Oh, the Dog Days of late August. Studios dump movies that couldn’t hack it in summer, couldn’t break free of the pack in fall.
But this twisted Muppets go Blue in a Melissa McCarthy murder mystery is “No ‘Sesame, All Street'”
“The Happytime Murders” co-stars Joel McHale and of course, Maya Rudolph. And looks absolutely filthy.
Jim Henson is gnawing at the walls of his coffin over all this Muppet Jazz, where jazz is spelled with an “i.”
August 17, will “Sausage Party” repeat itself?
Roger and Kim had a dram or two when we were in Windsor last fall.
Since its release in 1975, the Maysles Brother’s documentary about genteel decay and madness, “Grey Gardens,” has been celebrated as one of the great films of the genre.
It’s inspired an award-winning HBO dramatic film and a Broadway musical. It’s not just a “cult” film any more, but in some ways it remains one. Devotees of it cannot get enough of this story of Kennedy-connected old money, living in squalor and isolation in the Hamptons of the 1970s.
That’s the audience — “completists” of the tale of Big Edie and Little Edie Bouvier Beale — that the new documentary “That Summer” is for. There was more footage of the mother and daughter, their almost-ruined 14 room, two story estate in East Hampton. And that’s what Danish filmmaker Göran Hugo Olsson has gotten his hands on.
“Grey Gardens” had a complicated birth. As the years have passed, the Maysles brothers, David and Albert, got the lion’s share of the credit for one of the great “cinema verite” documentaries ever. But others shot footage and “directed” the film, and are on its credits, at least on IMDb — Ellen Hovde and Muffie Meyer.
Then there were the origins of the project. Socialite and Jackie Kennedy Onassis sister Lee Radziwill had the idea of documenting the “vanishing” world of the Hamptons, then sparsely populated with a mix of old timers and old money. Her Bouvier cousins (she and Jackie were born Bouvier) were the most fascinating characters living there.
And her pal, the old money artist/photographer Peter Beard, was just the guy to capture that world, and her aunt and cousin, struggling against local authorities to live the way they saw fit, in their own trash and cat-strewn, overgrown fantasy bubble — Grey Gardens.
The Radziwill/Beard project was abandoned, but two of the cinematographers — the Maysles Brothers — came back on their own, zeroed in on the mother and daughter with their cameras, and found a masterpiece in their Dickensian lives of limited opportunities lost in the creepiest co-dependency this side of “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?”
What this hour or so of new pre-“Grey Gardens” footage, narrated by Beard and Radziwill, does is humanize the Beales to a greater extent, and strip away some of the sadness of “Grey Gardens.”
It’s not really organized, and is left in the rough shape whoever was hanging onto it kept it in. But through “That Summer,” we gain a deeper understanding, not just of the co-dependency, but of how the Beales got there.
The artist Beard is introduced, his fame, travels and work in art photography, collage, fashion and travel shots. Then he sets up this world, where Warhol weekended and Mick and Bianca and the swinging set from the City got away to the then-sleepy Hamptons, seemingly forgotten since “The Great Gatsby” era.
He recalls what a delight the Beales were, how each “fun” visit was nothing like “work” and how they “selfishly explored the amazing thing we had in front of us,” Grey Gardens. He keeps blurting out, then and now, “Francis Bacon,” conjuring up the artist who might have inspired this canvas.
Radziwill, interviewed for a separate project (by Sofia Coppola) weighs in as a second narrator. She commissioned the original project and is in much of the original footage, talking with her relatives, gently cajoling and persuading them to allow plumbers in, and electricians and painters and cleaning crews.
Radziwill, a one-time princess, got her brother-in-law Aristotle Onassis to finance the clean-up of the house, done in baby steps to avoid upsetting the Beales. She comes off as a thin, beautiful ’70s socialite with endless reserves of empathy and concern for her relatives, so any suggestion that she killed the project and sat on the footage out of embarrassment seems an overreach.
We hear Little Edie mention Thoreau and introspective Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau as possible justifications for how she and her mother live, which reminds us that Little Edie went to Harvard. Well, that and their Brahmin accents.
But the simpler explanation, one I don’t recall “Grey Gardens” ever suggesting, is how difficult it would have been for two old money/lost money women of their generation, with no real experience of labor, to get their garbage disposed of, their house repaired and maintained. “Edie never was much for dusting,” her mother cracks, as we see the “Great Expectations” piano and parlor, covered in dust, the ceiling partly collapsed around it.
The clutter and disarray never seems to phase them (and isn’t as pronounced as it was in “Grey Gardens”).
“What are you looking for?” we hear the mother complain.
“What am I ALWAYS looking for, either my pants or my makeup.”
Later, it’s the phone that’s gone missing. Not a cellphone, remember, one that’s been attached to a wire to a wall…somewhere. For decades.
Little Edie can be bubbly, or angry. She fumes at the life she wanted, at the promise that was long ago lost.
“It’s very cruel to dig up the past. Where is privacy today? I never had any privacy in my whole life.”
Maybe you shouldn’t have “had incest with your uncle,” Big Edie cracks.
And everything that “Grey Gardens” once suggested is re-confirmed, a cruel co-dependent relationship of singing, cat-fancying ice-cream junkies, living and bickering in a house where the electricity had failed and each devolved into the other’s entire world.
It’s easy to draw a through-line connecting these two women to the birth of reality TV, especially when you recall that a Radziwill daughter is one of the “Real Housewives of New York.” The shallow pretension, putting on airs and in-breeding goes back generations, darling.
The lack of organization keeps this from being a complete film, or a great one. “That Summer” is a footnote to “Grey Gardens.” But for those wholly engrossed in the history, the tragedy and the “real Beales,” before “Grey Gardens” set their personas in stone and made them immortal, it’s a fascinating artifact and another piece of the puzzle of who they were before the caricatures took over.
MPAA Rating: unrated
Cast: Edith Bouvier Beale, Peter Beard, Edith ‘Little Edie’ Bouvier Beale, Lee Radziwill, Andy Warhol
Credits:Directed by Göran Hugo Olsson . An IFC/Sundance Selects release.
Running time: 1:21
Fox’s projections for what “Deadpool 2” might do on its opening weekend appear to be right on the mark.
A huge Thursday night and a record-setting (beating “It”) Friday of over $53 million have the film on track to clear the $130 million mark, exactly where Fox analysts said it would end up.
It’s rated R, so theoretically there’s less of a potential family audience. Plenty of “Violence? Cussing? So what?” parents are out there, but that’s the logic behind why this latest Marvel money maker won’t do “Avengers” or “Black Panther” numbers.
Lower expectations help. It could still eclipse this Deadline.com projection, as Friday AM, Deadline was just CERTAIN it would hit $150, but that seems unlikely, despite the staggering Friday. It’ll beat “It” and that’ll have to do, Mr. Lively.
Deadline — always dead wrong on Thursday night, less wrong the rest of the weekend. But they’re the only ones to “call” the weekend early, so a 10-25% margin of error will have to do for those of us looking for early word on “the numbers.”
“Book Club” is sliding in closer to a more reasonable $15-16 million, despite what pre-weekend online sales were suggesting. It takes a while for older audiences to get the word and get out the door to this Seniors in Spanx romantic comedy.
“Show Dogs” won’t clear $6. Meh.
You’ll see it. Brownie points to the first commenter who IDs where he turns up in his best movie in years.
Well? Did you? It’s there, in the movie, a glimpse of a U.S. Supreme Court justice, star of “RBG” and played for comic effect.
As you’d expect.
OK, “cameo” is too specific a characterization. “Sight gag” is more exact.
Go ahead. Post a comment if you caught it. Who’s got the keenest eye for Easter Eggs? She’s in there, in “Deadpool 2.” Yessir, yes ma’am.
“Disobedience” is a finely-acted tenterhooks drama about religion, sexuality, tradition and isolation. It is a movie grounded in a rigid hierarchy and ritual, but with a cruel undercurrent of despair. But it takes flight on a trio of brittle, biting and heartbreaking performances by Rachel Weisz, Rachel McAdams and Alessandro Nivola.
There’s only one moral high ground from which to criticize any religion, and that’s to be free of any religion yourself.
This is where Ronit “Ronnie” Krushka (Weisz) plants her flag. She came from an insular religious community, was intimate with its mores, rituals, traditional dress and text.
It could be any community of the most faithful of the faithful, conservatives not just out to conserve, but to roll back the clock on the modern age — the Amish, Mormons, Protestant Fundamentalists or Muslim primitivists, though nobody dares make movies about Islam’s most primitive fringe.
In Ronnie’s case, it is the Torah-centric myopia of Orthodox Judaism which she escaped, and which she challenges still. She may have flown home to London from New York, may crave just enough acceptance from “the community” to be able to mourn her just-died father, a revered Rebbe who disowned her, long ago.
The only condolence she gets from the Orthodox she left behind is “May you live a long life.” Here, that greeting/blessing is a dismissal, a “Nobody wants you here, heretic.”
Ronnie fights this with modern, real-world sarcasm in the form of casual non-Orthodox pleasantries.
“Want a cigarette?”
What’s she think of their practices?
“Medieval.”
She can’t get a hug from her old friend Dovid (Alessandro Nivola), her rabbi/teacher/mentor father’s favorite pupil, because of the primitive sexism of the culture.
She can’t get a straight answer about the old man’s estate from her uncle (Allan Corduner) because she’s asking at shabbat (sabbath) dinner.
And she can’t get over the shock of realizing whom her old friend Dovid married. He tied the knot with Esti (McAdams). Having history with the both of them doesn’t make staying in their house before her father’s leveya (funeral) easy.
If you’ve seen the TV ads for “Disobedience,” you know that the movie’s efforts at hiding just who Ronnie has “real” history with are disingenuous. Weisz plays the unguarded intimacy she feels with Dovid as if she’ll never give away the game.
But she and Esti used to be a thing. It was a scandal. The Rav was mortified, and his obituaries say he died “childless.” Esti seems irked at Ronnie’s return. Should she stay in a hotel?
“Do what you want.”
And the congregation, which figures Dovid is the next spiritual leader of the community, is shaken. Is he the King of his Castle, or what?
Sebastián Lelio’s film, based on the Naomi Alderman novel, challenges Orthodoxy for its rigidity, its myopia and its sexism. Weisz gives Ronnie a barely-restrained contempt for this crowd she once fled, but a contempt mixed with a need for acceptance — just enough to send off her unbending old man on his terms.
And she can’t even get that.
Nivolla (“American Hustle”) is far more subtle in depicting Dovid’s conflicts — a desire to do the decent thing, an awareness of what that constitutes in the modern world, but an overriding need for “honor” to be preserved.
McAdams gives the most startling performance. Esti is wounded, lost, a sell-out reconsidering what she surrendered. It is through her that we experience the film’s profound grasp of what it is like to love a certain way, to need acceptance and understanding from those closest to you, and how failing to get that could be so devastating.
The film which the grey, forlorn “Disobedience” compares most to is one seemingly unlike it in too many important ways. The Oscar nominated tale of sexual awakening “Call Me By Your Name” is sunny, coming-of-age tolerant and tentative, where “Disobedience” has the adult complexity of living with this life nature has foisted upon you.
“Tolerance” is one subtext the films share, as well as sex scenes which exist for some prurient shock value, and little else. There’s a tenderness in this unequal relationship, this time, even if the “How lesbians copulate” primer is just as much of a cheap come-on as “Name’s” sex-with-fruit infamy.
But the adult nature of the affair, long-ago remembered, makes “Disobedience” sit easier on the memory. Weisz’s fierce playing of Ronnie’s confrontations with men not used to being confronted by a woman are worth relishing, and McAdams’ soulful plea for a life without the lie, without the suffering of denying who she fundamentally is for the sake of a sect that is merely a 19th century reboot of Jewish practices long ago discounted, touch the very soul.
Lelio makes certain his stars get to play around with the comical implausibility that both women see in this “life,” were marriage “is “an institutional choice,” where genetics and the accident of birth are a life sentence to wearing wigs in public, sex on Friday nights and segregated worship services straight out of the dark ages.
But this trap is no laughing matter, one and all agree. It’s a world where getting the unbendable to bend, just a little bit, can be the difference between misery and happiness, life and no life at all. It’s no wonder this dogma breeds “Disobedience.” Western Civilization demands it.
MPAA Rating: R for some strong sexuality
Cast: Rachel Weisz, Rachel McAdams, Alessandro Nivola, Allan Corduner
Credits:Directed by Sebastián Lelio, script by Sebastián Lelio and Rebecca Lenkiewicz, based on the Naomi Alderman novel. A Bleecker St. release.
Running time:
Here I was, all primed to drip contempt all over the first disaster of the summer cinema season, when I made the mistake of staying through the credits of “Show Dogs.”
The mostly-fake outtakes from this talking critters kiddie comedy gave me new respect for what actors always say about working with dogs and kids.
Who knew that “dripping” would be the one thing Will Arnett would most dread dealing with in a tale of a police dog and FBI agent who go undercover at dog shows to track down animal thieves?
Clip after clip of Arnett dealing with drool on this, drool on that, and the source of the drool, a Rottweiler named Max. You have my utmost sympathy, sir.
But about the movie he and Natasha Lyonne co-star in — what a bowser.
There’s barely a single laugh in this thing, none from the humans, virtually none from the voices of the assorted dogs, pigeons, lion and panda who play police dogs, show dogs and the rowdy Vegas birds who want to help crack the case.
“Birds of a feather FIGHT CRIME together!”
Ludacris voices the Rottweiler who has nothing funny to say. Not even Stanley Tucci, as the prissy Belgian papillon who mentors the cop dog about show dog life is funny.
Only Shaquille O’Neal really had a chance. He voices a Puli, a dreadlocked champion show dog named Karma. Karma, at least, is quotably funny.
“You can’t push the river. It runs on its own.”
“I don’t think about the future. The present is its own present.”
That’s one zen master pooch.
It’s a lazy comedy in desperate need of joke-doctoring. You can’t just make dogs talk and expect it to be funny. We’ve all heard the butt-sniffing jokes. And referencing another cop-dog comedy is even lazier.
“Who’re you waiting for, Hooch?”
The good news for screenwriters Max Botkin and Marc Hyman is they got a screen credit out of this. The bad news is it was with this movie.
MPAA Rating:PG for suggestive and rude humor, language and some action.
Cast: Will Arnett, Natasha Lyonne, the voices of Ludacris, Alan Cumming, Shaquille O’Neal, Gabriel Iglesias and Stanley Tucci
Credits:Directed by Raja Gosnell, script by Max Botkin, Marc Hyman. An Open Road/Global Road release.
Running time: 1:32
“Deadpool 2” did $16-18 million business, setting a new record for an R-rated film’s “pre-opening” opening night — Thursday.
So maybe a $150 million weekend? That’s deadline.com’s speculation. Hard to guess that off marketing awareness data and Thursday night performance.
Box Office Mojo is hewing and hacking closer to the semi-official Fox projection ($130) and saying “$138 ought to do it.”
No, the market isn’t over-saturated with costumed super-hero movies. Not at all. Three in four months, all three on screens at the same time? Hasn’t hurt any of them. And Mr. Pool has earned reviews almost exactly on par with those pesky “Avengers.” I prefer “Deadpool” films to “Avengers” or “Black Panther,” “Ant-Man” or even the latest “Spider-Man,” but maybe that’s just me.
“Book Club” is slated to demonstrate how smart it is to counter-program against blockbusters. A “Golden Girls Read Fifty Shades of Grey” comedy starring screen legends named Fonda, Bergen, Keaton and Steenburgen, it has pre-sales pointing it towards a $20 million opening — “Big Fat Greek Wedding” territory. I still say it’s a “Mother’s Day” movie held back a week, but a hit’s a hit. Passable reviews (easy laughs, aimed at a less edge-seeking audience) won’t hurt it.
The talking-dogs live action comedy “Show Dogs” isn’t from Disney’s House of Chihuahua, but could hit $10 million, if parents are desperate enough.
And Pope Francis sends his message to theaters in Wim Wenders’ “Pope Francis: A Man of His Word,” in limited release and of general limited appeal. A decent-enough movie, it could have used a little more diversity of opinion, different voices. Is he as popular as “RBG?” We will see.
“Black Panther” has lost most of its screens and should exit the top ten. Finally. “Avengers” could earn another $30. Will “Overboard” hang onto audience share another weekend? “Life of the Party” should lose share to “Book Club.”
Aged, trigger happy and generic. Sci-fi violence and maybe one vintage Jackie stunt.
Where’s the charm, the wit, the warmth?
Gone with the wind.
Movie Nation 