Here’s a documentary/personal essay of the “Roger & Me” variety, a cross-country trip collecting interviews about Elvis, his place in the culture, and the America his rise and fall foresaw.
Eugene Jarecki directed it, Alec Baldwin and Chuck D are in it.
And Emmy Lou Harris, and an Elvismobile — not one of his many Cadillacs, but his Rolls Royce.
Oscilloscope Labs is the releasing studio, and look for it in limited release June 22.
It’s a period piece based on a Henry James story, so it’s about an American among the ancient money/nobility of Europe.
Pairing Joely Richardson and Vanessa Redgrave usually pays off. The ingenues here include Poppy Delevinge and a Polanski daughter.
But what of our protagonist, the fellow in pursuit of lost “papers” of a died-too-young poet? He doesn’t sound like Jonathan Rhys Meyers, not as we’ve ever heard of him. A hint of Joseph Cotten in that accent. Surely he’s not been dubbed.
Nice to see him bounce back, with this and “The 12th Man.”
“The Aspern Papers” open in the U.S. late in the summer, limited release.
Ewan McGregor seems an odd choice to be the adult overworked and losing the thread of life Christopher Robin, the son of A.A. Milne who needs to get back to Pooh, Piglet, Tigger and Eeyore when grownup life becomes too much.
But here he is, in an Aug. 3 movie that seems somehow redundant in light of “Goodbye, Christopher Robin” a couple of years ago. But Marc Forster directed, Hayley Atwell co-stars. Could be good, even if this trailer lacks a certain magic.
Disney’s “Solo: A Star Wars Story,” jump started its “weekend” box office count with Thursday night showings, as is now custom.
It has a holiday weekend all to itself as a new release, meaning Monday/Memorial Day, will be huge as well.
But it’s not setting any records, and that in itself is news. Reviews are middling. The “Star Wars” saturation point appears to have been reached, as the troubled production, following the Christmas “Star Wars” movie, is managing about 92 million over 3.5 days, $114 over 4.5.
Disney and Fox, about to merge, would own 83% of the holiday box office had the merger already taken place, notes Deadline.com. Because “Deadpool 2,” despite a STEEP 67% plunge on its second weekend, will clear $50 over four days.
What do we call a movie that loses over 65% of its opening weekend audience the second weekend? You remember. A TPPP — “A Tyler Perry Picture Plummet.”
Disney’s “Avengers” is still making “Infinity” bucks, another $19-20 million this weekend.
“RBG,” the Ruth Bader Ginsburg documentary, is hanging in the top ten. It and “A Quiet Place” have one last weekend in the top ten before June films start muscling them aside.
“Quiet Place” is over $180 million, which suggests the Blunt/Krasinski brood don’t ave to worry about Ivy League college cash. Ever.
Nothing dazzling about the Metacritic scores for “Solo: A Star Wars Story.”
A 63 is “meh,” and I find it a tad generous.
Of course, Rottentomatoes, where fanboys find legitimacy, is registering a more (meh) robust 71.
With “Deadpool 2” its chief competition, what numbers are we looking at, this Memorial Day weekend?
Deadline.com is calling it a “low-flying” opening, in the $105 million over FOUR days plus Thursday night (“Deadpool 2” did $125 in three plus Thursday night).
Box Office Mojo is calling it a $108 million weekend, with “Deadpool” hanging around at $50-60.
And Box Office Guru is throwing caution to the wind and saying $147 million over four days. Is he headed to Vegas this weekend? That’s a roulette bet.
I hate to see Ron Howard take the hit for a movie whose casting failures he was stuck with during his attempt to salvage the film. Younger critics tend to crucify a reliable old hand like Howard, who was never a dazzling stylist, in any event.
The J.J. Abrams storyline has been just as bad, in my estimation. “Rogue One” was the stand-out in this cycle of Disney cashing in on the Golden Lucas.
But in any event, $100 million in tickets is a lot of customers, and feedback. What are people thinking? I’m not an outlier as a naysayer this time. Lots of pans across Metacriticdom. Usually, if I’m all alone, the people who hate a film flock to a review they agree with (a big source of review traffic).
Yay, or nay on Alden Ehrenreich, Woody, Thandie and Ms. “Game of Thrones” and “Solo?”
It’s a common knock on comedies that they “try too hard.”
But not comedies set in laid-back, chillin’ and slackin’, South by Southwestin’ Austin, Texas. Not since “Slacker.”
Just park your romantic comedy in “The People’s Republic of Austin,” where hipsters grow unruly hair, insist “It’s just patchoili , cling to vinyl like it’s IPO Apple stock and eagerly await the return of VHS, and the comic culture shock laughs will follow.
Theresa Bennett’s “Social Animals” is basically a star vehicle for the quirky charms of Noël Wells, of “Master of None” and the dead-cat indie comedy “Mr. Roosevelt.” It co-stars Josh Radnor (“How I Met Your Mother”) and Southern comic Fortune Feimster. And while it throws a lot of Austin-iana at the wall, laughs and comic/romantic insights are hard to come by in a script that expects the “scene” and the “vibe” to do all the heavy lifting.
Characters rage at how precious the place is turning, “artisanal cupcake shops” driving up property values and driving out old businesses. One of those businesses is House of Wax, where Zoe presides. Yeah, she gives “Brazilians,” a noble profession on the bikini lines of the most hirsute city in the South.
Except nobody will get waxes with a more painless laser hair removal emporium just down the street. She’s broke, all alone and failing, and about to turn 30. “Let (30) fall on your like a warm blanket on a cold day” her pal (Carly Chaikin) advises. But her pal has “settled” for a dull, boorish fiance — a Republican in “The People’s Republic of Austin.”
“We look great…on paper.”
Not for Zoe.
Across the street, another business is failing. Vulcan Video was doomed before it opened, but its owner Paul (Radnor) likes lost causes. Like his marriage. He and Jane (Aya Cash) have kids, but no life. She’s stressed about supporting them all, and he’s whining about the lack of intimacy.
“Maybe you should have an affair,” she gripes.
“Who has time for that?”
That’s our set-up here, people peripherally interconnected (the newlywed played by Samira Wiley is the planet the others orbit), sort of thrown together as Jane takes up with a gigolo (!?) and sweet, romantic-at-heart Paul is hurled at Zoe, with whom he can wax nostalgic (Hah!) about mix CDs and classic films and the days when a video store clerk could have an impact on his customer’s lives. Bars? Not the best place for them to meet.
“I’m sober.”
“That’s great, because I’m an enabler!”
Wells has an approachable pluck about her, but Radnor is such a bland big screen presence that they set off no sparks and never make us believe them as a couple, or root for them.
Bennett, who scripted “Petunia,” couldn’t find a laugh here if the Alamo Drafthouse depended on it. Characters are introduced with illustrated “favorite sexual position” profiles, and the plus-sized stand-up comic Feimster leads a felatio workshop involving most of the women in the cast, and cucumbers.
Jane’s profound insight, “It’s just so hard to be alone…especially when you’re with someone,” drives the action. But what transpires from a real world relationship in crisis is absurd on every level, and not funny on any.
MPAA Rating: R for strong and crude sexual content, language, and drug use
Cast: Noël Wells, Josh Radnor, Aya Cash, Carly Chaikin, Fortune Feimster
Credits:Written and directed by Theresa Bennett. A Paramount release.
Running time: 1:30
It’s always looks so easy in the movies, “the Big Score,” the “heist.”
“Oceans 11,” Oceans 12,” “Oceans 13,” “Oceans 8” or even the woebegone “Logan Lucky” go off like clockwork. The “team” of smart, smooth career criminals with “special skills,” is assembled, the “joint” is “cased,” the caper is rehearsed — preferably with a scale model of the “mark” in question.
The crooks, who banter and get along — when they aren’t double-crossing each other — have seemingly unlimited resources, especially in the glossy all-star caper comedies of Steven Soderbergh.
But the truth is a lot more like “Masterminds,” disorganized mayhem masterminded by morons, or at least people who don’t know what they’re doing. Because they taught themselves how via the movies.
“American Animals” makes it look hard. British producer-director Bart Layton, of TV’s “Breakout” and “Locked-up Abroad,” uses that access to real criminals to conjure up a near masterpiece of “just ordinary guys out to commit a robbery” genre.
It’s a suspenseful “How to” primer and a droll, amusing and sobering “How NOT to,” the sort of movie that could discourage all the bumpkins, frat boys and anybody else bellowing, “WE could do that” while watching a heist picture and knocking back a few.
The Lexington, Kentucky quartet who actually took their shot at instance riches over a dozen years ago could have used that.
Yes, many of us might be able to score a fake-ID. Anybody with a zest for playing dress-up could figure out a disguise. Procuring firearms? This is America. “Whatever you want.”
But surveillance of the place you want to rob without being detected, “logistics,” how to get in and out, procuring a get-away car, finding a “fence” to sell the stolen property to, hurting somebody who gets in your way? That’s where the fantasy sets in. That’s where the “American Animals” get in over their heads.
Barry Keoghan (“Dunkirk”) is Spencer Reinhard, a UK frat boy studying art who takes a shine to the rarer-than-rare, oversized and illustrated by the author John James Audubon “Birds of America” stored under lock-and-key at nearby Transylvania University.
An introvert like Spencer would never act on any thieving impulse. Or so he’d have us believe. So his reprobate adrenaline junky pal Warren (Evan Peters, Quicksilver in the “X-Men” movies) is who he decides to tell about it.
And Warren, jock that he is, takes the ball and runs with it, right up to the moment he sizes up the task and cracks, “We’re going to need a bigger boat.” They need a larger crew. Smart, organized Eric (Jared Abramson) and go-getter/overachieving, monied entrepreneur “Chaz” (Blake Jenner) answer the cryptic question, “Are you out or are you IN?” in the affirmative.
Are they there for the cash? They’re all middle class to upper middle class “kids.” Curiosity of the “What would actually happen in REAL life” variety? Thrill criminals of the Leopold & Loeb persuasion?
Or was it just testosterone-fueled peer pressure?
Layton zips through the obligatory preliminaries — getting a laugh out of the “scale model” cliche, letting us see the various holes in their “fool-proof plan,” as in, a plan conceived by fools who rent “Heist” and “The Thomas Crown Affair,” who watch Sterling Hayden tough-talk the gang through “the plan” in the Kubrick classic, “The Killing,” by way of preparation.
They take on “color” names, just as in Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs.”
“Can I just say how DUMB this whole thing is?”
“This is just how it’s done,” Warren brags. Like he knows.
But Layton, with all his access to reality TV convicts, lifts “American Animals” to another level by the simplest device imaginable. He has the real crooks comment on their actions, thoughts at the time, and their remorse. He interviews the family, teachers and others about how “We were in SHOCK” at what these boys did.
And from time to time, he injects the real Spencer, Warren, Eric and Chaz, into the action, staring in forlorn regret from a driveway as the fictional versions of themselves drive the getaway car towards their “destiny,” and actually IN that car, stupefied at what their younger self just did.
It’s clever to the point of bloody brilliant, and you can say that about the entire movie as well. Peters pegs the needle as a hyped-up punk in need of a thrill, Keoghan (also seen in “The Sacrificial Deer”) makes you wonder if cagey introvert Spencer’s version of events is true, or a cover-up.
Ann Dowd is the officious, grandmotherly librarian in charge of “special collections,” the one they know they have to “eliminate.” And Udo Kier is all understated menace as a Dutch fence, the one person they can find who might buy what they steal, if they can steal it.
“American Animals” is a tense, taut sober and occasionally silly thriller that reminds us that the Caribbean Island at the end of the Hollywood heist is always a mirage. Real life is not like a Steven Soderbergh movie, and real crooks aren’t all-knowing versions of Bullock, Clooney, Pitt and Cheadle.
They make mistakes, even the ones who aren’t American idiots.
MPAA Rating: R for language throughout, some drug use and brief crude/sexual material
Cast: Barry Keoghan, Evan Peters, Blake Jenner, Ann Dowd, Jared Abramson, Udo Kier
Credits: Written and directed by Bart Layton. An Orchard release.
Running time: 1:56
The title “The Sisters Brothers” tells you the tone they’re going for — darkly comic, bloody.
Jake Gyllenhaal and flavor-of-the-moment Rami Malek also star in this comic horse opera. And Rutger Hauer.
Who plays the Sisters Brothers’ mama? Carol Kane.
Jacques Audiard of “The Prophet” and “Rust and Bone” directed. Will it be funny? Dark and bloody, yes, but funny?
Forest Whitaker is the journalist trying to find the truth. Johnny Depp is the cop who may not know who shot Biggie, but has an idea why he DOESN’T know, in this trailer for the Sept. 7 release.
A favorite of conspiracy buffs, this Brad Furman (“The Lincoln Lawyer”) film is based on a “book,” but “true story” might be stretching things a bit.
Well, we all needed Victoria Justice to play one last tormented teenager. We all needed to hear her blurt out “What the F?” like Nickelodeon or The Disney Channel wasn’t there to tell her not to.
“The Outcasts” unleashes Justice, Eden Sher of “The Middle” (aka Mayim Bialik, The Next Generation) and assorted TV teens on a PG-13 high school comedy about bullying, bully baiting, boys, revenge and blowback.
You’d expect no less from the kids at Richard Milhous Nixon High, suburban land of “self-segregated cliques and stereotypical angst” — in movie terms, a sea of pretty, white or at least almost entirely non-black faces.
Justice plays Jodi, a senior who sounds, dresses and seems to think like a 20something wishing she was playing “the cool chick just out of college” or something, anything more removed from “Victorious” than “The Outcasts.”
Sher is narrator-Mindy, MIT-bound while Jodi, daughter of a widowed-dad (Frank Whaley, remember him?) is headed “for a minimum wage job so that I can join the 21st century’s version of serfdom.”
“When did you start speaking like Trotsky?”
Mindy has goals and expectations, and Mr. Samuels, a supportive science teacher. Jodi? She’s seeing the real world through her postal-carrier dad, whom she calls “Herb.” She sings her self-penned songs to a non-existent online audience and fumes.
So she’s NOT the one who suggests, “I think we should ask Whitney (“Queen Beeyotch”) to stop torturing us.” And that “cool kids” party they’ve been invited to? Admiral Ackbar knows, and so does Jodi.
Blonde Whitney (Claudia Lee, wicked) did not get to be queen without mastering the epic, unprovoked burn. Of the Beautiful People, only Dave (Avan Jogia) with the rock star hair seems irked at “Adolf Whit-ler’s” hatefulness. Every generation needs its non-WASP Andrew McCarthy.
“Big Bang Theory” and her “frizzy-haired lapdog” cannot be Whitney’s equals. Not having it. Thus begins the “beating those fascists at their own game” where they “overthrow generations of ingrained high school social strata” to have their revenge.
The plan? “Unionize the outcasts.” Just like legions of such comedies before them.
I’m quoting lots of snippets of dialogue here because that’s a strength of this otherwise lowbrow-slow-going formula teen comedy.
“How’s it going, guys?”
“Well, we haven’t been roofied, yet.”
Kudos to screenwriters Dominique Ferrari, Suzanne Wrubel for giving the ladies, at least, something funny to say — which Justice, with her bangs and deep voice not cannot hide the fact that she’s 25 and too sitcom-stilted to not hit the comebacks, punchlines and pithy aphorisms entirely too hard.
They people the “outcasts” with the usual mix of too-pretty but ignored, overachiever, black revolutionary, emos, band nerds, goody two-shoes and virginal misfits these movies ALWAYS serve up.
No, not all the outcasts are the same. But in the movies, they’re all “types,” the same types. Here, with rare exceptions, they all live “like rich white people.”
Asian “how to get rich by 18” stereotypes, “angry black girl” stereotypes, bespectacled sci-fi nerds, bearded “fantasy cosplay” kings, we’ve got’em all. And they must be recruited in their native “tribe” and habitat. Kind of funny. Even if the scenes are too on-the-nose and hit their laugh-lines entirely too hard.
Virginia, the over-achiever with tech savvy, is played by Ashley Rickards of “Killer App” and TV’s “Awkward. “Ted McGinley is Principal Whitmore because, of course he is.
Nothing too deep here, even though the writers could have angled for homophobic cruelty or anti-Semitic ostracizing. I mean, our heroines are named Shellenberger and Lipschitz — sounds like a Boca Raton law firm, or an NPR co-hosting team.
The payoffs, instead, are bland, perfunctory and cutesy. Big sports movie speeches, fist-bumps of acknowledgement, and we’ve got ourselves an Emo/Goth/Nerd/Smart Kids Rebel Alliance. A bullying in progress? Who you gonna call? Um, text?
Then the Mean Girls (lots of Tina Fey shoutouts) Strike Back. And then “We’re becoming the things we used to hate,” which to be fair, teen comedies like this usually leave out. Not always, but usually.
The sentiments and the story arc are perfectly supportable, the execution? Slow, slack, humorless and lifeless. “The Outcasts” stops dead in its tracks at the midway point and never recovers.
There are film formulas, and then there are production line scripts like “The Outcasts” — scene by scene, character by character cut-and-paste jobs, add “fill in up to the minute snarky dialogue,” and start filming.
“The Outcasts” climaxes early, and heads to prom late. Because of course it does. Whatever sentiments it reaches for feel shoehorned in.
One last gripe, there ought to be a law against opening/establishing shots of yet another pillared portico entrance of Anytown High School for high school movies. Seriously, 40 years and hundreds of versions of it, enough.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for crude and suggestive content, language and some teen partying
Cast: Victoria Justice, Eden Sher, Ashley Rickards, Katie Chang, Avan Jogia, Claudia Lee, Will Peltz, Peyton List
Credits:Directed by Peter Hutchings, script by Dominique Ferrari, Suzanne Wrubel. A Red Granite/Netflix release.
Running time: 1:34
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