Filmed not too far from me, in the swamps and C-movie horror haven of Mount Dora, Florida. And Oakland Park and Miami.
My first thought on glancing at the trailer was, “Is this Australia?” Odd accents abound in “Crocodylus.”
January 1, the world sees for itself.
But yeah, it’s “Fellini-esque,” or promises to be. Plainly the inspiration for it, and thus its title, comes from Federico.
This black and white personal epic (growing up in Mexico City and environs in the ’70s) looks expensive, but it wasn’t. “Roma” is just the sort of high minded “art” content Netflix is smart spending its money on.
They may get more first weekend traffic from their half-hearted sci-fi or horror, but the genres where there is a niche they can fill — indie dramas and romances, rom-coms — are what I hope they’ll throw money at.
Alfonso Cuaron is the most prestigious “brand name” director they’ve rewarded so far. This looks wonderful. Comes to Netflix next month, and it has awards season pretensions, too.
Unlike that Coen Brothers “Buster Scruggs” bust.
In the documentary “Every Act of Life,” the playwright Terrence McNally admits “my work never gave me pleasure before the last couple of years.”
To which any fan of the theater might spit up her chablis, sputter in his espresso.
A 60 year veteran of the Broadway stage, four time Tony winner, creator of “Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune,””Master Class,” “The Ritz,” “Corpus Christi,” “Love! Valour! Compassion!” and adapter of musicals from “Ragtime” to “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” and the man isn’t enjoying his creations?
Oh. That’s for the rest of us, I guess.
“Every Act of Life” is a sweet spirited genuflection before the master, a man universally adored by those interviewed by filmmaker Jeff Kaufman, quick to admit his failures and those times actors such as Nathan Lane, Christine Baranski, Chita Rivera or John Glover saved his bacon.
The film is a brisk walk-through of McNally’s life, skipping much but getting at what we have to regard as “the important stuff.” He was born in St. Petersburg, Fla. (not mentioned) but crew up in a “sh—y town,” Corpus Christi, Texas, which gave its name to one of his most controversial plays.
His dad was a Schlitz beer distributor, and “there wasn’t a day when my parents weren’t drunk.” Younger brother Peter is here to verify that miserable, abusive childhood.
But that one special teacher, Mrs. Maurine McElroy, whom he has thanked in awards ceremonies, “was the first person who really got me, my humor, got what I’m smart about…and what I’m not smart at.”
She put him on the path that sent him to New York (which he and his Broadway loving parents had visited), Columbia University and A Life in the Theater.
His first serious boyfriend was none other than “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” era Edward Albee, a combative affair that saw Albee hit his peak and McNally get a foot in the door. His 1964 Broadway debut, the critically dismissed “And Things that Go Bump in the Night,” was the first of many failures. But having a famous playwright boyfriend gets you more at-bats.
Maybe he was ahead of his time, but it wasn’t until his plays took on more overtly gay subtexts and subjects that he became the legend he is today. That took years and years.
“Frankie and Johnny” was an early success. Others followed, with the odd dud blended in. Sometimes, multiple duds.
He “gets at the core of the human condition,” and in many different ways, from different angles, says “Master Class” star Audra McDonald.
“He’s had his triumphs, and his huge disappointments,” Baranski (“Lips Together, Teeth Apart”) notes. “That’s a test of character.”
She tested it further, offered a role in his “Lips Together,” when she told him what she thought of the show. He fixed it and it became a triumph.
McNally persevered because through it all, as Nathan Lane (“Love! Valour! Compassion!”) points out, “nobody loves the theater like Terrence.”
“It reinvents itself every night,” McNally says with a smile. Lane helped him cut “Love! Valour!” into a stageable play, after first trying to get absurdly long early drafts up on their feet.
Being the son of alcoholics weighed on him and crippled relationships and may have even hobbled his earliest Broadway shows. But when Angela Lansbury tells you to “sober up,” what Broadway baby could refuse?
McNally started out writing and mounting “operas in our family’s garage,” according to brother Peter. He developed a passion for hunting for “something beautiful and meaningful and putting it on stage.” And he launched some careers (Lane, McDonald) and revived others (Chita, Rita, etc. ).
It’s a celebratory film, plainly directed by a fan. Kaufman has docs on jazz musician Chick Webb and “The State of Marriage” was about the test case that pushed gay marriage into mainstream legal thought to his credit. He doesn’t press hard on the more intriguing corners of McNally’s personal story, and doesn’t really need to.
Because McNally, after cancer scares (He has the same amount of lung tissue as John Wayne did in his final years.), flops and epoch-defining hits, celebrated his 80th birthday Nov. 3, he’s due his accolades and the victory lap Kaufman’s documentary gives him.
MPAA Rating: unrated
Cast: Terrence McNally, Edie Falco, Nathan Lane, F. Murray Abraham, Lynn Ahrens, Jon Robin Baitz, Tyne Daley, Christine Baranski, Zoe Caldwell
Credits: Written and directed by Jeff Kaufman. An Orchard release.
Running time: 1:33
For the life of me, I don’t know why they bothered.
Sure, it’s got a stellar voice cast — Christian Bale and Cate Blanchett and Naomie Harris and Benedict Cumberbatch and Andy Serkis and Tom Hollander doing voices for all the digital talking animals.
But why remake this? Again?
You’ll be able to see “Mowgli” Dec. 7 (In theaters? Then streaming?).
Some good analysis/speculation here from Deadline.com on how Universal was able to get the word out on various platforms for “The Grinch.”
It leaves out the obvious, that generations have been aware of and connected to the character since childhood, starting with the book, utterly supplanted by the 1960s TV special, magnified by the 2000 Jim Carrey comedy.
But if marketing wants the credit for using a reliable brand, let’em have it. “The Grinch” is over $67 million for this, its opening weekend. A certified hit, and a big one. Not a great movie. Audiences, which were interested, inclined to love it and paid good money to see it, are only giving it a B Cinemascore. Audiences give everything “A” or “A+.” The dears.
“Overlord” was supposed to do $11-14 million and it will not even reach $10 million. Overpraised by fanboy critics, a middling mash-up script and low-heat cast and direction that leans heavily on dazzling digital effects and explosions recreating D-Day from the air, it’s not all that. And nobody is going to see it.
“The Girl in the Spider’s Web” has Claire Foy, and little else going for it. They’ve watered down the character (not her “queerness,” as some have suggested) and saddled her with a sloppy, chase-happy story that brings out the mother in Lisbeth Salander. It won’t achieve a $9 million opening and looks like a certified Sony bomb.
“Bohemian Rhapsody” experienced a 44% drop off from its opening weekend, $28-29 million. Not bad. It will clear $100 million, US, either tonight or by Monday.
And “The Hate U Give,” one of the best films currently in theaters, enjoys one last weekend in the Top 10, clearing the $26 million mark, over $30 by next weekend, when it will lose screens and fade away unless awards’ season revives it.
A little Bastardized Bard to start your day?
A lot of talent was drawn to this interesting idea in the “Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead” vein.
“Star Wars” weak sister Daisy Ridley has the title role, as Prince Hamlet’s cruelly misused lady love “Ophelia.”
I like the idea behind this retelling of the tragedy of “The Melancholy Dane.””George MacKay is Hamlet, Clive Owen is Claudius and Naomi Watts is Gertrude, and Ridley gets to show us something more than the dainty English rose who’s supposed to be all tough and space-experienced in the J.J. Abrams “Star Wars” movies.
It began with a 2015 email from out of the blue to a reporter, Bastian Obermayer, with a newspaper in Munich, Germany.
The author, labeling her or himself “John Doe,” was “just a concerned citizen” seeing ” unbelievable amount of corruption” at this Panamanian law firm and promising a data dump to ensure this got “exposed” and reported.
It was the “world, hidden from most of us” detailing how “French Revolution level income inequality” was being perpetrated by the super rich preying on governments and “We the people” who make up those governments.
It became “the largest leak of secret documents in history,” millions of emails and PDFs detailing offshore tax avoidance, money laundering and criminality ranging from stashing cash for drug kingpins to tax dodging to the money laundering “investments” that get hotels built for a certain future American president.
Dummy corporations and shell companies attached to Syria’s dictator Assad, Saudi sheiks, President Sharif of Pakistan, Prime Minister Gunnlaugsson of Iceland, Putin and Trump, Lionel Messi and the FIFA officials who govern his sport were exposed.
“The Panama Papers,” as they were called, became a scandal unlike any other, global in scale, “revealing a hidden world” where human civilization’s wealthiest codified global income inequality through outright criminal acts, and colluding with other criminals.
Alex Winter’s documentary “The Panama Papers” tells the story of “How we got that story,” names names and gets into the fallout from this story, which wasn’t the easiest to sell to a planet that’s come to see “kleptocracy” as “the new normal.”
Leaders were impeached or resigned, others stonewalled or refused to release their tax returns, and reporters died — killed by the powerful and shady figures (and public ones) whom this story hurled into the spotlight.
The wealthy of 200 countries were tied, via some 11.5 million documents shared by this one anonymous “John Doe,” to the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, since closed, its leader imprisoned. It was a firm married to the mob and mobsters, where “their business was secrets,” a business supposedly incorruptible politicians (David Cameron) felt the need to hire to avoid taxes and launder investments from underworld figures (Donald J. Trump).
The original reporter, Obermayer, started to realize “Maybe it’s not a good idea that only I know.” When you’re reporting on the corruption of murderous Russians and Saudis, of South American drug lords, there’s safety in numbers. He and his newspaper drew in American news organizations, The Guardian newspaper in Britain and papers and reporters in most every country which had famous names locked in that cache of data — Malta and Spain, Iceland and Panama.
Winter, who has used his post “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” years to become a good documentary filmmaker and a sharp interviewer, built his movie on interviews with the reporters, lengthy quotes from “John Doe’s Manifesto,” the whistleblower’s reason for leaking the data (Elijah Wood reads that manifesto in voice-over), graphics and clips from the movie “Scarface,” which touched on how widespread money laundering — the practice of taking illegally-obtained drug or human trafficking, murder for hire, etc. cash, and getting it “cleaned” by pouring it, along with bribes, into allegedly legitimate businesses — is.
One good example, the ways Donald Trump finances hotels with his name on them. Here’s proof that one in Panama used money from unsavory underworld figures to finance and build it, the details of how Trump creates such deals with crooks the world over. The crooks overpay for those investments, and Team Trump gets to skim from that.
We see political leaders confronted and chased from office in some countries (Iceland, Britain, Brazil), hear about Leticia Montoya, a poor secretary with the law firm, who serves on the boards of 10000 paper corporations — not benefiting from this big con one cent herself.
Winter, heard asking smart, pointed questions off camera, celebrates the heroic journalists involved in this story, getting them to give mini-autobiographies before they show and tell how they, and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, went through the papers and found the dirt that shook the world.
A couple of folks from McClatchy News Service, which I used to work for, talk about how hard it was to “sell this story to our company. Reporter Kevin Hall notes, “Who’s surprised that bad guys hide their money?”
Marissa Taylor, one of over 100 journalists worldwide involved in the expose, adds “Why are people going to care that the rich don’t pay their taxes and crooks are crooks?”
But they told the story anyway, and in much of the world, heads rolled and continue to roll. In America, we elected a kleptocrat president.
“This story revealed a whole hidden world. This was…the goods,” Taylor says.
Most disturbing of all are the investigative journalists who use the phrase, “state capture” in describing countries where vandal capitalism has put the crooks in charge. Malta, Iceland and Brazil are named, and then U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin’s sham of a confirmation hearing is repeated, his dodging of questions about sham corporations and tax avoidance and worse (Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort is juxtapositioned with Mnuchin) suggesting that this has happened in the United States as well.
With Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, married into a Chinese oligarch family, covering the vast array of crimes and criminal appointments up, we are looking at “Trump cozying of to his fellow kleptocrats as a way of making this the new normal,” former Senate ethics lawyer and tax law specialist Jack Blum declares.
It’s all pretty distressing, and the fact that so many other scandals have chased this epic one off the front pages just adds to to helplessness such exposes cannot help but create. Winter has made an important film, but an exhausting and dispiriting one about a scandal 99% of the world should care about.
While American journalists haven’t been killed (save for one the Saudis murdered in Turkey), you really wonder if we will ever see a story like this brought to light again, and if the world’s embattled news organizations will ever have the resources to stay with this until “justice is done, though the heavens may fall.”
MPAA Rating: unrated
Cast: Luke Harding, Frederik Obermaier, Bastian Obermayer, voiceover by Elijah Wood
Credits: Written and directed by Alex Winter. An Epix release.
Running time: 1:40
“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” morphs into The Girl with Nine Lives in “The Girl in the Spider’s Web,” a bastardized borrowing of Stieg Larrson’s avenging hacker angel.
Lisbeth Salander has more narrow escapes than Jason Bourne in this stylish but stale reboot of the Franchise Hollywood Never Quite Gets Right. It’s still snowy and Swedish (once removed), still a chilling peek at the seamy underbelly of the blonde and beautiful socialist paradise. But here character is sacrificed pure action and story becomes whatever they can make of a fifth rate Bond villain and ridiculous plot device.
There’s an encryption expert (Stephen Merchant) who wants something he sold to the Americans stolen from them,” the sum of all my sins” is how he describes it. Lisbeth, here played by the fierce Claire Foy of “The Crown” and “First Man,” is underground and on the run.
But she has a motorcycle, mad computer hacking skills and hacking support (“Plague,” played by (Cameron Britton) and a rep as a “righter of wrongs.” She’ll take the job.
That puts her, the code expert and the guy’s doted-on son (Christopher Convery) in jeopardy. There’s this murderous pan-national gang “The Spiders” — with tattoos to ID them — who want that computer file as well.
Lisbeth has to take a break from her “vigilante…defender of women” hobby and evade her pursuers, who also include this seriously irked NSA agent (Lakeith Stanfield of “Sorry to Bother You” and “Atlanta”) and the Swedish intelligence service and its bristling chief (Synnøve Macody Lund).
She escapes from an exploding building, dodges cops on her river-ice worthy motorcycle, makes a getaway in a Volvo and eventually steals a Lamborghini.
All made possible because of that lazy deus ex machina of modern fiction and screenwriting — the Omnipotent Hacker.
Lisbeth can find anyone, take control of anything, often via her handy-dandy smartypants smart phone. And even if she can’t say, break into a building and tell you everyone in it and where they are within that building, her pal Plague can.
Lisbeth’s journalist pal and sometime lover (she’s gay, as are several other characters in this) Mikael Blomkvist (Sverrir Gudnason) has been reduced to bit-player/pawn in this tale, perhaps a reflection of the shrinking role of journalism in “righting wrongs.”
Foy, dressed down, butch haircut and covered in piercings and tattoos, gives Lisbeth back the fierceness that skinny rich model Rooney Mara never could manage, even as the script can’t decide here if Lisbeth is violent and vengeful or not. She keeps letting bad guys she knows are murderous go, only to have them try and kill her again.
The little boy is rather bland in the role (some of that’s a scriptural “on the spectrum” requirement), the villains murderous but also inclined to let Lisbeth live when logic dictates they have what they need from her.
The fights staged for director Fede Alvarez (“Don’t Breathe”) are epic. Novel uses of a taser and cattle prod are among the props, and Foy holds her own here — wholly committed to the violence Lisbeth metes out and takes.
One thing about this story that the late novelist Stieg Larsson would have approved of is the stench of corruption the permeates the shiny, progressive gloss that is the world’s image of Sweden. But you have to wonder if Larsson, obsessed with the sordid, Nazi sympathizing past of Sweden’s wealthy elite, would have thought up a story, characters and plot devices as trite and worn as those used here.
Had he lived, I’ll bet he’d have gotten into Sweden’s uneasy relationship with its non-white immigrants and beneath-the-surface attitudes the blue-eyed blondes never let the rest of the world see.
“Spider’s Web” — and the screenwriters seem too embarrassed to acknowledge that slapping new tattoos onto the tale was stupid and lazy, so they don’t make much of it — is never less than watchable. But for all that wintry Swedish gloom, all that ultra-violence and vengeance, there isn’t a minute in its 117 minutes that you’re not aware you’re watching an inferior photocopy.
When it comes to girls with a dragon tattoo, give us Noomi Rapace and a story by Stieg Larsson, or let it go.
MPAA Rating: R for violence, language and some sexual content/nudity
Cast: Claire Foy, Stephen Merchant, Sylvia Hoeks, Lakekeith Stanfield, Sverrir Gudnason, Cameron Britton
Credits:Directed by Fede Alvarez, script by Jay Basu, Fede Alvarez and Steven Knight, based on the David Lagercrantz novel which used Stieg Larsson’s characters. A Sony release.
Running time: 1:57
It only cost $75 million, Deadline.com says. So a $66-70 million weekend (Deadline notoriously under-estimates kids’ movies Saturday take) ensures Universal will make bank on its latest big screen version of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.”
“The Grinch” as they titled it, pretending to have him do something other than steal Christmas, didn’t get the best reviews. But it’s not awful. And they probably wanted to get into the Benedict Cumberbatch business, so money well spent.
“Bohemian Rhapsody,” which opened at a heady $51 million last weekend, defying expectations, is seemingly headed towards $30 million, which was everybody’s prediction for its earning power for this weekend. Saturday could raise that, too.
The fanboy buzzed “Overlord” got a lot of reviews more generous than mine. Still, seeing it in a packed house late Thursday I was sure it would do better than the $11-14 million it was projected to earn. Nope. The “Zombies of Navarone” combat “suicide mission” and monster movie mashup is bombing — $11 million. You’re making producer J.J. Abrams cry, guys!
The other new arrival this weekend, in wide release anyway, is “The Girl in the Spider’s Web.” Sony rebooted the franchise with another “girl” and a totally new script. Which led to weak reviews and a feeble $8-9 million take at the box office.
Give us Stieg Larsson and Noomi Rapace, guys. Don’t give us Spider tattoos in place of dragon ones. Or don’t bother. They never managed to finish the original trilogy with Rooney Mara and Daniel Craig in the lead roles. Why cook up a tale of world conquest originating in Sweden, with one Bourne escape after another, when you couldn’t make a hit out of an international best seller that produced the biggest hit trilogy of movies (made for Swedish TV) ever to come out of Scandinavia?
“A Star is Born” will probably cross the $200 million barrier next weekend.
Tyler Perry’s Tiffany Haddish comedy “Nobody’s Fool” took a dive, but not the usual “Tyler Perry Plunge” of 70% achieved when his movie is so awful word gets around and kills it on the second weekend. A falloff that amounts to 61% of opening weekend? Still in the top ten, call that a “win.”
Start-up distributor STX is dabbling in animation, too.
Their MO — throw money at “names” of dubious cinematic merit — applies to the animated side, too. Janelle Monae, Kelly Clarkson, Nick Jonas, Gabriel Iglesias, Wanda Sykes, Emma Roberts and Blake Shelton do the voices in this cartoon about “being different” in a world where dolls are usually not quite so ugly.
Movie Nation 