A wrap up for the “Fast and Furious” franchise?
May 19, they give our heroes a villain with some serious throw weight. And just for fun, Brie Larson, aka “Captain Marvel,” shows up to give Michelle Rodriguez someone to worry about.
By the way, with bits of Charlize, Rita Moreno and Helen Mirren already on board, that makes FOUR Oscar winners in this cast.
The car stuff looks epic, as we’d expect no less from the director of Statham’s breakout hit, “The Transporter,” Louis Leterrier.
For a movie set and shot in Wilmington, N.C., a romance that’s about making a movie in Wilmington, N.C., “Remember Yesterday” certainly gets a lot of movie-making basics wrong.
It’s an amateurish amble through pre-production on location, with a prodigal filmmaking son (Adrian Monte) and his “assistant” (the world’s only Fracaswell Hyman) sleepwalking through sleepy Wilmington, enjoying nightly piano bar get-togethers, all for a film about to shoot in “Hollywood East.”
The locals are interested, but as no one in this low-budget bore is capable of acting “excited,” they aren’t all worked up over a new film.
When our heroine, Jenny (Jana Allen), the returning filmaker’s “gal he left behind,” gripes that “North Carolina government doesn’t let us HAVE movies here, any more,” you’d think the townsfolk would be all atwitter at new opportunities rolling in.
Maybe they know what Jenny and the chap who wrote and directed this do not. Wilmington is still a major production hub. Film production is old hat there.
Jenny, a waitress down at the We Serve on Paper Plates diner, just dumped her cheating, alcoholic husband (Ron Fallica). That’s good timing, because John Raymond (Monte) is checking on and prepping, with a crack production team of...two, to make this “Remember Yesterday” picture.
Maybe there’s a part for frustrated singer/dancer/actress Jenny? Maybe there’s still some spark between them?
Nah. Not really.
Writer-director J.R. Rodriguez gives us a bland cast and a colorful setting rendered just as colorless as he can imagine, an instantly-forgettable film with little Wilmington flavor.
Perhaps these are the best locations they could manage on this budget.
The same goes for the players, none of whom sounds like the Southerners who still live in and around a town that’s still home to its share of film and TV production.
Scene after lifeless scene saunters by, with nothing and no one grabbing our interest as they do.
A limited collection of flashbacks show the childhoods and young love of Jenny and John, but fail to sentimentalize the past or warm up a tepid present.
How can we be expected to “Remember Yesterday” when the movie about it is as forgettable as this?
Rating: unrated, alcohol abuse
Cast: Jana Allen, Adrian Monte, Jenique Bennett, Rick Forrester, Ron Fallica, Mirla Criste and Fracaswell Hyman
Credits: Scripted and directed by J.R. Rodriguez. A Gravitas Ventures release.
Running time: 1:16
A summer release from Universal that stars the voices of Will Ferrell, Jamie Foxx, Isla Fisher and Randall Park, with Will Forte as the dude who ditches his dog.
“R-rated,” with shades of “Ted” about it.
Grimsby seems to be a bit of a Brit laughing stock, as every mention of it in movies and TV use it as a punchline “Three Day Millionaire” makes it the city four lads try to save via robbery in this new release, due out week after next.
Looks like a laugh, Guy Ritchie/Danny Boyle lite.
“Lamya’s Poem” was pitched as an Oscar contender and did not make the cut.
It still has topicality, ambition and promise, and streams Feb. 21.
“Coven of Sisters” is a tight, tense Argentinian period piece set in witch-hunting, Inquisition Era Spain.
It’s clever enough to play around with the root reasons for witch-hunting — patriarchal control via terror — and so quick to make its exit that it feels incomplete. But what’s here is pretty harrowing and damned believable.
Sometime just before or after the Spanish Armada set sail, a traveling “judge” and his retinue of soldiers and aides reaches a coastal village in Basque country. They’re traveling from town to town, persecuting young women they can accuse, convict and burn for making demonically merry on a Witch’s Sabbath.
Prosecutor Salazar (Alex Brendemühl) and his advisor or “consejero” (Daniel Fanego) and sketch artist roll in and demand and receive the immediate cooperation of the local priest (Asier Oruesagasti) in their witch-hunting. Any strange behavior, young women carrying on, cavorting in the woods?
“Nothing is more dangerous than a dancing woman,” Salazar hisses (in Spanish, or dubbed into English).
Half a dozen friends and sisters are thus grabbed after merely being “seen” in the woods. They are shackled, tossed into a group cell and questioned one-by-one.
They’re in their teens, and once their initial terror fades a bit, they’re sure their innocence will be obvious and these strange men will recognize and admit their mistake. But as they’re interrogated and tortured one by one, coming back to the cell battered, punctured and shorn of their hair, Ana (Amaia Aberasturi) is the first to figure out they’re in a rigged game.
These men are hunting high and low for “signs” of corruption and wayward Christians, evidence of local “Satanic sects” and towns cursed — wells running dry, sheep giving no milk. And where there’s corruption there are sure to be wayward women causing it.
Ana is the one to figure out they’re timing these visits to phases of the moon, like the fishermen of each village, who depart and return on lunar tides. Damned if these theocratic creeps aren’t showing up when there are no men in town to protest and fight back.
But if the “sisters” tell the pervy prosecutor and his team what they want to hear, each acting out and stretching their tale out to last a day, they’ll run out the clock, the Basque fishermen will return and the Catholic Castilians won’t dare start burning local girls on suspicion of something they can’t prove.
I love that set-up, a “ticking clock thriller” conjured out of a witch-trial.
The meat on this script might have been the tales the girls tell, some of which are glimpsed here. More could have been done with this, showing us that the girls realize the stakes, even if some of them are reluctant to lie and blaspheme to save their necks.
The behavior of the inquisitors is monstrous and historically-defensible. They use soldiers as their muscle, cover their captives with hoods lest their eyes “bewitch” their accusers, and carry out interrogations that include nude physical examinations and flesh-rending “tests” that are nothing of the sort.
They’re superstitious sexists carrying out a war against women as a means of controlling the people.
The older women in the Basque village — an important distinction, as this is historical Spain’s most defiant and militant region — empathize with the girls and know this persecution for what it is.
“Men have always been afraid of fearless women.”
With sexism and misogyny basically a party platform of ultra conservative groups around the globe and across the religious spectrum, “Coven of Sisters” isn’t just another “bruja” (witch) tale set in witch-crazy Spain. It’s a horror story in which the real horror is but a metaphor for what women are up against, seemingly everywhere.
This tale ends somewhat unsatisfactorily. But the girls — Aberasturi, Yune Nogueiras, Garazi Urkola, Jone Laspiur, Irati Saez de Urabain and Lorea Ibarra — make compelling, believable figures running the gamut from defiant and laughing off the threat to terrified and cowed.
The men are so recognizable you see versions of them all over the evening news, no matter where you tune in.
Rating: TV-MA, violence, sexual subject matter, profanity
Cast: Amaia Aberasturi, Yune Nogueiras, Garazi Urkola, Jone Laspiur, Irati Saez de Urabain, Lorea Ibarra, with Asier Oruesagasti, Alex Brendemühl, Daniel Fanego
Credits: Directed by Pablo Agüero, scripted by Katell Guillou and Pablo Agüero. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:30
Seriously?
This is how you want to go out? A plotless, sexually-neutered piffle of a stripper movie, barely-scripted, with hardly enough “film” to fill a trailer, much less close to two hours of screen time?
No, I didn’t like it. No, it doesn’t appear that Steven Soderbergh was all that crazy about it, either. At least his lunkheaded “Logan Lucky” had a funny character or two, and was stupid enough that it dared to offend.
The third and final “Magic Mike” movie is just stupid. What “Staying Alive” is to “Saturday Night Fever,” “Last Dance” is to the gritty, sexy, hustling beefcake that was “Magic Mike.”
If Soderbergh was a musician, we’d call this a “contractual obligation album” and shake our heads about the money we just wasted supporting his “art.”
Even Channing Tatum seems a little embarrassed by all this by the time the third act rolls around.
It begins with Mike Lane, back to Miami bartender-for-hire gigs, his furniture business having bitten the dust, his dancing days behind him.
But the newly-separated and rich philanthropist, played by Salma Hayek and given the most idiotic name a tipsy screenwriter could type up — “Maxandra” — takes an interest. Somebody at her charity fundraiser mentions they recognize Mike as the dude, dressed as a cop, who rocked her world at a sorority party or some such.
“Max” wants some of that. Mike’s $60,000 quote (probably his debt) is a bit high, but $6k buys her a lapdance so erotically-charged they needed a stunt double to pull it off…and put it back on again.
Enjoy it. Revel in it. It’s the highlight of the movie, and it comes in the opening scene.
Next thing he knows she’s invited him to London to take over a show at an historic theater that will be a bone of contention in her divorce settlement. He’s to turn a stuffy period piece hilariously mistitled “Isabel Ascending” into a cutting edge beefcake dance revue, “revenge” against Max’s cheating ex.
The dancers — recruited from auditions, Youtube videos from Rome, parks and street corners — are given no names and no personalities. That points to how little Warner Brothers wanted to spend on a supporting cast.
The dance scenes aren’t bad…at first. Folding them all into a “show” for the finale is something of an unwatchable debacle.
The obstacles they must overcome — their feelings for one another, the colorless ex and his Very British way of cutting Max’s legs out from under her, the gods of dance who’re offended by all this — don’t amount to a hill of fava beans.
At one point, the screenplay decides to let Max’s aspiring novelist 14 year-old daughter — mentioning her by name constitutes child actress child abuse — voice-over narrate this tale as if it’s a novel she’s basing on the real life “phase” her adoptive mother is going through.
Thandiwie Newton was originally slated to play Hayek’s role, and while Salma is no slouch and comes away from this unbruised, you have to wonder what the testy and triggered Newton was thinking when she signed on in the first place, and what she saw that made her flee the way everyone else should have.
Feminist lip service in the finale? Sure. Hell, at one point Soderbergh tries to slap a little “case the joint” caper comedy “Ocean’s Eleven” in this, he’s that desperate.
When Mike makes a suggestion about one particular number he’s dreaming up for his dance event, that it needs to be “stripped, oiled-down and spanked,” the dude is talking about this movie, which buries a franchise so thoroughly you wonder if director and star will be able to crawl out of the grave they and this idiot screenwriter dug for themselves.
Rating: R for sexual material and language.
Cast Channing Tatum, Salma Hayek, nobody else you ever heard of.
Credits: Directed by Steven Soderbergh, scripted by Reid Carolin. A Warner Bros. release.
Running time: 1:50
Que horror!
March 10, GKids unleashes this Spanish language animated…thriller?
The distributing studio elected not to preview this anywhere in Florida outside of Miami. Even though the original story was set in TAMPA.
Smaller cheaper cinemas along the NC/Va border are fearful of what message a movie about dudes who do their situps sends. They aren’t booking it.
So here I am, in Chapel Hell amongst the Tarholes, paying premium Research Triangle Park prices to see this thing.
Impress me, Soderbergh, Tatum and Hayek.
A lady with a bone to pick about the villainous role history has assigned Richard III, thanks in large part to Wm. Shakespeare, decides she can find out where the fellow is buried.
Stephen Frears re-teams with Steve Coogan, his “Philomena” partner, for another tale of a plucky lady and her seemingly hopeless quest. Coogan co-wrote and co-stars in this one.
Harry Lloyd plays the ghost of Richard III, killed on Ambion Hill at the Battle of Bosworth Field, guilting our put-upon researcher (Sally Hawkins) into locating just where he might be buried.
IFC has this, which means we’ll get a good chance of seeing it in a cinema on this side of the pond. March is its US opening date.
