Andrew Garfield is the hero, looking for a missing woman (Riley Keogh), looking to the point where he goes deep down the rabbit hole of obsession in this dark noirish (Comic?) thriller.
Topher Grace plays his helpful, common sense friend.
David Robert Mitchell (“It Follows”) directed “Under the Silver Lake”.
A24 is releasing it. Our interest is…aroused.
Yeah, a killer “From the studio that brought you” sight gag.
Sure, a little “Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants” poke.
Lots and lots of the old ultra-violence, self-referential comic book movie incidentals properly mocked.
Score! May 18, DP sees if he can play with the Boys and Girls of Summer, this time out.
Those scamps from TV’s “Workaholics” let their R-rated freak flags fly in “Game Over, Man,” a scruffy, unruly comedy with violence, pot, full frontal nudity and a body count.
It’s “Die Hard” with stoners, a blood-spattered tale of three hotel room cleaners with Big Dreams who find themselves the only thing that stands between a gang of kidnappers and the Middle Eastern party boy they’re trying to shake down.
Motor-mouthed Adam Devine is Alexxx, “the hustler, the Rick Ross” of the trio. Anders Holm, credited with the script, is Darren, “the Ideas Guy.” And Joel (Blake Anderson) is the mechanical whiz who can engineer their assorted “big ideas,” they hope, into reality.
One big idea? “Jeans Club,” where you “rent” pants for the night. Another? “Hot Tutor,” hiring strippers to be tutors so that teens are more interested in homework.
The one idea worth exploring, they figure, is “Skintendo,” a wearable inter-active video game suit. When their creeper hotel manager (Daniel Stern) orders them to work a big party booked by a Tunisian Bey (Utkarsh Ambudkar) and rich poseur-Instagram star, they smell their chance. They’ll pitch him.
That almost comes off, but the “not according to plan” part of the night is just beginning. Criminals led by Neal McDonough take the Bey hostage. And they mean business.
“You are CRAZY, Mr. Albino Bad Guy!”
The three are loose in a hotel in lockdown, unable to phone for help, not that Alexxx would like that. Not “cool” enough, he figures. The hapless, quarrelsome trio — the other two think Alexxx is an idiot — stumble their way into brawls, shoot-outs, with every scheme botched, every botching punctuated with some bad guy or other dispatched.
“He looks like a human-sized ketchup pack exploded!”
It’s a wildly uneven and violent romp, lurching between fights and comic set-pieces. Two bad guy minions are actually a gay couple, who interrupt their terrorizing for sex. Great way to trick bad guys? Fake your own death — via auto-erotic asphyxiation.
A clever escape? How about an improvised “Home Alone” zip line?
“Dude, that’s more ‘Home Alone 3.'”
Meanwhile, at the party, hostages are getting killed. As the Bey is rich and famous, people we know are at the party. We get cameos by Jillian Bell, Joel McHale, Shaggy, Donald Faison, Fred Armisen and assorted “Jackass” alumni. Not all of them make it.
The starring trio have comfort level that makes them believable as friends, though the other two tend to shrink into the background behind Devine. The highlights of the supporting cast are Ambudhar, a veteran of “The Mindy Project” and “Pitch Perfect” who masters the patois of a foreigner trying his hand at hip hop vernacular, trying a little too hard, and Rhona Mitra, as a psychotic henchwoman with murderous intolerance for sexism.
There are some explosive laughs in this. But they show up so randomly, with the story in between the payoff moments so lame, that “Game Over” screams out for more editing. Judging by the many names on the IMdb page for the film, a LOT of folks have already been cut out of it.
These filmdom frat bros don’t sweat the logic or physics of anything, don’t flinch at making a joke out of graphic violence. That can be forgiven. What can’t is the movie’s slow-footedness, endless pauses for the bros to bond or bicker that they should be more bonded. “Game” sorely lacks a sense of forward motion. Alexxx provides the words that an action comedy like this should live by.
“This is Video Games 101. You kill bad guys, you take their s—!”
Every time the script forgets that, it’s “Game Over” before it really gets going.
MPAA Rating: unrated, with graphic violence, pot use, full frontal nudity and sexual content
Cast: Adam Devine, Anders Holm, Blake Anderson, Jamie Demetriou, Utkarsh Ambudkar, Neal McDonagh, Daniel Stern, Aya Cash
Credits:Directed by Kyle Newacheck script by Anders Holm. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:40
It’s a drama with conspiracy thriller elements based on the “oil for food” deal the world made with Saddam Hussein in Iraq in the years between the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
“Backstabbing for Beginners” is an A24 release, which always gets my attention. The veteran Danish director Per Fly hasn’t had much exposure over here. Will this change that?
Interesting to hear Ms. Robbie flaunt something like her actual Aussie accent. And show a little leg in this taste of “Terminal.”
Vaughn Stein’s movie is a film noir thriller/mystery with Simon Pegg, Mike Myers and Max Irons in the cast. Assassins, a mastermind and madness. May 11.
It’s the quotation that opens the quirky Canadian comedy “Birthmarked” that gives away the game.
“I think of a new born baby as a blank book,” Walt Disney once said.
And as this uneven but amusing romp unfolds, with its scientist parents setting out to raise three kids in ways that contradict their genetic family history, you can’t help but think of “Little Einsteins.” That Disney TV series was a concept the company bought from folks who were just sure that exposing toddlers to Beethoven, Great Books and Big Science would make them grow up smarter. It didn’t work.
But back in 1977, husband and wife scientists Catherine and Ben Morin (Toni Collette, Matthew Goode) wouldn’t know that. They pitch an eccentric, science-backing millionaire (Michael Smiley of “Free Fire” and “Rogue One”) the ultimate “Nature vs. Nurture” experiment.
“No one is a prisoner of their genetic heritage!”
They will raise three kids — Luke, their own son, the product of generations of scientists, taught from birth to be an artist, his every free expression praised and nurtured; Maya, adopted from a family of “simpletons,” taught and told she’s “brilliant” at every turn, and Maurice, adopted adopt from a long line of aggressive males, raised to be a pacifist, “like the Mahatma.”
We get a quick introduction to that upbringing — seeing years of exposure to Puccini, Mozart, complex concepts, with exercises bending them towards those end results. Luke (Jordan Poole) channels his hurt feelings into playing the blues, Maurice (Anton Gillis-Adelman) is forced to meditate away his tendency to tease and torment his siblings, with Maya (Megan O’Kelly) encouraged to intellectualize everything.
Catherine is into the project, but more accepting of what she sees the deviations of “any normal dysfunctional family.” Ben is totally into the experiment, all about “Anger Discharge Training” and “Stimulated Self Emotions” exercises.
But the kids? At 12, they’re starting to act out, befuddling their parents, arching the eyebrow of their Soviet defector Olympian research assistant (Andreas Aspergis). Their roughhousing develops an edge, they stage a grossly “inappropriate” play based on “Letters to Penthouse,” and at every opportunity, they mouth off.
“Come on, you’re smarter than that.”
“Apparently not.”
Canadian director Emmanuel Hoss-Desmaris and screenwriter Marc Tulin (“Whitewash”) find their laughs around the fringes of what seems a more promising set-up than it actually is. Ben’s lifelong obsession with lady equestrians makes for an interesting sex life, and kids raised in a psychological environment addressing their parents in the jargon of self-help can be funny.
“Mom! Dig DEEP. Find that inner serenity!”
The kids get short shrift in the story, and without doing more with them, “Birthmarked” never gets its hands on the weird relationships between loving but experimenting parents and their kids, the subjects of that experiment. The experiment itself has a funny but predictable and barely-sketched in arc, from meticulous to off the rails in rather too abrupt a fashion.
And the parental relationship is a little thin, too, as if the writer and director were too invested in setting up a twist, using science experiment graphics and expecting droll, ironic narration by Fionnula Flanagan, playing a personal assistant to the millionaire who witnesses this years-long debacle-in-the-making, to cover the film’s comic shortcomings.
Collette ably gets across a woman finally questioning what they’ve been doing to their kids while Goode does a decent job suggesting a man dogmatic in his determination to see this project through. Smiley’s millionaire Gertz is a cartoonish figure without the colors drawn in.
If the kids are shortchanged in the movie, that just mirrors what they might lack in such an environment — quality time, constructive child-rearing and socialization. They can quote “Playful teasing builds character,” but that doesn’t mean that the boundaries being hammered into them are the right ones.
Frustrating as it is, this scruffy, misshapen farce still has laugh-out-loud lines, and lightly-amusing send-ups of an idea that has intuition going for it, and little else. Maybe taking child-rearing advice from the likes of Walt Disney isn’t the best idea.
MPAA Rating: unrated, slapstick violence, sexual situations, alcohol, profanity
Cast: Toni Collette, Matthew Goode, Michael Smiley, Fionnoula Flanagan, Andreas Apergis, Suzanne Clement
Credits:Directed by Emanuel Hoss-Desmarais, script by Marc Tulin . A Vertical Entertainment release.
Running time: 1:27
It’s “Everything, Everything” again. Or “The Fault in Our Stars.”
And it stars tabloid terror Bella Thorne and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s son.
Yeah, the studio is only previewing it tonight. And it opens tonight. Which speaks volumes.
Angelina Jolie’s blundering adaptation of “Unbroken” has prompted a sequel. A runner’s surviving Japanese barbarism to get back to the Olympics? That sounds like a movie to me.
Francis Ford Coppola is one of the undisputed masters of cinema,masters of cinema, screenwriter of “Patton,” auteur of “The Godfather” movies, “Apocalypse Now,” “Tucker,” “Peggy Sue Got Married,” masterpieces married to commercial motion pictures, with the Oscars and “Greatest Film of All Time” listings to prove it.
A friend who crashed a party at a Brooklyn warehouse Coppola owned some years back related the story that the Old Master sat, drinking wine and shrugging, “I’m finished,” to anybody who cared to ask.
So when a boutique studio nabbed his “Tetro” a few years back, I tracked him down for an interview. I was dazzled by how curious he still was about movie-making, trying new things, and impressed by how he shrugs off failure (“Tetro,” an experiment, didn’t come off, I thought).
He tried running a studio. He was a breakthrough digital filmmaker (“One from the Heart”). He makes wine. He’s dabbled in opera, TV. He’s predicted the future of film, at various times, with varying degrees of success. He teaches workshops at any college lucky enough to have him.
Now he’s written a book — “Live Cinema and its Techniques” — about his efforts to marry his myriad storytelling passions — the “live” impact of theater and teleplays produced “live.”
It’s a lively read, a plea for embracing new tech and applying it to filmed storytelling techniques that were perfected during the 1950s, the era of “live” TV drama, which Coppola worships. He workshopped and shot a couple of short films, whose scripts and notes and production diaries he includes in the book.
He suggests that sports TV technology, and increasingly image-perfect digital cameras, make the idea of performing a movie (it’s actually TV, but let him have that) “live,” shooting it in order, with the odd pre-produced bit, in 90 minutes to two hours.
With 8K cameras capturing the action on the set, most of them hidden, establishing shots can be grabbed, and from them, the bytes of data compromising a smaller part of the screen blown up to allow a filmmaker to cut to close-ups from the same shot from the same lens of the same camera.
There’s a little history in the book, about film’s early days, TV’s invention, the folding modular stage sets of experimental theater, the joys of “little imperfections” that you see every week on “Saturday Night Live” (adds excitement to the viewing experience).
And there are anecdotes, little ways Coppola learned to make the limited rehearsals usually given to film production more like theater. He hit on an idea making “The Godfather,” inviting the cast to an introductory dinner, where he seated them in the pecking order of their characters. He discovered that getting actors to make a meal together, improvising in character, made the sense memory stronger and the connection between actor and character stronger.
“Live Cinema” is a quick read, a fun book and thought-provoking. Like many an old master, Coppola’s become more impressionistic as he grows older — bold strokes, not fretting over perfection or exactitude, impatient to do something quickly, with the heat of inspiration spilling over cast and crew.
True story, back when I worked in public radio, I interviewed — not Fred Rogers, but “Margy,” seen in this trailer for the new Morgan Neville documentary, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?”
She was a producer on “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” touring the provinces to talk up the program, PBS etc. I remember her being EXACTLY like him, his quiet demeanor and innate sweetness. Now, I don’t know if being around him made her that way, at least during the run of the show. But as I was listening to the interview on tape, editing it, I was struck by how calming she was, how she made me take on her vibe, the way Rogers may have given her his. She said as much in the interview.
A wholly beloved figure, of seminal importance to children’s TV and decades of American childhood. Maybe they’re over-selling the tolerance, consideration, thoughtfulness and sensitivity he might have brought “to a generation.” Trump’s America doesn’t really reflect Children of Fred, all grown up. But then, Trump voters probably weren’t Fred fans as kids.
This goes into pretty wide release June 8, and I fully expect Mr. Neville (he came through Orlando talking up “20 Feet from Stardom” with Merry Clayton) to collect his second Oscar for this one, sight unseen.
Movie Nation 