The real test of a screen actor’s mettle isn’t a coveted turn in an awards-bait role, or even an ambitious chance to “stretch” and do something you’ve never done as a performer.
It’s showing up for something that, whatever your original hopes, you have begun to realize is a big budget, high profile stinker.
So kudos to Oscar winner Charlize Theron, Emmy winner Kerry Washington, Oscar nominee-to-be Michelle Yeoh and screen icon Laurence Fishburne for not phoning it in on “The School of Good and Evil.”
Whatever the Netflix suits were thinking when they threw a ton of money at Paul Feig to co-write and direct this fantasy spoof — based on a novel by Soman Chainani — this much is clear. It’s been a LONG time since “Bridesmaids” made the TV’s “Freaks & Geeks” creator Hollywood’s hottest comic property. And every passing year has made that one look like more and more of a Feig fluke.
There’s this two-campus school in the land of stories, where “villains'” are educated to be “pure evil” and heroines and heroes instructed in the ways of good, “true love’s kiss” and all that.
One school is run by Theron, the other by Washington. Guess which on-the-nose role each landed.
Two BFFs, cast when Feig decreed he only wanted “to see women named SOPHIA for this” (Sofia Wylie and Sophia Anne Caruso) are fetched from their provincial town not far from the one Belle in “Beauty and the Beast” grew up in, and enrolled in the school.
But Agatha (Wylie), the girl the townsfolk all assumed is a witch, because her mother raised her to be one, is sure she’s been mistakenly plopped into the airy fairy School for Good with all the pretty-mean-girls-who-want-to-be-princesses are. And her vain blonde pal (Caruso) named Sophia — just to keep it straight — is certain she was meant for the School for Good, yet is for some reason parked in the School for Evil.
As The Schoolmaster (Fishburne) “never makes mistakes,” whatever will our young ladies do? After they get makeovers and start their lessons on how to experience “true love’s kiss” and maybe find their prince (Jamie Flatters)? After, of course, ridiculing the no-nonsense (and not at all funny) voice-over narrator, the “Storian” (Cate Blanchett).
“You know we can HEAR you, narrator! You weirdo!“
So there’s a lot of Hogwarts and a little “Enchanted” and a whiff of every wisearsed take on fairytales in the plot, and a taste of “Fantastic Beasts” in the impressive effects and exotic if not exactly interesting or amusing magical creatures. And there’s just a hint of “Bridesmaids” in the attempted tone and that one moment when Professor Anemone (Yeoh) blurts out an s-bomb.
These two and a half hours of tedium have a childish and girlish target audience as the film tries to both reinforce to “get dolled up and attract a mate” “princess” trope and flip it or at least ridicule it at the same time.
This was probably crap from its inception, but I didn’t read the book and couldn’t pick out novelist Soman Chainani’s cameo (he plays a teacher at the school) and get an idea of how sheepish or embarrassed or “Just glad that check cleared” he looked.
But Theron and Washington vamp this monstrosity up and almost never let on that they know this project didn’t really work out. That sets an example for the many younger players in the cast, who do their best to play more than this scene’s stunning costume.
Good for them. And let’s hope Netflix rewards that loyalty with a better project next time, although Theron might consider steering clear, considering her luck with this and that dog “The Old Guard” that Netflix built around her. Unless she needs the money.
Rating: PG-13, profanity, violence
Cast: Charlize Theron, Kerry Washington, Michelle Yeoh, Laurence Fishburne, Sofia Wylie, Sophia Anne Caruso, Jamie Flatters, Patti Lupone and the voice of Cate Blanchett
Credits: Directed by Paul Feig, scripted by David Magee and Paul Feig, based on the novel by Soman Chainani. A Netflix release.
Every time you figure “It’s time to pack your bags for the C-movie express,” Gerry B. shows up in a dumb thriller that somehow “plays.” He buys in, and we buy in — up to a point. And somehow, the thrilling edges out the silly and Paisley, Scotland’s finest brings that clumsy beast home.
“Plane” is almost as plain as its title. It has ludicrous plot points, comically-contrived back story elements, Milan runway-ready womenfolk and villains who are just “The Other” — Filipino separatists who don’t really have a point of view save for “Let’s take some hostages, and shoot as many as we don’t need.”
Directed by the Frenchman who gave us the criminal career of “Mesrine” on the screen, “Plane” is the quintessence of “a really dumb movie that plays.”
Butler’s Capt. Brodie Torrance, a TrailBlazer Airlines pilot for a nearly empty and “old” (per the college girl passengers) 727 to fly from Singapore to Tokyo and on to Honolulu just in time for New Year’s.
Widowed, with a college student daughter (Haleigh Hekking) waiting for him in Hawaii, he’s rushed — no time to shave — and ready to get this show on the road.
A storm changes all that, and in the film’s harrowing first act, we see a more or less by-the-book response to a lightning strike forced landing from high altitude. Capt. Torrance and Hong Kong native co-pilot Dele (Yoson An) somehow get the plane low enough to spy an island, stumble across a road, and land that rear-engined beast by the stubble of Torrance’s chinny chin chin.
That’s when the trouble really begins. They don’t know where they are. Their airline back in New York doesn’t either. This corner of the vast Philippine Archipelago is under the control of “gangsters, thugs, separatists.” And the guard escorting a murder suspect (Mike Colter) to Toronto for trial was one of those killed in their encounter with the storm.
There’s nothing for it but for the captain to take the guard’s gun, and the walking-muscle of a suspect, and hike out to look for help.
I know, right?
Of course our pilot has some “background” that will pay dividends in this scenario. Of course our suspect has “special skills.” And no, the script does damned little to create suspicion and wariness between the two men. They’re chummy, almost straight off.
Because “Plane’s” got bigger fish to fry.
The violence in “Plane” is sudden, shocking and damned personal, as director Jean-François Richet keeps his camera tight and hand-held on the hand-to-hand combat sequences, and he stages the shootouts on a “unruly mob vs. professionals” level.
Butler has perhaps his best onscreen brawl-to-the-death since “300.” Colter (TV’s “Luke Cage”)? Look at him. What goon with a gun would have a prayer against him?
The “professionals” here are the “private assets” (mercenaries) commissioned by the airline’s freelance crisis manager (Tony Goldwyn) to extract these stranded travelers from the clutches of Southwest the separatists.
That’s a whole different point of view in the film, “crisis managing” a lost airplane, with the airline’s chief (Paul Ben-Victor) at odds with fellow who manages — in a PR and search and rescue sense — such disasters for a living. Not making Goldwyn’s character a cynical heavy in all this is a bit surprising.
“Plane” is, in many ways, a classic January or August film, a movie destined for a low-attendance dumping-ground month on the movie release calendar. But every January or August produces an overperformer or two, dumb genre movies that defy lowered-expectations and connect with audiences.
And even though we already have one of those this January — “M3GAN” — and even though Butler’s fanbase has aged into its nickname (“GerryAtrics”), he’s got another visceral, involving action pic that’s not great, but works well enough to make us forget “Last Seen Alive” and his last few flops, if only for the month of January.
Rating: R, violence, profanity
Cast: Gerard Butler, Mike Colter, Daniella Pineda, Yoson An, Evan Dane Taylor, Remi Adeleke, Paul Ben-Victor and Tony Goldwyn
Credits: Directed by Jean-François Richet, scripted by Charles Cumming and J.P. Davis. A Lionsgate release.
Feel good movies are a universal language, a cinema lover’s comfort food whose formula crosses borders and language barriers.
I dare say “Kitchen Brigade” would amuse, tickle and touch in most any language. But the year’s first winner in this all-important genre is French. So of course, as the title promises, it’s about food and set in a restaurant.
But this bon bon from director and co-writer Louis-Julien Petit (“The Invisibles”) dips into competitive cooking reality TV, soccer, and multiculturalism, with migrant kids awaiting news on whether they’ll be accepted as immigrants or summarily deported back to Bangladesh, Ivory Coast, Morocco, Ethiopia, Congo or all points in between.
It’s smart and topical, touching and touchy. And it is, as the French would put it, un putain de délice — delightful, with an expletive added for emphasis.
Audrey Lamey, a regular on French TV, plays a frustrated and stubborn sous chef who opens our story by quitting her job with the arrogant but popular and ever-so-telegenic Chef Lyna (Chloé Astor), who should know better than to mess with Cathy Marie’s famed “beet organ” appetizer. That’s a dish of tube-shaped tuber slices, arranged like a pipe organ and served with just the right salad dressing.
Cathy Marie is proud, a woman with a reputation, which gets her offers to audition for “The Cook,” a cook-off challenge reality show. But she dismisses that. She will cook! She will save up for her own restaurant! Somebody give her a job!
Alas, the one place that makes an offer “embellished” their ad, just a mite. Lorenzo, played by that dashing EveryGaul François Cluzet, sheepishly admits this “charming” eatery with a “demanding clientele,” La Roptiere, is actually not a restaurant at all. It’s a youth hostel for migrants waiting to see if they qualify to get into French schools so that they can remain in France.
Cathy Marie’s struggling-actress pal (Fatou Kaba) nags her into taking the gig. But there’s this “nightmare” of a kitchen (mostly microwaves) and everything she’s to serve is canned.
“They love ravioli and soccer,” headmaster Lorenzo shrugs. We’ll soon see about that, starting with Cathy Marie opening the ravioli cans, dumping the canned sauce, washing and baking the individual raviolis and plating her dishes with a sauce she makes herself.
Voila!
It only takes a couple of extra hours to manage that, which will never do.
What she wants are “fresh ingredients,” and Lorenzo dismisses her with an “eight Euros a head” budget, he doesn’t care what she serves with that. What she needs is “commis,” kitchen assistants — help. And that’s how a dozen of the eager-to-assimilate newcomers, teenage boys, come to join her in the kitchen and learn at the feed of a queen a cuisine.
One of the reasons “feel good” movies are comfort food is the reassuring familiarity of their formula. The obstacles begin with the food, the nuisance matronly fangirl teacher (Chantal Neuwirth) and the working conditions and spread to that one African Muslim boy who won’t be bossed around, especially by a woman.
“No religion, and no misogyny” in my kitchen, Cathy Marie decrees.
There’s a bit of education for the non-restaurateur viewer and the migrant kids as our chef compares her kitchen “brigade” to a soccer team, from front-of-house (“Defense!”) to garnish (“Striker!”) to dishwasher, who is, of course, in goal.
The story arc has our haughty chef take an interest in others, for once, and the not-quite-as-desperate-as-is-warranted kids warming to her, to French cooking and the culture they fled conflict and poverty to escape to.
The four credited screenwriters cook up a seriously moving Big Obstacle, right on cue to start the third act. And they deliver a finale that involves something you might expect — reality TV — but that still manages to deliver a delightful twist that will touch your heart.
Lamey makes Cathy Marie’s journey almost as moving as those of her young charges, who again as you might expect, share their homeland cuisine with our jaded chef. Cluzet’s presence is a sturdy comfort, and among the kids, the youngest (Yannick Kalombo), the most talented cook (Amadou Bah) and the hardest nut to crack (Mamadou Koita) make the sharpest impressions.
They ensure that this is one feel good movie that won’t make you mind reading subtitles, and that will almost certainly whet your appetite for a little haute cuisine when you’re done.
Rating: unrated, some profanity
Cast: Audrey Lamey, François Cluzet, Fatou Kaba, Chantal Neuwirth, Yannick Kalombo, Amadou Bah and Mamadou Koita
Credits: Directed by Louis-Julien Petit, scripted by Louis-Julien Petit, Liza Benguigui, Sophie Bensadoun and Thomas Pujol. A Samuel Goldwyn release.
“Beautiful Beings” is a rough and harrowing coming-of-age drama in the tradition of “Kids,” “Thirteen” and “My Own Private Idaho.”
Any hint of “Stand by Me” romanticized boy bonding is smothered where we fear these unparented, impulsive 13-year-olds will end up, face down in a “Trainspotting” gutter on an island — Iceland — which has no trains, but lots of drugs, addicts, bad parents and Scandinavian depression.
Iceland’s submission for Best International Feature (foreign language film) has teen violence, teen smoking, teen drinking, sex and rape, and a bizarre touch of magical realism that gives the entire tale a dream quality.
It’s about three free range Reykjavik lads — played by Birgir Dagur Bjarkason, Viktor Benóný Benediktsson and Snorri Rafn Frímannsson — who hang together and find themselves dragged into the constant conflicts stirred up by the hulking, hotheaded Konni (Benediktsson). Addi (Bjarkason), the most “normal” and middle class of the lot, takes karate lessons, which is why he’s not shy about joining in whatever feud Konni has instigated.
But Addi is sensitive enough to show compassion for the mercilessly-bullied Baldur, or Balli (Áskell Einar Pálmason). Whatever the others’ living situation, Balli, picked on because he “smells,” downcast every step he takes through every miserable day of his life, has it worse.
His junky mother (Ísgerður Elfa Gunnarsdóttir) stopped cleaning the house when her abusive brute of a second husband was tossed in jail. His teen addict sister (Kristín Ísold Jóhannesdóttir) took that “anything to get out of this house” route and hooked up with the first guy with access to an apartment.
Addi takes pity on Balli after seeing him on TV after Balli’s latest beating put him in the hospital. And eventually Konni and Siggi (Frímannsson) accept the timid “gimp” into their smoking, trespassing and vandalizing “gang.”
Even not-quite-well-adjusted Addi has his issues at home. His alcoholic dad ditched him, and his mother is sure she’s clairvoyant, which infuriates him. But maybe he “senses” things, too.
As the opening scene is the boys, hooded up and armed headed to some sort of fateful confrontation, we can only wonder what Addi or his talks-to-herself-mother didn’t see.
“Beautiful Beings,” titled “Berdreymi” in Icelandic, is superb at capturing the universal problem of idle, unsupervised boys making bad choices, creating “Lord of the Flies” pecking orders and lashing out in violence because nobody’s taught them otherwise.
The second feature of writer-director Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson has, like his debut feature “Heartstone,” homoerotic strains in the affection among the boys, as well as a murky view of what is legally, pretty much any where on Earth, a rape scene.
There’s a clumsy shift in point-of-view in the film’s in media res opening, from our dreaming unidentified narrator to the bullied Balli. It wrong-foots the film, which takes a while to settle into being mostly from Addi’s point of view.
But Guðmundsson is quickly establishing himself as a talented, unblinking chronicler of his island homeland. “Beautiful Beings” is a most worthy film for the country’s film community to submit to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and I could certainly see it landing a nomination.
Rating: unrated, violence including rape, drug abuse, teen smoking, profanity
Cast: Birgir Dagur Bjarkason, Áskell Einar Pálmason, Viktor Benóný Benediktsson, Snorri Rafn Frímannsson, Ísgerður Elfa Gunnarsdóttir, Kristín Ísold Jóhannesdóttir and Anita Briem
Credits: Scripted and directed by Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson. An Altered Innocence release.
Once upon a time, at the tale end of the Golden Age of the Spaghetti Western, a couple of canny Italian producers and directors figured out that at home and abroad, a big chunk of the audience for those oddball sagebrush sagas was boys, and men who never grew out of “The Three Stooges.”
It wasn’t the iconic themes, the soaring score and the Italian take on (Spanish) Western vistas these folks showed up for. It was the fancy gunplay, the over-the-top brawls, silly characters and the nonsensical stories slapped together between “the cool parts.”
Slapstick was more important, and you can see traces of this even in Sergio Leone’s “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” But other pictures such as “Aces High,” “Boot Hill” and the “Trinity” films — “They Call Me Trinity,” “Trinity is Still My Name,” etc –went all in on the laughs. They were throwbacks to an earlier era in screen comedy, when “slap” fights were a big part of slapstick.
The stars of these films were often a Laurel and Hardy pair of Italian actors given English names, Terrence Hill and Bud Spencer — a thin, handsome chap teamed with the burly, ever-grumpy Big Man. They even made action comedies without horses. One of them was this goofy farce about a road race and a prize these two clowns could not decide how to fairly split up — a red dune buggy.
“Altrimenti ci arrabbiamo” this 1974 film was titled, “Watch Out, We’re Mad.” And in the world’s frantic search for that next pitch those content-craving suckers at Netflix will buy, it’s been revived for a new slap-happy slapstick farce, a reboot/sequel that’s as dated as a dune buggy, with only occasional flashes of the “Stooges” silliness that marked the original.
Edoardo Pesce and Alessandro Roja are the new Spencer and Hill, mercifully not given “Hollywood” names, cast as the sons of the two oafs back in ’74, who as kids took the dune buggy out and promptly lost it to a couple of bikers.
Now, “some years later” (Don’t do the math.), the former 13 year-olds are lured into a new “Road Rally” involving matched Beemer beaters on an offroad course, a race in which they finish in a tie. And damned if that 1974 dune buggy doesn’t become the bone of contention for a new generation and a pawn in a new game involving a rich, scummy developer (Christian De Sica), his dense, no-good-at-racing son (Francesco Bruni), the developer’s on-payroll motorcycle gang led by the a biker (Massimiliano Rossi) and a circus parked on land that the developer covets.
Torsillo is the man who orders his son to steal the dune buggy, which the rich man put up as a prize for a “rally” race that no one came to watch.
“It’s more fun to get something when you don’t deserve it.”
The endangered circus features a fetching tiger-tamer (Alessandra Mastronardi), and assorted clowns, sideshow characters (dwarves, et al) and a not-that-sharp strong man (Michael Schermi).
It took five credited screenwriters to back engineer this tale of the town or Tortuga into a new movie, and that aptly-named director Younuts of the teen comedy “Under the Riccione Sun” was parked behind the camera.
What works is what always worked, the slap contests and slap fights. Any fan of action cinema will spot how funny the stage punches all are when they’re open-hand slaps and obviously fake “stage punches” turned into “stage slaps.
There are a couple of decent brawls that precede a grand finale which is kind of funny. But even in that bust-up-the-developers’ big “launch party” scene, even bigger laughs are missed or simply blown because five screenwriters and Younuts notwithstanding, none of these pasta di giornos is an undiscovered comic genius.
The leads are passable, with Pesce summoning up memories of the late Bud Spencer and his fellow Italian slapstick “Big Man,” Israeli-born Paul L. Smith, who played Bluto in Robert Altman’s “Popeye.”
But even when you’re remaking junk, you’ve got to bring more to the table than look-alikes and faded memories of a movie that you’re remaking.
Rating: TV-14, constant fisticuffs
Cast: Edoardo Pesce, Alessandro Roja, Alessandra Mastronardi, Christian De Sica, Francesco Bruni, Michael Schermi and Massimiliano Rossi
Credits: Directed by Younuts, scripted by Vincenzo Alfieri, Giancarlo Fontana, Tommaso Renzoni, Guiseppe Stasi and Andrea Sperandio, based on the 1974 film. A Netflix release.
Actor turned writer-director Jesse Eisenberg‘s feature directing debut turns out to be just the sort of film you’d expect from the “Social Network/Now You See Me” star.
“When You Finish Saving the World” is smart and articulate. It’s flippant. There’s a hint of idealism, a heavy dose of “not fitting in,” and an earnest desire to do right clashing with some self-mocking narcissism.
Sweet, but brittle. Deep, but kind of twee. You can pick up on that just from the title. And it works, because Eisenberg has a good ear, a good eye and good intentions.
In Ziggy Katz, whose tale Eisenberg originally wrote as an Audible audio drama, Eisenberg has scripted an ambitious, over-compensating, insecure but exhibitionistic teen and thrown him into conflict with his idealistic, “woke” do-gooder mother, a social worker/counselor who runs the local women’s shelter.
It’s a “skips a generation” parable, a kid rejecting the values of his parents, exploiting them to live the way he wants. And it’s a send-up of “Mother Knows Best,” because Mom needs to be paying attention for that to be the case.
Ziggy (Finn Wolfhard) is growing up in a liberal household in a college town — Bloomington, Indiana. He’s got this online “business,” writing “classic folk rock” for this compensated musical vlog that has a whiff of “Fan’s Only” about it. Fans all around the world subscribe and tune in to Ziggy Kills, which he figures is his ticket to fame and glory.
“I’m going to be rich and you’re going to be poor,” he taunts his mother, Evelyn (Oscar winner Julianne Moore).
Ziggy’s self-absorbed and self-delusional. He’s not really picked-up on the mix of introverted teen girls and uh, adults who log into his Zoom meeting style presentations. They might be more interested in the model-cheekboned mop-top sharing a little face time with them.
His parents are tuned-out. Dad’s apparently a retired professor who reads, shops and cooks and frets about “living with two narcissists.” Mom keeps her responses locked on “empathy without emotion” and her face an impassive blank. She’s dealing with trauma and sad stories from women and children in crisis all day long, and a city reluctant to keep her “business” funded. So she’s wrapped up in her own world, too.
She has no idea what she’s walking in on when she ducks her head into Ziggy’s room. He has little interest in her life and work. She’s just a daily SmartCar ride to school, as far as he’s concerned.
But then he finds a new crush, the activist/le-ist Lila (Alisha Boe). Maybe he’s been a little hasty in rejecting his mother’s picket-lines-and-passion-for-causes upbring. Or maybe he’s not self-aware enough to see how needy, self-promoting and shallow he comes off when he brags to Lila about subscribers, ratings and his online “certified” status.
Mother Evelyn is also facing a crisis of confidence. There’s a new teen (Billy Byrk) staying with his mother in her shelter. He is sensitive, studious and possesses “a special heart,” she assures him. Maybe, she thinks, she can alter his life’s path in ways that foul-mouthed backtalker Ziggy never took to. The fact that he’s good-looking may figure into that.
Eisenberg and his stars do a grand job of creating conversational duologues. Neither parent nor child really knows where the other is coming from because they’re talking and not listening. He’s looking for ways to learn to be more tuned-in, and she’s judging this shallow capitalist she barely recognizes for trying to “take a shortcut” to get the attention of a cute leftist “Union Maid.”
He could take the one piece of advice she offers, “listen” and pay attention to the world. She could recognize that she doesn’t need a “guide my son to share my values” do-over. The one living under her roof is still malleable, if she’d just see it.
Eisenberg writes some funny scenes, lightly mocking the leftist club Lila goes to where she can perform her environmental protest poems, see civil rights puppet shows and hear labor movement classics like “The Internationale” sung, a cappella. Ziggy cannot read a room for the life of him.
And the Evelyn/Kyle scenes come right up to the edge of troubling, letting us question motives and wonder just how deep into an R-rating this slight, breezy and yet thoughtful film will go.
The major shortcoming of “When You Finish Saving the World” is its own incompleteness. It feels unfinished. No one life is examined in any real depth. Evelyn’s marriage, Ziggy’s afterthought of a friend-at-school, Kyle’s unwillingness to judge his abusive father, all add up to meat that would flesh out this gentle stor into something more insightful and consequential.
It’s still a promising directing debut from an actor we always assumed was sitting on sets, wide-eyed watching and listening and taking notes between scenes, even when he was just starting out.
Rating: R, for profanity, discussions of spousal abuse
Cast: Julianne Moore, Finn Wolfhard, Alisha Boe, Billy Bryk and Jay O. Sanders.
Credits:Scripted and directed by Jesse Eisenberg. An A24 release.
I’ve reviewed scores of these “Man…is the most DANGEROUS game” to hunt thrillers. And I’m wholly prepared to call this heartless, pulse-free corpse about creating corpses “The Stalking Fields” the worst of the lot.
Let me cut to the chase to save you all of the “What the hell is this all about?” muddling and muttering I had to do trying to make sense of the scatterbrained, nonsensical opening act.
There’s this company, AmaCorp, that’s going out, researching and kidnapping Americans with police records or bad tendencies, and then setting them loose to be hunted by disturbed government killers of the SEAL/Special Forces variety.
Cut the doomed loose in “The Stalking Fields,” send a team out to lead our mentally broken (PTSD) assassins back into the fold by generating an easy “kill” or two.
The one mass shooter/super-soldier (Sean Crampton) is a guy the government really wants back.
“Doing good doesn’t feel good any more,” he confesses. But let the Col. in the field (Richard O. Ryan) and the amoral Israeli designer of the program (Rachael Markarian) have a go at him. Round up some not-quite-randoms.
Kill some not-so-innocent “innocents” and he’ll Woodman will be as good as new.
The plot points are common to the modern version of this century-old genre. Yes, the victims are trapped in a fixed “game.”
The sets are a forest, and plastic-sheets hung on walls meant to simulate the “base” all this murderous nonsense is planned from. There are middling murders and a cliched flashback or two.
Terrible movie, dull and heartless and drably-acted by actors whose agents have no souls, the proof being they “booked” the poor players for this unthrilling thriller about hunting humans, “the most dangerous game.”
Rating: unrated, violence, profanity
Cast: Sean Crampton, Taylor Kalupa, Rachael Markarian, Adam J. Harrington, Ryan Marsico, Kevin Pasdon, Richard O. Ryan, Nora Garrett
Credits: Directed by Ric Maddox, scripted by Sean Crampton, Jordan Wiseley. A Gravitas release.
What, again with the incantations, the pentagrams, the “protective circle” of ashes?
Another ancient text turns to flames when you say the wrong thing?
Another horned demon skittering up the walls? Oy!
“The Offering” is a New York Jewish trip through horror tropes, an everything-but-real-frights thriller about this “taker of children” demon who comes after a pregnant woman who has joined her husband for a visit with her Ultra Orthodox father-in-law, who has been estranged from his son because the lad married a “shiksa.”
Then again, maybe Art (Nick Blood) was just trying to burn that bridge so that he wouldn’t be trapped in that ancient Brooklyn brownstone, in that family, in that tradition-obsessed culture and in his father’s business.
Father Saul (the superb character actor Allan Corduner) is a mortician, catering to the specific requirements of his faith and those who share it. Steady work and lucrative it may be. But it ain’t for everybody.
Art’s a real estate broker who needs something from his father. Wife Clara (Emily Wiseman) doesn’t know about that, and just seems relieved to have this rapprochement with her father-in-law.
Saul’s toothpick-chewing, judgmental assistant Hemish (Paul Kaye) sees through the son. But when father and his assistant decide to stick Art with handling a fresh corpse that’s come in, their “Don’t mess up,” seems, at the very least, disrespectful, even if Art used to do this work before leaving home.
Considering all that follows, it’s a big mistake on a lot of levels. An elderly, widowed scholar (Anton Trendafilov) died under supernatural circumstances. We know this from the film’s opening scene. Saul, Heimish and especially hapless Art have no idea. That knife the guy supposedly stuck in his own chest? That blue pendant around his neck? They have significance that Art has no clue about.
Uh. Oh.
The effects are good, if nothing we haven’t seen scores of times before. The acting is competent, if unaffecting, and that’s more a product of direction.
The plot’s confusing “taker of children” features allusions to missing kids and a girl demon, but seems thinly developed and sloppy.
What’s unusual and fascinating about “The Offering” in this Ultra Orthodox setting, with its exotic terminology, “ancient” lore and promise of something resembling a Jewish exorcism. I’m not sure how much of this is built on the foundations of real tradition and how much is screenplay invention, but there are indicators that this could work and the thrills could “play.”
Yes, the characters are horror tropes — consulting the “expert” on these things, a scholar whose real job is in the diamond district, the pregnant prey — as are the situations and frights. But setting them in a funeral home, in the midst of mourning (Cover that mirror or else!) is a novelty.
The bar for this version of “J-Horror” is high (“The Vigil,” “The Possession”), but not so high that “The Offering” couldn’t have managed something fresh and more interesting and at least more sensible than this.
The movie never establishes the love and devotion of the marriage, the ache of loss or the terror of Clara facing an unknown threat in an alien community that hasn’t wholly accepted her.
This “Offering” climaxes with a half-shrugged, half-shouted “Yeah, AND?”
Rating: unrated, violence
Cast: Nick Blood, Emily Wiseman, Paul Kaye and Allan Corduner
Credits: Directed by Oliver Park, scripted by Hank Hoffman. A Decal release.
The movies that matter in your life burn into the memory that first encounter with them.I saw “Chariots of Fire” at a preview in Charlotte, N.C., with local college and high school track teams in attendance, at a now long-closed cinema near now-renamed UNC-Charlotte. And I remember getting downright teary over just how beautiful this lovely period piece unfolding before me was.
It’s not just the stunning images of “Out of Africa,” “Moonstruck” and “Memphis Belle” director of photography David Watkin, or the crystalline synthesizer score of Vangelis Papathanassiou. There’s the immaculate period-perfect production design, the world of weathered stone and inherited, poshly-turned-out privilege it depicts.
The cast, a blend of the fresh-faced and the legendary, is remarkable. Lump them in the with stars of the PBS import “Brideshead Revisited” and you could feel a tidal wave, a whole generation of British actors about to wash over world cinema thanks to what the Brits would spend the ensuing decades proving that they do best — recreating their recent and distant past. And the synthesizer wasn’t the only music in it. There are lush sacred choral works, snippets of the operettas of Gilbert & Sullivan, bagpipes and bands laced throughout. The story is a flashback within a flashback. In the “present,” we sit in on a 1978 memorial service for the Elder Statesman of British sport. Through that, we drift into that iconic image of the film, young track athletes training by running down a Scottish beach (Fife) just before the 1924 Olympics.
One of their number, Aubrey Montague (Nicholas Farrell) writes a letter home, taking us back to 1919, when he met the great sprinter Harold Abrahams (Ben Cross) as they enrolled in Trinity College in Cambridge. “Monty” and we see the intensity of the Jewish Abrahams, and his prickliness. It is just after World War I, and disabled veterans are all about, as is anti-Semitism. Abrahams is determined to stand out, win and shave their snobbery up their noses.
“I’m forever in pursuit and I don’t even know what I am chasing.”
John Gielgud and the great British director and sometime narrator and actorLindsay Anderson (“If…,” “Oh Lucky Man,” “The Whales of August”) play the high-born “masters” of their respective colleges, anti-Semites from birth.
“Academically sound. Arrogant. Defensive to the point of pugnacity,” the Master if Caius (Anderson) intones.
“As ‘they’ invariably are,” Mr. Master of Trinity (the Oscar-winning Gielgud) sneers. Abrahamson means to win an Olympic medal a few years down the line, and his determined push for personal glory rankles the higher-ups.
Meanwhile, to the north in Scotland, the saintly Eric Liddell (Ian Charleson) is a star rugby player, the son of missionaries who grew up in China, and a man whose own mission is preaching and returning to China to spread the word of God. He is a naturally gifted runner coaxed into changing his focus, if only for a while.
“I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast. And when I run I feel His pleasure.”
Abrahams figures out he’s going to need a “professional” coach to best Liddell and chase a gold medal and hires the even-more-outside outsider Sam Massabini (Ian Holm). He’s also distracted by the transcendent beauty Sybil Gordon, a singing stage actress played by South African Alice Krige
Nigel Havers plays the Oxbridge dandy, renamed Lord Lindsay in the film, a “natural” athlete of title and impeccable breeding who puts down his cigarette to sprint and dash through the low-hurdles, which he masters by parking glasses of champagne on each one, vowing to “not spill a drop” as he gallops through them.
He’s meant to be adorably insufferable, and he is, although most viewers might embrace him as the embodiment of noblesse oblige and the privilege “amateur” athletics set out to test and honor.
The “villains” of the Olympics are the always-to-be-feared American Olympians, with two famous sprinters, Charles Paddock and Jackson Scholz, played by peaking stars Dennis Christopher and coiled, compact walking muscle Brad Davis (he was in producer David Puttman’s “Midnight Express”).
Location after lovely location for this film captures the place and recreates the time in glorious detail.
Some of the loveliest scenes in “Chariots of Fire” are slow motion reveries on the track. But terrific tracking shots takes us through the pell-mell that first day at Cambridge, and an intimidating peek at the American team training in Paris, all business. Note Christopher’s choice of leg warm-ups, on his back, mock-pedaling a bicycle.
Whatever the film and filmmakers’ politics, “Chariots of Fire” is an inherently conservative enterprise, never wholly mocking the high born, never wholly embracing the outsiders and most fervently celebrating the pious and divinely-inspired Liddell.
No one “brings down” the system. Abrahams merely infiltrates it and comes to be accepted as both “a gentleman,” a patriot and “one of us.”
“Chariots” exists in a few versions, so be certain to choose the longest you can find, as sequences are omitted by this one, and a trickier opening can be seen in that one. Otherwise, you might miss Kenneth Branagh and Stephen Fry in crowd and ensemble scenes, with Fry one of the singers in the finale of a production of H.M.S. Pinafore the students mount. Michael Lonsdale, already a star thanks to “Day of the Jackal” and as a Bond villain in “Moonraker,” is allegedly in here somewhere, but I’ve never noticed him. Among the men of this male-dominated cast, I’d say Farrell, the embodiment of privilege and also-ran pluck who outlives most of his teammates in “Chariots,” had perhaps the most durable career, in supporting roles in the decades that followed. There he was in “The Iron Lady,” here he is in “Munich: The Edge of War.”
The Scot Charleson, who peaked with “Chariots” and a plum supporting part in “Gandhi,” died of AIDS less than ten years after “Chariots.”
Cross had a long if less stardusted than one might have hoped career. I just reviewed the last film he appeared in, a horror tale, “Prey for the Devil.”
Holm’s lovely twinkle in “Chariots” was a nice contrast to the heartless android he’d played in “Alien.” He’d eventually achieve fantasy film immortality with the “Lord of the Rings” films, returning to Tolkien as adorable Bilbo after first playing Frodo in the definitive BBC/NPR radio series back in 1979.
But Krige, who emerged from “Chariots” as a not-quite-name star, quickly established herself in horror (“Ghost Story”) and who became a fan favorite in the “Star Trek” universe, is the one player in the enterprise (ahem) who became an icon. She acted in period pieces, romances and thrillers. She was the Witch in the brilliant “Gretel & Hansel” and the title role and magnetic presence at the heart of “She Will,” she has the kind of fame that films confirm and fan conventions render immortal. Actor turned screenwriter Colin Welland went on to adapt the South African and the “Lord of the Flies” parable “War of the Buttons.” Director Hugh Hudson aslo peaked with “Chariots,” with “My Life So Far” and his last film, “Finding Altamira” far from atoning for the big budget disasters “Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan,” “Revolution,” in which he failed to wrestle America’s founding into a movie and “Lost Angels.”It was Oscar-winning producer David Puttman who went on to preside over years of prestige pictures such as “The Killing Fields” and “The Mission,” taking a shot at turning Columbia Pictures into a prestige studio in the ’80s. He failed. One common thread in stories from film magazines and trade publications from that era seemed to me, as a budding critic back then, and how resented and disliked the folks behind “Chariots” were by mainstream Hollywood. Like Harold Abrahams in “Chariots,” they were seen as “brash” and “arrogant” outsiders by the Old Guard. The notion of what “snobs” they were turned up in profiles of Puttnam and Hudson, pouring out of the pages of “Fast Fade,” a quickie “biography” of Puttnam that came after his brief run at Columbia. You can see it on the IMDb bio of Hudson, accurately labeled an “Etonian” as if that shorthand (entitled upper class Brit) could be missed by anyone. But there’s no escaping the impact of their landmark film, a game-changer for British cinema and a piece of Thatcher-era triumphalism that shifted Britain’s place in the world of film, a moment worth heralding as moment of returned glory in Sam Mendes’ semi-autobiographical “Empire of Light.”
Seen today, with all its striking, dated synthesizer music and stuffily-tolerated British classism, it’s still glorious, the sort of dreamy memory that provokes Pavlovian tears in a film fan who remembers what a stunning moment it recreates and what a wonder that the film itself was when first seen.
Rating: PG
Cast: Ben Cross, Ian Charleson, Alice Krige, Nigel Havers, Nicholas Farrell, Ian Holm, Nigel Davenport, Brad Davis, Lindsay Anderson and John Gielgud.
Credits: Directed by Hugh Hudson, scripted by Colin Welland. A Warner Bros. release on Vudu, Apple TV, Amazon, Youtube and PositivTV
“Under Her Control” is a surrogacy-gone-wrong thriller wrapped in a “Devil Wears Prada” package.
This Spanish melodrama starts slowly and lumbers towards a Big Finish that isn’t nearly big enough to atone for the tedium that precedes it.
First-time feature director Fran Torres gets a few hot sex scenes into his debut, and spills some blood in the finale. But the middle acts are one long siesta thanks to a low-stakes script (by Laura Sarmiento Pallarés) dependent upon not a whole lot happening.
Cumelen Sanz plays Sofia, an ambitious sales clerk at a Madrid bargain fashion store with dreams of interning and then working for the great Beatriz Gaya (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón) a self-made Madrileña fashion tycoon.
Sofia is a devout, superstitious Catholic from Colombia not shy about dropping in on her Colombian beau, Nacho (Alex Pestrana) at the various rental properties he shows to prospective renters.
It’s not just siestas that Spaniards take over the noon hour.
Sofia’s fervent prayer comes true and she lands the internship as Beatriz’s assistant. But just as she’s learning the ropes and starting to get her ideas “out there,” all that unprotected sex comes home to roost.
She can’t tell Nacho. The priest she consults just shames and threatens her that “There is no worse crime than spilling the blood of the innocent!”
Meanwhile, single, 50ish Beatriz has figured out that her careerism and years of “swipe right” level relationships have run out her biological clock.
“By the time you know what you want, you’ve no time left,” she sighs (in Spanish, or dubbed into English) to her OB-GYN (Vanessa Rasero).
All it takes is her picking up on Sofia’s “condition” and the young woman’s desire to get out of it for Beatriz to spring into action, and enlist her gyno-pal and her lawyer (Pedro Casablanc) in the scheme.
They will manipulate and bribe Sofia, tricking her out of an abortion, plotting to separate her from Nacho during the pregnancy, keeping everything secret so that the baby can be passed off as belonging to Beatriz.
For all their machinations, they should take heed when Sofia brazenly asks for double their offer and a contract guaranteeing future employment. She’s not some naive waif, fresh off the boat from South America.
But she finds herself “Under HER Control” when Beatriz parks her in a country estate with no phone, where CCTV cameras will watch her every move and her health regimen will be strictly monitored.
And then the pregnancy progresses, hormones kick in and the real games begin.
The plot has dopey, obvious contrivances designed to make all of this plausible, which they don’t.
The performances are on low simmer as the characters turn towards sinister or allegedly desperate, and do nothing to engage us in the proceedings.
And the payoff is flat, with even the violence failing to up the heartrate as it supposedly ups the ante.
Rating: TV-MA, violence, sex, nudity
Cast: Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, Cumelen Sanz, Vanesa Rasero, Pedro Casablanc and Alex Pestrana.
Credits: Directed by Fran Torres, scripted by Laura Sarmiento Pallarés. A Netflix release.
