Rosamund Pike, Jacob Elordi, Richard E. Grant and Alison Oliver also star in this dreamy drift into a summer of decadence and corruption.
Carey Mulligan is listed on IMDb as being in it, but not in this trailer or its credits.
Another mystery?
Bit player actress turned writer/director Emerald Fennell concocted this Nov 24 release.
Is “Choose Love” “inane,” “insipid” or merely an “innocuous” attempt to make the cinematic romantic comedy a viewer’s choice “will they or won’t they” experience?
It’s “interactive cinema,” you know. So click on one of the selection of choices that pop up every few minutes. And if you don’t like what transpires after that, or are curious about how the other options might have played out, hit the “Do Over” prompt.
As for how this comes off as a story worth telling and watching, somebody has to make that call so it might as well be me. And in the spirit of the character who says “No backsies!” in the movie, I’ll opt for the last choice — “innocuous.”
It’s an interesting movie to watch in a technical sense, seeing where the edit points for different timelines can be inserted and allowed play out. But the range of choices, like the characters, is “bland” to “blander.”
And being able to pick and choose the narrative direction removes all stakes from the story and renders the entire experience kind of pointless. Then again, maybe that’s just me.
Our perky, 30ish heroine, Cami Conway (Laura Marano of “The Royal Treatment” and “The War with Grandpa”) is an L.A. recording engineer facing big choices in life.
Her career seems stalled, trapped engineering jingles, voice-overs for commercials and the like. And her pleasant, handsome finish-each-other’s-sentences beau of three years, lawyer Paul (Scott Michael Foster), is about to pop the question.
The noncommittal psychic/tarot card reader (Jacque Drew) shuffles the cards, tells her “Destiny is a myth” and that “YOU will have to decide,” and Cami follows those instructions to the letter.
Californians, am I right?
Those choices grow more difficult because she stumbles into the “save the planet” boyfriend “who got away” Jack (Jordi Webber), and then meets Brit pop mop-top Rex (Avan Jogia) at work, and they set off sparks, professionally and personally.
What oh what should Cami do? I mean, she’s looking right at the camera and asking? What should WE have her do?
There have been a lot of attempts at creating interactive cinema — movies in which viewers, or a polled consensus of viewers, get to “decide” which way the story goes — over the years. The best of them captured something of a theme park ride experience, at least as far as which character wins, who loses, who ends up with whom, who lives or who dies narrative goes.
Netflix is the first streamer to do this with a movie every viewer can customize to one’s own preferences
But with video games providing an ever more immersive, cinematic real-time-decision experience, I frankly don’t see the point.
The very nature of cinema is something just as primal as “living” a story and making your own choices within it. “Tell me a story” puts the burden on the storyteller and invites something fundamental into the equation — the element of SURPRISE.
All involved have tackled a string of technical challenges and made them “work.” But to what end?
So when one reaches the open-ended conclusion to the particular inane interactive effort that instructs us to “Choose Love,” the three choices we’re faced with don’t seem like enough.
“Back to Start,” “Back to Dream,” an earlier time-line changing edit-point” and “Back to Protest,” another edit point, should have a fourth option.
“Give my back my 90 minutes.”
Rating: TV-14
Cast: Laura Marano, Avan Jogia, Scott Michael Foster, Jordi Webber, Benjamin Hoetjes, Megan Smart and Jacque Drew
Credits: Directed by Stuart McDonald, scripted by Josann McGibbon. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:17 plus additional time for all the “choices” you make and unmake.
Something about the way Denzel Washington‘s Robert McCall lays his cane across his shoulders and drapes both hands over it tells us that he’s sized up a new threat, that he’s recovered from the Sicilian bullet wound that has him laying low in a postcard-perfect Italian seaside/cliffside town and that the bad guys are about to learn that old English expression, “rue the day.”
“The Equalizer 3,” pitched as the final film in this one-and-only Denzel franchise, is the most violent film in the series, with Washington making the character — his “government” trained man of violence — the most idiosyncratic, guilt-ridden and prone to tics, we’ve ever seen him.
And it’s the best-crafted film in this Antoine Fuqua trilogy, with Washington’s “Training Day/Equalizer” director making stunning use of Ravello, Italy locations and giving this TV-created character and franchise a finale that’s an homage to John Woo’s hitman thrillers.
That little gesture with the cane gives our hero a hint of the exhausted Christ on the Cross, just for a second, one of many religious images and nods to Woo’s trademark Christian iconography that Washington, Fuqua and screenwriter Richard Wenk give to the character.
“Equalizer 3” opens on a scene of terrible violence. Some 15 armed goons are bleeding out in various corners of a winemaking villa in the Sicilian countryside. Our meticulous “equalizer” is there to recover “something that doesn’t belong to you,” he tells the mob boss who stares down the barrel of a pistol at him.
How did he get to this unreachable mafioso? How did he kill so many thugs? Why is he here, really?
“We’re all where we’re supposed to be,” the unnamed McCall intones, quoting an old Italian saying. And then he adds to the body count.
He gets out of there alive, which is more than we can say for the made men he’s taken down. But McCall is found on a roadside with a grievous bullet wound, and the caribineri (Italian cop) who finds him, doesn’t report him.
The cop (Eugenio Mastrandrea) takes the bleeding, bald Black American to a doctor friend (Remo Girone). When McCall wakes up, he’s facing the troubling question, “Are you a good or a bad man?”. And he’s in scenic Altamonte. As he recovers and is befriended by one and all, he starts to feel “at home” and “at peace” here. He even buys a hat.
But the Neopolitan mob’s two most reckless brothers (Andrea Scarduzio, Andrea Dodero) are leaning on the local merchants and the property owners. McCall may still be using that cane, but when it goes on his shoulders, this man of violence, feeling his years and his guilt, is about the “equalize” the odds in this little corner of George Clooney’s Italy.
The script loses some of its lean, well-crafted vengeance thriller edge when McCall phones a CIA analyst, played by Washington’s “Man on Fire” co-star, Dakota Fanning, 19 years older than when they co-starred in that one. She’s adequate in this part, playing “young” and trying too hard to look “seasoned” in the field, taking tips from this stranger, wondering just what he’s up to and who he’s killing.
Take a gander at her in Raybans. Those sunglasses are wearing her, not the other way around.
Screenwriter Wenk hits the religious redemption allegory a tad too hard, and the picture doesn’t so much finish as peter out, with an anti-climax or two.
But Fuqua and “Kill Bill,” “Aviator” and “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” cinematographer Robert Richardson give us one gorgeously-composed shot after another.
Forget the Alfa-Romeo product placement in this one. “Coastal Italy” is the real sale.
And Washington still makes a very scary dude with a threat, most of them involving measures of time for his foe to “prepare yourself,” still a convincing enough man-of-action that his late-period Steven Segal wardrobe (black and billowy) isn’t hiding a body that’s gone completely to pot.
This “Equalizer” is older, more eccentric because he knows how much blood he has on his hands, mostly because there’s a lot more of it in this, his carnage-covered curtain call.
Rating: R for strong bloody violence and some language.
Cast: Denzel Washington, Eugenio Mastrandrea, Gaia Scodellaro, Andrea Scarduzio, Andrea Dodero, Remo Girone and Dakota Fanning
Credits: Directed by Antoine Fuqua, scripted by Richard Wenk, based on the TV series created by Michael Sloan and Richard Lindheim. A Sony/Columbia release.
Running time: 1:49
Didya love “Black Dynamite?” Didya MISS it? Get on that, wouldya?
I loved it. And this has “Black Dynamite” blaxploitation Western energy, and we know Mr. White’s gift for deadly deadpan.
Michael Jai White wrote, directed and stars in “Outlaw Johnny Black.” September 15, from Samuel Goldwyn.
Every ten years, like clockwork, we get a new version of “La grande séduction.” And every ten years, I review it and find something charming in this “Northern Exposure” tale of a dying village lying, cheating and manipulating its way into “seducing” a doctor to move there to help save the place.
The charms are always “slight,” and the first two versions of the film — a variation on the oft-repeated “small town comical conspiracy” formula perfected by “Whisky Galore!” — dragged a bit, and were 15 and 20 minutes longer than the latest.
But there’s something so resonant, so right about making this a Mexican tale, a tiny island fishing village that has lost its business to fish-packing plant competitors and its population to “The City” and the lure of Los Estados Unidos.
“The Great Seduction (La Gran Seducción)” is set on Santa Maria, a fishing island down to 120 residents and shrinking, a village so small and remote that an early scene has even the mayor moving his family to the mainland.
Everybody there is on government relief. Germán is cashing his check, his wife Maria’s and that of his late mother. And even cheating, they’re barely getting by.
Germán (Guillermo Villegas of “Where the Tracks End/El Último Vagón”) is our narrator, and as we meet him, his wife is moving to the mainland for a nursing job. But he won’t leave “our little slice of paradise” (in Spanish with subtitles, or dubbed into English).
Their long shot chance at saving the place is landing a fish-packing plant. No, their population isn’t big enough to run it, but they’ll worry about that later. Their biggest obstacle is that corporate won’t open a plant in a town without medical care. They need a doctor.
Events conspire to push Dr. Mateo Suarez (Pierre Louis) out of his job in a city hospital, “sentenced” to a month of looking after Santa Maria, which has been sending recruiting letters to every doctor in every major Mexican city’s phonebook.
The village, with Germán as ring leader and post-mistress Ana (Oscar nominee Yalitza Aparicio of “Roma”) as researcher, dives into tidying up, social-media “investigating” the doctor and plotting their strategy.
He’s into Los Cowboys, so they scramble to carve a ball, cut up watermelons to use as helmets and fake a game for him.
They talk gauche banker Benjamin (Julio Casado) into letting the doctor stay in his gaudy purple castillo of a mansion.
And they tap his phone. That’s how they learn about his fickle girlfriend, his disdain for a place with no cell service and his yen for Indian cuisine, prompting a quick Google search and a mad dash to whip up some facsimile of “Chicken Tika Masala!”
The lies pile up as bonding over fishing, “futbol Americano” and the like ties them to the doctor. And the many untreated illnesses touch him and make him feel needed.
The colorful cast of supporting players is a bit thin. The obnoxious nature of the manipulation is somewhat watered-down. And this version doesn’t get much at all out of the biggest lie of all, talking the most fetching single woman in town (Ana) into batting her eyes at the medico.
Director Celso R. García gets giggles out of efforts to troop the entire village from the cantina to the church and back again as they must convince the fish packer that they’re a bigger village than they are. Villegas mugs and narrates and amuses as a polished liar and cheat trying to pull off that one big score so that he won’t have to leave “our little slice of paradise” and can lure his wife back.
The third act’s turn towards “stop and watch the sunset” sentimentality works better in this film than I remember it playing in the first two.
But a small problem with the earlier versions becomes a bigger one here. Too many laughs or potential laughs are left on the table. The locals need to be larger-than-life colorful, the stunt-lies more outlandish, the doctor more cynical before he softens.
You want to retell this story with a little edge? Make Dr. Suarez a woman. Introduce a priest who’s not in on all the lying. Show more of the village’s “transformation” into a place worth living in instead of a ghost town in the making.
Maybe somebody’ll try that in 2033, the next time this “seduction” comes up for renewal.
Rating: TV-14, drinking, some profanity
Cast: Guillermo Villegas, Pierre Louis, Yalitza Aparicio, Eligio Meléndez and Julio Casado
Credits: Directed by Celso R. García, scripted by Luciana Herrara Caso and Celso R. García, based on the French-Canadian of the same title, scripted by Ken Scott. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:34
In the spirit of “It’s animated, let’s dub it with English-speaking voices and see if it’ll sell” comes “Goodbye Monster,” a cross-cultural curiosity from China that loses something in translation.
The director and co-writer of “Bobby the Hedgehog,” Huang Jianming, conjures up an animist fantasy about a world of vaguely recognizable creatures obsessed with medicine and health care.
Seems like a natural for the U.S. market, if not the Canadian one, right?
There are these two islands, famed for their hospitals. Their creed is “There is no sickness that cannot be cured.” And in that spirit, “removing” the “Dark Spirit” from those infected by it is an ongoing quest.
The great and cocky Bai Ze (sorry, the studio didn’t provide any English language voice cast names) is sure he’s conjured up a spell that will banish this “dark spirit” from all who suffer from it.
But he’s reckless and loses the chance to demonstrate this in front of the Four Elders. A rival gets his hands on the incantation, and the banished Bai Ze, forced to take on an orphaned unicorn boy Yi whose horn stopped growing, as a sidekick, sets off on a quest to clear his name and find a real cure, dodging an Owl-headed hunter and his fishy-soldier minions along the way.
Perhaps The Heavenly Thunder Mentor will have a clue?
There’s a three-headed god, Ku-Shan, who needs the cure, and bull creatures, gazelle women and others who somehow figure into all this, none of them all that clearly.
The CGI animation is of decent quality, the color palette is impressive and there’s just enough Taoism to at least ground this unfathomably strange concoction in that culture. But I had a very hard time making much sense of any of this, and remember, I watch thousands of movies and I take lots of notes.
The Dark Spirit, mentioned roughly 11,400 times by characters in the screenplay (there’s a stunning amount of repitition), appears to be the curse of self-doubt, manifested in a black, swirling cloud that consumes characters until Bai Ze finds a cure.
And that’s all I’ve got. Good luck to you or your kids decoding this exotic Mystery of the East.
Rating: PG, animated fantasy violence
Credits: Directed by Huang Jianming, scripted by Li Liang, Wu Xiaoyu, Zheng Xuejia and Huang Jianming. A Well Go USA release.
Running time: 1:39
This A24 release is a sort of Jesus-adjacent/not quite Pythonesque account of the revolutionary ferment of 1st century Jerusalem.
Omar Sy, Alfred Woodard, Benedict Cumberbatch, David Oyelowo and James McAvoy are in this January release.
An Oct 6 release from Lionsgate, et al.
Mel Gibson is Mississippi Mel in this one, which is based on a Michael Farris Smith novel.
Sort of Stockholm Syndromish involvement between the son and an accused cop killer?
Hard to tell from this, but the familial casting seems rock solid.
I have been thinking Liam Neeson and his “Retribution” comrades were lucky to get their picture into theaters before Denzel’s third go as “The Equalizer.” Even though “Retribution” bombed.
But the Oscar winning Mr. Washington is…interestingly attired for this film, suggesting the physical conditioning will fit the “retired” reputation of the character.
Orson Welles did the tent-sized black shirts/trousers thing, with cape and cane in his later years.
I don’t think Sony previewed this much of anywhere. Classic “Labor Day Weekend” dumped title. So I’m seeing it “preview” night — Thursday.
Fingers crossed, in any event.
I was never much of a fan of B-movie maker Monte Hellman, who had a long if not exactly prolific career — 23 directing jobs between 1959 and the 2010s. “Two-Lane Blacktop” is a solid genre picture, and I’m hard pressed to think of another of his films I got much out of.
But Hellman was long associated with King of the Bs, producer, director and impressario Roger Corman, and that put him into business with the pre-fame Jack Nicholson and Harry Dean Stanton and here we are.
Hellman made a handful of films with those two future icons, and the Nicholson Western “The Shooting” might be the best known of his Jack team-ups. But a film they made concurrently with that one — same locations, some of the same cast and crew — is worth a look, as Nicholson turned out the script and concocted himself a starring role.
In “Ride in the Whirlwind,” Jack co-stars with Cameron Mitchell. But Stanton, billed as “Dean Stanton” and a dozen years into a not-yet-remarkable career, has his first chewy big screen role as an outlaw named Blind Dick.
Corman financed the two Westerns, Hellman directed both and neither, truth be told, is all that to look at. The minimal settings are properly dusty and rustic in “Whirlwind,” with arid Yanab, Utah serving as an iconic “The Way the West Looked in Most Westerns” location.
But Hellman’s experiment in trying to film inside or on top of a rolling stagecoach is “Blair Witch Project” shaky. The shoot-outs are competently-handled, and that’s as much praise as they warrant. Technically and artistically, “Whirlwind” is exactly what it looks like — an under-budgeted horse opera.
Nicholson conceived a spare story of three range-riding cowhands “headin’ South” for “Waco” from their last job up along the Snake River.
Vern, Wes and Otis (Mitchell, Nicholson and Tom Filer) are “just passin’ through,” rattlign off names of ranches where they’ve worked or might work, unaware that a gang of five led by Blind Dick (Stanton) but including Injun Joe (future Oscar nominee Rupert Crosse) just robbed a stagecoach, shot the shotgun rider and had one of their number gut-shot in the process.
Nothing is made of their “haul,” but they’re holed up in a range rider’s cabin when the trio ride up to regard them warily, share their whisky and figure out the quintet is lying about why they’re there.
“They don’t want no trouble, we don’t want no trouble” is about a far as that goes. The three will ride out at dawn, they figure. Only the sheriff and posse show up and lay seige to the cabin, trapping the three innocents in the process.
“We waren’t doin’ NOTHING, dammit,” Wes complains, to no avail. He and Vern are the only two to make it out of their encampment and up the canyon walls, struggling for safety on foot even though “This ain’t no country to be set afoot.”
They’re just climbing.
THEN where’ll we be?” “Someplace ELSE.”
Their struggle to escape doesn’t end as the posse “burns out” the cabin. They’ve already had one of their number gunned-down by shoot-first/ask-no-questions lawmen. And they’ve seen a lone hanging victim along the trail, another reminder of the brutal, unjust summary justice of the frontier.
They need horses from the first ranch they get to, and there’s no explaining “We waren’t doin’ nothin’, dammit” to the owner (veteran character player George Mitchell), his wife (Katherine Squire) or their fetching daughter (Millie Perkins, also in “The Shooting”).
The suspense of the hostage situation in the ranch house isn’t handled any better than the desperate shootout in that range cabin. But the players give us a sense of the stakes, even as they pause — at one point — to play checkers.
The script’s parameters are agreeably narrow, but Hellman’s ability to direct and edit into this a sense of urgency leaves a lot to be desired.
What’s fascinating is Nicholson’s reach for a kind of “True Grit” era authenticity in the speech, the slang and the nature of conversations amongst a trio of itenerant cowpokes. Wes remarks, when they stop to take hostages, a meal and hopefully horses, how laid back they’re being about their getaway.
“This is the ‘less work I done on a weekday since I was 4, ‘less’ I was sick.”
Cameron Mitchell, who’d go on to TV stardom via “The High Chaparral” a year later, notes how every crossroads, village and full fledged town in the West has a “Gold Nugget” saloon or hotel or what have you, “every place between here and Rosa’s Cantina,” a nod to Marty Robbins’ 1959 Country & Western hit, “El Paso.”
Stanton is all costume and stubble and screen presence. And the still boyish Nicholson, who’d take a few more stabs at the genre after becoming famous, looks as at home in the saddle and the sagebrush here as he’d later look in shades, sitting courtside at Lakers’ games or in the front row of the Oscars.
I’m still no Monte Hellman fan. But Nicholson, in front of and behind the camera, makes at least two of Hellman’s films intriguing sidetracks for any film buff who considers him-or-herself a Jack completist.
Rating: G, violence
Cast: Cameron Mitchell, Jack Nicholson, Millie Perkins, George Mitchell, Rupert Crosse, Katherine Squire and (Harry) Dean Stanton
Credits: Direted by Monte Hellman, scripted by Jack Nicholson. A Continental Distributing release, streaming on Shout! Factory, Roku TV, Youtube, Amazon, etc.
Running time: 1:22
Movie Nation 