Yes, the young ladies, whom you’ll recognize as stars of “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” and “Split” and “The Witch,” are the focus of “Thoroughbreds,” rich and murderously bored pretty young things.
Olivia Cooke and Anya Taylor-Joy are the actresses.
But the only member of the cast of this film who died tragically in real life, for whom this is the LAST movie we’ll ever see him in, is the sweet-spirited Anton Yelchin.
March 9.
Sometimes one can pinpoint that moment in a movie when you, as a viewer, checked out. “Nope, lost me.”
“Mute,” the new Netflix film from director Duncan Jones (“Moon,” “Source Code,” “Warcraft: The Beginning”) is a random riot of such moments, two hours and six minutes of sci-fi eye candy that makes “Valerian” seem serious, streamlined and coherent.
It’s about this Amish bartender (Alexander Skarsgard) — so take a beat, have a head-slapping laugh at that idea — in FutureGermany who loses his cocktail waitress/hooker girlfriend and must track her down despite being, well, hell — AMISH.
The fact that he’s been mute thanks to a gruesome swimming accident in his childhood isn’t his biggest handicap. He can’t drive, although he steals a car, never has had a phone but uses one to track her down and gets really violent when anybody insults that girlfriend (Seyneb Saleh). Again, he’s AMISH. So no, trying to cope with voice activated phones, computers and library search engines of this future isn’t his only problem.
Wandering around this neon, dew-soaked “Blade Runner” world where screens are everywhere, cameras are everywhere there are screens, hovergadgets deliver everything except for the beatings our AMISH hero metes out to bad guys is the movie’s quest.
Then there are these two amoral, off-the-books AWOL Army surgeons (Paul Rudd and Justin Theroux, no doubt sharing Jennifer Aniston stories between takes) wandering the back alleys, performing medical miracles for the mob or anybody else who can afford their fees, playing The Ugly Americans to German barristas, bartenders, mall security guards and the like. They might as well be in another movie. A worse one.
The nightclubs have the usual lurid lighting and robotic pole dancers we’ve come to expect from The Future. Stumbling into Dominic Monaghan (“Lord of the Rings”) dolled up in geisha drag, playing a perv who has hired two such robots to have sex for his entertainment is another “Well, so much for THIS movie” moment.
Skarsgaard is fascinating, but maybe the most anti-Amish AMISH hero in the history of the Amish. He’s basically playing a private eye working a case without using his voice, and maybe one arm tied behind his back.
I mean, I love a flying “Fifth Element” taxi as much as the next nerd, but Jones — whose films have been spiraling down the “less and less interesting” drain since his breakout in “Moon” — shoves a showy, pointless Sam Rockwell cameo (A cloned soldier of the future?), some of the old futuristic ultra-violence and some old-fashioned “Being bad means being a HAM” Paul Ruddery into the blender.
If this is what the excruciating finished film looks like, what manner of dreck must Mr. Bowie’s son have left on the cutting room floor?
MPAA Rating: unrated, with graphic violence, sexuality, substance abuse, profanity
Cast: Alexander Skarsgard, Seyneb Saleh, Paul Rudd, Noel Clarke, Sam Rockwell, Justin Theroux
Credits:Directed by Duncan Jones, script by Duncan Jones and Michael Robert Johnson. A Liberty Films/Netflix release.
Running time: 2:06
There’s the seed of a promising premise at the heart of “The Lullaby,” a modern tale of Gothic horror from South Africa. It’s just a seed, though. An incoherent and obscure script, unrestrained hysteria in the performances and inept “gotcha” execution let that seed rot in the ground.
A prologue shows us Boers — white South Africans — stuffed into history’s first concentration camps during the Boer War at the start of the 20th century. Women wail, as they’ve been raped by their British captors. A helpful preacher intervenes. He wrings their rape babies necks and tosses them off a cliff, “Eden Rock.” Needless to say, this doesn’t help the mothers’ states of mind.
In Eden Rock in the present day, Chloe (Reine Swart) is a troubled 20ish young woman with Ricci eyes and Cara DeLevingne eyebrows whom we see give birth. Her mother Ruby (Thandi Perun) brings Chloe and little baby Liam home from the hospital, and asks one question.
“Who’s the dad?”
Chloe’s not telling. Mom is irked — “You’ve done this to SPITE me.”
And she’s alarmed. Chloe’s missing a few mothering instincts. Like all of them. The baby is being neglected, mishandled even when he’s being coddled.
When Grandma Ruby is away, things turn worse. Chloe has visions — of killing her baby, lopping off his toes when she’s supposed to be trimming his nails, of demons on the static-filled TV or in the shadows, coming to steal her baby.
Mom’s lepidopterist shrink (Brandon Auret) isn’t the solution to their problems. He may be the creepiest psychotherapist the movies have ever produced, and not just because he enjoys poking pins in butterflies.
“I’m a collector. I collect…things.”
So we the audience can make connections between the horrors of the past and the haunting of the present, even if Chloe can’t. Her mother’s lullabies should more overtly tie the prologue to the main story thread, but doesn’t.
The terrors Chloe fantasizes will eventually become reality, and she’s not the only one seeing this. But the shrink is mysteriously “Let things run their course” passive. And Ruby keeps leaving her grandbaby in the care of a girl who has to be reminded, “Don’t forget to FEED him.”
The only hair-raising moments come early on, glimpses of shadows that instantly send Chloe over the edge. There’s no rising realization of horror in her mind. She jumps straight into freak-out mode. And young Ms. Swart plays that bug-eyed mania, from start to finish.
Director Darrell Roodt does nothing to build suspense and little to build empathy for the character. Only the helpless baby earns our pity, and that’s because he’s not old enough to have a better agent.
Nor does Roodt spell out the connections between the adults in the story and the village’s horrific past, though that’s obvious enough to pick out visually.
There was promise in the set-up, which surprisingly makes the racist, Dutch Nationalist Afrikaans the victims despite the fact that they’d rather kill their babies than raise British bastards. Those opening horrors should burn into our memory and carry the succeeding picture off.
But for an SUV load of reasons — budgetary, acting prowess, camera placement, cutting — they don’t. And the unfrightening film that follows just underlines that with every fresh shriek and scream.
MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic, bloody violence
Cast: Reine Swart, Thandi Perun, Brandon Auret
Credits:Directed by Darrell Roodt, script by Tarryn-Tanille Prinsloo. An Uncork’d Entertainment release.
Running time: 1:26
Hollywood’s assorted guilds are handing out their peer-recognized best work over the past year in film and TV. And today it was the Hair and Makeup Stylists who honored “The Crown” and “Feud” and “American Horror Story” and “Big Little Lies,” and of course “Game of Thrones” on the TV side.
Film? A category honoring best contemporary makeup went to “Pitch Perfect 3.” Not exactly an “awards season” favorite. Nor was “Guardians of the Galaxy 2,” which had the best hair of any contemporary movie of last year.
Really? Does Jessica Chastain know about that?
Margot Robbie and Allison Janney transformed in “I, Tonya,” and the guys got period perfect near-mullets in that one, too. Best period hair styling.
Best period makeup? That would be “Darkest Hour,” turning Gary Oldman into Winston and Kristen Thomas into Clementine Churchill. Hiding Ben Mendelsohn’s natural villainy and making him George VI was impressive, too.
You hear the motor-sailor’s rigging groan, every squeak and metallic bend in the Spitfire, the muted pounding of a pilot trying to break his canopy and escape his sinking airplane, you feel the automatic weapons rounds thump against the hull of the beached trawler, whistling through the air of the front lines on the streets of “Dunkirk.”
So it was only natural that the Cinema Audio Society recognize Christopher Nolan’s largely dialogue-free masterpiece for the sound environment the crew concocted to match the spare, immersive and visceral visual one of the film.
“Dunkirk” took the big prize, the documentary “Jane” won for non-fiction, and “Game of Thrones” and Silicon Valley” took the TV prizes at the guild’s annual event.
“Dunkirk” could do well Oscar night, if there isn’t a “Whatever, just give it to ‘Shape of Water'” landslide. Though it was never going to have much in the line of singled-out acting honors (Mark Rylance, and Cillian Murphy and Tom Hardy stand out, but in compact ways that serve the story’s tense claustrophobia), I still say it’s the best directed, best edited, best shot best picture of 2017.
Seriously. It’s opening March 9, first I’ve heard of it. I dare say it’s the first you have as well.
Because it’s a Florida crime tale — Andy Garcia has a supporting role — and will probably only earn limited release.
Sofia Vergara has an awful track record on the big screen, and Karl Urban, despite his droll “Star Trek” and “Red” turns, has never blown up as a leading man, heavy or star with box office pull.
So yeah, see the trailer before taking a flyer on “Bent.”
Was there ever a more British title for a period piece romance than this?
“On Chesil Beach” suggests…not much of a beach at all, gloomy skies, tennis “at the club,” and Humber motorcars delivering one and all to a quaint port where a marriage doesn’t quite come off the way one expects in that pre-sexual revolution/pre-sex education era.
Saoirse Ronan and Billy Howle play the should-be-happier couple, Emily Watson’s her mum, and it’s all based on Ian McEwan’s novel about sexual hang-ups and expectations in 1962 Britain, land that was later to inspire the play, “No Sex Please, We’re British.”
“On Chesil Beach” is almost certain to get lost in the swamp of summer films, but might be worth checking out May 18.
Here’s an unusual take on the post-Rodney King verdict, a foster parent trying to keep a house full of black kids indoors after the original “Black Lives Matter” moment — the police “wilding” assault on motorist Rodney King — with her white neighbor (Daniel Craig) making the journey from irritated to sympathetic as the LA Riots break out around them.
Berry’s hair looks awfully high maintenance for a manic, overwhelmed foster mom. “Kings” opens April 27.
When your comic book movie rolls into a ton of theaters and utterly devours a long 4.5 day holiday weekend, it’s cigars and champagne all around the office.
But when it notches the biggest pre-summer SECOND weekend in modern box office history, what’s the protocol? What do you celebrate with?
“Black Panther” had another big Friday and seems headed towards a $100 million second weekend, with a respectable 50% drop off from its opening weekend, if Friday’s numbers project into Sat. and Sunday.
There’s a strong “Let’s see it again” pull to this Afro-centric superhero pic, which has to help. Not sure if the numbers are showing a big chunk of the audience isn’t really a comic book superhero crowd, but its alternate history of Africa take on the genre is bracing and worth embracing, especially by people under-represented on the big screen, especially in this genre.
Hollywood seems to have front-loaded tentpole pictures like this to a greater extreme, something “Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle” emphasized by breaking the mold. It opened well, but lingered and lingered in the top three — six weeks plus — to make its money. Contrast that with “The Last Jedi,” which blew up on its opening and plunged almost 68% its second weekend, and plummeted every weekend afterward. That suggested a lack of repeat business, weaker word of mouth than Disney would admit. It made 2/3 of what “The Force Awakens” earned.
“Panther,” unless Sat and Sunday fall off more than Friday, should escape that “Yeah, and?” thing that has enveloped the “Star Wars” universe (Neither film was that great, and my hunch is that it took fans two movies to figure that out).
“Game Night” has only Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams and a comically violent R-rated story to sell it. Good reviews should have helped, but not being an established brand is suppressing turnout. It may not reach the low end of projections ($18), unless word of mouth gives it a big Sat/Sun. push. $16.3 says Deadline.com.
“Annihilation” is based on a sci-fi lit trilogy, and that’s not really worth as much as say a Young Adult sci-fi lit trilogy. It was going to be a hard sell. Read the Amazon reviews of the books and you get a lot of “I didn’t really get what it was about, but I couldn’t put it down.”
There’s some of that in the rapturous reviews you read on the aggregating websites. “I loved the look/feel…literally made my skin crawl…scared me” but “I THINK it’s about…”
NPR, which appears to give movie passes to interns, goes on and on about production design. As movies are stories, that’s a dead give-away that you’ve failed. “Valerian” is dazzling to look at, too.
A lot of “I know this is the sort of sci-fi I should be raving about” subtext in those raves, I must say. It didn’t scare me a bit. There’s no urgency to it, a nice sense of dread, but little surprise. It doesn’t really work as horror, even on an existential level. This biological DNA bending entity — if you can call it that — has landed on Earth and started changing the entire ecosystem in its image. People too. You’d think this cast of all-women would be a little more alarmed than they come off. I loved “Ex Machina,” but Alex Garland misses the mark with this bigger budget picture.
Curiosity and good reviews only go so far in obtaining an audience. “Annihilation” is only headed towards a $10 million weekend, and will be gone by mid March. “Arrival,” a far more interesting and cerebral take on First Contact, didn’t blow up the box office either.
The romantic fantasy “Every Day” barely cracked the top ten. Teens don’t want romances, apparently. Under $3 million.
“Early Man” is the unjust flop in the top ten, Clint’s “The 15:17 to Paris” is hanging around, feeding on the older audience.
The King of “Hoo Hah!” seems spot on as the earthy, imperious college football coach who seemed to do things the right way, the old school way, start to finish.
Until he turned a blind eye to the assistant who was an a opportunistic pedophile — for DECADES — who used Penn State facilities to write his, his coach’s and the school’s name in infamy.
April 7, we see for ourselves.
Movie Nation 