“Simpson’s” fans might recognize the Sunsphere from the Knoxville World’s Fair of the 1980s, still standing and home of RealknoxvilleMusic.com these days.
Hanging out tonight with Wayne Blledsoe on his show ” Miles to Go” as he plays from his vast collection of labor, work and union songs and we talk about Labor Day, union movies and such.
Great views of Knox Vegas after dark, too.
Yes, when I worked here in the last millennium out of town wags called the Sunsphere”the doorknob to hell,” but I’m more mature now.
You’d think there’d be a historical marker noting this town’s places in cinema history — Sam Raimi, Bruce Campbell and the Coen Brothers filming a movie in the boonies, Food City manager Mike Campbell co-founding a cinema empire out of a closed movie theater.
Maybe Raimi should donate “the car” to get the ball rolling. Have Bruce show up for a ribbon cutting over the ’73 Olds Delta ’88.
“Root Letter” is an indie murder mystery about a missing pen pal, a film based on a Japanese video game.
It’s a slow, sloppily-structured exercise in tedium that is simple yet hard to follow, short but interminable thanks to leaden pacing and often-mumbled dialogue by its cast of mostly-unknowns.
Nah. Not beating around the bush on this one.
An opening scene introduces us to a teen we see getting a beat down thanks to an enraged father catching young Carlos (Danny Ramirez) having sex with his daughter.
That puts Carlos in a Tulsa hospital. And that’s where pen pal notes from Sarah (Keana Marie) are forwarded. It seems his class in Tulsa and her class in Baton Rouge have been assigned randomly-selected pen pals to correspond with as writing exercises.
As they’re both well into high school, this seems oddly late for them to be getting such elementary writing instruction. Usually this sort of assignment rolls out for pre-hormonal fifth graders.
They share the banalities of life — sanitized daily routine, childhood memories. She’s into Billie Eilish and Lorde, he’s all about Slayer and Metallica.
He’s just now figuring out “you can’t save everyone,” he writes. “Dear Carlos, I killed him,” she responds.
When Carlos recovers from his injuries and settles back into work washing dishes, the letters stop. That’s when he decides to travel to Louisiana and figure out what happened.
As as bland as this picture has been — sharing little snippets of his life, cutting to show bigger slices of hers — it’s about to get a lot worse.
Director Sonja O’Hara and screenwriter David Ebeltoft never get a handle on how to handle parallel structure in a screenplay. We lose track of Danny in the fictive “present” for most of the movie, and what few scenes there are utterly blow the mystery of how a teen would figure out another teen’s last name and track her down. Google isn’t the answer.
Danny spreads her letters on his bed as if to hunt for clues, but nah. Let’s just go find her English teacher and get her to figure out a way to let him know without violating her school system’s ethics and without making punching-bag Danny — he gets pummeled a few times — break a sweat doing his own homework.
Sarah’s mother (Lydia Hearst) seems a wreck, and Sarah’s whole life with her is an “Is he gone?” work-around with Mom’s rotating collection of boyfriends and what turn out to be her addictions and probation problems.
Sarah’s friends aren’t much of an escape either. BFF Zoe (Kate Edmonds) has hooked up with Mr. Wrong. And Jackson (Sam A Coleman) is interested in getting into the drug trade, using their stammering, supposedly meek mutual friend Caleb (Breon Pugh) to steal drugs from Caleb’s over-armed, camo-loving drug-dealing uncle (Mark St. Cyr).
Another friend slept with Sarah’s now-ex boyfriend. So Sarah gets drunk at a party, and the film is so sloppy we can’t tell if it’s from imbibing or it she was roofied. Next thing she knows, she’s awakened in a nice house down the street where the kind couple (Terry J. Nelson, Dodie Brown) took her in and let her sleep it off.
Turns out, they lost a daughter about her age. It made the wife a little crazy and left them both shattered. Could they be Sarah’s lifeline?
All this back story isn’t presented as something Carlos is figuring out, reading up on or being told by the good folks of Baton Rouge. Because remember, the script has forgotten about him. Until, that is, he starts poking around wherever Sarah might have been and asking questions about what became of her.
Hand to heart here, very little of this makes any sense. Whatever happened to Sarah would have generated a police report and journalism Carlos could access. Whatever he’s getting off TV station websites doesn’t explain in the least where she is — above or below ground.
Sarah’s an interesting character, and those she finds herself throwing in with are at least colorfully bad. The high school milieu has some limited interest. But Carlos is dully written and sleepily played.
I watch movies for a living, and as thrillers go, I found this laughably inept at just getting the basics of storytelling down. You need to understand who and how people are, follow a narrative throughline of some sort and give us something to hang onto so that we’re in the same boat as the protagonist trying to piece this “mystery” together.
The parallel structure problems, a third act string of crimes without consequences or even remorse and the idiotic steps Carlos takes in tracking somebody he’s never met with only a few PG letters to go on overwhelm this movie and don’t exactly embellish the image of the game it’s based on, either.
Honestly, I feel I know less about what connects these two and why any of this is worth exploring than I did when “Root Letter” started. I know I care a lot less.
Rating: unrated, violence, drug abuse, sex, profanity
Cast: Keana Marie, Danny Ramirez, Lydia Hearst, Mark St. Cyr, Sam A. Coleman, Breon Pugh, Kate Edmonds, Terry J. Nelson, Dodie Brown
Credits: Directed by Sonja O’Hara, scripted by David Ebeltoft, based on the Kadakowa Games video game. An Entertainment Squad release.
Whatever the stylistic charms of Olivier Bourdeaut’s acclaimed novel, the film version of “Waiting for Bojangles (En attendant Bojangles)” offers further proof that “manic pixie dream girls” exist in France, and not just in the person of Audrey “Amelie” Tautou.
It’s about a dizzy, star-kissed romance between two freer-than-free spirits and the child they give birth to and raise in the hippiest “free range” tradition. The novel tells this story through the eyes of the child, and in his voice. That’s not the way the film unfolds.
Director and co-writer Régis Roinsard invites us into a fantasy world of carefree love, lying as performance art and “unbridled imagination” — all made possible because of (one guesses) family money. Nobody works in this fictional bubble, and yet endless parties, extravagant living quarters and mountains of bills can pile up because no one can or should be bothered to pay them.
It’s a world with no visible means of support, a world where a couple can “meet cute” and discover “our song” on his baby blue 1958 MGA car radio motoring their way to a madcap “marriage on impulse” at an empty roadside chapel.
Because that’s how free spirited “Name me as you wish” Camille (or “Antoinette,” “Rita,” etc) and the rakish rogue George (Romain Duris) roll.
The fact that “our song,” which we hear over and over again in the film, is “Mister Bojangles” and Jerry Jeff Walker wouldn’t get around to composing it until ten years after that 1958 opening is immaterial. We’re on the fringes of magical realism and perhaps relying on a child’s misremembered memory. After all, young Gary (Solan Machado Graner) was only conceived that night. He wasn’t really a witness.
We meet Georges as he seems to be crashing this posh patio party overlooking the Mediterranean sunset, thanks to his stubble (a lower-class trait and another 1950s Riviera anachronism) and ever-evolving lies-as-conversation starters. He was Josephine Baker’s lover “during the war.” He is Romanian and “you might have heard” (in French with English subtitles) of his ancestor, “Count Dracula.”
He spies the stunning blonde across the way, dancing as if no one’s watching, and is warned away by his old money family friend (Grégory Gadebois). Camille (Virginie Efira) will “drive you doolally,” is the warning. “She dances on the edge of a precipice.”
It’s already too late. Smitten Georges floats into her dance, leads her into an extravagant tango and fills her ears with colorful lies. She lies a little, too, as she barely takes notice of her new dance partner until the mob descends on him after uncovering his fibs. She sticks up for him, and they’re off , with her standing up in the tiny sports car as her diaphanous Grace Kelly-in-“To Catch A Thief” dress (Chanel?) billows in the breeze.
It was meant to be.
Over the course of the film, we see Georges indulge her every whim and eccentricity as she indulges his — among them, giving birth to his baby. It’s only when their boy reaches the age of 10 or so that the problems surface. Nightly parties, which their son attends, making him miss school, keeping a stork for a pet, doing almost everything on a whim — is that a sane way to raise a child?
Any viewer watching this and taking in the impulses, the bubbly mania and stress-free kick-their-problems-down-the-road lifestyle of these two-now-three, is almost certain to remember the manic pixie dream girls you’ve known, real life versions of Katherine Hepburn in “Bringing Up Baby,” Streisand in “What’s Up Doc?” or Zoey Deschanel in just about anything.
I’ve been blessed with knowing four, by my perhaps-generous definition of these intoxicating free spirits. And as “Bojangles” takes its sobering turn towards “serious,” I couldn’t help but recall that three of the four died young.
Camille purposefully taking a walk down the street in the nude can be indulged by Georges, who dashes out, strips and joins her. But as one dinner party guest suggests when Camille strips off her panties to make an angry point, “She’s lost her mind.”
“Is Mom sick” the boy wants to know? “No more or less than most people” isn’t the most honest answer.
Duris, a star since “The Beat My Heart Skipped” and a screen heartbreaker since “Heartbreaker,” is at his dashing, sweep-you-off-your-feet best here. Georges dances, charms and lies like his life depends on it, like his whole shtick is a lie. He positively swoons over Camille (we get it). Duris sizzles in a Spanish flamenco production number in the third act.
And Efira (“Benedetta,” “Sink or Swim”) so cranks up the energy and the sexual allure for this woman that her dazzling beauty and devil-may-care spirit make her irresistible to pretty much any straight man you can think of, who would throw caution to the wind just to bask in her presence.
“I never fell in love before,” he pleads, after chasing down the MGA she caused him to crash, and then stole the morning after their “wedding.” “Don’t deprive me of such a delight.”
That’s the spirit of “Waiting for Bojangles,” the first half of it, anyway. Even the most irresponsible excesses — allowing Gary to decide he won’t attend school…at 10 — seem reasonable as this couple-and-child skip by on a years-long contact high that they share with us.
The second half is dark and more “reality” based, and manages to be a drag and drag dramatically as well. Perhaps mimicking the novel’s point of view and structure (Dad’s diary entries and Gary’s memories of his folks) would have helped.
But if you know the song that underscores this romance, know the Jerry Jeff and Sammy Davis Jr. and Nina Simone versions of it, you get what the novelist and the filmmakers were going for here. Reality is melancholy. Imagination and memory are our escape from it.
Camille explains it best. “When reality is sad and banal, make up a fantastical story” and live in that.
Credits: Directed by Régis Roinsard, scripted by Romain Compingt and Régis Roinsard, based on a novel by Olivier Bourdeaut. A Blue Fox release.
Running time: 2:04
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“Burial” is a clunky but somewhat engrossing WWII “quest” thriller about Adolf Hitler’s body.
British B-movie writer-director Ben Parker (“The Chamber”) conjures up a fanciful version of what happened to that corpse when the Russians got their hands on it. It’s a story that’s part myth, part combat film and part lecture to the Nazis and Russian apologists of today.
It’s not all that, but it’s not terrible.
An old Englishwoman (Harriet Walter of “Sense & Sensibility”) confronts a young goon (David Alexander) who’s just broken into her house. His haircut, imitation concentration camp numbers and Nazi tattoos give him away.
He came there looking for something, desperate for “the real story” of what happened to that movement’s tiny-mustached icon. After tasering and drugging him, the old woman — a Jewish Russian expat — gives it to him straight. Because “I’m afraid people like you can’t simply be TOLD the truth.”
In the last days of the war, young Brana (Charlotte Vega, Netflix’s “Warrior Nun”) was an intel officer assigned to a detail that was to transport a coffin-shaped box from ravaged Berlin to Moscow. Stalin wanted “proof” Hitler was dead, and Russians, she tells us at one point, “like to look in the eyes of our enemy.”
With a captain, a colonel and five enlisted men they set out by truck for a Polish railhead. As there are German “werewolves” (die-hards) in the woods who don’t want the Soviets or the world to have “proof,” this trip will be a bloody one.
Keeping everybody on task would be hard, even if Brane wasn’t shorter and slighter than everybody else. They must bury the box each night, guard it and make sure no one can find it if they’re attacked.
But with the war all but over, the Russian soldiers want a little celebratory booze and some “spoils of war,” which Brana knows means rape victims. Only the grizzled veteran named Tor (Barry Ward of TV’s “White Lines” and “Anne Boleyn”) seems to “get” Brana’s sense of purpose.
Those tracking them have access to herbal hallucinogens as weapons, which means any given attack could convince those being attacked that there are real werewolves on the prowl. And the Polish locals, victims of years of German and Soviet depredations, aren’t going to be of any help.
Save for one. He’s played by Tom Felton.
Parker’s Estonian-shot film flicks a little Russian, Polish and German into the dialogue for “authenticity” (tee hee) and kind of runs around in circles, hinting at supernaturalism but never committing to it.
The combat is brutal, personal and features villains dropping on the first shot and “heroes” who can take a knife in the back or two and bullet or three — B-movie style.
The obstacles on this quest are underwhelming, and the locations have no hint of the larger war being fought around them or that was fought over mere days before.
Kristjan Üksküla makes a generically vile fanatical and sadistic Nazi officer, Dan Renton Skinner a murderously oafish Russian one.
The old woman storyeller framing device is a reach for “meaning” in a formulaic WWII “mission” movie, and I can’t say it adds all that much to it.
But as B-movies about Hitler’s corpse and who might have a use for it — then, and now — go, “Burial” manages to be watchable, even when it’s making your eyes roll.
Rating: unrated, graphic violence, sexual assault
Cast: Charlotte Vega, Barry Ward, Dan Renton Skinner, Kristjan Üksküla, Harriet Walter and Tom Felton.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Ben Parker. An IFC Midnight release.
There’s no mistaking the look of a Fritz Lang film, especially the dark, soundstage-bound productions, with their elaborate arrangement of light, shadows and faces in the compositions.
But “Ministry of Fear,” his film of Seton I. Miller’s adaptation of a Graham Greene novel, had me double-checking the credits. Not to ensurethat Lang, the director of “M” and “Fury” and “Scarlet Street” and “The Big Heat,” was actually behind the camera. But to figure out what happened to this script.
No, that’s the right running time. It wasn’t hacked up in the ensuing years. No, this wasn’t Lang’s Hollywood debut after fleeing the Nazis. He’d made a few U.S. films already. All of those “my hotel room ransacked” references about action taken care of off-camera, that jaw-droppingly abrupt ending, were the way it “played” as released.
Compare this to the better Greene adaptations of the era — “The Third Man,” “This Gun for Hire,” “The Fallen Idol.” This script is boilerplate, perfunctory — “Confidential Agent” or “The Smugglers” directed by someone who knew where he wanted the camera and that shadow to fall over the leading man’s face ,but not fretting all that much over plot.
And. That. Plot. A man freshly-released from a mental hospital wins a cake at a rural “fete” by mistake, because Nazi spies have hidden microfilm in it? They come after it, and him, and he tries to unravel this mystery and expose their spy ring via comically direct, dangerously blunt questions about “criminal activity.” He hires a tipsy old man “private investigator,” sits through a seance and falls in with the brother-sister Austrian expat charity organizers whose lineage screams out “Suspects One and Two.”
Hitchcock would have rendered this a romp. Lang takes it ever so seriously, even at its most ludicrous.
Ray Milland is Stephen Neale, our hero, staring down a clock to the end of his incarceration when we meet him. It isn’t guilt — Catholic or otherwise (Greene’s trademark) — over how he got there that drives his actions. It’s his fear of the police locking him up again. Any spying or shooting pinned on him will be his doom.
Dan Duryea plays a scissors-wielding tailor who figures in the story, Hillary Brooke is the seductive medium who toys with our hero, even lets him have her purse pistol, at one point. Future “Batman” butler Alan Napier is a psychoanalyst who writes intellectual dissections of Naziism.
And Marjorie Reynolds and Carl Esmond are the Austrian siblings our Mr. Neale, on the lam and on the hunt for Nazis spies, falls in with.
“Ministry of Fear” has a hint of paranoia when a lot more than a hint was called for. Lang stages a visually striking shooting and unpredictable shoot out framed in an impressively deep composition.
But as Hitchcock best articulated, the great virtue of soundstage production was the degree of directorial control over what you put on film. None of the on-location variables or distractions. Lang found all these striking images, but he and Paramount didn’t wrestle the script into something with any flow to it.
Milland is passably interesting as the lead, but little of what made him crackle in his best performances is evident.
A lot of what’s “sinister” here is frittered away in one-off scenes or two-off cameos. Nothing at all is done with Duryea’s tailor, for instance. There’s no confrontation with this or that villain, on up the chain of command, leading to the spy master in charge of it all.
It’s a fast and frustrating film that seems to skip past a lot of “the good stuff.”
Watching it now, “Ministry of Fear” seems a lot more of a string of grand moments poorly-linked by blown opportunities. We see “Lang” in the credits and we leap to “classic” conclusions. To say this isn’t one of his best is about as respectful as one should get.
Rating: “approved,” violence
Cast: Ray Milland, Marjorie Reynolds, Carl Esmond, Hillary Brooke, Alan Napier, Erskine Sanford and Dan Duryea
Credits: Directed by Fritz Lang, script by Seton I. Miller, based on the Graham Greene novel. A Paramount (Universal Home Video) release on Tubi, other streaming platforms.
Running time: 1:26
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“Blind Ambition” is a simple, straightforward non-fiction film about what we journalists call a “man bites dog” story. It’s about something wholly unexpected and unusual, odd and cute.
We meet a quartet of Zimbabwean refugees who fled hardship to South Africa, got jobs waiting tables and started the process of mastering fine wine at the dining establishments where they work.
They became sommeliers, wine stewards at their restaurants. And when they were good enough at it to at least earn consideration for membership on South Africa’s World Wine Tasting Championships team, they took a suggestion and formed their own Team Zim instead.
A poor, corruptly-run economic basket case country — Zimbabwe — found itself represented at the wine-identifying competition among sommeliers from around the world, held at Chateau de Gilly in France in 2017.
So, it’s “Cool Runnings” with wine, right? Not quite. This never crosses into cutesy. It’s “uplifting,” but conventionally so, with a certain dignity surrounding it. These are, after all, “the finest palettes in Africa.”
Filmmakers Warwick Ross and Robert Coe shadow sommeliers Joseph, Marlvin, Tinashe and Pardon as they “train.” We learn of their home lives, how they landed restaurant jobs. We see hear and see snippets of their backstories, glimpse the news coverage of the chaotic, crisis-riddled last years of Robert Mugabe’s rule of Zimbabwe, the reasons these four fled. And we’re reminded of South African xenophobia, the attacks on “foreigners” that shamed the country during those days.
Wine masters, chefs, authors and others flesh out the skills they had to master and the conditions these young men had to overcome. And then we get into the nitty gritty of wine tasting, “which is not at all the same as wine-drinking,” one expert takes pains to explain.
The pragmatic value a sommelier has in a restaurant is helping diners match the “perfect” wines to their meal. In “competition,” they must show themselves to be the ultimate wine snobs, experts who can name the style, the varietal (grape), the vintage, the region and if they’re really good, the winery that bottled it.
We meet not just the Zimbabweans and the experts on refugees, Zimbabwe and wine. We’re introduced to mentors who gave them their starts, and follow them to France where their hired-by-phone French coach drags them all over wine country, from the Rhine to the Rhone, giving them an appreciation of the best the world has to offer, if nothing else.
The “blind” taste tests of competition make up the climax of the film.
There’s not a lot of “learning” about wine on the viewer’s part. As plucky and distinct as these young men are, their stories are more representative of the African refugee diaspora and its possibilities than of some “next big thing” in the wine world. South African wines are well-established. Zimbabwean wines barely known, until now. With actual home grown experts, perhaps that will change.
And thanks to the competition, in which the team tastes, studies and compares notes — debating what this or that wine is in two minute evaluations — the third act of “Blind Ambition” is livelier than the first two.
Rating: unrated
Cast: Joseph Dhafana, Marlvin Gewese, Pardon Tagazu and Tinashe Nyamudoka.
Credits: Directed by Robert Coe and Warwick Ross, scripted by Robert Coe, Paul Murphy and Madeleine Ross. A Samuel Goldwyn release.
Close your eyes and you can pretty much imagine the full “package” of a movie that would make its premiere on Comedy Central.
It’d be derivative — familiar and “new” at the same time. Maybe update “The Office” for the Zoom Meeting era, with ditzy “types” over-sharing, accidentally or on purpose, the most intimate details of their messy lives.
“How do I ‘mute?'” “How do I ‘Leave Meeting?'”
The cast? Same deal, mix the familiar with the new. Put Jason Alexander and Cheri Oteri in small roles, give Ken Jeong, Leslie Jones and Jay Pharaoh supporting parts and make the perky “New Ellie Kemper/Kimmy Schmidt” your lead.
“Out of Office” was scripted and directed by an “Office” writer and on-air regular, Paul Lieberstein, who was the put-upon HR nebbish on the show. It’s not his first directorial rodeo, but since no one saw the adorable “Song of Back and Neck,” he returned to the comic situation that keeps on giving for his latest, another story of the cutesy, quarrelsome workplace “family” that has been a fact of life for American sitcoms, if not “real life,” since “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”
It’s got a few laughs and a tiny dollop of heart, and wouldn’t have made a dime in theaters or much of a splash on Netflix or Paramount+. But it fits Comedy Central to a T.
Milana Vayntrub of the early years of “This Is Us” stars as Eliza, whom we meet as she’s escorted out of her latest workplace, a cardboard box with her belongings in it. She’s 28 and this isn’t her first “escort.” That’s why she’s cut-off in the middle of asking her parents (Oteri and Alexander) for money, brushing past the “Whattaya think room and BOARD is?” Because they’re selling the house she’s been mooching off them in to retire and move to Paris.
Eliza’s checkered employment history and lifetime of odd, impulsive choices means her exasperated dad won’t give her money before they board the plane. No, any cash she might need is entrusted to her younger, more responsible dental-hygienist sister.
Not to worry. That next job could be as close as the next job interview. It isn’t just the screwball in charge (Jeong) of this online help line who chats her up. He Zooms in the entire screwball staff (Emily Pendergast, Christopher Nicholas Smith, Elaine Carroll and Pharaoh) for the interview, which goes poorly until Eliza tells the boss what the others won’t — aka “what he wants to hear” about how to deal with his ongoing fight with his ever-escalating wife (Jones). Yeah, it’s bad advice and everybody else knows it. Consequence-free Eliza shrugs it off and gets the job.
But Mom’s parting words — “His marriage IS your job!” — should sink in. Think before you speak, give better suggestions and hope you’re a help. That’s a steep learning curve for Eliza to climb. Let’s see if she can manage it.
Liberstein populates this “Office” with absurdly-familiar, broadly drawn caricatures — the clueless guy in charge, the shaved-head, camo-clad veteran (Carroll), the argumentative over-qualified hunk (Smith), the too-nice wife (Pendergast) who shares too much of her not-able-to-conceive life with her office-mates, with her over-sharing husband (Chris Gethard) also working from their dormer office, free to blurt random input into every conversation. And then there’s our common sensible guy who went to the same college as Eliza (Pharoah), the “Designated Jim” (romantic interest) here, for those who remember the NBC TV series Lieberstein is recycling.
The banter is funny enough, starting with the Q&A job interview for work “literally ANYbody can do.”
“I see you’ve had a lot of…short time jobs?” “Yes. Thank you!”
A little office politics is introduced. A take-over is coming. The boss’s marital arguments turn uglier, more profane, more sexual and even scatological.
Then there are the little gems that would grab attention at any table read or writers brainstorming session for a sitcom. Jones’ wife character threatens to cheat with their aged neighbor, played by Monte Markham who makes that funny. Somebody plots throwing a “surprise” birthday party in the middle of an already-planned office party. (I can see Steve Carell trying that on “The Office.”).
Vayntrub makes a pleasant enough lead who would have been helped by sharper writing — more interesting character traits, funnier situations, a more obstacle-filled attempted courtship and funnier dialogue.
As with a lot of sitcoms, the idea here is to surround the romantic leads with funnier folk, and that works. Jones and Jeong on down the line deliver, with even “Office” alum Oscar Nunez scoring in a single scene as the new owner, bragging about taking “little companies” and making them into “great ones.” Quite the Mexican success story.
“My father lets me buy one company every two years!”
As a film, though, “Out of Office” plays more like a pilot to a sitcom that never was, a project any principled network “suit” would watch and dismiss.
“Too derivative,” she’d say. “We’ve already SEEN ‘The Office.'”
Rating: unrated, sexual situations, toilet humor, profanity (TV-14)
Cast: Milana Vayntrub, Jay Pharoah, Ken Jeong, Leslie Jones, Oscar Nunez, Emily Pendergast, Chris Gethard, Elaine Carroll, Christopher Nicholas Smith, Cheri Oteri and Jason Alexander.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Paul Lieberstein. A Paramount/MTV Films release (Sept. 5) on Comedy Central.
“Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul” is a dark comedy about a prosperity gospel megachurch preacher and his wife’s “comeback” from a fall from grace. First-time feature director Adamma Ebo got very lucky that Sterling K. Brown and Regina Hall were dazzled enough by her script that they signed on. They’re so good that the viewer, like Ebo, can lose track of the fact this was supposed to be funny.
Hall, most recently impressive in “Master” and on TV’s “Nine Perfect Strangers,” and “This is Us” Emmy-winner Brown give us brilliantly-detailed portrayals of a prayerful power couple, brittle but hanging on, putting on brave, smiling faces because they’re willing to do whatever it takes to get back what they just lost.
We see and hear Pastor Lee-Curtis Childs speak and “perform,” and the mansion, the “beautiful Bugatti,” the Prada suits and the gigantic Wander to Greener Paths church need no explanation. He is electric in the pulpit, beaming and upbeat, handsome and the epitome of preaching charisma.
He peacocks his latest outfit — “Don’t it look like I’ve been favoring the Lord?”
And sitting at his side, often in chairs that would put Buckingham Palace to shame, is his beaming, cheerleading, stylishly-turned-out Trinitie, aka “First Lady” Childs, his beautiful wife.
But when we meet them, it’s in an empty megachurch. He is hyped-up about the documentary film crew, seen once and almost never heard, that’s just started to follow them around, “fly on the wall” style, to capture their “comeback.”
A montage of TV coverage buzzes about the “scandal” that brought them down. But Atlanta’s Black “Jim and Tammy Fay” are hellbent on winning back the congregation that abandoned them, certain that their showmanship and earnest “self-forgiveness” will let them put whatever threatens to take all this away “behind” them.
But the film crew captures the tension in their desperation and the veneer that each wears over their egos about this humiliating state of affairs and the fragile, brittle state of their marriage.
Pastor Lee-Childs has a profane flip-out over stepping in gum in his designer Italian shoes. “First Lady” snaps “won’t nothing ever confirmed” about the sexual misconduct scandal that emptied their church and took a bite out of their bank accounts — “settlement” money.
And we see the glower in their eyes — beaming faces notwithstanding — when they speak of the on-the-rise Heaven’s Home Church down the road, and the righteous young preaching couple (Nicole Beharie and Conphidance) who opportunistically swooped in and swept away much of their congregation.
As Lee-Childs trots out ideas to get attention for their big Easter Sunday reopening and rehearses in front of Trinitie and “The Devout 5” — the congregants who refused to bail on them — their boundless optimism frays under the strain, Lee-Childs’ “scandal” explains itself and First Lady’s demands for him to “get it all back” turn strident.
Hall and Brown are never less than credible, so much so that we feel for these two in those moments when we forget we’re not supposed to. They create a couple that has endured even as it has made its own allowances for disappointments and concessions to “whatever works” that keeps them together. Brown’s job here is to sparkle and sizzle with energy and charisma. Hall’s is to let us see the bargain Trinitie’s struck in her mind.
The “mockumentary” format of the film works, but has felt played if not played-out since “The Office” had its run. Then Ebo takes us into the bedroom and we start to notice that she’s not consistent in showing us only what the “fly on the wall” filmmakers see.
But writer-director Ebo’s most obvious mistake here is assuming all of this is funny, just in its presentation. In post-hypocrisy American Christianity, a “scandal” that the scandalous expect their gullible followers to ignore is old hat. Greedy, smirking preachers lying and fund-raising from the pulpit, inveighing against “the homosexual agenda” and demanding charity and forgiveness when they’re not the first to offer the same isn’t funny any more.
And expecting laughs from the “purple Prada, peach Prada, periwinkle Prada” and “peal Prada” suits and Trinitie’s outlandish (ish) hats is twenty years of Tyler Perry movies out of date.
The deeper into this story that the movie gets and the darker things turn, the more we see this tale the way the stars do — as a tragedy only in the eyes of its two main characters. Brown and Hall elevate this low-hanging-fruit simply because they have to.
Rating: R for language and some sexual content.
Cast: Regina Hall, Sterling K. Brown and Nicole Beharie
Credits: Scripted and directed by Adamma Ebo. A Focus Features release.
