Today’s Around the World with Netflix outing is a minimalist, just-nasty-enough burglary-gone-wrong tale from Kenya.
“Nairobby,” the debut feature by writer-director Jennifer Gatero, is a “Reservoir Dogs” style no-budget heist picture in which there are no flashbacks to the actual “heist.” It’s set almost entirely in the aftermath, with accusations, backstabbing, betrayals and threats coming as the robbers try to reason out what went wrong.
Five college kids meet in an abandoned building, most in near-hysterics about who “the guards saw” and why “the alarm went off,” when their inside woman, Tasha (Lorna Lemi) “had the codes,” and what they’re going to do when their sixth member, Nick (Martin Gathoga) shows up, bleeding out from a terrible gash in his leg.
They had big plans, it turns out, to “distribute” their college’s scholarship money which they’re sure their corrupt dean will spend on a new Range Rover. It’s what he (Jack Chage) always does, raise money for “disadvantaged students” like most of them, and then buy himself a new car with the cash.
Vivian (Jeritah Mwake), her beau Yobra (Sanchez Ombasa), beret-clad hothead Oti (Neville Ignatius), med student Kama (Martin Ndichu), Tasha and Nick figured they’d use the money, stashed in the dean’s office, the way the dean said it would be used — for tuition.
But 37 million Kenyan shillings has them thinking other thoughts — of raising this one’s daughter elsewhere, of fleeing to Zanzibar and opening a seafood shack one wants to name “Frying Nemo.”
It’s just that Nick is bleeding out, his dad might be mob connected and med student Kama is as useful as a spoon, when what they need is a hospital.
Romantic entanglements, lies, a hidden pistol and recriminations follow as the clock ticks down on the sirens they hear closing in on them.
“I spread lies the way you spread your legs!” (in Swahili, with a bit of English patois thrown in).
Gatero, who appears on camera as a TV newscaster summing up the robbery, throws a lot of melodramatic manipulations into all this, characters shifting from panic and grief to lusty “love the one you’re with” changes in allegiances in an abrupt flash.
But she’s made a tight, suspenseful thriller peppered with flinty, repetitive, David Mamet-style dialogue, as if these college kids are all film students and know their “Heist” and “Reservoir Dogs” references.
“Nairobby” may not be an instant classic. It’s still a sharp enough opening outing to be worth a look and easily earns that second check Netflix should write to give us more gritty tales from Kenya from this very promising first-time director.
Rating: TV-MA, violence, sex, profanity
Cast: Lorna Lemi, Jeritah Mwake, Neville Ignatius, Sanchez Ombasa, Martin Gathoga, Jack Chage and Martin Ndichu
Credits: Scripted and directed by Jennifer Gatero. A Netflix release.
This Indonesian gangland thriller “Preman” has the most badass villain’s henchman ever. His name is Ramon. He speaks French, and refers to himself in the third person.
“Ramon does not like cussing.”
Ramon keeps scissors and other hair care accessories — some of them lethal — in his leather salon holster. Ramon is a killer, and a hairdresser, and you’d better not cuss him or sling gay slurs his way. Because Ramon will CUT a bitch, and remind you that “Ramon’s sexual orientation is none of your business!”
Remember, Ramon is not the hero or anti-hero of this violent quest tale. He’s just a henchman. But when you’re building your movie around a deaf gangster trying to save his headstrong child from murderers, a fellow whose weapon of choice is a “monkey fist,” you’d better have somebody seriously colorful lined up against him.
“Preman” is titled “Preman: Silent Fury” for international release to separate it from other Indonesian gangster films. “Preman” are low-rent thugs, enforcers for assorted political or monied interests, the muscle that clears villages wanted for redevelopment or ensures political power in ways the corrupt, ineffectual, outmanned police cannot.
Sandi (Farell Akbar) has grown up in the gang, wearing the officially-provided shirts and pretending to listen to the harangues of the gang boss, Guru (Kiki Narendra), who works for a fat-cat politician. Sandi “pretends” to listen because he lost his hearing in some childhood accident or trauma.
Might his nightmares, which involve tangles with people in fuzzy cartoon animal suits, explain that?
When the gang is ordered to clear the settlement that’s grown up around an orphanage/school for the poor, run by the sage Haji (Egy Fedly), Sandi must take a side. Haji raised him after he went deaf, and Haji insists that Sandi take his son (Muzakki Ramdhan) and seek a better life for the kid.
The movie is about what happens when you don’t take a sage’s advice. Because Haji is threatened, but defiant. And Sandi’s boy Pandu is a tough little kid — bullied but hellbent on fighting back.
“When are you going to teach me to use the ‘monkey fist?'” the kid wants to know.
Dad’s secret weapon in a gang world where guns are rare and machetes, daggers and clubs, some wrapped in barbed wire, are the preferred and much more intimidating weapons of choice, is a ball on a rope.
When the Sandi and Pandu try to save Haji and run afoul of the gang, Guru sends for “The Barber.” Let’s let Ramon, the badass, vested and goateed barber from Jakarta, describe (in Indonesian) what his quarry is carrying.
A Monkey Fist is “a high velocity flail, with a blunt weight on its end, generating impact through centripetal force!”
You go, Ramon!
All Sandi has to do is spin it and whip it and skulls crack, teeth shatter and foes fall to the floor. Of course, it’s not the perfect weapon. If a mob is brave enough to come at him in numbers, or if the fight is in a confined space, he might not have room to whip it, whip it real good.
One of the many cool elements to “Preman” is how many people in Sandi’s life know sign language. Even when he and the multi-lingual dandy Ramon (Revaldo, in a movie-stealing performance) throw down, his foe knows how to sign his threats and trash talk.
The movie’s simple quest structure — a father struggling to get his rebellious, short-tempered child to safety — is somewhat muddied by the “fuzzies” flashbacks, and clumsy third act efforts to over-explain Sandi’s deafness and the ugly personal failing that caused it.
But for a movie with wanton violence and cruelty, with a compromised cop (Gilbert Pattiruhu) forced to watch a gang rape (not shown) as punishment and characters who weep at the loss of loved ones, it’s also darkly funny.
Punctuate an off-camera gang-rape scene with an emasculatingly “comical” confession of sexual dysfunction. Have a guy slur He Who will NOT be Slurred, Ramon, and see what he gets for it.
For all its universal action movie tropes, “Preman” is very much a product of its culture, some of it less palatable to Western eyes. But it’s a dashing writing/directing debut by that cinematic rarity, a sound guy (boom operator to editor) who moved up to directing.
And writer-director Randolph Zaini, playing around with narrative structure and even joking around with the (aspect ratio) frame in a few scenes, announces himself as an Indo-Action (just made that up) filmmaker to watch, another reminder that Hong Kong, Japan, Korea and Thailand aren’t the only places in Asia that could teach Hollywood a thing or two about how to spice up a thriller.
Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence
Cast: Farell Akbar, Emil Kusumo, Kiki Narendra, Muzakki Ramdhan, Gilbert Pattiruhu, Putri Ayudya, Salvita Decorte and Revaldo
Credits: Scripted and directed by Randolph Zaini. A Well Go USA release.
The Taiwanese drama “Reclaim” is something of an upside down “Joy Luck Club.”
It’s not about Chinese American immigrants, or daughters who come to realize all that their Chinese mothers went through to get them better lives. Writer-director CJ Wang instead takes us into “Stella Dallas” martyrdom, wandering through an under-appreciated mother’s life, framed by the things her own never-praising/never-encouraging mother never did for her.
Lan-hsin, played by Yi-Ching Lu (“Stray Dogs”) has run an art studio day care for kids for over 30 years. Her love of art may have been reduced to delicately painting the tiny items in the school’s tastefully decorated doll house, but the work was steady and it helped her and her husband provide for their college-educated kids and paid for an apartment big enough for them, even big enough to take her father-in-law in during his final years.
But Lan-hsin comes home not to an empty or particularly clean house. Her layabout retiree husband David (Shih-Hsun Kou) literally will not lift a finger to clean it. He wants to know what’s for breakfast/lunch/dinner, passing on “remember not to” instructions for whatever they’re having. He’s pulled mountains of her books and the likes off the shelves, figuring they’ll have more room if her stuff is out of the way, “tossed.”
David? He’s a hoarder — teapot collectibles he’s sure will appreciate in value, busted appliances he won’t fix, artwork created by his dad, etc.
A guy who won’t clean up a mess he’s made on the toilet or return the milk he’s just taken from the fridge can’t be expected to not be a burden, not at this stage. It’s like expecting him to not monopolize the TV.
Her chilly, combative mother (Hee Ching Paw) is slipping into dementia, sneaking out of her nursing home and getting lost, “confused.” It’d be better if she moved in with them.
Even getting a “Where would she stay?” (in Mandarin with English subtitles) out of David seems like too much to ask. He pays his wife that little mind.
When we meet his flighty, self-absorbed sister, hear her latest “next big thing” business scheme (high end cemetery sites for ancestral ashes to rest in eternity) and see her, too, impose on the ever-imposed upon Lan-hsin, we wonder if it’s genetic.
All information in the family is filtered through “reasonable” mom, as David’s dismissiveness and knee-jerk reactions to every misstep have made their architect/planner daughter (Chia An-yu) and expat college teacher in America son wary of telling him that she has quit her job, broken up with her boyfriend and is moving back in with them, and that the son and his wife are considering moving back to Taiwan, abandoning their expensively-won academic careers to take over his wife’s family farm out in the country.
One thing we pick up, and quickly, is how their kids have inherited Dad’s selfish self-absorption and willingness to dump literally every chore, tiny task or inconvenience onto their mother.
“Mom, have you booked our FLIGHTS yet?” “There’s a delivery for me downstairs, would you get it? And can you spot me ($460) to pay for it COD?”
We see. We absorb. We get hints of the life, career and travels Lan-hsin wanted for herself, which her mother dismissed, discouraged and blocked.
And as Lan-hsin enterprisingly sets out to find a new home big enough for all of them to live, if need be, we wonder if she will snap, if this selfless woman will “Reclaim” something for herself from this family that’s leaned on her for decades.
“When people are selfless, all of their potential can be realized,” she’s been taught. Too bad nobody she’s related to learned the same lesson.
Writer-director Wang, making her feature filmmaking debut, lets scenes and shots linger past their payoff, which makes “Reclaim” drag along, a tale with 95 minutes of incidents, minor (and perhaps imagined) crises and apartment hunting that plays out in 124.
The complain-to-her-mother framing device makes one question the nature of some of the calamities that pile up on our heroine. Is some of this an alternate timeline, with an ungrateful daughter deciding that mom’s limiting choices are actually what gave her life value?
That means we’ve wasted a lot of time shouting at the screen, wanting this downtrodden woman to chew out her kids and throw things at her stunningly narcissistic husband.
Interesting subtexts here depict Taiwanese family expectations, “ingratitude” as the ultimate sin, note duty to one’s parents and dip into the gambling nature of the culture. Everybody’s looking for a scheme, the next shortcut to riches. We can see the traps. Sometimes, Lan-hsin can, too.
But the slow pacing and sidebars tend to muddle the messaging and make one wonder just what the hell the message is? Stick up for yourself? Be “selfless” so that you can best serve your family? Beware get rich quick schemes?
The mixed-bag “Reclaim” turns out to be doesn’t hide the fact that there’s a tighter, more impactful movie in this material, a common complaint with overlong made-for-Netflix productions. Indulging the filmmaker, like a mother indulging her kids for too long, doesn’t do anybody any good.
Rating: TV-PG
Cast: Yi-Ching Lu, Shih-Hsun “Johnny” Kou, Chia An-yu, Hee Ching Paw and Mason Lee
Credits: Scripted and directed by CJ Wang. A Netflix release.
One of the stranger film’s of Robert Altman’s vagabond career, and perhaps the least “Altmanesque,” is a small-cast horror tale shot on an Irish location, barely released in the U.S. and “lost” for decades — supposedly because Columbia Pictures destroyed its negative.
But “Images” starred Susannah York, who earned a co-writing credit for reading from her children’s fantasy novel “In Search of Unicorns,” something Altman worked into his long-gestating screenplay. It was photographed by no less than Vilmos Zsigmond, scored by John Williams and littered with eerie “Sounds” by Japanese percussionist Stomu Yamashta.
And as it got lost in the shuffle (and American distributor Columbia’s shenanigans) of Altman’s break out years — right after “M*A*S*H” and mixed in with “Brewster McCloud,” “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” “Thieves Like Us” and “The Long Goodbye” — it’s certainly worth a look.
The idea, Altman said later, was to make something in the French New Wave style, a sort of “Belle du Jour” or “Repulsion” thriller with nods to “Persona.” Altman was a TV craftsman who longed to be thought of as “an artist,” so his impulse was to go “obscure.”
York plays a writer of YA-before-it-was-YA lit married to a boor (Rene Auberjonois of “M*A*S*H”) of indeterminate employ, assorted hobbies (still-life art photography, hunting) and a goofy penchant for wearing driving gloves in and out of the car, in and out of the house.
“Cathryn” is another classic York shag-haircut beauty who comes somewhat unglued thanks to a late night call — or what she perceives as a call. She’s chatting with a friend when a “crossed line” (land-line speak) brings in the voice of another woman, a stranger.
“Do you know where your husband is tonight?”
Cathryn comes a tad unglued, and her ill-tempered, foul-mouthed husband Hugh can’t make much sense of it. We can’t decide if a couple of badgering, taunting calls have unmoored her, if this is a new state or if Hugh has a clue that his writer-wife is somewhat...off.
At her insistence, they dash off to her inherited place in the country (County Wicklow) where she can work on her book and he can play at being the great hunter.
Once there, they run into their newly-divorced old friend Marcel (Hugh Millais), who comes on to Cathryn as if he’s sure she’ll be receptive to this again, Marcel’s teen daughter Susannah (Cathryn Harrison) and this other fellow.
It’s only when Rene (Marcel Bozzuffi, note everybody’s name-and-character name), who seems to be an ex-lover, with anecdotes about a false pregnancy and the like, is told to “Shut up! You’re dead, STAY dead!” by Cathryn that the mystery really unravels.
She’s seen another version of herself, with a cocker spaniel (she fears dogs), drive up to the house as she looks down on it from a nearby hillside. Plainly, not everyone Cathryn sees is real. Not every personality trait we attribute to her is her own.
“Schizophrenic,” Marcel jokes, in the broad misdiagnosis of the day. She might agree, but it’s obvious Hugh has no clue. She’s not in treatment and apparently undiagnosed. The movie is about her response to these visions and her self-prescribed treatment.
Altman’s sometimes piggish misuse of women in “M*A*S*H” and elsewhere is echoed here. His playfulness with names and character names probably looked student filmish to Columbia, which picked up “Images” from Hemdale. And his frequent repetition of lines as character crutches might be another Altmanesque touch, for those looking for the telltale talkover dialogue, clutter of characters and repertory company Altman trademarks.
Hugh’s swearing always begins with “Son of a BITCH,” and Cathryn’s vocalized pause, applied to any situation she wants to get out of — a child’s unfiltered questioning, a masher’s crude attempts at seduction, a stranger at the door — is “I’m cold.”
Obscure as our storyteller tries to make “Images,” it’s easy enough to pick up on what’s happening. York, in what might be her most mercurial performance, runs the gamut from passive to alarmed, enraged to lost in a reverie, often in the same scene.
She was pregnant and Altman insisted on keeping his planned nude scene as a “Rubenseque” jolt and joke. No, people weren’t as fit in the early ’70s (look at the lumpy men), but that was still a daring move for the sex symbol York (“Tom Jones”) to agree to.
Thanks to Altman’s fondness for profanity (and the stunningly creepy sound design/musical effects of Yamashta), “Images” sounds remarkably modern, even if the sexual mores, fashion and evocatively grainy, drab celluloid greys of an Irish fall give it a period piece feel.
Thanks to its pedigree and York’s performance, “Images” is well worth tracking down on the TV streamers that have picked it up, especially if you’re an Altman completist. But its oddness is both a calling card and a handicap, as it’s not quite horror, not entirely a paranoid thriller and not necessarily “Altmanesque.”
Rating: R, violence, sex, nudity
Cast: Susannah York, Rene Auberjonois, Hugh Millais, Marcel Bozzuffi, Cathryn Harrison and John Morley
Credits: Scripted and directed by Robert Altman, with York reading from her novel “In Search of Unicorns.” A Hemdale release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.
Visionary writer-director Terry Gilliam‘s “Quixotic” thirty year pursuit of getting his idea for a Don Quixote movie on screen ended a couple of years ago when “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” finally premiered and went on to a desultory and dispirited big screen release.
After all the many incarnations of the cast, with Robert Duvall and Ewan McGregor and John Hurt on board different iterations, and Johnny Depp and Jean Rochefort on set and shooting when a 2000 version of it fell apart six days into production, a debacle documented in “Lost in La Mancha,” the film itself felt like a competently-done afterthought, an anti-climax starring Jonathan Pryce and Adam Driver.
But what does that make the follow-up documentary about it that the “Lost in La Mancha” team filmed, “He Dreams of Giants?”
Gilliam has chuckled and explained away to me and other interviewers the decades of “bad luck” that made him feel like a “cursed” filmmaker. His studio had to be bullied into releasing “Brazil,” others simply sold finished films (“The Brothers Grimm”) to another distributor or released and abandoned “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.” Co-star Heath Ledger died just as “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus” — his last widely-acclaimed, widely-seen movie — was winding up filming.
But seven different times “Man Who Killed Don Quixote” was a “go” picture. And when filming got underway in Spain in 2000, NATO bombing range flyovers, torrential rains and an infirm star (Rochefort) seemed to put an end to a dream the cartoonist, Monty Python wit and “Twelve Monkeys” director had harbored since the late ’80s.
Talk about “cursed.”
Pepe and Fulton, occasionally casting questions Gilliam’s way off camera on the set of a movie being attempted with half the already-thin budget of nearly 20 years before, document a reflective wizened Gilliam, stressed, still forcing out a laugh, still summoning up some enthusiasm as he stubbornly gets this movie monkey off his back at last.
“Art is hard,” he grins. The idea that it should be fun…who the f— came up with that?”
He reads from his beautiful, ancient Gustave Doré illustrated copy of Miguel Cervantes’ novel — “Too much sanity may be madness… But the maddest of all is to see life as it is and not as it should be.”
He compares his quest to that of his idol, Federico Fellini whose “8 1/2” (sampled here) became a mad, dreamy movie “without an ending” about making a movie without having an ending.
Gilliam is on the phone talking about financing even after production has started, laments that “the marketplace has no faith in this film” and we see clips of “Tidelands” and “The Zero Theorem,” movies he made which virtually no one saw.
Gilliam either sits with meditative patience in his director’s chair, animatedly sprints through what he wants his co-star, Driver, to do or downloads a year’s worth of f-bombs about “losing our light” or “losing a day” or “falling behind.” Only his intrepid director of photography, Nicola Pecorini, can talk him down.
But not by walkie talkie. Gilliam can’t get the damned things to work and jogs 100 yards or more to pass on another last minute instruction.
Before this shoot was over with, the man was wearing a catheter, was pushing 80, and looked it.
“More foolish and stupid than heroic,” he grumps of this exercise.
With many of those cast as his aged title character too infirm to finish, dying before shooting started (Hurt) or simply dropping out (Duvall, the only horseman of the lot), star Pryce is a good sport in declaring that his “Brazil” director “was just waiting for me to get old enough to play Don Quixote.
Driver, bless him, isn’t a “box office” star but was and is a big enough name to get the film financed, shot and released, and deserves any “what a trouper” accolades thrown his way. But he didn’t talk to the documentary filmmakers, or didn’t give permission for them to use any interviews for the finished film. That’s not exactly an endorsement of the experience or the finished product.
It would be nice if this generally laudatory, understated and reflective film served as Gilliam’s victory lap. It captures his dogged persistence and his artist’s eye, and humanizes him by letting us see him playing with his son in home movies, then playing with his grandchild in others. He got “Quixote” finished, got a standing ovation at Cannes for accomplishing that, and can now sit back and be interviewed about his career and films or Python or his favorite artists, a grand old man of the arts.
But Old Man Gilliam, like one other aged Python, keeps sticking his foot in it with this or that public statement (or being #MeToo’d by actresses on Twitter) and whining about being “canceled” for it. If he’s not careful, that’s what he’ll be remembered for and not “Time Bandits,” “Brazil,” “Twelve Monkeys” and “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.”
“Cursed” or not, it’s hard to not see a pattern here, and hard not to feel that his greatest fear for “Quixote,” that he’d “disappoint the fans,” actually came true.
Rating: unrated, profanity and lots of it
Cast: Terry Gilliam, Nicola Pecorini, Joana Ribeiro, Adam Driver and Jonathan Pryce
Credits: Directed by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe. A Bohemia Media release.
Never have I ever seen more cinematic “wow” wasted on a bad action script than this Korean cavalcade of crap.
“Carter” has a sky-diving fight that out Tom Cruises every “Mission: Impossible.” It has a bloodbath in a bathhouse, mid-air mayhem, a rope-bridge wrangle and a perilous pummeling in a pork truck, complete with DIGITAL pigs.
Throw in blood and water on the lens as we’re hurled into shootouts and throw-downs and through dizzying hand-held chases on foot, in buses and cars and on a Papa John’s delivery bike.
It’s a first-person chaser/kicker/slasher and shooter video game with virtually nothing that you could call a plot or “acting” and some reasonably convincing digitally-assisted stunts. Needless to say, “Carter” has more Bugs Bunny Physics than a year’s worth of Looney Tunes.
All of this — and a LOT of Netflix’s bottom-line — are flung at an idiotically muddled story of a zombie virus and its possible cure, which North and South Korea are fighting over, or perhaps fighting together to keep out of the hands of the American CIA.
The “DMZ virus” broke out and spread north, triggering a coup. And now it’s spreading, although the movie goes to pains to show us news reports saying South Korea has eradicated its cases.
Rub it in.
Joo Won, all muscles and tattoos, plays “Carter,” a guy who wakes up with no memory, a bald spot shaved onto the back of his head, and stitches. Implants connect him to a female voice, full of instructions and threats. There’s a bomb or two in his skull, too.
He’s implicated in the abduction of the one scientist who found a cure, and his little girl Han-na (Kim Bo-Min). That CIA team that just stormed into his apartment (he’s in skinny-minny underwear)? Fight them off.
“Jump out of the window to the next building!” In English, or subtitled Korean, needless to say.
That plunges “Carter Lee” into an S & M bathhouse that he must slash and slice his way out of. Scores and scores of nearly-naked bodies fly about in the steam, stabbed and hacked with a scythe until they struggle no more.
The early scenes have a bracing energy, even if the fights are as nonsensical as they are brutal. By the time our guy’s made his way far enough into the story to put some damned clothes on, the convoluted plot, Byzantine intrigues and head-scratching logic start to overwhelm it, and quickly succeed.
Can anybody trust anybody? Whose agenda is served by brainwashing a Manchurian Mass Murderer candidate into fighting for the South, and the North, and the CIA — or against each in turn as he tries to recover the child and find the scientist?
Damned if I know.
In this Byung gil-Jung (“Confessions of Murder”) film, the zombies are kind of an afterthought, supposedly “super strong” and “able to use tools,” something the TV newscasters feel obligated to mention as we’ve all memorized the usual zombie Achilles heels.
There are lectures on North Korean blind loyalty and intimations of South Korean treachery. And everybody hates the CIA, embodied by Maurice Turner Jr. and some minions, and by former child actress who-never-got-better Camilla Belle, reduced to bit parts in South Korean thrillers because that’s the way it goes.
This is “Crank” with one long, frenetic, ticking-clock chase and the occasional “Mission: Impossible” level stunt, and a body count and a story that you cannot let yourself think about, even though both are in your face and appalling, first scene to closing credits.
Because “Carter” goes off the rails long before its takedown on a train, before hostilities break out on a helicopter, off the deep end without ever hitting the water and off its nut without ever having one.
If you’ve seen “Nope,” you recall Jordan Peele’s clever, folkloric connection of the characters in his latest film to the “inventor” of cinema, Eadweard Muybridge. The stunt-horse training family under alien assault on a remote Southern Cal horse ranch — played by Keith David, Keke Palmer and Daniel Kaluuya — pass themselves off as descendants of the jockey who appeared in the very first “motion picture,” that of a rider taking a horse through its paces for “motion studies” conceived and filmed by one of the great photographers of the age.
The reason Peele could build his film around that gimmick is that Muybridge’s images are so iconic as to be shared cultural currency, familiar to almost anyone who has ever seen a motion picture or TV show.
I remember the first time I saw them and heard the quirky story of how they came to be, on an episode of the 1960s TV series “Death Valley Days” titled “The $25,000 Bet.”
The story goes that railroad tycoon/governor/senator/Stanford University founder and lifelong equestrian enthusiast Leland Stanford took a bet with a fellow rich swell that all four of a horse’s feet never left the ground at the same time. Stanford commissioned his favorite photographer to come up with proof. And inventor/landscape photographer Muybridge overcame the photographic limitations of the late 19th century to snap a string of images that could be termed the first “motion picture.”
“Exposing Muybridge,” a terrific new documentary about the man, the motion picture and the myths, omits “the wager,” which was almost certainly an invention by the credit-hogging Stanford. And while Muybridge filmed motion studies of a Black boxer, Ben Bailey, if he ever photographed a Black jockey at the gallop, it might have been years later, not on that first “proof of concept” effort in California.
PBS “Frontline” veteran and “Broken Dreams: The Boeing 787” director Marc Shaffer serves up a polished, brisk and entertaining documentary that details a life so colorful that Oscar winner Gary Oldman is trying to make a biography of the British expat recognized as the father of the cinema.
Oldman, who has collected Muybridge prints and done a lot of homework for the project he called “Flying Horse” when he announced it in 2018, is the most ebullient of the many informed talking heads that decorate Shaffer’s film.
Muybridge was “daring,” promising to “make my name” in the world, or disappear if he failed to do so. He was also “duplicitous,” and not just about his name — which he changed from Edward Muggeridge to “Mugridge” to Eadweard Muybridge, with many variations along the way. He didn’t invent “Photoshop” or even the idea of doctoring images, but he mastered the art — an “artist/scientist” who dabbled in the chemicals used to make the primitive glass-plate photographs of the Civil War era and just afterward.
Modern photographers Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe take us to Yosemite and compare Muybridge’s vivid, artistic and sometimes dangerously-grabbed images of the place to the works of those who came much later — Edward Weston and Ansel Adams. They deconstruct the compositions and re-photograph his perspectives, showing us the drama and the scenes and helping us “see the photograph with your whole body.”
Historians such as Marta Braun and Richard White dig into the details of the Muybridge’s life and career — from the early fame to the murder he got away with to the images of people, dogs and horses he photographed as motion studies, many of which he turned into “zoopraxiscope” disc “films” that could be projected for audiences years before Edison and the Lumiere brothers put on their picture shows.
Oldman looks at one of Muybridge’s many self-portraits and notes his “intense and focused” eyes, calling them “gold dust” to an actor hoping to portray the man on the screen.
The scandals, the ways the eccentric genius was denied credit by the robber baron Stanford (perhaps the “crime of passion” “murderer” association was too much), and the fact that the nascent filmmaker undertook many motion study films of nudes later at the University of Pennsylvania, some of them playful enough to be seen as the first movie “comedies,” make Muybridge a grand subject for a big screen biography. “Exposing Muybridge” thus becomes a proof-of-concept for Oldman’s magnum opus, and makes one long for it to be financed, filmed and released.
As it is, Shaffer has filmed a great primer on a key figure in the history of cinema and the perfect movie for anyone whose interest was piqued by “Nope” to learn “the real story,” which is colorful enough without the glorious myths surrounding it.
Rating: unrated, nude photographs
Cast: Gary Oldman, Marta Braun, Rebecca Gowers, Richard White, Thomas Gunning, Richard Jackson Kushakaak, Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Marc Shaffer. A Gravitas Ventures release.
Running time: 1:28
Posted inReviews, previews, profiles and movie news|Comments Off on Documentary Review: “Exposing Muybridge” remembers a cinema pioneer, an “eccentric” killer and a grand footnote to “Nope”
There’s a gloriously workmanlike quality to everything about Ron Howard’s fine film of the famous Tham Lunag cave rescue in Thailand, “Thirteen Lives.” It’s one of those real-life thrillers like Eastwood’s “Sully” or Howard’s own “Apollo 13,” a celebration of competence, courage and modest bravado as people rally around a crisis, do their jobs and see it through.
Twelve tween soccer players and their young coach went into a tourist cave near their corner of Thailand inthe summer of 2018. The rains came and they were trapped. Their country and eventually the whole damned world came to their rescue.
You’d have to be heartless, or Elon Musk, to not be moved by this.
Howard and screenwriter William Nicholson (“Gladiator,” “Unbroken”) do their version of “The 33,” telling a true story with multiple points of view with enough delicacy to avoid stepping on national pride or personal loss and avoid stepping into any “white savior” trap, as the key figures in the event were Western hobbyists — cave divers — summoned to do what mere Navy SEALS could not.
Part of that “delicacy” includes studiously avoiding showing how the kids got caught unawares, their semi-impromptu pre-birthday excursion to a local cavern/shrine turning life threatening when a sudden rainstorm left them stranded deep underground, with waters rising and oxygen levels falling.
We see the story from several points of view. There’s a documentarian “on the ground” perspective where an embattled local governor (Sahajak Boonthanakit) is stuck with the thankless job of being the public face of the rescue effort, summoning Thai Navy SEALS, accepting the help of an expat water engineer (Nophand Boonyai) who instantly recognized the problem wasn’t pumping water out, it was preventing the water from pouring in from sinkholes on on the sides of the the mountain called The Sleeping Princess.
The governor, occasionally chewed out by the government minister who oversees him, is set up to be he fall guy when this all comes for naught.
The working class parents, planning a birthday party for one of the soccer players, complete with Spongebob Squarepants cake, are the first to realize their kids are running late. Tanata Srita plays one particularly distraught single mom, a “stateless” refugee who fears the government won’t make any effort to save her undocumented child.
We see the sturdy proficiency of the brave and intrepid Thai military, scrambling to start pumping the water out, mustering a SEALS scuba team, who are untrained in cave diving, because who has the sort of leisure time and thrill-seeking persona to pursue something that risky and dangerous?
That would be the Brits. Lewis Fitz-Gerald plays Vern Unsworth, a British expat/spelunker who offers his help to the governor. He’s the one who puts in the call to John Volanthen (Colin Farrell), a member of a volunteer British cave rescue team. And John is the one who has to the “old man” of their ranks, retired Coventry fireman Rick Stanton (Viggo Mortensen),and convince that this is a job only they can manage.
“I don’t even like kids,” the old grump mutters.
The heroes are flown in, do their damnedest to avoid stepping on Thai toes (and occasionally fail) and pitch in to help, managing to convince the authorities — military and elected officials — that cave diving a cavern flooding with torrential rains is a specialized skill.
Word gets out that the Thais “don’t want any foreigners dying in the cave,” thus their reluctance to accept Western help.
“We won’t die,” grizzled pro Rick growls. “I have no interest in dying.”
And before you or he can say, “Right, see you in’th’pub,” the Herculean effort to find those boys, determine if they’re alive and figure out a way to rescue them before the monsoons make this tourist attraction a mass grave, gets underway.
The first-rate underwater photography is shot mostly in extreme close-up. The divers are literally in the dark, plunging through two or three kilometers of tight, flooded underground squeezes in search of missing children. Yes, the stars mask and tank up for these sequences.
There’s also lovely Thai travelogue cinematography, of the mountain where this takes place and the rice paddies nearby that may have to be flooded — at great expense — to save these children.
Howard uses music sparingly, letting the noise of the cavern drowned in a downpour — days of rain open the crisis, and it isn’t even monsoon season — the divers’ regulators and driping silence heighten the suspense.
Farrell plays this seasoned diver, a married father and IT consultant, as more empathetic and yet tentative in the presence of brawnier and brassier man’s man Rick.
Joel Edgerton brings a lovely, skeptical warmth to the Australian “Doc Harry” summoned as a sort of Hail Mary by the cynical and seasoned Rick, whose pessimism writes all the kids off, straight away, and right after they’re first found alive.
It’s not just the accent that makes this great work on Mortensen’s part. He’s an aquatic EveryMan/EveryDay Joe here, that one mechanic who can fix your car, the fireman who knows just how to get your kid out of that burning building, the rescue diver who isn’t going to sugar-coat just what they’re facing just to protect anybody’s feelings.
Howard finds the heart in this story, and the perfect places to pluck the heartstrings. It’s an emotional movie, given a real-time “What we don’t know yet” urgency by Nicholson’s script, and a sort of awestruck “Look what these 5,000 people did just to save these children” credulity by one of Hollywood’s greatest “movies with heart” filmmakers.
Emotional or not, “Thirteen Lives” celebrates a sort of Howard Hawks “men doing manly stuff because only they can” competence, an old-fashioned feel-good movie with kids in jeopardy, turf wars over how to save them and everybody doing their damnedest to make sure Job One remains the rescue, and no other consideration matters.
Rating: PG-13, intense scenes, profanity
Cast: Viggo Mortensen, Colin Farrell, Sahajak Boonthanakit, Tanata Srita, Pattrakorn Tungsupakul and Joel Edgerton
Credits: Directed by Ron Howard, scripted by William Nicholson. An MGM production on Amazon Prime.
“Buba” is a spinoff movie from a comic German TV series titled “How to Sell Drugs Online Fast,” which I’ve not seen.
So when I say I kind of got into the film’s dark, masochistic comic vibe but found it ungainly and lumbering, take that into account. The episodes of the show this came from were 30 minute quick hits, and that’s a hard format to translate into a 90 minute film, so if you loved the show, you may have a different take.
Still, as anybody not German will tell you, German “comedies” are a rare and bewildering thing, what you get from a culture that set out to wipe out God’s Chosen Funny People from their populace, and almost succeeded.
Too soon?
“Buba” is about a “dealer” who once sold to those kids learning “How to Sell Drugs” and faced an uncertain future thanks to a teen’s enterprising 3D printed gun.
It turns out Buba, played by Germany’s doppelganger for David Arquette (German TV star Bjarne Mädel), right down to the pot belly — has had a rough life.
Its high point came, a flashback tells us, when he was a kid and won a break dancing contest, beating out a youngster living in Germany at the time, a fellow you might have heard of — Leonardo DiCaprio.
But to win that night, young Jakob Otto had to miss some family outing. That evening ended with a car crash, two dead parents and a comatose sibling who woke up with a raft of medical conditions dogging every day of his life. Guilt about Dante (Georg Friedrich) and his fate has hung over “Buba” ever since.
Buba’s atonement for his “crime” is a lifelong aversion to happiness and pleasure, and a life list that he keeps — with Dante’s enthusiastic support — of “negatives,” aka “unpleasant experiences,” a “negatives list.”
Buba can’t feel good about anything without hoping and engineering something awful that follows it. And Dante has lived his life abusing that atonement.
“I can’t afford to have good feelings,” Buba explains (in German, or dubbed into English).
A stunt man job with a local Wild West (German) town means Buba can dodge safety protocols and burn or otherwise injure himself in the shows. Dante still collects their checks. Fake hit-but-a-car accidents? Dante runs that scam, too.
And when they’re warned away from their assorted hustles by The Albanian Mafia, Dante is the one who figures Buba’s masochism can serve them in good stead as they weasel their way into organized crime.
But as they do, and punching-bag Buba has to master being an enforcer in the protection racket while Dante curries favor with the elderly (female) gang boss, Buba meets The First Girl who Ever Kissed Him, a fellow contestant from that long-ago breakdance throw-down. And while the fact that she’s a tattoo artist plays into his whole self-abuse/injury/pain lifestyle, Jule (Anita Vulesica) just might be the sort of the pleasure this 40something lump has denied himself his entire life.
Bad movies are often propped up by incessant, over-explaining, “here’s where the ironic deadpan jokes are” voice-over narration, and director Arne Feldhusen lets this script trap him in exactly that fashion.
“Chapters” break down Buba’s journey through life, and as much as we need to hear about “The day my life changed,” the damned narration spoils it.
There’s color in the Albanian mob material, a brief explainer why this tiny country is the font of much European crime, inspiring an infamous “Top Gear” episode and the entire “Taken” movie series.
When the crone who runs that mob imparts a proverb — “A chicken can only dream of the things the fox has to do.” — we hear a bit of what “Buba” needs more of.
That said, the “takes a licking and keeps on ticking” pratfalls are fun and the Big Finish is big enough.
Those boons are what it takes for “Buba” to overcome its own “negatives list,” and they’re only good enough to lift this misfiring comedy into “mixed bag” movie territory.
Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, drug content, profanity
Cast: Bjarne Mädel, Georg Friedrich, Anita Vulesica, Soma Pysall and Jasmin Shakeri
Credits: Directed by Arne Feldhusen, scripted by Sebastian Colley and Isaiah Michalski. A Netflix release.
Jesus, I hate bad dialogue. Even in a torture porn C-movie, it grates.
It’s not that one doesn’t notice the pitiless, pointless slaughter, the heartless cruelty and bad acting. Idiotic plot? Let’s throw that in, too.
But bad lines badly-delivered? The worst.
“Dawn” is a thriller that “has it all,” as in it’s awful by almost every measure. Sowriter-director Nicholas Ryan, take a bow.
Jackie Moore of “Westworld” stars in this rideshare-driver-who-kills thriller that begins with (limited) promise and goes straight to hell in short order.
“Dawn” hosts “Dawn’s Den,” a “dark web” murders-for-clicks series. A nice touch? As this artist sits and drawls her “rules” for how to be an Internet “artist” hosting your own thrill-kill series, we can see spots on the lens. Blood, maybe?
But those “rules” are where the godawful dialogue starts. “Rule number one. You don’t always select your canvas, sometimes it selects you.” She means “select your subject to PUT on canvas,” but that’s quibbling.
Pay attention in English class, kids.
“The third and final rule,” she chirps, “ENTHUSIAM!” And then she goes on, Monty Python style, to add “Rule number five. ALWAYS give your audience what they want” and “Rule number six. Always bring a set of tools…and wear a bullet proof vest for safety.” And on and on she goes, “final” rules” and “bonus” instructions, inane and insane in the extreme.
The cutaways to Dawn’s narration are necessary because she’s picked up a seriously dull just-got-engaged couple, and Dawn’s sneering and increasingly menacing exchanges with a school teacher (Sarah French) and her “bro” business exec husband-to-be (Jared Cohn) range from idiotic — they’re insanely slow at realizing the threat — to tedious to downright insipid.
“Lesson for you, NOBODY’s innocent!”
What constitutes bad acting? A Southern drawl that comes and goes and goes some more, for starters. We hear this all through the dark night where Anna and Oliver are kidnapped, tortured and tested, all of it playing out in a kind of sleep-walking slow-motion.
And dagging poor Eric Roberts in for a single scene as a past victim, begging for his life, and Michael Paré in to play a cop is just cruel, no matter what you paid them. Then again, their names plus Moore’s got this garbage script financed.
And don’t hold out hope that the ending will save this, “darkest before the dawn” and all that. It doesn’t.
Rating: unrated, graphic violence, profanity
Cast: Jackie Moore, Sarah French, Jared Cohn, Eric Roberts, Nicholas Brendon and Michael Paré.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Nicholas Ryan. An Uncork’d release.
