Megan Stevenson, Ruth Syratt, Jane Horrocks and Sophie Thompson are in the cast, Stephen Fry narrates, much as he did the “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” movie.
But this looks 1963 “Doctor Who” cheap, goofy and sure to be a festival darling (it’s just now starting its fest run) if it’s any good at all. It premieres in Austin, if you’re heading for the only tolerable corner of Texas.
Edgar Ramírez and Adriana Paz also star in this edgy tale of a cartel kingpin who wants to retire…as a queen.
Audacious Jacques Audiard wrote “A Prophet” and “Rust & Bone” and this comic thriller/musical.
Limited theatrical release as this could be an awards contender, Netflix Nov. 13.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt gets to play a detective’s “Eureka” moment in “Killer Heat,” a new mystery thriller from the French director “Night of the Kings.”
As ex-NYC cop (Aren’t they all?) Nick Bali, he rolls his eyes, paces the crime scene and holds his arms open wide in his best “How did I miss this?”
And we, the viewers, wonder the same damned thing. Because Nick’s epiphany comes one hour and eight minutes in this scenic but generic private eye tale. The average viewer figured all this out an hour (or more) earlier.
The film is set in the Zorba the Greek corner of the Med, the under-filmed island of Crete, which is a plus. Beaches by “the wine dark sea,” an ancient, fortified harbor, twisty, scenic roads winding into the the rocky hills to the edge of even rockier cliffs, this picture is a postcard from a trip you’ll want to take, regardless of the muddled murder mystery that is the movie’s reason for being.
Gordon-Levitt’s got the private eye hat and world-weary gumshoe narration down. The script has him go on and on about “the myth about the guy who flew too high.” What was his name? Oh yeah, “Icarus.”
“Sometimes you use a carrot,” Nick growls in Gordon-Levitt’s best film noir PI voice-over, “Sometimes you use a stick. Sometimes you just lie your ass off.”
He does this all the way through the picture. And considering what the screenplay has Shailene Woodley play, JGL got off easily. Almost every line from the formidable Woodley is exposition, back-story or “explanation.” Actors look at scripts loaded with that for dialogue and mutter “Oh yay. But at least I get a free trip to Crete.”
Woodley plays Penelope, an American with a name from Homer’s “Odyssey” who married money. But the the young director of the family shipping concern (Richard Madden) has died in a free solo climbing accident up those cliffs. Penelope married the dead man’s twin brother, and has her suspicions about what really happened.
So does the viewer and by extension, the reader of this review. But let’s soldier on no matter what we instantly start to “think.”
Continue readingShe’s ready to flee the nest and move to California. He’s determined to make the case that staying in the Buckeye State is her first, best destiny.
Alas, he doesn’t turn on the weather channel and show her the wide swath of 105 degree+ days assaulting the climate-changed West Coast. Might have sealed the deal.
Then again, she could point to Ohio politics, the Gym Jordans and J.D. Vances, and say “Sayonara.”
Jessica Michael Davis directed, and co-wrote and co-stars in this with Collin Kelly-Sordelet.
“Escaping Ohio” has finished its festival run and Gravitas Ventures has it. Release date? The dears didn’t put that on the trailer, which suggests straight-to-streaming.
I interviewed Dr. Patrick Steptoe, who pioneered “test tube babies,” when he traveled America for a lecture series some years back.
Netflix holding back this British film about a hot button political subject seems like cowardice or worse.
Nov. 22. By which time the dunderheads here could have voted this procedure out of existence.
Nothing in a movie is there by accident.
So it’s worth pondering why the 1953 screen musical “The Band Wagon” is the movie that patients/inmates at the Arkham Hospital for the Criminally Insane watch in “Joker: Folie à Deux.”
The musical, one of the last hurrahs of MGM’s “Freed Unit” golden age, inspires the smitten future Harley Quinn (Lady Gaga) to torch the mental institution so that she and Arthur “Joker” Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) can attempt their escape. Or perhaps they’re just bored. The movie’s as old-fashioned as they get.
“The Band Wagon” is a show about putting on a show, a “42nd Street Lite” song-and-dance about the process of rewriting, staging and rehearsing a big Broadway show. The film emphasizes the messiness of that process.
But despite having musical auteur Vincent Minnelli behind the camera, and veteran hoofer Fred Astaire, along with Cyd Charisse, Nanette Fabray and piano prodigy and famed wit Oscar Levant on camera, it stumbles and struggles to come together before choreographer Michael Kidd’s dance and the stars who dance it blow us away for a big finish.
Perhaps “Joker” director Todd Phillips took inspiration as he struggled to find a tone, shape and form for his Great American Songbook jukebox musical riff on the darkest comic book franchise of them all. Maybe he sees in “Band Wagon” the quintessence of how musicals work and worm their way into memory and only truly come into their own years later via staying power.
It’s not the “story” or filler numbers that we remember from this 1953 classic. It’s the show-stoppers, the famed “Triplets” song and stunt featuring Astaire, Fabray and scene-and-picture-stealing Jack Buchanan dressed and photographed as tiny toddlers, the noirish, sexy-as-all-get-out big dance “Girl Hunt” finale, the “signature tune” that one and all put over that matters.
“Band Wagon’s” “That’s Entertainment!” was used as the title to an epic 1974 film-clips documentary about MGM’s long history of musicals, which I remember being broken into two parts for airing on TV back then. That doc was nothing but “the most memorable” moments from musicals, which is how many of them endure, “the great parts,” and which may be how “Joker 2” finds an afterlife.
“Band Wagon” already endures, one of the most highly-regarded late period MGM musicals. But there’s a case to be made for how corny and clunky the story is, how strained the laughs, how inane more than one of the song and dance numbers seems 70-plus years later.
Whatever its “memorable moments,” it’s no “Singin’ in the Rain” or “An American in Paris.”
The story concerns fading Hollywood song-and-dance man Tony Hunter (Astaire), a dapper dude still wearing straw boaters in a decade where even fedoras were becoming passe. He’s traveling to New York on the down low, hoping to give his career a lift by doing a musical play instead of waiting for another movie, which may never come.
“He was good 12, 15 years ago” a couple of gents on the train allow, and Tony — overhearing — agrees.
“That Tony Hunter’s a has-been.”
“I’ll go my way by myself,” he sings, on the station platform, a faded star seeing all the reporters waiting for Ava Gardner (playing herself).
But old friends the Martons, Lester and Lily (Levant and Fabray) have a new show for him, a musical about a respected illustrator who moonlights writing and illustrating lurid crime novels. It’ll be a hoot, they assure Tony.
The director they have in mind is a Broadway tyro, starring in “Oedipus Rex” and directing two other shows at the same time. We and they meet Jeffrey Cordova as he takes his many bows at the end of “Oedipus,” correcting co-stars and stage-hands in between curtain calls, and he bowls over “has-been” Tony. Almost.
Tony’s got to change with the times, and Cordova (Buchanan) is just the man to make him do it. The show? He hasn’t read the script. And hearing it summarized, he fixates on the “sells his soul” aspect of a respected artist making pulp.
“It’s ‘FAUST!'”
“Let’s get this straight, I am not Nijinsky,” Tony protests. “I am not Marlon Brando. I am Mrs. Hunter’s little boy, Tony, song and dance man.”
But his protests are to no avail, as Cordova charges the Martons to rewrite the show into genre-bending “art.”
We will follow this production through rushed rewrites, casting call and rehearsal montages, a disastrous tech rehearsal, busted full dress rehearsal, opening night “out of town,” and afterward.
We only get a blast of the new “musical revue” (songs from previous shows, often reimagined) that comes from all this “Faust” fiddling and abandoning in the film’s killer third act. That all by itself ensured “The Band Wagon” merited preservation by the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry.
For me, catching up with this film after many years, the struggles to find laughs and novelty and charm in the early acts reminded me of why I rarely stopped on this film when channel surfing, and had little burning desire to sit through it again in the Golden Age of Streaming.
But soundstage-bound or exterior “establishing” shots, it’s Technicolor gorgeous, even as Astaire is prancing through a pre-Civil Rights Era “A Shine on My Shoes,” a song and (studied but still limited) dance that wouldn’t amount to anything but filler, even without the cringy Black shoeshiner (Leroy Daniels) as “audience” to Tony’s dance around his shoeshine station.
The funniest player in the movie and a “discovery” for most American film buffs is the Great Scot Jack Buchanan, turning this Broadway “type” — fey and full of ideas, some of them brilliant — into flesh and blood fun. Cordova is brilliant and convinced of his brilliance, an incisive multi-tasker who gets to the core of why something works or doesn’t work in a flash.
He’s also a blowhard, always hectoring his manager (Robert Gist) to “write down” his witticisms and insights for his next college lecture or, you know, posterity. The manager notes how he’s already used his best lines in earlier lectures, especially this one.
“In my mind, there is no difference between the magic rhythms of Bill Shakespeare’s immortal verse and the magic rhythms of Bill Robinson’s immortal feet.”
Buchanan is funny in every scene, every song and every dance and he simply steals the movie from the top billed MGM royalty leading man. Astaire only really “gets it back” in the finale.
Buchanan is the lead singer and character in “That’s Entertainment!”, the ultimate musical argument for blurring the lines between highbrow and lowbrow entertainment. Because aside from his “Faust” “Eureka” moment, Cordova’s other great gimmick is to cast a ballet star, Gabrielle Gerard (Charisse), as Tony’s co-star.
Minnelli makes the most of this comic whirlwind by having the principals see and overhear, in snippets, Cordova’s wild, extravagant pitch for the musical-to-be to investors. Every time the door opens to the drawing room where he’s extemporizing, Cordova is more and more over the top.
Buchanan makes Cordova’s manipulation of Gerard’s manager/choreographer/lover (James Mitchell) an obvious but still hilarious laugh. And Charisse, a “giantess” dancer with legitimate ballet chops, makes a formidable dance partner and rebuffing, insulting romantic foil for the 23-years-older Astraire/Tony.
She makes their “age difference” cracks sting.
“I’d audition my own grandmother” before dancing on stage with her, he insists.
“Then why don’t you audition mine? She’d be just about right for you!”
Who could resist?
Alas, when “The Band Wagon” opened, audiences resisted it. The film, opening as the Korean War wound down and music and cinema were drifting away from Tin Pan Alley and Broadway and MGM, underwhelmed.
But over the decades, Minnelli’s picture has grown in stature. Once you get past the stodgy, over-familiar and laugh-starved opening scenes, it’s easy to understand why. Once you see the great set pieces, you remember how many musicals, including “LaLaLand,” and Michael Jackson music videos were influenced by or simply borrowed from this film’s most visually brilliant touches.
That’s almost certainly why Todd Phillips shoved this not-wholly-forgotten gem into his challenging, difficult and at times flailing and grim “Joker” sequel. Critics and audiences aren’t rallying to it, but the pushback from contrary voices is already evident on social media.
Perhaps someday, “Joker: Folie à Deux” will earn the sort of post box office mortem respect that “The Band Wagon” eventually did (it collected three Oscar nominations and didn’t win any). Perhaps “That’s Entertainment!” will no longer be the ironic punchline to the violent and “experimental” comic book movie musical.
For “The Band Wagon,” that title and that song became the movie’s reputation and brand, perhaps for all time. Whatever else this show-about-a-show is, “That’s Entertainment!”
Rating: G
Cast: Fred Astaire, Nanette Fabray, Cyd Charisse, Jack Buchanan, James Mitchell and Oscar Levant
Credits: Directed by Vincent Minnelli, scripted by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, songs by Arthur Schwartz and Fred Dietz . An MGM release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.
Running time: 1:52
An Australian animated remembrance of a weird, snail-obsessed childhood.
Kodi Smit-McPhee, Jackie Weaver, Sarah Snook, Eric Bana and Nick Cave are among those providing voices to the latest film from the director of “Mary and Max.”
This IFC (limited) release makes it into theaters Oct. 25.
A British “bio pic” musical about Robbie Williams, or a fever dream musical spinning off Williams’ sense of self by the director of “The Greatest Showman,” this holiday release has one of the more arresting trailers parked in theaters at the moment.
Not sure how big of a deal Williams is or ever was on this side of the pond, but this looks “mental,” as the Limeys say. And maybe fun.
But who is handcuffing whom?
Sophie Thatcher and Rupert Friend star in “Companion,” whose teaser trailer gives off very strong “Strange Darling” vibes.
We all saw “Barbarian,” and most of us thoroughly enjoyed it. So this holds promise.
Jan. 10 may be the release date. Then again, maybe they’ll hold it. Because “Strange Darling” just came out last summer.
Few movies about getting sober are as brilliant at conveying the allure of drowning, wallowing in alcohol, the emotional and physical liberation it seems to offer, as “The Outrun.” And rare is the story told within this most personal of experiences that exults in its trials, the gut check of “one day at a time” and the exultant release from the trap of addiction.
Saoirse Ronan is mesmerizing in this film, based on journalist Amy Liprot’s memoir (she co-wrote the script), which in director Nora Fingscheidt’s hands becomes an Orkney Islands travelogue, a healing-through-isolation-in-nature drama and a tour de force for Ronan, a great actress who gives herself over to this part to a degree we’ve never seen before.
A film that immerses us in the out-of-control, drink-your-blues-at-bay blur of addiction, filmed in the staggering, extreme closeups of a series of Hackney, London benders, “Outrun” contrasts that with being alone in a harsh environment, cornered into a confrontation with who you are, shocked by the ice-cold North Sea, the bracing, omnipresent wind and wildlife that take you out of yourself, your problems and your head.
It’s a tone poem of recovery, a windswept ballet of “choosing life,” and one of the best pictures of the year.
The story’s simplicity is framed within that one simple question addicts on the mend ask one another.
“How long you been sober?”
The movie tracks the answer to that from “0” days through “63 days,” “the steepest bit,” and beyond via that question and onscreen graphics. Through flashbacks, we see what 29 year-old Rona’s illness and the accompanying impulse control has cost her — dignity, a love affair, focus and physical and psychological injuries.
Ronan narrates the story of Rona through poetic observations about the differences in the islands, local lore and myth, and of her life there. She grew up on a 150 acre farm, helping her parents with the sheep. They’ve split up now, with Mom (Saskia Reeves) retreating into religion and dad (Stephen Dillane) reduced to living in a battered trailer.
Her father, we learn, has medically untreated manic episodes which alcohol abuse exacerbates. It’s through understanding her own issues that Rona will come to see her father in the cold light of knowing.
We meet Rona after grad school, an unemployed biologist who needs further schooling to actually do anything with this direction she’s taken. Moving back and forth through her life, we see the constant close-down-the-clubs/pubs habit, the ugly drunk she becomes at the end of the night, emptying every abandoned glass and bottle in the place as the staff tries to get this staggering last “regular” out the door.
She is a violent drunk. But somehow, she found love, and the film shows us — for the umpteenth time — how an alcoholic hides her bottles, if not her drunken behavior, from an increasingly despairing partner, here named Daynin (Paapa Essiedu).
Mom’s prayers for her smart trainwreck of a daughter include a suggestion. A wildlife conservation group needs monitors on the islands to count the shrinking local population of Corn crakes, which she can only find by listening for them. And she might be good at talking to her fellow farm folk about improved practices that will aid the wildlife population.
We see Rona get the job, witness how she fits into her place on “Mainland” island, and how that’s uprooted as she travels by ferry and puddle-jumper airplane to one of the Papa islands for this new work.
“I have a life to get back to in London” fades as the days sober add up, Rona joins meetings large and on the smallest island, tiny — just four older, burly men and her.
Her headphones blast the techo beat of her club cruising/dancing past, but the music of the howling wind drags her to awareness.
“I study my personal geology,” is how the budding scientist puts it. She swims with the seals. And she faces up to her lowest of the low moments, and what it cost her.
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