Something is coming for your kids. “The creature!”
“PLEASE DON’T TAKE MY CHILDREN!”
Great Dane Susanne Bier directed this “Quiet Ones” with blindfolds instead of muzzled mouths muffled sounds.
John Malkovich, Sarah Paulson and Tom Hollander also star in this Dec. 21 Netflix release.
“Bohemian Rhapsody” is framed perfectly — beginning and ending with Queen’s triumphant, show-stealing turn in the star-studded Live Aid benefit concert in 1985.
Director Bryan Singer trots us through the standard musical biopic “Moment When They Met” and “Moments of Creation” with brisk, efficient skill and wit.
The movie traverses the familiar, almost formulaic arc of such films with a fan’s brio — highlights, low-points, tests and triumph.
Everyone Singer cast, from star Rami Malek, who gives a break-out turn as the flamboyant, talented and lonely Freddie Mercury, to the lads hired as the rest of Queen is both a dead ringer for the person they’re playing and a fun performance.
Casting Mike Myers of “Wayne’s World” as a record company Doubting Thomas –“This will never sell…radio stations will never play this” — is an inside joke that works hilariously.
So let others quibble about the story’s hero, Mercury, not being portrayed as gay enough. It’s a movie about Queen, for Pete’s sake. There are a couple of baccanales, bar and truckstop pickups making overt what was ALWAYS known and accepted about Mercury in that Golden Age of Rock Androgyny (Bowie, Bolan, Elton, etc.).
And make whatever peace you can with the cloud that the director’s #MeToo reputation and lawsuit over an alleged rape casts over the film. Others appear to be reviewing “Bohemian” with that foremost in their minds.
I found “Bohemian Rhapsody” an unadulterated delight, a longish quick-brush-strokes depiction of the band, their times and the creation of the music that made them stadium rock staples, Classic Rock mainstays and idolized the world over.
That’s why picking that Live Aid peak to frame it is perfect. They could and should have been irrelevant in the mid-MTV mid-80s. But as Mercury played the Wembley Stadium crowd and the worldwide TV audience as just an extension of his concert grand piano, we all remembered that we knew the words he was demanding that we sing along to. And most of us, and generations that have followed, haven’t forgotten them.
We meet toothy Farrokh Bulsara (Malek), a Parsi Zoroastrian whose family was chased from Persia to Zanzibar (where he was born) to the United Kingdom, so that his fellow airport baggage handlers and others could ask, “‘Oi! Oo’s the Paki?,” rolling out their favorite slur.
The rock trio Smile finds itself in need of a new lead singer, and their most attentive, hopeful fan, Farrokh, offers his services (shyly arrogant) and auditions on the spot. Astrophysics major and guitarist Brian May (Gwilym Lee) and drummer-studying-to-be-a-dentist Roger Taylor (Ben Hardy) are gobsmacked. Not just that the guy knows their tunes and can instantly harmonize with them. It’s his range.
From the first, they’re in the thrall of the renamed “Freddie,” his singing voice, his ear for catchy melodies and clever lyrics, and his theatricality. His “exotic” look is played up by the shopgirl (Lynn Boynton) who is smitten by Freddie and becomes his lover and later wife.
The movie might have peaked too early, rushing through Queen’s name change, “Like her Royal Highness,” image building, feuds with record companies and the BBC, jumping almost straight into the conception and amusingly painstaking and analog construction of their most famous song.
We’ll give rock fans “A Night at the Opera,” Freddie tells the record company folks (Aiden Gillen, Tom Hollander and Myers), dropping the needle on an aria from “Madame Butterfly.” And so they did.
What they went through to achieve this cryptic, genre mash-up epic — recording portions and recording them via speakers swung past the mike in the studio, etc. — could have taken up the entire film.
But other tunes — “We Will Rock You” and “Another One Bites the Dust” get similar “This is where that came from” treatment. Any fan will thrill to these moments.
Freddie’s double-life tests his devotion to Mary (Boynton) and Queen’s growing fame pressures the “family” the band members claim that they are. Freddie was a self-styled diva, taking his cues from Callas and Garland (always tardy, temperamental, credit hogging). It’s hard to be a band of brothers with that much ego in the room.
The money, fame, drugs, orgies, mansion and wealth cannot fill the loneliness Freddie carries around with him. One manipulative employee turned lover/manager (Allan Leech plays Paul Prenter) roils the waters and breaks the bonds.
And then…AIDS.
As I said, it’s a time-tested musical bio-pic story arc, with Singer taking a shot at structuring this in the style of “Bohemian Rhapsody” itself — overture, crescendo, and onward — “the scale of opera,” as Freddie says in the film, “the wit of Shakespeare,” rock as musical theater.
With two of the surviving band members signed on as producers, the picture never gets past the surface dynamics of that relationship — lightly mocking the foibles of this or that member, backing into fresh appreciations of their role in the group in creating their best songs.
As for their guardianship of Mercury, this is the way Freddie would want to be remembered.
Freddie’s family comes off as more of a hoary plot device than the font of his talent. But his every relationship has a sort of chill that stems from that, a marriage never shown to be particularly romantic, a gay life that connected with who he really was, but unfulfilling in a lot of “finding love when you’re already famous” pitfalls.
It is the performances that lift “Bohemian Rhapsody” above formula, with Malek’s on stage lip-syncing of Mercury’s singing showmanship eerily on the money and accurate. He wields a mike stand like a pro (we see the evolution of this) and Malek even copies Mercury’s stage-crossing skip-step, a memorable piece of his Live Aid turn.
Every concert moment (using live Queen recordings for sound) packs a thrill, every studio moment a fun realization of “Oh, THAT’s how they did that.”
Maybe it’s for fans only and whatever its relevance culturally, Queen is very much a product of the 70s’ and 80s. So Lady Gaga’s legions and Kendrick Lamar’s customers might not appreciate it on that level.
But “Bohemian Rhapsody” and Rami Malek cleverly and warmly distill an era and its music into a thoroughly entertaining piece of music history.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic elements, suggestive material, drug content and language
Cast: Rami Malek, Lucy Boynton, Gwilym Lee, Ben Hardy, Joseph Mazello, Tom Hollander, Aiden Gillen, Allan Leech, and Mike Myers
Credits: Directed by Bryan Singer, script by Anthony McCarten. A 20th Century Fox release.
Running time: 2:14
All actors, the old joke goes, want to play Jesus. It’s a Messiah complex that comes with the vocation.
Gay actors, the out ones anyway, want to play Oscar Wilde.
The greatest wit of his age, perhaps of any age, a brilliant playwright — “The Importance of Being Earnest,” “An Ideal Husband” — and homosexual martyr from an era when Britain jailed such men for “gross indecency,” Wilde was a worthy subject for the wonderful Stephen Frye 20 years ago (“Wilde”) and a grand challenge for Rupert Everett, who wrote, directed and stars in “The Happy Prince.”
It’s a witty, sad film focusing on Wilde’s final years, after he “scandalized” London, sued the Marquess of Queensberr ( who outed him for his affair with Bosie Douglas, the louche son of the Marquess) and had that suit turn into a criminal trial and two years of hard labor for his sins.
Self-exiled to the continent — France mainly — this is Wilde at twilight, the man peddling “De Profundis,” his melancholy “Letter from Reading Gaol.”
A profligate wag out of cash, he is begging from old friends and longtime fans, one of whom (Anna Chancellor) spies him, tipsy and downcast on the streets of Paris.
“How kind of you to speak to me,” he says, humbled and hoarse, before asking for a fiver. “I am wedded to poverty,” he declares to an old friend, “and the marriage has not been a success.”
Everett’s Wilde has decided “There is no mystery as great as suffering,” that he himself is “a broken man…too cold to finish his play.” He drifts through his last days, renewing his practice of impromptu storytelling to children — once his own sons, now the street urchins of Paris. He tells them of The Happy Prince and the King of the Mountains of the Moon, “black as heaven,” and their rivalry and struggles.
Everett makes this Wilde a magnificent ruin, reveling in self-pity rather than wallowing in it. Spat upon in his home country, hounded by boorish British gay bashers on a holiday in Dieppe, Wilde takes one last lunge at love, begging forgiveness from his sickly, indulgent but humiliated wife (Emily Watson, soft and brittle), taking the attentions of his devoted former lover Robbie (Edwin Thomas) for granted, desperate for a reconciliation with the wastrel Bosie (Colin Morgan) who loved him, but also used and ruined him.
“I cannot live without the atmosphere of love. I must love and be loved!”
Everett gives these doomed years a wistful melancholy interrupted by moments where Wilde reminded everyone within earshot how he could still be the life of the party — affecting a girlish voice for flirtatious jokes, forever picking up the check, serenading rowdy French barflies with “The Boy I Love is Up in the Gallery” and remembering in flashbacks his many theatrical triumphs, addressing the audience with ready wit after every hit.
“Your appreciation has been MOST intelligent. I congratulate you on the success of YOUR performance…You think almost as highly of the play as I do myself!”
Everett brings genuine warmth as writer, director and star to Wilde’s moments with children — indulgent (to a fault) — and crushed resignation to his fate. He “dined on shame” in prison, where “in the cell, there is only God and man.” We see the humiliation of his head-shaving and dunking upon admission to jail and his cowed misery at enduring how the hoi polloi turned on him.
But his wit, famously, never left him — paying off a rent boy with “Our purple hours are sullied by green notes,” commenting on decor, even on his death bed.
“My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.”
Colin Firth added his Oscar-winning name and prestige to “The Happy Prince,” helping Everett get it made (Watson and Tom Wilkinson, as a priest, give marquee value as well). Firth effortlessly plays Wilde’s loyal confidante, the novelist and gay wit Reggie Turner, here seen as one of Wilde’s go-to actors in his heyday.
Everett didn’t attempt a “complete” life of Oscar, focusing so narrowly on the end. But the once rakish star, novelist and chat show mainstay creates a performance with a post-vanity vanity about it, a man who remembers what youth and beauty and fame once gave him and yet cannot give himself wholly over to mourning what only he knows he’s lost.
He has given us a portrait of Wilde that revives his memory and his martyrdom, but that allows the endlessly quotable genius to be not the great man and icon, but just a man — a funny, charming one whose indulgences and foibles bring him to life.
And for that he deserves thanks in words Everett gives to Wilde as he responds to a small kindness.
“Thank you…for a moment’s harmony in a discordant fugue.”
MPAA Rating: R for sexual content, graphic nudity, language and brief drug use
Cast: Rupert Everett, Colin Firth, Emily Watson, Colin Morgan, Tom Wilkinson
Credits: Written and directed by Rupert Everett. A Sony Classics/BBC Films release.
Running time: 1:45
A little Poe, a bit of Agatha Christie Rod Serling and a touch of Pirandello? Six characters in search of an…escape.”
Trapped, threatened with near certain death, reason it out, find the “clues” and get out of “Escape Room.”
This one opens in the Oscar-contender wasteland of early January (Jan. 4).
The model/”Blurred Lines” stripped object of desire is making her way through the B-movie ranks, and Aaron Paul is re-starting his leading man career about a few Big Studio fizzles, and taking a paid Italian vacation while he does it in “Welcome Home,” a Vertical Releasing thriller about a broken couple hoping to mend fences in Italy.
Their landlord has different ideas.
Limited release, Nov 16.
Don’t know about you, but I can barely contain myself. I wasn’t going to be able to wait until Nov. 2, anyway. Thank heavens Fox figures it’s got a contender on its hands.
You’re not going to confuse “Solis” with “Solaris” or “Sunshine,” but its effects are at least as good as in most of the space epics that involve somebody in some spaceship or other getting too close to the sun.
And the story — sole survivor of an asteroid mining accident struggles to stay alive until a rescue ship shows up — has promise.
But that absolute bottom-line must-have element to make your thriller work is somewhat lacking in writer-director Carl Strathie’s sci-fi tale — urgency. Everything else depends on that, and even though we hear the sounds of ticking (how analog) periodically on the soundtrack, this “time is running out” saga never picks up speed beyond “dawdling.”
Steven Ogg, best known as a voice-over and motion capture actor for video games like “Grand Theft Auto V,” is the star of this “one-hander.” His Troy Holloway is the only guy in the shot, first scene to last, in “Solis.”
No, we’re not counting the corpse of a colleague strapped in next to him.
He’s in a tiny pod in the vastness of space, has a black eye and wakes up with a headache and the realization that surviving the accident that put him in this escape pod might not have been the best thing to happen today.
“This is Troy Holloway, in the blind. Does anyone copy? Harris is dead…Milton…”
Drifting in a capsule with flickering lights, steam, occasional showers of sparks, alarms going off here and there, with limited power and no control, he’s a goner.
Wait! Help is on the way and on the radio. She’s got a British accent (Alice Lowe). She’s filling in for “the commander,” and she’s not good at calming an irate and profanely panic-stricken Holloway down.
What are your coordinates?
“I don’t HAVE any coordinates!”
Tell me what you see.
“SPACE!”
Commander Roberts declares, “My orders are to keep you alive! Are you concussed? Yes or no? Do you feel nauseous?”
“No more than usual.”
Forget about the agony of burning up in the sun, which Holloway is drifting towards.
“The pain and comfort will get worse. You will be dead from hypothermia in no time. We’re coming from you. 75 minutes!”
And she means it. The clock is ticking down, even if the movie feels as if everything’s on pause until the BIG FINISH.
First-time feature director Strathie ensures that the ship has lived-in, functional looking interiors and a plausible outer shell. The digital sun here is most impressive, but his movie’s best effects might be the simplest — canting or tilting the camera in what filmmakers call “Dutch Angles,” disorienting the viewer with Holloway upside down.
Ogg has to play this guy as a man resigned to his fate, which really lessens that “urgency” thing. He’s got to be talked into taking every step to possibly save his neck.
There’s self-surgery and of course an EVA (spacewalk) and a lot of arguing with Commander Roberts on the radio.
The dramatic possibilities are severely limited. No “Gravity” flashbacks, just a somewhat murky series of motivations for living provided in confessional moments and bursts of repetitive action are all that drive “Solis.”
Like the pod Holloway is trapped in, the movie’s mostly just adrift — limited power, with time running out. Not fast enough, it turns out.
MPAA Rating: unrated, bloody injuries, profanity
Cast: Steven Ogg, Alice Lowe
Credits: Written and directed by Carl Strathie. A Blue Fox release.
Running time: 1:30
It’s the screen actors who pursue the quixotic that I find the most interesting.
And nobody is more all-over-the-road than Stephen Dorff, the rugged, brooding star of half a dozen movies nobody sees in a given year, with just enough high profile work (“Somewhere,” “The Iceman,” “Leatherface”) to keep him in the public eye as “the younger Kiefer Sutherland.”
“Don’t Go” is an Irish ghost story, more moody than spooky, starring Dorff as a blocked American writer grieving for the daughter he lost months before.
When he’s not staring at the blank screen on his laptop, he’s drunkenly dozing on the beach below the Irish boutique hotel he and wife Hazel (Melissa George) are renovating. There’s this recurring dream he has there, a day when they built a sandcastle with wee Molly (Grace Farrell). He’s sure it means something.
Hearing the words “Seize the day” when he awakens cinches it.
Ben Slater had one well-received book, “The Reality Delusion,” but they moved to Western Ireland, Hazel’s birthplace, to move into her family hotel and bring it back to life. He’ll teach, she’ll supervise the renovation.
It’s a big, old seaside hostel named “Carrig’s View House,” with halls that echo and views that give you Ireland’s coast in all its grey, overcast glory. And even though everybody says “Moving back home, then?” and “Surely you’ll not be staying here, after what happened in THAT house” at Molly’s funeral, that’s just what they do.
The locals are friendly enough, barmen, colleagues at the Catholic school (Simon Delaney plays the garrulous Father Sean), even contractors.
“A writer? Have I ever heard of ya?”
“Nope. That’s why I teach, now.”
But their dog knows something is up. And Ben, donning his writer’s uniform (turtleneck, tweed blazer) for his classes at Sacred Heart, starts to pick up on it himself.
That recurrent dream presages other clues –in the oddly ordered arrangement of magazine titles, the words scratched in the sand after a seaside nap. It wasn’t “Seize the Day” he heard, it was “Seas the Day.”
Ben instantly assumes these clues are from Molly, because she wasn’t much of a speller, and that there’s a reality where she still lives if only he can reason out the mystery.
Which deepens. Hazel has history here, old beaus. Her college pal, the messed up Serena (Aoibhinn McGinnity) shows up, drunk.
And don’t expect Father Sean to be much psychological help. He’s not allowed to do exorcisms either, he jokes.
“I’m a contrary bollocks. So was He. That’s why they put Him on a cross.”
Limerick native co-writer/director David Gleeson (“Cowboys & Angels”) ensures we get lots of local color in the people, the scenery and the school and Irish pub life in this story.
And Dorff wears Ben’s grief and guilt like a tailor-made suit. He broods wonderfully, but he lets us see Ben break down as he starts to sense he can change the past and obsesses about how to manage it.
No, he never shaves — not for comedies, villainous turns or grieving fathers. It’s almost always the right look for the part. He landed next year’s “True Detective,” so his profile is about to blow up again.
The performances and setting combine to pull off “Don’t Go,” a film that eschews frights in favor of remorse, that never hurries even as Ben is realizing that the pun or “child’s spelling” of “seas the day” doesn’t change what he’s being asked to do.
MPAA Rating: unrated, sex, alcohol abuse, pot, profanity
Cast: Stephen Dorff, Melissa George, Aoibhinn McGinnity, Grace Farrell
Credits:Directed by David Gleeson, script by Ronan Blaney, David Gleeson. An IFC Films release.
Running time: 1:32
Here’s a little Warner Brothers bait and switch.
La Llorona is a Mexican ghost, a spectral menace from South of the Border.
This movie, starring Linda Cardellini, Patricia Velasquez, Raymond Cruz, with Marisol Ramirez as “La Llorona,” doesn’t appear to have anything to do with that.
Spooky looking enough in trailer form. “The Curse of La Llorona” comes out April 19.
“Mid90s'” captures a people and a place with the ring of the authentic, a grimly realistic depiction of skateboard culture in the working class LA where it blew up in the “Dogtown and Z-Boys” era.
Jonah Hill’s writing and directing debut documents transgressing kids at their underage drinking, smoking, trespassing peak in a story that is random and predictable, biting and yet predictably conventional.
It’s a period piece mainly in the sense that Hill, who made his name in foul-mouthed youth comedies like “Superbad,” gives himself permission to use the outdated, sexist, homophobic argot of dead-enders in that specific place and time.
Sunny Suljic (“The House with a Clock in Its Walls”) is Stevie, who admires his older brother Ian (Lucas Hedges of “Manchester by the Sea”) when he should probably be fearing him. Our introduction to the siblings sees Ian hurling Stevie against the wall and beating him black and blue. The heightened sound of the pummeling pushes you back in your seat.
The teen is furious at the tween for constantly coming into his room, messing with his carefully organized team jerseys, baseball caps, CDs and mix tapes. Ian is…neat.
And Stevie cannot resist. Every time Ian leaves in a torrent of profane threats, Stevie crosses the threshold and notes what he should be doing to be “cooler,” acting older than his age — attire, music, interests.
Then the fatherless boy finds Big Brothers who aren’t inclined to beat him. They’re skating slackers, teens running a skate shop but mainly just hanging out, showing off with their peers, a whole subculture that Stevie can fit into if only he can trade to get Ian’s old board and master it.
Writer-director Hill loses himself in the funny-gross banter, disgusting off-the-wall “Would you rather” games the boys play and the oddball culture clash questions the cool black skater Ray (Na-Kel Smith) asks the white “Fourth Grade” (Ryder McLaughlin).
“Why do white people love their PETS so much?”
Fourth Grade, named because of his verbal communication skills, is just as tactless.
“Can black people get sunburned?”
Stevie, coached by the one guy close to him in age if not size, Ruben (Gio Galicia) to avoid apologizing or saying “Thank you,” as it paints you as “gay” or the uglier slurs associated with that, gets suckered into that discussion and finds himself welcomed — and with a new nickname — “Sunburn.”
Sunburn seeks acceptance through mimicry and idiotic bravado. He’s not very good on a board, but he takes his spills like a little man — blood and head trauma included.
As the kids climb fences onto school grounds, ride their boards down the middle of busy LA streets, pee in public and provoke any adult authority figure who comes into view including Stevie’s too-young single-mom (Katie Waterston of “Fantastic Beasts” and “Logan Lucky”), Stevie/Sunburn has his first drink, his first drugs, his first taste of sex and his introduction to raging youth rebellion.
Hill makes the quartet Sunburn is initiated into interesting “types.” Fourth Grade is labeled “dumb,” but he’s the one with the camcorder, documenting their exploits. Ray doesn’t know black guys “don’t skate,” but takes what he’s doing as seriously as any other sport that might lift him out of his situation.
The multi-racial punk whose nickname is a combo of his two favorite swear words (F—S–t), played by Olan Prenatt, is the one with the car, the 17 year-old who comes from money, whose future he is sure consists of “Just livin’ life,” avoiding “all that tryin’ hard s–t.” He’s a mouthy pretty boy who attracts girls he uses with extreme prejudice and has access to too many drugs and too much booze for his own good.
Ruben is the member of the pack we know, by rote, Stevie/Sunburn will displace.
Stevie is raising himself, like a lot of kids in his situation. And his new “family” isn’t really a substitute for a real one, though every time he gets hurt, they look after him and encourage him.
Hill doesn’t really give the characters arcs. He just sets up conflicts — Stevie and Ian, Stevie and his Mom, Stevie and Ruben — and resolves them in ways we can see coming the moment we meet the characters.
He goes for a “Kids/thirteen” level of explicitness, jamming a McLovin’ load of taboo underage activities into a film that doesn’t treat them as laughs.
“Mid90s'” becomes, in full flower, a movie with characters more interesting or unusual than its very conventional story and setting, not a bad film so much as an incomplete one.
MPAA Rating: R for pervasive language, sexual content, drug and alcohol use, some violent behavior/disturbing images – all involving minors
Cast: Sunny Suljic, Lucas Hedges, Katie Waterston,Na-kel Smith, Olan Prenatt , Ryder McLaughlin, Gio Galicia
Credits:Written and directed by Jonah Hill. An A24 release.
Running time: 1:24
Movie Nation 