“Chupa” is a harmless Spanglish trifle for kids, an “E.T.” riff about Mexico’s flying (!?) vampire bobcat of myth, El Chucacabra.
It’s built on a simple formula — kid discovers a supernatural (or extraterrestrial) playmate, must save it from those who would exploit it — and executed accordingly.
There’s a little pop to its casting and limited charm in its Mexican cultural touchstones. Look at this list of screenwriters and see if you can guess how “limited” that is — Sean Kennedy Moore, Joe Barnathan, Marcus Rinehart and Brendan Bellomo. Not a Spanish surname in the writing of this Chris Columbus (“Home Alone”) production.
Evan Whitten (his grandmother’s Mexican) plays Alex, a Kansas City kid who lost his Mexican-American dad and has come to resent his culture, thanks to bullies at school. So his Mom (Adriana Paz) sends him South, to San Javier, to visit his abuelo, “Granddad” to him because Alex knows no Spanish.
He’ll hang with his cousins — the non-English speaking Memo (Nickolas Verdugo) and bilingual tween Luna (Ashley Ciara) — pick up the language, the culture, the cuisine (“Crickets? Those are BUGS!”) and live on grandpa’s ranch for a week or two.
Here’s the first place “Chupa” goes right. The great Demián Bichir hurls himself into this grandpa role, a retired, brain-injured luchadore who will teach the kid about his heritage, and maybe show him a few wrestling moves in the bargain.
The second boon to “Chupa” is its villain. Christian Slater is Indiana Jones’ evil twin, a scientist paid by wealthy moguls to prove a Chupacabra exists, and catch it so that it’s blood’s “healing qualities” can be exploited for material gain.
He’s close to success before Alex shows up, just missing catching one in the film’s prologue. But when CGI baby Chupa gets separated from his mommy, Alex finds and befriends him and stands in Quinn the Scientific Poacher’s way.
“Stop being so dramatic, kid. Go home. Get a DOG.”
Slater brings just enough amoral panic — Quinn’s got a deadline — to make his villain register.
But Bichir, whimsical as forgetful grandpa — all bellows and bravado remembering his former life, as masked hero of the luchador ring, El Santo — just brings it. He is a hoot to behold, and gives the film a cultural authenticity it lacks in most every scene he isn’t in.
There isn’t much to this that will appeal to anybody over the age of eight. But the film’s real sin is in how it shortchanges the legend and the Mexicanness of all this.
Director Jonás Cuarón, who co-wrote “Gravity” with his acclaimed director dad Alfonso and who directed “Desierto,” had better credits and better chops than most anybody listed as a writer, and real credibility in the culture. Paying him to give the script a more serious going-over could have paid real dividends, in this case.
Instead, all he’s here to do is make the kids hit their marks so that the CGI critter will fit in the frame. Pity.
Rating: PG
Credits: Evan Whitten, Ashley Ciara, Nickolas Verdugo, Christian Slater and Demián Bichir.
Credits: Directed by Jonás Cuarón, scripted by Sean Kennedy Moore, Joe Barnathan, Marcus Rinehart and Brendan Bellomo. A Netflix release.
Our intrepid old man hero makes it into the Age of the Rolling Stones with no “Sympathy for the Devil,” or The Devil’s Hireling, Nazi Mads Mikkelsen.
I have been skeptical about this since its inception. Do we really need another…
And this gimmick, a time-controlling “dial?” GMAB.
But this trailer pushes so many of the right buttons that hope arises. Great villain, more Nazis getting their asses kicked so badly they become Republicans. Phoebe Waller-Bridge as a kickass sidekick. She “makes” this trailer.
A new director — James Mangold — takes on an iconic character.
Toby Jones, and John Rhys-Davies, one more time.
And Grandpa Harry Ford, still getting a dirty, mythological/archeological job done.
“I don’t know much about art,” the old joke goes. “But I know what I like.”
That settles in for a pleasant, gloriously inconsequential run around the cinematic block with the latest from Kelly Reichardt. In “Showing Up,” the “First Cow” director/co-writer returns to her obscurant past (“Wendy and Lucy”) for an odd and esoteric take on art, the artist’s eye and the genteel poverty of the lifestyle set in the ever-so-low-stakes world of a Portlandia bubble of artists, art families and the art school that nurtures it.
Not a whole helluva lot happens in 108 minutes. Reichardt kind of dares you to “get” it, and dares you not to like it. But anybody familiar with this world and its archetypes might find pleasure in what Reichardt chose to focus on and lightly poke in the ribs here.
Michelle Williams rejoins her “Wendy and Lucy” director to play Lizzy, a sculptress working in clay and exasperated by the distractions of her landlady and fellow artist (Hong Chau of “The Whale”). Lizzy hasn’t had hot water in weeks. Lizzy has “a lot of work.” She has “an opening” coming up.
And so does the equally self-involved Jo, who brushes off every entreaty about the damned hot water heater with a little humbragging and a bit of flattery. Her “show” opens first. She works in wall-hangings of a dream catcher/mobile variety. But Jo can tell that every new “piece” Lizzy is prepping for the kiln is “a-MAZING.”
André Benjamin, once known for singing “Hey Ya” with OutKast, most recently seen in TV’s “Dispatches from Elsewhere,” has the kiln where all the potters (James LeGros) and their students and sculptors like Lizzy have their newly-glazed art baked to completion.
Maryann Plunkett plays Jean, who runs OSAC, the Oregon School of Art and Culture, and Lizzy’s boss. And when Lizzy wonders if her artist brother Sean will show up for her opening, we find out Jean is also Lizzy’s mom.
One of the characteristics of monocultures like this is the self-sustaining bubble that they become. Artists begat artists. Lizzy’s divorced dad (Judd Hirsch) was a potter, retired and playing house host to random strangers (Amanda Plummer included) like the unrepetent hippy he and everyone here pretty much is.
It’s a world where people obsess over gallery fliers — their writing, design and who gets “credit” for them — and “invitations,” where the gossip is of who is flattering whose work. Lizzy and Jo work in different media, but they are unmistakably rivals, even if Jo won’t acknowledge it and thinks nothing of blowing off Lizzy’s needs and sapping her concentration in this imaginary deadline-pressure cooker.
“But…I have so much WORK.”
“Showing Up” passes on an appreciation of The Artist’s Eye, that considered gaze that artists give to each other’s work, sizing up effort, talent, message and intent in a few seconds. Whatever they may think of what you’re doing, being supportive and encouraging to your face is what matters.
Reichardt immerses us in a world of “movement” classes, nude life drawing classes, fabric workshops with eager students (overwhelmingly white) working at looms and “openings” that begin with the art, progress to “installation” and climax with a circle jerk of other artists eating little cubes of cheese and drinking white wine as they compliment and probably backsnipe when you’re out of earshot.
Dramatically, Reichardt regresses from the more consequential, clever and incident-packed period piece “First Cow” with an overly droll movie that internalizes much and plainly not much that’s important to anyone other than the artist doing the internalizing.
The pigeon is a comic device for instigating conflict, but it barely does. More promising is Lizzy’s elusive brother Sean (John Magara), a morose recluse whose burst of creativity entails digging artistic holes in his backyard.
“Art is the Earth talking!”
But all of the comic possibilities here — feuding divorced parents, plainly disturbed but labeled “brilliant” brother, the Lizzy/Jo rivalry (which includes a man) and the damned pigeon, are introduced and robbed of their potential by a defiant filmmaker hellbent on defying and suppressing expectations.
“Showing Up” is amiable, pointilistically-observed minutia in which the minutia’s the point. It’s not for everyone, even among those who know art, and know “what I like.”
Rating: R (Brief Graphic Nudity)
Cast: Michelle Williams, Hong Chau, Maryann Plunkett, Andre Benjamin, John Magaro, James LeGros, Amanda Plummer and Judd Hirsch
Credits: Directed by Kelly Reichardt, scripted by Kelly Reichardt and Jonathan Raymond. An A24 release.
French filmmaker François Ozon’s “Everything Went Fine” is a fact-based drama that details the moral quandary and legal and logistical obstacles family members face in France when a failing relative asks them the ultimate favor.
“I want you to help me end it.”
But a writer-director known for films that touch on sex, sexuality and sexual tension — “Swimming Pool,” “Young & Beautiful” and the recent “Summer of ’85” are among his credits — was sure to emphasize the unconventional in the story actress-turned-writer Emmanuèle Bernheim told in her memoir, “Tout s’est bien passé.”
That adds to the complications and mixed-emotions of those closest to Andre Bernheim, who decides, after a debilitating stroke, that 84 years on this Earth is enough. Ozon’s cast expertly navigates this downbeat terrain, and find the sometimes humorous irony of helping an unpleasant man and “bad father” get out of their hair.
Parisian sisters Pascale (Géraldine Pailhas) and Emmanuèle (Sophie Marceau) are properly torn-up when father Andre (André Dussollier) has his stroke. Their sculptress mother (the regal Charlotte Rampling) has her own late life health issues — Parkinson’s and depression. Now this.
There’s also this fellow the sisters refer to as “Sh–head” to contend with, someone they see skulking outside of the hospital, not “daring” to visit while one of the two of them are visiting.
As the tubes go in and come out, the diapers and the IV — “That’ll be his food, now.” — the sisters weep and wrestle with this shell of a man they used to know.
But on a Metro ride home, Emmanuèle or “Manue,” as Dad called her, helps a tourist figure out a folding map. That prompts a flashback to her early teens, sitting in the back seat of her father’s ’80s Peugout, trying and failing to give him directions from a similar road map.
“Idiot girl,” he barks (in French with English subtitles), taking the map while driving, only pulling over when she gets carsick. He berated her for eating and we get the impression he didn’t stop there.
So why is Manue the one he choses to say “I want you to help me end it” to?
Pascale figures it’s a “gift,” considering how much she “wished him dead” when she was younger. Manue’s guess is even more blunt.
“Such an ass—e, right to the end.”
The film, seen entirely from Manue’s point of view, is about her efforts to brush past this mortal request, and once that doesn’t work, how she, her sister, their disinterested mother and others deal with it.
And let’s not forget “S—head,” lest he have a stake in all this.
As grim as end-of-life realities and decisions always are, there’s something faintly comical going on here, and not just in the nickname for this nuisance who will make his role in all this known as he lashes out and invades this somber space.
The sisters practically make an art out of taking bad news or being goaded by their father to get on with his wishes by storming out of the room in tears. First one runs away. Then the other. Then the first again. And so on.
And then there’s the worst complication of all, harder to deal with than the logistics of getting a bedridden man out of France, where “death with dignity” laws are more primitive, and into Switzerland.
Once the plans are in motion, this “ass—-” of a father turns whimsical, pleasant, engaged and charming. He remembers put-upon Manue’s birthday, dotes on a grandson, and seems like he might have some will to live after all. Maybe.
“Don’t think I’ve changed my mind,” he mutters.
There’s enough in this true story that seems borrowed from the dark comedy “Death at a Funeral” that I felt Ozon was giving us permission to laugh at some of this. Dad turns into a chatterbox about something he’s planning that’s against the law? That’s either a nasty going-away present for his legally liable daughters, or just comically dense.
The milieu, a privileged French-cinema-specific world in which TVs are never heard, but where everyone listens to Brahms piano sonatas, goes to gallery openings, a wealthy Jewish family touched by but not gutted by The Holocaust (pointedly mentioned) kind of underscores the amused/bemused tone.
If I’m reading that wrong, feel free to correct me, Monsieur Ozon. I have Google Translate.
But deathly-serious or darkly comic, Ozon’s players deftly maneuvre through the emotions, Internet searches and legal consulations of Dad’s journey into Shakespeare’s ultimate “undiscovered country.” The radiant Marceau lets us see the struggle, the fading hopes that Andre will change his mind and her conflicted emotions buried underneath all the planning that falls on her.
Unlike dramas like “The Father” or “Amour,” Ozon gets to “The End” without tears, giving this universal experience another point of view.
What’s happening here could be a bullying father’s sickest trick, or a very complicated way to give everyone in his life closure, And either way, the time for crying is early on in this last act, not at the very end of it.
Rating: unrated, some profanity,adult subject matter
Cast: Sophie Marceau, André Dussollier, Géraldine Pailhas and Charlotte Rampling
Credits: Directed by François Ozon, scripted by François Ozon and Philippe Piazzo, based on a memoir by Emmanuèle Bernheim. A Cohen Media Group release.
I’ve told friends, who ask questions about people I’ve interviewed, that the only time I’ve ever gotten up from an interview, and stopped at the hotel suite or restaurant entryway and turned around, considering the question, “Wanna grab a beer?” to a subject was Michael J. Fox.
The impulse never came up before or after. Blame it on watching him grow up on TV or his disarming Canadian charm, but it felt like two friends having a chat about some piece of work he’d just done, how it related to some piece of work I was about to do (profile him).
A lot of people took a hit when we heard of his illness. Not him.
May 12, this comes to Apple TV+.
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There’s a lot more editing in the stunts — jumps, tumbles, fights, mounting and dismounting a horse. For the first time in his movies, we can guess where we’re seeing the stunt man and when we’re seeing the “star.”
Yes, even Jackie Chan, martial arts comic beloved the world over for letting us see the amazing things his movies had him do, and see the outtakes of when stunts went wrong at the end, got old. He turns 69 the day his new movie, “Ride On,” opens in China and North America – April 7.
If you’ve ever been a fan of Jackie Chan, here’s a curtain call movie you won’t want to miss. It’s not that this meandering, maudlin trip down memory lane is all that good. It isn’t. Even the outtakes at the end are but ghosts of his greatest hits. But there’s an appreciation of what he’s meant to the cinema and just enough montages of Jackie’s Greatest Hits (and falls) to give his fans the warm fuzzies.
“Ride On” is a last roundup return to formula for Chan, who tried a trip to the dark side with the thriller “The Foreigner” a few years back, as if this imp could morph into every other aged action hero — just an old man with a grudge and guns.
“Ride On” is a deathly slow if generally affectionate homage to what he’s done for a living and the formula that he brought to decades of light thrillers and seriously funny martial arts comedies. “Fight,” but rarely to the death. Not “get the girl” but “save the girl” cousin, sister, friend or in this case “daughter.”
He plays a legendary, mostly-forgotten Hong Kong stuntman — quite the stretch — fending off debt collectors and struggling to get by by doing tourist photos and mascot appearances for small businesses with a horse he raised and trained.
Master Luo, like the actor who plays him, is second banana to an amusingly demonstrative horse named Red Hare.
Luo is in debt to a loan shark (Andy Oh), which could cost him his and Red Hare’s living quarters, an old stable/soundstage from the Hong Kong’s cinema’s past. And then his pride and joy, the horse he talks to, “Daddy” to child, has issues come up about his ownership. A “collector” wants to add this equine wonder to his stables.
Money talks in the kleptocratic Chinese oligarchy.
Luo needs legal help. He’s estranged from law school daughter Bao (Haocun Liu). She may want nothing to do with him. But her boyfriend (Guo Qilin) just finished law school, and his parents want to meet her one living parent. A deal is informally struck.
Meanwhile, Dami the Loan Shark and his goons have made one two-fisted attempt to collect too many, and Luo and his too-smart and pugilistically-inclined horse have foiled them — again. But this time they “go viral,” and all of a sudden the stunt work comes back.
The “old man” of the “brotherhood” of stuntmen is back in demand, mainly because of the dangerous stuff he’s willing to put the horse through. Luo is dismayed at the CGI “cartoons” that pass for stunts in the modern cinema.
“No one ‘falls’ for real these days,” a director assures him (in Mandarin with English subtitles). Luo does. So does Red Hare.
“You’re too old for big stunts,” his daughter complains. And the horse? “He isn’t a stunt man,” able to make his own decisions about the ever-rising risks Luo exposes him to.
Our story points Luo and Red Hare toward a reckoning, and Bao and Luo towards reconciliation.
Flashbacks show us not just Luo doing the impossible on film after film going back decades using vintage Jackie Chan clips, they tell us the story of the failed marriage and the bitterness the daughter carries into adulthood over the father who was “never there.”
The non-slapstick comedy here is contrived and clumsy. Luo comes off cocky, dumb and gauche when he “meets the parents,” for instance.
The fights between father and daughter have a similar abrupt, plot-device feel to them.
The stunts set up for the movies within the movie, even the ones that are allegedly part of the same film production, seem randomly costumed and conceived — anything to put Luo/Jackie Chan on a (sometimes fake, thank heavens) horse in the middle of a brawl, in ancient cavalry charges, jumping off cliffs and over steps.
The best scenes have Chan chatting up, cajoling and consoling the horse, who plainly has a big personality, even if that’s largely a product of the editing.
Take “Ride On” for what it is, Chan’s attempt at a graceful bow to the inevitable, and an affectionate remembrance of all the crazy stuff he’s done, the risks he’s taken and the bruises and broken bones he’s suffered when dangerous stunts go dangerously wrong.
A less-contrived, more streamlined script would have allowed more time for more clips of Jackie’s Greatest Hits and made for a more logical sampling of blasts from his past, and a more fun movie.
But there’s enough here to make any longtime fan nostalgic over the seat-of-the-pants pictures this screen legend conjured out of legions of foes and obstacles ranging from simple ladders and convenience stores to trains, sailboats and hovercraft all the way up to skyscrapers and the biggest “obstacle” of all, Chris Tucker.
Rating: Unrated, violence, largely slapstick
Cast: Jackie Chan, Haocun Liu, Guo Qilin and Andy On
Credits: Scripted and directed by Larry Yang. A Well Go USA release.
Running time: 2:06
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“Praise This” is a cheerful Gospel music “praise team” variation on every singing and/or dancing competition movie, from “Bring it On” to “Pitch Perfect.” It’s a star vehicle built around Georgia singer, composer and actress Chlöe, aka Chloe Bailey, and much of its screen time is spent showcasing pop group-styled singing and dancing choires competing to become National Praise Team Champions.
It’s so formulaic you can see many of the story’s twists coming, with each sequence and trope rigidly marching towards the next pre-ordained highlight. But “cheerful” counts for something, and the tunes, the often-broadly-drawn characters and the sassy, nasty/churchy trash talk, all in a Black Protestant churchgoing in Atlanta setting, make it watchable.
“Baby, try JESUS, do NOT try me!” That’s the tone, here.
Bailey plays a rebellious Angelino taken to Atlanta by her widowed dad in the hopes that his psychologist brother and their “churchy” and “bougy” family can straighten her out before she goes seriously wrong.
Sam is hellbent on becoming a famous singer, and was hanging with the wrong crowd to achieve her goals in LA. In Atlanta, she becomes the answer to her nerdy, sightly-off-key cousin Jess’s dreams. Jess (Anjelika Washington) always wanted a sister, so “sister/cousin” it is.
“Cousins, sisters — it’s the South. Doesn’t matter.”
Jess’s all about acclimating the sullen Sam to her new environment. “This is Atlanta. Sunday means CHURCH.”
That’s where Sam meets the corny praise choir that Jess sings and performs with, stuck with rich donor’s daughter Melissa’s (Birgundi Baker) dated R & B arrangements of Gospel classics such as “Break Every Chain” or “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.”
Their upstart abandoned “factory” church doesn’t stand a prayer against the Champions megachurch Champions praise team. They hired ringers to dominate this competition.
But Pastor PG (Tristan Mack Wilds) won’t lose faith, and “first lady,” his wife Natalie (Crystal Renee Hayslett) won’t let Sam’s “I don’t DO church,” “no relationship with God” attitude deter them.
“God used fish, donkeys, even ho’s to get His word out,” Natalie chirps, smiling and proseltyzing while judging Sam’s manners, choice of skin-baring attire and language.
Sam uses her LA connections to get into a party at local rapper-producer Ty’s (Quavo) studio and crib. The “fish out of water” comedy changes fish as she drags naive, virginal Jess with her.
“Oh God, he SEES us! I’m pregnant.”
Sam gives us the feeling that she’d do anything to get a music break. But her “break” just might come from that praise team, where her ability to “flip any song you’ve got for the Lord” will be tested.
As Gabrielle Union used to say in her cheer costume, “Bring it on.”
A few elements work better than others. A couple of the praise team members (Drew “Druski” Desbordes) have a moment or two.
And a couple of loud-mouthed “Muppet Show” styled hecklers are relentless in their off-stage ridicule of every sour note or cheesy dance turn.
“You’re goin’ down…ALL the way to Hell! Don’t LET the Devil win again!”
They’re the ones who lay out the parameters of what we’re seeing, performances that would’t pass muster with The Southern Baptists, for all sorts of obvious reasons. The borderline twerking nature of the shows are designed to “take it ALMOST to the club…the DOOR…But DON’T go in.”
Bailey’s a confident, charismatic stage performer and that informs her offstage presence as well. Washington may be playing a “Shut the hockey puck UP” innocent,” but she’s amusing at it.
The assorted mean girls and “Bless your heart” not-as-mean patronizing competitors score a grin here and there.
Not really enough amuses or dazzles, and attempts at giving us something emotionally “moving” or religilously inspiring fall well short of the mark. But for a middling-at-best movie, “Praise This” isn’t bad, even if it isn’t all that praiseworthy.
Rating: unrated, some profanity
Cast: Chlöe Bailey, Anjelika Washington, Tristan Mack Wilds, Crystal Renee Hayslett, Birgundi Baker, Michael Anthony, Quavo and Drew ‘Druski’ Desbordes
Credits: Directed by Tina Gordon, scripted by Camilla Blackett, Brandon Broussard and Tina Gordon. A Peacock release.
Running time: 1:52
Rating: unrated, some profanity
Cast: Chlöe Bailey, Anjelika Washington, Tristan Mack Wilds, Crystal Renee Hayslett, Birgundi Baker, Michael Anthony, Quavo and Drew ‘Druski’ Desbordes
Credits: Directed by Tina Gordon, scripted by Camilla Blackett, Brandon Broussard and Tina Gordon. A Peacock release.
Whatever “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” does at the box office, and it’s projected to open big, Illumination wants to tease us into getting ready for their big holiday cartoon.
“Migration.”
Not enough here to see how good it might be, but I like the concept. A “road comedy” set among migrating geese et al?
Movie Nation 