Hard to get much of a take on what this outer space kids’ adventure will offer. Looks cute. The name choice seems odd, “Elon” odd. But who knows where writer and co-director Adrian Molina’s head was when he was scripting it?
June 13, “Elio” touches down at a cineplex near you.
The earliest signs that the filmmaker would one day to be branded as “The Master of Suspense” in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1927 silent classic “The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog.” But it took the advent of sound, and several outings with the new technology, for him to discover that thrillers could and should be witty fun.
“The Man Who Knew Too Much” (1934) has a lot of ways of showing its age. For a picture that opens on a Swiss ski slope and climaxes with an assassination attempt at the Royal Albert Hall, it’s awfully soundstage-bound. Everybody on set under-reacts to every fright and act of violence they witness or are threatened with. The “fight choreography” of the day is downright dainty.
But it is devilishly funny, such as in the ways an indulged, privileged child (Nova Pilbeam) almost gets people killed and then finds herself kidnapped, with her parents not allowed to let the world know this.
Those parents — played by Leslie Banks of “The Most Dangerous Game” and “Jamaica Inn” and Edna Best (also seen in “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir”) — seem almost relieved.
“Whisky and soda?”
It’s as if the murderous mastermind (Peter Lorre in his first English-speaking role) is wasting his breath on these Brits with his warning, “You should learn to control your fatherly feelings.”
But this daffy, amusing thriller was a template for many a Hitchcock classic to follow, and not just the 1956 remake where he had Doris Day sing for her missing child. An exotic location or two, violence in a theater or very public place, ordinary people entangled in an extraordinarily sinister plot, police who are of little use or outright impediments to justice and a blonde who either drives the action of delivers the coup de grace became as much a part of the Hitchcock brand as his already-established “cameos” and Hitchcockian twists.
St. Moritz is where we meet the Lawrences, “Captain” Bill (Banks), precocious daughter Betty (Pilbeam) and target-shooting champ Jill (Best), who is spending entirely too much time with the French ski jumper Louis (Pierre Fresnay).
“You can KEEP your Betty,” she jokes. “I’m off with ANOTHER man!”‘
She and that other man are on the dance floor when the shot is fired, from a distance and through a window. Louis seems almost embarassed by this turn of events as he is the first character to sink, ever-so-slowly, to the floor, mortally wounded.
There’s a hidden note that Bill must retrieve from Louis’ hotel room, leading to a lot of fuss from the German Swiss authorities. Because Bill and Jill have gotten their own note that warns them they’ll never see their daughter again if they turn over what they’ve procured to British authorities.
Jill’s slow, crumpling faint at reading this is silent cinema silly, drawn-out by design.
The couple returns to London without their little girl, which draws official attention, and not just from the coppers. The foreign office is onto them and wants what Louis wanted to pass on.
Dash it all, there’s nothing for it but for Bill to start his own investigation, based on the note, with his man Sinclair (Hugh Wakefield) in tow.
Sinclair will endure hyponitism, a tooth-pulling from an underworld dentist and arrest for his friend. Bill starts to put this all together when he sees that sniggering Euro-fop Abbott (Lorre) whom he met on the slopes and the sharp shooter (Frank Vosper) who bested his wife in skeet shooting in Abbott’s company.
Comic misunderstandings give way to genuine suspense as that dentist whips out his picks and laughing gas, Betty cries in fear on the phone and Abbott makes threat after threat to avoid having his carefully-planned — right down to the Royal Albert Hall concert crescendo meant to cover the sound of the shot — assassination attempt exposed.
“Tell her they may soon be leaving us. Leaving us for a long, long journey. How is it that Shakespeare says? “From which no traveler returns.” Great poet.“
“The Man Who Knew Too Much” was the start of a legendary English-language (and Hollywood) career for Lorre, who was freshly-fled from Nazi Germany when he met Hitchcock, was cast and then learned to speak English for this role.
Hitchcock’s motto that “Good villains make good thrillers” served Lorre wonderfully in a string of classic films, including “The Maltese Falcon,” “Casablanca,” Hitchcock’s “Secret Agent,” “Mad Love” and hilariously sending up his screen image a decade after “Man Who Knew Too Much” in “Arsenic and Old Lace.”
“The Man Who Knew Too Much” trots by in a brisk hour and sixteen minutes, with clever turns and cleverer turns of phrase. Viewed now, it feels like a rough draft for the better thrillers Hitchcock would direct, starting with the crackling “39 Steps” mere months later.
But it remains a primer on thriller scripting, plotting, staging and editing, a movie Hitchcock was wise to return to after his mostly melodramatic and serious early Hollywood outings, a master filmmaker hittting his witty stride in the 1950s, where he gave us “Strangers on a Train,” “To Catch a Thief,” “Vertigo,” “Dial M for Murder,” “Rear Window” and his lightest, deadliest triumph, “North by Northwest,” most of them variations on the bag of tricks he first opened in “The Man Who Knew Too Much.”
Rating: “Approved” (TV-PG), violence
Cast: Leslie Banks, Edna Best, Peter Lorre, Frank Vosper, Hugh Wakefield, Nova Pilbeam and Pierre Fresnay.
Credits: Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, scripted by Charles Bennett and D.B. Wyndham Lewis. A British Gaumont release, a Corinth-restoration on Tubi, Amazon, et al.
Running time: 1:16
Denzel Washington furthers his efforts to keep his promise to “do right by” the late, playwright August Wilson by producing another film of one of Wilson’s plays, this one he assigned to his sons, actor John David Washington to star in and director Malcolm Washington to film.
“The Piano Lesson,” already the subject of a fine and far more brisk TV movie 30 years ago built around Charles S. Dutton, Alfre Woodard and Courtney B. Vance, earns a stately and cinematic treatment from the Washingtons, with Danielle Deadwyler, Ray Fisher and Samuel L. Jackson fleshing out the leads.
The limitations of the stage demand that poetic word images to tell the story — anecdotes, reveries, backstory and events of the past recalled in the fictive present. Wilson excelled at this, with this Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece relating the experience of the African American diaspora via the story of how an old, slave-decorated upright piano made its way from Mississippi to 1936 Pittsburgh.
For his feature directing debut, Malcolm Washington “opens the play up” by showing us those past events, visualizing the supernatural element of the play — the piano’s white owner’s ghost “wants it back” — and making much that was mystical, magical and metaphorical literal in the process.
We don’t have to imagine the fraught circumstances of how the piano was stolen in 1911 or the truckload of watermelons Boy Willie (John David Washington) and his truck-owning pal Lymon (Ray Fisher) have hauled to Pittsburgh’s Black neighborhoods for a lucrative sale in 1936.
Boy Willie is there to visit his sister Berniece (Deadwyler) and Uncle Doaker (Samuel L. Jackson). And he’s there to talk Berniece into selling that heirloom piano to raise the last of the cash he needs to buy a chunk of the very land their family was once enslaved on.
Old Man Sutter, last of his farming line in that part of Mississippi, has died. “Fell into a well,” Boy Willie crows. It’s the “Yellow Dog Ghost” at work, a bit of supernatural karmic revenge visited upon the morbidly obese old racist for a lynch mob he headed twenty-five years before.
If Boy Willie can just buy that land… At least Uncle Doaker seems to get it.
“As long as Sutter had it, he had us. We was still in slavery.”
Berniece, whom we learn is widowed, isn’t selling that piano.
“Money can’t buy what that piano cost!”
Uncle Doaker gets that, too. But he wonders about the “bad luck” that hangs over that keyboard. And their kin, the blues singer-songwriter and drinker Wining Boy (Michael Potts, terrific), sees the instrument as a curse that needs to be banished.
Berniece has a would-be suitor, the Pastor Avery (Corey Hawkins) and a little girl. Is that piano holding her back? The preacher thinks so.
“Everybody got stones in their passway. You ain’t got to carry them with you.”
But through Boy Willie’s storytelling, bargaining and pleading and Berniece’s blunt rebuffs, we pick up on the rift in their relationship and the weight of violence on African American families, then and now.
To my tastes — I’ve seen the play a couple of times, and the 1995 TV movie — director Malcolm Washington gets too caught up in the literal and loses track of the allegorical nature of the events of the play. The words do the work here.
We can duck into a jazz club where the lads try their hands at winning the attention of local ladies as a vocalist croons “Don’t You Feel My Leg,” a ‘sexy ’30s blues tune made famous in the ’70s.
But “opening up” a claustrophobic play tends to undercut the emotional, oppressive weight of the remembered family history, memories that haunt generations and literally close in around characters as the play progresses.
So “Piano Lesson” isn’t as moving, gripping, immersive and polished as “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” or “Fences,” two prior Wilson adaptations to make it to the screen.
Our first time director slows the proceedings to a crawl at times, as lively “new” elements in the script make the many conversations and negotiations seem more static. But that doesn’t ruin the show.
And even though I’ve been slow to warm to Denzel’s other “nepo baby” son, John David, as an actor, he summons up the garrulous, not-thought-this-through essence of Boy Willie. Here’s a man a little too anxious to unload a family heirloom that has blood on it, a man who may have blood on himself.
The playwright Wilson sometimes spoke of the meaning of his shows sneaking up on him. And that gives filmmakers a bit of leeway in adapting his work.
The Washingtons have revived an American classic and given it new currency by serving up a visual and visceral taste of the oppression this diaspora fled the Deep South to escape, oppression which scarred such families for generations, and from the looks of things, for generations to come.
Rating: PG-13, profanity, violence, racial slurs, alcohol abuse
Cast: John David Washington, Danielle Deadwyler, Ray Fisher, Michael Potts, Corey Hawkins and Samuel L. Jackson
Credits: Directed by Malcolm Washington, scripted by Virgil Williams and Malcolm Washington, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by August Wilson. A Netflix release.
Running time: 2:06
Jordan E. Cooper and Joanna Cassidy are also in the cast of this “Girlfight/Million Dollar Baby” drama.
But who exactly is this Luiii? The first person I can find on the interwebs with that one word name is a singer who is the wrong gender for the accented Luiii who wants to be a boxer.
If German actress Luise Großmann wants to bill herself with a single made-up name, she’d be better served coming up with something different. Because Luiii is taken.
“Uppercut” lands or misses its punches Feb. 28
“GTMax” is a French thriller about armed robberies pulled off with the aid of souped-up scooters.
No, not Vespas. But modified small-wheel street commuters turned into “battle tanks.”
So the promise of the premise is the sight of superscooters and dirt bikes tearing through the narrow cobblestoned alleys, along the Seine and all over Paris. This promise is at long last fulfilled in the third act, and that chase is pretty impressive.
But the movie that gets us there is dumb, talky and pokey in the extreme.
It begins with a dull set-up that goes on an on — a bike-modifying gang led by Elyas (Jalil Lespert) pursued by a furious, ex-Motocrosser cop Delvo (Thibaut Evrard) draw in siblings from dirt bike racing’s royal family (Ava Baya and Riadh Belaïche).
Meanwhile, in a scene that goes on too long, but not as long as an actual “real” race, Michael (Belaïche) has just lost the motocross championship and tarnished the family legacy, cost them sponsorships and could bankrupt the lot of them. Sister, ex-racer turned bike-tuner Soélie (Baya) must save their skins when Elyas & Co. come calling for bikes tough and fast enough to crash their way into hijacking a shipment of jewels.
The performances are overwhelmingly…adequate.
It took four credited screenwriters (stuntman/director Olivier Schneider added his two-Euros-worth) to cook up “the accident” that made Soélie afraid to mount up again and a finale that’s too illogical to comprehend.
Everything here is generic, right down to the dialogue.
“Whatever happens, we stay alive” is the biker family’s motto. The gangsters? “They’re in this for the adrenalin rush, not the cash!”
“Trust me, OK?” is sure to be trotted out. And when you really need somebody’s attention, “Hey, look at me, LOOK at me” always works.
Well, it “works” in bad scripts. Or is supposed to. In French or dubbed into English.
Rating: TV-MA, violence, smoking, profanity
Cast: Ava Baya, Jalil Lespert, Thibaut Evrard, Riadh Belaïche, Samir Decazza and Gérard Lanvin
Credits: Directed by Olivier Schneider, scripted by Jean-André Yerlès, Rémi Leautier, Rachid Santaki and Jordan Pavlik. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:40
Just caught an extraordinary performance of the epic Carl Orff cantata, music often repurposed in film scores, danced by the Carolina Ballet with grand accompaniment by the huge North Carolina Master Chorale, an eight piece ensemble and a flawless tech crew.
The cantata is a thunderous, overwhelming experience all by itself. John Boorman famously paired it with his Arthurian epic “Excalibur,” and I’ve never passed up a chance to hear it live since. A brilliant, evocative/interpretive ballet with a stark, stunning design deepens the impact. Several choreographers have produced ballets based on the piece, but I have to say this one illuminated the text in ways hearing it as a vocal piece do not.
This show is a once in a lifetime event. If you live in NC or Southern VA., this is a bucket list performance and production.
Natalie Morales has the title role, with Sonequa Martin-Green as the former comrade-in-arms who sees dead people.
Morgan Freeman and Ed Harris bring the gravitas.
A “cute” combat trauma tale? Feb 28, we find out if that works.
A film buff meets his Hollywood idol and wins his dream job working for her in “Sallywood,” a lighthearted indie lampoon of show business, showbiz “types” and the indignities of “I used to be famous.”
Sally Kirkland got her start in show business in the early ’60s and finally “arrived” when she won a Golden Globe and earned an Oscar nomination for the dramedy “Anna” in 1987.
Writer-director Xaque Gruber’s semi-autobiographical comedy shows a young man from Maine (Tyler Steelman) who grew up obsessed with that film about a fading Czech actress struggling in New York, who travels to Hollywood to take his shot at being a screenwriter, and who stumbles into his idol the first day there.
It’s the sort of Hollywood cartoon where she asks Zack “Are you my new assistant?” And so he becomes just that.
Working for the 80something Kirkland means guarding the unlocked gallery where she’s showing her abstract paintings (even though no one would steal them), helping her get to auditions for McDonald’s commercials, getting her into Hollywood parties and finding her string cheese on demand.
Gruber, who’s written for TV specials and kicked around at different on-set jobs, makes his film a “My Date with Drew (Barrymore)” mockumentary, with writer Zack setting up each scene with screenplay scene headings — “INT. strip club at night,” etc. and narrating to the camera or in voice over.
“If the Dalai Lama drive the 405 every day, his message to the world would be entirely different!”
Zack’s function in Gruber’s deadpan, cringey and cutesy comedy is to be Ms. “I used to be famous. I’m not famous any more’s” audience.
Kirkland, playing a cartoonish version of herself that she trotted out on talk shows back in the day, is flirty, spacey, hippy dippy and prone to oversharing.
About her “men,” for instance — “Bob Dylan, Kris Kristoffersen, Dennis Hopper, Maximillian Schell, Robert Shaw, Kier Dullea, Ray Liotta, Jon Voight…”
“I had my first ORGASM with RIP TORN!”
Zack’s first task, a “test,” is writing her obituary, the more flowery and flattering the better. But he’s most useful when his hunky Brit filmmaker/roommate Tom (Tom Connolly) cooks up “Outer Space Zombie Chicks in Prison,” with a starring role for Sally.
“If you take a film that’s a piece of crap, but you put a star in it, then you’ve got something” should be taught in film schools. Sally will don a spacesuit and alarming wig as a sight gag.
Jennifer Tilley plays Zack’s doting mom. Eric Roberts is Sally’s smarmy, lazy and self-serving agent. Keith Carradine a famous director who used to love Sally, Kay Lenz is his famous-director ex, the Kathryn Bigelow to his James Cameron. The late Michael Lerner plays a TV producer and Maria Conchita Alonso is a “scammer” and literary agent.
“Sallywood” is the epitome of the genre known as “the film festival comedy,” an indie film aimed at film buffs, that rewards cinephiles who recognize actors much of the world has forgotten and makes wry but unoriginal and obvious observations about “this town” and that “business.” It’s played in a lot of film festivals and won awards in a few.
But watching it, you can’t help but think it could have been more consequential — a lot sharper, sillier and sadder.
Steelman’s “Young Jiminy Glick” choice of voices for his performance, Kirkland’s deadpan dizziness and a sea of Hollywood types — producers, agents, hustlers and porn performers — with their edges rubbed off all work against an Inside Hollywood comedy that might have been.
Sally gives acting lessons to strippers and pole dancers in the film. Perhaps it’s too obvious, but having one of them “discovered” while Sally struggles on would have been a bittersweet and funny homage to her biggest role, “Anna.”
Probably one in three Hollywood “assistants” have funnier anecdotes/stories to tell than this. There’ve been funnier movies about downmarket (indie) cinema and faded stars. You don’t have to aim for “Sunset Boulevard,” but “The Big Picture,” “Swimming with Sharks” and “Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool” all covered similar ground on tiny budgets.
Kirkland gets to fume at all the times people who meet her think she was in the movie “M*A*S*H”–“That was Sally KELLERMAN!” — and trot out her Hollywood “underdog” persona one more time, so that’s something.
But whatever audience awards this pic has claimed on the film festival circuit, there’s no weight to it, and the sentimental lighter touches and limp jokes aren’t enough to carry it.
Rating: unrated, sexual innuendo
Cast: Sally Kirkland, Tyler Steelman, Jennifer Tilley, Tom Connolly, Keith Carradine, Eric Roberts, Nikki Tuazon, Michael Lerner, Kay Lenz, Vanessa Dubasso and Maria Conchita Alonso
Credits: Scripted and directed by Xaque Gruber. A Sneak Previews release.
Running time: 1:29
I joked on social media that I was catching a Thursday preview of “Wicked” with a cinema full of “high school theater kids.”
There were certainly a lot more of them — chatting, endorsing the Arianda Grande ole’ time — all two hours and forty mintues of it — than there were at an opening night showing of “Gladiator II” I caught.
Russell Crowe’s only in this “Gladiator” in flashbacks. A well-preserved Connie Nielsen and the venerated old man of British theater and British accents in film Derek Jacobi are the only two returnees from 2000’s “Gladiator.”
But Pedro Pascal and Paul Mescal have their fanbases. Apparently. And Denzel draws a crowd, as always.
Deadline.com is calling it a “Wicked” weekend, with the first film in a two-part adaptation of the stage musical based on a fanciful, fantasy “prequel” to “The Wizard of Oz” earning perhaps double the take of the “Gladiator” sequel — $114 million to $55 million.
“Wicked” had “fan screenings via cineplex paid previews earlier in the week, and opened Thursday afternoon. It picked up $19 million from three days of “preview” showings to launch this weekend. Folded into Friday’s “opening” day, that added up to $49 million+.
Projections Friday pointed to a $120 million opening. Sat. that dropped to $117, falling off to $114 Sunday.
“Wicked” is the most popular stage musical of the 21st century, so it has fans. Lots of them. The formidable and tuneful Cynthia Erivo and the bubbly/dizzy former child starlet turn pop star/one-time Pete Davidson dater Ariana Grande take over roles held by Kristen Chenoweth and Idina Menzel on Broadway.
Chenoweth and Menzel have cameos in this bloated, joyless bore. Most reviews have been more generous, but not all and not by much. It still may earn $120 million from people looking for a break from TV news. That BO number may be high by a pretty big margin, as taking three days of showings to make up the “preview” total loads the math. Saturday will be the tell.
“Gladiator II” picked up $6.5 million Thursday night and a decent Friday ($23 million+) and Sat. did not get it up to its projected $60 million take. Reviews for it weren’t great, either. Mine included. Lumbering and tedious, derivative and kind of pointless, to boot — I thought. It earned $55 million and change.
“Red One” just cleared $13 million on its second weekend — a 60% or so falloff from its opening. Word of mouth wasn’t good
“Bonhoeffer,” an anti-fascist/Christian nationalist bio-pic from WWII era Germany, cleared $5 million for its opening. Not terrible, but not great. Not the message that crowd wants to hear, before or after the election. It’s not that good, either.
The last weekend “Venom: The Last Dance” will be in the top five will earn it another $4 million. It should reach the $142 million mark, all-in from the North American take by the time “Moana 2” takes many of its remaining screens.
And for those keeping score at home, Judy Greer’s star vehicle, “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever,” is showing some legs — finishing in the top five Sunday and clearing the $25 million mark at the same time.
Epic-scale filmmaker Ridley Scott turns 87 on November 30. It’s safe to assume that, like Clint Eastwood, Scorsese, Almodovar or Bigelow, any film he makes could be his last.
But Scott’s still carrying on as if he has no laurels to rest on, that for every ambitious “Napoleon” or “The Last Duel,” every attempt ( (“House of Gucci”) to step out of historical epic or science fiction, he has to focus on serving up another “Alien” sequel or prequel, that some studio’s long-cherished wish for a “Gladiator” sequel must be fulfilled.
So if we ever want to see “You Should Be Dancing,” his Bee Gees biopic, the Western “Wraiths of the Broken Land,” or sci-fi dystopia “The Dog Stars,” we’ve got to line up for “Gladiator II” first.
Computer generated imagery (CGI) has transformed cinema since 2000’s “Gladiator.” Ancient Rome and its world is a lot easier to realize on the screen. Gladiator duels in the Roman Colosseum can cover even grander bloodsports that the enslaved fought to the death in — a simulated naval battle on the flooded arena’s floor, for instance.
But for all the expansions in scale, all the back-engineering a fresh plot onto the existing one — that of a great general politically purged and enslaved as a gladiator, forced to fight for change in a tyrannically corrupt regime and his chance to save his bloodline — “Gladiator II” has nothing fresh to say on the subject or the movie genre.
Hollywood’s already made four TV series out of the 1960 Kirk Douglas-and-Kubrick classic “Spartacus,” all of them coming out in the decades since the Oscar-winning Ridley Scott/Russell Crowe epic “Gladiator” arrived and revived the setting, subject and shirtless-duels-to-the-death genre.
But that doesn’t mean Sir Ridley can’t remake his version of a “Spartacus” gladiator-as-martyr tale.
Yes, CGI means that you can stage a naval battle on a budget and pit gladiators against a warhorse-saddled foe riding a rhino or fighting for their lives against CGI zombie baboons. That doesn’t mean you should.
Everything else in “Gladiator II” has the ring of “Spartacus” about it. Soldiers (Pedro Pascal, Paul Mescal) are enslaved for the crime of defying Rome. They endure a montage of gladiator training led by a sadistic veteran (Lior Raz) of the “sport.” Their “owner” (Denzel Washington) is a sinister, vindictive operator angling for social, financial and political gain from their feats.
Mescal, last seen in “All of Us Strangers,” is Hanno, an officer in the army of Numidia, an African nation-state coveted by second century Rome. He sees his archer-wife (Yuval Gonen) ordered slain by the Roman general (Pascal of “The Mandalorian”) who conquers the city, his adoptive home.
Hanno is enslaved along with his Numidian commander (Peter Mensah of “300” and TV’s “Spartacus”). Only one of them is destined to survive to be a gladiator, not the one who sees slavery as “something I cannot endure.”
Hanno proves himself in the arena, but not with the aim of earning his freedom from Macrinus (Washington, berobed and venal). He wants his revenge on General Marcus Acacius (Pascal), who happens to have married the widowed daughter (Connie Nielsen) of the late emperor Marcus Aurelius. And she sees something she recognizes in this young fighter, a hint that he might be Lucius, her lost-long son with the late general turned gladiator Maximus.
We glimpse and hear Maximus (Russell Crowe) in flashbacks.
Rome is ruled by two pale inbred siblings, Caracalla (Fred Hechinger) and Geta (Joseph Quinn), each too inept and bloodthirsty to effectively run a nearly-exhausted empire they’re intent on expanding.
No, this “Gladiator” is no more historical than the first one. It’s all a bit of a bore, the sea of extras filling the stadium, the vast mob in the streets, the colorfully-adorned armies (and navy) marching and sailing under their SPQR banners, mere tools bent and used for political purposes.
We’re treated to a taste of the poet Virgil, quotes from the late Maximus, who has become lionized by a later generation of gladiators — “What we do in life echoes in eternity.” There’s even a twisting of a quote by non-Roman novelist Bernadine Evaristo — “When you’re a slave you don’t dream of freedom. You dream of owning your own slave.”
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