This should be a spinoff from “John Wicke.” The idea of a hospital run for the murderous, the larcenous, injured “in the line of duty?”
Jodie Foster, Sterling K. Brown, Jeff Goldblum, Jenny Slate, Sofia Boutella, Charlie Day, Dave Bautista and many many others check in. June 8. Looks like a hoot.
There’s a statue I always make a point of passing by whenever I’m in Central Park in Manhattan. It’s of Balto, one of the “hero” sled dogs of Nome, Alaska’s diphtheria epidemic of 1925 and the subject of a pretty good animated film for kids.
So there’s an historic precedent for “Sgt. Stubby: An American Hero,” a modest-budget cartoon based on the true story of a mascot/war dog and valued member of his regiment in the trenches of World War I.
You want to teach kids about the horrors of The Great War, a somewhat sanitized cartoon is a better way to do it than say, the grim realism of “War Horse.”
It’s about a mutt who follows a friendly recruit from a small town Connecticut Main St. parade to the Yale parade grounds and basic training, where he becomes mascot and eventually life-saving war dog to 102nd Regiment of The Yankee Division, deployed to France in the pivotal final year of World War I.
The official record is, this generally untrained pooch warned his unit about mustard gas attacks, tracked down and comforted the wounded and took part in 17 battles in the Argonne, Château-Thierry and the final offensives that won the war. There are books about him and after his death, he was displayed at the Smithsonian Institution.
The filmmakers, from Canada’s TouTenKartoon and Fun Factory, don’t have him talk, they just tell his story, with a little creative and animated license. Robert Conroy (voiced by Logan Lerman) was the soldier who found him, got him to Europe and smuggled him home.
An indulgent drill instructor with a sense of humor lets him stay. “This dog drills better’n any of you.” A French soldier (Gerard Depardieu) mentors Conroy and Stubby once they reach the trenches.
And Robert Conroy’s sister (Helena Bonham Carter), the one he wrote letters to about the dog, narrates the tale.
The script traffics in some pretty tepid cliches, cooks who don’t like serving the dog, until the dog makes himself useful. Gaston, the Frenchman, complains about the teetotalling dog handler.
“You don’t like wine, Americain solzher?”
The precious few laughs here come via the easily recognizable canine behavior the animators capture. Running the dog through the obstacle course the soldiers train on is an obvious but cute touch.
“No Man’s Land” is rather less devastated and horrific than the real thing, but the trenches are realistically rendered, and the horrid German mustard gas attacks are vividly depicted.
Having the “Yankee” Division ship out, via train, through a sagebrush littered Western landscape (Western Connecticut?) can be dismissed as a Canadian animation mistake. Otherwise, the visuals aren’t bad.
Truthfully, it’s a tame and tepid affair for a kids’ film, with its chief recommendation being the chunks of truth built into its story. Stubby really did this and that, and the Frenchwomen of Château-Thierry really did sew him a chamois coat for his bravery and service to the town. He came home a celebrated war hero.
And while there’s no statue to him in Central Park, you can find him in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., another reminder of “Who’s a good boy?”
MPAA Rating: PG for war action and some thematic elements
Cast: Helena Bonham Carter, Logan Lerman, Gerard Depardieu
Credits:Directed by, script by Richard Lanni, Mike Stokey . A Fun Academy release.
Running time: 1:24
The groaning pills and pot gags, the bad puns, the middle-aged paunches.
Yes, Broken Lizard is back, 17 years after the “How lowbrow can we go?” success (ahem) of “Super Troopers,” the aging comedy ensemble, beloved by stoners, have crowd-funded their way back onto the big screen.
The “Club Dread” kids — not really — are older farts making fart jokes now, slapping together another slapstick farce about cops behaving badly for the adoration of frat boys everywhere.
The core of their corps — Jay Chandrasekhar, Kevin Heffernan, Steve Lemme, Paul Soter and Erik Stolhanske — is none the worse for wear, and still willing to let it all hang out in “Super Troopers 2,” an international incident of a comedy about Vermont cops getting jurisdiction over a little corner of the scenic Northeast that syrup-slurping Moose Heads have long called Canada.
The governor (Lynda Carter) explains how St. Georges du Laurent is actually American property, now. The chief (Brian Cox) leads the re-hired misfits fired so long ago for “The Fred Savage Incident” to “temporarily” take charge of a French Canadian town none too happy to lose its identity, its Pepe le Pew accents and access to National Health Care, Tim Horton’s and “Hockey Night in Canada.”
Or as they, led by their ex-hockey-player mayor (Rob Lowe) put it, you can stick your “Make America Great Again” where the Midnight Sun don’t shine.
“Weaker beer,” worse healthcare and zero gun laws is what the Yanks are offering, so the “Canuckleheads” say. And what’re they to lose? Aside from Rush and Barenaked Ladies?
A trio of disgruntled Mounties (Tyler Labine, Will Sasso and Hayes MacArthur) are aboot t’be kicked oot on their keisters. So hard feelings all around, eh?
The Canadians have Emmanuelle Chriqui as a cultural attache (Hey, a gal’s gotta work between “Fast and Furious” paydays) and that generally sunny Canadian way, always saying “Sow-ry” even when nothing is their fault.
The Americans steal their uniforms and run out ruining their reputations, pulling over tourists and unloading a string of French gibberish at them, as if the interlopers don’t speak the language.
“Frere Jacques grey poupon eau de TOILETTE! Ratatouille sacre croissant!”
I did laugh, here and there, at the endless “Mexican” gags aimed at Indian-American Jay Chandrasekhar, at Steve Lemme’s amusingly abrasive “Womack,” a comic actor of the Jimmy Fallon school — always on the brink of breaking-up in mid-scene.
The over-the-top blowhard Farva (Kevin Heffernan) tries ever so hard it’d be rude not to giggle at him, maybe twice.
But so many of the gags let the strain show. This stuff is seriously played, as in “R-rated comedy has passed you by.” Pill-paralyzed guy wheels his “Rascal” into a stack of bottles at a supermarket? Heat vision goggles revealing flatulence? The weary Canuck jokes? After “The Hangover” and “Bridesmaids,” after “Saturday Night Live” and for that matter, “How I Met Your Mother,” none of this stuff seems fresh, new, rude or that “politically incorrect.”
Cox blows his stack with skill, but the “plot” is a non-starter, the drug gags — female hormone pill jokes, a pot smoking band bus opener with Seann William Scott and whatever Wayans is still working these days playing the cops — past its expiration date.
Drug jokes are for the young, or the very very old. Plump middle-aged guys dyeing their hair to tell them? That’s just sad.
But never mind that. If you’re still into that, mazeltov. Go and be happy. Just designate a driver, stoners. You, like your heroes, aren’t as young and irresponsible as you used to be.
MPAA Rating:R for crude sexual content and language throughout, drug material and some graphic nudity
Cast: Broken Lizard, Emmanuelle Chriqui, Rob Lowe, Brian Cox, Lynda Carter, Seann William Scott, Clifton Collins, Jr.
Credits:Directed by Jay Chandrasekhar , script by Jay Chandrasekhar, Kevin Heffernan, Steve Lemme, Paul Soter, Erik Stolhanske
A Fox Searchlight release.
Running time: 1:30
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“Duck Butter” harks back to the earliest years of the Queer Cinema, “coming out” and “coming of age, sexually” dramas such as “Lianna” or “Go Fish.”
But it transcends those tentative first steps into the cinematic mainstream by foregoing many of the worn tropes of the corner of cinema, giving us a naive but wholly out and experienced heroine in search of herself and first true love, and maybe screwing that up the way she screws up much of the rest of her life.
Miguel Arteta did “Chuck & Buck” and “The Good Girl,” and in star and co-writer Alia Shawcat, of “Arrested Development” and the TBS series “Search Party,” he’s got a collaborator willing to put it all out there and forget her comic crutches for an intimate, damaged and personal story packed into day and night of enforced intimacy with somebody who might “be the one.”
“I feel great about it!”
Shawcat is Naima, a young actress working the indie side of the street who might be getting her Big Indie Break. She plays a third wheel in an indie romance being directed by Mumblecore Kings the Duplass Brothers, Jay and Mark (“Jeff, Who Lives at Home,” “Cyrus”) starring Kumail Nanjiani of “The Big Sick.”
And we get to see her blow it. Maybe it’s her inexperience, her lack of understanding of the heterosexual situation she’s been cast into, but her off-key rehearsals and implied arrogance at refusing the gentler-than-gentle direction the sweetheart Duplasses give her tell us this won’t work out.
But off-set, she’s met somebody who pushes that “blown big break” to the back of her mind. Sergio (Laia Costa of “Victoria” and “Piercing”) is a bracing, exotic and impulsive foreigner, an aspiring singer and free spirit who dances to a tune only she hears. She scribbles art, tries out songs at Oil Can Harry’s gay bar and has neither any visible means of support nor obvious talent.
Naima is smitten.
Social drinking gives Sergio the chance to expound upon her world view — “Do everything you want the second you want.” That might be a kiss, that could be something more profound. Sergio’s arresting idea for breaking the ice? “Skip time,” avoid all the dating and courtship rituals that trip up potential couplings. Spend 24 hours, eating, drinking, copulating and relating to the person you’re interested in.
No sleep. No closed door bathroom breaks. Sergio, we come to learn, has a thing about her excretory functions.
And Naima, who confesses “I’ve never actually gotten close enough to someone to love them,” is willing to give this a go. After, of course, she learns she’s lost the movie gig.
So they get together in Sergio’s How-can-she-afford-this? LA house, play with her dog, argue and get intimate — repeatedly — over the course of what feels like a make-or-break first 24 hours of their relationship.
The current cliches of young love movies intrude here and there. Of course, they get “real” while video chatting with each other across an empty room. The movie business tie-in is lazy, a cheap way to get the Duplass Brothers on board and another name (Nanjiani) into the credits.
The most obvious way “Duck Butter” ties into the traditions of its gender genre are the “how to” nature of the sex scenes, giving the straight world and youngsters just discovering themselves a clue about “How do they do it?” This isn’t “Blue is the Warmest Color,” but the intimate scenes are intense and explicit without being particularly titillating. Romantic? Maybe.
Arteta’s quiet and deliberate storytelling style lets us see the pitfalls facing this couple before they do. Whatever hopeful vibe is in play here, this Sergio chick is a bit of a nut. The first time she goes ape with her feces — she warns us about this habit– most potential mates, and viewers — will get the clue. “Maybe a little too ‘OUT THERE’ for me.”
Sergio reinforces Naima’s worst impulses — argumentativeness, egotism, giving free rein to her anger at a world that doesn’t owe her a career. Neither, I have to say, comes off as that likable. Can they not see this? Or is that kind of their type?
But the two leads make an interesting couple, not so much with peg-the-meter attraction or sparks-flying potential conflicts, as two women recognizing something they’re lacking and desperately, naively hoping to find it in the next available partner — each other.
MPAA Rating: unrated, with graphic sexual and scatalogical situations
Cast: Alia Shawkat, Laia Costa, Kumail Nanjiani, Jay Duplass, Mark Duplass
Credits:Directed by Miguel Arteta, script by Miguel Arteta, Alia Shawkat. An Orchard release.
Running time: 1:37
Peter Weir’s original film — mid-70s mysterious, sensual, creepy, launched Australian cinema in the mid-70s. You simply cannot overstate the importance of this classic import, with its many overtones and subtexts, the first time the world saw actresses like Rachel Roberts and Jacki Weaver.
In the new “limited series,” Natalie Dormer of “Captain America” and “The Tudors” and “Game of Thrones” is the martinet of a teacher who loses some of her girls’ school students at an Australian landmark.
A little stoner “America absorbs Canadian Culture” comedy.
Among the guest stars, Brian Cox, Lynda Carter,, Emmanuelle Chriqui, Rob Lowe, Jim Gaffigan, Fred Savage. As the original was like visiting the church of a strange religion (Stonertology) without imbibing in the rites (weed), well, low expectations.
Older farts doing stoner comedy? How’ll that work? Guess we’ll find “oot” in a tick.
Streaming cinema fans in search of the silly, the sexual, the satiric and the subtitled should definitely take a gander at “I Am Not an Easy Man,” a French sex farce about seeing the world from the other gender’s side.
It’s “What Women Want” or more exactly, the old Ellen Barkin/Jimmy Smits body-switch comedy “Switch” — going further, into funnier places in a post #timesup take on the gender wars.
We meet Damien, played by Vincent Elbaz of “The Hundred Foot Journey,” at the office, pitching a horrifically sexist phone app, the “Bone-o-Meter,” an idea hilariously endorsed by one and all in a conference room full of men.
Save for one. The only woman there is appalled.
Chuckling later, he strolls with all the swagger his entitlement can give him, swapping come-ons with assorted female shop owners and casual acquaintances who suggest “friends with benefits” arrangements. He goes to his pal Christophe’s book-signing and comes-on, aggressively and obnoxiously, to Christophe’s champagne-serving assistant, Alexandra (Marie-Sophie Ferdane). He even has a favorite pick-up line.
“Do you know what champagne and orange juice is?”
“A mimosa!”
“Your mouth looks pretty when you say it.”
Say good-bye, Damien.
“And when will I see you again?”
“In another life!”
It’s the walk home with Christophe (Pierre Benezit) that changes Damien’s life. He blindly strolls into a street sign so hard he knocks himself out. When he wakes up, the paramedic (a woman) is checking him out. Christophe is worried.
And the sign, directing us to the famous Paris Pere Lachaise (Father Lachaise) Cemetery? It’s now called Mere (Mother) Lachaise. Women, brazenly and uninvited, flirt from their cars. And when he wakes up in the morning, there’s nothing in his closet but colorful, revealing and suggestive shorts, shirts, “too tight” pants and sweatpants.
Before the morning is done, he’s realized that the one woman in that conference room at work is now the boss, that women are in ALL the decision-making positions at his ad agency. That boss has crudely come-on to him, asking for oral sex. And when he’s bristled and lashed out at this “parallel world” he finds himself in, he’s fired.
Christophe is no longer the author. He’s the author’s assistant. Alexandra the assistant is now the star writer, aggressive, assertive and entitled — sure that her Jaguar convertible will impress the boys.
Co-writer/director Eleonore Pourriat is also an actress, and she was even on the Louis C.K. series “Louis.” So yeah, you can guess she’s got stories to tell, and a point of view.
“I Am Not an Easy Man” –the title uses “easy” in that “Easy A” or “Earth Girls are Easy” sense — gives Damien and the viewer comic whiplash, dropping him into a world where women call the shots and have since time immemorial. Their clothing is masculinized, their aggression and assertiveness is built into their thinking. Even the aged and the homely figure they’ve got the right and indeed the obligation to “make the first move.”
Just. Like. Men.
Damien hooks up with one of those friends-with-benefits, who rejects him because he’s got too much body hair down there, “like a monkey.” Time for the boys (Christophe) to get together for a waxing session.
Men endure belittlement, discrimination, intellectual dismissal, brutish/selfish/dominating sex, ogling, catcalls and harassment and strip clubs where lithe, athletic men are the pole dancers. Boys headed off to high school wear belly-baring shirts and short shorts, lads objectified since birth.
Naturally, they organize. The women don’t have much patience for their “Masculist Groups,” and Alexandra’s next book pitch was going to be about “the myth of female dominance.” Until she takes up with Damien and her publisher thinks his “men in charge” delusion would make for hilarious reading.
For women.
I laughed and laughed at this thing, a film of wry, knowing giggles whose director knows where to stick the knife. As it’s on Netflix, you don’t have to read subtitles. It’s available as dubbed into English (check your audio settings).
But in any language, “I Am Not an Easy Man” works, an over-reaching satire that gets at the horrors women face in a world where they don’t have equality or the entitled initiative to succeed and a film that suggests God help us if the shoe is ever on the other foot.
MPAA Rating: unrated, with sex scenes, a fist fight
Cast: Vincent Elbaz, Marie-Sophie Ferdane, Pierre Benezit, Blanche Gardin
Credits:Directed by Eleonore Pourriat, script by Ariane Fert and Eleonore Pourriat. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:38
Alex Pettyfer is the reporter chasing down the “suicides” behind Soviet Russia’s World War II Polish mass murders in “The Last Witness.” Michael Gambon is among those assuring him “There’s no STORY here.”
This one opens in Poland this month, limited release elsewhere over the summer. Looks a bit malnourished, I have to say.
OK, he’s not the star. Nor is James Caan. Not Ving Rhames or Talia Shire or Armand Assante, either.
Justin Baldoni plays hustler/millionaire Barry Minkow in this “true story” con and crash bio-pic, about the “carpet restoration king” who morphed into…a preacher. Make your own titular jokes about that, as I’m above it. “Con Man” was due out in March, but the trailer’s new, so…
The actor and director Stanley Tucci read journalist/essayist and biographer James Lord’s account of “sitting” for acclaimed sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti and saw a movie in it, a simple “two-hander” in the parlance of pictures, a comic war of wills and dueling vanities.
“Final Portrait” is the film he gleaned from that biography, a tale of mismatched equals bantering and wrestling over something both of them desperately want. The famous artist wants to paint the pretty, pretty man. The pretty pretty man wants yet ANOTHER famous artist to immortalize him on canvas.
Geoffrey Rush plays Giacometti as a shambling slouch of a genius — cavalier about the cash raining down on him for his clay sculptures and abstract paintings. It’s 1964, and the Italian-Swiss artist is at the peak of his fame, one of the few people Picasso would call a “peer.” But outside of the art world of the day, outside of Paris, who knows him? He never achieved Pablo’s notoriety.
But Lord (Armie Hammer), a dashing gay swain with published travel writings and artist profiles, appreciates the master. He has, as he would title a later memoir (one of many), “A Gift for Admiration.” And as Giacometti would like to repay that flattery with a portrait, and promises “two, three hours, an afternoon at most” for Lord to collect another vision of himself as seen by a great artist, why not?
It’s only when sitting for the great artist that his future biographer gets a taste of the “real” Giacometti. He dabs a bit on the canvas, and CURSES. He dabs a bit more, and wanders over to admire, criticize or tinker with a clay sculpture in progress. He drops the brush and suggests “Lunch?”
“It is impossible to to ever finish a portrait,” the old man grumbles.
“So what we’re doing is meaningless?”
Lord listens to the comical expletives, the grousing insecurities, and has the effrontery to ask, “Have you ALWAYS been like this?” He answers each Giacometti “That’s a start,” signalling the end of the work for the day, with “I was supposed to leave tomorrow.” He watches Giacometti toss an inferior sculpture on the floor, shattering it, with “What a ham!”
“What?”
“I thought you were WITHOUT affectation!”
Tucci has read this memoir and picked up on Lord’s own inflated self-regard, the filter of the egotistical author remembering his younger self as an equal to the great artist and carrying and comporting himself as such. Hammer, sharing his scenes with an accomplished Oscar winner, holds his own as well. His patrician physical perfection decked out in the lounging classes’ dapper shirt, tie, blue sport coat and chinos, he endures Rush’s closer-than-close-up examination of his physical features with a stifled grin.
“From the front,” Giacometti, who looked a lot like Geoffrey Rush, grouses “you look like a brute. From the SIDE, you look like a DEGENERATE!”
Tucci’s “Big Night” muse, Tony Shalhoub, plays another brother figure here, the artist’s wry, indulgent assistant, a man who builds the frames the sculptures are molded onto, who stretches canvases and boxes them up when finished.
“I’m reading a good book.”
“Is it one of mine?” Again, Lord’s ego.
“No, it is ‘The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.'”
“What’s it about?”
“A spy. Who comes in…from the cold.”
Lord observes the long-suffering former muse (Sylvia Testud) who shares her life with Giacometti, and the giddy, spendthrift prostitute (Clemence Poesy) who has his attentions now. And he sits. And waits.
“Don’t SCRATCH your nose.”
“It itches.”
“Don’t ITCH.”
“Final Portrait” is a slight little nothing of a story, but I delighted in its wordplay, its depiction of a Paris as imagined in the mottled greys and dull browns of Giacometti’s art. Tucci’s production designer creates a drab ruin of a studio, all mud spattered floors and walls, grey light coming in from above.
Tucci uses his camera as the artist’s eye, exploring in tight close-up the tiny details of Hammer’s perfectly sculpted face just as Giacometti/Rush leans in to get a feel for his subject. The painting, starting with the eyes and working outward, gives us a new appreciation for the artist and his technique.
And “Final Portrait,” coming close on the heels of all the Oscar attention for “Call Me By Your Name,” lifts Hammer out of the league of lightweights he’s been trapped in.
Or anoints him their king. Either way, a delicious pas de deux for these two.
MPAA Rating: R for language, some sexual references and nudity
Cast: Armie Hammer, Geoffrey Rush, Tony Shalhoub, Clémence Poésy, Sylvia Testud
Credits:Written and directed by Stanley Tucci, adapted from James Lord’s memoir, ” “A Giacometti Portrait.” A Sony Pictures Classics release.
Running time: 1:30
