This debut feature from David Cronenberg’s daughter, whose prior filmmaking credits were “camera and electrical department” (Apprenticeship?) gigs, looks plenty dark and screwy.
Jay Baruchel, Emily Hampshie, Peter Gallagher, Enrico Colantoni and Alanna Bale star, and is that Isabella Rossellini’s voice I hear?
April 26.
Sept. 6.
Keaton and Ryder and Jenna Ortega and Willem Dafoe and O’Hara.
David Krumholtz is a once promising animator facing a terminal diagnosis and the world’s callous indifference in “Lousy Carter,” a droll “My midlife crisis is death” comedy set in academia.
The sort of fellow who’d accept and adopt as his “real” name a nickname he acquired on his high school golf team — “Lousy” — is almost asking for the insensitivity and downright cruelty that greets him the moment he’s abruptly given the news by an alleged “medical professional.” Carter jokes about whether or not he should “plan” on going to his 25th high school reunion to a doctor who abruptly advises him “no” when it comes to “plans.”
“You’re Carter, right?” He flashes an X-ray, offers a “Sorry about this” as his bedside manner, and dismisses his doomed patient to deal with the 20something office manager who is only focused on the bill.
“You guys usually shake people down right after the Doc hands down the death sentence?”
Krumholtz, just seen in “Oppenheimer” and probably most famous for his place within the “Harold & Kumar” universe and TV’s “The Deuce,” is well-cast as the hapless, paunchy 40something taking stock of his life and relationships in his “final days” as a single, unhappy and out-of-his-depth academic.
His therapist (Stephen Root slinging an Austrian accent) patronizingly shrink-splains “Schadenfreude” to him like he’s an idiot. His dry, humorously humorless fellow academic and “best friend” Herschel (Martin Starr) is blithely judgmental.
“The reason everyone is frustrated with you is you’ve diminished over the years.”
Lousy can’t bring himself to tell either of them. Or with his self-absorbed mother (Mona Lee Fultz) in the nursing home. Not when his almost sympathetic ex (Olivia Thirlby) can only muster an acknowledgement that this “man baby” was not a good match for “a real, live adult woman.”
Maybe he can do more than go through the motions teaching this graduate seminar on “The Great Gatsby” with his final days. Sure, the kids are entitled, lazy and argumentative dunces. Perhaps a fling with a smart, testy and witheringly-uninterested student (Luxy Banner) would be a way to exit this world with a smile.
“I don’t feel safe” she half-mutters as he keeps summoning her to after-class meetings. OK, perhaps just getting her to help him re-start this long-gestating animated version of a Vladimir Nabokov (“Lolita”) tale will do. Maybe grad student Gail can teach him how to pronounce “Nabokov.”
Writer-director Bob Byington has always been something of an acquired taste. Dry, wry comedies like “Infinity Baby,” “7 Chinese Brothers” and “Frances Ferguson” appeal to offbeat actors — Starr and Root have appeared in a couple, Nick Offerman seems like a simpatico fit — and make the rounds of film festivals and never find a wider audience.
There’s cleverness and wit and some shrewd observations about life and the sorts of people living it in his work. But there’s a superficiality to the films themselves and the characters in Byington’s movies, something kind of arm’s-length droll and witty but rarely laugh-out-loud funny.
Krumholtz, amusing enough to hold his own in a Woody Allen comedy — if that’s what you want to call “Wonder Wheel” — tests that thesis here, playing a funny but frustrated and frustrating character in a frustrating scenario that he can’t seem to insult his way out of.
When even the surprises and twists are cliches, we figure we’re being had — a bit — by our filmmaker/tour-guide. But when everybody strikes what seems to be the perfect tone for the material, and it’s never enough to lift “Lousy Carter” above the meekly amusing indifference that greets Carter himself with, we can’t help but feel we too are being talked-down “to.”
Rating: unrated
Cast: David Krumholtz, Martin Starr, Luxy Banner, Jocelyn DeBoer, Mona Lee Fultz, Stephen Root and Olivia Thirlby.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Bob Byington. A Magnolia release.
Running time: 1:17
To a generation of movie fans, M. Emmet Walsh was often the first name that came to mind when somebody used the label “character actor.”
That wasn’t by accident. The Coens launched him to prominence as a pitiless Texas hitman in “Blood Simple,” and turned him loose in a “character” part in “Raising Arizona” so’s we could see how funny he could be.
And then, unless my memory is playing tricks on me, “Siskel & Ebert” in one of the incarnations of their movie review show, did an entire episode on just this one guy. “Character actor.” We all knew what one was thanks to them. And to them the quintessential character actor of his era might have been Mr. Walsh.
“Blade Runner” to “Straight Time,” “Clean and Sober” to “Critters” to “Reds” to “The Milagro Beanfield War” to “The Mighty Quinn,” a decade or two of bit parts in film and on TV, and then all of a sudden he started turning up in everything.
Wilfred Brimley did mostly cuddly curmudgeons or no nonsense authority figures, to name Walsh’s chief rival for a lot of roles. Walsh played a much wider range of cranks and sadists and drunks and bullies and crooked cops and clowns. A native New Yorker, he made a pretty mean Southerner when he had to. “Blood Simple” sold that.
He had 234 acting credits, and did a delightfully sketchy turn in Mario Van Peebles’ “Outlaw Posse,” which came out a couple of weeks ago.
He learned to play the piano for “Cannery Row” (Doctor John doubled the “Real” boogie woogie) and sang in “My Best Friend’s Wedding.” That little punchline in one of the greatest rom-com moments in all of cinema might have been his biggest on-screen fright. Singing is scary.
Roger Ebert later made a “Harry Dean Stanton/M. Emmet Walsh rule,” that no movie with either of them in it was a total write-off. Not a bad rule.
Here’s what I rememember about Walsh from the two movies he made in a city where I reviewed movies and covered film production for the local newspaper. “The Music of Chance” and “The Lottery” were shot in greater Winston-Salem, years apart. The first was a classic “troubled production.” But not because of the ever-unfussy Walsh. Mandy Patinkin was the co-star, so need I say more.
On “The Lottery,” he was a grandfatherly presence on the set, putting on no airs, making no fuss, always happiest when people with little kids would stop by to watch him work.
He’d chat with them, and he’d give them something to remember him by — a 1943 steel Lincoln head penny. Not sure why he chose that, but they were rarely in circulation any more, cheap because they were plentiful, and it was a nice little thing he could do for a child meeting his or her first movie star.
I was too old to ask at the time, and it wouldn’t have been cool or particularly professional (we were a little more concerned with that in the pre-social media “influencer” reviewer era) to say “Hey, don’t I get a penny?” But damn, I wanted one of those “steelies.”
Damned fine actor, too. Rest in peace.
“Monty Python and the Holy Grail” is one of those gold standard comedies that keeps on giving, a farce so unerringly-costumed, production designed and covered in muck that it looks like a documentary, with slapstick and sight gags that twist towards surreal and dialogue that takes on economic theory, the aerodynamics of cocoanuts and what constitutes “a mere flesh wound.”
This classic merits revival every few years, and this year, The Florida Film Festival is bringing it back.
And they’re hosting a Q&A with the very silly John Cleese afterwards.
The Pythons aren’t getting any younger, so you’d best grab this chance to come see and hear from Basil Fawlty and his “Fish Called Wanda.”
I’ve interviewed a couple of Pythons — “The Terry’s” — Jones and Gilliam. But never the erudite Oxbridge Master of Silly Walks. I’m moderating the Q & A. Which means “Right, I’ve got some homework to do.”
Just following Our Lord J. C. on Twitter will never do.
Enzian Theater, Maitland, the evening of April 14.
See you there.
Here’s a sometimes-fun found-footage riff on that time, on Halloween Night of 1977, that a failing late night talk show “communed with the Devil” as a stunt for ratings.
I’ve said it before and I can’t stop repeating it — the ’70s, man. You had to be there.
In “Late Night with the Devil,” character actor David Dastmalchian plays talk show host Jack Delroy in a darkly-comic skeptics-vs.-believers-vs-Old Scratch himself thriller.
I wasn’t as enamored of this overreaching, choppy narrative about a live TV broadcast gone supernaturally wrong as many others reviewing it. I think it’s because I remember too clearly the very similar but more harrowing and suspenseful “The Cleansing Hour,” which has more pathos, higher stakes and surprises than “Late Night.” But the lighter touches, the reasonably-accurate spoof of the medium it sends up, make this worth a watch.
Dastmalchian plays a ’70s chat-show host, one of the legion of “also-rans” our narrator (the unmistakable voice of horror icon Michael Ironside) reminds us, a flip and (kind of) funny host willing to try most anything to get his ratings up.
Delroy is blandly representative of a type — a little Dick Cavett wit, a chunk of Jack Parr self-pity and self-importance, a Phil Donahue level of credulity and an uneasy smile that hides not just the loss of a recently-deceased wife, but the feeling that this is all just an act, a very hard one for him to keep up.
It’s difficult to decide if former radio talker Jack was ever all that funny, with his strained, lame monologue and Reggie Jackson (the Yankees had just won the World Series) and Jimmy Carter and Billy Carter jokes.
Of course, Carson got rich off material not unlike this, back in the day.
Delroy’s comic sidekick and sometime verbal punching bag (Rhys Auteri) might be somebody who realizes this “all an act” pose.
On this night, the guests begin with a medium (Fayssal Bazzi) named Christou, whose act is so bad and unconving that the studio audience can barely contain their groans. Their giggles? They can’t hide those at all.
But something happens, something that delays at least one commercial break. Christou may have actually “made contact” with somebody or something real. The fact that he projectile vomits black bile almost sells it.
Inviting an Amazing Randi-style professional skeptic (Ian Bliss) on the “Night Owls” show to debunk the “charlatan,” pretty much to his face, may be the most ’70s-savvy bit of pop culture spoofing that writer-directors Colin and Cameron Cairnes (“100 Bloody Acres” was theirs) conjure up.
This “Carmichael” debunker knows his stuff, and he’s insufferable. But Christou? He’s having a mental health crisis, or something. “This isn’t right,” he protests, slipping into shock. But is it supernatural?
Paranormal researcher Dr. June (Laura Gordon) and her star patient Lily (Ingrid Torelli) endure the skeptic’s skepticism when they show up. But when Lily jolts into a demonic alter-ego trance, we at least start to wonder if this Carmicheal debunker might be wrong.
Delroy has to be chilled when Lily seems to note his “sweeps week” despair of ever improving his ratings. “I think you’re gonna be very famous — soon.”
Dastmalchian, the most recent screen version of “The Boston Strangler” (he was also in “Oppenheimer”) isn’t the most credible chat show host ever. The larger-than-life personality, the ability to switch “on” seem lacking. That hampers “Late Night with the Devil’s” ability to make that sale. This is like an imitation of DeNiro’s dispirited wannabe talk show delusions in “King of Comedy.”
But the haunted side of Delroy fits this veteran character actor’s persona like a glove.
Bazzi is amusingly inept as Christou, a guy who loses his exotic Spanish/Gypsy accent the moment things start to get “real.”
Auteri serves up a venomous, spoil-the-peanut-gallery’s-fun drollery in this part, a smarty pants who relishes bursting bubbles for the boobeoisie.
And Torelli and Gordon are convincing enough before the fireworks start. And once they do, “convincing” stops mattering as much.
The filmmakers’ generally accurate recreation of how such a show might have gone down — “A television first, we attempt to commune with the Devil…but not before a word from our sponsors.” — breaks up the flow of the story so much that the finale is the only place where there’s rising action and heightening suspense.
But they’ve tapped into a fun angle to visit the “Devil, real or unreal” thriller genre, a “master tape” that comes close enough to broadcast standards to pass muster, and goes over-the-top enough to be fun enough to recommend.
Rating: R (Violent Content|A Sexual Reference|Some Gore|profanity)
Cast: David Dastmalchian, Laura Gordon, Fayssal Bazzi, Ian Bliss, Rhys Auteri and Ingrid Torelli, narrated by Michael Ironside.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Colin Cairnes and Cameron Cairnes. An IFC/Shudder release.
Running time: 1:33
Those chest-busting aliens are the gift that keeps on giving for Ridley Scott. He produced this Fede Alvarez (“Don’t Breathe,””The Girl in the Spider’s Web”) thriller, the latest in a long line of deep space horror tales, which is due out Aug. 16.
The cast isn’t totally unknown. But it’s pretty close to that anonymous, with Isabella Merced the one name I recognize — despite the fact that she changed it.
“Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire” is a creaky, cutesie and cluttered sequel to the dark and pseudo-serious reboot of this goofy, action comedy franchise of the 1980s, “Ghostbusters: Afterlife.”
Ungainly, so over-populated with survivors of those Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis and Ernie Hudson pictures, and their far less interesting younger counterparts, the film is analogous of that infamous Stay Puft marshmallow man of the original film, “Ghostbusters. ” “Frozen Empire” can’t get out of its own bloated way.
It’s so committed to “fan service” that any doubt that was ever a euphemism for “pandering to the people still into this junk” vanishes.
Newcomer Kumail Nanjiani, as a sketchy goof selling off his granny’s antiques who sets off the movie’s icy armageddon, pretty much steals the picture by default. Everybody else, old and new, has to content her or himself with almost triggering a case of the “warm fuzzies.” Almost.
That pretty much goes for the entire film here. “Almost.”
The Stengler family — Mom Callie (Carrie Coon), the daughter of the late Egon (Ramis), her science-smart teen daughter Phoebe (McKenna Grace) and older son Trevor (Finn Wolfhard) and Callie’s new man, former science teacher Gary Grooberson (Paul Rudd) have been living in the old Ghostbuster firehouse, cleaning spectral nuisances out of New York and making a hash of the city as they careen about in the Ectomobile ghost busting ambulance.
The mayor (William Atherton, amusingly vile as ever) isn’t pleased. “Retired” buster Ray (Aykroyd) is more interested in his other-worldly video channel, produced by protege Podcast (Logan Kim). And rich ex-buster Winston (Ernie Hudson) is financing possible upgrades to the operation and the industry via his in-house Brit wizard (James McAster) and Trevor’s crush, Lucky (Celeste O’Connor).
Then the low-rent hustler Nadeem (Nanjiani of “The Big Sick”) lets this bronze orb fall into the wrong hands — OK, he sells it to Ray. And almost everybody else is involved in unleashing the frigid ancient Beast Within — and ice and newly-found or newly released/already-captured ghosts threaten to tear a rift between “here” and what lies beyond.
“The end of the world as we know it” won’t just be a golden oldie.
Phoebe’s encounter with a cute chess-playing ghost girl (Emily Alyn Lind) who must be from the ’80s, based on her hair, attire and vocabulary (seemingly intended to be MUCH older), has Phoebe questioning her connection to the afterlife, and attraction to women.
So, being bi-curious almost kills the cat. And every body else.
Nanjiani is funny in most every scene, which makes the return of prodigal buster Venkman (Murray) almost painful to sit through. His character’s running the same academic “research” hustle he always did, still reaching for the same pithy punchline he delivered, on or off script, 40 years ago. And it’s not working.
Director and co-writer Gil Kenan, whose breakthrough was directing the animated “Monster House” and who co-wrote “Afterlife,” is at a loss with what to do with Murray and Annie Potts from the earlier franchise. He gives them and Hudson and Akyroyd scenes and closeups which only exist because he and co-writer Jason Reitman figure the fans would have wanted them.
Coon soldiers through this, the one serious player allowed not to land a laugh. But here’s comic Patton Oswalt and the normally-reliable Rudd seeking that same excuse, “allowed not to land a laugh.” Because they pretty much don’t.
The ghost gimmicks, sight-gags and settings — the New York Public Library — as well as the non-supernatural villain (Atherton) are, like Murray’s attempts at his jokey old self, simply recycled from the original films.
Even that orb’s nicknames, “Ball of Hate” and “The Devil’s Testicle,” feel like throw-away jokes because nobody on set came up with a better line.
The plot gets bogged down in old tech and new, exposition and more pages and pages of Akryoyd and his disciples riffing on the “science” of the “world beyond” our own, gobbledygook which no longer falls trippingly off the tongue.
And it’s hard to say relative newcomers Grace, Wolfhard, O’Connor, Kim and McAster come into their own, because their struggle to be noticed over the sentimentalility still ladled on in the second film, if not quite as heavily as in the first, doesn’t let them register. Not much, anyway.
Phoebe’s efforts — at 15 — to be accepted by authorities, the world and her family for who she is — “I’m a ghostbuster. I save the world!” — isn’t so much lost in the tsunami of not-quite-silliness as noted and shrugged off.
So there it is, a “Ghostbusters” that’s a ghost bust. “Impossible,” you say?
“Son, I stopped believing in that word a long time ago.” And never did figure out a funnier comeback for it.
Rating: PG-13 for supernatural action/violence, profanity, innuendo.
Cast: Paul Rudd, McKenna Grace, Kumail Nanjiani, Dan Aykroyd, Carrie Coon, Finn Wolfhard, Ernie Hudson, Bill Murray, Celeste O’Connor, Patton Oswalt, Emily Alyn Lind, Logan Kim, James McAster, Annie Potts and William Atherton
Credits: Directed by Gil Kenan, scripted by Gil Kenan and Jason Reitman, based on the screenplay to “Ghostbusters.” A Sony/Columbia release.
Running time: 1:55
Annie Potts returns!
Those giggly, girly, binge-eating, too-dim-to-balance-a-checkbook “Baby Assassins” are back, more childish than ever in “Baby Assassins 2 Babies,” the sequel to a fast, furious and glibly funny film about Japanese teens who have taken up contract killing as their high school extracurricular activity.
But you’re only allowed to take the viewer wholly by surprise once with your John Wick Junior Miss take on murdering for money. And something — several things — hit me wrong about this more sluggish sequel.
The fight choreography is more “choreography,” the ditziness is more grating and the acting even more over the top.
And the Bugs Bunny Physics of it all — pitting two petite flyweights up against rivals with a lot more throw-weight — the point blank shootouts where nobody is any more than slightly injured and the dead spaces between the action beats I found wearing and kind of soul-sucking. The video game body count didn’t help.
Here, two callous, life-is-cheap teen dullards (Joey Iwanaga and Tatsuomi Hamada) become rivals for punching, pistol-packing pixies Chisato (Akari Takaishi) and Mahiro (Saori Izawa).
Makoto (Hamada) and Yuuri (Iwanaga) are ready “to move up the ladder” after slaughtering a gang when all they were meant to do was take out its leader. The best way to not remain “errand boys” and to land two spots in the “guild” of assassins, their manager informs them, is to shoot other assassins to create vacancies.
That couldn’t come at a worse time for bleached-blonde Mahiro and chatterbox Chisato. They’re behind on their guild training gym fees, and they’ve blown-off payments on their “Jolly Assassins Insurance Plan.”
They can’t “go on strike.” They can’t give away their work with a “viral video” protest.
They have to rush to make their payments, but as they do, the bank is held up. What can they do but break their hostage zip-ties and kill the robbers? That gets them suspended, forced to take odd jobs and slash expenses. And that leaves them vulnerable.
Their guild rules say they can “Never kill outside of work.”
There are still laughs in this sequel, but for me, they all came after its lumbering, stumbling start. The coed killers take jobs as retail plush-suit mascots, and get into a tussle — with each other — over their costumes, and in costume.
And one quick-cut gag sees Makoto eject a round from his trusty pistol, with Yuuri snatching the floating round mid-air.
It’s the sort of comedy where a short order cook orders her feuding customers to leave with a “Play with your guns outside (in Japanese, with English subtitles).”
At some point, the flippancy of the gun violence here achieves “cringiness” and never gives it up.
A lot of the cleverness of the original film, the world-building and character-introductions, is lost when you add two new “babies” and show half of the nonsensical, bloody-but-not-remotely-as-bloody-as-it-would-be-in-reality action from their point of view.
The original “babies” — OK, the talky annoying one — overreaches with her breathless, bugeyed impression teen girl behavior.
At some point, “cute” no longer figures into it, and you’re just joking around with guns and gunplay tropes that aren’t any funnier simply because they’ve already been beaten to death.
Rating: unrated, very violent, teen smoking, profanity
Cast: Akari Takaishi, Saori Izawa, Joey Iwanaga and Tatsuomi Hamada
Credits: Scripted and directed by Yugo Sakamoto. A Well Go USA release.
Running time: 1:41
Movie Nation 