Netflix has this star spangled adaptation of “several” Edgar Allan Poe stories, slated for eight episodes.
Love that Carla Gugino. Willa Fitzgerald, Bruce Greenwood, Annabeth Gish, Zach Gilford, T’Nai Miller, Henry Thomas, Mark Hamill, Rahul Kohli, Mary McDonnell and Kate Siegel are also in the cast.
Next month, I think?
The idea isn’t the worst Netflix ever had.
Crank out an “Into the Woods” and “Wicked” riff on fairytales teaming up Red Riding Hood and Cinderella and give it a mystery for them to solve. Call it “Once Upon a Crime.”
But this tedious, tin-eared Japanese take on The Brothers Grimm finds almost nothing funny in that, just a lot of cute Japanese actresses and actors flippantly making light of Western fairytale tropes and characters, only not light enough.
At least that handsome prince “really knows how to pull of a red jacket and white pants!”
Red Riding Hood (Kanna Hashimoto) is minding her own business on her overdressed way to Spenhagen when a witch (Midoriko Kimura) cackles and taunts her over her shoes and won’t let her pass until she’s “fixed” that.
“In this country, beauty is the only thing that matters,” she hoots (in Japanese with subtitles, or dubbed). But she’s not very good at conjuring up the whole footwear makeover thing.
Red barely has time to get used to whatever’s happened to her comfy boots when she runs into Cinderella (Yûko Araki) who has problems far beyond footwear. She’s being bullied. Red Riding’s first clue?
“Your name literally means ‘covered in ashes.'”
A second witch is summoned –“What’s with all the witches today?” And the footwear matter is cleared up thanks to some glass slippers. Turn a pumpkin and mice into a coach and four, with coachman, and they’re all set for the ball, makeovers complete.
Running over the king’s favorite hairdresser on the way doesn’t cast as much of a pall over the evening as you might think. Until, as the heroines get a gander of the handsome prince (Takanori Iwata), dance with him and compete with Cinderella’s evil stepsisters for his attention, word gets out that the hairdresser is dead.
Who did it? Who hid the body? And why? Nobody is LEAVING This castle until…
Director Yûichi Fukuda (“Black Night Parade” and “Psychic Kusuo” were his) found out the hard way that the surest means of snuffing the light out in a comical fairytale is to burden the middle acts with witnesses, accusations, a dry mid-ball interrogation to figure out “Who killed that hairdresser, and why?”
While the production design is sparkling and the costumes impressive, there’s little here that might have given this corpse signs of life. The jokes in the dialogue are flat, the sight gags almost non-existent and the murder mystery barely worth labeling that.
It’s impossible to make some point about shallow “beauty” being the arbiter of citizenship and a means of getting one into the palace of Claire de Lune when literally everybody in the cast is inutterably gorgeous.
When every character is Milan or Paris runway ready, who gets to call whom “ugly” anyway? Even a six year-old could see through that, and as they’re the target audience here, well…
Rating: TV-PG
Cast: Kanna Hashimoto, Yûko Araki, Takanori Iwata, Natsuna, Miki Maya and Midoriko Kimura
Credits: Directed by Yûichi Fukuda, scripted by Aito Aoyagi. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:47
Rainn Wilson, Beau Bridges and Kevin Sussman are in the supporting cast of this series adaptation of the feminist novel by Bonnie Garmus.
Looks very good.
October 13, this premieres on Apple TV+.
BAFTA winner Monica Dolan stars in this amiable, moving road picture/”artist in the moment of discovery/re-discovery” drama from director Carol Morley of “The Falling.”
You glance at the credits to “Bitter Victory,” a World War II in the Libyan desert thriller starring Richard Burton, Curd Jürgens, Ruth Roman, Nigel Green and Christopher Lee, the only true “war” movie of director and co-writer Nicholas Ray, and you wonder, “Wait, how’d I miss this?”
The answer turns out to be, “Just lucky, I guess.”
Ray owes his screen immortality to “Rebel Without a Cause” (1955) and much of his reputation as an auteur to the films that led up to it — “They Live By Night,” “Johnny Guitar” and “In a Lonely Place.” But everything changed for him after “Rebel,” and he found himself working on a larger canvas, for higher stakes for much of the rest of his career.
The telling title on his post-James Dean resume is the other “war movie” he was on board to direct, the bloated 1960s epic “55 Days in Peking,” which he quit days into production, and finished off with a heart attack a short time afterwards. He handled the epic scale of “King of Kings” as well as could be expected. But “combat” and wasn’t his thing, unless it was limited to a simple gunfight or knife fight.
“Bitter Victory” is a groaning psychological thriller wrapped in a desert commando mission package. It opens with a string of tedious, unhurried, cinematically and militarily slack “assigned a mission” scenes confined to soundtstages meant to pass for Cairo and improves only somewhat when it moves out of doors for its trek through the Libyan Desert.
Ray handles firefights with so little care that they had to be replayed in fast-motion. He fretted not at all at how “tiny smoke bomb” every grenade explosion looked and was so careless with little matters like big explosions used as “a distraction” not distracting the hapless German guards from marching their rounds at their Benghazi headquarters, the object of this commando raid.
But stabbings and summary executions the filmmaker tackled with a bit more relish.
Curd Jürgens is cast against type as British Major Brand, a desk officer assigned a mission to retrieve “documents” from Gen. Erwin Rommel’s HQ. It’s the low ebb of the North African campaign, with the Brits who aren’t retreating on the front lines (too) comfortably cosseted in Cairo.
The reality was a bit more panicked, history told us.
Ray directs us through an enthusiastic training gym where soldiers are going at it with stylized dummies, tackling, stabbing and choking them with gusto.
Major Brand has no combat experience, doesn’t speak Arabic or German and isn’t someone who’s ever commanded men in the field. Not to worry, his second, Captain Leith (Burton) is similarly inexperienced. He’s a pre-war archaeologist who speaks Arabic, a “volunteer,” but also “an…intellectual.” And “Welsh,” the commanding officer (Anthony Bushell) huffs.
That’ll work out, we’re sure.
Why, let’s have Leith meet Brand’s wife (Ruth Roman). Turns out Leith and Jane have history, which enflames Brand a bit.
And thus the real reason Ray took this job comes to light. This will be a to-the-death slap-fight through the desert, with Leith questioning Brand’s bravery aka “manhood” and Brand failing tests of that, but cunningly pondering ways to get rid of Leith.
This French co-production betrays a certain sloppiness, pretty much start to finish. “Bitter Victory” predates the golden age of “military advisors,” and bears little resemblence to the better combat films of the era.
Ray dispensed with sequences like the parachute behind the lines business but never spared a moment of bare-teeth snarling between the subordinate officer (Burton) and his inferior superior.
The supporting cast was pretty unhappy, as casting, according to Christopher Lee (one of the sergeants in the 30 man commando unit), who said the men all drew lots as to who would play what.
Thus variety show ham Harry Landis got a few closeups, acting out a combat mission with his fingers on a table, accompanied by vocal sound effects, and Nigel Green, at his best in “Zulu” a few years later, stands out as the unit sadist. Nobody else got a chance to make his mark.
Burton gets all the good lines — “You have the Christian decency that forbids killing a dying man but ignores the work of a sharpshooter…You’re afraid to go in and kill with your bare hands. That’s what makes a soldier and destroys you as a man…The fine line between war and murder is distance.”
That makes the war of wills that supposedly drives the picture lopsided. Jürgens has a shifty-eyed close-up or two, Burton explodes or suffers mightily and “Bitter Victory” staggers onward ever onward in faint hope of a draw but always destined to fall well short.
Rating: “approved,” violence, innuendo
Cast: Richard Taylor, Curd Jürgens, Ruth Roman, Nigel Green, Christopher Lee, Harry Landis, Anthony Bushell and Raymond Pellegrin.
Credits: Directed by Nicholas Ray, scripted by René Hardy, Gavin Lambert and Nicholas Ray. A Columbia release on Amazon, Tubi, etc.
Running time: 1:41 (1:22 in the first U.S. version)
This Sept. 29 release, about a literal “lady killer,” is from Soi Cheang, and looks like a step up from his many “Monkey King” thrillers.
This Sept. 29 release (streaming on Shudder) is from the screenwriter of “The Tunnel” and could be a subtitled scare, for those who don’t mind reading the reactions in Norwegian.
On the film festival circuit, one sees a lot of indie films that invite us to appreciate them via the literary practice of “biographical criticism.” A festival-goer learns of what the filmmaker’ went through to get their story on screen, often from the filmmakers making appearances to support their movie.
We’re told who the unknown actors starring in it actually are, how little the movie cost, and big lumps of back-story are added to our appreciation of it by all that extra information floating around — festival programs, “director’s notes,” etc.
But a good film has everything you need to know about its story and its characters right there on the screen and in the sountrack. It’s self-contained and self-explanatory.
Director and co-writer Linh Tran’s “Waiting for the Light to Change” collected the big prize at this year’s Slamdance (contra-Sundance) Film Festival. It’s a gentle, moody melodrama that goes beyond being “a film that makes you come to it.”
There is information “out there” about its plot and characters that isn’t necessarily conveyed on the screen. Back story is either half-muttered in a single moment, or omitted and included on the IMDb page description of the film.
Tran was loathe to even have characters even identify each other by name so that we can make those associations and get into the movie quicker. She didn’t take care to get clear audio takes from her actors, who like many confuse mumbling for underplaying, a problem that’s only gotten worse over the years as filmmakers ignore it or forget to focus on it, because they know what their characters are saying. They have a script right in front of them, after all. Viewers don’t.
I watched “Waiting” with headphones, and re-watched passages to make sure of the omissions I was sure were missing in all the half-swallowed dialogue. There are things we know about it (again, IMDb) that aren’t necessarily explained on the screen and the soundtrack.
The movie is a wintry story of five people, some of them friends, wrapped up in a low stakes, slow-danced romantic do-si-do while gathered at a house on one of the Great Lakes.
Amy and Kim (Jin Park, Joyce Ha) are friends with mutual relatives, or so we gather from Lin (Qun Chi), who has just come over from China and laments a missing cousin from their ranks.
Jay (Sam Straley) is a just-fired chef who smokes almost constantly, and suggests almost everyone with him in this or that moment enjoy a puff. It’s his grandmother’s lake house, and no he didn’t make the call to ensure the key was there before they arrived.
That sets up a moment for Kim and Amy to bond over having to pee in the backyard, thus demonstrating their intimate connection.
Kim, we eventually gather, is in a relationship with Jay. Amy, we eventually figure out, knew him first.
When Jay’s friend Alex arrives, a shared joint gets Amy’s ardor up. But is Alex is her first choice to share a warm embrace by chilly lakeside?
“Maybe it’s better to long for something that to have it,” Amy opines.
Amy, we also gather, has changed. She never comes out and says “Back when I was fat,” but that’s in the plot description if not the dialogue.
“Do you think if we met now we’d still be friends,” Kim wants to know?
In limited group dynamics like this script, we have character “functions” laid out for us plainly. “Outsider” Lin is a witness with decent command of English and no inhibitions about sharing gossip as to who just kissed whom.
The guys are not-quite-charming lumps, with Jay moping and smoking about his lost job and maybe jealous of Alex, who brought his guitar and thus might be catnip to Amy or Kim.
The performances are mostly understated, with Park having the broadest, most overt character to play. We can wonder why she’s acting as if she’s romantically making up for lost time, or we can read on IMDb that she’s “recently undergone dramatic weight loss” and have that simplistic cause-and-effect added on, ex post facto.
I liked the tone and the limited arcs the characters play out. Up to a point. Scenes are smartly conceived and well-played.
But I don’t care how much or how little the film cost. There isn’t much going on here, and even some of that isn’t explained on the screen between the opening shot and the closing credits, which is where it counts.
Rating: unrated, adult situations, alcohol and pot abuse, profanity
Cast: Jin Park, Joyce Ha, Qun Chi, Sam Straley and Erik Barrientos.
Credits: Directed by Linh Tran, scripted by Jewells Santos, Linh Tran and Delia Van Praag. A Freestyle release.
Running time: 1:29
Awards season awards bait from Netflix? “Nyad,” about the swimmer turned broadcaster turned AARP-aged “one last hurrah” woman who attempted to swim from the U.S. to Cuba, will play in theaters in October before moving to Netflix later in the month.
Foster plays the loving partner and wife who fears she’s going to die in the attempt.
Movie Nation 