The rush of researched and seemingly random elements of the Internet — spam, pop up ads, kitty videos and “Never Gonna Give You Up” — give the second trailer from “Ralph Breaks the Internet” (“Wreck it Ralph 2”) its sizzle.
It might be overly reliant on the whole car race game motif, but there’s an “Inside Out” attention to Internet detail that seems more impressive than even the eye-popping visualization of the WWW given away in the first trailer.
He warned about the GOP War on Labor, years before the GOP “War on Women” was identified.
He sounded the alarm about the gun manufacturer’s terrorist organization the NRA had morphed into, years before Russian money covered their bottom line.
Health care meltdowns, the broken political system that lets a monied minority defy the Will of the People, Michael Moore’s covered a lot of ground over the decades. So who’s in the mood for Michael Moore’s Greatest Hits, a film which reminds us the cinema’s Jeremiah predicted the nativist backlash and Democratic Party drift that put Donald Trump in power?
Quick show of hands?
“Fahrenheit 11/9,” a non-sequel sequel to “Fahrenheit 911,” borrows too much from that earlier film, about the democratic institutional breakdown that put George W. Bush in the White House and had us fighting multiple wars, one unnecessary, and rebuilding the World Trade Center.
His new film revisits the 2016 election, returns to Moore’s hometown of Flint, Michigan, as ground zero in the have-have/nots wars of the future (over water) and stands shoulder to shoulder with the gutsy students of Parkland, activists who are — to Moore — pointing the way to the future of the Democratic Party and perhaps even a return to majority rule.
Cynicism tends to overwhelm the picture at times, even as Moore is interviewing Congressional candidates, “outsiders,” like Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez of New York or Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, or Richard Ojeda, a union boosting Congressional hopeful from West Virginia.
He recounts the West Virginia Teacher’s Strike, which spread across the country, the “fearless kids” or Parkland, who organized a nationwide “March for Our Lives.”
And most chillingly, he dives deep into the manufactured public finance crisis that Michigan Governor Rick Snyder turned into public health water crisis in Flint, and even attempts a citizen’s arrest of Governor Snyder, who imposed “state of emergency” conditions on several predominantly African American Michigan cities, put his cronies in charge and in Flint, caused 100,000 mostly- black people to be poisoned, and over-charged for the water that was poisoning them.
The guy should go to jail, but no lump in a Detroit Tigers hat is going to put him there.
Moore manages a few “stunts” like that in this film, spends entirely too much time recounting his own cozying up to Trump and remembering that last election and only really gets his dander up at the outrage perpetrated on his native Flint.
His bigger themes, the ones allow him to revisit “Roger & Me” and “Sicko” and the first “Fahrenheit,” is that the busted, money-corrupted system is drifting into despotism, that the rich keep rigging things in more and more obvious ways to starve, poison, cripple and keep compliant the working people of America so they can rule us from their high rises, gated communities and private islands.
And the Democratic Party, by compromising with those with the take-no-prisoners scorched Earth politics of today’s conservatism, has let it happen. He points one angry finger at the Clintons, who dragged the party towards Big Money.
And if Moore does no other service, he sticks a sword into the balloon of Obama nostalgia — showing just how little the two-term president with the Netflix deal did to fight for the poor, the racially oppressed. Obama’s sell-out visit to Flint is, to Moore, right up there with Putin and Comey’s interference in the last election as a cause for Trump’s unexpected (especially to Trump, as Moore reminds us) victory.
The stunts are old hat and the recycling makes “Fahrenheit 11/9” longer and more of a drag than it needs to be. He doesn’t really have an ending, just a string of open-ended warnings and uncanny resemblances to Germany in the 1930s.
Some of his “Democratic Establishment” shots land, Berner that he is. But if you want a more original take on the electorate the last election cycle, seek out “American Chaos.” James D. Stern took a different tack and made a film every bit as good as “Fahrenheit,” without Moore’s grandstanding.
Because rest assured that whatever happens in November, whatever happens with this latest Supreme Court fight, and whatever Robert Mueller does, America’s cinematic Jeremiah will be there, Detroit Tigers hat and all, to remind us we were warned, even if he won’t admit that none of his 30 years of warnings have ever been heeded. 
MPAA Rating: R for language and some disturbing material/images
Cast: Michael Moore, Donald Trump, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Credits: Written and directed by Michael Moore. A Briarcliff release.
Running time: 2:03
When TV writer/producers are lured to the big screen by some more-money-than-sense studio — Amazon, say — they tend to fail and fail big in a couple of very predictable ways.
They try and cram in a TV season’s worth of story in a delicate 100 minute beginning-middle-end motion picture, like say, the fellow behind “The Sopranos” and the genius who got “Mad Men” on the air. No, they didn’t get to make second films.
Or they try to reinvent the medium, which is what the fellow who created “This Is Us” does, “freed” of the conventions of network TV and episodic storytelling and TV PG-language for “Life Itself,” one of the great cinematic boondoggles of our time.
Writer-director Dan Fogelman attempts an experiment in “unreliable narration,” when the storyteller is either mistaken or lies to the reader/filmgoer about what is happening, what has happened and for what reasons.
As if that doltish conceit wasn’t debacle enough, he also stumbles into the first pitfall, attempting to cram too many characters and too much story into an interconnected series of tragedies that befall loosely interconnected lives.
“This is Us” style, in other words.
The result is random, aimless and incoherent treacle — a movie which reaches for the heartstrings repeatedly, shows gruesome deaths that may or may not have happened, often from different angles.
But the creator of the weepy “This Is Us” only manages one moment that will tug at the heartstrings. And that involves a dog.
A false start gives us Samuel L. Jackson narrating and directing a script as an “unreliable narrator,” delivering the first of the film’s many misdirection plays. Oscar Isaac is the madman “hero” screenwriter behind that failed “script,” and he relates — to his shrink (Annette Bening) — the story of his great romance (Olivia Wilde).
The product of that romance, and the film’s stand-out performance, is by the angry punk singer daughter who is a product of that union, played by Olivia Cooke.
And then there’s the olive farm in Andalusia, Spain, where olive oil baron Antonio Banderas meddles in the life of his foreman and the foreman’s family and son.
The screenplay is filled with sequences where people say something, then we’re shown “what they really said.”
Characters deliver long, personal history monologues — sometimes taking the person they’re telling their story to back to the day their met their great love, inserting themselves into the college library where they met, the accident they witnessed or caused, the day somebody died.
“I feel like my whole life is going to be marked by death and tragedy,” a little girl declares, except little girls of eight don’t talk like that, and the unreliable narrator at this point admits as much.
People talk of their world changing “at exactly that moment,” or another “completely random moment.”
Many — a great many — of those moments are mushy treacle. “Sometimes it scares me how much you feel.”
I am a fan of most every actor in this, and would never have bet they’d collectively collect checks in a movie as unwatchable as “Life Itself.”
Long takes drag us into a Halloween where our couple dress as Vincent and Mia in “Pulp Fiction,” another shows us Ms. Cooke (“Ouija,” “Ready Player One”) cover a song from Bob Dylan’s “Time out of Mind” “comeback” album. She relates how it was a favorite of her mother’s, fends off a “Lift your shirt!” heckler, tenderly applies herself to the tune on solo piano, and then thrashes through the rest of it, speed metal style.
Dylan shows up repeatedly on the soundtrack, singing or having that song cycle covered by characters.
And hell’s bells, none of it adds up to anything. “Life is the ultimate unreliable narrator,” with its randomness and endless mis-directions, isn’t a profound thought or theme to build a movie around.
It’s just something some gullible, poorly-read studio exec heard and thought, “I think I’ll spend Jeff Bezos’s millions on THAT.” The fool.
MPAA Rating: R for language including sexual references, some violent images and brief drug use
Cast: Oscar Isaac, Olivia Wilde, Antonio Banderas, Olivia Cooke, Annette Bening, Laia Costa, Jean Smart
Credits: Written and directed by Dan Fogelman. An Amazon release.
Running time: 1:58
The title “Where’s the Money” leans into the “plot” of this Andrew Bachelor comedy about trying to get cash from a bank robbery stashed in a flophouse that has been turned into a frat house.
Oldest “caper” comedy plot in the book.
Where the laughs lie are in its “fish out of water” gags — parking a black con man in a white frat house, “playing white guilt like Michael Jordan plays basketball.”
Bachelor, amusing but not the funniest guy in this thing, plays Del, a college age guy running his mom and dad’s gym, and going broke doing it.
Daddy (Mike Epps, antic and funny as ever) is in Folsom, stuck there after he and his brother (Terry Crews) got caught after carrying out a million dollar bank heist. Dad’s the one who sets his son’s plot in motion. And then he feels guilty about missing his kid growing up and reads him a bedtime story before sending Del on his way.
His MMA teacher pal (Kat Graham) and lowlife bud Juice (Allen Maldonado) are enlisted in the caper — get in the basement, dig out the cash.
But it is Del who, taking on the guise of Chet Buttersworth, must be kidnapped by frat guys who get lost invading the ‘hood in Klan robes to begin his initiation.
Klan robes? Well, as fraternities pre-date the Klan by decades, “the real question is, why is the KLAN wearing OUR robes?”
Del/Chet chases away other minority recruits to Kappa Alpha Chi (KAX) with a “token is broken” chant and proceeds to school assorted Partners in Privilege (Logan Paul, Josh Brener and Devon Werkheiser stand out) about how antiquated and racist frat rituals and nomenclature are.
Pledges are “slaves,” and “auctions” are how they fundraise? “TRIGGER WARNING! TRIGGER WARNING!”
A funny bit — Del becomes auctioneer for that fundraiser, “selling” people to rich white people outside of a “plantation house,” or as the frat boys re-label it, “It’s an AFFIRMATIVE auction!”
“My great great great granddaddies would LOVE to hear me say this, ‘Get your billfolds out, we’re buying WHITE people today!”
Less funny — Bachelor’s/Del’s attempts to teach the white boys how to do impressions of Denzel, Tyson and Cosby.
“The closest they’ve ever been to a black man is re-tweeting ‘Kanye.'”
Uncle (Crews) shows up, and having played cuddly the past several years, doesn’t have “Scary Terry” in him any more.
But the son of wealth Brock (Werkheiser) goes by “Barack” when he spits rhymes, and all the falling-over-themselves attempting to be PC or at least inoffensive, are amusing.
“Ghetto” is OK, because “I’m drawing an economic distinction, not a racial one.”
Trying to find Del/Chet’s house in that “ghetto” neighborhood — “Man, Chipotle’s got VALET now?” — forces the frat bros to avoid “all y’all look alike” racism, especially not to a car full of gang bangers (Method Man is their leader).
“His skin tone is right between you in the front and you in the back.”
Scott Zabielski, producer of Comedy Central’s “Tosh. 0” and “The Jim Jefferies Show,” and a couple of screenwriters whip up a few R-rated one-liners, a couple delivered by the trash-talking kids Del is supposed to be teaching how to “use your words” to avoid fights, in the MMA class his gym offers.
“Never thought I’d get this close to a vagina until I was at least 10.”
Plot? Ten different kinds of ridiculous. Finale? Every which sentimental Mexican standoff.
None of which is helped by hanging this contraption on the Canadian Bachelor (TV’s “King Bachelor’s Pad”), who isn’t the most deft at delivering a one-liner. He looks and comes off as a half-speed watered-down Chris Tucker 2.0.
Wait, can I say that?
MPAA Rating: R for crude sexual content, language throughout and some drug material
Cast: Andrew Bachelor, Logan Paul, Kat Graham, Retta, Terry Crews, Mike Epps, Method Man
Credits:Directed by Scott Zabielski , script by Ted Sperling, Benjamin Sutor, Scott Zabielski. A Liosgate release.
Running time: 1:24
Nazi rage against the rest of the human race lives on after death in “The Hatred,” a leaden horror film that takes more than its sweet time getting to whatever “terrifying” point it wants to make.
A war criminal (Andrew Divoff)took up farming after slipping into America. He argues with his daughter Alice (Darby Walker) over her lack of freedom, holed up in the remote farmstead
“Keep to your own kind, your family.” stay away from “degenerate influences.”
Farmer Sears runs his house like a concentration camp, at least as far as Alice is concerned. He wears combat poison gas gear to apply pesticides to his crops, and unpacks a long-stored gift from his beloved Fuhrer. It’s an iron cross with strange symbols and writing on it.
And no sooner has he buried this treasure in a basement wall than one of his fights with Alice turns deadly. He’s lost control. His wife (Nina Siemaszko) does the same. She leaves a farm with two bodies buried on it, and an evil talisman concealed in the basement.
Decades later, a quartet of coeds — Sarah Davenport, Gabrielle Bourne, Bayley Corman, Alisha Wainwright — drop in to the about-to-open bed and breakfast and stumble across the “research” the new owner (“American Werewolf” veteran David Naughton) seems to have been compiling on the place.
Irene, his little girl (Shae Smolick) knows all about Alice, and not from reading up on her. Uh oh.
“The amulet was sent here to Siegfried from Brazil,” and seems to store the hatred it encounters.
Helluva thing to discover on a stormy night while in your nighties, ladies. And “hide and seek?” Not the best time for that, either.
“I need some wine. Should we be SMOKING now?”
Shadows move, ghoulish hands reach up from under the covers, a vintage radio crackles to life with German propaganda from You Know When.
Whatever you do, don’t split up, don’t go to sleep, don’t look in “there”and don’t stick your hand in that watering trough where Alice drowned. This is Beelzebub’s B & B, now. Alice is just the maid.
Writer-director Michael G. Kehoe burns through the viewer’s patience with a slow-footed 22 minute prologue that he could have whacked down to seven. He set out to make a cute coeds in crisis exploitation picture, and the longer he takes to get to them, the less exploitation there will be.
And as the object of the picture is “Save the little girl,” for the love of God — don’t leave her alone.
A truly horrific wraith, the old “yank the coed out of the frame” trick, and a lot of far less frightening shock effects dress up this dark and stormy night. You see some of them coming from a long way off, and the closer we get to look at them, the less scary they become.
Who will survive? Maybe the young ladies who paid attention in her history and German classes. Maybe not.
Making us care is real goal here, and none of the players help us make that leap. They never seem scared. Why should we?
MPAA Rating:R for some violence/horror images
Cast: Sarah Davenport, Gabrielle Bourne, Bayley Corman, Alisha Wainwright, Shae Smolik, Nina Siemaszko, Darby Walker, Andrew Divoff, David Naughton
Credits: Written and directed by Michael G. Kehoe. An Anchor Bay release.
Running time: 1:34
Jessica Barden writes a “sex column with no sex,” a hopeless romantic nostalgic for “romantic comedies of the ’90s” (Seriously?), picky, about to be unemployed.
Then she discovers the Sugardaddy/Sugarbaby phenomenon — a re-branding for the #MeToo era of young woman who let themselves be “kept” by well-off older men.
Eww. And yeah, it happens. Read what’s left of the classifieds of any surviving alt-weekly.
Carly Stone, a writer for TV’s “Kim’s Convenience,” co-wrote and directed this comedy about love in an age of “practicality.” “The New Romantic” is finishing it s circuit of film festivals and headed our way soon.
A politically charged comedy from producers who have “Get Out” in their credits, families divided by politics and the holidays, that’s “The Oath.”
Tiffany’s character is married to Ike Barinholtz, Nora Dunn’s his mom and John Cho is a friend caught up in the mayhem of American families divided by Trumpis.
Damn.
Yeah they’re rolling this out, pre-Election Day (Oct. 12).
“It’s the crackle I love,” the record collector narrates to his son, who shares his passion. “We can disappear into it.”
That’s where “The Song of Sway Lake” lives — an elegiac, playful wallow in the crackle of pre-vinyl shellac nostalgia, summer romance and lost glory.
Bit actor and sometime director Ari Gold and his co-writer/collaborator Elizabeth Bull conjure up a warm, wistful movie about nostalgia itself — its traps, and its rewards.
Sway Lake once belonged to the Sway family. Wife Charlie and piano playing war hero Hal kept it as an exclusive resort for the famous and well-heeled. It even spawned a Swing Era pop hit.
But Hal died and the land around the lake slipped away. By 1992, development and Jetskis were pushing in on Crane Point Lodge, and depressed heir Tim Sway (Jason Brill) drowned himself in the lake that winter.
By the time summer arrives, all that’s left to do is sell the place. Tim’s record-hoarding son Oliver (Rory Culkin) and his fellow “vagabond” Nikolai (Robert Sheehan of “Geostorm”) drift in so that Ollie can find that crisp, unopened one-off pressing of the original 78 rpm record of “Sway Lake,” sung by its composer. He plans to steal it and keep this “record that cannot be sold at any price.”
“Both believe that stealing is moral when it’s in the name of love,” or so we’re told.
The guys rummage through a record-hoarder’s paradise, and cheerfully ransack the place as they do (plenty of alcohol is on hand). But as they search, in vain, for the valuable 78, they feud with the develop-or-die locals, Ollie is smitten by Isadora (Isabelle McNally), “the girl with the purple hair,” and his widowed grandmother (Mary Beth Peil of “Dawson’s Creek” and “The Good Wife”) and her long-suffering housekeeper (Elizabeth Peña) show up.
That complicates the hunt for the record they want to steal and sends Nikolai into a swooning reverie for all things Sway.
Nikolai is what we call “A Screenwriter’s Russian” — all poetic impulsiveness, pranks and free-spirited nudity and manly pursuits — fist fighting, motors and “qvality vomen!”
“He’s excitable,” Ollie explains. “There’s a lot of freedom here.”
“Americans would rather organize music than hear it,” Nikolai philosophizes. “In Russia, we dance!”
Lost in Hal’s World War II letters, Nikolai plots Ollie’s approach to a party like a military campaign.
“You take right flank. I come in from left.”
This really isn’t a war
That’s where you’re wrong.”
Culkin’s Ollie is a greasy-haired drifter with acne. I suppose he has his charm, and his thing for old music can be catnip to the ladies. But you do wonder what the lovely “I was named for the dancer Isadora Duncan” would see in him other than his legendarily rich surname.
“Song of Sway Lake” paddles along on vintage recordings by The Mills Brothers, and songs like “Yellow Bird” and “Begin the Beguine” covered by more recent artists. Director Gold is taking his own script’s advice — “When words fail, music. When music fails, silence.”
Romantic images of the Sways, back in their heydays, skinny dipping in the lake that bears their name are woven in, along with poetic love letters they exchanged during the war (Brian Dennehy voices Hal’s letters).
A prologue cut together from old vacation promotion films engagingly delivers the history of the place, and the omnipresent old 78s — Ollie’s last connection to his father (whom he talks to) — casts a spell, in ways it hasn’t in recent decades of similarly scored Woody Allen comedies.
“Hey dad. I met a girl. What song should I play her?”
“What do ugly guys like us know about love?”
Way back when, then and now, knowing the right song to play could give an “ugly” guy the ticket to the stars.
MPAA Rating: R for language, graphic nudity and some sexual content
Cast: Rory Culkin, Robert Sheehan, Isabelle McNally, Mary Beth Piel, Elizabeth Peña, Brian Dennehy
Credits:Directed by Ari Gold, script by Elizabeth Bull, Ari Gold. An Orchard release.
Running time: 1:35
Good casting. Not perfect, but good. A David Hyde Pierce/Oliver Platt (or John Goodman) pairing 20 years ago might have been more on the nose.
Does the world remember Laurel and Hardy? Aside from film buffs?’
Because this one looks sweet, conventional and funny. Made me tear up a little.
“Stan and Ollie” opens in Britain in Jan.
“Stephanie” begins as a supernatural mystery, flirts with “Quiet Ones” thrills and fizzles into the sentimental, enervated horror that is exactly what we expected — only more boring — in those opening scenes.
The fact that it barely saw theatrical release could drive a stake in the heart of the directing ambitions of Oscar winning screenwriter (“A Beautiful Mind”), producer and aspiring director Akiva Goldsman (“Winter’s Tale”). The fact that it barely deserved release just shows the studio was paying attention.
We meet Stephanie as a little girl (Shree Crooks) alone, — latchkey or abandoned, she’s all by herself in a big suburban two-story. She chatters to her constant companion, Frances, a stuffed turtle — redecorates at will, with crayons, feeds her pet bunny tomato sauce, practices her profanity because there’s nobody around to correct it — and copes.
Is anybody coming for her? We’re getting a child’s eye view of terror and trauma, coping by denial, by getting used to whatever is “out in trees” that is sure to “get” her.
Life is a cascading parade of accidents waiting to happen, drawing its suspense from “What will this little dickens get into next?” Climbing on shelves, dropping jars on the floor, jamming up a plugged-in blender which she, being 7 or so, attempts to free by sticking her hand in the thing.
And there are growls from outside and the walls ripple with life.
“Go’way, please go away!”
Something about this child isn’t right, and it’s not just that she’s the only kid her age on Planet Earth watching and re-watching “The Tale of Despereaux” on TV. Something happened “out there,” which we see glimpsed on other TV channels. There’s still power and cable, but words like “Quarantine” flash on the screen.
And there’s something upstairs that only deepens the mystery, a corpse. In the night, when she’s not hiding from whatever is outside by crawling into the tub or under the bed, she talks to the dead body.
Then, miracle of miracles, Mom and Dad (Anna Torv and grizzled Frank Grillo) return. She’s saved, back in their loving arms but still oddly detached as she halfhearted readjusts to life with adult supervision.
“You used to say ‘There’s no such thing as monsters,” she complains to Mom.
“I know. I’m sorry.”
They do that a lot — apologize.
Goldsman does his best to disguise what’s happening and what’s coming, looking for suspense in the dark of night, seeking tension in a heaping helping of extreme closeups, relying on the title character to engender sympathy, for us to fear for her, and for the audience to have forgotten the famous “Twilight Zone” episode that this, like so many other horror tales, is cribbed from.
Our Miss Crooks may look angelic, but something about her suggests a creepy confidence about the dangerous world she inhabits. That undercuts any suspense we’d feel or fear we have for her future.
Well, that and the film’s title.
Grillo and Torv give fair value, playing parents ruled by responsibility and loyalty, but also fear and dread. Can they cope with whatever is after them or whatever the untroubled Stephanie has become in their absence?
So much here depends on twists that are no twists at all that Goldsman is hamstrung by a screenplay even he should have seen was unfilmmable, or needed doctoring.
Only stunning luck in casting the kid might have saved him, and finding the next Jodie Foster or Haley Joel Osment only happens once a generation. Casting a kid who can manage shades of creepy, even in her sweetest moments, doesn’t disguise anything.
“Stephanie” simply toddles along, intriguing for 20 minutes, exciting for three or four, and dull the remaining 60 minutes of its tedious, been-there/saw-that-coming running time.
Rating: R for some horror violence
Cast: Frank Grillo, Shree Crooks, Anna Torv
Credits:Directed by Akiva Goldsman, script by Ben Collins, Luke Piotrowski . A Universal release.
Running time: 1:26
Movie Nation 