Christmas is an apt time for any movie about Christianity’s most eloquent apologist.
Anthony Hopkins has played both real people in this story about a meeting between the “Narnia” novelist (Matthew Goode) and the esteemed Dr. Freud.
Looks promising. No, it didn’t “really happen.” I’ve not seen the play this is based on, but that C.S. Lewis, because of what he’s represented over the decades (“Christian intellectual arguing for faith”) is a favorite of playwrights and screenwriters.
Well here we go, hoping for the best. Embargo for reviews of this title ends at noon Wed.
A religious parable is folded into this latest Neal McDonough vehicle, about a supernatural stranger who walks among us. On a parallel Earth!
Dec 1
There’s nothing like a character blurting out your entire review in a laugh-line early in the opening act.
“It’s like a Hallmark Movie gone wrong!”
I mean, I’ll hand it to screenwriter Melinda Bryce. She pretty much one-upped anything I say about “A Holiday I Do” with that zinger.
“A Holiday I Do” is a Hallmark-insipid, oatmeal-bland holiday romance whose lone novelty was intended to be the same-sex couple we’re set-up to root for at the outset.
Every scene is more tepid than the one that came before it. More than a few characters serve little to no function in the narrative. And the basic situation, that a divorced and I guess recently “out” mom (Lindsay Hicks) frets and futzes about throwing a bachelor party for her ex and helping with his small town wedding, over the objections of the bride, is a bit much.
But hey, she works on a horse farm and talks to her horses. The farm’s “in trouble,” something our heroine Jane’s elderly mother (Jill Larson) isn’t telling her. So at least the filmmakers had Hallmark hopes when they started out.
We meet Jane on “speed date” night at a Soho drag club. We don’t need a montage of bad encounters to realize Jane doesn’t seem at home here.
She’s taking her mother’s suggestions that she “find someone to share your life with,” now that her lifelong “best friend” and ex (Joe Piazza) is about to marry wedding-obsessed Heather (India Chappell). Jane’s small-town to the core, and “speed dating” isn’t really for people like her.
Jane has to keep watering down the “bachelor” party she’s to be throwing (the movie is so tame it won’t show us the risque cupcakes she’s ordered) just to please Heather, who sees her as a rival and someone she’s not looking forward to being in the same town with for the rest of her life.
But Heather blunders into putting her and fiance Mark on a plane to go fetch her parents, and that leads to cancellations and complications for the snowy holiday wedding. Jane will have to pitch in, and fall for the wedding planner Sue (Rivkah Reyes) as she samples the menu, cakes and what not.
The script seems to skip over the whole “gaydar” thing, or simple “confessional” scene that puts the two 30somethings on the same page in terms of sexual orientation. That makes everything that happens afterwards, including the inevitable “near disaster,” play as clumsy, awkward and under-motivated.
The performances are competent in a place-holder sense. Nobody has an edge, not even the “Bridezilla.” There’s no spark to anybody in this, and that carries over to the necessity for “romantic sparks” as well.
Marsha Warfield plays the banker who might want to “save the farm,” but can’t as her hands are tied. She’s almost funny, ranting about overpriced holiday-accented coffee to a barista.
As for filmmakers Paul Schneider (No, not THAT Paul Schneider) and Alicia Schneider, there’s an object lesson in “A Holiday I Do.” And not just a grammar one (it should be “A Holiday ‘I Do.'”).
When it comes to treacly romances set in snowy, Christmasy rural America, go Hallmark or go home.
Rating: unrated, PG “Hallmark movie” tame
Cast: Lindsay Hicks, Rivkah Reyes, Jill Larson, India Chappell, Joe Piazza and Marsha Marfield.
Credits: Directed by Paul Schneider and Alicia Schneider, scripted by Melinda Bryce. A Tello release.
Running time: 1:31
For everyone who has been waiting waiting waiting for a dark and glib French take on “Les anges de Charlie,” here it is, a flippant and somewhat blood-spattered star vehicle for four French leading ladies titled “Wingwomen.”
Director and star Mélanie Laurent picked up on the “La Femme Nikita/Thelma & Louise” elements of the comic book by Jérôme Mulot and Bastien Vives and ran with it for this long and sleek French exercise in action heroines with attitude.
It’s a heist picture that skips over almost everything about the “heists,” a thriller content that always feels as though the stakes are absurdly low. Its trigger-woman, Alex (Adèle Exarchopoulos) shoots down drones with a pistol and downs “civilians” with her never-misses tranquilizer dart gun.
But when it comes to revenge, it’s “full metal jacket” time — kill-shots galore, delivered by a silenced sniper rifle. And when it comes to a finale, well, no climax would be complete without a throw-away-the-last-whiff-of-integrity anti-climax.
We meet Carole (Laurent, of “Inglourious Basterds,” “Beginners” and “Now You See Me”) as she’s finishing a Swiss “job.” She escapes the killer drones thanks to her easily-distracted, always-lovelorn wingwoman/wheelwoman/trigger-woman (Exarchaopolous was in “Blue is the Warmest Color”).
Distracted Alex can’t hit her droning targets until bestie Carole tells her to “think of Karim,” the guy who just dumped her by text.
So yeah, it’s like that.
They’re in the employ of The Godmother, a ruthless, sunglassed tyrant (screen legend Isabelle Adjani of “Camille Claudel”) who likes taking meetings in an emptied revival house cinema.
“You’re my masterpiece,” she tells Carole, which isn’t a compliment. It’s a threat. Carole is ready to “get out.” And that’s not allowed. She doesn’t mention the fact that she’s just found out she’s pregnant, because it wouldn’t help. Godmother is ruthless.
Attempts to lay low in a stealth-tech forest hideaway end in mayhem, so there’s nothing for it but to agree to that “final job.”
They’ll need to consult planner/go-between Abner (Philippe Katherine). Alex will want to flirt with the Corsican gun-dealer/supplier (Félix Moati) of their Corsican art gallery heist.
“I just love...penetration.”
And they’ll need a better getaway driver than Alex. The something and someone Alex comes to resent is named Sam (Manon Bresch).
As a director, Laurent and her screenwriters choose to skip over many of the conventions of the genre — “training” aspiring Formula 1 driver Sam to shoot and handle herself on a “job,” the “jobs” themselves.
The one heist we see has a film production element to it, which is lazy and adds nothing to the proceedings.
The idea here is to focus on the fights and the zingers. Alex gets all the best lines, such as when a possible “menage a trois” turns into a brawl.
“Wanna take a break?” she taunts her foe (in French or dubbed into English). “Wanna call your mommy?”
The eccentric touches added to the characters are kind of fun, but even they have a played-out air. Tightly-executed or not, there’s a blandness to the action beats, a dullness to the messaging (“It’s not what you do, it’s who you do it with.”) and a general disconcern with logic — a stand-off over payment for their opening act job ends with Carole inexplicably leaving without that payment — and a disinterest in wrapping this up with a decent drop the mike moment.
It’s slick and scenic and the stars wear their black robber unitards with French elan. But “Wingwomen” never adds up to the sum of its parts, no matter how many are added to it.
Rating: TV-MA, violence, nudity, smoking, profanity
Cast: Mélanie Laurent, Adèle Exarchopoulos, Manon Bresch, Philippe Katerine and Isabelle Adjani
Credits: Directed by Mélanie Laurent, scripted by Cédric Anger and Christophe Deslandes, inspired by the comic book by Jérôme Mulot and Bastien Vives. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:55
“Your Lucky Day” is a somewhat hackneyed B-movie about the violence that a big lottery ticket unleashes in a small New York convenience store.
It stumbles into its inciting incident and drifts through some pitiless and bloody violence before taking a turn towards modestly interesting as the characters settle into “We need to think this over/What’s our story?”
IAnd it’s notable for being the final film of promising young actor Angus Cloud, who died of an overdose this past summer. The “Euphoria” actor’s final film is a solid piece of work and a sad coda to a life and career cut short by his own misadventures.
Cloud plays Sterling, a street dealer soft enough to get himself mugged by a couple of bougie teens — he won’t pull the trigger to stop them — but who makes the rash decision to rob a well-heeled racist (Spencer Garrett) who’s celebrated his “Mega Ball” winning ticket a little too loudly in the bodega.
That endangers the bluff, blowhard winner, the store owner (Mousa Hussein Kraish), the ice-cream eating pregnant couple (Jessica Garza and Elliot Knight) and the cop (Sterling Beauman) who just stopped by to use the bathroom.
One shootout later, there’s a dead victim, a “cop down,” and a lot of working-the-problem to do for our impulsive, armed idiot and the three people he has under a gun and making him wonder “What’s your story” going to be?
Writer-director Dan Brown, expanding a “comic” short film of the same title that he made over a dozen years ago, trots out tropes and complications of the most cynical and even sinister variety here. Human nature and human decency are tested. We’re a long way from “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” so lower those expectations for “noble” character behavior.
The action is well-staged, shot and edited, and the acting is uniformly good. But the plotting is somewhat eye-rolling and the pacing uncertain and slow. There are characters, agendas, bursts of violence and a somewhat overreaching “add characters for the third act” that has to be shoved into 88 or so minutes, and it isn’t handled all that gracefully.
It’d be great to be able to say that young Angus Cloud’s final, ironically-titled film underscores the tragedy of his untimely death. But irony or not, the mixed bag that is “Your Lucky Day” just isn’t good enough to use as an epitaph.
Rating: R, graphic violence, profanity
Cast: Angus Cloud, Jessica Garza, Mousa Hussein Kraish, Elliot Knight, Sterling Beauman, Jason O’Mara and Spencer Garrett
Credits: Scripted and directed by Dan Brown. A Well Go USA release.
Running time: 1:29
Musical cliches are a rich part of any sports movie’s appeal, especially a formulaic comedy like “Next Goal Wins.”
The chunky team needs to train to get in shape? A little Dolly Parton and “Nine to Five.”
And then there’s this curio served up during “The Big Game,” music meant to convey the first glimmers of hope, players finally “getting it.”
It’s not The Allman Brothers’ original version, on the most famous cover of it, by Molly Hatchet.
It is Buddy Miles‘ 1970 take on “Dreams.”
A musical mainstay of the ’60s, member of Jimi’s Band of Gypsies, and a guy remembered on the soundtrack of a quirky sports comedy about soccer on American Samoa.
Has the Marvel Studios team lost its mojo? Have comic book movies finally oversaturated the market (all over Disney TV, etc.) and jumped the shark? Run their course?
Maybe. I liked Brie Larson as “Captain Marvel.” I’ve enjoyed Samuel L. Jackson in an eyepatch. Up to a point.
But none of the trailers to this annointed Blockbuster of the Fall have moved the needle for me. At all.
Lowered expectations couldn’t hurt, as this exhausted genre has transcended “entertainment value” as long-overdue “inclusion” becomes its rai·son d’ê·tre.
Fingers crossed.
“Next Goal Wins” is a scruffy, formulaic sports comedy that offers a Taiki Waititi take on a 2014 documentary about “the worst” soccer team “in the world” and the ill-tempered coach brought in to change that status.
Even the titles are the same. What does the director of “Jo Jo Rabbit” bring to the table that’s novel and fresh? Not bloody much, to be honest. A lot of movie references, including the ones he tries to base this generic “inspiring” sports story on — “The Karate Kid”– and the ones he tries to pretend he isn’t cribbing from (“Cool Runnings,”:”The Air Up There”).
But when it’s going for lightly amusing and living off the spectacle of the great Michael Fassbender trying his dramatic, international star hand at comedy, it’s a pleasant sit.
If nothing else, the Kiwi Waititi teaches America about its sleepy, South Pacific possession, American Samoa, the culture and the Christian Polynesian rituals among its tiny populace. Getting a handle on how to pronounce it — “SAH-moa” — will be news to most of us.
American Samoa had a reputation for humiliating itself on the pitch, most infamously surrendering 31 goals in a match against Australia at one point. Years after that debacle — Australia has just as many World Cop titles as the U.S. — they’re no better. But they lure a troubled, tantrum-tossing tippler named Thomas Rongen in to try and lessen the humiliation.
“Just one goal” is the mantra of the multi-job head of Samoan soccer (the amusing Oscar Kightley). All he wants is for the Dutch-American hothead to coach them into scoring “just one goal.”
Waititi of course beats that phrase to death, with sometimes amusing results. The writer-director and sometimes actor dons a ridiculous mustache to play our narrator, an American Samoan preacher, and reminds us that “this actually happened, with a couple of minor embellishments.”
This Rongen portrait folds in a soccer-connected ex-wife (Elisabeth Moss) who’s taken up with an American soccer federation chief (Will Arnett, who replaced Armie Hammer in reshoots), and other tragic and semi-tragic elements to this intense “European” trying to learn the “chill” ways of the simple happy natives.
Yeah, that phrase is a little offensive these days. But that’s what this culture clash comedy inelegantly and often clumsily goes for. Mocking clueless “white people” and this “white savior” the players consider as much of a “loser” as them is funny, but only takes you so far.
The team is a collection of “types,” who actually line-up with the “real” team Rongen found himself training. There’s a transgender star (Kaimana), and the not-too-tolerant Rongen has to learn the Samoan word Fa’afafine, which is their name for a long-accepted “third gender” among their populace, their version of the Filipino word “bakla.”
The Westerner has some things to learn about tolerance as well as “island time” and life priorities from the Samoans.
The story is otherwise strictly “Big Game Comedy” formula, with the added treat of focusing on “conditioning,” what screenwriters do when their grasp of the “game” they’re writing about is slim.
But it’s amusing seeing Fassbender try to exasperate, deadpan and impersonate Liam Neeson (his big speech from “Taken”) or Al Pacino (“Any Given Sunday”) as Rongen copes with the culture shock of a place that’s forever making the Westerner wonder “What IS this s–t?”
“It’s safe to say, ‘You’re useless‘” he mutters to his tattooed, often roly poly Polynesian charges.
The life coaching Rongen gets is worth a laugh, because of its self-aware lack of subtlety.
“You’re sitting alone because you ARE alone.”
The movie is Waititi’s clumsiest and laziest outing ever, with abrupt, under-motivated changes in tone, heavy-handed insertions of “Matrix” and “Karate Kid” references and shameless mugging when our writer-director trots out his mustache and tries to goose his picture just at the point it might finally flatline.
“Laziest?” It’s obvious that the soccer teams and the movie about them spent more time writing and rehearsing their “haka” pre match trash talk chants than practicing the sport.
All that said, “Next Goal Wins” never lapses into unlikeable. And Fassbender, about as convincing as a former athlete as he is as a comedian, gives it the old college try.
Rating: PG-13, alcohol abuse, profanity, rude images
Cast: Michael Fassbender, Oscar Kightley, Kaimana, David Fane, Rachel House, Will Arnett and Elisabeth Moss.
Credits: Directed by Taika Waititi, scripted by Taika Waititi and Iain Morris, based on the documentary “Next Goal Wins.” A Searchlight release.
Running time: 1:43
“The Pigeon Tunnel,” a documentary built around the dark but playful the 2016 memoir and consisting of the last and longest interview the greatest spy fiction novelist David Cornwell, aka John le Carré, ever gave, isn’t an expose, a confrontation between interviewer and subject.
That’s the way Errol Morris, perhaps at Apple TV+’s direction, edited trailers for the film. It would be the British spy, wise in the ways of interrogation matching wits with the documentary cinema’s foremost “interrogator.”
The film turns out to be collegial, a long chat via Morris and his famed look-straight-at-the-camera-and-see-me-ask-questions “Interrotron.” Some issues are pressed, big themes — “betrayal” chief among them — are visited and revisited.
But Cornwell knew the films of Morris, famous for getting something like straight answers out of the likes of disgraced former Defense Secretaries Robert McNamara (“The Fog of War”) and Donald Rumsfeld (“The Unknown Known”) and sized him up.
And Morris? He’s plainly a fan. The Oscar-winning documentarian and master “interrogator” (“The Thin Blue Line”) takes a moment between questions, clips of le Carré movies and TV series and recreations from the life of the spy novelist to tell his interview subject that he sees Cornwell as “an exquisite poet of self-hatred.”
“The Pigeon Tunnel” was a title Cornwell slapped on many a work in progress. As he expands on his autobiography early on on the film, and Morris recreates for the screen, it comes from the practice of a Monte Carlo casino, how it released pigeons trapped on its roof through tunnels for the rich swells, “gentlemen,” to shoot as they fled to the sea in a more barbaric age.
Even the escaped pigeons, Cornwell notes, returned to the same roof where they were first trapped. Saving themselves accomplished nothing. There’s a spy game metaphor in that.
Young Cornwell witnessed the pigeon tunnels with his “confidence trickster,” gun runner, larcenist, politician, debt and rent dodger and general scofflaw father, Ronald “Ronnie” Cornwell. The film, with Morris pushing follow-up questions on occasion, is mostly content to simply stage — with actors — incidents from Cornwell’s troubled upbringing, college years and early days in “the spy game” set to the music of Philip Glass and Paul Leonard Morgan.
But Cornwell’s life – he died in 2020, shortly after these interviews were completed — is fascinating fodder for a documentary. He was a literary man and teacher recruited to assorted spy agencies at the height of the Cold War, eyewitness to the building of the Berlin Wall, the betrayals of Soviet moles into Britain’s spy agencies, an “outsider” with a few ideals who brought a lovely cynicism to the Game of Nations as he saw it once he started writing novels like “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold,” “Russia House” and “The Tailor of Panama.”
He talks about being abandoned by his mother, his father’s many prison sentences, the “betrayal” he felt at having to bail the old man out after he became famous. And he remembers the infamous Kim Philby defection to the U.S.S.R., offering his considered analysis of what drove “one of us,” as the British upper class regarded Philby (not Cornwell) to sell out his country for the murderous monster Stalin.
That “joy of self-imposed schizophrenia,” Cornwell reckons, “the very pleasure of being in the secret world” and being bored at the risks an entitled and protected figure like Philby never really faced is what drove Britain’s most infamous Cold War traitor.
Cornwell’s big admissions are no shocks. He includes some of himself, his own career — teaching and as a “very junior” agent, “not very successful,” “not told very much” — in every novel, which he labels “credible fables out of the worlds I visited, or visited me.”
His father’s unsavory scammer’s background put them both “on the run” early on. Even at “posh boarding schools,” young David never fit in even as he mastered the manners, speech and affectations of the class he didn’t belong to.
That contributed to his jaded view of the Cold War, when he found himself stationed in Cold War West Germany, wading through unrepentant, unpunished “Nazis” there and in East Germany.
He didn’t “do any of the dering do” of his novelistic spies. But then, they didn’t do much of that either. Writing “antedotes” to the James Bond fantasies of Ian Fleming, Cornwell kept things perfuntory, by the book, intimate, low key no matter how high the stakes.
Morris offers no “gotcha” moments here, seemingly content to let Cornwell retell his life story, embellishing and reinforcing the “beytrayal” theme, letting us in on the scarred and testing autobiography of a creative person.
“The Pigeon Tunnel” is a good book, a memoir, “illustrated” with archival interviews — Merv and “60 Minutes” — fresh interviews, recreations of events, people, places and times in Cornwell’s life. And in this case, that’s enough.
Rating: PG-13, suggested violence, smoking and some profanity.
Cast: David Cornwell, aka John le Carré, Jake Dove, Charlotte Hamblin, Alan Mehdizadeh and Errol Morris.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Errol Morris. An Apple TV+ release.
Running time: 1:33
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