Late getting to this. A lot’s been going on–holidays, aged family to take care of, a dying pet, life, democracy’s end, other movies to get to.
Right.
Durham for the day it is. “Brutal” running time. Brutal prices, but that’s AMC for you. Here we go. There and a half hours, plus…
In his mid ’70s, it’s only natural that the great Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar should turn his attentions to reflecting on lives lived, and questions of how one wants life to end with his latest film.
But in boiling down and adapting the Sigrid Nunez novel “What Are You Going Through” into “The Room Next Door,” Almodóvar has conjured up the blithe, arid banalities of Woody Allen at his most pretentious. He squanders two Oscar winners and an Emmy winner in a drab, lifeless story in which characters recite passages from poetry and James Joyce from memory and watch Buster Keaton’s silent classic “Seven Chances” as they ponder a planned suicide and melodramatic strings drone on in the score.
All that’s missing are a few mentions of “Mahler”and you’d have yourself a companion piece to any one of a dozen later Allen films, the ones without a laugh or a light moment to recommend them.
Julianne Moore plays Ingrid, a busy, best-selling author of “fictionalized” biographies and non-fiction who learns of an old friend’s cancerous decline from a mutual acquaintance who comes to a book signing.
Martha (Tilda Swinton) was once a combat correspondant. Now she’s in a New York hospital, longing to go home. As booked-up Ingrid — not a “close” friend — sets aside bigger and bigger chunks of her days to take Martha’s calls and visit her once she comes home to her roomy Manhattan flat to recover from her latest treatment, they reminisce over their careers — especially Martha’s.
They talk about “New York in the ’80s,” Martha’s daughter, flashing back to the troubled Vietnam vet father the child never knew and joke about a “shared lover,” and chuckle as they compare “enthusiastic” notes.
Martha also lets on as to how she’s prepped herself for “the end,” and how her “experimental treatment…survival feels almost disappointing.”
When things take a turn, Ingrid is who Martha confides in. She figures that her life of fame won through risk in war zones means “I deserve a good death.” Ingrid’s involvement drifts towards “the ask.” Martha wants to take a “suicide pill.” She wants to do it in Woodstock, in a posher-than-posh AirBnB. And she wants Ingrid in “The Room Next Door” when she does it — for companionship, and for dealing with the legal complexity of what comes after.
Whatever life there was in the Nunez novel seems bleached out of this meandering, claustrophobic melodrama that that Ingrid finds herself trapped in. That “shared lover” (John Turturro) is still in her life, a friend she can confide in and get advice from.
But this extraordinary situation barely takes on the gravitas demanded. Some anecdotes do nothing to illuminate character or this predicament. And the comic possibilities — this is like asking a casual acquaintance of long standing to oh, babysit, dogsit, help you move, co-sign a loan or the like.
Why didn’t Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld ever get around to assisted suicide as an “inconvenience?”
Moore is too good an actress to not let us feel the gut-punch of this turn of events. Swinton, who takes on a cadaverous in the later acts, easily fits our mental picture of a famous female war reporter — flinty, a little butch, blunt about her success and her failings and pragmatic about her goals.
Ingrid’s last goal is to die with dignity, with a writer she trusts perhaps taking an interest in her journals and by extension, her life story. That’s cynical, but letting Ingrid (and the viewer) figure that out had all sorts of dramatic possibilities.
It’s all perfectly high-minded and polished, but all of this could have been treated with more spark than comes across here. The epilogue that comes after a disappointing third act feels like both a stunt and one last let down that a legendary filmmaker delivers in adapting a novel he was either too serious about, or that he didn’t take seriously enough.
Rating: PG-13, suicide, profanity
Cast: Julianne Moore, Tilda Swinton, Alessandro Nivola and John Turturro
Credits: Scripted and directed by Pedro Almodóvar, based on a novel by Sigrid Nunez. A Sony Pictures Classics release.
Running time: 1:43
With Moms Mabley, Tiffany Haddish and Mo’Nique as my witnesses, I swear Hollywood could’ve gotten a funnier movie out of Keke Palmer by just setting up a camera in front of her whilst she texts, tweets and blurts whatever comes into her head aloud that the dead-comedy-walking “One of Them Days” provides.
It’s a lumbering stiff “buddy picture” with a “Friday” set-up. Just Keke (“Nope,””Pimp”) and Oscar-nominated singer/songwriter (for Original Song “All the Stars” from “Black Panther”) turned overripe actress SZA playing 30ish roomies trying to cope with being broke, Black and trapped “in the cycle” of working poverty “in the hood” in L.A.
As Dreux and Alyssa, they make mistakes about men, debt, which mobsters you don’t cross and white girl privilege over the course of a single day when the rent is due.
Waitress with “business school” cred Dreux (Palmer) has a big interview and a chance to go corporate with her chain restaurant employer. But her artist and “painter…of houses, portaits…and makeup” roomie of seven years Alyssa (SZA) lets her libido get the best of her as she passes on the rent money for well-endowed lover Keshawn (Joshua David Neal) to give to the no-nonsense/no AC/”stanky water” Baldwin Village complex landlord Uche (Rizi Timane), who is African and is taking no more excuses.
“He’s an ENTREPRENEUR” is no excuse when Mr. Good-in-Bed Keshawn skips off with their money, thanks to Alyssa’s gullibility.
The clock is ticking on their last day with a (leaky) roof over their heads, and they have to cope to bad hair and little time for the complex’s gay hairdresser to save the day, a “Payday Whenever” loan scam, a crazy homeless sage (Katt Williams) who warns them away from this “lifetime” debt, Keshawn’s brawny new lover Berniece (Aziza Scott) serving up ass-whuppings, and a gang leader named Lolo (Amin Joseph) who’s lost a very pricey pair of Air Jordans, which the girls might have just sold to Lil Rel Howery.
There are funny (ish) bits here — selling their blood plasma and facing a first-time plebotomist, forced to greet the world in donation-box clothing, the “white girl” (Maude Apatow) integrating their complex and shoving the double standards on fit-for-habitation housing, police and fire response down the Black folks’s throats and that “if you have a job, an arm and a leg the system will approve you” payday lender (Keyla Monterroso Mejia) who laughs at their credit scores and barks at the two roommates for being “Too OLD to not know how credit works.”
But mostly, this is a slow-moving parade of “WTF is MY CAR?” and “Girl, I TOLD you not to park there” gags between the mismatched roomies. I’m a longtime Palmer fan, and she’s almost never been this dull. She and SZA needed an edgier script to sparkle.
This picture, whose previews, promos and TV ads promised pace, patter and potential, adds up to the first major disappointment of the new cinema year.
Rating: R, violence, profanity, sexual situations
Cast: Keke Palmer, SZA, Amin Joseph, Katt Williams, Maude Apatow, Aziza Scott and Joshua David Neal
Credits: Directed by Lawrence Lamont, scripted by Syreeta Singleton. A Columbia Pictures release.
Running time: 1:37
Universal futzed around with rebooting its classic werewolf horror franchise “Wolf Man” for years, and delayed releasing the latest finished film as well.
Perhaps they were hoping more time would pass and we’d all forget the many other incarnations of the man-becomes-werewolf trope. Fat chance.
We all remember how this goes, right? People find themselves in werewolf country. Somebody gets bitten. That somebody wants to bite, too.
“Saw” veteran Leigh Whannell’s “original” take on this hairy, hoary and downright moldy horror staple fails to reinvent, reboot or truly re-launch anything. Pretty sure we’ve seen the werewolf as monster-villain and werewolf as “hero” twist before.
Folding in a Native American tradition of a “hills fever” that turns one into “Face of the Wolf” introduces little that’s interesting and nothing that’s important.
The Pacific Northwest setting, where a widowed father (Sam Jaeger) lectures his young son (Zac Chandler) on the ways of the woods, and the dangers, culminating with son Blake (Christopher Abbott) returning to those woods decades later with his journalist wife (Julia Garner) and wee daughter (Matilda Firth) doesn’t alter the inevitability of it all.
“My job as Dad,” Blake tells the kid he named Ginger,” “is to keep you safe.”
Ginger’s job? “To read your mind,” to anticipate Dad’s directions for keeping her safe.
There’s your foreshadowing.
Put a troubled marriage in peril the minute the arrive in the woods of Oregon, briskly toss them into an over-the-top accident with a moving truck as they trek north to clean out Blake’s “finally declared dead” Dad’s off-the-grid farm. Have Blake slashed by the claws of the not-quite-seen “beast,” with wife Charlotte (Garner of TV’s “Ozark” and “The Assistant”) forced to cope with his injuries, his “transformation” and the threat still growling outside threat.
Try not to guess all that happens, because rare RARE mild jolts aside, this picture’s as clockwork as my Citizen watch.
Garner gives us a taste of what facing the shock of “This can’t be REAL” looks like. The child actress never gets across the requisite terror of their peril.
And Abbott, of “It Comes at night?” He’s just another guy in (CGI) hairs arms and furry face trying to maintain his humanity, his loyalty to his family in the face of attack from his “new” pack/species.
Suffice it to say that Whannell and horror producers Blumhouse are more at home with ghostly, “Insidious” horror, and tactile threats from Jigsaw than with this underwhelming, predictable, everything-but-vampires homage to Universal Studios’ horror legacy.
Rating: R, gory violence, profanity
Cast: Julia Garner, Christopher Abbott, Sam Jaeger, Matilda Firth and Ben Prendergast
Credits: Directed by Leigh Whannell, scripted by Leigh Whannell and A Universal release.
Running time: 1:43
My third movie this Thursday, and none of them have stirred any interest from the paying customers.
Will “Wolf Man” or “One of them Days” or any of the Oscar contenders opening wide this weekend (“The Room Next Door,” “The Brutalist,” “The Last Showgirl,” (reopening) “Sing Sing,” or “Nickel Boys” sell any popcorn? Asking for a friend.
Every multiplex is a microcosm of the cinematic whole. I used to frequent great barometer theatres in Florida on Thursdays, but urban NC and rural Va. cinemas are “readable,” too.
I’ll know more Friday when I visit the Raleigh Durham metroplex. But this feels like a weekend that could be truly desolate.
The new films have no pop in the provinces and the holdovers are all gassed.
Let’s see what first numbers look like Friday afternoon.
“Eraserhead,” “The Elephant Man,” “Blue Velvet,””Wild at Heart,” “Twin Peaks,” “Mulholland Drive,” “Lost Highway,” “The Straight Story,” an unforgettable attempt at “Dune” — nobody did weird like David Lynch.
The Maverick ‘s Maverick iconoclastic filmmaker died today. He was 78.
Many people I interviewed — Rossellini, Loggia, Watts, etc — who worked with him would share stories about his instinct for “odd. ” Kyle MacLachlan verified one of the funniest, Lynch walking into a morgue set on while filming “Twin Peaks” as the florescent lights were shorting out, flickering.
“Aaaaahhh, leave it,” Lynch told the fretting grips trying to fix a bizarre, quirky touch that it brought to the scene.
For years, he insisted film distributors print the following in bios to the press kits for his movies
“David Lynch, Eagle Scout, Missoula, Montana.”
On brand. Pithy and perfect. An apt epitaph, too.
Watch one of his films in tribute. Another great way to remember him? This performance, the best thing in Spielberg’s “Fabelmans.”
Here’s a flashy, violent British film noir in the classic Warner Bros. fashion, an on-the-lam thriller set in the postwar U.K. underworld where a war hero pays the price for going wrong.
“They Made Me A Fugitive,” the film that the Brits saw as “I Became a Criminal,” is a terrific showcase for Trevor Howard, Sally Gray and Griffith Jones, as sadistic as bad guys came in the Blighty cinema of the day.
The title on both sides of the Atlantic was meant to conjure up memories of “They Made Me a Criminal,” a proto-noir Warner Bros. hit starring John Garfield back in 1939. The Internet Movie Database lists the film under its 1948 British title — “I Became a Criminal” — with its heavily-cut U.S. (original release) running time (1:18). Suffice it to say, those “restored” 23 minutes matter.
Jones, of “The Face Behind the Scar,” plays a gang leader who runs his contraband smuggling operation out of a funeral home, conveniently advertised with the huge letters “R.I.P.” attached to the roof. Our deadly but dapper leader’s name is a tad on-the-nose — “Narcissus,” aka “Narcy.”
Narcy figures their hide-the-cigarettes, nylon stockings and even drugs in coffins operation is missing something. That’s why he’s recruited “Clem” Morgan (Howard), an RAF pilot who escaped from a German POW camp during the war only to crawl into a bottle once back home.
“He’s got class,” Narcy growls to his minions. “We need a bit of that in our business.”
Morgan, in his cups with his “fiance” Ellen (Eve Ashley) when Narcy finds him at the pub, has no idea the extent of Narcy’s villainy — the drugs, the fact that he’s sweet on Ellen. It takes that first burglary, where the sober and suddenly moral (no drug smuggling for him) Morgan mouthes off one time too many for it all to come crashing around his ears.
He’s framed for running over a cop, tossed in prison and only somewhat wised-up when Sally, the chorus girl (Sally Gray, fiery) Narcy dumped for Ellen visits him in stir. Damned if Morgan doesn’t effect an escape (brushed over) and set out on a cross-country trek back to London to have his revenge.
Director Alberto Cavalcanti, billed simply as “Cavalcanti,” was a Brazilian expat who started his film career in France, made movies across many genres as journeymen filmmakers often did back then. He did romances (“Affairs of a Rogue”), a pretty good Dickens adaptation (“The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickelby”) and durable thrillers such as “For Them That Trespass” and “I Became a Criminal.”
He and the production team give us a gritty world of postwar privation and violence, populated with colorful chorines — lots of backstage at the music hall scenes — femme fatales and one sadist who isn’t above beating women when he isn’t ordering his thugs to murder.
“They Made me a Fugitive” doesn’t really get on its feet until Morgan slips out of prison while working on a road gang. He eludes a nationwide manhunt and stumbles into a wealthy country wife (Vida Hope) with “the whole damned world and his dog after my skin.” She agrees to help him, provided he does her “a service…I want you to shoot my husband.”
A testy, interrogatory exchange with an overnight trucker who picks him up and constant radio updates of his progress build suspense. Will he get to Sally before Narcy starts killing off her and others who “know” about the frameup?
A cop (Derek Birch) warns her that Narcy will “slit that pretty little throat of yours from ear to ear,” as if she doesn’t know “you’ve stuck it out just a few inches too far.”
Howard, a last minute casting replacement, establishes the tough guy edge that would serve him in decades of military and later authority figure roles. Gray renders her “Mata Hari” figure in unsentimental shades. And Rene Ray, Mary Merrall, Jack McNaughton, Charles Farrell and others perfectly populate this cinematic underworld.
Film buffs will note that future “Dr. Strangelove” Russian ambassador Peter Bull has the chewy mob informant role. And that portly, gruff underworld club manager? That’s Disney cartoon voice, “The Time Machine” and TV’s “Family Affair” co-star Sebastian Cabot.
I was a tad underwhelmed by the opening acts of “They Made Me a Fugitive,” but pretty much bowled over by the breathless, shadowy film noir that breaks out at roughly the midway point. Howard’s flinty, furious way with a line, Griffin’s violence-is-how-I-panic mania, Gray’s sober-minded sizing-up “what kind of man” Morgan is before lighting his imprisoned fuse, all take this picture to a fever pitch that can only end in mayhem.
Drugs, alcoholism, torture and mob executions give this film noir a most unBritish (for the period) edge.
No, fight choreography wasn’t a thing back then. But we buy into the life-or-death stakes this crew tangles into and never let our sympathies get out of hand, because “They Made Me a Fugitive” doesn’t let Mr. “I Became a Criminal” off the hook for the bloody, murderous mess he’s got himself into.
Rating: TV-PG, violence
Cast: Sally Gray, Trevor Howard, Griffith Jones, Rene Ray, Mary Merrall, Jack McNaughton and Peter Bull.
Credits: Directed by Alberto Cavalcanti, scripted by Noel Langley, based on a novel by Jackson Budd. A Warner Bros. release on Tubi, other streamers.
Running time: 1:41
The line between a “Z-movie,” a “zero stars” on the one-to-four-star scale, and a very bad one-star C or B movie usually comes down to intent.
Did they set out to make a film this awful? Was their motivation or agenda twisted? Or was this simply the best they could manage?
“Hemet, or the Landlady Don’t Drink Tea” is a comical abortion, an ever-misfiring farce built around the landlady from hell and how she abuses her tenants in the middle of a “bit off his leg” zombie apocalypse.
Liz, played by screenwriter Brian Patrick Butler in less-than-Rupaul-flattering drag, is a bully with an apartment complex, a mean old lady who figures she’s holding all the cards in tiny Hemet, California, now that the zombies are an ongoing menace.
Toe her line, accept her abuse and her ever-changing rules, rent-rates and privileges, and she’ll just insult you. “Resist the autocracy” she’s set up, with the sheriff (Randy Davison) and his minions at the property owner’s beck and call, and “You’re evicted” might be the least of your problems.
Tenants range from waitress Rosie (Kimberly Weinberger) to “tree hugging, Burning Man-loving, Chewbacca looking” “hippie” Howie (Pierce Wallace), with put-upon Black renter Martin (Merrick McCartha) a near bystander and mouthie “bath salts” wingnut Gary (Matthew Rhodes) the quickest to string together perjoratives to label the others.
One thing they might all agree on is that abusive landlady liz “is just beggin’ to be made into a lampshade.”
Liz? You don’t scare her. You don’t impress her. You can’t “change” her.
“Peace and love, buttcracks! Catch you on the flip!”
That’s the way screenwriter Butler treats dialogue — dopey patter consisting of run-on word-salad sentences fired-off for comic effect. The more alliteration, the better.
Cops are “criminal killing clutch-cannons,” zombies are “’28 Days Later’ maniacs.”
Rants about the cost of living in California, hippies protesting for “zombie rights” and the “genocidal maniac” who just bullied his way into a “third term” in the White House are pretty much the only entertainment value here.
The novelty of Butler’s drag performance wears off quickly. The amateurism of most of the players would have been more forgivable with a script that showed a bit more wit or, you know, effort.
But all Butler, director Tony Olmos and the rest of the cast and crew were shooting for is a cultish comedy with a few laughs, undercooked politics and undigested zombie victims. There’s no arc to the story and little that you’d call funny or ambitious or politically pointed.
“So bad it’s good” is a tricky target to hit. The fact that they missed the mark, and not by a narrow margin, isn’t a cardinal sin. It’s just the best argument for giving this one star, and not “zero” stars.
Rating: TV-MA, violence, sex, profanity
Cast: Kimberly Weinberger, Merrick McCartha, Aimee La Joie, Pierce Wallace, Matthew Rhodes, Nick Young, Randy Davison and Brian Patrick Butler as Liz Topham Myrtle.
Credits: Directed by Tony Olmos, scripted by Brian Patrick Butler. Bayview Entertainment release.
Running time: 1:29
The Latin title “Ad Vitam” doesn’t translate to “over the top,” which might be the biggest letdown in this brisk — once it gets going — French action picture.
A star vehicle conceived by Gullaume Canet, (“All Time High”), a star since “Tell No One” and “Love Me if You Dare” came out twenty years ago, it’s designed to show off his own fitness and dazzling stunt work as an ex-cop is chased up and down and all around Paris, through Versailles — and over it.
Franck is the son of a climber, whose “Ad Vitam” (for life) dictum he’s lived by, and which explains why we meet him hanging from ropes over Basilique du Sacré-Cœur on Montmatre when we meet him. He and a team are dangling and rappelling up and down one of the great landmarks of Paris, inspecting and documenting structural cracks and the like.
When Franck almost meets with an accident that isn’t an accident, he chases down the goon who tampered with his lines. The villain is rescued by one of those big, omnipresent Mercedes vans that all the best bad guys — in or out of government — motor about Europe in. Franck knows what’s up.
His very pregnant wife, Leo (Stéphane Caillard of “The Take” and “Get In”) has an idea of what’s going on. They come home to a ransacked apartment. It’s the second ransacking in the past few weeks. He used to be a cop. What’s he got that “they” want?
Because Leo used to be with the elite GIGN (tactical) unit herself. She knows Franck was sacked and that the reasons for it eat at him. He’s got something he hides on the roof of their apartment building, accessible only through their window, climbing up a gutter and clambering between chimneys. It’s a “key.”
When one last ransacking by ninja-clad commandoes with masks, police armbands and a relentlessly vicious leader (Johan Heldenbergh, terrifically vile) ends with Leo kidnapped and Franck facing an ultimatum, he’s in a mad dash to recruit ex-comrades in arms (Nassim Lyes), dodge the police who believe he’s committed a murder and fend off the “bad” agents who want that damned key.
Cameraman turned director Rodolphe Lauga — he shot “The Transporter” TV series — is saddled with a cumbersome script that stops the picture cold as we’re treated to an ineptly-long, montage-filled flashback about how Franck met Leo — at the Academy — their training, early assignments and obvious attraction.
Eventually, we know, they’ll get around to what this “key” is hiding. But Lauga and Canet, co-writers of the screenplay, take a movie-numbing long time to show us that.
They atone for that with a fight/trick/chase/shoot-out finale that has to be seen to be believed. Franck’s got mad parkour and climbing skills. But that’s not all he’ll show off trying to save his two-fisted wife, his life and his reputation.
“Ad Vitam” is competently shot and cut and works well enough for long enough stretches to recommend. But equally long stretches of training and graduation and karaoke celebrating kill its momentum.
And that chase at the end is like “Mission: Impossible” played for laughs. I mean, I love sight seeing over and around Paris as much as the next guy, but come on.
Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, profanity
Cast: Guillaume Canet, Stéphane Caillard, Alexis Manenti, Zita Hanrot, Nassim Lyes and Johan Heldenbergh
Credits: Directed by Rodolphe Lauga, scripted by Guillaume Canet, David Corona and Rodolphe Lauga. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:38
Bobby D. as Vito Genovese? And Frank Costello? In the same film?
Bada BING.
Debra Messing, Michael Rispoli and Cosmo Jarvis are in this Barry Levinson film, scripted by the veteran NYC crime reporter turned screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi, who scripted “Goodfellas, “Casino” and “City Hall.”
March 21.
Movie Nation 