This March 14 spy thriller was written by David Koepp, which might matter more than having an ex-James Bond (Pierce Brosnan) and former Miss Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) in the supporting cast.
Koepp scripted the first Tom Cruise “Mission: Impossible,” the Tobey Maguire “Spider-Man,” “Jurassic Park,” a couple of “Indiana Jones” movies, a “Mummy” and a “Jack Ryan.”
This Brit-pic, a serious-minded “Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” pops like a Bond thriller without the weight of a “franchise” on it.
Memory is a merciful thing when it comes movies. We remember the grand moments in films, the signature bits, and much of what’s less moving, entertaining or important just drifts away.
Charlie Chaplin had become Charles Chaplin long before “Limelight,” a grand old man (he was over 60) of silent and sound comedy, of vaudeville before that and of the English music halls which gave him his start and first taste of fame that was to grow until his was the most recognizable face and mustache in the world.
But he’d followed his father, a somewhat famous British singer and mimic, into those music halls. And he’d seen what changing tastes, declining status and obscurity did to show people. Crushed pride was the least of it, and alchoholism was often a consequence.
“Limelight” is a somber, sentimental and seriously old-fashioned melodrama, a lumbering, under-edited meander through the English music hall life of the early 20th century, when cinema first showed up to announce its eventual death.
But what we remember about it is the magic of the two greatest silent film comedians, Chaplin and Buster Keaton, sharing a few scenes late in the film, recreating a little of the earlier slapstick and mimed magic from their days treading the boards, living out of a trunk before the movies and Hollywood lured them West.
Chaplin’s movie is a literal relic, a far less edgy, dynamic and cinematic experience than “The Entertainer,” a blast of the new “kitchen sink realism” that scorched some of the same ground less than a decade later, and more sentimental and far less amusing than “Stan & Ollie,” the most recent film to reach back into that world.
The camera is anchored and static, with pristine, lifeless Hollywood backlots doubling for London streets, and mostly spare sets (and painted backdrops) for scenes often allowed to play out in a single long take.
That was a remarkable trait of Chaplin’s silent classics, as we see the clockwork comedy of a genius of the pratfall and near-pratfall dodge blows, gigantic machinery and automobiles and show off just how completely he’d mastered roller skates. But editing is what animates cinema, and “Limelight” only allows it when the star needed another take on that last bit, or decided a close-up is necessary.
He’d mercifully turn away from the hokey suicidal-dancer-who-won’t-dance plot to deliver entire music hall routines, corny songs, understated dances and dated monologues that preserve the institution he was celebrating — in amber.
But as the melodrama progresses and ballet-with-slapstick moves center stage, as the faded “star” Calvero’s “comeback” begins, “Limelight” livens up. By the time Keaton shows up we get why this picture, which earned plenty of indifferent reviews upon release, has come to be celebrated as Chaplin’s last “great” (almost) movie.
Calvero used to be a top-of-the-marquee “tramp act” in the music halls. We meet him drunk, having whiled away a night in his cups with his fellow unemployed old timers in 1914 London.
He smells gas upon finally making his way past the lock on his apartment house’s front door. And after elaborately checking his shoes to ensure he hasn’t stepped in something, spies a downstairs flat with towels stuffed under the door.
The gamine (Claire Bloom) has tried to kill herself — drinking poison, turning on the gas. Calvero rescues her, fetches a doctor and even talks the unsympathetic landlady (Marjorie Bennett) into letting her stay with him to recuperate, something the doctor ordered.
Thereza or “Terry” is broke, a dancer who can’t dance thanks to a bout of rheumatic fever. The doctor sets Calvero straight. She probably didn’t have rheumatic fever. This “can’t use my legs” thing is all in her head.
“Are you in pain?” Calvero asks. If not, “the rest is fantasy.”
It’s hopeless, she insists.
“Then live without hope. Live for the moment. There are still…wonderful moments!“
He dreams of a stage collaboration between them, but once awake he has accept the honesty in her “No one would ever think you’re a comedian.” He’s not funny, not while sober, anyway.
His agent (Barry Bernard) insists his name is “poison” to theater bookers. But as Calvero reaches his low ebb, at least he’s encouraged Terry to begin anew. She joins a dance company, and her director (Hitchcock favorite Norman Lloyd) and the producer (Nigel Bruce, Watson to Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes) have a ballet in mind, a “harlequinade,” that requires clowns.
Maybe Terry knows someone? And if she freezes up before dancing onto the stage, he’ll be right there to slap her back into reality. (Ouch)
Chaplin’s direction seemed more and more old-fashioned and lackluster the longer he directed and the more the cinema “grew up” and grew more visually sophisticated around him. The best images are in his real-time treatment of the ballet, as he uses crane shots to show the silent, efficient bustle of scene-changes in a theater.
Chaplin won his only competitive Oscar as a very old man, as “Limelight” wasn’t properly released in the U.S. under Academy rules, and the Best Original Score Academy Award (1973) came to the film after its “official” L.A. release in 1972. “Terry’s Theme,” also known as “Eternally,” is one of the most recognizable melodies in screen score history.
His acting was always presentational, closer to mime than “Method.” But the performances surrounding him here are pretty good, with Bruce, Lloyd and other veterans in top form and relative-newcomer Bloom holding her own and Chaplin’s son Sydney Chaplin not bad as the composer/love-interest who might turn Terry’s head away from the elderly savior she’s “fallen in love” with (Um, ok).
The real magic here is where it always was, putting two legendary troupers together in a dressing room, on a music hall stage, performing shtick (not exactly hilarious). They remind us of the nerve and craft that it takes to do it and that while tastes in comedy change, old tramp comics never die. Not while there’s a film camera around to catch them at their peak.
Rating: “approved” (G)
Cast: Charles Chaplin, Claire Bloom, Nigel Bruce, Sydney Chaplin, Norman Lloyd and Buster Keaton
Credits: Scripted and directed by Charles Chaplin. A United Artists release on Tubi and other streamers.
Running time: 2:17
There’s a contemplative vibe to this standard-issue “got a contract on’em” view of the tedium and violence of life behind bars. Sins admitted, committed and maybe even atoned for.
Pearce is having another “moment” thanks to this and “The Brutalist.” He’s had a few such moments. Because he’s been bloody brilliant forever, and every so often, we notice and remember.
Rosalind Chao, RZA (Now going by Bobby Diggs?), Matt Walsh, Lauren Knutti and Mr. HR from “The Office” (Paul Lieberstein) are also in the cast of this indie comedy about an artists’ retreat/boot-camp where they are coached into overcoming…creative blocks?
By turns paranoid and pollyanna-ish, “Homestead” is a conservative Christian survivalist wish fulfillment fantasy about living through “The End.”
The studio that brought us the controversial “Sound of Freedom” serves up an almost bipolar picture packed with MAGA virtue signaling — gun fetishizing, “authority” defying, law-ignoring, a might-makes-right mindset fueled by Black Rifle Coffee, the unofficial brew of Jan. 6.
This theatrical-release pilot to an Angel Studios series covers the same ground that many a post-apocalyptic thriller before it does, leaning more into a “Trigger Effect” and “The Day After” debacle than anything brought on by zombies.
But I was reminded of “The Walking Dead” in the drab, soap operatic way this extraordinary situation — a “bomb” that exploded off California — leads to a normalizing of societal breakdown and bunker mentality. Just hole up in a compound with family and ex-military folks and the rich oligarch who “hired” them until the dust clears, FEMA shows up or, wettest wingnut dream of all, civilization has to be rebuilt along their ways of thinking and on their blood-lines.
No, it’s not helpful that this wingnut agitprop comes out mere weeks after the non-fiction thriller “The Order,” where an earlier generation of cultish “preppers” tried to trigger the sort of social collapse that “Homestead” whitewashes.
The Christian messaging that Angel Studios is famous for is almost an afterthought — a furtive blurt of prayer as a mother (Susan Misner) and her kids fleeing the West Coast abandon their car and steal a van at a mobbed gas station, “Why did we buy a Tesla?”
When the message becomes more overt later in the film — Christian compassion, “loaves and fishes” for the hungry, “Are we building an ark or a fortress?” By that time it’s as if the screenplay is trying to paint a TV preacher’s optimistic grin on the grimness that “preppers” figure they alone deserve to survive. As if anybody could “prep” their way out of this.
The Big Bang explodes off of Los Angeles, sending assorted families fleeing East, towards this “Homestead” mansion/compound in the heart of The Rockies. Billionaire (we assume) Ian Ross, played by veteran movie heavy Neal McDonough, bought and built and stocked it. There are vineyards and orchards and a garden and a granery.
Part of Ian’s prep was to hire a cadre of combat vets who convoy in via SUVs and military-decorated pick-ups. Bailey Chase hit the gym and grew the requisite stubble to play Jeff Erickson, tactically-trained leader and “realist.” Jeff’s brusque to the point of bullying, a guy who sees their weaknessness and envisons a stronghold that their arsenal and training others there, including his almost-rebellious son (Tyler Lofton), can defend.
Ian’s compassionate conservative wife (Dawn Oliveri) figures they can feed the starving masses outside their razor wire fences. Jeff’s combat-zone veteran wife (Army logistics?), Tara (Kearran Giovanni) is a pragmatist and a problem solver.
Not that Ian hasn’t thought of “everything.” Even his ecologically-minded daughter Claire (Olivia Sanabia) is wholly on board. They’re raising peaches for peach wine, as in olden times that was the safest, surest path to “preserving calories” — turn your harvest into alcoholic drinks.
But as matters quickly settle into an uneasy routine — hunkering down, keeping the gates closed and identifying possible threats (local authority) and rumors of FEMA salvation — “Homestead” grinds pretty much to a halt.
Screenwriters Jason Ross, Joseph Snyder, Leah Bateman and Philip Abraham don’t such much “build” this universe as “cast” this “ark.” They fall straight into the fallacy of men and women with “particular skills,” geared-up soldiers who are in less danger and are inherently less interesting in this scenario than ordinary souls hurled into chaos.
The Baumgartner clan (Jarret LeMaster and Ivey Lloyd Mitchell play the parents, Summer Sadie Mitchell is their teen daughter) are hurled into this nightmare under-“prepped,” “camping” at home, going on the run towards Homestead, connected by charity work they did with the Rosses at some point in the past.
That sort of story, fleeing and surviving on the run, has been covered in scores of earlier films for a reason. It’s just more dramatic and a lot more interesting.
The coup coffee caps and T-shirts aren’t the only identity politics flags flying around here. There’s California bashing, Utah-praising, ridiculous assertions about “militia” defeating National Guard units, a supernatural premonition, the conspiracy nut podcaster who takes to short wave radio to advise everybody to put their cash in “bullets and beans” and um, “crypto.”
Not sure how that will work when the POWER GRID that’s been strained by the electronic, digital Ponzi scheme is down with no prospect of coming back up. But that’s the Neverland we’re visiting here. Crypto will almost certainly cause the next Great Depression, and gun nuttiness is already killing thousands while cultists pray for the day when the social order is upended and they can live out some lawless modern Old West fantasy with themselves on top.
The acting isn’t awful and the production values are passable. McDonough makes a much better villain than anybody shoved into that sort of role here.
This is an origin story that lacks anything in the way of a “hook” to whet the viewer ‘s appetite for a series. Even the “Christianity” angle is soft-peddled.
We may be closer to WWIII or some other calamity that knocks American society off its feet, judging by the past incompetence of those about to take power. But you’ve got to shove more entertainment value in The End than this.
Because the “You were right to fill your bomb shelter with canned beans” crowd is a much smaller audience than the “child traffickers are EVERYwhere” fanbase on Angel Studios’ lone blockbuster.
Rating: PG-13, violence
Cast: Bailey Chase, Dawn Oliveri, Kearran Giovanni, Tyler Lofton, Susan Misner, Emmanuel McCord and Neal McDonough
Credits: Directed by Ben Smallbone, scripted by Jason Ross, Joseph Snyder, Leah Bateman and Philip Abraham, based on the TV series created by Jason Ross and Ben Kasica. An Angel Studios release.
Running time: 1:52
This 2025 “real time” thriller takes us into Iraqi combat “as remembered” by writer and co-star Ray Mendoza.
Does it look more intense than the many Iraq War grunts-eye-view thrillers that preceded it, or even appreciable different from “American Sniper,” “Hurt Locker,” etc?
Hard to tell. But Alex Garland co-directed it, and A24 has it.
Saying Megan Fox is well cast as a robotic household “helper” in “Subservience” seems kind of mean. And one really should avoid using the phrase “human sex doll” in describing her role here, or her screen career in general.
“Subservience” is another attempt at a cringey, cautionary and harrowing account of the Future that Awaits Us, if we let AI run our lives.
The trouble with a century of such films, from “Metropolis” to the endless “Terminator” franchise to “Her” to “M3GAN,” is that we never listen. The AI singularity is upon us and we keep acting as if we’ve never “seen this movie before.”
Michael Morrone of the even cringier “365 Days” stars in “Subservience,” portraying a Colorado contractor facing mass robotic replacement of his high-rise building workforce, but who really needs help around the house and two kids after his wife (Madeline Zima) has a heart attack.
A “SIM” might be just the ticket.
Fox plays the short-skirted, fake-skin bombshell SIM who wins the job when she tracks down and cares for Nick’s wandering daughter (Matilda Firth) when she gets lost at the SIM shopping fare they visit to check out their replace-mommy-for-a-while options.
“Daddy, can we GET her? Pleeeeaaase!”
“Alice” they name their SIM, after “Alice in Wonderland.”
She is “strong, obedient, and I have no desires outside of fulfilling yours.”
Is she still talking about “cooking, cleaning and childcare,” though?
As wife Maggie awaits a heart transplant, Alice with the simulated heartbeat finds way to “look after” Nick, every day and in every way, in case “the worst happens,” something Maggie foolishly tasks her with doing. Looking like Megan Fox and as programmed to be as compliant as a sex worker, we know where that’s going.
The Will Honley/April Maguire script does zero intellectual heavy lifting as it touches on common fears of machine “replacement” of wait staff and other blue collar workers, and of caregivers and homemakers.
I’d no sooner muttered “Why are their AI in-home housekeeping robots but none in construction, etc.?” when that coming transformation hits Nick’s worksite. The “world building” here isn’t complete enough to recognize there’d be no need to make these welding, wiring, pipe-fitting, concrete-pouring and I-beam bolting machines look like humans, or give wy you’d give such machines nights off.
That’s for the series spun out of this, I guess.
SIM bartenders, nurse’s assistants and the like need the deluxe human covering “package,” sure. But who would dare make a home-use robot line that looks like Megan Fox, “anatomically correct,” and given to wearing lingerie — functional or otherwise?
Fox is OK as the lead and the villain, and we forget that she’s rarely worse than “adequate.” But the movie isn’t all that.
The latter acts of “Subservience” play out like assorted “Terminators” and “M3GAN,” as if there’s only one way to end a cautionary thriller like this. There’s nothing witty about the dialogue, and the plot is just as perfunctory, functional and here’s that word again, and it’s not a compliment — “robotic.”
Rating: R, violence, sex, nudity, profanity
Cast: Megan Fox, Michele Morrone, Madeline Zima and Andrew Whipp.
Credits: Directed by S. K. Dale, scripted by Will Honley and April Maguire. An XYZ/Millennium release on Netflix.
Running time: 1:45
OK, not your normal platform — Drumeo, a drum-centric site selling lessons, etc. is offering this. Not sure why that is (probably not a feature length doc).
But in the ’80s and ’90s, Collins was as omnipresent as any balding Brit pop star has ever been. At his peak, he was doing music videos, cranking out hits and even doing movie songs and film scores.
His first one for Disney was the animated picture “Brother Bear,” which brought him to Orlando where I interviewed him. He joked about how “Even I got sick of me” being all over the radio, and how Sting and Disney didn’t get along when The Police singer/songwriter was commissioned to do the tunes to a Disney animated film.
Great that Phil’s still around, kind of hard to see him infirm like this.
Adam Woodward’s the little-known British lead in this thriller, about deja vu dealings with the monsters you’ve been confronting in life after life through the past — Romans to Nazis to modern day MAGA Jon Voight.
On the nose casting, as it were. Charlotte Vega also stars.
Jan. 14, streaming.
A young, good looking but unknown cast — Inbar Lavi, Jake McLaughlin and Ray Panthaki among the ranks — hedge fund bros and a Miro’ painting figure in this Jan 10 thriller from Judd Bloch.
Movie Nation 