“2001: A Space Odyssey” is getting a VERY limited 50th anniversary “unrestored” re-release, presumably on 70mm celluloid at a few theaters that can still show it.
The mind-blowing effects in it were the result of Stanley the K. playing with chemicals. And it’s not what you think.
And a 1960 Canadian planetarium documentary drove Kubrick’s “mind trip” sequence.
Here it is.
In volleyball terms, “The Miracle Season” should have been an easy spike, a perfunctory “kill.”
The “set-up” is can’t miss. Popular, bubbly star volleyball player with a state championship team dies, gutting her teammates. They have to “dig” deep to save their season, “For ‘Line'” (Caroline) and wring tears out of the audience.
Toss two Oscar winners in the major adult roles — Helen Hunt and William Hurt. And with the director of “Soul Surfer,” one of the best faith-based sports movies ever, well it’s break out your hankies time.
The advertising writes itself — “If you cried at “Brian’s Song” or “The Fifth Quarter” or “Hoosiers” or “We Are Marshall,” you’ll bawl your eyes out at ‘Miracle Season.'”
Only we don’t. Sean McNamara’s “Big Game” formula drama is ONLY about the Big Game — an endless procession of them. Characters are shortchanged, emotional impact is deadened. Heck, the dead teen’s funeral/wake is practically covered in a simple, short montage.
In short, “We Aren’t Marshall.”
Danika Yarosh (“Jack Reacher: Never Go Back”) plays “Line” as a perpetually beaming, giddy blonde who lifts everybody up, just by her presence. She leads her Iowa City West Lady Trojans on the court, and starts the towel fights and Katy Perry sing-alongs in the locker room afterward.
She’s so damned adorable she makes your teeth ache. But then, maybe she has to be. Her mom is dying, her doctor-dad (Hurt) is reeling. But she’s got volleyball, and her best friend forever — Kelly (Erin Moriarty of “Captain Fantastic”) and a legion of friends, not just teammates.
“This is OUR year!”
And then she’s killed.
True confession time, the movie is right on the edge of insufferable right up to that moment — Line bucking up her recently-split-up coach (Hunt), taking pizza-stuffing dares from the other Lady Trojans, fixing up Kelly with the cute new boy in town (Burkely Duffield).
The town and the team are so devastated by her death that nobody wants to even think about volleyball. And when Coach “Bresh” summons them, they can’t focus on practice through the tears.
“NO crying on my court!”
Kelly is given the captaincy, and the challenge — “Girls are looking at you to see if it’s OK to play again.” She isn’t up to that challenge, not at first.
Line’s dad isn’t holding up well, either. All this death has him noting “God hasn’t exactly for ME lately” as an excuse for skipping church.
But they all suck it up and get back to the game, which takes over the last half of the movie, in toto. Dr. Deadgirl’s Dad sets the corny tone for Kelly.
“I may be the surgeon, but you’re the healer out there!”
Hunt, playing a woman who can’t let herself give in to grief, gets her emotional moment. It doesn’t really make up for the most banal sports movie dialogue ever — “Dig, DIG. Serve to Zone One! ”
But if Lifetime ever decides to make “The Pat Summitt Story,” about the tough, no-nonsense University of Tennessee basketball coach, this shows Hunt would be perfect for it — intense, sensitive, feminine and brusquely butch.
Moriarty isn’t bad in the lead, just underserved by the script. And yeah, she’s Iowa bland. The movie emphasizes wholesome at the expense of pretty much everything else, rendering it pleasantly inoffensive, but nothing more.
The volleyball itself is photographed in the most pedestrian slo-mo imaginable. You get a little sense of strategy, but not much. There’s no insider slang. You have to go back to the gay boy-joins-girls-volleyball-team comedy “Miles” to know that the form-fitting shorts the players wear are nicknamed “Coochie Cutters.” “Miracle Season” is too PG for that.
It could please any crowd with little experience of sports movies, especially teen girls. Maybe teen boys, too. But that lack of tears isn’t due to any great effort to not let anybody else see you cry. With all it has going for it, the only miracle in this “Season” is that it just doesn’t deliver.
MPAA Rating: PG for some thematic elements
Cast:Erin Moriarty, Helen Hunt, William Hurt, Danika Yarosh
Credits:Directed by Sean McNamara, script by David Aaron Cohen, Elissa Matsueda. An LD release.
Running time: 1:35
Kudos for the folks who hired two Oscar winners and made “The Miracle Season,” and for previewing it in cities across the country.
It’s a “Win one for the Gipper” variation, a true story about a high school volleyball team that took inspiration from a dead teammate to excel.
Helen Hunt is the “tough love” coach, William Hurt also stars.
LD Entertainment did “Anthropoid,” “Killer Joe” and “I Love You, Phillip Morris.” So yeah, this is worth taking as seriously as anything else opening this weekend.
There’s a special corner of movie-lovers heaven for actors who burn through their Hollywood capital on quirky, challenging movies that have little commercial potential.
Zachary Quinto’s earned his place there. And Jon Hamm, with all the offbeat TV shows and goof-on-his-own-image TV commercials, as well as with films like “Nostalgia” and “Marjorie Prime” and “Aardvark,” is getting there.
In the offbeat “Aardvark,” Quinto plays Josh, a troubled soul seeking psychotherapeutic help because his brother (Hamm), an actor and “one of the greatest talents of his generation,” is back in town.
No, he’s not having suicidal thoughts, one of the first questions a new therapist or counselor asks. But when Josh runs into a bag lady on the street or a chuckling African American cop sipping latte at the coffee shop where he works, he’s pretty sure he’s dealing with brother Craig, a guy with a gift for being “utterly unrecognizable.”
He’s that good.
And our question, and one that crosses the mind of the “counselor, NOT a doctor” who sees him, is “Does this famous phantom sibling even exist?”
Emily (Jenny Slate) is full of empathy and genuinely concerned, as Josh is given to precipitous mood swings and dark turns. She’s at a loss, so she confers with her mentor “(Stephen Schnetzer).
“If he’s paying cash for you to treat him for schizophrenia, then he’s NOT schizophrenic.” Wonder if he got that out of the manual, DSM-5? And the way he brushes Emily off, coupled with her tactless exit from her book club and brittle encounter with another ex while running make us see the counselor as somebody maybe in need of a little counseling herself.
Of course she meets the infamous Craig (Hamm). Slate is adorably, gulpingly tongue-tied and flustered upon encountering the TV hunk that we don’t have to have seen her in “Obvious Child” or “Landline” or “Gifted” to know what’s coming.
Slate has a niche worthy of a nickname – “Baroness of Bad Decisions.” Yeah, she tumbles for him.
Meanwhile, Josh’s disassociations are growing. There’s a lovely woman (Sheila Vand) who keeps crossing his path, almost flirting. He doesn’t know whether to testily push her away or charm her with his poor-dude/disturbed guy pickup lines.
You like his shirt? “I got it at a discount. It was marked ‘irregular.’ Sometimes irregular things can be just fine.”
First time feature writer-director Brian Shoaf stages some painfully awkward, sensitive and probing counseling sessions for Slate and Quinto to play. The script has lovely snatches of dialogue and fascinating, wounded characters, which was enough to drew in the three leads.
Here’s Josh’s reaction to the homeless woman who panhandles him every night after work. “If you spend this on anything other than food, I will be heartbroken. And probably kill myself.”
But Shoaf has trouble resolving the “mystery” of the story in a convincing and satisfying way, abruptly shifting gears for a finale that feels like a cheat.
“Aardvark,” as in “one of a kind” and “odd by nature,” is still a pleasure to sit through. Credit the players for that — Slate’s winsome neediness, Quinto’s barely-functional headcase and Hamm’s up-for-anything breezy actor who gets where he wants and what he wants without ever showing a hint of effort.
They all have other work that they’ll be remembered for. But in movie-lovers’ heaven, they’re celebrated for taking chances on directors and material just like this.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for mature thematic issues, language, some sexuality and violence
Cast: Jenny Slate, Zachary Quinto, Jon Hamm
Credits:Written and directed by Brian Shoaf. A Great Point release.
Running time: 1:28
A spy who falls for a scientist, kidnapping in the desert and a mental escape into the deepest deep blue sea.
Very Wim Wenders. “Submergence” finally gets a release next week. Limited.
American adolescence has been turned into a moving target by Hollywood in recent decades, thanks to the rise of the R-rated comedy about adults who’ve never grown up.
Blame the Ap(atow) Pack, the “Hangover” binge-athons or that Judeo-Canadian vulgarian Seth Rogen, but movies have normalized the kind of sophomoric body-abuse/sexual escapades and immaturity of “Knocked-Up” and “Forty Year Old Virgin,” films which pushed the R-rated edge over the edge even as they paused, here and there, for little dollops of sentimentality.
So arrives “Blockers,” the movie with the title Rogen (he produced) and Company couldn’t get into TV ads, etc. “Cock Blockers” is the expression, and that’s just what the parents of three teenage girls vow to become when they learn of their daughters’ “#sexpact” for prom night. The BFFs want to get busy, with whatever boy happens to be their date for the big night. Their parents want to “save them” from this mistake that passes for a rite of passage.
Clingy “cool mom” Lisa (Leslie Mann at her fluttery flaky best) wants her kid to avoid the “mistake” she made, saddling herself to that first love that derailed her future 18 years ago. Hovering Superdad Mitch (John Cena, laying it all out there) is fretting that the kid he’s taught sports and turned into an over-achiever is about to lose her virginity to some dork with a “man bun” and a smirk.
And then there’s Hunter (Ike Barinholtz of “The Disaster Artist” and “The Mindy Project”). He’s the “You guys wanna grab a drink?” divorced absentee dad and odd-man out, the one who rented the girls and their dates a limo, the seemingly least responsible “adult in the room” and the one who is not cool with the other two’s plans to intervene.
Yeah, he was the one hip enough to translate the dirty emojis the teens are texting back and forth. That doesn’t mean he’s OK with the adults ruining “the most magical night” of their kids’ lives.
We’ve seen a tearful montage of home movies — first day of school, field trips, honors — all the little victories and moments that parents and kids got to bond over. Now Mitch is appalled at his daughter’s “stripper underwear,” Lisa is empty nesting her way out of her connection to hers and Hunter can’t even compete with his ex’s cooler new husband (Hannibal Buress) in the eyes of his “little girl.”
Over the course of one harried, wild baccanale of a prom night, the adult trio chases the teen trio around Chicago, John Hughes comedy style — with full frontal nudity, “butt chugging,” sex games and general sneakiness. And that’s from the adults.
The film does a good job of rounding out the girls, too, from assertive, brassy Kayla (Geraldine Viswanathan) who isn’t the sentimental mush her dad Mitch is. No, she’s a woman who gets what she wants just like her feminist mom (Sarayu Blue). Julie (Kathryn Newton) is ready to cut Mother Lisa’s apron strings, but doesn’t want to break mom’s heart in the process. And Sam (Gideon Adlon) would love to get through the night without peer pressure sex or being humiliated by Hunter, the dad who tries too hard.
Julie is the #sexpact ring-leader, and she’s got this rose-petal covered bed, “Walgreens candle” fantasy for her “first time.”
“I saw this in a romantic comedy — ‘American Beauty.'”
“Didya watch it ALL the way through?”
The big set pieces are a vomit-off in the limo, a slapstick slap fight amongst the adults in Lisa’s SUV and assorted failed efforts by the adults to “pass” for someone who isn’t a parent or a Narc, but just another kid out for good times in a riotous teen orgy in a downtown hotel, or a beer bust at “the lake house.”
“Untuck your shirt. You look like a youth minister!”
“Pitch Perfect” writer turned first-time director Kay Cannon makes some of these big moments pay off, and delivers the sweetest, most sensitive “coming out” scene at the prom that you can imagine.
What Cannon can’t do is keep this picture from stopping cold every fifteen minutes or so, sensitive moments that kill the comic momentum and make us notice that the kid actors aren’t in the same charisma league as the grownups.
But that’s pretty much the point. We’re not leaving this “to the kids.” We’re growing older but not up. It’s “Don’t do what I did,” even though that has never worked in the history of generation gaps.
And if we’re reduced to “Blockers” because we’ve been there, done that, that doesn’t mean, in the movies at least, that we have to go gently into that “Be the adult here” night.
MPAA Rating: R for crude and sexual content, and language throughout, drug content, teen partying, and some graphic nudity
Cast: Leslie Mann, John Cena, Ike Barinholtz, Geraldine Viswanathan, Kathryn Newton, Gina Gershon, Hannibal Buress
Credits:Directed by Kay Cannon, script by Brian Kehoe, Jim Kehoe. A Universal release.
Running time: 1:42
Of all the lies the movies sell us over and over again, the myth of “total recall” — flashbacks, interrogations, reminiscences — may be the most pernicious.
“Memory,” as the star of of “Memento,” Guy Pearce, says in “Spinning Man,” is the least reliable, most problematic area of understanding in the brain. Our mind plays tricks on us, our memories cannot be trusted.
As a college philosophy professor suspected of murder, that’s Evan Burch’s crutch and his defense, although even his wife (Minnie Driver) calls his “absent-minded professor act” played.
“Spinning Man” is an intriguing premise with a promising cast and a hint of sordid titillation about it. That the one-word review of it is “forgettable” is a shame. But when you don’t play fair and don’t build suspense as you don’t play fair, the whole thing unravels faster than the cop who can’t wait to show you the video of that lane change you’re sure you didn’t make.
Burch is teaches in a small college in a small town seemingly overrun with nubile young things with a thing for college professors, even ones with a family and the hard-living mileage Pearce wears on his face.
Cheerleaders where he does his jogging, flirtatious coeds in class, coquettes in the hardware store — what IS a smart guy whose business is parsing words like “truth” and “ethics” and “morality” to do?
When a high school kayak rental clerk at “the lake” disappears, Evan finds himself under suspicion. She’s played by Odeya Rush, aka “Mila Kunis: The Next Generation.” So she’s probably his “type.” She’s a lot of guys’ type.
The suspicion is expressed by Det. Malloy, played by Pierce Brosnan, a tad too old to be a mere detective, but a well-preserved 65 so why not? A Volvo was seen with a guy “watching” the missing girl. And even though you can’t shake a college campus parking lot without rattling a dozen professorial Volvos, Evan is the one they’re wondering about.
The film sets us up for a game of intellectual cat and mouse, one man interrogating the other, the suspect an expert in the exact meaning of words and the use of language.
“What does a philosopher do?”
“Is this relevant?”
Think of philosophy, the teacher says, “as a logical clarification of thought.”
No kidding says the cop. He’s in the business of the “logical clarification of evidence…We’re in the same racket.”
Try questioning a guy like this, though.
“Can I tell you the trust, or can I tell you what I perceive is the truth, what I interpret and remember as the truth?”
We’ve seen the professor buy the most humane mouse trap there is. But we’ve also seen him fantasize about the clerk who sold it to him. There’s a student (Alexandra Shipp of “Love, Simon”) who hints they may have history.
As the wife gets suspicious and pieces of Evan’s alibi chip off, we start to wonder. We do.
Evan’s dreams hint at some encounter with the missing girl. What happened?
Pearce doesn’t give this guy the desperation he needs. But he makes it easy to step into Evan’s shoes — an accusation, seemingly out of the blue. Or is it? Smart people are always leaning on language to extract them from a fix. Maybe he saw “Survivor’s Guide to Prison” (on Netflix). He knows when to stop talking, when to stop cooperating.
Not until he’s called his lawyer (Clark Gregg). He’s a smart cookie. The cops aren’t impressed. Cops even have specific traffic tickets they call “college professor tickets.”
Brosnan does his work by the book, but Driver brings fireworks to a wife and mother of two who doesn’t take much convincing to wonder, “Oh no, not again.”
There’s not a lot here we haven’t seen before, and any hope we’re heading towards another “Memento” shaped exploration of the trickiness of memory and its absolute necessity when you’re fighting for your life evaporates within minutes.
Still, “Spinning Man” keeps on spinning and keeps us interested, until that third act, when all this has to be resolved and the script tumbles all over itself ending, not ending and adding an epilogue that undoes the clumsy wrap-up concocted here.
And here we are, a couple of hundred words later, and “forgettable” is still the label that best fits.
MPAA Rating: R for some language including sexual references
Cast: Guy Pearce, Minnie Driver, Odeya Rush, Pierce Brosnan, Jamie Kennedy
Credits:Directed by Simon Kaijser, script by Matthew Aldrich, based on the George Harrar novel . A Lionsgate release.
Running time: 1:40
He’s a drop out who mastered the art of closing the sale, but who needs to start over in order to get a gig on Wall Street, where salesmen and women are masters of the universe.
She’s a teacher collecting a little extra pay — “None of y’all’s business” why — by teaching night school. That’s where the Little Man can get his GED on.
White folks “Talking black.” A punchline in this funny trailer. Black folks running through a repertoire of comic gestures common to African American stand-ups and TV and film funnywomen and men.
“Night School” also features Rob Riggle, and was directed by Malcolm D. Lee from a Kevin Hart & Team script. So a little “Girls’ Trip,” a little “Get Hard,” and a little late for what looks like it could have been a summer comedy. Sept.
It’s not over-selling the gritty Argentine crime drama “Beer, Pizza and Smokes” to suggest it has hints of Truffaut’s classic “The 400 Blows” about it. Or “Dead End Kids,” “Kids” or “Rebel Without a Cause.”
There’s an underworld that five miscreant, 20ish friends scuffle about in. They make their hand-to-mouth way by stealing, low-rent heists in corrupt, crime-riddled 1998 Buenos Aires.
Filmmakers Israel Adrián Caetano and Bruno Stagnaro underscore this improvised hardscrabble subsistence by keeping the lighting low and natural, their camera hand-held.
It’s a film that gained little notice in North America when it was made, little more when it was released in the U.S. in 2005, seven years after it was filmed. But it’s a simple, over-familiar story told with nerve jangling verve.
Cordoba (Héctor Anglada) takes his name from the city where he was born. He’s the impulsive, hothead amongst this circle of friends, the one up for any job, any prank. But adulthood is staring him in the face. His girlfriend Sandra (Pamela Jordán) is pregnant.
He’s done one too many taxi holdups, in which he and a couple of his pals — usually the steady ut asthmatic Pablo (Jorge Sesán) and up-for-anything Frula (Walter Díaz) — duck into a cab which already has a “rich” fare, and proceed to rob the hapless customer.
Who never has the cash they’d figure he would.
The cab driver, “the boss,” is in on it. They rob a legless street musician to supplement their “income.” And yet none of these heists can afford them anything more than the movie’s title — “Pizza, Beer and Smokes.”
“We’re always working with morons, Dude,” Pablo complains. He’s not one given to looking in the mirror. They’re morons — clumsy, not that bright, given to impulsive stunts like breaking into the obelisk in a city square, climbing the inside of it and checking out how their fellow street people are surviving — porn and boxes of wine.
Sandra’s had enough, and in the words (in Spanish with English subtitles) we’ve heard in a century of underworld pictures, she kisses him off.
“If you want me back, get a job. Like NORMAL people do!”
So the pressure’s on Cordoba to make that “one last score.” So he, Pablo, Frula and the hapless drunk Megabom (Alejandro Pous) who can’t even be relied on as a lookout, join the older Ruben (Adrián Yospe) for one of those heists where everything goes wrong. Or so they think, until the heist after that.
Few movies have captured the Italianized Spanish and mannerisms of Argentina better than this one. The gestures, gritty texture of the cinematography and grimy streets filled with gutted cars, the driveable ones worn out, missing parts and covered in rust or primer, make this feel like an Italian neo-Realist thriller shot in New York in the ’70s.
Neither Caetano nor Stagnaro has ever made a film that made any splash north of the border. But they tap into a reckless energy that makes these lowlifes likable.
There’s no honor among these thieves as they swipe smokes and cash from each other, just enough to score that pizza or beer, which is all they can ever afford, which they have to consume standing up because street vendors offer no seating.
No wonder Sandra, heavily pregnant, wants out. A mom-to-be needs to sit.
The story may not hold many surprises. Idiot crooks do not get smarter by aiming higher, scoring guns and thinking — if that’s the word for it — big.
But “Pizza, Beer and Smokes” distills the essence of wayward youth like few Hollywood films of recent vintage, nervous with rebellion, even if they, like generations of North Americans, don’t really know what they’re rebelling against.
MPAA Rating: R (violence, alcohol abuse, profanity)
Cast: Héctor Anglada, Pamela Jordán, Jorge Sesán, Walter Díaz, Alejandro Pous
Credits: Written and directed by Israel Adrián Caetano, Bruno Stagnaro. An Art House release.
Running time: 1:27
“Una” lives in the house where she grew up, cares for her sickly mother and endures the lingering stares of the neighbors.
By night she prowls nightclubs in search of brusque, anonymous sex with strangers. At dawn she comes home, barefoot and unashamed of her ritual “walk of shame.”
But even a mere glimpse of a flashback tips us as to how she got here in her late 20s. She was a pretty tween. There was a man, perhaps the one scratched out of family photos? Something happened and we think we know what.
Rooney Mara has the title role in “Una,” an “I want…closure” drama that opens with sad resignation and builds towards something disturbingly pre-#MeToo. Because that thing which you can guess happened had not just consequences and repercussions, and it didn’t just scar the victim. It changed her and utterly altered her future.
Una is stuck in a present she doesn’t control. And she remembers the past. Young Ruby Stokes of British TV’s “DaVinci’s Demons” plays the child Una, recalling encounters, what she was wearing, her plaintive recorded video appearance in British court at the trial of her abuser.
“Would you give him a message?” her 13 year-old self wanted to know. That question is surprising, and the “message” isn’t what you expect.
EveryVillain Ben Mendelsohn is that man, a born creeper who has served his time when we meet him, and when Una tracks him down. He’s a manager at a warehouse, with a different name, a wife and a different life. He goes pale when she strolls into his place of business. No sense pretending he doesn’t recognize her all these years later.
“How many other 13 year-olds have you had sex with?”
There’s an unsettling sexuality to this hostile, threatening meeting, creepy “Lolita” intimations in the dynamic. She is the aggressor in this adult encounter, he is the one on his heels, taken aback, afraid. Her attire, her demeanor, the way Mara’s Una carries herself suggest someone who learned too early how she affected men, even if she never learned to control this power.
Una reduces Ray, who now goes by Peter, to a stammering, fearful 40something, with no control over this ugly past that has stormed into his workplace in what could be the worst day of his professional life. He can’t forgive the unforgivable, can’t explain away the transgression.
“I was never one of them,” he says at her read-between-the-lines queries about patterns of behavior. “I was NEVER one of them.”
This was something deeper, he insists. With an admittedly brash, physically precocious 13 year-old girl?
“What could I possibly have given you besides my body?”
His subordinate Scott (Riz Ahmed, Mendelsohn’s “Rogue One” co-star) is confused about who she is, but putty in the hands of the pretty young thing who has shown up at work. Peter has responsibilities this day, and he can’t run away from them or Scott even as she stalks him, invading his sight lines, rattling him.
Benedict Andrews’ claustrophobic film betrays its David Harrower stage-play origins, pinning us into whatever corner of this office and warehouse facility first Peter, then Una, flee to. The flashbacks feel like sketches of memory, with young Stokes suggesting the confusion of childhood, the misunderstanding of the naive about what was going on.
But like the even more disturbing “The Strange Ones,” about the unsettling dynamic between a young boy and the man we’re meant to see as his kidnapper/abuser, “Una” skirts the line between a situation she might have some power in and the sense that this is something simply awful, simply “happening to” her.
It’s daring enough to hint that there’s no way this story (the film was made in 2017) would be greenlit for filming, even in the UK, today.
Even though Mara’s subtle, bruised and confused performance suggests the damage this has done, even if Una still doesn’t realize the full extent of it, even if she still cannot articulate what she wants out of this long-awaited confrontation with her abuser. Because she’s so damaged she just doesn’t know.
MPAA Rating: R for strong sexual content, nudity and language
Cast: Rooney Mara, Ruby Stokes, Ben Mendelsohn, Riz Ahmed
Credits: Directed by Benedict Andrews, script by David Harrower, based on his play, “Blackbird . A Film 4 release.
Running time: 1:33
Movie Nation 