Movie Nation

I am seriously bummed that “The Florida Project” didn’t take home a single big prize at the Independent Spirit Awards last night.

Bummed enough to question how they do things in what was once truly the “Indie” niche honoring fare not turned out by a major studio.

“Get Out,” which I’d be perfectly happy to see take home the Best Picture Oscar (a long shot, but not the longest) won best director and best feature honors.

It was a Universal (Blumhouse, horror division) release that earned $175 million. There’s nothing “indie” about it. It didn’t cost a huge amount, it had Catherine Keener in a supporting role (Grand Dame of Indie), but still, it had a huge release, a major studio pushing it and a director with box office oomph, and is a genre film in the most popular non-comic-book movie genre there is.

It’s about as “indie” as the Independent Film Channel, which shows endless reruns of “Con Air.” But there you go.

It could collect an honor or two Oscar night as well, yet another reason to not consider it indie. There’s a sense that “This movie deserves SOMETHING,” thanks to its timing, the phenomenon it became, the sharp satire it presented. Yes, and “Wonder Woman” was a movie of its moment (female empowerment, pre-“#Metoo), and “Black Panther” is a movie of its moment. Neither of them particularly Oscar worthy.

That’s the rub. “Get Out” NOT the “best picture” of 2017. Not the best “indie” film (“The Florida Project”), not the best studio picture (“Dunkirk”), not…the…best. It’ll be remembered by horror film fans as the most highbrow entry in their genre in many years, but will anybody else be looking at reruns of this on cable in three years? No.

Jordan Peele best director. Greta Gerwig  (“Lady Bird”) got best screenplay honors.

Sam Rockwell took another best supporting actor award away from Willem Dafoe, Frances McDormand collected another best actress prize, Allison Janney won here and will win the Oscar too.

Indie Spirit looks an awful lot like Oscar night on a year like this, and that kind of kills the whole idea behind Indie Spirit.

“Mudbound” won the Robert Altman “whole family of the production” prize (Over-rated film, middling director, but sure, why not?), “A Fantastic Woman” took best international (foreign language) feature (good call), “Ingrid Goes West” and “Life and nothing more” — truly INDIE films — took prizes.

A lot of minor prizes at the bottom of the bill also went to true no-budget/no studio backing “Indie” fare.

But seriously, if you’re not going to set yourself apart from the Oscars, honoring films according to your original mission, why bother?

Some of this is the Academy seeing quality in boutique nameplate (A24, Fox Searchlight, Sony Classics) releases, thanks to Indie Spirit Awards of the past. But some of it is this organization refusing to rule out the Jordan Peeles and Martin McDonaghs, the people who line up Margot Robbie to star in their “indie” feature.

Deadline.com is reporting something tipped off by film fans on Reddit and other online movie fan web forums, that Movie Pass, the “disruptive” package deal film ticketing service, is blocking “Red Sparrow” ticket tales in many markets in some theater chains.

The suggestion is that this is “hard ball” on their cut-rate/cutthroat bulk buy ticketing push, aimed at some studios (Fox, in this case) and theater chains that aren’t AMC (My least favorite, in terms of quality of experience, etc.).

A real Richard move there, and while one does sense that the parking lots of your local multiplex have more cars and there are more butts in the seats, especially in off-traffic days, this is the Deal with the Devil Movie Pass wants exhibitors (theater chains) and distributors (studios) to make.

“Cut us in on ticket sales and concessions, or we’ll shut you out.”

As with AirbNb, as with Lyft and Uber, our mania to get a deal and take the most convenient “new” path to a desired end is cutting somebody’s throat, something that’s not in the advertising for the service, the app, etc.

Data mining is, of course, only one of potential downsides to this innovative means of propping up theater attendance.

As with illegal online streaming and downloading, a cut-rate short-cut “service” is inviting folks who find ways to abuse the $10, all these movies pricing structure. 

There is no victimless crime in illegal downloads, there’s no short cut to “all the movies you want to see for one low, low price” that won’t gut the movie business/cinema chains in the short run. The margins on most movies now is a lot narrower than it used to be, and the break-even point for the big ticket films is so high that another cut to their total take hurts.

But go ahead, sell it all to Netflix at fire sale prices.

The Irish co-director of “The Secret of Kells” returns to Oscar consideration with “The Breadwinner,” an Angelina Jolie-produced look inside the patriarchal horrors of Afghanistan under the Taliban.

Using different styles of 2D animation, Nora Twoney’s team conjure up a sun-baked world of poverty, repression and the magical power of storytelling.

“Stories remain in our heart, even when all else is gone,” the one-legged father (voiced by Ali Badshah) tells his daughter Parvana (voiced by Saara Chaudry) as they try to sell a few more family possessions in the street market.

Father is a proud man determined that his little girl know her country’s history, surrounded and repeatedly overrun by empires, but still “We were scientists, philosophers, storytellers.” This last trait is the one Parvana has absorbed from her father, literacy and a memory exercised so that she remembers dozens of traditional tales of Afghanistan.

Father lost his leg “in the war.” He used to be a teacher. Now the Taliban, young, ignorant fanatics, run the country with guns and intimidation. He is threatened for bringing his tweenage daughter to the marketplace, threatened for once being a teacher, with all these threats coming from a former student.

That bullying leads to his arrest. How will Parvana, her mother (Laara Sadiq), scolding older sister (Shaista Latif) and baby brother eat? Women are kept, trapped in their homes. They face starvation when Parvana cannot get a single vendor in the market to sell her food simply because she’s a girl and she is not allowed out.

The stories her father drilled into her may comfort her hyperactive kid brother, tales of The Elephant King and the boy who tests himself against him. But that won’t feed them.

In one magical, wordless moment, Parvana picks up scissors and decides she has the answer. Sister Soroya takes them from her and helps. A haircut, a change of clothes into those worn by her late brother and at least she can spend their shrinking supply of cash on rice, raisins and Naan (bread), enough to keep them all alive.

“When you’re a boy, you can go anywhere you like!”

This Irish-Canadian co-production hews closely to that message, the Taliban’s war on women and the toll that takes on the country. Parvana can read and write in a nation of mostly-illiterate men. As a boy, she can sell that service — reading and writing letters, turning what her father taught her into money that will keep her family alive, making her “The Breadwinner.”

At times the film shows itself an outsiders-looking-in take on the culture it depicts. And Canadian novelist Deborah Ellis isn’t shy about recounting the well-documented evils of Islam’s version of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, armed, ignorant thugs hellbent on dragging Afghanistan back to the Dark Ages.

Parvana’s adventures are picaresque with a hard edge of ugly reality. How can she, a young girl, free her beloved father from a prison which few leave alive? Of course, she finds another girl she knows doing exactly the gender change act she is attempting, just to get by.

The parable of The Elephant King that Parvana spins for her baby brother is a little vague in connecting their present-day struggles with those of a boy on a quest.

For all the different cultures it took to get this Irish-Canadian film about Afghanistan made — the screenwriter is Ukrainian — “The Breadwinner” is most at home connecting Irish traditions to Afghan ones — storytelling. The script often rises to the poetic, and if it’s not as magical as “The Secret of Kells,” what animated film of the past 20 years is?

What matters is its feel of authenticity, of a real struggle, and the lyrical way people trapped in it have of expressing themselves and clinging to hope.

“We must raise our hearts, not our voices. It is rain that makes the flowers grow, not thunder.”

It’s not the best animated film of last year, but “The Breadwinner” certainly deserves to be in that company Oscar night.

MPAA Rating:Rated PG-13 for thematic material including some violent images

Cast: The voices of Saara Chaudry,Soma Chhaya,  Noorin Gulamgaus

Credits:Directed by Nora Twomey, script by Anita Doran and Deborah Ellis, based on the novel by Deborah Ellis. A Gkids release, now on Netflix.

Running time: 1:34

“Black Panther” is only losing about half its audience, weekend to weekend, and that is pushing the Marvel marvel further up the record books in terms of all-time box office hits. It will clear another $60 million or so, when all the cash is tallied Sunday night, and will pass the $500 million mark at the US box office Monday afternoon.

Almost as impressive, “Jumanji” and “The Greatest Showman,” CHRISTMAS movies, are still pulling in people. “Jumanji” will clear the $400 million mark by next weekend, and “Showman” — a musical Hollywood probably wishes it had embraced with more Oscar love (Sunday night on ABC!) — is inching towards $175.

New releases? “Red Sparrow” tests the idea of Jennifer Lawrence as a highly-sexualized leading lady, an adult expected to open her star vehicle with no YA “Hunger Games” franchise to back it up. Mixed, barely passable reviews for the Russian sex-spy picture aren’t doing her any favors. The Oscar winner’s much-hyped debut nude will not hit $20 million.

Then there’s “Death Wish,” a poorly-acted, poorly-written, badly-directed and ill-timed celebration of gun nuttery — a remake NOBODY asked for, that critics are trashing across the board as “toxic.” A movie made by a–holes for a–holes.  Yeah, I sat through it with a paying audience, so I know. It‘s doing $12 million.

“Every Day” is still in the top ten for another week, barely reaching those teen girls who’d drag teen boys along with them for a gooey but thoughtful high school romantic fantasy. 

“Dry-eyed weeper” is movie critic shorthand for a tear-jerking romance that jerks no tears. And alas, that’s what the latest made-for-Netflix production, “Irreplaceable You,” is.

It may have the expressive, doe-eyed delight Gugu Mbatha-Raw (See “Belle” is you haven’t.) as a dying woman who makes her last mission on life finding her fiance a suitable mate. And that set up — tried and true since LONG before IMDb lost track of the Julie Walters/Jim Broadbent weeper with the same plot — should make it a no-brainer.

Wringing tears may be the easiest emotion to manipulate an audience into. Think about how many times you’ve misted up at a faithful dog tale or video on youtube, or Edmund Keane’s famous “Dying is easy, COMEDY is hard” aphorism.

So why doesn’t this come off?

It’s mainly an issue of tone, of how sparing the viewer abrupt blasts of bad news tends to rob a story of surprise and emotion. Lay it at the feet of “Veep” veteran Stephanie Laing, who directed, and Bess Wohl’s limp script, in other words.

When you open your film with shots of a cemetery and our heroine narrating, “This is where my story ends,” you’re playing fair. When you hit her with a doctor reporting “difficult news” to what she and her fiance (Michiel Huisman of “Game of Thrones”) think is a pre-wedding pregnancy ten minutes in, you’re kind of breaking the rules.

It doesn’t matter that you’ve included “Matrix” debates between Abbie (Mbatha-Raw) and her chemo nurse (Timothy Simons), and couple of funny support group scenes featuring an all-star supporting cast. The die is cast. “Comic relief” is supposed to be just that, relief from the grim matter at hand.

When your heroine doesn’t even lose her voluminous head of hair, how are we supposed to feel her pain?

The highlights here are few, but pithy. Steve Coogan leads “the last group you ever wanted to be a member of,” and Kate McKinnon and Christopher Walken are among its “dying of cancer” members.

Walken gets to be the voice of wisdom here, indulging Abbie in her final quest — shopping, “because women  are going to try and dress him (Sam)” after she’s gone, and they’re sure to screw it up, and interviewing Internet dating candidates because “women are going to eat him ALIVE.” Myron (Walken) is there to call her a “schmuck” or a “putz,” whichever works.

The one poignant-funny scene is Abbie, being put on hold as she tries to cancel wedding bookings and her gym membership — “I’m officially DYING, so I figure, ‘Why work out?'”

Yeah, she’s put on hold. We’ve all been there. The gym cancellation part, anyway.

There’s nothing here that’s offensive, nothing that really feels wrong — the support group scenes have an edge, although nobody there looks that sick despite the fact that they’re being told “CANCER is your job,” now.  The leads manage perfect American accents and have a little chemistry.

But the picture just lies there, inert and lifeless, despite the attractive and interesting cast and what must-have-looked like a can’t-miss premise.

“Irreplaceable You,” unlike “P.S. I Love You,” unlike “The Wedding Gift,” does…miss.

MPAA Rating: unrated, adult situations, profanity

Cast: Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Michiel Huisman, Kate McKinnon, Christopher Walken, Steve Coogan, Jackie Weaver

Credits:Directed by Stephanie Laing, script by Bess Wohl. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:35

Count’em — Steenbergen, Fonda, Keaton…and Candice Bergen for good measure.

Older women who are anything but “Little old ladies,” getting their freak on by reading “Fifty Shades of Grey.”

Andy Garcia brings back the charm, Don Johnson oozes over-60 sex appeal, Oscar winnerRichard Dreyfus, and um Craig T. Nelson are the guys.

A Mother’s Day movie to take mom or grandmom to?

If you met someone and really clicked with them, connecting in that “so much in common” “soul mate” level, would you be able to reconnect with them if their appearance changed?

Would appearance matter? And here’s the toughest test of all, would what they looked like matter if you’re still a callow, shallow, appearance-is-everything teenager?

That’s the question underpinning “Every Day,” an airy fairy female romantic fantasy about meeting Mr. Right in high school — and re-meeting him. And her. He or she shows up in a different body every day, forcing you to rediscover that connection wrapped in hunky guys, portly guys, butch girls and cheerleaders, Hispanic kids, the home schooled and the Born Again.

It’s a dopey premise that this film, from the director of the romantic weeper “The Vow” (based on David Levithan’s novel), hangs on. But if you don’t buy in, you’ll miss out on one of the more intriguing and honest — if idealized — portraits of high school that the movies have served up of late.

Built on a string of performers who have to play “A,” the classmate/peer the clingy Rhiannon (Angourie Rice) falls for, by degrees, Michael Sucsy’s film waxes and wanes in a romantic sense as some actors/characters are far more compelling than others, and finishes meekly.

And its insistence that this boy who wakes up every day in a fresh body, with only an iPhone and Siri to help him keep his routine in order, typically wakes up in a middle to upper middle class kid’s life and a generally pretty or handsome one, is grating.

But there are big themes to play with, meaty subtexts to chew on — highest among those? Tolerance. That’s closely followed by “Never judge a book by its cover.”

It’s just wise enough, like “Before I Fall,” about a shallow high school girl who dies every night in a car crash until she learns to appreciate and cherish life, loved ones who need her and classmates who could use her moral support, to hold interest.

Rhiannon is the sort of girl who’s a lot more invested in her relationship with Justin (Justice Smith of “Paper Towns”) than the self-absorbed jock is. He’s not callous. It’s just that he’s got his boys and he likes to smoke and play beer pong with them. He’ll squeeze her in when he’s in the mood for “alone time.”

Until that one day when he’s different. He blows off school and practice and they head into the city (Baltimore, never prettier on film) for their most romantic date ever — inexplicably discovering their shared love of “This is the Day (Your Life Will Surely Change)” by 1980s Brit band The The by singing along to it.

The next morning, he has no memory of it. None.

Then, when Justin ditches her at a party, formerly fundamentalist Nathan (Lucas Jade Zumann) gets her on the dance floor, lures out her deepest, darkest confessions and abruptly disappears. The only way she knows who he was is when he turns up in the news, claiming “The Devil” possessed him the night before and left him stranded on the road, with no idea how he got there.

Text messages from the “real” date start Rhiannon’s learning curve. She meets a cheerleader, an overweight inner city guy, a blue-browed transgender teen (Ian Alexander), all claiming they’re who she spent the previous day with, and she starts to buy in.

But how on Earth can this love affair flower and endure? The logistics alone would eat up half of every day. And not every body that “A,” as her new love calls himself, wakes up in owns an iPhone.

Best not to sweat that too much, as Sucsy’s film immerses us in a lived-in world where adults (Maria Bello plays Rhiannon’s mom) casually swear in front of their kids, where the slang is up to the minute and the kids have a normal cross section of body types (if no acne). That lived-in texture includes Debby Ryan, playing older sister Jolene (Mom had a thing for song-title first names), a foul-mouthed nose-ringed bad girl who barely tolerates her kid sister as she distractedly (dangerously so) drives them to school every morning.

The film hangs on young Ms. Rice’s performance, and while the “Spider-Man: Homecoming” and “Beguiled” starlet is a pretty, dainty thing, she doesn’t deliver the heartbreak and longing you need for this character to make this romance work.

Big heart-tugging moments — “A” finding himself in a suicidal teen’s body, testing his “Never mess up their lives” credo — fail to pay off. That’s on Sucsy.

Still, the idea that it takes an old soul to truly figure out your teen years — observing others, living in their skin (literally), broadening your perspective and your mind — resonates. “A” has a simple response to Rhiannon’s brittle home life. Her father had a breakdown, and Rhiannon’s new beau gives her a broader, forgiving and world-wise take on that.

“Sometimes, you just need a break.”

Yeah. Sometimes you do. And observations like that occur with just enough frequency in this somewhat strained romantic fantasy to suggest it will connect with some folks in some ways at some moments, which is the very definition of a “cult film.”

Which this could very well be. Some day.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic content, language, teen drinking, and suggestive material

Cast: Angourie Rice, Justice Smith, Lucas Jade Zumann, Maria Bello, Jacob Batalon and Debby Ryan

Credits:Directed by Michael Sucsy, script by Jesse Andrews, based on the David Levithan novel. An Orion release.

Running time: 1:37

As subtle as an NRA recruitment video, and about as emotional, Eli Roth’s “Death Wish” is that horror filmmaker’s remake of a ’70s vigilante film that nobody was asking for.

Bruce Willis, looking decrepit and acting like he gave his last damn a dozen years ago, stars in what plays like an old man’s movie for angry, emasculated and frightened old men.

And Roth? The “Hostel” director turned horror impresario underscores the cold hard truth that as a director, he makes a helluva producer. Whatever he knew about creating tension and suspense he forgot in his zeal to show sucking neck wounds, brain splatter and the other effects of bullets tearing into his flesh. The movie has no pulse.

Changing the vigilante from Charles Bronson as a man we never for a second believe is an architect to Willis, whom we never believe for half a second is a surgeon, is the most twisted thing about this remake. Roth uses split screens and montages to show Dr. Paul Kersey locking and loading, intercut with images of him dealing with the bodily injuries caused by gunshot wounds in a Chicago hospital.

There’s a conflict a real director could have chewed on.

The set-up is the same, a man who feels helpless when his home is invaded, his wife and daughter (Elisabeth Shue, Camilla Morrone) attacked, a man who feels he has “failed at the most important thing a man does,” protecting his family.

He needs…a gun.

Because when you can’t make us feel a thing in delivering “Look what those animals did to my baby,” standing over his comatose college-bound daughter’s hospital bed, getting revenge with firearms is the only option.

Roth lets the picture dawdle as the Joe Carnahan script parrots a tirade of Fox News “Chicago– City of Death” talking points, an aural assault of talk radio hosts decrying their city’s GUN violence problem (Never mentioning the GUN part, or where the guns come from — lax-gun-law Mike Penceland). He lets Kersey work his way up from random street thugs to the actual perpetrators of the home invasion, guys he more or less stumbles across.

Roth puts all the movie’s creativity into finding ways to do in the bad guys. Not that there’s much to that, either. No, not every hoodlum is black or brown. That’s progress.

Willis, as Kersey, dons assorted hoodies, practices with a stolen gun and injects himself into the city’s “crime wave,” becoming the viral phenomenon the locals label “The Grim Reaper.” He smirks when he sees cell phone video of his first kills.

The cops (Dean Norris, Kimberley Elise) of course sympathize, as they joke about “animals killing animals” on the streets, and Roth picks the oddest places to give them close-ups — throwing up after biting into an “organic” energy bar.

Willis can’t muster up the heat to make us feel the fix-his-bloody-wounds from combat (“Surgeon, surger thyself?”) or get the sense of Kersey’s personal journey, from impotent, helpless victim to man with guns. Shue might convince us it’s a happy marriage, Willis cannot be bothered to summon up the warmth of faked attraction.

  Vincent D’Onofrio scores points as the doc’s more streetwise brother, a flawed man whom D’Onofrio gives humanity in every scene.

I’d compliment Len Cariou (“Blue Bloods”), who has a lovely moment as an elderly father burying his daughter, Paul’s wife. But Roth and Carnahan (“The A-Team,” “Smokin; Aces”) follow that with a moment so jarring and silly — grandpa pickin’ up his shootin’ iron — that you forget how real the guy seemed just seconds before.

Roth, who hasn’t directed that much for a guy with his grossly inflated (horror) reputation, can’t get out of his own way here. And any thoughts of this reviving a career Willis seems to have lost interest in bleed out long before the closing credits.

MPAA Rating: R for strong bloody violence, and language throughout

Cast: Bruce Willis, Elisabeth Shue, Vincent D’Onofrio, Dean Norris, Camilla Morrone

Credits:Directed by Eli Roth, script by Joe Carnahan, based on the 1974 movie. An MGM Paramount release.

Running time: 1:47

Bruce Willis is long in the tooth, but if there’s one thing Eastwood’s long career taught us, it’s that action stars can still get it done so long as the most physical thing they have to pull off is pulling a trigger.

Eli Roth was a celebrated star of horror cinema back when “Hostel” came out and “torture porn” was so-named. He’s sought his fortune by parlaying his fame in the 13 years since into producing other people’s ultra-violent horror pictures.

His credits as a writer and/or director over those years have been singularly underwhelming –– “The Green Inferno,” anyone? “Knock Knock?” At least he didn’t do a “Hostel 3” after “Hostel 2.” He’s seemed more concerned with creating a brand and slapping his name on it than making new movies.

So there’s actually a lot riding on this unpreviewed-for–critics remake of a Charles Bronson/Michael Winner picture that is a cultural touchstone, its very title becoming shorthand for any story of a non-violent  person turning violent and vengeful when “The Other” draws first blood.

Does Willis have a new franchise on his hands? Will Roth resuscitate his rep and break free of the horror trap? We shall see.

Not a new show, not the first time I’ve said this.

But in a sea of cable and streaming “reality TV,” where we go to Late Night Hosts for our news, when “fact” has been reduced to opinion thanks to a single TV network, one TV program stands above all others in giving us lower-than-low comedy built upon the Great Edifice of Fact.

Derek Waters’ genius conceit, feeding comics (and comic actors) drinks as they relate researched, footnote-able “history” about tragedies, towns, poets and “underdogs” in their own slurred and progressively drunker words, has hit the sweet spot.

Where else can you go on a weekly basis, giggle hysterically at a comic impersonating Ross Perot in high-voiced high-dudgeon over funding The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and get choked up and misty-eyed over the sweeping story of this maligned then feverishly embraced national monument and the woman who designed it?

Where else can you see Lin-Manuel Miranda give us the DRUNKEN version of the life of Alexander Hamilton? Between hiccups, and the occasional belch?

It’s no wonder that guest stars — from Colin Hanks (Playing ‘mister” Fred Rogers a year before his father takes on the children’s TV icon) to Mandy Moore, Will Ferrell and Jenny Slate to Bob Oedenkirk sign on to mime out the stories assorted stand-ups (Tiffany Haddish was a stand out stand-up) boozily recite/relate and find themselves relating to.

I’m a history buff, and in spite of decades of reading everything that comes out on Thomas Jefferson, Hamilton, Ida Tarbell and Gloria Steinem, I find myself slack-jawed in awe at some of what the show’s research team digs up about them, or Baltimore and Poe, Coca-Cola and Atlanta.

It’s a program whose time has come, for a history-ignorant culture that will come for the drunken laughs and learn something, almost in spite of itself.

If you’ve forgotten its on Comedy Central, set the DVR and find your way back to the light. If you’ve never seen it, find it. See it sober and let it sink in.

This is TV’s finest half hour.