They gave an Oscar to everybody’s favorite “Goonie” and “Short Round,” Ke Huy Quan.
But will he be a box office draw? I am in an empty cinema opening night for Universal’s action comedy for V Day. Never a good sign.
Maybe the “Let’s keep lobbying for a ‘Goonies’ sequel” crowd will show up. Somewhere. The “Love Hurts” movie? My review is here.
The bluesman James Cotton was the son of a sharecropping Mississippi Baptist preacher and a mother who played the harmonica. And when they died when he was quite young, he picked up his mother’s harmonica and used it to play his way out of the cotton fields that gave him his last name.
Before Cotton was done — he died in 2017 — he’d more than lived up to his billing as Mr. “Super Harp.” He was a Grammy winner who played many of the major music festivals of his era, opening for The Who, The Doors and the Grateful Dead, headlining his own blues club in Chicago, touring his James Cotton Blues Band with The Steve Miller Band and introducing generations of rock fans to the music that gave birth to their music.
“Bonnie Blue: James Cotton’s Life in the Blues” is a loving musical appreciation of one of the last of his generation of bluesmen. We hear James Cotton lore, much of it related by his fans and two of the significant women of his life, who tell us how he learned by copying Sonny Boy Williamson II on “The King Biscuit Flour Hour” on the radio, performing in the cotton fields of the Bonnie Blue plantation he grew up onn near Tunica, Mississippi.
He met Sonny Boy, joined his band, and we hear from archival Cotton interviews the colorful anecdote about how the elder statesman of blues harmonica singers/players passed that band on to too-young-to-handle-it James.
Cotton would copy from and improvise around “every song on the jukebox” and every contemporary harp player he heard — Little Walter, Harmonica Shorty, Junior Wells and Sonny Boy included. When rock’n roll arrived, he adapted, and his passionate, animated stage show made him an in-demand opening act for all the American and British bands that grew up idolizing Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters and that generation of bluesmen.
“Bonnie Blue” is filled with fans who were inspired to take up the blues by his example, Annie Raines among them.
“That sound has a heritage, the spirit of the (Mississippi) Delta,” she tells us.
Filmmakers Bestor Cam and Mike Majoros build their documentary around a Narrows Center (Fall River, Massachusetts) concert appreciation of Cotton, one of several he was honored with during his lifetime, and after he died.
A roundtable of players, members of Cotton’s Blues Band and others, reminisce.
And the filmmakers rounded up Buddy Guy, Keb’ Mo’ and Bobby Rush to place Cotton’s talent on the “Mount Rushmore” of the blues, and Steve Miller, Jimmie Vaughan and others back up his “blues gangster” reputation. Cotton packed a pistol because he was “shot five times” at one point, allegedly by the husband or boyfriend of a woman Cotton was stepping out with.
“Mistaken identity” a couple of interviewees suggest. Or maybe not, others wink.
Either way, in “Bonnie Blue” Cotton comes off as both a virtuoso and a something of a character, falling down the usual musical potholes — cheating management, alcohol and drugs — only to re-emerge, re-ignite his career and cement his reputation as he put in more decades of educating the world’s youth after his “music with a (Delta) heritage.”
Rating: unrated
Cast: Bobby Rush, Keb’ Mo’, Steve Miller, Buddy Guy, Jimmie Vaughan, Annie Raines, Billy Branch, Jacklyn Cotton and James Cotton.
Credits: Directed by Bestor Cam, scripted by Mike Majoros. A Freestyle release.
Running time: 1:27
Long regarded as “the most beautiful film ever shot in color,” Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s “Black Narcissus” remains a feast for the eyes, one unspoiled by the knowlege that most every dazzling image put on the screen was manipulated, faked and seamlessly folded in to a tale of nuns going a tad mad in the Himalayas.
If ever there was an exemplar of “the heightened reality of the cinema,” this film is it. The fourth film The Archers (their production company) shot in Technicolor, and filmed pretty much entirely on soundstages in the U.K. — and a famed British garden — Powell, Pressburger, production designer Alfred Junge and his matte painting team create an Indian highlands of the mind. This is a world of altitude and ancient people and places, of mysticism, flowers and peaks and pastel vistas — created by taking black and white photographs of the region and heightening the colors through chalk and paint.
Over 75 years since its release, the resulting film still dazzles.
It’s a grand showcase for screen legend Deborah Kerr, an English rose so suited to a nun’s habit that she donned one again a few years later for “Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison.” But it’s also the career highlight for macho baritone David Farrar, another gem on the resume of Flora Robson (“The Sea Hawk”) a great stepping stone for future star Jean Simmons and the most acclaimed film for the first Indian actor to make a great impact in the West — Sabu, star of The Archers’ “The Thief of Bagdad,” the first filmed version of “The Jungle Book” and “Arabian Nights.”
The English novelist Rumer Godden grew up in India and conjured up a remote setting for a classic clash of cultures — a palace, formerly a harem for a local potentate and decorated with erotic images of befitting the ruler’s “House of Women,” repurposed by a later leader as a convent for prim, reserved English Catholic nuns.
They’d teach the local children, run a medical dispensary and live among the “simple” and ancient natives. It isn’t just the altitude and foreignness of Mopu Palace that throws them. It’s the eroticism. The hunky Englishman Mr. (Farrar), agent and fixer for the old, one-eyed Indian general (Desmond Knight) who requested their mission predicts their failure. A previous monastery of monks in the same quarters didn’t last a full year.
“It’s no place for a nunnery!”
And Mr. Dean’s short-shorts, hairy-chested open shirts and almost as open leering at the first-time Sister Superior (Kerr) and her four nuns (Robson, Judith Furse, Jenny Laird and Kathleen Byron) are both an open temptation and open challenge to their declared aims.
They’ve barely arrived up, with the old general paying the natives to attend their school and seek aid from the dispensary, when a new problem is thrust upon them. A local teen Kanchi (Jean Simmons, bejeweled and in dark makeup) has not come of age, but is fully aware of the power she already has over men. She and the highly-strung, unstable and coquettish Sister Ruth (Byron) may prove to be the biggest challenges our new Sister Superior faces.
Well, they and the preening, handsome and curious son of the general (Sabu) who arrives at a school for children and insists that he be educated and instructed as well. That cologne he’s wearing, the one Kanchi swoons over?
“Black Narcissus,” or “Narcisse Noir,” a scent popular with British Army officers under the Raj.
Earthly temptation all around, problems concrete and abstract that only the smirking Mr. Dean seems to anticipate or be any help in solving, and at every turn, gloomy ledges with no guardrails foreshadowing doom — accidents, or an hysterical leap into the void.
“Remember, the superior of all is the servant of all,” is the only advice her own Mother Superior gave Sister Superior Clodagh.
In this post-war film, Powell and Pressburger found the perfect setting for a parable of the end of the British Empire. Cultures clash, and the British Catholic nuns — repressed oppressors who think the “childish” natives “all look alike” and “smell,” are the last to figure out they simply don’t belong here.
“It’s this wind,” isn’t the problem. No, it’s not “the water” that is hitting the nuns hard. Dean’s sneering “What would Christ have done?” challenges summon up what none of them are prepared to face.
Kerr figured out how a nun’s habit could add layers of understatement to a performance and used that covering to mask Sister Clodagh’s doubts, worries and rising panic. Flashbacks (not seen in the initital U.S. release, or in versions shown in the States for years) give us Clodagh’s back-story, a pretty young woman with great prospects for a monied marriage in Ireland. But something happened.
Everyone else here is a mystery, and the movie is the richer for it. Tragic traditions are explained, an old folk tale of “the prince and the beggar woman” is relived and everything quietly teeters toward the small scale disaster that we know is to come.
Kerr, later a six time Oscar nominee, would revisit this Englishwoman-in-Asia setting for the cloying “The King and I” and gain her greatest fame by shedding her “habit” and playing a cheating Army wife in “From Here to Eternity.”
Simmons’s later stardom would present her as a by-then-outdated version of Kerr, something she sent up when she was cast in “Guys and Dolls.”
Powell and Pressburger’s run of masterpieces would climax the very next year with “The Red Shoes.” And with the passage of time, their glorious mastery of the possibilities of the hyper-reality of Technicolor would only grow in stature and legend.
Many’s the epic I’ve watched in recent decades — “Heaven’s Gate” to “Out of Africa” to Powell-fan Martin Scorsese’s “Gangs of New York,” “Kundun” and “Silence,” to “Horizon: An American Saga” — that made me think, “This isn’t nearly gorgeous enough to achieve ‘grandeur.'”
Powell and Pressburger set the sumptuous, over-saturated color bar so high so very long ago that one wonders if any film will ever best their very best.
Rating: TV-PG, adult themes
Cast: Deborah Kerr, David Farrar, Kathleen Byron, Sabu, Judith Furse, Jenny Laird, May Hallat, Eddie Whaley, Jr., Flora Robson and Simmons.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, based on a novel by Rumer Godden. A J. Arthur Rank release. on Tubi, other streamers
Running time: 1:41
“Bogota: City of the Lost” is an underworld “how criminals crime” procedural with an exotic setting and fish-out-of-water characters but no pace or narrative drive worthy of its novelty.
A tale that is voice-over-narrated to death by our smuggler-on-the-rise, it’s like a low stakes, myopic “Blow,” where the goals are modest and dull and somewhat heartless.
Plenty of Westerns have gotten by on telling a lawless tale in a lawless place with nothing but male protagonists. Korean ex-pats smuggling Korea lingerie and Korean down parkas into ’90s and early 2000s Colombia? By the standards of that then-blighted country, these guys are strictly small-time.
Motorbike armed robberies targeting newcomers are just the periphery of a crimescape cursed with cartels and corruption, but at least not “broke” like the Korea people like the Song family have fled.
Dad (Kim Jong Soo) has an old Army buddy from his Vietnam War service he has to rely on when he can’t get his family from Korea to the United States.
Sgt. Park (Kwon Hae Hyo) has set himself up as a smuggling kingpin, bribing the bribable, price-cutting the competition. He’s spun his own self-made myth about his place in Bogota as well. But he knows the locals — Korean and Colombian — still call him “Cuca,” short for “Cucuracha” (“cockroach).
Teenaged Song Kook-hee (Song Joong-ki) may have a name that Colombians and Koreans laugh at as sounding like “cookie” (or “kooky”). But as he starts as a delivery boy, showing his mettle as a driver of the trucks led by Sgt. Park’s top lieutenant (Lee Hee-joon) through roadblocks, bribes and “rebel” hijackings, he finds his loyalties divided.
Jeon Su Yeong sees through Sgt. Park’s bluster and dreams of setting up shop on his own. With Colombian smugglers and Colombian officials trying to limit the Korean impact on their economy, and with paranoid Park always keeping an ear open for betrayals, this seems like a long shot.
Perhaps the young driver has the instincts to elbow his way to the top, to the “sixth level” of Buddhism the mobsters speak of as their ultimate goal — comfort, power and happiness.
Voice-over narration explains the smuggling pipeline. Years pass — the film begins with the Korean Financial Crisis of 1997 — and we see, and hear narration, that shows us how Kook-hee devolves from victim to fellow predator in “a country where nothing goes well, but nothing is impossible.”
Director and co-writer Seong-je Kim leans on that laziest of crutches — voice-over — like a filmmaker certain he’s telling a “saga” despite the myopic community depicted here and their pitiful risk-reward ratio.
The violence that beefs up the third act is nothing special, but we do learn how Kook-hee finally masters the threat of motorcycle drive-by robberies or shootings. That “solution” is as dull as too much of what has proceded it.
Even the most charismatic characters — and Kook-hee isn’t that — need cool clashes, crisp stand-offs and the like to register. Song Joong-ki does what he can, but all his narration detracts from the striking setting and dangers of crossing the wrong people in Colombia at its most violent.
Rating: TV-MA, violence, drug abuse
Cast: Song Joong-ki, Kwon Hae-hyo, Lee Hee-joon and
Kim Jong Soo
Credits: Directed by
Seong-je Kim, scripted by Seong-je Kim and Hwang Seong-gu. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:48
Rupert Friend and Ed Skrein are the other big names in this reboot of the venerable franchise. But ScarJo and Oscar winner Ali stand out. He could use a big pagday, I dare say.
Johannson? If this is the way she wants to go…
July 2, 2025. Yay.
So this is a hard-R rated trailer for the kiddie cartoon hero Popeye the Sailor Man, a character that moved into the public domain — like Winnie the Pooh, et al — and is now up for grabs for a little silly exploitation film.
“Shiver Me Timbers” features “Popeye the Slayer Man” and was made by a bunch of folks who like splatter films, with a dash and sex and drugs. And don’t know how to pronounce “Halley’s Comet.”
Emily Bett Rickards (“Arrow”) stars as real-life wrestling pioneer Mildred Burke in this 1930s period piece, with Josh Lucas as the manager who believes in her and Francesca Eastwood, Walton Goggins and Tyler Posey in support.
This opens March 7. Looks plucky.
I was wondering my review of this taut, sinister Argentine thriller “4×4” was trending, four years after I wrote it.
And when the film came out, I wondered how long it would take for Hollywood to cast and remake this claustrophobic, paranoid jewel?
Bill Skarsgard plays the car thief enticed to break it or the wrong SUV. Anthony Hopkins provides the voice of The sadistic creep who wants to torture his burglar to death.
March 21, will Mister “It” escape from that super luxurious SUV?
I always liked the “Final Destination” movies, with their obsession with coincidence and “death’s grand design” that seals your fate, especially if you’re young and you’ve somehow dodged a bullet. Or fatal plane crash or lumber truck accident.
“Bloodlines” will try to tie a fresh collection of premature deaths to those who passed on past “Fina Destination” movies. Or so it seems.
May 16
“Cool” is the lifeblood of an indie thriller.
Park your tale in a novel “cool” setting. Serve up a “cool” heist/scheme/plot, preferably with epic brawls, chases or shootouts. Cast a cool heavy.
But even if you ignore or narrowly miss in securing every bit of cool cachet listed above, you’ve got to have a cool lead character and a star that pops off the screen.
“Jade” is a B-movie thriller built around British newcomer Shaina West. The plot is potboiler simple — rival gangs and rival cops and a stolen hard drive shoot and chase and kill each other in and around the mean streets of “The 505,” aka Albuquerque, New Mexico.
But West? She’s the real deal.
Our title character is five feet and four inches — not including the biggest Afro since Sly Stone — of muscle and attitude. “Jade” is a big-haired, halter-topped harpy with a convoluted back story parked in a convoluted present that she’s boiled down to the basics.
She’s got to keep herself alive in a tiff between “The Club” she once belonged to and its rivals. She’s hellbent on protecting Layla (Katherine McNamara), who is carrying the unborn child of Layla’s dead brother.
She’s going to have her revenge on anybody who interferes with her limited agenda or had anything to do with her brother’s death, even if she was the one who pulled the trigger back then, even if she “swore to never shoot another gun for as long as she’s living.”
And God help you if she gets her hands on a samurai sword.
Stunt players pepper the cast of heavies out to take down our heroine. They catch her and lose her, catch and lose her, catch and lose her and catch and lose her again. But director James Bamford, fight choreographer Daniel Joseph Rizzuto and West always always conjure up a way to get her out of those pull ties, off that chair she’s lashed to, punching and slashing through whatever mob minions escort her to “the basement” or “the meet” or wherever.
The cleverest/dumbest of these has to be her conning her way out of bondage via a game of “five finger fillet” with “discount Brad Pitt.”
She’s tortured, friends are tortured or taken hostage. And gangsters who tire of all the torturing just pull the trigger.
Mickey Rourke plays Tork, villain amongst villains and so strange looking at this stage of his post-boxing/post-botox/post-plastic surgery career that you kind of wish he’d limit himself to voicing villains in animation. Even Jade is moved to mock his rough impersonation of having “eyebrows.”
West shows us flashes of charisma and excellent fight choreography skills. She’s going to have to grow into finding and keeping her game face/panic face in a thriller where Jade never seems all that alarmed at her peril or concerned at her many injuries.
“WTF HAPPENED to you?”
“EVERYTHING!”
West is steady with a trash talk line, but undercut somewhat by a screenplay that doesn’t give her enough of them.
“Always bet on Black,” she cracks, quoting Wesley Snipes in “Passenger 57.” “I just always wanted to say that.”
None of the supporting characters is developed to any degree, and that adds to a feeling of confusion and “cheating” when this or that “twist” pops up. Bamford and his fellow screenwriters don’t set the stakes and the players playing for those stakes up well. At all.
But the gonzo fights that begin the moment Jade peels off her hoodie to show off her six-pack and her swordswomanship make this B-picture just cool enough to get by.
Rating: unrated, graphic violence, drug abuse, profanity
Cast: Mickey Rourke, Katherine McNamara, Mathew Yanagiya, Marcus Vincios Maciel, Mark Dacascos and “introducing Shaina West as Jade.”
Credits: Directed by James Bamford, scripted by Lynn Collier, Glenn Ennis and James Bamford. A Well Go USA release.
Running time: 1:29
Movie Nation 