“Terrible twos” and teens have nothing on Tweens when it comes to imagininative cruelty, shunning and making you question what you know and who you think you are.
This Dec. 24 release wears lots of newfound labels — “body horror” among them. But the story and stories like it were ancient when “Lord of the Flies” was published.
Adolescent flashback time?
Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein” is Gothic horror rendered in the grandest strokes.
The expansive, baroque settings are grandeur incarnate, with grandiose performances pitched to fill every pixel of the Grand Guignol frame that the scarlet, grey and gloomy green backdrops do not.
Where Robert Eggers’ “Nosferatu” was a younger filmmaker’s homage to one of the cornerstones of horror, del Toro’s take on Mary Shelley’s horror epic is a mature master’s contemplative, considered appreciation of a work that still has something to say to humanity two hundred years after it was published.
“Only Monsters Play God” is added to his film’s full title. That hints at the opera without song he’s made out of it, profound and sentimental and smart enough to recognize no modern interpretation of a scientist absorbed with humanity’s obsession with longer and longer life would be satisfying without a Byronic fatalism the Oscar winning director is old enough to understand.
Eternal life denies “death, the one remedy to all pain.”
Oscar Isaac is our wild-haired genius, raised to pursue science and be heedless of most anything else by his commanding, demanding and unsentimental Swiss man-of-science father, Baron Frankenstein (Charles Dance).
But young Victor’s motivation crossed into mania the night he say his mother bleed out in childbirth. His obsession with ending death has him experimenting and shocking the Edinburgh university where he teaches, and his ranting, theatrical defense of his “I would have command over the forces of life and DEATH” Jeremiad gets him fired.
But an onlooker at his faculty inquisition is his salvation. Harlander (Christoph Waltz) is there to bring him news of his brother, William (Felix Kammerer). He’s engaged to marry Harlander’s niece Elizabeth (Mia Goth). And he’s heard of Victor Frankenstein’s “mad” experiments and wants to underwrite them.
As the story is framed within a Danish polar expedition’s encounter with a towering, cowled “monster” whom they cannot kill, with battered and bloodied Victor there to confess when the captain (Lars Mikkelsen) asks “What manner of devil made him?” we know how this turned out.
That’s the beauty of this retelling of a timeworn tale. We know the plot, the characters, the themes and the subtexts. Writer-director del Toro introduces just enough novelty and an unexpected turn or two — one must leave narrative breathing room for Maggie Gyllenhaal’s just-as-anticipated “The Bride” of Frankenstein film next spring — to make the story “new.”
Our monster (Jacob Elordi, who first gained fame in “The Kissing Booth” and broke out in “Euphoria”) isn’t mute. He talks. “VICTOR” he shouts, before finding a shortcut to learning a philosopher’s vocabulary and mindset.
There are no villagers with pitchforks. Danish sailors will have to do. Victor’s great love here is (somewhat) unrequited, his passion for his brother’s intended. But in the best Mel Brooks tradition, we see the la-BOR-a-tory designed and installed in an abandoned “public works” (water pumping) tower left unfinished by the many wars of 19th century Europe.
And what do wars provide in plentitude? Fresh corpses to dissect, dismember and piece together for “galvanic” (electrical) reanimation, the doctor is told by his arms-dealing sponsor Harlander.
The casting could not be better. Isaac devours the screen with his rages and touches with his late-act epiphanies. Elordi, hired to give Alexander Skarsgaard a break from famous horror roles, brings a soulful turn to our cursed “monster.” Goth’s Euro-accent is never unsteady enough to deny the fact that as a horror icon (“Pearl,””X,” “Suspiria”) she belongs here more than most anybody else.
Waltz’s casting pretty much guarantees that Harlander has an “angle” he’s playing.
Mikkelsen, brother of Mads, brings gravitas and a hint of megalomania to the captain who hears both sides of this tale while trapped in a sailing ship in the polar ice.
And Dance, draped in a cape big enough to hold every actor who ever played “The Phantom of the Opera” all at once, is simply magnificent — vulpine malevolence incarnate and a mean man with a mission, to see that his science is served and continued by his oldest son.
I wasn’t crazy about the hoary “Let me tell you my story” framing device. Having two characters launch the flashbacks is just cumbersome. The turns towards sentiment are undermotivated, and even at two and a half hours in running time, the shifts in tone and point of view play as abrupt.
And any thriller that leans on CGI elk and wolves has cut corners in ways that can take you straight out of the movie, if only for a scene or three.
But “Frankenstein” is beautiful to look at and thoughtful enough to make one ponder its two hundred year old themes and warnings anew.
And if young Mr. Eggers and Ari Aster (“Hereditary”) figure the world of smart horror is their oyster, the Mexican master del Toro reminds us that the smart money — even a Netflix blank check — is always bet on him.
Rating: R, graphic bloody violence, nudity
Cast:: Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, Mia Goth, Christoph Waltz, Felix Kammerer, Lars Mikkelsen and Charles Dance
Credits: Scripted and directed by Guillermo del Toro, based on the novel by Mary Shelley. A Netflix release.
Running time: 2:32
Seems like this would be the most challenging music biopic of them all to keep honest for a deep dive.
An NPR program a few years back tackled the subject of Michael Jackson and why Black people have been disinclined to turn away from his, pedophilia, publicity stunts, sham marriages, skin lightening and the whole freak show be damned.
But if you don’t deal with those dark corners of his personality and psychology, you’re “whitewashing” him in the worst way.
This looks triumphalist, a fantasia sanitizing the image, like Baz L’s “Elvis.”
Would that play? Because swinging and missing at an honest take on MJ would be cringe beyond belief
You’d think these sorts of things would be figured out at a table read, if not in the audition.
Give your leading man his pages, make him read some of the fifth rate Raymond Chandler “tough guy” voice-over narration you have in mind.
“I only kill wolves to protect the sheep…I’m the BEST…I AM the ‘Exit Protocol.'”
Do you believe it? Do you believe him? Does he have the presence to pull off being “the best” hit man out there? An assassin’s assassin?
Scott Martin wrote, directed and acted in a Lou Diamond Phillips, Patric, Danny Trejo and Michael Paré B-movie Western titled “Big Kill” a few years back. Perhaps that’s where the delusion that he could carry a thriller was born.
But even a B/C movie like “Exit Protocol” demands a lead who won’t make the viewer feel embarrassed for veteran character actors Dolph Lundgren and Michael Jai White.
“Protocol” is a terrible script terribly conceived, directed and acted. Every time the phrase “the best” turns up we grimace in recognition that nothing here merits that phrase.
Hit man movies and those pretentious enough to label their killer an “assassin” because there’s no union rules that say they can’t are, to a one, “researched” by watching other hit man movies. Such figures are rarer than cultured, educated and erudite serial killers who love chianti and fava beans. Outside of the movies, they don’t exist.
And this nonsense of the “hitman who hunts hitmen” is totally a fictional and filmic invention.
So by design, these movies, from “Hitman” on down the line, grow dumber with every iteration. And if you don’t have an aged Pierce Brosnan or Liam Neeson or Wesley Snipes or whoever in the lead, you’re lost before you start, condemned to waste the viewer’s time.
Our contract killer Sam Hayden (Martin) narrates and narrates about being “the best” “assassin of assasins,” and how killing this or that “mark” is him doing “the world a favor.”
But “Section 8” screenwriter Chad Law and Martin do everything in their power to show us “the best” is just in his head. We meet Hayden during a botched “contract” in a church, where he’s given away the element of surprise to lecture his quarry. He shoots a lot and misses a lot.
This is repeated every time he has a hit his mob intermediary (J.B. Yowell, better suited to selling used cars, but only in a dealership his daddy owns) assigns him.
Screw that silencer on, pull the trigger and miss and miss.
Until, of course, you inexplicably befriend a grizzled killer (Lundgren, lumbering like Frankenstein’s butler Lurch these day) and have to shoot your way past legions of masked, tac-geared-up murderers. Those guys they never miss.
“Black Dynamite” White is brought in to assassinate the assassin, and the assassin assigned to kill the assassin. White tries to keep things professional, but the disappointment shows. Martin’s wife Stephanie Beran plays Wicked, another killer, because of course she does.
Listening to this dialogue and mulling over this half-assed plotting you don’t have to go to the screenwriter’s IMDb page to know how much he likes chewing gum. You can just picture it.
And director Shane Dax Taylor isn’t up to improving anything that was written or any of the acting or the drab uncinematic New Mexico locations.
Much of this crew has worked together before on similar fare (“The Best Man” is also a hitman movie), so it’s not like they didn’t know their leading man was no leading man. They’re just churning this junk out on a budget that guarantees it’ll sell, quality be damned.
So no, that’s nothing that could be discovered or corrected at a table read.
Rating: R, violence, profanity
Cast: Scott Martin, Dolph Lundgren, Charlotte Kirk, Lina Maya, J.B. Yowell, Stephanie Beran and Michael Jai White.
Credits: Directed by Shane Dax Taylor, scripted by Chad Law. A Saban release.
Running time: 1:24
The recent passing of Oscar winning actress Diane Keaton is reason enough to revisit one of her few directing credits, the lone documentary on her resume.
“Heaven,” which she completed and Island Pictures released back in 1987, when Keaton was at her Hollywood peak, is a playful, dizzy reflection of the woman herself — quirky and curious and fun, with flashes of insight and wry delight.
She made a film on a subject about which no one knows anything and thus everyone is an expert. So there are no Archbishops or Popes or Dalai Lamas weighing in here.
In a room artfully lit with architecture-mimicking shadows (in Palm Springs, apparently) Keaton questions some Protestant preachers, yes, and a rabbi is in the credits. There are Catholics in the ranks, but nobody in a collar appears on camera. Instead, she serves up samples of theologians and pastors from TV appearances, many of them vehement in their certitude.
Why question those who’re sure they have answers — “The New Jerusalem is 5000 times the height of New York,” the Bible says, according to one televangelist — when you can get family members, friends, hippies and hipsters, questioners and the curious, Salvation Army footsoldiers, Boy Scouts and boxing promoter Don King to speak on the great imponderables?
“Do you believe in heaven?” “Are you afraid to die?” “Can heaven be here on Earth?”
Every “expert,” even the questioning ones, picks a hill to die on.
“God is NOT a woman,” a bearded evangelist insists. “Heaven is an orgasm” a beau says in front of his giggling, blushing intended. “People never look in the sky,” one very old little old lady suggests. “There are SIGNS in the sky, Diane!”
Those “certain” they know can be angry or exasperated, and self-revealing in other ways. Belief has never been summed up better than by the lay preacher who says this.
“God likes to reward ignorance for ignorance’s sake.” The dumber you are, the more fervently you believe?
That was kind of the point in the Falwellian Reaganarchy of 1987 — mockery. In finding so many disparate points of view, from the devout breaking into song and quoting Scripture to the questioning demanding “proof” and contending with the circular logic of just whom the burden of proof lies with — believers or those who doubt — Keaton digs into layers of sometimes amusing superstition and belief and prods those who admit not having any answers beyond hopes and fantasies.
Nobody is identified on camera, putting every “expert” on a level playing field.
Working with editor Paul Barnes, Keaton excerpts decades of cinematic visions of the afterlife — “Green Pastures,” Astaire and Rogers “in heaven…dancing cheek to cheek” in “Top Hat,” David Niven and others riding that “Stairway to Heaven” and Spencer Tracy’s “A Guy Named Joe” wading across a fog-floored soundstage into the afterlife.
By the third act, the sense of mocking those with simple beliefs, pro or con, and the bickering recedes into the background and the film turns poignant, an effect enhanced by the fact that Keaton herself just died. That seems like the perfect moment for Sam Cooke to sing his Gospel hit, “That’s Heaven to Me.” And it still is.
Rating: PG-13, profanity, homophobic slurs
Cast: Don King, Victoria Sellers, Kenny Ostin, Abram Christ, Jacob Christ, Pastor L.D. Shaw, Evangelist Robert Hanan, Ruben Ben David, Pinkietessa Braithwaite, many others
Credits: Directed by Diane Keaton. An Island Pictures release re-issued by Lightyear.
Running time: 1:19
Adding the dismembered android upper half of Elle Fanning to the ancient but not-quite-played-out “Predator” franchise is paying off as it rolled up some $14 million+ Thursday night and Friday, on its way to a $40 million opening weekend.
Deadline.com is saying that a $60 million global opening weekend is in the cards for “Predator: Badlands,” the latest monstrous monster hunter hunting monsters movie. Decent reviews or not, this franchise has staying power. Considering how underwhelming this fall’s films have been in terms of box office take, that’s got to be a relief to the theater chains, which have been trotting out a parade of re-releases, speciality titles and the like as anime and the odd Indian film have been the only titles to consistently draw a crowd.
Case in point, the thin pickings fighting over the scraps in the rest of the Top Five.
“Regretting You” is getting that Colleen Hoover (“This Ends with Us”) crowd, pulling in another $7.1 million as it closes in on the $40 million mark. It cost about $30, with no big names in the cast, so it’s sure to finish in the black.
Third place goes to “Black Phone 2,” adding another $5.3 million. It will clear the $70 million barrier by midweek next week, a modest hit by horror blockbuster standards.
Amazon MGM’s faith-based “Sarah’s Oil” managed enough of a Thursday night and Friday to claim a $4.58 million opening weekend. It may turn out to have legs, but Zachary Levi’s not much of a draw and this doesn’t have Angel Studios behind it, urging people to buy extra tickets to ensure it’s a hit.
At least it’ll edge “Bugonia,” now in its third weekend of release and on track to earn less than $3.5.
“Bugonia” and Emma Stone and Jesse and Yorgos did not fend off Russell Crowe, Rami Malek, Michael Shannon, Richard E. Grant, John Slattery and “Nuremberg,” which earned $4 million. That star-studded cast might have produced an awards contender, but it didn’t. Reviews overall have been tepid.
Mubi, a relative newcomer to wide(ish) release competition, isn’t marketing its films well enough to move the needle. “Die My Love” has Oscar winners Jennifer Lawrence and Sissy Spacek, with Robert Pattinson, LaKeith Stanfield and Nick Nolte and sold barely enough tickets to crack the top ten ($2.3). “The Mastermind” suffered a similar fate.
It’s challenging, and a bit of an indulgent wallow. But reviewers have cut it some slack.
Reach out to critics and get more of us early access and maybe your movie will open with a bigger splash. Parking J-Law on Graham Norton’s chat show sofa isn’t enough.
Work work work actress Sydney Sweeney has another title in theaters, the limited release“Christy,” which has her starring in the story of boxer Christy Martin. People might have gone to see it, but Black Bear releasing has even less marketing money than Mubi. Barely cleared $1.3million and fell outside the top ten.
“Chainsaw Man”($3.6), “Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere” ($2.2) and the “Back to the Future” re-release got shoved out of the top five by the new titles. Only “Future” fell out of the top ten.
Can’t wait to read and review the new book by Nicolas Rapold.
Great anime is always a grand escape, like visiting a museum where the artwork tells a tale.
“Caterpillar” presents itself as a gay man’s documentary journey of self-discovery, when it’s really about body dysphoria/dysmorphia and faddish cosmetic surgery taken to its extreme.
David Taylor, a Miami hairdresser is biracial, wrestling with a troubled childhood, acceptance and obsessive dissatisfaction with the way he looks. He dotes on his mother as he suggests something he’s about to do to improve his “confidence,” “feel good about myself” and change the trajectory of his life.
But his tolerant “in her way” mother lets him know that she gave birth to a “good looking man,” and no “cutting” of any sort will be tolerated. No “cut your penis” removal, no “boobs,” nothing like that. This hurts his feelings, but that’s not what he has in mind anyway.
David wants Avatar eyes.
There’s a company — BrightOcular — in India doing these implants that give recipients other-worldly eye colors. It’s a natural place for this sort of sketchy “cosmetic” short-cut, being a nation that worships beautiful pop stars and actors, many of whom have otherworldly bright eyes — most of them gifted on them since birth — and a country barely removed from Third World standards for medical oversight.
David buries himself in social media endorsements and online ads — this or that “influencer” who’s traveling there to have this “totally safe” procedure done, giving them “those beautiful eyes that will hypnotize.”
David and others from all over the world plead for the chance to have this done, and when he somehow is offered this service “free,” in exchange for online endorsements, he meets men and women from many cultures and races also anxious for this “life changing” surgery.
A Jamaican New York Princess complains of the hard life that led up to her free-spending present day.
“What can I be content with? Just MORE!”
An underwear model (male) and women who have had botox, dental — Go to BRAZIL. “It’s just the best!” — and other “work” done burble away at this latest thing they consider “worth the risk.”
The medical consultations in India, which our filmmaker sits in on, are blunt.
“This is just fashion,” an opthomalogist warns. And there are side effects. “Your vision is more important than what we are doing here.”
Some years back, NPR slipped a “hot new trend in LA” fake story in one of its April Fool’s Day news programs. “Belly button removal is all the rage,” they lied, for laughs. The next day I had colleagues at the major newspaper where I worked come up and gush about the hoax, with even the native Angelinos on staff who’d heard it convinced it was real.
That’s kind of what we’re dealing with here. If you can imagine it as something people would pay to “improve” their appearance and be among the first to plunge into a fad, “influencers” gay and straight — narcissists to a one — will happily and heedlessly plunge right in.
A documentary is only as good as its subject. And while filmmaker Liza Mandelup had near total access to David’s self-absorbed life and even films the surgery, it’s hard to identify with these dizzy fools.
The fact that the implant mill is popping three patients in adjacent chairs in the same operating room speaks volumes. David may need to learn the Hindu translation of “F-around and find out.”
Our central character goes through fresh trauma, adds tattoos and changes of hair color and scenery on his way to a new David. Is any of this what it takes to improve his life? Are those alien Avatar eyes a game changer? Guess.
The characters are exactly what you expect them to be — superficial, vapid, not the brightest bulbs but each a tragic heroine or hero of their own narrative. David owns up to being “my own worst enemy” in the opening credits and never transitions from needy, impulsive and “image” obsessed to anyone who wouldn’t irritate the hell out of even his most tolerant friends.
Two hours with him in a film of this cringy, dubious “fashion” procedure served up with “No problem/What are you worried about?” Indian-accented salesmanship to dopes gullible enough to endure it is cinematic eye abuse in its own right.
Rating: graphic eye surgery sequences, profanity
Cast: David Taylor
Credits: Directed by Liza Mandelup. A Good Deed Entertainment release.
Running time: 1:51
Mona Fastvold’s film biography of a prophet of her times, a founder of a Christian sect which endures in some corners of New England to this day, suggests passion and historical detail — well, save for the fully furled sails of a speeding brig at sea — and some grammatically challenged blurbed endorsements from early reviews.
I stopped at a Shaker village in Maine some years back. Quakers who literally “quake?” Fascinating subject for a movie.
Christmas Day.
This feel good drama, “inspired by a Huffington Post” essay titled “Thank You, Cancer,” is an unlikely “for your consideration” contender being rolled out during awards season.
Not a “name” most of us will recognize in the cast, but a production and its producers can dream, can’t they?
Movie Nation 