This Brian Epstein bio pic stars Jacob Fortune-Lloyd, Emily Watson, Eddie Marsan, Eddie Izzard and…Jay Leno as Ed Sullivan.
The director did that misguided Eddie Izzard transgender “Doctor Jekyll” of last summer (in the US, 2023 in the UK).
“Midas Man” is earning a release in Brit cinemas and will come to North America via Amazon Prime. Shortly. One hopes.
Netflix’s conquest of “The Hallmark Holiday Movie” as a genre continues with “The Merry Gentlemen,” a snowy tale of Santa season stripping to save the family bar.
These movies follow a fairly strict formula, and this one — scripted by actress (“The Practice”) and sometime screenwriter Marla Sokoloff checks off the requisite boxes. Not with any subtlety, mind you.
It’s sillier and more contrived than one would like. But it makes for colorful background noise for all the holiday prep going on at home. And unlike a lot of what we’re baking and what we see baked and served here, it’s not likely to cause tooth decay or diabetes.
Watching Bûche de Noël prepped, eggnog snickerdoodles and chocolate candy cane cookies come out of the oven won’t make you fat.
Britt Robertson of TV’s “The Rookie” plays our single-gal-in-the-city who comes “home” to find a hunk for the holidays in this variation on a Hallmark-familiar theme.
Ashley’s a dancer with a Rockettes-knockoff revue, “The Jingle Belles.” She’s not 25 any more, so the production finds a reason to lay her off, “aging me out” of a steady gig she’s had for a dozen years.
There’s nothing for it but to go home, where Mom (Beth Broderick, who first made her mark in “Sabrina: The Teenage Witch” on the tube) and Dad (Michael Gross of “Family Ties”) put a brave face on the finances of their music venue small town bar, The Rhythm Room. It’s going bust.
Fortunately, Ashley keeps tumbling into hunks — her cabbie (Hector David Jr.), her sister’s (Sokoloff) cook-husband (Marc Anthony Samuel), the bartender at The Rhythm Room (Cole Prattes).
But it’s the handyman hunk (“Dawson’s Creek” alumnus Chad Michael Murray) wearing all the hair product that gives her the inspiration. A holiday male-stripper revue could save The Rhythm Room. Let’s put on a show!
Literally everything about this is pre-ordained, with every “twist” leaning into schmaltz — the “obstacles” to the success of the stage revue, the roadblocks to romance, the dialogue.
“I don’t bite.” Oh? “I’ve heard stories about city girls!”
And there’s something familiar about that cute old barfly (Maxwell Caulfield of “Grease II!”) that could come in handy in the third act.
That’s one of the appeals of these shlocky movies, the “Whatever happened to’s” who populate the cast.
Robertson is properly plucky and handles her Jingle Belles dance scenes well enough. The male dancers range from convincingly new dancers (none of them has missed a session at the gym) to Chippendales ready.
It all adds up to tinselled treacle, inoffensive enough to be shown at Christmas Eve church services, but barely tolerable — dramatically and aesthetically — in any other setting.
Rating: TV-PG, stripping
Cast: Britt Robertson, Chad Michael Murray, Marla Sokoloff, Marc Anthony Samuel, Michael Gross,
Maria Canals-Barrera, Beth Broderick and Maxwell Caulfield.
Credits: Directed by Peter Sullivan, scripted by Marla Sokoloff. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:27
For anybody who’d been wondering what director Neil Burger (“The Illusionist,” “The Upside,” The Marsh King’s Daughter”) has coming up next (Jan. 24), here it is.
“Inheritance” is a thriller about an aimless, grieving alcoholic daughter who’s just lost her mother only to reconnect with her dad (Ifans) in the Middle East where he’s in the biz of buying, stealing and selling information.
“Spy” is “a big word” to Dad.
Are both stars (Dynevor was on “Bridgerton,” “Dickensian” and appeared in “Bank of Dave”) Brits playing “Americans” here? Accents suggest that.
An ex-con is arm-twisted into solving “a little problem that needs to go away” — a mobster’s ex-girlfriend — in “Lake George,” a dark, dry and funny “hit-man” thriller where the “hit-man” keeps insisting “I don’t do that kind of thing.”
As it stars two alumni of TV’s “Fargo,” terrific character players Shea Whigham and Carrie Coon, let’s call it sort of a “Fargo Lite” hired killer thriller. It’s very well-acted, but not terribly surprising. And it’s a little glib about matters of murder(s) and body disposal.
Whigham is Don, fresh out of prison with no options other than trying to collect money from Armen (Glen Fleshler of “Joker” and TV’s “Barry”), money Armen isn’t interesting in paying. Something about how Don “f—-d up” the job and wound up in prison for ten years left Armen an unsatisfied customer.
But as his ex, Phyllis (Coon), knows entirely too much about his operation, she’s got to go. Armen’s lieutenant and majordomo Harout (Max Casella) will set Don up for success.
Harout sees his “guy” (Joey Oglesby) who can turn over an ancient ’83 Mercedes “diesel” wagon (“Don’t worry about smoke. It go away.”) and a :45, both “perfect for job.”
A couple of manly Middle Eastern kisses-on-the-cheek later and Don is on his way to do this thing he doesn’t do because “I really don’t have any choice.”
But meeting the Porsche-driving denim-jumpsuited mark leads to tears, pleas about an elderly “mother I take care of” and the like. And when the shot isn’t fired forthwith, we know how this is going to go.
Phyllis is going to chatter away, twist-tied to the a grab handle in the Merc, “connecting” with her kidnapper/killer on the drive to the desert. She’s going to dig for something in his personality that gives her wriggle room. She’s going to talk him out of it and make a better offer.
That’ll involve not killing her and hitting Armen’s “stash houses,” which she knows all about, the big reason Armen wants her out of the picture.
All Don wants to do is make it to this cabin he’s rented in Lake George where he can sort things out and figure out what to do with the rest of his life.
Coon has what can be described as “The Aubrey Plaza role” here, pretty enough to make Don listen without really using sex as a weapon or negotiating tool. It’s a canny turn, as the moment Phyllis talks him out of summary execution, she’s running the show.
Anybody gets hurt? Killed? That’s on her. That fingerprint they need to open this safe? She’s looking for garden shears to procure it. Coon (“Gone Girl,” “Ghostbusters: Afterlife”) plays Phyllis as self-absorbed, chatty, pitiless and always looking for an angle.
“If we’re gonna go down, let’s go down BIG!”
“Boardwalk Empire,” “Perry Mason” and “Mission: Impossible” alumnus Whigham has his best leading man role since the terrific “Wristcutters: A Love Story” in veteran TV producer/director (“Electric Dreams,” “The Affair” and yes “Fargo”) Jeffrey Reiner’s slow-burn dark comedy.
He’s the reactor and underreactor here, trying to hold his own in this “arrangement” that almost feels like a “relationship,” one where she is in charge.
“Are you trying to talk me into killing you?”
Fleshler has the hulking presence to be intimidating without much effort, so he underplays Armen’s menace and lets a little vulnerability sneak in.
Casella, a former child actor who’s aged into a surprisingly effective heavy (TV’s “Tulsa King”) is colorful, “professional” and pretty much flawless in a part he turns into instantly-credible.
The “glib” part of “Lake George” emerges in the sudden moments of not-wholly-unexpected violence, the trauma-free killings and body abuse (lopping off fingers) and disposal. It’s not much of a hindrance to enjoying the film, but it does call attention to the rigid, reductive formula the plot is following and the scenic but much-used SoCal locations despite the players’ best efforts to disguise all of that.
Still, if you’re looking for a clinic on how you don’t need a whole season of “Fargo” or “True Detective” to immerse you in a criminal milieu and the sorts of fixes folks living and working there get themselves into, you could do a lot worse than planning a trip to “Lake George.”
Rating: unrated, graphic violence
Cast: Shea Whigham, Carrie Coon, Max Casella, Ashley Fink and Glen Fleshler
Credits: Scripted and directed by Jeffrey Reiner. A Magnet release.
Running time: 1:48
Well, Hell. Now I’ve got to go back and catch “Heavy Trip,” the Finnish metal band comedy from 2018, the movie that inspired “Heavier Trip.”
“Heavy Trip” is on Tubi. Do your homework before catching the sequel in cinemas! It’s free!
The sequel is fitfully amusing and watchable. But you can sense the greater silliness that inspired it in this “Blues Brothers go Metal” road odyssey.
The band’s name is Impaled Rektum, which is pronounced “Im-PALL-ed” Rectum in Finno-English.
“The Most Brutal Metal Band in the World” didn’t make it big in Norway after their “Heavy Trip” from Finland to the land of herring eating A-ha fans. But they caused so much chaos and destruction that they landed in prison.
Ah, but this is a Norwegian prison, famed for “the best seafood buffet in Scandinavia,” for its spa and its pussycat of a warden (Mats Eldøen), whose goal is “a prison people will WANT to come to.”
But hardcase head guard Dokken (Helén Vikstvedt) won’t let lead singer Turo (Johannes Holopainen), Dave-Mustaine-worshipping guitarist Lotvonen (Samuli Jaskio), easily-triggered drummer Oula (Chike Ohanwe) and metal purist/KISS cosplaying bassist Xytrax (Max Ovaska) play their “symphonic apocalyptic reindeer-grinding, Christ-abusing, extreme war pagan Fennoscandic metal” behind bars.
When a promoter by the Satanic name of “Fisto” (Anatole Taubman) dangles a spot at Europe’s biggest metal festival, Wacken, they’re tempted to escape. When Lotvonen’s family is about to lose their reindeer slaughterhouse, that cinches it. They need the money.
Impaled Rektum make a break and do what needs to be done to get to Vilnius, then Rostock — “the smell of fish and PILSNER” — and eventually Wacken, with Mephistophelian Fisto changing the nature of their “deal” every stop along the way.
There’s nothing supernatural about the “evil” promoter, which is kind of the joke. They’re all just…evil. Make your deal with the Devil and get on with it.
They’re pursued by the fanatic prison guard for stealing her beloved camo-green ’96 Jeep Cherokee “Armando.” They stow away on the tour bus of metalheads Blood Meter and their artificially-deep-voiced singer Rob (David Brendin), a band that “was” the biggest thing in metal. For a minute.
Impaled Rektum stumbles into and torches a metal memorabilia shop and museum in Rostock where one can see Lou Reed’s liver, Dio’s ashes and Jimi’s eternally-burning Stratocaster.
Mr. “That’s not metal enough” bassist Xytrax, who changed his name from “Pasi” in the first film, will hear a J-pop girl group’s take on metal music and be smitten…and compromised.
And lead singer Turo will be tempted by Fisto to leave the band and set up as a growl-shouting solo act.
The jokes start in prison — a guard who begs them (in English, mostly, with some subtitled Finnish) as they escape, “Don’t forget to RATE us,” the endless Metallica references, the chest tattoo quoting what Dave Mustaine thinks of your opinion about his guitar solos, the “metal” makeover they get when they sign on the dotted line.
Some gags work, some don’t. The band is “just one concert from being the biggest thing in music,” and the movie about them is about a dozen jokes from being as funny as the supposedly-serious documentary “The Story of Anvil.”
The first “Trip” film is daffier, with sillier world building — long haired metalheads in rural redneck reindeer herding country. This time there’s no potential love interest, no finding “our sound” from the noise of a reindeer grinder (a laundromat dryer serves that purpose here), no dead end jobs — just a Norske prison to flee.
Yeah, I’m cranking up “Heavy Trip” on Tubi to see what possessed them to take another stab at this material. Because if there’s a music genre more thunderously tone-deaf to how funny their mania, mores and rituals are, I’ve never heard of it.
Fennoscandic, apocalpytic reindeer-grinding? Totally there.
Rating: unrated, violence (comic), some profanity
Cast: Johannes Holopainen, Samuli Jaskio, Chike Ohanwe, Max Ovaska, Helén Vikstvedt, David Bredin and Anatole Taubman
Credits: Scripted and directed by Juuso Laatio and Jukka Vidgren. A Doppelganger release.
Running time: 1:36
The shifting sands of editor-turned-director David Lean‘s career took him through early adaptations of Noël Coward scripts, included some definitive adaptations of Charles Dickens and eventually settled on the sweeping epics which is he best known for today — “Bridge on the River Kwai,” “Lawrence of Arabia” and “A Passage to India” among them.
One thing he was never known for was having a flair for comedy. Romances (“Madeleine,” “Doctor Zhivago,””Summertime”), sure. Casting Alec Guniness produced smiles here and there, but aside from the intermittently amusing “Hobson’s Choice,” Lean never made much effort to film “funny.”
But as Noël Coward was Lean’s champion and mentor, putting him behind the camera (with Coward co-directing) “In Which We Serve,” letting him adapt his play “This Happy Breed” and pitching in with rewrites for “Brief Encounter,” only Lean would do if Coward’s witty drawing room comedy “Blithe Spirit” was to be put on the screen.
Lean’s initiation to filming in Technicolor was such an ordeal that he dove into Dickens adaptations in black and white after “Blithe Spirit.” Technicolor had its own “consultants” on set in films using their cameras and film stock, lighting and relighting and slowing film productions to a crawl so that every Technicolor movie would look as perfect as “The Wizard of Oz” or “Gone with the Wind.” That’s no way to make comedy.
The film’s star, Rex Harrison, returning from years of military service, wasn’t sure he was up to being funny again. It kind of shows, as does his belief that Lean knew nothing about how to film comedy.
If you’ve ever seen the play on the stage, you know how hard it is to keep it moving and the witticisms landing. A 2020 film remake with Dame Judi Dench and Dan Stevens merely reminded one of how dated and musty the material, an upper class British ghost story, can be.
But in ’45, Margaret Rutherford reprised her antic stage portrayal of the “professional” medium Madame Arcati, and Kay Hammond repeated her droll and devious stage turn as the ghost of the first wife Elvira, even though Coward wanted Myrna Loy for the big screen version. The befuddled, rushed maid (Jacqueline Clarke) was a stand-out from the Broadway production of the play and came home to take the film role.
And the famed Coward wordplay crackles throughout, putting everyone on their toes, especially Harrison.
“If you’re trying to compile an inventory of my sex life, I feel it only fair to warn you that you’ve omitted several episodes. I shall consult my diary and give you a complete list after lunch.”
That line, censored from the American release of the film, was pretty racy stuff for 1945, as was the play, with its louche treatment of infidelity, the sexual attraction of one’s first wife and the like.
“Get me to bed, Charles. Then we can talk in peace.”
“A thoroughly immoral suggestion. You ought to be ashamed of yourself!”
The ghost of a fondly-remembered but faithless ex-wife (Hammond) is summoned up in a seance arranged by novelist Charles (Harrison) looking for material for his new book. His second wife (Constance Cummings), their doctor friend (Hugh Wakefield of “The Man Who Knew Too Much”) and the doctor’s wife (Joyce Carey) are present as Madame Arcati (Rutherford) recites her incantations and makes the table they’re gathered around thump and rise.
But only Charles sees the spirit — a vision in green makeup and ethereal light. Only Charles hears her come-ons, insults and insinuations.
“I’m pained to observe that seven years in the echoing vaults of eternity have in no way pared your native vulgarity.”
That might derail his current marriage, and with Elvira considering other options — pranks and worse — to get her husband back and have a little “fun.”
All the extra care in production design and getting the color lighting right shows. “Blithe Spirit” is a beautiful film. The Oscar-winning effects (the film’s lone Academy Award) are state-of-the-art pre-digital in-camera trickery and hold up beautifully.
And truth be told, after a stodgy, stagey start, “Blithe Spirit” finds its footing, gets up a head of speed thanks to Rutherford, Hammond and Clarkes, and finishes with a flourish.
But one can’t help but figure Lean learned his lesson with this somewhat lumbering outing.
He moved on from Coward and made his mark in period pieces both intimate and on a grand scale. And if ever Lean felt his film needed a lighter touch, he’d cast Alec Guinness, even in blackface (“A Passage to India”), to achieve that effect.
Rating: “approved,” TV-PG (innuendo)
Cast: Rex Harrison, Constance Cummings, Kay Hammond, Hugh Wakefield, Jacqueline Clarke, Joyce Carey and Margaret Rutherford.
Credits: Directed by David Lean, scripted by David Lean, Ronald Neame and Anthony Havelock-Allan, based on the Noël Coward play. A General Film Distributors/United Artists release on Tubi, other streamers.
Running time: 1:38
Back in olden times, Disney would re-release its animated classics — in theaters, in new video and digital formats — every few years so that new generations of children could discover as parents who grew up on the films introduced their kids to a great memory from their youth.
Granted, they went about as far as they could go with that make-more-money-off-already-produced “intellectual property.”
But this nonsense of remaking “The Lion King,” et al with CGI and “real” settings is head-slappingly cynical, even by “We really need content for the ‘family’ audience in the second quarter” bottom-liners’ standards.
Pixar, Dreamworks, Illumination and Disney Animation have been market-testing their way into a “no new ideas” corner for years — sequels and prequels, each more exhausted than what preceded them.
With audiences slow to respond to the unfamiliar — the charming book adaptation “The Wild Robot” has taking forever to catch on and make money — the inclination is to play it safe — “Minions: The Next Generation,” “The Lion King as a Cub,” etc.
So here we are, remaking a sweet, funny, beautifully-animated action comedy, the high water mark of Disney’s long-closed Feature Animation Florida studio, a film that was a hit when it came out, that spawned a sequel, a TV series and theme park attractions.
May of next year “Lilo & Stitch” is reborn.
As America abandons the rule of law, the Constitution and common sense in the thrall of a fascist traitor and his Moscow and mob-allied lackeys, the great Walter Salles has just the film to warn the rest of us of what we’re in for.
The grand old man of “Wallace” voicing fame, and British TV, before he became a voice-acting icon — Peter Sallis — passed away in 2017 just a few years shy of reaching 100.
The Wallace & Gromit filmmakers decided against any AI recreation of his quizzical, comically querullous tones and recast him to revive this long running series of misadventures of a smart dog and the puttering Cockney who shares his life with him. Ben Whitehead fills those comfy shoes now.
Lenny Henry‘s the biggest “name” (the one I recognize) in this voice cast.
“Vengeance Most Foul” premieres Jan. 3 on Netflix, the perfect home for Aardman’s bespoke animated marvels.
Well-cast, well-acted, sentimental and plucky, “Joy: The Birth of IVF” is an encouragingly upbeat account of the labors, trials and attacks endured by the intrepid British team that set out to find “a cure for childlessness.”
It’s a story of science practiced by pioneers and science misunderstood or just plain mischaracterized by those who misunderstood it. And in this case, at least, the smart people got their way and were vindicated and lionized for it.
The script smartly shifts the focus from the two men lauded for pioneering pioneered IVF — Patrick Steptoe (Bill Nighy) and Robert G. Edwards (James Norton), who outlived Steptoe and became the sole recipient of the Nobel Prize for this research — to to the single, qualified and contributing childless woman, Jean Purdy, who ran the lab that carried out the study, testing and impregnating.
Thomasin McKenzie brings this not-wholly-forgotten figure to life, a loner by choice and an enthusiastic young researcher who faced shunning by her mother, her church and her community for taking part in experiments the scandal-mongering British press likened to “Frankenstein.”
Jean, a nurse and embryologist, answers an ad for a lab manager with biologist/physiologist Edwards, and having the knack for capturing escaped lab mice gets her the job. As Edwards has spent the late 1960s experimenting with fertilizing mouse, rabbit and hamster eggs outside of the body, and gynaecologist and laproscopy pioneer Steptoe was pushing for less invasive laproscopic procedures for retrieving ova, they team up to begin working on IVF, in vitro fertilization — in an outbuilding of an older hospital in remote Oldhman.
The “forming the team” scenes are testy and amusing, with career outsider Steptoe not suffering colleagues of any sort gladly, Edwards close to pleading and the brash Purdy trying to shame Steptoe into signing up with insults about how no one likes him, anyway.
The script has the three seeing the future, as such screenplays often do — “You’re aware they’ll throw the book at us — the church, the state, the world. We will unite them all against us.”
But Jean sees things different.
“The mothers will back us.”
The film tracks through the glacial pace of shifting public opinion, lopsided televised debates with Nobel Prize-winning DNA pioneer James Watson (Nicholas Rowe of “Young Sherlock Holmes”) pushing his version of common sense alarmism about “abnormalities” in such babies and what would be done about that. The science establishment trots out “overpopulation” as an argument for not funding them.
Tanya Moodie plays the stern head nurse/matron who reminds one and all of what they’re fighting for, in a hospital that performs legal abortions and is working on a “cure for childlessness.”
“We are here to give women choice. EVERY choice.”
Director Ben Taylor, working from a Jack Thorne screenplay, leans into “cute” a tad too hard, playing up the spunky flirt Purdy, the crusty Steptoe and the unscrupulous, knee-jerk press’s excesses. The filmmakers underscore “test tube baby” failures with the “No no no no no no” song (“Nobody but Me”), a swimming outing by “The Ovum Club” (women who agreed to participate in the experiment) with Loudon Wainwright III’s “The Swimming Song” and a moment of trial-by-error success with Lee Dorsey’s original version of “Yes We Can Can.”
When Lesley Brown (Ella Bruccoleri) received the first successful fertilized ovum transplant in ’78, I was shocked SHOCKED that they didn’t use “Knees Up Mother Brown” to musically memorialize the moment.
But cloying tendencies aside, “Joy” is a welcome feel-good movie about science, a “Hidden Figures” for IVF and the sort of movie a lot of people will take comfort in as the world’s anti-science ignoramuses, anti-vaccine rubes and anti-“expert” opportunists control most of the media megaphones these days.
Cast: Thomasin McKenzie, James Norton, Tanya Moody, Rish Shah, Joanna Scanlan, Nicholas Rowe and Bill Nighy.
Credits: Directed by Ben Taylor, scripted by Jack Thorne. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:55
Movie Nation 