Peter Jackson finally finished his deep dive into Beatles vault footage from their mad rush to finish “Let It Be,” the album and a TV special meant to accompany it.
“Get Back” was the album’s ethos, getting the quarrelsome band back to their way of working under a deadline, a unifying “pressure” guiding them, according to Beatles historians, mostly quoting Paul McCartney. They even had roughed out a different LP with that as the title tune, and scrapped some of that as “Let It Be” shaped up in the sessions, filmed for a TV special.
Candid composition footage, rehearsal footage, arguments, jokes, and evey now and then a hint that they’re making their swan song. They broke up when the album came out.
This series was, as originally pitched by Jackson, a single film to be released theatrically.
Now it’s a three part series “event” meaning he’ll get to use more footage. Probably cut down on his editing it into a theatrical cut, too.
A missing person, suggestions of crime and down-and-out working poor trailer-park Angelinos struggling to get by — let’s label “The Cleaner” an indie film noir and see if I can make that stick.
This quirky, laid-back and downbeat drama is a star vehicle for King Orba,whose credits cover a wide range of jobs, positions, “additional crew” and the occasional acting job (“The Mighty Orphans,” TV’s “Stargirl”). He co-wrote it with first-time feature director Erin Elder and plays Buck, a broke 50ish house cleaner who lives in an RV next to the trailer housing his retired “piss and vinegar” house cleaner mother (Shelley Long).
Buck’s barely getting by on a good day, pedaling an old beach bike to cleaning jobs from a client list he inherited from his mother Sharon..
It wasn’t always like this, though we get the impression it was never much better. Buck used to sell RVs, like the one he lives in. But something happened.
At least his make-ends-meet struggle leaves him just enough cash to score a little weed from his younger friend, James (James Paxton of TV’s “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.”). James is all about making his own marijuana blends and giving them cute names — “marketing.”
Buck juggles work and keeping an eye on his medicated, beer-loving Mom, and not very successfully. Their new neighbor Becky (Eden Brolin of TV’s “Yellowstone”) might help out. It’s the least she can do after she gets Mom drunk at her trailer-warming party.
Then this new client, Carlene (Lynda Carter, TV’s “Wonder Woman”), an elderly retired singer, springs this on Buck.
“I don’t want you to clean my house, Buck. I want you to find my son.”
Buck, a guy without a car, without a computer, without a cell-phone, is supposed to locate an estranged adult son with “problems,” somebody who doesn’t want to be found in one of the largest cities in the Americas.
Even with a little help from James, who at least knows how to use social media, and Buck’s cop-brother Craig (Faust Checho), Buck is plainly “not qualified” to do this and is out of his depth.
But the singer favors him with a song, and shoves cash in his hand. It’d be rude not to try.
“The Cleaner” is so laid back it’s on the Matthew McConaughey “J.K. Livin'” spectrum.
The dialogue is spare, the “clues” Buck picks up on simple and obvious as he pedals his bike around East L.A., following up, masking his innocuous requests (“You seen this guy?”) behind unnecessary mystery because he’s probably seen the way the gumshoes do it in old movies or “The Rockford Files.”
The screenplay has just enough peripheral complications to keep things interesting. Cop brother Craig is almost estranged from his mother. He tries to bring his fiance (Soleil Moon Frye) to meet her, and that dinner goes from awkward to “trailer trash” ugly in a flash. Neighbor Becky is in an abusive relationship.
The script’s grace notes include a clever way of introducing Craig. Buck comes home to find his mother’s turned her ankle at Becky’s beer bust. He goes to get her pain med prescription filled, learns the medicine isn’t covered by Medicaid and winds up shoplifting batteries for her TV remote. He’s caught.
The cop who picks him up starts in with “Aren’t you ashamed?” Then we find out he’s his brother.
“The Cleaner” is the sort of movie you can make if you spend a lot of time on film sets and are personable enough to start conversations with the stars. Luke Wilson starred in “The Mighty Orphans” with Orb in a supporting role. Hey Luke, wouldya do me a solid?
Wilson, long a champion of indie cinema, signs on for a couple of scenes as a house cleaning client.
Veteran character players M.C. Gainey and Mike Starr join Long and Carter and Moon Frye and Shiloh Fernandez (of “Evil Dead,” playing the missing son here) and Sean Penn and Robin Wright’s son Hopper Penn in a cast whose assembly would be a fun tale to tell, and who ensured “The Cleaner” got financed.
And all that pays off with a quietly-compelling mystery set in a milieu that’s grittier than most of the characters living in it are willing to admit, struggling people who are colorful, believable and (mostly) relatable.
It’s not a polished jewel, but even in the rough “The Cleaner” shines, more proof that you don’t need to limit yourself to horror to get your first film made.
Rating: unrated, violence, drug abuse
Cast: King Orba, Shelley Long, Eden Brolin, Lynda Carter, Soleil Moon Frye, Mike Starr, M.C. Gainey and Luke Wilson.
Credits: Directed by Erin Elders, scripted by Erin Elders and King Obra. A 1091 release.
Well-crafted but not particularly well thought-out, “Halloween Kills” is a hot mess of a horror homage.
David Gordon Green’s take on venerable slasher franchise has ambition, an attempt at intellectual heft and one of the most empathetic performances of the great Judy Greer’s career. What it lacks is frights. What it traffics in is nostalgia, a warm feeling for John Carpenter’s 1978 horror classic. And it all but murders that.
The Scott Teems (“That Evening Sun”) script travels along two timelines –1978 and 2018 — and weighs in on our troubled era as Haddenfield, Illinois descends into mob rule and sloganeering mob violence.
No, Michael Myers hasn’t changed masks as he enters his AARP years. But the Trumpism analogy is right there in the open, with no less than Anthony Michael Hall (“Sixteen Candles” to “The Dead Zone” to “The Goldbergs”) playing a child survivor of that “Halloween” night long ago, leading the enraged citizenry in “Evil Dies Tonight!” chants as he sends vigilantes far and wide, hunting for the masked mass murderer who is literally changing the town’s demographics in a single night.
This is a “Frankenstein” village, assembling to meet a threat, but ranting and raving and following their worst instincts. All that’s missing are the Tiki torches.
The story begins as Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), that babysitter of yore for kids like Tommy (Hall), now “that crazy lady that almost got killed,” is wheeled into a hospital, gut-stabbed and still screaming “We GOT him. Shot him in the FACE. BURNED him alive!” She’s sure they finally shot, clubbed, stabbed and burned Michael Myers to death.
Her daughter (Greer) isn’t relieved. And when others start showing up — a bleeding-out Officer Hawkins (Will Patton) and corpses — daughter Karen starts shouting what we already know from the film’s dull “first kills,” what the TV news is in the process of confirming. Myers isn’t dead. He’s staggered out of that burning house, wiped out a fire brigade, impaled and gutted a teen or two and shown us he’s just getting warmed up.
Nobody listens as Karen pleads and demands police protection for her mother in the hospital, or that her daughter (Andi Matichak) at least stick around, help keep watch over her grandma.
But Tommy, who we see tell “The Haddenfield Boogeyman” story as part of a bar talent show this All Hallow’s Eve, has other ideas. Hall takes on the “Dead Zone” scowl of a man scarred by trauma, enraged into fanaticism by this latest twist in that murderer’s story. He picks up a baseball bat and rallies the citizenry.
Flashbacks take us back to Tommy, Laurie and others 50ish adults’ (Kyle Richards, Richard Longstreet) childhood memories of that awful Halloween of 1978. We see the worst night of Officer Hawkins’ life (Thomas Mann plays Patton’s character as a rookie).
New characters are introduced, set up to become someone the audience might root for, and pitilessly ventilated with knives of every description, without suspense or frights. As we hear the random giggles of slasher film fans feigning appreciation of this fireman’s saw slaughter or that pithy punchline — “This is for Doctor LOOMIS, Michael!” — punctuated by Michael killing the speaker, “Halloween Kills” pretty much goes to hell.
The idea here, aside from giving this renewed franchise some topical/socio-political relevance, it to make an “Empire Strikes Back” chapter in this planned trilogy. There’s a hopelessness and sadness that permeates every scene that doesn’t have mouthy tweens playing pranks on the gay couple (Scott MacArthur and Michael McDonald) now living in Michael Myers’ old house. Greer’s now-ironically named “Karen” embodies this.
Karen weeps for her murdered husband, fears for her hunted, wounded mother and her vengeance-seeking teen daughter and despairs at “what Michael Myers has done to us” — fomented an unthinking, chanting mob, misled by fear and ignorance.
Much respect for the director of “Pineapple Express” and the franchise-renewing “Halloween” of 2018 and the screenwriter for trying, but this misshapen, unfocused blunder is never more than a space-filler franchise installment, killing time and a whole lot of Haddenfield until the third film comes along.
The flashback references but doesn’t use Carpenter’s iconic film or even get a firm handle on its style in recreating the slaughter way back when. Finding a Donald Pleasance impersonator is just one of the crimes against cinema of those scenes.
Curtis isn’t the only actor from the original seen in this sequel, but not all of those cast as “surviving kids who grew up and hit middle age in Haddenfield” are very interesting actors. And Curtis, burdened with heavy-handed sermonizing speeches at the film’s conclusion, wipes away some of the goodwill the 2018 “Halloween” won her.
The film’s flurry of close-ups, a view of a fireman facing death by fireaxe from inside his glass-covered helmet, can be arresting.
But you can’t help but sense Green, who used to make self-conscious, sensitive and geography-specific indie films like “All the Real Girls,” “Undertow” and “Snow Angels” until the New York Times profiled him and noted that he’d never made a movie that made money, isn’t wholly invested in this genre or this subject. The director of “Joe” and “Prince Avalanche” and TV series like the hilarious “Vice Principals” seems to more interested in commenting on horror than actually delivering frights.
Even die-hard horror fans can’t help but notice “Halloween Kills” stumbles through the nostalgia that made Green’s “Halloween” reboot work, and that “Kills” isn’t scary in the least. Is he laughing with you as you giggle as the many ways Michael Myers kills (not that inventive), or is he saying “Dear Dr. Fauci, here’s what happened to American empathy for others” with his latest?
The fact that Green is in pre-production on “Halloween Ends,” the “finale,” and “Hellraiser” and “The Exorcist” should give Green fans, horror fans and Green himself pause.
But at least the New York Times will be happy.
Rating: R for strong bloody violence throughout, grisly images, language and some drug use
Cast: Jamie Lee Curtis, Anthony Michael Hall, Judy Greer, Andi Matichak, Thomas Mann, Kyle Richards, Dylan Arnold and Will Patton
Credits: Directed by David Gordon Green, scripted by Scott Teems, based on the John Carpenter/Debra Hill films and characters. A Universal release.
Why would actor, writer and director Miles Doleac (“Hallowed Ground,” “The Dinner Party”) set his latest horror fiasco in Der Black Forest of Deutschland? Did he meet folks he’d eventually cast in it at a continuing education class, Conversational German?
Just a guess. But there is no guesswork, or mistaking the sounds of second year community college German from the villains of “Demigod,” a disastrously dull dud of a thriller that makes you question the origins of the word “inept,” because “ept” never figures into it.
Robin (Rachel Nichols of TV’s “Man in the High Castle”) and Leo (Yohance Myles of TV’s “First Family”) are a couple checking out her late grandfather’s Black Forest home when they stumble into the legend — or a cult that’s really into it — of Cernunnos, “Supreme hunter” in this forest according to forest lore.
Not for a while, mind you, For nearly half an hour, we’re bored to tears by them wandering around the house, admiring grandpa’s stuffed critters, gutted critters and antique gun collection, eventually stumbling into Mr. “Yah, I knew your grandvatter,” the hunter Arthur Fuchs (Doleac in front of the camera). He briefs them on these “haunted woods” and the “monster” who lives therein.
This demigod/demon was “der lord of de before,” Arthur intones in Olde Hollywood Germanic English. “Before men began to wreck ZE VORLD!”
People disappear here and “It iz as if ze voods SWALLOWED zem whole!”
The couple is then attacked and kidnapped in the dark of night by this cult, mostly women, in one of the lamest kidnapping scenes ever staged in front of a camera.
But that’s nothing to what happens, slowly and dully, to Robin, Abe, Arthur and others rounded up by that cult and tied up in what looks to be a pine forest in the rural American South.
“Let ze disemBOWELing commenze!” Because they must make things ready for their “hunter” lord’s return.
“Ve vill repay hiss comink mit fresh game und sport!”
Every act of violence against the group of strangers tied up in the woods is met with an awful under-reaction by one and all.
Every line is worse than the one before, with those deigning to speak German sounding as if they’re not quite finished with Hooked on Der Phonics.
“Demigod” is awful, so bad that I grow weary of mocking it. Approach at your own peril.
Rating: unrated, bloody violence, entrails and whatnot, and profanity
Cast: Rachel Nichols, Yohance Myles and Miles Doleac.
Credits: Directed by Miles Doleac, scripted by Miles Doleac and Michael Donovan Horn.
Todd Haynes, director of the Dylan-of-Many-Faces biography “I’m and Not There” and glam/punk appreciation “Velvet Goldmine,” isn’t interested in spoon-feeding anybody a history of “The Velvet Underground.”
Haynes figures if you show up for it (Apple TV+ has it), you already know a little something about the highly-influential/legendarily “unsuccessful” 1960s and early-70s band fronted by Lou Reed and John Cale, produced by Andy Warhol and sometimes featuring the imposing film starlet, model and singer Nico, “the blonde iceberg in the middle of the stage” filled with musicians and their avant-garde rock.
So what Haynes delivers is a lovely, warm and impressionistic sketch of the band — montages of images and archival news, interviews, “Factory” and concert footage to set the scene and place the Velvets within their time. That and old interviews with members no longer living and fresh, fond and sometimes blunt takes on why they matter from surviving members Cale and Maureen Tucker. Fans, relatives and others paint a picture of a famously-experimental band that (with Warhol) invented the ’60s version of “multi-media” musical performance and influenced generations that came after them.
Haynes “shows” us rather than “tells” us a lot of the basics. We see the cover of Michael Leigh’s scandalized 1963 book “The Velvet Underground,” an exploration of “paraphilia,” that the band took as its name — eventually.
We hear from Reed about his first interest in music, listening to “The Diablos, The Jesters, The Paragons, doo-wop, rockabilly,” and from childhood friends and Reed’s sister Merrill about his sexual curiosity, performing at New York’s Hayloft gay bar as a teen.
There’s nothing of Reed himself talking about his sexuality.
Cale is first seen in an appearance on the 1960s TV quiz show “I’ve Got a Secret,” where the Welshman’s 18 hour long performance of a piano piece by an avant-garde composer he knew is puzzled over, respectfully acknowledged and lightly ridiculed by the program’s panel.
Cale’s brief discussion of his childhood mentions how he “got taken advantage of” as a child. You have to know, or look up his life story to learn about his abuse at the hands of a music teacher and Anglican priest.
The film doesn’t dwell on drugs, barely touches on them in fact.
But we see footage of what Andy Warhol’s “Factory” was like, and hear ringing endorsements of how this artists’ coop/workspace “was all about the work,” the way the painter, film and music impresario pushed those he invited there, including Reed.
The Velvets — Reed and fellow guitarist Sterling Morrison, who met at Syracuse University, multi-instrumentalist and classically trained Cale, Morrison’s childhood friend, drummer Maureen “Moe” Tucker, and later, when Warhol got the idea they needed a sex symbol out front, Nico (Christa Päffgen) who was in Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita” — are heard and seen as they’re tracked through a surprisingly long and depressingly downhill career.
They started out as Exploding Plastic Inevitable, the “house band” at Warhol’s happening and hip “Factory,” became celebrated in New York for Cale’s “droning” musical backdrop on viola or whatever and Reed’s clever, arty and poetic pop sensibilities, made clear on songs such as “I’m Waiting for the Man,” “Heroin” and “Venus in Furs.”
It’s fascinating to hear snippets of Reed’s pubescent pop tunes — he cut his first record at 14 — and Cale talk about his early exposure to “the 60 cycle (motor) hum of the refrigerator,” which to him and his earliest collaborators was “the hum of Western civilization.”
Applying that primal “drone” to the texture of rock records made even their most poppish tunes distinct and strange.
“That weirdness, it shouldn’t have existed in this space” an early acolyte marvels.
“You need physics to describe that band at its height” another enthuses.
Haynes tracks down big fan Jonathan Richman (of The Modern Lovers, and the movie “There’s Something About Mary”) and he speaks adoringly of his experience meeting with and being mentored by members of the band. Jackson Browne, of all people, remembers playing guitar for Nico shows in the ’60s.
There’s not enough of the music, not really enough of the “experience” of seeing them live when they played with Warhol films projected behind them, psychedelic lights, “white polka dots” bathing them in performance, with Nico struggling to stay on pitch during her brief turn as a singer.
Immersive and informative as it is, that keeps “The Velvet Underground” from being definitive. And that in turn lets it fall short of making its case, backed up by musicians and music critics (not seen here), the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, of their seminal status.
But Haynes handles the band’s post-breakup years in a lovely, warm final montage that celebrates Reed’s growing fame and later life, Cale’s revered status in music circles and the lives — too short, some of them — that this “it” band of the ’60s avant-garde went on to lead after shaking music up every bit as much as The Beatles, if not as profitably.
Rating: R for language, sexual content, nudity and some drug material
Cast: John Cale, Lou Reed, Maureen Tucker, Mary Woronov, Nico, Sterling Morrison, LaMonte Youung, Jackson Browne and Jonathan Richman
Credits: Scripted and directed by Todd Haynes. An Apple TV+ release.
Denis Villeneuve’s film of Frank Herbert’s “Dune” looks exactly as it should on the big screen — epic in scale, baroque in design, fatalistic in outlook, grim in its life-or-death stakes.
But then the reason we know what it’s supposed to look and feel like from David Lynch’s flawed 1984 adaptation, if not the SyFy Channel’s malnourished dive into it. This dense, tense and Bedouin culture/feudalism-in-space piece of science fiction, first published on the heels of David Leans’ “Lawrence of Arabia” in the 1960s isn’t so much “unfilmmable” as a bit played out in terms of themes, action beats and plot points. Herbert stole from desert Arab culture. Everybody from George Lucas onward stole from Herbert.
So as faithful to the spirit of the novel as this adaptation is, as wonderfully as visionary Villeneuve cast it, as stunning as the “Arrival/Blade Runner 2049” director’s production design and art direction team makes it, this pretty picture often plays as ponderous.
And Villeneuve makes that conclusion entirely too easy. You don’t have to remember Lynch’s “Dune” to realize that while Villanueve added material to the opening act and stripped away narration that organized both the novel and earlier adaptations, his film mimics the earlier film’s pace. You don’t have to remember the story from the novel or earlier adaptations — also referenced in “Jodorowsky’s Dune,” the documentary about a third “visionary” who almost made a version of this desert planet saga back in the ’70s — to get impatient with Villeneuve’s many lingering shots of “Star Wars” sized military formations, gigantic worms, ginormous spaceships and the “Thopter,” the dragonfly-like ornithopter that flies over the planet Arrakis, coveted s for its hallucinogenic, interstellar-travel enabling “spice.”
“Dune” gives us the dreams of its hero, Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), heir to the dukedom of House Atreides. Again and again, we’re teased with flash-forwards thanks to Paul, son of not just Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac), but of his witchy spellbinder of the Bene Gesserit mother (Rebecca Ferguson). This “chosen one” has glimpses of a possible future, which creates impatience in the story as it plods through everything it takes to put our hero in those more-exciting-than-what-we-see-here dream scenes from “Dune 2” and/or “3.”
Even though Villeneuve & Co. realized that Herbert’s book was going to take multiple films to cover, unlike David Lynch and his producer Dino DeLaurentis, by pacing this “Dune” exactly like Lynch’s — both films give us our first taste of the Sand Worms” one hour in — he all but ensures the slowest “origin story” franchise film in ages.
House Atreides, led by Duke Leto, has been given the “fief” of Arrakis, sending him and his vast armed clan to take over the spice mining on this forbidding desert planet whose natives, the Fremen, aren’t keen on “Outworlders” making a mess of things and giving them nothing in return.
The Duke, his concubine Jessica (Ferguson), his son Paul and most trusted lieutenants (Jason Mamoa, Josh Brolin and Stephen McKinley Henderson) and palace guards will take over from their bloodthirsty rivals, House Harkonnen, led by its bloated ogre of a Baron (Stellan Skarsgård) and his thuggish nephew (Dave Bautista).
“When is a gift not a gift?”
Arrakis is a poison pill for Atreides, a hellishly hot place infested with people-and-machinery-devouring sand worms, wracked by terrorist attacks from the Fremen. The Duke hopes to pacify the place by “negotiating” with the natives and fixing everything the Harkonnen messed up.
Fat chance.
Javier Bardem plays a gloriously insolent leader of the Fremen, Zendaya is a native dominating Paul’s dreams of the planet and his future. Charlotte Rampling is the forbidding Reverend Mother of the Bene Gesserit, who “tests” Paul, reminding him “You have more than one birthright, boy!”
“Dune” takes us from grand, oversized sets to striking Norwegian coastal cliffs and the stunning desert vistas of Abu Dhabi as it immerses us in this universe of intrigues and a Chosen One’s martial and ESP Bene Gesserit training from Mum.
“Use ‘The Voice!'”
And the film introduces us to an arid world where shade is a life-saving must just after sunrise, where water is so precious it has to be recycled in special suits and spitting isn’t the insult it is in much of our world, even though it’s just as gross.
Chalamet tends to overdo his many take-a-thoughtful-pause moments and Bautista seems woefully miscast in this ensemble of Oscar nominees and an Oscar winner.
But Mamoa and Brolin are macho delights, Ferguson soulful and scheming, Isaac and Sharon Duncan-Brewster (playing an Imperial ecologist) make strong impressions and Stellan Skarsgård, almost buried in (Digital?) prosthetics, tickles as an embittered, bloody-minded beast with little control of his “appetites.”
Hans Zimmer’s score leans heavily on the Arabic influences that inspired Herbert, whose novel gave much of the Western world its first taste of such words as “jihad” and The Mahdi.”
David Lynch was forced to suddenly squeeze in two thirds of the novel into the ruinously-rushed last 45 minutes of his “Dune,” and Villeneuve faces no such dilemma. But his take on the tale dawdles, pretty much from his opening scene to the anti-climactic finish.
There’s a trick to making first-film-in-a-franchise films, and while the sweep of this one is every bit the eye candy fans could hope for, Villeneuve, the screenwriters and I must add composer Zimmer don’t so much stick the landing as let their picture peter out.
Let’s hope “Dune 2” turns Villeneuve’s vision into more entertaining action epic.
Rating: PG-13 for sequences of strong violence, some disturbing images and suggestive material
Cast: Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Jason Mamoa, Josh Brolin, Zendaya, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Javier Bardem, Chen Chang, Sharon Duncan-Brewster, Charlotte Rampling, Dave Bautista and Stellan Skarsgård.
Credits: Directed by Denis Villeneuve, scripted by Jon Spaihts, Denis Villeneuve and Eric Roth. based on the novel by Frank Herbert. A Warner Brothers release.
There’s a rich Hollywood tradition of glib treatment of the mentally ill — movies with the medically disastrous “all they really need is love” message.
The simplistic melodrama “My Brother, My Sister (Mio fratello mia sorella)” flirts with giving us an Italian twist on that Hollywood “cure.” But it doesn’t wholly embrace that idea even at its soapiest. What we see here is a sometimes glum portrait of a family drowning in the illness of one member, unable to see that until the irresponsible prodigal brother (uncle) returns.
Haggard Tesla (Claudia Pandolfini) is presides over a properly weepy Roman Catholic funeral for her father, an astrophysicist whose life merits many a tearful testimonial.
Until, that is, a RayBanned beach bum strolls in and steps to the pulpit. Brother Nik — their dad named his kids “Nikola” and “Tesla” — has a different take, one a little off script. Tesla’s fury at the sibling (AlessandroPreziosi) she hasn’t seen in many years has just begun.
Their dad left them the family apartment — together– which the movie tries to convince us is only three rooms. Somehow, they’ll have to reconnect and work things out, and it might just take them a year.
It’s just that Tesla never told Nik that her son, Sebastiano (Francesco Cavallo) is schizophrenic, filled with tics and chatter with this Martian, “Kelvin,” inside his head. He’s a gifted cellist, and not the only musician in the family. But the apartment is papered over with Post It notes, reminding him of this or that, and everybody else of the medications, routines and bubble they’ve turned all their lives into to help him cope.
Tesla’s despair is that “surfer philosopher” (in Italian with English subtitles, or dubbed) is a disruption that their world cannot withstand.
Her college age daughter Carolina (Ludovica Martino), whose rebellion has taken the form of addressing her mother by her first name, uses her inheritance — grandpa’s old RV — to move out. She’s given up enough of her life to her brother’s care.
And Sebastiano’s piano accompanist, Emma (Stella Egitto), keeping to a strict routine to “help” Sebastiano, frets over Nik’s interference even as she despairs of ever being able to perform with “Seba” publicly.
Nik, given to random moments of nudity and naked romps with young women he’s picked up while kite-surfing on the beach, is a bull in their china shop of rigid routine, enforced quiet and lives totally built around the sick person in their midst.
Old wounds will be opened, a sibling rivalry half-renewed and ugly secrets exposed as Nik “interferes” with one and all, and that routine is shaken up.
Pandolfini (of “Cuanda da Note, When the Night”) and Preziosi (“None Like Us”) have an apt brittle chemistry, and the supporting players have just enough good scenes to lay out each one’s agenda.
Cavallo’s catalog of nervous twitches and banter with the voice inside his is reasonably convincing, in a “movie version of schizophrenia” way.
The “secrets” are a mix of “Wow, didn’t see that coming” and “Really, who couldn’t see THAT coming?”
There are several points where writer-director Roberto Capucci — the soccer road-trip comedy “Ovunque tu sarai” was his — could have turned this into something lighter, if less psychologically defensible.
But even Sebastiano stumbling into Nik’s nubile, naked new girlfriend in the bathroom never quite plays as a laugh.
The film takes on the timid/don’t-make-noise tone of the family, living under the cloud of the gifted cellist’s illness. Nik has old issues to resolve, Tesla has to take stock and Carolina asserts herself as a fashionista once she’s out from under the family’s roof. But Sebastiano’s part of the story smothers the life out of the rest of it.
That makes for a drab mental-illness-in-the-family Italian melodrama, one without much in the ways of upbeat highs or soul-crushing lows.
If you like movies with “pluck,” here’s one that uses the phrase “up by your bootstraps” more than once. And there’s nothing more plucky or All American than that.
“Women is Losers” is a tale of Latina struggle and overcoming discrimination, of making your own American dream, and of the way things were before Roe v. Wade.
Actress turned writer-director Lissette Feliciano doesn’t give herself enough screen time to do all of those themes justice. And she’s overly fond of having characters turn to the camera to deliver sermons when the “message” is already right there in front of us. But pluck wins out and makes this one a winner.
We meet Celina (Lorenza Izzo of “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood”) as she’s having a loud shouting match with her baby daddy (Bryan Craig of TV’s “Grand Hotel”) on the stoop in front of their San Francisco apartment building.
Mid-argument, she turns to the camera and suggests we go back to “the beginning” to see “how far we’ve come.”
The shouting match was happening in the early-70s. The story takes us back to the late ’60s, when Celina and her brassy buddy Marty (Chrissie Fit) were in Catholic school, dreaming big dreams, trying not to get too distracted by boys.
But their “older men” come home from Vietnam, and both wind up pregnant.
“We’re not going to let this ruin our lives.”
Two teenaged girls go to a “use the back door” dentist Marty’s beau has suggested for abortions. Only one walks out, because of how dangerous “back alley abortions” were, way back then.
“Women is Losers” lets us see the scar that stays on Celina’s heart from that experience, and her struggles to get a job without a degree, get an apartment as a single mother away from her judgmental and even cruel parents (Steven Bauer and Alejandra Miranda) and swim upstream against a society that was living down to James Brown’s soul hit warning.
“This is a Man’s World.”
Filmmaker Feliciano serves up gender discrimination in housing, employment and banking, in addition to the life Celina has sentenced herself to for one night of unprotected sex, a woman’s world in America pre-Roe v. Wade.
Characters occasionally “breaking the third wall,” a banker delivering his “I didn’t really say” his institution discriminates based on race and gender, Celina grousing about this obstacle or that one, is just one of the ways “plucky” translates as a little bit messy in “Women is Losers.”
The asides are often cute, as is a party homage to “West Side Story,” a cha-cha courtship dance set to a pre-Santana version of Tito Puente’s “Oye Como Va,” and a “How the Chinese Made it in San Francisco” history lesson, in black and white.
We glimpse an Applebees in an early ’70s San Fran street scene (it was born in Georgia in 1980), hear Donna Summer singing “She works hard for the money” a decade before she recorded it, and see all sorts of sexism, domestic discord and violence and other issues brought up without much more than a glancing treatment in the script.
Not every kindness shown Celina — her bank boss (Simu Liu) mentors her, teaches her the “Chinese way” of making it in America — seems to come with strings attached. But the ones that aren’t bizarre coincidences are.
But Izzo is terrific in a positive-role-model role, Bauer is amusingly vile (and believable) and “Women is Losers” hits home with its messages, even if it struggles a bit to tie it all into Roe v. Wade.
Rating: unrated, some violence, profanity, adult themes
Cast: Lorenza Izzo, Bryan Craig, Simu Liu, Chrissie Fit, Liza Wiel, Steven Bauer and Alejandra Miranda
Credits: Scripted and directed by Lissette Feliciano. An HBO Max release.
Oh lordy, what’s that pothead prophet, Doper Dave, stuck his foot in THIS time?
Transgender issues? Again? Is there an Eddie Murphy confession Dave Chapelle will eventually get around to making? What is UP with that, my racial slur-er? Joining arms with J.K. Rowling? Identifying with her as a “TERF?”
That all points to a better title for his “last special for a minute” finale for Netflix. He calls it “The Closer,” as in wrapping things up, a King of Comedy headliner, a closing act worthy of that master salesman label “Closer,” and an end to his nearly twenty year long argument with the transgender community.
Dude should have called it “Baggage.”
The bulk of Chapelle’s “The Closer” is spent leaning into a subject that keeps him controversial, when that seems more pointless by the day. He’s transcended the need for controversy. He’s THE humorist/comic-cultural critic of the moment. And his blundering attempt to claim he’s not “punching down” by continuing his slap-fight with the ever-lengthening-acronym LGBTQ minority community over this, his declaration that the phrase “punching down” offends him, never helps.
“Closer” begins with promise; riffs on COVID, his single-man superspreader carelessness in Texas, chewing on Black folks beating up Asian folks over COVID on Youtube.
He does that thing he does where he sounds serious and sensitive and thoughtful, only to undercut Humane, Sweet Dave with a killer punchline. The first version of that gag? It’s a bit about the latest news on UFOs, his theory and his movie pitch, that “they were here, long before us, and left. ” And now they’ve returned and want “their planet back.”
“I’m calling it, ‘Space Jews.'”
And then he sidles into his main topic of the night for this Detroit crowd — cancel culture and the folks running it, most often people represented by one of the letters in LGBTQ.
The rapper DaBaby, he notes, “KILLED a n—a,” but it wasn’t until he had a homophobic onstage meltdown that he faced cancelation.
“You can kill, but you’d better not hurt a gay person’s feelings…”
He traces his “transphobic” and homophobic baggage to a San Francisco news article nearly 20 years ago, asserts that every criticism since has cited “those same talking points,” and starts his long discourse on defusing all that by A) noting a trans comic he befriended and helped out and B) the price that friend paid for sticking up for Dave through one of his many blasts of trans backlash.
Chapelle can seem a paragon of reason and above-it-all magnanimity when he joins the chorus of comics (especially) who describe this gay “cancel culture” community as “too sensitive, too brittle.”
“Gangsta gay,” those people who rioted at Stonewall, he says. “THEM I respect.”
His “the Defense rests” is far from his funniest special, although there are almost enough laughs to make it worth your while.
Chapelle’s sharpest observations are the career-imperiling minefield any celebrity faces via Twitter or — shudder — “going out.” He relates several episodes where he says he was “trapped” and/or “drunk” and got into this argument or that smackdown when confronted in public.
How funny you see that depends on your reaction to this explanation for one fight. “Bitch, I didn’t even KNOW you were a woman!”
He’s thoughtful about the “racial component of feminism,” calls himself a feminist, and then turns around and labels himself a “TERF,” just like J.K. Rowling.
I noticed director Stan Lathan didn’t show the audience much in this special, and not at all until one defiant slap at Chapelle’s LGBTQ critics inspired a few folks to stand up and applaud.
Few comics performing today work from as deep inside “self-satisfied” as this guy. Not quite Kevin Hart, but close. All his stories give him the last word and make him come off as the quickest, the wittiest and the wisest. Perhaps if he saw that in himself, he’d better understand “punching down.”
Chapelle can attack “mean” “bathroom bills” from reactionary state legislatures, and go for a laugh with “frumpy dyke.” He can see racism in the speed with which gay rights blossomed when compared with the slow pace of African American equality, and land his best punch with “Gay people are a minority, until they need to be white again,” and yet brag about the time he “whipped the toxic masculinity right out of that (lesbian) b—h!”
The average viewer — NOT “these transgenders” who “want me DEAD” — might find common ground in the phrase “My pronoun game wasn’t as (sharp) as it is today,” and enjoy his mockery of “Tiki Torch white people,” aka “MICHIGAN white people,” biting the hands that bought tickets to “The Closer.”
But the best thing to come out of his “last” Netflix special might be this promise. That this is “The Closer,” that he’s not wading into that alphabet soup any more, because, as he puts it, “I’m not transgender…I’m not even gay.”
Chapelle’s obsession with this one subject, which he keeps “explaining” over and over again, reminded me of late period Lenny Bruce, when he took to reading his court transcripts to audiences in lieu of doing his “act.”
Chapelle’s “rich and famous,” he reminds us. Huge. “Clifford” big, he adds. He should start acting like it.
And maybe, now that he’s stuck up for Kevin Hart losing the Oscar hosting gig for the umpteenth time, now that he’s appealed for the uncanceling of DaBaby, we can all move on.
He certainly could stand to.
Rating: TV-MA, profanity, racial slurs
Cast: Dave Chapelle
Credits Directed by Stan Lathan, scripted by Dave Chapelle. A Netflix release.
The Turkish police procedural “Grudge” toys with the idea of really saying something blunt and chilling about Turkish justice, Turkish policing and the powerlessness of The People, and only loses its nerve in the third act. The ending is the final “cop out” of this decently-plotted Around the World with Netflix thriller, titled “Kin” in Turkish.
A star vehicle for veteran Turkish star Yilmaz Erdogan (apparently unrelated to Turkey’s current authoritarian president), it’s about a decorated police chief inspector who is ambushed in a taxi, kills his assailant, and then covers up the death in ways that make us wonder why it wasn’t self defense. The film unravels this mystery with varying degrees of urgency, springing a couple of third act twists that land as genuine surprises.
And it’s not half bad. Similar to Denzel Washington’s “Out of Time,” it lacks the “ticking clock” pulse-pounding suspense of a cop trying to stay one step ahead of an investigation that will implicate him, desperate to solve the case and maybe tidy it up before his subordinates get to the real truth.
Here’s the promise it makes. Chief Inspector Harun (Erdogan) lectures the newest cop on his “team” (Cem Yigit Uzümoglu) about an inept interrogation and lays some hard truth about policing in Istanbul.
“Everybody’s a little guilty until our suspicions are eliminated.” Damn, that’s chilling. And you know that ethos isn’t limited to police work in Asia Minor.
“It’s easy to be good” he tells the rookie (in Turkish, with subtitles, or dubbed). “It’s a lot harder to be just.“
But when the “just” Harun is jumped by a cabbie, we remember the opening scene, a poor man being arrested in a slum section of the city. We remember the tearful children watching this. And we recall the film’s title.
The first great twist is what happens to the body of the cabbie the next day. We see it dangling from a construction crane, within window view of police headquarters. Whatever Harun’s crack team expects to dig up about how it got there and who put it there, he’s in a panic about wiping down the scene of the crime and what the city’s many CCTV cameras might have captured about his part in that night’s killing.
His top lieutenant (Ruzgar Aksoy) is in the dark. But somebody else sees him palming a flash drive, hastily trying to finger a suspect to save his trusted boss (Ahmet Mümtaz Taylan) from the public humiliation this case delivers.
Director Türkan Derya, who works mostly in Turkish TV, does a competent job of leading the viewer through Harun’s scramble — tracking down, threatening and torturing old informants, revisiting — in flashback — earlier cases that seem to tie into this.
Erdogan plays the guy who acts if he has something to hide even as he maintains a professional, even moral, demeanor in the office and on the case. That key witness he shoots? It’s almost an accident.
Hints of a mystery woman (Duygu Sarisin), clues from the past and a growing hit list of cops and others let Harun unravel things just ahead of his team. But will that keep him out of trouble, and should we be rooting for him in the first place?
I liked the performances and the plot more than the script itself, which manages only a few punchy cop-speak exchanges and pushes at least one of its twists into the third act, when it would have served the picture better had it been a driving force of the narrative earlier on.
The foreshadowing is entirely too obvious, of the “Send my driver home, I’ll be driving myself” (Uh-oh!) variety.
And that ending feels like this Erdogan was pulling his punches in fear of messaging that might rile THAT Erdogan and Turkey’s police in general.
But “Grudge” comes damned close to checking off all the boxes, and manages to get just enough right to be worth trying on for size.
Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity, smoking
Cast: Yilmaz Erdogan, Duygu Sarisin, Ruzgar Aksoy, Cem Yigit Uzümoglu and Ahmet Mümtaz Taylan.
Credits: Directed by Türkan Derya, scripted by Yilmaz Erdogan. A Netflix release.
