“Sweethurt” is a scruffy, fitfully-amusing Aussie indie that’s basically a soundtrack in search of a better rom-com.
It’s a post-breakup farce set to the music of The Skategoats, Midimachine, The Struts, Better Luck Next Time and Third Eye Blind. Yeah, Tom Danger’s picture is nostalgic for the ’90s, when Alt Rock was a thing and naming your band Harvey Danger (No relation, I trust?) was considered cool.
Two years ago, Jacob (Rav Raynayake) broke up with teacher Olivia (Alannah Robertson), and she’s still in his nightmares. He dreams he’s the biggest kid in her class, propeller beanie cap, confessing his love and regret, mocked for it by the other kids.
“Yer gonna die ALONE!” the little Bruces and Sheilas shout. And maybe they’re right. His grandpa did.
Jacob is sent on a road trip to Broken Bay to see to some of his late grandpa’s affairs — settle up bar tabs, etc. Mate Mike (Mehdy Salameh) comes along, as does buddy Drew (co-writer Logan Webster).
And much to Drew’s horror, Jacob’s blonder-than-blonde and “thirsty” teen sister Abby (Sam Germain) is along as well. She’s not the least bit subtle in her Drew lust.
Meanwhile, out in Broken Bay, Skye (Tyra Cartledge) is bingeing on “wine cream” — red wine soaked tubs of Neapolitan ice cream — and worryting and irking her “68% gay” (based on her sexual encounters history) roomie Carly (Rhiann Marquez).
“Best way to get over someone is to do ‘anal’ with a stranger,” she offers, helpfully.
What “Sweethurt” boils down to is pointing these randos — dorky looking guys who are usually the writer/director’s alter ego and a collection of impossibly beautiful young women — into each other in a new variation of the endless male cinematic wish fulfillment fantasy, this time with “shrimp on the barbie” accents.
That’s not literally true here, as Tom Danger has a cameo (a bartender) and he’s blonder and fitter than virtually anybody he cast. But the formula’s the same as it ever was.
Funny stuff flits around the edges of these more genial-than-comical leads. The frantic Max (Dylan Lee) shows up at the dead grandpa’s door with a goat in his arms, a panicked look on his face and a tale of a date that ended badly and a cult’s goat sacrifice interrupted.
Olivia happens to be in Broken Bay, too, setting up Jacob’s confession that he’s got “absolutely no soul crushing regrets.” That’ll win her back.
And there’s an impromptu rave, with lots of tunes from the aforementioned bands energizing it. Kind of.
Death and mortality hang over this, but not in any elegantly-managed way.
All of which adds up to an odd funny scene, the rarer funny line, and a lot more reasons to self-Spotify the soundtrack than sit and wait for “Sweethurt” to get better.
Rating: unrated, profanity, sexual situations
Cast: Rav Ratnayake, Tyra Cartledge, Rhiaan Marquez, Mehdy Salameh, Sam Germain, Alannah Robertson, Dylan Lee and Logan Webster
Credits: Directed by Tom Danger, scripted by Tom Danger and Logan Webster. A Gravitas Ventures release.
Sadly, if we’re staying alliterative and offering value judgements on this Toni Collette “validation” star vehicle, we can’t leave out “vapid.”
But who doesn’t adore Toni C? Even if the film is a throwback to her mousy “Muriel’s Wedding” persona, she’s sure to give us something to chew on.
She plays a pushover marketing exec, always getting bowled-over by her boss and male co-workers, cheated-on by her “grown ass man working in a Starbucks” husband (Tim Daish).
But Kristin’s long-abandoned maiden name was “Balbano,” and her maternal grandfather back in the Olde Country has passed. She must return to “settle his affairs,” as she’s his last direct heir.
With her job a misery and a husband a soon-to-be-ex and their kid in college, why not? A quick funeral, a little sight-seeing, maybe a little “‘Under the Tuscan Sun,’ ‘Eat, Pray Love'” vacation tacked-on.
“Eat, Pray F—,'” her bestie and Krav Maga class pal Jenny (Sophia Nomvete) corrects. Kristin is thirsty and everybody knows it.
That’s often a sign of a strained comedy — by the way — putting too much effort on making a sea of F-bombs funny, each and every one of them.
In Italy, Kristin bumps into one smoldering Italian stranger (Giulio Corso) fresh off the plane, but finds herself in the care of a couple of others. “Soldatos,” it turns out. Nope, she doesn’t speak the lingo.
Her long-estranged grandpa? He wasn’t “a vintner,” as she was told. Don Guissepe didn’t die of natural causes, either. For that matter, her dad didn’t die “in a construction accident.” And this “secretary” who summoned her isn’t just a secretary. Bianca, played by the great Monica Bellucci, is a consigliere, a trusted advisor. Don Guissepe was a mafia kingpin.
“He preferred to call it ‘The Invisible Family.'”
So what we’ve got here is a fish-out-of-water comedy about a milquetoast Americana caught in the middle of a mob war in a country where she doesn’t speak the language, an affection-and-finer-things-starved sensualist who only wants la dolce vita when the locals only want to kill her.
“Mafia Mamma” was directed by Ms. “Twilight,” Catherine Hardwicke, who has no flair for comedy. Collette’s years removed from her bubbly “naive” comedy phase, with her many serious roles having “Oscar or Emmy contender” attached to them as she reaches her 50s.
What they cook up up here is a limp noodle of a farce with a string of tepid running gags — comical killings and attempted assassinations and amusing body dismemberments to “clean up” the crimes, mobsters spitting every time the rival famiglia’s name is uttered and Kristin swooning over dreamy men, yummy wines and “Gnocchi,” most of which remain just out of reach as the business of Famiglia Balbano keeps getting in the way.
The one-liners are of the “Just because you are a mafia boss doesn’t mean you have to be a bad person” quality.
The “solution” to the mob war “business” is obvious, the “heroine’s journey” from pushover to assertiveness just as predictable. A few flashes of humor — in court (Jenny is a lawyer), in the romantic clutches and in (violent) action — and Collette’s career-long likability are all “Mafia Mamma” has going for it. It’s not enough.
Rating: R for bloody violence, sexual content and language
Cast: Toni Collette, Monica Bellucci, Sophia Nomvete, Tim Daish, Eduardo Scarpetta, Giulio Corso, Alfonso Perugini and Francesco Mastroianni
Credits: Scripted and directed by Catherine Hardwicke, scripted by Michael J. Feldman and Debby Jhoon. A Bleecker Street release.
There’s this event our Oscar winning King of the “Just Keep Living (JK Livin’) ethos is promoting.
This trailer or commercial for it gets at the essence of Matthew McConaughey — laid back, cocksure, shirtless if he needs to be, a tad messianic about his way of looking at the world.
He’s like a better looking, kinder, gentler Russell Brand, if no dumber or smarter (which would be news to that delusional Britcon).
You can see the Airstream that MM toured America promoting one of the last bombs he made before transforming into an Oscar winner with a charmingly flaky persona.
One of the times I caught up with him was sitting on lawn chairs in front of that American classic recreational trailer wrapped in a “Sahara” poster — shirtless — of course. This is closer to the”real” MM than your typical chat show appearance.
He’s of the opinion that we’d all be better off if we were a lot more chill. “Be like Matthew,” in other words.
There’s been talk of him running for governor of Texas, an effort to unemploy the hate-filled incompetent tumor who has run the Lone Star state into the ditch.
Let’s see if he does it. April 24 at 10 am Eastern, we may get an idea.
Let it never be said that Nicolas Cage doesn’t deliver fair value every time he pops up on screen. Challenging indie dramedy, chewy support in an A-picture or straight-up vamping as some devilish variation of himself in everything else, he is as much fun to watch as anybody making movies today.
And here he is in “Renfield,” a bloody-minded and bloody-funny Dracula freed of “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent,” cutting loose in a splatter-comedy that’s fun for the whole family.
Well, if that family is headed by Samuel L. Jackson and oh, Jamie Lee Curtis.
This comic carnage from the director of “The Lego Batman Movie” is bathed in gore and wrapped in the “feels” of self-help speak. And if Cage is free at last/free at last, what are we to make of Nicholas Hoult in the title role? He was stiff enough in the one truly comic role in “The Menu” to make one question his funny bone. But he too is freed in this farce, positively Hugh Grantish as a downtrodden, befuddled underling trapped “in a toxic relationship” with his “master,” something that’s worried him for so many decades he’s sought out a self-help group.
That’s where we meet our voice-over narrator, Robert Montague Renfield, in a DRAAG meeting (“Destructive Relationship” something something “Group,” I think). That’s where he has to listen to others describe what a “monster” this lover, wife, parent or boss might be.
Renfield knows “monsters.”
He isn’t inclined to admit that he eats bugs and serves as “familiar” to his vampire, rounding up victims for him in city after city over the past century, a former lawyer whose life is reduced to “procuring.” In New Orleans, Anne Rice’s favorite vampire haunt, he’s found a shortcut.
All he has to do is hear what “monsters” Caitlyn, Carol and others in the DRAAG group are coping with, track down and anesthesitize them, take them to “The Prince of Darkness” and voila, two problems are solved at once.
But he stumbles into a drug gang situation doing just that, running him afoul of A) gangster Teddy Lobo (Ben Schwartz, bringing his A-game) and B), a traffic cop (Awkwafina, nicely made-up and loaded with F-bombs) out to catch Teddy and assorted corrupt cops (“New Orleans,” remember?) and gangsters led by Teddy’s ruthless mom (the great Shoreh Agdashloo of “The House of Sand and Fog”).
Suddenly, Dracula’s urgent need for the necks of “the innocent,” and not these tattooed thugs Renfield keeps bringing him, doesn’t seem as urgent. Drac wants “nuns” or “tourists” or “a busload of cheer-leaders.” But “Don’t make it a SEXUAL thing.”
It’s just that this is exactly what Renfield does when he sees the brave, righteous and gosh-darned cute Officer Rebecca (Awkwafina) stand up to “toxic” criminals in her life. Renfield will eat a bug (the source of his “power”) and pitch in, maybe make some time with the pretty policewoman and forget all about this control freak who sleeps in a coffin and rules his life.
The manipulations of someone with “narcissistic personality disorder” are trotted out, with Drac degrading Renfield with “I am your only friend…your only SALVATION,” and Renfield needing a self help book (wielded like a vampire-repelling Bible at one point) and bucking up from his sensitive support group leader (Brandon Scott Jones) to stand a chance of breaking free from his co-dependency.
The self-help stuff is a cute hook that isn’t deeply developed here. The story is new-vampire-in-town formulaic and the violence hilariously over the top, with buckets and buckets of guts spilled in bitings, brawls and Slaughterhouse Five, Six and Seven blood-lettings.
But McKay knows where the money is — in Awkwafina’s temper and diminutive, Chaplinesque walk, in Hoult’s semi-lovesick haplessness, and in Cage’s every single close-up. This is Cage at his Nic Cagiest. His fangs are repellently impressive, and he flashes them with flourish after flourish, adding little wide-eyed half-giggles and grand, gruesome gestures that pop an exclamation point on every line.
A delightful touch — McKay has Cage and Hoult act out their “history” in scenes superimposing them on Bela Lugosi’s classic “Dracula” from the Universal Studios horror library.
The jokes are about the nature of the “arrangement,” a job that is horribly messy, dangerous, with “eternal life” as the benefits for “the co-pay is my mortal soul.” There are running gags and we get the impression there is more that could have been made of the ballyhooed “support group” scenes, which have been central to the film’s advertising.
But a little of that stuff goes a long way, and that holds true for the film as well. The middle acts slow things down more than they should. Cage gets things moving again with every appearance, sometimes moving on bat wings.
Splattered geysers of blood, ripped off limbs and the like aside, this is a slight comedy, and McKay has the sense to get in, get gory, get his close-ups and get out of there before 93 minutes have passed. That makes for a vampire comedy everybody can sink their teeth into.
Rating: R for bloody violence, some gore, language throughout and some drug use
Cast: Nicholas Hoult, Nicolas Cage, Awkwafina, Ben Schwartz and Shoreh Agdashloo.
Credits: Directed by Chris McKay, scripted by Ryan Ridley and Robert Kirkman. A Universal release.
Running time: 1:33
Rating: R for bloody violence, some gore, language throughout and some drug use
Cast: Nicholas Hoult, Nicolas Cage, Awkwafina, Ben Schwartz and Shoreh Agdashloo.
Credits: Directed by Chris McKay, scripted by Ryan Ridley and Robert Kirkman. A Universal release.
“De humani corporis fabrica” is a cinematic med school anatomy quiz, one which doesn’t necessarily provide direct answers to what it is we see being probed, sliced, removed, straightened or examined under a microscope. We can guess. Usually.
If the photos above didn’t scare you off, here’s written warning. This is not for the squeamish.
That’s pretty much what this film is — well, much of the time — human anatomy, the working and sometimes defective parts of the body, seen in living color as they’re cut and corrected.
Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel filmed in 11 hospitals of Paris — in operating rooms, delivery rooms, looking at X-rays and cat scans and using endoscopes and every “scope” in current use in surgeries and examinations to take us into the intestines, lungs, throats, eyes and urinary tracts and wombs of assorted patients. The only dialogue is what’s overheard as nurses prep or dress anesthetized patients or doctors as they remark on what they’re seeing, what’s going wrong and bitch about workloads as they remove another prostate or show us one of the more graphic Caesarian section births ever filmed.
If you’re not cringing at the hammering and chiseling, drilling and screwing it takes to straighten a young man’s scoliosis, you’re made of sterner stuff than me. The eyeball poking and probing operation is but a warmup to the spinal surgery.
Traditional pre-natal sonograms are seen, like other sequences of “De humani,” in a grainy, expressionistic blur. Then we’re treated to the state-of-the-art color imagery of a scoped- peek at the near-birth baby’s development.
Every now and then, the filmmakers wander into rooms where patients are being handled, and managed. A woman’s plaintive cries point to madness, and a confused man endlessly repeats this or that phrase (in French) insisting that he’s not going back to his room.
And a couple of times we follow what look like a hospital’s security staff as they wade into the bowels of the institution, the metal plumbing-lined tunnels used for storage and providing the lifeblood of the ORs, ERs and pediatric wards above, where human plumbing is plumbed and altered by the healers who labor there.
“This prostate is HUGE!” Again, in French with English subtitles.
The film is maddeningly random and almost-pointlessly opaque at times, forcing the viewer to guess what they’re operating on, and why. Random translated words (“cortical chimney,” “Retzius”) point us in the right direction before actual answers slip in. Cross-section examination of an umbilical cord as it is sliced up and studied, a placenta is gone over or a breast cancer tumor’s cells are viewed in slice-slide formdon’t don’t require further explanation.
Castain-Taylor and Paravel are selective about who they actually show on camera, and delay showing any clear, focused doctor or nurse for most of the early scenes. They dip back into blurry, impressionistic and sometimes underlit (or unlit) scenes illustrating the muted and muffled conversations, rants and diagnoses we half overhear.
As one gropes for footing or simple answers, it’s tempting to reference American cinema verite documentaries on medicine, mental patients and the like and wonder if it isn’t just the surgery that’s “invasive” here.
“De humani” is meant to be immersive, and it occasionally is — and demystifying, which it occasionally achieves. But by the long, going-away (Retirement? Can’t tell.) party sequence at the end, with blurred dancing and music and close-ups of a more playful anatomical mural decorating wherever the hell these staffers are, much of what is “magic” about this flesh-and-blood-and-organs meditation has evaporated.
The surgeries shown here, organs in their place in the crowded human body, functioning or failing, is indeed eye-opening. But the film’s structure is, as an ancient Roman critic would have put it, inportunum et inordinatum.
Rating: unrated, graphic images of surgery, sexual organs included
Credits: Scripted and directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel. A Grasshopper Film release.
A24 is home to high end horror, and this high-concept thriller — she just wants to talk to her dead Mom, and friends/peers know how that’s done — sure looks like it delivers.
“Country Gold” is a pulled-punch satire of country music stardom, a Garth Brooks send-up that arrives about 20 years too late to land.
But give director, co-writer and star Mickey Reece credit for ambition. The Oklahoman Reece (“Anges” and “Corgis 2” were his) follows that reach-must-exceed-my-grasp artist’s dictum in a stagey, downbeat “comedy” that barely manages a laugh.
Reece stars as Troyal Brux, a cherubic king of country music at his mid-90s peak, a star who rides his big hat and “good ol’boy” image as hard as he can, neglecting his family as he does.
“I make nothing but hit records and baby boys” he brags to his wife (Leah N.H. Philpott).
His latest brush-off begins with a phone call. George Jones, that ol’Possom himself, an icon who seemed to live the hard-life/hard-love songs he wrote and sang, wants to meet up. “Time with me and the kids” will just have to wait.
Meeting his idol (Ben Hall) at a steakhouse, and carrying that over to The Ol’ Possom’s favorite watering hole, his pal Pee Wee’s honkytonk, “where country stars come to write their drinking songs,” just might let the evening get out of hand.
George isn’t really a fan, but he lets Troyal know that he’s about to have himself cryogenically frozen, and that he’s chosen to spend his “last night on Earth” (unless he comes back) with him. So the delusional diva takes that as a compliment, and sticks around through the booze, cocaine and lady masseuses to follow.
The script has Jones, a “washed-up gin rat” one person who joins them at their table notes, pass on wisdom to Troyal — “There’s true things that are terrible and terrible things that’re true.” George lived on his Daddy’s advice, “The world won’t let you scream, so you’d better learn to sing.”
Troyal probably learns more from the transvestite in the men’s room than from the aged boozehound, with “You can be anyone you want to be this time around” giving him visions of Garth’s “Chris Gaines” interlude.
Reece suggests a thorough if somewhat superficial grasp of his target and the country music milieu. Jones’ real-life pal Pee Wee Johnson becomes Pee Wee Roberts, for instance.
But Reece is a one-dimensional screen presence, with little that suggests charismatic “star” about him. He performs his glib patter at a sprint, which doesn’t make it funnier, and he’s an indifferent if country competent singer. Hall is a sturdier presence, even if he sounds little like the eminence he’s playing.
Despite the f-bombs, the egomania and a montage of Troyal shooting a beer commercial and having a hissy fit as he does, too little here rises to the level of “satire” or even “amusing.” Blown lines made the final cut, sidebars are set-up and abandoned and a promising premise that might apply to any country singer who achieves stardom is wasted.
“If George Jones was watching you, what would he say?”
Rating: unrated, drug abuse, nudity, profanity
Cast: Mickey Reece, Ben Hall and Jacob Ryan Snovel
Credits: Directed by Mickey Reece, scripted by Mickey Reece and John Selvidge. A Cinedigm release.
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