Movie Review: Joaquin commits heart and soul, but “Joker: Folie à Deux” flails

Posted on October 4, 2024 by Roger Moore

“Joker: Folie à Deux” is a Great American Songbook jukebox musical grafted onto the Grand Guignol of Todd Phillips and Joaquin Phoenix‘s vision of the comic book character.

It doesn’t work, doesn’t play and doesn’t coalesce into the Big Message movie one and all hoped they’d get out of it.

But with Phoenix dueting with Lady Gaga, who joins him as Harley Quinn, and even throwing in a fair approximation of tap dancing into the mix, the film manages to be a fascinating failure.

There’s ambition along with giggles-inducing pretension and grimacing violence. And Phoenix commits to the part and the picture down to his last corpuscle.

Aspiring comic turned mass murderer Arthur Fleck, aka “The Joker,” is in Arkham Hospital for the Criminally Insane, where he’s tolerated, taunted and abused by the guards, especially his handler, Jackie Sullivan (Brendan Gleeson).

“You got a joke for me today?”

If Arthur does, that gets him a cigarette.

Two years have passed since unfunny Arthur’s spree killing, which climaxed with the clown-faced comic murdering a talk show host live on national TV.

One fateful decision made for this film was in not giving us any flashbacks to refresh our memories about what put Arthur in prison. Not one scene from 2019’s “Joker” is served up. DeNiro played smarmy, bullying TV talker Murray Franklin, in case you forgot.

Fleck has been the subject of a TV movie and mass cosplaying fandom. People can’t get enough of this bad comic/unhinged killer. But is he sane enough to stand trial? His attorney (Catherine Keener) tries to get him on board with “just be yourself” and medical science will come to the right conclusion.

A TV interview (Steve Coogan plays the unsympathetic interrogator) might help his cause.

But Arthur has stumbled into his soulmate. Lee Quinzel is in the “singing” wing of the 1930s vintage hospital, where patients sing everything from bluegrass spirituals (“Will the Circle Be Unbroken?”) to standards made famous by Judy Garland (“Get Happy”). Lee (Lady Gaga) stands out in the chorus. And Lee is Arthur’s biggest fan.

They share a smoke, then a song and then a romance as she conspires to bust them out. Maybe on “movie night.” Sure, they’d miss the end of the Astaire/Cyd Charisse/Nanette Fabray and Oscar Levant musical “The Band Wagon.” But where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

“Escape” is not what we’re set up for here. This movie is about the trial, the cultish mania of celebrity and the soul-crushing effect it has on the weak-minded, from John Hinkley Jr. to Kardashian idolizers to prison pen pal brides and MAGAs.

The screenplay and Gaga’s performance do the best job yet of connecting Lee’s conversion to the villainess Harley Quinn as an obsession that becomes a breakdown for a woman who becomes Arthur’s mirror image.

Craving fame and connection to it does them both in.

As “monster/martyr” Arthur sits through a stunningly-dull and straightforward trial, he imagines sharing a “Sonny & Cher” styled variety show with Lee — duets, dances, and loving/insulting jokes.

But while the “Batman” universe movies have always been better at finding topicality in their stock characters and pulp storylines, “Folie à Deux” never comes close to achieving the core aim of all these “dark” comic book adaptations — depth.

Musical flourishes — “When the Saints Go Marching In” is sung, referenced by a hospital exercise yard trumpeter, Gaga solos The Carpenters’ “Close to You,” and the rights of everything from “For Once in My Life” and “What the World Needs Now” to “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” to “That’s Entertainment” were purchased and repurposed.

But to what purpose?

Humorless, shallow and grim will get you only so far. And usually, you don’t have to take tap dancing lessons to pull that off.

When the message is this muddled, all that’s left is to beg the question — “That’s Entertainment?”

Rating: R, violence, sex, smoking, profanity.

Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Lady Gaga, Brendan Gleeson, Zazi Beetz, Steve Coogan and Catherine Keener

Credits: Directed by Todd Phillips, scripted by Scott Silver and Todd Philips, based comic book characters created by Bob Kane, Bill Finger, Jerry Robinson, Pual Dini and Bruce Timm. A Warner Bros. release.

Running time: 2:12

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Movie Review: Mel Gibson and Kids face the horrors of “Monster Summer”

Posted on October 4, 2024 by Roger Moore

“Canceled” Oscar winner Mel Gibson takes a break from the violent, vengeful B-movies that have kept him busy for a decade for “Monster Summer,” a witchy kiddie horror picture directed by a child actor who grew up on “The Wizards of Waverly Place.”

Good production values and a solid supporting cast don’t hide the fact that it’s a tepid thriller that barely works up a decent fright or two. Derivative, nostalgic and old fashioned, director David Henrie’s horror-with-training-wheels tale is is perfectly watchable before a cringy blast of violence is added to spice up its weary formula.

A 1997 period piece set on Martha’s Vineyard but filmed in budget-friendly Southport, N..C, it’s about strange goings-on that point to childrden’s souls being snatched by something that rides around on a broom — or a 1980s Lincoln station wagon.

Aspiring journalist Noah (Mason Thames) is trying to “get off this island” and get printed in the local paper (Kevin James plays its drawling editor) and figures he has a world-famous scoop on his hands, if he can badger besties Sammy (Abby James Witherspoon) and Eugene (Julian Lerner) into backing him up in his search for “the truth.”

As their bestie baseball star pal Ben (Noah Cotrell) is among the first victims, you’d think they have incentive enoug.

Might this mysterious, Latin-chanting woman in black (Lorraine Bracco) staying at Noah’s mom’s Orca Inn be behind these “encounters” that leave kids haunted and almost catatonic? Or could the creepy old loner whose “family disappeared” years before be the perp?

Gibson plays Old Man Carruthers, who turns out to be an ex-cop who might dismiss Noah with “There’s no such thing as witches” and joke that “Why don’t you give that Fox Mulder a call?” But he asks some questions and develops some suspicions.

Meanwhile, kids are being attacked in the woods, in the water, and are never the same after these encounters.

Henrie and his screenwriters reach for Stephen King for Kids here, with hints of “It!” grafted onto elements of such earlier films as “Mean Green,” “Sandlot” or Gibson’s own “The Man Without a Face.” Sequences and plot threads almost work, but they barely fit together.

They try to summon up laughs — “Don’t accept poison apples from little old ladies with warts on their noses!” — and fail.

This is no “Wizards of Waverly Place.” The suspense is never much more than middling, with a couple of jolts that pay off. And the big finish has the violent stamp of “Lethal Weapon Lite” and feels out of tone with the bland but inoffensive time killer that “Monster Summer” has been up until then.

Rating: PG-13, violence, profanity

Cast: Mason Thames, Mel Gibson, Julian Lerner, Lorraine Bracco, Abby James Witherspoon, Noah Cotrell, Patrick Renna and Kevin James.

Credits: Directed by David Henrie, scripted by Bryan Schulz and Cornelius Uliano. A Pastime Pictures release.

Running time: 1:37

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Movie Preview: A “Dark Vibe” home ownership comedy with Kudrow, Romano, Cardellini, Parris and Poppy  and Leary — “No Good Deed”

Posted on October 3, 2024 by Roger Moore

We are…intrigued. Couples vying for the same house with differing agendas but the same “need.”

Netflix has this series, premiering Dec. 12.

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Netflixable? Hapless Swede gets in “Trouble” with Criminals, Convicts and Cops in this Comic Thriller

Posted on October 3, 2024 by Roger Moore

A good comic thriller knows how to frustrate the viewer in all the best ways — creating suspense through a collection of close shaves, near misses and moments when the heroine or hero “almost” gets away.

A bad comic thriller frustrates in ways that call attention to contrivances, melodramatic touches and lapses in logic.

Jon Holmberg’s Swedish caper-comedy/prison escape dramedy and “Fugitive” spoof “Trouble” is more amusingly frustrating than stupidly frustrating.

Good frustration, our hapless hero Conny (Filip Berg of “A Man Called Ove”) is a big box electronics store salesman and single dad who winds up in prison for a murder he didn’t commit. He was installing a customer’s TV, jamming to Blue Swede’s one hit on headphones, when the homeowner was stabbed right behind him. Yeah, he’s dumb enough to pick up the bloody screwdriver after the killing.

Bad frustration? Conny is arrested, given an inept lawyer (Måns Nathanaelson) and railroaded into prison facing 18 years, all before the widow (Sissela Benn) has a chance to bury her husband. Conny escapes from prison just as they come home from the funeral?

Man, Swedish justice is blind and swift.

Holmberg’s jaunty tale throws obstacle after obstacle in Conny’s way, unhappy accidents (stabbed in the hand as a bystander in a prison fight) and head-slapping coincidences.

All this happens because he’s trying to pick up extra shifts at work so that his little girl — who lives with her remarried mother — can have a horse.

Time and again this script, which takes in coke deals, SWAT raids, life in a Swedish prison, a misplaced phone with video evidence on it and a system hellbent on ensuring his case is “closed,” gives us glimpses of a way out only to have dopey Conny miss the obvious because the screenwriters are determined to get their 100 minutes in.

Conny was trapped in a low-paying dead-end job, driving a VERY old Honda Civic, and running flight training simulations on his home gaming system. Because he wants to raise his income and better his life? Or because his ex (Shirin Golchin) married a pilot?

When he gets caught-up in a murder case, the one cop to believe him, Diana (Amy Deasismont) is green and dismissed by her no-nonsense boss (Eva Melander) because Diana bases her “hunch” on her contact, that same evening, with Conny as a headphones-buying customer at his store.

Rushed into prison, his only advice from the other convicts is “go for the throat.” That doesn’t keep him from getting caught in a brawl.

Fortunately, the gang boss inside (Dejan Cukic) has plotted a prison break, and Conny stumbles across the tunnel. Unfortunately, gang enforcer Musse (Joakim Sällquist) saw him stumble across that tunnel. No, climbing into a washing machine in the prison laundry isn’t the best way to hide.

“Did you think this through (in Swedish, or dubbed into English)?”

“No.”

But a photo in Conny’s cell has them thinking he’s a pilot. Next thing he knows, he’s in on the escape as their getaway pilot/driver, trying to get to “new evidence” (that missing phone) even as he’s at the service of ruthless convicted bank robbers.

There are plot twists that even Conny recognizes. But when you’re on morphine because you’ve just been shot, you can’t quite summon up the memory amd reference the right “Harrison Ford film.”

“Indiana Jones?”

The obstacles that pile up — Evidence destroyed? Or is it? — do battle with the frustrations at Conny’s ineptitude as the picture works itself and the viewer into an amusing tizzy.

This one had me yelling at the screen more than once.

“Dude, most of the bad guys are chatting on a hotel penthouse balcony. Lock the DOOR behind them and call the cops!”

But director Holmberg, his co-writer and his leading man (Berg has an Aaron Eckhart look and John Krasinski vibe) do a splendid job of making us root for this guy and slap our heads at his head-slapping haplessness.

We do all this as we try to figure out not where this is going — that’s pre-ordained — but what logical and illogical twists they contrive to toss at us before the hero, the movie and the viewer arrive at our final, funny destination.

Rating: TV-MA, violence

Cast: Filip Berg, Amy Deasismont, Måns Nathanaelson,
Joakim Sällquist and Eva Melander

Credits: Directed by Jon Holmberg, scripted by Jon Holmberg and Tapio Leopold. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:38

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Movie Review: Post Partum Truths, Tears and Laughter through the Tears — “Another Happy Day”

Posted on October 2, 2024 by Roger Moore

In “Another Happy Day,” Lauren Lapkus plays a new mother who knows she’s no good at mothering, a frustrated, sleep-deprived young woman feeling lost and alone until she meets that not-quite-relative who says what she most needs to hear.

“I hope you’re not going to be talking about your baby because I am truly not interested.“

Writer-director Nora Fiffer’s debut feature shows us the tears and hopes that we understand them. And she finds humor amid the insights about this particular version of post partum depression.

Joanna (Lupkus) tracks via her phone timer how little baby Alma is sleeping and weeps at the little sleep she herself is. She’s learning to let the phrase “You have poop on you” roll off her back and can’t process that her newborn still isn’t looking at her.

This is “the loneliest I’ve ever been.”

Partner Lucien (Jean Elie) works. Her mom won’t come “help” despite her fervent pleas/ And her peers either don’t have kids and just don’t get it, or expose her to the insipid mewling that is every baby shower she’s invited to.

Visiting her old graphic design workplace just triggers her mood swings, as she leaps from relieved to finally be talking with other adults outside of her apartment, to craving getting back to work to paranoid to permanently unemployed there thanks to finally crossing a line with a boss (Carrie Coon of “His Three Daughters”) who at least starts the conversation with sympathy because she’s “been there.”

But Mom remembers this one relative. Well, she USED to be a relative. Miriam also lives in Chicago. She used to be married to your Uncle Leonard, but that was years ago. You won’t remember. Go see her!

Miriam is quite old, but still a working actress, she insists. She has a big, rambling apartment and little to no interest in “family,” “babies” or even Joanna.

“But you can come here,” they eventually decide. Just yank out an unused dog bed — “It’s for babies!” — and sit together, keep the “chit chat” to a minimum and maybe run lines with the self-absorbed older woman.

Fiffer uses this dynamic — of course Miriam has her own secrets and “issues” — to guide Joanna to insights about her own adulthood and her child, whom she jokingly refers to as “this parasite.”

“She doesn’t love. She just needs.”

Lapkus does a mercurial turn here, serving up a young mom who is manic and panicked, exhausted and depressed, and who still remembers what it feels like to be funny and even witty “in my real life.”

Every generation experiences this trial of child-bearing anew, but Fiffer and Lapkus (“Orange is the New Black,” “Crashing” and “The Big Bang Theory”) show us the phone-search-what-that-white-spot-on-my-nipple-is parents, lost and struggling with the art of “adulting.” Joanna is still prattling on about her ambitions and her “dream” when Lucien, cradling their child, is here to remind her that “This IS the dream,” at least to some people, those who don’t prefer dogs or cats and travel and a career.

None of it could be called “deep.” But there are grins and laughs of recognition in all these sweet, unassuming “It’s your turn to think you’re reinventing parenthood” insights.

And yes, hospitals still give out lots of helpful pamphlets and website addresses, all of which have but one message to every new mom and dad.

“Don’t shake the baby!”

Rating: unrated, profanity, scatological humor

Cast: Lauren Lapkus, Jean Elie, Marilyn Dodds Franks, Tim Kazurinsky and Carrie Coon.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Nora Fiffer. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:30

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Movie Review: Edie Falco’s a Helicopter Mom to her adult kids in “I’ll Be Right There”

Posted on October 2, 2024 by Roger Moore

Edie Falco has her best role since “Nurse Jackie” in “I’ll Be Right There,” a dramedy about an over-extended mom still dropping everything for everybody’s else’s needs well past the point she should.

Screenwriter Jim Beggarly (“Free Samples,” “A Country Called Home”) must have tailor-made this part for Falco, one that honors her screen baggage as the mistress of unconventional mothers.

Wanda is another Nurse Jackie, a juggler everybody feels the need to lean on, but who barely has the energy and personal space to keep herself upright. All her amusing-but-needy mother (Jeannie Berlin), “addiction issues” son (Charlie Tahan) or very pregnant daughter (Kayli Carter) have to do is pick up the phone and “I’ll Be Right There.”

She’s a helicopter parent in a ’90s Buick station wagon, bopping through daily freelance-bookkeeping jobs but only after taking her mother to the doctor for a Big Diagnosis, sitting in with her drug-addict son as his therapist cans him for lying and trying to help her daughter get this rush wedding planned, performed and paid for, pretty much on her own.

She’s got an ex-husband (Bradley Whitford) with new kids, a ’60s Pontiac convertible he won’t part with and no great desire to help pay for Sarah’s nuptials, and a pub owner/bookkeeping customer beau (Michael Rapaport) who adores her but whom she’s cheating on with a college professor.

That teacher, BTW, is a vivacious younger woman (Sepideh Moafi of “The L Word: Generation Q”), who’s always dropping by for a quickie.

“I have everything under control,” she insists in her most brittle Nurse Jackie voice. But long before she says “What about what I want?” we’re wondering that very thing.

The kids? “They’re at a very vulnerable time in their lives,” now. And is all that hovering helping? “Your son’s a (lying) crackhead and your daughter’s an unwed mother.”

Her mother’s got her “poker gals” and a gambling problem. And that Big Diagnosis has to be “the Big Casino.”

“I’ve had a good run, haven’t I,” Mom jokes.

The beau? He wants to help pay for her daughter’s wedding. And the side piece? She never invites Wanda to HER place, never introduces her to her friends and colleagues.

Something’s got to give, so it does.

The bland predictability of this barely-amusing-enough rural New York (Pearl River) tale takes a back seat to some winning performances, with Falco setting the tone as another overbooked stoic mother, lover, counselor and secrets-keeper.

And she’s the reason this cast, with some roles little more than cameos, showed up for work.

Director Brendan Walsh — he directed eight episodes of “Nurse Jackie” — knows the drill as Boss Falco puts another put-upon mom through her paces, one “crisis” at a time, one more ball juggled into the air, one more cell call that she answers with “I’ll Be Right There.”

Rating: unrated, adult subject matter, profanity

Cast: Edie Falco, Jeannie Berlin, Charlie Tahan, Kayli Carter, Bradley Whitford, Sepideh Moafi, Michael Rapaport and Michael Beach

Credits: Directed by Brendan Walsh, scripted by Jim Beggarly. A Brainstorm Media release.

Running time: 1:38

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Movie Preview: Nicole Kidman’s a CEO who likes a younger man to call her “Babygirl”

Posted on October 1, 2024 by Roger Moore

A sexy thriller of the “I tell you what to do and you do it” persuasion. An older woman fighting back time with botox, etc., a younger man who gets her attention and then REALLY gets in her head, etc.

Harris Dickinson plays the dangerous tempation represented by a barely legal — generations apart — younger man.

And Nicole’s CEO is cheating Antonio Banderas.

This Christmas, A24 invites you to get your kink on with this thriller from actress turned writer-director (“Bodies Bodies Bodies”) Halina Reijn.

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Movie Preview: Lou Diamond Philips in Bad Guy Beard and  Drawl — “Get Fast”

Posted on October 1, 2024 by Roger Moore

James C. Clayton also stars in this B Movie action pic about robbing from the wrong guys.

The shoe and the movie drop Nov. 15.

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Netflixable? Navajo hoops team Overcomes Obstacles on and off the Court — “Rez Ball”

Posted on October 1, 2024 by Roger Moore

“Rez Ball” is a feel-good sports dramedy tailor-made for teens and tweens.

It may be groaningly predictable in its adherence to formula, as most any adult sports film/basketball drama viewer knows what’s coming and when, and can even be bark out lines of dialogue before characters state the too-obvious. The ending is anti-climactic, and an excuse to pad on anti-climaxes after the anti-climax.

But this Sydney Freeland (“Drunktown’s Finest”) feature, based on a Michael Powell novel, is a sports drama that at least touches on some of the most widely known problems of Indian reservations — grinding poverty, pervasive alcoholism and a suicide-rate outstripping the rest of the population.

Its likeable, relateable characters may be sketched-in and never really understood at their own level. But decent performances parked in a striking setting — a Navajo Reservation in rural New Mexico — make it a genial, entertaining Native American run through the “Hoosiers,” “Coach Carter” and “Glory Road” playbook.

Two Chuska High School pals have big plans for their senior season on the Warriors basketball team. Nataanii (Kusem Goodwin) is the bigger star, but high-scoring Jimmy (Kauchani Bratt) isn’t exactly in his shadow.

They go together “like diabetes and frybread,” and are so good they can showboat through the ending of their season opener, irking their ex-WNBA star coach (Jessica Matten).

But the uncomfortable post-game interviews, radio coverage and a simple roadside memorial hint at what weighs on Nataanii’s mind. He lost his mother and sister in an off-season drunk driving accident. Jimmy’s back-home issues begin and end with his unemployed alcoholic mother (Julia Jones), who expects him to be a bread-winner as well as a possible college basketball recruit.

Their teammates may be a happy-go-lucky collection of “types” — one’s named Warlance, Bryson already has a “baby mama” — barely more than sketched-in as characters. But there’s enough in this lineup to challenge for a state title.

Then the worst happens, and Nataanii won’t be there for them to lean on. As the team struggles on the court (“grief” is a bit shortchanged), tempers flare and there’s nothing for it but to go beyond their normal “Rez Ball” style — “Run fast, shoot fast, don’t ever stop.”

They’ll need “The Old Ways,” a sagebrush smudging from their “new” assistant coach, Benny (Ernest Tsosie III), who ran the girls’ team when Coach Heather was a player there. They might benefit from a little teamwork training on a tiny sheep ranch out on the rez.

And they’ll need screenwriting magic to survive a string of cliffhangers and an avalanche of second chances.

The movie gets the job done, but I have to say does it rather clumsily. A big deal is made out of that “Hoosiers” assistant coach addition, but little is done with the character. Alcoholism is addressed, with nothing said about the teen drinking that goes on.

The picture’s early scenes hint at some splashy play, and racist on-court trash talk from their bitter white Catholic school rivals in Sante Fe — “You look like the guy that mows my yard. You guys related?” The trash talk turns funny when the depleted and downhearted boys’ team gets schooled and taunted by their own girls’ team in a scrimmage.

“Ever heard of DEODORANT?”

But the energy flags as the movie devotes most of its screen time to games. The novelties of this milieu — hearing “The Star Spangled Banner” in Navajo, players who don’t know their native language learning it so that they can “code talk” plays on the court — aren’t enough to overcome the script’s many trite shortcomings.

Yes, there are (occasionally) funny play-by-play/color announcers (Dallas Goldtooth and Cody Lightning) who cover the games and joke about “cultural appropriation” and “frybread.”

The cast is uneven, but game, with young Bratt (nephew of Benjamin Bratt) standing out, and Jones and Goodwind and Devin Sampson-Craig, as the hotheaded baby daddy point guard, make impressions.

But aside from a couple of genuinely touching moments, “Rez Ball” is dramatically flat. Heartache and heartbreak are suggested but never plumbed or embraced.

The whole ends up being is somewhat less than the sum of its players, characters and the unusual setting, a “Hoosiers” that fails to find the necessary heart to come off.

Rating: PG-13, suicide, fisticuffs, alcoholism, teen drinking, profanity

Cast: Kauchani Bratt, Jessica Matten, Devin Sampson-Craig, Julia Jones, Ernest Tsosie III and Kusem Goodwind.

Credits: Directed by Sydney Freeland, scripted by Sydney Freeland and Sterlin Harjo, based on a novel by Michael Powell. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:51

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Movie Preview: Clint Eastwood directs Kiefer, Collette, Zoey and J.K., with Nicholas Hoult as “Juror #2”

Posted on October 1, 2024 by Roger Moore

Hoult’s on the jury of a trial of a drunk driving case he knows is bogus.

Nov. 1.

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