Listen to the sound effects — all the bones and cartilege cracking and crunching and what not.
Jean-Claude Van Damme is entirely too old for this s—. Perhaps there’s money in pairing him up with Liam Neeson at some point in the near future.
Shannon Doherty, Emerson Min, STicky Fingaz and Kristanna Loken also star in this May 21 release.
The preview to this June 7 release is enough to make one ponder just what ends a career, or signals the beginning of the end.
Martin Lawrence was old news 20 years ago, infamous on my side of the industry (entertainment journalism) for being one of the bigger wastes of time — rude, self-destructive, an arrogant SOB of limited talent who was the last to get the memo.
Will Smith was always a nice, compliant, press-and-public friendly persona who put the effort into being liked. Until his little performative tirade at the Oscars. As indulged as he was during his many years “owning” summer, and his years chasing an Oscar that always seemed to be just beyond his talents and reach, you had to wonder if the public and the good press would come back.
Kevin Costner’s post “Dances with Wolves” divorce chased off fans. Russell Crowe throwing a phone (isn’t that quaint) caused him to jump the shark long before he let himself go to seed.
Add the public’s fickle attitudes towards stars to the fact that “Bad Boys” seems so…late 80s/90s — and we should be looking at a blockbuster that busts.
And yet this is almost sure to be a smash of the summer. Go figure.
One shouldn’t read too much into the turnout of a late matinee “preview” showing of a potential weekend blockbuster.
But if a movie is showing to roughly three times as many folks as I normally see at a Thursday afternoon “opening” showing in rural Va. (missed the Orlando preview — traveling), that tells me something.
Deadline.com is projecting, based on $10 million in Thursday previews — roughly three times the “solid” opening “norm” for a Thursday — folding into a whopping $31 million Friday, that “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire,” will manage at least $75 million when the last dime is counted by midnight Easter Monday.
It’s a “cheerfully stupid” and stunning dull affair, and I wasn’t the only one saying so. But kids of all ages love their kaiju. Godzilla sleeping in the Roman Colosseum? That’s adorbs.
The Warner Brothers/Legendary release, another “monsterverse” uniting of the great Hollywood-made monster King Kong and Japan’s lizard king Godzilla, isn’t setting any all time records. But considering how much theaters need customers to tide them over until a post-strike summer season settles in, it’s a godsend.
“Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire,” is quickly displaced from the top spot, falling off a box office cliff (65-70%) on its second weekend — $14-16 million. Easter Sat., Sunday and Monday could give it a boost, unless word is out how lifeless the damned thing is. At least Bill Murray and Annie Potts’ checks cleared, right?
But whatever. One “Empire” replaced by the next “Empire,” and all that. It’ll be in the low $70s, all-in, by midnight Monday, with a solid chance of grinding its way over $100 million.
“Kung Fu Panda 4” should pull in another $10 million+, pushing it over the $150 million mark domestically by Easter night.
That $10-11 million may let it remain ahead of “Dune Part 2,” which should clear $10-11 and thus have tallied over $250 million by the same end of Easter finish line. That’s the blockbuster of the year, so far, but that race for third is by no means decided as of Sat. afternoon, the big day for family movie going with the kids.
Sydney Sweeney as an “Immaculate” nun is still underwhelming, but may make it into the black for Neon, which didn’t spend all that on the “It” girl’s latest. It is “holding” respectably from its middling opening weekend take — another $3 million, maybe less. With a new “Omen” movie slated for release next weekend, that’ll be all she wrote for this one.
As always, I’ll update these figures as more data comes in over the long holiday weekend.
The nonsense slides by like lava on a wintry day in “Godzilla v. Kong: The New Empire,” a cheerfully stupid “kaiju” movie that isn’t as interesting as the licensing agreements that put a Hollywood creature feature creation on screen with a Pokemon collection of Japanese ones.
Dan Stevens completes the journey from “Downton Abbey” heartthrob to digital King Kong dentist. BAFTA winner Rebecca Hall classes up the joint as “the Serious Scientist.” And Oscar, Emmy and Tony nominee Brian Tyree Henry makes his first on-screen appearance since “Causeway” (he does voice-over work in the “Spiderverse”) in a movie that’s all about the digital “Titans,” digital titan brawls and a “plot” that isn’t worthy of that label.
“I’m worried about Kong!”
And well you should all should be. The 300 foot fall digital beast is getting white-haired and battle-scarred, holed up in the “Hollow Earth.” There are new challengers among his own kind down below, a scarred ape leading a titanic ape tribe, that scarred ape’s murderously pesky cub lieutenant, and the frosty reptile beast below that they’ve tamed and turned to their Kong-toppling purposes.
Godzilla? He’s above ground, trashing cities — but only by accident, now — as he attacks and neutralizes (Kills? “Absorbs?”) other titans who have crossed-over from Hollow Earth to human dominated Mother Earth.
The big worry is that Kong will return to the surface through a portal — Skull Island or wherever — and that will enrage Godzilla and “Oh no, there goes Tokyo” “again. Or Rome (Godzilla sleeps in the even-more-ruined Colosseum). Or Rio. Or wherever the kaiju roam.
“You can’t be serious,” might be the funniest line among many uttered by the scientist turned single-mom (she adopted the deaf Hollow Earth tribal child Jia — Kaylee Hottle), the conspiracy buff podcaster (Henry) and the surfer dude/kaiju expert and dentist.
The film is the least Japanese “Godzilla” movie ever, which is fine, since an Oscar-winning incarnation of that creature came out at the end of last year. The lizard king is a supporting player in this Kong-centric big critter combat film.
There’s fan service (pandering) in the jokey tone, the parade of classic pop/rock hits decorating the score — “I Was Made for Loving You” (Kiss), “Twilight Zone” (Golden Earring), “Turn Me Loose” (Loverboy) and of course, the obligatory bit of Badfinger.
But is there a movie in all of this Godzilla, Kong and kaiju-on-parade business? Not much of one.
It’s a lighthearted spectacle, but so disconnected from reality, narrative and human emotions that there’s almost nothing to it.
The effects are decent but not Oscar worthy, the way they were in “Godzilla Minus One.” And the only thing we’re expected to care about is whether Kong can survive retirement, which has to be on his mind every time he looks into a lake and sees the wrinkles, scars and white whiskers that should tell him he’s getting too old for this s—.
Rating: PG-13, “creature violence”
Cast: Rebecca Hall, Dan Stevens, Brian Tyree Henry, Alex Ferns and Kaylee Hottle
Credits: Adam Wingard, scripted by Terry Rossio, Simon Barrett and Jeremy Slater. A Warner Bros. release.
Running time: 1:55
Cedric? Maria Bakalova? Christian Slater? Dan Levy? Bill Burr? Fred Armisen? James Marsden? HUGH GRANT?
Jerry Seinfeld directs this giggling star farce about the breakfast wars between Post, Kellog’s and um, “Quaker Oats,” which premieres on Netflix May 3.
The timing, the deadpan absurdism. VERY “Seinfeld.”
Vicky Krieps co-stars in this French-flavored Civil War-era vengeance Western.
Garrett Dillahunt and Danny Huston also star in this May 31 release. Looks gritty, and has lots of film fest hype juicing it.
Maverick filmmaker Nicholas Ray was well on his way to “Johnny Guitar,” “Rebel Without A Cause”and “Bigger than Life” when he followed up his big Bogart break “A Lonely Place” with “On Dangerous Ground,” an intense troubled cop thriller with jarring action and sentimentality mixed with sadism and masochism.
You can know film noir, be immersed in the genre, its tropes and familiar milieus, and this Robert Ryan/Ida Lupino classic will still hit you like a cold, wet slap. Beautifully composed, lit and shot by George E. Diskant (“Kansas City Confidential”), with nervous hand-held footage of chases on foot and by car, edited into three brisk and immersive acts, shot through with psycho-sexual flourishes, including Ryan at his most sadistic, it’s a black and white classic that feels so modern now it had to land with a bit of a shock in 1951.
Ryan plays ex-footballer turned hard-boiled big city cop Jim Wilson. Ray and screenwriter A.I. Bezzerides (“They Drive by Night”) did “ride alongs” with Boston P.D. and their “research” shows as the first act is one long flourish of police proceedures circa 1950 — shift briefing (led by “Captain” Ed Begley Sr.) to three-cops-in-a-car patrols, listening for tips, calls and leads on their police radio as they hunt for a couple of cop killers.
Nobody ever flashes a badge or even says “Police” as they “rough up” a man whose only crime is running in the vicinity of a robbery, make their rounds of bars and collect tips from news vendors and alcoholics.
More than one of these underworld “types” has a nervous, addict edge. And the cops? They act like everybody knows them and everybody knows they mean business as Wilson hassles a bartender for serving an underage girl, barges in on a woman (Cleo Moore) who knows somebody who knows somebody and generally throw their weight around with a kind of impunity that was supposed to have been legislated or legally ruled-out of police work in the decades since.
“Next time you hit a guy,” Wilson advises an older, sore-shouldered colleague (Charles Kemper), “don’t throw it all in one punch.”
Wilson’s so rough his partners (played by Anthony Ross and Kemper) start to question him in “job is gettin’ to you” ways.
When he corners an associate of a suspect, Wilson and his “Go on, HIT me” quarry (Richard Irving) step right up to the edge of sado-masochism in their little dance, and then cross it.
“Why do you make me do it? You know you’re gonna talk! I’m gonna make you talk! I always make you punks talk! Why do you do it? Why?”
That earns Wilson a warning that becomes a threat and evolves into a “go upstate” and pitch in on a manhunt re-assignment. A teen girl was abducted and killed. The aged sheriff (Ian Wolfe) could use the help. The furiously mistrusting father of the victim (Ward Bond at his most belligerent) is hellbent on shooting the guy when they catch him.
Wilson sees his own cop-judge-jury-executioner shortcomings in this raging father, as they are thrown together in a mad, wintry pursuit that leaves the rest of the posse behind.
That’s when they meet the blind woman (Lupino, in a subtle and vulnerable turn) who might take them in, and may be harboring the fugitive on her remote, snow-covered farm.
Ray artfully blends long takes with close-ups, fluid tracking shots with jumpy, hand-held chase sequences. Scene after scene is composed in depth, with simple actions, character traits and plot points packed into foreground and background action, with action always taking precedence over dialogue.
But the dialogue, when the picture leans on that, just sizzles.
“I like to stink myself up,” Cleo Moore’s “known associate” of a hoodlum purrs, after Wilson and his partners barge in on her and notice her vast perfume collection. She picks out a favorite. “‘Noo-it duh Joy.’ (Nuit de joie) It means ‘Night of Joy.'”
The acting pops, with hardened colleagues lecturing Wilson out of concern, and the boss, gorging himself at lunch, crossing over into stark warnings about lawsuits and a firing that could follow if this teetering-on-psychotic loner doesn’t “settle down,” in more ways than one.
Ryan handles the transition from hardboiled “Nobody likes a cop” o compassion inspired by a sympathetic and pretty woman as well as any actor of his day could have.
“On Dangerous Ground” never transcends its genre because Ray & Co. never lose track of what it’s meant to be. It sprints by until pausing for tense interludes in the third act, before barreling into a finale that it borrows from 167 Westerns that preceded it.
The whole enterprise is of a piece — soundstage interiors to backlot street scenes to chases through the snowy, remote outdoors. Future director Lupino stepped behind the camera to keep the show on the road when Ray fell ill during production and the filming and throughline of the fact-paced narrative never missed a beat.
The urgent Bernard Hermann score sounds so much like his later “North by Northwest” music that it’s hardly a shock to learn he recycled some of the instantly-recognizable incidental music from this one for that Hitchcock classic.
A “meet the screenwriter” cameo here features A.I. Bezzerides playing an owlish, greasy lowlife who offers our cruel but incorruptible cop a bribe in an early scene in a smoky bar. Ray makes great use of the character actors of the day in a film he made on the tail end of “The Studio System.” Begley, Wolfe, Bond, Olive Carrey and Frank Ferguson are among the familiar faces available to an RKO shoot in 1951.
“On Dangerous Ground” has its “wow” shots, character twists and moments. But what stands out about this early Ray gem is how surefooted Ray’s cinematic storytelling already is. It’s fluid and confident in the headlong way it plays, a noir thriller that immerses us in a world, presents its problems and sets out to solve them through a morality tale with a whiff of the creepy and the kinky about it.
Rating: approved, TV-PG
Cast: Robert Ryan, Ida Lupino, Charles Kemper, Ed Begley and Ward Bond.
Credits: Directed by Nicholas Ray, scripted byA.I. Bezzerides and Nicholas Ray, based on the novel by Gerald Butler. An RKO release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.
Running time: 1:22
“Poor Things” and “The Favourite” director Yorgos Lanthimos has found a rep company that works, so Emma Stone and Willem Dafoe are back for this next outing, joined by Margaret Qualley and Jesse Plemons, Hong Chou.
I heartily approve of him continuing to cast Willem Dafoe until the man gets the Oscar he so richly deserves, year in and year out.
Emma dances and drives a Dodge Challenger? Wrecklessly?
June 21.
It often seems, on a personal as well as cultural level, that the F-bomb has lost all power to shock.
And then a comedy comes along to remind us of the colorful ugliness and delicacy of language and how it can be deployed and censored to jolt, judge and control society. And where there’s judgement and control, there are insiders and designated outsiders, those who get the short end of the stick.
“Wicked Little Letters” is foul-mouthed farce based on a true “scandal” about a small town terrorized by vulgar, cruelly personal and utterly anonymous letters. In the hands of director Thea Sharrock, screenwriter Jonny Sweet and a sparkling cast, it becomes a parable on shifting social mores, sexism, morality confused with legality and women’s suffrage.
It’s a vulgar hoot.
Oscar winner Olivia Colman stars as Edith Swan, a smug, self-righteous spinster who starts many a remark with “If I were without sin” or “We’re all God’s creatures” and “It is in the pardoning that we are pardoned.” That’s usually followed by a moment of bringing the hammer down.
A lot of her blushing disapproval is aimed at her unfiltered, blowsy and blue-streak swearing Irish neighbor, Rose Gooding, played by brassy Jessie Buckley of “Wild Rose,” “Doolittle” and who co-starred with Colman in “The Lost Daughter.”
Rose is a widow, a single mum with a live-in lover (Malachi Kirby) given to singing and closing the pub down, a woman who swears like she breathes.
“You mangey old titless turnip!” is the most printable outpouring to emanate from her Irish-accented mouth.
Edith is sweet to her face, but behind her back she holds nothing back.
“She’s heinous!”
The furor really begins in 1920s Littlehampton when Edith gets her blush-inducing 19th letter from an anonymous critic. The obscenity has a studied, insulting air and a colorful variety and unfamiliarity with the form that suggests it was researched from a Roget’s Thesaurus of Vulgarity.
“You f—–g a-s old whore!”
Edith is wounded, her mother (Gemma Jones) takes the vapors. But her officious, ever-so-proper father (Timothy Spall) is apoplectic. He’s the one who goes to the police over this “prison offense!” And he’s the one who convinces the boy’s club of coppers (Paul Cahidi and Hugh Skinner) that these must come from their next-rowhouse-door neighbor, Rose.
Just like that, poor, powerless Rose, a “war widow” with a tween daughter (Alisha Weir), is arrested, charged and tossed in jail because she can’t make bail.
The cops ignore the fact that it’s a tad too-on-the-nose for the professionally-profane Rose to be the author of such screeds, that the letters continue and spread to the entire community, and that “Woman Police Officer Gladys Moss” (Anjana Vasan) has serious doubts about authorship and Rose’s guilt.
Director Sharrock (“Me Before You”) gets a lot of mileage out of the contrast between “Wicked Little Letters” and the “Downton Abbey” world she’s documenting, filling her supporting cast with screen veterans like Spall, Jones and Eileen Atkins, who have all appeared in their share of Dickens, Austen and Gilbert & Sullivan period pieces.
Some Brit journalist with a notebook in hand counted “120 outbursts” of colorful invective (Well done, you.) in “Wicked Little Letters,” readings from letters and insults delivered in the heat of the moment. That underscores the movie’s “We’ve kind of become numbed to it all” subtext.
Color-blind casting is applied to clever effect, emphasizing the hidebound, myopic Old Order challenged by the new, limited horizons broadened by taking women cops and characters with differing racial, cultural and social backgrounds’ views into account.
Women Police Officer Moss adorably enlists “friends” of Edith’s (Lolly Adefope, Atkins and Joanna Scanlan) in her investigation, even though she’s warned “women constables don’t sleuth.”
Buckley, a bracing breath of fresh air in many roles, gives Rose a resignation about all this that seems out of character but is a nice twist. Yes, she’s potty-mouthed and outspoken. But busted for it? “It’s a fair cop,” she seems to shrug, even as she insists she didn’t do the letter writing.
The “national” nature of the “scandal” is briefly touched-on, and we’re allowed just enough time to fret over whether justice will be done to keep things interesting.
And if the tale drifts into cute and finds a finish that’s a tad too pat, at least we have the satisfaction of muttering “About f—–g time.”
R: nudity, profanity
Cast: Olivia Colman, Jessie Buckley, Anjana Vasan, Lolly Adefope, Gemma Jones, Eileen Atkins, Joanna Scanlan, Hugh Skinner and Timothy Spall.
Credits: Directed by Thea Sharrock, scripted by Jonny Sweet. A Sony Pictures Classics release.
Running time: 1:40
“The Talk of the Town” is a lightly-amusing, mildly-suspenseful, engagingly-acted and solidly-constructed comic melodrama, a pleasant enough time-killer from director George Stevens and featuring a rogueish Cary Grant, a charming and plucky Jean Arthur and Ronald Colman at his most urbane and droll.
History remembers it for the fact that it was a hit upon its release in 1942, and that it collected a whopping seven Academy Award nominations. But that Oscar recognition underscores everything this “pleasant enough” picture is not.
It is a civics lesson about a justice system rigged to suit the needs of the rich, but lacks the lump in the throat pathos and “blessings of democracy” earnestness of the films of Frank Capra or Preston Sturges.
There are screwball comedy elements. But Stevens — best known for “Shane,” “Giant” and “A Place in the Sun” — lacked “the (Ernst) Lubitsch touch,” or the rat-a-tat timing and dialogue of a Howard Hawks comedy.
It’s romantic and sometimes witty, but simply not on a par with the best films of that day that covered similar emotional ground.
Heck, look at the Oscar nominees it was up against at the March 1943 Oscar ceremony –– “The Pride of the Yankees,” “The Magnificent Ambersons,” ” “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” “Mrs. Miniver,” “Now Voyager,” “To Be or Not to Be.” It didn’t win anything against that field, and with good reason.
As I watched this long and somewhat leisurely light entertainment unfold, I kept wondering why I’d never encountered it before in a college class or film society showing, never sought it out on any classic film channel. Its credits scream “classic.” But the fact that one of the screenwriters, Oscar winner Sidney Buchman, had a hand in “The Awful Truth,” “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” and “Here Comes Mr. Jordan,” the template for “Heaven Can Wait” gives away the game.
Stevens, one of the top dramatic directors of his era, was simply out of his element here. “The Talk of the Town” never quite hits the right comic, sentimental or romantic notes accordingly.
But what does stand out after all these years is the enviable pairing of two leading men in a movie that gives Colman (“Lost Horizon”) the spotlight and a chance to shine in a rare lighthearted, if sophisticated role.
He’s Professor Michael Lightcap, an educated and urbane dean of a law school who rents a farmhouse outside of the New England mill town of Lochester. He’s planning on writing another ivory tower tome on the philosophy and history of one arcane corner of The Law.
But he shows up a day early, and home owner Nora Shelley (Arthur, of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” and later “Shane”) hasn’t finished cleaning and furnishing the place. What’s more, an escaped convict has just staggered to her door in the rain.
Leopold Dilg (Where DID they get these names?) is a Lochester loudmouth, somebody noted for taking on the self-serving “rule” of fabric tycoon and town “boss” Andrew Holmes (Charles Dingle). A factory burned down and a night watchman died in the blaze. The provocateur Dilg is the likely suspect, and is promptly jailed.
His “escape” just confirms his guilt, to the locals.
“Miss Shelley, do you believe I could burn down a factory?” convinces her he must be protected from discovery. Well, that and the fact that he’s played by Cary Grant.
Dilg is “the only honest man I’ve come across in this town in 20 years,” his lawyer declares. “Naturally, they want to hang him.:
The best “screwball” moments here are the never-ending parade of interlopers — cops, lawyers (Edgar Buchanan plays the true believer assigned to Dilg’s case, over Dilg’s objections), relatives, bloodhounds and a senator who comes to tell the esteemed professor that there’s a Supreme Court seat waiting for this great legal mind, if he’s willing to accept it.
When Dilg eventually gives away his presence on the farm, Nora passes himself off as “Joseph, the gardener.” But “Joseph” is awfully outspoken on matters of the law and America’s already two-tiered justice system. The “theoretical” professor finds his thinking challenged and himself manipulated into seeing Lochester law through this “gardener’s” eyes.
There’s an amusing outing at the local ballpark, where Lightcap meets the already-made-his-mind-up judge and his ilk. He’s lured to the scene of the crime, where the grandstanding capitalist plays the victim tirelessly pursuing justice…and publicity.
There’s more to this gardener, this crime and this whole system than our legal eagle realized. And there’s a lot more to this plucky pixie who aids and abets, protects and helps guide the suave Lightcap to the light.
Rex Ingram (“Green Pastures,” “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,””Sahara” and “Your Cheatin’ Heart”) turns up as Lightcap’s “man” (manservant), a less offensive version of the servile roles African Americans were generally consigned to in the films that era, but probably meant to be funnier than Ingram plays him.
The democracy-in-action finale is rowdy but messy in its messaging. And “message” is a big deal here, as Stevens & Co. are delivering something more cynical than Capra, less certain of American forthrightness than “Casablanca.”
“What is the law? It’s a gun pointed at somebody’s head,” Dilg lectures, one of several such speeches in the picture. “All depends upon which end of the gun you stand, whether the law is just or not.”
Colman’s fun to watch and listen to, Grant gives an edge in his seemingly reluctant playing of a second banana. And Arthur is good, tickling occasionally but never coming close to the breaks-your-heart pathos of her best performances.
All of which underscores the notion that all this “Talk” adds up to is something of a mixed bag, a film with all the hallmarks of a classic but without the pace or the “touch” that might have made it much more than it is.
Rating: “approved,” some violence, innuendo
Cast: Cary Grant, Jean Arthur, Ronald Colman, Edgar Buchanan, Glenda Farrell, Charles Dingle and Rex Ingram.
Credits: Directed by George Stevens, scripted by Irwin Shaw, Sidney Buchman, Dale Van Every. A Columbia Pictures release streaming on Tubi, Amazon, etc.
Running time: 1:58
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