Masked and murderous commando cops fight drugs and drug lords in the hellhole of Tulsa.
Wonder why the National Guard hasn’t been called into Oklahoma?
James Badge Dale and Ben Foster star in what turned out to be Graham Greene’s final film, with Oscar winner Melissa Leo thrown in for good measure.
Nov. 14, it’s “Tulsa King” meets The Evening News, coming to a theater near you.
“Good Boy” is elemental horror — a tale of a sick man under natural and supernatural assault — and his dog.
And the marvel of this movie is the performance by that real live dog. Director Ben Leonberg picked up on his pet Indy’s “range” of expressions and emotions and trained, tricked and puzzled the Novia Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever into a canine performance — created by editing — for the ages.
Indy is so devoted to his owner, Todd, that he’s never distracted by whatever goes on beyond the camera’s field of view during a movie shoot. His eyes don’t leave Todd (Shane Jensen) in his moments of need, peril and confusion. But Indy is wary of grandpa’s “haunted house” in the country. Indy wanders. Indy sees and hears things that intrigue and alarm him.
“Good Boy” is a simple, scary thriller that leans on one of the classic tropes of the genre — “The dog knows.” And seeing what Indy sees and taking in what Indy’s frightened, confused but loving and loyal eyes absorb makes us fear for what he doesn’t understand, what faces his master and could face him as well because he just doesn’t know better.
Todd, whose face is rarely seen and then not until the third act, is sick. We gather this from calls from his concerned sister Vera (Arielle Friedman), and from her visit, when she finds her brother coughing up blood.
Todd’s response to this is to flee to grandpa’s old house on the farm. He walks Indy, fusses over him. And when his medical situation turns dire, Indy is with him when he goes to get a cat scan and some very bad news.
But Indy is picking up other threats from their new surroundings. It’s not just their hunting, camo-nut, foxtrap-setting neighbor (Stuart Rudin) that they have to be wary of. There are noises, shadowy figures in the background Indy doesn’t see. And grandpa (horror icon Larry Fessenden), seen on old vhs tapes, had something weird going on around him.
Indy hears whimpers from a locked cellar, which can only be the ghost of Bandit, grandpa’s long-dead dog. He even sees him.
The tangible “threats” here come from the usual horrific visuals — gnarled, skinny, twig-thin black fingers, menacing eyes that pierce the dark, unseen evil reaching from beyond for somebody and somebody’s dog.
Leonberg wisely lets his beautiful, expressive dog’s face tell this story and sell this terror. This low-budget jewel all but mocks every film production that needs a dog but which uses a CGI one instead of a living, breathing, loving and relatable pet, from “Call of the Wild” to “Superman.”
There is no substitute for the real thing, and even people who don’t love dogs reognize that.
The tropes trot by as blood and black bile reach out from beyond — or maybe just from Todd’s diseased condition — and the dog takes in his master’s suggesting horror choices for TV viewing (“Carnival of Souls”) on his grandpa’s old TV.
The film’s limited dialogue and dogs-eye-and-ear-view (muffled dialogue, unseen faces) give its story an underexplained mystery, which works to its advantage. The pools of darkness, gloomy exteriors and shadows underscore the “less is more” ethos that the production lives by.
But as Spielberg himself could tell you, if there’s no Indy, there’s no movie. W.C. Fields may have warned his fellow actors to never co-star with “children or dogs.” “Good Boy” makes the humans all but superfluous as its star delivers some of the most realistic reactions to the unexplainable this time-worn genre has ever seen.
Rating: PG-13, bloody violence, profanity
Cast: Indy, Shane Jensen, Arielle Friedman, Stuart Rudin and Larry Fessenden.
Credits: Directed by Ben Leonberg, scripted by Alex Cannon and Ben Leonberg. An IFC release.
Running time: 1:13
Robert Duvall talked about having to give up horseback riding the last time I interviewed him, and even in his 70s, he was taking it hard. He’d made his working life provide him with lots of peak career Westerns, and he took those paydays to settle in “horse country” — not just in Texas.
Me? Not so much. I’ve ridden occasionally over the years, and I knew it was an iffy proposition for this trip, doing an hour or two on an arthritic hip cross country in Belize. But it is what it is.
I have always appreciated actors who trained vigorously enough to look “right” in the saddle. It’s harder than it looks. Speaking from experience, Blackadder’s insult about “He rides a horse rather less well than another horse would” is pretty hard to avoid if it’s uncomfortable.
Linda Lavin makes her last curtain call as graceful as the material will allow in “One Big Happy Family,” her final film before dying last December.
It’s a generally mirthless comedy that strains for laughs as it struggles to graft a “Maybe I’m not Jewish” DNA test narrative onto a child’s impending bat mitzvah.
Lisa Brenner wrote and stars in “Family” as an actress and mom who’s made being Jewish a central tenet of her life, only to discover that decades of “You don’t LOOK Jewish” remarks are now backed up by science.
Her story is told in a kvetching, klutzy script that botches basic math, struggles to make the whole DNA storyline funny, fumbles the bat mitzvah and saddles the 87 year-old Lavin with a veritable dictionary of Yiddishisms to utter.
“Oy” and “gevalt” indeed.
In a voice-over prologue, Rachel remembers freezing up during her own bat mitzvah, only to have her tactless, tone deaf stereotype of a mother (Lavin) take over her speech and scar her for life. The story then shifts to the present day, “twenty seven years later,” as Rachel struggles with organizing the celebration and with the idea of making a speech at her own daughter’s (Lumi Pollack) bat mitzvah.
She’s supposed to be an actress?
The DNA test thing is pushed on her by her TV chat show hostess bestie (Sabrina Cofield), and that’s when she learns she has a half-brother (Josh Fadem), or at least one half-brother for starters.
That infuriates her Calif-flaky, non-binary, juice-bar server/lesbian folk rocker sister (Kat Cunning, funny). But her Long Island mom isn’t admitting anything. At first.
“Did your sister give you one of her brownies?”
Mom then confesses to difficulties getting pregnant back in “the late ’70s,” until turning to artificial insemination.
That’s where the movie’s math, contorted to put a vibrant, doesn’t-look-it 87 year old in the mother/grandmother role. If Rachel is 40, she was born in ’85. Lavin’s Lenore is overusing Yiddish and talking about “remembering when the Dodgers were in Brooklyn,” when they moved to LA in ’57.
Possible? OK. But “plausible” demands more explanation.
The whole mass insemination story that produces constant DNA test site phone updates (amusing) revealing more and more siblings points to more interesting possibilities than it delivers.
Rachel curses in front of her kids and they curse back. Rachel’s sympathetic Filipino doctor-husband (Dante Brasco) keeps suggesting LA scent and herbal remedies to her stress.
Casting Fadem as her non-Jewish half-brother Bobby just muddies the movie’s ethnocentrism. Bobby’s the most “Jewish looking” character in it.
But sitcom-veteran Lavin navigates the abrasive tactlessness of the archetype she’s playing with ease, even if the Yiddishisms feel forced and dated a generation older than the character she’s supposed to be playing.
Rating: unrated, profanity
Cast: Lisa Brenner, Dante Basco, Lumi Pollack, Josh Fadem, Kat Cunning and Linda Lavin
Credits: Directed by Matt Sohn, scripted by Lisa Brenner. An Electric Films release.
Running time: 1:22
No, the stars aren’t household names. But this looks hilarious.
A loud new neighbor drives a couple out of their brownstone, and their revenge is making up a play that she must audition for and rehearse.
That’s so New York it hurts.
Oct. 28, get ready for noises off and noises on and very bad karaoke “La Bamba.”
Henry Melling is the ordinary looking moptop who falls hard for a domineering biker (Alexander Skarsgard) in this dom rom com.
Nov. 25, this makes its way to the holiday lineup at your local cineplex.
“Casey Makes a Mixtape” is a wan indie coming-of-age dramedy in which nobody comes of age, nothing dramatic or comedic happens.
It’s a sort of little film festival movie that couldn’t, a period piece that was never fated to pick up distribution outside of its run in festivals. I see it played in Portland, at least.
Texas filmmaker Blake Calhoun gives his lead characters names that all begin with the letter “C,” and the script shows little imagination beyond that. And he appears to have found out the hard way how difficult it is to make a “High Fidelity” tween comedy without the cash to buy music clearances.
Casey (Presley Richardson, making her film debut) is 13 and obsessed with music. It’s 1981, and she uses her boom box to record her favorite songs off the radio — tunes by the likes of Rick Springfield and Journey.
Casey’s Mom (Arianne Martin) thinks she has it going on. She’s off to Paris where she expects her beau to propose. First, she’s got to Pontiac Trans Am Casey to her parents’ house in suburban Texas for the summer.
Casey skateboards her way into meeting Craig (Julian Hilliard) and Carrie (Kennedy Celeste). If she could only convince a DJ at Q-102 FM in Dallas-Fort Worth to live up to their “Texas’ Best Rock” motto and play her favorites, The Police, she’d finish this ten-tune mixtape she has in the works.
“Don’t Stand So Close to Me,” she pleads into the phone, glancing at the wall poster of the pop-rock trio every time she calls Q-102.
That’ poster’s as close as she’s going to get to The Police. That’s as close as we’ll get to hearing that song.
Truthfully, Calhoun (“Spilt Milk” was his) only landed the rights to a couple of classic rock tunes from the era. Spoiler alert, one’s from a band named for a Massachusetts city and the other is by a Canadian “power trio,” and no, not THAT one.
Stripped of most of the music it would take for “Mixtape” to be a “Mixtape” and work its nostaglia magic, all we’re left with is uninteresting incidents decorating the dullest tween summer ever put on film.
The situations and the kid actors acting them out never come close to “interesting,” and the adults show us that the script is how those situations and characters turned out so drab.
Young Miss Richardson half-whispers and shrugs as she narrates the most blase details of her life directly to the camera. Not exactly “Sixteen Candles.” The boy can’t add up to a “love interest” and the “bad girl” (Celeste) is just a shoplifter.
As with “Empire Records” and “High Fidelity,” the most promising setting is the local record shop. That direction is the path this plot doesn’t take. Even that setting has all the life drained out of it. And no, we don’t hear the hit records of the era playing on its sound system, either.
The entire affair comes off as half-hearted and half-assed. But putting it online for streaming could be useful to aspiring filmmakers. Here’s how “not” to make a coming-of-age movie. Characters have to grow, change or discover something interesting about themselves.
And if you don’t have the cash to buy music rights to your period piece, you’d better set it in the 1880s, not the 1980s.
Rating: unrated, pot use
Cast: Presley Richardson, Kennedy Celeste, Julian Hilliard, Arianne Martin, Jennifer Griffin and Brad Leland.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Blake Calhoun. A Loud Pictures release.
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Movies have been tied to dreams from the very beginnings of cinema. The storytelling medium lends itself to the interior world of dreaming. And films from “Spellbound” onward have made serious attempts to recreate and interpret the experience of what our subconscious does in the journeys we take when we dream.
“Daniela Forever” is a movie about grief, undying love and lucid dreaming as a way of clinging to someone you’ve lost. The latest sci-fi from Oscar nominated writer-director Nacho Vigalondo (“Timecrimes,” “Colossal”) is a fascinating dip into lucid dreaming hampered by a DOA love story and the limitations of handsome but often emotionally unavailable leading man Henry Golding.
He plays a star DJ lured to Madrid by gigs set up by his poseur/manager (Rubén Ochandiano) but whose life is upended when he falls for an Italian artist, Daniela (Beatrice Grannò) who then dies in a car accident.
The film’s central flaw is glaring and obvious right from the start. We have no time to invest in the romance, and even as the narrative gropes and meanders its way to a conclusion that maybe “explains” that, we have nothing to cling to but DJ Nicolas and his undying devotion to Daniela.
Golding can’t make the sale, and looking at his other romances, it’s a wonder that he keeps trying his hand at them. As the prospective groom in “Crazy Rich Asians,” he had better chemistry with his best man. Here, we just don’t buy how bereft and lovesick his character is supposed to be.
His friend Victoria (Nathalie Poza) suggests he sign on for a drug trial that she’s been involved with. It’s being tested to see if this pill can enable directed lucid dreaming. Subjects are put on the medication, given instructions that amount to a “script,” what they should be trying to dream about, and then are intereviewed to see if this medication helps someone control their dreams.
Nicolas cheats. He only wants to dream Daniela back to life.
Nicolas enters these dreams in his apartment with Daniela, and ventures with her to where they met, places they went. He focuses on details, notices dead ends — limits to this dreamscape created by his lack of knowledge of this street, this shop (the suits on display have no backs, for instance).
“Everything I don’t know doesn’t exist.”
He tries to master this world and cling to Daniela, who is limited by how he remembers her and what he didn’t know about her. Her friend Teresa (Aura Garrido), whom he met at her funeral, might offer clues. But he’s so wrapped up in dreams that he lets everything in his waking life go.
“I think I get it now,” he tells Daniela, over and over again as he masters this somnambulent rule or that one. But does he?
Golding’s performance is flat, all surface affectations, none of them hinting at the obsession he allegedly has for this woman. Her elusive art — faceless characters, figures with their heads out of the frame, all composed on a computer — gets at the film’s superficiality.
The limits of her character, created from his memory, hamper Grannò, who does nothing to suggest the cause for obsession. She is a boring pixie dream girl.
The film’s one light touch is the one truncated love scene, picked up just as the menage a trois has ended, It’s the most comical and one of its most revealing moments.
But Golding has to carry this, and he just doesn’t. As fascinating as Vigalondo’s fantasy dreamscape with its rules — Nicolas can focus and alter where a door takes them, who they run into and the like — can be, “Daniela Forever” never escapes being a clock-watching romantic melodrama with intriguing sci-fi touches.
The science fiction is solid. The melodrama has you wondering how much longer we have to spend with this unbelievable “couple.”
Rating: R, profanity, one sexual situation
Cast: Henry Golding, Beatrice Grannò, Aura Garrido, Nathalie Poza and Rubén Ochandiano
Credits: Scripted and directed by Nacho Vigalondo. A Well Go USA release.
Running time: 1:52
A documentary about the making of her album “The Life of a Showgirl” makes Taylor Swift the queen of the box office on the first weekend of October, celebrating the record’s blockbuster release with a box office smash as a side dish.
Record sales, Spotify downloads, “intimate look” documentaries, everything the woman touches turns to gold. Well, the exeption might be The Kansas City Chiefs.
Deadline.com extrapolates that her $15 million Friday opening of a documentary she only announced she was offering to AMC theaters a couple of weeks back adds up to a $30 million+ weekend. Her fanbase could push that much higher, but we’ll see. She’s older, they’re older, and fanatics or not, only two weeks of pre-sales should keep this south of $40.
The other wide release this weekend is the bio-pic that was supposed to put Dwayne Johnson on the awards season map. “The Smashing Machine,” about the life of UFC brawler Mark Kerr, puts Johnson in makeup to make him resemble “The Thing” from “Fantastic Four,” and pairs him up with his “Jungle Cruise” sidekick, Emily Blunt.
Fans aren’t going for it. Reviews have been passable, far from ecstatic, and a $6 million opening weekend won’t help the aging action star’s quote and won’t keep the picture in theaters long enough to build any sort of groundswell of buzz. It’s Johnson’s worst-ever opening, and there’s schadenfreuide attached to the film as well, as Johnson irked a lot of the people who’d be voting him into awards by sticking his two cents worth into politics last year. Opening in third place when it was supposed to be a $20 million+ top dog is humbling for the wrestler-turned-acting diva, and the writing could be on the big guy’s wall.
“One Battle After Another,” on the other hand, is rolling through a $17 million weekend, which should push it past $50 million in North America by midnight Sunday. The global take should be in the $100 million range come Monday morning.
A second-place finish to the latest Tay-Tay mania is a big boost for Paul Thomas Anderson’s topical, awards bait, all-star comic thriller.
Everybody who was going to see “Gabby Dollhouse: The Movie” has pretty much seen it as it tumbles to fourth place with a just-under $5 million second weekend.
“Conjuring: The Last Rites” is proving to be the horror title to beat all the way to Halloween, hanging in the top five for one last weekend, making another $3-4 million, inching towards the $175 million domestic box office mark.
“Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle” is still making a little money — $3.3 million this weekend, putting it in sixth.
“Strangers: Chapter 2” got no one’s attention and is fading away $2.8 million second weekend (seventh).
Twentiesth Century Studios re-released the second “Avatar” film to hype us for the upcoming third one, and “Way of Water” may clear another $2.5 million.
IFC’s “Good Boy” cracked the top ten, a trained dog horror thriller? Yeah, I requested a review lunk but balls were dropped. Sorry I missed it. This is on track to earn $2.25 and come in ninth.
“The Long Walk” enjoys its last weekend in the top ten in tenth with $1.7 million.
Those three new releases and the “Avatar” re-release push “Big Bold Beautiful Journey,” “Downton Abbey,” the indie June Squibb comedy “Eleanor the Great” and “Him” out of the top ten.
As always, I’ll update these figures as the weekend progresses.
The screenwriter of “Se7en” wrote this thriller, with Georgina Campbell as the huntress and James Preston Rogers in the title role.
Palpable “Fargo” meets Fincher vibe in this Gavin Polone thriller. That’s not Malcolm McDowell as the “Elderly Priest.” It just looks like him.
Feb. 20.
Movie Nation 