A Climate Changed, specially effected reboot of 1996’s “Twister.”
That Glen Powell (“Maverick,” “Anyone But You”) is having himself a moment.
With Daisy Edgar-Jones, Sasha Lane, Anthony Ramos, Katy O’Brian, Maura Tierney and Kiernan Shipka.
Riding the wind and its “Twisters” this summer. I feel a theme park ride update. I do.
July.
Alfred Hitchcock’s peak years were the 1950s, when he was utter master of his craft and he was privileged to make use of Hollywood’s best and brightest with the budgets to do them all justice.
From “Stage Fright” and “Strangers on a Train” through “The Man Who Knew Too Much,”The Wrong Man,” “Rear Window,” and “Vertigo,” he and “the system” cranked out classic after classic, enduring thrillers with iconic set pieces and often starring the greatest stars of their era.
And just as he was about to become a droll TV host, Hitch saw fit to remind us that he’d had a wicked sense of humor all long.
“The Trouble with Harry” might have been a stretch. But “To Catch a Thief” found him finally letting Cary Grant be Cary Grant — suave, dashing, sexy and witty. And that was but the appetizer for their collaborative masterpiece, 1959’s lightweight delight, “North by Northwest.”
It is an effortless two hours and sixteen minutes of classic set-pieces, unlikely traps and amusingly off-the-cuff escapes, all starring the handsomest tan ever to step onto a film set.
The working title was “In a Northwesterly Direction,” and the plot was just that simple. Introduce Cary Grant, put him in peril and set the chase in motion, from New York to Rapid City, South Dakota. We hardly notice when that linear path is interrupted and our anti-heroic hero has to backtrack from Chicago to rural Indiana, where the deadly crop-dusters roam.
Every element in this production is exquistive, from Ernest Lehman’s lighthearted, fizzy script to Bernard Hermann’s glorious “drunken fandango” of a score, to the immaculate production design that put Cray Grant in a single grey suit (save for the finale) and in peril indoors — on soundstages, rear projection car-chases, a mimicked train ride and a recreation of Mount Rushmore — or outdoors on a dusty crossroads in the middle of nowhere which produced the most iconic image of Hitchcock and Grant’s careers.
The VistaVision color pops off the screen 65 years later in a film whose seamless transitions between soundstages and locations are as much fun as the obvious “Hollywood trickery,” all in service of a beautiful-looking film that let us see Cary Grant run and climb and reel into sweaty, close-up panic.
Best of all, it’s deathly serious while never letting us, for one minute, truly fear for the hero’s safety. That’s because Grant has some of the best lines of his career in a movie that never wholly gives itself over to comedy.
When Eva Marie Saint, as Eve Kendall, comes on to Grant’s Roger O. Thornhill on a New York to Chicago train, the most modern words to come out of her mouth are “I’m a big girl, now.”
And Thornhill’s reply, in those oft-imitated Cary Grant cadences, is as naughty as he gets.
“Yaaaaas, and in all the right PLAY-sez.”
The story is a simple case of mistaken identity. Glib Madison Avenue Mad Man Roger Thornhill is mistaken for a mysterious agent named George Kaplan. Kaplan’s apparently been on the trail of this international menace named Van Damme. And fast-talking advertising man Roger (Grant) cannot talk himself out of the death sentence this mysterious Van Damme (the ever-urbane James Mason) hands down.
“Games, must we?” Van Damme coos when sizing-up this mysterious foe who has tracked him cross country, letting him know there’s no denying his fate.
It’s perfect that Van Damme has a homoerotic henchman played by future Oscar winner Martin Landau to carry out his dirty work, and hilarious that their execution of this threat is to be via alcohol. They pour bourbon down Roger’s throat and park him behind the wheel of a cute Mercedes convertible, which he somehow manages to drunkenly avoid driving off a cliff.
“Oh Roger, NOT Laura’s Mercedes?”
The cover-up ensures that nobody believes Thornhill’s story, and when he tries to unravel the mystery himself, he’s framed for murder, fleeing for his life, falling in with Eve Kendall, and making escapes from a train, a hospital, an art auction, a crop duster and Mount Rushmore.
“I don’t like the way Teddy Roosevelt is looking at me.”
Grant and his gray suit cut a dashing figure, start to finish, the classic man in over his head and improvising his way out of one jam after another.
This is why movies about “ex-special forces” types, women and men “with particular skills,” from Liam and Denzel to Jason and whoever, are by design less interesting than an Everywoman or Everyman who faces peril and thinks outside the box of their limited life to save his or her skin.
“North by Northwest” has intrigues guided by a mysterious “Professor,” played by past Hitchcock collaborator Leo G. Carroll, and a comical arrest and traffic court trial involing future “Get Smart” co-star Edward Platt as Roger’s nonplussed lawyer and Jesse Royce Landis as his amusingly disbelieving mother.
Scene after scene here has been mimicked or echoed in scores of films since, most particularly the art auction where Roger must rude-talk his way out of impending murder by drawing attention among the monied swells bidding on fine art.
And then there’s the cropduster sequence — tense, slow-building, masterfully shot and cut as it edits together aerial footage and ground-eye-view shots of a real biplane chasing and dusting and shooting at our protagonist, with snippets of Grant on a soundstage cornfield, running and ducking for his very life.
You can have your shower scene in “Psycho” and your falling effects from “Vertigo.” This is Hitchcock’s true tour de force sequence.
The film’s success and timeless presence ensured that three members of the cast would go on to star in TV shows about espionage — Platt, Carroll (“The Man from U.N.C.L.E.”) and Landau (“Mission: Impossible.”). Hitchock would transition to TV and make the classic “Psycho” TV budget cheap, and manage a few more bloated and off-his-game productions in the ’60s into the ’70s.
Grant was less than a handful of films from retirement. And Saint, of “On the Waterfront,” would never be in anything as remotely entertaining as this Peak Hitchcock classic, a thriller that set a high bar for every high-toned thriller/comedy to follow.
“North by Northwest” is quintessential Hitchcock, a single film that explains his reputation and that tells us why generations since still love the very idea of Cary Grant. And it’s a true bucket list classic, a gorgeous, perfectly-crafted thriller that entertains the first time you see it, and every time you watch it again.
Cast: Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, Martin Landau, Leo G. Carroll, Edward Platt and Jesse Royce Landis
Rating: approved, violence, innuendo
Credits: Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, scripted by Ernest Lehman. A Universal release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.
Running time: 2:16
More urban, the shock of the assault on noisy cities, different family unit, different director, same jolts.
A tent pole picture for the summer of 2024.
Giving Diablo Cody’s “Lisa Frankenstein” a wide release was as good an idea as anybody had for this movie-going weekend.
No other titles — almost all January releases– are still drawing, the WGA and SAG strikes cut down on production for much of last year, Warners couldn’t be convinced to roll “Dune 2” out early (that might have been a smart play), and theaters need to stay in business until the summer season starts.
But the second meek weekend of Matthew Vaughn’s “Argylle” is marching over $6 million. That’s down 60% from its opening weekend. And the flop flingers at Focus Features could only manage $4 million and change for a “dated” and “edgy” Lisa F.” teen rom-com that isn’t much of anything.
Kathryn Newton heads a mostly unheralded cast (save for Carla Gugino). Nothing about that was ever going to draw.
“The Beekeeper” is still battling “Wonka” for leftovers, with each projected to pull in around $3.3, per Deadline.com.
And “Migration” is enjoying that animated family comedy field all to its itself for a bit longer, drawing $3 million in ticket sales on the weekend that much of America will be watching Taylor Swift watch her boyfriend battle the San Fran 49ers on TV.
This might be he worst Super Bowl weekend at the box office ever.
God help me, but I laughed a few times at “Down Low,” a glib, nasty and triumphantly transgressive comedy about a dying gay man’s off-the-bucket-list last big adventure.
Zachary Quinto plays that dying gay man, whom we don’t know is dying when he summons a masseuse (Luke Gage, who co-wrote this) whose specialty is “happy endings.”
The indignities of a hand-job interrupted by a debate over music — Leo Delibes vs. “Deep Throat” by CupkKake — and performed by a chatty, out-and-LOUD-about-it gay “bro” are just the beginning of this comedy’s “No they DIDN’Ts.”
It’s a rude and raunchy farce whose reason for existing is that rudeness and raunch. As such, it’s superficial and kind of dumb. But give these line-crossers their due. They find some laughs.
Quinto is Gary, as blandly suburban and polite as his name, a fellow who finally told his wife and family of his “true” nature, and then let devout churchgoer Patti (Audra McDonald) send out this snippy, over-decorated embossed “announcement” about it to all their friends and family.
Gary has never been around somebody like Kory, “like the long lost Kardashian,” an out and outspoken and oh-so-gauche gay hunk who peppers Gary with questions, suggestions, gay slang and gay-icon references.
“Sex and the City?”
“You are SUCH an Aidan and I NEED you to be Mr. Big!”
Kory, whose real name is “Cameron,” which comes out as he and Gary become “friends,” is a nonstop blast of nasty boy sexual frankness and gay sex-and-drugs analogies, “like a gay popper. People just ‘open up’ to me.”
Cameron sets Gary up with a blind hookup on PLUNGR, only to have the closeted bohunk (Sebastian Aroyo) balk at the “Mister Rogers-looking-ass dude” who is to be their “third” — 50ish Gary.
That sets Cameron off, and long silly story short, that’s how they end up with a body. The first one, anyway.
“Down Low” transitions into something like a “What do we do with the body/bodies?” stage comedy as an Ambien-blasted neighbor (Judith Light, of course) walks in, and a crime-scene-cover-up specialist (Simon Rex of “Red Rocket”), also on PLUNGR, is summoned for being the only person “sick and twisted” enough to give them a way out of their dilemma.
Quinto does well enough as the “straight man” (ahem) for all these buzzy.funny folks mild-mannered/cancer-dying Gary must cope with. Gage, of “White Lotus” and “Euphoria,” is a stitch, and Rex pushes things to the next level, as one might expect.
But the main reason the frank rawdog sex talk is here is to set up how outlandish what to follow will be. A crack-fueled sing-along (“Higher”) bubbles up but doesn’t distract us from the greater comical outrages to come.
Still, one can’t help but notice that “shock and ‘ewww'” is mostly what this is about. You don’t have to be homphobic to grasp the film’s cliched associations and eye-rolling gay lifestyle tropes.
“Down Low” starts tacky and then proceeds to look for lower low-downs, one right after the other, before finishing sweet. A little of all of that goes a long way, but take away the raunchy and there is no movie.
Rating: R, violence, drug abuse, sex and profanity
Cast: Zachary Quinto, Lukas Gage, Judith Light, Simon Rex, Sebastian Aroyo and Audra McDonald
Credits: Directed by Rightor Doyle, scripted by Phoebe Fisher and Lukas Gage. A FilmNation/Sony release on Netflix.
Running time: 1:34
“The Legionnaire” is a riveting topical drama “torn from today’s headlines” and set on the front lines of the global migration and housing crisis.
The plot is another cop must choose between “families” dilemma — his blood relatives versus his comrades in arms. But the novelty is in seeing racist Italy’s “immigrant problem” through the eyes of a riot cop of African descent who dons his helmet, gasmask and shield and does his job, evicting immigrant squatters. Until, that is, the squatters are his relatives.
Director Hleb Papou’s execution in telling that simple story is damned near flawless. It’s a sleek, lean and involving drama with thriller and melodramatic elements that make for smart, thoughtful entertainment.
The Legionnaires here are an elite riot squad which finds itself carrying out a lot of mass evictions all over Rome, where squatters from Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa have taken up residence in otherwise abandoned buildings.
We meet police in dramatic fashion, a phalanx of club-weilding warriors in helmets and gas masks emerging from the smoke and fog of tear gas. At the end of a day’s eviction, they put down their billy clubs, take off their helmets and masks and ride back to the office — just another day’s work.
One helmet comes off and reveals their lone Black member. Daniel (Germano Gentile) is “Hot Chocolate” or “Hot Choc” (in Italian with English subtitles) to his mates. They depend on him and he depends on them.
They are disciplined, brawny men, ready to move as one and move mobs as they do. They’re trained to know how far they can go in doing what their jobs, goaded and prodded in their fight-off-rioters rehearsals in a boxing ring.
But Daniel, we quickly guess, has a few triggers to fend off. There’s racial ball-busting from his fellow squad members, but some of it has an edge. And God forbid you taunt at him about his “Mama.”
Daniel is one of them, fluent in Italian, with a wife (Ina Gjika) and baby on the way, and no other family, so he says.
They don’t know his mother (Félicité Mbezele) and agitator brother Patrick (Maurizio Bousso) have been squatting in this one high-rise that’s been “occupied” since the late 2000s. And they’re not quick to figure out that calls to evict those in San Giovanni often wind up with Daniel calling in sick.
The film is about Daniel’s struggles with all the different groups grabbing for his loyalty. The cops expect him to do his job, no questions asked. But he’s tipping his brother and mother about raids, even as he begs them to leave, to come stay with him, at least temporarily.
Patrick is an uncompromising idealist with a little boy and an ex (Hedy Krissane) about to move the child to Milan. He’s an organizer, keeping the building’s routine (residents police themselves, do their own repairs and keep the power on) and looking for political allies (communists and leftists who pass for “half communist) in their struggle.
And that ball-busting and good-natured race-baiting in Daniel’s squad should tip him off that there are plenty of members who wouldn’t hesitate to drop the N-word on him the way other Italians are fond of doing at soccer matches. All these disparate stresses are destined to come to a head.
The script, co-written by director Papou, Giuseppe Brigante and Emanuele Mochi, allows room for a few grace notes between the domestic struggles and scenes of strife. The power is cut-off, and the residents are at a loss as to how they can get it back on without going to jail.
A Polish priest sent “by the Holy Father” shows up, asks to see the junction box, and voila! That’s what a populist Pope will do for you — find a priest who used to be an electrician.
A rally at the residence includes an appearance by populist folk singer Ivan Talarico, whose people power patter tunes would pass muster with Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie and Joan Baez.
Some of the action is pre-ordained. We’ve seen lots of versions of this tug of war for a cop’s soul before, after all. “The Departed,” “Brooklyn’s Finest” and the recent TV series “Small Axe” come instantly to mind.
But “The Legionnaire” is fascinating in its details, moving in its understated performances and righteous in its treatment of a cop who puts humanity and family ahead of camaraderie and property rights.
Rating: unrated, violence, nudity, smoking, profanity
Cast: Germano Gentile, Maurizio Bousso, Marco Falaguasta, Hedy Krissane, Ina Gjika and Félicité Mbezele
Credits: Directed by Hleb Papou, scripted by Giuseppe Brigante, Emanuele Mochi and Hleb Papou. A Film Movement release.
Running time: 1:22
We’ve had a gloves-off documentary about the triumphant and tragically addictive life of singer Amy Winehouse. Here’s a link to my interview with “Amy” director Asif Kapadia.
Now, the same folks who thought the abortion titled “Lisa Frankenstein” was a good idea are releasing a “true story” feature bio-pic of Amy (Marisa Abela) and her toxic, greedy dad (Eddie Marsan).
Focus Features will drop this right as the summer movie season is starting. Buncha rocket scientists, those Focus folks, I tell you what.
To put it delicately, “Lisa Frankenstein,” a new high school romance about an aspiring goth poetess who falls for a long-dead teen with dash and 1830s sideburn, doesn’t play.
A campy, bloody rom-com spin on a “Warm Bodies” theme, it manages a moment, here and there and just a hint of who screenwriter/genuine “character” Diablo Cody (“Juno,” “Young Adult,””Jennifer’s Body”) once was.
Indelicately put, it’s tin-eared evidence that the sparkling, edgy, Oscar-winning wit who wrote “Juno” got old. Not “old” old, but 45-is-too-old-to-be-scripting-teen-comedies old.
Nobody told Cody a 1989 period piece about a magically-animated corpse, who can’t talk until it’s too late, peppered with ’80s pop, quirky ’80s cars and struggling attempts at ’80s slang wouldn’t work. So the fool rushed in where wiser writers with and without Oscars fear to tread.
It’s a star vehicle for “Ant Man’s” Kathryn Newton, who wears Madonna Wannabe-wear and lots of Goth makeup and strains to find laughs when the screenplay cannot provide them.
Lisa is our teen scream queen, the “smart one” in a newly-formed family that includes a judgmental, figurine-collecting step-mom (Carla Gugino, not bad), the best dad the budget would allow (Joe Chrest, at least he looks like a “Dale”), and a pretty/vapid/dumb cheerleader sister named Taffy (Liza Soberano).
Taffy likes hunks, and is puzzled to hear Lisa is into the dreamboth editor of the school “lit(erary) mag,” Michael Trent (Henry Eikenberry).
“He doesn’t play sports. He’s cerebral.”
“He’s in a wheelchair?”
There’s a lot of Diablo dialogue like that, a little of which is cute, a lot of which just isn’t.
Cole Sprouse plays the soulful statue in an abandoned (Louisiana) cemetery whom Lisa pines over until that fateful day something brings the pre-Emancipation young gent back to life.
Cody and actress-turned-director Zelda Williams (“Kappa Kappa Die”) wring a laugh out of our accomplished young Southern gentleman showing off at the keyboard, sight-reading a tune that Lisa knows and sings by heart.
REO Speedwagon never sounded so…Antebellum. Newton sings just like an enthusiastic but almost tone-deaf teen, which adds to its charm.
But the killings that follow, the bodies that must be disposed of and lack of anything like chemistry between our lead characters (it’s the writing, not the acting) fail to deliver anything remotely resembling a story that needed telling or a movie one feels the need to stay through to the bitter — and I do mean bitter — end.
Rating: PG-13 for violent content, bloody images, sexual material, language, sexual assault, teen drinking and drug content.
Cast: Kathryn Newton, Liza Soberano, Cole Sprouse, Henry Eikenberry and Carla Gugino.
Credits: Directed by Zelda Williams, scripted by Diablo Cody. A Focus Features release.
Running time: 1:41
Romain Duris and Paul Kircher stars in this festival-acclaimed French sci-fi fantasy about family, evolution and a magical transformation of the human species.
It’s from the director of “Love at First Fight,” and this version of “The Animal Kingdom” — a very common title — opens March 15.
“Lost in Perfection” is a generally straightforward melodrama with thriller elements, or maybe a simple thriller with lots of melodrama (contrived plot twists and character “complications”).
But every so often, one is allowed to ponder if it isn’t some sort of Taiwanese dark comedy, with suicide, political intrigues, the manipulative media being manipulated and a “Black Widow” having one over on one and all.
Our alleged villainess is billed “The Unattractive Femme Fatale.” Kudos to zaftig co-star
Mei-Hsiu Lin for signing on and leaning into that label, that of a dowdy rural masseuse who acquires a small fortune from older Taipei men seduced by her magic fingers and whatnot.
Our heroine (Yu-Wei Shao) is an “eat a cookie” skinny TV anchor used to doing anything for clicks — fluff pieces on the politically-embattled premier’s dog-rescuing hobby, for instance, at the behest of the politician’s handlers. Even Li Mei’s choice for a husband (Figaro Tseng) seems focus-grouped.
She’s all about their wedding — the perfect photos, the media coverage, pleasing her doting dad (Tien-Chu Lee). She obssesses about her weight, her image, her work promotion and her daddy. Too bad if the groom gets pushed aside. But then, he’s into sex and she just isn’t.
And then there’s the opportunistic prosecutor who is sure he’s on the track of a master scammer who turns out to be Hsu Liang Ho, who just happens to be Li Mei’s dad’s neighbor and new paramour, and our “Unattractive Femme Fatale.”
What’s amusing about Prosecutor Lee isn’t his eager pursuit of fame and promotion, or his willingness to play ball to manipulate public opinion for his case, and perhaps away from the scandals about to envelope the government.
Prosecutor Lee is played by Rhyian Vaughan, an actor of Chinese and Welsh heritage who is a dead ringer for Tom Cruise. Every time I see him I expect him to jump out of a plane, on a bike or into an impossible mission and I chuckle. Look at that bottom photo and tell me I’m wrong.
Hsin Yin Sung’s latest — she did “On Happiness Road” — isn’t the most graceful weaving of all these disparate threads into a streamlined movie. Subplots drift into the background only to abruptly return to the foreground. Li Mei’s on-and-off engagement is the biggest one of those to lose in the mix.
But the bigger ideas resonate — a scandal blown-up without direct evidence, a “woman’s wiles” and agency overstated or discounted, the “unattractive” woman underestimated but having something she can teach the “perfect” one, the fragile manhood in this culture (the “victims” commit “suicide by charcoal” — lighting fires in closed spaces) and the media’s complicity in what we learn about and what gets covered up.
And a couple of scenes have a seriously twisted humor about them, not just the ones involving the look-alike for Nicole Kidman and Katie Holmes’ ex.
Rating: TV-14, explicit sex, nudity
Cast: Yu-Wei Shao, Mei-Hsiu Lin, Rhydian Vaughan, Figaro Tseng and Tien-Chu Lee
Credits: Scripted and directed by Hsin Yin Sung. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:54
Movie Nation 