Movie Review: Belgium’s hope for an Oscar nomination? “Julie Keeps Quiet”

Posted on October 22, 2024 by Roger Moore

She wants to become a professional tennis player, so Julie stays focused. She’s a teen, and if wants to continue to train Julie knows she has to keep her eye on the ball, on and off the court.

Julie has to work on her conditioning. Julie spends hours hitting, hours shadow-playing out points. She haunts the weight room and practices her footwork. She’s even taken up juggling to maintain that “eyes always on the ball” intensity.

Julie eschews most socializing. She won’t let her parents distract her. She’s so far into her head that walking her dachshund is the only pleasure she allows herself.

And when a teammate of Julie’s kills herself and the coach they shared is suspended from their club, Julie doesn’t lose that focus. Others have questions, but “Julie Keeps Quiet.”

Belgium’s submission for this year’s Best International Feature Oscar is a simmering, interior drama about the myopia required to become a professional athlete. Tessa Van den Broeck has the title role, the strokes and the game to make a convincing junior straining with every fiber of her being to make it to “junior pro” with the BTF, the Belgian Tennis Federation.

We never see her play a match. This Leonardo Van Dijl film (co-written with actress Ruth Becquart) lives in Julie’s head and makes us guess what’s going on in there.

Julie doesn’t talk. Even when she’s questioned by classmates, fellow players and the director of the club (Claire Bodson), she is close-lipped.

She has questions of her own, but her solution to every problem, every dilemma facing her in her life, has always been “practice, practice” and “more practice.” She throws herself into preperation, grudgingly accepts a new coach (Pierre Gervais) and carries on.

But something happened. Something was going on. Was it just the pressure of focusing one’s life this narrowly, the fear of not making it, that caused promising junior pro Aline to kill herself? That’s what that suspended coach (Laurent Caron) says.

Julie is young, naive and impressionable, all traits exaggerated by the juvenile nature of sports and making that your life focus. But she’s not stupid.

The script nimbly avoids directly addressing the matter at hand, which the viewer figures out almost from the start. But Van Dijl, making his feature debut, gives us clues in what Julie and the accused Jeremy talk about by phone as she stays in touch with the club pariah. And then Van Dijl delivers a quiet, child-questioning-an-adult scene about why everyone is “stressing out” that will knock your socks off.

“Jeremy, why did she do it?”

That conversation is not loud, explosive or accusatory. It’s as “quiet” as everything else in this film. At times, “mesmirizing” crosses over into tedium in this French and German (they’re studying it in high school) with English subtitles drama.

Who wants to watch an hour of tennis practice? Even players and former players might blanch at that.

But any hint that Julie’s journey to adulthood is stunted by her focus gradually washes away in this smart, tense and above all very “quiet” drama about a tragedy, a possible crime and how one tennis player handles it and what she herself can do about it.

Rating: unrated, adult subject matter

Cast: Tessa Van den Broeck, Pierre Gervais, Claire Bodson and Laurent Caron.

Credits: Directed by Leonardo Van Dijl, scripted by Ruth Becquart and Leonardo Van Dijl. A Cineuropa release.

Running time: 1:40

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Netflixable? Eric Bana and Sadie Sink are a father and daughter staring down a cult — “A Sacrifice”

Posted on October 22, 2024 by Roger Moore

“A Sacrifice” is a thriller about an American father who is the last to realize that his daughter’s being recruited by a German cult.

As Ben Monroe is an expert on “groupthink” and cult behavior, this is humbling. He’s the one who invited Mazzy (Sadie Sink of “Stranger Things”) to Germany — where he’s teaching — to “get her grades up,” which suggests flawed reasoning backed up by inattentive parenting.

Who figures bringing a sixteen year-old to cosmopolitan, hedonistic Berlin, where she doesn’t speak the language and where he is too distracted by his work, is going to help her “grades?”

Logic isn’t the strong suit this latest thriller from Ridley Scott’s writer-director daughter Jordan Scott (“Cracked”), a picture that broods and occasionally chills and takes its time entrapping the daughter right up to the abrupt twists of the finale. It’s short but not “brisk,” and not really developed enough or long enough to score its points.

Ben’s academic friend since his college days (Stephan Kampwirth) has police connections, which is how he gets Ben onto the scene of a mass suicide. The author of “The Science of Loneliness” is working on a new book on “Groupthink” and seeing all the bodies, ritualistically staged pre-death, and hearing the theories of the police profiler (Sylvia Hoeks of “Blade Runner 2049”) could help him with his research.

They banter about what people get from cults — “community, believing” in something greater than themselves, causing one to “give away your free will” in an effort to give “you life some meaning.”

This is an “off the radar” cult, and will require all the profiler’s skill, with maybe some help from an author whose work she respects, to chase down.

That’s the perfect time for Mazzy to show up, forced to make her way from the airport on her own, unable to figure out the subway and its long, tortured Germanic station names. It’s a good thing helpful hunk Martin (Jonas Dassler) is there to show her the way.

Ben may be absorbed by the sort of thinking that leads to “groupthink,” and having someone to discuss that with. Mazzy checks out the profiler and wonders “Who’s the midlife-crisis bait?”

We can guess most of what’s to come just in that first act set-up. So Scott, adapting a novel by Nicholas Hogg, tries to throw us off the obvious by shifting the point of view to show us Martin’s life — living with his doting grandmother — and the cult he’s in, where everyone takes the reassurances of leader Hilma (Sophie Rois), that “you’ll never be lonely again” at face value even as she’s warning of global collapse, mass extinctions and — RED FLAG time — “chemtrails.”

The ticking clock here is watching Mazzy get lured into a cult while her father is distracted by researching a cult with the cute cop on the case.

Scott pretty much botches that, with the shifting points of view never building the necessary suspense to make this come off. She succeeds in serving up Jonestown chills at what gullible people, from the People’s Temple to Heaven’s Gate to MAGA Q-Anon devotees, can be talked into doing as they take the wrong advice on fighting loneliness.

Connecting that condition to totalitarianism is as close as “A Sacrifice” gets to sending a message.

The story is reasonably absorbing, and the leads compelling enough to make us invest in “A Sacrifice.” But the lapses in logic are thrown into sharp relief in a third act that pretty much collapses in on itself.

The Big Confrontation and Race to Save are utterly botched, which Scott doubles down on by then OVER-explaining what we’ve seen set up in the first two acts.

The reason one always points out “nepo babies” in showbiz is that “talent” isn’t heriditary, even if the urge to give your offspring a leg or two up in your profession is. Scott’s filmmaking isn’t anything that makes her stand out from legions of other filmmakers trying to get their movies made, and her competence is easily questioned in the execution here, no matter how much fatherly advice her producer-dad gave her, if any.

language, sometimes she does, mostly she can’t even pronounce the place names.

Rating: R, violence, disturbing images

Cast: Eric Bana, Sadie Sink, Jonas Dassler and Sylvia Hoeks

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jordan Scott, based on a novel by Nicholas Hogg. A Vertical release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:36

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Movie Preview: “The Strangers” are back — “The Strangers: Chapter 2”

Posted on October 21, 2024 by Roger Moore

This teaser trailer promises a Fundamentalist variation on a theme — at least on the car radio — pursued unto death in the masked murderers tale “The Strangers.”

The IMDB page of this Renny Harlin “I’m BACK, baby!” sequel — part of a trilogy — doesn’t have a release date, nor does this teaser trailer.

It’s set up to be a trilogy. Perhaps that explains the insane running time (2:42) listed for this title on IMDB. The third film is due next year, with “Chapter 2” smuggled out in late 2024.

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Movie Preview: “The Vanishing?” David Schwimmer’s BACK, and in “Goosebumps”

Posted on October 21, 2024 by Roger Moore

Schwimmer tells “Dad Jokes” before going all “Red ROSS” on kids and neighbors over something that happened in the city decades ago.

Looks fun, I have to say. Good to see Schwimmer kvetching and kvelling on screen again.

Jan. 10, this “Goosebumps” tale of terror comes to Hulu and Disney +.

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Classic Film Review: Was “Caligula” (1976, ’79, 2024) as bad as we remember?

Posted on October 21, 2024 by Roger Moore

No matter how scorned by one generation of film critics and/or filmgoers, once a movie is finished and preserved for all time there’s always a chance of “rediscovery” and reevaluation by film fans of the future.

“Lost” films come back to life, flops are revived as “classics” as more sober-minded assessors weigh in once the furor and stain of notoriety have faded.

“Caligula” starred Malcolm McDowell, an elite talent hot off of “A Clockwork Orange,” and three future Oscar winners — Peter O’Toole, Helen Mirren and John Gielgud. It was scripted by acclaimed novelist and screenwriter Gore Vidal, who had a hand in “Ben Hur,” “The Best Man” And “Is Paris Burning?”

Director Tinto Brass (“Yankee” and “I Am What I Am”) had won respect in Italian filmmaking circles.

But when the film — released and yanked, re-edited and re-released — finally arrived in theaters, all anybody wanted to talk about was its Penthouse Magazine touches, the graphic depravitity, the sex and omnipresent nudity and sexually transgressive nature of it all. Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione produced it, and fired Tinto Brass to shoot additional “dirty” stuff and edit it in ways that played-up the titillation.

Reviews were brutal. Vidal demanded that his name be taken from the script, and the editor and composer did the same. If you wanted to get most anyone in front of or behind the camera red in the face in later decades, all you had to do was mention the title.

Was it really that awful? A new “ultimate cut” restoration, putting the film back as Brass and Vidal et al wanted it, removing some of Guccione’s excesses, promises to let us see how to looked when it premiered in Italy before Guccione took it over and invites us to rethink “Caligula.”

What I remember about it, never having sat through the many cable TV servings of it O channel-surfed by over the ensuing decades, is that I had to cross a picket line at the Manor Theatre in Charlotte, N.C. to see it.

Yes, it was picketed.

The beheading tank, a vast rolling scythe invented for the film as a means of delivering”entertaining” executions by God-Emperor Caligula (born in 12 CE, assassinated in 41, CE) struck me as particularly revolting.

All the breasts, bare bottoms and penises deployed here had a numbing effect in the theater.

And Matthew McDowell, in the title role, summed up the film with repeated references to his need for more stimulus in his depraved (not wholly endorsed by historians) life.

“Dull, dull, DULL!”

But how do memories of this abortion — featuring an actual live childbirth (three pregnant extras were employed to achieve this) — compare to experiencing it anew, “restored?”

Vidal was right to try and take his name off this, as the script is trite, disorganized and tin-eared. The day may come when all that we remember Vidal for are his contributions to films (he added the gay subtext to “Ben-Hur,” he claimed) and his feuds with Truman Capote and others.

If there’s a more insipid, oft-repeated line than “I hope I’m not interrupting,” I am at a loss to recall it. And deploying it while “interrupting” Caligula’s sexual dalliance with his sister Drusella (Teresa Ann Savoy, all but forgotten now) isn’t “cute.”

The vast majority of shots are held several seconds after their payoff, a pronounced and obvious flaw in the early acts, an insufferable agony in the later ones. Editor Nino Baragli (“The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” “Mediterraneo” can’t have wanted that.

Perhaps that’s the work of director Brass, an uncredited editor here. Let the record show that Tinto Brass never made a great or good film, before or after “Caligula.” Restoring this picture doesn’t change that dubious track record.

The sets, from the grottos of Capri to “The Glory that was Rome,” look like tacky, over-decorated soundstage versions of TV productions of the era.

And never has the addition of buzzing flies on the soundtrack seemed more superfluous. The film is ugly and the picture just reeks, and pretty much has from the start.

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Netflixable? A TV reporter fakes his way to folk hero status — “The Man Who Loved UFOs”

Posted on October 20, 2024 by Roger Moore

In the 1980s, Argentina became the new epicenter of the UFO conspiracy universe as an intrepid and enterprising TV reporter doggedly pursued and then presented “proof” of a UFO landing in the mountains of rural Argentina.

His breathless, credulous reporting produced images of the burn-spot landing site, heiroglyphics he found in nearby caves and local eyewitnesses — at least some of whom had their hair turn bleached-white due to what they saw.

Former entertainment reporter Jose De Zer became a sensation, going on to cover Argentine conflict and politics. And the UFO world moved on to the next “hot spot” for alleged alien activity, sightings and “contact.”

Years later, it turned out De Zer didn’t just hype and sensationalize, he flat-out made it all up. He went so far as to make the cave drawings himself, and fake the “lights” in the night sky and his famous closest “encounter” with beings from another world.

Filmmaker Diego Lerman looked at this story, which seems suited for farce or ripe for a cautionary allegory in the latest era of “fake news,” and goes for something more poignant, a huxter’s descent into the madness of his own invention in “The Man Who Loved UFOs.”

It doesn’t work. Leonard Sbaraglia may be a deadr-inger for the long-dead De Zer — born José Bernardo Kerzer. He may do his utmost to make the guy sympathetic, someone who believes his own BS about reinventing journalism and taking himself and his station into “the television of the future” (in Spanish, or dubbed into English) by pulling out all the stops on covering “something people WANT to believe.” But Sbaraglia never makes that hard sell.

Yes, that “what hasn’t been proven but believed by everyone” is prophetic, as much of the world flirts with fascism, manipulated by sinister media figures who prey on the ignorant prejudices and conspiracy mania of their audience. But the movie isn’t really about that.

De Zer was an opportunist. His idea of giving “the people” something other than bad news about the Argentine economy, reminders of how badly The Falklands War went and the politics that had produced coups and mass murder along with them is debated by his TV higher-ups.

“But we’ve never actually just LIED to our viewers!”

De Zer — sort of an Art Bell/Tucker Carlson/Geraldo character — gets his way, and with his long-suffering cameraman Chando (Sergio Prina) he sets out to solve an economically depressed mining region’s “tourism” problem by helping them publicize their “UFO landing.”

There’s nothing noble, heroic, comical or tragic about him as he’s presented here. From the moment he gets his first bribe to “report” there (gold nuggets from their long-dormant mines) we keep our distance. And nothing Sbaraglia or Lerman do makes him riveting or even all that interesting, much less compelling.

There’s no “charm” to this scoundrel’s ill-gotten fame, or his connection to the singing, dancing TV personality (Mónica Ayos) whose flattering TV profiles are a joke — he’s sleeping with her.

Noting is made of the amusing possibilities of poor Chando trying to rein his on-air personality in when De Zer is hurdling across rocks and fields of the mountainous plateaus or plunging down a mine tunnel which they’ve “discovered” by accident, but a discovery that was “meant to be” by the aliens allegedly directing their quest, luring them on.

And while there are glimpses of how this “coverage” made De Zer a folk hero, Lerman makes no effort to convey the fanatical devotion, the deluded “belief” and how their credulity made Argentines look or feel, and what being fooled this way cost them.

What we get instead are flashbacks to De Zer’s service during “The Six Day War” in Israel (he’s Jewish), the Sinai Desert epiphany he maintains ordained him to be the one the aliens “trust” for this “story.”

Even that had comic possibilities, one of the “chosen people” chosen by aliens, or so he wants everyone to believe.

Every journalist knows how easy it would be to “fake” most stories, just as every cop is most expert in the field of knowing what she/he can get away with. Seeing someone, for screenplay reasons that we never, ever buy into, go to all this trouble to fool people and fake his way to TV fame is more disheartening than amusing.

On the positive side of things, this film amusingly undercuts every huxter trying to sell his or her latest “UFO Investigation” documentary. “The truth is out there,” as De Zer repeats. Too bad most of the people claiming they’re “finding” that truth are either credulous clowns or con-artists.

There’s no suspense in the tale, even in its “big finish.” “Tragic” was never in the cards, as this con man got away with his stunt. But this could have been dark and funny. It isn’t.

Presenting this story in a fstraightforward manner does the character no favors, as he is beneath contempt, but never in an amusing way. It’s a progressively more fanatical performance that feels too colorless to make us care.

Rating: TV-MA, nudity, sex, smoking, profanity

Cast: Leonardo Sbaraglia, Sergio Prina and Mónica Ayos

Credits: Directed by Diego Lerman, scripted by Adrián Biniez and Diego Lerman. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:48

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Movie Preview: Dystopia Shmishtopia, Millie Bobby Brown, Chris Pratt and Chris Pratt’s…Hair? “The Electric State”

Posted on October 20, 2024 by Roger Moore

You know what they about sci fi cinema — “Utopia doesn’t sell.”

So instead we get another Netflix outing for Netflix Queen Millie Bobby, a dark and cautionary future after what we gather is a fascist “rebellion” that brought civilization crashing down into…”robots lost their freedom” and people were enslaved by…social media?

Wonder if there’s a pasty-faced Afrikaner supervillain?

Don’t get your hopes up. The Russo Brothers directed it.

Mar. 14

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Blackfriars, “Merry Wives” as The Bard” might have staged it

Posted on October 19, 2024 by Roger Moore

The American Shakespeare Center’s crown jewel in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Staunton, a theatre designed to mimic Shakespeare’s winter quarters, the perfect place to experience plays as the 17th century punters would have.

Intermission at a grand vamp of  “Merry Wives of Windsor.” Cast of eight in many guises, just killing it.

Because one doth not live by cinema alone.   

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Someday, Maybe I’ll get a theater named after me

Posted on October 19, 2024 by Roger Moore
Historic Wayne Theatre, which opened as a cinema at the tail end of the silent era in Waynesboro, VA.
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BOX OFFICE: “Smile 2” underwhelms with $23, “Wild Robot” clears $100

Posted on October 19, 2024 by Roger Moore

“Smile 2” arrives in theaters to excellent reviews, a little name recognition in its cast and a proven “brand” whose previous installment opened at $22 million, but soared onward and upward and cleared $105 million in North America alone.

Paramount HAD to figure the horror audience would show uo opening night and turn this into a blockbuster, that, the fans of the first film would be champing at the bit for a pre-Halloween horror pic that isn’t generic, low-budget or what have you.

“Smile 2” doesn’t look like it’s in the same medium as the more malnourished “Terrifier” franchise, for instance. It’s on a whole other plane than “Beezel,” a no-budget witch thriller of equally recent vintage.

But the second “Smile” is opening to the same decent but not overwhelming ticket-buying response that the first film enjoyed — $23 million by midnight Sunday, according to the studio tally sent to @thenumbers.

The simplest explanation for this underwhelming turnout (big brand horror films have opened in the $27-35 range) is that they didn’t wait long enough to release it. The original film left theaters maybe 20 months ago. And it’s been streaming ever since.

Paramount needed the cash, I guess.

“The Wild Robot” continues to rake it in, more of a steady hit for Dreamworks than a season-saving blockbuster. It’s over $100 million. Finally. Big animated pictures typically reach that mark in their first week or so. It’s good enough to deserve better. It earned $10.1 million this weekend.

“Terrifier 3” continues to give hope that the horror audience hasn’t vanished, it’s just gotten more obsessed with obscure titles that they figure their peers aren’t cool enough to have discovered. It’s heading towards a $9.3 million second weekend, a very respectable “hold” considering it opened at $18, almost as much as “Smile” or “Smile 2.”

The nostalgic wallow “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” is adding another $5 million, inching it closer to $300 million. It’s not half the film “Wild Robot” is, but there you go.

The Andrew Garfield/Florence Pugh A24 drama “We Live in Time” opened to a very respectable $4 million on far fewer screens than “Smile 2.” That one I’ll have to catch later this weekend, I hope.

The respectable but underwhelming Michael Keaton/Mila Kunis dramedy “Goodrich” didn’t crack the top five, even if it earned slightly better reviews than “We Live in Time.”

“Piece by Piece” and “The Apprentice” are good pictures that can’t find an audience, and are fading and will start shedding screens any minute now.

As always, I’ll update these figures as more data comes in.

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