Movie Preview: Another live action remake nobody asked for…save for the accountants — “How to Train your Dragon”

Posted on November 20, 2024 by Roger Moore

And you thought “Red One” was ill advised.

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Movie Review: Britain’s “Best International Feature” Oscar hope is an Indian Police Procedural — “Santosh”

Posted on November 20, 2024 by Roger Moore

American TV has pretty much beaten to death the police procedural drama thanks to overexposure to the infallible, unimpeachable justice system fantasies of Dick Wolf, the self-righteous heroes of “Blue Bloods” and and the scientist sleuths of “C.S.I.”

That’s why the British-made Indian policing drama “Santosh” hits you like a wet slap.

Writer-director Sandhya Suri conjures up a mystery thriller about policing, sexism, class and caste that gets into the dark corners of India and the overwhelmed, hidebound and corrupt culture of those entrusted to keep the peace.

Suri, who cut her filmmaking teeth on documentaries, found a great hook to hang her tale on — the country’s peculiar “laws of compassion” that allow the widows of fallen policemen to take their place on the force. Through a woman who takes up that offer, we see a broken system from the inside and watch a politically-charged murder case investigated, blundered and manipulated by figures who range from ineptly misogynistic to sinister.

The widow Santosh Saini (Shahana Goswami of the “Rock On!” Bollywood franchise) doesn’t have any good options when her husband is killed in the line of duty. Coming from a poor family, rejected by venal in-laws and about to lose her police-force-provided housing, she takes the “inherited” job offered by the Machogar P.D.

Santosh will become Constable Saini via on-the-job training. Unarmed, she will work with other female cops (mostly) who are given the delicate jobs pertaining to female complaints and crime victims (escorting a woman’s corpse to the morgue) and try to put the fear of the law into men who misuse and abuse women.

Everything from taking indecent liberties to breach of promise falls under their jurisdiction, where threats, abuse and bribes are part of the job, but carrying firearms isn’t.

Santosh watches and listens, and when a poor laborer from the Dalit caste tries to report a missing daughter, she is the only one who hears and sees him. Her best efforts can’t make the lazy, disorganized, dismissive louts of her department even file a report.

When the missing teen turns up dead in a well, there’s hell to pay — thanks to the media. Her aloof, classist boss (Nawal Shukla) is transferred. As no-nonsense older-woman detective (Sunita Rajwar) elbows her way in and takes on the case, Santosh now has a mentor and a champion.

With a bit of basic detecting, a veiled threat or two and some unveiled ones, they’re out to get their man, no matter how little the men who work with them care about another Indian rape and murder victim.

Writer-director Suri takes pains to showcase the overwhelming nature of policing a nation of 1.4 billion and counting. But she doesn’t flinch from highlighting “It’s not our job” (in Hindi with English subtitles) cops and the “rape culture” that men in and out of uniform callously and carelessly tolerate.

All of the women police officers depicted are more or less united in opposition to this ingrained attitude, with Inspector Sharma (Rajwar) their avenging angel.

But the injustices can seem too deep, too broad and too numerous for a few women to challenge.

“We’re illiterate,” the mother of the dead girl hisses at Santosh. “Isn’t that why the police are deaf to us?”

The hardest lesson comes from the seasoned detective, who arrives as a white knight but seems more tarnished and complicated than that the longer this case goes on.

“There are two kinds of ‘untouchables’ in this country. The ones people don’t want to touch. And the ones who can’t be touched.”

If that universal “law” doesn’t wipe the smugness off any First World viewer thinking “This is just how policing is in the Third World,” nothing will.

Goswami’s understated performance drives this brilliant debut feature, a sometimes silent observer who can barely register shock at some of what she sees and experiences. Goswami lets us see that Constable Santosh Saini knows how things have been and that they probably will continue to be, no matter what she and anybody she works with does.

Rating: R, violence

Cast: Shahana Goswami, Sunita Rajwar, Nawal Shukla and
Arbaz Khan.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Sandhya Suri. A Metrograph release.

Running time: 2:08

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Movie Review: Oscar contender “Under the Volcano” lets Ukrainians vacation until Russia Invades

Posted on November 20, 2024 by Roger Moore

The Biden administration had been warning for months that Russia was preparing to invade Ukraine. But when it finally happened, Ukrainians, right up to the country’s president, were shocked.

Even some of those accepting that it might happen carried on living. Some were even caught flatfooted, on vacation, when Putin made his move.

“Under the Volcano” embeds us with such a family, enjoying their time in the vacation hotspot Tenerife, in the Canary Islands. The bottom drops out and their world is upended just as they’re about to board a plane for home.

As they grasp the stunning news, “trapped” in a much longer holiday than they’d planned, stresses and fractures in the family are exposed and their teenage daughter finds herself forced to grow up fast, almost as fast as her war zone schoolmates back home and the African refugee teens she meets on the island.

This grim travelogue, a quietly gripping drama about Ukrainians stranded, like those African refugees, in a Spanish possession, is Poland’s submission as its Best International Feature contender at the Oscars, due to its production and the filmmaker who conceived it.

Polish director and co-wroter Damian Kocur’s follow-up to his award-winning “Bread and Salt” is a study in characters under stress in a place billed as a break from stress and the worries of everyday life.

But enjoying the beach, the Spanish singers at the hotel, the festivals and the sights — and reveling in making social media posts about their “good times” — ends the moment they stare at the airport departure board, which is when they first get the news.

Spaniard show them compassion, with the hotel giving them back their room and telling them there’s “no charge” for the extra stay, or the meals they eat there. Tourist guides pitch them distractions — road trips and treks up the island’s famous volcano. African refugees still hustle tourist trap trinkets at every turn.

It’s all either of the parents (Roman Lutskyi, Anastasiya Karpenko) can do to go through the motions. Their little boy (Fedir Pugachov) may be almost oblivious. But as she facetimes with a friend back home, hearing of the trauma and fear everyone in Kyiv is experiencing, standoffish teen Sofia (Sofia Berezoska) finds herself shaken in ways the adults are not. She might be the one who “sees” the Africans in similar straits all around them, some of them selling, others just wanting to make a human connection.

Kocur uses only brief TV and cell phone glimpses of the war “back home” to rattle this family. We don’t see the cancellation notices at the airport, just the parents’ shocked faces.

Their dilemma makes all of them easily triggered — by fireworks, by not knowing how to respond to the hospitality and empathy their Spanish hosts show them and by rowdy, unconcerned (but guilty and somewhat ashamed, when confronted) Russian tourists.

Sofia, who looks to be about 14, had been tentatively observing and videoing vacationing Spanish teens as part of her social media version of her vacation. She dotes on her kid brother, but keeps the adults at a distance. We start to pick up on the family dynamics that contribute to that as Roman and Nastasiya bicker, lash-out and struggle with their dilemma and their relationship in a country that isn’t their own.

Kocur’s film is a tad too patient at times, dumping more “vacation” experiences on these hapless vacationers without a country. And the allegories folded into the story aren’t the easy fit he may have envisioned.

One subtext here is the illusion of a united Europe — with the family and many of those they meet speaking English and a little Spanish as the needs arise — whose fissures widen (brutishly bullying Brits) thanks to these severe tests of a European war on top of an ongoing refugee crisis.

But “Under the Volcano” can most easily be appreciated for allowing us to put ourselves in others’ shoes — a vacation interrupted by tragedy, the struggle to remain a family “team” while trying to reason one’s way out of a crisis, and the grim realization that the day you went to the airport might have been the last good day you and everyone you know will see for years and years to come.

Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Sofia Berezovska, Roman Lutskyi, Anastasiya Karpenko and
Fedir Pugachov

Credits: Directed by Damian Kocur, scripted by Damian Kocur and Marta Konarzewska. A Lizart/MGM production.

Running time: 1:44

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Movie Preview: Seth Rogen runs “The Studio,” but Hollywood beats him down

Posted on November 19, 2024 by Roger Moore

Real Hollywood folk (Scorsese) mingle with Bryan Cranston, Rogen, Kathryn Hahn and Catherine O’Hara in this send up of the cinema as it exists today. 

March 26, Apple TV.

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Movie Review: Coming of Age, “What We Find on the Road”

Posted on November 19, 2024 by Roger Moore

“What We Find on the Road” is a dramatically dull indie roadtrip dramedy that reaches for “coming of age” and strains itself getting there.

The film begins with mystery and promise, drifts into predictable and undramatic and doesn’t really rally to become anything more than a scenic screensaver as it follows an 18 year-old driving a ’68 Dodge Polara from Cape Cod to California…by way of Tennessee (!?) and Texas (!?).

But if you’ve ever nursed an overheating, engine-knocking beater on a long drive and if you’ve never been to the Grand Canyon or seen a “road picture” in your life, it may have a little something to offer. Very little.

It stars young and still unknown bit player Finn Haney and was scripted by his father Bill, a documentary filmmaker (“The Last Mountain,” “The Price of Sugar” and “A Life Among Whales”), producer and sometime screenwriter.

Haney-the-younger plays TC, who just turned 18 and is looking at the collegiate future when an aged pot-bellied biker shows up at his door, asks his name and confirms that birthday.

“You old man wanted me to give you this,” he growls, and leaves the kid a set of car keys and a Vallejo, California address. The car? It’s at an old Cape Cod repair shop down the road, where Bill presides.

What’s rule #3 when you’re making an indie film, kids? Write a chewy part with a pithy speech or two that you can use to talk a “name” into taking that role. Here, that pays dividends as the great character actor Paul Guilfoyle (“C.S.I,” “The Good Fight,” just seen in “Arthur the King”) plays the sage of the sparkplugs mechanic who has stored that ancient “Blue Biscuit” convertible for “The Hammer,” TC’s estranged father.

The Hammer had a reputation — “rock and roll” and drugs and trouble with the law — which is why TC’s unseen mother wants nothing to do with him. But Bill leads the kid through the bring-the-383-cubic-inch-engine-back-to-life in a montage, and gives him a flashlight, “a c-note,” car advice and life advice before the boy sets off to meet a father he never knew.

“Start saving money for gas, it’s a guzzler.” And “You’re being perversely tested by your old man — 3000 miles in a beat-up old bomber to find your father, who hasn’t exactly nailed the fathering business.”

And with that bit of wisdom — with no mention of updated registration, insurance or title, a wonky radiator and a mysterious steel box welded into the trunk — TC is off, to be “tested” along the way, we figure.

Of course bestie Jake (William Chris Sumpter) shows up and demands to go along, as TC hasn’t ever driven on the highway before, ditching his parents’ Volvo wagon at the garage as he does.

The screenwriting problem-solving logic leaves a lot to be desired in this narrative, from the lads not telling their parents (While licensing and registering a car? While ditching a Volvo?) to their first stop, a pointless “upstate New York” visit to relatives that adds nothing to the narrative, no colorful supporting characters or performances of them. That first breakdown/traffic stop is a “Tennessee” cop whom they somehow encounter between Cape Cod and Vallejo via upstate New York in an overheating antique.

If your script’s not as clever as “Doc Hollywood,” you can’t get away with sloppy geography (D.C. to Beverly Hills via South Carolina in an antique Porsche, in that film.).

We’re treated to generic “road food,” “sleeping in the car,” radiator issues and the ongoing mystery of what might be in that box, which provides suspense with every traffic stop. None of it adds up to much that holds the interest.

His friend leaves and an Irish divorcée (Katherine Laheen) with her dog and a broken-down pickup take his place. The Grand Canyon is visited and bullies are brushed by as TC heads for that fateful meeting with the father who may have stashed drugs, drug money or who knows what in that box in the trunk of a car he’s sentenced his son to deliver to him cross-country.

There’s just not enough drama, charm, whimsy or angst to make this picture live up to those earthy early “change the plugs, alternator, tires and hoses” scenes with Guilfoyle. The insights are generic, the performances generally drab and the payoff’s more of a bust than a catharsis.

It’s scenic, and the traveling-far-in-an-unreliable-car makes “What We Find on the Road” relatable to a lot of us. But we don’t need a movie to remind us how tedius long drives generally are — with or without breakdowns, nosy police or fiesty Irish damsels.

Rating: R, profanity

Cast: Finn Haney, William Chris Sumpter, Katherine Laheen and Paul Guilfoyle.

Credits: Directed by Chaysen Beacham, scripted by Bill Haney. A Dada Films release.

Running time: 1:34

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Classic Film Review: Lemmon and Allyson remake “It Happened One Night” — as a musical — “You Can’t Run Away from It” (1956)

Posted on November 19, 2024 by Roger Moore

“You Can’t Run Away from It” is a comic curiosity from the early career of Jack Lemmon, a musical filmed when studios were scrambling to lure filmgoers away from TV and when musicals were so overexposed — “The King and I,” “High Society” and “Carousel” came out the same year — they almost instantly went out of fashion.

“West Side Story” reset musicals a few years later, returning them to the ranks of rare “event” pictures where the genre remains to this day. And the cinema would find other ways to retain its “date night” place in life — eventually.

But it’s hard to imagine audiences not smelling the desperation and the old fashioned fustiness of this remake of the Frank Capra classic “It Happened One Night” when “You Can’t Run Away from It” hit theaters in 1956.

Leading man turned producer/director Dick Powell had transitioned from musicals to a terrific film noir cynic on one side of the camera. Here, he directs his wife June Allyson in a musical that Columbia Pictures cobbled together from a movie and short story it owned the rights to, with new songs by Johnny Mercer.

Filmed in Technicolor and presented in widescreen Cinemascope, “Run Away” was meant as a song-and-dance star vehicle for Allyson, pushing 40 and years removed from the lesser musicals (“Till the Clouds Roll By,” “Good News,” “Two Girls and a Sailor,””Best Foot Forward”) that made her name.

It didn’t pay off.

The sexy, sassy, downmarket Depression Era edge of “It Happened One Night” was lost in the well-scrubbed, conservative 1950s. A parade of forgettable Johnny Mercer songs, many of them crooned by the not-quite-forgotten Four Aces (pre-doo-wop) quartet, a dopey “Scarecrow Dance” sequence that showcases why Robert Sidney was best known for middling 1960s TV variety show choreography and a bus trip premise that had to seem out of date in the age of “See the USA in your Chevrolet” America had to provoke eyerolls in many a Baby Boomer, dragged to see this by their Liberace/Lawrence-Welk-loving parents.

And no amount of makeup could hide the obvious, that the smokey-voiced Allyson was entirely too old to be playing the gamine whose controlling rich daddy (Charles Bickford from “A Star is Born”) keeps getting her impulsive marriages to gold-digging rakes anulled.

But here’s Jack Lemmon as a fast-talking, hard-drinking, short-tempered and oft-fired newspaper reporter/smart-ass, the Clark Gable role in “It Happened One Night.” He sings, and not just the little bits of humming/crooning he did in many a comedy, but full on solos and duets.

Stubby Kaye (“Guys & Dolls,” “Cat Ballou”) leads a Greyhound busload of extras — and bus driver Henny Youngman (!) in a cornpone “Howdy Friends and Neighbors” tune from Mercer.

And funny folks like Jim Backus pop up, steal a scene, and exit. So it’s not a total waste of time.

Allyson is Ellie Andrews, whom we meet confined-to-quarters on her father’s 60 foot schooner in San Diego harbor. She’s just run off and married somebody new, not her first time.

And considering how much she repeats the phrase “never been alone with a man,” we have to wonder how she manages the meeting, courtship and falling-in-love business, even with ne’er do well playboys like Jacques Ballarino (Jacques Scott, entirely too colorless to register), her latest.

But rather than accept Daddy’s latest anullment, Ellie leaps overboard and swims past the anchored aircraft carriers to freedom. She’ll get back to Texas and “save” this scandalous, newspaper-headline “marriage.”

With Daddy’s minions (Dub Taylor among them) watching the train station and airports, Ellie opts for the bus. That’s how she and we run into Peter Warne (Lemmon), a reporter who just finished a bender/send-off with his colleagues. He’s been fired, and they serenade him with “Old reporters never die. They gradually decline.”

Newspapering. Nothing like it.

The “meet cute” is that she’s in his seat. Peter will shoo her out of it with a boorish “Scoot, scoot, scoot scoot,” but before they’ve crossed one time zone, he’ll have to save her from a “bop talking” hepcat and try to save her bag, with all her money in it, from a snatch-and-grab thief.

Peter figures out who she is, pitches the “scoop” to his old boss in Houston, keeping her out of Daddy’s grasp for this cross-country trek.

“You’re just a headline to me,” he tells the “spoiled brat.”

Scenes from “It Happened One Night” are repeated, verbatim — the “walls of Jericho” shared motel rooms (twin beds were all the rage), the hitchhiking, skirt-hiking bit Claudette Colbert pulled off in the original film now has a song to go with it.

Streams are crossed, wires are crossed and between the location-shot stream-fording and soundstage haystacks and “motor court” lodgings, love is bound to blossom.

Powell makes the best of all that he’s been given, but the script lacks almost anything in the way of snappy dialogue and the wide screen process pretty much swallows character comedies like this one.

Backus had one of the funniest voices in film, and the future Thurston Howell, III and Mister Magoo milks that for all it’s worth in a single scene. Youngman squeezes in a one-liner as both Ellie and Peter insist that he hold the bus and “wait” for them at a dinner stop.

“Sure lady…” “They don’t know, but they’ll never see me again. I just quit!”

“You Can’t Run Away from It” wasn’t a hit in 1956. And its relative obscurity is underscored by the lack of color still shots of it floating around the Internet. It was lightly regarded, then and now.

But Lemmon made every role memorable and every leading lady likeable just by his presence. His manic patter early years were made for “screwball,” or its nearest equivalent in square 1950s and early ’60s America cinema.

Check out his “She’s my wife” exchange with sniggering “swingin’ safari” bus riding “daddio” on-the-make George Shapely, played by Paul Gilbert.

“Swing it over’t the other seat, boy. Blow, dad!”

He’d find his “Everynebbish” guise a few years later, in “The Apartment.” But the callous kid/blowhard of “Mister Roberts” grows up and grows an edge in “You Can’t Run Away from It,” a movie that figured out Lemmon was at his funniest when he was at his testiest.

Rating: approved, TV-PG

Cast: June Allyson, Jack Lemmon, Stubby Kaye, Jim Backus, Henny Youngman, Jack Albertson, Howard McNear, Elvia Allman, Dub Taylor and Charles Bickford

Credits: Directed by Dick Powell, scripted by Robert Riskin and Claude Binyon, based on a short story by Samuel Hopkins Adams and the movie “It Happened One Night,” songs by Johnny Mercer. A Columbia Pictures release on Tubi.

Running time: 1:35

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Movie Review: A Brave anti-fascist theologian is clumsily remembered in “Bonhoeffer”

Posted on November 19, 2024 by Roger Moore

I highly recommend you pay a quick visit to the Wikipedia page dedicated to German theologian and resistance martyr Dietrch Bonhoeffer before taking on writer-director Todd Komarnicki’s film “Bonhoeffer.”

Otherwise, you might be as lost as I was thanks to the botched chronology acted-out by a little-known cast in a screen biography that does not live up to its over-reaching subtitle — “Pastor. Spy. Assassin.”

Komarnicki, who scripted “Sully” and “The Professor and the Madman,” and who wrote and directed a long forgotten Bill Paxton/Julia Ormond WWII misfire, “Resistance,” struggles to get this celebrated figure’s sprawling but short life into 132 minutes. All along the way, as he jumps from the formative events of Bonhoeffer’s theology and anti-Nazi beliefs to the end of his imprisonment in a concentration camp at the end of the war, Komarnicki too often leaves the viewer adrift.

Wait, this character talks about clergy being sent to the “Eastern Front” (with Russia)? Didn’t we just see the aftermath of “Kristallnacht?” The war hasn’t started yet, has it? Is Churchill the one the resistance would be begging for help at this juncture? Is his reason for not helping German resistors really that he fears “invasion” in (just guessing here) 1942-43?

The narrative gets lost and drags us along with it as it does. I’ve seen a documentary about Bonhoeffer and read a bit about him over the years, and I found it impossible to place most undated sequences in the film in any definite time frame.

“Bonhoeffer” captures stirring sermons denouncing the cult of fascism and dwells, at length, on his formative months in America before Hitler came to power — renewing his faith through the sermons he hears in 1930s Black New York churches, discovering jazz.

We’ve already tasted his childhood, the pacifism that might have been born when he saw a beloved older brother march off “a hero” only to have his life wasted in The Great War (WWI).

Jonas Dassler (“Never Look Away”) is a dead-ringer for the preacher acting out a script that tries to celebrate a major figure who was a whirlwind of activity unafraid of pursuing what he saw as a greater cause and a higher calling. We see him helping found the “Confessing Church” in reaction to the Christian Nationalist bent of mainline German Protestantism under the Nazis. And we follow Bonhoeffer into the “underground seminary” where he tries to raise young pastors like himself — on the move and out of reach of the Gestapo — who see the Almighty as the head of the church, not Adolf Hitler.

But we get little notion of the vast collection writings which made Bonhoeffer famous and which immortalized him after his death. In a time of moral crisis and fascist intolerance, the “devout pacifist” speaks, declaring that “Not to speak” in such a crisis “IS to speak.” Silence is compliance and compliance is collusion.

“God will not forgive us for this” criticism of persecution of the Jews, he is warned buy his peers. “He will not forgive us if we don’t!“

And when he’s asked by old friends and relatives “Can you give more than your voice to this cause?” Dietrich Bonhoeffer became a spy, joining the Abwehr (military intelligence) where plots were afoot to assassinate Hitler. He will risk “dirty hands” and go where churches and pastors rarely go in his efforts to combat a great corporeal evil that others are content to pray over.

The scheming is given short shrift, and Komarnicki choses to depict a different bomb plot than the one Bonhoeffer was charged with participating in recreating that sequence of events. That adds to the historical murk that this movie lives in.

There’s enough of the man and his words to make us wish the screenplay had been better organized, and good enough to attract a more star-studded supporting cast (August Diehl plays the heroic Bishop Martin Niemoller). Unfamiliar faces, unidentified by on-screen graphics, leave the viewer in the dark about who is related to whom and what their place in all of this might be. Casting familiar faces often fix such shortcomings.

Bonhoeffer spoke, in life and in the film, of putting “a stick in the very wheel of the (fascist, immoral) state until it stops.” That’s a message this Angel Studios (“Sound of Freedom,” and “Cabrini”) production would have been well-served getting out weeks before the last American election instead of weeks after Christian Nationalism and fascism triumphed at the polls.

The movie also strains to narrow its message to Anti-Semitism, when Bonhoeffer himself saw fascism as a broader evil and an immoral threat on many fronts, with many scapegoated victims.

Both that and this gutless “NOW you warn us about ‘fascism'” release date are acts of cowardice that Bonhoeffer himself would have condemned.

Rating: PG-13, violence, mild profanity

Cast: Jonas Dassler, August Diehl, David Jonsson, Flula Borg, Nadine Heidenreich, Lisa Hofer and
Moritz Bleibtreu

Credits: Scripted and directed by Todd Komarnicki. An Angel Studios release.

Running time: 2:12

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Movie Preview: The Perfect title for a Horror Film? “The Man in the White Van”

Posted on November 18, 2024 by Roger Moore

Dec. 13, we figure out if this title tells us everything that we need to know about this one.

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Netflixable? “Hot Frosty” serves up a Snowman Who’s “Cut”

Posted on November 18, 2024 by Roger Moore

When it comes to holiday films, American tastes long ago moved into HallmarkLand.

Christmas princes, princesses, holiday get-aways that turn into second chance romances, holiday movies these days are all about Dolly Parton, Nicolas Sparks and sentiments — and plots — that can be boiled down to a Hallmark Card, or its cheaper Dollar Tree equivalent.

Netflix learned this lesson a couple of holidays back. Jeff Bezos and Amazon/MGM figured it out the hard way last weekend, when their idiotically-expensive “Red One” won the box office race in what could only be described as an underwhelming Pyrrhic Victory.

The most-watched holiday movie in America isn’t about Santa’s security detail (“Red One”), a new version of “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever” or the edgier/off-key “Chrismas Eve at Miller’s Point.” It’s “Hot Frosty,” a “Frosty the Snowman” tale where the snowman stepped off a fashion show runway in between trips to the gym.

Streaming holiday films are where stars of yore from Lindsay Lohan to lesser lights from “Sex and the City” show up and remind us they’re still here, still working and always employable as long as there’s a Hallmark Channel, Netflix or Amazon willing to write a check to park them in a winter wonderland.

“Party of Five” and “Mean Girls” alumna Lacey Chabert is our widowed, lovelorn heroine ready to meet “Hot Frosty.” Lauren Holly (“Dumb and Dumber”), Katy Mixon Greer (“Four Christmases”) and Craig Robinson (“Hot Tub Time Machine”) head the supporting cast of “Whatever happened to’s?”

It’s about cafe owner Kathy (Chabert) draping a magical scarf on a snowman in postcard-perfect Hope Springs, only to have it turn into a naked and seriously buff dude (Dustin Milligan) who might be new to this whole humanity thing, but “If it’s on TV, I can learn it.”

Widowed Kathy has let her house go, as she no longer has a “honey” for her “honey do” list. As our naked snowman swiped used coveralls with the name “Jack” on them, Jack is here to rescue her from her leaky roof (Shirtless shingling in the snow!) and her broken heart.

Because you can learn to fix anything on Youtube. And you can learn to dance and romance from TV.

Holly plays the busybody neighbor who needs Jack’s um, assistance. Mixon Greer’s the town doctor, who’s as baffled as Kathy about this buff new hunk in town’s lower-than-low body temperature.

And Robinson is the local sheriff, determined to get to the bottom of things as regards a “crime” Jack committed, and Jack’s lack of a markable finger print.

There’s maybe one laugh in this — at a gathering of ladies who lunch who gawk at an (unseen) shot of Jack just after his transformation, naked as the day he was born.

The story and the characters who inhabit it never quite surpass “cute” or measure up to “sweet.” But Netflix or screenwriter Russell Hainline have done their research on small town America. The store “Jack” swipes boots and those coveralls from, the same place where Kathy received the “magical” scarf as a gift, is a friend’s unclaimed luggage store. That’s something every Southern Living/RFTV subscriber in Flyover America knows all about.

A lot of people are watching “Hot Frosty.” Some may even like it. But even many of them might admit — with the threat of “No eggnog for you” hanging over them — that it’s pretty but pretty bland and pretty bad (mostly heartless and humorless), to boot.

But ’tis the season for “Give the people what they want,” and what they want is treacle, not The Rock.

Rating: TV-PG, near nudity, lots of shirtlessness

Cast: Lacey Chabert, Dustin Milligan, Lauren Holly, Katy Mixon Greer, Joe Lo Truglio and Craig Robinson

Credits: Directed by Jerry Ciccoritti, scripted by Russell Hainline. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:30

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Movie Review: Sex Worker “Anora” marries her “Whale”

Posted on November 18, 2024 by Roger Moore

Full disclosure, I ducked into “Anora” a couple of times, waiting for other movies to start, before finally setting aside the time to watch Sean Baker’s latest, start to finish.

The tale of an American sex worker of Eastern European descent who catches the fancy of a “whale,” a rich Russian oligarch’s son, who then marries her, it’s about transactional relationships — sexual and otherwise.

I couldn’t decide if this was really my thing. “Anora” lacks the raw emotion, street energy and urgency of Baker’s transgender romp “Tangerine” — and the pathos of his acclaimed peek at childhood homelessness in the “paradise” of “The Florida Project.” Catching thirty or forty minutes of this here and there had me shaking my head at its many explicit sex scenes, which have the whiff of polished, titillating “filler” in the narrative.

It’s easy enough to guess where all this is going. But how is this acclaimed filmmaker going to get 140 minutes of engaging, provocative “movie” out of all this carnality folded into gauche, bourgeois cliches?

The answer is that he doesn’t. “Anora” is an 85 minute movie in a 139 minute package. Lots of skin, lots of sex, plenty of calculated predation — he’s using her, she’s using him. Can a trip to Vegas be in their future?

There are only a couple of ways “Anora” could turn out, and Baker choses one. But only after he’s gotten his fill of athletic pole dances, lap dances, transactional sex and nudity.

The biggest shock in Mikey Madison’s performance in the title role is realizing she’s an actress with other credits. Baker’s MO as a filmmaker is finding “unknowns,” even people with no acting experience (“Tangerine”) but with a knowledge of the sort of characters they’re playing and the world they’re immersed in.

Madison is no stripper enlisted to portray someone she “knows” thanks to her life. She’s a career actress who mastered not just the dancing — laps, and poles — and the working class Bronx accent. She utterly inhabits this part, that of a 20something who does lucrative work but is smart enough to realize there are “no benefits” and “no 401K” attached to her “career.”

Landing “a whale” (rich client) as a husband feels a lot like a “Where do you see yourself in five years?” answer to a human resources dept. questionaire.

Anora isn’t shy about poaching co-workers’ regular clients and is a born saleswoman when it comes to “Wanna get a private room?” and “Let’s get you to the ATM.

She shares an El-side flat with another woman, sleeping all day and working all night in a job sure to age her and wear her out in a flash. Not that she acknowledges that reality.

Then this kid shows up with an entourage, a “boy” who wants a dancer who speaks Russian. Anora’s Russian “grandma never learned English,” so she’s his girl. She figures the kid is loaded, but she has no idea of how loaded until he suggests that she “google” his father’s name. He’s an oligarch, rich and connected.

But Dad and Mom are in Russia, and young Ivan, “Vanya” (Mark Eydelshteyn) is in New York, living in a seaside modernist mansion, playing video games, throwing parties and blowing through blow, hookers and cash.

Anora can’t hide the calculating she’s doing when she side-eyes his New Year’s Eve party invitation, when she’s negotiating his “exclusive” financial relationship with her.

One trip to Vegas later and they’re hitched. He’s 21 and learning what “better” sex is like from a pro. But “Anora” is about what happens when Ivan’s family and his family’s fixers do when they discover this unapproved-of marriage, and what she’ll do to save her whale.

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