Classic American small city in the Midwest — more diverse and tolerant than you expect, “safe” to those who move there.
And then Donald Trump gets elected and the racist goons come out from under the rocks they’d been hiding under.
Oct 10, this Bob Hurster (“The Listener”) take on the division that exploded in America once folks who saw themselves in Donald Trump felt empowered to act on their darkest prejudices comes out.
One early assertion in Nick Broomfield’s new documentary appreciation “The Stones and Brian Jones” will stand out to many a Rolling Stones fan, the idea that “I don’t think many people remember who (Jones) was.”
Even someone coming to the Stones as a babe, late in the game, can hear the difference between the recordings the blues and blues-rock band the Stones made in the Brian Jones ’60s and the sound of the ’70s-onward stadium tour mainstays “The World’s Greatest Rock’n Roll Band” became.
Jones formed the band via classified ad, dove deep into the blues with them and was a big part of why they became wildly popular before Mick Jagger and Keith Richards ever wrote a pop hit with them. A stunningly-adept multi-instrumentalist, Stones fans recognize his musical coloration of “Ruby Tuesday” (recorder, flutes), “Street Fighting Man” and “Paint it Black” (sitar), “Under My Thumb” (marimba), “She’s a Rainbow” (Mellotron) and harmonica on many of their early blues releases as the hooks that made the songs distinct, memorable, and unlike anything the band released after his dismissal from the group.
But Broomfield, one of Britain’s great documentary filmmakers and no slouch at musical biographies (“Biggie & Tupac,””Kurt & Courtney”), delivers merely glancing assertions of Jones’ musical prowess — a jam session friend of Hendrix, pal of Dylan’s, sax man on a Beatles session and so forth. The Stones’ longtime bassist and curator of their history (a packrat who saw all and saved all) Bill Wyman is here, wide-eyed and delighted at playing back to Broomfield snippets of Jones’ genius and why he’s worth remembering.
Broomfield instead leans into his own specialty, charting Jones’ psychic path from glory to self destruction. His interview subjects note Jones’ sensitivity about his looks, his height, his “insecurities” which played out in legions of love affairs, including a long string of young British women the rocker hooked up with, whose families welcomed him in and became his support system after his estrangement from his own, five of them abandoned after he impregnated them and moved on.
The filmmaker interviews many of them, the most famous being the model/singer Zouzou and the legendary singer and Stones retinue queen Marianne Faithfull. And Broomfield has archival interviews with others, including the singularly-gorgeous and magnetically destructive Anita Pallenberg, whose betrayal came at the perfect moment to trigger Jones’ final descent into dysfunction — fired from the band — and his untimely death three weeks later back in 1969.
Broomfield tracks the erosion of Jones’ influence and “power” in the band and the way his bandmates noted how none of them handled their ascent into fame worse, or lost himself in drugs as deeply as Jones.
German filmmaker Volker Schlöndorff “(The Tin Drum), who filmed “A Degree of Murder,” starring Pallenberg and featuring a score composed and performed by Brian Jones, observes that “drugs destroyed his discipline,” and that “you can’t be an artist without discipline.”
Events certainly bore that out, as Jones became too unreliable for the band, and without the band’s demands, died within days of his not-unexpected dismissal.
Broomfield approaches this subject as a fan and an observer remembering the era he grew up in. He narrates the story, recalls meeting Jones on a train ride when Broomfield was just an impressionable 14 year-old. And a few years later, Broomfield was in Hyde Park, London, for the “farewell” concert the Stones gave just days after Brian’s death.
The film features extensive readings (by actor Freddie Fox) of Jones’ letters — to family, lovers, and his scores of revealing personal responses to band fan mail from those early years. The way he saw the band as “two bands,” the joy he got at exposing his blues heroes to the big wide (British) world bubbles through in these short hand-written notes.
Still, “The Stones and Brian Jones” doesn’t lend itself to the air of sadness and tragedy that hangs over Broomfield’s best known biographies — the musical ones, and his sympathetic portrait of serial killer Aieleen Wuornos. But it is essential viewing for any fan of ’60s music history and The Rolling Stones’ place in it, even for those of us who haven’t forgotten Brian Jones and his place in it.
Rating: unrated, profanity
Cast: Brian Jones, Bill Wyman, Zouzou, Marianne Faithfull, Lewis Jones, Michael Lindsay Hogg, Volker Schlöndorff, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Eric Burden, Charlie Watts and Nick Broomfield.
Credits: Directed by Nick Broomfield, scripted by Nick Broomfield and Marc Hoeferlin. A BBC Films/Magnolia release.
Running time: 1:37
How’s this for a romantic “meet cute?”
He spies her outside the flat of a mate, a tracksuited young woman with bangs to die for and a willingness to sprint and parkour her getaway. He’s a combat soldier, apparently just gone AWOL, so by God he’s giving chase.
Eve (Carli Fish) wasn’t just outside that friend’s apartment. She was in it. He wasn’t just a mate, he was Ash’s (Oliver Lee) former sergeant (Clint Dyer). And Sgt. Sparxs, paralyzed in combat, abandoned by his wife, had just taken his life.
Eve, Ash comes to find out as he falls completely in love with ths reckless and sexy free spirit, was there to witness the act. She was Sparx’s “Ferryman,” someone to to ensure that things go off as planned and that the authorities (one assumes) realize it was a planned suicide.
“Ferryman” is writer-director Darren Bender’s sympathetic dive into assisted suicide, its pros and cons presented to lovesick Ash as he pokes his nose into Eve’s “club,” its rules and her reason for being in it.
If you haven’t guessed from her seeming good health and manic pixie dream girl lust for life, Eve is as doomed as anybody else in this underground club of the hopeless and despairing, those looking for a little instruction, sympathy and hands-off assistance in ending their lives.
Ash is in love with somebody not long for this world. That has him searching her phone, rummaging through her computer and stumbling into her parents (Raquel Cassidy of “Downton Abbey,” and Jay Simpson of “Small Axe”) and meeting other “ferrymen,” not something they’re expecting.
“I can’t break the chain,” they explain to him, in almost horror movie terms. But as they’re someone planning their own demise, who better to witness others see it through?
Fish (“Mother & Wild”) and Lee (“The Knife that Killed Me”) bring a youthful heedlessness to their characters — hers in a form of accepted denial, determined to go through with things no matter the romance that’s just dropped on her doorstep, his in becoming an active dissuader/disruptor of the club, or an ally with Eve against her parents’ weeping resistence.
It’s all kind of sadly formulaic and dispassionately passionate, but also adult and occasionally surprising in where it takes our assisted suicide sympathies. It’s not a simple decision, and often not one arrived at in haste. Once one has made it, there’s something to be said for having someone who knows exactly what you’re going through there at the end.
Rating: unrated, suicide subject matter, violence, sex
Cast: Carli Fish, Oliver Lee, Clint Dyer, Jay Simpson and Raquel Cassidy
Credits: Scripted and directed by Darren Bender. A Random Media release.
Running time: 1:30
This could be a fascinating peek into the machinations meant to end coerced confessions by short-cutting cops, and how this civil rights work impacted the young woman whose alleged accused attacker bore the surname that became known as “Read’em their Miranda Rights.”
Game recognizes game and there’s no hustle like hustling a hustler in “The Kill Room,” an unlikely all-star comedy about lowdown and dirty contract killing spilling over into the pretentious world of modern art and the “types” who inhabit it.
The darkness of the murdering tends to mute the comedy as the filmmakers struggle to make a mash-up of “Leon: The Professional,” “The Ice Man” and “Velvet Buzzsaw.” But whatever the shortcomings of comic-turned-director Nicol Paone (“Friendsgiving” was hers), the players and the mere casting of them are good for laughs.
Uma Thurman is Patrice, struggling owner of Manhattan’s Program Gallery, where she’s losing business, losing artists and losing her patience with her too-precious intern (Amy Keum, fun). Leslie catches Patric snorting in the middle fo a big opening.
“Don’t JUDGE me. It’s just Adderall.”
Samuel L. Jackson is Gordon, the Yiddish-speaking owner of the Neptune Bakery & Deli. Or so it seems. Gordon is actually “The Black Dreidel,” a “best bialys” baker who is serving as a front for a mob murder-for-hire business. Sort of like what Danny Aiello is up to in “The Professional.”
The Black Dreidel’s “bag man” is Reggie, an Italian-American (Joe Manganiello) contract killer whose preferred weapon is that bane of modern existince, the plastic shopping bag. Reggie is a mug and a bit of a brooder.
But all this money changing hands has Gordon fretting about how “they got Al Capone,” the IRS. He needs a way to launder cash and put it on the books. Patrice’s Adderall hook-up (Matthew Maher) accidentally gives Gordon the idea.
His “maybe we could help each other out,” IRS “never blinks an eye” at insane prices for art” pitch to drug-addled Patrice just gets him rejected and a “Are you really man-splaining money laundering to me?” lecture from her.
But things are dire. A star artist (Maya Hawke) is flipping out. A rival gallery owner (Dree Hemingway) is burying her in put-downs.
What’s a hustler to do? Dive into a new hustle. Only Patrice doesn’t know where Gordon’s money is coming from or what Reggie, commissioned to contrive “modern” expressionist artworks using bloodied bags for texture, etc., really does for a living.
He’s just the mysterious “Bagman,” whose art is delivered, paid for in cash, with Patrice taking out a cut as she writes checks back to Gordon’s mob overlords’ art “trust.”
The conceit here, that the art world is overrun with loathesome “African dictators,” arms dealers, Russians thugs, “oil tycoon/mobster types,” that they’re all pretenders, con artists and tax cheats with no “eye,” just the money to fake having taste, is clever.
Thurman, Jackson and Manganiello land a laugh or three, with our “Pulp Fiction” co-leads setting off comic sparks. Absurd situations, accidentally building “buzz” for this “hot new (young) artist,” “love your work” lying your way across the Big Miami Art Show (inspired by Art Basel, not named that) inspire chuckles.
Larry Pine plays a vapid, rich “They buy it because they think they need it” collector. Debi Mazar gives an edge to The Kimono, an al-powerful New York Times art critic nicknamed for her choice of attire.
But if screen comedies are poker games, then Paone, working from a script by Jonathan Jacobson, leaves a lot of money on the table, not properly playing the wonderful hand she’s dealt. But “The Kill Room,” which also needed a better title, has enough funny going on to recommend it if you don’t think of all it might have been.
Rating: R, graphic violence, drug abuse (snorting) and profanity
Cast: Uma Thurman, Samuel L. Jackson, Joe Manganiello, Amy Keum, Debi Mazar, Maya Hawke, Dree Hemingway, Jennifer Kim and Larry Pine.
Credits: Directed by Nicol Paone, scripted by Jonathan Jacobson. A Shout! Factory release.
Running time: 1:37
Post apocalyptic child rearing, getting your baby “home” after an environmental catastrophe?
Coming soon.
While one can appreciate the idea that a talented filmmaker with style and edge would turn his attention to children’s films, and the Texas-based studio he founded to shoot them in, a new Robert Rodriguez “Spy Kids” installment always gives me a case of, “Awww, dude.”
As in “Aww, dude, ‘Hypnotic’ wasn’t all that bad, and there are all those cool credits you accumulated before it — ‘Sin City,’ ‘Once Upon a Time in Mexico,’ going back to ‘Desperado’ and ‘El Mariachi.’ But another movie with kiddie spies and spy gadgets?”
This latest reboot gets made-for-Netflix money, so many Troublemaker Studios gets a little more in the black. But even though the messaging is upbeat, the video game villain has Muskian overtones and it finishes well, it lacks the Spanglish spark that made the original films so much fun.
Gina Rodriguez isn’t a bad swap for Carla Gugino as the new “mom” who is a spy. But Zachary Levi is nobody’s idea of Antonio Banderas. He isn’t even his usual jovial self, here, thanks to a script so PG it’s like the “P” was washed right out of it.
And all the colorful villains and actors playing them from the past films hang over Billy Magnussen’s turn as Rey “The King” Kingston, the video game mogul who wants to cheat-code, hack and reboot The World.
Everly Carganilla is Patty and and Conor Esterson is Tony, the two “kids” who have no clue Mom and Dad work for the OSS. No, not THAT OSS.
The parents, Nora Torrez and Terrence Tango, are ordered to fend off whoever is trying to steal this “Armageddon Code.” They find themselves battling villainous figures based on Aztec warriors and Spanish conquistadors, with some Heck Knight as the ultimate foe. They don’t figure out they’re straight out of a video until they’re already hostages.
Their kids, meanwhile, have escaped to the “Safe House” lair where they finally put the “Ah, they’re SPIES” thing together. This digitally-advanced lair offers Spy Training lessons via tutorials rendered by their digitized parents.
When they figure out that the game Hyskor and its creator Rey Kingston are the villains, game-master Tony figures it’s his turn to shine.
These movies are always more humorous than this. Not only is the flippant Levi wasted in it, few other jokes land either.
Here’s one that did. Villainois minions raid the “safe house.” One of them is cautious.
“Careful! They could have…gadgets.”
A souped-up trike and deco-design boat-jet, a robotic crab drone and weapon-stashing bracelets are among the blase tech trotted out.
I also laughed at the pass code the kids have to recite to enter the lair. Aw, man, NOBODY in the Spanish speaking world wants to give their ENTIRE name to anyone.
“Patricia Angelita Sorrow Feliz Rhiannon Tango-Torrez!”
There’s novelty in their “find another way” around violence conflict resolution messsaging, the effects are excellent, if not quite at a Marvel level at the moment and it finishes well.
But bland leads, a story that feels similar to many other “Spy Kids” adventures and the paucity of colorful supporting players kind of washes the Spanish/Spanglish fun right out of this most Tex-Mex of kids’ franchises.
Rating: PG
Cast: Conor Esterson, Everly Carganilla, Gina Rodriguez, Zachary Levi and Billy Magnussen.
Credits: Directed by Robert Rodriguez, scripted by Robert Rodriguez and Racer Max. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:37
“And Then Come the Nightjars” is a droll and poignant tale of male bonding and how a traumatic event scars such a relationship and sounds a death knell for a way of life.
It’s distinctly British elegy, a two-handed piece scripted by Bea Roberts, based on her award-winning play and given a verdant, wistful treatment by first-time feature director Paul Roberts. With original stage stars David Fielder and Nigel Hastings recreating the characters for this “opened up” production, “Nightjars” makes for a funereal film with flashes of wit, drama and fire.
A solitary white-bearded farmer (Fielder) works on his gates, grates and his outbuildings, fastidiously scrubbing down surfaces left and right, dipping and splashing disenfectant everywhere as snippets of the news play out on the radio.
It’s 2001 in Devon, and he’s doing his due dillegence as what is shaping up to be one of Britain’s worst foot-and-mouth disease outbreaks ever is crawling from Essex into other Home Counties.
That fellow who shows up in a pink cowboy hat “I won at the fete?” He’s Jeffrey (Hastings), the local veterinarian.
Don’t let the pink hat and crusty Michael’s “Christ and f—–g baby Moses in a basket” reaction to it throw you. And Michael doesn’t let Jeff’s hours-long “stop by” chat as they keep vigil over Dolly, who is about to calf, distract him. With disease about and a vet in his calfing barn, he senses what Jeff won’t tell him.
But the reassurances that “you’ve be fine,” that this disease isn’t close, that his herd — Michael names every cow — is healthy, seem enough.
“You’re the only one I trust with my girls.”
And maybe Jeff’s just killing time here because things aren’t great at home. Michael guesses that, too.
But that bird Michael hears but never sees? It’s a nightjar, “the bird of death…bad luck.”
Days later Jeff comes back in his haz-mat coat to talk Michael down from a shotgun stand-off with government officials there to “dispose” of the herd. Everything’s gotten worse, from Jeffrey’s marriage to Michael’s denial of the foot and mouth disease almost at his door. No, his cows aren’t sick, but no, Jeff can’t “go talk some sense” into those who have a government mandate, which he’s hear to oversee and perform.
He’s going to have to kill Michael’s cows. And his pleas work their way around to what can go wrong when this sort of this is rushed because of delays like Michael’s attempting here. “Humane” goes out the door.
Their easy, joking and over-familiar relationship — Jeff doesn’t hesitate to take nips off his ever-present flask, but never offers it to the farmer — bends from friendly/tetchy to testy and panicked. Jeff is haunted by what he must do. Michael is lashing out, even at his friend. They need each other to get through this. They just need to figure that out.
Roberts scripts lovely exchanges that show how entwined in each other’s lives these two have become. This isn’t just a customer/businessman connection, not just a vet who makes his living off these folks’ livelihoods. It’s a whole way of life tied together in family, the rhythms of the farm work year, the changing of the seasons and the unchanging nature of their community, an ecosystem that needs every farm to work and pay off, every animal cared for, every institution and every person there to survive and their farm to make it to another generation.
The story jumps forward in time a few more instances, showing how events of 2001 impacted that delicate interconnection and changed the two men’s relationship.
The simplest way to describe “And Then Come the Nightjars” is as a “kitchen sink” play that’s escaped “to the Country.” It’s beautiful to look at, from the working interiors of a 200 year-old cattle farm to the tree canopy-tunneled backcountry roads.
Fleshed out with a farm country wedding as well as a more directly sinister “they’re coming to get my herd” stand-off, it’s a lovely film with a somber, sad undertone, a country life “dying of the light” that makes the journey from stage to screen with its heart still broken, but intact.
Rating: unrated, profanity, disturbing images
Cast: David Fielder, Nigel Hastings
Credits: Directed by Paul Robinson, scripted by Bea Roberts, based on her play. A Gravitas Ventures release.
Running time: 1:20
Casting Olga Kurylenko is interesting, in that she’s got the action film bonafides.
And the timing of the trailer, just as people are pondering why North American men spend so much time pondering the Roman Empire, couldn’t be better.
Every British schoolchild knows the name of the queen who fought the Italian imperialists. Now, maybe the rest of us will dive into her story.
Clive Standen, Peter Franzen and Rita Tushingham are in the cast.
A fourth go-round for the “Expendables,” with most of the all-star buzz/all-star cast of aging action star lineup checked out since the last film in that opening trilogy, is turning out to be have been a bad idea.
Inflation-jacked ticket prices or not, a poor Thursday night (I saw it with maybe 5 people in the theater) and feeble Friday of $3.3 point to a $9 million opening weekend, tops, which Deadline.com notes is the worst ever for the franchise.
Terrible reviews, far worse than the original film and pretty much bad across the board, didn’t help.
Stallone doesn’t have anything else going on, to speak of, but Jason Statham has better things to do than ride this dead horse until he’s Sly’s age. No Terry Crews, newer, lower wattage co-stars gave fans no excuse to turn up just to see the Lionsgate spectacle.
“Nun II” will clear $7 million, a bad movie that keeps making money.
“A Haunting in Venice” deserved better than a half-decent opening and 60% drop second weekend. The lack of a more star-studded supporting cast may give its older audience an excuse to not bother — it might make $6. Then again, it traditionally takes older audiences longer to get around to movies aimed at them. It’s good. Maybe they’ll get the word. We’ll see.
The final Denzel turn as “The Equalizer” isn’t having that problem, clearing $4.5, $81 all-in by midnight Sunday. It probably won’t reach $100, but it’ll end up close.
And “Barbie” is getting a lot of IMAX screens and its $3.5 million take will be enough to shove the worst “Big Fat Greek Wedding” movie out of the top five.
I’ll update this as more data comes in. The released and abandoned “Dumb Money” and other more titles have my interest as well.
Movie Nation 