A Heist picture co-starring Jason Patric and a lot of lesser knowns, this one hits theaters and streaming Nov. 22.
“Tulsa” kind of hints at it, but this trailer alone reminds us that “Rocky” came out almost 50 years ago. We all get old, HGH and steroids etc be damned. He was short to start with. Has AARP Sly shrunk, too?
Yes, you can find versions of “Florida Man” is every state, especially in your more anti-social rural and MAGA precincts.
Sure, most are white. But not all.
This series, premiering Oct. 18, is part doc, part “Drunk History” as we hear the state’s weirdness chronicler and Grand Inquisitor, Carl Hiaasen, weigh in on the sheer dipshittery of Sunshine State “types,” and see Anna Faris play a molested mermaid, along with Jake Johnson, Randall Park et al.
I may review it if HBO pitches it. But being HBO…
For “Things Will Be Different,” his debut feature, writer-director (and editor) Michael Felker tries and tries to find ways to strip predictability out of his supernatural thriller. But when you’re working in a genre with fixed expectations, that often means throwing logic out the window and stumbling towards nonsensical as you struggle to go where no “Twilight Zone” episode has gone before.
Two armed siblings (Riley Dandy and Adam David Thompson) meet in a remote diner. They’re all alone. He’s already ordered so that they can discuss their next move as they sit, rifles slung over their shoulders, bags of money at their feet.
We don’t see the heist, don’t know who they robbed. We hear the sirens. The law is on their trail.
And where on Earth would these two armed goons not stand out in a public setting like this? Idaho?
“Joe” has a plan, and apparently Sydney or “Syd” is comfortable with it. They head off into the woods, cross a cornfield, chase off some target-shooting yahoos and duck into a well-kept but empty two story early 20th century farmhouse.
They hear the sirens again, but Joe’s confidence in their “safe house” is based on what he knows, what he’s told Syd and what she — agreeing to this robbery to get out of debt — believed is that it’s a “magical safe house.”
Fiddle with the time on the magical grandfather clocks therein, utter a few words in what sounds like Latin (Joe has a notebook full of “instructions), get that magic locked upstairs door to open, and they will step through time into some safer past for a couple of weeks, and return to their time afterwards once the coast is clear.
Sure, ANY of us would buy in if our sibling told us this “stay out of jail” tale as his pitch to sign us up for armed robbery. That, or we’d just Baker Act the loon and be done with him.
They drunkenly pass their two weeks of solitude in the wintry past with vintage CDs and vhs tapes, but danged if there isn’t a catch when they try to finish off their “laying low.”
A magical safe will have to be opened (per instructions). A magical cassette recorder that communicates with the overlords of this “Vise Grip”oasis must be consulted. A magical board covering the door, where messages, warnings and threats are carved, must be contended with.
As they freak out, they must “investigate” and contend with their pasts (barely), the history of this house (for a moment) and face off with whoever or whatever opens and closes this “Vise Grip” on time, because “they” are not letting them go.
Here’s my favorite line of dialogue, delivered by Thompson as Joe.
“It’s impossibly impossible, and it’s crazy to even consider this possibly possible.”
Sure, NOW you say that.
And here’s my least favorite line, delivered by the disembodied voice on the cassette tape.
“Go inside and await for our instructions.”
What community college D-student piffle is this?
The viewer is both miles ahead of the characters in guessing where this is going, and befuddled at the clumsy ways it gets there, or avoids letting us think we know how it’s getting there.
The performances aren’t bad, or particularly affecting either.
And as much as I hate thrillers that over-explain the unexplainable, plainly Joe, Sydney or “Luuuucyyyy” have got some ‘splainin’ to do. Without that, the headsnapping leaps this “plot” takes and the absurd situations and oft-broken “rules” this world requires which this script serves up don’t add up to a coherent movie.
“Things Will Be Different” when our writer-director (and editor) figures that out. And that “await our intructions” doesn’t require the clunky preposition “for.”
Rating: Unrated, violence, profanity
Cast: Riley Dandy and Adam David Thompson
Credits: Scripted and directed by Michael Felker. A Magnet release.
Running time: 1:41
The French animator Sylvain Chomet of “The Triplets of Belleville” brings this influential French playwright and filmmaker’s upbringing and career to the screen in colorful, sentimental strokes.
Let’s keep an eye out for this Song Classics release.
I swear, there must be an “example” screenplay in every film school’s Screenwriting 201 textbook, one with “dirty cops” who must be overcome, outsmarted and above all else SUSPECTED in a thriller that hopes to deliver a second or third act surprise.
The set-up for such scripts can have all the novel elements, milieus and settings you want. But anybody paying one second’s attention has only to wonder “They won’t be THAT obvious, will they?”
“The Silent Hour” is a compact, paranoid thriller about a detective (Joel Kinnaman) who goes deaf trying to protect a deaf witness (Sandra May Frank) from those out to murder her.
The setting is a about-to-be-renovated Boston apartment building, with the heroes forced to fight their way, floor-by-floor, bad guy by bad guy, out. So it’s the Thai thriller “The Raid” or its sequels without the body count, the gonzo martial artis mixed with the gunplay and on occasion, without sound.
The director is Brad Anderson, a practiced auteur (“The Machinist,” “”Transsiberian,” “Fractured,” “Beirut.” So even if the screenwriter is cribbing his “practice script” from Screenwriting 201 “dirty cops” thriller, there’s a lot going for this one, including the stars — “Game of Thrones” vet Kinnaman, veteran character actor Mark Strong, hearing-impaired “Sound of Fear” actress Sandra May Frank and Mekhi Phfifer.
Kinnaman plays a delusional “super cop” who loses his hearing in a bust-gone-wrong in the film’s pro forma opening (the 401st filmed chase through shipping containers on the Boston docks) opening scene.
Frank can’t hear much, and his hearing loss is “progressive.” His daughter’s birthday present guitar and guitar recitals? Better hear them while he can. Hearing aids monitored by cell phone? Only good as long as he keeps them charged. But even that won’t be enough. Eventually.
Months later, his former partner (Strong) talks him into “interpreting” when a deaf witness (Frank) to a mob execution turns up and no other interpreter is available. That’s how sloppy-ASL speaker Frank gets mixed up with Ava, who finds herself hunted by a hit squad that knows she knows. That’s where Ava gives Frank the pluck to continue the work and stick with a job he was and is good at.
“One missing piece doesn’t make you any less whole,” she tells him (via Americal Sign Language).
The picture’s task is to trap them in that nearly empty building with or without a phone, with or without a firearm, as bad guys — some wearing badges — try to track them down and silence them.
The threat is palpable and laid-out in blunt strokes. The “solutions” to problems are likewise set up to be checked-off, one at a time. But the obvious foreshadowing doesn’t negate the film’s suspense or the occasional clever bit of “get out of this jam” problem-solving.
We can be a step or two ahead of our couple in peril and still revel in the execution of the their various means of escape. Providing they do escape.
Anderson lets us experience their plight as they do, in shocking blasts of silence when what they really need is that one sense that will tell them the head honcho of the villains (Mekhi Phifer, excellent) is closing in, chambering a round or calling for more minions to help him stop them.
The script by Dan Hall is strictly paint-by-numbers — cut and dried and predictable. But the execution atones for some of that, and the performances give it that extra something that makes even a formulaic thriller worth your time.
Rating: R, violence, profanity, substance abuse
Cast: Joel Kinnaman, Sandra May Frank, Mark Strong and Mekhi Phifer.
Credits: Directed by Brad Anderson, scripted by Dan Hall. A Republic Pictures/Paramount release.
Running time: 1:39
This film, directed by Piven’s sister — their parents are acting/comedy/improv royalty in Chicagoland — is making the festival rounds now, with a planned release in January.
A pre-WWII story about a struggling Jewish tap dancer whose troupe gets a big break — in pre-war Budapest — just as Jews are fleeing Germany and environs — it’s based on a short story by the great playwright Arthur Miller.
Every classic film fan has her or his go-to stars, just as film fans did back when the movies were young, or stepping into middle age. I’ll watch most anything with Bogart and/or Bacall, William Powell, Gary Cooper, Joel McRea, Dick Powell, Stanwyck, Fonda, Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart or Gregory Peck in it.
Any film John Wayne did with Howard Hawks or John Ford is worth watching and re-watching. Glenn Ford? Alan Ladd? Take’em or leave’em, depending on the subject, the setting, the director and the studio the movie was made under.
But to my tastes, life is too short to waste on movies starring Robert Taylor, Spencer Tracy, Randolph Scott or Van Johnson.
And I never warmed to “The King,” either. Clark Gable, who made most of his pictures for big-budget, high-gloss MGM, had his moments — “It Happened One Night” and “Red Dust” stand out. But maybe it was the gloss MGM packaged him in, his acting style, which isn’t aging as well as more “natural” performances by many of his peers (Peck, Stewart, Fonda and Ford especially). But something always feels “off” in his Hemingwayesque posing and posturing, the starchy machismo he clung to as if he had no greater fear than being perceived as “soft.”
“Mogambo” (1953) gave the ageing star in one of his last macho hits, an on-location-in-Africa spectacle that paired The King of MGM with one of the greatest American directors for a romantic thriller of “The Great White Hunter” school.
It’s old fashioned, as more evolved generations see Big Game hunting — even just to capture animals for zoos and circuses — as barbaric and destructive. The greying, 50something Gable doesn’t just “get the girl,” he all but has his choice of two leading ladies in this love triangle story set on a safari.
Grace Kelly was less than half his age. Ava Gardner was 20 years his junior and too much woman for him, or almost anybody any studio paired her up with.
But off we, he and legendary Western filmmaker John Ford go into the wilds of British colonies that became Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya for the story of a bachelor safari leader tempted by two women who fall under his gaze.
Vic Marswell (Gable) runs a business where he has to maintain good relations with the natives as he leads well-heeled customers on hunts or expeditions, often capturing wild animals with one competent subordinate (Philip Stainton) and one malevolently incompetent one (Eric Pohlmann).
Then this blast of blowsy, showgirl sex appeal shows up. Gardner plays Eloise “Honey Bear” Kelly, a brassy broad summoned by her “old pal,” a maharaja, only to discover the rich twit left days before.
Vic doesn’t like having women around, but he’s knocked-down and kept on his heels by this dame.
She calls him “Mister whoever-you-are” and “my little white hunter,” and when she sees him in safari shorts, gives him a “Bless your big bony knees.”
Her “Look, Buster, don’t you get overstimulated with me!” warns him off.
As she cuddles with the caged critters — some of them not that cuddly — he sizes her up. He knows her “type,” he says — “not an honest feeling from her kneecap to her neck.”
It must be love. Or would be, if she wasn’t anxious to catch the first boat back out of the middle-of-nowhere. And when Vic’s scientist-client (Donald Sinden) and his very young wife (Grace Kelly) arrive as Vic’s next clients, only an Act of God, or engine trouble on the boat, could trap Honey Bear here with Vic’s next woman of interest, the beautiful Brit blonde married to a sickly anthropologist.
That manly Gable always needed an Ashley Wilkes he could show up in movies like this. But worldwise Honey Bear sees Vic as he really is.
“This is no Sir Galahad who loves from afar. This is a two-legged boa constrictor.”
Unspoiled African scenery (mixed with a lot of soundstage shots), wild animals in cagees, or in second unit nature footage inserts aside, this is Gardner’s picture. It’s not quite lifeless when she’s not on camera, but Gable’s posturing and posing — the fodder of generations of comic impersonators — gets old after a bit.
Kelly’s winsome protests meant to hide animal lust because “Women always fall for ‘The Great White Hunter'” are little more than a plot device. But our leading man was still picking his leading ladies up — literally — when the need arose.
Movies in this setting during that era make one all but expect racism, but despite filming in the middle of the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya, or perhaps because of it (Gable had bodyguards, Ford had to change locations due to threats) there’s little of that nature here — just a generally patronizing American and European attitude towards the sometimes servile natives, some of it conveyed by the mere presence of a Catholic missionary-priest (Denis O’Dea).
It’s the animal stuff that’s more likely to carry a cringe these days.
There’s very little action, but it’s ably conveyed by Gable’s glowering take on his character’s shoot-from-the-hip experience with this world.
This was Gable and MGM’s second take on this story, as 1932’s “Red Dust” was the picture that made his name with the studio, with the same screenwriter (John Lee Mahin) adapting the play it’s based on anew, transplanting it from pre-WWII Vietnam to post-war Africa.
That film, a “pre-code” drama co-starring Jean Harlow, was lusty and virile and transgressive, with Gable’s adulterous rogue walking a finer line between likable and loathsome. Ford’s take on this tale is more scenic, but the adultery is tame and aside from Gardner, the whole enterprise is humorless.
Howard Hawks took John Wayne to Africa for the more rambunctious men-among-men Big Game (trapping) safari comedy “Hatari” a decade later, and got a better picture out of it, even if the attitudes in it are little more enlightened.
“Mogambo” isn’t all that, but it isn’t bad. And it says something for audience’s long-standing love for Gable that it became a good-sized hit, despite coming out less than a year after the similar and edgier Peck/Gardner and Susan Hayward Hemingway adaptation “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”
Today it’s most interesting as a lesser picture in the Ford canon, and a movie that prolonged Gable’s leading man career long enough for him to joke around in Doris Day’s limelight in “Teacher’s Pet,” get upstaged by the scenery-chewing Burt Lancaster in the sub thriller “Run Silent, Run Deep” and earn a nice grace note for his long career by sacrificing what was left of his health enduring Marilyn Monroe and John Huston in the desert of “The Misfits.”
It was always good to be “The King of Hollywood,” even if too much of the time, you watched Gable and wondered who else could have done that part, and maybe given it another dimension or two.
Rating: PG, violence, adultery, smoking
Cast: Clark Gable, Ava Gardner, Grace Kelly, Donald Sinden, Philip Stainton, Eric Pohlmann and Denis O’Dea.
Credits: Directed by John Ford, scripted by John Lee Mahin, based on the play “Red Dust” by Wilson Collison. An MGM release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.
Running time: 1:53
Elsie Fisher and Gregg Turkington also star in this offbeat romp.
A multi generational Italian family holiday gathering in the ancestral home turns testy? Go figure.
Throw in a couple of Hollywood “nepo babies” and you get financing.
This hits theaters Nov. 8.
Any dude with the barest hint of a singing voice and a lot of adenoids can manage a Bob Dylan impression with just a little practice.
The bigger test in this Dec. 25 release will be if Monica Barbero can summon up the ethereal range and soul of Joan Baez, if indeed they’re letting her sing like Joan.
Love the casting of Boyd Holbrook atsJohnny Cash, badass. That works. Director James Mangold (“Walk the Line”) knows a good Cash when he sees him.
Edward Norton’s Pete Seeger, Norbert Leo Butz is folklorist/record producer Alan Lomax, Dan Fogler becomes agent Albert Grossman, Scoot McNairy is aged legend Woody Guthrie and, for Dylan fanatics, Charlie Tahan plays guitarist turned first-time-ever organist Al Kooper on that legendary “Like a Rolling Stone” recording session.
It may dazzle, and I can’t imagine it won’t at least occasionally thrill fans of the Bard of the Iron Range.
“It’s What’s Inside” is a high-concept body-switch thriller that relies on performances to convince us that this or that little-known to utterly-anonymous actors has switched roles to come off.
They don’t and it doesn’t.
While writer-director Greg Jardin does his level best to bowl us over with “technique” (split screens, endless 360 degree handheld pans, etc.) and does a decent enough job at complicating his role-playing-game-run-amok plot, a somewhat bland cast of players can’t manage to convince us that they’re possessed by the mind and spirit of someone else.
Making all of the characters “types” — the influencer, the tech nerd, the Buddist hippy chick, the rich dude, the hothead — and the other three so uninteresting as to barely qualify as “types” doesn’t help. Because these college pals meeting years after school at the mansion of the richest member of their ranks aren’t distinct enough as characters and aren’t good enough actors to “suggest” that some other colorless character is under their skin.
The best-known among this crew is “White Lotus” alumna Brittany O’Grady, playing the seriously sexy but shy Shelby who can’t interest her not-in-her-league beau Cyrus (James Morosini) to role-play revive their years-together-and-no-ring sex life.
That doesn’t keep them from showing up at the pre-wedding fete rich Reuben (Devon Terrell) is throwing himself at his artist/mother’s country estate.
Reuben also invited pretty advice-to-the-lovelorn vlogger Nikki (Alicia Debham-Carey), artist Brooke (Reina Hardesty), hippy Maya (Nina Bloomgarden) and blustery “bro” Dennis (Gavin Leatherwood).
And as a wild card, he’s summoned the guy whom he and Dennis had a hand in getting expelled from college. Forbes (David W. Thompson, whose credits go back to “Win Win”) went West and became a tech success. Is he still holding a grudge?
The “edge” of his arrival is taken off by this gadget he brings in a green suitcase. You just tape a couple of electrodes on your skull and those skulls around you and this thingy (VERY analog looking) will “download” your “brain files” into whoever, with other “brain files” uploaded into your head.
This gadget is basically an electronic aid for “role playing,” as characters body-switch and act on impulses — cheating, tricking, betraying, or in the case of Cyrus and to some degree Shelby, “avoiding” that outcome.
“Call me Nikki!” “Nikki.” “Say it AGAIN.”
The conceit doesn’t work because nobody in this in crew is convincingly switched to another body. The cast is a pretty and pretty generic lot stuck playing a forgettable collection of types. And even the more outgoing characters, the easiest ones to “switch,” make little impression in that regard.
And then there’s an “accident” and the party turns to chaos as characters blackmail one another to achieve some goal — a sexier life, a richer life, a better pairing, avoiding jail, etc.
The final act works much better than the earlier ones because the performances finally achieve some level of “out there,” with bigger emotions, higher stakes and evil twists that arrive in a seriously confusing blur.
But even then, the cast doesn’t manage to adequately convey a new persona inside someone else’s body. A lame joke about whether Dennis has license to use “the N-word” when he’s inside Reuben is about as far as that goes.
The title “It’s What’s Inside” demands that we buy in to the switches. But the cast’s inability — pretty much to a one — to manufacture the externals necessary to make their transformations believable does in writer-director Greg Jardin’s superficially showy feature film debut.
A little less camera blocking and a lot more rehearsal could have worked wonders on this set.
Rating: R, sex, violence, profanity
Cast: Brittany O’Grady, James Morosini, Alicia Debnam-Carey, Devon Terrell, Gavin Leatherwood, Reina Hardesty, David W. Thompson and Nina Bloomgarden
Credits: Scripted and directed by Greg Jardin. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:43
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