He’s still got the suit, the white bucks, the bow tie.
But it’s easy to see why this was a deemed Netflix picture. There are some laughs. Joe Manangiello delivers.
But Pee-Wee Herman’s lost his mania, his fastball. His laugh. That voice is showing a lot of mileage.
Not exactly “timeless.” Needed a daft and deft directorial touch to amp up the energy, or help Reubens fake it.
The typical horror movie can be labeled a success if it manages to jolt you a couple of times, and get the hairs on the back of your neck up here and there.
But “The Witch” works in less visceral, more cerebral ways.And it manages to be deeply disturbing as it does.
Writer/director Robert Eggers’ debut feature convincingly takes us back to Puritan New England and makes one religious, superstitious family confront the unknown.
That unknown is witchcraft, a grasping explanation for that which these colonists cannot explain.
In 1630s Massachusetts, a pious, contrarian farmer (Ralph Ineson) runs afoul of the theocracy in charge of the place and moves his family from the semi-safe comforts of town into the woods.
“We will conquer this wilderness,” he prophesies. “It will not consume us.”
He and his teen daughter (Anya Taylor-Joy) and tweenage son, Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw) are just gathering up their first crop, nearly finished with the thatched-roof barn and pen for their goats and horse when tragedy strikes.
Tomasin (Taylor-Joy) loses the new baby in the family in the middle of a game of peek-a-boo. Katherine, their mother (Kate Dickie) is bereft, weeping and lashing out.
“What is amiss on this farm? It’s not natural!”
A wolf got the kid? The daughter did something with him? Mom has another answer — the son has hit puberty and has taken an unhealthy interest in his older sister’s decolletage. Daughter Tomasin is in league with the Devil. She’s a witch!
William, the father, struggles to go on, to paper over the tragedy and the rift it causes in the family. He chops wood. Lots of it. As penance? He orders the mouthy younger twins, Jonas and Mercy, around. And he takes Caleb out hunting. But they get separated.
Eggers uses his effects sparingly. There are no shaky cameras to clutter up his meticulous colonial settings or characters. We catch a hint of the depravity witches might visit on a baby, the nature-loving nudity of these woodland monsters, and see animals and children possessed.
All of this is bent on casting the family’s suspicion at Tomasin, given a “You cannot be SERIOUS” sense of fear and outrage by Taylor-Joy. Young Scrimshaw, playing a child whose only reference to what has befallen him is a short life of religious indoctrination, has beatific moments of deranged clarity.
Dickie carries grief to new heights.
And veteran British actor Ineson (“Kingsman: The Secret Service”) ably captures the confusion of a man whose limited view of the world gives him an understanding of what is happening but a wholly inadequate response to it.
“We have been ungrateful of God’s love!”
It’s not edge-of-your-seat alarming and its jolts are more creepy than shocking. But for all its period detail and head games, “Witch” works on the most primitive level. Put children in jeopardy, have the adults be ineffectual at confronting it, and let the audience know something that the family can only suspect — that they are dealing with supernatural evil, and that their worst fears don’t come close to imagining what awaits them.
MPAA Rating: R for disturbing violent content and graphic nudity
Cast: Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie
Credits: Written and directed by Robert Eggers. An A24 release.
Running time: 1:30
The cinema produces so few romantic comedies that work that it’s not just a shame, it’s a crime, when one gets out unnoticed.
“Slow Learners” is laugh-out-loud funny, at turns cruel and raunchy, playful and wistful.
It doesn’t star anyone famous enough to “open” a picture, so Sundance Selects picked it up for a song and released it to no acclaim last August.
But it’s on Netflix streaming, just in time for Valentine’s Day.
Sarah Burns of the Upright Citizens Brigade (and “I Love You, Man”) plays gawky high school librarian Anne. Adam Pally of “Happy Endings” is Jeff, the bespectacled, awkward school guidance counselor.
They’re best friends. They tell each other everything. Not that there’s much to tell. They’re among the legions of the lovelorn in trendy Media, Pennsylvania (outside Philly).
Jeff’s life highlight might be leading his single male friends’ book club. They’re mostly nerds like him. But hunky/stubbly neighbor Max (Reid Scott of “Veep”) is their hero. He’s a player. Wallflower Anne pines for him.
She is wearing out her frank-about-post-childbirth bestie, Julia (Megan Reitman) with her self-absorbed tales of lovesick woe.
Yes, their friends can see Jeff and Annie as perfect together. But she doesn’t see him that way, and he’s resigned to going to Mom’s 65th birthday party (Marceline Hugot and Kevin Dunn play his parents) alone.
But the minute school’s out, Anne and Jeff decide to make a change. He loses the glasses, dons a bandanna and resolves to never sit through another computer date with anyone who lists his every physical, dietary, personality or fashion fault (the film’s first big laugh).
“Everything. Starting with your face…It’s like you’re smelling something…You don’t look like you have bones in your body. You’re like an old baby.”
And Anne, who had to admit her surprising lack of intercourse to her gynecologist (also hilarious) lets her inner freak out — drinking, jumping up on bars, putting it out there in every sense of the phrase.
The predictable turns of events that follow turn Jeff into a womanizing jerk and Anne into a libidinous lush. All of which keep them, and us, from the inevitable.
There’s a cute/mean double date scene, misbehavior in a photo booth and tasty tidbits of school life where the kids he’s to advise avoid Jeff and the students who keep messing up her books and the Puritanical principal (Kate Flannery) drive Anne off the deep end.
Burns is a Kristen Wiig waiting to happen, and Pally — a sillier Michael Stuhlbarg look-alike, makes us suffer (amusingly) with him even as we’re laughing at him.
Not every scene works, but the laughs are nicely sprinkled throughout. And if you wonder how the film’s best riffs came off, watch the cannot-keep-a-straight-face outtakes during the closing credits.
Nobody saw it last summer. And Hollywood isn’t beating down the cast’s collectives doors. Yet. But these “Slow Learners” catch on just in time to be the best cheap date movie for Valentine’s Day.
MPAA Rating: unrated, adult situations, language, alcohol abuse
Cast: Sarah Burns, Adam Pally, Reid Scott, Catherine Reitman, Mary Grill,
Credits: Directed by Don Argott, Sheena M. Joyce , script by Heather Maidat. A Sundance Selects release.
Running time: 2:36
A $41 million take on Friday hints that the R-rated comic book adaptation “Deadpool” is headed toward some sort of Feb. record.
Better than “Fifty Shades,” anyway.
$100 million+ by Sunday, a four day weekend take of $115, says Deadline.com.
Ryan Reynolds has a career-making smash on his hands, at last.
Reviews were good, Reynolds rocks the role, and it has no real competish.
Save for “Kung Fu Panda 3,” still rolling in the dough with a $26-28 million weekend.
“How to Be Single” is managing a not-bad $22 million weekend, at this pace. Anna Kendrick still holds the Rebel Wilson co-star record in terms of BO.
“Zoolander 2”? At least 8 years too late to have any chance. Seriously. $16 million. The transportation costs for the scores of cameos was more than that.
And one last time, WHO exactly demanded this sequel?
Michael Moore’s “Where to Invade Next” may manage $1 million this weekend, in limited release (300+ theaters).
A mixed weekend for movies, as we’ve learned to expect from February.
The Oscar contenders, most moviegoers have seen. But studios don’t waste potential blockbusters on the deep winter doldrums.
Thus, movies like “Ghostrider” and “Kingsmen” and (better) “The Lego Movie” pop up and make a mint. Because they’re at least something new on the menu.
“Deadpool” is a seriously adult (comic book nerdy adults especially) Marvel outing with tasty, testy laughs and blood and violence. Ultraviolence.
Great part for Ryan Reynolds, and he knew it and has clung to idea that this franchise will make bank for him for years.
Now, it’s out and it’s as cool and biting as we’d hoped. Great reviews, generally, for this one.
“How to be Single,” loosely based on a best seller in the chick-lit/pseudo-self-help genre, gives Dakota Johnson another chance to play the inexperienced-at-love gal in the city (“Fifty Shades of Grey”) and have a naked sex scene.
And it gives Rebel Wilson a chance to tear the roof off the sucker, wisecracking, dancing, scamming on guys, the lot.
Leslie Mann steals the movie as the older sister (type) who doesn’t want a baby, until she does, doesn’t want Mr. Right until he makes a play for her.
Mixed reviews for “How to Be Single.” Romantic comedies are so hard to get right. Raunchy ones even harder.
“Zoolander 2” was a movie that somebody wanted to see — perhaps only the cast, perhaps the post-theatrical (cable, rental) audience that made the original fashion spoof a cult hit. Ben Stiller fights off the deep onset of Dad (HIS dad) body — barrel chested, spindly legs, etc.
Owen Wilson has lost some of his zing.
But Will Ferrell brings it, and check out the scores and scores of cameos. Stiller has a lot of friends willing to go back and visit his earlier career.
Michael Moore’s new docu-essay/diatribe is scattered, aiming at multiple targets with many points of view. An excuse to visit the Best of Europe (and Tunisia) and suggest that maybe American exceptionalism is being better practiced in places that are doing what we used to do so well — educate and feed our kids, punish bad bankers, etc. “Where to Invade Next” is weak tea, only for the faithful. Reviews have been good, but some of the same easy marks endorsed “Hail, Caesar!” Old habits are hard to break. Sometimes your heroes deliver a dog.
Tiny pictures like “Standoff” and “A War” aren’t good enough to lure the cognoscenti.
Dakota Johnson happily slinks into the shadow of Rebel Wilson for “How to be Single,” a raunchy romantic comedy romp that comes up just short on all of those labels.
As in not raunchy enough, not remotely romantic, plenty funny, but at almost two hours, never quite achieving “romp.”
And just in time for Valentine’s Day, too!
It’s another riff on the NYC single’s scene, a movie confident enough in its own chops to rip on earlier takes on the single life.
Alice (Johnson) for instance, has decided that her college beau (Nicholas Braun) is great, but that they should see other people. She does, but she’s shocked when he does as well.
Co-worker and life-of-the-party Robin (Wilson) sets her straight.
“There’s no such thing as “We’re ON A BREAK,’ Season Three Ross!”
Robin’s not letting Alice and Meg, Alice’s married-to-her-job OB-GYN older sister (Leslie Mann) spoil their singlehood by getting “all hopped up on ‘Sex and the City’ and ‘Bridget Jones.'” They’re going out there. With Robin. And stirring the pot. Nightly.
“I once slept with an albino!”
Johnson’s Alice is romantic and unworldly enough to almost fall for an assortment of guys — a widower played by the first-ever charming member of the Wayans clan, Damon Wayons Jr., and the “I’m not the one” bartender EVERY woman hooks up with (Anders Holm). She’s too beautiful to be the near-wallflower she’s supposed to be, hiding under her bangs. But there’s a little of mom Melanie Griffith’s winsome sex kitten about her.
Alison Brie has a cute smaller role as the Anti-Robin, a young woman so ready to mate that she scares off most men (Ken, the bartender among them) and is trying every online dating trick in the book.
Wilson blows through her scenes — dancing and drinking in clubs, hurling herself onto cabs — with girth-ignoring gusto. She’ll let you hear and see (not really) things you won’t be able to un-see. Ever.
The menfolk are thinly sketched “types.
But the heart of the script is the “doesn’t need a man” Meg. Leslie Mann’s scenes at Meg’s practice, where she makes a big show of being immune to the charms of the babies she’s delivering and coddling, crackle with longing. She’s always been a lot more than Judd Apatow’s wife, and criminally under-employed.
The whole affair is too cluttered to clip along, laugh to laugh, love to love. Director Christian Ditter (“Love, Rosie”) had too many characters to serve to give anybody room to breathe.
“How to Be Single” staggers through abrupt shifts in character and tone and never once finds a big romantic moment. Couples lining up for this as a Valentine’s date will find plenty of laughs, and maybe a sense of relief that they’re not “single” and in NYC.
It seems shiny and fun, until you remember Season Three Ross. It’s too much like work, and there’s no such thing as “on a break.”
MPAA Rating: R for sexual content and strong language throughout
Cast: Dakota Johnson, Rebel Wilson, Leslie Mann, Damon Wayans Jr., Jake Lacy, Nicholas Braun, Anders Holm
Credits: Directed by Christian Ditter, script by Abby Kohn, Marc Silverstein and Dana Fox, based on a Lucy Tuccillo book. A Warner Brothers release.
Running time: 1:50
Soldiers, loaded with gear and dressed in camo, depart for a mission in Afghanistan.
They’re to search a village, question the locals about Taliban in the area.
Shots are fired. Soldiers are hurt, others are shaken by the stress.
But they’re in constant contact with their base, and can call in air support in an instant. Which they do, leading to tragic consequences.
“A War” is a vividly-detailed but somewhat generic modern combat film. The sole novelty here is that these utterly professional soldiers are Danish.
They live lives of military tedium, interrupted by sat phone calls home, joshing around the barracks and command decision debates about missions and priorities.
“Winning civilian (hearts and minds),” is mentioned.
But every time they go off-base, whether on an IED (improvised explosive device) hunt, sniper mission or routine search and questioning, tension is high and the fear is palpable.
Tobias Lindholm’s film has documentary realism even in its more melodramatic moments. The family Lieutenant Pedersen (Pilou Asbæk) has left behind is struggling. His oldest son is acting out in school, the wife (Tuva Novotny) is overwhelmed.
He’s lost a man, something everybody in this small unit from a tiny country feels intensely. He doesn’t want to lose another. He’s made decisions about civilians “by the book,” and come to regret those decisions.
His enemy is barbaric and ruthless.
All those factors play into the decision to end a firefight with unseen foes with a blunt instrument — an airstrike. And that’s when the Danish system of military justice steps into the picture.
“A War” is about the consequences of combat, even when the soldiers concerned are committed to a righteous mission — “giving these people a chance” to live a half-normal life without the threat of the murderous Taliban hanging over their heads.
Pedersen’s decisions are life-and-death matters to his men, but ripple all the way back to Denmark, to his family.
It’s wrong to think of these Danes as any different from the many other nations of the coalition still trying to keep the peace in Afghanistan. The processes may differ, but the rules of engagement don’t. Americans, Canadians, Australians and others face similar second-guessing and scrutiny, and no doubt have the same responsibilities back home.
But “A War” is an engrossing reminder that we’re not alone and that others are sharing the nasty, dangerous work of policing the failed states of the world. And that they wrestle with the same command dilemmas and personal vs. professional strains as Americans, with consequences just as deadly, with a need to ethically justify themselves to civilians and rear echelon commanders who don’t really know because they weren’t actually there.
MPAA Rating:R for language and some war related images
Cast: Pilou Asbæk, Tuva Novotny, Alex Høgh Andersen, Dar Salim
Credits: Written and directed by Tobias Lindholm. A Magnolia release.
Running time: 1:55
“Zoolander 2” is funnier than any terrible movie has any right to be.
A “high concept comedy” from the days when those were a thing, it’s basically a cacophony of cameos and random sight gags hurled at the viewer in a tsunami of haute couture hype.
But in the 15 years since the original film opened, did OK and then became a cable fixture in the pop culture conversation, nobody’s gotten smarter.
Oh yeah. The stupid is strong with this one.
Zoopermodel Derek Zoolander’s dream of a school for beautiful idiots like him, “The Derek Zoolander School for Kids who Can’t Read Good and Want to Do Other Stuff Good Too,” died, along with his wife, when the building collapsed. That was years ago.
A TV news montage, featuring reports from Katie Couric, Jane Pauley, Matt Lauer and yes, Jim Lehrer, catches us up on where Derek (Ben Stiller) and Hansel (Owen Wilson) have been these past fifteen years.
Derek’s been living “as a hermit crab” in the snowy Alps of “extremely northern New Jersey.” Hansel’s been holed up in the desert of Malibu, settled down with an orgy (Kiefer Sutherland included) that went on too long.
But somebody is killing the world’s pop stars — Springsteen, Usher, Madonna, and most tragically — Justin Bieber.
Bieber’s death? On camera, and it gets maybe the biggest laugh of the movie.
Derek and Hansel are summoned from retirement and reluctantly re-united by Interpol’s Fashion Police (Penelope Cruz), because the singers all died leaving selfies with one of Derek’s trademark poses. No, not “Blue Steel.”
A fashion gargoyle/maven played with “Dune” makeup and multi-cultural accent by Kristen Wiig puts Derek and Hansel back on the runways of Rome. But this is the era of polysexuals like “All,” played with vapid femininity by Benedict Cumberbatch. All appeals to both sexes, and no sexes.
“All is all,” he/she says. All has married himself/herself because “Mono marriage is finally legal in Italy.”
Derek has to reconnect with the “fat kid” (Cyrus Arnold) child services took from him years earlier and visit his nemesis (Will Ferrell) in prison. Hansel seeks the counsel of his idol, Sting. Yeah, THAT Sting.
None of this adds up to anything at all. Even All is abandoned after one scene. We giggle when this or that cameo (Christina Hendricks, Willie Nelson, Neil deGrasse Tyson) pops up. And groan at everything Derek and Hansel still cannot figure out.
“I miss not knowing things with you.”
Truthfully, this genre died with Mike Myers. Who isn’t dead, unless you mean cinematically. Will Ferrell is the last guy who could pull something like this off, and “Zoolander 2” gets a much-needed kick in the pants when he shows up. Big and broad and outlandish and still able to riff improved improvised laughs on the set, he’s still got his fastball.
Stiller? He can still do the vapid/vain thing. But he’s outgrown this genre of comedy, and even if he and Wilson are still game to try it, they’re both too late getting around to this sequel that the world sort of demanded — ten years ago.
“Zoolander 2” hasn’t the bite, the edge, the comic anger or sensibility to work in a post-“Hangover” — post Kardashian world. It just has a famous star and director filling the screen with a lot of famous friends. Or acquaintances. And that’s not all that funny.
MPAA Rating:PG-13 for crude and sexual content, a scene of exaggerated violence, and brief strong language
Cast: Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Penelope Cruz, Will Ferrell, Billy Zane
Credits: Directed by Ben Stiller, script by Ben Stiller, Justin Theroux, Nicholas Stoller, John Hamburg. A Paramount release.
Running time: 1:40
Not gonna lie. I laughed out loud — more than once — at “Standoff.”
The trash talk in this Mexican (Midwestern) “standoff” thriller is tasty, the hit-man threats even tastier.
“Take a good look,” the hitman (Laurence Fishburne) tells the last survivor of a graveside funeral service he’s just mowed down. “You only get one. I’ve shown you my face. You’re already dead.”
This guy is long in the tooth, years on the job. He’s made his peace with that bloody line of work.
“You don’t look the Devil in the face without takin’ a ride to the bottom floor.”
The trouble is, there was a witness to his latest massacre, a little orphan girl (Ella Ballantine) who treasures her late parents’ 35mm camera. She got photographs of the killer’s face.
Thomas Jane is Carter Green, the lonely drunk whose remote tumbledown prairie house is the sanctuary that “Bird,” the girl, flees to. Carter Green, flashbacks tell us, had a wife and son. Something happened. He’s not easy to threaten, especially when there’s a child involved.
“What you think I’ve got to lose I already lost,” he hisses, pinned upstairs with the girl, a shotgun and a single shell left.
“You ain’t nothin’ but a QUAIL hunter, boy. And I ain’t no small game!”
The two men wound each other on their first meeting. Blood is dripping, and their standoff–killer downstairs, Army vet and kid upstairs, has a sense of urgency about it
“We’ll just see who drops first.”
The wounds require gruesome self-surgery, the armed truce involves negotiation, taunting and eventually, torture. “Standoff” isn’t easy to watch, and the only unpredictable moments feel like cheats.
Writer-director Adam Alleca is better at the keyboard, cooking up chewy tough talk, than behind the camera. The shootout stuff is only passably staged, and the blood-bursts (not his fault…entirely) look digitally added, in some places.
But if Fishburne is fated to join Jane in that netherworld of C-movies, at least they make good company. Each gives as good as he gets, tears off tough talk through gritted teeth and delivers fair value, even in a thriller as forgettable as “Standoff.”
MPAA Rating:R for strong violence and language throughout
Cast: Laurence Fishburne, Thomas Jane, Ella Ballantine
Credits: Written and directed by Adam Alleca. A Saban Films release.
Running time: 1:26
It’s hard to fall in love with — or even like — Edith Welland.
Hell, it’s almost impossible.
Self-absorbed and scattered, cute but not gorgeous, perky but resentful and mean, she’s a Toronto actress with four years of failure under her belt. And she’s bitter about it.
And delusional.
“I think I’m really good.”
Edith (Leah Fay Goldstein) networks, goes to parties, sees her peers starting to have a glimmer of success. So she lies, stealing their credits and latest opportunities when someone asks her “What’re you working on?”
“Isn’t it great how it’s happening for all of us at the exact same time?”
Only it isn’t. Social media, where her friends share their triumphs, just makes her crazier.
Yeah, you could see her ditching her boyfriend “to concentrate on my career.” And spitting (literally) in his (Adam Gurfinkel) face when he takes up acting and effortlessly surpasses her.
You sense that she’s capable of sabotaging her roommate’s (Leah Wildman) play, wrecking a Facebook friend’s “big break” audition or trying to bluff her way into a call-back for a role in the Z-grade horror picture she’s up for, “Blood Sausage.
“Diamond Tongues” is a witheringly funny but still sympathetic portrait of a show business “type” — really, the only showbiz type — the needy, relentlessly optimistic narcissist who tricks him or herself into believing he or she is “special,” and not just somebody with “good looks, and a degree of talent.”
That’s what it takes — all navel gazing, all the time.
Goldstein, whose day job had been with the Canadian band July Talk, embodies the arrested development of an acting dilettante. Edith insults the older “producer” running an acting workshop with a “those who can, do” line, but still sleeps with him in the mistaken belief that it will further her aims.
Edith shows up for auditions without a headshot, can’t be bothered to get her agent or the guy she wants to hire to edit together her reel — the clips of her appearances as “annoyed woman” and the like. She dreams of droning movie star banalities on her favorite chat shows, but cannot be bothered to do the basic work it takes to have that success.
Co-writers/directors Pavan Moondi and Brian Robertson and Goldstein let us see the rising bile beneath the ditziness Edith presents to the world. There’s an ugliness that creeps in, no matter how much she smiles, no matter how dolled up she gets.
But as Edith’s self-awareness grows, so does her beauty, a kind of “world gives you back what you put out there” self-help ethos visualized through makeup, hair and Edith’s inner light.
It’s a cute transformation. And “Diamond Tongues” — the film takes its title from an earlier Edith experimental film about to come out — delights even as it reminds us of why it’s always helpful to wear earplugs while standing in line at film festivals.
All that upbeat “Me me me” from the punter/filmmakers and wannabe stars and starlets is grating, and the mere effort to resist rolling your eyes at each and every too-loud conversation about glories to come is just exhausting.
MPAA Rating: unrated, with sex, profanity
Cast: Leah Fay Goldstein, Nick Flanagan, Adam Gurfinkel, Leah Wildman
Credits: Directed by Pavan Moondi, Brian Robertson, script by Pavan Moondi. A Mongrel Media release.
Running time: 1:39
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