Movie Nation

As a critic, I’ve been listed with the online movie review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes since the day it went “live” in 1998. Because, as every ageist troll who disagrees with a review I’ve written likes to point out, I’ve been reviewing movies a long time, having written for newspapers, wire services, radio and TV stations and online.

It’s a site that rounds up reviews from all over (mainly North America, but also the UK, Australia, India and Spain, etc) and boils movies down to a “rotten” or “fresh” score based on those cumulative (and weighted) reviews. As a website, it’s a logical extension of the way the old Siskel & Ebert TV show reduced every film to a “thumbs up/thumbs down,” removing nuance and simply giving a filmgoer a notion of what the critical consensus on a film is to help decide whether to spend the money — worth seeing, or not.

Critics like it because it “legitimizes” those included there and broadens our reach with a site that has a much higher click-through rate on online reviews than Facebook, Twitter or any other social media does. That helps our Google search position when people are looking for moviegoing recommendations.

Movie studios and filmmakers hate it. It over-simplifies the expansive take a professionally produced, longer and considered review delivers. It further dumbs down criticism on the “Thumbs down” slippery slope. And it gives the oversimplifying Tomatoes website power over a multi billion dollar business.

I have taken many a call and irate email over the years from publicists and filmmakers, some of them even friends of mine, who would love for me or RTomatoes to change a “rating” to help their movie in the marketplace.

I never do. Ever. So stop asking.

But apparently there are PR firms working for film distributors that have figured out a pay-for-play way to “game” the Tomatometer. A couple of days ago, this piece in New York Magazine’s Vulture column talked of “critic” payoffs that cause shifts in the tomatometer. And we get a picture of matured (legacy, little growth) website that is so high-handed, cavalier and unconcerned that they’ve been letting critics get paid to endorse movies and perhaps boost a film’s box office take accordingly.

I used the word “apparently” for good reason, as Lane Brown, the Vulture reporter, doesn’t have literal “receipts.” There’s no smoking gun, no whistleblower “critic” who has admitted to getting paid cash for being so unethical. There are other errors (weighted reviews) and omissions in the piece which tell me Brown doesn’t have the deep knowledge of RT, its history and operations the writer seems to pass off as expertistise there.

But what the piece does explain is the odd and infuriating letter I got, apparently (not sure) from Rotten Tomatoes last month. It looks like most every other communication I’ve had with the company, where I deal with their Movie Data team and Critic Relations staff (of one).

“Dear Roger:

We have become aware of potential violations of Rotten Tomatoes’ Critics Code of Conduct regarding one or more of the titles that you have reviewed. As you are aware, Tomatometer-approved critics are not permitted to review a film and/or TV series based on financial incentive. Our Code of Conduct is attached, as a reminder.

If we find evidence to support future violations, your Tomatometer status will be removed. Please be aware that Rotten Tomatoes reserves the right to remove and suspend reviews and Tomatometer approval is Rotten Tomatoes’ sole discretion.

Regards,

The Team at Rotten Tomatoes

Critic Relations

Rotten Tomatoes

407 N. Maple Dr., (etc)”

So it’s a suggestion that they suspect I’ve taken money from someone to endorse a movie. That is legal-action libelous and utter BS and naturally I am still FURIOUS about the mere accusation. The fact that they put “reminder” in the email, as if they’d contacted me about this previously, is just another damned lie in this communication.

This didn’t just come to me, but to several other critics I know. We conferred on it, couldn’t decide if it was a prank or not. I complained LOUDLY to RT contacts, and heard nothing but crickets from Beverly Hills. That’s telling.

So the letter seems to be a legit CYA preemptive response to a pretty good hit they knew they were about to take from New York Magazine’s culture “Vulture.”

Every turn towards the bizarre and amusingly complicated gives away director and star Fares Fares‘ intentions in his “true story” hostage thriller “A Day and a Half.” He’s aiming for something like a Swedish “Dog Day Afternoon.”

There’s a member of a minority with grievances real and imagined, media misbehavior, comical miscalculations, absurd-on-the-face-of-them demands and unexpected turns at every, um, turn.

But this thriller, titled “En dag och en halv” in Swedish (with subtitles or dubbed into English) never escapes the low heat that makes it feel “low stakes,” a generic take on the “hostage” narrative, never quite living up to its promise, never much more than a pedestrian entry in the genre.

Artan (Alexej Manvelov) walks into a clinic in rural Sweden, waits with increasing fury for an “appointment” with Louise, and gets nowhere with the officious clerk in charge, even after he tells her Louise is his wife.

Eventually the gun comes out. Soon after that, a couple of people are hurt. And then, a panicked Louise (Alma Pöysti) is in the deranged clutches of a man she’d describe as her “ex.” He wants their little girl, whom she has “taken from me.”

Fares Fares plays Lukas, the only hostage negotiator close by, a man who strips to his underwear to show his lack of weapons, good intentions and perhaps submit to the gunman’s control, and get his relationship woth Artan off on a good foot.

Does it work? Lukas wants to look into Artan’s backpack.

“She kidnapped my daughter and now I’m a TERRORIST? ALL immigrants are TERRORISTS?”

There’s more than a whiff of “you (Swedish) people” in Artan’s grievances. He is Turkish (apparently) and faces a lot of discrimination. The media doesn’t need any encouragement in seeing a Middle Eastern immigrant, waving a pistol around and taking his wife hostage, in exactly the way Artan dreads.

He wants his daughter. He wants to get “them” out. A flight? A boat? A very long drive?

Over the course of that “Day and a Half,” blunders, missteps and the much messier than it seems relationship situation unravels in an “unmarked car” that the police hand over without bothering to fill the gas tank.

Lukas learns, reluctantly, of the soap opera whose final act he’s a reluctant player in. And we and Artan learn about how messy Lukas’s own personal life is.

There’s a resigned tone to much of this film, a fatalistic “This can only end one way” despite every quirky shift in direction and mood.

The tense moments have barely any tension to them at all. And the weirdness is just ordinary enough that we shrug it off with a “Sure, that could happen.”

The immigrant subject matter hints at a story with a political edge. And the film’s brevity suggests a taut, quick thriller with steadily rising suspense. But our co-writer director and star doesn’t let things play out that way.

Rating: TV-MA

Cast: Alexej Manvelov, Alma Pöysti and Fares Fares.

Credits: Directed by Fares Fares, scripted by Fares Fares and Peter Smirnakos. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:34

Sandra Oh plays the loopy sister in this dognapped farce set for Nov. 3 on Hulu.

I laughed a couple of times. Got to be a good sign for the “Quiz Lady.”

“Just keep driving” that Ute, mate.

Yeah, it’s Australian. Vague “crime in the Outback” vibe. Trapped in that Ute, frantically on the phone, rising threat levels, a panicked dad who “Didn’t know.”

Oct. 6, we’ll know.

She already got two movies and a TV series out of “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.” And Nia Vardalos even put a Greek travel comedy into theaters, “My Life in Ruins.”

But it’s pretty obvious that the only thing Hollywood wants out of her is more versions of her big family comedy sleeper hit of 20 years ago. And that’s a shame, and not just because she is utterly out of ideas of what to do with those characters except send them on a trip. That’s lame enough to be a 30 year running gag on “The Simpsons.”

“My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3” is a comedy that’s almost over before it begins, a Greek travelogue and tourism ad filled with the less-funny-by-the-movie/TV episode Portakalous family one more time.

Actors have died, so patriarchs are written out. An excuse with screenwriterly stretch-marks must be trotted out to send the family to Greece. With Gus (Michael Constantine) dead, the family is making the visit to the village he emigrated from for a reunion, a trip he never got to make.

Because “immigrants work hard,” give it all to the kids,” that’s their ethos, daughter Toula (Vardalos) preaches.

She wants to fulfill Dad’s wish that his journal be handed over to his childhood friends, who’d learn how his life turned out and the glories of a big Greek American family in Chicago and a restaurant called Dancing Zorba’s.

Brother Nick (Louis Mandylor) has other plans to do with Dad’s wishes, if he can ever stop grossly “grooming” himself in front of everybody and manage it.

Daughter Paris (Elena Kampourish) has taken off from NYU to come along, but she has a secret. Aunt Voula (Andrea Martin, still stealing scenes) has hired the guy everybody wants Paris to end up with, Aristotle (Elias Kacavas) to be her luggage porter for the trip.

A last goodbye to Mom (Lainie Kazan), who is slipping into dementia, and seven of them are off to the Olde Country, to meet the hip, tries-too-hard mayor of the dying village, the non-binary Victory (Melina Kotselou).

A big family secret will turn up. They and we will see olive groves and vineyards, flocks and herds and donkeys, the sights of Greece (“Can we stop at the Parthenon?” “No.”). Cranky locals will turn out to be kindhearted when it comes to the refugees who are flooding into Greece from the Middle East and Ukraine.

“Say ‘Hello!’ We are not xenophobic!”

“GREEK word!”

Things will look bleak, but another Big Fat Greek Wedding might in the cards for somebody.

Vardalos is out of new things to say — “A Greek man retires a week after he’s dead!” “Have sex on Easter, like everybody else!” And the new characters don’t have enough screen time to blossom and make some larger statement on Greece today. There’s barely room for the usual Vardalos pleas for tolerance via a big fat Greek embrace of everybody, gender, nationality be damned.

The players vary in their commitments, from barely worth the effort to trying too hard.

The third act delivers a couple of warm moments that lift it. But this picture’s a corpse still being shock-paddled and CPR-pounded on the operating table. Call the code, Nia. And yes, you look younger than everybody else in the orignal cast, now.

Rating: PG-13 for suggestive material and some nudity

Cast: Nia Vardalos. John Corbett, Louis Mandylor, Andrea Martin, Elena Kampouris, Melina Kotselou, Elias Kacavas, Joey Fatone and Lainie Kazan.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Nia Vardalos. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 1:31

What a random, almost plotless debacle “The Nun II” turns out to be.

Three screenwriters — one assumes (this is AI-generated bad) — took characters created by James Wan and Gary Dauberman, and sort of half-assed their way into giving two survivors from “The Nun” another battle with the wimpled menace, and Bonnie Aarons an excuse to doll up like a murderous Marilyn Manson in a habit.

I’m sitting there, dilligently taking notes, and writing in large, scribbled-in-the-dark letters, “When are they going to tell us what the hell this is about?”

They’ve got to bring The Nun back, resuscitate the demon and all that. They turn her loose on assorted locations, the primary one being in 1956 France. But why? What’s her beef this time?

The attempt to “explain” and “motivate” the murderess may be the lamest bit of plot-engineering outside of the Rob Schneider Universe. It’s shoehorned in, dropped into the plot by research we don’t see (Were any Catholics involved in making this movie?) and supposedly carried out by young Sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga, not great but not her fault).

Irene must hurry to France to a Catholic girl’s school where a teacher (Anna Popplewel) and her student-daughter (Katelyn Rose Downey) are among those menaced by some shadowy presence, dreamed about and glimpsed in shadows, and in the movie’s “money” moment, manifested in a collage created by a hellish wind that blows over the titles on a newstand’s magazine rack.

That school is where “The Nun” survivor handyman Maurice (Jonas Bloquet) landed. Coincidence? Ya-think?

The deaths are gruesome, the jolts cheap and the best effect is keeping the Mansonesque made-up Aarons in the shadows, menace incarnate.

I think the most hilariously stupid thing that happens here is having the He Man Girl Hater’s Club known as the Vatican send some plump, pampered archbishop stereotype to summon Nun-survivor Irene, a slip of a thing, to find out what this “demon” is up to this time. And, you know, deal with it. She is the “only one” who “has experience” with this demon.

“The Church needs another miracle.”

Even taking her 20something bestie from the convent (Storm Reid) with her tells us there are going to be two overmatched young women tossed about like little ragdolls, hoisted into the air and choked and who will only survive if the Satanic Sister (Aarons) or some minion or cloned manifestation of that Nun get bored torturing them to death.

Me? I was only bored for maybe 100 of the 108 or so minutes of this mess. There’s only so much admiring the production design will do for you.

Rating: R, violent content (terror?)

Cast: Taissa Farmiga, Jonas Bloquet, Storm Reid, Anna Popplewel, Katelyn Rose Downey and Bonnie Aarons.

Credits: Directed by Michael Chaves, scripted by Ian Goldberg, Richard Naing and Akela Cooper, based characters in the first “Nun” movie. A Warner Bros./New Line release.

Running time: 1:48

Part of “The Carnage in the Convent” universe.

Let’s have a good fright in Regal 4DX this Thursday afternoon, eh?

There’s one line from the chorus of the nautical anthem “Rule Britannia!” that always makes me cringe.

“Britons never will be slaves.”

Anybody who remembers reading of the 150 years of “press gangs,” rounding up civilian men in seaports or non-Navy vessels at sea, kidnapping them and forcing them into this dangerous service against their will, would think the Royal Navy choruses that belt that tune out are engaged in historical gaslighting.

The first movie most film fans learned of this brutish practice might have been, for generations, 1962’s “Damn the Defiant!” It’s got press gangs and lives upended by the practice, and sailors organizing against the life-threatening brutality of service in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars.

It’s a slightly-less jingoistic, less harmonious version of the world more thrillingly recreated for Peter Weir’s magnificent version of the Patrick O’Brian “Master and Commander” novels, the TV version of the adventures of “Hornblower” and nothing at all like the jolly tars of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies.

And since it’s been a regular feature, rerun on TV since the mid-60s, it’s a version of that history that’s stuck.

The sturdy British director Lewis Gilbert, of a few James Bond films and “Educating Rita” fame, serves up a version of shipboard politics and combat under sail (Think “slow motion.”) in a film that flips the script on 1962’s “Mutiny on the Bounty.”

Here, it’s the first officer who is the hardcase who helps drive the already-organizing sailors to mutiny, and a respected but softer captain who might have a chance to head off the worst.

The film’s a mix of coastal Spanish sea scenes and port settings, and soundstage interiors, with rear-projection action added where needed. It’s 1962 state of the art, no doubt, and a bit stodgy in pacing, shot selection and editing. Movies today put you closer to the action and play up the visceral experience of a battle, or simply heeled-over and “cracking on” in a tall ship under full sail.

But there’s something to be said for the calms captured here, ships ghosting along on Mediterranean zephyrs and light onshore breezes. The film’s climax, a desperate battle against French frigates and a fireship in the fog, is almost stately if still as suspenseful as it needs to be (and not a whit more).

Alec Guinness plays Captain Crawford, a by-the-book skipper, unbending in “following orders” but leaning towards keeping “a happy ship” when it comes to the Royal Navy’s penchant for corporal punishment.

His new first officer, Lt. Scott-Padget (Dirk Bogarde) takes a sterner view, a barking martinet who threatens and flogs at will.

A liberal captain and a sadistic first officer is a recipe for conlict. Their struggle is over whose word will be law in striking a balance between a”disciplined” and “efficient” ship and keeping the crew placated with a “happy ship.”

Crawford’s already mentioned “food that event the rats won’t eat” and lower decks resembling “life on a prison hulk” to his commanding officer. He knows his crew is suffering.

We see those lower decks through the meetings and machinations of the crew, with the hulking Vizzard (Anthony Quayle) signing his mates up for a secretly-planned general fleet strike over working conditions, pay and the like.

“Why is everyone afraid of the word ‘mutiny?’ Spread the Gospel.” The idea is, if every ship joins in, “they can’t hang” the entire Royal Navy.

Over the course of a voyage from Spithead to Corsica, the liberal captain and his sadistic first officer will clash, the French will move on Italy and earn an alliance with Spain and the frigate H.M.S. Defiant will be tested.

Gilbert, who’d do three Bond films, was a bridge between a more old-fashioned style of movie and filmmaking, one that didn’t hide the technical artifice, and the improved effects of the late ’60s and ’70s. “Defiant” is a lot more of the former than the latter.

The action sequences can seem as if they’re in slow motion as large spars (masts and booms) slowly tumble to the deck and the cannon recoil resembles Errol Flynn-era naval artillery rather than the real thing.

But Guinness and Bogarde set off serious sparks in a feud that peaks with the first officer taking out his rage at his by-the-book chief by having the captain’s midshipman son (David Robinson) caned for one minor infraction after another.

With the younger officer being politically “connected” and capable of “breaking” any captain he’s under, Crawford has to take care with every move he makes.

“From now on, I shall take steps that astound you!” seems like an empty threat.

Whatever affection I had for this seafaring tale in my old-movies-on-TV youth, “Damn the Defiant!” is more of a decent-to-good film than a great one. The director of “Shirley Valentine” and “Alfie” was more at home with interpersonal dramas than large scale action. Gilbert’s Bond outings could be fun (“The Spy Who Loved Me”) but rarely managed the sledgehammered pacing or bloody-minded sizzle of the best pictures in that series.

Burning a real wooden ship to the waterline is still damned impressive over 50 years later. But it’s Bogarde, Guinness and Quayle who animate the film, force us to take sides and make “Damn the Defiant!” worthy of being called a “classic.”

Rating: “approved” (TV-PG, violence)

Cast: Alec Guinness, Dirk Bogarde, Anthony Quayle, Maurice Denham, Murray Melvin and Tom Bell.

Credits: Directed by Lewis Gilbert, scripted by Nigel Neale and Edmund H. North, based on a novel by Frank Tilsley . A Columbia release on Tubi, Amazon, Youtube, etc.

Running time: 1:40

Johnny Flynn plays the younger version of a very old man remembered for his “Save one life, save the world” mission.

Helena Bonham Carter, Lena Olin, Romula Garai and Jonathan Pryce also star.

Considering that Hopkins isn’t being offered much that’s worthy of his talents in these, his final working years, this looks lovely and quite moving.

A Jan. 1 release.

In the spirit of “It’s never too soon to start teaching the kids discernment and the difference between cut-rate and low-bit-rate CGI animation and the good stuff,” let’s dive into the latest “Swan Princess” incarnation.

“The Swan Princess: A Fairytale Begins” is no “beginning” at all, but a continuation of a well-received 1994 traditionally-animated film from Disney alumnus Richard Rich, who directed “The Black Cauldron” and “The Fox and the Hound” and found himself on the outside looking in when The Mouse redicovered how to make animated classics with “The Little Mermaid.”

This Sony Wonder production for Netflix has a few frames from the earliest version of the story, but is mostly of that under-animated plastic-looking CGI variety one sees in cheaper car commercials and flatter, duller-looking TV and streaming shows. Remember the old direct-to-video Barbie under-animations of the early 2000s? It looks like those.

The film is about assorted transfers of power in the kingdom where all this is set, with the odd forgettably pleasant song, here and there, lecturing the peasants and the viewers on “What it takes to be a queen” and the virtues of “A story with another side.”

A new queen, 40ish Uberta (Catherine Lavin) is plucked from the masses of peasants related to royalty and crowned. Her working class husband Maximillian (Jesse LaPierre) sets out to reform policies among the Council of Crowns kings and queens so that the poor have work and food and don’t become thieves.

Queen Uberta? She’s all wrapped up in her “cause,” dueling a rival for best dog lover. Uberta takes in strays and tries to turn mutts into dog show winners, because she’s down to Earth like the common folk.

Generations join the family, rivalries rise and fall, talking critters show up and all of it is framed within a story “30 years” after all this begins, when the famous singer Madame LaCroix sings her final concert.

Frame by frame, it’s uglier to look at than most any recent feature-length animated bauble to cross most kids’ field of view — cheap and TV-friendly were the guiding principles here.

The voice cast is made up of unknown but competent professional voice actors — and screenwriter Brian Nissen.

The best one can say about this would be “It’s harmless enough.” But there’s a dated, patriarchal take on the queen, who has the power but who has little “causes” while the husband-king is the one fighting injustice, homelessness and the class war being waged by the rich against the not rich.

The songs vanish into thin memory, the animation drab and the story a patchwork pile of nothing. This “Swan Princess” is animated babysitting for tiny tots, nothing more. And even they will someday look back on what they watched as a pre-schooler and roll their eyes.

Rating: PG

Cast: The voices of Catherine Lavin, Jesse LaPierre, Yuri Lowenthal, Nina Herzog, many others

Credits: Directed by Richard Rich, scripted by Brian Nissen. A Sony Wonder release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:29