This “Winter’s Bone” tale is set in rural Jackson County, N.C., with power plays, politics, meth and bad blood tying up generations of folks given to “outlawing.”
If ever a rom-com didn’t merit, warrant or need a sequel, it was the thin gruel that was “Squared Love,” a Polish comedy about a vapid influencer and reluctant viral sensation/schoolteacher finding love.
But here we are, back to square one with “Squared Love All Over Again.” I guess “Can the handsome, shallow womanizer stay in love with the popular, famous yet down-to-Earth teacher?” is a question Warsaw wanted answered.
The sequel sees Monika (Adrianna Chlebicka) return from a long vacation with model/brand ambassador/influencer Enzo (Mateusz Banasiuk) to discover that her “naked buttocks” and other billboards and magazine covers have made her a national sensation, wanted for all sorts of gigs that don’t involve teaching.
Enzo? As he slept his way to fame and a sweet gig, his boss has fired him and made “destroying” Enzo her mission in life. He’s back to being plain old handsome but “blackballed” “Stefan” in a flash.
Monika is lured into co-hosting a kiddie TV talent show with an oily and embattled TV host (Mikołaj Roznersk). She stands up for the kids, who are taunted by the “celebrity judges,” and copes with a slow-but-steady come-on from Rafal.
Stefan is lost, but he falls in with Monika’s lonely, widowed car-restorer dad (Miroslaw Baka), who figures his own solitude and Stefan’s aimlessness have the same solution.
“It’s never too late to start something new,” he advises, in Polish with subtitles, or dubbed into English.
Dad gets a sexy, irate-customer as possible love interest (Monika Krzywkowska). Monika copes with her attention-whore school headmaster (Tomasz Karolak) and Stefan fumbles about for something he’s qualified to do, maybe something with classic Fiats, Lancers, Audis, etc.
“Squared All Over Again” is so mild-mannered that even the sources of conflict are rendered in shades of beige. And even if the script had called for more heat, one suspects the pretty-but-bland cast wouldn’t be able to deliver it.
Rating: TV-14, adult themes
Cast: Adrianna Chlebicka, Mateusz Banasiuk, Mikołaj Roznerski, Monika Krzywkowska
Credits: Directed by Filip Zylber, scripted by Wiktor Piątkowski, Natalia Matuszek A Netflix release.
They didn’t screen this dog widely, hiding it from most critics until opening night. And the reviews reflected the damaged goods that “Magic Mike’s Last Dance” turned out to be.
So, maybe a $10 million weekend, maybe $11 as this beefcake drama with a female audience in mind lures women away from the Super Bowl?
That “House Party” comparison may be telling. I was thinking, about 45 minutes into it this somewhat excruciating cinema sit-thru that perhaps this was never intended to go theatrical. Something about the HBO Max/theatrical post pandemic streaming model that didn’t really work and was abandoned is in play here.
In any event, anything over $10 million and it’ll win the weekend.
How thin is the selection at your local cineplex? James Cameron’s “Titanic” is back, and will be the third biggest ticket seller for the weekend, over $6.4 million.
James Cameron’s “Avatar: The Way of Water” will edge it for second place –$6.5-6.8 million or so worth of tickets sold.
“80 for Brady” is still selling tickets at a discount price for an older audience. It’ll do another $5-6 million in business, and by Monday AM will be over $20 million.
Tom Brady’s latest “retirement” announcement was timed to give this limp noodle of a comedy a boost. Shocked that no sportswriters picked up on this. I won’t be shocked if he suddenly “unretires” again. But he has that huge Fox Sports payday awaiting him, even if the promise of the broadcast booth isn’t easy points for him.
As his cameo in the film points out, the guy’s got no personality. Will that work on TV? The day-late and dollar short sports world chattering classes are finally starting to wonder about that, too.
“Brady” won last week’s weekday sweepstakes, rather handily, as M. Night Shyamalan’s “Knock at the Cabin” fell off a cliff after opening weekend and is looking at well under $5 million, a 72% PLUNGE is in store for its second weekend. He’s having better luck with streaming series. Perhaps Night should get a clue.
This would have been a good weekend to open another Indian blockbuster for domestic consumption, as they’ve been selling tickets in big cities, far and wide. But no.
The first word that comes to mind when considering Christopher Smith’s “Consecration” is “classy.” There’s a polish and high-mindedness to it, a sheen to its gloomy Scottish setting and real acting talent deployed in this “mad convent” morality tale.
Frights? Not many, to be frank. It’s a film whose violence is more of a wince than a jolt, whose “surprises” are depressingly conventional.
But it looks marvelous, from the shadowy “extreme” sect convent where it takes place down to the fanatical nuns who live there.
“Our zealotry is what protects us,” the Mother Superior (Janet Suzman) opines at one point. But nobody not wearing a habit buys into that. Not with what we see and hear there.
Jena Malone, lately of TV’s “Goliath,” takes on a British accent as Grace, an empathetic loner ophthalmologist who gets the bad news by phone from a Scottish cop (Thoren Ferguson). Her brother has died at this remote convent, and it looks like “a murder/suicide.”
Grace is instantly skeptical about that, and openly hostile to the religious order she meets when the policeman takes her to the scene of the crime.
It may have been a while since she’s seen Father Michael (Steffan Cennydd). But “my brother would never kill anyone. Or himself.” She’s sure there’s been a murder and that these demon-fearing nuns are hiding something.
Her poking around has Grace waking up, more than once, in a strange place, “plucked from the sea” where her brother’s body was found, or “passed out” and hospitalized from some sort of seizure. The nuns take her in, she gets out and ends up hospitalized before landing back at the convent, determined to decipher her sibling’s journal and learn the truth about this “ancient order” founded by The Knights of the Morning Star.
The cops fade into the background as she runs up against dogma, superstition and a whiff of the supernatural in her nosing about. Fortunately, she may have an ally.
Father Romero (Danny Huston) has come from Rome to ensure “openness” and “cooperation,” and to reconsecrate this troubled chapel and the nutty nuns who run it. Father Romero is the “explainer” in the screenplay, detailing the history of the order, and what is really going on in these visions Grace has of nuns leaping through an open window of the now-ruined 12th century cliffside chapel.
“God caught them,” Romero says.
He seems just as jaded about that as Grace, who doesn’t filter her language to suit the circumstances, or tamp down her fury at what may have become of her brother.
Malone would seem like a better choice, on paper, than she turns out to be as our lead. She gives us the fury but never lets us see the terror that should grip her as nuns come at her with knives and guns, or slash their wrists right in front of her as proof of their devotion and belief.
I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Huston, wonderful actor and famous “nepo baby” that he is. But based on the sorts of screen roles he’s offered, if he grabbed a stool next to me at a pub, I’d be looking for an exit strategy. The mere casting of him in this part makes Father Romero someone we never trust, even as he’s saying and doing everything to put Grace and us at ease.
Director and co-writer Christopher Smith, who did “The Banishing,” has a distinct visual style that makes his not-quite-horrific-thrillers look better than they play. This is high-toned horror, and not just because of the British and Scots accents.
The film’s inevitable march towards a worn genre solution to this mystery is further burdened by an attempt to “explain” what we think we’ve seen as something perhaps more logical, always a mistake. Leaving things mysterious and unexplained is far more interesting.
The best scenes let us sample Grace and Michael’s traumatic childhood, and force us to consider and pity people so wrapped up in a belief that try to end their own lives.
In a film lacking in real frights, the pathos of a young novitiate’s suicide attempt hits you hard, because it’s one of the few moments in the lovely and lushly-detailed “Consecration” that makes you feel something.
Rating: unrated, graphic violence, profanity
Cast: Jena Malone, Danny Huston, Janet Suzman, Thoren Ferguson
Credits: Directed by Christopher Smith, scripted by Christopher Smith and Laurie Cook. An IFC Midnight/Shudder release.
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