Brie Larson has the title role, one small step for Marvel to get some of that “Wonder Woman” buzz, crossover appeal, etc. etc.
“Captain Marvel” is a March release, opening in that “Black Panther” (broadly speaking) window. Directors of modest repute, zero big budget experience.
I guess I’m the only one who finds Brie Larson’s taking on this after that crap ape movie (and “The Glass Castle” and “Unicorn Store”) something of a post-Oscar “Let’s get paid” letdown.
One of the great sea changes in American culture over the past 60 years has been in attitudes toward and treatment of the mentally disabled.
From the gradual abandonment of “labeling” via outmoded IQ tests and “warehousing” people we used to call “feeble minded” to mainstreaming into schools, daily life, from the Special Olympics and the world-altering Americans with Disabilities Act, it’s a Civil Rights revolution that’s happened almost under the culture’s radar.
“Intelligent Lives” celebrates the fruits of this change in the more enlightened corners of America. The film introduces us to a special needs artist in Boston with dreams of art school and college, a Rhode Island woman of Haitian descent being prepared for a more independent life that includes her first real job in a hair salon and a graduate of InclusiveU at Syracuse University who has become an advocate for the disabled.
Oscar winner Chris Cooper (“The Orchid Thief”) talks with great passion about his son, Jesse, born with cerebral palsy that left him mute, suffering from quadriplegia.
“The neurologist told us, in front of our son, that he would never be intellectually normal and that we should think of having another child.”
The Coopers became tireless advocates for including the disabled in general education, dedicating increased resources that would grant access to computers (allowing Jesse to communicate, became an A student and a poet) and far wider horizons for kids like Jesse.
Cooper introduces the film and quickly transitions to an attack on the century-old practice of IQ testing, “misguided and false measurements of worth.”
When the outdated Stanford Binet IQ test was built on “antiquated questions” — “Do you dust a dresser?” — how accurate can it be, for starters?
Whatever the original purposes of the test, it has been used historically to discriminate against non-native English speakers (at Ellis Island), African Americans and other minorities.
“The IQ test told me nothing about my child’s potential,” Cooper declares. “Can any attempt to measure intelligence predict a person’s value or ability to contribute meaningfully to the world?”
As the United States comes to realize it is throwing away six million potential workers, people with “the ability to contribute meaningfully to the world,” schools such as Henderson School in Boston, an “inclusion” school, abandon IQ tests and settle in for the long, hard, hands-on and labor intensive work of preparing people like Naieer, a gifted painter, for a productive and more independent life.
Rhode Islander Naomie was institutionalized in what amounted to a Dickensian “workhouse” during her teens, until the state realized that the operators weren’t doing much more than grossly underpay for simple, manual labor that wasn’t helping students grow and prep for the outside world. We meet her as she takes the first steps — co-running a coffee cart in the state capital building — towards building a self-supporting life.
And wee Micah as he takes disabilities studies courses at Syracuse University, living in an assisted living environment and dabbling in OKCupid, a young man given the chance, for the first time, to think about the future.
We’re also introduced to several progressive educators, people who demonstrate the patience of those who know how long the journey is, from first classes in childhood to the college and post-graduate potential life Micah can see before him.
“Intelligence looks different on everybody,” one teacher says.
Cooper’s place in the film is talking about his son’s experiences (Jesse eventually died, but not without making a mark) and giving us the history of IQ tests and the shifts in America’s attitudes toward the mentally disabled. America went so far as to dabble in eugenics, sterilizing the “feeble minded” in some states.
The Kennedy Administration, headed by a president and attorney general whose sister, Rosemary, was institutionalized in the 1940s, started the national conversation.
Eunice Kennedy Shriver was a founder of the Special Olympics.
By 1975, equal opportunities in education were enshrined in law and in 1990, George H.W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act with a flourish, “Let the shameful wall of exclusion finally come tumbling down.”
But in the trenches, the advocacy, protests and lobbying goes on. And the teachers struggle, fretting over Naieer and “erratic” behavior that could cause him trouble should this tall young black man ever encounter the police, worrying about Naomie’s ongoing needs even as Micah’s parents celebrate his college graduation.
“Intelligent Lives” is far from a representative sample of such people — these are exceptions, outliers with access to resources and family support the vast majority of the disabled have fewer opportunities to access. And “introduced” is the right way to characterize everyone we meet in the movie. It’s not much deeper than a superficial introduction.
But as history, “Intelligent Lives” is invaluable at reminding us of the speed of change, once such change is recognized and accepted as necessary. As a journalist, I remember writing stories about non-profits fretting over the expensive and seemingly onerous demands ADA was about to place upon them as it was implemented — access ramps and hearing assistance and braille signage in elevators and elsewhere.
Most of us came to accept these measures as a small price to pay, and those who did became more enlightened, part of a change that broadened our ideas of civil liberties in America and our concept of an inclusive culture.
Those who didn’t found themselves on the wrong side of history.
MPAA Rating: unrated
Cast: Chris Cooper, Naomie Monplaisir, Naieer Shaheed
Credits:Directed by Dan Habib, script by Dan Habib and Jody Becker. A Right Now Films release.
Running time: 1:11
Even those of us who adore Emily Blunt would be ever-so-quick to say that she’s no Julie Andrews.
And Dick Van Dyke is every bit as irreplaceable. He’s here, just not in the same guise.
But damned if Angela Lansbury isn’t in the thing, this sequel “Mary Poppins Returns.”
With Meryl and Colin and Ben and Emily Mortimer.
And the omnipresent Lin-Manuel Miranda.
I had no idea David Warner was still living and working, but hiring him seems a smart stroke.
Dec. 18, we see if the magic indeed has returned. Or if Rob Marshall gets the spanking of his directorial life.
Boy, talk about a light, dullish teen dramedy that turns icky on a dime.
“Face 2 Face” is one of the most striking miscalculations in movie tone in recent memory. From light, right on the cusp of sweet, to just dark and grim and unable to pull off that transition. The leap to thriller will give you whiplash.
It’s a not-quite-charming cheat, a two-hander about former childhood friends who reconnect as teens, start sharing and helping, coaching and advising each other via a Facetime clone called “Face2Face.”
“Teel,” who goes by “Teel-Riffic” online, tracks down “Madison, “Mad-I-Sing” across country and across the years. It’s been a decade or more since they were acquainted.
Her “Do I know you?” response to his “friend” query earns an entirely-too-quick “Can I call you?” from him.
She is beautiful, bubbly and outgoing, a school principal’s daughter out in California. He’s a loner, introverted, nerdy and friendless and stuck back in Michigan. Why would she even accept a call?
She plays with her hair and practically lives her life on social media, inviting him (via her phone) to a party where she makes a bit of a scene. He’s too introverted to even be on social media. The computer and their face chats are his lifeline. We learn his mother won’t let him get his driver’s license and that he isn’t even on Facebook.
Teel (Daniel Amerman) shows up late for school and classes, “so everybody will think I’m in a rush and not realize I don’t have anybody to talk to.”
Madison (Daniela Bobadilla) is little too eager to fill him in on her plans to snag the cute boy in her school she obsesses over — Cole (Enspirit). The garish lipstick and heavy makeup give her away. A little.
Two guys named Toronto concocted this in the “Unfriended/Friend Request/Searching” mode — split screen, real time online conversations, every camera angle achievable by a teen holding up her phone to show a party, his room, their share-everything lives.
But these kids — one, seemingly an open book, the other a sealed one — have secrets.
Teel is so dorky and fey he’s never heard of “ping pong” (something teens play in parties in the movies). Madison is so instantly trusting that she confides in Teel about her scheme to get Cole “jealous” by shamelessly making out with another guy right in front of him. Or them.
“Hey, HAND dog. Get OFF her!”
Her retiring, nightcap drinking widowed Dad is micro-managing her life, leading to her complaints about “wife” duties in her life.
Teel confesses he has “no ambition in the jock arts,” not up for the sports “auditions” his parents push him into. He’d rather try out for “Bye Bye Birdie” or “Romeo and Juliet.”
Madison is a little too fond of lollipops, is insecure about her looks, her charisma, her sex appeal. She gets grounded and loses custody of her phone.
“But he (her father) DIDN’T take my computer, just my phone. He thinks I’m doing homework on it. I guess I’ll be doing you every afternoon after school.”
Girlish giggles, and “Girls are allowed to have our minds in the gutter.” Besides, he’s in The Friend Zone. But does he want to be?
The limited point of view turns the picture dull long before we find out the obvious answer to that. There are only so many games you can play with making your face pop in the side or the top of the screen, only so much you can do with bad stage makeup (he’s beaten up) or his tips about hers — “It hides everything that’s beautiful about your face.”
“Are you saying I look like a whore?”
Bobadilla of “The Middle” has a winsome screen presence, bubbly with the confidence of the preternaturally cute. Amerman of TV’s “The Shy Ones” and “Freak Out” has the tougher job, going morose, trying to convince us he’s really auditioning to play Romeo with an energetically off-key rehearsal.
Tacky moments overwhelm the supposedly tender ones, and no “big reveal” in the middle acts prepares us for the nasty one in the film’s final act.
It’s set up and foreshadowed, but not with any of the gravitas, horror or shame its victims attach to it.
Like the split screens and limited POV of the camera, it’s a gimmick and an ugly one that doesn’t save a flailing dramedy, doesn’t lift a thriller where the “thriller” part is a screenplay afterthought.
That twist makes “Face 2 Face” icky enough to be something both its stars shave off their resumes in the very near future.
MPAA Rating: TV-MA
Cast: Daniela Bobadilla, Daniel Amerman, Kevin McCorkle, Enspirit, Emily Jordan
Credits:Directed by Matthew Toronto, script by Aaron Toronto, Matthew Toronto. A Candy Factory release.
Running time: 1:28
Franz Kafka was born in Prague and died in a sanitarium outside of Vienna.
But his Kafkaesque nightmare of maddening bureaucracy run by heartless, buck-passing functionaries lives on just to the south, in the courts, hospitals and government offices of Italy.
Italian police brutality and legal, ethical and moral lassitude gave the world “The Last Seven Days of Stefano Cucchi.”
The film about Cucchi’s arrest and death in custody, “On My Skin,” is a slowly unfolding horror of callous Italian indolence. A man is arrested for drugs, charged with intent to distribute and then beaten — off camera. The evidence of that beating is all over his face, his inability to stand up straight or stay awake.
No judge asks about it. No prosecutor is appalled and confrontational with the cops, the Carabinieri. Every police official down the line sees his condition, some sheepishly ask concerned questions. Many use the phrase “a very serious charge” when Cucchi finally starts telling people he was beaten, but officialdom’s first worried question in every phone call is aimed at whatever the Italian acronym for “CYA” might be.
Tell me again how SURE you are “Amanda Knox Did It!” I wouldn’t trust these Pagliaccis to prosecute a jaywalker.
And the ass-covering extends to doctors, nurses and paramedics, not helped by the beaten man’s fear, and a kind of stubborn rage that sets in with his worsening physical and mental condition. He is enfeebled, missing his medication, afraid things will only get worse if he tells. Denied his own legal counsel, his family not allowed to see him via an ever-changing carousel of bureaucratese excuses, he goes into cardiac arrest in the first scene in “On My Skin.”
The movie that follows is a somber, slow-walk to doom, death by official Italian indolence.
In October of 2009, Stefano, “Ste'” to his family (Alessandro Borghi, very good), is shown working for his surveyor-father, working out at the gym, attending mass, chatting with his brother-in-law and eating dinner with his parents. He won’t be spending the night with them, he says.
At his place, he’s got this thin slab of chocolate colored hashish he has to carve up.
But there’s little alarm when he’s sitting, talking in his car about eggplant parmesan with a friend, when the cops show up. There’s nothing in the car. No money was changing hands. They were smoking — cigarettes.
“Being funny, huh?” the cops bark (in Italian, with English subtitles).
“No.”
“Shut up. Nobody asked you.”
Rousting them, the cops find drugs on him, just a little dab of this and that. Illegal, but “possession” sized amounts. Oh no, they’ve nabbed a DEALER. The detectives who roll up afterwards are sure of it.
Stefano doesn’t know it, but his life clock just started ticking down its final week.
We see the humiliation of booking — yes, he had drugs on him — hear his pleas to the police not to wake his parents with all this. Good luck with that, pal.
And then, a gap. We see him hustled out of a cell and into court. One of his eyes is swelling shut. His back is killing him, he says. He needs his epilepsy medicine, needs to call his lawyer.
Oh no. Some bottom ten percent of his law school class public defender has been assigned him. He doesn’t need to call anybody. Really he doesn’t. He finds this out in the courtroom. The nightmare which began with an over-eager arrest and mounted with whatever happened with those detectives off-camera now becomes life and liberty threatening.
Writer-director Alessio Cremonini tells this story in the most deliberative way — patiently, layer upon layer of bureaucracy added on. Yes, this guy had drug problems and perhaps he was selling on the side. Maybe not.
But the viewer cannot escape the growing outrage at his treatment, the growing dread at what’s coming and the sadness of Stefano’s plight.
He is sick, with serious back and almost certainly internal injuries. He is not getting even the most superficial treatment — endless agonies of X-rays, transport from this hospital to the next.
He faces this alarming death spiral alone. Officious peons doggedly refuse to let anyone who cares about him see him. Callousness surrounds him in his direst moments.
And every taker of the Hippocratic Oath he meets is either put off by his understandable paranoia and defensiveness, or content to let the system take the hit. Lots of Italian medical professionals give the broad “My hands are tied” gesture, or brusquely wear it on their faces.
Yes, the world knows that if you travel to Italy, don’t do anything to get you in trouble with the Carabinieri. God knows if they do something to you the locals won’t want to hear about it. Surely they have a “Carabinieri Lives Matter” movement to go with their infamous record of prisoners dying in their custody.
But as this slow but damning drama makes clear, you don’t want to get sick over there either. Forms to fill out, procedures to be followed — rigidly. Don’t make a fuss. Just accept their “Not my patient/not my responsibility/you’re being ‘difficult’/sign this” indifference and take it like every other Italian. If you die, it’s on somebody else’s hands. Always.
MPAA Rating: unrated
Cast: Alessandro Borghi, Massimiliano Tortora, Milvia Marigliano
Credits:Directed by Alessio Cremonini, , script by Alessio Cremonini, Lisa Nur Sultan. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:40
It’s not a new movie trope, but seriously — how do you make “Hot for teacher” an acceptable subject for a movie nowadays?
“My Teacher, My Obsession” whistles past the #Notlegal graveyard with horror. Well, with a stalker/thriller, anyway.
That’s what the prologue promises, a school janitor walking in on what looks like a sexual assault, a bloodied eyewitness yelling “RUN.”
But then comes the flashback, the hour long drift into exploitation, titillation and prurient bumping and grinding. Having it both ways, we call that.
Riley (Laura Bilgeri) is braced for another school year and another high school for English teacher dad Chris (Rusty Joiner).
But the girls at Frost High might have other ideas. Tricia (Alexandria DeBerry), blonde Queen Bee and her popular pretty girl classmates purr that they’ll have him “wrapped around” their fingers.
Kyla (Lucy Loken) is the one to watch out for. She’s kind of quiet, an 18 year-old yearbook photographer who has polished the bedroom eyes and vocal fry of the teen temptress.
After a couple of scenes where Chris establishes his “hip young teacher” bonafides (checking his students’ cellphone playlists) — “I remember what it’s like to be young and pretend not to care.” — Kyla’s plot is set in motion.
Befriend Riley, poor-mouth the other girls who might get in the way, sabotage her mother’s hopes for a “normal” relationship with the single teacher, plant photos, etc.
It’s laugh out loud ludicrous, almost from start to end.
“I’m 18. I’m free to do what and who I want.”
The adults are gullible and somewhat hapless when faced with this potentially lethal Lolita.
Teacher Chris? He walks — or drives — right into this. This is what happens, educators, when you don’t remember Sting singing “Don’t stand so close to me.”
Loken, of TV’s “Teen Wolf,” does her damnedest to measure up to the gold standard of dangerously obsessed high school girls — Erika Christenson’s oversexed/lethally libidinous “Swimfan.”
A very wooden (no pun intended) Joiner has to play a grown man helpless trapped in her web of aggressive come-ons and one-liners.
“Consider that my thesis statement!”
“Pick up that jar, sugar. I’m legal!”
The most generous way to look at this sort of film USED to be middle-aged male wish fulfillment fantasy. And that is generously creepy. It’s always doubly unsavory when a man scripts it.
But even without the “ick” factor, “My Obsession” gives away the game too easily, makes the seemingly-nerdy girl who still shoots on film too obviously a predator, wastes too much time in the middle acts with us knowing what is coming.
And if you’re going for “over the top,” Ms. Loken, there’s no value in going halfway.
MPAA Rating: TV-14
Cast:Lucy Loken, Laura Bilgeri, Rusty Joiner, Alexandria DeBerry
Credits:Directed by Damián Romay, script by Patrick Robert Young . A MarVista.Netflix release.
Running time: 1:26
The guys who gave us Schwarzenegger turn up in this film about the weightlifter/bodybuilder Joe Weider, whose ads graced the inside back covers of many a classic comic book, back in the day.
Julianne Hough, Tyler Hoechlin, Steve Guttenberg Robert Forster, DJ Qualls, Tom Arnold, Victoria Justice and Kevin Durand are the big names in the cast.
But the characters portrayed in the spotlight — LaLanne, Weider and Arnold Schwarzenegger — are what “Bigger” (Oct 12) is about.
Might’ve had a little to do with Hurricane Florence worrying film fans from Va to Ga.
Maybe not.
But the projected $29 million opening for “The Predator” reboot at the hands of Shane Black was a $24 million bust.
“A Simple Favor” should have earned $18, didn’t clear $16 by much.
“White Boy Rick” didn’t even reach $9 million.
And the widely distributed sequel “Unbroken: The Billy Graham Crusade Years” didn’t do half of the $5 million it was slated to take in.
Only “The Nun” matched expectations, $18 million on its second weekend of release — on the button.
“The Children Act” had decent pre-screen numbers (it’s on Direct TV too).
“Science Fair” did quite well on its single screen, still not enough to warrant wider release.
Jimmy Buffet as viewed through the Harmony Korine dark side of drunken beach poet as a lifestyle, that is.
Yes, the director of “Spring Breakers,” who let us know that hell yeah, he “gets” Florida, is back with a dark comedy starring Matthew M., Isla Fisher, Snoop Dogg, Zac Effron, Jonah Hill and James Delaney aka “Jimmy” Buffett.
Damn. “The Beach Bum” (2019 release date TBD) needs more boats. Sailboats. “Boat Drinks” they have in copious quantities.
If you want a thorough documentary accounting of your legendary life in music, leave the job to your adoring daughter.
Rashida Jones of “Tag” and TV’s “Angie Tribeca,” didn’t have to arrange interviews for “Quincy,” the film she co-directed about her Emmy, Oscar, Tony and multiple Grammy Award winning Dad, Quincy Jones. She had the one she needed right at her feet.
Just following Dad around — sometimes in a wheelchair, often on his feet, enthusing, persuading, flattering, accepting the endless accolades as well as responsibilities a “legend” carries with him — made a great framework for a survey and appreciation of Q’s 80 plus years of life, 70 of them in music.
Jones the daughter has co-directed (with veteran jazz documentarian Alan Hicks) an adoring, broad but not particularly deep screen biography built around Quincy doing what he does best — even in his 80s, even after repeated health scares — producing, arranging and masterminding the televised star-studded opening gala of Washington’s Museum of African American History.
There’s no sense being modest at this phase in his Oscar-winning/Oscar producing career, but even as he’s feted, from Montreux to Stockholm, New York to Washington, there’s a refreshing lack of pretense to the sharp-dressed octogenarian at the center of all this fuss.
“I’m too old to be full of it.”
Rashida, his daughter with then-wife Peggy Lipton, is around him at all hours (glimpsed, herself, out of makeup) in all sorts of scenarios — in the hospital, backstage here, traveling there. She’s concerned when he’s at his sickest, emerging from a diabetic coma, encouraging the “26 hour day” workaholic and night owl to finally give up drinking. And she’s amused enough by his Energizer Bunny schedule to set the many MANY traveling sequences to Quincy’s themes to the comedies “Austin Powers” and “Sanford & Son.”
Rather than round up legions of admirers to sing his praise on camera, she and the crew shadow Quincy for a recording of Dr. Dre’s podcast, listen in as he sweetly arm-twists Colin Powell to be on his TV African American Museum tribute, watch him chat with Tom Hanks at rehearsal for that special (“I quit drinking 19 months ago!” “Wow! Great! How’re you sleeping?”).
Tapes of Sinatra singing his praises accompany clips of Ol’Blue Eyes introducing his arranger conductor on TV specials.
“I began to realize he was a giant!”
Ray Charles, who was there the night Jones was awarded Kennedy Center Honors in 2001, talks, also in voice-over, of Jones’s gift for hip and swinging arrangements.
His daughter also gets Jones to sketch his own story — rough upbringing in Chicago, mentally ill mother committed when he was just a boy, tempted by the piano, taken in by the trumpet at 14.
We’re all heroes of our own stories, and the owlish Jones (and his daughter) can be forgiven for boosting the “miracle” of his breaking out and skipping over his Berklee College of Music year (formative, most say), ignoring his years of drug abuse, skimming through his compulsive womanizing.
“I had messed that marriage up” he says, about this or that union. Of course, he covered a lot of this ground in a lot more detail in his 2001 autobiography
The always-outspoken Jones is considerably less so here. Rashida asks him “Dad, how do you deal with your ego and your art?” No, he’s got no clever quip at the ready, there. His little girl let him off the hook, let him give his killer “news quotes” to GQ and others.
But Lionel Hampton and Clark Terry, Dinah Washington to Armstrong to Dizzy to Ray and Basie, Sinatra and Michael — almost anybody who was anybody in music worked with Quincy Jones or wanted to. The wall of Grammys, the vast collection of framed photos with the famous, the gold albums, Samuel L. Jackson accolades backstage at the African American Museum gala (“Damn, Q.” is the quotable part), all underscore his place in music and entertainment history.
Whatever Rashida accomplishes on her own as the most famous daughter of this giant of music, with “Quincy” (premiering Sept. 21 on Netflix) she’s taken control of her father’s legacy, given it a light polishing, and chiseled it in stone. The man worked harder than anybody else in show business (Sorry, James Brown), encouraged and championed generations of performers and kept himself in the game long past the point others were calling him “a legend.”
“Quincy” hints at how that came to be, and maybe that’s enough.
MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity, alcohol, smoking
Cast: Quincy Jones, Rashida Jones, and everybody who’s anybody in popular music
Credits:Directed by, script by Alan Hicks, Rashida Jones. A Netflix release.
Running time: 2:05
Movie Nation 