Matt Smith? OK.
Natalie Dormer? Flip your hair, dear, so we know it’s you. Meowwwwwrrrrr.
The desperate search for that first infected zombie (so as to affect a cure) leads to Stanley T. Thank heavens.
Looks fun, even if it is the umpteenth zombie movie in a “Walking Dead” world. Vertical has it, release date? “Sooooooon.”
A silent girl , Romina, is debriefed by police (in Spanish, with English subtitles) for purposes of criminal and psychological evaluation. Something happened last June on Crystal Lake.
Wait, Crystal Lake? Isn’t that where Jason Voorhees carried out hockey-masked mayhem every “Friday the 13th?” They have a Crystal Lake in Mexico?
A lot of people died and the girl (Francisca Lozano) can only nod her head at the names of the victims. “Narrate the events,” her interrogator orders.
No narration ensues, thankfully. Just the camera tracking over assorted mutilated, bled-out corpses, a female survivor. “Pelicula Adolescente muerto,” you say to yourself. It has spread to Old Mexico for this cut-rate horror quickie, “Romina.”
Six college age pals set off for the lake, four guys and two women. “Camping,” they giggle, because they’ve never googled the phrase “Crystal Lake.” And the playful, profane banter in the car gets around to Romina, “that freak of nature.” But only briefly.
They’re not alone at the lake. There’s no cell reception. The women? They’re spooked by the fact that “somebody is spying on us,” etc. Whoever “she” is, the lads like that she skinny dips.
“Go get her, tiger. I brought a date.”
Ezekiel (Victor Bonilla) wanders off by himself, Ramon (Walter Bercht) wanders off to find him. Sexual assault ensues.
And payback is a,…well, you know. “Didn’t you see ‘Evil Dead?’ ‘Friday the 13th?’ ‘BLAIR WITCH?'”
In a 76 minute movie, there is virtually no space for dead time, scenes that bore or do little to leap right into the action and advance the plot. Writer-director Diego Cohen manages to find some. Lots.
“Romina” toddles along like a student film, kids accusing the park caretaker, cursing each other at their bad fortune, camera lingering over the lake and the trees. Oh, the trees. Here and there, we see other buildings — homes? Businesses? You know, places they could turn for help?
What happens on camera? Comeuppance? “Tortura porno?” Naah. Just hints of a psycho-sexual power over the victims, non-victims discovering the remains of those caught, hog-tied and (usually) cut up, or weeping for their lives.
The performances are laughable. Suspense is dispensed with, “justice” in the retribution abandoned. Just a murderous, vengeful rampage with zero urgency or terror.
I want my 76 minutes back, Señor Cohen.
MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence
Cast: Francisca Lozano, Victor Bonilla, Roberto Beck, Walter Bercht
Credits: Written and directed by Diego Cohen. A Corazón Films/Netflix release.
Running time: 1:16
Another November release with the cast and zeitgeist-grabbing subject matter to be an Oscar contender, “Boy Erased” features Osacr winners Russell Crowe as a Southern preacher, Nicole Kidman as the preacher’s wife and Oscar nominee Lucas Hedges as the son who thinks “about men, a lot.” Joel Edgerton (All these Aussies!) runs the sham of a “conversion therapy”: program, in this based-on-a-true-story drama.
Edgerton (“The Gift”) also directed this Nov. 2 drama.
Andrew Solomon grew up a child with “weird hangups,” dressing in costumes, “obsessed” with the more morbid poems of Emily Dickinson, and with tragic opera.
His affluent parents indulged all of his idiosyncrasies, right up to the day he came out to them as gay. Years of brooding over this estrangement made him curious about how other families “managed” dealing with children very different from them — the degrees of support they gave to a child who might be “every parent’s nightmare” — autistic, born with Down Syndrome, dwarfism, even parents of kids who commit inhumanly cruel crimes.
Like the rest of us, Solomon has been stunned by the pace of societal changes in the attitudes toward homosexuality, a “disease” that was regarded as “treatable” in his youth, now commonly accepted and to varying degrees tolerated, even in the most intolerant corners of America.
Solomon’s book “Far From the Tree” becomes Rachel Dretzin’s upbeat documentary of the same name, a film that celebrates “difference” even as it accepts the heartbreak and agonizing effort it takes for people and society to change attitudes towards those we have historically treated as “abnormal…diseased…retarded” and “broken.”
Dretzin profiles Solomon, and takes her camera into the lives of both the children born “different,” and the parents who found the focus, the energy and patience to make give their child the “freedom to be” at home in their family and in their world.
There’s Jason Kingsley, now 42, born with Down Syndrome in the ’70s, but fortunate enough to be born to New Yorkers who made educating him and proving the doctors who suggested warehousing him, “discarding him,” wrong. Jason lives in a group home now, has worked in a mailroom for decades. He quotes a little Shakespeare, revels in the ethos of the heroine of “Frozen” (“Let it Go”) and carries on frank discussions about his limitations and his future with his mother.
Back in the ’70s, no one would have thought any of that possible of someone “Mongoloid,” and medicine wasn’t operating along those lines. Emily, his mother, was a writer for “Sesame Street,” and father Charles was a painting contractor who made his son and his son’s misunderstood condition his cause.
Jason became a “Sesame Street” star, showing just how smart and adaptable someone with Down Syndrome could be. Jason and his parents almost single-handedly changed America’s attitudes about it.
Jack’s parents gave Dretzin access to home movies of his infancy, the bubbly child who soon made them realize he couldn’t communicate with them. “Autism” was the diagnosis, and like most every parent interviewed here, his mother, in particular, grappled with guilt over what she might have done during pregnancy to cause it.
“It was overwhelming,” his mother admits. “I didn’t want it.”
Then we see the therapy sessions that got through to the boy who cannot speak, the tearful reactions of Jack’s parents as they drift from opining that this time-consuming, tedious training was just a “parlor trick” to realizing they were watching a miracle of medical science at work.
Jack, using a computer/voice synthesizer keyboard not unlike Stephen Hawking’s, talks about his ultra-sensitivity to noise, about a life that is “like being a tiger in a cage” — at 13. We come to the same conclusion his parents did. Here’s a smart kid trapped in a body that won’t let him show it.
There’s a touch of affluence or at least comfort to almost all of the families presented here, because when you have money you can cast about for answers and devote the time and resources to finding help.
The more working class family of Loini, a lonely 23 year-old with dwarfism, are at a loss how to help her. She is isolated by her condition and life situation, until that magic day when she makes it to a Little People of America Convention. Her mother and sisters see the change that comes in finding one’s “tribe.”
The film then follows the happy, well-adjusted dwarf couple, Leah and Joe, who found each other in just that way. The outgoing activist Joe may be tied to a wheelchair, much of the time. But thinking “I must be miserable” is a mistake. He’s positively giddy around Leah.
Solomon’s thesis isn’t one that lends itself to being neatly adhered to in a documentary, as we see Dretzin break format, first with the dwarfs — we only meet Leah and Joe’s parents briefly, in the film’s upbeat coda — then when she tests that thesis on the Louisiana (now Texas) family of a teen murderer, Trevor Reese.
The murderer’s parents are focused on to the almost total exclusion of their son, and the film doesn’t dwell on this part of Solomon’s wide net of “acceptance” and opinion that “defectiveness is a matter of perspective.” Families find ways to carry on, to get over the misplaced guilt they feel, and will love their children and try to help them. But for society to make that leap seems naive and indeed destructive.
“Far from the Tree” reminds us of the rapid pace of change, driven by medical and social sciences. And it shows us parents who, rather than throwing up their hands and accepting the medical/societal status quo, make the effort to first accept their child as “different,” and then make the rest of us aware that “different” is, in most cases, nothing at all to be ashamed or afraid of.
MPAA Rating: unrated
Cast: Andrew Solomon, Jason, Jack, Loini, Leah and Joe, the Reese family.
Credits:Directed by Rachel Dretzin. An IFC/Sundance Selects release.
Running time: 1:33
Oh Freddie, you had me at “Roger, there’s only room in this band for one hysterical queen.”
Uncanny impersonation/performance by Rami Malek and the ensemble (Ben Hardy is drummer Roger Taylor, Gwilym Lee is guitar virtuoso Brian May, Joseph Mazzello is bassist John Deacon). delightful recreations of how they cooked up the musical effects in their masterpiece, climaxing with Live Aid, the greatest live show any rock band ever put on.
The trailers to “Bohemian Rhapsody” are raising expectations. They simply cannot release a movie that is anything less than joyous, a celebration.
November 2, we’ll know if we have something to celebrate.
Netflix’s ongoing outreach movie audiences the theatrical release studios have abandoned includes making movies for filmgoers who by and large just don’t go to the movies any more.
Thus, “Our Souls at Night,” a reunion of 80something former “Barefoot in the Park” and “Electric Horsemen” co-stars Jane Fonda and Robert Redford.
A tale of two long-widowed neighbors in sleepy tiny Holt, Colorado, it is stately, quiet and elegiac, all respect-your-elders politesse for “Pleasantly dull.”
It begins with a drop-in, and “a proposal…not marriage,” from Addie, who lives down the street but doesn’t really know Louis all that well.
“Would you be interested in coming to my house sometime and sleeping with me?”
She adds a sentence that each of them will repeat, ad nauseam, over the next 100 minutes.
“It’s not what you think.”
One of the hellish adjustments of old age is loneliness. Your kids move away, your spouse dies, along with almost all of your friends. The elderly face a shrinking world of limited mobility, shrunken horizons and little human contact.
“Nights are the worst, don’t you think?”
Louis, a man of few words, has to “think about it.” But when he consents with the hope of lying awake and just having somebody to talk to, he is disappointed. At first. Addie literally cannot get enough sleep alone. So having company lets her catch up.
But as these sleepovers go on, they unburden themselves the way people do in fiction and the movies (it’s based on a Kent Haruf novel). She always thought he was “a good man,” he saw her as “a person of substance and character.”
Of course there’s a lot more to each of them than that — past flaws that these nightly confessions reveal. Present flaws include a reluctance to take this arrangement public. She wouldn’t mind, he prefers being her “back door man.”
“You know how people talk.”
Chief among those talkers is Dorlan, head gabber at the coffee-klatsch Louis drops in on at the cafe. Bruce Dern plays Dorlan, and he makes you think of “Nebraska” and much more realistic and honest a depiction of old age, family, dignity and indignities that was.
I started thinking of how much more spirited, colorful and interesting Louis would have been had Dern played him.
“Our Souls at Night” may accurately show flawed people still fretting over the past, still worrying about their adult kids (Judy Greer for him, Matthias Schoenaerts for her). A grandson is taken in and charmed into a more engaged and interesting kid by the close attention of his elders. He’s played by Iain Armitage of TV’s “Young Sheldon.”
The kid hijacks the story and turns the movie into something else, at least for a while. The “confessions” play into that, and a kind of abrupt disapproval leaps forth from one adult child, and perfunctory, ancient-history guilt trips are administered by both.
A more common gripe for me of films like this is their disconnection from the reality of old age in America. I might buy that a retired school teacher and widowed housewife might set a table for one for dinner, listen to jazz and lead their twilight years in quiet contemplation — in a European movie.
In America? The TV would be on, tuned to endless “Blue Bloods” marathons. And that’s where meals are taken, in front of the tube. Things around the house, like the folks who own them, start to go — grooming, housekeeping, attire and weight give this away.
Alexander Payne’s “Nebraska” nailed all that.
Never for one second do we buy into these two good-looking, well-preserved, trim and exercised outliers as anybody we’ve run across in rural America.
There’s nothing inherently wrong in making a romance novel fantasy about two unexceptional people played as ordinarily extraordinary by a couple of the prettiest movie stars ever to come down the pike.
But the stars, decades of warm feelings generated by their respective screen roles, reach for the mundane by underplaying, and that they do gingerly, because even the perfectly-preserved drop down into their lower gears past 75. And what little happens here feels humorless, predigested or at least sterilized for our protection.
MPAA Rating: TV-14, adult situations
Cast: Robert Redford, Jane Fonda, Iain Armitage, Judy Greer, Matthias Schoenarts and Bruce Dern
Credits:Directed by Ritesh Batra, script by Scott Neustadter, based on a Kent Haruf novel. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:43
A Christmas present for fans of Ms. Jones and Ruth Bader Ginsberg, a bio-drama about what made her reputation long before she became the most beloved Supreme Court Justice by the left.
Oscar bait? One can only hope.
Desperation, as a general rule, makes for good comedy.
For a “caper comedy,” it’s an absolute pre-requisite.
“Deidra & Laney Rob a Train” is fraught with desperation, real and comic.
Deidra (Ashleigh Murray of TV’s “Riverdale”) has it. She’s pretty much raising younger sister Laney (Rachel Crow) and brother Jet (Lance Gray) before flaky, self-absorbed mom (Danielle Nicolette) flips out one-time too many in the parking lot of the electronics store where she works.
“This is who I AM!” She smashes an HDTV, that gets classified as “domestic terrorism.” And she’s HAPPY in the joint, happy to ditch the three kids she wasn’t really raising..
“Every meal has a SALAD! ‘Salad law!'”
Super-organized, super-smart valedictorian Deidra sells homework and test prep assistant to classmates and fills her big wall calendar with the deadlines that loom larger with every passing day.
She’s missing school, struggling to get her scholarship applications filled out so that she can get into “any college that’s at least a two day drive from this Goddamned hillbilly town.”
That would be Shelbyville, Idaho. She’s from an interracial family, so her African American guidance counselor (Sasheer Zamata, funny) wants her to succeed, wants “one student I have here get into a college that doesn’t have ‘community’ in front of it.” The African American GC wants to get out of this GD hick town too, “to an inner city school, where things are…nicer,” herself. So, “I need you to get desperate!”
As the deadlines snowball, the responsibilities mount (Child Welfare Services is involved), bills roll in. “Genetic determinism” (apples not falling far from the tree) is a fresh worry brought up in sociology class.
What if she’s just like her crazy mom and no good dad? No child support dad (David Sullivan) is no help. But…he does work for the railroad.
And there are ways, a century and then some after the deaths of Butch and Sundance, to rob a train. Can a very smart teen and her always-in-her-shadow sister pull off a heist?
The whole voice-over “How to rob a train” montage is the first dull stretch in a comedy built on good casting, sparkling dialogue, brisk editing and yes, desperation. I mean, wouldn’t you feel anxious about your future if you mom was in prison? Especially after she drops one little dollop of “serious” about her past into one prison visit.
“Thought I could reach for something more,” Mom lectures. “‘More’ is not for us.”
The capers are childishly clever and amusingly tense, but it’s the high school and home life stuff that sings here.
Missi Pyle plays the etiquette/home ec teacher running the Miss Idaho Teen Pageant who arm-twists downtrodden Laney into entering.
Tim Blake Nelson is the railroad detective on the case — “Trying to think of a small word that means ‘ignoramus.'”
And Myko Oliver is the ex-boyfriend who works at a burger joint who pooh-poohs Deidra’s other get cash quick schemes.
“Sell weed? You broke up with me because I sell weed.”
A tip of the Pacific Western Railroad hat to the always-funny as a villain Nelson, and to screenwriter Shelby Farrell. Whatever else Netflix is doing to carve a niche in faintly-edgy teen films — crime, illegal substances, sexuality, profanity — starting with witty dialogue and likable characters.
“What do I want to be? You do realize that for thousands of years, that wasn’t a question. No Mesopotamian farmer asked his kid, ‘What do you want to be?'”
“Deidra & Laney” engage in a ferocious sibling catfight (“Bitch” always leads to a throw-down), struggle to cope with bills and school bullying.
The caper and its investigation robs the film of some of its momentum and fun. I’m inclined to say “Rob a Train” (rob “trains,” in point of fact) says what it has to say and does what it sets out to do in the first 45 minutes.
But this generally deft Sydney Freeland film gets more complex, sometimes comically so, for another 45. It also goes all sentimental.
Still, “Deidra & Laney Rob a Train” is that rare made-for-Netflix comedy clever enough, desperate enough, that it could have found an audience on the big screen.
MPAA Rating: TV-14, burglaries, sexual situations, profanity (a single F-bomb included)
Cast: Ashleigh Murray, Rachel Crowe, Missi Pyle,
Credits:Directed by Sydney Freeland , script by Shelby Farrell. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:32
It’s the first or second thing they teach you in all the better “How to Script a Romantic Comedy in Nine Lessons” online courses.
Find an excuse to throw a bunch of sexually active folks together, find a cool location, introduce drinks and pot as “truth serum” and bring in a promiscuous wild card/free electron to stir stuff up.
Let hilarity and maybe a few hurt feelings (with tears) ensue. There’ve been so many big screen variations of the “Secaucus Seven/Big Chill” formula that I lost count that I lost count around the time of “Love! Valour! Compassion!” And that was way back in 1997. “About Alex,” “Peter’s Friends,” the list is endless.
“The Feels” is a slapdash lesbian entry in the field, a laugh-free roundup of seven friends for a bachelorette weekend in or around Healdsburg, in California’s Sonoma Valley wine country.
There’s a little (very little) “Bridesmaids,” and “Bachelorette” (a Kirsten Dunst flop) thrown into this “Big Chill” variation.
The novelty here is having a confession cam — or what plays like one. Characters break from the partying to sit and talk about themselves — mainly about orgasms — for some half-hearted attempt at mockumentary reality.
It’ll chiefly be remembered as the movie Constance Wu made before “Crazy Rich Asians” made her famous and possibly a bankable box office star. Wu stars as Andi, the “attractive, powerful and cool” about to marry Lu (Angela Trimbur). Five of their pals join them for this “wild” weekend in the country.
There’s Vivien (co-writer Lauren Parks) and Youtube lesbian-pop- singer Karin (Kárin Tatoyan). “Regular Helen” (Ever Mainard) is the amusingly blunt, stereotypically butch friend who shows up with a VW Microbus.
And there’s Josh (Josh Fadem of TV’s “Better Call Saul” and “30 Rock”). He’s done much of the organizing, haplessly managed the decorating (AndiLu4EVR poster), and is the one who relishes telling the disappointed Lu that her married-with-two-kids older sister Nikki (director and co-writer Jenée LaMarque) won’t be coming. Or will come. Late. And let down her sis.
Josh is a little on the bitchy side. He’s also the wild card, an Eddie Deezen in the Jeff Goldblum role, heterosexual male in the henhouse. Not quite the right casting, I have to say.
There are awkward toasts, treks to town where they are “Round, brown and ready to party down” (?), according to Helen. Lauren got off early this weekend by lying “to my boss. I told him I was having my eggs harvested this weekend.”
As asides, they have these little confessions — about their first sexual experience, in a two story house with a shiny banister, in a hot tub with frisky waterjets, etc.
Despite those “accidental” Os from puberty, it turns out one of them has never had an orgasm. Ever.
Feelings are hurt, and mended. The singer sings an improvised Lordes-ish tune. Love is all around, no need to waste it. Which is to say that the dweeby guy makes his move (moves).
And precious little happens aside from that, mainly the No Big O revelation, and everybody telling everybody else “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”
Every movie has the potential to speak to “its audience,” and “The Feels” is no different. But basic building blocks like entertainment value, funny lines and funnier situations, played with zest and directed with some sense of pace are dispensed with.
If you’re not inclined to grade on the curve? Slapdash.
MPAA Rating: TV-MA, drug abuse, sex, nudity, profanity
Cast: Constance Wu, Angela Trimbur, Jenée LaMarque, Josh Fadem, Ever Mainard, Kárin Tatoyan, Lauren Parks
Credits:Directed by Jenée LaMarque, Lauren Parks , script by Jenée LaMarque, Lauren Parks . A Gravitas/Netflix release.
Running time: 1:28
Melanie Laurent’s new film opens in France before the U.S (Oct 10), but with this cast, we’ll see “Galveston,” based on a Nic Pizzolatto novel, in limited release shortly.
Brush up on your French with this English language with French subtitles trailer, which puts Elle Fanning in rough company of Ben Foster for 90 minutes.
Movie Nation 