The perfect movie to open right before Thanksgiving, a class conscious haute cuisine thriller.
We awaken from our triptophan stupors and get away from the turkey to soak up a little Joy — as in Florida born Brit Anya Taylor Joy.
Review to follow shortly.
Gross, gory and psychedelically nonsensical, Alex Phillips “All Jacked Up and Full of Worms” plays like the sort of indie film guy with a camera and some stoner buddies make.
It’s sloppy, semi-scripted and lacks much of anything that you’d call a plot, just random, semi-connected characters bumping into each other, falling into The Latest Thing — hallucinogenic worms — and disemboweling each other to get their hands on more of those narcotic nightcrawlers.
“There’s only one WRONG way to do worms!”
“To NOT do worms?”
That can make it play like an improvisational exercise, see how “out there” you’re willing to take things. Maybe actually eat live worms (just a guess here) to really get into the part. And don’t worry about the filmmaker who’s staging stabbings, self-injury, guttings that take out intestines and the like. He didn’t even bother to get the smudges off the lens between takes.
The “plot” could not be more random. It’s got nudity and sex workers and near-nauseating sex, a paganist guru (Dodge Weston) and a pervy ginger named Benny (Trevor Dawkins) who’s ordered “my baby” mail order. It’s a “Youth sized pleasure doll” ready for molesting. Benny either wants to start a family or is on the hunt for an infant to molest, or both.
Disturbing? Yeah. And that’s before he gets his first taste of “worm.” Wanna share one?
“We could do it ‘Lady and the Tramp’ style,” the helpful hooker (Eva Fellows) offers. Eat, chew, snort or take in through gash you slash into your arm, worms are the drug of choice in this corner of the American drug-crazed cornucopia.
Me? I sit down at the bar and some dude’s scarfing worms, I’m telling the barkeep “Gimme whatever he’s NOT having.”
But it’s not really depraved if you’re mocking the depravity, is it? Eh? Is it? Asking for a friend who needs a lawyer.
Rating: unrated, graphic violence, sex, profanity, sex with a baby doll
Cast: Carol Rhyu, Dodge Weston, Betsy Brown, Phillip Andre Botello, Eva Fellows, Mike Lopez, Trevor Dawkins, Sammy Arechar
Credits: Scripted and directed by Alex Phillips. A Cinedigm/Screambox release.
Running time: 1:12
I haven’t been the biggest fan of Netflix’s attempts at “prestige” pictures, movies rolled out late in the year with a whiff of “Let’s throw some money at big names and see if we can get an Oscar” about them.
But “The Wonder” is a winner.
A period piece mystery based on an Emma Donaghue novel and starring Florence Pugh, Tom Burke, Ciaran Hinds, Toby Jones and Irish “It” girl Niamh Algar, it’s a parable of Catholic Ireland given a mod, fourth-wall breaking framework by Chilean director Sebastián Lelio, who gave us “Gloria.” He and his players make it not just vividly period-real, but bracing entertainment as well.
It’s a post-potato famine tale of a Crimean War veteran English nurse (Pugh) who has been hired out to bring her Florence Nightingale-trained expertise to “watch” a rural Irish lass who seems to be living without the benefit of eating.
A reporter (Burke) there to cover the “miracle” may label Mrs. Lib Wright “the nightingale who’s come to watch over” this supernatural event, and verify it. But Lib is pretty irked when she figures out the parameters of her duties.
“What kind of backwoods village imports a professional nurse for something like this?”
The locals are unmoved. A council consisting of the doctor (Jones), priest (Hinds) and two local powers-that-be (Dermot Crowley and Brian F. O’Byrne) are hellbent on proving or disproving this miracle, with each having his own agenda, we fear. The doctor, for instance, is all about wacky theories about the child living on “magnetism” or perhaps she’s mastered what he doesn’t know to call photosynthesis. The priest? He’s ready to notify the Vatican that there’s an Irish miracle and future saint at work here.
The nine-year-old girl Anna (Kila Lord Cassidy) just speaks of heaven, hell, purgatory and her diet — “manna from heaven” — which is no help to the nurse.
A nun (Josie Walker) has come to split the “watch little Anna” duty. But with Catholic fanaticism all around her, Nurse Lib can’t be sure of her reliability. Only the cynical, locally-born journalist, returned from London, seems as skeptical as Lib. And he doesn’t care. Not really. He just wants a scoop.
Director/co-writer Lelio’s most obvious clever touch is to set this tale within the realm of storytelling and “stories.” We’re introduced to this world as a set on a steel-walled warehouse soundstage, watching Pugh settle in for the (faked) sea passage to Ireland in 1862 as our narrator (Algar, of “The Last Right”) tells how much these actors “believe in their story,” something she revisits as an older sister to little Anna.
It’s not just actors who love stories, she tells us. The entire Irish people do.
Set on a treeless Samuel Beckett Irish wasteland of mud and turf, “The Wonder” embraces its classification as both a mystery and a parable. The suspicious outsider is pitted against the superstitious locals, who must have summoned an English nurse because they want her to tell her what they want to hear, that this new tourist attraction is heavenly in origin.
Or not.
Our nurse has issues and secrets. So does the family she’s watching, as does the reporter with local ties. There’s more on the table here than Catholic mysticism and belief and acts of atonement.
Pugh is a gifted actress with a big career ahead of her. But there’s no getting around how naturally convincing she is in period pieces from the age of bustles and hair worn in prim, tight buns. It shouldn’t limit her any more than it painted Carey Mulligan, Kate Winslet or Jennifer Ehle into a corner. Still, there’s something to “This is where she lives” in her work in films like this. The emotions are naturally contained, and so much about her says “period piece” that she thrives in such settings.
Burke has been around for years and with “Mank,” “Living” and this film, is just starting to make his mark. There are traces of every period piece journalist (think “Inherit the Wind”) in this sneering hack.
Jones, Hinds, Crowley and O’Byrne are welcome icing on any Irish-set film, period piece or not.
There are limits to how much mystery one can wring out of a story like this, and “parable” is a nail you should only pound so far. But watching “The Wonder” I can’t help but wonder if Netflix is coming out of the stupor that had them writing blank checks to Alfonso Cuaron (“Roma”), Fincher (“Mank”) or Scorsese (“The Irishman”) when they could have been underwriting talent that won’t break the bank with their indulgences, and can deliver awards-worthy entertainments like this.
Rating: R, sex, adult subject matter.
Cast: Florence Pugh, Tom Burke, KÃla Lord Cassidy, Elaine Cassidy, Ciaran Hinds, Toby Jones, Josie Walker and Niamh Algar
Credits: Directed by Sebastián Lelio, scripted by Sebastián Lelio and Alice Birch , based on a novel by Emma Donoghue. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:49
The sound of a men’s chorus harmonizing through “Sloop John B.,” “Sail Away Ladies,” “Santiana” or “Haul Away Joe” still brings a tingle to the spine when those Cornish Fisherman’s Friends bring sea chanteys back to life in “Fisherman’s Friends: One and All.”
That’s a good thing, because this sequel to the unlikely indie hit about that unlikeliest of British pop chart toppers lacks the charm, wit and surprise of the original, a classic underdog story with lots of local color. And its contrived plot twists and less interesting narrative never let us shake the feeling that this is as unnecessary a sequel as has ever come down the slipway.
The original film had a death and a departure. And Daniel Mays had the good sense to not return as the (fictional) struggling record company A&R man/talent scout who hustles the ten voice choir to stardom.
That narrows the plot possibilities to being older, isolated from pop culture and “politically incorrect” singers who are now famous enough for folks to care and be insulted. They’ve had a record deal, so now they lose it. They had a grand tenor, but he moved to Australia.
And all that leaves leader and lead singer Jim (James Purefoy) in a mood, limiting his conversations with his old salt Dad (David Hayman) to memories or hallucinations. Because Dad’s dead.
They’re not adept at handling the press or group conference calls. And the new A&R man (Joshua Maguire) isn’t up to keeping them in line any more than his boss (Jade Anouka), earning the ire of the chief of Island Records (Ramon Tikaram). The characters are even more generic and less interesting than their counterparts in the first film, and the bland performances don’t change that.
Jim crawls into the bottle, bitter and rude, with only his granddaughter (Meadow Nobrega) and mother (Maggie Steed) for comfort.
Everything co-director/writers Meg Leonard and Nick Moorcroft (Piers Ashworth is also credited in the script) try feels played, played-out and played-out at half speed.
A lame audition montage to add a new tenor to make them a ten-voice group again can’t get a laugh out of one bloke who thinks singing “In the Navy” by the Village People will win him a spot, or the posh who does a fine, showy tune from “Pirates of Penzance.”
The “trials of fame” scenes include a radio chat with chipmunkish former “Top Gear” host Chris Evans, and that goes as dully as one might expect.
Let’s bring in a once “wild” alcoholic folk singer (Imelda May, pretty good) as a new love interest for crusty Jim. Let’s set our sights on getting into the famed Glastonbury Pop Festival as a means of getting our record deal back.
None of it is remotely original, little of it is even the least bit charming.
Only the tunes save this from being an utter waste of time. And you can buy that as a soundtrack and save yourself an hour and fifty minutes.
Rating: PG-13 (Language|Some Suggestive Material)
Cast: James Purefoy, Dave Johns, Jade Anouka, Sam Swainsbury, Richard Harrington, Maggie Steed, Ramon Tikaram, Joshua Maguire, David Hayman and Imelda May.
Credits: Directed by Meg Leonard and Nick Moorcraft, scripted by Piers Ashworth, Meg Leonard and Nick Moorcroft. A Samuel Goldwyn release.
Running time: 1:52
We pick up the tail end of a story of reporter Megan Twohey (Carey Mulligan) was just finishing up, the 2016 research and publishing her expose of Donald Trump’s legion of sexual assault accusers, and facing death threats and an indifferent electorate that put the man in the White House despite everything we’d learned about his character and utter lack of it. “You are a DISGUSTING human being,” we hear the disgusting human being Trump — an impersonator, here — shout at her on the phone. Twohey has to watch herself reviled by Fox News host Bill O’Reilly.
That experience made Twohey reluctant to go down this road again on a new story. But Kantor is seen seeking Twohey’s advice about getting women to open up. And after O’Reilly’s career-ending sexual predation and payoff scandal blew up, the film suggests, the nation’s indifference changed, and eventually the paper added Twohey to the ever-widening Weinstein investigation.
And we start to meet actresses and ex-employees still shaken by what happened to them, many of them suffering life-altering assaults decades before. Rose McGowan, Weinstein’s first and most outspoken accuser, is reached by phone (voiced by another actress), and bitterly relates how frustrating it is “to shout and have no one listen.”
Woman after woman hangs up on Twohey, or slams a door in Kantor’s face, after first giving her a look of shock and pain.
Samantha Morton plays a onetime British publicist with Miramax who reported her experiences and those of others, and was one among many whose silence was bought — paid off by a “system” set up to protect Weinstein from everyone he abused. Morton gets across how furious the woman still is in just a single, can’t-look-away scene.Ashley Judd had already come very close to naming Weinstein as her own Hollywood rapist, and seeing her speak at the Women’s March on Washington after Trump’s election, she is approached. Judd plays herself here, and knowing what we know about what Weinstein did to kill her career, that’s a tasty bit of acting revenge. And then we meet the older woman whose story frames this film. Laura Madden was an Irish girl who stumbled across a period piece being filmed near her home and talked her way onto the set and into the business, a history related in a couple of dialogue-free scenes that open “She Said.” The last of those introductory scenes is her running down a city street, hysterical and in tears.
The radiant Jennifer Ehle (the definitive Elizabeth Bennett on TV;s “Pride and Prejudice”) plays the adult Madden, a mother long-removed from the film business, facing a cancer scare when the reporters track her down. She won’t talk. Until, that is, she gets her Irish up at being threatened.Ehle is the heart and face of “She Said,” and the canniest bit of casting, because she will break your heart over what this woman endured.Mulligan, playing a reporter who starts this story pregnant and goes through post-partum depression in its aftermath, gives Twohey a world-weariness, and an easily-triggered fire that explodes with the right provocation. Kazan’s Kantor is a case study in empathy journalism, finding ways to connect with sources to get them to open up, or relating her own post partum depression to Twohey as a way of bonding so that the senior reporter will pitch in.Kantor pops in unannounced on those who won’t respond to her calls, breaks confidence to one potential source’s husband (a non-no) and uses their shared New York Jewish heritage to wring facts out of a male ex-Miramax exec.And we see her trying to turn away her pre-tween daughter’s questions about this very adult subject she’s writing about, bowled over by the kid’s quick grasp of what the all-binding acronym NDA meant to Weinstein and how it protected him from punishment for so long.
The implication of including all these daughters in this film of this story? That they were enduring this ordeal, all of them, so that their children would never face what they had to put up with.I like the film’s treatment of the shoe-leather and rent-a-car tedium of journalism, but couldn’t help but notice Kazan portraying an eager note-taker who sits, in every interview, with her pen poised on the paper, transfixed, taking in what she’s hearing but never ever writing anything down.Patricia Clarkson plays the paper’s special projects editor encouraging and urging on her reporters. Andre Braugher plays Times editor Dean Basquet, bringing a gruff no-nonsense bluster to the paper’s direct dealings with the infamously bullying Weinstein. There aren’t many laughs in this sad, infuriating story. But Basquet’s dismissal of threatening, intimidating and stalling calls from Weinstein are hilarious. Any journalist who ever dealt with the man, directly or indirectly (I did, once or twice) knows you just didn’t hang up on Harvey. Even the general public picked up on that ogre vibe.
The film’s similarities to “Spotlight,” which was about the Catholic Church’s worldwide predatory priests cover-up, are inescapable. But Schrader and screenwriter Lenkiewicz give their film a decidedly feminine and feminist bent. Women urge other women to “use your experience to protect other people,” Kantor gets a tad starstruck from all her encounters with and conversations with “Gwyneth” (never seen), and there are lots of hugs of support and tears of relief when this courageous woman or that one takes a stand and faces its consequences, all over again.No, you just can’t make the act of transcribing notes, reaching conclusions, writing and re-writing, editing and then, almost comically, two reporters and four editors standing over a single PC reading what they’ve produced hitting the “publish” button “cinematic” Even the fear that competing reporter Ronan Farrow’s expose would publish before theirs lacks high stakes drama, and gets mentioned but played-down here. But Schrader lets her players do the heavy lifting, and to a one, they don’t let her down. The women of this scandal and this movie about it reporting it make “She Said” a thoroughly engrossing account of how one of the touchstone stories of our time came to light, one door knocked-on, one tearful recollection at a time.
Rating: R for language and descriptions of sexual assault.
Cast: Carey Mulligan, Zoe Kazan, Jennifer Ehle, Patricia Clarkson, Samantha Morton, Andre Braugher and Ashley Judd.
Credits: Directed by Maria Schrader, scripted by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, based on the NY Times reporting of Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey. A Universal release.
Running time: 2:08
Rating: R for language and descriptions of sexual assault.
Cast: Carey Mulligan, Zoe Kazan, Jennifer Ehle, Patricia Clarkson, Samantha Morton, Andre Braugher and Ashley Judd.
Credits: Directed by Maria Schrader, scripted by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, based on the NY Times reporting of Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey. A Universal release.
Running time: 2:08
We know that the many threatening phone calls recreated for the new drama about the Harvey Weinstein serial sexual assaults scandal “She Said” aren’t actual recordings of the Miramax/Weinstein Co. chief yelling “WHO did you talk to? Was it Gwyneth?” It isn’t Weinstein himself.
But damn, that guy sounds JUST like him. Who could it be? A gifted mimic who took on the assignment? Or somebody the film’s producers knew and/or heard could do a spot-on, blustering, bellowing King of Hollywood imitation?
I stayed through the film’s credits to see if that actor might be identified. No. I did a quick online search which also turned up nothing.
As picking out famous voices, even ones disguised in portraying someone else, is kind of my superpower (public radio veteran), I concentrated every time I heard the film’s Weinstein and picked out what I think was the unmistakable timbre, pitch and Weinsteinish edge of this actor turned actor-director.
Usually, he works for Disney and Marvel, and this was a Universal production. So maybe not. But there are any number of reasons for not wanting “credit” in the film, as he made movies for Harvey and had plenty of first hand knowledge of the voice.
And he sounds like Weinstein already. Could it be the “Chef” pictured below?
I didn’t get around to reviewing this one. Not a fresh title, arrived unsolicited by mail, Japanese, a trio of short stories about sex and food, reviewing seemed pointless and labor intensive.
And I have hesitated to palm it off on any of the scores of public libraries I visit, stop by to write in or simply pass by because few if any would put this in their stacks for fear of conservative county commissioners backlash.
Especially in Florida.
But I will make an exception in this case. The Altamonte Springs Library is in the old Altamonte Hotel, a repurposed single story structure in this old Orlando suburb.
And it has the most uncomfortable seating of any library I have ever been to, and I’ve frequented hundreds of them over the years.
Fifteen minutes of sitting in these high chair torture devices and you’re doubled over in pain for hours. You walk in and see others sitting on the floor, outside, anywhere rather than risk back injury on these Banned in Guantanamo gadgets that even Taco Bell, which wants patrons tonLeave in seven minutes or less, turned down.
So, add it to your collection, sell it at a book sale (to pay for new chairs) or toss it, Altamonte Springs.
Movie Nation, adding cinema variety to libraries all over the Southeast, one DVD, one library at a time.
L
“Taurus” is more proof that there’s little new to say in the self-destructive rock star movie genre, that a Cobain by any other name is either fated to end up drowning in his own vomit, or not.
Writer-director Tim Sutton’s second feature with his new muse, rapper Machine Gun Kelly, billed under his real name (Colson Baker) here, is a portrait in drugged-up pop star indulgence. What it’s not very good at getting across is the source of the pain, the disaffection that drives our anti-hero’s excesses or his art.
The script has a murkiness to characters and character motivations, and Sutton doesn’t help itself in the casting or the under-explaining that goes on. Is this rapper Cole Taurus, holed up in an LA rental working on a new album or hauled out to the studio everyday by his long suffering assistant (Maggie Hasson) to that he can “spit” some more rhymes, seeing his ex (Megan Fox, Baker’s current off-camera flame) in the face of other women? Is he wracked by guilt over the neglect he shows their little girl (Avery Tiuu Essex), who is being raised by a woman (Siri Miller) whose relationship to all this is left hanging?
As I’m not his shrink, just a guy who watches movies and takes notes to make sense of what I’m seeing, beats me.
Assorted women drift into Cole’s life. One (Naomi Wild) has the perfect voice to co-star on his songs with, that kittenish girly lilt/growl so in vogue today.
Another brunette (Sara Silva) has his attention and maybe his interest. Because she’s beautiful and eager and, oh yeah, she brings him drugs.
The ex (Fox) is glimpsed in heated flashbacks, or flashed on the face of some other lover.
Ruby Rose plays the hard-partying punk regarded by Cole’s manager (Scoot McNairy), as the worst influence of all. She’s just a spikey-haired minx who can’t say no — to most whatever Cole has in mind.
And then there’s the constant, the put-upon, abused and blamed Ilana (Hasson of “Malignant,” TV’s “Impulse” and “Mr. Mercedes”). She’s the one who has to ask “Are you high?” as a rhetorical question. She’s the one who won’t move the car until he’s stopped hanging so low out the window that his knuckles drag on the pavement. Whenever he’s late for something or misunderstood or ignored an instruction, she’s the one he chews out, often in public.
“You’ve got a lunch meeting.”
“Negative!”
“What do you mean, ‘negative?'”
“As in I won’t be there, missing in action.”
The opening image of “Taurus” is a scene with a family pondering what’s wrong with their cable when their young son walks into the room, waving a gun which he wants to know whether or not is “real,” with violence sure to follow. That will eventually get the attention of our morbid, mean and yet insanely popular rap star. Fodder for inspiration?
But a couple of other scenes stand out here, mainly because they’re pitched higher than the many generic “He’s drunk and won’t leave the bar/strip club/home” ones, or are more revealing about our protagonist.
In one, he lights into Ilana and — mid-public-humiliation — she goes off on the arrogant, childish, irresponsible junkie “douche” she works for, just as publicly. It’s bracing and loud and what passes for “tough love” in a toxic, co-dependent relationship. God knows why she needs him. Maybe the money’s too good.
In another moment, less explicable, Ilana talks the crew of rappers and engineers in the studio to let a pizza guy fanboy come in to get a photo. Why she would agree to that, considering who she’s dealing with, is a mystery. When the other rappers — all black — act their friendliest to the pizza guy, insecure Cole dismisses him the moment he hears this new guy “spits” as well.
Those moments feel real and fresh, and there are bits and pieces of what feels like reality scattered throughout the film. But the tropes, which have been around since the first “A Star is Born,” on through “The Rose” and into “Ray,” “Sid & Nancy” and “Get on Up,” are worn out now.
Sure, every few weeks there’s another news story on this or that act of self-destruction by a pop singer, rapper or rocker. But just because they keep doing it is no reason to run through the same old suicide by needle on the “died too young” trail across the screen. Tragic as they are, these deaths have become cliches. Movies recreating them don’t even move us any more because we’ve become numbed to the self-destructive waste.
Baker has decent, head-to-toe tattooed screen presence. Tis character isn’t much of a stretch, as the real rapper has probably been around real basket cases like this guy.
But director Sutton doesn’t so much sympathize with either the character or the actor playing him as keep them at arm’s length. Sutton knows he’s made his star play a cliche, and the star can’t have missed that either. Why sweat the details if you figure that out early on?
Rating: unrated, drug abuse, sex, profanity
Cast: Colson Baker, Maggie Hanson, Naomi Wild, Ron G, Ruby Rose, Scoot McNary and Megan Fox
Credits: Scripted and directed by Tim Sutton: An RLJE release.
Running time: 1:38
Most everybody had that moment when they just gave up on Lindsay Lohan.
The scandals, the tsunami of gossip, the poor choices off screen and on, few actresses handled the transition from child starlet to adult attention magnet more poorly. Yes, it’s an awful test for even the strongest psyches, and her parental guidance leaned notoriously towards the Britney Spears side of the spectrum. But at some point, you’re well over 21 and what goes wrong is on you and you alone.
I gave the “Mean Girls” queen the benefit of the doubt right up to what should have been a golden opportunity that she turned into a rhymes-with-fitshow. “The Canyons” had one of the great writer-directors, Paul Schrader, a script by “Less Than Zero” author Bret Easton Ellis and a topic — the vapid, vain dysfunction of lives lived on the fringes of LA’s beautiful, rich and entitled.
Lohan diva’d her way into deserved oblivion in 2013 by misbehaving on that set and ruining what could have been something of a restart for her and a filmmaker who would later come back with a vengeance with “First Reformed.”
But as most of what she did she did to herself, it’d be churlish to not think she deserves another shot. So, a Netflix “Hallmark-style” Christmas rom-com? “Falling for Christmas?” Lindsay, now a high-mileage 36, looking winsome, taking pratfalls, wholly-engaged in the work and even doing a little “Jingle Bell Rock” sing-along?
Good for her. And good for Netflix, which is also giving a Hallmarkish rom-com home to the less problematic ex child starlet Victoria Justice, among others.
The movie? Oh, it’s insipid. You half expect to see Dolly Parton — Long
May She Rein — show up as a singing Christmas angel. Yeah, it’s like that.
Lohan plays a hotel heiress and influencer who is trying to fend off her father’s (Jack Wagner) efforts to make her grow up and take on work in the family business. Sierra is meeting her super-influencer and boyfriend of a year, the vapid Euro-trash Tad (George Young) at one of Dad’s upscale mountainside ski resorts. Tad is planning on proposing — and posting online about it — on a mountain top.
Things go wrong, and next thing we know, Tad is stranded in an ice shanty on a frozen lake with poacher Ralph (Sean Dillingham), Sierra’s crashed into a snowbank and developed amnesia and nobody knows they’re missing.
“I’m like…unclaimed luggage,” our puzzled heroine declares.
The freckled redhead who doesn’t know her name is now “Sarah,” and staying with her rescuer Jake (Chord Overstreet), a widower who runs the failing B & B down the hill, who doesn’t know who she is and who has a winsome mother-in-law (Alejandra Flores) and little girl (Olivia Perez) who falls for this woman who can’t remember her name and lacks even the most basic domestic skills, but who takes interest in her and shares some of the secrets of being a girl with her.
So what we’ve got is “Overboard” without the devious edge of a guy taking advantage of a rich amnesiac, grafted onto “It’s a Wonderful Life” (without an angel, Dolly Parton or otherwise) or “White Christmas,” where our hapless innkeeper has to learn how beloved and valued he is by those who love him.
There’s just nothing to this. A typical scene is a brief, helpful gift-wrapping lesson Jake gives Sarah/Sierra. There’s nothing cute, funny or charming in this 30-45 seconds of screen time. And yet it’s what passes for “home for the holidays” warmth, wit and wisdom.
Spoiler alert — it’s not funny. Second spoiler alert — the only laugh in “Falling” is “Sierra” waking up by turning the TV on to Netflix, which is wall-to-wall holiday movies like…”Falling for Christmas.”
But Lohan does what she can with this thin, treacly material, shows she can be a team player and bring value without (one hopes) drama to a set and a project that may not be an A-picture, but still gets her name out there in a non gossipy way. Good for her.
Call it a win, and maybe a proof of concept of the “I can still show up on time, act, and bring a little sentiment and sparkle to a part” variety. And call it a day.
Rating: TV-PG
Cast: Lindsay Lohan, Chord Overstreet, George Young, Olivia Perez, Alejandra Flores, Sean Dillingham and Jack Wagner
Credits: Directed by Janeen Damian, scripted by Jeff Bonnett, Janeen Damian, Michael Damian, Ron Oliver. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:35
Every movie opens with a world of possibilities and steadily, one by one, closes off those directions it might take. A good film is one that presents promising options, picks a more intriguing and perhaps less expected one, and maybe trips up our expectations along the way.
Russell Crowe‘s new writing, directing and starring effort “Poker Face” opens with piece of Aussie childhood that climaxes with a teenaged poker bluff that foils a bully. We then meet the adult poker player (Crowe) as he’s losing himself in the paintings at a museum. His sad-faced guise intrigues an attractive artist who furtively snaps pictures and clumsily tells him “I want to paint you.”
In in the third scene, our rich gambler drives his black Rolls Royce out into the country to consult a sage old shaman (the great character actor Jack Thompson) who “reads” him, figures out our hero’s state of mind and his health, reassures him that “You will know when it’s time” and passes on something that might give him “comfort” knowing that he has “some means of control.”
Three sequences set up a man with a past full of childhood friends, a gambling “career” that paid handsomely, a terminal illness and the interest of a painter, who might like more than his face, his “story” for instance.
From that collection of possibilities, “Poker Face” draws to an inside straight — a straight-up heist picture. And what’s the first rule of poker, mate?
Never draw to an inside straight.
Liam Hemsworth, the rapper turned writer-director-actor RZA, Aden Young, Steve Bastoni and Daniel MacPherson play the adult “oldest friends” who race a Roller, a Bentley and a Maybach to rich host Jake’s clifftop modernist mansion for one last poker game.
Molly Grace plays the widowed Jake’s daughter, who doesn’t know, and Brooke Satchwell plays an ex-wife who does.
And Paul Tassone is the fiery, ruthless leader of the gang that busts in on the festivities.
Crowe isn’t a first time director, but this heartless bore of a thriller makes one forget the pleasures of “The Water Diviner.” He leans on voice-over narration to deliver attempted profundities.
“If luck is leaving you, apply what you can to change its motion…Maximize your wins, minimize your losses.”
He tries to animate the poker game itself with extreme close-ups of players, chips and cards, and never makes the stakes seem high or the results remotely interesting. Even the in-game banter is shockingly mundane. But then, this isn’t “Rounders” or any of a slew of better gambling pictures. Crowe is rarely dull as an actor, but his poker-faced turn in “Poker Face” proves the exception to that rule.
The shifts in tone, stakes and genre are abrupt and so clumsily-handled you’re allowed to wonder “What just happened?” And the heist is such a non-starter as to leave one at a loss as to what the Oscar winning actor, one of my favorites, ever saw in this.
Rating: unrated, violence, profanity
Cast: Russell Crowe, Liam Hemsworth, RZA, Aden Young, Brooke Satchwell, Molly Grace, Steve Bastoni, Daniel MacPherson, Benedict Hardie, Paul Tassone, and Jack Thompson
Credits: Directed by Russell Crowe, scripted by Stephen M. Coates and Russell Crowe. A Screen Media release.
Running time: 1:35
