contests put on by the social media/game network YY. That’s the platform that all this streaming, gifting and transfer of wealth takes place on.
Hostess coach Dabao instructs her charges — “Keep your fans happy, make yourself look good…keep them engaged. Get gifts.”
And her star pupil, Shen Man, does her proud. She’s supporting her do-nothing dad and stepmother, uses a high-end Neuman microphone for her streaming cast, gets matching pink Maserati and Bentley automobiles (pictures shared, naturally), logs on and instantly 15,000 users join her.
“How big are your breasts?” one wants to know.
“Seeking one-night stand,” another suggests.
We see gawky boys talking about their online ideal and girls calling her their “role model.”
There’s a guy online with her all the time. Her sugar daddy?
“I swear by my breasts, he’s not my boyfriend,” she pleads, in Chinese with English subtitles. “If he is, may they stop growing!”
“People’s Republic of Desire” touches on the stuff that gets by Chinese censors — talking heads on a news show lamenting the end of upward social mobility in China and the rising ennui and despair of the hundreds of millions of working poor.
“Losers,” a certain US politician might call them. “Diaosi,” they call themselves — unattractive, not much to offer, they live vicariously through their favorite hosts or pine for the attention of their lusted-after hostesses.
Big Li is a self-described diaosi who made it big. Every host wants the attention of Tuhao — slang for China’s uncouth monied bourgeois. These fat cats — loan sharks, “privateers” and others of ill-gotten wealth — make names for themselves on YY championing and gifting their favorites. Gauche boors, “Duke” and “King” they call themselves, including the morbidly obese Songge. They throw around their money and get to hang with web celebrities which in turn makes them celebrated.
Hao Wu’s film charts the rise and fall of the hosts and hostesses, zeroing in on that make-or-break 15 day Annual YY Competition in which those hosts compete for attention and votes that translate to money. Best Female Hostess, best male host, best male idol, female idol etc. are named — based solely on money.
Wu saves his visit to the actual YY headquarters, where the REAL money is being made, for the third act. But along the way, both Big Li and Shen Man sees their reputations (such as they are) trashed, take desperate measures to get back their fame and restore their income, and like entrepreneurs everywhere — spend ridiculous amounts of time currying favor and raising promises of capital from their tuhao.
This fascinating deep-dive into Chinese online life captures frank admissions of “I’d sleep with you for money, but I already have money” and retinues back-slapping away the pain of rejection and declining fame.
There’s all this smoking smoking smoking, and young people stressing over nothing and going broke over nonsense.
Just like you see in the United States or anywhere else the web thrives and acquisitive capitalism feeds.
MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity, sex talk
Cast: Shen Man, Dabao, Big Li,
Credits: Written and directed by Hao Wu. An Independent Lens release.
Running time: 1:35
Alex Winter‘s “Trust Machine: The Story of Blockchain” is the best 85 minute primer you will ever get on Bitcoin, its many imitators and the potentially world-changing technology that makes cryptocurrencies possible.
As Winter’s legion of expert witnesses explain, this isn’t just about “democratizing” money. It’s about the tech that points toward a decentralized world of personalized power grids, impenetrable personal (online) identity and power quite literally in the hands of the people.
It’s heady stuff, and Winter — Bill of the “Bill & Ted” movies in an earlier life — is the perfect explainer and surrogate for the audience. The director of “Deep Web,” “The Panama Papers” and “Downloaded” is emerging as a top tier documentary storyteller, an Alex Gibney for the cloud computing age — seeking out good communicators to interview, asking the right questions off camera and figuring out which fuzzy concepts need graphics to help break down the facts into something the layperson can understand.
His technique is to throw a LOT of voices and faces at the viewer, carving off complex ideas into edible bits. That’s harder on those reviewing his films than those simply watching and learning from them.
There’s British hacker, activist and self-described “Internet busybody” Lauri Love, an “on the spectrum” thinker who warns about the ways the web is being “used to control…to manipulate,” as “a tool of accumulation of power.”
It’s all the data mining and abuse social media companies and hydra-headed entities like Google employ to keep individuals in their thrall.
And here comes Blockchain, the data management/”transaction tracking” technology willed to life by the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto as a response to the global financial meltdown of 2008.
Want to avoid the interconnected currency-exchanges manipulated by market “gamblers” who bring the world’s economy to near ruin, decade after decade? Take the power out of “too big to fail” institutions like banks and market manipulators like Goldman Sachs. Put it in the hands of every single person with money.
Venture capitalists like Tim Draper, cryptocurrency mavens such as Mark Jeffrey, journalists like Laura Shin of Forbes, Cal Tech quantum physicist Spiros Michalakis and musicians like Imogen Heap and Gramatik all extol the virtues of Blockchain, not just as a means of moving money around, but as a method by which individuals, from Kansas City to Kenya, Iceland to India, can take greater control of their lives, their identities and their future.
Puerto Rico’s power grid is wiped out by Hurricane Irma? Decentralize the antiquated “grid” with personal solar and wind power generation, linked by Blockchain, so that not every piece of the chain is not knocked out at once.
The business model for making a living as a musician is broken? Blockchain can connect musicians to fans more profitably than Napster, more efficiently than Spotify and give the artist control over what they create.
Winter’s film, narrated by Rosario Dawson, briskly skips through early Internet history and likens bitcoin to those early days of the world wide web. As Winter serves up a parade of Big Bankers (Jamie Dimon of JP Chase) and business TV talking heads (Jim Cramer, et al), ridiculing bitcoin and its tidal wave of crypto-knockoffs with the phrases “Ponzi Scheme” and endless comparisons to “Tulipmania” in 17th century Holland, he shows us a timeline.
Yes, there have been bubbles — several. Yes, there are con artists out there looking for ways to get their digital paws on your stash. Ordinary people from all corners of the world are stacking computers and linking them to “mine” the currency (better explained in the movie than I could hope to venture — basically, “improving the speed of verifying transactions” on the web with computing power, and being rewarded for it).
But Blockchain, the core technology, “the flux capacitor of bitcoin,” which is “not a thing, but a process,” is sound and revolutionary and could and should impact everything from water and energy to money and music.
Winter’s cast of interviewees are a blend of bitcoin evangelists and Blockchain explainers and theorists, with the many naysayers lumped mostly into montages, clip after clip of dismissal and derision from those who either aren’t grasping the totality of it or have a vested interest in maintaining the current system.
But when banking is explained as “just ‘cloud storage for money,'” when several theorists get into how Blockchain solved “The Byzantine Generals Problem,” when the technology’s seemingly foolproof autonomy and cryptographic impenetrability is summed up as “Your trust is in the laws of math, the building blocks of the universe,” and Blockhain is labeled “a bureaucrat that’s incorruptible,” you start to get it.
As venture capitalists like Tim Draper are worth watching and hearing out as they anoint it as “the next big thing” (five years ago) and have yet to be proven wrong, maybe the days of listening to the CNBC shouters, the Warren Buffetts and Jamie Dimons, the benefactors of the current system — during boom and bust — are at an end.
Whatever you bet on bitcoin, don’t make the mistake of betting against Blockchain.
MPAA Rating: unrated
Cast: Narrated by Rosario Dawson, with Tim Draper, Lauri Love, Bill Tai, Gramatik, Vinay Gupta, Imogen Heap, many others
Credits: Directed by Alex Winter. A SingularDTV release.
Running time: 1:24
Warners indulged one of the great talents in their ranks — Peter Jackson — in creating and releasing (in the UK with some US “special event” screenings) this documentary that spruces up and brings into our world (color, sound, speed correction) the experiences of those in the trenches of World War I.
With a few archival interviews with survivors (they’ve all passed) thrown in for good measure.
Dec. 17 and 27 showings in the U.K.
The official numbers roll out Monday afternoon, but for now, all the studios have shuffled their papers and guesstimated their final take by midnight tonight.
“Ralph Breaks the Internet” did not hit $90 million over the long holiday weekend, which earlier speculation had suggested. A somewhat winded sequel (I thought), it still managed a whopping $84.5 million or so since Tuesday night.
“Creed II” looked for a while like it might hit $60 million plus, but is settling for $55.8, a healthy $16 million more than “Creed” earned on its long holiday opening weekend. It only looks disappointing if you were reading Deadline.com, which was sure this one would clear $60 as late as Sat. AM.
Not a great film, in my opinion — but a crowd pleaser which still did very well, thank you.
Another $42 milllion+ for “Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald,” another $42 million for “The Grinch.”
“Bohemian Rhapsody” ALMOST managed another $20 over five days.
It has not caught “A Star is Born” at the US Box Office — yet. “Star” is ahead $191 to $152 and the gap may not close to less than $20 million, with the marketplace growing more crowded by the minute.
HOWEVER, “Bohemian” is bludgeoning “Star” overseas, leading $472 million to $353 million.
The new “Robin Hood” sucked and everybody could tell from the trailers. They didn’t have to wait for my review. And everybody else’s. $14 million for a $100 million movie that isn’t opening well ANYwhere.
“Green Book” did fair business in wide but not hugely wide release ($7.4 million), alleged Oscar contenders “Boy Erased” and “The Frontrunner” were wide (ish) release disappointments.
Guys who install carpet for a living run afoul of the cannibals that live, prey and feed in a big country home in this sick and twisted British horror comedy.
“Carpet fitters don’t CRY!”
There are five laughs in this trailer. Count’em.
It didn’t get theatrical release in the US (IFC Midnight didn’t want it? Magnet? Come on, guys!) But Dec. 11, look for “Cannibals and Carpet Fitters” through your favorite VOD provider.
David Zellner stars in this indier than indie dark farce set in the anything goes marketplace that is modern China.
A Texan among the natives is Too Big to Fail, right? Or is that just his hat?
Dark Star’s “Ghostbox Cowboy” goes into limited release next weekend and the first weekend in Dec. Dying to see it myself.
There’s something sinister about this house.
Is it the Queen Anne/”Psycho” design? The outdated wiring but oddly updated plumbing?
No! It’s in THE WALLS!
Is there a CLOCK in the Walls? A Mouse in need of Hunting? Could it be The Borrowers? Termites?
Any of which would have been a scarier choice than what’s “Behind the Walls” in this new horror tale from siblings billing themselves The Kondelik Brothers.
It’s a limp, murky looking and muddy-sounding tale of terror that tiptoes along for a 75 minutes before getting to its Big Payoff. Which isn’t.
A mother (Vanessa Angel of “Kingpin” and “Hall Pass”) and her three kids stand at the threshold of their new home, and she says “Perfect.”
But it isn’t five minutes before she’s changed that to “It’s only temporary.”
The little kids (Taylor Autumn Bertman, Mason Mahay) may adjust to being stuck inside after school all day. Lots of places for Hide and Seek. Little Karrie may have found a stuffed frog to play with in the basement. But she had to fall through a rotten floor to get there.
MUCH older brother Michael (Hutch Dano) has put his Michigan university dreams on hold. And Mom’s not told them everything they need to know about fleeing their abusive father (Lew Temple).
But with Mom in line for a promotion, promised by her new boss (veteran character actor Reggie Lee), things have to be looking up, right?
Yeah. Looking “up” from the shower drain, or “up” through the HVAC vents, “in” through the back of every mirror. Something is ALIVE in this house, and Orkin can’t help.
Everybody in the family has visions — nightmares — of what has happened to them and what might happen soon. But it’s not until that boss drops by for dinner that the place makes its malice known. Blood is spilled.
And as much as little Derry (Where’d this woman get her children’s names?) warns everybody about the voices Karrie is conversing with and playing CATCH with — “I’m scared of her new FRIENDS!” — for all the horror the two adults see in glimpses in the mirrors, it’s the abusive husband mother Kathy most fears. And his family.
They just don’t know, until everybody finds out at once.
The Kondelik’s look for frights in scurrying tracking shots (digital) through those air ducts and crawl spaces, in disembodied synthesized voices coming out of the walls — and the mouths of babes.
Visually, it’s an underlit murk of a movie with a sound mix — voices lost behind as assaultive, shrieking score — to match.
The dialogue is unquotably drab, the performances not remotely alarming enough to get by.
Did the Kondeliks look at their footage during editing and realize the flashbacks of the father, the tense visit by his twin (redneck) brother, were the scariest things in the picture?
Probably. But by then they’re already spent money on a cut-rate “creature effects” creator and credit, and it was too late. Those effects, tentacles and claws and a monster stumbling after one and all, hurled at us during the third act, are laughable.
Which is the only involuntary response this would-be thriller can manage.
MPAA Rating: R for horror violence and some language
Cast: Vanessa Angel, Reggie Lee, Hutch Dano, Lew Temple, Taylor Autumn Bertman, Mason Mahay
Credits: Written and directed by James Kondelik, Jon Kondelik — The Kondelik Brothers. An Ammo Content release.
Running time: 1:31
Deadline.com, always first out of the gate with box office analysis, is forever guilty of lowballing kids’ cartoons. Always.
And as I am writing this Sat. AM, I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that they’re still off on the over-under on “Ralph Breaks the Internet.”
They’ve gone from a $69 million prediction for the Disney Animation sequel to $88 million, Tuesday night through Sunday night.
And Saturday’s grosses are usually the best for family and kids pictures. In the $90s? We’ll see. Staggering numbers.
A bit low on “Creed II” as well. It’s now predicted to pull in $69 million worth of Rocky/Creed/Drago fans. Audience exit polling isn’t as strong as the first film, which explains why traffic to my outlier pan review (not dazzling reviews overall) has been staggering. People flock to reviews they agree with AFTER they’ve seen the movie.
“Fantastic Beasts” isn’t hurting, another $44 million taken in over this five day weekend for a mediocre muddle of a Wizarding World movie.
“The Grinch” will steal another $40 or so, once Max is done counting the loot.
Holidays mean “family” and “Instant Family” is headed towards a healthy $17 million plus over this stretch. It underwhelmed upon opening, but this doubles its take. I still say they hobbled this warm fuzzy family comedy by soaking it in profanity and sexting gags. The box office is bearing this out. Either that, or audiences of tiring of Mark Wahlberg comedies. Still, it should have legs.
So should “Green Book,” a potential “Driving Miss Daisy” Oscar contender. “Comfort food for the holidays,” I call it. It’s now on a thousand screens and not making a mint. Only $7 million or so. Once the older audience — non Trump voters (it’s about race and sexuality and “learning”) — finds it, “Green Book” should pull in the green.
“Bohemian Rhapsody” has found that sweet spot and keeps making bank. Another $21 million for this crowd pleaser.
“Robin Hood” is a colossal waste of $100 million and a fun Jamie Foxx supporting performance. It will earn $14 million, if lucky, on its opening five day HOLIDAY weekend. That’s a disaster.
And Jason Reitman’s “The Front Runner” is officially a debacle, opening wide and not even pulling in a million. Crying shame. Not the end of Jason Reitman, but gambling on his projects has grown iffier and iffier since “Up in the Air.”
“The Front Runner” is a solid if not quite sensational thriller with villains around every corner, including one the director thinks is the hero.
There’s the press corps — particularly Miami Herald reporters Tom Fiedler and Pete Murphy (Steve Zissis and Bill Burr) — which went sniffing around where presidential candidate Gary Hart dared them to go.
You’ve got this drawling, drinking womanizing enabler Billy Broadhurst (Toby Huss) and the woman “BB” parked on Hart’s radar, attention hound, “model” and pharmaceutical rep Donna Rice (Sara Paxton).
Hart’s idealistic staff, epitomized by campaign boss Bill Dixon (J.K. Simmons) were professionals, through and through — and professional at looking the other way while their candidate took little “breaks” at the arm of his enabler.
But director Jason Reitman’s film doesn’t seem to see Hart himself (Hugh Jackman, tetchy, buttoned-down and self-righteous) as the only real architect of his downfall.
That hurts a film in which Reitman wastes a lot of flash — long tracking shots, overlapping Altmanesque crosstalk, the feeding frenzy of a media scrum — making a pertinent and simple point, that this was when the country lost its ability to decide what was “important” in picking a president. His other point — that we missed the chance to have a smart, forward-thinking progressive who saw the big picture better than anybody of his generation in the White House — is not far from the surface, either.
Not that “Front Runner” really succeeds in making those points. You’d think, with a reality TV famous, foul-mouthed, womanizing liar in the White House, Reitman would have a slam-dunk on his hands. But all I kept thinking about was the cult of personality that has been there ever since we started electing presidents, how what the public let happen with Hart they quickly forgave with Clinton and even Trump.
None of which really announces “Here’s how we got where we are.”
But even with its muddled messages and misplaced hero worship, “The Front Runner” is still a thoroughly enjoyable deep dive into the American political process and a piece of ancient history — 1987 — that the kids could learn from.
Jackman’s Hart is a marvelous contradiction, grousing about “what’s important,” dismissive of posing for the cover of “People” magazine, suffering through make-up — and yet staging his 1987 campaign inauguration announcement in Colorado’s Red Rocks, a striking, startling and comically impractical setting that gives the lie to the man not being aware of optics.
I met Hart once, interviewing him for public radio after a mid-80s speech in Charlotte, N.C. All I remember was the flounced hair and cowboy boots. He was about as much a cowboy as Reagan. And he was projecting an image — “The West.”
So we’ve got this self-serious politician who allows just enough humor into his presence to seem human, an “Atari Democrat,” one of the Young Turks thinking ahead to when every school-child would need a computer, every dollar saved from a “peace dividend” by ending the arms race with the collapsing Soviet Union could be spent building for America’s future.
And he’s a guy who jealously guards his free time and his privacy, who treats any suggestion he “get personal” in speeches or interview with “That’s IRRELEVANT.”
Which, truthfully, it is. Until it isn’t.
Because Gary Hart liked his gin and tonics, liked hanging out with “BB,” and loved himself a little “Monkey Business.”
“Front Runner” has a prologue in 1984, as Hart was ending his failed run for the Democratic nomination, but quickly zeroes in on the days leading up to his announcing for the presidency three years later, and the three weeks it took for him to lose it all.
Vera Farmiga plays Lee Hart, loyal wife also known — to campaign insiders and DC reporters — for “looking the other way.” Farmiga gives a stoic, compact performance with few fireworks. But we want fireworks.
There’s something of “Shoot the Messenger” in the way Reitman and his fellow screenwriters (one, New York Times writer Matt Bai, wrote the book this is based on) treat the press here.
The Miami Herald reporters and their editor (Kevin Pollack) get their first tips from Donna Rice herself, and their amateurish stakeout of Hart’s DC townhouse earns them waves of pushback from other newspapers, but especially TV.
Ted Koppel, seen as he actually carried on a confrontational interrogation with the Herald’s Fielder, comes off as foolishly second-guessing a story he maybe didn’t want to believe.
A fictional Post reporter (Mamoudou Athie of “Patti Cake$), based on E.J. Dionne, is shown as young, naive and reluctant to pursue this “tabloid” story that Ben Bradlee (Alfred Molina) reluctantly accepts as “news.” But there it is, at the bottom of his list of questions, “rumors” — and young A.J. Parker asks it. Smart play. Always save the question that will get a hangup or an angry storming-out last.
I like the way Hart and his team furiously attack the press, throwing words like “dignity” and “This is beneath you” at one and all. As we’ve seen candidates do, until recently. Because now they have to expect it.
That’s one thesis “The Front Runner” has dead to rights. It was no great leap from the secretive, reckless “gambler” Hart — who dared the Post to “put a tail on me. You’ll be very bored.” — to “Boxers or briefs?” to — “Grab’em by the p—y!”
Everything is fair game in today’s media environment. Reitman revels in these scenes — feeding frenzies to testy, public confrontations — sometimes to the exclusion of getting under Hart’s skin (Why so recklessly arrogant?) or his wife’s.
J.K. Simmons gives us a touch of Dixon’s disillusionment, Molly Ephraim plays a campaign aide reduced to Donna Rice’s “handler,” sympathizing with this hapless “That’s how you see me…bimbo…you think I’m stupid” attention whore who undid so many and so much.
Of course there are two “Front Runners” here. One of them is Reitman, son of Hollywood royalty, a talented director who peaked with “Up in the Air,” tried to steal screenwriting credit and hasn’t made a movie remotely as smart and thoughtful since.
People never really forgave Gary Hart, and Reitman hasn’t caught a break from critics since that screenwriting kerfuffle. He’s got a hint of Hart’s tetchiness about him. Never ask him how much his career owes to his “magic surname.” I did, and set him off. Of course, like “A.J. Parker” I had the good sense to ask that question last.
Here, he’s made a good (not great) movie that’s not captured the interest of audiences or reviewers. Sure, he didn’t realize his “hero” was just one of its villains. And “The Front Runner” may not achieve its overreaching ambitions. But that’s appropriate, too. Neither did Gary Hart.
MPAA Rating: R for language including some sexual references
Cast: Hugh Jackman, Vera Farmiga, J.K. Simmons, Sara Paxton, Mamoudou Athie, Molly Ephraim, Alfred Molina, Kevin Pollack.
Credits: Directed by Jason Reitman, script by Matt Bai, Jay Carson and Jason Reitman . A Sony/Columbia release.
Running time: 1:53
Movie Nation 